Product Description

Have you ever wondered why the Guggenheim is always covered in scaffolding? Why the random slashes on the exterior of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, supposed to represent Berlin locations where pre-war Jews flourished, reappear, for no apparent reason, on his Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto? Or why Frank Gehry's Stata Center, designed for MIT's top-secret Cryptography Unit, has transparent glass walls? Not to mention why, for $442 per square foot, it doesn't keep out the rain? You're not alone.

In Architecture of the Absurd, John Silber dares to peek behind the curtain of "genius" architects and expose their willful disdain for their clients, their budgets, and the people who live or work inside their creations. Absurdism in a painting or sculpture is one thing—if it's not to your taste, you don't have to look—but absurdism in buildings represents a blatant disregard for the needs of the building, whether it be a student center, music hall, or corporate headquarters.

Silber admires the precise engineering of Calatrava, the imaginative shapes of Gaudi, and the sleek beauty of Mies van der Rohe. But he refuses to kowtow to the egos of those "geniuses" who lack such respect for the craft. Absurdist architects have been sheltered by the academy, encouraged by critics, and commissioned by CEOs and trustees. They stamp the world with meaningless monstrosities, justify them with fanciful theories, and command outrageous "genius fees" for their trouble.

As a young man, Silber learned to draw blueprints and read elevations from his architect father. In twenty-five years as president of Boston University, Silber oversaw a building program totaling 13 million square feet. Here, Silber uses his experience as a builder, a client, and a noted philosopher to construct an unflinchingly intelligent illustrated critique of contemporary architecture.

Le Corbusier's megalomaniacal 1930s plan for Algiers, which called for the demolition of the entire city, was mercifully never built. But his blatant disregard for context and community lives on. In Boston, Josep Lluis Sert's unprotected northeast-facing entrance to the B.U. library flooded the first floor with snow and ice every New England winter. In Los Angeles, sunlight glinting off the sharply angled steel curves of Gehry's Walt Disney Music Hall raises the temperature of neighbors' houses by 15 degrees. And of course, Libeskind's World Trade Center plan, with its spindly 1776-foot tower and quarter-mile-high gardens, proved so impractical it had to be re-designed, in an exasperating negotiation hardly worthy of the complex tragedy of the site.

Dr. Silber, an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, asks all the questions that critics dare not. He challenges architects to derive creative satisfaction from meeting their clients' practical needs. He appeals to the reasonable public to stop supporting overpriced architecture. And most of all, he calls for responsible clients to tell the emperors of our skylines that their pretensions cannot hide the naked absurdity of their designs. 103 color illustrations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #367131 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

Review
"This is a brief but delightful tour of contemporary architecture with a guide who is famous for his candor. He divides our best-known building designers into the architects, who keep in mind the users of a building, and the artistes, who keep in mind the cover of Architectural Review. Being John Silber, he names names and shows you the artists' buildings, travesty by travesty. This book will gall some of them. Even more so will it embarrass the guileless souls who have fallen under the spell of the artists' metaphorical lyricism 'explaining' their own work- and paid millions for such pretty words." Tom Wolfe"

About the Author
John Silber was president of Boston University for twenty-five years and is an internationally recognized authority on ethics, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of Kant. His works include Human Action and the Language of Volition and Straight Shooting: What's Wrong with America and How to Fix It. He has been the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim, and ACLS fellowships. In 2002 he was named an honorary member of the AIA. He lives in Boston.

Customer Reviews

good cause, bad argument.
I bought this book because I storngly dislike the work of architects like Frank Gehry and Daniel Liebeskind, and I thought it would be refreshing to hear an intelligent person handily dissect and dismiss these absurd blights on the profession. I haven't even gotten to the fun part yet and I'm already disappointed.

A quote:
"The drive toward absurdism in art has accompanied a decline in standards of taste in popular music and movies and the prevalence of tattoos and body-piercing ornamentation..."

He also goes on to attack numerous works of conceptual art such as Smithson's "Floating Island" and Doug Michel's "Cadillac Ranch."

The argument against these conceptual works as well as body art in general has almost nothing to do with the merits of good architecture and does very little to support his general argument. Rather, they expose this man to be what he almost certainly is: a somewhat dull, crotchety old person with a narrow vision of what art can and should be. I can see already that his arguments against these architects are not going to be at all interesting, as he has already bored me half to death.

I bought the book on Amazon and I will most likely be selling it back. Don't buy it unless you would like to have your own boring sensibilities buttressed by a fairly un-influential, pseudo-designer's rants...

CAN THE TIDE BE TURNING?
John Silber has written a wonderfully concise book about anti-architecture and its starchitect exponents. In this volume, he calls these absurd buildings what they are: absurd, non-adaptive, and ultimately dysfunctional. For example, Silber details the lack of applying any human factor design in creating the Stata Center. But Christopher Alexander long ago published a step-by-step method for how to extract socio-geometrical user patterns, then combine then into a well-functioning design. None of that here! The image of an alien form is paramount! As this book went to press, the famous lawsuit was filed by MIT...

I am glad that Silber digs a little deeper into the Modernist roots of absurdity, so as to provide a logical evolution of the present-day architectural madness. This way, people will not mistake this for a fleeting contemporary phenomenon. It is much more deeply rooted than that. Therefore, a genuine effort at global education is necessary to overcome the absurdity of such forms. He gives a great characterization of the creepy cult propagandist Sigfried Giedion: "Nothing reaches greater heights of pretension and bogus historic and philosophical explanation than his 'Space, Time and Architecture', a work that attributes to Picasso and other Cubists a knowledge of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity that none possessed."

In my own book "Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction" I had a similar thing to say: "Sigfried Giedion produced a voluminous but nonsensical explanation for why this new architecture was based on the new science of the day, namely relativity and space-time. This propaganda worked brilliantly. In the current rerun, deconstructivist architects expect the same method to work again."

Silber delves into the cruel, totalitarian frame of mind that gives someone permission for erecting architectural monstrosities. He recalls how Le Corbusier -- the angel of urban death -- was obsessed with destroying the complex, living urban fabric of Algiers. I also discuss this obsession in my other book "A Theory of Architecture": "Architects lost the distinction between an abstract idea and physical structure. They believed that the idea IS the thing, and the thing IS the idea. This is the essence of what might best be described as modernist conceit -- the ignorance of organized complexity, coming from the dangerous idolatry of abstractions."

We have here a book for the ages... a book for a new beginning towards a humane, adaptive architecture... a book that pulls down idols which have obscured beauty and truth for far too long. Bravo to a fellow San Antonian! Buy the book immediately, and give all your friends copies as Christmas gifts.

A Hundred Page Rant
This was an intriguing book for me. After reading the book I realized that the author's opinions about Gehry and Libeskind were parallel with my views of these architects, but I just couldn't get over how the book comes across like the rant of a third-year architecture student.

There was a part in the book where he criticizes how the new Denver Art Museum by Libeskind was inappropriately designed for displaying art. After a page or two of this criticism I was expecting an interview with or at least a comment or two from the curator of the Denver Art Museum backing up the author's claim, but there was no confirmation from a legitimate source.

The book is a hundred pages of why the author dislikes a handful of contemporary architects. I just wish that he had spent another hundred pages confirming his claims and proving why I should dislike these same contemporary architects.