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: #470309 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...

Silber, is this a book or just a rant?
I am a young architect and was quite excited when someone at my firm alerted me to this book. The thesis that the field of architecture has become absurd is one definitely worth exploring but this book fails to make the compelling argument I know it could. The text is fairly unfocused and rant-like and the background information he gives for the examples he cites is one-sided and incomplete. Even the line he drew between the absurd and good architecture was inconsistent even measured by his own criteria. I would expect a philosopher to be able to form a much more complete and persuasive argument than this.

Wouldn't pass muster with Silber
Neither my love of architecture or architectural criticism were indulged by reading this book. Fortunately, I didn't lose $[...] on it as it found me courtesy of a friend regifting it. This selectively researched and speciously reasoned volume would never have passed President Silber's muster had it been submitted by one of his faculty seeking tenure at Boston University during his reign there. It's more fitting of a blog with its confusion of opinion for knowledge, and seems like little more than a vehicle to register his seemingly obsessive hatred of Frank Gehry.

The tragedy here is that there is a point to be made about some architects, and the people that give them free reign, whose work shows more concern for a page in their portfolio than respect for the function of a building, the people who will use it, and others affected by its aesthetic. But how much "absurd" design results from such a disdain for public utility versus simply different perspectives on form and function? Maybe Silber could have researched that. Instead, this opinionated polemic erects a monument to Silber's ego as egregious as the Stata Center.

For a pointed criticism of Silber's architectural acumen, see Mark Lamster's review in the Los Angeles Times online ([...]) Schadenfreude, indeed.