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    Fit: An Architect's Manifesto
    Fit: An Architect's Manifesto
    Fit: An Architect's Manifesto
    Ebook135 pages2 hours

    Fit: An Architect's Manifesto

    By Robert Geddes

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    About this ebook

    Why architecture matters—and how to make it matter more

    Fit is a book about architecture and society that seeks to fundamentally change how architects and the public think about the task of design. Distinguished architect and urbanist Robert Geddes argues that buildings, landscapes, and cities should be designed to fit: fit the purpose, fit the place, fit future possibilities. Fit replaces old paradigms, such as form follows function, and less is more, by recognizing that the relationship between architecture and society is a true dialogue—dynamic, complex, and, if carried out with knowledge and skill, richly rewarding.

    With a tip of the hat to John Dewey, Fit explores architecture as we experience it. Geddes starts with questions: Why do we design where we live and work? Why do we not just live in nature, or in chaos? Why does society care about architecture? Why does it really matter? Fit answers these questions through a fresh examination of the basic purposes and elements of architecture—beginning in nature, combining function and expression, and leaving a legacy of form.

    Lively, charming, and gently persuasive, the book shows brilliant examples of fit: from Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia and Louis Kahn's Exeter Library to contemporary triumphs such as the Apple Store on New York's Fifth Avenue, Chicago's Millennium Park, and Seattle's Pike Place.

    Fit is a book for everyone, because we all live in constructions—buildings, landscapes, and, increasingly, cities. It provokes architects and planners, humanists and scientists, civic leaders and citizens to reconsider what is at stake in architecture—and why it delights us.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateOct 28, 2012
    ISBN9781400844548
    Fit: An Architect's Manifesto
    Author

    Robert Geddes

    Robert Geddes is an architect, urbanist, and teacher. He is dean emeritus of the Princeton School of Architecture; Henry Luce Professor Emeritus of Architecture, Urbanism, and History at New York University; and a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the National Academy of Design. The American Institute of Architects honored his professional firm for its "design quality, respect for the environment, and social concern."

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      Book preview

      Fit - Robert Geddes

      fit

      an architect's manifesto

      robert geddes

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS    PRINCETON AND OXFORD

      Copyright © 2013 by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press,

      41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6

      Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

      press.princeton.edu

      An earlier version of portions of this book appeared as The Forest Edge, Architectural Design Profile (London: Architectural Design, 1982).

      Excerpt from Baby, It's Cold Outside,

      by Frank Loesser

      © 1948 (renewed) FRANK MUSIC CORP.

      All rights reserved

      Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

      All Rights Reserved

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Geddes, Robert.

      Fit : an architect's manifesto / Robert Geddes.

      pages cm

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-691-15575-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

      1. Architecture—Philosophy. I. Title.

      NA2500.G394 2012

      720.1—dc23

      2012014059

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      This book has been composed in Helvetica Neue and Sabon

      Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

      Printed in the United States of America

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      To Evelyn

      In From a Cause to a Style,¹ Nathan Glazer expressed the growing disenchantment of an early enthusiast of modernism in architecture and planning—and who when young is not?—with the failures of modernist architects and planners in dealing with contemporary urban life. Why so? Because modernism evolved into something intended to surprise, to astound, to disorient, perhaps to amuse. It was not an architecture for ordinary life, and ordinary life has fled from it.²

      Ouch. That hurts.

      According to legend, a psychologist at a conference once said that the problem with architects is that they always take things personally. Immediately, an architect in the back row jumped up and shouted, I do not. That protester could have been me.

      This book is my response to Nathan Glazer's remorse.

      contents

      List of Illustrations

      Acknowledgments

      Introduction

      The Origin of Architecture Is Nature

      The Task of Architecture Is Function & Expression

      The Legacy of Architecture Is Form

      Notes

      Index

      Fit: Architecture and Society

      1A. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Good Government in the City (1338–1340), detail, fresco on wall of Council Room in Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy. The Bridgeman Art Library

      1B. Attributed to Piero della Francesca, Leon Battista Alberti, The Ideal City. View of an Ideal City, or The City of God, after 1470 (oil on panel), Italian, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino, Italy / Alinari / The Bridgeman Art Library

      The Origin of Architecture Is Nature: Light / Gravity

      2. The underground Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, New York, is entered through a transparent glass cube at the center of a civic plaza. The thirty-two-foot cube and its elevator and staircase are built of structural glass sheets with metal clips. Thanks to gravity, a white Apple logo hangs overhead. The clarity of light is remarkable: a brilliant crystal, by day and night. Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple Inc.; architects Bohlen Cywinski Jackson; architects Moed de Armas & Shannon; structural glass engineers Eckersley O'Callaghan (completed 2006). © Jake Rajs / Flickr. Unreleased/Getty Images. Interior photograph copyright Alan Chimacoff, www.chimacoff.com, all rights reserved

      3. The Phillips Exeter Academy Library, on a traditional New England campus, creates an almost monastic environment for reading. The flow through the building is guided by natural light toward the center lit from above, then through open lofts of books, toward oak carrels next to windows in the enclosing brick walls. Light filters through the muscular concrete framework, which responds to gravity in a celebration of geometric form. Phillips Exeter Academy Library, designed by architect Louis Kahn (1967–1972). Photo by Tom Bonamici

      The Task of Architecture Is Function & Expression

      4. Toward the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) founded his ideal university. He designed both its physical form and its social form, calling it an Academical Village. It was a new modular form for a university—the focal point was a library rotunda (not a chapel); the central place was a great lawn (not a paved quadrangle), flanked on both sides by linear colonnades containing student rooms and ten monumental pavilions for professors, to live and work together in a community. It embodied Jefferson's ideals for landscape and architecture, culture and politics. University of Virginia, designed by Thomas Jefferson (1819–1825). Photo by MPI / Getty Images

      5. Usonia 1 in Madison, Wisconsin, was the first in Frank Lloyd Wright's brilliant series of affordable houses, designed for families throughout agrarian America (Usonia was Wright's name for the United States of North America). Wright connected architecture with its setting in nature, from the prairie to the wilderness. His architectural forms were aimed at human experience—the family's hearth at the core of the house, the open plan of the living areas, the functional and visual transparency with the landscape. Usonia 1, designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1936–1937). © 2012 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / Art Resource, NY

      The Legacy of Architecture Is Form: Social / Physical

      6. The New York Public Library is a people's palace. It fits splendidly between a street and a green park; the architectural expression comes from the design principles of the École des Beaux-Arts. Inside is a monumental reading room; the library's function is the education and intellectual development of all citizens. As a physical form, the library is a delight from the City Beautiful movement; as a social form, it is a legacy from the Progressive Era. New York Public Library, designed by architects Carrère and Hastings (1897–1911). Photos copyright Alan Chimacoff, www.chimacoff.com, all rights reserved

      7. New York's Rockefeller Center is a triumph of private development, a workplace for thousands of people. It is also an architectural triumph: a dynamic composition of low and high buildings, combining Beaux-Arts symmetry with modernist verticality; it is a remarkable

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