A skyscraper towards the moon

Paul Goldberger is the Dean of Parsons The New School for Design, and one of the nation’s most eminent critics and writers on architecture and design.  Dean Goldberger has helped shape public understanding of the social and political implications of design for nearly three decades. First, as the architecture critic of The New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984, and currently at The New Yorker, where he writes the celebrated “Sky Line” column, a position once held by Lewis Mumford.

Dean Goldberger is the author of several books, most recently UP FROM ZERO: Architecture, Politics and the Rebuilding of New York, (Random House, 2004), which was named among the “100 Notable Books of the Year” by The New York Times. He has also written The City Observed: New York; The Skyscraper; On the Rise: Architecture and Design in a Post-Modern Age; Above New York; and The World Trade Center Remembered.

STEVEN GUARNACCIA:  The theme of this issue is Kalokagathia–the notion that if something is good and well made it can not but be beautiful.  Is there a criterion for understanding a skyscraper not just as a purely functional entity – as not just being well made but also beautiful?

PAUL GOLDBERGER: I think the criteria for beauty in a skyscraper is not that different from the criteria for beauty in any building.  Proportion, scale, elegance, memorability, connection to surrounding.

STEVEN GUARNACCIA: What do you mean by memorability?

PAUL GOLDBERGER:  Memorability refers to the iconic power of an image, which comes from a combination of distinction and physical beauty.  Something can be different and not iconically effective.  But there’s a sense of rightness to great things that one feels in a skyscraper as much as in a spoon or a cup or a photograph.

STEVEN GUARNACCIA:  Did a kind of new set of criteria have to be invented to appreciate the skyscraper as a beautiful thing?

PAUL GOLDBERGER:  When the skyscraper was new it was a challenge, I think, to design it as a beautiful thing and appreciate it as a beautiful thing.  But, in fact a new set of criteria did not have to be created.  In fact Louis Sullivan talked about the idea of tallness and expression of height as being an aesthetic thing itself.  So the criteria were new in the way in which we applied them to buildings, but they were not new in terms of human perception.  And the analogies that were often made in the early years of skyscraper design were to classical columns: that the building had a base, a shaft, and a capital.

These analogies underscored the desire to connect to older forms of perception and use the standards people had been bred with.  These are not particularly valid analogies, and they faded away as time has gone on. You start with the standards you know and then you expand in response to the thing itself and I think that’s what happened with skyscrapers.

Any of the words that one might use alone are misleading.  For example, simplicity is necessary but not sufficient… elegance, proportion, scale, detail, iconic power.  Every one of those things is necessary for a successful skyscraper, but is not sufficient for it.  And one might say it’s a combination of all of them in conjunction with a certain amount of functional success, of course, and urbanistic success in relationship to its surroundings that make a successful skyscraper.  A skyscraper does not exist in a vacuum.

STEVEN GUARNACCIA:  I know that the way that buildings relate to the city is extremely important to you.

PAUL GOLDBERGER:   I care passionately about the city as an entity in itself and a building is not an isolated object.  It has to respond to and enhance its surroundings.  That does not mean it has to look like its surroundings.  One of the greatest of all contextual buildings in New York was the Seagrams building on Park Avenue, which did not look like its surroundings when it was built, and indeed it looks less good over the years as it has become surrounded by buildings that look like bad imitations of it.  It was better when it was this beautiful glass object amid older classical stonework.  But it’s deeply responsive to those buildings, and to its presence within that world.  All buildings are contextual to some extent, some successfully and some not.

STEVEN GUARNACCIA: Do you appreciate the accidental juxtaposition of buildings that occurs over time?

PAUL GOLDBERGER:  Absolutely, and you see that particularly in New York.   I think the great challenge of urban design and planning is to not have too much of it.  But a city is always a combination of casuality, of chance and intention.  And most cities that have been planned down to the last detail are terrible.  On the other hand, 21^st century cities that are not planned at all are not particularly good either, because the laissez-faire city is not a very a good city. Houston is probably as close as we can come to that, as much because of the automobile, as because of architecture. We lose something very critical when we don’t plan, because the city becomes dominated by interstate highways and freeways, and the buildings and the whole idea of urban life disappears in service to the automobile.

In Houston, the fabric of the city is defined by freeways, and not by streets. It’s a different kind of experience.  Having said that, however, it’s a fallacy to think that everything depends on physical form.  Los Angeles remains an incredibly important reminder that a city can be truly great and have all the wrong form.  Vitality is not a direct function of density even though we tend to assume in a simplistic way that it is and I may have even implied that.  At the end of the day, a great city is a place where culture is not just consumed but created.  And Los Angeles is the second most important creator of culture in this country after New York. And it doesn’t resemble New York very much in form at all, and every time they keep trying to make it more like New York they just fall on their face.  It is, in the end, about the cars.

STEVEN GUARNACCIA: Up From Zero has recently arrived in Italy in paperback, and it’s been a great success. Why did you write it, and what is the message you wanted to communicate through the book?

PAUL GOLDBERGER: I did not write it to talk about what happened on 9/11, which enough other people have done.  I wrote it because I wanted to trace the arc from the idealism immediately following 9/11, to the reality of getting things built, and the gradual evolution from noble emotions to business as usual. I also felt that there’s never been a time, in our lifetimes at least, where the public was as engaged in a question of land use and urban planning as they were there, for obvious reasons. I’ve always believed that the form of cities is not just a result of aesthetic factors, not just a result of political factors, not just a result of social and emotional factors and not just a result of financial and economic factors, but all of these things:  social, political, economic, cultural, aesthetic.  And never have we seen all those things come together in such high relief as at ground zero.
If you’re interested not just in architecture, in its pure form, but in the connection between architecture and what a society wants, or is, and how it goes about its business, well that is an amazing story to tell. I actually wanted to write that book because it was a chance to be reporter and critic both.  I wanted to do all of it.

STEVEN GUARNACCIA:  What is the lesson to be learned from this story?

PAUL GOLDBERGER:  There are a lot of lessons.  One of them is that architecture alone doesn’t solve the world’s problems.  Design alone doesn’t solve the world’s problems.  And yet, if we give up on them altogether and end up just looking at something as a set of financial calculations, we learn nothing from the wrenching and awful emotional experience of this.  We care about symbols up to a point but we don’t particularly agree on what those symbols should be, and that’s another lesson I think that comes from it.

STEVEN GUARNACCIA:  Who should decide what they should be?

PAUL GOLDBERGER:  Another part of what we’ve learned from ground zero is that architecture is not democracy and planning is not democracy.  You don’t get the best result by putting it up to a vote.  And most politicians and most architects don’t really know what to do either.

STEVEN GUARNACCIA:  One of the nice things about architecture is that it’s hard for an architect to build a building all by himself.

PAUL GOLDBERGER:  You can’t stop artists from doing bad art, but you can stop most architects from doing bad architecture because they can’t afford to. Vincent Scully once said that architecture is a way in which generations communicate across time.  The communication across time that all culture represents, be it painting, music, literature and so forth, is made more concrete, more visible, more conspicuous and more a part of everyone’s life.  If you don’t want to see a movie, you don’t see it, but you can’t avoid architecture.  It becomes, by implication, a societal investment in the future, not just an individual artist or patron’s investment in the future.

STEVEN GUARNACCIA: Do you have a favorite book, film, or piece of music that might exemplify this idea of Kalokagathia?

PAUL GOLDBERGER: There are so many things that are beautiful because they are well made, that I love, and I wonder where even to begin.  I listen to a lot of music.  I listen to a lot of jazz and American theater songs, and I listen to classical music.  I listen to a lot of ‘60s rock and folk.

STEVEN GUARNACCIA:  Is there a musical theater piece that you feel has that quality of being beautiful but also well crafted?

PAUL GOLDBERGER: I’ve often thought about that.  The incredible perfection of the way a Tom Stoppard play is made, or indeed Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest.  One thinks of all of these as beautiful in part because of the perfection of their structure.  And I’ve tried, actually, to write other lyrics to Cole Porter. It’s astonishingly difficult.  I would probably rather listen to music from that period or I guess Mozart or Beethoven than almost any other sort of music.

STEVEN GUARNACCIA:  Is there a song you wish you had written?

PAUL GOLDBERGER:   God, there’s so many. Almost anything Cole Porter ever wrote.  You know, one of the most wonderful songs to me is “Fly Me To The Moon”.  I don’t quite know why I love it.  One day I realized I was thinking about it and that there are a whole bunch of songs with the word “moon” in the title, every one of which is good.  I don’t quite know what the meaning of that is, or whether it’s just some odd accident.

STEVEN GUARNACCIA:  Do you like the moon?

PAUL GOLDBERGER:  I guess I do like the moon.  I never thought about it, particularly, and yet I have this great response to all kinds of moon songs: “Fly Me To The Moon,” “Moon River,” “Blue Moon.”

STEVEN GUARNACCIA:  You were space race kid weren’t you?

PAUL GOLDBERGER:  Yeah, maybe it has to do with that.

Interview by Steven Guarnaccia