Robert Geddes - Fit: An Architects Manifesto

Copyright 2013 by Princeton University Press

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

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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. ArchitecturePhilosophy. I. Title.
NA2500.G394 2012
720.1dc23
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,

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.

Fit: Architecture and Society

1A. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Good Government in the City (13381340), 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 (19671972). Photo by Tom Bonamici

The Task of Architecture Is Function & Expression

4. Toward the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson (17431826) 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 universitythe 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 (18191825). 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 experiencethe 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 (19361937). 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 cole 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 Carrre and Hastings (18971911). 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 group plan. At street level, all buildings open directly onto sidewalks; identical low pavilions create civic places between them: the Channel Gardens slope gently to a sunken plaza, ice rink, and golden Prometheus fountain. Rockefeller Center, New York, designed by Rockefeller Center Associated Architects: Reinhard and Hofmeister; Hood, Godley and Foulihoux; Corbett, Harrison and MacMurray (19311939)

Civic Form: Populism / Monumentalism