selophane.blog

Above is the keynote address from the Tulane School of Architecture sponsored symposium: Preservation Matters by Tulane Alum and Editor of Architectural Record magazine, Robert Ivy, FAIA. The speech is a long overdue acknowledgement of the work of the Preservation Studies / Historic Preservation Program headed by my past professor, Eugene Cizek, FAIA and a discussion of the historic preservation movement within the city of New Orleans and Tulane’s role through the twentieth century. I have to laud the efforts of the new Dean of the Architecture School, Kenneth Schwartz, who introduces the conference and Mr. Ivy. Regional Modernism has a more detailed synopsis of the presentation.

Throughout my years at the school, I always felt that the historical importance of place and the efforts of the preservation program to bring this idea to the student body was too often bulldozed by a blind passion for high modernism and other international styles. Issues of climate and green design were handled in the structural technology classes, but too often they did not play a part in the critically explored design studio work.

As an aside, I spent a number of minutes trying to figure out where they held this symposium. This lecture hall does not remind me of any space within the building while I was there. The main lecture hall is sloped, while this is obviously flat. Eventually after much head scratching I reread the symposium invitation and realized that this was held in the new University Student Center. Now I’m glad to see that this building (which was under repair for most of my years at Tulane) is in use, but I have to wonder if this type of event shouldn’t have been held at Richardson Memorial Hall (the Architecture School) where it could have had a greater influence on the student body and faculty.

Tulane School of Architecture is hosting a one day symposium at the end of January focusing on Preservation. The keynote speaker will be Robert Ivy, FAIA and one of my favorite professors, Eugene Cizek, FAIA, will be providing commentary. This symposium is free and open to the public. If I was able to be in New Orleans, I would love to attend.
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After watching the latest episode of Architecture School I was struck with just how accurate of a portrayal the reviews seemed. I remember reviewers baiting students just like that, and verbally backing them into corners such that they were forced to say their design was bad. What was missing from this was the critics literally tearing apart models to express their disgust with the scheme.

I stand by my previous opinions about the student’s work, none of them responded to the scale of the neighborhood adequately. At least some of them were looking at filtering elements of New Orleans housing iconography through a modernist lens, specifically the front porch and the screening elements. Furthermore, most of the house strategies did not create any site strategies for creating a public/private separation outside of the house itself.

So my sister (a visiting professor at Case) sent me a link to a funny web-comic illustrating american collegiate architecture. This comic hits the nail on the head for a number of different styles of campuses across the country. Of course, because this is the media of a web-comic it only grazes the surface. One of the things that I have always found interesting about architecture is the ideas and concepts that a building can convey to the individual observer, and how institutions can co-opt these signs and signifiers to reinvent their identity and develop a new grammar of style. The other thing is that overtime the connotations of these buildings can get lost, and new un-trained observers start to create a new grammar of form. The interesting thing about this is that the untrained observations seem to have almost a viral growth factor. I think the best example of this from my experience is the original buildings on the campus of Tulane University. The oldest buildings are all ashlar limestone/marble in a Richardsonian Romanesque style, these buildings were the original natural science buildings on campus. Which makes sense because their stone skin evokes the classics and natural sciences which was the school’s specialty in the late 19th century. After a while the campus added two red brick buildings, which became the liberal arts and physics buildings. This makes sense based on the architecture as well, red-brick buildings/universities are associated with the new world and post-industrial society.

This language of buildings, which would have been evident to students 100 years ago, is lost on the population today. Instead, the student lead admission tours explain that these buildings don’t match the rest of the “front quad” because there was a mix-up in between Vanderbilt’s bricks and Tulane’s. This bit of canonical fallacy achieves a similar end result as the “real” reason – the University ends up claiming a piece of legitimacy as a liberal arts institution by comparing itself to a more prestigious school. As an interesting aside, this story of mixed up bricks (which would NEVER happen in real life and not result in a multimillion dollar lawsuit) seems to have propagated to so many different schools that it is hard to figure out where it started and how.