Box Is a Box Is a Box

"The Treachery of Images" (1928-29), Rene Magritte

Is Philip Nobel, the "resident curmudgeon" of Metropolis magazine, going soft already? Probably too soon to tell, but historians of such things —€” do such people even exist
yet? —€” may well look back on this moment and say that this was when Philip Nobel started to lose it. Asked why, they will say that it was one part Nobel, one part never-ending crisis of Modernism, one part New York Times Building and, oh, 10 parts New York.

I'll get back to this momentarily, but we needn't wait for the verdict on Philip Nobel to know that, despite "getting one in" occasionally, large-scale Modernist architecture has spent most of the last 40 years on the ropes. Among the first to put it there were architect-scholars Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, with their pithy and generously illustrated 1972 study Learning from Las Vegas. Whether or not you've already read Las Vegas, you should read it now to see how right —€” and how much more wrong —€” the authors turned out to be.

What Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour mostly saw when they surveyed the Modernist built landscape of the late 1960s was "heroic and original" architecture that was irrelevant, they said, because it did not speak with explicit symbols
that most people could understand.

As Experts with Ideals...[Modern architects] build for Man rather than for people —€” this means, to suit themselves, that is, to suit their own particular middle-class values, which they assign to everyone...Developers build for markets rather than for Man and probably do less harm than authoritarian architects would do if they had the developers' power.

One does not have to agree with hard-hat politics to support the rights of the middle-
middle class to their own architectural aesthetics, and we have found that Levittown-
type aesthetics are shared by most members
of the middle-middle class, b