Preface

Levine, Neil

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Preface

Neil Levine

Modern Architecture: Representation & Reality

This book began life as the Slade Lectures on Fine Art, which I was honored to give at Cambridge University in England in 1994–95. Although I had worked on a number of the subjects before bringing them together in the way they were presented there, and now here, the extended format of eight lectures allowed me to develop my thoughts more...

Author

Neil Levine

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00084.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15864

Preface

This book began life as the Slade Lectures on Fine Art, which I was honored to give at Cambridge University in England in 1994–95. Although I had worked on a number of the subjects before bringing them together in the way they were presented there, and now here, the extended format of eight lectures allowed me to develop my thoughts more thoroughly on how the issue of representation could be understood as the underlying factor in the development of modern architecture. Aside from the addition of an introduction and conclusion, plus some rearrangement of the parts along with further research and thinking about matters both general and specific, the eight chapters here fundamentally follow the course outlined in the earlier eight lectures.

Between the delivery of the Slade Lectures and the completion of the book manuscript, I had the opportunity to publish slightly different, stand-alone versions of three of the chapters. The first to appear was an early version of chapter 7, published as “‘The Significance of Facts’: Mies’s Collages Up Close and Personal” in Assemblage: A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture 37 (December 1998). Following that, my reading of Castle Howard, which forms the basis of chapter 1, appeared in the September 2003 issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (vol. 62) as “Castle Howard and the Emergence of the Modern Architectural Subject.” Most recently, a condensed version of chapter 8, entitled “The Architecture of the Unfinished and the Example of Louis Kahn,” was included in and provided the subtitle for Fragments: Architecture and the Unfinished: Essays Presented to Robin Middleton, edited by Barry Bergdoll and Werner Oechslin (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006). I am grateful to the editors of these publications for their often helpful advice. In this regard, I would like to single out K. Michael Hays, Alicia Kennedy, Zeynep Çelik, Nancy Stieber, and Barry Bergdoll.

I have had the fortune to present a good deal of this material to colleagues who have offered much helpful feedback and criticism. I want to thank, in particular, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth for inviting me to participate in the Seminar on Visual Representation and Cultural History at Harvard University’s Humanities Center; Robin Middleton for his invitation to speak in the University Seminar program at the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University; Katherine Fischer-Taylor for asking me to participate in the Chicago Group on Modern France at the University of Chicago; Renzo Dubbini for the invitation to talk in the Henri Labrouste Symposium at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia; and Christine Poggi for asking me to present in the session on collage she organized at the College Art Association. In addition, the talks given in the faculty colloquium of my own Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard; the History and Theory lecture series in the Architecture School at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and, especially, the Interfaculty Colloquium of Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture and Graduate School of Design helped me enormously in developing and refining my ideas.

A number of colleagues and friends have, over the years, been of considerable importance to me in this work, most notably Vincent Scully, David Van Zanten, Robin Middleton, Tom Beeby, and Michael Hays. To my colleague Alina Payne I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude for the intelligence and diligence with which she read and criticized the manuscript. Others who have aided in particular ways are James Ackerman, George Baird, Martin Bressani, Effi Casey, David Friedman, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Antoine Picon, Kathryn Smith, and Sarah Whiting. Cammie McAtee and Erica Allen-Kim proved to be extraordinary researchers. Mary Daniels, Cole Roskam, Gaku Kondo, and Erik Ghenoiu were also very helpful on specific issues. For their help in securing and providing illustrations I am grateful to David R. Phillips, Wim de Wit, Bob Zinck, Steve Sylvester, Susan Palmer, Nabil Boutros, Spruill Harder, Scott Krafft, Adam Kellie, Timothy McCarthy, Barbara Sachäche, Nigel Wilkins, Blanche Legendre, Max Protetch, Stuart Krimko, and Helen Carey.

For the research on Castle Howard, I am particularly grateful to Christopher Ridgway, curator of Castle Howard, for facilitating a second, two-day visit in the fall of 1994 and for his generosity in providing documentary and photographic materials. For their aid in securing illustrations, I also thank Alison Brisby, Castle Howard; Susan Pugh, National Monuments Record, Swindon; Pete Clark, Joe Coagy, Stephen Hayles, Becca Hickman, and Tony Vaughan, Ordnance Survey, Southampton; Camilla Costello, Country Life; and Claudia Ponton, Art Resource. To Kerry Downes I owe my initial exposure to Vanbrugh’s and Hawksmoor’s architecture as well as to the site of Castle Howard.

Access to original drawings and documents of Henri Labrouste was made possible by the extraordinary generosity of Yvonne Labrouste; Léon Malcotte; Madeleine Boy, former administrator, and Marie-Hélène de La Mure, curator of special collections, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris; and Jean Adhémar, former director, and Yvonne Jestaz, former curator, Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Access to drawings and documents of Frank Lloyd Wright, not to speak of priceless information and advice, was provided by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Margo Stipe, and Oscar Muñoz of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona. A great debt of gratitude is also owed to the following homeowners and stewards who allowed me to visit the buildings discussed here and provided important documentation. They include Cheryl Bachand, Elaine Harrington, Meg Klinkow, Betty Leigh, Karen McSweeney, Joan Mercuri, John Michiels, Frank Pond, Tom Schmidt, Dale Smirl, Donna Taylor, John Thorpe, and Lynda Waggoner. Although I did not write about the Heller House, being a house guest there numerous times gave me a special experience of Wright’s work of the period. For this opportunity, I especially thank Judith Bromley and Serafino Garella.

For their help in my research on Mies van der Rohe, I should like to thank Paul Campagna and George Danforth, both of whom studied and worked with the architect in the early 1940s and graciously allowed me to interview them. Danforth and Franz Schulze were kind enough to read an early version of this chapter. Although both strongly disagreed with its basic thrust, many of their specific criticisms were extremely helpful. I am also grateful to Pierre Adler of the Mies van der Rohe Archive, Museum of Modern Art, New York, for giving so generously of his time and advice and to Cammie McAtee for reading this chapter in a near final state and providing many important comments.

Anne Tyng was an important source of information on Louis Kahn. Sarah Williams Goldhagen shared with me her knowledge of Kahn and provided a significant critical reading of an early version of chapter 8. Joan Chan helped interpret some of the structural aspects of the initial proposal for the Trenton Bath House roof. Julia Converse of the Architectural Archives, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, made the important Kahn archives available to me; William Whitaker, curator of the Architectural Archives, was extremely helpful in providing illustrations.

My colleagues at the University of Cambridge were as gracious as hosts as they were helpful intellectually. To John Gage, who was chair of the Department of History of Art, go my warmest thanks. To Peter Carl, Deborah Howard, Jean-Michel Massing, John Sergeant, and Dalibor Vesely go my deep appreciation for their friendship and engagement. I also thank Lord St John of Fawsley, former master of Emmanuel College, along with the other members of Emmanuel’s faculty and staff, for all they did to make my stay in Cambridge so enjoyable and productive.

On a more personal, though no less intellectual level, I would like to thank two dear friends, Bénédicte Pesle and Arlette Marchal, for all they have done for me and given to me over the years. As the dedication of this book shows, I feel I owe my deepest sense of gratitude to two special people in my life: my late wife, Gillian Levine, for the untold amount of work, thinking, and criticism we did together on subjects both directly and indirectly related to this book; and my present wife, Susan Jacobs Lockhart, who has shared her ears and her eyes, her wisdom, her knowledge, and her profound critical mind with me in making this manuscript into a book. Finally, I would like to express my great appreciation to Patricia Fidler for standing by this project and helping to see it to completion and to Daniella Berman, Heidi Downey, Leslie Fitch, Duke Johns, John Long, and Mary Mayer for their wonderful efforts in the making of this book.

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