Book review: “What Architecture Is” by Witold Rybczynski

Just about every Chicagoan, I would guess, is familiar with the monumental steel sculpture by Pablo Picasso, called simply The Picasso, in the plaza of the Richard J. Daley Center in the Loop. But not as many are aware of the five huge owls atop the Harold Washington Library Center, seven blocks away.

In his new book What Architecture Is from Yale University Press, Witold Rybczynski discusses both artworks and the different ways they relate to their buildings.

The fifty-foot-tall Picasso, he writes, is an example of the way many modern architects include art elements in their designs but keep them at a distance, both literally and figuratively. Picasso said the striking rust-colored sculpture that he designed and gave to Chicago represented his pet Afghan hound although, according to his wife, it was modeled on the head of a baboon.

In either case, Rybczynski notes, the work “has nothing to do with that building’s function as a county courthouse.”  In other words, the Daley Center as architecture and the Picasso as a sculpture just happen to share the same space. They don’t share a meaning or message.

 

“Civility, clarity, utility, and beauty”

By contrast, the sculptures of the four twelve-foot-tall cast-aluminum barn owls at the corners of the Washington Library and the twenty-foot-tall horned owl looming over the State Street entrance are integral to story that the design team, headed by Chicago Thomas Beeby, wanted to tell.

If this sober and rugged building looks old-fashioned, it is because its designers are concerned with old-fashioned architectural virtues: civility, clarity, utility, and beauty.

As Rybczynski points out, Beeby described the library, constructed in 1991, as “a building of memories.” recalling such Chicago landmarks from a century earlier as Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler’s 1889 Auditorium Building, the Beaux-Arts gem Art Institute, built in 1893, and Sullivan’s 1899 Carson Pirie Scott department store, now the Sullivan Center.

 

“Meaningful ornament”

Another throwback is the building’s use of “meaningful ornament,” designed by sculptor Raymond J. Kaskey, a member of the Beeby team. These include cast-stone medallions with puff-cheeked cherubs “personifying the Windy City,” window spandrels of Midwestern sheaves of cornstalks, depictions of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, and the five giant owls, one of which is “grasping a book in its talons.”

An image of the horned owl and its book is one of dozens of small, clear illustrations of architecturally significant sites by Rybczynski throughout the text.

The Harold Washington Library has anchored the South Loop for more than thirty years, but, as architecture in a city enamored of architecture, it doesn’t get much love. Indeed, in 2009, the magazine Travel + Leisure identified it as one of the fifteen ugliest buildings in the world.

Rybczynski, though, is a big fan. In addition to praising the library in What Architecture Is, he also highlighted it in two earlier books: How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit (2013) and The Story of Architecture (2022).

 

Three books for the general reader

These three books are aimed at explaining architecture to the general reader from different perspectives although Rybczynski’s research and insights would likely be of interest to architects as well.

An architect himself and an architecture professor at McGill University in Montreal and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia for nearly four decades, the Canadian-born Rybczynski is the author of more than two dozen books, dealing with architecture from the simple home to the grandest church.

In How Architecture Works, he went through “ten essential topics” that would help a general reader think about new and old buildings. These topics are also applicable to other forms of art, hence the reference to A Humanist’s Toolkit. The emphasis in The Story of Architecture was on telling stories about buildings and how they relate to each other down the centuries.

 

A funny — or not so funny — anecdote

What Architecture Is begins with a funny — or not so funny — anecdote.

A lawyer from Austin, Texas, wrote an email to Rybczynski because ChatGPT had told him of a 1996 article by him titled “The End of Architecture?” that discussed whether the discipline had reached its limits.

Could Rybczynski send him a link to the article so that he and his reading group could read it?  No — because there was no article. It was all a figment of ChatGPT’s AI imagination.

But, now that the question had been asked, Rybczynski began wondering what he might tell the lawyer and his reading group about the state of architecture.

As he details in What Architecture Is, Rybczynski sees the field as having entered a time of uncertainty.  It’s not the End of Architecture, but it’s the end of something. So much of the work of modern architects, many of them now celebrities, has come down to the search for the Next New Thing.

 

Wrong-headed thinking

“We hate to repeat ourselves,” said one architect. “The first cardinal rule of what we do is if we’ve already done it, we’re not going to do that, so we start over.”

But this, for Rybczynski, is wrong-headed thinking.  He quotes Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: “We don’t invent a new architecture every Monday morning.” And Rybczynski adds: “He did not mean only that we could not invent a new architecture every Monday morning, but that it was a bad idea.”

Yet, today, architects no longer agree even on the fundamentals: “Is architecture a shared language (Mies van der Rohe) or an exercise in personal expression (Frank Gehry)?”  The result is stagnation and confusion.

Stagnation, because, conditions having changed, the old remedies no longer seem as compelling as they once did, and confusion, because the rushed attempts to discover an alternative too often produce eccentric if not bizarre results. It is at times like this that architecture can fall prey to flimsy ideas — and flimsy practitioners.

 

Guideposts

In this context, Rybczynski suggests to the Austin lawyer and his reading group that the key lies in the aspects of architecture that have always enabled great buildings in the past to move us.  So, he presents seven “guideposts”:

The first is the Past, an awareness of one’s architectural heritage, recent as well as ancient. The next three are related: Order, Ornament, and Meaning. The first usually — not always — emerges from construction, the second has been a constant theme of building across the ages, and the third, which is intimately tied to the second, is a key attribute; after all, a building without meaning is, well, meaningless.

Like Ruskin, I include the thorny subject of aesthetics, that is, beauty — it cannot be avoided. Drawing deals with means rather than ends, but it deserves its own chapter. Lastly, Place: how a place does and doesn’t influence architects and, vice versa, how architects work to create a particular sense of place.

Great architecture, Rybczynski writes, isn’t inevitable.  Nonetheless, the field has come through other times of uncertainty, and great art has resulted.

And when a building moves us, it is a marvel, he writes. “It is rare and precious and always has been.”

 

Patrick T. Reardon

9.9.26

 

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 9.22.26.