‘The Skyline as Architectural History’

Thank you for James Gardner’s telling piece on International Modernism [Arts & Letters, “The Skyline as Architectural History,” December 17, 2007].

I spent a 40-year architectural career as a dedicated international modernist, but after traveling the world late in my career and seeing the degrading impact of this style on beautiful cities around the globe, I had to admit I’d spent a life barking up the wrong tree. One essence of the problem is, I propose, as follows.

Building is a necessity, thus in architecture the vernacular must necessarily predominate. In any art, those of great talent are a minority. When architecture was practiced using a well established formal vocabulary, the paucity of talent and ability was far less noticeable — the predominant vernacular using the current formal vocabulary was without great merit but usually more or less acceptable.

Modernism, without an established formal vocabulary, necessitated an original solution for every project, a formal originality beyond the creative scope of the average practitioner, so the world has been swamped by the ultra boring and dull surfaced cubes we all know so well.

The reaction to this, the anti-structural post modernist idiosyncrasies which are replacing them are just as boring, for they even rid us of that which could be visually followed in modernism — structural rationality, where the eye could follow the route of loads from peak to foundation, as is beautifully clear in high Gothic.

A detail concerning Philip Johnson, where Mr. Gardner extols the virtues of the ATT building.

Johnson was a great intellectual influence on the art, but could not draw and had little design talent himself, as the ATT building well shows.

The essence of a tall building is that its top or spire should be formally readable from all directions.

The Chippendale silhouette of ATT is discernible from east and west, and is nought but a dull rectangle from north and south.

JAMES KINGSLAND
New York, N.Y.