Paul Goldberger is The New Yorker’s architecture critic and an academic. He’s a New Jersey boy who joined the New York Times in the early 1970s and after a decade of writing about architecture picked up a Pulitzer Prize. For several years he has harboured a desire to write a book for the general public on why architecture is worthy of attention, preservation and investment. Yale’s ‘Why X Matters’ series provided a vehicle for that ambition. His new book could be understood as New York’s answer to Alain de Botton’s Architecture of Happiness. Architecture matters because, says Goldberger, it’s about so much more than the creation of shelter; it’s a means through which we express who we are and articulate our ambitions. To build is a commitment to the future.
Goldberger shares with philosopher Karsten Harries the belief that ‘one task of architecture is to preserve at least a piece of utopia, and inevitably such a piece leaves and should leave a sting, awaken utopian longings, fill us with dreams of another and better world’. These are good arguments and they are joined by many other ideas about the relationship between artistic ambition and practicality; the difference between good buildings and great buildings, and architecture as a discussion between generations. Less successful are arguments about architecture as a framework for childhood memories and a chapter on suburbanisation and the sense of place.
The key buildings and texts that Goldberg uses to outline a recent history and a theory of architecture are much the same as you would find in a British architecture school’s undergraduate lecture programme, but his reflections on Yale, Vincent Scully and the 1960s campaign to save Pennsylvania Central Station in New York provide an insight into the passions and motivations of the US architectural scene. Goldberger dedicates the book to Vincent Scully and, in passing, confesses his sympathy for New Urbanism and evidence-based design, but his ideas are never really made explicit. At times it feels as if we are back in the PoMo 1980s arguing about Pevsner’s Cathedral and bike shed, the Villa Savoye’s leaking and preservation.
After reading this book I felt as if I had attended a really good dinner party rather than having been guided through an argument and a discipline. The strength of populist writing like Goldberger’s is that it is accessible and engaging; its weakness is that it rarely provides the reader with a proper appreciation of the context – the author’s world view is portrayed as common sense.
