The Old Way of Seeing: How Architecture Lost Its Magic (and How to Get It Back) - Hardcover

Hale, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395605733 ISBN 13: 9780395605738

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994

Synopsis

Demonstrating the ideas that make great architecture possible, an architectural critic charts the course of the art, showing how architects lost their sure course around 1830 and explaining how to recapture the basics that can improve our visual environment

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Reviews

In a compelling manifesto that addresses the puzzlement of why new buildings are so often ugly compared to those of earlier eras, Hale, a Boston architect and critic, argues that until around 1830 virtually every building was designed as a composition of interrelated elements in accordance with an age-old tradition of harmony, geometry and adaptation of natural forms. Beginning with the Greek Revival, he contends, this intuitive way of seeing and designing was lost, leading ultimately to the pretension, blandness and downright unattractiveness of most modern architecture. While praising the Bauhaus as a valiant attempt to reintegrate time-honored aesthetic values into the industrialized world, Hale deems the modernist International Style a failure. He proposes Frank Lloyd Wright's organic style as a touchstone for architects seeking to create buildings that are alive and resonant with meaning. This impassioned essay, interspersed with social history, includes scores of photographs of buildings, some of which are overlaid with what Hale calls a pattern of "regulating lines" that fit the elements of the design into a proportional system. As he shows, "Whether the designer knew he was creating the pattern is less important than that the pattern is there." Illustrations.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An architect and critic elaborates on what most of us see when we look at much of modern architecture: buildings that are lifeless and just plain ugly. Hale laments the current state of architecture and the loss of ``harmonious design,'' an art that involves play and intuition. ``A great building can give us the same exhilaration we experience in a natural landscape,'' he writes. He urges architects and designers to rediscover the beauties of natural law and geometry, to abandon the fragmentation he sees as characteristic of postmodern architecture. He offers a historical summary of how building strayed, in the middle of the 19th century coincident with the Industrial Revolution, from the intuitive verities of harmony and balance, forsaking meaningful patterns for crude symbolism or somber functionality. Photos. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Intended for the lay reader, this primer on design explores a number of interesting byways, from symbolism to scale, context, regulating lines, and pattern languages. Practiced New England architect and architectural writer Hale offers a paean to the past, more specifically a preindustrial past when, in his words, "one could walk down any street and be surrounded by harmonious buildings." It all began to fall apart in the 1830s, according to Hale, when the Greek Revival replaced substance with symbol. Hale revolts at the prospect of a rampant industrialism and everything else Modern Architecture implied: internationalism, uniformity, and universalism. Gentle, wise, and perceptive, he is a child of postmodernism. Recommended for public libraries.
Peter Kaufman, Boston Architectural Ctr.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395605733
• ISBN 13: 9780395605738
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 241