Witold Rybczynski’s 18th book, “How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit,” opens with a quarrel in its title. By any definition of humanism, architecture has been broken for at least seven decades. The book, published by Farrar, Straus Giroux, offers a tool kit for examining architecture but not for fixing it.
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Rybczynski asserts with pride that he, too, has no “agenda.” Why not? Is it not the job of an architecture critic to have an agenda? Almost all architecture critics have an agenda. It is to promote modern architecture while looking down their noses at new traditional architecture, when they acknowledge its existence at all.
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But Rybczynski isn’t just a fine writer, and he is not just a practicing architect. He is also a powerful member of the American design establishment. While sitting on the U.S. Fine Arts Commission, he voted to approve Frank Gehry’s absurd modernist memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower. If Rybczynski had been true to his book, he would have abstained. If he were true to his duty as an architecture critic, he would have voted no, no, a thousand times no.