1911-2011

Happy New Year (a bit early)! 1911 was very much a transitional time both stylistically and technically. Here are a handful of buildings that turn a century old in the coming year:

People’s Gas (D. H. Burnham & Co.)
Transportation (F. V. Prather)
City Hall (Holabird & Roche)
Hearst (James Green, an infamous “architectural aberration.”)
Dwight (Richard Schmidt)
Harris Trust (Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge)

Architects of stature…

Slate Magazine weighs in this week with some lofty architectural speculation. Does an architect’s height determine their reputation? Will a bona fide Napoleon complex help in a field full of obsessively driven professionals? Witold Rybczynski suggests that this may be the case. All I will say is that one of my fondest grad school memories is of one of the architects named in the article, spittle flying from his mouth, staring up at me as he tore apart my housing studio project on a review. And I’m not that tall…