So, it seems like the architect died in 2018, and Sainsbury in 2022. This could all have been extremely awkward if they'd done the work a few years earlier...
That doesn't mean the columns did not have a purpose. Columns can create points that organize spatial experience. Columns are cultural iconography (e.g. the Parthenon vs Johnson Wax).
There are certain ironies in the fine article:
1. The criticism of the non-structural columns for non-functionality in the context of an art museum.
2. If Venturi and Scott Brown had designed a duck (very common among museum commissions) removing the columns would have been difficult or impossible [1].
For context, Charles Windsor's architectural opinions are contrary not just to the ideas of Venturi and Scott Brown but to the aesthetics of the last 150 years.
[0]: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/lessons-sin-city-arch...
[1]: Architects with functional dogma will incorporate structural columns into their designs to achieve iconography and spatial organization because structural use justifies their inclusion.
>The criticism of the non-structural columns for non-functionality in the context of an art museum.
The letter reads as if the columns are criticized not for lacking structural purpose, but rather for being unnecessary obstructions. "We [will] live to regret our accepting this detail of his design." That would have to be because the columns are either ugly or a hindrance.
But to be clear, Venturi and Scott Brown’s distinction is in the context of architectural practice. Learning from Las Vegas started as a studio in Harvard’s GSD. The radical idea was looking at actual buildings built for ordinary reasons in ordinary ways…the radical idea was valuing the study from contemporary vernacular architecture.
The last factoid in the tour of his house was how he removed a load bearing wall from his sister’s house and did not replace it.
That whole tour was supposed to be for Wright fans but it just made me loathe him with every fiber of my core. Can you tell I’m an applied sciences person?
His more public work is another matter. I was struck by the color of the sky against the blue roof the first time I passed Marin County Civic Center from the highway. And Florida Southern in Lakeland is spectacularly good.
Flashbacks to every McMansion I ever had a client at. It's always gotta have columns. Just jammed in. No sense, no style, no awareness of the form, just "put a column there for no reason."
Columns used to represent something that was _difficult_ to build and place and often carried artwork and detail of their own. The days of them being iconographic lobby structure are long gone.
> Columns can create points that organize spatial experience.
These columns are ugly, do not match their surroundings, and are sat right in the middle of a transition that has no point in being divided. They're also sat in a pair side by side in what is possibly the worst arrangement of column I've seen yet.
> had designed a duck (very common among museum commissions) removing the columns would have been difficult or impossible [1].
This is a wing on the campus of an already existing historic building. Which itself has traditional columns. In an appropriate and iconographic style. I'm with the author, the wing's columns are gaudy and completely misplaced.
The columns have been there for thirty years and one of the learnings in Learning from Las Vegas is designing for that kind of lifespan is a reasonable architectural practice (thirty years is a typical mortgage term in the US). I think it is particularly relevant that the columns are in an ancillary space. Foyers get reconfigured every time a building program changes (e.g. signage and graphics as shows come and go). Now that Elizabeth Windsor is dead, it is ok to change the design she dedicated.
a wing on the campus of an already existing historic building. Which itself has traditional columns. In an appropriate and iconographic style.
Or it's kitsch. Beloved kitsch, but kitsch nontheless. Villa Rotunda was centuries old when the National Museum used its domestic idiom for public purpose and Palladio had already looked back a millennium for the Villa Rotunda’s kitsch back then. The original building made the same claims as those McMansions you hate. Or the Caesar's Palace Venturi and Scott Brown wrote about.
I have a half-developed theory that the reason NIMBY and excessive use of listed building conservation are so popular is that most people don't like the aesthetics of postwar architecture. They not unreasonably assume that anything new will be ugly and/or user-hostile and campaign against it.
(London managed the extreme of user-hostile architecture, a building that could set random onlookers on fire https://londonist.com/london/history/walkie-talkie-death-ray )
I also think the "decorated shed" category is unnecessarily dismissive of good decoration. St. Pancras station, famously saved by John Betjeman, count as a "decorated shed" by this categorization.