WHY ARCHITECTURE MATTERS BY PAUL GOLDBERGER. ELEANOR ROBBINS. Writer, New York. Search for more papers by this author. Request permission; Export. Paul Goldberger Why Architecture Matters is not a work of architectural history or a guide to the styles or an architectural dictionary, though it contains elements of all three. The purpose of Why Architecture Matters is to “come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as. Bookmark File PDF Why Architecture Matters Paul Goldbergergoldberger and numerous ebook collections from fictions to scientific research in any way. Along with them is this why architecture matters paul goldberger that can be your partner. Scribd offers a fascinating collection of all kinds of reading materials: presentations, textbooks.

This week, Mayor Mike Bloomberg used choice language in describing the state of play at the World Trade Center site. Over and against those who complain that the administration has been sitting on its hands for much of the last eight years, Bloomberg demurred, “Larry [Silverstein, the developer] has everybody by the proverbials—he really does.”

He might have been fielding a question from Paul Goldberger. It was only last month the New Yorker architecture critic appeared on Charlie Rose to wax sage on time, space, and the vagaries of building at Ground Zero. “Everything about this project has gone wrong or been delayed in some way,” he told Rose. “It’s been a nightmare.” There was plenty of blame to go around, said Goldberger; but, convinced as ever of the primacy of architecture, he expressed the innocent hope that right would yet prevail. It was as if he were saying: For the sake of good architecture, can’t we all just get along?

Goldberger’s new book, Why Architecture Matters, brims with this sort of pious peace-making. Form vs. function? Why not both, and something more besides:

Paul Goldberger Architecture

No one really remembers Chartres Cathedral because it housed thousands of the faithful efficiently, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater because it gave the Kaufmann family…a weekend retreat.… We remember these works of architecture because they went beyond these mundane achievements.

Goldberg has been churning out pretty statements like that for four decades. As chief architecture writer for the New York Times in the 1970s, Goldberger was our first popular post-modernist critic. Always game to call modernism’s bluff, he put the city and the street before the architect and the masterpiece, and he felt an organic connection with the history of architecture as an ethical constituent of the designer’s and the writer’s work. When, starting in the late ‘90s, the public taste ran again towards glassy gewgaws, Goldberger remained an exponent of moderation in all things, albeit a relatively quiet one. (He is always moderate, even in his censure.)

Why Architecture Matters is not quite a compendium Goldbergeriana, but it belongs essentially to his didactic project. The book announces itself as an architectural companion to Aaron Copland’s What to Listen for in Music; it resembles as well art historian John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (and more recently, Deyan Sudjic’s The Language of Things) in being a tour of architectural history from the pyramids to Bilbao, in no particular order, interpolated with critical statements and blanket assessments that alternate between the accurately uninformative (“the new is often hard to accept”) and the insupportably general (“architecture is art,” “buildings are created to enclose space”).

None of which is ever awful, actually—Why Architecture Matters is perfectly balanced between a researched history and an improvised analysis of architecture at its very root. It has only two serious faults. The first is that its title is the same as a 2003 book by Chicago Tribune critic Blair Kamin. The other, also to do with the title, is that there’s no suspense here whatever, as it’s taken for granted that architecture does matter: Goldberger lacks what critic Reyner Banham once called “bloody-mindedness,” the willful disregard for architecture as such that can make architecture writing truly exciting and a generative force for new design. Does architecture matter? Does it matter, say, to a Mike Bloomberg? And why doesn’t Goldberger ever doubt it?
Ian Volner is a writer and critic. He lives in Manhattan

“Why Architecture Matters”, Paul Goldberger

Winston Churchill authored the famous quotation, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”

We spend the vast majority of our lives in buildings. Architecture is that broad and diverse built environment that, in serving our needs, makes us feel exhilarated, awed, sheltered, secure, oppressed, confused, frustrated, bored, and a hundred other reactions…or sadly, nothing at all. “Why Architecture Matters”, by the New York Times architectural critic, Paul Goldberger is a book ten years in the writing and a lifetime of observing that answers the question, “Why?”

Not all critics have the ability to identify and address the big questions in their fields in understandable terms. When so much of architecture discussion is either deeply theoretical or just picture galleries, Goldberg’s clarity is refreshing in tackling the challenging questions of when, where, why, how, and what makes architecture, good, bad, or just mundane.

From Vitruvius to Lewis Mumford, Goldberger draws on the wide experience of architects, theorists, critics, and his own experience of architecture to describe how architects think about architecture and the influences that proportion, scale, shape, form, space, light, materials, texture, colour, and a host of others bring to create architecture.

Though limited to examples from western civilization, “Why Architecture Matters”, contains much to assist us in understanding what makes architecture more substance than just the mere style of a building: how it can help or hinder intended function on the multiple levels of human experience, how architecture marks the time, place, and memory of our personal and social meaning, and why it expresses who we are and what we value individually and collectively.

While the qualities of architecture described by Goldberger are sufficient to create their own images in your imagination, you may be tempted to indulge in more than the simple black and white photos strategically located throughout the book and trip the night fantastic in an orgy of Google image searching for more.

As a practicing architect for the past 28 years, this is one of the best book I have read on the nature of architecture and its impact on our lives as individuals and communities. You will never visit a city, walk a street, and enter a building or a room again without the understanding the experience of architecture.

“Why Architecture Matters”, Paul Goldberger, Yale University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-300-14430-7

David Lavender is a local architect with an international practice.

Why Architecture Matters Paul Goldberger Pdf Free

You can contact David at info@davidlavenderarchitect.com or follow him at @LavenderArch.