Sustainability in architecture is not a trend, it is now a given — like inside plumbing, New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger said last night at the Tenement Museum in New York’s Lower East Side. Goldberger also shared his top two favorite places in New York — which turned out to be not buildings at all, but Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge — as well as his views on “starchitects,” the function of memorials in American culture, and the transforming power of architecture.
Architecture … is the making of place and the making of memory. The urban impulse is an impulse toward community — an impulse toward being together and toward accepting the idea that however different we may be, something unites us. But what do we do in an age when every force pushes us away from cities, pushes us apart rather than together? And how we we make valid, lasting memory when it becomes so easy not to see the familiar, when we take it for granted and no longer even notice it? … We have to think hard about how the experience of being together will come to pass and how architecture can express a sense of community, a sense of common ground …
And this:
Architecture represents the real, and is ever more precious in an age of virtual. Every piece of architecture is an opportunity for real experience.
I could have stayed home and read Goldberger’s book, or hoped the museum would archive the talk. But I went and had an experience that I will remember.
Barbara, what a great and thoughtful article. Events and meetings are fascinating in that they are temporary, fleeting in time and meant to be built up to be taken down, but what happens while they are up is, and has to be, as meaningful as anything more permanent. What we build, how we foster communication while it is built, and now more than ever, how we follow up when the structure no longer exists… all the pieces are critical. Thank you for articulating this so well.
Thank you very much for your comment and contribution, Tahira. Goldberger also talked about how good architecture strikes a balance between aesthetics and functionality, which is also true of good meetings, I think. Good point about follow-up.
How absolutely wonderful, Barbara. Tahira's post above reminds me of the buildings that go up every time there's a World's Fair–the 1893 World's Fair, in Chicago, was built almost entirely of papier-mache–but the impressions they leave are lasting. And I'd add one more thing to the meetings-as-structure analogy: keystones. critical in any relationship; absolutely, um, key in meetings and conferences, whether it be a purpose or a point person. Thanks again!
Yi Shun/@thehubtalks
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