One of the best pieces of criticism I\u2019ve read this year appeared a couple of weeks ago on the Awl, the online journal best known for affectless and typically New York-centric takes on contemporary culture. (Co-founded by Choire Sicha, the new major-domo of the New York Times Style section, it\u2019s now edited by Silvia Killingsworth.) The essay, by Sam Kahn, is largely about playwriting. It\u2019s called \u201cThe Triumph of the Quiet Style.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kahn\u2019s argument has two basic threads. First, that the wildly influential Annie Baker and other younger playwrights, in a reaction against the testosterone-fueled approach of figures like Neil LaBute and David Mamet, are producing work that unfolds slowly, without rapid-fire dialogue or bombast \u2014 work that is, in a word, quiet. And second, that this sensibility (\u201cthe dominant, most provocative, most interesting aesthetic of our time\u201d) increasingly can be glimpsed in art forms beyond theater, including fiction and film.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no mention of architecture in Kahn\u2019s essay, but it\u2019s easy to see some parallels. For the last year or two, I\u2019ve been thinking about how best to sum up the most important emerging strain in contemporary architecture. This is an approach that rejects the hyperactive form-making of celebrated architects like Thom Mayne (very much the LaBute of his architectural generation), Daniel Libeskind, the late Zaha Hadid and others in favor of work that is spare, solid and unhurried.<\/p>\n
As I\u2019ve noted before, there\u2019s something archetypal about this architecture. Its forms are basic, totemic: Euclidean shapes dredged from the long memory of the field. It sometimes relies on modules or grids. It\u2019s often monochromatic. It\u2019s post-digital, which means it rejects the compulsion to push form-making to its absolute limits that overtook architecture at the turn of the century. As a result, it sometimes looks ancient or even primordial. It never looks futuristic.<\/p>\n
It is often architecture that has some weight, a palpable sense of mass or layers (as opposed to a highly photogenic skin). It\u2019s mostly produced by architects born in the late 1960s, the \u201970s and the early \u201980s. Its overriding characteristic is a sort of stillness. It is against virtuosity (at least the showiest kind). It\u2019s mostly made of stone, wood or concrete instead of glass and curving metal panels. Something Kahn says about Baker\u2019s work is also true of this architecture: It exists \u201cat room temperature.\u201d It occasionally slips past the spare into the plain or the generic, and from there to the intentionally or ironically banal. It\u2019s like some recent movements in fashion in that way.<\/p>\n
The architects making work of this kind include the Chileans Mauricio Pezo and Sof\u00eda von Ellrichshausen, Portugal\u2019s Aires Mateus and the Swiss firms Christ & Gantenbein and Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen. There are strong hints of the style in the architecture of Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, who call their Los Angeles firm Johnston Marklee; Productora, a Mexico City firm that recently opened a small office in downtown L.A.; Tokyo\u2019s Go Hasegawa; and New York\u2019s MOS and SO-IL, among many others.<\/p>\n
Every name I\u2019ve just mentioned was included in this year\u2019s Chicago Architecture Biennial, directed by Johnston and Lee, which made the event something of a coming-out party for the New Euclideans. It would be wrong to say the biennial as a whole was a celebration of knowing restraint \u2014 the youngest architects in the show brought a significant dose of color and restlessness \u2014 but there\u2019s some obvious tonal overlap between Kahn\u2019s essay and Johnston and Lee\u2019s show. Lee told me he wanted the biennial to have a \u201ca slow cadence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Does this architecture sound boring? I\u2019m realizing that it probably sounds boring. There are certainly many architects (baby boomers and digital die-hards in particular) who feel that way. And critics: Among the most entertaining takes on this year\u2019s biennial came from David Huber, who wrote in Artforum that the show was dominated by \u201ca loose network of architects, San Rocco-reading Europeans in their forties, [who] reject the razzle-dazzle of the digital\u201d in favor of \u201can austere yet casual aesthetic of simple geometries.\u201d (The San Rocco reference, a perfect detail, is to a precocious architectural journal published in Milan.) In the end, Huber wrote, the biennial was \u201can adventure in disengagement. \u2026 Architecture felt small, isolated, gutless, and inconsequential.\u201d<\/p>\n
I for one think architects should embrace the boring charge. As with Baker and other playwrights, the spirit of this new work, its power, comes in part from what it\u2019s reacting to \u2014 the overloud, overwrought, mostly male voices it has already managed to mute. (The emerging style, much of it coming from firms co-founded by women, seems well suited for the post-Weinstein moment.) We had a full generation of pyrotechnic architecture, produced by celebrity designers who sold spectacle to ready audiences and credulous critics. You could make a good case that buildings of that kind dominated architecture even more than manic playwriting dominated theater.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s something encouraging about how measured and well-considered the response to that work has been from younger architects. \u201cRoom temperature\u201d is exactly right. This isn\u2019t ice-cold minimalism, architecture plunged into a deep freeze after years of running too hot. It\u2019s unruffled. The only thing it tries hard to do is not to try hard.<\/p>\n
These architects are making a point of working without the cynicism that began a few years ago to color the work of Mayne\u2019s firm and others. As Kahn puts it, there\u2019s \u201csomething Quakerish in this sensibility.\u201d This helps blunt Huber\u2019s suggestion of austerity: The new architecture is lean more as a result of finding strength in basic but substantial forms than in defiantly going without. This isn\u2019t a hunger strike. It\u2019s closer to a calm expression of faith in architecture itself.<\/p>\n
How long the unhurried approach will stick around is among the most intriguing questions to ask about architecture at this moment. Is it best understood as a transitional style? (Lee has described the new ethos as \u201cmomentary,\u201d a chance for architecture to \u201cget resituated.\u201d) If so, how soon might it fade and what might it lead to?<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t mind waiting a bit for the answers to those questions. If there\u2019s one thing linking the quiet style in theater to architecture\u2019s new reticence, after all, it is not just a tolerance for the sound of one\u2019s own thoughts and the audible ticking of an existential clock but an appetite for them.<\/p>\n
Baker herself put it this way in a recent interview: \u201cSilence and stillness are very exciting to me. I feel so over-stimulated and bored by a lot of the theater I see these days because of the breakneck speed at which it\u2019s performed. There\u2019s this obsession with \u2018pace,\u2019 and I think it\u2019s because we\u2019re terrified of boring audiences that are used to looking at the internet while watching TV while talking on their iPhone. Also, when it feels like nothing is taboo anymore \u2014 we can have sex and violence onstage and no one blinks an eye \u2014 I think the one thing left that really makes people uncomfortable is empty space and quiet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Replace \u201cpace\u201d with \u201cform\u201d and Baker\u2019s critique of playwriting could be a critique of architecture over the last two decades. It\u2019s a critique that reveals the vainest sort of celebrity architecture as a kind of sitcom, sticking close to well-worn, crowd-pleasing formulas, with those credulous critics (and there were a lot of them, more than enough to fill a studio audience) providing the laugh track. As Nikolaus Pevsner wrote about an earlier impulse in architecture, toward modernism: \u201cIf the new style is bare, if it goes straight to the point, there are reasons for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
A boring building in 2017 is a building with something meaningful to say. To think of it merely as a pendulum swinging back toward a more balanced architecture is to underestimate it. It is also a wrecking ball (another solid and monochromatic form, a basic shape, an archetype) taking down a sensibility, a kind of machismo and self-satisfaction, that desperately needed razing \u2014 one that was taking up too much space and blocking too much sunlight, that was giving other kinds of architecture very little chance to grow. And it is doing so as wrecking balls do: at a deliberate and tireless pace, making sure the site is cleared, the old building reduced to dust, before it finishes its work.<\/p>\n
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