Design for Looking

Why Architecture Matters

by Paul Goldberger
Yale, 304 pp., $26

Building Up and Tearing Down

Reflections on the Age of Architecture
by Paul Goldberger
Monacelli, 320 pp., $35

Architecture is not art as a painting or a sculpture is art. Architecture is art that has to fulfill a functional purpose. A building must keep its occupants warm and dry, and it must stand up. And buildings are not collected in museums. They are found on the streets, imposing themselves on anyone who passes, and so they must strive, more so than paintings or sculptures, to be acceptable and accessible to the public.

The New Yorker’s architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, in Why Architecture Matters, acknowledges as much: “Architecture is balanced, precisely and precariously, between art and practicality.” He references the Roman polymath Vitruvius, who laid out several fundamental principles of architecture that have since been distilled to three: commodity, firmness, and delight. In other words, architecture should fulfill its purpose and provide comfortable accommodation, it should be constructed solidly and skillfully, and it should be beautiful and pleasing. “Each aspect of architecture coexists,” Goldberger writes, “and every work of architecture must to a greater or lesser degree take them all into account.”

But just pages after Goldberger enumerates and praises this Vitruvian troika, he dismisses it. The brush-off comes during a discussion of the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, especially Le Corbusier’s famous Villa Savoye.