Reviews for Luminous Simplicity: The Architecture and Art of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Parramatta

The average rating for Luminous Simplicity: The Architecture and Art of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Parramatta based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-12-30 00:00:00 Waechter Madeleine This book occupies an important middle ground -- for me at least. I have read enough about Modernist architecture that I don't need to hear another beginner's introduction. I get impatient with those and start to feel that I already know everything. On the other hand, I am not actually ready to follow into such dark recesses as the journals of Le Corbusier. I need a book like this: keeping in mind a picture of the total history, but going into many more specifics and less famous matters. This book is sometimes considered a primer for modern architecture, but I don't think that's quite right. Jencks gives very little space for the 20's and 30's, really just skimming by. He devotes most of the book, even the essays on Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe (the "heroic architects"), to work done after the Second World War. Really, this book is a manifesto for an architectural generation coming of age in the late-60's and early-70's, and so segues nicely into his defense of Post-Modernism in the post-script. (The first edition of this book was published in 1973, and a post-script was added in 1985.) What's helpful about Jencks's book is that he is somewhat polemical. At least in the early chapters discussing the "heroic architects," he organizes his information around a "hot take." Unfortunately, his hot takes are kind of eye-roll inducing, at least they were in me. For instance, his take on Mies is that his work is farce: "We can inhabit this truncated world where 'less' stands for 'more' and a perfected cruciform column stands for beauty, truth, God, and the brotherhood man, just as we can laugh when a ballet dancer slips on a banana peel" (107). So far as I can see, this is just a way of taking him down a peg, and as a real appraisal of his work is itself farcical. So for his other hot takes. I actually found the two long sections on British and American architecture from the 50's to the 70's most interesting. These essays are less tightly controlled than the ones on the "heroic" architects. What I liked about them, though, is that they get into all the little interesting details of this interesting period. All the utopian futuristic cities people were imagining, the growth of camp and pop sensibilities, the fraught divisions between architectural styles that I would have once thought were interchangeable. Although in some places these sections sag under the weight of their material, feeling like a precis and not an essay, they are overall more nourishing. The section on international architecture and urban planning is only slightly less accomplished. Urban planning does call to mind Jane Jacobs, however, who is mentioned several times in this book, but never sympathetically. I think it's very interesting the way Jencks responds to her; his style is so married to that of a technocratic aesthete, someone for whom the refined appreciation of beauty and the power to form people's lives are closely married. That might not be exactly fair, but I don't know what else to make of his praise for bizarre projects of social engineering and condemnation of the "philistines" who oppose it (quote from Robert Moses, but it could be put in his mouth too). In other words, in spite of his embrace of Post-Modern architecture (and even the 1973 components of this book show him paving the way for it) he remains at heart committed to a high Modernist project, where architects, possessing like Confucian scholars both elevated taste and technocratic competence, are the true guardians of public space, and the population of a city can't really be trusted to get what it wants. Before I end this review, I want to point out one last thing that really annoyed me. Jencks is committed to a way of speaking about architecture which he calls "multivalence." I'm not sure if it is his own coinage or comes from E.H. Gombrich or I.A. Richards, both of whom he cites as influences. The idea is that what makes certain art good (although he doesn't use the word "good") is that its different parts interact in a way which is open to multiple interpretations. Bad art lacks this flexibility; the heavy-handed singleness of its meaning bears down on you so lugubriously that it becomes almost a joke (the key to his reading of Mies as farcical). As an idea, it's though-provoking. There does seem to be something to it. But in practice, it means that he throws the word "multivalent" around when what he really means is good. Every time it comes up, it seems as if he has to belabour how this is in fact a technical ascription and not just his personal opinion about the beauty of a building. It is never convincing. Look at this note on page 384: "The Post-Modern hybrid keeps its symbols abstract and functional enough to be multivalent." Really? Abstraction and functionality make things multivalent? Or is it just that you like this building? In conclusion, this is still a good introduction to modern architecture which digs deeper than many of them.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-02-28 00:00:00 Melanie Miller In a very elitist but nonetheless informed summary of modern architectural movements, Charles Jencks enlightens the reader to a number of very short lived but nonetheless interesting architectural movements. It's probably about as dry as you can get, though, so you have to be really interested in modern architecture.