levinson, n.- notes on fame (article-2005)

Yale University, School of Architecture

Notes on FameAuthor(s): Nancy LevinsonReviewed work(s):Source: Perspecta, Vol. 37, Famous (2005), pp. 18-23Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40482235 .

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Notes on Fame

Nancy Levinson

long ago I went with a friend to a lecture at the Gradu- ate School of Design at Harvard. The speaker was a very

famous architect, which meant that the school's crowd-control commandos were on high alert: Assistant deans were mind- ing the doors and shooing nonfaculty away from the reserved sections up front while several hundred of us flowed into the auditorium and rushed for the rear seats or settled for the floor; stragglers had to make do with a remote screen rigged up outside the hall. The talk went off as expected: lots of images of projects, lots of techno-global lingo, all familiar from books and magazines; the architect had reached that level of media saturation which practically guaranteed nothing on offer that night would be new. But in a sense, the lecture itself was beside the point. What was more to the point was the packed house, the mass of us who swelled and sweated up the room and whose collective presence confirmed that the architect was indeed very famous.

At the start of a career, when you're on the ascent, you have to do good projects and give good lectures; but when you reach a certain stature the standards can slide because your name itself - your brand - is enough to get the job and fill the hall. Which is why the lecture appearance of a star architect - like much else in the vaporous empire of contemporary fame - so often seems hollow, ritualistic, and ultimately depress- ing. My friend and I felt suckered, though we knew we really

• hadn't been. We had been drawn by the big name, and the big name had shown up and PowerPointed a pile of projects. But we couldn't help feeling that somehow we were settling for less, which in this case definitely wasn't more. We couldn't help feeling not just that more should have been delivered that night by the famous speaker, but that all of us who crowded the room - all of us with our multiple options for entertainment or enlightenment, who could have passed the evening reading The Divine Comedy or watching Law & Order: SVU instead - should have demanded more. Is it unreasonable to expect that a public lecture at a prestigious university might be conceived as a significant occasion, an opportunity to replenish one's cultural capital, to float a vigorous new idea or provocative argument?

I don't think my friend and I were alone that night in our dissatisfaction; the reality-check critiques we heard afterward

at the wine-and-cheese social were gleefully fierce. Architects think a lot about fame, more than most of us would like to admit. Fame is a serious subject. It sets the course of careers and it influences what gets built, the environments of all our lives. But it's an awful subject, too, alienating and vaguely creepy, by turns fascinating and fatiguing, capable of stirring up fur- tive, unwelcome emotions, making you feel unhappy or envi- ous because you're not famous (or not famous enough), not in the inner circle or on the inside track. And it's polarizing: You can find yourself reaching for ready-made attitudes, indulging either in predictable disapproval of the star system or in the cynical endorsement of the cultural realpolitik that keeps the phones ringing at PR firms, divides the world into "players" and "nobodies," and concocts all those zeitgeist-y listings of what's in/what's out, who's hot/who's not.

Fame is a system of categorization, and it racks us up and ranks us. One of the critical passages of a career is to come to grips with this system, with its workings and effects; the professional realities of fame often run counter to the artistic ideals that held sway in school and maybe were a draw to the field in the first place. It takes a while to understand - really understand - that as a system, fame is restless and unstable, endlessly in flux; that it is influenced disproportionately by cultural politics and institutional networks and by the personali- ties, even idiosyncrasies, of powerful clients, curators, critics, publishers, and even professors; and that it is pathetically vul- nerable to the vagaries of fashion.

It takes a while to realize, for instance, that the heroes of your student days will become the has-beens of the next generation. I started architecture school at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1980s - in retrospect the heyday of postmodernism, or Post-Modern Classicism, to use the title of a Charles Jencks book I remember seeing on drafting tables at Penn amid the rolls of yellow trace and the Medaglia d'Oro cans of Faber-Cas- tell colored pencils. PoMo: Today even the word sounds tinny, faux. But back then PoMo hadn't devolved into the default non- style of suburban strips and of skyscrapers from Shanghai to Dubai. Back then it was new and exciting, the first real challenge to decades of modernist orthodoxy, and it was bracingly inclu-



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sive, positively promiscuous in its gathering together of strange bedfellows. A compendium on the movement might have featured such torchbearers as Graves, Venturi, Stern, Tigerman, Krier, and Moore, but it might also have included Pei, Isozaki, Hejduk, Rossi, Ungers, Hollein, Stirling, Erskine, Kurokawa, the Johnson of the AT&T Building, the Eisenman of Houses I- XI, and the Koolhaas of the Hotel Sphinx. The most extrava- gantly famous of all was Michael Graves. Ivy League professor, Philip Johnson protégé, maker of anthropomorphic buildings and Alessi artifacts: Graves was for a brief while ubiquitous. Magazines and monographs showcased his projects, from the glossy Sunar showroom to the notorious, swag-festooned Port- land Building. Downtown New York galleries like Max Protetch mounted shows of his drawings; nouveau-riche emporiums like Neiman Marcus offered prints of the elevation sketch of the Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Center (this high/low commerce inspired a lot of us neophyte designers to make Graves-style renderings - hence the tracing paper and colored pencils - and it was rumored that some of his more entrepreneurial Princeton students squirreled away the professor's desk-crit doodles). By the end ef the 1980s, of course, Graves would be passé, postmodernism no longer new or exciting. The 1988 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture made it remorse- lessly clear that the spotlight had swerved, leaving in the dark the decorated bulk of the Portland Building and illuminating the non-orthogonal geometries of Bernard Tschumi and Zaha Hadid and finding new meanings in the portfolios of Eisen- man and Koolhaas. And the spotlight would keep on swerv- ing: DeCon was even shorter-lived than PoMo, and most of the

would-be movements that have followed have been so narrowly focused, so shallowly rooted, that they don't even have catchy names. Or perhaps the adherents of blob buildings and digital design have intuited the advantages of remaining low-key and lower-case? And how long before today's neo-modernism is nudged offstage? Are we ready for neo-postmodernism?

I recapitulate these movements not to bemoan the succes- sion of styles or the evanescence of reputation. That large and durable works of architecture should be subject to the fast-for- ward of fashion is one of those stubborn, like-it-or-not facts of professional life. The point is that once you've lived through a few of these cycles, once you've seen the wheel turn and then turn again, once you've seen the icons smashed, or at least dis- placed, relocated from the academic auditorium to the roomy aisles of your local Target, you have learned a lot about the flux of fame and the fickleness of favor. The knowledge is inevita- bly unsettling and ungrounding, especially since you might find yourself moving along with the flux, going with the flow of what's famous, what's fashionable, even as you sense that such ungrounding might be a necessary stage in the difficult process of learning to think for yourself. At least that's how it has seemed to me; this shift of perspective is pretty common after two decades in the field, and it probably won't be so very different for today's young architects. One afternoon a few years ago, I was talking with a couple of architecture students at Harvard. The subject was Koolhaas, as it so often was then at the GSD; Eurolille was about to open, and the six- pound, three-inch-thick S,M,L,XL was sexing up the staid apparatus of the monograph genre, making us all familiar



PERSPECTA 37: FAMOUS 20-21

not merely with the architect's work but also with the Flying Dutchman's travel schedule and his fascination with pix- elated Japanese porno movies. I mentioned to the students that when I was in school the architect of the moment was Michael Graves, a proposition they found peculiar since they catego- rized Graves as a once-influential architect who had become the purveyor of cheerfully clunky kitchen stuff. I then sug- gested tjiat at some point the architect-of-the-moment mantle would pass from Koolhaas to somebody new. And what's more, I continued - with maybe too much gusto, too much anticipa- tory schadenfreude - it was possible as well that Koolhaas, like Graves, might one day be embarrassingly unfashionable and find himself in that twilit celebrity limbo to which we cruelly consign those who are no longer red hot but who remain too famous to be entirely ignored.

Graves and Koolhaas: It's easy to see them as wildly dissim- ilar figures. Michael Graves - the one-time "Cubist Kitchen King" from Indianapolis, progenitor of Disney's Brobding- nagian Swans and Dolphins - has parlayed his architectural fame into a lucrative career as an entrepreneur of upmarket objets and superstore gadgets. Rem Koolhaas, Rotterdam-born architecte maudit of postwar European angst and creator of such neo-modernist icons as the Villa dall'Ava, has leveraged his own professional cachet into a globe-shuttling career as a kind of multimedia hipster, the in-house philosophe to Miuc- cia Prada and the unsentimental analyst of posthumanist world urbanism. But for all their dissimilarities the two architects have common membership in an extremely select group. Both are among the few architects who have achieved any measure of big-time, brand-name fame, fame that pushes past the bounds of the field. Which is to say that both are among the few who have had the necessary tenacity and the intensity of focus to pursue fame, and that their careers thus exemplify another of those realities of fame that are rarely apparent when we're starting out. For just as it takes time to understand the capri- ciousness of fame, so too it takes time to see its essential pliabil- ity: to see that fame is less a collateral benefit of achievement than an achievement in itself, not so much a gratifying result of doing a good project as a project of its own.

Consider the cheeky little guide put out by the London-based office Fat. Prominently featured on the firm's Web site (and included elsewhere in this issue), "How to Become a Famous Architect" offers step-by-step advice on the courting of fame, advice that is deliciously cynical and uncomfortably apropos. Fame-hungry young designers are counseled on choosing the firm name: "Something punchy, arty, and a little stupid should do. There are not too many rules about this but make sure it doesn't include "urban" or "studio." Your name will present an efficient image and suggest that you have an office in a fashionable part of town and a committed workforce. No one will know that you are really operating out of your bedroom." They are advised on contriving a trendy - or better yet, counter-trendy - project: "Now that you have a name, you need a project. It must be a radical design of a house. It needs a catchy title. Pick a popular word or phrase, then add "house" to the end of it. If it sounds good, it is good." On cultivating personal aura: "Now it's time to develop your mystique. This is all-important, because it is what you are selling. Remember, you won't have to design a building for at least ten years. And in this time you will live off your mys-

tique, so make it good. Mystique is what you say and the way that you say it. If you come from continental Europe, great. If you don't, pretend that you do." And finally, on working the design press: "Know your audience: Journalists. It's important to remember that design journalists are desperate for anything interesting. This is because architecture is mainly boring. So be interesting. Make outlandish claims; tell them everything they know is wrong; most of all, be prepared to have a radical opinion on anything that may crop up in conversation. They will print it and thank you."

Thank you, indeed! I wish I could refute this as heartlessly off-point, yet it is almost Swiftian in its skewering of professional opportunism and editorial gullibility. The authors have zeroed in on that most disheartening of professional realities: Most architects want to be recognized, to be famous, for their work, but architects do not become famous because they design good buildings. Architects become famous because they have the will, the stomach, and the stamina to seek fame - to court the critics and curators, the publishers and Pritzker jurors, to tirelessly promote their work and cultivate a mystique. In architecture as in other fields, fame is less a reward than a goal, and as a system it is more majoritarian than critical, more suscep- tible to marketing savvy than to meritocratic standards. This helps explain why architects whose achievements barely rate the faint praise of "modest" manage to become renowned, while others of striking talent remain comparatively obscure; and why designers who haven't done interesting work in years remain fixtures on short lists and favorites of building commit- tees. Fame is a function of temperament as much as talent, and all too often networking know-how trumps artistic vigor. None of which is to suggest that there's any sort of easy, melodramatic divide, with genuine artists on the one side, incorrigible self- promoters on the other. Talent and ego are allied more often than not, for it is almost impossible to be talented at something, let alone masterful, and not know it. Many architects of lavish gifts have become well known, and there have been geniuses who have managed to pull off the artistic triumph and the pub- licity coup. Wasn't it Frank Lloyd Wright who said, "The real art of the twentieth century is the art of public relations"? Le Corbusier created not just masterful buildings; in his multi- volume Oeuvre Complète, he created the masterpiece of monographs, the apotheosis of the office brochure. Certainly Wright and Corbu understood that the work itself was not enough, not enough to secure fame anyway. The work had to be published frequently and promoted ceaselessly. The reputation had to be constructed along with the architecture.

The crude inequities of fame are, of course, nothing new, and they are often dispiriting. They rub hard against the grain of artistic idealism that can make school so potent an experi- ence and that can help ease the vicissitudes of a professional career. In school we are taught to value architecture more as an art discipline than as a commercial practice; and we are given to understand that those who aspire to contribute to the art have got to be willing to embark upon a sustained and rigorous search; and that in the search itself, the artistic journey, is to be found the abiding passion of an architectural career. Fame, to the extent that it's considered at all, is construed as what follows from a fruitful creative journey - an almost incidental outpouring of cultural appreciation, undeniably gratifying but



NANCY LEVINSON

nothing to think about too much. To achieve fame is fine; to court it would be crass: this is more or less the attitude toward fame and its relationship to art that was encouraged when I was in school. At Penn in the early 1980s, the chief exemplar of the architect-as-artist was Louis Kahn. Kahn had died just a few years earlier, and his memory was cherished by many on the faculty who served him up to us as a near-mythical figure, a selfless seeker of architectural truth who consorted as little as possible with the quotidian milieu of commercial practice. What seems now so poignant was the apparently reflexive and largely uncalculated editing that refined the portrait we were given of the great architect. We learned much about Kahn's midcareer artistic Odyssey in Italy, for instance, and about how his intense study of classical architecture would influence his breakthrough project at Yale; but we were left to figure out for ourselves that right from the start of his career Kahn had circulated in the sort of networks that could secure fellow- ships in Europe and Ivy League commissions. It was as if our professors were reluctant to acknowledge to us (or maybe to themselves) that the brilliant architect had been hugely ambi- tious and purposefully well connected, that he wanted to be, as Robert A.M. Stern says in Nathaniel Kahn's recent film about his father, "a player" - as if somehow Kahn's worldly ambi- tions didn't quite square with his aspirations to make enduring works of art.

Perhaps all this should have been apparent to us, and perhaps students today are beyond such innocence, so molded by antiheroic postmodernity that they self-propel from design studio to advanced networking. Perhaps, but I doubt it, if only because the goal of making art is so endlessly inspiring and the calculation of career advantage so relentlessly enervating. Who could endure the exquisite mortifications of design education without a few fortifying ideals, some animating models of excel- lence? But if students - and maybe even some of us who have entered that anxious period known as "midcareer" - continue to harbor a few fugitive ideals, it's clear how very distant we are from the era that produced and venerated Kahn or Wright or Le Corbusier or Mies or any of the modern masters, for that matter; how distant we are from an era whose language was filled with unabashed references to artistic struggle and professional vigi- lance, to truths and ideals. To pick up a book by Wright or Cor- busier - to read In the Cause of Architecture, say, or Towards a New Architecture - is to be transported to a time when artists of deep sophistication could speak as if the fate of the world depended on their labors, their integrity. Today such rheto- ric seems quaint; we're too deep into the postmodern age, the age of irony, to feel otherwise. As Fat's devious satire suggests, today the work of art is not the building, but the career, and the medium is not architecture, but the media.

Ultimately this might be the hardest professional life lesson of all. Tñe immense importance of the media puts into clarify- ing perspective the whole business of fame and architecture. For when you think about the big wide world of global media, of conglomeratized art and culture, of fame, celebrity, the mass market, major newspapers, influential magazines, broadcast and cable, big screen and DVD, Yahoo and Google, when you think about this megaculture, this metaculture, it's apparent that architecture occupies almost no space at all in the ephem- eral and phenomenal universe of the popular and the famous.

It's apparent that most of us in architecture operate within a professional sphere whose activities resonate imperceptibly in the larger culture. If you organized a taxonomy of fame, rank- ing the various orders of contemporary celebrity from the higher evolutionary developments of superstardom to the lower ones of professional prominence and peer recognition, it's clear where you would slot architects: The audience for architecture consists mostly of architects. Even the best-known architects - designers who head prestigious international practices, who occupy plum positions in schools, whose work is regularly published and profiled and monographed - are famous largely within the field itself. Very few architects have managed to move past the bounds of the field and to infiltrate the broader culture, as Graves, Koolhaas, and Frank Gehry (for instance) have done in recent years, and as Philip Johnson and I.M. Pei (for instance) did years ago. It's a measure of the marginality of the discipline that the most resoundingly famous American architect of all has been dead for more than forty years - or at least it's Frank Lloyd Wright who springs immediately to mind when you ask your non-architect friends to name an architect they know, and when you search the Internet it's Wright who leads the Google hit parade.

There's a simple and unsettling explanation for why architects are so marginalized. Most people haven't much interest in architecture. To be sure, there's a lot of interest in design. There's interest in interior decor, in stylish homes and modish workplaces, in the sort of well-crafted, eye-catching objects that retailers like Alessi and Target understand as "affordable luxury." There's interest in environmental comfort and personal habitat, in neighborhood decorum and real estate values. And there's always interest in structures of grand scale, curious shape, or historic importance, and in charming old quarters of modern cities. But the impulse that makes home-owners fork over a pile of cash for the latest flatware or for a mosaic-tiled bathroom that would have made Hadrian happy and makes tourists seek out Chartres, Monticello, or the Guggenheim, hasn't really much to do with architecture as architecture, with an art that is fundamentally difficult, even austere, too much so to achieve any sort of broad-based popularity. This might seem counterintuitive. We live and work in buildings. Architecture surrounds us. It ought to be the most engaging of the arts. And yet of all the arts, architecture is arguably the least popular, the least accessible. It doesn't have the narrative drive or emotional content of film and literature, the sensual power of music, or the theatrical pageantry of opera and ballet; its techniques and effects are not as readily apprehensible as those of painting and sculpture. Architecture elicits respect and often fascination and enthusiasm, but beyond the cognoscenti it doesn't really inspire the kind of devotion that makes people bond with movies and music and books, with painting and sculpture - works that can express complex sentiments and powerful emotions and do so in formats that are widely available and easily affordable. We sustain lifelong relationships with movies that can be viewed repeatedly, books that can be endlessly reread, music that can be replayed with the flick of a wrist, and art that can be visited on a Sunday afternoon. And we form these connections along with thousands - sometimes millions - of others, creating a community whose collective passion enriches our own attach- ment to the art.



Dramatic content, narrative momentum, accessibility, affordability, portability: These aren't, as a rule, the essential characteristics of architecture. For all its visuality, then, architecture is uneasily suited to the media that generate and sustain fame. An art of felt presence and real time, a discipline that can take years to master and whose works can take years to create, architecture is a slow art. It doesn't move at the pace of the globalized media, and it is stubbornly unresponsive to the new and the now, the au courant and the du jour - and when it does try to keep pace, to become fashionable, the results are usually dated before they're done. So it's no wonder that architecture occupies such a limited space in the mass media, that it's so rarely the focus of substantive reportage or searching cri- tique. In the mass media, architecture is usually consigned to the style ghetto, portrayed as artful image (the titanium curves of Bilbao), personality profile (Koolhaas's domestic arrange- ments, Libeskind's cowboy boots), or, most often, as to-die-for lifestyle (all those interchangeable downtown lofts and Hamp- tons hideaways).

No wonder, too, that fame is finally so unsatisfying, so boring. No wonder that some of us who flocked to the famous architect's lecture that night at Harvard left fuming not just at the pro forma performance of the speaker but at the whole damn apparatus of fame. Which raises a question: How did the figure at the lectern feel about the event - about the many such events that fill the schedules and ultimately the lives of the famous? Did the celebrated architect sense the discontent? Is the celebrity system as wearisome to those perspiring in the spotlight as it is to those of us fidgeting in the cheap seats? The effects

of fame on the individual are, of course, notoriously hard to know, largely because famous architects are rarely candid on this most sensitive of subjects. It's one of the perks of the deal: After laboring assiduously to become famous, you get to express indifference to your fame - to declare that it makes no differ- ence and that what really counts, what has counted all along, is the work. But fame brings with it profound personal and professional changes. Admirers become acolytes; journalists devolve into de facto publicists; friends and family meld into an entou- rage. All of which is more or less predictable, not to mention unavoidable, and helps explain why even in architecture, a field in which mastery, or at least opportunity, can come late, many designers do their most exciting and exploratory work in the years when they are unencumbered by fame and its blandish- ments. "Celebrity," John Updike has written, "is a mask that eats into the face." What would the lecture at Harvard have been like that night had the speaker removed the mask?



levinson, n.- notes on fame (article-2005)

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