Quote of the day: architecture is a public art, but should be an art of connection

From John Massengale, via email:

... This is similar to the "autonomous architecture" taught today at Architecture Art schools like Columbia. "Don't worry about the buildings around yours," the students are told, "those will change over time. Make your building consistent with its own rules."

And this continues the object-oriented anti-urban architecture of so much of the last 50 years.

Architecture is a public art that must be about making places and the public realm. One can choose to go to or not to go to MOMA or the the New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery, which frees the artist to do whatever he or she wants.

But the buildings themselves alter the experience of every person who passes them on the street. For those people we must make places where they want to be, not places that express the self, or ego, of the artist.

And recent research that the architectural qualities that make places where people feel good and therefore want to be are rather simple. The expression of the artist's ego and the making of object-oriented buildings are not among those qualities.