Paul Goldberger on Architecture as an Act of Optimism

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TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Paul. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

PAUL GOLDBERGER: Hi, Spencer.

SB: It’s amazing that we’re sitting here in the Glass House. And since we’re sitting inside the Glass House—for those who don’t know it, although I’m sure most of our listeners do, it’s Philip Johnson’s remarkable and legendary home—I thought we’d start today’s interview with its seventy-five-year history. What do you think makes the Glass House’s staying power over this time? Why has it captured imaginations so much?

PG: It’s sublime. It really embodies this connection between architecture and nature that architects have tried to do for a long time, but began to really do in earnest in the twentieth century. And the idea of the house not as a solid object, but as something transparent and light that would sit on the landscape and connect you to the landscape—that was something this house embodied very early on. It was finished in 1949. That’s before I was born.

SB: One year. [Laughter]

PG: Before a lot of things happened. It also celebrates technology in a certain way, of course—the ability to create large expanses of glass and have a structure supported on thin columns so that you wouldn’t really see much except the glass, and the ambiguity between inside and out. All those are fascinating, extraordinary things about it.

It’s fascinating, also, as an insight into Philip Johnson’s mind, because he took so much of this house from [Ludwig] Mies van der Rohe, who was very much his mentor in the early years of his architectural career. And Mies had designed the very famous glass house [the Farnsworth House] in Illinois, outside of Chicago, for Edith Farnsworth, but it hadn’t been built yet, and Johnson was very eager to get his built first. So this would be the first glass house, even though it was inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s designs for the Farnsworth House, but this is very much Johnson’s own at the same time. The differences between those two houses are really significant. In fact, I would almost be tempted to say the only thing they have in common is all the glass, because they use it in different ways; they have different messages.

The Farnsworth House floats over the landscape. It’s this super light, white object that appears to just be floating. And the Glass House sits four-square, like a Greek temple on the land. The metal is black, not white; it’s symmetrical, whereas the Farnsworth House is very asymmetrical. You can feel in this house Johnson struggling between Modernism and the classical roots of Modernism, because he really wanted to build a modern classical temple, which Mies van der Rohe had no interest in at all in his house.

SB: And, of course, as we discussed for that piece I wrote in Town & Country, you can’t have the Glass House without the Brick House.

PG: That’s right. Of course, exactly.

SB: For those who don’t know, there is a Brick House—it’s basically adjoining; we can look at it right now across the lawn—that is sort of the counterpart to the Glass House.

PG: Exactly. One is all transparent or almost all transparent; the other is all opaque, or at least almost all opaque. What Johnson was really also trying to do here is get down to the essence of a house and split up the parts. Every house is a mix of privacy and openness. Every house has walls, every house has windows, and so forth. 

Well, he broke the parts of it apart into these two structures to see what would happen. One is all transparency, and the other is all opacity and solidity, which is fascinating. It’s basically a conceit, of course. It’s not a practical way for houses to be. But he didn’t care about that. This was not a model for other things. It was a unique house that a very intellectually-minded architect wanted to build for himself. It was about ideas as much as it was about livability. Livability could be for other people.

This was his own house. He was the architect and the client, so it was up to him how livable it wanted to be. One of my favorite stories about this house is from not long after it was finished, and it was a great curiosity and many people came to visit and some rather snooty woman, probably a neighbor in New Canaan, said, “Well, this is very beautiful, but I certainly wouldn’t want to live here.” Johnson turned to her and said, “I haven’t asked you to, madam.” [Laughter] 

It was up to him what was livable and what was not. It’s very different when an architect is working for a client and has to fulfill the client’s needs than when the architect is himself the client, which is why there’s a whole really fascinating genre of houses architects did for themselves.

SB: Of course, this was also coming in 1949. I was looking at other major seventy-five-year anniversaries this year. This marked the year that President Truman gave his Fair Deal speech. This was the first annual Emmy Awards. Relevant to this week that we’re having this conversation, it was the founding of NATO and also the FBI’s releasing of its Hollywood blacklist.

PG: A-ha.

SB: So an interesting time in which this house came into the world.

PG: Yes. I’m trying to think about what those things have in common and what they say about the modern world, and whether we can connect this house to them in any way or not. I don’t know. This house, when it was new, was really a very bold and extraordinary thing. It really was an experimental work of architecture. And the thing, to go back to your first question, the thing that’s so amazing is how after seventy-five years, it still appears fresh and beautiful in a certain way.

SB: Bold, even.

PG: It does appear bold, yes, yes. It is actually, while it kind of is anchored in its time a long time ago, it also transcends its time. So it really is, in a sense, timeless. It’s a beautiful object that transcends 1949.

SB: I wanted to pull out a bit further and have a bigger question here, which is that, what are your thoughts more generally on the past seventy-five years of architecture? How do you see its evolution across this time, and what are some projects that could reflect that or stand out to you, that embody that change and evolution?

PG: Well, that’s definitely not a yes-or-no question.

[Laughter]

SB: I put a list together myself that I was thinking about: Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House, which is ’52—

PG: Mm-hmm.

SB: —or the Seagram Building, which was Mies [van der Rohe] and Philip Johnson in ’58. 

PG: Yes.

SB: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, of course, ’59. There’s an interesting thing happening.

PG: In New York, those were the great things of that period. And then a couple of years later, but not much, Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal at JFK, Kevin Roche’s Ford Foundation building, Saarinen’s CBS Building. I think those are the great things of the period beginning in 1949. It was a critical period because America was on top of the world at that point, and New York was the critical city in it. It was not an accident that the United Nations settled both in the U.S., and in New York in particular. Europe had been torn by war and took a long time to rebuild itself. Asia had not risen in the world economy to the extent that it would later. Same with Latin America.

The world belonged to the U.S. in the years after World War II. This was also a period where an enormous amount of new stuff was happening, certainly in art. The center of art moved from Paris to New York. The rise of Abstract Expressionism was essential to making New York feel like the most vibrant city in the world in that decade. It was an amazing time, I think. This house was poised to ride that wave, you could say, really. And I think it did. And it also helped inspire, but was not solely responsible for—let’s not give Johnson too much credit here—but it helped inspire a whole wave of modern architecture here in New Canaan, Connecticut, too, in this town.

SB: The Noyes House is incredible.

PG: Right. Eliot Noyes’s house—he did two houses [here in New Canaan] for himself. Marcel Breuer settled here and built a house for himself. John Johansen. And then several of these architects did work for other clients as well. There’s several other Johnson houses here that are seriously good. There was a lot happening. And the fifties were also a time of enormous optimism. I think it’s not an accident that it was also a time of far greater income equality—or maybe better to say, less income inequality than we have today. The middle class was rising. Every adult couple felt they were living better than their parents, and they were also sure that their children would live better than they did. And that was true for those generations. It became less true later.

Modernism, I think, still held out a certain amount of hope. In New York and elsewhere, it was pretty quickly commercialized—buildings like Seagram and Lever in New York. And also, we should not forget, the U.N. Headquarters itself, which came before either of those. Increasingly, real estate developers came to realize that this whole “modern thing,” maybe it could save them a little money, too. While the Seagram Building was extraordinarily expensive and a unique work of art, it created the illusion that it was just a glass box that you could knock off easily and quickly. And in fact, I think probably the worst part of Mies van der Rohe’s legacy is that he fooled people into thinking you could knock it off cheaply. And so they started doing that.

SB: Kit of parts.

PG: Kit of parts, yeah. So suddenly we have all the junk on Third Avenue and all the junk on Sixth Avenue and so much else in New York and other cities as well. The idea of Modernism as adventuresome, experimental, challenging, beautiful, elegant, handcrafted almost, with exquisite detailing, that began to fall by the wayside. But that’s a whole other part of the story.

SB: Yeah. Well, and then of course, the expansion—international expansion, I guess I would say—of architectural innovation happening elsewhere, like the [Centre] Pompidou in Paris in ’77, you’ve got I.M. Pei’s Pyramid at the Louvre in ’89, the most obvious probably Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, which seemed to be the—

PG: That was ’97.

SB: ’97.

PG: So by then we’re almost half a century after the Glass House. The Glass House would be fifty years old in 1999, and Bilbao was only two years before that. We were in another time entirely when Modernism…. Architecture surged back. Over the second half of the twentieth century, great architecture increasingly became a matter of individual, standalone buildings and not of making whole cities. 

To some extent, the greatest buildings have always been one-off, special things. But one of the things that is so remarkable about the first half of the twentieth century, let’s say, is that we were pretty good at just making ordinary cityscapes, making ordinary buildings on ordinary streets. If you look at the average apartment building in Manhattan or Brooklyn from the 1920s or 1930s, they’re pretty good, actually.

And then you look at the lousy ones that we were building later. Yes, we could build really special, great things when we wanted to and chose to spend the money to, but the drop in quality in the ordinary thing…. I think you can measure a time in a couple of different ways. You can measure a time by what its avant-garde, its most creative, cutting-edge people were doing. You can also measure a time by where the middle is, by where the median is. And we could say the architectural median or mean went down even as great things were going up. So when Frank Gehry did the Guggenheim in Bilbao, or, a few years later, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, which I think is possibly the greatest public building in America of the last twenty-some years, the ordinary buildings that we were building everywhere were really just getting worse, it seemed, not better. I think that continues to be a very real issue now.

SB: It’s interesting to consider. I guess I would love to hear your thoughts on maybe the more recent, let’s say ten or twenty years.

PG: Mm-hmm. Well, we haven’t fully even answered your question about the great things of seventy-five years ago, either.

SB: Yeah.

PG: But I mean, I think the most important difference between seventy-five years ago in architecture—and in all of culture—and now is the loss of the optimism that was felt then. That, I think, was a critical defining thing, that things were getting better and better. Everybody was living better. We were being more creative. We were being smarter. Science was advancing; technology was advancing. Everybody believed in all those things and believed that while life would certainly not be perfect for everybody, the average person had a better-than-average chance at having a pretty good life. 

That sense of optimism is not present now, at all. In a way, I don’t know that I want to make this sound like a theorem or anything, but just a more casual observation, this huge inequality that we have today where we have just no strong middle and people either seem to have much too much or not enough, and there are very few people who are in the middle, is also reflected in where we are with architecture—as I said a minute ago, the inability to make ordinary buildings that are good. 

We can make incredible, amazing, beautiful buildings when we want to and pay for them, and we have built many, but we’re not building ordinary everyday buildings for ordinary everyday people as well as we once did. We’re also, of course, not building enough of them, period, because we have a great housing crisis and we do not have enough housing. We’ve had other periods like that, but we responded in a really, really big way.

If you think about the building that happened in this country in the late 1940s and early 1950s, after World War II, it was incredible, actually, the volume of stuff. Now, a lot of it was suburban housing that we now regret in some ways because it was completely dependent on the expansion of the culture of the automobile and the highway system and all that stuff.

But nevertheless, we were building it, and we were building a huge amount of urban housing. If you look at Stuyvesant Town, which may not be the world’s most beautiful piece of architecture, but those are really good apartments. They were really well-built. There’s a lot of rather beautiful open space. Now that seventy years of landscaping has grown in, it actually feels much more civilized than it did before, because it doesn’t look like some stark development of the Russian occupation in East Berlin or something like that. It looks like a very beautiful set of red brick towers sitting in trees and open space and parks.

SB: Well, and by now, too, I feel like we should have learned enough of the mistakes, right?

PG: Yes.

SB: Pruitt–Igoe.

PG: Well, we have learned enough of the mistakes. We just now don’t seem to have the money and the wherewithal and the determination as a society to use our knowledge and build with it.

SB: Staying on the seventy-five-year thing.

PG: Yes. Yes.

SB: When I was researching, I noticed in 1986 you wrote about an important seventy-five-year anniversary. [Laughs] It was the seventy-five-year anniversary of the Oreo cookie.

PG: Ah, okay. Right.

SB: [Laughs] And I have to say, I love that the architecture critic of the paper of record was allowed to say something as lowbrow and brilliant as you did about the Oreo cookie. I feel like even in the limited time we have to talk today, it would be a shame if I couldn’t read what you wrote about the Oreo cookie. [Laughs]

PG: I don’t remember the exact thing, so tell me.

SB: It’s quite architectural.

PG: Okay, good. Well, that was what was fun about it.

SB: These are the first opening lines: “The Oreo is the stuff of legend in part because of its taste and its texture—a pleasing juxtaposition of soft, sweet cream and hard, crisp chocolate—but also because of its appearance. It stands as the archetype of its kind, a reminder that cookies are designed as consciously as buildings, and sometimes better. The Oreo is a cookie that embraces contradictions. Not only is it dark on the outside and light on the inside, but it is lavishly ornate in its exterior design while being utterly simple within.” 

[Laughter]

PG: Well, I guess I did have it right. Yeah, It’s pretty good. Well, I did once also do a piece for Esquire magazine. It was back when Nora Ephron was working as an editor, and she asked me to do a piece on the architecture of cookies, which is probably what got me first thinking about that. I remember writing about how a Nabisco Sugar Wafer looked like it was the Mies van der Rohe of cookies because it looked almost like the Barcelona Pavilion, or something like that. I don’t remember some of the other ones I included in that, but it was really fun. One of the things that I always had a good time with when I was at the Times was writing just about all kinds of objects of design.

I wrote about the paper clip once. I wrote a short essay on the paper clip as a nearly perfect piece of design that is impossible to improve upon, actually. [Laughs] It’s economical, it’s easy to use, it looks nice. Yeah, it’s just right. And in fact, at various times, people have done little variations on the paper clip, and they’re all terrible. Why can’t they just leave the goddamn paper clip alone? It’s one of the few problems in the world we’ve actually solved fully. So let’s just accept victory and move on.

[Laughter]

SB: And don’t fix it.

PG: And don’t fix it. Don’t fix what isn’t broken. There’s just so much stuff that’s interesting, and some of it is really well designed, some of it is not. I will say one good thing about the last—I don’t know if it’s fully seventy-five years—but maybe fifty, and maybe seventy-five, is that the dream the Bauhaus had, that quality design could come to the masses, actually has happened. If you think about, while I don’t think everything IKEA makes is perfect by a long shot, in general, there’s been a great deal of quality design brought to everybody.

SB: You can find gems in Bed Bath & Beyond.

PG: You can find gems in Bed Bath & Beyond. [Laughter] Absolutely. And also, if you look at stuff…. Think about the design of flat-screen televisions and compare it to the ridiculous ornate Mediterranean cabinets and stuff that television manufacturers used to do. Or look at the iPhone, look at the computer. Apple certainly has brought more design quality to more people around the world than any company in the history of anything. 

Objects have gotten somewhat better. Actually, most cars—I’ve always been fascinated by car design. I love cars. And despite the fact that I’m an urbanist and I take the subway and I walk and try to avoid using a car very much, I nevertheless love cars and I’m fascinated by car design as a subject, too. At the Times, I used to, from time to time, dip into all that stuff—and it was fun.

SB: So pulling out even further, I guess if we’re going to go to maybe the past century, you’ve written—

PG: I’ve not been writing for the entire past century.

SB: [Laughs] You’ve written that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater is “perhaps the greatest house of the twentieth century.” And I was wondering, would you consider the Glass House as a contender, too?

PG: The Glass House is definitely a contender. Ultimately, even though I know I wrote that, I think I hedged it by saying “perhaps” or whatever. I really don’t like, in the end, saying something is the absolute greatest, because you can argue forever this and that. And it’s kind of a Talmudic argument that just goes on and on and doesn’t have any real… whatever. The Glass House and Fallingwater and the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe are, all three of them, definitely among the very greatest houses of the twentieth century. I don’t think it matters what you put as one, two, three or whatever. 

There are many others, too. Richard Neutra’s Lovell House in Los Angeles…. I think of several other Wright houses. There are a couple of Frank Gehry houses, including his house for himself. Louis Kahn, who may have been the greatest architect of the mid-twentieth century, curiously never did a house that rose to the level of his greatest work. He did a few houses, and they’re good, they’re of great interest mainly because they were done by him, not because they are just transcendental.

SB: It’s not the Salk Institute.

PG: Not the Salk Institute, not the Kimbell [Art Museum], not anything like that. That’s right. That’s right. I think he was just so much more interested in a public building of some kind—and building its civic scale—that the single-family house didn’t interest him as much. And he, I think, tended to do them mainly for clients who were friends, who kind of, well, very much wanted to, he didn’t want to disappoint them, so he would do something. But his heart and his soul were in the other kinds of projects.

SB: I want to turn this conversation here to obituaries. Maybe not a fun subject.

PG: Okay. I hope not mine or yours, but okay.

SB: Yeah. [Laughs]

PG: Okay.

SB: Well, you’ve written a lot of them over the years, including Philip Johnson’s.

PG: Yes.

SB: And in 1974, then a newly minted architecture critic at the Times, you were assigned to write Louis Kahn’s obituary.

PG: That’s correct.

SB: And Kahn famously died in the men’s room at Penn Station in New York.

PG: Yes. Right.

SB: Over the years, you’ve also written obituaries about Luis Barragán, Reyner Banham, Gordon Bunshaft. More recently, Kevin Roche and I.M. Pei. What has writing obits taught you about time and about the lives of architects, and—in the case of Banham—the life of an architecture critic?

PG: Writing obits is a really interesting exercise. I should first say that most of these, other than the Kahn, were done in advance and not on deadline.

SB: Yeah. They’re sitting in the Times “morgue,” right?

PG: Right, right. Exactly. The Times has always had, as a matter of policy, tried to write advance obituaries about prominent people, on the theory that the appropriate obituary is just going to be too long and take too much research to get something appropriate and adequate in under-deadline pressure. But every now and then there are mistakes or things fall through the cracks. And there had never been an obituary prepared for Louis Kahn, and of course he died suddenly.

So I was asked to…. I remember they found me, I was swimming in the Yale Club swimming pool, and I got an emergency call to come back to the office, and I did and spent the night writing. That was back before computers, before anything. I was sitting on a typewriter pounding out things, and a copy boy would take each sheet and run to the copy desk as it was finished. It was really something out of the front page out of those old newspaper movies and stuff.

The others were able to be a little bit more considered, I think, over time. I worked on some of them well in advance, others later. Years after I left the Times, they would call me and ask me to do them. Your question is interesting, about what does it teach you about the lives [of architects]? I think a couple of things. One is that it forces you to look, as with any life, at the whole of it. Now, architects are unusual because so many of them live very long. I don’t know why that is, but it just seems to be, and it’s a slow career to develop. Very few architects are famous and do important work in their thirties. And many of them, like Frank Gehry, who is still active at 95, Frank Lloyd Wright died at 92, still working….

SB: [Oscar] Niemeyer I think was—

PG: Niemeyer lived to 104 and was working until pretty close to the end. But some people do fade away a little bit or, as with, say, Paul Rudolph, fall very much out of fashion. So you need to look at the career as a whole—that’s one thing—and the arc of it. And trying to balance the life and the work, which is of course an issue for every artist, but also an issue when writing about an artist, because an obituary is technically a little story of a life, not just a commentary on the work, and figure out what is the essential thing, what really mattered, and combining the life story and the evaluation of the work and so forth. 

So it’s a really interesting challenge, as a form, to do. What does it teach me about architects? Well, they do, as I said, they do tend to live long. There are relatively few who have died young, a handful, but not many prominent ones. Zaha Hadid died at 65, very much in the height of her career and rather suddenly.

SB: I think the lives of architects, too, are so complex because they’re artists, but they’re also dealing with the realities of utility and engineering and all these other things.

PG: Of course.

SB: I was thinking about…. Actually, I went back to the very first piece of writing that you did in the Times, I think—at least this is what I could find—but it was written in October ’73, and it was about what was then a new building at One Police Plaza.

PG: The police headquarters, yeah.

SB: And it begins with a sentence that I think is really relevant here.

PG: Okay.

SB: I don’t know if this is technically the first sentence you wrote in The New York Times ever, but it’s: “Designing a building for the city of New York is the sort of nightmare that makes architects wonder why they didn’t go into some easier profession, like neurosurgery.”

[Laughter]

PG: That’s wonderful. I’d forgotten about that sentence completely. Gosh, that was pretty good, actually.

SB: [Laughs] I think about that because it’s like— Neurosurgery, I mean, man, being an architect is tough.

PG: It is tough.

SB: Their lives, I think the obituaries, the way that you wrote them, really do reflect that sort of…. The arc.

PG: Yeah. Well, every life is an arc. In fact, Henry Geldzahler once said this—

SB: You wrote his obit, too.

PG: There was a line that I don’t think it was his, I think it might’ve even been Aristotle or something, but that he loved, and that was in the program for his memorial service, which was, “Every life inscribes an arc, and it is perfect.”

SB: Very nice.

PG: Yes. So one tries to do that, but one also tries to balance everything else. Not every architect was successful at every project. Then there also are unfortunate and complex things that come into people’s lives, and architects are not exempt from that. However great and important the buildings of, say, Richard Meier and David Adjaye are, inevitably, their obituaries will contain mention of unfortunate #MeToo incidents that damaged the careers of both of them. I think their stories are not only that, but they cannot not be that as part of it.

SB: Kahn would not have escaped that story today.

PG: Today, that’s right. Whereas in the days when the Kahn obit was written, not only were social mores different, so is journalistic custom, and the Times never mentioned any survivors other than, to use that old-fashioned word that seems ridiculous today, “legitimate married families.” Men who had lifelong mistresses or gay couples who had companions, they were never mentioned. Similarly, the paper would only allow to be mentioned under Kahn’s survivors his wife and the daughter they had. The other two children were not mentioned as survivors, which I have…. And Nathaniel Kahn is a friend of mine. He was 11 years old then. He’s become a friend years later.

SB: Made a great film about his dad.

PG: Right. And he did that incredible film about his father. And we’ve talked about all this a lot. I feel terrible that…. I still feel guilt that he and his sister were not mentioned in the obituary because it’s so wrong. Now that’s a more positive change. I mean, you’re right that, by today’s standards, Kahn would have been called out for everything. But at the same time, it’s also true that all of his children would’ve been mentioned as survivors.

SB: When it comes to architecture, do you have any philosophies on time? And what makes a building or a piece of architecture stand the test of time?

PG: Well, architecture is partly about time. All architecture is an act of optimism because it’s built because you believe in and expect there will be a future. What makes something stand the test of time? It’s a hard question. I’ve grappled with it a lot over the years, and I play with it a little bit. And I did this book a few years ago, called Why Architecture Matters, that has two different chapters that try to grapple with that in two different ways, actually. One of them is called “Buildings and Memory,” and the other is called “Buildings and Time.” And I think only time will determine what makes a building timeless. And that sounds like an evasion of the question [laughter], but it’s true. Because, in fact, we often reject things before we come around again to respect them.

SB: The Pompidou is a good example of that, actually.

PG: The Pompidou was very popular at the beginning, then kind of went down, then back up again, and so forth. But when Frank Lloyd Wright died, there was a whole pile-on about how he was kind of— Who needs him, whatever, that he was a man of the past. Then people came back and rediscovered it. Paul Rudolph was very much out of fashion at the time of his death, but there’s been a huge revival of interest in his work now, and I suspect a lot of buildings that were demolished would not be demolished today, buildings of his.

Here we are in the Glass House. I remember Philip Johnson once telling me that, when he was young, no serious architect thought anything of the Chrysler Building. It was thought to be a piece of garish commercial junk and that serious architects would never do anything so frivolous as that. Now, he was not saying he agreed with that. He was just observing—because this was an observation he made, obviously, many, many years later—observing how it was not thought to be a great building until much, much later in time.

 There’s a wonderful line by Sir John Summerson that I really love, when he said that—I think he was speaking of Victorian architecture—but he said something like “Everything really has to fall out of fashion before it can come back and really be understood for its long-term historical feeling.” Because Victorian architecture was wildly unpopular in England until then everyone wanted to start saving it.

Art deco, in this country, went through a similar thing. It was dismissed as sort of garish commercial junk. And then everyone suddenly decided this was all wonderful. So a building that is truly timeless is a building that makes us look at the world in a new way, and that way continues to be meaningful long afterwards. In other words, it’s not just novelty. Novelty is newness that has no lasting power, but a truly great and timeless work of architecture has a newness that continues to feel fresh, continues to teach us things, continues to be able to be interpreted in a lot of different ways, too. I think it has a depth. 

In the same way that you listen to a Beethoven string quartet or the Fifth Symphony or something, and you’ll always hear it a little differently. You always hear something a little new in it. You’ll always have some.… Great architecture, I think, does that. It creates a certain sense of awe and wonder, even if you’ve seen it a hundred times. I’ve been in the Glass House—where we’re sitting now—loads and loads of times, beginning with my first visit when I was a student, which was, I can’t believe it, but it was like fifty years ago. And yet there’s still a little sense of wow every time I turn in the driveway and see it for the first time. That little lift of your spirit, that’s one test of whether something is truly timeless and truly extraordinary: Does it lift your spirit again and again and again?

SB: Beautiful. Well, this is a good segue. Back in time—you mentioned school—you went to Yale. I thought we would maybe go there, and obviously, there’s a lot we could get into about your upbringing, too. Your parents, who were both teachers. You grew up in New Jersey, one of three.

PG: Right.

SB: There’s a great line from a piece in the Times in which you noted, “Back when I was a 10-year-old architecture critic, there wasn’t much to do except play with blocks.”

[Laughter]

PG: I did play with blocks. Yes, yes.

SB: But I think it was almost foreordained somehow that you’d become a writer of architecture. I know you were interested in being an architect, and then interested in writing, and sort of merged those passions.

PG: I merged the two, and I decided I was a pretty good writer—I was never that sure I’d be that good an architect.

SB: [Laughs]

PG: At some point, I decided the world had enough second-rate architects and it didn’t need another, but I could be a first-rate writer.

SB: And Vincent Scully, who was such a pivotal figure for you and so many others.

PG: Yes, yes, absolutely.

SB: You’ve written and spoken so much about him, so I don’t know that we have to go into too much detail, but I was curious to hear about your time with him, how you think about the time you got to spend with him.

PG: Well, it was great, an incredible privilege. It’s one of the reasons I was so glad I went to Yale, because I had the opportunity to have as a mentor one of the great architecture historians of all time. I was an undergraduate, but I worked with him as if I were a graduate student, and that was fantastic. It was actually through Scully that I met Philip Johnson originally, in fact, and got an invitation to come to the Glass House for the first time.

SB: Yeah, full circle.

PG: Exactly. Exactly.

SB: And you’ve also noted the influence of Lewis Mumford’s writing. I was wondering if you ever met him and what it was like for you also, years later, in 1997, when you took the post at The New Yorker, effectively resurrecting his column.

PG: Mumford, I did meet once, shortly before his death, and he was not well. I was invited by a friend who knew him and his wife and was an academic at the University of Chicago who was writing something that involved Mumford—I don’t even recall what—and invited me to come to visit at their house in Amenia, in upstate New York, and meet him. He was already entering a period of, kind of, dementia. He was polite and sat there and listened, but barely spoke. His wife, though, was very lively and engaging, and I remember it as a memorable visit, even though it wasn’t possible to really exchange ideas. Mumford’s an extraordinary figure, brilliant in so many ways, and yet also arrogant, wrong about many things.

I so disagree with his views of New York, which he thought was…. He really ultimately hated density and believed that the city could be planned rationally, and that the “Garden City” was the right answer. So I have a deep philosophical disagreement with him, and he never got Jane Jacobs at all. He misunderstood and misread everything she was saying. [Editor’s note: We recommend reading Mumford’s December 1, 1962, review in The New Yorker of Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.] But I would put Mumford as the person I admire most that I disagree with most, if that makes any sense.

SB: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Laughter]

PG: In other words, the ratio of agreement to admiration is wildly out of whack with Mumford because I disagree with so much that he wrote and said, and yet I admire him anyway. And so much of his architecture criticism was brilliant and perceptive, even as his larger views about the city, I think, were wrong.

SB: Yeah, I think he was also so often ahead of his time, things he was writing about, Technics and Civilization, that book.

PG: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was also one of the most important early intellectual critics of the Vietnam War. We talked much earlier about what Henry Luce called “The American Century,” the period after World War II, when America was kind of on top of the world. Mumford saw more quickly than almost anybody that that could lead to a kind of wild excess of bombastic power, which indeed it did.

He also was one of the most articulate critics of…. There’s a great essay he wrote called “The Highway and the City,” in which he argued that they’re fundamentally incompatible and that we are destroying cities by running interstate highways through them, and that everything cannot be about serving the automobile. So he was not wrong about everything. He was really right about a lot of things too. He’s a very complex and fascinating figure.

SB: The third person I have to bring up here after Mumford and after Scully is Huxtable, of course, Ada Louise.

PG: Right, right.

SB: The O.G. architecture critic, I guess we could say, who you worked alongside at the Times from ’73 to ’82.

PG: Yes.

SB: Could you tell me a bit about your time with her? What do you remember most from her?

PG: I remember having fun with her because she was a person of enormous dignity and great strength and conviction as a writer. Somewhere behind that super elegant, ladylike appearance was not only great strength and conviction, but a lot of fun. The reason I was hired as an architecture critic was that she was appointed to the editorial board, but wanted to remain as architecture critic part-time and to be the senior person. These were the days when journalism was only expanding and getting bigger and stronger, not when it was fighting for its economic life. So they said, “All right, we’ll just hire a junior person to work under you.” And that was me.

I remember her saying, “Oh, it’s so much fun. There’s somebody I can gossip about architecture with, finally.” And we did. We had a lot of fun just talking about things, and generally agreed. I think I was more sympathetic to postmodernism than she was. I think—it’s so interesting—over time, I came to agree with…. I mean, I.M. Pei is a good example. I found a lot of his modern stuff conservative and a little dull in the seventies and eighties as things were evolving and changing. As the years went on, actually, a lot of it looked better and better over time. [Editor’s note: We recommend reading Huxtable’s July 11, 1971, New York Times review of Pei’s East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.] And I.M. Pei is very lucky he lived to 102, because he really did live to a point where his work was really widely admired after maybe having a dip at a certain point. So we mostly agreed. We didn’t always agree, but it was fun to work with her. 

And then the other part that I really treasure even more is knowing her late in life when she did that wonderful stint as architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal, in the last few years of her life, when she was convinced to go back and do journalism again after doing other things and writing books and so forth, and did some wonderful, wonderful pieces. She also, I think at that late point in her life, felt very secure, was widely admired, and became much more generous to younger people. She was a particularly beloved mentor to a number of younger women in the field. That was something that would not have happened earlier.

In fact, in the years when she was at The New York Times, she was very convinced that her success came because she worked hard and was talented, and did not think that the women who were charging that The New York Times had discriminated against women, as a group, were justified in filing a lawsuit. And she declined to join it as one of the complainants, which meant that her relationships with many of the other women at The New York Times were not so good. Late in life—I don’t know, I never asked her if she changed her mind about that—but I did observe that she became very, very generous to a lot of women, some of whom really feel that they owe their careers to mentorship from her.

SB: We’ll stay on The Times for a bit. And I have to say, prepping for this, it was hard because you’ve written so much [laughs], and reading your work, the breadth is really incredible. From Oreos to—

PG: Skyscrapers.

SB: —to the Louvre pyramid. Yeah, exactly.

PG: Yeah, right.

SB: Given that we only have so much time, I thought I would read a few of your lead sentences from The Times.

PG: Okay.

SB: And you can react if—

PG: Tell you if I like them still or not?

SB: Yeah, you can react if something comes up.

PG: Okay, good.

SB: So sort of speed round, I guess. The first is from January 29, 1978, and you wrote, “Respect in architecture, like love, takes many forms.”

PG: Ooh, that is a good line, but I have no idea what followed it.

[Laughter]

SB: Well, I’ll read one from October 9, 1980: “It was not so long ago that historic preservation meant a quaint old house containing a quaint old lady who desperately wished that George Washington had slept there even if he hadn’t.”

PG: That’s also a pretty good line, yeah.

[Laughter]

SB: The ledes are strong.

PG: Okay, good.

SB: December 8, 1983: “Very few architects have ever been able to speak with any real sense of their own work.” Holds true.

PG: That is true.

SB: Yeah.

PG: Very few architects are articulate about their own work. Many of them are not articulate about much of anything. Some are, some aren’t. There are occasional exceptions.

SB: There are certain architectural orators, I guess we could call them. Bjarke Ingels comes to mind here, who I think a lot of their [BIG’s] success, not all of their success, but a lot of it is down to their ability to speak about really complicated things in ways that actually aren’t dumbed down, but make sense for a wider, more general audience.

PG: Totally true. And also, in that wider and more general audience are clients, and it’s one of the ways you get clients, is that way.

SB: Yeah. All right. March 30, 1986: “Architecture is an art of movement as much as it is an art of stasis: though buildings stand still, we must move through them to understand them.”

PG: I think that’s good, too. Now, the really interesting thing would be if you asked me to match up each of those sentences with the building that the piece was actually about, because so far I have to say, well, I think those sentences are all pretty good. I haven’t the slightest idea what I was talking about in any of them. In other words, what the next sentence or two was going to be, actually. [Editor’s note: The next sentence in Golberger’s March 30, 1986, article—titled “A Grand Tour of Spaces and Places Just Misses the Mark”—was “It would seem, then, that film would be the ideal medium to capture architecture.” The review was about Pride of Place, an eight-part TV series on American architecture.]

[Laughter]

SB: Well, I have three more, so maybe we’ll figure it out.

PG: Okay.

SB: August 7, 1987: “There are few things in architecture as wonderful as monumental staircases, and they are as much a thing of the past as gas lamps.”

PG: That’s also pretty good. I wonder what I was talking about…. Now, if we ever do this again, you should do this and then make a list of the buildings and then see if I can match up which sentence applied to which building.

SB: I’m pretty sure the last one was not about one building, but many, and you—

PG: Might’ve been about—

SB: The Met[ropolitan Museum of Art] stairs, I think. [Editor’s note: This is correct. The story in conversation was effectively an ode to grand New York City staircases, “like those in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the wonderful, sprawling complex of stairs and terraces in front of Low Memorial Library at Columbia University,” as Goldberger writes.]

PG: Oh, the Met stairs?

SB: I think it was referencing the Met stairs.

PG: Well, it may have also been about the A.D.A. requirements making it harder and harder to make grand staircases anymore.

SB: Yeah. All right. October 13, 1991: “Architects are not like dancers, and even less like football players: Their careers develop slowly and peak late.”

PG: There we are.

SB: We already—

PG: We’ve been talking about that already.

SB: And the final one, from January 7, 1996: “Film is a great architecture critic.”

PG: Ooh, I like that, too. What was I writing about? Let’s see. That must’ve been about a film, but I don’t know what film. Wow. [Editor’s note: The article was about “Film Architecture: Set Designs From Metropolis to Blade Runner,” an exhibition at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University.]

SB: [Laughs] This year also marks forty-five years since you published your book The City Observed: A Guide to the Architecture of Manhattan. And while I feel like we could probably do a whole podcast series on that book, let alone the architecture of Manhattan, I wanted to bring up your writing on Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center building.

PG: Yes.

SB: In that book in particular, you do compliment a few things about it, but you also call the Twin Towers “pretentious and arrogant” and “boring, so utterly banal as to be unworthy of the headquarters of a bank in Omaha.”

PG: Right. I remember that.

SB: And you also noted in a strange foreshadowing, almost, that the towers were “an occasion to mourn.”

PG: Ah. Yeah. What I was thinking of then, of course, was not imagining ever that what happened would happen. It was more thinking that are we ever going to do anything as big and ambitious, and boy, did we blow it. And of all situations in which we should have done something better and could have done something better, that we could only come up with this. I think that was what I meant to say there, or what I was trying to say.

SB: Yeah. And you’ve written so much about that site since—a book [The World Trade Center Remembered].

PG: Well, it’s interesting that you bring up City Observed, which has always been one of my favorite things that I’ve ever done, and I always hoped I would do a new edition of it. And of course, with every passing year, there’s even more work to do a new edition because more has changed, more has been built and so forth. And I still fantasize about that. It was my very first book. Maybe it’ll be my last book someday.

SB: Let’s do it. 2029, fiftieth anniversary edition.

PG: Yeah, fiftieth anniversary edition. Maybe I should do that, a fiftieth anniversary edition.

SB: Publishers, you heard it here first.

PG: Right, right. Okay.

SB: And the introduction to that book is also so incredible.

PG: Thank you.

SB: I think it’s a really beautiful testament to your love of New York, but also you reference in it an essay that I wasn’t familiar with, which is E.B. White’s “Here Is New York.”

PG: Oh, yes.

SB: Calling it “the finest single commentary on the city in our time.” So I went ahead and read it in preparation for this, and I have to just encourage all the listeners to go find this essay, read it. It is a really remarkable piece of work.

PG: It is a really remarkable essay. And it goes back to, actually, around when the Glass House was built. I think it was published in 1949 or ’50.

SB: Yeah, in Holiday magazine.

PG: Holiday magazine originally.

SB: Commissioned by his stepson, Roger Angell.

PG: Right. Who later wrote an introduction to it when it was reprinted as a standalone book. And it’s a classic thing. That, too, is timeless, even though it’s rooted in certain things about New York then that are very, very different. Nevertheless, as you just experienced, you can read it now and still feel it’s speaking to you in a meaningful way. A lot of it’s because it’s about feelings and emotions about the city. It’s not just physical descriptions of things that are gone. And it’s also—a lot of it—about time and experiencing time in a city. But in the same way that if an essay that was written in the nineteenth century that talked all about the horse dung on the streets and the clip-clop of the carriages would make you feel not like you were going—reading something that spoke to you today, but this one does. It’s not locked in that way

SB: It’s like what you were saying about what makes a building stand the test of time. I would say the same is almost true of a piece of writing.

PG: Yes, very much so.

SB: And in this case, this is—

PG: Very much so.

SB: I felt awe reading this.

PG: Yes. Totally. I do, too. And also, like a great piece of architecture, every time I go back to that E.B. White essay, I see something I didn’t notice before or didn’t remember, or maybe I think of it in a new way or something like that. It’s another gift that keeps on giving and that’s wonderful. But I do want to do a new City Observed, because I think everything I was trying to say then is true, but so much else is also true and so much has changed and so many things have not changed.

SB: What a different city.

PG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I know. I sometimes have looked out a window and thought, “Oh, my God, eighty percent of what I can see wasn’t here when I first came to New York.” And I don’t think of myself as old at all.

SB: Before we finish, I wanted to bring up the subject of hotels.

PG: Sure, sure, sure.

SB: This will probably seem random to the listeners, but there is a news hook here. You wrote this beautiful foreword to a forthcoming Monacelli book, Design: The Leading Hotels of the World, that I happened to edit. And you’ve also written about hotels quite a bit over the years. Just looking at your pieces in the Times alone, I found writing about the Palace Hotel, the 42nd Street Grand Hyatt, the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square, the Four Seasons on 57th Street, and even the Tawaraya Ryokan in Kyoto. And you’ve done texts for two Ian Schrager books [Ian Schrager: Works and Studio 54].

PG: You’ve found everything.

SB: What do you make of all this hotel writing over the years, and how do you think about hotels from, I guess, an architecture critic’s—

PG: I also wrote a piece you didn’t mention in The New Yorker about the Westin, I think it is, the hotel.

SB: I remember that.

PG: The hotel that Arquitectonica did at 43rd and 8th that had the headline “Is This the Ugliest Building in New York?” [Laughter] A building I really did not like at all. I think I just love hotels. I love how they represent this amazing meeting point of fantasy and reality. You have to be comfortable, which is reality, and they have to serve a lot of practical needs. You’ll hate a hotel if things don’t work, but they should also transport you to another place, figuratively as well as literally, and play into a sense of fantasy and connect to where you are in some meaningful way and not feel as if you could be anywhere. What I like best are hotels that speak to the place they’re in and make you feel that place more deeply.

SB: Yeah, your text in the Leading Hotels book where you write about the Ritz Paris is…. I just love your passion coming out about this incredible space.

PG: I was traveling about ten days ago again, and I was briefly in the Netherlands and I stayed…. I had a meeting in Rotterdam, and I stayed at this really horribly unmemorable and irritating hotel that I hated. But it was useful, particularly when I contrasted it with this hotel I stayed in in Amsterdam for the following few days. It was called The Dylan, which I had never stayed in before, and absolutely loved. It had the most wonderful vibe. It was elegant, beautiful, not over the top, gracious, comfortable, and you felt so connected to that landscape of townhouses and canals and everything there. Everything just felt right. There was just this rightness to it.

SB: Well, I’ve always been fascinated with hotels because I feel like at their best—and this connects to time—they can be both at the cutting edge but also totally timeless.

PG: Yes, of course.

SB: So there’s this sort of combination. And hotels have really contributed, I think, to pushing certain sensibilities or certain design and architectural things forward in a way that maybe a house or an office building cannot.

PG: That’s true. That’s true. Absolutely. No, I am a great lover of hotels. I can’t afford to stay in them all the time, but I love them anyway.

SB: Well, final question—I thought I would just quote…. It’s not really a question. I guess it’s a way of finishing our conversation, but maybe you’ll have a response to it. I thought I would quote from an essay you wrote in ’81 titled “Why Buildings Grow On Us.” You write, “A building is only partly finished on the day that it is declared complete; it begins to age only at that moment, and our perceptions only begin to form.” You add, “One of the greatest benefits of architecture is to provide us with symbols of permanence; we may know that architecture is not really forever… but it is comforting to feel that it is not there just for the moment, either.”

PG: Yeah, I’ll stand by that.

SB: I think it’s a nice place to end, because to me, so much of what we’ve been talking about is embodied in that quote, even going back to where we began, with the Glass House.

PG: Yes. I think that’s right. Absolutely. And whatever the Glass House was thought to mean when Philip Johnson finished it, in 1949, in fact was only the beginning of what it means and only the beginning of its life. And now, the life is everything this house means for the culture and for everybody who comes in it and sees it and comes through it. New layers of meaning all the time. That’s why architecture is…. Yes, it’s a solid and static object, but it’s also a living thing.

SB: Let’s end there. Thank you, Paul. This was great.

PG: Thank you, Spencer. This has been fun.

This interview was recorded inside the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, on July 10, 2024. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Emily Jiang, Mimi Hannon, Emma Leigh Macdonald, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Diego Mallo based on a photograph by Ogata.