The bicycle shed conundrum

The bicycle shed conundrum (2015)

Pevsner’s buildings-versus-architecture distinction is back in play.

A recent NYTop-ed piece1 by Steven Bingler and Martin C. Pedersen, “How to Rebuild Architecture,” led to a furious rejoinder2 from Aaron Betsky in Architect. In parallel, Architectural Review editor Catherine Slessor took Frank Gehry to task3 for dabbling in luxury goods. Contrasting Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton Museum with a new primary school by Giancarlo Mazzanti, Slessor wrote that the latter “gets to the heart of what architecture should be: modest, socially minded and truly transformative.” These threads remind me of Nikolaus Pevsner’s famous distinction,

“A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.”

Pevsner’s distinction suggests that Fondation Louis Vuitton is architecture and the primary school that Slessor mentions is not, but it has two aspects, scale and aesthetics. Lincoln Cathedral is meant to be visible, a landmark and destination. A bicycle shed is meant to be functional, but may also have aesthetic appeal. If it does, is it architecture? I would say yes—aesthetic appeal is how it rises out of mere strength and commodity (to cite Vitruvius) to provide delight.

Bingler and Pedersen begin their op-ed by noting Bingler’s 88year-old mother’s dislike of an affordable housing project in Charlottesville, Virginia. While confessing that he likes it, Bingler says it’s indicative of the gap between architects and the public. Betsky retorts, “Good architecture can be startling, or least might not look like what we are used to.” Wallace Stegner makes the same point about nature—its “inhuman” scale can overwhelm us. (Thoreau viewed the “wildness” of the Maine woods similarly.) There’s an innate tension between the familiar and the new, whether it’s due to scale, appearance, or some other salient difference.

Bingler and Pedersen also argue that contemporary architecture’s disconnection from the everyday condemns it to irrelevance. The term starchitectis invoked. Like Slessor, they see the world as two camps—the 0.1 percent and the deserving rest. What doesn’t pass

their litmus test of “common sense” gets lumped in the category of “fashion…indulgently removed from the real purpose of architecture,” in Slessor’s words. Betsky is right to resist, for two reasons. First, “common sense” too often leads to Poundbury or worse—dreadful New Urbanist concoctions. In an urban context, it leads to generic, market-driven density—the same towers and podiums endlessly repeated. (In this case, mass customization doesn’t even produce affordability. It’s like a skyline full of high-end cars.) Second, aesthetic progress is often bespoke, as Thorstein Veblen notes in Theory of the Leisure Class. A glance through history shows that “modest” has its own cult— remember that “dumb” and “ordinary” were often on the lips of an architect like Joseph Esherick in reference to his old-money houses.

We accept that a bicycle can cost the earth, with a bamboo or carbon-fiber frame and other accoutrements that appeal to a minute fraction of bike riders, yet potentially benefit all of them if innovation finds its way down market. Betsky makes this point to argue for experimentation as a path to higher performance, while Slessor, Bingler, and Pedersen are mainly arguing against an “art for art’s sake” that ignores functionality. (Yet even frivolity has its uses. It produces masterpieces along with fluff. Even cathedrals have it.)

In a panel I heard at SFMOMA, Betsky said of architecture that “it’s all art,” but his standpoint here is really Vitruvian. It maps to Pevsner’s in making aesthetic appeal the tipping point between architecture and buildings, but it keeps good-looking bike sheds in the picture while also admiring their commodity and firmness.

As the writer Yukiko Bowman noted to me, ambition is in play here, not just aesthetics.4 This brings us to Pevsner’s invoking of scale. Is a bicycle shed architecture if the designer’s ambition creates something original? Or does its size eliminate that possibility? Consider the small church that Raphael designed near the Farnese Palace in Rome, or Tsien & Williams’ late, lamented Folk Art Museum. They suggest that scale isn’t the dividing line. Ambition, originality, daring—they also tip a building into architecture.

Notes:

1. Steven Bingler and Martin Pedersen, "How to Rebuild Architecture, New

York Times, 15 December 2014. 2. Aaron Betsky, "The New York Times Versus Architecture," Architect, 23

December 2014. 3. Catherine Slessor, "Editorial View: Architecture has nothing in common with luxury goods," Architectural Review, 5 November 2014. 4. Yukiko Bowman, in an email to the author in late 2014.

Posted on my Medium site (johnjparman.medium.com) on 18 January 2015, and prompted by a class that Eva Hagberg was teaching, but the details escape me.