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Timothy Culvahouse MILLENNIAL QUESTIONS INVITE polemical responses, so I will begin with a rash remark: architectural innovation in our century has involved more rejection than invention. We have rejected old ideas to open
our minds to something new; rejected certain possibilities to symbolize
a challenge to a political or cultural order; rejected other possibilities
because we could not muster the resources necessary for success in them.
Many of us, sad to say, have rejected something simply to distinguish
our work from that of others. Individuals, like nations, too often define
themselves by what they are not. I cannot recall a notable building of the last fifty years that has not rejected at least a handful of these possibilities. Nor is it easy to think of an architect of this period whose position is not actually defined, in part, by such rejections. Dare we imagine another thousand years of rejected possibilities--including the possibilities discovered in Modernism itself? I think not. We have rejected enough. Architecture is the application of judgment to the superabundance of possibilities, not their reduction.
I look at the First Church of Christ,
Scientist, and am amazed at this unprecedented whole in which Maybeck
abandons no part of the legacy as he innovates. The church combines
long-known forms with forms original to its architect and with fashionable
forms of its day. In it he employs both traditional and cutting-edge
technologies, and he does so without irony. Timothy Culvahouse is an architect on the faculty of California College of Arts and Crafts. He is the editor of a journal for California Members of the American Institute of Architects.
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