An Architect Turns to Words
“I went to the museum a year ago, and it was gone. They just erased it. I had done everything you’re supposed to do. I stayed in touch with the museum. When they got a new director, I wrote the director. But in four or five years everyone connected with the project was gone. So they decided to do a new space somewhere else and design it in-house.”
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But however rich the field, his own practice was small and unsatisfying. “What I found after 10 years–or 15, 20–of being in practice is that I couldn’t manipulate architecture to make personal statements of which I was particularly proud. And after a number of attempts you can’t blame the client or the situation. You have to say there’s something about the interaction between you and the process that isn’t working.”
Why should the prince of Wales have become an architecture critic? he wondered in one issue. “Is it because of architecture’s peculiar relationship to patronage, a generic obsequiousness regarding Position?” Solomon observed that as royal power has waned, “the monarchs of Great Britain have moved to occupy positions of influence in progressively weaker institutions. . . . The Prince has astutely located a cultural institution weak enough and insecure enough in its own underpinnings so that his opinions will be accepted . . .”
Chicago, we observed, might be the only city going with more architecture critics than rock critics.
“It’s very much like acting,” he said. “It’s almost in some ways like acting, because your ego is always on the line. You can’t go out and act without a company. You really can’t go out and practice in any meaningful way without clients. Part of your creative self is at risk in this kind of situation . . .
What’s exhilarating about journalism is that it happens. What Rick Solomon chooses to think about today he can put in his magazine tomorrow. Lately he’s been thinking about ceremonial spaces. “I’m going to do a piece,” he said, “that recalls the fact that both sports arenas and theaters were spaces in which life-and-death issues were worked out. Looking at the new Steppenwolf theater in those terms brings something that’s really different to it. I’m really excited about it.”
