To the editors:
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First of all, Zotti offers in his piece a veritable Thanksgiving-Day cornucopia of inconsistencies and contradictions. Examples: He damns Sullivan, then praises him; calls him a modernist, then a Victorian; says he is irrelevant for our time, then insists he is worthy of emulation, etc. As annoying as is all the flip-flopping, it is a minor problem compared to the eagerness with which Zotti embraces the simpleminded antibusiness/antitechnology line espoused by David Andrews, author of one of the books Zotti discusses in his article. Anyone who can assert, as Zotti does (quoting Andrews), that the skyscraper is “a monument to institutional cupidity,” and who can also imply that the minimalist glass and steel aesthetic of the 50s and 60s resulted from the need by developers to cut construction costs, cannot be taken seriously as a critic.
Bill Hinchliff
“Very little ‘Miesian’ architecture was actually Miesian at all, but rather was expedient construction by speculators who saw minimalism not as a medium for elegant simplification and technical perfection, but only as an opportunity for cheaper, easier, and therefore more profitable real-estate development than had been possible before. Costly materials, intricate detailing, and time-consuming craftsmanship (all of which were present in archetypal Mies works … ) were largely dispensed with by his imitators. But it was the economic impetus behind that shift away from Mies’s exacting principles (and away from the ornament and decoration of conventional office buildings up to that time), rather than a new philosophical enthusiasm, that established the International Style as the favored mode of the American corporate establishment in the years after World War II.”
