----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Turner" <vze26m98 at optonline.net>
So for architecture, I'd claim that a building type, "hotel" for example, can act as a frame of reference similar to the above in allowing evaluation to take place. Its sufficiently bounded by time and form to act as such. So when Joanna says that Peter Dominick's Grand California hotel is "crap," it sounds to me that she's conceding it as aesthetic object (she didn't say "it's not art!"). Unfortunately, she didn't enumerate any of the values she judges so harshly, nor offer up an example of a hotel that she thought WASN'T crap. Perhaps, Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Japan, done in the "Maya Revival" style?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ImperialHotelFacade.jpg>
-----------------------------------------------------------------
That's a little better, but still a little too much frosting for art deco and for Japan.
The question of whether the craftsman style can be scaled up is a real question. I don't know what the answer is, but I would say the examples offered so far have failed to do so.
The application of a style, be it art deco or Tudor or Louis XVI is no guarantee of beauty. And from what I've seen of post-modern architecture, there is a great deal of stylistic commentary, but no substance. Sometimes there's little bit of humor, which is ok. Now I get it that the whole mannerist aspect of po-mo is to argue against substance, and I am pointing to that as the sign of a culture in decline.
Joanna
