The Decline of Commercial Architecture

"Design and Development" by Witold Rybczynski, in Wharton Real Estate Review (Fall 2001), Lauder-Fischer Hall, 3rd fl., 256 S. 37th St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104–6330.

Commercial real estate developers, who are responsible for the vast majority of new buildings in the United States, seldom win plaudits for great architecture. Not one of the nine projects that won the Progressive Architecture Awards last year was a developer-driven building. Yet Rybczynski, an author and University of Pennsylvania professor, isn’t ready to lay the blame at the feet of money-grubbing developers.

"In the past," he notes, "some of the most imaginative and experimental architecture was commissioned and built precisely by and for real estate developers." As long ago as 1728, the speculative builder and designer John Wood erected a spectacular and innovative residential complex in the English resort town of Bath that included, among other things, "33 three-story houses behind a façade that was loosely based on the Roman Coliseum." The renowned architect John Nash designed the Royal Opera Arcade, a glass-roofed shopping street (and precursor of the mall) that opened in London in 1818. Other examples include New York City’s Dakota apartment building (1884) and Rockefeller Center (1933). The many commercial commissions of modernist master Mies van der Rohe included the aluminum-and-glass Lake Shore Apartments (1951) in Chicago—a now familiar style that was revolutionary in its day, according to Rybczynski, "influencing the design of both office buildings and high-rise apartments for more than two decades."

So why did developers move away from cutting-edge architecture? Rybczynski is skeptical of the pocketbook explanation. History shows that good architecture doesn’t have to cost more. He thinks the change has more to do with a shift in the patronage of high-profile architecture.

Beginning in the late 1960s, governments, tax-exempt institutions, and private individuals had the biggest building budgets, and thus the ability to make an architect’s reputation. "Public clients were notorious for ignoring the user, whether it was the tenant in a high-rise public housing bloc, or a child in a windowless schoolroom, and for spending [other people’s] money on architectural experiments.... Such clients have encouraged architectural styles that are often bleak and whose minimalism runs in the face of common taste. It is a didactic architecture of private symbols and quirky theories, that favors aesthetics over function, exterior expression over interior convenience, and design purity over clients’ demands." Why would a developer—or anybody else who cares about the comfort and happiness of a building’s inhabitants—hire architects with an agenda like that?