Allan is honored at the Soane Foundation’s 20th Birthday Gala.
The Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation will honor Allan as they celebrate their 20th birthday at the Foundation’s annual Gala, on April 26th, in New York City. Event details can be viewed on their website and on New York Social Diary. Allan sat down for interview that was published in the Soane’s Spring newsletter. The interview reads as follows:
Soane Foundation: You design with both the classical idiom and modernism as starting points. Isn’t that unusual?
Allan Greenberg: Well, why should it be? We don’t read James Joyce and say, “I’m not going to read anything else except prose structured in the same way as Ulysses.” No, we read Henry James, Faulkner, Hemingway, or the latest novel by an emerging writer.
There have always been a variety of styles with which architects choose to express themselves. I’m thinking of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Gunnar Asplund and a number of others, particularly Italians, who’ve long been trained in modernism and classicism.
The great exemplars are Le Corbusier and Mies, who were able to take classical principles and turn them through 180 degrees, so that the resulting architecture is in exact and precise opposition to classicism—which means it is still tied to the tradition they are reacting to.
Of course, one group of architects, now remembered as the Harvard Bauhaus, completely rejected history. And their work, which pervades the world, is largely mediocre because of its lack of ability to relate to culture, climate, or geography. But the great modernists knew what they were doing and relate to the same tradition I do. They just chose different ways to express it.
SF: What was your first love in architecture?
AG: Or who? I’d say Le Corbusier. The first building I ever had to sketch in school was Edwin Lutyen’s Art Gallery in Johannesburg. And I was stunned to discover, in the second post-war volume of Le Corbusier’s Oeuvre Complete, a section where he praises Lutyens. Twelve years later, I published a paper about why Lutyens and Le Corbusier and Lutyens and Frank Lloyd Wright were so close.
In trying to resolve these interconnections, I realized that the modern dichotomy is just totally wrong. It’s a view of the world held by people who are scared of the past and who have so demonized it, they’ve fouled history. After all, steel frame buildings are a classical, not a modernist, invention. The American skyscrapers of the 1880s and 1890s were steel framed, and most of the classical houses you see from 1900 to 1920 are actually steel framed as well. Most of the technology we think of as modernist is actually quite old. Classicists have tended to be like all good architects, always on the lookout for a better way to do things.
SF: There seems to be inevitability about the use of the classical architecture.
AG: Yes and no. I do understand how a people can find their history clouded, as have the Germans, and thus want to sweep the slate clean. Of course, in choosing to ignore their rich and marvelous architectural heritage, until recently the Germans have even neglected a genius like Karl Friedrich Schinkel.
SF: I suppose there can never be an unfreighted architecture. Even the most minimal architecture must, in the end, carry the weight of meaning of its time. So even for those wanting to start anew, their architecture will begin to accrue memories.
AG: Right. But it takes millennia to accumulate significance.
SF: Everybody talks about the amazing interiors you created for the Department of State in the 1970s. How long did the project take you?
AG: We started in 1984. George Shultz, then Secretary of State, said, “I’m going on a Latin American tour in about a month. If you can give me a set of drawings in about three weeks, I’ll look at them on the airplane–and when I get back we can talk about them.” We managed to get the drawings done and, while he was gone, kept polishing. When he came back and I showed him the catch-up work, he said, “Just do it.”
We had about four months for the first 19 rooms (there were 48 in all), not only to finish the construction drawings but also to begin fabrication. Looking back, I think that having to work under that intense pressure allowed me to be more creative than if I had had a long time to get it all right.
SF: Can you tell us about your collaboration with Arthur Drexler at MoMA in the early 80s?
Arthur ran a very open house during the 1970s and 1980s. I remember The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts in 1977, which I think was one of the most popular architectural exhibitions the museum has ever held. Just imagine these gigantic drawings, all watercolors created by teenagers or students in their early 20s for the various historic competitions, taking over a large part of the museum. A few years later, Arthur did a Lutyens exhibition that I co-curated with him.
You know, given my fascination with Schinkel and Mies, and speaking of MoMA, here’s hoping that Barry Bergdoll has a big Schinkel/Mies exhibition in the back of his mind. That would be something to look forward to.
SF: Speaking of looking forward, we are very excited that you are receiving Soane Honors at our Gala dinner on Tuesday, April 26.
AG: I am very pleased as well. And, indeed, I am looking forward to it very much.
Allan Greenberg
