090909 and Ayn Rand

These past two days have been a blur. There were some meals, a few classes, random splashes of hope... really quite a bit and not a lot.

I have been learning though and that is encouraging. After all it is why I came to New York.

Yesterday in my history class we talked about the modern perception of the architect, an image personified by one Howard Roark. I have not been in school for architecture a month before they feel it necessary to address this "Fountainhead Syndrome." Ayn Rand obviously wrote into that character her philosophy but she chose architecture for a reason. There is an aura around the profession cultivated by the great names that design great buildings and something in our culture that demands to attach one person to one achievement. We are hero worshippers.

Now architects in power have done little to correct this stereotype. In fact the first thing we design is ourselves. Who are Ephraim Goldberg or Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris or Luwig Michael Mies or Frank Lincoln Wright? Nobodies is the answer. Now who are Frank Gehry, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Loyd Wright. They are Architects!

And so to become a successful architect we are given this formula:
1. change your name
2. design a chair (many of the above started that way)
3. build a house (which requires a wealthy patron willing to say "Go where you want to with this," which in most cases means a wealthy relative.)

This formula is taken from an article titled "A Name, A Chair, A House." However, judging from the exhibition currently adorning the Sibley hallway, a selection of larger than life portraits of past Pritzker* winners, I would like to add one more step.

4. be an old white male

Anyways, today I had theory class and the professor is just brilliant. She started lecturing and five minutes in my brain exploded. She is the type of professor who can talk for two hours and fifty eight minutes and then say "Great two more minutes! With Vitruvius began..." It is fascinating and yet at the same time I can certainly commiserate with Brian Regan as he attempts to watch a Nova special on String Theory.

I finally made it home and put in my episode of Mad Men for the day. I am rationing. Don Draper gets called into his boss's office for a bonus and his boss points out a book on the shelf, Atlas Shrugged. "Have you read it?"


* The Pritsker Prize is the "Nobel Prize of Architecture" and there has only been one female recipient in the thirty year tradition of the award, a fact that my female professors will not let us forget... Isn't it funny when something is described as the Such-and-Such of Such? Oh well this is the Paris of the Midwest... not quite the real Paris is it?