I can hear some of you giggling. The Academic? Which one?

Well, it's not like there aren't enough of them. Among Famous Architects we got plenty of Deans and Professors and Visiting Fellows to go around. Since the marketplace treats architects as cute boutique service providers, the architects have rebelled by seeking the warm, wet, forgiving conditions of universities, where they can replicate among impressionable young people, make themselves enormously relevant to each other, draw up plans for campus museums and science centers, and leave the cold world outside where it belongs.

But there's Academic, and then there's deeply Academic.

Credentials:

Some Famous Architects in universities, you know, can count their trips to construction sites on one hand. When you're theorizing your way to the top, real-world construction experience can seem so limiting. And counter-intuitive. Drawing in a copper roof is always going to be more satisfying than standing around in a muddy pit talking to some 50ish metalworking reject who just doesn't get it and who can't make it work the way you drew it.

So just skip that part.

Le Courbusier got his reputation from a portfolio of sketches and a manifesto; Mendelsson got more expressionistic mileage from his drawings than from actual buildings, and so on through Johnson, Venturi, Graves, Richard Buckminster more-plans-than-clean-socks Fuller, and our own dear Rem Koolhaas. Consider the list of hugely influential architectural projects that exist only in this parallel fairie-tale universe of the unbuilt and unbuildable:

Piranesi's etchings
Wren's St. Paul's model
Hugh Ferriss's Metropolis of Tomorrow
Saint Elia's Citta Nuova
Howard's Garden City
Corbusier's Radiant City
Albert Speer's plans for Berlin
Bucky Fuller's Manhattan dome and Dymaxion house
Tatlin's Monument to the Third International
the competition entries for the Chicago Tribune Tower
FLW's mile-high tower and Broadacre City
the work of the Archigram group
Soleri's Arcosanti drawings
the competition entries for the World Trade Center
(to name a few)

I love how architects proudly point to things that aren't there. As the philosopher Ross Perot once said, "They talk about it, and they think they've done it."

Bernard Tschumi thinks he's done it. Tschumi is the dean of Columbia University's architecture school. Tschumi has been allowed to build exactly one single building in the US. By some astonishing coincidence that building is on the campus of Columbia University. And it's not like he's not just starting out or anything. The ridiculous part is comparing Tschumi's slender accomplishments with the astonishing fact that Tschumi runs a school of architecture.

Crimes:

That single building?

It's the Lerner Student Center at Columbia University.

Few buildings have been so universally panned. As a work of architecture Lerner Hall isn't strong enough to be a good mistake, and the result suggests that he's unfamiliar with spatial grammar. For a full description I rely on my Columbia graduate-student correspondent Darlene, who has flawless credentials as an impartial user:

Yes, the Lerner Center... or, as my grad. student colleagues and I call it, "the glass thing, you know, with the ATMs." It's really an atrocious building that looks somewhat interesting from exactly one exterior viewpoint -- where you're close enough to be intrigued by the complicated-looking stacked ramp visible through the gridded glass wall, but far away enough to overlook the fact that no one seems to be using it. . . Mostly it's used by the undergraduates. I tried to explore it once, now I stick to the ground-level cafe and ATMs in part because it's an incredibly frustrating building to navigate through. Passing through some annoying security card turnstiles, you have no obvious choice where to go other that up the wide ramp, which at least looks somewhat interesting, with exposed metal suspension wires and translucent green glass flooring. But it's such an unnecessarily long path to actually go up a floor that you're looking for a staircase once you get to the second.

The main central ramp area is also strangely cramped on the inside despite the glass and minimal furniture/decorative structures. The illusion of openness breaks when only a few dozen students are in the space. Especially when a crowd tries to negotiate the ramp.

It really does repel one from entering, failing as a student center from the get-go.

So… in terms of net accomplishment Tschumi is upside down, but he's not content to let his building speak for themselves. He's been very busy writing Marxist dialogs about it. He cranks out a lot of projects, essays, competition entries, pamphlets, manifestos, and everything, maybe, except invoices. If you've been blessed with the determination and leisure and emotional stability to make sense of any of his impressionistic Franco-Marxist explanations, please email me immediately.

(Late news: Tschumi is stepping down as dean at the end of June 2003. He's most likely to turn his full attention to his new Athens home for the Elgin Marbles, to be built at the foot of the Acropolis in time for the Olympics, and commissioned specifically to annoy the British Museum.)

(Thank you, Darlene.)