Witold Rybczynski's Blog

It is not unreasonable to conclude that something went terribly wrong with the architecture of federal buildings in the (modernist) postwar era, producing clunkers such as the FBI Building, the HUD Building, and the Forrestal Building in Washington DC, or various bland federal buildings around the country. It’s hard to not conclude that prewar classical buildings represent something superior. Nor is it unreasonable for the President to lead the conversation, taking the baton from Jefferson and FDR, who both had strong architectural opinions.

It is important to recognize that a “solution” will be complicated. For example, the competition brief that produced the Federal Reserve Board Building (above) specified that classical motifs such as pilasters and columns were not required—and Paul Cret included none.

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The post FEDERAL BUILDINGS first appeared on Witold Rybczynski.

Demetri Porphyrios invited me to contribute the foreword to King’s Cross: The Making of a Master Plan which describes a 67-acre urban development of disused railway lands in central London. The planners were Porphyrios Associates and Allies & Morrison. The project, which was a finalist for this year’s Stirling Prize, includes buildings designed by David Chipperfield, BIG, Heatherwick Studio, Maki & Associates, Porphyrios, Wilkinson Eyre, As I wrote, King’s Cross is “an important landmark in the longstanding debate between modernists and traditionalists . . . and answers the question of whether it is possible to combine traditional urbanism and contemporary architecture with an emphatic ‘Yes’.”

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The post THE HUMAN CITY first appeared on Witold Rybczynski.

With apologies to Jack Kerouac. In Satori in Paris, one of his last books, he describes the Japanese word satori, or sudden illumination, as a “kick in the head.” Précisement! I was sitting in an Uber, being driven down Locust Street. We passed by a building, probably built in the 1960s, a handsome composition in brick and precast concrete trim. Not bad, I thought, at least it’s not just glass, which seems to be the one-note tune played by architects today. A few seconds later we drove by another building, likewise a medical something—we were in a hospital district.

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The State Dining Room in the White House seats 140. The larger East Room, at the same density, would seat about 240. A reasonable size for a new, third dining room, let’s call it the Banqueting Hall, would be large enough to seat, say, 500. Assuming a two-square plan, that would be a room 55 by 110 feet, which happens to be about the same size as Inigo Jones Banqueting House in Whitehall. That room is a double cube, which is one of the things that makes it so beautiful (see above). The White House Banqueting Hall would need a 55 foot ceiling,

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The Louis Kahn/I. M. Pei generation of architects were modernists who had dispensed with many of the previously essential aspects of architecture such as ornament, but they still believed in buildings ordered by rules, especially the old rules of geometry, symmetry, centering, axes, and so on. That didn’t mean that they didn’t diverge from those rules—in Pei’s case quite often—but when they they did so they were always aware of the break and compensated in some way. That seems to be what is missing in current architecture. There are no rules, broken or unbroken, which too often results in mere confusion.

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The post THE OLD RULES first appeared on Witold Rybczynski.

The State Dining Room of the White House seats only 140, in crowded but charming intimacy, the small size adding to the atmosphere of exclusivity. Still the idea that a larger banqueting hall would be a useful alternative to outdoor tents on the South Lawn strikes me as a sensible proposal. The challenge is to balance the need for seating capacity with the need for an appropriate size that suits its setting. Three times larger than the State Dining Room would be the capacity of Inigo Jones’s beautiful Banqueting House in London (above). The proposed White House ballroom (it is really a banqueting hall) was initially to have a capacity five times as large (600),

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The post HOW BIG? first appeared on Witold Rybczynski.

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting podcast on the current imbroglio over the demolition of the White House East Wing. The East Wing was built by Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, expanded by FDR in 1942 (partly to conceal an air raid shelter), and further enlarged by Richard Nixon, so this is not really about preserving history. Goldberg maintains that the demolition is important not because of the hysterical reaction of so much of the media and of the left in general, but rather because of the effect that the images of demolition have on the public in general. People always stop and stare when they pass by a demolition site.

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The post A WRECKING BALL TOO FAR first appeared on Witold Rybczynski.

Well, it’s the law, at least for now. The executive order concerning the use of classical and traditional styles in federal buildings was signed on August 28, 2025. The intent is unequivocal, for example: “In the District of Columbia, classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for federal public buildings absent exceptional factors necessitating another kind of architecture.” But what kind of classical? That remains to be seen. It could be the somewhat archaeological classical of Charles McKim, who is mentioned in the order, or the stripped classical of Paul Cret, who is not.  (Cret’s 1933 Ft. Worth courthouse is pictured above.) Or the inventive classical of Grosvenor Goodhue,

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The post WHAT KIND OF CLASSIC? first appeared on Witold Rybczynski.

Recent architecture from KieranTimberlake at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s hard to imagine a more awkward addition to a nice old building (Cope & Stewardson, 1892). The height, roof form, curtain wall, brick color—all clash, and not in a good way. And the obligatory green roof doesn’t make up for it. What were they thinking?

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The post WHAT NOT TO DO first appeared on Witold Rybczynski.

Although the media frequently describes the building project that the Federal Reserve is undertaking at its Washington, DC headquarters, the Marriner S. Eccles Building, as a “renovation,” it is much more than that. When Paul Cret designed the building in the mid-1930s, he used an H-shaped plan to ensure daylight in all the offices. The current project fills in those two spaces with glass-roofed atria. The external view (above) shows the clumsy mating of Cret’s marble facades with a steel-and-glass curtain wall. Quel dommage!

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The post THE FED BUILDS first appeared on Witold Rybczynski.