I am puzzled as to why a sentence praising the work of Herman Jessor, a Jewish socialist immigrant whose work was almost entirely within New York City, should be accused of a dog-whistling attack on “coastal elites” if the same sentence expresses doubt in the world-transforming merits of Peter Eisenman (regardless of his late career move into tourist spectacle). Nonetheless, on Kahn, particularly given his work in Bangladesh, Zeifman’s point is well made and taken.
However, a clarification is apparently required. The point I was trying to make, with specific reference to the Smithsons, Eisenman’s one-time inspiration, was that paper architecture and built architecture can require very different talents. Sheffield’s Park Hill (1961), designed by municipal journeymen and a group of students from the Architectural Association, would have been impossible without the inspiration and precedent of the Smithsons’ unbuilt and unbuildable dream projects for Berlin and London. But before its—ethically, if not architecturally, indefensible— demolition, I would have defied anyone to call the Smithsons’ own version of the same idea, Robin Hood Gardens (1972), the superior building. Its Sheffield cousin has a material rigor, a constructional strength, a social complexity, and an interest in communicating its ideas beyond a cognoscenti that was sadly beyond the Smithsons when they came to actually build stuff. One day, if current struggles succeed, we might see social projects like these built again at scale. While our treatises about the legacies of Brutalism might come in useful here and there, the material qualities so in abundance at Park Hill are what architects are going to have to relearn from scratch.