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The Built Environment

Shop Talk

A celebrated British architect suggests ways to think about and enjoy buildings

Brian Sholis

Brian Sholis

— 5 min read
Shop Talk
FAT and Grayson Perry, A House for Essex. Photo: Jack Hobhouse

Hi everyone,

This week, I’d like to begin with an administrative note: this iteration of Frontier Magazine will end its run on November 7.

Frontier Magazine began as an annual print publication in 2015, not long after Frontier, the studio, was founded. It served then, as now, to celebrate big ideas and inspiring people and to advance the notion of design’s ability to accelerate positive change.

We moved the publication online circa 2019, publishing occasionally through the pandemic until we launched this weekly newsletter in January 2023. Since then, we’ve sent more than 100 issues and, last autumn, released eight podcast episodes.

Frontier Magazine is not over. While this iteration of weekly stories, written by me, is coming to an end, the studio is in the process of rethinking what the magazine can be and will share more in the coming weeks. Stay subscribed to this list and you’ll be the first to know about its next iteration, with other contributors.

In the meantime, we publish! This week, a brief note on Charles Holland’s new book How to Enjoy Architecture: A Guide for Everyone and the kinds of public conversation we have about buildings. See you here next week.

As above, so below,
Brian

Shop Talk

Haus-Rucker-Co, Oasis no. 7, exhibited at Documenta 5, Kassel, Germany, 1972 and discussed in How to Enjoy Architecture. Photo: MOMA

Two weeks ago, introducing an interview with someone who lives in a celebrated apartment building, I mentioned wanting to broaden the story of that midrise. Discussions of architecture are shaped primarily by the designers of buildings and those buildings’ (published) critics. I’ve had architect Charles Holland’s How to Enjoy Architecture (buy in the US or Canada) on my desk for some time, unsure of how to recommend it. But framing the aforementioned interview showed me why I find Holland’s treatise appealing.

The slim volume, with chapters on style, composition, space, materials, structure, and use, is not about Holland’s work as a partner in the celebrated firm FAT, nor subsequent projects designed while running his own studio. Instead, it’s an avuncular and idiosyncratic survey of the buildings, gardens, and places that demonstrate, for him, those six principles. It ranges from Palladian villas to a 2014 school by Spanish firm Ted’A Arquitectes, with yawning gaps in between. Holland notes early and often that the book is not a typical history, though each chapter’s introduction and conclusion has the declarative repetition of an academic study.

But in between is something I’ve had the privilege to enjoy in my own conversations with architects: shop talk. Designers talking about their own work, as in the interviews published here and elsewhere, is one thing. Architects talking about others’ work is altogether different—and often more fun.

Holland’s book, which is addressed to a general audience, is meant to inspire closer looking at the buildings and environments in which we find ourselves. To do this, he essentially catalogues his enthusiasms. The book is chatty rather than theoretical, and in it you’ll find stealthy opinions rather than zealous arguments. Those opinions are obviously informed by deep learning and a mastery of craft. Though it can be baggy at times, the book is always approachable.

Adolf Loos, American Bar, Vienna, 1908, discussed in How to Enjoy Architecture. Photo: Viennaslide

It’s a paean to “the visual, spatial, and material richness of buildings without a sense of guilt as to whether it is the right kind of architecture to like,” he writes in the introduction. He’s especially good, in his chapter on composition, on how Aldo Rossi “combines not just archetypal fragments of buildings but memories, too.” And in the chapter on materials, he memorably describe Louis Kahn’s buildings as “contemporary and archaic, carrying the aloof ambiguity of inhabited ruins.” Holland also delivers a quick but useful description, in the opening of his chapter on structure, of the relationship between architects and structural engineers.

Perhaps these are figures and subjects that are known to you. Yet, as a catalogue of one designer’s encounters with buildings, even people who pay attention to architecture will find subjects new to them. For me, that was the architect Charles Voysey and the Elizabethan country house Hardwick Hall, as well as terms like the ha-ha and bungaroosh.

Some of the best experiences I’ve had with architecture were in the company of architects who could see, and explain, things I didn’t notice on my own. It’s not gossip, per se—though that’s fun, too. It’s lightly worn knowledge, freely shared. Being told how a magic trick works might diminish the surprise but not the pleasure of seeing it performed again. So, too, with the observations Holland shares in these pages. Consider this a request for more architects to write down, and more interviewers to ask about, their insights into others’ work.

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Though it’s been twenty years since I read it, I remember feeling similarly about art—and now architecture—critic Michael Kimmelman’s 1998 book Portraits, in which he talks with artists as they amble through galleries at “the Met, the Modern, the Louvre, and elsewhere.” It seems out of print, so let me point you to your local library: find the book near you by clicking here.

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