For the greater goodNicolai Ouroussoff laments the...

For the greater good

Nicolai Ouroussoff laments the lack of social consciousness and future-oriented impact among architects in this country (“At the Elite’s Altar,� Dec. 1). While this revelation goes to his credit, it is a shallow and insincere attempt to redeem his past glorification of architects serving their own mission of eternity and the cultural elite without conscience.

Ouroussoff has made himself an advocate of architecture as aesthetic discipline only, even as he quotes Rem Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskind as voices of humanism and social consciousness. Exactly those architects stand for the aestheticizing and excessive conceptualizing of the architectural mind-field in order to appeal to a cultural and esoteric elite.

How can we believe his sincerity about a subject when the very forum that could generate a popular support for issues like public housing, public open space and public buildings only adulates the same elitist architectural ideas over and over again? Since when are these fashionable architects of today advocates of the messy process of creating good architecture for the needy and underrepresented? They will get much more star coverage to design a $40-million store in Soho than a low-cost housing project for 500 families in a not-so-fashionable neighborhood.

Instead of lamenting in a polemical and general way about the lack of architectural engagement of architects, he overlooks the real things that are going on right in our backyards and frontyards. (Architects like Pugh + Scarpa or Koning Eizenberg, just to name a few, who create meaningful, sustainable and technological innovative architecture for housing projects in L.A.; or the various nonprofit organizations, like Livable Places, which struggle to create architecturally inspiring projects in underserved areas.)

Don’t talk to the ones who are not doing it but to the ones who are!

Mark Mack

Venice

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Mark Mack is professor of architecture in the department of architecture and urban planning at UCLA and principal architect of MACK Architect(s).