Paul Goldberger on Public Architecture

6 p.m. Oct. 28. New Haven Public Library, Main Branch, 133 Elm St. 203-946-8130 ext. 314, newhavenlibrarypatrons.com. Free. No reservations required.

People often ask me why architecture matters. Sometimes they are friends or students, earnest and inquisitive; sometimes they are strangers at a party who throw out the question carelessly.

If you've ever seen an episode of "Law & Order," you know why architecture matters. New York's Tweed Courthouse and State Supreme Court are featured prominently in the show, because they are instantly recognizable as monuments of civic power and the rule of law. Their colossal, neo-classical columns tower over those who walk in and out of the building, silently stating that this is a site of order, as Jack McCoy makes a demand for last-minute evidence from a cop or ADA.

Paul Goldberger, the New Yorker critic and author of the new book Why Architecture Matters (Yale University Press, 296 pages, $26), makes a similar observation. But for him the architecture in question is the traditional form of American banks, which "tended to be serious, classically inspired buildings, civic presences symbolizing both the stature of the bank in a community and protection for the hoard of cash within."

This statement is typical of Goldberger (who will give a talk at the New Haven Public Library on Wednesday): a simple observation grounded in an understanding of architecture and society. If we wanted to try and sum up the whole book, we could do worse than: "because architecture interacts with people, and people interact with it."

Of course, this would be but a drop in the ocean of potential answers. Moving through space, time and medium, Goldberger considers works ranging from Chartres Cathedral to Le Corbusier's Ronchamp Chapel, from the ancient treatise of Vitruvius to Hitchcock's North by Northwest, from Baroque Rome to suburban Nutley, N.J.

Why Architecture Matters is an extended meditation on the deceptively simple three-word phrase, a meditation that allows for rumination, emotion, observation and even contradiction.

Successful architecture, he tells us, "makes life better," "take[s] our breath away," "invites belief," and "evokes indescribable joy." Architecture is "the making of place and the making of memory," and a great building "must have a use, it must stand up — and it must be a work of art."

It is thinking about architecture as a work of art that leads to the most contrary of the contradictions. Goldberger deems it "churlish to complain that Frank Lloyd Wright's houses leak or that Le Corbusier's weather badly or that Frank Gehry's are difficult to construct," because they are works of art. The Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, on the other hand, commits the unforgivable sin of exhibiting a lack of beauty while refusing to enter into conversation with its fellow structures on the Mall. If it were beautiful, "we might forgive its arrogance and indifference to both tradition and function — breathtaking beauty can allow you to get away with a lot in architecture, as in life." Goldberger's first statement contradicts his belief that good architecture must be both functional and a work of art. His second only looks at the Hirshhorn from the outside, and does not consider how the museum succeeds as a building designed to display modern art.

But any exploration of why architecture matters must find itself wading into contradiction, because, as Goldberger repeats often, architecture is always a balancing act: It must aspire "to be both familiar and new, to provide both pleasure and serenity, order and novelty, intensity and repose, somehow managing to make you feel both equilibrium and a sense of revelation all at once." When we turn our attention to one element, the other always clamors in reply.

If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function, then architecture passes the test (as does Goldberger). And this, ultimately, is why architecture matters.

Mia Reinoso Genoni teaches architecture, art history and the humanities at Yale University.