Letters: Quiet and elegant, a new Barnes is born
The curse of modern architecture is the unlimited license granted by engineers that anything an architect can imagine can be built ("A first look at the Barnes," Tuesday).
Contemporary architecture lacks thematic discipline and encourages the excesses of Santiago Calatrava, Ron Arad, and those structures by Frank Gehry that are more art than architecture. Creative minds need limits against which they can press their creativity. Renaissance art was limited to depiction of religious images, but, by pushing against these limits, art escaped the church into the humanism that forever altered our intellectual world.
If the architects of the new Barnes had not accepted the constraints imposed by Alfred C. Barnes, we could have ended up with just one more flight of architectural fancy. Architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien have provided us with a structure, which, sans shock and awe, looks both backward and forward in time, much like a late Picasso looks both backward and forward in space. Williams and Tsien have offered Philadelphia a most elegant building.
Reese Palley
Philadelphia
