15 Unfortunately for Harris (or, more precisely, for the University of Texas), this curriculum was a bit too revolutionary for a senior faculty inherited from the school’s primarily technical past, and his new faculty’s enthusiasm was a bit too energetic, and so Harris resigned in 1955. He was followed by many of his new hires over the next couple of years, as their contracts expired. However, as is often the case in such situations, all seem to have gone on to much better prospects, and the “Texas Rangers,” as they came to be called, developed an almost mythical status.
16 Pierini, p141.
17 Rafael Moneo, “Five Architects and After: From Structure to Performativity,” lecture at The 70s: The Formation of Contemporary Architectural Discourse, Cornell/Harvard symposium, Fall 2000—Spring 2001, delivered February 6, 2001.
18 Werner Seligmann, "The Poetics of Counterpoint," in Mario Campi & Franco Pessina Architects, Rizzoli, 1987, p11. Note that, in his analysis of the work of these Ticinese architects, Seligmann chooses to use “counterpoint” as a form of high praise.
19 As Colin Rowe says in his “Eulogy for Werner Seligmann,” “But Werner was consumed by a messianic passion, and, to me, this was one of his more engaging ambiguities. With an almost adolescent enthusiasm, he really did believe—I think—that modern architecture was going to redeem the world, this long after the available evidence had begun to suggest otherwise…” see <colinrowecentenary.wordpress.com/2020/06/16/eulogy-for-werner-seligmann/>.
Nevertheless, as Rowe himself migrated from a position of modernist enthusiasm toward one of doubt, especially in regards to urban design, Seligmann seems to have followed suit; at least the later projects seem to suggest a position of agnostic modernism.
Seligmann also resembles Moretti in this sense: Moretti practiced while managing to avoid taking a public position on architecture during the fascist period. (See Thomas Schumacher, “Luigi Moretti,” at <architecture-history.org/architects/architects/MORETTI/biography.html> accessed 7/24/22).
20 Seligmann, “Poetics of Counterpoint,” p11.
21 Ibid., pp11-12.
22 Op cit., American Institute of Architects (AIA): Topaz Medallion Award 5/11/1998.
23 His father, for example, had been a violinist with the Osnabrück Stadttheater. (Interview by Bruce Coleman with Jean Seligmann in Cortland NY on January 28, 2012, and February 12, 2012.)
24 This was famously described by Walter Benjamin (in his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, 1968, p239), when he says, “Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.”
25 Erle Loran, Cézanne’s Composition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943, p53. Although parodied by Roy Lichtenstein, with his Portrait of Mme Cézanne (1963), Loran’s book was often on Colin Rowe’s studio reading lists, evidently for its value in being potentially instructive for the designing of facades.
26 Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970, pp63-64. As with Loran’s text on Cézanne’s paintings, this text was also included on the reading list for Colin Rowe’s urban design studio.
27 Werner Seligmann, “Le Corbusier as structural engineer,” Architectural Record, v175, October 1987, p142.
28 Seligmann himself was actually quite resourceful in developing structural solutions. The historic Cortland, NY, Fire Station, built in 1914 by Sackett and Park in a Dutch Renaissance revival style, was in danger of abandonment, due to its structural inability to house modern fire vehicles. Seligmann placed two ground beams in each of the station’s three bays, so that the wheels of the vehicles would be supported independent of the building’s structure. The Fire House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
29 However, Seligmann was always quick to note that whenever the “pure” versions of these paradigms occurred, as in the built Dom-Ino project for Villa Baizeau in Carthage, Le Corbusier was less than satisfied. Perhaps they were considered to be too much of a “one-liner.”
30 Seligmann owned a signed copy of the plates from the exhibition.
31 Tragically, as such institutions are wont to do, this pastoral terrace has grown to be a parking lot; and the elegant fenestration of the west facade, with its tunable array of operable windows and originally intended to be accompanied with a thin brise-soleil, has been replaced with a neutral grid of inoperable windows, considered more energy efficient at the time of its installation. A renovation of Building I has also erased important aspects of the entry sequence.
Introduction page 18