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Excerpt from The Richard H. Driehaus Prize book 2006
Architecture as a Creative Force
Paul Goldberger
Allan Greenberg is one of those rare architects who will be remembered not only for a significant body of work, but for a commitment to ideas, to writing, to history, and to the ongoing presence of architecture as a creative force in our culture. One of the many documents surrounding the Driehaus Prize describes Allan as “an eminent practitioner of progressive architecture that advances classical ideals,” and that is a wonderful phrase, since it subtly but powerfully tells you the most important thing about Allan: that he is not, for all his brilliant scholarship and committed classicism, one of those classicists who looks yearningly at the past, and who wishes to send only the message that things were better then, and that our age has gone to the dogs. Allan is far too smart, and far too subtle, for that. He believes passionately in the present — as passionately, in his way, as any modernist. The difference between Allan and the modernists is that he believes that classicism has an ability, even a duty, to enrich the present. And Allan believes, most important of all, in the idea that classicism should be a part of the larger architectural dialogue of the present. Another way to say this would be to say that Allan Greenberg does not reject the idea of progressive architecture — he simply insists that classicism is a part of the progressive act.
Allan’s passion is not simply for classicism as a thing unto itself, then. It is for the idea of the present, and for the way in which classicism can continue to grow and develop as a creative force. And I might also say that Allan’s passion is for all of architecture, since one of the other things that distinguishes him from so many of his peers is the breadth of his vision. He can speak with brilliant insight about all kinds of architecture different from his own. He has chosen a particular road for his own work, but he does not believe that it need follow from this, that there is only one route to the Kingdom of Heaven. In a world that is too often defined by fundamentalists, Allan represents the enlightenment.
But if we honor him in part for his determination to respect the broader landscape of architecture, and for his desire to make connections between classicism and other worlds, we honor him most of all, of course, for the work that has flowed from that determination. In the end, an architect is judged by his architecture. Whether it is the extraordinary farmhouse in Connecticut that emerged out of his long study of Washington and Mount Vernon — a study that eventually yielded a brilliant book, and changed my own views about Mount Vernon (and I should say that visiting Mount Vernon with Allan, as I did, is one of the great architectural experiences you can have) — or whether it is the great work he has done for the State Department, including 29 different interior suites including the office of the Secretary of State — or the courthouses or the Humanities Building at Rice University, or even the Hilfiger shop in Beverly Hills, in each case Allan has shown us how classicism, brilliantly rendered, can deepen and enhance our sense of American culture. Allan Greenberg’s work manages at once to be in the great tradition of classicism and to be profoundly American. He has worked to make classicism meaningful in our time, and he has succeeded.
Copyright © 2006 by Paul Goldberger. Not to be reproduced without permission.
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