(Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 1999)
“’The ideal kind of building is one you don’t see’: this is a characteristic remark of Joseph Esherick, AIA Gold Medalist, who died this past December. His New York Times obituary begins, as if in wonder that such a thing could be, ‘Joseph Esherick, a self-effacing architect . . . .’ Esherick shares this improbable quality with a distinguished line of San Francisco Bay Area architects, from Julia Morgan to William Wurster to Jim Jennings. Of these, Wurster is the acknowledged master of the invisible building; beginning in the 1920s, he designed houses for comfortably well-to-do clients who, as a matter of principle, took care not to be conspicuous . . . . Walter Benjamin, writing in 1935—the year [Wurster’s] Gregory farmhouse was published in Architecture—made an observation that will be familiar to many readers of this magazine. He was trying to imagine the effects of the mechanical reproduction of images on our reception of works of art. What sort of difference might it make that people could pick up a color lithograph of the Mona Lisa for a few reichsmarks? Casting about for an analogy, he struck upon architecture, which, he writes, ‘has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction . . . .’ Imagine the consequences for architectural theory of a proposition that asserts not Joseph Esherick’s aspiration that buildings not be attended to, but rather the inevitability that they won’t be. When has contemporary theory paused to consider this question of reception? The short answer is: it hasn’t.”
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