I know people will be reading this in crisp October, but as I write I’m hanging on to summer in the week before Labor Day. Summer is a time for many things. One of them, for the right-minded architect, is golf. I realize that I’ll alienate some readers here, but golf and architecture are, I believe, related activities. Golf is said to be an old person’s sport — witness Tom Watson, who almost won the British Open this summer at age 59 — and as we all know, architects, like symphony conductors, tend to flourish in their later years. I.M.
Never the same shot Golf is also like architecture in that there are no cookie-cutter plans, or at least no good ones. Unlike bowling or tennis, golf is played on a surface in which every course, every fairway, every green is different. In a lifetime, you never play exactly the same shot twice. Isn’t that part of what makes the practice of architecture, too, so fascinating? Mark Twain should have tried golf. He might have come up with something to rival John Updike’s marvelous short story “Farrell’s Caddie,” in which a wizened caddie steers a callow American golfer around a
I know people will be reading this in crisp October, but as I write I’m hanging on to summer in the week before Labor Day. Summer is a time for many things. One of them, for the right-minded architect, is golf. I realize that I’ll alienate some readers here, but golf and architecture are, I believe, related activities. Golf is said to be an old person’s sport — witness Tom Watson, who almost won the British Open this summer at age 59 — and as we all know, architects, like symphony conductors, tend to flourish in their later years. I.M.
Joan Goody Joan Goody FAIA, a partner in the Boston firm of Goody Clancy, died on September 8 in the converted Beacon Hill carriage house that was her longtime home. She was 73. A Brooklyn native, Goody studied history at Cornell and architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. After marrying architect and MIT professor Marvin Goody, she joined his firm in 1970 and became a partner in 1978. Marvin Goody died in 1990 and Joan later married poet and editor Peter Davison. Among the significant projects for which she was lead designer were the renovation of Trinity Church,
Curating Wright The Wright show disappoints in other ways, too. There’s no sense of a governing critical intelligence. The exhibition is simply a haphazard attic of Wrightiana, certainly fascinating for Wright buffs, but lacking a clear point of view. The title is the giveaway: Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward. The idea is that Wright designed his buildings by first planning the interior spaces, and only then shaping the exterior appearance around them. Well, sure he did, but so what? This is a tired cliché, not a stirring theme for a new exhibition. It’s an idea for an old-fashioned show
