I also love the juxtaposition of the images; Classicism truly is the first International Style and yet the canon makes room for regional variation. It isn’t the imposition of “One World Order”, but rather a lingua franca that enables us to to embrace common values while celebrating our differences.

Ask for bids, RFPs. Look at portfolios, interview artists. Find one you like, and then write a contract and pay them a reasonable price. A $1000 prize and certificate is NOT reasonable for what seems like could be WEEKS or MONTHS worth of design work and market research.

*A disclaimer to students: you may be very talented but until you overcome the temptation to work on spec, you will do a disservice to the business of design.

1. My judgment as to the ranking of Greenberg as No. 2 living American classicist to Bob Stern’s No. 1 has to do not with my assessment of the quality of their archtiecture, but my assessment of how well they are known by the public, and the knowledgeable public, rather than the professional or expert among readers. That’s probably more appropriate to my newspaper column and blog than to the Chapter blog, but anyhow that is my thinking. It may be flawed, but aside from Andres Duany, who rarely if ever designs buildings so far as I know, there are no living American classicists/traditionalists to interpose between Bob and Allan, and Allan definitely ranks No. 2 by those criteria. Maybe there is someone else that I overlooked? Do you have any suggestions? Is it necessary to even make such a ranking? Perhaps not, but neither is it some great sin. I’m an arcitecture critic. I make judgments. You have appropriately criticized them.

2. ARRG Syndrome is a joke I made up for two local architects, Friedrich St. Florian (WWII Memorial, Providence Place mall) and Bill Warner (Providence River waterfront). Friedrich has gone back to designing modernist houses now that he has made money on traditional work; Bill did landscaping work for the most devastating recent modernist project in Providence, contributing to the ruin of his own masterpiece. As for Greenberg, I don’t know his work especially well, certainly not as well as someone who has been mentored by him. If he rejects the label of classicist, I’m sure I don’t know why. And if he actually took up modernist additions to traditional buildings long ago, then I suppose one must scroll farther down on Google than I did to get to evidence of it. The world surely considers him a classicist. My library does not contain a Greenberg monograph, and works of his that are in books that do I have are classical.

3. As a participant in the discussion of architecture in America today, I think it is perfectly appropriate to uphold a view that rejects modernism not just as an aesthetic idea that has ruined many cities, but as a flawed intellectual product, demonstrably bad even if it has managed (through what I consider largely devious tactics, and I think Andres would back me up on this) to take over the profession and all of its major power centers, and which has used that power not to seek the best of both worlds or to magnanimously welcome classicists to do work if they can get it, but to ruthlessly suppress classicists by blocking schools from educating them, blocking them from major work when they can, and meanwhile publicly impugning the validity and appropriateness, in the rudest manner, of traditional principles of design. I think this viewpoint about modernism has as much a place in the discussion as the one that posits that classicists have much to learn from moderrnism. I would say, in a similar vein, that democracy has nothing to learn from totalitarianism. Yes, I am making that equation – not that there aren’t some among the management of past or current totalitarian states who were civilized, or tried to bring a degree of civility to the application of the boot.

4. I recognize that Bob Stern does work in the modernist vernacular along with Allan Greenberg, and I have chastised him in my column for doing so on any number of occasions. Do not overlook the fact that I referred to Greenberg’s classical work as “brilliant.” I like to think that I try to give credit where credit is due, but not where it is not due. Of course, this is by my own lights, which are themselves open to criticism, criticism that I welcome as I thank you for yours.

5. Yes, the best thing I got from the evening was my conversation on the train back to Providence with Nathan about Greenberg. (Nathan is more forgiving than I am, I think, but much more penetrating in his analysis of the phenomenon that Greenberg represents.) And yes, what I had to say in the chapter blog item primarily reflected my disappointment. However, out of respect for the fact that our organization hosted Allan Greenberg, I muted the degree of my disappointment with the substance and the coherence of his remarks. I’m sure, Christine, that you would have found my real feelings even more objectionable!

- Respectfully, David