This article was originally published on Common Edge.
Even within the world of design media, it was easy to miss the news: In late January, Notre Dame’s School of Architecture announced that Peter Pennoyer, a New York–based architect and author, had won the 2024 Richard H. Driehaus Prize. The Driehaus is architecture’s traditional/classical design version of the Pritzker Prize. Although it comes with a hefty $200,000 check—twice the size of the Pritzker’s honorarium—and previous winners include such luminaries as Robert A.M. Stern, Michael Graves, Leon Kier, and Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the award still exists in a sort of media vacuum.
Coverage is minimal, which befits traditional architecture’s alternate-universe status within the profession. For that reason, I reached out to Pennoyer to talk about his practice, the status of traditional design, and his vision of sustainability. (Pennoyer will be honored at a ceremony in Chicago next month; Maurice Cox, former planning director of both Detroit and Chicago, will receive the Henry Hope Reed Award at the same event.) What follows is an interview that has been edited for length and clarity.
MCP: Martin C. Pedersen
PP: Peter Pennoyer
MCP: I got a press release from the Driehaus people about the award, but didn’t see any other coverage. There wasn’t even a perfunctory rewriting of the press release. What accounts for the dearth of coverage in the design press?
PP: By the design press, you mean the architect magazines?
MCP: Architectural Record, Architect, Metropolis, the ecosystem that we’re all familiar with. And that I worked at for a long time.
PP: The Driehaus is about traditional and classical architecture, and I don’t think there’s much interest at, say, Architectural Record in examining those kinds of practices. It’s not considered important at all by the architectural establishment, especially in almost all of the universities. It’s not as though we’re arguing, “Should we do the machine for living, or should we be humanists?” It’s simply not even considered.
MCP: And why do you think that is?
PP: There is a deep-seated interest—if not delusion—in the idea that the avant-garde, the cutting edge, the next new thing is what we should all be concerned about, at the exclusion of history, tradition, community, and context. So if what we’re interested in is the possibility of some new ingenious movement, the attitude might be, Why waste time looking at things that are more contextual and connected with the culture at large? And then I think there’s the disconnect, the chasm, between popular taste and what many people think is beautiful, appropriate, and interesting, and what one is taught to appreciate in architecture school.
MCP: So where were you taught? What’s your origin story?
PP: I grew up in New York City and was interested in architecture from a young age. I was lucky enough that my father was, for a while, president of the Art Commission, which is a city agency that has since been renamed the Public Design Commission. It reviews all construction projects, all designs for public property, ranging from bus shelters to new public schools. So I grew up seeing my father go through the process of evaluating new projects. I had a lot of exposure to architecture and was fascinated by it.
I was interested in old buildings, and I settled my attitude about it fairly early. In eighth grade I wrote an essay contrasting a new Brutalist building that was being constructed at the end of our street to the Plaza Hotel, comparing Henry Hardenbergh’s wonderful mastery of the architectural language with the rather humdrum concrete form work that was going up in a building called Phoenix House. I went to Columbia College, where I started as a French literature major. Eventually I met Bob Stern and took his undergraduate course, worked and took many courses in the preservation division of the architecture school, where people were more interested in tradition and classism and context. Then I worked for Stern for a couple of years before attending graduate school.
MCP: Did you study classical design at school?
PP: Yes. At that time, Columbia was open-minded. One was allowed to propose traditionally influenced designs in studio. It wasn’t as monolithic as it is now. I also took courses where we examined treatises, went into the rare books room and looked at Claude Perrault’s 1684 edition of Vitrivius. We studied it, and I was able to dig in deeper and find that it had been in a volume in Thomas Jefferson’s estate when he died, and I connected one of the cornices to a cornice in Monticello.
MCP: Did that make you an outlier among your classmates?
PP: Yes. So I graduated from college in 1981, architecture school in 1984. And there were people who were more excited about Modernism, certainly the faculty. You heard things like, “Well, your symmetry is fascist.” Another favorite of mine, which has stuck in my mind forever: A professor looked at a beautiful arch for a subsidized housing scheme, one of our studio problems. He looked at this arch and said, “What a pity. Because where there are arches, there are princes, and where there are princes, there are slaves.” So, yes, there was that attitude, but there was also respect for architectural history and a respect for scholarship, because there are a lot of serious scholars at Columbia who felt that it was always worth digging deeper into architecture. It wasn’t totally taboo.
MCP: Who are your clients, typically?
PP: That’s interesting, because there are no typical clients I’ve worked for. A few years ago we did a house, with a historically preserved facade, for Jeff Koons, an artist whose work is anything but traditional. We’ve also built private houses, a couple of multistory apartment buildings in New York. And we have another one on the drawing boards. We’ve designed a few museum exhibits. It is really not about the size of the project for us, but whether we can bring something of value to our clients in the design.
MCP: Do you do civic projects as well?
PP: We’ve never been invited to the table with civic projects, except for the clock at the Moynihan train hall. That was a competition, and we beat out some very known starchitects, as they’re called. We’re working on a museum and theater renovation alterations in East Hampton, New York. That’s a civic project, but within an existing building. We have not been able to yet land a museum or a courthouse. I was inducted as a juror for the Excellence in Architecture program in the GSA about 20 years ago. But they’ve never approached me with an assignment.
MCP: I looked around your site, and it seemed to be mostly residential projects.
PP: There’s that, and the high-rise work. I started out doing some renovations of existing buildings in struggling neighborhoods, but didn’t continue to do that. When my office feels like we should weigh in on zoning and preservation issues, we do counter-proposals. We developed a very complete scheme for the New York Public Library. They needed a lending library and hired Lord [Norman] Foster to create one inside of the Carrère & Hastings main branch on Fifth Avenue, which Foster proposed to do by destroying the stacks and essentially changing the whole circulation through the building. That would’ve ruined it, and many other people agreed.
MCP: It was Ada Louise Huxtable’s parting shot.
PP: We spent some time and investment in coming up with an alternate plan. We did the same when the Hudson rail yards were being developed, near Penn Station, where we published our ideas in order to have a voice in the public forum.
MCP: What about the binary attitude toward classical architecture? You either love classical architecture; or, if you’re part of the architectural establishment, roll your eyes at it; or think it represents things like the antebellum South, even though we’re at a point where pretty much all the styles now are historical styles, including Modernism.
PP: Modernism can fetishize the most boring and banal examples of its legacy, like Brutalism or 1970s pop architecture. Postmodernism, god forbid, has even become a style now that people pretend they revere. Unsurprisingly, before people go to university, they’re much more inclined to share the consensus about what beauty means in architecture.
MCP: But beauty is subjective. Right?
PP: Well, no, I think there is an absolute standard of beauty around which we can all, most people, agree—until they go to architecture school or study architectural theory. I think it’s educated out of people. There’s much more consensus and basic human instinct for beauty, proportion, and harmony than we’re led to believe. There are absolute values of beauty. Roger Scruton has been, I think, the greatest thinker about this subject. His book The Aesthetics of Architecture is in some sense the final word on the subject.
MCP: I’ve had many conversations with my Common Edge collaborator Steven Bingler about the uselessness of the style wars. In fact, our name for this website, which he coined, combines the common truths of 5,000 years of building with the cutting edge of innovation. Our thinking has long been that there could be a radical middle, which might blend aspects of both. What do you think of that as a general idea?
PP: It’s absolutely what’s happening, whether one admits it or not, because building science progresses, largely due to the efforts of people who study chemistry and engineering in schools, largely to people who are technically adept at solving problems. We all benefit from better insulation, from better usage of carbon and water and all our resources. But this is happening and continues to happen, because these incentives are there. But it’s not being driven by architects, who are largely concerned with, if you read the university journals, showing off how concerned they are about the world. But the advances continue, and those advances need not change the aesthetic appearance of the building. There is absolutely no reason that a building that is deriving energy from solar panels needs to look like a Martian landing module. The idea that you have to express in the style, proportion, and materials of the building that your building is doing something good for the world is, I think, absurd. You can be a traditionalist and as passionately concerned about spending your energy dollar well as anyone who tries to make buildings that look like they’re newfangled.
MCP: Although, at some point, if we’re going to take seriously issues like sustainability and embodied carbon, those necessities will inevitably impact the aesthetics of buildings. Don’t you think?
PP: I was born in 1957, so my parents built a house. Everything was so much smaller then. The average American house has tripled in size. No one had air conditioning. There was one bathroom. None of that seems part of what we have now. And I think part of sustainability would be mindful about not demanding more, not assuming that we need three bathrooms or five bedrooms. But I don’t think it needs to affect the way a building looks. You can still have a building that feels like it’s part of a place and create a technologically advanced building.
MCP: Scale is often the issue in a lot of cases, where we go from an older, almost handmade, building that’s four stories to a 20- or 30- or 40-story building made by machine.
PP: I have no fear that making something with a machine is bad. I prefer the handmade—I think we all do—but the machine is a good thing. It means that more people can have more things of beauty. If the machine encourages sloppy design and replication on a mass scale of design that’s not thought through, then that’s a bad thing. But I have no problem, whatsoever, with reverting to a machine to make something beautiful that one could not simply afford by hand. I don’t believe in that romantic delusion that we can somehow latch onto better aesthetics by having more hand work. Although I love hand work, we use a 3D printer in my office. We design hardware and then we have a rapid prototype, and the data goes to the manufacturer, which has CNC machinery. There are many things that we would never want done by machine: carving, plaster cast, ornament, all of that must be done by hand. And indeed, our designs, even for molding, start with a hand drawing, because you lose a sense of scale if you don’t use your hand. But then it goes into the software.
MCP: Where are we now in architecture from your perspective of someone who does classical work in New York City?
PP: The “we” part of the question is interesting. If the “we” is where the profession is, it starts with the architecture schools and the colleges that issue undergraduate architecture degrees, as well as masters of architecture and even doctorates, god forbid. It’s solidly in the camp of this quest for architecture that expresses the urge to experiment at the expense of looking at beauty, and an urge to engage with issues of justice and environmental performance and all sorts of other things, which are not aesthetics. They’re not even about constructability.
MCP: But they’re not unimportant. They are important.
PP: I think anyone who’s exercising their imagination, trying to solve problems, might be doing something important, if it contributes to expanding the palette of our aesthetic knowledge and our quest for beauty and harmony and community. I don’t think it’s the student’s fault; this is just part of the gestalt of the university; they’re taught to imagine that each student might be an intuitive genius or might be bringing something that’s entirely novel. It’s an incredible pressure to put on students and skips the stage of looking at history. And, by the way, when you look at history, if you have an architectural practice, it quickly makes you feel very small.
You have to be curious enough to look at other buildings carefully, visit them, read about them, and understand the architecture. It’s a very humbling experience, because you discover that probably any random draftsmen at McKim, Mead & White would have been better at doing what we do in half the time. So we’re faced with this struggle of trying to recapture an education that was totally expunged. And your curiosity is met with a kind of shock of recognition that none of us are as great as we would like to be. And not having to worry about proportion, harmony, and beauty, I think, is a cop-out. It makes things easier. Feeling like you’re a genius is probably in some sense easier, too, but I don’t know any geniuses. I don’t see any geniuses practicing today. I think there’s a danger in diluting ourselves into the idea that we’re these lone artists.
MCP: I think your critique, at least some of it, was at one point accurate. I also think, because of issues such as climate change and AI, the “lone genius” as an education model is disappearing. Is it completely gone? Who knows.
PP: I think you’re right. There is a sense that we’re all scrambling after some answer to impending climate doom, which, by the way, I’m concerned about—climate change exists—but I’m not in the panicked doom camp on that. And I don’t think it’s helpful for architecture to be panicked about it.
MCP: I’m in the thoroughly panicked camp. I think we’re hurtling toward a climate reckoning.
PP: I’m not, I’m not there. But whether one is or isn’t, there’s still the issue of community and contextual design that respects people’s sense of place and addresses spiritual needs.
MCP: If you were to get a civic project where you had to team with a modernist firm, are there firms you would welcome working with, you could be simpatico with?
PP: If they’re open to my ideas, I’m open to them. I collaborate with many designers, and I’ve had clients who are artists we collaborate with. So I don’t begrudge anyone their ideas. I’m interested and open-minded about it. That’s not to suggest that I would change the way I look at the world. But I don’t have enough experience to be able to name a firm that I think would be a good collaborator. And frankly, the collaborations between firms that I know of are typically design architect and architect of record. I don’t know any model where there are two design architects or two architects of record.
MCP: I think the model where it works is when the design architect is open to input and ideas, design ideas, from the project architect.
PP: And we are. We have architects of record and we listen to them. You have to be open-minded. And even, in my own house, if people really look, they would understand that my entire ground floor is essentially an open plan, even though the rooms look traditional. There are large openings between rooms and the character of the room and their sense of spatial distinction is carried largely by the ceilings, which are very developed. So I’m not advocating a literal return to history. That’s not very interesting for anyone.
