WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI’s latest book is The Story of Architecture.
I served for a decade on the jury of the Richard H. Driehaus Prize, awarded each year to the architect who best represents the values of traditional and classical design. As Martin C. Pedersen observed recently on his website Common Edge: “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, M’chael Graves, Léon Krier, and Andrés Duany and Elizabeth PlaterZyberk, the award still exists in a sort of media vacuum.”
Pedersen is right. The design press pays scant attention to the Driehaus Prize, probably because its readers—the architectural mainstream—have little interest in traditional/classical architecture. Never mind that this approach accounts for countless private residences nationwide, as well as academic buildings, public libraries, concert halls, a federal courthouse, and a presidential library. One building that should have penetrated the media vacuum is 15 Central Park West, a luxury apartment building in Manhattan whose record-breaking commercial success gained it renown among real-estate mavens; the stately limestone façades consciously recall such prewar classics as the Apthorp and the Beresford.
But popular acclaim counts for little in the closeted architectural world. As the New York architect Peter Pennoyer, this year’s Driehaus winner, told Pedersen, “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
