The original and the copyist

Architecture is sometimes described as the second oldest profession, but often — in both theory and practice — it competes with the first. In his splendiferous office in Manhattan’s Seagram Building, Philip Johnson confirmed this when he told me, ‘Remember, son, I’m a whore.’ True to his vocation, this was a line he had often indiscriminately used.

Architects need to have big personalities because their responsibilities are so huge. Frank Lloyd Wright said that surgeons can bury their mistakes, but architects have to live with them. And so do the rest of us. Few of us have ever met a reticent, self-deprecating architect.

In the middle of the last century the Institute of Personality Assessment at the University of California performed psychometric tests on leading architects, now the subject of Pierluigi Serraino’s interesting new book The Creative Architect. But really all you have to know about the architectural personality disorder is that Wright was the inspiration for the megalomaniac Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.