Inside Spaces

Architecture View;THE BOOM IN BIGNESS GOES ON

By Ada Louise HUXTABLE

This is the year in which schizophrenia took over officially in architecture. The event of the year may have been a formal confrontation at the Harvard Club in early December between the high practitioners of modernism, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, whose prestige skyscrapers proclaim the esthetic of money, function and power in every major American city, and the high priests of postmodernism, represented by Robert Stern, Michael Graves, Jorge Silvetti and Steven Peterson, who build a little and write and talk a lot about why firms like S.O.M. are passe. The debate was refereed by the editors of the Harvard Architecture Review, an earnest, high-culture publication put out by students of the Graduate School of Design that gives a lot of space to this sort of thing. But the truly remarkable feature of the meeting was that S.O.M. asked for it, in a ''What are we doing wrong?'' spirit, which might be freely translated as what do you guys know that we don't know. ''Practice'' and ''polemic'' lined up on opposite sides of the table. S.O.M. was told that the austere glass box is out and decoration, color and historical allusion are in. The ultimate putdown was delivered: Modern is a bore.

New York Times • Arts • page 25 • 1,275 words