The Pope & the Pill

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Catholics are no longer sheep who can be taken by their shepherd through any gate, without question, terrified by the menace of being burned as heretics. There are people who think like the Pope, and nobody stops them from having as many children as they want, or making of their love something like a medicine, given by doses in a certain amount and at a certain time.

ANA DE VARGAS

Bogota

Sir: I would rather appear "irreverent" than unobservant. In your excellent and balanced piece on Humanae Vitae, you have me saying "nobody cares enough about religion these days to want a schism." Interest in religion has been increasing as interest in the institutional church has been decreasing. What I said was that there is certainly not enough interest in organized religion these days to produce a schism.

(THE RT. REV.) JAMES A. PIKE

Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions

Santa Barbara, Calif.

Society's Monuments

Sir: If, as Architect Nathaniel Owings states, "architecture has always been the mirror image of a civilization," your cover article [Aug. 2] exemplifies the disturbing preoccupation with monumentality that exists in our society. Architecture as the molding of a physical environment can make no significant changes in how human beings live unless it is linked with a change in the social, political and economic environments. The major portion of the architecture you show expresses the "needs, priorities, aspirations" of the corporation, the industrial megalith and a national state of mind that is more interested in the economics of production and performance than in the amelioration of the human condition.

S. IRA GROSSMAN

Cambridge, Mass.

Sir: Quite a smashing story on Nat Owings and U.S. architecture. But how can you present a survey of the latter without showing a single building by Louis Kahn? He may well be the most influential U.S. architect since World War II.

PETER BLAKE, A.I.A.

Editor

Architectural Forum

Manhattan

Sir: Your article on Mr. Nathaniel Owings and today's architecture was indeed much overdue. Buildings have long reflected the people that inhabit them, the times that harbor them and the civilizations that grow with them. It is especially apparent today, when one has only to go to Harlem or Watts or Hough to see how the buildings reflect the temper of the people.

New buildings can build new hope. They can be representative of a "fresh new start." With people like Mr. Owings, knowing they hold this precious key with all the social responsibilities that go with it, the year 2000 may indeed be universally welcomed.

ADAM LINTER

Manhattan

Sir: In American history, great architects, such as Bulfinch, Richardson, White, Maybeck and Wright, have created a style and generally stuck with it to the end. This is not the way of Nat Owings and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. If one looks at the works of S.O.M., there is an astonishing range and volume of design. S.O.M. does not play variations on a theme and is perhaps the first major architectural firm to remain uncommitted to its past.

JOHN BOIT MORSE

Santa Ynez, Calif.

Remembrance of the Past