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Sir / In his story on Sydney's Opera House [Oct. 8], Robert Hughes is confused when he deprecates street architecture as "façade" architecture, and celebrates the freestanding site for architecture as "sculpture." Architecture is not sculpture. People do not live and die in sculpture. This sort of craven search for show-off building sites and crudely gestural architecture-as-sculpture is one of the major failures of modernist architecture, particularly of the so-called Expressionists, of which Jørn Utzon is a very late bloomer.
DONALD HOFFMANN
Kansas City, Mo.
Sir / In our mundane, functional age, Utzon has provided Australia and the world with a symbol of grandeur and a shrine of fantasy. The Sydney Opera is both myth and monument.
WALLACE VAN ZYL
Muncie, Ind.
Battles of Flesh and Spirit
Sir / "Paul Tillich, Lover" [Oct. 8] served to rattle and shake my personal theology. Certainly the Lord advocated that his followers "love one another," but, according to Tillich's wife Hannah, Paul didn't call a halt to his burning passion for the fair sex.
But, after all, it was Mr. Tillich who staunchly wrote: "Protestantism is a continuous history of the breaking of images." He may have shattered my theological images, but my faith remains intact in those wonderful saints who, in spite of the battles of flesh and spirit, led lives that offered the word of hope and good cheer.
RON BLEWETT
Chardon, Ohio
The Gullibles
Sir / So Sidney Hook and the University Centers for Rational Alternatives want to set up a required program of undergraduate studies to save liberal education and to help establish "a permanent defense against gullibility" [Oct. 8].
One of the larger examples of gullibility in our society is putting up good money to pay teachers to require students to take courses to get a degree to get a job that doesn't require a college education.
RICHARD D. ERLICH
Oxford, Ohio
Sir / Admittedly, American education is in trouble. But to say this is due to a lack of a liberal arts education is absurd. Our society desperately needs specialists.
It has been my experience that the most gullible and naive people are liberal arts majors who know little and yet have the incredible gall to call themselves educated. Let me assure you that to say that our educational system needs a more extensive system of liberal arts is analogous to saying that a sinking ship needs more water.
ED GRIFFITH
Durango, Colo.
Humane Death
Sir / I am fascinated by Governor Reagan's suggestion [Oct. 8] that we search for more humane methods of capital punishment, i.e. "the simple shot or tranquilizer."
Governor Reagan's statement is really a challenge to our technology to find methods of putting condemned persons away so that we, the living, do not vicariously feel their pain. To take the life of a human who is unwilling to give it is inhumane.
STEPHEN B. CAPLIN
Indianapolis
Over the Wall