I was watching some TV late night after coming in and I happened to see an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent called Mad Hoops that no only starred scrawny John Krasinski as a star basketball player, the school he played for was named MosesCaro High School. There is only one Bob they could have added to make it better.
I’ve been glancing over the National Capital Planning Commission’s National Capital Framework Plan. While it contains many fantastic ideas of how to preserve the character of the monumental core while allowing development of many more sites for Federal offices and mixed uses. Its use of commercial corridors punctuated by monuments creates a strong aesthetic of government in a living city. However, it tolerates some of the looming office buildings more than others in a predictably traditionalist way, forgetting the urban conditions along the way.
Most conspicuously, in talking about the Federal Triangle buildings, it recognizes that the large single-use buildings with only a few useful entrances and no storefronts deaden the area, even during the day. However, it calls for the demolition of The J. Edgar Hoover building to revitalize the city and not, say, the Herbert Hoover building. In the case of the former, the brutalist headquarters of the FBI, they mention that the use of “International Style” plainness makes it look like a fortress, but on the same page they heap praise on the traditional buildings as being dignified and vibrant.
The problem with the argument presented here is quite simple: two styles of architecture that address the street in virtually identical ways are seen as completely different. Both are set back from the street, both have distant, cold windows with hard walls and high gates keeping members of the public out. If you are still in a prison, does it matter if the bars are gold or not? In this case, the staid taste of the Washington architectural establishment is simply bashing a style it doesn’t like.
Maybe it just needs lipstick and stockings?
They’re all monumental structures which you can’t group together with good results. Yet the prettier ones get away with it, offering a a pleasant background that ultimately hides the major flaws in the building. I won’t claim this isn’t a problem in modern architecture, but I have picked up a trend where Beaux-arts buildings in particular are forgiven of their damage to the fabric of a city because they are beautiful superficially. Modernist buildings are rightly criticized for their blank façades and monolithic use, however, even as “Storefronts!” becomes the rallying cry of urban planning, many praise functionally blank buildings for looking like buildings that work. When they turn to attack buildings of identical typology, it is generally because of a modern look, not because of a city interface issue.
It takes a more nuanced understanding of the form of a city to realize that a city needs buildings that are part of a fabric, as well as ones that punctuate the fabric. Unfortunately, the judgement of that design is stuck behind shallow observations and a pathological hatred for modern architecture. The NCPC’s report aims to undo many of the sterilizing effects of the McMillan Plan, but it will never manage to mitigate some of the effects. I can only hope that they eschew monolithic districts and give all kinds of architecture a fair shake
.
Sometime later I’ll talk more about the symbolism of using imperial architecture for bureaucracies, but that’s a different deal.
I added two Wikipedia articles recently, Peter Eisenman’s House VI and Roche-Dinkeloo’s Ford Foundation Building. Both are major projects in the history of architecture, let alone modernism, and both are exactly the kind of high-profile projects that get attention in other sections of Wikipedia. Imagine To The Lighthouse and The Crying of Lot 49 having nothing written about them, save for some snipes about them scrawled in anger by a fanatic who thinks that the English language died with Dickens. With few articles of any depth on buildings that are not public and fewer that are highly theoretical, it’s easy to understand that this might be tied to something about common knowledge and, uh, how people obsess over the canonicity of Star Wars novels rather than having jobs.
There is a divide between modern and traditional building styles, yes, but more importantly, there is a divide between buildings that require any technical knowledge of architecture. Even when people do write articles, they make incorrect assertions about things at the heart of architectural theory. Did you know that the curtainwall is structural on the Lever House? Neither did I – or the engineer for that matter.
So why is it that I was the one who had to (was lucky to) add these? Architects lead busy lives, perhaps, so making the time to put quality into what is essentially a thankless job. But the opportunity to actually offer some information in layman’s terms is a way to make architecture accessible to people in a way that’s more than just a superficial judgement of prettiness. Architects are generally wrongheaded in our aim to make people live in buildings they do not understand. Of course they hate them.
