Bo and Patty Pilgrim Chapel, at Dallas Baptist University. (DMN)

Mark Lamster writes about architecture for the Dallas Morning News, which owns, at least for now, my employer, the Providence Journal (for sale by A.H. Belo, which also owns the Morning News).* So I was predisposed to be generous in my response to his essay “Kitsch Dallas: Why is the city of the future stuck in the past?” After all, he takes offense at how Dallas Baptist University has stolen the design of Joseph Brown’s First Baptist Church, in Providence, completed in 1775, for its student chapel. Lamster’s looking out for us, eh? Good for him!

John G. Mahler Student Center at DBU.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it seems that Lamster isn’t interested in any platitudes that might put a more pleasant spin on his dislike for the school’s copying. He also debunks the Mahler Student Center, which he thinks looks too much like Independence Hall. But Lamster commits so many clichés and his view of architecture is so hackneyed, so lacking in basic fairness, charity and understanding, and so typical of the intellectually flaccid orthodoxy of an architectural commentariat that has not felt the need to defend its principles in decades, that pointing them out rather tersely must be considered a form of parental kindness.

Lamster writes well, and his lead-in to the piece is a great romp. He pretends to be taking a trip to visit famous colonial buildings along the east coast but it turns out his trip is only a few hours and he never leaves the Dallas area, visiting what he calls its “pastiche” architecture, which he purposely (I hope!) misunderstands in order to deplore. Some of the architecture he criticizes is poorly designed and assembled with cheap materials. Easy pokes at bloated targets are his stock in trade, apparently.

Notice how Lamster makes sure to set the subjects of his story’s photos behind embarrassing foregrounds – a basketball court, a parking lot – putting the buildings in their worst possible light. What a cheap shot! That is more a criticism of Dallas, or of the campus, than of the architecture itself. Any new traditional architecture will look a bit strange and uncomfortable set in what most of Dallas offers as built environment. But if beauty is to win back American cities, it has to start somewhere.

He wonders whether Georgian architecture can possibly be patriotic, since it’s named after King George, against whom we revolted. That may cause cognitive dissonance in the Lamsterian mind, but most people who dabble in architecture realize that it was Thomas Jefferson who promoted classicism – not specifically Georgian – as redolent of the experiment with democracy undertaken in ancient Athens.

But “so many of our founders were slaveholders”! So blame the buildings – and furthermore, blame the buildings that have been built since America purged itself of slavery. But how can those buildings have been built, Lamster must wonder, if slavery no longer existed? Those buildings look like they equate with slavery, so how can they even exist? Is there a disconnect here? If so, it passes over Lamster’s head. Oh well, just blame the buildings!

Space requires overlooking a host of howlers, but not this: “As one friend put it recently, you don’t drive a Ford Model T, so why build a Colonial Revival house?” Because you think it’s beautiful perhaps? Classical architecture goes back several millennia, and revival of (or more accurately, the continued use of) past styles goes back just as far. To consider a “revival” style as illegitimate today renders almost the entire history of architecture illegitimate – an illogical proposition, to say the least.

Headquarters of the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

But “it’s not just a question of style. Contemporary design should respond to the ways we live now, taking advantage of the materials and technologies of the present.” Point to a single person who lives in a revival-style house who does not have a refrigerator, or whose house doesn’t use materials, traditional or modern, that have evolved over time since the period of revival.

Lamster reminds me of the people who say hiring a classicist to design a house is like hiring a doctor who uses 19th century surgical techniques or bleeds his sick patients. A third grader can see through these ridiculous arguments. The fact that they are still used regularly illustrates how the critical faculty of critics has weakened, since modern architecture has a powerful establishment that muscles past the objections of people who want beauty in their vicinity, and who like traditional architecture. Who the hell needs to bother trying to win an argument anymore? Not the modernists, apparently. Model T indeed!

Yes, the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s White House on the highway in from the airport tests even my patience, but it does not really look like the White House. It’s an imitation so cheap that even I cannot rise to its defense.

Old Parkland office development.

Lamster goes on to lambaste perfectly decent new traditional buildings like the Old Parkland. Somehow, he equates it with Jefferson’s academical village, the original campus he (Jefferson) designed for the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. It bears no such resemblance that I can detect beyond its brick, and a low wing that you can see in the photograph. It could be a “copy” of almost any large classical building of brick. Or to be more accurate, it could merely reflect architectural principles that have been used to design successful and attractive buildings for centuries.

Why – since Lamster had so many juicier targets easier to belittle for those even less knowledgeable about architecture than he is – did he choose to pick on Old Parkland? Probably because his real objection is not to new buildings that resemble buildings of the past (even if they don’t) so much as to new buildings that take up space that should be given to “architecture of our time.” Predictable but not defensible.

Well, I’m sorry if I have wasted readers’ time. I am shooting fish in a barrel. But yes, as Lamster well knows, that is fun.

* A.H. Belo Corp., owner of the Dallas Morning News, sold The Providence Journal to a chain that laid me off the day it took ownership, last September.