Concrete building, the Hotel Acazar, in Saint Augustine, Fla. (Top two photos by Patrick Webb.)

Patrick Webb, of the American College of the Building Arts, in Charleston, delighted the TradArch list today with examples from Saint Augustine, Fla., of concrete used without brutality. They are the Hotel Acazar, above, and Grace Metodist Church, below to the left. Financed by Henry Flagler, the railroad magnate, both were designed by Carrere and Hastings and completed circa 1887, using Perth Amboy terra cotta.

Grace Methodist Church in Saint Augustine.

You see, it is a matter of choice, not just cost, to bring beauty to building. I’d wager that any building of concrete in the Beton-brute style better known as Brutalism could have been made more attractive for equal cost. It’s less a matter of material than of design philosophy. The bar is ridiculously low.

Those who are drooling over Paul Rudolph’s Brutalist Orange County Government Center probably realize that, but would never admit it. They take pride in the decision back in the late 1960s when the building was first proposed, to plop it amid a traditional streetscape in Goshen, N.Y. The decision to use concrete was secondary: They were not inflicting concrete on Goshen but Brutalism. Indeed, primarily they were not inflicting Brutalism on Goshen but modernism. Joy in poking average people in the eye is a part of modern architecture’s founding conceit – that people who like this stuff are more intelligent, or have a more refined, less Philistine sense of aesthetics, than those who do not.

False! Those who do not like it are actually more nuanced, in fact, than those who like it. If it is true that the mind is like an iceberg, most of which is under water, it is fair to say that those who dislike Brutalism are using more than the percentage of their consciousness  that’s above the water. Those who like Brutalism have thoughts that are more reliant on the crutch of orthdoxy, which enables them articulate complex (and generally foolish) ideas without having to think. Their brains never reach beneath the surface.

If Orange County had built a government center more like the building above in Saint Augustine, or the equally nice one at the upper left, the embarrassing intellectual pretzeling we’ve seen in Goshen this past week would not have been necessary. For that matter, that elegant bridge in Saint Augustine, pictured below, is probably also made from concrete. Do you suppose any of the Orange County Government Center acolytes would rather have a typical modernist concrete bridge in its place? Neither do I. Would they admit it? … Just askin’.

Bridge in Saint Augustine. (Landmark Realty)