Tower with, not against Prov

Posted on November 20, 2016 by David Brussat
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Hope Point Towers, left; Route 195 Corridor, right. (Fane Organization)

Unsurprisingly, the Providence Journal editorialized today in favor of the three residential towers, dubbed Hope Point Towers, proposed by New York developer Jason Fane. On the same day, in “Man behind Providence high-rise proposal has gotten well connected,” ace reporter Kate Bramson described at length how the developer has worked behind the scenes to massage the local political system, building up a network of lawyers and lobbyists to help him develop on the Jewelry District’s vacant former Route 195 land.

Who can blame Fane? Rhode Island is still Rhode Island. The director of the Route 195 corridor, where the three skyscrapers of 33, 43 and 55 stories would be built, Peter McNally, told the paper, in Bramson’s words, that he “has never met or worked with a lobbyist.” Take that assertion with as many grains of salt as you like, it is beginning to look as if the three towers are a done deal. Or at least its proponents think they are.

Maybe not. The Journal editorial, “Rhode Island needs towering aspirations,” took on its critics by trotting out a classic false choice: unless you back the proposal as it stands, you are against economic growth.

Not so. In fact, there is a middle way between  doing something offensive and doing nothing at all. Like any entity at an early stage, the proposal can and should be changed to fit better. Then out popped a most astonishing assertion in the Journal’s editorial:

All of us must understand that it is the nature of economic growth to change the “character” of a marketplace. If we insist on having only old (and empty) buildings, and reflexively oppose all forms of innovation, modern structures and low-cost energy, we will surely be left with an old and dying economy.

Okay, so let’s give the heave-ho to one of Providence’s chief competitive advantages – its beautiful historical character – in favor of a proposal plainly ugly and out of character and, beyond that, of uncertain benefit to the city’s competitiveness.

The passage is not just wrong but wrongheaded on so many levels. First, the idea behind opposition to this project is not to stop change but to direct it wisely. Nobody is insisting on having “only old (and empty) buildings.” Nobody is reflexively against innovation or modern structures. And finally, we already have an old and dying economy.

The Fane proposal, as it stands now, is conventional in every regard. Its design is a typical modernist combination of sterility and glitz, unlikely to charm most Rhode Islanders and inherently unsustainable environmentally. It is typical in its overkill regarding its cost and height. Genuine innovation – the unconventional wisdom – would involve designing more structures of lesser height, closer to the center of downtown and more in keeping with the character of Providence.

Developer Arnold “Buff” Chace was quoted in the Journal editorial:

The scale is a problem for sure. Buildings of that type are not part of the character of our city. … We need housing, no question about it. The part I don’t understand is why you would come into a city that has a need and then suggest something that has no relationship to the wonderful character of Providence.

He is spot on. The Journal editorial pointed out, correctly, that Chace and Fane would compete in the same market for residents. But Chace recognizes, and maybe even the Journal editorial board intuitively understands, that a more dynamic downtown of higher density would be good for the bottom line of all firms involved in building up the city. That is why the city should invite Fane to move his project downtown, and erect it not on the former 195 land but in Capital Center or, better, on the parking lots that extend from Washington to Weybosset streets, or even better still, on those parking lots between the Financial District’s existing towers and the Providence River.

Whether they go up downtown or in the Jewelry District, the towers should be divided into smaller buildings. Their design should be traditional – so that they could incorporate the features old buildings once used to regulate the climate’s influence on comfort levels. Operable windows, colonnades, wall width and ceiling height, and many more such features go back to the pre-thermostat age. They enabled building users to regulate the indoor environment without today’s massive injections of carbon. New buildings in traditional styles can and do incorporate all of these features. Buildings make up about 40 percent of energy use in America, and yet one of the chief strategies against climate change is off the table because it is inherently injurious to the interests of the architectural establishment.

Clearly, Jason Fane has bulked up on lawyers and lobbyists because he recognizes that his plan will face a powerful opposition with logic on its side. He would rather come in, have his proposal accepted without any fiddling around to accommodate local needs, and make the killing that, in America’s free market kidnapped by crony capitalists, is the expected privilege of those who are already rich.

Rhode Island leaders skeptical of the steroidal quality of this plan should work with the Fane Organization to promote changes in the project that would help it succeed for itself and for all of Rhode Island by strengthening rather than undermining the character of its capital city, Providence.

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Ruskin’s “Two Paths” speech

Posted on November 19, 2016 by David Brussat

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Among the platitudes of architecture these days is the modernist credo that innovation is the chief merit of the building arts. Innovation is important, but modernists have a narrow definition of the term that limits their vision. John Ruskin, the 19th century British art critic, saw this clearly long before the advent of modernism as a force in architecture, under the influence of which almost the entire field abandoned traditional concepts of beauty.

Here, grabbed from Architecture in America: A Battle of Styles (edited by Henry Hope Reed and William A. Coles), is a passage from his “Two Paths” address to architects in 1857:

If you … can get the noise out of your ears of the perpetual, empty, idle, incomparably idiotic talk about the necessity of some novelty in architecture, you will soon see that the very essence of a Style, properly so called, is that it should be practiced for ages, and applied to all purposes; and that so long as any given style is in practice, all that is left for individual imagination to accomplish must be within the scope of that style, not in the invention of a new one.

… Let us consider together what room for the exercise of the imagination may be left to us under such conditions. And, first, I suppose it will be said, or thought, that the architect’s principle field for exercise of his invention must be in the disposition of lines, mouldings, and masses, in agreeable proportions. Indeed, if you adopt some styles of architecture, you cannot exercise invention in any other way. And I admit that it requires genius and [a] special gift to do this rightly.

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John Ruskin in 1863. (Wiki.)

It seems to me that Ruskin is on target here. He was urging his listeners to find new ways to apply old rules with greater virtuosity and an even more pleasing effect than had been achieved by their predecessors. Such an attempt may be beyond the comprehension of most modernist practitioners today, and modernist theorists no doubt seek to keep the idea very well hidden, especially from students. Ruskin’s thinking was notoriously complicated, whether in architecture or the many other fields in which he worked his mind. But it beats me how he can have leapt to the above sublimity from the following inanity, written when Ruskin was younger, in The Stones of Venice (1851-53). It is also taken from Architecture in America. Here it is:

[T]he whole mass of the architecture, founded on Greek and Roman models, which we have been in the habit of building for the last three centuries, is utterly devoid of all life, virtue, honourableness, or power of doing good. It is base, unnatural and unholy in its revival, paralyzed in its old age. … The first thing we have to do is cast it out, and shake the dust of it from our feet for ever. Whatever has any connxion with the five orders, or with any one of the orders, – whatever is Doric, or Ionic, or Tuscan, or Corinthian, or Composite, or in any wwise Grecized or Romanized; whatever betrays the smallest respect for Vitruvian laws, or conformity with Palladian work, – that we are to endure no more.

Hard to figure. Very hard to figure. Ruskin’s book on Venice is widely associated with a preference for the Gothic over the classical as better reflecting what Salvatore Settis, author of the recently published If Venice Dies, calls the “soul” of Venice. Ruskin likes the idea of preserving old buildings but believes that the signs of aging and decay should be preserved with them – an idea I find immensely attractive, and to a degree responsible for the allure of such U.S. cities as New Orleans and Charleston.

And yet Gothic architecture makes extensive use of ancient forms. H.P. Lovecraft also involved himself in the sort of critical minutiae that enabled him to love Georgian buildings and hate Gothic ones. In letters to the Providence Journal he expressed his admiration for the proposed new Providence County Courthouse that was to replace the old Gothic one. Today, one can only envy him the narrow palette of his likes and dislikes. One must cringe at how Lovecraft – or Ruskin, for that matter – would react to the sort of modernism that has left Providence with Old Stone Square and the GTECH building!

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America gets its dome back

Posted on November 17, 2016 by David Brussat
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Photographs from the Flickr site of the Office of the Architect of the Capitol.

It has been disconcerting if not downright depressing to see the dome of the United State Capitol shrouded in scaffolding these past two years. Ditto the Washington Monument when it was being repaired. Unlike the great obelisk, no calls to keep the dome cloaked as a work of “art” have been heard, so far as I know, thank goodness. But shhh! The swamp has not yet been drained, so you can never be too careful.

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The Obama administration, working with the Office of the Architect of the Capitol and the General Services Administration, deserves kudos for keeping this project under budget and on time, especially with the Inauguration of the next president upcoming.

“The U.S. Capitol Dome Restoration Is Complete,” in Architect, the journal of the American Institute of Architects, is a matter-of-fact account of the work. Since the AIA is among those who would probably applaud if Obama had instead proposed to replace the old dome with something more edgy, one can only hope that the authors  of the Architect piece, Chelsea Blahut and Wanda Lau, are not in their editor’s doghouse for playing it too straight.

I wish I had at hand my copy of the late Henry Hope Reed’s masterful volume on the art and architecture of the Capitol. Alas, it is AWOL, hiding in our basement. So I will quote our first president from the architecture primer Architecture in America: A Battle of Styles, co-edited by the great Henry Reed. On July 23, 1792, President Washington, at Mount Vernon, wrote a letter to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia as early plans for a capitol were being discussed. He wrote: “The Dome, which is suggested as an Addition to the center of the edifice, would, in my opinion, give a beauty and grandeur to the pile.”

Ah, with its dome lovingly restored, the pile is safe, at least for now.

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Towering towers in La Prov?

Posted on November 15, 2016 by David Brussat
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Proposal by the Fane Organization, left, for land next to proposed park. (Fane)

A New York development firm with offices in the Rockefeller Center has proposed to build three residential towers, in phases, rising 33, 43 and 55 stories up from the vacant Jewelry District land where Route 195 used to be. All three would be taller than the Industrial Trust Bank Building downtown (30 Rock is only 15 stories taller than 55). Zoning allows seven stories on Parcel 42, max ten under some circumstances. The Fane Organization says it will seek an exception to this, in addition to an as-yet-undetermined sack of city and state development incentives.

The Providence Journal ran in today’s edition a lengthy story, “Reaching for the sky in Providence,” about the proposal’s unveiling at a meeting of the I-195 Redevelopment District Commission yesterday. Quoting Jason Fane, it read in part:

“This will be an iconic project, and to succeed it’s got to be on a sufficient scale that it’s visible,” Fane told The Journal. “It’s changing Providence, and the commission will have to decide that they want something like this or not.”

If they want it, he said he wants to build it. And if they don’t, he said after the meeting, he’ll go away.

Except for the goofy-looking picture-window pods near the middle of each building’s east-facing façades, the architecture isn’t quite as abysmal as we have all come to expect. Each building mimics a postmodern wedding-cake skyscraper, with a degree of vertical attenuation in each. Each has what appears to be a brown masonry shaft rising from a five-story base (about the height of the average Jewelry District building) upon which all three would sit. Each shaft has what the modernists like to call “punched” windows, as opposed to the glass curtain wall with which each building’s upper stories would reach skyward. From left to right, the shortest building has a stepped roof, the tallest has a set of up-thrusting glass shards, and the middle building’s roof has a rounded element amid its pinnacles.

Being so far and away beyond the allowed height on the parcel – because it is right next to the public park – it is hard to see how the 195 commission can give Fane the go-ahead without essentially saying, “We have our rules, but who cares?” This trio of buildings should be downtown, or in the Capital Center. Capital Center has plenty of unbuilt land, and downtown cries out for more population density. The location of these three new towers will turn Providence’s already bifurcated skyline into a trifurcated skyline. The city may soon be able to boast the same scary cityscape whose isolated towers for the wealthy separate the haves from the have-nots in Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s dystopian film.

The big question is whether this ambitious proposal is for real or some sort of joke, part of a cynical developer’s real-estate shell game involving players unknown to the commission. Does Fane actually see a market here for the as-yet-unspecified hundreds of apartments and condos they would build, perhaps from booming Boston, or do they take us for rubes holding out bags of tax money for anyone with a quasi-plausaible pitch to grab?

Of course, everyone wants jobs and investment in Providence. But these can be had without accelerating the unfortunate trends that have marred the city’s beauty over the past decade or so. Perhaps the commission can make it clear to Fane that we can do business with them without necessarily making Providence a worse place. Despite our experience since early in this century, development and ugliness are not, in fact, joined at the hip.

Posted in Architecture, I-195 Redevelopment District, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Tour of superior courthouse

Posted on November 11, 2016 by David Brussat
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View down George St., courthouse center right, its tower upper right. (Photos by David Brussat)

A while back, R.I. Supreme Court Justice Gilbert Indeglia, whom I’d met after giving a talk on architecture in Kingston, near URI’s main campus, a couple of years ago, invited me to tour the Providence County Courthouse. I’d been there before. I had a served on a grand jury – where I’d heard the gory details of, among others, a case in which the suspect ran over his victim with a car (back and forth, in her own driveway). And for my first 14 years in Providence, living on Benefit Street, I had frequently used the courthouse as an elevator from South Main Street to Benefit, five stories up. It is one of my favorite buildings in Providence, perhaps second only to the the Rhode Island State House on Smith Hill beyond downtown.

My tour was delayed by writing Lost Providence, in which the courthouse figures (even though it has not been lost). Before the manuscript came back to me today with copyediting suggestions, I had time to take the tour.

Justice Indeglia and Deputy Sheriff Everett LaMountain (now there’s a lofty moniker!) took me around the building, showing me a host of recently renovated courtrooms, from whose furniture was removed decades of penknifed signatures and other art, replacing old carpet and refurbishing some hundreds or thousands of square feet of mahogany. The original beauty of the courtrooms (in my opinion never really dimmed that much by time’s vicissitudes) has been restored by a craftsmanship still flourishing amid its supposed dark ages.

From one courtroom near the top floor of the courthouse’s nine stories we looked out a window to the north. The judge hinted that most workers in the groves of justice would have preferred a view of the State House more than the orange brick of the RISD Chace Center of 2008. They are fortunate, however, in that the view of the inside of their own workplace is sufficiently splendid to overshadow any disappointment of the outside view.

My patient guides kept me informed and entertained Monday afternoon as I shot a full “roll.” Sheriff LaMountain did double duty three days later after I found that I’d had the camera set to “Effects” rather than to “Auto” – no wonder those shots looked so fuzzy. He superintended my visit to retake them. I have arranged them not in historical order but in subject sets – hallways, public spaces, courtrooms and architectural detail, introduced by several outside shots. This masterpiece of architecture was built between 1928 and 1933 and designed by the firm of Jackson, Robertson & Adam, who also designed RISD’s Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf Building across College Street. May readers appreciate it through this post rather than a visit under the exigencies of the law. In any event, the building may, for the most part, be freely examined by those whose appetites are whetted here.

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Vote’s “style wars” tea leaves

Posted on November 9, 2016 by David Brussat
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Trump Tower vs. Trump Building

It’s hard to say, to say the least, what, if anything, Donald Trump’s victory may mean for architecture. It is easier to imagine that a Hillary Clinton win would have meant more of the same for how we build. Trump is not just a reality show host: he is a real-estate developer who specializes in the big and glitzy. Are the “style wars” between traditional and modernism on his radar? Maybe. Maybe not.  Does Trump Tower, where the victor had his campaign headquarters, reflect his architectural taste? It probably does. Not good.

Nevertheless, like last night’s electorate, it is possible we could be surprised. The Trump property that got the most play in the campaign aside from his tower was his new Post Office hotel in Washington. It is a new hotel but a historic building. There is also the Trump Building, in New York, a classical tower completed in 1930, for a month the world’s tallest building, and one that reflects the heroic era of Manhattan’s skyscraper skyline culture.

I don’t know Trump’s inner circle well enough to identify anyone who might stand up for tradition in architecture. As a sometime Republican and sometime conservative, he surely must feel some sort of kinship with the idea of tradition. In the hope and expectation that surround his new job, let me suggest a couple of interesting possibilities for developer and soon-to-be-president Trump to consider.

First, granting the number of larger issues on his plate right now, he should at some point consider reviving George W. Bush’s nomination of Thomas Gordon Smith, or a classicist of equivalent eminence, as the chief architect at the General Services Administration. In that job the Notre Dame professor could help even out the playing field for traditional architecture in future federal buildings, which the GSA controls. It has been staunchly modernist for decades. Smith’s nomination in 2006 caused a firestorm of protest from the usual suspects, and Bush, showing uncharacteristic wussitude, withdrew the nomination. Let Trump put Smith up for the same post.

Second, Trump will have the opportunity to tap into the thinking of City Journal, the quarterly of the Manhattan Institute, as he develops his strategy for the nation’s inner cities. The City Journal is not just a fount of policy ideas; it is also a proponent of the classical revival, having run many excellent essays over the years on traditional architecture and classical architects.

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WTC plan by Franck Lohsen McCrery. (City Journal)

It is City Journal that weeks after 9/11 published the classical proposal for the World Trade Center rebuild, designed by the firm of Franck Lohsen McCrery Architects. Their excellent proposal never made any headway in the WTC design competition because that competition put its thumb on the scale for entries that were “of our time” – that is, which represented the chaos of our era. This is the same chaos that President-elect Trump has a mandate to reverse. The World Trade Center as it has emerged represents the taste, perhaps, of Donald Trump, but of the establishment for sure. Maybe Donald Trump will understand that architecture can be a symbolic indicator of his supposed desire to recast the establishment as a vehicle for making America great again, and, as he says, to heed, once again, the voices and the tastes of the average American citizen.

One more suggestion: The Donald should see to it that an early grave is dug by Congress for Frank Gehry’s Ike memorial design.

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First kill all the bureaucrats

Posted on November 8, 2016 by David Brussat

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Let’s see if I have this correct: The 110-year-old Christ Church on West 36th Street, in Manhattan’s Garment District, was purchased by a developer who wanted to save the facade to be incorporated into the design of a new hotel. But his plan has been blocked by a city building-code bureaucrat because the second story of the facade is set back six feet from the sidewalk, violating the “street wall” zoning in that part of the city. The developer then volunteered to rebuild the second story flush with the first story and the sidewalk edge. Preservationists and other interested parties – including Steve Cuozzo, author of “Not even a prayer can save this beloved church facade” in the New York Post – fear the bureaucrat will stand his ground.

Is this description correct? If so:

  1. What kind of bureaucrat is this?
  2. What kind of developer is this?

Whatever you think of facadectomies, or the compromise proposal to build a facsimile of the wall in the required location, this developer, Sam Chang, should be hoist on our shoulders and paraded down Fifth Avenue. (Readers will now send in reasons why he should not be feted.) And the bureaucrat should be shot. I hasten to add that my tongue is securely in cheek – still, idiot, you certainly do not understand your job, or the rules you so zealously enforce. Get thee to a nunnery!

I just read Cuozzo’s personal history of the building’s life, and I must wonder whether it is possible, in this day and age, to demolish the remains of a church with such a sexy history.

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Pix of Moran’s Samaritaine

Posted on November 7, 2016 by David Brussat
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This image of his counterproposal and those below courtesy of Connor Moran.

Last night I posted on Connor Moran’s elegant counterproposal for the Rue de la Rivoli side of La Samaritaine, the famous Paris department store. The Notre Dame grad, a native of Naperville, Ill., who now works for Ferguson & Shamamian, in New York City, has answered my request for more and larger images of his proposal. The third image has been used to illustrate a poster for this year’s Stanford White Awards, sponsored by the New York chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. The SANAA proposal to which Moran responds and the Samaritaine facade now demolished are at the end.

Who can doubt what Parisians would prefer? What the world would prefer?

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Which way will Paris go?

Posted on November 6, 2016 by David Brussat
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Counterproposal thesis by Connor Moran in fifth year at Notre Dame. (Connor Moran)

Two items regarding the direction of Paris. First is a plea from architectural theorist Leon Krier that Paris’s Mayor Hidalgo find someone other than Dominique Perrault to redesign the portion of the Ile de la Cité (site of Notre Dame cathedral) from which French courts are moving. They are slated to occupy a tragic blotch by Renzo Piano on the edge of Paris. The city’s legal establishment fought in court to avoid the move into his cheesy tower, but failed. Perrault’s incompetence is affirmed by his design for the regrettable new national library a decade or so ago (see bottom image).

With all that’s going on in Paris, it seems like we won’t have it anymore, and damn soon, unless the city and its leaders reverse the direction of the future of the City of Light. The second item on this post shows the way.

It is a counterproposal by Connor Moran, a graduate of Notre Dame (the univesity, not the cathedral) now at Ferguson and Shamamian, in New York, for the Rue de Rivoli side of La Samaritaine (the other side faces the Seine, and seems out of danger, at least for now). The famous department store is being butchered by the Pritzker winning architecture firm SANAA. Moran’s elegant alternative for the Rue de Rivoli side is above. The leftmost panel is the insensitive (to use the gentlest word) proposal by (IN)SANAA (my own titular reinterpretation). Below is Leon Krier’s SOS. Both of these items come to me courtesy of Mary Campbell Gallagher, of SOS Paris and a founder of the International Coalition for the Preservation of Paris.

Here is Moran’s description of his project, which has apparently already won him (congratulations!) the Stanford White Award from the New York chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art:

The outcome of my study is ultimately to be determined by how the Parisian public receive my thesis project. I will be following in the footsteps of traditional architects such as Quinlan Terry in London and Leon Krier in Luxembourg, who have successfully crafted arguments against the modernization of such iconic traditional European cities. S.O.S. Paris hopes to use my project as a visual tool that will inspire more people to argue against the corruption of traditional Paris and ultimately aid in the creation of preservation laws that prevent future disregard for the city’s historical and artistic development.

Here is Krier’s “C’est an stitch-up” (a piece hopefully not behind BD magazine’s paywall), calling on the mayor, and France’s president, to rethink what seems likely to overtake Ile de la Cité. Below are Gallagher’s thoughts on the same subject:

The President of France and the Mayor of Paris have chosen the worst possible architect to plan the redesign of the ancient Ile de la Cité in the center of Paris, site of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Dominique Perrault proved how perversely incompetent he is when he designed the new National Library in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, the Bibliotheque Mitterrand. Believe it or not, he placed the book stacks in glass-walled skyscrapers, literally cooking the books. The authorities rushed to install shutters. And that’s forgetting the deck outside, slippery when wet. Read what Leon Krier says about Perrault and the history and future of the Ile de la Cité.

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(Please excuse the confused structure of this post; I am being pressed to have dinner at my dear mother-in-law’s here in Providence. Gotta rush! Sorry!)

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Comments on my PPS post

Posted on November 5, 2016 by David Brussat
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Photo similar to that shown by Max Page on Friday. (The Still Room)

Because many readers do not read the comments section of a blog, I am publishing two comments from eminent theorists who have read my blog post “Why preserve? PPS speaks.” They are from Steven Semes, a Notre Dame professor of architecture and the author of The Future of the Past, and Nikos Salingaros, a mathematician and author, with Michael Mehaffy, of Design for a Living Planet. (If I receive any comments from readers who disagree with my assessment of the direction of preservation, my thoughts about PPS, or of the opinions of Max Page, I will run them as separate posts also.) Below are their comments in the order they were received:

***

Max Page has many good points to offer and your hesitation is also understandable. Saving old buildings is the easiest and most effective path to sustainability. The solution to gentrification is to build new neighborhoods people want to live in (it’s simply a matter of limited supply and great demand). Issues of justice (environmental as well as social and political) must be in the forefront of preservation as they should be in every other aspect of public life.

Where I think the preservation community needs to look beyond “saving places” is that we must have a sense of what we are saving them for. Do we save everything old just because it’s there and someone thinks it is “part of our history”? Or do we have some criteria for judging what is worthy of preservation and what needs to go? (Consider the difference between the words “historic” and “historical.”) Do we preserve examples of environmental disaster (suburban sprawl, for example) simply to preserve “history”? Preservation must have an aim, and it must be to help build cities that are beautiful, sustainable, and just. In that way, Max Page is right. That does not in any way preclude saving specific buildings and places as a means to that end, but, I believe, that is not an end in itself.

***

Seen from the scientific approach (closest to my heart), preservation is a normal process of evolution. A design discovery that creates a healing environment needs to be preserved, and its DNA saved from destruction by random forces. It’s in our collective interest to repair certain older buildings from inevitable material decay so as not to lose their encoded design DNA. Those tectonic configurations help humankind move “forward” in leading our lives with as much positive environmental feedback as we can imagine.

At the same time, design discoveries that we find are unhealthy (i.e., that immediately repel the vast majority of common people), and which might actually make people sick in the long term, should be demolished and reconstructed. Wrong evolutionary steps need to be selected against. Nature does that. But when selection is based on a twisted sort of political ideology, we reverse human evolution: not our body’s evolution, but the evolution of human artifacts and the created built environment. The fervent desire of an elite group to preserve repulsive buildings or unhealthy urban configurations is part of this latter phenomenon. Their flawed education has sadly attached nonsensical “links” between the worthless object and desirable though abstract human ideals.

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