Fallen angel in Charleston

Posted on July 12, 2016 by David Brussat
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Latest building proposed for WestEdge project in Charleston, S.C. (Publix)

As mayor of Charleston, S.C., for some 40 years, Joe Riley was a hero to the preservation movement. But lately he has hopped in bed with preservation’s nemesis, modern architecture.

An article from 2015 on the website Next Cities, “Southern Rivals Struggle to Balance Historic Preservation and Modern Architecture,” expresses its theme with considerable confusion. Its quotations of Riley speaking to CBS seem to contradict each other. The first quote expresses the theme; the second, about a painting, contradicts it; the third, about a garage, also contradicts it. The theme is that preservation and progress are somehow mutually exclusive.

Here is the first Riley quote:

“A historic city should be a living place,” Riley told CBS. “Because if you don’t have that, then it’s a former something. A former once-great city that now is pretty to see.”

Here is the second Riley quote:

“You know, it’s like there is this beautiful painting that has been painted and you have an opportunity to paint something within that beautiful painting,” said Riley. “You’ve got to be careful that in what you paint there, you don’t detract from the overall context of what has been created.”

Here is the third Riley quote:

“I said I want a building that doesn’t look like a parking garage,” Riley recalled. “And he very nicely explained to me that’s not what you do. And I said, ‘No, that’s what we do here in Charleston. I don’t want it to look like a parking garage.’”

Unlike the second and third quote, the first quote suggests a confused Riley who seems to believe that modern architecture moves a city into the future but preservation does not. It’s as if new architecture must reflect a machine mentality in order to represent progress. Granted, modernism has done an excellent job promoting that idea, but good p.r. does not make an idea true, and it has definitely not been popular among most of the public.

Progress in a city should evolve its physicality forward in ways that make it increasingly beautiful and increasingly lovable to the majority of its citizens. The easiest, most sensible way to do that is to use the past that has been deemed worthy of preservation as a model for future development.

At least in cities like Charleston and its rival Savannah, not to mention Providence, the main job for preservation is no longer saving individual historic buildings. Though it is occasionally still necessary, that has been largely accomplished. The main job now is promoting new buildings that add to rather than undermine the setting created by successful preservation. Riley’s support for ugly new architecture in Charleston’s WestEdge development suggests that he does not understand this anymore.

Providence, which is happily paving the way for architecture nobody will love in its latest economic development plan, has never had a mayor who understood this, so the betrayal of Charleston represented by Riley’s new attitude is difficult to grasp here.

Providence’s sad/glad fate is that for more than a century it has been too poor to bulldoze its charms. Alas for prosperous Charleston, the loss of a mayor who understands preservation leaves it prey to ugly developments that might boost its economy in the short run but undermine its future in the long run. Instead, it should plan developments that boost its economy in the short run without undermining its future in the long run. That is, in fact, relatively easy. It is not rocket science. The entire world did it successfully for hundreds and even thousands of years, until about 1950.

Charleston now has its first new mayor in many decades. Its citizens can only hope he has as deep a grasp of these vital issues as his predecessor once did.

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Charleston’s Rainbow Row. (photo by Melizabethi123)

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Slowing Prov’s 6/10 Big Dig

Posted on July 11, 2016 by David Brussat
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Boulevard version of proposed Route 6/10 connector project. (RIDOT)

A state transportation agency used to routinely grabbing buckets of federal money was probably taken aback last week when the U.S. Department of Transportation rejected its bid for a $175 million FASTLANE grant to help it rebuild Providence’s 6/10 connector. So startled that RIDOT may have been, so to speak, scared straight.

One of the local transit watchdog blogs published “Burying R.I.’s 6/10 Big Dig,” relaying news of the funding snafu. The Providential Gardener, as the blog is known, speculated that a more rational plan for the job may have been given if not a green light then a second wind.

In an era where city planners, backed by the U.S. Department of Transportation, take every opportunity to replace urban highways with more efficient, transportation-friendly, and cost-effective networks, RIDOT’s “Big Dig” plan looks like a throwback to the 1950s. Typical of Eisenhower-era highway systems, RIDOT’s approach benefits long distance commuters at the expense of the residents who bear the brunt of living near the highway. It’s an antiquated, suburbs-first philosophy.

The Gardener gives the city planning department credit for pushing a proposal that, instead of rebuilding the highway with a tunnel twist, as RIDOT wants, would replace the highway with a boulevard. With the project reaching for a billion-dollar pricetag, a rethink was in order.

The Gardener also praised RIDOT for its apparently greater transparency, saying goodbye, finally, to “the dark days of the ’90s” when DOT Watch kept a sharp eye out for RIDOT no-no’s. But let’s also not forget that RIDOT spent the ’90s abandoning the ’50s mentality. It moved Amtrak rails underground, daylighted the city’s rivers, helped bring in Providence Place, and relocated Route 195 away from the city center.

Advocates for the full-monty boulevard option really ought to crank up their artistic side. The RIDOT-generated image above is unlikely to win many supporters, and I do not find any alternative images online. Not only the boulevard itself but new development along it should be re-imagined so as to generate public support rather than undermining it with the sort of sterile institutional dreck that the Route 195 folks seem to have taken such a shine to. Notice how hard they are struggling to move forward.

CommerceRI may have a bad case of ’50s mentality, and the 6/10 connector plans seemed to suggest that RIDOT, too, had contracted a relapse after all these years. Perhaps last week’s federal smackdown will bring relief.

Let’s hope that the 6/10 connector project will morph into something that lives up to RIDOT’s glory years, during which the agency earned kudos for projects that the public loved. Slowing the connector down could, as The Gardener suggests, smarten it up.

Posted in Development, Providence | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Self-driving auto-da-fe?

Posted on July 9, 2016 by David Brussat

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Auto-da-fé has come to mean, in common lexicon, the burning of a heretic. Give it more time and the phrase will mean self-immolation. Let me push it along a bit. The recent first death in an accident involving a self-driving car should cause the auto automobile to combust spontaneously: self-driving auto-da-fé, as it were.

The accident, involving a Tesla, occurred a couple months ago in Williston, Fla. In a recent article for his blog BLDGBLOG, “Robot War and the Future of Perceptual Deception,” Geoff Manaugh suggests that scientific research and planning for the advent of self-driving cars must address questions raised by the accident. On May 7, a Tesla plowed broadside into an 18-wheel tractor-trailer when its autopilot computer confused the rig’s white side for the sky.

But Manaugh, far from concluding that self-driving cars are a potential transportation system that should be abandoned, averred that U.S. highway systems will have to be completely redesigned. He goes on to speculate, in light of the Tesla accident, that the military will want protect potential military targets by harnessing the flaws of computer perception to baffle enemy automated weaponry, such as self-driving tanks and drones. But isn’t everything a possible target in modern warfare? How do you protect a highway interchange from enemy drones without saddling it with features that spoof citizens’ own self-driving cars? Going even further, Manaugh suggests that the interiors of hospitals and, by extention, any facility (or home) set up to accommodate robots for a growing number of tasks will have to be completely redesigned.

Why don’t we just tear our entire society down and rebuild it to be future-friendly? That might cost a lot, but progress demands it. Or does it?

Scientific American has a more straightforward article on the implications of the Tesla crash for self-driving cars. “Deadly Tesla Crash Exposes Confusion Over Automated Driving,” by Larry Greenemeier and published yesterday, notes that a few years ago Google shifted its overall self-driving-car project from its focus on cars where the driver chooses among separate “self-driving features” (or the car chooses automatically in an emergency) to one that fully devolves all driving functions to the automobile itself:

Google had started down a similar road toward offering self-driving features about six years ago—but it abruptly switched direction in 2013 to focus on fully autonomous vehicles, for reasons similar to the circumstances surrounding the Tesla accident. “Developing a car that can shoulder the entire burden of driving is crucial to safety,” Chris Urmson, director of Google parent corporation Alphabet, Inc.’s self-driving car project, told Congress at a hearing in March. “We saw in our own testing that the human drivers can’t always be trusted to dip in and out of the task of driving when the car is encouraging them to sit back and relax.”

In short, facing more risky development problems, Google doubled down.

My contention remains that humans’ own onboard automatic driving systems (that is, their brains) are certainly flawed, but are more reliable than the computerized variety. If and when all cars drive themselves, and driving becomes a matter of millions of vehicular computers interacting with each other’s host vehicles and simultaneously with their roadway environments, this will become swiftly evident. Has anyone thought through how to switch from one system to the other without hazarding those who still rely on the former? In replacing the system we have with a system we want, we will certainly cut corners to reduce the mammoth a price tag. The whole idea is the epitome of pie in the sky. So it remains vital to not go there: We need to initiate the self-driving auto-da-fé system.

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The 4th w/out the Overture

Posted on July 8, 2016 by David Brussat
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Napoleon watches Moscow burning in 1812. (Painting by Adam Albrecht, 1840)

I am still suffering from Tchaikovsky’s Retreat from Providence.

Last year the Rhode Island Philharmonic gave a bravura performance of “The 1812 Overture” for the city’s Fourth of July celebration at India Point Park. Not this year. I have no idea who is to blame – Mayor Elorza or the orchestra? Was there an inability to come to terms? Or was it somehow determined, at City Hall, that the Overture would be too old hat? Tradition has worked well in Bristol. Is it to be ditched in Providence?

Here is a full choral version of the Overture played by the Leningrad Military Orchestra, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra and the St. Petersburg Chamber Choir, Vladimir Ashkenazy conducting. The YouTube video does not provide the date of the performance, but it is unlikely to have been on our Independence Day, not if the recording was made in St. Petersburg. Anyhow, what does the piece even have to do with our Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776? The War of 1812 might be found among the rationale, but that was a sideshow during the Napoleonic Wars between France and a major but shifting coalition of allies alternately led by Britain and czarist Russia. France was our ally in the Revolution, but it was France whose retreat from Moscow was celebrated by Tchaikovsky. Perhaps it is merely his inclusion of the melody of France’s national anthem, “The Marseilles,” in the piece that caused Arthur Fiedler to place it on the program for a July 4, 1974, performance of the Boston Pops in the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade. I probably saw it, since I was in Boston shrugging off Emerson that summer. It became a traditional part of American fireworks displays only after that, a mere 42 years ago – a time when the idea of a victorious Russia was anathema to many Americans.

Go figure! No, go listen!

Hearing that the Philharmonic would not be present at India Point Park, I retreated this year. But, as they say, there’s always next year. Let’s hope.

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Big bear barely Brunonian

Posted on July 6, 2016 by David Brussat
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Sculpture newly installed on Brown Campus. (Providence Journal)

Just off the Main Green at Brown, a mounted Marcus Aurelius presides over Lincoln Field, now called Simmons Field after the university’s most recent former president. Or at least the Roman general used to preside. And Ruth Simmons is now dissed. On Sunday I opened the Providence Journal to find a photo of the above abomination squatting on the quadrangle green.

The story in the Journal reads:

The teddy bear sits now behind a chain-link fence, an installation in progress that left passersby wondering Sunday whether people might eventually cozy up to a bear that doesn’t seem cuddly despite its plush appearance. Chipped black buttons for eyes adorn the 23-foot-tall sculpture that’s bisected with an oversized black desk lamp, awaiting its light bulb.

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Marcus Aurelius (twitter.com)

“Giant bear sculpture at Brown University has its friends, foes,” by Kate Bramson, reports that the sculpture is a baby-blue copy of artist Urs Fischer’s other work. His most celebrated bear is yellow, purchased at auction from Christie’s for $6.8 million by a member of the Qatar royal family, who had it installed at the airport in Doha. Yeah, yeah. We all missed our calling. The one at Brown is owned by hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen and wife Alexandra, and it is on loan to the university for five years.

Five years!

One can roll one’s eyes at the Cohens, but Brown’s leadership has a duty to its community, its alumni, its past and its future. The university and its campus are handed down in trust, and that trust has been violated. Another recently installed sculpture, “Idee di pietra” by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone, on the Main Green, is a bronze tree that looks real but for a boulder nestled in the crook of its dead branches. Fine.

Many sculptures, venerable and otherwise, adorn this bastion of the Ivy League, founded in 1764, the nation’s seventh-oldest college. None so alters the character of its setting as the blue bear. It arguably violates all five of the “values of public art” asserted by the university’s Public Art Committee. Four of the five, all but the last regarding donors, are violated inarguably. If this sculpture is indeed Brunonian, then the longtime critics of Brown’s lack of serious academic standards must be right.

“‘Ghostbusters’ meets ‘Toy Story'” suggested a professor of computer science, Anna Lysyanskaya, to Bramson while touring friends through campus.

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“Ideas of Stone” (Journal)

Bramson found few to take the bear’s side. That’s no surprise. When it comes to their own environment, student taste is surprisingly conservative. Students at Columbia are demanding the removal of a far less egregious sculpture by Henry Moore. These are not issues of free speech but of community values. Objecting to the unsought reconceptualization of Lincoln Field is not to be against art but to favor artistic standards.

And what to make of the placidity with which the blue bear reacts to being cleaved through the skull by a giant desk lamp? Does it make light of violence? Or is it merely a reference to the distress students feel at having to study at night instead of partying? Just asking.

If the Public Art Committee, the Campus Planning Committee and the University Curator cannot wrap their heads around the damage done to a wide range of university priorities by this over-the-top sculpture, University President Christina Paxson should step in and remove the thing.

RAMSA partner Gary Brewer just sent this Brown Daily Herald article about a much better bear sculpture then planned, now erected, as part of the excellent Nelson Fitness Center building completed a few years ago.

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Statue of Kodiak bear near Brown’s new Nelson Fitness Center. (from Gary Brewer)

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Less is more … or a bore?

Posted on July 5, 2016 by David Brussat

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Happy belated birthday (it was June 24) to Robert Venturi, avatar of the postmodern movement in architecture and the self-appointed rebutter-in-chief to arch-modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his infamous dictum.

In the battle of slogans, “Less is more” has beat “Less is a bore” hands down. Mies’s line is pithier, pregnant with meaning and it swept the battlefield. Venturi’s line was reactive – the sort of cocktail-party riposte that you think of moments too late, or in this case not just too late by 19 years and long after the horse has left the barn but just a shade lame.

And too bad, because “Less is more” is wrong.

“Less is more” was wrong before it became a slogan. The kind of architecture embodied by the phrase was a mistake the first time someone thought it up. We were told a machine age required a machine architecture. No plausible reason was given. All we got was an architectural metaphor for efficiency, not efficiency itself. The kind of architecture modernism replaced worked better at pleasing our eye and serving our needs. Traditional architecture developed over thousands of years, its best practices tested by trial and error and handed down by practitioners generation after generation. It failed to maintain its market share because modernism had better advertising, not because it was a better product.

The brief heyday of postmodernism was valuable to the extent that it provided a small opening for a return to genuine traditional architecture. Postmodernists won their argument against modernism but failed to follow up, offering instead a goopy amalgam of cartoon typologies and then leaving the field for the true modernism – modernism with all of its flaws exposed, its ideals abandoned, yet still leaping from peak to psychodelic peak.

Whether modernism’s dependence on oil will bring this truth to light before it brings an end to the earth’s economy and its environment remains to be seen. But the truth is and has always been there to see, and easy to see for those who will only open their eyes. Less is more, indeed. Harumph!

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Independence architecture

Posted on July 4, 2016 by David Brussat

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The classicism of the Jefferson Memorial, inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, a design beloved of Jefferson, is by John Russell Pope and was dedicated in 1943, during the Second World War. The monument’s classicism was pecked at by modernist ducks – among them William Hudnut, head of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Hudnut declared that “this monument, when completed, will embody so grotesque a presentation of Jefferson’s character as to make him, if such a thing is possible, forever ridiculous.” In spite of such claptrap, which purposely overlooked Jefferson’s role in setting classicism as the young nation’s design template, Pope’s memorial was built after FDR overrode objections by the Fine Arts Commission, which never voted to approve it.

(Thanks to Erik Bootsma for correcting an earlier version that said the design was approved by the commission.)

Pomp, which embodies what critics saw in the design’s classicism, betrays a profound but typical misunderstanding. If anything, circumstance is the key word, and classicism fits itself to a building’s purpose of representing its subject’s character and accomplishments with modesty, simplicity and elegance – an ethos that modernism cannot abide.

In the photo above, the Jefferson Memorial is observed from the National World War II Memorial. The photo below was shot moments later.

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Gaudi’s Manhattan tower

Posted on July 3, 2016 by David Brussat
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Drawings of proposed Gaudi skyscraper in Manhattan, near ground zero. (The Daily Beast)

That Gaudi had considered erecting a New York skyscraper is not widely known. William O’Connor writes of it in “Gaudi’s Lost Manhattan Tower” for the Daily Beast. O’Connor prates absurdly of Gaudi’s modernism – more than any other major architect, including Frank Lloyd Wright, he was sui generis, his fascination with ornament precluding him from the modernist canon. But the Beast’s writer goes on to introduce some interesting details about the project that might be new to many readers. So far as I know, aside from this, Gaudi neither built nor proposed work outside his native Spain. It seems, then, that even in 1908, when the tower was proposed during a visit from railroad tycoon William Gibbs McAdoo, a future presidential candidate and treasury secretary under Wilson, New York was where it was happening, skyscraperwise.

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Who owns Europe’s night?

Posted on July 1, 2016 by David Brussat

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Videographer Luke Shepard and a companion traveled through 36 cities in 21 European countries to film “Nightvision: The Brilliance and Diversity of Euoropean Architecture.” It captures buildings of both chief types, old and new, traditional and modernist They are different. The modernist buildings seemed of interest, in the end, only because they were as big as … well, as buildings, real buildings. Viewers can judge of how interesting. Below may be the best of the bottom lot. Tip of the cap to Kuriositas. Enjoy!

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Lucas, return to Light Side

Posted on June 30, 2016 by David Brussat
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Theed, capital of Naboo, painted by Jacob Charles Dietz. (deviantart.com)

George Lucas, having been rejected in efforts to build a museum with his own money first in San Francisco’s Presidio and then on the lakefront of Chicago, is back in the Paris of the West with a third proposal, but the same architect – MAD, a Japanese firm – that did him dirt in the Windy City.

Does the creator of Star Wars not learn? His plan for a classically designed Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in the Presidio unravelled when the city’s culture leaders refused to accept the Beaux Arts as a legitimate museum style in the 21st century – that’s my interpretation, which relies on what I read between the lines in 2014, including a piece in Metropolis by the normally reliable critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, John King. Here’s my post, “SF rejects free museum.”

Then Lucas went to Chicago, where land in historic Burnham Park on the coast of Lake Michigan beckoned, but he hired MAD’s Ma Yansong to design what seemed like a set of aluminum mountains along the lakefront. The public was nonplussed, a friend-of-the-park group sued, Lucas dug in his heels, but this week he pulled the plug.

Before he oopses all over the place yet again, Lucas, who is now considering Treasure Island off the coast of San Francisco (plus an L.A. site in reserve), should check to see if the Force is with him. His Star Wars saga has always seemed to house evil in places like the modernist Death Star, headquarters of Darth Vader and his Dark Side, and the good guys (or at least the victims) in places like Tatooine. Get the drift? The saga’s human refugees live in Naboo, amid the adorable classical vernacular of its capital, Theed. Is this accidental or is it a deeply intuitive recapitulation of good vs. evil? That matters less than that its lessons be heeded by Lucas, as they have apparently long been subconsciously internalized.

Learn from your creation’s own narrative, George. Return to the Light Side.

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Rendering by Urban Design Group of Dallas for museum on S.F.’s Presidio park. (Lucas)

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Rendering of MAD design proposed for Grant Park, in Chicago. (AP/MAD)

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Rendering of proposed development on Treasure Island, site of latest museum plan. (Dbox)

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Tatooine, setting for scenes throughout Star Wars saga. (starwars.wikia.com)

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