Entitling Historical Concepts

Posted on August 13, 2021 by David Brussat

Eric Piasecki’s photograph on the front cover of “Visions of Home.” (Historical Concepts)

Most architectural firms have names listing one or more partners, McKim Mead & White being a chief example familiar to classicists. In recent times some firms have chosen names seemingly designed to impress you with their creativity, such as SHoP Architects, headquartered in the Woolworth Building, of all places, or S/L/A/M (now SLAM) Collaborative, headquartered in Connecticut.

And then there is Historical Concepts, an unusual name even for a traditionally oriented Atlanta-based firm that mainly designs homes for the wealthy – often the only commissions that can be had by classical and traditional architects, because modernist architects have rigged the commission system for decades.

The other day, a book arrived whose arrival was the result of a comedy of errors entangling architect David Andreozzi (of Andreozzi Architecture, naturally) in Barrington, Rhode Island. The book’s author, Andrew Cogar, had sent it by accident to me. Since the enclosed note thanked me for something I had not done that involved the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, whose New England chapter is led by David Andreozzi, I figured the book must have been intended for that David, not this one. So I arranged to transfer it to him over pizza at his son’s new pizzeria in Providence. Apparently, David A. mentioned this to Andrew Cogar, whose graciousness resulted in the arrival of a second copy of the book, Visions of Home, at my address.

By the way, Cogar gave me a tour of Atlanta when I was there long ago as a juror for the ICAA Southeast chapter’s annual Shutze Awards, the equivalent of our chapter’s Bulfinch Awards. Maybe this ancient event triggered the delightful comedy of errors.

Since the wrapping of the first copy was too complex and ornate for me to open after I discovered the book was not meant for me, I am grateful to have received a copy of my own, which I have read with great pleasure.

I will not review the houses on display in the book, except to say they are all very lovely. Rather, I want to remark upon the title of the firm, Historical Concepts. Andrew Cogar is now head of the firm, but the book’s introduction was written by the firm’s founder, James L. Strickland, and here’s how he explained the rationale for the firm’s unusual name:

Why Historical Concepts instead of, for example, James L. Strickland Architects? Fair enough. I chose our name for two reasons. The first was that our animating idea was the creation of contemporary homes rooted in the timeless values of history, and I wanted potential clients to understand this the moment they heard our name. The second, more important reason had to do with my longstanding interest in the people with whom I work. I always believed that I was designing not just houses but a philosophy of practice … .

That says it all, because the concepts that are involved in building beauty along traditional lines require both the talent and the patience to look backward as well as forward. A firm named Historical Concepts will not be capable of functioning along those lines if its workers belong in a firm called, say, Pickup Schticks. Two years ago I wrote a post, “Romance and the style wars,” about the movie The Diary of Anne Frank, in which her romance with Peter Van Daan builds with such subtlety that it is not revealed until a gentle kiss near the film’s conclusion:

That is the traditional progression into love. It can be speeded up or even slowed down further to reflect the personalities and circumstances involved. The more or less subtle steps along the way might perhaps be compared with the succession of classical moldings that mark the transformation of a wall into a ceiling …, or, on the exterior of the house, by the diverse levels of ornament – such as (in rising order) the astragal, cymba reversa, dentils, ovolo, modillions, fascia and cyma recta – that make up the entablature of an ornate classical roof cornice.

Thus: the beauty of nature’s creativity versus the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’m of hyper-innovation that drives today’s dominant architectural concept. I am just as sure that every worker at Historical Concepts understands the difference as I am sure that it flies over that head of every egotist at Pickup Schticks.

Love and rape are not the only pair that might reflect truth: Freedom and slavery serve equally well, with Beijing’s CCTV tower, by Rem Koolhaas, leading the way, stomping on the people as cogs in a mighty machine that may be heading our way. But hey! Let’s conclude with the concept of tradition as the architecture of love and, as depicted with such beauty in Andrew Cogar’s fine book, home.

(The book was written by Andrew Cogar with Mark Krystal and Cogar’s partners at Historical Concepts. The photographs are by Eric Piasecki.)

CCTV, home of CCP propaganda in Beijing, designed by Rem Koolhaas. (NYT)

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Liverpool loses heritage status

Posted on August 8, 2021 by David Brussat

Liverpool in 1915 as troops muster before St. George’s Hall for service in World War I. (BBC)

Seventeen years after its bestowal, Liverpool has lost its status as world heritage site by an act of Unesco, the United Nations’ chief cultural agency.

Sixteen years ago, in June 2005, I attended a symposium at RISD, which had partnered with the Royal Society for the Arts to compare efforts in Providence and Liverpool to revive the two cities. At the symposium I met Arthur Mark, a mover and shaker with ties to the RSA who lives in Rhode Island. Last night I had dinner with him, not having seen him since before his 90th birthday last year. I mentioned that I’d read that Liverpool had just lost its world heritage status. I also called to Arthur’s attention my column in the Providence Journal about the symposium, “Can civic renaissance be bottled?” He reminded me that Will Alsop, the British starchitect, had criticized me, asserting that “newspaper critics” always “oppose progress.” Alsop had no idea I was in the audience, but others did, and pointed me out as evidence in favor of Alsop’s proposition and, more generally, as the skunk at their modernist garden party.

I have reprinted my column below, and remain firm in my belief that civic renaissance can be “bottled” – if civic leaders will finally understand that civic renaissance depends on preserving architectural heritage and preserving the setting of that heritage by building new buildings – of traditional styles – that people will love. Liverpool did not heed that advice, and as a result has lost its coveted global heritage status.

***

“Can civic renaissance be bottled?”
June 9, 2005
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My father studied in Liverpool for a year after he married my mother and before they had me. Beyond recalling the tedium of postwar rationing and the joy of popping over to visit the Continent, they said little to me of their stay. Still, I was very excited to learn that the Royal Society for the Arts, based since 1754 in London, and the Rhode Island School of Design were to hold a symposium comparing the birthplace of George M. Cohan (born July 3, 1878, at 536 Wickenden St.) with that of John, Paul, George and Ringo.
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The symposium was held Sunday through Tuesday, at the RISD Auditorium, in Providence. It drew from the design and planning elite hereabouts, but also from the ranks of RSA fellows around this country.

Much grist for comparison came in the form of ambitions dashed. By the turn of the last century, Liverpool and Providence had grown rich from commerce. By 1950, however, fortune had frowned so grimly upon the head of Narragansett Bay and the mouth of the Mersey that neither city could afford — as so many others, in both countries, did — to rip down their downtowns and build anew.

So for both, poverty seeded destiny. With the beauty of Providence, readers are familiar. Liverpool likewise has truly impressive architecture. Its Three Graces — the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building — were erected dockside in the robust Neo-Classical styles of the early 20th Century. Block after block of Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian buildings, such as St. George’s Hall, completed in 1854, dominate the city center. Without them, no less than in Providence, renaissance would be unimaginable.

Both revivals have their critics. As always, benefits are not equally spread. In both, the gritty residue of social and cultural inequality has itself been sold as key to the authenticity of a renaissance — a quality known on both sides of the Atlantic as edginess, or edge. “Can it be bottled?” panelists from both cities asked — rhetorically, of course, as all agreed it could not.

If not, can it at least be preserved, like the old buildings that renaissance seems to require?

At most symposia, as in life, questions outnumber answers. At this symposium, answers were officially discouraged. Some answers, however — such as “Edge cannot be bottled” — were asserted repeatedly as conclusive. So was the idea that Providence needs more modern architecture, though all seemed to agree that what it had was not very good. (I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson, Edward Larrabee Barnes and Paul Rudolf have little-noted buildings here.)

The yearning for another celebrity architect to “parachute” into town was palpable. RISD President Roger Mandle, while noting that celebrity architect Rafael Moneo is doing RISD’s museum expansion, defended the “canvas” of Providence’s historic architecture, as did Rhode Island College Prof. Mark Motte. But they seemed a tiny minority.

In fact, this reporter felt like the skunk at the garden party, and was pleased to be singled out as such after celebrity architect and panelist Will Alsop, of London, observed that newspaper critics always “oppose progress” (i.e., modern architecture). Oh? In Britain maybe they do, but not in America!

Alsop himself won the competition to design Liverpool’s Fourth Grace, to join the first three alongside the Mersey docks. Alsop’s monstrosity, if built, will elbow the heck out of the three existing Graces. Blessedly, delays assure that it won’t be up by 2008. Liverpool has been designated the European Union’s “City of Culture” for that year.

I was not surprised when a Liverpudlian panelist, Eddie Berg, pointed out that while Alsop’s design had won the official competition, it came in last in a public referendum. Of course, that was nonbinding.

The importance of a public role in directing the revival of Liverpool and Providence was another of those questions whose correct answers could be assumed. But, so far as I could tell, nobody wondered why the broad public’s clear dislike of modern architecture is always so studiously ignored.

That’s because nobody wanted to hear the answer to that question. The answer, actually, is simplicity itself: For the same reason that we preserve the old buildings that people love, new buildings should be built in styles that people will love.

Why does every renaissance city have historic architecture at its base? Because that’s what people want, and that’s where people go. Build cities as people built cities for centuries, and the questions facing most cities — of sustainability, transportation, commercialism, etc. — will not be so vexing. They were not so vexing, after all, until planning and design turned edgy after World War II.

Every city a renaissance city? Bottle that answer, you royal fellows, if you dare.

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Cleveland, fair and square

Posted on August 3, 2021 by David Brussat

Public Square, with Civil War memorial and base of Terminal Tower at left. (thisiscleveland.com)

My first visit to Cleveland revealed a city rich in history and in historical architecture, far beyond what I had expected. The downtown and beyond feature many more large, old, lovely buildings than Providence. For me and perhaps for readers of this blog, the best way describe Cleveland is by comparison with Providence. Cleveland proper is more than twice the size of Rhode Island’s capital, 381,009 to 179,883; but Providence has almost twice Cleveland’s density of population, 9,773 residents per square mile to Cleveland’s 4,901.

Terminal Tower.

Cleveland, originally called Cleaveland, was founded on the southern bank of Lake Erie in 1796 by Gen. Moses Cleaveland, who led the survey team that platted the Western Reserve claimed by colonial Connecticut. He laid out the settlement in the New England style, around what he called Public Square. Soon after the founding, Cleaveland traveled back to Connecticut, never to return. The first “a” in the name was dropped in 1831 to fit onto the masthead of the Cleveland Advertiser, a spelling that soon became official. In 1836 “open warfare nearly erupted” (in the words of Wikipedia), with neighboring Ohio City, across the Cugahoga from Cleveland. It was annexed in 1854 and is now the neighborhood of Ohio City.

I’m sure my host and oldest friend, the humorist Stevenson Hugh Mields, will forgive my spare account of Cleveland’s history. He used my visit to further acquaint himself with the city, which he normally avoids, having ditched D.C.’s madding throng two years ago for Cleveland’s western exurbs, near Oberlin and its college. He now lives on a farm. His father was my father’s oldest friend, both from Milwaukee, and they both were city planners in Washington and loved cities. Steve’s oldest friend loves cities too: Steve does not. He avoids Cleveland as best he can – because it is a city. He hates not just Washington but New York, Paris, and just about any other major conurbation. In spite of himself, however, this past week he could not hide his affection for and pride in many aspects of Cleveland.

View of downtown from Progressive Field.

After my arrival we watched the Cleveland Indians trounce the St. Louis Cardinals 7 to 2, in one inning slamming three home runs in three straight at-bats while I stood in line for dogs. The stadium sits near the banks of the Cuyahoga amid downtown, offering views of the Forest City’s skyline.

Over the next few days we visited the delightful West Side Market, in the aforementioned neighborhood of Ohio City. A neoclassical-Byzantine shed of brick, it was erected in 1912 with a clock tower and Guastavino-tiled ceiling, its giant hall chock-a-block with food stalls. We explored the Cleveland Arcade, built in 1890 and inspired by Milan’s 1877 Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. This gallery, in the Art Nouveau style, sits between two buildings of nine stories spanned by a glass ceiling midway up covering four floors of shops below – now hotel rooms – with two floors of shops on the ground floor and basement levels. This is reminiscent of the Providence Arcade (1828), the nation’s oldest (but not its first, long gone in New York and Philly) indoor mall, with a ground floor of shops topped, since 2013, by two stories of mini lofts that have now gone condo.

We also explored the Euclid Arcade (1911), a neoclassical shopping gallery just down Euclid Street from its larger, older and more famous sister. Steve and I did not realize that right next door to the Euclid was a similar facility, the Colonial Arcade (1898). I sat down for a drink to await Steve’s perusal of a nearby shop, unaware that the food court where I sat was the connection to the other arcade.

Providence has no equivalent to Cleveland’s extraordinarily beautiful Terminal Tower (1927), 52 stories high. It was the tallest building outside New York City from 1927 until 1964. In the Beaux Arts style, it closely resembles New York’s Woolworth Building (1913), by Cass Gilbert, designer of four buildings on the Oberlin campus, including the splendid Allen Memorial Art Museum, which we saw the next day. Cleveland’s Union Terminal was built under Terminal Tower in 1930. The rail station closed in 1977 after Amtrak switched to a station on the banks of Lake Erie on the site of Cleveland’s original train station, Union Depot, built 1853 and rebuilt in 1865 after a fire. Union Depot had been the largest rail terminus in the U.S. until Grand Central Terminal in NYC was built in 1913. (The original Pennsylvania Station, completed in 1910 and much bigger still, was not a terminal – end of a line – but a station for through rail traffic.) The new Cleveland station sits next to a highway running along Lake Erie. Cleveland Union Terminal was renovated by 1990 into a shopping mall.

Terminal Tower, now known, officially, by some, as the Tower City Center, faces Public Square, which harks back to the city’s founding. It boasts an elegant Civil War memorial similar to Kennedy Plaza’s Civil War memorial in Providence. Cleveland’s Public Square is also bounded by buildings in a variety of styles, old and new. Not far north of Public Square is another landscaped civic plaza, the Cleveland Mall, twice the size of Public Square, and also stricken by outbreaks of the new amidst the old. The Mall is younger than Public Square but older than – and perhaps comparable to – Waterplace Park in Providence, built in the 1990s in a style far more traditional than might be expected for its era.

The Cleveland Mall was conceived in 1903, and inspired by the temporary, neoclassical White City, centerpiece of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, in Chicago, which attracted 27 million visitors over six months. That was well over a third of the U.S. population, before air flight and motor cars. It was so popular that city fathers across the nation sought to copy it in their own cities. One such city was Providence, which centered its effort around Kennedy Plaza (then Exchange Place), but a more sustained example was Cleveland, which hired Daniel Burnham, famed for organizing the White City, to design its Cleveland Mall with an eye to the burgeoning City Beautiful Movement.

So Cleveland stacks up well to Providence, with the blessings (sorry, Steve) of size, in all of its dimensions, but Providence has some key advantages.

Cleveland’s downtown has more surviving beautiful historic buildings, most particularly the Terminal Tower, than has Providence, but Providence has a more historically intact downtown than Cleveland, with more blocks totally unsullied by modern architecture, street after street of historic buildings erected, mostly, between 1870 and 1930. Cleveland has many such buildings but there are fewer streets where the historical feel of their character is not interrupted, often quite dreadfully so, with modernist structures, whose ear to history is deliberately shut off. (Modern architecture is purposely anti-traditional.) And while the streets of downtown Cleveland are generously wide, downtown Providence’s streets are almost uniformly narrow, with a height-to-width ratio that urbanists calculate as being perfect for creating the outdoor-room feeling that is most comfortable for pedestrians. Destinations seem closer and distances shorter. Both Providence and Cleveland are fortunate to have had troubled economies in the heyday of modern architecture. Cleveland lacks the competitive plethora of stark modernist towers common to larger cities. Most of its downtown skyscrapers are relatively pleasing postmodern evocations of the prewar era of early towers in New York City.

The downside of living at a distance from a city is the need to spend more time in an automobile. Steve and I drove around a lot, to many charming small towns outside of Cleveland, but in particular to the small college town of Oberlin. The humorist is also a musician, and Oberlin’s music department is among the best in the world. As the school opens after the pandemic, and the calendar fills up again with free concerts by music faculty and students, the spirit of Steverino will take wing. He will rise with the joy of the blue heron named Harry who arose from the pond in front of his house almost every time we pulled into its dirt track driveway. Steve will not need to borrow the thrill of the city that enchants his old friend from Providence, at least not until I return.

I doff my hat (a new hat with a floppy brim that served me well at Progressive Field last Wednesday) to all who sent emails and comments urging me not to leave this or that classical highlight off of my Cleveland visit.

Cleveland Arcade, on Euclid Street; two nine-story buildings with shops under glass ceiling.

Euclid Arcade, also on Euclid Street, alongside Colonial Arcade.

View from Terminal Tower of southern part of Cleveland Mall. (Cleveland Memory Project)

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Tomorrow: On to Cleveland

Posted on July 27, 2021 by David Brussat

Downtown Cleveland as seen from the Cuyahoga River. (Yuanshuai Si/Getty)

I don’t think I’ve ever been to Cleveland. Pittsburgh rivals the Forest City in my memory as a stop on a bus trip home after, if I recall, dropping out of J-school at the University of Misery, in Columbia, Mo. But tomorrow all that will change. I will be visiting my oldest friend from D.C., Stevenson Hugh Mields, the great humorist, now a resident of Cleveland’s westerly exurbs, near Oberlin College.

Cleveland’s downtown is one of the several center cities in the United States most influenced by the City Beautiful movement. The erection of classical downtowns in the early 20th century arose from the popularity of the so-called “White City” built along the Chicago waterfront for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. I intend to sightsee that influence in Cleveland to the hilt.

One of eight Guardians of Traffic. (Wikipedia)

Soon after I arrive we will visit Progressive Field, the second retro stadium after the Orioles’ Camden Yards, in Baltimore. We will see the Indians – ahem! I mean the Guardians, named, I guess, for one of the city’s eight “Guardians of Traffic” – play the storied St. Louis Cardinals; their name may be at risk now that ornithology has been declared racist.

Steve solicited a list of things I, as a diehard classicist, might like to see. I listed the Cleveland Art Museum, the Terminal Tower, the Old Arcade, the Wade Park District, and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame (kidding).

I’m sure I’ve left many notable sites off of my list, and if anyone has any recommendations, please send a blog comment or an email to dbrussat@gmail.com.

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The vapidity of the modern

Posted on July 21, 2021 by David Brussat

Philip Johnson, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Phyllis Lambert with Seagram Building. (ArchDaily)

You know you are being targeted when your clickbait stories include video of a 2001 panel led by Charlie Rose (transcript included) discussing Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with Paul Goldberger, Phyllis Lambert (a liquor distributor’s daughter who hired Mies to design the Seagram Building in the 1950s) and Barry Bergdoll, a curator at MoMA. Yes, so even the internet is incompetent in its targeting. Here is a segment from that panel discussion that is fun because it reveals how vapid these people are. Well, no. They are intelligent people, I suppose, but they are being forced to discuss Mies, who was vapid himself, so perhaps you  can’t blame the panel for its vapidity. A better word may be incoherence. Enjoy!

15:56 Charlie Rose: Right. Right. Right.

16:00 Phyllis Lambert:  – and he said, he said, ”Yes, but it’s too mechanistic.” He said, ”We have to have our feet on the ground and our head in the clouds.”

16:04 Charlie Rose: Yeah. But can you define this philosophy – we’ve talked around it – that comes from him?

16:08 Phyllis Lambert: A philosophy?

16:10 Charlie Rose: Of – yeah. Did Mies have a philosophy? Did he have –

16:16 Phyllis Lambert: He talked freely about – I think under – it’s, it’s the internal thing. He didn’t talk about it much.

16:21 Charlie Rose: Right.

16:24 Phyllis Lambert: When he describes his buildings, it’s always fairly much a description of how they, what the pieces are. And in the office in Chicago – I mean, all of this – I was speaking to Gene Summers, who was his right-hand man for 17 years. And I said, ”Mies – did Mies ever talk about,” you know, ”his philosophical intent?” And he said no. He was interested in making things clear. He was interested in structural architecture.

16:45 Charlie Rose: Yeah. Clarity.

16:48 Phyllis Lambert: So that there was these two – yes. Absolutely. (crosstalk) There are these two levels that he was – he was on, you know, and, and—

16:56 Paul Goldberger: But they had qualities that he never talked about, but he could convey in the work, that nobody else could. And there’s a serenity to a Mies building that is not present in most sort of imitation Mies buildings, most—

17:10 Charlie Rose: But he wouldn’t talk about it.

17:13 Paul Goldberger: He wouldn’t talk about it, particularly.

17:17 Charlie Rose: He wouldn’t talk about the achievement of—

17:18 Paul Goldberger: Although, although I think when Phyllis—

17:20 Charlie Rose: —Serenity.

17:21 Paul Goldberger:  —talked about his dislike of mechanistic things, he was sort of – that was as far as he could go, to say that. It’s very interesting that the images you showed at the beginning [of the panel] all had figures in them, which is right because, in fact, people feel right inside a Miesian space. They don’t feel that it excludes them the way so many modern spaces do. There’s something about the way the human figure is in that space that feels as perfect as the presence of the human figure in any kind of architecture throughout history. It is as natural and right.

17:48 Barry Bergdoll: Well, I think there’s a connection there. I think the big – if one could say I want to put my figure on a Miesian philosophy, it is the hard one where he takes on this – there’s a kind of crisis of confidence in this issue of the technological, but it doesn’t lead to a retreat from the technological because he emphatically says this, the 20th century, is the moment of a technological transformation of society. It cannot be denied. It cannot be undone. But we need to both struggle with it, transform it and transcend it. And so there’s a kind of – there’s a realism in the sense of wanting to deal with what he will over and over again call the facts of the epic, with this desire towards spirituality, towards a restoration of something that might be either lost or endangered but without nostalgia. And I think that that is one of the reasons why he suddenly seems to be of such contemporary relevance in—

18:40 Charlie Rose: Express that again because I want to make sure I understand.

Well, that’s as good an end point as we are likely to get in this rambling conversation about Mies. But let’s be clear on the need to exclude nostalgia in referring to the restoration of something that might be either lost or endangered.

The passage just concluded was preceded by conversation equally vapid, and followed by the same. It’s hard to criticize because it’s hard to find any assertion within all the goo that one can grab onto, examine and assess. It’s the same thing that enables the Pritzker prize and its winners to float in a cloud of rhetorical gauze – how, one can only wonder, did the jury decide that this whirly-gig of a building was superior to that loopy-doopy building? If you had locked Rose, Goldberger, Lambert and Bergdoll in a room and forced them to discuss the work of McKim, Mead & White without using the word “nostalgia,” would the level of incoherence be identical? I imagine we will never know for sure.

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Steuteville’s public square

Posted on July 15, 2021 by David Brussat

The old New Urbanism: Kentlands, Md. (emrisse.com)

I have lost count of the number of times I’ve quoted Rob Steuteville’s writing for the Congress of the New Urbanism. The latest example is my recent post on “Guatemala’s peaceful Cayalá.” In fact, I must admit my topics on N.U. have declined in recent years as I’ve tracked what seems to be its decreasing interest in the importance of traditional architecture for new city, town and infill planning. The CNU charter’s pledge of “agnosticism” toward traditional and modernist styles got my goat a long time ago, and still has me in its grip.

At first I thought that was just what might now be called a sort of “woke equity,” given that CNU was only on the map because of its trad-styled projects, whose popularity was the envy, then, of landscape urbanists such as Harvard’s Charles Waldheim, who seem to favor a sort of natural, streetless urbanism. In a piece on a debate between Waldheim and CNU founder Andrés Duany, Steuteville cites the professor’s regret at CNU’s “hegemony” in planning circles. Waldheim then criticizes New Urbanism’s “retro design tendencies,” in response to which, according to Steuteville, Duany agreed that:

“[O]ur greatest deficiency is first-rate design.” He added that Waldheim “was astonishingly informed” about New Urbanism’s vulnerability on this front. Landscape Urbanism is self-indulgent at times, but it is “ almost universally better designed and better presented.”

In New Urbanism, there’s very little hostility to modernism except that it displeases the market and therefore modernism is generally avoided, Duany added. Devotees of classical and traditional architecture, who gravitate towards New Urbanism, may disagree with Duany on this point.

That was a long time ago, but Duany’s apparent snuggling up to Waldheim was alarming. Steuteville wrote about this debate for the New Urban Network in 2014. I certainly hope devotees of classical and traditional architecture disagree with Duany that there is “little” hostility to modernism in CNU. There should be a lot, and it ought to be more than just a matter of what displeases the market.

In recent years my former role as a devotee of new urbanism has dissipated as its annual congresses have given more and more attention and awards to the mostly rare (I still hope) examples of modernist N.U. projects. After years of turning the other cheek to modernist sniggering at N.U.’s “retro design tendencies,” CNU seemed to be crawling into bed with the devil! In 2014, after attending the latest congress, architect David Rau tweeted to traditionalist colleagues that “CNU is burning!”: “It was upsetting to discover at CNU in Buffalo that New Urbanism has been divorced from traditional architecture. Kaput, the marriage is over.”

In response to Rau’s cri de coeur, I wrote “Modernism invades the New Urbanism“: The post included this passage:

Modernists now appear to realize that their strategy of sneering at the New Urbanism has failed. They now seek to charm CNU leadership away from the traditional signifiers that the public recognizes as New Urbanism, under cover of an appeal to young Millennials starting careers in planning and architecture. Apparently, it is working.

Just a bit of history that some folks might have forgotten. Ever since, whenever I happen to read about the activities of the CNU and the new urbanists, they seem to have lapped themselves in their effort to place distance between the CNU and architecture that people love, and which made people love the new urbanism. Now it’s all about getting with the program on global warming, or developing new methodologies for implementing increasingly abstruse ideas of urbanism, gears within gears rather than old tried-and-truisms about cities, streets and beauty. Anyway, I don’t hear much about the CNU lately, let alone much criticism from the modernists. Hmm.

In 2015, Steuteville replied to my post “New Urbanism’s easy choice,” and his comment was followed up by an array of comments from traditionalists agreeing or disagreeing with my post. The two photographs juxtaposed in that post – the “old new urbanism” on top and the “new new urbanism” on the bottom – pose a stark but easy choice, it seems to me. The same two shots sit at the top and at the bottom of this post. Steuteville raises some of the complexities involved in why we supposedly cannot have the beauty we deserve, but I still think the CNU has become tangled, or lost, in many of those complexities. It was once a bright shining beacon of hope for Americans. Today, well …

Today, I would dearly love to get back on the bandwagon. I hope I am wrong about CNU having strayed from the traditional straight and narrow, and that Rob and Andrés will administer me a good spanking for my apostasy.

While I’m waiting, allow me to join the long line of comments by email praising the work of Rob Steuteville, whose writing remains enlightening even where we disagree – and, frankly, I don’t think we disagree on much. Keep up the good work, Rob! (You will receive this post by email.)

The new New Urbanism? Paseo Verde, in Philadelphia. (phila.gov)

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History wins on Williams St.

Posted on July 10, 2021 by David Brussat

Cottage with latest proposed addition (top); cottage with modernist addition (bottom). (PHDC)

For a year or more the vultures circled over an old cottage between Williams and John streets just off of historic Benefit Street. A developer’s plan to add an ultra-modernist addition to a historic cottage at 59 Williams, and then to plop a pair of junkster modernist “town homes” behind the cottage, facing John, at the expense of a woods that had survived since the 19th century, placed the historic character of College Hill and Fox Point at dire risk. Had it proceeded, the development would have proved an irresistible precedent for even worse.

I now learn that the developer has called off his dogs. The neighborhood is safe, or as safe as any place can be in a city whose leadership prefers to eat the seed corn of its history. Two proposed modernist Brown University dorms still threaten to wreck a block on Brook Street between Power and Charlesfield streets nearby. Brown has offered to review the design of the two dorms, but it may take a sterner rattling of Brown’s cage to force the school’s leadership to see reason.

A correspondent sent me word that the plot of land with the woods on it was suddenly for sale for $1 million. Digging down further into the Zillow posting, I discovered that the Williams Street cottage had sold on June 2 for $580,000; the buyer is now seeking to flip it for $1.6 million. That suggests that the renovations recently approved by the city will go forward. But a deep source that I contacted to double-check this news told me that the developer had altogether abandoned the condo townhouse part of the project.

The cottage renovations will be historic in style, and quite easy on the eye. That is because the neighborhood maintained a constant opposition to the modernist design proposed by architect Friedrich St. Florian (with its patently clichéd awkwardly raking roof). The Providence Historic District Commission, which oversees plans for the city’s historic districts, delayed deciding on the renovations for three sessions. This probably caused the developer to ditch the modernism and go with a much more historically sensitive design, no doubt to St. Florian’s dismay. Apparently, at some point, the developer decided to ditch the whole project, including the condos, which was no doubt running far higher in costs than he expected (largely due to St. Florian’s goading the opposition’s tenacity).

There are lessons to be learned here. Members of the PHDC know what their jobs are, but are willing to stray in order to curry favor with wealthy developers and fashionable designers like St. Florian. They must be pressured to permit only those changes that will fit into a district’s historic character – using definitions of aesthetics that would feel proper in the eyes of an average resident of the district, not the kooky fake notions dreamed up by the professional designer class, who are poorly educated in all matters of design, and inflict their folly on citizens who have invested deeply in historical architecture – because citizens trust officials to do their jobs properly. The words “historic preservation” in the title of their organization must be taken more seriously.

In this process of, um, reminding officials of their duty, the neighbors almost managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by bowing and scraping to a designer, St. Florian, who seems to have forgotten why he is celebrated around here. He designed one of the few traditional shopping malls in the United States, which is lovely in spite of its design flaws. And he designed a classical World War II memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., at a time when most designers were testing the patience of American citizens by designing goofy modernist memorials and museums in that sacred precinct.

On the same wavelength, some of the opponents did not realize how counter-productive it was to assert that they did not oppose modern architecture – except in their neighborhood. Such a hypocritical NIMBY contradiction enabled the developer (and St. Florian) to persuade themselves that the opposition was not serious and that if they could hold on long enough, they could make a lot of money by wrecking a beautiful neighborhood.

St. Florian probably did not make things any easier for his boss by using the time between commission sessions to make his designs for the cottage addition and the townhouses more, not less, ridiculous. His opponents can thank the great architect for throwing his doubt of their resolve back in their faces.

It is impossible to know what straw of opposition, or which commission delay, will break a developer’s back and force him to throw in the towel. The neighbors on Williams and John street can celebrate the fact that they did indeed manage to trip over the last straw.

It is possible that I am reading these Zillow tea leaves wrong and that the project will continue, possibly with an infusion of new cash, or with a new developer. Or that I should have done more digging to confirm my information. Neighbors must remain vigilant along Williams and John even as they gird their loins to fight Brown on Brook. However, if they are willing to learn the lessons of their victory – be even clearer that your opposition is to anti-historical design – they will show the next set of brutalizers that they are a force to be reckoned with.

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Greenberg’s independence

Posted on July 6, 2021 by David Brussat

The epitome of classical Washington (Accounting Today)

In the temporal orbit of Independence Day, we have seen the passing of classicist Thomas Gordon Smith and the trashing of all the values he respected and that we celebrate on the Fourth of July. Leaving aside the latter, I recently happened upon an interview with classicist Allan Greenberg that voices several themes that both would, I believe, have held in common.

Both men were, you might say, radical classicists in that their designs were often less sedate and more colorful than what is conventional or even natural in the classical language. That commonality suggests their independence of dogma (even of beautiful dogma). I hope readers will take in the interview of Greenberg in its entirety. My guess is that Smith’s views would be similar, if less vociferously expressed, for Smith was more gentle and unassuming than Greenberg, who at 83 is a native of South Africa. He obtained U.S. citizenship in 1973.

Here are a few quotes from the interview, starting where I think Smith and any classicist would immediately concur. To begin with, his clear expression of why classicism is relevant and comprehensible in the modern world:

Classicism is the most comprehensive architectural language that human beings have yet developed. I maintain that Classical architecture is still the most potent, the most appropriate, and the most noble language to express the relationship of the individual to the community in a republican democracy. Classical architecture’s fundamental subject is the connection between the individual human being and the community – between citizen and government. It’s no accident that Classical architecture’s birth coincided with the birth of the ideal of democratic government in Athens nearly 3,000 years ago.

Granted, in some circles democracy is now considered a racist den of inequity. But let’s leave that aside for another day. Here is Greenberg’s concise description of how classicism relates to the human form:

A Classical building uses the human figure as the crucial measure of all things. The ancient Greeks used columns and statues of people interchangeably. Columns typically have capitals, like human heads, forming their tops, and they have bases corresponding to feet. The function of the ankle – to transmit the body’s weight through the feet to the ground – is performed architecturally by plinths and base moldings. To strengthen the anthropomorphic quality, the upper two thirds of the column shafts have a slight taper, which creates a widened base, like a person with his feet spread solidly apart for balance and stability. This taper – the term for it is entasis – infuses the column with vitality. Similarly, the three-part division of the human body into legs, torso, and head is paralleled by a Classical building’s plinth, walls and columns, and roofs – in other words, base, middle, and top. …

Tradition is a source book. For a classical architect, the past is a series of case studies, which can teach you different lessons about formal manipulation, about construction, about social, political, and other urbanistic questions – about how these challenges were resolved in the past. The past is not dead. It is active and there for you to study. It is relevant.

An important truth is that modern architecture is incapable of providing a coherent source book for architects, and worse, it treats the past as dead.

The following exchange, part of a 1996 essay by Greenberg refashioned  by Martin Cothran into the form of this interview in 1997 for The American Experiment, is interesting in light of recent events:

TAE: What’s needed for Classicism to really flower again?

Mr. Greenberg: What it needs is a president of the United States who knows about and is interested in architecture. I don’t want to exaggerate this, but the welfare of architecture in the U.S. has, to a large extent, reflected the interest of a great president. Washington designed Mount Vernon and was very interested in architecture. Jefferson was maybe our greatest architect ever. Madison was interested in architecture. For these people, the architecture of Washington, D.C., and the Capitol, and the public buildings was very important. Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt were very interested. So were Coolidge, and Hoover, which is how the Federal Triangle came into being. I think a president who is interested in architecture could make a big difference. …

Before classicism can again occupy a central place in our lives, a monstrous libel must first be undone. Throughout much of the twentieth century, influential segments of the art world have accused classicism of opposing freedom – an allegation that continues to unjustly undermine classicism’s influence.

I will conclude with the following quotes. Greenberg expands at length on the injustice of the current (if thankfully not widespread) notion that classical architecture is fascistic:

A commonplace in the aesthetic education of my generation was the easy dismissal of contemporary classicist architecture as “fascist.” Monumentality, symmetry, mass; the Classical vocabulary of column, arch, dome, and architrave; the use of dressed stone; the sculpted figure – these were, especially in combination, the signals for scoffing. If the offending architecture were safely old, it would be forgiven, but if built [since World War II] it would be linked to Hitler and Mussolini.

The association of classicism with fascism and Nazism extended beyond architecture to Classical painting, music, verse, sculpture, theater, and dance. Even today poets who write in strict metrical form, painters who honor the ideals of harmony, firmness, and utility, actors and directors who tell a coherent story and provoke an audience’s identification with sympathetic characters can be accused of crypto-fascist tendencies by avant-garde critics.

Hitler and Mussolini are claimed to be artistic conservatives who used the vocabulary of classicism, especially in architecture, to express their political ideology. Since the fascists rejected modernist art and persecuted those who practiced it, the logical conclusion was that artistic modernism stood for freedom of human expression, while traditional art meant the suppression of creative impulses and the destruction of personal liberty. Or so went the accusation. …

Certainly Hitler encouraged Albert Speer to create a new Classical architecture for the Third Reich. Mussolini, too, favored classicizing art and architecture. But as Leon Krier argues in his essay “An Architecture of Desire,” Hitler’s choice of style may have contradicted his revolution’s spirit. The appropriate expression for an efficient totalitarian order, presided over by a planning bureaucracy, and predicated on reducing the individual to a cog in the machine, would surely have been Bauhaus or International Style. The fact that Hitler and his lieutenants preferred Classical art and architecture for themselves is no more significant than the fact that they preferred Cuban cigars and French wine: Classical art was the best quality art available. …

By contrast, the frequently harsh innovations of modernist art, which reject the mysterious practices of tradition, suggest that modernism is in fact the appropriate expression of the totalitarian state.

I have long asserted that a primary purpose of modern architecture is to mold and prepare the human psyche to be a cog in the machine, not just of industry but of politics, culture, ideology and broader society.

Amid architecture’s dark hours, it is pleasing to have Allan Greenberg on my side, which perhaps only goes to show how unspectacular is the insight that classicism and modernism are at the opposite ends of the political spectrum. I hasten to add that architecture itself is apolitical; liberals and conservatives alike may partake of its advantages. It may be a relief, as well, that most modernist architects have little if any familiarity with radical aesthetic theories; still, simply by designing buildings as they learned to do as students, they carry forth, without realizing it, the regrettable doctrines of Corbusier and his acolytes.

[The following italicized matter introduces the interview discussed herein: “This version of the interview is adapted from an essay originally published in the Fall 1996 issue of American Arts Quarterly and was published in the March/April 1997 issue of The American Enterprise. It is published here with the kind permission of the American Enterprise Institute.” Martin Cothran, who adapted the interview from the essay, is a tutor at online Memoria College.]

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Kristen Richards, R.I.P.

Posted on July 2, 2021 by David Brussat

Kristen Richards smiles while having drink with me at Pub Connolly’s. (Photo by author)

Just a week after losing Thomas Gordon Smith, the pathfinding classicist at Notre Dame, the world of architecture mourns the passage of Kristen Richards, the great impresario of architectural news and opinion, who passed away yesterday at age 69, a tragic victim of demon cancer.

Richards had for two decades published a website compiling newspaper and magazine articles on architecture, landscape design and urbanism, in English, from publications around the world. ArchNewsNow (ANN) went out three days a week, with a couple dozen or more articles each day, sent free to some 15,000 subscribers from every corner of the globe. What’s the latest in design? Which starchitect is up? Which starchitect is down? Even headier stuff than all that. Today, Richards would have had her subscribers mainlining the collapse in Surfside. No writer on architecture could afford to be without her dispatches.

Richards founded ANN with the assistance of her husband, the computer wizard George Yates. Subscriptions to ANN were free, but I had no idea she undertook this herculean task voluntarily, with few ways to monetize her work. Richards’s career before starting ANN in 2002 included founding an off-off Broadway theater, acting, founding an art gallery, publicity, editing (until the end, she edited Oculus, the magazine of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects), and, early on, modeling – she spent three years in Greece in the late ’70s and became a Greek version of the Breck Girl – a poster, which I failed to locate, was published with her obituary in the New York Times.

In his tribute to Richards in today’s Architectural Record, Fred A. Bernstein describes her workday, rising early in the morning to start hoovering material (using software developed by Yates) from publications in 20 countries:

She read every article, decided which ones to bring to her readers’ attention, and then organized them into a daily dispatch, complete with summaries written with lightning speed.

I cannot imagine reading, in a single 24-hour day, the entire oeuvre of a typical ANN, let alone writing not one but two summaries – one short, the other of some depth – knitting together quotes from each article. Bernstein says she wrote “with lightning speed.” That must be the understatement of the week. Trust me, I was in my youth a dictationist for the Associated Press. “Give me dictation,” they’d cry at AP-WX when a reporter called in from the field. But I couldn’t’ve transcribed their stories as fast as Richards summarized the contents of her dispatches. No, Kristen Richards thought with lightning speed.

I think she summarized my weekly Providence Journal columns and, after 2014, my Architecture Here and There blog posts with a wry humor designed (or so it seemed to me) to cause the bulk of ANN subscribers to roll their eyes. Naturally, most ANN content reflected the thinking of the vast architectural establishment, touting the latest works of the global elite of celebrated modernists from Adjaye to Zaha. I can’t stand them and so I’m sure Richards must have felt pressure – not excluding pressure from her own internal editor – to “cancel” my occasional appearances in her dispatches. And she never hesitated to let me know when she thought something I’d written went over the top. Often she even warned me in advance of articles she thought might, um, tickle my fancy.

My wife Victoria and I met Kristen in 2014 on a visit to the Big Apple. She and I had drinks on the sunny roof garden of a Midtown pub. By then, she had been publishing my newspaper columns and then my blog posts for years, and we’d maintained a frequent email back-and-forth during which she often rebuffed, with a gentle digital smirk, my efforts to get her to run my latest defenestration of some modernist ne’er-do-well.

But sometimes she ran them, and often without prompting from me. For this reason, I think I have insight into Richards’s character as an editor that most other writers she favored cannot possibly have. She was open-minded, yes, and diligent, but she was also courageous. No doubt many of my pieces ended up on her cutting-room floor. Still, while it might indeed be self-serving to say so, it must’ve taken considerable bravery to run some of my pieces.

Few editors today would bother to take the risk, and many no doubt would relish the ability to deny me a forum to spout my classical disdain for the modernist pish-posh. But Kristen Richards was a hero and a paragon in my eyes. Her shoes are probably too big to fill – but I truly hope someone out there will try to keep Kristen’s legacy alive and the indispensable ArchNewsNow going. May she rest – at long last – in peace.

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Thos. Gordon Smith, R.I.P.

Posted on July 1, 2021 by David Brussat

Bond Hall, 1917, UND School of Architecture, 1964-2019. T.G. Smith led 1995 renovation. (Wikipedia)

Classical architect Thomas Gordon Smith died peacefully in his sleep near the South Bend, Ind., campus of the University of Notre Dame, age 73. His many admirers have adorned pages with encomiums to his commitment to classical architecture, to its many centuries of beauty on into a more graceful future, and to generations of students who are now spreading his word through their buildings in, so far as I can tell, every corner of the world.

Thomas Gordon Smith (John Hudson Thomas Journal; photo by Rodney Mims Cook)

Smith was educated at Berkeley during the heyday of postmodernism, studying under Charles Moore, then won a Rome Prize fellowship, which he concluded with his contribution of a façade in the 1980 Venice Biennale’s Strada Novissima, a hallway of “ironic” cartoon façades representing the fad of the moment in architecture. This experience turned Smith’s mind toward the rigorous classicism that was a refugee from the postmodernist movement. By the end of his sojourn in Rome, Smith had, as widely noted in his obituaries, “become fully committed” to classicism of ancient Greece and Rome. However, in a 1982 retrospective of the biennale, critic Paul Goldberger had this to say:

We can see instantly, for example, how the talented Allan Greenberg is in his own way as much a dogmatist as any of the modernist theorists whose work he seeks to supplant. Thomas Gordon Smith, younger than Mr. Greenberg, comes off as a kind of naive or folk classicist; his facade has none of the sternness of Mr. Greenberg’s pure pristine white classical composition, but is instead a rather zestful, splashy and slightly vulgar parade of images, classicism filtered through the lens of California.

Smith’s facade at 1980 Biennale. (Metalocus)

It’s relatively clear why Smith would want to distance himself from all of this.

After Rome, Smith opened his own practice, taught architecture at several universities, and by decade’s end became a professor at, then chairman of, the University of Notre Dame’s department of architecture, whose separation from its engineering school he led, in 1989-90, shifting it from a conventional modernist approach to a novel classical approach. By 1995, the New York Times had described the young school as “the Athens of the new movement.”

One of his early students at Notre Dame, the classicist and educator Christine Huckins Franck, described Smith’s impact on architecture:

A great light has gone out in the world with the passing of Thomas Gordon Smith. He created Notre Dame’s classical architecture program and will forever be the intellectual spirit and driving force of the contemporary classical renaissance.

Today, Notre Dame’s architecture school bestrides the world like a colossus. Some 1,200 classicists formed at Notre Dame have expanded the number of classically oriented architecture firms from a mere handful to hundreds around the world today. It is widely asserted that Notre Dame graduates are far more likely to secure jobs as designers than graduates of the typical modernist academic program. Mark Foster Gage, ’97, writes of the impact of Smith’s leadership:

[H]e’s the person who single-handedly turned Notre Dame into a classical architecture program, and they’ve been pumping graduates into the world with these highly unusual but very sought-after skills for three decades.

In 2006, Smith was nominated by George W. Bush to be chief architect of the General Services Administration, which is in charge of designing the vast federal portfolio of architecture. It is testimony to Smith’s influence that the entire modernist establishment rose in horror at the prospect, and managed to block his appointment. The brouhaha may have served as a dry run for the more recent effort against Donald Trump’s executive order to promote classicism in federal architecture – in a manner not altogether dissimilar to Smith’s transformation of architectural education at Notre Dame.

Indeed, without that transformation it would be difficult to imagine a president daring to turn federal building design away from modernist styles. In fact, the transformation itself ensures that the classical revival is strong enough to absorb the defeat of the Trump initiative and continue in the fight against modern architecture, which remains dominant in the profession.

As Henry Kissinger said, “Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.” No sir! Not during the regime change in the School of Architecture at Notre Dame. It would be interesting to have been a fly on the wall in the room where the famously modest and unassuming Smith announced to his modernist faculty that he was changing to a classical curriculum.

Architect Milton Grenfell sheds some light on the dynamics:

[Smith] coming to ND plopped him down into a nest of Modernists. He only got the job because the school was about to fold, and in desperation someone recommended TGS, with his respectable credentials. He was young, bright, published, and his designs edgy – though not entirely in the direction they perhaps wanted.
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But it was the tail end of the postmodern era, and tossing a few columns around was okay, and even transgressive in its own way. I’m not sure anyone without the charm and graciousness of TGS could have survived the academic modernist snake pit.  But he did, and each year, he hired a few more traditionalists, until most of the mods retired. It was his graciousness –  and intellect – that enabled him to survive, and flourish.
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Fortunately, Traditional Building magazine published an interview by Gordon Bock of Smith, and his wife Marika of 50 years, as he retired from his Notre Dame professorship in 2016 (he retired from his deanship in 1998). Otherwise, we might not be able to quote Smith himself on this aspect of his many accomplishments. Bock quotes Smith as follows:
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[T]he conversion to classical [writes Bock] did not meet with instant or unanimous approval. “It’s a five-year program, and students at the upper level just weren’t interested at all,” says Smith, so they kept the program as is for those with only two or three more years to finish. “It was with new people – some of whom were shocked, but others who were responsive – where we began to build up the classical program.”

Bock makes the vital point that not only education and practice in the profession were powerfully influenced by the emergence of a very strong voice for classical design, but potential clients, and indeed all of us as daily observers of the built environment, were suddenly permitted to understand that the beauty of the past was not irretrievably lost. “They’re learning that ‘[t]here’s something out there that we like, and now we can have it done.’”

Today few people understand how traditional architectural practice had by the 1960s come so close to eradication by the modernist architectural establishment. As Marika Smith puts it, in describing some of the more open-minded professors who influenced him at Berkeley:

“His professors weren’t necessarily enthused about some of the ideas he was developing, but it was a much more open school; they didn’t see classicism as something archaic.” Or as Smith puts it, “Even if not interested, some were at least able to avoid the idea that ‘It’s over and you can’t do this anymore.’”

Nevertheless, adds Smith: “One professor asked, ‘What is it you want to do—applied archeology?’”

That attitude still prevails among the architectural establishment today. But public attitudes toward style have maintained a healthy skepticism toward modernism and a strong preference for the classical and traditional throughout the century during which modern architecture emerged in Europe and ousted tradition from its eminence here in the United States and around the world. The amazing thing is not so much that Smith became a classicist in spite of this, but that, amid the clear failure of modernism, the huge preponderance of architects, theorists and educators did not.

Thomas Gordon Smith’s kindness and gentle erudition is characteristic of his personality because classicism itself is kind and gentle. It is a conundrum that a man of such personal modesty should preside over such profound change. All who knew him – and all who did not know him – owe him deep gratitude for his role in reviving a lovely architecture for the world. May he rest in peace.

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