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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Max building fail in Miami

Posted on June 25, 2021 by David Brussat

Collapsed sections of Champlain Towers in Florida. (NYT/Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse)

Aside from expressing sorrow and dismay, it is too early to say anything definitive about the beachfront building collapse in Surfside, Fla., north of Miami. The 12-story Champlain Towers condominiums opened in 1981 with 136 apartments. About half of the units were damaged or destroyed. Of the residents, as of Friday evening, four are confirmed dead, 37 have been rescued, 120 have been accounted for, and 159 are still missing, up from 99 yesterday. While many residents were apparently absent at 1:30 a.m. or so Thursday when it suddenly began to pancake, the death count is considered sure to rise sharply.

It is vital to learn the exact cause of this avoidable tragedy.

Most buildings that collapse in whole or in part do so during construction or during or after a hurricane or an earthquake. More than one-half of Champlain Towers collapsed early Thursday morning for no apparent reason. The building had passed inspections very recently as part of Florida’s mandated 40-year safety assessment, but rumors have emerged that 8777 Collins Ave. had been sinking at a rate of one or two millimeters per year, about the same rate as the Leaning Tower of Pisa until it was stopped in the 1990s.

The mind shrinks from contemplating what it must have been like to be inside the building as it began to topple. Most victims probably died instantly in their sleep, perhaps groggily aware for an instant or two of some noise and shaking, as if still in a dream state. Certainly few of those who did not escape survived long enough to guess what was happening. This may be of some comfort to survivors of loved ones now gone.

Several lucky survivors or witnesses have told reporters that “this does not happen in America.” Truly? The mind reels. And yet I can think of no equivalent to Thursday’s disaster. The worst collapse in Florida history, until now, was the five-story Harbour Cay, also a condominium building, which was near the end of construction when it gave way, killing 11 and injuring 23. Coincidentally, this tragedy occurred in 1981, the same year the Champlain Towers was completed.

Across the street from Champlain Towers is Eighty-Seven Park, an 18-story, 68-unit condo building designed by starchitect Renzo Piano, which opened last year. If nearby land was squishy, nearby construction might have aggravated the condition. According to an article on the collapse in The Conversation:

There was also construction work ongoing nearby, and investigators will need to consider whether this could have disturbed the foundations. This nearby construction work could have created ground movement under nearby buildings due to vibrations or deep excavations work.

Obviously no building falls down for no reason, and it’s far too early to assign blame. It is unfair to point a finger at the modernist design of the Champlain Towers, but it is entirely appropriate to wonder whether the differences between modernist and traditional architecture – or, if you prefer, differences between design and engineering practices past and present – might have played a role.

Buildings once were held up by load-bearing masonry walls. Materials were laid on thick to err on the side of caution. Then came structural steel upon which curtain wall was hung, after which the sheer solidity of construction grew more tenuous. Late in this span of time, reliance was placed on computer systems able to pinpoint the stress a structure could sustain – or so it was supposed.

Better able, to be sure, but as engineers relied more and more on computations of exactitude in the performance of materials under stress, the savings involved in attaining such precision became difficult to resist. Modernist architects ever eager to demonstrate their contempt for natural principles such as gravity put ever more pressure on engineers already weary of their usual helping of the sloppy seconds of architecture.

Architects Journal looks at potential causes of the collapse and offers a diagram (below) tracing the order in which different sections of the building collapsed.

Has modern engineering in the service of modern architecture, and in particular modernist skyscrapers, begun to cut things a little too fine? If you live in one of those supertall towers that increasingly mar the skyline in New York City and elsewhere, you might have given some thought to that possibility. This question, however it is phrased, must not be dodged or neglected as the fate of the doomed Champlain Towers is reviewed.

Diagram of apparent order in which building collapsed. (Architects Journal)

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The architecture of ballet

Posted on June 20, 2021 by David Brussat

Ballerina drags world’s problems into ballet. (H. James Hoff)

On Father’s Day we took in “Emergence,” a maskless program by Festival Ballet Providence celebrating the ongoing state of unlockingdown in which American society, at long last, finds itself. It was an excellent show. To my mind, the spare setting in the FBP parking lot beneath a beautiful azure sky did not diminish the performance of four pieces, two of modern dance and then two of traditional ballet. But the setting did recall an essay I had finished earlier in the day by Robertson Davies, the Canadian novelist and jack of all literary trades.

“How to Design a Haunted House” was actually a lecture, or speech, delivered in 1960 to the Ontario Association of Architects, whom he twits for (among other things) the decline of theater architecture. He writes:

Let us begin with the Drama. You people have just about killed it because of the revolution you have brought about in  theatre design. There was a happy day when we had wonderful playhouses, with terrible scenery: now you have given us terrible playhouses with wonderful scenery. … [Regarding the new theaters], they were not temples. … Maybe they had Stereo-Structural Sensualism; there seemed to be an awful lot of naked steel showing in some of them. I am so old-fashioned that it still makes me ashamed when I can see what holds a building up. It is honest, I know, but where is its charm? Such painfully honest architecture might perhaps be called the New Immodesty.

Back to the Festival Ballet’s “Emergence.”  Much as it would fit into my usual narrative, I cannot say that the difference between the first two dances and the last two dances was in the degree of ornament. The dancers were to a last man and woman beautiful in face and physique, and their movements were evocative of— of what? The modernist dances featured purposely stiff, often machine-like choreography, with abrupt movements suggesting displeasure via a concavity or angularity of form in the plasticity of bodily shape, often with blank looks and even frowns on the faces of the dancers. Whatever the meaning imparted by these two pieces, they seemed to repudiate the beauty of the dancers themselves.

The classical dances were, as one would expect, lovely, smooth and elegant. The choreography and the movement of the dancers’ bodies, limbs and faces seemed to exalt their physical and facial beauty. The very expressions on their faces danced just as surely as the movement of their bodies and limbs. For the first time that evening, smiles could be seen on the faces of the dancers. Their movements told a story much more legible than the stories told by the modernist dances, which challenged viewers to construct their own interpretation of the meaning of the piece. Apparently, these interpretations aimed to fill viewers’ minds with the angst of our era.

Obviously, the modernist dances were intended to make the audience think – otherwise there would be no point to them. Neither the choreography nor the dancers’ movements were beautiful, nor were the ideas they seemed to convey. The traditional dances were intended, on the other hand, to cradle the minds of the audience in feelings that had characterized ballet from time immemorial – along with music that accompanied them. The aim of the traditional dances was to give pleasure. The audience knew what to expect of the traditional pieces, especially the romantic pas de deux set to Chopin, and had little idea what to make of the modernist pieces. I am sure that to do the excruciating work of classical ballet well is a much more difficult artistic feat for the dancers.

So in the end, the performance as a whole did end up fulfilling my usual narrative. The difference between classical and modern ballet does reflect the differences between classical and modern architecture. It is easier for an architect to design a modernist building because it need not conform to practices and principles that have evolved over centuries to create beauty – a goal that most modernist architects have removed from their repertoire, so difficult is it to achieve with the tools in the modernist toolbox. Dare I suggest that modern ballet risks accomplishing the same achievement?

A university is likely to receive more donations from alumni if the beauty of the school’s campus grows in the lifelong memories of its graduates. So, likewise, a ballet company will probably win more patrons and donors if its programs favor beauty and tradition over intellect, novelty and their abstractions. In the program guide for “Emergence,” the company director, Kathleen Breen Combes, writes:

These performances represent the wide range and scale of what Festival Ballet Providence has to offer, from delightful and powerful stories, to bold, new works reflective of today’s artistic voices.

Truly. And I am glad that the company has dancers who can dance both styles of ballet. To like one style does not require audiences to dislike the other. But the Festival Ballet’s future compels its directors to approach programming decisions without indulging in fuzzy math or wishful thinking.

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Bad language/bad buildings

Posted on June 14, 2021 by David Brussat

“Stair Falling” (2010). Performance artist Kira O’Reilly in Ljubljana. (Nada Zgank/Kira O’Reilly)

There is a difference between language and architecture. Language, to riff off the saying attributed to Talleyrand, aims to disguise the absence of thought; whereas architecture aims to express the thoughtlessness of fatuous design.

The critic Theodore Dalrymple, a retired British prison psychiatrist, recently published an excellent essay, “The Degeneration of Public Administration,” in City Journal, about the decline of official language. He describes the clear goals set by Sir Robert Peel in 1829 for the newly established Metropolitan Police Force (in London), and their descent to the gibberish of a contempory police official’s reply to concerns over safety at a park. Dalrymple then describes the more exalted gibberish of a British museum director who empties her museum of its works to make way for an “art installation” that includes performance artist Kira O’Reilly, who throws herself nude and in slow motion down a staircase. Maria Balshaw, in 2009 the director of the Whitworth Gallery at Manchester University, records her own emotions about having curated such a feat, and her experience of having felt the physical danger to the artist – “artistic risk” being among the goals of a museum. Balshaw describes saving O’Reilly with her female gaze. Balshaw exposes her abysmal self-infatuation as a “woke” administrator. Here is how Balshaw, quoted by Dalrymple, describes O’Reilly’s work of art:

And all she did, really, was roll very, very slowly down the stairs in a series of tumbles, choreographed movements that replicated what would have happened if she’d fallen at speed to her death at the bottom of the staircase. But it unfolded over four hours, so bits of it were painfully slow to watch.

No doubt!

This did nothing to harm Balshaw’s career as an arts administrator. She is now director of the Tate Gallery in London. Throughout his essay, Dalrymple simply cannot resist zinging the ironies all of this involves.

In my first paragraph I tie it all to architecture, because that’s my job. But read the entire piece, which has nothing to do with architecture. No: on rereading I find that Dalrymple quotes Balshaw on architectural beauty. He writes:

It is also revealing that the staircase is the only context in which Balshaw mentions the quality of beauty – suggesting that, somewhere deep within her, some faint aesthetic feeling survives.

Perhaps, but she probably has the word “beauty” on her list of mental save/gets, like a star quarterback insisting his touchdown was the result of “teamwork.” Well, of course. He is on a team. (Do pro athletes take courses in how to say nothing of interest to sports reporters?) Actually, Balshaw’s reference to beauty was less likely to have been an auto-reply than an error of omission. She shouldn’t have allowed that save/get to remain on her mental keyboard. Tsk, tsk!

Dalrymple sums up:

The degeneration of the public administration puzzles me because in all walks of life, from plumbers to electricians, locksmiths, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, surgeons, cardiologists, research scientists, and so forth, I meet capable, intelligent, honest, and talented people. The explanation of this strange divergence, I suspect, is ultimately in the way that the humanities, or inhumanities, are now taught in higher education.

My wife and I recently had a delightful encounter with a young pest-control agent, who, after checking our perimeter for ants, delivered a thoughtful and seemingly learned disquisition on the comparative nuisances of ants, spiders and wasps. After he left, we went inside and wondered if he’d been to college.

Nah.

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Get rid of all speed bumps

Posted on June 9, 2021 by David Brussat

Cartoon courtesy of Brent Brown Graphix.

I doubt that social-justice warriors are on the warpath against speed bumps. Speed bumps are a prime example of punishing the innocent for the sins of the guilty. But punishing the guilty for the sins of the guilty is rational, and so these days probably verboten, so don’t expect it in Providence anytime soon.

I am on the warpath against speed bumps, however, and I admit it’s my bad that I waited until the speed bumps showed up in my neighborhood.

Shortly after they appeared on Rochambeau Avenue, which was my most frequent route from Hope Street to North Main and back, I switched over to either Doyle Avenue or Cypress Street. So I wonder how many Hope and Blackstone neighbors will adopt similar “bypass” strategies, and how many families on Doyle and Cypress will worry about their increased traffic.

Recently, mayoral candidate Brett Smiley sent out a campaign statement about the speed-bump crisis. He raised questions about the planning process for speed bumps but did not come out against speed bumps. He lost my vote.

Speaking of process, I’m glad to find that I did, in fact, write a post against speed bumps back in 2015 (see “Speed bumps on Blackstone?“) I attended a public meeting at Nathan Bishop Middle School, where 190 of 200 attendees opposed a plan to place speed bumps on Blackstone Boulevard. I wrote: “It now seems, if the city is serious about paying attention to public input,” that the speed bumps are “very likely to be abandoned.” Indeed, they never were installed. The lesson learned by the city was not to hold public forums on controversial issues.

So far as I know, and I could be wrong, there was no public input or forum to gauge community reaction to the plan to place speed bumps on Rochambeau. They have been installed, and they have also been installed on tiny 12th Street, which ends at Hope just before India restaurant. 12th Street?!

Who knows what other streets have or will soon receive a dose of such aggravation? Speed bumps are the most irksome form of traffic calming, as planners call these strategies for slowing down vehicles on streets. In some European cities, planners have found that reducing or even eliminating signs – “signage” in planner speak – reduces traffic speeds as drivers must pay more attention to how they’re getting to where they’re going.

City officials already know that speed bumps create dangers of their own. People speed up between them out of anger or to make up for (minimal) lost time. People dodging between gaps in the bumps designed to let ambulances pass through might swerve into an oncoming car or one parked to their right. People may lose control of their vehicles when they strike an unexpected speed bump. One thing’s for sure: they pay more attention to avoiding the bumps than they do to the street environment. People who live near a speed bump are irked by the scraping or crashing sound of such unexpected encounters. Is there a straw that breaks the camel’s back for such people? Do these dangers pose more risk than speeding to pedestrians? Has the city done a study? Maybe speed bumps are appropriate and effective in some places, but not on Rochambeau.

There is a class of misguided residents who apparently support speed bumps, presumably in the mistaken opinion that it will make them or their children safer. That is unlikely. What it will do is to punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty. However effective, that is wrong. The proper and more effective response to speeding is an officer of the law handing out tickets, and if that doesn’t work, hike the fine two or three hundred percent. A ticket or two that makes news will stop speeding in its tracks, or most of it – and, as a bonus, punish only the sins of the guilty, leaving the innocent alone. The best form of traffic calming is a cop.

But wait! Defund the police!

By the way, utility contractors seem unable to properly repair trenches dug to lay or fix utilities below pavements. Do our increasingly washboard streets qualify as speed bumps? Why does the city not force contractors to do their jobs?

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Stick by our “stuck bridge”

Posted on June 3, 2021 by David Brussat

Bascule Bridge as seen from third floor of Wingate assisted living. (photo by author)

As usual, city authorities, including Mayor Elorza, are trying to find new ways of screwing up Providence by throwing non-existent money at it. In this case, they want to take a perfectly good old 1908 bridge, stuck engagingly in the up position for half a century, and turn it from a local icon into bad art.

The Rhode Island Department of Transportation, which owns the Crook Point Bascule rail bridge, has set aside $6 million to tear it down. But lots of people like the bridge as a landmark that seems to wander around as you drive or walk near India Point and the eastern edge of Fox Point. It is a bit of history, a relic of the era when 300 trains a year passed through the city, sending manufactured goods to market after their production here in exchange for materials to make more such high-value goods. Those were the days when Providence saw itself as sitting on top of the world. Its civic leaders enjoyed a map of the eastern seaboard with “trade arrows” pointing to markets throughout the world. They chuckled at piker cities with the gumption to pretend to be our rivals, powerhouse-wannabe cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

The bridge might not bring all that to mind for most who see it, especially those ignorant of Providence’s past glories. But its monumental stuck-uppedness – sign of an oops that we can attribute to the past – demands attention.

According to the Providence Journal, GoLocalProv.com and other news outlets, Horsley Witten Group & Jonathan Harris, an engineering firm headquartered in Sandwich, Mass., has won a design contest held by Elorza for ideas on what to do with the bridge. As described in planning-speak (which the Journal reporter has done a fine job of emulating), the Horsley plan:

[r]epurposes the iconic landmark and its surrounding area, preserving a piece of the City’s historic infrastructure while reinvesting in an inviting new public space.

In short, destroy the village (oops, the bridge) in order to save it.

The city, says the firm, should take what makes the bridge appealing – its olden rusty form sticking notably upward – and cover it up with bad art glowing with LED lights. That way, nobody will care about it anymore, except for teenage boys (of all ages) who will enjoy throwing rocks and stones at it in order to knock out its illumination. The designers suggest future sites for affordable housing nearby, perhaps in order to provide a steady stream of unruly teenagers (just kidding!). With new art replacing the old railroad ties, suddenly the bridge will become worthy of demolition. But nobody will be eager to pay $6 million to replace a railroad monument (tarted up or left alone) with nothing.

What should be done is what sensible people would do who recognize that post-pandemic Providence has far better ways to spend its own or federal taxpayers’ money. The rust and the upward tilt of the bridge should remain. The graffiti should be zapped off. A barrier to prevent people from climbing the erect part of the bridge (occasionally to jump off) should be built. A historical plaque should be installed to explain the bridge as part of the city’s robust manufacturing and infrastructure history. When such a project is done, nobody who visits it would recognize that it has been renovated. It should look much as it looks now. Or, if this is somehow unpalatable or too costly, it should be left alone.

A pedestrian and bicycle path now leads from India Point Park (which would be plenty of park for most neighborhoods) along the edge of the Seekonk River, past Blackstone Park and onto Blackstone Boulevard. Let these users who would approach closest to the bridge enjoy it as it is.

My mother-in-law is lucky enough to have the Bascule Bridge as the centerpiece of her third-floor view from the Wingate senior assisted-living center next to the old IGA. (You’ll never guess what that stands for!) I would pen these words of warning even if her dear self did not live there, and even if I did not enjoy the prospect from that height. In fact, this is my second post on the subject. A monument that is largely free and always very interesting should be left alone to connect the city’s past to the city’s future without molestation from civic leaders who cannot think of anything better to do with our tax dollars. Enough!

Engraving from 1911 edition of Providence Magazine. (author archives)

Posted in Architecture, Preservation | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

A memorial to the agrafe

Posted on May 31, 2021 by David Brussat

The Bowery Savings Bank, 130 Broadway. McKim, Mead & White, 1895. Each of the Corinthian columns and pilasters has an “astragal” moulding below its capital, just above the fluted portions of their shafts. As an example of “agrafe,” this astragal moulding was extended along the the faces of the adjacent walls, forming the bottom edge of a “sub frieze” at the tops of those walls; within that sub-frieze, a series of elegant geometric panels were carved. (Photo by Eden, Janine and Jim, via Wikimedia Commons)

Today is a day to remember those who have given their lives to perpetuate our American system, the first rule based on the ideal of equality under law for all citizens. Each citizen differs, and likewise, while maybe not quite so memorably, each element of the ornamental canon of classical architecture also is different, worthy and beautiful in its own way.

Seth Joseph Weine, an architect, archivist and tribune of classical architecture, long associated with the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, headquartered in New York City, recently sent to the TradArch listserv a brief essay on a term in that canon that was new to both Seth and to me, and I hope it will be just as fascinating to readers as it is to both of us. His essay is below:

***

I was curious about what Wikipedia says are the main characteristics of Beaux-Arts architecture, so I read their article on it. I think it gets some things right – but, perhaps, doesn’t quite address the powerful soul of it.

But that’s not what I want to ask you all about. What I found mysterious was this passage in the article: “Beaux-Arts training made great use of agrafes, clasps that link one architectural detail to another.”

I think I know what they’re referring too – things like:

  • When the astragal moulding of a pilaster is extended across adjacent walls forming the bottom of the “sub-frieze,” whose space is then usually ornamented or paneled;
  • When a baseboard encounters a door architrave, and the designer makes the baseboard’s top moulding extend upward and around the architrave, to form the architrave’s taenia, a small “fillet” molding near the top of the architrave’s outermost moulding band;
  • When an arch is below a window sill, and that arch has a keystone, extending (and shaping) the keystone upward to merge with and form a (visual) support for the sill;
  • When a kitchen has a high ceiling, and the wall-cabinets are divided into sets of upper and lower doors by a taenia molding, extending that moulding horizontally to become the shape of the front edge of the kitchen’s open shelving;
  • When a building’s walls are rusticated (into bands and recesses), that same pattern is done on the columns, or conversely: the pattern on the columns is inversed – instead of recessed bands on the columns, it has bands that project;
  • Perhaps the most frequently seen example of an agrafe is when one looks at the base of a column or pilaster, and the baseboard of the adjacent or nearby wall is shaped so that the lines of the base (its “steps”) align with the major components of the base of the column or pilaster.

I love such stuff, this sort of interlocking of the design, and, in practice, I would play such delightful games as often as possible and appropriate. But I never encountered a term for such moves until I came across the word “agrafes.”

[Here Seth inserts a detail from the photograph above that gives a closer impression of the agrafe.]

I see that the word has another established use in the terminology of architectural construction: especially. it can refer to the dovetail-shaped joints we see in ancient and traditional masonry. Also, the non-architectural definition of the word means, according to Webster, “a hook-and-loop fastening,”  and they cite its etymological roots in the Latin for “to clamp on.”

Well, I’d say that sense of attachment or connectiveness resonates well with the the Beaux-Arts architectural term cited by Wikipedia.

I’ve certainly practiced agrafe-ing! But in my vasty vast experience and reading, I’d never come across the term for that kind of thing. Has anybody else ever heard of this term? Any scholarship on this? Any collection of great “agrafes”?

– by Seth Joseph Weine

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Biden’s putsch at Fine Arts

Posted on May 26, 2021 by David Brussat

Justin Shubow examines model of Frank Gehry’s Ike memorial in 2013. (Bloomberg)

President Biden on Monday asked four of the seven members of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts to resign or be frog-marched out of the picture if they did not do so by 6 p.m. that same day. In his response to the official letter from the White House, CFA chairman Justin Shubow stated:

I respectfully decline your request to resign. I request an explanation of the legal basis and grounds of your extraordinary request and accompanying threat of termination.

Shubow was joined in this by the three other members asked to resign. All seven of the current members were appointed by President Trump to fill normal vacancies, including Shubow in 2018 and four others appointed on Jan. 12, 2021, to replace members appointed by President Obama as he left office in 2017. Shubow was voted in as chairman on Jan. 21.

He noted that in the commission’s 110-year history, no president has ever sought a member’s resignation: “Any such removal would set a terrible precedent.”

Shubow was referring to the fact that the commission is an independent federal agency. Presidents may not remove any member without good cause, and such causes surely do not include members’ architectural tastes, which a spokeswoman cited as Biden’s rationale for the move. Nor would race qualify as an appropriate rationale, which some believe to be the real motive. All seven current members, at least as of the day before yesterday, are white males. That is awkward in this day and age but not illegal. To sack a member on grounds of his or her race, sex, religion, ethnicity or other such factor is illegal, unconstitutional or both, but no better a rationale than sacking a member for being a classicist or a modernist.

The remaining Trump appointees who were not asked to resign are its vice chairman, Rodney Mims Cook Jr., architect Duncan G. Stroik and architect James C. ­McCrery. All of them are classicists. Although Biden has selected four replacements, who in theory now hold office according to the White House letter, they may end up on the wrong side of a run-in with the law. In any event, they are all members in good standing of the modernist-industrial complex.

To remove a member of an independent federal agency without good cause will not just degrade the status of the Commission of Fine Arts but every commission that Congress has seen fit to protect from overreach by the executive branch.

No doubt Shubow and his colleagues are consulting with lawyers. It may be that refusing an illegal request to resign can moot the request. After all, none of the four members’ terms is up, and if they legally continue in their offices, there will be no vacancy for Biden to fill. (Unless he can manage to pack the commission, as if it were the Supreme Court.)

Laws that create federal agencies often are written with trapdoors or loopholes that enable politicians and bureaucrats to evade restrictions they don’t like, and perhaps this is the case with the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Shubow and his three colleagues – architect Steven Spandle, painter and sculptor Chas Fagan, and landscape architect Perry Guillot – might be doomed by such legislative or bureaucratic trickery, or by the recent timidity of the judicial branch.

In any event, Shubow & Co.’s lawyers should urge them to seek an injunction against the White House’s latest move in this game of architectural chess, which is likely to last a lot longer than some suspect. In the absence of a spine at the national level of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (which has kicked “advocacy” off its mission statement), I have asked its New England branch to urge that such an injunction be sought.

Biden’s move will counteract Trump’s effort to change the correlation of forces in U.S. architecture away from the modern architecture and toward classical and traditional architecture. These were the templates for official American design chosen by Jefferson and Washington as reflecting the ideals of democratic Greece and republican Rome that inspired the founding fathers. Biden has already cancelled an executive order signed in December by Trump that would have changed the modernist mandate for federal design that has been in force for six decades to a mandate favoring classical and traditional design.

Traditional and classical architecture are preferred by almost three-quarters of Americans, according a survey performed by the Harris Poll in October 2020. Its large majorities, extending across a wide range of demographic categories – age, race, income, education, geography, and political party – reflect a long train of earlier studies and anecdotal evidence stretching back to the early years of the 20th century. There are neither studies nor stories to be found arguing that modern architecture is preferred by majorities of anyone but its architects’ mothers. Over time, the correlation of forces between historical traditions of beauty and success, and a failed exercise in novelty a mere century old, is likely, regardless of Joe Biden, to reflect what most Americans (and probably the president himself) prefer – as would be appropriate in a democracy.

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