Memorial news & views

Posted on April 4, 2017 by David Brussat
Screen Shot 2017-04-04 at 3.11.17 PM.png

National World War I Memorial competition entry by Kimmel Studio, Annapolis. (Devin Kimmel)

George Weigel, the religious philosopher, replays the sad saga of the proposed memorial for Dwight Eisenhower in his essay “Ike Memorial No-Brainer,” from the National Review. Weigel urges Congress to dump Frank Gehry’s “Memorial To Myself” design that has already enriched Gehry by $16 million in federal funds and promises to top out at $150 million if this farce continues. Weigel suggests holding a new competition and mentions the recent World War I memorial competition that called for a budget under $25 million. It will rise on what is now Pershing Park, near the White House. Weigel notes that the memorial is “now being built,” but further investiga- tion suggests that construction won’t begin until Nov. 11, 2018.

Hmm. The image above is not Gehry’s Ike, of course. Nor is it the WWI memorial design that may or may not be under construction (that’s on the bottom). Rather, it is the WWI memorial design that should have won the competition. It holds pride of place atop this post because I wanted to look at it again. It was the better design. Perhaps I am biased because I helped its architect, Devin Kimmel, of Annapolis, write the text for his entry’s Phase II presentation to the judges. Still, I was in love with that design, more so, at least, than I can recall feeling for any other unbuilt building or monument I’ve known, except maybe for the World Trade Center rebuild proposed by the firm of Franck, Lohsen, McCrery in the Autumn 2001 City Journal.

I just read the report of the jury on the Kimmel design. The jurors’ com- plaint, that it was too big, recalls Austrian Emperor Josef II’s complaint that Mozart’s music had “too many notes.” Perhaps, too, the jury, in slyly pooh- poohing the memorial’s classicism, was hinting that a war memorial in the language of a war memorial might be a little too much.

The winning entry by architect Joe Weishaar and sculptor Sabin Howard is not bad. It is a mixture of classical bas-reliefs etched upon stark, one might almost say modernist, walls that elevate a lawn whose center boasts a sculp- ture of a cannon crew aiming what looks too much like a Civil War-era field piece. But it is mainly a park and its role as a memorial hardly leaps out at you. Apparently, that is what the memorial commission had in mind.

Screen Shot 2017-04-04 at 11.33.23 AM.png

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

C. of C.’s new trad degree

Posted on April 3, 2017 by David Brussat
Screen Shot 2017-04-02 at 1.29.57 PM.png

Gaillard Center, in Charleston. (DMSA)

The College of Charleston is to be congratulated for instituting the first classical program of architectural education in the South. Starting this fall, its new master of arts program in Community Planning, Policy and Design will instruct students in progressive traditional design that makes classicism “more culturally diverse, socially inclusive, sustainable, and beautiful.”

You can apply here. The program brochure is here: CPADbrochureWeb

The C. of C.’s new CPAD program joins a recent spate of new classical and traditional coursework within existing university design departments. The University of Colorado, Denver’s College of Architecture and Planning has its new Center for Advanced Research in Traditional Architecture (CARTA), directed by Christine Franck, one of the classical revival’s leading impresa- rios. Catholic University in the District of Columbia has just added a classical concentration to its master’s curriculum in architecture and planning.

Only Notre Dame among universities in the U.S. boasts a full-fledged classical program offering a master’s and doctorate; it ousted its modernist program in a palace coup almost three decades ago. Yale’s program has at least the blessing of diversity, with students able to choose whether to study modern or classical architecture (at least this was the case under recently retired dean Robert A.M. Stern). Several smaller schools, such as Judson University, in Illinois, offer classical coursework in a generally modernist curriculum. Few architecture curricula in America or elsewhere offer even that, or at most schools even architecture history, let alone what the College of Charleston now offers. SCAD, the Savannah College of Architecture and Design, has taken hopeful steps toward offering some classical coursework. The American College of Building Arts, also in Charleston, offers traditional craft courses but not a general education in architecture. And of course the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art and many of its chapters (including the New England chapter) offer certificate courses in classicism. On the down side, a couple of years ago the Boston Architecture College jettisoned its new classical concentration, allegedly for money reasons. Notwithstanding that, perhaps the latest news from Denver, Washington and Charleston heralds the beginning of an expansion of traditional teaching in architectural education. Great! But there is a long way to go.

Since it is my belief that C. of C.’s phrase “progressive traditional” is redun- dant – that classical and traditional architecture have evolved for centuries and are thus naturally, intrinsically progressive – a bit more on what it means from the program’s brochure might be helpful. It states:

Most design schools around the world teach modern architecture, a few tolerate classicism, and only a handful actively promote traditional design. CPAD is counted among the latter, but with a unique and important twist: our students are taught to understand and appreciate traditional design from a global, pluralistic perspective. They know how to draw upon the specific forms and details of local sites, but they are also capable of thoughtfully engaging with any and all traditions when crafting architecture and urbanism to serve diverse populations. Furthermore, our students are encouraged to engage with modern ideas, materials, and aesthetic innovations, to aid them in their quest to make places that are beautiful by classical standards but successful and sustainable by any standard.

That certainly clarifies that progressive traditional isn’t just another way to describe, say, the new Gaillard Center, a concert hall with a highly innovative curved portico just two blocks from the C. of C. campus green and pictured in the CPAD brochure. Designed by David Schwarz, its ornament riffs off African-American motifs. It makes sense to call it progressive traditional.

Seriously, progressive traditional puts a spin on the teaching of the classical tradition, ensuring that its cultural values are as advanced as they are in teaching the modernist tradition. That not only includes diversity, inclusion, sustainability and other values, but even the use of advanced materials in fashioning a classical building. Furthermore, it embraces the influence of design traditions (see below) from around the world and throughout history. Here is a passage on “pluralistic placemaking” from the brochure:

At the core of the progressive traditional philosophy of CPAD is a conviction that all cultures in every part of the globe have made valuable contributions to the realm of design. We celebrate the ennobling truth that all human beings are bound together by abundant commonalities, many of which have been elegantly etched in the history of architecture. We also acknowledge the present and growing need for people to work together and use every tool in the box—whether old or new, and no matter where it was invented—to build a more functional, resilient, and delightful world.

Longstanding Mayor Joseph Riley, recently retired and set to teach in the program, was instrumental in its foundation, as were New Urbanist guru Andrés Duany and architect Schwarz. Nathaniel Robert Walker, a Brown doctoral grad (2014) and assistant professor of architecture historian at C. of C., had the vision and partnered with Prof. Grant Gilmore III, director of its Historic Preservation and Community Planning program, to found the CPAD program along with Grant’s co-director Kendra Stewart, of the Joseph P. Riley, Jr. Center for Livable Communities, and a host of others. Perhaps illustrative of the progress of the so-called New South, using the word progressive in the program’s vision and promotion actually opened, I am told, many otherwise locked political doors in this delicate effort.

The state of South Carolina is also to be congratulated for approving the CPAD program in this day of tight educational budgets. As Duany points out, Charleston should not be importing but exporting architectural expertise. I have no doubt CPAD’s graduates will do great credit to the Palmetto State by beautifying the region, the nation and the world.

CPADbrochureWeb

Screen Shot 2017-04-02 at 2.50.38 PM.png

(Three photos courtesy Nathaniel Walker; lower right, courtesy of Khoury/Vogt Architects)

Posted in Architecture, Architecture Education | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

The Huxtable joke’s on us

Posted on April 1, 2017 by David Brussat
Screen Shot 2017-04-01 at 4.43.02 PM.png

Hudson County Courthouse, in Jersey City, N.J. (Jersey Digs)

It may sound like an April Fool’s joke, but I recently started to read Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? Turns out the joke’s on us. The book’s author, the late Ada Louise Huxtable, was, as most readers of this blog are probably aware, the über-influential architecture critic for 19 years at the New York Times. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s preface encouraged me to hope that Huxtable perhaps was not as bad as I’d long thought. He wrote:

Twentieth century America has seen a steady and persistent decline in the visual and emotional power of its public buildings, and this has been accompanied by a not less persistent decline in the authority of the public order. This many of us know, but only Huxtable could capture the process in the precise moment of transmutation: At the moment the judges left the marble colonnaded chambers of the turn-of-the-century Hudson County Courthouse for new, functional, efficient modern headquarters next door. Right-thinking Americans will have seen this as a long-overdue disengagement with a corrupt and archaic past for a hopeful and enlightened future. Not Huxtable: She alone reports how much has been lost and what little has been gained.

Oh? That’s really not quite what I would have expected from Huxtable. So I turned to her 1966 column “Hudson County Courthouse: What Ever Happened to the Majesty of the Law?”

No one wants a circa 1910, solid Maine granite building with bronze lanterns and crestings and a four-story interior rotunda of pearl-gray marble, opening through all floors to a central dome, embellished by murals and surrounded by polished Italian green marble Ionic columns.

Of course not! Who would want one of those? The mayor of Jersey City refused to buy the building from the county for one dollar, saying he “had no need for a ceremonial city hall.” But Huxtable condemns the utilitarian new Hudson County Courthouse, mostly by comparing its modernist tediums with the graces of the old building. “So much for the dignity of the insti- tutions of man,” she intones. Is this the real Ada Louise Huxtable?

No. It’s too good to be true. The real Huxtable is the one who describes the new Lincoln Center as having, with its “fussy” colonnades, “defaulted as contemporary architecture and design.” After her fusillade, I almost wanted to like the place myself. The real Ada Louise is the one who, in “Sometimes We Do It Right,” describes plopping a tower of “satin-smooth aluminum and glass” – 140 Broadway, with its Noguchi cube sculpture – into a classical setting. This blotch is how to “do it right”? Its “skyscraper wall reduced to gossamer minimums of shining, thin material hung on a frame of extra- ordinary strength through superb contemporary technology”? This created “one of the most magnificent examples of twentieth-century urbanism anywhere in the world”?

Alas, that is the Huxtable with whom we are familiar. But what about the last column in the book, “Old Town Blues,” about tiny St. Paul de Vence, in France? I thought she must be pulling some sort of inverted April Fool’s joke, only pretending to mock those who would preserve and protect the town’s ancient beauty and heritage. But she’s serious. She is actually mocking the American-style urban renewers that the French rejected for so long. She writes: “Funny people, the French. They must be doing something right. Or could we be doing something wrong? Funny place, the world of the absurd.”

“The World of the Absurd” is the title of the book’s first column. And the world of the absurd is what we have today: beauty and heritage under attack everywhere, even in rural France. And for all too long it was Huxtable herself leading the parade. There are columns in this first collection of her Times criticism that might fool one into thinking she was on the side of the angels. For example, she attacks the proposed (and eventually canceled) Lower Manhattan Expressway – though without even mentioning Jane Jacobs, its leading critic, who is not even listed in the index). Yet most of the columns serve to correct any such false hope. Huxtable considered herself a critic of the conventional wisdom, but she was in fact its tribune, cheerleading for modern architecture at the height of its influence. In her introduction, she claims to feel “no wish or need to take back a word I’ve written here.” Since the few good words fail to cancel out the many bad words, it is too bad we can’t take back her whole career.

Screen Shot 2017-04-01 at 4.39.26 PM.png

New “courthouse” next door for which old courthouse was abandoned. (NJ.com)

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Gallagher: “If Venice Dies”

Posted on March 31, 2017 by David Brussat
Screen Shot 2017-03-31 at 1.04.22 PM.png

Canaletto, “Reception of the French Ambassador” (1726), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. (TNC)

Mary Campbell Gallagher, founder of the International Coalition for the Preservation of Paris, has written a review of Salvadore Settis’s If Venice Dies for The New Criterion. Here is a direct link to her fine review, elegantly titled “La Serenissima” no more?” Below are my further remarks on Settis’s book in honor of its having now been reviewed by Gallagher.

***

“We must all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” Benjamin Franklin’s revolutionary bon mot serves as excellent advice for great historical cities as well as for citizens challenging authority. They are engaged in a revolution – really, a counterrevolution – against worldwide urban trends that have the survival of historical cities in their crosshairs.

Venice and Paris are chief among those great old cities under siege, so it is appropriate that Gallagher, who is fighting to save Paris, praises Settis’s book If Venice Dies, published last year by New Vessel Press. Her focus is on many of the economic challenges facing Venice and other old cities. My own focus in “Review: ‘If Venice Dies,’” which posted last October, is more aesthetic, more design oriented, more focused on Settis’s idea that a city has a soul. My conclusion was that the greatest enemy of Venice’s soul, to its character etched by human behavior in its appearance, is modern architecture.

And so it was unfortunate that Settis did not address the most obvious and by far simplest answer to the plight of cities like Venice and Paris. This is to build more architecture that reflects that soul, that builds upon and strength- ens that character. Far easier to break from the recent past and build in a manner that revives the evolution of centuries than to try to solve the problems they face that have nothing to do with design. New traditional architecture in Venice would strengthen its beauty and its will to fight modernist incursions. Likewise, building in historically appropriate ver- naculars globally would reduce the pressure of tourism on Venice, etc., by adding new places that people love, so that our desire for beauty does not force us to stuff ourselves, on holiday, into the few cities that still have it.

Design may not be a sufficient answer to the problems facing Venice and its besieged brethren, but it is easier to change a design strategy than to change existing economic, political and social conditions. New traditional architec- ture could thus make it easier to solve the many other far more complex and politically difficult problems such cities face.

Gallagher considers Settis’s account of those more complex problems and how they might be addressed. But her review also cites an unsettling argument from Settis’s powerful polemic. She writes:

In a bold analysis, resting on his deep knowledge of the history of architecture, Settis says that the aestheticization of architecture has killed ethics. Aesthetics legitimizes real estate speculation and has become a mere market mechanism in the pursuit of profit.

Perhaps. But that makes sense only if by “aestheticization” Settis means using modernist design fads as an excuse to break away from historic character so as to profit by modernism’s gigantism and el-cheapo materials. “Aestheticization” really ought to refer to the opposite – to the prioritization of civic beauty, or “soul,” over the profit motive. It is difficult to imagine that Settis would be against that.

Gallagher urges UNESCO to place Venice on the list of World Heritage in Danger. I agree, as I am sure Settis would as well. If the world bureaucracy can help Venice’s citizens and government fight off powerful economic elites, such a designation can be vital. Among the most powerful elites is the mod- ernist design establishment. If it can be brought to heel in Venice, perhaps it can be neutralized or displaced elsewhere. If so, the entire world will benefit.

Posted in Architecture, Books and Culture | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Postmodernist Edwardians

Posted on March 30, 2017 by David Brussat

Screen Shot 2017-03-30 at 12.19.37 PM.png

Kristen Richards, the founder and editor of the indispensable ArchNewsNow, sent me the other day a piece she said would interest me. Well, that was the understatement of the week. “Understanding British Postmodernism (Hint: It’s Not What You Thought),” by Timothy Brittain-Catlin in ArchDaily, was almost like me talking to myself.

Since I’m not British, that is odd. But I’ve always had cranky thoughts about American postmodernism that track with the “It’s Not What You Thought” part of Brittain-Catlin’s article. He doesn’t think that British postmodernism is “about Charles Jencks, or about Robert Venturi. Nor is it about being the cheap British imitation of what the expensive Americans were doing. Look- ing back, it was a magnificent Edwardian revival.”

Likewise, I’ve never thought much of the postmodernism expressed by Venturi or most of his followers, except for its challenge to modernism. As a challenge to modernist orthodoxy it was on target and powerful; but as a movement it wimped out, satisfying its “revolutionary” urges by lamely plopping cartoon classical details on modernist forms, while modernism responded by twisting itself, vaulting from “strength” to “strength” by valuing absurdity of form over purity of line. But to the extent that post- modernism did open a crack in the door for a few architects interested in a real classical revival, it, too, owed little to Venturi or Jencks.

The architects that Brittain-Catlin identifies as the Edwardian Revival – John Melvin, Richard Reid and others – are excellent. And yet when you look at the buildings that inspired them, there is at least a slight falling-off from the non-neo Edwardian architecture. Almost any challenge to orthodoxy, in this case the modernist establishment in Britain, usually pays some tribute in the form of timidity. But the original buildings were extraordinarily exuberant.

What?! Exuberant Edwardianism? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms, as difficult to imagine as libertine Victorianism? Well, this is what we are supposed to think or at least what mod-symp architectural critics and historians have tried to teach us to think.

Referring to the architect Piers Gough’s comments on the Edwardians, Brittain-Catlin writes:

Those architects were enormously inventive – as Gough said, they would vary the fenestration on every floor; they were built well at a time when quality building was valued. Yet you could recognise easily the features on them that spoke to everyone. [Critic Trevor] Garnham’s hero W.R. Lethaby knew that if the ornamentation of a building reaches back in time to distant, symbolic things, everyone will somehow understand it, however complicated it is, and like it the more for it.

Isn’t that what architecture and architects are supposed to do? Brittain-Catlin could have been channeling some of Robert Adam’s thoughts on the classical language’s parallel with the English language, or any tongue that has evolved down the centuries, as classicism has but modernism hasn’t; indeed, modern architecture has not even sought to forge a comprehensible language – quite the reverse. (Preliminary to a broader review of Adam’s new book Classical Columns, I have recently posted a few quotes from it here and here. I earlier quoted at length from his essay “How to build a skyscraper” after he won this year’s Driehaus Prize. I did not have the book yet but the essay was reprinted in City Journal, available via my post’s link.)

Screen Shot 2017-03-30 at 12.20.07 PM.png

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Rhode Island, circa 1947

Posted on March 29, 2017 by David Brussat

Screen Shot 2017-03-29 at 6.34.30 PM.png

Here’s a video of a nine-minute promotional film on Rhode Island, the smallest state in the union – though the state with the nation’s highest per capita production of industrial goods. The grainy black & white photography and the “professional” voice of the narrator combine, along with the film’s quaint subject matter, to produce a treasury of head-snapping “come again?” moments. Why does almost everyone in the film seem to be bedraggled, as if they had just survived the Hurricane of 1938, a full decade prior to the film’s release? Actually, in spite of the narrator’s condescending praise of the state’s economy, by the time this film was made the economy had been on the slide for at least three decades, a decline that remains the smallest state’s greatest legacy (except for its liberty in religious concernments). There is more than enough here to cognate the dissonance of every modern Rhode Islander. In addition to the video itself, below are several local screenshots. Enjoy!

Screen Shot 2017-03-29 at 6.36.23 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-03-29 at 7.23.53 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-03-29 at 6.38.28 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-03-29 at 6.36.45 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-03-29 at 7.13.05 PM.png

Thames Street, Newport

Screen Shot 2017-03-29 at 7.11.11 PM.png

Westerly

Screen Shot 2017-03-29 at 6.39.03 PM.png

Woonsocket

Posted in Architecture, Old Video, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Adam on classical language

Posted on March 28, 2017 by David Brussat
Screen Shot 2017-03-28 at 6.46.12 PM.png

A row of houses with a language difficulty. (modernrichmondtour.com)

Robert Adam in his book Classic Columns addresses a topic many have addressed but at far greater depth of perception.  Few can fail to perceive that classical architecture is a language and that it evolves slowly just as the English language does, and that it has been doing so for many centuries. The classical “language” has been out there for us to hear and read for centuries, and we have learned it just as well as we have learned our English, our Ger- man, our Chinese, or what have you. The word house means house, with all its manifold variations, and has done so for centuries. Likewise church, bank, town hall, barn and office building. And the actual house, written in the brick, wood, stone and glass of classical architecture (or in a traditional or vernacular architecture descended from classical), also looks like a house, no less than what you think when you hear or read the word house.

Adam’s essay, “Classical architecture is the architecture of today,” expresses the idea in his more stately, exemplary way, and reaches the point at which we have been for the past half a century, where the classical language now has a rival in the “modernist” language. Referring to an architect’s practice of “quoting” bits of well-known architecture from the past, he writes:

Living languages are not scrapped and reinvented every fifty years. We may express ourselves a little differently from Charles II or Nicholas Hawksmoor but we can use their expressions today because what they were is part of what we are. Our civilisation and means of expression are modern but they carry their past with them and we are the richer for it.

We are not limited to the use of the past. We can use the latest technology. It is no longer necessary to learn a special language to use a computer, really advanced technology does what we want it to do. As new technology becomes – to use the buzz phrase – “user friendly,” we can, quite literally, make it speak our language. Voice simulators can quote Jane Austen and injection moulding can quote John Soane.

There are, of course, dangers in these analogies. No one orders drinks in the language of architecture or discusses the weather with cornices and capitals. It is easier to check on whether you are being understood in a spoken language and English has the great advantage that there has been no cultural elite trying to destroy it for thirty years.

This was written as a speech delivered in 1985 at a debate at the Royal Institute of British Architects – with the Prince of Wales in the audience. Adam continues:

Architecture is rather different. There has been a cultural elite trying to change its language. Speaking their own made-up architectural language, they think we all ought to learn it. But why should we? We’re fine the way we are. Put another way, imagine a game of charades where the other players keep saying “no”: they can’t guess what you are trying to be. Eventually you lose. Some people, unfortunately, never admit they’ve lost.

As the Modern Movement sinks under an accelerating barrage of “no’s” we should be thankful that the full apparatus of the living Classical language has survived. Perhaps our profession will now realise that nobody but architects ever bothered to learn their language and will take up Classicism, the true International Style.

Alas, the over-optimism of the 1980s! I was in London when Prince Charles’s handlers were still nervous about the royal family’s identity in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death. Because his recent declarations about architecture had been so controversial (“carbuncle” and all that), he was forced (not sure that’s the right word) to choose a modernist to run his school of architecture, just to sort of calm things a bit. Charles had had the modernists on the run, I think, but then he toned it down and the modernists recovered and went on to more and more ridiculous forms of architecture – more and more unlikely to ever become a language that anyone could really understand.

The muzzling of the Prince of Wales was not the only explanation for the modernist revival, but to me it seems to have been a big part of the whole picture. Maybe Robert Adam will bring up the topic later in his book. Or maybe not. If he does, I will report back.

Posted in Architecture, Books and Culture | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Minutes in lovely Malta

Posted on March 27, 2017 by David Brussat
Screen Shot 2017-03-27 at 2.40.08 PM.png

Fortifications guard the harbor as they did during the Great Siege of Malta in 1565.

When I feel like writing a post but don’t have much time I fly to YouTube and its endless city videos. Today, Valletta, the capital of Malta, the island nation just south of Sicily. I visited in the late 1990s when former Providence mayor Joseph Paolino was our ambassador. I found a hotel room with twin balconies overlooking the capital and the harbor, where in 1565 an invasion by an army of 48,000 under the Ottoman Empire’s Suleiman the Magnificant was, after much catapulting of severed heads, repulsed by some 800 Knights Hospitaller and 7,000 Maltese. Today, although like Venice under an assault of mammoth cruise ships, the city of Valletta could not be more beautiful.

Before I left for Malta, my friend and former Journal colleague Irving Shel- don described the island as “Baroque from stem to stern,” and it certainly was. The two videos here, one of just over four minutes and one of less than three minutes, do a fairly good job of capturing its beauty with a minimum of videographic trickster conceits. Going to YouTube to find a good video of a place is tough because of the great variety of choices. Many feature obnox- ious narrators or unlistenable music in addition to bad photography, but you can’t know for sure without cranking them up. These two are nice. The ima- ges, above and below, are all screenshots from either video. Neither, how- ever, spend enough time on the fortifications from which the Knights repelled the Turks. Oh well.

The longer video is here. The shorter video is here. They are both products of Malta’s tourism bureau, at www.visitmalta.com.

Screen Shot 2017-03-27 at 3.19.53 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-03-27 at 3.16.40 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-03-27 at 3.18.47 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-03-27 at 3.20.59 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-03-27 at 2.37.00 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-03-27 at 2.38.10 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-03-27 at 2.41.29 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-03-27 at 2.37.41 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-03-27 at 2.40.32 PM.png

Posted in Architecture, Video | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Adam on history & tradition

Posted on March 26, 2017 by David Brussat
Screen Shot 2017-03-26 at 3.23.09 PM.png

Sackler Library (2001), at Oxford. (John Critchley)

I am reading British architect Robert Adam’s collection of essays, Classic Columns: 40 Years of Writing on Architecture,” just published. Chapter 5, “Can restoration be too authentic?,” totally demolishes a longstanding pet peeve of mine – modernist additions to old buildings, or rather, the use of the word authenticity to justify them. Adam’s essay demonstrates how architectural historians use the concept of authenticity to buttress a misuse of history in an effort to undermine tradition.

Screen Shot 2017-03-26 at 3.21.34 PM.png

Robert Adam (ADAM Architecture)

The previous chapter, “Tin Gods: Technology and contemporary architecture,” explores, among other things, why modernism (the broader philosophy that undergirds modern architecture) seeks to undermine tradition. I should quote from that chapter to prepare to quote from this one. But since each chapter unpacks insights that cascade into the next chapter, I’d have to quote the whole book. You should read it, but in the meantime here are some passages from Chapter 5, originally a 2003 lecture given to the York Civic Trust.

Adam begins by explaining how “[i]t is not what actually happened that is of interest to the historian but that which is extraordinary, that which is apparently original, and so that which is considered to be, in this very peculiar way, ‘authentic’ to its period.” What is different is seen as more important than what is the same, in architecture as well as in history. Both are important. Historians often forget that. He continues:

Once you become steeped in this thinking, it distorts your view of the present and the future. … It should also be obvious that this theory, presented this way, defies everyday experience. The vast majority of what happens today is pretty much what happened yesterday. Many, many essential parts of our lives are to all intents and purposes the same as those of our fathers. We live in a world made up predominantly from the recent and even the quite distant past.

After proceeding to demonstrate that the word authentic is mostly used these days to flip its normal meaning onto its head, Adam writes:

This application of historical or archaeological methodology to living buildings and places is like the study of wildlife through taxidermy. It has the effect of turning living organisms into dead specimens and takes away the life that made them worthy of study in the first place.

Adam describes how the quest for “authenticity” transforms restoration into a curatorial exercise of historical accuracy. Modern shapes that explicitly avoid fitting into the look of a restoration project serve, it is said, to “pre- serve” the building’s authenticity – even as modernists warn that using traditional building methods will turn cities into museums.

Screen Shot 2017-03-26 at 4.05.46 PM.png

Royal Ontario Museum (canadianseniors.com)

The word “authentic” is so closely linked to the concept of “truth” and we are so respectful of the experts who believe that historical authenticity is important that we rarely question its relevance. To whom does it really matter? Take a casual visitor to an old building; is his experience spoiled or devalued if he mistakes a new repair for an original part of the building? How far do you have to go to make sure this doesn’t happen? Do you have to go so far that you contradict one of the key objectives of doing it in the first place – to restore the wholeness of the original work of art so that it can be appreciated? Indeed, this seems to be the case. … The coherence of the design is less important than making sure that every visitor knows for sure which stones are new and which old? Surely not. But this is the ridiculous situation that the principle of historic authenticity forces on us. This kind of thing only matters to academics and experts, and if they really want to know, they can find out anyway.

Iconic buildings, such as the Tower of London, and iconic places such as Williamsburg, Virginia, are part of the way each nation identifies itself through its history. They are also not at all authentic. The Tower of London is an imaginary nineteenth-century reconstruction of the Tudor tower largely by Anthony Salvin. Williamsburg is a late twentieth-century imaginative and often hypothetical reconstruction of an eighteenth-century town. The lack of authenticity is public knowledge, to a greater or lesser degree, but some – or indeed many – might be fooled. But it does not really matter to anyone except an academic or an expert. …

And here is how tradition fits in:

We must not confuse history and tradition. They are not at all the same thing. Historians often see traditions as little more than bad history. They are fair game for ridicule and, we are told, deal with the past in an inauthentic way that is quaint and even amusing. But this really misses the point. Traditional are not history; they are not subject to historical methodology. Traditions are, however, of great importance. They make living, continuous, and developing connections with our past and it is through our traditions that we all find our place in the world. …

Tradition is the natural way we deal with our past. Once we know this, we will understand that it is not out of stupidity or ignorance that visitors to Windsor Castle really don’t mind that much of what they see is a fake castle, not at all authentic, or that drinkers sit unconcerned in half-timbered pubs made of planks around steel beams, not in any way genuine. If asked, they will often know full well that these things are fakes but it really doesn’t matter. These are symbolic reminders of historic myths and ideals that they hold dear: the myth of the chivalrous origins of the monarchy or the myth of Olde England, myths that link a factual past with the ideas of the present. As people of intellect, we may sneer at the inaccuracies but these are genuine sensations felt by real people and have a value just by that fact.

Tradition, Adam adds,

[i]s not neat and systemised like the study of history; it is a messy layering of memories, ideas, truth, and fiction but, above all, it is alive and connects us in a vital way with the actions of our ancestors and projects these actions and memories on to future generations.

Suggesting that we abandon the misuse of authenticity and adapt a sense of history that fits into rather than undermining tradition, Adam continues:

Yes, we will lose some evidence; yes, we will undertake some restoration that is not guaranteed to be accurate; yes, some people will be fooled – but we will have more buildings that live, we will have a more natural relationship between old and new buildings, we will preserve one totally forgotten part of the character of the building or the place – the way it changes. No change is the most devastating change you can make.

But of course modern architecture is the creature of an ideology that believes that we have reached a point in history – modernity – where any change would be retrogressive. Go back to Chapter 4 for Adam’s take on this phenomenon. There are earlier chapters with much worth quoting. So much of what he writes fills in the gaps of what most classicists think. I intend a more typical review of Classical Columns once I’ve finished it. I really could have quoted a lot more for this post, but my fingers are tired. I hope Adam won’t sic his lawyers on me for overcopiosity of quotation. Since, however, it is so much easier for your eyes to hop from word to word than for my fingers to type them out letter by letter, I strongly recommend buying the book.

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

‘Transforming Providence’

Posted on March 25, 2017 by David Brussat
Screen Shot 2017-03-25 at 4.42.15 PM.png

WaterFire event on relocated and reopened Providence River. (waterfrontcenter.org)

Yesterday’s announcement of the publication date of Lost Providence brings to mind that Transforming Providence, by Gene Bunnell, a professor of city planning at SUNY/Albany, has just been published. I am pleased that he has weighed in on the redevelopment story here, and hopeful that the creative tension between our two books will generate interest in both. Long ago I read his 2002 book Making Places Special: Stories of Real Places Made Better By Planning, especially its chapter on Providence.

Bunnell’s latest book is a thoroughgoing update of that chapter, bringing us very much up to speed on the latest developments. Transforming focuses more on the planning process than on the design process, and therein lies the major difference between our books. His book furthermore recalls the excellent Providence: The Renaissance City (2004), by Mark Motte and Francis Leazes Jr., a more in-depth study of the same topic from the same planning-centric perspective. I leaned on Renaissance bigtime in writing my chapters about the last half-century or so of redevelopment in Providence.

Because Bunnell’s specialty is in planning rather than design, his assessment of projects such as the Capital Center project and the I-195 Corridor finds more to applaud. These are basically urban-renewal projects except for one big factor – almost no old buildings, commercial or residential, were razed to open up the acreage for new development. Providence managed to dodge the cannonball of urban renewal half a century ago, and for precisely that reason it is an unusually beautiful city among its U.S. sisterhood. Regarding urban renewal in other cities, Bunnell sensibly opines:

[T]he development was often mediocre and generic, and did little to enhance the character and vitality of the community. More often than not, the developments that came about were starkly at odds with the historic character that had once provided the basis for local identity and a sense of place.

Bunnell does not transfer that judgment to Capital Center or the I-195 Corridor. But hey, that’s my job. What he does do is identify the lead players and institutions, both public and private, involved in specific development projects. He correctly spotlights the Providence Foundation, an arm of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce. The foundation has been behind almost every smart redevelopment idea since the 1970s. He emphasizes the need to think longterm, to take good ideas from past projects that failed, and to pinpoint the commonalities of successful projects. He drills down to reveal key challenges to all development in Providence. For example:

[C]osts of construction in downtown Providence are roughly the same as those in downtown Boston, but the rents commanded by commercial and residential properties in Providence are signifi- cantly lower than those in Boston.

Bunnell cites key pots of money that can help bridge the gap, such as state and federal historic preservation tax credits and the investment incentives passed by the state to help sell off its I-195 Corridor parcels. He appears to recognize that such devices, unpopular as they are with voters, are required to make up for the city’s and state’s poor climate for business. I would add – and I wish that Bunnell had engaged this subject – that bridge funding would be less unpopular, and projects would be easier to implement, if developers offered project designs more popular with the public. Still, Bunnell has his finger on the most important economic and administrative issues facing Providence and other cities today.

So Transforming Providence deserves a place in the libraries of all who need or want to know about how Providence became the excellent city it is today.

Posted in Architecture, Development, Providence, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment