Tag Archives: architecture

May 21, 2013 · 9:55 am

The Non-Luxury of Architectural Preservation

Of late I have been thinking a great deal about the topic of historic preservation in architecture, thanks to a number of news reports which I believe the reader will find interesting.  While spread across centuries, continents, and cultures, all of these stories bring home to us two key points.  The first and perhaps most obvious is that we lose pieces of human history all the time, often without realizing what has happened until they are gone.  Yet the second and perhaps more contentious is whether the question of historic preservation is something which only matters to those with the luxury to pursue it.

You may have read, gentle reader, of the destruction of a Mayan pyramid in Belize, which was bulldozed to be turned into road fill.  This took place despite the fact that the archaeological site, and the structure itself, have been known and marked for well over a century now, as part of a far larger complex which has yet to be scientifically excavated.  Even today, with all of our technology, the jungles of Central and South America still have many secrets yet to reveal to us.  There are many more things to be discovered in these areas, and which continue to occur on a regular basis, such as was announced recently in the discovery of a large statue from a pre-Columbian ball game court in Mexico.

In Egypt, scholars are alarmed at the increasing rate of destruction at the site of the ancient Roman city of Antinopolis, built by the Emperor Hadrian to honor his boy toy Antinous, who accidentally drowned – or was murdered, depending on whom you believe – in the Nile near this spot in 130 A.D.  Here, the nearly intact Roman hippodrome has been swallowed up both by the desert sands and an encroaching modern cemetery.  In addition the area of the ancient necropolis, or “city of the dead”, which has yielded numerous superb mummy portraits, is being converted into farmland for the burgeoning population of actual living people in the area to work.

Even in the United States, we can see the shocking destruction of buildings which are, if not as ancient as the aforementioned, not only old, but beautiful.  Take the demolition of old St. Patrick’s Church in suburban Albany. New York, a Neo-Gothic building from around the turn of the previous century.  Due to various factors including declining mass attendance, many of these old churches now serve shrinking populations.  Often this leaves the diocese or religious community which maintains these structures no choice but to put them up for sale.  In this case, the church is being replaced with a supermarket, which is perhaps rather too-telling

The story of architectural loss in the Americas, Egypt, and elsewhere is one not only based on values, but on resources.  It is all very well to pass a law saying that historic buildings must be preserved.  However if there is no enforcement mechanism in place to impose that law, nor the budget to fund it, then all the good intentions in the world will not halt demolition or decay.

There is also a kind of absolutist tendency among some in the historical preservation world to argue that anything more than a few years old is “historic”, and worth preserving.  We saw this in the battle over the hideous Third Church of Christ Scientist by “starchitect” I.M.Pei here in D.C., which unfortunately has yet to be demolished.  And indeed similar arguments are being made to preserve the even more egregiously awful and failing FBI Headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue.  How anyone with an advanced degree could argue that, ”I think if it can be saved, it should be,” with a straight face is beyond me.

As in everything in life, the key here is to strike a balance.  For many poorer countries, preservation of architectural monuments and important buildings or ruins is simply not possible.  There are organizations like UNESCO to help them, but as we saw in the destruction of ancient structures in Mali during the Islamist uprisings, even international organizations can only coordinate restoration efforts up to a point.  These are often viewed as a luxury which wealthy, first-world countries alone have the means to play with.  For all of us, the loss of these pieces of the past, however they come about, are tragic, and call for our attention and, yes, our financial support, if we care about history, or architecture, or art.

Yet even at home, we can do our part in our own communities.  Rather than worrying so much over whether it is historically appropriate for our neighbor to paint his front door fire engine red, as is so often the kind of in-fighting that goes on in well-to-do historic neighborhoods, perhaps we ought to be looking with a more keen eye to see what is actually worth our time and effort to preserve.  Nothing built by the hands of man will last forever, after all, and by tailoring our preservation efforts to those structures which are not simply old, but exemplary of the best that human beings can do when they push themselves, we will all be better-served.

Watervliet

Demolition underway at St. Patrick’s Church
Watervliet, New York

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February 21, 2013 · 8:45 am

The Statues That Washington Forgot

Now that the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery has announced it will be closing for major renovations for the next three years, it seems an opportune moment to address a subject which one of my readers alerted me to some time ago.  The grand museum on Pennsylvania Avenue here in Washington, across the street from the even grander Old Executive Office Building, was known as “The Louvre of Washington” when it opened in 1874, thanks to its combination of French Second Empire style and luxurious gallery spaces.  It was the first home of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, which by 1897 had grown so large that it moved to its present location a block away.

However the keen-eyed  observer of the building will notice something amiss on its imposing red brick and sandstone: why are there only two statues, when there appears to have been space for so many more?  The answer, as it turns out, is that the museum was originally adorned with many over-life-sized statues of important figures from Western civilization.  So where have these works gone?

The eleven statues that originally stood along the facade, each standing around 7 feet high, were carved in Rome to order for William Corcoran by American sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel (1844-1917).  After the Corcoran collection left the building in 1897, it was turned over to the Judiciary, and served as a Federal courthouse for the next 50 years.  Ezekiel’s statues were subsequently removed from the exterior, since it was determined that they had no relevance to the new use of the building, and in 1901 they were sold at auction to local heiress Evelyn Walsh.

Walsh owned what was formerly known as the Friendly Estate in NW Washington; a gigantic expanse of land that was later sold off and subdivided into numerous communities.  She arranged the Ezekiel statues around her swimming pool, and presumably bathed under the appreciative gaze of Da Vinci, among others.  Through subsequent auctions after the sale of her estate, the collection of statues was eventually split up among several owners in Virginia.

Meanwhile, by the 1950′s and continuing through the Kennedy Administration, Congress began to consider a proposal that the old, crumbling Corcoran museum be demolished, so that a new and more efficient courthouse could be built in its place.  Eventually LBJ intervened, thanks to lobbying pressure from people like Jackie Kennedy, historic preservationists, and S. Dillon Ripley, the influential Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution for many years.  In 1965 the building was turned over to that body, and following renovations it opened to the public in 1972 as the Renwick Gallery, a museum of American craft and design.

Today the statues carved by Ezekiel for the facade of what is now the Renwick Gallery stand in the Botanical Garden of the city of Norfolk, Virginia, hundreds of miles away.  An owner of six of the sculptures donated his to that city, for placement in the public garden back in 1963.  Eventually the owners of the remaining five were located, and persuaded to donate their statues to the city of Norfolk as well.

Several months ago a friend from Twitter alerted me to the fact that he had taken his family to see these same gardens, and while admiring the statues was surprised to learn that they had been transported to his city from Washington.  While originally these sculptures would have had at least some protection from the elements, standing in their covered cubbyholes studded across the facade of the Renwick Gallery, for decades now they have been completely exposed to the elements, standing out unprotected in the snow, rain, and summer heat which characterize this part of the country.  No doubt standing around Mrs. Walsh’s swimming pool did not do them much good either.

While the Ezekiel statues are no longer the property of the Federal government, it is a pity in some ways that they cannot be returned to their original home on the facade of the building for which they were designed.  Today, copies of two of the statues – those of artists Peter Paul Rubens and Esteban Murillo –  stand in their original niches on the facade.  They seem isolated and forgotten, without purpose, particularly without their brethren.

Admittedly, the Renwick, unlike the Corcoran which preceded it in the space, is not an institution that attempts to provide a reasonably encyclopaedic overview of the history of Western art.  However one cannot help but think that those empty niches ought to be filled with what was originally placed there by the architects, artists, and donors who built it.  Instead, these original works of art are now covered in mold, crumbling away in a public park, leaving the building originally designed to display them lacking a crucially important part of its intended decoration.

DaVinci

“Leonardo Da Vinci” by Moses Jacob Ezekiel (c. 1871)
Botanical Garden, Norfolk, Virginia

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December 21, 2012 · 9:45 am

A Lost Opportunity in Haiti

Yesterday the winners of the international design competition to build a new cathedral in earthquake-devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti were announced.  Regular readers of these pages will recall that I had shared my fears about this competition previously.  According to the University of Miami, which sponsored the competition, 250 architects from around the world submitted entries, and the winning design came from an architecture firm in Puerto Rico.  The new cathedral will preserve the facade of the old, but “veers from the original with a new, circular building that wraps around a central altar, accented by local art, with retractable walls that open to the garden for special occasions.”

Where to begin…

Some time ago, a group composed of fellow architecture aficionados/actual practitioners with whom I maintain friendly relations was discussing what sort of design competition they ought to hold.  At the time the destruction in Haiti was constantly in the news, and the images I had seen of the destruction of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption in the capital had really struck me.   I suggested to the group that the clear answer for the subject of their competition was the Port-au-Prince Cathedral.  It is not often, after all, that one gets to build a brand-new cathedral from the ground up, and in an environment which not only has a great deal of history, but also a great deal to keep in mind with respect to building in an earthquake/hurricane zone.

Traditional Caribbean architecture varies from island to island, but there are certain commonalities which we can appreciate.  For example there is the prevalence of traditional ornament, somewhat simplified, and applied over flat surfaces which are often whitewashed or painted in bright colors.  We can see this in photographs of the Cathedral as it existed prior to the earthquake, with its almost sugary-pink and white color scheme, referencing a mixture of French Neo-Gothic design with other elements.  It called to mind the famous Basilica of the Sacred Heart in the Parisian neighborhood of Montmartre, but with a more tropical sense of joy.

Unfortunately, the new Cathedral looks less like a church and more like a movie theatre on the planet of Naboo, from the “Star Wars” universe.  While incorporating what remains of the old facade, and appearing at least from the outside to loosely keep to a basilica plan, this design does not say “timeless Caribbean”, it says “tacky po-mo California suburb.”  The square bell towers with long (presumably concrete) crosses imbedded in them and the church in the round are really not contemporary at all, unless by “contemporary” you mean 1974.  I will not even begin to try to explain why the horizontally ribbed walls look like giant black air filtration systems.

Once again here we are being presented with the same, ugly aesthetic that has continued to fascinate both architects and the powers that be within the Church since the mid-2oth century.  It is the same bad taste, bad theology, and bad liturgy which has brought us the overpriced white elephant known as the Taj Mahoney – i.e. Los Angeles Cathedral – the intergalactic landing bay known as Oakland Cathedral, and parish churches that look more like high school gymnasiums or drive-in banks rather than houses of worship.  The new Cathedral of Port-au-Prince will cost many millions of dollars to construct, and it will sit like a fat pimple on the landscape of Port-au-Prince for about ten years before it starts to leak and fall apart, as it will inevitably do.

It is all too telling then, that the passage quoted above rather gives away the game.  It notes that the new Cathedral will have retractable walls, which will open to the outdoors gardens for “special occasions”.  So in case anyone has missed my meaning to this point, allow me to clarify my point of view.

There is no more special occasion that takes place in any Catholic church, whether it be a Cathedral or a parish church or a tiny chapel, than the celebration of the mass – absolutely nothing else is more important: no wedding, no funeral, no concert, no conference, or any other event matters as much.  We cannot blame the architects for not seeing that, but we can blame those who selected this work as being worthy of such a function.  It is deeply unfortunate that the people of Haiti are now going to be saddled with an architectural monstrosity which will do nothing to remind them of the fact that here is the House of God, where He dwells in the Real Presence of the Eucharist reserved in the Tabernacle, and where He comes to us again and again in the Holy Sacrifice of the mass.  What a shame that this was not the focus of those who selected this inadequate, bad marriage as representative of the heart of the Catholic faith in Haiti.

Haiti

Winning design for the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption, Port-au-Prince

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November 30, 2012 · 10:56 am

Venice in America

Today is the Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle, brother of St. Peter and patron saint of many things, including fishermen, Scotland, and Russia.  However he is also the patron saint of one of the greatest and most significant architects of the modern age, Andrea Palladio, who was born on St. Andrew’s Day in 1508.  If you are not hugely interested in architecture, you may not be familiar with his name, but if you live in the Western world there is a reasonably good chance that the home you live in, or the civic buildings that make up the town where you live, were shaped and influenced by the ideas of this 16th century Venetian master.

Just as Jacobo Sansovino, whom I wrote about earlier this week, had a profound influence on the artists of his day, in convincing them that they were equaling or even surpassing the achievements of their ancient Greek and Roman forbearers, so too Palladio was a driving force in convincing architects that they could do the same.  Sansovino was himself a highly accomplished architect, of course, producing many beautiful and monumental structures in Venice between the 1530′s and 1560′s.  Palladio, who was a generation younger, had to bide his time while Sansovino held sway over the public taste of the capital, but eventually he became the head architect of the Venetian Republic after Sansovino’s death.

One of Palladio’s most influential contributions to the development of modern architecture and indeed modern living was in taking advantage of open spaces, rather than being afraid of them.  Keep in mind that in much of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West until the time of the Renaissance, most people lived together for protection, either in closely-packed walled towns, or in castles or other fortified structures in the countryside.  Foreign invaders or marauding neighbors bent on pillaging and destruction could sweep in at any moment, and there was safety in numbers.

What our eyes need to be trained to see is how different the world which Palladio created was from the times that had come immediately before it.  There is nothing of the fortress about a Palladian house.  There are no dark, thick walls designed for defensive purposes, with only interior courtyards to allow light and air.  Instead, his houses sit gracefully inside beautiful parks and gardens, surrounded by trees and flowers, green lawns and splashing fountains.

Nor were these houses gigantic, bloated structures, like the Baroque behemoths that were built to house the egos of absolute monarchs.  Rather, they were comfortable places to enjoy oneself with one’s family and friends by engaging in outdoor activities, reading, entertaining, or the like.  They are of course much larger than the average person’s home, but they are not overwhelmingly so.  The confidence with which these villas were built testifies to a similar spirit of self-confidence of the day that times were getting better, and that the darker ages of constant warfare between rivaling factions were becoming less frequent, at least in the Venetian Republic.

This in itself is a key component to the architecture which Palladio created.  His houses are built for aristocrats, but they are they are the aristocrats of a republic.  There was no hereditary king of Venice: the Republic was ruled by a Doge, an elected official whose powers were limited further and further as the centuries wore on.  While the Venetian Republic was not truly a representative democracy, in the sense that we would understand the term, it had a series of checks and balances in place to ensure that no one single individual or family could come to dominate the entire system.

Palladio’s ideas and methods were not just limited to a bunch of gondola-riding aristocrats half a millenia ago.  For in fact, many of the American Founding Fathers were hugely enamored of the Palladian way of living.  President Thomas Jefferson, for example, built his beloved estate Monticello, as well as the Virginia State Capitol building, and the main building of the University of Virginia, using principles derived from his own study of Palladio’s work.  James Hoban, the Irish-American architect of the White House, took his plans for the Executive Mansion directly from two Palladian-style country houses which had been built a few years earlier in Ireland.

Even today, Palladio’s legacy is all around us, not only as part of our visible history, but in continuing to influence architects who build homes and businesses, offices and churches by taking Palladio’s ideas and applying or re-interpreting them.  As is so often the case in these pages, we have here yet another example of why it is important to understand the cultural history of the West, something which the past forty-odd years of academically entrenched relativism has done such a bang-up job of trying to eradicate.  Over many centuries the ideas of this single Venetian architect have had a positive impact on both the look and livability of our homes, our public buildings, and indeed our cities.

Palladio understood that in order for contemporary society to succeed, it must be interconnected with the best aspects of the society which came before it.  He helped to radically change the way that his contemporaries lived by looking at how people had lived before, how they lived in his day, and figuring out he could bring together the best aspects of each.  In doing so, he succeeded in transforming not only a small Italian republic, but the lives of people in countless cities and towns large and small, all over the world.  His is but one example of why we should both study and try to understand our past, taking the lessons we learn there, and adapting them to the needs of the present.

Fratta

“La Badoera” Villa by Andrea Palladio (built 1556-1563)
Fratta Polesine, Italy

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October 3, 2012 · 2:50 pm

Mr. Gehry’s Lumpy Mashed Potatoes, Skin-On

I feel very sorry indeed for our friends up north.

The Canadians are generally such sensible, mild-mannered people, that it must appall many of them to see what has been proposed for downtown Toronto this week by the world’s leading “starchitect”, Frank Gehry.  In a press conference on Monday, scale models and plans for building a mixed-use residential, entertainment, retail, and educational development in Canada’s largest city were revealed by Mr. Gehry and his primary backer in the project.  These plans include three new skyscrapers clad in metal “skins” of different types, a museum, and a university campus, among other features.  Reactions on social media over the past 48 hours have spanned from dismissive eye-rolling over the design to a general consensus that the project looks quite literally like a pile of garbage, and moreover that the proposed skyscrapers in particular appear unstable.

A little over a year ago, when I first started complaining about the hideous Eisenhower Memorial which Gehry had been commissioned to design for the Nation’s capital, I went back and did some research on Gehry’s views.  I found two quotes from Mr. Gehry particularly telling.  In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Gehry admitted, “I’m confused as to what’s ugly and what’s pretty.”  That fact is patently obvious of course, from many of his executed buildings and unexecuted plans.

However the other quote has relevance for the good people of Toronto, Mr. Gehry’s home town.  “City planning? Forget it,” Mr. Gehry said.  ”It’s a kind of bureaucratic nonsense. It has nothing to do with ideas. It only has to do with real estate and politics.”

It is therefore ironic but perhaps not surprising that this massive complex will be undertaken with the leadership of one of downtown Toronto’s real estate developers, who owns part of the site as well as a number of the buildings around it.  The new museum will house said developer’s collection of modern and contemporary art.  And a theatre currently owned by said developer at the site will be demolished, with a new one to be built in its place.

Naturally any such massive project is going to require political involvement to complete, since you do not undertake a project of this size without government participation in areas such as zoning, licensing, and permitting.  On top of which, presumably Canadian taxpayers will be footing at least some part of the bill for things like road paving, traffic diversion, and utilities upgrades and repairs.  Thus, the very “nonsense” which Mr. Gehry claims to abhor, is the same nonsense he himself will employ, in order to create this city of crumpled buildings.

The real nonsense of course is why Mr. Gehry continues to draw such attention and adulation, 20 years after the Guggenheim Bilbao was plunked down like a lumpy bit of skin-on mashed potato in Spain’s Basque Country.  In looking at that structure, along with the Disney concert hall, the pending Eisenhower Memorial proposal, his failed Corcoran and Paris and New York projects, and now the blighting of downtown Toronto, one has to ask the question: haven’t we seen all of this before?  Making blobby shapes and then covering them in a “skin” seems to be all that Mr. Gehry is capable of doing.  When it comes down to it, is he really such a creative genius, or isn’t he really just a one-trick pony in the world of architecture?

For now anyway, none of Mr. Gehry’s structures actually blot the downtown Washington cityscape,  and presumably the size of this commission in his home town will keep him far too occupied to try to build anything else here in DC for the foreseeable future.  And that being the case, perhaps I ought not to pity the Canadians so much.  Instead, I ought to feel a deep sense of gratitude toward them, for keeping this individual away from my city.  Though that being said, I would not wish a Frank Gehry design on my worst enemy.

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