A friend wrote recently. He was responding to my observations about the role of public spaces in sustaining a robust sense of solidarity.
Good architecture is a public good, he writes, and “bad architecture is regressive. There will always be bad buildings because there will always be budget constraints and mismanagement by building committees. But the boondoggles foisted on the public by celebrity architects are thoroughly inaccessible to those outside the intellectual class.
He goes on to say, “It’s not a new observation; Tom Wolfe made the case in The Painted Word years ago: ‘Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until . . . it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture . . . and came out the other side as Art Theory!’”
This is not, however, just a matter of academic absurdity and aesthetic malpractice. It has an effect on our political culture. “If you’re a lower or middle class American, you can stand in Grand Central and marvel at the technical expertise, physical sacrifice, and artistic genius that the station required. You also sense that the people responsible for such a place had both confidence and hope in the future. They also wanted to transmit something to that future, to tell us something of the natural virtues required to put up such a building.”
I think that’s quite right. Modernist and postmodernist architecture are the perfect ideological tools for isolating and demoralizing ordinary people, making society more pliable for the dominant elites who can theorize and marinate in irony.
January 30th, 2013 | 3:38 pm
Garrison Keillor remarked that the Catholics in Lake Wobegon knew how to build a church: they hired people who could do the job and paid what it cost. The Lutherans didn’t want to be ostentatious, so they’d form a committee of guys who had experience putting up sheds and knew about drainage.
January 30th, 2013 | 4:10 pm
In the Chicago area I pay attention to the number of grand old buildings of the early part of the 20th century — mainly banks and churches — that are now either abandoned or being used for something far different than their original intent.
The grand old bank buildings are more likely to be just abandoned, as the need for grand buildings in an era of electronic banking is a lot less.
The churches are sometimes on their third or fourth congregation. I look up at the top to see what name was engraved in stone; the current inhabitant usually just has a banner extolling its name and congregation, or maybe on a simple sign planted in the ground in front.
January 30th, 2013 | 4:32 pm
G.K. Chesterton said that “Architecture is the most practical and dangerous of the arts. Other forms of art we can be said to have to live with but architecture we have to live in.” The barren and sterile structures that we often associate with contemporary architecture are often far from conducive to truly human dwelling places for work, study, travel, transit, leisure, worship and life. Yet, in the same way that we are unwise to totally discount modern and post-modern art, we are wise to seek a dialogue or even a communion with post-modern architecture–a dialogue that retains what is good in contemporary architecture. The art of William Congdon is evidence that a true dialogue between the sacred and contemporary secular, one that even redeems and reclaims the secular for its own, is possible.
Interesting developments in France, recently documented in multiple posts on this very blog, verify that the Cube and the Cathedral are unnecessarily mutually exclusive. I neither envision nor desire a cubed-cathedral, yet an architectural equivalent to Congdon’s abstract-modern-sacred-art is a welcome promise–if anyone has the audacity to build.
January 30th, 2013 | 4:43 pm
I agree but I think it’s important not to get carried away. These things cost money. My preference would be to commission a third party, possibly a local community board, allowing them to collect revenue from users (e.g., train fares, retail space rental) so they can budget accordingly.
January 30th, 2013 | 10:35 pm
A very interesting short article. Where did you comment on public spaces? Where can I read more on this subject, especially the topic of your final paragraph?
January 31st, 2013 | 8:02 am
In the Autumn 2010 issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple writes (city-journal.org) :
“In what was once the beautiful small city of Worcester … part of the graceful complex of ecclesiastical buildings next to the cathedral was destroyed in order to erect the Giffard Hotel, a concrete building in the style of Le Corbusier that would have gladdened the hearts of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu.”
The article is entitled, “The Vandals in Retreat” and ends on a hopeful note perhaps inspired by Dr. Dalrymple’s wife. Once read it is remembered.
January 31st, 2013 | 8:09 am
“For a Christian humanist … the best of human endeavor is as much infused with divine presence as is the natural world. … Indeed, more so, since nature for him is as fallen as man and required ‘salvation’ by means of positive human intervention, whether in the form of agriculture or architecture.”
From: “Timeless Cities, An Architect’s Reflections on renaissance Italy” by David Mayernik
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