Architecture Here and There

Illustrations: Above, the newly opened Maxxi museum of contemporary art, in Rome; below top, St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City; second, Zaha Hadid; third, Ara Pacis museum, Rome; fourth, Richard Meier inside Ara Pacis museum; fifth, Maxxi from above (model)

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The global art world converges on Rome this weekend, but truth and beauty also hope to sneak in to witness, softly, amid the glare.

Pope Benedict XVI will host 262 artists, leaders in their artistic fields, invited without regard to religious belief. Bono cannot make it, but Zaha Hadid will be there. Yes, the barbarians will meet the pontiff not just inside the gates of the Eternal City but inside the Sistine Chapel itself.

Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said in a Nov. 5 media event that the aim of the gathering is to "renew friendship and dialogue between the church and artists, and to spark new opportunities for collaboration. . . . We are a bit like estranged relatives; there has been a divorce." For a century the church "has very often content[ed] itself with imitating models from the past," and hesitated to ask itself whether there might be religious "styles that could be an expression of modern times."

I urge Pope Benedict and Archbishop Ravasi to visit the latest work by one of their guests. Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born, London-based deconstructivist architect known for her jagged and slithery modernism. She has designed the new Maxxi art museum, in the Flaminio district, thankfully well beyond Rome's historic center.

"At the entrance," says one review, "a concrete box that houses an upper-level gallery projects out above your head, its front tilted menacingly."

This passage, from Nicolai Ouroussoff's review "Modern Lines for the Eternal City," in Sunday's New York Times, concludes a description of the approach along Via Luigi Poletti to the museum. If the pope and the cardinal follow Ouroussoff's instructions, they should come upon the museum around a bend and feel the sudden sensation that, yes, indeed, the vandals are circling the city.

[The only major work of modernism to have breached the walls and invaded the historic center of Rome is the Ara Pacis museum, left, by Richard Meier, which houses the Ara Pacis tomb from ancient times. Rome's new mayor has promised to bow to popular sentiment for its removal, but has not yet acted.]

Some members of the TradArch list (a forum of architectural discussion) warn that Ouroussoff's essay represents a "pre-emptive strike against the Appeal to His Holiness Benedict XVI for the Return to an Authentically Catholic Sacred Art."

I alluded to the appeal at the beginning of this column. The appeal is "truth and beauty" trying to crash the party at the Sistine Chapel. The appeal states its case in the sort of phraseology appropriate when dealing with a personage known as "his holiness." Indeed, its sentiments will be easily recognized by the pope, who, as Cardinal Ratzinger under Pope John Paul II, warned in 1998 against the rock and pop stars, such as Bob Dylan, that the pontiff was consorting with at the Vatican.

"They had a message that was completely different from the one the pope was committed to," wrote Cardinal Ratzinger at the time. He asked whether "it was really right to let these types of 'prophets' intervene." No doubt he feared that John Paul, who was so tough in his opposition to the Soviet Union, was backsliding on art. Even a pope must sometimes play the good cop!

I have a feeling that when Benedict gets a load of Maxxi, his words as cardinal will come rushing back to him. He will recognize in the architecture of Zaha "Ha-Ha" Hadid and her fellow modernists the shade of the devil incarnate. He may have a word or two with his cultural counselor.

Notwithstanding the Maxxi museum's "front tilting menacingly," the devil's rhetoric does not clobber her victims on the head with a hammer but tickles them under the chin, trying to lure the weak into beginning their descent with an apple, or an art museum subtly designed to evoke, without being too obvious, a snake, or the turret of a tank that crushes the human spirit, or a vacuum that hoovers it up and hocks it into a spittoon.

[Many images online depict versions of the model of Maxxi as seen from above - snaky! - but I could find no photographs of how the finished product actually appears from above.]

The appeal begs the pope to rethink, to not fall victim to the smooth rhetoric of modernist propaganda that admonishes the church for "contenting itself with imitating the models of the past," and that it should seek "an expression of modern times." Those are Cardinal Ravasi's words, from above. But they could have been lifted from any textbook at almost any school of architecture.

The appeal reads in part: "Architecture and sacred art have spread through the followers of the famous masters, but have in the modern age been virtually prohibited among modern architects and in architectural education. . . . The recourse to historical styles, classical and 'sacramental' architecture does not pose any obstacle to the creative architectural process, but rather it directs the process to communicate the . . . truth that the church must spread. The message of Jesus Christ and the Gospels cannot be interpreted by subjectivity: They are established as truths of faith."

In short, there's a good reason for the divorce between art and religion. If a church is the spirit visible, then a papal embrace of the likes of Zaha Hadid should cause a global trembling among the faithful. Faith is not required to fear the ill effect of modern architecture on the spirit of mankind.

To sign the appeal to the pope, please visit my blog or www.appelloalpapa.blogspot.com/.

[The appeal is here. Please sign the appeal. There are over 1,200 signatures at this writing - only three, however, from New England last I looked. The more signatories there are by the time Pope Benedict meets with the artists this Saturday, the more likely his words for them may reflect the sentiments of the appeal.]

David Brussat is a member of The Journal's editorial board (dbrussat@projo.com). His projo.com blog is called Architecture Here and There.

Increasing concern that modern architecture contributes to the decline of Western civilization brings an increasingly desperate hunt for ways to return art and architecture, at least, to the realm of aesthetic sanity, if not sanctity. Last week I linked readers via this blog to an appeal, or petition, that will be submitted to Pope Benedict, urging him and the Vatican to "Return to an Authentically Catholic Sacred Art."

A link to that blog is here, and directly to the appeal, here.

My thanks to Nikos Salingaros for bringing the appeal to my attention. And to Nicolai Ouroussoff, of the New York Times, for writing a perfectly ludicrous column about the Maxxi museum in Rome that was fun to kick with both feet.

The Vatican has invited 262 artists from around the world, leaders in their respective artistic realms, to Rome, indeed into the Sistine Chapel itself (pictured above), for some straight talk from the pontiff on Saturday. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, and one isn't quite sure of the stance from which Benedict will be coming - will it be "back to the straight and narrow" or will he invite artists to help lead the One True Church straight to ... well, read the column.

The appeal may be submitted to the pope on Saturday, Nov. 21, the day of this meeting, but signatures to the appeal can be delivered later. However, the more signatories there are by the time Benedict addresses the artists on Saturday, the more sense his remarks are likely to make.

I hope that, given the attention paid in Rhode Island and around the world to all things Catholic, that the appeal will generate pressure for a return to tradition, at least in the realm of ecclesiastical architecture, from which the church has deviated, even in Rome. The forces of tradition were outwitted by those of modernism in the design process to rebuild the World Trade Center, and didn't do all that much better in the process of rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina. Maybe this time it will be different. But let's not all hold our breath!

Readers of the column on Thursday will note that my attempt to demonize modern architecture finally reaches its logical conclusion. No, I do not intend to stop there. As a devoted modernist at least in terms of punditorial structure, I must continue to push the envelope of argument. But I do wish to insist that readers should understand that I am not saying that all individual modern architects are actually the . . . well, read and enjoy the column on Thursday.

The photo above shows the Providence Public Library with the originally planned addition, at right, which is not identical to but is related closely to the original 1901 building. The library board should have been prosecuted for grand theft beauty then. Today, by forcing the public to enter the building through the appalling 1951 addition actually built, that is, through the basement on Empire Street rather than through the front door ("duh!") on Washington, the board has gotten away with grand theft beauty yet again. Public trust indeed. Few of the public ever see the most elegant parts of the library, now shunted aside. The PPL leadership hoards the loveliness to itself. Sack them all, I say. The evidence for the prosecution is below.

Book 'em, Danno!

You can see the lovely roofwork through windows on the second floor. Note the book motif in the cornice. All of the beauty in these photographs is more extraordinary in real life, and there's nothing to keep the public from viewing it, and from feeling righteous scorn for the library board for hiding it in back instead of placing it out front by inviting the public through the front door. There is a photo exhibit hidden up the stairs behind the (real) front entrance (now barred), so go in through the sterile, modernist entrance on Empire and up a floor and make your way to the old front lobby, where the stairs will gracefully carry you upstairs (if you ignore a sign that says "Staff Only") to see an exhibit with the following photograph:

Note that the husky frames of the men working atop the Industrial Trust Building block the view of the Westminster end of the Providence National Bank, erected in 1929. Now, of course, it has been razed. Visible beyond is the facade of the Weybosset end, added in 1950. It is the only part of the bank that survives, held up by a steel scaffold, and its possible demolition is the subject of a recent blog post with more lovely pictures of downtown Providence. Link to it here.

Also part of the exhibit is this photo of the garden behind the PPL long ago, where you could take a book and read, or have a picnic. No longer. Today the workers at PPL have a cheesy little balcony with tables overlooking the lovely parking lot, and beyond that (once the Police HQ was demolished a couple years ago), more glorious parking!

Sigh.

The photo above shows the sidewalk of Washington Street between Clemence and Mathewson streets not before but after - yes, after! - its recent repair. I repeat, this is the finished product, not a fright shot taken to demonstrate the need for sidewalk repair.

At left is a close up of one of the instances of asphalt "repair." I am told this is not temporary but the final work. I do not - I cannot - believe that. This looks like a patch job by kindergarteners that merely shifts the danger of the sidewalk from holes to mounds - it is no less unsafe than before, just unsafe in a different way. Plus, it's uglier. Far uglier.

Nearby, on Union between Washington and Fountain, the sidewalk was repaired in a professional manner, replacing broken bricks with fixed bricks in similar style and shade.

Anyone want to try to untangle the politics of sidewalk repair in Providence?

I would add, on a different topic but along the same stretch of Washington, that the owners of the fire-damaged Arnold Building have done an excellent job with the difficult task of covering up injuries to their building and posting signs to redirect retail patrons in an attractive manner. You can see the fine work in the photo at left. ... Alas, only kidding. Unfortunately, it takes money to do such things up right, though with proper advice a neater job could have been done.

Still, let's hope the Arnold will be saved rather than demolished.

(Illustrations: Above, the newly opened Providence Career & Technical High School, the city's only deconstructivist building, so far as I am aware; below first, Twickenham stencil from www.artofthestate.co.uk; second, the Vatican, view from atop St. Peters; third, Jacques Derrida; fourth, Michel Foucault)

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What type of community isolates its members from society, brainwashes them into villifying established ideas and replacing them with new ones couched in mystical jargon, then puts them, under strict discipline, back into society with a mission to seek its conversion?

A cult, of course!

Nikos Salingaros, whose theories of architecture I described on Nov. 5 in "Here's why nature nurtures tradition," wants to intervene in the cult of modern architecture. Okay, that's a step or two down from Moses, as I described him last week, but the world needs to be yanked out of its fascination with modern architecture, and Salingaros is almost a one-man team of intervention. Friends don't let friends drive modern architecture.

Salingaros has just returned from Rome, where he was glad to learn of an appeal (petition) to get the Vatican to issue an edict against a recent spate -- in Italy, God help us! -- of new Catholic churches of stark modernist design. If even the Vatican requires an intervention to free it from the apostasy of the modernist cult, then who is safe?

A mathematician at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Salingaros researches how the chaos of nature resolves into regenerative patterns. Human beings, human societies, cities, streets, buildings and all of the things that man produces reflect nature in patterns of growth that can be understood through the science of fractals.

Until the 20th Century, human growth and productivity, organized or organic, followed this natural way, for the most part unconsciously. Then came modernism, and, most visibly, modern architecture, whose cult has converted society as if it were a virus. In his book Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction (2004), Salingaros writes that natural regeneration "unites matter, establishing multiple connections on different scales and increasing the system's overall coherence; whereas deconstruction undoes all of this, mimicking the decay and disintegration of form."

Salingaros identifies modern architecture as a form of deconstruction. He raises his eyebrows at its adherents' self-justification in terms of "deconstructionist" thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Deconstructionists believe that tradition must be undermined before supposedly enlightened ideas (often Marxist) can prevail. Serious efforts to commandeer law schools and departments of English, at least, largely failed in the 1980s, but schools of architecture had swallowed an earlier version of this Kool-Aid by 1950.

Salingaros argues that celebrity architects such as Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, etc. -- modernism's "deconstructivists" -- reflect such thinking. "[D]econstructivist buildings," he writes, "resemble the severe structural damage such as dislocation, internal tearing and melting suffered after a hurricane, internal explosion, fire, or (in an eerie toying with fate) nuclear war."

In a behavior right out of Cult 101, modernists have tried to tie their own work to the science of fractals. "I was puzzled to read an entire chapter in [Charles] Jencks's book entitled 'Fractal Architecture' without hardly seeing a fractal. . . . I can only conclude that Jencks is misusing the word 'fractal' to mean 'broken' or 'jagged.' . . . He has apparently missed the central idea of fractals."

[The title of Jencks's book, as opposed to the chapter cited by Salingaros, is The New Paradigm in Architecture (2002).]

Recent modern architecture in Providence has shied away from such extremes, except for one building. Unfortunately, that single exception is a school, the city's new Career and Technical High School -- a frightful thought indeed.

If I were to tell most modern architects I know that they were part of a cult seeking to convert the world to an architecture of decay and destruction, they would look at me as if I had two heads. At the same time, I've heard many tales of horror from students in architecture schools that confirm Salingaros's description of them (especially studio classes) as star chambers of humiliation designed to brutally snuff out independent thought.

"Architecture schools," Salingaros writes, "are training graduates who are indoctrinated into deconstructivist philosophy, yet are unable to design a simple building fit for human sensibilities. . . . Our civilization appears to be so complacent with its recent technological progress that it does not recognize threats to its very existence. . . . None of this is even remotely perceived by either practicing architects or students who would become architects because the discipline has become entirely self-referential." That is so totally true.

So much so that even the Vatican nods as diocese build churches that symbolize falling down rather than looking up. Architecture is what we all look at every day, and in ways that other scientists are studying it can affect our mood -- and maybe our ability to reason and to love. That is scary. Is anyone listening? It suddenly occurs to me that Nikos Salingaros is actually Paul Revere.

(Readers can go to my blog to find a link to petition the Vatican against modernist apostasy.)

[Articles on Nikos Salingaros can be linked to here, from which is a link to lists of his books and his lectures.]

David Brussat is a member of The Journal's editorial board (dbrussat@projo.com). His projo.com blog is called Architecture Here and There.

(Illustrations: Above, at center, just left of the Industrial Trust, is the One Ten Westminster condo project, to make way for which the Providence National Bank building was (mostly) demolished in December 2005; below top, the Westminster Street end of the bank just prior to demolition; below bottom, the Weybosset Street facade that remains. Both designed by Howe & Church, and built in 1929 and 1950 respectively. All photos in this blog entry courtesy of Art In Ruins web site.)

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The Downcity Design Review Committee delayed action on a request to demolish the remaining facade, on Weybosset Street, of the Providence National Bank building. According to a report by Providence Journal staff writer Philip Marcelo, "at least three of the four" members of the committee who attended the meeting expessed doubt about the need for demolition - which the owner argued was required because deterioration had turned the facade (supported by a steel scaffolding) into a safety hazard.

"[Committee] Vice Chairman Clark Schoettle," Marcelo wrote, "agreed with opponents that the [the owner] had failed to maintain the facade. He noted that the committee had granted the developer permission to demolish the [building] only on condition that the facade remained. 'This seems like demolition by neglect,' he said."

Schoettle is director of the Revolving Fund of the Providence Preservation Society.

I had not realized that the owner - Jeremiah O'Connor III - was also a member of the DDRC. He recused himself from the decision to table a vote on demolition until next month. He was asked to get an assessment of the facade by a structural engineer.

The story confirmed that O'Connor wants to turn the site into a parking lot.

Last week I wrote a letter to the Providence Preservation Society asking whether it intended to oppose demolition. The reply was indeterminate. However, it appears that PPS must have stood tall at the DDRC meeting on Monday.

A recent visitor to Rome tells me that efforts are afoot to petition the Pope to issue some sort of encyclical or edict or whatever urging that Catholic institutions such as churches and diocese avoid modern art and architecture. Presumably, the grounds are that such work tends to undermine the Church, whose strength arises from its traditional values.

The petition, or appeal as it is known, is linked here.

I haven't had time to investigate the mechanics of how you vote by actually clicking on the link myself, but I gather that "Subscribe here" (as it says at some point) does not mean that you are sending all of your earthly belongings to the Mother Ship.

I will click the link now and report back ...

I am back. I clicked on "Subscribe here" and a page appeared with instructions to click an e-mail address and write your name, your professional affiliation and your address if you want to sign the appeal. When you click, a blank e-mail comes up, so you can write down all the information any way you want, and add a lengthy essay about why you want to sign if you are so moved.

I was not so moved, but I did provide the information, and so expect to see my name inscribed upon an official papal appeal for reason and beauty.

Signatures will be accepted after Nov. 21, but the pope meets with a large international delegation of artists in the Sistine Chapel on Saturday, and a large number of signatories to the appeal may affect what he will say to them.

All readers should sign the appeal, unless you are a masochist and you read this blog in order to pick at the scabs that line your soul. Even you should sign the appeal, if you want your scabs to disappear and your spirit to be eligible, someday, to rise. (I do not claim, hereby, the authority to actualize such an eventuality, but He who does may be watching...)