Architecture Here and There

Hartford is the scene of the latest embarrassment of modern architecture. A story in the Hartford Advocate reports a lawsuit by the Connecticut Science Center, a museum designed by the firm of Cesar Pelli, whose design errors are costing the museum millions. In this case, 30 tons of steel were required to gird up the obviously unstable roof in the photograph at left.

As Malcolm Millais explains in his recent book Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture, architects push the envelop of the physically possible and then rely upon engineers to keep their absurdist monstrosities from toppling over. The engineers never get much credit when the champagne is flowing down the gullets of the delusional artist wannabes who rammed the crap through the committees that chose the arrogant architect in the first place. The engineers seem satisfied to lap up the sloppy seconds.

I reviewed Exploding the Myths here.

This sort of thing is happening over and over. Institutions that went out on an aesthetic limb in the hope that their president's picture would be printed large in glossy journals end up with stuff that doesn't work, wears out long before its time, or just falls down.

The institution is suing the architect. Let's hope it does not forget to defenestrate the members of its board who saddled the Science Center with this ridiculous heap in the first place. A lawsuit is a very good thing if it warns institutions that stupidity - that is, hiring a modern architect - can cost more money than they bargained for.

The city has received an applicaton from the owners of the site of the mostly razed Providence National Bank to raze the rest of it, which has been held up by a steel scaffold for about three years now. No doubt it's tedious to the owners, but to Rhode Islanders it's the vestige of one of the most beautiful buildings in the city, and the city should not have let them tear down most of the building to begin with - at least not without more substantial evidence that they had financing for their proposed new building - and a bond to replace the old one if the new one was not built.

This may be hard on the owner because issuing the permit was the city's dereliction of duty. In a fair world, the city would be required to make good its folly. As it is, the city should not permit the owner to rip down part of one of the most alluring street walls in the nation (see below for a broader view, including the bottom two, taken before the new Hampton Inn, with addition, seen in the first of the next three photographs). If the owner plans to build some day when the economy recovers, he must do so in keeping with promises initially made to retain this facade.

The application to raze what remains of a great beauty will be on the agenda of the Downcity Design Review Committee this coming Monday, Nov. 9, at 4:45 pm., at the Department of Planning and Development, 400 Westminster St., Fourth Floor.

This is right down the alley of the Providence Preservation Society. It earned a black eye to its reputation when it failed to go to the mat for the bank building when it first came under attack. If it does not raise cain at this final proposed atrocity, what's it good for? People should go to the DDRC meeting and shake the rafters.

The two shots below show the Westminster Street end of the Providence National Bank before it was demolished. In the first, it awaits its turn as the unlamented Buck A Book building comes down. In the second, you can see the Westminster facade from an upper floor of the old Hospital Trust Bank (now a RISD dorm) and you might just make out, to the left of the Turk's Head Building, a hint of the Weybosset Street facade that, today, is all the remains of the building. I criticize PPS for not going to the mat for this building, but I did not fight as hard for it as I ought to have, either, having been taken in by the propaganda for the OneTen Westminster project, soon to be (they said) the tallest building (condos) in the state, and how they'd keep the Weybosset facade of the bank, and on the Westminster side design the lower floors of the new facade in keeping with the city's masonry urbanity. ... And look what has happened. "And put up a parking lot"! Well, not yet, but damn them all anyway!

Illustrations: Above, cathedral at Léon, Spain; above second, canyon; below, first, Nikos Salingaros; second, fingerprint; third, daily

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Someday, people will realize that they can demand better buildings and cities, and they will do so. Extraordinarily rich and powerful people will sense a market in flux, will shudder, see their fortunes heading for the door, and tap their politicians on the shoulder. Architects will start making places people like. Look for a tipping point. It could have happened during the redesign process after Sept. 11, 2001. It did not, but it could have. Someday it will.

When it does happen, it will not be because millions suddenly read a book called A Theory of Architecture (2006) by architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros, or his Algorithmic Sustainable Design (due out at Christmas) or A Pattern Language (1977) by his colleague and mentor, the more widely known theorist Christopher Alexander. It will be because an event that everyone pays attention to suddenly lifts a veil on what we all have known instinctively, and what Salingaros and Alexander have been saying for years.

They have been saying that traditional architecture reflects mankind's natural inclinations.

In 2003, Salingaros said of Tom Wolfe's rollicking 1981 critique of modern architecture From Bauhaus to Our House: "He was there in New York, he saw what was going on, and he wrote a very nice book about it. Many people read it -- and it made no difference. So I asked myself, 'How can this be? This man said it, decades ago. People read it and they didn't wake up.' "

The problem with Wolfe's book, which is one of my bibles, is that it told everyone something they already knew in a funny, memorable way -- but readers had long since been bludgeoned numb by the ugly, ubiquitous Bauhaus offspring. Wolfe offered readers no positive alternative.

Salingaros provides such a positive alternative by expanding upon the natural insights of Alexander, a Brit born in Vienna whose longest stint has been at Berkeley. Salingaros, an Aussie of Greek parentage who teaches at the University of Texas at San Antonio, lays down the scientific basis for why nature and traditional architecture are so intimately connected, and why the connection makes people feel so much at ease.

"Drawing a very broad analogy between neurons, individual thoughts, and physical structures," Salingaros writes, "we mimic our own mind when we create coherent objects and buildings." His work "explain[s] our instinctive need to integrate or 'harmonize' our surroundings."

For Salingaros, this connectedness can be broken down into rules that help architects assemble buildings, using proportions and scaling mechanisms that reflect the science of fractals -- natural feedback patterns whose structures are logical but too irregular to decode with Euclidean geometry. You can observe fractals in clouds, trees, broccoli, snowflakes, fingerprints, conch shells, waves, the shapes that oceans' motion makes of coastlines, lightning, Hubble space photos -- patterns much more evident in the cathedral at Léon, Spain, built in 1255-1591, than in the chapel at Ronchamp, designed by Le Corbusier and built in 1953-55.

Architects needn't understand fractals to make beautiful buildings. Obviously not. The builders of cathedrals are not likely to have dared to confess a yen for science, and they knew nothing of fractals, which existed, were perceived, or at least sensed, even by boys, but had not yet been "discovered."

A building free of references to historical styles could be designed with this system, but "minimalist surfaces and edges negate the way human beings process information . . . and our body reacts with physical and psychological stress[:] raised blood pressure, adrenaline, raised skin temperature, contraction of the pupils -- all symptoms of our defensive mechanism against a threat."

Salingaros tells architects that buildings should be designed under the guidance of three laws of structural order. The third law is: "The small scale is connected to the large scale through a linked hierarchy of intermediate scales with a scaling ratio approximately equal to e ~ 2.7."

As law No. 3 only begins to suggest, there is far too much "Cognitive Rule 3 is analogous to Consequence 1a of the first law of structural order, and to Consequence 2a of the second law given in Chapter 1" for Salingaros's work ever to reach the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

Nevertheless, Salingaros is Moses offering wisdom from on high (whether that of God, science or Alexander). His stone tablets must be popularized, perhaps made into a movie. In fact, they already have been: scenes of the habitations of good guys and bad guys in decades of cinematic science fiction. They need only be clipped, spliced and set to music. Bach and Bartok, for example.

Nikos Salingaros has done no more than to describe what is right in front of us all, but the obvious often requires a bodyguard of trumpets.

[Next week, I expect to write a column about Salingaros's explanation for why modern architecture has survived in spite of its unpopularity and its unnatural qualities.]

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

Simply put, some buildings are more natural, and cities evolve through time in patterns that reflect the natural order of things. In the last century, architects and planners have learned to abort this process on greater or smaller scales. Nikos Salingaros (pictured at left), following through on the architectural theories of Christopher Alexander, shows us how to abort the modernists' abortion of Nature.

Most of my quotes come from A Theory of Architecture, written in 2006, but Salingaros has a new book coming out soon called Algorithmic Sustainable Design. He has collaborated with Alexander on the latter's newly published four-volume The Nature of Order.

Here is a link to Salingaros's Web site. To read his curricula vitae is to wonder whether he ever gets up from his keyboard to eat, and yet he travels all over the world to give talks in a variety of languages, including that of science.

Recently, a Planetizen poll placed Salingaros as No. 11 in the pantheon of urban thinkers. He came in ahead of Le Corbusier, the history's chief assassin of cities, so there must necessarily have been a judgmental aspect to the rankings.

Thursday's column will begin the introduction to Salingaros's thought by introducing his theories about the relationship of architecture to mankind's natural biological instincts. Next week (I hope), the column will continue with Salingaros, but focus more on his harsh assessment of modern architecture and how it has managed, cult-like, to brutalize the world we live in. Say tuned.

Can anyone help solve this mystery? The bollards in front of Providence City Hall disappeared several weeks ago. At first I was upset, but then, on second look, I really did not mind the look of City Hall without the bollards. But this evening, seeing the stimulus work eliminating ruts in the bus lanes of Kennedy Plaza, I worried that Mayor Cicilline might have had the idea of getting rid of the gorgeous granite slabs that pave the sidewalks around City Hall and replacing them with (what else but) more tedious gray concrete - for which work perhaps the bollards were temporarily removed.

Shudder!

You can see the bollards near the bottom of the photo at left.

Anyway, that's my nightmare. I hope someone out there can relieve my anxiety.

Illustrations: Above, Chicago's "White City," at the World's Columbian Exposition, in 1893; below top left, Dr. H.H. Holmes; middle left, Stanford White; next middle left, Evelyn Nesbitt; final middle left, Harry Thaw; bottom left, Walter Gropius

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What ever happened to the American Renaissance? Between 1870 and 1930 many U.S. cities improved their appearance with grand classical architecture in civic spaces. At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, in Chicago, some of the greatest architects in America planned and built a collection of 200 or so classical buildings arrayed around a set of lagoons festooned with ornate statuary. Unfortunately, the buildings were made of plaster.

Some 27 million visited the fair. That number was equivalent to half the nation's population at the time, or about 150 million today. A riveting history, "The Devil and the White City" (2004), by Erik Larson, describes how the fair turned Chicago into such a seething cauldron of newcomers that it provided the perfect cover for Herman W. Mudgett (alias Dr. Henry Howard Holmes) to build a labyrinthine hotel with hidden, soundproof chambers in which to torture and murder at least 27 girls. He was America's first serial killer.

Prominent among the White City's architects was the famous Gilded Age firm of McKim, Mead & White. In 1906, its partner Stanford White was murdered by Harry K. Thaw, a millionaire jealous of an affair White had had with actress Evelyn Nesbit, age 16, before she married Thaw. The murder occurred during a song, "I Could Love a Million Girls," at the premier of a revue staged at the rooftop café of Madison Square Garden (the old one), which White had designed in 1891. It is unclear whether the apartment with the famous "red velvet swing," a feature of White's erotic frolics, was in a tower of the Garden itself or at a nearby building. Stanford White's murder by Harry Thaw led to America's first "trial of the century."

None of this may be said to support the proposition that classical architecture soothes the savage breast. In fact, that was exactly the case made for classical architecture, not just in late 19th Century America but throughout its history of two and a half millennia. Nevertheless, the two sets of murders described above seem to have bookended the City Beautiful Movement -- the American Renaissance in overdrive -- that arose after millions of visitors to the White City returned home with new ideas about how their cities and towns could look.

Last Friday and Saturday, a symposium sponsored by the Providence Preservation Society, the Providence Athenaeum and the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design examined the American Renaissance. I attended two fascinating lectures delivered by a pair of celebrated architectural historians, Richard Guy Wilson, of the University of Virginia, and Ronald Onorato, of the University of Rhode Island.

Both historians had a lot to say about the American Renaissance nationally and in Providence. Wilson noted its roots in feelings of cultural inferiority to Europe, and the desire among artists and thinkers to craft a genuinely American style. Onorato described how two leading Providence architects -- George Champlin Mason Jr. and Alfred Stone -- boosted the influence of their city on the American Renaissance through their writing and organizing as design professionals.

Onorato guided his listeners on an imaginative tour of Providence and Newport with architects attending the 1883 annual meeting of the American Institute of Architects. They stayed at the Narragansett Hotel on Dorrance Street, in Providence, and I wonder whether they rubbed shoulders with members of the Providence Grays baseball team, who billeted at the same hotel. The very next year the Grays won the first World Series, defeating the New York Metropolitans.

All of this was interesting, but neither historian had much to say about the demise of the American Renaissance, except that 1) the movement bit off more than it could chew, and 2) tastes changed.

It would supercharge this column even more to declare that I think the American Renaissance was murdered -- either shot in the face like Stanford White by a jealous rival, or simply smothered in a soundproof room in Dr. Holmes's "World's Fair Hotel" for the crime of being beautiful.

In spite of the plausibility of both possibilities, I make no such charge. The American Renaissance was suffocated and shot in the face, but no single assassin is guilty. The Depression and World War II suffocated construction and left cities a mess after 20 years of neglect. Founding modernist Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus mates fled Nazi Germany and were handed architecture-school deanships on a silver platter. They killed U.S. architectural education, first at Harvard and then throughout the nation, where most schools were fashioned after L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.

[I would have added here, if I had thought of it, that the graduates of the revolutionized architectural curricula brought their revolt to the firms, the professional organizations, the journals, melding seemlessly with the nation's postwar Zeitgeist of "progress" through science, technology and organization. In the arrogance of their idealism (soon to fade), they were not above brutality in their politics of professional advancement. In this last stage the murder metaphor may reach considerable validity. ... Of course, what parts would I have had cut out in order to fit this in?]

The death of beauty in America over a couple of decades was in historical terms almost instantaneous. A revival could be just as swift if architects would re-examine outmoded and wrongheaded thinking that puts innovation ahead of beauty as the primary aesthetic purpose of architecture.

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

The symposium on the American Renaissance sponsored by the Providence Preservation Society brings to mind the two sets of murders that bookended the City Beautiful. That movement was sparked by the White City at the World's Columbian Exposition, or Chicago World's Fair. (Remember when cities vied for world's fairs rather than Olympic games?)

I think that, having mentioned murder, I will introduce Thursday's column with a set of photographs of Providence buildings that either escaped assassination, were wounded in assassination attempts, or were assassinated outright and no longer exist. Here goes:

Providence City Hall (1878) dodged a bullet when poverty prevented the city from carrying out the Downtown Providence 1970 Plan (1960):

One of the city's American Renaissance superlatives, the Providence Public Library (1901), was hobbled by a clunky attachment (not pictured) in 1951 or thereabouts:

Providence Place's opponents, mainly the dupes of suburban mall interests, tried to throttle the building by preventing its erection or (boring from within) seeking to use modernist interventions to water down its traditional design. Luckily, they failed. Beyond the mall are the original Westin (on which I cut my architectural criticism teeth) and its recent addition; to their right is part of the GTECH building, which signaled the modernists' successful attempt to wrest ugliness from the jaws of beauty. Despite the elegance of the mall, seen below from the balcony of the Governor's Office at the Rhode Island State House (another Am. Ren. icon) and Waterplace Park, Capital Center today is sadly diminished:

Finally, here is the Providence Police/Fire Headquarters in the process of being murdered, victim of Mayor Cicilline's shortsightedness. In its place, a parking lot: