Architecture Here and There

This video of just over four minutes shows London in 1903, shooting about 10 or 20 seconds at successive famous intersections with famous buildings as backdrop. Some at times of heavy traffic, some at times of light. Not sure I saw any cars until I definitely saw one almost four minutes in. That contrasts with lots of cars on the streets of San Francisco in a earlier video post - challenged (correctly, I think) as to its supposed 1905 date - because a 1906 clip showed far fewer cars one year later (to be sure, after the earthquake).

Apparently was shot by Thomas Edison. Anyhow, enjoy!

Nice head.

'Nuff said.

Actually, that's not a building but a fish. It could be a fish commenting on a building in the photo essay by Witold Rybczynski, from Slate, about modern marvels gone wrong. "Nice try" was the headline served up by the editors at Slate. The fish was served up to the TradArch list by architect Steve Mouzon. Visit his Original Green web site. It is a blobfish, but are you sure it isn't blobitecture?

Snap your fingers and it will be the next big thing on the Mall.

But please don't - it might come true.

Illustrations: Above, Leon Krier parody (1985) of London't historic Downing Street with modernist intervention (p. 113) (From The Future of the Past, 2009, W.W. Norton); below, front cover of book, with renovated Soldier Field, in Chicago

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In last week's column, "Speaking truth to preservation," I promised (or threatened) to introduce preservationists to a new book, The Future of the Past, that describes why they are so reluctant to address the greatest threat to beautiful old buildings and historic places.

The book, by architect and architectural historian Steven Semes, who runs the Rome Studies Program for the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, is subtitled "A Conservation Ethic for Architecture, Urbanism and Historic Preservation." It asks professionals in those fields to re-examine the ethic that many of them embrace today, which sees historic buildings as "documents of their time" with "little relevance to how we design buildings and cities today." It is an ethic that is robbing the public of its beautiful places.

My review of Semes's book ran on Dec. 17. I challenged architects and preservationists to read it. In last week's column I renewed that challenge. I will prod these professionals -- especially officials paid by, working for and accountable to the public -- to defend their beliefs.

"My aim in this book," writes Semes, "is neither to demonize modernist design nor to argue that traditional architecture is right and modernist architecture wrong. Rather, I want to set out as clearly as possible the differences between them and why I believe the two traditions are antithetical. They cannot easily be combined or hybridized in the way that Gothic and the classical were from the 15th to the 18th centuries, for example. In that case, the Gothic and Renaissance or Baroque styles were different in their respective formal languages but their underlying principles were fundamentally reconcilable. To the contrary, when traditional and modernist architecture come together, we find an opposition of aims as well as procedures, of fundamental premises as well as forms. This opposition has complicated all attempts to synthesize or harmonize new and old architecture in historic settings."

The average person instinctively perceives the incompatibility, but for decades practicing architects, architectural historians and historic preservationists have managed to convince civic leaders responsible for our built environment that in modern times only "modern" architecture is appropriate to build -- even in historic settings.

How did this view come to be dominant?

"The influential writings of [architectural historians] Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner presented the genesis of modernist architecture as the inevitable product of the spirit of the age," writes Semes, "and then retroactively identified as 'pioneers' those historical designers whose work seemed to point toward modernism."

It may be natural that architectural historians focus on buildings designed by architects who defy the conventions of architectural history. But to teach that the exception is more important than the rule in architectural history skews students' understanding of architecture's past and present. Most buildings, including those that tease out the creative potential of time-honored principles, fall well within architecture's conventions.

The evolution of architecture is far too complex to be categorized into stylistic "periods" with any degree of academic rigor. "Despite Pevsner's claims to the contrary," writes Semes by way of example, "it was because someone invented rib vaulting that the Gothic style emerged, not because the spirit of the time required it."

If historians, examining man's history in hindsight, are unable to use scholarship and language to agree on the significance of particular historical epochs long ago, how can architects be fairly expected to "express" their own era in the far blunter terminology of glass, steel and concrete?

The idea is absurd, and it is no surprise that the architecture arising from it is essentially absurdist, nihilistic and egocentric, as are the principles of historic preservation and architecture criticism that flow from it. (Anyway, if we do live in an era of turmoil and decadence, architecture should seek not to reflect it accurately but to change it.)

"Critics," writes Semes, "often praise a new work by saying, 'And here the architect calls into question what a door can be' -- or a window, a bathroom fixture, or a building. This calling into question of what might otherwise be taken for granted exerts a strong fascination [in] contemporary culture, but it precludes the formation of a stable visual language or set of models, without which there can be no consistent criteria for judging the merits of new designs or sustaining a formal tradition, to say nothing of maintaining dialogue between old and new in historic settings."

I hope these quotations from The Future of the Past will whet readers' appetite for upcoming columns on the book -- and even more important, encourage them to read the book itself.

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

Tomorrow's column is not what I had intended to write at the start. It is impossible to open to a stray page of Steven Semes's "The Future of the Past" without alighting upon a passage so pregnant with pungency that it must be quoted. It is therefore difficult to map out an argument on, say, why today's preservation ethic is destructive without getting sidetracked. So this column will morph into next week's column. How far the process will elongate is anyone's guess, but readers of tomorrow's column will understand that however delightful the journey may be (and it might well turn out to be excruciating for the more hardline of modernist-besotted preservationists), the book itself must be heaven.

Semes has the gift of elucidating ideas about architecture clearly and with panache. His sentences and paragraphs completed my simple feelings on the subject. It is almost as if I had never really thought about architecture. This is not an easy admission for a writer to make, but I make it with joy and gratitude. Semes's defenestration of the reigning preservationist orthodoxy, however diplomatic, must crush its adherents' sense of sophistication. The ideas of "architecture for our time" and of "buildings as documents of their time" are no longer sustainable as pillars of preservationist philosophy.

The cover of the book, left, features Soldier Field, in Chicago, whose recent renovation brings to mind an alien space ship landing on a Greek temple. A more sensitive treatment of an addition to a historic building is pictured on top. Brown University built an addition behind the John Carter Brown Library on its main campus green. The original, completed in 1904 and designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, is graced by the 1991 addition's elegant retreat, designed by Hartman-Cox, of Washington, D.C., from the original's Beaux Arts classicism.

I had figured I might be able to write two or three columns about "The Future of the Past," not including my review back on Dec. 17. Now it looks as if five columns or even ten might not be sufficient to mine the many nuggets of gold buried in them thar pages.

Illustrations: Above, William Morgan in the Beneficent Congregational Church; below, exterior view of Round Top, Waterplace Luxury Condominium towers, Antoinette Downing, doyenne of preservation in Providence and a founder of Providence Preservation Society

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William Morgan sounded a rousing trumpet for historic preservation at the Providence Preservation Society's annual meeting last Thursday. The setting was Beneficent Congregational Church, or "Round Top," as it's known, on downtown's Weybosset Street.

Round Top was built in 1809 to replace a plain, steepled meeting house with a more ambitious edifice topped by a gilded dome. It was renovated in 1836 by James Bucklin. He added to the dome a lantern with eight pilasters on which sits a roof surmounted by a Corinthian column. He replaced the slender Adamesque pillars of the original portico with massive, fluted pillars of Doric monumentality, among other exterior changes. In 1923, John D. Rockefeller Jr. hired his wife's brother, architect William Aldrich, to design a new, more ornamental chancel inside for the altar and pulpit, in front of which Will Morgan addressed the society.

Morgan's lecture was witty, erudite and pushed all the right buttons for his audience. He praised the society's role in preserving the architectural heritage of Providence, and even showed a slide of the ugly modernist condo towers at Waterplace Park. "Why do you laugh?" he wondered in mock puzzlement at the tittering -- the sort of moment that arrives in all speeches of this kind. "Buildings that look like everywhere else do Providence no favors," he said in concluding his lecture.

Morgan is a contributor to these commentary pages. We share tart, bantering disagreement on architecture by e-mail -- a disputatiousness that continues in more friendly tones when we share lunch. I keep up with his wry, amusing but debatable dispatches to editor Robert Whitcomb's "This New England" blog -- including his latest, a post in which he twits Round Top's enrichment by the Rockefellers, which, he says, "dismissed" its "quintessential New England spirit."

I do not intend to dispute this characterization, which Morgan repeated in his lecture. He is, after all, an architectural historian and I am just a newspaperman. But his comments reflect a scholarly historicism that most people don't see when they view buildings. They see buildings in whole, to be liked or disliked in their entirety, rather than as a series of changes over time, "authentic" or otherwise. Most visitors to Round Top see a beautiful church, and many would say of the Rockefeller renovations that they added to its beauty.

Architectural scholarship helps to untangle the history and meaning of buildings, but professional preservationists mistake its purpose, and in so doing undermine what should be their chief mission. They treat a city like a museum, fetishizing architectural styles as if preservation were a curatorial exercise rather than an effort to protect and promote civic beauty handed down by history.

Morgan's remarks, for all their erudition, largely catered to the membership's architectural populism -- its preference for traditional over modernist buildings. But the society, under a succession of boards and executive directors, has done very little in recent years to oppose buildings that "look like everywhere else." Its reluctance to challenge new architecture that erodes the historic character of the city that inspired the society's creation in 1956 has done Providence no favors.

Back then, as Morgan reminded his listeners, preservation was a hobby of little old ladies eager to preserve any house where George Washington slept. After the society's creation, its efforts came to include the preservation of whole neighborhoods, such as College Hill. Morgan and his family moved from Louisville, Ky., to Providence because, as he said, it wasn't one of those places "whose people bombed their own cities."

What Morgan left out is that preservation became a national movement -- pioneered in Providence by Antoinette Downing [left], among others -- because Americans feared, for the first time in U.S. history, that any building torn down would be replaced by something ugly. While old buildings are somewhat safer today, modern architecture still threatens their setting -- and the society does not seem to have a problem with that.

Will Morgan's lecture gives me an excellent opportunity to introduce Steven Semes's pathbreaking new book, The Future of the Past. The book will help PPS members understand why the Providence Preservation Society has lost its way. Why is a great institution so eager to protect ugly gas stations and produce terminals when it should be protecting beautiful old buildings from ugly additions and promoting new buildings that enhance the settings of the buildings it protects? Why isn't that gospel in Providence, of all places?

A discussion of these issues should help members and the public participate in choosing the society's next director -- a post vacant for almost a year. That discussion will begin with an examination of The Future of the Past next week.

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

William Morgan gave a rousing lecture at the annual meeting of the Providence Preservation Society last Thursday. Morgan had slides (or whatever they're called these days), but he omitted some very relevant material. He was witty and erudite, but - surprise, surprise! - refrained from twitting the organization for its continuing refusal to engage in the real work of preservation.

But Morgan (full disclosure: he's a friend of mine) did twit PPS's host, the Beneficent Congregational Church, known as "Round Top," in downtown, for its elaborate chancel, paid for in the 1920s by the Rockefellers.

If the more ornate chancel installed in 1923 is somehow inauthentic, or, as Morgan suggested, rips the church away from its New England roots, then what are we to make of James Bucklin's changes in 1836, which transformed an 1809 Adamesque church with a dome and a slender portico to a Greco-Egyptian church with a massive Doric portico and a dome with an ornate lantern on top - taken from the fourth century B.C. Choragic Monument to Lysicrates, in Athens. Is that inauthentic? What about the congregation's demolishing a steepled meeting house to build a domed edifice in 1809? How far back must we go before we reach the authentic? Or is all change inherently inauthentic?

Hmm.

And what about the glass-box shoved into the crook of Round Top in 2004, pictured above? I refrain in my upcoming column from twitting the church for that abomination, an elevator shaft, or PPS for applauding it - the photo is from its roundup of preservation "winners" that year. But you can read my complaint right here. By the way, in the background of the top picture is Paul Rudolph's Beneficent House, built in 1969.

Well, more such ramblings are coming up on Thursday, with the promise of yet more the following week.

Illustrations: Above, view taken from Biltmore Hotel of Waterplace Park, with GTECH at left and Waterplace Luxury Condominiums at right (with edge of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island headquarters just left of rightmost WP tower); below, view from Waterplace condo of GTECH; view from Waterplace condo of State House - note foundation of unbuilt BC&BS below.

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A grand total of five condos have sold since the two towers of the Waterplace Luxury Condominiums, featuring 193 units next to Waterplace Park in downtown Providence, opened in 2008. That bit of news in Saturday's Journal story by Christine Dunn comes as no surprise to me. But, to coin a phrase, "It's not just the economy, stupid!" Some 2,000 condos have sold in Rhode Island since the complex opened. There must be some reason, in addition to the economy, that only five were sold at this complex.

Some evidence for the reason why only five units have sold is on the Web site of the Waterplace. Although GTECH and the Blue Cross/Blue Shield headquarters are its neighbors, the existence of those two features of its environment is barely acknowledged in the project's promotional photography. (Of course, it has no choice but to come clean on its own architectural demerits.)

Of 29 photos that show views of the project, views from the project, or shots of nearby architecture, only one is of GTECH, one you can see it through a window, and only one shows the BCBS building, under construction, which today blocks views of the State House from many units. Of 84 clips in a video montage of the neighborhood and nearby retail and cultural amenities, the camera pans by GTECH only once.

Every shot highlighting Waterplace Park, alongside of which the complex sits, was taken either before GTECH was built or from an angle that excludes GTECH, which sits directly opposite the complex on the other side of the Waterplace basin.

Of course, few people buy housing on the basis of its architectural style, let alone that of its neighbors, but design certainly plays a role in most decisions to some degree. This attempt by the project to draw a cloak over its closest neighbors suggests that it hopes to delay as long as possible the moment when potential buyers will come face to face with the environment they contemplate spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to live in.

The details in the Journal suggest that this ruse has not worked very well.