Architecture Here and There

To this typical complaint, my typical reply . . .

I received an e-mail, called "Heresy," from Jerry Kler about my last column, "Appeal to the Vatican for artistic sanity." Because the e-mail struck me as an unusually typical representative of the genre of objection to my unapologetic and unforgiving opposition to modern architecture, I offer both the e-mail and my reply.

I have invited Mr. Kler to reply to my reply. He says he will, and I will publish that, and his reply to my reply to his reply, etc., if it goes that far. (Isn't this sort of dialogue what journalism is supposed to be all about, and why it is protected by the Constitution?)

The e-mail:
When the Pantheon was designed and built, they were committing the same travesty that you allude to in your article. It would have been better to have a small cave without the soaring and uplifting space. Why do anything different than had been done by the cave dwellers?

The first time I saw the Pantheon as well as St. Peters, I was exhilarated by the forward thinking of the design and how brilliant the conception which leapt ahead of what other buildings were.

Is it so wrong to build for the time we live in while at the same time appreciating and preserving the buildings of the past? Your thinking, which I understand, condemns what is different as satanic. To never leave one period in history is to deny any progression of thinking.

Rather than vehemently disagree with your premise, I was disappointed in the narrowness of your thinking, which does not allow any artistic coexistence. Bravo to the Pope for at least trying to reconnect art and the church, which were so connected in centuries past.

(Signed) Jerry Kler

My reply:

I do not condemn what is different as satanic. I condemn was is purposely different enough to contradict and contrast with what exists as satanic. That's a very big and important difference.

I am not against modern architecture that fosters continuity, but so little of it does so, or even seeks to do so. There is no earthly reason for architecture to seek to "challenge" its users. Mostly that turns out to mean architecture that is hard to build, hard to use, hard to maintain, hard to look at and hard to love, and therefore doomed to a short life.

Continuity is a major tool of building civic space that is beautiful, strong, useful and comfortable for most people. Traditional and classical architecture are all about evolving, not copying. It evolved for centuries and even millennia until modernism stopped it cold. Traditional architects stand on the shoulders of the great so as to move forward with what is the best of the past while adopting new uses, new technologies, even new styles, etc. - without the need for genius to create beauty, but with the potential for greatness when genius participates.

The number of traditional buildings that literally copy those of the past is very, very small. Despite the mischaracterizations of modernists, traditional architects have never sought to remain stuck in the past, but see the future as a continuation of the past, as it is in all natural growth and most of mankind's productions, including most art.

It is modernism itself, not traditional architecture, that fosters a "frozen in time" look. Modernists call it design "for our time," but unlike timeless traditional work whose continuity transcends historic periods, the work of modern architects is often dated as soon as it is completed. You can always tell by looking whether a modernist building was built in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, etc., whereas it is not always easy to pin traditional buildings even to a particular century.

Just because the 20th Century was the "Machine Age" doesn't mean that everything must be designed to be like a machine. Some things can and should be softer and more intimate. Arguably, architecture is one of them. Modern architects have long refused to compromise with this obvious truth.

And finally, it is not just a matter of taste. Judgment requires us to choose among ways of building that are better or worse, on a sliding scale, for mankind and his habitations, big and small. To call it a matter of taste is a tactic for avoiding the need to choose. To call it a matter of taste is an abdication of that responsibility. It is not a responsibility of most people but of people with power in architecture. Modernists adopt this tactic because they understand that most people would not choose their way.

Satanic might be an exaggeration, but enough lives have been worsened by Le Corbusier and his acolytes, and those who have "evolved" modernist styles since then - and have actively blocked a level playing field for tradition - that modernism's serious condemnation is long overdue.

Actually, its condemnation is frequent and powerful, but ignored by the profession.

It is not a surprise that you mistake my meaning. It is the modernist propaganda that regularly and purposely mischaracterizes what traditional architecture is all about, and almost without rebuttal in schools, journals or professional societies of the architectural establishment.

I don't blame you for your attitude; it is typical. But I will be interested in hearing your reaction to a different way of expressing what traditional design is all about. My fear is that you will simply neglect to respond. That is the typical response of modernism. Close the ears. Batten down the hatches.

So, with every hope for openness and dialogue, I am waiting...

Sincerely, David Brussat

Travel magazine's ten ugliest buildings in the world

A slide show of the ten ugliest buildings in the world, according to the editors of Travel magazine, is here. Not sure these are in any particular order, but my choice for ugliest is the one I chose to place up above - Federation Square, in Melbourne, Australia. A reader might understandably wonder how I made that choice, or for that matter how the editors of Travel made their choices, given the abundance of modernist buildings to choose from.

Indeed, what causes some modernist buildings to get placed on this list and others to be nominated for the Stirling Prize? In fact, the architect of one of these buildings had two buildings nominated for this year's Stirling, and one of them won. The difference between prizewinning modernism and the dreck of "worst ten" lists is impossible to discern.

Keep in mind that a history of two or three thousand years of traditional architecture preceded the age of modernism. None of those millions of buildings made it onto the list of what the editors of Travel thought were the world's ten worst. And those that did make the list include buildings decades long in the tooth. Even when architectural journals select their lists of worst buildings, they rarely include any traditional ones.

An exception was this year's Carbuncle Award, in Britain. One of the buildings was a new Poundbury fire station - but you know it was selected only because it was rumored to have been designed by Prince Charles himself.

Yes, they can hate Charlie, but they can't find any buildings the prince would like that are worse than any of the ones they believe must be built in our modern era. Does that say more about them or their era? Do you really want to know?

A local tidbit: One of the ten worst here is the Pompidou Center, in Paris. The editors note that the design (by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano) was the winner of an international design competition, and the editors wonder, if the winner was this ugly, what the second-place design looked like. In fact, the second-place winner was our own Friedrich St. Florian (working, I believe, with Norman Foster). St. Florian designed Providence Place and the World War II Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

St. Florian's second-place finish in such a prestigious competition was surely a milestone in his career, yet so far as I am aware, no illustration of the design has appeared in any of the restrospective exhibits after his retirement from RISD a couple of years ago. Interesting.

Pope Benedict meets with world artists

Illustrations: Above, artists at the Vatican on Saturday; below left, Pope Benedict upholds four pontius - oops, I meant palm - pilots in a photo from January.

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Almost all of the artists who accepted invitations showed up at the Sistine Chapel to hear Pope Benedict discuss art. As expected, Bono did not show up. Zaha Hadid showed up, as expected, and so did Daniel Libeskind, another architect who specializes in a sort of "glass half empty" worldview - that is, whose buildings seem eager to confuse you, depress you and even tear you down rather than lift you up.

The New York Times report on the meeting is here. It does not mention the Appeal to the Pope, and the pope does not seem to have had much to say that the artists could not spin as him doffing his pointed hat to them. No hint that the artists thought they might now be expected to be less dispiriting and more uplifting. But that is the New York Times. I will let readers know if I read a report of the meeting that uncovers something more unexpected. For now, disappointment reigns.

Update: Here's something a little better from a Finnish newspaper: "Through your art," said Benedict, "you yourselves are to be heralds and witnesses of hope for humanity." But he warned them to guard against "seductive but hypocritical" beauty that creates "indecency, transgression or gratuitous provocation."

The 'apartheid regime' in design education

This post should be of interest in the Creative Capital. The Rhode Island School of Design is one of the top design schools in the world. But design education is almost wholly modernist and excludes education in other stylistic forms. A more diverse reality exists in the actual market for design, and by ignoring it design schools do their students, and the rest of us, a disservice.

In a keynote speech at the conference of CUMULUS (International Association of Universities and Colleges of Art, Design, and Media) in Bratislava, Slovakia, on October 12, called "Am I Just Seeing Things or Is the Modernist Apartheid Regime Still in Place?" and linked to here, Jan Michl (left), a professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, delves deeply into the problems this has caused for design education and design itself. The situation in design education closely parallels that of architectural education. This essay is long, but definitely worth reading. (See excerpt below.)

A new gallery, RISD Expose, which I popped in to visit on Friday evening, is run by RISD students at 232 Westminster Street. The students themselves embrace diversity of design - at least when they market their own work. On display was plenty of figurative art, if not plenty of traditional figurative art. I only looked at one price tag - for a nifty little wood stool. It was on sale for over $1,000. They jump into the market with both feet. Good luck!

The illustration on top comes from an expanded version of the "Apartheid" lecture, with copious notes. It can be linked to here. Jan recently sent me a pleasant e-mail about my columns. He has some other essays in a range of languages - English, Norwegian, Czech, Slovak and Spanish - on his web site, which is here.

"We should then see, and teach also our students to see, the modernist aesthetic for what it all the time has been: namely a strikingly novel, creative contribution to the stylistic pluralism of this age. It is the fact of this pluralism - not just its latest manifestation - that design schools should embrace. Embracing pluralism would abolish the only thing wrong with the modernist aesthetic - namely its apartheid ambition. This would finally open for modern - as against modernist - design schools."

Column: Appeal to the Vatican for artistic sanity

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)

* * *

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.

Coming up: Should the sacred arts be sacred?

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.

Grand theft beauty

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.

Your tax dollars at 'work'

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.

Column: Time to intervene in the modernist cult

(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.

Reprieve for the Providence National Bank facade, for now

(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.)

* * *

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.

Is the pope Catholic? Maybe, but watch his churches . . .

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...)

Coming up: Salingaros closing in on mod cult

I have used the above photograph, of the newly opened Providence Career and Technical Academy (or High School), to illustrate "deconstructivist" architecture. It is apparently the only major (or minor for all I know) example of it in the city. This shot was taken about a year ago, so I hope to get a more up to date shot before the column runs.

By the way, the new school sits near Classical High School and Central High School, which form a complex. Classical High is Brutalist and Central High is Classical. I won't tell which requires your kid to take a test to get into.

The Journal's digital photo archive had only one image of the exterior of the new school, and it appears to have been shot so as to reveal as little as possible of the absurdity of the school's architecture. An image of the school will appear at the top of my Thursday column about the feelings toward modern architecture of Nikos Salingaros.

Part of his take on modern architecture is that its staying power arises from its success as a cult. Since cults notoriously seek to flummox supposed opponents of the cultish agenda, the idea that the Journal might be part of a plot to cover up the assininity of this $90 million (yes, $90 million) investment of public funds by the city will naturally occur to the reader. I am here to deny any such plot.

Seriously, Dr. Salingaros is on the way to rouse us from our slumbers. "The modernists are coming! The modernists are coming!" He is a true hero of our error - oops, I mean era. Read more about it on Thursday.

Engineers failing to gird up failing modernism

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 just one such example, 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.

Make them keep it standing, however long

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!

Column: Here's why nature nurtures tradition

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

* * *

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.