Last week, Andrea Harris wrote:

For those who were born too late and therefore are under the impression that the Seventies was a gloriously innocent time of day-glo colored discoball party fun fun fun, that decade was actually when the American character was sunk in neurotic depression. We ran from Vietnam like a bunch of scared big girls. The economy sucked. Cynicism and selfish, destructive behavior was rampant. Cars were hideous junk painted ugly "earth tones" like crap brown, condensed-milk yellow, ketchup-stain red, and garbage can green. (My father's giant boat of a '73 Ford LTD was that color. Driving it was like trying to pilot the Hindenburg on the ground.) Fashions made men and women look like clowns. (Two words: plaid pantsuits.) The divorce rate, the drug-crime rate, the venereal disease rate -- everything bad went up.

And plenty of it landed in your living room along the way--James Lileks reposts the entire original "Interior Desecrations" site from the late 1990s, the inspiration for his best selling book a few years later. For the full visual horror of the 1970s at its plastic craptastic worst, click here and keep scrolling until your eyes bleed. For my Electronic House magazine review of his 2004 book, click here.

"What if the National Portrait Gallery had the graffiti it showcases in the exhibit vandalized on the side of their building? It would be helpful to have even a small amount of education."

"Prepare now for the coming post-stimulus hyperinflation with these million-dollar bills featuring Barack Obama's picture! Why wait until the government gets around to issuing them in 2011, when they'll buy a single measly gallon of gas?"

I must say, hopefully our real million dollar notes will look as sharp as these Weimar Republic bills--which, with their Bauhaus designed at least looked cool, even if they were essentially worthless due to hyper-inflation.

The perfect place to watch the videos we linked to in the previous post: James Lileks gives thanks to the hotel that defined the 1970s--and sadly, vice versa: the Gobbler.

The Boston Herald notes, "Boston City Hall named world's ugliest building"--and note the usual "start from zero" aspects of the 1969 building:

"That's gotta go," said Ivette Arenas of San Francisco, when it was pointed out to her on her way to the Common. "You have some of the best (buildings), and right here you have the worst."

"It is a pretty ugly building," agreed Carol Sue Graves of Orange, Va., as she walked to Faneuil Hall.

An example of the "New Brutalism" school of design, City Hall was seen as a clean break from Boston's past, said Jeff Stein, dean of the Boston Architectural College.

"They were looking for something new and startling," Stein said. "And boy did it succeed."

In From Bauhaus To Our House, Tom Wolfe wrote about the similarly Corbusier-inspired Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, built in 1955 and mercifully demolished less than two decades later:

Millions of dollars and scores of commission meetings and task-force projects were expended in a last-ditch attempt to make Pruitt-Igoe habitable. In 1971, the final task force called a general meeting of everyone still living in the project. They asked the residents for their suggestions. It was a historic moment for two reasons. One, for the first time in the fifty-year history of worker housing, someone had finally asked the client for his two cents' worth. Two, the chant. The chant began immediately: "Blow it....up! Blow it....up! Blow it....up! Blow it....up! Blow it....up!" The next day, the task force thought it over. The poor buggers were right. It was the only solution. In July of 1972, the city blew up the three central blocks of of Pruitt-Igoe with dynamite.

A similar sort of aesthetic euthanasia seems long overdue in Boston.

In a brief slide show, the BBC explains which fonts are chosen for which movie posters and why.

Many fonts are chosen to perform workaday service on movie posters. But only one has gotten the offer to star in a movie of its own:

(Found via a Google search on "Helvetica Postrel", which, speaking of movies, has quite a Damon Runyon-esque ring of its own.)

Maggie's Farm links to "a righteous attack on Le Corbusier" by Roger Scruton in City Journal.

I took my own shots at Monsieur Jeanneret a few years back, in a long, long post with heavy assists from Tom Wolfe and City Journal's own Theodore Dalrymple.

Bing and Bob are nowhere to be found, but Michael Totten has an amazing assemblage of photos and stories from the road, in a locale that combines Christianity, Islam, and beautiful architecture amidst plenty of Soviet-era concrete monstrosities.

Stefan Beck quotes a terrific Theodore Dalrymple anecdote in the middle of his post on the “abortion as art” scandal involving Yale senior Aliza Shvarts:

Anyone seeking a little comic relief in the wake of Yale University’s alternately sickening and embarrassing “abortion as art” scandal need look no further than Terry Zwigoff’s 2006 comedy Art School Confidential. It’s very loosely based on a comic by Daniel Clowes, which appears in this anthology and is in many ways superior to the film as a satire of the mind-bending pretentiousness and inanity one finds in even the finest fine arts academies.

As I recall, one panel in Clowes’s original depicts the “old tampon-in-a-teacup trick”: Pressed for time? Cobble together some loaded imagery and insist with a straight face that it “raises questions” about something or other. “Raising questions” has enjoyed a lucrative career as the art world’s biggest con. When the shock-schlock “Sensation” exhibition appeared at the British Royal Academy of Art, Theodore Dalrymple asked its chief of exhibitions, Norman Rosenthal, what value he saw in a giant portrait, made up entirely of tiny handprints, of the child-murderess Myra Hindley. Right on cue, Rosenthal said that “the picture raises interesting questions.”

Dalrymple asked what those might be, politely reminding Mr. Rosenthal that “it must be possible to formulate them in words.” A picture is worth a thousand of them, after all—but in this case the ratio turned out to be more like 1:1, if a sharp intake of breath may count for a word.

Of course, most great works of art do raise questions, but they do so in addition to (for instance) being beautiful, or telling a story, or demonstrating proficiency of some kind. Bad art can rarely claim to do anything but raise questions. Yale senior Aliza Shvarts’s menstruation videos supposedly address “the ambiguity surrounding form and function [sic] of a woman’s body.” If, God forbid, that sounds to you like it might mean something, take a moment to pick it apart. What ambiguity? Is there some fundamental disagreement about whether the female form should function as a tube of red paint?

The fact that ridiculing the project and its unintelligible justification seems redundant is entirely the point. At any point in this project—which at best is a black eye for Yale and a waste of our time and at worst may lead to some lunatic assaulting Ms. Shvarts—an adult could have and should have stepped in and said, “This proposal is nonsense. There is nothing artistic about it and the questions it ‘raises’ are a figment of your imagination. You’re embarrassing yourself and your school.” None did.

Probably for about the same reason that Roger Kimball describes here:

A juror in the obscenity trial over Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious photographs the S&M homosexual underworld memorably summed up the paralyzed attitude Orwell described. Acknowledging that he did not like Mapplethorpe’s rebarbative photographs, he nonetheless concluded that “if people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.”

“If people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.” It is worth pausing to digest that terrifying comment. It is also worth confronting it with a question: Why do so many people feel that if something is regarded as art, they “have to go along with it,” no matter how offensive it might be? Perhaps—just possibly—Aliza Shvarts has reminded us how untrue that statement is. If so, we are in her debt.

Of course, for those who think that a genre of "art" on the cusp of its second century is still "modern", you too can apply to the Yale Art School!

Update: Related thoughts from Maggie's Farm; be sure to follow the links.

Last week, when I began assembling the B-roll footage and still photos for Wednesday's Philip Johnson video, I had a pretty good handle on what was readily available on the 'Net (and had ready access to any still photos I'd need from my own collection of books on modern architecture, if they weren't already online). Last July, I linked to a video containing shots of the Glass House, and I knew that clips of Charlie Rose interviewing Johnson were online. But stumbling across this YouTube clip was quite a moment of serendipity:

Sontag's arch Beat Poet-style patter, overdubbed as she's filmed driving through Manhattan, is a scream. But what a fox she was in the early 1960s, in her New Frontier Jackie Kennedy togs and hairstyle. She was right around 30 at the time; her much harsher looking appearance a decade or so later is a reminder of this John Derbyshire truism regarding how women of the far left often age.

Sontag's 1975 essay, "Fascinating Fascism", was a necessary attack on Leni Riefenstahl's attempt to rehabilitate her image 30 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany. But did Sontag know, when she was standing next to Johnson on top of the world in his Seagram Building offices, that she was standing next to someone who would have been thrilled to be another Albert Speer?

By the time of his death in 2005 at the venerable age of 98, Philip Johnson was arguably America's best known architect, having designed his famed "Glass House" in 1949, and worked with Mies van der Rohe on Mies's Seagram Building a few years later. The former was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1997; the latter dubbed "Building of the Millennium" by the New York Times.

But Johnson's puckish demeanor in his later years, which earned him decades of good cheer from fellow Manhattan elites, hid a dark journey through the liberal fascist politics of the 1930s, which culminated in his cheering on the Nazis as they marched through Poland in 1939. "We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle", he would write to a friend at the time.

At the start of the 1930s, Johnson was an admirer of the socialist-leaning architects of Germany's Bauhaus, as he founded the newly born Museum of Modern Art's architectural department, and helped put modern architecture on the map in the US. Apparently after witnessing a Hitler rally in Potsdam in 1933, Johnson was immediately attracted to the Nazis. That moment sent Johnson on a seemingly strange journey: shortly thereafter, he would leave MoMA to seek employment with first Huey Long and then Father Coughlin, before ultimately winding up cheering the Nazis on at the start of WWII.

During that same period though, while Johnson openly admired the Nazis, he befriended the last director of the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe, even as the Nazis were shuttering the design school's doors. Returning to MoMA in the 1950s and establishing himself, via his famed Glass House, as a known architect in his own right, as Hilton Kramer noted in the mid-1990s, and Anne Applebaum shortly after Johnson's death, Johnson did a near-thorough job of tossing his radical past down the memory hole. At the least, most of his fellow Manhattan elites didn't lose too much sleep over it.

And yet, comparing Johnson's past with the lost history of the 1930s described in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, in retrospect Johnson comes across as a sort of dark version of Woody Allen's Zelig character, appearing alongside several of the fascist left's most important figures in both the US and Europe during the Depression.

(More video blogging found here, incidentally.)

This is hysterically funny on all sorts of levels: The New York Times has an article titled--I think with a straight face--"Parent Shock: Children Are Not Décor". From the headline on, the theme is Bobos in Paradise Yuppie parents who discover, the hard way, a basic and incontrovertible fact of life that in less enlightened times was once considered common sense: Little kids and delicate modernist furniture and decorations are not compatible:

Nevertheless, some people try. Ms. Brown and Mr. Friedman — who of course were thrilled to have a child, like all the later-in-life parents interviewed for this article — were also determined not to let Harrison “take control of the house,” Ms. Brown said. They went ahead with putting in flat-front lacquered maple cabinets in the kitchen, even though they soon had to watch a professional babyproofer drill 300 holes in them for safety latches. (Ms. Brown still cringes.) They put up silk Shantung draperies in Harrison’s bedroom, knowing that they might well end up stained, as they soon did — with yogurt. And they held onto the molded-wood chairs, which were not an easy transition from the highchair. “They have a very sleek bottom,” Ms. Brown explained. “He slides off it.”

The slightly arch tone of the article is a scream--it reads like the writer herself had no idea that high design and rough-housing kids were incompatible concepts when she wrote the piece.

(H/T: IP. On the other hand, I have a lot more sympathy for these parents than this earlier Times story of "modern" domesticity.)

If you can get past the presenter, who with his sandals, T-shirt, stubble and unctuous gestures looks and sounds like he's 30 going on 12, ("Right--back to being a grown-up!" Paging Ms. West; paging Dr. Dalrymple) there's some tremendous video of Mies van der Rohe's seminal all-glass house, completed in 1951, here:

Mies designed this house before Philip Johnson's Glass House, but Johnson's house--built at the height of his "Mies van der Johnson" period--was completed first. But Mies's plan, with its floating appearance and the patio built ajog from the house proper has much more tension and dynamism than Johnson's square glass box.

(Incidentally, I needed to scale the video down to fit the blog. For a larger version of the clip, click here.)

WCBSTV in Manhattan reports:

Amtrak workers are threatening to strike. The railroad and its unions are struggling to reach new labor agreements. Workers could walk off the job at the end of January.

If that happens, rail lines across the country could be crippled, and Penn Station in Manhattan would be forced to close.

Don't toy with my emotions like that.

Tim Blair writes:

It’s not often one happens upon a story combining issues of architecture, environmentalism, institutes of higher learning and accidental avian windowcide, let alone such a story written in a manner joyously suggestive of B-grade horror movie previews. For this, we thank the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and journalist Andrea Jones.

As Tim adds, in full Monster Chiller Horror Theater Mode, "Read on. If you dare!"

Ann Althouse notices a superstar architect being sued for taking his deconstructionism just a little too seriously:

The building is incredibly cool, a showpiece. Check out these pics of the Stata Center at MIT, designed by Frank Gehry. But MIT is suing, "charging that flaws in his design... one of the most celebrated works of architecture unveiled in years, caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, and drainage to back up."

Corbusier would have gone from Bauhaus to the poorhouse if his clients sued him along similar lines.

While people who live in stucco houses shouldn’t throw quiche, I've posted some rather unkind words about Philip Johnson after his death. But his Glass House, though clearly (heh!) inspired by Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House (but really, what was Johnson doing in the 1940s and '50s that wasn't inspired by Mies?) was such an iconic piece of Mid-Century Modern.

Meanwhile, James Lileks has some architecturally-related video that's also well worth your time.

Daniel Henninger has some thoughts on what the deaths of two firemen in the abandoned Deutsche Bank builfing opposite Ground Zero tells us about post-9/11 America:

The details of this public-policy morass are no exception in the post-9/11 world. They are the norm. The hyper-complex requirements and mindset reflected in the public record over 130 Liberty St. mirror the endless debate and litigation we've also layered into efforts to surveil and prosecute terrorists.

Yes, partisanship plays its part, but intellectual hubris and self-regard plays a larger part. We've got a society that's smarter than ever, but maybe too smart for its own good. Whether the problem before us is national security, the environment or protecting baby, we compulsively drive the system now to develop the most exquisite, complex procedures, which allow us to think ourselves both perfectly safe and ethically perfect.

Procedural perfectionism has been raised to religious status. Normal people now think like lawyers, bureaucrats and administrators, rather than as in the techworld, where the culture values fast mid-course corrections and can-do.

One may ask: The political and commercial forces that produced stasis for 130 Liberty St. may outwardly mourn the deaths. But would any of them pull back from their obsessions now to get the building down fast? I doubt it.

We have met the enemy, and he is still us.

So Manhattan's culture has transformed dynamists into stasists? Hasn't it specialized in standing athwart history for decades?

28690 Philip Johnson Glass House Opens In New Canaan...
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James Panero of The New Criterion and Benjamin Ivry of Commentary use the occasion of Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Cannan being opened to the public to remind us what a piece of work the late architect was.

Amongst his links, Panero includes Hilton Kramer's essay on Johnson from the September 1995 Commentary. Here's but a sample:

I was reminded of a conversation I had with Marga Barr in the last year of her life. I was then working with her on the preparation of a "Chronicle" of Alfred Barr's career [as art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art] for publication in the New Criterion. (It was published under the title, "Our Campaigns," in a special issue of the magazine in the summer of 1987.)

On one of the mornings we had set for a meeting in her apartment, the New York Times published Johnson's proposed designs for the rehabilitation of the Times Square-42nd Street area. I found them even more wretched than some of the awful things he had already built, and I was eager to know what Marga thought of them. In recounting to me the story of Alfred's career, she had had frequent occasion to speak of Johnson, and she always did so with fond affection-for the record, so to speak. That morning I asked if she had seen the paper, and she rather glumly acknowledged that she had. I then asked what she thought of the kind of buildings Johnson had lately been designing-and hastened to add that she was under no obligation to discuss the subject if she preferred not to. In responding to difficult questions, Marga had a way of turning away for a few moments while she composed her thoughts and then facing her interlocutor with a very determined look. This is what she did that morning as she said to me: "I feel about Philip today the way I would feel about a beloved son who had gone into a life of crime."

If you're unfamiliar with the endless twists and turns contained within the background of the man who brought modern architecture to America, definitely read the whole thing.

Anne Applebaum's piece on Johnson's decade spent flirting with National Socialism--even as it was kicking his favorite achitects out the door--is also well worth your time.

Update: Video added; the articles in the above hyperlinks make for quite an interesting counterpoint.

Early in the new year, I described a Christmas-week visit my wife and I took to Xanadu William Randolph Heart's San Simeon estate. As I wrote back then:

Construction of Hearst's estate began in 1919 and continued until 1947, when Hearst was too ill to remain living on his estate; he would eventually move to Beverly Hills to be closer to his surgeons, and died in 1951.

California's not likely to part with San Simeon anytime soon, but the Guardian reports that Heart's final home can be yours for a cool $165 million.

James Lileks has some fun with urban renewal; but a la Malcolm Muggeridge, as always, real life trumps satire.

As Michelle Malkin writes, "We always hear 'Never forget.' But how many still remember anymore?" Lawhawk notes that yesterday was "the 14th anniversary of the first WTC bombing attack, which killed six and wounded more than 1,000 people". He has an update on where construction efforts to rebuild the WTC stand: "The Battle for Ground Zero, Part 219".

I've always had a soft spot for Bauhaus architecture; there are a couple of photos of me on the site taken at Mies van der Rohe's epochal Barcelona Pavilion, and I own several pieces of his furniture. Mies was the last headmaster of Germany's famed Bauhaus design school, it was closed by the Nazis under his watch.

The founder of the Bauhaus was of course Walter Gropius, dubbed "The Silver Prince" by Tom Wolfe in From Bauhaus To Our House. Gropius and Mies would both wind up teaching and building in the US after the rise of the Nazis in their home country. "See-Dubya", guest-blogging for Michelle Malkin while she's embedded in Iraq, notes that the US embassy in Greece, shot at early this morning with an RPG rocket, ostensibly by Greek radicals, was designed in 1957 by Gropius. Gropius was a much better teacher than an architect, but it's not at all a bad looking design, but with its nearly all glass facade, as See-Dubya notes, it's extremely vulnerable to just the sort of attack it faced this morning.

Mies always liked to say that architecture was "the will of the epoch translated into space", but the epoch in which Gropius' building was built has passed, and in today's world of terrorism, US embassy buildings need to be much more fortified--and have much less glass--than this unfortunately outdated design.

Over the weekend, Nina and I, along with a couple of friends, drove down to San Simeon, to tour William Randolph Hearst's legendary estate, which served as the inspiration for the fictional Citizen Kane's "Xanadu". We wanted to see "Hearst Castle", as it's popularly and somewhat inaccurately called today, before the Christmas decorations came down. On Saturday, we took the last night tour of the season, and on Sunday, one of the several day tours that are offered.

In contrast to the cold, dark, gothic, cavernous surroundings depicted in Kane, while the entire San Simeon estate is enormous, the individual rooms feel surprisingly warm and inviting. Those rooms are very large, especially when compared to the average home, and yet, the whole thing is built on a surprisingly human scale. For the interior effect as a whole, think Stately Wayne Manor, rather than Kane's Xanadu, for an appropriate historic fictional pop culture comparison.

This brief snippet of Wikipedia's page on Hearst Castle suggests what Hearst was trying to accomplish:

The estate is a pastiche of historic architectural styles that Hearst admired in his travels around Europe. For example, the main house is modeled after a 16th century Spanish cathedral, while the outdoor pool features an ancient Roman temple front transported wholesale from Europe and reconstructed at the site. Hearst furnished the estate with truckloads of art, antiques, and even whole ceilings that he acquired en masse from Europe and Egypt.

On both tours the state-supplied guides repeated numerous times that as a proper progressive, Hearst was not at all a religious man.

Heaven forbid! If you'll pardon the religious allusions. Hearst certainly didn't mind them, as so much of the building's interiors and artwork has a Catholic theme, because Hearst was obsessed with recreating the Europe he explored in his younger days on the Grand Tour with his parents.

Construction of Hearst's estate began in 1919 and continued until 1947, when Hearst was too ill to remain living on his estate; he would eventually move to Beverly Hills to be closer to his surgeons, and died in 1951.

That means that the bulk of the construction was occurring in the 1920s, the very decade that the modernists of Weimar Germany's nascent Bauhaus movement (and those in Europe's International Style who moved more or less in its orbit, such as France's Le Corbusier) were doing their utter damndest to banish not just decoration in architecture, but the past as well. As Tom Wolfe wrote in From Bauhaus To Our House:

The country of the young Bauhausler, Germany, had been crushed in the war and humiliated at Versailles; the economy had collapsed in a delirium of inflation; the Kaiser had departed; the Social Democrats had taken power in the name of socialism; mobs of young men ricocheted through the cities drinking beer and awaiting a Soviet-style revolution from the east, or some terrific brawls at the very least. Rubble, smoking ruins--starting from zero! If you were young, it was wonderful stuff. Starting from zero referred to nothing less than re-creating the world.

The result was a fire sale for someone on Hearst's enormous budget. If Europe was committed to destroying itself and starting over from zero, Hearst would buy the best of the past for his home.

I think Mies, who always expressed a fondness for old churches, beginning with Charlemagne's cathedral in Aachen, his birthplace, and any building that was "really built", as he would say, would have admired San Simeon. But Corbusier would have probably broken out in hives just from looking at its photos, let alone visiting there. (If 20th century Manhattan upset Corbu's delicate equilibrium, just imagine what San Simeon would have done.)

It's a reminder that culture wars are nothing new, and are often partially internecine struggles: at the very moment when the leftwing progressives of the Bauhaus movement were banishing the past, another liberal of the time (at least before FDR--whom Hearst had originally supported--nearly taxed him out of existence in the mid-'30s, causing Hearst's politics to swing to the isolationist-era anti-New Deal right) was spending millions of his own fortune to preserve it.

And as it must to all men, death came to William Randolph Hearst. Whoops, sorry to go all Kane on you! When I quipped to our first tour guide, "what, there's no sled", he immediately shot back, "They burned it at the end of the movie, didn't they?"

The modernists eventually won their cultural battle of course, and "Starting From Zero" would become the recurring theme of the 20th century, (certainly not just in architecture) and like the fictional Kane's posessions, Europe is still finding new ways to continue its cultural self-immolation and the fire sale on its past.

But with Hearst's demise, San Simeon is now open to the public. If you're ever out this way, I highly recommend a visit.

"Corbusier" of Architecture And Morality explores the growing popularity of what he calls "Lifestyle Centers":

Ironically enough, my town is investing lots of its own resources to build a brand new town-center along its waterfront, far from its historic town square. Why do our city leaders think this a good idea? For one thing, the new town center, while looking and feeling like a traditional urban street, is in reality more optimally planned for accomodating major commercial anchors. There is a cineplex at one end of the development and a brand new hotel and conference center at the opposite end, with "blocks" of retail, chain restaurants with views of the lake, and elegant fountains and walkways. There's even a landscaped amphitheatre for open-air concerts, and the new town center has recently proved to be effective in gathering large numbers of people to watch fireworks.

Such "lifestyle centers" are growing in propularity in suburbs across the country. They are basically un-enclosed shopping malls, and their thematic architecture makes little attempt to relate the authentic vernacular of histor areas of the towns near which they are located. Our new instant town center by the lake resembles an Italian fishing village with cardboard cutout detailing, instead of the much more native Texas lakehouse style found in nearby rural area. Still, they manage to restore a sense of place, regardless of how instantaneously they are conceived. Older, and often more tastefully built town centers could apply lessons from the success of lifestyle centers.

I think Santana Row in San Jose would definitely qualify as a lifestyle center; I blogged about it last year--complete with cheesecake poster!

In City Journal, Nicole Gelinas has an update on "The latest round of painful negotiations between the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the World Trade Center site, and Larry Silverstein, who owns the right to re-develop it":

Under that earlier agreement, Silverstein retained the right and responsibility to build three office towers at Ground Zero, but the Port Authority took over the financial responsibility for building a fourth building—the Freedom Tower—and finding tenants for it.

She describes the latest developments as essentially an addendum to that earlier agreement, and as "good news". Because, "the faster Silverstein can build his three towers, the better for the fate of Ground Zero, and New York City":

Silverstein’s three towers, unlike the Freedom Tower, are likely to be commercially viable. Despite a few trendy design elements, they’re really just going to be normal office buildings, and their most gimmicky features may well disappear as they move from the drawing board to real life. Plus, the three towers will arise closest to Lower Manhattan’s major thoroughfares and to its transportation hubs, making them attractive to corporate tenants.

Unlike the Freedom Tower, moreover, Silverstein’s three towers aren’t supposed to be “skyline icons,” so they won’t have to bear the burden of the symbolic 1,776-foot height that Governor Pataki has forced the Freedom Tower to bear even before it’s built.

While the success of the Freedom Tower depends on tenants’ overcoming their fear about working in “that building,” the success of Silverstein’s three towers depends only on New York’s economy—that is, will it be strong enough in 2012 (when construction should finish) to support their 6.2 million square feet of new office space? That’s the risk Silverstein, like any developer, takes.

Real progress on Silverstein’s three towers is important for another reason: the Freedom Tower’s fate remains far from certain. Earlier this week, PA chairman Anthony Coscia made headlines when he confirmed that he would rather resign than force Port Authority employees to work in the tower after having experienced the horror of 9/11.

His assertion didn’t do much for the tower’s prospects—and though the PA’s proposal is to line up lease agreements from state and federal agencies instead, it’s not clear that their employees want to work in the tower either. Plus, too large a government presence will scare away the private-sector tenants that downtown really needs, as corporate execs who rent Class-A space don’t want to work in what’s perceived as a government office building.

The best thing for the Freedom Tower would be for New York, and the Port Authority, to just leave it alone for awhile. Perhaps after another three years, say, when visible development is taking place on Silverstein’s three towers, rationality will at last prevail at Ground Zero, and the new governor and the Port Authority will let the private sector start from scratch on a commercially viable office building, not a skyline landmark designed by committee.

I hope she's right, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Architecture And Morality writes that 40 years after Le Corbusier's death, one of his unbuilt buildings has recently been completed:

A rather significant event occurred in the world of architecture in the last year—at least from the point of view of this writer. In the city Firminy-Vert, a historical mining community in France, a church initially designed by Le Corbusier was completed. It is the fourth Le Corbusier structure to have been realized in this town, the result of the architect’s fruitful relationship with its post-war mayor. The Church of Saint Pierre was realized by one of Le Corbusier’s numerous acolytes, Jose Oubrerie, who collaborated with the master architect in the last years of his life during the early 1960’s. More than 40 years after his death, the church is finally complete, and in spite of Oubrerie’s own influences, the design of the church of Saint Pierre is remarkably consistent of Le Corbusier’s later works.

A&M notes though, that while the form is pure Corbu, some of the detailing has changed:

Many details in the design were the result of stricter building codes, as well as Oubrerie’s own aesthetic predilections, but the rest of the structure combines formal elements that have become the trademarks of Le Corbusier’s most celebrated projects, such as his monastery at La Tourette, his Assembly building in Chandigar, India, as well as from his Chapel at Ronchamp du Haut.

And that updated detailing is probably a good thing. In The Master Builders, Peter Blake's hagiographic look at Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Blake quotes Eero Saarinen, who called Corbu one of architect's great "form givers". But as dramatic as Corbu's forms were, his detailing was frequently slipshod. (In contrast to Mies--there's a reason why the aphorism "God is in the details" was universally attributed to him.)

Architecture And Morality writes that it's not that unusual for a building to go up after an architect's death. However...

It is rare to build based on plans from several decades before, often because it requires another architect to interpret the design intentions of the original designer, divining on what he was thinking. The best way at ascertaining this kind of intangible information was to rely on an architect’s protégé. Frank Lloyd Wright, who surrounded himself by many sycophantic apprentices who lived and worked in his large private compounds in Wisconsin and in Arizona, produced dozens upon dozens of architects who mastered and internalized his style so as to be indistinguishable from Wright’s own work.

I remember that shortly after the Wall fell and Berlin was re-unified, there was some talk of building Mies's epochal Friedrichstrasse office tower, modernism's first all-glass skyscraper. It exists only in drawings and models (I've seen Mies's large, original conte crayon drawing in New York's Museum of Modern Art, which displays it from to time, and it's a powerful vision.) Fortunately, as the example of Corbu's church in Firminy-Vert illustrates, it's never too late.

Zaha Hadid is an Iraqi-born and British-based architect whose ideas are some of the most exciting I've seen in a long time. Blending modernism and expressionism, her works at least look like what the future I always imagined as a kid should resemble, unlike most bland postmodern designs.

According to this blog, she has an exhibit running through October in the Guggenheim, which incorporates her design for the kitchen of the future:

It's not quite Joan [sic] Jetson's kitchen, with the ability to relieve you from all the mundane kitchen chores like cooking or washing dishes, but I'd trade my kitchen in for one like this any day.

All it lacks is a replicator in which to say, "Tea, Earl Grey, hot".

(Via Technorati.)

Opinion Journal goes in search of the base truths of modern art:

Once in a while a news story so speaks for itself that it threatens to put commentators out of a job.

In this year's summer show at London's Royal Academy of Arts, "Exhibit 1201" is a large rectangular tablet of slate with a tiny barbell-shaped bit of boxwood on top. Its creator, David Hensel, must be pleased to have been selected from among some 9,000 applicants for the world's largest open-submission exhibit of contemporary art. Nevertheless, he was bemused to discover that in transit his sculpture had gotten separated from its base. Judging the two components as different submissions, the Royal Academy had rejected his artwork proper--a finely wrought laughing head in jesmonite--and selected the plinth. "It says something about the state of visual arts today," said Mr. Hensel. He didn't say what. He didn't need to.

Meanwhile, James Lileks checks in on the state of modern architecture:

As for the building’s interaction with the street, well – it doesn’t have a great deal to say, other than “Damn, I’m blue.”

You'll be too, when you're done. But click anyway.

Over at City Journal, Nicole Gelinas writes, "Despite Pataki and Bloomberg, the private sector is fixing lower Manhattan":

Seven World Trade Center officially opens its doors May 23 after an efficient two years of design and construction. Seven is a stunning piece of work. Just as important, it’s the first tangible evidence that lower Manhattan will triumph over 9/11, both architecturally and economically. Who built Seven? Not Governor Pataki or Mayor Bloomberg, but private-sector developer Larry Silverstein, who completed the 52-story tower while the pols dithered over 16 still-scarred acres across the street.

Silverstein could build Seven so quickly—replacing the office building of the same name he owned before 9/11—because it’s adjacent to the World Trade Center site, not part of it. Thus, Silverstein’s lease with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the bistate entity that owns Ground Zero, doesn’t govern the site. Free from the government “direction” that has overseen Ground Zero redevelopment, Silverstein did what he does best: he built.

And as the photos that accompany the article illustrate, Silverstein and his architect managed to overcome several sticky design issues, not the least of which was integrating Seven around a new Con Ed substation, replacing the substation destroyed on 9/11.

In the Wall Street Journal, Leonard Gilroy writes that "Today's urban planners falsely claim" Jane Jacobs' legacy:

Given urban planners' almost universal reverence for Jacobs, it is ironic that many have largely ignored or misinterpreted the central lesson of "Death and Life"--that cities are vibrant living systems, not the product of grand, utopian schemes concocted by overzealous planners.

Modern planners have contorted Jacobs's beliefs in hopes of imposing their static, end-state vision of a city. They use a set of highly prescriptive policy tools--like urban growth boundaries, smart growth, and high-density development built around light-rail transit systems--to design the city they envision. They try to "create" livable cities from the ground up and micromanage urban form through regulation. We've seen these tools at work in Portland, Ore., for more than three decades. But the results have been dismal and dramatic. The city's "smart growth" policies effectively created a land shortage, constricting the housing supply and artificially inflating prices. By 1999, Portland had become one of the 10 least affordable housing markets in the nation, and its homeownership rate lagged behind the national average. It has also seen one of the nation's largest increases in traffic congestion and boasts a costly, heavily subsidized light-rail system that accounts for just 1% of the city's total travel. Not exactly how they planned it.

That's because these planning trends run completely counter to Jacobs's vision of cities as dynamic economic engines that thrive on private initiative, trial and error, incremental change, and human and economic diversity. Jacobs believed the most organic and healthy communities are diverse, messy and arise out of spontaneous order, not from a scheme that tries to dictate how people should live and how neighborhoods should look.

She felt it was foolish to focus on how cities look rather than how they function as economic laboratories. "The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop--insofar as public policy and action can do so--cities that are congenial places for [a] great range of unofficial plans, ideas and opportunities to flourish," Jacobs wrote.

Sadly, many in the Smart Growth and New Urbanism movements cite Jacobs as the inspiration for their efforts to combat so-called "urban sprawl" and make over suburbia with dense, walkable downtowns, mixed-use development, and varied building styles. While Jacobs identified these as organic elements of successful cities, planners have eagerly tried to impose them on cities in formulaic fashion, regardless of their contextual appropriateness and compatibility with the underlying economic order. In short, they've taken Jacobs's observations of what makes cities work and tried to formalize them into an authoritarian recipe for policy intervention.

As Jacobs opined in a 2001 Reason magazine interview, "the New Urbanists want to have lively centers in the places that they develop. . . . And yet, from what I've seen of their plans and the places they have built, they don't seem to have a sense of the anatomy of these hearts, these centers. They've placed them as if they were shopping centers. They don't connect."

Jacobs's ideas came from the heart. Her foray into urban theory was partly inspired by the failed urban renewal efforts of the post-World War II era that displaced tens of thousands of poor and minority residents and resulted in the isolation or destruction of previously vibrant neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and elsewhere.

As Gilroy writes, "Fundamentally, there is little difference behind the social engineering mentality of those who wrought the disaster of postwar urban renewal [which we covered in a long, long post last summer--Ed] and the mindset of today's planners trying to regulate away suburbia in hopes of master-planned urban living for everyone."

Tammy Bruce, who as usual, was great on yesterday's Pajamas Podcast, noted earlier this week on her blog that construction--finally!--has begun on Freedom Tower, the sucessor to the World Trade Center:

Send your prayers and good vibes to the construction crews, the people of New York, and the buildings themselves. Landmarks like this are physical manifestations of the greatness of America, our ingenuity, courage, skill, and hope for the future. Yea for the Freedom Tower!

I only hope this isn't another false start.

Jane Jacobs, who wrote the hugely influental The Death and Life of Great American Cities (see our posts here and here for more) in 1961 has passed away at age 89. Orrin Judd has an extensive write-up of her life and career.

City Journal's Nicole Gelinas explores the endless holding pattern that efforts to rebuild the World Trade Center are currently stuck in.

New Jersey's Lawhawk has some thoughts on this issue--and Mayor's Bloomberg's central role in impeding progress.

I'm in the process of reading two books I recently bought from Amazon as sort of post-Christmas gifts to myself: Googie Redux: Ultramodern Roadside Architecture by Alan Hess, and The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream by Meredith L. Clausen. Googie, which I know James Lileks is a big fan of, was a somewhat informal designation for modernist commercial architecture of the 1950s and '60s. As this superb Website explains, Googie grew out of a Los Angeles coffeehouse by that name, and came to dominate roadside architecture: the original McDonald's and Jack in the Box restaurants (not the versions seen today, as we'll discuss in a moment) were Googie; the building at LAX that currently houses the Encounter Restaurant (which I posted about a couple of months ago) was Googie. It was playful stuff, designed to give the stern shapes originated by Bauhaus boys like Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius more curb appeal--and hence entice motorists to pull over and stop in.

In his book, Alan Hess notes that in 1969, Ray Croc dumped the original Googie-styled McDonald's restaurant design for the more traditional looking mansard roof buildings we see today (he kept the originals' iconic golden arches on the new buildings' signage), and Hess uses that year, and that gesture as one of the demarcation points that traditional modern architecture had come to an end.

And he's certainly got a point: in addition to Ray Croc discarding Googie forms, it was also the year that Mies and Gropius died. Manhattan's Seagram building, on Park Avenue, has long been considered one of Mies's great successes (and one of my favorites, which was partially why I chose it for the unofficial Pajamas pre-launch party that grew like Topsy). In contrast, as Meredith Clausen notes in her book, very few obituaries of Gropius mentioned his involvement in the Pan Am building, just down the block. Ironically, during the Pan Am building's planning and construction, Gropius saw it as the bookend to a career that included the founding of the Bauhaus in the 1920s. But even before Pan Am was completed, it became the Building That New Yorkers Love To Hate, as a mid-1980s New York magazine cover story dubbed it, complete with wrecking ball smashing into the building. And indeed, there was good reason to loathe the beast: Pan Am (since renamed in the 1980s for current owner Met Life), dwarfed handsome Grand Central Station with its towering bulk, cut Park Avenue in half, and was--and is--considered ugly and brutal by the vast majority of New Yorkers.

And despite all that, as the Pan Am book notes, it will probably never be torn down, as it's a larger building than current Manhattan zoning laws allow for office buildings on its size lot.

If Googie made modernism fun, Pan Am made many people come to hate modernism. And if these are the sorts of topics you enjoy exploring, check out Architecture and Morality's "Carnival of the Architects and Urbanists".

(In it, we're listed as "multifarious blogger extraordinaire Ed Driscoll", and naturally, a nifty piece of textural embroidery like that richly deserves its addition to the rotating "What They're Saying" board on the sidebar.)

Hadn't heard this one before, but considering Pete Seeger's background and the subtext of the song "Little Boxes" (and its famous refrain of "Little boxes made of ticky-tacky", what James Bennett writes certainly makes sense:

The song was actually written by Malvina Reynolds at the time she was a Communist Party USA member.

The political context of the song was interesting. Right after World War Two, the Communist Party USA, seeking to capitalize on its wartime link to "our ally, Uncle Joe Stalin", lanched a big organizing drive around one of the major general complaints of the time, which was the lack of available housing. The CPUSA's drive was centered on demands for a gigantic government housing program to build government-owned "worker's apartments". This drive quickly petered out as the veteran's housing loan progam and rapid suburban development rapidly produced millions of single-family houses, to the delight of returning veterans and wartime workers who had been renting chicken coops and trailers.

"Little Boxes" was written after the collapse of the CPUSA's last major popular campaign, and is a sort of snarky critique of the cause of its irrelevance. It also marks the Left's shift from critiqueing the market economy for producing too little, to critiqueing it for producing too much -- substituting an aesthetic critique for an economic one. This in turn was a symptom of the collapse of any trace of a working-class base for the hard Left, and its replacement by a bohemian-intellectual base.

The specific houses in question were the multi-colored developments on the hills just south of San Francisco. I remember seeing them on my first trip to that area and thinking them charming. Eventually I learned that they were the "ticky-tacky" in question. It's a sort of reverse Marie Antionette --- criticising the peasants for eating cake when they could have had nice Soviet-style high-rise concrete block apartments instead.

And that certainly worked out just swell for all concerned, huh?

Update: A reader emails:

FYI I live in one of the little boxes made of ticky-tacky, in southern-most San Francisco.

It's a little two-bedroom, one bath 50's box, painted pink and white. I had the good fortune to buy it nearly 10 years ago.

Market value for a comparable house in our neighborhood? $900,000-$1,000,000.

But c'mon, wouldn't you rather be paying a lifetime of rent inside a Corbusier-designed Borg-like ferroconcrete monolith like Pete and Malvina had wished upon the American public?

James Lileks frequently refers to "Googie"-style architecture in his Daily Bleat (he did so just yesterday, in fact). This site tells you all you need to know about it.

(And this book, even more.)

I wrote several articles for Audio/Video Interiors; it was the original home theater magazine, and inspired by Architectural Digest. So it's reasonably safe to say that I love high-end interiors and exteriors. But if you ever catch me uttering anything along the lines of this astonishing quote discovered in a recent issue of Arechitectural Digest by ShrinkWrapped, a blogging psychoanalyst, well, send me off to a psychoanalyst:

"Once we got the house, I didn't need my therapist anymore. And when it was finished, we invited her over, and she liked the renovation. She found it very beautiful. She approved."

I suppose it's somewhat less potentially dangerous than plastic surgery--though infinitely more invasive to the wallet.

(Via Roger L. Simon.)

In his post about the Paris riots that we linked to a moment ago, Ed Morrissey wrote:

The riots typify French reaction to Islamism, and spring from a European approach to the Islamic wave of migration into Europe. After WWII, the French built so-called "sink estates" for the workers they encouraged to emigrate to help rebuild the nation, as did Germany. Most of these workers came from Turkey and colonies in North Africa. Instead of planning for their integration into society, however, the French allowed these communities to grow and fester in economic and social isolation. After two generations, the sink estates have proven to be nothing more than preplanned ghettoes, and the workers have no future except as second-class citizens of the nations they helped rebuild from devastation.

In an amazingly prescient article written in 2002, Theodore Dalrymple foreshadowed the role that modern architecture would play in formenting this week's riots. In particular, the early-20th century modern architectural theories of France's own Le Corbusier (whose 1920s aphorism that "the home is a machine for living in" made him a household name):

Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with their French-born descendants and a smattering of the least successful members of the French working class. From these projects, the excellence of the French public transport system ensures that the most fashionable arrondissements are within easy reach of the most inveterate thief and vandal.

Architecturally, the housing projects sprang from the ideas of Le Corbusier, the Swiss totalitarian architect—and still the untouchable hero of architectural education in France—who believed that a house was a machine for living in, that areas of cities should be entirely separated from one another by their function, and that the straight line and the right angle held the key to wisdom, virtue, beauty, and efficiency. The mulish opposition that met his scheme to pull down the whole of the center of Paris and rebuild it according to his “rational” and “advanced” ideas baffled and frustrated him.

The inhuman, unadorned, hard-edged geometry of these vast housing projects in their unearthly plazas brings to mind Le Corbusier’s chilling and tyrannical words: “The despot is not a man. It is the . . . correct, realistic, exact plan . . . that will provide your solution once the problem has been posed clearly. . . . This plan has been drawn up well away from . . . the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds.”

But what is the problem to which these housing projects, known as cités, are the solution, conceived by serene and lucid minds like Le Corbusier’s? It is the problem of providing an Habitation de Loyer Modéré—a House at Moderate Rent, shortened to HLM—for the workers, largely immigrant, whom the factories needed during France’s great industrial expansion from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the unemployment rate was 2 percent and cheap labor was much in demand. By the late eighties, however, the demand had evaporated, but the people whose labor had satisfied it had not; and together with their descendants and a constant influx of new hopefuls, they made the provision of cheap housing more necessary than ever.

An apartment in this publicly owned housing is also known as a logement, a lodging, which aptly conveys the social status and degree of political influence of those expected to rent them. The cités are thus social marginalization made concrete: bureaucratically planned from their windows to their roofs, with no history of their own or organic connection to anything that previously existed on their sites, they convey the impression that, in the event of serious trouble, they could be cut off from the rest of the world by switching off the trains and by blockading with a tank or two the highways that pass through them, (usually with a concrete wall on either side), from the rest of France to the better parts of Paris. I recalled the words of an Afrikaner in South Africa, who explained to me the principle according to which only a single road connected black townships to the white cities: once it was sealed off by an armored car, “the blacks can foul only their own nest.”

The average visitor gives not a moment’s thought to these Cités of Darkness as he speeds from the airport to the City of Light. But they are huge and important—and what the visitor would find there, if he bothered to go, would terrify him.

A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust—greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years—is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them.

Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti—BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme. The iconography of the cités is that of uncompromising hatred and aggression: a burned-out and destroyed community-meeting place in the Les Tarterets project, for example, has a picture of a science-fiction humanoid, his fist clenched as if to spring at the person who looks at him, while to his right is an admiring portrait of a huge slavering pit bull, a dog by temperament and training capable of tearing out a man’s throat—the only breed of dog I saw in the cités, paraded with menacing swagger by their owners.

There are burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités: in Les Tarterets, residents had torched and looted every store—with the exceptions of one government-subsidized supermarket and a pharmacy. The underground parking lot, charred and blackened by smoke like a vault in an urban hell, is permanently closed.

We previously looked at the architectural theories of Corbusier--and Dalrymple--back in August, in a post titled, "The Life And Death Of England's Cities".

A friend of Terry Teachout writes him about a recent dinner in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Connecticut:

It was beautiful—everywhere the eye went it found something to delight it. Wright's big public rooms have found a ghastly afterlife in today's McMansions. He's not responsible for that, but he is responsible for the tiny kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms, the smoking chimneys, and the leaky roof—all traits, the owners assured us, of other Wright houses (they belong to a Wright homeowners' association).

I suppose the Parthenon would be drafty.

It's a pretty safe bet that the private homes designed in the 1920s by Le Corbusier, France's answer to Wright shared similar qualities. Of his post-'20s public work, we shan't speak much here, having dynamited it thoroughly only a couple of months ago.

My dad has always been a pious fellow, but he couldn't help making that joking riff on the similar sounding line in the Lord's Prayer from time to time, which I'm sure he heard as a kid, growing up in pre-World War II Yonkers.

It's a phrase that took on new meaning in 1968, when the current version of Penn Station opened, replacing the magnificent original, which stood from 1910 until the mid-1960s, when it was demolished by a cash-starved Pennsylvania Railroad to build its current subterrainian version, and place the current Madison Square Garden and an office tower on its air rights.

The current Penn Station is a horrible, dank place, the absolute nadir of modernism, and blasphemy to the greatness the name implied for decades. But as I explain in my latest Tech Central Station column, across the street, there is, as George Lucas would say, A New Hope...

I'd like to share a belated (for reasons discussed here) welcome to readers of Will Franklin's more or less eponymously-titled Willisms, as this post of ours on the horrors of modern architecture was nominated to be part of his latest "Carnival of the Classiness". He's got a great list of posts--be sure to click on over and read them all, including #19, a three word review of Oliver Stone's Alexander that's no doubt entirely correct in its assumptions.

(And greetings from the Chicago American Airlines Admirals Club, where I'm between flights back to the West Coast.)

Warning! Long and rambling post with enormous swatches of quotes from articles and books about the evils of modern architecture to follow! I won't be upset if this topic bores you and you want to move along. Otherwise, grab a beer or a Coke--you'll be here a while with this one. I'll wait while you hit the fridge--and I'll understand if you skip this one entirely.

Back?

OK, here we go!

In one of his "Screeeeed" blog's posts (currently offline as the Home of the Bleat is undergoing a massive urban renewal project of its own), James Lileks referred to this truly remarkable 1995 essay by Theodore Dalrymple, the nom de plume of an English psychiatrist who's also a brilliant social critic. Lileks quoted from Dalrymple's piece, but I don't believe he linked to it, so it took a few minutes of Googling to stumble across it.

[Update: Lileks' post is back online--Ed]

But needless to say, the whole thing is well worth reading. Dalrymple arrives, independently, at many of the same conclusions about England's public housing that Jane Jacobs did in the mid-1960s and America's then still burgeoning urban renewal projects, in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, one of the few books praised by both conservatives and the left. It's probably not all that surprising that most of her findings translate all too well across the Atlantic.

As Dalrymple wrote in his piece:

Until quite recently, I had assumed that the extreme ugliness of the city in which I live was attributable to the Luftwaffe. I imagined that the cheap and charmless high rise buildings which so disfigure the city-scape had been erected of necessity in great gaping holes left by Heinkel bombers. I had spent much of my childhood playing in deserted bomb shelters in public parks: and although I was born some years after the end of the war, that great conflagration still exerted a powerful hold on the imagination of British children of my generation.

I discovered how wrong I was not long ago when I entered a store whose walls were decorated with large photographs of the city as it had been before the war. It was then a fine place, in a grandiloquent, Victorian kind of way. Every building had spoken of a bulging, no doubt slightly pompous and ridiculous, municipal pride. Industry and Labor were glorified in statuary, and a leavening of Greek temples and Italian Renaissance palaces lightened the prevailing mock-Venetian Gothic architecture.

"A great shame about the war," I said to the store assistant, who was of an age to remember the old days. "Look at the city now."

"The war?" she said. "The war had nothing to do with it. It was the council."

The City Council—the people's elected representatives it transpired, had done far more damage to the fabric of the city in the 1950s and 1960s than had Goering's air force. Indeed, they had managed to turn it into a terrible visual ordeal for anyone with the most minimal visual sensibility.

Dalrymple places much of the wreckage done in the name of modern architecture firmly at the feet of Le Corbusier, the Swiss born, but thoroughly French modern architect, who spent his entire life--first symbolically, and then eventually literally--dynamiting the street, something he saw as all too messy, with its smells of cooking, corner merchants, kids running and bicycling, parents conversing on stoops, etc.

Like most of Europe's modernist architects, Corbusier came to prominence in the 1920s, when he built a series of remarkable--and remarkably handsome--expensive, airy white flat-roofed homes for the wealthy patrons of Paris's art community (Michael Stein was one of Corbu's early patrons--the home he built for Stein in Garches, France would eventually become hugely influential in its form. The brother of Gertrude, both were American expatriates living abroad.)

In many respects, these folks were the predecessors to the social class that David Brooks wrote about so memorably about a few years ago. Rather than today's Bobos In Paradise, these were proto-bobos in Paris, and they had the money and inclination to fund not just modern art, but modern architecture, and found the perfect avant garde architect in "Corbu".

Corbu's architecture worked splendidly when he was building private homes for wealthy patrons who desired to live in their austere modernism, and maintain the enormous upkeep they required with their pure white walls and flat roofs.

But Corbu also saw himself as a social planner desiring to work on an enormous scale, which Dalrymple mentioned in another, more recent, essay on modern architecture:

Le Corbusier (the French-Swiss architect) once said, a house is a machine for living in. By the same token, a school is a machine for being taught in, and a hospital for being cured in. Unfortunately, if you spend you entire life living in machines, you are likely to end up by feeling like a machine part.

Le Corbusier wanted to raze Paris to the ground and start again. Its irregularity, its nooks and crannies, its accretions of ornament, its grandeur, its illogicality and lack of overall plan, irritated him. He thought he could do better: pull the whole lot down – Sainte Chapelle, the Louvre, Notre Dame, everything – and replace it with militarised ranks of buildings like the UN Headquarters, separated by open spaces in which rapists might safely rape for lack of anyone else in them. Cars would speed down the multi-lane highways between the ranks of the buildings, as people (those irritating flies in the ointment) rushed from one machine to do something in to another,

Well, his dream – everyone else’s nightmare, of course – has come true, at least in small part. All over the world, people have been decanted into dwellings that provide them with cubic space and the bare amenities but little else. When I say people, I mean principally the poor, of course, those with little choice of where to live; the architects and planners who do the decanting them prefer to live in bijou cottages or, where available, Georgian mansions. Not for them the self-denying ordinance of frugal functionality: it is the ornament of others they hate and despise, not their own. Hell for them is not just other people, it is other people’s taste.

What is so obvious about the Corbusian vision, and that of so many of its followers, is its complete lack of tenderness, its deliberate, full-frontal brutalism, as if the only thing that protects is from the sentimentality of kitsch is a complete and conscious rejection of anything approaching ornament, of anything that could imply a fondness for the world. In other worlds, the Corbusian vision is but a gestalt-switch away from kitsch, upon the existence of which its own existence is parasitic.

Perhaps it is not altogether surprising that people who live in a brutal or brutalised architectural world should themselves so often turn out brutal or brutalised. My argument does not require, of course, that bad architecture should be the only or even the main cause of human brutality; it would be obviously absurd to argue that human brutality first entered the world with Le Corbusier. But it is not surprising if people who are herded into machines for living in, and are educated in machines for learning in, and cured when they are ill in machines for being cured in, should not have a very tender attitude to their surroundings or even their fellow machine-inhabitants.

It has fallen to the post-Corbusian age to erect housing and public buildings devoid of all embellishment. If you observe the mud huts of Africans in the bush that they build with their own hands, you will rarely find one that is not embellished in some way, often with great good taste, sense of colour and design. They express thereby not only a love of the world but of life. By contrast, bleak Corbusian functionalism expresses in concrete form the insignificance of man as an individual. Le Corbusier wanted to build a world fit not for heroes (he was active between the wars), but for clones. His buildings are to architecture what Maoist overalls were to clothes; and it is no great surprise that his work was much appreciated by collectivists, both Communist and Fascist, to both of which groups he was himself drawn.

In England, Corbu's vision was adopted to both reduce post World War II housing shortages, but also by England's liberal politicians to simultaneously eliminate the last refuges of Victorianism, which Dalrymple notes in the 1995 essay we were discussing at the start of this post:

Read More »

Saying that Donald Trump can be a blowhard is, if anything, an understatement of Empire State proportions. But be sure to listen to his testimony to the Senate yesterday on repairing the U.N.'s building, where The Donald explains to 100 clueless senators how the world works--at least the world of Manhattan real estate.

Update: Hugh Hewitt, who played Trump's masterful performance on his radio show this afternoon blogs:

The e-mails are pouring in from amazed, amused and astonished listeners. My favorite thus far, from blogger MySandman:

"This is positively absurd!! The architect got HOW MUCH in pre-commission? [Answer: Trump said $44 million] Good Grief, I work for a world-class firm, and that number is science fiction to me. I have got to get this transcript to my bosses. We need to start working for the UN .

Seriously, though. These people at the UN are so tremendously incompetent that I am frightened beyond belief to know they are where they are, controlling aspects of world socio-politics . You say this is a reality show in itself. I am astounded by the fact that it is a scene replayed right out of Atlas Shrugged: A Capitalist dealing with Marxist on the level of parent mentoring infants. Could there be any more profound example of why Socialism does not work? I submit to you, that what you are playing illustrates the supremacy of America on the global stage like no other document in this century."

Another e-mailer wonders if Kofi's son is working with the Italian architect.

Seriously, this testimony should be played in high schools. Given Trump's profile, the kids would listen, and not only would they be schooled in the basics of development, they'd also get a glimpse of why every government building project everywhere is inefficient.

Indeed. (To coin a phrase.)

Another Update Dangerous Liberty has video of Trump's performance.

If the news here in California sounds grim, at least it's offset by a wonderful development on the east coast. Offset? For me, it's all cancelled out in terms of how good this piece of news makes me feel: the original Penn Station is (in a sense) being rebuilt. The original was knocked down in the mid-1960s, but the enormous post office across the street is a virtual double for its former exterior. James Lileks links to this New York Daily News piece, which says:

State and city officials yesterday named the developers who will replace one of the city's lost jewels - the old Pennsylvania Station - with a new gem.
After years of delay, the city, state and two big developers are all aboard with a design to turn the main post office on Eighth Ave. into a grand transit hub recalling the elegant Pennsylvania Station that was razed in 1963.

The $818 million plan will preserve the handsome facade of the James A. Farley Post Office, erected in 1913, while adapting the building as the new Daniel Patrick Moynihan Station, to honor the late U.S. senator, who pushed hard for the idea.

"This is going to be a magnificent gateway for New York," Gov. Pataki said at yesterday's unveiling of the design, which also calls for shops, restaurants and a boutique hotel.

Pataki noted that more than 500,000 subway, NJTransit, Long Island Rail Road and Amtrak riders a day now use Penn Station, a bland hub located across Eighth Ave. He called the current location "horribly inadequate." It's "certainly not an appropriate gateway to the greatest city in the world," he added.

As envisioned by James Carpenter Design Associates, in collaboration with Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, the new central train hall will mirror the old Penn Station through the addition of tall, steel arches on which will sit a huge, yet lightweight, skylight.

A second, so-called "grid shell skylight" will be set atop a hall to be located roughly in the middle of the building, between Eighth and Ninth Aves., that will serve as a taxi station and baggage dropoff.

The winning plan for the project was submitted by a team of major New York developers, The Related Cos. and Vornado Realty Trust, which has extensive holdings in the area.

The companies will put up about $300 million of the projected $818 million cost at different stages before the work is completed in 2010.

The city, state and federal governments and the Port Authority are also helping to fund the project, whose main transit beneficiary will be NJTransit trains.

The congestion that commuters now face in reaching the track level in Penn Station will be relieved with the addition of staircases and other access to 11 platforms that already sit under the Farley building.

The Postal Service will occupy 250,000 square feet.

Up to 1 million square feet of air rights will be applied to the northeast corner of Eighth Ave. and 33rd St., where a Duane Reade store now stands. A residential tower is expected to rise there, next to Vornado-owned 1Penn Plaza.

"The completion of the Moynihan Station gives a second chance to recapture the extraordinary station that once was Penn Station," said Charles Gargano, chairman of the state Economic Development Corp.

Yes sir!

I've spent countless hours in the current Penn Station, which arose in the mid-1960s. Lileks has an exceptionally well-written description of just how awful the current facility is:

The sin of the demolition of the old Penn Station was never erased, and the wretched piss-soaked warren they put in its place was a constant reminder of the Original Sin of post-war urbanists. That unholy combo of bottom-liners and utopians took away one of the most magnificent spaces in urban American and replaced it with something that seemed lifted en masse from a claustrophobic dream. To modern eyes it makes no sense: the era where social divisions were keenly felt gave us a space so vast that all distinctions dissolved in its great stone heaven; the egalitarians, by contrast, gave us a space whose equalizing impulse was best expressed as the desire to oppress everyone’s spirit. I usually cooled my heels in the Amtrak First Class club, which was a parody of a sham of a travesty of First Class, at least in the 90s. You got a scratchy seat and a battered magazine and translucent coffee. If I didn’t have a first class ticket I went to the bar on the north side of the room, where you could smoke. It stank. Aside from rush hour, it was empty, and had a sad battered quality that made you feel like a rude sack of meat slumped over a ration of intoxicants. And I never knew which track I should take. It never seemed clear. Even though they had signs and names it always seemed as though they were leaving out some key detail. Like your destination. No, I hate Penn Station. I’d like to go back in time, drag the architects into the present, and ask them: what, you thought we would all be wearing George Jetson jumpsuits, queuing patiently for the Atomic Express? The reality is a waiting room with insufficient signage, a great hall that isn’t, and a Hudson News thronged with balding guys, ties askew, furtively paging through battered porn mags.

Hey, my tie was never askew!

Seriously though, this is wonderful news, especially as the plans to rebuild the WTC seem to be in constant limbo.

Andrew Ferguson writes that "in the great struggle between cities and suburbs, raging now for a century or more, the verdict is finally in: Cities lost. The vast majority of people prefer the ``burbs.'' The long-predicted comeback of the traditional city isn't in the cards":

There are lots of obvious reasons for the cities' decline -- the decentralizing effects of telecommunications, the loss of manufacturing jobs, the inconveniences of public transit -- but Kotkin is more appalled by the steps urban planners take in hopes of reversing the decline.

``They think they can revive their cities if they make them `hip and cool,''' he says, referring to the street festivals, cafes, arts fairs, high-end boutiques and other yuppie delights that attract the young and single, the childless and rich.

``But that's not how cities last,'' he says. ``You can't build a long-term civic culture around transient populations.''

What any healthy city requires is a stable base of middle- class families. But the conditions necessary for attracting and keeping families are precisely what city planners ignore.

``They've forgotten the basics,'' Kotkin says. ``Are the schools good? Are the streets clean and safe? It's a lot easier to satisfy the yuppies with no kids than to fix the schools.''

And so city life, once the backbone of civilized social arrangements, devolves into just another ``niche lifestyle.''

Back in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan once quipped that New York City would eventually become a shopping and Disneyland-style destination. That's already started to happen--and in San Jose, which is far more suburban sprawl that downtown city, there's already one outdoor shopping mall that simulates a few blocks of urban streets--but with 7/8ths less homeless people and drugs.

Much as I love Manhattan, I'd much rather get my dose of city living in small controlled doses, than live in an environment like that all the time.

In this recent New York Sun article, Julia Vitullo-Martin says that a lot of mediocre modernist buildings are about to become landmarked in Manhattan:

Since landmarking has the effect of rigidifying current use and preventing evolutionary change, New Yorkers need to pay close attention to this debate.

The Municipal Art Society’s watch list of 30 Under 30 includes, for example, the egregious Marriott Marquis Hotel designed by John Portman, the immense IBM Building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, and Philip Johnson’s cathedral-size AT&T/Sony Building. Do New Yorkers really want these structures pre-empting all future uses? Are we confident enough of their merit to protect them into perpetuity? Will Walter Gropius’s MetLife Building, looming over Grand Central Terminal, be next on the list of buildings to be protected?

The problem is that modernist architects espoused a good number of truly bad ideas, which are far more important than their familiar contempt for color and ornamentation. At its most fundamental, modernist architecture intended to break with the past, defy the streetscape, and rend the urban fabric. In urging that buildings be landmarked, preservationists are not merely advancing the benefits of modernism’s clean, uncluttered lines. They argue the benefits of what are often modernism’s depredations, such as the superblock.

Of course, some of the debate will be settled by deterioration. As a Yale architectural historian, Vincent Scully, pointed out in 1999, modernists embraced an aesthetic of impermanence — with the result that most of their buildings will not survive because they were poorly built. Mies van der Rohe may have defined architecture as the will of an epoch translated into space, but much of that will is crumbling beneath its shoddy materials.

Many of the finest modernist buildings have already been landmarked. Joseph’s Urban’s sublime New School for Social Research, for example, on West 12th Street, is protected by an individual designation. Mayer, Whittlesley & Glass’s Butterfield House, across the street, is protected by the overarching of the Greenwich Village Historic District. The best-known modernist buildings were designated when they became eligible. Gordon Bunshaft’s 1952 Lever House on Park Avenue, for example, was designated a landmark in 1983, a year after eligibility.

So was Mies's Seagram building, right across the street, and arguably the best modernist building in Manhattan.

The prospect of Gropius's Met Life building (formerly known for years as the Pan Am building) being landmarked is a bit depressing though. It's an enormous battleship of a building, totally dominates nearby Grand Central Station, and divides Park Avenue in half. It was one of Gropius's last buildings, but it's also the building that New Yorkers love to hate, and probably wouldn't miss if they were assured of something better in its place--or an unobstructed view down Park ave.

There's a new documentary about the important 20th century German-born architect called Mies van der Rohe: Regular or Super. It's a straightforward 60-minute biographic film that would be right at home on A&E or the History Channel, except for its annoying postmodern framing device.

For a film about a man who built some of the most important tall office buildings and apartments in North America, the filmmakers decided to use one of Mies's last and least important projects--a tiny Esso gas station he built near Montreal to book-end their documentary, and provide it its title.

I have a review of it online over at Blogcritics.org.

I just read on the New Criterion's Weblog that Philip Johnson died yesterday at age 98. Johnson was a pretty good architect, but an astonishing impresario of architecture--he helped establish the Museum of Modern Art's architectural section, which he also ran for many years.

More importantly, Johnson (at left and in the background in this photo from my first National Review Online article in 2001) helped Mies van der Rohe escape the Nazis in the 1930s and emigrate to Chicago; and Mies would, for better or worse, make modernism--and specifically, his version of it--the dominant form of urban architecture in America from the end of World War II until the late 1970s.

Roger Kimball has a long, detailed and well-measured memoriam to Johnson--which showcases the highs, and the lows (and the lows were staggeringly low), of his long and checkered life and career.

Shades of The Fountainhead:

A judge should order the destruction of two condo towers being built for an oceanfront resort that carries the name of Donald Trump, according to a lawsuit filed by a Miami architect who claims the billionaire and a hotel developer took his design.

Howard Roark could not be reached for comment.

Eric Gibson looks at how Ikea is bringing modernism to the masses, "for those of us who did not grow up with Mies van der Rohe or Alvar Aalto in the family".

One thing I haven't seen addressed by the Blogosphere in the back-to-back action of the Madrid train bombing and the replacement of Spain's government with Bush-hating, terrorist-appeasing Socialists is, will Spain's tourism from America take a nosedive?

France's certainly did, and curiously, from what I've read, Chirac and company were genuinely surprised. It sort of reminds me of Gray Davis during California's dreadful rolling blackout period of a few years ago. Davis railed on about how he'd tear a new one to any power company who refused to supply him with electricity at rates he deemed appropriate. But when a utility said, "You know what? We think we're going to pass on building a generating station here. California doesn't seem too business-friendly right now. Have a nice life, Governor!", Davis seemed genuinely astonished that a business took his words seriously. (This is a huge paraphrase on my part. I remember the story, but I can't seem to input the right parameters to bring up a Webpage with the details via Google.)

I wonder if Spain's new government will be equally surprised when revenue from tourism goes south. They'll draw exactly the wrong conclusion from it: tourists today know that a horrific terrorist attack can--and will--occur somewhere. What they care about is, what are you doing about it? (That's sheer speculation on my part, but it seems like common sense.)Spain's appeasement of terrorism doesn't seem like a message that cries out, "Come visit us! Come back to Spain!" when the subtext is, "We're now two-thirds softer on terrorism!"

And that's a shame. I visited Spain for a weekend in the middle of a ten day trip to England back in 2000. At first, it was purely to satisfy my modern architecture Jones, and visit Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, generally considered to be one of the jewels of modern architecture, even by people who doesn't like much else in the genre.

I spent many hours at the Pavilion, taking God knows how many shots of it (I think I went through three or four rolls of film on it alone. And yes, we finally bought a digital camera a year or so later.)

But what I discovered beyond Mies's building was Barcelona itself, a marvelous city. I had interviewed Franz Schulze, the Chicago-based architecture critic, journalist and professor, for an article on Mies's furniture for Modernism magazine. He introduced me to the firm that arranges architecture tours for the Illinois Institute of Technology, where Mies taught architecture from the late 1930s (after fleeing Nazi Germany) until the late '50s, designing its campus in the interim. Our tour guide drove my wife and I around Barcelona in a private car with another woman driving, so our guide could concentrate on explaining the city to us.

It's a beautiful, beautiful city. (you may very well be reading this and thinking, "no kidding, Sherlock". But sometimes I have to see these things for myself.) Up until 9/11, I wouldn't have hesitated to go back. After that terrible day, I'd probably think about it, and then bite the bullet and say, "what the hell".

With an appeasing government in power, that's all changed.

And I'll bet I'm not alone.

Is it due for a comeback? And if so, what would Mies van der Rohe think about today's practitioners?

They all intersect at Samizdata.net, in a very interesting post. Be sure to read the comments.

UPDATE: I was about to post in Samizdata's comments, but figured I'd post this here as well. Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus To Our House does a pretty good job of explaining how modern architecture came to be the dominant form of architecture in the US, and does a thorough job of deflating the egos and pretensions of Corbu, Mies, Gropius, Johnson, et al.

There's a lot of modern architecture that I really like, but Corbusier's housing projects and city planning were uniformly disastrous. It always amazes me to see them worshipped 30 years after the first American housing projects based on his designs (such as Pruitt-Igoe) were first dynamited. (There's footage of Pruitt-Igoe, both before and after its spectacular demolition in Koyaanisqatsi, incidentally.)

In contrast, Corbusier's private residences of the 1920s, where he got his start as an architect-for-hire, were pretty nifty. But they were individually commissioned, by wealthy clients who knew what they were getting into, and specifically wanted that style--a far, far different experience than those residents of projects such as Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini-Green, who had modern architecture inflicted on them.

Sorry for the lack of posting on Monday. But I spent my last full day in New York having lunch with my wife and a friend at the Four Seasons (my very favorite restaurant--there I said it--ever since I was a kid. It doesn't hurt that it was designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, or that the food is pretty good, too), followed by an interview with Les Paul, who's about to celebrate his 87th birthday next week.

To paraphrase Woody Allen's line to Groucho Marx, sorry I won't be able to attend your 87th birthday Les, but I expect you to be at mine!

My profile of Les Paul should appear soon in Catholic Exchange, and the quotes from my interview with him will help to flesh out the article I've been assigned by Vintage Guitar magazine on Gibson's Les Paul Custom electric guitar.

In the meantime, all I can say is that it's always wonderful to talk to a legend--here's a guy who's led several remarkable lives concurrently: he played guitar behind Bing Crosby in the 1940s, had numerous best selling records in the 1950s with his then wife, Mary Ford, and during the same decade, simultaneously help to design what would become (alongside the Fender Stratocaster) the greatest rock and blues electric guitar of all time (just ask Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck and Slash of Guns and Roses--they all played a Les Paul at one time or another), and also invented many of the music recording techniques that we take for granted today.

For the past twenty years, Les has played every Monday night in New York--first at a club called Fat Tuesday's, and since the early '90s, a club called the Iridium. Backed by two rhythm guitarists--Lou Pallo on electric (a Les Paul Custom, naturally) and Frank Vignola on acoustic, and Nicki Parrott on stand up bass, Les plays a variety of tunes from the 1940s and 50s--his own hits, plus those of Gershwin, Cole Porter, and other classic composers.

There's a real sense of history here. I can't help but think that the ghosts of great legendary guitarists Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian (Les's development of the electric guitar seemed to have taken off when Christian's voice on the instrument was silenced by an untimely death from tuberculous in the early 1940s), Wes Montgomery (whom Paul knew) and Jimi Hendrix (who once called Paul for advice concerning his Electric Lady studios) are watching overhead as Les plays.

So many lives lived by one man--so much innovation. And so much great music!

Needless to say, I'll let you know when my actual articles about Les and the guitar he designed are available!

UPDATE: I tried to upload a photo of Les from the show, but Blogger's upload function is giving me fits, and I don't have the same FTP flexibility on this laptop that I do on my desktop PC at home. So stand by--I'll post a photo or two when mid-week, when I'm back at EdDriscoll.com Central.

Update: I later gave the article to Blogcritics during its very, very early days. It must have the longest ongoing comments section ever.

I had more respect for the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings, whose Gordon Bunshaft designed Lever House and the Union Carbide building in New York in the 1950s--both above-average examples of mid-century modernism (not to mention above average Mies van der Rohe knockoffs), until I read the quote that VodkaPundit found.

UPDATE: I just added my comments to the story on the VodkaPundit site.