Loose Planning

I am spending this week in Nashville, Tennessee working at a storage facility which provides me with ample time to job hunt, read, surf the internet and, of course, blog post. I have been noticing Nashville's architecture since I have been here and have decided that i hate it. Utterly and completely hate it. This cities renaissances have come during unfortunately disparate times in architectural style. The first came in the late 1890's giving us the Victorian Union Station and Gothic Revival Customs House, another came in the 1970's giving the city dozens of classic modern structures, and finally from the 90's to today with the Post-Modern LP Field and AT&T Buildings and the Neo-classic Schermerhorn Center. In addition to this public confusion, Nashville is also the state capital of Tennessee, so there is a large Federal/Beaux Arts civic center right in the middle of it all. To top it all off, Nashville has a 1-1 scale reproduction of the Parthenon in a neighboring park.

Obviously every city in the country has a jumble of disparate architectural styles that can be loosely associated with the rise and fall of successful economic conditions within the cities, but Nashville has so poorly integrated and planned each build cycle, the resident is left totally distracted by the situation. Just about every architectural style I know of is represented in a city that is not big enough to disperse the effects of the competing aesthetics. Every time I look up I just want to bulldoze half of what I see to make my eyes stop burning. Ponder the following photos...

The final image is the propsed mixed-use tower that will add to the calamity. I encourage you to Google image search for more pictures before you make a judgment. Also bear in mind that all of the above pictures encompass about 8 square blocks...

Tighten it up Nashville city planners. It looks gross.

The anti-contextualist manifesto.

I make no apologies for the length of this post. Tighten up, Taco Bell.
Franchise restaurants certainly present numerous challenges to communities, and it is a considerable victory for localities to be able to work with such businesses to craft designs that break with corporate stock examples in some degree. However, to craft a Taco Bell, for example, that resembles what might well be a local historic building type—particularly one that resembles a domestic structure—is a dangerous conceit. While it is unlikely that such a design would be taken for a an authentic period building that had been adapted for use as a restaurant, the greater the faithfulness of that Taco Bell’s design to identifiable local traditions, the greater the chance that the meaning of the original type be distorted and cheapened. James Fitch, founder of Columbia’s Historic Preservation program, wrote, “[e]ven when the mass production of the facsimile leaves the prototype unaltered and intact, mass distribution confronts it with another danger. Heedless repetition of the form ends by emptying it of emotional force: overfamiliarity reduces its cultural potency and ends by destroying its capacity to move us.”

The prototype being the original old structure and the facsimile being the Taco Bell, Fitch makes clear that contextualism or even compatibility taken too far has dangerous implications for our ability to relate to artifacts of the past. It does not matter that the Taco Bell might not be a literal replication of a specific local building. Rather, it is critical that an attempt to re-appropriate what are likely historically accurate or historically spirited design elements and crossing them with modern elements such as signage, doors, and even such subtle things as brick color and mortar composition commingle elements that never would have existed together in the prototype. Any potential accuracy in the facsimile is compromised by the question of how each individual element was designed, manufactured or constructed, and assembled. For Fitch, the scientific data contained in the prototype is confused with the speculation offered by the facsimile, and the observer—quite possibly ignorant of the information contained in the original—is left to sort out the question of meaning totally unequipped for the task. If design guidelines are to encourage or allow buildings that have this impact, they represent for the field of historic preservation an acute threat and must be tightened up.

PS: San Loco destroyed your Cheesy Gordita Crunch with its magnificent Queso Loco--which I'm sure uses meat above Grade R. Look out!

Smarmy banker feigns taste.

The New York Times published an article today explaining recent developments in the story of modernist architect (and designer of NYC's Whitney Museum) Marcel Breuer's only skyscraper, the Cleveland Trust Tower in Boston. The city of Boston has purchased the building and plans to demolish it and construct in its place a 15-story building at a cost of $223M (retrofitting the existing 29-story tower would cost $185-$200M, a significant savings for taxpayers). Along with Walter Gropius (founder of the Bauhaus school), Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, Breuer was a founding architect of the modernist movement, and a designer of tremendous skill and distinction.

It goes nearly without saying that I think the building is worth preserving and retrofitting for both cultural and financial reasons, but Julie Baker, a commercial banker quoted by the Times, disagrees: "That thing looks like a collector’s case for Matchbox cars...If I could get a wrecking ball, I’d tear it down myself.”

Wow, thanks for your opinion, Julie! If I had some brass knuckles, I'd punch you in the face. I don't give a damn what you think, you unconsidered savage. I bet if your thinking was so short-sighted at that fancy commercial bank of yours, they'd have fired you last week. Regardless of what you think, the building has a singular meaning for the city of Boston and for the architectural community, and the vicissitudes of your taste are a minuscule irrelevance compared to it. Also, it's great of you to consider the waste of material and embedded energy produced by demolishing a building that large...I guess it's just like throwing away a paper towel you used to dry your hands, right? Thank you, though, for participating in the now well-worn cycle of judgment that so often underappreciates an artist in his or her own time or soon thereafter, resulting frequently in the destruction or mistreatment of what time almost inevitably accords--especially in the case of otherwise celebrated creators--widespread acceptance, AND, gasp!, sometimes even appreciation.

So, numskull, how 'bout you tighten up that loose cannon mouth of yours and consider the dialog occurring between the tower and the adjacent Beaux-Arts rotunda -- you might put your brain to good use.

Architectural Banality at UVa: More brick and white columns, please.

The University of Virginia just broke ground on its new South Lawn Project, an expansion campaign that will be its largest in the last 100 years since Stanford White's construction of Old Cabel Hall, Cocke & Rouss Halls. Too bad it sucks.

I was deeply saddened to learn that Jim Polshek--the architect originally selected for the project-- felt he needed to walk away from the proceedings a few months ago; I think he is one of the brightest lights working in the field of architecture today. Because of his abilities, I think he was much better suited to getting the job done...

This project is a colossal and unprecedented opportunity to not only expand the spatial and operational capacity of UVa, but to make a statement about different architectures--born of different times and operating under differing theories but fundamentally committed to the idea that a built environment can dramatically influence and contribute to the experience of those who navigate it--and how they can work together to improve both the aesthetic and the community that aesthetic serves. Jefferson's lawn was one of the first great laboratories that explored these ideas.

People--sometimes those who like to call themselves preservationists or who espouse a preservation ethos--throw around the term "appropriate" when describing how a new addition on grounds should relate to Thomas Jefferson's original plan. Frequently in the preservation world, however, people mistake appropriateness for the lowest common denominator of design--for that set of materials, symmetry, solids and voids, and massing that draws on existing built fabric in the most apish of ways to yield a product of such extraordinary mediocrity, blandness, and banality as to not only squander the aesthetic opportunity furnished by the project, but also to dilute the brilliance of the original work that it so self-consciously sought to respect. That, friends, is not appropriateness--that laughs in the face of appropriateness. That act is a desecration of appropriateness. Appropriateness--and this is why Jim Polshek was such a wonderful choice to begin with--especially when dealing with a vision of the magnitude and significance of Jefferson's--is taking a chance at making an honest, beautiful, bold thing that honors the spirit of the old thing. The new thing should be a witness (in the theological sense) to the vision that helped make UVa great. And what we get instead is an ill-advised design too timid to treat with any seriousness or originality the essence of Jefferson's ideas which are now imbued with the lessons of 190 years of education, politics, culture and all that other stuff we're supposed to study in these awesome new buildings.

University of Virginia, tighten your shit up.