High school is traumatic for a lot of people. The incivility, the immaturity, the confusion, and the hormonal imbalance all compressed into one building, day in and day out, it eventually takes an emotional toll out on all the inhabitants, especially those who have to endur it within a sickly grey, abandoned tomb.
One can imagine the torment echoing from the halls. The green ooze dripping off the roof doesn’t help much either. Then again, I sometimes look back fondly on that sensation of being surrounded by teeming humanity, barely kept at bay from the world at large, in a stone hut. The art projects, graffiti, and sports trophies adorning the hallways only seemed to cement the impression of high school as a Lascaux cave dwelling.
Pruitt-Igoe
There’s something too tragic about the failure of public housing projects to warrant catty criticisms of, but the upcoming documentary on the Pruitt-Igoe Projects looks like a good critical take on the subject.
The building, designed by the same architect who designed the World Trade building, was also one of the first modernist buildings to be demolished. How providing free housing to the poor could fail so quickly, while non-project housing nearby continues to thrive, is the source of an ongoing argument that may not be settled anytime soon.
Centro Gabriela Mistral, Santiago, Chile
photo: NY Times
When you’re not looking, some of these concrete monstrosities have sex and make baby obelisks.
Prison Cell Interiors
Saint Mary’s Church, Rockledge, Florida
For religious architecture, it’s hard to beat the ever-upwards thrusting immensity of the old gothic cathedrals and their flying buttresses. The power with flourish and solemnity in their designs, as overwhelming as they might seem, were actually a humbling of church designs, meant to unify the church with the laity through inspirational structure.
But when it comes to demotivational architecture, nothing beats claustrophobic enclosure. To achieve the effect that says, “there is nowhere else to go, you are trapped, plus, we are watching everything that you do” takes a considerable amount of effort. Not architectural effort, as it looks like this particular building could have been molded by an oversized child with a pile of clay and some popsicle sticks. Not creative effort, as it looks like they copied lighthouse blueprints off of Wikipedia and removed any interior details. But effort at suppressing any instinct towards designing a building while not being simultaneously depressed.
If the architect really wanted that feeling of “no escape” and forced introspection that comes with solitary confinement, then they could have easily added 360° of mirrors, looped recordings that shame each visitor as they enter, and a council of floating heads projected onto the ceiling.
It’s too bad they stopped short.
So Not French, Yet Really Quite French
L’Eglise Ste-Bernadette du Banlay
The French are surrounded by caricatures of their country as an eternally romantic land of lovers and dreamers. They are all artists drinking wine and thinking of philosophy and have no need for oppression. Why crush people’s souls when there is art to be made, yes?
Well, an appreciation of art also means a gullibility for terrible art. And that can lead the pretentious down the path towards building a puzzling monstrosity like this church in the middle of France. The thrill of building a giant concrete edifice to an ottoman humping a chaise lounge will slowly fade as the towering block of dead weight that you have cast into the ground will slowly shadow all of that temporary excitement to create something “new”.
What’s sad is thinking how all of the clergymen and laymen that go about their day in said religious structure probably have long gotten used to its defective premise by now. While wandering the hallways in monks’ robes, they try pondering the philosophies of the world in a building that’s all basement.
Industrial Brutalism
AT&T Long Lines building
Although the term “brutalism” seems like it was intended to convey an aesthetic of soul-crushing power and domination, it’s actually a reference to the French word for “raw concrete” (“beton bret”). It could’ve been “Betonism”, but if you were a billion dollar corporation looking for an architect, would you prefer a Betonist or a Brutalist?
Which one would be more likely to represent your full-scale domination of the world? You want a modern day fortress to keep out the heathens that have stood in your way for far too long. You want a dark tower in the distance that the commoners are afraid to even mention. That’s not something that “beton” tends to get across.
Light, embellishment, style, who cares? You want to jam a giant stone scabbard into the Earth and call it yours. Look at that thing. All I can imagine on the inside is a giant wooden wheel powered by a thousand galley slaves pushing it in circles to make the billboard light up. More likely it’s filled with wall-to-wall shag carpeting that’s drenched in 70s cigarette smoke and fluorescent lighting that would make a Soviet-era government building look cheery.
At some time in the past the rich abused slaves and monopolies to hoard money and eventually sink it into giant baroque skyscrapers covered in embossed corbels and romantic inlay to make the most of their successful greed. Then, at some point they decided “why spend so much money to show off our power”. They lost sight of the little things.
Of Lead Zeppelins and Concrete Spaceships
I blame 60s futurism. It’s one thing to be bewildered at what the future might hold in store for us with jet packs and glass bubble cars and everyone wearing neoprene jumpsuits, and it’s another thing to actually go through with some of those visions as if they were reasonable ideas. I’m sure if someone showed me a blueprint for a house that looked like a UFO or a wad of noodles, I’d be temporarily curious. Interesting maybe, good for theoretical essays on abstract forms and psycho-geography, sure, but for the people who have to go to work everyday I’m sure it’s a constant burden. Giving instructions on how to find the front door on a regular basis (“…just keep going around”) or just explaining why there’s a chimney on a building with central heat, yet no attic, must be depressing.
And then, when you’re done building a convoluted structure and dealing with the trifling annoyances of the day to day operation, why place a random mishmash of walls in front of it?
Shout-out to Robert Moses
You have to hand it to him, the man got things done. Going down the list of accomplishments is like a list of every superstructure in New York: the Triborough Bridge, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the BQE, the Staten Island Expressway, the Henry Hudson, the Belt Parkway, and many more. Highways and Biways may be a hotly debated topic - maybe New York wouldn’t be New York without them or maybe they’re just sprawl enablers - yet I appreciate the Verrazano for getting me into Brooklyn with ease.
Then I read this review of Wrestling with Moses:
There was his plan to build a four-lane highway through the middle of Washington Square Park. Another project would have razed 14 blocks in the heart of Greenwich Village under the guise of urban renewal. There was also a plan to plunge a 10-lane elevated superhighway, to be called the Lower Manhattan Expressway, through SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown and the Lower East Side.
Dear god, the man wanted to pour concrete of the whole island and turn it into a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop.
(The Third Church of Christ, Scientist in Washington, DC)
Libraries have an excuse. They need to block out sunlight to protect the books from decomposition. There are better ways to do this rather than building a windowless, lifeless slab of rock to fill full of books, but at least there’s a reason for it.
Churches on the other hand, where’s the logic there? What happened to the underlying theology of Gothic cathedrals with spirals reaching towards the heavens? The underlying theological-architectural logic here is something along the lines of, “here’s where you file your taxes”, “report here for deprogramming”, or “this will make for a good bomb shelter when the rapture comes”.
I feel for the historic preservationists on these subjective matters of taste. In 200 years, when we’re going through a neo-historic stone age rennaissance, these buildings might come back in to popularity. And until then, we have to suffer through our ill-conceived choices to remind us of what has gone before.
(Robarts Library at the University of Toronto St. George Campus in downtown Toronto)
Sometimes I can understand the logic behind these buildings. Maybe you need a sturdy building that will last the test of time, be energy efficient yet affordable, and kind of look like a Transformer when you squint your eyes just right.
Then here you go. Here’s a building that satisfies all of those conditions. Such great aspirations, but in the end it still just looks like a grey, depressing Transformer. Maybe he turns into a filing cabinet.
Probably not the first time valiant efforts have led to outright dissapointment.
