Ugly

It’s not a useful word, ugly. The word is unattractive enough, an odd collection of letters that manage to be both awkward and diminutive. But there is a certain pleasure to saying it, too— ugly. The pleasure is in the word itself, it’s the selfish enjoyment of judgment and it’s in the sneer that is an almost essential part of contorting our mouths around its letters. We may love beautiful things, but we like even better to call something ugly— the louder the better.

Left behind however in all of this shouting is the thing being described. As forceful as it is, ugly is empty. It’s power is self-contained. It describes nothing. To call something ugly depends upon a listener to understand. It requires an unspoken agreement about what makes something ugly. Or else it requires follow-up. Ugly either depends on nodded assent or else starts an argument. It ends the conversation or else it is just its beginning.

When applied to architecture, ugly assumes and too often gets that consensus— “Concrete is ugly!” For some buildings, like Boston’s City Hall, little more than that is expected to be said. That simple and absolutely empty statement, once voiced, is immediately tied to ideas about the failures of modern architecture, the imposition of monumental public buildings on traditionally-scaled cities, and the reactions to industrialized materials and construction practices. Ugly, here, has got cultural back-up. It’s got subtext, yes, but the assumptions are too heavy for those four letters. It makes me want more words.

Build me a city, but make sure it’s not ugly.

With such consensus, where does this ugliness, then, come from? Is it a perversion to design ugly buildings or to enjoy them? Or is consensus an illusion and ugliness just descriptive of our own need to divide the things we like from those we don’t?

Cold. Hard. Unlike ugly, these words don’t presuppose judgement. They describe. And yet, if the topic is modern architecture. If the topic is concrete, they are said with similar inflection. Ugly. Cold. Hard. To be continued.

City Hall & Boston’s naked modernism

City Hall, Boston’s aging rock star of 1960’s modernism, has been getting a lot of attention recently. In 2005 ArchitectureBoston, the Boston Society of Architecture’s bi-monthly magazine, published an issue on the history and current state of the building. They followed it last year with an issue dedicated to proposals by young area architects for its transformation.

Architects paying attention to a favorite building isn’t surprising. Mayor Tom Menino’s decision, however, that the city should relocate its operations to South Boston and put the building up for sale is surprising. Passing over the very strange decision to advocate the city government leaving the city’s center, Menino’s argument for a waterfront view in South Boston stands primarily on his criticisms of the architecture of the current city building.

David Boeri, host of WBUR’s Radio Boston, used Menino’s announcement to put together an hour long radio treatment of the building which brought together familar arguments about the character of modern architecture, traditional public place-making, and the need to preserve modern buildings for their historical role in shaping contemporary culture.

What interested me more than the intentionally opposed arguments of paneled experts were the interviews with people on the street, office workers, and government officials. Of the exposed concrete finish and its massive cantilevered forms, certain phrases were repeated. The building is ugly. Concrete is cold. It is hard. Ugly. Cold. Hard. These are the words that hang over architecture today, together a shroud too small for the thing it’s trying to cover.

Ugly. Cold. Hard. Dealing with these words seems necessary for any architect hoping to hold onto his own love for designs that elicit each of these. And for the architect whose buildings will likely be accused of one or all. So, a post for each. Ugly. Cold. Hard. Let’s begin.

Bearing Walls

"Something there is that doesn’t like a wall". Frost stands on the side of nature. His provincial farmer is shown to be close-minded and dull in comparison to the poet. For the buildings that linger in American cities from the mid 1960’s I sense a similar antagonism— though curiously inverted. The poem I want to write for these monstrous and beautiful buildings is also such a wall, a declaration of taste and priorities that separates me from those who dislike, strongly, their concrete walls.

Philip Nobel swung at these walls in a 1999 essay in Metropolis. [Yes, this post hardly seems current, but my interest is.] His article is presumably an essay illustrating several case studies of midwestern (important to contrast them with the furiously arrogant coasts) architects designing service buildings for those suffering from Alzheimer's. He hopes to investigate architecture’s ability to heal, in particular, and the legitimacy of the architect’s interest in positively impacting the lives of others. These questions are far too large for the few designs he mentions. And really they are mentioned only as an afterthought to his real interest— pages of invective against Paul Rudolph’s 1960's design for the Boston Government Services building. He writes with an anger disproportionate to his subject. The claims come fast and hard. The building makes sick people sicker (the building is disorienting to those with mental illnesses who seek social services there). Then, harder. The building kills people (a tragic self-immolation took place in the building’s chapel). Finally, buildings like it killed the architect (a weak shot at Rudolph’s death from cancer associated with asbestos). He writes to tear down walls based more on ideology than on their material.

Nobel tries to give Rudolph a perverse theory of psychology that would make him culpable if not consciously responsible for the buildings supposed failings. But his quotes from the architects writings and lectures are no different than those of any other late-Modernist who made sculptural works that reached towards art. Really, Nobel hates the building. And he isn’t alone. His article has been picked up by various bloggers and conversation threads about architecture, those eager to explain— contain— the very strange building in the midst of their city. Something there is that doesn’t like a wall.

But I do like these walls. I like their strangeness. I resist the idea that the textured concrete of their surface is threatening because it is rough to the touch. I’m energized by the landscape this building creates. It’s a building I want to share. I bring friends to its open plazas and grand stairs so that they will be populated— these incredible spaces that are too often empty. My urge to inhabit these spaces is intense and it is this primitive feeling that makes me so certain of the power of these walls. There is real poetry to be written about this place— both its genius and its tragic failings. I’m trying to figure out how to do that.

You don't expect to step off of the T and find yourself in a movie. Not that there was one this evening, but there was something in the air. Smoke, actually. The platform was filled with the light gray of engine smoke. Hundreds of feet along the platform, light was refracted through thicker air. It was smog. The air was polluted and were I to see it every day I would be broken down by it. But to see it once this evening, it was magical.

It didn't cause worry. When smoke should scare me I feel like I will know. It took a station I've been to every week for years and made it new. I walked up the escalator and into the concourse hall and saw how the smoky atmosphere had drifted upwards and reached even the top
of the barrel vaulted space. I saw rays of light and colors that looked vibrant against the sparkling gray atmosphere. I saw why movies look so good and so different from the every day, the artifice behind the magic. Somehow the dirt and grunge of the evening commute had caused something festive. I like that I found my version of the Christmas holiday in the accidental stage set of a Boston train station.

And somehow great and disappointing that when I asked a cop what was going on he just shook his head and said it happens, plenty of times. I smiled, shook my head and walked into the night.

Shrinking City

Boston’s a small city. It’s even smaller when the skyline turns into a set of stacked alphabet blocks. Spelling out a shared feeling here. Go Sox. The buildings will look tall again in another few days, but for now Red Sox nation’s playing baseball.

Thinking with my hands

I’ve been tempted several times to write here about the idea of a virtual world. I’ve imagined that the Sims or Second Life are more than games. Our world is full and they are providing new digital frontiers and the freedom that comes with them. These online communities offer opportunities for the adventurous to build rooms, houses, cities— even characters and identities for themselves. Spaces open up online and relieve some of the stress of physical and social constraints that surround us.

Still, I have never actually entered this world. I’ve been tempted intellectually by the idea, but not the reality. There is something about creating a virtual world in the image of the one we live in that continues to leave me unimpressed. It’s too literal and seems almost unnecessary. Yes, the rapid rise of these worlds amazes me. Commerce, entertainment, communication, relationships all occur now in these digital spaces. But, I can’t help but wonder if the appeal of an alternate digital world comes at the cost of diminishing our own. The depth and success of the simulated world can be measured best by one’s own detachment from this one.

I’m not interested in predicting the path of Second Life or how much of our time we will spend in digital worlds as they become more established and further linked to people and products in this one. I’d rather try to get at what about this vision of the internet feels limited to me and whether there are others that push further.

Though imperfect and dated, the first time I opened Google Earth I felt like I had been given a gift— in this case a colorful ball that I could toss and spin and whose scale was slippery. It was all encompassing at one moment and intimate at another. I loved it how it could be grabbed with the mouse and rotated and how it would spin just past where you let it go, suggesting physical laws mirroring those in this world. It enforced the idea that its interface needed not to be seen as a screen. It could be a ball. It was a continuous and smooth surface. Not something distant to be controlled by clicking on arrows or by remote control, but an object apparently close and able to be directly affected by the movement of my hands on the mouse.

As infants we learn how we can with our hands and voice make an impact on the world around us. Materials give at our touch if they are soft, press back if they are hard. A flame feels hot and yet can be extinguished with a breath. I need to use childlike imagery to describe my experience with Google Earth and I think its the this quality of regression that marks the sophistication of the program and my hopes for digital technology.

There is a scene in Spielberg’s Minority Report in which the police officer played by Tom Cruise stands in front of a glass screen and thinks with his hands, grabbing information, sorting through it, repositioning it. His eyes move as quickly as his hands. He’s searching for something and the balance of command and uncertainty is masterful. It was mesmerizing even as it was really a superfluous moment in the movie. More a physical retelling of the Sorcerer's Apprentice than a vision of the dystopian future. But the attraction of this theme is worth paying attention to— and the Youtube videos that pair scenes from Minority report and advances in computer interfaces suggest that many are. I’m attuned to the the idea that we can use our bodies to aid our minds in understanding the world. Finding ways of organizing and using the information available to us is, maybe, an extended infancy— one we are only beginning to get used to.

The idea that thinking is something that could be given a shape, and that we could someday “think with our hands” as easily as we now talk with them, is rich. The potential of the internet and its ultimate integration into daily life seem to be here more about illustrating the extent of our own inner life than in creating ever expanding virtual simulacra of the world outside.

(Note: I’ve used Google Earth for years now and really wanted this post to be a lead-in to an amazing product from Microsoft call Photosynth, but the post veered in another direction. I’ll come back to it.)

Architecture and The Sleep of Reason

I expect that mine won’t be the only architecture blog to talk about Eyal Weizman’s new book, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. This book more than any other I have recently come across argues that at the intersection of culture, politics, and violence lies architecture. And that is a seductive idea for anyone working in a field that too often feels headed for cultural irrelevancy.

Weizman sees architectural practice and theory at the roots of the conflict, informing specific strategies implemented by individuals, groups, and institutions over the past forty years, and grounding the rhetoric used to frame the extents and nature of the occupation. Proposed solutions to the conflict even turn to a redesign of the disputed territory, offering an architectural solution when none can be found in politics, economics, or diplomacy. Individual chapters of the book cover aspects of Weizman’s research into each of these, but perhaps more than his journalism it is the illustrations he uses in the book that may be what make it so provocative— particularly to designers.

Among site photos, film stills, charts and many, many maps, Weizman includes collages he has made of the occupied territories juxtaposing existing Israeli and Palestinian settlements with the proposed infrastructural projects intended to keep them apart. Described as “vertical partitioning,” these projects are proposed solutions to the re-division of space claimed by both states. Their sweeping—massive bridges, tunnels, and walls— carve up a single continuous landscape into independently occupied and controlled territories. These proposals apply bold Modernist planning to a post-modern or post-structuralist conception of space and the result is dizzying, both formally and intellectually. It is also exciting. Forty years of settlement, violence, and politics have produced a spatial landscape so complicated that even a familiar vocabulary of highway infrastructure and concrete barriers becomes fantastic and strange when manipulated to address the political and cultural landscape of the conflict. Their literal function— connecting parts of the territories while separating others— is subsumed by their appearance as a snapshot of contemporary Israel. As such they feel more like the projects of an architectural studio, students’ projects whose success is gauged by their ability to use a vocabulary of building to address ideas of identity, culture, and power.



But Weizman seems wary of letting his illustrations leave the world for the shelter of the studio, for the isolation of architectural theory and debate. The collages he includes are not his solutions. Though trained as an architect, he uses his graphic abilities to serve his research into areas as disparate as military maneuvers, settlement patterns, and international law. He represents architectural interventions upon the occupied landscape as white voids superimposed over photographic montages of the landscape. The addition of architecture is depicted as an absence. It’s an attractive solution to representing something that exists for the moment only as an idea, but its graphics are loaded. Their snaking white forms cut out of the landscape are appealing. In an arid desert landscape, the interventions are a dominant feature and their clarity reads in contrast to the the accreted patterns of settlement and their complicated relationship to topography and to each other. They not only illustrate, but organize, the political and cultural factors not apparent in a photograph. The architect’s, and my own, undeniable attraction to designs that introduce visual and functional order onto a site, I’m reminded of a prophetic image warning against the seduction of clarity. Critiquing darker side of Enlightenment thought, Francisco Goya warned in an eighteenth century print that “the sleep of reason produces monsters”. The collages contained in Hollow Land make me question whether I am looking at a well-intentioned attempt to produce a functional solution to an intractable problem or a sanitized version of the cloud of nightmare creatures lurking just beyond such a rational approach.


Weizman suggests that in the face of political and cultural injustice, the professional may have to transform his or her practice to adequately address the situation. Borrowing strategies and language from Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and founding member Rony Brauman, Weizman ends his book urging that architects’ roles in the Middle East conflict may be primarily to “bear witness” to events and practices there. It is a step away from the sweeping architectural proposal and the idea that a solution to the conflict might have an identifiable shape. While attempting to offer humanitarian support, whether providing shelter for those without it or providing visual representations of diplomatic proposals, designers can use their skills to introduce a narrative of the ways in which architecture and planning are used as weapons. Architecture is a weapon with pervasive but less immediately recognizable effects on international conflicts. In Hollow Land, Weizman offers a testimony to the particular ways in which the Israeli occupation has used this particular weapon. Ultimately this is not a book for architects. I was heartened to see that the Harvard Bookstore (where I found the book) it was not shelved with books on architecture but with books on the Middle East. As a testimony to strategies of occupation, this book will hopefully be read by those mediating the peace process and the determination of the shape and relationships between Israel and Palestine.

Looking for Architecture on Slickr

Architecture wanders. It’s got legs and though we don’t live among a landscape dotted with moving cities, it’s still notoriously hard to pin down. Part of the problem is that we talk about buildings, not to mention architects and Architecture, with relative ease—even and maybe especially when we know nothing of the places from which they come. We’re surrounded by buildings, but architecture is more likely to found in books, the places architecture can get closest to its own ideals. So the liveliest buildings live almost as comfortably on paper as they do rooted to the ground. And those of us interested in architecture compare buildings in northern Europe to those in New York, swerving steel forms rising above docklands to cantilevered concrete set amidst a sea of parking. The comparisons aren’t so casual; they’re tied to the extensive hagiography of the architects and to the classifications of style, materials, and building technologies. On the page buildings are involuntary participating in someone else’s arguments about them. Exciting buildings today look like this says one article. Architecture looks like this says another. But a little screensaver application I found recently has got me wondering if it hasn’t side-stepped the most judgmental parts of my own field to get at the good stuff underneath. Slickr, an add-on to the popular photo sharing site Flickr.com, streams a series of downloaded images selected according to “tags”, or search terms of your choosing. Type in architecture and you get all those images that someone felt compelled to label that wy. The algorithm doesn’t ask for a reason, and doesn’t judge quality. It’s wonderfully removed from five hundred years of academic wrangling. A construction site in Beijing is followed by a plantation era mansion. Time, location and style melt smoothly into each other, assisted by the soft fades and slow zooming motions across each of the images.

What I like best about Slickr is what it finds its way free from and the patterns and behaviors that still manage to emerge as I keep watching the stream of images. The screensaver provides a snapshot of architecture today. Each image is part of a story but one only accessible in parts. Watching them, I can't help but give the stream of images associations better rooted to places I've visited. I imagine myself sifting through a street seller's boxes. Not post cards—these images are more personal—but family snapshots of unfamiliar relatives and family celebrations that aren't quite like my own. Funny, now, to be caught in New York and in Paris, imagining a street scene only as a context to try to explain the impact of these images.

But thinking of my own vacations and the wandering I've done trying to wander towards architecture feels about right, because the photos on Slickr are snapshots. They're memories of places visited by others. They're buildings people traveled to see. And it's here that I sense culture creeping back in. The pictures on Slickr are often of monuments and they are in places introduced by guide books, magazine articles, and travel programs. What someone takes the time to visit, take a picture of, and categorize as "Architecture" has most likely already been labeled that way by someone else. So Slicrk doesn't really escape the categorization of architecture; it just manages to acknowledge how many different voices are out there trying to make themselves heard.

But still, I like that Slickr presents only the evidence and not the argument of those decisions. I can imagine but not really know which art history classes individual photographers might have sat through. Which of the documentaries on major architects someone might have seen. And which magazines, books, even songs someone listens to while travelling. All I can really tell is that each picture is something that someone thought interesting enough to try to remember and something close enough to their own idea of architecture to give it that name. The lack of certainty feels right. Slickr's a collection by a collector more interested in the objects she has found than in the organization of her collection. The collecting is fun. The objects are what's important, and Slickr gets at the joy of being in the world and seeing something surprising. It's why I would take a picture, or draw a sketch, or write down a note about what I had seen. But, I think, it's also why I would build—to add something for someone else to see, touch, and move around in. To be a part of something that might find its way into the collections of someone new.

Reading Boston

When I moved to Boston three years I told myself that this city was a place to learn about old buildings and old building traditions. Beyond the general feeling of approval or disappointment I have when in a classical building, I feel I lack the vocabulary necessary to really speak about a building whose success lies most in its subtle use of languages I don’t speak, or speak only haltingly and with effort.

H.H. Richardson’s Crane Memorial Library in Quincy has been a place I have intended to visit since first reading of it several years ago. I’ve even been there by chance on a bike ride with friends, but a temporary closure kept me on its outside, enjoying the stone and unable to see its rich wood interior. Today’s warm weather got me on my bike and there again.

Today I spent an hour or so inside, the building meticulously restored and used as the library’s magazine reading room—a surprisingly quiet part of the library on a Saturday afternoon. I drew the plan, understood its organization and found patterns in the wooden ornament.

Being in the library felt like an exercise for me. I wasn’t moved by the space, but appreciated its craftsmanship. I felt able to understand some of Richardson’s decisions. I’m still wondering about others, wondering which ones fall comfortably within the range of accepted gothic revival designs and which ones show Richardson heading somewhere different. I can’t help but look for abstraction and am drawn to the library’s stranger moments for this reason: it’s understated and off-center entrance; the informally asymmetrical roofline that brings light into the building from different heights on its different sides. I look at classical buildings as a critic without his glasses: I’m able to appreciate the structure and forms of the building, but cant’ really see its details—at least not with the appreciative eye that I would like someday to develop. It’s hard not to be awed by the detail, cowed by the knowledge that were I asked to design a wooden stair railing or column, I would not have access to this tradition.

Still, even seeing this building with foggy modern eyes, I can see that it is more interesting than the city today. Boston may have been, must have been, at it’s most vibrant and exciting at the turn of the century. A brief period of wonderful, heroic, exploration into concrete blew apart pieces of the city and introduced a rough scale to its streets. They provide a contrast that I love, but are already too far from the present. Middle children who live in the shadow of the city’s historic core—talented, awkward, and showy in a city that doesn’t quite know what to make of them. And we keep building. But we haven’t said anything really interesting. There’s so little that can speak to either Boston’s history or its iconoclasm (the city’s concrete megastructures are the companions to the giant infrastructural projects that have always kept Boston a construction site).

And yet I think there may be interesting stories being told about this city. There are the string of artists that come through Cambridge, often affiliated with MIT, that combine art and urbanism. There’s an exhibition in Cambridge that I’m looking forward to seeing(Urban Networks at Art Interactive in Central Square). An art organization in the Fort Point Channel has built itself a home surrounded by highways and unoccupied loft buildings. I’ve only passed it at night, and I think its time to see what’s happening inside. It may be here rather than the towers rising Downtown or in the Greenway that may someday wrap through the city, that the most interesting stories about the city are being created.