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.