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.