Michael Kimmelman versus Trump
Donald Trump is considering an executive order that would require classical or traditional styles for almost all federal buildings, and New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman rushed to the opposite extreme and produced the worst architecture criticism to appear in the Times since his predecessor Nicolai Ouroussoff left.
He used Thomas Phifer's United States Courthouse in Salt Lake City as an example of one of his favorite federal civic buildings, which this regulation would not allow. It is the building to the left in this picture, and it is obviously a forbidding, sterile monolith. Architects loved it, but ordinary people hated it and named it the "Borg Cube" after a villainous alien race in Star Trek that used cubical space ships.
Kimmelman's article uses a picture that looks at this building head-on, so it looks like a free-standing minimalist sculpture in the middle of its grassy grounds.
Here, we use a picture showing the face it turns to the street, to make it obvious how completely it ignores its urban context. Across the street, there is a older building with stores and restaurants facing the sidewalk, creating an attractive place for pedestrians. But the courthouse has a blank wall facing the sidewalk, then a lawn, and then set back behind the lawn, the forbidding blank wall of the courthouse building, creating a miserable place for pedestrians.
Anyone who admires this building either doesn't care about or doesn't know anything about placemaking.
The building is a typical example of the most obvious fault of modernist architecture: it tries to create a sculptural object in space rather than creating a good place for people to be.
The architects who admire it have a post-romantic view of the architect as an artist whose only obligation is to his own creative genius, rather than thinking of architects as professionals who have an obligation to create good places for their clients. It is as if a lawyer speaking in court only cared about his own flowery rhetoric and did not care about his client.
Trump's new guidelines would replace guidelines adopted in 1962, the heyday of mid-century modernism, which say that design should, "flow from the architectural profession to the government, and not vice versa." This is just another way of stating the modernist ideal of the architect as an artist with obligations to his own creative genius rather than to his clients.
I don't think the government should require a specific style, but it should adopt architectural guidelines that require buildings to break up their massing, to have human-scale fenestration, and to relate to their urban context, so we don't get more forbidding monoliths that turn their backs to the street like this Salt Lake City Courthouse. These guidelines would be something like form-based codes, so they would replace the mid-twentieth-century ideal of the architect as an artist creating sculptural objects with a twenty-first century ideal of the architect as a professional who should create human-scale places for the community.
Things might be different if Trump had considered an executive order that required the style that he really likes best - the glitzy modernism of Trump tower. Then the critics might rush to the opposite extreme and call for a humanistic architecture rather than sterile glass monoliths.
See Kimmelman's article here
He used Thomas Phifer's United States Courthouse in Salt Lake City as an example of one of his favorite federal civic buildings, which this regulation would not allow. It is the building to the left in this picture, and it is obviously a forbidding, sterile monolith. Architects loved it, but ordinary people hated it and named it the "Borg Cube" after a villainous alien race in Star Trek that used cubical space ships.
Here, we use a picture showing the face it turns to the street, to make it obvious how completely it ignores its urban context. Across the street, there is a older building with stores and restaurants facing the sidewalk, creating an attractive place for pedestrians. But the courthouse has a blank wall facing the sidewalk, then a lawn, and then set back behind the lawn, the forbidding blank wall of the courthouse building, creating a miserable place for pedestrians.
Anyone who admires this building either doesn't care about or doesn't know anything about placemaking.
The building is a typical example of the most obvious fault of modernist architecture: it tries to create a sculptural object in space rather than creating a good place for people to be.
The architects who admire it have a post-romantic view of the architect as an artist whose only obligation is to his own creative genius, rather than thinking of architects as professionals who have an obligation to create good places for their clients. It is as if a lawyer speaking in court only cared about his own flowery rhetoric and did not care about his client.
Trump's new guidelines would replace guidelines adopted in 1962, the heyday of mid-century modernism, which say that design should, "flow from the architectural profession to the government, and not vice versa." This is just another way of stating the modernist ideal of the architect as an artist with obligations to his own creative genius rather than to his clients.
I don't think the government should require a specific style, but it should adopt architectural guidelines that require buildings to break up their massing, to have human-scale fenestration, and to relate to their urban context, so we don't get more forbidding monoliths that turn their backs to the street like this Salt Lake City Courthouse. These guidelines would be something like form-based codes, so they would replace the mid-twentieth-century ideal of the architect as an artist creating sculptural objects with a twenty-first century ideal of the architect as a professional who should create human-scale places for the community.
Things might be different if Trump had considered an executive order that required the style that he really likes best - the glitzy modernism of Trump tower. Then the critics might rush to the opposite extreme and call for a humanistic architecture rather than sterile glass monoliths.
See Kimmelman's article here
posted by C. Siegel at 1:53 PM
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