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A new article by Robert Campbell from the Architectural Record.
The Architectural Record said:Calling a truce in the style wars over government buildings
Thom Mayne?s courthouse in Eugene, Oregon, came through the Design Excellence Program.
Photography: ? Tim Griffith
Richard Meier?s Phoenix courthouse is another Design Excellence project.
By Robert Campbell, FAIA
?The development of an official style must be avoided. Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government, and not vice versa.?
The words are those of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. They?re part of his famous "Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture" (1962), which helped inspire a revolution in government architecture. The revolution was the Design Excellence program in the General Services Administration (GSA?sorry, it?s hard to write about government without bogging in multisyllables). From 1994 to 2005, under the GSA?s chief architect, Ed Feiner, the program tried to choose the best architects in the country for the design of courthouses and other federal buildings.
Full disclosure: I?ve been a so-called ?peer adviser? to the Design Excellence program since its inception, one of dozens of people around the country who are occasionally asked to help the GSA select an architect or to review an evolving design.
But getting back to Moynihan?s dictum: I once heard Feiner phrase it another way. ?We don?t decide what is good design,? he said. ?We ask the architects to tell us.?
But that begs an obvious question. Which architects do you ask? It?s a conundrum. By asking some architects and not asking others, is the GSA deciding, de facto, what good design is?
That conundrum was the heart of a national conference in Washington, D.C., in June. Entitled ?Function, Form and Meaning in Federal Courthouses,? it was held, ironically, in the pompous, disorienting interior wasteland that is the Ronald Reagan Building (not a product of the Design Excellence program).
The conference was supposed to look back over the 13 years of Design Excellence, using courthouses as a building type case study, and figure out what worked and what didn?t.
Disclosure again: I was the keynote speaker at this conference. I?m not about to repeat my remarks (I tried to argue every side of every issue, just to throw everything on the table). Instead, I?d like to address the real question about this conference: Why was it held?
A hidden cabal?
It was held, I think, in an effort to clear the air of a persistent rumor. Many people suspect there is a hidden cabal that?s been trying to bully the GSA into abandoning contemporary architecture in favor of ?traditional? or ?Classical? buildings, perhaps fully decked out with theatrical domes, pediments, and Grecian colonnades.
Rumors like that get around for a reason. To understand them, you have to go back to a series of events that began with the resignation of chief architect Feiner more than two years ago.
Before Feiner, before Design Excellence, the best architects seldom applied for GSA work. It was assumed the GSA wasn?t interested in architectural innovation or excellence. Since World War II, most government buildings had been bland, generic, unimaginative. All buildings are billboards for the values that created them, and these shouted ?bureaucracy.? That bad period, it?s worth noting, was an exception in American architectural history. From the one-room brick courthouses of Colonial days through the so-called WPA Style of the 1930s, with its masterful Art-Deco and Stripped Classical post offices, American government buildings before World War II were usually a source of architectural pride.
For almost two years after Feiner resigned, the government failed to appoint a new chief architect. It was widely assumed that the GSA was deliberately letting Design Excellence die. But why? Was there pressure from conservative judges? From some senator or committee? From old-line architecture firms? From the White House? Nobody claimed to know.
Then, at last, came the news that Thomas Gordon Smith, a professor at Notre Dame, would be the new chief architect. Whether Smith was actually appointed (as I believe he was), or whether the announcement was merely a Washington trial balloon, there was flak from the architectural community. Soon it was announced that, no, Smith would be merely a consultant to the program. The new chief architect would be Les Shepherd, a Modernist who had long served as Ed Feiner?s second-in-command.
Thomas Gordon Smith would have been an astonishing choice as chief architect. He came to Notre Dame as chairman of architecture in 1989, where he created the only major school in this country that teaches traditional Classical architecture. Presumably, he would have led the GSA toward that same goal.
Anyone who, like me, writes about architecture for the general public knows that most people love traditional architecture and prefer it to contemporary. Everyone in my home city of Boston seems to know that in a 1976 Bicentennial poll of architects and historians, the Modernist Boston City Hall was named the seventh-greatest work of architecture in American history. Boston City Hall is so widely disliked (except by us architects) that the current mayor wants to tear it down and start over.
An architectural language
I find it increasingly hard to get very excited about these style battles, and I suspect a lot of people feel the same way. Thomas Gordon Smith spoke at the conference, and he sounded entirely sane. (As one nationally known architect said to me on the way out of the hall, ?The dragon turns out not to be such a dragon.?) He presented Classicism as an architectural language of well-understood conventions, a language that can and should be used inventively. I?ve visited his school and liked the student work.
I suppose you could make the analogy with English, another language of conventions in which it is, nevertheless, possible to write original poetry. If you stretch the English language, or the language of architecture, too far too fast, what you get is an uncomprehending public. As Charles Moore put it, avant-garde architecture can be like Esperanto?an invented language understood only by a small international claque of appreciators.
In my talk at the Washington conference, I showed images of some of the recent courthouses the GSA has built. And, in fact, they come in many styles, some of them pretty conservative, including a couple of deep bows to neo-Georgian or Southwest adobe. The latter were obeying another of Daniel Patrick Moynihan?s behests: ?Specific attention should be paid to the possibilities of incorporating ? qualities which reflect the regional architectural traditions of that part of the Nation in which buildings are located.? Of all the GSA courthouses, only Thom Mayne?s in Eugene, Oregon, is anything you could call far-out. And one of the Eugene judges spoke to us, too. He was in love with his building.
I ended the day feeling less than inflamed by the taste war. Do we really have to make a religion out of any one approach?
Modernism in architecture was clearly a religion, in the sense that it was based on an a priori belief system rather than on pragmatic experiment. The world is full of systems like that. Freudian psychoanalysis and astrology come to mind: both systems of belief, like Modernism, in which a single internally coherent system is assumed to govern more or less everything. The more strident aspects of today?s New Urbanism, with its ideology of the so-called ?Transect,? can sound a lot like another such belief system. So can Classicism. Or Pugin?s Gothic.
For me, a keystone experience was that of living as a student for three years in a building called Lowell House at Harvard. Lowell House is exactly what Modernists rebelled against: a sort of oversize, underdetailed, cupola-topped version of a British redbrick Georgian country house, a stage set for the lives of students (all male, of course) who were regarded as the cultural descendants of the robed undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge.
Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, for whom the building was named, was a bigot who established a Jewish quota at Harvard and, as chair of a blue-ribbon panel, sent the Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti to their needless deaths. You can read Lowell House as the architectural embodiment of his Anglophile bias. Buildings are always message bearers. But I?ve never been able to persuade myself that life would have been better if Walter Gropius had arrived at Harvard 10 years before he did and had insisted that Lowell House be designed in the International Style. Lowell was, and is, a delightful, functional, and beautiful place to live.
An architectural agnostic
There is room in America for different kinds of architecture. Any one of them can be done well or badly. We don?t have to make a fetish of either the past or the future. In any architectural language, old or new, you can be inventive and functional on the one hand, or form-frozen and dysfunctional on the other. Of course, you have to reinvent your language, just as Palladio, faced with new programs and sites, reinvented the language of the Romans he idolized. Or as did Jefferson, when he branded the Pantheon on the University of Virginia. Or Corbu, when his memory of whitewashed shapes on the Greek islands led him to Ronchamp.
I?ve turned into an architectural agnostic. I don?t believe in any set of principles. Or better, I believe in everything. We?re never going to have another dominant style. There ain?t gonna be no common language. The information revolution makes too many options available to everyone. Architects and clients should be able to use any architectural style they like, as long as it?s fresh and fitting and solves the real problems.
You do have to wonder, though, exactly what will be the role of Smith, now the one and only ?GSA Architecture Fellow.? I guess we?ll find out. Is he indeed the product of some conservative political move behind the scenes? Should there be, perhaps, an equal-and-opposite adviser with a different point of view?
I?ll end as I began. Another of Moynihan?s Guiding Principles says this of federal architecture: that it must be done ?in an architectural style and form which is distinguished and which will reflect the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of the American Government.?
Four nouns chosen as a poet might choose: You can?t say it any better.
