One of the things that I believe as an urban planning/public admin weenie is that public buildings should be palaces to the people.
I don’t necessarily think that this means that we RETVRN to classicalism like some right wing dorks want but I think that there needs to be more attention to things other than functionality when it comes to building things.
In downtown Durham, NC, you will find a US Post Office. Built during the New Deal, it combines the aesthetics of neoclassical monumentalism with the contemporary Art Deco stylings of the time. As a result, it’s really really cool. Despite clearly showing its age, it’s still a piece of good art that not only shows the authority of the USPS but the respect that public institutions should receive.
Compare this to City Hall a block away, built in 1977. I honestly don’t hate this one as much as most people do, but it is decidedly not a palace for the people. It looks like a defensive position or a county jail; where’s the front door? how do citizens access city services? Why does it look like a municipal redoubt? While the post office connotes respect, the City Hall connotes fear, domination. A public building need not be friendly, but it shouldn’t cause hateful feelings. Even someone who hates Congress can’t help but admit that Capitol Hill is intentionally built and absolutely gorgeous structure, right?
One more example of a public building: the East Regional Library, which was opened in 2006. Not a neoclassical monument like the post office, but honestly? I think it’s still palatial in its own way. It’s absolutely covered in windows, filling the book stacks with natural light. The entrance is clearly demarcated and actually has this cool effect where you walk down a narrower entry corridor that opens up into the expansive, surprisingly quiet and comfortable reading room. A lot of these types of structures feel sterile and lifeless, but I think they threaded the needle of making a modernist structure feel lived in and kind of cozy. And one of the best parts is that Durham County essentially copy pasted this design for a different regional library, lowering architectural costs while still having a cool structure.
Now, I think the current MAGA movement to make architecture great again is going to lead to weird and stupid outcomes given the people administering it. Durham also is home to this bizarre architectural chimera of a post office. I think it’s kind of endearing in a weird way, but I don’t think strapping a pediment to a strip mall is going to make architecture great again or whatever. And I get the impression that that’s what the MAGA movement will do when it comes to public buildings. It’s the equivalent of going
The liberals have been giving you scotch in a sippy cup for years! To Make America Great Again, we’re going to start giving you worse scotch in a 2001 McDonald’s Shrek Happy Meal glass. MAGA!
As a tangential aside to this whole discussion, I feel like building this type of structure is somewhat necessary for building legitimacy in governance. If we’re going to spend millions on libraries and post offices, why not spend a little bit more to make something that people like going to and looking at? You can spend $17,000,000 and get a utilitarian library that people will think sucks or you can spend $19,000,000 on one that looks pretty and that people will give you kudos for or at the very least not complain as much about.
As technocrats, we can fall into the fallacy of efficiency über alles and I think it’s shortsighted. A difference of $2MM is essentially meaningless on that scale to the average citizen. They’ll probably forget about the marginal expense before they finish reading the news story, never mind before the next time they go into a polling booth. But an ugly building is always ugly.
TL;DR – I do think we should be more intentional about making public buildings not grody for the sake of architecture and building civic legitimacy, but the MAGAts hyperobsession with classicalism is kind of unnecessary.
Posted by Nervous-Emotion28
3 Comments
My friend was just arguing this to me a few days ago that aside from private developments public works need to be the most aesthetically pleasing balls to the wall things possible
He was saying that we need like a fund for architects to run hog wild with municipal buildings or something i was like you’re crazy my dude
I have been thinking the same thing. Just go balls to the walls with a mix of styles, for what ever reason I think art deco and something based in that proto-fascist futurist art movement could be a really interesting style for stuff like train stations.
Aesthetic value cannot be written into KPIs and thus cannot be objectively measured and thus ontologically don’t exist. Obviously this is wrong, but that’s basically how people think