Bauzeitgeist: Boston

Showing posts with label Boston. Show all posts

Monday, December 30, 2013

Other Prentices

CHICAGO, and elsewhere.

From Google.

From Preston, to Prentice.

Back in October, I spent a few days in Chicago. Under a chilly, grey skies, I saw the forlorn Prentice Women's Hospital, its sentence announced. While her broad concrete bosom still graceful and proud, but the black-glass clad underskirts of her podium had been ripped away.

©October 2013, Bauzeitgeist.

Prentice is an insightful contemporary preservation case in several ways, especially because there was little direct argument that the building was truly useless, or unable to continue performing its intended functions. It was only that other, more profitable functions would drive more money and attention into the institutional and civic situation. Goldberg's graceful ward was simply not big enough, and therefore did not justify occupying its valuable location—a very commercial argument for a university hospital.

Which is what stings: the disappointment that a mission-based institution occupying a prominent site in the center of an architecture-valuing community would pull down this unique building, and also proposed to replace it with such hideous buildings. There's even more back-story, which reeks of Chicago power-politics, and justified the destruction on the contemporary investment-and-jobs-vaguery.

So that building is gone, and Chicago is definitely the poorer for it, regardless of how cutting-edge the new research hospital would be or how many high-income doctors will work there—for there's little question that there were other locations for a research facility to go.

There is some small consolation, however: there are other Goldberg hospitals, Prentice's sisters, still standing today at the extreme corners of the continent: in Boston, in Tacoma, Washington, in Mobile, Alabama, and in Phoenix, Arizona:

Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, 1976-1980.

Good Samaritan Hospital, Phoenix, Arizona, 1978-1982.

Providence Hospital, Tacoma, Washington, 1969-1974.

St. Joseph's Hospital, Mobile, Alabama, 1982-87. All images from Google.

Mostly finished after Prentice, together they are remarkably similar in exterior appearance and interior arrangement to the now-dying building in Chicago. Indeed, especially in the use of the striking clover-leaf floor-plan, the Prentice's sisters are in most cases taller, larger, more expressive and more intricate; a furtherance of the architectural concept. Their quad-module towers meeting in a dramatically curving shoulder joint, as these last two images, taken from the excellent Bertrand Goldberg archive, show in the Providence Hospital in Mobile, Alabama:

Images courtesy Bertrand Goldberg Archive.

All is not lost? No, not all, just some.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Sommerlesung: Insuring the City

Occasionally, a visit to the bookstore, for those who happen to live in a place where such an errand is even possible, results in a discovery of a newly published book which is unexpected in a euphoric but somewhat devastating way. The existence of a volume on a subject so esoteric that the idea that you alone were interested in it was plausible, is a source of joy; that this insensible idea is dashed by the presence of the book on the shelf is a cause for surprise, and the small lament that you are no longer the lone expert on this particular topic (and therefore, with the discovery of this newly-published book, not the one to write the definitive account of the subject? Perhaps a cause for a small but powerful sadness).

Even if none of that makes any sense, never mind. Here is a book to read: Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape, by Elihu Rubin, published by Yale University Press earlier this year. The book tells the story of the Prudential Center, one of the largest office buildings and commercial developments ever realized in Boston or New England, chronicling the economic, commercial, social, urban, political and architectural thoughts and movements that brought about this unusual tower and the multi acre "Prudential Center" arranged at its ankles in the center of Boston's midtown Back Bay district.

I lived in Boston for many years. It was my first city-- my first time living in a city as an adult. I lived only a few blocks from the Prudential, and in more than one apartment had a view of the silver-grey-green bulk which towered over the red brick and rooftops of the older townhouses of the area. I can't say I came to love the building, but was certainly always fascinated by it, its hideous metallic grille body, its weird, anthropomorphic capital, crowned with dozens of antennae, and embossed with a corporate label as if a slip of paper had passed through a massive typewriter. The building seems to so rudely destroy the historic charm of the Back Bay's mannered, leafy streets, and yet is itself somehow hopeful and silly, broadcasting its simplistic, vintage optimism.

That the Prudential Center is so ignored, unloved and loathed a landmark in the common estimation of both Boston's citizens and visitors, which was produced nearly 70 years ago by an unappreciated, no-name corporate architect, certainly makes it an unusual subject of a full publication of academic architectural enquiry. That an architectural historian has successfully brought to print a novel-sized volume on not only this building's history but a footnoted account of its creation and execution is equally too infrequent.

In five thoroughly researched chapters, Rubin details the architectural heritage of the Prudential Insurance Company of America, particularly its nationwide Home Office expansion program, which resulted in striking if rather conservative new office blocks in Newark, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Jacksonville, and Minneapolis. To see a major corporation undertake a multi city building program in the midst of America's urban abandonment, and to have this occur for specifically pro-urban reasons, underscores how different corporate citizenship was seventy years ago from today. For more on this, see the inevitable Atlantic Cities post on the topic, in a review the book from June, which includes a reply in the comments section from the author himself.

Rubin devotes two chapter to the social and political environment of Boston at mid-century, when a parochial backwardness thwarted the implementation of modern architecture in the historic city, which was followed by a corrupt political machine. The book passes briefly over the sudden, shocking arrival of modernist urban renewal in Boston by momentarily referencing the West End, Government Center, and the Central Artery, all of which involved expunging huge areas of the centuries-old core of the city and interrupting the historic street pattern. It would be interesting to juxtapose these more thoroughly, along with the subsequent Christian Science Center near the Prudential, to show them as one class of similar urban renewal upheavals.

The book stays on topic, detailing the state and local tax schemes which kept the Prudential project alive. The final chapter reflects on the intervening time since the initial construction, in which the towers in the park Prudential Center was first revitalized as an upscale shopping mall, a program which remains in place today to great success, and in the last ten years has resulted in smoothing out the edges of this originally-inward-looking development.

If there is one complaint about the book, its that this ending is rather rushed: although the later 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s additions are mentioned in the last few pages, a more thorough architectural examination of the changes to the character and function of the whole center by these changes would have been welcome. These projects are nearing an end, as the last available spaces in the Prudential Center have been filled in or spoken for, but it is interesting to look at this three-decade maturing and how it reflected changing social attitudes toward city centers, as the modernist plan of multistory retail plazas and prospects, good in theory but dreary and windswept when opened, were internalized into a suburban style mall. A later era, just passed, saw the addition of new luxury condominium towers (there were always luxury apartment buildings on the site) which lastly culminated in the addition of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel & Residences in the mid-2000s, which was not only one of the most prominent developments in Boston during the recent real estate boom, but also created a traditional urban street facade along Boylston street where previously there had been a driveway.

The Prudential Center shown in axonometric on a Transit Authority

The only other complaint about the book, and the more significant one: the novel-sized publication contains only black and white photos, and most of these are tiny, and pushed to the edges of each page by lengthy blocks of text. Vast panoramas of the Boston skyline, and presentation drawings that are surely huge in their original form, are miniscule. This is a shame; perhaps the publication could have done with a series of plates in the center. This would have had the additional effect of showing some affection to the building itself, which remains a prominent landmark in Boston, yet one that is universally unappreciated.

The Prudential in a wooden model of the city of Boston

by the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

The Mandarin Oriental Hotel is the two mid rise blocks at the center of the picture,

Insuring the City isn't a typical read for any audience: its neither a general interest publication, nor is it the sort of books architects usually buy. Its not theory, and its not a coffee table monograph. Its dozens of pages of text only interrupted by subheadings like "The Bond Market" or "The Pubic Authority Model" or "Toward a Tax Concession." But this is also what makes the book so worthwhile, so important, so relevant, and so recommendable, for if chapters about creating a special purpose vehicle for a major corporation to develop a multi acre urban site isn't the typical book that architects pick up (much less write), perhaps it should be. This, I believe, is exactly the sort of subjects that architects remain ignorant to their own professional detriment: this is the story of how major projects actually get done, in American cities as elsewhere, a tale which is usually the saga of clever developers and willing public officials than it is of architects taking a lead role. In what is left of the summer, I'd suggest this is exactly the sort of book that architects should be taking to the beach.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Chaos, Indeed

Whitney Museum Expansion, New York @2001 OMA

Its difficult to imagine that the young, urbane staff of OMA/AMO does not have a contingent of aesthetically-conscious post-grads who have spent significant time in downtown Manhattan (anything in walking distance of the firm's Prada Epicenter on Broadway) at any time over the last decade or so.

However, it seems to have eluded the OMA/AMO team that the predominant retail interior of the district has for many years been the incomplete, 'raw' fit-out, that naked palimpsest of the building's previous industrial and/or dilapidated punk purposes.

For to only partially refurbish a sub-Houston Street storefront as an art gallery is a completely routine, unoriginal act. To declare it ironic or provocative, as OMA/AMO and the New Museum did in the brief display of the CRONOCAOS exhibit on the Bowery, is to be basically unaware of the interior appearance of both art galleries and retail shops in Manhattan.

Either that, or OMA/AMO/Koolhaas think their joke is a lot funnier than it really is. As seemingly every article on the exhibit, and the press release itself, seems to need to explain the partial revamp in detail (Ouroussouff, in The New York Times, called it "startling"). If a joke has to be explained, then is it really that clever?

****

But considered in another way, it is altogether fitting that the gallery housing CRONOCAOS was half-finished and in need of explanation, for the entire exhibit, and the theorizing behind it, is a half-baked, incomplete mess.

Aside from the theorizing itself, the content of the exhibit's boards suffer from a very low standard of editing, description, and visual communication. The narrative would not meet the standards of a mid-semester pin-up at a respectable architectural school, much less what would be produced by the in-house curating team of a major New York cultural institution.

An architecture student who presented this level of sloppiness would suffer a withering review for making tutors sort through such an incoherently assembled mix of unrefined argument and unsupported assertion. The startling presence of so many typos, and the stylistic laziness (for example, putting some words in single quotes, and some in double) is annoying.

Some of the graphics themselves are not particularly convincing, and many appear to have been hurriedly churned out. Part of the problem may be that OMA/AMO's signature look, the lower-case-Helvetica-labels-over-multicolored-rectangles-as-diagram, which the office pioneered more than a decade ago in the early years of Photoshop and Illustrator, have become ubiquitously elementary, and have not aged well. Perhaps they should not have been preserved.

Meanings are elusive. Words and phrases are employed without bothering to define them adequately. Paragraphs trail off as unfinished thoughts...further lending to the breathless, bromidic atmosphere of the writing. Few opportunities to make cheesy puns or eye-rolling plays on words are passed up: the project on the Illinois Institute of Technology is titled "Miestakes"; an aspect of the Harvard Campus masterplan is named DMZ, standing for DeMoralized Zone. Statistics and facts are often either wrong, or asserted without citation. The caption of one board, for example, reads:

There is now a worldwide consensus, in all cultures and all political systems, that postwar architecture was wrong, that is deserves [sic] to die and disappear because it is 'ugly', and because it is declared responsible for many of our current ills...

In another part of the show, a board asserts that The Reichstag in Berlin contains "no trace of earlier identities..."

This may be just small nitpicking. But remember that CRONOCAOS is universally presented as nothing less than a cutting-edge visual and dialectic manifesto from the world's premier, avant-garde spatial think-tank and its celebrity-genius intellectual/practitioner.

In reality, its obvious that it is a speedy dust-off of earlier project boards, strung together in haste by interns, and while it points to many important questions, it is too disorganized, too shallow, and too incoherent to be regarded as successful museum exhibit, much less a mature architectural theory.

****

CRONOCAOS has promise. Across its presentation, it suggests a number of very good questions about historic preservation. These are important, relevant issues which are not being debated or called into question very widely elsewhere.

But CRONOCAOS asks too many questions, and delves into almost none of them--little effort is given to moving below a titillating, ostentatiously provocative surface to a deeper discussion or understanding of the issues. It is didactic when it should be speculative, brash when it needed to be erudite.

It so launches (emphasis added):

Embedded in huge waves of development, which seem to transform the planet at an ever accelerating speed, there is another kind of transformation at work: the area of the world declared immutable through various regimes of preservation is growing exponentially. A huge section of our world (about 12 percent) is now off-limits, submitted to regimes we don't know, have not thought through, cannot influence. At its moment of surreptitious apotheosis, preservation does not quite know what to do with its new empire.

Architects-- we who change the world -- have been oblivious or hostile to the manifestations of preservation. But the current moments sees the perfect intersection of two tendencies that will have so-far untheorized implications for architecture: the ambition of the global taskforce of preservation to rescue larger and larger territories of the planet, and the - corresponding? - global rage to eliminate the evidence of the post World War II parried of architecture as a social project. The various elements of this exhibition attempt to show the wrenching simultaneity of preservation and destruction that is destroying any sense of the linear evolution of time and propelling us into a period of CRONOCAOS.

OMA and AMO has been obsessed, from the beginning, with the past-- though we didn't always realize it at the time. On this wall are a selection of projects that have not been presented before as a body of work concerned with time and history. On the opposite wall, we show the documentary debris of these efforts. Together, the work reveals an inability to rest with any single approach towards the past. OMA has instead deployed an array of tactics, each one super-specific to the particularties of the project and the site. If there is one constant, it is the desire for the 'preserved' - when we choose to preserve it - to not be embalmed but to continue to stay alive and evolve...

Who thought this was good copy??

Initially, its confusing in that the pronoun "we" seems variably to stand in for: AMO/OMA; Rem Koolhaas; the profession of architecture; and society. There might be "preservation regimes" that OMA or Koolhaas aren't aware of, but to say suggest that "no one has thought through" them or "cannot access" them-- who wrote this stuff?? How arrogant to state that a subject that many other people are concerned with has just recently occurred to you, so here you are, helicoptering in to grace it with your veneer. How silly to claim to have been heretofore oblivious.

Then that 12%-- what is that supposed to mean? Does this include the Amazon Rainforest? The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Belgravia? Paris? Beacon Hill? The Grachtengordel? Teotihuancan? The Great Barrier Reef? There is absolutely no definition of this.

It would be bizarre to assert, in this end-of-nature era, that there is too much of the planet's surface that is defended against our consumption. The protection of just 12% of the earth's surface seems appallingly low, not secretive-danger-regime, as it is clearly suggested. And even if the figure refers strictly to 12% of mankind's built environment as being under some form of protection, that is clearly not the same as saying that it is off-limits to alteration.

Not many people think that Venice, Amsterdam, Paris or Charleston would be better off with the bulldozer; to lose architectural and cultural heritage for the sake of more building. There is also a question of whether many of the world's most popular tourist destinations would continue to be commercially viable or economically prosperous if they were built over. The only advantage would be to the builder.

As OMA well knows, tourism is a massive global industry, and one of the most effective transfers of foreign exchange to developing regions of the world. This is quite aside from the environmental and ecological considerations of endless cycles of throwing away and rebuilding our cities.

****

One wall of the CRONOCAOS exhibition is covered in a wall of tear-sheet, self-assembly exhibition catalogues (clever!), indexing several of OMA/AMO's projects from the past thirty years. Some of them, such as the firm's study of Lagos, Nigeria, have very little relationship to any issue of preservation.

Others, such as the innovative proposal for Zürich Kloten Airport's expansion, in which

we identified in the existing structures of ZRH enough abandoned or under-used sections to accommodate the entire program; all we needed to do was to stitch the 'found' spaces together with infrastructure in a sequence that accommodate the intended flows

sounds utterly fascinating. But the single-paragraph board is woefully insufficient to convey the achievements of the proposal itself, much less summarize the preservation implications of the intervention.

Many of the other projects included in CRONOCAOS take a much more pedestrian, tried-and-true approach to preservation: contrasting the original architecture by adding on an unapologetically contemporary expansion (Whitney Museum; Cornell's Milstein Hall; the Binnenhof, etc.) Some like the LACMA proposal, are made slightly more interesting by the relative youth of the original building. Unfortunately, none of these undertakings are presented with any measure of depth of detail.

Again, quick sentences have been dashed off and printed up, a painful, unenlightening mash of blathering snark, overzealous self-importance, and grandiose triumphalism. The project boards do not seem to have been re-examined or edited for the show, so that there seems no attempt foundation for a greater coherent theory.

Then there is wounded Rem, poor he whose genius was so great, the French state has punished him for its: his Maison à Bordeaux was listed, and the original, handicapped occupant died, but given its protections, it can't be altered for reuse by someone more ambulatory. However, this self-serving lament does not entertain the possibility that a model of high-design accessibility might have a wider benefit to society.

****

CRONOCAOS is at its most goading when it hints that destruction should be promoted, or when Koolhaas asserts there should a destruction commission as much as a landmarks board. These are clever, but unserious and flippant, and become ridiculous when Preservation becomes a global hegemon straw-man. On the other issues central to the preservation debate, many can be discovered in the exhibit, with a bit of work.

Societies struggle with contradictory desires for new and old (especially fast-growing, non Western countries, such as China). Preservation is intertwined with the more challenging struggles of contemporary culture: fleeting authenticity and economic viability. Few buildings are built with the intent that they stand forever, and materiality makes their lifespans very short indeed. Preservation oscillates between sanctifying some landmarks so quickly that their worth has not been established by consensus or pedigree (Maison à Bordeaux; perhaps Swiss Re also).

In other instances, recent but not yet historical treasures are not protected, and therefore destroyed before future generations can celebrate them. Robin Hood Gardens is not included here, nor are the Nakagin Capsule Tower or even the recent rejection of Le Corbusier buildings by UNESCO. A board which includes an image of Berlin's Palast der Republik makes no mention of that building's story, or the reconstruction of the faux-historic Schloß on the site. A further question of whether we can presume that a newer building will be better, prettier, or more valuable could also be put forward.

It has previously been observed that preservation either freezes an object in a state of dilapidation (Greek and Mayan ruins) or overhauls it to an idealized state, which is sometimes a contemporary invention (Colonial Williamsburg; The Palace of Knossos). The choice of archaeology and restoration by their nature eliminate the other possibilities, and present a structure's complicated, meandering history as a single, static image.

Preservation favors the masterpiece over the ordinary, and so magnifies the bias of the historical record toward the elite. OMA/AMO repeatedly use the term "mediocre" --winking at the concept that ugly or average architecture should be preserved as well--in contravention of the exhibit's more prominent assertion that there is already far too much preservation.

These are mostly not new ideas, and are certainly not OMA/AMO's fertilizing of "un-theorized" territory, as has been clearly set out. Indeed, most the above issues, when related to CRONOCAOS at all, are only really explored in articles about the exhibit, rather than in the exhibit itself.

Polemically, CRONOCAOS has not been nurtured to a degree that such issues are adequately, purposefully juxtaposed, or present any fresh insights. The potential for meaningful argument struggles for attention on a surface paved with embellishment and meaningless prattle. To walk through the CRONOCAOS exhibit is to read someone's scribbled notes of a brainstorming session which you didn't attend and which no one has followed up on. It is no window into an exclusive salon of avant-garde architectural theory, nor a useable manifesto for our young century.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Krone der Großstadt

Just a few minutes after my last observations from inside Boston's South Station, I spotted a similar skyline-themed simulacrum once the journey commenced, on the wall of the Amtrak dining car (apologies for abysmal quality of the iPhone photography. My camera has been sent for repairs. Never buy a Panasonic).

The mural goes from right to left, north to south, covering the whole northeastern BosWash megalopolis: Boston-Providence-New London-New Haven-Bridgeport-New York-Trenton-Philadelphia-Wilmington-Aberdeen-Baltimore-Washington-Quantico-Fredricksburg-Richmond-Newport News-Norfolk, which corresponds to the route of the (sort of) high-speed Acela line.

Like the JetBlue murals, each city is reduced to a recognizable, or semi-recognizable symbolism of its skyline. There is a mixture of both historic landmarks, well-known tourist attractions, and otherwise a long line of office buildings of various cities-- with each location getting roughly equal space, so that small cities are almost as highly profiled as the anchor cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington.

Boston's Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge

The northern terminus is Boston, which is indicated by a cable-less Zakim Bridge, with the Prudential in the background.

Providence, Rhode Island. Courtesy Flickr user bunkosquad.

Strangely, both Stamford and Newark, which have intriguing, heteromorphic corporate skylines, don't make the cut, while 15,000-strong Aberdeen, Maryland and the New Jersey state capital, Trenton, are both listed. Perhaps Aberdeen is the hometown of some prominent Amtrak executive. It has no skyline to speak of, and Trenton just a few office buildings opposite the state capitol--neither seem to have any landmarks on the mural.

New London has a few multistory buildings in its actual downtown, which is dominated by a concrete transmission tower. This is polished over for the sake of the mural, as it is represented by what I presume to be the Groton Monument (which isn't even in New London, technically).

This is actually the tallest structure in New London, Connecticut.

Despite being both dull and hideous, New Haven's two tallest office towers are represented, Kevin Roche's unique and renown Knights of Columbus headquarters, despite its distinctive profile, is nowhere to be found.

The artists included this...

...but not this:

New York is basically reduced to some unidentifiable rectangles surrounding the unmistakeable Empire State Building, which flows directly into Philadelphia's Market Street triptych, which then imperceptibly melds with the totally unmemorable, anonymous back-office mid-rises of Wilmington.

Philadelphia, courtesy Flickr user Fordan.

Wilmington, Delaware, courtesy Flickr user gravgirt

Baltimore, courtesy Flickr user Spike51551

After Baltimore, the mural reaches its representative climax with the huge, oversized dome-and-obelisk pair, the Capitol and Washington Monument--only the Empire State Building rivals them in size.

Probably the most curious inclusion of all is the Quantico Marine Base, where, among many other top-secret goings-on, Bradley Manning sat in the brig until recently. Its recognizable by the pyramid of the Marine Corp Museum, which I guess is a tourist draw, but still an somewhat unsettling contemporary reference.

National Museum of the Marine Corps, Quantico.

via Wikipedia contributor RadioFan

As with New London and Aberdeen, Fredricksburg, Virginia isn't exactly Shenzhen, and seems to be marked by some colonial church spire. Colonial Williamsburg Governor's Palace rises taller than the anonymous office blocks of Richmond. Probably the artists were encouraged to highlight popular tourist destinations, to hopefully inspire some commuters to become repeat riders, with family in tow on a vacation.

Like the urban region itself, the mural peters out anticlimactically in southern Virginia: Norfolk and Newport News take up the left-handside of the mural, before it reaches the corner of the wall, at the end of the dining car.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

This Building Gave Me a Headache

BOSTON.

One of the better-written Wikipedia articles that I can recall coming across is the entry for Boston City Hall. Not only does it give a concise summary of the building's unique origins, but also discusses the debate around its architectural merit, with subsections titled "Description of the Architecture" and "Intentions of the Architects" and "Reception of the Architecture" (neutrality disputed). Considered a brutalist masterpiece by many architectural historians, it is reviled with equal fervor, especially among the citizens of the city and the public employees housed within.

There's not much to be accomplished in declaring if the building is ugly, or not. No one can definitely assert this anyway, for an aesthetic judgement is subjective by nature. As long as one person finds the building repellant, then it is ugly, and as long as a single person finds it pleasing, then it is not.

I've spent a fair amount of time in this building over the last ten years, and in using the building, taken an interest in how the argument intersects issues of appearance and performance-- form and function, perhaps.

In a previous position as an administrator of a downtown construction site, I used to have to visit a permitting office on an upper floor once a month to renew the site's public area use authorization in person, often waiting 20 or more minutes in a small alcove, waiting my turn to visit a particular city employee's cubicle.

An iPhone photo of the Permitting Department Ceiling,

Separately, I would have to visit a sub-basement to stand in line to occasionally clear my car of any overdue parking violations. Adjacent to this are the banks of windows where civil unions can be granted. I have often wondered just what the newly wed make of their austere matrimonial venue.

I should generally say that if concrete is your thing, this building really is a joy. The exterior is often extolled, but also many of the less-trafficked areas of the building enjoy a pristine condition which engenders moments of delight. The vacant upper stairwell somehow evokes both the sublime rush of a serene temple and the aggressive minimalism of a perfectly preserved stage set from a James Bond escape scene. The underused space benefits from a lack of wear, soil, litter, and graffiti. This itself is something of a paradox of the building: its best parts are those which are least used (a phenomenon probably not uncommon to buildings as they age).

Many other, more central parts of the building are not in such a like-new condition. Not only are these spaces worn, but these immutable concrete spaces are also in many cases haphazardly modified for their current use. I was reminded of this a few weeks ago, when I had to revisit City Hall for the first time in years, and spend the entire day in a meeting on one of the upper floors.

When I left in the late afternoon, I had a headache. Not because I was oppressed by the cruel, ungentle concrete or visually assaulted by the phalaxes of oversized dentil mouldings. But because I had been sitting for hours in stale, overheated air.

As the air conditioning system is binary, the vents were still blasting heat into the offices, despite the warm spring weather. Most of the upper rows of offices lack operable windows, so natural, local mitigation is difficult. The building's circulation system was poor-- a design shortcoming which does not rest quite as squarely with the architect as purely formal issues, in the usual estimation.

HVAC shortcomings may be the leading complaint in buildings new and old. Its an engineering issue that is roughly at the opposite end of the spectrum from aesthetic concerns. Especially factoring in the age of the building, and that it is an overworn, undercared public asset, it seems unfair put the blame on the original designer.

Yet it remains that using this building was simply not physically pleasant--and I was only a visitor for one business day; this was not my place of work. Sitting for hours in this stuffy office, I heard the clerk complain about the general discomfort: too hot in the summer, requiring a clip-on fan at their cubicle partition, and too cold in the winter, requiring a space-heater under their desk.

I wonder how much time the design team at Kallmann McKimmell & Knowles spent considering these people, and their workdays, their minutes or hours of interaction with the building. It is in this aspect that the building's utility suffers from their formal agenda. From the front entrance to the upper office mezzanines, architectural space has been informally reconfigured and edited to conform to daily needs, comforts, and functions. What is grand, bold, and austere is made haphazard, curious, and casual.

This is especially true at the building's entry, which, like so many buildings these days, is the stage for a security zone. What was an open entry hall has been rudely partitioned for this process. The personnel have even installed a length of faux white picket fence to funnel users out of the building. (Presumably the campy irony of this gesture was not intended?)

Nearby, adjacent to the decrepit central elevator bank, is a forlorn row of Bell telephone booths, a privacy alcove now used as easy-access storage for trolleys of event furnishings. A rather nicely-poured stairway, standing apart from the walls a bit like a tree in the corner of a yard, is roped off casually--not to be used.

The view out the large windows, overlooking the brick steppe of the surrounding plaza, shows the overhang of thefortress utilized as a carport for city and employee vehicles. A shipping containers used as maintenance storage has been placed in this cave-like shelter, too.

Looking not down and out, but in and up from this same corner of the entry level reveals a startling gesture of the building. Starting at raised interior platform, which forms the floor of the inner courtyard, a soaring, pristine space transcends the upper levels in a cathedral-like exultation. Light shines down from an unseen source above, trickling down the tremendous cliffsides of banded and layered concrete, appearing both engineered and geological; monumental and flawless surfaces despite their decades of age. This civic alter unites the various floors of the building, its light stretching to illuminates the public entryway.

In all my times into and out of the building, rushing to this floor and that, I had never noticed it, Because of a flimsy barricade blocking the foot of the steps, I could not get closer to stand underneath, to see the source of the light, and understand the building better.