Washington Monument Grounds Competition, Why Bother?

The vision for Monument Gardens from the McMillan plan by Daniel Burnham, Charles McKim, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens Commision of Fine Arts

Last week a coalition of Washington DC planners announced the National Ideas Competition for the Washington Monument Grounds. The announcement of this open design competition to redesign the grounds surrounding the Washington Monument, has prompted a lot of response from commenters on Greater Greater Washington and elsewhere, but I simply ask, will it be worth the bother? I am apathetic about this competition for two reasons, one based on my knowledge of the current state of architecture, and second because there already is a great plan for the site.

I’m afraid this competition, like the recent Eisenhower competition, and African American Museum competition, will be an exercise in playing with a stacked deck, stacked only for the modernist. The Competition states that a jury of “respected Americans who are leaders and creative thinkers in the fields of history, design, civics education, art, and science” will be judging the multitude of entries to whittle the competition down to twenty-five semi-finalists and then five finalists that the public will be allowed to vote on.

Will this be the vision for the Washington Monument as well?
Eisenhower Memorial proposal by Frank Gehry

While having the appearance of public input, the jury will have complete discretion to choose which entries will make it to the finals. The steering committee appears to have not a single prominent classical architect involved, leaving me with the distinct feeling that the result will be another confused and ridiculous modernist accretion to our beautiful, classical, city. The shame is that the professionals and academics running this competition will claim to have chosen what the people want, but will undoubtedly chose what they want, ignoring how poll after poll have proven the public’s love of the classical.

The biggest reason however is that the grounds of the Washington Monument already have a tremendous, beautiful and amazing plan, just one that has not been realized. In the 1901 McMillan Plan’s re-envisioning of the original L’Enfant layout of Washington DC, the Monument was to be centerpiece of the Mall, terraced fountains and railings and a large triumphal stairway descending towards gardens and parterres beautifying the center of the city. Not only is it part of the original plan that so many architects and planners profess to have a reverence for, but moreover it’s simply the best solution to the problem.

In 1900, the Monument Grounds were not so different from what we see today, described by many then as now as a wasteland of open space. The plan developed by Daniel Burnham, Charles McKim and Augustus Saint-Gaudens well researched and planned to be the symbolic heart of a great nation and everything from the width of the Mall, the spacing of the trees and the heights of the buildings along it was considered so to create a unifying, beautiful and magnificent effect.

One of the pavilions of the Monument Gardens from the McMillan Plan, which would have provided shade and visual interest for those strolling the grounds. - from the Commission of Fine Arts

This part of the mall is the keystone to the entire plan, one that not finishing leaves the entire work much the poorer, like not painting the nose of the Mona Lisa. To instead propose an alternative plan of modernist architecture hatched in the halls of architectural academia would be to deface this magnificent work of art with a monstrous carbuncle.

Finish the Plan, don’t destroy it.

Speaking this Friday on Beauty and Harmony

A good part of the reason I've not been blogging lately is that I've been preparing a lecture and presentation for a conference this weekend. The architecture schools of Catholic University of America and the University of Notre Dame are co-sponsors of A Living Presence - Extending and Transforming the Tradition of Catholic Sacred Architecture.

I will be speaking on the topic of Harmony and Beauty, a difficult philosophical concept for a very long book, but one that has proven to be even more difficult to shoehorn into a 15 minute presentation.

My slot will be in the 1:30 -3:15pm session on April 30, titled: Beauty and Abstraction.

Novelty vs. Beauty

Following is the text of my article published on Catholic News Agency's website.

I'm also being interviewed on EWTN radio's Son Rise Morning show tomorrow (Sept 3) in the 8am hour about this article.

Here follows:

When I tell Catholics I meet that I’m an architect, invariably they ask me, “Why doesn’t the church I attend look like a church? Why don’t they build nice churches like the old ones we love?” Sometimes I come up with a complicated answer or theory, but most of the time I answer, “architects.”

In the United States, we have a fairly good tradition of building beautiful churches in which one can feel a true sense of reverence. One would be hard pressed to find a church built before World War II that wasn’t beautiful and beloved by its parishioners. It would be an even more difficult task to find such a church built after the World War that comes close to the beauty found in an average 1920s church and a Herculean task to find one built since the 1960s.

How is it that even within the Catholic Church, where we affirm and believe in the importance of tradition, that a deep and profound architectural heritage came to be abandoned? Again the answer is that architects, like so many other artists, have become obsessed with the idea of novelty. Most artists have been trained to believe by their mentors in 20th century art culture that only novel or “revolutionary” creations are worthy of being called art.

Today, I would venture to guess that most architects labor under this idea in one form or another. Some are truly dedicated revolutionaries, trying to undo centuries of tradition and casting aspersions towards traditional architects as backwards monarchists, luddites, or purveyors of kitsch. Most, however, are simply trying to be creative in the best way they can, some even maintaining an innate affection for the traditional, but still holding it at an arm’s length.

But in terms of high profile architecture, the revolutionary architects have been the ones that have caused the most egregious damage to the beauty of the Church, creating bunkers that one barely recognizes as a church, let alone a Catholic one. The Jubilee Church in Rome by Richard Meier, Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles by Rafael Moneo and the Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland by Craig Hartman of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, to name just a few, are examples of the tremendous ugliness foisted upon the Church by these revolutionary modernists. Coincidentally, or perhaps quite logically, all of these architects are atheist or at least agnostic spiritualists. However, most churches we see daily in our communities are built by skilled, but uninspired, architects. A great many of them are committed and practicing Catholics, who nonetheless labor under the philosophical sway of the revolutionaries.

Now, most architects don’t want to rock the boat and become bomb throwing revolutionaries; they are content to go with the flow, while not realizing the philosophy they casually subscribe to contradicts the basic philosophy of their very own Church. Most believe, as do a great many Catholics, that progress is a good thing and so too even in the Church. A great many indeed believe, given the changes of the Mass and the art of the church that the Church during Vatican II embraced the idea of novelty writ large.

But this philosophy of novelty is contradictory to the teachings of the Church because it rests upon a fundamental belief of the modern movement: the absence of objective truth. A philosopher friend of mine explained to me that the one unifying strain of thought in modern philosophy is the belief that truth itself is not something to be discovered by man, but rather something that man creates. The classical philosopher, on the other hand, believes that truth is eternal, that we are by our nature made to seek and know the truth. To the modernist, however, there simply is not such a thing as objective, knowable, eternal truth. This belief in the absence of real truth is what is at the very root of this insatiable thirst for novelty.

The ancients believed that art was one of many ways that one could come to understand the truth, as was succinctly explained by Aristotle who wrote that “art imitates nature.” Now the Philosopher did not mean that art is just the drawing of what we call natural, such as bunnies or mountains or trees, but that art imitates the true nature of things, such as when we refer to our human nature. Art, therefore, is concerned with the truth about the nature of things: it imitates nature in order to teach us to know and love the truth. Aristotle states that human beings delight in knowing, and what in art is not concerned with delight?

What then is left for the artist to imitate if truth does not exist? If there is nothing of nature that is truly knowable then there is nothing to be learned from beauty, and art has little value over the enjoyment taken in its consumption. When there is no truth, only the new and different and shocking are the things in art that can be enjoyed.

But this enjoyment lasts only for a short time, because since there is nothing to be learned from these works of art, they lack the depth and weight to be a truly satisfying meal for the soul. If one looks at what passes for art today, it has become very thin gruel indeed. The insatiable desire of novelty has led to such abandonment of traditional forms and ideas of art that a pile of cigarette butts or the preserved corpse of a shark is considered the height of art. That such art is highly prized because it is “of its time” only shows how much art has devolved from valuing beauty, order and truth to merely a fashion or fad.

Previous generations of artists always relied upon the wisdom of their forbearers, building upon their techniques and their brilliance to find ever new ways to make beauty. Progress for architects in the past always was a fuller understanding of their craft, looking at precedent to create more beautiful buildings than the generations before. But today progress has little to do with precedent, discovering a fuller understanding of the truth and principles and working towards the end of wisdom. But again because modernists posit that those principles cannot be known, real progress towards wisdom is impossible, leaving behind only an insatiable lust for that new. Instead, the modern artist sees progress itself as the end, and calls novelty true architecture and dismisses all architecture based on tradition as worthless kitsch.

The philosophy of the classical mind stands in stark contrast with the modernist, believing that truth is real and it is a knowable thing. The classical architect embraces this idea and believes that truth is made manifest through beauty, for it is in beauty that we can come to know God. St. Thomas Aquinas says this in part when he says we know God through the order of the universe.

In architecture we only need to look to the examples of the past before the middle of the 20th century to see this beauty. By studying the great architecture of the past, especially the work of the Church, we can come to better understand the principles of beauty: order, proportion and magnitude. The more we study it the better we come to understand our own world and God’s ordering of it. Indeed, this is the true purpose of all art, to shed light on the reality of being through the beautiful, to make radiant the truth. Now to best understand these truths, such as the truths of the faith, we must look to the lessons of the past and emulate them. Not simply copy or parrot the works of past masters, but by practice learn the true principles of the art.

Understanding and emulating the beauty to be found in traditional architecture is key to the creation of true Catholic art. Through the principles of proportion and order, an architect can create sacred architecture that is entirely grounded in the principles of beauty that is found in tradition and that sheds new light on truth, and especially the truths of the faith. This is the amazing property of a beautiful church, it is at once ancient and new, just as beautiful today as it always has been, still speaking with clarity of the truth through beauty it possesses.

This is why the Second Vatican Council declared “the church has not adopted any particular style of art as her own,” because throughout the centuries of Catholic architecture, the lessons and principles of sacred architecture cannot be irrelevant in our or any other time, but are infinite, because they are from God. Indeed, our architecture should reflect the faith that God is the infinite and eternal principle of all things. Just as our theology teaches us, the truths of God are not exhausted or made irrelevant in any time, but have become better understood; our fuller understanding of the truth has made our past discoveries even more radiant.

So too the styles of architecture change, not by massive revolutions or by wholesale rejection of the past (such as how Walter Gropius famously threw all of Harvard’s architectural history books on the trash heap when he became Dean of the architecture school in the 1930s) but by slow degrees corresponding to the revelation of the truth through philosophy and art and the work of centuries of artists.

This is the future of a true Catholic architecture, one that embraces our human capacity to know and to experience the truth, both through our intellect and through the beauty of art. That we can create such beauty and that we ought to create this is evident from the teachings of the Church. We, however, must in many ways undo the damage done to the classical world by the march of modernism, both as a philosophy and in the practice of art and architecture. Philosophy and architecture need each other when it comes to this, for philosophy to define and defend the idea that there is truth and beauty, and for architecture to create beautiful works of art, informed by truth.

There have been signs of progress towards this ideal, where new developments in architecture are striving towards a fuller understanding of truth through the beautiful, such as at my own alma mater, Thomas Aquinas College. Here where the Great Books are studied not for their historic value, but as books that are critical to understanding ourselves, the world around us and God himself, a grand new chapel has been built to the glory of God. The Chapel of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity is not simply a replica of a Church, but a lesson in brick and stone of how ancient principles of beauty come to life in new and creative ways.

Inspired by both the high renaissance churches of Palladio in Italy and the local vernacular Mission churches of California, the chapel shows perfectly how this growth of wisdom happens. By blending together these different styles without an inordinate desire for novelty, a truly original piece of art is created. Here the architect Duncan Stroik rejected the notion that one must pursue the novel and embraced the beautiful forms that will endure for generations. This is the choice that all architects must make to create a true Catholic architecture.

When it comes to a choice between novelty for novelty’s sake and the beautiful, in our Catholic churches the beautiful and the true must always be chosen. We can create something new, a new way to see the beautiful, but not create a new beauty according to our own image. In this way we can create what is both ancient and new. Truth is as infinite as God is, to seek after it in our architecture is to create something worthy of God and our Church.

This resource is provided in collaboration with The Foundation for Sacred Arts.

Leon Krier on the True Sustainability: Tradition

Many many apologies for the long hiatus yet again in posting. A few big projects came down the pipe these past few weeks so blogging has fallen to a lower priority rung. However these next few weeks should be much more sane.

Tonight I attended a lecture by architect, theorist and urban planner Leon Krier at Catholic University of America right here in DC. For those of you in the DC/Maryland Area, Mr. Krier will be speaking this Wednesday at University of Maryland on the same topic, the Architecture of Community.

Leon Krier (taken with cell, sorry for quality)

Tonight Krier spoke mainly on traditional urbanism, which makes up the bulk of his scholarship, but in light of our increasing awareness of environmental concerns and energy concerns. He gave a very good argument as he usually does for both traditional urbanism which centers planning around the 10 minute walk, ie, according to human scale and nature, but also on traditional architecture itself.

In previous posts I have made the argument that traditional architecture not only looks better, but that it is more sustainable. I have given a number of arguments showing how traditional construction details, and traditional materials are more adept at dealing with natural forces of wind and weather than experimental modernism. I have tried to show how tradition is not just an aesthetic choice, but is an actual functional part of a building. Tonight Krier was able to sum this up with just one statement, one that I think ought to be declared an axiom of architecture:

"Tradition is not about style, it's about technology."

Krier made the argument that traditional details, traditional construction is not about a style, not about aesthetics, but is entirely about technology. Not about experimental technology in the modern sense, but technology that works. Criticisms were raised in the questions after the talk about traditional architecture simply historicism. Krier gave the brilliant response that technology that works, such as the wheel or other discoveries, are not simply historic events, but are truths, and as such are outside of time.

We use wheels all the time, but don't worry about when they were invented, but that we simply recognize their utility and incorporate them into our lives. So too would the case be for construction technology, we simply don't need to reinvent the wheel.

So if it ain't broke, don't fix it!

The Year of Palladio

Palladio's Villa Rotonda (E. Bootsma)

So ends 2008, declared by the Institute of Classical Architecture/Classical America to be the Year of Palladio. Andrea Palladio, an Italian architect of the Renaissance, is considered by many historians and architects today to be one of the greatest architects of history, if not THE greatest. Though the Year has ended, museums still are holding exhibitions in honor of the noble architect.

Praise has been filtering in from across the globe from architects, academics and from the architectural press. In NovemberRoger K Lewis of the Washington Post extolls the greatness of Palladio in terms of his masterful use of mathematics and harmony. Architecture critic Jonathan Glancey (Guardian UK) is not at a loss for words to praise Palladio.

However just as lauds are given to Palladio, they are always given in terms that reject any acceptance of classicism today. A caption for a photo accompanying the Glancey article reveal the bias of current architectural critique:

"...Palladians, were drawn to the crystal-clear design, free of the pomp and lavish baroque that preceded Palladio"

This is a typical line of argument in architectural history given by Pevsner, that great architects in the past were part of a great sweeping movement towards an inevitable Modernism of today. Truly great architects were not ones that practiced using tradition, precedent or beauty, rather
they are reformers, rebels and rare geniuses (Michelangelo is always seen as the solitary genius).

Palladio is always seen in terms of his stark churches, pure and white, as if he was sort of a Corbusier of the 16th Century. Rarely is it mentioned that Palladio preferred a church to be pure and white for theological, not architectural, reasons. Nor is it said he preferred for houses, lavish paintings and decoration, for this would not fit well with his reputation as a "purifier" of architecture, or as Glancey calls him, "a proto-modern."

The critics and academics make it clear that Palladio is NOT to be praised as great without reference to his time. Palladio is only to be understood and praised in so far as he is part of the development towards modernism, designing in the tradition of Palladio today would be "controversial" or simply verboten.

Glancey makes it clear:

Even today, there are architects, notably the father and son team Quinlan and Francis Terry, who continue to work in a tradition descended from Palladio. In fact, the Terrys attract controversy precisely because they insist on pursuing a line of Palladianism ... as if the days of Palladio, or at least his ideals, were still part, parcel and pediment of everyday life.

Palladio's ideals, beauty, harmony, order, learning from tradition, do not apply today, according to Glancey. He is wrong. The principles of beauty and order are as true today as they have been for centuries, and we call architects great not because they have created something new ex nihilo, but have uncovered or understood the great truths of beauty which is not created, but discovered. The truth about beauty is that is not changing, not different for different times or men, but is universal through out time and place.

AIA Discusses Historic Significance of Modern Buildings.

This has been a dominant line of argument of late in the Historic Preservation movement, that "significant" buildings are worthy of preservation. However the confusion of "significance" for value does a tremendous disservice to the state of architecture in the world. After all what is "significant" is not always good, certainly Smallpox is a "significant" thing, but I seriously doubt that anyone would consider it a "good" thing.

A building can be significant in three ways:

1. A moment of history occurred there.

2. The building is an example of a style or movement or an architect's work.

3. The building is great as a building and a part of a larger environ, either rural or urban.

The first two ways of being significant are the most common ways that preservationists argue for the inclusion of modern buildings. These ways clearly are completely extrinsic to the building itself, so then the question of the building's intrinsic value is then apparently moot, or so it would seem.

The problem is that the building is a work of art created for a specific purpose. A building is made as a office building or school or church. A building also has to stand up to the elements and finally, a building as a work of fine art, has to move us to something greater, something that tells us about what it is to be human. (more will be discussed about this as time goes along)

A building must possess all three of these things : (as Vitruvius said: Utilitas, firmitas et venustas) These three things, brought together, lift a building to the realm of Architecture. In my opinion though, venustas (beauty) really is the spark that enervates a dead pile of brick and stone to architecture, but more on that later on.

However we live in a day that these things are really lacking in a LOT of buildings and in a lot of buildings that the critics call the great architecture of our day. There are a lot of buildings however, like smallpox, are so bad that they are the opposite of architecture. These are, seemingly without exception, the buildings foisted upon the world in the past century of the Modernist experiment. These are the buildings that are "significant!"

 

Now I'll allow, that there are SOME circumstances that allow for a bad building to be preserved for historic reasons. But I think those reasons need to be a lot more significant than "LBJ slept here one night." A hotel where MLK was killed or the Berlin Wall come to mind. These places have such a tremendous historic significance that the place rises above mere encyclopedic record, but it tells us something about being human, which is of course what art should do intrinsically. Here the lesson is extrinsic but somehow overwhelms an intrinsically bad architecture.

But the Berlin Wall, though a historic artifact did such incredible violence to the city that prudence practically requires us to tear it down. Document it, preserve it in memory and in archives, but don't sacrifice the city and our human endeavors to it. We need to have this sort of reason in dealing with the detritus of Modernism. Realizing it may be significant as in terms of a mistake, we should document it and tear them down.

 

This too goes for the second reason listed above. The significance of a particular work of architecture by a "famous" architect is even more removed from the intrinsic value of a building than its history. The IM Pei Third Church of Christ Scientist is the best example. The building is a failure on almost every level of Vitruvian goodness, but because it was made by "the great Pei" it should be preserved. So what? Because the building was built by a somewhat famous architect the owners and the rest of the city has to suffer an incredibly bad building?

A building's worth should be judged FIRST by its intrinsic worth. Does it work as a building, keeping out the wind and rain and keeping people comfortable? Does it stand up to time, or do we have to spend twice the initial cost every ten years keeping it up? Does it work as architecture, does it inspire us to something higher than the mundane and tell us about ourselves?

Or does it simply serve to stroke the egos of so many architecture critics who know better than the educated rabble?

What Beauty Is

Aristotle on Arts
Ethics Bk VI: Ch. 3

“state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reason. ”

St. Thomas on Beauty
Q.5. A.4
“Obj.1 Its seems that goodness has not the aspect of a final cause, but rather of the other causes. For, as a Dionysius says, Goodness is praised as beauty. But beauty has the aspect of formal cause. Therefore goodness has the aspect of a formal cause.

Reply Obj.1 Beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally, for they are based upon the same thing, namely, the form; and this is why goodness is praised as beauty. But they differ logically, for goodness properly relates to appetite (goodness being what all things desire), and therefore it has the aspect of an end (the appetite being a kind of movement towards a thing). On the other hand, beauty relates to a cognitive power [intellectual virtue], for those things are said to be beautiful which please when seen [or heard]. Hence beauty consists in due proportion, for the senses delight [pleasure being key to learning here] in things duly proportioned, as in what is like them – because the sense too is a sort of reason, as is every cognitive power. Now since knowledge is by assimilation, and likeness relates to form, beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause.”

Aristotle on Beauty
Metaphysics XIII Ch. 3

"Now since the good is distinct from the beautiful (for the good is always s in action but the beautiful may also be in what is immovable), those who assert that the mathematical sciences say nothing about the beautiful or the good speak falsely. For they do speak about and show these, and in the highest degree. The fact that they do not use the names, while they do exhibit construction and theorems about them, does not mean that they say nothing about them. Now the most important kinds of the beautiful are order, symmetry, and definiteness, and the mathematical sciences exhibit properties of these in the highest degree. And since these (that is, order and definiteness) appear to be causes of many things, it is clear that the mathematical sciences must be dealing in some way with such a cause, that is, the cause in the sense of beauty."

Poetics
“that which is beautiful, whether an animal or any other thing which is composed of a number of parts, should have not only these parts [properly] ordered but also a magnitude, and not any chance magnitude. Indeed, beauty exists in magnitude as well as in order;”

“for the visual grasp of it and of its parts does not take place simultaneously, so its unity and wholeness are lost for the viewer.”

“The proper limit of [a good tragedy or plot] according to its own nature is this: the greater the length up to the limit of being grasped as a whole.”


Leon Batista Alberti
Ten Books of Architecture Bk VI Ch2

"I shall define Beauty to be a harmony of all the parts, in whatsoever subject it appears, fitted together with such proportion and connection, that nothing could be added, diminished or altered, but for the worse."