The Evanescent and Phantasmagoric

[UPDATE added. See further down. —MJ]

A post about Sony cameras the other day sparked a conversation about an architectural style called "Brutalism" because I mentioned it in a parenthetical comment. From various commenters I learned a little about that. This morning we got another comment from a reader, Phil, who lived at the Barbican for 15 years. I appreciate hearing about things like Brutalism from different perspectives, although in this case it doesn't bring me a centimeter closer to liking it. This post is meant to be about something else entirely, but I'll start with the architecture.

Is this Brutalism? The photograph, from Shorpy, comes from the early 1960s. It's the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center, on the lakefront in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was dedicated on Veteran's Day 1957, the year I was born. I can't find very much online about it as a building or as architecture. It does appear to be made mostly of raw concrete, although it's doubtless steel underneath that forms the slender-looking supports. It has large mosaics on the street-facing facade, which seems, from my limited understanding, to also be a not-uncommon aspect of the Brutalist style. The building was designed by the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, who also designed the St. Louis Arch and a number of still-famous public buildings including the passenger terminal at Dulles Airport. Public architecture is not one of "my" arts, the ones I follow and feel affinity toward, but I probably know more about Saarinen's work than that of any other, excepting maybe Wright whose work everyone knows. Saarinen passed away only four years after the War Memorial Center was dedicated. More's the pity; he certainly had much more to give. He accomplished a lot in a lifetime of only 51 years.

The picture shows the building the way Saarinen obviously meant it to be seen, crowning a pristine hill. To me it doesn't fit the Brutalist category because it was clearly meant to look like its mass is floating above the ground, giving a visual impression of weightlessness. The hill it's on, shown so nicely here, was meant to be part of the whole. Unfortunately, developers and planners can't stand open land, especially when it's just a visual prospect setting off a view of a building that was designed to fit there. American practicality has no use, and less respect, for mere views. The base of the building you see here was extended way out toward the lake, and the space where the hill used to be is now cluttered with a mess of bits and pieces of other structures. The War Memorial Center itself has been rendered dated and almost dowdy-looking by the newer and more glamorous sibling pressing up against it from next door, Santiago Calatrava's Quadracci Pavilion, which is literally several shades brighter, making this building look as drab as a rainy day by comparison. Curiously, both serve or served as the Milwaukee Art Museum, and yet both are more or less useless for that purpose. There are galleries underneath the War Memorial Center, and most of the dramatic spaces in the Quadracci Pavilion are not very functional for showing art. The buildings themselves might be art. But the actual art galleries in both cases seem to be afterthoughts.

Okay, too much intro, but I couldn't help relating it to the architectural discussion that flowed out of the Sony design post.

[UPDATE: Finally found a picture of the War Memorial Center as it is now. The photo by Bill Cobb is undated as far as I could find out. The old picture is taken from the Northeast, and Bill Cobb's is more from the Southeast, and from the air. But you can get an idea of how much of the original hill is gone and how much has been built up around the 1957 building. —MJ]

Running up that hill
Here's the point I wanted to make. It's that we all bring ourselves to photographs, and to art, and the complex meaning artworks possess is a construct in our minds that relate to many things: not only our personal associations, connotations, and memories, but things like our existing relationships to taste, our calcified pre-existing beliefs and attitudes, our prejudices and so on. A person who has already decided their "stance" toward modern art, say, or to neoclassical government buildings, can't come to new examples of those things with minds that are completely open in the usual sense.

In this case, I can't view this picture without remembering that I once played on that hill. I lived right at what was then the northernmost edge of the Milwaukee metropolitan area from age five to age 18. I also can't see this picture without the knowledge that that hill is no longer there as it was. Nor can I shake off a minor but ancient resentment against whoever had a part in deciding to disrespect Eero Saarinen's artistic intentions by obliterating the hill. It seems obvious to me that he intended the building to fit its space and its surroundings—but the space and surroundings as they existed in 1957.

More globally, I've come to realize that what appears to be the most solid and lasting form of art—architecture—is often actually among the most ephemeral. No one wants to destroy a 350-year-old Vermeer—quite the contrary—but buildings have a lifespan. They age, they need to be updated, their uses change, their meaning relative to the "now" of when they were new changes, funding for maintenance increases and becomes burdensome. Their visual effect is spoiled by remodeling, sometimes called "remuddling" when it is ham-handedly or ignorantly done, and sometimes they're simply obscured by new things built in the way. And, often sooner rather than later, many buildings, even great ones carefully designed and expensively constructed, come under the wrecker's ball. When they're torn down they're gone. All that remain are photographs.

And sometimes the tokens and talismans of older worlds that do remain are not exactly representative. One of the Foxfire books made the point that early log cabins are believed to have been sturdily and expertly constructed, but that's not true, because only the tiny fraction of them that survived were made like that—all the rest fell down! There used to be a log cabin in what is now my front yard, with slits cut in the logs so muskets could poke out and scare away the Seneca, but when entropy finally threatened to overwhelm it, money could not be found for its preservation. I inherited a photograph. It lasted from the 1700s to the 1970s, which ain't too shabby for a shabby old log box.

But back to Eero Saarinen's creation. There used to be an open-air Art Fair held on the lawns at the bottom of that hill every year, by the shore of Lake Michigan, and when my age was still in the single digits my mother would take us to see it. I loved to draw, and I loved to look at art in books, and I studied that building long and hard from the viewpoint of this photograph. She explained to me that it was supposed to appear as if it was floating, and I was both enchanted and disturbed by the effect. It looked ethereal but also unstable. She explained that it was designed by a great architect with a funny name (my parents were Brad and Jane, and we were Mike, Charlie, and Scott. My maternal grandparents were John and Mary, and their daughters were Ann, Jane, and Mary. I did not come from people who brooked much in the way of creativity or adventure regarding given names). The War Memorial Center might have been the first work of non-residential architecture I engaged with in a serious way. It fascinated me for a long time, and yet, at the same time, never completely satisfied me as a work of art, and not only because you couldn't see it all at once.

The art shown at the Fair also had that ambiguous effect on me. I remember one piece that consisted of a polished aluminum box the size of a casket, with what appeared to be a small torn hole sculpted in the top, modeled as if a projectile had burst through it from the underside; and if you got your ear close enough to the hole you could hear a high-pitched tone coming from inside. I was delighted by it, but I was also strongly curious as to why and how on earth it was considered art, and what its ultimate purpose could possibly be.

All of these things are "in" me, and I bring them all to this workmanlike 4x5-inch transparency that was taken in or near 1962 by Balthazar Korab. (And by the way, this picture is a good example of why I tend not to like color. The colors here are just off, polluted with other colors, although they reek of Ektachrome transparencies so much that I almost viscerally sense the substrate as transparent even though that doesn't exist on the screen. I find such not-quite-right colors disturbing, and most color in most color photographs is similarly off. I suspect that's why I've always liked dye transfer prints—the yellows, especially, tend to be unpolluted—and inkjet prints, which can bring relief as well. I've always related this affliction of mine to the way Edgar Degas saw flowers; he found their riotous colors and crowded fractal irregularity disturbing, and I read once, when I was still in my teens, that he only painted a vase of flowers forthrightly one time in his life before reconstituting his aversion to them again. Not sure if that's really true.)

Anyway the building is still there, but its aspect, meaning, and aesthetic impression have all changed. This photograph is probably the closest thing that exists to what the architect intended, and it's the closest thing to my memory of it as well. Here you can see a larger version.

Mike

ADDENDUM: Lois said: "Ugh! It's now a parking lot. Check Google Street View. Interesting article—as always."

Mike replies: Great idea, and yes, ugh. Here's the closest I could come using Google Street view to the vantage point that the 1962 picture was taken from, the prospect of the building looking from the Northeast:

I was limited by the restricted movement of the Street View camera van, but surprised that it photographed at all inside the parking lot.

Here's the satellite view. I put a red dot at the approximate location of the Street View crop above, which is probably within a 30-foot radius of where Balthazar Korab was standing in 1962.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

[Ed. note: Whenever we stumble adventitiously upon a new topic, the comments are usually extremely good, because we hit a fresh vein in our readership's far-flung knowledge and experience. (I mean like a vein in a mineral mine, not in the body!) I've posted too many "Featured" comments below, but even so, many of the ones I didn't feature are excellent. If this topic grabbed you, I urge you to read all the comments in the full Comments Section, accessible by clicking on the link at the very bottom of the post or by clicking on the title and scrolling down.]

Bryan Geyer: "Beginning in 1957, at the end of the Lockheed L-1049 Constellation prop-plane days, and then into the jet age, when Trans World Airlines (TWA) introduced (1959) the new 707, I flew (first class) frequently between California and New York City. TWA was already my preferred carrier. They had prettier stewardesses, better food/drink, and better seating. And then, in 1962, came Eero Saarinen’s new TWA Flight Center at JFK airport. The structure was a revelation, and entirely unlike any public point of assembly that I’d ever seen. You’d deplane into elegant curving tubes—it was akin to being absorbed—and there was no apparent noise because there were no parallel surfaces. The central terminal was entirely open, at all of various levels, with gently curving concrete and tile stairways that served to access the waiting areas, the bars and restaurants, the ticketing, and the baggage claim—with all of it drenched in a cloak of quiet calm. Arrival and departure was always a pleasurable experience, every time, until TWA’s regrettable demise."

Joel Becker: "Re 'The buildings themselves might be art. But the actual art galleries in both cases seem to be afterthoughts': Stewart Brand's seminal How Buildings Learn actually covers this topic quite well. Architecture that assumes a building's use will never change and tries to achieve a perfect design for that planned use ends up trapped, while architecture that allows and expects for evolution ends up creating more useful, and more beautiful, structures over time."

Jack Mac: "When you and I lived in Milwaukee I knew this building well. A friend is leading an effort to preserve the building as it has has a lot of deferred maintenance. Too bad Eero didn’t make it out of stainless steel as he did the St. Louis Arch. I am happy to report the St. Louis Arch has been well maintained with public and private money. It’s fun to photograph, and you can take a vertical tram to the top. Unfortunately when you are at the top, you can no longer see the wonderful Arch, as you are in it!" 

Jeff Markus: "The caption under the larger version of the photo claims it to be a Kodachrome, but it sure looks like Ektachrome to me too. In particular, Ektachrome which has begun to dark fade, and will go more and more magenta in the future, eventually becoming pretty much all magenta and nothing else. Nasty looking. So far as I know, that is inevitable for the pre-E6 materials. Maybe E6 too, don't know. The greens in particular look terrible. Kodachromes, on the other hand, keep very well. There was book done of FSA Kodachromes done a while back and the images still looked fresh. Mike, I bet you have a copy of that.

"A friend of mine has some very well-known old Kodachromes, the Marilyn Monroe nudes on red velvet series. These are 8x10 transparencies that were close to 40 years old at the time I saw them and looked as if they had just been shot that week. Originally done as calendar art, some were later used for the premier issue of Playboy."

John McMillin: "Here's another building in Denver that's considered Brutalist. It's a TV news headquarters that's being demolished soon. Note the base of the building is recessed behind the exterior walls, as if the building sits on a small pedestal. The entrances are shaded and not obviously marked by the architecture. This follows the same principle as that Milwaukee building, though it's more constrained and less dramatic. The architects were aiming for a parlour trick, like making an elephant levitate.

"The literal translation of the French is 'raw, unrefined.' The hallmark feature of Brutalist architecture is a rough concrete aggregate wall that hasn't been textured or decorated. Add in a rigorous commitment to geometry and you have a style that was sold as a progressive reform of 19th century Art Deco and Neoclassical ornamentation—but it was also a handy shortcut for stingy governments and builders who sought the most square feet for the lowest cost.

"Today, few but art historians shed any tears for Brutalist buildings, which are aging out and deteriorating. They are the visual signature of totalitarian cities, in film and in fact. I dislike most of them. My daughter's elementary school, built in the early sixties, was like a bunker. There was zero natural light. The only classroom windows were puzzlingly located in the closets, a 3'x3' panel below waist level. Why? Who knows! [Fire escapes? —MJ] It was the postwar boom, when everybody was still drinking off their PTSD from the war."

John Krumm: "That new white building made me laugh (the one in the update link). Looks like a sailboat bisecting a cruise ship. Our library in Duluth, Minnesota, is kind of a local brutalist design that also brings to mind a ship, albeit a space ship...it's supposed to be an ore boat."

Mike replies: You ain't seen nuthin' yet. You should see the new white building with its "sails" out. Do a Google Image Search for "Quadracci Pavilion" (a.k.a. Calatrava addition) to see the building's echoes of sails, which has become the symbol of the City of Milwaukee.

Kristine Hinrichs: "As this is one of my favorite/most underappreciated buildings in Milwaukee and I’m there weekly, I have to chime in. One of the more interesting details is how Santiago Calatrava used elements from the War Memorial in his design—the shape of the railings in both structures are almost identical, Calatrava carried that rectangular element you see in the windows onto the plaza and other areas, etc. If you look at photos of Saarinen’s TWA terminal (now hotel) at JFK you can see his influence on Calatrava. This complex features the work of two national and two significant local architects—the War Memorial, Kahler addition; Calatrava, and Shields addition. Although the Milwaukee Art Museum is easily the most photographed structure in Milwaukee, I urge photographers to also visit the War Memorial."

Phil: "Re '[Buildings] age, they need to be updated, their uses change, their meaning relative to the "now" of when they were new changes, funding for maintenance increases and becomes burdensome.' Have you read or watched Stewart Brand's 'How Buildings Learn'? You might find it interesting. He's put the six TV episodes on YouTube; here's the first. The book is good too. Here's my summary, which Stewart Brand liked."

Mike replies: The book is great, but I've never seen the video version. I will now. Actually, I didn't know a video version existed.

John Custodio: "The bad color in the Shorpy transparency is more likely due to some degree of fading in the cyan layer (a red shift in the shadows and in the sky). It's a Kodachrome (from the info on the Shorpy website), but the fading would probably have been worse if it was an Ektachrome.

"I put a curve on it in Photoshop which decreased the red channel in the shadows and decreased some of the red in the sky. Also brought up the black level in the shadows to compensate for the decrease in red."

jp41: "Mike, this article is fantastic! Learning about photographer Balthazar Korab and his 1962 image of the Milwaukee County War Memorial is wonderful. I saw this mid-century modern building in 2013 and captured a single set of bracketed exposures, as my attention was focused on photographing the Milwaukee Art Museum. Had I known this was an Eero Saarinen creation, I would have definitely dedicated more time to it. Above is how it looked in August 2013."

Dave Glos: "That post was a thrilling ride. Love the hard right turn, fleshing out 'parenthetical' remarks from a discourse on camera design into a vibrant, deeply personal discourse on your connection to a modernist building from your childhood, then adding touches on our present relationship to architecture, plus side comments on wonky color. Moreover, everything you wrote resonated with my perspectives. Gluing disparate threads into a cohesive narrative that relates to some aspect of photography is a gift which drives me to read The Online Photographer. Thank you.

"In high school, I had a strong interest in being an architect, but talked myself out of it, likely the better for all, and pursued engineering. My consolation prize was an elective, Architectural Appreciation, which included a field trip to the modern architectural mecca of Columbus, Indiana as the grand finale. That experience is cherished, and drives my desire to expand my knowledge. I’ve had the great luck to visit several Frank Lloyd homes, including Falling Water, see many fantastic museums in spectacular buildings and spaces, travel to Barcelona to experience Antoni Gaudi’s phantasmagorical creations, and be engrossed by ancient ruins in Greece. Great architecture and spaces touch me at a fundamental level, making me feel alive and grateful."

Comments

[Bill Polkinhorn]

Mike:
You are at your very finest with articles like this!!

[Bob G.]

Excellent, insightful and thought-provoking comments.
Thank you.

[Mike Kukulski]

You wrote: “early log cabins are believed to have been sturdily and expertly constructed, but that's not true, because only the tiny fraction of them that survived were made like that—all the rest fell down!” This is a great example of “survivorship bias”. Another great example of this was a study of WWII bomber damage to determine how to better armor them against attack. The initial inclination to fortify the areas that showed the most damage from returned bombers was incorrect, because the fact these bombers had returned proved these areas were not critical for survival. The areas where the study showed little damage were then deduced to be the vulnerable areas, as the bombers hit in these locations did not successfully return. For more, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

[Bruce Bordner]

I'm happy to live about a mile from the famous Bell Labs building by Saarinen, now called "Bell Works" (https://bell.works/new-jersey/explore/).
After Bell Labs "left" there were several years when it seemed likely that the building would be destroyed. Luckily someone invested in it and now it's a thriving business location, with some retail and maybe a restaurant.
The campus is planned and beautiful although there has been apartment and home development in the outer ring. That made very little difference. The famous transistor (or flying saucer) water tower and all of the original features (with additions) are still there. This one worked.
The design is a simple box. It can't be used for anything but offices - the water service only ran though certain areas, and everyone walked to the bathrooms. It took a few years, but now these are desirable and full offices.
I live around a lot of monuments, and we have fishing shacks from the 1700s, so we get serious about history in NJ. Just gotta find the money...

[Speed]

Our friends at Google Maps have supplied some recent views (December 2022) of the building ...

https://maps.app.goo.gl/hsrLiHhpyhqk7gvH9
https://maps.app.goo.gl/s4vWw91FGVhSJWUW6

The building is better suited perhaps as a place for gun emplacements to protect the harbor from attack by the Lake Express ferry from Muskegon, MI.

[Bryan Geyer]

Mike—In the opening sentence of my earlier comment of today, where I mention “old DC7” aircraft, I should have said Lockheed's L-1049 Constellation instead. So, please delete “old DC7”, substitute Lockheed L-1049 Constellation. (At the close of the trans-continental prop plane era, TWA flew the famed Lockheed L-1049 Super Connies non-stop coast-to-coast. Their competition, American and Pan Am, flew Douglas DC6Bs and DC7s. By FAA edict, United Airlines was not authorized to carry passengers non-stop CA to NY. The eventual impact of airline deregulation later changed everything.)

[Herman Krieger]

With a view of a brutal sport!

[John Shriver]

Brutalism
One of the premises of brutalism is that the materials appear as what they are, concrete looks like concrete, not trying to imitate stone, etc. Painting the concrete of a brutalist building is an absolute anathema. Although I've seen it done (Technology Square in Cambridge). Painting concrete is also foolhardy because the paint will eventually peel.
There was a fad of building brutalist college and university libraries in the 1960's.
The Washington DC subway is a famous example of brutalism, with concrete, bronze, quarry tile, and granite being the primary exposed materials. However, it is graceful.
One quirk of brutalist buildings is that many of them have "arrow slits," tall skinny openings in the concrete wall that an archer could stand behind. The Barbican has these. All of Eduardo Catalano's brutalist buildings at MIT have arrow slits, the Student Center having the most noticeable ones.

Saarinen
Eero Saarinen designed two wonderful non-brutalist buildings at MIT: Kresge Auditorium and the Chapel.
Kresge is a dome of thin-shell reinforced concrete, one-eighth of a sphere supported only by the three corners. The three open sides have glass curtain walls. The roof was originally Orastone, a white plastic with embedded marble chips, but it only lasted a few years, as it expanded and contracted in the sun and shade and cracked. That was followed by sheet lead, and finally a standing seam copper roof, which has been stable. But the original white roof was very dramatic.
The Chapel is a brick cylinder surrounded by a moat, with light that comes in through downward facing narrow windows over the moat.

[ChrisC]

following your updated comments, I tried using Google street view to find that same location as the original photo. I suspect that your exact photo location is probably on the roof of the ramp down into the basement.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Y5eLeQ4TVkwejMUG7

Talk of brutal! It seems that your beautiful hill has been dug over into a parking lot to address the eastern extension with a big basement. I wouldn't even call the extension Brutalism - most of it is just bland. However, there does seem to be traces of the original hilltop building in the architecture of the newer parts, with the use of cantilevered floating elements.

On the subject, I do have one of my photos on the wall of my office that no one will be able to shoot again because of building extensions.

[JOHN GILLOOLY]

It's interesting to read about your take on color photographs and the color being "off." In my most recent re-engagement with film over the last 2-3 years, it has been that unique "offness" of each color film that has drawn me to shoot color film. (When I initially starting shooting film again I intended to shoot almost all bw.)

We are in a different era now and I think the reasons for shooting film have changed. If you want the flexibility to have perfectly accurate colors or to make your color exactly the way you wish, you will use digital.

For me, this is THE reason to shoot film. To frontload the decisions that will bake in a certain look...and live with it with little to no editing. And the biggest part of baking in a particular look is the unique characteristics of any given film.

[Ritchie Thomson]

I can hardly stand walking around central London now as there are so many buildings put up seemingly without any thought about the look of the city as a whole. Its a series of monuments to individualism, no one cares about the collection and how each building might affect views of the others. Smaller and older buildings are cast in to perpetual darkness. Some of the buildings are interesting and aesthetically pleasing, many are not. But taken as a whole its monstrous. Luckily I live in Edinburgh where we have much less of this, and the 'new town' still stands pretty much as it was designed and built in the 18th Century, not by individuals trying to outdo each other with bigger and bigger buildings, but planned as a whole, with space and light considered.

[Allan Stam]

Why is there a cruise ship with a yacht stuck on top of it protruding from the War Memorial?

[robert e]

All good architects design to the environment, which includes the landscape, yet environments change, sometimes quickly and drastically, especially in and near population centers. Wright, famous for going further than most in not just designing to the environment but integrating his buildings with them, has had a number of his works relocated in order to save them from development or shifting land. (At least one was razed, that I know of.) We are lucky that the structures are preserved, but I can't help wondering how much of the architect's vision and intention survived relocation. I'm sure it's a mixed bag.

[Chris Feola]

I worked for a few years in an architecturally significant Brutalist building. Sure, it was ugly as sin, but at least it was the single most miserable place to work that I've occupied. The American Press Institute's Marcel Breuer raw concrete building was so ugly that locals called it The Bomb Shelter. And this was in Reston Virginia, where you'd expect people to like such things.
But as ugly as it was outside, going inside was worse. It leaked like a sieve if the sky so much as drizzled. Ventilation was terrible, so the windows were always fogging up. Not that there were a lot of windows; it looked like a bomb shelter from inside, too.
But the worse part was that it was apparently designed to test and torture humans. Take, for example, the grand fan of stairs as you entered the building and descended to the lobby.
We called them the Stairs of Death. Because while they were a not-generous but at least manageable 12-inches wide to the right as you entered, maintaining that perfect fan shape meant they narrowed down to roughly SIX INCHES to the left. Despite constant warnings and the occasional roping off of the left side, every single API event began with a woman in high heels venturing too far left and face planting down the stairs.
It was torn down in 2016 to make room for condos. Brutalist fans protested; apparently they never had to work there.
Some pictures here: https://brutalistdc.com/marcel-breuers-reston-api-building-under-threat/

[KeithB]

The "museum on a grassy hill" reminds me of the Page museum at the La Brea tar pits:
https://tarpits.org/experience-tar-pits

Or the California Academy of the sciences which is built *in* a grassy hill.
https://www.calacademy.org/

[David Bennett]

As I understand it - brutalism was sold in the UK as strength, advenuressness, and power as we came out of The Second World War.

It helped that a lot of London was in ruins. I think one building in six was damaged beyond repair.

It doesn't quite explain how brutalism became the thing to build, But maybe this on another not so unrelated topic, I read that before minimalist architecture, the powers that be pushed it as 'Scandinavian' and they produced and sold furniture in the same mould - so that when minimalist architecture appeared - -people had already been moulded to like it.

Why couldn't they have chosen Georgian architecture?

By the way, we saw the Dorothea Lange exhibition at the Barbican.

[Steve Deutsch]

The only constant is change. Be grateful for your memories.

[Roger Bradbury]

The War Memorial Center looks like it could have been used as a location for Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. I should know; while I've never been to Milwaukee I often went to one of Kubrick's locations, the 1960s Brutalist Friars Square shopping Precinct in Aylesbury, England.

It was in Friars Square I bought my first SLR, a Zenit B, at Dollonds Photographic, one of the shops around the edge of the square. I can't visit the precinct now because it was replaced by the Friars Square Shopping Centre in 1993.

But the Brutalist County Council's office tower block that looms in the background of some shots is still there; I worked in its basement for a few years.

If you've seen the film you won't remember seeing Friars Square as that sequence was cut from the film. But the photos are still an interesting glimpse into England's recent past.

http://betweenchannels.blogspot.com/2011/06/friars-square-shopping-precinct.html?spref=pi

[Herman Krieger]

Condominium for dogs, with outside toilet.

[James Bullard]

Three may have been a cabin in what is now your yard but it wasn't for the Pony Express. The Pony Express ran between St. Joseph, MO, and Sacramento, CA.

[Refresh your browser page, and that bit will magically disappear. --Mike]

[Lois]

Ugh! It's now a parking lot. Check Google Street View. Interesting article -- as always.

[Mike Fewster]

Just had to drop into this conversation with my thoughts about the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry. No one ever agrees with me on this but it seemed relevant to your thoughts on architecture.
I love the building as art and sculpture but dislike it intensely as architecture.
Before visiting, I was in love with it. When I got there, I found much of the fabulous exterior, those titanium curves, ate artificial. They are tacked on like billboard hoardings to the structure beneath. those extraordinary curves and reflecting surfaces - are not part of the structure beneath.
So. Is it architecture or sculpture? I feel it is the latter.
The brutalist architects would have seen it as a dishonest structure and scorned it.
Thoughts anyone?

[hugh crawford]

That white thing in the current photo looks like a particularly wonky AI (the only good kind in my opinion, if you want reality there are cameras for that) attempt at a cruise ship docked in front of the museum.

As a counter-example, how about the old Whitney Museum of American Art? I think it still looks pretty wonderful.

[Jeff Markus]

In today's LA Times there's an interesting article about a recently-built Brutalist home in a neighborhood just below the Hollywood sign. As is usual for the Times, well photographed. Considering how much time, money and effort was apparently spent to build this house, within two miles of an earthquake fault, the design of the wine cellar is rather inexplicable. The photo shows a narrow room, concrete walls and polished concrete floor. Set in rank into the walls are short brass posts, finely machined, two to support each bottle; one to cradle the neck and the other to support the body. Very clean looking and minimalist, but there is nothing else to hold those bottles in place. It won't take much of a shaker, common here, to turn that room into a lake of blended varietals and glass shards.

In the 1980's I lived within about 100 meters of that same fault. Around dawn one morning, while we were still asleep, we had one of those shakers. Lying in bed my wife and I listened as every piece of glassware in the adjacent kitchen fell from the open shelving one and two at a time and shattered on the tile floor.

[Tullio Emanuele]

Hi Mike,
So “buildings have a lifespan” my comment is: Indeed.

Being originally from Italy, it has been sometime difficult for me to explain to my American family and friends how old some Roman buildings truly are and how complex their histories.

Examples:
The Pantheon, originally build by Emperor Augustus in 27 BC- AD 14. Then rebuild by Emperor Hadrian ca. AD 126 as a Roman temple which then became a Catholic Church and has been used between other things as tomb for the Italian Royal family..

Castel St. Angelo. The little castle connected to St. Peter Basilica by a passage, which started as a mausoleum to the same emperor Hadrian and converted to a castle by Pope Nicholas III in the 14 th century.

St. Peter Basilica originally built on the same site of the older St. Peter, starting in the 15th century and completed over 100 years later, 4 different Popes and many different architects (Bramante, Michelangelo, Maderno and Bernini being the most famous).

Let’ s not forget Ponte Fabrizio, the oldest bridge (over 2,000 years) in the world still in use.

[David]

Brutal is what they did to that site. Shameful.

[wts]

Here is an excellent building by Le Corbusier at Harvard that should be gloriously alone at the top of a hill. However, it was designed for and built in a limited space on a narrow street surrounded closely by other buildings. Don't let this photo deceive you:

https://ccva.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/craft/building/_1800xAUTO_crop_center-center_none/Screenshot-2024-04-17-at-3.23.40-PM.png

More about this building:
https://carpenter.center/building

[Christian Ahn]

With your note about featured comments, I visited this blog entry again and must agree that it combines very well so many different aspects like architecture, photography, personal memory, history and feelings, to name just a few...
Very well written and great comments - as always!
One addition from my side on Brutalism in the architecture: we lived the last four years in Prague, Czech Republic, and there you can find a few brutalist buildings which creates a strange contrast to the otherwise very historical city. I found an interesting bit on this here: https://www.new-east-archive.org/features/show/13210/best-brutalist-buildings-in-prague-czech-republic-socialist-modernist-architecture
It also includes some good (IMHO) B&W photographs of the buildings.

[Mike Fewster]

Is there any interest in starting a discussion about what makes good architecture?
Fr example, I'd argue that the Bilbao Guggenheim Gallery is magnificent sculpture but poor architecture. That fabulous exterior doesn't reflectthe the spaces it encloses and their usage.
Frank LLoyd Wright's "Falling Waters." It looks stunning. Loved it when I first saw pictures of it. Then I discovered that there are significant problems with the engineering. Does that count in evaluating the architectural significance?

[Dennis Ng]

War Memorial Center did come into my mind when I saw this. For some reason the hang on the balance and eye looking out is really helping the message. Anyway it is gone.

BTW, it is very like the windows default screen at one stage.

And ... Any -ism I do not bother to look it all.