The Half-Life of Buildings

The Half-Life of Buildings Are “great” buildings still great THETERM “instant classic” is often used to describe a new building, but how forty years later? long does architecture really last? Time can be cruel to bestselling authors (who today reads Thomas B. Costain or Grace Metalious?), hit movies (tried to watch “The Ten Commandments” lately?), and popular fashions (remember bell-bottom trousers and Nehru jackets?). Are buildings immune? Perhaps the most graphic example of short-lived greatness currently in the news is Boston City Hall. In 1962, Boston held a national architectural competition for a new city hall, attracting 256 entries. Gerhard Kallmann, Michael McKinnell, WITOLDRYBCZYNSKI and Edward Knowles, all Columbia REVIEW 9 7 University professors, came out of prover- safe political ground in making this sug- bial nowhere to win. Their design was a gestion, for City Hall was unpopular bold interpretation of what is sometimes among both the people who worked in it called the Brutalist style, then very much and the general public. Employees disliked in vogue. Brutalism (derived from the the labyrinthine interior, complained French béton brut, or raw concrete) was about inadequate heating in winter, and popularized by the French architect Le blamed dampness and mold for sick- Corbusier in the late 1950s in buildings building syndrome. Most Bostonians dis- such as the Unité d’Habitation in liked the architecture. People tolerate Marseilles and the Indian state capital of International-Style modernism as “func- Chandigarh. Brutalism’s chief hallmarks tional” and “clean,” but Brutalist architects were monumental forms, a superhuman indulged in heroic sculptural effects that scale, and above all the extensive use of had nothing to do with function, and the exposed concrete, inside and out. The bare concrete surfaces, which were often architects of Boston City Hall were influ- bush-hammered to expose the aggregate enced by Le Corbusier’s work, especially (which made the concrete even rougher) the monastery of Sainte-Marie-de-la- were anything but clean, and to most Tourrette, near Lyons (completed in observers simply looked cheap. It didn’t 1959). The best-known Brutalist building help that City Hall was surrounded by a in the United States is probably Paul nine-acre plaza (part of an I. M. Pei master Rudolph’s Yale Art and Architecture plan) that resisted all efforts to introduce Building, which was nearing completion activity, remaining windswept, inhos- at the time of the Boston competition. pitable and inhuman. When Boston City Hall was finished It is important to note that among in 1969, it received the American Institute many architects, Boston City Hall was— of Architects’ prestigious Honor Award, and is—admired. As late as 1991, a poll of the influential critic of the New York Times architects included Boston City Hall (as described the building as “spectacular,” well as the Yale Art and Architecture and later a national poll of architects and Building and the La Tourrette convent) historians ranked it sixth among the among the “100 most important buildings “greatest buildings in American history.” of the last 100 years.” In fact, a group of But in 2006, only thirty-seven years later, architects has recently petitioned the Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino pro- Boston Landmark Commission to grant posed selling the building and building a City Hall special landmark status (it is less new city hall in South Boston. He was on than fifty years old). Landmark status 9 8 ZELL/LURIEREALESTATECENTER Figure 1: Boston City Hall would prevent demolition, which is the The steel-and-glass design of the apart- likely outcome if Mayor Menino (who ment towers really was avant-garde, antici- revived his proposal to sell city hall last pating the glass curtain wall of the Fifties year) has his way. The case is pending. and Sixties, and it still maintains its time- Boston City Hall has an important les- less modernity. But most unusual buildings son to teach clients: beware the avant- remain stuck firmly to their time. garde. Commissioning an unusual or novel Brutalism, for example, lasted just a decade design does not guarantee that thirty years after Boston City Hall. By the 1970s, most hence that design will not be outmoded, architects (including even the designers of even if—especially if—it styles itself as the city hall) had given it up, and were “avant-garde.” In fact, very few buildings designing more traditional-looking build- prophesy the future. Ludwig Mies van der ings that included historical references, an Rohe, one of the masters of twentieth-cen- approach that became known as tury modernism, designed the unusual Postmodernism. Clients should resist the Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago suggestion that an unusual building design for developer Henry Greenwald in 1948. is “ahead of its time.” The design may be REVIEW 9 9 unusual, even unprecedented, but chances services. The clear architectural expres- are that in thirty years it, too, will look old sion of the two functions was novel, and and dated. The important question should the dramatic contrast between the glass be: Is it a good building? studios and the heavy brick towers was striking. Shortly after Richards was built, the Yale architectural historian Vincent FUNCTION Scully called it “one of the greatest buildings of modern times,” and the Museum “Good” means useful and well as beauti- of Modern Art in New York mounted an ful. The Richards Medical Research exhibit devoted solely to the building. Building (1957-60) at the University of Students of architecture, the author Pennsylvania was a project that brought included, made pilgrimages to Philadelphia then little-known Louis I. Kahn public just to see the Richards building. acclaim. The concept involved a cluster While Richards remains an important of towers containing glazed laboratories milestone in Kahn’s career, its status has in studio-like spaces, with solid brick considerably diminished over the years. shafts containing stairs and mechanical This is due in part to its functional short- Figure 2: Richards Medical Research Building, University of Pennsylvania 1 0 0 ZELL/LURIEREALESTATECENTER comings, and in part because the design and communications, technology has had was superseded by the architect’s later a major impact on a building’s usefulness. work. The functional shortcomings were But technological changes are almost serious: large amounts of glass produced always unpredictable, hence unanticipated too much light and glare in the laborato- in a building’s design. For example, the ries; the complicated exposed concrete designers of Salk in 1965 could not be structure was not only expensive but also expected to anticipate wireless communi- environmentally troublesome due to cations, low-e glass, the need for energy falling dust; and the studio concept pro- conservation, or the way that computers vided too little flexibility for researchers. would alter work habits. One of the com- Far from representing the future, Richards mon claims of modern architecture is quickly became passé: the design did not adaptability and flexibility. The implied herald a new trend in lab design. In the promise is that the useful life of a building Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La can be extended from the usual twenty to Jolla, completed shortly after Richards, forty years to sixty to a hundred years, Kahn abandoned the idea of studios and through the provision of features such as service shafts altogether, and designed larger spans, movable walls, adjustable much more conventional laboratories with spaces, adaptable infrastructure, and so on. large open floor plates, and pipes and For the owner, the veracity of the claim is ducts above suspended ceilings. The Salk important, since flexibility always comes at Institute is generally considered Kahn’s a steep price. But the spotty record of masterpiece, and has successfully main- buildings that have attempted—with very tained its architectural stature—and its limited success—to advance the concept utility—over more than forty years. of infinite adaptability (the Pompidou While the planning of the Salk Center, Lloyds of London), suggests that Institute takes future space requirements any promise to extend the useful life of a into account more successfully than building through design should be exam- Richards, that does not mean parts of the ined with great skepticism. buildings will not, at some point, become Aesthetics and function are intertwined functionally obsolete. In the past, when in the case of the Martin Luther King, Jr. technology evolved more slowly, buildings Library in Washington, D.C., designed by were functionally useful for a decade or Mies van der Rohe in 1966 (though not more. Beginning in the nineteenth centu- completed until 1972, after the architect’s ry, with gas lighting and plumbing, and death). While not a ground-breaking followed by electricity, air-conditioning, work, the four-story pavilion is a charac- REVIEW 1 0 1 teristic Mies design, and the famous he didn’t take into account a change in the architect’s only public library. social role that libraries are expected to Nevertheless, in 2006, a task force play today. In the last few decades, a num- appointed by Mayor Anthony A. ber of American cities—Chicago, San Williams found the King Library to be Francisco, Salt Lake City, Denver, “an outmoded structure erected long Albuquerque, Seattle, Nashville—have before the advent of the digital world,” built new, architecturally striking libraries. and recommended selling the building The general aim is to attract a younger and building a new library on another public to an old institution. Implicit is the site. The thirty-four-year-old library is hope that novel eye-catching architecture undoubtedly technologically obsolete, can compete with Google and Wikipedia, but old buildings can be upgraded, as the which, in many ways, have made so many venerable New York City Public Library of the functions of public libraries obso- has been successfully—several times.

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