Why don't we get better architecture than we do?
Why do so many new buildings look as if nobody - not the owner, not the architect, not the builder - has poured any love or pride into them? They're aloof, they're oversized, and they're so under-designed they look like the carton the real building came in.
I'm not advocating a return to architectural styles of the past. But it's hard not to be impressed by the care and craft lavished on even the most ordinary buildings in earlier eras. An everyday office or warehouse structure would, very often, put on its architectural dress-up clothes to meet the public.
All you have to do is look around Boston. A classic case at the moment is the so-called Dainty Dot building in Chinatown. It's now a hotly debated preservation issue, because a developer wants to tear it down. The Dot was built for a routine industrial purpose, yet it's a lesson in good architecture.
I can think of a lot of reasons why we don't do better. Here are three of them:
We don't care as much about the public world as we used to. One of the purposes of those older buildings was to shape a beautiful public realm - the outdoor world of streets and squares and parks. But at some point, Americans began to withdraw from the public world. I think it began with radio. People stayed indoors to listen. Then came television, computer games, DVDs, and elaborate sound systems. They're all great in their way, but they all tend to isolate us in our private worlds. Air conditioning, too, keeps many of us indoors, instead of out on the porch or in the public park.
Today, many Americans act as if our contributions to the public world - that is to say, our taxes - are an act of theft by the government. Most of us today would rather spend money on our private possessions - our entertainment centers, our cars, our vacations - than on the public realm we share with others. We travel to Europe to enjoy a quality of urbanism we often can't find at home. Our personal toys - the TVs, the BMWs - are usually better loved and better designed than the buildings we live among. We don't value the public world, and its quality declines from inattention.
A second, related reason: Government is broke. At least, it's broke after it's spent wads of money on exaggerated crusades like exploring the solar system or bringing democracy to the Middle East. I remember the great cultural critic Lewis Mumford once saying that traveling to the moon was like building the pyramids: In both cases, a costly national effort was devoted to sending a privileged few to heaven.
But I'm thinking even more of local government, which often gets trapped by laws that limit the amount of taxation. When there's not enough revenue, a local leader, a mayor let's say, begins to think like a businessman. The mayor wants the city to turn a profit. In flush times like those we've recently enjoyed, the way for a city to make a profit is through real estate. Thus, for example, we see Mayor Menino's current proposal for a 1,000-foot tower to be built on a city-owned site in Winthrop Square downtown. By approving the biggest possible building, the city gets the highest possible price for its land. City planning starts to focus on reaping profit, rather than creating a great place to live and work.
Another way to work the game is to keep zoning so restrictive that almost any new building is technically illegal. In that case, each building needs some kind of special permission. In return for granting permission to break the rules, the city negotiates a trade, in which it will gain some kind of public benefit - maybe some off-site affordable housing, let's say. Every building becomes a deal between the developer and the city. And the bigger the building, the bigger the benefit it can spin off. Underfunded city governments are thus under constant pressure to allow bigger and bigger buildings, regardless of their quality or impact.
OK, a third problem. We live in an era in which there's very little agreement about what constitutes good architecture. (Or good contemporary art or music.) An example is another current controversy, the attempt by Mayor Menino to get rid of Boston City Hall. A lot of architects admire City Hall and a lot of other people hate it. There's no agreement.
Where there's no consensus about what's good, it's hard to persuade any building owner to spend more money than absolutely necessary. Long ago, an architect designing a bank could tell the banker that of course the building must be finished in fine stonework and boast a row of imposing Corinthian columns across the front. Leaving out those features would be like going to a formal dinner in your underwear, without your tux or bow tie. Again, I'm not arguing for classical columns today. But without some kind of consensus, it's hard to enforce any standards at all.
Not only that, but today that bank is a branch of some national superbank. Local pride does not come into play. The real bosses live in another part of the country. So if they build a bad building in Boston, they won't have to live with the embarrassment it might cause among their friends. Another strike against good design.
Things do get better. Years ago, this column used to give a prize to the worst Boston building of the year. (We called it the Pru Award in honor of the ghastly Prudential Center, which since then has undergone many changes.) We had to abandon the Pru Award because we ran out of really terrible buildings. That happened partly because citizens began to feel empowered to demand a richer, livelier, better crafted and more humane public environment.
Improvement comes slowly. But the problems I've listed aren't invincible. And the more clearly we see them, the better is our chance of overcoming them.
Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.
