The audacity of hope for better public works

Last Saturday, President-elect Obama announced plans for a "public works construction program" that will be "the largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s."

Is he talking about architecture? I'm not getting my hopes up. Obama is a lawyer, and lawyers usually think more about social and economic issues than about the physical world we build and inhabit.

In his radio announcement, Obama mentioned roads and bridges, sewer systems, schools, mass transit, electrical grids, dams and other public utilities, windmills and solar panels, and expanded access to the Internet.

Nothing in there specifically about architecture.

The program is clearly modeled on FDR's New Deal recovery programs of the 1930s, of which the best known was the Works Progress Administration. The WPA, too, was an effort to jump-start a morbid economy. But it created much more than infrastructure. It sponsored superb public architecture - post offices, courthouses, airports, dams, office buildings for government agencies - fine works that we're still proud to live with. The term "WPA style" is used by historians to denote a whole trend in architecture.

Architecture is what's missing in Obama's proposal. But maybe there's hope.

For whatever it's worth, in 2004 Obama attended a talk in Chicago by Daniel Libeskind, the architect best known for his master plan for the World Trade Center site in New York. And according to Nina Libeskind, Daniel's wife and business manager, Obama said on that occasion that if he hadn't gone into politics, he would have wanted to be an architect.

It's amazing how often people in other lines of work make that comment about architecture. It probably doesn't mean much.

But on that slender reed, let's hang a plea. Let's ask the Obama government to create a great heritage of civic architecture in this country.

If that sounds crazy, you're forgetting the days when government did just that. It wasn't only the WPA. Most eras of American history have seen the creation of great public architecture. We're currently the exception, not the rule.

A few weeks ago I wrote here about the restoration of the Chestnut Hill Pumping Stations, built around 1900. They weren't federal, but they were government buildings, and despite their workaday function they were magnificent architecture.

One reader, architect Brett Donham, e-mailed a comment on that article. The engineers and administrators who built the pumping stations "held a status in society that we can't imagine today," he wrote. "They were very highly regarded and listened to. The country was proud of them and the works they designed, got financed, and built. These buildings, the reservoirs and the whole system, were vivid symbols of a muscular confident America."

Symbols of a muscular confident America. . . When did we lose that kind of aspiration?

Recently I visited our State Department's new American Embassy in Berlin. This is a building that shocked the European community when it opened last July. On a prominent site next to the famed Brandenburg Gate, our government chose to ring the embassy with a no-man's-land of steel bollards and fences. The message was not "muscular and confident." It was "scared and defensive."

Not so long ago, our government was doing much better. The State Department maintained an active panel of architectural advisers, many of them distinguished architects. Some terrific embassies resulted. But under the Bush administration, the department retreated to cheap, characterless, cookie-cutter designs, often built on suburban sites where they could be easily defended from terrorists. Dozens of these were built around the world.

The other principal sponsor of federal architecture is the Public Buildings Service of the General Services Administration. In 1994 it inaugurated a superb program it called Design Excellence. Like the State Department, it recruited advisers from the architectural community. The result was a series of fresh and individual federal courthouses. The Moakley here in Boston, by architect Henry Cobb of the firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, and the recently opened one in Springfield, by Moshe Safdie, are among the best. The GSA still maintains the Design Excellence program in name, but it is no longer very active.

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was perhaps the last great advocate of better government design. Way back in 1962, before he was a senator, Moynihan wrote a one-page text that is the Gettysburg Address of public architecture.

Moynihan was then a White House staffer under JFK, and an adviser to something called the Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Office Space. For them he authored a memo he called "Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture."

Wrote Moynihan, memorably: "The policy shall be to provide requisite and adequate facilities in an architectural style and form which is distinguished and which will reflect the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American National Government. Major emphasis should be placed on the choice of designs that embody the finest contemporary American architectural thought. . . The government should be willing to pay some additional cost to avoid excessive uniformity in design of Federal buildings."

Dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability. You couldn't find four better words. (Although "muscular and confident" isn't bad.)

Moynihan's memo eventually became the inspiration for the Design Excellence program. So his words live on.

What I'm hoping is that someone will shove Moynihan's great memo under the nose of our intellectually curious president-to-be.

Hey, what else does the guy have to worry about?

Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.