Tom Shakely

Lost Spaces

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    The peculiar experience of belonging

    The late Roger Scruton on the “metaphysical nature of our city temples and tombs:”

    Adolf Loos, founding father of architectural modernism, maintained that only in two of its applications is architecture an art—in the temple and the tomb. For it is only in these structures, built to house the non-existent, that architecture escapes from its everyday function as a shelter against an inhospitable reality. …

    Tombs, temples, and memorials form the heart of our ancient settlements, marking the public squares, the crossroads and the places of pilgrimage. They are the nodes of the urban network, and the streets radiate out from them, carrying the message of belonging to the furthest reaches of the city. Every town in Europe is built around a church, and public spaces are marked by monuments and chapels, reminding us that the place has a meaning more durable than the people who reside there. …

    People moved out to the suburbs, and into the suburbs from the fields. And yet no new places were created. The suburbs were no-places, and the city itself became a concrete platform, on which the glass boxes could be shifted back and forth like pieces on a chess-board. In an astonishingly short time, many of  the places that we knew had disappeared, and no places had come in their stead.

    … I have been even more struck by a deeper metaphysical difference. The old buildings belong in the places that they create; the new buildings typically belong nowhere, and create a nowhere wherever they are constructed. Physically the old city center is a space; metaphysically, however, it is a place, a somewhere to which buildings, people and the institutions that unite them can belong. But the new developments are spaces that refuse to be places, spaces where nothing belongs. …

    How does the peculiar experience of belonging enter human consciousness, and to what end?

    These questions return me to Adolf Loos’s observation concerning the temple and the tomb. In constructing these memorials to the non-existent we are fixing ourselves to a space. Temples and tombs are massive, immovable, as though the spirit contained in them has been fixed forever to the ground. The god and the hero cling to their allotted space with all the force of the imagination, and this causes us to reimagine that space as a somewhere to be shared and defended. In a space that has become a place it is not the body only but also the soul that finds a home. So much recent attempt at placemaking fails because it bypasses those core emotions. Yet how can you make a place for people if you do not first make a place for their heroes and their gods? We settle down by inviting our gods and heroes to settle beside us. And in that way the place is sanctified as ours.

    When the Antifa activists gather in the squares to pull the statues from their pedestals and the busts from their plinths, they are sending the message that this place is not ours, that we do not belong here, and that we want to start again outside the community that brought us into being. And the result of their destructive pranks will surely be no different from the result of so much modern building—the replacement of somewhere by nowhere. And I suspect that that is where we are going.

    I like Ave Maria so much because it is a space that strives to be a place—a place with Our Lord at its center and with the life of the community radiating from the reality of his Eucharistic presence.

  • This isn’t Disneyland

    Rochester Cathedral, an English church which dates to the 13th century, recently had a miniature golf course installed—not outside, but inside. There are a lot of metaphors for the disappearance of Christianity as a living force in Western nations, but the visual of a place built for transcendence being converted into a place for amusements captures it better than words. Now, with that as background, here’s this:

    An allegedly drunk man who launched into a foul-mouthed rant at cathedral staff over a crazy golf course has pleaded guilty to common assault.

    Micheal Feeney berated visiting chaplain Margaret Moore about the “disgraceful” golf course built inside Rochester Cathedral.

    The 67-year-old, who occasionally prays at the cathedral, raged at staff and visitors after a free nine-hole golf course was installed in the nave of the 13th-century building.

    He shouted: “This isn’t f***ing Disneyland, this is a f***ing cathedral, this is a f***ing disgrace.”

    Feeney pleaded guilty to riotous, violent or indecent behaviour in a churchyard and one count of common assault at Medway Magistrates’ Court in Kent on Tuesday. …

    “The response to the crazy golf has been amazing,” Reverend Nathan Ward said.

    “A time is coming when men will go mad,” said Saint Anthony of Egypt in the 4th century, “and when they see someone who is not made, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”

  • Craft v. ideology in architecture

    Nick Phillips writes on architecture of the sort that we have, and of the sort that many want:

    In The Architecture of Community, a brilliant, baffling book that contains equal parts text and the architectural equivalent of political cartoons, traditionalist architect Leon Krier opens with a simple proposition. Imagine that you had to choose between eliminating every building built before 1945 or every building built after 1945. Which would you choose? The total built volume of both periods is about the same—so which act of destruction would feel like the greater loss?

    This proposition is fascinating because it should be a hard question, but it isn’t. Our guts immediately tell us that a world full of postwar buildings would be alienating and hollow, utile but sterile. We lean on our pre-war buildings for far more—for meaning, for beauty, for a sense of place, for the stuff that makes life not merely livable, but worth living. This is Krier’s point. Modern architecture attempted to make a clean break with the past and “start from zero.” But for most ordinary people, the result has been the opposite—an unprecedented dependence on our architectural heritage as a refuge from our architectural present.

    Whenever anyone bothers to ask the American people about what kinds of buildings they prefer, they speak with a clear voice: They prefer traditional ones. In 2006, the American Institute of Architects decided to survey the general public for their view on the question, producing a ranked list of “America’s Favorite Architecture.” The list is remarkable: Of the 50 most favored buildings, a mere seven were built in postwar styles. Of those seven, two are monuments (the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Gateway Arch) and another, the World Trade Center, no longer exists. The other four are Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, the Rose Center for Earth and Space, Chicago’s Willis Tower, and, inexplicably, Las Vegas’ Bellagio casino. The remaining 43 most favored buildings all hale from the prewar period. Perhaps the public will eventually come around to the new stuff, but it’s been 70 years.

    Various other types of evidence corroborate the clear public preference for traditional architecture. And what it all reveals is a stark disconnect between what ordinary people like and what actually gets built. When famous architects build today, their intended audience is not really the general public, or even the client. It’s other architects. It’s the people who award the Pritzker Prize. It’s the academics, theoreticians, and highly-credentialed practitioners who dwell in the impregnable temple of architectural criticism.

    These temples exist in every artistic discipline, and they presently elevate one precept above all others: disruption. …

    The results are bizarre. For thousands of years, we built beautiful things. It is close to impossible to find a pre-20th century building capable of conjuring strong negative feelings—the worst they can evoke is indifference. But with the architect-theoreticians at the helm, we have succeeded for the first time at producing buildings that make people feel things like confusion, dread, anomie, and helplessness.

    Phillips underscores what seems to me to be his primary point: “contemporary architecture reflects the migration of art away from craft and toward ideology.”

  • • •

    Discretion in little places

    Discretion in little places

    A thing I wrote in May 2013 while having a beer:

    I’m sitting here in The Queen Mary Pub in a small town deep in South Florida, on the fringes of the Everglades. It’s nearly midnight and I find myself alone at the bar reading C.S. Lewis’s “Perelandra.” A few inches away, my glass of London Pride finds itself nearly missing.

    It’s been a pleasant evening, one of those where the bar isn’t too crowded, and even with mostly college students ordering pitchers an aura of warm feelings and consciousness soaks the place.

    And yet, because it’s in our nature, probably, to end up meddling with the moments that should most please most of us, I hear one of the bartenders, a woman, whisper to the barman who’s been nearby… “See that girl over at that table? How old is she?”

    My barman’s filling a drink. “I dunno,” he says. “But she hasn’t ordered anything and she’s been there without a glass.”

    “I’m going to grab her ID,” replies his colleague decisively. “I mean, ask for it,” she quickly corrects herself.

    It turns out the girl doesn’t have her ID with her. She’s asked to leave. Her friends at their table are left to finish the night without her, and she’ll be walking home alone.

    Let’s break away from this scene for a moment to visit our friends at Merriam Webster. Specifically, “discretion,” which we’re told is the “freedom to decide what should be done in a particular situation.”

    I feel for this girl who was made to leave, even if she wasn’t of legal age. Because despite doing no concrete or true harm to anyone here among us, one among us was compelled to do a concrete harm to her evening.

    In law, there’s a general idea that a case can’t be judged unless actual harm has come to some party. Law is not meant to be decided abstractly—which is why we have philosophy.

    In the case of the girl here at the pub, from whose company we’re now the poorer, there was no harm. Even presuming she was, in fact, underage, my barman had been watching her. She was enjoying good company even if not good spirits. Even if she was underage, no genuine harm was done to anyone.

    And yet, our culture has developed in such a way that we send her away anyway. An abstract law protecting abstract principles occupies a higher place than the barman exercising his own discretion.

    In a sense, we’re no longer in some out of the way place on the fringes of a national preserve. In the act of eliminating discretion, a barkeep became an agent of Tallahassee, the Florida capital. She became an agent of something other than her own conscience, disrupting private fellowship for an abstract principle.

    We become poorer people as our chances to exercise discretion—to personally decide how a principle might best be applied in a particular situation—disappear from our culture.

    In a constitutional culture constructed to favor the concrete and local culture of a place over the distant and abstract sentimentality of a state or federal capital, it only makes sense to leave as much room as possible for acts of discretion.

    Just as “one size fits all” rarely suits fashion, it certainly doesn’t suit our cultures and communities well, because it frustrates their ability to be authentically unique, special places. It makes them like anyplace else.

    And it feels more and more difficult to go anyplace anymore that anymore feels like any special place.

    Anyway, back to my Lewis and London Pride.

  • •

    13th & Locust

    There are so many places that take on new light and meaning when you discover their history. In Philadelphia, 4th & High Street became one of those places for me. Now thanks to Davis Shaver I can add 13th and Locust Street to my list of special places. First, look at this lost architecture:

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    To the point:

    An inconspicuous corner that played a key role in Teddy Roosevelt’s winding road to the White House – Broad & Locust, blocks south of Philadelphia’s City Hall, itself still a year away from final completion when the 1900 Republican National Convention was held in town. … Kearns Goodwin details the scene in her book:

    “The moment Roosevelt arrived in Philadelphia, the stampede for his nomination began—just as Lodge and Judge Parker had predicted. Entering the crowded lobby of the Hotel Walton around 6 p.m., he was met by ‘vociferous applause’ and thunderous cries of ‘Teddy, Teddy, Teddy.’ When the raucous crowd launched into a chorus of ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,’ journalists noted, ‘Roosevelt blushed, doffed his hat and bowed his acknowledgments as he recognized the tune played after his charge up San Juan Hill.’”

    “He had scarcely finished breakfast the following morning, the New York Tribune reported, when ‘he had reason to suspect that something of importance affecting his political fortunes had happened in the course of the night’: one state delegation after another ‘invaded’ his room, announcing that he was their unanimous choice for vice president.”

    As an aside, I happened to walk past this display on the 1900 Philadelphia convention in the Philadelphia Airport last month:

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    There’s something hideous at 13th & Locust today, but the intersection and the neighborhood in general will be more meaningful now that I know it’s history.

  • •

    Philadelphia Ferry Building

    Philadelphia Ferry Building

    A look back in time to a different Philadelphia, this is the Pennsylvania Railroad ferry terminal at Market Street, circa 1908 and courtesy of the Library of Congress. The instant I saw this, I thought of the iconic San Francisco Ferry Building.

    Now, it doesn’t look like Philadelphia’s ferry building was constructed with anywhere near the degree of beauty or care for permanence that San Francisco’s was. I’m basing this purely from what I know of San Francisco’s compared to this photo. Maybe I’m wrong.

    In any event, absorbing this photo is an instance when you’re hit with L.P. Hartley’s insight that “the past is a foreign country.” Philadelphia’s ferry building disappeared, of course, replaced by Penn’s Landing’s sprawling parking lots and highway ramps. Replaced by desolation, in other words. And across the river Camden is an entirely different place—almost everything on that waterfront is gone.

    The Market Street (Ben Franklin) Bridge wouldn’t be built for another 20 years. When that was finished, I guess the practical need for ferries diminished. It still would’ve been nice if this thing, or something like it, has stayed where it was and become a landmark in the way that San Francisco’s Ferry Building is. Until Penn’s Landing is redeveloped, we’re stuck with this:

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    Before Independence Mall

    Before Independence Mall

    Independence Hall at Chestnut Street, circa 1910. I think this would have had to have been taken from the top of the American Philosophical Society at 5th & Chestnut Streets. This comes from the Library of Congress.

    It’s amazing to look at this scene of an earlier Philadelphia and see how different this section of Old City was a century ago. There was no “Independence Mall” yet, and Independence Hall was just a part of the fabric of the neighborhood—not yet something set apart from the city in such a fundamentally distinct way as it is now.

    City Hall, filthy, can be seen in the distance. Other than that, there’s not much in this photo that the contemporary Philadelphian would recognize.

    It’s fascinating to think about the entire lived experience of so many in the buildings that were eventually destroyed to create Independence Mall—entire lives, entire histories took place there.

  • What suburbs do

    In the typical war of words over the positives and negatives of suburbanization we’re left with the binary of “cities v. suburbs,” where the fractured, isolated, idyllic suburban life is compared to the dense, plagued, teeming urban environment.

    This is problematic because it ignores the real problem with suburbs, which is that they don’t hurt our cities nearly as much as they hurt our towns.

    Specifically, the towns they’re nearby and sucking the life out of by pulling away residents and draining civic worth away from and into disjointed geographic spaces. College towns are particularly magical because they’re often survivors in terms of places where real small town America still exists.

    The Bedford Falls of It’s a Wonderful Life exists in our cultural consciousness as a cute and magical place. But our sentimentalism is rooted in the knowledge that those kinds of towns really were the norm rather than the silver screen exception—places where the owners of the local shops lived in town, and where the banker, policeman, and taxi driver were best friends in no small part because they lived down the street from each other.

    Suburbs kill dynamism because they fragment people, families, and communities that could have existed as towns. Cross pollination, randomness, and locality aren’t possible in these physically stretched out places.

    The Millennium Science Complex at Penn State University was put up a few years ago as a flagship research center. It was purposefully designed so that scientists, researchers, etc. from different areas and with varying focuses would “run into each other,” as a former trustee describes it to me a while ago. It was designed specifically so people and their ideas would intermingle and cross-pollinate, hopefully bearing research fruit as a result. This is what small towns once did that suburbs cannot—provide space and context for chance and relationships.

    American cities are thriving. But our small towns that are evaporating, and suburbanization is a driving force.

  • Creative responses to failure

    I think Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program is one of the best programs of its kind in the country. I know some call Philadelphia a “city of murals.” It’s true they seem to be everywhere.

    I’ve been thinking about murals for a few years, most recently on a visit to State College where I’m working with a few people to build out the Nittany Valley Heritage Walk to surround and ultimately conserve the enormous Inspiration Mural on Heister Street. A more recent mural addition to State College is the one that appears here, on the blank wall of McClanahan’s Downtown Market along Calder Way:

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    These are beautiful things. But it’s also true that the existence of most murals (like the one here) is possible only because of the failure of our architecture. What McClanahan’s built was a structure with a hideous and worthless blank wall that contributed to the deadening of a key portion of a main artery of the town. The mural above, like most opportunities for grand murals that I’ve seen, are creative responses to failure.

    They should be celebrated for what they are, and for the stories they tell. They should also be a call to our architectural and civic sensibilities to start building structures that are themselves works of art.

  • WREC: Warminster Recreation and Education Center

    WREC: Warminster Recreation and Education Center

    When I wrote the introduction to Conserving Mount Nittany, I wrote about a woods without a name near where I grew up:

    “Ours was a typical suburban neighborhood, but there was a woods across the street from our home. As far as I know it had no name. I spent countless hours over late mornings, afternoons, and evenings in the final moments before the era of continuous communication alone under the trees. The light casting shadows at odd angles and the creative mind of my childhood-self supplying adventures that in spirit carried me far from the physical scene.”

    Another little place with a woods existed nearby, maybe a ten minute walk. I think it used to be called the “Hart School,” but by my time its life as a school was over and it was known as the “WREC”—Warminster Recreation and Education Center. It was one of those places where dozens of neighborhood kids went to hang out on summer afternoons. Playing basketball, maybe. Attending a summer camp of some kind. Playing or riding bikes or loitering. A barely managed and unstructured place where a childhood took shape. It worked, and my own childhood would’ve been poorer without it. Like a release valve in bad times, and a Central Park in miniature for kids who’ve never been.

    The WREC has been torn down, and in its place will go dozens of new homes that will be out of character with the wider neighborhood, which is one of those with its roads and trails connecting to other places, rather than merely a self-contained contemporary plot that connects to nothing. It was much more than a building to me, and I wish the town had thought more creatively about how that space could have been redeveloped while serving the same purpose of providing a common place for neighbors of all ages. Before it was destroyed in October I went for a final visit, walking from the WREC’s entrance down past the woods and across Little Neshaminy Creek:

    It was a good place. It was a part of the neighborhoods around it, and connected them in the way good public spaces do. What the township offers in its place is a managed park, a former Army base, miles away. It will require kids to be driven, which means it will be a scheduled event, which means it offers nothing of the character of the WREC that’s been replaced, which is a tragedy in miniature for the generations to come in the place I grew up.