I’m a firm believer that you can’t really understand a work of architecture until you’ve seen it in person.  The Empire State Plaza in Albany bears this out. – photos can’t do it justice .  Going to Albany to see it is well worth the trip.

I had been there a few times in the past, most memorably at night in deep snow back in the 70s.  I had a few pictures of it which I used in my class, but I needed better ones.  More importantly, I had to see if my memories of it could possibly be real, or whether I had built it up out of proportion over the years.  I hadn’t – it exceeded my memories in many ways.

I think that the Empire State Plaza is the worst urban redevelopment project to ever be built in this country.  It is not nearly as well known as it should be – being in Albany, as New Yorkers famously ignores everything that happens in Albany.  If this project were in New York, it would be known world-wide.

It is terrible in at least three ways:  as a whole, as individual pieces, and for what it did to the city of Albany.

The scale of it is enormous – 4/10 of a mile (12 blocks) long, 1/4 of a mile wide.  It is a vast, empty plaza, devoid of all but smokers even on a warm day.  In the winter, I’m sure no one ever goes onto it, as there is a whole subterranean concourse level beneath, which connects all the buildings.  

To walk into the plaza is to be humbled, to feel the power of the state poised to crush you.  Greta hummed the imperial march from Star Wars the whole time we were there. The newer buildings dwarf the Capitol, and their massive solidity seems about to crush the dainty Capitol between them.

The State Capitol sits on the top of a hill, and the plaza has been built up to a slightly higher level – perhaps symbolizing that the power of the state lies not in the feckless legislature, but in the inertia of the bureaucracy?  

The buildings range from the banal to the truly awful.  Wallace K. Harrison was Nelson Rockefeller’s favorite architect, their association going back at least to the design of the UN (where Harrison first began copying Corbu).  He was of the grandiose modernist school (which is often detectable through the excessive use of marble), and in New York he was partially responsible for Lincoln Center.  The buildings fit into the simple parti of the plaza design – a museum facing the Capitol at the end of the axis, four smallish towers on one side facing a large tower and the “Egg” on theater, with a couple of bookends near the Capitol.

The towers are not so bad as objects.  Elegant and slim, there are two nested masses, expressing core and office floor area.  The idea of a series of identical towers works, and their footprints are actually quite small, with the potential for good daylighting.  The problem is all that empty space in between them.  The large tower refers to classic slabs such as the RCA Building, but in the extreme tower-in-the-park vein.

The Egg is rather funny.  Sometimes it looks like a boat, sometimes a duck, sometimes an egg. This is another element in the channeling-Corbu vocabulary – the expressive, playful highlight which contrast with the preponderant rationality (think of the stuff on the roof of the Unite).   I can’t imagine they named it the Egg to start with; I like it when a nickname is so perfect it has to be acknowledged.

The museum is ponderous and looming, at the top of a huge staircase that spans a street.  Most schoolchildren enter from the streets way below, so they don’t experience the whole effect.

The two building flanking the Capitol are the worst.  Massive, clunky, ill-proportioned.  (They are so ugly that I suspect Harrison’s even-less-talented partner, Max Abramowitz, must have had a hand in them.)  They try to articulate some aspects of their systems – such as the beams which support the overhanging upper stories – but the differentiation of parts doesn’t work if you just cover everything with marble.  Greta and I have been defining a few building types on this trip, related to popular culture, with the Barad-Dur type showing up pretty often.  Greta immediately classed this building in the Star Wars ATAT type.  

But the biggest problem with this project is what it did to the city.  The Capitol sits at the top of a hill, with the commercial and residential districts on the slopes below it.  

The neighborhood seen to the left in the old postcard above was obliterated, and the podium / plaza run straight out from the Capitol.  By the time you get to the south end of the museum, the edifice looms above the city.

To the west, a long, lower building presents an impenetrable wall.

And to the east, facing the Hudson, there is a giant rampart, from whence the defenders can look down upon the populace.

But there are no people here (except a few lost pedestrians), as the area has been cleared for approach ramps that lead to the parking garages in the podium below the plaza, and to the streets on the west side.

The relationship between the plaza and the Capitol may be problematic, but that edge is by far the most successful.  The imagery and message of the other three sides is clear:  the government is secure behind its defenses, and the danger and messiness of city life has been pushed far away.  There is a megalomania of architectural vision here that is seldom seen so clearly (the only other example that comes to mind is the Renaissance Center in Detroit).  Harrison, the lesser acolyte of Corbu, has achieved the complete destruction and negation of the city that the master was never able to fully carry out.

I’d been to Pittsburgh a few times in the past and always loved it.  I think cities that are squeezed by the topography – steep bluffs and big rivers here – have an intensity that is missing in cities that can spread endlessly.  Pittsburgh is another of those cities that was really important 100 years ago, and isn’t now.  But somehow it has fared better than many others – reinventing itself, emphasizing factors such as higher education.  John pointed out to me that Pittsburgh had as many abandoned mills as any other rust belt city, and when it was apparent that they wouldn’t be revived, the rich and powerful decided to knock them down, to allow for redevelopment, and to remove them as depressing reminders of decline.  It seems to have helped.  We architects tend to fetishize the “ruin porn” photos of cities such as Detroit, but maybe it isn’t good for a city’s life for it to be filled with desolation.

There are many things to like about Pittsburgh (and a few to hate).  First, bridges.  As I’ve mentioned, it’s a lot easier to get Greta to look at bridges than buildings, so we hit them all.  There are the three identical bridges over the Allegheny from the 1920s, pictured above and below.

There is Gustav Lindenthal’s lenticular truss Smithfield street bridge.

There are the juxtapositions of bridges with bluffsand bridges with bridges

The bridges are great, but it is time for people to get over this –  It’s Pittsburgh, folks, not Paris:

For some reason on this trip I’ve become obsessed with collages of urban fabric – bridges, but also lots of building facades seen together.  Pittsburgh is a good town for this.

There are lots of buildings here that are interesting in their own right;  like, what’s that bizarre thing poking out at the right above?

and some weird scale issues – impressive facade:

but it looks like they blew the whole budget on the entry:

and then in the midst of post-war mediocre gigantism, there stands a gem (more on that one in a later post).

But no post on Pittsburgh would be complete without a mention of PPG Place. Every time I start to think that maybe Philip Johnson is not the dark lord of American modernism, this complex looms up in my mind.  Pictures cannot do it justice.  It is the most hideous bit of architecture/urban design perpetrated in the past 50 years (and I will be posting another contender soon).  

It is awful in concept, in execution, in scale, in proportion, in detail (or lack thereof).  It is horrible to be surrounded by it, and it is horrible to see its banality dominate the city from a distance.  

But there are certain contexts within which it fits.  I can only hope that someday we will be able to classify it as ruin porn.

The University of Cincinnati is also a bit of an architectural petting zoo.  Apparently at some point the dean of the architecture school convinced the university that they should hire prominent architects to do signature buildings.  Predictability, the results are in the good, bad and ugly categories.  The juxtapositions are radical, as can be seen in the photo above, where you get Morphosis, Michael Graves, and one of the strangest brutalist buildings I’ve ever seen (is it a science building or full of telephone switching equipment?)

The Graves building is pretty darn nice.  It makes sense, it has a simple clear plan, and the scale of it fits in well.  (At least, we old folks from the 80s will probably like it.)

The Gehry building is not technically on campus, but a few blocks away, and is part of the general self-conscious milieu.  It sits by the side of the road, and it made me think of Venturi’s analysis of Las Vegas, a building which is trying very hard to create an impression as you glimpse it from a moving vehicle.

Of course, the building that must be talked about is Eisenmann’s addition to the design school.  Seldom is a building worse than I expect it to be (I have pretty low expectations for some people), but this is one.  The exterior evokes recovered memories of all the bad color choices of the 80s – why was Eisenmann still doing this in the 90s?  (and why couldn’t he have remembered that he was once one of the “whites”?)

The entrance pictured above feels even worse than all those parking garages in TV shows where bad things always happen.  Perhaps Eisenmann was playing a joke with this, as an amazing amount of effort has been put into the extended entry stair which does indeed end up in a parking lot / service entry.

The interior has a couple of good spatial moves – a big void which goes through a few floors, a big stair which runs up alongside it, 

but these big moves have no impact on the building beyond themselves – they do nothing to organize the building spatially or conceptually.  You come across them randomly – we actually wandered the building for quite a while before we found them.  Most of the time you’re in corridors such as this:

Fundamentally as boring and soul-destroying as any other internal double-loaded corridor, except that this one has cost an enormous amount of money in the pointless manipulation of gypsum board surfaces.  Yes, it’s more entertaining than two parallel walls, but you get the feeling (actually you know) that Eisenmann was just playing games with diagrams and ideas, and not at all actually designing the space.  These corridors meander through a solid mass, seldom touching the exterior wall or the interior void.  There is no order to the building that one can intuit after a while, and the infrequent maps are not much help in finding anything either.  The architecture department seems to have made a very good decision by staying put in the older building to which this is attached.  Maybe they understood what it was going to be like, and the other departments didn’t.  There is a tradition that the architecture building is usually the worst one on a campus, and here again we see Eisenmann  manifesting his familiarity with architectural history and tradition.

The part of campus which I unexpectedly loved was the relatively new “main street”, with the site plan by Hargreaves Associates, and which comprises some older Georgian buildings, some new buildings by Morphosis, Moore Ruble Yudell, Gwathmey Siegel and others, and which abuts and overlook the football stadium.  It’s a spectacular bit of urban design, with well-contained spaces squeezed between very active building forms, constantly shifting perspectives, long and short views, and contrasting materials and styles.

The radical change of scale that comes from incorporating the football stadium is brilliant, being able to look onto the field from above, rather than having the stadium be a looming solid wall that kills the space around it.  The glimpse of Tschumi’s building (the white one with the triangular grid) across the field gives you the sense of distance and scale that you sometimes get in a dense city, but almost never on a campus.

It feels like a piece of a city, and although undoubtedly planned to the nth degree, it gives that sense of unintended juxtaposition and unanticipated revelation which are perhaps the greatest architectural pleasures in a city.  

It seems fitting that this design is in Cincinnati;  after weeks in the grid-universe of the American West, Cincinnati was was the first place we came to where the topography dominated the city’s organization, where the back and forth between the pre-human world and the order of the planned city achieved a satisfying balance.  This design reflects that balance in a completely thought-through and beautifully articulated way.

Perhaps Eisenmann was trying to say the same thing, letting his building operate with more of a topological than geometric order.  But a building is not a city (although that might be nice conceit to explore in a design studio).  It can’t encompass all the complexity of a city and the contrasting set of ideas that develop over time.  Trying to make a building that complicated seems very forced – there are only so many unrelated ideas that can comfortably co-exist in a small place.

A campus is not a city either – it is fundamentally a planned entity, and somehow the attempts to mimic the city-like development pattern (such as the Oregon Experiment) haven’t been very successful in creating a city-like environment.  Lucien Kroll wrote about how to how to bring this sensibility into modern large-scale development (by allowing multiple voices and designers, and compressing the time-frame of city-building), and this part of the Cincinnati campus is probably the most successful example of that I’ve ever seen.   I loved it even more than I hated the Eisenmann.   

Indianapolis is just big – about 20 miles across, in either direction.  (368 square miles – significantly bigger than New York City).  This great size leads to a corresponding variety – a large and spread-out downtown, and many residential neighborhoods – from old and decrepit, to close-in and gentrifying, to old ones that are a few miles out from the center and unbelievably grand, and newer neighborhoods of McMansions on the periphery, which feel like they are out in the woods.  Bill Adams took us on a great tour which really showed the variety of places, but I felt that I had barely scratched the surface.

The downtown has some fine old buildings:

The City Market

The Indiana Theater

The Statehouse, right where it belongs on the axis

a somewhat typical mansion on the north side

And then the city has a fairly normal array of postwar buildings and juxtapositions, which vary from the commonplace to the truly weird

a nondescript but gratuitously angled 70s-thing

A Marriott which probably looks much less real than the rendering of it did

a portico on a state office building, notably overscaled, ponderous and pointless

the skyline as seen from the canal to the west

a classic 70s Hyatt, which brought on a wave of nostalgia 

the new NCAA headquarters, by native son Michael Graves

with this attached hall-of-fame piece

The strangest thing was seeing what aspects of civic life are most valorized.  The Statehouse is quite impressive, but who are those individuals being accorded a place of honor on the banners hanging out front?  Statesmen, or perhaps war heroes?

No, it’s the Colts’ cheerleaders!

But by far the most amazing thing in Indianapolis is the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, which is in the center of town where the two main streets intersect, similar to the Philadelphia City Hall.  The urban space is very grand, a circle 500 feet in diameter between building walls, with the buildings enclosing the traffic circle and the Monument.  The Monument is covered with the kind of histrionic and spectacular civic sculpture which was common in the late 19th century (such as at the Columbian Exhibition, or the Maine Memorial in NY).  

It’s a fantastic, over-the-top piece, and it may be the best means we now have to experience what the White City must have felt like.