Further Reading: On nostalgia, value and artistic virtue

The following post is made up of three essays inspired by articles well worth reading. The first deals with nostalgia and how it influences our understanding of socio-economic (as well as architectural) problems. This is followed by a discussion on economic value and Walmart. Finally, I examine one of the central insights from the film Amadeus about the role of virtue in making art.

• Nostalgia is a powerful factor in the development of new ideas and policies. As long as people have memories, nostalgia is a perfectly natural response to an environment that's gradually become uncomfortable, even hostile. It provides us an escape from reality just as much as it presents an attractive vision for redeeming the future by ushering a return to a more virtuous time and place. Since we tend to remember things in fragments, there is a deliberate selectivity in what we want recall, which makes nostalgia an exercise in incomplete image-making. Even if the details of what we remember have never been forgotten, it doesn't ensure that we understand very well what really happened at the time.
  

When someone claims to be all-knowing about an event by saying "I was there", I remind them that doesn't make it any likelier that you had a complete understanding of that event, since so much of the surrounding context and other related events were not considered to help explain it all. Our perceptions make the events we witness 'feel' more real, but they often blind us from acknowledging a larger, more comprehensive reality (much like Plato's allegory of the cave). This is demonstrated by the notion that hindsight is 20/20, in that we would have acted differently if we had understood the context more competely at the time.

History is a discipline that applies the idea of hindsight and of making sense out of the interrelatedness of events. Nostalgia is a retreat from hindsight, a conjuring of irrational sentimentality of the past, detached from a complicated reality that it was. Policy-making, an endeavour that demands a considerable amount of rational analysis and exhaustive research past policies their effects, should therefore not resort to irrational nostalgic view of the past. The viability of socio-economic policy (or architectural theory, for that matter) cannot be tested in a laboratory, itself a space created to remove as much context as possible. Instead, context is everything when measuring the effectiveness of a policy or theory that will affect the countless people's lives and all the unmeasurable and unpredictable factors that influence their behavior.

Such thoughts came to my mind when reading Brink Lindsey's article on economic inequality since the Second World War. In a lengthy essay (30+ pages) Lindsey writes about 'nostalgianomics', the tendency of some economists to idealize a past era in order to serve as a model in making policies for the present. Using an isolated set of data showing a relatively low level of inequality from top to the lowest quintile the three decades following the war, left-wing economists like Paul Krugman proceed to call for a restoration of policies friendly to labor unions, punitive to corporate CEO's and high levels of government intervention in the economy. Since life was swell during Krugman's childhood in the 1950's, this should serve as a starting point in assessing what is missing now and what should be done to address it. This mode of thinking seems prevalent among those who have an unshakeable John Kenneth Galbraith-like faith in the prudent role of government in guiding the market economy towards stable prosperity and eventual social harmony.

Lindsey argues that this nostalgic view of the post-war period is misguided, as it fails to take into account social and geo-political context unique to that time. While economic inequality was less dramatic, the unequal treatment between blacks and whites, men and women, union and non-union, corporate cartels and entrepreneurs helped make it so. Cultural and social changes since the late 1960's have made it impossible to return the supposed glory days of the 1940's and 1950's. In addition, a world war that destroyed the industrial competitiveness of Europe and the eventual rise industrial competitiveness around the globe ensured that the good ol' days of highly-paid manufacturing jobs and a growing middle class were to due to expire from the start. Lindsey explains that the economic policies pursued in the 1970s and 1980s were not part of a plan to destroy the post-war era of prosperity and social harmony, but as a response to its inevitable exhaustion due to a changing reality beyond any one actor's control.

Beyond providing a broader perspective about the overall issue of inequality, Lindsey's article is valuable as a quick primer on the economic history of the last half-century. It illustrates the connection between cultural values and economic phenomena, and that the success of a policy is only as good as its reflection of the culture that surrounds it. As values change over time, it is only prudent that goals will have to be reassessed as well. Likewise, what was once considered a problem in the past might be an advantage today, so it is reasonable to pose new questions for new times rather than applying the same old questions for a different set of circumstances. Inequality today means something quite different in the world fifty years ago, especially when seen in the context of absolute wealth and standards of living. Pursuing an abstract social goal like equality risks ignoring more tangible needs of the day-to-day life of average people.

Although Lindsey's article considers the short-sightedness of nostalgia in economics, there is a correlation with recent architectural discourse (but of course!). For anyone who has followed architectural trends in the last 40 years, it is obvious that nostalgia for an idyllic past has been a major influence on building design. Whether it is in the historicist strand within architectural postmodernism or in much of the work of the New Urbanist movement, there is an overt desire to restore the look and feel of a distant time and place. This is usually done in complete detachment to the reality of the current context, as portrayed by the juxtaposition of highway with speeding cars next to a lifestyle center designed in a style that originated from a time when streets were designed for pedestrian traffic and horse-driven wagons.

Just as nostalgia is memory based unrelated fragments, much of the historicist design is only skin-deep--elaborate facades made of thin veneers of foam insulated stucco or masonry veneer supported by a modern framework of steel and concrete. Instead of being connected to larger contemporary notions of space, time and transparency, the historicist project tries to recreate a fragmented reality all to itself, as an escape from an overarching reality that is beyond anyone's control. Just as we are bound to choose memories that recall pleasant feelings, erecting pseudo-European renaissance villages in modern-day suburbia is our way of choosing a happy reality that is completely of our own imagining. It's not as if there's any public will to bring back monarchies, guilds, philosophical humanism and a triumphant church hierarchy and other major influences on our beloved architecture.

Or maybe that's the point. After all, nostalgia is manifest in post-modern or post-structuralist reaction. When language, symbols, images or meanings aren't what the seem to be, when truth is relative depending on one's perspective and power, when context is what you make of it, maybe the superficial application of historic styles is the most 'honest' way expressing the reality of our times.

• Another article that I came across interested me less about its subject- Walmart - than the valuable nugget of insight into a major problem that affects American society today. Charles Platt, a former editor at Wired magazine, went undercover to see what it was like to work at the world's largest retailer. Beyond his observations about the efficiency of the way Walmart operates, and the highly autonomous decision-making on the salesfloor, which are both well-known, I was more taken by his restating of an obvious fact that is often ignored when debating the pros and cons of Walmart (a personal note: I don't like to go to Walmart- the dull decor and mediocre selection turn me off ). Writing on the relative low wages paid to workers (which are still better than many other retail outfits), Platt briefly summarizes the concept of value in the determination of wages:
  

I found myself reaching an inescapable conclusion. Low wages are not a Wal-Mart problem. They are an industry-wide problem, afflicting all unskilled entry-level jobs, and the reason should be obvious.

In our free-enterprise system, employees are valued largely in terms of what they can do. This is why teenagers fresh out of high school often go to vocational training institutes to become auto mechanics or electricians. They understand a basic principle that seems to elude social commentators, politicians and union organizers. If you want better pay, you need to learn skills that are in demand...

Platt further explains how trying to go around this fact by means of legislating for a mandatory higher wage or by unionizing does not solve the problem of adding value to low-skill workers. Such methods are treating the symptom of low wages at the bottom strata of society fail to treat the actual illness- the low economic value of laborers. Platt reaches an uncomforting (but vitally important) conclusion:

To my mind, the real scandal is not that a large corporation doesn't pay people more. The scandal is that so many people have so little economic value. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?

As a product of decaying school districts and having family members that have spent much time and talent teaching in these districts, the answer to the question of how so many people have so little economic value becomes more clear. Unlike Platt, I don't think it matters whether the public school is free or not, but whether students learn anything of real economic value. Instead of learning math, science and writing, more and more the priority in the school curriculum has been placed on learning the right socio-political lessons (eg: drugs are bad, safe sex is good, intolerance is evil, saving the environment is everyone's duty, we are stronger through diversity, etc.). While such lessons can have value in public education in promoting civic-mindedness and social harmony, there is no reason that they should absorb so much time and drain so many resources from teaching skills that will manifest themselves in real economic value.

One fallacy that is often assumed when discussing ways to teach students marketable skills is the notion that it is more useful to emphasize specific skills and knowledge that have direct economic value than to stress basic skills and abstract knowledge. Skills are marketable in so far that there is a market for them at that point in time. In the past when technology and accompanying techniques were simpler, teaching skills towards a specific job made sense, especially in jobs where the way of doing things were not ever expected to change. Nowadays, the teaching of job skills becomes futile in the face of rapid technological change. Although there are certain timeless aspects to every profession, more and more jobs require an ability to learn new techniques quickly and to multi-task. Often these techniques are unforeseen a few years before. I personally find myself having to learn completely new software every year to design and render buildings, things never instructed to me in architecture school. I don't fault them for failing to give me marketable skills (which the knowledge of software indeed is, especially at the entry-level of the architecture job market) since I got from them something more abstract but even more important- how to think and the ability to learn quickly.

In the work world of today, it is evident to me that what is most important is to be trainable. This takes persistent effort on the part of teachers and parents in instilling in children basic skills in reading, writing, arithmetic and the ability to closely listen and communicate clearly. Most minimum wage workers I've interacted with seem to be able to barely accomplish the given task at hand and seem to have little aptitude or desire to take more responsibility. It is not because they lack the drive, but rather because they haven't been made trainable. In a world of specialization where one's worth depends on his or her level of specialization (and the large amounts of training required), those that are not trainable are at a major disadvantage. When one's worth is not butressed by union muscle or a legilated lack of price competition, what's left? Either one comes to terms that one must build worth by learning marketable skills quickly (through his acquired trainability) or that he is entitled to that worth by virtue of simply breathing.

It seems that for Platt, Walmart offers those with little economic value a chance to acquire marketable skills (managing a sales floor, tracking inventory, etc.). It isn't surprising, then, that pro-union interest groups who are invested in determining worth by entitlement are opposed to Walmart. There are too many unskilled people, whose problems are only compounded by lower-paid unskilled immigrant labor and a modern economy that demands high worker productivity. How free markets determines the economic value of workers won't be going away anytime soon. As long as work is perceived as an entitlement, I'm afraid our public schools will fail continue to deliver trainable workers. This can only make us all poorer.

• Finally, there was a short piece referring to one of my favorite films- Amadeus. Even though it first came out in 1984, this masterpiece by director Milos Foreman never tires from the dozens of times I've watched it, primarily because it offers one of the most compelling views into the mind of an artist. Especially near the end, when Mozart dictates his Requiem Mass to Salieri while on his deathbed, it is fascinating to watch the composer (brilliantly played by Tom Hulce) describe the piece's underlying musical structure while completely overwhelming his rival's comprehension. "Give me time..." yells Salieri, begging Mozart to slow down so that he can catch up in inscribing the notation, not realizing that this musical genius' life on earth was already running out of time. That's the nature of the creative mind, which has no respect for time and which tumultuously works through ideas and details on its own before ever putting them to paper.

The creative mind doesn't care if you got the right beliefs or practice good virtues either. Doug Tennapel argues that the film Amadeus shows that the most creative people are not necessarily the most virtuous, and that believing the contrary hobbles artistic accomplishment. He writes:

There are good ideas rolling around in Amadeus but none more central than the idea that being a good artist has nothing to do with virtue. Hitler appreciated the arts, Maxfield Parrish screwed his models, and the best writers are drunk, emotional narcissists. I hope I didn’t miss anyone. Anyways, being correct on any position does jack for one’s artistic ability.

Tennapel brings to our attention a common cliche when judging the merits of an artist-that whatever the strengths of the work, it is nullified by the artist's lack of character and his sociopathic tendencies. Similar to using ad-hominem attacks on someone with whom we don't agree politically, it seems that if we don't like someone's work, we justify it by reminding everyone that this person was a real creep or jerk. It avoids constructive debate and prevents us from the healthy practive of reevaluating our own assumptions. I see this quite a bit in architectural discourse, in which someone tries to discredit an entire architectural movement based on the leaders' personal flaws, whether they were too inebriated or too obsessive compulsive or just plain arrogant.

The reverse of is just as true-a work of art isn't necessarily good just because it comes from a good person. Having the right ideas doesn't prevent mediocre films, music or art pieces from being made. And one's political ideology doesn't guarantee works of beauty and inspiration. Believing otherwise seems to arise out of an innate desire for fairness, that the good is manifest in all that one considers worthy. Unfortunately, creative genius is not about what is just, as it often arises in moral vaccuums (eg. Facsist art & architecture, Soviet musical composers, etc.) By transcending moral rules that derive from cultural norms of the day and the imperfect men that make them, good art has the power to reveal a higher truth more abstract than right or wrong.

As soon as the making art becomes a moral exercise, artistic quality tends to suffer. Art fails to communicate convincingly the greater truth. Bad art makes it more difficult for us understand and receive this truth, which is why I get upset when some churches eschew art in general since it gets in the way of imparting 'the message'. I can particularly relate to Tennapel's opinion of contemporary Christian-inspired art:

While we have a rich history of fine Christian content in the past, it’s the exception today. The rule is for Christian art to be mediocre. We have a high opinion of our correct position but place form a little too far down the ladder from function. There is beauty and truth to be found in a story well told and a position well argued.

Sacred music is one art that has suffered in churches in reaction to a concerted movement to purify ritual and permit the clergy to provide more of their own interpretation with more talking. By dumbing down the quality of the music and putting up dull works of architecture devoid of art, it is hoped that spiritual revelation will be more accessible to the people. In my mind, spiritual revelation will be more narrowly understood, its power diminished by the lack of examples of how God is manifested in artisitic works of timeless beauty. I recommend the book Why Catholics Can't Sing by Thomas Day, which explores and criticizes the triumph of bad taste in contemporary Catholic worship.

As an individual who admires genuine creativity and the power of art, I think it is foolish for any institution to be so confident about itself that it chooses to denigrate art. Substance matters, but style plays the important role of making it palatable. A sophisticated aesthetic goes a long way into getting the point across as art has a way of communicating that arouses the senses as well as the deepest reaches of the mind. No amount of talking or writing can come close to such an effect.

It would also be wise to separate art from its agreement to accepted ideas. A moving statement can often be achieved by working outside the realm of institutional assumptions. Le Corbusier, an atheist (and evil incarnate to many others), was regardless a brilliant artist who gave the Catholic church one of its most inspired architectural legacies in the past century (Ronchamp chapel, La Tourette monastery). Many of his greatest built works emerged from the departure of his own copious doctrines. He allowed himself to reexamine his beliefs, to look for new directions and renew his works with added richness. It is a discipline from which all institutions who care about the strength of their message could benefit.

UPDATE-MORE FURTHER READING: The other night I was able to catch a C-Span interview with Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard. He discussed his recent article The Age of Irresponsibility, which describes the socio-cultural trends of the last few decades and how they have infected our current body politic with fiscal recklessness, corruption and and a lack of healthy bourgeois restraint. The article is not for the faint-of-heart, but Mr. Continetti skillfully describes the zeitgeist and what it portends for the future. The epic scope of the article belies the author's youth (he's only 27 years old), but his solid writing and his comfortable television presence foreshadows the emergence of an important public intellectual in the near future.

Econ 101: It’s the Allocation, Stupid

For those that are gracious enough to visit this site, you may have noticed that we try to combine a variety of disciplines: economics, architecture, religion, politics. Though it is true that we, like most bloggers, are better schooled in some areas than others (and consequently go into more depth in those areas), we do not neglect common sense when offering commentary on how it is we thing society is best ordered. I would like to offer such common sense as it seems (at best) a healthy minority of friends and colleagues refuse to investigate the realities of our current economic mess.

As I understand it, economics goes something like this: there’s a scarce amount of goods and services in the world, and we have to figure out how to allocate them. There are a number of ways of doing this, but two in particular have been tried most frequently, and one is in the process of being implemented in America as I write. The first way is to, as a society, do nothing. It’s often called the “free market” or “free enterprise.” It allows people, in a lawfully agreed-upon manner, to freely engage in trade. People are allowed to use their gifts, talents and skill to make products, offer services, transport goods, invent things, pretty much do anything that others place a value on. The market then acts not only as a place where goods are exchanged, but even more importantly, where information is exchanged. In trillions of daily voluntary exchanges, information on prices, demand, supply, production and everything related to the free exchange of goods is shared.

There are setbacks to this economic model. Good theology tells us people are sinful and imperfect, and in a free society, people’s innate sinfulness will spring up from time to time and cause harm. Most of the time, this sin, via the simple fact that sin will distort the free market and will thus corrupt the inherent value of goods and services, is localized and prosecuted, if it isn’t fixed within the market system itself. Greed is allowed to flourish in this system, as it does in all systems, and appropriate legislation and the rule of law are required to ensure the free market stays as free of corruption as possible. But greed, because it is spread so disparately across millions of producers and consumers, is rarely concentrated in a way that is finally detrimental.

The second model is one of centralized redistribution. The model is quite simple in theory and far older than the free market approach, but surprisingly complex in practice. The thinking says that we can morally take the property of individuals for the good of the collective, or use the excess of the wealthy to “balance” the poverty of the poor. In essence, through forced taxation (much like the medieval feudal system), citizens hand over their property to a central planner, who then “provides” for the needs of all. Various severities of this idea has been tried through the centuries. We seem, through the nationalization of several industries and by acquiring more debt than our GDP, to be slowly (or perhaps rapidly) adopting this point-of-view. Instead of feudal lords, the federal government is taking more and more of our property and centrally planning the economy.

There are setbacks to this model as well. History tells us that it is virtually impossible to administer this model because of its complexity, and because the voluntary information that flows so freely in a free economy is now choked off at several bottlenecks along the way. Information instead lies in the hands of a relative few people, people who cannot possibly have the adequate information to make informed decisions about the inherent value of goods and services. In other words, the proper allocation of resources becomes impossible, as an organic pricing system is replaced by an artificial pricing system. One small example might be the overabundance of size 12 shoes in the former Soviet Union, shoes that went unused. So where there wasn’t enough bread, there were far too many shoes that weren’t used. Information wasn’t able to be conveyed. There were simply too few ears for all the speakers.

There are serious moral ramifications of this collective model as well, too many to account for here. Suffice to say individual liberty and property are compromised. When allocation of resources is placed in the hands of a select group of people, rationing is the only possible result, as history tells us. So what inevitably happens is that the “class structure”, which are supposed to be eliminated through collectivization, is strictly enforced, as some get the scarce goods and some don’t, always for the good of the cause.

The difficulty with the free market is that it is that there is very little that is intuitive. It is not concrete. It really is the invisible hand. But we don’t like invisible hands. We like big concrete, centralized hands. We want someone else to produce X,Y, and Z, and we don’t want to leave that production to chance. What if someone doesn’t make it? What if they charge too much? What if I don’t like it when they do make it? Instead, we’d prefer to let a central planner tell us they’ll make it instead of leaving it to an unseen producer.

But with all its problems, one would have to be willing to live in ignorance not to be appreciative for all the free market does for us every day. It has solved, without anyone guiding it or directing it, the great problem of allocation. We have progressed as workers and are free to pursue those things we love to do precisely because we have allocated someone else to do the things we don’t want to do: grow food, ship food, build homes, build furniture, etc.. It wasn’t long ago that most folks spent vast amounts of their time in the drudgery of procuring food and shelter. Why don’t we anymore? We have let the free market decide how to allocate resources. At least we used to. Adopting the collective model will invariably lead to less efficient allocation of resources, bottlenecks, red tape and a terrible flow of information. At least, it always has.

Ideologues are Lazy

The Presidential Debate proved to be chock full of ominous warnings. I’ve written earlier about how I was bothered that a distinction of what is and isn’t a human/civil right with regards to healthcare wasn’t clearly articulated by either candidate. I was also bothered when Jim Lehrer asked: “Are you -- are you willing to acknowledge both of you that this financial crisis is going to affect the way you rule the country…” Hmmm, last time I checked, Presidents don’t rule…at least not under our constitution. At most, they govern, they lead, they act as a figurehead at times, and they are the Commander-in-Chief. But they simply don’t rule, especially on the domestic front. This idea of lords and kings ruling over us was what we revolted against in the first place. We instead chose a far messier process: democracy. (Or as purists prefer, a constitutional republic.)

So this question would have been the perfect time for either candidate to inform Mr. Lehrer and the American audience that, in fact, Presidents don’t rule and it wasn’t their intention to rule. Mr. Obama might have won me over if he had said, “Well, I appreciate the thought, Mr. Lehrer, but it’s not my intention to dictate by fiat my ideology on 300 million people. It’s rather my agenda to sign legislation that the houses of Congress write that is in line with my vision for this great nation.” Of course, neither candidate said any such thing. Maybe its because they were quietly hoping they wouldn’t have to do all the hard work of governing, compromising and getting dirty with details of actually running a mammoth and complex government. With Mr. Obama, I’m getting the sneaky suspicion that he is more and more happy to rule, and less inclined to govern.

In his first 3 weeks we have seen him arrogantly throw the gauntlet on the so-called “stimulus” bill, threatening that if it isn’t passed there will be hell to pay. And one executive order after another has imposed a decree on corporate executives pay, among other things. Then there’s the “Rule as I say, not as I do” precedent where President Obama has ignored his own promises to refrain from hiring D.C. insiders and carrying about with business-as-usual pork spending. I’m not in the least surprised that Mr. Obama has carried on with a very typically liberal agenda, even as he promised change, even change from other liberals, like Hilary Clinton. (A great breakdown of this can be found here.)

And I’m not surprised for one reason: I always assumed that folks as ideologically driven as Mr. Obama were not tolerant of dissent, which to my mind, is a form of intellectual laziness. It’s not to say ideologies in and of themselves are bad. But Mr. Obama’s ideology is a simple one and a lazy one. His ideology is at best Keynes’ rejected idea of government spending, and at worst, a strong move towards socialism. According to the theory, government spending alone will stimulate an economy. Not only do I find this attitude foolhardy, I find it to be first-class daydreaming. Whereas markets take risk, this ideology hides behind false certainty, which is just another way of cutting off debate and refusing to engage in a diversity of ideas.

I have found few ideologues that can appreciate the inherent risk of the marketplace. Rather, they are intellectually lazy and push problems and solutions off on others. They often refuse to consider the unintended consequences of what might come, how government programs create terrible incentives, or that an honest solution might take more time and hard work than the phony solution of printing worthless paper. The solution to hand it over to someone else, especially a large seemingly beneficent government is far easier, even if fraught with peril in the long run.

And now that he’s not getting his way, he’s displaying signs of anger. That anger, that impatience that things aren’t getting done fast enough, that his nominations aren’t sailing through, that the pressures from foreign enemies are mounting hourly, are signs of his arrogance and his intellectual laziness. There is no evidence he has ever done the hard work of an intellectual. He has pontificated from time to time, but for the most part he has excelled at checkers. Presidential decisions are far more akin to chess. But ideologues don’t like chess. It’s too much work, too much scheming, too much preparation. It’s far easier to simply say “King me” and to rule. I have no doubt that’s exactly what he was expecting.

I remember a fascinating documentary about the rise of Nazism. One of the more striking details it revealed was the laziness of Hitler. You might think that a man as possessed as he was would have been a workaholic. But in fact, he often slept in until noon, watched movies, went for long walks with his dog, and routinely asked not to be bothered with work. Of course, there is no comparison to any American president with the evils of Hitler. My comparison is not one of morality, but one of temperament. An ideologue has no incentive to think critically, and that is precisely the problem with Mr. Obama. His mind is already made up, and that leads to pronounced intellectual weakness. For all of Bush’s faults (and he had many), a critic cannot honestly say Bush did not sacrifice his own ideology for the perceived good of the country. I humbly ask Mr. Obama to consider Mr. Bush's example.

Podcast #6

In Podcast #6, relieveddebtor and corbusier discuss what impact the stimulus bill will have on architecture, an appreciate of contextualization in architecture, the beauty of Thorncrown Chapel, and how some Bible verses can be used to glorify ourselves instead of God.

O'Neil Ford: The Search for an Authentic Modern Response

When my older brother was going to college in San Antonio, he would mention to me a particular architect that had designed much of the campus. During my visits, I found each of the buildings to be of distinctive modern design and the spaces between them intimate in scale and responsive to the steep site. My brother praised the quality of the architecture by this apparently celebrated designer, O'Neil Ford, and continues to insist to this day that it was one of the most beautiful environments he had ever lived in. I had never heard of this architect, and I would soon forget about him until a couple of years later, he had me visit a house that belonged to a family whose son he was tutoring. There was a particular crispness to the exterior sillhouette, fine detailing and an original palette of materials and finishes. Inside, the rooms were layed out along a hallway gallery, which functioned as an strong axial spine permitting uninterrupted views of a beautiful large garden beyond. Sure enough, this handsome home was an O'Neil Ford design, which thus piqued my curiosity about the man and his buildings that would endear to my continuing interest in how local and and global influences could interact in a meaningful way.

Other than from admiring references mentioned by the older professors at school, it would be only until recently that I decided to become more deeply acquainted with the Texas master's work. Up to that point it was well known that he was among the most influential architects in Texas, responsible for establishing an emerging local Modernist tradition. His own firm survives under the name Ford, Powell & Carson, which still has a strong reputation in the state, even as it has relinquished trend-setting status long ago. Beyond being exponents of modern design, I became familiar with the firm's work in historic preservation upon working with their exquisite working drawings in trying to reconstruct details for a 19th-century courthouse in East Texas. At the time I had considered this as just another project specialty that countless other large firms had taken up as the market for architectural preservation was expanding. It did not occur to me that preservation was of special significance to the founder O'Neil Ford himself in his attempts in creating an authentically Texan modern architecture.

One of the most glaring realizations upon trying to get to know the state's most cherished architect was how little was written about him. If it were not for a valuable retrospect written by David Dillon, a widely read local architecture critic and scholar, even less would be known about Ford. He designed hundreds of projects throughout the state from the 1920s all the way to the 1970s, with a client roster that would include Texas' most iconic corporate pioneers in its trademark industries of oil, retail and microchips. He would lecture and teach at the most celebrated architecture schools, and would even serve on arts commissions under president Lyndon Johnson. San Antonio's skyline would be indistiguishable without its 750 foot tall Tower of the Americas, which Ford designed as part of the 1968 World's Fair. Great swaths of historic building fabric that help make San Antonio the most picturesque city in the state were preserved by Ford's important advocacy. He introduced innovative structural systems to buildings, exploring the possibilities of thin-shell concrete and paraboloid roofs for industrial and civic buildings, including some of the most elegant laboratories for Texas Instruments.

Beyond these notable accomplishments is the extent of Ford's influence on younger designers that would later shape the contemporary architectural landscape unique to Texas. The names of the interns that came and went at Ford's San Antonio studio serves as veritable "Who's who" of founders of major firms, deans at the major achitecture schools and signature local architects who would make their mark designing exquisite home for the moneyed local elite. Despite never having gone to architecture school, much less to college, he cultivated deep links with art and design professors at universities throughout the state and felt quite at home in a cultural salon setting with his artist friends. The almost bohemian way in which young designers would show up at his doorstep and agree to work for little to no wage in exchange for a small room near the studio eerily parallels the cult-like encampment at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin compound in Arizona. Like Wright, Ford championed the importance of incorporating traditional crafts in his spaces, especially in the houses he designed, enlisting his brother, a master carver and sculptor, to create custom doors, screens, and louvered grates. Just as Wright expounded at length on the nature of materials and proper ways to use them, Ford demonstrated similar sensitivity, taking into account the climate, local availability and vernacular tradition. He detested the superficial treatment of the wall, joking that most brick veneer walls were "brick venereal." He would eventually develop his own vocabulary of materials that would later come to exemplify Modernism in Central Texas: massive masonry walls, either of stone or of pink brick, metal standing seam roofs with severely thin edges at the eave, floor to ceiling-glass, deep porches and simplified volumes that echo the pioneer sheds of the first settlements in the region.

Even as Ford helped usher a modern architectural idiom for Texas, he was a deeply involved in the preservation of its heritage. One of his earliest major undertakings was in the revitalization of the historic neighborhood of La Villita in downtown San Antonio during a time when the practice of historic preservation was unheard of. This ecclectic agglomeration of blocks built by Mexican and European settlers in throughout the 19th century just along the south bank of the San Antonio river was re-adapted into an arts and crafts colony and complements the rustic charm of the city's main tourist attraction, the Riverwalk. In contrast to other preservation projects at the time (late 1930s) that tended to make living museums out of entire districts by isolating them from the surround contemporary economic and cultural life (eg. Williamsburg), La Villita was to be integrated into San Antonio's cutlural life and produce artifacts that would help define the city's identity. There was little desire to recreate the look and feel of a place a specific point in time. Instead, the district would serve as an architectural panorama of the passing of time, emphasizing the evolving spirit of the diverse inhabitants and their affect on the built fabric. Ford's guiding reason for the district's redevelopment was "not archaeological-but rather attempt to preserve the spirit of architecture that is Texan".

The lesson to be drawn from Ford's achievements is in the value of acknowledging tradition as we try to create new forms for our own time. In undermining the widely accepted narrative of the Modernist movement's categoric rejection of historical reference and vernacular tradition, Ford, along with other contemporary 'critical regionalists' ( such as Alvar Aalto of Finland, one of Ford's personal favorites) used these influences as the foundation on which to design a new tradition. They did not romantically regard themselves as rebels breaking with tradition but rather as conservators who also innovated to fit the contemporary need of their times. A 'softening' of the hard straight lines and stark materials that exemplified the International Style was often the result from designers like O'Neil Ford, which endowed their works with humanity, warmth and a certain spirit that harmonizes with the surrounding landscape and the accumulation of the local culture upon it.

In surveying the buildings of O'Neil Ford, there is an emphatic response to question of who and where the inhabitants of a structure are and how they are different from everyone else. One can call this 'a sense of place' or 'authenticity', but this quality about his buildings only magnifies one of the central failings of much of Modernist movement: the ignoral of the environment in all of its cultural dimensions, the diversity in the particularities of people, its failure to belong to a place. When such links to place are missing, a Modernist building's answers to who is 'anyone' and where is 'anywhere'. This lends a certain self-centeredness to a building and often becomes regarded by a community as an offense to a harmonious environment it desires. Instead of embodying a genuine contemporary identity to a place, many Modern buildings appear to impose a threatening bland universality and reductionism. The same criticism applies to the ubiquitous practice of constructing in the mode of contrived historicism, which is just as guilty in imposing a cultural identity that is just as foreign and dishonest about the spirit of a place as any Modernist counterpart. Literally imitating another place and time (like many a New Urbanist suburban development) has the uneasy effect of answering the question of who (somebody else) and where (somewhere else).

In either the modernist or historicist mode, there seems to be an unfortunately tragic sense of cultural confidence. We are either anybody or we are somebody else, anywhere or and somewhere else, but never are we confident enough to reflect who we really are. An architecture that celebrates place and demonstrates a connection to its passage of time is therefore an affirmative act that will ensure the survival of a people's identity in the future. O'Neil Ford, along with his other global contemporaries trying to define a regional response to Moderism, serves as a model towards generating authentic solutions to modern problems that effectively preserves an authentic identity and spirit in the face of changing times. The practice of historic preservation and adaptive reuse is also signicant in achieving a cultural confidence through time, since one should never forget who they are and where they have been. Far from being a reactionary and defensive response to progressive calls for 'change' the appreciation of tradition as it has evolved in time encourages originality, spirituality and an overall depth that is sorely lacking in much our modern world.

Self-Help Christianity: Why Philippians 4:13 is So Popular

In many ways, religion exists in America as marketplace. We have the freedom to pick and choose what we like about it, and what we don't, and we shop and buy accordingly. Its moralism is, one might argue, deeply stained into the fabric, the culture of America, and this is most apparent by what a "religious" country America is. America is far from morally perfect, but it can be a convincing argument that much of America is a morally positive place with a strong religious component. But, without borrowing from pietist or legalist strains, and without trying to ride too proudly on my high horse, I wonder how deeply that religion runs. It often just feels like a superficial clothing to an otherwise secular body, a moral garment to a wordly wardrobe.

One of the quickest ways to know which religious currents are making waves is to tally the most popular Bible verses. A few years ago, it was likely the prayer of Jabez, the promise that God answers prayer, especially materially-driven prayers. Perhaps the most popular today, and by popular I mean in a true "pop" sense, is Philippians 4:13: "I can do all things in him who strengthens me." "Him" refers to Christ and is often translated that way, even though Paul doesn't mention Christ by name in the verse. I don't know where I hear or see this verse, it just seems to be everywhere. And even if someone doesn't volunteer it as a favorite, I'm quite confident if I quoted it, many would nod and say, "Oh yes, I like that one." I mean who wouldn't like it? We all want to think we can do anything, even if most of the time we do next to nothing.

I was particularly struck by the popularity of this verse when I noticed it in bold white letters across the black backdrop of glare reducing strip as seen on the face of Florida Gator quarterback Tim Tebow. The guy has been roundly praised by the media and I have no sour grapes over his success. He's a public Christian, even if perhaps a different strain from me, and he deserves all the recognition he gets. But there it was, in several high profile games: "Phil. 4:13". (He used John 3:16 for the National Championship game.) Either he has a friend named Phil whose April 13th birth or death he was commemorating, or he was telling the world of his Samson-like source of strength. No doubt his faith, and this verse, was an inspiration for him, a reminder that he is never alone, that Christ does truly empower us in our daily lives to overcome challenges and press on towards the goal, in the words of Paul.

But there is something that irks me about this verse being so popular. It's starting to feel a whole lot like inspirational, feel good, lollypop, band-aid Christianity. It's so attractive because it's so self-empowering. We've even managed to make our favorite Bible verses ultimately about us, and about achieving. Has our need for success and material validation gotten to the point where we just select those verses that give us the power to carry on in our weary suburban lives? Where is the cross? Where is the sacrifice? And what is it we're supposed to be achieving, anyway? I have no problem with achieving excellence in life and being inspired by faith. I do think that, perfectionism aside, God calls us to excel, to maximize our talents, weather on the football field, in the marketplace, or as a parent. "Chariots of Fire" demonstrates this better than I can say it. But I also want to be honest to scripture, and I can't say that our use of Philippians 4:13 as self-help empowerment is exactly what Paul had in mind.

Paul was writing to a church in conflict, as many of them were. He was encouraging the Philippians to be of one mind, which in itself is an act of sacrifice. Jesus clearly told his disciples to carry their own cross, not exactly what we would call self-help. Indeed, the common refrain of biblical repentance, of changing direction, of living a life of service worthy of God, speaks not of self-aggradizement, but of self-sacrifice, so that one's true call might be revealed. I'm not trying to be preachy. I am trying to say that Christians, if we are to have relevance in an already narcissistic age, would do well to model how we find meaning in service, in losing ourselves to some degree rather than empowerment. "I can do all things"? Great. Just don't forget "all things" includes visiting the dying in isolation as well as running the 40 in under 5 seconds.

I suppose I can't complain that millions of people are exposed to what is a wonderful verse of scripture. And I shouldn't complain that many thousands may have been curious enough to actually dust off their Bible to see what Phil 4:13 had to say, even if they hadn't been to church in years. And, again, I won't fault Tim Tebow for being public with his faith. But I think it's worth asking if faith is really worth much if all it is a motivation to succeed. It's great if we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us if we really intend to do anything and everything, from winning a football game to speaking the truth to risking humiliation if and when the time comes. But if all things really only means material success, it is making Philippians 4:13 a terrible idol, and an unwilling companion to our sin.

Architects in a Downturn- Is it time to make buildings that matter?

If it is not obvious to most people already, there is no doubt: the current economic recession has had devastating consequences to the building trades, in particular architects. As any of my colleagues can tell you, our profession is very sensitive to economic cycles, and a feeling of vulnerability accompanies us throughout our careers. Being laid off multiple times is not unusual (sometimes it's seen as a right of passage) and is one of the reasons people leave the practice of architecture in droves in favor of something more economically immune and higher-paying. Once an economic recovery is underway, firms suddenly realize that the pool of employable talent is remarkably thin, as the previous downturn harvested some of the best and brightest towards other more productive endeavours. In a perverse way, part of one's advancement in the profession is therefore to simply stick it out by working one's way up the ladder as vacancies are left unfilled.

The mood in firms right now is predictably quite different from just a couple of years ago. Back then, workers at all levels would suddenly dissappear out of the blue as a result of taking job offers at rival firms that offered a considerable pay raise. There would be new hires starting at the office each week, and new cubicles were being built into every nook and cranny to accomodate them. It felt cramped, a bit noisy and the hours were long. Now many desks are empty, it's much quieter and the hours are much shorter (or it could simply be the winter). Older architects will reminisce about their experience in previous downturns, often making it seem that it was a lot harder back then. Jobs would be so scarce that workers would migrate from one firm to the next as soon as word spread that a firm landed a major project.

There's no telling whether the current recession will be as bad, but times like these encourage some of us to be a bit more reflective about what it is we are trying to do. Without all the backlog of work to consume our schedule and sometimes our judgment, there is time to reassess priorities and restore quality in the work that luckily remains. Most typical businesses respond in this way, but overall, a good year is simply when revenues are high, while a bad year is the opposite. For many architects this quantitative view pales to their concern for quality. Success is seen differently by many of us, who would rather be proud of a beautiful project done during a time of scarcity than collecting year-end bonuses for voluminous yet mediocre work delivered during times of plenty.

Staying true to one's convictions in the face of financial hardship is a perennial romantic ideal among 'serious' architects, even as it is a major cause of why the practice of architecture is comparitively unprofitable (Rand's The Fountainhead, anyone?). The more designer-type architect is often a less than rational economic entity, who perversely revels in expending valuable talent, productivity and time in exchange for the slimmer than slimmest chance of being noticed. It is during economic downturns that firms participate in architectural competitions, since they are a means of keeping busy and honing one's skill once the seemingly endless project stream runs dry. While they promise to launch the career and reputation of the lucky winning firm, for everybody else it is large monetary loss despite the small consolation of having attractive glossy renderings handy for a variety of marketing materials.

As with any person caught in bleak situations, some architects have taken it upon themselves to make lemonade out of lemons. They console themselves to the belief that architectural output improves in quality in inverse relation to the decline in the overall economic climate. When times are going well and private money is flowing, the thinking goes, there is a temptation to substitute decadence and showy effects for thoughtfulness and social responsibility. Once the money becomes scarce and government funded projects are the only game in town, there is an assumption that the resulting buildings will be endowed with more noble virtues, since governments only build for those in most need that were otherwise not in the interest of the 'greedy' private sector.

What follows is a widely embraced conceit that designing for noble or charitable ends will more likely result in a higher level of design. Such is the overall tone of a few articles I've come across recently in architecture websites and professional newsletters. Nicolai Ouroussoff, an architecture critic at the New York Times, basically starts and concludes his piece with the assumption I just described:

...But somewhere along the way that fantasy took a wrong turn. As commissions multiplied for luxury residential high-rises, high-end boutiques and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo and Dubai, more socially conscious projects rarely materialized. Public housing, a staple of 20th-century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda. Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure. Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich, like private jets and spa treatments...

Still, if the recession doesn’t kill the profession, it may have some long-term positive effects for our architecture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure, including schools, parks, bridges and public housing. A major redirection of our creative resources may thus be at hand. If a lot of first-rate architectural talent promises to be at loose ends, why not enlist it in designing the projects that matter most? That’s my dream anyway.

It is implied that high-budget private commissions unleash the baser instincts from high profile architects, while injections of government policy and its attendant largesse will naturally bring out our more noble, and thus better, selves. Government is seen in this context to be the great arbiter of what 'matters', since private investors with the free-market system puts too low a price tag (which translates into mattering little) on things that are highly valuable (in a cultural and political sense) to the community at large. Government involvement in the construction businesses is lauded by many architects, since it allows for an ideal harmony between one's professional duty and his desire to insert himself in helping solve the supposed social or environmental problems.

Not enough of this was happening in during the recent global real-estate bubble, apperently. At at time when architecture firms around the world were swimming in private cash flows and freer than any prior time to push the envelope, the profession's leading lights failed to deliver. Or so it would seem from a blog post's comment about the quality of architecture of the first decade of the 21st century:

Take this article from New York Magazine on the architecture of the last building boom. None of it is great. I don't think any of it is good. Most of it is mediocre. A lot of it is awful. Architects not only got drunk on the methylated spirits of the last building boom, they went blind as a result. As a historian I seem virtually nothing of worth in this decade. Recently I had to give a lecture on the architecture of network society and I found plenty of it by OMA, MVRDV, Herzog and de de Meuron, FOA, and others. Unfortunately all of it was from the last century. Am I getting old? I ask my younger friends and they can't identify anything good new either. CCTV? That is a sad joke, an example of a once great architect doing a lousy imitation of Peter Eisenman for an evil client. I can't take it seriously. Good thing Corb never worked for Mussolini. You can only imagine what he would have done. Overexposed and uninteresting, I predict CCTV will sink like a rock. Gehry hasn't made a single good building since Bilbao, although he has built some unbelievably awful structures at MIT and on the West Side Highway. Herzog and de Meuron are boring beyond belief. I guess whatever talent worked for them in the 1990s went its own way. It's bad out there.

While I will admit that I have become over time more and more bored by the current architectural output that graces the magazines, I don't think it's fair to judge their merit until time and critical distance have had a chance to inflate (or deflate) their significance. The author does seem to suggest that the past decade's building boom seems to have clouded the judgment of these highly-regarded designers. Almost all of the architects mentioned above experienced tremendous growth in the number of staff, the variety of building types and services offered in the last ten years. Once they had won praise for a singular project (often realized during times of financial struggle within the firm) that would eternally cement their worldwide reputation for the rest of their career, these top designers aggressively tried to grow their practice to enable them to tackle even more opportunities that were previously closed to them. Their studio-like practice soon became a business, catering to an endless train of foreign and institutional clients that would require sustaining large teams of designers and builders. This development, however, often risked diluting what made the firm distinctive in the first place.

Had the leaders of such reputable firms refused to grow in this manner and instead focused exclusively on government or institutional projects, which are often awarded by competitions, they would no doubt be much smaller. Fewer architects would be employed by them and with it fewer young minds being offered the opportunity to learn from masters and participate in sophisticated design practices. Granted, firms shouldn't exist simply to provide jobs to those who want one. Rather they exist as a manifestation of the designer's core values. It's just that often this admirable loyalty to core values makes pursuing architecture career much less accessible for many people. It is not a coincidence that countries in which the state is a major client coupled with a comparatively weak private sector (eg. France, Spain, Germany, Japan, Finland, etc.) are home to some of the world's most celebrated firms, which not known for their volume of work but for their discipline in taking the time to do quality work. They are also places where many bright young people who prepared themselves for an architecture career face very limited opportunities. The few who are fortunate to practice do so with the likelihood of meager financial gain and fragile job stability. The rest go to the U.S or the U.K. to work for corporate firms that will sponsor their visas.

With private commissions drying up and in the spirit of times we live in, many architects are looking forward to a sort of government bailout for themselves. As part of his strategy to stimulate a weak economy, the incoming President Obama proposes massive infrastructure spending, which includes increasing efficiencies in government buildings by making them greener and in promoting alternative energy sources. By way of either massive deficit spending or by printing more money (inflation), many architects are elated that federal money will be headed their way not only to stabilize their shrinking practices, butalso to put their talents to more virtuous uses. They recall fondly of the Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs, in particular make-work programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and how it yielded elegant federal buildings, stunning infrastructure projects (Grand Coulee Dam and TVA) and beloved monuments. While the New Deal policies of the Great Depresssion did help foster memborable works of architecture, the historical record shows that it failed in reducing permanent unemployment and had a negative effect on economic growth. The more recent example of Japan during its "Lost Decade" of the 1990s is evidence that a massive program of public works projects throughout the decade delayed its economic recovery for more than ten years. Sure such Japanese luminaries like Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban and Arata Isozaki were able to benefit and create some spectacular institutional buildings with all the government largesse available to them, but at great cost to the overall dynamism of the Japanese economy.

The main reason major public works campaigns fail to generate a meaningful stimulative effect is that they fail to allocate resources and capital efficiently. By taking capital away from the more efficient and accountable private sector (tax collections) and transfering to the most inefficient and unaccountable player in our economy (the government), productivity declines and with it economic growth. The free market is the most efficient way to choose winners and losers, between those that fulfill real needs and others that don't, in spite of other important, yet uneconomic, values. A market interfered heavily by the government yields the opposite result, since government, blinded by political gain and philosophical idealism, chooses winners that should often be the losers (Big Three auto bailout, anyone?). Thus our national competitiveness is futher compromised and growth languishes from the declining productivity of enterprises that would not survive without the state propping them up.

But who said that architects behave as homo economicus? For many among us, the quality of the built environment is of paramount importance and is always in need of an enlightened architectural response. It transcends concerns about monetary policy, pricing mechanisms, market values, interest rates--things that, though difficult to understand, tend to make the world go round. There is an admirable moralism that drives the agenda of many architects which unfortunately isolates them from a healthy curiosity in the inner workings of systems that govern how money moves around and how goods and services are exchanged. It's the reason why many of the prescriptions we give to solve urban problems tend to fail, favoring the directness of inefficient subsidies over the indirect yet more bountiful result of long-term profitability. It is also the reason why many architects tend to favor top-down solutions, that, while enabling the construction of what they would prefer, has the effect of making the practice a studio (which are economically difficult to sustain) instead of a business (which are structured to be economically viable-or at least try to be).

Just as the political winds maybe shifting in the midst this deep recession, leaders in the architectural profession will have to decide what policies they want and how to structure their firms accordingly. Should we continue to make the practice of architecture profitable and viable way for many people to have fulfilling careers and answering to real economic needs, or should we emulate the studio model that relies on government patronage, closed to only the most elitely talented and self-sacrificing individuals who often deliver delightful buildings no economic value? Architecture salaries grew at the fastest rate in the last decade due to the real-estate bubble. Is this trend worth abandoning so that we can make buildings for the "greater good" even as it impoverishes us?

UPDATE: Further reinforcing my argument that economic downturns encourage designers, rather than the opposite, take a look at this article in the New York Times.

Freedom, The French Revolution, and Christmas

There are times when all one can do is remark at the rareness of freedom. For so long I have taken it for granted. But the more history I read, the more impressed I am with the American experiment, its founders, and most of all, its success. Freedom actually worked here, even while it has failed so often amid power grabs, ego and corruption. The basic statements worded so well by Jefferson, that men have certain inalienable rights, should never be assumed, as long as there is any chance someone can gain at someone else's expense. I feel quite fortunate that I have been able to take such freedom for granted, and freely experience, as much as I've been willing to venture, the fullness humanity has to offer.

But, like many others, I pause with concern about the future. Is the experiment coming to an end, slowly but surely? Or is that just the thought of your average paranoid conservative, worried what the next four years might bring? A few simple facts can no longer be ignored: our government is committed to spending more money than the nation is even worth, a staggering, astounding figure measured with twelve or thirteen zeros. There seems to be no stopping the idea that healthcare and education are "rights", and therefore moral entitlements to all Americans, a stark reality for any believer in limited government. Even those who are supposed to defend limited government have completely caught bailout fever, an embarrassment to say the least.

This is how it happens, I suppose. Freedom is lost, a little at a time. I guess it beats the alternative. I have only recently begun to study the French Revolution, a revolution I ignorantly always assumed to be similar revolution to America's, just having gone a little astray. While I've studied the Revolution in the past, I wasn't clear at how brutal, and absolutely Stalinist-like it really was. In the name of liberty 200,000 were imprisoned, about 40,000 were guillotined, the Church was basically destroyed for years, and an innocent aristocracy was gutted and murdered for having wealth. Atheism or agnosticism ruled in the intellectual classes and journals competed as to who could call for the more radical measures against royalty and the bourgeoisie.

Like Stalinism, many of the leaders of the Revolution favored a drastic redistribution of wealth as a means to solving inequality. The rich were seen to be the root cause of poverty and misery, and doing away with the rich was the only real solution offered to end such inequality. It is true that most Americans would think hereditary monarchies as untenable, but we would surely find mass murder in the name of liberty even more appalling.

In the long run, The French Revolution was a commitment to the material life as much as anything else. The Church was seen as the greatest intellectual and moral threat to the Revolution, and the vast majority of priests refused to go along with the tenets of the Revolution. They rightly saw that the attempt to create a materially equal society with an empty humanist morality was not only impossible, but also immoral. As the Revolution came to a pitiful end, it should have been apparent for all to see how little the material life offered, and indeed, how it ultimately always leads to envy, jealousy, and a society mitigated by skewed property valuations. When property is all there is in this world, it becomes a very prized commodity.

As I grow and acquire, I see more clearly that the material life has little to recommend it. That's not to say the acquiring of property is in and of itself a bad thing. That is how we provide for ourselves and families. But the material world is in a constant state of disrepair and disintegration. It takes time and labor just t keep up with the curve, to keep up with ever-changing styles, to fix what breaks, to solve persistent problems. Worse, it is a distraction, like a mistress that is never satisfied, that always needs more attention. Even our bodies are on a collision course with disease and death, health being a gift for a prescribed amount of time. I'm not convinced that a life seeking material gain only, either in governing philosophy or in personal accumulation, is paved with anything but trouble.

That brings me to Christmas, the most materialistic time of year for too many, myself included. Amid the failures of the material life come this most bizarre of promises, that a completely humble child born in the lowest possible circumstances offers us real hope. Not only do we get a vision of a life that is at peace despite our material bondage, we get a vision of joy that stems from a commitment to that child. There comes a point when the material world has failed us for the last time, and we ask what it is that we really want, where our hope really lies, and whether our future is as bright as it once looked. I can only speak for myself when I say that I am relieved to have an alternative vision for what life can be, permission to not be discouraged when the material life fails. It's not to say there aren't plenty of things to be perturbed about. Only that this little baby born so long ago offers us a different vision, and it's really a vision that offers the only legitimate freedom we'll find in this material world.

KRob 08- The changing landscape of architectural drawing

In the last few years, I've tried to bring forth timely topics that currently affect the architectural profession. From writing about sustainability and urbanism, to technological and market trends changing the practice, it is apparent that there is a cornucopia of issues young designers can engage in. Certain issues have a particular appeal to young professionals because they offer a mission worth pursuing--making the world a better place by pushing more environmentally-friendly construction, or helping to making cities more healthy and enjoyable and improving society as a result. Other issues with a more technical emphasis, such as experimenting with computers and other technologies, appeal to those who want to expand the definition of what it is to be an architect the twenty-first century. There are countless organizations that address all these interests and that offer ways for like-minded professionals to share ideas with each other as well as to coordinate with communities from the local to federal levels.

With all these choices and all of the activities that can take an architect's meager amount of extra time, it is all too easy to forget an essential component that should inform what architects do over any other building-related profession: visceral beauty. Certainly beauty is always on our minds when we work, but rarely do we think about it on its own, detached from function, technical logic, budgets or what the client has specifically requested. Remove an object from the context that helped make it, and what meaning or significance is left? Does the object express intangible qualities that are unique to the individual that created it?

These are important questions we should always consider, even if they are too abstract for people who would rather make a 'real' difference. That is why I have been fortunate to be involved during the last few years in the longest running architectural drawing competition-the KRob. The Ken Roberts Memorial Delineation Competition poses precisely these questions and stimulates a rich discussion on why a drawing moves us, and the infinite number of thoughtful and beautiful ways we communicate ideas graphically. Many of us who have gone through schools are indeed mindful of this, but it always was seen as supporting larger architectural idea, not as a thing of value in and of itself. The irony is made clear when the invited jurors every year try to remind themselves what the basis of the judging will be, as it is quite different from the typical architecture competition in which winners are judged by how well they respond to a given program and not to the beauty of the drawings (though it helps).

The 320 entries submitted this year really brought into focus more clearly than ever how the definition of the architectural drawing has expanded and changed. The winners of the hand-drawn categories recall the original and most intuitive method of delineation, while those of the digital-hybrid media categories demonstrate how the computer has allowed drawings to transcend the two-dimensional plane and incorporate multiple layers of information and detail. Although technique was vital in judging entries, what put some over others was in what it had to say (...or what it was trying have us guess what it way trying to say). Although it may not surprise those who did go to architecture school, the submissions from students was overall a bit stronger than the professionals. Given the amount of time and the encouragement by their teachers to experiment and explore, their work often outshined the professionals who are pressed for time and pressured by commercial obligations to please clients.

This was the first year that KRob accepted international entries. Jungsoo Kim of South Korea won the ignaugural International prize with his series of renderings depicting an enormous fissure breaking open the ground plane to reveal an oversized man-made canyon. Some of the perspectives inside the fissure remind me of the parting of the red sea in the film "The Ten Commandments" only with more haze and and softer light. If you look at the top left corner of the drawing there is a temple complex at the end of the fissure's axis, indicating the space's function as a part of a spiritual procession. The earth is rendered powerfully here, and reminds us of our inevitable becoming a part of it upon our deaths. Glowing lights beaming out of from the surface add a magical quality to the drawing's overall expression.

In the hand-drawing category, the jurors were impressed by the winning professional entry by Scott Tulay which interprets the phenomena of light, shade and structure. The blue, black and grey charcoal palette helped emphasize the contrast light and mass, while the composition of intersecting beams and framing elements abstracted the reality of the interior of a barn or warehouse into a rich yet haunting spatial pattern. Tulay's drawing does recall in my mind the Cubist paintings of the early twentieth century, which attempted to reveal a more abstract and universal reality.

This was quite different from the winner of the hand-drawing student category. Matthew Sander's axonometric drawing of a mechanical tower along with an illustration of a shed in successive phases of construction (and a dog house!) won over the jury partly due to its mystery. The drawing selectively cuts sections of various elements, revealing the inner workings of the tower, the depth of the ground below and repeats one building over and over to give the drawing a sense of time in space. The smeared graphite sprinkled over the page (likely the result of dirty parallel bar wheels) is evidence of Mr. Sander's patient yet positively 'fussy' attempt put seemingly disparate elements into a whole. What the relationship was between the sheds and the tower (and that dog!) spurred lengthy debate , and made the drawing and example of how the story or its ambiguous meanings gave it special meaning beyond its common technique.

The strength in which a drawing tells a story also characterizes the winner of the digital-hybrid prize in the professional category. While the technical mastery of the drawing is evident, Aleksander Novak-Zemplinski's depiction of Los Angeles in a distant and greener future demonstrates the power a drawing has in transporting us into another believable reality. There is a multiplicity of scales, a high level of detail and a dramatic use of color and atmosphere. The futuristic blimps, the hive-like vegetated hillsides of densely packed dwellings and the buzzing human activity at the landing strips are just a few of many different elements that encourages the viewer to immerse themselves in another reality. Influences from science-fiction movies are obvious, and it turns out that the drawing is part of a visulization for a film project. It reminds us that one of the major objectives of an architectural rendering is not necessarily to depict a future building as realistically as possible in its given context, but rather to offer a glimpse of a more inspiring reality once the building is fully realized.

And yet, the winner of the best digital-hybrid drawing in the student category departs from visualisations of alternate realities to something altogether more abstract. Brandon Shigeta's winning entry is a handsome concept diagram that describes the transformation of an existing pattern of urban blocks. A greyscale aerial view of a portion of a city is overlayed with colors and graphic elements to communicate the idea of a park space that serves as buffer between two areas of the city. The drawing's composition of fading pixels, arrows and chaotic curvilinear lines gives it an aspect of motion and highlights the notion that the design cities are guided by many unseen though evident forces. They culminate at the green space, which in turn explodes outward in a perpendicular direction. Very little traditional drawing or figurative illustration is present. Instead, Mr. Shigeta likely used software that allows unlimited modulation of layers and vector-based linework. Such modern techniques that are becoming ever more commonplace, and the drawing represented to the juror's a striking example of the changing definition of the art of the architectural delineation. Concepts can be communicated with new tools that allow for an ever expanded range of meanings. Initially, Mr. Shigeta's entry was noticed for its elegant composition. But it was upon closer inspection that the jurors uncovered and were impressed by the drawing's complexity of information. With the manyfold effects of this drawing revealing itself with each glance, and from the breadth of discussion it stimulated among the jurors, Mr. Shigeta's urban diagram was awarded the KRob's Best of Show.

The result did not necessarily mean that the jurors decided to embrace the new. Each of the three jurors could choose a personal citation of a work that they felt strongly about. Two of the jurors selected works especially for their deference to traditional delineation. Dawn Carlson's watercolor of a Gothic church harkens back to the refined compositional drawings of the Beaux-Arts curriculum that were prevalent in all architecture schools before the onset of Modernism. The flat, non-perspectival picture of a city by J. Arthur Liu emulates the Oriental artistic tradition of depicting cities from above, which functioned as a sort of map of the area, and were featured in books, murals, and tapestries. For its incorporation of a technology unrelated to architectural drawing, Richie Gelles' entry showing a series of X-Ray slides describing his concept for a hospital won the admiration of the jury.

Overall, the winners of this year's competition were a diverse group. The jury was often split on many of the selected finalists, and often the debates about why they chose one over another were passionate. The value of these debates can not be overstated, and it is the desire of the organizers of the competition to create a more accessible forum for all to participate in the dialogue regarding the changes affecting architectural drawing. The success of the Ken Roberts Competition is critical to the continuation of this dialogue, and it invites all students and professionals to contribute.

I'm a Winner! Bobos, Millennials, and Obama: Why Conservatism is So Un-Cool

This past election put two different personalities and two different generations on a stage for all to see. On the one hand was the old-school John McCain, the grumpy maverick who seemed glaringly inflexible and at times repetitive. On the other was the "coolest" politician since JFK, someone who appealed to young voters and monopolize the issue of change. Barrack Obama epitomizes, and personifies, so many of the values that have come to define almost two generations: flexibility, open-minded, post-racial, post-partisan, maybe even post-American. Scores of Americans are over the past, over history, or at least over a sense of history. Since American history is mostly negative, they might say, it's time to move on to bigger and brighter things. In that regard, McCain never had a chance. Even though he has been a rare individual among the groupthink in D.C., he was a product of a bygone generation that most young Americans would prefer stay that way: gone.

In the media age, image matters, maybe even more so than policies or governmental philosophy. (At least for now. A return to history could change all of that, and that return could be hurried along by an aggressive Russia or Iran, or a seriously damaged economy.) Obama had a glow, and that image was especially attractive to two groups in particular: Bobos and Millennials. Bobos are the Bourgeois Bohemians so appropriately detailed by David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise. Millennials are the Gen Y-ers, the grandchildren of the boomers, gifted with multi-tasking, love of community, and a profound sense of entitlement. Both of these groups, in ways both positive and negative, seek a break with the past.

The Bobos retreated from the elitism of the 1950s, the Donna Reed image where status was king. They desired a society where achievement dominated and trumped past values that championed last names, connections, and diplomas. What they created was a society built on several paradoxes: their achievement mindset led them to overcome the elites, but never be able to rest, lest they lose their prominent positions. They became a generation of reconcilers, who brought together two groups that had historically been at war, bohemians and the bourgeois. They sacrificed the virtues of the past, lest they interfere with the present, and they created a “nice” and “decent” society that stood for very little. They regarded wholesomeness as a newfound value, particular evident in a love affair of nature and all things organic, but rarely created time to actually enjoy such wholesomeness. Obama projects niceness, decentness, wholesomeness, and achievement. Like Bobos, he has earned the future.
 
The Millennials are the Bobos’ kids, but it doesn’t seem that they’re quite as much into achievement. (I found this 60 Minutes video worth watching.) They are rebelling against the achievement doctrine; after all, they never spent time with mom and dad because mom and dad were busy at the office. Moreover, achievement doesn't mean much to a generation who never grew up losing at anything, from T-ball on up to grade grades in college in part due to calls from helicopter parents. Millennials value friendships, openness and themselves above all other things, and bring a stark sense of entitlement into the workplace and relationships. They will sacrifice achievement for quality of life, and they seem to take the Bobos lack of respect for the past to a whole new level: Millennials are the future and they know it. For a generation used to being coddled, told "You can do it!" and who sincerely believes the future is also theirs (not because they've earned it, but because, well, it just is), the "Yes we can" message must have been familiar and encouraging, even if ridiculously empty.

Lost in all of this is a deeper discussion of principle. “As a matter of practical politics, contemporary liberalism amounts to a coalitional ideology, while conservatism remains an ideological coalition,” writes Jonah Goldberg. If conservatism is about principle, and if it is an ideological coalition, what chance does it have among a majority of Bobos and Millennials? Not much. These are two groups that are among the most narcissistic and self-assured generations in American history, who have never been challenged or rallied to a national cause. Indeed, they were probably laughing at McCain’s motto: “Country first.” I wonder how many Millennials were mortified at such an idea. Country First? Yeah, right after me, my dog, Facebook, and my iPhone.
 
Maybe I’m being too hard on these generations. Millennials certainly have their gifts, and in many ways they’re a breath of fresh air compared to grungy Gen X. From a religious point-of-view, I hope they will reject the Bobo’s “Flexidoxy” and come to embrace truth as found in the historical Church. But from a political point-of-view, as a conservative, I wonder if this isn’t a lost generation. Peggy Noonan points out that “many of the indices for the GOP are dreadful, especially that they lost the vote of two-thirds of those aged 18 to 29. They lost a generation! If that continues in coming years, it will be a rolling wave of doom.” Time will tell. For now, I’m already quite sure Obama will have serious challenges, and we’ll see how long the Millennial naiveté lasts.
 
Also, I know making generalizations about generations is a dangerous task. For a differing point-of-view, check this post out. There are great points here. But the voting numbers don’t lie. And it strikes me that there is something about conservatism this generation can’t tolerate. At least, not a majority of them.

An Impossible Statement: “Healthcare Should Be a Right”

As a simple intellectual exercise, I’d like to quibble about semantics. Just in case your ears didn’t perk when Barrack Obama said the above statement in a previous presidential debate, I wanted to draw attention to a fundamental understanding of what a “right” is. No matter where we stand on the political side of things, I think this is a question worth asking and answering, from a philosophical viewpoint. When asked if healthcare was a right, Obama responded, “Well, I think it should be a right for every American.” So the question for me is, “Should healthcare be a right?” Or, “Is it already a right?” The questions are entirely different. If he had said “Healthcare is a right” instead of “Healthcare should be a right,” I might disagree in the end, but wouldn’t be as perturbed.

The problem is the word, “should.” For a politician to use this word in this context is alarming, as it suggests rights are granted by those very politicians, not by a higher authority. The word “should” implies something needs to change, a sentiment which shouldn’t surprise anyone following these campaigns. For example, if a father says, “Son, you should clean your room,” this implies that the room isn’t clean now, and that needs to change. Furthermore, it implies someone has the power to change it, presumably the son, but the father if worse comes to worse.

If I were to apply this to Obama’s quote, “Healthcare should be a right,” that implies that healthcare is currently not a right, but in the future, well, it should be. So are rights fluid, and can our understanding of them change? I’m not so sure. Isn’t this is a misreading of what rights even are? A right either is, or isn’t. Rights are an existential question, not a political one. Rights are, and must be, understood to be granted by a higher authority than man, usually God, but perhaps Natural Law or the “common good” can be substituted. If rights don’t come from a higher authority, then they lose the one thing that makes them truly a right: protection from man, the ability to claim it over and above someone else’s competing claim.

If anything, government interferes with man’s inalienable rights more often than not. (Hence the Bill of Rights, restrictions on what government does to protect human rights.) Government didn’t end slavery by extending the right to freedom; government perpetuated slavery for centuries by legalizing it. Government didn’t give women the right to vote; government withheld that right for centuries, only later recognizing its error and changing course. Rights either “are” or they “are not”. But they never “should be”.

The truly stunning decades of the late 1700s found man discovering that rights were inherent to the dignity of man himself, that they were not granted by a monarch or even a parliament, no matter how popular. If rights were conveyed by government, they could just as easily be taken away by that same government. Historically, the rights to press, religion and free speech, were not thought of as inalienable. But that thinking was changed; certain rights came to be seen as inalienable, as true to humanity as the air we breathe. This was a remarkable achievement for mankind, one thousands of years in the making.

So back to the quote and why it is an impossible statement, a paradox of language: if healthcare should be a right, then something needs to change and someone needs to change it. Someone needs to assign this right, and as soon as possible. But if someone can do that, it’s not really a right, but a privilege in every sense of the word. If Obama had said that healthcare is a right, he would have every moral imperative (even if I and others heartily disagreed with his logic) to fundamentally altar the way our healthcare system is run.

But the fact that he said it “should” be a right is quite alarming, and I think a gift, an insight into the way that he understand, or doesn’t understand, the role of government. Rights simply “are” or “are not”, because true rights are absolute claims that any human can make against any other. If rights are granted by those in power, they are not absolute, but instead are negligible, and by definition, are no longer a right, but a privilege. If a right “should be” now, it’s only a matter of time before someone decides it “shouldn’t be”.

An Architectural Delicacy: Thorncrown Chapel from a Religious Point-of-View

I have the good fortune of being married to someone who spent several years of her life growing up in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. This is good for a number of reasons, but mainly it was a good excuse to vacation in the beautiful mountains of Arkansas and to see the famous Thorncrown Chapel designed by E. Fay Jones. Sharing a blog with an architect, and stumbling across pictures of Thorncrown via the Internet made seeing the chapel top priority.

I had several thoughts upon leaving Thorncrown. The first was, why do chapels get all the great buildings? I suspect there are several reasons that chapels (as opposed to sanctuaries built by congregations) generate the best ideas and employ the best architects. For starters, congregations rarely have the funds to be avant garde. They usually can muster up just enough cash to fund a standard, if not boring A-frame sanctuary, with predictable stability, efficiency and minimal religious symbolism. In the case of Thorncrown and other chapels, it was the wealth (thanks in part to answered prayers)and land of one person that provided the carte blanche necessary for architectural risk and reward.

Occasionally, wealthy members of congregations will pony up substantial funds for a church sanctuary, enough funds to bring on an architect with bold ideas and vision. But other considerations must be dealt with in a church that a stand-alone chapel rarely deals with. Mostly, it's a question of stewardship. "Should we, as a church," they'll say, "spend that kind of money on a building when we can build a bigger one for half the cost and give the rest of the money to the poor?" Certain, a fair question. Also, a building committee will rarely agree on a bold design, but instead, will almost always opt for a safe, comfortable, familiar design, even if it is unexceptional and may mimic their over-carpeted living room, or the church most of them "grew up in."

But once I was done mourning the reality that I would never serve in a space as beautiful, I asked myself what makes Thorncrown stand out? What makes it work so well? There were a few features that struck me, especially from a religious point-of-view. For starters, it is a vulnerable structure. Unlike the great cathedrals (I acknowledge they have size considerations as city parishes), Thorncrown embodies fragility and delicacy. It looks as though a strong wind would leave it splintered...yet it holds, bracing itself with interlocking beams.

The fragility is especially appealing as religion itself is as a fragile enterprise. Religion is dependent in very real ways on the duel saintly and sinful natures of its participants and leaders. History displays serious religious scars, and ultimately what holds the Church together is the fragile faith and hope of a people who believe in a god as yet unseen. Thorncrown seems to welcome this fragility. In a culture where Christians can be zealous, proud and arrogant, Thorncrown ignores that hubris and admits that believers walk by a fragile, but steady faith. The architecture of the self-assured is bulky, dated, and gaudy. It projects certainty, not vulnerability. Thorncrown is, as faith often is, hard to nail down, and hard to know where to begin. It's just there, and even though a whisper of doubt could knock it all down, it holds in spite of looking weak from the outside.

One also cannot mention Thorncrown without commenting on the way it blends in to its natural surrounding. Architecturally, it strikes me that this is the way a good designer will be at the mercy of what is presented. In this case, the client was not Jim Reed as much as it was the Ozark Mountains. I recognize that most religious buildings are not built in the mountains. But every religious structure is built somewhere, and that place is a place of ministry. The place of ministry, in fact. I remember my seminary's chapel, nestled amid a thoroughly modernist building in Chicago. The front and back walls were entirely glass, with one wall looking out towards 55th street. Buses, students, joggers, and the homeless all were the backdrop to worship. This was an urban school, and the chapel did not shield the urbanism beyond its walls with sheetrock and religious art. Instead, there was an intentional effort to embrace it.

But too many churches act as cloisters. Forget stained glass windows...many of them have given up on windows altogether. (I guess the natural light makes spotlights less effective. We wouldn't want there to be any doubt about who the main attraction is, after all.) When worshippers enter the space, they might as well be entering another zip code. They can get their worship over with in this enclosed space, and then never really worry about what goes on outside those walls. Thorncrown makes that cloister mentality impossible. To be in that space is in itself to focus on what happens outside those walls. Suburban churches appealing to the nominally religious would do well to learn from Thorncrown's openness. It has genuine theological value.

Much more could be written about Thorncrown...it's attention to detail, its lasting importance, its wonderful combination of humility and awe. I could maybe even stretch my interpretation to observe the dependent and interlocking nature of the beams as a reflection of the Christian community itself. I'll just say that what I found particularly impressive was its openness, openness to the outside world, and seemingly, whatever may come its way. There is a place for strong, dramatic and safe religious architecture to convey the strength, certainty and finality of the god we worship. But Thorncrown acts as a reminder that there is also a place for delicacy and fragility, feelings the faithful know all-too-well over the course of a religious life.