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November 17, 2008
Buildings, old and new
Of all the arguments against progress, only one holds water in my book: Progress is almost always ugly.
Which are prettier, horses or cars? Old steam tractors or sleek modern John Deeres? Grand old barns or new tin sheds?
Electricity is nice, but look at all the poles and wires littering the countryside!
Telephones are handy, but look at all the ugly cell towers cluttering the horizon!
Some of the ugliness of progress can’t be helped, but much ugliness could have been avoided if we hadn’t been so fast to discard the values of our pioneer ancestors.
When the pioneers finally got on their feet in about the year 1900, they started building churches, schools and public buildings such as courthouses.
The pioneers weren’t rich. Yet, they threw extra money into the pot to make their buildings imposing and grand.
Look at the rotundas, windows and staircases in those old courthouses. Look at the tall steeples and huge bells in those churches. Look at the grand auditoriums on some of those schools built in the 1910s!
None of it was necessary, but most all of it was noble.
Even barns, the most lowly of buildings, were built with pride and made not just to be functional, but to be beautiful as well.
Somewhere along the line, we lost the pride of our pioneers in the beauty of our buildings. We became rigidly practical. By about 1950, our new buildings were all function and no fluff.
Nowadays, practical people proudly point out how ridiculous those old buildings with their frivolous flourishes were. What a waste of money!
In our very practical and very ugly age, we build tin sheds, and not just as a substitute for the old wooden barns and granaries. Even some new churches are little more than corrugated metal pole sheds!
Listen, if this sort of stifling practicality had ruled the day throughout our history, we would have no cathedrals, no castles, no palaces, no public buildings as beautiful as the Minnesota State Capitol.
Yes, these noble buildings were a complete waste of money—if you only view them as places to hold meetings.
But if you view buildings as an opportunity to create spaces that lift the human spirit, then it was money well spent.
Major League Baseball provides a good example of practicality and progress leading to ruin.
In the 1970s, teams built a series of new stadiums. Never mind that they looked like UFOs, those stadiums were practical. In addition to baseball games, they could host lesser events such as football games and rock concerts.
Scientific progress enabled the ballparks to get rid of grass––which is difficult to care for and easily damaged––and replace it with Astroturf, which provided perfectly consistent bounces.
To level the playing field, the new parks were perfectly symmetrical. No nooks and crannies. No Green Monster, as in Fenway Park, to turn shallow fly balls into home runs and no Death Valley, as in Yankee Stadium, to turn home runs into routine fly balls.
These new stadiums had the charm of a tin shed. But they were cost effective. And practical!
Not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before fans grew to hate the new ballparks. They stayed away in droves.
Finally, somebody decided that progress hadn’t been such a good thing.
In Baltimore in the late 1980s, they built the first old-fashioned new ballpark. Fans loved it. Cleveland was next. Over a dozen more followed.
Other parks tore up their artificial surfaces and added grass. Some created nooks and crannies to make the field more interesting.
In Minnesota, the Twins will soon move from the Metrodome, a modern marvel with its inflated roof, to an open-air stadium with many unnecessary and expensive decorative touches.
Let’s hope that, following baseball’s lead, we find a way to return some grace and nobility to our buildings on the prairie.
In fact, as I look for hints that we might return to the prosperity and pride the little towns knew before World War I, one sign would stand out:
If somebody out here put up a grand building––a building meant not just to store things, but to impress and uplift; a building built with unbridled optimism and a foolish disregard for budget constraints––then I would know we have recovered some of the dash and panache of our pioneer ancestors.
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