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Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center, Goshen, N.Y.
From the NYT:
Seven Leading Architects Defend the World’s Most Hated Buildings
As told to ALEXANDRA LANGE, JUNE 5, 2015… Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center in Goshen, N.Y., was already dilapidated when Hurricane Irene dealt it further damage in 2011. Since then, many have argued that, with its more than 80 roofs and scores of boxy windows, the Brutalist government building from 1970 is an eyesore and a financial drain. It is one State Supreme Court ruling away from being partly demolished. Credit Jeff Goldberg/Esto
Zaha Hadid explains:
“The 1960s were a remarkable moment of social reform. The ideas of change, liberation and freedom were critical. … As a center for civic governance, it enacted democracy through spatial integration, not through the separation of elected representatives from their constituents. Many similar projects around the world have also suffered neglect; yet sensitive renovation and new programming reveal a profound lightness and generosity, creating exciting and popular spaces where people can connect. Rudolph’s work is pure, but the beauty is in its austerity. There are no additions to make it polite or cute. It is what it is.”
Generally speaking, any vindication that sputters to a halt with the words “It is what it is” isn’t.
A friend of mine briefly had the misfortune to work for the late Paul Rudolph. He said that the then fashionable architect, the former chairman of the architecture department at Yale and designer of Yale’s Ministry of Love Headquarters Art and Architecture Building Rudolph Hall, had the unpleasant tendency to bring his nocturnal taste for gay sadism to managing his employees during the daytime.
Brutalism wasn’t just his aesthetic style, it was also his favorite recreation and his management philosophy.
Rudolph and Brutalism are out of fashion at the moment. But when they come back into fashion, trust me, you’ll start to hear a lot about how Rudolph’s “transgressive” sexuality inspired his art.
But, until then, mum’s the word because it just might get naive people wondering about the reigning narrative of what the past was really like, when today we all know that cisgender straight white males oppressed everybody else completely, so a victim like Rudolph never had a chance to impose his visions upon the public. Why am I punching down at poor Rudolph for his whipping up these vast buildings?
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OT – Steve, this Disney H1B story screams for you to write a screenplay. Middle aged Americans forced to train their foreign replacements. Think Gung Ho meets Office Space. Mike Judge could direct and I think you know a witty former programmer to help write it.
One of my favourite architectural descriptions: “the site consists of a collection of Victorian town halls, along with the packing cases they were delivered in”.
http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1915-1920/1919_2089.jpgReplies: @dearieme
I
Faster, please!
Bees on crack would probably build something like this instead of regular honeycombs.
Although the true test of an office building is how pleasant of an experience it is to actually work in one, and is a factor that never seems to come in for much consideration in architectural reviews which seem to grade office buildings by the criterion of how well they look as abstract pieces of sculpture plopped down on bare ground, I kinda like the look from afar of the Orange County Government Center with all of its cantilevered boxes and interesting shadows.
There is bad modern architecture and then there is really, really, bad modern architecture like this award winning abomination on the National Historic Register that makes the Orange County building seem like Notre-Dame de Paris in comparison:
...then I noticed the little American flag on the top of the building!
“was already dilapidated when Hurricane Irene dealt it further damage in 2011”
Was a load-bearing window broken?
Tearing down 1960s and 1970s Brutalist buildings is part of our collective healing process. This stuff is part of the original rape culture. It’s a form of abuse.
Yeah, Brutalism was definitely one of the odder fads in Western history.Here’s the Brutalist City Hall that Boston erected in the ’60s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall
Reaction was not favorable:
Frankly, it makes the NorCal patriot in me luxuriate in the Beaux-Arts grandeur that is San Francisco City Hall:
Of course, it was built back when people knew how to build public architecture….
There is no human cover, absolutely none.
By the time I reached that gargantuan, looming monstrosity and scrabbled up the steps (to avoid the imminent bullet to my back), I was willing to confess to anything if only they would let me leave.
Boston City Hall is a soul-crushing behemoth.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Massachusetts_State_House,_Boston,_Massachusetts_-_oblique_frontal_view.JPG
-John Huston in Chinatown
Scollay may have been a dump at the time, but from pictures it looks like the kind of gentrifiable quarter that, left alone, might be the hottest address in Massachusetts today.
Today’s update from Caitlyn’s twitter feed: “TransIsbeautiful”
https://twitter.com/Caitlyn_Jenner/status/607313687259447296?lang=en
So we have an idea of what “gay art” is like from this and Piss Christ, etc… What about “trans art”?
I’m not making a joke… I wonder how gender benders will turn their own psychological issues into visual impositions on the rest of us. It is only a matter of time before some T-artist is elevated to fame just on the strength of its identity.
Or maybe Ts don’t make art…?
Here's some gay art.Replies: @Kyle McKenna
Brutalism seems to be alive and well, but the building materials have changed.
Here is the hideous Seattle Central Library, which the New York Times gushed over at the time of its opening in 2004.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Central_Library
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/arts/architecture-the-library-that-puts-on-fishnets-and-hits-the-disco.html
As bad as it looks on the outside, the real horror begins after you walk through the doors. Incidentally, as a library, it functions miserably.
Whatever else you might have to say, Brutalism is a cool name. Soooo metal…
Federal style is okay too: US Courthouse and City Hall in Los Angeles, California (link).
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/128/342659593_71d4d5ae8d_z.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall
Reaction was not favorable:Frankly, it makes the NorCal patriot in me luxuriate in the Beaux-Arts grandeur that is San Francisco City Hall:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/SFCityHall.png
Of course, it was built back when people knew how to build public architecture....Replies: @Big Bill, @anonitron, @Hubbub, @HHSIII, @Reg Cæsar
One feels so naked, alone, and antlike crossing the barren, windswept plaza around the Boston City Hall. I could feel my steps quickening as I walked, turning my head to-and-fro, scanning the nearby rooftops for snipers.
There is no human cover, absolutely none.
By the time I reached that gargantuan, looming monstrosity and scrabbled up the steps (to avoid the imminent bullet to my back), I was willing to confess to anything if only they would let me leave.
Boston City Hall is a soul-crushing behemoth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall
Reaction was not favorable:Frankly, it makes the NorCal patriot in me luxuriate in the Beaux-Arts grandeur that is San Francisco City Hall:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/SFCityHall.png
Of course, it was built back when people knew how to build public architecture....Replies: @Big Bill, @anonitron, @Hubbub, @HHSIII, @Reg Cæsar
Boston’s awful city hall is gentled, somewhat, by the plenty lovely Massachusetts state house located just a few blocks away.
And that is exactly how tens of thousands of truly lovely homes arrived: on railcars, in packing crates, ordered straight out of the Sears catalog.
Homosexuality is rebellion against nature or logos as are these buildings. If somebody had told me this ten years ago, I would have rolled my eyes, but the older I get, the more this seems to explain.
In a certain sense Jewish identity is also a rebellion against logos (incarnate). How many of the creators and promotors of anti-beauty in any field are gay secular jews?
That US court house is vaguely Hitlerian. This is true Georgian or if you will “Federal”:
Fun fact: The headquarters of the Likud party in Tel Aviv is Brutalist.
I followed your link – it’s a Lego building in close-up. Remember ‘The simple is complex’.
Modern day architecture is in general a abomination and a reflection of the interior ugliness that many people carry around inside of them. Just like those who do modern art, which is another repository of people who are not only dead inside but talentless as well.
Though at the same time I also consider both societal cancers to be direct attempts at degrading Western society by elements in the intelligentsia and the upper class. What better way to demoralize a people than by making the places they work in, do business in or live in so ugly that it amounts to a visual and emotional beat down.
This ugliness cuts across the board from apartment complexes, retirement homes, housing tracts, schools, churches, etc. The new constructions are dehumanizing and a eyesore. They really deserve a appointment with a wrecking ball.
Still what do these monstrosities say about those that buy into the dreary and soul sucking architecture? Because no one seems to say to the architect “it’s clear you have the talent of a 5 year old with building blocks and by the way you’re fired”. I suspect they cannot because just like the architect they lack any sense of beauty, proportion and perhaps a soul.
It’s the same with modern art. Ever see the Guggenheim in Bilbao? The building itself is bug ugly and within it’s walls is housed various piles of junk that some very rich people call art. I can find more talent in the local high school that what the Guggenheim has on display.
The 20th and 21th centuries will no doubt go down in history as a dark age where public art, and architecture died.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall
Reaction was not favorable:Frankly, it makes the NorCal patriot in me luxuriate in the Beaux-Arts grandeur that is San Francisco City Hall:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/SFCityHall.png
Of course, it was built back when people knew how to build public architecture....Replies: @Big Bill, @anonitron, @Hubbub, @HHSIII, @Reg Cæsar
Never give an architect an even break. He will always over-excess.
“Orange County Gov’t Center”
Rubik’s Cube.
From Kingsley Amis’s essay Sod the Public:
Most artists, or people who think of themselves as such, have to get the public to watch or listen before they can sod it. The famous pile of bricks at the Tate Gallery was powerless against those who never went to see it, and while still on the shelf Finnegans Wake is impotent. Architects are different. They have the unique power of sodding the consumer at a distance, not just if he lives or works in the building concerned, or just when he passes it a couple of times a day, but also when he happens to catch sight of it miles away on the skyline.
My first though was… Who cares?..there was lots of this type of stuff in the Soviet Union in the 70 ‘s
…then I noticed the little American flag on the top of the building!
the “ruining class” are quite dysfunctional.
“Paul Rudolph donated his archive,[8] spanning his entire career, to the Library of Congress, as well donating as all intellectual property rights to the American people. “
Thanks, but no thanks.
These buildings may be ugly but if they’re safe and functional, leave them alone.
With clockwork reliability, every 30 years a new generation of architects emerges from the universities and collectively declares that all existing public buildings are “eyesores” that must be torn down and rebuilt. Who benefits from this exactly?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall
Reaction was not favorable:Frankly, it makes the NorCal patriot in me luxuriate in the Beaux-Arts grandeur that is San Francisco City Hall:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/SFCityHall.png
Of course, it was built back when people knew how to build public architecture....Replies: @Big Bill, @anonitron, @Hubbub, @HHSIII, @Reg Cæsar
Buildings, whores and politicians all get respectable in old age.
-John Huston in Chinatown
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall
Reaction was not favorable:Frankly, it makes the NorCal patriot in me luxuriate in the Beaux-Arts grandeur that is San Francisco City Hall:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/SFCityHall.png
Of course, it was built back when people knew how to build public architecture....Replies: @Big Bill, @anonitron, @Hubbub, @HHSIII, @Reg Cæsar
Wasn’t it built right over Scollay Square?
Scollay may have been a dump at the time, but from pictures it looks like the kind of gentrifiable quarter that, left alone, might be the hottest address in Massachusetts today.
How do you top Brutalism?
With Postbrutalism.
are you trolling?
“It is what it is” – as Steve Sailer would say, this is speaking power to truth.
I'm not making a joke... I wonder how gender benders will turn their own psychological issues into visual impositions on the rest of us. It is only a matter of time before some T-artist is elevated to fame just on the strength of its identity.
Or maybe Ts don't make art...?Replies: @Alfa158, @larry lurker
Hard to tell based on the small sample size so far, but Walter Carlos’ electronic music innovations seemed to fade after he became Wendy, and the Wachowsky brothers’ movie successes dropped after one of them became Lana. But again, small sample size, and a lot of people have one big breakthrough creative success early in their lives and turn out to have little more to add after that.
Architecture, like journalism, suffers from the flaw of too many hopefuls practicing their craft. Sadly, like fish, both schools are too busy navigating through yesterday’s s— to see the lake is drying up, the ocean is turning to carbonic acid, and nobody gives a f— about transsexuals.
Here is the hideous Seattle Central Library, which the New York Times gushed over at the time of its opening in 2004.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Central_Library
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/arts/architecture-the-library-that-puts-on-fishnets-and-hits-the-disco.html
As bad as it looks on the outside, the real horror begins after you walk through the doors. Incidentally, as a library, it functions miserably.Replies: @Curle
Surpassed in ugliness only by Paul Allen’s folly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMP_Museum
Par for the course in prominent architects’ office, btw. Not the gay part so much as the sadism. Oversupply of workers and undersupply of demand for their services. Causes pay to be poor and working conditions to be dismal.
Oddly enough, a similar effect of the supply-and-demand phenomenon could be observed in the nation’s labor market, in relation to the flood of immigration. Were it not so impolitic to do so, I mean.
I’m sure the building will be torn down. To be replaced by something even uglier. There’s a lot of money to be made tearing the thing down and building a new one. Just think of the kickbacks and rakeoffs from demolition alone!
Architects are not content to be like Christopher Wren or Brunelesci to honor the past while making the classical styled buildings bigger, more functional, and cheaper and safer to build. Architects are not even capable of building beautiful skyscrapers any more, nothing like the Empire State Building or Chrysler Building. Just tall boxes or sometimes twisted ones or giant pickles and walkie-talkies.
For example, there’s not a single public architect saying, hey people love both St. Paul’s and the US Capitol, lets create a neo-classical building with a big dome but do it cheaper and faster.
In China things are even worse, there buildings put up erase the past for yes, Brutalist designs that are if anything even uglier. Modern Beijing looks like the moderately upscale parts in the move “District 9” meeting “Dredd” (the reboot with Karl Urban not the Stallone version).
And the ugliness of the designs reflect simply the smallness and lack of ambition in the architect. They merely want to be trendy tomorrow, not remembered a hundred years from now. Perhaps they don’t think there will be anything after tomorrow.
Replace the windows with colored glass, and I think you could get something workable.
You are right. At least it is not another large glass and concrete monolith.
With Postbrutalism.Replies: @hodag
Jawa Sandcrawler.
--James Howard KunstlerThen the design is most fitting.
Speaking of extolling brutal artists, many The Daily Mail commenters are rooting for the fugitives targeted by a manhunt that has spread across New York. The sympathy-for-the-Devil crowd halfway convinced me:
http://www.crass.us/2015/06/goal-for-prison-escapees-in/
It’s depressing and exhilarating to realize that I’ve been commenting here long enough to reduce, reuse and recycle. From one of mine in November, 2012:
I'm not making a joke... I wonder how gender benders will turn their own psychological issues into visual impositions on the rest of us. It is only a matter of time before some T-artist is elevated to fame just on the strength of its identity.
Or maybe Ts don't make art...?Replies: @Alfa158, @larry lurker
Andres Serrano isn’t gay.
Here’s some gay art.
“had the unpleasant tendency to bring his nocturnal taste for gay sadism to managing his employees during the daytime.”
Like how? Did he make the grad students wear dog collars? If you make a statement like that you should be specific. Geez.
Unpaid 'internships' abound. Peter Eisenman once went nine weeks without paying his 'paid' staff. Etc etc.
Don McCloskey the economist is another example. After his sex-change operation his work declined, though it became more stylish.
It reminds me of the jail where they imprison monsters in The Cabin the the Woods.
From Wookieepedia:
That sounds like the occupants of this building!
The design of the building makes social justice appear despotic.
–James Howard Kunstler
Then the design is most fitting.
Phillip Johnson was more into gay exhibitionism– his own home in Connecticut was entirely glass.
His public works, such as his AT&T Building in New York and his IDS Tower in Minneapolis are relatively tolerable.
I’ve attended two Eastern Canadian universities, and the new corporate looking buildings are far far nicer, both inside and out, than the older brutalist buildings.
Question: Why did a lot of art seem to go downhill since the beginning of the 20th century?
In the old days, they tried to copy Nature, and made recognizable things. After that, they had to come up with ideas to justify themselves. Most of them weren't very good.
I’ll see your Orange County Government Center and raise you a Lauinger Library at Georgetown University:
You must have meant Gunga Din.
http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1915-1920/1919_2089.jpgReplies: @dearieme
“how tens of thousands of truly lovely homes arrived”: yeah, but the modern architect would throw the houses away and keep the crates”.
In a certain sense Jewish identity is also a rebellion against logos (incarnate). How many of the creators and promotors of anti-beauty in any field are gay secular jews?Replies: @Steve Sailer
Rudolph was the son of a Methodist minister.
I’m sure some Saudis with box cutters could take care of it.
Also, chief box cutter Mohammed Atta was an architecture student.Replies: @athEIst, @Buzz Mohawk
Question: Why did a lot of art seem to go downhill since the beginning of the 20th century?Replies: @SFG
My explanation (not original): photography.
In the old days, they tried to copy Nature, and made recognizable things. After that, they had to come up with ideas to justify themselves. Most of them weren’t very good.
Minoru Yamasaki, who designed (actually, drafted) the World Trade Center, was the Saudis’ favorite Western architect, and had buildings all over that country.
Also, chief box cutter Mohammed Atta was an architecture student.
Actually that explains a lot.
One seldom hears it now, but the WTC towers were considered eyesores by many. They were much taller than originally planned or needed, and they threw the whole Manhattan skyline off balance.
I remember seeing them being built, and how I hated the way they insulted the Empire State Building and the whole island by their presence once they were up.
I think the only reason some people thought they liked them was becasue they were just amazing to behold. "Gee whiz, look how goddammed big those things are...and there are two of them!" That sort of thing. I felt it too.
They were ungraceful, boxy monstrocities with narrow windows. They were also hard to make a good economic case for. One will notice there has been no hurry to build that much volume back into the area. The much less voluminous replacement tower, BTW, is equally disappointing. One senses it was mostly created out of a sense of (justifiable) obligation.Replies: @Jacobite, @Reg Cæsar
“The beauty is in its austerity”. What could be less true? This is a cantilever structure, horizontal bars transmitting the load to vertical columns inside the building. Cantilevers ought to glide sideways like a bridge or float upwards like the branches of a tree, seemingly held up by thin air like the nave of a cathedral. This building must contain twenty cantilevers supporting a weight which could be supported by a single one. Why do the upper floors need to project outwards like the houses on old London Bridge? Why are there upper floors at all on such a spacious site? The word waste does not begin to describe it.
Philip Johnson defined architecture as “the art of wasting space”.
Also, chief box cutter Mohammed Atta was an architecture student.Replies: @athEIst, @Buzz Mohawk
Mohammed Atta was an architecture student.
Actually that explains a lot.
Here's some gay art.Replies: @Kyle McKenna
Thanks. It’s wonderful to see the Sistine Chapel without 3,000 Asian tourists crammed in.
Like how? Did he make the grad students wear dog collars? If you make a statement like that you should be specific. Geez.Replies: @Kyle McKenna
https://www.unz.com/isteve/paul-rudolphs-above-ground-sm-dungeon-defended/#comment-971160
Unpaid ‘internships’ abound. Peter Eisenman once went nine weeks without paying his ‘paid’ staff. Etc etc.
Also, chief box cutter Mohammed Atta was an architecture student.Replies: @athEIst, @Buzz Mohawk
That’s interesting. Somehow I’m not surprised that a creator of brobdingnagian boxes was popular in Saudi.
One seldom hears it now, but the WTC towers were considered eyesores by many. They were much taller than originally planned or needed, and they threw the whole Manhattan skyline off balance.
I remember seeing them being built, and how I hated the way they insulted the Empire State Building and the whole island by their presence once they were up.
I think the only reason some people thought they liked them was becasue they were just amazing to behold. “Gee whiz, look how goddammed big those things are…and there are two of them!” That sort of thing. I felt it too.
They were ungraceful, boxy monstrocities with narrow windows. They were also hard to make a good economic case for. One will notice there has been no hurry to build that much volume back into the area. The much less voluminous replacement tower, BTW, is equally disappointing. One senses it was mostly created out of a sense of (justifiable) obligation.
But I blame the Rockefeller brothers more than the architect. As with his other notorious demolition, Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis. The original plan was half low-rise, half high, i.e., semi-human scale. But the city housing authority changed it to 100% highrise. You can't fix stupid clients. (His other job for the city, the airport terminal, gets a lot of praise.)
One seldom hears it now, but the WTC towers were considered eyesores by many. They were much taller than originally planned or needed, and they threw the whole Manhattan skyline off balance.
I remember seeing them being built, and how I hated the way they insulted the Empire State Building and the whole island by their presence once they were up.
I think the only reason some people thought they liked them was becasue they were just amazing to behold. "Gee whiz, look how goddammed big those things are...and there are two of them!" That sort of thing. I felt it too.
They were ungraceful, boxy monstrocities with narrow windows. They were also hard to make a good economic case for. One will notice there has been no hurry to build that much volume back into the area. The much less voluminous replacement tower, BTW, is equally disappointing. One senses it was mostly created out of a sense of (justifiable) obligation.Replies: @Jacobite, @Reg Cæsar
I disagree. As abstract sculpture it is an interesting shape and looks very good as a bowsprit for the island of Manhattan. Whether it is a good place in which to live or work is another matter entirely. It certainly has magnificent views.
I agree that the old towers were just about as ugly as things can get.
I am willing to consider your point the next time I look at the tower.
And thank you for the concerto video on your “website.” It says a lot for European Man.
One seldom hears it now, but the WTC towers were considered eyesores by many. They were much taller than originally planned or needed, and they threw the whole Manhattan skyline off balance.
I remember seeing them being built, and how I hated the way they insulted the Empire State Building and the whole island by their presence once they were up.
I think the only reason some people thought they liked them was becasue they were just amazing to behold. "Gee whiz, look how goddammed big those things are...and there are two of them!" That sort of thing. I felt it too.
They were ungraceful, boxy monstrocities with narrow windows. They were also hard to make a good economic case for. One will notice there has been no hurry to build that much volume back into the area. The much less voluminous replacement tower, BTW, is equally disappointing. One senses it was mostly created out of a sense of (justifiable) obligation.Replies: @Jacobite, @Reg Cæsar
I worked in New York Harbor for three years; you don’t have to tell me!
But I blame the Rockefeller brothers more than the architect. As with his other notorious demolition, Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis. The original plan was half low-rise, half high, i.e., semi-human scale. But the city housing authority changed it to 100% highrise. You can’t fix stupid clients. (His other job for the city, the airport terminal, gets a lot of praise.)