On Fri, 9 Jan 1998, Dan Becker wrote:

> I want to know why in the pantheon of modern poetry that it can no longer
> rhyme.  Why can it no longer have a pulsating rhythm that seizes you and
> rushes you headlong down its slopes of meaning?  It's like mountain ski
> trails...lots of different paths down the slope.  I like modern poetry,
> it's fresh and I love the multitude of meaning that the reader can bring
> into it, yet it also seems to me that the historical traditions have been
> completely abandoned.

The link here I see with architecture is the still dominant ethos among
architects that "modern", "ahistorical" architecture is a moral
imperative, and that (say) a dentil cornice is as verboten on a modern
building as a rhyme and meter scheme is in a modern poem.  (Venturi and
the "postmodern" movement would allow it, if-and-only-if it's
transparently fake, as an ironic gesture.)

Some years back, many years ago now, a Greek Revival townhouse in
Greenwich Village, NYC, was blown up by someone experimenting with bombs
in the basement.  The lot (in the middle of a row of similar houses) sat
vacant for several years while a screaming argument went on about what
should happen on that property.

As y'all know, some architect whose name escapes me designed a replacement
house for the site, and went broke trying to get it approved and built.
Later on, someone more affluent than him bought the lot and finally did
get to build the house he had designed.

This house (I think it's on 11th Street) is not popular today.  The middle
part of the facade is canted, like a revolving panel pressed partways in.
But it's built of the same color brick as the adjoining houses, and it
continues the cornice and third-story windows that make the block a
unified whole.

What everybody (except architects) forgets now is that the aspects of the
house that made it intensely disreputable in 1970 were the things that
look good about it (to us preservationeers) today.  The literal copying of
a historic cornice from the buildings on either side (the same cornice the
destroyed building had) was a shocking architectural heresy.  Not only
that, but replacing the precise stoop from the vanished historic house was
in violation of all the zoning and building codes -- apparently stoops are
illegal to build in NYC despite being commonplace on historic townhouses.
I think it took an editorial in the New York Times before a variance for
the stoop was approved.

The ethic that denounced the 11th Street house for its historically
accurate features (and reluctantly accepted it only because the canted
facade made it a plainly 20th century building that stood out from the
row) is still powerful in the architectural profession in my experience.
Using the classical vocabulary of architecture is shunned not because of
expense or practicality, but because it is still thought to be immoral.

That same ethic governs the building codes that prohibit stoops in NYC,
that everywhere prohibit all kinds of other features that are absolutely
essential to the fabric of almost any historic urban neighborhood; these
laws guarantee that new neighborhoods will never be like them, and usually
guarantee that replacement buildings in historic neighborhoods will be
intrusive and different.

Another NYC building which is still hated -- and will probably soon be
destroyed -- because it was and is a heresy against modern architecture is
the former art gallery at Columbus Circle.  Buildings are not supposed to
be playful, nor are they allowed to take history seriously.  Contrary to
what you might think from the explosion of postmodern minimalls
everywhere, these rules still hold tremendous power in the architecture
profession.

In Ann Arbor, a lavish three-story downtown commercial building was
proposed just a couple years ago.  For the exterior design, money was no
object.  Since the site adjoins a city historic district, they brought a
model of it to our historic district commission, even though it didn't
require any review from us, and we were very impressed.  The concept was
about as full-blown a Collegiate Gothic confection as has been seen since
Gropius and his fellows arrived in America; it would have been a really
remarkable building.

But apparently Ann Arbor's architectural establishment was not amused: as
I understand it, they sent a committee to quietly but vehemently protest
this utter heresy.  The project's sponsors were cowed, and quickly caved.
All the interesting features were removed from the plan, and a dumbed-
down, very boring, postmodern building resulted.  This on a major site at
the south end of downtown.  One of the architects who was involved in this
"committee" had the grace to be a bit embarrassed by this, saying he would
have preferred something "halfway between" the original plan and the banal
result.  But what was so bad about the original that required a formal
protest?

In East Lansing, at Michigan State University, they have just finished a
new building for the relocated Detroit College of Law.  It has a slight
nod to postmodern, but other than that, it is every bit the dreadful,
sterile building that could have been built on that site in 1970.

I grew up during a time when every interesting old building in the
vicinity was being destroyed or threatened.  In Lansing MI, the north half
of downtown used to be a network of streets lined with three-story
Italianate and Gothic storefront buildings, with ground floor retail and
apartments above.  It was all demolished in the late 1960s, became vacant
land for decades, and eventually developed as a suburban office park, with
surface parking.  West of the Capitol, the neighborhood with the best 19th
century houses became a ponderous complex of state buildings amidst a vast
region of empty blocks left for a future expansion that never happened.
This is what Modern architecture and its peculiar bloodless morality has
done in my world.

                               Larry Kestenbaum