What happened to being grand? That’s the question my wife asked the other day, referencing a friend who employed the question as a mantra in his career-long quest to make public spaces beautiful.
I am asking the question today as I bemoan modern architecture’s decline into ticky-tack, easy-to-assemble buildings proliferating at the expense of soul-soothing and inspiringly-beautiful design.
I grew up in Wyoming and Colorado, where the natural majesty of the Rocky Mountains and the endless wind-scoured Wyoming prairie eclipsed anything created by human hands.
I lived hundreds of miles from any great American city, but I was captivated by iconic 1930s photographs of New York City’s skyline with the Chrysler and Empire State buildings rising in Deco elegance up to the clouds.
San Francisco was the first big city I visited and I remember staring mesmerized at the Golden Gate Bridge, an engineering master-work spanning a mile-wide ocean strait with its clay-red towers tall as skyscrapers.
It’s amazing to think that three of the great American architectural marvels — Empire State Building, Golden Gate Bridge, and Hoover Dam — were completed within a few years of one another during the 1930s. They were built with muscle, rope and steam engines and they are truly grand.
Today, plywood and durable composite materials have replaced the iron girders and concrete that are the skeletons and skins of the great American architectural icons.
Development spanning almost 15 years turned Revere Beach parking lots, fast-food joints, and barrooms into multi-story apartment buildings. These oceanside newcomers share the same architectural style — a sort of Lego Modernism combining panels painted different colors and structural material textured to give the buildings an admittedly-vibrant but impermanent appearance.
The new buildings lining Ocean Avenue look like they were designed by architects who sat around a conference table and said, “Well, if we add a little here and change it up a little there, then it will look pretty good.”
A marked exception to the modern ticky-tack trend is Procopio’s Caldwell building on Oxford Street in Lynn. Although the new high-rise exhibits a multi-textured design, it also includes a grand foyer entrance and bold skyline details that puts the building in a class above the Revere Beach construction.
Price point and marketability dictate how developments get built — I understand that concept. But the ugly new edifices visually polluting Revere Beach lack any of the architectural vision and ambition that 19th-century and 20th-century designers invested in Lynn’s great architectural gems like the North Common Street library; the Willow Street post office, and the Art Deco twins: City Hall and the phone building.
There’s nothing grand about what got built on Revere Beach, just like there’s nothing Boston about the buildings defining the city’s Seaport District. The Seaport high-rises are handsome, even dramatic, in their design. But they could just as easily be located in Des Moines or Duluth.
There is no evidence Revere Beach’s new builders drew inspiration from the arcing beauty of one of America’s historic beaches or from the ocean stretching beyond it.
The big pink St. George condominium building is easy to brand as an ugly monstrosity with Miami beachfront pretensions. But give St. George’s architects credit for making an effort to design a building with an oceanfront feel mirrored to varying degrees by the other late 20th-century brick and concrete buildings lining the Eliot Circle end of Revere Beach.
Architecture — the constructed appearance of that which is human — buoys or deflates our spirits and inspires or stagnates our imagination. Manhattan — that great magnet drawing people from all over the planet — perfectly defines architecture’s power.
Lego Modernism — for want of a less-charitable moniker — aspires to contemporary and practical design. But it isn’t grand, and grand is what inspires people to be great.
Thor Jourgensen can be reached at [email protected].
