May 2023 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Behold, the new Richard Gilder Center for Science — an addition to New York’s American Museum of Natural History, designed by Jeanne Gang, the most-published architect on The Eyesore of the Month!

Here’s what you get when you ask computer aided design (CAD) to give you a “bat cave.” CAD is universal now in the architecture biz. This technology has aggravated the feedback loop between the human tendency to seek novelty and the bizarre-ness of every new building produced in our culture. Even before CAD arrived on the scene, novelty-seeking drove post-World War Two building design. That itself derived from the accelerated sense of “progress” induced by our turbo-charged cheap oil economy, which brought on dizzying technological innovation, another feedback loop. The net result was the buildings that represented human endeavor — especially, public buildings, museums, courthouses, libraries — had to look like nothing ever seen before. This programming also served to demolish people’s sense of history, of which the thinking classes were increasingly ashamed, especially after the fiasco of two world wars and Auschwitz.

What was wrong with this grand cavalcade of novelty-seeking, you might ask? It was creative… innovative… diverse! Well, yes. But it also tended to ignore the archetypal symbolic language that buildings need to project in order to inform people what each building means and what its role is in human endeavor. You could no longer distinguish a school from an insecticide factory. It also obliterated the anthropomorphic element in architecture that fitted buildings into a design ethos that reflected human form, in particular the “tripartite” configuration of top, middle, base (head, trunk, feet) which is the basis of many so-called classicisms.

Yet another consequence of perpetual novelty-seeking for the sake of “progress” is that buildings no longer relate to the other buildings around them. Each is a one-off, and so there is no continuity or unity in the urban pattern. The result is an unfortunate urban cacophony which only ends up expressing the disordered condition of our society.

Now you know.

Thanks to Bryan Kaufman for the nomination