Empire State
Comments: 6
The 80s brought the fulfillment of Kenneth Galbraith’s morose aphorism about America’s recoil from the memory or New Deal policies.
The traditional role of public architecture in a democracy — to remind the citizen that he or she is the reason for the state, and not vice versa — was cut from the cultural script. America seemed to have no great public buildings or works projects to show for the 80s. Where were the kind of structures that had stirred its heart and bolstered its civic confidence from the 1880s to the 1930s — the symbols of promethean America, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Golden Gate, the Empire State Building or, for that matter, Huey Long’s Louisiana State House? Nowhere — only a succession of ticky-tacky post-modernist confections by Philip Johnson and his favored younger architects, the pediment-quoting Ralph Laurens of their profession: formica-thin memorials to the vanity of this or that corporate raider, gilded Trumpery, visual propaganda for the empire of Donald Duck. Cultural tourists came to New York to gaze on its past monuments, as they once came to Rome; but in the present, they saw only discos, galleries, trends, the brightly roiled surface of fashion.
— Robert Hughes
The Culture of Complaint
Posting this from the Reading Room of the Library Hotel on 41st and Madison. I’m not staying here (alas! — it’s wonderful) but a colleague is*. She deposited me in the Reading Room before we bid each other farewell because … there’s wi-fi and I can have another cup of coffee before heading up to the park and the museums along its eastern edge (Guggenheim, here I come!).
This being the Library Hotel, there are books everywhere, and I glanced across at the nearest shelf to find a copy of Hughes’s book, which I read years ago and which is just terrific. I knew he’d have something constructive (or wittily deconstructive) to say about things, and, typically, he does not disappoint.
* We each travelled halfway around the world and then ran into each other walking down Mercer St. in Soho!
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Posted to Architecture • 2005.05.18 (Wed) • 22:03
Comments
Posted by Carl 2005.05.18, 22:56
Hey Jeremy,
I hope you’re enjoying your trip to the States. I stumbled across your blog from Google while looking for blogging tools and it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve read in a while. I’ve always wanted to live and work abroad and travel alot, I’m studying abroad (in France) next year, and so reading other people’s experiences of life abroad is always great. It certainly helps me escape the monotony of life here in the UK and the stress of my upcoming exams.
Anyway, have a safe trip and I look forward to reading more of your blog.
Posted by Dan 2005.05.18, 23:04
Heh, I’m the same as Carl above. Really enjoy your take on Japan. Have to say that the photo of the Empire State building is very impressive. To me, it doesn’t look like a photo but a piece of 1920’s/30’s art. I don’t know why, it just does!
Posted by jh 2005.05.18, 23:38
Thanks for the kind words! Always happy to provide a brief and meaningless caesura to the day’s more mundane concerns.
I can’t tell you how much I love this city.
And that building is a piece of 1930s art!
Posted by Dan 2005.05.19, 03:40
Heh, you know what I mean - the lines created by the builings in the foreground, and the lighting on the skyscraper all conspire to create the illusion.
Posted by Adam Rice 2005.05.19, 05:38
Ah, the Guggenheim. On my first visit to NYC, I walked all the way from Delancey up there, along Central Park. When I finally reached it, I had one of those electrifying moments.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens 2005.05.19, 07:44
I’m a great fan of Robert Hughes going back to his “Shock of the New” from which I learned you can tell who’s important in society by who’s building the great buildings. Kings, church, government…in the 1980s wasn’t it yuppies?
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