Traveling again, but I must pause for a moment of admiration and awe at what passes, by almost universal assent, as one of the architectural wonders of our great nation: Trinity Episcopal Church at Copley Square in Boston. I must have seen it before--perhaps as long as 70 years ago--but I never gave it sustained attention until yesterday. I say "almost universal" rather than merely "universal," based on one indisputable item of evidence: myself. For my money, this is one of the most gobsmackingly ugly heaps of misbegotten rubble I've ever laid eyes on outside of a combat zone. It looks like the woman's prison in a knockoff sequel to the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It looks like a dope dream generated by Mad Ludwig of Bavaria in consort with Isabella Stewart Gardner on a poisonous February morning. It looks like--but perhaps you get the drift. I'm not a fan, except in the sense of something so jaw-droppingly misbegotten has to be a source of high entertainment.
I read that the building dates from the 1870s. I gather it is the third building occupied by this religious community and you'd have to say it was con-veen-ient that the second one burned down just as plans for the third were getting under way (nah, I kid, I kid--I do not suspect the rector of insurance arson). The whole project does seem--I'm getting serious now--to have been conceived by someone who wanted to show the Europeans that he could go them one better, but who really didn't have a clue as to what European church architecture was about. The outside is an improvisation mélange of garrets and gables. The inside is dank as a tomb, but the real problem is that apse: he's fashioned some kind of a half-dome up there, except that in its very halfness, it doesn't do any of the work that a proper dome would have to do. The consequence is that he has had to impair the face of his own work with massive crosspieces that he seems to have retrieved from the underpinnings of a giant sleigh. There are plenty of stained-glass windows but so heavy in competition with their stained-glass medievalism that they do almost nothing to overcome the pervasive gloom.
I suppose one could be diverted by the obvious pride the proprietors take in their heritage and their mission of preservation. And the truth is, you've got to admire it. There are some national wonders you just have to accept on their own terms, like the world's deepest hand-dug well; or the Friends of Hopalong Cassidy Birthday Celebration. Trinity Church occupies a proud and central place in that company and as the tour guides surely say, should not be missed.
Here's another topic on which I am perhaps just playing catchup: projections of power in architecture.
For starters, I suppose that just about every durable structure can be read as a projection of power:d the Great Pyramid, the Parthenon, the Hagia Sophia, whatever. But move closer to home: for thre moment, I'm particularly interested in the late-19th Century bank building. You recall: it was down at the corner of Fourth and Main. It may have been Greek revival, perhaps faux Renaissance. In any event, its point was: we are stable and durable, we will be here when you need us. Correspondingly, I think one of the inflexion points in modern finance came to pass at that point--say, the early 80s--when it sank in on bankers that you didn't need a building for a bank. If you were a money center potentate, sloshing around in surplus capital, you could just ship it all out to some guy with a swivel chair and a computer in an office in a strip mall between the Karate Dojo and the manicurist. Presto, a bank.
Item two: the opera house. Seems to me the standard opera house in Central Europe or Northern Italy is an outcrop of the Austrian Empire, saying "we're here and we're staying--deal with it." Perhaps this explains why every jerkwater pioneer town beyond the 100th Meridian in the 19th Century had to fling up an opera house, as if to say, "don't be misled, we are real." I can only begin to imagine what we will do with that tradition as face-to-face opera gives way to multiplex HD.
Item three: railroads. Up in Tacoma a couple of weeks ago, I marveled at the splendid old rail terminal, now a courthouse, and wondered to myself--what kind of optimism, not to say cash, led to the construction of so grand a facility in what is, after all, something of a tank town?
I thought of these "projections of power" again this morning when I read the splendid Business Week piece on the implosion of the postal service. Here in Palookaville, we've a newish post office in drab Steelcase modern. We also still keep the old one--a dignified pile on the south side of the town square. The new one always seems to be packed with customers, the old one, not so. What would it be like if we just abolished the old one and farmed out the residual traffic to, say, the convenience store just a couple of blocks up the street? We'd have more convenient parking, for one thing.
I know that each of these examples poses issues of its own. Post offices, for example--I know that no community, no matter how small and forlorn, wants to let go of its local postal service (in this, it is just like passenger rail, although I guess the rail battle had been pretty much fought and lost). Post-office building must also have a lot do with political patronage--the local politician getting goodies for the boys and projecting his own power via a heap of building material with his name on it.
I really don't know where to go with this except to roll my eyes and say declare that "my, it's a changed world." I guess it is obvious that our lives today are more abstract, more in our head. But do we know how to live in a world without stable points of reference--banks, opera houses, railroad stations, post offices, that have done so much, for good or ill, to define who we are?
I read that the building dates from the 1870s. I gather it is the third building occupied by this religious community and you'd have to say it was con-veen-ient that the second one burned down just as plans for the third were getting under way (nah, I kid, I kid--I do not suspect the rector of insurance arson). The whole project does seem--I'm getting serious now--to have been conceived by someone who wanted to show the Europeans that he could go them one better, but who really didn't have a clue as to what European church architecture was about. The outside is an improvisation mélange of garrets and gables. The inside is dank as a tomb, but the real problem is that apse: he's fashioned some kind of a half-dome up there, except that in its very halfness, it doesn't do any of the work that a proper dome would have to do. The consequence is that he has had to impair the face of his own work with massive crosspieces that he seems to have retrieved from the underpinnings of a giant sleigh. There are plenty of stained-glass windows but so heavy in competition with their stained-glass medievalism that they do almost nothing to overcome the pervasive gloom.
