Tarot Card of the Day for September 5, AT5

King of Wands, Rev.

Oi, I should have seen this coming.

Wands represent Air; vitality, communication, intellect.
Kings represent mastery.

In traditional divination, wands represent physical and mental health. I think that's the message of this card. I haven't used the neti pot the last few nights and haven't been drinking enough water or getting enough sleep. In relation to yesterday's Eight of Pentacles, this reversed King of Wands is telling me there's an imbalance.

Mayfair Condos on the Rise

The Roberts Tower will start rising out of the ground soon. I'm a tad excited. We're finally getting a major building downtown that a] was not designed by HOK*, and b] exhibits some depth of thought in its design. It will be a good backdrop for Old Post Office Square, and add a bold architectural statement to the neighborhood. It will also take some attention away from the Garage Mahal and the hopelessly bland Renaissance Hotel garage. I'm hoping that it has the effect the Equitable and Boatmen's Bank buildings have on the Old Court House. By quietly receding from the historic structures around it, it will help to enhance them.

Time will tell. It will also tell what's really on the other side of this rendering. I know it's a blank wall, but is it a visible blank wall?

*Nothing against HOK; they've done some great work. Unfortunately, none of it is in downtown St. Louis.

Tarot Card of the Day for September 4, AT5

Eight of Pentacles

Yay! more pentacles! What the frak is this?

Pentacles represent Earth, blah blah blah...
Eights represent labor, work in progress, skill.

.

Let's hope it's talking about skill, but I suspect it's taunting my work ethic of late.

The Future Is Behind Us

Last night, I had to drag myself to the first AIA continuing education seminar of the season. This is usually an exercise in irrelevance, since the AIA's target audience is architects in professional practice and I'm an architect in civil service. I've sat thru endless seminars on BIM and marketing for the sake of 2 points toward my licensing requirements.

Last night, tho, was fascinating. David Zach, futurist regaled us with an entertaining and educational speech on the nature of progress and the importance of tradition. It was refreshing to hear somebody talk about the importance of holding on to tradition in a roomful of architects. I'm not pleased with the direction of modern architecture and its obsession to violate any and every ideal of form and function. I'd even go as far as to say that I'm disgusted with a lot of the crap [one example] people are building these days.

Maybe you can guess where this is going...

Yes, I happen to have a pet peeve. I call it mindless preservation. Tradition is one thing; freezing everything in the past is another. Are the meticulously-restored ruins of the Parthenon really more important than the building it used to be? Let's face it, ruins are ugly and convey precious little of the importance of the building that used to be there. In the same vein, American preservationists expect additions to historic buildings to be clearly distinct. I could understand this if the building itself was pivotal in history, but the bank on Main Street probably wasn't, unless it happens to be the work of Louis Sullivan. An extension of the original design is not going to confuse history geeks. Then we have art museums... They used to display plaster casts and mock-ups of architectural styles, especially of the classical orders; you could visit a museum and actually learn about ancient art and architecture in its intended form. Now at the local art museum, we get fragments; pieces of sculptures, funeral goods in separate cases, the door of a citadel, all removed from their context. All you can appreciate is craftsmanship. I'd rather experience an intact Antinous as Bacchus, and know what it was like to walk thru that door now hanging lamely on the wall, without having to travel all over the world.

An extension of mindless preservation is the modernists' attitude that it's not acceptable to design buildings in the classical idiom. The History of Architecture professor at the University of Kansas would never waste any opportunity to condemn the revivalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and then, in the very next breath, wax poetic about the renaissance. Hmmm... what's the frakking difference? Granted, the later revivals were often no more than shallow fads, but a great deal of revival architecture has its own merit--the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts comes to mind--and you just can't deny the charm of a small-town main street. I had a text book in my high school drafting that actually compared modern design to Victorian stereotypes. The rendering of the modern building was sleek and professional; the rendering of the Victorian building was a shoddy freehand sketch of a western false front. Propaganda at its basest, in a classroom where the teacher told us the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis was ugly and should be torn down. Buildings are products of their time and place, and should be judged accordingly.

I'm not saying that there should be a literal revival of classical architecture, but that we shouldn't throw away the lessons of Vitruvius just because they're old. A building isn't a great work of architecture just because an architect figured out a new way to twist steel or the engineer figured out how to extend a cantilever even farther. The Sidney Opera House is great architecture because it evokes the spirit of its site; the Bilbao museum is a novelty that has now been repeated ad nauseam. Fallingwater is great because it respects its site; the Sears Tower is just a skyscraper on steroids. The classical laws of proportion can be applied to contemporary design. We can respect our past and still look toward the future.

You might want to sit down for the sermon...

We'd be better as individuals and as a society if we would cherish our origins instead of stamping them into the dust in an effort to prove our individuality. Ultimately, any innovation will cease to be novel, and what is left if we eradicate the source of the innovation?

A comparison of the ancient Roman Pantheon, built by Hadrian, to the University of Virginia Rotunda, designed by Thomas Jefferson. Both of which academics consider great works of architecture. The Pantheon draws it fame from its structural system and awe-inspiring interior space; architectural historians praise the Rotunda for its harmonious exterior [follow the link for cool interior panoramas]. So... are revivals good or bad?

Tarot Card of the Day for September 3, AT5

Nine of Pentacles

Pentacles represent Earth; abundance, stability, faith.
Nine represents completion.

In traditional divination, this card represents safety, prudence, and enjoying the fruits of one's labor. It depicts a woman of calm disposition in a lush garden, signifying a sense of satisfaction and groundedness. She has attained the gifts of Earth.

I think its significance today is about Cernunnos. I had an especially nice meditation with him last night, and have had a lingering sense of his presence despite a bad mood brought on by that negative manifestation of Earth, customer service.

I'm just happy it's not upside down.

Baddite Proverb of the Day

Whoever put 'fun' in 'da mental' had a sick sense of humor.

Intranssient Transit

So, Metro is once again struggling with budget problems and proposing drastic route changes.

This is disgusting.

No successful urban area can remain that way without good, reliable transit [we won't go there with metro in this particular post]. Without an effective, area-wide transit system, the region's economy is going to suffer. People who can't afford cars will not be able to work; people who can afford them but don't like them will be forced to deal with traffic or leave the area.

The more we become dependent on cars, the more sprawl we're going to see as people move farther and farther away from congested roads, thinking the congestion won't follow them. Traffic is like the cold virus. You might be able to escape it for a while, but eventually, it will follow you.

General Motors destroyed our street car systems for a reason. The less public transit, the more people need their cars. The more people who have cars, the more GM can convince the government to build more and wider roads, encouraging more people to use cars.

Traffic congestion is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more roads you build, the easier it is to use cars, so the more cars get used. This is documented urban design fact that the oil and automotive industries have lobbied our government to ignore to our impending doom. We've already seen the effects of our over-extended infrastructure in the Minneapolis bridge collapse and failing levees in New Orleans and thru-out the Mississippi/Missouri watershed. It's time re-evaluate our priorities and plan sustainably. That means heavy investment in public transportation, and increasing Metro service rather than cutting it.

New West Cahokia

The attacks against 'Twain' continue. Richard Serra's monumentally-scaled tour-de-force is under attack yet again, but these vandals have the city's blessing. Gateway Foundation and Shaw's Garden are building 'City Garden' in the two blocks east of 'Twain', using forms and materials that completely contradict the straightforward simplicity of the Serra sculpture.

The earlier renderings I saw of City Garden showed an open, visually accessible landscape that extended into the 'Twain' block, integrating the sculpture into the section of the mall isolated by the Gateway One disaster. But what's going up is entirely different. Massive concrete walls clad in rustic random ashlar limestone and mounds.

Yes, Virginia, there are mounds in Mound City.

The result is that the view of the sculpture is completely blocked from the north side of the mall, and hemmed in by a mound on the south side. The horizontal emphasis of the sculpture comes to an abrupt end scarcely a hundred feet from its easternmost point. Instead of being an environmental sculpture, it is now a display piece; just as the Wainwright building has been framed-in with bland modern neighbors, 'Twain' is now framed in with dirt. The arrow pointing boldly down the mall now points meekly at a bank of earth. [For the record, the State's additions to the Wainwright are one of the city's great modern works; it's what surrounds it that ruins its context.]

Precious few people understand the subtle beauty of 'Twain'. I'd venture a guess that most of its detractors never truly experienced it. 'Twain' is about its context. To appreciate it, you have to walk around and thru it, observing the city and experiencing the way it frames your surroundings. Go inside, and the clutter and noise of traffic are cut from your perception, leaving the city around you as the sculpture. This is public art at its most humble, and it deserves better respect than it gets.

I don't know if Shaw's Garden [yes, I still call it Shaw's Garden, MoBot is too impersonal] had any impact on City Garden's design, but it's shaping up as yet another wasted opportunity in the history of St. Louis public space development, unworthy of the Garden's immense contributions to our city and to the world of botany. In stark contrast to the head-noddingly boring federal courthouse square [the English word for plaza], it appears overly elaborate. Its massive walls and berms already block views from the street, divorcing it from its urban context.

For urban spaces to work effectively, they must be welcoming, and they must have active adjacent uses to feed them. Neither the federal square or this New West Cahokia achieve these. I'll admit I may be premature on my assessment of City Garden, but indicators are not favorable. Old Post Office Square should prove successful for these same reasons, and should enliven their surroundings. I expect retail space around it to become prime property, and that it will fulfill its aim of emulating New York's Bryant Park. City Garden and Federal Square lack any active adjacent uses. One obstructs views and the other is a parched lawn with furniture that looks painful to sit on, even more so to look at. Workers who park south of downtown have not one single retail opportunity until they reach Olive Street; a wasted opportunity to have a vibrant urban neighborhood.

The Gateway Mall has been doomed from the start, when Corbusian urban design eradicated its relevance with its inward-looking corporate neighbors. It has been nothing but a somewhat-pretty lawn for corporate aristocrats who have since sold their holdings out of town. What it needs is retail space--real storefronts, and adjacent residences. 1010 Market by Harry Weese is a good building, perhaps even a great one. I.M. Pei's General American Building is a pretty street-killer. The rest of the private buildings facing City Garden are mediocre, and calling them street-killers is being generous, especially in the case of 'Gateway One on the Mall'. The city must require retail storefronts on all new downtown buildings, and should offer some serious incentives for the conversion of existing ground floors to retail. This is the only way the Gateway Mall and City Garden will have a chance of becoming relevant urban spaces.

Otherwise, we should just give it up and turn it into the Gateway Shopping Mall.

Now THAT'S Divine Retribution

On the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Gustav threatened a repeat performance on New Orleans. The GOP, assembling in St. Paul decided to take it seriously, and they deserve our respect for doing that, even tho it was mostly political posturing [I mean, seriously, was it necessary to shut down everything but mandatory business?].

Bush missed his grand swan song, and you have to know that McCain breathed a big sigh of relief at that, but I have to wonder...

Dubya's cronies were quick to call Katrina divine retribution for the sins of New Orleans. Dubya himself never did anything to counter that argument, and never showed any remorse for not ending his vacation as the storm barrelled down on the gulf coast. Gustav puffed up and got ready to blow down their convention, then ultimately petered out.

I like to think there's a voudoun Queen somewhere in New Orleans who evoked this particular spirit and shunted him aside before he could do any real damage, and she's sitting on a balcony today on Bourbon Street, sipping a hurricane and smiling knowingly at coverage of Dubya's video greeting card to the convention last night.

That, or the woman from the Parkay commercial is standing on the banks of the delta laughing her ass off.

Karma's a bitch, isn't it, Dubya?