The desecration of St. Paul's

Archival image courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

As a choirboy at Boston's Cathedral Church of St. Paul in the 1970s, I was always vexed and perplexed by the uncarved, uneven stone blocks in the church's crowning pediment as I faced the façade on my way to weekly rehearsals and Sunday morning services. Compromising the Greek Revival grace and refinement of the old stone temple front – which was built of light Quincy granite hauled from the Quincy quarries on America's first railroad and Ionic columns of brown sandstone quarried from Acquia Creek in Stafford County, Virginia – the pediment seemed to hunger for something to fill that gap, to climax the cathedral with a sublime signature that sanctified its patron saint in an artistic and proper Bostonian way.

In fact, the church's original 1819 Greek Revival design by Alexander Parris (of Quincy Market fame) and Solomon Willard (of Bunker Hill Monument fame) had called for a detailed bas-relief of St. Paul preaching before King Agrippa II to be carved into the crowning pediment.

St. Paul Before Agrippa and Bernice by David Martin (1639-1721).

It would have resembled the pediment bas-relief above, on St. Paul's Cathedral in London, had it been executed, and would have likely been modeled on various artistic interpretations of Paul's homily to Agrippa, Bernice and Roman governor Festus on his Christian conversion and the realization of Old Testament prophecies of Jesus Christ's suffering, death and resurrection, as recorded in Acts 26 in the New Testament. This carving would have been just the artistic finishing touch of Bostonian academic erudition this fine work of architecture called for. Alas, a shortage of funds made it not to be.

Photo by Beyond My Ken, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Well, the pediment was finally filled after two centuries. Only this nautilus whimsy backed in shocking blue isn't what I had in mind. True, this sculpture – "A Ship of Pearl" by Donald Lipski – was intended as a universal metaphor for spiritual evolution based on Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem The Chambered Nautilus, promoting the Cathedral as a "House of Prayer for All People" (Isaiah 56:7) rather than an Episcopalian coterie.

St. Paul's Cathedral at night. Photo by Father Tim.

But the neon of the nautilus clashes violently with the historic architecture and cheapens its public effect, especially at night (right), much in the vein of that image of mass communication (and miscommunication) in Simon & Garfunkel's song: "And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made, and the sign flashed out its warning..." And it is a warning about what we're in for when we enter.

Former interior, Cathedral Church of St. Paul. Photo by Daderot.

No, not this. This was the cathedral before its makeover. In proper Episcopalian form, rows of wooden pews faced the half-domed choir chancel (renovated by Ralph Adams Cram in 1912), physically reinforcing the sanctity of its ministers and bishops over its parishioners, and providing the choir and organist with a good acoustical channel to the congregation.

St. Paul's Cathedral before its renovation. Photo courtesy of Pinterest.

And what a coherent composition it made! The mahogany rails of the original pews (though their doors had been removed and their floors raised before I joined the choir) lent a touch of old-time New England, and blended smoothly with the chancel's carved reredos, choir benches and wainscoting that were part of Cram's sensitive remodel.

Look at it now: Original pews ripped out, replaced with freely placed chairs. Floor tackily redone with a zany labyrinth design in line with the funk of the nautilus. Altar relocated to the center. Skylights punched into the old coffers. Original windows replaced with those thermal-paned tack-ons with fake muntins, now half closed off. 

Understandably, the church wanted a more flexible, accessible meetinghouse-styled sanctuary with more democratically arranged seating in circles (for which the labyrinth provides a handy floor plan) that enabled the minister to communicate equally to all parishioners of all races, colors, genders and abilities, and "to better house a full range of ministries," as the renovation's designers, Context Architecture, put it. But this took away the Greek Revival / Classical Revival coherence of Parris's and Cram's historical visions, reducing the interior to a generic parish hall furbelowed with the frippery of historical chintz. 

Photo courtesy of the Organ Historical Society.

Even the magnificent Aeolian-Skinner loft organ that my choir director, Thomas Murray, loved to play – and I still remember the rumbles, swells and echoes of its diapasons in his stellar performance of Eugène Gigout's Grand Choeur Dialogué – was dismantled, put in storage, and listed for sale through the Organ Clearing House, to make way for...

...a handicapped-acessible elevator. Which is also understandable, given the demands of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and many churches' efforts to accommodate people of varying physical capacities. But history was lost in the process, and the church no longer exhibits its historical evolution of fine craftsmanship through the ages.

The chancel, too, broke the molds of history to extend outward into the nave to be closer to the worshippers, bidding farewell to the minister/congregation dichotomy of New England Anglican and Episcopal churches from King's Chapel to Old North to St. Paul's. The checkerboard floor looks as tacked on as the labyrinthine seating plot. 

Photo courtesy of the Organ Historical Society.

Now St. Paul's interior yields a very different effect for me from when I paraded with my fellow choirboys up the central aisle to the choir chancel, and back toward the narthex at the end of the service, while singing "God of Our Fathers" to the organ's brassy fanfare, "Onward, Christian Soldiers," and other majestic hymns every Sunday morning, and hearing the organ's soft bell-chimes solemnly close the service before Mr. Murray's postlude performance of Charles-Marie Widor's Toccata rip-roared away.

At night, St. Paul's Cathedral seems to blend more with the neon shop signs and late-night office lights than with the rest of Boston's historic architecture, on account of the neon nautilus glitz of what filled its pediment – which, indeed, comes across more like advertising than artistic homage to a saint. This is a vulgar desecration of New England's first Greek Revival church, in the name of no-more-kings social progress. I love the causes, but not the context.

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There goes the neighborhood

How dramatically a change of scenery can alter the character of its foreground. Such is the fate of this Georgian Revival building in Watertown, Mass., built in the 1920s as the office of masonry contractor T. Stuart & Son, handily backdropped by lowly stone/brick yards, until...

...they gave way to high-end residential development that totally changes the building's visual context, most notably by giving it the high-end luxury condos and apartments it had happily lived without for a century, keeping the town affordable, until now. There goes the neighborhood!

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Power and pallor in presidential libraries and museums — Part IV

This is a continuation of a series of posts assessing the architecture of U.S. Presidents' libraries and museums. Part I covers those of John Adams to Rutherford Hayes; Part II, William McKinley to Herbert Hoover; Part III, Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy. This is Part IV.

Joyless Johnson
 

Too bad Kennedy's VP and successor didn't get an architectural/archival tribute as creatively cutting-edge as that of his prez. Designed by Gordon Bunshaft and R. Max Brooks of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, even lacks the high-tech innovation of Bunshaft's Lever House in New York (1952).

Photo by Beyond My Ken, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Lever's marked contrast of vertical and horizontal elements (right) does resurface slightly in LBJ's libes (above), albeit haphazardly. Here it tries to be both at once, which cancels out both its latitudinal and longitudinal forces to render it static and nondescript, as if Bunshaft didn't know what to make of Johnson's presidency. And no wonder: Johnson's beneficent Medicare, Medicaid, Great Society and Civil Rights initiatives were badly balanced by his Vietnam War escalation, breaching his promise never to "send our boys to fight Asian wars" and disgracing him into declining a second term. Lever's well-balanced upward and outward thrusts articulate future technological and corporate growth and expansion with lofty optimism, while the library goes nowhere, leaden with the gloom that ended LBJ's irresolute presidency...

Photo by Wally Gobetz, courtesy of Flickr.com

...as well as JFK's joyfully optimistic one, with the assassin's bullet that shot Johnson into power — and how. In On the Rise, Paul Goldberger wrote that the 1971 LBJ Library "suggested a pompous presidency; it may or may not have been so, but the mausoleum-like architecture makes it hard to believe that Mr. Johnson was anything but an emperor."

Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Archives

The awkward placement of the horizontal element on top of the building does suggest an imperial crown — or the swelled head that made LBJ ruthlessly ambitious, rising from Senate Majority Leader to Vice President to President to Vietnam Warrior. This makes the building top- heavy, not lithely levitating like Lever House or the JFK Library. 

More like an airport control tower awaiting Lyndy's landing on Air Force One. The paved plaza certainly has a runway routineness, which is not helped by the bureaucratic impersonality of the University of Texas at Austin's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs running beside it. 

Offsetting the austerity of the campus are colorful perennials, shady trees, lush greenspace, and especially the single-jet fountain, which hauntingly evokes the aura of the John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame at JFK's Arlington National Cemetery gravesite when lit up at night.

Photo by Zereshk, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The library's Great Hall feels imperial indeed — soaring and reaching in all directions, coffered for an echoic effect, carved with a gargantuan presidential seal, and constructed with a ceremonial staircase rising regally toward a window-wall revealing the four-level presidential archive stacks. 

Trying to expand as much as possible within the confines of its concrete shell, the hall conveys Johnson's great power- grab and mountain-climb up the political ladder — as well as his ultimate demise. 

For its barren walls, empty coffers and underutilized space sour with the vapidity of vanity, the all-for-nothing aura of a president's fall from greatness, and his failure to carry Kennedy's vision to full fruition.

Photo courtesy of the LBJ Library and Museum.

Nor are the archives particularly appealing. Resembling cell-block rows instead of library stacks, they contradict the space's openness with a jail's barred enclosure, making one wonder why they are displayed just so. To invite us to learn more about an underappreci- ated man? To suggest a punishment due him for overextension of power?

Photo by Wally Gobetz, courtesy of Flickr.com

LBJ's four-door Lincoln limousine does lend credence to Goldberger's speculation of a pompous presidency (though Johnson didn't order it until after leaving office). It also casts him as a "limousine liberal," a term coined soon after Lyndon left office in 1969 when Democratic New York mayoral candidate Mario Procaccino described his Republican opponent, John Lindsay, as such. (Lindsay won, then switched parties.)

Photo by Found5dollar, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Photo courtesy of the LBJ Library and Museum.

Of course, no presidential museum is complete without a precise, down-to-the-details replica of the Oval Office as it looked when that museum's namesake occupied it – this one complete with his presidential desk, three-TV console enabling him to keep track of CBS, NBC and ABC broadcasts simultaneously, period phones and teletype machines, personal books and mementos, and a portrait of FDR that LBJ looked to for inspiration. At least this space's classical style and presidential-suite luxury are a temporary relief from the white-bread blandness of the building itself.

Photo by Ajay Suresh, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Yes, as we leave the LBJ library and museum, we can't help noticing its plainness on the plain it stands on. Its uniform cream-travertine skin, relieved from total blah by cornices of modillions formed by the coffered ceiling structure, doesn't exactly make us want to go back there, and seems to memorialize Lyndon Johnson as an imperial but nondescript president who was too full of contradictions, missteps, and deviations from his Great Society idealism for us to get a proper historical reading on him – hence the lack of architectural reading we get on his library/museum.

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When worlds collide...and collaborate

This is one of my favorite street-corners in Boston – where mid-rises and high-rises of disparate historical periods, architectural styles, building materials, and namesake functions competing for equal sky-time on the skyline somehow manage to harmonize in a pleasing, coherent cohabitation of complementary contrast.

Here they are, from top left to bottom right:

The Boston Consolidated Gas Company Building, a "twin tower" built in 1927 from a Classical Revival / Renaissance Revival design by Parker, Thomas & Rice (who included J. Harleston Parker, the namesake of the Boston Society for Architecture's Harleston Parker Medal) for the 1903 consolidation of multiple local gas companies, including the city's first and only coal-gas company for 30 years prior, The Boston Gas Light Company, founded in 1823. A big gas conglomerate required a big building, and a visually distinctive one at that: it follows Classicism's base, shaft and capital hierarchy to the letter and is clad in carved and dressed limestone, with a first-floor arcade and arched top-floor windows. And what better place to locate it than on the fringes of one of the company's main beneficiaries, the Back Bay (note that neighborhood's gaslamps). The building was converted to luxury apartments in 2014.

Photo by Thomas Kelley.

The Castle at Park Plaza, formerly the Armory of the First Corps of Cadets, was built of rocky granite from 1891 to 1897 from a Richardsonian Romanesque / Medieval Revival design by William Gibbons Preston as an ammunition storage and drill-hall facility for the First Corps of Cadets of Massachusetts, founded in 1741 and renowned for graduating officers for regiments ranging from the Revolutionary War through World War II. It was structurally engineered to withstand mob violence, owing to the political and civil unrest going on then. After various uses – including UMass Boston's first library, a banquet facility for the Boston Park Plaza Hotel (see below), and a Smith & Wollensky Steakhouse – it is now an event venue known as the Saunders Castle & the Tower. Public spectacle events it has hosted in its vast drill hall include Discovering King Tut's Tomb, Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, The Moonwalkers: A Journey with Tom Hanks, and Immersive Monet & the Impressionists.

The Liberty Mutual Tower, built from 2011 to 2013 from a design by CBT/Childs Bertman Tseckares Inc., may be Boston's major revival of the turn-of-the-century masonry skyscraper style that produced the likes of New York's Flatiron Building and Times Tower (sadly shorn of its Renaissance Revival granite/terracotta façade, and now masked in bland marble and LED advertising) at very narrow street intersections, which molded them into acute triangles. This tower is clad in Indiana limestone mounted on architectural precast concrete, with some granite used on the lower podium to blend with historic Back Bay buildings. The many awards it won (and deserved) include the Boston Preservation Alliance's 2014 Preservation Achievement Award. So if you're sick of those goofy "Liberty, Liberty, Liberty" ads on TV, the Internet or your car radio, have a look at the tower to see how tasteful the company can be when it wants to.

Photo by RhythmicQuietude.

The John Hancock Tower, aka 200 Clarendon Street, is another geometric oddity that fostered a radical transformation of the Boston skyline – for better or for worse – when built from 1968 to 1976 a from a design by the late Harry Cobb of I.M. Pei & Partners. 

Inspired by a skyscraper concept proposed by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe in 1922, the Hancock broke every Boston architecture rule in the book for its minimalist mirror-glass International Style, its twisted parallelogram shape, its accurate reflections of cloud formations, its status as New England's tallest building (a record it still holds), and especially its reputation as the "Plywood Ranch" or "Plywood Palace" because many of its windows popped out due to expansion and contraction of air between each window's inner and outer glass panels, necessitating their boarding-up until all 10,344 panes could be replaced with single-paned, heat-treated panels, which have held firm ever since. 

To make matters worse, the tower swayed in high winds, giving occupants motion sickness. This forced structural engineer Cosentini Associates to install a tuned mass damper near the top to counteract the swaying and to add 1,500 tons of diagonal steel bracing to the building, following the model set by the tower's precursor, the John Hancock Center in Chicago (1969). 

At first reviled by many as a blemish on the Boston skyline, the Hancock Tower is now one of the city's most recognizable and revered icons, easily spotted miles away from multiple directions, and an ever-popular Facebook/Instagram photo-op subject.

Photo by Kenneth Grant.

The Old John Hancock Building, aka The Berkeley Building, is the John Hancock Tower's most immediate ancestor. Built in 1947 from a design by Cram & Ferguson, this Ohio sandstone edifice brought the streamlined Art Deco style of the Empire State Building into Boston, at the same time blessing it with the iconic weather beacon that is still used today as a predictor of the elements:

Steady blue, clear view.

Flashing blue, clouds due.

Steady red, rain ahead.

Flashing red, snow instead.

(It also flashes red when a Red Sox game is rained out.) I had the privilege of singing in its beautiful John Hancock Hall with the Bretton Woods Boy Singers to close our (final) summer concert season with one last hurrah.

10 St. James Avenue, though hard to see in the top photo, is significant for its transitional style, bridging the generation gap among the Miesian modernism of the John Hancock Tower, the masonry revivalism of the Liberty Mutual Tower, and the limestone antiquity of their century-old neighbors. Built in 2000 from an eclectic design by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, this 20-story office building alternates a blend of limestone and buff-colored brick with reflective mirror glass, blending nicely with all neighbors from all eras, and referencing the Berkeley Building's spire with a vertical antenna of its own. Its glass galleria unites it with the Paine Furniture Building next door and provides a covered but sunny passage to Stuart Street, with cafe seating that lets you stop and rest in safety from any kind of weather Berkeley's beacon predicts.

Photo by James Woodward.

The Paine Furniture Building, aka 75 Arlington Street, was built in 1914 in a Classical Revival design by Densmore & LeClear as showrooms, offices and manufacturing facilities for the Paine Furniture Company, which explains its large, light-giving Chicago windows and tall, wide entries and display windows. Structured in steel and faced in limestone with carved brackets, capitals, modillions, festoons and a balustrade, it is notable for its cropped corner entrance, easing its accessibility from both crossroads. I had the privilege of studying interior design when Suffolk University's New England School of Art & Design was housed there, and its large windows and cylindrical load-bearing columns comprised the perfect studio ambiance for such a pursuit.

Photo by Mark N. Belanger.

The Hilton Boston Park Plaza, originally The Hotel Statler Boston, is another triangular cropped-corner power-presence on this corner. Built in 1927 by hotelier Ellsworth M. Statler from a Classical Beaux-Arts design by the New York firm of George B. Post and Sons, it furthered the wave of Roaring '20s New York glitz into Boston, touting it proudly in every festooned arch, crystal chandelier, ceiling medallion, gilded balcony, and white-glove valet throughout its city-within-a-city. Notable guests included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Katharine Hepburn, and Judy Garland.

Photo by Brooks Payne.

Statler Park was a gift to Boston from Ellsworth M. Statler in 1927 in exchange for Mayor James Michael Curley's approval of the hotel's construction at the desired height. Statler later donated The Fountain Figure, the bronze statue atop the park's central fountain, sculpted by Ulysses Ricci around 1912 (below).

The Motor Mart Garage, built concurrently with the Hotel Statler Boston from a Stripped Classical / Art Deco design by Ralph Harrington Doane, it was the world's largest garage upon its opening in 1927, timely with the growing prevalence of the automobile in Park Square, and certainly made to order for the Statler's influx of hotel guests, especially with its innovative double-ramp circulatory system for 2,000 cars. Publicized as "more than a place to park your car," the garage also offered a car wash, an auto body shop, and a pumping station. The angel-winged circular shields along its cornice trumpeted the quality of service offered therein. It received the Harleston Parker Medal as Boston's "finest new building of 1927."

Photo by Kevin Stewart.

This corner of Boston is symbolic of the city's growth from an aggregate of low-rise villages and narrow streets to an upwardly mobile metropolis out to compete with New York for livability and commerce, those ambitions expressed in the diverse styles and materials of their eras, but all sharing the common attribute of being on the up and up in architecture. But so as not to become too cavernous as they soared to new heights, they were careful to reserve space for one of Boston's first pocket parks, for the new wave of office workers and hotel guests to enjoy their lunch. 

Photo by Luis Torres.

This enclave attracts me because I'm a native New Yorker, and when my family relocated to Boston I couldn't help but count its New York-styled buildings as my favorites. Among them were the Old John Hancock Building, the Hotel Statler Boston, the Armory (which brought back memories of New York's Seventh Regiment Armory, where I had witnessed my neighbor Andrew advance in the ranks of his Knickerbocker Greys military club), and perhaps the only example of Midcentury Modern on historic Beacon Hill. This hodgepodge of high-rises and mid-rises, stone and steel, glass and glitz, certainly brings the Big Apple home to the Hub, in a way that is uniquely Bostonian.

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'Private eyes, they're watching you...'

Mayor's Suite/City Council Chamber windows, Boston City Hall (1969, Kallmann-McKinnell-Knowles). Photo: Epicgenius.

Boston City Hall (1969, Kallmann-McKinnell-Knowles). Photo by Daderot.

...and they could indeed see your every move, if someone does happen to be watching you from the privacy of whatever room lurks behind those eyelike twin windows, while you transfix your eyes onto them in awe at their in-your-face stare at your lowly self.

City Council Chamber, Boston City Hall, in 1981. Photo by Bill Lebovich.

That classic Hall & Oates song from 1981 flashed in my mind as I noticed an online image of the two watchful windows of the City Council Chamber (left) in Boston's City Hall, which were clearly designed to enable city councilors to keep vigil on the city they're leading, reassure us that they're watching over us like angels, or remind us that "Big Brother is watching you," in George Orwell's words of warning from 1984. 

Victorian blast furnace, Shropshire, UK. Photo by David Humphreys.

That is but one example of the "two eyes" effect in worldwide architecture, as designers integrated the semblance of faces or ogling eyeballs into their buildings, whether deliberately or accidentally. They were either calculated attention-getters as business pitches for the structures, or simply sources of sunlight that just happened to have facial features. This Victorian blast furnace (right) was probably not meant to be facially comical, but we can't help seeing its elongated windows as eyes, its circular vent as a nose, its arched entry as a mouth, its chimney as a raised arm, and its gabled roof as a peaked hat.

Photo courtesy of Build Green New Homes.

In fact, I was taught to recognize eyes and faces in houses as early as third grade, courtesy of the following poem:

HOUSES

by Aileen Fisher

               Houses are faces

               (haven't you found?)

               with their hats in the air

               and their necks in the ground.

               Windows are noses,

               windows are eyes,

               and doors are the mouths

               of a suitable size.

               And the porch – or the place

               where porches begin –

               is just like a mustache

               shading the chin.

One of greater Boston's most instantly recognizable "faces" is the rounded, oddly detailed front entrance façade of the famous Harvard Lampoon Castle in Cambridge. Built in 1909 from a composite design of Dutch Gable, Flemish Renaissance, Elizabethan, Jacobethan and English Medieval styles by Edmund March Wheelwright (who embellished it with real imported 17th-century Delft tiles, Belgian leaded windows and a genuine Elizabethan mantelpiece), this oddball mashup of sometimes incongruous architectural details bespeaks the humor of its interior publication with a comical face, comprising a crowned bowler hat, porthole eyes with lozenge frames, a cast-iron lantern nose, a lintel-lipped (or mustached) vertical window mouth, a front door like a sideways bowtie, a front-stoop beard, and a cylindrical brick façade suggesting the contours of a ruddy, sunburned or drunkenly flushed human face. 

The façade seems to have the bug-eyed stare of someone shocked or startled in a comedy sketch, in line with the humorous slant of the stomping grounds for such pioneering humorists as Robert Benchley, Christopher Cerf, Fred Gwynne, B.J. Novak, and Conan O'Brien.

Harvard Lampoon Castle (1909, Edmund March Wheelwright), Cambridge, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Google Maps.

"Shocked" castle, Iceland. Photo by Ingvild Sommer.

"Shocked" stone house, Gordes, Provence, France. Photo by Celli07.

Similarly "shocked" and "startled" faces abound the world around. 

On this Icelandic castle (above), half-moon transoms, a mouth-like arched window, and "hands up" crenellations create the castle's "shock value." 

Likewise, on this stone house (left) in Gordes, Provence, France, the leaded vertical window-eyes, the off-center chimney nose, and the agape elongated window-opening mouth create a shocked expression on that façade, with the gable on the lower section adding the comical effect of a "mustache." 

"Shocked" or "glum" stone ruin, Skiathos, Greece.

"Surprised" stone house, Cyprus. Photo by Nikta Nikta.

In this stone ruin in Skiathos, Greece (above), over centuries the elements appear to have carved a shocked or glum expression out of the remains of its arched window "eyebrowed" eyes and its agape Moorish-arched doorway mouth. The dome makes a good bald head.

This stone castle in Cyprus (right) is given a "surprised" expression by its curving plaster "eyebrow" lintels and wide-open squarish grilled "eyes," its arrowslit "nose," and its grilled window "mouth" surrounded by the "lips" of a black frame and a "chin" sill.

The white house in Heidelberg, Germany (below) has a "shocked" or "sad" expression, depending on which of its window pairs you see as "eyes." The shuttered larger casement windows with the agape archway "mouth" have a look of shock, whereas the small oval windows with the arch's "pout" seem sadder.

"Shocked" or "Sad" house, Heidelberg, Germany. Photo by Luftschiffhafen.

Cartoon-face shop, Kyoto, Japan.
Photo by Didier Zylberyng. 

Scary robot-faced diner, Tokyo, Japan.
Photo by Steven L. Johnson.

Of course, some commercial buildings are deliberately built with "faces" calculated to grab your attention and attract your business to the enterprises within, such as these Japanese oddities: at left, a Kyoto clothing shop with bulging eye-windows, a sharp ventilator nose (with nostrils!) and a wide-mouthed entry; at right, a Chikara Meshi Tokyo diner with robotically staring square eyes (complete with eyeballs!), a bridged nose that appears to be an extension of a broken "hat" pediment, a toothed mouth display/message window, and a a sign and entrance in the form of a multicolored beard.

Happy house, Belarus. Photo by Tumar.

Other buildings put on a happy face — with decoration, of course, since it's harder to eke a smile than a shocked, sad or sober visage out of ordinary exterior details. An example is this charmer from Belarus, with square windows and a cosmetic smile, as if it's watching you with the intent of brightening your day as you pass by.

Smiley-face turret, Switzerland. Photo by Djenev.

Here's another smiley, this time in Switzerland: a pop-out turret with all the ingredients of a quick cheerer-upper: wide-open oval lookout windows, arched panels for raised eyebrows, acorn-like reliefs and a meniscus-like line for a smiling mouth, and a polygonal roof for a hat. How optimistic can a building get?

"Big Teeth" house, location unknown. Photo by Hydebrink.

Yes, a few houses can become accidentally happy, such as this one from parts unknown. Here, two curtained square window "eyes" and a Belgian stone-bordered planter "mouth" planted with large shrubbery "teeth" make up a rather jovial welcome home or see-you-soon.

Cuibul de Lemn hotel, Râşnov, Romania, courtesy of Google Earth.

Buildings can be sleepy, too, as the Cuibul de Lemn hotel in Râşnov, Romania, shows. No doubt a promotion of the hotel as a quiet place to get some shut-eye, it makes the most of its "closing eyebrow" windows, "nose" ventilator, and flat closed "mouth" below to visually communicate its message. Furthermore, it is a variation on...

The Eyes of Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania.

...the Eyes of Sibiu (Ochii Sibiului), a Romanian tourist attraction of houses with eyebrow dormers in Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania. Originating from the 15th century as an element of Baroque architecture, the dormers give the impression of the half-shut eyes associated with the upstairs sleeping quarters behind them.

The Eyes of Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania.

According to popular legend, the Eyes of Sibiu were intended to scare the general public into thinking they were being watched from above – like true "private eyes" – though in reality these eyebrow dormers were designed as a ventilation system for attics. And with good reason: who would want to sleep in a stuffy attic or feel faint after poking around up there?

Trödel & Antik antique shop, Friedrich-Wieck-Straße, Dresden, Germany.

Especially if the attic belongs to an antique shop, like Trödel & Antik in Dresden, Germany, which certainly needs its eyebrow dormers to ventilate the fragile inventory stored up there. And these "Eyes of Sibiu" do have a way of staring you right in the face, enticing you inward to browse the collection.

Photo courtesy of Brick & Batten, Atlanta, Georgia.

Hospice de Beaune, France.

Here are a couple of eyefuls: a house showing its "shocked" reaction with arched dormers for "eyes," an arrowslit window "nose" and a wide window "mouth" (above); and L'Hospice de Beaune, France, forming eyes and nose (with nostrils) from pointed dormers and mouth from the window opening below the "nose" (right).

Now, see if you can identify the location (or at least the type of house) the following sets of "eyes" belong to:

Buford-Ward-Riches House (1875), Indianapolis.

These "eyes" are gazing down at you from atop the Buford-Ward-Riches House in Indianapolis, Indiana. Built in 1875 in the French Second Empire style with a Mansard roof, it is known as one of only five such houses left in the city. Those "lookout" eyes certainly came in handy for watching for approaching (or encroaching) visitors, expected or not.

Horner-Terrill House (c.1875), Indianapolis, in 1932.

These "eyes" are among the extant dormers of the Horner-Terrill House, also located in Indianapolis, another of its five remaining French Second Empire homes. Built c.1875, the house is a hybrid of the asymmetrical massing, floor plan, and cornice brackets of the Italian Villa style and the French Second Empire Mansard roofs and landmark corner tower with corner porch. The tower, supplying a few other sets of lookout "eyes" (in fact, there are "eyes" all around the house – so watch out), was once crowned by a Mansard roof with ornate metal cresting, from which approachers and intruders could certainly be watched from above and afar.

Horner-Terrill House (c.1875), Indianapolis, in May 2013.

Sadly, the Horner-Terrill House is in disrepair, a victim of deferred maintenance and two aborted attempts at restoration. This isn't even the most recent image of it; it was taken 13 years ago, and recent reports indicate that the house is still standing, but it continues to deteriorate, and its rear wing has partially collapsed. Hopefully it can be restored soon, "eyes" and all.

6-8 W. 95th St. (1894, H.E.P. Hartwell), New York City.

These porthole "eyes" with astonished brows mark the twin entrances of 6-8 W. 95th St. in Manhattan, one "eye" per entry. Built in 1894 from a design by Horace Edgar Poe Hartwell for his real estate speculator brother Luther Francis Hartwell, these mirror-image townhouses blend Renaissance Revival and Spanish Baroque styles, enriched with foliate carvings around their oculi and on the railings of their stoops, making these "eyes" irresistible to stare at. (The interiors were just as irresistible, promoted in 1893 as "Artistic Boston Houses" with "marble walls, mosaic floors, fine cabinet work, Louis XVI parlors, old English foyer halls, First Empire dining rooms, nothing like them in the market.") And look: each house has its own "private eyes" at attic level, so if you pay a visit here, you can be sure that, in the words of another classic '80s number, "Somebody's watching me."

Log house, Arkhangelsk, Russia. Photo by Sergey Yakovlev.

Portholes make good door windows, too, providing a broader range of vision of who's on the other side than "magic eye" peepholes – especially with one porthole per eye! These "eyes" are on a double entry to a log house in Arkhangelsk, Russia, a splendid example of Nordic log construction that makes sure you can watch who's coming.

Carpenter Gothic house with window nose and eyes, door mouth, porch mustache.

This is but a sampling of the thousands of houses and buildings with "eyes" and "faces" that can be seen all over the world. And I'm sure you can spot some in your neighborhood, on your travels, or even in your home, if you eye – make that 'ogle' – your surroundings more prudently. 

But remember – somebody may be watching you!

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