Roman on the reservoir, Georgian on the green

The Walter J. Sullivan Water Purification Facility is the finest example of 21st-century Romanesque Revival architecture I've ever seen. Historical details and millennial water engineering work in concert to form a cutting-edge water purification plant in the cloak of Cantabrigian custom.

While on a winter walk around Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Mass., I was awestruck by so many aspects of this edifying edifice at once: its long reach across 155,632 square feet (about 3.6 acres); the attention to detail the architects, Barry Giorgi and Camp, Dresser & McKee (now CDM Smith), put into its Romanesque arches, window banks, and landmark lookout tower, in ways reminiscent of H.H. Richardson and early Frank Lloyd Wright; its historically compatible choice of building materials; and its monumental majesty on the reservoir as a tribute to the city's age-old tradition of keeping Fresh Pond fresh. 

Keith N. Morgan of the Society of Architectural Historians put it best: "Ten years in planning, this facility reconceptualized waterworks as community center. Camp, Dresser and McKee—a global corporation begun in 1947 as a partnership of MIT sanitation engineers Thomas Camp, Herman Dresser, and Jack McKee—undertook the project from design through construction. Site studies led to demolition and replacement of the former facilities, a Neo-Georgian 1915 structure by George A. Johnson and a 1922 pump house. Recognizing Fresh Pond as a recreational asset, architect Barry Giorgi's design welcomes the public with Romanesque Revival styling and multiple materials (cast stone, granite, brick, and slate). It displays the awesome water process systems through large arched windows."

The 1915 Neo-Georgian structure by George A. Johnson that
the Walter J. Sullivan Water Purification Facility replaced. 

A facility of this archi-technological caliber made me optimistic that the new millennium would revive the historical styles we had spurned over a half-century, until Post-Modernism signaled a new nostalgia for them, coming full circle with a fuller revival of them to revive the classic civic pride with which we had once bestowed our buildings, while casting the classics in the contemporary context of 21st-century technological advancement.

A parallel structure enunciating comparable optimism was Robert A.M. Stern's Spangler Center at Harvard Business School, built the same year (2001) in a Georgian Revival that similarly spread its walls and wings far across campus to encompass 29 project rooms, a 350-seat auditorium, IT support services, and much more in old-school brick, arches, keystones, quoins, cornices, columns and porticoes.

Upon its completion, Witold Rybczynski wrote in Architect Magazine that Spangler Center "resembles a large country house," while Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell deemed it "the best piece of traditional architecture to be built in Greater Boston since the early decades of the twentieth century."

These edifices marked another revival for the first time in a century, being some of the most ambitious paragons of the extension of rich historical architecture for blocks and blocks since the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

This West Side castle hybrid of Gothic, Romanesque and Neoclassical comprises 21 interconnected buildings housing 45 halls exhibiting 32 million specimens of plants, animals, fungi, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts over an urban extension of four street blocks and one avenue block, while being surrounded by its own parkland (Theodore Roosevelt Park) to give it the open space it needs for architectural self- expression. The museum was built from 1871 to 2023 from designs by multiple architects, most notably Calvert Vaux and J. Wrey Mould (the original Gothic castle), J. Cleaveland Cady (the neo-Romanesque wings along West 77th Street), Candy, Berg & See (the Romanesque Revival granite façades), John Russell Pope (the neoclassical Central Park West entrance façade with the mighty columns, and the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall Rotunda), Jeanne Gang and Davis Brody Bond (the 2023 Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation), and Gary Hilderbrand of Reed Hilderbrand, as the landscape architect for the rejuvenation of Theodore Roosevelt Park.

The sheer magnitude of this museum filled me with all the awe of an awestruck admirer when I was a kid. I especially couldn't fathom how its front castle of conical turrets and lancet finials could extend all the way from W. 81st Street to W. 77th Street.

Especially awesome is the moment you pass through Pope's monumental columned entry into a barrel-vaulted ceiling of octagonal coffers, a Diocletian transom, and polished marble columns with leafy capitals, which make up a majestic showcase space for a suspended fossil display, as a high-style tribute to Teddy Roosevelt as a naturalist and conservationist.

The museum's vast, never-ending halls, replete with natural, sculptural, dioramic, fossil and crystal exhibits, were even more indescribable in a child's mind, best expressed by Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye:

Then you'd pass by this long, long Indian war canoe, about as long as three goddam Cadillacs in a row, with about twenty Indians in it, some of them paddling, some of them just standing around looking tough, and they all had war paint all over their faces. There was one very spooky guy in the back of the canoe, with a mask on. He was the witch doctor. He gave me the creeps, but I liked him anyway...

The Whitney Hall of Oceanic Birds at its official
dedication in 1953. AMNH Photograph #319645.

Boy, that museum was full of glass cases. There were even more upstairs, with deer inside them drinking at water holes, and birds flying south for the winter. The birds nearest you were all stuffed and hung up on wires, and the ones in back were just painted on the wall, but they all looked like they were really flying south, and if you bent your head down and sort of looked at them upside down, they looked in an even bigger hurry to fly south. The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.

But I digress... I was just as overjoyed as a child would be the year the Walter J. Sullivan Water Purification Facility and the Spangler Center were dedicated as upright monuments to water conservation and higher education, that people were building big and beautiful again, in the grand old-hat but high-hat tradition of the American Museum of Natural History, as opposed to those mammoth modern megablocks they'd been ripping down historic districts for from the fifties forward. But, alas, the full-scale Romanesque and Georgian revivals spearheaded by Sullivan and Spangler were short-lived, giving way once again to unmemorable modernist mediocrity by the time a quarter of the new century had lapsed. So let's enjoy these big, beautiful bonanzas while they're still with us, because their kind will never be built again (unless, of course, you're a Mar-a-Lago mogul in the White House with a ballroom on the brain, which I don't look forward to).

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"American Museum of Natural History," Wikipedia, last edited on 20 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Museum_of_Natural_History

"American Museum of Natural History – Exterior and Interior," Historic Districts Council, https://hdc.org/buildings/american-museum-of-natural-history/

"Cambridge Municipal Facilities Energy Use Disclosure Report," Calendar Year 2015, https://www.cambridgema.gov/cdd/news/2014/07/~/~/media/3db131e0716f4e7ab215d8070ff503ed.ash

"Classics, Old and New," Harvard Magazine, March 1, 2001, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2001/03/classics-old-and-new-html

Morgan, Keith N., "Cambridge Water Purification Facility," Society of Architectural Historians Archipedia, 2001, https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/MA-01-NC3

Rybczynski, Witold, "Tata Hall and the Art of Adding to the Harvard Business School Campus," Architect, October 14, 2014, https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/buildings/witold-rybczynski-tata-hall-and-the-art-of-adding-to-the-harvard-business-school-campus_o/

Salinger, J.D., The Catcher in the Rye, New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951, 1979, 1991 and 2014, pp. 134-135.

"Spangler Center," Wikipedia, last edited on 28 May 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spangler_Center

Built in Boston the Wright way?

Stumbling upon this Instagram image of Frank Lloyd Wright standing before a model of an office tower (left), I was struck by its striking resemblance to World Trade Center West in Boston's Seaport District (above), as if the latter were derivative of the former. If so, it was about time something Wrightian surfaced in Boston, where Wright never practiced, despite his far-reaching influence across the American map and Boston's reputation as a major architects' mecca. The closest he got to the Hub was his Theodore Baird Residence in Amherst for an Amherst College professor, and his Zimmerman and Toufic H. Kalil houses in Manchester, N.H. Otherwise, he steered clear of Beantown, perhaps finding its architecture too old-hat to find a progressive niche there.

But the hills of San Francisco were clearly not too passé for Wright's far-reaching ambitions, for this 1912 model was intended for the unbuilt San Francisco Call Building for one of the city's most widely circulated newspapers. It was a pure celebration of skyscraper verticality, alternating slender piers and fenestration stacks, climaxing in a wing-like cantilevered cornice pierced with openings to let the sun's rays filter onto the façade for an added effect of light.

Doesn't that look familiar in the Seaport? The cantilevered cornice pierced with sun-emitting holes is right there, as is the vertical emphasis of the lean piers and upright window strips. Yet the architects, Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood, were certainly not out to be copycats of Wright. They were out to put their own postmodern stamp of squared columns articulating the building structure on World Trade Center West, as it pertained to its district's maritime ambiance. In their words, "The form, language, and materials of the building relate to the maritime character of the site. The weighty masonry, substantial cornice and protective canopies recall the adjacent warehouses and pier buildings, while the steel construction and wind mitigation 'sails' of the lower building refer to the ships, cranes and bridges of the harbor."

The bowfront (deviating from Wright's flush façade) allowed occupants that full harbor view, and its elegant vertical lines clearly expressed the upward mobility of not only the building, but also its district. For this was one of the first buildings built in Seaport, in 2003, to kick off a new Boston neighborhood with innovative architecture, along with the over-the-water cantilever of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Institute of Contemporary Art, the welcoming horizontal canopy thrust of Rafael Viñoly's Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, the open-armed circular wingspread and concave curtain wall of Harry Cobb's John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, and the curvilinear curtain wall of SOM's Manulife Financial headquarters. These environmental characteristics that determined World Trade Center West's form are certainly a far cry from Wright, who was tailoring his flat, razor-thin San Francisco Call Building for a densely settled, hilly community that was just starting to be on the up and up, long before the Coit Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid became its skyborne iconography. 

Wainwright Building (1891, Louis Sullivan), St. Louis, MO.
Photo by W. LeMay (CC BY-SA 2.0).

But another thing both Call and WTCW have in common is their apparent inspiration from Louis Henry Sullivan, which I discussed in a post last year. Wright himself called Sullivan's Wainwright Building in St. Louis, Missouri, "the very first human expression of a tall steel office-building as Architecture." And he should have known, having worked in Sullivan's office, until accepting private commissions caused Sullivan to expel him – and propel him to become America's greatest architect. The influence of the Wainwright's squared vertical piers and window stacks and boldly embroidered cornice on both Call and WTCW is obvious, in their upward expressions of verticality, cantilevered climaxes, and smooth-skinned delicacy. For that was what Sullivan meant by "form follows function": a skyscraper's soaring vertical form is shaped by its function as a tall office building.

That is how World Trade Center West is paying tribute to two pioneering architects who never practiced in Boston (though Sullivan was born there, and Wright briefly lived in Weymouth as a child) by bringing their spirits into Boston as a living demonstration of their long-standing influence on office-building design regarding the clear, honest expression of structure, the smooth soar of the verticality of building upward into the sky to get as much office space on a limited footprint as possible, and the presentation of such a building as a monument to America's economic growth, the progress of architecture, the advancement of building materials (steel) to make those advancements possible, and, for WTCW, the nativity of a new neighborhood on the Boston Harbor where it all began.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Frank Lloyd Wright; ‘The San Francisco Call Building’, 1913," Instagram, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/DC90KNWSU8k/

Gonzalez, Jaime, "Press Building San Francisco," Pinterest, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/25262447894722671/

"Hooked on the Past David Romero," Flickr, 2016, https://www.flickr.com/photos/143771393@N04/

O'Malley, Eric, "Recreating The Call Building Model for Taliesin," The Whirling Arrow: News and Updates from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, January 6, 2021, https://franklloydwright.org/recreating-the-call-building-model/

"Wainwright Building," Wikipedia, last edited on 11 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wainwright_Building

"World Trade Center West," KMW Architecture, completed 2003, https://www.kmwarch.com/world-trade-center-west

Guess the Architect!

These three buildings (one of them an historic restoration) were all designed by the same architectural firm. Can you guess which one? (Hint: They are all in the city the firm practices in.)

I took these three photos before I knew who designed these three buildings, because each of them had that certain something special about them that I couldn't place – until I ended up working at the very place that designed them. Then I knew why they were special: the firm brought their distinctively pragmatic yet aesthetic personal touch to each of them. For more clues to who their architect is, they're described below.

Cambridge Fire Dept. Station 10 (a giveaway to where the architect practices!), completed in 2024, was the city's first fire station to be built in modular, kit-of-parts construction. It was erected as temporary quarters for the department's Engine 1, Ladder 1, Rescue 1, and Dive Rescue Unit fire engines during the firm's environmentally sustainable gut-renovation of the historic Cambridge Fire Headquarters (right).

For a modular building, Station 10 has an unusually crisp, clean-lined, set-in-place design, with apparatus-bay doors topped with geometric variations on the window lintel hoods seen on some of the city's mid-19th-century houses. A "trailer" attachment, made up of six combined trailers, houses the firefighters' kitchen, common areas, fitness center, bathrooms, and sleeping quarters, one bunkroom per firefighter.

But the four-bay fire engine garage looks as professional as any fire station, expressing the speed, efficiency, and no-frills, no-nonsense dedication of the department's first responders. In the words of Tom Flan on Facebook, "Gotta love it, looks just like it should, highly functional!" Echoed by Christopher Golomb: "This kind of municipal planning is to be admired."

The modular building providers were Extreme Modular Buildings (EMB) of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, which transported the station parts and trailers all the way from Canada to 15 Hovey Street over a distance of 2,500 miles. Each modular component measured 54’ x 14’ x 17’2” so it could house one of the four fire engines. All parts were assembled onsite upon their cross-country arrival there.

Choosing the site in a densely settled city replete with untouchable historic buildings was almost as herculean a task as shipping the station there. After 44 feasibility studies were made of 27 sites, surplus space on a Spaulding Hospital parking lot was selected to minimize fire-engine din in residents' back yards and to complement the noise the hospital's emergency vehicles were already generating. The first responders are delighted with the new station, temporary and modular as it may be, particularly for its accommodation of one bunkroom per firefighter, instead of being crammed and cramped into one multi-bed dormitory. 

This is how Cambridge Fire Department Station 10 is a useful model for cost-saving modular design and construction for other public safety facilities and for temporary housing of firetrucks during a fire station renovation. Its recognition in the Firehouse Magazine Station Design Awards for 2025 attests to this.

The Harvard Faculty Club, first built in 1930-1931 from a design by Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch & Abbott in the brick Georgian style that has defined the Harvard campus from the beginning, was carefully restored to reflect that tradition. The reconstructed bay windows bear the academic marks of arched windows with keystones, complemented with mullion-lined cornices along the rooflines and pediments. Brick stringcourses articulate the floors. Slate roofs, dormers, and paneled chimneys complete the picture.

Built the same year as the Gold Coast Harvard Houses and the Biological Laboratory designed by the same architects, the Harvard Faculty Club is noteworthy for its more residential human-scaled stature than those other developments. 

This was an important quality I noticed about the building and its bay windows while reading a book in its garden (Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper): the building's diminutive height enforced the garden's intimacy, helped along by the architect's thoughtful restoration. This motivated me to record this effect on my camera.

The two-family home at 137 Mount Auburn Street has been garnering attention on the Nextdoor chatroom site as of late, for not being one of the "ugly" or "boring" new buildings that the post-writer was complaining about (click here) and that Neighborhood Conservation Districts and the Cambridge Historical Commission are curbing with professional architect, engineer and attorney reviews of new developments. And well-deserved attention at that. It was built to complement the historical styles along Mount Auburn Street without bringing "fake history" to the scene. The traditional symmetry and lintel-lined sash windows of the gabled, porched façade are broken by the contemporary corner-bay, corner window and balcony, with the effect of a newer building growing out of an older one in a way that is offbeat but not offensive, and clarifying the house's younger age.

OK, if you haven't guessed the architect yet, the answer is The Galante Architecture Studio (TGAS). Located across from 137 Mount Auburn Street at Mount Auburn and Brewer Streets, TGAS practices in a corner shop with display windows showcasing the creative design process that goes into their buildings, as TGAS, and into their designer chairs, napkin-holders and wall-hangings layering cutout archival maps of cities at various historical development phases, as Galante Design Studio (GDS). Buildings and household objects originate in prototypes in their studio workshop, which evolve into models and' drawings. This process enables Ted Galante, his team, and his clients to develop a complete comprehension of a building or object, its place in its social context, and its best use to its client or buyer, and thereby develop the final product thoroughly to meet the owner's needs thoroughly. 

These three buildings certainly exhibit that commitment to craftsmanship in their crisp, simple forms, their respect for their social and architectural contexts, and the down-to-earth pragmatism of their residential, academic and municipal functions.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

Blier, Suzanne, "Why is everything so ugly? Why are buildings so boring?", Nextdoor, October 19, 2026, https://nextdoor.com/p/HgCTgqZRrPsh?utm_source=share&extras=NzI1NDI2NTI%3D&utm_campaign=1792411155230&share_action_id=f6656ec1-58e9-443e-9035-3493f867a88f

"Cambridge Fire Station 10," The Galante Architecture Studio, 2024, https://galantearchitecture.com/portfolio/cambridge-fire-station-10/

"Faculty Club," Harvard Property Resource Center, Harvard University Planning & Design, 

https://harvardplanning.emuseum.com/sites/875/faculty-club

"Our Fire Station 10 on Hovey Avenue has been recognized in the Firehouse Magazine Station Design Awards for 2025," Cambridge MA Fire Department, Facebook, January 13, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/CambridgeMAFire/photos/our-fire-station-10-on-hovey-avenue-has-been-recognized-in-the-firehouse-magazin/1183917370571014/

"Temporary Fire House – Station 10," Cambridge Fire Department, October 4, 2023, https://www.cambridgema.gov/cfd/news/2023/10/workinprogresstemporaryfirestation10hoveyav

"The Harvard Faculty Club," CambridgeHistoricalCommission, Instagram, 2025, https://www.instagram.com/p/DEpmIIEOHcK/?img_index=5

How New Formalism has grown on me

Kennedy Center. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, courtesy of Library of Congress.

Donald Trump's seizure of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, from stocking its board with "yes men" to renaming it after himself to threatening to rip it down if he doesn't get his way with it, has made me see it in a new light.

Kennedy Center at night. Photo by Aude.

Initially dismissing it as the "cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried" that Ada Louise Huxtable called it in her New York Times review on September 7, 1971, I now view this Washington venue as more of a jewel-box, a marble temple, and a work of art.

Lincoln Memorial, east side, Washington, D.C. Photo by Martin Falbisoner.

The slender bronze-painted steel columns against the solid Carrara marble exterior wall, complemented by the stacked setback of its top deck from its cantilevering roofline, now present the Kennedy Center to me as sort of a New Formalist reinterpretation of both the columned walkway of the Lincoln Memorial (right) and the riverfront verandah of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate (below), picking up the flat-roofed Acropolis of the former and the sweeping shelter of the latter.

Mount Vernon, west face, Alexandria, Virginia. Photo by Ken Lund.

The Kennedy Center's architect, Edward Durell Stone, himself thought along those lines: “In considering the general building type, I would say that Washington is primarily a city of white buildings in a park-like setting. I would see no reason for departing from that.” (That could be one reason why Trump wants to tear the Center down: it's not "classical" enough for him, given his first term's executive order to make all new government buildings in Washington in the classical style, as he plans to build his White House ballroom and the triumphal arch on Memorial Circle.)

The entrance façade of the Kennedy Center. Photo by Ajay Suresh.

I admit I've had a mite of affection for the Kennedy Center from the start. For one, its gala opening on September 8, 1971, premiered one of my favorite choral works, Leonard Bernstein's Mass, commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for the occasion. The music's blend of avant-garde abstraction and harmonic mellifluence seemed to find its architectural expression in the Center.

Radio City Music Hall (1932), New York. Photo by Smart Destinations.

Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by George Marks.

Two, Edward Durell Stone was my mother's first employer after she got married and my parents settled in New York. "Hire her!" was the reaction to the charming impression she made at her interview, based on her office efficiency and conversational prowess. So she became Stone's dependable secretary until her maternity leave when I came along.

Initially making New York history in Art Deco with the Radio City Music Hall (above) and Modernism with the Museum of Modern Art (left), Stone went on to reinvent Classicism in a Modernist framework. He and Minoru Yamasaki brought forth the New Formalism – new as Modern, formal as Classical – that would become their trademark, for better or for worse. At its best, it soared architecture in a flight of spindly columns with the heavenly uplift of a Gothic cathedral, Greek temple or Venetian palace, but with bare-bones assembly befitting the New Frontier. At its worst, it collapsed under its own weight amid the flames of exploded airplanes when Yamasaki's World Trade Center telescoped downward on September 11, 2001, leaving shards of neo-Gothic tracery and bones of fleshy bodies in its wake.

Photo by Richard Taylor.

The Kennedy Center is New Formalism at its partial best. Its land-side façade, solid and pure in its marble-wall consistency and lightened up by its regiment of delicate columns, extends a friendly invitation to us to promenade around its parameters before we go inside to see a play, a concert, or an opera. 

Photo by Y.C. Wu.

In a brief but beautiful scene in the 1976 film All The President's Men, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) exits a taxi in front of the Kennedy Center, just as a big crowd is jubilantly exiting a performance there. This gives him a chance to lose himself in the throng and throw off potential pursuers while he changes cabs on his way to his 2 a.m. meeting with Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), his secret source of information about the June 17, 1972 burglary in the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex right next door (see first photo). Though it was unrealistic for a Kennedy Center performance to end as late as 2 a.m., its architecture in the scene had a certain lilt about it, a certain lift, that added to the drama.

Kennedy Center's Grand Foyer. Photo by JohnnyK.

Kennedy Center's Grand Foyer. JFK bust by Robert Berks. Photo by Josh Bowers.

A truly dramatic soar for such a crowd to enjoy is right in the Grand Foyer, which the building's relatively squat, horizontal, ground-hugging stature belies, making it an eye-popping, jaw-dropping surprise for the newcomer. Measuring 630 feet long and 63 feet high, the Grand Foyer is said to have room for the Washington Monument laid on its side along the red-carpeted floor, with 75 feet to spare. 

The ascent of the cathedral ceiling is accentuated by the 16 hand-blown Orrefors crystal chandeliers dangling from above, a gift from Sweden. Together with the salutatory red carpet, they offer guests an internationally warm welcome as a prelude to the Hall of Nations or one of the three auditoriums that comprise the Center.

Hall of Nations, Kennedy Center. Photo by Rupal Desai.

The Hall of Nations extends the welcome with flags of nations with whom the Ufvv.S. has diplomatic relations along its 250-foot-long, 63-foot-high corridor, as a living symbol of Kennedy' s foreign policy goals:

To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support – to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective – to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak – and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run. 

Hall of Nations, Kennedy Center. Photo by Ahmad Karimi.

Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.

We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.

But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course – both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war.

So let us begin anew – remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

— From President John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961

The three auditoriums – the Concert Hall, the Opera House, the Eisenhower Theater –  vary in style according to the types of arts that are mounted on their stages. But they all avoid the New Formalism of their housing in the name of fine finishes, to immerse their audiences more fully in the concert, theater or opera experience before them, as contemporary interpretations of classic concert halls, opera houses and theaters. 

The Concert Hall, home to the National Symphony Orchestra, has seating akin to that in the Musikverein in Vienna, and is illuminated with Hadeland crystal chandeliers gifted by the Norwegian government. 

The red velvet Opera House, home to the annual Kennedy Center Honors, boasts a red and gold silk curtain given by the Japanese government and a Lobmeyr crystal chandelier with matching pendants, gifted by the Austrian government. 

The Eisenhower Theater, named for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who signed the National Cultural Center Act into law on September 2, 1958, securing the planning of the Center, mainly puts on plays, musicals, smaller operas, ballet, and modern dance.

But I'm not much for the Center's riverfront face. Its ceiling-high windows look uninviting to water-commuters and interrupt the façade's Carrara marble continuity...

Kennedy Center on Potomac River. Photo by Brooks Kraft.

...though this was partially redeemed by the row of 40 weeping willow trees planted in memory of the 35th President, that were cut down last year, reportedly due to decay and the shallow beds that gave them short lifespans. There's talk about replacing them with weeping cherry blossoms, but fingers crossed...

...and by its distant view on the Potomac at night, especially when the sea and sky form a dark background to the light of the living symbol of JFK's passion for and commitment to the arts in full view, as if waiting with bated breath for Trump's last term to end so it can reaffirm the artistic identity Kennedy and Stone intended for it.

2 Columbus Circle

2 Columbus Circle by Edward Durell Stone, c.1964.

A Stone work of New Formalism that I sheepishly admit I miss, now that it's been altered beyond recognition in a shameless, sloppy way, is 2 Columbus Circle, aka the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art, in New York City. Lambasted by Ada Louise Huxtable in 1964 as resembling "a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops [that] begs for a canal or garden setting," its creative use of elongated arches, a palazzo arcade with oculi, and a concave curve with the circle had a way of reducing historical forms to their barren geometries with a circusy playfulness that definitely made one stop and stare, like it or lump it. And its plain off-white walls of exposed aggregate concrete – presumably used to display giant banners of upcoming or current art exhibits – gave it a visual flexibility akin to the ever-changing decorations of the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, or the ever-more-changing LED display ads in Times Square. Regardless, I miss it now. Because look what they did with it:

2 Columbus Circle today. Photo by Stefan Weisman.

Kudos to a botch-up job by architect Brad Cloepfil for the Museum of Arts and Design in 2008, 2 Columbus Circle now looks like an ink-spill from Charlie Brown's pen in an attempt to write "HI" to his Pen-Pal. This has to be the weirdest fenestration in New York history. The angular protrusions of the windows on Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum were weird for their time, in their radical disruption of Madison Avenue trad, but have acquired a sculptural appeal over the years that makes this building (now Sotheby's Global Headquarters, housing auction spaces and public art galleries) a pioneering milestone of modernism. But this mess will never pass for innovative architecture. It will only serve to bring up memories of that "die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops," which at least brought some of the high spirits of Piccadilly Circus to Columbus Circle, as a rare moment when New York architecture had a sense of humor.

The Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow Center for International and Public Affairs at USC

The Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow Center for International and Public Affairs at USC. Photo by Bobak Ha'Eri.

The Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow Center for International
and Public Affairs at USC. Photo by Sitao Xiang.

This New Formalist cloister by Stone, formerly the Von KleinSmid Center at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, may be familiar for its use as a film and TV shooting location. In the movie The Graduate (1967), it was the setting for Elaine Robinson's classroom at UC Berkeley, when Benjamin Braddock followed her through the cloister all the way to her class, pressuring her to get her birth certificate in preparation for the marriage he wished to have with her. In The Paper Chase TV series (1978-86), it was a backdrop for the nameless Law School where Hart, Ford, and Bell struggled to meet the demands of the tyrannical Professor Kingsfield.

Photo by Sharon Mollerus.

In reality, it is one of the best mid-20th-century interpretations of the Roman cloister and temple. In fact, it may be Stone's New Formalist masterpiece, for the way it gives students and faculty a sense of logical direction through its corridor and temple courtyard of evenly spaced arches to the academic destination it invites them to at the end of the archway – as the Romans did.

Photo by Nick Grasu

It is also remarkable for the way it invites students and faculty to come forward and partake of its programs in anthropology, art history, international relations, political science, globalization, and applied social sciences by landmarking itself on the USC campus with its international peace symbol of a globe-crowned tower tapered with concave-curved sides, as a guiding light. Its status as Stone's New Formalist masterpiece was cemented in "Stone" in 2021, when it was renamed in honor of Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow, Native American tribal historian and chief of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation, who earned his master’s degree in anthropology at USC in 1939. 

“Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow was an ambassador and bridge builder who used education to create intercultural understanding and promote collaboration between peoples and communities,” said USC President Carol L. Folt. “Likewise, this building is an important nexus of interdisciplinary study that unites people across differences. Naming the building — and establishing a scholarship program — in his honor pays tribute to his life and legacy and ensures future generations of students have the opportunity to learn his remarkable story... 

“This building serves as a crossroads for different cultures and communities from around the world, and it is a gathering place for our students. We wanted to rename it for an individual who embodies the qualities we strive for at USC, and when we asked the university community to nominate people for this honor, the selection of this beloved and inspiring figure — one of our most cherished alumni — became clear. I know the USC community will welcome this name with the enthusiasm and joy it deserves.”

Kennedy Center. Photo by Shekhar Mehta.

Edward Durell Stone's personal brand of New Formalism has grown on me over the years all the way from pre-childhood to the present, by virtue of my mother's early connection with him, the roots of the style in his pioneering Art Deco and Modernist designs, and the style's ultimate function as a bridge-builder among nations, architecturally, materially, politically, artistically, and academically. 

Stone found that happy architectural medium among disparate disciplines and worlds as a simple but elegant expression of the peace the liberal arts and positive international relations can bring to the world if judiciously applied. Donald Trump's self-serving interference with that process should be a wake-up call to reaffirm these positive goals that were originally set for the Kennedy Center by its namesake himself.

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Sources:

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Kennedy, John F., and Ted Sorensen, "President John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address (1961)," Milestone Documents, National Archives, last reviewed on February 8, 2022, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-john-f-kennedys-inaugural-address

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