Malling Washington

With the advent of the Indian museum, the Mall is complete, according to the planners. Time will tell, but the fact remains that the major buildings built in and around this precinct over the last half century offer sad comparisons with their older neighbors.

Any number of Mall vistas testify to the chasm World War II marks in the nation’s architectural history. The West and East Buildings of the National Gallery of Art–completed in 1941 and 1978–offer the best-known example: a stark contrast between two different ideas of what architecture is. But visitors can see such contrasts up and down the Mall. Take, for instance, the first of the Mall’s postwar museums, the National Museum of American History. Designed by Walker O. Cain and completed in 1964, it faces an ensemble of federal offices designed by Arthur Brown Jr. and completed three decades before.

From American History’s elevated terrace, reached by a pair of long exterior stairways rising from Constitution Avenue, you stare out at Brown’s magnificent second-story porch. Its Roman Doric columns, entablature, and pediment crown Brown’s Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium. Below, the auditorium boasts three handsome portals crowned by carved masks. Recessed colonnades flank the auditorium and link it to office blocks terminated at both ends by pediments containing allegorical groups, as the central pediment does.

Then you stare up at the façade of Cain’s museum. Can these buildings really be just three decades apart? What cataclysm intervened? Generous decoration has given way to a lifeless geometric rationalism. American History is a long box containing two stories of exhibition space above the terrace. Two low, rectilinear attics are stacked on top. A cornice, pitched at roughly forty-five degrees, offers very scant relief from the tyranny of right angles. The American History museum is a steel-framed building clad in Tennessee marble, but the stone is laid not in blocks suggesting mass in compression, as with traditional buildings, but rather in large, vertically oblong panels that suggest a thin screen. Narrow window-strips separate the recessed masonry screens from the rest of Cain’s curtain walls, heightening the impression of flimsiness.

IS THE DEPRESSING CONTRAST with Brown’s ensemble simply a question of unequal talents? No, even though Cain was a minor architect. The key factor is that the designers of Brown’s school benefited not only from a treasury of expressive resources but also from the “fail-safe” mechanisms that all but guaranteed at least satisfactory architectural results. The primary cause of Cain’s failure must be sought in the dogma that took hold of architecture schools in the 1930s–a dogma that claimed architecture must reflect changes in the human condition wrought by modern science. It must speak of “progress” and “evolution” through abstraction and the absence of ornament; it must be “scientific” in expressing its structural properties, as Cain’s flimsy curtain-walls do. But because modernism never shed its Romantic roots, such scientific dogma had to cohabit with the notion that buildings should enshrine novelty, as the expression of the designer’s originality and creative prowess. This cult of originality has contributed to the stylistic instability of the Mall’s modernist architecture.

THE DESIGNERS of the Mall’s modernist museums have enjoyed varying degrees of success in replacing traditional means of expression with new ones. Some of them have unquestionably erected far more engaging buildings than Cain’s. And yet, time and again, their work confronts us with fundamental deficiencies. For instance, the elementary gesture of endowing entry into a building with formal significance is almost entirely absent. Modernist entrances tend to be mere voids in a mass. How can such reductionism contribute to the dignity of the nation’s premier civic precinct?

Or take the use of sculpture. Brown employed sculpture as an organic part of his design, but at American History, the sculpture is not integral. On its Mall terrace, we encounter a chrome form resembling an unraveling, sidewise figure eight mounted on a tall, slender, tapering plinth of black granite. Designed by José De Rivera and entitled Infinity (1967), this modestly scaled work was the first piece of abstract sculpture ever commissioned by the federal government. De Rivera’s curves may strike a contrast with Cain’s right angles, but they do not approach the level of formal interplay animating Brown’s edifice. And the sheer blankness of American History’s large exterior recesses deprives the building of visual power–a result of the rejection of the classical idea of the sculpturally active façade.

BLANK façades are a widespread blight on the Mall and its environs. The National Air and Space Museum (1976), designed by Gyo Obata of Hellmuth, is about as minimal as American History. The difference is that on the Independence Avenue elevation, Obata obtained sharp contrasts of light and shade through the arrangement of his seven rectilinear volumes, which are clad in Tennessee marble in deference to John Russell Pope’s West Building across the Mall. Four of these volumes, the major boxes, rise higher than the minor boxes. The entrance is stashed ignominiously in a glazed void beneath one of the latter. On the northern elevation, Obata replicated the four major boxes, but here, because of the lack of direct sunlight, they alternate with vast, recessed expanses of tinted glass enclosing large, sky-lit exhibition courts. The contrast of light and shade is lost, and seen from the Mall, the museum seems a hopelessly bulky, inert structure.

Across Seventh Street from Air and Space lies the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1974), designed by modernist pioneer Gordon Bunshaft. This is another Mall museum conceived in terms of rudimentary geometries–this time, the cylinder rather than the box–and it is situated behind a thick and forbidding wall of concrete with pebble aggregate. The Hirshhorn cylinder is perched on four stout piers that flare outward as they rise. The glass lobby, entered by way of rotating doors in bronze canisters, is snuggled between the two southern piers. The cylinder has a large circular void in its core, making room for a rather stark courtyard with an elevated and unornamented bronze pool, situated off-center, with water jets. Across Jefferson Drive, more unsightly walls of concrete with pebble aggregate enclose a sunken sculpture garden.

THE HIRSHHORN is commonly dubbed the “doughnut” or the “bunker.” It might strike one as a great place to put a cyclotron, or its balcony overlooking the Mall might read as an observation deck on an alien spacecraft. At the same time, however, the cylinder is a reasonable form for this cross-axial site, which terminates across the Mall at Pope’s National Archives building (1935). A cylindrical structure, in principle, could play nicely off the Archives’ dominant rectilinear masses, aided by the fact that these two edifices, unlike many others along the Mall, are not screened by trees.

But the Hirshhorn suffers acutely by comparison with Pope’s mausoleum, just as American History does by comparison with Brown’s palatial ensemble. The National Archives building is a brilliant success in scenographic design; it communicates a sense of imposing scale and timeless grandeur that is thoroughly appropriate to the Mall. The Hirshhorn looks like an oddity.

There is more to the Mall’s postwar museum architecture than modernist rationalism, of course. Postmodernism made its debut on the four-and-a-half-acre site on the south side of the Smithsonian’s Gothic “Castle,” facing Independence Avenue. Jean Paul Carlhian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, devoted to Asian art, and the National Museum of African Art are one-story pavilions designed to defer in scale to the Castle as well as the Freer Gallery and the Arts and Industries Building. This means that the Sackler and African Art are largely subterranean enclaves. Each of the two museums has three underground levels, with the bulk of their gallery space located one floor below grade.

Apart from their modest scale, the pavilions were intended to be stylistically contextual–to harmonize with and enrich the stylistic stew of the three neighboring Smithsonian buildings. The Sackler, located next to the classical Freer and clad in gray granite, has six copper pyramids for a roof, while African Art, located by the Victorian-eclectic Arts and Industries, was built with pink granite and is crowned by six copper domes. Globe finials are perched between each building’s roof structures, while ersatz-classical motifs have the vestigial character typical of postmodern design.

THE MOST NOTEWORTHY postmodern building in Washington’s monumental core–and one of the most noteworthy anywhere–is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1993) designed by James Ingo Freed. A shallow limestone volume with a protruding, semicircular screen faces Fourteenth Street just south of Independence Avenue. Diminutive Viennese Secession lamps crown the bulky piers at each end of the screen. Having passed through one of the voids in the screen, visitors enter the building by way of a little structure framed in gray bolted steel. Here begins Freed’s death-camp décor.

Inside the museum, no dominating axis is evident. One enters the main court, the Hall of Witness, from the side, stepping onto a platform of treaded steel that is equipped with benches and a bewildering gray-metal contraption that serves as a sort of sculptural frame for the platform. Steps lead down from the platform to the floor of the hall. A glazed roof slants across the space, permitting views of pedestrian bridges above that allow visitors to cross from one building block to the other as they view the permanent exhibition. Metal-clad, hipped-roofed structures resembling watchtowers also loom picturesquely above. At the back of the hall is a stairway with rails at skewed angles. Few visitors will notice the hall is rectangular in plan.

On the museum’s western front, a hexagonal limestone pavilion features crudely detailed blind doors and windows. Niches occur in the vertices’ lower reaches, and together with the glazed corner-strips, protruding above, they jarringly disrupt the limestone façade, whose heavy cornices look like they’ve been sheared off at every turn. In a curious echo of the American History museum, the façade thus assumes the appearance of flimsy panels. Freed seems to be making two statements here: one concerning modern structural methods, and another concerning the precarious nature of civilized society. Both are of dubious artistic value. But the main problem with this pavilion is that the stark, severely geometric Hall of Remembrance it encloses is severely lacking in symbolic power. Encases in a black metal box, the Hall’s eternal flame would be at home in a chemistry lab.

Within postmodernism’s conceptual confines, there is a certain logic to Freed’s attempt to evoke a world out of joint by means of an evocative décor and disordered perspectives. But resort to a décor based on explicitly exotic elements can only be a recipe for theme-park architecture. The Hall of Witness’s scenographic setting is stage-set stuff.

THEN WE COME TO the contorted geometries employed by Frank Gehry, which have their roots in the deconstructionist movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Gehry’s metallic heaps are the life of the postmodern party, even if they confuse architecture with abstract sculpture.

That’s not a problem for Corcoran Gallery, which unveiled Gehry’s design for an addition in 2001. (Groundbreaking is now scheduled for 2006.) This is one of a series of Gehry projects involving agglomerations of folds or strips that do not resolve into legible wholes–the same problem created by the inordinately complex geometries of I.M. Pei’s National Gallery East Building.

Gehry envisions three great folds of stainless steel–he calls them “sails”–that billow outward along New York Avenue. A large expanse of glazing is tucked between two of the sails and contains the new main entrance to the Corcoran. The addition is crowned by a roof consisting of another stainless-steel fold, in this case an irregular conic section tilted upward towards the west, with skylights protruding from slits, and with more glazing stashed into interstices between the roof and the rest of the building. In approaching the main entrance, visitors will walk between huge, tilted skylights rising out of the sidewalk to each side.

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN marks the debut on the Mall of the “organic,” curvilinear Romanticism which springs from the pronouncement by William Kent, an eighteenth-century English landscape gardener, that “nature abhors a straight line.” This notion has found its most memorable architectural expression–in an urban setting, at least–in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum (1959) in Manhattan.

The Indian museum makes more impact outside than inside, though its major interior spaces abhor straight lines quite as much as the exterior does. However, design changes after the firing of the original architect, Douglas Cardinal, in a contractual dispute, have diluted the exterior’s picturesque effect.

Cardinal, a Canadian of Blackfoot and métis ancestry, has called the museum as built a “forgery.” Nevertheless, the theme-park element was part of the project from the beginning, and it was not confined to the mesa-promontory architecture. In the surrounding landscape we thus encounter an encapsulation of the Washington region’s habitat.

A waterfall rolls down a rock formation extending from the building’s northwestern elevation, facing the principal point of access from the Mall. It refers to the falls up the Potomac, while the stream that meanders alongside the building recalls the Mall’s vanished Tiber Creek. A swampy patch at the east end of the site likewise harkens back to the Mall primeval, while a little grove of trees stands for the forests of the Virginia Piedmont. A “meadow” and plots of corn and other indigenous crops are found on the Maryland Avenue side.

Inside, a huge space rises under the dome, with a circular court below. A low sculptural wall of copper strips swirls about the court; curving walls, stairways, and overlooks loom above. Despite the curves, the space is overlarge, unanimated, and badly detailed. Curiously, a solar panel of stone at the center of the court doesn’t align with the metal-framed glass oculus in the dome. And the court’s blank expanses of skin-coat plaster need to be covered with textiles.

Wright’s Guggenheim is an idiosyncratic and expressionistic building, but hardly a beautiful one. It marks the culmination of his Romantic quest for an organic architecture to which the form of nature’s supreme organism, man, was irrelevant. It is thus another benchmark in the dehumanization of art. The Indian museum shares this pedigree, though it is eminently doubtful that it will achieve the Guggenheim’s iconic status. What distinguishes the two is that Wright focused on abstract form, not sentimental associations.

Finally, we can look forward to a glass-box revival across Pennsylvania Avenue from Pope’s West Building. The Newseum, for which ground was broken late in 2003, is an agglomeration of boxes, three aligned with the avenue, and a fourth box, to contain condominiums, pitched at a skewed angle to align with C Street.

The three Newseum boxes will rise in height as they recede from the avenue, each having its own degree of transparency. A large stone tablet etched with the First Amendment will be tacked onto the outer box. This volume will also boast a 4,500-square-foot “window” offering pedestrians a view of a huge media screen and news zipper in the Newseum’s ninety-foot-high atrium, situated in the middle box. The three glazed boxes, which rise in height from front to back, are conceived as “three rectangular ‘bars’–a three-dimensional newspaper,” according to architect James Stewart Polshek, while all the glazing, of course, stands for “openness.”

WHY IS THE IDEA of a masonry building anthropomorphically massed and detailed to evoke the majesty and endurance of one of our fundamental liberties out of the question? Best not to ask. We’ve gone from “the world as cosmos” embodied by classicism’s harmonious geometries to “the world as nature” evoked by the Gothic’s arboreal profiles, to the Newseum’s glitzy, disembodied “world as breaking news.” This is progress?

Erected during a relatively brief time span, the Mall’s postwar museum buildings offer eloquent testimony to modernism’s fundamental stylistic instability. To be sure, a confusion of tongues has long been on display thanks to the Freer, the Castle, and the modernized-Romanesque-cum-Gothic hodgepodge of the Arts and Industries building. But the Freer and the Castle in particular relate to instinctive modes of perception and the human scale–and thus to deeply ingrained preferences–in a way Pei’s East Building, for example, doesn’t.

In the architecture and decoration of the western tradition, art is clearly understood in terms of the mastery of the human form as revealed through the painter or sculptor’s representation of the same or the architect’s arrangement, by analogy with the composition of the human body, of his subordinate volumes and spaces in relation to the whole. When the designer concerns himself with novelty and the negation of tradition, technique too easily gets the upper hand over art. And the criticism that advocates such pyrotechnics is, in all too many cases, sheer sophistry–an empty game of tagging architecture with irrelevant political, sociological, or psychological concepts.

At the same time, classical architecture’s social, psychological, and even spiritual role of connecting us with civilization’s immemorial past, of making that past a meaningful presence in our daily lives, is simply lost on modernist pundits whose emotional–not to mention historical–horizons so often appear pathetically constricted.

Sure, Frank Gehry’s architecture intrigues people, and there’s plenty of room in the world for it. But it’s a mistake to tack his histrionics onto Ernest Flagg’s Corcoran (1897), whose grandeur is owed to an entirely different, much more ancient, and much more profound conception of creative endeavor–a conception that also happens to be much more at home with the historic identity of Washington’s monumental core.

WHILE INTERIORS IN SOME OF the Mall’s modernist museums are functionally sound (Air and Space) or visually stimulating (the Hall of Witness in the Holocaust Museum), the exteriors of these buildings are collectively unsuited to successful urbanism. They remind us that the elimination of the traditional façade has been a disaster.

A classical architect thinking more about the appearance of Independence Avenue and less about the Air and Space Museum’s structural frame would have designed something very different from Obata’s boxes. Similarly, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s La Villette Customs Station (1789) in Paris, with its crowning cylinder punched out with an arcade and perched on a pedimented base, might have provided better inspiration for the Hirshhorn than a mere geometric form. And one wonders whether Freed’s 14th Street façade really establishes any meaningful relationship to the Holocaust by reducing the classical idiom to rigid geometries. A severe Doric front could have asserted the grave, noncelebratory intent of his building more effectively. And a classical Hall of Remembrance pavilion could have had more aesthetic and emotional resonance, both inside and outside, than his hexagon. The Newseum will be a huge draw, but glass-box architecture is not suitable to a monumental setting. Like today’s newspaper, it is ephemeral. It does not age. It simply deteriorates.

The postwar museums have reinforced the Mall’s status as the heart of a city-within-the-city that empties out at nightfall. Indeed, the admirer of Arthur Brown’s Constitution Avenue ensemble might have cause to regret the planning that put it there. The Smithsonian’s underground museum complex, which anticipated the dreadful subterranean visitor center now under construction at the Capitol, is a reminder of the institutional surfeit that has long bedeviled this area. To thrive as the center of a great capital, Washington’s monumental core needs a finer-grain, mixed-use urbanism. New buildings on the Mall may even be in order.

THE FUTURE ARCHITECTURE of monumental Washington should reflect not only the lessons offered by the Mall’s postwar museums, but modernism’s cumulative impact on America’s built environment. Urban designer Andrés Duany recently suggested that there are between three hundred and three thousand modernist masterpieces. “The problem,” he added, “is the thirty million failures of modernism that have destroyed our cities and our landscapes.”

Modernism’s win/loss ratio on the Mall has been better than in the nation as a whole, but it has nevertheless been unacceptably low. Banning modernism is not the issue. The point is rather that the burden of proof–on the Mall and elsewhere–should be on modernism rather than tradition. Tradition should be the default option. And, unlikely though it might seem, the winds will shift in precisely that direction in the coming decades.

Catesby Leigh is a regular contributor on architecture to The Weekly Standard.