Posted 5:42 PM by Gene

I've figured out why so many new buildings are ugly: RealTORS®. Most of them have degrees in the deadly subject of BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION and never came within a mile of an art, music or literature course, thinking them for sissies, and besides, Babbitts need no education. Plus they always view their creations through the distorting prism of COST, meaning everything's right angles and windows and glary, and looks like hell even new -- and especially so.

When Walter P. Chrysler put up his building (sorry to cite it again) he could have erected a 100-story slab -- certainly his heirs would have done precisely that -- but despite his lowly background (he started as a locomotive wiper) he was a wizard of industrial design, plus he clearly acquired taste on the way (the mausoleum where he and wife Delia rest is almost painful in its simplicity and beauty), and he had more common sense and guts than the current DaimlerCorp management multiplied by 100. Combined with William Van Alen's genius he created a landmark. And Chrysler was involved every step of the way -- the incredible spire was as much his idea as Van Alen's, and he planned the construction carefully enough that not one worker died. We cherish that building now even more than ever because of the RealTOR® chunks going up all over, including in Manhattan, whose location is no guarantee against bad architecture.

A new kind of CW has it that magnificent buildings, especially corporate headquarters, are manifestations of hubris and symbols of decline. This sort of thinking encourages still more RealTOR® slabs (not that it would have prevented the 1000-foot-tall stylized railroad spike CONcast is building with tax help -- there's one kingdom of hubris that deserves to decline), and besides, it's wrong: the Woolworth Building, the tallest in its day, went up decades before its namesake's decline and conversion into a third-rate sneaker retailer, and not far from the late lamented Singer Building, an ode to the sewing machine's might; and though 30 Rockefeller Plaza housed a company that defined the manic speculation that waved in the Great Depression, RCA lasted for over fifty years afterwards, and we see there another symbol of industrial genius. There is nothing wrong with great buildings; if only they weren't in our past.

If anything we're living in a day of spectacularly ugly superskyscrapers, but thank God most of them aren't here.