Architect as … cultural healer

There’s been a lot of media attention on New Orleans and the removal of statues honoring the confederacy and notable confederates. This article from CNN talks a bit about it. It’s amazing that removal of a single statue can have such a strong personal impact on me when I’m so far away.

View of New Orleans from the Marigny Docks
View of New Orleans from the Marigny Docks

I applaud the city of New Orleans for taking a proactive step to try to heal the scars of slavery and all of the horrors that came after the “peculiar institution” came to an end, if only in name. As a Jew, to get close to the feelings that African Americans feel, I have to imagine living and operating daily in a world with statues to nazis. And the thing is, the nazi’s only directly terrorized and killed a single generation (and all their future generations that were snuffed out before they started). Imagine if the Nazi’s had ruled for 400 years and what kind of cultural baggage we would have.

The closest parallel to the confederate monuments I have personally and locally is Ronald Reagan National Airport here in Northern Virginia. I refuse to call it by its current name: I call it “National.” I do this not because of his politics or economic policy, but because his administration looked the other way while an entire generation of my gay forefathers died in a plague. They refused to act because HIV and AIDS were happening to ‘those people’ and it was ‘icky.’ This was negligent, but it wasn’t willful. They didn’t give gay people (and transfusion cases, the African American community, drug users, and others) HIV, but they didn’t do anything to stop it. And for that I can’t bring myself to say the official name of “National Airport.” I imagine if it had been intentional and gone on for hundreds of years and maybe I can start to understand what the African American community feels about confederate statues and memorials.

For that reason I feel like this is literally the least that should be done. I’m not saying we should erase the confederacy from the history of the south, but we should be looking to how Germany teaches its history. We need to remember that ‘nice people’ do horrible things to other people when profit can be made, whether it’s the south and slavery (and the rest of the triangle trade) or the whole country’s treatment of the Native American nations. That’s said, remembering history does not mean honoring those who perpetuated the horror. It’s not disrespectful to the dead, who were literally traitors to the union, it’s doing something to set right the scales of history. They had over a hundred and fifty years of being honored and remembered. It’s time to start setting things right.

So, set that all of that to the side. In another part of my brain I’m sad. It’s just another reminder that my city is not the city I left; that time moves on and things are constantly changing. Will I miss it being “Lee Circle?” Yes, I will. But that’s ok. Being an adult is being ok with things changing, especially if it’s for the right reason.

View of Gibson Hall of Tulane University from Audubon Park
View of Gibson Hall of Tulane University from Audubon Park

A third side of this came up just this week while I was writing this response.  It has been suggested that my Alma Matter, Tulane University, change its name as a part of these changes.  As you learn on any tour of the school, the University, which was originally the publicly funded Louisiana College of Medicine, became a private school and was renamed in honor of Paul Tulane after he made a sizeable endowment to the school in 1882.  What you don’t typically learn on any tour of the school is that Paul Tulane was also the largest donor to the Confederacy in New Orleans.  This raises some deep questions about the suitability of the name.

Should his funding of the confederacy be honored?  No, it should be condemned.  Should his endowing a school with enough funding to be self sufficient and become a seat of higher learning be honored?  Yes, it should be celebrated.  I feel like the answer to this comes down to intent.  The issue is clear cut for me on Confederate memorials because the intent of the memorial is to honor the leader of the confederacy, but its murkier on the name of Tulane University.   The intent of the school’s name is to honor the endowment by Paul Tulane, not his actions which helped prop up the confederacy.  Nevertheless, he did do that and there is an unavoidable link there.  Furthermore, his endowment was made after about 17 years after the end of the civil war, and might be seen as a way of making amends for his support of the Confederacy.  Then there are the logistical issues, if the school were to change names, how would that even work?  Would they need to send new diploma’s and transcripts to all alumni?  And how would that affect their overall brand?  Maybe the university should resurrect the Newcomb name and change from Tulane University to Newcomb University?

Personally, I think a name change is not warranted, since the name is meant to honor the endowment not Paul Tulane’s role in supporting the confederacy.  That said, I think the university needs to use this as a teachable moment and show that even those who do great deeds in service of the common good can also do great harm.  At the very least they should start making it common knowledge that University’s namesake was also a supporter of the Confederacy and a complicated man.

Preservation Matters: A Video

Above is the keynote address from the Tulane School of Architecture sponsored symposium: Preservation Matters by Tulane Alum and Editor of Architectural Record magazine, Robert Ivy, FAIA. The speech is a long overdue acknowledgement of the work of the Preservation Studies / Historic Preservation Program headed by my past professor, Eugene Cizek, FAIA and a discussion of the historic preservation movement within the city of New Orleans and Tulane’s role through the twentieth century. I have to laud the efforts of the new Dean of the Architecture School, Kenneth Schwartz, who introduces the conference and Mr. Ivy. Regional Modernism has a more detailed synopsis of the presentation.

Throughout my years at the school, I always felt that the historical importance of place and the efforts of the preservation program to bring this idea to the student body was too often bulldozed by a blind passion for high modernism and other international styles. Issues of climate and green design were handled in the structural technology classes, but too often they did not play a part in the critically explored design studio work.

As an aside, I spent a number of minutes trying to figure out where they held this symposium. This lecture hall does not remind me of any space within the building while I was there. The main lecture hall is sloped, while this is obviously flat. Eventually after much head scratching I reread the symposium invitation and realized that this was held in the new University Student Center. Now I’m glad to see that this building (which was under repair for most of my years at Tulane) is in use, but I have to wonder if this type of event shouldn’t have been held at Richardson Memorial Hall (the Architecture School) where it could have had a greater influence on the student body and faculty.

Preservation, not just for berries anymore!

Preservation Matters: a symposium at Tulane School of Architecture

[Image via Tulane School of Architecture .]

Tulane School of Architecture is hosting a one day symposium at the end of January focusing on Historic Preservation. The keynote speaker will be Robert Ivy, FAIA and one of my favorite professors, Eugene Cizek, FAIA, will be providing commentary. This symposium is free and open to the public. If I was able to be in New Orleans, I would love to attend.

In light of the natural and governmental disasters in the past few years and the public policy debates currently raging within New Orleans, this symposium seems slightly overdue. I am glad to see that the new Dean of the Architecture School, Kenneth Schwartz, FAIA, is doing something that should have been done years ago. The historic preservation program is one of the few distinguishing elements of the Tulane School of Architecture, it helps ground architectural education at TSA to “the place” as well as “the time.” In the time I was at school, it felt as if the program did not get as much attention and funding as some of the more esoteric modernist pursuits. At times we felt like the red-headed step children of the school.

I may not personally agree with all the philosophical and ideological teachings I was taught during my historic preservation classes, but i do credit this program for helping me make the shift from design student to practicing professional. It was the only area of my education where material interactions with environmental factors as a function of building life were ever considered critical, or even discussed; it is also the only time we were able to, never mind required to, design an adaptive reuse project. This program helped introduce students to public planning officials and organizations and better inform our understanding of the political and legal process of building and protecting structures. It also broke the design bubble fostered in many of the other studios by merging design students with masters of preservation students (MPS) who were rarely design professionals.

Critics are the Worst kinds of Sadists – Architecture School episode 2

After watching the latest episode of Architecture School I was struck with just how accurate of a portrayal the reviews seemed. I remember reviewers baiting students just like that, and verbally backing them into corners such that they were forced to say their design was bad. What was missing from this was the critics literally tearing apart models to express their disgust with the scheme.

I stand by my previous opinions about the student’s work, none of them responded to the scale of the neighborhood adequately. At least some of them were looking at filtering elements of New Orleans housing iconography through a modernist lens, specifically the front porch and the screening elements. Furthermore, most of the house strategies did not create any site strategies for creating a public/private separation outside of the house itself.

University Architecture

Gibson Hall at Tulane as seen from Audubon Park.

So my sister (a visiting professor at Case [2016 UPDATE – she is now an Associate Professor of History at UNH]) sent me a link to a funny web-comic illustrating american collegiate architecture. This comic hits the nail on the head for a number of different styles of campuses across the country. Of course, because this is the media of a web-comic it only grazes the surface. One of the things that I have always found interesting about architecture is the ideas and concepts that a building can convey to the individual observer, and how institutions can co-opt these signs and signifiers to reinvent their identity and develop a new grammar of style. The other thing is that overtime the connotations of these buildings can get lost, and new un-trained observers start to create a new grammar of form. The interesting thing about this is that the untrained observations seem to have almost a viral growth factor. I think the best example of this from my experience is the original buildings on the campus of Tulane University. The oldest buildings are all ashlar limestone/marble in a Richardsonian Romanesque style, these buildings were the original natural science buildings on campus. Which makes sense because their stone skin evokes the classics and natural sciences which was the school’s specialty in the late 19th century. After a while the campus added two red brick buildings, which became the liberal arts and physics buildings. This makes sense based on the architecture as well, red-brick buildings/universities are associated with the new world and post-industrial society.

This language of buildings, which would have been evident to students 100 years ago, is lost on the population today. Instead, the student lead admission tours explain that these buildings don’t match the rest of the “front quad” because there was a mix-up in between Vanderbilt’s bricks and Tulane’s. This bit of canonical fallacy achieves a similar end result as the “real” reason – the University ends up claiming a piece of legitimacy as a liberal arts institution by comparing itself to a more prestigious school. As an interesting aside, this story of mixed up bricks (which would NEVER happen in real life and not result in a multimillion dollar lawsuit) seems to have propagated to so many different schools that it is hard to figure out where it started and how.