On Paul Rudolph and the City Center Towers
July 9, 2008 at 5:00 am | General |
(Warning: This post starts light-hearted, but becomes rather dark and serious at the end, and is a bit unusual when viewed alongside this site’s normal daily content. Thus, I am breaking it up with a “read more” link, and letting you know that if you don’t want to read something that will likely give you a fairly disturbing mental image, skip to other posts.)
Yeah, I know. They’re beloved landmarks. They’re a part of the skyline. They were a sign of downtown’s resurgence. Etc.
If I may be so bold: they’re mostly garbage. And the reason why can be summed up in two words.
Those words are “Paul” and “Rudolph.” This man might possibly be the worst architect in American history.
Photo by John Roberts of fortwortharchitecture.com
A little background on the man. Paul Rudolph came into his greatest power in the architectural void of the ’60s and ’70s during the highpoint in “popularity” (amongst the academics, anyway) of the horrific Brutalist style, which decided that human beings enjoyed being amongst crushingly overscaled structures of blood-drawing unornamented ultrarough concrete set in barren plazas on superblocks that obliterated any sense of the urban fabric. This is the movement that gave the world disasters like Boston’s shockingly bad City Hall and, on a smaller scale, Fort Worth’s own City Hall, a structure so bleak and pointless that most city residents forget it even exists (check the link out and look at John’s photo real closely. Imagine putting the finishing touches on the blueprint for that and, rather than weeping at the result, striding proudly up to Fort Worth city officials and saying “there’s your new city hall! The nexus of your city government, the place the public will interact with the civic core, should look like the barracks of a Soviet airbase!”).
Rudolph tended to favor “corduroy concrete,” striated like the fabric, a material that was unpleasant to look at and even worse to the touch. His buildings featured intentionally bizarre and complicated floorplans with myriads of ramps and staircases, even where logically a bad idea. They are easy to get lost in, even for people who’ve worked in them for years. They’ve got plazas nobody goes to, because every surface is coated with rough concrete. Entrances are often hidden out of view in dark, scary cubbyholes. They greet the street with blank walls. Sometimes, they feature charming touches like windows obscured by columns, rendering them useless (in cases where he bothered to put windows in at all). Did I mention the nearly universal presence of structural problems and leaking roofs?
On the Paul Rudolph scale, the City Center towers (known more colloquially as the Bass Towers, and officially known as D. R. Horton Tower and Wells Fargo Tower) are far from being his worst work. They’re not even the worst thing he designed in Fort Worth. They are, though, his most prominent.
If you take a look at everything the Bass family has done in downtown, focusing mainly on new construction, you can see that they didn’t start out knowing everything right off the bat. The earliest new developments they did in downtown were, frankly, abysmal – I’m thinking here mostly of the Renaissance Worthington Hotel, which not only spans multiple blocks in the sort of streetscape-destroying fashion I loathe, but also faces the street on most sides with blank concrete walls. The historic preservation work was grand, but they had some learning to do on the new construction front. The Bass developments gradually got better until today, with them now building the sort of friendly, approachable, engaging buildings with great pedestrian interaction and nice even streetwalls that have always made for great urban environments (much of the credit for this must go to their favorite architect, David Schwarz, a name local modernists loathe but of whom I am a fan). The City Center towers are somewhere in the middle of the progression.
By this point in his career, Rudolph had shifted with the times, and was now using featureless glass for his buildings like his contemporaries. He still had the old urges, though, and gave the City Center towers a shape that went from flat & plain in the middle to angular undulations at the corners. The seemingly random creasing of the towers does little for their looks, but they’re not my biggest problem with the towers.
Louis Sullivan once said that a skyscraper must be a proud and soaring thing. Paul Rudolph, it would seem, disagreed on that point. Whatever little upward momentum the City Center towers have isn’t terminated in some proud fashion, but is instead ground to a halt by the lumpy projections and notchy cutouts found at the upper levels of each tower. They appear cluttered and confused, unsure of themselves. This still isn’t the big problem with City Center. That happens at ground level.
Rudolph himself on the lower floors of the towers:
I have been influenced by the fact that people perceive the first six stories (or 120 feet) of a high-rise building in a very different way from the rest of it. I came to that 120 feet because it has been shown (and I tested this myself) that most people can’t recognize other people from more than 120 feet. So what happens higher than this matters only as seen from a great distance.
I could point out that identifying people from 120 feet isn’t really the same thing, at all, as differentiating parts of a building at the same distance, but whatever. Let’s let him get rolling.
Therefore, you can argue that above 120 feet, the high-rise tower can be scaleless,
You could argue that, I suppose. Doesn’t mean you’d be right, of course…
but below this level, the building must achieve a human scale.
Which the City Center towers fail to do entirely.
One of the unique things about these towers is that they are always leading you around from one facade to another. They are not frontal. They are not on axis, or not usually at least.
Yeah, that’s what you want out of an office tower. Not comforting designs that maintain the streetwall, and present friendly and identifiable scale to pedestrians. You want designs that screw with the fabric of the urban space. Great idea.
I managed, in the 120-foot vertical span that counts as human scale, to make each of the four sides of each tower start at a different height from the ground. Several facets of the towers begin at a point only one story off the sidewalk, others begin at six stories, the rest are somewhere in between.
Ah, yes. Because six-story tall metal pipes sticking out of the ground, random overhanging glass slabs forty feet above your head with hundreds of feet of glass looming above that, and dark recesses in the parts that start higher up are certainly “human scale.”
Crimeny.
At the base of the towers this creates a loggia of varying heights into which are placed a bank, lobbies, and other elements. At the pedestrian level, this loggia is in scale with some very delicate adjoining buildings.
Also at the base of the towers are a series of bizarre (and often scary) dark, recessed nooks and crannies, perfect for making pedestrians think all sorts of unpleasant people could be hiding in the shadows waiting to spring on them as they pass. An architect friend of mine once said that he considers those spaces around the ground floors of the City Center towers to be the worst public spaces in Fort Worth, and I’m inclined to agree.
I also think it’s rich that Rudolph described the neighboring historic buildings as “delicate.” Those buildings are made of solid and sure-footed brick and stone, and greet you with a friendly handshake right up on the sidewalk. Rudolph’s towers are flimsy glass and stand up on their metal stilt poles like somebody who has leapt up on a table to escape a mouse.
Now, this is all fun, and is either a laugh for you (if you’re agreeing with me) or making you steam up (if you don’t). That’s fine. Honestly, the City Center towers aren’t even close to being Rudolph’s worst buildings. That honor definitely goes to the Lindemann Center in Boston, a mental hospital Rudolph designed in the ’70s. If I may be serious, that’s what really inspires my hatred of Rudolph’s work, and this post. As bad as I think they are, the architecture of the City Center towers has never killed anybody. The same can’t be said of the Lindemann Center.
Rudolph intentionally designed the Lindemann Center as an architectural exploration of mental illness. Essentially, he designed the building to be “insane” in order to express the insanity that would be treated inside it.
As described in Metropolis Magazine’s thought-provoking article on the Lindemann Center, “The Architecture of Madness”:
Thus, the spaces inside reflect Rudolph’s romanticized view of mental illness: eerie, twisting stairways, one of which leads nowhere like an oubliette in a Medieval keep; amorphous passages that never reveal their ends; a chapel that creates a stirring, dismal ambiance through spatial theatrics.
Rudolph’s dramatic spaces and subliminal imagery (there’s a thinly veiled frog’s head looking out from the building’s facade) make the Lindemann Center very expressive, and very dangerous. As has been noted by psychiatrists who have worked in the building or sent patients there, the building can be physically and psychologically damaging. Indeed, it is not hard to imagine the effects of the building’s subtle, encrypted psychedelia on a patient already prone to paranoia and hallucinations. In his book Treating the Poor (1992), Matthew Dumont, a Boston psychiatrist, records his apprehensions about sending a schizophrenic patient to the Lindemann Center. “There is a certain perverse genius in the design of the building for people with poor ego boundaries,” Dumont writes. He argues that elements of the building actually conspire to defeat mentally ill patients’ efforts to orient themselves in space. One culprit is the bush-hammered concrete, used, as at the Art and Architecture Building, on every surface, inside and out. Dumont writes that patients “generally like to tap a corridor wall as they walk down it as a way of assuring themselves that they are not falling through a dreamlike vortex. But if you try to touch the wall of a corridor at Lindemann as you walk, your knuckles are likely to be bloodied.”
Responses to this environment are predictably tragic. Horror stories of patients lost in the building are common, as are accounts of assaults on patients and staff in its many dim, secluded alcoves. Indeed, the building has proved to be so insidious that it is possible to hold certain spaces responsible for repeatedly abetting self-destructive acts. A catwalk over the Lindemann’s plaza-level lobby had to be glazed after it invited too many suicide attempts. The chapel, a top-lit chamber called out on the skyline with a crowning finial, is experienced as the heart of the building, what Rudolph once called “that releasing space which dominates.” It has been sealed shut since shortly after the building opened in 1972; a patient died there after igniting himself on the concrete slab altar. As one former Lindemann Center psychiatrist noted darkly, the patient was just following environmental cues: “It looks like a place that should be used for human sacrifice.” The little-known tragedy at the Lindemann Center could supplant the firebombing of the Art and Architecture Building as an emblem of the confusion in Rudolph’s work. But beyond Rudolph, the saga of the Lindemann is a sort of cautionary tale about Modern architecture’s persistent belief that it can affect human behavior. As this extreme example shows, it can certainly hurt.
Sometimes, people might wonder why people like me get so deep into all this architecture and urban design business. To me, it’s because architecture and urban design affects us greatly, whether we consciously recognize it or not. It’s something that touches us every day, in almost every interaction with have with today’s world, for better or worse.
Much is said about saving the natural environment, but not a lot of people think of saving our built environment. Making the built environment better means a great deal to me. It might seem odd to pick at things like the City Center towers for their dark recesses and unfriendly designs, but we need to make sure we have high standards for our built environment that make it something that improves our daily life.
When architectural egos run rampant and designs ignore human beings, I am often reminded of the terrible tales from the Lindemann Center. It’s things like that which motivate me in my advocacy of great urbanism and humanly-scaled architecture.
So now you know a little more about why I write here on Fort Worthology.