President of the National Civic Art Society, a non-profit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. that promotes the classical and humanistic tradition in public art and architecture. Eleventh Chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, an independent federal agency comprising seven presidential appointees who are the aesthetic guardians of Washington.
T.S. Eliot diagrams one of his plays (or rather a cryptogram?)
I don’t know what to make of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (and perhaps never will), but F.L. Lucas’ 1923 New Statesman review is enjoyably devastating. A poet and scholar, Lucas would during World War II come to work as an intelligence office at Bletchley Park, Britain’s decryption headquarters. In the 1920s, he was already demonstrating his ability to break codes over his knee:
Among the maggots that breed in the corruption of poetry one of the commonest is the bookworm. When Athens had decayed and Alexandria sprawled across the Egyptian sands, when the Greek world was filling with libraries and emptying of poets, then first appeared that Professorenpoesie which finds in literature the inspiration that life gives no more. The Alexandra of Lycophron, which its learned authors made so obscure that other learned authors could make fortunes explaining what it meant, survives as the first case of this disease and the first really bad poem in Greek. The malady reappears in Rome in the work of Cinna and Propertius; it has recurred at intervals ever since. Disconnected and ill-knit, loaded with echo and allusion, fantastic and crude – such is the typical style of Alexandrianism.
Readers of The Waste Land are referred at the outset to a work on the origins of the legends of the Holy Grail by Miss J L Weston, a disciple of Frazer, and to The Golden Bough itself. Those who conscientiously plunge into the former will learn that the basis of the Grail story is the restoration of the virility of a Fisher King and thereby of the fertility of a Waste Land, the Lance and the Grail being phallic symbols. While maintaining due caution and remembering how “Diodorus Siculus/ Made himself ridiculous/ By thinking thimbles/ Were phallic symbols”, one may admit that Miss Weston makes a very good case. With that, however, neither she nor Mr Eliot can rest content. Miss Weston is clearly a theosophist, and Mr Eliot’s poem might be a theosophical tract. The sick king and the waste land symbolise, we gather, the sick soul and the desolation of this material life.
It is hard not to regret the way in which modern writers of real creative power abandon themselves to the illusion that they have philosophical gifts and a weighty message to deliver. In all periods, creative artists have been apt to think they could think, though in all periods they have been frequently hare-brained and sometimes mad. Now, we have the spectacle of Mr Lawrence, Miss May Sinclair and Mr Eliot all sacrificing their artistic powers on the altar of some fantastic Mumbo-Jumbo.
Perhaps this unhappy composition should have been left to sink itself, but it is not easy to dismiss in three lines what is being written about as a masterpiece. For at present it is easy to win the applause of the blase and the young, of the coteries and the eccentricities. But a poem that has to be explained in notes is not unlike a picture with “This is a dog” inscribed beneath. Not, indeed, that Mr Eliot’s notes succeed in explaining anything. The main function of the notes is to give the references to the innumerable authors whose lines the poet embodies, but the borrowed jewels he has set in its head do not make Mr Eliot’s toad the more prepossessing.
In brief, in The Waste Land Mr Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all. For the rest he has quoted a great deal, he has parodied and imitated. But the parodies are cheap and the imitations inferior. Among so many other sources Mr Eliot may have thought, as he wrote, of Rossetti’s Card-Dealer, of Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, of the Vision of Sin. But the trouble is that for the reader who thinks of them the comparison is crushing; The Waste Land adds nothing to a literature which contains things like these.
Below is an essay I published in Public Discourse last month. It is an adaptation of the June 1, 2012 testimony I delivered before the U.S. House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands on “The Future of the National Mall.” (C-SPAN video here.)
We Must Preserve the Founders’ Classical Vision for Our Nation’s Capital
By Justin Shubow
January 17, 2013
The plan of our nation’s capital and the architecture of its core buildings and monuments must carry on the classical vision the Founders intended as the physical manifestation of America’s form of government and political ideals.
* * *
The National Mall and surrounding Monumental Core is arguably the greatest work of civic art in the modern era. To preserve and protect this man-made masterpiece, the National Civic Art Society, of which I am president and chairman, recently produced the documentary film “Washington: The Classical City,” which may be watched on our website, www.civicart.org.
To envision the future of the Mall, we must first understand its past. The Mall as we know it is just slightly over 100 years old. Yet it appears to have been there forever. It is hard to imagine, but at the turn of the twentieth century there was no breathtaking vista from the Capitol building to the Potomac, no graceful boulevard of trees and paths lined with noble edifices, but instead a shabby rambling park, anchored at one end by a soot-spewing train station and at the other by a malarial swamp. Abutting its grounds were flophouses and squalor.
This was hardly the vision for the city that President George Washington had in mind when he directed Pierre L’Enfant to create a master plan for a new capital worthy of a new republic: a grand scheme of radiating streets and avenues whose geometrical arrangement symbolically focuses on the Capitol, the White House, and the Washington Monument.
To this day, these are the landmarks by which we orient ourselves spatially and spiritually. Harmonious, luminous, and orderly, the urbanism of the L’Enfant plan and the architecture of its most important structures were to be classical in design, the physical manifestation of our form of government and political aspirations. This conscious decision linked the city to the ideals of republican Rome and democratic Athens, as well as to the Age of Reason later called the Enlightenment.
The classical tradition is time-honored and timeless. In a letter to L’Enfant, Thomas Jefferson expressed his wish for a capitol designed after “one of the models of antiquity, which have had the approbation of thousands of years.”
To be clear, the founding generation no more slavishly imitated other societies’ architecture than the founders imitated other forms of government when they drafted the Constitution. Instead, they sought and created an unmistakably American idiom. Who would confuse the White House or the Capitol for a building in a foreign country?
The founders intentionally situated their day and age within the two-millennia-long tradition of classicism. They recognized its dignity, its aspiration to beauty, its harmony with the natural world and human perception, and its capability of expressing hierarchy and meaning to the citizens it serves. They were founders and framers not just in government but in architecture. They understood the wisdom of the past and adapted and improved on it. Why should we be any different today?
Alas, by 1900 the L’Enfant plan for our national capital was largely forgotten. It had been compromised by commercial pressure and aesthetic confusion. Thankfully, in 1901 Congress created the famous Senate Park Commission led by Senator James McMillan of Michigan. Serving on the McMillan Commission were some of the greatest architects, landscape designers, and sculptors of their time, all of whom worked within the classical tradition.
Influenced by the City Beautiful Movement, they not only revived the L’Enfant Plan; they perfected it. Among their achievements, they extended the main axis of the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial site. They also cleared trees and leveled the ground to create one of the greatest man-made vistas in the world. It is transfixing. Empty space in and of itself is made electric, with the Washington Monument as the lightning rod. There is no official rule that the American people must congregate there for our most historic events and communal gatherings, but they do so nonetheless. They are drawn in by the Mall’s power, which is welcoming and uplifting, not oppressive or inhumane. It is a vista of optimism and promise.
The McMillan Plan created a symbol and place of national unity, one that even today stands as the embodiment of our collective ideals. The classical L’Enfant and McMillan Plans, together with such masterpieces as the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, have endowed us with the eternal capital of an eternal republic.
Yet beginning after the First World War, some avant-garde architects and theorists wished to replace the eternal with the putative “spirit of the times.” Beholden to an ideology that rejected the past, an ideology that had become fashionable in a crumbling Europe, they asserted that classicism had become passé; it was a death-mask that no longer could express the soul of America. They saw themselves as the vanguard ushering in a Modern Era, the inevitable next stage in the progressive evolution of mankind.
To these individuals, buildings such as the Capitol were musty piles that stank of ideas and ideals whose time had passed. Indeed, these architectural radicals opposed the designs for the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. Frank Lloyd Wright called the Lincoln Memorial the “most asinine miscarriage of building materials that ever happened.” Joseph Hudnut, the influential dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, proclaimed the National Gallery of Art a “pink marble whorehouse.” After World War II, the avant-gardist hegemony was complete.
This total rejection of our national heritage caused the Mall to be vandalized by the Hirshhorn Museum, which resembles an alien spacecraft or gun turret looming over the public. This elitist movement gave us the urban-planning disaster of L’Enfant Plaza, as well as the brutalist FBI Headquarters, which looks like the Ministry of Fear. Do the citizens who visit these buildings, and the government employees who work in them, take the same pride in these structures as they do in the National Archives or the Federal Triangle?
Today we find ourselves in a predicament like that of the McMillan Commission: the guiding classical vision for the city and its Monumental Core has once again been forgotten, ignored, and violated by accretions of discordant art and architecture.
Sadly, the National Park Service and other agencies charged with preserving the Mall have been neglecting their mission. If any district deserves the stringent protections of a national landmark, it is the Mall as created by the L’Enfant and McMillan Plans. Yet when the Park Service recently approved the design of the planned National Memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower—a deconstructionist eyesore that clashes with our greatest presidential memorials—it did not even bother to consider the design’s cultural and historical impact on the Mall and other protected sites in the area. Stylistic harmony, dignity, and perhaps even beauty are of no concern to them. It is as if the Park Service did not care whether an invasive weed was to be planted in a National Forest of evergreens.
Not only are the National Park Service and others not preserving what must be preserved, they are acting to preserve what is unworthy of preservation. Although it is difficult for us to imagine, in the process of approving the Eisenhower Memorial, the National Park Service, the General Services Administration, and other agencies lavished praise on the adjacent Department of Education Building, which they are now seeking to place on the National Register of Historic Places (a PDF of the eligibility form is available here).
Can one imagine a more sterile, soulless building? It conjures thoughts not of education but of faceless bureaucracy, with all the character and warmth of a computer punch card. Who would miss it if it were demolished? The aesthetic and cultural confusion demonstrated by these sorts of agency decisions is astounding.
The good news is that there is a solution; the future is rooted in the past. What we need is a plan for Washington, DC that carries on the vision set by our founders and their architects: a McMillan Plan for our time that would preserve and extend the best of our capital city into a third century.
It was none other than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who made sure that the magnificent Jefferson Memorial was built over the objections of out-of-touch elites. He explicitly paralleled the importance of continuity of tradition in architecture to that in government:
[T]he principles of harmony and of necessity require that the building of a new structure shall blend with the essential lines of the old. It is this combination of the old and the new that marks orderly peaceful progress, not only in buildings but in building government itself . . . .
Today Washington sorely needs that sort of statesmanship—the cultural confidence to stand up to architects who think they know better than the American people. We believe that the vision of today’s leaders can equal that of our founders, and that offers hope for the future of our capital.
On Friday February 2, 2013, I’ll be giving a talk about Frank Gehry’s design for the planned Eisenhower Memorial to the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society at the University of Virginia. The society, which claims to be the “oldest continuously existing collegiate debating society in North America,” was founded in 1825, the first year the university held classes. The event starts at 7:29 p.m. sharp.
The Jefferson Literary and Debating Society Hall – Architect: Thomas Jefferson (circa 1817)
I suppose I’ll be preaching to the choir, alas, since the room in which they meet is Jeffersonian classical (notice especially the rhythmic Chinese railing). A self-taught architect influenced by Palladio (but who sought to create an American national style–cf. the White House and Capitol, the designs of which he oversaw), President Thomas Jefferson designed the building to be a dining hall. However, the university turned it over to the society in 1837. The society’s use of the hall has been continuous except for the Civil War, when the Confederacy used it as a hospital.
How is a taste in this beautiful art [architecture] to be formed in our countrymen, unless we avail ourselves of every occasion when public buildings are to be erected, of presenting to them models for their study and imitation? . . . You see, I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts. But it is an enthusiasm of which I am not ashamed, as its object is to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile them to the rest of the world, and procure them its praise.
I do think democracy has produced chaos, especially visual. A lot of people don’t like it and yearn for nineteenth-century images, forgetting that the politics of those images were different than the democracy we love.
***
Most of us believe in democracy, but the system has created a world that looks strange, chaotic, and different, and we do not like it. We are struggling and it is easier to go back to models which are more coherent and seem more seductive now. We have to remember that those models came under a different political time and philosophy. If we are to survive, we need to live in the present and try to work towards the future. I will reiterate what I have said many times: I cannot face my children it I tell them I have no more ideas and I have to copy something that happened before. It is like giving up and telling them there is no future for them.
***
I think of this in terms of controlled chaos. I always relate it to democracy. Democracy is pluralism, the collision of ideas. Our cities are built on a collision of thought. Look out there. There is a building by [architect I. M.] Pei, there is a bridge, there is that huge hunk in the distance. If it wasn’t for democracy it would all look like one thing. Stata [Gehry’s building at MIT] represents that idea, which is where I think we are in life now.
In his design for the National Memorial to President Eisenhower, Gehry has well-captured what he sees as the ugliness and chaos of democracy–a vision anathema to the Founding Fathers as well as Eisenhower himself. As the former Supreme Allied Commander, who had witnessed true chaos and destruction first-hand, said in 1962:
When we see our very art forms so changed that we seem to have forgotten the works of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, and speak in the present in terms of a piece of canvas that looks like a broken down [Model T Ford], loaded with paint, has been driven over it, is this improvement? What has happened to our concept of beauty and decency and morality?
Note that Gehry, like most leading contemporary architects, believes that architecture ought to slavishly kowtow to the alleged “Spirit of the Times”–no matter how deplorable those times are–as opposed to attempting to ameliorate them. Such architects are passive, feckless fatalists.
Frank Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial with “Young Man” Ike Statue Standing on the Wall at Center
For reasons too embarrassing to mention, I recently stumbled across the U.S. Army Field Band Jazz Ambassador’s educational video “Inside the Big Band.” At around the 15:40 mark, the outfit explains how to play funk and hip hop, as only the U.S. Army Field Band can explain.
That’s called playing it straight, folks. [Insert “Play that Funky Music” joke here.]
This is eerily similar to a 2005 episode of Look Around You, a pitch-perfect British parody of early 1980s children’s science television. (To this day, I have a 5- year-old’s crush on Ginny Ortiz. Damn you, 3-2-1 Contact, for causing me to major in physics for two painful years.) In one episode (or as they call it, “module”), singers competed to predict what music would sound like in the year 2000.
Before his performance, competitor Antony Carmichael, a profiterol chef from London, explained, “There’s a new kind of music emerging in America where people talk over the music. . . . It’s known as ‘rap music.'”
If you enjoyed that, also check out the uninhibited performance by shy theoretical physicist Tony Baxter.
And the third and last performance, Tony Rudd’s Bob Dylan-esque “Machadaynu,” was popular enough to receive a heavily sampled remix.
Within that door
A man sits or the image of a man
Staring at stillness on a marble floor.
No drum distracts him nor no trumpet can
Although he hears the trumpet and the drum.
He listens for the time to come.
Within this door
A man sits or the image of a man
Remembering the time before.
He hears beneath the river in its choking channel
A deeper river rushing on the stone,
Sits there in his doubt alone,
Discerns the Principle,
The guns begin,
Emancipates—but not the slaves,
The Union—not from servitude but shame:
Emancipates the Union from the monstrous name
Whose infamy dishonored
Even the great Founders in their graves …
He saves the Union and the dream goes on.
Written for ceremonies marking the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation and read by the poet at the memorial on September 22, 1962.
Goethe famously said that “Architecture is music frozen in time.” Expressing that literally, Le Corbusier and composer Iannis Xenakis co-designed the Philips Pavilion for Expo ’58 in Brussels. In particular, the hyperboloid building, shaped like a stomach, was inspired by Xenakis’ scratchy composition Metastasis (listen). “Metastasis” means “the spread of a disease from one organ or part to another non-adjacent organ or part.” (Is this what the Dutch electronics company had in mind?) As visitors entered and exited the pavilion, they heard a recording of Xenakis’ Concret PH, which is nothing but the noise of burning charcoal (listen). Xenakis described the projected sound as “like needles darting from everywhere.” Cutting edge, indeed. In the interior, visitors heard Edgard Varèse’s disjointed piece Poème électronique, which was specially written agglomerated for the pavilion (listen). I commend the composers for accurately capturing Le Corbusier’s architecture in sound.
Philips Pavilion at Expo ’58 – Architects Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis
Writing for The New York Times, Robert Beaser, a professor and chairperson of the composition department at Juilliard, explains how classical architecture in Rome inspired him to reject the barrenness of Modernism in music.
The year was 1977, and this 23-year-old composer arrived wet behind the ears to take up residence at the American Academy in Rome [ed. — designed circa 1912, as he notes, by the Beaux Arts firm of McKim, Mead & White] — home abroad to American artists and scholars since 1913 — as the youngest recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship in Musical Composition. . . .
The American Academy in Rome (1913) – Architects: McKim, Mead & White
That was also year I came to understand the reasons why “art music” had become the mess it had: A Faustian marriage of Hegelian teleology and apocalyptic 20th-century world wars. [ed. — compare the ideology underlying architectural Modernism; Faust, recall, sold his soul to the devil] For a young composer entering into this world the sanctioned choices felt impossibly narrow. . . .
Here were the rules from the dark heart of 1970s orthodoxy:
No octaves. Ever.
Pre-compositional charting: required.
Never repeat anything.
Nothing linear.
Continuity or atmosphere verboten.
Basically, if you want to sing, join a choir.
Don’t let any revisionist historian tell you otherwise — it was a closed system. The battle lines were clearly drawn: tonality versus atonality, serialization versus alleatoric/open form/conceptualism. . . .
Living for a year in one of the wellsprings of Western Civilization helped me find the courage to look inward, to locate that which was particular to me. Visiting the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, Masaccio’s elemental frescoes rattled me — so stripped of artifice, lyric, human, and bare. How could I find such clarity in my own music? Where could I find notes that spoke the truth? . . .
History is not our enemy: A renaissance Italian architect might have looked at Roman house and said: “here is a form that I can use for my own purposes.” The result would be anything but a copy — but a playful riff on the prevailing orthodoxy. We can always learn from what came before us, but we actually need to look at it.
If you happen to be in Waco, Texas tomorrow October 11, I’m giving a talk at Baylor’s Honors College on “A Monumental Fight: The Eisenhower Memorial and America’s Historical Memory.” Here’s the press release:
WACO, Texas (Oct. 9, 2012) – Justin Shubow, chairman of the National Civic Art Society in Washington, D.C., will be hosted by the Honors College at Baylor University for a lecture on, “A Monumental Fight: The Eisenhower Memorial and America’s Historical Memory.” The event will take place at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11, in the Alexander Reading Room of Alexander Residence Hall, 1413 S. Seventh St.
Shubow is a leading authority in the field of civic art innovation and preservation. He authored The Gehry Towers Over Eisenhower and has contributed reviews and criticism to numerous publications. In June 2012, he testified to the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands on the future of the National Mall.
“We demand an investigation of the memorial planning, competition, design and approval processes,” Shubow said, regarding the subject of his lecture. “Congress must investigate, as must the GSA Office of Inspector General and the General Accounting Office. At the very least, the facts warrant an entirely new competition, one that is open, democratic, inclusive and fair – one that is as open to an unknown designer from Abilene as much as a ‘starchitect’ from L.A.”
The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, call 254-710-1523.
by Brent Salter, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805
[Published in the October 2012 issue of Vanity Fair.]
To the Editor:
In his article on the growing opposition to the design for the National Memorial to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Paul Goldberger doubted whether the Eisenhower family’s denunciation of Frank Gehry’s deconstructionist plan should matter at all.
In 1964 the Roosevelt family condemned the modernist design for the F.D.R. Memorial, which was the work of one of the country’s leading architecture firms. Speaking for his family, the president’s eldest son said about the proposed monument, “We don’t like it, and I’m sure father wouldn’t either.” That was good enough to kill it; the architects had the good grace to withdraw their plan.
Likewise, there is no doubt that Eisenhower, who was famous for his modesty, would have hated Gehry’s grandiose design. Disdaining modern art and architecture, which he did not believe represented the taste of the American people, the president said in 1962, “We see our very art forms so changed that we seem to have forgotten the works of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. . . . What has happened to our concept of beauty and decency and morality?”
Goldberger also makes a telling omission. Despite the thousands of words in his article, he does not defend Gehry’s design. Instead, he merely defends the architect. Whether or not Gehry should gracefully heed the Eisenhower family’s fierce opposition, not to mention the president’s own taste in art, he should listen to what his friends are saying — or pointedly are not.
