Architecture as language

The State House in Indianapolis is a good building. It's not particularly spectacular in its architecture. In some ways it's just a larger and more elaborate typical Midwestern county courthouse, like Bloomington's or Fort Wayne's, only grander. \nIt is a good building because its architecture resonates with its purpose. The building is the home of the Indiana state government, and it is meant to express the solemnity, permanence and grandeur of democratic rule. It succeeds at that goal.\nOther buildings closer to home express a similar institutional sense of purpose. The serious and formidable-looking limestone churches along Kirkwood evoke the old hymn "A Mighty Fortress is Our God." And Collins looks like a college dorm should, with its handsome buildings opening onto a central lawn.\nBut as one moves out from the older parts of campus, the architecture becomes less attractive. Read Quad, where I lived for nearly four years, is home to a fine community, but the building itself is 'Well, if it were to be razed, and a Collins-like structure built in its place, would anyone complain?' Most of the newer dorms, like Foster and McNutt, are just as unloved.\nOther postwar campus buildings fail to distinguish themselves. The Geology Building is a massive block of stone, and Ballantine Hall is a monstrosity. Ballantine is especially terrible. The building's bulky, ugly exterior is matched by its plain and sometimes puzzling interior (i.e., why is that map on the first floor?).\nWhat made these buildings so awful? They were built rapidly during what critic James Kunstler (www.kunstler.com) calls America's "Soviet Period" in architecture. After the war, architects stopped designing buildings to express old-fashioned values like "grandeur" in favor of the International Style. The intellectual guiding lights of this movement were convinced that history was irrelevant and that social harmony required creating buildings without ornamentation like the gargoyles of Maxwell Hall or the Greek-inspired design of the Auditorium.\nArchitects' rejection of older building styles coincided with the explosive growth of universities around the United States, IU included. Buildings without decoration are cheap and fit into stretched university budgets well. The Main Library is a perfect example of what this combination of fashion and finances led to: two boxes without windows.\nIn case you haven't noticed, the International Style never brought about world peace. It just left us with a lot of ugly buildings. Lots and lots of ugly buildings, in fact. Kunstler writes that 80 percent of everything built in America was built within the last 50 years, and those buildings will be around for a long time because we can't afford to replace that many buildings.\nMost people never fell in love with postwar architecture. They continued to prefer the more decorative styles of the past. Until 9/11, most New Yorkers thought the World Trade Center was undistinguished and preferred older landmarks like the Empire State Building, just as most IU students hate Ballantine Hall.\n Architecture is slowly recovering. The education building isn't perfect (for one thing, it's too far away from campus), but it is more visually stimulating than Geology. Other new buildings, like the Neal-Marshall Education Center and the planned multidisciplinary science building, are welcome additions to one of the country's most beautiful campuses.\nBut this recovery isn't inevitable. When we travel to Europe, Americans marvel at Paris, Rome and London. We never ask how we could build cities like that at home. We lack the vocabulary to demand better places to live. And since good buildings express their purpose, our failure to articulate a purpose for our buildings means that we end up living in an endless sprawl of concrete.