The problem with those ugly government buildings
By now you’ve surely seen the Buzzfeed article snarkily picking apart 7 of the ugliest government buildings in DC. Normally, I’ll stay away from posting Buzzfeed click bait stuff, but aside form the article being somewhat funny, there is a deeper issue with these horrible, Brutalist government buildings that the author doesn’t even scratch. I’ll let Adam Kotsko from his amazing blog post “The Inertia of the Suburbs” lay out the first part of the issue:
Unfortunately, it appears that the U.S. only had one relatively brief window for such forceful state planning, extending from FDR to Nixon (only 40 years out of the 200+ of the Republic’s existence) — and it wasted it on the suburbs.
I would add one caveat to this that the Buzzfeed article points out: we not only wasted all this wealth and forceful state planning on the suburbs, but we overwhelmingly spent it on ugly, impractical, and embarrassing buildings as well. Nearly all American government buildings (schools, admin buildings, police precincts, prisons) were built between the 1940s and the 1990s, and sadly this massive build out coincided with the mass appeal of Brutalist/Modernist/Postmodernist architecture, leaving Americans with a high water mark period marked most predominantly by outrageously hideous and demoralizing buildings, so shoddily built that they are already falling apart and need to be replaced. Where Belgium took all the wealth they skimmed out of Africa in the 19th century and built the palaces and grand places of Brussels and Antwerp, where Paris spent the 18th and 19th centuries building a city that to this day is the architectural and place-making wonder of the world, we here in the US took the largest influx of wealth the world has ever seen and built stuff like this:
America’s misspent golden age would be less hard to take, if so much of the built environment wasn’t also built so badly. We’re now collectively coming down from the fleeting high of being the world’s dominant superpower at the exact time that almost everything we’ve built in the last 75 years needs to be replaced. This just doesn’t mean all the crappy, far-flung suburbs that will be deserts of poverty and alienation in short order, but also all of our government buildings, all of our roads, water mains, electricity, train lines, everything needs to be replaced because we’ve built almost nothing worth keeping since 1960.
It’s quite a predicament we’ve gotten ourselves in.
