Critic Curt Gambetta brings forward an age old uncomfortable question on corporate public spaces whose main purpose is often curtailed by exemplary architecture that is hard to reject.
His piece titled, "No free gifts," carefully borrowed from the anthropologist Mary Douglas, asks the question of, what would be the return of such corporate gifts. In his article, Mr. Gambetta alludes to large tax breaks and other conservative agendas of corporate cultures. After all, “nothing in life is truly free.”
"Much as ‘radical transparency’ is demanded from senior management at Bridgewater, the openness of Grace Farms to its community feels forced, its agenda delegated from above. When I visited this winter, the library contained an assortment of suggested reading, a series of social justice greatest hits for anxious Northeast liberals to get up to speed on: Bell Hooks, postcolonialism and so on. Next to a series of flyers about the foundation’s involvement with advocacy against sexual slavery and other social justice causes, a series of tablet computers invited browsing. The screen backgrounds seemed fitting: four executives in suits, sitting in front of a wall of glass, in front of which hovered a series of browsing options dedicated to the theme of ‘justice’. It is a classic image of liberal justice: something debated on behalf of those who require it, its protagonists nowhere to be found." - interwoven
I'm done with these pieces that try to find the sins of the owner in the architecture. It's the political hackery of our time. Maybe Grace Farms owners are hypocrites, but that doesn't say anything about the thing itself any more than Volkswagens are tied to Hitler.
Lebbues Woods covered this well in a piece on the Seagram Building:
"The Seagram Company assumes the aesthetic raiments of government, bestowing on the public space of the street an imposing demonstration of social hierarchy and the ethical relationships of New York’s social classes. The rich give, the poorer receive. The rich are generous—they bestow on the teeming masses beauty, and space for gathering and enjoyment, and ask, in return, what the givers of all gifts ask, appreciation and a kind of fealty that amounts to a confirmation of the social arrangement the gift expresses."
Thats just such a beautiful buliding. In time all architecture sins are forgiven. See Giza, tenochtitlan, rome...etc. The object becomes dislocated from the crimes of the times, and if good enough, its essence supersedes its original function.
i don't know where to even begin. wait, no, i do. read up on some background on the project - it's a church that's not a church because the neighbors didn't want a church and the property wasn't zoned to be a church. but they most definitely have an evangelical mission and, at least on my visit there, were completely transparent about that as far as they could go without saying they were a church.
so, to compare a church to or as a form of "corporate public space" completely misses both the intentions of the founders as well as deliberately mis-reads the nature of the facility. this is not a corporate public space, ala the plaza in front the seagram building. it's not even close or in the same genre. it's a church, which has opened it's grounds to those who make the trek.
and if we're seriously going to indict every church that takes money from individuals who make it in ways we disagree with... sigh...
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I'm done with these pieces that try to find the sins of the owner in the architecture. It's the political hackery of our time. Maybe Grace Farms owners are hypocrites, but that doesn't say anything about the thing itself any more than Volkswagens are tied to Hitler.
Lebbues Woods covered this well in a piece on the Seagram Building:
"The Seagram Company assumes the aesthetic raiments of government, bestowing on the public space of the street an imposing demonstration of social hierarchy and the ethical relationships of New York’s social classes. The rich give, the poorer receive. The rich are generous—they bestow on the teeming masses beauty, and space for gathering and enjoyment, and ask, in return, what the givers of all gifts ask, appreciation and a kind of fealty that amounts to a confirmation of the social arrangement the gift expresses."
Thats just such a beautiful buliding. In time all architecture sins are forgiven. See Giza, tenochtitlan, rome...etc. The object becomes dislocated from the crimes of the times, and if good enough, its essence supersedes its original function.
Woods is offering more of a direct architecture critique there, though wrong. Grace Farms is a public oriented facility called out as hypocritical. Seagram Tower is critiqued as a show of elite dominance. Anyone who has seen Mies' unique, transparent, classical (ordered) take on modernism from the plaza may disagree. modernism was the ultimate leftist style, tied directly to housing for the masses, and Seagram its shining example. Postmodern towers of the more recent past, with opaque reflective glass, hovering forms, and priveledged crowns (like Citigroup, AT&T, VIA57, Houston, etc) or little connection to ground level would be better examples of elitist form.
Roman elites were also known to donate/build public works projects as a display of their wealth
Chemex, I understand your reasoning but disagree. Mies was a classicist. That Seagram is done in the style of modernism does not mean its proportions and motivation aren't thoroughly patrician.
I see Grace Farms as the updating of that - it is no longer enough to disguise corporate money in the "unique, transparent, classical modernism, the ultimate leftist style..." - instead it must be more thoroughly dressed up as Grace Farms has done.
Also agree with other posters - all sins leading to iconic buildings are forgiven - sometimes in a shockingly short time period - ahem - CCTV.
this building is a great piece of landscape architecture ;)
i don't know where to even begin. wait, no, i do. read up on some background on the project - it's a church that's not a church because the neighbors didn't want a church and the property wasn't zoned to be a church. but they most definitely have an evangelical mission and, at least on my visit there, were completely transparent about that as far as they could go without saying they were a church.
so, to compare a church to or as a form of "corporate public space" completely misses both the intentions of the founders as well as deliberately mis-reads the nature of the facility. this is not a corporate public space, ala the plaza in front the seagram building. it's not even close or in the same genre. it's a church, which has opened it's grounds to those who make the trek.
and if we're seriously going to indict every church that takes money from individuals who make it in ways we disagree with... sigh...
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