My heart skipped a beat last when I stumbled across an article called The Case for Saving Ugly Buildings.  I wanted to learn what  makes a building ugly, and what makes an ugly building valuable.  Instead I learned that landmark preservation laws in the United States generally single out buildings for their “singularity” and “irreplaceability” without regard for their utility, sustainability and aesthetics.  And I learned that many cities, like New York, enacted preservation laws at a time (in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s) when it was already too late to preserve beloved Victorian and International Style structures, but just in time to preserve brutalist ones, which are typically very difficult to maintain, to renovate, and to look at.  Maybe they should have called the article The Case for Saving Brutalist Buildings.

Brutalism was a movement that, obviously, didn’t put too much stock in appearances.  Rendered in hulking, windowless, raw concrete forms, brutalist monuments often look less like buildings than futuristic ruins.  Some, like Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art and Architecture Building, are confrontational in image but thrilling in spatial and sculptural character.  Others aren’t.  The article cites the AT&T Long Lines building at 33 Thomas Street in New York City as an example of the latter.  It’s a building that’s singled out by novelist Teju Cole too, in Open City.  The hero of that book, who wanders sadly and endlessly through the city, imagines workers inside the windowless tower pushing heavy carts through muffled, shadowed hallways, distressed from the lack of light and air.  (Actually, the building houses equipment for phone switching.)  Although its concrete frame is clad in reddish granite, the building makes no concessions to good manners.  Swallowing an entire block near the heart of TriBeCa, it’s blank facades have a monstrous, sullen presence.  But during the day the Long Lines building possesses a kind of laconic American heroism, like the Hoover Dam.  And at night, its hard edges softened, it has the quiet mystery of a Hugh Ferriss rendering.  One of the pleasures of New York is the democracy of the streets.  Everything fits inside them, even those buildings that make no effort to please the eye or the body.