In London newspapers they’re debating who’ll take over directorship of the National Theatre next year, when Nicholas Hynter leaves, the same way New Yorkers might talk about who’d take over the Yankees if Joe Girardi left. The fuss brought my attention to the National’s remarkable facilities, a sprawling, Brutalist complex at the south end of Waterloo Bridge designed by architect Denys Lasdun that opened in 1973, just a few months after the Theatre’s founding director, Laurence Olivier, retired. For a structure housing a revered national cultural institution, the building is deeply aggressive, modern, and discordant, not stereotypically British. When it opened Prince Charles observed, smartly, “The National Theatre seems like a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting." Of course today, after the success of the Tate Modern, we’re all tremendously fond of power stations.

Yet I can’t get over how unattractive the National Theatre comes across in photographs. The structure is an immense one that encompasses three individual theaters, as if the three central theaters at Lincoln Center had been built under one roof. It’s composed as a jumble of skewed square towers and street-length floor balconies, all in poured concrete, unrelieved by openings or plantings, as if two cruise ships had collided with the aforementioned power plant. The National is too much building, broken into too many bits. Brutalism isn’t about being pretty, but this building doesn’t hold up well when compared with other monuments imagined in the same style. Its forms lack the the compressed sculptural drama of Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale, the hippiesh elan of Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ‘67, and the hopeful, idealizing geometries of Peter and Alison Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens. I can’t help but believe that the British theater is indebted to its language, one of precision, lyricism and economy. What a shame that this building doesn’t reach for any of that.

July 01, 2013 by Nalina Moses

February 07, 2012 by Nalina Moses

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.

December 08, 2011 by Nalina Moses

The Carpenter Center is Le Corbusier’s only building in North America, and one of the few modern buildings in Harvard Square. It’s both conspicuous and invisible. Set on a narrow, seventeenth-century block between two staid brick university buildings, it’s freakish and liberating. It doesn’t feel like an institutional building and it doesn’t even feel like a building, really. It feels more like a device for moving students in and out of its studios and galleries, a machine for coming and going.

The building is spectacularly porous. It has no center; in plan it’s two lung-shaped volumes connected with ramps that pass all the way through and spin off centripetally to the sidewalks at each side. Strangely, for a great modern building, there are no canonical photographs of it, and no single point of view from which you can see it as one whole thing. Approaching it on the sidewalk, you see the ramp and one half of the building, or the building cleft into two dissimilar parts. When I visited the Mill Owner’s Association Building in Ahmedabad I realized that Le Corbusier’s buildings, no matter how good they look from the outside, don’t lend themselves to one image. Instead they generate images for the moving visitor cinematically, and, in the case of that building, spectacularly. I could not leave the Mill Owner’s Building – I walked through it again and again. At the Carpenter Center, where I spent time roaming the galleries, I felt as if I were leaving it and then entering it again and again.

January 24, 2011 by Nalina Moses

Last night I saw “Inception,” six months after the buzz, but nonetheless excited to lose myself in an elegantly designed movie. But the experience wasn’t visually compelling at all. The architect in the movie, Ariadne, is a young, hippie-ish woman, which is cool. But the synthetic worlds that she constructs for her team of dream-invading global super-spies fall flat. Roads that bend at 90 degrees vertically? Mirrored Parisian courtyard blocks? Endlessly looping staircases? These are adolescent, Escher-like effects.

The one unique design in the film is the Ice Fortress that serves as a backdrop for a captive’s dream. Its setting reminds me of the snow planet where we find Luke at the beginning of “The Empire Strikes Back." But the building itself is a dazzling, over-the-top, brutalist concoction that was modeled after the Geisel Library at the University of California San Diego. That building, by architect William Pereira, was funded by and perhaps also inspired by the work of Theodor Geisel, the writer known as Dr. Seuss. In turning to this awesome, ridiculous building for inspiration, the movie-makers did something absolutely right.