RAMSA
Museum of the American Revolution at night
So it appears, to judge by critics of Robert A.M. Stern's design, unveiled last month, for the proposed Museum of the American Revolution, in Philadelphia. Except that the only definition of "revolutionary" acceptable to most architecture critics is the conventional definition: modernist. That is, it must "look like the inside of a refrigerator," to quote one commenter, "honcho," exasperated by the entirely predictable critical fusillade against Stern's admirable building.
"Looking For Revolutionary American Architecture? You Won't Find It at the New Museum of the American Revolution," cries critic Nathaniel Popkin at hiddencityphila.org. "Imitation," he asserts, "is the self-imposed prison of an architect without imagination."
(Huh? History of architecture circa 500 B.C. to A.D. 1950, call your office!)
"Robert A.M. Stern's Conservative Museum of the American Revolution Design Snuffs the Revolutionary Spirit" is the boilerplate thrust of Kelly Chan's critique at artinfo.com. "To insist on the need to graft a 'historical' building onto a historical site is to reduce the area's vast and varied history to a shallow, vague -- not to mention confused -- image of the past."
In a gentler tone, Philadelphia Inquirer critic Inga Saffron also disparages the design. "Our forefathers," she declares, "created a new nation by marrying what was good about the past with the latest ideas about organizing society. The design for the Museum of the American Revolution should aspire to no less."
In short, she, like most of her fellow architecture critics, will only be satisfied if a Martian spaceship lands near Independence Hall. Only buildings that imitate the intergalactic motif popular among starchitects in recent decades will do. Show Stern the gate, please! A conventional revolutionary style requires something on the order of Frank "O!" Gehry's whirly-swirly, or maybe the ziggy-zaggy of Zaha "Ha-Ha" -- excuse me, Dame "Ha-Ha" -- Hadid, recently knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
What the critics resist acknowledging is that Stern's design is by far the more genuinely revolutionary. The modernist movement in architecture is a century old, and has been dominant in America for more than half a century. It is the establishment. Most people dislike it, and are glad traditional beauty is fighting back.
The methods used by the architectural establishment to suppress such a revival would make King George III blush. Totalitarian is not too strong a word for the phenomenon.
The study of architectural history and practice was literally purged from the curricula of almost all architecture schools after World War II, and remains so today. Students with classical sensibilities are browbeaten regularly by professors. Traditional building proposals are excluded from public, commercial and institutional commissions by rigged competitions and brainwashed facilities committees and corporate boards. Skilled jobs held by generations of immigrant craftsmen have been killed in the process, enabling modernists to intone blandly that capable artisans are difficult to find. Ugliness has become so pervasively integrated into culture that resistance seems futile -- so much so that the mass German pychosis under Nazi rule, as described by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), leaps to mind.
True, there has been no Boston Massacre in architecture. None was necessary. Classical architecture went softly into that dark night. Society accepted the New Order like a "bracing slap across the face," as Tom Wolfe put it in From Bauhaus to Our House (1981).
But today, the classical revival is as revolutionary as any movement America has seen in recent decades. Bob Stern is among its leaders. His museum design, carried out with RAMSA partners Alexander P. Lamis and Kevin Smith, reflects its spirit. This is what its critics, with their narrow-minded sense of the revolutionary, refuse to acknowledge.
Indeed, Stern's design is not at all the slavish imitation of historical precedent that the critics would lead you to expect. Rather, its Georgian classicism doffs its hat to contemporary design clichés with such vigor that no sentient third grader could fail to discern its recent vintage. Not enough to prevent it from fitting into Philadelphia's founding historic district -- already marred by modernism -- but too much for its critics to admit without revealing the cynicism and insincerity of their criticism.
So don't be alarmed. For the rest of us, Philadelphia's new Museum of the American Revolution will be plenty revolutionary.
