Art blogger Tyler Green threw this question out there in response to the American Institute of Architects list of 150 favourite American buildings. So I’m responding with my list. I’m sure this list will come across as pedestrian or “out of it”, but I don’t care. Personally, my favourite building hasn’t been built yet. That building being the isolated Brutalist concrete bunker that I live out my days in after I withdraw from society and become a survivalist hermit.
Here they are, in no particular order
Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA
This building is still in my system, and I can’t stop being in love with it, so I’m getting it out of the way by listing it first. The BAM/PAF building demonstrates what’s best about Brutalism (my favourite style of architecture), by not forgetting to be inhabitable and usable. It echoes the geometric depth of a Gehry, but does so in a much more subdued and elegant way. I’ve always loved college campus architecture in general. If you want to read more about this guy, just check out my last post.
The Chrylser Building, New York, New York
An ornate monument to America’s triumph as an industrial power, the Chrysler Building is the closest thing our society has erected to a pyramid. The stainless steel spire of the Chrysler still dazzles, a fitting crown for the king of New York skyscrapers. I’ve never seen it up close and in person, but I feel like I know it, through films and photographs of it’s iconic interior and exterior. One of the things that makes this building one of my favourites is how it was crafted to be a thing of splendor and beauty both inside and out. It’s a building so gonzo that it’s surprising that it even got built.
Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, Austin, TX
In my various travels, I keep returning to this building. The structure sits simple and revealed on the UT Austin campus, adjacent to a beautiful fountain and across from the campus’ iconic tower. Outside it is plain and dignified, inside it is surprisingly filled with life. The interior of the building is smartly designed, providing the public with an awesome multi-story interior window showing the shelves of red boxes that contain the 40 million pages of documents housed there. While I understand and appreciate the greatness of Lincoln, I cannot truly relate to the struggles of his day. I have never been in the library without shedding tears for the pains of the 1960’s and for LBJ. It masquerades as tourist attraction, but it is really a mausoleum to the memory of man and his era.
Pan-Pacific Auditorium, Los Angeles, CA, built 1935, burned down in 1989
Built one year after the almost mythincal, ur-design of the Chrysler Airflow, the Pan-Pacific Auditorium was an early example of the short lived Streamline Moderne movement. Taking it’s design cues from art deco and incorporating nautical themes, this building, and others like it, embodied the proto-science fiction fantasies of a world at the far end of the industrial age. In an era when Los Angeles became synonymous with suburbia and car culture, this building was a gutsy reminder of the hopeful intentions of the city I love most.
It’s almost fitting that this building no longer exists, as the movement it symbolised seems perpetually unfulfilled and aborted, as if the utilitarianism of the post World War II world had not enough room for Streamline Moderne or Art Deco. I came to love this building through multiple watchings of Xanadu, and I believe I have faint memories of passing it as a child, which may be why I have such a strong attachment to it.
San Francisco City Hall, San Francisco, CA
I never fail to be amazed by this building. This building, built to replace the city hall destroyed in the 1906 earthquake/fire, represents the coming of age of cities in the Western United States. Being from Los Angeles, where architecture is temporary, and where our “real architecture” tends to be domestic in orientation, I’m amazed at the sheer classiness of this building and the buildings that surround it. There was a moment in the mid 19th century when California was a nation unto itself, and this building would have made a fitting capital for a growing republic. My “California Secessionist” sympathies aside, this building makes a fitting center of government to San Francisco, America’s most “European” city.
The End
So that’s it, my five. These are all buildings that I love, for whatever reason. Buidlings that I thought about for this list included Ted Kaczynski’s shack, the Vehicle Assembly Building, Los Angeles City Hall, the Cal Trans District 7 Headquarters, the Winnebago/RV (not a building, really, but like a building and uniquely American), the Texas Capital Building and the Lincoln Memorial.