Two Demolitions: Prentice Women's Hospital (2013) and Penn Station (1963)

Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital (1975) in Chicago is being demolished as I write. May even be gone already, for all I know, since the first blows were struck on October 11. This happened despite a prolonged campaign by preservationists and fans of modernist architecture, who consider the hospital a masterpiece of Brutalism.

Some of the building's fans are asking if this might be the "Penn Station moment" for the preservation of modern architecture, that is, a loss that so shocks people it leads to a sustained and successful preservation movement.

I doubt it.

Historic preservation is not about saving buildings because they are old or noteworthy examples of a style. It is not really about saving buildings at all. It is about saving us from the loss of a world that seems more gracious and noble than the one we live in today. New York's old Penn Station, built in 1910, was to New Yorkers the survivor of a bygone age of splendor, when they built majestic buildings just because they could. Its replacement, Madison Square Garden, seems like the opposite: cheap, ugly, shabby, the symbol of a fallen age. As Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in her 1963 “Farewell to Penn Station”:

Any city gets what it admires, will pay for and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn't afford to keep in clean. We want and deserve tin-horn architecture in a tin-horn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build, but by those we have destroyed.

A building like old Penn Station evokes feelings of awe and wonder, and its loss made people mourn because it seems that we can't build like that any more. Even Alexandra Lange, an admirer of the Prentice Women's Hospital who worked to save it, admits that it evoked something very different:

Prentice hospital was not beautiful. Its cloverleaf top is weird, even to an admirer like me. Its glassed-in bottom, as architecture critic Blair Kamin wrote in the Chicago Tribune, was “boxy” and “unremarkable.” You can tell people a building is important as often as you like, but unless they feel it, they won’t cry over its destruction, and they won’t organize so that it never happens again. Preservationists (and architecture critics, myself included) can learn to tell better stories about buildings: their secret spaces, their best angles, their relationship to history and use. But experience might still tell a different story. It’s dark. It’s rough. It makes me feel small. It makes me want to run away.

One day modernists are going to recognize that most people don't want ugly buildings that make them want to run away. Not to mention that space was cleared for many of America's modern "masterpieces" by bulldozing whole blocks of lovely old houses, which makes fighting for their preservation a tad hypocritical. The people who built them wanted to sweep away the past, because they thought that was a good thing.

I am a flexible person. If some people want buildings that make them cower in terror, sure, whatever. But the world is full of this stuff. Not just architecture was built in the Brutalist vein, after all, but vast amounts of our infrastructure: highway overpasses, interchanges, dams, canals, power plants, etc. I can get that feeling of being overawed by ghastly avatars of the Dark Side underneath any of a hundred urban freeways.

That is what Brutalism evokes for me: a world in which the old and the beautiful were demolished to make room for the intentionally ugly. A world in which not caring about what was lost was a badge of toughness that architects wore with pride. To face the future, they said, you need a heart of concrete and steel To that world I say, good riddance. So I cannot mourn when the buildings that gave physical form to the murderous rationality of modernism are swept away in their turn.