Critic’s insider view of architecture

“The world isn’t interested in architecture,” says Mark Lamster.

Lamster’s remark is surprising on a number of counts. First of all, he’s speaking at the Arkansas Arts Center, delivering a lecture called “Sizing Up Architecture: A Critic’s View,” as part of the ongoing Art of Architecture lecture series. Many of those attending the lecture are local architects. And Lamster himself is the architecture critic at the Dallas Morning News and an associate professor at the University of Texas at Arlington School of Architecture. Murmuring ensues.

Undaunted, Lamster defends his statement. “TED [technology, entertainment, design] Talks, founded by an architect [Richard Saul Wurman], found that the most popular topic to cover is happiness,” he says. “The least popular is architecture. People want to hear about people.”

Then he delivers the punchline. “We have to get people to understand that architecture is instrumental to happiness.”

To that end, Lamster strives to offer a perspective on the built environment that helps others see and talk about their surroundings in new ways. “We want to get people to have a conversation that they wouldn’t normally have. This is the story I’m interested in telling,” he says. “Being a critic has taught me how to talk about architecture.”

The experience of growing up in New York shaped Lamster’s architectural views-a combination, he says, “of Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver, nostalgic as opposed to hard-edged, dangerous and seedy. I like these paradoxical vistas.” He would likely find Little Rock’s thriving River Market district intriguing, as well as the desolate warehouse area that spawned it.

By way of example he cites New York’s Seagram building, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson and dedicated in 1959, which he calls “a giant washing machine on Park Avenue” that rehabilitated the reputation of the Bronfman family, which grew rich during Prohibition thanks to American bootleggers who brought Seagram’s booze over the border from Canada. Lamster says that locating the building on Manhattan’s Park Avenue, amid some of the most venerated old-line American institutions, bought the company respectability.

Then there’s the 15-story neo-Gothic tower of Day & Meyer, Murray & Young on Second Avenue just north of the end of the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, “a weird windowless building [opened in 1928] with a secret life as a giant storage cabinet with a tracked rail system to move steel vaults” long before the invention of computerized distribution centers.

Lamster bemoans the destruction of what he calls “masterworks,” such as the modernist 1950s-era Ruth Carter Stevenson House in Fort Worth, Texas in 2013. He describes it as “a pinwheel of creamy brick, stucco and redwood … that somehow managed to be monumental and unpretentious” and sees its demolition as a devaluing of history.

Many in Little Rock may feel the same way about the recent rapid dismantling and sweeping away of the dramatic old Arkla Gas headquarters, built in the 1950s, that sat between River Market Avenue and Rock Street and Fourth Street and Capitol Avenue; it’s to be replaced by an 84-unit apartment project. Less physically compelling but a longtime fixture in midtown is the five-story Baker Building at West Markham Street and University Avenue, taken down to the ground to be replaced by a Chipotle restaurant. Then there’s the huge, boxy Brandon House property at 12th Street and University, now gone; its owners are considering various development options. And most recently the wrecking ball hit the low-slung brick-walled West Markham Professional Building at West Markham and Tyler streets, which had fallen into disrepair and was being used as an off-the-grid shelter by homeless people.

Fortunately, projects such as the rehabilitation of the Arkansas Senate Chamber and Offices, Mosaic Templars Cultural Center at Ninth and Broadway, Dreamland Ballroom in Taborian Hall at 800 W. Ninth St., and all manner of restoration taking place on Little Rock’s Main Street are helping to maintain Little Rock’s historic sense of style.

Concerned residents often rally in an effort to save such structures. But when beautiful old buildings are demolished, civic concerns are of little value, Lamster says. “It’s not about style or aesthetics or beauty, but money. In Dallas, there’s plenty of money, but nobody to make it happen.”

He sees old buildings as a source of “architecture for everyone.” Among his favorites in Dallas is Love Field’s Braniff Building, an airy aluminum and glass structure designed to evoke flight, which is being transformed into a mixed-use complex with unique spaces, including an observation deck, that will be open to the public.

Compare the Braniff Building with recently constructed Museum Tower in the Dallas Arts District, which Lamster describes in the Dallas Morning News as “a condo for plutocrats” that he accuses of reflecting art-scorching light into the very museum district for which it is named.

Achallenge with architecture and urban design-and a hot topic for architecture critics-is that what sounds like a good idea at the time can cause problems in the future. An example is Little Rock’s Interstate 630, intended to provide an easily accessible east-west arterial freeway to move commuters in and out of downtown, with the consequence of dividing the city into racially and economically disparate neighborhoods defined as being North of I-630 and South of I-630.

Lamster has a similar situation in Dallas; he gets agitated when discussing a argument-inducing idea of tearing out IH-345. “Dallas didn’t realize what it had in the 1960s-a walkable, thriving downtown,” he says. “The city decided that streetcars and walkways had to be done away with so cars could get some speed going. So it created a noose, an elevated ring road that segregates the urban core from the rest of the city, causing blight and keeping people apart. We’re fighting to remove it, to bring life back to downtown.”

It’s a controversial proposition, he says-one that’s sure to keep an architecture critic busy for the foreseeable future.

Perspective, Pages 83 on 03/30/2014

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