The Life of American Cities: October 12, 2014

One Good Street Per City…Is It Enough?

Recently Ogden’s 25^th Street was named as one of America’s Ten Best Streets by the American Planning Association.  A well-deserved distinction, Ogden’s 25^th Street has long been a favorite of mine, along with other great Utah streets like Provo’s Center Street, Brigham City’s Main Street, Park City’s Main Street, along with most of Utah’s smaller central towns like Helper, Gunnison, and Panguitch, to name a few. 

Most of the examples of good streets in Utah towns and in American towns and cities in general are the result of cyclical economics.  These streets were originally the commercial centers of the cities and towns we call home.  They were more than just centralized business locations, they were the town centers, the civic characters of cities and were the heart of communities.  Most originated prior to the automobile, and thereby were centrally located for pragmatic reasons; they were the “walkable” and “walk toable” centers of the communities.  All the services necessary to support daily living in a neighborhood node or a small community were found in these civic centers, and as a result they were filled with people.  Over time, as first the streetcar and then the automobile came onto the scene, the centers were stretched and pulled apart as fundamental services were displaced.  Over time, investment in the centers waned and many fell into disrepair and neglect.  People ceased visiting the centers due to the lack of essential services which only further eroded the character of these bygone places.  People began taking an interest again in the 1970s, and what all these great streets have in common today is a huge public and private investment over the last 40 years to revive these civic centers.  Much of the reason they are great today is due to the fact that when they were forgotten, they were truly forgotten and the original structures were abandoned and left alone. 

But 40 years of intense investment to still have the root of the original problem exist is demoralizing. These streets are quaint and cute, but they are really just a fake image of their former selves.  It’s as if the original owners moved out or were forced out and were replaced with absentee landlords.  Now, it’s not my intention to criticize the businesses that exist on these streets because in many cases they are locally owned businesses, but drugstores have been replaced with optometrist offices, nickel and dime’s  with high-end bike shops, department stores with law firms, grocery stores with lingerie shops, and sporting goods stores with overpriced restaurants. In other words, the basic services that used to exist on these streets no longer exists, instead boutique shops line the streets because nothing is capable of competing with suburbia’s big box retail outlets. Habitation on these streets is typically limited to evenings, weekends, and holidays when it feels good to stroll down the paths of a great place.  I would argue that Ogden’s 25^th Street is a great street that is dedicated to the automobile and it is really only great from Grant Avenue to its Union Station terminus.  That seems to be the problem. 

But the larger issue is that our American cities have one great street, one great place, and it rests on a terribly fragile foundation.  As long as our cities are dedicated to the automobile we may have to be assuaged with having just one great street.  Until we revolt and start imposing on our cities a “walkable” and “walk toable” landscape, that will be what we are left with.   Take a walk down to your Main Street, USA, inhabit the place.  Walk it.  Use it.  Demand the need for it.  Start your own revolution to make American Cities great, one street at time, not just on one street, but the whole city.

The Life of American Cities: October 6, 2014

My teenage boys recently went to a concert in Provo with some friends to see a band whose name I can’t remember, and if I tried to remember it would seem an attempt to betray my true age.  I was interested in their Instagram post following their outing, the initial one stating “Provo is cool.”  And the follow up:  “Provo is cool because we were there.”

It takes people to make a place.  I’m always a bit chafed when architecture is presented in a sterile photograph without people, a laboratory, a fake.  Sitting in Piazza della Rotonda in Rome just over a week ago photographing the Pantheon, it would have been unthinkable to photograph this masterpiece without the masses milling about.  The Pantheon is truly a pinnacle of art and engineering, the zenith of Roman architecture.  What makes it so interesting is that it has been in continuous use since 126 CE.  People of different cultures, nationalities, and eras have graced the Pantheon since its origination.  People, people, people.  Is the Pantheon a place because of the people that inhabit its graceful interiors, or sit on the steps of the Fontana in the warm Roman sun, or seek refuge under the powerful portico?  Or is it a place already? Is place a predetermining factor for population?  Is place somewhere that attracts the people to its essence, its beauty?  Would Piazza della Rotonda be the same if the Pantheon were a ruin, a bare foundation scarring the earth?

Now Rome is vastly different than Salt Lake.  There is a monumental building on every corner.  The whole city seems to be a place, full of places, each with its own distinct character.  What these places all have in common is that they are populated, constantly, day and night.  Rome is a dense, compact city.  Salt Lake is not and will likely never be.  But Salt Lake does have the makings of place.  Salt Lake has a street infrastructure with so much potential for complete streets that their nearly ubiquitous use by the automobile is maddening.  Where is Salt Lake’s essence?  Where are Salt Lake’s great places?  I’m looking for answers here.

There is a new place which is just being introduced to the city.  Formerly a freight corridor for the Denver and Rio Grande and Union Pacific Railroads, and later abandoned, the S-Line greenway is a multi-modal transportation corridor primarily dedicated to the new UTA Streetcar, but with a wide and substantial bikeway, a smaller pedestrian pathway, and paved plazas at each street intersection, all of which is sited in a breathtaking landscaped greenway native to the Utah environment.  This place is just beginning to attract people, but remains fairly quiet most days.  I rode my bike on the S-Line on Sunday and it was slightly disappointing to be the only one on it, though it may have facilitated my higher speeds over the posted 9 mph limit.   The connections on the east and west ends are a bit tenuous and with continued investment on the part of South Salt Lake and Salt Lake City, there should be better integration into the existing urban fabric, but right now it remains slightly isolated. 

This essay will remain slightly open ended but I ask you the reader to comment and identify the essence of Salt Lake, to name the great places of our city, or potential places that are lurking in the background, like that old abandoned freight corridor.   

 

The Life of American Cities: October 4, 2014

Having just returned from a two week excursion in Italy seeing such places as Venezia, Roma, Firenze, Milano, and five beautiful coastal villages built impossibly on the craggy cliffside abutting the Ligurian sea called "Le Cinque Terre" (Riomaggiore, Manorola, Corniglia, Vernazza and Monterosso), over the next 2 months I will write a blog about my experiences, my reminiscences, my biases, and my readings of the life of my American city, Salt Lake.  In the course of my blog, I will include my experiences of other American cities I have visited in the past, namely New York, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Charleston, Boston, San Francisco, Portland, Austin, Buffalo, Spokane, Indianapolis, Seattle, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, to name a few, as well as some better known Utah cities such as Ogden, Provo, St. George and some lesser known examples like Springville, Orderville, and Saratoga Springs.  In addition, I will be looking closely at another American city I will be visiting in November, Savannah, Georgia. 

Utah's Space Age Temples at Ogden and Provo

Mormon temple construction succumbed to the strains of economic depression in the 1930s and the distractions of World War II in the 1940s, a construction drought lasting nearly two decades. Construction resumed in 1945 with the completion of a temple in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Additional temples were constructed in Bern, Switzerland in 1955, Los Angeles, California in 1956, Hamilton, New Zealand and London, England in 1958, and Oakland, California in 1964. The temples in the post-war period were distinctly modern, vis-à-vis the early Utah temples, with their minimalist vernacular. This new breed was devoid of extravagant ornament, yet still suited to the established temple typology. The Idaho Falls Idaho Temple resembles a wedding cake with its progressive setbacks which eventually resolve into the central spire. The Bern Switzerland Temple, the London England Temple, and the Hamilton New Zealand Temple all formally exhibit a heavy and grounded rectangular main massing contrasted with a spire engaged in the front façade with a distinct vertical character. The Los Angeles California Temple exhibits a more elaborate base, in the form of a Greek cross, yet maintains the vertical spire on the front of the massing. The Oakland California temple is a derivation of the Los Angeles Temple but with five spires, with prominence given to the spire in the center of the massing. The four lesser spires act more as pinnacles, an extension of the main mass. Although these were modern temples, the interior spaces were designed for the traditional live ceremony with two important exceptions.


As if to usher in the modern era, in 1953 President David O. McKay commissioned a 16-millimeter film version of the endowment ceremony, up until that time it was a live ceremony, to be used in the one-room Swiss Temple. However, the Oakland temple was the first temple designed with the intention of modernizing the temple ritual by implementing 35-millimeter projection screens for a new film in the endowment rooms, thus altering the traditional interior plan and modernizing the temple ceremony. The Oakland temple bridged the transition between the earlier and less efficiently managed ‘live-action’ temples and the streamlined efficiency of the neo-modern temples, the first two being the Provo Utah and Ogden Utah temples, both of which were built in 1972 and designed by then Church Architect Emil B. Fetzer. Each exhibited a solitary central spire, vaguely reminiscent of the post-war temple typology, but embraced an obvious, yet highly abstract, ornamental program to embellish the exterior, something the immediately preceding temples lacked. Formally, both consisted of a rectangular massing with soft chamfered corners articulated with alternating attenuated windows within wider solid spandrels, all detached and elevated from its larger orthogonal base through the use of a narrow band of windows recessed from the face of the main block above. A tall central spire contrasted with the main form like a toothpick through a Reuben. These new Utah temples exhibited formal characteristics anathema to the traditional temple building typology. The new forms boasted of heightened efficiency of the ceremonies within and, therefore promoted a sense of fretful urgency to the work. Each served a large population center, relieving the stress on the overburdened Salt Lake Temple.

The Ogden and Provo Utah Temples both resemble a futuristic architecture and would greatly influence the architecture of the Washington D.C. Temple (1974), next in line and in design during the construction of the two Utah temples. An associative metaphor is a method whereby one comes to understand the unfamiliar modern building with something that one understands through familiarity. The Apollo Space program depended on the sleek and streamlined Saturn V rocket boosters to propel the astronauts’ module beyond the terrestrial frontiers and into the great voids of space. The Ogden and Provo Temples captured the same imagery in their architecture with the spires resembling the Saturn V breaking away from the earthly tether atop of pillar of fire and the main massing resembling the billowing exhaust from the powerful rocket boosters. This familiar imagery was seared in the collective memory of America in July 1969 as Apollo 11 targeted the Moon. Although the Saturn V symbolic imagery was likely unintended by the architect, the intended symbol of the new Utah temples, the Hebraic pillar of fire and the cloud God employed to stifle the Egyptian army as Israel made her miraculous escape, was very similar. The Ogden and Provo Temples are unlike any other temple, they are larger symbols, where the architectural systems of space, structure, and program are subordinated and suppressed by the overall symbolic form. As Robert Venturi alleged: “This type of building-becoming-sculpture we call the duck in honor of the duck shaped drive-in, “The Long Island Duckling.” The Provo and Ogden Utah temples are therefore ducks in Post-Modern theory.

Both temples occupy very diverse sites. The Ogden Temple is sited near the center of downtown, the Provo Temple at the foot of the craggy Y Mountain, atop Provo’s east bench. The Ogden Temple is seen from without the city and the Provo Temple is seen from within the city. Although the architecture of each reflects its time, both have been continuously impugned by architectural critics and church members alike for their lack of religious aesthetics worthy of Mormonism’s most important building type. The Church has made attempts to refine and standardize each of the outstanding temples in recent years by painting the gold colored spires a bland and boring white and perching a gilded Angel Moroni at the top. Each temple was designed and conceived of as a machine with a singular functional motive: to relentlessly churn out ordinance work for the living and dead. In that regard, each has been highly successful and despite the paucity of architectural acceptance, each has assumed an iconic presence and defined a sense of place.

However, in November 2009, the nonagenarian former architect Emil Fetzer died. As if signaling a green light, the Church immediately developed plans to update the Ogden temple and on February 17, 2010, ceremoniously announced plans to scrap the iconic Ogden exterior for one resembling the newly completed Draper, Utah temple, which is the new “standard plan” for temples. In other words, the iconic Ogden temple will no longer be iconic, but will become a bland and monotonous member of the new group.  Additional upgrades will include improvements to the old electrical, heating and plumbing systems with more modern, energy-saving systems. As well, the above ground parking will be eliminated and an underground parking garage will be constructed along with a complete redesign of of the temple block. The changes affect the adjacent Ogden tabernacle which will lose its spire in submission to the more hierarchically important building type. Paul Anderson, a Mormon temple scholar, opined that the Ogden Temple's look was controversial from the beginning. He added: “Some of the building materials were associated with commercial, not sacred architecture, and the location on a main city street, rather than elevated above it, added to that impression.” For one as conversant as Anderson, the precedent for siting the temple in an urban setting gained acceptance with the early temples, Kirtland, Ohio, Nauvoo, Illinois, and especially Salt Lake City, Utah, which functions as Mormonism’s primary architectural symbol.

Architectural preservationists should be up in arms about the planned changes. The Ogden Utah temple, along with its close twin, represent a paradigmatic shift in the way in which Mormons conceived and interpreted the temple, transitioning from the temple as a sacred structure to the temple as a machine. As the Church’s 14th and 15th operating temples, and two of four built in the 1970s, these were designed for ordinance work, and not as places of refuge and communion for the faithful adherents. As the sense of urgency for temple work increased, twenty-six temples were constructed in the 1980s, twenty-four in the 1990s, and sixty-one in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The update to the Ogden facade represents a rejection of the history associated with these specific temples.  Ironically, the Church made a gross error in the 1970s when it allowed architect Emil Fetzer to gut the interior of the historic Logan Utah temple and replace it with a disturbing 1970s interior, closely reminiscent of the Ogden and Provo interiors.  The same intentions seem to be at play with this planned renovation.

A member of the Church’s presiding First Quorum of the Seventy, Elder William R. Walker explained, “the Ogden Utah Temple has been a beacon of faith in downtown Ogden for nearly forty years and has blessed those who have served and worshipped within its walls. We hope these improvements will not only better serve Church members but also add to the beauty of downtown Ogden for all to enjoy.” He further explained that, "It basically is the same as building a new temple.” The decision to reinvent the exterior of the temple originated from the three members of the Church's governing First Presidency Walker added, because “they thought it somewhat dated.” One hopes that the First Presidency will moderate their extreme architectural urges when they consider the outdatedness of the Salt Lake, Manti, Logan, St. George, and for that matter any temple constructed prior to the Ogden Utah temple.

© 2010 Steven D. Cornell

Sources
1.  Buerger, David John. The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship. Smith Research Associates: San Francisco. 1994. 167.

2.  Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. 3rd Edition. Rizzoli: New York. 1977. 40.

3.  Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Learning From Las Vegas : The Forgotten Symbol of Architectural Form. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1977. 87.

4.  Salt Lake Tribune. February 18, 2010. 'Somewhat dated' LDS temple to get new look.