Pruitt-Igoe lives.

In another life, when I was a Boston cab driver, I drove two Harvard students back from Logan after a trip from some warm International place spot on the map. They were a couple, well healed. The woman said “driver, you can drop us by the ugly building over there…” It was the concrete science building, which was near a few old red brick buildings that were covered with ivy. I replied: “which one?” She look at me, suprised, then steamed, as if it was there were an accounting for taste. It was a mistake. The boyfriend stiffed me on the tip. It was worth it: Top of the world Ma!

I wrote on 1 Western Ave here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/anderkoo/2004/03/30#a56

It’s across the river from me and mind-numbingly ugly. As I wrote in March, I read it as a deconstruction of Harvard’s courtyard-centered residence halls, but not a particularly insightful one.

It looks like it was built in the ’50s in the Soviet Union, then shipped over brick by brick and reconstructed like London Bridge.

Modern architects think that architecture is a proper vehicle for innovation, self-expression, and progress. It’s not. Buildings aren’t art. They are something people have to live in, look at, and use. Gehry’s buildings in particular tend to suffer from leaks, drafts, etc. In 50 years this period in architecture will be looked at as the worst ever. Worse than anything the middle 20th century every belched up. Worse than dung huts and straw roofs.

Thank you for the link. Kunstler’s site is breathtakingly funny, in the way that only institutionalized lunacy can be. (I mean lunacy that becomes the institution, not locked-up lunatics. Whatever.)

He also ridicules the Simmons Hall dorm: http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200402.html. Perhaps I shouldn’t be considering MIT for architecture school…

I still think the crown belongs to Boston City Hall. You can’t top that. If Orwell wrote 1984 a few decades later he could have used the building to illustrate his book.