Gelato-lovin' Blake Gopnik is not the man I'd turn to for notes on breakfast dives (brunch, maybe). But he does right by the Waffle Shop, a downtown diner and an example of American Moderne design that's well preserved and, more impressively yet, still functioning. The Waffle Shop is exactly the sort of historic vernacular architecture that a city needs to fight to keep, lest the perpetual nip and tuck of industry eventually make that city over into a Dallas, Texas.
And the critic has his place in championing significant works: putting architecture in the public eye, clarifying its context, and suggesting ways to preserve a visual legacy without hampering the city or its business. Doing his part for architectural activism, Gopnik writes:
Though the restaurant has been allowed to go a bit to seed -- there's dirt everywhere, the ceiling is a mess, and the facade's original plate glass is patched and seamed -- its great bones survive unchanged. With not much more than a splash of paint, some elbow grease and a modestly tweaked menu, one of the city's more artistic restaurateurs could restore the Waffle Shop to its former glory.Okay, so he wants to turn it into a brunch spot. Fair enough. He writes that the store only lacks for exposure—the Moderne style sells itself, after all.
No doubt, the Waffle Shop deserves the advocacy. But c'mon—it's softball. Gopik should be swinging for the Mies-designed MLK Library, a real knuckleball of an advocacy project. It's not only the most significant modern building in the city—erected by one of the most distinguished architects of the 20th century—it's a highly politicized building, one whose fate hung more than once on a single vote during the District's 2006 legislative session. Getting into the thick of it is just good journalism. The excellent opinion piece by outgoing architecture critic Ben Forgey notwithstanding, there hasn't been much of that out of the WaPo on the library.
And furthermore, the Mies case involves tricky, inside baseball. Library supporters seem like jerks when they oppose compromises like painting the exterior, altering the floorplate, and draping the windows. But a critical backgrounder from the paper of record could establish in the debate that ornament is crime (or so they used to say): even superficial tweaks add up to a thorough repudiation of the design. Or that none of the compromises address the city's stated problems, unless the city really means to say that the library's fugly. And a backgrounder with a little teeth might address head on the fact that people who complain about the Mies, complain about the homeless people at the Mies and the books that it doesn't have.
Mies Van der Rohe, MLK Memorial Library, a great while back. Photo courtesy Rob Goodspeed.
Forgey rattled off those points and, most importantly, declared that the building is totally beautiful. And it is: severe, stately, handsome. It should be said every time a city bureaucrat complains that it's ugly, since that debate is neither here nor there.
Gopnik's the guy who bats cleanup in this town, critically speaking. Right now, the city doesn't have a plan for the building. It's a good time for a critic to outline a progressive, rather than a defensive, agenda. So, what would Gopnik do?
Posted by Kriston at December 26, 2006 5:00 PMGak! MLK, beautiful on the outside, terrible stairs on inside drive me nuts! Poor on the use factor.
Posted by: Rob W at December 27, 2006 11:45 AMIt can't be a library. The awful truth is that the MLK Library is an outpost of urban decay blighting the reviving stretch from the Verizon Center to 11th Street. The severity of the building repels people, which means that it has failed in its civic-art mission. As a result, it's now gone from severe to menacing and bleak, with no one in it to browse the stacks except the homeless and the addicted. For a library to become a hive of despair should make any civic-minded person angry. Anything is better than the status quo.
Posted by: Spencer at December 27, 2006 11:54 AMI'm surprised that you'd go for the Loos angle, Kriston, since IIRC Loos is willing to allow the lower classes some measure of ornament—it's only the elites who ought shun it. I quote a passage quoted by Holbo:
I am preaching to the aristocrats. I tolerate ornaments on my own body if they afford my fellow-men pleasure. Then they are a pleasure to me, too ... We have art, which has replaced ornament. We go to Beethoven or Tristan after the cares of the day. My shoemaker can't. I must not take away his joy as I have nothing to replace it with.
Presumably even the shoemakers are allowed to have a library they like?
Posted by: ben wolfson at December 27, 2006 12:44 PMYou're absolutely correct to call attention to the Post, but there's also a real problem with the politicians. For example, Tommy Wells, the new councilman from Ward 6, clearly supported tearing the building down during the campaign. What really shocked me was the fact that he couldn't distinguish between the city's decades long neglect of the library and the building itself.
Posted by: b at December 29, 2006 11:22 AMThe first meeting of the Mies Van der Rohe fan club is underway!
It is true that the building's overhang (along with the court's finding in Armstrong v. District of Columbia Public Library etc etc) guarantee that homeless people will congregate at the library. The destitute should not be shut out from receiving subsidized knowledge, but neither was the library intended to serve as the city's unofficial homeless shelter. As such it is a major deterrent for families, volunteer organizations, and users, whom the city hopes to once again attract with a new central library. The reality is that the indigent are dependent on public institutions, and nothing will prevent them from following on to the new central library, three blocks away.
These are problems that need to be dissolved and addressed separately (homelessness, library usage) insofar as they can be. (Rob Goodspeed suggested that privatizing the library in some fashion would solve the problem, since a private organization could ban the homeless from the facility. Bleak, maybe, and unrealistic for a variety of reasons, but it address the question face forward.)
The severity of the building repels people
Before the early 1990s, the press accounts almost without exception describe the library as a vibrant community hub complete with books and services—before the library system fell into utter neglect and disrepair. (If you are that curious, there is a press archive in the coffee table hutch where we keep all the X-Men comics.) Looking at the history it seems that the lack of books and services repels people.
Posted by: Kriston at December 29, 2006 11:27 AMWe are with you, Kriston.
Posted by: Brad and Angelina standing outside fallingwater at December 29, 2006 6:33 PM
