The Burnside Blog
The Political Memory of Architecture
November 4 has come and gone and we have a brand new shiny historic President-elect. While I spent the night in a technological omnivorous feast of internet and TV exit polls, called states, and hopeful feelings, I was also thinking a bit about all of the election gatherings that were happening across the land.
One particular element that struck me was the difference between Senator John McCain’s invite-only soiree at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix and Senator, now President-elect Barack Obama’s massive all-comers hullabaloo in Grant Park, Chicago. Does their choice of location say something about their campaign? Their politics? I don’t know, but they are interesting locations.
The Arizona Biltmore Hotel, opened in 1929, is a building often mistakenly attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright. It was in fact designed by Albert Chase McArthur—a friend, contemporary, and client of Wright. Its singular feature is the molded concrete textile block system that Wright and his son had perfected on many buildings in Southern California. While Wright did consult McArthur, he always claimed that it was McArthur’s design and his alone.
However, in an ever-Wrightean and back-room politicalesque double speak, FLW later wrote McArthur’s widow in 1954:
I have always given Albert’s name as architect . . . and always will. But I know better and so should you.
For McCain, the hotel was the site of his honeymoon with his wife Cindy and, unfortunately for them, the end of the road for his drive to the presidency.
Obama, on the other hand, found himself with 125,000 of his closest friends in Chicago’s front yard. First plotted in 1835, Grant Park was first named Lake Park and later after the 18th President. While Daniel H. Burnham (an early influence on Wright) first envisioned it as a formal landscape with museums and civic buildings, others fought to keep it open and free.
Massive enough to hold 125,000 people comfortably, Grant Park is also large enough to evolve with both natural areas as well as art museums, natural history museums, fountains, and all kinds of cultural landmarks. On the north end, Millennium Park was built at the turn of this past century with architectural works from Frank Gehry, Anish Kapoor, Jaume Plensa, and solar powered cubes to power it all.
Here in Portland, Republicans held their election night party at the venerable and A.E. Doyle designed Benson Hotel. With the exception of George W. Bush, The Benson has hosted every U.S. President since Harry Truman. Curiously, it is said to be the location where President Richard Nixon wrote the famous “Checkers speech.”
It’s beautiful and classic French Second Empire styled lines did not seem to help the Oregon Republicans this year. Though they all felt very comfortable.
Across the river, the Democrats took over the Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects conceived Oregon Convention Center. LEED certified and crystal towered hatted, the building is an easy to spot landmark on the Eastern urban skyline. What it lacks for in interior warmth, it more than makes up for in a big-tent-fits-all kind of space.
And while one cannot say that one’s chosen party location would make or break one’s campaign, it is still facinating to see how history thrusts itself upon a given location. People will remember where they were that night, and hopefully, the space around them will have helped console them or enliven their celebration. It is that ever malleable narrative of an architectural space that a human interaction or event brings to it that makes it so fascinating.
Mae Sue Talley – one of the former owners of the Biltmore back in the 1970s – sums it all up nicely about the power of a space. In a PBS documentary she speaks about the strength of the hotel, though she may as well have been speaking about any architectural space—Grant Park, Benson Hotel, Oregon Convention Center—with some history behind it,
It’s of the place. It’s of the time. It’s true to its sense of materials. It has a sense of space which is not about grandeur or bigness but about responding to the human scale, human feelings. And when that occurs, wherever. It is on the face of the earth, it endures.
Are there spaces or locations that mean something to you?
