Posted on 09/11/2013 8:21:53 AM PDT by C19fan
The campus of Yale University, 1921. Midnight.
It is perhaps the most important job of your career. You, a successful architect, have been selected by a rich donor to build a new tower here, on your alma mater’s campus, at Yale. The tower, Gothic in style, named “Harkness,” must look archaic, timeless. It is 216 feet tall, one foot for every year since Yale’s founding. You could be building history…except that the tower does not look nearly old enough.
So you—in, presumably, a long cape, high collar, and top hat—sneak to the construction site. You pull a flask from the folds of your garment, uncork it—and throw acid onto the new granite.
The rock wears away, shows pockmarks, ages.
You have done it. You are a genius.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
What was the architectural style of the people who ended slavery?
“What was the architectural style of the people who ended slavery?”
Late Greek Revival, and early Victorian.
The effort to link Gothic architecture with racism is pretty thin. It seems that it was largely an effort to give the schools a sense of gravitas, of tradition, of history, of timelessness. You can’t do that with a grass hut.
Racism everywhere! Aaaaahhhhh!!!
Why not use utility buildings to build the lecture halls and classrooms in?
Ain;t gonna happen because the elite in academia feel like they have to be "gods in their domains"...
They claim to be against the elite, but they ARE the elite!
Campuses should look more like African villages, huts and all. The witch doctor (PhD of course) can have the biggest one.
Sorry, but the Section 8 housing style usually doesn't inspire people.
I wonder if Meyer ever read "The Fountainhead"?
Ah ha ha ha! We do love our pallor, don’t we?
The truth is that language and race aren't the same thing, nor are architecture and race. If your entire worldview is filtered through the current progressive obsession with race then you tend to produce this sort of nonsense.
I am convinced that if some 3,900 year old Babylonian construction site foreman came up to that guy in 2013 and saw his lousy mudsmithing, there would be some immediate lashing going down.
Race, prior to WWII and the Nazis, was used a lot more loosely. Often meant just group or nationality.
In fact the #2 definition of the word is still: “2. A group of people united or classified together on the basis of common history, nationality, or geographic distribution.”
Which would make what Wilson said the rough equivalent of Winston Churchill’s “English speaking peoples.”
I’m no fan of Wilson.
But “English-speaking race” does not equal “racial cultural triumphalism.”
Certainly, Georgian architecture -- the usual alternative for American college construction -- is (if we have to go there) far more connected to slavery and racism than Gothic.
One of the commenters on the Atlantic site points out that the prominent architect of Duke University's Gothic buildings -- Julian Abele -- was in fact an African-American.
One thing we can fault American collegiate architects for, though, is combining the two styles in strange ways:
Yep. “Anglosphere” is a more contemporary locution but clearly Wilson did not mean to indicate white supremacy. And I’m no Wilson fan either.
It couldn’t have anything to do with European universities our universities emulated traditionally being built in Gothic style, could it?
Wilson was most definitely a white supremacist, but he wasn’t expressing it in this case.
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