WRITTEN IN STONE: AN ARCHITECT DEFINES THE CLINTONS
by Mia T, 12-30-02
If mutability of meaning was necessary for the survival of the clintons--their survival hinged ultimately on the deconstruction of words and laws--it is more than a little ironic, and a manifestation of the special sway and shortsightedness of the pathologic ego, that clinton's monument to himself will necessarily define the clintons with the permanance of great inviolate places of iconic architecture.
Whereas a huckster removes meaning from institutions --the wife picked up where the husband left off--an architect encodes meaning in buildings. James S. Polshek, the architect with the dubious distinction of having been commissioned to build the William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, believes that a successful architectural solution must necessarily be rooted in relevance.
Just as Polshek's buildings have physical layers, so too do they have layers of meaning. His Rose Center for Earth and Space, for example, is informed formally and programmatically by the historic architecture of a designated landmark even as it redefines itself, (often too self-consciously, in my view), in Star-Trekian terms. Reduced to its essence, the building is the nascent universe before the Big Bang, the promise of the undifferentiated cell in its mother's womb.
The "bridge to the 21st century" was, perhaps, clinton's most delusional conceit, so it is not surprising that it would become clinton's self-referential metaphor of choice. His library was to be that bridge, if he had anything to say about it...
The architect is often the master of the inside joke, witness Robert Venturi's postmodern chairs. Venturi exploited--unabashedly and with abandon--the vocabulary of Las Vegas, its stage-set-as-reality and its roadside culture--bright, clashing, ugly and fake. The architect's inside joke is his hedge against the sycophancy that comes with patronage.
The flip side of the encoded meaning of the architect is the terrorist's decoding of it. To bin Laden, the World Trade Center was Jewish capitalism encoded in urban space. If Polshek's vision of clinton's library is a bridge, the inside joke is that, at best, it is a bridge to nowhere.
More likely, it is a bridge to the 7th century...or a doublewide to house clinton double-speak. Take your choice.
copyright Mia T 2002
