Sagging Symbols. (original) (raw)

My uncle ran a grocery store in our home town. It was on 6th Street, but the actual address really didn't matter. When people asked where the store was, we just told them it was on the courthouse square. That was enough. Everybody knew where the courthouse was.

With its ungainly dome squatting atop walls of a singularly unattractive dirt-colored brick, it definitely was not a beautiful building. But its ugliness was irrelevant, like the looks of a beloved family member, because the courthouse was more than mere bricks and mortar.

In the midst of the vast, windswept West Texas landscape, the courthouse was the architectural paperweight that kept the town from blowing away. Built in 1910, just a few decades after the first settlements were established in our part of the state, it offered tangible evidence that our town was here to stay and that the residents were a civilized lot who knew what a public building ought to look like. More than that, it was a symbol � however clumsy � of the stability of democracy and the solemn grandeur of The Law.

Don't laugh. Converting abstract ideals and values into tangible reality was once considered a valid � even essential � function of architecture. Our courthouse was the product of an age when buildings were designed to serve an important symbolic function, and architects worked hard to make them �fitting.� Public buildings were intended to embody the awesome majesty of government itself and to make you feel both insignificant (a mere mortal in the presence of something mighty) and ennobled (a commoner doing business in a setting worthy of royalty).

A grand symbol demanded a grand setting, so many public buildings � especially courthouses � were sited in the middle of town, in a landscaped square where the town's most important monuments were installed. (On our own courthouse lawn, a windmill and a bandstand were joined every year by a big red thermometer that charted the progress of the annual Community Chest campaign.) Newspaper accounts described new public buildings with phrases like �highly artistic,� �a noble specimen of fine architecture� and �a credit to the town.� People took pride in them.

Whatever happened to that idea?

Today the notion that a public building should be edifying is as outmoded as a bustle. Here's how I know: I went to a post office the other day and couldn't find the front door.

It was in a medium-size Southern city � but not downtown, where a post office should be. I parked in the vast asphalt lot, headed inside to buy some stamps � and stopped in my tracks. The facade of the building, probably built in the 1970s, was a featureless grid of glass and aluminum panels, any of which could have been a door. But which one?

On closer inspection, two of the panels proved to have tiny metal plates inscribed �Push.� I pushed, and found myself in a bare-walled, low-ceilinged space that had all the charm of a car-rental agency. I thought of my hometown post office, distinguished by a handsome stone arcade and a lofty lobby with brass grillwork and a WPA mural, and the real meaning of the tired phrase �they don't build them like that any more� came flooding in.

I'm starting to sound like Andy Rooney, so I'll close with a great courthouse story: