Avant garde against humanity: the rise and fall of anti-social architecture.

The 1960s were a heady time for architects--the last decade in which they were treated like demigods--and the American landscape still has the scars to show for it: the belligerent monolith of Boston City Hall, the regimented grandiosity of Nelson Rockefeller's Albany Mall, and hundreds of damaged campuses, from Fredonia State (a casualty of I. M. Pei) to Yale (where Paul Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building continues to frustrate occupants nearly 40 years after its concrete dried). Innumerable parts of our land suffer today from what was inflicted on them by architects during the heyday of Modernism.

Unfortunately, the spirit of the '60s is returning in building design; the tragedy of architectural arrogance is now being replayed as farce. Across North America, a rash of anti-social architecture is erupting. Public participation in design decision-making has blocked some of the worst ideas, but alienating buildings are rising in significant numbers. Indeed, advocates of "progressive" architecture proclaim many as instant landmarks, and portray their designers as stars.

An egregious example appeared in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the spring of 2000. Harvard University decided the best candidate to design a building on Mount Auburn Street in Harvard Square would be an avant-garde Viennese architect named Hans Hollein, winner of the much-ballyhooed Pritzker Prize (an award yet to be given to any architect working in a strongly traditional vein). The Boston beloved for its architecture with historical roots--Faneuil Hall, the Old State House, Beacon Hill, the Back Bay, the neo-Georgian delights of Harvard--thus became the site for an artistic experiment that showed no respect for its preceding, neighboring structures.

Hollein proposed a building with a wavy, sloping glass front and a metal mesh stretched across most of the facade. This amounted to a slap in the face of Mount Auburn Street, where beautiful Georgian and Regency Revival buildings form a cohesive, remarkably agreeable backdrop for daily life. Whereas the gracious existing buildings, mainly red brick with white trim, say "New England," the five-story building designed by Hollein with Bruner/Cott Associates of Cambridge was to be clad in bronze panels--saying "anyplace." The old buildings feature vertical windows based on the proportions of the upright human body; Hollein's new building was to have "ribbon windows"--horizontal glazing at odds with the neighbors and unrealted to human scale.

I asked Leland Cott, Hollein's local collaborator, about the design. His answers reveal the arbitrariness of today's avant-garde preoccupations and hint at why so many buildings by today's cutting-edge architects are mystifying or maddening to the public. Why does it make sense to stretch a mesh of brass and stainless steel across the facade? The mesh, Cott answered, is "a way of redefining the building surface." It asks, "Where on the face of a building does the surface really begin?" Au courant architects, especially European ones, love mesh. They see it as the perfect wrapper for an up-to-the-minute structure.

They arrived at this point by a convoluted route: In the 1940s and '50s, the Holy Grail of Modern architecture was the simple glass box. Modernists believed the elimination of applied ornament was the key to producing buildings as "honest" as an Eagle Scout. But as people quickly got bored with oversimplified glass boxes, some of the Modernists decided that decoration was okay after all--as long as it wasn't (horror of horrors) traditional. Edward Durell Stone, designer of New York City's Museum of Modern Art, placed masonry sun screens on building exteriors. Other Modernists tried different means of giving elaboration to buildings that, owing to early Modernism's puritanical ideology, had been stripped of pleasing detail.

In the last several years, avant-garde designers have decided the answer to boredom is mesh. If women's legs are admired in mesh stockings, wouldn't buildings look alluring in fashionable industrial mesh? "It's a kind of sexiness of the half-revealed; that's what's at work there," says Patrick Pinnell, an architect who taught at Yale for many years. This intellectual conceit wouldn't matter, except that architects who feel compelled to go with the latest craze are not likely to create satisfying, lasting environments.