Human-Scale

As I mentioned in the last post, I had a family wedding in Atlanta last weekend. My first visit ever to Atlanta, if one doesn't count the airport, which of course one shouldn't. Gah--the idea that folks might mistake O'Hare for Chicago. . . Anyway, I have to say I was distinctly unimpressed. I did expect to be impressed, I really did. I mean Atlanta--home of the New South, an Olympics venue, the place where all the young movers and shakers seem to spend time. But the downtown was so dead, so utterly empty of people except for a few bewildered tourists like us, so lacking in urban edge, that I felt perfectly ok sending my really-not-much-to-be-trusted 16-year-old and his 13-year-old cousin off on their own. They had a great time getting sick after sampling 60 different kinds of Coke at the Coca-Cola Museum. As a result, Hugh is now a passionate wanna-be Atlantean. "We should move here!" he enthused.

Damn. One more thing dividing me from my son.

We made the mistake of staying in the Westin Peachtree--the highest hotel in the western hemisphere in "an iconic downtown location," according to the website (how weird is that? the hotel isn't "iconic," just the location?), but according to Wikipedia, actually only the second tallest all-hotel building in the western hemisphere. So who do you trust, Westin or Wikipedia? Ah, the dilemmas of life in the internet age. Designed by renowned Atlanta architect John Portman, the Westin Peachtree is the embodiment of modernist alienation and elitism. Now mind you, I love modernist architecture; I'm a Chicagoan, for pete's sake, and any Chicagoan worth her organic seasalt is a fan of modernist architecture--but the thing is, Chicago accustoms you to modernist architecture done well, done right, done with respect for the humans who will inhabit it and the society that will swirl around it. Ah, Mr. Portman. You should have spent more time in Chicago. Your hotel, Mr. Portman, sucks. Excuse the highly technical language there, but it just really sucks. Your hotel makes its guests feel they've just booked a weekend in a parking garage--except most parking garages are far more easy to find one's way around in and, frankly, far more attractive. Your hotel is cold and uncomfortable and dehumanizing and godawful ugly.  It is staffed by fine and friendly people, all of whom wear a look of terror and doom. They know they cannot compensate for the physical ghastliness of the place and that their tips will reflect this fact. But at least they haven't absorbed the hard lines, the unforgiving nature, of all the concrete around them. Still, my tips were miserly. I couldn't help it. Everything around me demanded unkindness, a heart of stone, a heavy boot. Orwell, oh Mr. Portman, what Orwell could have written about your hotel.

And the thing is, Mr. Portman, you don't actually have to travel way up north to Chicago. Just go down the street to the High Museum of Modern Art. There's a splendid building, a wonderful example of modernist architecture done with feeling and sensibility and a basic humanity. Go wander around there for awhile. It will do you good. It certainly did me good after being subjected to the brutalism of your hotel.

So now I'm home, in my 1930s Craftsman-inspired, Chicago-tinged, totally funky Baton Rouge house. It's crumbling around us, but it's a lovely house, a house for human beings. And when I go to work, it's in a crumbling 1930s building that is part of the original LSU campus--a lovely building, tho' slowly disintegratiing due to years of budget cuts and deferred maintenance. Despite the exposed asbestos and the paint shards that fall on my head, I love Himes Hall. Like my house, it was built to human scale. So, Atlanta, thank you. And thank you, too, Mr. Portman. Thank you for reminding me of what I have. Unlike so many people, I get to spend my days and my nights in physical environments that I find sustaining and restorative. And as I begin to realize that there really aren't all that many days and nights left, not in the big scheme of things, such things matter. Life is too short to be spent in concrete.