When Louis VII of France entered for the first time Abbot Suger’s newly completed church of Saint-Denis—arguably the earliest thoroughly executed work of Gothic architecture on the planet—he reportedly exclaimed with joy: “How modern!” And while it’s true we don’t know precisely what the king meant by “modern,” the key issue is that that conversation happened sometime around 1140 CE. Almost a millennium after Louis and Suger promenaded through Saint-Denis, their eyes looking skyward to the pointed vaults above, an unquiet search for what is new in art and architecture continues unabated.

One can see the remains of this anxious pursuit in the fabric and structure of Knoxville—its buildings and roadways. From banks and municipal buildings to former iced confectioneries and other commercial structures, the last half of the last century has left its detritus of Modern successes and failures across the face of the expanding city much like a glacier leaves behind stony outcroppings in the landscape.

Disputes about Modern architecture’s successes and failures for the last century tend to parallel (or more precisely follow) those in the art world, including what the term “modern” means, when the period begins, if and when it ends, how it differs from “contemporary,” right down to whether or not the term ought to be capitalized. Of course, a sheet of stretched canvas is a much more accommodating surface upon which to rapidly rethink one’s beliefs than is a set of construction documents or a building site.

Modern, Contemporary, and Now

Architecture has always been the most cumbersome of the arts with its challenging clients, tight budgets, difficult sites, weighty materials, capricious contractors, and inscrutable human beings as occupants. Moreover, because of the muddle between Contemporary and Modern, it’s easy for one to unintentionally conflate the two, or to simply give up altogether and see what’s on HBO. To keep some distance from this lexical knot, in what follows, Modern will be used somewhat broadly. That said, it’s important not to confuse “modern” and “contemporary.” After all, Louis did not call out to the abbot, “How contemporary,” as that would have been the opposite of his meaning, and the term Gothic would not exist for another 500 years.

Recently, museums have hired curators for “art of the now,” as opposed to either “modern” or “contemporary,” as they try to assemble the now-est of the new. On its website, the Museum of Modern Art highlights the modern/contemporary dichotomy: “With extraordinary exhibitions and the world’s finest collection of modern and contemporary art, MoMA is dedicated to the conversation between the past and the present, the established and the experimental.” In an article on the new Whitney Museum, New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz put it this way: “Each of these museums [The Tate Modern, MoMA, the Guggenheim, etc.] still preserves, collects, and exhibits the art of the past. But with the action and big money centered on contemporary art … each is more committed than ever before to the art of the now and the cult of the new. …But that cult, and the ascendance of spectacle, may be the end of museums as we know them…. [A] major shift [is] underway.”

Things Fall Apart

After the holocausts of Pearl Harbor, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and countless acts too difficult to speak of, too awful to represent, artistic experimentation that began before the First World War and continued throughout the interwar years, moved even further away from representation and narrative. It was about this time that an influential art critic claimed the world did not need any more art objects: It was time for art to find another preoccupation, and it did. In the late 1940s and 1950s, there was a renewed sense of a tabula rasa, one that for many was at the core of a modern experience, which situated conventional aesthetics at its extreme periphery.

For the generation emerging from schools of architecture in the late 1950s and early ’60s who would lead the academy and practice for the remainder of the century, there were no answers for the problems of their day, and yesterday’s revolutionaries were viewed as today’s establishment. These no-longer-forward-looking leaders chose doubt in the avant-garde over faith, favoring recuperation of what the fathers had worked so hard to expunge: memory. William Butler Yeats wrote at the close of the World War I: “The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” But this was anarchy of another sort.

The implications of this collective circumstance, which may seem remote not just temporally, but culturally, are anything but. They resonate daily in the constructed world of East Tennessee. They help explain why certain buildings realized during the past few years on the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus have the curious character they do, and why they are fundamentally different from what the university built two generations ago. They explain why new buildings on Market Square are built to look older than the 40-year-old TVA towers at the square’s North end. They help us understand why, at the crossing of Market Street and Cumberland Avenue, the stately brick building that originally housed the Whittle Corporation, now home to the U.S. District Court, looks as if the Second Continental Congress met there.

After the Fall

In post-war United States, absent wartime destruction, the damage to cities was self-inflicted through well-intended urban renewal programs. The mass demolition of entire neighborhoods to clear the way for modern housing towers and limited-access roadways such as the Cross Bronx Expressway (1948), the first expressway constructed through a high-density urban setting, did more to engender enmity for modern planning and architecture among the general public than could any deliberate plot.

Similarly, the Tennessee Department of Transportation was doing its best to slice and dice some of Knoxville’s oldest neighborhoods with interstate roadways, while the GI Bill created a similar environment on university campuses. As was the case at virtually all land-grant universities, UT underwent a vast building program during the postwar years, largely funded by federal dollars.

By the 1980s, UT had created a markedly lousy campus—“The Hill,” notwithstanding—with some pretty forgetful buildings, albeit several excellent ones. So there is good reason for a general lack of confidence in what Modern architecture can contribute to solving the university’s current dilemma of a campus largely without character.

One of the buildings the university demolished first (considered part of the problem) for the new student union (considered part of the solution), one of the excellent ones built during the post-war boom, was the Carolyn Brown University Center’s parking garage. While much has been written about the loss of the University Center, as odd as it may sound, architecturally, its garage was far superior. Designed by Robert B. Church III, a founding leader of the university’s School of Architecture, and to date the largest single benefactor to the school, Church was a student of Louis Kahn (who was on leave from the University of Pennsylvania, teaching at Princeton) and one of the finest Modern architects to practice in the region during the last century.

The garage only incidentally stored cars. Its structure was a three-dimensional marvel with extraordinary and capricious volumes of vertical space. More sacred than secular, the vertical shafts illuminated the dark horizontal swaths of parking. Clearly showing the influence of his mentor, Kahn (and Paul Rudolph’s Boston Government Service Center), the garage was a quiet yet heroic work, but with many humanist touches, most of which were so subtle they went unappreciated to the parking public, or they were never completed (such as the rooftop plaza) so they never could be properly apprehended.

The building successfully connected several levels of university terrain at a complicated campus nexus—much of which was destroyed by the expansion of the business school building. At the south end of the garage, a seemingly gratuitous curvaceous gathering space occupied a triangular bit of ground, further demonstrating how the garage created, on several of its surfaces and edges, active settings to promote the kind of impromptu gatherings that one thinks of when one imagines a vital college campus. And, of course, there was the famous “Money Wall,” sadly the loss of which was the only thing the News Sentinel wrote of as demolition loomed.

Never properly completed nor maintained, abutted with building accretions rendering its usefulness to the larger campus moot, and warehousing fewer than 300 automobiles, the garage was doomed. The administration chose demolition, claiming the programmatic requirements of the new building—50 percent larger than the old center—needed the space. Listening to university administrators (and those hired to speak for them) about their decision-making process, one would think UT’s current billion-dollar building campaign was in tightly-packed midtown Manhattan rather than a relatively open office park. One can only hope the new center offers half as much delight as did the parking garage it displaced, and that the university soon realizes building density is the path to a quality campus, one that students will want to inhabit sans buses. This can be done without eschewing the achievements of the past 100 years in lieu of an architectural character that is neither historical nor Modern. 

Next: Part 3—An Unquiet Search

George Dodds

George Dodds’ Architecture Matters explores issues concerning the human-made environment, primarily focused on Knoxville and its environs. He has been teaching and publishing commentaries on the practice and history of architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture for over 30 years. He has practiced in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., has lectured internationally, and has served on the editorial boards of several journals. Since 2000, he has been on the faculty of architecture at the University of Tennessee.