Of Order

Standing in front of the Parc Wyndham 55 hotel on Ellis Street, I look up in awe. Scaling the building upward with my eyes, I am supremely mesmerized by the repetitive simplistic pattern of brown-tinted bay windows set amongst a skin of beige blandness. The sheer size of the building is a thing to remember-- its wide, hefty massing isn't shy to hog up the airspace around it-- but the paved sameness that shapes its identity is so profoundly awesome that I wince at the sight of it; frankly, its an ugly building. Its ugly to me because it ignores its context, in both scale and style, and it is therefore disrespectful to its elder neighboring buildings. 55 Cyril Magnin was the brash "new guy on the block" (and he's literally sitting on the whole block) in 1983 who's looks were forgettable but he insisted in being liked.
The hotel is also ugly because it is an inelegant display of the post-modern take on order. Sure, it is a departure from the modernist functionalism that produced oversized glass boxes (see, World Trade Center), but to me it is both rich in apathy and poor in the humane charm that makes its neighbors so timelessly lovable.

Cities, at their essence, are the attempt to create order on earth. While medieval settlements laid their streets in an organic respect to the land they called home, the pursuit to modernize urban life brought on the linear grid, indiscriminately imposed on the sweeping topography of hills and peninsulas (see, San Francisco). Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisquatsi aptly visualized this with cross-cut scenes of Manhattan alternated with the face of a microchip. Both are obsessively orderly, attempting to tame the erratic chaos of their dwellers, be it electricity or people. And while the street grid is just one display of this attempt to rule and regulate, it is in buildings that this is manifested skyward.

I am a man who has found love in his city, for cities at large, and I love them for all their orderliness. But sometimes I yearn for the rainforest, to stand at the foot of goliath oaks and hear the chaos, smell the irregularity, and feel the splendid disorder that keeps them living so marvelously.