Dispatch 07: In Bladensburg, a Shrine to Entropy
A grotesquely designed building as an emblem of our national disunion.
If an abomination must exist, let it exist in a vacuum. Do not serve a meal of Skyline Chili on fine china. Do not drive a Nissan Cube down the Blue Ridge Parkway on a crisp October morning. Don’t pull out a plastic kazoo to perform Brahms. When an abomination is contextualized, it is noticed.
Bladenburg, Maryland is not a vacuum. It is a town of modest size but it has a significant history and a particular character; a context, if you will.
It was the site of a decisive battle during the War of 1812. British marines navigated up the Patuxent River and invaded the Port of Bladenburg. James Madison, the sitting president at the time, was almost captured in the ensuing melee. That same night the British marched on Washington and burned it.
America’s early aristocracy settled its scores at The Bladensburg Dueling Grounds. From the beginning of the 19th Century until the Civil War, over 50 duels were fought there to settle personal and political disagreements. Francis Scott Key’s son Daniel was killed at the Dueling Grounds over “a question regarding steamboat speed”. In retrospect, a regrettable hill to die on.
Bladensburg is also a lodestar of musical history. From the end of prohibition until the early 1990s, it was part of a Route 1 corridor that hosted an astonishing array of nightclubs. The Dixie Pig on Bladensburg Road hosted Country & Western acts such as Patsy Cline and Jimmy Dean. Years before he played “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”, Charlie Daniels was a regular there. The Cross Roads hosted Ernest Tubb, Jerry Lee Lewis, Link Wray, and Faron Young. Local lore holds that Jerry Garcia, Eric Clapton, and Keith Richards all made separate pilgrimages to witness guitar hero Roy Buchanan’s residency there from 1969 to 1972. Some say after Keith’s visit, Roy turned down an offer to join The Rolling Stones.
In just the last decade, Bladensburg was the backdrop to a landmark Supreme Court case, The American Legion vs. The American Humanist Association. It centered around a massive World War I monument- known locally as Peace Cross- and whether its presence as a religious symbol on government property violated the establishment clause of the Constitution. The Legion won and the 40-foot cross still stands.
All of this is to say, Bladensburg is not some recently built strip mall. It is not a realtor’s exercise in post-hoc neighborhood branding; it is not a location filter on Zillow. It is a real place with a longstanding heritage of its own. So a hideous interloper that spits in its aesthetic face will be noticed. And for the last six months, that’s all I have done. Indignantly, I have noticed it.
George Orwell once said, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them”. Here I will tailor that maxim to state: “Some buildings are so ugly only architects could design them.”
Ladies and Gentlemen, I submit to you the new Bladensburg Library. Finished last year, to the tune of 13 million dollars, the building is rankly grotesque. It is a heap of cascading glass walls that have no discernible pattern connecting them. The overall style is that of a raging personality disorder. No part of the design complements another. The exterior has seven completely unrelated claddings; the most prominent of which resembles reptile scales. It does measurable damage to a person’s soul every time they behold it.
A free-associative list of things that the new Bladensburg Library resembles:
A Gateway desktop computer smashed by a shovel.
The corporate home office of Axe Body Spray.
The Tower of Babel if it was built by aging, misanthropic hipsters.
Jagged glass diarrhea.
The architectural representation of having your sex life investigated by a malevolent H.R. department.
A shrine to entropy.
What possible vision could yield such a monstrosity? The architects at Gant Brunett, perpetrators of this appalling stylistic crime, do not leave the public guessing. On their website, they declare that the library design incorporates “references to the dynamic nature of water and its potential”. Stunned silence; a sarcastic chef’s kiss. The institution solely responsible for giving the library its form, in all its credentialed wisdom, embraced formlessness itself!
Act I, Scene 1 of “The Making of Bladensburg Library”:
The Citizens of Bladensburg: “Hi there, we’re paying 13 million dollars for this building, can you not make it look like primordial chaos?”
Gant Brunett architectural firm: “It’s water, bro!”
A town that spends millions of dollars on a building should receive what it asks for. So this begs the questions: Did the architects not deliver what the public asked for? Or did the public ask for a monstrosity? My money would be on the latter.
The Bladensburg Library is emblematic of a larger challenge for modern creative work in our country: Americans no longer have a shared culture. Without this, we cannot expect our artistic class to produce grand, edifying public works. To what creative North Star should those artists orient themselves? In modern America, we have no coherent answer. The architects delivered formlessness because that is what was implicitly demanded of them. The library is a symptom not a cause.
This problem is not limited to public architecture. Every children’s TV show produced in the last decade is without any message besides “being kind”. Of course, kindness is laudable but it does not a worldview make. And the lyrics of modern music are likewise afflicted. The airwaves are jammed with Pharell intoning “Happiness is the truth” or American Authors braying “This is going to be the best day of my life”. As our shared culture recedes, artists shy away from the particular, the regional, the actual. Instead, they deliver the vague and unassailable.
To my mind, there are two profound causes of this challenge:
First, we live in a post-internet world. Our monoculture has splintered into a web of sub-cultures. That means that 105M people will never again tune in to watch the final episode of a sitcom like they did with M*A*S*H. On the other hand, countless Twitch streamers in basements from Akron to Anaheim can find their niche audience. What is lost in cohesion, is gained in individuality. (Which seems in shorter supply to you these days? Cohesion or individuality?)
Second, any remaining cultural touchstones have been “problematized”. Sure, the Super Bowl can draw 123M viewers- but half of them think that Taylor Swift is a Democratic Party “psy-op” and the other half think football itself is a “psy-op” for American capitalism. That such a straightforward event is imbued with Rorschach-like differences is deeply troubling. Of course, the architects of Gant Brunett were keenly attuned to that divisiveness. So when it came to incorporating specific regional history, they demurred. These days history is not an honor roll to namecheck but a minefield to bypass.
What we are left with increasingly resembles not a nation but a featureless economic zone. We venture out into a vast marketplace, transact our business, and scurry back to the confines of our narrow subculture. That’s fine for commerce but not for human flourishing.
It is not difficult to anticipate the most likely critique of my assertions: “We never did have a shared culture. And the only reason you think that we did is because of your own economic status, race, gender, etc.” Fair enough. A person can make that argument if they so choose, but it is a devil’s bargain. No future culture can be built atop such an antagonistic and cynical foundation. It precludes even the premise of unity. And the resulting vacuum will not remain empty. It will be filled by another culture; one that will be far less tolerant than the one we are now in the process of blithely discarding.
Perhaps I am psychotic to drive past an ugly building and see a civilizational precipice. Probably that’s true. I’m in show business, after all; a histrionic by nature. My intuition, though, outlines a stark choice: We can continue down the ominous path of viewing our nation solely as an economic zone, denuded of any heritage. Or we can decide to sacrifice some of our individuality to gain back a modicum of cohesion; we can forgo the cheap moral thrill of “problematizing” our political opponents to gain back something resembling a shared culture.
Until then, it will be one jagged shrine to entropy after another. It will be whole skylines of the dearly priced abominations.