FROM BAROQUE TO ROCOCO TO RIDICULOUS?

James "Long Emergency" Kunstler takes a monthly break from decrying official corruption and assorted forms of decay (I stumbled across his weblog initially from an environmental site) to honor the architectural "Eyesore of the Month."

In February, he took a break from "the usual cavalcade of horrors for a brief lesson."  I think he's praising Our President for ordering commissions for federal buildings to be submitted in traditional architectural vernaculars.  (That his DOGE boys are hoping to sell off a lot of the postmodernist and brutalist stuff offers some sort of a plot twist.)

By way of example, he offers a recent municipal building in Alpharetta, Georgia.

[S]ee another new-ish civic structure dressed in neo-Georgian formality: the Alpharetta, GA, City Hall by David M. Schwartz architects — granted, not a federal building, but proof that trad proportions and details can be done well, where there’s a will to get’er done. Nice, huh. Dignified. Serene, confident, legible. . . reflecting what is to be desired in a polity, sanity and grace.

It's hard to mess up the traditional designs.

Unattributed photograph retrieved from James Kunstler.

He continues,  "Sure there are other ways of making buildings, but are they expressing what we want to say about ourselves? Might we want to suggest that there is a sacred order to the human project, and be reminded of it forcefully in our monumental buildings?"

That's true, and you can't have too much of that grand Roman quality, whether it's the Federal Supreme Court taken together, or that portico on the mostly Georgian city hall.

And yet, it's possible to overdo even the traditional forms.

Unattributed photograph retrieved from Grapevine Main Station.

That's the Peace Circle and Grapevine Main Station complex, serving as a station on the Trinity Metro Commuter Rail service in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area.  It looks like a parody version of a Chicago and North Western small city station.

Green Bay Press-Gazette file photo.

There were similar stations with that Italianate tower in Beloit and Sioux City.  Perhaps overdoing the clock tower was on purpose.

Located at the intersection of Main Street and Dallas Road in Historic Downtown Grapevine, the 42,000-square-foot rail station consists of Harvest Hall, a European-style food hall with seven globally-inspired kitchens; Third Rail, an indoor/outdoor entertainment and event venue; 38,000-square-foot expansive outdoor Plaza; and a 150-foot-tall Observation Tower with 360-degree views of the city and beyond all connected to Hotel Vin, a six-story, 120-room Marriott Autograph Collection property and a 552-space parking garage.

Undoubtedly, many of the hotel guests, shoppers at the adjacent new-made-to-look-old shopping district, which, itself has a few structures that overdo the old forms of commercial buildings, and passengers on the Grapevine Vintage Railroad, which uses a station building that looks right, are arriving by car rather than on a Trinity regional train.  Looks like tourist season is already in full swing on the GVVR.  One of the tours includes plane-watching from that tower.