It certainly isn’t as iconic a building, although I think part of that is because you don’t see the exterior very much. I don’t want to be as reductive as saying this is because there’s nowhere convenient to put a camera that gets you a good, uninterrupted shot of the building, but I honestly don’t see that image very much in e.g. TV news establishing shots, compared to the shot across the Thames or College Green of the HP.
On the other hand, the debating chamber is big enough to hold every elected member comfortably, so swings and roundabouts.
Interesting that the cost for this - £369Bn - is so much less than the Westminster quote, for what at first glance (modernise a 200/300 year old building) looks like it should be a similar sort of job. Shows what a state HP must be in.
Not sure if you’re joking, but that puts me in mind of one of the formative experiences of my civic life. In the late 1980’s, I was part of a program called Close Up, that brought high school juniors and seniors to Washington for a week, to tour governmental departments, meet with our various representatives, attend lectures on government policy and current events, and generally learn as best we could how our government worked.
A tour of the White House was not part of the program, but we did drive past it, and I was surprised to see that protesters were permitted to display banners and posters in Lafayette Park, directly across from the White House; so the President could, in fact, look out the window and see common citizens.
The other thing that deeply impressed me was our tour and lecture on the history of the Congress and the Capitol. After the lecture, we were released to explore the Capitol (with some obvious exclusions). I was utterly amazed that a group of high school kids was permitted to wander freely, with no one questioning our right to be there. We could ride the subways between the Capitol and the House and Senate Office Buildings, look at the portraits in the rotunda, even request copies of bills from the Government Publishing Office, which we were given with no questions asked. It really drove home to me the extent to which the Capitol and the government belonged to us, the people.
Alas, that freedom was a victim of 9/11 (and was probably given a further deathblow by January 6). Last time I was in Washington, there were police barricades at the Capitol steps, and Lafayette Park was closed to the general public. It truly broke my heart, and speaks to the way that our democracy has weakened and teetered closer to authoritarianism.
I think I’m going to be the weirdo here because I have zero sentimentality toward buildings like the White House.
Going further, I’m all in favor of getting rid of it and replacing it with a refurbished Costco. Why? Because the grandeur of the building has lent respectability to certain incompetent cretins throughout history. It allows people like Trump to be seen as “presidential” without doing Thing 1 to earn it beyond winning an election. Get rid of the building for that reason alone - preserve it if you like for posterity, but have the president work out of a damn strip mall. They should be judged by their policies and what they actually do.
While we’re at it, cease all the pomp and circumstance - state dinners, giving medals to scout troops, etc. Have the executive branch actually do stuff. I’m fed up with all the “optics” that they exploit, and we unfortunately lap up.
I feel completely differently about other historic buildings. I’ll cry the day they decommission Fenway Park.
Symbols are extremely important. People incorporate them into their mental images all their lives. They can be tarnished. The American flag became a symbol of our idiocy in Vietnam, so people burned it. The national anthem is completely degraded by being sung at every sporting game. OTOH, some people incorporate sports teams as symbols. For me, every sports stadium in the country could be torn down and turned into affordable housing. They mean nothing.
Some national symbols need to remain national symbols. They represent the country. Only if the vast majority of citizens treat them that way will the country itself mean something to the totality of the populace. Part of the problem in the country is that national symbols have both been tarnished for one half and appropriated and glorified by the other half.
The tarnishing may be irrevocable. Or a giant can of polish may come to the rescue in our future.
Indeed. I visited Strasbourg earlier this year, and saw the European Parliament. It’s a fine building of glass and steel, and looks like a perfectly nice place to conduct Europe’s business. But it lacks the grandeur of Westminister, the gravitas I would expect for the Mother of Parliaments.
True, but just to bear in mind, what is considered “classical” today was avante-garde and modernish when it was built hundreds of years ago.
So if we built a gleaming new glass building for the US president or British parliament, it would be the same approach, and it will look all classical-old-fashioned 200 years from now.
The official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada, 24 Sussex, is in such bad shape the Prime Minister no longer lives there and they’re talking about tearing it down. They’re also talking about fixing it, which will cost millions, which for reasons I personally don’t really grasp is controversial, even though
a) It’s a miniscule fraction of what the government spends on other crap, and
b) We do have to have the Prime Minister live somewhere.
Gleaming glass buildings were the hot new thing right after WWII. Nothing about them speaks to any specific period, or the 21st century, except that they’re still being built because they are cheaper than any alternative.
That last might be a symbol of the 21st century, but probably not the one you were looking for.
Seeing as you Brits burned our capitol and didn’t pay reparations, I propose that you send over your experienced castle builders and replace our White House with a white castle. That will give our president a proper, regal residence on par with your king.
…and Biden can sell tasty White Castle hamburgers in the WC Cafe.
For decades, California was effectively without a Governor’s Mansion. The building served only as a museum, not as the governor’s residence. When Ronald Regan was governor he rented a house in Sacramento’s ritzy “Fabulous Forties” neighborhood*. When Jerry Brown was in office the first time he famously lived in a modest apartment. Then when Jerry Brown was governor the second time he moved into the old Governor’s Mansion, returning it to its original purpose.
*If you’ve seen Lady Bird, it’s the neighborhood where the “blue house” is.
I mentioned in another thread that I had jury duty last week, and the courthouse in Sacramento is a 1960s brutalist building. Certainly not the “classical” building most people picture when they think of a courthouse. But honestly, brutalism is starting to grow on me, and I kind of like our brutalist courthouse. It might not look classical is the same sense as the White House or Capitol, but it does look kind of old fashioned, and dare I say it looks like a classic mid-century government building. But it’s slated for replacement soon; a new, modern glass courthouse is currently under construction.
I would disagree with that. Glass buildings are still being built, but the style of those glass buildings has evolved. The modernist “international style”, a glass rectangle with no decoration whatsoever, was en vogue from about the 1950s-70s, and really isn’t being built anymore. The World Trade Center was a perfect example of that style. By the 1980s postmodern architecture start to emerge, which added decorative elements back into buildings. They might still incorporate a lot of glass, but they’re a distinctly different style from modernist buildings. Now I hear postmodernism has mostly fallen out of fashion, but I’m not exactly sure how to describe contemporary architecture.
I don’t want to get too nitpicky on this. The modernists may have pared back on the gaudy stuff, but the detailing work was meticulous and wildly expensive. The crown jewel of modernism was the Seagram Building.
The design used costly, high-quality materials, including bronze, travertine, and marble. The lavish interior, overseen by Johnson, was designed to ensure cohesion with the appearance of the facade.
Doesn’t matter. If, as you say, both modernism and postmodernism are out of favor, and the succeeding style doesn’t have a name or even a common aesthetic, what in the world would you build to represent 21st century America? This is exactly the wrong time to even think of it.
The project has been in limbo for the past three years with MPs divided over two main options: a “full decant” of MPs into temporary accommodation while work is carried out, versus some form of “continued presence” on the parliamentary debate.
…
The estimated cost of full decant has risen from £4 billion, when MPs first voted for it, to around £11 billion — a price tag many MPs feel cannot be justified amid a cost of living crisis. Estimates for the cost of refurbishment while staying in place are even higher, and would take considerably longer.
…
The board also discussed introducing a third option known as “enhanced maintenance,” described by one parliamentary official as “basically a program of rolling patch and mend.”
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An MP who sits on the restoration board, granted anonymity to discuss private meetings, defended the downgrade, saying: “It makes sense to undertake other projects that can be done over the next couple of years and paid for within current budgets.”
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Alexandra Meakin, lecturer in politics at the University of Leeds, said the scaled back proposal was “deeply concerning,” noting that “each week of delay costs millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money and increases the significant safety risk faced by thousands of staff and visitors to parliament.”
*(The test is also known as the reverse marshmallow test. In the original marshmallow test, a child is shown one tasty treat but told that if they can resist eating it for five minutes, they’ll get two. In the shit sandwich test you, yes you, are presented with a literal shit sandwich and told that if you don’t eat it in five minutes, you’ll have to eat two. Fail to eat them and it’ll be four, etc, etc. The question isn’t, are you going to enjoy this experience, the question is whether you can take the pain now to spare more later.)
There is one big difference between the shit sandwich test and this current situation in Parliament or really any highly unpalatable political situation in any country.
You are the same you who will eat the one sandwich now or two later. The pols in office today may have to eat one, or they can set things up so their successors need to eat 2. Or better yet, set things up so that the other party is in power and will get the blame when they make the public eat two.
You see the large difference in incentives between you and a legislature.
That’s a fair point, and it is definitely a factor now. But in teh very recent past, the Tories won an 80 seat majority, Boris Johnson “squatted like a giant toad over UK politics” and most people - and certainly most Tory MPs - believed they were on course for at least one more term in government, probably two. And yet then they still did not eat the sandwich.
It is kind of a catch-22. If MPs think they’re going to be around when for a long time, then they pass on the sandwich because they don’t want the ordure to stick to them over time. And if they think they won’t be around, then they pass on the sandwich because someone else might be eating two.
(Apparently the acronym IBGYBG exists in the finance industry, to be used between two individuals brokering a deal that earns a bonus for them now but might blow up in clients faces later: I’ll Be Gone, You’ll Be Gone.)
