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"The development of an official style must be avoided. Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government, and not vice versa."
The words are those of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. They're part of his famous Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture (1962), which helped inspire a revolution in government architecture. The revolution was the Design Excellence Program in the General Services Administration (GSA--sorry, it's hard to write about government without bogging in multisyllables). From 1994 to 2005, under the GSA's chief architect, Ed Feiner, the program tried to choose the best architects in the country for the design of courthouses and other federal buildings.
Full disclosure: I've been a so-called "peer adviser" to the Design Excellence Program since its inception, one of dozens of people around the country who are occasionally asked to help the GSA select an architect or to review an evolving design.
But getting back to Moynihan's dictum: I once heard Feiner phrase it another way. "We don't decide what is good design," he said. "We ask the architects to tell us."
But that begs an obvious question. Which architects do you ask? It's a conundrum. By asking some architects and not asking others, is the GSA deciding, de facto, what good design is?
That conundrum was the heart of a national conference in Washington, D.C., in June. Entitled "Function, Form, and Meaning in Federal Courthouses," it was held, ironically, in the pompous, disorienting interior wasteland that is the Ronald Reagan Building (not a product of the Design Excellence Program).
The conference was supposed to look back over the 13 years of Design Excellence, using courthouses as a building type case study, and figure out what worked and what didn't.
Disclosure again: I was the keynote speaker at this conference. I'm not about to repeat my remarks (I tried to argue every side of every issue, just to throw everything on the table). Instead, I'd like to address the real question about this conference: Why was it held?
A hidden cabal?
It was held, I think, in an effort to clear the air of a persistent rumor. Many people suspect there is a hidden cabal that's been trying to bully the GSA into abandoning contemporary architecture in favor of "traditional" or...