Hyping the Charmless Concrete Bunker: The Civic Center at 50

In advance of the official celebration on the 18th, the City and fans of brutalist architecture are hyping City Hall and the greater Civic Center complex as "groovy."

Maybe they will succeed with the rebrand.

Groovy or intimidating fortress?
(City of Salem)

Gross, not groovy (last month)

But a little like Emperor's New Clothes, it requires looking past what is plain and clear. It is too often desolate, gloomy, and gross, not groovy. It is groovy only in the sense that the undressed concrete has grooves.

So gloomy inside
(Docomomo)

Distracting us with the severe geometry
(City of Salem)

In trying to whip the enthusiasm, too much attention is given to style. There are ways that considered as a pure aesthetic object the forms of the Civic Center are interesting. The severe rectilinear geometry of the pillars and walks and building volumes can be admirable as an exercise in formalism.

But as a space humans might want to visit and work in, as a space for living activity, it is so far from groovy. How often are you or someone you know actually happy to visit or work in City Hall? And outside of business hours, it is dead and empty.

Real warmth in a Lane County government building
(Docomomo)

Just five years after the Civic Center was finished, the Lane County Public Service Building shares many of the same elements of brutalism and modernism. Yet it is so much warmer. The tile, better lighting, more wood, smaller courtyards, all these details fit in the basic brutalist concept and enliven it with more human scale and hints of the natural world. It also meets the sidewalks in downtown Eugene. It might actually be groovy. It does not have the purity of concept we see in our Civic Center, but as living building it seems so much more effective and worthy of praise.

And two years before the Civic Center (though it may not be fair to invoke this example), there is the glory of the Mount Angel Abbey Library, a truly great building. Always it inspires happiness on a visit. 

Buildings can be delightful. The Civic Center is not delightful.

The Civic Center isn't bad because it is 1970s brutalism, it is bad because it's hostile brutalism and mid-century design.

Start of Nomination

As a document to a period and sensibility, the Civic Center deserves consideration. A Nomination to the National Register is not out of place. But must we love it? And could not the Nomination and the discourse around the Civic Center's anniversary better acknowledge problems with the architecture, with building function, and with its approach to land use and siting.

Civic Center in median of more lanes than I-5
Effectively no one observes unmarked crosswalks

February 29th, 1972

Detail, Pringle Creek Urban Renewal area

The total concept from 1972 was so much oriented to the "garden" setting for buildings, and for parking and traffic. It's all so very autoist. (There may be more to say in another post on this.)

On a smaller, Salem-sized scale, the Civic Center (and greater Pringle Creek Urban Renewal area) exemplifies the sorting and kind of "dead and artificial place" Jane Jacobs criticized.

Our Civic Center is "decontaminated sorting"
(Jane Jacobs, Death and Life)

As we consider Our Salem, the Climate Friendly and Equitable Communities rules on land use and transportation, we should better situate the Civic Center as a flawed, even failed, approach to our urban form. Valorizing it gets in the way of critical thinking about what we need and want in a 21st century city.

See also:

• More on the National Register Nomination, "City Council, May 23rd - Eco-Earth and Civic Center Historic Designations"
  
• "MORE PARKING!!! won't Solve Peace Plaza's Deadness" (2021)
  
• "Move Peace Plaza! It Doesn't Work - In Fact, It's Broke!" (2013)
• "Two Police Stations: Eugene's Car-Dependence and the Civic Center's Desolateness" (2013)
• "A Postscript on Peace Plaza: The Library Remodel Broke it!" (2013)
• "Pringle Creek Urban Renewal District Nets Little over Inflation" (2012)