Dennis Cooper provides a builder’s guide to that most desirable and convenient of home accessories, the secret passage, and illustrates a number of admirable examples. No oubliettes, though. What exactly are we supposed to do with tax collectors, political cause solicitors, and other unwelcome guests?

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Ugliness is not really their primary problem, though. Brutalist buildings tend to have been designed as thoroughgoing expressions of superbia, in a spirit of utter and complete indifference to reality. Their unhappy owners too frequently discovered that basic systems, like heating and cooling and roof drains, simply didn’t work, that maintenance was impossible, and repair costs prohibitive.

40-50 years later these dinosaurs are typically eyesores and falling apart, but Brutalism is the gift that keeps on giving. Any building of the sort is a) unusual and b) inevitably the intellectual handiwork of a big-name architect. Consequently, architects and preservationists dote on them, and the institution foolish enough to build it in the first place is highly likely to meet major resistance when it wants to give up and tear the monstrosity down.

Yale’s Art and Architecture Building (designed by Paul Rudolph) is a notorious example, but is nonetheless being restored. (Hey! It’s only money.)

And, Charles Paul Freund, in the American Spectator, relates the sad (but amusing) story of the Third Church of Christ, Scientist in Washington, D.C.

How many dollars does it take to change a light bulb? Well, if the defunct bulb you’re replacing has been illuminating the Third Church of Christ, Scientist in downtown Washington, you could be looking at a bill of up to $8,000. That’s because unscrewing a blown bulb in that concrete monument to impracticality is tantamount to a construction project. According to one church official, you’ve got to build scaffolding just to reach some of the bulbs.

Why should anybody care about the Christian Scientists’ maintenance budget? Because their light bulbs, along with the rest of their building, are at the center of a series of issues from property rights to the separation of church and state that may be coming soon to a courthouse near you.

If you haven’t yet had enough of Washington and religion this campaign season, take a stroll a couple of blocks north from Lafayette Square to 16th and I Streets, where one of the country’s least welcoming houses of worship sits in sight of the White House.

If at first you don’t at first recognize the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, as a church at all, don’t be embarrassed; most people probably mistake it for a fortress intended to protect the president’s house against a tank assault. It’s a largely windowless octagonal tower made of raw, weathered concrete, and it’s surrounded by a sterile “plaza” that seems to have been emptied to keep the line of fire clear. The site inspires few people with a sense of spirituality.

That includes its own congregation, which has always disliked the building and dearly wants to be rid of its ugliness and its crushing costs, but which has been prevented from replacing the structure by Washington’s local preservation authorities.

Not that the church is either old or historic. It was designed in 1971 in an effort by the Christian Science church to establish a signature architectural presence in the heart of the capital. (The office building surrounding the “plaza” was part of the project, too.) The church tapped I.M. Pei’s firm for the design; Araldo Cossutta, who was also responsible for the city’s unloved L’Enfant Plaza, was the architect.

In terms of fulfilling its function, the project misfired. It’s uninviting to the community not only because it has the feel of a bunker, but because its front door is, by design, hidden. The cold plaza is generally avoided by the church’s neighbors.

The sanctuary seats 400, though the active congregation has shrunk to some 50 worshippers. The building’s concrete exterior is already deteriorating, and the maintenance costs are overwhelming. Money that would be better spent on the church’s mission, members say, is eaten up by the building itself.

So why has the city’s Historic Preservation Review Board unanimously declared the Third Church of Christ, Scientist to be an official D.C. landmark, preventing not only its demolition, but even its unauthorized alteration? Because, it turns out, it is a sterling example of the mid-century school of design known as Brutalism.

Admirers of Brutalism include numerous architecture and design specialists, and some of these persuaded the preservation board that when it comes to raw concrete and the rejection of ornament, the church “is in a league of its own” and must be preserved.

That action has drawn harsh criticism, especially from Washington Post Metro columnist Marc Fisher, who called the building “antagonistic to human spirituality” and an “example of a failed and arrogant architectural experiment.”

Defenders of the building have dismissed Fisher and others like him as design philistines, and regard the whole issue of the building’s aggressive ugliness as an irrelevant matter of taste. “Preservation isn’t always about whether we like and not like buildings,” one of the board members observed before she voted to make the church a landmark. “You can learn enough to have an appreciation for it.”

Read the whole thing.

The building above used to be Boston’s City Hall, but they replaced it with this.

Sippican Cottage has a few choice comments… and the explanation.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Gallery of photos of views from the tallest (170 meters 557 feet) glassfloored building in Europe: Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower.

It used to be Texans who made news with unprecedentedly large outlays on conspicuous forms of high living. These days, it’s billionaires from India.

The DailyMail reports:

India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is planning a palace in the heart of Mumbai with helipad, health club, hanging gardens and six floors of car parking.

His wife, mother and three children will live there with him, looked after by 600 live-in staff.

Construction has already started on what will eventually be a 175m tower and planners are aiming to complete it in September 2008.

Earlier this year, Forbes rated Mr Ambani as the richest resident Indian with a net worth of US$20.1 billion.

He came 14th in Forbes’ 2007 worldwide rankings.

Currently he is chairman of petroleum major Reliance Industries Ltd, India’s largest private sector company

The building, already worth £500 million, could start a rush on skyscrapers.

The Age reports:

The building, named Antilla after a mythical island, will have a total floor area greater than Versailles.

Hat tip to Dominique R. Poirier.

nyc-architecture.com has a photo collection on New York City’s lost Pennsylvania Station:

Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.” – “Farewell to Penn Station,” New York Times editorial, October 30, 1963

Hat tip to The Barrister, who writes:

There was a fervor for tearing down old buildings in urban American during the 1960s and early 70s. Many historic, but dilapidated, downtowns were bulldozed, as were countless wonderful “Union Stations” – and anything else that seemed “old”.

Today, we cherish towns like Savannah which were left untouched by the government scourge of “urban renewal.”

19th century housing was replaced by “modern” Soviet-style planned and government-subsidized housing projects (which finally are beginning to be dynamited themselves, for good reason). And the buildings were replaced with parking lots and sterile semi-high rises, and malls – that horrible concept which turns its back on the town in an effort to create an unreal, soul-less consumer paradise for the masses.

When you drive through downtown Bridgeport, CT, Hartford, or Nashville, you will be hard put to find an old building. Lucky towns escaped this frenzy of “modernization,” which I term “dehumanization.” Nobody wants to be in those sorts of downtowns.

Pennsylvania Station on the West Side of Manhattan – one of the masterpieces of the beaux-art movement – did not escape the epidemic of destruction. Grand Central Station escaped – but only barely. Just tell me – where would you rather wait 40 minutes for a train to meet your girlfriend or boyfriend – the new Penn Station, or Grand Central?..

Who would have the nerve to knock this thing down and replace it with the new (and truly terrible in every way) Madison Square Garden?

New York Times story.

No picture of the stairs, alas!

Seven years ago, when Nader Tehrani and Monica Ponce de Leon, partners at Office dA, an architecture firm in Boston, were asked to renovate a five-story town house in the Back Bay neighborhood, they faced a singular design challenge. The house belonged to Elmar Seibel, now 54, a dealer in rare books on art and architecture, and his wife, Azita Bina-Seibel, 46, a chef and restaurateur.

Mr. Seibel’s personal collection includes at least 40,000 books on Persian and Iranian culture. He keeps many in a warehouse, but perhaps 14,000 or 15,000 are at home.

There is a 1491 copy of a medical book written by Avicenna, the 11th-century philosopher and physician also known as Ibn Sina. A 17th-century eyewitness account of the coronation of a shah, written by Jean Chardin, a French jeweler, is inscribed to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, then the finance minister of France. A 19th-century cookbook has 4,000 handwritten recipes of dishes made for the shah’s court.

The collection began with the birth of the couple’s son, Kian, now 13. Mr. Seibel, a West German native, and Ms. Bina, born in Iran, wanted to give him something from his mother’s family’s cultural heritage. “The original idea was to create something for him — but it takes on a life of its own,” Mr. Seibel said. (Kian, who is fluent in Farsi, has not yet read any of the books in the collection. But he says he will, soon.)

Where, then, were the 14,000 books to go?

“What holds the house together is a vertical staircase that wraps itself around a tower of books that goes up three floors,” Mr. Tehrani said. (The family lives on the top three floors, while Ms. Bina’s mother, Aghdas Zoka-Bina, and a tenant occupy apartments on the first and ground-floor levels.) The stairway ends just below a skylight. “The tower of books appears to pierce the skylight, though it doesn’t in reality,” Mr. Tehrani said.

“The staircase is the ‘it’ factor,” he added. The books are easily accessible from the staircase, just four inches away. Some shelves are designed to hold books upright, while others are wide and shallow, so that manuscripts or magazines can be left there, in an offhand way — and they are. Many of the shelves are backed in translucent glass to let natural light shine through, and recessed lighting in the ceiling makes it possible to grab a book, settle onto any step and read in perfect light. Squinting is not required.

We just bought 80 surplus library bookcases.

China is planning to build a 400 room resort-hotel in a water-filled quarry in Songjiang. Atkins Architectural Group won the international design competition.

Hat tip to Andy G.

James H. Billington, in the Wall Street Journal, contrasts two famous churches of the Eastern Schism, identifying in the architecture of St. Basil’s, in Moscow (above) the centralizing impulse of the Muscovite despotism, and finding -—by contrast—- in the design of the Church of the Transfiguration at Kizhi in Karelia the echo of the very different individualistic culture of Hanseatic Novgorod.