The Best
and the Worst:

Knoxville architects pick their favorite and not-so-favorite local edifices.

What do Knoxville's buildings say about us? With a hodgepodge of styles, a conservative design ethic, and often frugal spending, it isn't entirely good.

by Jack Neely

In all but the very biggest cities, there's an unwritten law that you're not supposed to criticize architecture in public. It's different from everything else. A restaurant that doesn't meet the approval of the community will change or fail and soon be replaced with something else. A movie that's trashed by the critics may die at the box office, prompting producers to re-think their next project. It's the same with newspapers, of course. But any building, as long as it serves the practical functions of keeping its insides dry, will likely stay until the occupant outgrows it.

Most of us never know what a building will look like until it's built and too late to change. What good would it do to criticize? What are they going to do, tear it down and try again? So, as author Tom Wolfe put it in a book most architects hate, we take it like a man.

But some architects seem frustrated with being held so aloof. Marlene Davis, dean of UT's School of Architecture, thinks criticizing buildings that already exist would do a great deal of good. "Criticism makes architects sensitive to future endeavors," she says. Criticism—from architecture professionals or from a thoughtful public—can "articulate enduring standards of quality."

Those standards have had their ups and downs in Knoxville, as old buildings have been replaced by newer "modern" ones, and as the march of progress turns suburban terrain into commercial trenches. But how does Knoxville's architectural picture look as a whole? What constitutes "good" design from "bad," and which side is winning? Ask local and national architects, and the answers are mixed—there seems to be just as much to be ashamed of as proud (see sidebars). The most troubling concern, however, is over our architectural future—whether our city will ever develop a sense of its own civic identity through cohesive, well-planned design.

As it happens, Davis' sunny office is located in one of Knoxville's most controversial buildings, UT's Art & Architecture Building. Designed in the '70s by McCarty, Bullock, and Holsaple (known for its bold modernist work, the firm has since split into McCarty-Holsaple-McCarty and Bullock Smith), the building's concrete exterior strikes many as cold and forbidding.

"It's gotten a lot of criticism because it doesn't have brick," says Davis, who before she moved to Knoxville worked with the contractor on the building. When someone says they don't like the building, she asks if they've ever been inside; usually, they haven't. "They come inside and they love the building, she says. "There's an openness, a visual interactiveness. It's a good demonstration of how design can promote a sense of community."

That much is true. Outside Dean Davis' office is a long balcony from which you can see people in the snack shop, people reading the paper in the plaza area downstairs, people entering the art gallery, people seated in a classroom across the way. Even during the summer lull, it's a lively, inspiring place.

Davis was also involved in a small way in the construction of another McCarty-Bullock project which shares several qualities with the Art and Architecture Building, especially that open interior space: the City-County building. Opinions about how well it works swing to greater extremes; 20 years after its construction, it may still be the most-talked-about building in Knoxville. That building and the response to it represents as well as any building the complexity of contemporary architecture.

An old Harvard professor of Davis', Jerzy Soltan—an associate of the great French architect Corbusier—viewed the building and proclaimed that its architect was "touched by genius." That would be Bruce McCarty, the semi-retired founder of the firm. Davis likes that building too. "It has good access to the street, connects the city to the river, and meets the scale of the bridges and other buildings."

The City-County Building is indeed built into the riverbank and offers several fine views of the river to those whose offices are on its south side. Several other architects and urban designers, while praising some aspects of that building, are sharply critical of what it does to the rest of downtown. Rather than connecting the city to the river, they say, it walled the river off from the public's view, rendering it invisible to pedestrians and motorists alike.

Grover Mouton, who's in charge of the urban-planning program at Tulane University's School of Architecture, has been in Knoxville repeatedly over the last few years consulting with the mayor's office about the riverfront and other projects. While praising the building's interior, as almost all architecture professionals do, he says its exterior "speaks to a brutal aspect of architecture that says 'Don't get near us, we're powerful.' What it's done to the city is a nightmare. Unfortunately, it's the key to the waterfront."

Jeff Gordon, an architect educated at the Rhode Island School of Design and Harvard, taught at UT until he moved to Atlanta earlier this summer. He feels a little more comfortable about criticizing Knox-ville architecture for the record than many Knoxville architects do.

His sharpest criticisms have to do with Knoxville's abdication of its relationship to the river. "The tragic thing about the City-County Building is that the buildings could have been built with mixed-use, with ways of cutting through the buildings to the river, allowing another whole layer of urbanism from the building down to the river." He suggests terraces and walkways should have been built to enhance it.

Doug McCarty, who helped his dad design the building, defends it as being more complicated in its function and structure than many observers realize, folding a jail and a massive amount of parking into one clean-looking building. He says they actually considered other plans that would have allowed more openness. Still, he admits they might have done it differently today, now that the emphasis nationwide is more on pedestrian-friendly urban landscapes.

"The waterfront wasn't considered that important" in the '70s, he says. "It was mainly the view, and in the building the view was very successful."

Knoxville has been struggling with its own topography for years. Even to some early settlers, this steep bluff overlooking the river seemed like an odd place to build a city; an 1834 gazetteer criticized Knoxville's siting. It's been a challenge ever since.

The good architects seem to relish the challenge. Ken Moffett is one of the prominent players in the architectural firm Bullock Smith, internationally known for over 15 years for its innovative designs of theme parks; currently on their drawing tables are plans for an exotic theme park in Morocco, complete with Islamic-style onion domes. Moffett's also working on something a little more down-to-earth: the addition to the juvenile justice center off Sutherland.

"This location is pretty distinctive, in terms of topography, with lots of ups and downs," Moffett says of Knoxville. "It reminds me of Pittsburgh. It has a confusing street network, interrupted by long hills. But it makes it a more interesting place to be. It's not just a grid, like Indianapolis."

Moffett says Knoxville streets have many puzzling intersections which don't allow us to see where we're going. "I'm puzzled about why there hasn't been a more concerted effort to untangle the street network." Some of that could be improved—but, he hopes, not too much. "We should try to keep that intrigue, that interest."

Downtown's a particular challenge. "It's a little bitty downtown with valleys on all four sides, and I don't know how many bridges connecting it."

UT architecture Prof. David Fox says those bridges across the river bear weight far beyond South Knoxville traffic. "Collectively, the bridges have become a symbol of Knoxville to the point that they define its character," he says. "It's impossible to define the character of Knoxville without the bridges."

Yes, Knoxville is architecturally conservative. Maybe it even goes beyond that.

"There's almost a timidity that prevails in terms of what's been done in recent years," says Moffett. "All that comes to mind is a scattershot of isolated examples in the midst of a context of faceless work. It's ironic—or just puzzling—that we have a well-regarded school of architecture in town but not the impact that presence should have."

Several architects interviewed made similar remarks. One commented bitterly that the Architecture School of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville is better respected and more influential in the architecture and urban design of Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga than in Knoxville. Chattanooga, in particular, owes much of its downtown to its openness to UTK's leadership. Even the Aquarium idea came out of a UTK-sponsored architectural charrette.

"There's not much outside-the-envelope architecture in Knoxville," Johnson says. Hired by Pro-Temp to design a Knoxville headquarters on otherwise bland Kingston Pike, he built an unconventional stucco building angling away from the road, with a whimsical, wavy roof. Some appreciate the break in the strip-development monotony, some find it outrageous. "But they all know where it is," Johnson says, "and that's the goal."

One architect says government is partly to blame. "Knoxville is still emerging from a history of provincial good-ol'-boy government that doesn't realize the status of what is no longer a small town but a mid-size city."

It's hard to separate aesthetic conservatism from fiscal conservatism. Marlene Davis says that if many modern buildings are less pleasing to the eye than older buildings, it's less the fault of any modern architectural doctrine than a bottom-line cheapness that didn't afflict American business to the same degree 50 or more years ago, when buildings were respected as important and enduring symbols of the builder's values.

Exacerbating the problem is the fact that built-in air-conditioning systems make buildings much more expensive to build than in former times. Davis says modern buildings' mechanical systems often account for 30 to 40 percent of their total cost. Good design often goes begging.

It's a syndrome of modern America that may be a little more acute in Knoxville. "That conservative fiscal attitude is an East Tennessee quality," says architect Frank Sparkman, who's originally from Nashville. "If we believe we can get along without something, we do. We say, 'What's the least we can spend to accomplish this?' not 'What's the best, and how can we pay for it?'"

Perhaps going along with that conservatism is a lack of a sort of pretension which, in retrospect, makes other cities architecturally remarkable. "I don't think Knoxville is pretentious," says Grover Mouton from his home in New Orleans. "In Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans—the pretention is phenomenal"—rendering memorable buildings regardless of the moral state of the builder. He mentions Knoxville's 1886 courthouse, which he calls "sweet—with no pretensions at all."

In architecture, building to human scale is the late-century trend, and Sparkman says it seems to suit Knoxville well. "I've heard people say they like the fact that Knoxville's not quite a success. There's something humane about it."

"There is an independent spirit about Knoxville and Tennessee," observes Mouton, echoing the comments of several others. "I'd heard about it, and I thought it was a lot of bull. But it's true." He says that spirit has eclectic results on Knoxville's streets.

"There are pockets of strong architecture in Knoxville, that's for sure," he says. "There are some very original buildings in town. The trouble is, they're sitting by themselves. There's no contextual connection. Too much has been removed. You don't have the ensemble."

"Knoxville doesn't have a unifying sense, like Charleston," says DeWayne Pendley of McCarty-Holsaple-McCarty. "Knoxville is a mix of a lot of the styles of two or three centuries." Outside McCarty's big window in the NationsBank building, you can see it: the huge marble art moderne post office building; the brick neo-Georgian Whittle Building, 60 years newer but centuries older in style; the concrete modernism of the TVA Towers on Summit Hill; the tall, icy, mirrored skyscrapers of Gay Street.

Knoxville clients will let you know what they like and insist on it—and it might not have much to do with what's next door. McCarty and his colleague Pendley believe Knoxville clients are more willful than clients in most cities who bow to the architect and give him or her greater reign. In Knoxville, McCarty says, "the client is very interested in being involved in what the building's all about."

"We think that's a very good thing," he says almost convincingly.

"The independent character of East Tennessee I've always admired—but it's also an impediment," says Sparkman. Appalled at how much has been lost in a short time, Sparkman says Knoxville needs a coherent long-range urban plan. Most of the architects we spoke with, in fact, brought up Knoxville's lack of coherent and effective urban planning as something they found frustrating. Knoxville doesn't have the will for urban planning like that in Portland, Ore.—or, for that matter, Gatlinburg. That independent spirit we're proud of can make large-scale cooperation seem unlikely.

However, several architects say merely relaxing some zoning codes would be a step in the right direction. "Right now, it's illegal to build pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods and streets," says Knoxville architect Buzz Goss, who's well-known in Chattanooga for his work there.

Far from enhancing or promoting an urban plan, architects say outdated zoning restrictions actually prevent good architecture. Goss and his wife, Cherie, are young designers best known here for their urban renovations. They encountered a rather bizarre example of planning when their work on the interior of a Gay Street apartment mandated adding seven parking spaces.

"Zoning ordinances create things like Kingston Pike," Goss says, with mandatory setback and minimum-parking requirements. "There is not, in my opinion, a single good building on Kingston Pike. The SunTrust Center at Pellissippi Parkway—now, that's a handsome building," he says. But, he adds, its appearance and effect are seriously compromised by zoning-mandated setbacks and parking. Zoning makes strip developments necessarily horrible.

"Everybody's required to have enough parking for that one day after Thanksgiving when everybody goes out to shop," Goss says. Alternatives like shared parking are never considered, he says, and landscaping and planting are pitiful attempts to improve an impossibly ugly situation. "You can put on a band-aid, but you've still shot yourself with a gun."

But why is good architecture important? After all, if good architecture were proven to sell gasoline and hamburgers, Kingston Pike might look like the Champs-Elysee.

"There's such a thing as civic pride," says Mouton, as if he thinks maybe Knoxville needs to be reminded about that. "Knoxville has very good, seasoned designers. It's not like you've got a bunch of yahoos. The spirit of design in Knoxville is very good—if the clients would let them do it."

"Good architecture conveys an image of quality, of permanence, of caring about where you are and how you live and work," says McCarty. "Directly and indirectly, it conveys an image to the world of what your city's about." He says people judge a city by how it looks; if their experience is positive and memorable, they'll take that with them.

By the way, Knoxville is famous again this summer in a book thousands of Americans are taking to the beach with them. It's the current nationwide bestseller A Walk In The Woods, by popular author Bill Bryson. In the book, strip-development Knoxville—it's hard to tell exactly what part of it Bryson saw—is "a ceaseless unfolding pageant of commercial hideousness."

"We're a tough species," says Moffett. "We can soldier along in the crummiest environments and not seem to care. But the average person doesn't realize the extent to which their environment influences their state of mind. People don't really have an awareness of how important what's around them can be."

Parrott, who's on the team of one of the city's biggest architectural projects, the Gay Street Justice Center, thinks people need to be educated that quality makes a difference. "Life is a trip," he says, "and we need to enjoy the journey, because the destination is—well, something else. We can ride there in a cattle car. Or we can ride on the Orient Express."

"One building won't make or break a community," says Sparkman. "What's really important is that what we do collectively connects to something that is a positive contribution to the community—to making it a thoughtful, livable city. It could still be an okay place to live. But what an opportunity a thoughtful city could provide."