Metro Pulse/Secret History/Tear It Down, Part 2

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Our most hated architecture: A summary of reader outrage

by Jack Neely

My proposals that 10 Knoxville structures be torn down for the public good drew more complaints than I've gotten lately. Considering that some of the buildings are profitably occupied, I expected to get some obligatory complaints from managers, and did. A couple of readers also made surprising cases in favor of the old KUB building on Gay Street, which seems to be the object of some X-generation admiration. Some buildings, I'm told, need to be preserved for irony's sake.

And someone pointed out to me that I misspoke when I claimed that the residents of Kingston Towers, many of whom are foreign students who don't have cars, have to cross five lanes of busy traffic without a crosswalk just to catch the bus. That's incorrect. Thanks to TDOT's latest improvements to the Alcoa Highway intersection, students now have to cross six lanes of busy traffic without a crosswalk. I regret the error.

One frustrated developer told me that the Inter-Agency Building on Kingston Pike would have been torn down if only a project to bring a new Walgreens to that corner had not been scuttled. Of course, the project would have taken out the historic Oakwood house behind it, too. I'm not sure he understood my point.

Of course, the overwhelming majority of complaints I got concern buildings left off the list. There are too many reader additions to list here, but four came up repeatedly.

My neglect of the City-County Building, UT's Art and Architecture Building, the new Unitarian Church on Kingston Pike, and Thompson-Boling Arena, each galled multiple readers. I pleaded that they fall under my 25-year exemption, but in some cases, there's more to it than that. Though I wasn't too fond of any of those buildings when they were built, over the years I've found myself enjoying events inside them. And as I've spoken to architects about their subtleties, I've become convinced that some of them are much prettier than they look.

Take the massive Art and Architecture Building on UT's campus. I was a UT student when they built it, I hated it and it seemed to hate me. I understand that its style is described as brutalism. For students in finance or philosophy who don't have occasion to study third-year brutalism, it just looks for all the world like a big ugly concrete building.

But in recent years, attending lectures and gallery shows in that building, I've developed an alarming affection for it. On the inside, it's a lively, airy, visible place, with a perpetual feeling of incompleteness that seems suited to budding careers in art and architecture.

Another is the City-County Building, a more polite, less brutal version of the Art and Architecture Building. To readers who don't like modern architecture, and many still don't, it's too plain for its purpose. (Some modern people, even those born a half-century after Bauhaus, which makes them more modern than me, still don't like modernism much; I'm beginning to worry about whether it's going to catch on.) In this building, decisions are made that affect Knox Countians from Farragut to Corryton. In its courtrooms, the fates of thousands of mortal lives have been determined. Some are serving their sentences in the same building, either as convicts or county executives. For some, this building is one last image of freedom. But the building's exterior offers little clue of its crucial significance, little consolation to the condemned.

Worse, it blocks the river. To build it, the city closed down the south end of Market Street, which was once the most-traveled route to the old riverfront wharves. Now, the steep street by which Knoxville once unloaded river goods and Swiss immigrants is more or less just a fluorescent-lit hallway.

And like a lot of buildings of its era, it jealously keeps its hundreds of employees to itself. On a typical day, many arrive in the basement parking lot, ride the elevator up into the building, eat lunch in the snack shops, without ever venturing out into downtown. After all, the door outside is an elevator ride and a block away. It's one big reason downtown looks deader than it is.

However, as a piece of modern architecture, it's a long, graceful thing, and from some perspectives it can look lovely. To see it at its best, you may need to see it from the middle of the Henley Street Bridge. And like its brutish brother at UT, it works well on the inside. Its multiple levels of clerks' offices look almost exciting. The cop who greets you in the center and serves as a guide seems to enjoy his job.

One architect told me he wished we could keep it but punch a big hole in it, just to restore Knoxville's best connection to the river.

A couple brought up the most-recent Unitarian Church on Kingston Pike, which might be surprising. Designed by a prominent Nashville firm, it's one of Knoxville's few recent buildings in town that has won awards for its architecture, and if you have a chance to get a good, close look at it, its long curves make it a surprising and impressive building. But it's still squatty and square from the road at 45 m.p.h., which is, after all, the vantage from which most people see it. I got a letter from a retired UT academic who thought it looked like a proctologist's office. Not that proctologists' offices look any worse than anybody else's. Siting may be its only fault; I wonder whether people might like it better if it were rotated 45 degrees toward the Pike.

Unfortunately, nothing would save the Thompson-Boling Arena except, maybe, its dumb pragmatic usefulness.