It was wonderful to climb to the top shortly after it was completed and to hear the Park Rangers in the viewing lounge describe it as their local “mountaintop” where they relaxed after the crowds had gone for the day.

I agree with Sauer’s notion of its inevitable tactility and its essential and unfettered modernism.

Now, viewing it on the web in recent photographs I am struck by its kinship to that other great modern American monument The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. One is arched vertically, the other horizontally. One exults in a new beginning with soaring optimism, the other rejoices in and yet grieves for life-ending heroism. But each expresses in the purity of its relationship to earth and air the poetic aura that emanates from buildings of unfettered, minimalist clarity.

The Arch is worthy of inclusion.

Patrick J. Quinn, FAIA

The Empire State Building, sporting new energy-efficient windows and with high-performance LED fixtures illuminating its spire, looks grand at 77 years of age. Familiar to every visitor to New York City, and to every filmgoer, it handily topped the Harris Poll of America's Favorite Architecture, conducted for the 2007 sesquicentennial of the American Institute of Architects. But the King Kong of all skyscrapers was appreciated from the get-go. The WPA Guide to New York City, written just eight years after the Empire State Building was completed, states: “its architectural importance far transcends the matter of height alone. The design, for which Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon won the gold medal of the Architectural League in 1931, is essentially modern.”

Seen from near or far, the stepped-back form of the Empire State Building is immediately identifiable. For New Yorkers, its dirigible-mooring mast gestures emphatically, with an iconic timelessness that reinforces our sense of who we are and, post-9/11, what we fear to lose. In his 1948 book, Here is New York, E. B. White wrote, “The Empire State Building shot twelve hundred and fifty feet into the air when it was madness to put out as much as six inches of new growth.” He saw this as “the white plume saying that this way is up.” The building has become our lighthouse, the landmark against which we measure distance and time. As one of the buildings that give shape to New York, it is essential and still modern, after all these years.

Rick Bell, FAIA
Executive Director, AIA New York

The Air and Space Museum (1976) contains the largest collection of air and spacecraft in the world. The intensive functional requirements of housing such a collection, when combined with the client's requirement that the building not stand out against its monumental backdrop of the Washington Mall, dictated its simple design solution. While graceful, and constructed of fine materials with elegant details, there is little for a visitor to note about the architecture of the museum (especially when there are lunar rovers and flying boats to distract you!) Architect Gyo Obata of HOK adeptly met the complex programmatic requirements, but the resulting structure is so vanilla that it hardly compares to the presence of the rest of his oeuvre. Obata's training under Eero Saarinen is much more apparent in works like Independence Temple and McDonnell Planetarium (both in Missouri).

In fact, the Smithsonian was a much more lenient parent to the Air and Space Museum's two neighbors on the Mall, the Hirshhorn (1974, Gordon Bunshaft) and the Museum of the American Indian (2004, Douglas Cardinal). It's as if Obata was made to design by stricter rules to pay for some imagined sins of Bunshaft's sculptural Hirshhorn, and then by the time the baby Museum of the Indian came along to fill the last site on the Mall, the Smithsonian had given up on trying to raise only prim and unobtrusive buildings on the Mall.

The most unfortunate effect of the Air and Space Museum is that it, like nearly every other building along Independence or Constitution Avenues, contributes to the dead zone of activity and urban design at the boundaries of the National Mall. Across Independence Avenue from the Museum are the massive and institutional buildings of the Department of Education and Federal Aviation. The only difference between the two sides of the street is that the entering the bureaucracy requires extensive security checks, allows no photography of the building's contents, and leaves the visitor standing in just as oppressive of an environment as she found outside on Independence. Once you enter Obata's chicly austere travertine volume, however, you immediately recognize that the building comfortably houses both a horde of happy children and hundreds of priceless, fascinating artifacts. The Smithsonian, for its urban design foibles, still inspires its visitors to celebrate the shared cultural property of the nation. We can only imagine a federal bureaucracy that might be so engaging.

Jess Wendover, AICP, LEED-AP
Director, Mayors' Institute on City Design
Senior Director of Programs, American Architectural Foundation