Mistake in Yellow and Gray

Texas has always been a forward-looking state, where things are always going to get better and history doesn't count for much.  The spirit of the state is well expressed by GM engineer and inventor Charles F. Kettering, who said in 1948, "My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there."  So it's natural to expect that this bias toward novelty would show up in architecture. 

The problem with novelty in architecture is that most of the time, a new building is surrounded by older buildings.  And if the style of the new building is too radically different than its surroundings, the overall effect cannot be a happy one, regardless of how elegant or coordinated the new building is on its own.  When you leave out elegance and coordination and design a building's appearance in a manner that seems to have taken every minute of a half-hour's thought, well—you get the new Local apartment building here in San Marcos, Texas. 

I should explain something about the way San Marcos has grown from a town of less than 10,000 people in 1950 to its present estimated population of over 60,000.  Like most county seats in Texas, settlement started out around the county courthouse in the town square.  Many of the original buildings around the square still stand, and the immediate area of the square is a historic district, as is a quarter-mile or so of old homes along the main road that extends southwest of downtown, and much of the newer construction in town is several miles farther southwest in that direction.  Going northeast in the opposite direction from the old residences, you encounter one- and two-story commercial buildings, a 1970s-era bank building or two, a few auto repair shops, a gas station, and so on, until you reach the San Marcos River, fed by nearby Spring Lake, which has evidence of human habitation going back 9,000 years.  While there are not any architectural gems in the couple of blocks northeast of town, the buildings were all pretty consistent with each other, and the historic small-town atmosphere still lingered in that district to some extent.

That is, until the Local started going up a mere two blocks away from the courthouse square.  Here is a view taken from a parking garage a few blocks north of the area I'm speaking of:

The brownish copper dome to the extreme right is the county courthouse, no longer in active use but preserved for its historic and architectural beauty.  Almost even in height with the courthouse is the six-story thing on the left that looks like something an architecture undergraduate turned in at the last minute. 

In researching the history of the Grenfell Tower building in London that caught fire on June 14, I learned that its architectural style is known by the technical name of "brutalist."  I'm not sure that the Local's style has the dignity of a name, but I think brutalist will do until a better one comes along.  Here's a closeup of its sole concession to the fact that it's going to be on public display to thousands of people for years or decades to come: the yellow and gray—patterns—or whatever they are:

Good architecture treats space and the people who occupy it with respect, framing and transitioning to make mechanical necessities such as columns and cornices things of beauty.  The Local is just a box for housing students, and one gets the feeling that the designers came close to leaving it a solid uniform light gray, and then had a twinge of conscience, plus maybe some leftover yellow and dark gray panels (there's no sign of paint anywhere outside), and so they determined on the alternating design that reminds me of nothing more than a surveyor's stadia rod, or the way old 1960s space-flight rockets were painted with alternate black and white squares so the engineers could tell if they were spinning after launch.  Both patterns were designed for high visibility, and I suppose you could say the Local has that.  But they could have made it any color or no color at all, and it would still be highly visible anyway, towering six stories above the surrounding one- and two-story buildings.

Engineers were no doubt involved in the design of this structure.  If you look carefully just to the right of the old-fashioned-design streetlight in the second picture above, you can see evidence that electrical engineers were involved:  a set of junction or transformer boxes connecting to large steel conduits that run up outside the first two parking-lot floors of the building.  I suppose this side is the rear, but it looks pretty much the same from any angle, so who can tell?  Trying to make one side of this building inconspicuous is like trying to hide an elephant under a napkin—the thing can't be done. 

This is not the first or the only apartment building in downtown San Marcos.  The red-brick structure visible to the left in the second picture probably is, or was, an apartment building, but it was built in a scale and style commensurate with the rest of that section of town.  With the huge increase in population in the last decade brought on by the explosion of enrollment at Texas State University (of which I am an employee, therefore indirectly part of the problem), the city has broken out in a rash of apartments ranging from the marginally tasteful—the old First Baptist Church was converted into apartments in a way that at least made some concessions to the appearance of its surroundings—to the esthetic horror that is the topic of this blog. 

There may be no place on Earth where the Local would fit in and look normal, but if there is, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to live there.   And nothing I'm saying should be construed as a criticism of the safety, structural integrity, or legality of the building under discussion.  There are lots of things that are legal that nevertheless shouldn't be done.  Downtown San Marcos was not exactly an architectural showplace, but it at least had a semblance of coherence and a flavor of the town's historic roots.  The Local has changed all that.  I will probably teach students who live in the Local, and that's okay—everybody has to live somewhere.  But I'll still always think of it as the Mistake in Yellow and Gray.

Sources:  The photos were taken by the author on June 15, 2017.  The Kettering quote is from a Forbes magazine interview and can be found at https://todayinsci.com/K/Kettering_Charles/KetteringCharles-Quotations.htm.

Apple, Google, and the Mystery of Music

Back in the dark ages of music reproduction, when state-of-the-art was a plastic box called a cassette tape, yours truly worked for a few summers between college semesters at an audiovisual repair shop.  Most of my time there, I spent in the back room trying to fix recalcitrant tape recorders and players, but once in a while we were short-handed and I actually had to deal with a customer.  One guy I remember in particular.  He had brought in a strange-looking cassette player shaped and colored more or less like a volleyball, and its guts were not cooperating with my attempts to fix it.  One day he stopped in and demanded to see the guy who was actually working on his unit.  I came out to the front counter and tried to explain the problem to him.  He listened patiently, and then all he said was, “Man, I gotta have my music.”

Multiply him by the seven billion or so people on this planet, and you can realize some of the consequences of the fact that music is a universal feature of human culture, and the scale of money to be made by whoever provides music to these masses.  Before mechanical sound reproduction was possible, this was by necessity a retail operation.  Either you made music yourself, which is still the main way to hear music in many parts of the Global South, or you supported a few specialists called musicians, who could entertain as many people at once as could hear the sounds they made—a few thousand at a time at most.  Then came the phonograph, radio, magnetic recording, digital audio, the iPod, and most recently, according to Wired.com, Google and Apple’s attempts to dominate the global supply of streaming music to smartphones. 

Wired reporter Matt Honan admits that music is now a commodity, like gasoline or pork bellies.  The important thing about a commodity is the bulk price that  the distributors pay to the suppliers, which Apple reportedly offered to set at six cents per 100 songs streamed.  If Apple prevailed, that would mean for every song streamed to an individual listener, the entity formerly known as the record label would receive six ten-thousandths of a dollar.  Just a few years ago, when 45-RPM discs were still being sold, royalties might have amounted to as much as a tenth of the cost of a record, say maybe sixty cents.  Of course, you could listen to a record over and over again, but the same is often true of streaming audio.  The point here is that the cash return to the label for each listen has diminished almost to the vanishing point. 

It is not clear that Apple’s low bid will win out, but something close to it probably will.  And in the nature of digital distribution, we will probably end up with one major worldwide supplier of music to the masses, just as Google is the major supplier of search-engine technology.  Is this a bad thing?

It depends on what you think music is for.  Many people I know, especially younger ones, but even including my wife (who turns 57 next Tuesday), view music as a sort of background accessory to their lives, like certain styles of clothing.  The music they listen (or listened) to in their 20s and 30s becomes a part of them, and they select it to accompany or even induce certain moods of relaxation, pleasure, and so on.  For many people, like the gentleman I waited on at the repair shop, life without music is unimaginable, and it forms a continuous undertone to their lives at work and home.  If this is all that music means to you, then it doesn’t matter that much who supplies it, just as the name of your electric utility company probably doesn’t matter to you as long as the price is reasonable and the delivery is reliable.  That’s what dealers in commodities do:  deliver the goods reliably at a reasonable price.

But if you believe music is the most direct path to one’s emotions, in a manner of speaking a direct line to the soul, and can represent the abstraction called beauty, which is one of the “three roads to God” (the other two being truth and goodness)—well, then, the matter becomes a little more serious.  While it is unlikely that Google, Apple, or whoever ends up in charge will discriminate against particular styles of music if such discrimination reduces the bottom line, we can expect censorship to become an issue, especially in countries or regions where restrictive regimes hold power.  In the past, revolutionaries and freedom fighters have used music to great advantage.  In the classic World War II film Casablanca, no one can forget the stirring cafe scene in which a group of German soldiers singing “Die Wacht am Rhein” are drowned out by the French patriots singing “La Marseillaise.”  Say Google becomes the music supplier of choice in China, and the government decides that anything with religious or political overtones is not allowed?  Google and Yahoo and other high-tech firms have already kowtowed to the demands of governments for censorship with regard to search-engine results, and why should songs be any different?

Fortunately, anyone with a pair of lungs and vocal cords can make some kind of music or other.  And even now, in secret house churches, in African villages, and anywhere two or more people decide to sing together, the mysterious thing called music is doing its work in putting human beings in touch with the transcendent.  And we don’t need Apple's or Google’s help with that.

Sources:  The Wired.com story “Why There Are So Many Streaming-Music Rumors Right Now” appeared on Mar. 8, 2013 at http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/03/why-there-are-so-many-streaming-music-rumors-right-now/.  My thoughts on music drew inspiration from a talk (downloaded from iTunes!) by Peter Kreeft entitled “Beauty,” which is available at http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio.htm.  And the name of the 19th-century patriotic song that the Germans sing in Casablanca is disclosed at http://www.vincasa.com/indexwacht.html.