In the decade that I’ve been visiting Athens, I’ve had many occasions to walk through the “bad” neighborhood, Omonia. Inevitably, I end up in front of a gutted wedge of a building that still has its unlit neon marquee, with the boast, Hotel Sans Rival. Hotel without rivals. Bits of beaux arts ornament still cling to its facade, but the interior gapes black and hollow. It reminds me of a skull decorated for Day of the Dead. I always stop at Hotel Sans Rival and to imagine what it was in its heyday. What political betrayals, what prosaic adulteries did it host? Why did it end like this?
Even half collapsed, Hotel Sans Rival has its loveliness — something that can’t be said for most contemporary architecture. A few days ago, I finally read Adolph Loos’ 1908 minimalist manifesto, Ornament and Crime, which laid the intellectual groundwork for the basic-bitch boxes we build today. I didn’t expect to like it, but I also didn’t expect it to be gibberish race science — the sort that could have been penned by another Austrian Adolph. Loos says that ornament, in modern times, among modern, “civilized”, Western Europeans such as himself, is depravity. Also, decadence, degeneration, and other bad sorts of Ds. To Loos, a colorless cube proves European civilizational superiority to Persians, Black people, and …Slovaks. Loos’s ideal city is white and bare. He calls it a new Zion. It sounds like an Apple Store.
(proof of inferiority, I guess?)
Reading Loos in Athens made me think of the meanness at the heart of so many contemporary built environments, which seem determined to eliminate the human, the particular, the disorderly, even as they rise atop old and beautiful bones. What is this drive to make cities that look like iPhone packaging? Why do the rich want to live in places so clean and white and sterile that even a pigeon couldn’t find a home.
A few notes
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* I have a new print in my store to benefit the legendary Puerto Rican cultural center El Puente, in South Williamsburg. All profits go to them.
Love the “Rival” sketch. All the more reason for historic preservation, which hopefully outlasts some of these “basic bitch boxes”.