Month: September 2008

Doubt: A Parable was written by John Patrick Shanley and marks a serious departure for the man who also penned screenplays for Moonstruck and Joe Versus the Volcano. While Doubt enjoyed two successful seasons on Broadway and snagged both a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize, Live Arts’ current production marks the play’s regional debut.

Although the play is a compact 90 minutes, it still manages to explore a few compelling moral issues. Set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, Doubt’s action centers on an impropriety that the progressive Father Flynn (played charismatically by newcomer Timothy Read), the priest and boy’s basketball coach at St. Nicholas, may or may not have perpetrated on a 12-year-old boy. Opposed at every step by the inflexible nun Sister Aloysius (Doris Safie), Father Flynn finds a sometimes-ally in the gushing and vulnerable Sister James (Amanda Pierson Finger) and in the mother of the boy he’s been accused of preying on, the pragmatic Mrs. Muller (Simona Holloway-Warren). The actresses are utterly believable in their adversarial roles, and remind the viewer that strong women also exerted themselves in the patriarchal Catholic Church of the ’60s.

Nun’s the word: The clergy tries to keep a possible sin under wraps in Doubt: A Parable at Live Arts.

With hints and arguments dropped from every angle, it is nearly impossible for the viewer to decide who is right and who is wrong, who is innocent and who is guilty. In fact, Read—moonlighting from his day job as a pastor to a Crozet Presbyterian church—conducted his own exit poll after the show: “Did he or didn’t he?” Loyal members of his congregation as well as new fans had to answer, “Hard to say.” Even director Fran Smith’s subtle authorial touches pull a viewer’s compass in opposite directions and serve to enhance the play’s ambivalent message: Does the music playing when Flynn takes off his clerical robes signify something sinister? Does the way he crouches low on a basketball when counseling young boys demonstrate his accessibility or his lecherousness?

Shanley’s drama relies on the audience to interpret its lessons. Father Flynn even delivers two short sermons in the work, which make spectators briefly feel like they’re sitting in pews, asked to peel back the many layers of a religious parable. But the play’s explorations of forgiveness versus cover-up, doubt versus suspicion, and innocence versus naivety never weigh too heavily on the audience, often lightened by epigrammatic one-liners delivered by Safie’s Sister Aloysius, who is implacably against sugar cubes and ballpoint pens in addition to pedophilia. The cast does an excellent job of grounding a complex moral tale in a place that is human, empathetic, and ultimately honest in its ambivalence.

I have a personal and rather embarrassing standard for Metallica. It hinges on one question: Does the song lend itself to the daydream in which I stand on a stage, 32nd-note riffs sparking from my guitar, and snarl vocals that proceed to both impress and frighten the crowd, which—incidentally—is composed in equal parts of people I would like to impress and people for whom I have a great hatred.

The majority of Death Magnetic, when held up to this ridiculous yet reliable standard, succeeds admirably.

The band’s 10th studio album, produced by Rick Rubin, was hailed as a return to Metallica’s speed metal days long before it was released in September. And it is. Gone are the bluesy, wandering melody lines that populated the Load albums, as well as the pop-song structures of the Black Album that seemed content with a single riff. Mostly.

Because while Death Magnetic brings back galloping riffs and sonic fury, there are moments when shades of Metallica’s more recent, sludgy past pop up. And they’re not all bad.

Vicious tempos and start-stop precision made Metallica famous way back in the days of tight jeans and mullets. The 2008 Metallica reaches back for both (tempo and precision, not tight jeans and mullets). But they combine them with some of the more “Mama They Tried to Break Me” moments of the ’90s. It works on songs like “The Day That Never Comes” and “Cyanide.”

Instead of relying on those alt-metal years, Metallica uses them to do something they haven’t done for the last decade: write songs with multiple movements and complex arrangements. Or, put another way, songs that make you want to drive fast and punch concrete.

But for all the celebration of Metallica’s return to its first-four-albums form, there is an aspect that didn’t come back. Lyrically, it may be time for fans to learn to live without the Master of Puppets-era James Hetfield.
 
The lyrics for Death Magnetic came solely from Hetfield, and thank whatever deity for that, given the low points from the group’s previous album, St. Anger. Clearly, though, Death Magnetic still exists in that nebulous, post-recovery mode of self-evaluation.

Hetfield was clearly at his best when writing in a persona—songs like “Disposable Heroes,” “One” and “Creeping Death.” But those are nearly 20 years in the past. The songs we’ve got now aren’t bad if one can forgive the occasional poetic inversion for the sake of rhyme, the more-than-occasional metal cliché and the phrase “forever more.”

There are bright moments, of course, songs like “The End of the Line,” where Hetfield is back to barking lyrics and sounding like the same lead man whose staccato shouts on “Creeping Death” hit like spears.

If the early Hetfield of Master of Puppets was metal’s Hemingway, sparse and violent in nature and subject, then the post-recovery, pushing-50 Hetfield is someone different, more personal, drawn to assaying an interior world. It’s just good to hear him do it at this tempo again.

Complaining about new buildings is a great, if unsung, American pastime. New condos on the corner? “Ugly!” New strip mall where there used to be trees? “Atrocious!” Everybody does it. And if they don’t, they’re boors who wouldn’t know a Parthenon from a Panera.

In the spirit of that noble tradition, we at C-VILLE have taken it upon ourselves to single out half a dozen of the most complaint-worthy constructions in town. Not all of them are new; in fact, their building dates stretch back to 1952. But all of them are part of our current landscape in Charlottesville and Albemarle. People live, work, park and buy toasters in them; they teach and learn in them; and they gaze upon them as they walk and drive past.

It’s our contention that these six buildings (well, O.K., one is more like a collection of buildings) don’t serve these purposes as well as they should. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that they represent major missed opportunities. Rather than “Welcome to Downtown,” one says, “Halt, ye dollar-toting visitors.” Instead of a bold embodiment of Jefferson’s spirit, one provides a pale copy of his style. And a third panders to New Urbanist theory while, in practice, flouting most of its goals. (Hello, “Community Street!”)

Yes, these are the buildings we wish had never been built: a rogue’s gallery, to be sure. In an architect’s town, they’re the collective embarrassments that make us look like yokels. All you critics out there, feel free to cringe.
 

Creating problems by solving one

Water Street Parking Garage
Location: 200 E. Water St.
Year built: 1993
Assessment: $5,549,700
Use: Parking 
Square footage: 354,250
Current owner: Charlottesville Parking Center, Inc.
Owner at time of construction: Charlottesville Parking Center, Inc.
Developers: City, Charlottesville Parking Center, Jefferson National Bank
Architect: VMDO

What they were thinking: The bigger, sexier picture: A new parking garage was seen as one of the cornerstones of making the area south of the Downtown Mall attractive for revitalization. The smaller picture: As Charlottesville Pavilion General Manager Kirby Hutto, whose title at the time was special events coordinator for the Charlottesville Downtown Foundation, said in a May 1995 Daily Progress article, almost two years after the garage opened: “It used to be [parking] was one of the biggest issues folks used to call us about. That’s really a non-issue now.“

What they squandered: Perhaps we should add to the list of Zen Koans this brain-teaser: Why does a parking garage have to look like…a parking garage?

But being just plain ugly is only the beginning of the Water Street Parking Garage’s downsides. The structure takes up (some might say “eats up”) two whole city blocks, and is never without available spaces. Kudos for planning for future growth, but at what point does envisioning down the road mess up the part of the road we’re on?

Water Street Parking Garage

Here’s another question: Isn’t it possible to accommodate Downtown parking while preserving the walkability of the area? Strolling along the north side of the garage along Water Street, in the dim presence of thick support slabs and metal awnings, doesn’t feel much different from walking inside a parking garage. And if you decide you want out of the sheltered corridor, beyond the awnings there’s little sidewalk left—it’s almost like walking along the thin shoulder of a highway.

Let’s see…what else? For all of its aim to please, the garage is often not practical, as there’s only one way to get out. For instance, many people going to see a play at Live Arts, which is catty corner to the garage, won’t park at the garage because the backup of cars getting out adds to the time it takes to get home. Live Arts even regularly starts late to accommodate the time it takes for theatergoers to find alternate parking.

Last and maybe least: For the occupants of the buildings along the section of the Mall parallel to the garage, there is no southern view. Looking out the windows is like being hit with a ton of bricks. That kind of nuisance is to be expected in a growing city, but not necessarily in a growing city making the best possible decisions about its urban environment.

Aspiring to average

Hollymead Town Center
Location: 159 Community St.
Year built: 2005
Assessment: $29,848,000
Use: Commercial with big residential plans
Size: 12.96 acres currently; 180 acres total planned for project
Current owner: Hollymead Town Center LLC C/O Regency Realty Group (based in San Antonio, Texas)
Owner at time of construction: Hollymead Town Center LLC
Developers: Several, including Regency Centers, Octagon Partners and Wendell Wood
Architect: Bignell, Watkins, Hasser Inc.

What they were thinking: The ultimate purpose of the county’s Neighborhood Model is to provide urban development in areas surrounding the city without disrupting, if possible, open space. The model would create a residential oasis along the much-trafficked Route 29 corridor. Ultimately, the model was meant to add high-density recreational space instead of urban sprawl. Hollymead Town Center was to become the highlight in the county’s much-debated targeted development areas. But what initial developer Wendell Wood fed to the county was pure rhetoric: a mixed-use and pedestrian enchanted island, the first of its kind in Albemarle.

Hollymead Town Center

What they squandered: In all fairness, Hollymead Town Center is just another strip mall in a nation of strip malls. The visual containment and human scale that was promised as one of the principles of the Neighborhood Model was completely abandoned to give life to an impersonal, mammoth and disproportionate shopping complex. The rural living that is supposed to be a flavor of the Neighborhood Model is lost to the stretch of concrete and inaccessible parking that houses Target, Pet Smart, Harris Teeter, Bonefish Grill, Sakura Japanese Steakhouse & Sushi Bar, TGI Friday’s and Mattress Warehouse among others. It’s enough to make you want to shoot an arrow into that 142,500-square-foot red and white bull’s eye.
 

The thing that gobbled Fifeville

Fifth Street Flats
(a.k.a. The Purple People Eater)
Location: 215 Fifth St. SW, near the intersection with Dice Street
Year built: 2006
Assessment: $3,537,800 ($248,000 average per unit)
Use: Residential condos
Units: 12
Current owner: Various
Owner at time of construction: Bill Atwood and Dan Walters (bought from Ampy Smith)
Developers: Bill Atwood and Dan Walters
Architect: Bill Atwood

What they were thinking: In a word, infill. The lot was empty in a neighborhood that’s within walking distance of both UVA and the Downtown Mall, and the city had been looking to increase its housing stock. The lot was zoned for up to four stories, and Atwood and Walters saw this as an opportunity to satisfy both the city and their pocketbooks.

“We thought we were doing good at the time,” Bill Atwood told C-VILLE in April. “If we want affordable housing, we’ve got to get more units.” Atwood has long worked as an architect, but this was one of his first forays into development, and he said he was a little naïve about it—he thought since it was zoned for such a large residence that the neighbors must have understood what could go up there. As for the color, he thought he was reflecting the colors that he saw in the neighborhood.

Fifth Street Flats

What they squandered: With its height, setback and color, the building does an awful job of fitting into the context of the Fifth and Dice neighborhood, once a predominately black area that has lately become more racially mixed, with houses dating back to the 19th century. The Purple People Eater creates a kind of embattlement where gentrifying yuppies can enjoy the southern views while keeping watch on the rest of the neighborhood. The faux balconies that face toward the neighborhood are tiny, not big enough for a chair, so that residents can’t even passively visit with the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the building’s gentler side looks out on a series of cottages built in 2005. And as one man told C-VILLE, the building is so close to the sidewalk that when you walk by you’re afraid you’re going to bump your elbow.
 

Time to move forward
 

Darden Graduate School of Business Administration
Location: 510 Massie Rd. (North Grounds)
Year built: Completed in 1996 (basic grounds); second phase started in 2000 (the phase including the parking garage and hotel)
Assessment: $156,865,500
Use: Education
Size: 97.113 acres
Current owner: Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia
Owner at time of construction: UVA
Developer: UVA
Architect: NY firm Robert A.M. Sern

What they were thinking: Tired of their ’70s modernist compound, Darden trustees wanted two things: state-of-the art interiors capable of keeping up with the Joneses of the Ivy League, and a colonnaded, red-bricked, Jeffersonian stamp of approval. Over $100 million in private funding meant they got what they wanted.

Darden Graduate School of Business Administration

What they squandered: What Would TJ Do? (WWTJD?) has always been an architectural hot button around Charlottesville, and the much-ballyhooed construction and expansion of the Darden School, completed in late 2002, is no exception. Cited in The New York Times as “one of the worst abominations of recent campus architecture,” the Darden School keeps company with the likes of the South Lawn Project as an architectural Frankenstein, lumping together hallmarks of Jeffersonian architecture—a quad space lined by columned walkways, interspersed with pavilions—to create a photocopy imitation of the Lawn that fails to equal the sum of its parts.

The result has had architects, scholars, and community members asking themselves whether the school’s construction really keeps with the Jeffersonian spirit. In response to their colleagues’ protests, some A-school faculty members defended the Darden design with the claim that it follows Jefferson’s philosophy of using “architecture from antiquity” to “embody timeless ideals of humanity and beauty.”

Alas—it’s more likely that our man TJ is howling in his grave. We can’t help but think that there is something odd, not ageless, about gutting historic architecture and filling its insides with conference rooms and office space. Located on North Grounds, more than a stone’s throw from its original Academical Village roots, the business school attempts to maintain ties with its copycat salute to Classical styling, but goes on to feature its extensive parking lots front-and-center.

Highly visible, it’s been called “a theme park of nostalgia,” “a modern object in Jeffersonian dress,” and the Lawn’s “cyborg twin,” making us wonder: Is imitation the highest form of admiration, or are we just flattering ourselves? Many feel that robo-Lawn Darden misses Jefferson’s point. It’s time to move into the 21st century, folks, and stop relying on red brick and the Rotunda to stand in for real values.
 

No hospitality
 

New Cabell Hall
Location: Jefferson Park Avenue, between Emmet and Main streets
Year built: 1952
Assessment: Not available
Use: Education
Square footage: 160,000
Current owner: UVA
Owner at time of construction: UVA
Developer: UVA
Architect: Eggers and Higgins

What they were thinking: It was constructed as a classroom and office building for the college of Arts and Sciences as part of a larger expansion of University facilities following World War II. It is still considered a sound and strong building that can be reused in the future.

What they squandered: New Cabell Hall is the silent, used-to-being-ignored stepson of the Lawn landscape. UVA Architect David Neuman, speaker at this year’s Community Briefing titled “Building on Jefferson’s Legacy,” deemed New Cabell Hall the poster child for 1950s architecture, the postwar, underdesigned aesthetic. Indeed, if boxy, stern, cold and cheap-looking rings a bell, then, New Cabell is your cup of tea.

New Cabell Hall

It sits high, looking down on Jefferson Park Avenue with less than authoritative stature, blocking off Jefferson’s “academical village” from the rest of the community. Originally, the plan was to tear it down during the third phase of the South Lawn Project to create a better connection with the actual Lawn, but the state made an offer UVA couldn’t refuse when it decided to throw $78 million for New Cabell renovation in a higher ed bond package passed this year.

Leonard Sandridge, UVA’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, says New Cabell will ”be renovated and modernized with new technology, electrical and plumbing systems, air conditioning, a fire suppression system, asbestos abatement, and more flexible furnishings and fixtures.” He adds that the project will also “improve handicap accessibility, address certain building code issues reflecting the change in building code over the years, increase the natural light in the building, upgrade the courtyard, and renovate the restrooms.” In short, it lacks flexibility and modernity for today’s level of educational research. It is certainly not hospitable, and it lacks fundamental aesthetic appeal for an academic building. Who wants to study in a bunker?

Where today rests a forgettable structure with AC units hanging from its windows and steep and slippery staircases, a more dynamic and welcoming one could have served the ever-increasing number of Wahoos, engulfed by Jefferson’s message and vision. With the upcoming completion of the South Lawn Project, New Cabell will inevitably become the lowlight of the University’s pristine architecture.

How to waste a prime space
 

Lewis and Clark Square
Location: 250 W. Main St.
Year built: 1989
Assessment: $12,777,500
Square footage: 36,000
Use: Residential
Current owner: Individually owned units; a portion once owned by Oliver Kuttner*
Owner at time of construction: Various investors
Developer: Craig T. Redinger
Architect: VMDO

What they were thinking: The hook (line and sinker) from the developers was that a new residential building would have “a major impact on downtown,” according to a 1988 article in The Charlottesville/Albemarle Observer. In the same article, developer Craig Redinger said, “The response to the residential units has been overwhelming. There has been a real, strong, surprising interest.”

Lewis and Clark Square

What they squandered: No brainer part one: Historic Downtown has become the undisputed heart of Charlottesville. No brainer part two: The major artery to that heart is University Avenue converting into Main Street. No brainer part three: Therefore, the Main Street entrance into Downtown, whether for drivers or pedestrians, should be as inviting as humanly possible.

To put it simply: Lewis and Clark Square doesn’t do the trick. Imagine you’re president of a welcoming committee and forgot to arrange for the creation of a festive banner, and now it’s just a bunch of people standing around and limply waving.
 
In fact, a hand is what the building resembles—a huge, flat hand planted between South and Water streets saying, “Halt! ” Well, make that two huge, flat hands, if your line of sight pairs the structure with the Federal Building across Water Street (though that’s at least positioned at an angle, as if to say, “All right, go on through, I guess”). Downtown just shouldn’t even remotely resemble a forbidden city.

And then there’s the architectural style of Lewis and Clark Square, beyond its physical shape. Some might say its aesthetic incorrectness is on par with the political incorrectness of the nearby Lewis and Clark statue it’s named for. Our 21st century minds know what the big deal with the statue is: Sacagawea seems to be cowering at the feet of the conquering white men. But what’s the problem with the building? Maybe the touches of brick are too blatant an attempt to be “historical.” Maybe combining sober brown with modern “flair” and Bermuda-short-type colors seems more kitschy than savvy.

But back to the real business at (flat) hand. What is a building of that shape and dower sensibility doing in that prime space? Unfortunately, the flip side to “as humanly possible” is: “people make mistakes.” 

 

*Correction from 9/30/08: The original story stated that Oliver Kuttner owned a unit in the building. He, in fact, once owned a portion of the building.