Why do I smell government at work here?

It’s not like only modern architects and builders have the sole franchise on boo-boos:

5D, 24-105mm at 97mm, 1/3000, f/5.6, ISO 400

Now what kind of twit would do a thing like that to a beautiful facade?

Could it be because the building belongs to the local government here in Paso Robles, CA?

Maybe the person doing this was concerned about a Window Tax – something which wouldn’t surprise me given the composition of our local government here and its greed for tax revenues. But wait a minute, no government would tax itself, right? And how could all that material and labor cost be cheaper than a pane of glass?

Eureka! I get it now. The bricklayer was the mayor’s brother!

The idea of a great man.

Paso Robles Carnegie Library, built in 1908.
5D, 24-105 at 105mm, 1/500, f/6.7, ISO200

It’s said that the true measure of philanthropy is not how much you give but how much you have left. By that measure, Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) is the greatest philanthropist the world has seen, having given away almost all of his fortune at the time of his death. Inflation makes comparisons difficult, but if you figure wealth as a percentage of Gross National Product, Carnegie ranks fifth in America, after Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Astor and Girard (d. 1831 – trade and banking).

Carnegie mostly gave his money to build public libraries in the United States, England and his native Scotland. While I see libraries as essentially a waste of real estate in a digital world (the Library of Congress could be digitized for $1 billion, the space put to better use) there is an undeniable charm to a fine library and the tactile enjoyment of good books.

The small town of Paso Robles, a stone’s throw from my home in Templeton in central California, has a pretty town square graced with a Carnegie Library. Sadly, the brick building was damaged in the earthquake a few years ago and the City has finally come around to fixing the damage. While the whole is still surrounded with chain-link fencing, it’s possible to see the results of the rebuilding from a distance.

Many would denigrate Carnegie for his use of low paid labor in his steel mills near Pittsburgh. To me, the choices are simple. You take one or two generations of the poor and stupid, exploit them horribly and confer a priceless gift on the world. The next generation now has no excuse for being either poor or stupid. Or you do nothing and the poor and stupid continue being just that. It’s your choice, but there’s little arguing with the benefits of the Carnegie way.

A great man and a beautiful piece of architecture. Check out the brand, spanking new copper piping in the snap above. Gorgeous.

Except for a very small tweak in Photoshop to fix perspective, the picture has had no post processing.

Rounding out the Manhattan thing.

Here are some snaps of New York architecture, taken over the years.

Guggenheim Museum, Fifth Avenue

Old and new

MoMA

SoHo

Park Avenue

The Look building reflected in the Helmsley Palace

Sixth Avenue

A fine primer on architectural style is How to Read Buildings – if you want to regale friends with the differences between an architrave and a muntin, this one is for you.

Here’s another worth checking out if Art Deco is your thing:

Carnegie Hall’s west elevation along Seventh Avenue always reminded me of what a steel mill might have looked like in that brilliant Scotsman’s era:

Carnegie Hall. Pentax ME Super, 135mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64.

1920s buildings are hard to improve upon:

Low-fifties, west side. Pentax ME Super, 135mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64.

Go back a few more decades and Tribeca has some lovely old iron warehouse buildings, now all converted to expensive lofts, with soaring ceilings and huge windows – the Carnegie mills probably provided much of the building materials for these:

Iron-framed building in Tribeca. Pentax ME Super, 28mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64.

If the politics of big buildings interest you, try Paul Goldeberger’s book Up from Zero which goes some way to explain why, seven years after 9/11, Manhattan has yet to see the first brick laid in rebuilding the World Trade Centers.