OK, I might as well say it: I like the new LDS Church Conference Center (designed by Zimmer, Gunnsel, and Frasca, 1999).
As a gentile and consummate bo-bo ("bourgeois bohemian" - a cross between a hipster and a yuppie), I should hate it, or at least that's what all my aesthetically astute friends and colleagues tell me. The unfavorable response the building gets from the local literati runs from mild scorn to outright hostility, particularly among those who consider it "terribly fascist." By this I'm assuming they mean that the building's imposing size and monumental frankness equate nicely with their vision of the all-encompassing, authoritarian LDS Church. And on cold January days I might agree with them - devoid of summer greenery, the sky-gray Conference Center, fronted by its barren plaza, can be intimidating. Still, for me the building works as a piece of architecture, and it works better than our other new building, the Salt Lake City Main Library (Moshe Safdie, 2003).
I'm not an architecture critic. Nor do I want to stage a competition between these two buildings. Stylistically, in fact, both get good reviews. The Conference Center uses elements drawn from both Pre-Columbian architecture in South and Central America (Aztec and Mayan Temples, for example) and some of Frank Lloyd Wright's lesser known work (the austere, concrete Unity Temple in Oak Park, Ill., and his strangely Meso-American Hollyhock, Millard, and Ennis-Brown houses in Los Angeles) to reference the historical era of the Book of Mormon.
The Library too seems architecturally well-considered, being gently Neo-Classical (like the unwinding of the Roman Coliseum) and ultimately modern (the west elevation particularly so with its smooth-faced angular geometries). And both work well programmatically: the architects of the Conference Center get high marks for their ability to make an incredibly huge building look, well, only large, while Safdie, in the Library's welcoming atrium and multiplicity of uses, creates a building that lives up its billing as the city's "urban living room."
Where the two buildings part company, however, is in the realm of "place." As a historian of place-making - the process by which people transform unmarked "space" into meaningful "place" by appropriating it and making it their own - I am drawn to buildings that have a strong connection to the circumstances, conditions, and culture of a specific location. Whatever you may feel about the Conference Center, it is hard to deny its "placed" quality - it is truly a Salt Lake City building. Like the LDS Tabernacle and Temple before it, the Conference Center speaks eloquently of Mormon cultural identity and the role our city plays in Mormon history. A unique presence, an "otherness" if you will, is achieved through embracing a radical design.
For all its sophistication, the Main Library lacks a clear architectural connection to our city. By exhibiting a striking but nevertheless ubiquitous modernist style, the Library forsakes "place" for national respectability. Getting a Safdie building becomes one way of signaling to outsiders that we are not as provincial as they (and we) might think.
It is rumored that the design is one Safdie used for a library in Vancouver, but this is alright because part of the Main Library's role is to connect us to a larger, more cosmopolitan network of contemporary design. In this, the Main Library adheres to a tradition of western American cultural insecurity that typifies Utah architecture almost from the start. As early as the 1850s, Salt Lakers (Mormon and Gentile alike) built fashionable mansions and civic edifices as a way of displaying to others cultivated refinement and legitimacy. It is this heritage that the Library continues.
A professor of mine once said that historians must "write bravely" if they are to make a difference. The same can be said of architects. The LDS Conference Center is a brave building. Neither architect or client was afraid to use the building to mark Salt Lake City as a distinctive Mormon place. Hopefully, there will be other brave buildings, ones that can help us define what kind of "place" we want our city to be in the new century.
Next week: Utah's best buildings.
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* THOMAS CARTER is a professor of architectural history in University of Utah's College of Architecture and Planning. His research focuses on the vernacular landscape of the American West.
