When buildings are just buildings

What is the vernacular of Cleveland? What language does our city talk to us in? A while back I mentioned the passing term coined by a friend of the "townshack" for explaining what he felt in Cleveland before going on his merry way; the poorly designed and perhaps poorly crafted backhanded attempt at urban lifestyle living designed by people who apparently abhor it. I took some photos around Cleveland of what was once an anomaly but somehow became the standard but left the camera in my bag, afraid to be taken out for fear that by acknowledging these monstrosities that they would somehow become 'more real'. I have a difficult time explaining why these structures are so very offensive, they fit such a wide and varied criteria for being 'wrong' that it seems rather difficult to narrow down succinctly how so. I suppose the most obvious problem is that even though they were knowingly designed by an architect, they lack all pretense and intent for any recognizable or identifiable expression of architecture. They neither offer explanation or exploration, expression or meaningful characteristics of anything beyond being a simple and cheap decorated box. Even the argument for the artistic merit of simplicity and cleanliness fail at the onslaught of these perpetually false ideologues, these ham-handed attempts to hybridize the suburban with the urban a monument of excess only in terms of tackiness.

It isn't that I favor the argument that all buildings should be gems, not for the 'elitist' reasoning that the building isn't the architecture but that the social implications of the building are. No, I have problems with that argument simply because it would be impossible to enforce and without the regularity of simple buildings, the standardized and institutionalized forms creating the backdrop, then true architectural gems wouldn't mean as much. Besides, glorious works of architecture can be more then shiny baubles and trinkets tossed about to please the public. They could be inspiring lobbies, wonderfully functioning workspaces, simple buildings dabbling in the wonders of materiality and function that lift the spirit and minds of the inhabitants. These attributes are not so easily seen from the street but are no less important.

So then, what is Cleveland's dialect? True there are some gems, those not being actively destroyed, buried within the confines of our boundaries, surrounded by placid neighbors and hidden among the lethargic, but they are few and far between and even more corrosive the new jewels being promised, surmounting the horizon, are under threat of being tarnished by the same forces that created the existing blight upon our city (Third parties in the Triangle project). Is our vernacular that the status quo is only a shield that our true heart lies behind? That Cleveland projects the image of the 'hidden gem' the 'beauty you have to want to see'?