Making Sense of Mormon Architecture
Gleaming white and towering over the Beltway, the DC Temple was like a vertically preoccupied Lord & Taylor.
New Year’s resolutions are bunk. But non-NYRA subscribers should resolve to fix their oversight today.
Off White
Inside a Mormon temple, the American Dream clings to life.
by AJ Artemel
What furtive spectacle did I expect to find here, inside the Washington, DC, Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? This Cinderella Castle on the Belt- way loomed large in my childhood memory of weekend shopping expeditions; I’d crane my neck to catch a glimpse of the hovering mass from the backseat of my parents’ car. Never did I imagine venturing inside.
Since its consecration in 1974, the temple complex has been closed to all but adherents, and only those with up-to-date records of tithing and participation. Much-needed repairs—some to address damage from a 2011 earthquake—led, in 2018, to the site’s temporary deconsecration. Before reconsecration this past August, the church briefly held open-house tours of the building, giving non-Mormons in the area their best chance to see the interior in their lifetimes.
Take a tour of the DC Temple, and Mormon history, here.
Making Room for the Future
Walking toward its rising and falling wall, the memorial appears understated, generously inviting life to register against it.
by Ana Miljački
I have walked around it in my mind, touched it, seen it cry. Like you, perhaps, I saw images of the University of Virginia’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers on social media, in major news outlets online, images of it enabling important gatherings just within a few weeks of its opening. The memorial was designed by Höweler + Yoon Architecture (Eric Höweler and Meejin Yoon) and Mabel O. Wilson with the help of their collaborator at UVA Frank Dukes and Charlottesville landscape architect Gregg Bleam. It offers a necessary and hopeful lesson on the agency of architecture in our times, but it also presents a vital challenge to culture and life in the US more generally. On UVA’s campus, and upon the valiant insistence of its students, this memorial’s architecture, and the listening, deliberating and translating (which I think of as architecture as well), have begun the local process of what W. E. B. Du Bois once described as “pulling back the veil.” The University of Virginia was built and maintained by over four thousand enslaved laborers in its first half-century of existence. On its own, the gesture of pulling back the veil to acknowledge that history is in no way commensurate with the catastrophe of enslavement and its survival, but without it nothing further is possible.
Read more about the memorial here.
Postmodern Philosophy, Again?
Postmodernism is back, though not in the way that some architects would have liked.
by Joseph Bedford
Reviewing contemporary popular debates, postmodernism has largely devolved into a synonym for post-structuralism or even for “theory.” This began in philosophy departments in the United States, which have largely excluded the continental tradition; postmodernism became a catch-all phrase to name more skeptical continental philosophers, especially Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze. The recent recuperation of this emptied-out husk of postmodernism allowed it to maintain the appearance of radicality: “postmodernism” now signifies those who are aligned against neo-nationalist traditionalism in today’s culture wars.
Postmodernism is thus not simply back as a style in architecture—it is also back as a term of popular discourse and political debates, occupying a very different semantic position than before.
Read more about that most slippery of –isms here.
New York Review of Architecture is a team effort. Our Editor is Samuel Medina, our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our Editors-at-Large are Carolyn Bailey, Phillip Denny, and Alex Klimoski. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc. For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, and Thomas Phifer.
To support the work and receive NYRA by post, subscribe here.