LCV Spring 2013 - (Page 51)

became popular from the 1960s for buildings that needed to make a statement about authority or endurance, and thus its use for governmental or institutional buildings. There are several such buildings in Louisiana. Probably the most unloved is the St. Mary Parish courthouse in Franklin. Designed by Lloyd J. Guillory, it was built in 1967 when Brutalism reached a crescendo. The courthouse’s heavy concrete frame and insistent grid seem assertive and defensive at the same time. Some critics have suggested that Brutalism was a response to and a profound cultural expression of its Cold War era, and of a world menaced by nuclear annihilation. Perhaps that is so, and while it is easy to dismiss a concrete Brutalist building as intimidating and ugly, one thing it is not, is bland or boring. PHOTO BY W. RANDALL MACON; COURTESY OF LSU ALUMNI MAGAZINE was used for the walls at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola designed by Curtis and Davis in the 1950s. The advantages of a material that is fluid allowed the former dining hall at Angola to be covered by a soaring vault of concrete. Here the concrete was poured between wooden formwork that was removed after the concrete hardened. Curtis and Davis also proved how reinforced concrete could create extraordinarily sinuous forms in their design for the Rivergate, a building shamefully demolished in the 1990s. New Orleans can boast a house built of concrete as early as 1935. The Lone Star Cement Corporation, working with the architectural firm of Weiss, Dreyfous and Seiferth, demonstrated the use of concrete for a house at 5521 Claiborne Ave. Aesthetically, the house has the boxy, geometric shape and smooth walls that agreed with the emerging interest in modernism at that time. In promotional material for the house and the construction material, Lone Star claimed that concrete could resist two of New Orleans’ curses—termites and moisture. Despite these advantages, concrete houses never caught on in the city. In contrast to the continuous wall surfaces of the Lone Star house, the former John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Building constructed in 1960 to 1962 at Lee Circle in New Orleans is concrete as honeycomb. Designed by Gordon Bunshaft for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the interplay of the grid of horizontal and vertical members and of solid and void are brilliantly activated by the play of light and shadow. This is a strong building and not at all intimidated by the concrete freeway span that now leans on its space. That there is a sculptural beauty in concrete structures is PHOTO BY DAVID JOHNSON left: The St. Mary Parish Courthouse in Franklin was built in 1967. above: The interior of the LSU Student Union in Baton Rouge features a soaring concrete columns. evident in the rows of immensely tall concrete silos that line the banks of the Mississippi River and the rice silos along the railroad tracks of Southwest Louisiana. The geometry of such industrial structures, whose pure forms are revealed as the sun strikes their surfaces, had a profound influence on mid-20th-century architecture. One building that seems to have drawn on that aesthetic, expressively employing light and shadow to enhance its shapes, is the Joel L. Fletcher building on the campus of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Designed by Barras, Breaux and Champeaux and built in 1976, the strong, angular blocks have a sculptural quality quite appropriate for the building’s purpose of housing arts and architecture departments. Because of concrete’s visible display of great strength, it Yet concrete can be used in ways more temperate or approachable. The Tangipahoa Parish Courthouse of 1967 in Amite by DesmondMiremont and Associates clearly articulates its reinforced concrete frame on the exterior. Yet the design balances the strength of the concrete with the transparency of glass to give a sense of order and of clarity to the building and its purpose as a courthouse. The late John Desmond, whose firm was responsible for the courthouse in Amite, always used concrete beautifully, employing it for its strength yet creating seemingly lightweight buildings. The Student Union at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge opened in 1964 is a tour de force of everything that modern materials and methods could create. Concrete columns branch out to support the roof that hovers over the gallery in front of the building. Inside, similar columns carry a grid of beams to open up the space of the two-story lobby. Here the structural strength of concrete allows space to flow horizontally and vertically forming a lightweight web and a lyrical balance between weight and airiness. Concrete this is, brutal it is not. _______________________________________________________________ Karen Kingsley, Ph.D., is professor emerita of architecture at Tulane University, author of Buildings of Louisiana (2003, Oxford University Press), and editor-in-chief of the Buildings of the United States series. Spring 2013 • LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 51 

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