adma
Superstar
The way I see it, if there was a time to be hating on Sid Smith in and of itself, it would have been the 70s/80s, when it seemed the epitome of a kind of Cold War Organization Man generic educational sterility from the pre-hippie era, and people were high on the Postmodern and whatever Tom Wolfe-tweaked popular epiphanies about how "less is a bore". And if I may ever so emphasize: "that was then"--if anything, there ought to be *more* inherent sympathy to the Sid Smith aesthetic now thanks to awareness of all that is Mad Men & midcentury; as well as the historical context and the idealism behind it all.
But countering that is two things: (1) the compromising effect of subsequent renovations, and (2) general ignorance and apathy t/w architectural history among younger cohorts, maybe even more so than 30-40-50 years ago. They don't care less when it was built, who it was designed by, or any of that; they've never been given the means to care. To them, "old and dated" means "old and dated"--they don't engage in dynamic terms of historical space and time, they only engage according to the immediacy of their existence. And to them, devoid of that kind of "contextualizing" data, Sid Smith sux. In their eyes, forcing them to endure Sid Smith is like forcing them to do their term papers on IBM Selectrics.
Remember: they're the same people who are indifferent on somewhat similar grounds to the Simpson Tower renovation (speaking of things Parkin).
But countering that is two things: (1) the compromising effect of subsequent renovations, and (2) general ignorance and apathy t/w architectural history among younger cohorts, maybe even more so than 30-40-50 years ago. They don't care less when it was built, who it was designed by, or any of that; they've never been given the means to care. To them, "old and dated" means "old and dated"--they don't engage in dynamic terms of historical space and time, they only engage according to the immediacy of their existence. And to them, devoid of that kind of "contextualizing" data, Sid Smith sux. In their eyes, forcing them to endure Sid Smith is like forcing them to do their term papers on IBM Selectrics.
Remember: they're the same people who are indifferent on somewhat similar grounds to the Simpson Tower renovation (speaking of things Parkin).