Take an obviously ugly, unloved, unused or underused public building. A grotesquely out of place building (urban, it has been placed in a rural setting) loathed for decades – since its inception – by virtually its entire community (they after all have had to look at it every day). Finally the community is about to be able to blot it from the landscape – or, more precisely, to alter it so radically that they’ll probably be able to live with it going forward without hating themselves and the world. All good, right?

Well, no.

Architecture remains the realm of The Great Man, and Paul Rudolph is part of that crew, so every building he designed must be defended, even if that building – as is the case with the Orange County Government Center, in Goshen, N.Y. (two hours directly south of UD‘s house in New York) – gives off the rank sweat of an unseam’d bed. And not just defended but stuck there, dammit, forever and a day.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm, student of prose, now examines the New York Times architecture critic’s attempt to keep Rudolph in the Land O’ Goshen. How do you write against the obvious? How do you avoid revealing any off-putting elitism? How, as a dynamic modernist, do you deny the validity of change itself?

You want to avoid this gambit, tried by an earlier defender of the place:

“It’s like saying, ‘I don’t like Pollock because he splattered paint,’” said Nina Rappaport, chairwoman of Docomomo-New York/Tri-State, an organization that promotes the preservation of Modernist architecture. “Does that mean we shouldn’t put it in a museum? No, it means we teach people about these things.”

Hop away from the hog oiler and listen up – you might learn something.

No, Michael Kimmelman will take a different tack. Let’s scathe through his piece.

Headlines:

A Chance to Salvage a Master’s Creation

Paul Rudolph Building in Goshen, N.Y., Faces Threat

Master, Threat. But there’s a chance to Salvage. Faces Threat: Immediate Drama. Urgency. We are alerting the troops.

Unless county legislators act quickly, a paragon of midcentury American idealism will be lost.

Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center, in Goshen, N.Y., announces itself as a civic hub. It’s made of corrugated concrete and glass, organized into three pavilions around a courtyard, like an old wagon train around a village green.

First move: Go folksy. Go Americana. Ignore the fact that the photograph that accompanies your article fails in any way to resonate with paragon, idealism, civic, pavilion, courtyard, old wagon train, and village green. Press forward.

And that’s the approach SOS is going to note in Kimmelman’s piece. When you got nuthin’ your only option is to go all out. Know what I mean? It takes balls. It takes writerly skill.

A county proposal would tear down huge chunks of it, flatten the roof, destroy windows, swap out parts of the textured concrete facade and build what looks like an especially soul-crushing glass box. Goshen would end up with a Frankenstein’s monster, eviscerating a work that the World Monuments Fund, alarmed by precisely this turn of events, included on its global watch list alongside landmarks like Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China.

A building made of huge chunks of monstrous soul-crushing concrete is now threatened with transformation into a building with huge chunks of monstrous soul-crushing glass. So far not a strong defense. Still, he’s jammed some very pretty scary words – SOS likes the lip-smacking eviscerate – into this, and he’s just getting started.

Plus, whatever it looks like, this thing is up there with Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China. Damn hayseeds don’t appreciate what they’ve got.

Haters in Orange County government have been contemplating its demise for years, allowing it to fall into disrepair and shuttering the building, citing water damage after Hurricane Irene in 2011. Pictures of the interior from the early 1970s, when the center was still new, show a complex of animated spaces, by turns intimate and grand. Later renovations ruined the inside, making it cramped and dark. Rudolph was a master of sculpturing light and space, following in the footsteps of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose emotionalism he married to the cool Modernism of Europeans like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.

Haters is also scary stuff. Haters. When Kimmelman, a man of strong opinions, writes with hatred about buildings he hates, he’s not a hater. He’s a… what… a potent discriminator…

Now we get some familiar archi-adjectives – animated, grand, intimate, cool. All are there to create a vague flush of excitement in us as we contemplate inhabiting this paragon of light and space; all are there to obliterate the obvious impossibility of attaining anything like a sense of grandeur or intimacy in this building.

And since when are grandeur and intimacy things anyone associates with county government? Since when are Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China continuous with the Goshen New York municipal building?

Still, The Great Man was continuous with earlier Great Men. We are to be impressed with this lineage (Corbu, Wright, Gropius).

His style, unfortunately, came to be branded Brutalism, and turned off many. But the government center was conceived with lofty social aspirations, making tangible Rudolph’s concept of energetic governance as a democratic ideal. It was a beautiful notion; and while the architecture may never win any popularity contest, it was beautiful, too, with its poetry of asymmetric, interweaving volumes.

This is what SOS means by just going for it. When you’ve got nothing going for you, go for it. Acknowledge the bizarre, motiveless ascription of the name Brutalism to this sort of building; insist that if a building means well, it looks well (“conceived with lofty social aspirations”), and then stick in some patriotic cliches to keep the flush of vague excitement going (energetic governance as a democratic ideal). The awkwardness here is that central to democracy is the will of the people, and in regard to Paul Rudolph’s building that will is overwhelmingly clear.

Now make your boldest move: Call an ugly building beautiful. Go ahead. You’ve gone this far; the only place to go is yet farther. Call it poetic.

Okay, so we’ll skip a little.

Demolishing Penn Station seemed expedient to politicians and other people a half-century ago, when only a noisy bunch of architecture buffs and preservationists pleaded for its reprieve. Back then, Rudolph was a leading light in American architecture, his work the epitome of American invention and daring.

The original Penn Station was beautiful, monumental, and deserved every bit of the effort devoted to salvaging it. But here we’re back at the Machu Picchu/Great Wall of China problem. Machu Picchu, Great Wall of China, Penn Station, Goshen County Building. Seriously?

Final paragraph.

History is on the Government Center’s side, too. Here’s hoping county legislators are.

Another grand statement for a small subject. Goshen must be on the side of history!

Actually, Goshen, with energetic governance as its democratic ideal, can be wherever the hell it wants. Goshen seems to see itself as a place of vernacular buildings which express its actual history, rather than as a Mount Rushmore of all-American, world historical architects like Paul Rudolph, who, after his early work met with hostility

turned inward to lavish interior-design projects, evincing through the 1970s a comfort with the extravagant that was out of tune with professional norms. Then he turned away from the American scene altogether, to rework old ideas in a series of large projects overseas, such as the Colonnade apartments in Singapore and the Lippo Centre in Hong Kong…