From: KAH To: "'jared-housh@utulsa.edu'" Subject: Response to Headspace 111100 Yes, this thing is on...and we're reading you loud and clear. You've just got to give me a topic that I have something to add to (oh, and the time to sit down and think about it) :) The dying beauty of architecture in America has bothered me for some time. Why, in a nation as young as ours do we strive to tear down what little history we have to build malls and food chains with their cookie cutter image? These slap together buildings that you miss the construction crews for if you blink at the wrong time? No time to think of design or details. So often now we would rather tear down a beautiful building and replace it with a homogenous cube than pay the money to restore it to its original beauty. I remember quite well a building in downtown Tulsa that they tore down a few years ago. They replaced it with a parking lot. That building used to be a car dealership....it was a three or four story building that already had car ramps in it (my dad had considered buying it for our auto repair business, but it was too far out of our price range). That incredible building could have been preserved, and served to provide more parking than the single level parking lot that replaced it. To add a little more irony to the situation, Tulsa was celebrating its centennial, and tearing down it's history at the same time. And the reason we tear down old buildings is the same reason we build ugly ones....it's more cost effective. It is indeed a sad truth. And so I applaud the universities and individuals who make the effort to match new buildings to old styles, who spend the money to make our world a slightly more beautiful place. Because those people really are out there....it's just that there aren't nearly enough of them. I simply can't see myself awing my children some day with the beauty of the big cement building that used to be a walmart.
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