Why should the beautiful die?
City architect Richard Neff designed this palace of public safety in the style old Pa Pitt likes to call American Fascist, which combines classical detailing with an Art Deco sensibility. It is currently getting a thorough renovation.
It’s Construction Safety Week! But don’t worry. You still have fifty-one weeks in the year to be careless.
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and become a better person
is American fascist supposed to be a bad thing? you don’t like?
Father Pitt uses the term “American Fascist” somewhat humorously, but also as a way of pointing out how much the style paralleled, and was influenced by, similar developments in Italy and Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. The architectural balancing of messages was the same: we are modern and up to date, the building says, but we stand in the classical Roman tradition of strong and benevolent government. (You might ask an ancient Roman what he thought of his strong and benevolent government, but all the ancient Romans are too dead to respond.) In fact the fasces, the Roman symbol of authority after which the Fascisti named themselves, are an ornament on many public buildings of the period—notably the federal couthouse downtown, our finest example of the American Fascist style. Fascist politics, fortunately, did not infect our government to any extent, but some of the style did. It produced some fine buildings, and this firehouse and police station is one of them.
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