I walked out of Chicago’s Union Station, following my nose to Lake Michigan. I have always liked Chicago. It’s small enough to feel manageable, but big enough to be a thoroughly vibrant city with a dynamic feel. And the architecture! There are few places I would rather stand than in Millennium Park, looking back to the amazing array of towers that comprise the Chicago skyline.

My legs took me quickly to the park, which is the site of a breathtaking outdoor auditorium designed by Frank Gehry. His signature suspended metal sheets frame the stage, echoing his designs of the art museum in Bilbao and the Disney Symphony Hall in LA. The auditorium is part of a larger public arts space, including the Crown Fountain by Jaume Plensa; the contemporary Lurie Garden designed by Kathryn Gustafson, Piet Oudolf and Robert Israel; and Anish Kapoor's crowd favorite “Cloud Gate” sculpture. Comprised of twenty four acres, it is one of the world’s most compelling public arts spaces. As you walk through it, you can’t help but be reminded of the profoundly re-humanizing impact beautiful art and architecture have on an humanity.  

Chicago seems to do architecture so well, but New York so poorly. This week another reminder came as “new plans” were released for the huge Nets arena project in Brooklyn. The first drawing on this blog is Gehry’s original design, the second drawing is the new one. In a classic bait and switch, Forest City Ratner, the site’s developer, presented the new, “more economical” design by Ellerbe Bechet, a corporation that specializes in creating aesthetic blight for urban spaces. The new design was apparently inspired by a Best Buy located in Minnesota, on the edge of the vast parking lot for the Mall of America. If built, it will be a hefty, ugly, airplane hangar looming over one of the busiest intersections in Brooklyn.

And you know what? It’s more than an incredibly unattractive building foisted upon a city that needs something more. It’s a statement about values, about life, about what makes us get out of bed in the morning. As Nicolai Ourousoff wrote in Tuesday’s New York Times, the message it sends is “what’s most important is to build, no matter how thoughtless or dehumanizing the results. It is the kind of logic that kills cities- and that has been killing this one for decades.” I have to agree. Replacing the uplifting art of Gehry with an ugly box is an insult to New Yorkers. But even more so, it is a negative statement about the role of beauty in the lives of citizens. Given an opportunity to contribute to the culture and health of a city, Ratner (and the city government) have settled for an Orwellian business model.

This is a biblical issue. Genesis chapter one introduced humanity to a God who is creating something beautiful that works perfectly. Part of the church’s redemptive role on earth is to restore beauty, as beauty restores humanity. As friend and artist Makoto Fujimora wrote in his new book, Refractions, “One thing is sure: our cultural productions will define us, whether we like it or not. Art expresses who we are.”

So who are we? The same process unfolded with the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, when Daniel Libeskind’s original design was negotiated down from inspiring to demoralizing. Is crass commercialism acceptable? Is it ok to pull a bait and switch on a city? I don’t believe that beauty and economy are mutually exclusive. It is possible to build something beautiful that also functions economically. I wonder how Christians should respond to this act of injustice. Would any church go out and advocate for God by picketing for beauty?