GGW links to a WaPo story and slideshow unveiling the six starchitect proposals for the new National Museum of African American History and Culture.

I hate them all. Every single one of them ignores the context of the National Mall and pretends to be a lone sculptural statement. Every single one would make the Mall harder to appreciate as a formal whole.

	Devrouax: Derivative of the National Gallery East Wing, only boring. Almost a total lack of human-scale details.
	Diller: Slick CAD rendering, but what would this even look like in real life? An utterly incomprehensible and ridiculous proposal.
	Foster: A suburban bunker invisible from the street. Totally the wrong building for the context.
	Freelon: Didn’t society already collectively agree that brutalism sucks?
	Moody: A good design if this were a museum about mining located somewhere in the mountains. A giant stone slab facing the street is not good urbanism. It’s not interesting either.
	Moshe: Probably the least offensive of the lot, but will someone explain to me why glass curtain walls and wavy Gehry lines are taken seriously as “progressive”.

See the WaPo slideshow for larger images

The National Mall is not a sculpture garden writ large. It is a formal “outdoor room” to be framed by buildings that collectively add to a whole greater than the sum of their parts. It’s an embarrassment to the architecture profession that the so-called best and brightest are so constrained by the dogma of modernism that not one of six teams even tried to present a context-sensitive design. Will a real architect – one interested in designing buildings for a city rather than a lone hilltop – please stand up?