Suppose a developer wanted to advertise the name of his/her subdivision by building a sign 500 feet long on a prominent hillside that was visible for miles. Suppose each letter was going to be 50 feet high and built out of telephone poles, pipes and sheet metal. And suppose the whole thing was going to be lit up by 10,000 or so unshaded 40-watt bulbs, so it couldn’t be overlooked even at night.
A design review board’s nightmare? Not really. In 1923, a pair of developers named S.H. Woodruff and Tracy Shoults proposed — and built — just such a sign in a sleepy hamlet near Los Angeles. It advertised their 500-acre housing development, which was called Hollywoodland. In 1949, the sign’s last four letters were removed by the local chamber of commerce, leaving a landmark now famed the world over: the giant hillside sign reading HOLLYWOOD.
The point is that our ideas of what’s aesthetically right or wrong can change drastically over time. During the 1920s, no one gave a second thought to outlandish structures like the Hollywood sign — they were considered a natural expression of an exuberant era. Today, however, conventional planning wisdom frowns mightily upon any structure that dares call attention to itself and thus potentially upsets the equilibrium of the mundane. Today, a developer proposing a 500-foot-long advertising sign would either be run out of town or politely referred to a psychiatrist.
The Hollywood sign and other ebullient structures like it — including some of America’s most beloved landmarks and icons — could never come to pass under today’s withering regulatory scrutiny. Imagine the hurdles faced by someone today proposing to build a 305-foot-high statue on an island in the middle of New York Harbor. It’s almost too easy to predict the ensuing litany of objections: Construction on the island could adversely affect nesting seabirds; rain could cause the statue’s copper skin to shed toxic sulfates; the statue could obstruct Bayonne’s view of Manhattan; a statue promoting Liberty might offend those favoring alternate forms of government.
In today’s ultra-deferential planning climate, simply mitigating or refuting such objections might take decades, if it ever happened at all. A modern-day Statue of Liberty would no doubt look quite different — not because the risks have changed, but because we have.
Just about every state in the Union has manmade structures that are the product of eccentricity, obsession, megalomania, or just plain shameless commerce. They range from Mount Rushmore to the Watts Towers, from Sam Hill’s Stonehenge replica in southern Washington right on down to the Big Duck of Flanders, N.Y. Such icons are a part of any vibrant culture, yet practically none of them could have arisen under the crushing heel of today’s regulatory bureaucracy.
The Chinese have no such qualms about building with exuberance. Just across the river from Shanghai’s famous Bund, they’ve built a 1,536-foot-tall broadcast tower that looks like something straight out of Buck Rogers.
Called the Oriental Pearl Tower, it’s the tallest such structure in Asia. Every evening, this amazing colossus is lit up by animated cascades of colored lamps, making it impossible to overlook by anyone within a 10-mile radius. In the span of a decade, the Oriental Pearl has become the instantly recognizable symbol of Shanghai, and in a sense, of China’s renaissance itself.
As for the United States, the nation that turned exuberance into an art form, we have for the most part turned off the lights. What our aesthetic tiptoeing and whispering has gained us is a way to ensure the least offense to the most people. What it has cost us is our magic portal to the offbeat, the extraordinary and the insanely great.
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