Wonderous, strange and fanciful!
No, it’s not the budget committee at Atlanta City Council. It’s the Atlanta Millennium Gate -- featured yesterday in the New York Times.
As usual, the paper’s attitude toward Atlanta is amused and amazed, as in: They really do wear shoes down there, people.
But writer Shaila Dawan reminds us of a city treasure we should enjoy more often.
The Georgia Tech architecture dean, quoted calling the arch ‘wondrous, strange and fanciful, is right.
It’s an old-looking new structure, with a great shape and a good view from on top.
Is it an Eiffel Tower? No, but it’s no French-fry box Olympic Flame, either.
We don’t have enough great public art yet in this town that Sherman burned. Let’s have some joy and fun celebrating what we do have, and not wait for the New York Times to tell us to do so!
The man "behind the arch," so to speak, is Rodney Mims Cook Jr. -- a man with a passion for architecture.
He built another monument close by, where Peachtree Street and West Peachtree Street run together at Pershing Point. The World Athletes Monument, a 40 foot collection of naked men, is a nice place to sit and watch the Peachtree Road Race runners practice. A good romp for athletes, and in fact, that’s what it is supposed to celebrate, world athleticism, funded by that non-athlete, the Prince of Wales.
I first came to love it for another reason.
One sunny September day when I was reporting for WSB-TV Action News, I was assigned to cover crowds at the British Consulate lining up to sign an official book of condolences for the Diana, the former Princess of Wales, who had just died, unexpectedly and tragically, in France.
It was hot. Folks were weeping. And the line snaked around tepid corridors of a midtown office building. But we could have been anywhere -- boring, stale and enclosed -- waiting to sign a guest book saying we were sorry Diana was dead.
After the story aired and the live shot came down, we drove back to Channel 2 along Peachtree Street. And there, at the base of the Prince of Wales’ gift statue, were the real memorials to Diana: People placing flowers, leaving cards, standing in the open air in front of a statue that may have reminded them of a European city, perhaps even London.
That statue, built for other reasons altogether, became a beloved landmark because it was the place Atlanta could go to mourn.
It was maudlin, mawkish, but strangely moving. And far more appropriate for the international stir that was Lady Diana that what I’d left at the consulate.
No, Atlanta is better for having outside art, and outside places where we can pass and see each other, and ourselves. Enough of the art of the city tucked onto interior walls. More Calders in front of the High Museum! More statues that celebrate, or condemn, or contemplate that we can see from the street.
And of course, more arches and memorials that are not to the Confederate Dead, or the mourned veterans, or anything else grim and gone. Even if it takes the New York Times to remind us of a good one, like the Millenium Arch.
An Elaborate Arch, an Opaque Significance
David Walter Banks for The New York Times
Rodney Mims Cook Jr. in front of his creation in downtown Atlanta, the Millennium Arch, an 82-foot-high stucco-and-limestone version of the Arc de Triomphe.
Published: April 29, 2009
ATLANTA — Should you wish to rent out the office of Rodney Mims Cook Jr. for a fund-raiser, say, or a wedding reception, he will happily vacate the premises, leaving a fire burning in the fireplace.
From atop the Millennium Arch is a view of a small landscaped lake bordered by downtown streets and condominiums.
Most offices would not be in demand for such services, but Mr. Cook’s is special. It is a glass pavilion atop an 82-foot-high stucco-and-limestone version of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, overlooking a small blue lake as if it were the grand finale to a miniature-golf course with an ancient Roman theme, surrounded by condominiums. The Millennium Arch, as it is called, stands in the middle of Atlantic Station, a large shopping, business and residential community on the site of a former steel mill near downtown.
“It’s wondrous and strange and fanciful,” said Alan Balfour, the dean of the school of architecture at Georgia Tech. “I don’t think anyone even knows why it’s there. It arrived from another planet, I think.”
It arrived, in fact, from the planet of Mr. Cook, 52, a buttoned-down member of a wealthy Atlanta family. For years, he has championed the cause of classical architecture, developing close ties to Prince Charles, a fellow enthusiast, and serving on the board of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America. He is currently coordinating the design for the memorial to John Adams, John Quincy Adams and their wives planned for Washington.
But for just as long, Mr. Cook’s hometown critics have insisted that classicism has no place in a booming Southern capital of glass, steel, peach-shaped landmarks and mighty highways. A proposal he made to build a $10 million Beaux-Arts plaza in Atlanta’s main park in honor of the 1996 Olympics was rejected. His World Athletes Monument, a gaggle of nude sculptures atop a 40-foot pedestal, was completed in 1996 with money from Prince Charles, but not particularly welcomed until the death of the Princess of Wales when Atlantans used it as a depository for funeral wreaths and condolence cards.
So the $18 million arch is a triumph for Mr. Cook, not just because, as he asserts, “no one has built anything like this since the Jefferson Memorial,” but because he realized the project in Atlanta.
The critical response was predictable. Architects claimed it was ersatz, Disneyfied classicism, or that classicism itself was insensitive to the setting. One local architect, Michael Gamble, questioned the appropriateness of using a classical form to welcome the 21st century, and compared the arch unfavorably to the mercury-tone “Cloud Gate” sculpture by Anish Kapoor in Millennium Park in Chicago. Because the arch was near a large blue and yellow furniture store, some people nicknamed it the Arc d’Ikea.
But others were impressed. One of Mr. Cook’s former critics, Elizabeth Dowling, an architect and historian who had once scoffed that “the Greeks would have spit on us” if the Beaux-Arts plaza had been built, conceded that Mr. Cook had “matured.”
The arch was not originally intended for Atlanta, but for a place where it might have seemed far less extraterrestrial: the nation’s capital.
Mr. Cook conceived of it in 1999 as a way to celebrate peace, rather than the military victories triumphal arches habitually note, and he planned to put it in Barney Circle, a neglected node of Pierre L’Enfant’s master plan for Washington. The neighborhood welcomed it as a tool for beautification and revitalization, but official support flagged, in part, Mr. Cook said, because of the terrorist attacks of 2001.
So the arch, downsized, has quietly settled into the fabric of Atlanta. It is on the cover of this year’s visitors guide to downtown and midtown. Some 50,000 people have visited the Atlanta history museum in the arch’s base, Mr. Cook said, exceeding his expectations. And rentals of the space for events have been booked through 2010, he said.
Though the arch is new, it has already attained a milestone that other monuments take decades to achieve: no one is quite sure what it is about.
“It’s supposed to commemorate something,” said Kim Baskerville, 35, who lives nearby.
“Probably dead Confederates,” said Don Robinson, 64, a retired air traffic control assistant, who was recently waiting at a bus stop near the arch.
Mr. Robinson studied the inscription — “This American monument was built to commemorate all peaceful monuments since the birth of Jesus Christ,” it reads, in Latin — for a minute or two.
“It’s a monument celebrating I think the birth of Christ,” Mr. Robinson said.
Mr. Cook said the inscription’s Christian bent was patterned after the wording on European monuments.
Even some of the protesters who were present when the arch opened on July 4, 2008, said the building was beautiful, objecting instead to the history exhibits, which honored some Atlanta families, including that of Mr. Cook’s wife, without mentioning that their fortunes had been made thanks to slave labor.
Mr. Cook responded that what he originally envisioned as a boosterish exhibition had been amended to include unsavory chapters of Atlanta’s history like the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish industrialist, and the race riots in 1906, but that he was not required to include every fact in the limited space of the museum.
At any rate, Mr. Cook said the assertion that Atlanta was not the place for a Roman arch stemmed from ignorance of the city’s rich heritage of traditional buildings.
“Our Flatiron Building predates the New York Flatiron Building by about six years,” he said. “The Hurt Building has one of the finest rotundas in the country.”
He gave several more examples, then added, “We just have so much big, newer stuff, you don’t notice it as much.”