August 2004 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Behold the model for Frank Gehry's Museum of Tolerance now under construction in Jeruselum. Financed by Americans, the museum makes an interesting case in its sheer physical form: the Post-modern must not just be tolerated, it has to be suffered. The citizens of Jeruselum will now have to suffer a building that looks like a pile of floor sweepings from a machine shop. What's more, unlike buildings employing traditional materials and modes of assembly, this one will not be repairable over time.

The tendentious spirit behind the museum is strange and curious, too. Does everything have to be tolerated? What about the intolerable? Is there a social contract or some calculus of behavior that determines these things? Or is the museum only an extension of the childish American kindergarten gestalt of our time which holds that all value judgments are inadmissable?