Closing Main Doors to the Supreme Court Sends Troubling Message

Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post wrote on Tuesday, Closing main doors to the Supreme Court sends troubling message. It's the best ode to architecture I've read, probably ever. Read the whole (short) piece, but if not...

"The decision to close the front doors of the Supreme Court to visitors, announced Monday and enacted Tuesday, is no small tweak to the security arrangements of the nation's capital. It is not a minor detour on the tourist path nor a mere question of convenience, like deciding to enter through the garage door rather than trek around to the vestigial front porch. The closing of the front doors of the Supreme Court, like so many mindless decisions attributed to security concerns, is a grand affront -- architecturally, symbolically, politically. The decision will enforce new and unwanted meanings on one of the city's most dramatic and successful public buildings."

"That statue, the power of the entrance plaza (already defaced by bollards), the sweep of the main staircase, the compelling force of the large columns and the reassuring simplicity of the Great Hall are now all rendered mute and meaningless ornament, to be looked at in passing, but no longer part of a living, temporal experience of the building. That visitors can still leave via the grand front door is of little comfort. This relegates the opening promise of the portal -- "Equal Justice Under Law" -- to the rearview mirror. It is no longer a promise at all, no longer an expectation of the visitor upon entrance. Now, to read it, the visitor must turn around, like Orpheus, and hope it wasn't just an illusion.

By a thousand reflexive cuts, architecture loses its power to mean anything. The loss to the citizens of the United States is enormous. We are becoming a nation of moles, timorous creatures who scurry through side and subterranean entrances. Soon, we will lose our basic architectural literacy. The emotional experience of entering a grand space has been reduced to a single feeling: impatience in the august presence of the magnetometer."