WaterFire in 2001, before Waterplace Park was surrounded by modern architecture

Photo by Richard Benjamin

MAYORS arriving in Providence tomorrow for the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors will find a city spiffed up for their arrival. Extra pots of flowers have been deployed. A special WaterFire will be lit on Saturday evening.

Until recently, Providence called itself the Renaissance City. The motto was chosen largely because, in a rare fit of urban regeneration, rivers paved over a century ago were uncovered and a new downtown waterfront was built that reflected the glories of the city’s largely intact historic architecture.

The mayors will walk along this paragon of development during WaterFire. Many will join Providence’s Mayor Cicilline in gushing over the latest new buildings on the riverfront. But the new buildings turn their back on the built heritage of Providence. Though its beauty offers our mayor access to visible civic truths that most mayors do without, he joins many of them in misunderstanding how modern architecture reflects some of the worst errors of modernity, now evident in the economic crisis.

Mayors stand near the top of a civic strata of political, corporate, professional and other elites whose misbehavior has brought our cities, the nation and the world to crisis. That crisis was caused by an ethic of selfishness, gigantism and complexity that since World War II has, in large part, replaced an ethic of individualism and free enterprise pursued at a more human scale. This spread of greed and corruption through the institutions of society might perhaps be most clearly perceived and understood through its most visible symbol — modern architecture.

Alienation between average citizens and the elites of society seems related in some way to the decline of beauty in the appearance of our cities.

Architects use more and more unnatural materials and complex technologies to give increasingly unusual shapes to buildings erected for increasingly amorphous and complicated purposes. Modern architects replace beauty with creativity as the leading principle of design. Cities grow more sterile. Channeled through the ego of the modern architect, the fascination with absurdities of form and size causes ever greater complexity and expense in design, engineering and construction. Skyrocketing costs necessitate increasingly rococo strategies of project finance, and result in an increasing focus upon profit over utility among the goals of architecture.

We have reached a point where architecture has grown too clever by half. So have the systems of development, bureaucracy, planning and finance that support modernism. A virus of guile has infected our economy, our politics and our society. Our democracy suffers accordingly. Fewer and fewer citizens can follow what is happening. The few who can find it easier and easier to game the various systems. As the cheating grows in scale, it saps public resources and erodes the ability of cities to respond.

Mayors find their agencies and the public manipulated by the elites that foster this perilous scenario. Power brokers even higher up than mayors are now being pressured, for example, to cancel their visits to Providence. That situation offers a striking view of how deeply ego, greed and corruption have embedded themselves into the structure of society.

As a tactic in negotiations unrelated to the mayors’ conference, the Providence Firefighters’ Union plans to set up a picket line, which has rattled the Obama administration. The union’s president was accused (as reported in last Saturday’s Journal, “Contract in dispute for years”) of “taking paid leave to work on union business . . . and then being paid overtime to substitute in his own job.” And the “relevant authorities deemed the [accusation] groundless.”

Such “double-billing” is bad enough. That the “relevant authorities” found nothing wrong reflects the institutionalization of greed. It is a greed that sneers at the city’s interest in hosting the nation’s most powerful, Cabinet-level policy officials. Providence’s fortunes are at a low ebb and its operations depend increasingly on help from Washington. Mayors from 180 other troubled cities also hoped to benefit from federal leadership at their conclave. The firefighters don’t care. Their conceit surpasses belief.

The visual manifestation of this conceit is the very modern architecture that mayors will inspect as they stroll the rivers of Providence this Saturday evening. Most people think it ugly, but architects don’t give a hoot. They learn in architecture school to take public dislike of their work as a feather in their caps.

When Providence changed its motto from “The Renaissance City” to “The Creative Capital,” it exalted those modernist buildings and the dubious creativity that they represent. As if building Houston on the Woonasquatucket required a higher order of creativity than building Florence on the Arno!

To walk society back from this city-killing faith in absurdity, toward a more human scale of life, is as important a job for mayors as addressing the other problems of cities. Indeed, rebuilding the love of cities will make their problems easier to solve. Ponder that as you enjoy WaterFire on Saturday.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board ( dbrussat@projo.com). His projo.com blog is called Architecture Here and There.