A Modest Proposal for a 21st Century N.H. Icon

Valley News, May 2003
Donald Maurice Kreis

On the occasion of the Old Man of the Mountain finally succumbing to gravity after 10,000 years, here is some excellent advice from the hipster New York architectural duo of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio:   “What’s most poignant now is that the identity of the [mountain] has been lost . . . . It would be tragic to erase the erasure.”

Actually, that was Diller and Scofidio’s pronouncement to The New York Times, just a few days after September 11, 2001, about what should happen to the site of the World Trade Center.   They used the word “skyline” rather than “mountain.”

New York sensibly ignored this advice, and how appropriate for a metropolis that has long been about erasing erasures.   After stripping Manhattan of all natural fauna, New York called upon Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to create the artificial paradise known as Central Park 150 years ago.   The glorious neoclassical Pennsylvania Station was obliterated in the early 1960s, an erasure later erased by the successful struggle to save Grand Central Terminal and, now, the nascent plans for a new Penn Station.   All cities regenerate; that’s why Boston’s downtown-ruining Southeast Expressway is yielding to a greenway above and the Big Dig below.

Unlike the World Trade Center, the Old Man who presided over Franconia Notch was part of nature, where entropy is an ineluctable force.   The law of entropy holds that all matter is slowly devolving into a chaotic, useless form.   We can slow this process, but it is hubris to defy it – as we may discover, when the world’s oil is finally depleted or the polar ice caps melt.

But it would not simply be arrogant to try to rebuild the Old Man of the Mountain – it would be a design mistake of the first magnitude.   Long before he tumbled to earth, the Old Man had outlived his usefulness as a symbol of contemporary New Hampshire.   Here is a wonderful opportunity to replace him.

Lots of states have used natural wonders as an iconic image worthy of license plates and tourist propaganda; think Niagara Falls or even the distinctive profile of Camel’s Hump in Vermont.   But there was always something kind of creepy about New Hampshire anthropomorphizing and then fetishizing a pile of rock, as if to say:   The only truly awe-inspiring natural wonder in New Hampshire is the one that looks like us.   How unworthy of a state that boasts the majestic Presidential Range, the bucolic Connecticut River, the refreshing Squam Lake.

In the same vein, how unworthy of Daniel Webster to have claimed that the Old Man of the Mountain was a “sign” hung by the Almighty “to show that here in New Hampshire, He makes men.”   Happily, a more famous bit of Webster oratory points the way toward an appropriate symbol for Granite State virtues in the 21 st Century.

The Webster speech everyone remembers is his argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1818 on behalf of Dartmouth College – in which he implored the justices to take note of an obscure institution deep in the woods of western New Hampshire.   “It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college,” Webster told Chief Justice John Marshall. “And yet there are those who love it!”   We remember these words today not so much because they helped establish the significance of the contracts clause of the U.S. Constitution, but because they appeal to our instinctive love of institutions and their physical symbols.   The obvious lesson is that New Hampshire, a human creation, should adopt something built by humankind as its official icon – a building.

Precedents abound.   The White House and the U.S. Capitol are both recognized symbols of the federal government and, thus, our national identity.   For other nations, there is the Eiffel Tower, the Houses of Parliament – even the Sydney Opera House, whose sail-like forms just won its architect Jorn Utzon the coveted Pritzker Prize for architecture.

As it happens, Webster’s alma mater sports the best building in New Hampshire and, thus, the one most worthy of becoming the official icon of the Granite State.   Unfortunately for those who still love Webster’s small college, the building stands on the campus of his other alma mater – the Phillps Exeter Academy in Exeter.

Specifically, the distinction belongs to the prep school’s library, built in 1972 to a design by the great Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn.   Unabashedly modern in form and feeling, Kahn’s library is organized around a square concrete atrium, with the stacks neatly on parade behind four gigantic circular openings.   It is this motif of the circle juxtaposed with the perfect square that embues the building with enduring delight and also offers the best iconic possibilities for New Hampshire.

Such an image could be easily simplified, a boon to license plate and highway sign designers.   More importantly, it conveys something of the New Hampshire spirit – for what is Yankee individualism if not the insertion of a square peg in a round hole?   The interior view would be a sly concession to the reality that in this climate, most cherished buildings are contemplated more from within than without.   By paying homage to a library, we communicate our reverence for education – but since it’s a prep school building, we also express some of our ambivalence about publicly funded schools.   And recognizing the work of a Philadelphia architect in this manner would be an appropriate acknowledgement that in today’s migration-prone New England one no longer has to have been born here to be truly of here.

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