Spectator Life

Bonjour and bienvenue to the Clooneys. Gorgeous George, his wife Amal and their eight-year-old twins have been granted French citizenship. The Hollywood actor has long had a deep streak of Europhilia, owning luxury properties in Berkshire and Lake Como, Italy, as well as his pad in Provence. Located near the village of Brignoles, the Clooneys’ €9 million ($10.5 million) wine estate spans 425 acres, including an olive grove, swimming pool and tennis court. In an interview last month with a French radio station, 64-year-old Clooney declared (in English) that "I love the French culture, your language, even if I'm still bad at it after 400 days of courses." He also praised France’s privacy laws, citing them as the principal reason he and his wife want to raise their children there.

Perusing the listings of a recent auction, I noticed an intriguing, relatively flat piece of copper-plated cast iron featuring intricate foliate and geometric designs. It was a baluster designed by the firm of Adler & Sullivan in 1893 for the old Chicago Stock Exchange. The 1972 demolition of that building, thanks to the “urban renewal” undertaken by many progressive American cities during the mid-twentieth century, led to this bit of architectural salvage coming up at auction many years later. It also led to the death of an idealistic photographer and activist named Richard Nickel. When Nickel (born in 1928) was killed on April 13, 1972, his body was not recovered for weeks.

In 2019, I wrote a piece for the American Conservative reflecting on the Notre-Dame fire and on the meaning of that cathedral in a secular age. At the time, I considered donating my paycheck from that article to the rebuilding effort. I’m glad I didn’t. I certainly wasn’t the only one moved to devote some of my hard-earned money to saving one of the jewels of Christendom. Over €800 million poured in from around the world. €165 million was quickly spent restoring the edifice’s structural integrity. But over €600 million remained, and soon the architects descended. After an initial flurry of mostly outlandish proposals that aimed to modernize the building’s exterior, the French government caved to popular outrage and ditched the design contest.

'Please. I beg you. It’s not worth seeing. Avert your eyes. It’s all laptop screensaver crack smoke. Just please don’t make me write about Hunter Biden’s artworks.' Such were this critic’s fevered thoughts as the news of New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s resignation came across the Twitter-tape. And so we turn to another artist manqué. This time, he is a builder, a builder of works on the order of the Romans of the 1930s. And now, these works will remain unappreciated (such is the fate of true artists). So, let’s appreciate. 'Excelsior', this governor scrawled across the edifices and tunnels and apps of his numinous creation. 'Ever Upward', he helpfully provided just beside it in translation. 'It’s Latin!

‘What a loss is the excellent Humboldt. You and Berlin will both miss him greatly,’ Prince Albert wrote to his much-beloved daughter Vicky, Crown Princess of Prussia, on news of the death of the author, explorer and celebrity Alexander von Humboldt in 1859. ‘People of this kind do not grow upon every bush [‘an den Blumen’] and they are the grace and glory of a country and a century.’ After some delays and bad luck, the grace and glory of the Humboldt name flourishes once again with the opening of the Humboldt Forum. Annoyingly digital to begin with, the launch in January of the Forum signaled the culmination of Berlin’s Museum Island restoration program and, with it, the crowning of the capital’s place within contemporary European culture.

When South Vietnam was overrun, Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. When the Bolsheviks triumphed in Russia, St Petersburg, Tsaritsyn and Nizhny Novgorod became Leningrad, Stalingrad and Gorky. It’s a common in history: lose a war, lose a name. In the summer of 2020, half of America has lost a culture war. And the torrent of new names is coming.On Tuesday, a special Washington DC commission convened by Mayor Muriel Bowser released a toponymy report on the of the nation’s capital. The report’s findings are dire. It turns out that DC is absolutely full of locations honoring people that have been canceled.Most troublingly, there are gigantic national monuments right in the middle of the city.

On a cold and unremarkable November night about 10 years ago, I arrived from India in Knoxville, Tennessee. The first thing I noticed about my new home was its massive front porch.Long and unfussy, it stretched along the entire width of the red-brick Craftsman bungalow. It had an old wooden floor and on one side furniture half-swallowed by shadow. More than anything, I was struck by its deep sense of ease, and how familiar it felt. I’d grown up in a small town in India, in a bungalow with a veranda not unlike this porch. Standing on it that freezing night, I suddenly felt a little less cold.

Will the government finally stop giving the concrete finger to popular taste by erecting ugly, expensive and unsustainable buildings with taxpayers’ money instead of fostering a civic architecture that speaks the language of American democracy?The leaking of a draft directive that calls for a return to ‘Classical and traditional styles’ in major public buildings in Washington DC has occasioned outrage and contempt from the expected quarters: architects who know best and journalists to whom the exterior of a public building is an obstacle to be surmounted on the way into the corridors of power. But the traffic circus known as Dupont Circle is not about to become a Roman circus, with lions of the Senate fighting each other with net, trident and rolled-up order papers.