THE HAUS THAT JETER COPIED FROM RUTH: I was all set to do a post on how Albert Speer would have loved the new Yankee Stadium, what with the monumental scale, the massive flattened and simplified classical elements, and the self-conscious, self-aggrandizing musculature. It pretty much looks exactly like what Speer would have built. Or this.
But then I realized something I didn't know -- the new Yankee Stadium isn't repurposing Nazi propaganda architecture; it's just replicating, detail for detail, the facade of Yankee Stadium of 1923, minus the 1970s additions.
So this is slightly, but only slightly, less a horrifying idea. First, you should just never build a major new civic building by pretending you're building an old building. Buildings, like art and language, are artifacts of their own time. It would be silly, except as a stunt or an academic exercise, to write a modern mob story in Elizabethan English and iambic pentameter. If your neighbor converted to a pyramid, a castle, or a log cabin, you'd probably move. It's fine (maybe necessary, under some circumstances) to incorporate, to echo, or to acknowledge prior buildings, but to sell something by saying: "my concept for this is that it will look exactly like the original one" is lowest-common-denominator architecture. That's a bad idea on its own merits. And second, even if it weren't, and even though the original Yankee Stadium predated Nazi architecture, it just looks like Nazi architecture. Nazi architecture has acquired a meaning -- much in the same way, but not degree, that the swastika acquired a meaning. The Nazis didn't invent the swastika, but the Nazis are the reason why we don't use it now.
So, look, Yankees: everybody in baseball already hates you. Did you really need to give them more reasons?
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