Last Sunday James S. Russell, architecture critic for Bloomberg News and a former editor for Architectural Record, mused on his personal blog about the possible influence Paul Rudolph’s Brutalist University of Massachusetts campus in Dartmouth may have had on Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two Boston Marathon bombers who was also a student there.
Mr. Russell describes the campus as “a gigantic eerie, dozen-building concoction of grim ribbed-concrete hubris….” This is the sort of description that drives right to the heart of urban alienation. It’s Edvard Munch’s The Scream. This ability to sum up and drive the nail home is one reason he is the architecture critic for Bloomberg News. No side-stepping here.
It didn’t take long for someone to pounce on and, to use the popular pundit term, “eviscerate” Mr. Russell for what was viewed as his own hubris for thinking out loud about a sensitive topic. “Crass” is what writer Rory Olcayto called it from across the pond over at Architects Journal. Besides being a popular British put-down, Crass was also a British punk rock band that advocated anarchism. How dare he attempt to relate something he thinks about a lot (architecture) to the psychology of Bomber #2. Note: There is no evidence to support that attending the University of Massachusetts or living in its Brutalist architecture leads to violent behavior.
