For Sale: Groovy Gov't Office Bldg.

There's not much love in Philadelphia for the state office building at Broad and Spring Garden Street, designed in 1959 by the once ubiquitous Philadelphia firm, Carroll, Grisdale & Van Alen. I'll admit there was a time when I thought the slab couldn't be blown up soon enough. (Yes, that is the shining, white knight of the Inky tower in the background.) But then the state gave the marble facade a good scrub a few years ago, and I began to take a shine to the relic of bureaucratic modernism. Somehow the cleaning made its grid of square windows dance the Cha-Cha. The architects didn't just rotely plug in window squares at regular intervals; they gave the otherwise, by-the-book International Style high-rise a serious sense of rhythm by alternating windows that are flush with the facade, with ones that protrude. The squares are finished off with a thick metal outline. But the designers didn't stop there. They also pleated the walls of the penthouse. It's a surprisingly playful touch for a government office tower, more in keeping with one of Morris Lapidus's Miami confections than the stuff of Philadelphia officialdom.

Now, two years shy of its 50th birthday, the state office building is about to go on the block. Sean Pressmann, chief-of-staff for the Pennsylvania's Department of General Services, says the state will post a Solicitation for Proposals soon on its website. The legislature approved the sale in July, and the department is already hunting for office space to lease for the 1,000 state workers now housed at Spring Garden Street. It's a little ironic, given that one of the excuses for not building a ballpark at Broad and Spring Garden was the need to retain the state presence. Now there's an even chance that the building could end up as condos.

And what swell condos it would make, with a few significant tweaks. Although I've grown to like the general look of the building, I'm still appalled by Carroll, Grisdale & Van Alen's lifeless handling of the ground level. All the usual, pre-counter culture, anti-urban architectural tendencies are on view: the raised plinth separating the building from the surrounding streetscape, the shrouded entrance and the graceless, unwelcoming plaza/park. But unlike the federal courthouse at 6th and Market - one of the architects' most reprehensible projects - the mistakes at the base of the state office building could be easily corrected. It's not hard to imagine that plaza transformed into a lovely, green spot with a cafe and tables. With Loft District condos sprouting up across Broad Street and swarms of students and workers pouring out of the subway, it's an increasingly busy intersection. Ever since Lofts 640 and Marc Vetri's Osteria established their beachhead up the street, the neighborhood has been on a gentrifying tear.

You won't hear many people rem-iniscing about the work of Carroll, Grisdale & Van Alen, a firm that no longer exists. But the more of their buildings I encounter, the more I'm impressed by the originality of their forms and the stylishness of their details. I doubt their reputation will ever experience a big revival, but several of their buildings are starting to look pretty good to me. My favorite is one of their last efforts, the 1972 Scheie Eye Institute at Presbyterian Hospital, a muscular concrete and brick building that is softened by curves and deep-set windows. Next time you have your eyes checked, stop (before you're blinded by the exam) to admire the rotunda lobby, which has lots of lovely details from the era, including wooden screens. The juxtaposition of the roughly sculpted concrete and brick forms put you in the mind of some of Louis Kahn's work. It's almost as if they designed the building's sensuous forms to be understood by touch, which is a nice way of approaching a building that serves people with serious eye problems. When you think about some of the plain, boxy hospital buildings going up these days, the Scheie seems an even more remarkable achievement.

Yet, even when Carroll, Grisdale & Van Alen were good, they were often bad. Their designs are nearly always socially maladroit on the ground floor. Every time I pass the David Rittenhouse labs at 33rd and Walnut, I admire the round-edged, deep set, tactile square windows and then shake my head in amazement at the blank hostility of the street-wall. Ditto for the Youth Study Center on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, another of their elegant atrocities. The detailing of the limestone facade and classic ribbon windows shows real skill, but that base! There will be no tears shed when that building goes down for the Barnes Foundation's new building. Their perfectly round Bucks County Courthouse in Doylestown is another fascinating curiosity: bold in its form, inventive in the organization of the courtrooms, yet utterly blinkered to the lovely town at its feet. And then there are the What-Were-They-Thinking?failures like the Library Company on Locust Street.
While there is a lot wrong with Carroll, Grisdale and Van Alen's work, their failings are often typical of the architecture of the late '50s-early'60s, when cities were fumbling around for a way to compete with the suburbs. And yet it's evident that this was a creative bunch bursting with ideas, even as they stayed loyal to Modernism's rules about geometry and regularity. They didn't repeat the same forms over and over. Each project seems to be an attempt to create something fresh and original. And that's still worth admiring today.