Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
Basilica interior. Photo from the St. Lawrence Basilica website
Laura Hope-Gill, author of two histories of Asheville architecture, offers her perspective on the fate of the property across from Asheville’s Basilica.
The beauty of a work does not end at its property line. It penetrates the hearts and spirits of the people passing by who carry it with them into the world.
I appreciate the care the city is taking in ensuring the Basilica’s “integrity” as they discuss the construction of a hotel meters away. The use of this term though denotes structural integrity, yet leaves outside its perimeter the equally real aesthetic integrity.
I respect that the city has imposed clear requirements for construction. I love the idea that seismic tests will ensure the dome sustains no injury during hotel construction. While there could be a team of the most highly trained geologists and engineers camping out at the construction site measuring every tremble of a jackhammer, every Timberland footfall upon grass-pierced concrete, saying the building will bear no injury from the hotel’s construction misses the point.
We who love the building will bear the injury. We who need empty spaces that provide a vantage point from which to behold beautiful buildings will feel the seismic jolt.
I want as badly as the next person a plan that addresses housing needs in this city. If McKibbon has $28 million to invest in the city, let it invest three blocks west on the site of the Three Brothers Restaurant. A hotel there will have far superior views. Why trespass on a treasure?
Fill the empty space next to Basilica with McKibbon-sponsored floral stands sponsored from a few blocks away. Fill it with food trucks, with artists’ booths, fill that space with life, and it would be a cracked-pavement piazza that more truly reflects the Renaissance notion of renovatio* than does real estate negotiation.
Nothing a hotel group can build will come anywhere close to even a throat-clearing cough in terms of engaging in architectural conversation with the Basilica, the final work and resting place of a genius and innovator whose footsteps Buckminster Fuller’s follow. Because it is Guastavino’s final work, it is a building for all time and the whole world whose history it now transcends.
* Renewal, renovation, restoration.
Laura Hope-Gill directs the Master of Arts in Writing Program at the Lenoir-Rhyne University Center for Graduate Studies of Asheville. She is the author of the Asheville architectural histories Look Up Asheville I and II and is the poet laureate of the Blue Ridge Parkway. She is entirely aware that economics will almost always win out over aesthetics yet still believes the soul of things requires some honor in their passing.
