Salt Lake City surprised and sometimes delighted us. It was unexpectedly interesting. Salt Lake was founded by Brigham Young and the Mormons who were following him. Those early believers laid the streets out on a rigid north-south grid- just like Escalante, only way bigger – and they have to be wide enough to turn an ox-drawn wagon around, both of which contribute to a slightly different feel than, say, San Jose. Salt Lake is both grubbier than I expected, with lots of homeless people, and booming, with the construction of new apartments almost everywhere.

As an aside, I wonder if a booming local economy and homelessness are connected. I hope not. End aside.

Salt Lake also feels more Liberal than I expected, with a woman mayor – the city’s third woman mayor, BTW – although on thinking about it, the Liberalism might be an illusion. I think it feels more Liberal to me because I associate Liberal with concern for the greater Community, as opposed to living in a gated community, and Salt Lake City’s many new public buildings and parks exude Liberal Civic Pride.

In the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, almost due east from downtown – and I’m defining downtown as Temple Square – is the Natural History Museum of Utah overlooking Salt Lake City like the Lawrence Hall of Science over Berkeley and the Bay. I’ve read, and Linda Melton has reminded me that the tallest buildings in a village or a town or – even/especially, take your pick – a cosmopolitan city reflect the place’s values. In that way, this building which is high on a hill overlooking Salt Lake is a statement building saying Science is valued here, which somehow warms my soul.

The Museum is designed by Ennead – that’s all, Ennead, just Ennead – who have offices in both New York and Shanghai and seem to be a sort of a co-op specializing in museum and public buildings. They have designed a 427,000 square-foot natural history museum for the Yangtze River Estuary Chinese Sturgeon Nature Preserve, the Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park and Museum of Rowan University in New Jersey, the Wuxi Museum and Art Park near Shanghai, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University near us – actually two buildings at Stanford – and the University of Michigan, Biological Sciences Building and Museum of Natural History (for starters).

The Lobby is enormous, with a wall of windows overlooking Salt Lake City and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. At the back of the Lobby is an excellent topo map of Utah. I love maps like this, and I could have stayed there all day. With all this going for it and its excellent pedigree, I wished I liked the museum more. My lukewarm opinion might be influenced by the fact that we went through the museum backward. The Museum is a strange hybrid of an old-timey-style museum at the bottom and a new-style museum on top. When we bought our tickets, they told us that most people take the elevator to the top but walking up the ramp from the bottom would give us the exhibits in chronological order. We chose chronological order and walked into the largest collections of dinosaur fossils I’ve ever seen. It was overwhelming, and by the time we got to the skimpy section on early man, three floors up, we were pretty burned out.

There were two things about the museum that annoyed disturbed surprised us. When we walked up the ramp to the museum, we ran across very noticeable lines in the concrete walks and retaining walls with numbers. The lines seemed random, with some lines straight and some curved. We asked several of the museum staff what they were, but nobody knew, and one guy even asked his supervisor, who also didn’t know. Now, come on! somebody put the lines and numbers there for a reason, and they are the opening sequence of a museum visit, our visit, anyway. Later, while we were staring at a giant skeleton, one of the guys we had asked about the mystery lines came up to us and pointed out that there was only one real fossil in the display, the rest were copies, and we could tell which one by its exoskeleton. Because the copies were lighter than the stone original, they could stand up on their own.

BTW, Michele and I think the lines represent the contour lines of the original, pre-graded, site.

The second building in our building walk day was The City Library, designed by Safdie Architects in conjunction with VCBO Architecture. Looking at the VCBO website, I think the heavy lifting was done by Safdie Architects, whose list of famous public and semi-public buildings starting with Montreal’s Habitat, built in 1967, is legendary. Fifty years later, they are still going strong. Safdie Architects’ oeuvre includes buildings like Alice Walton’s – of the Walton family – Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the 1.3 million square foot Marina Bay Sands complex in Singapore, Exploration Place Museum and Educational Center in Wichita, Kansas, and the United States Institute of Peace Headquarters in Washington. Moshe Safdie is the founder, but according to their website, Safdie Architects is an extended family of partners and colleagues. I think all of these new, much younger, partners and colleagues are why the firm is still so creative.  

The City Library is stunning, playing a reflective glass building against a huge curved colonnade, with a five story open space between them. The colonnade has shops on the first floor and four floors of reading areas above, with stairs leading from the plaza to the top of the library on top. The elevators connected the floors are behind glass elevator shafts and are kinetic sculptures.

Coming-up, we’ve seen the future and it doesn’t work that well.

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