Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
George Rafferty
American; 20th-century
Sault St. Marie, MI: 326 East Portage Avenue
65%
Tower of History. 1968
This building was clearly designed in the modern "style," which is to say it's more an academic exercise in formal severity than (what it ought to have been, and what I imagine it wanted to be) a sculpture in celebration of God and man (weirdly, it was commissioned by the Catholic Church) whose proportions were dictated by the forms of its setting and the magnitude of its symbolic task. In other words, the Tower of History is a sore thumb projecting up from the otherwise rustic, arboreal town of Sault Ste. Marie. The building is panoptic and hugely out of place. That said, it achieves some small successes on purely intrinsic, physiognomical terms (which is part but not nearly all of how architecture is to be judged). The jutting horizontals in the building's upper third have a bit of a tumorous appearance to them, but they also provide a more complex and inspired breaking-up of space than Brutalism typically accomplishes. While all of the interiors are nondescript, the viewing platforms refuse to resolve the mess of angles and intersections that lead up to them from below , resulting in a satisfying irregularity to the tower's exterior spaces. (TFS, 2025)