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ArchitectureBoston,
September-October 2004
Donald Maurice Kreis
“Am
I under arrest?”
It
was not a question that a middle-aged lawyer with no criminal history,
but who moonlights as an architecture critic, was accustomed to
asking a police officer. But this was a new place – the only major
city in New England that this potential troublemaker had previously
never visited – and the cop had certainly made clear that the tourist
he was addressing, on a downtown street corner within sight of a
big, gleaming McKim, Mead & White building, was not free to
go.
“Don’t
make me embarrass you,” the gendarme officer said, apparently
having decided that his mark was the sort of fellow inclined to
avoid a public scene. Actually, with no one around but strangers,
the traveler was almost curious enough to call his bluff. Ultimately
it was not fear of embarrassment but fear of wasting an otherwise
pleasant Saturday afternoon that led the miscreant to acquiesce
and follow the cop into the nearby shopping mall where two stern-faced
security guards joined them.
Call
this brush with the law a case of attempted architectural photography.
Charles
Follen McKim, whose building looked down on the crime scene, might
have appreciated the caper, though his work was not directly implicated.
Rather, the architecture in question came from Arrowstreet, the
Cambridge-based designers whose retail accomplishments include everything
from the imposing CambridgeSide Galleria to the folksy false forest
of the Centerra Marketplace owned by Dartmouth College. Just as
McKim had once re-created the Baths of Caracalla over the tracks
of the Pennsylvania and Long Island railroads in Manhattan, here
Arrowstreet had cantilevered a cathedral of commerce (complete with
Gothic arches) over a set of busy railroad tracks – at the very
spot where the tracks themselves cross a river at the edge of Waterplace
Park in the heart of downtown .
The
building is designed so that one cannot be distracted from the important
act of shopping by these intriguing structural facts. Rather,
it is only from the sidewalk along busy Francis Street that what
appears at a distance to be a courtyard proves to be a space open
to the river and the railroad below. An otherwise undistinguished
commercial building is suddenly a bridge, and there is the faintest
hint of the pleasure one gets out of the Ponte Rialto in Venice
or the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.
The
pleasure was short-lived in this instance, [tightened] however,
[modified order slightly for clarity] because the visitor dared
to pull out his camera as he strolled down Francis Street and to
aim it at the river and railroad tracks below. A mall security
guard indignantly marched up to the tourist and instructed him that
photography was prohibited. Outraged, the travelling critic snapped
– his shutter, that is. The guard began chattering urgently into
his two-way radio. [I’m a little confused here...maybe it’s chronology....It
reads as tho’ this security guard is the same person who said ‘don’t
make me embarrass you” As I think about this after reading the whole
piece, I’m guessing that it was the security guard who caught you,
babbled into his radio, which then brought the real cop on the scene.
If that’s correct, I’d propose something like this change:
6480
The pleasure was short-lived in this instance, however, because
the visitor had dared to pull out his camera as he strolled down
Francis Street and to aim it at the river and railroad tracks below.
A mall security guard indignantly marched up to the tourist and
instructed him that photography was prohibited. Outraged, the
travelling critic snapped – his shutter, that is. The guard began
chattering urgently into his two-way radio, summoning the aforementioned
official representative of the city’s constabulary.
A
word here about Francis Street, cameras, and architecture. As
best a visiting attorney is able to ascertain without conducting
a title search, Francis Street is a public thoroughfare, in a city
with a visitors’ bureau that is actively promoting the kind of tourism
that should reasonably be assumed to include photography. An attorney
who is also an architecture writer quickly grows accustomed to being
hassled by security guards when wandering into privately owned but
publicly open buildings and taking pictures of the architectural
features in plain view. Indeed, the lawyer/critic in question
was once thrown out of a different Arrowstreet project – a Hannaford
Brothers supermarket in another great New England city – for precisely
this transgression. On that occasion, the visitor was openly accused
of industrial espionage, presumably on behalf of a competing supermarket
chain.
Ultimately,
no spy ring was busted in the Case of the Francis Street Caper.
No threat to the republic, or to public order, came to light by
detaining a shutterbug who didn’t fit even the most imaginative
terrorist profile . Once inside, the security guards suggested
that their suspect could resolve the situation by identifying himself
and explaining his purposes. Our hero gave the guards his business
card and explained that he was a tourist in their fine city , not
wanting to complicate things by admitting so shady an avocation
as architecture criticism . After successfully demanding the opportunity
to inspect the driver’s license of the perpetrator, they set him
free, kept the card, and warned him that he could soon be hearing
from the mall’s lawyers about “trademark” violations.
The
lesson of the parable is not that shopping malls need to do a better
job of orienting briefing their security personnel about intellectual
property law (since they ought to know the difference between a
trademark and a copyright, the former being obviously irrelevant
to this situation). Nor is the lesson that something is profoundly
rotten in our culture when the supposedly public architectural realm
has been so thoroughly privatized that it is no longer possible
for a person who loves buildings to take pictures of design features
that seem interesting. That struggle was lost long ago, as part
of a greater losing battle for excellent public-spirited architecture.
Rather,
the lesson is that things have gone too far when private security
forces are in league with the police store detectives are prowling
public streets and enlisting the help of the police, in an effort
to to deter the architecturally curious. That is why our suspect
snapped (photographically speaking) when first confronted, and why
every architect and every American who cares about architecture
should start packing a concealed weapon in the form of a camera.
Whatever
these building owners have to hide is something that urgently needs
to be exposed.
Sidebar:
But was it legal?
Exactly
how risky is photographing a building from a public sidewalk without
permission? Not very, according to Peter J. Gardner, an attorney
at Stebbins Bradley Harvey & Miller in Hanover, New Hampshire
and chair of the New Hampshire Bar Association’s Intellectual
Property Law section. He starts by noting that it’s a question
of copyright rather than trademark law – and that both are federal
statutes applicable throughout the country .
Architectural
designs do enjoy protection under the federal Copyright Act, according
to Gardner. But, he adds, the law specifically allows the taking
of photographs as long as the building is “ordinarily visible from
a public place.”
“That
said, it may be prudent for those who wish to photograph buildings
to note that while they may indeed have certain rights under copyright
law, they may be prevented from availing themselves of those rights
if, as a practical matter, they must trespass to do so,” said the
intellectual property expert. In other words, stay on that sidewalk!
©
2004 by Donald M. Kreis
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