Forever? For ever? Eh, let's just tear it down

The Chronicle's Rad Sallee talked last week about something we've halfway wondered about for a while: the quotation on Michael Davis's "Water Screen," the thing at Main Street Square that's supposed to be a frame containing a waterfall on which images are projected (we say "supposed to be" because we've only seen it working a handful of times). Across the top of the frame is the inscription "As we build our city, let us think that we are building forever." As Sallee asks, "Not to pick nits ... but shouldn't it say 'building for forever?'" Um, well, yes. Maybe.

The quote originated in the 1849 book The Seven Lamps of Architecture by British author and art and social critic John Ruskin:

Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, “See! this our fathers did for us.”

When architect Joseph Finger designed Houston's City Hall in the late 1930s, he paraphrased Ruskin's quote above one of the drinking fountains in the lobby: "As we build our city let us think that we are building forever," the lobby inscription reads. And it's that paraphrase that Davis used on the "Water Screen," Houston Downtown Management District Executive Director Bob Eury told the Chron. "Davis intentionally used the City Hall version," he said.

What Ruskin was talking about was the idea that architecture, and the meaning of buildings, gives us a link with past and future generations — it's one connection between the people who build and the people who use those buildings, theoretically forever. His original quote, "let us think that we build for ever," is an old-fashioned way of saying "for forever." The City Hall version is a little more figurative, though it still means the same thing — but it's apparently easy for people (even newsmen) to misunderstand. "What does 'for ever' mean — building incessantly, or for posterity?" Sallee wondered. Whatever the wording, it's an appropriate question considering that Main Street Square is located in the block where some significant structures (the Metropolitan and Loew's State theaters, the Lamar Hotel and the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed First City banking hall) have been demolished over the years. But hasn't Houston gotten the message yet? We guess not.