Cassandra was my kind of gal. Unfortunately I can’t find her statue anywhere on Parliament Hill.

In case you attended a progressive, fact-free school, she’s the unfortunate Trojan princess granted the gift of foresight by Apollo but then, when she did not return his love, cursed so that no one would believe her. “There’s something fishy about that wooden horse,” she said, but …

I thought of her after grousing last Friday about a “general breakdown of public institutions” in Canada. Such talk can get you pegged as an alarmist crank. But three days later the Citizen reported that “Retiring baby boomers have sparked an unprecedented churn of workers within the federal government, starting at the top where nearly 60 per cent of executives spend less than a year in their jobs.”

Did somebody say breakdown? The obvious problem here is that policy is being administered, interpreted and in significant measure made by people who haven’t been on the job long enough to master its details, let alone the historical background. But it’s even more alarming that this obviously dysfunctional situation was either tolerated by the senior bureaucratic and political figures whose job it is to ensure that the public service works properly, or else they didn’t know about it.

It’s not clear which. Monday’s Citizen went on: “Such rapid turnover has long been suspected, but the Public Service Commission highlighted the problem in its latest annual report with a study of pay records that showed 40 per cent of Canada’s public servants started and ended the year in different jobs. That jumped to more than 75 per cent for some occupations.” But the paper didn’t say who had long suspected it or how strongly. And I’m not sure which would be worse: people knew but didn’t care, or it came as a complete surprise to half of cabinet, the Opposition and the Privy Council Office. I distinctly recall a big public service revitalization exercise under the Liberals. Did they know it ended this way? Did the Tories? Did senior public servants? Did anybody?

In any event, the people responsible for managing the public service apparently only just now got around to verifying that they are presiding over demoralizing, ill-informed chaos. If that isn’t a general breakdown of public institutions it surely fulfills its key functions. We face a problematic staffing situation no one intended to create, knew had been created or has any idea how to fix. And please do not be cynical. It’s not just the same old government inefficiency. It’s getting worse and it matters. You may think a functioning bureaucracy is exasperating … until you try dealing with a crumbling one.

Speaking of crumbling, a major new study just catalogued the disastrous condition of Canada’s municipal infrastructure. Its author, McGill engineering professor Saeed Mirza, gets an honorary Cassandra award because he’s been warning about this problem for ages. Yet Prime Minister Stephen Harper promptly blew his study off, telling Parliament Tuesday: “Since coming to office, this government has announced record amounts of spending, and record new programs into dealing with infrastructure in Canada. They amount to an additional $33 billion over the next seven years. This covers everything from national down to certain types of municipal and local infrastructure.”

It’s bad enough that our bridges, sewers and roads are disintegrating. But the institutional catastrophe is the contemptuous reception given to warnings. I wish I could assure you the PM was simply wrapping himself in protective partisan rhetorical fog while preparing to move decisively behind the scenes. But I cannot be sure the bureaucrats managing this file have been on the job long enough to master it and communicate their alarm upward, or that cabinet could absorb the message if they were. This purple-turning and finger-jabbing may well be all our politicians have. (British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s pompously clueless response to a recent massive breach of data privacy evokes equally disquieting reflections.)

There is no quick fix here. We have a systemic institutional problem driven by an intellectual one. Our Trojan horse is the idea that politics is about compassion, best measured by how abusively someone denounces the wretches across the aisle, and questions of detail, historical analysis of our institutions, fundamental philosophical questions are fit only for geeks and losers. Let this into your city, I wail, and disaster will ensue.

If MPs had to pass a statue of Cassandra on their way into Parliament every day, they might smile a bit less patronizingly and listen a bit more carefully. I know it sounds hysterical, but I swear someone’s talking inside that pretty wooden horsie.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

While cement shatters across Quebec, Charlemagne’s late 8th-century chapel in Aachen Cathedral still stands firm. Perhaps we could go there and say a prayer to our Lady of Reinforced Concrete that our bridges, overpasses and underground slabs keeping buildings out of subways will last 1/20th as long. In The Story of Architecture Patrick Nuttgens calls Charlemagne’s chapel “The best example of what is called Carolingian architecture.” I don’t know if there’s much competition in that field. But it is magnificent: massive, sombre yet somehow uplifting, and built to last both physically and morally. Wouldn’t it be weird to be surrounded by stuff like that?

Parts of the main ancient Roman sewer remain in use. And Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza, the tallest building in the world for 40 centuries until eclipsed by the spire of Lincoln cathedral, still radiates mysterious serenity. A modern building is lucky to hold the title of world’s tallest for 40 months or be worth looking at for 40 seconds while it does.

To be fair to our own era we have, in the last 300 years or so, reasonably come to expect a steady stream of improvements in building materials and construction techniques. Why take the time and trouble to build something that will last thousands of years if it’s cheaper to tear it down and put up a better one in 50? It is telling that what urban planner Bill Risebero’s The Story of Western Architecture calls “the first important example in the world of the structural use of cast-iron” was a Severn River bridge in 1779 but within a century wrought iron and then steel had made cast iron bridges obsolete. Charlemagne wasn’t expecting anyone to invent better rock and at least until reinforced concrete in the 19th century no one did. But there’s something depressing about spending your life in throwaway buildings.

Or losing it. That cast-iron bridge still spans the Severn, unlike the notorious cement one in Minneapolis or Laval’s De la Concorde overpass. And many other such structures may be as unsafe as they are ugly. Twenty-two centuries ago Marcus Vitruvius Pollio wrote (in Henry Wotton’s delightful 16th-century translation) “Well-building has three conditions: commodity, firmness, and delight.” So how can constant improvement in materials and techniques have resulted in structures that are inconvenient, hideous and even dangerous?

Bill Risebero praises Frank Lloyd Wright’s innovative Larkin Company office building built in Buffalo in 1906 and demolished in 1950 (it is now a parking lot). Apparently it was nice if you saw it. Or not so much nice as different from older nice buildings in ways that pointed to even more hideous ones yet to come. Like the infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex built in St. Louis in the 1950s. Using every modern theory about exterior design, interior design and the efficient packing of deprived human units, it swiftly became a vandalized den of filth and crime and in 1972 was blown up on national television to the cheers of spectators (it is now a vacant lot).

Or take the office cubicle … please. Ugly, unpleasant to work in and unhealthy, in a “sick” building that recirculates foul air while discouraging physical activity. Want to use the smelly, steep slippery staircase in the typical office building (assuming you can even find it)? I didn’t think so.

There is a profound aesthetic problem in a post-modern society. We no longer believe there is one basically right way to build things and instead dip into a grab bag of past styles at random or, at best, as a deliberate statement of our beliefs (Gothic, say, for Canadian conservatives; restrained neo-classical for Americans). And this problem arises in part because modern materials let us build almost anything in almost any shape, instead of being compelled by the strengths and weaknesses of wood or stone to combine structural and visual elegance. But I also think there’s something necessarily appalling about a morally empty architecture that doesn’t aspire to serve, delight or last.

Beneath it all, a place I try to avoid driving these days, I cannot help thinking that while Charlemagne personally may have needed a bath, his church/mausoleum stayed up in part because the people who build it thought it should be truly nice and nicely true. We, on the other hand, bow down before municipal cement in a landscape whence delight, commodity and even firmness seem to have fled.

Contemplating cities where a stroll is a nightmare and a drive potentially lethal I suggest a pilgrimage to Aachen, where we could learn to build solid, attractive delightful buildings. Or just pray that the ugly junk we’ve thrown together won’t fall down while we’re under it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]