Seeing the Mall fully activated, fully full, democratically so, tearful and hopeful, was an inspiration. The meaning of the Mall’s monuments, those enduring symbols of the nation’s aspirations, sacrifice, and hope for change, was renewed during these last several days–it was great to see them in action.

Given Obama’s interest in architecture, let’s hope that he illuminates the profound connection that exists between our quality of life and the places we inhabit. Here’s a brief recap of presidential architectural forays written by David Brussat for the Providence Journal. Aside from his comments about Daniel Libeskind (Dave and I have agreed to disagree on some contemporary structures), this is a fascinating read.

“BARACK OBAMA spilled the beans at a campaign rally last March 21, in Salem, Ore.: “I can tell you that when I was young I wanted to be an architect, but, um, I . . . [shout from offstage] . . . That was good! Architect of change! I like that!”

If only Obama had not been interrupted by that blockhead, we might know what sort of architect he would have been. Maybe, if we are really lucky and Obama really is smart, we can have not only change we can believe in but change we can see.

Today, many Americans are dissatisfied with their built environment. Obama must try to change architecture from the modernism of the past half a century to a new traditionalism for the future. Is he likely to do so? The tea leaves give us few clues.

On the one hand, given the chance to frame the backdrop of his acceptance speech in Denver last August, Obama chose a classical stage set. He took some ribbing for its supposed pomposity, and classicists furrowed their brows at the colonnade’s prefab clunkiness. But the set contributed to the exaltation of what was then the apogee of his career.

Furthermore, in 2004, when the Obamas wanted to upgrade from a condo to a house, he and Michelle bought a Georgian Revival built in 1910. It was located by his wife, who was a member of the board of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks.

On the other hand, Obama once attended a lecture (or so claims the lecturer) by Daniel Libeskind, a modernist known for buildings that look like they are about to fall down. If Obama did attend a Libeskind lecture, maybe it was just for laughs.

Let us hope so. Since Thomas Jefferson designed Monticello, the Virginia State Capitol at Richmond and the original buildings of the University of Virginia, no president but Franklin Roosevelt has shown much interest in architecture aside from the occasional monument or federal building. FDR designed a modest hideaway on his Hyde Park estate called Top Cottage in 1939, and several buildings in Dutchess County, N.Y., and Warm Springs, Ga. Other than Jefferson, FDR is the only U.S. president known to have designed a house of his own.

One of FDR’s most enduring legacies has to do with architecture. Among the more notable of his New Deal agencies, the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, designed thousands of post offices, bridges and other structures in traditional styles that ignored the emerging craze for the International Style (early modernism). Many of them survive today because of the intrinsic structural and aesthetic merits of traditional over modern architecture. Its merits represent a sustainability whose resurrection would be much more effective at addressing climate change than the high-tech “gizmo green” fad that is favored by the architecture profession.

The federal government was the last major institution of American society to shift from traditional to modern architecture. Corporate, collegiate and institutional America went first. While the classicism of the Lincoln Memorial (1922) was uncontroversial, that of the Jefferson Memorial (1941) was attacked by modernists then on the rise in the profession. The last major federal buildings of classical style were erected by FDR during the 1930s. Tuesday’s inaugural parade passed them on the way up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.

The presidential motorcade also passed the first major federal building built in a classical style since then: the Ronald Reagan Building (1998). In fact, the grace of Pennsylvania Avenue arises from the City Beautiful movement, launched by the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Obama’s own Chicago.

The worst building on Pennsylvania is the J. Edgar Hoover Building, FBI headquarters, designed in a Brutalist style similar to that of Boston City Hall. If Obama has the eye of an aesthete, as anyone who claims he originally wanted to be an architect surely must, he probably turned his eye from the FBI building to the Department of Justice (1935), a classical building right across the street. If Obama wants to doff his cap to FDR, let him revive New Deal classicism. That would not only create many thousands of jobs, but a physical symbol of the Obama administration to which the public could easily relate.

Three blocks north of the White House is K Street, Lobbyists Row, the worst concentration of modern architecture in the nation’s capital. Part of Obama’s agenda is to push America’s body politic away from K Street toward Pennsylvania Avenue. Using architecture to tell the good guys from the bad guys might help him surmount the predictable resistance.

It is possible that change of great magnitude will want an aesthetic component. It might need a symbolism capable of representing its spirit to the public. Jefferson understood the importance of having an architecture that reflects the nation’s aspirations. Obama should embrace his inner architect by initiating a national conversation about architecture. If he does, he will do far more for his country than he could ever have done as an architect.”

-David Brussat, Providence Journal, January 22, 2009

Author Michael Chabon, a member of Obama’s Arts Policy Committee, describes the critical importance of the arts at this moment in our nation’s history:

“Every grand American accomplishment, every innovation that has benefited and enriched our lives, every lasting social transformation, every moment of profound insight any American visionary ever had into a way

out of despair, loneliness, fear and violence—everything that has from the start made America the world capital of hope, has been the fruit of the creative imagination, of the ability to reach beyond received ideas and ready-made answers to some new place, some new way of seeing or hearing or moving through the world. Breathtaking solutions, revolutionary inventions, the road through to freedom, reform and change: never in the history of this country have these emerged as pat answers given to us by our institutions, by our government, by our leaders. We have been obliged—to employ Dr. King’s powerful verb—to dream them up for ourselves.

America’s artists are the guardians of the spirit of questioning, of innovation, of reaching across the barriers that fence us off from our neighbors, from our allies and adversaries, from the six billion other people with whom we share this dark and dazzling world. Art increases the sense of our common humanity. The imagination of the artist is, therefore, a profoundly moral imagination: the easier it is for you to imagine walking in someone else’s shoes, the more difficult it then becomes to do that person harm. If you want to make a torturer, first kill his imagination. If you want to create a nation that will stand by and allow torture to be practiced in its name, then go ahead and kill its imagination, too. You could start by cutting school funding for art, music, creative writing and the performing arts.

Our children need training and encouragement and support—they need rehearsal space and tempera paint and bass violins, teachers and tap-shoes; they need constant, passionate exposure to the great artistic heritage of their people, so that even if they don’t grow up to be artists themselves, they will still have been blessed, as Americans have always been blessed, with the artist’s gift for seeing the possible in the impossible, the fellow soul on the other side of the fence. Our artists need freedom to pursue the solitary investigations into which their art inevitably leads them. America needs that untrammeled flow of creativity, of the willingness and ability to innovate, to skylark, to tinker, to daydream out loud: over the course of two and a half centuries now, our creative flow has filled the world’s libraries, museums, theaters and recital halls, its academies, movie houses and marketplaces, with works of genius to break the heart and boggle the mind. And the people of the world–our world–need an America that remains in full, confident possession of its mighty gift of imagination, not merely to meet the global demand for our entertainment and art and literature, but so that they–and we–need never fear the brutality, the arrogance and the inhumanity to which a nation in want of imagination must, inevitably, descend.”

On summer nights, my older, next-door neighbor Rickey Caruolo would play the guitar on his front steps. He always drew a crowd—women who were mesmerized by his movie-star good looks, his football buddies from Mount Pleasant High, old timers, and children, lots of them. Fifty-two children lived on Lennon Street, and the undisputed god of that street was Rickey. Lennon was a street of families, each contributing four, five, six boomers to the tumble, the backbone of the American dream, fifties style.

Everyone had two parents and a dog then. There were endless days of four-square, red rover, and hide-and-go-seek. It was a moveable feast: if someone wasn’t home, you simply found someone to play with at the next house.

We swam in the summer, burned leaves in the fall, starred in Mr. Nickerson’s Halloween movies, sang carols in the long winter night before the annual Christmas party at the Dionne’s house—all of us, every season, every year. Even the dogs played together.

We moved in a bubble of innocence in Providence, in Little Rhody, the smallest state, isolated by size and inclination. It would be easy to dismiss our harmony as typical of any small-town neighborhood with shared, small-town values.

But it was more than that. There was infinite grace. More than three decades later, when I added up the number of children on Lennon and came up with the staggering total of 52, I called Mrs. Dionne, one of our many mothers, just to make sure. Years evaporated in an instant.

“You’ve got the number exactly right,” she said. “We raised the best kids on the planet on Lennon Street.”

Each head was counted, we counted. Rickey held court on the sweeping front steps of his house. When he wasn’t playing his guitar, he played hi-lo-jack, his favorite card game. Or he’d unfold the newspaper and read Peanuts, with feeling, to us little ones. If we looked puzzled, he would explain the comic strip, frame by frame.

“Do you get it now?” he’d gently ask. He would tell us what happened on the Jack Paar Show because he was the only one old enough to stay up that late. He’d break up the occasional fight with marauders from outside Lennon Street and afterwards, you’d see him, arm around the beaten kid, coaching, consoling, teaching.

He was our paperboy. He knew everyone. His peers called him Elvis, because he was cool, cooler than the King, cooler even than James Dean.

There was Rickey, and then there were the rest of us. He was magnetic, smooth, and, by temperament and opportunity, a lady’s man.

There are so many Rickey stories.

“Have Curt tell you the one about the broken down sedan, circa 1934, that was parked behind Rickey’s house.” Rickey and fifteen guys with names like Big Daddy Lynch chipped in nickels and dimes to buy it and then scribbled their names along with their financial stake on the back seat of the car.

“Get Michael to tell you about the night Rickey showed up at his house, pleading—everything was urgent with Rickey—with his mother to let him take Michael downtown to Loew’s Theater so they could watch a Floyd Patterson heavyweight fight. How Rickey narrated the entire fuzzy black and white newsreel, blow by blow, to his ten-year-old buddy. How Rickey was Michael’s hero.” “Do you remember him swinging the jump rope for us? The way he made up funny songs as we jumped?”

God, he made us laugh.

“You’ve got to write about American Bandstand. Rickey would race home from school every day to watch it. He’d fall in love with a new dance girl every week and then, man, he’d talk about those girls like he knew them.”

“Tell everyone about the time he bought the candy-apple red Chubby Checker twisting shoes, the ones with the plastic insets in the soles so he could really put the twist into overdrive.”

He loved to dance, loved to teach people how to dance too.

“Ask your dad about that 1956 Chevy of his, the one that would never start.”

Used to charming everyone and everything, Rickey would talk aloud to the car, hands flying.

“Aw, why are you doing this to me now? Don’t you know where I have to be?”

He’d kick the car, stomp off, and return a few moments later. “OK, I am going to give you one more chance.”

No start, another kick, and he’d be back, swearing to the car that this was absolutely the last chance. He was generous with second chances, whether for cars or people.

Rickey’s first tour with the Marines, in 1963-64, took him to the Pacific, where he trained in Okinawa and the Philippines. He was in Tokyo when President Kennedy was shot.

In 1965, he received orders to Vietnam. Ricky died on March 23, 1966 near Quang Ngai in central Vietnam two weeks short of his return to the United States and three short of his 22nd birthday. Wayne Burwell, a close friend of his since boot camp, later wrote to his family and described his last two hours.

On the day he died, their company had been chasing Vietcong for two days and seen a lot of action; many were killed. It was their final day out. Eight companies were poised to sweep a village that morning. Rickey, with ten other men, crept ahead, seeing no action until they were thirty feet from the village. Heavily-armed Vietcong suddenly opened fire from treetops, bunkers, and trenches. Rickey’s group rushed a trench, ten feet away, losing two men as they did so. Rickey, the team leader, covered until everyone was in the trench and could cover him. Once there, they realized that three Marines, one wounded, were caught between them and the village. Rickey and another left the safety of the trench and crawled out to the wounded man. As he dragged him back, Rickey was hit. When Burwell crawled out to help, Rickey insisted that he first get the other soldier to safety. Only then did he allow Burwell to pull him back.

They were still cut off, there was nothing to do. As they waited, Rickey told Burwell he knew he was dying and asked him to write to his family. He told his family of his love, how much he missed his little sister Joy, and gave his savings to his baby godson Jim to spend on college or just on fun.

Finally, at nightfall, Burwell and Lenny Byrd, another friend, dragged Rickey on their stomachs 400 yards before the Vietcong cut them off again. Rickey begged Burwell to abandon him, but he wouldn’t. Burwell held him in his arms until he died.

A priest and a Marine officer came to Lennon Street. Marine Lance Cpl. Richard Anthony Caruolo, Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, had been killed in action.

He was one of the first of the 224 Rhode Islanders who fell in Vietnam. A stream of people, days long, quietly slipped in and out of the Caruolo’s house.

For the first time, there were reporters on the street. The realization came for many that there was another world out there, a dangerous world not like Lennon Street. He loved his Marine dress blues. He wore them in his casket, which had been filled with hydrogen and sealed in Plexiglas to survive the long trip back from South Vietnam. A floral wreath placed on top read, “Good night, sweet prince.” After the funeral at St. Augustine’s, his cortege moved slowly down Lennon Street. His beloved dog, Rex, howled as his master’s body was borne by.

Outside the cemetery chapel, Rickey was saluted with gunshot, the loud blasts of which reverberated inside. Each time, his mother pressed her hand to her heart, a heart that would break and stop a year later almost to the day. After Rickey’s death, the street shouts turned to whispers, Rex grew white around the snout, and so many soldiers from Rhode Island died in Vietnam that it was hard finding military pallbearers.

Rickey was awarded the Silver Star posthumously for heroism in combat, and eventually took his place on the Wall on Panel 6E, Line 41. Almost forty years later, the clean-cut memories of a guy who loved life, loved people, loved Snoopy, loved his country, are evergreen.

We count him among us.