“Nostalgia” - or Community and Place?

Havana: Nostalgia Is a Dangerous Business is the title of an interesting book review at Design Observer. In the review, it seems to me, the architect Belmont Freeman uses the word "nostalgia" as many Modernist architects use it, as a pejorative description intended to suggest a soft-minded yearning to live in the past. As I say below, that is not why I am a traditional architect and urbanist. (please note, the comment continues after the jump)

What we are talking about is an architecture of place versus an architecture of time. Modernism argued that the world had changed and architecture must change with it. It argued for the expression of technology and it argued for a progressive social movement. I'm sympathetic to a lot of its arguments, particularly the social ones.

That was 100 years ago (Frank Lloyd Wright would be 143 years old if he were miraculously still alive). We must recognize that just as they argued then, times have changed. We can see the virtues and the problems of Modernism, and we can see we are no longer living in the world that Wright, Mies, Gropius and Corb wanted to reform. Modernism won a long time ago.

As Corb and Wright dreamt, Modernism brought us the super-highway, the dispersal of the city and, very often, the destruction of the street as public realm. In retrospect, the tragedy of the commons includes the denigration of the public realm and the common good.

Nouvel on the left, Gehry on the right, in New York City
(continued)

In retrospect, the super-materialism of Modernism ignored many human needs and desires. Modernism was a progressive social movement that produced some of the worst social housing in the world. Some examples like Pruitt-Igoe, which won an AIA national award, were so bad they were blown up. When Le Corbusier, a great artist and a genius, saw what the residents of his housing had done to his designs he said, "'You know, it is always life that is right and the architect who is wrong.'' That can be applied to a great many Modernist experiments, particularly the experiments on housing the poor, who had no alternative to taking what the architects and housing authorities gave them.

Today it is the New Urbanists who carry the social banner, not Koolhaas, Hadid and Libeskind. In the 21st century, there is nothing "progressive" about designing in a technological style. But there is often something anti-urban and even anti-social about continuing the "experiments" of Modernism. I put "experiments" in quotes because one has to ask how long one experiment repeated over and over can be considered "experimental." Yes, there is something experimental about the style of Hadid's computer-dependent designs, but the underlying emphasis on novelty, architectural egotism and technological determinism is old, and Hadid's architecture is no less anti-urban than Corb's was. And is there anything "new" about Norman Foster's or Richard Rogers's buildings?

Belmont Freeman (who was one year ahead of me in school, when there was a great deal of experimentation with the freedom of Post-Modernism) implies that traditional architecture is a "nostalgic" power play for the bad old days of corrupt Cuban governance. That position is in sync with the Modernist ideology that tradition is only of the past and that it must be swept away. In fact, traditional and Classical architecture have fundamentally different tectonic qualities, and they produce fundamentally different places.

In the practice of traditional and Classical design, the making of place - the city, the neighborhood and the town - is the first duty of any building design. In the ideology of Modernism and the currently fashionable Autonomous Architecture, the creativity and personal vision of the architect comes to the forefront, which is precisely why we live in an age of Starchitects. The object (the building) becomes more important than the city: in Autonomous Architecture, students are explicitly taught that the buildings around theirs will be torn down over time and what is important is that the ideas of their building be internally consistent. After 100 years of Modernism, the expression of the ego and the individual over the good of the community has become unmistakably explicit.

Of course most Modernist architects are not ideologues, and community boards and preservationists everywhere argue for contextualism, so we all know examples of contextual Modernism. Here in New York City, there are many good examples. But there are so many that we can now see that they are parasitic: they depend on good traditional neighbors on a good traditional street to look their best and to be part of a larger ensemble. Mies's jewel-like Seagram Building amid the masonry palazzi of Park Avenue shone brilliantly. But line up a few boring glass boxes on Sixth Avenue, and the street falls apart. Or put Starchitect Frank Gehry's IAC headquarters next to Starchitect's Jean Nouvel's latest luxury high-rise on West Street and the street is no longer a place where pedestrians are interested in walking (the fact that the "boulevard" they stand on is the Modern traffic engineer's version of a boulevard doesn't help, but the building designs deserve a very large share of the blame). A century of Modernism and tens of thousands of Modernist buildings have in fact produced a shockingly low number of places where pedestrians enjoy walking, unless the Modernism sits in a traditional urban fabric surrounded by traditional buildings. Like, for example, Gehry's great Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

An architecture of time versus an architecture of place. But at some point we revolt against an architecture of time that is so anti-place. That is the nature of the zeitgeist Modernism argued for. We learn not to repeat our mistakes, and we learn that materialism and ego make us yearn for human civilization and community.

V&V Nostalgia PS