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Response to Ada-Louise Huxtable
Published in Preservation magazine To: Ms.
Ada-Louise Huxtable In the November/December issue of Preservation, Ada Louise Huxtable looks at a photograph of some
new townhouses in To begin with the domestic side of the argument: there is surely a
reason that a person of sensibility might reclad a
refrigerator. A typical refrigerator, like many industrial products, is no
more than a witless expression of its own "thingness". It is a
result of its manufacturing process, retroactively decorated with a few
gewgaws. It is, at best, not worth looking at. At worst it is a visual
disruption of the cabinetry that dominates an important domestic space. It
seems to me that the search for visual harmony within the confines of the
home is one of the better instincts of Americans. Especially now that urban
space has become too brutal for comfort and the private places must
compensate. Beyond that, there is the fundamental right within the privacy of a
dwelling to have it as one pleases, and the architectural critic is rude to
intervene, even as an aside. I continue to be surprised at the police-state
reach of the old modernists.
Nothing, apparently, is beyond their prudery. Each and every domestic artifact must be
brought under ideological control. This much can be said of the supposedly
totalitarian New Urbanists: their radius of concern stops at the building
fronts. To get past this unfortunate analogy, and on to the more interesting
question of whether a building should ever be a copy, one must first
address the term "copy.” It is no mean achievement that the
artistic avant-garde has been able to saddle this neutral, technical, term
with an intrinsically negative connotation.
It is certainly not a negative in most other endeavors, and
furthermore in its use here it is also inaccurate. What architects do is
actually the process of emulation, otherwise known as participating in a
tradition. While it is not the place to discuss the process here, its
results may be recalled easily: it is the design methodology that has
sustained architectural culture and its craft for several millennia and
that is responsible for most of the places that are worth inhabiting today,
including Ms Huxtable’s own dwelling and the city that is the matrix
of her life. That this is not obvious might be explained with a paraphrase of
Francois Furet: “(Modernist architecture) demands and receives a
psychological investment that renders it virtually impermeable to rational
and empirical refutation." In truth, the problem is not with the copying, but with the fact
that it is traditional architecture that is being copied. It is surely not
beyond our discernment that most modernist architecture is copied from
other modernist architecture. That this does not bother Ms. Huxtable
exposes an old and widespread prejudice.
What is new and fashionable is the attack against urban harmony. But
it may still be possible to propose several good reasons why one would
emulate precedent or, to rehabilitate the term, to copy. One reason may be that a designer is modest enough to realize that a
good copy is better than a bad original. It should not be so difficult to
admit that not everyone is up to an artistic breakthrough every time. I have always thought that the University
of Houston School of Architecture, for example, did better with its Ledoux
copy by Phillip Johnson than it would have with an original Johnson, given
the banalities that he was designing at that time. Do we actually need to be reminded that most good cities are
comprised principally of competent copies and marred by just a few failed
(usually modernist) originals? Bad cities simply reverse the ratio. Test this thesis with an experiment:
travel to a city and ask your host to help you find a bad building built prior to 1930, one from that period when
buildings were invariably “copied.” You may well spend all day
driving around in a vain search. Now, look for a bad building built after 1960, and you will probably find one
just by turning your head. Then, to confirm the thesis, try finding a good building designed after 1960,
and you will again find yourself on a long drive. What we have achieved with the modernist design process, to put it
bluntly, is an appalling win-loss ratio. The methodology of originality,
compared to that of emulation is simply not dependable enough. In no other
profession--not medicine, not law, not car design, not sports--would such
awful odds be tolerated. In medicine
it would be a massacre; in sports the coach would be sacked. And yet in the
field of architecture we are expected to risk a litany of disappointment on
the small, infinitesimally small, chance that a masterpiece may emerge.
This state of affairs may be acceptable to most architects, but to an
urbanist it is simply not worth it. There is a related question: What do the people say? When a building is designed through any
sort of public process, one where the user, or even the passerby, has a
voice, then we all already know that the preference would be for a
traditional (i.e. copied) architecture. The many and varied reasons for
this preference lies in stolid American pragmatism. The exercise of
democracy leads to traditional architecture and where this is not the case,
it is a class issue. A few sophisticated individuals prefer modernist
architecture, but not even those too poor to be choosy will tolerate it, as
HUD has painfully found out. The discovery of Ray Gindroz, now embedded into the new HUD
standards, is that the poor want their housing to look, insofar as
possible, like that of the middle class. They do not want to be different
from those that are better off.
Incidentally, "copying" also allows those conventional
construction methods that are less expensive and more durable than the
experiments of modernism. Modernist architecture, in fact, is suitable only
for the very wealthy: they can afford to build it, to maintain it, and to
move out of it if the experiment fails. I have always recommended the
practice of modernist architecture on the wealthy, but I consider it
irresponsible to saddle the poor with its rigors and frailties. There is another reason to retain the technique of emulation. One of
the principal attributes of urbanism, that of
mixed use, requires it. I have confirmed in our own projects that people
are quite tolerant of mixed use, so long as the architectural syntax is
shared among the buildings. The consistent language camouflages an
otherwise objectionable inclusivity. This requisite of urbanism, in my
opinion, trumps the prerogative of the architect. It is for this reason
that some New Urbanist code engages, not only
building type, but also architectural syntax. I should add that it is not
important for this purpose that the syntax coded be a traditional one; one
of the modernist styles might do as well. This is not to entirely discard dissonance or the option of
experimental work, it is just that it is better to
reserve such exceptions for civic buildings. In fact, a New Urbanist
strategy is to support the “progress” of architecture by coding
only the private buildings, while protecting the prerogative of the public
buildings to express the aspirations of the institutions they embody and
the creativity of their architects. God bless them. There is another possible explanation for Ms. Huxtable’s bias. Many traditional buildings are erroneously thought to be just copies. This may be because the visual discernment of the critic has been coarsened by continuous exposure to modernism. The modernist ethos requires not the subtleties of progress, evolution, and improvement but the radical break. This unattainably high standard leads anxious architects to obvious gestures. The critical eye thus becomes accustomed to the exaggerated, the strained, and the hysterical. It is like one who, listening continually to heavy metal, finds all baroque music to sound alike. The categorical dismissal of traditional architecture as “copying” cannot be interpreted more kindly than that. |
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