such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and badnature. It is all in where you stand at the time. Victorian domestic architecture, for instance, was thought in the heyday of less-is-more modernism to be simply atrocious: wasteful, decorative, asymmetrical, patchy, heavy, sentimental. But now how oddly charming seem the neo-Gothic, gingerbreaded mansions of, say, Newton, Massachusetts, with their fish-scale shingles, corner towers and bristling gables, long wide porches, busy spindles and brackets, hodgepodge fenestration, and outward air of inward secret passageways and cozy illogic. A lost abundance of materials and richness of household arrangements speaks now in these confident, innocent, ample buildings. Time deposits upon even the satanic mills of Lowell a nostalgic patina.
I live, as it happens, in an area of old North Shore estates, big summer places built, for the most part, by quiet Boston money, though Mr. Frick and Mr. Crane came in from Pittsburgh and Chicago respectively and erected monuments of conspicuous construction. The most modest of the old summer houses encompassed large breezy rooms for the owners and numerous small rooms for the servants; this was sound architecture in an era of cheap domestic labor and for a season when coolness, not heat, was desired. As the upper classes learned to do without live-in servants, and as air-conditioning and modern medicine lessened the terrors of summer in the city, the houses have become all-year residences, hard to heat and awkward to maintain, for all their enduring amenities of site and style. Good architecture has become less good, and its most extravagant examples are torn down as uninhabitable (the Frick mansion), converted to public wards (the Crane “castle”), or ignominiously condominiumized.
Row houses, built by developers block by block, were the metropolitan norm in my native Pennsylvania, famously so in Philadelphia but in small towns, too, right to the edge of cornfields. In the postwar period of explosive suburbanization and one-home-to-a-lot tract development, even the most elegant row wore a distasteful aura of compromised privacy and potential squalor. Then, with the rise of fuel and land prices and the return to the inner city, row houses were freshly admired for their efficiency, their close communal witness to the life of the street. They became good architecture.
And what, indeed, of Levittowns? Deplored as ticky-tacky boxes when freshly imposed upon the acres of scraped earth, the uniform units in many areas turned, decade by decade, less tacky and boxlike asproud owners made additions and improvements, and trees and shrubs matured in a pervasive softening. Caring occupancy can redeem unpromising architecture, and impoverished, uncaring occupancy has destroyed many a thoroughly planned and well-intentioned project, in East St. Louis and elsewhere. What we see, in looking at most domestic architecture, is less the spirit of the architect than that of the occupants. The unlovely three-decker, New England’s special contribution to urban design, looks lovely to someone who has had a happy childhood in one, or is moving up to his generous floor-through from a single basement room. The best urban plan, Jane Jacobs and others seem to say, is Topsy’s: let cities just grow, and they will fall into neighborhoods of shops, services, and solicitous mutual awareness. The best plan is the least, the loosest, allowing most scope to human powers of accommodation.
Insofar as we are all architectural critics, we tend to admire either grand gestures (the Pyramids, Salisbury Cathedral, the Seagram’s Building, the Hancock Tower) or else buildings that blend into the landscape. We are fond, exteriorly, of habitations—thatched cottages, pueblos, yurts, igloos—in which we would not care to spend a night. We like buildings that appear to merge with nature, but when the merger involves our sleeping on a dirt floor, or consorting
I live, as it happens, in an area of old North Shore estates, big summer places built, for the most part, by quiet Boston money, though Mr. Frick and Mr. Crane came in from Pittsburgh and Chicago respectively and erected monuments of conspicuous construction. The most modest of the old summer houses encompassed large breezy rooms for the owners and numerous small rooms for the servants; this was sound architecture in an era of cheap domestic labor and for a season when coolness, not heat, was desired. As the upper classes learned to do without live-in servants, and as air-conditioning and modern medicine lessened the terrors of summer in the city, the houses have become all-year residences, hard to heat and awkward to maintain, for all their enduring amenities of site and style. Good architecture has become less good, and its most extravagant examples are torn down as uninhabitable (the Frick mansion), converted to public wards (the Crane “castle”), or ignominiously condominiumized.
Row houses, built by developers block by block, were the metropolitan norm in my native Pennsylvania, famously so in Philadelphia but in small towns, too, right to the edge of cornfields. In the postwar period of explosive suburbanization and one-home-to-a-lot tract development, even the most elegant row wore a distasteful aura of compromised privacy and potential squalor. Then, with the rise of fuel and land prices and the return to the inner city, row houses were freshly admired for their efficiency, their close communal witness to the life of the street. They became good architecture.
And what, indeed, of Levittowns? Deplored as ticky-tacky boxes when freshly imposed upon the acres of scraped earth, the uniform units in many areas turned, decade by decade, less tacky and boxlike asproud owners made additions and improvements, and trees and shrubs matured in a pervasive softening. Caring occupancy can redeem unpromising architecture, and impoverished, uncaring occupancy has destroyed many a thoroughly planned and well-intentioned project, in East St. Louis and elsewhere. What we see, in looking at most domestic architecture, is less the spirit of the architect than that of the occupants. The unlovely three-decker, New England’s special contribution to urban design, looks lovely to someone who has had a happy childhood in one, or is moving up to his generous floor-through from a single basement room. The best urban plan, Jane Jacobs and others seem to say, is Topsy’s: let cities just grow, and they will fall into neighborhoods of shops, services, and solicitous mutual awareness. The best plan is the least, the loosest, allowing most scope to human powers of accommodation.
Insofar as we are all architectural critics, we tend to admire either grand gestures (the Pyramids, Salisbury Cathedral, the Seagram’s Building, the Hancock Tower) or else buildings that blend into the landscape. We are fond, exteriorly, of habitations—thatched cottages, pueblos, yurts, igloos—in which we would not care to spend a night. We like buildings that appear to merge with nature, but when the merger involves our sleeping on a dirt floor, or consorting
Similar Books
