The New York Times Book Review, April 6, 1997, p. 13.
The Pasteboard Past
Historic preservation, Ada Louise Huxtable argues, is not
always a good thing.
THE UNREAL AMERICA
Architecture and Illusion.
By Ada Louise Huxtable.
Illustrated. 188 pp. New York:
The New Press. $30.
By Witold Rybczynski
Ada Louise Huxtable is well known to many readers of The New
York Times for her early advocacy of historic preservation.
During the almost 20 years when she was the newspaper's
architecture critic she did as much as anyone to in-
form and educate the public about the necessity for preserving
the rich architectural heritage of American cities. She lost
some battles, notably one to prevent demolition of Manhattan's
Pennsylvania Station, but there is no doubt she was
instrumental in winning the war.
Victory has left Ms. Huxtable dissatisfied, however. In "The
Unreal America," she takes historic preservation to task.
Attempts to re-create the past, like the renovation of the
immigration halls at Ellis Island, strike her as overly
sanitized. She is disturbed by the intrusion of commercialism
into historic landmarks like Boston's Faneuil Hall. Above all,
she abhors the notion of authentic reproduction: "What the
perfect fake or impeccable restoration lacks are the hallmarks
of time and place. They deny imperfections, alterations and
accommodations; they wipe out all the incidents of life and
change. ... They are hollow history." Her concern with what
she considers architectural pretense goes far beyond
preservation. She visits Disneyland, the Mall of America and
Las Vegas, and finds their celebration of make-believe
symptomatic of a widespread condition: "Surrogate experience
and surrogate environments have become the American way of
life. Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary,
between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the
latter, as an improved version with defects corrected --
accessible and user-friendly -- although the resonance of
history and art in the authentic artifact is conspicuously
lacking." This gives a good idea of the style of this short
book: assertive rather than reasoned, sweeping in its
condemnations and full of thinly veiled sarcasm. The book is
based on a lecture to the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. It must have been a rousing evening. But read in the
cold light of day, the harangue wears thin. Reflecting on the
above passage, for example, I wondered: What is surrogate
experience? Climbing a stair, watching someone climb a stair,
or reading about someone climbing stairs are certainly
different -- but all are experiences. And what is wrong with
correcting defects? Are accessibility and user-friendliness
bad? Finally, what is the relation between art and
authenticity? Something can be historically authentic, but,
forgeries aside, what does artistic authenticity signify?
Artistic authenticity is never defined, for this is a poorly
argued book, brimming with inconsistencies. The author claims
it is not her intention to prove anything right or wrong;
later she tries to do exactly that. She characterizes the
union of culture and consumerism as uniquely American -- as if
the French had not invented the department store in the 19th-
century and the hypermarche in the 20th. She maintains she
writes only about buildings she has visited, but includes an
extended discussion of the new Disney residential community of
Celebration that appears to be based entirely on promotional
brochures.
Ms. Huxtable's polemic leans heavily on the writing of
European intellectuals. They provide a shaky support,
consisting chiefly of academic jargon: "surrogate experience,"
"artificial environments" and "simulacrum." Such
pseudoscientific terms are intended to lend credence to a
thesis that is, at its core, unconvincing. It presumes that
the public -- except you, wise reader -- cannot tell the
difference between what is real and what is not, that we live
in a sort of perpetual haze. It strikes me that the people
watching the erupting lava outside the Mirage in Las Vegas
don't mistake this for a real volcano. The visitors to
Sleeping Beauty's Castle in Disneyland know that they are in
Anaheim and not the Black Forest, just as the commuters who
used to hurry across the neoclassical concourse of the old
Pennsylvania Station knew that they were in Manhattan and not
in ancient Rome.
Make-believe has always played a role in our surroundings, and
the relationship between reality and illusion has always been
blurred; Pennsylvania Station was simultaneously a surrogate
Baths of Caracalla and a real place. Such ambiguities do not
faze Ms. Huxtable. She is more interested in using words like
"unreal" and "nostalgic" to deprecate architects whose work
she dislikes. These include Jon Jerde, the designer of the
Mall of America; the neo-traditionalist town planners Andres
Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk; the post-modernists Michael
Graves and Robert A. M. Stern; and anyone who has had anything
to do with Prince Charles.
Mr. Graves and Mr. Stern, in particular, are castigated for
the hotels they have designed for Walt Disney World and Euro
Disney. Indeed, the Walt Disney Company is the Great Satan of
this jeremiad. The book refers darkly to the "Disneyfication
of architecture." This sounds ominous, but what does it mean?
Shouldn't an architect designing a resort hotel incorporate
make-believe? Shouldn't amusement parks be frivolous? Leisure
and fantasy have often gone hand in hand. When the Georgian
architect John Nash was commissioned by the Prince of Wales to
design the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, he concocted a gaudy
Hindu palace, not one of his normally sedate classical
designs. Is it Disneyfication when Disney hires critically
acclaimed architects like Frank Gehry, Arata Isozaki and Aldo
Rossi to design its office buildings? Apparently not, since
these are three designers Ms. Huxtable admires.
The final chapter of "The Unreal America" describes the work
of these three men and a number of other architects practicing
what the author calls "the new architecture . . . the
best-kept secret in the arts." This is a curious claim.
Several of these architects -- James Stirling, Fumihiko Maki,
Alvaro Siza, Christian de Portzamparc, as well as Mr. Rossi
and Mr. Gehry -- are the recipients of the highly publicized
Pritzker Prize for architecture (on whose jury Ms. Huxtable
sits). Most have received such prestigious commissions as
institutional buildings and art museums. Museums,
particularly, are very much in evidence; apparently the "new
architects" don't concern themselves with anything as mundane
as shopping malls or resort hotels. What they do generally
share is a commitment to architecture that is abstract,
fashionably minimalist, austere and undecorated. Judging from
this assortment, with the exception of the buildings of the
effervescent Mr. Gehry, artistic authenticity is not much fun.
Ms. Huxtable remains an unrepentant modernist. "I cannot think
of anything more ludicrous than the idea that modernism
somehow got off the track and was a monstrous mistake that
should simply be canceled out," she writes. "Revolutions in
life and technology can never be reversed." But if the late
20th century has taught us anything it is surely that
revolutions can be reversed, as they have been in the Soviet
Union and Central Europe. And, sadly, monstrous architectural
mistakes were made. In that regard, historic preservation is
clearly reactionary. It reflects the public's intense
skepticism of the architectural avant-garde, whose misbegotten
theories were responsible, in part, for the devastation
wrought on American cities in the name of urban renewal. Many
of the inhumane public housing projects of that era are now
being demolished. Would that we could as easily remove the
overblown performing arts complexes (Lincoln Center), the
unpleasant civic centers (Boston City Hall) and the
dysfunctional civic spaces (Philadelphia's Independence Mall).
The historian Vincent Scully called historic preservation "the
single most significant architectural movement of the past 20
years." It is part of a general fascination with the past also
reflected in publishing, television and films. It is also
evidence of a broad change in the consciousness of Americans.
We have discovered that old buildings and neighborhoods, like
old music, are not merely of antiquarian interest; they
continue to give pleasure. Is this nostalgia? Of course. For
the moment, we have had it with novelty and experimentation.
We miss the easy familiarity of buildings and urban places
that our forebears took for granted. And, Ada Louise
Huxtable's protestations notwithstanding, we will have it
back.
Witold Rybczynski, the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the
University of Pennsylvania, is the author of "Looking Around:
A Journey Through Architecture" and "City Life."
[End]
The Pasteboard Past
Historic preservation, Ada Louise Huxtable argues, is not
always a good thing.
THE UNREAL AMERICA
Architecture and Illusion.
By Ada Louise Huxtable.
Illustrated. 188 pp. New York:
The New Press. $30.
By Witold Rybczynski
Ada Louise Huxtable is well known to many readers of The New
York Times for her early advocacy of historic preservation.
During the almost 20 years when she was the newspaper's
architecture critic she did as much as anyone to in-
form and educate the public about the necessity for preserving
the rich architectural heritage of American cities. She lost
some battles, notably one to prevent demolition of Manhattan's
Pennsylvania Station, but there is no doubt she was
instrumental in winning the war.
Victory has left Ms. Huxtable dissatisfied, however. In "The
Unreal America," she takes historic preservation to task.
Attempts to re-create the past, like the renovation of the
immigration halls at Ellis Island, strike her as overly
sanitized. She is disturbed by the intrusion of commercialism
into historic landmarks like Boston's Faneuil Hall. Above all,
she abhors the notion of authentic reproduction: "What the
perfect fake or impeccable restoration lacks are the hallmarks
of time and place. They deny imperfections, alterations and
accommodations; they wipe out all the incidents of life and
change. ... They are hollow history." Her concern with what
she considers architectural pretense goes far beyond
preservation. She visits Disneyland, the Mall of America and
Las Vegas, and finds their celebration of make-believe
symptomatic of a widespread condition: "Surrogate experience
and surrogate environments have become the American way of
life. Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary,
between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the
latter, as an improved version with defects corrected --
accessible and user-friendly -- although the resonance of
history and art in the authentic artifact is conspicuously
lacking." This gives a good idea of the style of this short
book: assertive rather than reasoned, sweeping in its
condemnations and full of thinly veiled sarcasm. The book is
based on a lecture to the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. It must have been a rousing evening. But read in the
cold light of day, the harangue wears thin. Reflecting on the
above passage, for example, I wondered: What is surrogate
experience? Climbing a stair, watching someone climb a stair,
or reading about someone climbing stairs are certainly
different -- but all are experiences. And what is wrong with
correcting defects? Are accessibility and user-friendliness
bad? Finally, what is the relation between art and
authenticity? Something can be historically authentic, but,
forgeries aside, what does artistic authenticity signify?
Artistic authenticity is never defined, for this is a poorly
argued book, brimming with inconsistencies. The author claims
it is not her intention to prove anything right or wrong;
later she tries to do exactly that. She characterizes the
union of culture and consumerism as uniquely American -- as if
the French had not invented the department store in the 19th-
century and the hypermarche in the 20th. She maintains she
writes only about buildings she has visited, but includes an
extended discussion of the new Disney residential community of
Celebration that appears to be based entirely on promotional
brochures.
Ms. Huxtable's polemic leans heavily on the writing of
European intellectuals. They provide a shaky support,
consisting chiefly of academic jargon: "surrogate experience,"
"artificial environments" and "simulacrum." Such
pseudoscientific terms are intended to lend credence to a
thesis that is, at its core, unconvincing. It presumes that
the public -- except you, wise reader -- cannot tell the
difference between what is real and what is not, that we live
in a sort of perpetual haze. It strikes me that the people
watching the erupting lava outside the Mirage in Las Vegas
don't mistake this for a real volcano. The visitors to
Sleeping Beauty's Castle in Disneyland know that they are in
Anaheim and not the Black Forest, just as the commuters who
used to hurry across the neoclassical concourse of the old
Pennsylvania Station knew that they were in Manhattan and not
in ancient Rome.
Make-believe has always played a role in our surroundings, and
the relationship between reality and illusion has always been
blurred; Pennsylvania Station was simultaneously a surrogate
Baths of Caracalla and a real place. Such ambiguities do not
faze Ms. Huxtable. She is more interested in using words like
"unreal" and "nostalgic" to deprecate architects whose work
she dislikes. These include Jon Jerde, the designer of the
Mall of America; the neo-traditionalist town planners Andres
Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk; the post-modernists Michael
Graves and Robert A. M. Stern; and anyone who has had anything
to do with Prince Charles.
Mr. Graves and Mr. Stern, in particular, are castigated for
the hotels they have designed for Walt Disney World and Euro
Disney. Indeed, the Walt Disney Company is the Great Satan of
this jeremiad. The book refers darkly to the "Disneyfication
of architecture." This sounds ominous, but what does it mean?
Shouldn't an architect designing a resort hotel incorporate
make-believe? Shouldn't amusement parks be frivolous? Leisure
and fantasy have often gone hand in hand. When the Georgian
architect John Nash was commissioned by the Prince of Wales to
design the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, he concocted a gaudy
Hindu palace, not one of his normally sedate classical
designs. Is it Disneyfication when Disney hires critically
acclaimed architects like Frank Gehry, Arata Isozaki and Aldo
Rossi to design its office buildings? Apparently not, since
these are three designers Ms. Huxtable admires.
The final chapter of "The Unreal America" describes the work
of these three men and a number of other architects practicing
what the author calls "the new architecture . . . the
best-kept secret in the arts." This is a curious claim.
Several of these architects -- James Stirling, Fumihiko Maki,
Alvaro Siza, Christian de Portzamparc, as well as Mr. Rossi
and Mr. Gehry -- are the recipients of the highly publicized
Pritzker Prize for architecture (on whose jury Ms. Huxtable
sits). Most have received such prestigious commissions as
institutional buildings and art museums. Museums,
particularly, are very much in evidence; apparently the "new
architects" don't concern themselves with anything as mundane
as shopping malls or resort hotels. What they do generally
share is a commitment to architecture that is abstract,
fashionably minimalist, austere and undecorated. Judging from
this assortment, with the exception of the buildings of the
effervescent Mr. Gehry, artistic authenticity is not much fun.
Ms. Huxtable remains an unrepentant modernist. "I cannot think
of anything more ludicrous than the idea that modernism
somehow got off the track and was a monstrous mistake that
should simply be canceled out," she writes. "Revolutions in
life and technology can never be reversed." But if the late
20th century has taught us anything it is surely that
revolutions can be reversed, as they have been in the Soviet
Union and Central Europe. And, sadly, monstrous architectural
mistakes were made. In that regard, historic preservation is
clearly reactionary. It reflects the public's intense
skepticism of the architectural avant-garde, whose misbegotten
theories were responsible, in part, for the devastation
wrought on American cities in the name of urban renewal. Many
of the inhumane public housing projects of that era are now
being demolished. Would that we could as easily remove the
overblown performing arts complexes (Lincoln Center), the
unpleasant civic centers (Boston City Hall) and the
dysfunctional civic spaces (Philadelphia's Independence Mall).
The historian Vincent Scully called historic preservation "the
single most significant architectural movement of the past 20
years." It is part of a general fascination with the past also
reflected in publishing, television and films. It is also
evidence of a broad change in the consciousness of Americans.
We have discovered that old buildings and neighborhoods, like
old music, are not merely of antiquarian interest; they
continue to give pleasure. Is this nostalgia? Of course. For
the moment, we have had it with novelty and experimentation.
We miss the easy familiarity of buildings and urban places
that our forebears took for granted. And, Ada Louise
Huxtable's protestations notwithstanding, we will have it
back.
Witold Rybczynski, the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the
University of Pennsylvania, is the author of "Looking Around:
A Journey Through Architecture" and "City Life."
[End]