fantasies did have vision—the product, mainly, of the working out of certain congruent themes of prior modernisms. Those domes and inflatables and garbage housing were not just technologically and environmentally prescient; they also figured—whether in civil rights or Woodstock variants—in political ideas about the extension, openness, and spontaneity of spaces of assembly. And the canny melding of technological control with an “anti”-technological ideology gave birth to appropriate technology.
The alternative visuality of the 1960s, however, has had only the most marginal impact on architecture. (Many breathe a sigh of relief.) The psychedelic style that included Fillmore posters, the Merry Pranksters bus, and Sgt Pepperesque couture required a certain lag before becoming appropriatable by architecture. We liberated the 1970s supreme Soviet—Venturi, Stern, Moore, Graves, et al.—from the kitsch closet and made it permissible for them to love Vegas and the roadside. But they always had to rationalize their love, to capture it for their outmoded agendas and fantasies of control. We responded with disengagement and irony, as usual.
The “appropriated” art of so many artists of my generation was a typically limp response, immediately gobbled up by the art machine. Having bought into a critical history that denigrated intentions, we then bought into our own ironical reappropriation of intentionality via obsessive proceduralisms and poetic trances. Too late. Narcissism is not the same as self-confidence. Even Seinfeld has been cancelled.
Vive la Différence!
The Whole Earth Catalogue and Our Bodies, Ourselves are our holy books, good news for a political body and a contested environment both. These really were milestones: we’re all a little more gay now, a little closer to the earth, a little more skeptical about the system’s “choices.” The politicization of the personal (as the formula should have been) demands idiosyncrasy beyond the tonsorial and sartorial. Pity about our architecture. So many interesting sites wasted.
It Isn’t Easy Being Green
We always hear that green architecture “looks bad,” and most of it does. At the end of the day, though, separating your trash is probably a greater contribution to world architecture than Bilbao. Well, maybe not Bilbao.
2000
2
Herb’s Content
Does the New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp keep writing about the same things?
Longest consecutive run of a single name: Rem Koolhaas, nine out of eleven articles
Most mentions of a single name in an article about a subject other than the person mentioned: six, Rem Koolhaas
Most Hollywood references in a single article: twelve (Chateau Marmont, Pedro Almodóvar, King Pleasure, Alfred Hitchcock, That Touch of Mink, The Best of Everything, Rear Window, West Side Story, Grace Kelly, Jimmy Stewart, film sprockets, and film noir; in a story about a hotel by Jean Nouvel)
Number of paragraphs required to deploy the above references: five
Favorite non-American architectural nationality: French
Second-favorite non-American architectural nationality: Dutch
2001
3
Notes on a Tennessee Town
In my suburban Washington, DC childhood, I had a remarkable next-door neighbor, a grandfatherly figure called Bob Coe. Bob was a landscape architect—trained at Harvard—whose early career had been spent with the Olmsted brothers. A man of sincere liberalism, he signed on with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the 1930s and was responsible for landscape design at a number of sites throughout the project.
The one that he spoke of most, though, was Norris—a planned community built in 1933–34 to house TVA workers who were building a giant dam nearby. Bob had lived in Norris, and it was there that he met and married his wife, Kay, a preternaturally kind Tennessee native who taught first grade for over fifty years. The two of them spent hours each week working in their beautiful garden which was, for me, a paradise—the most lovingly cultivated half-acre I have seen before or since. I assumed Norris was a variation on this garden.
A couple of months ago, I finally had the opportunity to visit Norris and take a dam tour down the Clinch and Tennessee. Norris is lovely: the garden city layout of the town is carefully informal and sensitive to the hilly topography, and it contains a number of astute spatial deployments, including a repeated grouping of three houses around a common lawn that struck me as beautifully scaled and latently convivial. Throughout the town, I thought I could recognize Bob’s rich, serpentine and layered sensibility in landscaping grown lush.
The original houses that have survived are very small and inexpensively built, but have a compact elegance. One mustn’t overstate the consequences of 350 houses: the current atmosphere leans toward the funky, and Norris remains a very small place with a few modest shops and services, two schools, and several TVA labs and workshops. The vibe is tender, though—even moving. Kids are wandering the pathways at dusk. Neighbors are chatting in the commons.
Here, I thought to myself, was a genuine town, built out in the optimistic idiom of interwar modernity. At Norris, and nearby Oak Ridge, there’s a lingering aura of purpose that exceeds the site planning. The plan conveys a way of seeing spaces as continuities, flowing in scale from the town to the river to its watershed to regional topography to the organization of the nation and beyond. The spectacular dam down the hill and the beautifully managed river are there to testify to what a town can do. A place with a grounding beyond economy, this is not a company town but its flipside. Its rationalism is gentle and its layout sinuous. Those curves—understood as the contour-following outgrowth of a compact with nature—reflect a strong feeling for the welfare of the environment: an ecological vision, an idea of sympathy, not of discipline.
A recent visit to Taliesin revealed another classic intersection between form, ideology, and organization. Taliesin continues to draw both the shape and the reasons for its routine from the religio-architectural principles laid down by “Mr. Wright.” To the degree that these principles are complicit and shared, the place works wonderfully in both its hierarchy and its collectivity. Like Norris, the architectural frame still functions adaptably despite the inevitable ebbing of the force of the cultural project of Wrightian architecture. And the specificity is superb; a complex that continuously reads its own site.
Not long after my trips to Norris and Taliesin I spoke at one of the periodic conclaves of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), this one in Ann Arbor. I have had a modest career in the past few years playing Tim Leary to Andres Duany’s Gordon Liddy at these events, offering hyperbolic dissent to his neo-traditional, generic planning strategies. The argument has some merit: it’s no accident that Seaside and Celebration have become icons for creepy social control, symbols of fraud and camouflage, private interest masquerading as public, the opposite of Norris.
Not living in a very civic time, we do get a huge overproduction of surrogates and appropriations of civil life—the Disney effect. How to resist? I don’t suggest that we must be Shakers or rural electrifiers to find reasons for shaping townscapes. But real town life is not simply a matter of consumption, of mass customization, or even of market-driven “choice.” Not an original insight
