Where are we headed?

Residential Architect, May, 2004 by Philip Lembo

take a look around you in the new residential areas and even the existing desirable suburbs where the old is being torn down and replaced with McMansions. These are the 3,000- to 5,000-square-foot residences with their pseudo-Romanesque or French chateau looks. And there are towns such as Celebration, Fla., with its turn-of-the-century look and its seldom used front porches--all a novelty brought to us by Disney. What's going on? We seem to be more caught up with fantasy than with reality.

Modern architecture distanced itself from the self-indulgent, the dishonest, and, with some flights of fancy, tried to develop a rational approach to the design of our dwellings. The approach was more in keeping with our lifestyles, technology, and modern building techniques. In recent years our nostalgia and perhaps our fear of this Brave New World has pushed us into a fetal position--longing for something more familiar, something we understood from our ancestral past, despite the fact that it has no relevance today.

What happened? Like it or not, we are still feeling the after-effects of the Cold War and McCarthyism. During the early 1960s, architecture came under scrutiny by reactionary forces within and on the periphery of a government that began to view urban planning, urban renewal, and Modern architecture as leftist in nature. All of sudden, Mies van Der Robe, Walter Gropius, and others who came to the United States to escape Nazism were being attacked again for their progressive views, and all sorts of social ills were laid at the feet of Modern architecture. Everything--including drag use and promiscuity--somehow became associated with it. "Modern" became a bad word.

If the critics looked deeper,-however, they would realize that what really brought us to this point was the entire industrial revolution, which was not spawned by the aristocracy in power at the time but by the desire of the merchant, the manufacturer, and the average person to better the standard and quality of life. It was brought about by progressive ideas and by the desire for social change. Many such merchants and manufacturers grew wealthy and spawned a new aristocracy that became complacent. The average person, however, has maintained these views of progress and constantly strives for improvement. During the Cold War, these ideals became mistakenly confused with communism, and anyone who held these progressive notions was labeled a communist. Today we are seeing the result of that confusion in the shunning of Modernism or anything that seems too progressive or liberal. Thus, without even realizing it, we are turning our backs on many of the qualities that made us the envy of the world. The most visible result is in our choice of architecture with a backward view. Until we begin to realize this and rid ourselves of this self-imposed, self-conscious manner in which we have arrived at our current position, we will tall behind those in Europe and Asia. Unlike us, they do not have this lingering aftershock of the Cold War and McCarthyism holding them back, something that is evident in the architecture now being produced on those continents. And they never got caught up in post-Modernism and in the reaction to Modern architecture to the extent to which the United States has.

When we rediscover the roots of our Modernism, perhaps we can come to an acceptance of Modern architecture for our residences.

Philip Lembo, ALA,

NCARB

Clearwater, Fla.