At home with the past: Allan Greenberg makes the familiar fresh again

Residential Architect, Sept-Oct, 2002 by S. Claire Conroy

America's foremost Classicist doesn't exactly look the part. Allan Greenberg doesn't wear bow ties and vests with dangling watch fobs. There's not a monocle in sight. Au contraire, his attire is distinctly minimalist--a freeform black jacket, collarless dark gray T-shirt, and roomy black slacks. He looks like he could break into a mime act at any moment, or spout philosophy over a carafe of Cote du Rhone at a French cafe. The outfit is a big clue to Greenberg's sensibility. At 64 years old, the South African-born architect was raised on Modernism and even has loved and practiced it for a time. But he has come to embrace Classicism for a wealth of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with fashion or style.

For Greenberg, Classicism is simply the richest, most articulate architectural language available today. It is architecture's Esperanto, able to communicate among a great many cultures and across a great number of stylistic periods. "The problem with Modem buildings is they don't fit their environment," he says. They don't "talk" to the buildings around them; their solipsism makes them bad neighbors, bad stewards of the sites they occupy.

Greenberg has seen the worst Bauhaus had to often Johannesburg, where he grew up and went to school, had all the architectural charm of Houston, he quips. The city has had great cycles of "building up and taking down," and the binges and purges have obliterated the variety and character it once had.

He studied architecture at the University of Witwatersrand, where the curriculum at the time was divided into two years of training in Classical architecture and two years in Modernism. His education was rigorous in the European way--many hours of learning by rote to draw every proportion and detail of the buildings he studied. He became intimately acquainted with the strengths and weaknesses of the world's "great buildings." And committing so many structures to memory provided him with a tremendous database from which to draw for his own work.

It was at Witwatersrand that he learned to love Corbu. Here was a Modernist Greenberg could respect and admire, one whose forward-thinking architecture considered carefully what came before it. "More important than style is quality," Greenberg explains. "Le Corbusier understood all the architecture of the past. He took the new and fit it in. It's very hard to do, and he did it very well."

So taken was he with Le Corbusier's work, he set out to apprentice with him after architecture school. Unfortunately, only an unpaid position was available and Greenberg couldn't afford to take it. Instead, he went to work for architects Jorn Utzon in Denmark, where he labored on the Sydney Opera House, and Viljo Revell in Finland. In Scandinavia, he watched the same process that so horrified him in South Africa--old buildings coming down, new undistinguished buildings going up. "I saw the sophistication of Scandinavia being compromised," he says.

Determined not to go back to South Africa, whose political situation in 1961 he found "reprehensible," Greenberg emigrated to the United States. He sought and secured in 1965 a Master's Degree in Architecture at Yale University on scholarship. He trained with Robert A.M. Stern, among other luminaries. At Yale he also began to teach and to research, write, and publish scholarly essays, monographs, and the like on architecture and architects. "As an architect, I'm compelled to study all of architecture" he says. "It's so hard to master; you have to love it. There's so much to learn--mathematics is important, epidemiology, law, sociology--I see it all through the prism of architecture."

the great divide

South Africa and Scandinavia weren't the only cultures erasing their past. After graduating from Yale, Greenberg spent two years in the City of New Haven's Redevelopment Agency, watching the same wave of destruction slapping down old buildings indiscriminately. What took their place was not the masterwork of Mies Van der Rohe, but the "banal commercial buildings" of lesser emulators and admirers. And was there, perhaps, something a little naive in America's embrace of Modernism on its own shores?

"There's this fixation on European architecture. But the social situation is so different over there," Greenberg says. "Not long ago they had Hitler. Europe's take on the past is very different. People here believe Modernism is evolution. But Europe's Modernism is after 1950. The world is very jealous of the way we could look at the past. It is a great divide."

Europe's espousal of Modernism was as much a move away from something as a reaching for something. Classical architecture bore the taint of Adolph Hitler and Albert Speer, exploiters of its evocative power. It became the architecture of domination, fear, nationalism run amok. Coming home to Bauhaus, which Hitler had shut down, must have seemed an affirming act. Modernism promised a new beginning, a new order. It was an International style that would reunite instead of divide (it was chosen for the United Nations building in New York). What a relief to leave the past behind.