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Before Ellis Island was restored, the fear and expectation of immigrants who passed through its doors could still be felt in its decaying room. (Shirley Burden, Courtesy Museum of the City of New York) |
Of the main hall, Huxtable charges: "A skilled and scrupulous conversion to a memorial museum has exorcised all ghosts. What you see is what you get- and what you get is not what it was." (Courtesy National Park Service) |
| Ada Louise Huxtable gives contemporary notions of preservation
a reality check in her new book, The Unreal America. by Carole Rifkind Pioneering a new frontier for journalism in the late 1950s and 1960s, Ada Louise Huxtable sounded sure, steady, but always very carefully modulated alarms on the mess we were making of our cities. When scolding threatened to become boring, she leavened reproach with praise. However, whether critic or celebrator, she was always provocative in the sharpness of her insights, convincing in the intelligence of her judgments, and entertaining in the sheer elegance of her language. But she's turned up the volume to blaring in The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (The New Press, 1997)--deservedly, I'd say, given mounting evidence that the more we've learned about architecture and urbanism over the last four decades, the less we seem to understand about how to create places that we can feel proud to leave to posterity. Bolstered by a degree in art history from Hunter College, a curatorship at Philip Johnson's Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, a Fulbright fellowship in Italy, and some dozen years of freelance writing for art and architecture magazines as well as for the New York Times, Huxtable rose to national prominence as a crusader for cities following her appointment as full-time architecture critic at that newspaper in September 1963, the first such post at an American daily. Huxtable's very first writings for the Times already reveal an adherence to a three-point architectural value system: quality, integrity, and continuity. In a May 1963 article, Huxtable protested the impending demolition of the McKim, Mead & White--designed 1903 Pennsylvania Station "because we can never again afford a nine-acre structure of superbly detailed solid travertine any more than we could build one of solid gold." In the same vigorous piece, she damned the Modernist face-lift of the ornate 1904 Times Tower, calling Americans to task for preferring the new to the old, "no matter how shoddy." Huxtable mourned the "bulldozed wastelands" that occupied the heart of most American cities in the early 1960s, urging planners not to "wish the old city away," but to "work with its assets, allying them to the best new building for strengthening relationships for both." These critical standards have remained fundamental to Huxtable's worldview through the changing critical tides of three decades--and they remain so today. Despite, or, perhaps, precisely because of her lifelong advocacy for old buildings, Huxtable's latest book turns a loaded cannon against historic preservation as it has been practiced in America since Colonial Williamsburg opened its doors in the late 1920s, a sanitized restoration project that took most of the messiness and complexity out of history and that lured visitors by the carload. While most preservationists will agree with her estimate that the scrupulous preservation of Williamsburg has been of profound importance, precious few have responded to Huxtable's alarm that its "replacement of reality with selective fantasy" has paved the way to "that most successful and staggeringly profitable American phenomenon, the reinvention of the environment as themed entertainment." This issue is not new to Huxtable; it has troubled her since the 1960s. "Williamsburg is an extraordinary, conscientious and expensive exercise in historical playacting in which real and imitation treasures and modern copies are carelessly confused in everyone's mind," she remonstrated in the Times in May 1965. "Partly because it is so well done, the end effect has been to devalue authenticity and denigrate the genuine heritage of less picturesque periods to which an era and a people gave life." The issue grew even more vivid in the 1970s when the critic took in the prospect of transforming New York City's seedy, old shipping center into South Street Seaport, an after-hours boozing zone for Wall Street clerks and a shopping mecca for suburban day-trippers. "In the process of saving the seaport from an uncertain future, it is certain that it will be turned into something else. This is not preservation," Huxtable warned in the Times. "There are a lot worse things, of course, if only we are honest about what we are doing and what we are destroying. But it is a little hard for some of us to accept the reality that what is at the end of the preservation rainbow is the shopping center." But why, after all this time, does Huxtable bring out such heavy guns in The Unreal America as she renews the assault on Williamsburg? Surely, it is because it's become glaringly obvious that the line from Williamsburg to Disneyland is all too short, and that so-called preservation may be producing even more devastating results than the cataclysmic urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s. Charging that the bigger and more impeccable the restoration, the more the original building fabric is deprived of the marks of time that infuse it with life and energy, Huxtable strives to remind us that "history is quicksilver that runs at the touch." Huxtable insists that history falsified is as subversive as false history. She mourns the precision and impersonality of the restored immigration hall at Ellis Island, where impeccably housed and highly sophisticated information programs have filled shabby, evocatively abandoned spaces that at the turn of the century welcomed one of the most dramatic human migrations in recorded history. "A skilled and scrupulous conversion to a memorial museum has exorcised all ghosts," she charges. "In the restored main hall, what you see is what you get--and what you get is not what it was ... What we find is that we have invented a new past according to a set of criteria designed to satisfy our own current needs and standards." Huxtable deplores the loss of integrity at Boston's "malled" Faneuil Hall Marketplace, an early-nineteenth-century wholesale food market that in the mid-1970s scored as an adaptive-reuse project for showing a better alternative to the homogenized, standardized shopping-center experience. Broadening her perspective to take in housing developments, shopping malls, and a variety of other themed settings, she rails against fake Colonial crafts-and-candle shops, Western ghost-town penny candy emporiums, and residential enclaves that are fantasies of "old town" America, such as Disney Development Corporation's much-praised Florida new town, Celebration, with its pie-in-the-sky panorama of Greek Revival, Georgian, Regency, Mediterranean, and French Country--style homes. "Clever, 'authentic' adaptation makes the ridiculous acceptable; this is a managed eclecticism of a seductive reality that both blows and corrupts the mind," Huxtable charges. Ironically, it was the mood of the Bicentennial, with its blitz of local events, publications, and media coverage of the American past, that blessed the marriage between Mr. History and Miss Profit. As it turned out, however, the progeny of the union has been plagued by bad genes: those for preservation based on a feel for place and a love of history have been recessive, while those favoring money and economic return have been dominant. Bank loans, real estate development, property values, construction jobs, tourist spending, tax revenues, dollar multipliers--such terms liberally pepper the speech of today's preservationist. Under the tax framework that existed in the rapidly expanding economy of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, property owners experienced enormous pressure to replace smaller, older structures with larger ones that afforded more profitable uses. But federal incentives for historic preservation established by the tax reforms of 1976 and 1981 produced powerful new mechanisms for the preservation of older properties, including more favorable depreciation terms, easier money, and investment tax credits, which, between 1982 and 1985 alone, stimulated more than $10 billion in income-producing historic preservation projects. Spotting the trend, in Kicked a Building Lately? (Quadrangle, The New York Times Book Company, 1976), Huxtable praised the "near-total reversal of attitudes towards the past." She was cautiously hopeful that "preservation, the woolly, sentimental cause of those little old ladies in tennis shoes, is now endorsed by astute developers everywhere in an avalanche of imaginative recycling of old structures of diversity and dignity." By the end of the 1980s, however, unremitting pressure to harvest the economic benefits of preservation tossed traditional concerns right into the backseat. In some cases, the tax law's requirement for substantial rehabilitation led to over-restoration of historic properties, when less work might have better preserved the patina of time. The bureaucratization of historic preservation tended to alienate the historic district from the surrounding landscape, "canning" it, in effect, as has occurred in the Vieux Carré district in New Orleans, Soho in New York City, and in many other towns and cities. And then there has been the shocking impact of heritage tourism, which, fueled by consumerism and fanned by restlessness, scorches the fragile old areas that it purports to preserve. In hundreds of locales across the country--from the heavily restored Old Sacramento in California to other latter-day fabrications like Old Mystic Seaport in Connecticut--the gentrification of slums, the embalming of dying streetscapes, the creation of historic look-alikes, and the installation of such hokey features as Victorian signboards, wooden sidewalks, cobblestone alleys, and gaslights mock the integrity of history. "In today's fractured and deeply troubled society, the need is for something that comforts, reassures, and entertains--a world where harsh truths can be suspended or forgotten for a benign and soothing, preferably distracting substitute," writes Huxtable in The Unreal America, pointing out the popularity and profitability of "nostalgic simplifications of feel-good, participatory history." Huxtable's chagrin at the wasting tendencies of historic preservation has been matched by her disappointment in the "feel-good," image-building tendencies that have paralleled it. Validated by a Pulitzer--the first for architectural criticism--and freed from the pressures of daily journalism when she won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award in 1982, Huxtable attacked the rampant commercialism, trivialization, and high entertainment quotient that she observed in contemporary architecture and urban design. Once again, she was comfortably supported by those enduring critical guideposts: quality, integrity, and continuity. In The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered (Pantheon Books, 1984), Huxtable thrashed the shallow eclecticism of the historicized office buildings churned out wholesale by her old mentor and apostle of Modernism, Philip Johnson, in partnership with John Burgee. She accused the team of producing architecture of a quality far below that of the examples they so glibly exploited: "The dumb but reasonably honest glass box at least has the virtue of a saving simplicity; there is no virtue in elaborate vacuity," she judged. She also focused her ire on the "preposterous scale" of Edward Larrabee Barnes' IBM Building in midtown Manhattan, whose mannered design devices, intended to minimize huge bulk, were but a "skillful exercise in futility," and on the work of two other New York firms--Kohn, Pedersen, Fox, and Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo--for returning to history in search of "nostalgia, novelty, and innuendo" instead of dealing creatively with a more critical problem, the cumulative impact of the skyscraper on the urban setting. In recent years, Huxtable has been joined by a growing chorus of voices who lament the cultural impoverishment resulting from America's growing proclivity for fun and fantasy. In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1986), sociologist Neil Postman regards the glitz of Las Vegas as a "metaphor for our national character and aspiration," seeing it as a place that "proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment . . . [where] politics, religion, news, athletics, education, and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business." Criticism of our media- and marketing-dominated society emanates from a wide circle of thinkers in Dumbing Down: Essays on the Strip Mining of American Culture (Norton, 1996), edited by Katharine Washburn and John Thornton. Jonathan Rosen, for example, sharply raps Washington's United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for trivializing tragedy. "Something has changed in our understanding of what history is that makes us want to conjure up the past and perform for us," he laments. Never before has the lowest common denominator been so skillfully and cynically disseminated, charges Huxtable in The Unreal America. Huxtable pairs her pain at the corruption of historic preservation with her anxiety that America is failing to participate in the reinvention of architecture "as a great and timeless art" that she sees on the horizon. In a concise survey of works by some 15 architects whom she credits with dramatically expanding the experience of architecture in our time, Frank Gehry is the only American to make it to the short list. Praising the work of few others, notably the late Frank Israel, Steven Holl, and Eric Owen Moss (I would also have included some younger American architects, such as Turner Brooks, William Bruder, and Fernau & Hartman, for starters), Huxtable believes that too many of our architects have either aligned themselves with the paste-on approach to history that permits the Post-Modernists to take "revenge on Modernism" or with the sharp angles and slanting walls of the Deconstructivists, a little of whose cutting-edge shenanigans "can go a long way." Mourning the passing of utopian Modernism's "holy trinity" of purpose, form, and function, Huxtable salutes the birth of a revived Modernism--complex, personal, subtle, diverse, and vigorously in search of new formulations of enclosure, such as color, light, form, space, and movement. Now we can recognize the enormous weight that her cultural framework assigns to continuity. Just as historic landmarks must reflect growth and change over time, so contemporary design has also to acknowledge and respect Modernism as its heritage. Huxtable singles out a range of architects that she judges as pushing Modernism towards a new synthesis while remaining intensely involved with its fundamental issues. She cites the timeless quality of Rafael Moneo's sophisticated blend of eclecticism and Modernism; the sensuousness of Christian de Portzamparc's evocations of Miami Modern; the powerful, poetic vision of Tadao Ando's severely minimal configurations; the joyful color and complexity that characterize the late James Stirling's pitch of Modernism into Mannerism; the subtlety of Jean Nouvel's manipulation of light, technology, and material. Huxtable deeply admires Frank Gehry's conception of architecture as exquisitely functional sculpture, although she's more than a little nervous about where he is taking us. "The constant balancing act between on-the-edge experiments that renew architecture, and the potential disaster of architecture for sculpture's sake, can enlarge the art of building magically or diminish it disastrously, enrich it or empty it out," she writes. Indeed, it's almost too terrible to contemplate the transgressions that will be committed by Gehry's lesser disciples. Since Huxtable virtually created architectural journalism in America, it's a happy irony that despite the bricks hurled at her latest book by the New York Times and Architecture, most other big-city dailies affirm the truth of her insights. "Is the time near for her to depart the stage?" asks Peter Bosselin in the Boston Globe, who answers his own question with a "resounding no." Los Angeles Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff praises her dogged dedication to principle as a "testament to a deeply optimistic spirit, a spirit that refuses to accept that we cannot do better." Writing for the Baltimore Sun, Edward Gunts recognizes The Unreal America as a "definitive look at the dumbing down of American architecture--and why it's happening." Comments Lee Lawrence for The Washington Times: "It still is exciting when critics and scholars direct well-trained eyes to the familiar and crack it open to larger truths." The Unreal America leads us in a new direction, and Huxtable's guideposts of quality, integrity, and continuity will help us find the way. CAROLE RIFKIND is a New York--based architectural historian. She is the author of A Field Guide to American Architecture (Plume, 1980), and coming out next fall, A Field Guide to Contemporary American Architecture (Penguin/Dutton). |
Keywords:
Ada Louise Huxtable, preservation, museum, memorial, restoration