Neo-Traditional Architecture

   The New York Times
   May 14, 1995
   Arts & Leisure, p. 34.


   Architecture View [Excerpts]


   Herbert Muschamp


   Saskia Sassen, a professor of urban planning at Columbia
   University, has used the phrase "culture of eviction" to
   describe the reigning dynamic in the city now. The term
   doesn't refer only to the homeless. It refers to suburban
   children who know that they'll never be able to afford a
   house as nice as the one they grew up in. It refers to the
   struggling artist who discovers that the city no longer
   offers marginal living conditions to creative people. It
   refers even to the middle-class family working just to hold
   onto a little space and their dignity. Beyond that, it
   refers to the global migration from poor countries into
   large American cities and to the social displacement of
   those left out of the global-information economy.


   Architecture doesn't drive the culture of eviction, but it
   plays a big role within it. Architects not only put up
   edifices; they also create images that conceal the
   magnitude of the displacement that is occurring. This is
   probably the big story of architecture in the 1980's. This
   was a decade when real-estate developers discovered the
   virtues of quality architecture, when architects learned to
   be sensitive to the urban context, when post-modernists
   showed themselves willing to accommodate tradition and
   popular taste.


   At the same time, this was a period when housing costs
   skyrocketed, when homelessness became the new term for
   destitution, when the middle class could no longer take for
   granted the dream-house incarnation of the American dream.
   While architecture was promoting continuity with the past,
   society was experiencing a rupture with it. New housing
   developments began to simulate their surroundings
   esthetically while transforming them socially. While
   buildings appealed to popular taste, fewer people could
   afford them. Architecture, in other words, functioned as a
   smokescreen, an enchanting facade of stability that masked
   our rapid transformation into a society of virtual nomads.


   The situation had those who write about architecture in a
   bind. We write about the look of buildings because it's
   expected of us and because we like it; we think form
   matters. Who were we to criticize real-estate developers
   for becoming more sophisticated about design? Yet at a
   certain point it became imperative to look further upstream
   toward the social and economic forces that bring buildings
   into being. Perhaps that point arrived with the end of the
   cold war, and the pressure it created to reexamine a
   society in which some people enjoyed parkviews while others
   slept in the park.


   Architects have no choice but to work within the culture of
   eviction. Their livelihood depends on keeping it going. But
   they do have the capacity to decide how best to reckon with
   it. They can choose to mask it, substituting symbols of
   stability for the real thing. They can devise new forms
   that celebrate nomadism as a liberating force of
   contemporary life. Or (like Frank LLoyd Wright) they can
   respond to the creative challenge of mediating between
   these extremes.


   No one has proposed legislation outlawing free enterprise.
   On the contrary, the political climate today favors the
   further relaxation of regulations that try to compensate
   for its defects. Nonetheless, the economic slump of the
   past few years has clarified the options architects face.
   It has cleared away a lot of smoke.


   [End]


UD/Manhattan3559