Modernist Snob

...This is the modernist faith in full force: the architect as seer and high priest...

...Apparently, it's obvious to people of good taste...

...They are only wallowing in empty nostalgia...

...Is it really true that "authentic reproductions" devalue the real...

...What's the evidence that most Americans are, in effect, mentally ill...

...It was a heady time...

...It is easy enough to make this point, as she does, by throwing in some ludicrous products of early postmodernism, such as Philip Johnson's Gothic-topped tower for PPG Industries in Pittsburgh...

...Like the other arts—like America itself— architecture is returning to the past in search of renewal...

...She never says...

...Describing the appeal of places like Colonial Williamsburg, John Cheever wrote that the images are "not picked for their charm or their claim to a past...

...As she says, architecture has moved beyond strict modernism and postmodernism into a general eclecticism, and these few, in her view, are leading a revolution...

...What truths...

...If we are going to find new ways of making buildings that educate, inspire, and please us, we will need a more generous vision than what is offered in The Unreal America...

...Of course, the evolving, lived-in city is superior to the city under glass, but isn't there any room at all for a Williamsburg, a mere speck of earth at 173 acres, amid Huxtable's prized diversity...

...A few elements of dogma have changed...

...In fact, Huxtable remains as committed to many of the old precepts as ever...

...There is an understandable hunger for the familiar, the recognizable, and the meaningful...

...Her contempt for "sneakered and T-shirt-ed" Middle America leads her not just to criticize it for denying reality but to suggest that Middle America itself is unreal...

...Instead she marches out jargon and intellectual shock troops—Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco get many footnotes—to do her work...

...But in her new book, The Unreal America, she spends very little time revisiting or defending the movement she once championed...

...They are not the sorts of building you would want to take home to meet Mom and Dad...

...But the problem is knottier than that...

...Little wonder that Huxtable is so concerned to keep the design of buildings in a few carefully selected hands...

...Huxtable sees this trend in architecture as a terrible danger, a symptom of a larger national penchant for creating a sentimentalized and sanitized past...

...Instead, she merely quotes it in passing as she rushes on to more indictments...

...They can't face the truth...

...It is nothing but a fake, it cheapens the past, and it "has led to the denial of the diversity and eloquence of change and continuity...

...At times, her cultural criticism degenerates into mere snobbery...

...Isn't it possible, for example, that people sitting in the reconstructed House of Burgesses amid all the emblems of the era's established authority get a much sharper sense of the awesome choice Virginia made when it opted for independence in 1776...

...Huxtable isn't really interested in thinking seriously about such questions...

...They even prefer illusion to reality...

...Americans are so taken in by all the razzle dazzle of their shopping malls and theme parks, Huxtable says, that they no longer know what's what...

...The country that invented the Broadway musical and Hollywood, that believes in make-believe, is not to resort to whimsy in its buildings...

...Each aspires to be a solo masterpiece of artistic expression...

...When she sees America she simply sees red—or, more precisely, she sees a nation living in a fantasy land epitomized by Colonial Williamsburg, Las Vegas, and Disney World...

...Isn't it possible that places like Williams-burg may even give us a better understanding of reality...

...none resides comfortably on a block with other buildings...

...The entire first half of her new book is an attempt to make the case that Americans are hopelessly addicted to unreality, but much of the discriminating judgment that distinguishes her work as an architectural writer deserts her when she turns culture critic...

...Huxtable's buildings look different, but they have some important things in common...

...If stuff like this gets into the wrong hands, Huxtable seems to say, awful things can happen...

...The modernists didn't stop with the promise of new and better buildings...

...It certainly cannot succeed when it holds the society it springs from in contempt...

...Have the lines at the Impressionist exhibits shrunk since Renoir prints were plastered onto every desk calendar in creation...

...Modernism in architecture was at its peak, and the Manhattan skyline was filling out with soaring steel and glass towers...

...Modernist Snob Ada Louise Huxtable Lets America Have It By Steven Lagerfeld During nearly 20 years as the architecture critic of the New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable policed the world of building design with incisive and crisply composed criticism...

...Homebuy-ers who are flocking to suburban New Urbanist developments (designed according to pre-World War II town-planning principles) out of a hunger for vital neighborhood communities are to be condemned...

...We are still living with the hangover of this era...

...What reality...

...She's not contemplating a revolt of the masses, however, because a lot of the work she cites is austere and frankly esoteric...

...Huxtable often returns to the notion that architecture is a social art, but in the end what she seems to mean is that we have a social obligation to submit to the grand designs of heroic artist-architects...

...Her own reality is a much smaller world, where the line between high culture and the rest is firmly drawn...

...Most of them are also "difficult," Huxtable allows, and while they include allusions to past forms and to history, most passersby would need a cram course to understand them...

...but] because we are a homeless people looking at nightfall for a window in which a lamp burns, and an interior warmed by an open fire, where we will be fed and understood and loved . . ." Here is an interesting observation, and it might have helped Ms...

...Now the past is dismissed with a wave, as she almost offhandedly concedes that modernism's "tortured and exhausted principles" led to "dismal failures" in its later years...

...Much is made of supposedly disturbing revelations, such as the fact that Disney uses tunnels to keep trash removal and other unpleasant "realities" out of sight...

...In the best tradition of critical writing, she makes a passionate case for her handful of favorites, among whom Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas are probably most familiar to Americans...

...A lot is left out...

...The Disney empire, already beat up by a legion of academic critics and aspiring Ph.D.'s, gets another thorough pummeling here...

...So where did modern architecture go wrong...

...they were also going to reengineer the ghetto and reshape the city itself...

...Huxtable herself long ago Steven Lagerfeld is deputy editor of the Wilson Quarterly...

...Huxtable build a stronger case if she had given it some thought...

...Architects are now allowed to make sparing use of tools that were once forbidden—color, ornament, and historical allusion—but these things are to be treated like very dangerous controlled substances...

...Colonial Williamsburg, with its attempt to reproduce a community as it existed about 1770, she says, is guilty of "linguistic and conceptual crimes against art and history...

...At the beginning, some of its present-day critics would say...

...It is hard, for example, to kindle a lot of warm feelings for a building hailed for its arrangement of "solids and voids in a style of reductive simplicity...

...People listened...

...A social art by definition is bigger than the sum of its practitioners' aspirations...

...There are a number of other asides—on the debilitating political effects of erecting public buildings designed on the cheap, on the new emphasis on interior public spaces in architecture—that hold far more promise than her assault on "the unreal America...

...recognized some of the movement's excesses, using her perch at the Times to help save some of New York's historic buildings from the wrecker's ball...

...After nearly a century's experience with this faith, it is surprising to hear it voiced with so little humility, or even at all, especially in architecture, where the mistakes can't simply be taken off the wall and whisked into the attic...

...The "unreal" America is big and diverse enough to embrace (and pay for) the kinds of buildings Huxtable favors...

...Huxtable had high standards and she wrote with assurance and verve...

...It's not hard to see what the powers-that-be at the Times were thinking when they made her the nation's first regular newspaper architecture critic in 1963...

...She became a leading voice of the architectural establishment...