Looking Around: Reflections on Preservation
If you, like me, happen to follow architecture rather closely, you may have recently noticed several folks in the community talking about their Johnson. Always fond of puns, it’s the 20th-century American architect Philip Johnson they’re referring to, rather than, well, you know.
Two weeks ago, it was announced that the Norwegian firm Snøhetta revealed plans to overhaul the front facade of Johnson’s iconic 1984 AT&T building, a Postmodern skyscraper located at 550 Madison Ave in New York City.
Philip Johnson’s 550 Madison Ave (formerly known as the AT&T building). Left Image by David Shankbone, CC BY 2.5. Right Image by Matthew Bisanz, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Proposed changes by Snøhetta. Via Dezeen.
While this is not the first renovation to the tower (Charles Gwathmey did a less invasive but, in this writer’s opinion still problematic rehab in the 90s), architects and critics, famous and obscure alike, were quick to decry the changes. Olly Wainwright, architecture critic for The Guardian, in no small words, called the plans “vandalism.” Mega-architect Norman Foster, no friend to Postmodernism, said on Instagram that the building was nevertheless “an important part of our heritage and should be respected as such.”
Image by Anna Fixsen, Metropolis Magazine. Via Twitter.
A protest was organized, seen above. On the far right, you can see the famous Postmodern architect and former Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Robert A.M. Stern, holding a model of the building.
A hashtag, #SaveATT, was created, alongside a Twitter account, @Save_AT_T, and a Change.org petition shortly followed.
You may be wondering why all of these architects and critics are losing their minds about a renovation of an 80s building that looks relatively sleek and contemporary. It’s not so much that the proposed renovation in and of itself is objectively bad, it’s about the building for which the renovation was proposed.
The Lowdown on Johnson’s Highrise
Before we get into the details, I’ll say it straight-up: the AT&T building, including its lobby, should absolutely be saved. Why? 1) Because it is probably the most famous example of Postmodern architecture, and 2) because it caused the biggest architectural hissy fit since the birth of Modernism.
Philip Johnson was, until the AT&T building, a high-modernist architect who built a large number of corporate headquarters and a famous glass house. Always a controversial and infuriating character, he decided, seemingly on a whim, to take a Postmodern turn in designing his tower for AT&T.
The Glass House by Philip Johnson. Photo by Staib (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In 1979, when the AT&T tower was announced, Postmodernism (a movement characterized by the revisiting, distorting, juxtaposing, and recontextualizing of historical architectural forms within a contemporary philosophical and aesthetic context) was a relatively theoretical movement, not yet thrust into the eye of the general populus.
Postmodernism had a certain critical eye that cast its gaze at (what was seen at the time as) the stifling hegemony of Modernist architecture, which the Postmodernists found cold, technocratic, and corporate. That the style was appropriated by Johnson for a major corporate building, made a few theorists rather angry, as corporatism was one of their key criticisms of Modernist architecture.
Johnson on the cover of Time Magazine holding a model of the AT&T Building.
To rub more salt in the critical wound, the AT&T building was Postmodernism’s first big media moment, obscuring the smaller, more nuanced works of the movement’s first five years, which added to the hissy fit. Charles Jencks, the eternal gatekeeper of the movement, was so in crisis at the ruining of his nuanced art by a particularly vain starchitect, that he had an existential crisis, asking “Is Postmodernism Dead?” Jencks would continue to see the building as a transition from “real” Postmodernism and “PoMo” aka Postmodernism that Jencks does not like.
Don’t worry, it’s probably all explained in one of his extremely great charts.
After AT&T, Postmodernism exploded in popularity and quickly replaced Modernism as the hegemonic architectural style, endlessly replicated, splayed across a landscape of gabled museums and courthouses; shopping malls and parking decks. RIP to theoretical purity, born: 1968, died: 1979. Cause of Death: Philip Johnson.
While it may be startling that a building completed in 1984 is already in existential danger, such danger is becoming more and more common, sooner and sooner after the building is completed.
Preservation itself is always a difficult topic, one that raises many questions: Why should we save buildings, and what makes a building worth saving in the first place? Why should we save just the exterior of the building? Why not the interior or landscape as well?
Why Should We Save Buildings?
Buildings are worth saving for several reasons. Sometimes, a building has an interesting cultural history - perhaps an important person was born there, or it was the site of a burgeoning subculture, or an important historical event. Sometimes a building is worth preserving because it is a particularly good example of its architectural style, or because it’s the only example of its particular style in the surrounding area.
Sometimes a building is worth preserving simply because it is beautiful, old, or built by a famous architect. Sometimes, like in the case of Johnson’s AT&T building, the building should be preserved because it had an important role to play in architectural history, theory, or criticism.
My own story of how I began writing about architecture is one that opens with loss - the kind of needless loss that should never happen again.
Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center. Via Library of Congress.
When I was little, I was a house fanatic. (As we can clearly see, not much has changed.) Whether it was watching the then-nascent HGTV channel, or dirtying my mother’s station wagon windows with nose-prints watching yard after yard scroll by, I could not get enough of houses. For most of my young life, architecture was defined by houses.
My mother grew up in Goshen, New York, and we would occasionally go up there to visit family and friends. When I was around thirteen or fourteen, we took a wrong turn looking for a Dunkin Donuts, allowing me to stumble upon the building above, Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center, built in 1967.
This building was unlike any building I had ever seen before, and in the few minutes we stopped by, it had transformed my ideas about what a building was, what it could be. It was the building that introduced me to architecture.
Around 2010, when I finally figured out what building it was, I learned that it had been threatened with demolition. My first ever snippet about architecture I had written was a letter pleading the National Trust for Historic Preservation to intervene. Throughout high school, I wrote at length about the need to save Modernist buildings so that they could have the same effect on future generations as they had on me.
In 2015, my junior year of college, it was announced that the fight for preservation had been lost, and Paul Rudolph’s masterpiece was mutilated beyond repair. I will never be able to revisit the building that inspired me to begin writing about architecture. If I’d never gotten to see that building, it’s unlikely that McMansion Hell would have ever materialized. I can say with some certainty, at the risk of being melodramatic, that had I not seen that building, I would be a completely different person than the one sitting here writing this.
Orange County Government Center during its Demolition. Photo by Daniel Case. CC BY-SA 3.0.
Now, others won’t be able to have that experience. What’s left of Rudolph’s work is beyond uninspiring, a shell of what used to be an innovative, form-defying building. What could have inspired many to make deeper inquiries into their built environment has been reduced to a non-place housing the DMV.
We don’t like to think of buildings as being non-permanent. When a building is constructed, there’s an expectation that it’ll last forever. Buildings seem monolithic, stable, permanent. It’s in a building’s very design to be anchored firmly to the ground, to be able to brave the elements, withstand the years. While natural disasters are responsible for the destruction of a great many buildings, the fickleness of the aesthetic tastes of human beings has felled a great many more.
After around the 70-year mark of a building’s life, it becomes significantly more at risk of demolition. Several books have been written about lost buildings in many cities, sparing few details about how needless some of these losses were. In Baltimore, as in other cities, many a masterpiece was felled in the mid-20th century to make room for a rather infamous building sniper: parking decks and parking lots.
Maryland Casualty Building. Demolished in 1984 in order to build a parking lot.
When it comes to pre-20th century buildings, whose preservation is argued for far more often than buildings like AT&T or Rudolph’s Government Center, the argument isn’t necessarily that these buildings are somehow superior architecturally to others because of their age, but because they are totally irreplaceable.
Even if you wanted to build a full-scale replica of a demolished building from, say, the 18th century, it’s likely that the materials needed to rebuild it are no longer around. Most of the marble and stone quarries that brought us styles like Richardsonian Romanesque or Gothic Revival, were completely depleted. In addition, the construction methodologies required for pre-industrial building practices are either not likely to get approval because they aren’t up to modern building codes or because some of those trade skills are simply lost. Regardless, the cost of replacement materials, as well as the labor needed to build these historic buildings, are both economically unviable.
On a more surface level, old buildings are snapshots of how people once lived, and saving them is an important part of charting the history of human development, historically and technologically.
Mechanics Theater, Baltimore, MD. Demolished in 2013 and replaced with a festering open pit.
A common fallacy of preservation is that it is reserved solely for the oldest, most ornate buildings, especially those relevant to the heavily sanitized version of American history taught in primary schools. I would argue that preservation is even more important for those buildings we find difficult to like, those that challenge us architecturally, like Rudolph’s Government Center.
There is always a point in time where a style of architecture is loathed by its successors. Many a Queen Anne Victorian house was razed because people at the beginning of the 20th century found them both dowdy, dusty, and plain unhygienic. Modernism was loathed by Postmodernism. Postmodernism is loathed by today’s architects who grew up in its shadow.
That which is loathed is not always that which is not worth preserving, but by the time we realize this, it’s often too late. Only after a building is threatened do people come rallying to save it, when these preservation efforts are more successful when they start long before the first threat. This is perhaps why so many houses by Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe skyscrapers remain for people to enjoy.
Interiors
TV AM building interior by Terry Farrell. Remodeled, mid-1990s. Via Dezeen.
People go to visit old buildings (especially places like Museum houses) because they want to experience life as it was in a different era. The exterior is one part of this experience, but it’s the interiors which give people the sense that they are not merely looking at history but are instead enveloped in it.
Though there has been some progress over the last few years, interiors and landscape architecture have not been as high of a priority for preservation as a building’s exterior architecture, and because of this, there have been great losses, like the TV AM building above, in which I’m sure many 80s and 90s children would love to bask nostalgically.
I’m always delighted when, in my searches for this blog’s house of the week, I come upon a time-capsule house, that is, a house that hasn’t been remodeled since it was built. As the years go by, these houses have become less and less common, and their interiors have been replaced with today’s white furniture, contractor gray walls, and sparkling white trim.
Interior of a house in Florida built in 1980s from the archives of the author.
It’s hard to describe the feeling of loss that comes with looking at a house built in 1980 and discovering an interior fresh out of last month’s HGTV Magazine. Do I really think the world needs more overstuffed chintz sofas or shag carpeting? No, but the idea that a world without a single room decorated like it’s fresh out of a Laura Ashley catalog seems like quite an erasure of the pop cultural history of how everyday people decorated their houses.
I’ve devoted a large bookshelf to old catalogs, renovation books, interior design magazines, and other resources about how people decorated their homes partially out of personal obsession and partially because I’m afraid that someday that history will be lost in the material world and will only exist in the glossy imagery of those pages.
Conclusion
What deserves to be preserved and how that preservation is executed is in the eyes of the people. While that idea sometimes gets abused by ruinous people who use historic preservation designations to protect parking lots or empty spaces to prevent affordable housing from being built, or use preservation as a means of proving the superiority of one group of people over another, these bad eggs should not give us the idea that preserving or documenting our important spaces is somehow politically toxic.
Cottonwood Mall Demolition by Mike Renlund (CC BY 2.0)
The “our” is key. People experience architectural loss on an individual level. We can see this when the news reports a mall or shopping center is to be demolished - the comments on such stories are almost always people sharing their fond memories of school shopping, birthday parties, comings of age. When someone moves out of their house or apartment, there’s always a lingering sadness that whoever lives there after you will completely alter that place into their own small piece of the world.
While highly public campaigns like #SaveATT are one method of preservation, they aren’t the only way people like you or me can contribute to saving our collective architectural memory. Documenting and archiving one’s own life is, in itself, a way of preservation.
Inside Today’s Home, a 1979 decorating book from the collection of the author.
Got old catalogs or maybe photos of your parents’ house with all of its tacky decorating laying around? Consider scanning them and maintaining an archive or contributing them to one of the many online groups on places like Flickr or Archive.org devoted to maintaining collections of primary sources from certain time periods.
One of the most remarkable aspects of social media is that people are creating their own ethnographies, their own archives of collective memories through Facebook groups like one I’m in called “Old Baltimore Photos”, where participants get together and tell stories of how they experienced the city and its buildings as it used to be, on a scale past historians could only dream of.
As losses like the Orange County Government Center, barely in its fifth decade of existence, tell us, the time for preservation is not tomorrow or in a few years. The time for preservation is right now. If there’s a building that means something to you, take pictures, visit often, tell people about it! While it might take time and effort to make sure a building is protected for future generations, the first step of the process is always, as cheesy as it sounds, love.
HEY FOLKS! IT’S MY BIRTHDAY THIS FRIDAY!
Here are a few things you can do if you want to celebrate with me!
Sign the Petition to Save the AT&T Building!!: http://bit.ly/SaveATandT
Make a donation to DoCoMoMo US, the organization leading the fight to preserve important landmarks of Modernist and Postmodernist architecture: https://www.z2systems.com/np/clients/docomomous/donation.jsp
Consider supporting me on Patreon! I’ve started posting a GOOD HOUSE built since 1980 from the area where I picked this week’s McMansion as bonus content!
If you’re feeling particularly nice, you can view my book wishlist here: http://a.co/j5LNE0R
See you tomorrow with our Ohio McMansion of the week!