Ada Louise Huxtable is well-known to readers of The New York Times for her early advocacy of historic preservation. During the almost twenty years that she was the newspaper’s architecture critic, she did as much as anyone to inform—and, I dare say, educate—the public about the necessity of preserving the rich architectural heritage of American cities. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist lost several famous battles, notably the fight to prevent the demolition of Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station, but there is no doubt that she was instrumental in winning the war.
Victory has left Huxtable dissatisfied, however. In The Unreal America, she takes historic preservation to task. Attempts to re-create the past, such as the renovation of the immigration halls at Ellis Island, strike her as overly sanitized. She is disturbed by the intrusion of commercialism into historic landmarks such as Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Above all, she abhors the notion of authentic reproduction. “What the perfect fake or impeccable restoration lacks,” she writes, “are the hallmarks of time and place. They deny imperfections, alterations, and accommodations; they wipe out all the incidents of life and change … they are hollow history.”
Her concern with what she considers to be architectural pretense goes far beyond preservation, however. She visits Disneyland, the Mall of America, and Las Vegas and finds their celebration of make-believe symptomatic of a widespread condition. “Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life,” she proclaims. “Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary, between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter, as an improved version with defects corrected—accessible and user-friendly—although the resonance of history and art in the authentic artifact is conspicuously lacking.”
This gives a good idea of the style of this short book: assertive rather than reasoned, sweeping in its condemnations, and full of thinly veiled sarcasm. The Unreal America is based on a lecture delivered to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It must have been a rousing evening, afire with righteous outrage and lectern-thumping wrath. But overheated rhetoric should not be pondered too closely. Read in the cold light of day, Huxtable’s harangue wears thin. Reflecting on the above passage, for example, I thought to myself, What on earth is surrogate experience? Climbing a stair, watching someone climb a stair, and reading about someone climbing stairs are certainly different—but all are experiences. And what is wrong, after all, with correcting defects? Are accessibility and user-friendliness really that bad? Finally, what is the relationship between art and authenticity; something can be historically authentic, but, forgeries aside, what does artistic authenticity signify?
Artistic authenticity is never defined, for this is a poorly argued book. It brims with inconsistencies. On one page, the author claims that it is not her intention to prove anything right or wrong; on another, she does exactly that. She characterizes the union of culture and consumerism as uniquely American—as if the French had not invented the department store in the nineteenth century and the hypermarché in the twentieth. She maintains that she only writes about buildings she has personally visited but includes an extended discussion of the new Disney community of Celebration that appears to be based entirely on promotional brochures.
Huxtable’s polemic leans heavily on the writing of European intellectuals such as Umberto Eco, André Corboz, and Jean Baudrillard. They provide a shaky support, consisting chiefly of academic jargon: “surrogate experience,” “artificial environments,” and “simulacra.” Such pseudoscientific terms are intended to lend credence to a thesis that is, at its core, unconvincing. It presumes that the public—except you, wise reader—cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is not, that we live in a sort of perpetual haze. It strikes me that the people watching the erupting lava outside the Mirage in Las Vegas don’t mistake this for a real volcano, any more than the people sitting on the steps of the New York Public Library would mistake the stone sculptures for real lions. The visitors to Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland know that they are in Anaheim and not the Black Forest, just as the commuters who used to hurry across the neoclassical concourse of the old Pennsylvania Station knew that they were in Manhattan and not in ancient Rome.
Make-believe has always played a role in our surroundings, and the relationship between reality and illusion has always been blurred; Pennsylvania Station was simultaneously a surrogate Baths of Caracalla and a real place. Such ambiguities do not faze Huxtable, however. She is more interested in using words such as “unreal” and “nostalgic” to depreciate architects whose work she dislikes. These include Jon Jerde, the designer of the Mall of America; the neo-traditional town planners Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk; the postmodernists Michael Graves and Robert A. M. Stern; and anyone who has had anything to do with Prince Charles.
Graves and Stern, in particular, are castigated for the hotels that they have designed for Walt Disney World and Disneyland Paris. Indeed, the Disney Company is the Great Satan of this jeremiad. The author refers darkly to the “Disneyfication of architecture.” This sounds ominous, but exactly what does it mean? Shouldn’t an architect designing a resort hotel incorporate make-believe? Shouldn’t amusement parks be frivolous? Leisure and fantasy have often gone hand in hand. When the Georgian architect John Nash was commissioned by the Prince of Wales to design the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, he concocted a gaudy Hindu palace, not one of his normally sedate classical designs. Is it Disneyfication when the Disney Company hires critically acclaimed architects such as Frank Gehry, Arata Isozaki, and Aldo Rossi to design its office buildings? Apparently not, because these are three designers whom the author admires.
The final chapter of The Unreal America describes the work of Gehry, Isozaki, Rossi, and a number of other architects practicing what the author calls “the new architecture … the best-kept secret in the arts.” This is a curious claim. Several of these architects—the late James Stirling, Fumihiko Maki, Álvaro Siza, and Christian de Portzamparc, as well as Rossi and Gehry—are the recipients of the highly publicized Pritzker Architecture Prize (on whose jury Huxtable sits). Most have received prestigious commissions such as institutional buildings and art museums. Museums, particularly, are very much in evidence; apparently, the “new architects” don’t concern themselves with anything as mundane as shopping malls or resort hotels. What these architects do generally share is a commitment to architecture that is abstract, fashionably minimalist, austere, and undecorated. Judging from this assortment, with the exception of the buildings of the effervescent Gehry, artistic authenticity is not much fun.
The author remains an unrepentant modernist. “I cannot think of anything more ludicrous than the idea that modernism somehow got off the track and was a monstrous mistake that should simply be canceled out,” she writes. “Revolutions in life and technology can never be reversed.” But if the late twentieth century has taught us anything, it is precisely that revolutions can be reversed, as they have been in the Soviet Union, in central Europe, and in large part in China. And, sadly, monstrous architectural mistakes were made in the name of revolution. In that regard, historic preservation is clearly reactionary. It reflects the public’s intense skepticism of the architectural avant-garde whose misbegotten theories were responsible, in part, for the devastation wrought on American cities in the name of urban renewal. Many of the inhumane public housing projects of that era are now being demolished. Would that we could as easily remove the overblown performing arts complexes (Lincoln Center), the unpleasant civic centers (Boston City Hall), and the dysfunctional civic spaces (Philadelphia’s Independence Mall).1
The historian Vincent Scully called historic preservation “the single most significant architectural movement of the past twenty years.” It is part of a general fascination with the past that is also reflected in publishing, television, and films. But it is also evidence of a broad change in the consciousness of the American public. We have discovered that old buildings and old neighborhoods—like old music—are not merely of antiquarian interest; they are a continued source of pleasure. Is this nostalgia? Of course it is. For the moment, we have had it with novelty and experimentation. We miss the easy familiarity with buildings and urban places that our forefathers took for granted. And, Ada Louise Huxtable’s protestations notwithstanding, we will have it back.
In hindsight, I was perhaps a little hard on The Unreal America, which was, after all, based on a lecture. But the author’s rhetorical pronouncements and disdainful judgments called for a response.