Monday, December 19, 2011

SO BEAUTY IS JUST FOR THE RICH?

Not long ago, I visited William Randolph Hearst’s renowned estate near San Simeon, California, now a state park better known as Hearst Castle.  With its serene mountaintop setting, verdant gardens, and spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean, the palatial retreat designed by Julia Morgan between 1917 and 1941 was soon nicknamed The Enchanted Hill.  And indeed, soaking up its breathtaking gardens on a crystalline morning is about as close to paradise as most of us will ever get.  Our guide touched on this fact when she ended the tour by sighing: “Well, it’s time for us to go back down the hill to reality.”

This poignant comment got me to thinking.   Is it only Hearst Castle’s extravagance that makes it such a remarkable place?  Or is there something more--something that any one of us, whether millionaire or middlebrow, could bring to our own environment?

Most of us seem to have accepted that beautiful surroundings are the exclusive domain of the wealthy.  Granted, money is a prerequisite to many things in this world, but creating and appreciating beauty are not among them--if they were, all artists would be fabulously wealthy.  Rather, beautiful surroundings are something that any one of us, rich or poor, can aspire to.  We may not be able to create them on the scale that Hearst and Morgan did, but we can do so on the scale of our own homes, and that is enough. 

In fact, what makes Hearst Castle so unforgettable is not merely its lavish design or the drama of its site. Rather, it’s the degree of thought and care that both Morgan and Hearst invested in every aspect of the work.  A diminutive fountain, a beautiful motif in colored tile, a carefully-sited orange tree--it’s the sum of these modest details, and not just the grand gestures, that make the Enchanted Hill sing. 

What’s more, such details, and a thousand others, are within reach of just about anyone who cares to have them.  They hinge upon careful thought and a desire for beauty more than they do on money.  If you’re not convinced, consider that the same people who marvel at what Morgan and Hearst created at San Simeon also feel pangs of longing for quaint French villages or Italian hill towns--places that are hardly the product of great monetary wealth.  Human contentment, it seems, has less to do with extravagance than with the simple degree of comfort and care we invest in our own surroundings:  In its own context, a bright pot of flowers on a windowsill can have just as much impact on the spirit as the most scrupulously-tended formal garden.

Whether castle or cottage, beautiful homes all share the same basic traits.  Some of them we must furnish:  materials--however, modest--assembled with care; patterns to delight the eye; textures to delight the touch.  Others are there for the taking:  fall colors, the trickle of rainwater, the song of a bird, the fragrance of a climbing vine.  Taken together, these are aspects of beauty that all of us can afford, and that we all deserve to have around us.

Monday, December 5, 2011

TOMORROW'S LONG-LOST TREASURES (PART 3 OF 3 PARTS)

Today, almost fifty years after the destruction of New York City’s Pennsylvania Station and San Francisco’s Fox Theater, practically everyone agrees that they were the sort of architectural treasures that deserved preservation.  But with 20/20 hindsight, these are ridiculously easy calls.  The real test, as New York and San Francisco both learned through bitter experience, is to recognize the value in buildings we take for granted in our own time.  This is still much harder than it seems, in spite of all we think we’ve learned about preservation in the interim. 

Why?  The reason is best seen through analogy.  In 1963, when the Pennsylvania Railroad began demolishing Penn Station amid overwhelming disinterest from New Yorkers, the building was fifty-three years old--in today’s terms, the equivalent of a structure built in 1951.  How many people you know would regard a building of this era, however excellent its design or energetic its defenders, as worthy of preservation?  Now suppose that this preservation would also cost a lot of money--perhaps more than a replacement structure.  Now what are the odds of survival?  Viewed in this context, the destruction of Penn Station and a thousand other long-lamented landmarks doesn’t seem so inexplicable.  In fact, without extraordinary vigilance, it’s just as likely to happen again in our own time.

Every generation is blinded by its own biases about what constitutes “worthy” architecture.  Faced with the preceding scenario, we’re just as likely to make the same poor choices our predecessors did.  Our foresight inevitably falls just short of where it ought to be, distorted by the aesthetic lens of the present. 

Today, it’s the exuberant “Googie” commercial architecture of the 1950s and 60s that’s at greatest risk;  tomorrow, it may be buildings our generation finds even less worthwhile.  Is an original mission-fronted Taco Bell worthy of preservation?  A domed Century 21 theater?  How about Apple Computer’s first office building, or the last remaining cell phone tower?       

If you find these choices distasteful or even ridiculous, you’re probably in good company.  But if we hope to preserve architectural history for its real beneficiary--posterity--we have to set aside our own biases, and learn to approach preservation from posterity’s point of view. 

Shopping plazas, burger joints, and motels:  Pennsylvania Station, they ain’t, and that’s just the point.  In preservation, the target moves year by year.  If judging architectural worth from the context of the present was easy, we’d never again have to mourn a lost landmark.

EPILOG

A half-century after the loss of Pennsylvania Station, some New Yorkers have audaciously set out to reclaim their long lost masterpiece.  The Farley Post Office, a sprawling Beaux-Arts work also by McKim, Mead and White that stands not far from the site of old Penn Station, may soon be transformed into a passenger terminal worthy of the magnificent original.  The idea was first proposed in 1991 by then-Amtrak president W. Graham Claytor Jr., and was energetically supported by senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, neither of whom would see it realized during their lifetimes.  

The Farley Post Office was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965 as a direct result of preservation laws arising from Penn Station’s destruction.  It’s an imposing legacy, but it came at a very high cost.