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.

TOMORROW’S LONG-LOST TREASURES (Part 2 of 3 Parts)

Last time, we recounted how landmarks such as New York City’s Penn Station and San Francisco’s Fox Theater were lost to development pressures during the early 1960s.  In fairness, preservation and profit sometimes coincided splendidly even then, as they did at at San Francisco’s pioneering Ghirardelli Square or at Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace.  Yet for the most part, developers then and now have had neither the foresight nor the monetery incentive to be entrusted with preservation-worthy buildings.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the private quest for profit often tramples the public good--it’s both obvious and understandable that, for developers, the bottom line controls all else.  What’s more inexcusable is that our public servants are often equally clumsy stewards of our architectural legacy.  

To cite the most egregious example, one could hardly hazard a guess at the number of preservation-worthy buildings--not to mention whole neighborhoods--that have been destroyed directly or indirectly by our government’s postwar obsession with urban freeway building.  Initially, there were good reasons to improve the nation’s transportation routes.  Eventually, however, this freeway program simply became a juggernaut, with state engineers aiming to entangle every major city in an ugly and brutally-conceived web of concrete and asphalt.  For three decades, the heart of San Francisco’s incomparable waterfront was blighted by just such a structure.  It took an earthquake to accomplish what public protest had failed to do:  Destroy it.

Dozens more American cities remain saddled with freeways that slash through their downtowns, dividing and devastating everything in their path. Even our sensible neighbors to the north were not spared from postwar freeway mania:  In Toronto, the elevated, rusting hulk of the horrendous Gardner Expressway still chokes off the city’s dazzling view of Lake Ontario, an insult which residents are forced to resign themselves to.      

But urban freeways haven’t been the only disaster foisted on us by state planners.  As freeway building has mercifully declined, they’ve found other ways to kill us with kindness. In California, for example, scores of superb school buildings dating from the 1920s and early 30s have fallen victim to a well-meant but blundering campaign to ensure the seismic safety of public schools.  

In 1967, the state passed legislation requiring all pre-1933 schools to be examined for seismic safety.  Unfortunately, officials took the path of least resistence in effecting this worthy goal. Rather than retrofitting these lovingly-crafted Revivalist buildings, which ran the gamut from Medieval to Gothic, Tudor to Spanish Revival, wholesale demolition ensued.  Almost without exception, the hurriedly-built replacements for these grand old buildings were bland stucco boxes that may--or may not--be seismically safer given what we’ve learned about earthquakes since.  

In the short term, this campaign produced plenty of feel-good press for officialdom.  In the long term, it deprived the public of splendid buildings harking from an era of unmatched civic pride, and condemned generations of students to school careers 

spent in tawdry, third-rate surroundings.

We may shrug off these losses as the lingering planning biases of the Modernist era, confident that such things could never happen in today’s preservation-savvy climate.  Not so:  Fine architecture remains just as much at risk today as it ever was.  We’ll  see why next time.

TOMORROW'S LONG-LOST TREASURES (Part One of Three Parts)

When someone who’s been well-liked passes on, it’s amazing how many people suddenly materialize to pay their last respects.  You’d think it might be better to do this while the person was still sentient and around to appreciate it.

Not that there’s any comparison in degree, but well-liked buildings have often gotten the same treatment.  This is odd because, unlike human beings, our favorite buildings can be around forever if we want them to--almost any infirmity can be dealt with given enough money and effort.  Yet time and again, we allow irreplaceable buildings to vanish before our eyes as we stand idly by, only to wring our hands and mourn when it’s too late to bring them back. 

The story of New York City’s colossal Pennsylvania Station is the classic case in point. Completed in 1910, Penn Station was the largest railroad terminal ever built, and perhaps the crowning achievement of the renowned Beaux-Arts architects McKim, Mead and White.  With its soaring and replendent waiting room modeled on the Roman baths of Caracella, there could hardly have been a structure more worthy of preservation.  Yet in 1963, amid just a scattering of protests from a few ardent admirers (the term “preservationist” had not been coined yet), the cash-strapped Pennsylvania Railroad began to demolish Penn Station in order to sell the air rights above it for development.  

Even today, historians all but weep at the heartrending photographs of this temple of transportation slowly succumbing to the wrecker’s hammer--a process made more excruciating by the building’s unshakeable permanance, which cruelly dragged out demolition for two years and gave New Yorkers plenty of time to rue their inattention.  In a final insult, the station’s replacement turned out to be little more than a banal network of tunnels that burrowed furtively beneath the new sports arena occupying the site.  Of the original Penn Station--by that time reduced to so much landfill in the New Jersey mudflats--art historian Vincent Scully lamented:  

“It was academic building at its best, rational and ordered according to a pattern of use and a blessed sense of civic excess. It seems odd that we could ever have been persuaded that it was no good and, finally, permitted its destruction. Through it one entered the city like a god...one scuttles in now like a rat.”

New Yorkers weren’t the only ones asleep at the switch back then.  San Francisco was likewise scarred by the loss of the Fox Theater, a work of stunning, over-the-top Beaux-Arts splendor by the great theater architect Thomas Lamb.  Built at a cost of some five million dollars and opened in June 1929, the Fox was without doubt one of America’s greatest metropolitan movie palaces.  Yet within a single generation, changing architectural tastes and the rise of television had taken their toll on the Fox.  By the early sixties, its owners were anxious to be rid of it.  

Unlike the demise of Penn Station, the Fox’s impending destruction was widely publicized, and was even commemorated with a final show on February 16, 1963.  Although a few architecture buffs spoke out on the building’s behalf, most people were apathetic, while others, including San Francisco mayor George Christopher, actively supported demolition.  Amid this climate of resignation, the building’s destruction duly began twelve days after closing night.  Today, an utterly mundane (but presumably more profitable) office building carrying the insulting moniker of Fox Plaza occupies the site.

It’s easy to blame greedy developers for many of the great losses our cities have suffered.  Yet our public servants have done their share of bungling as well.  We’ll look at that next time, before we ask ourselves:  Could it happen again?

WHY WE QUIT GETTING PLASTERED

Perhaps the most singular trait of American homes is the hollow, cardboardy thud of our gypsum-board walls.  No one else has anything quite like them.  Mind you, if it weren’t for World War II, our walls might not sound quite so hollow.  

Before the war, American homes were routinely plastered inside--a painstaking process that first required nailing thousands of feet of wooden stripping called lath to the ceiling and walls of every room. The lath was covered with a coarse layer of plaster known as a “scratch coat”.  The wet plaster squeezed through the gaps in the lath, locking it to the walls and ceiling. 

Days later, when the scratch coat was dry, a second “brown coat” was applied to make the surfaces roughly flat.  This, too, had to dry for several days.  Last came the “skim coat”, a thin layer of pure white plaster that produced a smooth finished surface, something like the cream cheese topping does on a cheesecake.  

Depending on the weather, this process could take days or weeks, during which no other trade could work inside the house.  This was how plasterwork had been done for centuries, and there seemed no reason to change.  

Then came World War II, and with it an urgent need for military structures ranging from barracks to whole bases.  Faced with shortages of both labor and material, Uncle Sam was desperate to find faster and cheaper ways to build.  And since beauty was not much of an issue, eliminating plaster was an obvious starting point.

Enter the United States Gypsum Company, which way back in 1916 had invented a building board made of gypsum sandwiched between sheets of tough paper.  After more than two decades, the product they called Sheetrock still hadn’t really caught on.  Even its successful use in most of the buildings at the Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1933-34 didn’t do much for sales.  But the urgencies of wartime construction changed all that.  

As the government soon came to appreciate, Sheetrock did away with the need for wood lath, multiple plaster coats, and days and days of drying time (hence its generic name, “drywall”).  Installation was simple:  After the 4x8 sheets were nailed up, the nail holes were filled, paper tape was used to cover the joints, and a textured coating was troweled on to help disguise the defects.

Of course, all this was only meant as a stopgap replacement for plaster, but as you’ve probably guessed, it didn’t turn out that way.  By the war’s end, many builders who’d gotten used to slapping up drywall were suddenly reluctant to go back to the trouble and expense of plastering. 

What’s more, Sheetrock’s arrival coincided with the rise of modern architecture, which preferred plain, flat surfaces to the fussy moldings and reveals of prewar styles.  To Modernist tastes, the fact that Sheetrock couldn’t be molded the way wet plaster could was hardly a drawback.  People seemed more dismayed by the flimsy cardboardish sound of the walls in their postwar homes, but they soon got used to it.

Flimsy or not, there’s no doubt that Sheetrock proved a huge boon to the postwar housing industry.  Prior to the war, the typical American developer built about four houses a year.  By the late Forties, a developer like the legendary Bill Levitt was able to churn out 17,000 tract homes at Long Island’s Levittown, sell them for $7,990 , and still make a thousand dollars profit on each.  Mass production was the key to the postwar housing boom, and Sheetrock helped make it happen.  

Just something to bear in mind next time your kids smash a doorknob through the bedroom wall.

MAKING LIGHT

Next time you head for the bathroom in the middle of the night, consider what the casual act of lighting your way would’ve entailed just over a century ago: If you were lucky enough to have a house with piped-in gas, you could strike a match to the nearest gas mantle to get a blinding white flame. Otherwise, you’d have to stumble your way to the john by the light of a guttering candle. No wonder so many Victorian houses burned to the ground.

Although nowadays it’s hard to imagine a world without electric lighting, it's been with us for a relative wink of an eye. Thomas Edison perfected his incandescent bulb in 1879, after trying out hundreds of filament materials ranging from bamboo to hair to paper (he finally settled on tungsten). Not so well known is that Edison also had to invent a way to evacuate the air from the bulbs--no mean task using Victorian technology.  

Even so, it took another twenty years or so before electric lights had largely replaced gas mantles in American homes. As late as the early 1900s, older houses with gaslight were still being retrofitted for electricity. These transitional houses are easy to spot: the wires leading to the electric fixtures were often run inside the old gas pipes. 

In the early days of electric lighting, fixtures intentionally flaunted naked bulbs so that no one could possibly mistake them for gas.  It was a way for people to advertise their modernity, much as hipsters of the 1990s sported conspicious cell phone antennas on their cars.

Since that time, there have been surprisingly few fundamental changes in residential lighting.  Switches and wiring were eventually hidden inside of walls instead of being mounted on top of them, but other than that, most houses continued to have lighting fixtures in the center of ceilings, much as they had in the days of gaslight. The Revivalist home styles of the 1920s brought a craze for wall sconces--another gaslight derivative--but the fashion had largely died out by the end of that decade.

The first really new development in lighting since Edison’s light bulb was neon tubing, which made a big splash in the early 1930s. It made its American debut in a sign for a Packard showroom, and was soon all the rage as signage in movie theaters and other commercial buildings. However, with its otherworldly glow, it found little use in residential design.  

Fluorescent lighting (not to be confused with neon) was introduced not long afterward.  Being diffuse and hence glare-free, and also producing much more light for a given amount of power, it quickly became the standard for commercial buildings.  Still, no matter how hard architects tried to push its use in luminous ceilings and other Modernist lighting concepts, the sickly blue-green quality of its light did not endear it to homeowners. It took another forty years of improvement, as well as laws mandating its use, before fluorescent lighting was grudgingly accepted into American homes.

In the interim, a number of other high-efficiency lighting types have been developed, including mercury vapor, sodium vapor, and metal halide, but the unnatural spectrum of light they produce has also precluded their use in domestic work. 

By contrast, halogen residential lighting, introduced during the 80s, was an instant hit with the public. Why? Halogen’s warm, yellow-white light is very close to the spectrum of sunlight. Accordingly, engineers are currently working hard to make the next big development in high efficiency lighting--light-emitting diodes, or LEDs--as warm and friendly as incandescent and halogen lamps.

Because the sun, after all, is still everyone’s favorite lighting fixture.  

STYLE SLEUTHING

When it comes to identifying home styles, most people know generic terms such as Victorian, Bungalow, and Spanish.  Really pegging the thing is a little tougher, though.  Although more precise terms like Tudor, Mission, and Craftsman are often casually thrown about--especially by real estate agents, who ought to know better--they’re used wrongly more often than not.  Herewith are some of the most common points of confusion.   

For starters, calling a house “Victorian” is like calling a car “postwar”--it  only describes what era the thing was built in.  Luckily, the four major styles of Victorians are easy to tell apart:  If the house has horizontal siding, false cornerstones, and windows with segmental arches, it’s an Italianate.  If it looks like an Italianate but also has a steep mansard roof, it’s a Mansard.  If it has a square bay window, skinny proportions, and a porch with lots of linear wooden gingerbread, it’s a Stick (also called Eastlake).  If it has windows with colored glass borders, a few curved walls or a turret, and a porch with lots of decorative spindles, you can bet it’s a Queen Anne.  Next category, please.

Bungalow is ageneric term describing any home that’s built close to the ground and has a low-pitched roof.  More precisely, if a bungalow has wood siding or shingle (often with stone or clinker brick trim), it’s a Craftsman Bungalow.   If it has stucco on the outside, it’s a California Bungalow.

The gaggle of labels hung on Spanish-style homes--Mission, Spanish Colonial, Churrigueresque, Moorish, Mediterranean--are another endless source of confusion.  Strictly speaking, Mission refers only to architecture modeled on the West’s Spanish Colonial missions, and would suggest a rather plain house with thick stucco walls, an Alamo-like scrolled gable, and a few decorative barrel tiles, if not a whole roof full of them (for practical purposes, the term Spanish Colonial is essentially synonymous with Mission).  

On the other hand, tile-roofed houses with more ornate features such as spiral columns and elaborate door and window surrounds are called Churriguersque, after the 17th-century Spanish Renaissance architect Jose Churriguera.  Pointed or parabolic arches, ceramic tile accents, and perhaps castle-like crennelation would be clues that you were looking at a Moorish-style home.  Of course, when in doubt, you’re always safe using the term Mediterranean, which has come to include pretty much anything with red tile on the roof.  

The terms Tudor, Elizabethan, or Half-Timbered are often used interchangeably to describe English-inspired homes, but these terms don’t mean the same thing.  A Tudor-style house usually has brickwork combined with restrained half-timbering, steep gables, a massive and prominent chimney, and relatively small windows sometimes topped by a pointed Tudor arch.  By contrast, an Elizabethan-style home would have large areas of leaded windows divided into grids or into the familiar “Olde English” diamond pattern, along with lots of florid half-timbering in repeating motifs. 

While both of the above examples might also be called “Half-Timbered”, that term more properly refers to a building technique and not a style.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned any postwar home styles, it’s because it takes quite a bit of time for style names to stabilize.  Case in point:  During the Sixties, California Ranchers and split levels were routinely called “Contemporaries”, as if they were going to stay in fashion forever.  Today that term is all but forgotten.  

Likewise, today’s gewgaw-laden tract houses are often referred to as “neo-traditionals”, but that term is so vague that it’s unlikely to survive.  Hence, it’ll be a while before we know what posterity deems to call them. 

MAINTAINING THE MILLINERY

If architects feel obliged to design timeless buildings, you’d never know it from much of the work being built today.  The current fashion for nonfunctional excrescences and complicated paint schemes bespeaks an increasingly cavalier attitude about the need for buildings to age with grace, and the burdens they create for their owners when they don’t.  

For too many architects, how a building looks in its opening day portrait seems to matter more than how a it will survive the rough road of actual use.  After all, any building is ageless once it’s safely enshrined in the architect’s portfolio. How it fares in real life is often something else again.  

Paint remains the number one vice of shortsighted architects. While five-color paint schemes are a guaranteed grabber on opening day, it’s only a matter of years--and sometimes months--before all that painstaking brushwork chips, fades, and requires recoating.  Renewing such complex designs is an expensive undertaking that, when it’s done at all, seldom approaches the quality of the original job.  

Nor is much thought given to exactly how such painted structures will be maintained.  In a recently-built outdoor shopping plaza, for instance, I came across a hundred-foot-long pergola meant to support climbing vines, which the architect unexplicably chose to build out of painted steel.  Did he or she ever consider how this structure, preordaineded as it was to rust, would be repainted once it was overgrown with creepers?  

Fabric awnings are another common bit of architectural flim-flam.  Among the most short-lived products in architecture, awnings are indispensible for their intended purpose--providing shade and shelter.  Too often, though, they’re used gratuitously, like so much silk ribbon, in the hopes of adding a festive air to an otherwise dull design.  Inevitably, most examples are mildewed, faded, or hanging in very un-festive tatters within a few years.

Many architects who do manage to resist the quick fix of fabric awnings instead fall prey to horizontal glass canopies--another idea that looks lovely in a computer rendering, but simply doesn’t work in practice.  Gravity being what it is, all those crystalline surfaces quickly collect an unsightly layer of dirt, dust, and dead insects--an outcome that even the most rigorous maintenance can’t prevent.  

Then there’s the whole panoply of outriggers, props, sunscreens, and other gratuitous bric-a-brac that nowadays sprout from building facades  For lazy architects, such offhand applique’ is yet another shortcut to visual impact.  After the fad for gewgaws inevitably passes, however, these features serve mainly to ensure an excruciatingly dated look.  

None of these are willfully negligent design choices on the part of architects--just stupid and misguided ones.  We architects think nothing of devoting hours or days to choosing colors and finishes. Yet a glance at much recent work suggests we spend much less time thinking about that most fundamental of architectural qualities: a building’s ability to grow old with grace.

As the reformed Modernist architect Edward Durell Stone put it in 1966: “Architecture is not millinery.  Fashions pass by, buildings remain to become grim reminders of transient enthusiasms.”