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Overview
A deep exploration of modern life that examines our cities, public places, and homes
Following How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski casts a seasoned critical eye over the modern scene with Mysteries of the Mall. His subject is nothing less than the broad setting of our metropolitan world.
In thirty-five discerning essays, Rybczynski ranges over subjects as varied as shopping malls, Central Park, the Paris opera house, and America's shrinking cities. Along the way, he examines our post-9/11 obsession with security, the revival of the big-city library, the rise of college towns, and our fascination with vacation homes, and he visits Disney's planned community of Celebration. By looking at contemporary architects as diverse as Frank Gehry, Moshe Safdie, and Bing Thom, revisiting old masters such as Christopher Wren, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright, and considering such unsung innovators as Stanley H. Durwood, the inventor of the Cineplex, Rybczynski ponders the role of global cities in an age of tourism and what places attract us in the modern city.
Mysteries of the Mall is required reading for anyone curious about the modern world and how it came to be that way.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429953245 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 09/08/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 539 KB |
About the Author
Witold Rybczynski has written about architecture for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Slate. Among his award-winning books are Home, The Most Beautiful House in the World, and A Clearing in the Distance, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. He lives with his wife in Philadelphia, where he is the emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. How Architecture Works is his eighteenth book.
Read an Excerpt
Mysteries of the Mall
And Other Essays
By Witold Rybczynski
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2015 Witold RybczynskiAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-5324-5
CHAPTER 1
Mysteries of the Mall
Most of us don't attach much importance to the mundane architectural settings of our everyday lives. We go in and out of supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, and gas stations without a second thought, perhaps because we understand these places so well that they seem merely a part of our natural surroundings. It's necessary to think back to childhood to recall what it was like when such ordinary places were new and strange. I remember my first schoolroom, with its imposing hierarchy of many little desks and one big, important desk. Or the first time I was taken to a museum, with its succession of large, silent rooms filled with labeled glass cases. Or the first, truly strange experience of a movie theater: sitting alone — in a crowd — in the dark. As children, we unravel these unknown, exotic places like anthropologists in a new world, without the encumbrance of foreknowledge. We are obliged to decipher for ourselves the meanings of each new place, and to find our own place in it.
As adults, we feel more or less at home more or less everywhere. This is not just a question of habit. I don't mean that there aren't locales that appear exotic, but it's rare that we find ourselves in places that are truly incomprehensible. This is not just because buildings fall into recognizable types (a concert hall designed by Frank Gehry is still a concert hall; the relationship between performers and audience follows a well-understood convention) but also because television and movies have brought us in contact with so many places we would never ordinarily visit: prisons, morgues, missile silos. Last summer, I toured a World War II submarine moored alongside San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf; it was the first time I had ever been aboard such a vessel, but thanks to Lloyd Bridges and Sea Hunt as well as many submarine movies, the confined mechanical interior of the USS Pampanito felt, if not exactly familiar, at least not unfamiliar. Similarly, when I was obliged to go to a hospital, a place I had not been in for thirty years but had seen innumerable times on television, the layout of the long corridors flanked by dreary wards, and the curious hospital atmosphere that combines boredom and urgency, personal attention and impersonal neglect, felt normal, and I think I would have been surprised had it been otherwise.
So, I didn't expect to come upon a new kind of place, that is, a place that demanded unknown rules of behavior, not twenty miles from my house, and certainly not in a shopping mall. This encounter happened in the 1970s. I was walking through the mall, which had recently opened, when I came upon a large, open area with many tables at which people sat eating. There were no waiters visible, and the food appeared to come from a series of take-out counters where young people served food that could be taken away on trays, cafeteria-style. The counters were located on the periphery of the open area, and to judge from the colorful overhead signs, there was a choice of different kinds of food: Chinese, Tex-Mex, pizza, southern fried chicken. I lined up at one of the counters, ordered my food, paid, and then, holding my loaded tray, I realized that I wasn't sure what to do next. I had been in fast-food restaurants before, of course, but this was different. Here, the tables all looked the same. I wasn't sure if I was expected to sit opposite the kiosk where I had just picked up my souvlaki and Coke, or anywhere at all.
I had stumbled on a "food court." (The name was then unfamiliar to me, which was one of the sources of my confusion; knowing the name of a space is a big part of learning to recognize and use it.) The food court is an unusual eating place. A conventional restaurant is a highly stylized environment; we are called customers, but as the hostess shows us to our table, we really feel like guests in someone else's house. The atmosphere of a cafeteria, on the other hand, is different: uniform, regimented like an industrial assembly line, reflecting its mess-hall and refectory roots. The experience of a food court is neither of these. It feels neither domestic nor institutional. Because it's not clearly set apart from the surrounding mall and the crowds of strolling shoppers, it has something of the feel of the sidewalk café, except that there are no waiters and no need to buy anything. In a sense, it's like picnicking on a park bench.
I must confess that few of my architect friends share my interest in food courts. If they notice them at all, they find them commercial, lowbrow, beneath contempt. (One exception is the Toronto architect Jack Diamond, who based the design of the dining space of the student center of York University on a food court.) Those of us who find food courts, drive-in banks, and shopping malls worth a second glance owe a debt to the writing and teaching of John Brinckerhoff Jackson, who, for the last half century, has been drawing our attention to such neglected places. "I have wanted people to become familiar with the contemporary American landscape and recognize its extraordinary complexity and beauty," he writes.
* * *
When Jackson uses the word "landscape," he is referring not only to the natural countryside but to the man-made landscape, and not only to parks and gardens but to the full range of man-made environments: highways and roads, towns and neighborhoods, public buildings and houses. Now, all these categories of place, taken separately, are the objects of study of different specialists: agriculturalists, landscape architects, highway engineers, urbanists, and architectural historians. What distinguishes a landscape historian like Jackson is that he considers man-made surroundings not as works of art or engineering or economic necessity but as social artifacts, that is, as evocative backgrounds for human activities.
Jackson taught the history of the American landscape at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, for many years, and his writing appeared monthly in the magazine Landscape, which he founded and edited from 1951 to 1968. Several collections of his essays have appeared in print: Landscapes, The Necessity for Ruins, and Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. Retired from teaching for the last decade, the indefatigable octogenarian has continued to observe the contemporary landscape in its large and small manifestations: national parks and backyards, Pueblo villages and mobile-home parks, country roads and suburban driveways. And he writes bracingly about all of these, and more, in his latest book, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time.
A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time is a collection of fourteen essays, arranged in three major sections, covering roughly the Southwest (Jackson lives in New Mexico), the natural landscape (parks and gardens), and the landscape created by the automobile. This arrangement sounds quirky, but it allows the author to explore both large subjects in detail and detailed subjects in a larger setting. He writes evocatively about the prehistoric dwellings of the Pueblo peoples, for example, reminding us how conceptions of space and time are determined by culture. Unlike European-American buildings, which are conceived as a single unit subdivided into multiple rooms, Pueblo architecture is made by clustering individual rooms, usually in a stepped-back fashion, to produce the characteristic rambling buildings that resemble piles of children's toy blocks and that can still be seen in towns like Taos, New Mexico. Curiously, in view of this approach to building, the Hopi language contains no word for "room." Jackson speculates that this is because the Hopi conception of space is different from our own:
A Pueblo room (or basic dwelling) is thus nothing more than a three-dimensional interior space in which objects are contained or events occur. The room itself imposes no identity on its temporary content, and in turn the contents do not permanently characterize the room ... It is as if the occupants were saying that the single space, the single event is of no consequence: it is repetition which creates the periodic or rhythmic recurrence of spaces and events, the cosmic order.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, these structures are not marvels of building ingenuity. The walls were built of mud or stone, whatever material was close at hand. The timber beams were never planed or smoothed, and such relatively simple devices as the arch and the column were unknown. The prehistoric Pueblo builders demonstrated a cavalier disregard for natural forces: there were usually no foundations, for example, and walls that supported three or four stories were neither thickened nor properly buttressed. As a result, the buildings quickly showed the effects of erosion and decay. Citing Benjamin Lee Whorf's research, Jackson suggests that this was an indication not necessarily of technological backwardness but of a different conception of time, a conception that he calls "antihistorical." "They built as if the present order were going to last, untroubled by age and neglect and decay," he writes.
* * *
Jackson uses the discussion of prehistoric Pueblo architecture as a base from which to move on to an examination of twentieth-century houses in rural New Mexico. Here, he identifies a different conception of the dwelling. The houses he came across in the 1920s when he first visited the region were simple two- and three-room structures, more or less alike, more or less undistinguished, with walls of adobe brick and corrugated-tin roofs. To a middle-class sensibility, they appeared little more than shacks offering minimal shelter. And so, in a sense, they were, for the surrounding villages were much more important to the people who lived in them than their homes, whether for work, for recreation, or for seeing friends; even memorable family events such as anniversaries and reunions were held in church basements and school gyms rather than at people's houses. Jumping ahead sixty years, Jackson describes the mobile homes and prefabricated houses that now dot the New Mexico landscape and are home to many low-income people. The trailers are healthier and more comfortable than the old adobe shacks of the 1920s, but they are used in much the same way. Like the shacks, the trailers are more or less alike and considered useful rather than individually expressive objects.
In his discussion of mobile homes, Jackson does not deride their lack of architectural appeal, their standardized appearance, and their temporariness. He prefers to examine what it is that has made them for many the most accessible form of new housing in the nation. (According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the average price of a new mobile home in 1991 was $27,800, compared with an average sales price of a new home, including land, of $120,000.)
This tolerant attitude toward what many see as the aesthetic shortcomings of the American built landscape is typical of Jackson's writing, and it has exasperated some critics. In The Geography of Nowhere, a spirited condemnation of the American built landscape, James Howard Kunstler has written,
What J. B. Jackson appeared to lack, it turned out, were critical faculties. So caught up was he in the empirical dazzle of his observations that he seemed unable to make judgments about what he was observing. He was not interested in consequences, only manifestations.
In fact, Jackson does make aesthetic judgments, but it is true that he prefers to be an observer rather than an advocate of conventional beautification. I think the reason he appears uncritical (or is it merely tolerant?) is that often he really admires the various signs of human initiative and creativity no matter how commonplace, and he delights in the ordinary interactions that take place between people and their surroundings, whether it is the way they decorate their backyards, run small businesses out of their garages, or organize their lives along a highway — Jackson has much to say about truck stops and about the industrial landscape of loading docks and warehouses.
It's also possible that Jackson simply does not share the taste of his critics. After all, there aren't many academics who would publicly admit, "I am very pro-automobile, pro-car and pro-truck, and I can't imagine what existence would be without them." Or who would concede, "Like millions of other Americans I have no great liking for wilderness and forest, but like the majority of Americans I am fond of trees." Elsewhere he adds, "I am one of those who believe that our current guilt-ridden worship of the environment is a sign of moral and cultural disarray." Jackson is critical of groups like the Sierra Club that wish to isolate nature from human use and is more sympathetic to what he calls the humanized landscape of state parks, beaches, and recreation areas.
* * *
Three chief themes can be found in A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time. The first is the uniqueness of the American man-made landscape and the need to understand it on its own terms. Jackson writes vividly of the new kind of historical relationship that settlers in the New World developed with trees. The American forest was a resource to be exploited (unlike in most of Europe, where it was set aside as aristocratic hunting preserves), and the early colonists quickly developed ways of using timber in house construction. At the same time as trees were exploited, they were also being planted, and ever since colonial Williamsburg the tree-lined residential street has been a characteristic feature of American urbanism. So, in their day, were town squares, courthouse squares, and village greens, usually ringed by trees.
The traditional town square is a symbol of social unity and cohesion that no longer exists, however. Cities became collections of ethnic neighborhoods and eventually spread farther and wider than anyone expected. This was partly, but by no means entirely, owing to the automobile. For, as Jackson rudely reminds us, Americans have never been decided about how they ought to live:
In theory, but only in theory, we want to duplicate the traditional compact European community where everyone takes part in a rich and diversified public life. But at the same time most of us are secretly pining for a secluded hideaway, a piece of land, or a small house in the country where we can lead an intensely private nonurban existence, staying close to home.
The compact nineteenth-century railroad suburb was in many ways a solution to this dilemma, providing private houses and gardens, leafy common streets, nearby shopping areas, and access to the city. But it was quickly usurped by the automobile, which did much to break the connection between the city and its suburbs.
The ambivalence that Jackson identifies will probably take Americans in a different direction from traditional city planning. The title of this collection refers to his intriguing thesis that Americans' sense of place, their actual sense of physical belonging, is mainly conditioned not by architecture and urban design but by shared daily, weekly, and seasonal rituals and events, that is, by a sense of time. This has something to do with the immensity of the land and the relative newness of American cities and towns; on the whole, Jackson argues, there has not been enough time to establish the individuality and variety that mark the older cultures of Europe. Spaces are identified not so much by their physical features as by the events that take — and took — place in them. For example, the grand public spaces of Washington, D.C., have a lesser place in the national memory than, say, the remembered image of three-year-old John Kennedy saluting his father's funeral cortege or of Marian Anderson singing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. One might say, following Jackson, that the homecoming game matters more than the stadium, the parade more than the street, the fair more than the fairground. This also explains the relatively rapid changes that occur in American cities. Places like railroad depots, main streets, and public squares acquire significance in one period and lose it in another.
* * *
Jackson's second theme is the notion of the vernacular in building. This term was popularized by architects and architectural historians with reference to popular, traditional, nonacademic techniques and forms of building. Thus, Saxon barns and Norman farmhouses are examples of vernacular buildings, and so are New England saltboxes and southern shotgun houses. Vernacular originally implied preindustrial, folkloric creations, and some critics such as Bernard Rudofsky, the author of Architecture Without Architects, have argued the moral superiority of such "timeless" buildings. This is a romantic view. It is now beginning to be understood that just as in formal architecture the history of vernacular buildings is marked by evolution, invention, and change. It is even likely that fashion plays a role in vernacular designs. A history of popular housing in nineteenth-century America, for would show the clear influence of changing Victorian tastes in the way that parlors were decorated or in the kinds of ornaments applied to porches. The distinction between vernacular building and architecture has never been absolute: architects have often incorporated vernacular elements in their designs (most popular building methods, like wood framing or bricklaying, have vernacular origins), and vernacular building is not immune to formal architectural influences.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mysteries of the Mall by Witold Rybczynski. Copyright © 2015 Witold Rybczynski. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Part One: The Way We Live Today,
Mysteries of the Mall,
Godfathers of Sprawl,
Big-City Amenities. Trees. High-Tech Jobs. Cappuccino. Retirement Paradise. Nose Rings,
Designs for Escape,
Tomorrowland,
Thoughts on Home,
Part Two: Our Urban Condition,
Tocqueville, Urban Critic,
We're All Venetians Now,
Downtown,
Bauhaus Blunders,
Downsizing Cities,
The Fifth City,
Bollard Burg,
New York's Rumpus Room,
Why We Need Olmsted Again,
Part Three: The Art of Building,
A Distinguished Failure,
Show Dogs,
When Buildings Try Too Hard,
The Unreal America,
The Story King,
A Good Public Building,
A Blight at the Opera,
Sounds as Good as It Looks,
The Biggest Small Buildings,
Palladio in the Rough,
Part Four: Place Makers,
The Master,
Corbu,
Why Wright Endures,
Call Arup,
Mr. Success,
The Unfettered Eclectic,
A Humble Architect,
The Zen Master,
The Smart Man from Hollywood,
Notes,
Afterword and Acknowledgments,
Index,
A Note About the Author,
Also by Witold Rybczynski,
Copyright,