Deformation: Shape Changed by Distortion

INTRODUCTION

A well-known architect once famously opined, in a moment of exasperation, that 98% of what gets built and designed today is s**t. One has a suspicion that this is closer to the truth than most of us architects would care to admit. Certainly, this country’s ordinary streetscape architecture, with occasional exceptions, confronts us with a dismal array that offers precious little grace, respite or wonder. Strip centers, mcmansions, et al are easy targets, the product of a lowest common denominator condition shared among users, clients, developers, bankers, engineers, and architects themselves, notwithstanding a smattering of good individual buildings and attempts at thoughtful urban developments. Those of us with a modicum of awareness know it’s bad, from sea to shining sea, and have a pretty good idea why.

But that is not our subject. By and large the mission is to focus not on that vast and depressing expanse but on what we used to call foreground buildings: the attempts to stand out from that background. You know them when you see them, and all common building types may be represented—residential, commercial, institutional, the lot—but the distinguishing characteristic is that of standing out from the pack in some way. In and of itself this is not a bad thing; the most admired buildings from time immemorial to the present have achieved that status by doing something different: not necessarily by being flashy, but through a fresh or refined take on materials, massing, details, proportions, contextual relationships. Now, the appellation of merde was meant to apply, one presumes, to the great unwashed of architecture and cityscape, and not necessarily to our foregrounders—at least, not quite so much. But there are issues of accelerating peculiarity in recent times that do apply to many of the latter, and an examination of those is our subject.

The broad-brush evolution of architecture through history consists of long periods of development and refinement, interrupted by lacunae such as the “dark ages” or game changers such as the industrial revolution. Moving on, James Stevens Curl brings us exhaustively through the 19th and early 20th century origins of modernism in a recent controversial book, only to heap vitriol on the Le Corbusiers, Mies van der Rohes, and Gropiuses of early modernism itself, and pretty much everything that has happened since. Notwithstanding the deserved status of certain buildings from “modern times” as masterworks, one is inclined to agree that a certain measure of that vitriol is indeed warranted.