How Big is Too Big?

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2008: the world is watching as a building rises to surpass the height of all previous human-made objects. Its architects and builder will not reveal the final altitude of their creation. Size matters. They won’t accept second place in the tall building Olympics. How big will it be?

Most of us know the end of that story–the Burj Dubai became the world’s tallest building at 818 meters (2684 feet). We live in a society obsessed with growth, wealth, obsessive eating, size, mass, volume, area. It’s all about big. Huge even. Everything has to be bigger, better, faster, louder, more powerful, more luxurious. The Biggest Loser vies with Survivor for ratings on television. It’s ironic that the biggest losers will be humans when the global energy crisis leaves little to sustain life. The Survivors will be the cockroaches.

A profound new book by Quaker economists has posed the question of why seven billion people continue to behave as if the earth’s resources were infinite. Each month economists publish figures for GDP percentage increases, stock index gains, inflation, national wealth. The message is that growth in economic activity, increases in monetary wealth, and expansion of all kinds of technology will outpace the degradation of the earth’s systems and save the planet from ruin before 2100. Most ecologists are not sanguine about these prospects.

Instead, Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver argue that humankind should seek a “right relationship” between sustainable economic activity and the earth’s delicate biosphere. All current evidence from climatologists, biologists, ecologists and other earth scientists is that the current pace of economic growth is not only too great, but that significant retrenchment will be required if humans are to save themselves and their environment from catastrophic ruin in the next century. What does this mean for a society that wants to build “bigger and better” with every new technological leap?

Among the prescient messages in this book is that one of our society’s most destructive obsessions is the quest for bigger economies and more stuff. While many of us profess a desire to live with less, we fail to understand that less does not mean a small step backward in personal wealth and consumption. Less means a complete transformation of our expectations for personal fulfillment, affluence, material wealth and physical well-being.

When it comes to how we live, and the spaces we inhabit, our vocabulary and standards for adequate accommodation are about to change in ways we never thought possible. Americans in particular will be forced to live with less. Our houses will be subdivided, our rooms diminished in size, our possessions curtailed. And we will become wealthier as members of the commonwealth of life on our planet, if not at the bank or stock brokerage.

Alice Tully’s makeover: dry, dull, uncomfortable

Among the New York Times’ consistently excellent music critics, Allan Kozinn is often the odd man out. He writes intelligently about concerts on the margins, while also standing up for many traditional performances and artists of the old guard. He sometimes sounds a bit prickly, which is one of the things I most admire about him. Today he struck a blow for those of us who loved the “old” Alice Tully Hall and are sad to see it gone.

Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, the architects of the project, are freshening up Lincoln Center, ostensibly because the “closed and elitist” language of this 1960s landmark has turned away the concertgoing public. As with much that is transforming American cultural institutions during the recession, Lincoln Center’s motives for changing its buildings and public spaces are rather short-sighted. Putting more bodies in the seats at the expense of preserving the longstanding value of a cultural landmark, the LC administration hired a trendy, “conceptual” architectural firm to update its public spaces. Unfortunately, a casualty of this makeover was one of the city’s best concert venues.

Kozinn’s appraisal of the Alice Tully Hall renovation is written from the point of view of a discerning listener as well that of a regular patron who demands a commodious venue in which to enjoy many kinds of music. He does not swoon, as many have, over the “transparency” of the cantilevered lobby looming over Broadway. He finds the high tech lighting in the new hall rather gimmicky after the first visit. He minces no words about his view of the acoustics and general performance of the new hall–”I hate the new Tully Hall.”–strong condemnation from a leading music critic in view of the almost universal praise that followed the opening some months ago.

To those who have followed the career of Diller and Scofidio, Kozinn’s views should come as no surprise. Like many contemporary “starchitects,” these designers care little about the experience of patrons who regularly use their buildings. They were among the most arcane, abstruse and arid of the “conceptual” artist-architects of the 1970s and 1980s. Mixing performance, texts and often unbuildable collages in their early work, Diller and Scofidio developed their reputations as “paper architects.” Like Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, and Daniel Liebeskind, they professed their disdain for building–that is, until they began to make money doing it.

It is little wonder, then, that Kozinn finds the new concert hall numbingly dull, colorless, and inhospitable to music. He questions the decision to fill the bright, large lobby with a restaurant rather than leaving space for patrons to mill about the space. He finds little to praise about the hall’s new interior. Pietro Belluschi’s warm wood and comfortable red seats in the old hall were beloved of patrons. I remember many wonderful performances in the Belluschi hall, which was intimate, sonically rich, and popular with performers. Why was it renovated? I suspect that the administration and the architects simply saw a chance to “re-brand” the hall with a hot new designer’s label. Their attitude shows clearly, if ironically, in the choice of a new location for the portrait of Alice Tully that once stood in the lobby–a small vestibule adjacent to the ladies’ rest room.

No one questions the need for a larger lobby and a better circulation system at Tully. The original location at the back of the Juilliard School and tortured entry sequence were hated by everyone who used the facility. The architects improved this immeasurably. Give them credit for this modest accomplishment. But don’t be dazzled by shiny new surfaces and expensive technology, overlooking the obvious flaws in this ill-conceived project. Allan Kozinn has not bought the “propoganda line” that Lincoln Center is employing to sell its renovation plans. To wit, that the new architecture will create “open,” people-friendly spaces that will bring new audiences to what was once a “closed citadel” of the arts. Perhaps New Yorkers should be skeptical too.

Renzo Piano, stealth classicist

The opening of Renzo Piano’s new Modern Art wing at the Art Institute of Chicago has won him another rave from critics throughout the U.S. Even the New York Times’s Nicolai Ouroussoff, generally a curmudgeon when it comes to Piano’s work, granted him a positive nod. His only complaint was that the country was feeling the effects of “Renzo Piano fatigue” as a result of his slew of recent commissions  in America. Why should this be the case?

Piano is a suave, cultured and disciplined designer who engenders confidence in institutional clients, both in the U.S. and abroad. His success is  hard won and, in my view, entirely deserved. While other international starchitects like Daniel Liebeskind, Rem Koohaas, and Zaha Hadid plop their trademark works in cities, expecting adulation for ignoring their local audience and trashing the urban environment, Piano carefully knits his buildings into the fabric of the places he encounters. While there is a superficial similarity to his work–most buildings are light, glassy and structurally innovative–he tries, sometimes to a fault, to find a balance between his interventions and the character of the buildings which set the stage for the new work. This is true at the Morgan Library entrance pavilion, which must attach to three disparate urban buildings (including the greatest classical building in New York–Charles McKim’s original library of 1909). It is also true of his California Academy of Science in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, a building that effortlessly includes an older Beaux Arts museum into a larger new facility while providing numerous sustainable systems that make the structure as contemporary as possible. His light, beautiful, and classical museum so outshines its clumsy Herzog & DeMeuron neighbor (the De Young) that visitors may wonder how the Swiss architects were ever considered for their commission at all.

There are moments when one architect achieves a pre-eminent position in the global marketplace, often because his work strikes a chord with stylemakers, critics and politicians. This was the case with Frank Gehry around the time of his Disney hall and Guggenheim Bilbao projects. It was surely the case when Louis Kahn unveiled his brilliant Kimball museum and Salk Center designs. Today’s master builder is Renzo Piano, an architect who has found a contemporary answer to the world’s need for a classical balance and assurance amidst chaos and uncertainty. He has made his mark quietly, largely without pandering to avant-garde critics, and the patronage network has responded with the best institutional commissions of the last decade. On balance, Piano has given us work that will outlast the flash-in-the-pan quasi-sculptures of Gehry, and perhaps rival the serene masterpieces of Kahn. That is an achievement worth celebrating, and Americans should be pleased with their good fortune and good judgment in choosing an architect of such gifts.

There goes the neighborhood

This week’s  New  York Times featured two disturbing articles that reinforce points made in earlier posts on this blogsite. Both suggest that the built environment of New York City, its wonderful urban fabric and historic neighborhoods, is not getting the attention it deserves from those who design and govern it. Santiago Calatrava’s transit hub for the World Trade Center site, years in design, has been beaten to death by bureaucrats eager to cut costs and improve anti-terrorist features. The Spanish architect works best when he is given relatively free reign, and this work shows him at his worst (as Nicolai Ouroussoff rightly points out). Give the Port Authority and the city government an “F” on this one. The WTC/Ground Zero site was the last best chance for the city to create a significant urban design with monumental features and parks. That chance is gone now.

On the other side of Manhattan, the neighborhoods that comprise an expanded South Village historic district bordering the Lower East Side, have fared no  better in the hands of the Landmark’s Preservation Commission. For two years the LPC has dragged its feet on scheduling hearings to designate the new historic district. Meanwhile, at least three of the area’s most important historic structures have either been demolished by greedy developers or renovated unsympathetically, voiding their significance. Robin Pogrebin has been following the controversy, and her story paints a depressing picture of the machinations of the one civic organization that is supposed to protect the neighborhoods of America’s greatest city. The LPC is letting the foxes in the henhouse; be afraid.

When will money stop shouting?

As America faces the consequences of eight years of frenzied consumption, unbridled greed and a culture of “pay to play” in all walks of life, perhaps we will learn some lessons about the significance of money. It has appeared to many in the Bushwacked age that people with a lot of gelt were smarter than those who decided not to make mammon their god. As an architect, I’ve seen this in many of my clients–success on Wall Street translated into an arrogance about nearly everything. Listening to the advice of a qualified architect was not on their agenda. Kings of bond trading and queens of derivatives went around acting like their knowledge and wisdom were boundless. Mr. Madoff has proven conclusively that a lot of them were fools.

The sheer stridency of our culture has worn down many of us who believe that wisdom comes only through experience, and that knowledge has to be cultivated in an atmosphere of humility and respect for others. Expertise, artistry, craftsmanship, leadership and other salubrious qualities cannot be purchased at auction. Moreover, he who shouts the loudest and carries the biggest sheaf of credit cards should not  be granted credibility in areas of public discourse in which he otherwise possesses no credentials.

It is time for Americans to look at civic virtue through the lense of past ages and learn from the history of greed and corruption. During the Roaring Twenties, the French Ancien Regime, the Regency, the reign of Czar Nicholas Romanov and other ages of excess those with money shouted and people listened. The results of their gullibility and short sighted reverence for the plutocracy are written in the tragic history of failed regimes and ecomomic crashes.

It will be refreshing to go forward under new leadership that does not reward aggression in any form, but especially the kind of win at all costs view of success that has characterized the last eight years. When money does more than talk, but rather drowns out civil discourse as it has in recent history, the consequences are devastating–to morals, education, politics, the environment–indeed, nearly everything a democratic society depends upon. Perhaps at the next town meeting we will be able to listen intently to a modest farmer, philosophy professor, fiddle player, or shoemaker with respect, unconcerned about her net worth or rank in the Fortune 500.

LPC on Trial

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission is one of the most successful preservation agencies in the United States, if not the world. It has saved tens of thousands of buildings in a great city, and continues to do excellent work. Unfortunately, its reputation has been tarnished in recent years by an autocratic, politically motivated chairman, commissioners who are too ready to approve questionable projects,  and a mayor who likes to pull strings for developers.

An excellent series of articles by Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times has exposed the workings of the Bloomberg era LPC.  Pogrebin skillfully chronicles the tortured process under which developers and preservation advocates battle for control of land and buildings in the city. Ever since the New York City Planning Commission abrogated its power to actively create a vision for New York, the city has been in the thrall of developers like Donald Trump and Stephen Rattner, who press for deals with the mayor with little public scrutiny. Out of frustration the neighborhood boards have turned to preservation as a means of slowing growth–hence the present contentious atmosphere.

The LPC is overburdened with applications for minor alterations to the thousands of buildings in its care. It has a staff of only 17 researchers and operates under a tiny budget. Adding another layer of oversight to its already beleaguered staff has nearly broken the back of a once proud organization. To make matters worse, under Robert Tierney’s direction the commission has neglected to examine questionable development proposals and has permitted the demolition of many eligible buildings, leading many to question the political motivations of the chairman. His close ties to Mayor Bloomberg and the mayor’s pro-development stance leave the impression that his agenda is hardly pro-preservation. Moreover, his commission has been lax in permitting radical modernist proposals, like the addition to the Harvard Club, to go forward, damaging precious landmarks and delicate streetscapes.

The Times has taken on a powerful political constituency in the real estate and development interests by publishing this groundbreaking series of articles. It is now time for New York’s citizens to demand a change in LPC leadership, and for the preservationists to take back the ground they have lost under Mayor Bloomberg, especially as he pursues his bid for a third term.

Messing with a Masterpiece

Historic preservation is an art, not a science. As such, it demands aesthetic creativity equal to that of painting or music, indeed any art. Only recently have architects and conservators begun to think of building preservation in this way. Yet the challenges of preserving the world’s most precious architecture are pressing professionals and patrons to find more creative solutions in the face of diminishing resources.

Paul Le Clerc, the director of the New York Public Library, is well aware of these challenges. He presides over one of the nation’s greatest cultural institutions and cares for an architectural treasure beloved of all New Yorkers–Carrere & Hastings’ main library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, finished in 1911. Though attached to an elite institution that caters to scholars, Le Clerc sees himself as a populist. His mission, he believes, is to take the NY library system into the information age. Two years ago, he was presented with a pot of gold by a Wall Street tycoon with which to transform the city’s library system. With that gift began a travesty that will have profound consequences for New York and for historic preservation as a discipline.

After many months of interviews and deliberations, Le Clerc and the library’s board have chosen Sir Norman Foster to be the architect of a massive renovation of the 42nd Street building. Perhaps sensing public outrage, the New York Times buried the announcement on the back page of its arts section. Accompanying the article was a piece by the Times architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff that began by praising the building as “one of the most glorious examples of civic architecture in America” and asking “Why tinker with it?” Unfortunately Ouroussoff can never resist a chance to trumpet the virtues of European avant-garde architects, and launched into a vigorous defense of the library’s plan and its choice of architect. Despite his spurious arguments, New Yorkers who love this extraordinary building will be outraged not only by the “hubris” (Ouroussoff’s word) of the library administration and board, but by its selection of one of the most anti-preservation architects in the world to carry out the plan.

There are so many things wrong with this choice that it is hard to know where to begin. The initial decision to gut the library’s innovative stack spaces and to make them into public spaces was suspect when examined from a number of different points of view. Why was it necessary to have these facilities in the main library when a technology branch across the street had just closed? Were the scholars, specialists, and tourists who value this building not reason enough to maintain it? How was it that the board chose to relocate one of the most valuable, indeed priceless, collections of books, manuscripts and printed matter on Earth in a vast subterranean space below Bryant Park? The board must also have considered the kind of criticism it might encounter over changing the interior of what is arguably the best modern library in the United States, and one that achieved its significance partly as result of the design of the stacks. Why is there a double standard when it comes to other, unimpeachably “modernist” landmarks such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Kimball Museum in Fort Worth, or the Whitney? These buildings actually required expansion (not an issue at NYPL), yet when excellent architects were chosen to create additions, the critics and design community went berserk. Their argument–masterpieces must retain their integrity, and no addition would be acceptable for works of such stature. It appears that for the “design community” certain masterpieces are expendable, others inviolable.

Then there is the question of what kind of architect might be chosen for such a renovation. America has a large, distinguished community of traditional, classical architects who were capable of creating a seamless and harmonious interior renovation, perhaps even maintaining some of the stacks in their present position. The board members made it clear in recent press statements that they were not interested in this approach. Ouroussoff was quick to come to their defense: “This [traditional] approach trivializes history by blurring the distinction between old and new. The result is a watered-down vision of history–or worse, kitsch.” This well-worn and completely spurious argument holds no water for intelligent patrons throughout the world, from the Trustees of the Harvard Business School and Princeton University to the Dons at Cambridge University, who have commissioned magnificent traditional buildings from superb architects such as Robert Stern, Demitri Porphyrios, and Quinlan Terry. Moreover, it ignores the view of history that is most relevant to the 21st century, instead clinging to a 19th century Hegelian ideology that philosophers abandoned decades ago. “One has to embrace one’s time,” said board member Catherine Marron, forgetting that our century is full of pluralistic responses to history.

I’ll address the issue of why preservation of the New York Public Libary deserves a better architect in my next post. But suffice it to say that I don’t believe that Norman Foster is “as good as Carrere & Hastings” (a firm I’ve researched and written a book on), nor do I think that he is capable of designing “a second masterpiece” inside a virtually windowless space of 1.25 million square feet that was designed specifically for the storage of books.

Building on a slab

In the last post I talked a bit about a new cable TV series on architecture school. I caught the next episode and it answered a few questions and raised a few others. Here is my take on the adventures of these plucky students and their teachers as they began to build in New Orleans.

Byron Mouton, the studio critic in the class, has passed my litmus test for young design teachers–he’s no flash in the pan aesthete. He knows how to build on the gumbo soil of the bayous on the Gulf Coast. And he leads his students by example, not by fiat. Even my qualms about letting the students vote for their favorite scheme to build seems now like a wise decision. Taking a relatively average, simple design and making it into a liveable house has made for some interesting television. Since designers are not always given the green light on the “best” solution in a given set, making the best of a given circumstance can teach some valuable lessons.

Following the tension-filled episode in which the class learned which house would be constructed, “Digging a Hole” was a wonderful tonic. The students got a good dose of reality when they put shovels in the ground and collaborated on the construction of “their” design (having forgotten the sting of not being chosen in the competition).  Architecture is by and large collaborative, and this exercise shifted the students attention toward the team aspect of projects. A good example of this was featured in the episode, when three students went to the house built during the previous year to decide how to finish off their exterior stairs. An intelligent group decision was reached through critical evaluation of options and a consensus on which best fit the intentions behind the design. Professor Mouton was not present, having sent the young architects off to do their own thing. Throughout this first stage of construction, the master was in the background. Filmakers asked students to explain the intricacies of the construction, including such things as hurricane straps on the sills, and termite shields. Perhaps their best moment came when explaining why their house would feature a modified version of “slab on grade” construction, with piers set to a level determined by flood and hurricane data.

Why is building on a real site such a great opportunity for young architects? First, it gives students a chance to see the process by which architecture is made from beginning to end, not just the portion that portends to art or concepts. Second, it teaches patience and humility, two key virtues not often imbued on young designers. Third, it exposes design novices to the “user” or client in ways that can’t be simulated in an average studio.

If the change in the attitudes of the students is any guage, the building process has really raised their aptitude and interest–kicking it up a notch, as Emeril Lagasse says. The concrete platform that stood after the last episode represented a lot more than just a building foundation, it was a solid basis for making a career in architecture, and one that more architecture schools should offer their beginning students.

Why Modernism isn’t modern anymore, part 7: the urban wasteland

Among the most beautiful cities in the world, places that attract tourists and art lovers, not one was planned or constructed by exponents of Modernist ideas. Brazilia, Chandigarh and Milton Keynes are heroic failures that will never develop into places that people love as they do Paris, Rome, New Orleans, or New York.

As Aldo Rossi explained in his book, The Architecture of the City, the special cities that we value as works of art in themselves were the product of the minds of designers who looked at urbanism as a form of cultural expression, not those who reduced planning to formulas for traffic management, maximum density, or housing built for the lowest possible price . His critique of Modernist ideas about the city helped to sink the ideas of functional city planning and zoning that had driven planning during the mid-20th century.

Since the 1980s, much of the world has abandoned the idea that it is possible to construct a beautiful city. Once the urbanistic formulas of the Modernists were discredited, planning itself entered a period of decline in influence. Despite the excellent studies of successful traditional urbanism written by Jane Jacobs, Oscar Newman, Christopher Alexander, and Kevin Lynch among other mid-century critics of Modernism, city governments largely ignored the new research, instead opting to abolish their planning departments or put them into the hands of so-called policy analysts. This happened in New York following the Lindsay administration, when the city’s fiscal crisis became an excuse to dismantle one of the most creative and vibrant urban design departments in America. Since then, “planning” in New York has been the province of back room deals between developers and the mayor.

The wasteland of Modernist urbanism has been depicted in numerous films and novels, from Jacques Tati’s Msr. Hulot satires of the late 1950s and 1960s to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil in the 1980s. Its effects have been studied by sociologists and historians since the late 1940s, when “urban renewal” began to transform the dense cores of many large cities into versions of LeCorbusier’s famous “Ville Radieuse” or Radiant City. For decades the alienation engendered by “towers in the park” was ignored because its effects were felt mainly by the dispossessed and poor, people of color condemned to life in “the projects.” Only in recent decades have psychologists begun to recognize its symptoms in the middle and upper class residents of “garden suburbs” whose alienation stemmed from similar conditions.

Episodes of the Jetson’s television series made the dream of city life in the future into a lark–talking to friends via TV links, whizzing from market to work in floating cars, and spending days alone with robot companions seemed romantic and fun. But when that dream became a reality a decade ago, people noticed that they were lonely, depressed and psychologically damaged. The massive separation that technologies of transportation, communication and building have provided has its dark side–the loss of community.

That loss was obvious to many critics of Modernism long before it became the subject of books and the popular media. In the 1970s a group of Yale-trained architects influenced by Vincent Scully and Denise Scott Brown designed the Florida town of Seaside as if it were an old-fashioned pedestrian-friendly American village. Liz Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany subsequently joined with like-minded urbanists on the West Coast to form the Congress for the New Urbanism, which now has tens of thousands of members. Their research showed that many of the cardinal tenets of Modernist planning led to abject failures in the areas that they were intended to ameliorate–traffic, land use, hygiene, air quality, environmental conservation. Indeed, nothing promulgated by Modernist architects has been as destructive as their vision of the new city. Throughout the globe, in Beijing, Jakarta, Mexico City, Singapore and Johannesburg the same sterile, vacuous, scale-less wasteland is replicated amidst ribbons of highways and traffic jams.

Unfortunately, the New Urbanism came too late to change the policies that created zoning, building and planning ordinances in use throughout the United States and most of the developed world. Since the early 1990s the CNU has offered new solutions to zoning, transportation planning, and housing, sponsoring design conferences and charrettes in troubled places such as post-Katrina Mississippi. But resistance to common sense solutions to restoring community has been stubborn, especially among academic architects and planners. Their defense rests mainly on the claim that governments and developers fail to create the “creative” Modernist urbanism that exists in their drawings and virtual computer models. The users and patrons are at fault.

The world is aware of the failure of Modernism as an ideology driving urban planning and community building. Even many architects who design abstract, high tech buildings are critical of existing strategies for laying out streets, squares and public spaces in the city. The recent Sundance TV series, “Architecture School” makes this clear. In the film, Tulane University professors accept the existing urban fabric of New Orleans as right for regular folks. The community comes before architecture, and students learn a lot about the social basis for their discipline as they try to design a house in a traditional neighborhood. Unfortunately, when a resident asks why all of their proposed buildings are “ugly” they have nothing to say. The double standard applies here as in most situations–the professors can accept the old city as a viable pattern for development, but the architecture must be new, radical, innovative, and Modernist. So New Orleans, one of the most beautiful and unique cities in the world, will get a few more alienating icons. It has endured hurricanes, poverty, war, and the ravages of a mighty river for centuries. A couple more ugly houses won’t even be noticed.

Why Modernism isn’t modern anymore part 6, choking on monoculture

Food analogies seem to register with Americans, who besides being obsessed with their bodies are likely to tune into at least one cooking show a week on TV. So let me suggest that the global built environment has begun to resemble one huge fast food franchise–a vast MacDonald’s that has spread to the farthest corners of the planet. What Modernists dreamed of–a world of functional, flat-roofed machines for living and working undifferentiated by place or culture–has come to pass. Unfortunately for those of us who like a varied diet and appreciate local cuisine, the architectural monoculture has obliterated local building traditions in the same way that global fast food and big box stores have destroyed local color in food and retail goods. James Howard Kunstler, the author of the Geography of Nowhere, saw this trend two decades ago, and continues to rail against its effects in his recent books.

One of the things that disappointed me most about the Olympic icons built in Beijing was how little they seemed to acknowledge the rich history of Chinese art and architecture, particularly a reverence for landscape. When in the past architects designed for a place, they tended to bow to the cultural milieu in choosing forms and materials of local significance. The Chinese are a conservative and tradition-bound culture when it comes to eating, and every visitor is enchanted by local cuisines throughout the huge country. They entertained the world with their distinctive cuisine. But when it came to building, they bowed to the monoculture of Modernism. Beijing looks like any other large city–it’s just bigger.

Though most of the world’s esteemed architects pay lip service to giving their buildings a place-specific tone, very few actually employ local building materials or traditional crafts in their work at any scale. They explain that modern building technology has moved beyond such niceties. Sometimes when a local material is employed, it is treated “critically” or given a shocking, new context so that people will recognize its position of alienation. It’s a cynical nod to the locals.

Indeed, the gatekeepers of high culture around the world–patrons who hire the handful of name-brand architects–are not interested in maintaining provincial flavor in their new museums, theatres, concert halls and academic campuses. They purchase one-of-a-kind buildings distinguished mainly by the name of the genius who created the design. There is an international franchise in high-fashion building design that closely resembles haute couture clothing.

The rest of the buildings that are springing up in fast-growing areas like China, India, the Nevada desert, Dubai, and resort areas around the world do not benefit from the touch of genius. They are part of the international development business that generates high rise buildings, shopping malls, townhouse developments, office parks, country clubs and all the other shelter required for capitalism no matter what the climate or terrain. And all of this architecture looks the same, wherever it is constructed. It’s cold, alienating, scaleless, and it helps sell international brands like Coca Cola, Exxon and Michelin. But the world is changing its attitude toward the environment, and sustainability is leading us back to local and regional ways of doing things.

The Italians, for whom food and wine are sacred, have resisted the monoculture better than most countries. Their answer to the numbing sameness that pervades the media as well as the environment is the slow food movement. With the increasing desire for revival of local agriculture and organic food, this movement has begun to influence the rest of the world, even the United States. Instead of eating efficiently, ingesting food produced thousands of miles away by Big Ag, people  who care about the earth are starting to care about where the food comes from, and how it was grown. Locavores are raising their voices for maintaining traditional agriculture. Where are the proponents of local building traditions? Can we have a slow building movement?

The answer is yes. Traditional building groups like INTBAU in Europe and the Institute for Traditional Architecture in the U.S. are growing in influence. The Prince of Wales Institute in the UK has been sponsoring educational programs and projects for two decades, building the town of Poundsbury according to local planning and building traditions. New schools are training the next generation of masters in the Building Arts–blacksmithing, timber framing, wood carving and joinery, masonry, metal casting– just as Pierre de Coubertin’s Les Compagnons du Devoir has done for the youth of France since the early 20th century. To be sure, much of this renaissance in old world craft has served the building preservation industry, but some has begun to spread to construction in new buildings.

Public reaction against the alienating monoculture that surrounds us in the media and the environment is mounting throughout the world. Only when the public demands more from architects, developers and institutional patrons will the numbing sameness of Modernist design begin to give way to a more humanistic way of sustaining the built environment.