I was out of town on Labor Day. Driving on West Gray a few days ago, I noticed something was missing – half of the River Oaks Shopping Center was practically gone. I’d known for a while that this is what was to happen, still it made me sad. Soon there will be yet another big box retailer, housed in all likelihood in its respective corporate standard building – the McDonaldization of architecture at work.
The River Oaks Shopping Center was a gateway from the exclusive River Oaks neighborhood to downtown Houston. Flanked by palm trees, it provided one of only a few pleasant outdoor pedestrian shopping experiences in the city – the complex was built before the advent of air conditioning, when sidewalks where not a commodity, and when Houstonians, no doubt, were not known for being among the fattest people in the United States, if not the world. The Art Deco-ish buildings had their Houston flavor – setting back from the street to allow for a reasonable amount of parking, as opposed to today’s shopping centers where parking and the car are what drive any project.
In 1972 architects Robert Venturi, Denis Scott Brown and Steven Izenour wrote a book entitled “Learning from Las Vegas”. They analyzed the “Strip” in Las Vegas and argued for an architecture based on symbol and signs as a counterpoint to what was seen as the stark and “bor[ing]” Modernism of the earlier decades. While the merits of that proposition could be, and have been, discussed at length, we seem to have learned much more from Las Vegas – a city where large hotels and casinos are torn down only a few years after their completion to make room for newer and more lavish ones. Where, as Michael Sorkin might observe, you can be anywhere in the world and yet nowhere at all. They have perfected the art of destroying to the extent that no trace of a past is present. They have re-created a world where context has no meaning. What’s wrong with that? Everything.
A friend of mine recently put a bid on a house that was built in 1938 near Rice University – a beautiful, small, cottage, “Spec” home constructed by craftsman of the last century, having hardly moved an inch in Houston’s expansive soil after seventy years. He lost out to a builder who will tear it down and build yet another monster that will take up most of the land, fall apart a few months before the end of its one year warranty, and be just another ordinary house.
Sometime ago I saw a sign that one developer had on a 1950’s office building that was going to be torn down – his intention was to “redefine Village living” – was there anything wrong with the old definition?
Our psyche seems to moving towards different directions – at a time when for more than three decades computer memory has doubled every eighteen months, we are rapidly destroying not only what has been on earth for millions of years, but our own handiwork of a not too distant past.
So what that we throwing away architecture just like paper plates – does it matter? Architecture is a visible timeline of our collective memory and when it is lost, we lose part of our culture and part of societal soul. And what matters is that this disposable thinking permeates the rest of our lives – from our relationships with our friends, with our spouses, with our children and with our neighbors to how we see ourselves, how we see other cultures and, of course, how others see us.
We seem to be obsessed with staying young and resort to extreme surgery and toxins to give ourselves and others the impression of youth, but as I watch on the myriad home improvement shows, we are also drawn towards the “rustic” look, so much so that we “fake” the age of our furniture. I saw one program where the host built a new table and then whipped out a heavy chain and started beating the hapless four-legged object she just created – to give it that “distressed” look, I suppose. She then painted it, but took out a blow-dryer to crackle the paint . . . I wonder if her diamond rings are real.
Who are we and where do we come from – obviously we can’t handle the truth.
I lived in Barcelona for several months in 2005 – the coolest city in the world. What makes that city special for me, is that fact I could walk by two thousand year old Roman ruins, cramped medieval streets, early 20th century Modernismo buildings and just completed contemporary structures, all within a few minutes. There is a sense of identity and pride whose buzz one cannot help but feel – maybe that is what kept the Catalan people and their culture alive during the dark times in their history when they were oppressed and not even allowed to speak their native tongue.
We can do better.
the City 