Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [130]
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Style seems superficial in an age of ideas. To a modern sensibility the role of classification historically played by style is instead played by ideology. Style is about a building’s looks; ideology is about the ideas that cause it to look that way. Ideology implies valuation, since some ideas are more significant, more appropriate, or simply better than others. Because certain ideas lead to certain looks, style and ideology are inevitably associated. For this reason, traditional architecture may no longer be considered simply in its own terms but instead as representative of a traditional outlook and all that implies.
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By this logic, Classicism is verboten because of its attractiveness to the Third Reich, British imperialists, and Southern slave owners, among others—including, paradoxically, democratic Greeks, Jeffersonian Republicans, and the Works Progress Administration under Roosevelt. Unfortunately, this sort of guilt-by-association quickly turns into a no-win game. For example, modernism was appropriated by some of the worst totalitarian regimes, so by the same logic, it should no longer be an acceptable style. One can imagine a future in which, as every new style eventually becomes associated with some villain government or evil corporation, the only acceptable style remaining is the one that hasn’t been invented yet.
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Colleagues who complain to us about Seaside usually have two criticisms. The first is the restrictiveness of the architectural code, and the second is the significant number of overdecorated “gingerbread” cottages there. They are usually surprised to learn that the gingerbread houses at Seaside demonstrate not the requirements of the (largely styleneutral) code but the code’s inability to overcome the traditional tastes of the American housing consumer. The only way to wipe out the hated traditional architecture would have been to tighten the hated code.
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(Harvard Graduate School of Design News, Winter/Spring 1993, 13.) In all fairness, it must be acknowledged that the academy is aware of its own neuroses. Jorge Silvetti, the chairman of Harvard’s architecture program, has written, “ … we are becoming more and more like alchemists or magicians—every project becoming a private and arcane search for a secret formula for bliss, or a ‘voodoo’ act of magic empowerment” (Jorge Silvetti, “The Symptoms of Malaise,” 108).
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Needless to say, in such an intellectually limiting environment, the concepts of traditional neighborhood design are dismissed immediately as too black-and-white, too probusiness, and much too … traditional. Students in these schools who advocate traditional neighborhood design are generally regarded, by their own account, as campus nerds par excellence.
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In our “highly evolved” regulatory system, this process is most often accomplished through expensive lawsuits, as documented in The Death of Common Sense. In light of this situation, a number of not-for-profit organizations have arisen over the years—the National Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen—capable of throwing legal firepower at otherwise unresolvable problems. As of yet, there is no such advocate for the built environment. But the sophisticated legal strategies that have succeeded in attacking air pollution and corporate negligence are also available to activists concerned similarly about their cities. Tough times call for tough measures, and activists should not shy away from using every means at their disposal in defense of their urban environment.
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Only a brief explanation is necessary to demonstrate why the private sector alone cannot always be trusted to make places of lasting value.