Notice: Trying to get property 'ID' of non-object in /code/wp-content/themes/thenation-2023/functions.php on line 3332 How Did Americans Come to Love “Mid-Century Modern”? https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mid-century-modern-furniture/Marianela D’AprileJan 23, 2024

Solving the riddle of America’s obsession with postwar design and furniture.

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Culture / Books & the Arts / January 23, 2024

Freedom Furniture

How did Americans come to love “mid-century modern”?

How Did Americans Come to Love “Mid-Century Modern”?

Solving the riddle of America’s obsession with postwar design and furniture.

Marianela D’Aprile
Niels Vodder display wtih furniture designed by Finn Juhl, Cabinetmakers Guild Exhibition, 1949.
Niels Vodder display with furniture designed by Finn Juhl, Cabinetmakers Guild Exhibition, 1949. (Photograph: Aage Strüwing, © Jørgen Strüwing)

Type the words “mid-century modern” or “Danish Modern” into the search bar on Facebook Marketplace, and you’re just as likely to see a fat floral sofa as you are a sleek credenza. A search for “MCM” on Craigslist in the New York City area returns listings for, among other things, a lamp whose base is composed of chrome-plated spheres; a set of two oak chairs with square backs; and a painting most likely made by someone at a class where they were drinking wine as they wielded their brush. We all know what actual mid-century modern furniture looks like: expanses of teak, tables resting on hairpin legs, brass hardware, and natural finishes, as well as wool upholstery in shades of olive, ocher, and orange. The items for sale online are not any of that, but the term proliferates anyway—MCM furniture is what people want to buy.

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The Chieftain and the Chair: The Rise of Danish Design in Postwar America

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For some 15 years, mid-century modern has been a staple at vintage shops, at estate sales, and in the online stores that sell similarly styled pieces. The take-off of the trend is hard to pinpoint precisely, but it coincides with two disparate phenomena: the premiere of AMC’s Mad Men in July of 2007 and the Great Recession, which arguably started only five months later. While the latter spurred in Americans a nostalgia for the booming economy of the postwar era, the former showed them exactly what that era looked like. Every Sunday night, there it was: the clothes, the hairstyles, the accessories, and, crucially, the interiors—apartments on the Upper East Side, houses in Ossining, and brand-new offices in Midtown.

Soon, companies jumped on the mid-century bandwagon. Banana Republic launched a 1960s collection: slim-fitting suits with skinny ties and sheath dresses with white piping. So did Estée Lauder: lipsticks and nail polishes and powders in various saturations of rosy pink, all in gold packaging. The furniture giant West Elm looked to cash in too, producing dozens of MCM-inspired pieces. (A search for “mid-century” right now on the West Elm website yields some 400 results.) Most notoriously, in 2014, the Williams Sonoma–owned company started producing a splayed-legged, square-cushioned sofa called “the Peggy,” after Mad Men’s most popular female character. The Peggy, which retailed for around $1,200, was a veritable disaster of furniture design. After an essay by Anna Hezel in The Awl (titled “Why Does This One Couch From West Elm Suck So Much?”) went viral in early 2017, the company started offering full refunds to anyone who’d purchased it. But West Elm’s other MCM items continued to sell by the container load.

Maggie Taft’s new book, The Chieftain and the Chair: The Rise of Danish Design in Postwar America, ends where the above story begins. Her aim is to examine where those teak expanses and hairpin legs came from in the first place. Taft explores the history of Danish modern design through two pieces of furniture: Hans Wegner’s Round Chair, better known as simply “the Chair,” and Finn Juhl’s Chieftain reading chair. The former is a basic dining chair, designed as part of a set, whose defining element is a single, semicircular wooden form that serves as both back and armrests—hence the “Round” in its moniker. The latter is a cushioned chair upholstered in leather, with wide armrests and a high, regal back rising above its seat. Their differences—the Chair’s slight size and the Chieftain’s heftiness; the Chair’s huge popularity in America and the Chieftain’s relative lack thereof; Juhl’s architectural education and Wegner’s training in cabinetmaking—allow Taft to develop a succinct but multilayered history of Danish Modernism.

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During and after the Second World War, Taft tells her readers, a pair of schools in Copenhagen—one training architects and the other cabinetmakers—formed the center of gravity for Danish design. Juhl had attended the demanding and prestigious Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi, Arkitektskole (Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture), graduating in 1934. Around that same year, Wegner moved to Copenhagen from his hometown of Tønder, where he had worked for three years as a journeyman in a cabinetmaking shop run by Hermann Friedrich Nicolaus Stahlberg. As people moved from the countryside to the cities (and thus from houses to apartments) during and after the war, a new generation of Danish designers focused on creating pieces of furniture that could fit easily into small spaces and were adapted to the realities of postwar urban life. By the early 1950s, designers and furniture makers in all of the Nordic countries—not just Denmark—had ventured forth in search of new markets. Pooling their resources, they first targeted consumers in the rest of Europe. Eventually they found in the United States a growing base of customers with deepening pockets who, thanks to government assistance, were purchasing larger homes that they needed to furnish.

In order to fill all those homes with Danish furniture, however, the makers and producers had to find ways to get people in the US to buy it. So they employed what Taft calls “tastemakers”—magazine editors, architects, and curators, among others—to help sell the style. Danish Modern furniture, according to the story these tastemakers told, was simple and long-lasting, humble yet refined. It was built for urban and urbane living, but it could also be purchased by the masses—thoughtful, tasteful, and perfect for those with small apartments. “Even the poorest Dane” could afford it, reported a Cincinnati Post article quoted by Taft. Yet none of that was close to the truth: From the outset, mid-century modern furniture was not for anyone but the well-off. The designs were delicate and often mannered, and the pieces were out of the financial reach of the vast majority of Danes—most of whom still outfitted their homes in the bulkier neoclassical styles—as well as most consumers elsewhere in Europe and the United States. But the idea that this furniture was long-lasting and already hugely popular took hold regardless, helping to boost its reputation among American tastemakers and consumers alike.

Despite the gap between marketing and reality, Wegner’s Chair eventually became so ubiquitous in the US that the demand far exceeded the capabilities of the workshop, owned by cabinetmaker Johannes Hansen, that produced it. As Taft explains:

When the Chicagoans called, they didn’t want just four chairs. They wanted four hundred. [But] Hansen couldn’t fill the order. Like most cabinetmakers, his operation was small. He had only five craftsmen in his workshop, too few to make so many chairs in any reasonable time frame. And then there was the matter of credit: Hansen would need a down payment to secure the materials and labor needed for so large an order, while Americans were accustomed to a forty-day grace period between placing an order and the first payment coming due.

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A new program of mass production had to be introduced. Eventually, American manufacturers moved in to fill the production gap. The furniture manufacturer Baker hired Finn Juhl to design its Baker Modern line, and he made changes to his earlier classic designs (such as the Chieftain) to make them easier to manufacture on a large scale and to distinguish from their Danish counterparts. Instead of teak—widely used in Denmark because of that country’s colonial relationship with Thailand, where it grows natively—Baker chose American walnut. The Chieftain’s horned vertical back supports—originally produced by the cabinetmaker Niels Vodder with a step joint, a sophisticated move that allows two pieces of wood to meet at an acute angle—were elongated to maintain the overall shape while simplifying the joinery process. It was at this point that Danish Modern started to become all-American, leading to the eventual conflation of the terms “Danish Modern” and “mid-century modern.”

By the late 1950s, almost every American furniture company had a Danish line. “Advertised as ‘Copenhagen Danish Modern’ (Lane), ‘Danish-inspired’ and ‘Royal Dane’ (Bassett), and ‘truly Danish-Modern’ (Stakmore), these American furniture sets borrowed certain features common among Danish imports—for example, all were made of wood—and codified them, helping to create a popular sense of Danish design and what it looked like,” Taft writes. In this way, Danish Modern became a hallmark of the American century and American power.

At the first televised US presidential debate in 1960, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon sat in Round Chairs. Danish Modern was presented as a symbol of the luxury, freedom, and stylishness afforded by the capitalist development with which America had become politically synonymous; it was now as American as democracy itself. This association, however questionable, became an important element of the furniture’s appeal—and of the marketing campaigns to sell it. Danish Modern was, in ad copy and in the words of the era’s tastemakers, furniture for all Americans. “It is a significant part of the Wegner story,” wrote House Beautiful editor Marion Gough (as quoted by Taft), “that people were ‘discovering’ this beauty even before the experts stamped it with their approval.” Wegner’s Chair belonged, at least in theory, to anyone and everyone.

Danish cabinetmakers, American manufacturers, and tastemakers like Doris Scherbak—an American whose husband was stationed in Paris to work on the Marshall Plan—popularized not just the specific pieces of Danish Modern furniture but the very idea of it. Curved lines, splayed legs, rich wood: These became emblematic of the idealized, placid mid-century American lifestyle made possible by the outrageous growth of capitalism. Since the high cost of producing those emblems kept them out of reach of a number of Americans, capitalist ingenuity saw an opportunity to satisfy its profit motive: Copies and knock-offs proliferated in the United States, where copyright rules were lax to the point of nonexistence. Even Scherbak, who had outfitted her apartment in Paris entirely with furniture and fabrics from the Danish store Den Permanente, bought a pair of knock-off chairs in Mexico and proudly wrote to Fischer that she was “happy to have” them, because they were “really good copies and were so very cheap.”

As these copies and knock-offs filled the market, design integrity and quality suffered. Take, for example, a collapsible chair designed by Wegner, with two notches on its underside for hanging when folded. Numerous manufacturers reproduced it as a fixed chair but retained the notches, turning them into a purely decorative element. Or consider the proliferation of curved chairbacks that emulated the Chair’s back and armrests. Designed to enable the joining of two rectangular blocks of wood, the Chair’s unique curve was a crucial part of its engineering, not an aesthetic decision but a structural one. The makers of the Chair’s many knock-offs kept the curve not because they were reproducing the Chair itself as a crafted, engineered object, but because they were reproducing the Chair as an idea, embodied by an image. If we subscribe to the adage that form follows function, then the reason that copycat designs looked the way they did is because the look made them salable.

I am tempted here to return not to Mad Men but to another piece of prestige television from an earlier era: Sex and the City. In the middle of the show’s run, when Carrie’s column is being optioned for a film in which Matthew McConaughey is apparently set to play Mr. Big, Carrie and the girls end up on a trip to Los Angeles. Once there, Samantha takes Carrie to a backyard in the Valley, where a man opens a trunk to reveal a mass of fake Fendis encased in thin, off-gassing, transparent plastic. Carrie purses her lips into a “no”—they’re very nice, but she doesn’t want them because they are fake. The originals conferred the appearance of something: status, good taste, and, above all, wealth. The fakes would communicate the same thing to everyone but their owners, who’d know they were a sham. That wasn’t good enough for Carrie.

Things have certainly changed. In the world of purses and bags, the market is saturated with fakes to such an extent that there are now prestige fakes more highly sought after than other run-of-the-mill fakes, and perhaps even more than the originals themselves. “Authenticity” is increasingly elusive at a time when replicas of the Chair far outnumber the originals. In the furniture world, the mainstream public is so removed from the fact that pieces are designed by specific people that, outside of specialist circles, there might as well be no such thing as an original.

Taft’s story culminates in a hall of mirrors: Once American manufacturers started producing their own Danish-style designs, Danish furniture makers started copying them. Danish originals gave way to American copies, which gave way to American originals, which gave way to Danish copies of the American originals, and so on and so forth. The furniture objects became a representation of the marketing and advertising slogans that the originals had inspired. And so we’re back to where we started. The 21st-century popularity of MCM-style furniture surely has to do with Mad Men’s aesthetic appeal and a recession-fueled nostalgia for the years of the postwar boom, but it might have even more to do with the very thorough and very successful decades-long marketing campaign for Danish Modern design. During a time of scarcity and strife—and yet another war—rich wood tones, hairpin legs, and wool upholstery could serve as a respite without veering into ostentation. The narrative had been long established, and the evidence for it could be found not just on TV but also in catalogs, photographs, and advertisements: MCM furniture was luxurious yet restrained, beautiful yet sober, unique yet egalitarian. It promised, through the simple act of buying, the image of a better life. In this way, it has never been a symbol of freedom or democracy, but rather of the way capitalism pushes people to treat consumption as the only way to achieve a different reality.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mid-century-modern-furniture/
Truth in the Age of the Deepfakehttps://www.thenation.com/article/culture/truth-deepfake-pop-culture/Marianela D’Aprile,Marianela D’AprileJun 2, 2023

A few months ago, an image of Pope Francis wearing an André Leon Talley–looking puffer coat cum cassock started circulating online. Since, like the pope, I’m from Argentina, several friends sent this image to me. Each time I received it, I bristled and said, “That’s AI,” or some version of that phrase, which felt to me the same as saying, “You have been fooled.” I felt like I was adding insult to injury: It’s a bummer to learn not only that you have fallen for a fake image but also that the swagged-out pope doesn’t exist, that the joy you felt upon seeing the image of this Catholic heavyweight sporting a giant metal cross on a chain and a puffer coat that someone made to look like papal vestments was based on nothing more than a fiction.

I may not have fallen for this particular ruse, but the dread that I will get conned by some other one has been following me around. What exactly am I looking at? And will I be able to tell if it’s real? The potential answers are bleak: It’s common knowledge now that some TikTok and Snapchat users are so accustomed to seeing their face filtered or mirrored by the selfie camera that they struggle to recognize other kinds of images of themselves. Earlier this year, a reporter for NPR’s Morning Edition wrote that legislators are struggling to keep up with advancing deepfake technology and experiencing difficulties regulating the production and dissemination of images and videos that might, say, influence the outcome of an election.

But our loosening grip on reality isn’t just a product of fraudulent images, app filters, or AI chatbots. It is also born of the simultaneous rotting and unmasking of civic institutions and those supposedly tasked with the safekeeping of democracy. The election of Donald Trump, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the rise of QAnon, the January 6 riots, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal—these were all harbingers, and symptoms, of our unraveling shared reality. For better and for worse, we no longer inhabit anything remotely close to a consensus reality. Each of us is free to decide not only what we personally believe but also what is true. “Do your own research,” Alex Jones told his listeners and viewers, reportedly 80 million per month at the peak of InfoWars’ popularity. Because the institutions we once trusted to define the basic parameters through which we understand our world have proven themselves to be either corrupt or deeply biased, or both, we have nowhere to turn for answers.

erhaps this is why the popularity of reality-check pop culture has been climbing toward a screaming peak. There is the glossy biopic, with its amped-up version of events and at least one headline-grabbing star; the salacious documentary film, trotting out its B-roll footage like a fisherman chumming the waters; the gory true-crime podcast, so popular a category that four of the top 10 most-listened-to shows on the Apple Podcast app fall into it. In 2022, Netflix alone produced 56 original documentaries and docuseries, including a full-length film about the “Tinder Swindler,” the guy who conned women he dated out of millions of dollars. There was the series Our Father, which chronicled the discovery that a fertility doctor in Indiana had inseminated hundreds of patients with his own sperm—a fact uncovered, with the help of Ancestry.com, by one of his 94 biological children. In February of that same year, the same streaming platform released Inventing Anna, a miniseries about Anna Sorokin (also known as Anna Delvey), who for a few years in the 2010s posed as a wealthy heiress in order to trot around the New York City social elite scene. The following month, Hulu released The Dropout, an eight-episode series about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, preceded by the 2019 documentary about her, The Inventor and followed by the 2023 podcast bearing the same title as the miniseries. The “truth” programming runs the gamut from schlocky to prestige.

The proliferation of this sort of media is partially a result of the pressure to produce content. Studios have been mining newspapers, tabloids, and court records for ideas for ages, but the turnaround times seem to keep getting shorter. Donald Cline, the fertility doctor, was sued by the state of Indiana in 2015. Delvey/Sorokin had been arrested in October 2017, her story gaining notoriety in May of the following year after a big profile in New York magazine. Holmes was arrested in June of 2018; Simon Leviev, Tinder Swindler, in 2019. The genre’s growth is also about the simple fact that liars and cheaters get views: These stories are attractive for their shock value. It is easily to be lured by the staring-at-the-train-wreck-can’t-look-away pull of someone who is getting away with what they’re trying to get away with—but who eventually won’t, a certainty that makes the swindling enjoyable to watch and the enjoyment morally acceptable. Audiences get to feel both tantalized and superior, exalted and relieved, comforted and engrossed, disgusted and magnetized.

But alongside all of that, there is something else more existential: the reassurance, however fleeting, that liars and cheaters might eventually get caught, that there is such a thing as a true story. These shows and movies and podcasts appeal to the same compulsion that leads us to binge-read Wikipedia pages, to arm ourselves with facts, to supplant our gullibility with cynicism. Perhaps most of all, their allure lies in their ability to temporarily suppress that ever-present dread over whether we’re being duped, to at least for a moment neutralize the lurking threat of the unreal. The easier it becomes to manipulate reality, the more we want to believe in an absolute truth. (Even if, as in AI-generated images that “reveal” the “background” of famous works of art and AI-generated videos of crime victims “telling their own stories,” that “truth” is entirely fabricated.)

he day my friends brought to my attention to the puffy pope, I happened to come across a website that tests visitors by asking them to choose which of two images of human faces is real. (Real as in not generated by AI, but rather a photograph of an actual human being taken by an actual human being.) I pulled the website up on my phone and killed a few minutes while waiting in line for coffee by clicking on different faces. Each time, I dreaded the message that would appear if I got it wrong and felt intense relief when a green frame around the image instead told me that I, on some level, was still in touch with reality and its visual manifestations. Click, green frame. Click, green frame again. I closed the website before I got one wrong. The truth, I realized, would not predictably be found inside my phone.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/truth-deepfake-pop-culture/
Everyone Deserves Grandeurhttps://www.thenation.com/article/culture/architectural-grandeur/Marianela D’Aprile,Marianela D’Aprile,Marianela D’AprileApr 6, 2023

The only time I visited Milan, I emerged from a narrow street onto the Piazza del Duomo. As soon as I saw the ornate cathedral presiding over the open square, I started laughing—so much I couldn’t stop. The sight was so overwhelming, absurd even, that I couldn’t look at it for more than a few seconds at a time without bursting into a nervous, incredulous chuckle. I felt like I was looking at something forbidden, scandalous even. Over the course of my stay, I walked by it, next to it, behind it, and across it. I even paid to go inside.

It strikes that the point of the church’s grandeur is to do exactly what it did to me: bowl people over, command the space around it, and summon onlookers inside. Its ability to do that came at a cost, though. Over the more than 600 years that it took to build, the Duomo held something of a monopoly on architectural grandeur, and the members of the poor and working classes who participated in its construction—many of whom never got to see the building completed—likely went home to squalor.

The group of people behind the movement for “beauty” in architecture, some of whom convened recently at the 2023 Traditional Architecture Gathering, argue that buildings with such awesome (in the literal sense of the word) aims are no longer being built; that Modernism and its clean, ready-made lines have wiped aesthetic pleasure off the face of the earth in favor of “intentionally ugly” buildings. I am typically loath to wade into an argument about the definition of something as multivalent as beauty, but it seems to me worth speculating that these people, when they talk about beauty, are referring to the visceral element of architecture’s aesthetics that helps them to connect to something beyond the immediate tangible object, something bigger than themselves that’s mysterious or ethereal.

If their problem is with Modernism, specifically, then they wouldn’t be exactly wrong to say its primary aim was not exactly to connect people to the divine. Modernist churches aside, the movement’s most important projects—the ones that broke with what came before them but also set a precedent for the future—were experiments in how to bring high-quality, easily constructed buildings to more people, many of whom, especially in cities, were still languishing in dereliction. Since then, its aesthetics have been co-opted by corporate America (evidence abounds in clean-lined ads for tech companies and the slick architecture of their headquarters). 

If the “traditional architecture” proponents’ problem is with a lack of grandeur in contemporary architecture, then they would be wrong: It’s 2023, and despite, or maybe because of, a litany of world-historic events in just the last few years, grandeur is decidedly on the agenda. Nowhere is that more clear than in the new Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC), currently under construction in Manhattan’s World Trade Center complex and slated to open in September of this year.

The PAC sits at the foot of One World Trade Center, just north of the memorial pools that fill the now-empty footprints of the Twin Towers. To its southeast, Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus perches uncomfortably, its white, spiny figure resembling a gull, or maybe a gutted fish, taking flight. Just south of the pools, a new Greek Orthodox church, also designed by Calatrava, scans as a sugar cube, disturbingly precious in its diminutive scale. Across West Street, the stubby forms and flat faces of the World Financial Center, a gigantic complex designed in the early ’80s by César Pelli, participate in their own private postmodern parade. When 5 World Trade Center is completed, its 910 feet of glass-covered height will dwarf its next-door neighbor, 90 West Street, a landmarked Gothic building completed in 1907 whose 23 stories measure a mere 324 feet.

Within this landscape of architectural oddities, the PAC stands out not for its short stature (138 feet) nor for its stark geometry (it appears to be a perfect cube) but for its splendor, and more importantly, its purpose—what exactly is a performing arts center doing in FiDi? (Incidentally, one could ask the same question of Hudson Yards’ Bloomberg-funded cultural center, The Shed.) The PAC, once completed, will cost half a billion dollars; some of that budget will have gone toward the 4,896 marble panels that line its exterior. Thin enough for light to pass through them, the panels are glass-laminated on both sides to prevent warping and arranged so that the marble’s undulating amber veining creates a near-kaleidoscopic pattern. The building is beautiful—grand even.

According to The Architect’s Newspaper, the PAC has been backed by a mixture of public and private funding. This includes a $89 million grant by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development and $75 million from billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, for whom the building is named.

The building seems to be an attempt to round out the World Trade Center site as a destination all its own, a sort of micro-neighborhood between Tribeca and the Financial District. It might even seek to give the area its own Duomo-like anchor: a building that, by virtue of its distinctive beauty, summons people inside. Neither the city nor the PAC itself has made clear exactly what sort of programming the center will host once it’s open, so it’s hard to speculate with accuracy about what kinds of crowds it will attract. Despite the use of public funds for its construction, its location suggests that the PAC’s target demographic might be the few who are at home in those environs. One could speculate that part of its purpose is also to clean up those financiers’ image a bit: “culture-washing,” as they say.

Meanwhile, buildings in neighborhoods with lower average rents, where people might experience a bit of everyday architectural grandeur, or take in some art—or both—are quickly disappearing. Early last year, South Slope’s Grand Prospect Hall—a French Renaissance–style building that eventually became something of an icon for Brooklyn-dwellers—was demolished to make way for a flat-faced, gray-and-glass five-story condo building. Grand Prospect Hall, originally built in 1893, had hosted everything from union meetings to boxing matches to weddings, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2019, the East Village’s Sunshine Cinema, a five-screen theater housed in a Dutch Reformed church built in 1844, was demolished so that a nine-story office tower could take its place. As of today, four of its eight rentable office levels remain empty. This is to say: Couldn’t one $500 million performing arts center be disaggregated, that money instead put toward, say, 10 $50 million public halls, or 100 $5 million theaters, or even—given the fact that HUD provided a significant chunk of its funding—some public housing?

In architecture as in the world at large, money—and all of the things it makes possible, such as beautiful building finishes—continues to get concentrated in fewer places in New York. That is, ultimately, the problem with PAC and with buildings like it—of which there will surely be more. Sure, they are striking, but only a small portion of New Yorkers and tourists will experience that beauty. When they do, it will be under rare circumstances—a special trip, a chance encounter—and they will likely go home, maybe not to dereliction and squalor like those Duomo builders, but certainly to something less breath-taking. Buildings like PAC are a siphon for resources that could, and should, be more evenly distributed, so that more people might experience a little bit of everyday grandeur.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/architectural-grandeur/
What’s the Matter With Contemporary Architecture?https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/reinier-degraaf-architecture-oma/Marianela D’Aprile,Marianela D’Aprile,Marianela D’Aprile,Marianela D’AprileMar 22, 2023

To work in architecture is to be perpetually tempted by nostalgia. Things just aren’t as good as they used to be. Even worse: They can’t be. This sense of terminal decline abounds inside the field, where practitioners often lament that they are not afforded as much creative freedom or professional prestige as their forebears were. It exists outside the field as well, with people often wondering why buildings today don’t look anywhere near as good as those from even a few decades ago, not to speak of those much older. “Doesn’t everything now just look kind of… bad?” these critics of contemporary architecture ask. In a recent editorial, the editors of n+1 answered with a resounding “Yes!”

This leaves architects with a lot to complain about: the decay of their profession’s prestige and authority; their inability to live up to their world-changing potential and participate in capital-intensive, socially consequential projects; and the fact that no one seems to care anymore about hiring them to design the buildings they live in—even if many people still care enough to blame them for the ugly buildings that do get built. The whole enterprise increasingly has the appearance of a lost cause, many architects worry; the battles over what good buildings should look like and what they should do are now waged, mostly in futility, by a rarefied set of people working to enact an even more rarefied set of values, to the applause of no one and the criticism of many. Even if a new library, say, puts forward an innovative paradigm of public architecture, many more people will likely interact with the dozens upon dozens of “5-over-1s” going up in cities all across the country. As a result, architects suffer under the notion that no one really gets what they do and therefore, at least from the architects’ point of view, no one pays them the respect or money they deserve.

Recent efforts to unionize architecture firms have highlighted the extensive and unfairly compensated training and professional expertise of architectural workers. Unpaid internships are still alarmingly commonplace, if frowned upon, and 60-hour workweeks are often the norm. Something is amiss in this corner of the world; there seems to be a total mismatch between how architects conceive of themselves, how their clients treat them, how the public sees them, and what they actually do.

One writer who would seem well equipped to address this situation is the architect Reinier de Graaf. Famous in certain parts of the field, de Graaf remains mostly unknown outside it; his career contributions are best characterized as “architecture for architects.” In 2017, he published a collection of essays titled Four Walls and a Roof, whose 529 pages were intended as a warning of sorts that architects shouldn’t get too high and mighty about what they do. In case the message didn’t take, he followed up that book in 2021 with a 328-page novel called The Masterplan, in which an egotistical architect gets a painful lesson in humility from forces beyond his control. Show, don’t tell, as they say.

De Graaf’s latest book, Architect, Verb: The New Language of Building, is a mercifully shorter nonfiction work whose introduction describes it as “a quest for architecture to be architecture again, written in the sincere hope that, in ridding it of unsolicited baggage, our profession might one day re-emerge as an independent and critical discipline.” But even though de Graaf wants to rescue the field from its marginalization, self-imposed or otherwise, his new book is deeply mired in the same nostalgia that plagues the architects he faults for creating the current crisis. Architect, Verb eagerly and cynically points at everything that’s wrong with architecture: The “green” standards are insufficient! The awards are pay-to-play! Real estate interests supersede good design! While a number of these observations, as well as their inherent criticisms and ironies, are spot-on, and de Graaf backs them up with ample data, the book is ultimately not all that concerned with how things got this way or how they might get better.

e Graaf’s litany of complaints is informed by decades of experience. He’s the longest-serving nonfounding partner of the Dutch architecture firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), which was started in 1975 by Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vriesendorp, Elia Zenghelis, and Zoe Zenghelis and is probably best known in the United States for its design for the Seattle Central Library, an angled, jutting metal form with large interior spaces into which natural light falls generously through a diamond-shaped lattice of metal mullions.

The Seattle Central Library, completed in 2004, is arguably the high-water mark of OMA’s work. The project demonstrated the firm’s dexterity in enacting theoretical concepts through architectural form. Beginning its work on the library in 1999, OMA designed a building composed of immobile “platforms” (imagine thin, floating metal boxes containing at least one building floor) connected by vertical circulation elements like stairs and elevators. The spaces above each platform (the top of the box, to continue the analogy) were intended to remain flexible, available to be used by librarians and patrons for whatever purposes they saw fit. It’s a relatively simple concept, but it demonstrated an acute understanding of the way that the use of space within a building could be facilitated via architectural design.

OMA’s Casa da Musica, a concert hall in Porto, Portugal, that serves as the home of the National Orchestra of Porto, also proved paradigm-breaking. By managing to give the classic shoebox-shaped concert hall a faceted exterior form, OMA created new ways for the public to engage with a type of building usually associated with exclusivity. Around the same time, OMA completed an understated but exquisitely executed embassy for the Netherlands in Berlin that plays with the history of building codes in the formerly divided city. Its perfectly square floor plan fills out the site, in keeping with West Berlin ordinances, but its cubic shape is broken up by floors that jut out or dig into the overall perimeter. The embassy won the 2005 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, also known as the Mies van der Rohe Award. With these three buildings, OMA solidified its status as an innovative firm willing to take risks but also keenly aware of how people use space.

By the early 2000s, Koolhaas and de Graaf—the latter being the former’s quieter counterpart—had successfully set themselves up as architecture’s deep thinkers. In 1998, they had founded AMO, a think tank within OMA that was meant to give intellectual substance to the firm’s formal pursuits. In 2002, de Graaf became its director.

AMO’s track record has been mixed. Although de Graaf involved it in international sustainability and energy-planning efforts, producing Roadmap 2050: A Practical Guide to a Prosperous, Low-Carbon Europe for the European Climate Foundation, AMO has seemed equally concerned with giving an architectural edge to brands like Prada, for which it has designed catwalks, exhibition spaces, and, with OMA in 2009, a complex of renovated industrial buildings, including one covered entirely in 24-karat gold leaf, for the Fondazione Prada, the company’s art foundation in Milan.

Whether or not OMA and AMO always lived up to their promise, it seemed to young architects that the firm was positioned to make a real difference in the world, and so they followed its work closely. Koolhaas and de Graaf appeared well aware of the complex realities—social, economic, political, and otherwise—with which architecture had to contend and well-poised to deliver a response. They never purported to have the ability to change the conditions that, for example, forced some people to use the computers at a library to access information, but they could produce buildings that actually responded to those problems.

Now, nearly 20 years later, OMA and AMO’s impact feels markedly different from what their projects once promised. On the one hand, the firm’s influence extends far into the field. Several well-known architects today—the Chicago-based Jeanne Gang, the late Zaha Hadid, the recent MacArthur “genius” grant recipient Kate Orff, and Jair Bolsonaro’s infamous friend Bjarke Ingels—got their start at OMA. On the other hand, the scale of the work that the firm now takes on—one of its latest projects is a master plan for a 1.3-million-square-meter health district in Doha, Qatar—seems to exceed the limits of its research-and-theory-based approach to architectural design.

art of the trouble is that the world around OMA and AMO has changed. Their faith in a vast, architecturally designed commons now seems like a wistful vision of a future not likely in the offing. With one global recession under our belts and another possibly in the making, it is hard to imagine feeling optimistic about the future of the commons because of how one public library arranges its stacks, computers, and reading rooms. It’s equally difficult, in a post-Brexit world, to find exciting pluralism in a proposal for a new European Union logo of sorts (a barcode made up of merged flags) as one AMO design in 2001 did. The realities, grim or otherwise, of which Koolhaas and de Graaf were once so acutely aware have caught up with and outstripped the architectural tools they had to deal with them. Koolhaas, for his part, seems content to play the role of overly intellectual naïf. (See, for example, the 2020–21 exhibition he helped curate and design at the Guggenheim, “Countryside, the Future,” whose central thesis seemed to be “Did you know that people live in rural areas and that things happen there?”) But de Graaf still wants to find a way to make his ideas matter.

The sense of thwarted potential that results from de Graaf’s desire to render the theoretical practical is the tension that underpins Architect, Verb. Divided into 10 chapters that each reflect some aspect of what he calls the “extraneous quest” to make architecture something it is “neither able to resist nor capable of fulfilling,” the book seeks to show how the field has been set up to fail by a variety of external circumstances.

To make his point, de Graaf starts with a chapter on the so-called “Bilbao effect,” the notion that the Basque city’s economy took off after the 1997 opening of the Frank Gehry–designed Guggenheim Museum there. As de Graaf points out, the Guggenheim was among several large-scale projects built or commissioned in the late 1990s in Bilbao, as a part of a broader investment plan. It has, however, become synonymous with the city’s revival. Moreover, attempts to replicate the Bilbao effect elsewhere have failed—you cannot just will urban prosperity into being through a single construction project, however monumental it might be.

De Graaf is not wrong here. But he does think there was another kind of Bilbao effect: that “after the Guggenheim, architecture was never quite the same.” Gehry’s building may not have been solely responsible for launching Bilbao into financial greatness, de Graaf suggests, but it did popularize the idea that a city’s economic success could hinge on a single piece of good architecture—an impossible standard for any building to live up to. But even before the Guggenheim in Bilbao, wasn’t at least one criterion for a building’s “success” the way it transformed the environment and the economy around it? Was this secondary Bilbao effect really all that different from the previous standards by which architecture was measured? De Graaf exaggerates the Bilbao myth’s impact to prove his point that architecture is now held to some new, impossible standard—but it doesn’t seem all that new. He is caught between being forced to admit that architecture doesn’t actually have this kind of power and wanting to believe that, in fact, it does.

In another chapter, de Graaf seeks to challenge a different set of myths, this time concerning the term “livability.” Using data from surveys by Mercer, The Economist, and Monocle to define how the term has been construed, he delves into a condensed history of the city of Vancouver and the ways in which attempts to make it more “livable” have also made it unaffordable. Once again, de Graaf is not necessarily wrong here: “Livability” has often been little more than a metric for producing higher real estate values and, for most of the people there, a far more unlivable city. But de Graaf gets in the way of his own arguments by not examining why architects might have embraced “livability” in the first place. The concept was never really about making a city more livable, but rather part of an effort on the part of architects to place themselves closer to power and maximize their projects’ “impact.”

The other chapters in Architect, Verb are full of similar incisive criticisms that unfortunately stop short of addressing the larger questions of power and capital that operate in the field of architecture. De Graaf bemoans the trendy use of the word “creatives,” the lack of good definitions for “beauty,” and the trend of breaking increasingly obscure building records in order to label projects with grandiose superlatives. He is, as the book’s subtitle suggests, interested in “the new language of building” and how it distracts both architects and those who live and use the buildings they create from the material realities of making them. Yet even here, de Graaf does not sufficiently dig into whom these ideas might be benefiting and why architects, on a practical level, might be compelled to use them.

While there is a good deal of jargon and professional cant in architecture these days, and while de Graaf is not wrong to mock it (the book ends with a “Dictionary of Profspeak,” a long list of sometimes nonsensical words thrown around by “creatives”), the language of building is not the real problem here. Rather, it’s how and why we build: the way all construction produces carbon and material waste; the way supply chains, even for “green” materials, are carbon-intensive; the way most projects are led by private real estate developers and therefore have only one priority—profit.

he current crisis in architecture runs so deep that architects themselves, who once treasured their status as professionals who stood outside the working class, have recently begun to recognize their status as members within it in the hope that, by doing so, they may improve, at the very least, their working conditions. Architectural workers in Portugal just formed a national union. Their counterparts in the United Kingdom have done the same. Stateside, Bernheimer Architecture in New York City has become the first unionized architecture firm in the country.

Meanwhile, there are architects out there who, even given the field’s limitations, are attempting to confront some of the problems enumerated by de Graaf. The Paris-based firm Lacaton & Vassal has developed a reliable, replicable system for refurbishing existing social housing projects, reducing their carbon footprint and preserving their use. In Ireland, Grafton Architects has honed a site-sensitive, understated approach to design that treats buildings not as heroic structures but rather as just one part of a functioning urban ecosystem.

Such firms—and there are others—are willing to work within architecture’s constraints. And, to be sure, there are many: The main drivers of building, at least in the United States, are private developers, none of whom are all that concerned with the very real issues that keep de Graaf (and others, myself included) up at night: quality of design, affordability, the climate crisis. The building sector is responsible for 40 percent of annual carbon emissions worldwide, and any attempt to significantly reduce that number will require architects and the field’s attendant thinkers and researchers to turn at least some of their attention from new construction to the retrofitting of existing buildings. Meanwhile, when architects don’t go to great lengths to mitigate the effects of for-profit development and the policies that make it possible, architecture and urban development tend to heighten existing racial and class inequalities. It’s easy to blame the field or the individual architects themselves, but they too are caught in a system not of their own making.

De Graaf seems to think that we can undo this system by getting rid of the “baggage” that has come with it, looking backward toward a time when architecture could be simply itself. Such a time, however, never existed. Even if it had, it would be nearly impossible to liberate architecture from the constraints of a society whose inequalities and ills architecture can already exacerbate. Instead of indulging in nostalgia, or pretending to have more power than they do, architects should confront the problems already in front of them, of which there are plenty. If the avenues within the profession for addressing those problems are limited, they might find other inroads, not as architects, but simply as people. Like all fields of work, architecture alone cannot remake the future, but grappling with the realities of today might help architecture begin to make a better tomorrow.



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Perverse and Unfair: The Radical Steps to Fix the Housing Crisishttps://www.thenation.com/article/culture/brave-new-home-review/Marianela D’Aprile,Marianela D’Aprile,Marianela D’Aprile,Marianela D’Aprile,Marianela D’AprileFeb 1, 2021

Brave New Home begins with an anecdote that leads to the book’s central question. Its author, Diana Lind, recounts how after she gave birth to her first son, her life no longer revolved around social events, trips, work, and other outside-the-home activities. She was instead forced to become a homebody. Spending all this time at home, she started noticing all the ways her housing situation in Philadelphia didn’t match her needs. Specifically, she was alone with her husband, without much support in the form of relatives or friends nearby. She felt isolated at a time when she needed to feel the exact opposite. The options available to her to break this isolation were all things she’d have to purchase, like Mommy-and-me classes and meals in family-friendly restaurants. She bemoaned this situation and longed for a different arrangement, one in which friends and family were closer, in the sort of setup that used to be much more common in the United States.

Nowadays, it seems almost everyone experiences some version of this. We live in housing that doesn’t suit us properly—too expensive, too small, too far from family and friends, too subject to the whims of landlords. The list goes on. Hence the book’s central question: How can we fix pervasively unfair housing?

This is a vexing problem, and Brave New Home begins its search for the answer with a history of single-family housing in the United States, tracing how popular ways of living changed through time—boarding houses falling out of fashion, the rise of the single-family home, the flight from cities to suburbia, particularly by affluent white people. Lind makes an effort to name the historical and economic conditions that led to these evolutions and even admits early on that the “home has never been truly free of market demands.” Still, she often depicts individuals, as consumers of housing, along with their corresponding buying power, as the most powerful agents in shaping what housing looks like in the United States.

What Brave New Home does in terms of elucidating possibilities for alternative modes of housing or even thinking about housing is often energizing. It is hard to struggle against our present when we cannot imagine the future, and Brave New Home certainly expands our horizons for how we could live.

Some of these alternatives are framed by exciting questions. What if we could more easily live across generations, so grandparents could support working parents in raising children? Or in Lind’s words, “What if health and wellness drove value in the housing industry rather than prestige and privacy? What if the American dream for housing wasn’t just a yearning for the financial boon that homeownership provides, but also for a home that was a source of mental and physical health?”

Some of the alternatives, though, are grim. A chapter dedicated to co-living spaces doubles as an exposé of the ways many people are forced to arrange their entire lives around work, in such a way that they are forced to simulate a community by paying a company to arrange their lives—everything from cleaning to socializing—for them. Tiny homes, another phenomenon Lind analyzes, seem to be an adaptation to unacceptable conditions: jobs that take people from place to place, never allowing them to put down roots, or that pay too little to afford a traditional home or apartment.

f we are to change housing in the United States, we have to contend with the real estate industry’s outsize power in shaping the options available in the housing market, as well as public housing policy. We also have to contend with decades upon decades of racist housing policies that have kept cities segregated. And we have to battle the effects that those policies have on people’s lived material realities. Many of the housing choices we make are not driven by preference. They are forced on us by options that exist because big developers have contorted housing policy to the benefit of their profits. Our choices are limited by the circumstances of our employment and larger income trends. And they are shaped, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor lays out in her book Race for Profit, by practices meant to segregate and discriminate against Black working-class people in particular to keep real estate values up.

Brave New Home recognizes this tension but never quite meaningfully engages with it. Again and again, Lind gives the same weight to individual choice, tradition, cultural habits, and media influence as she does to market and economic forces. For example, her discussion of millennials’ low rates of homeownership leaves open the question of whether they don’t own houses because they choose not to, or because the lack of available well-paying, stable, full-time jobs, in combination with skyrocketing home prices, has forced them into renting.

Lind concludes that these two influences might not be mutually exclusive. Of course they aren’t, but that’s not the point. To change housing as we know it, finding a definitive the answer to that question will be crucial.

n their book In Defense of Housing, David Madden and Peter Marcuse put forward an answer to Lind’s central question. They argue that as long as the profit motive exists, we will never be able to make housing that works for the needs of most people and that policy shifts and zoning changes that leave untouched the status quo of housing as a commodity won’t solve the housing crisis. Instead, they put forward a radical alternative: that housing is a human right and that to be distributed fairly, it should be removed from the market entirely. Similarly, Neil Smith, in his book The New Urban Frontier, outlines the importance of capital investment in the shaping of cities, and while he concedes that consumers have a set of preferences, these are always necessarily conditioned by the landscape created by capital investment.

Brave New Home certainly belongs to this universe of books on housing, but its argument does not clarify whether Lind would agree or disagree with Madden, Marcuse, and Smith. The book’s unwillingness to stake a clear position on what shapes the housing landscape puts most of the alternatives it proposes on equal footing. The reality is that many of these alternatives would need to be championed by competing interests. Lind is well aware of this—“Differing motives will naturally create conflict, and investors are coming out on top more often than not”—but the book never addresses these implications: The interests of real estate investors and people in need of housing are diametrically opposed. To curb the power of investors, those with opposing interests would have to mount a full-blown offensive against them. Instead of this contestation for power, Brave New Home proposes that regulating real estate ventures and diversifying zoning to expand beyond single-family homes might create more housing options for Americans.

As the book approaches its conclusion, Lind describes the current paradigm of urban policy, in which cities and city planners attempt to incentivize developers to build more density and more affordable units through tweaks in tax policy and zoning changes. She recognizes that these tweaks are insufficient (“We need a suite of brave new ideas if we’re really going to address our current housing paradigm’s problems, not just make slight improvements to the status quo”) and even casts doubt on the notion that homeownership generates wealth for anyone (except for “an entrenched class of wealthy people”). But the fundamental assumption that profit-driven developers can provide enough housing for everyone remains unquestioned.

The fight for housing is not about type or about zoning or about density; it is about the right to live in a dignified way at all. In Chicago, where I live, that fight has taken the form of a campaign to lift Illinois’s statewide ban on rent control, which has been in place since 1997. Led by organizations like the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, the Pilsen Alliance, and the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America, the campaign has its locus in a few rapidly changing neighborhoods of the city, where largely Black and Latinx families have lived for generations and are now finding themselves priced out of their homes. In Chicago, perhaps one of the last somewhat affordable big cities in the country, rent control is the most pressing housing fight, and it’s about pushing back against the people who see housing as merely a way to make a profit.

As Madden and Marcuse argue in In Defense of Housing, “There is a conflict between housing as lived, social space and housing as an instrument for profit-making—a conflict between housing as home and as real estate.” Lind seems to be aware of this conflict, but Brave New Home presupposes that the status quo is intractable and that the profit motive will always exist, so we might as well just find release valves that make our housing more bearable. The way to a world with fair housing isn’t going to be found in alternatives that don’t completely upend the balance of power between capitalists and the working class. Fair housing is possible only when we can guarantee it as shelter for the many, not profit for the few.



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