Neomods and Short-Term Memory Loss
By Duo Dickinson
Kevin Roche’s New Haven (Connecticut) Coliseum is going to be torn down, its unforgettable topsy-turvy garage-over-auditorium dynamism slated for the dumpster. Why? Despite its celebrated status as part of the “Model City Program” initiated by Richard C. Lee, the city’s mayor from 1954 to 1970, the megastructural statement proved that style cannot overcome substantive misfits. A bleak interior and structurally compromised concrete parking decks have long kept crowds away despite millions of dollars spent trying to undo the project’s multiple problems. The 1972 auditorium got in the way of its use. Along with its adjacent Knights of Columbus Tower (Roche Dinkeloo, 1969) and other Modernist “object buildings” flecked across this little New England city, the Coliseum found its place by rejecting its context.
This is just the latest in a list of buildings that, owing to their abstracted outlook, are doomed to cultural, environmental and financial irrelevance. A rejectionist posture is at the heart of Modernism’s appeal; for some practitioners, the dismissal of history, context, and program is somehow alluring.
For over a decade, there has been a celebration of the latest wave of context-free design: the “Neomod” movement. Where once po-mo trim bits and fluffy colors abounded, nary a muntin is seen. Professional credibility seems to hinge on an adherence to a Neomodern orthodoxy: Most architects lauded by “those in the know” are part of a new generation promoting Modernist aesthetics, leaving everything else that’s built – casinos, theme parks, and the like – to be celebrated only in the mainstream press.
The danger of this outcome is not aesthetic; it is attitudinal. Modernism – new or otherwise – follows a rulebook written by architects, rather than by those who end up living, working, and playing in the buildings we design. Much of what is now hailed as the future of architecture merely revives the arrogance of the past – a mindset that spawned buildings conceived as occupied sculpture and that was openly contemptuous of the values of contemporary culture. It is ironic that, though the New Haven Coliseum and others of its ilk, from Philadelphia’s Southwark Plaza to Chicago’s Cabrini Green, failed because their design ignored human scale and use patterns in favor of a “grand design,” their intellectual genesis is again preeminent in our profession. As these projects prove, there is no way to explain away design without context.
In its infancy, Modernism did prove that the emperor had no clothes. It showed the absurd lengths to which historic conventions hamstrung buildings into silly preconceived notions, and it offered an empowering message of innovation. As with labor unions during early twentieth century, early Modernism addressed undeniable problems with clearly evident truths ( e.g., form follows function).
But just as twenty-first-century labor unions have lost the moral outrage of Eugene V. Debs fighting for an eight-hour workday, Neomodernism has become, all to often, just another surface detailing technique, devoid of its moral underpinnings. What has evolved from that old-time Modernism is a fashion-designer aesthetic enhanced with pumped-up cyberimagery. Such sexiness is compelling, but does it sustain interest and live well beside, around and with us over the long haul? Do those criteria even matter to the profession, the academy, or the professional press?
Moreover, why are we so focused on this work to the exclusion of the subtler, more contextual gestures? My sense is that our memories are too short and our souls are too lazy. It is hard to remember the screaming failures of housing projects like the newly departed Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago once they’ve been replaced with human-scaled homes. It takes time to understand the values of those who will use what we design, and it takes focus to study and reflect the history and culture of our buildings’ sites.
A building built with fine-arts sensibilities to the exclusion of weatherability, affordability or usefulness has a brief list of design criteria to talk about. Form and materials that are intentionally distilled to scaleless abstraction have no “moral” imperative to shed water or resist rot. Art lives in its own world, where success is self-determined.
Beyond rarified in-house arguments between design philosophies, promoting the rejectionist posture of Modernism as our profession’s Truth once again puts architects in the now classic position of elites respected by a shrinking few. As with all professions where success is often self-defining, it is wise in this time of apparent consensus to pause and rethink the criteria for laudatory recognition. At a time when image is everything, it’s crucial that we recognize the inheritance of so much of the last generation of Modernist work: dysfunctional buildings built for a brief celebratory presence that sentence their occupants to the abidingly irreparable “out years”.
Will New Haven miss its coliseum? Architects will, at least.
