What is the American vernacular? We tend to think of it, at least when it comes to where we live, as a range of styles that emerged through colonization: Neo-Colonial in the East, Spanish Colonial in the West. These two mix and match in the middle, producing regional hybrids that range from the neo-Mission style to Prairie style. Anything other than these variations are either the product of rich people imposing something alien or a house designed by high-end architects, or often both. The message is clear: The style that got here first, imposing forms, ways of using a site, and building methods, is seen as being honest and of the place.
There are reasons to doubt this perceived wisdom. As J.B. Jackson, the motorcycle riding Harvard professor and landscape theoretician was fond of pointing out, the only true modern vernacular this country has seen were the sod huts constructed by the first white settlers. Anything else was built with imported materials and ideas, making it a style imposed on the place.
In the last few months we’ve seen a surge in the publication of books that try to resurrect different, and sometimes more idiosyncratic, interpretations of the country’s human-made and natural landscapes. The most comprehensive of these is Susan Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino’s Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-1975, published in September by Monacelli Press. It reviews the scores of mostly modest houses that cropped up throughout Chicago’s suburbs in the period before and after the Second World War. Most of them were designed by architects who followed many of the hallmarks of Modernism that Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock defined in their 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibition The International Style. Flat roofs, metal or concrete construction (or balloon frames made to resemble it), large panes of glass, orthogonal forms with an occasional expressive curve or angle, and plans as open and uncluttered as possible: the qualities of these modern structures often stood in sharp contrast to the style of neighboring houses, as the book’s photographs clearly demonstrate.
The best and the most vivid examples of this suburban residential Modernism come from the mid-to-late-1950s, powered, I assume, by the growth of the suburbs and the wealth of the region. What was built before then had an experimental character, and what little was realized after that, at least that the authors have included, was odder and lacked the resolve of the Modernism that appeared during the Eisenhower era.
Regrettably, in this otherwise thorough and well-researched book, the authors did not choose to concentrate more on demographic and economic data and analysis. What percentage of overall single-family home construction were these Modernist buildings? What ethnicity were the clients, and were they connected to any particular professional pursuit or segment of the economy? The book discusses the popularization of Modernism through magazines and exhibitions, but what about in the wider culture, such as on television, where some soap operas featured modern homes? It also discuss the growth of the Chicago suburbs and their transformation, but doesn’t consider spatial relations and the obvious disconnect between these houses as single objects and overall community design.
Perhaps this is asking too much of an already weighty book, but it makes me wish for an approach to a specific era of architecture that would more closely intertwine taste cultures, economic data, and other social information. Some of the better monographs on architects have that depth, but even there narrow art historical standards tend to prevail.
Another book Sabatino collaborated on (with Barrie Scardino Bradley and Houston’s semi-official architectural historian, Stephen Fox), Making Houston Modern: The Life and Architecture of Howard Barnstone, goes some distance in that more material culture-oriented direction. Published by the University of Texas Press in August, the book describes how Barnstone, a Jewish and Maine-bred interloper, arrived in Houston during the postwar boom as part of a wave of fortune-seeking newcomers, which included his Yale classmate George Bush. Riding the economic wave, he built a successful practice with his idiosyncratic designs, mixing elements of canonical Modernism with expressive as well as futuristic and nostalgic ones. Taken together, his work became an exemplar of the high-style version of the extreme eclecticism that marked Houston’s streets and suburbs for decades, until in a familiar fate, it was drowned by the global wave of mass-produced buildings.
That both Barnstone and many of his clients were Jewish and not originally from Texas, and that he also was part of a modern art-loving crowd led by the oil services magnates John and Domenique De Menil, gave the architect more freedom to operate, perhaps, but also isolated the work. The fact that Barnstone was a manic depressive who was, if the book is to be believed, not easy to work with as a collaborator or a client, further limited his development. I am not sure that Barnstone ever made Houston modern, as the title implies, but he certainly built some of the most interesting examples of Modernism there.
In my next post I’ll discuss volumes that look at similar architects and styles in the Pacific Northwest and North Carolina. I find this genre of books a valuable one, documenting as it does the particularities of individual architects and, more importantly, the social, economic, and physical environment in which their work flourished. These volumes demonstrate how Modernism became an alternative vernacular for a mobile middle class whose members were not always descendants of the Pilgrims, who were building a new kind of economy and society (or so some of them hoped), and who believed that the cities in which they worked could be as open, rational, and humane as the forms they proposed.
Aaron Betsky is a regularly featured columnist whose views and conclusions are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine nor of the American Institute of Architects.
