[lbo-talk] A Mac in my future

berber carpet bomb berber.carpet.bomb at gmail.com
Wed Jan 16 14:18:29 PST 2008


On Jan 16, 2008 2:03 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


>
> Yeah, it seems to be post-WW2 in architecture, later in industrial
> design. Doesn't every small town in the Midwest have a beautiful old
> bank building? I saw one in Grinnell, Iowa, a few years ago, and was
> mighty impressed. Big old beautiful houses all over the place, too.
> Brownstones in NYC. San Francisco. Now it's manufactured housing and
> Toll Bros. mansions.
>
> There's a story in Cary Reich's bio of Andre Meyer about the building
> of the hideous Lincoln Towers on the West Side of Manhattan in the
> 60s. The developer, William Zeckendorf, wanted to hire a good
> architect and make a beautiful set of buildings. Meyer, his
> financier, said no, we'll make more money if we don't do that. No
> doubt he was right.
>
> Doug

there was an article on modernist architecture IIRC in the London Review of Books a couple of months ago, addressing some of this. It made me want to jump on the list and ask who knew about architecture so I could do background reading.

Carrol kind of laughed at me earlier this year when I was takiing photos of this town's gorgeous old homes, which he saw as pretty standard fare. And he's right. But when you get to a place like Florida, where it's almost all post-WWII, it's horrible. I did not realize how much I missed the geography of place -- where I grew up. It was a town that saw it's heyday in the late 1800s, so filled with Victorians, painted ladies, greek revivals, federalist era homes, etc. etc. Even the old mass produced Sears bungalow homes have something about them that is different -- though I'm sure someone who knows more about architecture might be able to explain why it's rot.

so, I don't know what it is, maybe it's just an attachment to geography (whether manmade or not) that makes such an impact on me. I longed for the rolling hills, small mountains, and GREEN of my stomping grounds the entire time I lived in lLimpDick. When I found myself standing under a canopy of pine tress my first day after my escape from LimpDick, I frickin hugged them, I'd missed it so much. but I was surprised by how much I missed architectural styles I'd grown up with.

In this town, the whole 60s redevelopment thing meant that they often just raised older buildings, thinking they were ugly or too old or something. They were replaced with parking garages, parking lots, and modernist, spare glass, concrete, and steel designs. There's some historic stuff here and no one really cared. i guess it was the modernist, futurist leanings of the time?

It took a small groundswell of preservationists to put a stop to it and preserve it. And although I gravitate toward older styles -- and totally love swedish modern (is that what they call it?) for it's spareness in interior design -- even the new stuff is fascinating, to me, unschooled as I am. When I sit on the porch and look up at the windows in the buildings downtown, I love it how the windows capture the light at certain times of day. I don't know if architects plan this stuff out, but if they do, I'm grateful for the visuals every day.



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