Defining the Lower Modernisms as those categories of design endeavors that are Modernist in style and intent but fall short of the standards of legitimate Modernism begs the question of what the vague and overused term “Modernism” means in this context.

As the foregoing definition alludes to, Modernism as a critical category is simultaneously at least three things: an Architectural Style, a Mode of Practice, and an Ethos. The shared collection of visual traits that identify the style of Mid-Century Modernism, such as flat roofs, glass walls, and the avoidance of ornament, is easy to describe and to reproduce for such purposes as imitation or satire; but the mode of practice and the ethos of Modernism are both broader and more abstract.

Concomitant with the development of Modernism was the 20th-century reconception of architecture as a practice of evaluating design problems and elaborating solutions that satisfy objective performance criteria. At one time the basis for the rallying cry “form follows function,” this concept is now fully internalized into the methodology of design. Since the rise of Modernism, buildings are understood by architects as systems, collections of assemblies addressing technical requirements such as programme, circulation, envelope, structure, lighting, HVAC, power, and plumbing; and the architect’s job is to unite these independent elements into a cohesive whole.

This mode of practice is the unassailable legacy of Modernism in its broadest sense and it remains unchallenged in its utility. Postmodernism challenged only the style of Modernism, but not the substance – the process by which the office of Michael Graves (or more accurately, executive architect Emery Roth & Sons) designed the Portland Building, once you look beneath the surface, was business as usual. Just as in Modernist buildings, the architects coordinated elevators into structural cores, tried to get all the beams, ducts, and sprinklers to fit without lowering the ceilings, and figured out how to hang the curtain wall panels off of the structure.

Best exemplified by Lou Kahn and the New Brutalism of the Smithsons, devout Modernists sanctified this process by expressing the distinctions between these disparate elements on the form of the building. By assigning such loaded terms to this mode of expression as “honesty,” “integrity” and “truth to materials,” design philosophers charged this mode with an ethical imperative; to dissemble architectural elements became “dishonest” and hence, sinful. This Ethos of Modernism, seductive though it may be as a rhetorical position, proved utterly vulnerable to the attacks of Modernism’s critics in the 1960s and 1970s, among them David Watkin’s Morality and Architecture, which traced this ethical line of reasoning back to the Gothic Revival of the 19th Century.

The “Legitimate Modernism” to which our working definition refers is therefore that which successfully integrates the Modernist mode of practice and ethos with a Modernist style. This characterization implies an alternate definition of the LoMos as “Illegitimate Modernism,” that category of design endeavors that either fail to integrate the Modernist ethos with a Modernist style, or fail to integrate the Modernist style with the Modernist ethos.

Built in the shady corner of a downtown parking lot, Taco House would look temporary if it did not look so old, a somewhat improvisational exploitation of an underused piece of downtown property waiting for a higher and better use to come along and bring about its redevelopment. The County Assessor’s office certainly views Taco House this way: the 15,500 square-foot parcel has an assessed land value of $1,185,000, with assessed improvements, comprising 330 square feet, valued at only $750.

Taco House offers easy-going hospitality in the kind of hybrid indoor-outdoor space espoused by the Mid-Century Modern designers. It is oriented to pedestrians with a sidewalk canopy and a porous street wall. Taco House embodies certain urban, informal virtues; but it is the steel-framed structure that attracted Russ Holthouse and I to make our recent lunchtime visit.

The freely extended frames resemble hanging brackets, as if Taco House were a module designed to be lifted by crane or helicopter and plunked down in whatever parking lot requires a Taco House.

The steeply-pitched steel frames evoke the proportions of an A-frame house, but skeletal, incomplete. Technically, these frames seem to be “bents” such as those that hold up a Butler building, as they appear to carry both the gravity loads of the roof and provide the in-plane resistance of lateral loads. The bents are painted bright red, which is eye-catching, but probably not intentionally in homage to Renzo Piano’s use of red paint on exposed steel members.

On closer look, however, perhaps Piano was an influence on Taco House’s designers, as the rear facade is detailed as an exoskeleton with service elements, including structural, piping, HVAC and bollards, exposed and painted in a collection of contrasting colors – an example of the “Vernacular Pompidou” style named in honor of Piano’s and Richard Rogers’s Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

The use of those ostentatious steel bents in a taco stand otherwise so unassuming leads one to wonder at an explanation – it seems improbable that they were designed and built custom for this application. Perhaps the steel members were an off-the-shelf item, or perhaps salvaged and reused from some other structure. Was a car wash, such as Expert Car Wash at 900 South La Brea Avenue depicted above, disassembled and adaptive-reused as taco stands?  The fact that there is a second, nearly identical Taco House at 340 South Hill Street, neither confirms nor denies this possibility.

The tacos, generously sized at $1.25 each, were decent and satisfying.

I liked the look of this matchbook, with its jaunty, pre-Starbucks mermaid logo and friendly logogram, rendered in orange in a chubby-serifed variant of the Cooper typeface that I used for the Matchbook Delight! logo above. I had to do a little web-browsing to learn the very 1970s story behind this hotel.

The “PSA” of the hotel’s name refers to Pacific Southwest Airlines. Old-timers might remember the smiley-faced paint scheme of this regional carrier’s jets. Orange and black were their signature colors, as used in the hotel’s logogram. In 1970, PSA reached for horizontal integration by getting into the hotel business, starting out by purchasing the Islandia Hotel in Mission Bay, San Diego (designed in 1961 by the firm Liebhardt & Weston). The Islandia was a low-rise hotel of 105 rooms built in the Polynesian-Gabled style in a waterfront district heavy with nautical and tiki architectural influences. The existing buildings featured double-mansard roofs, probably covered in cedar shakes. The 266-room, concrete tower was built by PSA.

The photo on the reverse of the matchbook shows the juxtaposition of old and new – in the foreground stands the restaurant, built on posts literally above the bay, with peaked roof jaunty and flags flapping. The restaurant, now called Red Marlin, still operates today, looking pretty good on the exterior per Google’s Street View imagery. The tower looks groovier on the matchbook than it does in today’s off-white paint.

The hotel now operates as the Hyatt Regency Mission Bay, and might be worth some consideration when planning that San Diego Tiki-Road-Trip Lomoventure.

Bibliography:

Renga, Alan and Mark Mentges. Images of Aviation: Pacific Southwest Airlines. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2010. p. 85. Accessed on Google Books.

Although Noyes’s portfolio contains a number of serious architectural commissions (including the former IBM building now occupied by Otis College in Los Angeles), his most familiar work to the average citizen consisted in corporate design programs for clients like IBM, Westinghouse, and Mobil.

Noyes began to work on Mobil Oil’s corporate design program in the mid-1960s, helping Mobil transform a confused design identity into a coherent and memorable one that still defines Mobil’s look to this day. The following spread shows prototypical service stations from the mid-1960s designed under Noyes’s program. These early stations bear enduring hallmarks, such as the circular motif in the design of the canopies and in Chermayeff and Geismar’s then-new Futura-based logotype.

As asserted in previous posts, lowbrow programmes like service stations have traditionally been considered mere buildings, beneath the threshold of Architecture. In the case of his Mobil stations, Noyes elevated what had been heretofore a particularly junky type of building and gave it the respect to treat it as a real design problem, thereby elevating it into the realm of Architecture; simultaneously thereby expanding the discipline’s domain downward to encompass a building type previously below the reach of architects. Although these stations are all around us, their qualities are all too easily overlooked, and this essay intends to highlight some of their architectural merits.

Our survey begins with two fine specimens of Mobil stations based on Noyes’s standards, both complete and equipped with “Mobil Mart” stores. The well preserved example at the northwest corner of Highland Avenue and Melrose Avenue seems to be from 1988 according to a records search. Its canopy shelters three pump islands. Although the station itself is a controlled visual environment, the designers’ efforts have been unable to control the visual clutter of billboards and street furniture that surround the station.

Mobil’s signature circle motif appears as an expressed element in the underside of the canopy, both projecting downward and defining a relieved inset, as though an enormous cookie cutter were involved in the process. The circular cutout is a branding atavism, making reference to the circular canopies seen in the earlier prototypes depicted above. Formally, this design move is the opposite of what would have been the more obvious approach of dropping the circles as a lowered soffit within the canopy, which also would have had a structural logic, like a “drop cap” at the head of a column in a concrete building; in this case the non-obvious contrary move is so much better.

The builders spent extra to get rounded corners where the concrete paving meets the asphalt, echoing the rounded corners of the canopy above.

Rounding the corners of rectangles was generally a high priority throughout the Mobil design program, employed in every part of this company-standard signage.

The Mobil Mart is a species of the Perfect Building, designed with extreme discipline and as few details as possible – you could study a photo of it for twenty seconds and thoroughly memorize its architectural characteristics. My personal dream is to adaptive-reuse one of these as a house (the accompanying canopy would make a fine lanai in support of Gracious California Living). The white, solid top-of-wall is expressed as though it were the edge of a solid, thick roof slab, another rounded-corner rectangle element, in mimicry of the pump island canopy. Both glazed storefront and running-bond opaque wall flush out precisely with this roof element, separated by a horizontal reveal of consistent width.

The circular motif reappears in the Pegasus sign.

The top-of-wall detail nears perfection – it is both nearly seamless and lacking any unsightly cap-flashing that would detract from its diagrammatic clarity. The large light openings of wired glass achieve a shimmering, diaphanous effect in the sunlight. The black mullions, grey spandrel glass, and grey concrete podium all reinforce the Modernist graphic quality of this composition.

At the corner of Atlantic Boulevard and Beverly Boulevard in East Los Angeles there persists a second complete Mobil station of high design integrity, this one also comprising three pump islands under a single long canopy.

The material palette and detailing adhere closely to the Mobil standards and resemble those used at the Melrose/Highland location, but this configuration, typical of Mobil stations on larger sites, differs. The canopy’s length is as if planned for four pump islands of equal spacing, but in place of the third spot, the Mobil Mart has been slid halfway under the canopy. Perhaps the Mobil Mart was added later in replacement of a pump island.

Following classical Lou-Kahn Modernist philosophy, the Mobil Mart is unattached to the canopy and detailed to make this separation evident – the plane of the canopy floats freely above the mass of the Mobil Mart like a ramada. A second, shorter building, detached from the Mart and also hanging halfway out of the canopy’s shelter, contains the washrooms.

The sheltered outdoor court separating the Mobil Mart from the washrooms recalls the house Noyes designed for himself and his family in New Canaan, Connecticut, which consists of separate living and sleeping pavilions connected by a breezeway. The Mobil Marts also share in common with Noyes’s home certain expressive tactics – lightweight glazed panels contrast with heavy masonry walls, both topped with a horizontal plane of roof.

Rounded-corner rectangles:

The historical design integrity of the two Mobil stations described above is unfortunately exceptional, as Mobil has for years been desecrating their service stations in a misguided effort to update their look. The Noyes-pattern Mobil service station is now Endangered Lomo – visit these sites while you can, maybe buy yourself a tank of Regular Unleaded, as it is unlikely that a ragtag army of historical preservationists will be coming to their defense anytime soon. It is a different story in England – a circle-pattern Mobil station there was recently “listed” as an historical property, undoubtedly adding the A6 at Red Hill, Leicestershire, to the itineraries of eager heritage fanatics.

The fucking-up of Noyes-pattern Mobil stations has taken three typical forms. The type-1 defacement is the application of blue paint or film to the fascia edge of the canopy. This blue band covers approximately the top 2/3 of the canopy, and is interrupted at the Mobil signage. In struggling to think of an explanation for why this would constitute an improvement over the original design, I hypothesize that the all-white look of the Noyes canopy was considered too “plain.” The blue stripe modifies the figure-ground relationship of the canopy, having the effect of emphasizing the vertical surface of the canopy edge as a ground, while making the canopy thereby read less like a horizontal slab. This example is found on Sepulveda Boulevard south of Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks:

The type-2 defacement is the application of a blue projecting box to the canopy’s edge. Sometimes backlit, this intervention, similar to the type-1 blue paint, has a destructive effect on the legibility of the canopy. Here are before-and-after views of the Mobil station at the corner of Crenshaw Boulevard and Adams Boulevard:

If you look closely, you can discern that they have actually squared off the canopy’s rounded corner when they undertook the remodel (sometime after the original photograph was taken in 2006). The Mobil signage has also been replaced and relocated, and the Mobil Mart building has received new signage and a type-1 blue stripe.

The type-3 defacement is the application of a projecting white eyebrow from the front of the Mobil Mart building. This eyebrow is usually white and aligned with the bottom 1/3 of the Mart’s top-of-wall, following the logic established by the type-1 blue striping. It projects outward approximately one foot, providing a modicum of weather protection for the doorway. The projection occurs only on the front, disrupting the four-sided, Perfect-Building equivalence of the underlying architecture. The station at the corner of Washington and Crenshaw Boulevards exemplifies:

The aforementioned three types of defacements – practical case studies in bad design sense – can be spotted all over town. What inspired this report and elevated it to emergency status, however, was a glimpse of an even more execrable defacement. At the Mobil station at the corner of Figueroa Boulevard and Adams Boulevard, the Mobil Mart half-sheltered beneath an otherwise clean canopy has been transformed into a Circle K Mart:

Painted a sickly fleshtone, the abstract menace of this architecture-turned-zombie hides half concealed in the shade of the pristine white canopy. The closer I look at its details – such as the matching fleshpaint applied over the spandrel glass – the more I feel as though my brain is being eaten.

Bibliography:

Bruce, Gordon. Eliot Noyes: A Pioneer of Design and Architecture in the Age of American Modernism. New York: Phaidon, 2006.

For further reading on the subject of service station design:

http://pleasantfamilyshopping.blogspot.com/2011/03/golden-age-of-gas-stations.html

The Lower Modernisms, to the extent that they represent the lowbrow alternative to High Modernism, are a culturally relevant subject for the same reasons that everything lowbrow is presently in vogue.

Hipster culture celebrates working class culture, albeit in detached, ironic, and often offensive and farcical ways. The trucker hat is emblematic of a douchebag culture at its worst, parading a working-class symbol in a manner that feels like a mean-spirited joke at the expense of those perceived as their inferiors in the social hierarchy. But in another manifestation, the rise of gourmet food trucks, this stigma is absent – a middle-class hipster foodie culture, one that did not exist before the internet, earnestly appropriates working-class techniques and habits of consumption. The rise in the last five years of a thriving new market for designer jeans, with unprecedented price tags and rigorous techniques of pre-aging intended to mimic actual wear patterns, reflects this same impulse – such jeans are an elitist alternative to the trucker hat.

Each of these examples reflects a search for authenticity or “aura” in the Benjaminian sense, an attribute evidently perceived as lacking in mainstream, middle-class consumer culture. This sense of authenticity, sought in vain by consumers of pre-aged simulacrum denims, is on the contrary perceived as really existing in vintage goods and working-class trappings. Typical Lower-Modern architecture – liquor stores and bowling alleys – offers both advantages; the patina of real aging, and a legitimate working-class character. Considering also the general popularity of “Eames Era” design, hipsters should be crazy about this blog.

In contrast to the facetiousness of recent American Hipsterism, consider the thriving Japanese consumer market for both vintage American workwear and vintage-inspired renditions thereof. Japanese magazines like Free & Easy and Lightning demonstrate an otaku-like deadpan character that transcends Western irony. The Lower Modernisms project pursues that same spirit by evaluating the architecture of humble buildings on their own terms, without the conventional prejudice and snobbery that has kept these works out of the architectural history books.

From this view, the ESCC’s massing resembles a late-Modern baseball stadium more than anything else, but it is actually a drive-in, drive-thru storage building and parking garage with a smattering of commercial office space.

The massive scope of this 400,000 square-foot, porkchop-shaped building can only be grasped from a distance. Its profile neatly follows the contours of an irregular parcel caught between Interstate 405 and a park-and-ride lot serving the Orange Line Bus-Rapid-Transit station at Sepulveda Boulevard. Courtesy of Google Maps:

The ESCC’s façades present varying aspects without seeming incohesive. From the front, where the ESCC’s north façade improbably towers over a row of single-family homes, it could almost pass as an office building.

The ESCC’s west façade is made seemingly endless by a shallow curve that follows the property line, and the horizontal emphasis of its exterior elements recalls ocean-going vessels. The ESCC is an anonymous participant in the high-architectural tradition of taking inspiration from ocean liners, and bares comparison with the 1966 Wyndham Court project by Lyons Israel Ellis in Southhampton, England, described by Owen Hatherley as “a glorious concrete Cunard” that “immediately evokes the cruise behemoths that sailed from the nearby port” (7). The ESCC looks rather more like a container ship.

The ESCC resembles a number of English “Megastructure” projects designed and built in concrete in the 1960s and 1970s, although it lacks academic pedigree. It is a lomo megastructure, in its pragmatism and humility closer to the anonymous industrial structures that Reyner Banham termed “Mégastructures Trouvées” in his book Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past. Its integrated exterior vehicular circulation ramps and skeletal, ancillary stair towers even permit comparison (and contrast) with the Pompidou Centre. The ESCC’s easygoing modern detailing suggests that its designers, probably working in the mid-1980s, might well have had some of these high-modernist precedents in mind while they struggled to transform this commission for a vast mini-storage building into a work of Architecture.

Even though it does not quite fit the criteria, the ESCC’s monumental scale and rugged frame have earned it an honorary place on my just-launched Google Map of Brutalist architecture in Los Angeles: http://g.co/maps/33c44. For the sake of this exercise, I have assumed a working definition of Brutalist Architecture as buildings with an exposed, unpainted, cast-in-place structure of architectural concrete. Leave a comment below if you care to contribute any good candidates and I will add them to the map, which someday may form the basis for a Los Angeles Brutalism bicycle ride. I have not input any university buildings yet, as these will tend to overwhelm all others in their numbers and quality. Nor have I included Orange County, where ruggedly handsome architectural-concrete public schools serve unappreciative suburban children.

Although they are not architecture, the freeway interchanges are surely the most stunning works in the Brutalist design language in Los Angeles. It would be a fruitful exercise to analyze the great freeway interchanges, neither as sculpture nor from a traffic circulation perspective, but as architecture – to diagram the way they define the space above, below, and around their contours.

The nondescript pale beige of the frame is enlivened by the painting of the steel roll-up doors of individual storage spaces a version of International Orange, well established as the default color for storage units by the Public Storage real estate investment trust.

The façade’s monotony is relieved by the varying widths of those roll-up doors, accented by the unpredictable, jazzy rhythm of the punched holes of hallways leading to the interior and the syncopation of vertical posts and pipes tacked onto the outside of the frame.

Commercial office space behind glazed storefronts is sprinkled about the edges at the top and bottom of the building in a seemingly random sandwich of office space with storage space.

The visual interest of the ESCC is programme-driven. It resembles the cross-programmed buildings featured by Atelier Bow-Wow in their book, Made in Tokyo, the unique forms of which were derived from Tokyo’s combination of relaxed zoning controls and intensive use of space; in particular, the “Car Tower” (page 72), the “Delivery Spiral” (86), the “Truck Tower” (92), and the “Tokyo Dispersal Centre” (162).

The ESCC’s construction is in the mode of cast-in-place concrete parking garages, its frame, relatively slender in appearance, left exposed.

All the goodness comes together at the southwest corner, perhaps not coincidentally the most visible to northbound traffic on the 405 Freeway. Here more than anywhere, the building resembles a concrete frame that has been conceived as a matrix into which diverse elements can be plugged – vehicular circulation ramps, stair towers, storage units with roll-up doors, a ground-level storefront office space. This is a successful visualization of the idea of the “plug-in city” in which programmatic components are fit as needed into a more permanent frame, such as the 1981 “Highrise of Homes” project by James Wines’ firm SITE, of which idea there is a good run-down on the ArchiTakes blog.

Behind a jaunty row of multicolored flags on the roof is parked a lone RV on the roof, calling to mind the 1967 “Free Time Node Trailer Cage” project by Archigram. Plug in your home node!

Above the ramp, two orange-doored structural bays of storage space were grabbed – they had to be, for compositional as much as pragmatic reasons.

My photographs linger on this great moment, where the flags flap against a blue sky atop the dynamism of the ramp and the skeletal stair tower. It put me in mind of the playful amusement architecture of Camelot Golfland and its waterslide tower, which is a wonderful and unique characteristic for a mini-storage facility to possess.

Bibliography:

Banham, Reyner. Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Cook, Peter, ed. Archigram. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

Kaijima, Momoyo, Junzo Kuroda, and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto. Made in Tokyo. Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing Co., 2001.

SITE. New York: Rizzoli, 1989.

The Stardust was an epic work of the Lower Modern, a hotel-casino that exemplified the “Decorated Shed” advocated by Venturi and Scott Brown in Learning from Las Vegas. The graphic elements of this matchbook, rendered in cleverly harmonizing hues with a three-color print process, echo the forms of YESCO’s great 1960s electrographic sign.

There are two key components to this graphic identity. The nonverbal element is a random array of a shape that can be called a “stardust”: a four-pointed star with points on axis and concave sides. This lomo shape vaguely recalls the effect of twinkling lights or of the streaky appearance of electric lamps photographed through a defocused lens. The second component is the “STARDUST” logogram, the letterforms made up of sharp shards. The Ts in particular resemble the stardust shapes in the starry array, and bring sputniks to mind.

Throwing showgirls together with a space-age imagery, Stardust played up a double entendre of “star” to evoke and conflate outer space and celebrity.

In the same way that Disneyland comprises a collection of distinct fantasy environments, the Stardust resort brought together an eclectic mix of themed restaurants, and the inside of the book correspondingly throws together a collection of eclectic typefaces.

It was not so long ago that the dominant architectural-historical narrative held that Modernism was dead, succeeded in the evolution of avant-garde movements by something called Postmodernism. During those dark years, the conquering Postmodernist overlords strode the lands like kings. Meanwhile the persecuted Modernists struggled, in many cases committing apostasy and taking up the new faith, while others were forced into the Underground.

Not much later, the tables were turned, and subsequently it is Postmodernism that appears bankrupt. The key works of Postmodern architecture (take Michael Graves’s Portland building – please!) are now primarily hated or ignored by practitioners and ideologists of design. The commonly held perspective of architects today is that Postmodernism was infertile, spawning the most disappointing architectural progeny of the 20th Century and leading to an ideological cul-de-sac. In the oversimplified evolutionary roadway of architectural styles, Postmodernism became a dead-end road; architects have been compelled to go backwards to the main highway of Modernism in order to move forward again.*

The 1989-1993 television series, Quantum Leap, stood as a parable for the disorienting dilemma under which contemporary architects struggled to design Postmodern architecture. In each episode, Scott Bakula’s “Sam Beckett” had the duty of righting the wrongs – he parachuted into some new context, identified the problem to be solved, proceeded to solve it, and then got out. Just as the Postmodern practitioner concealed his or her secret Modernist ethical codes while designing historical re-enactment architecture, no matter what historical or social context in which he discovered himself, Sam could never reveal that actually he came from the future and saw Scott Bakula when he looked in the mirror. Meanwhile, Sam’s “swiss-cheesed brain” struggled to recall fuzzy memories of the futuristic world that he willingly abandonded. Unable to reveal his true persona to his associates, Sam was obliged to embrace the role and historical context given him. As soon as Sam succeeded at convincing his collaborators that he was Authentic, he abandoned them, leaping to the next project. Dean Stockwell’s “Al Calavicci” fulfilled the role of Sam’s super-ego. Al was an invisible conscience that only he could perceive, impressing upon Sam his sense of ironic detachment, a parallel for the exclusive language and code of ethics that only architects can understand.

Just as Sam Beckett hopes each time that his next leap will be the leap home, the Postmodern architect’s existential crisis of meaninglessness could only be solved by returning back home to the ethics and ideals of Modernism. And from that point of regression, it is through the Lower Modernisms in particular that the path of future development continues. Lomo commercial projects provide valuable precedents for a post-Postmodernism, as they presaged both the historical references and the humor of the best Pomo architecture, but without the ponderous elitism. Furthermore, the Lomo solutions become ever more relevant as the profession, especially in the United States, transitions toward a relatively impoverished architecture of low budgets, restricted options, strict entitlements, and limited resources.

Notes.

* I cannot help but share this perspective, short-sighted by its own set of prejudices, even though it seems increasingly obvious that a re-evaluation of the Postmodernist architecture of the 1980s and 1990s is already happening and about to bust into the mainstream. A renaissance of Postmodernism, presumably starting with a critical reconsideration of its theoretical merits to be followed shortly afterward by a wave of nostalgia for its stylistic qualities, is as inevitable and predictable as the impending tidal wave of nostalgia for music, fashion, and popular culture of the 1990s. I cannot yet imagine what this will look like even though we all know it is coming, but this is the time to strategize how to get out to the front of the Pomo Revival. These two blog posts are part of my effort to grapple with the beast.

Entirely clad in slate and half-buried in the mounded landscape, this outbuilding has a Modernist integrity and rigor that puts the 1969 tower to shame.

A theoretical Perfect Building is one that approaches Platonic perfection by having the fewest number of distinct details. A hypothetical Most Perfect Building would be a sphere of homogeneous material of constant thickness with no openings of any kind; any section cut through it would be identical.

In practice, the Perfect Building is one which is detailed to appear like a Platonic ideal. Belying the nature of constructed buildings as assemblies of multiple parts, with walls distinct from roofs and with cladding distinct from structure, a Perfect Building inspires the beholder to interpret it as a pure Platonic shape. Such buildings are the ethical acme at the end of the pathway of reasoning that equates Ornament with Crime.

The Perfect Building at 5900 Wilshire seeks anonymity. You are not supposed to notice it. It reads as a pure box of tiled stone. Aside from the mandatory concession to having those two doors, it has been carefully detailed to maintain this illusion of pure boxness. The slate tiles run straight down to the ground with no material transition. There is no cap flashing over the top of the walls to express the distinction between roof and wall; this effect is achieved at some cost, as it is invariably more difficult or costly to build a properly watertight building that achieves such graciously minimalist effects.

What shoves this little building down into the family of the Lower Modernisms is its programme – an enclosure housing nothing but mechanical equipment does not rise to the accepted threshold to be considered as Architecture per se. Recalling the argument made in post 003 about the Huntington Beach Central Park Washroom Pavilion, it is paradoxically this freedom from being Architecture that permits the building to be so rigorous. The functional concerns over water intrusion that usually necessitate ugly cap flashings over the tops of parapets are here relaxed, allowing greater aesthetic control on the part of the designer.

Nothing but slate is seen in its silhouette against the sky, and even the opening around the door frames has been clad in the same slate tile, reinforcing our perception of the thickness and mass of this stone box. For all we know from looking at it, the walls might be perversely constructed of nothing but a stack of slate tiles and blocks, like an orderly alternative version of the informal walls designed by newly minted Pritzker Laureate Wang Shu.

Climbing around to the top feels like cheating, but exposes how the effect was achieved. The walls are of poured-in-place concrete, the slate tiles adhered to it with a cementitious material. Matching tiles are applied even over the top of the parapet. The concrete is exposed at the inner face of the parapet, with the roofing terminated under a sheetmetal counterflashing let into a continuous reglet in the concrete.

Had the slate tile been left off it and the poured-in-place concrete exposed and expressed with similar rigor, this would have been a better Theoretical Perfect Building, but possibly a lesser Practical Perfect Building, as the slate tile lends an abstract quality to its appearance.

William Pereira would abhor the suggestion that this little building was his finest moment.

The discourse of Modern Architecture was at its most vital and sophisticated in its later years, but this very vitality contained the seeds of Modernism’s downfall. On the strength of seductive straw-man arguments asserting the failure of Modernism, Postmodernism rose as its apparent successor movement. Although many aspects of the 1970s critique against Modern Architecture still seem valid, the response should have been not the wholesale abandonment of the Modernist Project, but rather the expansion of that Project to include the Lower Modernisms.

The heady and tumultuous period of architectural discourse from 1965 through 1975 gave rise to many compelling works of 20th Century architecture, a time when many of the great early pioneers were still at work and Modernist practice was sufficiently experienced and entrenched that practitioners knew what they were doing and were able to work with confidence and skill. The Huntington Beach Central Public Library serves as a fine example of such work – completed under the design leadership of Dion Neutra after Richard Neutra’s death, this building embodies the potential for a thoroughly Modernist Architecture, all finished in glass, steel and rough concrete, to create a genuinely humane and tremendously popular public facility. This late-modern period gave us beloved classics like the Pompidou Center, the Ford Foundation and the Salk Institute, as well as countless smaller projects lacking renown but just as successful. Just as architects as a class were starting to pull their shit together and figure out how to design Modernist buildings that people actually liked, however, the rug was pulled from under them.

Arising out of that same vital and diverse discourse was a strain of criticism asserting that Modernism, as a whole, had failed to reach its own aspirations. Contemporary books like Form Follows Fiasco by Peter Blake, From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe, and The Failure of Modern Architecture by Brent Brolin mounted this critique with zeal. The arguments of these writers vary in their details, but concur that “functionalist” buildings have functioned badly; buildings intended For The People have been hated by those People; and that the tastes and preferences of Modern Architects have not aligned with those of building users. That the works of Modern architects had frequently failed to live up to the high-minded, progressive ambitions of Architectural Modernism may seem self-evident, but each of these books presented the criticism with a tone of self-astonishment, as if the hegemony of Modernism were so impenetrable that surely the reader must be shocked, shocked! to learn that architects’ buildings were failing to meet their aspirations.

By the sleight-of-hand of conflating the failure of individual building designs with the failure of the Modern Movement as a whole, this line of reasoning tossed the baby with the bathwater by suggesting that Modernism’s ideals of Functionalism, Progress, and Social Welfare were responsible for this failure and therefore needed to go. The seductiveness of this fallacy was such that architects, rushing to abandon the old virtues, could convince themselves that Modernism was indeed finished, making way for its successor.

Just one of many competing contemporary trends in these years when Modern architects were doing their best work and figures such as Robert Venturi, James Wines, and Charles Moore were performing the noble work of expanding the boundaries of the discipline in new directions, Postmodernism was ideally situated to inherit the momentum of the anti-Modernist critique. The wagons were soon circled around the underachieving historical re-enactment architecture defined as Postmodern by the brilliant propagandist Charles Jencks. I believe that the twenty-year dominance of the double-coded, historicizing style was due in large part to Jencks’s being clever enough to assign it the name of “Postmodernism,” referencing fashionable concepts in literary criticism and the arts. The name suggests both closure and inevitability, implying the arrival of the Mannerist phase that would precede Whatever Big Thing is Next. Jencks’ claim in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture that “Modern Architecture died” on the 1972 day of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe tower block was the nail in the coffin, a memorable cocktail party bon mot that ended the conversation.

Postmodernism’s dreary triumph would have been unnecessary had Modernism’s critics been open-minded enough to appreciate what could be found in the Lower Modernisms. A broader perspective would have revealed that these ignored or disdained typologies on the lower commercial fringes contained numerous works that embodied the creativity, populism and human scale those 1970s critics were after and successfully sidestepped the crimes they ascribed to Modernism. The Modernism pilloried by Peter Blake in Form Follows Fiasco, still a persuasive read today, is the Modernism of the Plan Voisin, the Yale Art and Architecture Building, master-planned communities, windswept plazas in front of skyscrapers, and segregated zoning practices – decidedly not the populist modernism of coffee shops and mini-golf courses. Brent Brolin in The Failure of Modern Architecture gave us blanket statements of anti-Modernist polemic wherein the counterarguments can be found within the Lower Modern canon:

The modern architect’s personal vision is infused with a sense of moral superiority (45).

Instead, modernism has remained an elitist movement, aesthetically inaccessible to the majority (58).

In an alternate history, a Lomo answer to this anti-“Duck” critique might have emerged triumphant. Instead of suffering a twenty-year plague of pretentious, humorless historical retreads, we could have hallucinated through a twenty-year carnival of a triumphant Lomo architecture – growing ever-wackier, its creativity ever more unrestrained, the Jaunty prevailing over the Butch.

***

Bibliography:

Blake, Peter. Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn’t Worked. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977.

Brolin, Brent C. The Failure of Modern Architecture. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976.

Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1977.

Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972.

Watkin, David. Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.