Don’t Be So Quick to Knock Down Modernist Architecture

Love it? Hate it? Either way, Modernist architecture — like Edward Durell Stone’s work at the State U. of New York at Albany — is an essential part of American architectural history. (Chronicle photo by Lawrence Biemiller)

Midcentury modern architecture certainly has its detractors. The architecture critic Catesby Leigh has been pushing his alma mater, Princeton University, to give up modern design and return to traditional forms. “Everyone — aside from most architects — is just coming around to the fact that traditional architecture works better than Modernist architecture,” he told the Yale University student newspaper recently. “Marci,” a frequent Buildings & Grounds commenter, never passes up an opportunity to slam Modernist architecture on this blog. “Modern architecture looks great until the morning,” she once wrote.

But hold on. Midcentury modern has reached that unloved age that all architectural styles pass through — and midcentury modern will pass through it too. Let’s not forget that when Modernist buildings were going up, all of those antique architectural styles that are so beloved now were considered by many to be outdated and overly ornate. In the era of urban renewal and at other points in our history, we tore them down, and now we regret it. Will the same thing happen to modern architecture?

Lawrence Cheek, in an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, raises the question of what to do with these buildings, a good number of which can be found on college campuses, thanks to a postwar building boom.

Don’t be so fast to knock them down, he says. “Here’s a basic truth about architecture: A style is almost always held in contempt by the children of the generation that produced it” he explains. “It’s the grandchildren who finally begin to treasure it.”

We should even keep some of the mistakes, he says: “Most of these midcentury movements led to dead ends. The minimalist International Style offered too few possibilities in form, surface, and decorative detail to sustain interest, and Formalism buckled under the dead weight of its own empty pretensions. Brutalism never enjoyed any affection outside the architectural journals. But their disgrace is actually a reason in itself to preserve some monuments of Modernism.”