Why 1304 Mass Ave Really Matters

BUILDINGS HOLD OUR LIVES, but we have forgotten how they shape us. The house, the office building, the factory, the church contain daily activity, influence us their users in the small ways that ultimately determine the grand scene of our actions. What I say and do in my bedroom is significantly affected by the fire door located inescapably next to my bed, through which my neighbors and I can and do willy-nilly communicate all our audible bedroom life. My relations with Harvard bureaucracy (especially the Registrar's Office and UHS) are inextricably linked to the hostile grey sterility of Holyoke Center. And some elements of architecture have a physical and emotional impact not so easily pinned down, buildings that make us walk in certain patterns: the Lampoon's crazy island, whose wedge I always walk the long way round on my way home so as to pass the Starr bookstore and not the garbage cans; architectural features that define our perceptions, like the daises of lecture rooms in Sever or Emerson, on which the professor performs or presides in front of an audience made silent spectators by the very structure of the room. These things are so integral to the way we move and think that I do not bother to imagine a bedroom uninhibited by a fire door, a Cambridge not dominated by Holyoke Center. But stop and think of a square concrete Lampoon, or classrooms with level floors and movable chairs. It might make a difference.

Most of the time, most of us don't think of the architecture in which we function day-to-day, until it changes or we leave it. Architecture, as both a social and an aesthetic experience, is more permanent than other structures of group interaction, and at the same time more immediate than other arts. Buildings are doubly familiar as things to be appreciated for themselves and as arenas in which to play--and for exactly that reason, architecture is fully appreciated neither as author nor as experience. The buildings we know well, we take for granted; they seem so functional that we forget their role as artificers and artifacts, and neglect the built environment until too late. Thus New Yorkers wept more for the loss of the Brooklyn Dodgers than for Penn Station; Harvard recovered its Greek coins, but threw away Hunt Hall.

Unlike the loss of a team or ancient coins, the loss of socially focal and artistically valuable architecture is noted in passing, accepted after the fact as inevitable and necessary. America's Forgotten Architecture, written collectively by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, aims to wake our dormant awareness of the buildings we encounter daily, to make us realize how they matter and that we can and should keep them alive. Written to save the landmarks that mark the geography of American communities and their collective memories, the book is not a coffee-table volume of Historic Architecture glossies. It is a handbook, available in paperback, demonstrating how and why architecture is forgotten, showing in what ways the aesthetics of ordinary buildings matter, and outlining methods of preserving the structures that make only minor architectural statements, but create the mood of a living place.

More a book for Dodger fans than for coin collectors, the consecutive assemblage of articles and photo essays dedicates its efforts to saving and revitalizing buildings that are communal symbols, to preserving, in this conglomerate and megalopolitan age, America's forgotten communities, be they towns, farms, neighborhoods, schools or City Halls.

The book forces you to look around and see that yes, these things are forgotten. The age of throwaway containers has relegated the containers of work, worship, play, the family and the community to no-deposit, no-return status. Unless a building is consecrated "historic" by some authority, no one thinks to recycle it when its original function ceases to be historically valid, or when the structure can no longer hold the activity for which it was built. Instead, we replace the old construction with something which serves the demands of the moment and the market.

CHALLENGING COMMON ASSUMPTIONS of what a "historic building" is, America's Forgotten Architecture attacks stereotypes of history and architecture. Both, the authors realize, need to be seen not as the works of individuals, but as processes that acquire meaning only in a greater context. History is not the creations of Great Men, nor architecture that of Architects; the anonymous designer of a row of 1830's workers' houses in Alabama, and the workers who lived in them shaped the past and influenced the present as much as the Southern aristocrats who lived in mansions nearby. Frame cottages are as important to save as plantation residences.

But even buildings recognized as "historic," by any definition, are often destroyed out of sheer indifference. The list of lost buildings and their memories compiled by the National Trust is depressingly long. One example in particular makes me cringe, a description in Forgotten Architecture of a firefighting exercise in Annandale, Va.

...Firetrucks surrounded an empty deteriorating house that had been repeatedly set afire and extinguished by fire fighters. Close up, one could see on each truck the seal of the city, beautifully painted, and on it a picture of Ossian Hall, a plantation house built in Annandale about 1783--a structure historic enough to give the community a sense of its heritage and its identity.

The house being burned was Ossian Hall.

We lose the unique meanings of places when we lose the buildings that define them. The book's linked photos and text demonstrate remarkably effectively how physical structure is social structure, how the framework that holds an activity reflects and shapes it. The analysis speaks so directly to personal experience that it's hard to read straight through Forgotten America; I began to mentally illustrate how the form of a building conveys its meaning with my own experiences--what it signifies that Mather House is a fortress on the outskirts of Harvard's enclave, that Leverett House closely resembles a Holiday Inn, or that the Fogg imitates the palazzo of a Renaissance aristocrat. I was not daydreaming distractedly. The National Trust purposely relates their statements to individuals' experience by including exercises in architectural awareness (my favorite: "Find a building that repels you and ask yourself why."). An outline of styles in American architectural history and photographs of aspects of the built environment (from "Living Spaces" to "Commerce and Industry") provide categories that the authors encourage one to use in trying to quantify and objectify subjective reactions to familiar architecture. The method works: one recaptures a sense of place and finds it worth preserving.

WHEN I STOPPED and asked what can I do to combat the money and power that works to destroy the architecturally rendered meaning of a place? How can I fight those who move London Bridge to Arizona, or build a monument to President Pusey in Harvard Yard? And the National Trust doesn't answer, really. They are less enterprising in confronting the social issues than in analyzing the cultural deficiency, they are better at awakening the dormant sensibility of the man-on-the-street than they are at challenging the very alert interests of the developer and businessman.

Not that they don't recognize the enemy, but they only describe ways to escape him, or at best fight with his own weapons, the profit motive and buying power. The book describes the methods that have been used by preservationists (documentation, recognition as a "historic landmark," zoning laws, real-estate clauses). But this time the catalog does not speak to the Dodgers fan, only to the philanthropic patron of the arts--because, as the authors admit, "the only way to save or rejuvenate old buildings is money." They recognize that "built into the current economic system are a number of disincentives to preservation...the tax structure tends to favor new and bigger buildings. Building codes are geared to new construction. And lenders do not consider old buildings good risks." But there follows merely a series of arguments to persuade developers and lenders to invest in old buildings. Disappointingly, the authors don't seize the opportunity to suggest new legislation, nor do they sufficiently analyze ways a community could keep its minor landmarks from the hands of big business.

America's Forgotten Architecture advances imaginative precedents and proposals for the adaptive re-use of old buildings. But the book fails to attack the problem from the other side: they don't think of re-vitalizing some of the social structures that the building embodied--the aspects of the architecture's use that made it socially viable then, those intangibles we miss now. If the authors had been as innovative and daring in their ideas for reworking society as they are in their ideas for keeping the architecture--if they had had the courage to propose consciousness-raising exercises on not only the hidden artistic aspects of everyday buildings, but on the hidden economic and political aspects of a society that lead it to discard these buildings as non-profitable and therefore valueless--then America's Forgotten Architecture would have been a revolutionary manifesto. The book is now a record of fights won, but offers little challenge to future duels. Too bad. It could have been a contender.