this is a mess
Following graduation I’ve come back home to Ithaca for the summer (where “home”=“the place where I grew up”) and it’s helped me understand an architectural trend I’ve noticed recently. It’s particularly visible to me here for a couple of reasons: I grew up here, so new buildings stick out; Ithaca, as a prosperous but relatively isolated collegetown, has its own idiosyncratic culture; and a recent loosening of zoning laws has brought on a wave of new construction downtown.
The defining feature of this architecture is a development of modernism that maintains its formal elements: asymmetries, cube shapes, airiness and oppenness. But visually it centers traditional building materials like brick and wood in a decorative (not structural) way. The shining steel and huge windows of earlier modern architecture becomes ornamental peripheries.
An older building in Ithaca: brick structure, symmetry, some ornamentation, cloth awnings, arches over windows.
Modenism in Ithaca: smooth stone exterior, asymmetry, no ornamentation, awnings, or arches.
Skeuomorphic modernism: brick exterior, asymmetry, no arches, cloth awnings become steel sunshades, overt modernist elements become secondary ornamentation.
De-emphasizing the synthetic components of modernist architecture in favor of older materials is a spatially situated authenticity claim. Modernism is defined in part by what it is not, an attempt to situate buildings solely in an aesthetic space with an ‘anywhere’ quality. The new style tries to maintain the aesthetic features of modernist forms while projecting the appearance of being definitely, organically ‘here’ by using the same textures of wood and brick that old buildings use. This is an illusion—I’ve seen similar styles in Minneapolis and in photos of other cities.
The phenomenon is related to the one described in True-ish Grit, which talks about post-industrial cities selling their decay as an authentic backdrop for social media. (I promise I’m not deliberately mirroring Real Life Mag, they’ve just been putting out too much good shit.)
I think that this increased focus on authenticity of place is a response to anxieties resulting from the fluidity of information enabled by the internet. Semiotic information is no longer tied to space; its final spatial holdout in the printed word has been undercut by the digital word. Detached from its physical place, from the speaker or the text, words now are only attached to other words. But even as smartphone absorption seems to make physical space irrelevant, we try to make the physical spaces where we use our phones feel more real. But this style of architecture is the product of the likewise detached forces of global capitalism, which is why it seems to peddle the same sort authenticity regardless of place.
It’s the mirrored spacelessness of the internet and of money that produces this skeuomorphic architecture which comforts through decorative anachronism. It stands out in Ithaca because this cookie-cutter authenticity feels inauthentic against the backdrop of Ithaca’s actual local culture--anachronistic bohemians and bleeding-heart liberalism.
