The Architecture of Television
The Architecture of Television
So many houses, so big with so little soul.
Susan Susanka
Modern architecture has long ceased to reflect family values. Today our houses are designed to support a pattern of life that is hurried, fragmented, and centered on technology, commercialism, and show. Our houses are often much larger than our needs require and filled with “decorative” rooms, speaking on our desire to impress visitors rather than to nurture family life and create centers of family industry. Modern architects have sacrificed beauty and individuality for cheap and disposable generics. In the words of Kunstler, modernism swept away “all architectural history, all romantic impulses, [and jammed] all human aspiration into a plain box.” Instead of a distinct voice for the families’ varied lives and personalities, neighborhoods have become nondescript rows of cookie-cutter houses. Rather than harbors of charm, endurance, character, and dignity, modern “homes” have become false, ugly, and universal.
The following is an excerpt from Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, a stimulating analysis of modern architecture which I read while researching the importance and influence of architecture. Here, Mr. Kunstler discusses the effect of television on architecture.
[Think] of how much television has to do with the way houses look in the present landscape. The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever occurs beyond its four walls. (TV rooms are called "family rooms" in builder's lingo. A friend who is an architect explained to me, "People don't want to admit that what the family does together is watch TV.") At the same time, the television is the family's chief connection with the outside world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather, it seals them off from it. The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.
The car, of course, is the other connection to thee outside world, but to be precise it connects the inhabitants to the inside of their car, not to the outside world per se. The outside world is only an element for moving through, as submarines move through water.
As the outside world became more of an abstraction, and the outside of the house lost its detail, it began to broadcast information about itself and its owners in the abstracted language of television, specifically of television advertising, which is to say a form of communication based on simplifications and lies. As in television advertising, the lies have to be broad and simple because the intended audience is a passing motorist who will glance at the house for a few seconds. So, one dwelling has a fake little cupola to denote vaguely an image of rusticity; another has a fake portico à la Gone with the Wind, with skinny two-story columns out of proportion with the mass of the house, and a cement slab too narrow to put a rocking chair on, hinting at wealth and gentility; a third has the plastic pediment over the door and brass carriage lamps on wither side, invoking "tradition." The intent is to create associations that will make the house appear as something other than the raised ranch it actually is, something better, older, more enduring, resonant with history and taste.
It must be obvious that there are honest ways to design a dwelling than confer meaning and sensual appeal. But they involve more complicated procedures than the two-second visual pitch to a passing motorist using cartoonish symbolism. And the task is made inordinately more difficult when each house is disposed on its own acre, with only a schematic connection to the land in the form of "landscaping" with shrubs, and no relation whatever to other buildings - even if there are some nearby. It is also difficult when the street is degraded by a lot of automobile traffic.
American wonder why their houses lack charm. The word charm may seem fussy, trivial, vague. I use it to mean explicitly that which makes our physical surroundings worth caring about. It is not a trivial matter, for we are presently suffering on a massive scale the social consequences of living in places that are not worth caring about. Charm is dependent on connectedness, on continuities, on the relation of one thing to another, often expressed as tension, like the tension between private space and public space, or the sacred and the workday, or the interplay of a space that is easily comprehensible, such as a street, with the mystery of openings that beckon, such as a doorway set deeply in a building. Of course, if the public space is degraded by cars and their special needs - as it always is in America, whether you live in Beverly Hills or Levittown - the equation is spoiled. If nothing is sacred, then everything is profane.
The equation is also spoiled when buildings cease to use the physical vocabulary of architecture - extrusions and recesses - and instead resort to tacked-on symbols and signs. One is a real connection to the outside world; the other is an appeal to second-hand mental associations. (I saw a wonderful example of this in Vermont: a two story building on a rural highway that had a gigantic sign on it, with letters four feet high. The sign said COUNTRY STORE, as though passing strangers had to be informed in written words that they were in the country. The woods and meadows on each side of the road were not enough to get across the point.)
The habit of resorting to signs and symbols to create the illusion of charm in our everyday surroundings is symptomatic of a growing American character disorder: the belief that it is possible to get something for nothing. The germ of this disorder probably has been with us a very long time, because this was such a bountiful land. But our economic luck in the aftermath of World War II accelerated the syndrome. Life was so easy here for so many for such a long time that Americans somehow got the idea that you merely had to wish something was so in order to make it so. The culture of advertising - which bombarded America daily, hourly - eroded our capacity to distinguish between the truths and the lies. And not even in moral terms, but on the practical level. You could label a house "traditional" and someone would accept it, even if all the traditional relationships between the house and its surroundings were obliterated. You could name a housing development Forest Knoll Acres even if there was no forest and no knoll, and the customers would line up with their checkbooks open. American were as addicted to illusion as they were to cheap petroleum. They had more meaningful relationships with movie stars and characters on daytime television shows than they did with members of their own families. They didn't care if things were real or not, if ideas were truthful. In fact, they preferred fantasy. And the biggest lie of all was that the place they lived was home.
Text: Quote by Susan Susanka from Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live. Excerpt taken from The Geography of Nowhere, written by James Howard Kunstler. © James Howard Kunstler, 1993.
Photograph: Untitled. © business2oakland.com
Friday, September 14, 2007