Volume 39, Number 20 · December 3, 1992
Inventing American Reality
By Ada Louise Huxtable
In recent years a shift has taken place in the way we perceive reality, a shift so pervasive that it has radically altered basic assumptions about art and life. The shift is profound; it goes beyond the debate over modernism and postmodernism and it increasingly affects the design of the buildings around us. Some, like myself, believe the shift mutilates and sells short what it pretends to elevate and embrace. It has instantly recognizable characteristics—an emphasis on surface gloss, on pastiche, on the use of familiar but bowdlerized elements from the history of design, on tenuous symbolism and synthetically created environments, a detachment from the problems and processes through which contemporary life and creative necessity are actively engaged. These attributes provide a dubious replacement for the rigorous and elegant synthesis of expression and utility that has always defined and enriched the best of the building art. This change in vision and values has brought irreversible changes in the understanding and practice of architecture today. The art of architecture as packaging or play-acting is a notion whose time, alas, seems to have come.
Feature, 6700 words
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