The new Bayshore mall promises everything.
“Bayshore will be transformed into a town center that we’ve never seen
before,” proclaims Glendale Mayor Jay Hintze. It offers “a place to shop, live,
work and play,” its developers declare.
In one audacious, gigantic stroke, Glendale got a new downtown – 1.2 million
square feet of offices, condos, stores, plazas, fountains, hotel, movies,
fitness centers, restaurants, markets, dry cleaners, pharmacies, salons, bars
and clinics.
In the process, Bayshore has overwritten the old suburban shopping mall
design with a “town center” that ostensibly embraces more urban values. It may
seem like a bold and historic change, like a vision of the future. But actually,
there is nothing new at Bayshore Town Center. It is a culmination of what we
have seen before, repeatedly.
Over the last quarter-century, architectural forms have evaporated from much
of our landscape. Since the demise of the ranch house, the last distinctive
suburban form in the 1970s, a new hybrid has evolved that renders architectural
form not just improbable but impossible. Across the landscape of the exurbs, the
cake has been lost and just the frosting is left.
The result is a kind of oozing formlessness, which makes it difficult to tell
a home from a store, a church from a movie theater. In Bayshore’s new Town
Center, the various buildings are equally indistinguishable and inauthentic.
This way of making the world has gradually crept up on us and is profoundly
changing the way Americans live.
How We’ve Changed
This is a church. Trinity Lutheran Church on Cedarburg Road in Mequon is
exactly what we might think of if asked to draw a “church.” Its founders left
Germany in 1843 and came to America to escape religious oppression. Their first
church was made of logs. In 1891, the first services were held in this building.
This 115 year-old form sticks in our minds for a reason. Every line, every space
and shape is necessary. It harmonizes with itself. The proportions are
impeccable, its modesty and spirituality inspiring. This building is supremely
confident of its own values. There it is, a beacon in the landscape.
Elmbrook Church and St John’s Lutheran Church are exurban versions of a
church. They face each other across Baker Road in Brookfield. Elmbrook looks
vaguely authoritarian, reminiscent of Darth Vader. From the immense parking lot,
it looks like the county zoo building. What’s missing is much more remarkable.
Nothing makes these “churches” into something intrinsically religious – they
could be a college building, medical facility, corporate headquarters or indoor
go-kart track. This architecture is earnestly amorphous. No mention of St.
John’s.
As is this house on Stone Creek Drive in Mequon. This building doesn’t even
have a basic orientation. It’s neither a horizontal nor vertical composition. It
looks like it was “customized” willy-nilly by a computer program and enlarged
until the structure incrementally lost its form. This “house” has been morphed
into a run-on sentence that turns everything into mush.
This kind of “McMansion” is appropriately named. Like the super-size meals at
McDonalds, it’s all about quantity. It starts out with cheap land and adds cheap
materials. When you’re all done, you can’t help but feel bloated.
Now consider the houses on Shepard Avenue or just about any street in
Milwaukee or its older suburbs. Every one is different, but they all make sense.
Their distinctness exemplifies the noun “house.” Their lines and proportions
produce a specific, poised composition with undeniable authority. It’s not
really a matter of style. Taken together, their clarity and complexity is worthy
of any good work of art.
Once individual forms become blurry, whole classes of buildings can lose
their denotation. In Mequon, domestic and commercial buildings, like this
mega-home and roof-happy shopping center, are written in the same architectural
language, a composite of limp triangles that have merged into the same species.
The scaling and domestic feel of suburban buildings started out in the late
1930s as a progressive impulse toward a more casual and egalitarian
architecture. But like many well-intended movements, decades later, we are left
with its unintended consequences. As real forms melt away, anything is possible.
If a house is not a house, then a shopping center can be a house, too. This
mutation turns a solid into a liquid. The shopping center is so excessively
homey that it looks more like a movie set than a group of tangible buildings.
Its artificiality is its essence. We have created something like “new exurban
smell.”
The exurbs have also taken the multi-family dwelling and transformed it into
a facade that can be arbitrarily stretched to cover any volume. But forms are
not infinitely malleable. These condos at the Pabst Farms development in
Oconomowoc get fuzzy when detached from their original form and would snap into
focus as soon as you imagine them as discrete rectangles.
Whitefish Bay has taken this domestication one step further. Their new
library looks like a house. This is quite perverse. There is probably no
building that should be more public and less domestic than a library. It
deserves its own form as a place that collects and shares knowledge freely in a
democracy. Libraries shouldn’t be disguised but exclaimed.
Buildings get better the more forthright they are about their purpose. The
Fox Bay Building, designed in 1948 by Henry Plunkett, promotes rather than
censors its use. It’s a place to shop or go to the dentist. It’s also a debonair
Moderne building that radiates confidence, a proud piece of culture that asserts
a moment like Duke Ellington in the 1930s and the Beatles in the 1960s. It’s
inspiring to be part of history.
Even today, there is a lot to learn from this ambitious building. The
wraparound canopy is elegantly drawn and proportioned. From the pedestrian point
of view, it’s hard to imagine a more amiable approach to the street. Contrasting
glass block, Lannon stone and stainless steel shimmer together. The windows, the
lines and the materials emphasize the horizontal posture of the building.
Goethe once said, “Architecture is frozen music.” Our contemporary exurban
architecture is like the Muzak we started piping into insurance offices and
hotel lobbies. It was supposed to make us happier and more productive to have
something smooth and subdued humming in the background. Now think of your
favorite Beatles song and its Muzak version. See, it’s not so hard to tell the
difference between a real and formless building.
At Bayshore, the transition from form to formlessness is complete. It’s an
entire world where nothing is anything in particular. The blended surfaces are
permutations of something that was once real. Mimicry trumps reality.
Downtowns once grew organically, mixing periods and styles, creating
distinctive buildings. Bayshore Town Center is part of a new wave of “suburban
downtowns” that are now mass-produced as one ready-made, amorphous product.
Mega-developers with one point of view have replaced the many different points
of view that used to compete with each other, creating a sense of place. The
press release for one “placemaking conference”for developers starts out,
“Creating authentic places with a mix of uses that provide an identity and a
sense of community is difficult, complex and requires a variety of approaches,
according to industry experts.”
It took a half-century to figure out how to turn the old malls into something
a little quainter. The result is not a downtown but something “town-like,” as
Bayshore’s developers note. Rather than authentic buildings, the industry
experts have given Bayshore a bunch of architectural talking points. According
to the developer, the facades of these buildings “draw their design from the
surrounding neighborhood.” Which neighborhood is that? This attempt to create
buildings derived from our architectural heritage looks as flat as flowers on
wallpaper.
Meanwhile, even as the design echoes the neighborhood, it also offers,
according to the developers, “an eclectic blend of architectural styles that
distinguishes the Bayshore design.” One is left wondering how an “eclectic blend
of styles” would distinguish itself from anything.
These are ersatz buildings, facades rather than forms. The signature
structure on the northeast corner of Silver Spring and Port Washington Road
fills the block. But it has been made to look like a series of smaller
buildings. It’s a mural of a structure rather than an actual one. The project’s
lead developer, Yaromir Steiner, told the media that “a project like this is
much more than its architecture.… The buildings are a backdrop.” When backdrops
become more real than architecture, Alice is in Wonderland and formlessness has
triumphed.
Why We’ve Changed
Older suburbs like Shorewood and Wauwatosa inspired the developers of
Bayshore, who aimed to create a kind of New Urbanism. Glendale’s city
administrator, Richard Maslowski, termed the new Bayshore as “a throwback to the
old downtown of the ’20s and ’30s.”
In many ways, that’s right. Shorewood and Wauwatosa were designed on
pedestrian scale around the streetcar. Their density and proportion produced a
convivial sense of community, a true sense of place.
But that was before freeways changed everything. The buildings in older
suburbs offer an intimate pedestrian experience. They register at less than
25 mph or 50 feet. When freeways became the main street of America, the
world sped up and the viewing distances dramatically increased. Most buildings
couldn’t be appreciated this way, so their forms became coarser. But logos and
signs could catch the vision of a speeding driver, and they became more
important. It was a small step further down this road until the sign
dematerialized the building, as in the Machine Shed in Brookfield. Signs aren’t
just more obvious than buildings, they’re cheaper, too. Signs rule.
Though billed as New Urbanism, exurban design dominates Bayshore. The irony
is that the Town Center includes residential development. Its residents as well
as shoppers will meander through the plazas and along the streets. This
ostensibly pedestrian-oriented space will draw people close enough to the
buildings to sense the crude forgeries of older materials. Even the “concrete”
isn’t real – when you throw a rock at it, it dents.
The change in our architectural design says something fundamental about our
values. As Louis Henri Sullivan once noted: “Our architecture reflects truly as
a mirror.” So what’s in the mirror?
When asked about life in the exurbs, the answer often goes like this. We pay
less tax. Land costs less. We have fewer neighbors. There is less traffic, less
crime and less noise. What we don’t say, but what is equally true, is there’s
less diversity, fewer poor people. There is less of everything.
In this vast sea of negation, it’s reasonable that there would be less
architecture as well. The exurbs are a prevent defense. You can’t complain about
a shopping center, church or any building, for that matter, if it looks just
like your house. Blair Williams, a local developer who is a scratch golfer put
it this way: “It’s like when you are on the tee and the only thing in your mind
is, ‘Don’t hit it in the water.’ Then you always hit it in the water.” You can’t
make a real building when you are trying not to make one. Architecture is an
assertion. Good buildings stand for something.
Exurban design also reflects a new conception of privacy. This is a lifestyle
that promises everyone his or her very own sky and bushes and the visual absence
of neighbors whenever possible. Since everything is horizontal, no one looks
down or up at anyone else. Every effort is made so buildings don’t “see” each
other. The new suburban ideal starts out as a negative social space that is as
psychologically isolated as possible. The house, then, is a buffer, even when
clustered with others.
Urban houses draw a line drawn between the public and private self. Their
exteriors are extroverted, dressed up to go out in public. They make a
statement, have a style and a personality. Americans used to be more dapper, and
so were their houses. The interiors, meanwhile, remained private: No secrets
were revealed; people were as private as they needed to be. The homes of the
city and its older suburbs offered privacy but without the anonymity of exurban
homes.
As homes become internal domains, they lose this public face and are built
from the inside out. For starters, this diverts resources from the exteriors.
More importantly, the McMansion is not about looking sharp for anyone else. It’s
about other people not knowing who you are. But that leaves open the possibility
of being private or unknown to yourself as well.
We don’t live in houses the way we used to. The combination of the merging
technologies of television and computer has given the internal world of a house
a new dynamic range. Large screens in the living room compete with and overwrite
reality. As the remote control lets us control our televisions, technology puts
us in command of our environment.
Formless architecture serves an introverted culture, where the public self is
gone, and it’s the stuff inside that matters. Architecture then becomes
camouflage. There is no better camouflage than casual domestic uniformity.
As formlessness picked up momentum and scale, it became codified. The
guidelines in a city like Mequon (see “Model Mequon,” page xx) could be found in
probably any newer suburb in America. The formula has become explicit. No odd
juxtapositions. No learning. No contradictions, spontaneity and sharp edges of
reality. We have tamed the beast and put the ship in a bottle.
What We Have Lost
Frank Lloyd Wright thought houses were the place “where you grow the soul.”
That may be a little over the top today, but if you consider architecture a
meaningful human endeavor, it’s hard not to think we’ve lost something
important.How strange the landscape of America will look if formlessness
prevails.
Bayshore has no real buildings or noticeable history because it is a process.
It was built in 1953. It was transformed into an enclosed mall in 1976. It was
updated again in 1994. Styles come and go at the mall. Bayshore will never get
old. It will just get dented and tired. Then it will be time for another
reblending whenever marketing consultants come up with a new “retail
environment.” Bayshore will never have a past, which makes it difficult to have
a present.
Elsewhere, there are architectural forms that persist because they are too
good to throw away. They have intrinsic character. They survive the next big
marketing idea and miraculously adapt from one use to another. When 167 N.
Broadway was built in 1892, it was the Wirth and Hammel livery and stable. Today
it is the Milwaukee home of Design Within Reach, the premier national retailer
of modern furniture design. That’s quite a leap, but look at how elegantly the
building succeeds.
Design Within Reach not only sells furniture but also educates the public
about design. It not an accident that its only store in Wisconsin is housed in
an exquisite 19th century building. The company usually finds a classic building
in every place it locates. Like its product, this building is well crafted and
designed. Formally, it’s a rectangular building that makes sense of the
rectangle. The elements of the building are poised in relationship to each other
and the whole.
You can’t make a building like this today, nor would you want to. But this
114-year-old building is more of our time than any new building in Mequon or at
Bayshore. The best art and architecture of any time remains contemporary.
But it’s not just the city that provides a rich and meaningful architectural
experience. Between World War II and the 1970s, 75 percent of the homes built in
the suburbs were ranches. Frank Lloyd Wright re-invented it and built this ranch
home, the Adelman Wright House, in Milwaukee in 1948. (According to Nicholas
Olsberg, who is writing a book on Wright, the architect persistently listed this
house as one the key works in his oeuvre.)
The ranch included such contemporary amenities as passive solar heat, an
embedded orientation to nature, handicap access and a “family room.” In Back
to the Future, George McFly lived in a ranch, as did Dick Van Dyke and
Ronald Reagan. The ranch house was optimistic about the future.
Then the ranch house was banished from new developments. Baby boomers who
grew up in ranches doubtless wanted to move on. Was the ranch house too modern?
Too modest? Perhaps we are less compelled today by inconspicuous consumption.
Whatever the reason, nothing came after the ranch. For the first time, a popular
architectural form was not replaced with anything in particular. The ranch house
replaced the bungalow, which replaced the American Foursquare, the Tudor,
Colonial revival and so on. It was part of a great chain of housing forms. Real
architectural forms used to be second nature. Then the conversation between the
past and present stopped.
In Dwell magazine, there are countless accounts of modern houses being
vehemently opposed by their exurban neighbors. Rather than an enthusiasm for
authentic buildings, we’ve become passionate about preventing them from
disrupting our life.
Meanwhile, architectural form is thriving in cities like Milwaukee. After
decades of being subservient to the suburbs, of aping suburban design with
developments like Grand Avenue mall, cities are finding themselves again. A city
can’t be less vertical, less pedestrian, less diverse, less assertive and less
public. It has more of everything a newer suburb lacks. It remains a very public
place where buildings compete to stand out from each other and there is too much
complexity to achieve extreme uniformity. And as developers (and city codes)
promote these urban qualities, striking new architectural forms are being
created in Milwaukee and other cities.
Now there are two opposing ways of being in the world, two ideas of the self.
America is split down the middle, with city and older suburbs stylistically
pitted against the newer suburbs and exurbs. Urbanists might argue that it’s
impossible to continue indefinitely without forms. Just as we need words to mean
something, we need architectural forms to help construct our world. Yet a
yearning for such structure may be hopelessly romantic.
Are forms necessary? The battle is on. We are going to find out.
Model Mequon
How a draconian city code enforces the exurban way.
Mequon is about the size of Boston, 47 square miles. But it has less than one
person per acre, about 24,000 people. According to its master plan, no more than
29,000 will ever fit into Mequon. In the same space, Shorewood would pack
440,000 people. Boston has nearly 600,000.
Mequon is not a city, not a town, not farmland anymore. The minutes of the
Mequon Planning Commission incessantly talk about preserving “rural character,”
but if this were still rural, only about 1,500 people would live here, and in a
very different manner.
Mequon’s “rural character” is a highly controlled and specified state spelled
out in city ordinances. You can’t fish anywhere other than “a designated area.”
You can’t undress and get into a bathing suit in a public bathroom. You can’t
use “superfluous language,” such as a phone number on a sign. Thus it makes
sense that movable letters on signs are restricted to prevent language from
getting out of hand. Signs are also forbidden to “sparkle or twinkle.” Speaking
of sparkle, no lights are allowed that move in the wind.
Nature is also highly controlled and used strategically to “screen” and
“buffer” one thing from another. Nature is a remedy for architecture. “Screening
can lessen the visual pollution that may otherwise occur within an urbanized
area.” There is endless discussion about how to use scrubs and trees to cover up
and soften the edges of “unsightly” man-made things. Meanwhile, “All noxious
weeds as follows – Canada thistle, leafy spurge, field bindweed (creeping
Jenny), burdock, poison ivy, common ragweed and giant ragweed” – are declared to
be “nuisances affecting the public health.” A two-hour drive through Mequon
revealed no burdock.
Terms like “public safety” and “public health” are liberally sprinkled
throughout the ordinances to give them punch. A dilapidated building is not just
something that looks dissimilar from the rest of Mequon. It’s a health hazard
that could be “infested with vermin or rodents.”
In Mequon, the rules follow you to the grave. You can’t plant tall
perennials, have a slight mound, and “markers must not be more than 24 inches in
width, 12 inches in thickness and 18 inches above the ground.” You can’t put two
bodies in one grave except for a mother and infant. “Winter decorations” such as
evergreens must be removed from graves by March 15. “Objectionable receptacles
for cut flowers should not be placed on graves or lots.”
The rules go on. “No tree or shrub, flower, flower bed or plant shall be
planted, nor urn, marker or monument shall be placed or removed or any other
improvement made on the grave without first obtaining the approval of the
superintendent.” And finally, “All inscriptions on memorials or markers must be
not less than 3/16 of an inch deep.” The devil is in the details.
Sometimes the language is anxious and absurdly specific. Even though “dirt”
is defined as “any substance that makes a surface not clean,” an ordinance
maintains that you have keep sidewalks clear of “dirt of any kind.” It is not
enough to prohibit “loitering.” “Loafing” in a way that obstructs is also
prohibited.
But there also are general terms that seem quite subjective. Things have to
be “compatible” and “harmonize” with the architectural character of the building
or the neighborhood. “Objectionable” things are forbidden. “Unnecessary” and
“discordant” noises are prohibited. Could Thelonious Monk live in Mequon?
The ordinances sometimes are a self-reflective justification of themselves.
Just in case anyone forgets that more rules are better than fewer, that the
public order is vulnerable to threats from any direction at any moment, consider
this passage: “The substantial possibility exists of a proliferation of
political campaign signs in the city over extended periods of time with the
attendant traffic safety, litter, structural hazards and loss of meaning of the
message conveyed by said signs in the absence of any regulation of such signs.”
Of course it’s easy to make fun of rules. All municipalities have silly ones.
However, in Mequon they enforce them. The minutes of the Mequon Planning
Commission exude power and confidence. Mequon is a well-oiled machine. It
implements.
The new Mequon was born when the quintessential style of Mequon building
started reproducing itself. This became the standard with which all subsequent
construction had to be backwardly compatible. Thus it is forbidden to make a
building with an “unorthodox or abnormal character in relation to the
surroundings as to be unsightly or offensive to generally accepted taste.” This
ordinance alone would turn the history of architecture into toxic weeds.
Facades must be made up of materials that are not “aesthetically incompatible
with other buildings” or “present an unattractive appearance.” Colors must
“harmonize” with the neighborhood or not detract “relative to the scenic beauty
of the vicinity.” These are strikingly broad and malleable terms that are used
to create, without saying as much, a rigorous corporate landscape that is
actually destroying the rural character of the place.
In an interview with the mayor and city planner of Mequon, they repeated the
term “earth tones” as a kind of mantra. And indeed, Mequon is painted in a
palette of browns and warm grays. Everything depends on minimizing “discordant
and unsightly surroundings,” as the rules note. But Mequon is not a cloning
operation, which brings up another rule: “No building shall be permitted the
design or exterior appearance which is so identical with those adjoining as to
create excessive monotony and drabness.”
This, of course, leaves the door wide open for moderate monotony and
drabness. The whole enterprise of making this kind of exurb starts out from the
premise: “I don’t know a lot about architecture, but I know what I don’t like.”
That turns out to be everything that is either urban, what used to be suburban
or genuinely rural. Everything is Mequonized, even McDonalds.
