Fascist, Facade, Fa-cadist

I want to make this absolutely, entirely, unequivocally, clear. I do not share the contemporary concern with ‘facadism,’ I do not condemn it, I do not condone it. I share the urban environment with it, as I share that environment with other ‘movements’ as they occur – part of the natural life cycle of cities.

For those of you who are unaware of the term, or the reality, ‘facadism’ is the somewhat derogatory term applied to the process of building renovation that merely maintains the original street frontage/elevation while completely destroying, and building a new structure behind the mask of tradition and history.

Vancouver is currently undergoing a real estate boom that rivals, as a percentage of ‘change,’ anything in the City’s history. In terms of ‘absolute,’ inflation-adjusted dollars, the current spending spree is probably well ahead of any period of boosterism-driven development on record.

One of the problems with the pace of change is the difficulty that citizens have in maintaining personal contact with the newly developed spaces. Towers that spring from former brownfield sites may make the required concessions to public amenity space, but the towers themselves deny the humanity of the occupants, and of the passers by on the streets below. And, when sites such as Concord Pacific’s development along False Creek, and the ‘Yaletown’ area in particular, are overseen by one company (and their associated architects, ‘vision,’ budgets, and choices in market segment) all the buildings tend to come out looking virtually identical.

Now, I have to admit, these buildings are not quite as soulless as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, or various representative bits of Soviet-era housing in the worker’s paradise. But the architectural responses to the kalidescope of demands have been reduced to a minimum, an architectural monoculture.

Some developers, and in some areas of the city, have tried to make money in other ways. And, remember, along with ego, money is a (the) driving force here. When money is the driving force, success is relatively easy to calculate. Money returned less money invested equals profit.

Granted some of the returns may not appear on the ledger directly, such as density transfers, but they will show up, eventually.

Vancouver often grants a sympathetic view to ’sensitive’ redevelopment, particularly in the Gastown area, the City’s oldest commercial zone. Indeed, much of the building stock is heritage listed, at one level or another, and may include certain restrictions with respect to height, FSR (floor/space ratio, a measure of the building area/lot area), and conformity to design guidelines relevant to the area.

And this helps give rise to ‘facadism.’ The retention of the original street-wall, complete with architectural detail ’as built’ lends a sense of visual and cultural continuity to the street frontage; and helps to maintain a sense of scale that reflects human action/interaction both in the buildings and outside on the public street.

Very often the buildings are allowed a vertical addition, sometimes of one or two stories, with a set-back that hides much of the vertical addition from the street-level viewer. The developer wants this additional space to maximize profit, the City may gain tax revenue, and there is an argument that the additional space benefits the local business/residential community with a greater pool of people.

And the buildings are often exemplary in the attention to detail; rooftop green-spaces, geothermal heating systems, and other contemporary details complement the century-old visage that graces the street. The ‘new’ building has a full complement of modern services, of up-to-date amenities, of positive changes to construction methodologies.

The anti-facadists, in their fascistic navel-gazing decry the ‘lie’ that the public sees. They maintain that this new building is, in some sense, a misrepresentation. They complain that a perfectly good, old, building has been destroyed for the nominal profit available through the redevelopment/rebuilding process. They squawk about the loss of heritage detail in the interiors; the loss of old tile floors, the loss (though often reclaimed by specialist recyclers) of old timber, brick, and stone. And they complain that it is new.

But the anti-facadist fascists, in their own ideological verve, have never had to replace all the plumbing in a hundred-year-old building. They have never actually done the math to determine the cost of up-grading, up-dating, up-coding every single system in an old building to reflect the demands not only of modern city codes, but the even-more insistent needs and demands of modern consumers of space. And the actual consumers of space, those corporations and individuals that pay the final tab, want ‘new.’

The romance of old buildings disappears in the middle of a Vancouver winter, when your staff expects heat, and gets instead the banging and gurgling of old heating systems. Original elevators, if the building had elevators, were tiny. You had best be on very good terms with anyone else using the cage. New elevators are bigger, faster, and (possibly) safer. And if they aren’t qualitatively safer, at least you can talk to the ‘operator’ if things get jammed up.

People forget that when most of the building stock in Vancouver was built, or at least the buildings where ‘facadism’ is an issue, electricity ran light bulbs, elevators, and not much more. It certainly didn’t drive recirculating hot-water heating systems. And I don’t hear any clamouring for what is euphemistically termed ‘gravity feed’ hot water heating, which depends on the temperature gradient (and hence specific gravity difference) between hot water and cold to drive the circulation throughout the entire system.

I know of at least one building in the Downtown East Side that is six stories high, still has that gravity system, and the top floor is, shall we say, a little less than comfortably warm in the middle of winter. But the heating system is genuine, it is an antique, and it should be where the anti-facadists huddle while bemoaning the more up-to-date technologies they so fervently disavow.

After you up-grade the heating system there are a couple of other areas of concern. The electrical service. We now expect duplex receptacles every few feet of linear wall surface. We expect to be able to plug in a hair dryer, toaster, microwave, computer, adding machine, general and spot lighting, and a variety of other electrical loads without ever being inconvenienced by something so tawdry as a breaker tripping. Or, perhaps, the nay-sayers would prefer screw-in fuses?

What about the vast array of other, hidden, details? What about high-speed internet cabling? What about security system wiring? Do we just run all this stuff along the base boards, in an attempt to cut the installation costs? What about floors that are not level, rooms that are not square, renovations done by any number of incompentents over the pre-existing life of the building. What about the leaking skylights, or light-wells, as applicable? What about the dry-rot in any, endless, variety of hidden spaces?

My suspicion is that the vast majority of anti-facadists are taking a small amount of architectural knowledge, mostly ‘theoretical,’ drawing on various anti-humanist ‘post-’ positions to generate an inadequate, and perhaps juvenile, Arcadian view of architectural perfection – something the buildings in question never aspired to, let alone reached.

They have fond memories of some quaint detail in an old building, like the memories we have of the first place we lived without ‘adult’ supervision – it was great at the time, but we would never consider putting up with it now.

But the fascist anti-facadists want me to put up with their ideologically perfect building. It maintains the original facade, while maintaining all that is wrong with the building in terms of today’s wants, needs, and expectations.

And I disagree, fervently.

On the Loss of Architectural Ornamentation

Go to New York.

Look up.

No. Do not stop looking up.

Take the time to gaze at the detail, the expense, and the concrete evidence of a building as art – yet connected to both the age that built it, and those ages that came before.

Look at the relationships established by something as simple as a window casement in the Empire State building: the shape of the window, its outline nearing the proportions of the Golden Mean. And there are thousand of those windows.

Stand two blocks from the Chrysler building and find yourself exhausted trying to accommodate one tenth of the detail. In stainless steel, terra cotta, bronze the visual impact is amazing.

In the Kuching of the Brookes there is evidence of the Empire. In all the grand colonialism, for better or worse, there is decoration that tries to incite the viewer’s interest in the buildings they face. The Main Post Office with its grand columns, or the Courthouse there is an intent to draw the pedestrian in to the persona of the building itself. In the Muslim mosque, the Sikh temple, or the Christian church the builder’s goal again was to involve the viewer.

Vancouver, on Canada’s wet West Coast, we too have our reminders of Empire, and our reminders of civilizations earlier, and every bit as self-referential as our own. We remembered.

But we have begun to forget.

And soon we will be unable to remember what we have forgotten.

We will forget that buildings are more than the sum of the bricks, mortar, steel, and glass from which they are built. We will forget that we once thought that men could build this edifice, and we marveled at the thought.

And we will forget that our buildings once attempted to connect us in a broad social project. The architect, the builder, the customer, and the public once expected these things. And we have forgotten that expectation.

I don’t want to blame Modernism (that ‘ism’ with the capital ‘M’) because I feel the issue is far greater than what can be laid on the alter of an ill-defined ideological mess, one most fondly nurtured by academicians – and mostly ignored by the very people living ‘through’ the project of modernity.
So, who, or what, is to blame for the loss of architectural ornamentation that is evidenced in modern (note the small ‘m’) buildings?

It could be the stunning visual simplicity of the Seagram’s building in New York – as sure an antidote to over-ornamentation as one could hope to find.

It could be the sheer cost of detailed ornamentation that is made to last. Every cornice, every ornamental column, every idolatrous image took time, money, ability to design, manufacture, and mount.

It could be the loss of our own connection with our multiple pasts. To pick solely on the British colonial project (as if it were a singular, monolithic, homogeneous entity without internal contradictions) look at the spread of ‘Imperial’ courthouses throughout the former Empire, and indeed the maintenance of same in so many, now, Commonwealth member-states.

A local, and oddly telling decoration, is on the entrance to the ‘original,’ Main Library, at the University of British Columbia. In granite, a material much used locally, are figures representative of the Scope’s ‘Monkey Trial’ in the United States – arguably about the teaching of evolution, but equally arguable is the position on the place of rational thought – ironically a powerful argument against the existence of the decoration itself.

In societies where numerous peoples are expected to live in ‘harmony and respect’ regardless of their heritage, perhaps there is no place for that architectural ornamentation. Perhaps, if we honour one tradition on a building, we sleight all others. Or perhaps we are too bloody self-centered to look at the very next building, one with ornamentation that exalts a different, and perhaps contradictory, past.

In any case I think we are too poor, or too cheap, to afford that ornamentation.

We are too poor, not in the monetary sense, but because we lack not only the value of the connections to our own pasts, but we lack the connections to the pasts of others. An example may be in order.

My past, my background if you will, is nominally Anglo-Canadian, though there is some limited evidence of interesting variations from the ‘postage stamp province,’ Manitoba. This past, nominally monolithic, is supposedly Christian. But I am too poor to appreciate the intricacies of art in Islam. I have no idea who the multiple deities are, represented in Hindu (again, as though Hindu was a monolithic, homogeneous entity), there are no referents that I can grasp to fully appreciate the symbolism in traditional Chinese arts – so the Tua Pek Kong temple in Kuching are beyond my ken. In that sense I am poor, I do not know enough.

We are, or at least may be, to cheap to afford that ornamentation. And this is subtly different from being too poor.

Being to cheap means that we are unwilling to invest the energy, time, money to learn enough about people’s multiple pasts to make sense of their ornamentation, and their cultures. And if cheap is the right word here, we are all too cheap. This thrift is not limited to one culture, one faith, one time, or one place.

Maybe the banality of undecorated modern architecture is what we deserve, as a global society, for being too poor – or too cheap, to learn about the multiple, interwoven, pasts of others. And the even more complex pasts we could then claim for ourselves.

This is written without reference to notes of any form. There are no pictures at hand, in black and white, or colour, to refresh the writer’s memory. There is no one to comment on, or advise during the writing (in under an hour) of this missive. With these caveats in mind, I am particularly open to comments or suggestions form readers.