First, I want to thank Suzanne Haraburd and her husband for their kind words in response to my letter [Sometimes less is actually … less, Viewpoints, May 10] about the latest Whiteco design. I also want to thank Aaron Garbutt for his considered reply even though I disagree with many of his assertions. Such public statements in a forum like Viewpoints are one of our best hopes to ensure that future architectural efforts in the village are at least informed by both the richness of tradition and the diversity of views in Oak Park.
Mr. Garbutt asserts that my critiques are “weak,” yet offers no compelling reason why. This is not an issue of individual stylistic preference?#34;quite the contrary. I like many of Brininstool + Lynch’s designs, such as their insightful museum in Racine. What I’m asking for is their A-game for us as well. I am also not one who thinks that high quality Modern architecture cannot provide sincere and beneficial responses to context?#34;my former colleagues at Ross Barney + Jankowski do it all the time.
What my remarks were intended to elicit, and which Ms. Haraburd and others have clearly responded with, was an assertion by the community that this particular version of the project has some serious?#34;and reparable?#34;shortcomings that relate to the ways it does or does not engage its context. Clearly one is that this community which I, in part, represent is unwilling to concede Mr. Garbutt’s thesis that Harlem Avenue “is a highway and a blank wall might just be advisable(!)”
Anyone who contends that that stretch of Harlem flows like a highway has only driven it at 3 in the morning. It is an intermediate-volume regional arterial but there?#34;particularly because of the insistence of Oak Park and River Forest that pedestrian traffic be respected and accommodated?#34;it deliberately throttles down for what, yes, can be a maddeningly slow section for much of the day. For an architect to then throw up his hands and want to wall part of it off is to walk away from participating in the gestalt of our village’s most overtly pedestrian zone.
That is not opinion or taste; it is clear community preference and longstanding public policy. Each structure along the way must participate and engage the street. Mr. Garbutt threw out two European references of quality urban promenades to which that area could/should not aspire; I could note that the Lungotevere, Rome’s Wacker Drive, is far more of a raceway than that stretch of Harlem, yet no one has proposed conceding the pedestrian character of the Roman sidewalks along it.
Mr. Garbutt then makes the startling assertion that “the building’s appearance has little to do with anything.” With that, either he’s just said that appearance in architecture doesn’t matter?#34;and he should ask for a tuition refund?#34;or the design he allegedly upholds is as completely out-of-context as I was suggesting.
Yes, “(m)id-century public housing did not fail due to lack of decoration,” but it did fail. That reality, deserved or not, has placed a strong connotation on an entire genre of forms. Architects who would re-use or even get too close to those forms, yes, must be cognizant of those connotations. Ignoring them or saying their designs can recycle them, devoid of those associations, is a kind of hubris too prevalent in this profession. Again, that is not personal taste; it is social reality, and architecture as public as this unequivocally carries a social dimension. Again, it is entirely possible to be a context-sensitive Modernist. This is not about style.
If this were an entirely private development, then perhaps one could more rightly assert that a design could successfully be developed devoid of considerations beyond its own program. Yet we have entire cities of buildings that went that way, and they are alienating and incredibly dated. There are also, to be sure, scattered gems, such as works from Mr. Wright that were as deliberately blind to such considerations, and they are timelessly wonderful.
But the Whiteco project is being done at least partly on my dime and on that of those I represent, so I would assert that our community’s feedback?#34;which Mr. Garbutt rightly points out is a valuable function of the Wednesday Journal?#34;is indeed something to be taken under advisement in this case.
We are the clients, too.
Eric Davis, AIA, is an architect and an Oak Park Township Trustee.