February 9, 2006

What's the difference between fake and real Mission? You mentioned scale and appropriateness. For authenticity should scale=small and appropriate=not on strip mall? Does Mission-style architecture share a family history with Mission furniture?

Fake Mission is basically anything made to look like an old Spanish mission that is not, in fact, a Spanish mission or related building, like the adobes. The walls are thinner than masonry walls, the windows are too big, the roofs too thin. The buildings are random and air conditioned, so unlike a real mission they are not sited to cool themselves or warm themselves with the sun and wind; they just sit on a site and mechanically handle their air. The proportions are different.

It's not that I don't like the style: it can be quite nicely done. It's just that it's not really the same as the missions (and it's not as if there's no easy comparison because there'sa mission right downtown). And I'm kind of tired of it, the way I get tired of every new building emulating the Victorians in San Francisco. I like it when architecture expresses its own time and age, rather than another time and age.

Modern "Mission" furniture is different from the fake-mission housing style. It's a modern, romantic reinterpretations of the rough, handmade, utilitarian furniture made for the missions. That came out of the Arts and Crafts movement in the early 1900s, as a response to the industrialization of traditional crafts.

Good answer. Informative. What architecture (examples) would you say expresses our own time and age? I'm put off constantly by the concrete and stucco (EFBS they call it) that is daily replacing many of our beautiful buildings in downtowns across America.

I think that good, modern architecture tends to be site-responsive. So in one place it will look very different from another. I think the work of Tadao Ando suits the modern Japanese landscape remarkably well, and not so well the city. Norman Foster makes high-rises that respond to the environment, which is just stunning -- I think his work really does reflect a new movement in architecture to bring the environment in rather than fighting it. Renzo Piano's work is awesome, as well, on the same front.

Those guys all make monuments and skyscrapers. I think we're more accepting of different and unusual and avante-garde in monuments and skyscrapers.

On the other hand, housing is conservative and destructive. People want their house to feel brand new (so they rip out everything that was there before and rebuild rather than repair or renovate) but they want it to look as if it had been there forever (so they ape old styles, but with modern proportions because who really wants to live in a real Colonial with six foot ceilings?). Developers are trying to build something for high profits, so they spray on stucco coatings because they go on faster and cheaper than wood or fiber cement siding.

I try to look at those developments without too much prejudice: the house I live in, now considered a Victorian gem, was once just like those ticky-tacky little development houses: cheap and overblown and not at all in the classical style of housebuilding. Not all Victorians survived intact to the modern age, and not all those houses will survive intact to the future. I try to figure out which ones will survive, which models of design are likely to be revered and restored in fifty years.

I think the houses that have the staying power are modern interpretations of the Arts and Crafts, with heavy moldings, porches, the look of "home" that seems to come from a painting. I think people respond to that on a primal level the way they don't necessarily respond to modernist boxes. Then again, I'm sure I'm entirely wrong. Eichler tract houses are now cult items. Strange things happen with time.