I live in a neighborhood in the upper northwest corner of Washington called the Palisades. Mostly made up of modest craftsman and colonial houses built in the ’20s and ’30s, the neighborhood has a coherent charm. But for how long? As houses turn over, many are being torn down. Replacing them are copycat modernist structures that look like three or four giant shoeboxes stacked at odd angles. If the slick developers keep dumping piles of shoeboxes where there used to be bungalows, the neighborhood is going to end up looking like Imelda Marcos’ closet.
At least my house isn’t going anywhere. That’s both because I’m staying put and because my house, with its heavy concrete block construction, laughs at the developers and their feeble wrecking balls.
As the Field Guide to American Houses puts it, “Houses of concrete blocks simulating stone … were widely advocated by early 20th-century pattern books as a novel new building method.” Which poses a difficult question. Young fogey that I am, had I been around in 1926, would I have harrumphed about the newness and crass novelty of a house tarted up with faux-stone concrete blocks? Maybe. But I like to think not. My house may have been made with a relatively newfangled technique, but its design — a hipped-roof colonial revival — was about as traditional as they come.
Technology doesn’t have to be at odds with traditionalism. Indeed, it’s only thanks to internet magic that there is now a “DC Historical Building Permits Database.” And it’s due to that database that I’ve learned about my house’s DNA, much as the computer ancestry business has made tracking one’s forebears a matter of a few clicks.
Now I know not just that my house was built in 1926, but that the permit was issued June 23 of that year, at 8 p.m. to be exact (though I have my doubts that the city workers in the permit office were still at it that late in the evening). The builder was Wm. F Young, and the architect was Howard W. Cutler.
I can’t say I know nearly enough about 20th-century draftsmen to have recognized Cutler’s name. But I was intrigued enough by the very idea that my house had an architect that I Googled the man. To my delight and astonishment, I found that Cutler was responsible for the Kodak Tower in Rochester, New York. Analog film might not be the business it once was, but more than a century after it was built, the Kodak Tower is still a handsome mix of old (French Renaissance Revival) and new (steel skeleton skyscraper construction).
That’s one of the things missing from the generic modern pile-of-shoeboxes style: a nod to the past. And by the past, I don’t just mean a grab bag of vintage elements and motifs: I mean a dialogue with the older architecture of a city or neighborhood that makes a place feel like a given place.
“There’s a placelessness to these things,” says University of Notre Dame architecture professor Steven Semes. He describes the shoeboxes with admirable contempt: “Gaudy patchwork of materials on a flat façade” with a stone section here, stucco there, siding over there, broken up by oddly placed windows. It’s a mélange that is less a function of aesthetic choices, says Semes, than just what’s easy to design on a computer.
Oh, and don’t forget the flat roof that makes no sense where it snows. And then, there are the flat sides of the shoeboxes, usually made of prefabricated panels of mystery material with exposed banding over the seams.
The shoeboxes don’t just look shabby because of bad design. “There’s a connection between how a house looks and how it’s built,” says Semes. Not only does cheesy construction make for a cheesy-looking building, but it’s the other way around as well: When you’re building something to last a hundred years, you don’t indulge in fads that will leave your house looking embarrassingly dated in 20 years.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
