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Donald Maurice Kreis
Through the lens of aerial photographer Alex
MacLean's camera, a few hundred feet in the air, Merchant's Row
in Rutland tells a story of virtue and hope, vanquished by the forces
of greed and expediency.
Zoom in: MacLean has photographed a row of classic
commercial buildings of the late 19th Century, with street-level
storefronts and, above, finely crafted brickwork, windows and cornices
decorated in the charming styles of that era - Italianate, Greek
Revival, French Mansard. And roughly in the middle of the block
is a deliciously garish anachronism - Vermont's first 'skyscraper,'
the seven-story Service Building, opened in 1930 and fitted out
in the futuristic Art Deco mode that is also characteristic of the
Empire State and Chrysler buildings in New York. All in all, it's
a vibrant urban streetscape.
Zoom out and one sees the defilement across
the street: a sprawling, one-story, 75,000 square foot Wal-Mart,
separated from Merchants' Row by a vast and treeless parking lot.
The book that MacLean has just illustrated with
his co-authors, Burlington-based land-use experts Julie Campoli
and Elizabeth Humstone, employs these and other images to the most
welcome of ends. Their volume, Above and Beyond, is the ultimate
Vermont coffee table book because it eschews the traditional postcard
scenes and shows the inhabited parts of the Green Mountain State
as they really are - ugly, and getting more so.
However, as the images of Merchants' Row and
the associated commentary show, Campoli, Humstone and MacLean are
too quick to blame the automobile and too willing to let architecture
off the hook. Humstone, executive director of the Vermont Forum
on Sprawl, is hardly a surprising advocate for the book's central
and highly reasonable thesis, which is that communities need to
take a long and comprehensive view when it comes to land use, encouraging
village-scale pedestrian-friendly growth or risk the slow paving
over of Vermont's remaining paradise. So she and her co-authors
praise Wal-Mart's "unusual choice" to build in downtown
Rutland, as opposed to the strip development zones along Route 7
on the city's outskirts.
But banal big boxes are blights on the landscape
wherever they sprout. Merchant's Row has been ruined and there is
no reason to forgive the perpetrator, which committed the atrocity
in route to becoming the nation's biggest corporate behemoth. But,
as Above and Beyond starkly details, large corporations are not
the only Vermont landowners who have desecrated the landscape with
structures that are devoid of style, gracefulness and sense of permanence.
MacLean's photographs show a consistent pattern: Vermont is being
covered over by what Pete Seeger a generation ago so memorably referred
to "little boxes made of ticky-tacky." The only difference
is now we have the big boxes to accompany the little ones.
In this context, the most depressing thing about
Above and Beyond is not the sprawl its authors so rightly condemn
but the design choices the authors see fit to praise. "A high-quality
design can make higher density units attractive," they correctly
point out, offering up as an example a development in Stowe consisting
of a row of agreeably closely packed pseudo-Victorian homes, complete
with a white picket fence along the sidewalk to complete the Disney-esque
fantasy. There's a reason that a development with a similar aesthetic
- Seaside in Florida - was used as the backdrop for the film "The
Truman Show."
The effect is bland, conformist and nostalgic
about a village life that never really was anyway. Yes we can make
our streets look as they did during, say, the first administration
of Grover Cleveland. But exactly how great was village life in 1885,
before women could vote, schools were desegregated, labor laws were
enacted, tuberculosis and polio were cured and petty provincialism
was brought down by the advent of radio and television?
More hopeful, and more helpful, is the authors'
contrasting the paved-over ugliness of Shelburne Road with the kind
of downtown-revitalizing land-use choices that led to the development
of the 81-unit condominium complex at the corner of Battery and
College Streets in Burlington. Designed by Truex Cullins & Partners,
the building features a distinctively undulating facade that adds
welcome texture and variety to the downtown streetscape while also,
presumably, lake and downtown panoramas sufficient to entice home
buyers to forego the customary pleasures of a secluded lot in the
formerly undeveloped countryside.
Persuading people of the virtue of such a choice
is a key objective of the volume. In that regard, credit the authors
with consistency rather than hypocrisy. Vermont has its share of
those who pontificate against sprawl and then ride their SUVs to
secluded homes on five-acre lots on what was, until they moved there,
farm or forest. Anti-sprawl activists Campoli and Humstone are not
among them..
Both live in bungalow-style homes on small plots
in Burlington. To get to work, Humstone walks a mile to the Vermont
Forum on Sprawl (where she is executive director) and Campoli walks
downstairs to her home office. "I've been doing research in
this field for 15 years so it's pretty likely that what I learned
would rub off on how I live, although I don't feel like I've made
any sacrifices," Campoli reports. "I honestly don't know
whether people will modify their behavior in the interest of sustaining
the rural landscape. . . .Just as sprawl is a multifaceted problem,
the solution, if it comes at all, will be from a hundred different
directions and through small gestures as well as big ones."
In quest of that solution, they face formidable
opposition - not just from subdividers and developers, but from
the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Frank Lloyd Wright. From Monticello
to Fallingwater, the ideal American home has always included a secluded
setting consistent with the enduring myth of the USA as an agrarian
paradise overseen by gentleman farmers (e.g., Jefferson), financiers
(like Fallingwater client Edgar Kaufman) and anyone else with the
means to flee the city on occasion. To blame this myth on the automobile
is to confuse cause and effect.
Automobiles have certainly helped the myth run
riot, and in that sense it would be good if gasoline cost $50 a
gallon. But even when that happens, it's possible that cars will
become fuel efficient and their ubiquity will endure. One rational
response to this reality would be to forget about the pedestrian-friendly
village scenes so revered by these authors and try to design responsibly
for an auto-centric lifestyle. The nearest example that comes to
mind is Centerra Park in Lebanon, New Hampshire - full of parking
lots with trees, winding drives, corporate headquarters that look
built to last longer than five years and even a strip mall (for
the local Co-op Food Store) that is architecturally interesting
rather than expedient.
Ironically, Centerra is being developed by Dartmouth
College as a way of relieving pressure upon, and thus preserving,
the storybook New England village scene that serves as the enticing
backdrop of its Hanover campus.
Nationally, the architecture profession is catching
on to the reality that Jefferson, Wright and their successors in
the design business cannot escape at least some responsibility for
the kind of landscape-defiling "McMansion" pictured in
all its outsized ticky-tackiness on page 155 of Above and Beyond.
Every April a jury hired Architectural Record magazine designates
as "Record Houses" the year's best residential designs
- and, this year, fully five of the eight are modestly sized dwellings
on compact urban or semi-urban sites. The nearest, Tower House by
Toronto's Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, is a sculptural celebration
of how wood, glass and concrete can simply and eloquently yield
luxury (and privacy!) within strict limits. It would look great
in Burlington, even though it resembles nothing from a previous
era. Let us rail against sprawl, to be sure, but in the process
we should also ask why contemporary Vermont architecture is so lost
in nostalgia that it seems unable to inspire more responsible land-use
choices.
-30-
Info about the book:
Authors: Julie Campoli, Elizabeth Humstone and Alex MacLean
Title: Above and Beyond: Visualizing change in small towns and rural
areas
Publisher: American Planning Association
Publication date:2002
Retail price: 54.95
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