Taking a Stroll Through Nowhere: A little tour of Brighton and Allston, Massachusetts

Becoming architecturally conscious means also having to realize how much mediocrity and failure we’re surrounded by in our human-made environments. The emotions that this realization can draw out — frustration, anger, depression, sadness — are all the more pronounced because architecture is the most public of any art. This is the wonderful and horrible thing about it. If you live in nearly any city or town, it’s quite literally impossible to take a step outside of your housing unit and not have your sight dominated by a landscape that’s been shaped by people. In many cases throughout America, unfortunately, this is a bad thing, not least of all thanks to the misanthropic and technophilic projects of the twentieth century. The majority of history books and biographies continue to withhold legitimate criticism for canonized modernist figures such as Corbusier, Rohe, and Gropius, preferring to propagate the idea that modernism was a bold and wonderful period for architecture which we can learn to appreciate through edification, even if it offends us on a deeply intuitive level.

In fact, just taking into account North America, modernism was one of the most destructive events in urban history, wherein a bunch of men discounted history as if all those hundreds of years of knowledge were outdated and forever tainted by monarchical imperialism, lusted after The Future, and designed according to abstract aesthetic principles removed from human reality. The development of long-lasting, meaningful, and welcoming public space was pushed aside in favor of plans that aggressively prioritized automobiles. Moreover, all sorts of buildings sprouted up which, in their layout and appearance, suggested that humans were ultimately undifferentiated machines of production to be stacked on top of one another for maximum efficiency. As it stands, modernism’s positives largely are limited to a bundle of photographic shapes. Its woes, however, are still inhabited on an international scale. The movement’s greatest lesson does not come from any of its saint-architects’ inscrutable, machismo-laden manifestos; rather, it comes from its collective failure to have improved society as promised. Modernism’s lesson is that we must not repeat it.

Today in North America, things haven’t gotten much better. This is understandable to some degree, for modernism’s damage and reach was so wide that to have escaped from it in the span of only a handful of decades would’ve been nothing short of a miracle. America’s physical landscape had the privilege of standing separate from World War 2's violence; and so, once the war concluded, its unique promise of industry compelled architects like Gropius, Rohe, and Breuer to contribute to its future. It is of some importance that Corbusier’s Swiss nationality saved him from persecution by the Nazis, meaning that he could remain in Europe while others fled, somewhat sparing America from his egomania. Nevertheless, his ideas spread: his Radiant City scheme, for example, became the model for urban development in post-war America. The actual project itself was never realized, but the sketches and models of vast flattened tracts, punctuated by monotonous rises that negate human scale, come closer to anticipating America’s general make-up in the latter 20th century than anything else.

And yet the lack of definite and major national improvement to public space and residential architecture is worse than it could be. It is something of a crime that the city of Boston continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on erecting ludicrously overpriced and oppressively slick-looking luxury condos and simultaneously neglects touching up its areas that are in need of beautification and pedestrian-friendly design the most. Boston, as a “historical” city, wants to promote itself as an up-to-date metropolis brimming over with scenic sites; the reality is that it, like practically every other U.S. city, is by and large comprised of ugly purgatories. I was recently reminded of this state of affairs while walking home from a friend’s. The following photographs are a partial record of that route. My walk started at the intersection of Brooks St. and N. Beacon St., Brighton; the last photos are close to the intersection of Brighton Ave. and Cambridge St., Allston. Of particular note here is the overcast sky. Some might say that this unfairly characterizes the state of things. I find that a dour sky is ideal for exactly this context: the roads, buildings, and other civic features can’t rely on blue skies or foliage to mask their insufficiencies. Good buildings and good roads should offer some appeal and thoughtfulness, no matter the weather.

Oh, dear. We’re greeted by an upside-down speed limit sign and a… relocated bus stop sign. The sidewalk is cracking apart and dissolves into the asphalt of a parking lot. A billboard with rusting supports is set right next to a forsaken structure void of any ornamentation, likely an office building once. If you’re a pedestrian and need to continue along this route, the only path is a makeshift ribbon of dirt along a grassy sidebar set uncomfortably close to the road. To the right is a chain-link fence keeping us from the Massachusetts Turnpike and a tangle of foliage and litter (not to worry; there’s some on our side too (my opinion is that people will be less likely to respect space if it seems that those who created the space didn’t care themselves)). In the opposite direction, wedged between North Beacon Street and Soldiers Field Road, is the Charles River Motel. The motel’s front has a much bigger portico and a more elaborate entrance, resembling a variant of Georgian, or Colonial Revival, architecture. Its backside comes closer to looking like the adjacent office building, in a very dismal way.

An overpass and the cave beneath it loom ahead as the road bends. When I see the view shown in the first photo above, I see a hierarchical symbolism that extends from the literal structure — one which dominates the pedestrian with its massive forms and noises of cars passing by and overhead. To make things worse, this passage has no artificial lighting, making the prospect of going through it at night slightly intimidating. Ideally, I think, this overpass would instead be an underpass, with an option for bicyclists to continue cycling overhead so that they’re not squeezed into a tunnel alongside automobiles. The anti-pedestrian theme extends to the other side: an asphalt lagoon is spotted by one inexplicably situated island and has no crosswalks.

Faneuil Gardens, an apartment complex, is shown in the fourth above photograph (and the first below). These buildings typify a lot of what depresses me about modernist residential architecture, which is its frequently literalist approach to form (an outgrowth of modernist architectural ideology’s positivist angle which reductively purported to know humans as one might know a common household pet): the housing unit has become a roofed box with no features besides windows, themselves unadorned. The grassplots appear as contractual obligations rather than pleasant spaces anyone aside from very young children would want to be in. It’s all rational, but not in a way that makes realistic sense beyond insular tracts. As Hölderlin wrote: “Aber aus bloßem Verstand ist nie Verständiges, aus bloßer, Vernunft ist nie Vernünftiges gekommen” — “Nothing intelligent has ever come out of mere intellect; nothing reasonable has ever come out of mere reason.” “Affordable” and “low-income” housing should never be synonymous with faceless buildings set within civically useless sites.

Not to harp too much on Faneuil Gardens, but, as if things weren’t bad enough, some of the complex’s buildings look out onto a parking lot. No one wants to see a bunch of cars and asphalt when they peer out their windows. This is the sort of bad planning that verges on contempt. Several oddities have sprung up a little further down, including a converted U-Haul building whose chintzy appearance (the palette and wobbly cornice make me think it might’ve previously been a Mexican restaurant) would likely appeal to Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour for how neatly it fits into their oversimple dichotomy of buildings either being “ducks” or “decorated sheds” (the U-Haul building would be the latter). I took the third photo above just because it was surprising to see that a building with some classical stonework had survived. What, if anything, had been written on the plaques is a mystery. It’s possible that no one ever even got around to inscribing text, as was the case with as major of a Boston building as Symphony Hall. Across the street is the Pig ‘n’ Whistle diner. It’s been closed since 2002, and Brighton seems to have no future plans for it except to let its parking lot morph into a post-apocalyptic crackscape. I love diners, and this would be an excellent place to have one — right next to the WGBH complex — so that people wouldn’t have to depend on Dunkin’ Donuts for food.

A long and dreadfully tedious building — not much different than the unoccupied office; just stretched out long enough that you can imagine its terminal staleness continuing into infinity— stands at the intersection of Glencoe Street and North Beacon Street. Ostensibly once serving some industrious purpose, it now houses one of Cradles to Crayons’ locations, in addition to studio spaces for musicians. I had to take a photo of one of its east end to show the bizarre clump of materials and shapes that’ve been grafted onto it. Cities and buildings are organisms of a sort, and it’s only natural to find contrasting outgrowths everywhere, but this is so clashing that I have to wonder more than usual what the constructive process was.

When I reviewed the last two photos later on, I thought they were worth including for how nonspecific they feel. Is this Boston that we’re seeing? Or is it some dead zone in the Midwest? It’s certainly close to what I saw when driving around southwest Michigan: flat-topped, squat, cheap-looking buildings whose purposes could be switched merely by rearranging the signage (modernist architects tended to avoid angular roofs due to their historicity; never mind that, to be “functionalist” for a moment, flat roofs are prone to more leakage than pitched roofs). Aside from that quality of nonspecificity, there’s some appreciation to be had for the bazaar’s brightly painted facade (and the mural on its obscured right exterior wall). Clearly, at least one person wasn’t satisfied with having an unembellished storefront.

If architecture is the most public of any art, then this should mean by extension that we, as citizens, should have not only a deep imaginative investment in our civic projects, but also significant decision-making power therein. We don’t, though. One of the problems is that the field of architecture has become specialized, academic. It’s turned into a cult with denominations, and one of the primary purposes of a cult is to be exclusionary. This is something that the architect Friedrich Gilly worriedly wrote about as far back as the late 18th century for the 1799 volume of the Sammlung nützlicher — that the field could, if unchecked, come to be the domain of abstract theorists and antiquarians. Sadly, it has become just that, with the additional monolithic interference of corporations. In his final essay for the aforementioned publication, Gilly also wrote:

“…the daily practice, the advancement, and in a sense the fate of every science, and still more that of the needful, practical arts and even crafts, all ultimately depend on the interest and the response — and thus on the level of education — of the public at large… […] It is well to urge the importance of this more general interest, this practical appreciation of culture.”

Most of us don’t have strong opinions about architecture; or, worse, we find it boring. These general attitudes are, if anything, only encouraged by how journalists approach the topic . Unless we go out of our way, practically the only time we’ll read about architecture is if a mega-building is being built, and the text will be a checklist of room-count, what the square-footage is, the developmental time frame, interior spaces’ utilities, and how much it all cost, plus interchangeable P.R. blurbs. The way these subjects are written about, you’d think that architecture was a neutral force guided by large sums of money for which no one could ever have strong aesthetic convictions. We desperately need way, way more critical architectural literature that is intelligent, interesting, and accessible.

And when there is such a lack; when so much of America’s landscape would, on its own, never inspire a budding love for architecture in children; and when the built environment — buildings, roads, signage, public utilities, etc.— is what many of us grow up among by default, and so perhaps learn to interpret the qualities of built environments as facts of life, rather than creations to be consciously critical of, it’s no wonder that we have this collective cultural apathy for architecture. So if no one else is going to help, we need to arm ourselves with sensitivity, cognizance, and language — mutually intelligible language through which we can straightforwardly and creatively communicate about these human-made spaces which have so often failed us in the pursuit of happiness during the past hundred years.

— Text & photos by Ario Elami, who is on twitter at @doshmanziari.