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Reviews

THOMAS DE MONCHAUX
Vernacular Modernism
Good buildings are adaptable

Published in: Issue 34: Head Case

Publication date: Spring 2019

Ben Marcin, Untitled (Twenty Office Buildings). 2010–14, archival pigment print. 75 × 87". Courtesy of C. Grimaldis Gallery.

25 Park Place. Atlanta, GA.

56 Norfield Road. Weston, CT.
378 Sixth Avenue. New York, NY.

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25 PARK PLACE IS A T WENT Y-EIGHT-STO RY skyscraper in downtown Atlanta, constructed in 1971 by an

architecture firm named Carson, Lundin & Shaw. It’s the kind of building that might flash on an early-’80s
cop show, during the montage that lets you know that the cops are headed downtown.

The color of its cast concrete echoes the gray Southern limestone of Atlanta’s oldest standing skyscraper, an
1897 building a few blocks away, which indicates that 25 Park Place knows where it is. But because it doesn’t
imitate that precursor beyond its color — because it’s not itself made of limestone or styled with the
neoclassical columns and entablatures of its neighbor — it knows when it is, too.

The cast-concrete panels that serve as mullions between 25 Park Place’s floor-to-ceiling windows form deep
vertical fins — almost as deep as the windows are wide. These fins and panels help hold the building up,
shade the glass from the sun, and frame the views from inside. For those walking or driving past, the fins
offer another kind of reward: when you see the building from an angle, it looks solid and opaque; when you
see it straight on, it looks surprisingly transparent. This visual effect is a gift to the streetscape, to every
moving eye.

The composition of 25 Park Place’s facade follows the order established for American skyscrapers by their
original theorist, Louis Sullivan. It’s based on the components of a classical column: base, shaft, and capital.
The base is a two-story colonnade at street level, which features glass walls set some twenty feet back from
concrete columns that align with the cast-concrete facade above: this setback creates a shady extension of
the sidewalk and thereby blends public and private space. The floor and ceiling and columns in the lobby
were detailed to match those in the outdoor colonnade, bringing the look of the streetscape inside, and a
touch of the dignity of the indoors to the street. The shaft is the next twenty-five or so stories of offices, with
all those fins alighting the facade. The capital is a one-and-a-half-height level at the top, where the fins are
twice as close together — not just as decoration but also function: a big vertical grille for all the air being
pulled into and out of the building by the mechanical equipment on the other side of the fins. Good buildings
are adaptable: originally constructed to house a local bank headquarters, 25 Park Place now serves, with few
changes, as an office building for Georgia State University.

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY BUILDING in Weston, Connecticut was designed by a local architect named Joseph
Salerno. It was built in 1963, when the town, an hour or so north from New York’s Grand Central, was
shedding its rural past on its way to life as a commuter-rail suburb. The low, one-story building is tucked into
a hollow behind a big intersection with gas stations and a liquor store, downhill from an 1831 New England–
style clapboard Congregational meetinghouse. There’s something familiar about the library. Up high, a super-
angular roof; down low, rubble-rock walls that rise to knee or shoulder height, and lots of glass in between. It
looks a little like a motel or a roadside restaurant from the 1970s, like an especially good Howard Johnson’s.

As with those franchise buildings, the roof and ceiling are the primary elements. In this case, it’s as if a dozen
local barns have been lined up in a row, their pitched roofs forming a lively zigzag ceiling overhead. The top
halves of the walls are glass, while the bottom halves are dressed stone and cast concrete. The lower masonry
parts of the walls extend outward, past the overhung roofs above, out into the landscape. This blends indoors
and out, and evokes, without hokey imitation, the drystone walls that were a defining feature of the old
farmland into which the library was built.

The concrete and stone bring earthiness; the glass and lightweight roof, complementary airiness. When you
sit down to read, you feel protected, but when you stand or walk to search for books, you feel liberated. The
entire building responds to the repositioning of the body engaged in the activity it shelters. At the entrance, a
kind of building-within-a-building, a frame of timber and glass that’s like a conceptual mudroom, gives you a
place to pause at arrival and departure. It is mirrored by a similar building-within-a-building that houses the
circulation desk and staff. In these mirrored places, host and guest, staffer and visitor are put on an equal
footing, placed into a reciprocity at their moment of routine encounter — ever so slightly raising that routine
into ritual. Today, the building might evoke ski lodges and national parks, or maybe California, or some
association with traditional Japanese architecture in wood. The building is modest in scale and materials: it
doesn’t deploy monumentality or symbolism to tell you that it is civic-minded and public facing.

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The level of design excellence in the Weston public library is very high, but the building may have an
ordinariness to it, even a drabness, when viewed with today’s eyes. It has become what urbanists and
architects call a background building, the kind of place that makes the world, but over which it’s easy for us
to pass. Such buildings are overlooked in more ways than one. Weston, catching up to the even more
aspirational suburbs nearby, now tends toward McMansionish grandeur and faux-colonial revivals in heavy
trim. The brand-new commercial development in the village center, riffing ponderously on an existing
Victorian-era pavilion, looks like a low-res download of a princely hunting lodge from the Holy Roman
Empire.

Each of these buildings — downtown office tower, town library — is a comprehensively effective work of
architecture. Each uses materials efficiently and — within the technological limitations of their eras —
sustainably. In their design, these buildings don’t merely accommodate what happens inside and around
them: they stimulate and elevate those events. In their materials and colors and some of their shapes, these
buildings acknowledge and evoke something of their spatial and historical context without resorting to
reproduction or pastiche. They provide varieties of pleasure without being merely entertaining — through
geometrical effects that we may not even experience consciously, or through visual and spatial effects of
which we’re more aware, or through the use of patterns or pieces with which we have positive cultural
associations. They make gestures that show that they know where and when they’re situated, and that they
know what you need from them. They acknowledge their conditions. They make everything that happens
inside them and around them better. They are, in a word, modern.

It looks a little like a motel or a roadside restaurant from

the 1970s, like an especially good Howard Johnson’s.
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But also, there is nothing special about them. Buildings like these are everywhere in America. More
particularly, they’re the pre-1990s inner sprawl around the multi-lane peripheries of older Eastern cities; the
outer downtowns of St. Louis, Indianapolis, and other cities of the lower Midwest; the inner downtowns of
the Sun Belt; and pretty much all of Oakland, California. In New York City these buildings tend to be the dull-
seeming libraries, schools, police stations, and fire stations built in the ’60s and ’70s, as well as a lot of
storefront offices and some of the old white-brick apartment buildings you see throughout Manhattan.

I singled out 25 Park Place and the library in Weston somewhat haphazardly to stand for tens of thousands. I
found the former by going down an internet rabbit hole and clicking on an old website put together by an
Atlanta enthusiast. I detoured into the Connecticut library to kill time before visiting the meetinghouse at
the top of the hill. In the same way that, purportedly, one is never more than three feet from a spider, we are
surrounded by these structures, by these background buildings we are not accustomed to seeing, that we
have been kept from seeing.

IF AND WHEN WE DO see these buildings, it is sometimes because we can recognize in them something that
we think of as a style — a look, a manner, a catalog of formal conventions — that we have been accustomed to
seeing: midcentury modernism. Or, in their tendency toward austerity, their sculptural massing, and their
disinclination to entertain, we might see in some of these buildings a little of brutalism, the photogenic cast-
concrete style of architecture that in the past few years has had a kind of revival to fashionability, even as its
exemplars are culled by demolition. But although these tens of thousands of buildings may share some
elements of style, they are not of those styles, or any other. They are just modern. They are the modern
architecture of circa 1960 through circa 1990.

A significant strain of modern architecture emerged a century ago, in the European aftermath of World War I
and the 1918 influenza pandemic. Forward-looking and newly skeptical of even artful falsity, this modernity
in design radically devalued the historicist conventions and retrospective revivals of the previous four

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centuries of design practice. It practiced an economy of means, doing the most with the least. It privileged
efficiencies and felicities of user experience over appearance-driven symbolism and signifying ornament.
Between the wars, modern buildings tended to look like airplanes and ocean liners — then the newest
machines. In the 1930s and ’40s, a group of the architects who had first developed the modern, many of them
émigrés and exiles from Central and Eastern Europe, brought a version of it to the United States.

In that establishmentarian and doctrinaire time and place, this version became a near-universal mode in
public and corporate construction, as well as in architectural education, and as such was reassimilated into
the very stylishness and ornamental signification from which its earliest innovators had been trying to get
free. Nevertheless, a significant effect of the modern legacy in the United States was the prevalence, from the
late 1950s to the early 1980s, of competence and diligence. In that era, this modern design manifested a
humane consciousness, a seriousness of purpose, and a diffusion of best practices across an unprecedentedly
broad American landscape.

Organized around fundamentals of structural and mechanical engineering, materials science, physiology, and
psychology, these best practices sometimes converged with vernacular and folk building traditions in urban
and rural America. A canonical touchstone was the Sea Ranch, a 1964 cooperative development of second and
retirement homes along an isolated ten miles of Sonoma County, California, cliffs and coastlines. Under the
design direction of the ex-kibbutznik landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, his choreographer partner Anna
Halprin, and a short-lived supergroup-type architecture firm called MLTW, the timber-framed barns and
outbuildings of Sonoma found a modern companion in subtle and complex compounds of condominiums.
These compounds wove their way into the landscape with all the grace of Italian hill towns, but also with an
uncompromised function and bravado of form that, but for the woodsiness, we might associate with
brutalism. Echoes and echoes of echoes of Sea Ranch resound across American subdivisions built in the 1970s
and ’80s.

At Sea Ranch and similar projects, highbrow modern designers took a self-conscious interest in specific
traditional or indigenous shapes and methods — in the vulgar and vernacular. Even the ex-Bauhaus
architects who had been cast into suburban Boston took an active practical interest in what was to be
learned from New England barns and farmhouses. A generation later, some more academically inclined
modern architects would try to consolidate and document this convergence with the name “critical
regionalism.” That never really caught on. But the converse and complementary tendency had already
developed. Some trace of everything taught by Walter Gropius and his successor Josep Lluís Sert at Harvard;
former Bauhaus director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at IIT in Chicago; and the interwar Finnish immigrant
Eliel Saarinen and his son Eero at the Cranbrook Academy outside Detroit resonated with and amplified the
more ingenious and conscientious local building traditions that it encountered. The technical excellence, the
best practices, the robust rules of thumb, the residual idealism about prioritizing the duty of the built
environment to serve its users — all this took root far into the American hinterlands and modern design
became its own new vernacular.

Vernacular modernism was not a movement. It was not a self-conscious collective endeavor by dozens or
thousands of architects with necessarily elevated or associated intentions. Yet the collective body of built
work has its commonalities and strictures, its shared commitments and tactics. The standard practices in the
semi-anonymous work of all those architects brought a baked-in dutifulness, a long tail of interwar idealism,
and an encoded facility with a particular kind of design excellence that was a residue, among many, of the
architecturally modern.

To be sure, it is impossible to separate vernacular modernism from all that its original construction
paralleled: the high period of the strip-mall-and-office-park highway-oriented car culture, of suburbanization
and white flight from American downtowns, of the racist and classist urban renewal events of the mid- to
late 20th century.

Yet for all its coincidence with these grotesques and absurdities of bigness in urban and exurban design, one
way of recognizing vernacular modernism is that it is high-resolution architecture. Its typical material
austerity — a palette of only two or three elements, such as terra-cotta tile, wall-to-wall carpet, and concrete or
cedar — is mitigated by its spatial richness. There are generally many levels and layers, more than we’re
accustomed to in contemporary environments: mezzanines, landings, conversation pits, overlooks,
thresholds, reveals. This contrasts with much of present-day design, whose stimulating material and
ornamental effects divert from a spatial poverty: boxy rooms at standardized heights.

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The solution is not a revival of the shapes and details

used by modern architects of the past. That kind of
thinking is antimodern in its spirit even if it’s modernist in
its desire.
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Vernacular modernism gets particularly close to the scale of the human body. It’s developed down to a finer
grain than we’re accustomed to in contemporary architecture. Many contemporary buildings look sort of
subtle from a distance, but the closer you look, the less there is to see: close up, the building evaporates into
empty drywall and familiar generic hardware. This experience is inverted the more you look at a vernacular
modern building. Were it rendered in the style of an earlier age, this degree of detail is something we might
associate with Arts and Crafts, especially as it developed on the West Coast in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. But the higher degree of detail to be found in vernacular modernism is not gratuitously
ornamental or decorative. The details tend to be thoughtful but simple: an unexpected skylight or clerestory
window, a built-in bench, a shallow pit filled with white gravel, distant echo of a stone garden, tucked under
the last turn of a cantilevered open-riser staircase in a lobby.

There’s a quintessential example of vernacular modernism, of an urban kind, at the northeast corner of Sixth
Avenue and Waverly Place in Manhattan. It’s a crisp and understated one-floor 1967 bank branch in Saarinen-
esque sculptural rough-hewn black granite and smooth black-coated steel, and in Miesian walls with nine-
foot-tall, square glass windows that step back to incorporate a subway entrance. The pale-plastered outdoor
soffit ceiling of this entrance niche is identical to the indoor ceiling within, the same kind of visually flowing,
urbane gesture as the shady sidewalk arcade at 25 Park Place in Atlanta. Other than property listings, this
building appears to be Google-proof, and even after poking around in the Municipal Archives, it remains to
me as anonymous and perfect as a Shaker quilt. It was a Duane Reade pharmacy for a while, but now, other
than a slice of its northern edge that’s a narrow Starbucks, it sits empty.

The door handles at the Starbucks are hollow steel tubes, the same ones you’d find at every other Starbucks
in America. The door handles to the former pharmacy are rectangles of dull aluminum, creased into three
planes, the same ones you’d find at every non-Starbucks storefront in America of the last twenty years. But
over on Waverly, the handles to the glass double doors of the old bank — later the emergency exit to the
Duane Reade — are milled bronze cylinders, massive but slender, tapering toward their ends, like tall candles.
Someone really thought about them, about how they would feel in your hand. Someone else has now
jammed a two-by-four piece of lumber through them for security.

This one building somehow encapsulates all of the late 1960s in design: the openness of the glassy facade
along busy Sixth Avenue, then the solidity of the one strip of stone wall along quiet and masonry-built
Waverly Place. All the anodized aluminum trim around the windows and doors is twice as thick and deep as
it needs to be, so that it registers visually from across the busy avenue and so that rainwater flows better past
the windows and low walls below. The rough black granite is identical to the cladding Saarinen used for his
Midtown Manhattan CBS headquarters skyscraper in 1965, but for the lowest course, which is polished —
both to make it easy to clean and to give a base to the whole composition. The same details are functional as
well as compositional. In the stone wall adjacent to the taper-candle-handled door is a stone escutcheon that
would have held the original bank sign; it pushes out from the wall like the lowest level of a truncated
pyramid. The care around this single detail is an example of the extraordinary ordinary of vernacular
modernism. Because of its strong, simple geometry; because of the context-aware urbanity with which it
accommodates and addresses itself to the busy avenue and subway, but also to the quiet side street; and
because of the grace of its little details, the building is a perfect vessel.

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IF THERE IS A LITERATURE or historiography to vernacular modernism, it is oblique. The more ephemeral

and marginal the document seems relative to conventional sources, the clearer its depiction of vernacular
modernism. There are books that serve as wonderful documents of the genre without meaning to do any
such thing, that are diligently trying to do something else: the 1979 American Institute of Architects guide to
Kansas City is a very good bet, along with all its ilk; so are civic booster or business bureau publications from
the late 1970s through early 1990s, tending to have stultifying titles like This Is Atlanta. But taken together —
and only together — the buildings in such books add up to a clear depiction of this architecture of modesty,
competence, and ubiquity. Vernacular modernism isn’t captured by the filter of stylistically driven social-
media feeds of the “Fuck Yeah Brutalism” kind. It resists cool-seeking. It resists connoisseurship. More often it
emerges in the visual catalogs of obsessives who are consciously concerned by some other subject: serial
photography of Los Angeles dingbat apartment complexes, dead malls of exurban Virginia, unintended skate
ramps of Buffalo, and other intuitive psychogeographies that are inadvertently mapping this territory.

Looking at such feeds, you notice immediately that these buildings aren’t new. To address vernacular
modernism, one must ask why this way of building ceased. There’s more than one explanation. Since the
mid-20th century, the economies and practices of building construction have tilted away from generally
expensive materials and generally cheap skilled labor — which encourages ingenuity and craftiness in
straightforward media like wood, steel, concrete, and cement block — toward generally cheap materials and
generally more expensive and less skilled labor, which favors basic shapes and layouts that present an
appearance of complexity through applied ornament or prefabricated manufactured elements. As many
architects have observed, buildings were once made of materials; now they are made of products.

The late stage of this trend appears as large-scale, factory-fabricated structural insulated panels that
laminate fake bricks and mortar, insulation and waterproofing into something resembling a giant ice-cream
sandwich, speeding on-site construction by displacing labor back to a factory. This innovation makes it easier
to treat a building more like a product — in its manufacturing, its marketing, and even in its design. Although
much of vernacular modernism subscribed to a universal-seeming and manufactured-looking set of
elements and components, these were often more a matter of local technical know-how and custom
artisanship, appearing project by project. Familiar economies of scale and globalization over the last thirty
years have since resulted in what we might call a Home Depot–ization of the built environment: the
dominance of a narrow set of overfamiliar components that, to hide their narrowness of choice and use, offer
a deceptive diversity of some other variable. Whether in black, fake brass, or chrome, you get the same tinny
little hook or handle. Once you recognize these bits, you see them — and often only them — everywhere.

The only name I’ve heard some architects use to identify the phenomenon of vernacular modernism is
contractor modernism. Designers in practice in the 1980s and 1990s used that term to describe a certain kind
of concise residential or commercial building from that era that tended toward sculptural angularity and a
crispness of edge, toward finely articulated volumes with thin surfaces and deeply considered details. I
suspect that the hint of condescension in that name has something to do with the displacement of the labor
of architectural construction and design. Only a tiny fraction of structures, especially in homebuilding, are
custom designed in real time; most are variations on off-the-shelf cookie-cutter templates, finalized and
authorized as blueprints by a nominal project architect — often after a significant time lag. Many contractors
of that time, bypassing contemporaneous designers, would have been constructing buildings whose direct
templates or indirect prototypes were drawn up years earlier. These latent buildings would have been heavier
on locally crafted materials and lighter on remotely manufactured products than those subsequently
designed but built simultaneously. In this way, the term contractor modernism was dismissive: a disavowal of
the builders of buildings by the designers of buildings — and of a robust kind of modernism as it was once
still practiced by those builders, even as design and its market had moved, at least stylistically, into other
looks and moods.

BEGINNING ARO UND 1980 , the architectural style known as postmodernism lent a high-cultural imprimatur
to the much older tradition of slapping a decorative and intricate-seeming facade onto a basic boxlike
building, so as to make the simplistic seem complex, the new seem old, the cheap seem expensive. With its

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catalogs of mutually independent features that could be wrapped around or packed into a box,
postmodernism was shop-able and shippable. Postmodernism was inexpensive to make and adorned with
stickily signifying symbols of the very gentility and substance that it lacked. It was easy to sell.

We now have all the examples of vernacular modernism

that we are ever going to have. We might just stop
demolishing quite so many of them.
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Within the microculture of American architects themselves, there may have been, in postmodernism and all
that followed, a release from the perhaps exhausting piety and self-seriousness — the terminal correctness —
of an utterly competent modernism then in its fifth decade. Unless you have a very specific sensibility, it’s
hard to express yourself, or merely distinguish yourself, in a preperfected idiom. Plus, it’s difficult: this kind of
heavily detailed and painstakingly modern design (especially prior to the advent of computer-aided drafting,
scripting, and fabricating, on which the profession now depends) required a consistently high level of
inventiveness and meticulousness — all that seeing and thinking and drawing took a great deal of
coordination and cooperation. This effortful approach in a poorly paid field was never especially sustainable,
even without the more general economic pressures on low-end white collar and creative classes in the 1980s
and ’90s. Cookie-cutter symmetrical facades and punched windows are just quicker and easier for everyone
— except the people stuck living with them.

It feels discouraging to suggest that, with noteworthy exceptions and despite the fancier tech inside their
walls, any given new tower or library is mostly going to be worse than its antecedents — less subtle, less agile,
less soulful, less simple, less modern, less good at whatever it is trying to do — than the equivalent
construction of a generation or two earlier. The solution is not a revival of the shapes and details used by
modern architects of the past. That kind of thinking is antimodern in its spirit even if it’s modernist in its
desire. Given changes in how families and communities and societies live, vast technical advancements in
material and energetic engineering, and new obligations around sustainability, one wouldn’t argue that new
modern buildings should look and work like old buildings — even like old modern buildings. We now have all
the examples of vernacular modernism that we are ever going to have. We might just stop demolishing quite
so many of them.

ANYONE WHO HAS WATCHED the jackhammer-swinging segment of a house-flipping reality television show
knows the controlled-chaos pleasure of demolition. Exemplified by the suburban teardown,
demolition/construction is an approach to the built environment that is especially legible to those who
would primarily financialize it. Demolition presents a seeming virtue of sweeping away the failed or the tired,
and soothes our horror at visible aging. It is also very cheap, relative to the more intricate constructive
practices of rehabilitation, renovation, reinhabitation, and retrofitting. A vicious cycle has been established in
which it is cheaper to replace than repair; the average lifespan of a new American building has drifted
downward in recent decades to about seventy years.

Architecture rarely enters general cultural consciousness other than through psychodramas of demolition
and preservation. The 1910 Pennsylvania Station in New York City, and the now celebrated Gilded Age
neoclassicism of which it was the epitome, was to established thinking tired and dreary and embarrassing
until it was rather casually destroyed in 1966 for the new one — the canonical ground zero for what has come
to be called the historic preservation movement in America. Part of brutalism’s cultural currency is surely its
vulnerability — for all its bunker-like looks — to destruction. There was no finer example of brutalism than
Robin Hood Gardens, an East London housing estate designed in the 1960s by the actual originators of the
style in Great Britain, Alison and Peter Smithson. It was leveled in 2018. A design museum conserved a single
unit.

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No similar piece of vernacular modernism belongs in any museum. One can’t especially make the case for not
destroying any particular vernacular modern building — they’re all pretty good, and none are especially
unique. But if you lose too many, you pass a tipping point. Vernacular modernism presents an opportunity to
disengage from a habit in which our appreciation and apprehension of the built environment play out
mostly in the studied violence of losing or saving some special piece of it. There is a parallel, in climate
destruction and mass extinction, in the conservation of the natural environment: the deepest equation of
peril and potential is no doubt around complex and distributed groups of insects and creeping things,
around mysteriously collective organisms like corals and fungi, and, deeper yet, around the microbiomes that
live within us. When these go, we are truly done. In America, all these works of vernacular modernism — in
their abundance, in their unbeauty, and in their definitively modern dexterity and durability — are analogous
to these systems of species: it is the background that matters above all.

This ecology is not only by analogy. Along with global climate destruction and its consequences, another
defining condition of our century is global hyperurbanization: in 1960, a third of humanity lived in cities.
Today, it’s more than half; by midcentury, it will be close to three-quarters. All problems will be urban
problems. These emerging densities and complexities are not the circumstances that especially require a
cavalcade of new monuments and masterpieces, or very many new buildings at all. The most sustainable
buildings are not the ones that some self-appointed private agency has greenwashed into certifiable
respectability or nominal net-zero operational energy use. The most sustainable buildings are the ones we
never spend carbon and capital to build in the first place. Construction and operation of the built
environment accounts for about a third of America’s energy use. Eighty percent of the systematic energy
associated with any given building deals with its raw materials, the manufacture and maintenance of its
components, and the demolition/construction work of its instantiation; only twenty percent is associated
with its lifetime operations, like cooling and lighting. So this requires of us the work of transformation: a new
interest in the preservation, retrofitting, and adaptive reuse of existing structures and infrastructures — an
ever deeper, ever denser, ever livelier occupation of existing places, precursor carbon footprints, and already-
lost costs. It requires repair and reuse. Some of the most acute emerging design practitioners I know are no
longer especially interested in buildings as shapes or signs, but (as in the work of the New York firm The
Living) as convergent ecologies of upstream and downstream natural and artificial systems; or (as in the
work of the New York firm MODU) as sites of strategic reoccupations that transcend conventional cycles of
construction and inhabitation. Transportation accounts for about half the increase in greenhouse gases
exhaled by America since the 1990s. This suggests an ever more intentional inhabitation and adaptive
transformation of precisely the urban and suburban landscapes where vernacular modernism first
flourished—former urban peripheries that have become inner rings and downtowns.

We have been conditioned to expect buildings to reward our conscious attention by soothing and
entertaining us. So when we encounter buildings that have become old through monumentality or
monumental through age — meetinghouses, cathedrals, temples, citadels — we tend to notice their
picturesque or sublime aesthetic effects. But these old places also become more radically sustainable with
every passing year. Vernacular modernism was generally well-designed and well-made. Now it, too, is old.
Because of its dutifulness and durability, vernacular modernism is precisely the kind of architecture that will
respond best to the coming work of transformation. But because it’s easy to overlook, because it’s ubiquitous,
and because it isn’t especially cool or charismatic, and never was, it’s also precisely the kind of architecture
that we keep needlessly destroying. And mostly replacing with something worse. In the minds and hands of
its makers, vernacular modernism was not especially prophetic or curative. But in its current abundance and
extreme competence, it happens to be a critical resource for getting through the technological and ecological
bottleneck of the next two hundred years. Properly maintained and adaptively inhabited, that 1963
Connecticut library would happily serve for all those two hundred years and more — as the neighboring
wooden meetinghouse on its hill already has. +

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