DECEMBER 31, SUNDAY

BUILDINGS CONTINUED

Traditionless. But what I wonder is why strip malls would be anything else. It is almost as if the United States has started from scratch, with no traditions, with only low cost and efficiency in mind. These strip malls were only built for the present. And it could be that standardized American construction methods using wooden frames contributes to this feeling of impermanence. Why build forever if we live in the flux of rapid change. Buildings aren’t built with thick masonry walls to last two hundred years. We are an always start over culture. Maybe our architecture is what is suited for a start over country with no traditions. Maybe our forms of construction, the quickly thrown up cookie cutter housing developments with no trees and every house alike are part of a cultural change that is happening everywhere in the world. Maybe I am a reactionary that can’t handle change. Very likely there will very soon be 3D printed houses that will be the equivalent of the manufactured housing that is already everywhere in Buncombe County, cheap housing in trailer parks. I didn’t see any trailer parks in any of these European countries. I didn’t even see any dilapidated housing. All the housing in Europe seems to be compact with tiny or no yards and solid housing, even in Greece, which isn’t nearly as wealthy as the United States. But maybe the United States is at the forefront of change with totally manufactured housing, maybe in new shapes, coming next.

Cars. Or, maybe, as indicated by manufactured trailer parks or sprawling suburban cookie cutter housing with substantial lawns, a country with plenty of land has developed around the automobile and individual commuting and spread out shopping while cities in Europe are compact with all shopping within walking or biking distance and streets too narrow for automobiles. We have stores spread out along highways with a parking lot in front of each one. Maybe strip malls were built after the advent of the automobile with the freedom of individual transportation central in the USA, while European cities were built before the automobile, which are smaller anyway in Europe, in fact everything is smaller and more compact in Europe. So maybe it is the automobile that has shaped architecture in the USA.

Freedom. Or maybe one of the differences is the American sense of individual freedom to do what we please. Everyone is free to put a building where they want and to build it in any way that they want as long as it doesn’t harm someone. This is certainly true of Swannanoa where the residents voted ten years ago not to incorporate because they didn’t want either city taxes or for anyone to tell them where they could build or how they could build. So we have box stores everywhere but side by side with apartment houses and plots piled high with mulch or stone for sale, a total hodgepodge of unattractive buildings. In Kathe’s home town with tight zoning even the trees you can plant in your yard are prescribed. With that mindset no one will build an unattractive building although some of the chain grocery stores in Winsen have drawn criticism.

Bad Taste. Or maybe it could be that Europeans simply have a more refined taste in buildings and in storefronts. The store windows in Paris are all beautiful and the colors used are delightful. There is little of the corporate logos and decoration such as the McDonald arches. Signs are smaller in Europe with almost no billboards whether because of zoning or because people have better taste or some combination of the two. In the United States there is localized very good taste, but in Europe good taste, or the absence of bad taste, seems to be universal.

I am not an architect and I am unsure about any of these judgments. But something is going on here. Maybe I just like European buildings because they are different that the buildings in Swannanoa. Perhaps a Dutchman would be enchanted by Swannanoa, or if not Swannanoa, Asheville, where the stores are in older store fronts that seem to be more solid and permanent except on the highways out of town. Maybe I am just being a snob, which from an American perspective is an elitist who looks down on other people, but from a European perspective might be person with slightly more refined taste, not a slob.

I don’t know. I know I am being unfair in choosing photographs of buildings in Europe that I like and strip malls in the United States that I don’t like. But regardless of fairness, this is something I want to wonder about, and strip malls still depress me.