Very Special, Very Unique Bricks

Bland cities are never old, but old cities can be bland

I went to a wedding in Santa Fe New Mexico a few years ago. This is the Palace of the Governors built by the Spanish in the early 1600’s. It’s the oldest building in the continental US not built by Native Americans.

This is the Hotel Santa Fe, where the wedding reception was. It was built in 1991. It is not the oldest building in the continental US.

And finally, here is the entrance to the main parking lot downtown. I don’t know when it was built, but are you noticing a theme?

Last week, I wrote a bit about the creeping “Blandness” of cities, why its an important issue, and how weird and idiosyncratic things help break up the monotony. This week I want to talk about one of the ways cities and planners try to fight blandness.

Blandness accusations are rarely leveled at historic or old places. These places date from a time before mass production or globalized tastes and trades, when materials had to be local and styles were born out of the specifics of a culture and environment. The Palace of the Governors looks like a building specifically from the Southwest. Vernacular architecture is the term to describe a type of building that deploys traditional styles and local materials or techniques.

In the case of Santa Fe, vernacular architecture is the law. The city has a strict ordinance that covers about 1/4 of its land and mandates construction in the “Territorial or Pueblo Style” to preserve the “charm and unique character of Santa Fe.” Original Pueblo buildings are made from adobe brick— sun-baked earth strengthened with straw and shaped into blocks. These buildings are made from the ground they stand on, and the brick’s properties regulate heat and keep buildings cool. Unlike the Palace, the hotel and the parking lot aren’t made of sun-baked bricks. They’re typical steel-frame buildings with a layer of adobe, or more often sand colored stucco, sprayed on at the end to comply with the law. Ultimately, Santa Fe’s architecture laws are about maintaining the look of the Pueblo style, rather than the actual purpose of it.

Santa Fe raises some of the tensions in creating unique places. In the fight against blandness, the default move is to maintain something “traditional.” Whether through laws like Santa Fe’s, or more often through rigid historical preservation, the result is to try and cast the city in historical amber that keeps it looking like itself and no other place.

Cities go to extreme lengths to protect historic things. Central Paris has strict height limits to preserve its mid-rise character and ensure that the Eiffel Tower remains the focal point of its skyline.

In London, views of Saint Paul’s and Parliament have been protected since the 1930’s along certain corridors. You cannot legally build anything that would obstruct a view of the cathedral’s dome or Parliament’s tower from a series of points to protect its unique place in the city’s skyline. The most extremely English example is the view from an oak tree in Hampstead Heath.

This has resulted in some comic architectural slight of hand, like the “Cheese Grater” building, which slopes down aggressively to get out of the cathedral’s way looking down Fleet street.

Finally, there is the good old-fashioned historic district, an entire neighborhood where you can basically change nothing about the exterior appearance of a building. What if your city has nothing old to protect? No worries, just steal it from elsewhere. Here is Tianducheng in China.

Before you laugh at the Chinese, consider that America has two Eiffel Towers in Las Vegas and Disney World, or that for a while in the 1900’s Mock-Tudor style English villages and homes were in vogue. Below is Pomander Walk on New York’s Upper West Side, a particularly goofy example. The English village effect is kind of ruined by the apartment block at the end of the street.

I like old buildings, I think heritage is important. I also don’t want to live in a theme park or a city where the architectural clock has been stopped at some arbitrary point. I see two main issues with an over-reliance on preservation to keep cities special.

Issue 1: It makes places static.

A city cannot evolve or change under heavy-handed preservation. Central Paris, unable to grow upward by law, remains wildly expensive and has shifted growth towards increasingly crowded suburbs and fringe areas like La Defence. The Santa Fe laws might seem like a middle ground (you can build new things, as long as they look like the old things), but it raises its own issues. Adobe brick construction was learned by the Spanish from the Arabs, who integrated the knowledge of the Pueblo Indians —incredibly impressive builders in their own right — to create the style Santa Fe is trying to maintain. It’s an incredibly unique architectural lineage and a good example of only-in-America ethnic alchemy. When we stop a city’s clock we prevent new collisions from ever developing. Imagine if we had preserved the colonial character of New York and prevented tenements and row houses from emerging? Or if we’d preserved all the tenements and row houses and stopped art-deco from emerging?

Issue 2: Uniqueness isn’t only built, it’s lived.

The other issue is that, absent other measures, preserving traditional buildings puts forward a vision which only addresses surface appearances. The unique flavor of a place is largely in the uses and practices which buildings were made to serve. A couple years ago, Apple opened a store in the historic Tower Theater in downtown LA. The building was preserved but the use was not. Instead of being a contributor to LA’s unique identity as the home of a living, breathing film and performance industry, it became a shell in which I can buy the same products I can buy in any major city or even online. It’s blandness in a prettier package.

Part of me cringes every time I read about a development “preserving the industrial character” of a building when we haven’t preserved the actual middle-class industrial jobs and trades that have largely fled urban areas.

I’m realize I’m being a bit hyperbolic in my description of both issues. You can obviously single out specific buildings, streets, and even neighborhoods that make a place unique without permanently stalling evolution, and its better for Apple to take over a beautiful building than to tear it down to build a store from scratch.

So whats a good middle ground? How about one final brick. To me, a brick is red, but when I was living in London I noticed that about half of the bricks are a sort of sandy yellow. Because I’m weird, I went looking for the reason.

Here is a description of London bricks from The Journal of Construction History, a publication I was thrilled to find out about.

The London stock brick is made from deposits of brickearth overlying the London Clay, which are easily worked and produce a durable, generally well-burnt brick. This durability actually increases, since the London stock brick has the fortuitous advantage of hardening with age and in reaction to the polluted London atmosphere

The color is a reflection of the city’s earth. Workers would dig down to the layer of clay-filled dirt and make the bricks right on site. Studies have shown that the handmade local bricks are actually better insulation than later mass-produced ones from imported materials, and they get harder over time. Like the Pueblo adobe bricks, these bricks look unique and work better (although with climate change, maybe worse insulation will eventually be better).

It’s not the law, but new buildings use these yellow bricks all the time.

These buildings look London but they’re not trapped in time. They belong to a subset of vernacular architecture that manages to be both useful in modern times and special looking. Another favorite example is the wind catcher, a sort of chimney built traditionally across the Middle East and Persia to channel cool breezes into a building and push hot air out using air pressure alone. These ancient structures are making a return to some new buildings in places like Dubai.

Trapping a city in time is it’s own form of blandness. I may regret saying this publicly… but I find Paris to be kind of monotonous (visually that is)! We can create unique places that balance history with thrilling evolution, and make ways for new things to carry on the unique character and purpose of traditional places without being silly replicas of them.

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