APRIL 2007 »  book review

Colonists' Revenge

Architecture of Democracy: American Architecture and the Legacy of the Revolution
by Allan Greenberg
Rizzoli International Publications, New York, NY, 2006
204 pp.; hardcover, 150 color and b&w illustrations; $50
ISBN 0-8478-2793-3

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

On a steamy August day in 1964, a young South African architect named Allan Greenberg landed for the first time at JFK Airport in New York City. He was en route to earn a master's degree in architecture at Yale, and had a wife and two small children in tow. For all his jetlag and distraction, he still noticed the strange, new, forceful appeal of polyglot America. "I was aware of being surrounded by voices speaking English with more accents than I had ever imagined existed," he writes in a revealing mini-autobiography that opens his new book. "An electric energy seemed to pulsate through the ground on which I was standing. At that moment I fell in love with America. It felt as if I had come home."

He'd already tried falling in love with some other countries, their peoples and buildings. He'd spent his undergraduate years at a South African architecture school where history had not yet been banned from the classroom, so Greenberg memorized how to draw hundreds of landmarks worldwide. In the late 1950s and early '60s, he took architecture courses or apprenticed to firms in London, Helsinki and Stockholm; in Denmark, he helped Jørn Utzon finalize plans for the Sydney Opera House. At one point Greenberg even tried to work for his then-idol, Le Corbusier, but the aging master couldn't pay any salary. Besides, Corbu warned his young fan, "There is nothing you can learn here; there are no rules I can teach you."

Greenberg, of course, has since spent his professional life learning, following, interpreting and sometimes upending rules. A prolific Classicist with offices in Washington, DC, New York City and Greenwich, CT, he is one of the few traditionalists who have wangled celebrity residential clients (Martha Stewart, Harrison Ford) as well as nonresidential commissions as high profile as State Department offices and university compounds. He is also widely admired for teaching (Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia) and for nurturing staff members – a generation of Classicists has emerged from his office. Last year, he won the $100,000 Richard H. Driehaus Prize, becoming the first American to receive these laurels. All of which makes this lightweight, rambling volume a puzzling disappointment. Greenberg set out, he writes in the acknowledgments, to investigate "the ways in which American architecture embodies the precepts outlined in the founding documents of the Republic." He makes a handful of insightful points on the topic, again and again.

After the Revolution, he explains, the citizen's house became the basis for numerous building types. Think of how often "we identify our public buildings by the suffix house": statehouses, courthouses, firehouses, schoolhouses, jailhouses. Classical precedents – especially Greek temples and Roman domes – also of course determined the course of American architecture, but the ancient details symbolized something new in the New World. Anthropomorphic columns below pediments represent a community of citizens who can "determine their own destinies," Greenberg writes, while houses' arched doorways mark "the transition between the public sidewalk and the private realm," where government cannot intrude without permission.

Greenberg breezes through examples of pre-1900 buildings and streetscapes nationwide and delves deeply into the design and influence of just a few sites: Mount Vernon, Monticello, the U.S. Capitol and Jefferson's Academical Village at the University of Virginia. Along the way he occasionally reveals his long-smoldering antagonism toward Modernist buildings and urbanism: lines of skyscrapers with a "vacant gaze" expressing "disdain for the existing neighborhood" and Corbusian housing projects best suited to "eroding the city's essential character."

The book manuscript began life as a script for a television series, now in development. Alas, it often reads like a TV script, despite an erudite supply of quotes from the likes of Vitruvius, a 15th-century Italian architect named Filarete, Melville, T.S. Eliot and Vincent Scully. Greenberg seems to have assumed that readers have short attention spans and poor memories. Passages sound like grade-school civics lessons: "The American colonies were governed by the crown in London" and "The founders of the United States created a nation with a new form of government." Observations keep reappearing, as if meant for episodes broadcast weeks apart: Washington and Jefferson enjoyed "celebrating the daily routines of their families' lives," and "both men celebrated the daily routines of family life."

There are nonetheless two good reasons to buy this book. Your purchase would help boost Greenberg's Classical celebrity rating, as there aren't nearly enough Classicist celebrities yet. And, secondly, if Greenberg's popularity does rise, it will perhaps inspire more publications of crypto-anti-Modernism. The book not only criticizes Modernist designs once in a while, it also includes photos of them at their worst: plastered with flyers or leasing-agent banners, or looming creepily over horse pastures. TB

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