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Death To Minimalism

Take away the unnecessary, untidy, and intricate and you take away a place’s soul...

Nathan J. Robinson

filed 17 February 2019<br>in

Architecture & Design

Minimalism is the aesthetic language of gentrification. A friend of mine who lives in Los Angeles says he tracks the progress of the transformation not by how many white hipsterish people are in the neighborhood, but by how many houses have put up what he calls “the gentrification fence.” You’ve seen it, it looks like this:

Every time I go back to my parents’ neighborhood in Florida, another little old house from the 1920s-1950s has been flattened and replaced with one of these. It has been stunning watching the transformation of my hometown.

You can see the same thing in Manhattan, of course, which has become the playground of the international super-rich. They build themselves sleek pencil-thin towers in which contact with other human beings is minimized to the greatest extent possible. (If some meddling redistributionist city government requires them to stick in a few “affordable” units, a “poor door” can ensure the rich never have to accidentally spend an uncomfortable elevator ride with a member of the proletariat.) Every day, New Yorkers wake up to see a little less of this…

…and a lot more of this:

Jeremiah Moss’s “Vanishing New York” blog, and the accompanying book, has tracked the city’s development from a messy, historic, romantic multicultural city full of punk rockers, cheap knishes, and dive bars to a glittering corporate monoculture home to little more than condo buildings, office towers, and wine bars. (I wrote about the book for Current Affairs.) Moss suggests that there is a certain lack of “soul” that characterizes the new New York. I have the same sense, but I also find it kind of difficult to articulate what “soul” actually means.

I think, however, that we can refine our sense of what it is by looking at a particular instance of change that recently occurred in the Bay Area. Here is a recent Twitter post about the renovation of an old house in the city:

If you thought the “before” photo was on the right, you’d be wrong. That’s the new and improved version, shorn of its color, its Victorian-era architectural details, its charming rounded windows, and all of the signs that the people living in it are human.

People on social media were almost unanimous in their hatred of the change. It was an “architectural hate crime,” the house had been “Ikea-fied.” “So it went from eccentric to boring,” one person noted. They had “remove[d] all of the grit, character, and individuality just to leave it as bland and homogeneous as almost everything else.”

“The first house has character, personality, looks like it’s lived in and has a story to tell. The second house looks like it needs a Xanax and to be put on suicide watch.”

“The blue one looks fun. Like a home.”

“It’s like a house-vampire came along, sucked all the life out of it and left a bloodless corpse behind.”

What is it, though, that actually makes #2 so much worse than #1? Why does the word “soulless” spring so quickly to mind? All they did was paint it white, remove a few curlicues, tidy it up, add a wooden fence, and put in some more contemporary windows. Why does the change seem to “kill” the house? Perhaps it’s a commitment to historic preservation, but why does this particular bit of historic style seem worth preserving? What’s so special about a bit of scrollwork? Why should rounded window frames be better than rectangular ones? The turquoise paint, the “Beware of Dog” sign, the satellite dish, the unevenly placed planters—none of this was original. It seems as if the house has lost something that is greater than the sum of the actual changes, some kind of inner spirit.

I don’t think it’s easy to actually put the change into words. A lot of commentators used words like “soul” and “life,” but is this just a kind of mysticism? I am sure there are those (probably including the house’s owner) who would deride the reaction as mere “nostalgia,” an irrational outmoded attachment to old things because they are old. I think there is more to it than that, though. Let me show you two pictures. Here is one I took today walking around my neighborhood:

And here is the parking lot of a Target:

One of these places strikes me as much more beautiful than the other. And by “beautiful,” I don’t mean some Platonic quality that exists in the ether. I mean something that gives you pleasure just from looking at it. Beauty is kind of “objective” in this sense, in that something either does or doesn’t give you pleasure. That doesn’t mean that everyone gets pleasure from the...