Contemporary design abets globalization. The golden arches and swoosh are everywhere. Mickey Mouse is recognized where actual mice are dinner, and Coke is common where water is more valuable than gold. Soccer moms and death squads alike esteem the elaborate formal purposefulness of the SUV. Smoothly curving transparency traces the cutting edge in digital gadgetry, and oral hygiene, through San Jose and Bangalore, Columbus and Colombia. The examples abound, proliferated by design, which puts a happy face on the complicated economic reality of the global marketplace, making it go down easier: design’s efforts to matter have achieved their unholiest fulfillment.
As these examples attest, and as European critics in particular complain, globalization for the most part means Americanization.1 EuroDisney and Le Big Mac are symbols for an economic and cultural imperialism that has become relatively institutionalized in the protective coloration of a general globalization. Since the Marshall Plan, this globalization has been paced by the prerogatives of the American consumer. This has unexpectedly rendered American design more invisible: as the increasingly sinister happy face is further removed from the potentially messy actuality of its provenance, it loses touch as well with the spirit of American design that traditionally reveled in that realism. The character of the universally appealing, focus-group laundered, lowest-common-denominator multinational consumer product is a far cry from what the world had historically come to value about American design. It has become impossible to think of American design apart from its global presence as the bland face of such production, particularly when the same branded design confronts the consumer in Beijing, Orange County, and Dubai. In such circumstances, the frank pragmatism for which American design was known before globalization cannot be exceptional. The brutal calculation that led Irving Gill to Mediterranean forms as a consequence of the tilt-up concrete construction method he was pioneering is completely lost in the stick-framed, EIFS versions exported to China and the Middle East today. Instead, American frankness sags into banality, and its pragmatism descends into simple greed.
Though the trend is clear, globalization has not yet run its course. Exceptions to this calculated universal blandness can still be found. This is most persuasively seen at the relatively anonymous levels of creativity where the stuff that fills the city is made. While today’s design stars are international personalities, there are still buildings that are not monuments, not infrastructure “on display,” things that are used locally and eventually thrown away. Stuff that is not designed to be shipped any distance preserves a sort of contemporary regional design difference. Those places where design has a history deeper than the global economy, but traditional vernacular forms have not choked design evolution, continue to produce stuff that can be viewed as characteristic of that locale. In particular, the difference between American and European design remains noticeable. Alarm over the incursions of Topolino and Le Big Mac has obscured the continuing fact that at this quotidian level Europe and America have maintained separate, distinctive design identities. Beyond the oft-remarked differences in the sizes of stuff explained as a response to the differences in the sizes of the places themselves (even the Mini, re-sized for the American market, dwarfs the Smart Car)—American and European things feel different. The foreignness that the tourist senses is more than a simple matter of unfamiliarity. It results from the perception of a fundamentally different embodied intentionality; in other words, it is a matter of design.
In architecture, matters of design are confused with history and contextual issues but ultimately boil down to a divergence in attitude toward space—a difference as obvious, and obscure, as the all-pervasive but invisible medium itself. Here globalization has found less purchase. Architecture’s slowness, rootedness, and place-specificity make it harder to move around. And despite the early claims of the International Style, architecture has been consistently bound tectonically to the dictates of local materials and methods. This is particularly true where “non-signature” buildings are concerned.2 This difference begins with objects, where it seems more immediately apparent in the artifacts produced by each culture, in the trace of the characteristic “eye” or “hand” that has formed and been formed by that culture. Here, space lurks as a constituent of this difference in the relative degree to which the culture identifies with such stuff or with the places where it is made. It is a cliché, but therefore also true, that America is culturally oriented to “things,” for example. America is famously the home of “frank technology,” homo consumeris, and the commodification of all experience. America has produced the housing tract and its site-as-factory procedure, the John Deere tractor, and Levis. In contrast, Europe is seen as the steward of connoisseurship and style; as home of the cultural sublime it has contributed a succession of perfect, figural spaces, elegant theories, Italian hill towns, Ferraris, wine, and haute couture collections.3
Apart from the complex example of Frank Lloyd Wright, the most original American architect, most of what is considered uniquely American in architecture has been little concerned with the quality of space. Neither the virtuosity of Eero Saarinen nor the poetic “stillness” of Louis Kahn are ascribable to the spatial quality of their buildings. Among contemporary examples, Frank Gehry’s crumpled paper makes a field of figural objects and Peter Eisenman’s traces and absences record the former presence of objects, not spaces. HH Richardson, Louis Sullivan, Buckminster Fuller, and Mies-as-SOM: there are very few interior volumes in the history books about American architecture.4
An architectural discourse featuring space has not evolved in the American academy nor much informed the efforts of the profession; though space is central to the American condition, the icons of American architecture have been objects in this space rather than containers of it. As the poet Charles Olsen has said, “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom Cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.”5
American space is oceanic, out there. That which is necessarily contained by building is more prosaically deemed “area” and concerned with measurement—square footage—rather than quality or affect. In America, space has always been equated with freedom and real estate space to move—and space to sell.6
Architecture inhabits this American space modestly, temporarily, like a vehicle or piece of furniture, and packages it functionally into rooms and amenities that can bulk out the listings in the buyers’ guides. The wild just beyond the George Washington Bridge humbles even the mighty example of New York City, while Chicago makes barely a bump on the prairie. The Sears Tower seems an impressive exception until the observation deck visitor looks out upon all the vastness that surrounds it. Though ordered and divided up by Jefferson’s commensurately vast, continent-girdling grid of roads and property lines, this space exceeds architecture’s will to master it, while the correspondingly vast and free-wheeling market frustrates architecture’s inclination to dig in and become a lasting part of it. Only engineering, at the scale of infrastructure, is able to assert a quality of endurance in all that vastness and stand against the erosion of value by actually doing a job that needs to be done—yet with so much concrete that when it becomes obsolete it is a bigger job to demolish it than to just leave it.
One result of this is an equivalence of things in relation to space in America, a flattening of status that America likes to think of as democratic; there is space, and there is stuff in it. This makes it easier to imagine buildings as just more stuff—and to imagine stuff architecturally. Much of the best, or at least most influential, architecture in America has served pragmatic programs with modest cultural claims: grain elevators, dams, factories, towers. The apparent exceptions, such as Gehry’s or Richard Meier’s work, are better seen as examples of the effects of Americanization/globalization on the rebound. While Gehry’s designs are almost literal representations of initially modest stuff, they are transported by a signature scrappy shininess to monumental status: shreds of wadded-up paper, discarded shoe boxes, used coat hangers, and other trash rendered precious in titanium. Meier’s work is at root no more than similarly gussied-up and commodified Corbu—what Europe most fears about McDonald’s, but rendered acceptable, as would McDonald’s had it begun with a brasserie instead of a hamburger stand.7
The continuity between the American object and the American building is not stylistic but ontological: in contrast to European building production, the American inventory does not imply hierarchy. American objects stand free of any subordination or superiority to buildings, and its buildings exhibit no paternalism to objects. Each enjoys the equal attention of design and occupies the same position in the cultural landscape: the Sears washing machine and the Sears Tower go about their respective jobs in the same matter-of-fact way. In contrast, the noticeable “sophistication” of “European design” sets the continental objet apart as an exemplar, related to buildings only as a fulfillment of desires unrealizable at a larger scale. The housewares or furniture that exemplify “Danish design” or “Italian design” stand iconically in the global marketplace for “sophistication,” pointedly raising the bar for the earthbound architecture that must house it. “French,” “British,” and “German” haute tech engineering take up the challenge with an architecture composed of fetishized objects, serial aggregations of exquisite components that grudgingly share the spotlight with the larger architectural assemblage. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’s—and Tony Rice’s—famous gerberettes at the Pompidou Centre, for example, spawned a self-conscious welter of custom-forged and cast structural, glazing, and cladding widgets that now proliferate throughout the work of the haute tech. In America there are relatively few widgets, or at least widgets on display; structural sections are used as they come from the mill, and glazing systems come straight out of catalogs. The Simpson clip, a classic American connection device, serves the same purpose as many haute tech connectors, but is modestly stamped out of galvanized sheet metal and is always buried under other construction. Since performance and cost exert the pressure to innovate, efficiency replaces style as a value in American construction; since this efficiency is measured in economic terms rather than by tectonic ideality, the matter-of-fact Simpson connector wins out over a more structurally elegant cast stainless steel piece. And since the stamped connector does the job well enough, is readily available, and is cost-effective, there is no architectural incentive to reinvent fittings for each building.8
The self-conscious object and the matter-of-fact object exemplify traditions with inherently different relationships to space. The matter-of-fact object is unconcerned with scale as a difference in kind, but simply as one of degree. Consequently, the matter-of-fact building-scale object is less likely to consider its volumetric nature as particularly special. The fact that the large matter-of-fact object may contain more or less space than the breadbox-sized object is beside the point; what matters is how well it discharges its program or function. The self-conscious object, in contrast, cannot get over the remarkable fact that it is a building or a breadbox, which sets it apart from other objects at every scale, as a Building or a Breadbox. In an American space writ large, neither buildings nor breadboxes are ever more than marks on the horizon, farther or closer, and this inculcates a sort of pragmatic humility in the objects that ultimately makes them less aloof.
This modesty characterizes the object’s genesis within an environment of tinkering. Such design proceeds by solving problems rather than making statements; consequently style is seldom an issue. Refinements arrived at by tinkering are pragmatic and particular rather than theoretical and systemic. The individual customizations do not necessarily “add up” to anything other than their piece of the problem, and so the cumulative judgment necessary to achieve a sense of style is lacking. In the absence of the larger conversation, a bizarre and sometimes charming idiosyncrasy may develop, as with the work of Bruce Goff, or more recently Greg Lynn; more often, though, the result is the straightforward reasonableness for which American design has been known, deriving from the lack of claims for more than the solution of a particular problem or the matter-of-fact mastery of a corresponding piece of the construction puzzle. “How-to” TV shows are popular in America, including sitcoms with that theme (Home Improvement) and reality TV that could be considered the tinkerer’s equivalent to Survivor: American Chopper, Monster Garage, Monster House, Junkyard Wars, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and Robot Wars. Programs featuring objects also proliferate in the virtual space of the television set: MegaStructures, Modern Marvels, Building the Ultimate, Extreme Engineering, and others celebrate big things doing big things, while spaces are featured as the subject of shows like World’s Best Implosions. Unlike Europe, which has a collective History peering over its shoulder, America has felt only the pressure of the Nielsen box, the market, and the creative challenge of a vast territory with harsh demands.
Underlying all of these symptoms of design difference between the two cultures is their fundamentally different rapport with technology. This factor was less apparent before globalization, or before the global cataclysm of World War II precipitated economic globalization, because technology itself varied around the world. Since WWII erased any entrenched differences among the allies or between the former combatants, encouraging cooperation among the former and wiping the slate clean for the latter, a consistent technology has insinuated itself into all aspects of life, making the variation in outlooks more obvious. In America, where the prevailing attitude toward the machine was always more or less one of trust and companionship, the postwar spread of technology was not alarming; technology was equipment, its presence in the home as labor-saving devices, central air, and family entertainment was welcomed. In Europe, on the other hand, the war metastasized a historically more hesitant relationship with technology into fear or awe. Heidegger’s early (prewar) respect for “equipment” in “The Origin of the Work of Art” (which was much more closely related to the American attitude) can be contrasted with its postwar demonization in “The Question Concerning Technology,” as a force that would “enframe” all of experience. Between this essay and his “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” of the same period, Heidegger makes a case for architecture as a counterbalance, in obvious contrast to the efforts in America to extend building’s objective continuity with the forces of technology.9 (Heidegger’s particular case was not helped by memories of his dalliance with the National Socialists before the war.) Heidegger’s warnings had little effect in stemming the tide of industrialization in the building trades, which in the immediate postwar period went back onto a war footing to cope with the immense housing shortage of a devastated continent.
The result in Europe has been a haute building technology favoring a complexity that highlights its mechanical accomplishment. Such accomplished complexity keeps the machine on a pedestal, where it can be properly admired—and an eye can be kept on it. At arm’s length there is no evidence of the hand of the maker that would draw this technology close, nor place for the user who would bond with it. There is no hope of repair should it become broken, nor avenue to supplement or upgrade it should it become obsolete. Once it leaves the factory, sealed in its epoxy-skinned design perfection, the European technical object remains aloof from the tampering desires of its new owners.
America never came up with a “high tech” because its companionable relationship with technology does not encourage the perspective necessary to obsess on it. Almost all American design follows the path of refinement-by-tinkering, or souping-up, pragmatically appropriating the allied work of others, tweaking it or adding something new or different, adjusting it and then setting it loose. American technology is more likely to be a machinic collage of elements from Mopar, McMaster-Carr or Grainger, or from companies found in the Sweet’s catalog or Thomas Register, than to be purpose-designed from scratch.10
Because of this meritocratic genesis, that process is invited to continue even after the device is installed in its new home. If broken, the piece of equipment will be taken into the garage to be fixed, or to be cannibalized for its constituent doohickeys, whatchamacallits, and thingamajigs, to serve as a parts on some other project. Even if not broken it will eventually succumb to the same fate, as a restless spirit dreams of a better mousetrap or peripheral interface device. And the steps from the mouse to the house and beyond are limited only by the size of the garage and its collection of stuff.11
But globalization, even as Americanization, threatens this happy attitude. America is a victim, as well as an agent, of globalization; McDonald’s and Disney imperil America’s forthrightness as much as Europe’s heritage. While it is European dismay that makes the danger visible, it is European difference that reminds that this danger is America’s heritage. American design is best where the individual’s invention aspires to hegemony, but before it achieves it—Ray Krok before Ronald McDonald, Walt Disney before Michael Eisner. At such point, local constraints have conditioned the aspirations without limiting them, while the aspiration has disciplined the idea’s necessary, inherent idiosyncrasy without eliminating it. At such a point the focus groups have not yet bleached out its charm, and the market has not asserted the full force of its ruthless normalization. Historically America has been able to tell the difference between the idea and its roll-out, between the patent and its licensing. Though the market rewards the latter, the culture’s heart is with the former. Yet the roll-out itself is no mean feat. As Henry Ford proved with the Model-T or Steve Jobs with the Mac, it need not condemn the thing to the timid mediocrity now flooding the world as a consequence of globalization.
In the end, what has America been but things in a vast space, and what is the world now but another space, larger still? It was evolution in such a wide-open environment that gave American stuff its original character, that forced America to make exactly the kind of objects that can travel so readily across the frontier and then eventually around the world as they do: McDonald’s proliferates so easily because it seems so ruthlessly placeless itself, a fast food Conestoga.12
Yet EggMcMuffin is not exactly flapjacks and joe around a morning campfire, and the spirit that stood up to the trackless wilds of the western frontier now seems to quail before the virtual mercantile risks of an open world. Increasingly insulated by its apparent cultural hegemony, America seems arrogant, but is really just newly self-conscious. If globalization continues as a generalized Americanization, it is not American arrogance that should be feared but a new American anxiety before the market. What is scary is not the placeless, non-spatial competence of American stuff but the forsaking of its native robustness for an inexperienced idea of inoffensiveness—a slick, insinuating blandness that enters the market stealthily as Le Big Mac or Royale with cheese, rather than forthrightly as the Whopper. Love it or hate it, the plastic version of Michael Graves at Target is not the same as the mercenary belligerence of Portland. America needs to view the world’s vanishing foreignness not as a vindication of bland design and mass marketing but as the fading of a valuable contrast. This difference might be the only thing to help America remember what is American, and allow it to reassert the possibility of American design as exceptional before the world chokes on it.