Legoland Infects Central Coast
Driving north on Highway 101 through Santa Maria to San Luis Obispo, I look at the interlocking succession of pre-fabricated and formula buildings along the highway and I am struck by a one-word epiphany: Legoland.
On our precious Central Coast, on display for miles and miles, we have a perfect example of uniformly unimaginative, hollow-soul, box-with-a-smiley-face-facade commercial architecture infecting communities throughout California.
Whatever happened to architects who dreamed of expressing their unique and personal imprint on our land, designing buildings that are beautiful, functional and inspiring to look at and work within? Are there so few business owners who want their buildings to speak for the singular character and superior quality of their businesses?
Instead, we are living in a grownups' Legoland that we've been inoculated for since childhood. But instead of the traditional Legoland red and white as the dominant color schemes, adult Legoland allows us the exciting adult's only option of substituting various shades of beige and brown.
At one time sandboxes were common in the United States and children were encouraged to practice rudimentary building skills free-form fashion among the billions and billions of forever-malleable granules of sand. In the sandbox there are no pre-fabricated parts that by their nature limit the need for imagination, creativity, and personal style.
By the 1960s the now ubiquitous, tiny , interlocking building blocks called Lego took over as children's building material of choice. The switch-over to pre-fab was eagerly supported by parents who preferred the neatness and predictability of the plastic blocks compared to the sand-in-the-eyes, sand-in-the-hair, sand-tracked-across-the-carpet uncontrollability of the sandbox.
So now we live with the Lego legacy: Instead of architects and builders extrapolating on their personal, idiosyncratic, anything-goes, castle-building dreams of their youth, far too many are content to simply requisition generic building parts and choose which of the handful of formulaic ways they should be snapped together to achieve a boxy building most remarkable for being unremarkable.
On our precious Central Coast, on display for miles and miles, we have a perfect example of uniformly unimaginative, hollow-soul, box-with-a-smiley-face-facade commercial architecture infecting communities throughout California.
Whatever happened to architects who dreamed of expressing their unique and personal imprint on our land, designing buildings that are beautiful, functional and inspiring to look at and work within? Are there so few business owners who want their buildings to speak for the singular character and superior quality of their businesses?
Instead, we are living in a grownups' Legoland that we've been inoculated for since childhood. But instead of the traditional Legoland red and white as the dominant color schemes, adult Legoland allows us the exciting adult's only option of substituting various shades of beige and brown.
At one time sandboxes were common in the United States and children were encouraged to practice rudimentary building skills free-form fashion among the billions and billions of forever-malleable granules of sand. In the sandbox there are no pre-fabricated parts that by their nature limit the need for imagination, creativity, and personal style.
By the 1960s the now ubiquitous, tiny , interlocking building blocks called Lego took over as children's building material of choice. The switch-over to pre-fab was eagerly supported by parents who preferred the neatness and predictability of the plastic blocks compared to the sand-in-the-eyes, sand-in-the-hair, sand-tracked-across-the-carpet uncontrollability of the sandbox.
So now we live with the Lego legacy: Instead of architects and builders extrapolating on their personal, idiosyncratic, anything-goes, castle-building dreams of their youth, far too many are content to simply requisition generic building parts and choose which of the handful of formulaic ways they should be snapped together to achieve a boxy building most remarkable for being unremarkable.
posted by David C. at 9:23 PM
1 Comments:
Interesting parallel, David, between Legoland and Suburbia.
The primary factor in this, as always, is money. The building products you see being used are relatively cheap compared to more traditional materials.
This, of course, makes all the aesthetic difference; many would agree that the elagant gravity of stone out-classes the cheap, cartoon quality of the block used in construction today.
But the simple fact is few developers are going to spend part of their budget on aspects of a building's structure that is not required by law and that may not even be apreciated by the owner's clientele.
However, most of them do not think about the societal ramifications this has long-term. Historical districts are venerated in the community because of the attention to detail and overall character that is rare nowadays.
If you really want to get philisophical, I think it's because society as a whole takes pride in different things these days. There seems to be no end to public opinion on every structure in their respective realms, but pride in Place has been actively waning for many decades. It's one of those things that, hopefully, I can help someday.
Keep up the good work.
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