I was born in the 1960s, which means I am among the first generation to grow up with color TV. This also means I am also among the first Americans who are able to see their past in color. Or, at least, the urban landscape of our past. Maybe that’s why I love old TV shows like The Rockford Files—shows with a lot of exterior shots of working class cities and suburbs from back then. Once in a while, Rockford will race through Los Angeles and there, flashing by in the background, a McDonald’s from 1976 will appear. Or maybe a Woolworth’s or a Wash King. (Yes, I do realize that most people have never heard of Woolworth’s or Wash King.)
These were the places I would visit with my parents when I was a kid, and it’s kind of neat to see them again, if only on a TV screen. Seeing them today, forty years later, I am often struck by how different the architecture was back then, especially the fast-food joints and coffee shops, many of which were getting on even when Rockford was in his prime. These vintage buildings from the 50s and 60s often had weird, playful curves and tilted walls, all of it stitched together at crazy angles. I remember one restaurant in particular that my mom used to take me to every weekend. It had plastic booths nestled under a rocket-red awning with trippy lights hanging down. It looked like something straight out of The Jetsons.
I have a confession to make: I love concrete architecture. I know, I know. Concrete architecture (CA, for short) is not fashionable. It’s not renewable (not yet, anyway). It’s not touchy-feely. It’s not cool.
Part of the bad-rap CA has is due to its association with brutalism, the quasi-Soviet style that was popular in the 1970s, especially in England. It’s cold. Windowless. Dystopian. Think 1984. A Clockwork Orange. Total Recall. Et cetera.
Obviously, that’s not the type of CA that I’m talking about. Rather, when I think of great concrete architecture, I think of buildings that mix smooth, rectilinear slabs of stone (that’s all concrete is, after all—artificial stone) with glass and other construction elements. When built to a more human scale, and combined with greenery and organic decoration, CA can be soothing. Symmetrical. Ordered. Neat. Human.
I keep thinking of that scene in Lawrence of Arabia when a reporter asks Lawrence, an Englishman, why he loves the desert so much. “Because it’s clean,” he says. His answer resonates on many levels: literal, moral, political, and philosophical. That’s sort of why I like CA. It’s clean. It’s calming.
Salk Institute – Louis I. Kahn, Architect
I think my first exposure to CA was from movies. Specifically, James Bond movies. There’s Willard Whyte’s desert mansion in Diamonds Are Forever (actually the Elrod House in Palm Springs by John Lautner). Then, in The Man with the Golden Gun, there’s Scaramanga’s secret lair, carved into the rock of a volcanic island. Almost every male nerd has a secret fantasy of being a Bond villain (or, at least, of having a Bond villain’s lair). What could be cooler for a bookish, introverted, probably asthmatic kid than to have his own secret, clean (pollen-free) hideout where no one, not even MI6, can find you?
Which brings me to my main point. Introverts of both sexes have a fondness for CA because we associate it with solitude, in a good way. The only real experience with CA that most of us have is from public spaces—libraries, museums, research centers, etc.—whose sense of empty space is soothing to introverts (who tend to have too much internal stimulation).
So it’s no surprise that the ultimate fictional incarnation of CA would be owned by the ultimate fictional nerd, Tony Stark. His mansion in the Marvel MCU is a Lautner-esque swirl of concrete perched on a California cliff over the Pacific. The mansion is the epitome of the Bond-villain/mad scientist aesthetic. Stark, who seems to be a selfish lout but is actually psychologically damaged by the remembered death of his parents, is free to be alone in the mansion’s cavernous rooms, jammed with post-modern decorations and transhuman technology. Stark doesn’t need a human heart; he has a mechanical one, powered by cold fusion. It can’t be broken.
So, what does it say about me that I like CA so much? Basically, it says that I am an unreconstructed nerd, who likes things clean and controlled. Oh, well.
Ash Clifton, Writer 