Richard Longstreth

North Shore Congregation Israel, Glencoe, Illinois, Minoru Yamasaki, architect, 1964.

Modern conceptions of space have certainly affected settlement patterns since World War II. Too often this landscape is dismissed as “sprawl,” with no effort to understand the forces that shaped it. The modern metropolis is not the product of fools, any more or any less than the industrial city. Functions gravitate to where they appear to operate efficiently from an owners’ perspective. The shopping mall flourished not just because larger numbers of the middle class possessed unprecedented mobility, disposable income, and leisure time. Retail districts in many cities were saturated, unable to expand at a rate commensurate with market growth.

Decentralization has been a fact much longer than many realize. Beginning more or less with the railroad, factories and worker housing scattered about the large cities. The rich and the middle class sought the periphery. The sprawl of cities such as Detroit seemed epic by the late 19th century, but this, in turn, was diminutive compared to the next several decades. The surge after World War II was hardly unprecedented, and, had it not happened, cities would have had to remake themselves, leaving little fabric to preserve.

What did change, of course, were the particulars. The major cause was the car. These machines not only consume space themselves, they allow us to traverse space in ways never before imaginable. Driving time, not linear distance, has been a standard locational measure since the 1940s. We think little about driving an extra five miles— a few minutes—for shopping, to church, to our home. The car did not so much introduce choices as it allowed us to retain the openness and free movement associated with many towns (but not with most cities) in the 19th century. The modest tract houses of the postwar era are really incarnations of the modest ones in most American towns. Shopper’s World took the New England green as a prototype. The open spaces around the school, amid the office parks and apartment complexes, are latter-day surrogates for seeing the country from the town and being able to reach it in minutes.

We do not think of the modern world as tied to the past because its ambient newness is so unrelentingly promoted. How can the strenuously billed harbingers of a better tomorrow be considered in the past tense?

Part of the challenge is for preservationists to think less like critics and more like historians. Most are bad critics of the built environment, which they cast in simplistic terms, the development Godzilla versus the preservation Bambi. But it’s not all their fault. Even the most sophisticated tend to cast things in black-and-white. Lewis Mumford did this: Park Avenue was no better than a slum; ye olde New England village was beyond reproach.

Yet preservationists have done a pretty good job with history. Over the past 40 years, they have saved a remarkably diverse swath of the past. And they made a major contribution to the academy by insisting that more things were significant than the textbooks let on.

Still, much remains to be saved. After World War II, the United States became an international leader in modern architecture. The legacy of a broad range of creative designers—of landscapes and interiors along with buildings—is probably unmatched by any other nation. The vernacular realm offers many examples as well. At no time has such commodious housing been available to persons of moderate means. All the derisive comments about sprawl, about ticky-tacky, inhumane boxes out to the horizon, refer to a remarkable phenomenon that may never be duplicated, with the family-run motels, the chain department stores, the idiosyncratic cheek-by-jowl with the idiomatic.

We cannot squander this legacy the way we squandered what came before. We do not have the luxury of time.