UGLY AND ORDINARY ARCHITECTURE (154)
p ant of an anonymous vernacular tenement on an Italian medieval street could achieve identity through decoration on a front door or perhaps through the bella figura of clothing within the scale of a spatially limited, foot-going community. The same held for families behind the unified facades of Nash's London terraces. But for the middle-class suburbanite living, not in an antebellum mansion, but in a smaller version lost in a large space, identity must come through symbolic treatment of the form of the form of the house, either through provided by the developer (for instance, split-level Colonial) or through a variety of symbolic ornaments applied thereafter by the owner (the Rococo lamp in the picture window or the wagon wheel out front, Fig.114).
The critics of suburban iconography attribute its infinite combinations of standard ornamental elements to clutter rather than variety. This can be dismissed by suburbia's connoisseurs as the insensitivity of the uninitiate. To call these artifacts of our culture crude is to be mistaken concerning scale. It is like condemning theater theater sets for being crude at five feet or condemning plaster putti, made to be seen high above a Baroque cornice, for lacking the refinements of a Mino da Fiesole bas-relief on a Renaissance tomb. Also, the boldness of the suburban doodads distracts the eye form the telephone poles that even the silent majority does not like.
SILENT-WHITE-MAJORTY ARCHITECTUER
Many people like suburbia suburbia. This is the compelling reason for learning from Levittown. the ultimate irony is that although Modern architecture from the start has claimed a strong social basis for its philosophy, modern architects have worked to keep formal and social concerns separate rather than together. In dismissing Levittown, Modern architects, who have characteristically promoted the role of the social sciences in architecture, reject whole sets of dominant social patterns because they do not like the architectural consequences of these patterns. Conversely, by defining Levittown as "silent-white-majority " architecture, they reject it again because they do not like what they believe to be the silent white majority's political views. These architects reject the very heterogeneity of our society that makes the social sciences relevant to architecture in the first place. As Experts with Ideals, who pay lip service to the social sciences, they build for Man rather than for people this means, to suit themselves, that is, to suit their own particular upper-middle-class values, which they assign to everyone. Most suburbanites reject the limited formal vocabularies architects' values promote, or accept them20 years later modified by the tract builder: The Usonian house becomes the ranch house. Only the very poor, via public