Product Description

[An] insightful primer on contemporary architecture"(ARTnews), by the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic. Featured in the New York Times and Preservation, The Unreal America is the former New York Times architecture critic's highly praised examination of Americans' preference for invented environments--theme parks, shopping malls, historic restorations. These and other unreal places including Disney's Celebration City, have created a fantasy world where the authentic is neither admired nor desired. Real art, real places, and history, Huxtable provocatively argues, are the losers in the unreal America.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1204717 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Amazon.com Review
Pulitzer Prize-winner Ada Louise Huxtable meditates on modern American architecture and its implications in The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion, a book based on a lecture she delivered to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Huxtable argues that theme parks, shopping malls, historic restorations, and towns like Disney's Celebration create "surrogate environments" detached from the reality of everyday experience. She rails against historic preservation, claiming that attempts to re-create the past in such places as Ellis Island and Boston's Faneuil Hall result in hollow shadows of the originals that have little to offer the modern viewer. The marriage of culture and consumerism in these places also gets Huxtable's gourd. She seems to feel that much of this architecture is designed for the sole purpose of impelling consumerism. In the preface, Huxtable writes that as a young journalist she was told to "tell the reader what you think," and here she does exactly that with fervor and clarity.

From Library Journal
In her first book since The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered (LJ 6/15/85), architecture critic Huxtable here critiques the American devotion to invented environments. She looks at the artificial towns, streetscapes, and ambiance of Disney parks, Williamsburg, and many other places built in this century but of no time. The American comfort with these created worlds disturbs Huxtable. Her contempt for what has become a common taste?nearly a universal aesthetic of cleaned-up, socially sanitized environments?has sound intellectual footing and is offered with appropriate passion, but it is also rooted in the elitism of the intelligentsia, offended and distrustful of the popular partly because it is popular. The fear that quality architecture will lose out to the designs driven by marketers, consumerism, and entertainment has been a presence in specialized circles for many years. The issue is given a thoughtful, if admittedly one-sided, airing here for a broader audience by the much admired Huxtable. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?David Bryant, New Canaan P.L., Ct.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
A crisp study of the future of the megalopolis. A testament to a deeply optimistic spirit. Read it and hope. -- Los Angeles Times

A welcome voice against tackiness, conformity, anti-intellectualism, and pretension, and in favor of invention and improbability. It's fun to agree with her--she's usually right--and easy to learn from [her]. -- ARTnews

An independent and often furiously indignant reaction to the country's current epidemic of high and low-minded fakery [Huxtable] virtually invented this form of social-aesthetic outcry, and her return to it is a public good. -- Wall Street Journal

Readers who discovered Huxtable's visionary viewpoints in the New York Times...eagerly seek out this examination of environment as entertainment. -- Publishers Weekly

Customer Reviews

Must Reading for Serious Architectecture Buffs
The main thrust of The Unreal America is that commercial interests are choking out our experience of genuine regional and cultural diversity--in architecture, travel and even our knowledge of history. The first three quarters of the book is devoted to the theme parks, shopping centers and architectural restorations that Huxtable abhors, including Disney World, Celebration, Florida, Las Vegas and colonial Williamsburg. The last quarter of the book is disjointed from the beginning because she abruptly switches gears and lauds buildings that she finds exhilarating and which properly integrate materials, use and environmental context.

The book is must reading for anyone who has a passion for architecture and is concerned about how commericalism and real estate development affects our society. Although the tone of Huxtable's writing is haughty, angry and sometimes repetitive, her message is an important one. Huxtable rails against The Disney Company and its penchant for creating fake, idealized versions of real places. Walt Disney's dream was to create clean, controlled environments where happiness abounds, but in the years since his death in 1966, the dreams and fantasies of children of all ages have become mass-merchanidised and channeled into a narrow focus of personalities and products. Huxtable maintains that Disney has become a mass dispenser of schlock-from amusements to art to architecture.

Huxtable also decries the way that shopping center malls and superstores such as Home Depot and Walmart have choked out diversity in retailing. "In the reality of suburban America," she writes, " there is no place else to go", because malls and movie megaplexes have replaced downtowns and streets. Huxtable acknowledges that architecture is largely influenced by investment economics. She is a realist that does not expect that strip malls and shopping centers should go away, but she denounces the banality of their designs and how our collective experience of that stifling sameness makes society more homogenized.

A fine introductory text, but little new for the initiated.
The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion, by Ada Louise Huxtable, is a book that is inviting to a non-academic audience. Huxtable makes case studies of structures that she has experienced and groups them into two categories- 1) What she finds reprehensible, the theme architecture discussed in the beginning chapters- 2) What she finds enlightening and exhilarating, the extension and modification of modernist ideas in contemporary works. Because of this categorization, the book is a bit disjunctive as Huxtable switches gears from complaining to lauding. Her approach to all structures is personal. She tends to incorporate her own reactions into her criticism and back up her feelings with formal description and by citing philosophers of culture such as Baudrillard and Eco. It is refreshing that Huxtable does not invoke a Marxist critique to indicate all that is wrong with corporate theme architecture and all that is right with public projects. On the other hand, her subjective disdain or praise is convincing only insofar as one acknowledges these opinions as expert. The first part of her book comes off as a social critique of theme parks, malls, and consuming venues that take their forms from the past. The second is more descriptive of how architects control materials and space to successfully fit a use/purpose while also creating new structural forms. This book deals with complex issues of simulacra and new history, but Huxtable keeps the language simple and approachable to the non-academic reader. Unfortunately, those already familiar with Baudrillard, Eco, Barthes, et al will find these arguments long dated. This book is a quality introduction to contemporary architecture for the uninitiated. The cognoscenti, however, will find the book unremarkable. A more comprehensive book that is excellent complementary reading to The Unreal America, is Architecture After Modernism, by Diane Ghirardo, which achieves more objectivity and depth.---William V. Ganis (WillemG@aol.com

A Little Too Smarmy
Though her thoughts on what she thinks are "good" modern architects are very illuminating and insightful, her rants against Disneyfied structures and environments are tiresome, pithy and repetitious. She seems like she's trying to sound like a hip, streetwise rock critic or something. Forget the first 50% of the book (or skim), and save your time and energy for the last 50%.