Colonial

By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Associated Press

The Capitol in Colonial Williamsburg

New York

Americans have always wanted the past and the future—the idyllic dream of a mythical past and the magical promise of a perfect tomorrow. These are fantasies, of course, but they are quintessentially American fantasies, intrinsic to the good life that is the American dream—no matter how you get there.

We look to the past for comforting familiarity, for reassuring connections to a heritage that may be real or imagined, and to the future for solutions that break all the established rules—the simple Cape Cod cottage with its rose-covered picket fence or the house of tomorrow with its visionary labor-saving devices and futuristic forms. Both, of course, are stuffed with the latest technology.

This ambiguous and anachronistic duality has created an irreconcilable split between tradition and modernism in this country; each style has its passionate advocates of the new or the old as the only right way to build. Those who have remained wedded to the established materials, proportions and details of the classical tradition consider themselves defenders of the true faith. Modernists, intent on new solutions, dismiss classical forms as an impediment and embarrassment, obsolete for contemporary needs.

But unlike modernism, which stakes its claims on new materials and technologies that have revolutionized construction to create unprecedented ways to design and build to meet changing needs, the idea of tradition involves a far more complex set of values and associations. The architecture and furnishings of this country's early years are so closely identified with its founding ideals that they have acquired an overlay of shared heritage and patriotic sentimentality far beyond their undeniable aesthetic appeal.

Behind the reality is a backstory of mythmaking and tastemaking as intrinsically American as the style itself. A small, unorthodox exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, "The American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis," has a large agenda: to restore the reputation of a tradition discarded by modernists as irrelevant and expendable, and to establish the style's continuing suitability and adaptability to the contemporary city and, in particular, New York.

There is also a subtly subversive subtext that challenges some basic assumptions about quality and authenticity, the real and the reproduction, over a long period of time. It is the sincere belief of the show's co-curators, Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins, that history makes such judgments questionable, and that the sheer persistence and uninterrupted popularity of the buildings, furnishings, crafts and decorative arts that we call traditional make this the true "American Style." It is clear where their sympathies lie.

Museum of the City of New York, Bequest of Helen Van Praag Tallmadge

A settee by the Company of Master Craftsmen, c. 1926, made in the style of Duncan Phyfe.

The terms traditional and Colonial are used interchangeably; both are associated with the Georgian models that the English settlers of the American colonies brought with them in the 18th century. The definition has been stretched to include the new Republic and the early 19th century. Perfected through a long journey from Rome to Renaissance Italy and to the England of Christopher Wren and the brothers Adam, and across the Atlantic to its new home, Georgian classicism and the later Greek revival officially defined and symbolized the new nation.

Although the American version is presented as a series of Colonial revivals, it is actually a saga of survival. Copied, compromised, adapted, aborted, rejected and rehabilitated, always just above or below the radar of fashion, it is the style that refused to die.

Interest peaked with patriotism-fueled events like the Centennial celebrations in 1876, the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, and the recognition of Americana as museum-worthy collectibles, which sent a wash of Colonial embellishment over comfortable Victorian homes.

Enlarge Image

Museum of the City of New York, Bequest of Helen Van Praag Tallmadge

A Duncan Phyfe sofa (1810-15), restored in the shop of Ernest F. Hagen in 1922.

By the 20th century the grim realities of early colonial life had been replaced with a sentimentalized and romanticized version of a reinvented past. Wallace Nutting's hand-colored photographs of carefully staged "Colonial" interiors with decorously posed costumed inhabitants had popularized the myth by 1910.

But it was the construction of Colonial Williamsburg from the 1920s to the 1930s that set standards of taste and acceptability by establishing a "cut-off date," demolishing many buildings of valid later styles, and authorizing "authentic reproductions," an obvious oxymoron that has become a useful euphemism for an approved commercial copy, sidestepping authenticity to fit perfectly into the American state of mind.

Only in America was this mix of promotion and patriotism possible. We love our new old things. When Mr. Blandings built his dream house, it was Colonial.

The show's subtle heresies start almost immediately. A gorgeously handcrafted contemporary version of a Duncan Phyfe sofa stands back to back with the real thing and looks even better than the priceless antique. There is no mistaking the message: We should be rethinking our ideas about quality and authenticity, what we accept and what we reject.

If the difference is imperceptible, does it really matter? You may feel that something important is missing from the contemporary version, like the hand of the maker in its explicit details, the glow fine wood takes on with age, and the living history it carries. But it is still a wonderful piece. At least until it gets to the auction house, where value and authenticity are linked and few can afford the price, although that fine custom copy may cost almost as much. The bottom line is more personal and subjective; some of us still make distinctions or might choose other options, and nobody likes to be fooled.

Feeling confused and a little uncomfortable? Your most cherished ideas challenged? That's the intention. We're talking history here, not connoisseurship. Like most revisionist history, it keeps an existential cool; there are no value judgments. Myth and reality are all part of the story. The curators make a well-documented case.

The American Style: Colonial Revival And the Modern Metropolis

Museum of the City Of New York

Through Oct. 30

But is something important being lost or omitted to keep the story going? What about those sterile Grand Rapids knockoffs that made "good taste" available to all through bland adaptations? Or the elegant Georgian silver tea service that might have come by slow sail from London to grace the home of a newly rich American in the China or slave trade? Well, it wasn't made by a London silversmith in the 18th century; this is a fine version made by Tiffany in the 1930s. (So why can't I stop thinking about a stunning Danish Deco plate with a geometric sunburst design also from the 1930s? About creative change versus static copies?)

As an architectural historian without ideological baggage, I am open to re-examination of almost anything. Postmodernists revived traditional elements to comment on what was perceived as a modernist vacuum; some of the results were pretty bad, but they were thinking within a contemporary context. It can be argued convincingly that it is easier to produce a good building based on a familiar vocabulary than to do so with risky unknowns, and there are a lot of bad modern buildings to prove it. There is a current surge in publications promoting yet another Colonial revival, as if the 20th century's revolutionary contributions to the arts of design never happened.

As a historian, I champion no one period; I honor the best of any style. As a New Yorker, I admire and enjoy the Colonial Revival houses that add so much charm to the city's streets. Some of our most splendid buildings are by some of the country's best architects: McKim, Mead & White; Carrère and Hastings—all in classical revival styles. I never pass the colonnaded entrance of a school or courthouse without regretting that the language of human dignity and worth spoken by the classical vocabulary is so poorly valued or understood.

Then why am I resisting the perfectly detailed neo-Colonial doorway by Peter Pennoyer for a house in New Jersey (he is also the designer of the show) that opens the exhibition? Full confession: I am no fan of perfection. I find some of the more academic work of today's born-again classicists impressively correct but singularly lifeless.

I have spent a good part of my life in a small New England town with a priceless American heritage where such over-the-top perfectionism simply does not exist. There are offbeat and off-kilter compromises by carpenter-builders trying to follow the examples in English pattern books in the new towns of the New World, dealing with costs and shortages, substituting materials, inventing their own details. The 18th-century house built for the richest man in town is made of wood cut in blocks to simulate stone that was not available. This place is genuine; its buildings retain the hallmarks of its history, something that can never be imitated or reproduced, and there is not a perfect thing anywhere—for which I am eternally grateful.

I truly believe there is an American style, but it is something far more innovative and flexible—a loosely interpreted vernacular where broadly used, familiar materials, forms and scale do not replicate existing models—an open tradition completely, authentically American that accommodates even modernists comfortably. There are multiple degrees of choice that avoid artificiality and overkill. These options and opportunities are the source of a creative continuity that is the real thing.

Ms. Huxtable is the Journal's architecture critic.