The Real And The Fake Zine, inspired by Michael Bierut
The Zine
The real and the fake, essay by Michael Bierut
On one of my first visits to New York City, in the late seventies, I was taken to what I was told was the newest, hippest part of town: SoHo. My college friends and I wandered around the nighttime streets for a few hours; we couldn’t find a party that we were invited to, and the one bar we did get into seemed a little boring. The dingy, industrial mise-en-scène reminded me of the corner of 30th and Superior in Cleveland, a place no one in their right mind would visit at any time of day unless they needed plastic tubing or a gross of light bulbs. I came all the way from Ohio for this? But all was not lost. The next day I found myself on a corner that seemed to sum up everything that had thrilled me in my fantasies about Gotham: broad streets, rushing taxis, majestic skyscrapers, important-looking people. I decided then and there that I would never live anywhere else.
Where I was standing was the corner of 50th Street and Sixth Avenue, in front of the Exxon Building, in the midst of a group of brand-new towers built in the ’70s to extend the Rockefeller Center complex. Imagine my surprise when, upon moving to New York a few years later, I chanced upon this description of my beloved corner in The City Observed by Paul Goldberger: “four ponderous towers . . . three of which are almost identical . . . with none of the life and joy of the original buildings.” Context is everything. The context of 50th and Sixth Avenue was not just the surrounding streets, but an idea about New York that a lot of people my age carried in their heads. Mine was derived from television sitcoms set in New York and movies like North by Northwest, which featured a brilliant open- ing credit sequence by Saul Bass set dynamically against the kind of facades that Goldberger found so oppressively bland. That was the real New York for me back then, not SoHo (despite Goldberger’s enthusiastic assessment that it was “far and away one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in New York”).
Each person understands a built environment differently, and much of the difference has to do with mental images we bring to an experience. Many of these images are, by necessity, secondhand. For instance, midwestern hotels in the thirties often had spaces “themed,” to use the current word, on New York, or rather the idea of New York: the Manhattan Bar, the Empire Ballroom. The robust streamlined glamour of these spaces was derived, naturally, not from the real New York, but from the idea of New York that people got from screwball comedies like My Man Godfrey or Twentieth Century.
Compare this with a place like the new Las Vegas hotel and casino complex New York, New York. There the old-fashioned glamour is evoked as always, but with a surprising new layer of graffiti, gum stains, and soot, all simulated with a dazzling degree of stagecraft. This painstaking detail has been made necessary, I suspect, not by any dedication to verisimilitude for its own sake, but to satisfy the expectations of visitors who have never been to the place but know it well not from Carole Lombard movies but from cop shows like NYPD Blue. They know what the “real” New York looks like, and it’s a little bit dirty. This sort of simulation appears to drive Ada Louise Huxtable crazy in her book, The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion. She is alarmed and dismayed by shopping malls, amusement parks, theme restaurants, Las Vegas, Colonial Williamsburg, the restoration of Ellis Island, and the pasta primavera at Disneyland. “The replacement of reality with selective fantasy is a phenomenon,” Huxtable observes with distaste, “of that most successful and staggeringly profitable American phenomenon, the reinvention of the environment as themed entertainment.”
But, one wonders, when has the taste for fantasy ever gone unsated? From high culture to low, from nearly every plate in Janson’s History of Art to every fast-food stand up and down the American commercial strip, it’s difficult to find anything that doesn’t revel in a certain degree of simulation. As an architectural critic, Huxtable is particularly unhappy that new faux buildings are making it harder for us to appreciate good new architecture when we see it: “With both patrons and public weighing in for the fast fake, serious architecture is having a particularly heavy going.” Yet even architects who attempt to create ex nihilo, without reference to any imagination but their own, find themselves subsumed sooner or later, whether it’s Richard Meier’s High Museum standing in for a glitzy insane asylum in the movie Manhunter or the other-worldy evocation of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal in the summer’s sci-fi spectacle Men in Black. Inevitably, even “abstract” spaces become very powerful, and very specific, signifiers of common ideas.
The public imposes their imagination whether they are invited to or not.“I don’t know just when we lost our sense of reality or our interest in it,” Huxtable says, “but at some point it was decided that reality was not the only option, that it was possible, permissible, and even desirable to improve on it.” I’m no architectural critic or art historian, but I would guess that we decided the issue back in 15,000 B.C., when one of our ancestors decided to improve on the reality of an ibex with some smudges on a cave wall in Lascaux. And the human race, to its everlasting credit, has never looked back.
