Being back in the American South, I have had plenty of opportunity to drink in the vernacular styles of housebuilding here. In particular I have been looking at, and thinking about, the “big houses” be they plantation or city houses, so popular before and immediately after the Civil War.
They aspire to a classicism, and that pleases me. They strive. They make a touching homage to the impossible; they are monuments to it, in fact. It would be silly to consider such architecture a success, but as a bold failure, an intentional one, they are at least honorable. They aspire to nobleness, or at least nobility, conscious of their innate inability to achieve it.
These houses, like so much in the South, are an allegiance to a lost cause, the same lost cause that in the period in which they were built suffused the entirety of the South and now lives on in rather more pathetic ways. These houses, in all their failed glory, their striving for nobility, show us modern man’s hopeless assumption that he is still a gentleman.
No one builds houses like this now, full of lofty square rooms and fireplace monstrosities that render half the room unusable. No one builds them for a very good reason - no one now, except the eccentric holdouts still inhabiting them, imagines that there could possibly be, on this soil, in these climes, such a thing as a gentlemen. This is a good, clear-eyed appraisal of the situation, and in deference to it, and to those who strove like so many Knights in pasteboard visors for gentility in these fierce climes, we should stop with our meddling preservation and let the houses, like the families that built them, sink down into the red clay, sink with all their faux dignity intact out of memory and sight, to wherever it is that dead dreams go.
Tags: architecture, dreams, memory, South, The South
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