In Praise of Background Buildings
Editor’s Note: Gracen Johnson, the Director of Content & Contribution at the Incremental Development Alliance, has been contributing to Strong Towns since 2014. This article is a based on an Instagram series by Gracen. We encourage you to view the original (start here) and follow Gracen on Instagram.
I really connect with poet John O’Donohue’s description of how true beauty makes us feel: alive and at home.
He writes: “We can slip into the Beautiful with the same ease as we slip into the seamless embrace of water; something ancient within us already trusts that this embrace will hold us.”
And says: “So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.”
O’Donohue found beauty in the aliveness of the Irish landscape. To me, great urban neighborhoods evoke the homecoming he speaks of, a sense of fullness and satisfaction that reaches back generations inside you…You feel alive and at home.
AJ Casson captured this so perfectly that I found myself snapping a photo of his painting like I would a real-life neighborhood.
I later learned that this artist must have spent hours embraced by the very streets that fill me up these days. He took night classes at a landmark school in my neighborhood, a place filled with warm memories that has become part of my own weekly routine.
O’Donohue distinguishes beauty from glamour. Beauty is the soul-food we crave. Glamour is the currency of the never-satisfied.
The Myth That Architecture Should Not Be “Boring”
Many people seem to think it’s a crime for architecture to be “boring,” as opposed to fresh or impressive or a number of adjectives that fall into the glamour category. I am here to argue that:
We need buildings that are not trying to stand out in order to appreciate the ones that are.
It’s the occupants that make a building interesting anyway. The form of our buildings shapes the streetscape, but the interesting part is actually how they are lived in and around.
Glamour tends to be fussy and expensive. If you have wealth to share in the form of cutting-edge, impressive architecture, thank you for your patronage. For the rest of us, humble, timeless, and familiar is a better direction.
I don’t know if it’s a widespread term but many of my own mentors explain with pride that their work is to design great “background buildings.”
Background buildings are ones that are not trying to stand out. They don’t try to steal the show or land on a magazine cover. They don’t derive their value from critics’ reviews or even public opinion. They are simply trying to do their job—be a reliable home for their occupants and contribute to a nice streetscape. They have a friendly front and create comfortable indoor and outdoor spaces for people to live and work. They offer a “seamless embrace,” if I can borrow from O’Donohue.
I’m going to contrast that with what Léon Krier has called monumental architecture. Structures of public importance should stand out—things like that landmark school I mentioned, city halls, theatres, houses of worship, bridges, libraries, museums, etc. This architecture has a different job: to inspire feelings of pride, confidence, security, awe, industriousness, and togetherness at a community level. As a bonus, it helps us navigate the city—“turn left at the church” or “meet at the gates in the park.”
Krier highlights here that form must follow function. There is something unsatisfying and gauche when what should be backgrounders attempt to be monumental (see: McMansion Hell). Or the reverse, when buildings of great community importance could pass for a nondescript office building (see: all over the place).
We need background buildings to set the stage for monumental buildings. We need monumental buildings as architecture that ties the community together. If everyone had pink hair, it would no longer feel special to have pink hair. We each respect our role in the circle of life.
Lest this be confused with nostalgia for something lost, I’ll note that great new background buildings come on the scene every day. For all of the reasons above, they just do not get talked about as often. I’d like to pay honor to a few people who build them here.
My colleague, Marques King, reminds me that in the design biz, “background buildings AKA fabric buildings.” As in, they are woven into the urban fabric—seen as parts of a whole, not as standalone creations. Marques has such respect for these unsung heroes and a talent for building them that he named his architecture firm, Fabric[K] Design. I have also been inspired by the thoughtful designs of Tolar | Anderson | Kim, Kronberg UA, Flintlock Lab, and Brown Design Studio who have created families of background buildings that combine familiar traditions with modern building technology, code, and materials. Many of these buildings contain multiple units camouflaged in what look like single-family homes.
The most legit work I’ve seen to make new development accessible, beneficial, and lovable to existing communities comes from people who trade in solid background buildings, not the latest innovations to disrupt city-building.
Beauty from the Inside Out
Monumental buildings tend to be symbolic. They do this through their form and are engaging from the outside in. You know a monument when you see it.
Background buildings, on the other hand, tend to be an expression of their occupants. They do this through their decoration. They have a common and repetitive form and are engaging from the inside out.
Our cities are at least 90% background buildings and in my experience, truly homey places lean into that hard. They have a cultural respect for modest, simple buildings that don’t try to steal the show from the monumental stuff or from inhabitants. Over time, background buildings can get so good at wearing the lives of their occupants that they become subtle masterpieces and we view their neighborhoods with the same awe and fullness as O’Donohue taking in the west coast of Ireland.
Background buildings are interesting because people are interesting. Here are some things I love when walking through a mature neighborhood full of background buildings doing their job:
Hearing a guitar drift from an open window
People unwinding on stoops, patios, and porches after work
Outdoor living rooms on porches with curtains, candles, and couches
The woodwork or masonry you only notice when you’re within 10ft
From the sidewalk at night, a narrow glimpse of the art on the wall or what’s on tv
A peek into the warm glow of a kitchen on a corner lot
Getting a whiff of fresh laundry in the summer or a fireplace in the winter
Homemade decorations that tell you a bit about who lives there
A cat on a sill, a nest in an eave, a dog in the window
Seeing all the works-in-progress in the rear alleys—car repairs, weight training, decluttering, free throw practice, renovations, artwork
No matter how “boring” and typical the building form, if it’s designed for people to live full lives in and around it, the result is an interesting place.
Glamour Is Expensive
We all love a little glamour but it’s expensive to maintain. If it doesn’t look like a normal, natural building, chances are it’s leaning on an array of costly technologies, materials, or procedures to keep it looking good and functioning well.
When you build a glamorous building, it can go a few directions:
It must always remain in the hands of people or institutions who can and will look after it. It may become more expensive over time.
It will eventually look dated and washed up and may be too expensive to restore to its original glam. Enterprising people will adapt it to a more manageable version of itself.
Those building technologies will become less expensive and this kind of aesthetic becomes more commonplace (organic evolution from glam to standard).
If you don’t have the money to spend on face-lifts and feats of engineering in perpetuity, just save your neighborhood the drama and build an intentionally un-glamorous background building. Stick with the practical and let that inner beauty shine through. If you have the means to create and maintain something awe-inspiring, thank you for that contribution.
In Conclusion
There is an alley not far from that landmark school in which someone has lovingly bedazzled their waste storage area. I could smell cinnamon buns baking from a vent out the rear of the building as I walked by.
Buildings that do this—create comfortable space and become a canvas for their occupants—are every bit as important and interesting as ones that get photographed for magazines.
“If developers, for instance, could attend to the call of beauty, what a difference it would make to the way our towns, and cities, and buildings actually appear, and the level of presence that would be in them.” - John O’Donohue
Beauty, not glamour. And just to Mister Rogers this point home, that beauty comes from inside. It’s you I like.
