JULY 2007 » book review

Living Traditions

Where We Lived: Discovering the Places We Once Called Home
By Jack Larkin
The Taunton Press, Inc., Newton, CT; 2006
256 pp.; hardcover; 400 photographs and50 illustrations; $40
ISBN 978-1-56158-8

Reviewed by Stephen A. Mouzon

First, I would like to be entirely clear about one issue: the new book Where We Lived is well worth the money. Based on the images alone, author Jack Larkin has assembled a wonderful collection of Historic American Buildings Survey photographs and drawings dating from the Depression-era inception of the program. The photographs are at least evocative; some are even haunting. The fact that a number of the buildings no longer exist brings that now-familiar hollow sorrow that comes when we realize we have traded something of value for something less, as we have been doing now with our built heritage since the beginning of the Great Decline, which started around 1925.

With that being said, I should note that the tone of the rest of this review is likely colored by a strategic error Larkin made in the writing of the text. When one finishes a book, it is often possible to characterize the read in a sentence or two. Such a summary is necessarily simplistic, but it can be useful. In this case, that characterization would be that "this is a story of British travelers rendered ill-tempered by the discomforts of their adventures in the relatively rustic Colonies (or later, the States)." That is unfair, of course, because the text encompasses a lot more than that. But this thread clearly runs through it, and the net effect was that the ornery nature of the thread tended to make this reviewer cranky about the book.

This issue highlights a central problem of the book that Larkin never resolved: is he acting as an historian, or as a storyteller? In other words, is the book primarily academic or is the primary audience the citizenry at large? On the one hand, the technique of using cantankerous accounts could be considered incisive in an academic work, getting to the real substance, however uncomfortable it might be, of what life was like at the places and during the times being described. And Larkin clearly has done a massive amount of research in assembling this book; one can safely assume that it was in the works for several years. This is no simple coffee-table book, thrown together in a few weeks; its core is clearly academic. But there are far too many hints that the book is intended for the larger consumer audience instead. It is quite an attractive document, due primarily to the richness of its graphic imagery. For a document based almost entirely on black-and-white images, it is unusually colorful. The sidebar excerpts from period documents such as letters, diaries and the like are so heavily interspersed that if someone is reading straight through as the book is composed, he or she can easily lose track of the underlying storyline because of the entertainment value of the sidebars. This is perfectly appropriate for a consumer shelter magazine, for example, which a reader might pick up to glance at for a moment before putting it back down to pursue other activities, content with the self-contained snippet he or she has read. But it certainly is not the way a serious historical account should read. Instead, the reader should be allowed to maintain a strong grip on the multiple themes that normally run through a history.

Both approaches, to be clear, are legitimate. And both are useful for certain purposes. I applaud Larkin for what appears to be an attempt to bring serious history to the masses, but one must question the effectiveness of the method. I am happy that he performed the experiment, but we are now entitled to judge its effectiveness. The approach is unsatisfying because the method continually bounces the reader in a schizophrenic fashion between readership identities: many of us can read as both consumers and as academics, but please don't ask us to do switch back and forth as we turn from one page to the next.

Until now, the storyteller's role appears to have been tied to the consumer identity of the publication, with the historian's role tied to the academic identity of the publication. However, the most frustrating aspect of the book is a lost opportunity that is both serious and academic, but that also requires the role of the storyteller. The armature of research and image collection set the perfect stage for the telling of a story that needs to be widely understood. This is the story of how living traditions work. Specifically, a tradition begins as a great idea by a single person. They build the idea. It can be something as simple as a better way to build an eave or maybe a way to frame a sunny garden spot. Whatever it is, if it resonates with enough other people to the point that they say "I've got to have this on my house, my shop or my town," (depending on the scale of the pattern) then they also build it, and the thing becomes a local pattern. Later, if the people in the region where the local pattern first occurs observe it and decide that they love it because "it really reflects who we are or where we are," then they adopt it into their family of regional traditions. Therefore that which is traditional is that which is most worthy of love.

It should be noted that patterns originally resonate and are later adopted as regional traditions, because of their resonance with regional conditions, climate or culture, or some combination thereof. Throughout most of the world, those webs of conditions, climate and culture become so intermingled over time that they are exceptionally hard to untangle with any real clarity.

The colonization of the Americas by the Europeans, however, presents an historically rare opportunity to clearly view the interaction between the influences of regional conditions, climate and culture, because, on the one hand, the colonists were bringing a culture with them that had not developed in the New World. On the other hand, they had to adapt very quickly to regional conditions and climate or otherwise perish, as some of them did. Such opportunities to separate and discern the effects of regional conditions, climate and culture are rare. Telling this as a rational and compelling story is perhaps our best opportunity to get to the heart of the nature of living traditions. Beyond their character is their mechanism: how do they actually work? Learning the operation of living traditions is essential if we hope to restart them. Why restart living traditions? Because they allow ordinary people to build extraordinary places that even the Imagineers who built the Walt Disney theme parks can scarcely replicate today at the cost of great time and expense. This book required the research and resources necessary to tell the story of living traditions, but entirely missed the opportunity; that is a story still waiting to be told.

Stephen A. Mouzon, AIA, CNU, LEED, is an architect based in Miami Beach, FL. He is also the director of design for PlaceMakers, LLC.

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