There and Here

I am continuing to work through Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own. Today I read Pollan’s musings on the pouring of the concrete footings for his little writing hut.

…any building represents a meeting place of the local landscape and the wider world, of what is given “Here” and what’s been brought in from “There.” The Here in this case is of course the site, but the site defined broadly enough to take in not only the sunlight and character of the ground, the climate, and flora and slope, but also the local culture as it is reflected in the landscape–in the arrangements of field and forest and in the materials and styles commonly used to build “around here.”….

And There, of course, is just another way of saying the broader culture and economy, which in our time has become international….In fact, a whole set of values can be grouped under the heading of “There,” and these can be juxtaposed with a parallel set of values that fit under the rubric “Here.”

THERE—HERE
Universal —Particular
Internationalism—Regionalism
Progress—Tradition
Classical—Vernacular
Idea—Fact
Information—Experience
Space—Place
Mobility—Stability
Palladio— Jefferson
Jefferson—Wright
Abstract—Concrete
Concrete—Rock

The juxtapositions can be piled up endlessly, and though matters soon get complicated…, they can still serve as a useful shorthand for two distinct ways of looking at, or organizing the world.

The tension between the two terms is nothing new, of course….In our own time, the balance between the two terms has been steadily tilting toward the There end of the scale. There are some powerful abstractions on the side of There, and in the last century or so these have tended to run over the local landscape. The force and logic of these abstractions are what have helped farmland to give way to tract housing, city neighborhoods to ambitious schemes of “urban renewal,” and regional architecture to an “international style” that for a while elevated the principle of There–of universal culture–to a utopian program and moral precept. Modernism has always regarded Here as an anachronism, an impediment to progress. This might explain why so many of its houses walked the earth on white stilts, looking as though they wanted to get off, to escape the messy particularities of place for the streamlined abstraction of space…

…these days everybody has a good word for regionalism and the sense of place. But it remains to be seen whether the balance between Here and There is actually being redressed, or whether universal culture, more powerful than ever, is merely donning a few quaint local costumes now that they’re fashionable and benign. I’ve never visited a “neo-traditional” town like Seaside, the planned community on the Florida panhandle celebrated for its humane postmodern architecture and sense of neighborhood, but I can’t help wondering if the experience of sitting out on one of those great-looking front porches and chatting with the neighbors strolling by doesn’t feel just a bit synthetic. In an age of Disney and cyberspace, it may not be possible to keep a crude pair of terms like Here and There straight too much longer, not when a “sense of place” becomes a commodity that can be bought and sold on the international market, and people blithely use homey metaphors of place to describe something as abstract and disembodied as the Internet.