NOSTALGIA
Last week, when my mother and I were rifling through our archives, after digging through countless boxes, manila folders, and carefully sorting through hundreds of black and white photos, I stumbled upon a quote from a familiar name; one of the masters of modern architecture, Le Corbusier. It is an old quote – I have heard it many times – but I have never given it serious thought until last Friday.
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“You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: ‘This is beautiful.’ That is Architecture. Art enters in.”
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The quote was used as you might expect to find it, at the front of a portfolio in lieu of some contrived description of an architect’s design philosophies or principles. But there it stood, occupying a page all to itself, next to the words “Ralph Anderson Associates.” This quote, if you ask me, is a far more elegant way of introducing Ralph Anderson’s work.
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As an architect, Ralph Anderson was an optimist. He believed in the democracy of space – that everyone should own a little piece of nature. He believed in the importance of the surrounding landscapes and how it reinforces our desires to feel at home. As an architect he was in the business of touching hearts and striving for the beautiful.
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Today the memory of Ralph Anderson’s visions exists primarily in boxes of files in our basement and in the minds of those closest to him, his children. Many of the homes he designed have been remodeled to accommodate new owners and some public projects have even been demolished to pave the way for new buildings with, perhaps, more financially-driven motives at work. Most architects from Ralph’s era are now retired, or are approaching the twilights of their careers, so the immediacy of establishing this body of work was apparent to all of us involved. This is our effort to preserve his place in Chicago’s history and to ensure that his legacy remains intact.
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In reading Le Corbusier’s quote the words I am most struck by are the least concrete ones:
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You touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: ‘This is Beautiful.’
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We seldom like to talk about these aspects of architecture. These are words reserved for starchitects, idealists, and sometimes academics. But this is the humanistic side of architecture. These are the sentiments that endear us to a space and allow us a setting wherein we cultivate our memories. I am reminded of the word nostalgia. We understand this word as a yearning for the past, but its meaning is actually slightly different. From the Greek roots nóstos meaning, “returning home,” and álgos meaning, “ache” or “pain,” we can interpret the word more closely as a yearning to return home. In Ralph Anderson’s homes, we are reminded of another time when rosewood furniture was not so expensive and the values that shaped the American dream were still an integral part of society. We are reminded of our own homes and the people we shared them with – our families.
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I did not know Ralph Anderson. He died almost ten years before I was born, but his impact on my own life is not lost on me. He imparted his love of design and beauty onto his children by designing his own home and filling it with the care and attention to detail that every home deserves. My mother is one of those children and followed in his footsteps by becoming an architect – a career she has held for the last 30 years. As a recent architecture graduate myself, I can only hope that some day people will say the same things about my work that so many have said about Ralph’s:
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“This is Beautiful.”
..........Max Mahaffey
October 2010