Hope?

Barbara slid in next to me at the Round Table. I asked her how Europe was and she started showing me photographs. Architect porn, actually. Digital photos of exquisitely built and restored early modernist buildings. It was so invigorating to see someone caring for their heritage. It kind of made one a bit embarrassed, however to be an American now, a member of a society whose buildings, influence and culture are crumbling into decay.

I think of those early Bauhaus Architects and how for them America was the touchstone of the very idea of progress. How the desire for Old Europe to catch up with the upstart nation propelled these Architects for generations. Barbara began showing new work, marvelous work, work in supposedly over regulated Europe that we would never be allowed by the code bastards to do here in America, and even if the code bastards would have allowed it, the schlock misters of greed, otherwise known as the developer, would never have paid for the humanizing amenities, low maintenance high quality construction, or the effort to fight off the code bastards and build something good for the present and the future.

We discussed how things had changed. The Europeans had a new saying "America is Here". This saying has a meaning shocking to an American. The meaning is that America is no longer the far off city on the hill when it comes to social organization or technological innovation. the Europeans have taken dominance. We are almost now nothing more than a faint memory to them. Barbara observed that people talk about China, India and even a continuing American influence, but that Europe is bustling with energy, that people there are eager to work hard and achieve, not so much so they can be rich, but so they can do and push humanity and their nation forward.

I asked her if coming back to LAX depressed her. "Oh My God, Steve, I didn't think anyone would understand if I said that. Coming home was SO depressing, it was like I was returning to a third world country that is so far behind it doesn't even know its in the third world."

We stared at each other in silence. We understood in that moment that the decisions so many Bauhaus Architects made to come to America were ones of artistic survival and that these were journeys our best young Architects would likely take, in the opposite direction. We knew that worse than the present Wall Street crisis was the future crisis where Americas best and brightest would be moving on to Europe where their only logical future could be.

Barbara caught my eye as it turned dark and cloudy within. We asked each other if too much had been thrown away in the last thirty years for our nation to recover. We could not sat that there was or was not hope for America.