Stephen Gerard Dietemann Design

A debate has been raging in the nearby town of Lee. It seems that many on the town’s planning board – and one assumes, others in the community as well – are unhappy with the design of the triangular pediments constructed on the front facades of the stores in the “Berkshire Outlet Village”. The pediments in question are remnants of an architectural design style that emerged in the 1980s called “post modern” – POMO for short. Architectural practitioners of POMO borrowed architectural elements such as pediments and columns freely from many architectural styles of the past, but the Greek temple, such as the Parthenon or the Temple of Hephaistos were the most pilfered of all ancient architecture. In essence, POMO offered a contrived, self-conscious aesthetic. Unfortunately, while a public debate concerning developments like the “Berkshire Outlet Village” is absolutely necessary and long overdue, focusing that debate on aesthetic or stylistic issues misses the point. The debate should focus on the effect cloistered developments like this one has upon our lives and attitudes.

In his book How Buildings Learn author Steward Brand writes, “Every building leads three contradictory lives - as habitat, as property, and as component of the surrounding community… Economists dating back to Aristotle make a distinction between “use value” and “market value”… If you maximize use value, your home will steadily become more idiosyncratic and highly adapted over the years. Maximizing market value means becoming episodically more standard… in order to meet the imagined desires of a potential buyer. Seeking to become anyone’s home it becomes nobody’s.”

Now substitute the word “building” for the word “home” in the passage above. Then cluster a group of “market value” buildings together on a site set comfortably and self-consciously apart from the history, social center, and human energy of the nearby town -- in this case Lee -- and restrict all aspects of human interaction not exclusively related to the unfettered needs of retail commerce, and you have the “Berkshire Outlet Village.” This growing, restrictive and prosperous assembly of outlet stores represents the fleeing retail component of towns, just as development like “Corporate Woods” in Albany represent a disappearing business component and the suburbs represent the ongoing residential depletion of cities and villages.

Conventional wisdom holds that the catalyst for a place like “Berkshire Outlet Village” may be the automobile, zoning, or human laziness. While all these may play a role, I believe that the principal driving force behind a place like “Berkshire Outlet Village” is the conflict, seldom examined publicly these days, that lies at the crossroads where the needs of democracy and the corporation diverge. Villages, no less than cities, are complex entities; traditionally at least, they have been the site of our commerce, residence, art, religion, and industry; in short all aspects of human existence. This mix has seldom been neat or orderly, but it is an essential dynamic, the very engine of human creativity. Furthermore villages and cities have been cauldrons of political change; the image of the ordinary man standing on a soapbox in the town square expounding his views was an icon of the American city until relatively recently in our history. Democracy is nurtured in villages and cities because so many conflicting interests meet, and must be reconciled there. Alas, this may be the very reason we now have a thriving “Berkshire Outlet Village” carefully located outside the village.

Sadly, the very items that define a vital American village or city in a democratic society would probably not be included in the utopian retail paradise as envisioned by the average corporate retailing CEO. Democracy must accommodate the needs of all of its citizens and constituent groups. In the town or city the corporation -- ideally anyway -- is simply another constituent group whose needs must be evaluated in the context of the needs and desires of all the other constituent groups. Increasingly the corporate response to this reality is to create a “refuge” like “Berkshire Outlet Village” where, unlike the traditional village, no one lives, debates politics, worships, argues minority positions, raises families, interacts with neighbors or makes art. Architecturally these buildings are absolutely anti-contextual – they have no interest in relating to the nearby architecture of Lee. They appear as so many little fiefdoms, corporate “temples” floating in a sea of automobiles. The net effect is empty and bleak, an artificial world of retail and retail alone, a self-conscious fragment of what was once part of the daily life of Lee, Great Barrington, Lenox, and Albany. Our towns and cities are struggling because they are increasingly being divested of their essential components.

Last month I said that I saw each building as “a mirror reflecting our own image at the close of the century.” The “Berkshire Outlet Village” is a potent mirror and we should think carefully before we decide that this is the reflection we want to see.