Stephen Gerard Dietemann Design

Do you remember one of the early moments in the Beatles’s movie, “Help!”? The scene where all four of the Fab Four arrive together by cab in front of a typical line of English row houses, and after farewells to one another and two curious matrons watching from across the street, they each enter what appear to be four separate apartments via four separate doors? If so you will recall the visual punch line that follows – all four doors lead into one enormously long apartment complete with sunken beds and soda machines. As a twelve year old boy living in the mid-sixties this fascinated me because it was funny and unexpected, but also because it gave a glimpse into the marvels of my new world, complete with glorious electrical gizmos of all sorts, not least of which the guitars and other electronic devises that created a music that the world had not heard before and which my mother and father could not abide. The future was new and uncharted in so many ways.

Today, forty years later, most young people listen to either the Beatles or music so derivative that you are often left with the feeling that you have heard it all before. To put this in context, imagine that instead of listening to the Beatles, The Doors, The Stones and the Jefferson Airplane my teenage friends and I had been listening to the music of forty years prior, say Tommy Dorsey and the other big bands. Such a thought would have been inconceivable, not because big band music was bad – some is very good – but because the world had moved on and big band music was not the soundtrack of that moment, electronic – guitars and soon synthesizers -- were. As for architecture, at the same time I recall the excitement of visiting friends of my parents who had recently constructed a ‘modern’ house, with its large open spaces, sheets of glass, and flat roof decks. New materials and new forms were emerging. Even the pedestrian and ubiquitous ‘ranch burgers’ harkened back to Frank Lloyd Wright’s powerfully innovative residential projects. As a society we were going to the moon literally and figuratively. It was an exciting time in the best sense.

Fundamentalism is the opposite of this vision. At its core fundamentalism is about fear, fear of the present, fear of that which is different, perhaps fear of thinking itself. Fundamentalism -- in all its forms -- offers simple answers to complex questions and at its heart is about control. Today we like to point to the Middle East and a few ‘third world’ countries as the sole repositories of fundamentalism, but we should examine ourselves far more closely. We too are experiencing an emergent fundamentalism in almost every arena of our lives. Elvis lives, Monroe is perhaps more alive than ever, and antiques – those vestiges of another time – are chased in a crazed frenzy. If only the worse aspect of this were that teenagers still listen to popular music created forty years ago; far more ominous is the fact that our politicians increasingly offer simplistic bromides and a black and white vision of complex problems. Many mainstream religions today openly seek to assert control over women and reject the validity of such basic scientific concepts as evolution. Architecturally we move forward (there is nowhere else to go) while looking backwards, building often gigantic houses -- despite overwhelming evidence of scarcity and consequential ecological damage throughout most of the world -- based on Louis-the-Somethingorother or Neo-Colonial ‘styles’. Dallas, Texas, is a wonderful example of this phenomenon, but we have our share of such monstrosities here in the Berkshires as well. I have always said that if you really want the ‘Colonial’ experience, forgo indoor plumbing and electricity. That’ll offer you the true Colonial experience. Architecture, as always, reveals our true societal face and it is a confused, thread bear face, desperately seeking some sort of status and validity from an imaginary ‘perfect’ past. Fundamentalism.

Lest I leave you despairing there are signs of hope. The ‘small home’ movement and even the modular metal ‘kits’ increasingly available indicate an awakening and bodes well. Energy conservation is increasingly important in building design. Perhaps soon we will finally disengage from Elvis and Marilyn and, yes, the Beatles, and then, who knows where we might go. But most importantly, don’t be scared.