Building on the Past : Memo to All Deconstructionism Fans: Here Comes the Classical Counterculture

As a child, Rodney Cook created perfect cities--idealized megalopolises made of construction paper and Scotch tape. They were wondrous things, sprawling, meticulously scaled models with lights, subways and water systems that he built in his grandmother’s basement.

Some were based on real places, but his favorite model is borrowed from the world’s great cities. He grafted buildings and plazas from Paris, Rome, Athens and Chicago onto a grid patterned after the graceful layout of Savannah, Ga.

Now 38, Cook long ago put aside childish things. Today he builds in stucco, stone, copper and wood. But he still draws on the architectural glories of the past, finding beauty in tradition, inspiration in history.

Cook is one of a growing number of emerging designers and architects who are sparking a revival of classical styles. These new traditionalists are bucking the dominant modernist trend that began 100 years ago. Their goal: to profoundly alter our surroundings and change the way we live.

“Modernism is dead,” Cook declares, perhaps a bit too boldly. “It’s going to take a while to peter out, but the end is all too close--it’s over.”

While many would find fault with that pronouncement, it seems beyond dispute that in a disorderly age of skewed deconstructionism and fanciful post- postmodern assemblages, classicism is, indeed, enjoying a renaissance.

From a stately new $16-million Greek-revival newspaper building in Athens, Ga., to a new domed, Renaissance-inspired art gallery outside New York City to a plethora of extravagant houses sprouting up across the country with elegant Doric porticoes and Palladian windows, the splendor of classic European styles is proliferating.

Some would argue that this is less indicative of a classical revival than a sign that architecture is adrift.

“It’s a time of searching,” says William McDonough, dean of architecture at the University of Virginia. “The agenda is more broad, more ecumenical.”

Critics also wonder if classical forms are suited to contemporary times. Do stately Greek-revival structures, for example, really fit in cities as fractured and sprawling as Los Angeles or Houston or are the kinetic, off-center deconstructions of Frank Gehry or the glitzy, sci-fi-inspired offerings of Helmut Jahn more appropriate?

Still, after decades of being neglected or even ridiculed on university campuses, three degree-granting schools have tailored their curricula to meet the demand for classicism. And in recent years, a number of grass-roots organizations promoting classical architecture have either sprouted or grown in size and influence. The re-emergence has also been captured on the cover of Architecture magazine, and newly founded journals are being dedicated to it.

The issue, new classicists say, is not merely how new buildings will look. Designers put off by the angular abstraction of modernism tend to speak of their work in spiritual terms. Theirs is an architecture of the heart that celebrates wholeness, they say. Their work nourishes the spirit.

A century ago, early modernists saw themselves as revolutionaries rejecting outdated ideas of the way buildings ought to look and function. The first unadorned modern skyscraper appeared in Chicago in the 1890s. By the 1920s, a formalized idiom was emerging characterized by the functional, spare designs of Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It was christened the International Style in 1932 by the Museum of Modern Art.

But new revolutionaries such as Thomas Gordon Smith, architecture dean at the University of Notre Dame, say modernism is exhausted and old-fashioned. Its practitioners have created new rules that are every bit as oppressive as the orthodoxy they once overthrew.

“This is a counterculture movement at this point,” Smith says.

If so, it is a counterculture with an establishmentarian face. Prince Charles, one of the movement’s most ardent champions, has founded a school in London dedicated to traditional architecture, including Islamic styles. Already the center is developing into an influential international force with summer schools in France, Italy and the Soviet Union. Plans for expansion to the United States are under way.

In addition, the prince is building a planned community in Dorchester, England, that will contain 20,000 housing units, all built according to his ideas of what architecture should be.

In the eyes of critics, the new movement portends a drift toward conservatism, a longing for days past to days perhaps better left behind. Charles addressed that criticism in 1992 when he announced the creation of his school.

“We are told that our contemporary-built environment must reflect the ‘spirit of the age,’ ” he said. “But what concerns me most of all is that we are succeeding in creating an ‘age without spirit.’ ”

In the 1970s, when many of today’s new young traditionalists were in college, the atmosphere on campuses was often hostile. When Smith told his faculty adviser at UC Berkeley that he planned to study historical design, the adviser, he recalls, mockingly labeled his chosen field “applied archeology.” And this was one of the more tolerant schools.

One of Smith’s colleagues studied at Cornell. When he divulged to a faculty member that he wanted to become an architect to create things of beauty, the teacher reportedly told him never to repeat such a heretical notion.

The emergence of postmodernism in the 1970s paved the way for the new classicists. Reacting against the prevailing austere, less-is-more approach, postmodern architects drew on historical models--for instance, adding columns or Art Deco relief to otherwise modern skyscrapers. They often use classical elements ironically, but the new traditionalists embrace the forms with full sincerity.

Cook was the first American named to the board of trustees that will oversee Charles’ American school. In helping establish it, Cook--a little-known designer--is positioning himself to play a larger role in the architectural community.

Cook is a polarizing figure locally. His oeuvre at this point consists of about 30 houses and only one public building. Nevertheless, with a number of higher-profile projects on his drawing board, this scion of one of Atlanta’s oldest families--who is not even a licensed architect--sees himself in the vanguard of the new classicism movement.

“I rejected architecture school,” Cook says. “I had a number of friends who went into architecture school as classicists and came out modernists.” When the University of Virginia rejected his application--because of his classical leanings, he says--he enrolled in the private Washington and Lee University in Virginia where he studied art, architecture history and mechanical drawing.

Reaction to his work can be fierce. In 1991, when Architectural Digest featured a picture-chocked spread on his domed, Italian-Renaissance-inspired, heirloom-filled home--which Cook says he designed when he was 12--one letter writer waxed ecstatic, gushing, “ . . . We are witness to a supernova of architecture.”

The article led to Cook’s biggest commission: designing a gallery and cultural studies center in a New York City suburb dedicated to the work of the Hudson River school painter Jasper Cropsey.

But another letter from a reader called the house pretentious, and many Atlanta architects openly deride Cook’s work as amateurish. In their eyes, he is a dilettante using his family’s money and contacts to dabble in architecture.

A few years ago, he proposed erecting a lavish $10-million plaza in Atlanta to commemorate the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, which will be held here. In a rare show of solidarity, outraged architects turned out in force to denounce it, with some saying it would embarrass the city. “It would probably have been at home in Las Vegas,” said local architect David Hamilton of the design, which was later withdrawn.

Libero Andreotti, an architecture professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said it “would not make a passing grade in a freshman design studio.”

Cook says the attacks are all to be expected. After all, he says, he is a rebel going up against the modernist orthodoxy.

One recent afternoon, he showed a visitor around a 60-acre community he is developing with a partner on an old horse farm in the heart of Atlanta’s affluent Buckhead community. The houses, being built on lots costing $600,000 an acre, all must conform to his rigid stylistic guidelines. As he trudged through the mud in work boots, he talked of architecture, the arts and his latest commission--restoration of an old palace near St. Petersburg, Russia, the summer palace of Peter the Great, which will be turned into a hotel.

“I think the arts drive a culture and not the other way around,” he says. “When you have architects telling clients and the gullible public . . . that buildings should make you uncomfortable, should be designed to make you feel angry and irritable and constantly on edge, that’s the blueprint for disaster.”

Cook’s scorn extends to much modern art, which he says promotes violence. Art should be “uplifting and enlightened and inspiring,” he says, which is why he is so thrilled with the direction in which he believes architecture finally is moving.

Traditionalism, Cook predicts, “is going to influence the way we live for the next 80 years, at least.”

* Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this report.