Engagement at Edgewood

I am not a military man, but it seems to me that the most terrible battles are fought in the unexpected places. When Napoleon met Kutuzov at Borodino, it was not because Borodino was a significant place - it was made important by vectors of the projected power intersecting at the arbitrary point on the chart.

So much also, twin battles of Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sanh - places without much importance, right points in the space which once were bitterly disputed. Today a new battle starts, at Edgewood, the quiet and forgotten place. It is an odd place for a combat, perhaps the last place one would expect a contest for the heart of a great nation.

But in this small vicinity on the fringes of Palo Alto, California, a fight develops which could be emblematic current crack in the American psyche: on the one hand massive and well-financed forces of reaction and economic determinism. On the other - only a rabble. They are not much really. Just some people interested by the beauty, the form, and the possibility of avoid the heart-to-deaden architecture of corporation. A small group which does not think that it is idiotic to hope for an alive place which is made on a human scale, one which calls upon our innate sense of beauty and proportion, one which inspires to us to dream, rather than consume.

I wrote before of the extraordinary achievement of Joseph Eichler, the pioneer alone of the democratic modernism in the United States. You saw the beautiful houses which it established, houses still valued by the remainders of a certain intelligentsia, but for the majority of the Americans an unknown achievement.

Even among the Americans who know of Eichler and his architect, A. Quincy Jones, only some know of their achievement without precedent, hidden far in a small corner of Palo Alto: a modernist shopping centre:

Daring in the design, it reverses each assumption of suburbia. You can walk there. The stores human- are human-scale, the size is compact but not crowding:

And it was beautiful, once. It is almost ruined now, brutalized like a sensitive woman married to the worst kind of fool:

Now it is occupied by a dull supermarket, a store of cheap wine and spirits, a store of beauty products, a school of meditation. And there is a developer who wishes to destroy it.

And this rabble will stand up for Edgewood, the sacred place. This is the place where we draw the line of the sand. I come to America without direction, not knowing if I am to see a birth or a funeral – but that is the way of battles.

You will find me at the barricades. As we say in France, une beauté terrible est soutenue.