Contemporary buildings, especially in the urban-American Midwest, are ubiquitously bland. This is not to say there are no good architects or good architecture, but it appears thoughtfulness, innovation and connection are reserved only for those signature buildings, the foreground of architecture. In fact, urban America is copy after copy of the same city with only a few distinguishing landmarks. While foreground buildings are important and act as primary roles in distinguishing place, the majority of the built world, the greater urban fabric, acts as the primary role in defining place. This realm, which shall be called the background or background architecture, is left up to developers and contractors who design based on business models of efficiency and the bottom line, models founded upon global capitalism, consumer society and the will of white, middle-class America. Universally applied, these models result in universally dull projects, which is why if blindfolded and dropped within the grid of Cleveland, Ohio, one may just as likely mistake it as Louisville, Kentucky. Nikolaus Pevsner said, “A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.” Background buildings, particularly in the urban context, are not bicycle sheds, but they are designed as such. They should be well-composed, responsive to local culture and contribute to defining a sense of place. They certainly should not be Lincoln Cathedrals, but as bicycle sheds they are not enriching the society they serve. The foreground may have the power to attract a visitor, but only the background has the power to attract a resident.
Contemporary society and architecture’s response to it follows the mode of global modernization. This process, which Kenneth Frampton calls, “universal civilization,” proposes all conditions should be the same everywhere. Progress, under universal civilization, is only achieved through abandonment of culture, disregard of history and the insatiable appetite for tomorrow’s offerings as necessary steps toward becoming “Modern.” As Paul Connerton writes, “Culturally induced forgetting is reinforced by the temporality of consumption, which renders even more inaccessible to immediate perception the process of reification intrinsic to commodity exchange by focusing attention even more insistently on immediate perception.” In other words, our desire for perceived value, our fa¿¿¿¿ade, numbs our sense of real value, our core and structure. Global modernization is destroying a local sense of place, that is, “a qualitative, ‘total’ phenomenon, which we cannot reduce to any of its properties¿¿¿¿¿¿¿and cannot [describe] by means of analytic, ‘scientific’ concepts" (Norberg-Schulz). Architecture has for too long focused on making spaces—objects placed in an objective field and designed based on objective data—whereas architecture should be about making places. Architecture should not only express global conditions, which are present and undeniable, but it should also reflect local conditions, addressing the reality of diversity with respect to activities, class, ethnicity, people and places. Such localized socio-cultural issues provide the opportunity for architecture to identify and create a sense of place that is unique instead of ubiquitous.