In the 20th century, we witnessed a battle within all the arts about whether art was pretending, playing or plying the truth. In painting, we got the fight over whether it was truthful to create illusions (pictures) or better to just let the paint be itself—its patterns, texture, shapes. It began to feel as if it were more honest to see in how the painting looked how it was made. Illusion was fakery and in something of a leap of logic fueled by ideology and disseminated by propaganda suddenly therefore untruthful.
It might have surprised those who declared in the middle of the 20th century that abstract painting was the only authentic and authentically American Art of This Century (as Peggy Guggenheim put it in the naming of her gallery) that the ideal of abstraction-- two dimensional imagery that did not pretend to be anything else-- had its roots in 19th century Victorian arguments about wallpaper. Design theorists like A.W.N Pugin and Owen Jones argued that it was not authentic to make something that did not look like how it was made nor to print or weave the illusion of flowers and leaves on flat walls and carpets you walk on (although apparently no problem with paper on walls and carpets on floors).
Architecture experienced a similar trajectory, beginning in the Victorian era with theorists like Viollet le Duc and William Lethaby all of whom argued for the moral superiority of Gothic architecture. Why Gothic? It was associated with Christian values (as we would say today) and you could see in how it looked how it was built. Flying buttresses and ribbed vaults held the buildings up and except for some obviously applied ornament that was all there was to it. It was honest. Besides, they were built by men not machines, a preoccupation of the Victorian era which coincided with the first industrial revolution when manufacturing seemed to some to threaten the honesty of craftsmanship.
If there is a moralistic undertone in how we talk about contemporary architecture now, we inherited it from the Victorians who passed it on to the European modernists who, to this day, remain our go-to frame of reference when we talk about authentic and honest design. First came the English in the persons of Pugin, Lethaby and Owens, then Loos, an Austrian who admired the English, then Wright, a Victorian if ever there was one, then Charles Jeanneret, Van der Rohe and so on.
In Southern California, we saw this play out first with the arrival of the Anglo Saxons from the east coast who imported the American Arts and Crafts movement to Pasadena (Greene brothers and others) from where it spread across the region then the arrival of the Austrians who imported a particularly severe kind of European modernism (Schindler, Neutra and others) which captured the imagination of the WWII generation in the middle of the last century and then (driven by what, honestly, could only be described as nostalgia) their grandchildren in this century.
The Craftsman movement that flourished at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains manifested a particularly American (Protestant, Episcopalian, Methodist, Mennonite, Amish) version of that Victorian hand--wringing about authentic construction and design. The Greene brothers designed and then built the Gamble House mostly by hand (and mostly in wood). You saw in how it was made and how it was designed. This architecture took hold here because the time was right—it coincided with the surge of Victorians into the West.
European modernism, on the other hand, took hold mostly because the place was right. It was more at home here where the geography and climate are more astringent than flowery Bavaria and because some of them (those by Irving Gill, for example) look like our own ancient vernacular, the adobe construction of the indigenous peoples of the southwest later white washed by the Spaniards (who also added a little Baroque embellishment from home).
There is more irony than authenticity at play here. Stripped down, white-washed buildings in northern Europe betrayed modernism’s intellectual and romantic regard for the ancient vernacular traditions of the Mediterranean but they were out of place in northern Europe. Whereas, American Craftsman houses betrayed the Victorians’ intellectual and romantic regard for the medieval vernacular traditions of northern Europe and would look more at home there (where it rains there are forests and lots of wood).
Commercialized and industrialized construction has long since diluted the purity of those brief moments in southern California history and we cannot relive them. Conversely, were we honest with ourselves we would cease to pretend that those experiences never happened but rather absorb them and learn from them. We would ditch the moralism and instead playfully, truthfully embrace who we are and the way we build buildings now to create an architecture that is wholly our own.