Have you ever wondered why somebody dubbed so retro-looking a style “midcentury modern”? More on that error below.

This is one of my favorite things:

Is it old fashioned? Or cutting edge? It’s hard to even imagine a time when big knobs and dials and faux-woodgrain were hot and new. Yet, of course, at one time they were.

Stuff that reads to us today as old fashioned/retro/vintage wasn’t that way when it was new. Our retro was the modern of its day. Who’s to say what we take for granted and scorn and throw away without a second thought won’t be valued by the future and imbued with their own sense of what “old fashioned” means? “Antique,” “retro,” “vintage,” and “old fashioned” are judgments, emergent out of distance and time, not inherent characteristics of a thing. The same feelings can attach themselves to different particulars. Which is more real? The thing, or the thing it represents?

I was thinking about all of this reading a neat piece in Discourse Magazine (where I also often write) about nostalgia. I thought this was interesting, in particular:

That’s part of the nostalgic urge, and it’s healthy: It’s good to be interested in other eras, how they looked, why things looked the way they did, what it all meant. (Really, it meant they wanted to sell you soap and watch Milton Berle.) What’s not healthy is imposing some narrative of uniform cultural solidity on the past based on memories and YouTube compilations of old commercials. Boohooing about the loss of a common culture—three networks, Time and Newsweek and Life, the daily paper, the movies, Paul Harvey every noon saluting his fellow Americans—saps one’s desire to make something good of our times and the times to come, because what’s the point?

In other words, by not understanding how things come to feel nostalgic—with time and randomness, mostly—we can make the mistake of thinking that none of the junk we have today will ever reach that high bar. But people said the same thing about…everything. Homer, as the translator Emily Wilson puts it, didn’t sound archaic to the Greeks. That’s her way of defending her modern translations: to capture the feeling and the sense of the work, back in the day, you have to render it in modern language today. That’s very interesting.

You see this, broadly, with urbanism and the built environment. We mostly like pre-car traditional urbanism, especially the mid-rise small towns and streetcar suburbs. We like the smaller, older buildings that existed because of limitations on construction but also the absence of zoning and parking requirements. But we look at these things as if they were artifacts, whose origins are obscured. We don’t know how the things we love came to exist, and we fear that anything built today will be inferior. We don’t know if the “ugly buildings” of today will be fiercely defended by tomorrow’s historic preservationists.

There’s a real wisdom in “everything must change so that everything can stay the same.”

Related Reading:

Against Black Boxes

The Sun Sets on Harvest Moon

Top Three

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