ACT Reading — Humanities — Drill 2

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the book The Buildings We Forget: Memory and Architecture in the Postwar City by Claudia Fernandes (©2017). There is a particular kind of building that architects rarely photograph and critics rarely write about: the functional vernacular structure, the kind of building that appears on nearly every commercial block in America and registers to most people as background rather than foreground. The strip mall, the drive-through bank, the three-story medical office building with a flat roof and a parking lot: these structures were not designed to be noticed. They were designed to be used. This absence from critical discourse matters more than it might seem. Architecture criticism, like most criticism, tends to direct attention toward the exceptional rather than the typical, toward the singular work of genius rather than the fabric of the built environment that most people actually inhabit. The result is a discipline that produces brilliant analysis of a handful of canonical buildings and near-total silence about the landscape most Americans experience every day. When cultural geographers began studying the strip as a distinct form—the commercial strip, the arterial corridor lined with chain stores, fast-food restaurants, and gas stations—they found it remarkably consistent across the country. The same structures appear in Phoenix and Pittsburgh, in coastal suburbs and inland small towns, creating what one geographer called a "geography of sameness." For many critics, this homogeneity represents a failure of architecture and urban planning—evidence that market forces, left unchecked, produce monotony. An opposing view holds that the strip's consistency is not a failure but a form of legibility. The traveler in an unfamiliar city can navigate by recognizable signs and structures; the predictability that critics find deadening is, for the person far from home, reassuring. This argument does not necessarily redeem the strip aesthetically, but it suggests that the values embedded in the built environment are more complicated than aesthetic critique alone can capture. What would it mean to take these ordinary buildings seriously—not to celebrate them uncritically, but to analyze them with the same rigor applied to celebrated works? The answer might tell us more about American culture than any number of essays about landmark buildings.