Fifth Column

BRONZE AND IRON AGE PEOPLEHOODS are indeed heavy metal. Consider the Judeans—who, despite the best efforts of the likes of Pharaoh Shoshenq I, King Nebuchadnezzar, and Emperor Vespasian, cast their astonishingly ancient rites and sites all the way into modernity; and despite now constituting only two-tenths of a percent of the population of the world, usefully shared the ethical monotheism and related spiritual technology of the God of Abraham with the 4.5 billion current practitioners of Christianity and Islam. Spare a thought, too, for the Urnfield culture system proto-Villanovans and all their progeny.

They were eventually known to themselves, before they vanished from history, as the Rasenna. They are known to us now by the exonym conferred by the ancient Romans, who helped along their vanishing and to whom their history was already antique and mysterious: the Etruscans. Long before the chieftains of Latium on the Italian peninsula mustered themselves into a world-historically influential republic and empire, their cousins up in scenic Tuscany had risen and fallen—efflorescing from circa 700 to 600 BCE before their descendants were assimilated into Rome some 300 years later. We can’t much speak their language, so what we know of their laws and liturgies is mediated by the Romans, who, in the usual attitude toward forebears, revered and reviled them both. The Etruscans’ Modiglianiesque almond-eyed funerary statues mutely smile their Cheshire Cat smiles at us from many museums—but in that context, rather like a cuneiform tablet or a graven image of Khepri the beetle god, they signify a safely domesticated sublime: soothing us with a sense that the past is at last past. And yet, to this day, the Etruscans continue to design our built environment, in the form of one singular architectural detail.

This detail, of course, is the Tuscan column. Although other distinctive Etruscan architectural elements—consider their surreal biconical cinerary urns and alarmingly chimeric acroteria—have fallen into obscurity, their column lives on everywhere, now and forever. You can, for example, purchase a single diminutive plastic example (nine inches in diameter and thirty-two inches in stature, misidentified as a “Greek Pillar”) at the Home Depot, for $53.24. Presumably, this is intended as some kind of garden decoration distantly in the tradition of picturesque landscape architect Capability Brown and company, who in the eighteenth century provided fake antique ruins and eye-catchers in the British countryside for posh patrons in memory of the monuments they had espied during their Grand Tours. But the Home Depot will also sell you any number of full-size versions, cooked up with all manner of petrochemical recipes, to add a touch of class and classicism to the façades or atria of your local McMansion, strip-mall fast-casual dining franchise, or value-engineered college dormitory.

Such historicism is the sort of maneuver long familiar, in high art and low, since at least the neoclassical revival of Brown’s age. It was briefly canonized and weaponized into a matter of academical pedigree and putative cultural import by Jencks, Moore, Scott Brown, and company, circa 1980. But long since that faction’s internecine power games and imaginary formalist successions faded into pathos, the Tuscan column, and its order, persists. Just as you are never more than three feet away from a spider, you are also almost always already, courtesy of the ubiquity of this particular column, or its image, somewhere in Tuscany.

Here it is, for example, on the façade of the former Wanamaker’s department store annex by downtown Manhattan’s Astor Place. The Tuscan order is recognizable by an unfluted column rising from an S curve base on a squared-off plinth, up to a minimal, saucerlike capital distinguished by a collar-like ring, or astragal. As a secondary order, the Tuscan was significantly formalized not by the Romans but by scholastic types of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, who backdated it (along with, less accurately, the Corinthian Composite) to the Etruscans. Its subsequent popularity—especially in carpenter-built classicizing architecture—derived from its sturdy simplicity. Its seemingly basic complement in the Greek orders, the Doric, was—in the reliably paradoxical Hellenic manner—actually anything but simple (those flutes, those entasistic deflections, those cryptic cosmic ratios!), whereas the Tuscan was generally a matter of cylinders, circles, squares, and whole-number proportions. The influential early American architect Thomas Jefferson was likely familiar with the order’s innovative use, circa 1630, by Inigo Jones for St. Paul’s Church in London’s Covent Garden, whose patron had famously asked its designer for a chapel as cheap as a barn. The rustic purposes conferred by those Renaissance scholastics on the Tuscan order—good for dignifying outbuildings and rural assizes—gave it a wholesome, salt-of-the-earth connotation that, in addition to its actual economy, likely appealed to Jefferson, who employed it in his 1806 designs for Poplar Forest (the woodsy Lynchburg, Virginia, estate that is the less famous of his plantations of enslaved laborers), and to the very many designers and patrons he influenced. And also to John Wanamaker, an inventor of the department store.

THE WANAMAKER’S BUILDING is a foursquare, 1.2 million-square-foot, fifteen-story block-filler from 1907, designed by Daniel Burnham. The structure, though subdued in decoration, befitting its original role as a warehouse annexed to a now-destroyed store to its north, was designed in the manner of what was then the chain’s flagship “Grand Depot” department store in Philadelphia. This had been recently updated by Burnham in a version of Renaissance Revival that was at the time called the “Florentine Style.” This meant Tuscan columns and pilasters, but anachronistically fancied up with flutes and filigrees. Also a singular golden eagle and complicated pipe organ left over from the St. Louis World’s Fair. Since its founding in 1861, Wanamaker’s distinguished itself from its competitors with style and innovation: The retailer is credited with introducing the cash refund and the seasonal sale, as well as with being the first department store to feature telephones and electric illumination. At the Astor Place building, a gargantuan version of a Renaissance palazzo, Burnham deployed scores of embellished Tuscan-style pilasters reminiscent of those found on Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai.

After Wanamaker’s retreated to the suburbs and died, the building was used by a bank, by the United States Army, and, from 1996 to 2021, by the big-box retailer K-Mart. All I remember about that K-Mart is that the hot dogs at its upstairs in-store dispensary were notorious (though for being good or bad I can no longer attest); that there had been a fleeting, Giuliani-era microdiscourse about the corporate sanitation of the East Village, promptly defused by the aura of scum and scuzz projected by resilient downtown locals and trucker cap–wearing Gallatin students; and that the vast overlit interior was otherwise uncannily indistinguishable from those of its exurban counterparts. Upstairs, all those deep floors—clear spans, lots of room for ducts and wires—have been mostly leased by what seem to be the last true connoisseurs of urban white-collar office space, the tech bros, with Yahoo, AOL, and Meta/Facebook among those who have been in residence. Downstairs, in October of 2023, there opened Manhattan’s first example of the celebrated mid-Atlantic supermarket chain, Wegmans.

Wegmans (much like Wanamaker’s before it in the epic Wawa-dessy of the rises and falls of the strangely beloved regional retail chains of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and upstate New York) has inspired remarkable customer loyalty—even a devotion that made its October 2023 Manhattan opening a matter of Gotham newsworthiness that extends to this very article in these very pages. Wegmans has style, of a kind. Its metal shelving and refrigeration units are black, not the usual powdery white, which makes for more colorful-looking produce and packaging—illuminated, it appears at Astor Place, in 1990s-throwback halogen spotlights. There’s a signature in-house brand featuring “Italian Specialties.” The whole is a mash-up of a supermarket and a food hall. At Astor Place, the former is in the basement. Which in its far underground reaches has satisfyingly acquired precisely the abject atmosphere—talcum, synthetic citrus, cardboard, and bleach—narrowly associated with Manhattan’s more ancient D’Agostinos and more ambitious Duane Reades. The food hall, on the ground floor, is a lofty double-height space in which precooked meals and treats are grouped by their putative culture or geographical provenance. The central one is—bella Toscana!—something called, there on a big sign, Mediterranean. Which seems to mean salty pasta salad, glistening oversized olives, and—in an enduring echo of aspirational American upper-middle-class tastes of the 1990s—a general emphasis on sun-dried tomatoes.

The big-box façades of exurban Wegmans stores are pastiches of Continental references. There are bits of collegiate red brick and dressed fieldstone, faintly Bavarian clock towers, and blind Palladian windows incorrect in their proportions—false openings in which, McMansion-style, the arches don’t curve up in seamless radii from the uprights below, but bend suddenly, like the line of a half-unraveled paper clip, with a pinch. Inside at Astor Place, the displays—all that sweaty pasta salad in glass cases—are sheltered by plastic awnings in imitation of the striped fabrics that might have once graced neighborhood greengrocers. The internal decoration takes the form of fake town house façades, slightly less than life-size, with windows that prove to be blindly translucent light fixtures emanating an orangey and crepuscular diode glow. By the dentils on their pseudocornices and the brackets below their keystones, they are, of course, in the style traditionally called Italianate. This was a pattern-book version, popular in America after the Civil War, of the picturesque and asymmetrical villas and farmhouses of northern Italy (Tuscany, Umbria, the Veneto) in which, much-documented by lithograph and photograph, latter-day Grand Tourists resided.

What really makes the Wegmans aesthetic work is its half-heartedness. Only the top halves of the fake brownstones are present, as a kind of fascia hanging over displays and counters. Below are silky-smooth composite floors that are as open and clinically bright as possible. There is no geometric correspondence between the upper and lower halves of the space. The former is optimized for the optic: a visual field made to evoke the human-scaled urbanity of, say, brownstone Brooklyn. (The inadvertent referent may be latter-day Carroll Gardens, whose remaining Italian American vintage has been “preserved” to the extent that it has been comfortably assimilated within the signifying system of an upper middle class to which the neighborhood’s vendors and mongers now cater.) The latter is optimized for the haptic: a spatial field of pure and uninterrupted movement, organized in the service of grazing. A sensation of visual entertainment is provided without the commensurate obstruction of circulation. A sensation of absolute spatial liberty—even to a sterile austerity worthy of an Archizoom mirror box—is provided without the commensurate vertigo and boredom. The half-heartedness is redoubled in the detailing: The pastiche of those Italianate brownstones is ingeniously low-res, strategically crude in conception and execution. The perceptible absence of effort, the humorlessness of the mise-en-scène, also communicates that your attention isn’t really required, because nothing too demanding or disorienting is really going on. There is in this arrangement a kind of terminal point of the old fantasies of the prewar department store and postwar shopping mall: all the diversions and conveniences of actual urbanity minus any alarming serendipities and specificities. You can expect the expected.

Artlessness has something to do with aspiration. Or with its suppression. Visit many other food halls and supermarkets that cater to the Manhattan middle class (from the likes of Eataly to the more uplifting corners of various Traders Joe) and you can observe interior decoration whose insistent good taste or good cheer are intended to make you feel that you are among people of certain qualities and distinctions. And that through your possession of those qualities, through your spending, even through a kind of sadomasochism of thrilling expenditure, and ultimately through your sacramentally partaking of the posh-seeming food, you will be elevated in turn. Wegmans, though, offers comforts shared with those other markets without the stressful sensation that you are somewhere better than you.

In a certain longstanding American mythos, even as we are also a nation of immigrants, European realms are for admiring, from the standpoint of genuine-yet-performative self-deprecation (mostly vis-à-vis our old boss, the United Kingdom), or for despising (mostly everywhere else except Paris, France). Italy is especially stimulating because it offers participants of this ritual opportunities for both masochism and sadism. Depending on whether you wanted to put yourself down or puff yourself up, you could look both up to and down upon some fantasized incarnation of the Tuscans, the Romans, the Neapolitans—even or especially if they are among your own forebears. One could idealize, say, Michelangelo. One could demonize, in classist, nativist, colorist, sectarian, or any other number of ways, what one could characterize as the swarthy, the rustic, the hidebound, the feudal, the criminal, the Catholic. The Risorgimento—the political unification of the Italian peninsula into a modern sovereign nation-state—happened, just like the founding of Wanamaker’s, in 1861. The associated economic and political turmoil—1848, 1871, and all that—accelerated Italian emigration, especially by peasants from depleted rural hinterlands, into the working classes of the Americas. Even as notions of Italian antiquity were during that Gilded Age ever more revered, diasporic Italians themselves had only contingent access to the era’s specific constructions of whiteness, status, and Society.

This made especially useful Tuscany’s longstanding and particular ability to confer a touch of class onto strivers. To enforce their idea of a modern national language onto a tapestry of regional dialects, the unifiers of the mid-nineteenth century reached all the way back to the elegant-though-archaic Florentine vocabulary of Dante. Arguably the first early modern practitioner of architecture, as we now recognize the profession, was Arezzo’s own Giorgio Vasari: middling painter, decent designer, social climber by marriage, patriarch of Western art history, and the favored servant of the ascendant duke Cosimo de’ Medici, who himself made up for his relatively thin pedigree and violent past with the sort of pageantry and patronage that was Vasari’s métier. Civic projects like the Uffizi—now the celebrated Gallery—fancied up Florence. To this day, its façades and colonnades feature very many of our favorite kind of column. Such works impressed the locals of the sixteenth century and would later charm nineteenth-century British and American tourists of the kind documented in E. M. Forster’s sentimental novel of manners, A Room with a View (1908), whose titular quarters and vistas were influentially amplified in the 1985 Merchant Ivory film adaption. The combination of self-certain condescension and sensational fascination that Italy inspired in an Anglo-American imagination is given voice in the film by the authoress Eleanor Lavish (Judi Dench), who remarks that Tuscany offers “a mixture of the almost primitive with the anciently classical that I find irresistible.”

THE MIDDLE-CLASS FRAILTY of it all; the mid-Atlantic Pennsylvania and New Jersey of it all; the constructions of white ethnicity of it all; the listlessly anachronistic pastiche of it all; the creams and beiges and browns of it all; the endless 1990s of it all; and more than anything, the indeterminate yet overdetermined Mediterranean, Florentine, Italianate, Tuscan of it all: This superabundance of signification brings us, inevitably, to the kitchen of Tony Soprano. The Sopranos, auteur David Chase’s operatic HBO series about a fictional New Jersey crime family of southern Italian descent, inaugurated the golden age of television in 1999. A drama, per Miss Lavish, of classical tragedy meeting almost primitive atavism. Interior sets for Tony’s family home were based on a strangely sinister existing McMansion in North Caldwell that was used for exterior filming—broodingly beige-bricked, hip-roofed, Palladian-windowed, garage-snouted, azure swimming–pooled, defensively hedged—up whose steep, dark driveway the protagonist drives his heavyweight SUV, having traversed North Jersey from the Holland Tunnel, at the conclusion of the show’s memorable opening credits.

Inside, there are Tuscan columns. Painted, in the usual McMansion way, and perhaps in a distant evocation of Jeffersonian carpenter classicism, glossy white. Two freestanding columns, strangely diminutive because their bases are set at wainscoting height on a strange half-wall podium, adorn the cased opening from the foyer to the formal living room. Two more columns, similarly elevated, define the approach as you turn right from the entryway, into the dining room. This room, all the better to televisually enframe fraught family gatherings, is double-height; the balustrade for the overlook above, like that leading up the stairway, is not in any classical style but is instead crisply modern: a grille of narrowly spaced parallel vertical slats in orangey-stained wood, chamfered at the top and bottom at forty-five degrees. This surprising combination of historicist pastiche and residual modernism was once considered classy. I can report this because, right after my immigrant family first moved to America, we lived for a couple of years in a suburban condominium featuring the exact same interior detailing—glossy white Tuscan columns and those vertical slats with the forty-five-degree tops—and that very adjective was the one used by our downstairs neighbor to describe our shared décor.

The Tuscan column of all Tuscan columns is the single one that stands—asymmetrically positioned and all alone, like a stool pigeon in court—to the right of Tony Soprano’s head as he broods in his den on his beige leathery sofa, watches his television, and weeps, his dark and mawkish heart revealed in those John Wayne westerns on his screen within our screen. The sofa is backed up against a peculiar but appealing arrangement of a half-height partition, detailed in those same modern vertical slats on which the column is elevated. Beyond that is the kitchen: all routed-out imitation cabinetwork, all creams and beiges fading toward terra-cotta-ish peachy, orangey, and lemony tones. It’s the very same color palette you see on the walls in the Astor Place Wegmans and in other commercial venues that are trying to convey both the classy and the sylvan, along with (now that in the 2020s all styles are no longer successive but radically simultaneous and siloed) some kind of perpetually 1990s microaesthetic: Panera Bread, say, or certain residual Barnes & Noble bookstores. (The style is closely associated with the pergola—another ’90s signifier of agrestic natural aristocracy. Think, for example, of the Chiantishire cosplay of Tony Blair and his neoliberal cortigiani, recently echoed in that other HBO criminal-family drama, Succession.)

Tony Soprano’s singular column was a turning point between the two rooms at the heart of the horrors of North Caldwell. The rooms were positioned at a scenographically handy oblique: between the kitchen—its bleachable surfaces convenient for exercises in Tony’s professional violence—and the den, the site of intimacy, eroticism, fantasy, and evidence of inner lives. In one episode, Carmela, startled overnight by a seeming intruder, appears to open up this very column and withdraw a hidden machine gun. The machine in the garden state. Or, courtesy of the Tuscan order, in Arcadia. Or at least in Suburbia.

The truly significant machines at the Soprano house were the five freestanding Carrier air-conditioning units that sat candidly at the edge of the backyard pool patio and lawn and that figure prominently in a Season 3 story arc in which Tony uses their noise to drown out basement conversations and thwart—more machines—FBI listening devices. During the first frantic months of the coronavirus lockdown in New York City, I spent some weeks at a not dissimilar house in the tristate area. Two glossy white Tuscan columns framed its front door. I would stand next to an identical arrangement of air handling units behind that house’s big garage and contemplate the conceptual relationship between the fresh air that I was seeking by standing there outdoors and the notionally salubrious atmosphere that the machines were enforcing indoors. This puzzling intersection of natural and acculturated phenomena was not unlike when, as in the Sopranos pilot, wild migrating ducks take up residence in a chlorinated backyard swimming pool. For all the uncanniness of the atmosphere the machines generated, they were, in their frank and undecorated purposefulness, to such a modern subject as myself, a strange tonic to all the aesthetic artifice of that locked-down house and to the domestic disturbances within it. This same inadvertent mechanical reprieve is the great saving grace of the Wegmans aesthetic: In all its stores, and especially at Astor Place, the building systems—an intricate nest and network of ducts, conduits, track lights, suspended flatscreens, and more—are shoved up toward the ceiling, and everything is uniformly and sculpturally painted out Louise Nevelson–style and even, here and there, artfully illuminated by the occasional uplight. The effect is beautiful in a way I am still trying to understand.

It might be beautiful because it’s useful. In 2024, nothing is more sustainable than a good modern building from 1907. No building built today, for centuries to come, will ever be more environmentally righteous than anything extant by Daniel Burnham already is. The embodied energy and carbon of its construction—a vastly greater ecological burden than its lifetime operational fuel consumption—has long been magnificently amortized over a century of usefulness. Despite its monumental size, it is a deferent background building: Its Tuscan order is orderly but not ostentatious. To its credit, Burnham’s pragmatic pile is not a landmark of the especially expressive kind that, offending subsequent tastes—in New York City especially—attracts the wrecking ball. (Consider the coelocanthic survival of McKim, Mead & White’s sturdy yet palatial 1907 Penn Station Service Building on Thirty-First Street, long after the destruction of their railroad station across the way. It’s still at risk, but assuredly its karmic destiny is to be adaptively redesigned by Billie Tsien and Tod Williams into a home for the ever-itinerant Folk Art Museum.) Recently, at the Astor Place Wegmans, I gloried in the spectacular moment when the escalator to the basement conducts you briefly through the cross section of that level’s subceiling realm in which century-old Wanamaker’s-era details complement sustainably retrofitted technology—visible critique of the manic retrofuturistic fatalism of all those tech firms upstairs. I thought of the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts montage effect of these juxtapositions: This is the architecture of the future.

CLASSY, THOUGH: That’s a word that takes us back to the past. Or to the online reviews for Wegmans. The pyramid of chocolate pieces available for scooping at the trail mix bar are described as being irregular chunks—therefore classy—not standard regular chips. Presumably because chunks are somehow more artisanal, more craftspersonlike. “Wegmans is a classy store,” reports one assessment. “Pricey? Not if you have a Wegmans shopper’s card.” The single word classy headlines a user review of a Wegmans in-house restaurant. The review also notes that, as an accompaniment to a steak dinner, “the garlic Tuscan fries are amazing.” Neither immersive frying, nor bâtonnet-cut potatoes nor even much garlic figure especially in traditional Tuscan cuisine, which lets us know how far the adjective and its connotations have traveled. And of course, to use the descriptor classy so sincerely, snobbery dictates, is to reveal yourself not to be so. Tony’s tracksuited deputy Paulie Walnuts to the painter of the equine portrait his boss had commissioned and discarded: “How much to paint a different suit on him, change his face a little? I was thinking paintings you see in the courthouse, something classy, you know, like a Revolutionary War general, Napoleon and his horse, that kind of thing.”

Class, classiness, classification, classical: These are fraught words. Architecture in the forms and orders, variously revived, of antique Greece and Rome was not always described as classical. To many in the developed West, over the decades and centuries, that specific Mediterranean formal vocabulary signified not the presence of any particular architectural style but simply of Architecture itself, narrowly but forcefully defined. Classical, in the sense of ancient and august, worked its way surprisingly obliquely and recently into English: in the early seventeenth century, from the French version of the Latin classicus, which described not a system of classification, but merely a single class within one—ancient Roman patricians of the highest rank. So at first, in English, the word classical meant only that which was putatively superior. The hierarchical orders of columns—Corinthian at the top, then Corinthian Composite, Ionic, Doric, down to the fifth and least, Tuscan—aligned to the hierarchical social classes into which Roman citizens and subjects were organized for taxation, accounts of which are among the earliest attested uses of the Roman word that gives us class. Thus Tuscan offers all the paradoxical pains and pleasures—especially in America, a class-bound and financially polarized land that still thinks of itself as egalitarian—of being down-to-earth and yet still part of a system seemingly leading up to some fortunate firmament or rarefied tax bracket.

Architecture in the classical manner seems today to appeal especially to certain trads and fascists who like their social systems orderly and hierarchical and perpetual. They will tell you that its formal conventions and proportions communicate certain universal and natural truths, somehow inevitable, about what’s greater than and what—or who—is less than. In its ubiquity, and its connotations of order and probity to which many are now culturally habituated, architectural classicism can seem somehow natural and inevitable and universal. But that ubiquity is merely a result of the radical and whimsical contingency of history. It is comic and peculiar that an unusually constrained and highly culturally specific Metal Age formal vocabulary of trabeated stone, particular to certain islands and peninsulas in the eastern Mediterranean, should two or three thousand years later be found from Australia to Zambia, from North Caldwell to Astor Place.

To defamiliarize ourselves from these forms and so to encounter this contingent peculiarity, we can imagine that in pivotal ancient battles the Persians vanquished the Greeks or the Carthaginians bested the Romans—and so summon an alternate time line in which our American courthouses sported winged bulls with human heads, trapezoidal fenestration, and other Assyrian accoutrements. Or in which the Etruscan biconical cinerary urn, and not the Tuscan column, was the default off-the-shelf decorative motif for McMansions. To summon such a world, consider the exquisite and eccentric architecture that diasporic descendants of Bronze Age Judeans commissioned—in the first decade of the twentieth century, just as Wanamaker’s was building its sturdy annex on Astor Place—from designers Vincenzo Costa and Osvaldo Armanni for the aluminum-domed Tempio Maggiore, or Great Synagogue, in Rome. At the edge of the former ghetto to which, until the Risorgimento that conferred the citizenship that they had been denied by the Papal States, those descendants had for much of the previous two millennia been confined. At the heart of the Catholic world. And at the capital of an ancient empire that had, under Vespasian, destroyed the structure central to their land-based spiritual practices, a singular temple in Jerusalem; and that tried to disappear them from history as comprehensively as the Latins subsumed the heirs of the Urnfield culture system proto-Villanovans. The result was an architecture of radical resistance and aesthetic protest, whose architects assiduously refused any form that could be traced back to imperialist Romans and colonizing Hellenes and instead synthetically resignified and counterappropriated a mélange of formal details from other exoduses and exiles occasioned by other empires—Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian—and even ancient Assyrian touches that might have been familiar to that earlier temple-destroyer, Nebuchadnezzar. It’s a building whose determined strangeness reveals the hidden strangeness of every other building on Earth. And it’s a reminder—especially useful during the Anthropocene polycrisis—of contingency, agency, and possibility: that no matter how much the past is all around us written in stone, the future is not.