Lessons from The Shootist: They Knew How to Build Quality

The Shootist was John Wayne’s last movie – with Ron Howard as a badly behaved teenager, no less! – but this post is neither a movie review nor a reminiscence of John Wayne. The film was made in 1976, set in 1901. There are some aspects of civilisation that wouldn’t be harmed much by going back to that era – yes, all the way back to 1901. I don’t mean the gunslinging. But watching the movie, assuming the set was halfway authentic, they did some things right.

They built houses that today we would say have character. Beautiful craftsmanship, hardwood floors, incredibly detailed ceilings, fine furniture made of real wood and that would last many lifetimes if treated with some respect. Compare that to the crap we have today; you can’t tell me that IKEA is better than the furniture they had. Our houses are marginally better insulated and truly ugly, inside and out, compared to what our forebears built.

The house where Wayne was a boarder: gorgeous, solid wood everywhere, but the bar where the final scene plays out was magnificent. Stone outside, elaborate woodwork inside like you simply cannot get today, unless you spend a fortune and can find someone with the skills to do it. Inlays and insets, crown mouldings to make anything Home Depot sells look bland and cheap in comparison. And the bar certainly didn’t seem to suffer from any shortage of alcohol. Variety was more limited, I suppose; no wine spritzers.

The same day, I dropped my wife off for a meeting at The Union Club, built almost 100 years ago in 1913. Beautiful craftsmanship. Barring major earthquake or other disaster, and with decent maintenance, the Union Club building will still be beautiful in another 100, or 300, years. Same for the Odd Fellows building in Victoria, and countless other houses, commercial buildings, and other buildings from that era. Even my sister’s house, circa 1911, which was built as a tradesperson’s house and is small – 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 900 square feet – has more character and more quality than much of anything you’ll see today.

How did we go from a generation that experienced all this beauty and quality first-hand – to what we build now? Why didn’t we build on that craftsmanship and our appropriate technology to continue to make houses and buildings (and bars) that looked and felt like that and had decent insulation, solar heating, a non-wood-fired cooking stove? We used technology to make everything cheap, in every sense of the word.

The town in The Shootist even had a horse-drawn streetcar – but it was being electrified the next year. Electrified streetcars, in 1901. We’ll be lucky if we get that today before the oil runs out.

If we had to go ‘back’ to that level of quality, the world would be a better place, our cities and towns would be far more beautiful, and just maybe we would be better people for it. Our environment does have some effect upon us; perhaps we don’t value what we have because everything is disposable. We even think the planet is disposable.

Resources

The first two books are from James Howard Kunstler, whose biting analyses of all that is wrong with American architecture, if such even deserves the title, are contained in the first book. Check out Kunstler’s “Eyesore of the Month” for examples of “Architectural Abortions.” The second book contains his suggestions for better buildings and restoring community.

The third book is a collection of essays, drawings, and examples of New Urbanism, a school that seeks to rebuild community and has become famous doing so. The final book is the classic “A Pattern Language,” in which the authors describe their findings from studying buildings all around the world. They discovered certain patterns that are followed in all cultures – and so building in ways outside these cultures may express the architect’s ego but produce a house that is forever uncomfortable and ‘not quite right.’