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MODERNISM A LA MODE
How architecture went from radical to chic
By Mark Kingwell
Discussed in this essay:
From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American
City, by Nathan Glazer. Princeton University Press. 300 pages. $24.95.
Makers of Modern Architecture, by Martin Filler. New York Review Books. 323
pages. $27.95.
How architecture went from radical to chic
By Mark Kingwell
Discussed in this essay:
From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American
City, by Nathan Glazer. Princeton University Press. 300 pages. $24.95.
Makers of Modern Architecture, by Martin Filler. New York Review Books. 323
pages. $27.95.
In1967, Ideal Toy Company of
New York introduced a building
kit called Super City that was intended
as a high-end rival to Meccano
or Lego, offering polystyrene plastic
modules and triangular struts, plus
bubble skylights and sleek cladding,
for creating miniature slabs and towers.
"The best building kit ever made," the
writer and artist Douglas Coupland
gushed in 2005, "Super City was the
first purely modernist building kit.
Anything made from Super City
looked like a Craig Elwood or a
Mark Kingwell is Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Toronto and a contributing editor
of Harper's Magazine. His book Concrete
Reveries:Consciousnessand the City
will be published next year by Viking.
From a i967 advertisement for Super City by ideal Toys
Richard Neutra or a Wallace K. Harrison."
Riffing on what he saw as the
kit's space-age high-modern coolness,
Coupland added annotations that
mocked the sophisticated style of the
designs. "Karen Carpenter's apartment,"
he suggested in one comer of a
Super City ad. Opposi.te that, "[arvik
heart transplant centre." Nearby,
"Henry Kissinger and Jill St. John having
sex" and "Parking lots that only
accept vehicles with gull-wing doors."
When a style of architecture is so
familiar as to be rendered in toy blocks,
a sort of loopy apotheosis has been realized.
Mark 1967 as the year in which
modern architecture reached the pinnacle
of its pervasive influence, when
even the world's children were being
indoctrinated into its program of modular
construction, uniform steel-andglass
structure, and straight unadorned
lines. In a few short years some of those
kids would undoubtedly be in a position
to commission full-scale versions for a
new corporate headquarters project in
Berlin, or a new capital city planned for
somewhere in the jungles of the developing
world.
This style of building was, to be sure,
a very particular version of modern architecture,
and one with a specific devolution:
what sociologist Nathan Glazer
calls in his new book a move "from
a cause to a style." The standard story
goes something like this. In the beginning,
a beginning dated more or less to
the start of the twentieth century, a
handful of visionary architects, inspired
by the potential of new materials such
as concrete and steel, imagined a world
of urban living free from spurious ornament,
cluttered gernutlich interiors,
and status-defining stylistic tropes. Built
forms, always the bedrock of social interaction,
could be planned and executed
not in the haphazard, follow-themoney
manner of yesteryear but in
progressive waves of ever-improving,
even utopian, design. New buildings
for a new age! And in back of it all, a
heroic commitment to social justice
via the building art. The architect
emerges not as a mere purveyor of
"commodity, firmness, and delight," to
cite the ancient Vitruvian desiderata as
translated by Sir Henry Wotton in
1624, but as a social revolutionary par
excellence: philosopher, critic, activist,
craftsman, and artist all rolled into one
REViEWS 83
egomaniacal package. "Weare in a diseased
state," Le Corbusier wrote in
1923, "because we mix up art with a respectful
attitude towards mere decoration."
The received styles are dead, and
the "great epoch" and "new spirit" of
the age demand innovation. Le Corbusier's
Villa Savoye and his chapel at
Ronchamp, plus his ambitious schemes
for workers' housing and his city plans,
show what could be done with such a
bold vision.
In the event-so this standard story
goes-reality proved, as ever, a resistant
medium. The grand schemes and
social visions were dashed by the exigencies
of financing and construction
and the dirty-hands business of actual
clients, not to mention the wider influence
of economic downturns, war,
and technological innovation. In a
small but telling irony, Le Corbusier,
perhaps the most exemplary of modernist
architects within this narrative,
had to improvise expensive handmade
components for his early buildings in order
to give them the machined look
that mass production was not yet capable
of achieving-a sort of reverse
techno-effect, foreshadowing the fauxauthenticity
of more recent machine
nostalgia, with the current proliferation
of false rivets in sports-car interiors
and exposed, load-free girders in
restaurants. When large projects, or
even specific buildings, were realized,
there was a visible hollowing out of
modernist dreams by dismal reality. Le
Corbusier's "Radiant City" design, with
its lithe residential towers surrounded by
parkland and curving superhighways,
became the model for dead-zone towerblock
projects of the 1950s and '60s,
many of them now either abandoned to
vertical-slum anarchy or tom down in
favor of low-rise alternatives.
The standard form of the modernist
movement, meanwhile, the glasscurtain-
slab skyscraper, moved effortlessly
from bravura gesture-Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building
in Manhattan, a masterpiece of matteblack
volume and generous public
space-to become the favored building
block of corporate globalization.
Imitation becomes the sincerest, which
is to say the cheapest, form of theft. As
Martin Filler insists in his entertaining
and informative survey of modem masters,
Makers of Modern Architecture,
84 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2007
Mies cannot be held responsible for the
bad iterations of his style any more than
Palladia can be indicted for all the
hideous neoclassical arches and pedimented
columns that festoon everything
from skyscrapers in Shanghai to
Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal ar IdlewildlJFK Airport, N.Y.C. © Ezra Stoller/Esto; D, by Le Corbusier
© Erich Lessing/Art Resource/ARS/FLC/ADAGP, Paris; Frank Lloyd Wright's Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, N.Y.C., by David Heald ©The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, N.Y.C.
pitched-roof monster homes in the suburbs
of Dallas. But it is at the least disheartening
and at the most scandalous
that what began as a revolutionary
movement for social change should deteriorate,
within the span of four
decades, into a mere style. A style,
moreover, that now appears to serve
the interests of the very forces--capital
and class-it claimed to oppose. "We
showed them what to do," Mies complained
to his friend Arthur Drexler.
"What the hell went wrong?"
As usual, this official story, which
Nathan Glazer accepts uncritically,
isfartoo simple, but making
it more complex forces a series of
tendentious choices. One can, like
Filler, refuse to define a single "modernism"
and instead lay down firm historical
parentheses that embrace more
than twelve decades of building practice
and link the nineteenth century to the
twenty-first. His list of makers of modem
architecture begins with Louis Sullivan,
the popularizer (not Frank Lloyd
Wright, as many think) of the much
abused dictum that "form ever follows
function," and ends with Frank Gehry
and Santiago Calatrava, two disparate
practitioners with only an attenuated
kinship to what many people consider
modernism. This capaciousness then
allows Filler to pick and choose idiosyncratically
from a wide swath of
builders for his raves and pans. Along
the way, the classic statements of Le
Corbusier and Mies are acknowledged,
but so are various forms of organicism
(Wright, Alvar Aalto), technomodernism
(Norman Foster), and postmodernism
(Robert Venturi, Renzo Piano).
Charles Rennie Mackintosh and
Charles and Ray Eames, designers
known for furniture rather than buildings,
earn respectful chapters of their
own. At no point is a larger narrative of
modernism offered; Filler resolves the
definition issue by ignoring it.
This approach has its virtues. Filler
is right to blast the rhetoric of ism and
counter-ism that has vexed architecture
since the Second World War, with
new stylistic trends set up every few
years to oppose whatever has become
fashionable (postmodern succeeding
modern, deconstruction succeeding
that, and so on). He challenges the superficial
theoretical pretensions of the
various after-modern "schools," with
their cheap pronouncements cribbed
from works of philosophy or literary
theory. Architecture, like art, enjoys
. an oedipal energy in which creation is
always destruction, usually of one's most
intimate influences. But architecture's
story is really one of repetition, not
progress. New materials, new styles,
and new techniques arise, but the problems
of rendering built forms in a physical
universe remain ever the same.
There may be dialectic conflict in architecture's
forward march, but there is
no absolute standpoint at its end.
Nevertheless, Filler's inclusiveness
creates as many problems as it solves.
If we abandon the standard progress-ofstyles
narrative, what arises in its place?
Despite some effort to remain cool and
focused on the work itself, Filler cannot
resist a bit of alternative mythmaking
and some of the insider's arrogance
that is unfortunately typical of
the architecture profession (though as
a critic he already occupies an outer
Concert Hall, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe © The Museum of Modern Art, New
York City/Art Resource/ARS/SCALA; La Cite Radieuse, by Le Corbusier
© Giraudon/ ADAGP, Paris/FLC/ Art Resource/ ARS
circle). For him, the chief fallacy in
laypersons' talk about architecture is
the identification of modernism tout
court with one of its less fortunate offshoots,
the familiar International
Style-which happens to be the very
identification that Glazer accepts as a
premise of social critique.
The term "International Style" was
coined by Alfred Barr, founding director
of the Museum of Modem Art, but
it was made popular, and eventually
canonical, by a 1932 exhibition at
MoMA organized by Philip Johnson
and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. More
than just the talk of the town, the show
established the agenda of modem architecture
for decades to come, including
both masterworks and disasters. Mies, Le
Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright were
all included (Wright later withdrew, allegedly
claiming his work was not featured
prominently enough), and because
there was little attempt to reconcile the
differences between the European vision,
especially Le Corbusier's expansive
social conscience, and the American
emphasis on practicality, the
emergent style was a volatile distillate of
divergent programs.
Style has always been a bad word in
architecture, suggesting either a lack
of imagination or a susceptibility to
replication, or both. In the MoMA exhibition,
style was boldly celebrated as
the essence of the art, and modem architecture
was instantly reduced to a
single branch of its family tree. Revolutionary
modernism had been born in
1923 with the publication of Le Corbusier's
Vers une architecture, the most
innovative book on architecture since
the Renaissance, which defined a hu-
REVIEWS 85
mane rationalism far more subtle than
the boxy sameness to come, deftly defending
the idea of the "regulating line"
in all great buildings, ancient and modem.
Le Corbusier praised the timeless
geometric beauty of the golden section,
the same proportions that had
excited everyone from Vitruvius to the
realist landscape painters of the Italian
Renaissance. "There exists one
thing which can ravish us, and this is
measure or scale," Le Corbusier wrote.
"To achieve scale! To map out in
rhythmical quantities, animated by an
even impulse, to bring life into the
whole by means of a unifying and subtle
relationship, to balance, to resolve the
equation." But thanks to Johnson and
his opportunistic cronies, Filler suggests,
this beautiful vision was defiled
less than a decade later-indeed, just a
year after the English translation was
published-reduced from grand longing
to empty template.
To be fair, Le Corbusier himself was
somewhat vague about style. He at
once declared it dead and demanded it
be reborn along the functional lines
of the airplanes, automobiles, and
steam liners he so admired. But with
the International Style now conflated
with modernism, soon set to colonize
the planet's urban spaces, confusion
reigned among architects. Thus, instead
of a teleological model of creative
progress, Filler offers a chaotic
mind map of modernism, with the International
Style an immovable blob
(or slab) at the center and, around it,
a constellation of reactive satellitesbiomorphism,
nco-ornamental kitsch,
computer-generated anti-building,
sculptural overstatement, and so onfighting
for the recognition, and the
money, that allows the architect to
practice his art. Whereas Glazer is concerned
with a political narrative, Filler
is a devoted aesthete in search of creative
heroes and copycat knaves.
johnson emerges as the archvillain
of the drama, an unrepentant scoundrel
with early ties to Father Coughlin and
the Nazis ("all those blond boys in
black leather," to quote johnson's comments
to his biographer), followed by
a stint coattailing the far more talented
Mies, and then a long toxic endgame
in which johnson naughtily championed
whatever style or counter-style
seemed to have the biggest wind behind
86 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2007
it. MaMA is, moreover, the wicked
pavilion in which johnson was able
to exert his poisonous influence, first as
a curator and later as an influential
trustee. The 1932 exhibition was just
the beginning of a series of group shows
and retrospectives that, in Filler's view,
allowed johnson to continue defining
the trajectory of American architecture
through the rest of the twentieth
century. johnson died in 2005 at the
age of ninety-eight, an evil magician finally
brought down by a neglectful
reaper, who, Filler comes close to suggesting,
ought to have attended to the
business sooner.
According to Filler, johnson was "a
born salesman and glib improviser,"
"deeply superficial" and "bored easily,"
who produced designs that were, variously,
"sorry," "hollow," "offensive," "appalling,"
and "bordered on outright thievery."
His "undisguised pleasure in
perversity" is the one constant in a fadfollowing
life spent switching styles at
whim, making johnson "the magpie of
Modernism," a man "symptomatic of
the poverty of American civic culture in
the late twentieth century." A few others
get similar, smoothly phrased drubbings:
Richard Meier ("limited powers
of invention"), WTC designer Minoru
Yamasaki" ("fleetingly fashionable"),
MoMA renovator Yoshio Taniguchi
("much-disparaged"), not to mention
New Yorker architecture critic Paul
Goldberger, whose book on the Ground
Zero reconstruction "lacked a discernible
moral character," continuing
the "maddening equivocation" of his reviews
and revealing his "essential complicity"
with the financial heavyweights
dominating the project.
Aside from the demonizing and
score-settling, Filler wants ardently to
avoid the reductionism so typical of
discussions of modem architecture.
His refusal to endorse the standard
view that modernism is synonymous
with the brief moment of the International
Style, as if modem art were reducible
to abstract expressionism, immediately
disarms common criticisms,
such as Glazer's, that modernist architecture
is cold and inhumane. More
important, it invites a larger aesthetic
embrace of the past century's building
innovations. And yet, the refusal
fails to account for the loss of political
charge in architecture that is a main
concern even among friends of modernism.
How did style-of whatever
kind, by whatever name-become so
important, to the detriment of the reformist
principles that had animated
the movement at the beginning?
The current stars of architecture,
whether we or they call themselves
"modem," appear to be far more interested
in signature gestures and exalted
status as conceptual artists than
in the passe social engineering of a
century ago. Indeed, probably never
before in the history of what Filler likes
to call "the building art" have its leading
lights seen themselves so emphatically
as artists first and builders second.
This is not always deplorable: Frank
Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
has survived both a massive hype-storm
and a predictable backlash to secure
its position as perhaps the only genuine
masterpiece of late-twentiethcentury
architecture. Lesser talents,
often with bigger egos, have fared more
poorly. Daniel Libeskind's jewish Museum
in Berlin, a notable success, was
followed by lackluster projects in Denver
and Toronto, plus an embarrassing
failure as part of the World Trade Center
reconstruction, when he was outmaneuvered
by David Childs, a slick
operator whom Filler likens to the feckless
Peter Keating in The Fountainhecul.
Santiago Calatrava, despite his
formidable command of structural beauty,
has yet to produce a work as stunning
as Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal
at jFK in New York or Dulles International
Airport in Chantilly, Virginia.
(A planned Calatrava spire for the
Chicago waterfront has been delayed,
and, in any event, the design is disappointing,
being little more than a twisted
version of a standard pyramidal tower.)
The architect-as-sculptor may be
the logical outcome of one reaction to
modernism's doldrums, but it is not at
all clear who the beneficiaries are, apart
from the architects themselves.
Whom, then, should architecture
serve? Hannah Arendt,
rare among political theorists
for her interest in the built environment,
called architecture "the space
of appearances" and argued plausibly
that, because it provided the canvas
for all social life, it was essentially political.
Certainly no other fact of everyday
life is as inescapable. You can tum
off a television or a computer, avoid
cash transactions, even stifle advertising's
constant blare; but you cannot
avoid being in the fabric of your place.
Architecture, alone among the arts, is
inescapable. It is also persistent, existing
in time more than in space. And
yet, most of us have little,
if any, influence on how
it is made. It is no wonder
that the most common pejorative
verb used about
architecture is "foist."
People's choice awardsand
community review boards
aside, most of the architecture
that surrounds us
is simply there whether we
like it or not.
The artist Frank Stella
has famously rejected the
idea that architecture is an
art form, since it includes
functionality among its
aims, but it is hard to
maintain that position when so much
of the movement of architecture precisely
mirrors that of the art world.
Styles and stars come and go, trends
are announced and denounced, sometimes
simultaneously, and the sublime
mysteries of aesthetic genius are everywhere
celebrated. The upside is a potential
for great civic beauty and even,
sometimes, the social change craved
by the early modernist reformers. The
downside is ugliness, clutter, enervation,
and heedless destruction of the
old in favor of the novel. Great cities,
opponents of planning like tosay, are
grown rather than built, implying that
there is a kind of mysteryin the process;
certainly it is true that big plans have
often done more harm than good.
Glazer wrings his hands about these
issues,touching down here and there to
denounce the elitism of modem architecture
and modem art, which he tends
to lump together. Richard Serra's controversial
Tilted Arc, which dominated
a plaza among federal buildings in lower
Manhattan, comes in for particularly
heavy fire, presumably because it is a
fusion of the two: installation art as a
kind of architecture. Glazer favors the
adjectives"farout," "wild,"and "radical"
forschemesthat seem to him to defyhuman
scale or the accepted urban vernacular.
He would surely be baffled by
the warm reception given to Serra's
recent MoMA retrospective, which
shows the artist to possess a command
of space and materials that any classical
architect would envy. Like Jane
Jacobs before him, Glazer holds a thoroughly
normative position about city
life that masquerades as mere common
sense; it is not so much defended as
revealed through counter-punching.
What he likes is what the people like,
whether the people know it or not,
and what the people don't like is modern
architecture.
Glazer is a sociologist, not an architect
or even an architecture critic,
so his aesthetic judgments will provide
easy targets for dismissive professionals.
But that fact is actually part of
the problem he is trying gamely, if
awkwardly, to address.When arrogant
architects insulate themselves from
criticism by adopting the refined disdain
of conceptual artists, what hope
is there for an architecture of social
change? The trouble is that neither
Filler, with his combination of quasiacademic
detachment and critical savagery,
nor Glazer, with his activist's
righteous anger and hearty lack of pretension,
can resolve the complex of
paradoxes that wreathe the issue.
Why is it, Glazer wonders, that it
took Prince Charles, the very embodiment
of elitism by birth, to speak up
for the people of England against the
depredations of modem architecture?
This is not a mystery to anyone who
has lived in Britain and felt the deep
consonance between "ordinary" subjects
and the Barbour-and-wellies banality
of the Windsors. High and low
Chapel Notre-Darue-du-Haut, by Le Corbusier © AKG Images/Stefan Drechsel
alike fear the intellectual challenge of
genuine innovation, especially anything
experimental. Verdict: the familiar
(nee-Gothic, Victorian red
brick) is good; the unfamiliar (aggressive
modernism) is bad.
On occasion, however, 'it does take
a prince. Many if not most of the
world's best buildings have
been erected not through
popular choice but by central
power, sometimes
concentrated in a single
man. Architecture is the
most collaborative of the
applied arts, but it cannot
be done, or done well, by
committee (see the ongoing
fiasco of the WTC reconstruction).
Success often
comes from ignoring
public desires in favor of a
singular vision that just
might benefit the public.
The people, meanwhile,
simply want what they
want. That is, their desires are their
desires;in themselves they mean nothing,
and mostly they cannot be predicted
or, still less likely, programmed.
Great architecture educates desires; it
does not pander to existing ones.
Thus the vision trap. Even modestly
talented practitioners such as
Libeskind can, with a few lucky commissions,
find themselves on top of
the media world-only to be dropped
just as fast. Filler notes that Libeskind's
2004 autobiography, Breaking
Ground, with its "unmitigated selfregard
coupled with a stunning lack of
self-awareness" is likely to be "an enduring
camp classic." Rem Koolhaas,
the most mercurial of the current star
crop, has repeatedly denounced the
West, in particular New York, for its
petty constraints on his vision. He
prefers to build in the hyper-capitalist
hothouse of China, where a combination
of central authority, deep
pockets, and no regard for environmental
niceties made possible his arresting
CCTV Building in Beijing, a
structure impossible to imagine in
North America.
The more urgent question is
whether architecture should be
part of a larger urban vision.
Early modernist planners thought they
REVIEWS 87
could create whole neighborhoods, even
whole cities, that would hasten democratic
change and improve the quality
of life. The results, when attempted,
often had the opposite effect: for every
park created by Robert Moses, that
much derided draconian master-planner
of New York, there is a brutal concrete
overpass. And planners are frequently
just wrong. The ambitious 1969 Manhattan
city plan, with its laudable hatred
of car traffic and machined-slab
office towers, now reads like an old issue
of Amazing Stories: "It is assumed
that new technology will be enlisted in
this improved transportation system,
including transit powered by gravity
and vacuum and mechanical aids to
pedestrian movement, such as moving
belts or quick-access shuttle vehicles.
These devices almost surely will become
available by the end of the century
to meet the demand of the most influential
business center in the world."
While we're at it, where the hell is my
jetpack? Nor are planners always on
the people's side. Baron Haussmann's
beloved redesign of Paris, with the spiraling
arrondissement system and broad
boulevards, was also a comprehensive
military plan to level guerrilla-friendly
warrens in favor of the state's cavalry.
He could not have predicted that, after
a hundred years of de facto racial segregation,
the expansive banlieues at the
edge of the same city would prove the
best place to riot in 2005.
Glazer, like many citizens, wants architecture
to enhance urban life and,
ultimately, the'democratic practices of
the nation. Grand public buildings,
restful and lively public spaces, a balance
of privacy and the common
good-architecture can provide all of
these. But the more it tries, the greater
the risk that the project will backfire.
Architects, moved by innovative design
and the new liberty of materials, lose
the social ambitions of their forebears
and become ensnared in thickets of individual
self-expression and competing
styles. They strive for signature
buildings, the kind that elevate a modest
practitioner from mere servant of his
clients' wishes into an international
celebrity and Pritzker Prize laureate.
At that point, the architect really is
an artist-everyone tells him so--and
the notion of social service is unthinkable
because it is directly contra-
88 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2007
dieted by the outsider ambitions and
tortured-genius mythology of all modem
art. The affairs, alcoholism, and
trademark clothing all follow, with Issey
Miyake black and kooky eyeglasses
"as carefully thought out," to use
Filler's words, "as Wright's anachronistic
presentation of himself as a caped
Aesthetic Movement dandy or Le Corbusier's
droll impersonation of a bowlerhatted
Magrittian bourgeois."
In this sense, Glazer is right to link
modernism in architecture with modernism
in art, though his insights on
the subject are clunky. He laments the
decline "from meaning to muteness" in
public monuments, noting sadly that
Lewis Mumford's pronouncement has
come true: "If it is a monument it is not
modem, and if it is modem, it cannot
be a monument." Mocking Serra's farout
desire to "subvert the context" of
a public installation, he denounces the
tendency of modem art to become selfreferential,
elitist, theoretical, rebarbative,
and antidemocratic. Serra's "is
an understandable point of view,"
Glazer writes, clearly thinking the opposite,
"but it is not, I would argue,
legitimate for public art, whose very
point is to symbolize common values,
common concerns, yes, a common political
system." Late modem architecture,
taking its cue from the art world
and the academy, retains the alienation
effect of Marxist theory but loses
the commitment to social reform.
"The theories in favor today among
advanced architectural theorists and
students are those that emphasize, indeed
celebrate, breakdown in society
and meaning, often in obscure and contradictory
language." Glazer, lonely coauthor
of The Lonely Crowd, is pained
that failures in urban planning should
have driven architects into this culde-
sac. Stay the course, form-makers!
The people's utopia still beckons!
For better or worse, this is a call
that will likely go unheeded.
These writers ultimately agree,
Filler with qualified aesthetic admiration
and Glazer with dismay, that recent architecture
has become both a starmaking
machine and a forum for massive
signature sculptures: touristfriendly
monuments that too often
leach funds away from other, less spectacular
projects such as public housing.
This trend will pass, if it hasn't already,
but the utopian imaginings of early
modernism seem decisively lost. Besides,
those desires were always
overblown, however attractive. Architecture
is political, as all public things
are, but architecture itself is not politics.
We citizens must conduct the business
of sifting among our built forms and
public spaces for the ideas and interactions
that may make for a thriving society.
Nobody can do the work of
democracy for us.
"A plan proceeds from within to without,
for a house or a palace is an organism
comparable to a living being," Le
Corbusier concluded in Vers une architecture.
He used an even more delicate
metaphor in the next paragraph: "A
building is like a soap bubble. This bubble
is perfect and harmonious if the
breath has been evenly distributed and
regulated from the inside. The exterior
is the result of an interior." Aliving being,
a soap bubble: these are not the images
we expect from the machine-forliving
man. More practically, many of
the most successful contemporary architects
no longer seem to take such
claims to heart. Monumental-conceptual
architecture is designed from the outside
in, with sketches on napkins or flashy
computer-imaging systems. At its far
end, modernism has realized one ambition
of its most aggressive proponents:
finally, people are an afterthought. The
world is the ultimate Super City toy
kit, and we are not included.
Each age gets the architecture it deserves,
and ours is an age of transnational
capital, steep inequalities in
wealth, and runaway narcissism. But
perhaps it is not too much to hope that,
in the generation currently at study,
there can be found new prophets of design,
architects who combine classical
norms with sustainable energy, an organic
materials palette, and, who knows;
maybe something as outlandish as inflatable
or underwater housing. The possibilities
of environmental architecture
are just as exhilarating as the dreams
inspired by concrete and steel. Modem
architecture does not end; it mutates. It
does not change the world; it reveals it.
At their best, these mutations are humane,
useful, and beautiful. Commodity,
firmness, and delight may be the old
answer; ever reconsidered and repurposed,
it is still the right one.
[/LEFT]New York introduced a building
kit called Super City that was intended
as a high-end rival to Meccano
or Lego, offering polystyrene plastic
modules and triangular struts, plus
bubble skylights and sleek cladding,
for creating miniature slabs and towers.
"The best building kit ever made," the
writer and artist Douglas Coupland
gushed in 2005, "Super City was the
first purely modernist building kit.
Anything made from Super City
looked like a Craig Elwood or a
Mark Kingwell is Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Toronto and a contributing editor
of Harper's Magazine. His book Concrete
Reveries:Consciousnessand the City
will be published next year by Viking.
From a i967 advertisement for Super City by ideal Toys
Richard Neutra or a Wallace K. Harrison."
Riffing on what he saw as the
kit's space-age high-modern coolness,
Coupland added annotations that
mocked the sophisticated style of the
designs. "Karen Carpenter's apartment,"
he suggested in one comer of a
Super City ad. Opposi.te that, "[arvik
heart transplant centre." Nearby,
"Henry Kissinger and Jill St. John having
sex" and "Parking lots that only
accept vehicles with gull-wing doors."
When a style of architecture is so
familiar as to be rendered in toy blocks,
a sort of loopy apotheosis has been realized.
Mark 1967 as the year in which
modern architecture reached the pinnacle
of its pervasive influence, when
even the world's children were being
indoctrinated into its program of modular
construction, uniform steel-andglass
structure, and straight unadorned
lines. In a few short years some of those
kids would undoubtedly be in a position
to commission full-scale versions for a
new corporate headquarters project in
Berlin, or a new capital city planned for
somewhere in the jungles of the developing
world.
This style of building was, to be sure,
a very particular version of modern architecture,
and one with a specific devolution:
what sociologist Nathan Glazer
calls in his new book a move "from
a cause to a style." The standard story
goes something like this. In the beginning,
a beginning dated more or less to
the start of the twentieth century, a
handful of visionary architects, inspired
by the potential of new materials such
as concrete and steel, imagined a world
of urban living free from spurious ornament,
cluttered gernutlich interiors,
and status-defining stylistic tropes. Built
forms, always the bedrock of social interaction,
could be planned and executed
not in the haphazard, follow-themoney
manner of yesteryear but in
progressive waves of ever-improving,
even utopian, design. New buildings
for a new age! And in back of it all, a
heroic commitment to social justice
via the building art. The architect
emerges not as a mere purveyor of
"commodity, firmness, and delight," to
cite the ancient Vitruvian desiderata as
translated by Sir Henry Wotton in
1624, but as a social revolutionary par
excellence: philosopher, critic, activist,
craftsman, and artist all rolled into one
REViEWS 83
egomaniacal package. "Weare in a diseased
state," Le Corbusier wrote in
1923, "because we mix up art with a respectful
attitude towards mere decoration."
The received styles are dead, and
the "great epoch" and "new spirit" of
the age demand innovation. Le Corbusier's
Villa Savoye and his chapel at
Ronchamp, plus his ambitious schemes
for workers' housing and his city plans,
show what could be done with such a
bold vision.
In the event-so this standard story
goes-reality proved, as ever, a resistant
medium. The grand schemes and
social visions were dashed by the exigencies
of financing and construction
and the dirty-hands business of actual
clients, not to mention the wider influence
of economic downturns, war,
and technological innovation. In a
small but telling irony, Le Corbusier,
perhaps the most exemplary of modernist
architects within this narrative,
had to improvise expensive handmade
components for his early buildings in order
to give them the machined look
that mass production was not yet capable
of achieving-a sort of reverse
techno-effect, foreshadowing the fauxauthenticity
of more recent machine
nostalgia, with the current proliferation
of false rivets in sports-car interiors
and exposed, load-free girders in
restaurants. When large projects, or
even specific buildings, were realized,
there was a visible hollowing out of
modernist dreams by dismal reality. Le
Corbusier's "Radiant City" design, with
its lithe residential towers surrounded by
parkland and curving superhighways,
became the model for dead-zone towerblock
projects of the 1950s and '60s,
many of them now either abandoned to
vertical-slum anarchy or tom down in
favor of low-rise alternatives.
The standard form of the modernist
movement, meanwhile, the glasscurtain-
slab skyscraper, moved effortlessly
from bravura gesture-Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building
in Manhattan, a masterpiece of matteblack
volume and generous public
space-to become the favored building
block of corporate globalization.
Imitation becomes the sincerest, which
is to say the cheapest, form of theft. As
Martin Filler insists in his entertaining
and informative survey of modem masters,
Makers of Modern Architecture,
84 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2007
Mies cannot be held responsible for the
bad iterations of his style any more than
Palladia can be indicted for all the
hideous neoclassical arches and pedimented
columns that festoon everything
from skyscrapers in Shanghai to
Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal ar IdlewildlJFK Airport, N.Y.C. © Ezra Stoller/Esto; D, by Le Corbusier
© Erich Lessing/Art Resource/ARS/FLC/ADAGP, Paris; Frank Lloyd Wright's Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, N.Y.C., by David Heald ©The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, N.Y.C.
pitched-roof monster homes in the suburbs
of Dallas. But it is at the least disheartening
and at the most scandalous
that what began as a revolutionary
movement for social change should deteriorate,
within the span of four
decades, into a mere style. A style,
moreover, that now appears to serve
the interests of the very forces--capital
and class-it claimed to oppose. "We
showed them what to do," Mies complained
to his friend Arthur Drexler.
"What the hell went wrong?"
As usual, this official story, which
Nathan Glazer accepts uncritically,
isfartoo simple, but making
it more complex forces a series of
tendentious choices. One can, like
Filler, refuse to define a single "modernism"
and instead lay down firm historical
parentheses that embrace more
than twelve decades of building practice
and link the nineteenth century to the
twenty-first. His list of makers of modem
architecture begins with Louis Sullivan,
the popularizer (not Frank Lloyd
Wright, as many think) of the much
abused dictum that "form ever follows
function," and ends with Frank Gehry
and Santiago Calatrava, two disparate
practitioners with only an attenuated
kinship to what many people consider
modernism. This capaciousness then
allows Filler to pick and choose idiosyncratically
from a wide swath of
builders for his raves and pans. Along
the way, the classic statements of Le
Corbusier and Mies are acknowledged,
but so are various forms of organicism
(Wright, Alvar Aalto), technomodernism
(Norman Foster), and postmodernism
(Robert Venturi, Renzo Piano).
Charles Rennie Mackintosh and
Charles and Ray Eames, designers
known for furniture rather than buildings,
earn respectful chapters of their
own. At no point is a larger narrative of
modernism offered; Filler resolves the
definition issue by ignoring it.
This approach has its virtues. Filler
is right to blast the rhetoric of ism and
counter-ism that has vexed architecture
since the Second World War, with
new stylistic trends set up every few
years to oppose whatever has become
fashionable (postmodern succeeding
modern, deconstruction succeeding
that, and so on). He challenges the superficial
theoretical pretensions of the
various after-modern "schools," with
their cheap pronouncements cribbed
from works of philosophy or literary
theory. Architecture, like art, enjoys
. an oedipal energy in which creation is
always destruction, usually of one's most
intimate influences. But architecture's
story is really one of repetition, not
progress. New materials, new styles,
and new techniques arise, but the problems
of rendering built forms in a physical
universe remain ever the same.
There may be dialectic conflict in architecture's
forward march, but there is
no absolute standpoint at its end.
Nevertheless, Filler's inclusiveness
creates as many problems as it solves.
If we abandon the standard progress-ofstyles
narrative, what arises in its place?
Despite some effort to remain cool and
focused on the work itself, Filler cannot
resist a bit of alternative mythmaking
and some of the insider's arrogance
that is unfortunately typical of
the architecture profession (though as
a critic he already occupies an outer
Concert Hall, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe © The Museum of Modern Art, New
York City/Art Resource/ARS/SCALA; La Cite Radieuse, by Le Corbusier
© Giraudon/ ADAGP, Paris/FLC/ Art Resource/ ARS
circle). For him, the chief fallacy in
laypersons' talk about architecture is
the identification of modernism tout
court with one of its less fortunate offshoots,
the familiar International
Style-which happens to be the very
identification that Glazer accepts as a
premise of social critique.
The term "International Style" was
coined by Alfred Barr, founding director
of the Museum of Modem Art, but
it was made popular, and eventually
canonical, by a 1932 exhibition at
MoMA organized by Philip Johnson
and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. More
than just the talk of the town, the show
established the agenda of modem architecture
for decades to come, including
both masterworks and disasters. Mies, Le
Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright were
all included (Wright later withdrew, allegedly
claiming his work was not featured
prominently enough), and because
there was little attempt to reconcile the
differences between the European vision,
especially Le Corbusier's expansive
social conscience, and the American
emphasis on practicality, the
emergent style was a volatile distillate of
divergent programs.
Style has always been a bad word in
architecture, suggesting either a lack
of imagination or a susceptibility to
replication, or both. In the MoMA exhibition,
style was boldly celebrated as
the essence of the art, and modem architecture
was instantly reduced to a
single branch of its family tree. Revolutionary
modernism had been born in
1923 with the publication of Le Corbusier's
Vers une architecture, the most
innovative book on architecture since
the Renaissance, which defined a hu-
REVIEWS 85
mane rationalism far more subtle than
the boxy sameness to come, deftly defending
the idea of the "regulating line"
in all great buildings, ancient and modem.
Le Corbusier praised the timeless
geometric beauty of the golden section,
the same proportions that had
excited everyone from Vitruvius to the
realist landscape painters of the Italian
Renaissance. "There exists one
thing which can ravish us, and this is
measure or scale," Le Corbusier wrote.
"To achieve scale! To map out in
rhythmical quantities, animated by an
even impulse, to bring life into the
whole by means of a unifying and subtle
relationship, to balance, to resolve the
equation." But thanks to Johnson and
his opportunistic cronies, Filler suggests,
this beautiful vision was defiled
less than a decade later-indeed, just a
year after the English translation was
published-reduced from grand longing
to empty template.
To be fair, Le Corbusier himself was
somewhat vague about style. He at
once declared it dead and demanded it
be reborn along the functional lines
of the airplanes, automobiles, and
steam liners he so admired. But with
the International Style now conflated
with modernism, soon set to colonize
the planet's urban spaces, confusion
reigned among architects. Thus, instead
of a teleological model of creative
progress, Filler offers a chaotic
mind map of modernism, with the International
Style an immovable blob
(or slab) at the center and, around it,
a constellation of reactive satellitesbiomorphism,
nco-ornamental kitsch,
computer-generated anti-building,
sculptural overstatement, and so onfighting
for the recognition, and the
money, that allows the architect to
practice his art. Whereas Glazer is concerned
with a political narrative, Filler
is a devoted aesthete in search of creative
heroes and copycat knaves.
johnson emerges as the archvillain
of the drama, an unrepentant scoundrel
with early ties to Father Coughlin and
the Nazis ("all those blond boys in
black leather," to quote johnson's comments
to his biographer), followed by
a stint coattailing the far more talented
Mies, and then a long toxic endgame
in which johnson naughtily championed
whatever style or counter-style
seemed to have the biggest wind behind
86 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2007
it. MaMA is, moreover, the wicked
pavilion in which johnson was able
to exert his poisonous influence, first as
a curator and later as an influential
trustee. The 1932 exhibition was just
the beginning of a series of group shows
and retrospectives that, in Filler's view,
allowed johnson to continue defining
the trajectory of American architecture
through the rest of the twentieth
century. johnson died in 2005 at the
age of ninety-eight, an evil magician finally
brought down by a neglectful
reaper, who, Filler comes close to suggesting,
ought to have attended to the
business sooner.
According to Filler, johnson was "a
born salesman and glib improviser,"
"deeply superficial" and "bored easily,"
who produced designs that were, variously,
"sorry," "hollow," "offensive," "appalling,"
and "bordered on outright thievery."
His "undisguised pleasure in
perversity" is the one constant in a fadfollowing
life spent switching styles at
whim, making johnson "the magpie of
Modernism," a man "symptomatic of
the poverty of American civic culture in
the late twentieth century." A few others
get similar, smoothly phrased drubbings:
Richard Meier ("limited powers
of invention"), WTC designer Minoru
Yamasaki" ("fleetingly fashionable"),
MoMA renovator Yoshio Taniguchi
("much-disparaged"), not to mention
New Yorker architecture critic Paul
Goldberger, whose book on the Ground
Zero reconstruction "lacked a discernible
moral character," continuing
the "maddening equivocation" of his reviews
and revealing his "essential complicity"
with the financial heavyweights
dominating the project.
Aside from the demonizing and
score-settling, Filler wants ardently to
avoid the reductionism so typical of
discussions of modem architecture.
His refusal to endorse the standard
view that modernism is synonymous
with the brief moment of the International
Style, as if modem art were reducible
to abstract expressionism, immediately
disarms common criticisms,
such as Glazer's, that modernist architecture
is cold and inhumane. More
important, it invites a larger aesthetic
embrace of the past century's building
innovations. And yet, the refusal
fails to account for the loss of political
charge in architecture that is a main
concern even among friends of modernism.
How did style-of whatever
kind, by whatever name-become so
important, to the detriment of the reformist
principles that had animated
the movement at the beginning?
The current stars of architecture,
whether we or they call themselves
"modem," appear to be far more interested
in signature gestures and exalted
status as conceptual artists than
in the passe social engineering of a
century ago. Indeed, probably never
before in the history of what Filler likes
to call "the building art" have its leading
lights seen themselves so emphatically
as artists first and builders second.
This is not always deplorable: Frank
Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
has survived both a massive hype-storm
and a predictable backlash to secure
its position as perhaps the only genuine
masterpiece of late-twentiethcentury
architecture. Lesser talents,
often with bigger egos, have fared more
poorly. Daniel Libeskind's jewish Museum
in Berlin, a notable success, was
followed by lackluster projects in Denver
and Toronto, plus an embarrassing
failure as part of the World Trade Center
reconstruction, when he was outmaneuvered
by David Childs, a slick
operator whom Filler likens to the feckless
Peter Keating in The Fountainhecul.
Santiago Calatrava, despite his
formidable command of structural beauty,
has yet to produce a work as stunning
as Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal
at jFK in New York or Dulles International
Airport in Chantilly, Virginia.
(A planned Calatrava spire for the
Chicago waterfront has been delayed,
and, in any event, the design is disappointing,
being little more than a twisted
version of a standard pyramidal tower.)
The architect-as-sculptor may be
the logical outcome of one reaction to
modernism's doldrums, but it is not at
all clear who the beneficiaries are, apart
from the architects themselves.
Whom, then, should architecture
serve? Hannah Arendt,
rare among political theorists
for her interest in the built environment,
called architecture "the space
of appearances" and argued plausibly
that, because it provided the canvas
for all social life, it was essentially political.
Certainly no other fact of everyday
life is as inescapable. You can tum
off a television or a computer, avoid
cash transactions, even stifle advertising's
constant blare; but you cannot
avoid being in the fabric of your place.
Architecture, alone among the arts, is
inescapable. It is also persistent, existing
in time more than in space. And
yet, most of us have little,
if any, influence on how
it is made. It is no wonder
that the most common pejorative
verb used about
architecture is "foist."
People's choice awardsand
community review boards
aside, most of the architecture
that surrounds us
is simply there whether we
like it or not.
The artist Frank Stella
has famously rejected the
idea that architecture is an
art form, since it includes
functionality among its
aims, but it is hard to
maintain that position when so much
of the movement of architecture precisely
mirrors that of the art world.
Styles and stars come and go, trends
are announced and denounced, sometimes
simultaneously, and the sublime
mysteries of aesthetic genius are everywhere
celebrated. The upside is a potential
for great civic beauty and even,
sometimes, the social change craved
by the early modernist reformers. The
downside is ugliness, clutter, enervation,
and heedless destruction of the
old in favor of the novel. Great cities,
opponents of planning like tosay, are
grown rather than built, implying that
there is a kind of mysteryin the process;
certainly it is true that big plans have
often done more harm than good.
Glazer wrings his hands about these
issues,touching down here and there to
denounce the elitism of modem architecture
and modem art, which he tends
to lump together. Richard Serra's controversial
Tilted Arc, which dominated
a plaza among federal buildings in lower
Manhattan, comes in for particularly
heavy fire, presumably because it is a
fusion of the two: installation art as a
kind of architecture. Glazer favors the
adjectives"farout," "wild,"and "radical"
forschemesthat seem to him to defyhuman
scale or the accepted urban vernacular.
He would surely be baffled by
the warm reception given to Serra's
recent MoMA retrospective, which
shows the artist to possess a command
of space and materials that any classical
architect would envy. Like Jane
Jacobs before him, Glazer holds a thoroughly
normative position about city
life that masquerades as mere common
sense; it is not so much defended as
revealed through counter-punching.
What he likes is what the people like,
whether the people know it or not,
and what the people don't like is modern
architecture.
Glazer is a sociologist, not an architect
or even an architecture critic,
so his aesthetic judgments will provide
easy targets for dismissive professionals.
But that fact is actually part of
the problem he is trying gamely, if
awkwardly, to address.When arrogant
architects insulate themselves from
criticism by adopting the refined disdain
of conceptual artists, what hope
is there for an architecture of social
change? The trouble is that neither
Filler, with his combination of quasiacademic
detachment and critical savagery,
nor Glazer, with his activist's
righteous anger and hearty lack of pretension,
can resolve the complex of
paradoxes that wreathe the issue.
Why is it, Glazer wonders, that it
took Prince Charles, the very embodiment
of elitism by birth, to speak up
for the people of England against the
depredations of modem architecture?
This is not a mystery to anyone who
has lived in Britain and felt the deep
consonance between "ordinary" subjects
and the Barbour-and-wellies banality
of the Windsors. High and low
Chapel Notre-Darue-du-Haut, by Le Corbusier © AKG Images/Stefan Drechsel
alike fear the intellectual challenge of
genuine innovation, especially anything
experimental. Verdict: the familiar
(nee-Gothic, Victorian red
brick) is good; the unfamiliar (aggressive
modernism) is bad.
On occasion, however, 'it does take
a prince. Many if not most of the
world's best buildings have
been erected not through
popular choice but by central
power, sometimes
concentrated in a single
man. Architecture is the
most collaborative of the
applied arts, but it cannot
be done, or done well, by
committee (see the ongoing
fiasco of the WTC reconstruction).
Success often
comes from ignoring
public desires in favor of a
singular vision that just
might benefit the public.
The people, meanwhile,
simply want what they
want. That is, their desires are their
desires;in themselves they mean nothing,
and mostly they cannot be predicted
or, still less likely, programmed.
Great architecture educates desires; it
does not pander to existing ones.
Thus the vision trap. Even modestly
talented practitioners such as
Libeskind can, with a few lucky commissions,
find themselves on top of
the media world-only to be dropped
just as fast. Filler notes that Libeskind's
2004 autobiography, Breaking
Ground, with its "unmitigated selfregard
coupled with a stunning lack of
self-awareness" is likely to be "an enduring
camp classic." Rem Koolhaas,
the most mercurial of the current star
crop, has repeatedly denounced the
West, in particular New York, for its
petty constraints on his vision. He
prefers to build in the hyper-capitalist
hothouse of China, where a combination
of central authority, deep
pockets, and no regard for environmental
niceties made possible his arresting
CCTV Building in Beijing, a
structure impossible to imagine in
North America.
The more urgent question is
whether architecture should be
part of a larger urban vision.
Early modernist planners thought they
REVIEWS 87
could create whole neighborhoods, even
whole cities, that would hasten democratic
change and improve the quality
of life. The results, when attempted,
often had the opposite effect: for every
park created by Robert Moses, that
much derided draconian master-planner
of New York, there is a brutal concrete
overpass. And planners are frequently
just wrong. The ambitious 1969 Manhattan
city plan, with its laudable hatred
of car traffic and machined-slab
office towers, now reads like an old issue
of Amazing Stories: "It is assumed
that new technology will be enlisted in
this improved transportation system,
including transit powered by gravity
and vacuum and mechanical aids to
pedestrian movement, such as moving
belts or quick-access shuttle vehicles.
These devices almost surely will become
available by the end of the century
to meet the demand of the most influential
business center in the world."
While we're at it, where the hell is my
jetpack? Nor are planners always on
the people's side. Baron Haussmann's
beloved redesign of Paris, with the spiraling
arrondissement system and broad
boulevards, was also a comprehensive
military plan to level guerrilla-friendly
warrens in favor of the state's cavalry.
He could not have predicted that, after
a hundred years of de facto racial segregation,
the expansive banlieues at the
edge of the same city would prove the
best place to riot in 2005.
Glazer, like many citizens, wants architecture
to enhance urban life and,
ultimately, the'democratic practices of
the nation. Grand public buildings,
restful and lively public spaces, a balance
of privacy and the common
good-architecture can provide all of
these. But the more it tries, the greater
the risk that the project will backfire.
Architects, moved by innovative design
and the new liberty of materials, lose
the social ambitions of their forebears
and become ensnared in thickets of individual
self-expression and competing
styles. They strive for signature
buildings, the kind that elevate a modest
practitioner from mere servant of his
clients' wishes into an international
celebrity and Pritzker Prize laureate.
At that point, the architect really is
an artist-everyone tells him so--and
the notion of social service is unthinkable
because it is directly contra-
88 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2007
dieted by the outsider ambitions and
tortured-genius mythology of all modem
art. The affairs, alcoholism, and
trademark clothing all follow, with Issey
Miyake black and kooky eyeglasses
"as carefully thought out," to use
Filler's words, "as Wright's anachronistic
presentation of himself as a caped
Aesthetic Movement dandy or Le Corbusier's
droll impersonation of a bowlerhatted
Magrittian bourgeois."
In this sense, Glazer is right to link
modernism in architecture with modernism
in art, though his insights on
the subject are clunky. He laments the
decline "from meaning to muteness" in
public monuments, noting sadly that
Lewis Mumford's pronouncement has
come true: "If it is a monument it is not
modem, and if it is modem, it cannot
be a monument." Mocking Serra's farout
desire to "subvert the context" of
a public installation, he denounces the
tendency of modem art to become selfreferential,
elitist, theoretical, rebarbative,
and antidemocratic. Serra's "is
an understandable point of view,"
Glazer writes, clearly thinking the opposite,
"but it is not, I would argue,
legitimate for public art, whose very
point is to symbolize common values,
common concerns, yes, a common political
system." Late modem architecture,
taking its cue from the art world
and the academy, retains the alienation
effect of Marxist theory but loses
the commitment to social reform.
"The theories in favor today among
advanced architectural theorists and
students are those that emphasize, indeed
celebrate, breakdown in society
and meaning, often in obscure and contradictory
language." Glazer, lonely coauthor
of The Lonely Crowd, is pained
that failures in urban planning should
have driven architects into this culde-
sac. Stay the course, form-makers!
The people's utopia still beckons!
For better or worse, this is a call
that will likely go unheeded.
These writers ultimately agree,
Filler with qualified aesthetic admiration
and Glazer with dismay, that recent architecture
has become both a starmaking
machine and a forum for massive
signature sculptures: touristfriendly
monuments that too often
leach funds away from other, less spectacular
projects such as public housing.
This trend will pass, if it hasn't already,
but the utopian imaginings of early
modernism seem decisively lost. Besides,
those desires were always
overblown, however attractive. Architecture
is political, as all public things
are, but architecture itself is not politics.
We citizens must conduct the business
of sifting among our built forms and
public spaces for the ideas and interactions
that may make for a thriving society.
Nobody can do the work of
democracy for us.
"A plan proceeds from within to without,
for a house or a palace is an organism
comparable to a living being," Le
Corbusier concluded in Vers une architecture.
He used an even more delicate
metaphor in the next paragraph: "A
building is like a soap bubble. This bubble
is perfect and harmonious if the
breath has been evenly distributed and
regulated from the inside. The exterior
is the result of an interior." Aliving being,
a soap bubble: these are not the images
we expect from the machine-forliving
man. More practically, many of
the most successful contemporary architects
no longer seem to take such
claims to heart. Monumental-conceptual
architecture is designed from the outside
in, with sketches on napkins or flashy
computer-imaging systems. At its far
end, modernism has realized one ambition
of its most aggressive proponents:
finally, people are an afterthought. The
world is the ultimate Super City toy
kit, and we are not included.
Each age gets the architecture it deserves,
and ours is an age of transnational
capital, steep inequalities in
wealth, and runaway narcissism. But
perhaps it is not too much to hope that,
in the generation currently at study,
there can be found new prophets of design,
architects who combine classical
norms with sustainable energy, an organic
materials palette, and, who knows;
maybe something as outlandish as inflatable
or underwater housing. The possibilities
of environmental architecture
are just as exhilarating as the dreams
inspired by concrete and steel. Modem
architecture does not end; it mutates. It
does not change the world; it reveals it.
At their best, these mutations are humane,
useful, and beautiful. Commodity,
firmness, and delight may be the old
answer; ever reconsidered and repurposed,
it is still the right one.
