After Modern
ism
Architectural modernism rejected the principles that had guided those who built the great cities of Europe. It rejected all attempts to adapt the language of the past, whether Greek, Roman, or Gothic: it rejected the classical orders, columns, architraves, and moldings; it rejected the street as the primary public space and the facade as the public aspect of a building. Modernism rejected all this not because it had any well-thought-out alternative but because it was intent on overthrowing the social order that these things represented—the order of the bourgeois city as a place of commerce, domesticity, ambition, and the common pursuit of style.
Modernism in architecture was more a social than an aesthetic project. Le Corbusier, the Russian constructivists, and Hannes Meyer when director of the Bauhaus claimed to be architectural thinkers: but the paltriness of what they said about architecture (compared with what had been said by the Gothic and classical revivalists, for example) reveals this claim to be empty. They were social and political activists who wished to squeeze the disorderly human material that constitutes a city into a socialist straitjacket. Architecture, for them, was one part of a new and all-comprehending system of control.
Of course, they didn't call it
control: socialists never do. Le Corbusier's project to demolish all of Paris
north of the Seine and replace it with high-rise towers of glass was supposed
to be an emancipation, a liberation from the old constraints of urban living.
Those dirty, promiscuous streets were to give way to grass and trees—open
spaces where the New Socialist Man, released from the hygienic glass bottle
where he was stored by night, could walk in the sunshine and be alone with
himself. Le Corbusier never asked himself whether people wanted to live like
this, nor did he care what method would transport them to their new utopia.
History (as understood by the modernist project) required them to be there, and
that was that.
Classical and Gothic buildings spoke
of another age, in which glory, honor, and authority stood proudly and without
self-mockery in the street.
We could no longer use their styles
and materials sincerely, the modernists argued, since nobody believed in those
old ideals. The modern age was an age without heroes, without glory, without
public tribute to anything higher or more dignified than the common man.
It needed an architecture that would
reflect its moral vision of an equal and classless society from which
hierarchies had disappeared. Hence it needed an architecture without ornament
or any other pretense to a grandeur that no living human being could emulate,
an architecture that used modern materials to create a modern world. The key
words of this new architecture were "honesty" and
"function." By being honest, modern architects implied, buildings
could help us to become so. The new city of glass, concrete, and parkland would
be a city without social pretense, where people would live in exemplary
uniformity and be rewarded with equal respect.
This social agenda meant that
architectural modernism was not an experiment but a crusade. It regarded those
opposed to it as enemies, members of a priesthood of pretense to be removed as
soon as possible from positions of influence and power. When the German art
historian Niklaus Pevsner and the Russian constructivist architect Berthold
Lubetkin brought the crusade to London, they set up shop as legislators,
condemning everything that was not conceived as a radical break with the past.
Both were traveling as refugees from modernism of the political variety—Nazism
in Pevsner's case, communism in Lubetkin's—creeds that, like modernism in
architecture, preferred elites to people and social control to spontaneous
order. These two brought with them the censorious dreariness of the regimes
they fled. Nothing was more loathsome in their eyes than the would-be
enchantment of a Victorian Gothic bank or a neoclassical school. To Pevsner,
Arthur Street's great Gothic law courts—the centerpiece of London's legal
quarter and a fitting symbol of common-law justice and its daily work of
reconciliation—were mediocre buildings of no consequence, whose fairy-tale
pinnacles and marble columns were neither uplifting nor cheerful but merely
insincere. By contrast, the Underground station at Arnos Grove, with its plain
wrapped brickwork and its grim metal-frame windows, was a portent of a better
future world, in which modern life would be honestly portrayed and openly
accepted.
For many people, the best thing about
modernist music is that you don't have to listen to it, just as you don't have
to read modernist literature or go to exhibitions of modernist painting.
Architecture, however, is unavoidable. It is not a transaction between
consenting adults in private, but a public display. The modernists nevertheless
conceived design in terms appropriate to the intimate arts of music,
literature, and painting. Their buildings were to be individual creative acts,
which would challenge the old order of architecture and defy the tired
imperatives of worn-out styles. Modernism's egalitarian mission could be
accomplished only by a daring elite, who built without respect for the
tradition of popular taste—indeed, without respect for anything save their own
redeeming genius. The paradox here is exactly that of revolutionary politics:
human equality is to be achieved by an elite to whom all is permitted,
including the coercion of the rest of us.
Most users of a building are not clients
of the architect. They are passersby, neighbors: those whose horizon is invaded
and whose sense of home is affected by this new intrusion. The failure of
modernism lies not in the fact that it produced no great or beautiful
buildings—Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp and the houses of Frank Lloyd
Wright prove the opposite. It lies in the absence of any reliable patterns or
types that can harmonize spontaneously with the existing urban decor, retaining
the essence of the street as a common home.
The degradation of our cities is the
result of a "modernist vernacular," whose principal device is the
stack of horizontal layers, with jutting and obtrusive corners, built without
consideration for the street, without a coherent facade, and without intelligible
relation to its neighbors. Although this vernacular has repeatable components,
they are not conceived as parts of a grammar, each part answerable to each and
subject to the overarching discipline of the townscape. The components are
items in a brochure rather than words in a dictionary.
The old architectural pattern books
did not offer gadgets and structures. They offered matching shapes, moldings,
and ornaments: forms that had pleased and harmonized, and that could be relied
upon not to spoil or degrade the streets in which they were placed. New York
used them to great effect, and even now they could be used to restore the
civility of damaged neighborhoods. The only obstacle is the vast machine of
patronage that puts architects, rather than the public, at the head of every
building scheme.
Although history can show great
architectural projects and great architects who have succeeded in them, both
are exceptions. We build because we need to, and for a purpose. Most builders
have no special talent and no high artistic ideals. Aesthetic values are
important to them not because they have something special or entrancing to
communicate but because they need to fit their buildings into a preexisting
fabric. Hence modesty, repeatability, and rule-guidedness are vital
architectural resources. Style ought to be defined so that anyone, however
uninspired, can make good use of it and add thereby to the public dwelling
space that is our common possession. That is why the most successful period of
urban architecture—the period that envisaged and developed real and lasting
towns of great size—was the period of the classical vernacular, when pattern
books guided people who had not fallen prey to the illusion of their own
genius. Routine styles and standardized parts perpetuate the gestures that have
won general approval and help us to employ them again without offense.
In American cities, we can still
witness the effect of the pattern books (such as that published by Asher
Benjamin in Boston around 1800). Whole areas of agreeable and unpretentious
dwellings, whose architects are no longer remembered and perhaps no longer even
identifiable, have escaped demolition on grounds of the charm imparted by their
syntax: Beacon Hill and the Back Bay area of Boston, Greenwich Village, the
Upper East Side, much of Brooklyn, and the terraced streets of Harlem are
well-known examples. Pattern-book housing of this kind bears the mark of
civilization, even when it has degenerated into a slum. It needs only private
ownership and the prospect of social and economic security for the population
to respond to the call of their surroundings and once again to take pride in
them. Hence these neighborhoods can rise again, like the fragments of London's
East End and docklands that were not demolished after the war and are now
islands of civility in a sea of arrogance. The modernist housing project, built
on the model recommended by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus, never rises from its
inevitable decline. When the high-rises and their barren surroundings become
areas of "social deprivation"—and it usually happens within 20
years—there is no solution to the problem except dynamite.
This is not to argue that creativity
and imagination have no place in architecture. On the contrary. Pattern-book
architecture is possible only because of the intellectual and artistic labor
that made the patterns. Some of this labor was collective—a far-reaching
activity of trial and error, leading to easily managed designs. But just as
important as this collective labor has been the individual inspiration that
conjures up new and living details, transforming our perception of form.
Stylistic breakthroughs create a vocabulary of dignifying details: Gothic
moldings, the classical orders, Palladian windows, Vignola-esque cornices. These
great artistic triumphs become types and patterns for the ordinary builder, and
the vernacular architecture of New York displays all of them. Our best bet in
architecture is that the artistic geniuses should invest their energy, as
Palladio did, in patterns that can be reproduced at will by the rest of us. For
the fact remains that most of the architecture that surrounds us is bound to be
second-rate, uninspired, and unspiring, and that its most important virtue will
be that of good manners.
That this is wholly unlike the
situation in the other arts should be obvious. In music, literature, and
painting, there are works of lasting value and others of merely mundane appeal.
The mundane examples quickly disappear from the canon and remain interesting
only to the scholars. In architecture, however, everything stays where it is,
troubling our perception and obstructing our view until something else replaces
it. In making innovation and experiment into the norm, while waging war against
ornament, detail, and the old vernaculars, modernism led to a spectacular loss
of knowledge among ordinary builders and to a pretension to originality in a
sphere where originality, except in the rare hands of genius, is a serious
threat to the surrounding order.
Because architecture is a practice
dominated by talentless people, manifestos and theories of the kind the
modernists proliferated are especially dangerous, for they excite people to be
bold and radical in circumstances where they should be modest and discreet. The
modernists discarded millennia of slowly accumulating common sense for the sake
of shallow prescriptions and totalitarian schemes. When architects began to
dislike the result, they ceased to be modernists and called themselves
postmodernists instead. But there is no evidence that they drew the right
conclusion from the collapse of modernism—namely, that modernism was a mistake.
Postmodernism is not an attempt to avoid mistakes, but an attempt to build in
such a way that the very concept of a mistake has no application.
Modernism was severe—it had to be,
since it was taking a stand against popular taste, hunting down kitsch and
cliché in their fetid lairs and dousing them with the cultural equivalent of
carbolic acid. Postmodernism announces itself as a liberation; its aim is not
to take the side of high culture against kitsch but to play with both of them.
Postmodernist art is nonjudgmental: at home with affluence, advertising, and
mass production, as tolerant of popular taste as of the modernist contempt for it.
We are living beyond judgment, beyond value, beyond objectivity—so the
postmodernist movement tells us. We are not in the business of forbidding
things but rather of permitting them.
It turns out, however, that everything
is permitted except the thing we most need: a return to the centuries-old
conception of architecture as a practice bound by publicly accepted rules. The
postmodernists ruled this out of court as much as their censorious modernist
predecessors did. Any return to the values of the classical vernacular, with
its emphasis on the street and the facade, is branded a betrayal of history, a
retreat into "nostalgia," and in any case no better than pastiche.
That argument, more or less diluted by
fashionable relativism, is the reigning orthodoxy of the schools of
architecture and the machine of public patronage. Hence the way to win
commissions is not to propose a building that will fit into its place as though
it had always stood there and be as unnoticeable as good manners require but
rather to invent something outrageous, insolent, and unignorable.
Following the stern cast-concrete
forms of modernism, therefore, has appeared a new kind of flamboyant building:
brightly colored girders exposed to view, tubes and wires rioting over the
surface, ornaments stuck anyhow onto surfaces of transparent Lucite or
shimmering tiles. The effect shows a freedom from constraint that reminds you
why constraints are a good idea. At its most aggressive—and it is usually
aggressive—it may involve the deliberate "deconstruction" of the
forms and values of the classical tradition, in the manner of Bernard Tschumi's
student center at Columbia or of the monstrous yet culpably vague designs by
Peter Eisenman for the redevelopment of the West Side of New York. If a justification
is required, then the project will be backed up with pretentious gobbledygook
in the style of Eisenman, offering concepts and theories and abstract ideas in
the place of visual logic.
Britain's reigning postmodernist
panjandrum is Richard Rogers (now Lord Rogers)—the architect who, together with
the modernist Norman Foster (now Lord Foster), receives all the important
commissions and sits on all the important committees. Rogers belongs to the
generation of postwar architects trained in modernist rhetoric, who were taught
very little about style and everything about public relations. Recognizing the
public hostility to modernism, many of these architects have hastened to
declare modernism officially dead and to welcome the new era of freedom of which
they are the champions.
Rogers made his reputation in
partnership with Renzo Piano at the Centre Beaubourg in Paris. This cultural
center and exhibition hall is like a demented child's model of a spaceship,
dumped inexplicably in the city. True to the postmodernist spirit, it is
decorated with functionless tubes and scaffolding, whose decorative effect
depends upon being perceived as functional, like the chrome-plated exhaust of a
racing car. Its colors are not those of the materials used to build it but of
the paints that disguise them. Its joints and load-bearing parts are concealed,
and nothing is really visible that is not surface. It is a slap in the face to
the modernist principles of honesty, truth to materials, and functional
transparency. In this respect, you might very well be taken in by Rogers's
claim that modernism is a thing of the past.
In fact, however, the Centre Beaubourg
is the first real triumph in Paris of the modernist idea. It is a step toward
achieving Le Corbusier's goal of razing the city to the ground. The Centre
Beaubourg required the demolition of a vast and beautiful tract of stone-built
classical vernacular and the imposition of a recreational purpose on what had
previously been a living quartier of the city. The project was guided by a
social vision—namely, to exchange the quiet, self-sustaining life of bourgeois
Paris for a fast-moving, multimedia "happening" that would be
maximally offensive to bourgeois values. Its loud colors and in-your-face
externals, its shape, size, and materials—above all, its windowless and
doorless sides, which warn you away with metallic imperviousness—all these are
signs of a profoundly motivated effrontery, a desire to uproot and disenchant
the domestic life of one of the world's greatest cities and to replace both
work and home with an undisciplined playground.
This is not the socialist project, and
we are in one sense a long way from the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. The modernist
program focused on work, discipline, and the regimented life of the new
proletariat: Le Corbusier's definition of a house as a "machine for living"
says more about his conception of life than his ideal of architecture. Life,
for the modernists, was all work and no play, with just an occasional stroll
outside for hygienic reasons. The Centre Beaubourg is a celebration of play,
randomness, and indiscipline. It is a machine for playing, and the machinery is
part of the joke.
Nevertheless, there is a sense in
which we are in the same aesthetic territory as the modernists. For this
architectural enterprise has no meaning apart from the social experiment of which
it is the vehicle. The assumption of originality is the perfect and ready-made
excuse for an insolence that is socially and politically motivated. Although Le
Corbusier could have designed his fantasy city for some green-field site, he
expressly insisted on Paris. Revolutionary projects aim at the destruction of
existing things, and the future "alternative" is always as vague as a
drawing by Peter Eisenman. Likewise, the Centre Beaubourg could have been built
anywhere, but in that case it would have lost its point. The real goal was to
wipe away the history of the city and to plant in the midst of bourgeois Paris
the seeds of the anti-bourgeois revolution. The Centre was President Pompidou's
idea, and he conceived it as a way of announcing to the world that he was, in
the last analysis, on the side of history and a friend of the anti-culture of
1968. This was the message that motivated him in choosing the outrageous
designs of Piano and Rogers.
T
he postmodernist project has also
visited London with the same effect. Perhaps the most impressive symbol of the
old city of London and its institutions was the insurance company of Lloyd's.
This began life in 1668, among the club of merchants who were in the habit of
meeting at the Edward Lloyd Coffee House and who decided to establish an
institution with which to protect one another from bankruptcy. English
commercial enterprise relied upon bonds of honor that fell critically short of
intimacy and could therefore be extended far and wide through the world of strangers.
Hence institutions like Lloyd's could appeal for capital from outside the
community of city traders. The "names" who provided this capital to
the underwriters were people of wealth and standing, who implicitly trusted
this institution run by gentlemen, and who thought nothing of placing their
entire possessions in the hands of a discreet and well-spoken stranger.
The underwriters treated the solid,
well-furnished building of Lloyd's as a clubhouse; they shrouded its routines
in mystery like the rituals of a church; and the old bell of the frigate Lutine,
captured from the French in 1793, sounded eerily through its hallway to
announce the loss or arrival of a strategic merchant vessel. It was the very
image of the safety that the English associated with their homeland, and its
well-bred investors somnolently assumed that such an institution would last
forever, an unsinkable rock amid the tides of misfortune that afflicted lesser
men. When a new board of directors decided to demolish the Victorian clubhouse
and erect a grotesque piece of postmodernist kitsch by Rogers in its place, the
"names" continued to dream in their country houses, unaware that the
bottom had fallen out of their world and that the proof of this was standing
now on top of it.
One glance at Rogers's building,
constructed at vast expense and functioning so badly that it is the subject of
continuous, expensive repair, ought to have awakened the "names" to
what had happened. This tower, ridiculous as architecture, is manifestly part
of a social project: it is an affront to the old conception of the city and a
harbinger of the new world of corporate finance—a vertical playground, with the
childish metalwork and intergalactic shapes familiar from the Centre Beaubourg
and transparent external elevators carrying the new breed of whiz kids high
above the streets of old London. It is a sign that seriousness and probity are
things of the past; from now on, everything is fun. And part of the fun will be
to deprive those trusting old gentlemen of their family fortunes.
Shortly after the erection of this
building, Lloyd's collapsed, the English squirearchy—heavily invested in
Lloyd's—faced ruin, and the city institutions joined the Church of England and
the Tory Party as things of the past. Richard Rogers, meanwhile, was knighted
and subsequently raised to the peerage by a Labour Party grateful for his
assaults on the old establishment and eager for his support in Parliament. In
this spirit, Prime Minister Blair's first attempt to confront the problem of
the inner cities, devastated by centrifugal development and modernist housing
schemes, was to appoint a commission on urban renewal, with Lord Rogers at the
head of it.
P
erhaps the culminating postmodernist
project has been the Millennium Dome, the Babylonian temple to Nothingness that
Rogers built down the river from London in Greenwich—again, nugatory as
architecture and eloquent as the expression of a social idea. Until very
recently, great public projects were designed to last. In the nineteenth century,
for instance, promoters of exhibition architecture, such as the Grand Palais
and Petit Palais in Paris, gave their buildings ceremonial and permanent
exteriors and conceived of them as celebrations of the city and its
achievements and contributions to the public life that would be lived in their
shadow. By contrast, the Millennium Dome's promoters conceived of it from the
beginning as temporary—a vast tent whose purpose would expire when sufficient
numbers had bought their tickets and wandered in baffled lines around its
exhibits. Void of all architectural signifiers, impressive, if at all, only as
a work of engineering, this fleeting visitor from another planet is part of the
same broad social program as the Centre Beaubourg—the program of disestablishing
the old culture of our cities and putting a fun-filled playground in its place.
Hence its very temporariness is
integral to its effect. Nothing endures, it tells us; nothing has meaning
beyond the moment. The exhibits match the architecture: the past of the
country, its institutions, monarchy, and religion, its imperial triumphs, its
achievements in war, and its leading role in the spread of law and
democracy—these are either reduced to insignificance or ignored. All is fun—but
fun with a vengeance. Visitors wander through a video arcade, as buskers and
steel bands try to whip up an excitement the exhibits could never inspire on
their own, glimpsing the very same images that they could obtain by twirling
the knobs on their televisions. Even the crowning exhibit—the body zone, in
which two humanoid creatures tower to the roof—finds nothing meaningful to say
about the human figure. All you are given is a lesson in pop physiology, with a
tour through the inner organs of a faceless ape, entering through the nether
regions, past pubic hair infested with lice.
The prime minister often refers to the
Dome as if he had ways of making us enjoy it; he has dismissed its critics as
lacking in patriotism, and he has piled more and more public money into
servicing the debt of a project that has so far attracted little attention. Nor
should we mistake the social agenda. The politically correct exhibits have one
overriding purpose: to flatten out the landscape of our national culture and to
put a bland, "inclusive" multiculture in its place. The project's
greatest box-office success to date was "Domosexual Day," when the
dome was packed with London's homosexuals, flooded with pink light from
outside, and filled with giggles within. In order to revive its flagging fortunes,
the Dome company has employed Pierre-Yves Gerbeau, former executive of
Disneyland Paris, to draw in the crowds. What was to have been a celebration of
Britain and its people for the millennium is now a Franco-American fun palace,
complete with ushers disguised as Coggsley and Sprinx—comic-strip characters in
supermarket colors—professional lowerers of the tone, who will perform the
function of Goofy and Donald Duck in Disneyland.
In the temple of the Dome, we
encounter what Joyce would call God's funferall. Many Englishmen view the sight
with revulsion. They recognize that cities are built, and civilizations
sustained, from the human need for permanence. The postmodernist project is an
attempt to deny that need—to deny it collectively, like the dance of the
Israelites around the Golden Calf. The frivolity of postmodernist architecture
is of a piece with its spiritual idolatry—its worship of the moment and its
refusal to be bound by any law. In the face of this, it seems not only that
modernism was a mistake but that postmodernism compounds the mistake, by
removing the one thing that might rectify it: the desire for permanence.
Y
ou could undo the work of modernism
tomorrow by a simple expedient: by abolishing all architects, equipping
builders with the pattern books that created Beacon Hill or Lower Manhattan,
and laying down regulations governing heights, depths, and street lines—in
other words, by returning to what was once standard practice. In this respect,
the message of the postmodernists is the old one: that we must always be new.
If modernism has failed, then the answer is not to retrace our steps, like
architects Quinlan Terry or Léon Krier, but to press on still further into the
anti-architecture of Eisenman or Tschumi or the kitsch monumentality of Rogers.
It is one of the marvels of the modern
world that human beings, having proceeded along a path that leads manifestly to
error, can yet not turn back but must always exhort themselves to go further in
the same direction. It is with modern architecture as it has been with
socialism, sexual liberation, and a thousand other modern fads: those who
defend them draw no other lesson from their failure than the thought that they
have not yet gone far enough. Our present need is not for the uncoordinated and
dislocated architecture that the postmodernists would wish on us but for an
architectural grammar that would permit talentless people once again to build
inoffensively. That is what the classical pattern books taught, and that is why
there was such a thing, before modernism came on the scene, as a serious
architectural education that could prepare ordinary human beings for the enormous
responsibilities involved in building the environment of strangers.
What is needed, in short, is not a
postmodernist but a premodernist architecture. And here and there this
architecture is beginning to emerge: Allan Greenberg's neoclassical court building
in Manchester, Connecticut (converted from a derelict modernist supermarket);
Greenberg's proposed new addition to the Decoration and Design Building on
Manhattan's Third Avenue; the Harold Washington Library in Chicago by Hammond,
Beeby and Babka; Robert Stern's Brooklyn Law School tower, which revives the
cheerfulness of the vernacular skyscraper—these and many other attempts point
us in the right direction, not forward but backward, to what had been lost.
Moreover, architects and critics are
now finding the words, and the confidence, to express the once-forbidden
thought that you can be modern without being modernist—that there can be an
architecture for our time that derives from permanent values rather than
ephemeral social projects, that gives new life to the grammar, and the search
for harmony and decorum, of the architecture of the past. Modernism is dead;
but classicism survived, as it has always survived. Last month there took place
in Bologna, sponsored by the city, the latest in a series of traveling
conferences devoted to classical architecture, showcasing modern but
premodernist buildings and allowing their architects to explain them to the
world. The purpose was to show that modernism was a mere ideology, as dead as
the totalitarian political projects whose inspiration it shared. And first
among the concerns of the architects who explained their work was to show how
we might undo the work of the modernists, encasing their buildings in classical
shells as Greenberg has done, veneering them with facades in the same spirit as
we veneer ourselves with politeness.
Maybe these are small beginnings. But
small beginnings are much to be preferred to enormous dead ends.
