22 March 1997
With permission of the author.
First published in arq, Vol 2: winter 1996, pp. 60-71.
history
James Marston Fitch
Beyer Blinder Belle
41 East 11 Street
New York
New York 10003 USA
This paper deals with a strange and isolated series of events at New York's Museum of Modern Art between 1966 and 1977, orchestrated by the Director of the Department of Architecture, the late Arthur Drexler. The events, which consisted of a series of books, exhibitions and catalogues, were all aimed at discrediting the Museum's own International Style and replacing it with Drexler's own special brand of eclectic post-modernism.
Modern architecture saw its Golden Age in America in the years 1960-1980. That period saw the appearance of a constellation of great buildings and landscapes that marked the true maturity of the style, such as Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles' Boston City Hall [Fig. 1], Harry Weese's Washington Metro rail stations, Saarinen's Dulles Airport in northern Virginia, Mies's Seagram Building and Kevin Roche's Ford Foundation Headquarters in New York, SOM's Equitable tower in Chicago, and Kahn's Salk Institute in La Jolla [see Fig. 11].
l. Part of a constellation of great buildings:
Boston City Hall by Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles, 1970.
2. Modern design triumphs at a residential level:
house at Santa Monica by Charles Eames, 1949.
3. One of two spectacular functional failures:
Richards Medical Research Building,
Philadelphia by Louis Kahn, 1961.
Modern design triumphed in the same period at the residential level in such great houses as those by William Wurster and his colleagues in the San Francisco Bay area, and those by Richard Neutra for the Tremaines in Santa Barbara and the Kaufmanns in Palm Springs. It was the period of the classic small modern house as well: Mies' house for Dr. Edith Farnsworth near Chicago, Philip Johnson's own Glass House in Connecticut, which so slavishly mimicked it, and Charles Eames' own elegant demonstration in Santa Monica of how to build a similar structure out of industrialised components [Fig. 2]. By the same token, this was the Golden Day of the modern landscape, from the private gardens of Dan Kiley in New England to those of Thomas Church in California, and the innovative social landscapes of Garrett Eckbo and Lawrence Halprin across the country.
But it was also the period that saw the spectacular functional failure of two of modernism's grandest constructs: Paul Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building at Yale and Louis Kahn's Richards Medical Research Building at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia [Fig. 3]. The wide use of unshaded fixed glass brought both of these beautiful buildings close to ecological disaster. Unfortunately, these were not isolated events. Such fundamental deficiencies were even then apparent to serious modern architects as they watched the steady drift of the style away from its functionalist origins towards increasingly formalistic ends (Fitch, 1972).
The most powerful ideological attacks on modernism were based not upon its functional shortcomings, but upon its alleged aesthetic deficiencies. And they came not from the public world but - of all improbable places - that citadel of modernism in art and architecture, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The attacks were launched in the form of a book, Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published by the Museum in 1966, and the Museum's exhibition and catalogue of 1975 and book of 1977, The Architecture of the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts.1 This move into such recondite areas of art history - for Venturi's paradigms for post-modernist practice were drawn almost exclusively from the Baroque and Rococo styles of the Counter Reformation - by the institution whose very existence had been based upon contemporaneous art deserves more critical attention than it has so far received. The more so because the moves were conceived and engineered by two of modernism's strongest ideologues within the museum: Philip Johnson and the late Arthur Drexler, who was then director of the Museum's Department of Architecture and Design.
The Museum had become an official sponsor of modern architecture ever since its first ground-breaking show on the subject, 'The International Style' in 1932, jointly curated by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson (Hitchcock and Johnson, 1932). Over the years, in a series of exhibitions and publications on the subject, it had fashioned itself into the ideological centre of modernism in architecture. The Museum sponsored the show that introduced the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to the American public in 1947, with Johnson as curator and author of the handsome catalogue (Johnson, 1947). In 1952, it staged another important show, 'Built in the USA: Post-War Architecture', dedicated to 'the great post-war flowering of architecture in this country which is so obvious around us'. Johnson, who wrote the preface to the catalogue, was able to say flatly that 'the battle of modern architecture has long been won ... with the mid-century, modern architecture has come of age' (Johnson, 1960). In 1960, Drexler published his own monograph on Mies, which concluded with this glowing assessment of the man's work:
'The measure of Mies' authority is this: it no longer seems possible to rebel against the Miesian discipline except in Miesian terms: the alternatives to his philosophy are themselves based on the design structure. With Mies architecture leaves childhood behind.' (Drexler, 1960)
Nevertheless, even in this Mies biography, Drexler was already voicing private reservations about modernism:
'Architects have been increasingly dissatisfied with the tight range of forms made possible by skeleton construction. They have sought especially to renew and amplify values of plastic form ... through the expressive elaboration of individual structural elements.' (Drexler, 1960)
The first reactionary thrust of the Museum against the ideology of modernism came in 1966 with its decision to publish Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. It was objectively a sharp attack on modernism, for the book was fundamentally a young man's plea for the freedom to do what he liked. And what he liked at the time was the Baroque and Rococo, the Mannerist styles of the princely courts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. It was a striking book, well-researched and abundantly illustrated, but its main arguments were for a pictorial architecture, with no interest in or knowledge of the functional and environmental aspects of the buildings the author was praising or condemning. In his foreword to the book, Drexler praised Venturi for the 'delight' he takes in exposing the 'reality' of modern architecture, 'especially in those recalcitrant aspects most architects would seek to suppress or disguise' (Drexler, 1966). Yet there was much suppression and evasion in Venturi's own critique, for example, of Mies' house for the Tugendhats [Fig. 4]:
'Modern architecture tends to reject inflection at all levels of scale. In the Tugendhat house no inflecting capital compromises the purity of the column's form ... Walls are inflected neither by bases nor cornices nor by structural reinforcements, such as quoins, at corners' (Venturi, 1966)
4. Unmentioned by Venturi:
Mies' brilliant exploitation of the Tugendhat House site, 1930.
This critique, while accurate in its own metaphysical way, is the equivalent of chiding the tiger for not bearing the markings of the tortoise. It suggests that Venturi was unaware of the long struggle of the modernists to dissolve the traditional building, to recompose it with flat slabs, screens and columns which met, intersected, and penetrated each other to create a new sort of space. This was the concept behind Mies' Brick Country House of 1922 and the basis for the famous similarity between the paintings of the De Stiil artist van Doesberg and the floor plans of the architect Rietveld's house for Mrs Schroeder in Utrecht (1924). And it was also, of course, at the heart of Wright's long battle 'to destroy the room as a box'.
But Venturi's position on the Tugendhat had other, much more serious flaws. It failed to understand Mies' brilliant exploitation of a challenging site: a plot which fell sharply down from the street towards an adjoining park to the south, and a three-storey house that stair-steps down the slope, giving every room in the house a southern exposure and completely private views. To optimise its resources, the Tugendhat living spaces had motorised glass walls that slipped down into pockets to open the rooms to the balmy summers and rose to cut out the cold Slovakian winters. It had been beautifully decorated by Mies with furniture of his own design. It boasted luxurious kitchens, pantries, and baths. To neglect to mention such amenities while harping on some missing mouldings suggests that Venturi had never seen the actual building, only photographs of it, and thus had failed to understand that it was that rare thing in architecture - a building that is both great and good. This was rare enough in any architect; remarkable in a formalist like Mies.
The sponsorship of Venturi's book by the museum, when he was still relatively unknown as a scholar or architect, suggests that his ideological posture had won strong support within the institution. The praise of an established figure like Vincent Scully, who wrote the introduction to the book, is also surprising, suggesting that Scully himself had abandoned the role of advocate for modernism that he had assumed in his book for the George Braziller series, Modern Architecture (1961). In his introduction to Venturi's book, Scully's tone is almost viperish:
'Venturi's ideas have so far stirred bitterest resentment among the more academic-minded of the Bauhaus generation - w th its utter lack of irony, its spinsterish disdain for the popular culture but shaky grasp on any other. its incapacity to deal with monumental scale, its lip service to technology, and its preoccupation with a rather prissy purist aesthetic.' (Scully, 1961)
Considering the fact that Venturi's subject was recondite and his argument dense, his book had astonishing success, precisely among architects themselves. It was to go into several printings. Scully was to write a new introduction for the second edition, and whatever one may think of Venturi's intellectual posture in this book or of the architecture that he has produced in the years since its publication, it is clear from the new introduction that Scully's view of himself had changed from that of being a moderator of history to becoming a monarch of taste.
'At this distance, I feel doubly honored to have been invited to write the original introduction, which now seems to me not so well written as the book itself (edited by Marian Scully), but embarrassingly correct in its conclusions. I am especially pleased to have had the wit to assert that Complexity and Contradiction was "the most important writing of the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture of 1923". Time has shown that this outrageous statement was nothing more than the unvarnished truth, and the critics who found it most amusing or infuriating at the moment now seem to spend a remarkable amount of energy quoting Venturi without acknowledgement, or chiding him for not going far enough, or showing that they themselves had really said it all long before. It doesn't matter much. What counts is that this brilliant, liberating book was published when it was. It provided architects and critics alike with more realistic and effective weapons, so that the breadth and relevance which the architectural dialogue has since achieved were largely initiated by it.' (Scully, 1977)
In the perspective of a quarter century, Venturi's strategy is very clear. In order to discredit modern architecture, he needed to ratify its antithesis. And what could be more antithetical to the rational, pro-democratic commitments and icon-free, structurally responsive forms of modernism than the aristocratic-theocratic bias and historicising ornamentalism of the Mannerist, Baroque, and Rococo periods? To his credit, Venturi was candid about his motivation:
'Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox modern architecture.' (Venturi, 1977)
And then, from the pulpit of the Museum of Modern Art, the very shrine of American modernism, this young counter-revolutionary gives us his credo:
'I like elements which are hybrid rather than "pure", compromising rather than "clean", distorted rather than "straightforward", ambiguous rather than "articulated", perverse as well as impersonal, conventional rather than "designed", accommodating rather than excluding ... inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. ' Venturi, 1977)
The long text which followed was densely argued and richly illustrated but it could not conceal the fact that all of his sweeping generalisations were based upon the crippling restrictions of his credo. It was limited to a narrow time-band of two centuries, roughly 1550-1770, to Western Europe out of the whole world geographically, and, of all the world's political systems, to the princely courts of the Counter-Reformation.
This keyhole view of architectural experience becomes obvious when one quantifies the buildings whose ambiguities and inconsistencies Venturi chooses to celebrate. He cites some 85 churches and monasteries, 30-odd castles and palaces, and 45 bourgeois houses, while one finds only a single bridge, two farm houses, four office buildings, four orphanages, four theatres, and seven banks. Thus the overwhelming majority of his models of complexity and contradiction were generated by the exigencies of those societies least likely to offer useful paradigms to modern American society. The ruling classes of those societies - clergy, royalty, aristocracy - had not confronted (indeed, could not confront) the basic tasks of modern productive society. These had been served by the anonymous, mundane activities of miller and miner, blacksmith and farmer, merchant and textile maker, which across the centuries they had invented and in which Venturi at that time found of too little interest to examine.
Considering the slashing nature of his attack on the modernists, the young architect (he was then 41) offered surprisingly few contemporaneous examples of what new course, actually, his colleagues should adopt. He had mild praise for a few modern buildings, largely because of idiosyncrasies in their plans or elevations: Wright's lovely little V. C. Morris Gift Shop in San Francisco, apparently because of the spiral ramp which devoured so much of its rectangular floor space; Alvar Aalto's high-rise apartment building in Bremen because its undulating facade concealed a fan-shaped layout of pie-shaped apartment units [Fig. 5] and Hans Scharoun's Philharmonic Hall in Berlin, its wildly free-form plan generated by an orthodox theatre nucleus that lacked conventional walls. The common denominator of these idiosyncratic choices seems to have been just that: their idiosyncrasy. Whether they would have performed better at any level, formal or functional, than their modernist prototypes is not even mentioned. Their selection seems to have been motivated by nothing more profound than 'a taste for contradiction in itself', as Drexler was to put in his book (1977) on the Beaux-Arts.
5. Accorded mild praise by Venturi:
Aalto's flats at Bremen with their fan-shaped plan and undulating facade,
1962.
6. The simplified gables and lunettes of post-modernist
Palladianism revealed:
Guild House, Philadelphia by Venturi and Rauch, 1966.
7. Walls manipulated as 'morally free' surfaces for idiosyncratic
ornament:
National Gallery Sainsbury Wing by Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, 1991.
8. A special brand of ornamentalism:
Seattle Art Museum by Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, 1991.
As a registered architect (as well as a civilised man), Venturi was compelled in his actual architecture, both before this book and in the three decades since, to restrain the preferences proclaimed in it for the hybrid, the compromising, the distorted, the ambiguous, the perverse and equivocal. That 'moral space' of freedom in which opulence and ornament could freely play, that Drexler demanded in his essay on the Beaux-Arts, could not include structure (or the integrity of the building would be at risk), nor functional layouts of corridors, stairways, or fire exits (or the life of the inhabitants would be in danger), nor mechanical equipment like airconditioning and lighting (or the comfort and health of the tenants would be jeopardised). Thus the only 'morally free' element of the post-modernist building would be its surfaces - in Venturi's subsequent buildings - and specifically, its walls. And it is precisely upon the manipulation of such surfaces that Venturi's ornamentalism would effloresce - in frescos and murals, sculpture, and fragments of historicising details.
Having so few prototypical examples of post-modernist architecture in the world outside, Venturi closed his polemic with a list of 14 of his own designs, six of them built. After so bold a challenge to the status quo, these Venturian designs were surprisingly timid and conventional. Most of them suggest fairly straightforward solutions to familiar problems, with use of his new-found ornamental freedoms. Two residences - one built and one proposed - show the now familiar simplified gables and lunettes of post-modernist Palladianism. The one large structure actually built, a senior citizen's housing project in Philadelphia [Fig. 6], is an essay in minimalism, a stripped-down version of the prototypical six-storey high-rise, so simplified here that the most banal detail, such as a single course of white-glazed brick, is treated as an ornamental triumph.
There is little hint of the special brand of ornamentalism that would later make Venturi's firm one of the country's most prestigious post-modernists (and Venturi winner of the coveted Pritzker Prize in 1991), with commissions such as the Sainsbury Wing of London's National Gallery [Fig. 7] and the Seattle Art Museum [Fig. 8]. In both buildings, he has manipulated the walls as 'morally free' surfaces on which he could inscribe idiosyncratic ornament. In the National Gallery, one finds a collage of architectural fragments scattered like disjecta membra of late Georgian and early Victorian London, while in Seattle, his walls are covered with paper-thin bas-reliefs so personal in their imagery as to be embarrassing to the casual observer.
As if aware of the limited applicability to American conditions of the architectural symbolism of the princes and prelates of the Baroque and Rococo, Venturi turned n 1972 to a totally new venue for another set of anti-modernist paradigms - the Nevada metropolis then known for its gambling, gangsters, and prostitution: Las Vegas. In his book Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Venturi celebrates the populist art and architecture of the Strip. For all its pretended objectivity, this work studiously avoids the complexity and contradictions of its subject matter: the environmental and cultural problems presented by a town located in one of the nation's harshest climates, whose principal industry was vice. In fact, neither condition is even mentioned in Learning from Las Vegas. Silence in the second case might, perhaps, be excused, though it still remains to be shown how the blatant vulgarity and shameless waste of Las Vegian ornamentalism could be helpful to the ordinary American community.
But to blandly ignore Las Vegas' profligacy of waste of energy is another matter altogether - especially if one remembers this whole project began as an experimental class in Yale's School of Art and Architecture in 1968. Las Vegas has a microclimate characterised by extremely high temperatures: daytime air temperatures regularly peak at 110 degrees Fahrenheit, while blacktop paving can show radiant readings of 145 degrees Fahrenheit and over. Yet, based upon photographic evidence only, taken from inside air-conditioned cars, the authors pronounce the Las Vegas Strip as being 'nearly all right'. Their advisory report Venturi et al, 1972) prepared for the Las Vegas Planning Commission is quoted as being 'against trees because they are too hard to maintain'.
In a final display of environmental illiteracy, the authors go on record as being against introducing 'lots of water and greenery because they raise the humidity'. Evidently these new enthusiasts for desert living had never heard of that standard document of air-conditioning engineering, the psychometric chart, which shows us that, in the very dry air of the desert, temperature drops sharply with each percentile increase in humidity. In any case, Venturi and his co-authors dismiss such basic ecological problems as irrelevant: 'high energy expenditure and urban wastefulness are not central to our arguments for symbolic architecture' - and nowhere do they even mention the problems of energy conservation again.
Two publications were produced by The Museum of Modern Art in connection with the Beaux-Arts exhibition: the 40-page illustrated catalogue, which appeared at the time of the show in the Fall of 1975, and the 525-page, heavily-illustrated text, The Architecture of the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts, which followed in 1977. The two texts served two discrete functions. One was to describe the institution and what it did; the other was to explain why the museum was engaged in such a recondite and unprecedented trip into the pre-modern past.
These two documents do not tell us who initially conceived of the project, but give us ample information on the persons who executed it. The editor, Arthur Drexler, was at the time Director of the Department of Architecture and Design. Associated with him were four art historians: Richard Chafee, Neil Levine, David Van Zanten, and the late Ann Van Zanten. Despite the subject, not one of the authors was an architect; the four historians all held doctorates in art history. Drexler was without formal training in either discipline - a circumstance not without irony in view of the subsequent impact that their study was to have upon architecture itself. And looming in the background was Philip Johnson, who had played a decisive, if shadowy, role in the museum's architectural activities for decades, including the design of its first and second modernist extensions along 53rd Street in 1950 and 1964 [Fig. 9].
9. Philip Johnson's second modernist extension to
Drexler's Museum of Modern Art, 1964.
10. Drexler's exemplar:
Un hotel a Paris pour un Riche Banquier
designed by a Beaux-Arts student.
Drexler's key role in the preparation and presentation of the Beaux-Arts project was anything but passive. In both catalogue and book, his hand is obvious and his intentions are made quite clear: the discreditation of modernism and its replacement by a kind of eclectic ornamentalism that is startlingly vague in its visual and intellectual aims. In his preface to the catalogue, the Director of the Museum's Department of Architecture and Design states his change of position quite unambiguously:
'Fifty years ago redemption through design good design - was the mystic hope hidden within the humane re-ordering of earthly things. Today, in architecture as in everything else, messianic fervour seems naive when it is not actually destructive.' (Drexler, 1975)
But he remains discreetly reserved as to why the Beaux-Arts, among all the historic styles available, should be the one to be considered uniquely appropriate for review:
'Now that modern experience so often contradicts modern faith we would be well advised to re-examine ... some Beaux-Arts problems, among them the quest on of how to use the past [which] may perhaps be seen now as possibilities that are liberating rather than constraining.' (Drexler, 1975)
It is in the extended essays of the book, with their lavish illustrations and lengthy captions, that the real intentions of the authors become apparent: implicit in the sheer scale of the talent lavished on the subject, explicit in the lead essay by Drexler, 'Engineer's Architecture: Truth and Its Consequences'. The historians' essays on the development of the Beaux-Arts as an institution are typical examples of American art-historical scholarship. But the captions for the show itself, as quoted in the catalogue, are mannered and claustrophobic. If a new and deepened perspective of historic process was the objective of the museum's new venture, there was little evidence of it in the show itself. Despite all the apparatus of scholarship, the text of the catalogue is hallucinatory in its a-historical perspective, in setting the background for 'La Belle Epoque', it explains that:
'Viollet-le-Duc, newly appointed Professor of the History of Art and Aesthetics, had to resign after repeated student disruption of his lectures. With the design and construction of the Paris Opera, and the implementation of Haussmann's plan for the city, students turned with renewed interest to the [Ecole's] tradition of brilliant planning and composition.' (Drexler 1977)
There is not the slightest clue to the reasons for Viollet-le-Duc's forced resignation - i. e. his controversial theories on how modern building had evolved from the caves and tree homes of prehistory and of his growing insistence that the new iron and glass constructions be given a new and candid expression in architecture. This lack of critical perception is typical of the entire catalogue. To illustrate the 'new' thinking of the students who had shouted Viollet-le-Duc off the rostrum, the authors present the thesis of one of them, Un Hotel a Paris pour un Riche Banquier. This presentation drawing [Fig. 10] shows a huge urban palace whose length would appear to be about that of the United States Capitol. The entire comment on the project reads thus:
'[the Town House] is urban in scale and it provides a triumphant solution to the problem of an irregular site by the device of two pivot-like round chambers that gather up the axes of the building at their inner angles ' (Drexler, 1975)
The level of critical penetration displayed in this caption is typical of the entire catalogue. This enormous palace for a nouveau riche banker to Napoleon III is located at the intersection of two of the new boulevards created by Baron Haussmann to prevent a recurrence of the barricades of the 1848 revolution and aimed at controlling the next one, which did occur in 1870, only four years after this beautiful drawing had been made.
Drexler's essay, 'Engineer's Architecture: Truth and its Consequences', is long and flowery, employing a series of analogies from art, poetry, drama, and philosophy whose polyphony often outruns their relevance to architecture. Obscure as it often seems, there is a central point to his argument and one to which he returns time and time again, in many guises: to discredit the fundamental thesis of modern architecture; namely the symbiotic connection between new form and new function.
Having to his satisfaction separated the two, he then advances the argument that functionality is neither desirable nor even necessary to architecture. Such a divorce permits him to 'liberate' architectural form for the untrammelled play of the imagination upon it, i. e. to ornamentalise it. This has a moral as well as an aesthetic impact with which Drexler must deal. He finds a handy quote from Picasso:
'Art is a lie, Picasso declared. "We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth ... The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies".' (Drexler, 1975)
Then, ignoring the vast experiential difference between the artist's painted form and the architect's built one, Drexler almost criminally misinterprets Picasso:
'The "lie" whereby architecture most readily convinces us of its "truth" is that form responds to necessity.' (Drexler, 1975)
Or, again:
'Architectural form is a fiction designed to reveal a truth.' (Drexler. 1975)
Having freed architectural form from any moral obligations to honesty in structural expression, Drexler then turns to simplicity, which, he discovers, is a trait not without its hazards:
'Simplicity, for example, connotes virtue in architecture as in life: probity, forethought, restraint, humility ... when the idea of simplicity takes the force of a moral injunction applied to the fashioning of buildings and artefacts, the avowed equation of simplicity with goodness obscures a less obvious connection: goodness is constraint: the ultimate good is the ultimate constraint; the ultimate good brings life to an end. Thus the Shaker community forbade sexual intercourse between its married adherents. extinguishing itself in consummate piety and good design. Shaker buildings and artefacts are undeniably simple and often beautiful, but intelligent appreciation [i. e. Drexler's] eventually recoils from distortions wrought in the name of simplicity, which signify death.' (Drexler, 1975)
If Drexler was fearful of the 'distortions wrought in the name of simplicity' by the Shakers, he had no such misgivings about excessive ornament at Garnier's Paris Opera, where,
'opulence, like Shakespeare's Cleopatra, makes hungry where it most satisfies: too much is not enough.' (Drexler, 1975)
Equating opulence with ornament, Drexler tells us that:
'the loss of ornament has impoverished our architecture beyond any advantage simplicity can return.' (Drexler, 1975)
and he continues:
'opulence as an architectural value has made its way since the First World War steadily downward through the cultural strata of society: today it is the exclusive province of the uninstructed.' (Drexler, 1975)
Drexler applies these newly-found moral and aesthetic criteria to the monuments of modern architecture: Mies van der Rohe's pavilion at Barcelona, Kahn's Salk Institute, [Fig. 11] etc. He finds them all in one way or another deficient. Only Le Corbusier's little chapel at Ronchamp, which he deems as 'post modern' (though it was built in 1950) wins his partial approval:
'The significant post-modern fantasy of architectural form makes mass and weight serve as symbolic assertion of the free spirit, contradicting the earlier rationalist commitment to a determinist architecture based on structural and economic necessities ... Rejecting utilitarian values, it has opened the way to historicizing references.' (Drexler, 1977)
11. A contradiction of an earlier rationalist commitment?
Salk Institute by Louis Kahn, 1968.
For all his concern with truth and honesty, he is not troubled by Le Corbusier's use of cement stucco on metal lath to create the great balloon-like walls of pseudo-concrete, which would have been all but impossible in concret-brut itself. Indeed, Drexler's opposition to modernism has grown so fundamental as to 'support whatever means would seem to contradict it ... a taste for contradiction itself.
Drexler's remarkable essay, as an introduction to an exhibition nominally committed to an only routine review of a certain historical period, closes with a summary of its actual subject - the ethical, aesthetic, and moral weaknesses of modern architecture:
'In its early years the modern movement prompted an allegiance that transcended mere enthusiasm and approached religious fervour. Promising release from a past perceived as burdensome, the new architecture expected an end to injustice with new patterns of life finding their own space and form.' (Drexler, 1977)
Yet that promise of new space and form has been betrayed, he tells us. This in the very decades that saw the appearance of the constellation of new buildings and landscapes described at the beginning of this essay. But now Drexler tells us:
'It is possible to suggest, if only with evidence provided from outside the realm of architecture, that the dominant utilitarian view of existence is being challenged.' (Drexler, 1977)
And he closes the essay by a last indictment of modernism. It was too progressive politically. In a brash and opinionated statement, he unambiguously calls for a reactionary take of position.
'Most of us now understand that architecture is the least suitable instrument with which to achieve social justice. Without abandoning other responsibilities, we might yet wish to concentrate on what architecture and architecture alone can provide, leaving reform or revolution to those better equipped.' (Drexler, 1977)
Drexler's tone throughout this essay is petulant, discussing the physical constraints with which the architect must necessarily deal as bothersome limitations upon his personal freedom of action, sounding much more like a graphic designer (which he actually was) than an architect (for which he had neither formal training nor actual expertise). He faulted modernism for 'valuing necessity over freedom', for its conceptual posture, which seemed finally to exclude possibilities [for change] rather than embrace them', for a posture so rigid that it left critics with no choice 'but to support whatever would seem to contradict it'. (Drexler, 1977).
With the opening of his next show, 'Transformations in Modern Architecture' at the Museum of Modern Art in February 1979, it must have seemed to Drexler that his crusade against Modernism had triumphed. That, at least, is evident in the tone of his long introduction to the catalogue for the show. He confesses that he has used photos of his own selection, with or without the architect's consent; and that he has deliberately omitted plans or sections of the conditions photographed. His reason for this odd editorial intervention is, as he confesses, to 'liberate' the photograph from its contextual spatial envelope and to permit Drexler to handle it as an isolated visual image, pure and simple. Thus liberated from contextual reality, Drexler can select only the most idiosyncratic, abstract or arty prints, which seem to make his point, i. e. that even the most pure of Internationalist modern are moving in the (Drexler-desired) direction of eclectic Post Modernism. Modernism itself had proven to be of limited historical significance. Of the movement itself he says,
'Defined with sufficient rigor, it is compressed into something that flashed across the horizon between the early Twenties and the early Thirties: 10 or 12 years and a handful of masterpieces.' (Drexler, 1979)
Given this hallucinatory 'rigor' in defining the extent in time and space of the Modernist movement, he then proceeds briskly to eviscerate its ethos.
'Functional perhaps meant nothing in particular but today "functional" has no place in serious discussions about the nature of architecture, either as praise or blame.' (Drexler. 1979)
Of modernism's perception of the social significance of architecture itself, he is equally contemptuous: the reactionary thrust of his own world view, already apparent in the 1979 catalogue, is now quite explicit.
'Modernism's theories about housing and urban planning, for example, once held to be the very claim to ethical competence, by the end of the Seventies have been largely repudiated for contributing to the environmental dysfunction they were supposed to end.' (Drexler, 1979)
Drexler's unrelenting attack on modernism serves only partly to obscure the meagre alternatives which he has to offer. Aside from a rather perfunctory recapitulation of those afforded by Venturi's two books - the Complexity and Learning from Las Vegas - Drexler has nothing to offer but the historicising eclecticism of the old Beaux-Arts. He describes his new option euphemistically thus:
'As the demand for meaning [in architecture] increases, new - or old sources of supply must be found ... this has helped to change the import of "historicizing" formerly inadmissible but now a new frontier of meaning.' (Drexler 1979)
Having taken us through this thorny labyrinth of special pleading, Drexler closes his catalogue with a full page photo of the model of the not-yet-built AT&T headquarters building by Philip Johnson [Fig. 12]. Of this paradigm of recidivism Drexler has only this to say:
'Ten years from now, it will be interesting to see if this building seems only a straightforward but modest step in the process of retrieving the past.' (Drexler, 1979)
12. A paradigm of recidivism:
AT&T headquarters, New York by Philip Johnson, 1983.
13. An exemplar for young engineers:
the Crystal Palace by Paxton, 1851.
14. The superficial polemics of post-modernist leaders:
hotel at EuroDisney, near Paris by Robert Stern, 1992.
Actually, the retrieval of the past has taken quite an opposite trajectory in America with the appearance of the preservation movement - with its own professional personnel, academic apparatus and huge popular base. This has changed forever the perspective through which we view the fragments of historic architecture with which we share our landscape. At one time, say up to 50 years ago, it was possible for the architectural profession to argue that it was merely responding to an overwhelming nostalgia for a lost landscape, on the part of its clients, when it produced facsimiles to satisfy that hunger. But that argument is no longer viable today. There is not a nostalgic client anywhere in the United States who could not fairly easily find a genuine antique building to restore, modify and/or adapt to his own needs; and a team of trained and experienced preservation architects to help in the task.
Moreover this entire process takes place in an intellectual climate in which the professional's very comprehension of the past has itself been radically altered. Whole new fields of activity for dealing with the artefacts of past epochs have been created in the past century or so: archaeology, art history, museology. And the whole thrust of scholarship in each of these fields has been to define, in ever sharper terms, the difference between the original, the prototype, on the one hand, and the duplicate, the facsimile, the copy on the other. There has long been basis enough for such distrust, especially in the field of fine art where the copy or facsimile, no matter how honest or well-intentioned to begin with, had a disturbing tendency to show up, sooner or later, in the market place as an original. If the post-modern architects choose to ignore this fundamental shift in attitude towards the past, so be it. Obviously the preservationists cannot.
One thing which has distinguished the American preservation movement from its earliest days, has been its distrust of the facsimile or reproduction, its insistence upon the actual original, prototypical artefact. There is something almost religious in its insistence upon the actual tree under which Washington supervised the battle of Stony Point, the very same blood-stained bedclothes under which poor Lincoln breathed his last in the little hotel across from Ford's Theatre. And indeed there is probably more than a little of the Christian tradition of the pilgrimage and the relic of the true cross in the preservation ethos. Those early preservationists may have erred in their early attributions, but their errors were those of faulty scholarship, not faith, and they were always quick to correct their errors in the light of subsequent knowledge. (See, for example, Mt. Vernon's repeated reexamination of its paint colours across the decades.) We must therefore disallow the claim of Drexler's post-modernists that they stand in the direct line of succession to the preservationists.
One must ask again: why would an institution, whose whole raison d'etre is the sponsorship of art after the Impressionists and of architecture beginning with Frank Lloyd Wright, have chosen to sponsor such recondite projects as the book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, and the show, The Architecture of the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts? Why, having decided to broaden its overview of the present by a new and more catholic examination of the past, did it choose two historical periods which, by their very nature, were most antithetical to modernism: the Baroque and Rococo of Counter-Reformation Europe and the Beaux-Arts of the French Second Empire? If history were indeed to be re-examined as a resource for modern architects, why not the archaic Greek that so intrigued the early Le Corbusier? Or the Roman which Jefferson had found so useful in building the first Republic? Why not suggest that the modernists study the Shakers, whose works had inspired our own Craftsman movement? Why not urge young engineers to study the Crystal Palace [Fig. 13], the Brooklyn Bridge, or the Eiffel Tower? Or industrial designers to re-examine the great Clipper ships and racing carts that so excited Horatio Greenough? In short, what were the real intentions of these two actions - the book and the show - if not to derail and destroy the rational/functionalist content of modernist theory and practice? And why, 10 years later, did it permit Drexler (and of course Johnson, the eminence grise of the Museum) to indulge in this pictorial distortion of the true course of modernist architecture?
It is difficult to imagine that the Museum of Modern Art, of all our institutions, could have been unaware of the implications of these interventions into the architectural culture of this country. For in modern life, the great exhibitions have developed a dynamic of their own. Together with the crowds that visit them, the critical literature that they generate, and the permanent influence of these publications, they have had an enormous impact upon the field which they nominally only describe. In this case, they clearly prepared the ground for the success of the Post-Modern movement, stylistically and functionally reactionary as it has shown itself to be. And the attacks were all the more persuasive in that they originated in the very temple of modernism itself, not from some fragmented traditionalists who, however discredited, had never given up their opposition to the modern. Whatever the shortcomings, real or imagined of modernism, they have not been replaced with anything better by the superficial polemics of the post-modernist leaders, whose ambitions and capabilities have now found perfect expression in their new hotels [Fig. 14] at EuroDisney, outside Paris.
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Notes
1. Both date from the period between 1966, when Venturi's book was published, and 1967, when the decision to proceed with the Beaux-Arts show was finalised, according to Arthur Drexler.
References
Drexler, A. (1960). Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, George Braziller, New York.
Drexler, A. (1966). Foreword to Venturi, R. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Drexler, A., ed. (1976). The Architecture of the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts: An exhibition presented at The Museum of Modem Art, New York, October 29, 1975-January 4, 1976, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Drexler, A., ed. ( 1977). The Architecture of the Beaux Arts, The Museum Of Modern Art, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Drexler, A. (1979). Transformations in Modern Architecture, The Museum Of Modern Art, New Y
Fitch, J. M. (1972). American Building 2: The Environmental Forces that Shape It, 2nd edition, Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
Hitchcock, H.-R. and Johnson, P. (1982). The International Style, W. W. Norton, New York.
Johnson, P. (1947). Mies Van der Rohe, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Johnson, P. (1969). Introduction to Built in the USA: Post-war Architecture, George Braziller, New York.
Scully, V. (1961). Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy, George Braziller, New York.
Scully, V. (1966). Introduction to Venturi, R. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Scully, V. (1977) Introduction to Venturi, R. Revised edition. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Venturi, R. (1966). Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Venturi, R., Scott Brown, D. and Izenour, S. (1972). Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, revised edition, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Illustration credits
1, 3, 9,11 by Cervin Robinson.
2 by Julius Shulman.
6, 7 Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown.
8 by Susan Dirk.
12 by Philip Johnson.
13 by Dell and Wainwright.
14 by Disney
Biography
James Marston Fitch is Professor Emeritus, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. He is currently Director of Historic Preservation for the architectural firm of Beyer Blinder Belle <bbbarch@mail.idt.net>.
Thanks to the author and arq.
Hypertext by JYA/Urban Deadline.