This is an interesting discussion. The blight of the 20th century was a belief that in order to usher in a new and perfect society, it was necessary to completely destroy the old. A sort of purification, without a church or an individual conscience in sight.
That architectural ideas fit in with this meme is not surprising.
Your analysis is by the way, not only interesting, but also fair... that is, these cites SEEM to save money, and SEEM to provide green space... although of course, they don't. Not in the long run.
As you say this style seems to me to be essentially democratic. But that didn't stop Ayn Rand spouting about it as some sort of elitist, visionary movement in "The Fountainhead". How I loathe that book.
Yeah, but modernist buildings are the architectural equivalent of porno. Great to beat-off to, but who wants to bring a porn-star home.
Si Fi,
I don't quite understand what you mean. From what I remember, Ayn Rand was very critical of the Beaux-Arts historicism that comprised the majority of new construction up to the second world war. Since her book is about the celebration of the ego, I can see why designing in an older style seems to subvert the ego, since most of the stylistic choices are already made for you. It's difficult to exhibit an architect's signature style when one heavily borrows from baroque classicism. Though I believe the story is over the top, Ayn Rand's novel is a good read.
Dan,
Could you please clarify what you mean? Under your definition, my wife and I would love to "take the porn-star home", i.e. live in a modernist dwelling. It's not the choice of a majority of people, but there is a market for Modernist architecture. It's an interesting point you make, if only I can better understand what you're staying.
Corb
I think you're right about the book being a celebration of the ego. Too much of a celebration for me.
I was really put off by the very rudimentary plot - as I remember it wasn't it about the love between the smartest guy in the world and the sexiest, but coldest woman in the world. Didn't the richest man in the world turn up as well ?
Anyway I must admit when I read it at 17 I thought all old buildings should be torn down. With age I am tending to the opposite. I think the Fountainhead is really a youngster's book.
Thank you for your analysis on Corbu.
I would like to add something that you seemed to have a little bit overpass in your analysis. It is true that the Modern movement has celebrated the Machine Era, and the triumph of the Ego on the past. But it is also very clear that Corbu cared mainly about hygiene, light and access to water, gas and electricity.
I have to remind you that until 1956, Europe still had slums, and people could still have housing conditions only found nowadays in third world countries, no water sewage, no central heating and poor hygiene. Tubercolosis and the Spanish flue were as deadly as the 1st WW.
This to say that the Modern Movement with the CIAM, and the Chartre d'Athène were commited to a better living according to the industrial production of that time, therefore, you have to admite that they were pragmatic.
Corbusier for his hygienic point of view, in the 30's, was praise, by the french fascist but as well by the communists. Both ideologies were Modern, and were similar in their utopias, for creating a new Humanity.
It is from the end of the second WW that the modern movement started to have the EGO mythology, to promote itself as the remedy, the cure for a better world. In order to rebuild Europe, and to house the rise of natality, the Modernist urban ideas, that were only paper projects before the war, had to be adopted by the majority of governments.
It is interesting to notice that Corbusier, didn't really build any big housing projects after the war, he was more comissioned for the UN buidling, or for religious constructions. Whereas Mies Van der Roe was more and more reveilling his commitment to classical philosophy, and especially Saint Thomas de Acquina, in his quest for minimalism.
Kim,
Finally, someone who understands that there were good reasons why modernist architects were designing buildings the way they did. I admit that I gave too little attention on the modernist's concern for hygiene, and my only excuse was that the ideal of brevity prevented me from elaborating on this point. Thank you for bringing up this important point. I am well aware of your point, though it's hard for most Americans, who mostly live in detached single-family houses, to understand the actual health problems endemic to much of old-fashioned dense neighborhoods with little infrastructure. They are not aware that wide boulevards in Paris helped demolish much of the city's older urban fabric that was a cesspool of disease and filth. I decided to focus my arguments away from something few readers know about.
Thanks, and I hope other readers will learn from your comments.
I echo Kim's and your points. You have to have lived in a centuries-old city to really understand why the Modernist vision was so glorious in its time.
Interestingly, though, for the "dirty-medieval-city" versus "beautiful-new-city" vision, we can cast farther back to the Beaux-Arts movement (yes, the very same that Rand condemned) and one of its primary benefactors, Baron Von Haussmann, who was the great force behind the total replanning of Paris during the Belle-Epoque. His rough equivalent here in the U.S. is Robert Moses, who began by building the gorgeouus Merritt Parkway from Connecticut to New York and went on to be responsible for the major components of the bridge-and-tunnel system that still serves NYC.
The push behind both of these men's visions (uh, aside from egomania, of course) was, respectively, to abolish unsanitary conditions by using open avenues, promenades, and public parks to provide free and healthy amusements to the people of Paris; and, in Moses's case, to usher in the Auto Age and open up the countryside to city inhabitants, seen as a simultaneous stroke for the U.S.'s blend of capitalism and democracy.
From these two models--and from the horrendous lack of industrial zoning when we needed it for factory districts during the 18th and 19th centuries--we built the framework that continues to cling to our decisions about public space and urban design: "cities are dirty and strict zoning that separates uses is best."
We are growing beyond this by necessity. Zoning is becoming more flexible to reality and more encouraging of diverse uses in small places. Still, it's hard for a lot of developers to resist the come-hither that New Urbanism has given them: choose cheap, raw land, plunk down dense townhouses and a drugstore or movie cinema, let the city chase after it all with expensive new infrastructure (or better yet, make the developers or their bog-box clients buy it all), and then call the whole thing a neotraditional design. Still missing is any organic sense of "placeness," of natural growth and local history. Can't be faked. Can't be Disneyed or Roused into existence overnight, though we would wish it.
One last note: Modernism has quite a different set of connotations in literature, about which I know a little more. The great literary Modernists--among them Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner (whom I don't care much for, actually), and poets like Eliot were reacting to a sense of severe displacement and dislocation due to several great wars (the Civil War, the First World War) and the onset of modern technology. Their fiction concerns itself deeply with the workings and movings of the individual human consciousness, trying to create coherence and narrative from a confusing avalanche of impressions and memories. Wonder how this matches up with the architectural world of Modernism?
Truthandconsequences,
I can relate to your observation about developers and the lazy habits that limit their thinking. I think Joel Garreau in "Edge City" captures the mindset of the developer really well: pretty simple and direct people, but watch them crank out the numbers and squarefeet in their heads in no time flat. Good architecture is dependent on clients who care about thoughtful design. If the clients (developers) don't care about issues that transcend matters of accounting, then you get ugly architecture. I often hear from older architects how envious they are of what gets built in Europe, and wish that their clients were as culturally enlightened.
On the subject of Modernism, one thing architecture and literature have in common is this progression from the figurative to the abstract. Older literature valued a clear narrative, stock characters and especially in classical poetry, the application of rules that somehow ensured a harmonious and thus beautiful result. Classicism, which was most of the architectural output since the Greeks, valued a clear techtonic relationship, stock motifs and decorative elements, and the application of strict compositional rules that ensured harmonious proportion, and thus beauty. Modernist architects threw out most of these rules, decoration, and often tried to make techntonic relationships more about advancing technology than about its similarities with the human form against gravity(like the classical column). Modernism grew out of that similar kind of thinking among authors that the World up to WWI had run its course and that it was best to start over as radically as possible. Design became less influenced by fabulous draftsmanship and figurative details than about the skillful combination of spatial and planar fragments. There was also a concurrent Modernist movement, often referred to as the Expressionists, who were influenced by Freudian psychology, surrealism, and spontaneous creation. The early works of Erich Mendelssohn, Hans Scharoun, and Hugo Taut, as well as Vorkurs of Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus exhibit this tendency.
I could go on and on, and discussinng the relation between Post Modern literature and architecture is even more intriguing. I firmly believe that the study of the history of architecture is probably one of the most accessible ways for laymen to understand all other aspects of cultural history.
hey! I feel just the same about the study of literature! Vive la difference!
Commenting by HaloScan
