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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
An interesting critique of modernist architecture:"Nathan Glazer asks why modernism failed: "How did a socially concerned architecture come to be condemned, 50 years later, as soulless, bureaucratic and inhuman?"... In two ways, he is absolutely right. American consumers have decided by the tens of millions to shun modernist towers and to live instead in traditional single-family homes.
The first reason for modernism's failure is that America in 2007 looks nothing like inter-war Europe where modernism began. The modernist's world was one of poor, carelessly planned cities where cheap density was a real blessing. America ended up being rich and filled with cars. With all that wealth and all that mobility, Americans moved to car-based suburbs and chose to spend a little extra for ornamentation... Modernism moved from being a social movement into an elite style, and part of appealing to elites is being inaccessible to the rest. Self-referential buildings that require lots of inside knowledge to get the joke are a way of separating the cognoscenti from hoi polloi. Those who cared about such things came to control the production of public buildings, and the result was overly abstract monuments and drab towers that appeal to the artistic elite and no one else.
Why didn't this happen in the past? Perhaps because, historically, wealth and power, not aesthetic knowledge, determined what public buildings were erected. Wealth and power were often distributed among the artistically ignorant, whose tastes more accurately reflected those of the public as a whole. Royals - from Napoleon III to Prince Charles - have been blessed by a lack of artistic training that helped their aesthetic judgments better match public sensibilities.
Something odd and unexpected seems to have happened to modernism in architecture and planning: it had broken free from its origins and moorings, drifted away from the world of everyday life, which it had hoped to improve, into a world of its own. From a cause that intended to remake the world, it had become a style, or a family of styles. Modernism had, it is true, produced masterpieces, but it had been incapable of matching the complex urbanity that the history of building, despite its attachment to the historical styles decried by modernism, had been able to create in so many cities. As the older parts of cities were swept away in a wave of urban renewal, as nineteenth-century courthouses and city halls were demolished for modern replacements, more and more people wondered whether what they had lost was matched by the new world being created by modernism. "
Glazer says that Modernism was not simply a new style in architecture, succeeding neo-Gothicism, neoclassicism, Art Nouveau. It represented a rebellion against historicism, ornament, pandering to the great and rich as against serving the needs of a society's common people. There are some obvious points where one can quibble with the detail here; being relatively inexpensive, modernism has continued to exert an influence in some areas, especially corporate architecture and skyscrapers (although even there the more recent trend is to emphasise the organic rather than the rectilinear). Secondly, the point about aesthetics having historically been within the command of the artistically ignorant seems somewhat misplaced; architecture has rarely concerned itself with popular or folk traditions and this is as true of Hawksmoor and Gaudi as it was of Corbusier and Gropius.
As a point of personal preference, I invariably prefer the profuse and ornate to the spartan and constrained. The likes of Pugin, Wagner and Gaudi all figure prominently in my personal pantheon, which tends to account for the dislike I've always felt for the minimalist in art or the modernist in architecture. Instead, I think of the detail and ornamentation Gaudi built into the spires of the Sagrada Familia and Bazalgette into the London server system, neither of which would ever even be seen. Gaudi in particular, as well as architects like Montaner and Cadafalch, had revolted against the rigid uniformity of Cerda's socialist inspired grid layout for Barcelona's extension. Conversely modernism's credo that form followed function was unforgiving of ornament, banishing it to the realm of craft. As JG Ballard put it;"Modernism's attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic. Bertolt Brecht, no fan of modernism, remarked that the mud, blood and carnage of the first world war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled bathroom. Architects were in the vanguard of the new movement, led by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus design school. The old models were thrown out. Function defined form, expressed in a pure geometry that the eye could easily grasp in its entirety. Above all, there should be no ornamentation. "Less is more," was the war cry, to which Robert Venturi, avatar of the tricksy postmodernism that gave us the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, retorted: "Less is a bore."
But the modernists maintained that ornamentation concealed rather than embellished. Classical columns, pediments and pilasters defined a hierarchical order. Power and authority were separated from the common street by huge flights of steps that we were forced to climb on our way to law courts, parliaments and town halls. Gothic ornament, with all its spikes and barbs, expressed pain, Christ's crown of thorns and agony on the cross. The Gothic expressed our guilt, pointing to a heaven we could never reach. The Baroque was a defensive fantasy, architecture as aristocratic playpen, a set of conjuring tricks to ward off the Age of Reason...
[Nonetheless] its slow death can be seen, not only in the Siegfried line and the Atlantic wall, but in the styling of Mercedes cars, at once paranoid and aggressive, like medieval German armour. We see its demise in 1960s kitchens and bathrooms, white-tiled laboratories that are above all clean and aseptic, as if human beings were some kind of disease. We see its death in motorways and autobahns, stone dreams that will never awake, and in the turbine hall at that middle-class disco, Tate Modern - a vast totalitarian space that Albert Speer would have admired, so authoritarian that it overwhelms any work of art inside it."
Ballard is unusual in that the motorways, tower blocks and cars that were the hallmarks of modernism form the essential constituents of his surrealist pantheon, playing the same role as Dali's soft watches or space elephants. But for myself, modernism seems a particularly unexpressive style. The Austrian architect Adolf Loos expressed this when he published a diatribe against decoration in 1908, titled "Ornament and Crime." Loos argued on utilitarian and financial grounds that ornamentation can have the effect of causing objects to go out of style and thus become obsolete, something that led him to see it as wasteful and profligate. Having seen the Looshaus in Vienna, profligacy and degeneracy have rarely seemed quite so appealing. The spirit of the present age has remained puritannical on such matters, seeing a profuse love of detail as a form of excess and preferring the minimal on aesthetic and economic grounds alike. Equally, I tend to see architecture in 'writerly' terms, of the relationship of its style to the spirit of the age, its symbolism and status as a single moment with a larger narrative, the choice of styles like gothic, classical and modernist frequently being charged with various political and social stances.
Nonetheless, I have to admit to some considerable ambivalence on this score. Modernism was after all loosely aligned with progressive causes. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a member of the November Group, named after the insurrection of 1918-9 that briefly put Berlin in the control of worker's councils (although, he also did some designs intended to persuade Hitler to choose him to design the German pavilion at the Brussels Expo of 1934, complete with swastika flags and Nazi eagles). The Bauhaus school was an attempt to adapt the design theories of William Morris to mass production (and was subsequently forced to close by the Nazi regime), encapsulated by Lenin’s dictum "socialism equals soviet power plus electrification." Ornament was seen as a dishonest attempt to hide labour and technology behind the styles of the past, while the reduced costs of modernist architecture made housing more affordable for more of the population. One should not express too much sympathy for the progressive aspects of modernist architecture though; the Bauhaus school for being originally founded by a socialist worker's council while Le Corbusier's dedicated his architectural manifestos "To Authority" as a way of illustrating the belief that government was to function as the master planner and allocator of a nation's resources in order to achieve utopian social goals. Modernism 's utopianism was certainly both coerceive and totalitarian in character.
Conversely, much of the architecture I admire the most in aesthetic terms was frequently reactionary in character, with Pugin and Gaudi being obvious examples. Contemporary advocates of traditional forms of architecture see it as a representing a continuity with the past that I'm not sure I find particularly congenial, as with Quinlan Terry's attempts to reconcile classical architecture with the christian heritage (by arguing that the classical orders of architecture were handed down by God to Moses on Mount Sinai after He finished delivering the Ten Commandments). I was especially struck by Jonathan Meades's observation that he had come to regard Gaudi's architecture as being essentially equivalent to Speer's grandiloquent architecture, Stalin's wedding cake skyscrapers or Ceausescu's palaces. Hitler deplored the Gothic as "Asiatic," had no taste for the Baroque and instead prescribed austere neo-classical architecture as the expression of Reich und Volk, albeit on a grandiose scale that would have dwarfed Berlin's existing architecture. Conversely, Stalin's "Asiatic" architecture was kitsch, akin to the Baroque of the counter-reformation in terms of its propaganda value. However, even there modernism exerted its influence on Russian architecture, as Moscow's Seven Sisters were built to rival American skyscrapers. The late WG Sebald expressed a view similar to Meades when describing the grandiose architecture of Antwerp in Austerlitz:"When Belgium, a little patch of yellowish gray barely visible on the map of the world, spread its sphere of influence to the African continent with its colonial enterprises, when deals of huge proportions were done on the capital markets and raw-materials exchanges of Brussels, and the citizens of Belgium, full of boundless optimism, believed that their country, which had been subject so long to foreign rule and was divided and disunited in itself, was about to become a great new economic power-at that time, now so long ago although it determines our lives to this day, it was the personal wish of King Leopold, under whose auspices such apparently inexorable progress was being made, that the money suddenly and abundantly available should be used to erect public buildings which would bring international renown to his aspiring state. One of the projects thus initiated by the highest authority in the land was the central station of the Flemish metropolis, where we were sitting now, said Austerlitz; designed by Louis Delacenserie, it was inaugurated in the summer of 1905, after ten years of planning and building, in the presence of the King himself. The model Leopold had recommended to his architects was the new railway station of Lucerne, where he had been particularly struck by the concept of the dome, so dramatically exceeding the usual modest height of railway buildings, a concept realized by Delacenserie in his own design, which was inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, in such stupendous fashion that even today, said Austerlitz, exactly as the architect intended, when we step into the entrance hall we are seized by a sense of being beyond the profane, in a cathedral consecrated to international traffic and trade...
It would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than domestic size - the little cottage in the field, the hermitage... are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no-one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the Gallow Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder that is dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins."
Needless to add, Sebald's joining of Tolstoy's theory of art with Speer's theory of ruin value here only truly serves to accentuate my interest in architecture of that kind. With that said, Sebald's argument applies rather better to modernist architecture than to its predecessors; there are few things as desolate as a ruined image of a future that never arrived. Gothic and classical buildings do at least retain a gentle dignity as they return to nature. Nonetheless, there is an alternative view to that being expressed here. To William Morris, a building like Great Coxwell Tithe Barn was a masterpiece of world literature, a product of folk architecture rather than of the gentry or aristocracy but still painstakingly constructed on a giant scale. Morris advocated decoration and beauty as a means of social improvement and perfectly justifiable on socialist grounds, the product of a form of economic activity that did not alienate the craftsman from the means of production. Mass production was seen as inherently capitalist, a view that resulted in Arts & Crafts being a decidedly expensive commodity. Similarly, the likes of Ruskin elided the brutalism of labour when they advocated a form of society that emphasised craftmanship and the connection to the soil. Ruskin's advocacy of gothic was partly predicated on his belief that gothic architecture was best suited to his idea of the craftsman as artist in his depiction of natural detail rather than simply implementing coldly geometrical classical designs that left no scope for the individual talent. Nonetheless, it is the form of architecture that seems to best express my own aesthetic and political preferences. There is something rather reassuring about the English love of the pastoral rather than the urban, about English Arts & Crafts being connected with ideas of ruralism and hand-crafted cottage industries or as with the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic connected to ideas of distributism, while it became a form of mass production in countries like Germany. In short, Arts & Crafts was frequently the consequence of a typically bungled and naive utopianism. As a form of architecture, it expresses England's wariness of capitalist expansion and yearning for an arcadian rural society of the kind denounced by Martin Wiener's Thatcherite tract English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850–1980. This quotation from Wilde on the same theme seems to best express my own views:"People often talk as if there was an opposition between what is beautiful and what is useful. There is no opposition to beauty except ugliness: all things are either beautiful or ugly, and utility will be always on the side of the beautiful thing, because beautiful decoration is always on the side of the beautiful thing, because beautiful decoration is always an expression of the use you put a thing to and the value placed on it... That the beauty of life is a thing of no moment, I suppose few people would venture to assert. And yet most civilised people act as if it were of none, and in so doing are wronging both themselves and those that are to come after them. For that beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men."(Wilde, Art and the Handicraftsman)Labels: Aesthetics, Architecture, Maximalism
posted by Richard 3:07 pm
