Architecture Here and There

I follow a fair number of similar lists, and am always amazed at the stereotyping. Are there really any 'modernist' architects anymore in the same vein as Corbu or Johnson? There is good and bad contemporary architecture just as there is good and bad traditional architecture. Both 'styles' can either fit in with their surroundings or contrast poorly with them.

I work in a firm that serves the needs of our clients, and does not have any particular house style. The office I work in is a contemporary building nestled in a historic district, but the use of similar materials, setbacks, and massing means it's blends seamlessly with the older structures next door. Alternatively we've worked on historic renovations, and developed far more traditional buildings to fit in with planned college campuses or the context of it's surroundings. If all we did was design only 'contemporary' or 'traditional', we would have done a disservice to the community on multiple occasions.

In other words, I wish we could just get past all this silliness and polemics about 'styles' and just critique good and bad examples of architecture. I reject the notion that 'modernists' reject "the language altogether", but I also understand the importance of maintaining our heritage and history within towns and cities. Sometimes contemporary buildings are simply not appropriate, but the same can be said of traditional buildings as well. It should be the immediate context, and not any particular dogma, that guides the aesthetic of a building.

Joel - You sound like a very sensible person, and I'm sure that you are, and that your firm is a perfectly reasonable one. But I still reject the idea that a genuine equivalence exists between architecture that the public overwhelmingly dislikes and architecture that it has loved for centuries and still does.

If tradition had not been frozen out of most major civic, academic and corporate commissions over the past half a century, and in ways that smack of the authoritarian, then I concede I'd have less of a leg to stand on in my "prejudice" against modern architecture.

But given the methods by which modern architects have kept traditional architects down (except for private housing, which is influenced more by a market of individual sensibilities than by the committees involved in most other types of project), I will continue to express contempt for modern architecture's moral turpitude as well as its aesthetic sterility and civic inhumanity.

That contempt is only deepened by an understanding of the history of modern architecture and how it long ago abandoned its original (arguably) social motives, and how it now embraces the money ethic of corporate America and the rape of foreign cultural traditions and aesthetic vernaculars.

Not that there are not good examples of modern architecture, and sensitive men and women designing modernist buildings. Certainly there are, few and far between as I believe them to be. But to admit this - and to poo-poo the vital importance of style (it is, after all, the one thing we can see - does not get us closer to understanding how to free architecture from its rut and learn how it can help design a more humane built environment.

The metaphor of language is a very good one. The collective architectural traditions of the world provide nearly endless rebuttal to the idea that tradition is a monolithic, one-size-fits-all prescription incapable of change and growth. Just as the worlds languages have changed, grown, and have proven capable of expressing every conceivable thought (literally) be it functional, artistic, or both, traditional architecture is capable of endless variety and responsiveness.

To be told that "modern" (small "m") functions and feelings can't be expressed by the world's wealth of architectural tradition is no less absurd than saying all our accrued languages are no longer capable of expressing modern thought--that we must abandon grammar, known words, even the characters from which we build the understood words, because somehow Modern Man is a new creature, born ex nihilo. The permutations of both language (traditions) and nonsense (dominant Modernism) may be technically endless; but only the former also has the potential of infinite meaning--the latter offers wholly finite meaning, in that it offers none.

Modernism, blessed with an unusually large budget, materials of uncommon (today) quality, and a designer of extreme virtuosity may achieve the status of being "interesting" or "cool," if viewed with overly-forgiving isolation from its responsibilities to the public, urbanity, and all context. Such a confluence is exceptionally rare (although they are the principle focus of the academic realm and architectural media--exceptions made to appear to be the rule). The rest of modern (or Modern) architecture is left to flail about on tight budgets with tinker-toy kit-of-parts materials and designers seething with resentment that they don't have free reign in expressing their Unique Artistic Vision, comprised of the language in their mind only they can understand. By contrast, architects prior to modernism didn't have to be (mad) geniuses in order to create respectable buildings. Virtuosity might produce masterpieces; but the rest had a safety net, grammars and syntax that allowed them to produce something decent and lasting--even when "mixed and matched" by accident or by intent.

Early non-Bauhaus, non-Corbusier Modernism (Deco, Nouveau, perhaps Moderne) proved fairly extreme deviation from "pure" traditions could be successful when an underlying grammar (basic proportions, material quality, contextual sensitivity) and words (human-scale detail, material quality). This sort of Modernism, re-claimed from the anti-language faction that won out, can be "mixed" with Traditionalism--because ultimately it can produce new traditions that evolve rather than routinely breaking down.

The dominant forms of Modernism, however, can never be "mixed" with Tradition, because to insert a modernist un-word--the "Captcha" required for this comment provides a ready example: "zxnmhk [with random lines and squigles and shades in the background]"--into real human communication, in any genuine and evolving tongue, is to render it meaningless. The egotists who propagate un-language will never cede their sense of the supremacy of the artist and "personal expression" (however slavishly tied it really is to prevailing fads and shoddy material trends); they will never submit to meaning and language; and they won't quit ruining young minds that could potentially learn real languages and help them to evolve. They can't be "mixed" with, they can only be displaced from their positions of (relative) power through popular demand, and people will only know they can demand better--demand meaningful architecture--the more they see it preserved and alive.

At this point, we (architects and designers) have generally forgotten how to speak (if we do not so often choose to denounce language as a matter of dogmatic certainty, as in previous decades). A debate about stylistic purity is for another day--right now the urgent business is simply remembering that there are such things as letters, words, and grammatical frameworks that can be employed to express something meaningful. People still believe in meaning, even if most architects do not.

Ian - Stated with perfect measure and polish. I am overjoyed that my column has sparked off such a masterpiece of erudition. So much to cherish - I especially enjoyed your roping in the Captcha to exemplify modernist befuddlement. The Captcha gobbledygook I'm about to type probably won't work the first time - which may be typical of this site alone, but it well captures the dysfunctionality of our purportedly functional modernism.

David--you're being incredibly generous in your assessment of the quality of my writing--but I'm really pleased you thing the argument is reasonably sound. I was pretty bleary-eyed when I wrote that overlong screed (working an overnight shift). But the central metaphor is one that comes to mind often when I hear people talking as though humans suddenly became twice as tall, gained an extra set of arms, and began to see in infrared sometime around 1919 (in Germany) and the 1950s (in the USA) and that "old" architecture can't meet the requirements of "new" human life.

Anyway--I won't rant again, but suffice it to say your kind words have given my fighting-the-good-fight batteries a recharge today.

Or I guess I should say, as a neo-human born in 1980--"4kcmsh," right?