Architecture Here and There

(Illustrations: Above, the newly opened Providence Career & Technical High School, the city's only deconstructivist building, so far as I am aware; below first, Twickenham stencil from www.artofthestate.co.uk; second, the Vatican, view from atop St. Peters; third, Jacques Derrida; fourth, Michel Foucault)

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What type of community isolates its members from society, brainwashes them into villifying established ideas and replacing them with new ones couched in mystical jargon, then puts them, under strict discipline, back into society with a mission to seek its conversion?

A cult, of course!

Nikos Salingaros, whose theories of architecture I described on Nov. 5 in "Here's why nature nurtures tradition," wants to intervene in the cult of modern architecture. Okay, that's a step or two down from Moses, as I described him last week, but the world needs to be yanked out of its fascination with modern architecture, and Salingaros is almost a one-man team of intervention. Friends don't let friends drive modern architecture.

Salingaros has just returned from Rome, where he was glad to learn of an appeal (petition) to get the Vatican to issue an edict against a recent spate -- in Italy, God help us! -- of new Catholic churches of stark modernist design. If even the Vatican requires an intervention to free it from the apostasy of the modernist cult, then who is safe?

A mathematician at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Salingaros researches how the chaos of nature resolves into regenerative patterns. Human beings, human societies, cities, streets, buildings and all of the things that man produces reflect nature in patterns of growth that can be understood through the science of fractals.

Until the 20th Century, human growth and productivity, organized or organic, followed this natural way, for the most part unconsciously. Then came modernism, and, most visibly, modern architecture, whose cult has converted society as if it were a virus. In his book Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction (2004), Salingaros writes that natural regeneration "unites matter, establishing multiple connections on different scales and increasing the system's overall coherence; whereas deconstruction undoes all of this, mimicking the decay and disintegration of form."

Salingaros identifies modern architecture as a form of deconstruction. He raises his eyebrows at its adherents' self-justification in terms of "deconstructionist" thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Deconstructionists believe that tradition must be undermined before supposedly enlightened ideas (often Marxist) can prevail. Serious efforts to commandeer law schools and departments of English, at least, largely failed in the 1980s, but schools of architecture had swallowed an earlier version of this Kool-Aid by 1950.

Salingaros argues that celebrity architects such as Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, etc. -- modernism's "deconstructivists" -- reflect such thinking. "[D]econstructivist buildings," he writes, "resemble the severe structural damage such as dislocation, internal tearing and melting suffered after a hurricane, internal explosion, fire, or (in an eerie toying with fate) nuclear war."

In a behavior right out of Cult 101, modernists have tried to tie their own work to the science of fractals. "I was puzzled to read an entire chapter in [Charles] Jencks's book entitled 'Fractal Architecture' without hardly seeing a fractal. . . . I can only conclude that Jencks is misusing the word 'fractal' to mean 'broken' or 'jagged.' . . . He has apparently missed the central idea of fractals."

[The title of Jencks's book, as opposed to the chapter cited by Salingaros, is The New Paradigm in Architecture (2002).]

Recent modern architecture in Providence has shied away from such extremes, except for one building. Unfortunately, that single exception is a school, the city's new Career and Technical High School -- a frightful thought indeed.

If I were to tell most modern architects I know that they were part of a cult seeking to convert the world to an architecture of decay and destruction, they would look at me as if I had two heads. At the same time, I've heard many tales of horror from students in architecture schools that confirm Salingaros's description of them (especially studio classes) as star chambers of humiliation designed to brutally snuff out independent thought.

"Architecture schools," Salingaros writes, "are training graduates who are indoctrinated into deconstructivist philosophy, yet are unable to design a simple building fit for human sensibilities. . . . Our civilization appears to be so complacent with its recent technological progress that it does not recognize threats to its very existence. . . . None of this is even remotely perceived by either practicing architects or students who would become architects because the discipline has become entirely self-referential." That is so totally true.

So much so that even the Vatican nods as diocese build churches that symbolize falling down rather than looking up. Architecture is what we all look at every day, and in ways that other scientists are studying it can affect our mood -- and maybe our ability to reason and to love. That is scary. Is anyone listening? It suddenly occurs to me that Nikos Salingaros is actually Paul Revere.

(Readers can go to my blog to find a link to petition the Vatican against modernist apostasy.)

[Articles on Nikos Salingaros can be linked to here, from which is a link to lists of his books and his lectures.]

David Brussat is a member of The Journal's editorial board (dbrussat@projo.com). His projo.com blog is called Architecture Here and There.

 Tags  architecture Deconstructionism Derrida Foucault Modernism Nikos Salingaros Vatican

Comments

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adam said:

you have no idea what you are talking about.

Link | November 12, 2009 1:02 PM
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David Brussat said:

Adam - For example?

Link | November 12, 2009 1:14 PM
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Ian said:

Using deconstructivism as the sole representative of "modern" architecture and then saying we shouldn't teach or build it is like saying we shouldn't build traditional buildings because you don't like pyramids. Modern architecture has numerous styles, as does traditional architecture.

Maybe instead of railing against something you clearly haven't taken the time to understand, you should try educating yourself in the language of architecture that is independent of style. What is it about traditional building you like? What is it about modern building you don't like? It has to be about more than just style, or the whole thing just becomes a fashion show and a question of taste.

Think about spatial, material, and sensual aspects of architecture, and let those be your guides.

Link | November 12, 2009 2:24 PM
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David Brussat said:

Ian - My use of the phrase "modernism's 'deconstructivists'" should assure you that I am aware that modernism and traditional architecture both have many styles. Style is not just a matter of taste, nor is it merely a "fashion show." Style - what something looks like, whether it essentially builds upon or builds independently of the past, whether it fits into or contrasts with its context - raises important questions that transcend "spacial, material and sensual aspects" of architecture. Those are important but they do not answer the question of what should be built, which is the basic concern of my column most weeks. Rather, your suggestion that I shift my attention to those aspects and away from style is an effort to get me to stop picking a scab that bothers modernists very much. Modernists just want me to stop it! And I understand that. It will not work!

Link | November 12, 2009 2:47 PM
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adam said:

Please outline in more detail what makes the Providence Career & Technical High School "deconstructivist"? Look at the website of the SLAM Collaborative, which designed it, and try to argue that they are part of this "cult" you describe. One of the best writers on Salingaros is Michael Blowhard; you should join his blog, for sure.

Link | November 16, 2009 12:34 AM
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David Brussat said:

Adam - SLAM is (or at least was as of maybe five years ago) a good firm that does eclectic work, including some fine traditional design. I wrote admiringly of it after a presentation at Build Boston several years ago.

I was taken aback by its name, which seems to speak more to the Career & Technical High School than the sort of work of theirs I praised at the time. It is deconstructivist mostly because of its planar irregularity, the syncopated rhythm of its fenestration, its quirky hodgepodge of metalic materials and how the columns at its entrance seem to be falling down.

The cult I described in my column is more a state of mind than an organization you join. A firm with diversified work like SLAM would be harder for me to accuse of being "of" the cult lock stock and barrel. However, if its architect who built the C&THS actually believes that his (or her) design is "of its era" and "looks to the future," then it may safely be said that he (or she) buys into the notions that characterize the cult of modern architecture. A new book by Steven Semes, "The Future of the Past," is the most erudite explicator of the fallacy of those sorts of ideas. I plan to review the book soon.

I quoted from Michael Blowhard's interview with Salingaros in my column of the week before, regarding the failure of Tom Wolfe's book to generate a reaction against modernism. Blowhard seems to get it. I will take your advice and visit his blog.

Link | November 16, 2009 10:14 AM
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Link | March 8, 2010 2:54 AM
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