From Bauhaus to Our House 2 of 3

FROM

TO OUR HOUSE

Pt. 2

See here for context and disclaimers. All quotes from Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House. 

Quick refresher: Bauhaus (soon to be known as "the International Style") came from the compound spirit of post-WW1 Europe. "The creation of this new type of community (the compound) proved absolutely exhilarating to artists and composers, as well as architects, throughout Europe in the early 20th century. We're independent of the bourgeois society around us! (They became enamored of this term bourgeois.) And superior to it! It was the compounds that produced the sort of avant-gardism that makes up so much of the history of 20th century art. The compounds - whether the Cubists, Fauvists, Futurists, or Secessionists - had a natural tendency to be esoteric, to generate theories and forms that would baffle the bourgeoisie. The most perfect device, they soon discovered, was painting, composing, designing in code."

Tonight's installment is about what happened when the revolution came to America. (Thanks a lot, Hitler!) (i.e. many came to America to escape Nazi hostility in Europe, not like literally.)

"The university architecture departments themselves became the American version of the compounds."

Some images from Yale campus, as contributed by fellow travelers. (Louis Kahn, Richard Barnes.)

"Studying architecture was no longer a matter of acquiring a set of technical skills and a knowledge of aesthetic alternatives.  Before he knew it, the student found himself drawn into a movement and entrusted with a set of inviolable aesthetic and moral principles. (...) Faculty members resisted the compound passions at their own peril."

Louis Kahn (1901 - 1974)

"One day Kahn walked into a classroom and began a lecture with the words: "Light... is." There followed a pause that seemed seven days long, just long enough to recreate the world."

Salk Institute.

Indian Institute of Management.

Gordon Bunshaft's Lever House, "the mother of all glass boxes. She was as fecund as she was shad." She was fecund as she was shad is a hell of a sentence. I confess I'm not 100% on what he means, though I imagine it has to do with her giving birth to an abundance of glass box offspring. Such as:

The Seagram Building by Mies Van der Rohe.

"Worker housing pitched thirty stories high, and capitalists use it as corporate headquarters."

It's worth noting while we're here that the Seagram has custom-made bronze wide-flange beams stuck on the exterior to "express" the real ones concealed beneath the concrete. American building codes necessitated this adornment, and adornments as we learned last time, are of course "bourgeois." So many layers of irony here. The end result, though, were bourgeois adornments to align with the anti-bourgeois ethos of "unconcealed structure."

Now let's have a look at a compound apostate: Edward Durrell Stone. 

"Modernism's populist."

He came to prominence as a true believer:

The Museum of Modern Art (NY)

and then... something happened.

The Kennedy Center, "with a lobby six stories high and six hundred and thirty feet long - so big, one journalist pointed out, that Mickey Mantle's mightiest home run would have been just another long fly ball."

And the Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art. "Were those... lollipops?"

"To critics, he retorted that (his works) represented 'twenty-five hundred years of Western culture rather than twenty-five of modern architecture.' The man was not even a backslider. He was an apostate pure and simple. He had renounced the fundamental principles. Somehow he actually catered to the Hog-stomping Baroque exuberance of American civilization. He was actually playing up to American megalomania (and) glorifying "the client's" own grandiose sentiments."

Stone's legacy is still being discussed along the axis Wolfe maps out, which goes to show the vendetta code of any system governed by the compound clerisy. 

Before we break for the third and last part of this look at From Bauhaus to Our House, a few more words on Mies Van Der Rohe.

This guy has quite an imprint on the Chicago skyline. (IBM building digitally inserted above - not by me, from a google image search - between the Wilco and Trump Towers.)

"Within three years the course of American architecture had changed, utterly. It was not so much the buildings the Germans designed in the United States, although Mies’ were to become highly influential a decade later. It was more the system of instruction they introduced.

The teaching of architecture at Harvard was transformed overnight. Everyone started from zero. Everyone was now taught in the fundamentals of the International–which is to say, the compound–Style. All architecture became non-bourgeois architecture, although the concept itself was left discreetly unexpressed, as it were. The old Beaux-Arts traditions became heresy, and so did the legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright, which had only barely made its way into the architecture schools in the first place. Within three years, every so-called major American contribution to contemporary architecture–whether by Wright, H.H. Richardson, creator of the heavily rusticated American Romanesque, or Louis Sullivan, leader of the “Chicago School” of skyscraper architects–had dropped down into the footnotes, into the ibid. thickets."

The old federal building in Chicago (l) and the current (r). You don't get a clearer contrast than this, folks.The twentieth century in one state-emblematic reboot.

NEXT: The epic conclusion! The Structuralists, the Rationalists, and more. "They were absurd but fascinating."