From Bauhaus to Our House 3 of 3

FROM

TO OUR HOUSE

Pt.3

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 twentieth century, the American century, was now two-thirds over - and the colonial complex was stronger than ever. Young philosophers in the university were completely bowled over by the French vogue for so-called analytical approaches to philosophy, such as Structuralism and Deconstructivism. The idea was that the old "idealistic" concerns of nineteenth century philosophy - God, freedom, immortality, man's fate - were hopelessly naive and bourgeois. The proper concern of philosophy was the nature of meaning." 

"Which is to say, the proper concern of philosophy was the arcana of philosophical clerisy itself."

"By day, Structuralists constructed the structure of meaning and pondered the meaning of structure. By night, Deconstructivists pulled the cordical edifice down. And the next day the Structuralists started in again (...) There was no way to avoid the fashions of the architectural compounds, no matter how esoteric they might become. In architecture, intellectual fashion was displayed fifty to a hundred stories high in the cities and in endless de Chirico vistas in the shopping malls of the new American suburbs." 

"O Worker Housing!"

When it came to actual worker housing, the latter half of the twentieth century in America played out much as the earlier decades of the century played out in Europe. Among other massive public housing projects gifted to compound architects (Minoru Yamasaki) to design, the Pruitt-Igoe projects (since become "an icon of failure of urban renewal and public policy planning) became infamous for the dissatisfaction of the very people it was built for: i.e. America's impoverished. 

"In 1971, the Pruitt-Igoe task force called a general meeting of everyone still living in the project and asked the residents for suggestions. It was a historic moment for two reasons. one, for the first time in the fifty-year history of worker housing, someone had finally asked the client (the worker) for his two cents. Two, the chant, which began immediately: "Blow it... up! Blow it... up! Blow it... up!"

As famously conveyed in the experimental film Koyanisqaatsi.

I understand there is some vitriol and debate about the legacy of Pruitt-Igoe. Outside of the Wolfe book and the above clip, I know - and suggest - nothing. Except the obvious: the clerisy of the compounds is ill-suited for the public sector. So naturally we can't get enough of it. 

A substantial amount of From Bauhaus to Our House is devoted to Robert Venturi, and rightly so. He (arguably) had the most influence in the compounds and beyond - that is to say, in the public sphere.

Not that he really built all that many buildings.

The AT and T Building in NYC. "The design was Philip Johnson's but the victory was Robert Venturi's."

As mentioned before, whenever things go kablooey in American life, the root cause is almost always Marxism or Narcissism. For late-2oth-century architecture - as in almost all the arts and social sciences, one after another - it was a blend of both.

"Structuralism has originated in France in what might be called a Late or Mannerist Marxist mist. The Structuralists assumed that language (and therefore meaning) has an immutable underlying structure, growing out of the very nature of the central nervous system. Instinctively, the ruling classes, the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have appropriated the structure for their own purposes, and saturated it with a bewildering internal propaganda. If this notion in itself seemed a bit incomprehensible, it didn't matter (...) it was taken for granted that Structuralist experiments were good for the people."

Enter the New York Five. I'll only focus on a couple. Starting with:

Peter Eisenman.

"Eisenman's explanations were not much help, even to the initiate. Eisenman had gone all the way with the linguistics business... Others were talking about syntactical nuances and the semiology of the infrastructure and the semantics of the superstructure and the morphemes of negative space and the polyphemes of architecture afterimage. They would talk about such things as the 'articulation of the perimeter of the perceived structure and its dialogue with the surrounding landscape.' (This caused a Harvard logician to ask 'What did the landscape have to say?' The architect had nothing verbatim to report.) But they were all United Press International rewrite men, simple to a fault, compared with Eisenman. Eisenman's great genius was to use relatively clear words from the linguistic lingo and lead one's poor brain straight into the Halusian Gulp. 'Syntactic meaning as defined here,' he would say, 'is not concerned with the meaning that accrues to elements or actual relationships between elements, but rather the relationship between relationships.' He was beautiful! He could lead any man alive into the Gulp in a single sentence."

Wolfe's prose is always a delight to read. I love that "they were UPI rewrite men..." and "Halusian Gulp" business. (Which apparently is a recurring and never-quite-explained phrase in his other work as well.) 

Another of the NY5 was Michael Graves, who became known more for his (quite lovely) illustrations than his actual buildings. Not that he didn't throw down out there, such as this addition to Benacerraf House.

"Underneath all the metal Gerrit Rietveld ivy are a breakfast room and a playroom."

 
And the last of them I'll look at here:

Richard Meier.

 

Every -ism begets a counter-ism (then a neo-ism) and soon the Structuralists begat the Rationalists.

Van Eyck orphanage in Amsterdam.

"The Marxist mist enveloping Rationalism was even denser, muggier, and more sentimental than the one that enveloped the Structuralists. The Rationalists had the romantic prole-cult notion that the master craftsmen of the Renaissance built from out of the natural and inevitable impulses of the people, as if out of some sort of structuralism of the motor reflexes. The fact that these buildings  were commissioned and paid for by kings, despots, dukes, pontiffs, and other autocrats didn't matter. At least they weren't capitalists. Soon the Rationalists were adding a primitive zest to the architecture debate in the United States. At conferences they went around yelling "Immoral!" at everyone they disagreed with. They were embarrassing but fascinating. Venturi made them furious. "Immoral!" Venturi extolled the very gutter of capitalism in its modern phase, namely the commercial strip."

 "As for their own work, it looked... well, vaguely Facist."

"Bourgeois-proofed architecture of the European school of holy-rolling, foot-washing, primitive Marxists."

The books ends reiterating its central thesis that all of the above were just inevitable (and diminishing) ripples from the original stones thrown by Gropius and le Corbusier. Particularly Corbu. While casting about for pictures, I came across this blog which examines the raising-ramp trend of Corbu's that made its way into the works of all the compound-men (and women) who came after.

High Museum of Art, Atlanta. (Designed by Meier.) Not the best example, I just liked it.

As trends go, it's got a lot longer history than Corbu, though. (Tomb of Hatshepsut, Ancient Egypt.)

That repetition of movements and inevitabilities is an inescapable by-product of compound-ism - not that Hatshepsut is included in all of this - brings us full circle to the beginning of the book for one last quote:

"The truth was that the internal mechanism of the compound competition, the everlasting reductionism - non-bourgeois! - had forced them all within the same tiny cubicle, which kept shrinking, like the room in Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum." Short of giving up the divine game altogether, they couldn't possibly have differed from one another in any way visible to another living soul on earth save another compound architect outfitted, like the cryptogopher, with Theory glasses."

~