(Discussion in A+D issue, July / August 2009)
The Importance of Being Modern
Letter
Modern, Postmodern and the Intervention of the Effete
The spirit of a piece of architecture is the spirit of continuity: each work carries forward from an antecedent; each contains all of the previous experiences of the world of architecture. A good piece of architecture also contains the hints and the seeds of future works. Perhaps this is why a good piece of architecture is rare.
I wish all architects were on a rational path to excellence. But the spirit of our times is firmly focused on a present that is so expansive and profuse that it shoves the past off our horizon and reduces time to the present moment only. Within this system a building is no longer a work of art, or what the French would call an œuvre. It is no longer a thing made to last, or to connect the past with the future. It is just one current event among many, a gesture with no tomorrow. In our hyper-society no one has time to think any more or to contemplate. Just make something that will be noticed for a fleeting second. Make something queer, odd, unusual, but spectacular! This is the illness of our times. This is the reality of an effete society, with effete architects producing an effete clutter of inane objects that belong to no one, contribute nothing, and add nothing to the future.
This statement could be made today, or it could have been made in 1893, when the Chicago School – a school of modern thinking – was knocked into oblivion. It was sidetracked by an effete wave of mercantile architects backed by commercial clients and drawing on the bad taste of French academia. The International Exhibition in Chicago in 1893 was an École des Beaux-Arts extravaganza made of plaster hiding the actual structure. It had Roman domes, Greek columns and Baroque molding and details. The new technologies of concrete, glass and steel were thrown to the dogs. Patient search was replaced by greed for quick money. The exhibition was a rude lesson to modern architects. They knew they had been defeated.
It was due to the ‘modern project’ – the emergence of modern architecture as an aesthetic and social movement – that the thinking community of architects regained an image of themselves two decades later. A mission arose, allowing architects with vision of their place in history to take control of their art, their lives and their destinies. What follows is an attempt to put this phenomenon within the perspective of time and of history, in perspective at least up to the time the movement was again hijacked by French academia under the guise of ‘Postmodern’ theory in the 1970s.
Meanings of ‘Modern’
‘Modern’ is a commonly used adjective employed to describe many things. What does it mean? In architecture we all know of the ‘modern movement’ and we have heard of ‘modern architecture’, even if we do not necessarily know what it means. Similarly, we have heard of ‘Postmodern’ and we don’t really know what that means either.
If we don’t know what these movements are all about it probably means we are designing in a vacuum. Hopefully some kind of rational logic guides us toward creating functional and livable buildings. Hopefully we are learning through our contextual experience how to solve problems that we encounter in our day-to-day endeavors, generating performance criteria, creating options and evaluating them.
But most young architects are lured by magazines and journals and the media into designing for the press, or maybe for competitions. We see spectacular building stunts on television and in the newspapers, and we think, ‘Can we ever create something like that?’ We get attracted to words like ‘cybertecture’ and believe it to be the future, though in fact it is just more of the same.
In the following discussion I argue that we are all barking up the wrong tree. We don’t know what we are doing. Instead of using our brains and thinking things out logically we are in effect looking at the social news and the fashion page to decide on the clothes we will wear, as if life is some huge fashion ramp, and we will be judged by the outrageous costumes we wear. All of us want to be ‘modern’, as opposed to ‘traditional’; we want to be ‘liberal’ as opposed to ‘conservative’; and we do not want to be left behind by history. In my argument I am stating that being ‘modern’ is not just being different for the sake of being different, but that we have to be a part of a value system, have a vision, know our mission, and set an agenda around these. We are architects, not a political party chasing votes. Our visions are evolving and each of us has to set our own agenda and assert our values through our work. Thus, my argument is not a prescription, but a ‘sifting of ideas’ that helps each one of us to settle into our own comfort zone regarding who we are and what we want to be in this great profession. I feel it is important that we start with a discussion of what the word ‘modern’ means to us. For me the word, and even the concept of modern, has several different sources and meanings. Let me share my ideas.
American Modern
In America the word ‘modern’ means ‘the latest’, something new or contemporary. It has a tinge of the innovative, of discovery. Equally it may imply a style, fashion or packaging. It could be just a ‘new look’ or the ‘in thing.’ Each year the American automobile industry changes the styling of its cars, and these are rolled out with great fanfare, as if last year died and the New Year’s birth is a world event. On the other hand European and Japanese auto manufacturers go on making improvements little by little, but the body of each car, its style, year to year, looks the same. In fact they may involve more unseen improvements under the bonnet than what the ‘new body’ of the American car offers. In a media-driven consumer market, what you see is what you get. Fashion shows have models walking the ramp, showing off preposterous costumes just to grab attention. Beefcake boys in little bikini briefs and anorexic girls looking bored, sashay in billowing outfits on the ramp. This is a game of style that we are all supposed to play. We are supposed to applaud preposterous ugliness. Socialites with no taste, scheme and maneuver to occupy the front row seats at the Milan previews. If they don’t know how to select their underwear, how will they ever be patrons of art or architecture! The new economy, the new urbanism, the new architecture and nouveau-riche are all mercantile sham. They are money making schemes driven by shallow taste and deep pockets. There are well-paid critics who write academic articles that reconcile bad taste to the contemporary scheme of things. Journals and curators of museums are all playing the same game, looking for cute things, tricky things, queer things, spectacular things, or blatant stunts, not for meaning. The new architecture is like a collection of follies in a nineteenth-century English garden; sentimental jokes and nostalgia at best.
Architecture is a more serious craft. Once built, we cannot just throw our designs into the washing machine, or give them to a poor aunt. Our efforts will be around for some time. Perhaps the word ‘contemporary’ is a bit kinder as it may refer to the era in which we are living and building, its technology, and its social structure, modes of production and machine processes.
American ‘modernism’ deserves a closer look. Most Americans carry with them the luggage of a foreign culture. They want to keep the good things and throw out the trash. They want to free themselves from the bondage of the past traditions and redesign themselves and be ‘free.’ Perhaps it is this parting with tradition and the exploration of self that makes American modernism attractive.
European Modern
‘Modern’ in Europe defines an age, or an era. In the sciences and philosophy the works of Galileo and Descartes tempered the birth of the ‘modern age’. God, testaments and religion were replaced by empirical observation and scientific conclusions, leading to axioms. It was now mankind that declared the truths of the world. Having its roots in Greek philosophy, the modern European spiritual identity found itself immersed in questions to be answered. It interrogated the world, not in order to satisfy any particular practical need, but because the passion to know had seized mankind.
> Humanity desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished as we have an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before we understand. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire. This ‘either-or’ encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge. This makes the wisdom of uncertainty hard to accept. The modern European journey is a narrative from a closed, traditional society into one of relativity and uncertainty. As God slowly vacated the seat from which he had directed the universe, declared its order of values, distinguishing between good and evil and endowing each thing with meaning, man began to redefine God in his own image. Europe set forth into a world it could no longer recognize. In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity; the single divine truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parceled out by men. Thus was born the Modern Era.
The thinking self, according to Descartes, is the basis of everything and thus one has to face the world alone – Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). This anoints a heroic attitude to man’s personality. Cervantes takes this further, making each individual face the world of uncertainty; to be obliged to face not a single absolute truth alone, but to deal with many contradictory truths. One’s only certainty in this conundrum is the wisdom of uncertainty. Don Quixote, and the entire European village, departed from their rural, traditional belief system to search for empirical truth and a redefinition of self. Man awoke and he dared to reinvent himself.
Modern as Progressive
Distilled from both American and European ‘modernism’ there emerged a concept of ‘progress’. This concept sees history on a time line and assumes continuous ‘progress’ and improvement. The idea of progress got a fillip from the rapid stream of nineteenth- and twentieth-century inventions that redefined civilization – everything from electricity, light bulbs, telephones, cinema, to radio, television, cell-phones, digital technology, the Internet. In all fields technology drove human behavior, lifestyles, diplomatic relations and power.
‘Progress’ sees diseases conquered one by one; it sees democracy gradually replacing despotism; it sees institutions becoming more accountable and transparent; it sees housing and consumer goods becoming cheaper and more accessible to the masses; it sees the rights of minorities becoming more sacred; it sees law and order and justice being more fair; it sees a growing reach of education, and more empowerment, through enhanced knowledge, skills and sensitivities; it sees a reduction in political polarity and more inclusive governance; it sees more sustainable and ecologically sensitive development; it sees the fading of borders, the integration of economies and the spread of social security. This broad concept of ‘progress’ dominated our consideration of ‘modern’ from the end of World War One (1918) to the present time. It tempered the concept of socialism; planned and mixed economies, and social security systems even in the most capitalist of nations. The roots of modern architecture lie in technological advancement of the nineteenth century. James Watt’s long span wrought iron structures, Paxton’s Crystal Palace, Eiffel’s great halls and tower, the Chicago School and then the Werkbund movement, the Bauhaus and the CIAM, all brought together these isolated and diverse ideas into a unified movement.
Three strong threads define ‘modern architecture’. These were maturing in the nineteenth century and grew more holistic in the twentieth century. The three threads are technology, social change and more recently, the battle against effetism. Effetism is the tyranny of the pretenders. Against the cheap mercantile architecture being cut and pasted on our cities, this triad of forces drove architecture as an integrated part of ‘progress’ until the advent of the ‘new economy’, the rampant mercantilism of the nineteen eighties, and the degenerate, mercantile architecture that emerged from the new economy and growing imbalanced concentration of wealth. The modern movement withered with the death of its founders and the rise of a new class of Atlantic-centered architects who were the torchbearers of the new effete, mercantile architecture. They disguised their work under the new French theory of Postmodernism. Of course in the process of looking to the French Academy they also claimed to be Structuralists and Deconstructionists – all styles with no social content and an expression of technology as opposed to an employment of technology. The new architecture has no putative beauty. It has to be ‘explained’, and there has to be an esoteric theory; the vaguer the better.
Modern Architecture
Modern architecture belongs to our times. But how ‘young’ is it? Surely Paxton’s Crystal Palace created in 1851 was young? And Watt and Bolton’s spinning mills in the first decade of the nineteenth century were new and dynamic? What about the Eiffel Tower or the series of Galleries des Machines built for the Expositions Universelles held in Paris in 1855, 1867, 1878 and 1889? All of these structures are ‘modern architecture’, not because they are ‘new’, or because they are ‘contemporary’, but because they address the human condition and the social and economic era in which they were conceived. They are ‘modern’ because they express themselves honestly through technologies that did not exist prior to their realization. Perhaps technology is the key to their claim to being modern. All of these structures are a counterblast to the fake and false Plaster-of-Paris neo-Greek, neo-Egyptian, neo-Spanish Colonial and neo-Roman buildings that cluttered cities – buildings that looked like one thing on the outside but were something different on the inside. Even today, the mercantile architecture of our times makes up ninety-nine percent of our urban landscape. Such false, untrue and debased statements are an insult to our intelligence and taste. Take the example of a state-of-the-art, cutting edge IT firm building its training campus in Mysore to look like a Roman Forum, with monumental columns, a great open piazza and pediments over a portico. I can imagine the leaders of our IT industry dressed in togas, wearing centurion helmets and carrying long spears, addressing new recruits. Maybe the creators of this urban fabric also look different on the outside from what they are within? Maybe they seem to be what they are not.
Thus, modern architecture lies on the fault-line between ‘seeming’ and ‘being’ – an indeterminate space between lies and truth. This chasm yields the three-tiered agenda which must characterize ‘modern architecture’:
The fight against the lie of effetism, consumerism and mercantilism.
The search for improvements in the human condition.
The employment of technology for the human good and for beauty.
Postmodern
About forty years ago, around 1970, architecture began to stagnate. This dormancy was anointed with the label ‘Postmodern’. It seems all of the concerns of the modern movement were put aside in a long sleep which engulfed the minds of architects. A French movement in literary criticism and philosophy became the opiate infusing illusions into the great art. Architects started fooling themselves and their students that they were philosophers. They imagined that through association with Jacques Derrida, or by quoting Michel Foucault, they would morph into Parisian philosophers. Ivy League school teachers started winding themselves up in French philosophy, like little plastic toys you wind up to watch them dance about! This spell of self-delusion and stupor coincided with the arrival of the ‘I, me, myself’ generation. It coincided with fast bucks, unearned increments on Wall Street and paper money from equities. Mercantilism, on leave of absence since the Great Depression, was back in town. Wealth, not creativity, became the new sign of status. Like the impact of the École des Beaux-Arts in the late-nineteenth century that smothered the modern movement in America and Europe, this hallucinatory drug captured the spirit of architecture. Quietly we left behind the search of function. Commercial ornamentation again crept into our language. Community design, affordable housing, open spaces and the public domain were quietly put on the back burner, and gradually out of sight. Honesty of expression, a dialogue wi
th materials in the search for their capabilities, nature and expression faded. The aesthetics of honesty was replaced by consumerism and marketing. In its place came cute ideas, clever little stunts, even spectacular large monuments, and on Main Street, superficial packaging, fashions of the season, styles and billboard architecture. A huge chasm gradually emerged within the city culture of the modern era, through a growing alienation between individuals and their urban settings. Abandoned in heartless urban ennui, in a daze of sleepy acceptance, the consuming public lost touch with community, neighborhood and even neighbors. Television, the internet and shopping replaced conviviality. The rich forgot about the poor, and the poor got credit cards.
Hundreds and thousands of buildings have been produced in the past four decades, but few add anything to the nature of ‘being’. They neither inspire nor catalyze human interaction, nor do they sponsor ‘coming together’ – things that had happened naturally in the urban fabrics of small towns like Granada and Seville. Pedestrian, cozy, welcoming urban enclaves had been the stuff of life for centuries. All this was thrown out of the window for phallic symbols and meaningless stunts. These new buildings discover no new segment of human existence, only confirming what has already been built or said, thereby fulfilling their purpose. They confirm the stupidity of the life that everyone is living. By discovering nothing, they fail to participate in the sequence of discoveries that constitute the evolution of architecture. They place themselves outside the history of architecture, or maybe in what is meant by ‘Postmodern’ – that they come after the history of architecture.
Letters To A Young Architect Page 12