After establishing a final base camp using the Peary System, Peary and Henson set off with four Eskimos on the final dash for 90 degrees north on April 2, 1909, from an estimated distance of about 133 miles away. On April 6, they camped at a place that Peary calculated was at or near the Pole, and after remaining in the area for thirty hours making observations and taking pictures, the party returned to their ship, the Roosevelt, docked on Ellesmere Island at the edge of the polar ice cap on April 27. Although they made what many consider unrealistic speeds, Peary and Henson were traveling back over trails that had already been broken once and stayed in igloos already built. Peary’s diary, released by his family in the 1980s for public examination for the first time since the early 1900s, revealed that Peary’s daily observations of ice conditions, weather, speed, and distance covered correlated almost exactly with those of Matthew Henson, even though the two barely spoke after returning to the Roosevelt.109 Additional confirmation came when later explorers on similar expeditions reported similar conditions to Peary’s and made comparable speeds.
When he planted the flag at the Pole on April 6, Peary staked America’s place in the world of exploration, symbolically eclipsing the British, whose Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole in 1912 only to find that a party led by Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten him. Scott and his four comrades died in a freezing storm, eleven miles away from a food depot that was originally planned for a location twenty-four miles closer. Leaving his heart-wrenching “Message to the Public”—in which he avoided all personal blame—Scott in death temporarily snatched world attention away from Amundsen’s remarkable achievement.110 But even Amundsen could not overcome the contrast of images: the American flag flying victoriously, while Scott froze tragically, a victim of a society past its prime, and most of all, of his own ego, which itself had only recently come under scientific scrutiny.
The World of the Mind
At the turn of the century, exploration and investigation were not limited to the earth’s physical and geographical expanses, but spread to the human mind. Psychology and the study of human behavior emerged before World War I as people sought to understand the functioning of normal and abnormal human personalities. The center of this new activity was Vienna, more specifically Sigmund Freud, who drew around him such notables as Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Stekel, and Lou Andreas-Salomé, all impressive intellects, who over time went their separate ways like bees spreading pollen throughout the flowers of European medical practices and universities.
Originally trained to be a neurologist, Freud dabbled in hypnotism, but finding that ineffective in explaining and altering human behavior, developed a technique called “talking out” or “free association” wherein patients would talk themselves out of their problems. Freud’s background lent itself to this aloof methodology, since being a Jew in an anti-Semitic society, he was already considered different and even strange. Freud capitalized on this factor, as it allowed him to be and remain on the outside looking in at his patient without being fettered by preconceived ideas concerning faith and spiritual interference. Employing a secular, scientific view, Freud developed theories heavily influenced by Ernst von Brücke, the director of the physiology laboratory at the University of Vienna, who believed that humans were living organisms in a dynamic system in which the laws of chemistry and physics applied.111 Freud applied this idea to personality, as affected by transformations and energy according to science as much as the human body. Later he wrote, “My life has been aimed at one goal only; to infer or to guess how the mental apparatus is constructed and what forces interpret and counteract in it.”112
His first literary production, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published in 1899. Although the work was very poorly received, Freud remained convinced he was on the right track since he believed dreams were caused by unconscious forces indicative of personality and the dynamic changes occurring in a person’s life. In 1904, he followed with The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which he furthered this thesis by attributing daily errors, memory lapses, and slips of the tongue to these same unconscious forces. From here, he published a trilogy of works, A Case Study of Hysteria, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, and perhaps the most important, Three Essays on Sexuality. With this last work, he gained a large popular audience, as humans everywhere were fascinated by anything concerned with sex, especially when it stressed the power of sexuality and sexual experience. Whether he intended to or not, Freud precipitated a profound shift in the way people viewed sex and contributed to the modern focus on sexual dysfunction and the idea that sex was the most important factor in determining one’s happiness.
In terms of its general psychological theory, Freud’s work presented a combination of the hormic driving forces and the hedonistic pleasure-pain theory, seasoned with a light sprinkling of Schopenhauerean and Nietzschean philosophy.113 In contrast, Carl Jung, the son of a Protestant minister, departed from Freud over the importance of sexuality, even questioning if there was some unconscious factor at work in Freud himself that caused him to elevate sex to such a dominant position. Jung experimented with word associations in patients, and rather than seeing universal sexual forces at work, he detected cultural and ethnic-historic influences that were important. Myths were important for an ethnic group, as were the symbols in use and understood by one group but not another. Dealing with historical patterns of symbols, Jung discerned aspects that were not individual in orientation, but were group-based. While this allowed social and historical variables to be added to the mix, and behavior was at least partially socially determined, it put Jung at odds with Karl Marx, the founder of communism, whose theories of economic determinism were in vogue. Marx assumed that individual psychological motivations of all humans were the same, remaining unaltered throughout history. He missed the historical and ethnic context, and would never have understood the concept of synchronicity as a hypothesis of revolution (an acausal connecting principle) as Jung developed it.
These masters of the mind contended with the human psyche as it formed, or even dictated, human behavior. Others, however, were content to merely express humanness in the most elementary of surroundings, the buildings people lived and worked in. And just as Freud and Jung came to wildly different conclusions about what constituted the human mind and motivation, so too did three giants of architecture arrive at vastly different interpretations of man’s physical surroundings.
Human Nature in Steel and Stone
Less than two weeks after German forces slammed into Belgium, triggering the bloodiest war in Western history to that time, a fire swept through the idyllic Wisconsin home of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin. It was not accidental: a servant hired by Wright a few months earlier not only locked all the doors and windows and set the blaze, but then rampaged through the house with an ax after the fire started, killing Wright’s live-in lover, Mamah Cheney, and her two children and finally entering a dining room where six workmen were having lunch to kill four of them. The killer, Julian Carlton, hid in a basement furnace, attempted to commit suicide by swallowing acid—which only seared his mouth and esophagus so he could not eat—then was captured. Carleton died of starvation soon thereafter.
Wright, so stunned that he later claimed to have gone blind from trauma, finally emerged from seclusion to promise that Taliesin would be rebuilt.114 The home, characteristic of Wright’s designs of that period, featured large, wall-less open areas, with the entire house integrated into the hillside. Furniture was built in—a manifestation of the organic architecture theory which allowed the occupant to interact with the outdoors while remaining protected from outside elements.115 Glass was decorative, functional, and abundant, and Wright borrowed heavily from the cathedral stained glass designs his mother had introduced him to as a child. Organic architecture employed local, natural building material—stone and wood from the area where the building was constructed—and demanded that a building become a part of its surroundings. The most famous of
his organic buildings, the awe-inspiring Fallingwater (completed in 1939) near Bear Run, Pennsylvania, sat atop a waterfall, which cascaded forth seemingly out of the house itself.116
For all the serenity Wright’s designs possessed, his personal life was a series of chaotic tragedies and self-inflicted wounds. Eight years after the fire and murders at Taliesin, he married a morphine addict named Maude Noel, but that marriage dissolved, whereupon Wright took up with Olga Lazovich and married her. Throughout his romantic turmoil, Wright continued to design and build fabulous residence towers, offices, administration buildings, apartments, hotels, and, from 1943 to 1959, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York City, one of the first museums to be intended as a work of art in itself. Its round design permitted art to be viewed in a constant motion, with embedded lights and geometric floor shapes accentuating the interior of the structure and enhancing the experience. Embodying the term “ahead of his time,” Wright designed buildings that the technology of his time could not sustain—some of the designs, indeed, the Petra Island house in Mahopac, New York, with its seventy-eight-foot overhanging deck, would have collapsed if built with materials available when Wright designed it.117 Other Wright-designed structures, especially many of those in California built in the Mayan Revival style to resemble ancient block temples, eroded and nearly disintegrated. Critics took these as examples of Wright’s flaws, but his supporters cited them as evidence of genius.
As Wright was refining one modernistic style, across the Atlantic, in Barcelona, Spain, Antoni Gaudí was reaching his creative pinnacle in his garden complex at Parc Güell, completed in 1914, the Church of Colònia Güell, completed 1916, and Palau Güell in Barcelona (1890–96). The Catalan had already impressed Wright’s teacher, Louis Sullivan, although Gaudí was in no way like the Americans. Whereas Wright bathed his work in the ecology of architecture as expressed in the natural elements—wood, stone, and plants—Gaudí immersed himself in the history and culture of the area in which he built. Part of the Renaixença movement, reviving Catalan identity, Gaudí didn’t just borrow from the past, he rebuilt it. Wright’s first trip for a project was to the site to examine the landscape; Gaudí’s, to a library to investigate a location’s character. In sharp contrast to Sullivan’s brass and mahogany, or Wright’s lumber and rock, Gaudí splashed color and decorative tile abundantly. His wild shapes and uneven surfaces, combining Gothic and Muslim designs, made his structures as likely to appear in a twenty-first-century Disney theme park as a twentieth-century Spanish street.
Antoni Gaudí embodied paradox. Predictable to a fault, he embraced poverty with the admonition, “Elegance is the sister of poverty but you must never muddle poverty with misery.”118 Gaudí was determined to escape the world of materialism, yet his major patrons were the leading industrialists of Catalonia. A devout Catholic who inspired the Alan Parsons Project to produce an entire rock album eighty years later, a self-denier and pessimistic opponent of Spanish liberalism, whose work grew more grand and glorious the further he moved from his youthful idealism, Gaudí was to architecture what his fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso was to painting. For a man who once wrote, “Ornamentation has been, is, and will be polychrome,” Gaudí dived into depths of architectural decorating unseen since the Renaissance.119
The ornate Casa Batlló in Barcelona (1907), for example, featured rounded, curving edges akin to a pastry or a dinosaur. In contrast to Wright, whose layers and often blocky, square approaches offered a sense of anal-retentive order, Gaudí’s buildings lack symmetry or sharp edges at all. One critic described the style as “fish scales”: “even the walls are rounded in undulations and have in essence the feel of the smooth skin of a sea serpent about them.”120 Yet just as Wright’s Fallingwater incorporated the beauty of a waterfall, Gaudí’s serpentine bench at Parc Güell was doubly functional as a channel for rainwater on rainy days and a bench on dry ones. Both men demanded an active architecture that enlisted the occupant in the experience—Wright by looking out through the broad vistas of Taliesin, Gaudí through the mystical feeling of rolling along his balconies and benches that would strike the conscience of the observer. Wright wanted a sense of awe for the landscape; Gaudí, a marvelous humility before God. As eccentric as Wright, Gaudí’s devout Catholicism infused his creations with overt spiritual themes, none grander than La Sagrada Familia (The Sacred Family) cathedral in Barcelona.
Called “God’s Architect,” Gaudí routinely cited miracles and divine inspiration for his stunning cathedral design, all paid for with private funds. La Sagrada Familia in fact resembles a crown that represented the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ, enhanced by eighteen towers that symbolized the twelve apostles, the four evangelists, Mary, and Jesus. Gaudí designed the details of La Sagrada Familia with a higher purpose in mind, from the corners of the cathedral (representing the periods of Catholic fasting) to the giant fountain and massive lantern that symbolized the purification of the soul. Begun in 1883, the cathedral combined the sense of the sacred with the sensual shock of the unusual, virtually Gothic-on-psychedelic-drugs, though like a powerful drug, some loved it and others hated it. Louis Sullivan called it “the greatest piece of creative architecture in the last twenty-five years. It is spirit symbolized in stone!”121 George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia, described it as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world, [its spires] exactly the shape of hock bottles…. I think the anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance.”122 When Eusebi Güell, a Barcelona construction magnate who was Gaudí’s major patron, died, it caused a marked change in the architect’s attitudes. He refused to have his picture taken, or to talk to reporters; he was a vegetarian, and while wealthy, like modern celebrities who fancy themselves in “solidarity with the poor,” dressed like a pauper. While at work on La Sagrada Familia in 1926, Gaudí was run over by a tram. He died three days later, leaving the cathedral incomplete. For seventy years, others attempted to finish the work, although their progress was interrupted by the Spanish Civil War, parts of the church were destroyed by Catalan anarchists, and plans for a high-speed underground train threatened to undermine the foundation.
As Gaudí toiled away on La Sagrada Familia and Wright struggled with the horror of the Taliesin murder/fire, a third architect with revolutionary ideas, Walter Gropius, completed the Fagus Werk shoe-shaping factory in Alfeld an der Leine, Germany. Unlike his contemporaries Wright and Gaudí, Gropius was called to duty in World War I and saw action as a reservist, fighting on the Western Front, where he was wounded. He returned to architecture after the war to found the Bauhaus (“House of Building”) school, generally considered the first true modernist architectural style. In a Europe where Gaudí’s excesses inspired love and hate, the clean and sterile modernist style of Gropius offered a simple alternative antidote. With generous use of glass and metal, Gropius was completely unlike the environmentally sensitive Wright—yet later Wright would borrow from (though never copy) the large flat surfaces and jutting floors that characterized Gropius’s “Glass Chain” or “Crystal Chain” style.123 Gropius, with his steel and glass, was nevertheless an expressionist, whose rounded turrets, transparent walls, and asymmetry had much in common with both the American and the Spaniard. Leaving Nazi Germany in 1934, Gropius soon moved to America. Ironically, in their later years, both Wright and Gropius designed structures for Iraq, Wright creating what would become Arizona State University’s Grady Gammage Auditorium (intended for Baghdad) and Gropius laying out the University of Baghdad (later built by his colleagues at the Architects Collaborative in Cambridge, Massachusetts). By 1914, through grossly different styles, the three architectural revolutionaries of the modern age reflected different aspects of the tripartite nature of the human condition, man (Gropius), nature (Wright), and God (Gaudí).
It was left to a much different artist to express the conflict among the three. Thousands of miles to the east, Igor Stravinsky, coming off the international success of his ballet The Firebird in 1910, g
rappled with the nature of man in his new ballet. Obsessed with a project based on pagan ritual in which a “sacrificial virgin dances herself to death,” Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring pitted the beauty of the human form in the dance with the violence and conflict of nature as captured in a Russian spring.124 That moment of upheaval “that seemed to begin in an hour…was like the whole earth cracking,” he noted, and it was “the most wonderful event of every year of my childhood.”125 Obsessed by the polar opposites of Eros and Thanatos, Stravinsky epitomized the attitudes in Europe, where a new liberation of the possible stood on the precipice of a volcanic eruption of martial carnage such as the world had never seen. Perhaps it was fitting, then, that when The Rite of Spring was performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in 1913, it sparked a brawl inside the opera house. Catcalls led to heated arguments inside the theater, followed by a general riot in which Stravinsky partisans and critics pounded each other, ladies with their handbags and men in tuxedos rolling in the aisles.126 Yet it was only a hint of the violence about to sweep Europe. Some men, such as Wright and Gaudí, would skate along its outside fringes, never dipping into the horror—Stravinsky, in fact, would move to Switzerland, briefly visit Russia in July 1914, and leave again for Switzerland just before the borders were closed. Others, like Gropius, would narrowly avoid death in the conflagration.
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