A Letter to the Masterbuilder
ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1803, AND THE DAY AFTER, CHARLES FOURIER, the most thorough and imaginative of modern utopians, wrote his “Letter to a High Judge.” He was at the time a cotton factor and unlicensed stockbroker in the industrial city of Lyons, where the Revolution had taken turns divergent from those of Paris and had been crushed and brought into line by Napoleon. Here was a thinker far more revolutionary than the Revolution, a provincial intellectual who had an elaborate plan for the reformation and happiness of humankind, who saw that a clean sweep and a new beginning had happened before his very eyes and that he could have a say in the political and social rebirth of an entire country. He had written a treatise with an uninformative title, A Theory of the Four Movements and General Destinies: Prospectus and Announcement of Discovery, published five years after the letter to the high judge, much as if he had thrown all copies into the sea.
The letter is, as we can now say, Kafkaesque, title and all. The high judge to whom it was written was Kafka’s Klamm in the topmost room (if he existed) of The Castle. We have had so many analogues of this high judge that we do not need to labor the point. He is Hitler, Stalin, all the gaudy dictators of South America, Franco, Tito. They are all somehow the suit of empty armor that Philip II of Spain set up to review his troops, who thought the king was inside. The king was instead in his room in the Prado (hung with nudes by Rubens, for his eyes only) studying minutely every diplomatic paper crisscrossing his vast empire, very much the spider at the center of his web, alert to every twitch. Every human life was in his hands but none had access to him except through intermediaries strung out along a maddening and labyrinthine remoteness. We now know that all of Fourier’s communications to his government — letters to the Foreign Office, to high judges, to Napoleon himself — were intercepted by the police, investigated (“from a harmless idiot,” one of them is marked), and filed, to be found by scholars of French intellectual history in the late twentieth century.
You and I know perfectly well, O Masterbuilder, that if we were to write a letter to the President of our Republic, the letter would never reach him. It would go directly to the FBI, with copies to the National Security Agency and the CIA. They would not read the letter for what we wanted to say, but for what clue it might contain as to what they should do about us: whether we are a harmless idiot, an assassin, a terrorist, or other threat to their hegemony. Our letter might well be a plan to reverse the entropy that is turning all our cities into slums, a plan to cancel the national debt as a black hole sucking all our taxes into it, a complaint that our food is poisoned by preservatives, or that our neighbor’s power mower and leaf blower of a hundred decibels (the noise you hear and feel standing under the wing of a 747 as it guns for takeoff) are making life intolerable in our neighborhood. All of these would be of equal indifference to the jaded eyes of the interceptor. Fourier’s last letter to Napoleon asked for four hundred orphans (of which there were tens of thousands, thanks to Napoleon and his wars), four hundred quaggas (zebras with stripes on the neck only, now extinct thanks to glove-makers), and an estate anywhere in the country (plenty of those, too, depopulated by the guillotine). These orphans, all of a tender age, and the quaggas (their mounts), were to be raised on the estate (the manor house a barracks) as Harmonians, living according to the philosophical principles announced in The Four Movements. Such phalansteries were already in existence in the United States — the communities of the Shakers, Mennonites, Owenites, and many others. The experiment would have been, let us say, interesting, even picturesque. Such ideas were scarcely unfamiliar. Wordsworth and Coleridge had a vague plan to found a truly democratic community in Ohio. Marx and. Lenin would later be inspired by some of Fourier’s ideals. But Fourier’s letter to Napoleon, like the earlier one to the high judge, were never read by the high judge or Napoleon. They were intercepted by the police.
So, O Masterbuilder, I do not expect the sentiments and ideas of this letter to be read by you, whoever you are. I call you Masterbuilder, Ibsen’s name for his imaginary architect, who became so eloquent a symbol for Ibsen’s disciple Joyce. The Finnegan of Finnegans Wake is a masterbuilder. He is the symbol for homo faber, Man the Maker. In our time the anthropologists and philosophers have tried to find the boundary line between wild and tame, nature and culture, the uncivilized and the civilized. The line is easily found for the other species. But we will have tamed ourselves, and how?
Some thinkers place the boundary at the beginning of speech, some at cooked food, some at clots of kin forming the embryonic family and state, some at a sense of justice, and so on. Ibsen and Joyce placed that line at architecture: the house, the temple, the village. Carl Sauer, that subtle geographer, had doubts about Louis Leakey and the origin of social humankind in the Olduvai plain, where the evidence of our beginning as social creatures would seem to be. No, said Sauer, that’s hunting territory, without shelter or permanent campsites. The human animal is helpless in its infancy for longer than any other animal. It must be taught to walk, to speak, to protect itself, and it needs a good three years, and longer, to survive with the least measure of independence. So Sauer guesses that humankind in Africa would have built huts on the coast, with the ocean to take to in boats in time of attack, and with food from the sea. The Olduvai Gorge would have been hunting territory.
We will probably never know how or when it came about, but we are at present, and have been for as far along the perspective of history as we can see, animals who build houses. A. M. Hocart and Lewis Mumford have written convincing theories about the origin of villages and communities, and Fustel de Coulange’s description of an ancient Greek city is perfectly valid, Rodney Needham tells me, as a description of primitive villages in Southeast Asia and Africa. That is, the sense of boundaries, clans, the distribution of sacred and secular property is pretty much the same. From this I derive that the city is a concept shared by the human race, however the diffusion of this idea came about.
The old Greek polis was built around a hill (the acropolis, ‘hilltop”), which was both temple for the supernatural being imagined as the city’s protector and a fort for the people to take refuge in during an attack — our word sanctuary still has this double meaning. A city was thought of as the origin of a particular kind of people, and when through overcrowding it sent out colonies, or daughter communities, it became a mother (metro-) city (polis), metropolis. Rome was never what we call a country, only one city with many colonial cities constituting to our modern eyes an empire because we see it as a vast state. The state is an invention of the sixteenth century, not of the classical world. Neither Greece nor Rome had a name for itself as a political organization. Leagues and treaties bound them together.
What I want to say in this letter, O Masterbuilder, is that your civilizing art, that of building, has undergone, like everything else, changes of such a radical (“from the root”) nature as to invite comment from a provincial intellectual who, like Fourier, can write a letter to the powers that be, but must write it in Kafka’s world, having no hope that what it has to say will ever be seen by the eyes that ought to see it. As early as that visionary Edgar Poe, writers have had the premonition that they are writing messages which will have to be put in bottles and thrown into the sea. Lucky the writer who knows for whom he or she is writing! Fourier is yet to be read by someone with the scope of a Napoleon (thank God, considering the time). Joyce wrote for he knew not whom. The writers most characteristic of their trade in our time are Antonio Gramsci in prison (kept there by Mussolini); Ezra Pound in prison and a madhouse (put there by Mussolini’s enemies); Solzhenitsyn in his gulag; exile, prisoner, recluse, banned writer. I’m not certain what this pattern means, for most of my acquaintances who are writers suffer as much from being published and paid no attention to as from being unpublished for whatever reason. It all adds up to the high judge not getting his mail.
But we continue to write. Let me say, O Masterbuilder, that I think of you as civilization�
��s practical genius, and prefer you to many other kinds of genius we can locate at the creative heart of civilization. When William Morris placed architecture as “the beginning and end of all the arts of life,” he was, I think, speaking an absolute truth. I’m the kind of provincial intellectual who has concerned himself enough with architecture to have an opinion or two of substance. I know Le Corbusier’s writing and his buildings (he is the significant continuation of Fourier into our time). I have sought out buildings in various places and studied them to the best of my uneducated abilities. I know a little something about architecture. And I have questions.
I live in Lexington, Kentucky (and have for thirty-one years). As in most American cities, downtown Lexington has been destroyed as effectively by commerce (well, commerce built it in the first place) as Dresden by the American and British air forces in World War II. I understand this: it is a process admitting of full explanation. What destroyed downtown Lexington is of course the automobile, which had no place to park itself.
It is useful in talking about the automobile to think of it as a creature, like Samuel Butler’s Erewhonians who saw machines evolving at a much faster rate than animals (Butler had read Darwin and Malthus in his own way) and solved their rivalry by revolting against them. Butler was right. The automobile is a bionic roach. It eats cities. Another principle in operation with the automobile was discerned by Diogenes in the fifth century B.C.: namely, that a man who owns a lion is also owned by a lion. We are all owned by automobiles, creatures whom we must feed gas and oil (a necessity so transcending political rhetoric that we continued to buy oil from Iran while it held our citizens hostage, and from Libya while we bombed it), shoe with rubber, wash, and lavish with other attentions, not the least of which are lifelong car payments. It is the most successful of parasites, far beyond the wildest hopes of microbes or rats. There is no system of slavery in history as rigorous as our enslavement by the automobile. But this complaint (and diatribe) is incidental only to the predicament of the architect in our time.
We have adjusted to the automobile. It has a room in our houses (the garage or carport, touching analogue of the room for the ox in an Italian peasant’s house), we have turned it into a house (mobile home), and have pretty well relinquished the house itself in favor ofliving in the automobile. Fourier’s prophetic eyes would note a reversion to barbarity, to the Golden Hordes on horseback. Well and good: we are the new barbarians, pioneers into the inhuman and into a new vacuum of knowledge. But we have not yet given up architecture. And it is precisely in the way buildings are being built that I (provincial intellectual writing futilely to the Masterbuilder) see a wrong direction that (I hope not) signals a totally wrong direction for all of civilization.
I had better get down to examples. Recently a new bank building went up in the urban wasteland of downtown Lexington. It is very tall: some thirty storeys. It is a steel skeleton with a glass skin. The top three storeys are beveled with a raking forty-five-degree angle (I suppose this must not be called the roof), so that the building seems to be modeled on a plastic kitchen trashcan. That’s fine. What I want to ask about is the nature of this building’s being. First, I have never looked at this building, which I must see daily, when there weren’t workers on a plank suspended by ropes from the top washing it. To wash the second storey they must lower themselves twenty-eight storeys by rope and pulley. I presume this building is to be washed forever, much as the Golden Gate Bridge must be painted forever.
To comment on this astoundingly primitive idiocy I mean the word), I must come at it from another angle. Whether from the inevitable disillusionment of middle age or from an accurate perception of reality, I began to notice a decade ago that the spirit of our times indulges in an inordinate amount of gratuitous meanness. Meanness: a withholding of generosity, a willingness to hurt, a perverse choice of the bad when the good is equally available. Journalism proceeds thus: the worst possible light is the one that sells newspapers and magazines. The blinding type we must read nowadays in books is another example: before computer-generated type the various sizes were designed individually, the proportions of smaller type being different from those of larger. Modern type designers draw one font and reduce and enlarge it photographically, not caring that the smaller reductions are anemic and an awful strain on eyes.
It is difficult to distinguish gratuitous meanness from greed. The thin wall that is not a boundary for noise, the rotten concrete that collapses on New Year’s Eve, the plumbing inside walls that requires the destruction of a house to be repaired, the window that could so easily have been designed to swing around for inside washing rather than requiring a ladder. You can think of a hundred more examples, but whether they are the result of indifference or stupidity is a nice question.
I’m asking about matters that I presume architects have thought about deeply. The office tower in which I work at the University of Kentucky is sealed. All of its air is dead, supplied by air-conditioning, a failure of which would suffocate the occupants. (In passing, we might note that the contemporary concern for breathing second-hand tobacco smoke is coincidental to all buildings’ being air-conditioned, that is, with inert air trapped in a building, and the spokespeople for this problem seem oblivious to the fact that cigarette smoke is as a speck of dust to a boulder when compared to the emission — poison — from automobiles, an emission daily in the United States equal in volume to the volume of the Atlantic Ocean.)
With modernity in architecture there came, tied to it, the paradox of a technological retrogression. If a medieval candle went out, one person was in darkness; the failure of a power station plunges a whole city into darkness, halts elevators in their shafts, trains on their tracks. That’s the principle. The actuality is far more subtle. The brunt of modernity is in a pervasive convenience and in technological “advances.” I put that word in quotation marks because I have come to feel that modernity has marched into a great trap, that the once-balanced paradox has come to weigh more on the side of retrogression.
Is the destruction of cities by the automobile an advance? Decidedly and unarguably, no. Is the high-rise building an advance — full of inert air, with sealed windows, dependent on a power station to move its elevators, be lit, or even breathe? No. That the high-rise is a spiritual backwardness we all know well. There is no lonelier or more dangerous living space than the modern apartment or condominium complex. The inwardness of the modern house has made a desert of the yard and street. Conviviality (of the Mediterranean kind Le Corbusier said should be the sole purpose of a city) does not any longer exist.
The decision to make the modern city a wasteland began with the transfer forty years ago of all police to squad cars; thus ended all protection of the citizen by the police. What the police do now is respond to a telephone call and review a crime that has already happened and from which the criminal has had plenty of time to escape.
What I think all this keeps adding up to, O Masterbuilder, is distance. With all the technological advances of modernity we made distance negligible, and now we are in a position to ask what was wrong with distance that we employed all our ingenuity to obliterate it?
One solid definition of a city is a number of people living close enough together to live well. What Fourier was writing about to the high judge was closeness. He asked that we be close, community after community, emotionally, conveniently, spiritually. Aristotle had said that a city in which the mayor did not know all of its people by name was too large to govern. Fourier was after the retribalization of humankind, the sort of group we all keep trying to recreate in church congregations, clubs, scout troops, little societies with common interests (gardening, politics, hobbies).
The spirit of modernity went the other way: into widening every distance. If, once, I wanted to talk about the bread I eat, there was the baker. Now all I can do is write a letter, if I can find where the bread comes from, and of course the letter will have no effect at all. Distance negates responsibility. I would like to ask the arc
hitects who built the office tower where I work if they were aware of the fierce currents of wind they created in putting their building on a hill with no walls to break the eddying of air, and if they knew what pressure this wind would put on the outward-opening doors that are the only access to their building. I would like to ask them why they didn’t use revolving doors, invented (I believe) precisely to alleviate this problem. I would like to ask a hundred such questions of architects, about space, windows, privacy, stairwells, lighting, noise, students’ desks (the ones in my classrooms are the worst designed in the history of chairs), and many another thing.
As futility is, the instigation of this letter, it is fitting that futility end it. What happened, O Masterbuilder? What was there in modernity that it went so wrong? Why did our dream of great mobility turn into a nightmare of paralysis? Could you not work around the bankers and their greed? Did gratuitous meanness wear the mask of revolutionary innovation? What was it that caused all of Le Corbusier’s buildings to be betrayed, all his model cities unbuilt? Why is New York City more dangerous to live in than Dickens’s London (itself more dangerous than medieval Paris)?
Unlike Fourier, I will keep my own vision to myself, as there is nothing practical in it. But I am writing to a practical person, for the architect is the very essence, along with the architect’s twin the engineer, of practicality. As I see it, your task is to return the city to us, or to provide an alternative. This second route, you understand, amounts to rebeginning civilization, which has so far invented no alternative to the city. The home is long gone (it is a bed, a garage, and a TV screen), the city is destroyed, there are no neighborhoods, the quietest backstreet in the smallest town is now used as a freeway by interstate trucks and drunken drivers, all trees and parks have only a few more years before parking lots take them over. I keep seeing all this as a defeat of your great art, the basis and crown of civilization, and my provincial mind keeps coming back to the thirty-storey building of glass that must be washed forever by workers on a plank suspended by ropes and pulleys from its top, a predicament so gratuitously mean and backward and countermodern as to focus all of modern architecture into one question: why.
The Guy Davenport Reader Page 33