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Something to Talk about: Modernism, Discourse, Style Author(s): Sarah Williams Goldhagen Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Jun., 2005), pp. 144-167 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25068142 . Accessed: 10/03/2013 14:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

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to Talk

Something Modernism,

About

Discourse,

Style

SARAH WILLIAMS Harvard

is a word

There

we door not

we

fence

...

a "style"

sciously

This

architecture

to a formalistic

within

refrain

should

architecture.

temporary

from

a notion

within approach.

The

"style." of

"style,"

it is an approach

to

life that

The moment we

open

the

movement

contemporary

atically excised from view modernist practices and ideas that did not suit their polemical intentions. To say this is to say

con

to describe

using

is the word

is

all of us.

Sigfried Giedion Time

Space,

and Architecture,

4th

nothing new, and among specialists and

theory,

now

by

a

in architectural history

consensus

general

exists

on

two

points:

in architecture depicted first, that the image of modernism above was derived not from the fullness of the broad and

uncon

slumbers

GOLDHAGEN

University

ed.

largely

movement

architectural

revolutionary from

one

core

the

subset,

then so-called

under

but

way, move

modern

ment hat was,

or

this

contemplating w

readers?even

in architecture?1

is, modernism

some

question

who

try

not

In

many to?will

likely conjure up a sturdy parade of familiar formal tropes. Flat walls,

roofs. glass

"Transparency" doors,

glass

and partitions.

lots

of glass:

glass

Reinforced-concrete

window or

con metal buildings, tough-edged and stark. Compositions armatures trolled with geometric rigor. Structural split off from building skins, opening up free-flowing spaces articu lated lightly with space dividers that barely touch the hori zontal planes. A dynamically asymmetrical distribution of

that eventually became codified by the Congr?s Inter nationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CLAM); second, that to see modernism

as

in architecture

this

style

or

any

single

richness.2 style glosses over its complexity and multifarious Less well recognized, however, is that in spite of its par tiality this constellation of formal tropes, which reifies mod ernism

in architecture

into

a

style,

retains

the

status

of

a

sense of the term. "An accepted paradigm a or model pattern," paradigm is a framing device that lends coherence to a discipline by restricting its field of vision to in the Kuhnian

problems of elaboration, expansion, and critique.3 As I dis cuss in this article, the style-based paradigm of modernism

spaces. An absence of ornament or historical reference in its rigor, an "abstraction," and a resulting Calvinist on the compositional emphasis play between elements or volumes (Figure 1).

still broadly informs not only popular but also the topics, directions, and character of scholarly inquiry.4 Such ongoing reliance on the paradigm of style?even the face of its obvious among specialists?in

An ensemble of well-known critics, historians, and (to a lesser extent) architects distilled this cluster of rhetorical synechodoches from a series of buildings, texts, and exhibi

shortcomings should perhaps not be so surprising. By def inition, a paradigm opens up large conceptual spaces that demand elaboration and refinement; at the same time, by

tions in the late 1920s, and many of these authors system

virtue of its function

in architecture

accounts

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as a frame,

it necessarily

"reduces

vision."

sometimes

Adopted

sometimes

consciously,

without

a paradigm

"need not, and in fact never does, recognition, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted."5 the origins and legacy of the style-driven Analyzing presence, paradigm helps to explain its subterreanean despite the work of several generations of scholars who col lectively challenge not just its usefulness or its components, but even its empirical foundations. Taking stock of a broad range of contemporary scholarship, written from method art the traditional ranging from positions ological to the interpretive

historical much

in

research

and theoretical,

suggests that

architecture,

twentieth-century

while

often compelling in its specific insights and analyses, nev that is literally ertheless employs a picture of modernism incoherent.6

It is time for the disciplinary reliance on a style-driven to end. Building on the efforts of paradigm of modernism historians and theorists to consider alternative modes of inquiry, I propose the notion

do well to retain

that the discipline might

as a coherent

in architecture

of modernism

phe

it not as a stock if variable nomenon, but to conceptualize cluster of rhetorical synechdoches, or as any of the other useful but ultimately partial possibilities that have been pro posed,

rather

but

as a discourse.7

The

concept

of discourse,

models in cultural studies, phi drawn from methodological and the social sciences, and the conceptualization losophy, in architecture

of modernism

as a discourse,

resolves

Figure 1927,

1 Le Corbusier, reproduced

Corbusier

work of the style-based paradigm. Modernist

dated

not

as a

style

but

as a discourse,

architecture, becomes

a het

erologous array of individual positions and formal practices within a loosely structured field, of which a fundamental premise

has

been

that

architecture

must

instantiate

an eth

ically grounded material practice that grapples with (rather than categorically rejects or ignores) the phenomenon of itself. modernity

as a Style

It has become common

to acknowledge?as Beatriz Colom others have Mark and Oechslin, Wigley, were orig notions modernism out?that of popular pointed a canonical series of black-and-white inally gleaned from ina, Werner

photographs of projects built between 1919 and 1930 by Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, J. J. P. Oud, and others.8 Images such as those of Behrens's AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin (1909), the Weissenhofsiedlung

in Stuttgart

Stuttgart, Style

,115

(1927), early villas by Le

in and around Paris (especially in texts that pre Werkbund famous Deutscher exhibition), in Alfeld-am-Rhein (1912), Mies's Fagus Factory

Gropius's concrete office block and skyscraper projects, and Oud's are repeatedly repro housing estates in the Netherlands as amovement. duced in the texts that codified modernism Among these canonical pieces are: Le Corbusier, Vers une Internationale architecture (Paris, 1923); Walter Gropius, Arkitektur 1925); Adolf Behne, Der moderne (Munich, Zweckbau

Conceived

International

the

Functional

The Birth of Modernism

atWeissenhofsiedlung, and Johnson,

many

cases as analytical problems and handles the conventional well as the range of anomalous cases that have emerged in the scholarship that has been conducted within the frame conceived

pavilions

in Hitchcock

(Munich,

1926; repr. and trans, as The Modern 1966]); Walter Curt [Santa Monica,

Building Behrendt, Der Sieg des neuen Baustils (Stuttgart, 1927); Adolf Gustav Platz, Die Baukunst der neuesten Zeit (Berlin, 1927); Sigfried Giedion, Bauen inFrankreich, Bauen inEisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (Leipzig, 1928; repr. and trans, as Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete [Santa Internationale neue Monica, 1995]); Ludwig Hilberseimer, Baukunst (Stuttgart, 1928); Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Mod ern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (New York, 1929); Bruno Taut, Modern Architecture (London, 1929); and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Hitchcock SOMETHING

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TO TALK ABOUT

145

Architecture Since 1922 (New York, 1932); Alberto Sartoris, Gli elementi delVarchitettura funzionale, sintesi panor?mica delV architettura moderna

(Milan, 1932); Nikolaus Pevsner, Pio neers ofModem Design from William Morris toWalter Gropius (London, 1937); and Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture 1941).9 In both these early narrative

(Cambridge, Mass., accounts

of modernism's

in

and

history

ones

subsequent

(most of which drew from the early texts), the photographic in the medium helped to artificially produce coherence message.

black-and-white

Oft-reproduced

photographs

the sophisticated balance of the colors in projects by Le Corbusier and Taut and the sensuous, lavish materi ality in the work of Mies. Selectively chosen views of, for obscured

works

example, dynamism

and asymmetries,

classicism

and

open

imagine

distortions

of

The

precedent.

in these

spatial

free-flowing, in some

are

works

less by the interiors

engendered camera's

on

reliance

we

spaces

and Oud stressed Mies, sometimes hiding an innate

by Behrens,

and

relationships

cases

than by the

themselves

character.10

of mod origins of our misguided conception ernism do not lie, however, in the technology of reproduc tion alone. They are to be found equally in the construction The

of an often paradoxical authors

of

texts wrote

these

about

of the

of "style." Many

conception

and

treated

as

modernism

if it were a style, although simultaneously insisting mod ernism was not defined by, and could not be reduced to, is the exemplar of this paradoxical merely a style. Giedion praxis.

the

Pevsner,

Hitchcock,

creation

of

canon

this

were

in some

influenced,

of change in the history of art.11 Follow W?lfflin ing Hegel, argued that a period style?Gothic,

theoretical model

and

Baroque?represents

embodies

the

efflo

rescence of a cultural mentality?the Zeitgeist.12 W?lfflin and the long succession of art historians after him who in the Germanic

worked

to artistic

approach

in which

niques

assumption

that

in any

or

relationship forms, in and of themselves,

The

of

interpretation

architectural

between pointed

an artist's

oeuvre,

vidual work of art, therefore would an

146

analysis JSAH

of

its

JUNE

its own

art had

that

internal,

traditions, which artists collectively in his individual way) until exhausted, at (each explored which point a revolution occurred. The second was that

formal

changes in the social ethos inspired or even forced trans at formations in artistic and architectural style. W?lfflin, the height of his career, in Classic Art, argued that broad stylistic transformations in art took place through the syn ergistic confluence of both dynamics: internal crisis in artis tic

on

practice

external

one

the

social

change

and

hand, on

the

the

exerted

pressures

by

other.14

in architecture Early polemicists theorizing modernism some cases In followed W?lfflin's lead. they overtly empha sized style (Behrendt, and Hitchcock and Johnson); in oth ers they described

an admixture

of stylistic gestures and and Still others Pevsner). political ideologies (Gropius new architecture emphasized how the formal elements of the were

intimately linked to the intellectual and cultural ethos and scientific discoveries of modernity (Giedion and Sar most Like of these believed their authors W?lfflin, toris). task was

primary

to

the

explain

and to characterize

the new

of

emergence

style

in art's history. Also likeW?lfflin, assumed that the birth of a new artistic they was to linked the and style intimately Hegelian Zeitgeist, a visual

that

its distinctiveness

qua

language

the

language?style?meaningfully

interpretive

an artwork's

toward

way

content.

tech

formal a trans

work,

style and content: the way to meaning. or

even

necessarily

of

an

indi

begin with

The Paradigm of Style and Anomalies A paradigm is tenacious, benefiting from several self-rein forcing mechanisms. Affording the possibility of intersub basic

jective

jects over

can

be

and

other

architecture,

basic

themes.

in town.

as its lowest

or

only

common

until

potential

In the

case

a par

replacement, in

of modernism

and

tinue to appeal to style asmodernism's only

consensus

Furthermore,

historians

contemporary

that its sub

assuming

by a compelling

game

coherence

enough

a discipline,

in shorthand,

discussed

adigm is challenged is no

lends

paradigm

or to a topic within

definitions

there

a

agreement,

to a discipline,

con

theorists

unifying

feature, if The

denominator.

ongo

ing de facto reliance on this subterranean paradigm can be seen in two ways: how historians and theorists identify the of and within modernism, and how they discuss its putative anomalies.15 The paradigm of style also governs

boundaries

how

writers

on

architecture

twentieth-century

approach

periodization. To boundaries

style.13

/ 64:2,

and

approach was the

inW?lfflin's

art

existed

parent

materials,

or less stable and definable

Inherent

emerges.

pattern

tradition defined style as a collec conventions,

amore

the notion

cases

particular the widely known work of Heinrich W?lfHin. For W?lfflin, style and its broad transformations through his the core of a lifelong intellectual search for a formed tory

Renaissance,

was

First

autonomous

and others responsible

directly, in others, indirectly, by German art-historical the and early twentieth century, in ory of the late nineteenth

tive

formation.

pointed

Giedion, for

his career,W?lfflin Throughout explored two concep tual models to explain the phenomenon of stylistic trans

start

with and

historians' so-called

2005

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treatments anomalies:

of modernism's in

the

past

several

2 Charles-Edouard

Figure

Corbusier),

3

Figure

Ii

Ludwig Mies addition

gymnasium

immi~r ___:Bw

(Le

1916-17

Switzerland,

=:r~~~~~

Jeanneret

La Chaux-de-Fonds,

Villa Schwob,

van der Rohe,

to Frau Butte's

for

project Private

School,

1924

Potsdam,

-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ *' j .... ,j .@4: ...... ..................::. sm,,i,e, ,,,, , ( ,......... ',. , ;::. .,,:,,,,....................................................... .4~~~~~~~~~ .L.''' .''.' \'.""".'$i#:

4.

. ....... ....... -~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

.......... X ... ...i;.

.._ ..............

... ... .

__i

decades, historians have repeatedly discussed how Giedion, Gropius, Pevsner, and the rest of the first generation of authors consolidated and propagated a style-based paradigm of modernism by excising individual works by progressive its stylistic dictates. To redress this sometimes purposeful oversight by the first generation, today's historians painstakingly document the complexity

architects

of

the work

that fall outside

of

this

or

that

architect?Le

Corbusier's

neo

Switzer classicizing Villa Schwob in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in Mies's executed villas land, Berlin, Adolf Biedermeyer in the Austrian Alps, Loos's Swiss rustic Khuner House in Los Frank Lloyd Wright's textile block La Miniatura Rietveld's Summer Gerrit House Angeles, primitivizing Verrijn Stuart, or Oud's highly ornamented Shell Building in the Hague (Figures 2-7).16 Such projects, which would otherwise be ignored, are brought to light and discussed

because

they

have

become

un-ignorable.

who

works,

conceived

of

in social

modernist-looking and who

that were

institutions

conventional-looking

indisputably historians discuss these as

projects

of a

architect's

given

ideas

and

his

anom

provocative

alies that rightly challenge us to rethink received tations

created

as modernists,

themselves

participated in orientation. Typically, modernist more

were

They

by architects who designed well-known

oeuvre.

interpre However,

what we have learned about the ideas of one or another of these architects, are

countless

retheorize

examples?is our

now there

or of all of them together?by

understanding

not

then

used

of modernism

to

rework

and

as a whole.17

theorists, by contrast, who are largely focused on the project of explicating the relationship of that they modernism (or a critical subset of modernism deem to be avant-garde) to modernity itself, continue to Architectural

SOMETHING

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TO TALK ABOUT

147

Figure

4 Adolf

Figure

5

Pasadena,

Loos,

Khuner House,

Payerbach,

Austria,

1929-30.

in 1929

Photographed

Frank Lloyd Wright, 1923. Photographed

La Miniatura

(Millard House),

in 1929

m

Ml

Figure Summer Stuart, Pieters, 1940-41. in 1940

148

JSAH

/ 64:2,

JUNE

2005

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6 Gerrit Rietveld, House

Verrijn

Breukelen

St.

the Netherlands, Photographed

scription

against

ornament

and

symbolism

in the

(as

case

of

the rejection of academic composition (Asplund), Wright), to transparency and lightness (H?ring, the impulsion concern for structural or the Schindler; Figures 8, 9), The

Scharoun).19

(Aalto,

expression

reinsertion

convincing

of these and high modernism has gone only halfway, however. All too

into the ranks of so-called other architects more

often,

and

synthetic

discussions

nonmonographic

a residual category, consign this work to what is effectively the overstuffed shopping cart of an "Other Tradition," or as one

a

of

example

of

multiplicity

modernisms."20

"other

com Externalizing projects and strains that do not fit an ongoing fortably into the dominant stylistic paradigm is was writers in such as initiated that Germany by practice 7 J. J. P. Oud,

Figure

The Hague,

1937-43.

Shell Building,

view

Photographed

in 1943

in foreground,

of cafeteria

who

Behne, organicism Neue

Sachlichkeit.

tices

within

postwar work

within

contours

the

into the nature

delve bounded

more

by

of a stylistically often

analyses, art

of

added

have dense

the

inclined

theoretically

canonical

analyses

and

architecture

draw mainly

1910s and 1920s or the early post-World War anomalous

istically valuable,

buildings writers'

these

then,

of modernism

tionship

are

(or

mainly

the

the

Yet

to

avant-garde)

the

rela

often

marred

More which

by

what

social

pervasive anomalies

an especially vexing challenge In past

rists.

the

generations,

call

bias.

selection

to both historians oeuvres

of

and theo

certain

important

in such as Alvar Aalto and Eric Gunnar Asplund and Hans Scharoun in Ger Scandinavia, Hugo H?ring architects

many,

and Rudolph

States

have

anachronistic trends, modernism.

or

as

Schindler

andWright

as

of

seen

been

figures

from defunct

holdovers successors

challenging

in the United

isolated

scholarship

Contemporary

genius,

the

many of these architects repeatedly demonstrates and

other

practitioners

istic tropes while

employ

violating

some

of

the

others, whether

work

of

how they

canonical

a coherent

of

practices

It conveys

been

set of aesthetic it ignores

a

a reaction movement. in sev

problematic

of

political some

that

even

that

group

and

fact

the

is

impression

by

this

conceptualize

the modern

tradition false

the

constituted

of

the modern united

architects doctrines.22 the

architects

Fur who

designed according to the principles articulated by St. John and Blundell-Jones were themselves integral to the Wilson movement.

modern

The

and Blundell-Jones

that

tendencies

St.

John Wilson

admire flourished not as amarginalized movement

to the modern

other

is said, most

(as

famously,

and Scharoun), about H?ring just before it was established (as, for example, is often asserted forWright) and after it emerged, in reaction to it (as is typically main tained for Aalto). These tendencies existed within the mod ern movement itself, not only in the work of H?ring and of,

but

also,

others,

among

styl

it be the pro

as new Oud

and

studies

have

suggested,

in that

Schindler.23

a strain of "critical regionalism" substantially, though not entirely, with St. identifies

Frampton

already-codified on

again

to, or

alternative

an "other"

of

was

Scharoun as

proto-modernist

an

Most has

and not

present

conceptualized

the notion

thermore,

modernity

to the stylistic paradigm by to be

continues

modernism

scientists

early archi

"organic"

mainstream.

and Blundell-Jones

and

doctrines

eral ways.

by

refer principally to preselected works that fall firmly within the paradigm's boundaries. Their insightful theorizing is based on a data set that is in itself misleading and faulty, all too

prac

in the

approach

unequal

as an

Tradition"

the

movement

However

about

conclusions

his

opposed

the

Frampton.21

"Other to,

II years. Styl

excised.

and

separate

anomalous

of

rationalist

so-called

St. John Wilson

from of

theories

architectural

Zevi

of

tendency

continued

of modernism

as Bruno

the

this

recently,

Kenneth

ideolog

ical network linking architectural forms to cultural predis positions and political and social convictions. Still, these more

to

rationalist

externalization

The core

the

period,

tecture

visible

given a lease on life in the writings of Colin St. John Wil son and Peter Blundell-Jones, and in a different manner by

dis

unjustly

historians,

comprehension

to

paradigm

style-based

limitations

and

conventional to our

immeasurably

the

Their

modernism.18

missed

of

the more

so-called

and H?ring's

Scharoun's

opposed to

that overlaps "Other Tradition," but and Blundell-Jones's John Wilson he avoids many of the pitfalls of that formulation mainly because

turning to it he spent decades unraveling in the work and theories of dominant figures

before

complexities

SOMETHING

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TO TALK ABOUT

149

8 Hugo

Figure shed,

cow

H?ring,

Gut Garkau,

Germany,

1922-26

# %

However,

regionalism

is also artificially unified,

as a coherent,

Frampton's

aesthetic

political ideas,

In

practices. to

convictions Frampton's

is an

approach

St. John Wilson heterogeneity

architects'

these

of over

of

aesthetic

and

approaches

ideologies, amassing in the same category, for architects with greatly diverging political ideolo example, such

gies,

(who

was

a committed

Social

Most Jones, alous

important, although

and

Frampton

the

acknowledge in modernist

tendencies

St. John Wilson,

of

architecture,

their

Figure 150

the

9

Rudolph JSAH

modern

dominant

putatively

Schindler,

/ 64:2,

JUNE

movement

ence

of Le

sought

King's Road House, West

as a

residence house

that

of human

use,

country

mass-producible

and nuances

1921-22.

of

life; moreover,

Photographed

or

that

relationship

the

basic

era

and

each

took

within

position

the user

each

accom

that

to do

sought

between

a

congru that

aspirations:

an architecture

villas

a new

Nowhere

dwelling.25

analyze

and Gray's

in these

develop

less visually

successful

mention

Corbusier's

so and

by

creat

the

did this visually, through the management and

Gray approached

ere

a more

the needs

perspective

polarized

Hollywood,

to

Le Corbusier

anom

both

compara

the Mandrot

depicts

exigencies

argues,

St. John Wilson

an enmeshed ing

focus on their subjects' ideological and aesthetic differences with

ideal,

everyday

does

modated

Blundell

presence

he

produce,

modern

opportunist.)

Wilson's

John

climate, and site context; to it, he opposes E.1027, which to Gray carefully designed around just those contingencies

rat), Luis

an

aside

it, he

an

for

shunts

Democ

toward a nostalgic (who veered Barrag?n Oscar and (who might be anti-modernism), Niemeyer called a consensualist, although some consider him simply

St.

strains.

and

In

example.

proposal

But it, too, elides the

political

as Aalto

an

their

those

tendencies

in Le tive analysis of Le Corbusier's Villa de Mandrot as serves Pradet and Eileen Gray's E.1027 in Roquebrune

of

importance

improvement

ernist

to a specific

formulations

and Blundell-Jones. of

the

recognizing

architects'

it

a spe

in which

cific socio-critical political ideology is conjoined set of

ates false oppositions and fails to analyze the substantial and fundamental unifying goals of architects of different mod

critical

in that he presents

set of convictions

identifiable

a

of

notion

in CIAM.24

than

vista,

which

were

aspects

of

design

site.

of that

in a straightforward manner. Gray did this phenomenologically,

in 1924

2005

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accommodating

the

movements

and patterns of daily rituals. Although differ ences of emphasis and execution distinguish Le Corbusier's and Gray's

same

the

approaches,

concerns

conceptual

gov

erned the design of both houses. Blundell-Jones's treatment of H?ring and Scharoun contains similar, ifmore nuanced, examples of such false polarization. In their polemical superior

supposedly or

greater

next

"other"

lesser

level. As Aristotle

nature

of what

enon

to

analyses

in writing

in common.

or

of modernism,

the

social

only any

it be the percep

and

one

that

requires

the

about the

Understanding

whether

phenomenon, color

of

properties

points

have

they

multidimensional tual

their

take

out

to

authors,

some things can be differentiated

of color,

because

these

modernism,

do not

degrees,

their own

to consolidate

attempt

cultural

analyze

the shared properties of its diverse parts before allowing oneself to become mesmerized by its different hues.26 Fail lead one

that a

to conclude

ing to do this may selected hue or design strategy is different others.

These

authors,

in

modern

over the complexity

movement,

differences,

they

in

in kind exist Moreover,

degree.

of the

and heterogeneity

construct

also

neglect

and the "Other Tradi

are differences

there

reality

in glossing

falsely in kind from the

surmise that differences

tion," and therefore where

on

concentrating

in the "Tradition"

commonalities

a

but

alter

single

call a tradition

nate strain, which they erroneously and which, in its singularity, is as bounded as the canonical strain of modernism that they aim to criticize precisely for its boundedness.

Hence view

paradigmatic

these

authors

further

even

of modernism

as

the

reinforce

to chal

seek

they

lenge it: paradoxically, style remains the principal means by which the boundaries of modernism and its supposed strains are

established

tury who understood architecture

as

As

in the proliferation

scholarship

of

and Periodization treatments

on modernism,

tectural history

diverges

the

of

periodization

of the last one hundred

the

archi

is simi

years

cen

twentieth

or neoclassical as

are discussed

movement

or

early modernists

Art Nouveau

include

they

typological famous by architects

van de Velde; Secessionists

and Henry

and Otto Wagner; Deutscher Werkbund Josef Hoffmann leaders such as Behrens; andWright. This narrative asserts that then came the second period, the heyday of modernism in the late 1910s and 1920s, when many architects produced work that falls comfortably within the familiar style-based including Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies, a host of associated with movements including Russian Constructivism and Rationalism, de Stijl, the ABC Group, the Glass Chain, CIAM, and so forth. This time of creative paradigm, architects

stylistic

synthesis was from

period,

the

by a more

followed

1930s

when

on,

tributed to modernism's

varied

architects

third con

either

into the International

ossification

Style (particularly in corporate architecture) or reinter preted it, as the style slowly disseminated into regions where it did not originate, such as the United States, the United Scandinavia, Asia, Kingdom, the third period, modernism's sively

as architects

eroded,

both nal

to

accommodations fourth

The

when

mid-1960s, in recent

of anomalies

the

from the stylistic tropes made

proto-modernists:

tices.

of Style

but whose work

the modern

of

to be designing modern in some important way (often

the use of ornament

through motifs)

turn

style, by a

themselves

and Latin America.

During

stylistic coherence

progres

its

criticized

claims and produced modernist-looking

and maintained.

Paradigm

at the

Architects

counter-style.

by

The

point the expiring or expired in buildings and cities, is superseded

at which

1965-80), mummified

such asVictor Horta

phenom

substantially

loosely constructed stages, each demarcated by its stylistic difference from the ones preceding it: a protracted birth (ca. 1890-1918); progressive stylistic synthesis (ca. 1918-30); and collapse (ca. 1930-65); (ca. stylistic dissipation

the

period,

accelerating

critiques

and

goes,

shattered

velocity the

cultures,

regional so the narrative

of

these

under many

barrenness

increasing

universalizing

inflected

buildings

climates,

modernism

early

and prac

begins the

in the of

impact

postwar of corporate

inter co

optation. By 1980, modernism

had been all but definitively ushering in the inchoate period

just as problematically?grounded largely in the of of This architectural his paradigm style. periodization tory from 1900 to the present, which is followed with minor

replaced by postmodernism, of stylistic pluralism inwhich we live today. Postmodern architecture of the 1980s and 1990s is then

variations by virtually all contemporary textbook accounts of modernism and postmodernism and implicated in an

typically posed as a series of formal opposites to the putative stylistic tropes of early modernism.28 In place of flat roofs are ones that are conventionally pitched or deconstructively

larly?and

enormous

range

of

scholarship,

is based

on

an

prehensible, easily narrated model of historical ment that recalls organic models of historical originating in the nineteenth century.27 > to this model, modernism According extended from around 1900 to around

easily

com

progress

skewed; in place of the transparency of glass is the opacity of more traditional materials?brick and stone?or the

in architecture

in place of the ambiguous translucency of deconstructivism; simple calculations of the grid and the golden section, the

develop

1970, with

four

complex

geometries

of the M?bius SOMETHING

This content downloaded on Sun, 10 Mar 2013 14:08:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

strip and transforma TO TALK ABOUT

151

mmmmmgm^gmmmmma^^^mmga^^

10 Walter

tional geometry; in place of paeans to structural expression, ironic gestures of structural obfuscation; in place of open plans, roomlike "irrational" tion,

or

spaces arranged in traditional or decidedly

ways;

in

place

of

cool

abstraction,

ornamenta

to the supposed upsurge Smithson, and Aldo van Eyck?or of interest in regional identity in Italy? How might this change the way we approach contemporary members of the British Hi-Tech

symbolism.

this compelling if conventional story, style Throughout remains the de facto paradigm by which modernism's his tory is told. Yet in each of these successive subperiods,

of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)? After all, most of these postwar architects would have disagreed that they were working with a modernism that was in

decline

and anomalies belie and indeed threaten

counter-examples to overwhelm the narrative

coherence

of this satisfyingly does the history of modernism

tragic four-act play.29What in architecture look like ifWagner's Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna (1904?12) is as fully modernist as Gropius and Adolf Meyer's (1910-11)? Or if Loos's Faguswerk Khuner House in Payerbach of 1929 is as fully modernist as Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye in Poissy? Or ifwe recognize Schindlern King's Road House La (1920-21), Wright's Miniatura for Weis and the (1923), Gropius's pavilions albeit (1926-27) to all be fully modernist, senhofsiedlung in different ways (Figure 10; see Figures 5, 9)? And what that have been left out of the paradigm alto as such the many later projects ofWright orWillem gether, in Hilversum, Town Hall Dudok's the Netherlands about works

(1923-30; Figure 11), created by practitioners who knew of the dominant style-based paradigm emerging from CIAM and insisted that they too were creating modern architec ture? What does this move to a stylistically plural and inclusive approach to modernism do to our conception of the postwar period?to, for example, our understanding of the work of Louis Kahn (Figure 12), Alison and Peter 152

JSAH

/ 64:2,

or the work of the Rem Kool

movement,

haas's Office

JUNE

or,

defunct.

later,

Ifmodernism and many

other

periodization there Wright's

matured

reason works

to account for these

is reconceptualized

to

conclude

are mere

the

monuments,

less-recognized

of its history makes that

little sense. No Loos's,

precursors

to

Wagner's, a modernism

accepted

longer is and that

and flourished

under their tutelage. No longer is there reason to conclude that the work and projects of Archigram, Kahn, or the Smithsons are last gasps, historic or pathetic, of an expiring like BBPR's Torre Velasca

idiom; no longer do buildings inMilan (1958) or Albini and Pirovano in Cervinia (1949-50; Fig

Colombini's

Rifugio ure 13) become unknowing harbingers of postmodernism. No longer should it even be taken as a given that James Stir ling's Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1977-83) or OMA's Villa are temporal

dalFAva in Paris (1985-88) ernism's

indicators of mod

demise.

Commonly accepted characterizations and assumptions about the periodization of twentieth-century architecture select one or more aspects of a building or project that do not look modernist in the sense established by the para digm?Loos's ornament

and

disinterest symbol,

in transparency, Wright's

Kahn's

2005

This content downloaded on Sun, 10 Mar 2013 14:08:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

insistence

on

"rooms"

use of instead

. ..:

*.:::

.....::

Si S.?i.ii ....... : i ?S.' :............ #g:'1'', ... r;e . .............?s ?* ......... . .: ' ':-,'......... '.'. :.......

a,.s .., :,.,:........ ,,:.' .:."...

Mv s-e.. t.x.ji!:: .....=!

Figure

11 Willem

the Netherlands,

Dudok,

Town

Hall, Hilversum,

1923-30

if Figure Trenton,

12

Louis Kahn, Trenton

New

Jersey,

1954-55.

Bath House, Photographed

in

1959

Figure

13

Colombini, _|Hi^__^_|wH5_|__H|___i

^^H^^^^^^S?p*'

' ~{_B Mm_|

'iJ^SffS^^VWHBi^KyjSJ^j^^B^-^

;^_^_^_^_^_^_HRlf^^^^'

*t?

Franco Albini Rifugio

and Luigi

Pirovano,

Cervinia,

Italy, 1949-50

''^__h_^

* '-jfjll^^fe-^m^M0

i_^_^HH_|^S_^_^^_^_r'^^_^_B^: WtsM iL^^?^mWS?^m^m^^?^m^m^mW^^u^^^'' ?#

^

"^m??mmWmW^mwk',

:-;-v!^Bp?^S^_^_f^_|_9HS_t

SOMETHING

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TO TALK ABOUT

153

of Spaces, BBPR's Gothicizing over

glossing

the

ignoring or

allusions?while

uncomfortable

that most

reality

other

aspects of the project belie its assigned place in the estab lished chronology of modernism's life and death. Moreover, although architects' stated intentions should not be the only criterion by which we determine the place of their work in history, surely some accord should be given to the reality that,

over

most

the years,

of

the

insistently modern?not

or

proto,

that

practices

and

late,

architects'

contemporary

architects

not

certainly

above

to

be

Indeed,

post.

of a variety

reworking

understand

they

mentioned

asserted that their work was

and determinedly

of

ideas

and

is yet

modernist

another reason that the style-based paradigm by which we periodize modernism may be flawed. According to the cur accepted

rently

the

periodization,

to account

way

only

for

a highly visible portion of contemporary practice is to assert has that, with the demise of postmodernism, modernism survived its successor.30 Surely this risible proposition indi cates the need to rethink our field's basic assumptions terms

what

regarding

was

modernism

and

and

is.

digm is not in need of critical examination, reformulation, and perhaps replacement. Why is the style-based paradigm so

so difficult

tenacious,

an

and

modern

of

architecture

well.

century constitute

the nineteenth

the most

At

basic

level,

century.31

a profound

change from

Furthermore,

important

questions have been raised and substantially clarified through the style-based paradigm's frame. What is the relationship of forms to its social and political agendas? What

modernism's kind

of communication

among

architects

progressive

existed

that facilitated the rapid international assimilation of this new set of

on

ideas

was modern

to make

how

debt

architecture's

and

architecture to modern

cities? What

art? How

did mass

influence the and industrial technology consumption was to of form? If architects took the approach style making not

the

common

lowest

what

denominator,

were

nant formal pursuits of architects who believed value

of

"modern

symbolic

architecture"?space,

the

domi

in the social "objectiv

ity," or something else? All these questions and themany seri ous studies addressing them have emerged from the style-based paradigm and constitute the very ground of our current

understanding

inquiries will architects,

of modernism.

No

doubt

more

such

also offer insights on the work of individual

movements,

buildings,

formal

devices,

and

trends.

Nonetheless, given the current state of the discipline, it would be difficult to argue that this long-standing para 154

JSAH

/ 64:2,

way

only

Ackerman

a

maintains

grip for other reasons as well.

observed

that

a structure

"provides

style

for the history of art"; Ernst Gombrich, discussing style, it a "necessary evil," adding that humans are by

believed nature

In the

animals.32

classifying

on modernism

literature

in architecture, itmay be that style has functioned not just as an intellectual construct but also aswhat George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, andMark Johnson, a philosopher, call a "basic-level are

"house" come

images

"chair."

of

higher

level

or

not

mental category,

furniture?concepts called

concrete

such

categories

words,

to a basic-level

abstraction,

elicit

these

say

In contrast

architecture of

we

When

to mind.

notion

of basic-level

Examples

category." or

pitched cate

"superordinate mental

pictures.33

A basic-level

it has accomplished precisely what its original creators, fol had intended for it,which is to explain and lowingWolfflin, how progressive architectural and urban practices in analyze those

challenged the

paradigm

style-based

strong cognitive

particularly

the

The paradigm of style inmany ways has served historians and

the twentieth

it remains

proposed,

the

architecture,

James

Style

of modern

earlier,

suggested

is convincingly

for a discipline to provide an intersubjective, common foun dation by which inquiries may be conducted. In the case of

gories"?do

theorists

one

alternative

As

escape?

until a paradigm qua paradigm

at a

Theorizing

to

JUNE

category in human cognition has several that in part suggest why a stylistic paradigm of

properties

was

in architecture

modernism

at first

and

adopted

explain

it has been so difficult for architectural historians

why theorists

entire

the

but

as one

Just

category."34

a chair,

of

image

category is imageable, a single mental image can repre

level at which

"the highest sent

and

to shake off. A basic-level

not

of

furniture,

can

get

so can

a clear mental one

summon

a

image of modernist architecture if one employs a cog nitive paradigm based on style. These mental images are simple and easy to recall. A basic-level category is the high

mental

est

"at which

category

shapes."35

Just

level

overall walls

and

a roof while

as

members the

have

similarly house

paradigmatic

architecture

perceived has

Pevsner's

(despite

four

famous

distinction) can be either Lincoln Cathedral or a bicycle shed, in Stuttgart the apparently homogenous Weissenhofsiedlung is far easier to remember than the 1914 Deutscher Werkbund exhibition buildings, which were stylistically more heteroge neous (Figures 14, 15). People find a basic-level category, in not

its concreteness, to remember. conceptual,

For

only

this

analytical,

to

easy

reason?not or

explanatory

conceptualize necessarily

but

also

easy of

because

superiority?the

its

basic

level category is the "level atwhich most of our information is organized."36 Using style to approach and define mod ernism in architecture may, then, concord well with the habits of human cognition. Yet these cognitive obscure

our

need

to seek

out

and

carefully

habits should not consider

the

ana

lytical criteria that are the best tools for exploring modernism

2005

This content downloaded on Sun, 10 Mar 2013 14:08:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

structure

separate

from

skin,

an asymmetrical

deploy except

when

except

when

tation

in

they

use

reference, and

elevation,

They

are

"abstract"

and

represen

detail.

all the anomalies, given all the problems of peri that trouble the litera given the contradictions

odization, ture in the field, cognitive

they

symbolism,

don't.

they

of spaces and forms

neoclassicizing;

section,

plan,

Given

are

they

when

except

distribution

it seems evident can

tenacity,

no

longer

its

that style, despite serve

as

the

to explore modernism the theme of anomalies has become

conceptual

in architecture.

frame with which

so prominent as a to be virtual subfield itself suggests something fundamen tal iswrong with the conception and formulation of mod

That

ernism

in architecture:

have

exceptions

an extent that they have smothered become Figure

14 Bruno Taut, Glass

exhibition,

Cologne,

Deutscher

Pavilion,

clear

that

measure

common-denominator

Werkbund

Style

all, not

is, after

a chair

but

a

complex

are now at the following impasse. Modernist buildings have flat roofs and use a lot of glass, except when they don't; toward volume rather they are shaped by an orientation

We

except

when

space

second

takes

to innova

place

tions in program, materials, systems, and so on; they allude to or employ industrially produced materials such as rein forced

concrete

or metal,

except

and brick; they are orthogonally many

cases

when

they

are not.

only to

is akin

They

for

those

geometric, employ

in stone,

wood,

except open

modernism's

and

its conceptual

domain. But ifmodernism

plans

in the and

than

on

the

architect's

intentions

socio-ethical

for

socio-ethical

Barcelona

over

intentions

recent scholarship, Pavilion

for example, of

Pavilion was considered expression

1929.39

form

can

seen

be

in interpretations For

the

years,

forms

in much

ofMies's Barcelona

the zenith of Mies's

of the technological

simple, clear essence of the new age. In

15 Henry van de

Figure

s. . ..... '' . . .....

....,. ... ,'

the

he designed: what the practitioner believed his forms would he signify to the society and the people for whom on This the emerging emphasis primacy of designed.38

Velde,