ARCHITECTURE
LAST YEAR’S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, it’s generally agreed, reached a new low in matters of substance. Still, there was food for thought in the way the affairs of state revolved around the L word. Two figures competed for our attention on the national stage—one who had made up his mind long ago that liberalism is a Bad Thing (even if in the past it had produced one or two Good Things, like labor laws and public education); and one who wouldn’t admit to being liberal until he couldn’t do so without raising the question of why the admission was such a problem.
A few days after the election, John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general, died, and the front-page obituary in the Times recalled Mitchell’s famous remark that “this country is going so far to the right you won’t recognize it.” The quote reminded me of the story about the anonymous fan who sent a huge bouquet of flowers to the funeral of Mitchell’s wife, Martha (the woman who’d gone about proclaiming Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandals so loudly that they’d had to tie her down and shoot her up with tranquilizers), and around the bouquet there was a ribbon that said, “Martha was right.” This time, I felt like sending a bouquet saying, “John was right.” We have gone so far to the right that we don’t recognize it. We could go a lot further, and with a Quayle loitering in the wings maybe we will, and maybe that’s what it will take to recognize it. Recognition or the lack of it seems to be the problem now.
I’ve been wanting to do a column on conservatism ever since the day several years ago when I was having a chat with John Hejduk in his office at New York’s Cooper Union, and Peter Eisenman came bursting into the room clutching a copy of The New Criterion. Eisenman was tickled because Hilton Kramer had just published a scathing attack on Michael Graves’ proposed addition to the Whitney Museum. “What have I been telling you,” Eisenman exclaimed, “the conservatives are going to save us!”
I think I know what he meant: that liberal culture had grown so flabby and indiscriminate in its acceptance of novelty that it had allowed Postmodern historicism to flourish, that only conservatives had the guts to point out that it was all a bunch of rubbish. Eisenman likes to act the rogue, and I understood from previous encounters that he equates personal nastiness with intellectual rigor; yet I had hope that when he himself got the inevitable bad notice in Kramer’s publication it might dawn on him that nastiness can be just as indiscriminate as tolerance.
A few days after that episode, Cooper Union held a debate between Douglas Davis and Robert Stern to coincide with “Modern Redux,” the show Davis had organized at New York University. Since I admired the position Davis had taken in this show I went to the debate to praise him, not to see him buried by Stern, but I was disappointed. Davis said that surely if Stern needed heart surgery he would want only the most modern equipment, and therefore why should he want to design old buildings; but analogies are not reasons. (Just because you insist on a modern bypass procedure, that’s no reason why you should live in a building that looks like an iron lung.) Stern insisted that Postmodernism was about freedom—a great line to use in the hall where, over a century before, the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln made a legendary campaign speech, though a little pathetic if what this new freedom amounted to was the right slavishly to cop shingle-style houses. Still, there was no doubt that Stern made Davis look stodgy, bound to a moralistic code that had ceased long ago to find convincing expression in the vocabulary of Modern forms.
While the L word was being pitched and tossed last fall, I went back to two classic essays from 1980 on the question of conservatism in Postmodern architecture: Jurgen Habermas’ Adorno Prize acceptance speech (which began with a denunciation of the architecture section in that year’s Venice Biennale, where Postmodernism got its first big international showcase) and the rebuttal by the show’s organizer, Paolo Portoghesi. I hoped they might make conservatism easier to recognize now, at the end of the decade, with the movement in relative decline. They still make good reading.
It would not surprise Habermas to see Eisenman clutching The New Criterion, for he attacks not only the historicists represented in Portoghesi’s show but also the “young conservatives” who “on the basis of modernistic attitudes . . . justify an irreconcilable antimodernism,” a line of thinking that “leads from Georges Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida.” At the same time, I think Portoghesi had reason to bounce the C word back into Habermas’ court—not, as Portoghesi contended, for defending a moribund style of visual art grounded in uncritical views of rationality and progress, but for writing as though it were still profitable to speak of conservative people (not that they don’t exist) rather than of conservative and liberal (or “modern”) impulses operating in a field that resists division along party lines.
The lines were certainly crossed last November in “Everyday Masterpieces: Memory and Modernity,” an exhibition at the Architectural League of New York. The show offered beautiful photographs of buildings from the ’20s to the ’40s, most of them bearing the distinctive features of Art Deco, including quite a few Miami Beach hotels and some apartment buildings from the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. The premise was that these works needed to be reevaluated, understood not as spurious versions of orthodox Modernism but rather as a masterful synthesis between Modern and classical forms. For reference, images of classical architecture—the Temple of Poseidon at Paestum, for instance—were placed beside such 20th-century “masterpieces” as the Warsaw Ballroom (formerly Hoffman’s Cafeteria).
Most of the buildings were described as the work of “unknown or little known” architects, and the point of the show (though its organizers denied, I think sincerely, an anti-Modern bent) was to suggest that when early-20th-century architects were not bound by the antihistorical strictures of Modernism, their works employed classical forms, “spontaneously” sprung from cultural memory.
This was a depressing show. It’s the usual “vernacular” problem again—not just that the very word “vernacular,” as John Summerson observed years ago, amounts to a confession of a historian’s ignorance about how a building came into being, but that it is a receptacle to fill up with fantasies where the information ought to be. And what a dull fantasy this was.
Miami Beach’s hotels focus strains of black culture (the impact of jazz on architecture); Latin culture (the forging of a Modern tropical style to replace the traditional Spanish vocabulary of Addison Mizner’s day in the ’20s); Jewish culture (Denise Scott Brown alludes to this in an interview in the show’s catalogue, but in a book of nearly 250 pages the subject is dropped after five lines); and gay culture (the resuscitation and indeed the naming of “Art Deco” in the ’60s and ’70s). But in this show, a group of buildings that can speak about the complexity of architecture’s relationship to us was forged instead to carry Classical Credentials (in most cases forged), just to earn the word “masterpiece.”
What was most depressing about the show (we didn’t need the Scott Brown interview to remind us) was that its ideas could be traced to a book that was about fleeing canons, not rushing into their arms. I’ve reread Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture often, impressed each time by its force. It was a truly liberal book, liberal in the sense described by George Armstrong Kelly in an essay on Tocqueville as “independence against everything despotic or debasing, self-involved or mean-spirited, be it monarchical or republican.” Venturi was determined to shatter not just any canon, but a canon that endorsed shattering; hence his “gentle manifesto” in response to Le Corbusier’s tirades. Hence his principle of ’accommodation” to what people want.
The thrust of Venturi’s critique was not just to demolish a canon; it was, more important, to build a dam against the formation of a new one, to say that the notion of a mainstream, the great confluence of 1923 that produced a consensus of style, was worse than the style itself. And so I’ve reread the book with sadness and anger, as, in the decades since it was published, we’ve seen how easily the principle of accommodation can accommodate any status quo, and how architects—Po-Mo’s, De-Cons—are still somehow hoping that the dam will not hold, that the mainstream will flow once again, and flow in their direction. (Is that the sound of water approaching? Or just Hilton Kramer thundering in the dark?)
When I think about Modernity what I think of is a piece of paper with nothing on it, and what it’s like when you go to look at an architect’s work and out come sheets of that paper with beautiful drawings on it, images animated by the prospect that anything and everything could have gone down on that piece of paper. I think of Frank Lloyd Wright talking about how his favorite thing was to buy some new colored pencils and hold them out into the light, and of Le Corbusier writing about “when the cathedrals were white” as a sheet of paper, expanding in its whiteness to cover the whole world.
When I think of Postmodernism, I think of the idea that the paper is also just a sheet of paper, one of countless sheets that have passed over the tables of architects since the world began. I think of paper as something that can be cut to fit. And when I look at architecture now, the paper I think about is the one in the child’s game where two players throw out their hands in one of three configurations, paper, rock, and scissors, options that occupy no hierarchy except in relation to what circumstances, our fickle partner, throw at us. I think of the need to believe that the world can be made new at each moment; of the need to cut that belief down to size when it threatens to suffocate us; of the blunted edge that results when that belief is cut out altogether.
Herbert Muschamp directs the Graduate Program in Criticism at the Parsons School of Design, New York. His column appears regularly in Artforum.
