>
> The stellar examples are interesting and worth of preservation and all
> that, yes, and they are historically significant for the influence they
> had. However, that does not contradict a realization that these
> structures -- or many other structures plainly worthy of preservation --
> were driven by some very bad ideas. We preserve the plantation without
> endorsing the slavery that made it possible; we preserve the royal palace
> without endorsing monarchism; probably some complex associated with
> Stalinism will be preserved by people who aren't Stalinists.
I think that you overstate the ultimate influence of the International
Style. By the end of the 60's the possibility that a Boulevard of
undifferentiated glass curtain walls set in zoning-enforced sterile plazas
could develop was a thing of the past. I don't know this, but is there
another architectural landscape of similar uniformity and vapidity to Park
and the west side of Sixth around 50th Street anywhere else in the world,
that's not including high rise apartment projects, for which I think Robt.
Moses was far more to blame than Mies, from Chicago to Moscow?
If you are willing to grant that the skyscraper is a necessary and
inevitable component of urban landscapes than I think that the case can be
made that what came after the International style, in city after city, New
York, Hartford, New Haven (I'm thinking of Rudolph's K of C building among
others), Boston, among cited I know passing well, and Dallas, Atlanta, L.
A. among those I only know from photo and film, includes a fair number of
exciting buildings that are at least as visually intriguing as those built
in the era from Sullivan to the Depression. I can think of few visual
experiences as breathtaking as swinging around Hartford on I-84 to I-91 and
watching the sun play off the faceted and multicolored faces of the towers.
> The ideology of the International Style was that everything else was bad
> and dishonest,
So was the ideology of Ruskin and Morris which so influenced architectural
style in the late Victorian period and the Arts and Crafts Movement. So was
the ideology of Stickley and Sullivan, and Wright. For an influential
literary exponent of architectural and design aesthetic who did not turn
his back on the past you would probably have to go back to Asher Benjamin
and Adam.
I am willing to agree that we're
> better off for having Lever House; I am NOT willing to agree that we're
> better off because our world was shaped by that ideology.
But its not, its shaped by , leaving nature aside, a built world that is
comprised of 60% uninformed designs of all periods and styles, 30% plug
ugly examples of ditto, and, maybe, 10% distinguished structures ditto. Of
that composition I would estimate that, even in the urban environment,
International Style structures represent only a sizable minority. And in
the last 20 years, when office space in the US nearly trebled, the
environment has been influenced hardly at all by it. Portland, Maine has
seen an enormous boom of building in its commercial core in the years since
I moved here. Almost all the new structures have brick or stone facades,
ornamentation of some kind, and show a sensitivity to the scale and
aesthetic of the already present environment. I don't travel much out of
the No. East, but I have seen images of similar development throughout the
world.
On the other hand, I do have the pleasure of visiting my parents from time
to time in Lauderhill, a section of Ft. Lauderdale that was built on fill
on the fringe of the Everglades. They live in one of an innumerable
collection of condo developments built around golf courses, which surround
wide avenues of mall after mall, in an area that was a fishing ground in my
childhood. This should be the perfect laboratory for the influence of the
International Style, since not a single structure dates back even to the
late fifties. Let me tell you that this is architectural hell, with botched
adaptations of a myriad of earlier styles, of which one or two buildings,
out of thousands are glass curtain walled boxes.
> Yes, it would have been possible to do out-of-the-continuum buildings and
> be explicit about their exceptionalism: e.g., "this stuff may look easy
> but it's hard to carry off, it's not for everybody." But Mies and
friends
> wanted a whole world of glass boxes. That's okay rhetoric, interesting
if
> coming from a handful of iconoclasts, but unfortunately they came to
> control the world of architecture.
Hardly. They had some real influence for about a decade and a half, and
during that time Kahn was still able to build his Richards Lab at the Univ.
of Penn, Rudolph his Art school at Yale, Wright the Guggenheim etc.
> Nope, that is hogwash (to borrow a term).
Its HOGSWALLOW, and it has to be written in caps.
What is nice about most older
> urban neighborhoods is their adherence to human scale and context and to
a
> vocabulary of form and ornament that developed across thousands of years
> of civilization. Whether structures individually are "good" or "bad"
> architecture is very secondary, and highly debatable in any event. Brand
> new buildings could easily do all of these things. Old buildings can
also
> fail -- we can all give examples of historic forts and prisons and cities
> which are miserable human environments, considered any way you want.
Here I agree with you entirely, but is there any such thing, other than the
projects, of newer urban neighborhoods? The only from-scratch neighborhood
I can think of in New York is a section of town houses built in part of the
bombed out South Bronx, and it ain't half bad; human scale, attractive if
not particularly distinguished architecture, decently kept up I understand,
at least as appealing as the streets of detached, semi-detached and
attached houses that were built all over Brooklyn and Queens between the
two World Wars.
>
> One of the precepts of the International Style which has fortunately been
> discarded even among professional architects is that physical context is
> irrelevant. Eero Saarinen was blasted for his Yale dormitories because
> the rough concrete exterior seemed to echo nearby Gothic quadrangle
> buildings. That was seen as wrong, sinful, a lie, dishonest, a betrayal
> of architectural principle, etc.; by some accounts Saarinen was never
> taken seriously again. Nowadays it would be okay even if the echoing was
> more direct, as a response to the context.
Right, and thank goodness. But again I think that you overstate that
influence.
>
> > > Note that "Revival" is modern terminology. At the time, each was
seen a
> > > completely new interpretation within the existing architectural
> > > vocaulary.
> >
> > I argue with that. Absent the term, maybe, but the intention was to
build
> > a self-consciously retro environment.
>
> Again, hogwash. You're seeing it through Gropius' eyes. Is writing
retro
> because we and Shakespeare use many of the same words and forms?
No the words and forms are the bricks and skeleton. ee cummings and
Shakespeare shared those elements. If cummings had written like Shakespeare
had it would have been retro and it would have had to have been produced
with an awareness that it was written out of time. I have read some of the
writings of various members of the firm of McKim, Mead and White. Here is
Joseph Morrill Wells who was very influential in turning the firm away from
Romanesque and toward the Palladian style.
"The classical ideal suggests clearness, simplicity, grandeur, order and
philosophical
calm- consequently it delights my soul. The medieval ideal suggests
superstition, ignorance, vulgarity, restlessness, cruelty and religion- all
of which fill my soul with horror and loathing."
Two points- you can refer this back to your statement that adherents to the
International Style were dogmatic and my counter that so were those of
earlier styles, in this case in spades, and you can. I think, clearly read
in it, given the context of their buildings, that Wells wasn't trying to be
just influenced by his Shakespeare, he was intending to be his Shakespeare.
This was clearly intended as a revolt to replace one retro style with
another.
He also said "In architecture, individuality of style is at best a doubtful
merit, and in a great majority of cases a positive (if not fatal) defect or
weakness..." This 50 years before Bauhaus, and from a man who was
considered the major creative thinker in the most important firm working in
New York during its Golden Age.
>> > For them, it was a moral imperative that a power plant, an elementary
> > > school, a county courthouse, an office building, should all be
> > > architecturally indistinguishable from one another. I don't think
the
> > > public ever bought into this, but they didn't get a choice.
See above!
> Again, I don't really know enough about furniture to discuss this
> intelligently. I would be somewhat inclined to agree with you if you
were
> describing a piece that would be a precise expression of a moment in
> history, one which, if you showed a photograph to an antique dealer, he
or
> she would say, "oh yes, Chippendale," or "definitely late 1820's." Each
> such piece would include an exact constellation of features, all directly
> related to each other, because that was the way they made furniture in,
> say, Dresden in 1766, at least, as we understand it today. If that's the
> case, no wonder it doesn't feel creative to you.
Lets go a step further with this and tie it in with architecture. When I
make a piece in a period style it has historical plausibility, that is- if
it isn't a copy of a period piece a knowledgeable viewer wouldn't know it
from a period piece from examining a photograph, as you say.
There is a broad category of furniture known as "Centennial", meaning
furniture which was produced under the influence of the Philadelphia
Centennial Exhibition in 1876, where objects of the Colonial and Federal
eras were displayed along with Colonial and Federal style pieces made with
"modern" manufacturing techniques. The result was the beginning of
collectors' and scholars taking an increasingly chauvinistic interest in
our material past (hither-to-for this was considered impossibly
unsophisticated. All attention was directed toward Europe), but also began
a 50 year reign of Colonial Revival design, where bits and pieces of
various early American styles were expropriated, modified to enable machine
manufacture, and mashed together in a single piece. This pathetic stuff was
then sold to the masses, along with other bastardized revival styles, as
the next best thing to owning the originals. None of it had the unity,
presence or grace of the originals.
I don't know how much design work any of you have done, but from my
experience, study of good design, be it furniture or building, will reveal
certain truths about what it is that makes work of a particular style
succeed or fail. Ignore those truths and you are very unlikely to produce
something that isn't laughable (Think of Johnson's pediment on his ATT
building).
That's the problem that I think architects today would be faced with if
they attempted to widen their vocabulary to include great chunks of past
style. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but its damn hard and likely as
not only a few masters would succeed and the rest would fail as miserably
as all those designers of International Style structures who were not Mies
or SOM.
>
> I can't argue with your artistic sense. But I am always skeptical of
> arguments that take as a premise that we in the present are suddenly
> unique in human history, that there are no precedents for anything that
is
> happening now, etc.
I'm not at all saying that we are unique in human history, just that we
have to reflect our present in our aesthetic- I refer you, among other
things, to Michelle's argument about the use of materials.
>
> This very idea -- that using the traditional architectural vocabulary in
a
> freestanding building would be a "lie" -- is a perfect example of the
kind
> of International Style ideology that I'm complaining about. The
> likelihood that 100% of the AIA would toe the line on this reflects the
> death-grip of that dogma on the architectural profession.
See above.
> I recognize your tactic in this conversation (not counting that last
> part), because I've done it many times myself, as a prolific online
> conferencer and as a local politician. Faced with someone with whom one
> has a deep and fundamental disagreement, bring up details and cases and
> specific situations, in hope of finding agreement on the small things
that
> is impossible on the big question.
>
> We could each recount dozens or hundreds of examples of the working out
of
> these principles in real-life situations, and very likely we would agree
> on 90% or more of them. We were probably both drawn to B-P for similar
> reasons, after all, we are interested in similar things, we both like old
> buildings, and we both detest shoddy work. Not only that, we're both
> Jewish!
> But the ideological gap between us, I surmise, remains deep and
> fundamental,
I'll grant you that.
and perhaps we should acknowledge it here.
Acknowledged!
I don't know
> whether you're an architect or not,
Heavens no. Though I did design, and build, my own house- in a vaguely
retro style.
but you *think* like an architect.
Most of the architects I've known don't practice thinking very much.
> Don't get me wrong -- I *like* most architects, and almost always enjoy
> working with them.. But even as the Bauhaus has retreated into something
> of a historical style, and most non-architects have rejected (or never
> accepted) its world view, architects as a group remain startlingly loyal
> to it.
My attempt at a summing up- I see the fundamental difference between us, I
suspect, somewhat differently. We both consider ourselves architectural
pluralists, and both grant favor to at least some modern buildings. Where
we mostly differ, I think, is that you see a far more profound negative
impact on the built world resulting from the establishment of the
International style than I do. I acknowledge that much of the built world
since post-WWII is unfriendly, hideous, or, at best, falsely chummy, but I
lay (unreconstructed socialist that I am) the blame far more on the
activities of the marketplace and its players than at the feet of the
architects who for the most part are willing lackeys. As to why we disagree
so fundamentally, probably because we're both Jewish. You know the old joke
about "ask any two Jews their opinion about something and you'll get three
different answers" . It all goes back to out great-great grandfathers'
sitting around a table at shul and arguing, for years at a time, about some
obscure point in a single sentence of the Talmud.
Bruce
Bruce
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