On Sun, 18 Jan 1998, sbmarcus wrote:

>  Lawrence,
>
>  I agree with a good deal of what you've written, but do feel a need to
>  respond to some of it.

I appreciate this preface.

>  Why isn't there room in the spectrum for those who do turn their backs on
>  the past, as well as those who don't. You said yourself, above, that there
>  are examples of Modernism that you do admire. Is the "made" world not
>  better off for the existence of these alternative, out-of-the-continuum
>  structures. The fact that the Stellar examples of the International style
>  laid the foundation for the mediocre miles of glass on Park Ave. doesn't
>  lessen the aesthetic validity of the former.

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.

The ideology of the International Style was that everything else was bad
and dishonest, and the success of that ideology led *inevitably* to the
mediocre miles of glass boxes on Park Avenue, and hundreds of thousands of
others in every corner of the country.  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.

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.

Yes, there are certainly individual International Style architects who
became incredibly important preservationists, who championed the cause of
saving one historic building after another.  By their example, they helped
make preservation respectable within architecture, a notable feat.  They
also helped put an end to the notion that a building's neighbors and
context were irrelevant, that new additions must clash with the original.
But they were reformers who, by watering down the worst strictures, made
the ideology slightly more palatable in practice; they did not revolt
against it.

>  And it's not much different
>  from this art , or any other, at other times and places. The streets of
>  Paris are filled with boring examples of bad architecture of the styles of
>  a dozen periods, as are the streets of New York and London. I admit that
>  the totality of the experience of wandering the streets filled with
>  traditional structures is a lot more comforting, less unsettling, but
>  mostly because of the an engulfing nostalgia, rather than aesthetic truth
>  (BIG CONCEPTS there).

Nope, that is hogwash (to borrow a term).  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.

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.

> > 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?

> > 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.
>
> I agree, but I see the same thing happening here in "Colonial" America all
> the time in the interplay of restorers and their clients. This has been
> discussed before in other threads, but I work with several restoration
> contractors and consultants who constantly bully their clients into
> accepting their ideal "restoration" without adequate reference to their
> client's needs, intention or purses.

No argument there.

> No. I almost never make replicas, just work in period styles. But the
> vocabulary is for me, culturally, a lie, even as it satisfies my
> mechanic's need for developing skills and being technically challenged.

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.

> My creative nerve responds best when I have the opportunity to take
> what I know from the past and include it in a design that makes sense
> in terms of my experience, which is a world that included jets, e-mail,
> VCRs, WWII, rural roads with cars driving at 50 MPH, Ezra Pound,
> Duchamp, Alben Berg, Artaud, etc., etc.

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.  It's just like the fellows who say (who are currently
saying), "Yeah, in the past, stock market prices [or land values] have
gone up and come down, but the world is different now, and UP is the only
possible direction!"

(I am likewise skeptical of anyone who talks about the past as a lost
paradise, that things in 1835 or 1920 or whatever were better than they
are now.  But anyone who says that either doesn't know much about the past
or has very peculiar values compared to most of us.)

> > And how could the process not have been an expression of creativity?
> > All kinds of constraints (word meanings and connotations, structural
> > integrity, availability of pigments, heating ducts, project budget,
> > shape of the site, etc.) are an integral part of any creative process.
> > To design a Gothic building in this decade is no less creative than to
> > design one in the International Style.
>
> Yes, if you are building an addition. I bet that you couldn't find an
> architect willing to take on a commission for any reason other than money
> to design a free-standing Gothic structure if you polled the entire AIA:
> Not because they are slaves of their discipline, but because the
> vocabulary would be a lie.

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.

Remember our exchange in the last go-round:

You wrote:

> I don't get a sense that there is much communication between those
> dedicated to preserving our material heritage and those shaping our
> material future. Work gets bought and paid for all the time in preservation
> that most contemporary architects would never dare suggest to their
> clients.

And I responded:

> Would never dare, not because the clients wouldn't embrace it, but
> because the architect would be read out of the profession by his
> colleagues.

Consider that these are two pieces of the exact same picture!

>  Only if you accept your thesis that all architects practice that. Think of
>  post-modernism. I can't say that I like much of it, but the reference to
>  traditional ornament is not, to my mind, as someone here stated, only
>  ironic. The redaction of Post-modernism to domestic architecture is a
>  rebirth of rural vernacular vocabulary that often works quite well and in
>  my neck of the woods fits in quite well with existing historical examples.

All this is happening at many different levels here.  At the height of the
International Style, say in 1965, there were still "Colonial" style houses
being built by contractors all over the country.  But anything designed by
an Architect, from the big name stars to the legion of local hacks, had to
be done the "right" way.

By the 1970s a reaction against all this sameness was setting in.
Venturi's response was to encapsulate the reaction as an inside joke for
architects, which ultimately led to the reluctant toleration of postmodern
gestures even in new buildings.

But the vernacular raced ahead of them, and so we have new mini-malls with
pitched roofs and cupolas, new courthouses with towers, etc.  Down at the
grass roots, as you say, and in domestic architecture, Venturi's irony
requirement has been disregarded.  And I think that's a fine thing.  If we
have to have mini-malls, better that they have a pitched roof in this
climate.

>  > That schism exists, I think, because of the unbending ideology of Modern
>  > architecture.
>
>  HOGSWALLOW! Is your ideology any less unbending then that of the moderns.
>  A curse on both your houses. (If I were given to emoticons, I would insert
>  a big grin here).

But I don't have an exclusionary ideology to substitute for theirs.  It
was the moderns (your term) who declared that any building path but theirs
is immoral and wrong and a "lie".  I'm an architectural pluralist, and I'd
rather see the proverbial hundred flowers bloom than everybody marching in
lockstep.

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, and perhaps we should acknowledge it here.  I don't know
whether you're an architect or not, but you *think* like an architect.
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.

                               Larry Kestenbaum