Customer Reviews

From Bauhaus to Our House

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Tom Wolfe is without a doubt the most honest and humorously penetrating social critic since Mark Twain. He writes what we would love to say and in a manner any of us would give our pinkies to employ. This book, though not as good as others, goes right to the heart of the problems with modern architecture that have plagued our cities and our aesthetic sense. Lest some of you think I'm a cultural philistine, I am myself an architecture student, and I can say that Wolfe's skewerings of the modern profession are so accurate as to be almost omniscient. He rightfully lampoons the excessive intellectualization, the hackneyed leftism, and reverse snobbery of architectects since the 20's while showing the lamentable effects of these traits. His analysis, though shallow, is regretably dead accurate for he understands the social and intellectual impulses (and justifications) that have driven the profession since the Bauhaus. Tom Wolfe constantly plays the role of the young boy in "The Emperor's New Clothes" and, once again he is pointing out the laughably naked elite which are producing architecture these days. I do not agree with all of his analysis of certain buildings, but his social critique from the archictural theorists to the clients to the "working class" are all as humorous, sad and accurate as you expect from Wolfe.

From Bauhaus to Our House is inescapably a book about architecture, but it's about more than that, too. Wolfe uses architecture as a lens to magnify a problem you see again and again in human society and human history - group think and mindless following.

I have no architectural background, and found Wolfe's (very) brief history of 20th century Western architecture to be very interesting. I've always wondered how we ended up with so many monotonous and kinda fugly buildings in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. In Bauhaus, Wolfe offers up his explanation in a fun, readable manner.

Beyond that, however, Wolfe also gives you a look at one instance of a rather homogeneous group of people - in this case academic architects - come up with an idea that takes on a life of its own and becomes too powerful for anyone to challenge. Call it group think, peer pressure, mindless following, popular culture or the will of the majority, it's a somewhat frightening process and here Wolfe shows it to us in a case where - thankfully - all we got from it was a lot of ugly buildings.

Recommended.

One doesn't normally think of a book on architecture as being funny, but Wolfe's hilarious evisceration of modern architecture's sacred cows is truly a scream. Wolfe skewers the pretensions and downright foolishness of some of the most famous names in 20th Century architecture, and does so in a manner that is always engaging and fun to read. You may not agree with everything he says, but you certainly won't be bored by his witty and provocative observations. As good as Wolfe the novelist is, Wolfe the essayist is even better.

For the rest of us who find cold, modern architecture to be...well...cold and modern, this book will briefly explain why you feel that way...and why some people seem to like it so much. It is a book that is clearly only skimming the surface (look at it sideways, how could it purport to be otherwise) but it's a fun surface to skim. I also wouldn't read this if you're a devout post-modernist. You'll find uncomfortable parallels between Wolfe's jabs at architecture and jabs others make a po-mos. A fun read that will enlighten someone who never hopes to be an "expert" on architecture, but would like to know why some God-awful, very expensive buildings ever got built.

Wolfe hits the nail on the head with most of this book. But I also agree with the reviewer who says that he generalizes too much. Granted, he does give Wright due praise, but he seems to lump the rest of the modernists together as if they were all the same (Kahn is treated as just another International disciple and Aalto is conveniently left out altogether). I disagree with a lot of his analysis of early modern architecture, and I happen to think some of the ideas of the Bauhaus guys were very important. But any Corbu-bashing is music to my ears; his late work in particular is just hideous and anyone who doesn't admit at least that much has to be hiding behind pretentious theories or hero-worship. The real prize of the book is Wolfe's excellent take on postmodernism. He basically confirms the suspicion that today's artists are pulling the wool over our eyes, and he exposes the blatant stupidity and intellectualization of Venturi and his cronies. A great read, lots of fun!

The Painted Word (1975) & From Bauhaus to Our House (1981)(Tom Wolfe 1931-) It is not necessary to read these two books together, but they really do compliment one another and it is when taken together that they make the most powerful case. The case is that, just as each of us has always secretly suspected, modern art is crap. In fact, not only is it crap, it is intentionally so, more or less as a calculated insult to our middle brow tastes. Indeed, while most of us would consider it the purpose of art to convey beauty, modern artists consider art to be merely a tool for political expression. Logically then, since most of them are, and were, opposed to our middle class, democratic, capitalist, protestant values, modern art is antithetical to virtually everything that most of us believe in.

I say that we have all always intuited that this is true, but it was left to Tom Wolfe, naturally, to declare for one and all that the emperor had no clothes. He does this most forcefully in the opening lines of Bauhaus, which deals with modern architecture, when he says:

O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within they blessed borders today?

But the reasons for the sorry state of the arts are most clearly explicated in Painted Word. The essay therein was occasioned by a Hilton Kramer review of an exhibition of Realist artists. On the morning of April 28, 1974, Wolfe picked up the New York Times and read the following by Kramer:

"Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial--the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify."

Kramer's words brought about an epiphany:

All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well - how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not `seeing is believing', you ninny, but `believing is seeing', for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.

Painted Word is an extended riff upon this theme--the idea that art had become wholly dependent on theory. His case builds to the stunning dénouement when an artist named Lawrence Weiner presented the following artwork in the April 1970 issue of Arts Magazine:

1. The artist may construct the piece 2. The piece may be fabricated 3. The piece need not be built Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.

Concludes Wolfe:

And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a "receiver" that may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just "the artist", in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode--and in the moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperature...and came out the other side as Art Theory!...Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.

And it is upon reaching this final state of pure theory that C.S. Lewis pessimistic prediction in The Abolition of Man comes to fruition. When we as a people, no longer capable of forming coherent judgments about quality, no longer confident enough to differentiate what is good from what is bad, end up being forced to accept any old garbage that is hailed by the critics and forced upon us.

Wolfe is at his wickedly funny, subversive best here, pricking the pretensions of the Art world--artists, critics and patrons alike. If you want to know why the establishment reacts so angrily to his novels, you need look no farther than these two dissections of the tastes, or lack of such, exhibited by the intelligentsia in Modern Art. When you pronounce to the world that the opinion makers live in ugly, uncomfortable buildings ands decorate their homes with art which is at best a hoax, at worst a pile of trash, you sort of have to expect that the opinions they deliver won't be all that favorable to you.

GRADE: A+ (taken together)

Tom Wolfe explains how it is we have houses and buildings designed as architectual statements rather than places for human habitation or work. A fast, fun, very enlightening read. I knew very little about architecture before reading this book but often wondered where these cold and sterile, chrome and white buildings came from. After reading this book I felt like I had a better understanding of the archetictual mevements in the twentieth century, the main movers and shakers, the those that went against the prevailing theories. A must read for anyone even remotely interested in archetecture.

Tom Wolfe's FROM BAUHAUS TO OUR HOUSE skewers the Bauhaus School and Modernism in general (characterized by the International Style of architecture), as well as Post-Modernism (essentially, another version of Modernism). It's an intelligent, satirical look at an early 20th century European architectural ideology that rose up to reject the bourgeois and design for the working class--which the International Style architects may have regarded as too benighted to know what it really wanted. Apparently, according to these architects, what the worker would want, if s/he knew better, was to live in unadorned, black-and-white, steel and concrete boxes constructed with mass produced materials. Architecture schools and art institutes in the U.S. not only enthusiastically embraced the ideology ("They do things better in Europe," said Malcolm Cowley), but also its principle European champions, giving places of honor to the likes of Walter Gropius (Harvard), Mies van der Rohe (Armour Institute), and Josef Albers (Yale). Much of this movement was constructed around drawings and theory vice actually building buildings. In this way, architecture suffered from some of the same scholastic claptrap as the other arts, indeed of academe itself. When Wolfe drolly comments, "For the ambitious architect, having a theory became as vital and natural as having a telephone" (p. 121), he could have been speaking in general of contemporary academics--which many of these architects, ensconced in their university "compounds," were.

Wolfe's targets easily lend themselves to such a treatment. The Modern architects' disdain for the opinions of both client and occupant are obnoxious. One wonders why the client (but not so much the occupant) kept, as Wolfe puts it, taking it like a man. However that may be, Wolfe's style gets a bit old after a while. You just want him to chill for a bit. People weren't all necessarily duped by Modernism. The clean lines and simplicity of forms of work by Le Corbusier constitute a refreshing break from the past, and has certain aesthetic appeal. The offense of the style is not just that it is impractical; it's that it becomes so damn derivative and so dogmatic from that point on. (Frank Lloyd Wright, who was not a member of the International Style clerisy, but was "an American original," and so fairs pretty well in Wolfe's treatment, was not necessarily very practical himself. If you're a parent, tour "Falling Water" and you'll see what I mean.)

Wolfe's venom, to be sure, is aimed at the arrogance, pretentiousness, and hypocrisy of many of the leading architects comprising the Modernist and Post-Modernist movements. In that regard, Wolfe is very much on target in his criticism, even if he does go a bit overboard. Understanding that this is a screed, and not an objective critique, the reader will be pleased to find in this little book a readable, trenchant, witty, funny, and erudite treatment of these leading trends of 20th century architecture.

This is an absolutley brilliant and hilarious book that was a total eye-opener to me about why there is so much sterile, ugly architecture in the United States (and elsewhere). I have read sections of this book numerous times. Reading this book is like learning why the sky is blue. You have an explanation you did not have before about why an every day part of your environment is how it is.

Wolfe's little book is actually an extended polemic against the Bauhaus school and all its offshoots in architecture and design. Although never boring, I found nothing new here. In fact, I found several direct steals from Robert Hughes's landmark SHOCK OF THE NEW (1980), the book and teleseries which came out the year before Wolfe wrote his little screed. I'd advise anyone interested in pursuing the iconoclast's case against modern architecture to check out this earlier work as well.