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5.0 out of 5 stars
From Ideology to Ikea, May 26, 2009
This review is from: From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American City (Hardcover)
(A version of this review first appeared in the March 2009 issue of The Christian Century.)
The divorce of contemporary architecture from human need is explored at length by Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer in this perfectly titled book. In 11 essays unified by a clear message, Glazer recounts how Modernism went from a world-saving mission to one among several furniture options on an IKEA showroom floor. The book's power comes from Glazer's position as a high-profile urban consultant for the past 50 years. He has been a witness to the literal demolition of Modernism's accomplishments.
A commonly cited end point for Modernism is 1972, when World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki's Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis, despite being the subject of a prestigious architectural award, were intentionally destroyed. Glazer was on the committee that made the decision. "I had shared that optimism and modernist faith," he declares. But Glazer is a Modernist who has been mugged by reality.
Glazer provides some frightening examples of how Modernism's faith in the future burned all bridges to the past. Lewis Mumford, the most prominent American urban theorist of the mid-20th century, even considered the Lincoln Memorial a part of the old order that needed to be overturned. Monuments in general, for Mumford, "are all the hollow echoes of an expiring breath ... which either curb and confine the works of the living, like the New York Public Library, or are completely irrelevant to our beliefs and demands."
Such radicalism was justified as necessary to defend the ordinary citizen. Modernism, explains Glazer, "represented a rebellion against historicism, ornament, overblown form, pandering to the great and rich and newly rich as against serving the needs of a society's common people." Hence brownstones were bulldozed to make way for the modern housing developments that would, in the words of CIAM, "teach people how to live." Such projects gave us what urban dwellers today call "The Projects." "We know better now," sheepishly admits one of the many Modernists quoted by Glazer.
While Modernism today may be a lost cause, it has yet to be replaced by anything else. Contemporary architecture is not the next in a succession of styles, but "the merest skirmishes around a common norm that has effaced all historical styles. And a norm that leaves most of us discontented."
Glazer identifies the fissure underlying abstract architectural discussion today, a discussion lost for some time in the smoke and mirrors of postmodernism. Those who seek to follow a contemporary architectural discussion are rightfully puzzled by the opacity and baffled to hear architects say, for example, that they are now "beyond building." Glazer, however, provides a cogent explanation for the bewildering intellectual atmosphere: "Architecture in recent years has turned away from the pragmatic social and behavioral sciences to the wilder reaches of critical theory because its early efforts to design better housing turned into a failure."
Critical theory is the study, inspired mostly by thinkers in the Marxist tradition, of how social meaning is generated and maintained by social elites. Critical theorists examine texts-and buildings--for how they uphold traditional meanings and, presumably, repressive social orders.
From a Cause to a Style is not a wholesale condemnation, and the book's elegant, judicious tone keeps it from ever descending into a harrumph. Modernism may be an ideal style for certain kinds of buildings or monuments. Glazer concedes, for example, that the very modern Vietnam Memorial is a success. But the limits of the style are evident. Modern simplicity makes for wonderful factories, claims another of Glazer's repentant Modernists. However, "let a religious belief or a social ideal replace cubic foot costs or radiation losses, and nothing happened. There is not a single modern church in the entire country that is comparable to a first-rate cafeteria."
According to Glazer, critical theory is now the ruling mindset of architecture. As a result, Glazer has little hope that an architecture of beauty is on the horizon. "Starchitects" such as Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind produce beautiful forms - but they seem more interested in generating buzz than in creating humane models for urban life. Furthermore, because postmodern architecture lacks the narrative force to fully overturn the anathema on ornament, Modernism has reasserted itself.
Not only would it embarrass architects to design decorative detail or call for it; they wouldn't know how to do it, and there would be no craftspeople to provide it. The workers who once carved and sculpted the decorated surfaces of buildings in the late 19th and early 20th century simply don't exist.
Glazer's solution is a sober one. We should cultivate appreciation for the accomplishments of the now unrepeatable past. If ever there was a charge to jealously defend premodern churches, Glazer provides it: "We can preserve the buildings of the past. We can't build them again."
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