History Repeating #2: Farce
For someone who’s supposed to be not only be tired of history, but of history repeating itself, I thought I ought to get this draft out of my drafts folder so it’s no longer a reminder of my history of history fatigue. I don’t know how long it’s been sitting there, but History Repeating #1: Tragedy was from 2018. I recently bought a copy of the Paperny book I mention here. I’ll no doubt refer to it every now and then in the future, and it’s nice to know it’s there on my office shelf, next to a book on Soviet Avant Garde Architecture of the 1930s.
On one level we must accuse Post Modernism of telling the truth for how can the 1971 building in the header image above not perfectly illustrate the causes of the 2008 Financial Crisis? But no, rather than telling us our banking system was a sham, it was telling us to trust what we see and to believe in a banking system that was a sham and, at the same time, appreciate and enjoy the disjunction between the image and the reality. It turned out the joke was on us. The flow of architectural history has some macro trends – it’s more of an ebb and flow as it swings between intellectual mythologies dominant and romantic mythologies dominant. It’s not a new observation.
Here http://bashny.net/t/en/143046 you can see some wonderful precursors to Post Modern Classicism. This one’s my favorite. It’s the 29131 Hotels Moscow City Council (“Moscow”) by L. Saveliev, and A. Ctapran. You don’t have to quint to hard to see Rossi’s hotel in Fukuoka.
And then there was this.
“Archstudies.gr and DeCorbuziers, in partnership with the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens, have announced their international student competition to design a conceptual funerary monument for the death of Modernism.” [AD]
A lie told often enough becomes the truth. In that sense, Charles Jenck’s soundbite and its accompanying image have definitely become truth – even at ostensibly technical universities, it seems. If one sees architecture as merely the application of stylistic trappings then there’s a measure of truth in CJ’s statement. After all, many people see architecture this way, including editors of formerly respected architectural magazines.
The message is that “utilitarian” buildings need dressing up, and that’s what architects are meant to do, and will be applauded for doing. I don’t know which is in the sorrier state, architecture or the reporting of it. It seems that anything “utilitarian” and perfectly useful without any input from an architect, is seen as fair game for architects to add their bit of value to it. Let’s go backwards in time. Not too far though. August 10, 2015 might go down in history as the day all hope for architecture died.
A useful and inexpensive item remains unchanged on the inside, yet is dressed up on the outside and sold for a higher price.
Quality is seen to reside in the external appearance, rather than resulting from the thought and intelligence that went into perfecting the design and manufacture of the useful parts that remain unchanged because they can’t be improved upon.
“For several years we’ve been flirting with the idea of making custom-designed kitchens,” said Jakob Lange, head of design at BIG Ideas. “But in reality we often end up with custom-made kitchens that are quite expensive. That’s why the thought of making a kitchen which is exclusive in every way except the price appeals a lot to us.”
This is a very post-modern thing to do. I’ve said it before but it’s worth saying again. If you look at the rear of Robert Venturi’s 1963 seminal post-modern building, Guild House and you’ll see it shares a lot of DNA with Hannes Meyer’s 1930 Dessau Törten building.
Yet Guild House is one of the first Post Modern buildings. You can’t unlearn modernism as an attitude towards building, you can only disguise the visual appearance of it and that’s what happened. We don’t know how much this suddenly new and rich world of meanings was appreciated by its residents. Nor do we know if the residents of Pruitt-Igoe were happy to leave their troubled development, but I’m willing to wager they weren’t rehoused in anything that could be called Post-Modern. The cleared site remains vacant to this day. With his Pruitt-Igoe Myth, Charles Jencks killed off the idea that a government had an obligation to house its population. A large proportion of the population in countries of the former Communist bloc still live quite happily in housing just like this. There’s a noticeable lack of anarchy and hell breaking loose.
The architectural leap from Pruitt-Igoe to Seaside represents the ideological shift from social housing for the disadvantaged to speculative housing for the private market.
This revolution doesn’t have a name yet but The Financial Revolution is suitable enough. With Reaganomics, Government spending was cut and housing budget went first. Over in the UK, PM Thatcher did the same with the Housing Act of 1980 that gave tenants the right to buy their council housing. In the UK, it is popular to see Brutalism as a style rather than inconvenient reminders governments once took it upon themselves to house their people.
The UK government therefore wants to see this building gone and the site redeveloped to suit market needs. Architects too, miss the point. Instead of calling the UK government to account for its ceaseless social cleansing, UK architects are up in arms because this is an important example of the work of Alison and Peter Smithson. This is why those architects who have benefited most from pandering to neo-liberalism have no problem adding their names to a petition.
I’m not the first to see a connection between Post-Modernism and Reagan-Thatcher economics but there’s more to it than them both happening at the same time. In this post I’d like to use Vladimir Paperny’s model of Culture One vs. Culture Two to see if it can accurately describe The ongoing Financial Revolution that has been happening in Western economies in the years since 1975. I hope I come across some signs it is ending but if 2008 didn’t stop it, I’m not hopeful. In passing, this little building from 1972 perfectly sums up the causes of the 2008 financial crisis.
Let’s take another look at two of Paperny’s oppositions and see how neatly or not they fit our current architectural culture.
Centrifugal vs. Centripetal: [2025 me. This one defeated me in 2018 but it’s a simple concept that probably has resonance for where we are today. It’s about the forces that consolidate vs. the ones that don’t. We know how this ended, but we have more important yet identical things to worry about now.]
Beginning vs. Ending: Culture One saw itself as standing at the beginning of a new history. It was interested in the future. Culture Two regarded itself as perfection and as standing at the end of all that went before.
After all the fun was over, Post Modernism crawled into the hole that was Post-Modern Classicism and stayed there. That richness of architectural meaning people were supposedly craving turned out to be columns and pediments and all the usual visual indicators of a vertically stratified society. This species of Post-Modernism was presented as a return to vernacular style and sensible ways of building. It may have been, but it also put people back in their places by articulating the political values of a time when kings were kings.
Patrik Schumacher has said that Parametricism will be “the last style”. Hitler had similar optimism re. the staying power of The Third Reich. It’s not an opposition, but Paperny’s statement that “Autonomy is celebrated in proportion to mediocrity” is as true now as it was of architects in the time of Stalin.
Horizontal vs. Vertical: The International Style is said to have been responsible for cities worldwide looking the same but, if we think of the International Style as the style of capitalism, then it’s no surprise to see its advance guard of hotels, airports and office buildings followed by buildings less symbolic. What’s amazing is that this was seen as progress. In 1965 Tehran, the Hilton was probably the place to be.
We don’t hear much about the International Style these days. It’s been replaced by a shallow Globalism where much the same buildings by the same architects can appear on opposite sides of the world. Internationalism and Globalism seem to be different names for one and the same economic imperialism. The architect of the Tehran Hilton was Iranian architect Heydar Ghia, but the well-connected British architect Raglan Squire was consultant. His son continues as Squire and Partners, still doing work for Hilton.
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