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Colin Rowe - Introduction To Five Architects

The neo-avant-garde share common ldeologkal roots with Marxism. The measure of architecture is in meeting the demands of the flesh, says cotin rowe. The plastic and spatial inventions of cubism and constructivism, Terragni and Le Corbusler remain the standard specific to the ideologicaUy indifferent medium itself.

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Colin Rowe - Introduction To Five Architects

The neo-avant-garde share common ldeologkal roots with Marxism. The measure of architecture is in meeting the demands of the flesh, says cotin rowe. The plastic and spatial inventions of cubism and constructivism, Terragni and Le Corbusler remain the standard specific to the ideologicaUy indifferent medium itself.

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Tugba Korkmaz
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Architecture | Theory | since 1968 | edited by K. Michael Hays 1972 Colin Rowe Introduction to Five Architects (New York: Wittenborn, 1972) Ifthe historical architectural avant-garde shared common ideological roots with Marx ism, it also shared a Marxian philosophical ambition to interfuse form and word — variously articulated as expression and content, system and concept, practice and theory, building and politics. That the fusion process ultimately failed entailed a shift in the terms in which the experience of modernity itself was thought, a shift from modernity, fully developed, as the essential desired achievement of architecture to modernity as architecture's limiting condition. Feeling the force of this shift, Colin Rowe, in his introduction to the work of five of the American neo-avant-garde, forthrightly exposes what seems to be the only possible choice: adhere to the forms, the physique-flesh of the avant- garde and relegate the morale-word to incantation. For ifthe latter has been reduced to “a constellation of escapist myths," the former “possess an eloquence and a flex! bility which continues now to be as overwhelming as it was then." The measure of architecture no longer lies in the efficacy with which it prefigures a new and better ‘world, but rather in its achievement, within the contingent conditions of the modern, of meeting the demands of the flesh, as it were, of elevating form as its own language without reference to external sentiments, rationales, or indeed social visions: “the great merit of what follows lies in the fact that its authors are not enormously self- deluded as to the immediate possibility of any violent or sudden architectural or so- cial mutation.” The plastic and spatial inventions of cubism and constructivism, Ter- ragni and Le Corbusier, remain the standard specific to the ideologically indifferent medium of architecture itself. The neo-avant-garde are “belligerently second hand,” ‘Scamozzis to modernism's Palladio, a series of simulacra. But itis through acceptance of that standard and the repetition of just those simulacra that the architect aspires tobe intelligible, From this position, the true potential of architecture lies not in the prospect of its popular or technological relevance, but in the possibility of its autonomy. While Rowe's later project, Collage City, has received more criti- cal attention, this short introduction has proved more theoretically powerful. For his argument entails his final question: “Can an architecture which professes an objective of continuous experiment ever become congruous with the ideal of an architecture which is to be popular, intelligible, and profound?” And that question fixes the oppo- sition that has haunted most of subsequent architectural practice. rll s—~—“—SSS 1972 Colin Rowe Introduction to Five Arciterts What you should try to accomplish is built meaning, So get lose to the meaning and build ‘Auo VAN EYCK, Tam 10 Primer, p. 7 ‘Wen, in the late 1940s, modern architecture became established and institutional Tar, ecessarily, it lost something of its original meaning Meaning, of cours, & rea eer been gupposed to possess. Theory and offical exegesis had insisted dat tae modern building was absolutely without iconographic content, that it was 90 ane ua the illustration ofa program, adiect expression of social purpose, Moa mots Chitecrare, it was pronounced, was simply a rational approach to building: ‘vas a logical derivative from functional and technological facts; andat the last Shalysis it should be regarded in these terms, as no more than the nev atable result of twentieth century circumstances. ‘There was very litle recognition of meaning in all this. Indeed the need for symbolic content seemed finally to have been superseded: and it Was ane mifat there emerged the spectale of an architecture which claimed to be scien ries but which—as we all know—was in reality profoundly sentimental. For ver) fe from being as deeply involved as he supposed with the precise resolution of tractng fats dhe architect was (as he always is) far more intimately ‘concerned ‘with the physical embodiment of even more exacting fantasies Fantasies about ineluctable change were combined in his mind with farther fantasies about imminent and apocalyptic catastrophe and with si) aan epost instant millennium. Crisis threatened; but hope abounded. A change oer dares therefore required —for, fa new world might sil ie, like a phoen's, from our of the ashes of the old, it was up to all men of good will to help Pit or pen and thus while a holocaust of conventional vanities now ensue the an tect called upon himself simultaneously to assume the virtues ofthe scientist, the peasant and the child. The objectivity ofthe frst, the naturalness of the second the Prasnvete ofthe third indicated the values which the situation required and ane rchiteet, twansformed in terms of this image, could now assume his proper role part Moses, par St. George—as the leader and the Mberator of mankind. “The idea was grand and, for a time, the messianic program was productive. The architect found himself to be an enthusas speed and for Sport for youth, sunbathing, simple lf, sociology Canadian grain nO, Atlan: eens Vuitton trunks, filing cabinets and factories And his buildings Pecstte Af lusgations ofthese enthusiasms. But they became aso the outward and visible Signs of a better world, 2 testament io the present a5 to what (he future would ‘Seclose; and there was always the proviso that his buildings were the agen's of this dace atthe more modern buildings were erected the more the hoped for conde tion would ensue. owe | 3972 1972 | 75 ilable, standardized and basic, as the architect had always wished itt sarily there resulted a rapid devaluation of its ideal content. The intensity of its «cial vision became distanced. The building became no longer a subversive propo- sition about a possible Utopian future. It became instead the acceptable decoration rainly non-Utopian present. The ville mdiuse—that city where life would be ome intelligent, educated and clean, in which soc and politica 1 justice would be established issues resolved—this city was not to be built. C mpromise and ac mmodation were therefore in order; and hence, with defi ere fol ion of conv The scene was now ripe for the cheap politician and the con mercial operator. The revolution had both succeeded and failed. The cautious and the careful could, therefore, now emerge; but, while they could acclaim revolution ary success and repudiate suggestion of failure, there sill remained the predicament of “the true believer” who, above all else, was obliged to detach himself from The camp of success—always eclectic, facile and agreeable ceeded to modify and to use the revolution. The camp of “the true believer” — always anxious for authenticity—attempted to work over the results of the revolt tion so as to make them strange, arcane, difficult; interesting to the few and inacces sible to the many. And both parties were prone, as advant age seemed to dictate, t0 mploy sometimes the polemics of revolution and sometimes its forms. Thus there ensued that succession of fractional style phases: 1 cult of townscape and the new npiricism, Miesian neo-classicism, neo-Liberty the New Brutalism, Team X, the Futurist Revival, Archigram, in terms of which nnvolutions any consid hitecture in the 1970s must be based, and, i interpenetrated, so infected one an +, so much exchanged arguments and apolc getic, appearances and motifs, that to discriminate either is becomi So much is largely true today of modern architecture in gen al; but it should go without saying that these remarks d not wholly describe its ivendi—either past or present—within the United States. Thus, while wit 1 to Europe, itis possible to argue an adjunct of socialism and probs ly spran h g from approximately the same ideologi 1 roots as Marxism, in America an indigenous modern architecture was very con. re was the result of no largel usive collective social concern and its exponents seem scarcely to have bee vision of either impending cataclysm or of unitary fature world. These visions were distinctively European and, in extreme form, per haps more specifically Germanic; but, whatever their place of origin and concentra: tion, rooted as they were in the circumstances of World War I and the Russian Revolution, they qualified European production as they never could American. In post-World War I Europe, the combined promise and threat of Architecture or Relation could seem to many important innovators to be a very real one; but, in the United States, the presumption that only architecture could turn a “bad” revolution into a “good” one, that only a Wagnerian recourse to “total” design could avert social ‘catastrophe, this could never seem to be very highly plausible. For in the United States the revolution was assumed to have already occurred—in 1776, and it was further assumed to have initiated a social order which was not to be superseded by subsequent developments. In other words, with the revolutionary theme divested by circumstances of both its catastrophic and futurist implications, with this theme rendered retrospective, legalistic and even nationalist, an indigenous modern archi- tecture in America deployed connotations quite distinct from its European coun. terparts. Its tacit assumptions were infinitely less grand. It was clean, efficient empirically reasonable, simple, evidently to be related to the time-honored Yankee virtues; and while a Frank Lloyd Wright could—and did—claim revolutionary ante- cedents, could represent his buildings as the natural sequel to something latent and libertarian in American air, as the Usonia efflorescence of a politically democratic society; still, in doing so, he proposed no intrinsic challenge to the social order and inferred no scheme of radical social reconstruction. Instead, such an architecture as his was essentially a call for a particular political society to become more com: pletely itself But, if the Architecture-Revolution confrontation (whatever value fs attached (o either of its components) is oné of the more obviously unex plored ingredients of modern architecture's folklore, and if any attempt to explore it ‘would, almost certainly, meet with the most strenuous disavowal of its significance, and if it might be possible to demonstrate the action or the inaction of this fantasy for present purposes it should be enough simply to reiterate that the revolutionary theme was never a very prominent component of American speculation about build. ing European modern architecture, even when it operated within the cracks and crannies of the capitalist system, existed within an ulimately socialist ambiance: American modem architecture did not. And it was thus, and either by inadvertence or design, that when in the 1930s, European modern architecture came to infiltrate the United States, it was introduced as simply a new approach to building—and not much more. That is: it was introduced, largely purged of its ideological or societal content, and it became available, not as an evident manifestation (or cause) of social ism in some form or other, but rather as a décor dela vie for Greenwich, Connecticut or as a suitable veneer for the corporate activities of “enlightened” capitalism. Depending on our values, this was either triumph or tragedy but the presentation of modern architecture primarily in terms of formal or techno logical construct, its disinfection from political inference, its divorce from possibly doubtful ideas, in other words, its ultimate American qualification, should be recog- nized as being important—both inside and outside the United States—and as having direct bearing upon developments at the present day. For, by these means, and for better or worse, the message of modern architecture was transformed. It was made safe for capitalism and, with its dissemination thereby assisted, the products of a ‘movement which became crystallized in the stress and the trauma of the central Euro: pean 1920s became agreeably available to be catalogued—on either side of the Atlan. tic—among the cultural trophies of the affluent society. The ironies of a European revolution which, perhaps, tragically failed to make it, do not comprise the most gratifying of spectacles, When these are owe | 4972 pounded with the further ironies of trans-Atlantic architectural interchange ar their physical results, in America, Europe and elsewhere, we find ours fronted with an evidence—an adulteration of meaning, principle and form c + from easy to neglect. The impeccably good intentions of modern architectui its genuine ideals of social service, above all the poetry with whic Sn, ith eto inhibit doubts invested random twentieth century happening may all conspi to its present condition, to encourage a suppression of the obvious: but, conspire a nay, and however reluctant .cognize it, the product of modern archi ture compared with its performance, the gap between what was antic and whai been delivered, still establ base line for any responsible contemporai production and, in doing so, introduces the context for consideration of such build ings and projects as are here published. These, had they been conceived 0 and built in France aly, had then they been illustrated by Alberto Sartoris wen FR. §. Yorke, would today very likely be approached as ancient monument and as exemplary of the heroic periods of modern architecture, they would be vi and rec indeed one can imagine the tourists and almost concoct the historical tvaluations. But these buildings were not conceived c. 1930. They a On ively recent origin; they are built in, or proposed vicinity of New York ¢ and therefore, whatever their merits and demerits, such is the present conste of critical ideas, they can only be regarded as constituting a prob or we are here in the presence of what, in terms of the orth: Jox theory of modern architecture, is heresy. We are in the presence of anachron: nostalgia, and, probably, frivolity. If modem architecture looked like this c. 1930 hen it should not look like this today; an, ifthe real political issue of the present is became apparent that never had it nd thinking, which Sigitied Giedion had supposed: mbiosis of highly discrete and ultimately incompatible prc s an ne incompatibility between the form of modern architecture and its pr fessed theoretical program, however apparently happy was @ f co-existence ‘ome thirty to forty years ago, has now long been evident, thas also been the subje in general, sardonic comment. The configuration of the modern building wa: zed to derive from a scrupulous attention to particular and concrete problems, i s supposed to be induced from the empirical facts of its specific case; ar modern buildings looked alike whether their specific case was that of a factory or an Peter Eisenman, House I 969 buildings erected in the name of modern architecture had comprised an enormous series of misunderstandings; that they had represented no intrinsic renewal; that, ultimately, they had constituted no more than a simultaneously sophisticated and naive rearrangement of surfaces. Reyner Banhamn’s Theory and Design in the Fist Machine Age celebrated just this problem and it concluded with what amounted to a repudiation of modern architecture's forms and an endorsement of what the modern movement, theoretically, was supposed to be. And this is a style of critique which, for obvious reasons, has now become very well known. For, at one and the same time, it allows its exponents the pleasures of condemning, or of patronizing, most of modern archi- 1972 | 9 tecture’s classic achievements an of annexing that revolutionary tone whic though it may be ancient, can still posture as new: sible to speak of the theoretical program c ‘em architecture and to observe how, almost invariabl d theory its breach, then, by now, the logical contradictions within this all ps, it would be more correct to speak of should, equally, be @ this theory not in terms of its logical contradictions. hit of any critical ‘olatile sentiments, not so much the stipulation of a consistent di ion of a general tendency of thought and the evidence of a highly pronounced s already suggested, in its theory, modern response to twentieth re than a rational and unprejudice century enlightenment and its products; and, if we subject this theoret tion toa slight caricature, we might distinguish what i sila prevalent an position. It may be outlined as follow Modern architecture is no more than the result ofthe age: the age is crestin ‘Thus compressed and rendered absurd, it becomes, of course, dificult to understan wund such a statement as this one; that is, how passion could, and can still, revolve a intil we recognize that what we have here is the conflation of two powerful nin teenth century tendencies of thought. For here, in varying degrees of disguise, we cence” and “history.” We are provided with the Positivis are presented with be conception of fact (without any great epistemological reservations as to what constitute a fact) and we are provided with the Hegelian ¢ which all problems will vanish away But again, although in these notices we may touch upon one fF twentieth century architecture, itis only when we intro- iments into this scene that it fully begins to acquire color and momentum. And thus, the idea of relying upon these may be, the idea that when once the relevant data are ¢ ting hypothesis will automatically divulge itself, becomes very easily allied wit so many attacks upon “art” (the gratuitous transformation of private concern int public pre-occupation) which, even though “art” fs bought and consumed to its Restruction, is typically conceived to be a reprehensible activity. And, correspond ingly, attacks upon tation at the continued existence of the institution and dismay that acceptable so long as the architect suppresses hi individuality, his temperament, his taste and his cultural traditions; and unless, in this way, he is willing to win throug ind, then all his we to “objectivity” and to a scientific state of 1 cteuct the inexorable unrolling of change and thereby, presumably, retard the progres However, if we are here presented with what might seem to be gument for pure passivity, with an argument thatthe architect should act simp as the midwife of history, then we might also recognize an entirely contrary strand of thought which no less urgently clamors for attention. The idea that any repetition, any copying, any employment ofa precedent or a physical model is a failure of cre stive acuity is one of the central intuitions of the modern movement. This is the ‘deep seated idea that repetition establishes convention and that convention leads to ‘allousness; and thus, almost constitutionally, modern architecture has been opposed to the dictatorship of the merely received. Opposed to the imposition of «priori pat- tern upon the multfariousness of events, instead it has set pre-eminent value upon discovery” —which, characteristically, it has been unwilling to recognize as “inven tion.” Without an unflagging consciousness of flux and of the human efforts which this implies, without a continuous ability to erect and to dismantle scaffolds of refer fence, then—-so proceeds an argument—it is entirely impossible to enter and to oc- cupy those territories of the mind where, alone, significant creation moves and flourishes. “The idea can only deserve respect; but, ifit is pressed, then like so mainy ideas which also deserve respect, it can only become something doctrinair and destructive of its own virtues; and, with its heroic emphasis upon the architect x activist, the notion of architecture as ceaseless moral experiment must now be subjected to the presence of yet another equally coercive but contrary proposition. ‘This, quite simply, i the idea that modem architecture was to instigate order, that it ‘was to establish the predominance of the normative, the typical and the abstract. However we may estimate the record of nineteenth century building, iis not hard to see how ideas of order and type should have recommended themselves to the modern movement. For, in contrast to the products of Romantic individualism and political lis: faire, there was always the evidence of previous cen- turies, of Bath or Potsdam, Amsterdam or Nancy; and, if there was always involved some sort of fantasy concerned with a contemporary simulacrum of just such cities as these, then, in the Siedlungen of Frankfurt or at Siemenstadt, among the early tri ‘umphs of modern architecture, one may presumably discem the influence of this intention. But such developments belonged to the age of innocence; and while in them the reasonable demands of the particular versus the abstract, of specific Function versus general type might seem to have been approximately met, there stil remained to prevent the multiplication of such achievements the overriding inhibi tion as to repetition, the conviction that to reproduce something, to allow precedent to enforce itself, was to betray the forces of change and to deny the drive of history, Now whether it was thus that the demand for order became vitiated by the competing necessity to illustrate the action of experiment or the be havior of frst principles, it should be enough to state that it seems likely —whatever value we may wish to attribute to change and order—that a high valuation of change must, in the end, cancel out a high valuation of order, that, given the perpetual re definition of a situation, no theory of types can survive, that, ifthe terms of a prob- Jem are constantly altered before approaching solution, then that problem never can be solved. But if, with this statement, though it is rarely made, there is nothing re mmarkable announced, then attention might usefully be directed towards another of those paradoxes which sprout so irresistibly the more the theory of modern architec ture is, even casually, scrutinized ‘Modern architecture professed to address itself to the great pub: lic. What was believed to be its intrinsic rationality was never overtly intended for the delectation of minor professional interest groups; but rather the architect was to address himself to thenaturl man, Enlightenment won by bitter struggle was to speak to enlightenment which was innate, As simply a scientific determination of empirica) ‘data modern architecture was to be understood by thenaturalman; and hence the mod. owe | 3972 a em building, believed to be purged of mythical content, became conceivable as the inevitable shelter for a mythical being in whose aboriginal psychology myth cout The notion, of course, continues to possess a certain eighteen century decency. Without rhetoric the truth will be accepted as the truth. But, in practice, it has always alli an alternate ambition, The modern building hesis of an architecture which does not involve itself with mine asides, which is absolutely not at all addressed to the few, but which, of its natu absolutely available and intelligible to the uninstructed (or to the however instructed) here, when the ideal of public intelligibility makes its 8 nizable empirical facts is, evidently, immediately compromised by the more sup- pressed concept of the buildin, prophetic and the intelligible should now be related ton ts products. And it should not be necessary tc itemize the details ofthis anathema. Simply it should be enough to ask the question: n?; and, without being unduly sententiou: meaning, mathematical symbols with values and physical forms with attendant over tones, itis difficult to see how any ideal of communication can flourish. In a bette world, no doubt, the problem would not exist; but if, in ¢ ceiving a better modern architecture here conceived no problem, then we might abruptly conclude this issue by suggesting that, unless a building in some way or other evc Interest. The ideal of order based upon public understanding, if it is to be insist The foregoing remarks have been an attempt, admitted compressed and far too generalized, to identify—not without critical asides—th complex of sentiments about architecture in terms of which the buildings here pu ois lack of cor esoteric privacy and failure to keep pace with the social and technological moveme of the age. But the moment that this body of ideas is subjected to even the mi asual skeptical a of modern architecture, located as they once were in a al and social revolution whose imminence the mod so much a literal directive for the making of buildings as it was an elaborately indirect nism for the suppression of feelings of guilt ilt about the products of the mind—felt to be comparatively insignificant, guilt about high culture—felt to be unreal, guilt about art—the most extre judgment in any analytical or synthetic enterprise. In the end what is understood as the theory of modern architecture reduces itself to litle more than a constellation of \deavoring to relieve the architect of re escapist myths which are all active i ike combine to persuade him that his decisions bility for his choices and which all yw, immanent in scientific, oF hi are not so much his own as they are, somehi Jal process. And this realization breeds another. For if these once convincing and still seductive doctrines—with their strong determinist and historicist bias— are and if that they are not yet demolished is, lecture’s public virtues, then one might still ask why fes so much emphasis upon change, which very readily susceptible to demolition, surely a tribute to modern arch it is that an attitude of mind which ation and discovery, itself continues not to change but then the sets such a high value upon exp ‘The sense of what was said some fifty years ago prohibits repetition: repetition of what was said persists. peti P 19205 Now, either statements made about architecture in the prise an immutable revelation valid for all time (which is contrary to the mean ing ofthese statements), or they do not. But if, logically —in terms of the principle ‘which it tends to stipulate—the use and re-use of a verbal or polemical model derix- ing from the 1920s should be conceived as subject to the same reservations 25 ‘Ne tse of a physical model belonging to the same years, then that such logic does not widely apply is easy to explain. For, while the forms of words can still seem to pro vide an heroic litany of revolution, the form of buildings does not so readily offer itself as any religious intoxicant; and, ifthe steady incantation of, now, very ol thetorical excursion into areas of Jutionary themes will encourage the further joys 0 assumed social and technological relevance, the recapitulation of the themes of build ing offers no present career so blissful and free from trouble: and thus, while the derivative argument continues to thrive, its expon the legitimate and sole heirs of the modern movement, disp nts, conceiving themselves to be ay very litle tolerance for what ought to be recognized asthe absolutely parallel phenomenon of the deriva Which is again to establish that the physique and the momle of modern architecture, its flesh and its word, were (and could) never be coincident: we that neither word nor flesh was ever coincident with and it is when we recognizs he itelf let alone with each other, that, without undue partiality, we ean approa inder the circumstances what to do? If we believe that modern archi- present day. For eture did establish one of the great hopes of the world—always, in detail, ridicu Tous, but never, in tae, to be rejected—then do we adhere to physique-flesh or 10 rmorale-word? ‘To repeat: this choice became visible once it became almost too vident to bear that the central and socialist mission of modern architecture had im the sentimental technology, failed —or alternatively that this mission had become dissolved ties and bureaucracies of the welfare state. The simple fusion of art an‘ olical gesture and functional requirement was now not to be made: and in of sy

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