Embedded Files
Summer 2015
Seattle enacted Design Guidelines some years ago to assure that built environments add up to "urban design." The assumption when first enacted: formal peer review is the surest route to infills and additions that "fit in," and a built environment that incrementally transforms to a modicum of grace. Alas, upsetting that assumption: modernism's second coming and the particularly loud assertion in Seattle that "design freedom" means 'what I say it means—yesterday's over, don't you get that'?
And yet:
"Modernism in architecture: No exit? A style forged 100 years ago now conquers cities and campuses all over the world. It's a lovely aesthetic, but it's stamping out 5,000 years of design and regional differences."
So what about this cause for rejecting style-from-antiquity now a style-from-antiquity itself?
Here's Nathan Glazer:
- ...at the origins of modernism in architecture, urban design and planning, the visionary architects and
planners were, in their minds, leagued with the people against what they saw as archaic, overblown, extravagant, and inefficient architecture and design, the taste of princes. ... Modernism, in its origins, was a cause, not simply another turn in style.
What, then, had happened, that [the Prince of Wales] could better represent the people, their interests and tastes, than the architects?
"From a Cause to a Style"— Princeton University Press, 2007
And a lament from a reviewer of Glazer:
Now that the future has come and gone the time may finally be ripe to evaluate modernism in full. From a Cause to a Style poses as just such an inquiry, analyzing the connection between the social mission of modernist architecture and the aesthetic tradition that it inspired. The title implies a narrative about a transformation— if you will—in which a noble social experiment succumbs to fashion and the winds of time. It's a fascinating premise for a book. It’s so fascinating, in fact, that someday I might try writing it myself—because Glazer didn’t. ...An eminent Harvard sociologist and co-author of the seminal Lonely Crowd, Glazer is a keen observer of humans in their habitats. But he belies his expertise by stapling together loosely associated essays, speeches, and papers and calling it a book. Anyone who skipped the introduction would suffer roughly the sense of confusion and disjunction that modernism was trying to avoid. Glazer writes about modernism, but From a Cause to a Style is pure Dada. ...
But whatever catches his fancy, Glazer consistently presents a human-scale view of architecture unsullied by the pseudo-intellectual jargon and otherwise abstruse view of the architecture critic and, too often, the practitioner. Glazer also understands the complex relationships among architects, planners, public institutions, and the public itself, and the book as a whole offers a compelling vision of the status quo: a world in which ornament and history are no longer accepted but also in which not ornament and not history are no longer accepted. It is a style---and a cause—that does not know how to respond to itself. As Glazer notes, when buildings become mere vessels for ideas, it seems like the end of architecture is at hand.
"Modernism In Fragments"—Josh Stevens, Planetizen, Sept. 24, 2007 http://www.planetizen.com/node/27266
What Glazer does manage to say:
Modernization was a movement with much larger intentions than replacing the decorated tops of buildings with flat roofs, molded window frames with flat strips of metal, curves and curlicues with straight lines. It 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. p. 7
In contrast to their heirs and successors today... one has to note that [the early modernists] seemed to eschew extravagance, sensation, and shock in form and image in favor of the creation of what they hoped would become a normal, accepted, and reproducible urban environment, indeed the ordinary environment, rather than an eye-pooping intrusion into it. ...In contrast their successors design walls that can and lean, roofs that bubble and heave, buildings that look as if they are instantly ready to take off into space or collapse in a heap of tin. They are not models for a city: only models for what the architect hopes will be truly astonishing, something to hit a nerve of contemporary excitement that he can exploit. p.277
The involvement of architects in the planning of cities has a long history, but what was new in the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of modernism was that now architects concerned themselves with a subject that architects in the past had rarely dealt with, the housing of the poor and working classes. p 281
Sociologists were not skeptics to begin with,... but found in their empirical investigations that there were significant loses in ...radical clearance and rebuilding. ...[S]ociological classics...drew attention to virtues in what urban planners and their political supporters had labeled slums. Whatever their origins as housing for workers or downgraded middle-class housing, the poor and the working classes could despite the constraints of their economic weakness, create communities within them, with the key features that define a community: the ability of people close to each other through relationship to also live close to each other physically, and to have access to institutions that served them—churches and social agencies, and the small businesses that catered to their needs. p 284
The focus on total design...made no place for the many simple accidents or innovations in urban life that can emerge in the leftover or older spaces of the disorderly unplanned city. ...As an early writer on civil architecture [Laugler, 1765] noted, " There must be regularity and whimsy, relationships and oppositions, chance elements that lend variety to the tableau, precise order to the details , and confusion, chaos and tumult in the whole." The hard architectural determinism that zeroed in on the physical features of the modernist aesthetic as a cause of social problems did go too far, and it ignored how class affects the varying influences of planning and design on people. Upper-class people were often quite happy in high-rises, and even lower-middle-class people without access to summer homes in the country for release could find high-rises quite congenial. ...Further, the argument from physical form ignored the important financial and political and administrative factors that affect the fate of a modernist urban environment...quite independent of its design characteristics. p.286
The sociological critique of the replacement of the complex and dense urban fabric of the city of capitalism by the planned city of modern intelligence served to disconnect modernism from its most substantial effort to relate to social reform. It was indeed a shock to modernists that the housing put up by small entrepreneurs with no social objectives in mind, except to make a profit, could develop advantages over time that housing specifically designed to provide environmental advantages to low-income groups did not. p. 289
From attempting to design an environment that reflected rationality and good sense and economy, modernism evolved into something that wanted to surprise, to astound, to disorient, perhaps to amuse. That was fine on occasion—at the World's Fair, on vacation....But it was not an architecture for ordinary life, and ordinary life has fled from it. p. 292.
Towers,Modernism & Society
http://sunnvancouver.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/modernity-and-tower-modernism/
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