Art and Anthropology

News flash. Anthropologists, while busy discovering new missing links every other month, have noticed that early humans made art. Furthermore, it appears that artistic endeavor was predicated on crafting things that humans, then and now, found beautiful. Dennis Dutton, a professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, has written a book about this. In today’s New York Times he asks if today’s “conceptual” artists are producing “art” at all.

I have argued here and elsewhere that the pursuit of beauty, in all its forms, is a necessary factor in the making of paintings, architecture, poetry, music, sculpture–any fine art, and most applied arts. For the past century or so, conceptual artists have abandoned this pursuit, and, while many provocative works have appeared, art has suffered. Dennis correctly asks whether the works of such artists as Damien Hirst will remain in the canon a hundred years from now.

Perhaps it is ironic that scientists–particularly neuroscientists mapping the brain and anthropologists mapping human evolution–are making profound contributions to the understanding of art and music these days. Art critics, self-involved as they are, have generally not noticed these discoveries. Antonio Damasio’s critique of rationalism has dismantled much of the philosophical scaffolding that many artists and architects use to justify their work. Scientists analyzing the evolution of the brain continue to point out that aesthetic pleasure is hard-wired, not culturally derived. In short, those who argue that contemporary art has moved beyond the true and the beautiful are wrong.

Well, “chacun a son gout” and all that. Those who enjoy looking a medicine cabinets and embalmed sharks are entitled to spend millions on Mr. Hirst’s work. For me, the Museum of Natural History has better examples of animal parts. But let’s stop denigrating the legitimate work of artists and architects who spend their careers mastering the techniques and crafts that are necessary for artistic production as it has existed for thousands of years. Our old brains still respond to beauty.

Has Athens Lost Its Marbles?

After years of delays and much embarrassment, the new Acropolis Museum has opened in Athens, Greece. Strangely, in the years since the Athens Olympics (for which the museum was intended but couldn’t be finished on time), Greece has slipped back into a decades-old pattern of cultural and architectural underachievement. For a civilization that is still revered as the crucible of Western art and ideas, this situation is at the very least disappointing. There has been some buzz going around that the new museum would remedy the vacuum, but don’t bet on it. Bernard Tschumi has designed a building that belongs in 1960s Miami Beach, not next to the most important historic site in the world. So far the Athenians haven’t liked it much.

More significantly, the Greek government has been fighting with the English government over the return of the Elgin Marbles, which are slated to be installed in the upper gallery of Tschumi’s kitschy jewel box. Just about every commentator has an opinion on which country ought to take care of these extraordinary sculptural metopes from the frieze of the Parthenon. There is even a new book about repatriation of national art treasures from the director of the Art Institute of Chicago that weighs in on the subject. If only the great temple itself, recently restored on the Acropolis, were ready to accept these priceless antiquities, the case would be simple. Unfortunately the choices being considered include a beautiful set of rooms in the British Museum, designed by John Russell Pope, or a sterile, technocratic grid of boxes in the Tschumi museum.

On the subject of repatriation, I can only say that I do not believe that so-called “national” works of art must necessarily be displayed in the nation or place where they were originally created. While in principle the nations and regimes that paid artists to create great works ought to have first claim to them, many situations exist in which the works have taken on new meanings in new venues, or which scholarly communities have studied and protected antiquities better in far-off institutions than in those of the home country. Moreover, the global and multicultural nature of contemporary society offers numerous ways in which to view and enjoy works of art. Placing them in contexts that may be original but not safe, as in the Baghdad museum debacle, is no more acceptable than lifting them illegally from their place of origin for sale on the open market. It is interesting to observe that the countries most adamant about the return of their treasures are those with the least confidence in their own political and cultural place in the world–Peru, Greece, and Italy come to mind.

The Parthenon metopes are quintessentially architectural scupltures that should not be divorced from their place at the top of the cella inside the peristyle of the temple. In the British Museum installation they are given a simulacrum that is very close to the original spatial arrangement, in a classical room. In Athens they will be given an alien, disjunctive installation next to a wall of glass that looks out on the Acropolis, as if to say “modernity has ripped you from your mother’s breast.” From an architectural standpoint, the British have honored the sculptures, while the Greeks have besmirched their beauty and uniqueness.

The crude and brutal Tschumi design for the Acropolis Museum muddies the waters in the controversy, which is perhaps why it has thus far generated so little comment, either positive or negative. On his website, the architect calls the building an “anti-Bilbao,” as if this comparison were germane to a cultural museum on a historic site. He has little or no understanding of the context in which he builds. Demitri Porphyrios, the Greek architect most capable of producing a distinguished work of architecture in the classical mode, was not asked to compete for the commission. Both the Acropolis’s stewards and their chosen architect have failed not only their city, but the entire world in providing a compelling setting for one of the greatest art works ever created.

Do the Parthenon metopes deserve “repatriation?” Yes, in a setting that does them justice. Does Athens deserve to have them after the Tschumi debacle? No.

Andrew Wyeth, American master

The historic events of the coming week may overshadow a passage in American culture that is no less significant. The death of Andrew Wyeth brought back debates about American art that have raged since his first exhibitions more than half a century ago–the question of what constitutes a modern artist in this country. Wyeth stood in the shadow of a great  illustrator and painter, N.C. Wyeth, who helped to perpetuate in the 20th century the narrative realism that has sustained painting since colonial times in the new world. He fulfilled his father’s dream that a “serious” artist might emerge from the family, yet constantly had to answer for his popularity with the public when other “serious” painters were virtually ignored (except by avant garde critics and a handful of cognoscenti). Wyeth’s best work is modern in the best sense of the word–fresh in spirit and intimately connected with the psychological and social climate of the contemporary world. Moreover, his art was quintessentially American, redolent of the myths and cultural themes that defined this nation as it grew and matured during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Among the powerful subjects and recurring motifs in his art, Wyeth painted figures in the landscape with rare grace. His pictures capture the pioneer spirit, the anxiety of modern existence, the vast emptiness of America’s rural tracts, the hardbitten stoicism of farm life, and the brutal beauty of the sea, among other themes. It is difficult to imagine American art without his haunting images of rural life in Maine and the Brandywine Valley of Pennsylvania. Like all great art, his work defies categorization, so why worry about his modernity now that he is gone?

Dymaxion history

When I was a boy in the 1960s, reading science fiction and following super heroes in Marvel and DC comics, I couldn’t get enough of the myths of the space age. That’s not surprising, since real history was being made around me. It was easy to confuse Buck Rogers and Doc Savage with John Glenn and Chuck Yeager. I was a romantic kid, so it was a short leap from my imagination to the moon.

Of course, eventually the moon’s surface appeared on prime time TV, with shadowy astronauts and lunar rovers exploring its craters and dusty valleys. I never believed the naysayers who said the whole thing was shot on a back lot in Hollywood. Of course I didn’t give any credence to the conspiracy theorists who saw Cubans and Mafia hit men behind the Kennedy assassination either.

Reading about the heroes and villains of the 1960s now is still something of a reach for me, as I have trouble squaring my memories with what historians have discovered in archives and other sources. Because of this, I find it even more important to see the record set straight, or as straight as history can get it. Being a historian of architecture, I am skeptical of all but the most careful research on the subjects I know best.

When I read the reviews of the recent exhibition on Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney Museum in New York, I was immediately struck with both nostalgia and disappointment. Fuller was to my generation a kind of Timothy Leary figure, a guru with promises that seemed incredibly important but also too good to be true. Like so many other heroes of the time, his life hid a number of secrets and contradictions.

In my previous posts, I have made it clear that romanticism for the modern movement in architecture is something I disdain. One of the reasons for this is that I suspect that most younger architects (less than say, 35 years of age) who see modernism through rose colored glasses have little understanding of its complex history during the 20th century. So, when I read about museum exhibitions that perpetuate bad history and hype about major proponents of the machine aesthetic, it raises my hackles a bit.

Bucky Fuller was a complex personality who deserves careful historical scrutiny. He was also enough of a huckster to have made even contemporaries a little uncomfortable. The same can be said of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. However, one should never confuse designers of real genius such as the latter two, with someone of minor gifts. Fuller was clearly in the latter category, but the Whitney might as well have been his publicist for all the critical scrutiny they gave their sci-fi hero.

Three architecture critics who cover the American scene were quick to write about the Fuller show, which on its merits did not seem a major retrospective but only a tribute awaiting more complete treatment in the future. Nevertheless, Nicolai Ouroussoff of the Times weighed in with a starstruck rave that betrayed his generational awe of the pioneers of mid-century modern design. A far more measured piece followed in Slate, from Witold Rybczinski, who shares my jaded view of much contemporary design.

Neither review was as penetrating, or devastating, as Martin Filler’s recent piece in the New York Review of Books. Filler has just published a well-reviewed volume of essays, and he has proved to be the least biased and most scholarly American critic for more than a decade. His wife, Rosmarie Haig Bletter, is a respected architectural historian with special expertise on the German masters of the modern movement. He gives no quarter when historical facts are mangled.

As Filler points out, Fuller attained a kind of “rock star” status only at the age of 70, after a peripatetic career working for the US military building lightweight shelters and a string of spectacular failures as an inventor. His rambling, obtuse language and utopian ideas struck a chord with students of the LSD generation, who sat four hours in Kesey-esque love-ins soaking up wisdom from a man who looked like a professor. Most people today remember him, wrongly, as the “inventor” of the geodesic dome, an idea he borrowed from someone else and claimed as his own. Wonderful in concept and seemingly perfect as a space-age building type, the domes have never been perfected as shelter for humans, serving better as conservatories.

It was easy to believe the hype, as most of us did in the 1960s. Bucky Fuller became an icon of the American view of progress, as his Expo ‘67 US pavilion in Montreal captured the nation’s aspirations perfectly at that heady moment. Dymaxion, the Fuller mantra, was a conflation of “dynamic,” “maximum” and “ion,” three words that seemed to sum up the zeitgeist of the decade. Like so much of Fuller’s output, the neologism captured ideas that we wanted to believe in, but in the end amounted only to empty rhetoric.

Martin Filler dissects the myth of Fuller’s genius while also drubbing the Whitney’s “seriously flawed” retrospective. He has particular disdain for K. Michael Hays, the Harvard “theory” professor who co-curated the show and wrote a major catalogue essay on Bucky’s “Geological Engagements with Architecture.” Referring to the “inchoate syntax” of both critic and subject, he concludes that “the museum-going public is ill-served by such imparsable nonsense.” He also finds the museum’s installation curiously dry and visually bland.

I need not belabor the conclusion that Hays, Dana  Miller and the Whitney have made a pig’s breakfast of their tribute to a man who “had a profound effect” on American culture during the 20th century, according to Martin Filler. The dangerous and alas, too frequent impact of such adulatory exhibitions is that they perpetuate shabby, rhetorically weak and historically incoherent interpretations of people, artifacts and events that are fundamental to our understanding of the recent past, and thus of our own cultural identity. While architecture continues to wallow in its own philosophical miasma, and the nation spirals into chaos, it is doubly important to dig deeply into the dichotomies and contradictions promulgated by such figures as R. Buckminster Fuller.

Good history is being written about the 1960s. Read the work of Taylor Branch or Robert Dallek and you will discover a rich world under the surface of people and events. The built environment–buildings, cities, bridges, roads, landscapes–deserves similarly penetrating analysis. When reputable critics fail to identify bad architectural history, or see beneath the scrim of ideology, the public is not only “ill served,” it is left bamboozled, hyped and ultimately impoverished. That’s part of the reason why we get so much bad architecture today.

Why Modernism isn’t modern anymore part 8, the spirit of the age

During the 1920s, between two of history’s most destructive wars, Europeans and Americans found that the machine was a powerful a metaphor for the rapid changes occurring in Western society. Reyner Banham wrote an influential book called Theory and Design in the First Machine Age that remains one of the best treatments of the birth of the Modern Movement in architecture. Since then, historians have more or less canonized the early 20th century as the apogee of the machine age that began during the the late 18th century in Britain. If that era had a zeitgeist, or guiding spirit, few would dispute that man’s romance with the machine was a part of it. Charlie Chaplin caught it in “City Lights,” and Igor Stravinsky reluctantly accepted its shadow over “The Rite of Spring.”

A few prescient futurists then predicted that machine technology would dominate intellectual, scientific and even artistic production for the remainder of the century, but all would underestimate the scope and universality of its force. No thinker, not even Freud, would recognize the dark undercurrents of technological futurism in the years before the explosion of the first A-bomb. And, after the mini-computer became a necessary tool in the first information age, technology crept into human consciousness like a virus invading the body’s tissues. It disappeared beneath layers of false hope for a future made perfect by the machine, only to be replaced in 2001 by ambivalence and fear. It was no coincidence that the Unabomber and Al Qaeda emerged just prior to the millennium to confront technological imperialism with a new kind of terrorism.

One of the reasons that technological determinism, and thus Modernism, should have little influence on 21st century ideas of progress is that they reflect humanity’s Faustian bargain with perfectibility and positivism. Virtually all of science has come to question kind of certainty that once appeared inevitable in the empiricism of the late Enlightenment in Europe. Karl Popper attacked the Vienna school during the first half of the last century and was proven correct in the second half. The latest theories about the origins of the universe are grounded in the murkiest corners of Quantum mechanics, a muddle even to the smartest young minds. But the most startling and important discovery of the 21st century was the sequencing of the human genome–recognition that no machine could be as powerful or interesting as a human being.

A second powerful indictment of industrial progress came in the form of a small book published by Rachel Carson in the 1960s. To recognize that the entire earth was being systematically destroyed by chemicals and other environmental toxins that were by-products of technology caused nearly every progressive thinker in the world to re-evaluate his/her values. Yes, there are those who continue to believe that humans will win the race to save the earth via new technology alone, but most of us are looking elsewhere for solutions to the largest crisis of our generation.

But if it is not enough that scientists and philosophers have abandoned the zeitgeist of machine marvels, look at the most creative artistic minds of the 21st century and you will find only a few (mainly architects) who look favorably on Modernism as an ideology for making art. Since I am a classically trained singer as well as an architect, I follow music assiduously and believe that we are in one of the richest periods in history for classical composition and performance. A recent article in The New Yorker by John Adams, who many believe to be America’s next truly great composer, demonstrates that an artist educated in one of the hotbeds of Modernist avant-garde music, Harvard University, could renounce his teachers and embrace tonality and traditional world music in his mature work. Adams, the composer of Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic, is in touch with the most provocative and salient ideas in today’s music, and professes no allegiance to Modernism whatsoever. Indeed, he believes that his entire artistic persona was formed by rejecting the empty, ugly abstractions of the avant-garde.

The concert halls and opera houses of the world are overflowing with enthusiastic audiences after decades of disgruntled subscribers complained about the effrontery of atonal works by the lions of academic Modernist composition–Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen and Pierre Boulez among others. Tan Dun of China is but one of a new group of composers who use folk idioms, serial techniques, western diatonic harmonies and virtually any sound available in their compositions. Critics such as Alex Ross of the New Yorker refuse to continue the old debate about the zeitgeist in music, instead looking at the work’s intrinsic craft and emotional appeal. Novelists have embraced narrative forms and realism anew, to the praise of readers and critic alike. Poets employ complex rhyme and meter, as in the work of Paul Muldoon of Princeton. Many painters have abandoned abstraction altogether in pursuit of more complex emotional and intellectual expression that is only possible through traditional realism.

If architecture is “frozen music,” why must it resist the cultural forces that have taken the other arts toward the spirit of this new age of environmentalism, organic analogies, and open systems of design and information? Romancing the machine as architects continue to do only removes them from the most pressing human issues of the day–the disease and degradation that are destroying the world’s organisms at an unparalleled rate. Why not embrace the totality of solutions devised by designers of the past and present, without prejudice? Strip away the ideology of a long-dead world view and look at the planet as a giant organism, not a giant machine, and we may yet discover the path to survival.

Why Modernism isn’t modern anymore, part 7: the urban wasteland

Among the most beautiful cities in the world, places that attract tourists and art lovers, not one was planned or constructed by exponents of Modernist ideas. Brazilia, Chandigarh and Milton Keynes are heroic failures that will never develop into places that people love as they do Paris, Rome, New Orleans, or New York.

As Aldo Rossi explained in his book, The Architecture of the City, the special cities that we value as works of art in themselves were the product of the minds of designers who looked at urbanism as a form of cultural expression, not those who reduced planning to formulas for traffic management, maximum density, or housing built for the lowest possible price . His critique of Modernist ideas about the city helped to sink the ideas of functional city planning and zoning that had driven planning during the mid-20th century.

Since the 1980s, much of the world has abandoned the idea that it is possible to construct a beautiful city. Once the urbanistic formulas of the Modernists were discredited, planning itself entered a period of decline in influence. Despite the excellent studies of successful traditional urbanism written by Jane Jacobs, Oscar Newman, Christopher Alexander, and Kevin Lynch among other mid-century critics of Modernism, city governments largely ignored the new research, instead opting to abolish their planning departments or put them into the hands of so-called policy analysts. This happened in New York following the Lindsay administration, when the city’s fiscal crisis became an excuse to dismantle one of the most creative and vibrant urban design departments in America. Since then, “planning” in New York has been the province of back room deals between developers and the mayor.

The wasteland of Modernist urbanism has been depicted in numerous films and novels, from Jacques Tati’s Msr. Hulot satires of the late 1950s and 1960s to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil in the 1980s. Its effects have been studied by sociologists and historians since the late 1940s, when “urban renewal” began to transform the dense cores of many large cities into versions of LeCorbusier’s famous “Ville Radieuse” or Radiant City. For decades the alienation engendered by “towers in the park” was ignored because its effects were felt mainly by the dispossessed and poor, people of color condemned to life in “the projects.” Only in recent decades have psychologists begun to recognize its symptoms in the middle and upper class residents of “garden suburbs” whose alienation stemmed from similar conditions.

Episodes of the Jetson’s television series made the dream of city life in the future into a lark–talking to friends via TV links, whizzing from market to work in floating cars, and spending days alone with robot companions seemed romantic and fun. But when that dream became a reality a decade ago, people noticed that they were lonely, depressed and psychologically damaged. The massive separation that technologies of transportation, communication and building have provided has its dark side–the loss of community.

That loss was obvious to many critics of Modernism long before it became the subject of books and the popular media. In the 1970s a group of Yale-trained architects influenced by Vincent Scully and Denise Scott Brown designed the Florida town of Seaside as if it were an old-fashioned pedestrian-friendly American village. Liz Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany subsequently joined with like-minded urbanists on the West Coast to form the Congress for the New Urbanism, which now has tens of thousands of members. Their research showed that many of the cardinal tenets of Modernist planning led to abject failures in the areas that they were intended to ameliorate–traffic, land use, hygiene, air quality, environmental conservation. Indeed, nothing promulgated by Modernist architects has been as destructive as their vision of the new city. Throughout the globe, in Beijing, Jakarta, Mexico City, Singapore and Johannesburg the same sterile, vacuous, scale-less wasteland is replicated amidst ribbons of highways and traffic jams.

Unfortunately, the New Urbanism came too late to change the policies that created zoning, building and planning ordinances in use throughout the United States and most of the developed world. Since the early 1990s the CNU has offered new solutions to zoning, transportation planning, and housing, sponsoring design conferences and charrettes in troubled places such as post-Katrina Mississippi. But resistance to common sense solutions to restoring community has been stubborn, especially among academic architects and planners. Their defense rests mainly on the claim that governments and developers fail to create the “creative” Modernist urbanism that exists in their drawings and virtual computer models. The users and patrons are at fault.

The world is aware of the failure of Modernism as an ideology driving urban planning and community building. Even many architects who design abstract, high tech buildings are critical of existing strategies for laying out streets, squares and public spaces in the city. The recent Sundance TV series, “Architecture School” makes this clear. In the film, Tulane University professors accept the existing urban fabric of New Orleans as right for regular folks. The community comes before architecture, and students learn a lot about the social basis for their discipline as they try to design a house in a traditional neighborhood. Unfortunately, when a resident asks why all of their proposed buildings are “ugly” they have nothing to say. The double standard applies here as in most situations–the professors can accept the old city as a viable pattern for development, but the architecture must be new, radical, innovative, and Modernist. So New Orleans, one of the most beautiful and unique cities in the world, will get a few more alienating icons. It has endured hurricanes, poverty, war, and the ravages of a mighty river for centuries. A couple more ugly houses won’t even be noticed.

Why Modernism isn’t modern anymore part 5, the death of theory

In 2004, Stanley Fish, America’s gadfly literature scholar and cultural theorist, sheepishly admitted that all the fuss over “critical theory” had been something of a scam. David Lodge, the English satirist, was convinced that it had entered a period of decadence, and, like all fashions, had run its course. Terry Eagleton, Britain’s most respected scholar in the field, wrote a book about its demise. By 2008, Wired Magazine led with a story on the irrelevance of scientific theories in an age of massive information analysis. Only architects, it seems, failed to get the memo: prescriptive, rigid schemas for how to make art, science and literature are no longer de rigeur.

Architects, the most practical of artists, are paradoxically drawn to the most arcane and obscure cultural movements, among them “critical theory.” As I wrote in my last blog, their interest can cynically be attributed to a desire to bamboozle the public about the true insignificance of their buildings. However, the real reasons that the design professions cannot jettison outmoded intellectual fashions has to do with the ideology of Modernism, the 20th century movement that refuses to die a natural death. While the style and technology of modern buildings continue to provide valid and compelling solutions for contemporary building, the ideology of Modernism outlasted its usefulness decades ago. Moreover, since few architects really understand the history of this ideology, many continue to follow its most destructive and ridiculous theoretical tenets uncritically.

The ideology of Modernism may be summarized in a few essential points, though many (tiresome, repetitive) books have been written about the subject.

• Architecture is a revolutionary art that maintains its authority by a perpetuation of the avant-garde, which antagonizes and undermines the status quo during each succeeding generation.
• The only logical schema governing architectural design, and the form of buildings, is “the authority of the program.” Thus the Seattle Public Library, a recent building by “starchitect” Rem Koolhaas, is a diagram of the program devised by its chief librarian, and therefore deserves to be called a masterpiece.
• Beauty is replaced as an aesthetic standard by various theoretical constructs including “shock value,” and “metaphor” as means of judging the worth of building designs.
• Technology and function are the two most often cited stand-ins for aesthetic distinction: hence the maxim, “commodity plus firmness equals delight.”
• The paradigms, styles, types and elements that have sustained traditional architecture for thousands of years are suspect and must be surpassed by “original” solutions devised without recourse to the study of the past.
• All architecture, including vernacular design, that displays the trappings of “historical” styles (except the Modernist style) is by nature “nostalgic” and “backward-looking,” and therefore should be judged aesthetically vacuous and even immoral.

This rigid and destructive ideology continues to infect the schools of architecture and drives most criticism when it can be found in literature on buildings. And while many writers have added significant ideas to the “theory” of contemporary architecture that contradict the ideology of Modernism, most literature on design during the past decade and a half has cited allegiance to “Modernism” as the gold standard by which good architecture is judged. Indeed, the Architectural Record publishes article after article in which the building and its architects are praised for hewing close to the credo of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and ICCROM during the 1920s. Try doing a Google search or word count on a single issue of the magazine and one word will stand out–Modernism. It’s a totem.

I’ll discuss why the scaffolding of Modernist ideology above has little claim to intellectual credibility today in future posts. The question that begs to be asked before doing so is, why do architects who benefit from the marvelous building advances of 20th century modern architecture continue to believe the “theory” that gave rise to such buildings nearly a century ago? In the other arts, music foremost, the most creative and successful practitioners have combined the best of 20th century compositional advances with those of previous composers without swallowing the ideology that gave rise to past styles.

Moreover, many artists have questioned the late 20th century fascination with “conceptualism” as a means of creating works of real beauty and significance. For if the disciplines, media, and traditions laid down by past masters are thrown away in favor of pure ideas, the arts suffer from the death of practice. Better the waning of theoretical hegemony than the loss of an entire culture of artistic production in any field.  Is theory really dead? Perhaps the rush of the information age will cause many artists, scientists and philosophers to rethink the nature of discourse in their chosen disciplines, as E.O. Wilson has suggested in his book, Consilience. Architecture can only benefit from a more open forum than the choked, academic morass that we’ve been enduring for a decade.

Why Modernism isn’t modern anymore part 3: adaptability and change

If we are going to adapt new a new way of using energy on this planet, we are going to have to make better and more comprehensive use of the existing infrastructure of buildings and other human-made artifacts. In his wonderful book, How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand explains how traditional buildings morph over time to conform to their inhabitants changing “stuff” and life styles. His examples are rather unassuming and modest, things like Quonsett huts, Butler buildings and sheds. As he says, “Most building adaptation is, like most building evolution, vernacular.”

I am a historic preservation architect, so this way of thinking has always made sense to me. Luminaries like John Ruskin and William Morris, not to mention conservationists of the environment, have been goading us for decades to be more sensible about taking care of our existing buildings and landscape. Modernists, however, have always viewed adaptive reuse with skepticism, and sometimes with contempt. That is because Modernism is positivistic and historicist in philosophical outlook. Old things are worth studying perhaps, but are otherwise not very useful.

Positivism, as we know, assumes that all human endeavor advances toward greater and greater perfection, and that knowledge and wisdom in the present surpass all past intellectual activity. Historicism, as a philosophical construct devised by Hegel, slices all epochs into discreet cultural moments that ebb and flow according to the dialectical struggle of opposing historical forces. Each succeeding epoch surpasses the last, rendering the preceding era’s artifacts quaint and obsolete, fit to be gawked at in museums but hardly worth using over again.

It’s surprising that architects continue to believe in these epistomological dead ends, because nearly everybody in the world of philosophy has moved on. Moreover, anthropologists, biologists, and ethnographers continue to underline the critical importance of the interconnected web of humans, animals and plants that interact in time and space on our planet. Evolution in the brain and body of organisms is a temporal process, not merely a formal one, and every current form embodies thousands of years of previous development. Brand, a biologist, understands this profoundly, and his impatience with Modernist architects is grounded in this knowledge.

Since avant-garde buildings continuosly re-invent architecture, and are designed to fulfill a specific program on a specific site at a specific time, they are by nature one-of-a-kind artifacts. As such, Modernist buildings are singularly difficult to adapt to new uses. Change is an anathema to the heroic gesture that most architects cultivate. Take, for instance, Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum of Art in Manhattan. Now a landmark, this concrete art-box worked well for displaying 20th century art, but quickly became obsolete as an all purpose art museum. Efforts to change it, including at least four separate designs for enlargement by famous design luminaries such as Michael Graves and Renzo Piano, failed miserably not only as adaptations but as bold new statements about architecture. C. Montomery Meigs’s Pension Building in Washington, D.C., was designed to house war records in the 19th century, but found not one but two new uses during the 20th, and now serves beautifully as the National Building Museum. It’s a fine, adaptable, traditional work of architecture that will be around well beyond the 21st century.

As Brand makes clear in his book, “Magazine architecture,” the kind that wins critical acclaim for starchitects, is almost pitiable when it comes to adaptation and change. Because it makes a fashion statement, a gesture toward contemporary art, an avant-garde building becomes frozen in its cultural moment. With each passing month, year, decade, it may stand for its architect’s ego, a momentary idea, an outdated movement, but it resists standing for anything else. Vernacular architecture, the un-self-conscious product of a culture, ages well because it strives to do none of these things.

Why Modernism isn’t modern anymore part 2: the cost of energy in building

In the historic preservation movement, there is a simple maxim that underpins every effort: “the greenest building is the one that’s already built.” That is because the “embodied energy” in the existing structure makes it essentially irreplaceable in the energy-starved world we live in.

Ian McHarg understood this over 40 years ago when he wrote his masterpiece, Design With Nature. Every human-made intervention in the natural world involves the expenditure of energy. Energy is the real cost of building virtually any structure, from an outhouse to a bridge.

The true obscenity of Modernist building is its inherently wasteful use of energy. Many of iconic buildings of the past 20 years–Norman Foster’s Hong Kong Bank, Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim, Richard Rogers’ Lloyd’s building in the City of London–were proudly touted as among the most expensive structures every built. The expense of their construction was not simply a matter of cost per square foot (thousands of dollars in every case) but of the energy consumed in producing their “high tech” materials and building systems. Low-e glass in thicknesses that could resist high winds, titanium skin, high strength steel cables, carbon composite structural components–these are only a few of the thousands of high cost-elements used in these buildings. Moreover, the “experimental” structural and HVAC systems in these buildings–part of their allure for critics–stretched the conventional systems for manufacturing and fabricating components to their limits, expending extraordinary amounts of human capital as well as energy. The favored materials in contemporary architecture–metals, glass and concrete–consume more energy in production than any old world materials. They are renewable, but at enormous expense. And these experimental surfaces are unlikely to withstand the weathering that traditional buildings handle with ease, making them costly to maintain and perhaps even obsolete within a generation.

Proponents of experimental “green” buildings, such as skyscrapers with hanging gardens, million square foot convention centers with puny passive ventilation systems and other such oxymoronic follies, argue that technology is necessary to solve the “problems” of building sustainable structures in the global marketplace. There is faulty logic in their arguments. Despite the proven maxim that any energy efficient building skin should be no more than 40% glass, Modernist architects insist that all glass curtain walls are the lightest and most environmentally responsible buildings one can erect. Despite the inherent danger in erecting buildings higher than 50 stories, risking loss of life similar to that of 9/11, Modernist architects continue to dream of mile-high skyscrapers with  complex “green” technology that will reduce their gluttonous energy use by small percentages. Few of these “cutting-edge” designers discuss low-tech or traditional building solutions, such as timber, brick, rammed earth, stone or adobe buildings. Why? Because the ideology of Modernism rejects such “nostalgic” nods to the past.

The “engineer’s aesthetic” of the 1920s has morphed into a romance with building technology that is unprecedented in world history. It seems that anything is possible in building science, and indeed larger and lighter structures can be built today than 50 years ago. But the cost of such wizardry, in currency, resources and energy, most often exceeds any benefits achieved. Critics seldom question the wisdom of using these resources, because novelty is still prized above all else in the design professions. Pursuit of “new form” and “new structure” supersedes rational balancing of energy resources.

Like gas-guzzling SUV’s and super-sized McMansions, the monumental buildings of today’s “starchitects” nearly always push the boundaries of scale, technology, and form–they are large net consumers of energy. Yet few questions are asked about the social and capital costs of these experiments, as they are often foisted upon the public by insecure public officials anxious to see an increase in cultural capital for their institutions. And because there is no balancing point of view among architectural critics today, virtually every high profile public building emerges as a public relations “success” regardless of its intrinsic merit.

Contemporary society now faces one of the most alarming crises in human history–global climate change amidst crushing energy shortages. Buildings protect us from harsh climate, but use a disproportionate amount of energy in construction, and produce more waste than any other human activity during their first years of operation. Modernistically-inclined architects have for decades ignored the challenge of designing smaller, more efficient, and less-technologically complex buildings in favor of Buck Rogers like dreams of future spaceships for human habitation. The current fascination with Buckminster Fuller shows how little we remember of the folly of such faith in technology–nearly every invention from the mind of this eccentric futurist ended in failure.

In the next post I will explore the second reason why Modernist architecture, like the Dymaxion house, belongs to the past rather than the future of spaceship earth.

Why Modernism isn’t modern anymore, part 1

History shows us that during periods of cultural upheaval such as ours, art movements often wane while experiencing their most vehement, almost nostalgic, moments of hegemony. The current fascination with heroic Modernism, a movement that achieved its apotheosis during first half of the last century, is proving this lesson all over again. It’s remarkable how few critics have noticed this phenomenon–but that’s simply another telltale of our culture’s myopic ignorance of history.

As an architect with no investment in the academic status quo, and a historian who has studied modern architecture for 30 years, I have an objective point of view that can provide a critique of the current design culture that is present no where else. The foregoing is part 1 of a series of posts on the state of architectural criticism that may be refreshing to a general audience concerned about the built environment.

As the 21st century completes its first decade, it has become clear that modernist architecture and urbanism have failed to provide successful models for sustainable development throughout the globe. There are at least seven persuasive reasons why this is the case. Why isn’t Modernism the answer to contemporary architectural challenges anymore?

1. It costs too much–while most of the world struggles to build low-tech, energy efficient buildings, Modernist buildings consume more energy and materials than ever before.

2. It’s not adaptable–as Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth catalogue, has proven, Modernist buildings are singularly resistant to “learning” and changing over time.

3. It’s self-referential, not open–in a world where “open systems” pervade the Internet and much of the rest of culture, Modernism continues to operate in a suffocatingly insular community of critics and academic designers who guard their turf ever more zealously.

4. “Theory is dead” and the avant-garde cannot persist–Wired magazine’s July issue said it best: the new model for the information age has no use for the kind of rigid ideology that sustained the avant-garde.

5. Cultural homogeneity (International Style design) has created a crisis of identity throughout the globe–the success of international Modernism has become its curse, resulting in social and psychological alienation and a loss of authentic cultural identity.

6. It has created an urban wasteland of dense, tall buildings and threatening, auto-choked highways–the New Urbanism and other critical movements have proven that sprawl, suburban “edge cities” and other bi-products of modernism are unsustainable models for future settlements.

7. It’s not the Zeitgeist anymore–serialist (12-tone) music has been replaced in concert halls with rich, pluralistic forms that audiences love; while Modernism has been discredited in all of the other arts, architects cling to a movement that is philosophically and culturally bankrupt.

In the next post, I will follow these seven arguments in detail, beginning with the capital and environmental costs of building with ‘high tech’ systems and materials.