Certain Modern Architecture

     Architectural modernism rejects the principles that guided the great cities of mankind.  It rejects centuries of classical orders, columns, architraves, and moldings.  It rejects the street as the primary public space and the facade as the public aspect of a building.  Modernism rejects the city as a place of commerce, domesticity, ambition, and the common pursuit of style.

     Le Corbusier's project to demolish all of Paris north of the Seine and replace it with high-rise towers of glass was supposed to be an emancipation.  More like a hygienic glass bottles.  He never asked himself whether people wanted to live like this, nor did he care what method would transport them to their new utopia.  

     Modernism requires an architecture without ornament or any other pretense to a grandeur... an architecture that used modern materials to create a modern world.  The key words of this architecture are "honesty" and "function."  By being honest, modern architects implied, buildings could help us to become so.  The new city of glass and concrete would be a city without social pretense, where people would live in exemplary uniformity and be rewarded with equal respect.

     That social agenda meant that architectural modernism was not an experiment but a crusade.  It regarded those opposed to it as enemies, members of a priesthood of pretense to be removed as soon as possible from positions of influence and power.  Their supporters condemn everything that is not conceived as a radical break with the past.  What a censorious dreariness!  

To modernists, Gothic styles (like below)

are mediocre buildings of no consequence, whose fairy-tale pinnacles and marble columns are neither uplifting nor cheerful but merely insincere.  
     For many people, the best thing about modern music is that you don't have to listen to it, just as you don't have to read modernist literature or comprehend modern paintings. Architecture, however, is unavoidable.  It's a public display (like London's "The Shard", below). 

Its paradox is exactly that of revolutionary politics: human equality is to be achieved by an elite to whom all is permitted, including the coercion of the rest of us. 

     Most users of a building are not clients of the architect. They are passersby, consumers, or neighbors: those whose horizon is invaded and whose sense of home is affected by new intrusions.  

     The failure of modernism lies not in the fact that it produces no great or beautiful buildings—Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp and the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright prove otherwise.  It lies in the absence of any reliable patterns that can harmonize with the existing urban décor, retaining the essence of the street as a common home.

     The degradation of our cities is the result of a "modernist vernacular," whose principal device is the stack of horizontal layers, with jutting and obtrusive corners.  They are erected without consideration for the street, without a coherent facade, 

and without intelligible relation to its neighbors. Although it has repeatable components, they are not conceived as parts of a grammar, each part answerable to another and subject to the overarching discipline of the landscape. 

     Old architectural pattern books offer matching shapes, moldings, and ornaments: forms that please and harmonize, and that can be relied upon not to spoil or degrade the streets in which they were placed.  New York City used them to great effect, and even now they could be used to restore the civility of damaged neighborhoods.  The only obstacle is the vast machine of patronage that puts architects, rather than the public, at the head of new building schemes.
     We build because we need to... and for a purpose.  Most current-day builders have neither special talent nor artistic ideals.  Aesthetic values are important to them because they need to fit their buildings into a preexisting fabric.  Hence modesty, repeatability, and rule-guidedness are vital.  Anyone, however uninspired, should make good use of "style" and add to a public space that is our common possession.  
     In American cities, we can still witness the effect of the pattern books (such as those published by Asher Benjamin).  Whole areas of agreeable and unpretentious dwellings, whose architects are no longer remembered, escaped demolition on grounds of their charm.  e.g.: San Francisco; Charleston, Savannah; Garden City on Long Island; Beacon Hill of Boston.       Architecture of that kind bears the mark of civilization.  It needs only private ownership or the prospect of socio-economic security for the population to celebrate them.  Those neighborhoods can resurrect themselves, like London's East End.  For comparison, the modernist "urban housing project" never rises from its inevitable decline.  When the high-rises and their barren surroundings become areas of "social deprivation"—and it usually happens within 20 years—there is no solution except dynamite.
     Stylistic breakthroughs create dignifying details: Gothic moldings, Palladian windows, Vignola-esque cornices.  Great artistic triumphs like Roman arches become fundamentals.  You can walk through the big city of Prague and enjoy every turn in the street: it's called the most beautiful city in Europe.  

In stark contrast, modern architecture, with its austere "box-like" offerings, is handsome to a degree.  But, row after row of it is bound to be uninspiring, like the absence of good manners.  

     In music, literature, and artwork, there are creations of lasting value and others of merely mundane appeal.  The mundane examples quickly disappear from the canon and remain interesting only to the scholars.  In architecture, however, everything stays where it is, troubling our perception and obstructing our view until something else replaces it.  
     Modernists discarded millennia of slowly accumulated common sense for the sake of shallow prescriptions and totalitarian schemes... and for cheap/fast post-war construction.  Even Art Deco is sleek and modern, yet decked out with some ornament and eye-pleasing pattern.  Similar to "machine age" architecture, its design is "forward-thinking to the future".  Overall, it screams "optimism".  

Modernist buildings sigh like impersonal bank tellers...  

     Hence the way to win commissions is not to propose a building that will fit into its place as though it had always stood there but rather to invent something outrageous, insolent, and unignorable: brightly colored girders exposed to view, tubes and wires rioting over the surface, Lucite, and shimmering tiles.  The effect (below) shows a freedom from constraint that reminds you why constraints are a good idea.  

     At its most aggressive—and it is usually aggressive—it may involve the deliberate "deconstruction" of the forms and values of the classical tradition, in the manner of Bernard Tschumi's student center at Columbia.  Britain's reigning postmodernist stylists are Richard Rogers (now Lord Rogers) and Norman Foster (now Lord Foster).  They receive all the important commissions and sit on all the important committees.  Rogers belongs to the generation of postwar architects and made his reputation with the Centre Beaubourg in Paris.  It's like a demented child's model of a spaceship, dumped inexplicably in the city.  True to the postmodernist spirit, it is decorated with functionless tubes and scaffolding, whose decorative effect depends upon being perceived as functional, like the chrome-plated exhaust of a racing car.  

     It is a slap in the face to the "modernist principles" of honesty, truth to materials, and functional transparency.  The project was guided by a social vision—to exchange the quiet, self-sustaining life of bourgeois Paris for a fast-moving, multimedia "happening".  Its loud colors and in-your-face externals, shape, size, and windowless / doorless sides (with metallic imperviousness) is a celebration of play, randomness, and indiscipline. 

     We need more pre modernist architecture, like Ralph Lauren's Women/Home store on Madison Avenue (below), 

or Allan Greenberg's neoclassical court building in Connecticut (converted from a derelict modernist supermarket) or the Harold Washington Library in Chicago (built 1991, below),

or Robert Stern's Brooklyn Law School tower, which revives the cheerfulness of the skyscraper (like the one below).

     Moreover, architects and critics are now finding the words, and the confidence, to express the once-forbidden thought that you can be modern without being modernist—that there can be an architecture for our time that derives from permanent values rather than ephemeral social projects.  The search for harmony and decorum, and respect for your neighbors.  Modernism was a mere ideology, encasing buildings in non-descript steel/glass, as if they were cubicles.  Maybe classic revivals are small, but small beginnings are much to be preferred to enormous dead ends.