He was appalled. My friend asked why they would build buildings in the twentieth century using a seven hundred year old architectural style?
Frankly I didn't have a good answer for him.
My friend's opinion made sense because Prague is old enough to have the real thing, that is, Gothic buildings built during the Gothic period. Prague has even older extant buildings. And most of the Czech capital's subsequent buildings were built in architectural styles that were developed in the period in which they were built, including early twentieth century Cubism, an architectural style virtually unknown outside of Prague. The city is a wonderful mish-mash of divergent architectural styles (including this) making it a tremendous resource for anyone interested in the development of Western architecture over the past thousand years, give or take a century or two.
While you'll find examples of revival styles in Prague, those are the exception rather than the rule.
So I imagine my Prague friend would be rather perplexed by the recent presidential executive order decreeing that all new American Federal buildings be built in a style (Classical, based on the architecture of Ancient Athens and Rome) that is more than one thousand years older than Gothic.
For another point of view, check out this video.
It seems these two could not be more pleased about the executive order. There are a few obvious problems with this piece, namely the participants don't know what they're talking about.
In fact, they seem to be reveling in their lack of knowledge saying essentially: "I may not know the slightest thing about architecture but I do know what I like." Of course everyone is entitled to his or her opinion but it seems rather odd to me for someone to go public flaunting their ignorance.
First of all, the presenters make references to some of our nation's most important buildings, the U.S. Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress Jefferson Building and the Lincoln Memorial, the best of the best examples of the "traditional" architecture the executive order is promoting. Why can't new buildings look like those? they seem to be saying.
The answer is because these are the centerpiece buildings of Washington D.C. whose architecture frankly takes a back seat to their importance, their particular history, and their status as national icons. As such, the comparison is setting an impossible standard for new architecture.
What this video doesn't show us are the scores of "traditional" style buildings in Washington that don't come close to these iconic buildings both in terms of excellence in design, or their history. It's not much of a stretch to be of the opinion that many of these buildings are undistinguished, uninspired and graceless, they do little to enhance the urban environment in which they inhabit, and are downright ugly, just like the non-traditional buildings these two lambast. "Throwing some columns or arches in front of them" as one of the commenters suggests, isn't going to change that.
The two people in the video decry the lack of "thought and effort" that has gone into the creation of the more contemporary buildings. This could not be farther from reality, as we'll see in a bit, the opposite may be true, that in fact too much thought went into the architecture of these buildings.
Getting to the gist of the video: one of the commenters singles out the FBI and State Department buildings in Washington D.C. as being "crushingly ugly". Now that's her opinion and whether you agree with it or not, she has every right to express it. But here she expresses her opinion as if it were a fact, then goes on to say: "it's called Brutalism for a reason" implying at least to my ears, that the architecture is intended to by ugly.
To be clear, Brutalism is an architectural style that came into being in Europe after World War II when the demand for new housing not surprisingly was enormous. The term comes from the French term for raw concrete, "beton brut", coined by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, to describe the materials he employed for his post-war housing developments or, Unité d'Habitation, the first of which was built in Marseille in 1952.
As a building material, raw concrete has several advantages over masonry, stone and steel cladding. Beyond the obvious economic factors, concrete is plastic that is, it can molded into a nearly infinite array of shapes, allowing for the creation of non-traditional forms. It should be noted that the dome of the Pantheon in Rome, built nearly 2,000 years ago, in my book one of the greatest feats of engineering and most beautiful buildings I've ever experienced, is made entirely of unreinforced concrete.
Followers of Le Corbusier, the English architects Alison and Peter Smithson used the term "New Brutalism" to describe their own use of unadorned raw concrete in their work, and "Brutalism" as best as I can tell came into the lexicon of official architectural terms through the architectural historian and critic Rayner Banham in his book: The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic, published in 1955.
Brutalism is the direct descendent of the International Style, or Modernism, whose development can be largely traced to the German design school Stattliches Bauhaus, or simply The Bauhaus. The Bauhaus existed in three entities in three separate cities and times, Weimar, Dessau and Berlin between 1919 and 1933. The school was a radical departure from the traditional art schools of the era, in part by bringing together artists and artisans of all stripes together under one roof, beginning their studies with a core program which emphasized craftsmanship and hands-on contact with materials placing a premium on experimentation with new forms .
The Bauhaus embraced the Industrial Revolution, particularly mass production with the goal of harmonizing fine arts with industrial design. The school's guiding principle in regard to design was that "form follows function" meaning that the end result of a creator's work, whether it be a skyscraper or a toaster, should honestly reflect what that object is intended for, without unnecessary distractions. In that vein, the cladding of buildings most associated with the Bauhaus is steel and glass, i.e.: nothing to hide.
However, the concept of form following function when it comes to architecture did not begin at the Bauhaus but right here in Chicago two decades earlier. As radical an architect for his day as the Bauhaus (and later Chicago) architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was for his, Louis Sullivan in an article published in 1896 titled The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered, wrote the following:
Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open aple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies, in a twinkling.
It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.
Louis Sullivan was a passionate and uncompromising advocate of creating an architecture that was derived from nature and at the same time, an architecture that was uniquely American. Despite being inspired by architecture of the past, he had no regard for imitating the architectural styles of long lost civilizations. In his book Kindergarten Chats, published in 1901, regarding the common practice of the time of designing banks in the Classical Revival style, Sullivan quipped:
I am going to insist that the banker wear a toga, sandals and conduct his business in the venerated Latin tongue -- oral and written.
Hmmm, not a bad idea come to think of it, that bank sounds a lot cooler than mine.
Sullivan's buildings and those of his fellow "Chicago School" architects stripped down the design elements of their buildings, thanks in large part to the technical development of the curtain wall, exterior walls that are suspended from the interior skeleton of the structure rather than self-supporting, a system also developed in Chicago. The curtain wall enabled piers to be kept to a minimum while opening up the windows significantly, which inspired the creation of the "Chicago Window" consisting of a large pane of glass flanked by two double hung windows, entirely filling a bay, the space between the columns that form the structure of the building. In addition to providing more light into the building's interior, this alternation of wide windows and narrow piers emphasized the building's internal structure, hence form following function.
The heyday of the Chicago School or Commercial Style as it was also called, was short lived. Sullivan's dream of a uniquely American architecture was supplanted by a resurgence of the Classical revival, a result of the tremendous success of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Ironically, working for the firm headed by Daniel H. Burnham, the chief architect of the Columbian Exposition, Charles B. Atwood, designed what for me is the most significant and beautiful Chicago Style building, the Reliance Building, which has the distinction of being the first skyscraper to have the majority of its surface area to be of plate glass.
As such, the Reliance Building is the paradigm of what was to come twenty years later in Germany, one could say making it the first truly Modernist building.
Depending upon your point of view, that could either be a good or a bad thing as Modernist architecture is not universally loved in our day.
That wasn't always the case.
Two posts ago, writing about the misguided idea of building a triumphal arch in Washington D.C., I made the comment that the experience of two World Wars in the twentieth century changed the world order in countless ways, including our built environment. Growing up in the sixties I remember distinctly the attitude most people had toward architecture which was this: the newer the better.
People it seemed who lived through the World Wars and the Great Depression, couldn't get away fast enough from the past and looked forward to a bright new future which was in part symbolized by bright and shiny, brand spanking new Modernist buildings. When great Chicago School buildings such as Holabird and Roche's Republic Building on State Street, and Adler and Sullivan's Garrick Theater on Randolph went down in the early sixties, there was barely a peep from the general public, even though the two were deserving of landmark status (had such a thing existed at the time), and were replaced by vastly inferior buildings, in the latter's case a parking lot.
The few voices of dissent such as those of photographer Richard Nickel, architect John Vinci and historian Tim Samuelson, were like voices crying out in the desert. And when the city bulldozed thousands of acres of homes bisecting long established neighborhoods in order to build massive expressways, most folks just shrugged their shoulders saying: "Oh well, that's progress."
The tide did seem to turn during the demolition of yet another Sullivan masterwork, The Stock Exchange Building in 1972. Richard Nickel was killed as part of the half-demolished building collapsed on him as he was trying to salvage ornament. The tragedy of Nickel's death gained the preservation movement some traction in the community as people started to realize that at the rate we were going, one day none of Chicago's great architectural legacy would be left standing.
At the same time, those bright, shiny Modernist boxes that were so loved a decade before, were starting to show their age. Even worse, masters of the style such as Mies van der Rohe who emigrated to Chicago after the Nazis closed down the Bauhaus, started to die off and were replaced by practitioners who shared Mies' dogmatic approach to his art, but didn't have the old master's soul, his attention to detail, and most important, his design chops.
The result was instead of "less being more" an old axiom adopted by Mies, less just became less.
The same fate befell the city's brutalist architecture as its original practitioners, the equally dogmatic Bertrand Goldberg, author of Marina City and the late, great Prentice Hospital, and Harry Weese the architect of the Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist in Chicago and Washington D.C.'s Metro system, passed from the scene leaving the torch for lesser architects to pick up.
Again like Mies, the dogma remained but not necessarily the ability, or the will to design attractive buildings.
In the hands of lesser architects, their buildings, rather than being groundbreaking and daring, became tedious and dare I say, ugly. In my opinion of course.
Today it seems, at least if you believe the mission statement of the National Civic Art Society, we have come full circle in our taste for architecture, preferring the older, pre World War II styles to the post.
Fair enough, the pendulum throughout history has been constantly swinging.
Does that mean we should relinquish the choice of how to build in our public buildings and monuments to public taste, which as we just saw changes over time, or worse, to the whims of the current occupant of the White House?
I believe that would be a terrible mistake.
I'll give you two examples.
In the early eighties it was decided that to honor the veterans of the Vietnam War, a monument was to be built in Washington D.C. Here I'm quoting myself from a previous post:
Maya Lin was then an undergraduate student of architecture at Yale who entered a class assignment into the competition and gained instant notoriety when she was selected the winner. Her design was conceptual and minimal, two highly reflective polished black stone walls bearing the inscribed names of 58,175 American dead. The slabs were dug into the earth, as if a giant wound. Her creation which became known simply as The Wall, was a departure from the heroic designs of Washington's existing assortment of monuments. This was to be a statement about war, not merely a monument to those who participated.
There was immediate criticism of the design, much of it bombast from politicians who objected to the unconventional nature of proposed monument. In the midst of the feeding frenzy, there were some valid concerns. Some veterans felt that the monument only paid tribute to the dead, not to those who returned. Others objected to the fact that an American flag was not a part of the design. The debate about whether or not to build The Wall dragged on for several months.
I have little doubt that if it were left up to the public and the politicians, the Vietnam War Memorial as it exists today, one of our nation's capital's most beloved and visited sites, would never have been built.
The other example is right here in Chicago. It's the sculpture that sits in Richard J. Daley Center in the heart of Chicago's Loop. It's untitled but ask any local "Where's the Picasso?" and they will know exactly what you mean. When it was officially unveiled in 1967, the five story work of Modern Art, was received with a smattering of applause by the crowd, but mostly silence.
"What is it?" replied the crowd, some out loud, some to themselves. To many I'm sure, the rusty Cor-Ten steel structure resembled an old, broken down 1952 Plymouth that had been left out in the elements too long.
But the creators of the sculpture assured us that the rusty finish, along with that of the building it stood in front of, would eventually develop a lovely bronze patina. They were true to their word. Here's me again from a few years ago:
Just as most locals never set foot inside the Art Institute, Symphony Center, or other institutions of so called "high culture", I dare say that most Chicagoans deep down consider the Picasso if not beautiful, at least something to be immensely proud of. Just as those esteemed institutions, the Picasso has put this city on the map of respectability. After all, being regarded only as the city of hog butchering, Al Capone rat-a-tat-tat, and corrupt politicians, gets a little old.
Again, had it been up to the public and many of the politicians at the time, the Chicago Picasso would not have been built.
Fortunately, the politician who mattered the most, the mayor of Chicago at the time, Richard J. Daley threw all his considerable weight behind the project. Known more for his malaprops than for his profound utterances, Daley hit the mark at the dedication of the Picasso when he said this:
We dedicate this celebrated work this morning with the belief that what is strange to us today will be familiar tomorrow.
And he was right, the Chicago Picasso is today as much an iconic symbol of this city as is the Lakefront, the Water Tower, the Wrigley Building, the Marshall Field Clocks and the Edward Kemeys Lions in front of the Art Institute.
That said, the skepticism about Post WWII architecture is not all misplaced. Its champions and its practitioners alike reveled in being iconoclasts who were intent on changing the world in ways many people either find uncomfortable, or outright reject.
Have a look at random quotes from the manifestos of some twentieth century artists, architects and planners taken off a blog that advocates traditional architecture:
“Not only is ornament produced by criminals but also a crime is committed through the fact that ornament inflicts serious injury on people’s health.” - Adolf Loos: Ornament and crime 1908
“Destruction of artistically valueless monuments as well as of all buildings whose artistic value is out of proportion to the value of their material which could be put to other uses.” - Demand #5 of the Work Council for Art: Under the wing of a great architecture 1919“Smash the shell-lime Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns…to the garbage heap with all that junk!” - Bruno Taut: Down with seriousism! (sic) 1920
“In carrying out this industrialization, the social, technical, economic and also artistic problems will be readily solved.” - Mies van der Rohe: Industrialized Building 1924
“We can no longer derive any benefit from the literary and historical teaching given in schools.” - Le Corbusier: Five points towards a new architecture 1926
“All ‘individuals’ are an obstacle in the path of development, and in fact progress takes place in spite of them.” - Hugo Häring: The house as an organic structure 1932
“ART = net resultant of momentarily (time fix) dominant articulability of ego’s cosmic sense.” - Buckminster Fuller: Universal architecture 1932
“Creative art is unthinkable without a spiritual clash with tradition. In this clash existing form must be smashed in order to find the pure expression of one’s own time.” - Reinhard Gieselmann: Towards a new architecture 1960“A new condition of human intimacy will exist. The inhabitants live naked. The former patriarchal family system will no longer exist. The community will be complete, free, individual, impersonal. The inhabitant’s main occupation: pleasure.” - Werner Ruhnau: Project for an aerial architecture 1960
“Architecture is not the satisfaction of the needs of the mediocre, is not an environment for the petty happiness of the masses. Architecture is made by those who stand at the highest level of culture and civilization, at peak of their epoch’s development. Architecture is an affair of the élite.” - Hans Hollein: Absolute architecture 1962
To say twentieth century architects were dogmatic is a gross understatement, but that goes for artists and architects from time immemorial. Some of these statements are iconoclastic, some are inscrutable, some are revolutionary, some are bombastic, others are outrageous, while some are pure nonsense, although I do kind of like the one about all of us living free and naked.
No small amount of arrogance either in all the comments above which may account for the resistance to their work from those who are weary of the cultural elite.
But in the end, architects like all artists must be judged by their work, not by what they said. The truth, and I believe this to be the truth, not just my opinion, is that there are not good or bad styles of architecture, just good and bad design.
The progress of art and architecture, like a great river, is constantly moving and changing, never composed of the same water. That, as Louis Sullivan (as bombastic as they come), might say, is the law of nature.
Governmental mandates for the arts are like putting a damn on the river, leaving a big pool of stagnant water in its wake.
On that note, I'll leave the last word for Hizzonor Mayor Daley who was asked about the politics of Pablo Picasso. He answered as only he could:
Leave the art to the artists, and the politics to the politicians.
Well said Mr. Mayor.
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