Discourse of Modernism

Something to Talk about: Modernism, Discourse, Style Author(s): Sarah Williams Goldhagen Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Jun., 2005), pp. 144-167 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25068142 . Accessed: 06/03/2014 10:12
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Something
Modernism,
to Talk
Discourse,
About
Style
SARAH WILLIAMS
Harvard University
GOLDHAGEN
There
is a word
we
should This within approach.
refrain
from
using
to describe
con
temporary we door not fence
architecture. architecture
is the word a notion The of
"style." "style,"
The moment we open the is
atically excised from view modernist practices and ideas that did not suit their polemical intentions. To say this is to say nothing new, and among specialists
and theory, by now a general consensus
in architectural history
exists on two points:
to a formalistic a "style" within ...
contemporary to life that
movement slumbers uncon
it is an approach
sciously
all of us.
in architecture depicted first, that the image of modernism above was derived not from the fullness of the broad and
revolutionary largely from architectural one core movement subset, the then so-called under modern way, move but
Sigfried Giedion
Space, Time and Architecture, 4th ed.
ment
hat was, or is, modernism in architecture?1 In
that eventually became codified by the Congr?s Inter nationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CLAM); second, that to
see modernism in architecture as this style or any single
contemplating w
readers?even
this
some who
question
try not
many
to?will
likely conjure up a sturdy parade of familiar formal tropes.

Flat walls, roofs. glass "Transparency" doors, glass and partitions. lots of glass: glass window or Reinforced-concrete
richness.2 style glosses over its complexity and multifarious Less well recognized, however, is that in spite of its par tiality this constellation of formal tropes, which reifies mod
ernism in architecture into a style, retains the status of a
con metal buildings, tough-edged and stark. Compositions armatures trolled with geometric rigor. Structural split off from building skins, opening up free-flowing spaces articu lated lightly with space dividers that barely touch the hori zontal planes. A dynamically asymmetrical distribution of spaces. An absence of ornament or historical reference in its rigor, an "abstraction," and a resulting Calvinist on the compositional emphasis play between elements or volumes (Figure 1). An ensemble of well-known critics, historians, and (to a lesser extent) architects distilled this cluster of rhetorical synechodoches from a series of buildings, texts, and exhibi tions in the late 1920s, and many of these authors system
sense of the term. "An accepted paradigm a or model pattern," paradigm is a framing device that lends coherence to a discipline by restricting its field of vision to in the Kuhnian problems of elaboration, expansion, and critique.3 As I dis cuss in this article, the style-based paradigm of modernism still broadly informs not only popular but also the topics, directions, and character of scholarly inquiry.4 Such ongoing reliance on the paradigm of style?even the face of its obvious among specialists?in in architecture accounts shortcomings should perhaps not be so surprising. By def inition, a paradigm opens up large conceptual spaces that demand elaboration and refinement; at the same time, by virtue of its function as a frame, it necessarily "reduces
vision."
Adopted
sometimes
consciously,
sometimes
without
"need not, and in fact never does, recognition, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted."5 the origins and legacy of the style-driven Analyzing presence, paradigm helps to explain its subterreanean despite the work of several generations of scholars who col lectively challenge not just its usefulness or its components, but even its empirical foundations. Taking stock of a broad range of contemporary scholarship, written from method art the traditional ranging from positions ological historical
much
a paradigm
to the interpretive
in
and theoretical,
suggests that
while
research
twentieth-century
architecture,
often compelling in its specific insights and analyses, nev that is literally ertheless employs a picture of modernism
incoherent.6
It is time for the disciplinary reliance on a style-driven to end. Building on the efforts of paradigm of modernism historians and theorists to consider alternative modes of inquiry, I propose
the notion
that the discipline might

in architecture
do well to retain
as a coherent phe
of modernism
it not as a stock if variable nomenon, but to conceptualize cluster of rhetorical synechdoches, or as any of the other useful but ultimately partial possibilities that have been pro
posed, but rather as a discourse.7 The concept of discourse, Figure 1927, 1 Le Corbusier, reproduced pavilions atWeissenhofsiedlung, and Johnson, International Stuttgart, Style ,115
models in cultural studies, phi drawn from methodological and the social sciences, and the conceptualization losophy,
of modernism in architecture as a discourse, resolves many
in Hitchcock
cases as analytical problems and handles the conventional well as the range of anomalous cases that have emerged in the scholarship that has been conducted within the frame work of the style-based paradigm. Modernist
conceived not as a style but as a discourse,
Corbusier dated
architecture,
becomes a het
the
erologous array of individual positions and formal practices within a loosely structured field, of which a fundamental
premise has been that architecture must instantiate an eth
Gropius's concrete office block and skyscraper projects, and Oud's are repeatedly repro housing estates in the Netherlands as amovement. duced in the texts that codified modernism Among these canonical pieces are: Le Corbusier, Vers une Internationale architecture (Paris, 1923); Walter Gropius, Arkitektur 1925); Adolf Behne, Der moderne (Munich, Zweckbau Functional (Munich, Building Behrendt, Der Sieg des neuen Baustils (Stuttgart, 1927); Adolf Gustav Platz, Die Baukunst der neuesten Zeit (Berlin, 1927); Sigfried Giedion, Bauen inFrankreich, Bauen inEisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (Leipzig, 1928; repr. and trans, as Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete [Santa Internationale neue Monica, 1995]); Ludwig Hilberseimer, Baukunst (Stuttgart, 1928); Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Mod ern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (New York, 1929); Bruno Taut, Modern Architecture (London, 1929); and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Hitchcock
SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT 145
in and around Paris (especially in texts that pre Werkbund famous Deutscher exhibition), in Alfeld-am-Rhein (1912), Mies's Fagus Factory
ically grounded material practice that grapples with (rather than categorically rejects or ignores) the phenomenon of itself. modernity
The Birth of Modernism

It has become common ina, Werner
Conceived
as a Style
1926; repr. and trans, as The Modern 1966]); Walter Curt [Santa Monica,
to acknowledge?as Beatriz Colom others have Mark and Oechslin, Wigley, were orig notions modernism out?that of popular pointed a canonical series of black-and-white inally gleaned from photographs of projects built between 1919 and 1930 by Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, J. J. P. Oud, and others.8 Images such as those of Behrens's AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin (1909), the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart (1927), early villas by Le
Architecture Since 1922 (New York, 1932); Alberto Sartoris, Gli elementi delVarchitettura funzionale, sintesi panor?mica delV architettura moderna (Milan, 1932); Nikolaus Pevsner, Pio neers of Modem Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius (London, 1937); and Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.,
accounts of modernism's
his career,W?lfflin Throughout explored two concep tual models to explain the phenomenon of stylistic trans
formation. First was the notion that art had its own internal,
1941).9 In both these early narrative

history and in subsequent ones
traditions, which artists collectively in his individual way) until exhausted, at (each explored which point a revolution occurred. The second was that changes in the social ethos inspired or even forced trans at formations in artistic and architectural style. W?lfflin, the height of his career, in Classic Art, argued that broad stylistic transformations in art took place through the syn ergistic confluence of both dynamics: internal crisis in artis
tic practice on social the one hand, on the and the pressures exerted by external other.14
autonomous
formal
(most of which drew from the early texts), the photographic in the medium helped to artificially produce coherence
message. Oft-reproduced black-and-white photographs
the sophisticated balance of the colors in projects by Le Corbusier and Taut and the sensuous, lavish materi ality in the work of Mies. Selectively chosen views of, for obscured example, dynamism
classicism open spaces
change
works
by Behrens,
reliance imagine on
and asymmetries,
and we
and Oud stressed Mies, sometimes hiding an innate

The are free-flowing, in some cases works
precedent.
in architecture Early polemicists theorizing modernism some cases In followed W?lfflin's lead. they overtly empha sized style (Behrendt, and Hitchcock and Johnson); in oth of stylistic gestures and and Still others Pevsner). political ideologies (Gropius new architecture emphasized how the formal elements of the were intimately linked to the intellectual and cultural ethos and scientific discoveries of modernity (Giedion and Sar most Like of these believed their authors W?lfflin, toris).
task was to explain the emergence of the new style
in these
ers they described
an admixture
engendered
camera's
less by the interiors

of spatial
themselves
and
than by the
character.10
distortions
relationships
of mod origins of our misguided conception ernism do not lie, however, in the technology of reproduc tion alone. They are to be found equally in the construction The of an often paradoxical
authors of these
conception
about
of "style." Many
and treated modernism
of the
as
primary
texts wrote
and to characterize
if it were a style, although simultaneously insisting mod ernism was not defined by, and could not be reduced to, is the exemplar of this paradoxical merely a style. Giedion
praxis.
in art's history. Also like assumed that the birth of a new artistic W?lfflin, they was to linked the and style intimately Hegelian Zeitgeist,
that a visual the language interpretive qua way language?style?meaningfully toward an artwork's content.
its distinctiveness
pointed
Giedion,
for the creation
Hitchcock,
of this
Pevsner,
were
and others responsible

influenced, in some cases
canon
directly, in others, indirectly, by German art-historical the and early twentieth century, in ory of the late nineteenth particular the widely known work of Heinrich W?lfHin. For W?lfflin, style and its broad transformations through his the core of a lifelong intellectual search for a formed tory theoretical model of change in the history of art.11 Follow W?lfflin ing Hegel, argued that a period style?Gothic,
Baroque?represents and embodies the efflo
The Paradigm of Style and Anomalies

A paradigm is tenacious, benefiting from several self-rein forcing mechanisms. Affording the possibility of intersub
jective basic agreement, a paradigm lends enough coherence
to a discipline,
jects over can be definitions
or to a topic within
discussed and basic in shorthand, themes.
a discipline,
assuming Furthermore,
that its sub

consensus until a par
Renaissance,
adigm is challenged
there is no other architecture,
by a compelling
in town. historians
potential
case and
replacement,
in con theorists
rescence of a cultural mentality?the Zeitgeist.12 W?lfflin and the long succession of art historians after him who worked
tive
game
In the
of modernism
contemporary
in the Germanic
to artistic
tradition defined style as a collec

conventions, materials, and tech
tinue to appeal to style asmodernism's

only as its lowest or only common
unifying
feature, if
The ongo
approach
denominator.
niques pattern
assumption
in which emerges.
that
amore
or less stable and definable in W?lfflin's

or architectural art
formal
a trans
Inherent
in any
approach was the

work,
ing de facto reliance on this subterranean paradigm can be seen in two ways: how historians and theorists identify the boundaries of and within modernism, and how they discuss its putative anomalies.15 The paradigm of style also governs
writers on twentieth-century architecture approach
parent
The
relationship forms, in and of themselves,

interpretation of
existed
between pointed
oeuvre,
style and content: the way to meaning.

or even of an indi
how
an artist's
periodization.
To boundaries start with and historians' so-called treatments anomalies: in of modernism's the past several
vidual work of art, therefore would

an analysis JSAH of its style.13 JUNE 2005
necessarily
begin with
146
/ 64:2,
Figure
2 Charles-Edouard Villa Schwob, 1916-17
Jeanneret
(Le
Corbusier), Switzerland,
La Chaux-de-Fonds,
=:r~~~~~
Figure
Ludwig Mies addition 1924
van der Rohe,
project Private
for School,
Ii
immi~r ___:Bw
gymnasium Potsdam,
to Frau Butte's
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ *' j .... ,j .@4: ...... ...............::. ... sm,,i,e, ,,,, , ( , ......... ',. , ;::. .,,:,,,,....................................................... .4~~~~~~~~~ .L.''' .''.' \'.""".'$i#: 4. . ....... ....... -~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
........... .._ ...
.. X ........ ... ...i;.
... ... .
__i
decades, historians have repeatedly discussed how Giedion, Gropius, Pevsner, and the rest of the first generation of authors consolidated and propagated a style-based paradigm of modernism by excising individual works by progressive architects its stylistic dictates. To redress this sometimes purposeful oversight by the first generation, today's historians painstakingly document the complexity that fall outside
the work of this or that architect?Le Corbusier's neo
because
they
have
become
un-ignorable.
They
were
created
by architects who designed well-known

works, who conceived of themselves
modernist-looking
and who
as modernists,
participated in orientation. Typically, modernist

more conventional-looking projects
in social
institutions
that were
as
indisputably historians discuss these

provocative anom
alies that rightly challenge us to rethink received

tations of a given architect's ideas and his oeuvre.
interpre
However,
of
Switzer classicizing Villa Schwob in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in Mies's executed villas land, Berlin, Adolf Biedermeyer in the Austrian Alps, Loos's Swiss rustic Khuner House in Los Frank Lloyd Wright's textile block La Miniatura Rietveld's Summer Gerrit House Angeles, primitivizing Verrijn Stuart, or Oud's highly ornamented Shell Building in the Hague (Figures 2-7).16 Such projects, which would otherwise be ignored, are brought to light and discussed
what we have learned about the ideas of one or another of these architects,
are countless our retheorize
or of all of them together?by

not then used to of modernism
now there
rework and as a whole.17
examples?is understanding
theorists, by contrast, who are largely focused on the project of explicating the relationship of that they modernism (or a critical subset of modernism deem to be avant-garde) to modernity itself, continue to Architectural
Figure
4 Adolf
Loos, in 1929
Khuner House,
Payerbach,
Austria,
1929-30.
Photographed
Figure
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1923. Photographed
La Miniatura in 1929
(Millard House),
Pasadena,
Ml
Figure Summer Stuart, Pieters, 1940-41. in 1940
6 Gerrit Rietveld, House Breukelen Verrijn St.
the Netherlands, Photographed
148
JSAH
/ 64:2,
JUNE
2005
scription
against
symbolism
and
ornament
(as
in the
case
of
the rejection of academic composition (Asplund), Wright), to transparency and lightness (H?ring, the impulsion concern for structural or the Schindler; Figures 8, 9),
expression (Aalto, Scharoun).19 The convincing reinsertion
into the ranks of so-called other architects

often, more
of these and high modernism has gone only halfway, however. All too
and nonmonographic discussions
synthetic
a residual category, consign this work to what is effectively the overstuffed shopping cart of an "Other Tradition," or as
one example of a multiplicity of "other modernisms."20
com Externalizing projects and strains that do not fit an ongoing fortably into the dominant stylistic paradigm is was writers in such as initiated that Germany by practice
Figure 7 J. J. P. Oud, 1937-43. Shell Building, Photographed view of cafeteria in foreground, Behne, organicism Neue tices who to opposed the more The core Scharoun's visible and H?ring's rationalist of tendency anomalous in the "organic" so-called of the The Hague, in 1943
Sachlichkeit. within the
externalization of modernism Zevi opposed rationalist unequal
prac early archi Most has been
continued his
postwar work within the contours of the style-based paradigm to tecture recently,
period, to this the
as Bruno so-called and
mainstream. approach again
delve
bounded missed
into the nature

modernism.18 by more
and
Their
limitations
analyses, art
of a stylistically
often unjustly have dense dis added ideolog
separate
conventional to our comprehension
historians, of the
given a lease on life in the writings of Colin St. John Wil son and Peter Blundell-Jones, and in a different manner by
Kenneth Frampton.21
immeasurably
ical network linking architectural forms to cultural predis positions and political and social convictions. Still, these more
canonical
St. John Wilson

"Other to, Yet the Tradition" doctrines of and
and Blundell-Jones
as an alternative of tradition false by
conceptualize
even movement.
this
to, or the modern is
a reaction
theoretically
architecture
inclined
and
analyses
architectural
draw mainly
theories of
from
the
practices
the notion
an "other" the
problematic that of
in sev
1910s and 1920s or the early post-World War

istically valuable, tionship anomalous then, these buildings writers' (or the are mainly conclusions avant-garde)
II years. Styl
However the rela about to
eral ways. movement by a coherent
It conveys was
impression a group political some of
the modern united Fur who
excised.
constituted set of aesthetic
architects doctrines.22 the architects
and that
of modernism
modernity
thermore,
it ignores
the
fact
refer principally to preselected works that fall firmly within the paradigm's boundaries. Their insightful theorizing is based on a data set that is in itself misleading and faulty, all
too often marred by what social scientists call selection bias.
designed according to the principles articulated by St. John and Blundell-Jones were themselves integral to the Wilson
modern movement. The tendencies that St. John Wilson
and Blundell-Jones
other to the modern
admire flourished not as amarginalized

movement (as is said, most famously,
More
which
pervasive anomalies
continues
to the stylistic paradigm by

to be conceptualized present
modernism
an especially vexing challenge

rists. In past generations, the
to both historians
oeuvres of certain
and theo
important
and Scharoun), about H?ring just before it was established (as, for example, is often asserted forWright) and after it emerged, in reaction to it (as is typically main and not tained for Aalto). These tendencies existed within the mod ern movement itself, not only in the work of H?ring and
Scharoun but also, as new Oud and studies have suggested, in that of, among others, Schindler.23
in such as Alvar Aalto and Eric Gunnar Asplund and Hans Scharoun in Ger Scandinavia, Hugo H?ring architects many,
States
and Rudolph
have been
Schindler
seen as
andWright
of isolated
in the United
genius, as
figures
anachronistic
trends, modernism. or as
holdovers
successors Contemporary
from defunct
challenging scholarship an
proto-modernist
already-codified on the work of
Frampton
many of these architects repeatedly demonstrates

and other practitioners employ some of the
how they
styl
that overlaps "Other Tradition," but and Blundell-Jones's John Wilson he avoids many of the pitfalls of that formulation mainly because before complexities turning to it he spent decades unraveling in the work and theories of dominant figures
a strain of "critical regionalism" substantially, though not entirely, with St. identifies
canonical
istic tropes while
violating
others, whether
it be the pro
Figure shed, # %
8 Hugo
H?ring,
cow
Gut Garkau,
Germany,
1922-26
in CIAM.24
However,
Frampton's
notion
of
critical
regionalism
as a coherent,
is also artificially unified,

identifiable
in that he presents
in which a spe
it
ates false oppositions and fails to analyze the substantial and fundamental unifying goals of architects of different mod
ernist tendencies and strains. St. John Wilson's compara
set of convictions
cific socio-critical political ideology is conjoined

set of political ideas, aesthetic practices. to approach In recognizing the formulations improvement convictions Frampton's architects' is an
to a specific
of their of of over
importance
in Le tive analysis of Le Corbusier's Villa de Mandrot as serves Pradet and Eileen Gray's E.1027 in Roquebrune
an example. for aside In an it, he ideal, depicts the Mandrot residence country and nuances house of human as a that use,
those
proposal shunts
mass-producible exigencies
St. John Wilson

heterogeneity of
and Blundell-Jones.
these architects'
But it, too, elides the

approaches and
everyday
aesthetic
political
ideologies, amassing in the same category, for architects with greatly diverging political ideolo example,
such as Aalto (who was a committed Social Democ
climate, and site context; to it, he opposes E.1027, which to Gray carefully designed around just those contingencies
produce, does ence sought modated modern he argues, a more mention successful or dwelling.25 the basic Nowhere congru that that position so and by each St. John Wilson of Le to Corbusier's in these of analyze
gies,
toward a nostalgic (who veered Barrag?n Oscar and (who might be anti-modernism), Niemeyer called a consensualist, although some consider him simply rat), Luis
an opportunist.)
and Gray's villas era each
aspirations:
develop the needs
an architecture and took a
accom within creat site.
a new that
life; moreover,
sought
to do the user
Most
Jones, alous and
important, although
Frampton acknowledge in modernist
St. John Wilson,

the architecture, presence their
Blundell
of anom
an enmeshed ing
relationship
between
the
Le Corbusier
perspective
did this visually, through the management

and vista, which were aspects of design
of
that
tendencies
polarized
focus on their subjects' ideological and aesthetic differences

with the putatively dominant modern movement both ere
Gray approached
less visually than
in a straightforward manner. Gray did this

phenomenologically, accommodating the
Figure 150
Rudolph JSAH
Schindler, JUNE
King's Road House, West 2005
Hollywood,
1921-22.
Photographed
in 1924
/ 64:2,
movements
and patterns of daily rituals. Although differ ences of emphasis and execution distinguish Le Corbusier's
and Gray's approaches, the same conceptual concerns gov
erned the design of both houses. Blundell-Jones's treatment of H?ring and Scharoun contains similar, ifmore nuanced, examples of such false polarization. In their polemical
supposedly greater or superior lesser
loosely constructed stages, each demarcated by its stylistic difference from the ones preceding it: a protracted birth (ca. 1890-1918); progressive stylistic synthesis (ca. 1918-30); and collapse (ca. 1930-65); (ca. stylistic dissipation 1965-80), mummified
counter-style.
at which
point the expiring or expired in buildings and cities, is superseded

Architects at the turn of the twentieth
style, by a
cen
attempt
do not
to consolidate
these their
their own
authors, to to the
"other"
modernism, take
tury who understood architecture through motifs)

as the modern
themselves
degrees,
analyses
but whose work
to be designing modern in some important way (often or neoclassical

as
next nature
because
level. As Aristotle of color,

of what
points
out
in writing
about the only

any
the use of ornament diverges

movement
some things can be differentiated

they have in common. Understanding
from the stylistic tropes made

are discussed they include Art Nouveau
typological famous by
or architects
early modernists
multidimensional
tual enon properties of modernism, of
phenomenon,
color or the that
whether
social one and
it be the percep
cultural phenom analyze
proto-modernists:
such asVictor Horta
and Henry
van de Velde; Secessionists
requires
substantially
the shared properties of its diverse parts before allowing oneself to become mesmerized by its different hues.26 Fail ing to do this may selected hue or design strategy is different
others. These authors, concentrating on
and Otto Wagner; Deutscher Werkbund Josef Hoffmann leaders such as Behrens; and Wright. This narrative asserts that then came the second period, the heyday of modernism in the late 1910s and 1920s, when many architects produced work that falls comfortably within the familiar style-based including Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies, a host of associated with movements including Russian Constructivism and Rationalism, de Stijl, the ABC Group, the Glass Chain, CIAM, and so forth. This time of creative paradigm, architects stylistic
period,
lead one
to conclude
falsely in kind from the

neglect
that a
differences,
commonalities
where in
in the "Tradition"
are differences
and the "Other Tradi in kind exist

Moreover, in
tion," and therefore

reality there
surmise that differences

degree.
in glossing
modern
over the complexity

they also
and heterogeneity
but a single
of the
alter
synthesis was
from the 1930s
followed
on, when
by a more
architects
varied
either
third
con
movement,
construct
nate strain, which they erroneously and which, in its singularity, is as bounded as the canonical strain of modernism that they aim to criticize precisely for its
boundedness. paradigmatic Hence view these of modernism authors even further as they reinforce seek the to chal
call a tradition
tributed to modernism's
ossification
into the International
Style (particularly in corporate architecture) or reinter preted it, as the style slowly disseminated into regions where it did not originate, such as the United States, the United Scandinavia, Asia, Kingdom, the third period, modernism's
sively eroded, as architects
and Latin America. stylistic coherence

its early
During progres inflected

and prac in the of
lenge it: paradoxically, style remains the principal means by which the boundaries of modernism and its supposed strains
are established and maintained.
criticized
universalizing
claims and produced modernist-looking

by accommodations The fourth when accelerating and the to period, tices. regional so the narrative shattered of these climates,
buildings
cultures, goes, under many begins the postwar
The
As
Paradigm
in the proliferation
of Style
of
and Periodization
treatments the of anomalies of in recent the archi
mid-1960s, both nal the
modernism velocity increasing
impact inter
scholarship
on modernism,
periodization
critiques
barrenness
of corporate
co
tectural history larly?and
of the last one hundred
years
is simi
optation. By 1980, modernism
just as problematically?grounded largely in the of of This architectural his paradigm style. periodization tory from 1900 to the present, which is followed with minor variations by virtually all contemporary textbook accounts of modernism and postmodernism and implicated in an
enormous range of scholarship, is based on an easily com
replaced by postmodernism, of stylistic pluralism inwhich we live today. Postmodern architecture of the 1980s and 1990s is then typically posed as a series of formal opposites to the putative stylistic tropes of early modernism.28 In place of flat roofs are ones that are conventionally pitched or deconstructively skewed; in place of the transparency of glass is the opacity of more traditional materials?brick and stone?or the in place of the ambiguous translucency of deconstructivism; simple calculations of the grid and the golden section, the complex geometries of the M?bius
SOMETHING
had been all but definitively ushering in the inchoate period
prehensible, easily narrated model of historical ment that recalls organic models of historical originating in the nineteenth century.27 > to this model, modernism According extended from around 1900 to around
develop progress
in architecture 1970, with four
strip and transforma

TO TALK ABOUT 151
mmmmmgm^gmmmmma^^^mmga^^
10 Walter
tional geometry; in place of paeans to structural expression, ironic gestures of structural obfuscation; in place of open plans, roomlike
"irrational" tion, or ways; symbolism.
spaces arranged in traditional or decidedly

in place of cool abstraction, ornamenta
to the supposed upsurge Smithson, and Aldo van Eyck?or of interest in regional identity in Italy? How might this change the way we approach contemporary members of the British Hi-Tech haas's Office movement, or the work of the Rem Kool of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)? After all, most of these postwar architects would have disagreed that they were working with a modernism that was in
or, later, defunct.
this compelling if conventional story, style Throughout remains the de facto paradigm by which modernism's his tory is told. Yet in each of these successive subperiods, counter-examples to overwhelm the narrative and anomalies belie and indeed threaten of this satisfyingly does the history of modernism coherence
decline
Ifmodernism
and many other
is reconceptualized
less-recognized
to account for these

the accepted
monuments,
What tragic four-act play.29 in architecture look like if Post Office Savings Wagner's Bank in Vienna (1904?12) is as fully modernist as Gropius and Adolf Meyer's (1910-11)? Or if Loos's Faguswerk Khuner House in Payerbach of 1929 is as fully modernist as Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye in Poissy? Or ifwe recognize Schindlern King's Road House La (1920-21), Wright's Miniatura for Weis and the (1923), Gropius's pavilions albeit (1926-27) to all be fully modernist, senhofsiedlung in different ways (Figure 10; see Figures 5, 9)? And what that have been left out of the paradigm alto as such the many later projects ofWright orWillem gether, in Hilversum, Town Hall Dudok's the Netherlands about works (1923-30; Figure 11), created by practitioners who knew of the dominant style-based paradigm emerging from CIAM and insisted that they too were creating modern architec ture? What does this move to a stylistically plural and inclusive approach to modernism do to our conception of the postwar period?to, for example, our understanding of the work of Louis Kahn (Figure 12), Alison and Peter
152 JSAH / 64:2, JUNE 2005
periodization
there Wright's reason works
of its history makes

to conclude that precursors are mere
little sense. No
Loos's, to Wagner's, a modernism
longer is
and that
matured
under their tutelage. No longer is there reason to conclude that the work and projects of Archigram, Kahn, or the Smithsons are last gasps, historic or pathetic, of an expiring like BBPR's Torre Velasca idiom; no longer do buildings inMilan (1958) or Albini and Pirovano in Cervinia (1949-50; Fig
and flourished
Rifugio ure 13) become unknowing harbingers of postmodernism. No longer should it even be taken as a given that James Stir ling's Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1977-83) or OMA's Villa dalFAva in Paris (1985-88)
ernism's demise.
Colombini's
are temporal
indicators of mod
Commonly accepted characterizations and assumptions about the periodization of twentieth-century architecture select one or more aspects of a building or project that do not look modernist in the sense established by the para digm?Loos's
ornament and
disinterest
symbol,
in transparency, Wright's
insistence on "rooms"
use of
instead
Kahn's
*.:::
. ..:
.....::
Si S.?i.ii ....... : i ?S.' : #g:'1'', ... ............ r;e . .............? s ?* ......... . .: ' ':-,'......... '.'. :.......
a,.s .., :,.,:........ ,,:.' .:."...
Mv s-e.. t.x.ji! :: .....=!
Figure
11 Willem
Dudok, 1923-30
Town
Hall, Hilversum,
the Netherlands,
if
Figure Trenton, 12 Louis Kahn, Trenton Jersey, 1954-55. Bath House, Photographed in New
1959
Figure ' ~{ _B Mm _| ^ 'iJ^SffS^^VWHBi^KyjSJ^j^^B^-
13
Franco Albini Rifugio
and Luigi Cervinia,
Colombini, _|Hi^__^_|wH5_|__H|___i
Pirovano,
Italy, 1949-50
^^H^^^^^^S?p*'
i_^_^HH_|^S_^_^^_^_r'^^_^_B^:
;^_^_^_^_^_^_HRlf^^^^'
* '-jfjll^^fe-^m^M0 ^
*t?
''^__h_^
"^m??mmWmW^mwk',
WtsM iL^^?^mWS?^m^m^^?^m^m^mW^^u^^^'' ?#
:-;-v!^Bp?^S^_^_f^_|_9HS_t
SOMETHING
TO TALK ABOUT
153
of Spaces, BBPR's Gothicizing

glossing over the uncomfortable
allusions?while
reality
ignoring or
other
that most
digm is not in need of critical examination, reformulation, and perhaps replacement. Why is the style-based paradigm
so tenacious, so difficult to escape? As suggested earlier,
aspects of the project belie its assigned place in the estab lished chronology of modernism's life and death. Moreover, although architects' stated intentions should not be the only criterion by which we determine the place of their work in history, surely some accord should be given to the reality
that, over the years, most of the architects mentioned above
until a paradigm qua paradigm

and an alternative one proposed,
is convincingly
it remains the
challenged
only way
for a discipline to provide an intersubjective, common foun dation by which inquiries may be conducted. In the case of
modern architecture, the style-based paradigm maintains a
insistently
modern?not contemporary practices
and determinedly
proto, or late, architects' that they
asserted that their work was

and certainly not post. of Indeed, ideas and of a variety to be modernist
particularly
James
strong cognitive
observed
grip for other reasons as well.

that style "provides a structure
Ackerman
reworking
understand
is yet
believed
nature
for the history of art"; Ernst Gombrich, discussing style, it a "necessary evil," adding that humans are by
classifying animals.32 In the literature on modernism
another reason that the style-based paradigm by which we periodize modernism may be flawed. According to the cur
rently accepted periodization, the only way to account for
a highly visible portion of contemporary practice is to assert has that, with the demise of postmodernism, modernism survived its successor.30 Surely this risible proposition indi cates the need to rethink our field's basic assumptions
terms regarding what modernism was and is.
in architecture, itmay be that style has functioned not just as an intellectual construct but also aswhat George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, andMark Johnson, a philosopher, call
a "basic-level are "house" come of category." or "chair." Examples When we of basic-level say these words, categories mental category, pitched cate
and
images the at a
to mind. architecture of
In contrast or
to a basic-level
notion higher
furniture?concepts called "superordinate mental
level not
abstraction, such
gories"?do
elicit
concrete
pictures.33
Theorizing
theorists
Style
architecture well. At the most basic level,
A basic-level properties
modernism
The paradigm of style inmany ways has served historians and

of modern
category in human cognition has several that in part suggest why a stylistic paradigm of
in architecture was at first adopted and explain
it has accomplished precisely what its original creators, fol had intended for it,which is to explain and lowingWolfflin, how progressive architectural and urban practices in analyze the twentieth
those of
why theorists
sent image
it has been so difficult for architectural historians to shake off. A basic-level level at which
category."34 but not of
and
"the highest
the of entire
category is imageable, a single mental image can repre

as one can get a clear mental one summon a furniture, so can
century constitute
century.31
a profound
Furthermore,
change from
important
Just
the nineteenth
a chair,
questions have been raised and substantially clarified through the style-based paradigm's frame. What is the relationship of modernism's
kind
mental
forms to its social and political agendas? What

among progressive architects existed
image of modernist architecture if one employs a cog nitive paradigm based on style. These mental images are simple and easy to recall. A basic-level category is the high
est level "at which shapes."35 and category Just as members the have similarly house Pevsner's perceived has four overall paradigmatic (despite
of communication
that facilitated the rapid international assimilation of this new

set of ideas on how to make debt architecture to modern and cities? What did mass was modern architecture's art? How
walls
a roof while
architecture
famous
influence the and industrial technology consumption was to of form? If architects took the approach style making
not the lowest common denominator, what were the domi
distinction) can be either Lincoln Cathedral or a bicycle shed, in Stuttgart the apparently homogenous Weissenhofsiedlung is far easier to remember than the 1914 Deutscher Werkbund exhibition buildings, which were stylistically more heteroge neous (Figures 14, 15). People find a basic-level category, in
its concreteness, to remember. conceptual, For not only easy to conceptualize necessarily but also easy of basic its this reason?not or explanatory because
nant formal pursuits of architects who believed

value of "modern architecture"?space, symbolic
in the social
"objectiv
ity," or something else? All these questions and themany seri ous studies addressing them have emerged from the style-based paradigm and constitute the very ground of our
current understanding of modernism. No doubt more such
analytical,
superiority?the
inquiries will
architects,
also offer insights on the work of individual

buildings, formal devices, and trends.
level category is the "level atwhich most of our information is organized."36 Using style to approach and define mod ernism in architecture may, then, concord well with the habits of human cognition. Yet these cognitive
obscure our need to seek out and carefully
movements,
habits should not

consider the ana
Nonetheless, given the current state of the discipline, it would be difficult to argue that this long-standing para
154 JSAH / 64:2, JUNE 2005
lytical criteria that are the best tools for exploring modernism
separate
structure
from
skin,
except
when
they
don't.
They
deploy
except except tation
an asymmetrical
when when in plan, they they are use
distribution
of spaces and forms

they are and "abstract" represen
neoclassicizing; symbolism, elevation,
reference, and detail.
section,
Given
odization, ture in the field,

cognitive tenacity,
all the anomalies, given all the problems of peri that trouble the litera given the contradictions it seems evident
can no longer
that style, despite

serve as the conceptual
its
frame with which That
so prominent as a to be virtual subfield itself suggests something fundamen tal iswrong with the conception and formulation of mod
in architecture: exceptions have proliferated to such
to explore modernism the theme of anomalies has become
in architecture.
ernism
an extent that they have smothered

become Figure 14 Bruno Taut, Glass Cologne, 1914 Pavilion, Deutscher Werkbund clear that employing measure style even common-denominator
the paradigm.37 It has

as the lowest or only to is akin
of modernism
exhibition,
mistaking only chairs for all furniture or only houses for all it simply misconstrues architecture: the role of style in
twentieth-century architecture and its conceptual place in all, not a chair but a complex
in architecture?which
is, after
modernism's
domain. But ifmodernism
is not constituted
phenomenon
in, and product of, human civilization.
Style We
and Intention
by any of the formal tropes that we normally associate with it, then what may we say it is? Many scholars, even if they do not do so explicitly, have migrated toward focusing less on the forms of modernism
than on the architect's socio-ethical intentions for the forms
are now at the following impasse. Modernist buildings have flat roofs and use a lot of glass, except when they don't; toward volume rather they are shaped by an orientation
than mass, except when space takes second place to innova
he designed: what the practitioner believed his forms would he signify to the society and the people for whom on This the emerging emphasis primacy of designed.38
socio-ethical intentions over form can be seen in much
tions in program, materials, systems, and so on; they allude to or employ industrially produced materials such as rein
forced concrete or metal, except for those in stone, wood,
recent scholarship,
Barcelona Pavilion
for example,
of 1929.39
in interpretations
For years, the
ofMies's
Barcelona
and brick; they are orthogonally

many cases when they are not. They
geometric,
employ
except
open plans
in the
and
Pavilion was considered expression
the zenith of Mies's
of the technological
simple, clear essence of the new age. In
Figure Velde, s. . ..... '' . . .....
15 Henry van de Auditorium, Werkbund Cologne, 1914
Deutscher exhibition,
.. . ... ,' ..,

<$ .... ...'..'.-l#gJ
j
* . ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.. .......
_'.?? '' g}:1ff~~~~~~~i| Ot
SOMETHING
TO TALK ABOUT
155
some instances inspired by the pavilion's reconstruction

Barcelona, a spate of fresh interpretations has been offered.
in
as social action, by which

mean action that takes into
I, following
account the
J?rgen Habermas,
conduct and needs
Detlef Mertins and Robin Evans each propose a phenome interpretation of the project; K. Michael Hays nological
offers a Marxist reading.40 Mertins argues that Mies was try
of others, and ismeaningfully

many ernism emerges contemporary in architecture from the primary scholars,
oriented
toward them.45 For

that mod no doubt
the presupposition social themselves: action
constitutes sources
ing to convey in the Barcelona Pavilion "an architecture of becoming," of intensely personal self-realization in an alien ating world: "Matter is both fixed and inmotion, both calm
and restless, caught in a state of tense vibration, a frozen
practitioners
of modernist socio-ethical
a question of should
explicitly framed their goals in terms.46 Le Corbusier insisted "architecture is architecture

morality."47 be the Taut "creator asserted of new that modern social archi
moment
of becoming. The substance of the building alter asserts itself and dissolves, liquefying to the touch of natively
the eye. The cruciform chrome columns are palpable yet self
tecture
observances"
and that the modern
architect's obligation is to cultivate in the users of his buildings "ethical and social character."48
dismissed any conception of or statement about mod
effacing. Like phantoms

the play of reflections,
they materialize
the observer
and evaporate
do the same."41
in
Oud
making
Evans similarly argues that Mies's pavilion is fall of paradoxes

meant thetic to create judgment, "a perfect vehicle for what of our Kant own calls aes where consciousness
ern architecture?including Giedion?that left out what
those he called
his friend by a social vision.49
perception
all other forms of interest and intelligence."42 to Evans, these aesthetic choices must be According understood in the context of the politically unstable envi dominates ronment of the tottering Weimar Republic. In this political system built on sand, Mies built the national pavilion as a machine for thinking, a building that "eats ideas," creating an architecture that is physical but bodiless, that holds in synthesis the symmetry of classicism and the geo repetition of standardization, that suppresses vertical symmetry and embraces horizontal symmetries in a "world turned upside down." It is a "small landscape that affords the impression of infinity"43 Hays sees many of the same formal elements in the Barcelona Pavilion; he, however, argues that they were meant not to edify and situate the viewer but to
alarm rience and confuse him, to press that comes him into a the heightened fragmentation expe of of the alienation from
Gropius, propagandist extraordinaire for the cause of the new architecture, spoke of his abiding frustration at being publicly perceived as a visionary whose gift to the world was flat roofs and plate glass: "I cannot accept always being formalist point of view as originator of cubes with flat roofs; this point of view ignores the com prehensive work in design and sociology which we have
been doing Such for German statements society often have as a whole."50 been used as a noose from
labeled from amere
dialectic metric
which
to hang the entire modernist project. Postmodern critics of modernism the elitism deplore underlying what an assert to be less than they nothing offensively patroniz
and ing elaborate project in social engineering. Historians theorists inspired byMichel Foucault or by various mem bers of the Frankfurt School interpret such aspirations as blatant, unknowing, or repressed attempts to buttress the
power machine Enlightenment interests of of the status For of quo?more these writers, especially, architects' rationalization, over their own, the capitalism. rhetoric was
experience perpetuated
These authors
by modern
the
life itself.44
same forms, and their per
self-realization, a cloak instrumental thrown
describe
and
progress
in essence
ceptions and verbal descriptions of the Barcelona Pavilion are remarkably similar. But they differ in their interpreta tions of the cultural, political, and social project thatMies
meant to convey in the forms he chose and the way he com
or others',
self-interested,
goals.51
To be sure, in hindsight,
Gropius, Le Corbusier, Oud,
the grand social agendas of

Taut, and others, however
posed them. The battleground, then, is not over what these authors see at the Barcelona Pavilion, but over what they read into the forms that they see. And what they read into this icon of modernism have been Mies's springs from what they believe to socio-ethical intentions for this project in they do not articulate this explic
the new architecture. for
deeply felt and progressively made, appear overreaching and naive. To be sure, in hindsight, some of these architects'
good quences, intentions and in led their to unforeseen, may even unfortunate have been conse instru effect
mentalized
however, to
programs
intepret
for social engineering.

such aspirations also
It is possible,
propo
as serious
particular, and?although
itly?more generally,
This
not only
type of inquiry is common

on Mies but on any number
today, in scholarship
of modernist archi
sitions in an ongoing, ethically grounded discussion about the role of architecture in modern life. In contemplating the ethical implications of their modernist practice, these
architects and their colleagues embraced the conviction that
tects and institutions. Underlying such studies is the pre their vocation that understood the practitioners supposition
156 JSAH / 64:2, JUNE 2005
a building or buildings in the world is by definition social action. The practitioner's ethical obligation, then, was to make
to reflect on what sort of social action he proposed and what he hoped to accomplish by it.He must, in the words ofMax be able to "give himself an account of the ultimate Weber,
meaning of his own conduct."52
tects to be substantially different and even at odds with each other. Conversely, differences in style can obscure common aims and common ethical agendas54; this is evidenced by St. John Wilson's categorization of works as formally dissimi lar as H?ring's farm in Gut Garkau and Gray's E.1027 as part of a single "Other Tradition"
To take a more canonical example,
use to the analyst seeking to unearth Style is of little socio-ethical intentions, which are shot through with inher ited assumptions and socially received or influenced convic
tions about the nature and possibilities of architecture?its
inmodern
Le
architecture.
neo
Corbusier's
social role, its value as a political tool, its potential as a form of artistic knowledge, its personally transformative potential. As such, intentions can be discerned and understood only in the context inwhich they were formed, by analyzing the archi
tect's notion of what making architecture means and does in
classsical Villa Schwob, which for years was portrayed as an early work with little relation to the canonical villas of the 1920s, is now thought to articulate the same sustained med itation on architecture's relationship to its own historical tradition that is central to his mature villas.55 For a number the boundaries of reasons, of modernism then, using style to delimit in architecture and to articu
the world of politics, society, economics, and culture. From the architect's inherited, imbibed, and deduced beliefs on these
questions?whether they are assumed, half-understood, con
late its shape leads to incoherence and confusion: confusion about the phenomenon itself, confusion about its bound
aries, confusion about different movements and strains
sciously affirmed, or transformed?he

own volition constructs his vocation. Sometimes, than-conscious clues to an architect's intentions
deliberately and of his

convictions about
a set of socio-ethical
conscious for his work
and
less can be
it, and confusion about its continuity and its evolu tion. The paradigm of style does not easily admit important works by some prominent architects who are indisputably within or Kahn. It does not correctly such as modernist, Wright depict the designs of architects who thought of themselves and were thought of by others as indisputably modernist but whose work does not entirely fit the stylistic paradigm, such asAalto or Dudok. It does not accurately describe the aspirations or the works of postwar architects such asKahn, the Smithsons, or Stirling, who were self-consciously mod ernist in their insurgencies. It does not, in short, adequately characterize modernism dynamic role and place in the modern world that many of its found and leading proponents ing and canonical practitioners and sometimes insistently ironically?con repeatedly?if itself, which was an identifiable if set of convictions about the built environment's
socio-ethical
discerned
in his stylistic choices. However, no reliably con sistent relationship exists between a given set of stylistic ges tures and a given set of social and ethical intentions: a style can have multiple meanings for the simple reason that style functions within
other functions
performs many
architect. These
the world
may compete
of a practicing
with, or sim
ply have little relation to, the architect's social and ethical agenda. Because style, in standardizing informational con tent, is often used to establish and sustain boundaries for
social protocol, an architect (or a critic who advocates their
adoption) may adopt a certain set of stylistic devices to gain entrance into a preexisting social group of architects and clients, or to maintain status within that group.53 In such cases, an architect might employ a style with intentions that that style signifies in common architec tural parlance (consider the formal consonance of the work but divergence of political intentions of Le Corbusier and differ from what Andr? Lur?at). Or an architect may split off a style from the design methods or materialist foundations on which itwas
originally constructed, as was the case in some of Skidmore,
tended could not be understood if "fenced in" by style. It rather wrongly privileges style as generative ofmodernism
than as generated by modernism; as the conceptual founda
tion of modernist
thinking rather than a visual expression and artifact of socio-ethical intentions and convictions in the modern
divorce our
about the role of architecture

these reasons and others, we must
world.
investigation
For that
of modernism
we associate
from the cluster of formal synechdoches

with it. We must reconsider modernism
reinterpretations Owings an architect might employ a trope from a familiar architec tural language in order to turn its familiar meaning upside down, as when Gropius used the vocabulary of the Ameri can daylight factory for an elite art school inGermany. can mask greatly diver In truth, stylistic homologies
andMerrill's
ofMies's work. Or
afresh.
Past Attempts the Current

For more than
to Overcome Situation
forty years, writers
the Paradigm
and
on modern
and
contem
gent aims. Many works that today represent the core of the modern movement employ its paradigmatic stylistic figures, yet we know the intentions and aspirations of their archi
porary architecture
modernism in
have struggled to stop conceptualizing

terms, and to emphasize its com
stylistic
plexity or even incoherence when
seen through the prism of

TO TALK ABOUT 157
SOMETHING
style.
Since
the
1960s,
various
reframings
or
reconceptual
and Design
izations have been proposed. Reyner Banham, in his Theory in the First Machine Age (London, 1960), dis closed the hypocrisy of the modern movement's claims to and should be redressed structural rationalism and argued that this very failure could in the post-World War II, "sec analysis of what might be called the of the modern movement technological fallacy sparked a lively discussion in subsequent reviews by Stanford Ander Jordy, each of whom of the early modern
with the machine. Ban
designers, theorists, and critics demanded that architecture be engaged with contemporary political and social condi tions in a radical eradication of the boundaries between high architecture
architecture's
or art and everyday life, and others insisted on

autonomy vis-?-vis culture and the market
ond" machine
age. His
place in an elusive, dialectically and possibility.64
driven expression
of angst
andWilliam son, Alan Colquhoun, different proposed reconceptions

movement's supposed infatuation
Each of these attempts to wriggle out of the straight jacket of style and move discussions of modernism beyond its strictures has contributed greatly to our understanding of modernism
some critical aspect facets
and its evolution.

of modernism from
Each,
To
however,
that state
privileges
other
in a manner
excludes
ham and Colin
Rowe
both
ernism's embeddedness
its many practitioners'
also insisted on early mod in tradition and precedent despite

to the contrary.56
consideration.
that modernism
claims
Following Banham's critique, a flood tide of challenges to the canonical, formal tropes associated with modernism appeared in journals such asArchitectural Review, Casahella, Domus, Oppositions, and, later, Assemblage. By the early 1980s, Giorgio Ciucci had concluded that the notion of a
modern geneous he meant movement?even modern the apparently stylistically by homo which at movement!?was a myth.57 an "invention," Others chipped
to be modern is simply a determination on casts of the architect's the importance helpfully light intentions and on his felt need to find a language of con in architecture
temporary relevance, but it reveals little about why mod
the specific paths that it did rather than in other, even completely different directions. spinning off To suggest that modernism was imbued with Enlighten took ment ideals helpfully
to several
ernism
emphasizes
strains
the centrality of Cartesian

yet it ignores
rationalism
of modernism,
a fabrication,
away
the few remaining foundations of the notion of a unified modernism. Anderson unmasked "the fiction of function." in the work ofWright.58 Wolf Tegethoff and Fritz Neumeyer, and then Evans, Hays, and Mertins, exposed deeply symbolic strains in work by Mies. Scholars traced the stylistic roots of the putatively Neil Levine radical Italian Futurism Contemporary
in a number of ways.
rationalism in (for enlightened and the example) Aalto, Scharoun, Surrealist-inspired work of Friedrich Kiesler, Berthold Lubetkin, and Paul Nelson.65 strains of non-Cartesian,
To maintain that modernism in architecture is about new
teased out mimesis
conceptions
from form
of space profitably
onto an abstract
shifts the field's focus away

that surely was enor
concept
in the bourgeois Art Nouveau.59 authors have assimilated these critiques

Some assert that modernism was not
architects, especially mously compelling 1920s and 1930s, but it essentially retains the style-based paradigm by turning it inside out, and neglects to address the non-spatially
ret, Taut, and essence boundaries
to many
in the
driven investigations of Oud, Auguste Per

others. To assert that meant culture modernism to break rightly down empha in its the
a style but a historically discrete movement that existed in a delimited timeframe?say, between the founding of Art Nouveau and either the last CIAM meeting before World War in 1959.60 II, in 1937, or the final CIAM meeting, has this the presentational advantage of Although approach it creating legible boundaries, artificially periodizes a broad and enduring cultural formation according to the rise and fall of one particular, albeit important, institution within it. Others write together is nei era ther style nor a temporally demarcated but a general in principle or cultural predisposition. Perhaps modernism that what holds modernism architecture was that branch of architectural production in the twentieth century that was "conscious of itsmodernity
and striving for a change."61 Or perhaps it was a movement
is a socio-critical of architecture
practice
and mass
sizes the role of political ideologies inmodernist positions, but it ignores the insistent effeteness inwork by prominent
modernists such as Mies. To say that modernism's reveals that essence political is a socio-critical, autonomous
practice
positioning
strains, but
can be embedded
it undervalues and
in even its most

ultimately
formalist
mischaracterizes
the non-socio-critical
engagement 1920s and 1930s, orMax Abramovitz in the 1950s and 1960s.
Because these available
of architects
but genuine social and political such as Gropius and Taut in the and Gordon Bunshaft
reformulations
of modernism
ratio its basic precepts from Enlightenment nalism.62 Or perhaps itwas the inclination to design archi that derived
tecture was around a socio-critical JSAH / 64:2, new conceptions praxis JUNE split 2005 of into space.63 two, Or perhaps some it in which
remain partial and inadequate, historians and theorists, of mod endeavoring to be faithful to the multifariousness ernist practice, tend to oscillate between stylistic paradigm alone and employing falling back on the amore complex if
158
variable model
based partly on style, partly on historical and and partly on cultural predispositions periodization, social convictions. The different elements of these three kinds of conceptualizations?stylistic
and ideological
more
correctly,
a series
of arguments
and
debates,
which
are
related to one another and governed by a set of underlying

concerns or principles.
tropes,
historical
then con
demarcations,
convictions?are
joined, idiosyncratically and inconsistently. This approach, which characterizes a good deal of contemporary scholarly and interpretive practice, is preferable to relying on style alone, but it is hardly satisfactory. It neither solves the myr iad problems that starting with style creates, nor does it help
us to understand the paradigm range elides of issues from and view. questions that the conventional
an explore the definition further, a discourse is extended expression of thoughts on a subject or related col lection of subjects, conducted by a self-selected group of people within a discrete set of identifiable social institutions, To and lasting over a bounded,
mean short, period of time.67
which
does not necessarily

around an essen
It is focused
tially coherent
questions and In a discourse,
(although not always articulated)

has its own jargon, its own use contested in other words?to the discursive
group of
terms. jargon
Toward
a Discourse
of Modernism
in Architecture Can the definitional tyranny of style and the string of ad to its legions of anomalies and prob be overthrown? Is it possible to avoid
another aspect of modernism without
of contemporary philosophy?a speech act is offered to a as an community of recipients intrinsically hypothetical assertion, and is submitted to this community with the hope of "discursively testing its claim to universality."68
What if we conceptualize modernism not as the result
hoc accommodations lems of periodization

privileging one or
of a discourse but as itself that discourse? In this view, mod their styl ernist buildings, projects, urban plans?including
istic positions?as well as manifestos, exhibitions, and other
artificially
cussing delimited
reducing
sometimes movement,
it to that aspect alone,

a style, sometimes one or another sometimes
to avoid dis
a historically political or
it as
contributions, have been proposals or hypothetical propo to an sitions offered up, either actually or hypothetically, identifiable community of recipients (architects, urbanists, critics, curators, historians, and theorists) with the intent of testing that proposal's merit and validity. These proposals, taken in aggregate, create a linked series of discussions and debates on a relatively autonomous, by which Imean dis crete, set of questions. For practitioners, the primary media were through which these debates have been conducted designs in two and three dimensions;
exhibitions, conferences, criticism,
social ideology, sometimes merely then shifting definitions modern?and

convenience, or polemical intent?
a "determination" according
not
to be
to need,
entirely.
Probably
There
is, as Pierre Bourdieu writes, "no way out of the . . . one's game of culture only chance of objectifying the true nature of the game is to objectify as fully as possible the very operations which one is obliged to use in order to
secondary media were

journals, and books.
achieve that objectification."66 The need to try to find a more satisfactory ground from which to conduct inquiries
into modernism in architecture remains. We might climb,
as the Approaching modernism as itself a discourse (not is less intuitively appealing than result of a discourse) approaching
course cannot conjure
like Robin Williams

desks to adopt a different
in Dead Poets Society, on top of our

vantage point from which to ana
it as a style because,
te, not it up in your mind's
in cognitive
eye. Doing
terms, dis
You so, however,
is a sup er or dina
a basic-level
category.
in architecture. Mindful that others have lyze modernism to continue other and will valuable ways propose proposed I would like to outline one of retheorizing modernism, fruitful way to situate our disciplinary
propitious place.
brings together and builds on the many important findings and insights of several generations of scholarship on mod ernism while
have arship. either
enterprise
in amore
resolving
some of the major

not resolved
problems
by, that
that
schol
emerged
in, or were
Ever Design,
since the publication of Banham's Theory and it has been de rigueur to recount modernism's biog of a well-known cast of one
a dis
raphy by tracing the interactions characters in the United States and Europe
another in discussion and debate?in other
engaging
words,
the properties defining a discourse obtain for in architecture is indisputable. Take the period modernism in architecture was of the 1910s and 1920s. Modernism That by clearly identified social groups and institutions, including elite patrons of the arts (clients, museum curators, and gallery dealers), journal and book publishing companies, various academies, and preexisting and newly formed professional
history of modernism
born in and nourished
course. Derived the Latin

used to mean
from the medieval

a series
Latin
"to run about," the word

of discussions
"argument" and "discourse" is typically

and debates on a rela
tively closed set of questions.

bunch of people running
Figuratively,
having an
a discourse
argument?or
is a
organizations. No
can be written
adequate
with
about
in architecture
SOMETHING
TO TALK ABOUT
159
to these people and these institutions. Text are books replete with references to H?l?ne de Mandrot, Walther Rathenau, Salman Schocken, Gertrude and Leo Stein; to print media, including periodicals such as de Stijl, Disk, UEspirit Nouveau, Fr?hlicht, MA, Stavba, and as those previ Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet; and to books such ously mentioned seimer, Hitchcock
to academic
out reference
governed less by one or another local culture than by its own internal principles, which were then adapted to extremely varied local contexts, often partly shaping its local stylistic
manifestations. One clear indication of the relative autonomy
of this discursive which

like
community language in itsmembers spoke. In the 1920s, for example, words

"rational," "new," "modern," and "interna
is the distinctive
by Behne, Behrendt, Gropius, and Johnson, Sartoris, Taut, and Vogt;

such as the Bauhaus, Harvard's
Hilber
"functional,"
tional" were all proposed

ment in architecture. The
to describe the burgeoning move

meanings of these terms were
institutions
of Design, Mies's Illinois Institute of to and VKhUTEMAS; organizations, most of Technology, which came into being in metropolises, such as the ABC Graduate group in Basel, the Arbeitsrat f?rKunst in Berlin, the Archi tect's Research Group in Philadelphia, the de Stijl group in in the Netherlands, the Deutscher Werkbund the Munich, OSA and ASNO VA groups in Moscow, and, most famously, the international organization CIAM; to displays of pho tographs, drawings, and buildings such as theWerkbund exhibition of 1914, the Purist show in Paris of in Stuttgart of 1927, and the 1918, the Weissenhofsiedlung of Modern International Style exhibition at The Museum in Cologne
School
defined primarily by their differences from one another, as in a semiotic system. Analogous to Bourdieu's description of style, each of these terms "could only really be constructed in relation to the others, which is its objective and subjective is totally reversed depend negation, so that [its]meaning... ing on which point of view is adopted."71 The relative appro priateness of each of these terms, and the nuanced differences
among The modernism them, was widely debated.72 nature is evident of in many the discourse instances; of one autonomous
mostly
in architecture
Art, New York, in 1932. A similar, if somewhat less familiar list, could be given for subsequent periods.69 Taken together, these patrons and proponents, journals and books, academic institutions, professional organizations, and group exhibitions
repeated interaction,
example from the 1920s is how proponents o?Neue Sach lichkeit and Expressionism discussed Neue Sachlichkeit.73 Advocates ofNeue Sachlichkeit put forward a design strategy based on the rationalization
programmatic requirements,
of structure and of functional or

which were conceived as the
facilitated
an enormous
and critical
amount of
engagement
opposite of both academic Beaux-Arts practice and Expres sionism. Neue Sachlichkeit meant the kind of architectural
composition to reproduce, that was especially impersonal, via mass easy to deduce, This and was easy con
cross-influence,
among participants in the discourse of modernism. By the end of the 1920s, modernism in architecture, even if it did exhibit degrees of local variation, was an aggressively international phenomenon, as is captured inAlfred Barr's characterization of the impact of Theo van Doesburg's and Pablo Picasso's
ideas on Gropius's Bauhaus: "In the history of art, there are
production.
trasted with Expressionism, which was held to be the kind of composition that was hard to deduce and impossible to
reproduce, Proponents and emphatic about its status and as a unique object. con of Neue Sachlichkeit Expressionism
entertaining sequences than the influence by way of Holland of the painting of a Spaniard living in Paris upon the plans of a German architect in Berlin."70 Architects,
urbanists, patrons, curators, critics, historians, theorists, and
few more
trasted their respective approaches to design not only with each other but also with the Beaux-Arts method, which both groups held to be the kind of design practice that could be exercised only with professional training in competently well-established formal conventions. Neue Sachlichkeit, and academicism Expressionism, acquired their relative meanings,
one another.
polemicists
these
spanning awide geographic range had settled on identifiable, common concerns. The institutions housing
discussions helped to generate, sustain, and structure
then, in large part from their differences

The process of creating those definitions
from
was
not only the sorts of questions

making range of architecture possible and answers. cities, The
that architects asked about

but also, to some critics, extent, curators, the his
an autonomous outside Another
dynamic that had little meaning the discourse itself.74
or place rel
architects,
indication of the discourse of modernism's
torians, and theorists who talked about and formed positions on these questions did somainly in reference to each other?if one they weren't doing so in direct conversation with the institutions enumerated above and through another?via
their work.
an essentially atively autonomous nature is its focus around coherent set of questions, even if each individual's compre
hension or, for of that these questions even was not always clearly articulated for matter, Consider,
conceptualized.
Hence modernism
160 JSAH
the social space constituted by the discourse of in the 1920s was largely autonomous, its logic
/ 64:2, JUNE 2005
example, the way in which students at the Bauhaus and VKhUTEMAS conceptualized the Constructivist language that they both employed. At both schools, discussions cen
tered on the socio-ethical obligations

temporary
to ameliorate
society. The
question of the practitioner's the conditions of living in con

positions of the schools,
ish architecture's amaterial
engagement
with as a
the world,
or
its status
as
practice?rather
professional
conference.
It has
respective
a large and fluid constituency of professionals

ested tists. outside Like any visitors, such as artists, this one philosophers, is a forum conference,
joined by inter
and for scien of a series
similar to the terminological landscape, were defined in ref erence to one another, just asNeue Sachlichkeit was defined by its differences to Beaux-Arts practices and Expression ism. The American artist Louis Lozowick visited Moscow wrote: in 1922 and, after visiting VKhUTEMAS,
debates and discussions on a relatively closed, identifiable set of questions inwhich individuals take positions in reference to, in reaction to, in combat with, or in sympathy with one
another. Session topics, and therefore the agenda for discus
There were many kinds of odd looking objects scattered around

the stands room, or some by in wood, others some in metal sketches and that attached looked to like themselves,
sion, are detenriined in advance, vetted by people of positional or intellectual leadership. Viewpoints are offered, new insights proposed. Positions are conceptualized in large part by their differences from or similarities to other possible and actual
stances. Identifiable strains of thought and practice, patterns
mechanical drawings. They looked half familiar and I dropped a

remark somewhat drew to the effect similar that projects loud and the Weimar Bauhaus was My "No, engaged casual no, remark no, what in and experiments. collective protest.
a sudden
of conflict, and schools emerge to press their claims. Notwith standing such schools, which often do not have the allegiance of their members on every issue, the number of such positions is extremely large, varying with individuals' personal procliv
ities and ethical convictions, social reference groups, training
we are doing is something

are seeking They new are forms, still
utterly different.
trying to justify to create ... we art. We are
In theWest
on have not
they
been
them
aesthetic
grounds. infected
trying
by esthetic
contagion
against
art."75
and background, talents and desires.76 Like the debates at pro

fessional conferences, spawned a wide the discourse of modernism with in archi participants tecture range of responses,
Despite
work
the formal similarity of the art and architectural

in the two schools, Russian students conceptualized
situating themselves and refining past positions, and refrain

ing tural, the discourse's political, central questions in response to social, and into, cul other its per economic, extrinsic to, but
the value of their work in opposition to their counterparts at the Bauhaus. The German school was still engaged in the outdated practice of making art for aesthetes; the Russian school made usable objects. Although the accuracy of the distinction could be contested (as Lozowick did), the iden of these very closely related schools was constructed, tity and agreed on by all, as a debate between opposing posi tions. For the 1930s, one could conduct a similar analysis of
the way in which were the terms used. "regionalism," In the 1950s, "vernacular," "mass culture" and and "nationalism"
developments
technological, ever penetrating
meable yet highly articulated boundaries.77 Conceptualizing modernism as a discourse would bring
our understanding of modernism art-historical consensus in architecture on the nature closer of mod to
contemporary
ernism in art.While W?lfflin

describe and analyze broad
and his successors sought to

stylistic changes over time, con
"history" were
relevant and terms "signification"
similarly opposed;
were "typology," (or "meaning").
in the 1970s, among the

"context,"
temporary art-historical scholarship on modernism typically focuses on describing specific artistic practices, explaining
their character, ferreting out their hidden and overt agendas.
"functionarism,"
Style has receded

Greenbergian
into the horizon

insists that
of art history.78 Post

no concrete image or
In the 1920s, such debates revolved primarily around a limited range or cluster of questions, including the follow What was the proper role of technology, or of scientific ing: life?What role might architectural discovery, in modern tradition play in a discipline of the present that is visibly, insistently surrounded by artifacts from its past? Do archi and urban design have the potential to serve as agents for concrete social change? In what manner might tecture
or should architecture embrace or advance a political
scholarship
images define modernist painting and sculpture, which instead is discussed as a loosely linked set of cultural convictions: an
insistence lenging depart of from on the obsolescence or of academic narrative modes of content, tradition, a a chal to
figuration conventional
tendency a deter
representation,
mination
ing,
that art should be part of modern

or criticizing the
life, by recogniz
emergent "mass
incorporating,
culture."79 Unlike
ernism"
its usage in the architectural field, "mod

that now encompasses a broad web of
agenda? In a vocation so woven into the fabric of society itself, is there socially transformative potential in private reflection and revelation? Itmight be useful to invoke a familiar conceit. Think
modernism not as a set of forms but?and this is not to dimin
in art is a term
definitional
ments, genres,
categories
and media.
that include different

Modernism in art
styles, move
is Impression
of
ism, Dada, Surrealism; it isFauvism and Cubism; it isAbstract it is the skewed figuration of Expressionism andMinimalism;
Picasso
and the cool abstraction ofMondrian;

and installation.
it is collage, in architec
a frame
these socio-ethical
should ticular one's or his one's class, client social a selected or clients,
obligations
actions
best be fulfilled? To whom

of subgroup users one's society, or a par groups, project one's
performance,
be oriented?all
A discourse-based
ture might have
paradigm of modernism
effect. It might create
disenfranchised the anticipated
a similar
of one's
work that is structured enough to differentiate itfrom both the nonmodernism of architects such as John Russell Pope or Edwin Lutyens, and the anti-modernism of projects such as Albert Berlin Speer's proposals (1937) and the INA-Casa Tiburtino quarter (1949-54).80 Yet a discourse-based paradigm of modernism,
successive cluster of generations questions and of participants would debate also a be concerns,
children's
grandchildren,
countrymen,
neighbors, The discourse of modernism greatly

character
or oneself?
in architecture external
over
has been
for a Pantheon
in downtown
influenced
of these
by phenomena
phenomena
to it, and the

time. For the
changed
in which common
1920s, itwas influenced by the economic interests of a bur geoning international capitalism; the fortunes of the down trodden;
reconstituting
the political
themselves
climate
and
of societies
in some cases
in upheaval,
their political
flexible enough so that Dudok's Town Hall, Gropius's mass in Stuttgart, Le Corbusier's Villa producible dwellings Oud's Shell Building, Savoye, Loos's Khuner House, Schindlern King's Road House, and Wright's La Miniatura all belong.
systems in the hopes of never again experiencing a world war; the social climate of dramatic advances in the scientific
understanding time; the cultural of the constitution of new of space, matter, practices and in climate
avant-garde
The
Discourse
of Modernism Action
modernism
in Architecture
as
Communicative
Conceptualizing
the arts. In the 1930s, the increasing conflict among Bol shevist, Nazi, Fascist, and democratic political systems, the and the burgeoning interest in worldwide Depression, regional identity as a counterbalance to the political specter of internationalism giving way to imperialism pushed the discourse in new directions. After World War II, a new set
of economic, political, social, and cultural developments?
in architecture
as a discourse
centered on the problem of how the built environment should be constructed to grapple with and respond to, rather than of modernity reject or ignore, the complex phenomenon repositions it as a broad, deep, fundamental, yet also explica ble social and cultural formation.81 It helps to solve many of the problems that have dogged the history and theory of mod
ernism in architecture for generations. Modernism in archi
including
welfare
the spread of democracy

the cold war, the need
and the growth of the

to rebuild economies
state,
and destroyed
semination
cities, decolonialization,
culture?helped
and the rapid dis

it once again.82
of mass
reshape
tecture is not limited to this or that movement, but instead generated many movements and strains. It isnot amonolithic, dominant, formal strain held in dynamic stasis by "other"
satellite strains; it is not a single ideology, cultural conviction,
in architecture, the history of modernism Throughout such external phenomena have helped give shape to the inter nal structure of the discourse of modernism,
dimensions: the relationship A cultural dimension centered to artistic
which I propose falls along four related but conceptually and actually separable
on practice, questions and on about archi of architectural
or social predisposition; it is not a biological organism with its own tidy story of nativity, spreading influence, deteriora
tion ernism a core into ossified mannerisms, and collapse. Instead, mod around plurality in architecture cluster is a set of arguments and have that cohere produced a
tecture's relationship to its own traditions. A political dimen sion focused on what kind of political and economic institutions architecture might and should help to advance. A social dimen
sion considering what phenomena?social, cultural, political,
of propositions
of patterned difference in the answers given, the ends sought, its stylis and the architecture proposed and built?including tic inclinations.
If modernism in architecture was and is a discourse,
economic?epitomized
accentuate what is good
modernity,
about
and how architecture might

phenomena and redress
these
the aspects ofmodernity

sequences. media and And a formal of communication?what cannot convey,
that produce harmful or unhappy con

dimension addressing an architectural sort of language best architecture's language can
then what have been the questions that held it in synchronie flux? As some contemporary historians and theorists have on the conviction that changing suggested, they centered social or the built environment constituted a meaningful political act in the modern world. A web of interrelated are the practi questions spun out from this belief. What in tioner's socio-ethical responsibilities performing these inevitable and necessary social acts? By what means could
162 JSAH / 64:2, JUNE 2005
and what
instantiates
both the conditions of modernity

positions on each of the other
as awhole and the individual's

dimensions.83
three
inquiries, themselves internally structured by four dimensions, generated and regenerated out of the many material and the discourse of modernism
cultural influences on architects, their clients, and so on,
A set of socio-ethical
and out of a confrontation with modernity itself. From this strains discursive identifiable the complex dynamic emerged of modernism mutating and responded in the 1920s, with new strains evolving and as the world changed and architects questioned
ments, Daniel
suggestions, Abramson,
hagen, K. Michael and Gwendolyn Wright. 1.1 have chosen
and insights of many scholars whose work I admire: Stanford Anderson, Barry Bergdoll, Daniel Jonah Gold Hays, H?l?ne Lipstadt, Nancy Stieber, Iain Boyd Whyte,
to those changes. Positions were taken and inter revised, subjectively and dialogically Each position put forth likely was, and likely was understood in the discursive field to be, a normative proposition about the role and place of the built environment tion in the discourse in the modern world. Each posi likely was, and likely was understood
to use the term "modernism" to the architects
at least in reference not
the word that progressive embraced. Rather, these architects described themselves as practicing archi tecture that was "modern," "new," "rational," and so on?in German-speak ing countries, one phrase often used was simply "neues Bauen." For amore extensive discussion to Adolf 1-4. of nomenclature, The Modern see Rosemarie Functional Haag Bletter's
while acknowledging that? is of the interwar period, 1918-39?it or avant-garde architects would have
intro
in the discursive field to be, amaxim offered to all other actual and imagined participants for the purposes of testing its claim to universality. Participants in the discourse likely believed that what aspects of each position were dispens
able or wrong-headed, what aspects sustained their moral
duction 1996),
Behne,
Building
(Santa Monica,
the probable protestations of at least some of the historical sub Despite under discussion here, I believe there are many good reasons to, in this jects instance, violate the probable positions of the historical actors themselves. The as Bletter notes, indicates the of this historicity surely something few contemporary historians or theorists would wish to deny. "Modernism" furthermore helpfully indicates the place of the movement in architecture within the more general history of twentieth-cen term "modernism," movement, tury culture, neous,
and practical force, would

observation and evaluation,
be sorted out through empirical

discussion, and debate.84
The
in other
discourse of modernism
words, on what Giedion
in architecture did center,

aptly called "an approach
to life." What determination

or
he and others meant to be modern
imperatives underlying
largesmall-scale
by this was not a vague but an approach to the moral the practice of strategically making
interventions in the modern
since "modernism" is generally used to describe contempora and at least partly analogous, movements in art, music, literature, dance, and so on. See, for example, Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Urbana, 1986); T. J. Clark, Farewell Charles to an Idea: Modernism (New Haven, 1999); Episodesfrom aHistory of Modernism The (New York, 1997); Michael Levenson, Modernism (New York, 1999); Bernard Smith, Mod Cambridge Companion to Harrison, (New Haven, ed., 1999); andMarianne Thorm?hlen, Modernism (New York, 2003). Finally, the term "modernism" ing that the progressive and avant-garde architects under discussion common enterprise even as and often battled they acknowledged ernisms History Rethink indicates shared a over the
built
world.
tioner really believed

stable and final
It is difficult to imagine that any modernist practi that, through these exchanges, some
consensus or mutual agreement on answers
could emerge. Yet many no doubt did think that by testing in the discursive field, their and other one's propositions positions might be improved. As many critics of modernism
in architecture architecture to be?about But may the attest, well then, have the discourse of modernism may of and well continue in been?and achievement to have been,
many and profound differences in their ideas and practices. to Theory and 2. Perhaps inadvertently, Reyner Banham, in his conclusion Design in the First Machine Age (London, 1960), set off early discussions of relationship to style by polemically trying to narrow the defin ition of modernist practice to one that is genuinely functionalist and that truly into its forms. Early attempts to grapple with integrated new technologies modernism and simultaneously loosen itfrom a certain set of formal practices modernism's
efficient also
instrumental to be, what
ends.85
it appears
Habermas
architecture
calls "communicative
was and is an ongoing
action." Modernism
conversation, a discus
in
sion about how, in living with

and alized economic built conditions environment might
the cultural, political,

a newly enhance
social,
of modernity,
came from responses to and reviews of Banham's book. These include Stan ford Anderson, that Isn't 'Trad, Dad,'" in "Architecture and Tradition Mar cusWhiffen, The and Criticism Architecture ed., History, Theory, of (Cambridge, in Architecture" "The Modern Movement Mass., 1965); Alan Colquhoun, (1962), repr. in Colquhoun, ture and Historical Change Essays inArchitectural Criticism: Modern Architec 1981), 21-25; andWilliam (Cambridge, Mass., Essence of Modern of the European Architecture 22 (Oct. 1963), 177-87. Influence," mJSAH to expand on these early critiques; in sub
conceptu
self-awareness,
to a more improve social life, might contribute might humanized present, and might help people to envision their
future in a better world.86
Jordy, "The Symbolic Twenties and Its Continuing Historians
and theorists continued
sequent decades, "The Fiction "II mito
among the most prominent have been Stanford Anderson, of Function, "Assemblage 2 (Feb. 1986), 19-31; Giorgio Ciucci, e le vicende movimento moderno dei CIAM," Casabella 44 1980), 28-35,
Notes
This article is dedicated to the memory ofWilliam for architectural ity of spirit, enthusiasm history, nature of modernism and have stayed initially drew me to the profession, with me ever since. I am also especially grateful to Francesco Passanti for and incisive questions This regarding style and modernism. text is drawn from the first chapter of my book in progress, "Rethinking in Architecture." I am lucky to have profited from the com Modernism his insistent Jordy, whose generos and inquiries into the
in 118; Neil Levine, "Wright and His/story," ofFrank Lloyd Wright (Princeton, 1996), 419-34; and Richard Pommer, "Mies van der Rohe and the Political Ideology of theMod ern Movement in Architecture," in Franz Schulze, ed., Mies van der Rohe: (Nov.-Dec. Levine, The Architecture Critical Essays (New York, 1989), 96-145. 3.Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1970), 23. 4. Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 10, states that paradigms SOMETHING "define legitimate 163
2nd ed. (Chicago,
TO TALK ABOUT
of a field for succeeding generations of practition problems and methods to think "modernist ers." This ongoing proclivity architecture" and see images of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye or Mies's Seagram Building was recently remarked on byWerner Oechslin: "we still crave the comfort of cohesive, "A hundred conclusive years later," he
For
revised and expanded editions of Sartoris (2nd ed., 1935, and 3rd ed., 1941). a more comprehensive of many of modernism's discussion principal The Historiography Modern Architec theorists, see Panayotis Tournikiotis, of ture (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). 10. See Claire Zimmerman, "Mies van der Rohe's Photographic ture," Journal ofArchitecture 9 (fall 2004), 331-54. Architec
writes, retrospective judg ments of the 'style' of modern architecture!" Oechslin, "A Cultural History : 'Modern Architecture ofModern Architecture-2 and the Pitfalls of Cod ification: The 29-38. The Aesthetic View,'" Architecture + Urbanism 237 (June 1990),
See also Oechslin, 'Modern': Historical
Event
"A Cultural History ofModern Architecture-1: versus Demand," Architecture + Urbanism
11.Many of the first-generation and critics were trained in or historians 's ideas. Giedion influenced byW?lfflin described himself in the introduc tion of Space, Time, and Architecture, 2, as a "disciple of Heinrich W?lfflin." For discussions Modern ofW?lfflin Building, 's influence, see Bletter, introduction Functional 4; Detlef Mertins, introduction to Behne, to Behrendt,
235 (Apr. 1990), 50-64. 5. Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 6. This historical article
17.
art insists on the legitimacy of both so-called conventional and newer theoretical approaches to the interpretation of the his
introduction to Giedion, Building inFrance, Victory, 32; Sokratis Georgiadis, Giedion: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh, and 2; Georgiadis, Sigfried and both 1993). Johnson Americans, were trained in the equally Hitchcock, established tradition of connoisseurship, stylistically focused art-historical by Bernard Berenson: see Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work (New York, 1994), 33-49; and Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the which Intellectual Origins of the Museum Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), of has a good chapter on Hitchcock, Johnson, and Barr's debt to Paul see Sachs and the art history department atHarvard, 18-85. On Hitchcock, also Paolo
Each approach (within which there are, of course, a tory of modernism. is based on legitimate if different conceptual foun plurality of orientations) dations regarding evidentiary standards in scholarly inquiry. term "discourse" has been used by critics and theorists of post 7. The to mean a set of linguistically modernism that generated representations to depict (and therefore constrain and artificially fix) an ever-shift "The Discourse Foucault, ing, unknowable empirical reality. See Michel on Language," in Foucault, The Archaeology ofKnowledge and theDiscourse attempt on and Norman (New York, 1972), 215-37; Lilie Chouliaraki Language Fairclough, Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analy sis (Edinburgh, 1999); and Stuart Hall et al., eds., Modernity: An Introduc am not tion to Modern Societies (London, 1995), 201-5.1 using the concept of discourse Foucault's institutions, sense of the term; however, I do accept in a poststructuralist contention that discourse is sustained largely through social
Hitchcock
Scrivano, Storia di uriidea di architettura moderna. Henry-Russell e Vinternational style (Milan, 2001); on Pevsner, seeMichela Rosso, La storia utile. Patrimonio emodernit? di John Summerson e Nikolaus Pevsner, Londra, 1928-1955 (Turin, intellectual Smith, contains Historiography, of these figures; see also Elizabeth A. T. at the End of the Cen Architecture and Its History 2001). Tournikiotis, of many
biographies
on Language," "Discourse such as the academy (Foucault, I am drawing primarily from J?rgen Habermas's account, in are as acts its of which the community recipients speech regarded by to assertions submitted critical and analysis intrinsically hypothetical to all others for purposes of discursively submit my maxim response?"I 227. Rather, in his words, "the unforced force of testing its claim to universality"?to, The Philosophical Discourse of the better argument." Habermas, J?rgen Twelve Lectures Mass., 1987), 305; see also Modernity: (Cambridge, Habermas, The Theory of Philosophical Discourse, 40, 295; and Habermas, Communicative Action, Vol. II: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston, 1987), 149-50. In this model of discourse, participants begin with the pre that consensus could ideally be reached; however, a discourse supposition need not ever arrive at a consensus see Habermas, McCarthy, 1991), to qualify. On communicative reason, Communicative Action, II, 1-111; Thomas Theory of The Critical Theory ofJ?rgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass., and Simone Chambers, "Discourses and Democratic toHabermas The Cambridge
"Re-examining ed., At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years tury," in Russell Ferguson, 1998), 22-99. ofArchitecture (Los Angeles, see E. H. Gombrich, 12. For a synopsis ofW?lfflin 'sdebt toHegel, "Norm of Art History in and Their Origins Stylistic Categories in Norm and in Studies the Art the Renaissance Form: Ideals," of 1966), 81-98; see also Gombrich, "Style," in Donald Preziosi,
and Form: The Renaissance /(Chicago, ed., The Art 13. On
ofArt History: A Critical Anthology (New York, 1998), 150-63. importance to the art historian, and the implied style, its conceptual to see Gombrich, of form "Norm and Form"; James content, relationship
Ackerman, "Style," inAckerman, Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renais sanceArt and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 3-22; Meyer Schapiro, and David 143-49; Summers, "Style," in Preziosi, Art of Art History, and the Problem of Art His "'Form,' Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, in Preziosi, Art ofArt History, torical Description," 127-42. 14.W?lfflin, Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca, See also the excellent discussion inMichael ofW?lfflin 1982), 207-88. The Critical Historians of Art (NewHaven, 1982), 101-20. For later attempts to theorize the notion of autonomy in art history, see Henri Focil lon, The Life ofForms inArt (1934; New York, 1989); and George Kubier, The Shape ofTime: Remarks on theHistory ofThings (New Haven, 1962). The is quite different from that employed by art-historical notion of autonomy Podro, architectural theorists and historians who, under the influ contemporary ence of Manfredo as a Tafuri and Theodor envision autonomy Adorno, stance to socio-critical available the see, for deliberately architect-agent: and the Posthumanist Subject: The example, K. Michael Hays, Modernism Architecture ofHannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge, Mass., and the Oarsmen, Once or, Mies' Abstraction 1992); Hays, "Odysseus Mies (New York, 1994), 235^4-8; The Presence of of Becoming: Mies van der Rohe and the Avant Garde," in Barry Bergdoll and Terence Riley, eds.,Mies in Berlin (New York, ed., Architec 2001), 106-33; as well as many of the essays in Joan Ockman, Again," "Architectures (New York, 1985); and R. E. Somol, ed., Autonomy ture/Criticism/Ideology and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde inAmerica (New York, 1997). in Detlef Mertins,
291-333;
Practices,"
in Stephen K. White, (New York, 1995), 233-59. Colomina, Privacy
Companion
8. Beatriz Media
(Cambridge, Mass., a Style was myth sustained
and Publicity: Modern Architecture and Mass 1994), passim. She asserts that "the International of mass culture and by the strategic deployment
advertising techniques" (211). See also Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture 1995), (Cambridge, Mass., "A Cultural History ofModern Architec 156-225; andWerner Oechslin, Architec ofModern (Superficial) Consensus 245 (Feb. 1991), 28-39. text Der Sieg des neuen Baustils (Stuttgart, 1927) 9.Walter Curt Behrendt's illustrates awider stylistic variety than do some of the others, but the argu in stylistic terms. In both text and ments he advances in it are grounded ture^ 'Picture': The ture?" Architecture + Urbanism choice istically 164 of images, Bruno Taut's Modern Architecture (London, 1929) is styl more heterogeneous than most of the other works cited, as are later JSAH / 64:2, JUNE 2005 : "The
Mertins,
especially through the challenge of anom Scientific Revolutions, 52-66 (see n. 3). 16. Francesco Passanti, "Architecture: Proportions, and Other Classicism and Arthur R?egg, eds., Le Corbusier before Issues," in Stanislaus von Moos 15. On the erosion of paradigms, alous cases, see Kuhn, 287-94; 2002), 68-97, Barry in and Riley, Mies Space," in Bergdoll "Modern Is Always the Sparing: On Berlin, 66-105; Kurt Lustenberger, Three Rural Buildings by Adolf Loos," Daidalos 32 Qune 1989), 52-59; Bergdoll, "The Nature of Mies' Levine, Frank 149-66 and Dolf (see n. 2); Ed Taverne Lloyd Wright, J. J. P. Ouds Shell Building: Design and Reception (Rotterdam, see his "Wright and His/story," Frank Lloyd Le Corbusier (New Haven and London,
doing so?see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of theJudgment 1985), 258-59. An excellent exposition of Bour ofTaste (Cambridge, Mass., dieu, and a proposal on how to apply his ideas to architecture (which differs "Can 'Art somewhat from the ideas presented here), isH?l?ne Lipstadt, Professions' Be Bourdieuian Fields of Cultural Production? The Case of the Architecture 27. The Leonardo Cultural Studies 17 (2003), 390-418. Competition," since 1970 have standard texts on modern architecture
been
Broekhuizen, 1995). 17. Levine
Benevolo, History ofModern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 1971); Tim Benton with Charlotte Benton and Dennis Sharp, "History of course materials Architecture and Design offered and pub 1890-1939," lished by the Open University 1975); Alan Colquhoun, Modern (London, Architecture (Oxford, 2002); William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, Weston, 3rd ed. (London, Modernism 1996); Frampton, Modern 1996); and Manfredo Architecture; Tafuri Richard and Francesco
Privacy and Publicity; Wigley, White Walls; Hays, Posthuman ist Subject; Hilde Heynen, Architecture andModernity: A Critique (Cambridge, The Presence of Mass., Mies; Mertins, 1999); Mertins, "Transparencies Yet to Come: (Ph.D. and the Prehistory of Architectural Modernity" Sigfried Giedion diss., Princeton University, 1996); and Somol, Autonomy and Ideol
Wright, 18. Colomina,
is one exception; 419-34.
(London,
dal Co, Modern Architecture 28. The canonical
(New York, 1986). texts outlining the stylistic properties of postmodernism are, among others, Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (New York, 1998), esp. 1-20; the many editions
advanced studies, formal criteria continue ogy. Even in these theoretically to set the terms of debate. For examples, see Anthony Vidler's "Space, Time, in Ferguson, One Hundred Years, 100-25; andWigley, and Movement," White Walls, and fashion in which the author aims to unveil the differand of ornament inmodern architecture's "white walls." implicitly embedded see Levine, Frank Lloyd see Fabio 19. On Wright, Wright. On Asplund, s Tallum: Gunnar and Lewerentz Woodland Galli, Asplund Cemetery in Sigurd Stockholm (Stockholm, 1996); Caroline Constant, The Woodland Cemetery: Toward a Spiritual Landscape (Stockholm, 1994); and Erik Gunnar Asplund, see Peter Blundell Erik Gunnar Asplund (London, 1988). On Scharoun, Jones, Hans Scharoun (London, hard and Eber 1995); and J?rg C. Kirschenmann Hans des Unvollendeten Scharoun: Die Syring, Forderung (Stuttgart, see Peter Blundell-Jones, Hugo ver 1993). On H?ring, H?ring: The Organic sus the Geometric (Stuttgart, 1999). On Aalto, seeWinfried Nerdinger, ed., (New York, 1999); Peter Reed, (New York, Alvar Aalto ed., and Materialism of Architecture: 1998); and and His
of Charles
Jencks, The Language ofPost-modern Architecture, lsted. (London, 1977); and Paolo Portoghesi, After Modern Architecture (New York, 1982). See also Diane Ghirardo, Architecture afterModernism (New York, 1996). see 29. For a discussion of the narrative compulsion in historical writing,
The Content ofForm: Narrative Discourse and Historical Rep Hayden White, resentation (Baltimore, 1987). 30. For a discussion of this phenomenon in literature, see Thorm?hlen, n. 1): "Postmodernism 4 is now passing into his Modernism, (see Rethinking is not to say that itwill disappear but that what significance it will not be that of a paradigm which people feel obliged to posi tion themselves in relation to. As academics grapple with the consequences tory, which possesses
of that shift, a skeptical look at the word itself, both with and without the should be useful. For one thing, one may wonder whether modernism will in some sense survive its successor." post-, account of the revolutionary nature of architectural 31. For a convincing of the century, see Jordy, "Symbolic Essence," practices early twentieth 177-82 (seen. 2). 32. Ackerman, n. 12). "Style," 4 (see n. 13); Gombrich, "Norm and Form," 82 (see
Alvar Aalto: Toward aHuman Modernism Alvar Aalto: Between Humanism Eeva-Liisa Milieus, 20. The Pelkonen, 1920-1960" "Geopolitics
phrase Other Tradition
(book manuscript). "other tradition" is Colin
St. John Wilson's:
see his The
inModern Architecture: The Uncompleted Project (London, and appears in numerous calls for 1995); it is also used by Blundell-Jones (SAH, ACSA, etc.). papers to conferences 21. Behne, Modern Functional Building, 119-47; Bruno Zevi, Towards an
33. George Lakoff andMark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York, 1999), 27-28. So why in have art historians long since moved beyond characterizing modernism art in stylistic or formal terms? It is beyond the scope of this essay to address this complex question adequately. Surely the most obvious reason, however, is that art historians work with more rarefied objects, which are housed in institutions tecture virtue years, patronized mainly by the cultural elite, such asmuseums. Archi and industrial design, by contrast, command a larger audience by in the urban landscape. Especially of their presence in the postwar the techno-rationalist strain of modernism in architecture became
"Towards a Crit Organic Architecture (London, 1950); Kenneth Frampton, Six Points for an Architecture ical Regionalism: inHal Fos of Resistance," ter, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Wash., 22. On Ciucci, 1983), 16-30. the ideological differences among various members of CLAM, see "II mito" The CIAM Discourse on (see n. 2); and Eric Mumford, 1928-1960 2000). (Cambridge, Mass., of Oud, see Ed Taverne, Martin de Vierter, and Cor
Urbanism, 23. On
the example Wagenaar, J. J. P. Oud: Poetic Functionalist?The
Complete Works, 1890-1963 (Rotterdam, 2001). On the example of Schindler, see Judith Scheine, R.M. Schindler (London, 2001); and Elizabeth A. T. Smith andMichael Darling, eds., The Architecture 24. Kenneth don, 1992). 2001). ofR. M. Schindler (Los Angeles, Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd ed. (Lon
in the vernacular landscape, which surely exacerbated the pop ubiquitous ular and scholarly tendency to conflate the techno-rationalist strain of mod as a whole. ernism with modernism 34. Lakoff 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. On 38. For anomalies, accounts see Kuhn, of intentions have Scientific Revolutions, 52-65 and their role in artistic informed (see n. 3). and architectural differ sub and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 27.
Other Tradition, 102-21. On Gray, see Caroline Con stant, Eileen Gray (London, 2000). 26. For a discussion of the difficulty of articulating commonalities under different of the lying apparently phenomena?and analytical necessity of 25. St. John Wilson,
production,
all of which
this section but which
stantially from the account offered here, see Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions inArchitecture (Cambridge, Mass., Baxandall, Pat 1965); Michael terns of Intention: On theHistorical Explanation ofPictures (New Haven, 1985); SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT 165
and David
Summers,
"Intention
in the History
of Art," New
Literary His
"Critical Architecture" (see n. Retreat 60. For 14); and Esther into the Future the 1937 date,
(see n. 40);" Mertins, da Costa Meyer, (New Haven, seeWeston, 1995). Modernism
"Architectures The Work
tory 17 (winter
1986), 305-21.
ofAntionio
of Becoming" SanfElia:
39. Some examples in addition to those discussed below are SarahWilliams Louis Kahns Situated Modernism (New Haven, 2001); Kathleen Goldhagen, James, Erich Mendelsohn York, 1997); and Nerdinger, "Architectures 40. Mertins, and the Architecture Aalto (see n. 19). of German Modernism (New
(see n. 27). For Functional
the 1959 (see n.
date, see Bletter,
introduction
to Behne, Modern
"Mies van der Rohe's 56-68;
of Becoming," 106-33 (see n. 14); Robin Evans, Paradoxical Symmetries," AA Files 19 (spring 1990), Between Culture and and K. Michael Hays, "Critical Architecture: 14-29. 131. of Becoming," 67. Symmetries,"
1); and, implicitly, Colquhoun, Modern Architecture 61. Colquhoun, Modern Architecture, 9. 62. Alberto
Building (see n. 2).
Form," Perspecta 21 (1984), 41. Mertins, "Architectures 42. Evans, "Paradoxical
Modern Science (Cam Architecture and the Crisis of Perez-Gomez, Architecture Modern Mass., 1983); (see n. 24). Frampton, bridge, 63. Vidler, "Space, Time, andMovement," 100-25 (see n. 18). 64. These characterizations, based pardy on the argument initially advanced by Peter in Theory of the Avant-Garde 1982), B?rger (Minneapolis, laid out inHays, Posthumanist Subject, 122 ff. (see n. 14). Rationalism" are
43. Ibid., 68. 44. Hays, "Critical Architecture," 18-19. 45. On Habermas 'snotion of social action of Max Weber),
see McCarthy, Zur Habermas, (Frankfurt, 1970), 73-145. Logik der Sozialwissenschaften 46. For a discussion of the ethical underpinnings of early modernist dis David Watkin, point of view than that presented here), inArchitecture, Revisited (Chicago, 2001). Morality 47. Le Corbusier, Towards aNew Architecture (London, 1927), 17. 48. Taut, Modern Architecture, 9 (see n. 9). 49. Oud Oud,33 to Giedion, (seen. 23). "The Bauhaus, Art, N.Y., 1919-1928: 1938," in Richard quoted inTaverne, de Vierter, andWagenaar, course (from a very different see
(which originates in the writings 140-47 (see n. 7); and J?rgen Habermas,
clearly 65. See my manuscripts "Alvar Aalto's Embodied atMoMA." structing Modernism 66. Bourdieu, 67. On Distinction, the institutionalized (Boston, 123-49. 292 (see n. 7). and Edward 12 (see n. 26). nature of discourse,
and "Con
ory and Practice
1973); Pierre Bourdieu,
ford, 1990); and Bourdieu, (Stanford, 69. 1987), 68. McCarthy, 1943-1968:
see J?rgen Habermas, The The Logic ofPractice (Stan In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology
Habermas,
J. J. P.
50. Gropius, 1934, quoted in Karen Koehler, in of Modern Exile and theMuseum Gropius Etlin, ta., Art, Culture, andMedia 51. See, for example, Reinhold and Corporate tecture, Media, The Werkbund:
Culture eds., Architecture Eigen, A Documentary Anthology (New York, 1993); and Sarah Williams and R?jean Legault, eds., Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation Goldhagen in Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). Although cast as accounts of postmodernism, in K. Michael Hays, the material presented ed., Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), and Kate Nes bit, ed., Theorizing aNew Agenda for Architecture (New York, 1996), isworth from the point of view presented here. reconsidering 70. Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (New York, 1937), 156. 71. Bourdieu, Distinction, 260; see also 164, 170. on whether to title 72. For example, see Alberto Sartoris's correspondence inAlberto the elements of "rational" or "functional" architecture,
See Joan Ockman
Martin, Space
under the Third Reich (Chicago, 2002), 293. The Organizational Complex: Archi
2003); Frederic (Cambridge, Mass., and Mass Culture Schwartz, before the First Design Theory World War (New Haven, 1996); Anthony Vidler, Claude-Nicholas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of theAncien R?gime (Cambridge, Taftiri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Mass., 1990); and esp. Manfredo Capitalist Development (Cambridge, Mass., architecture. ings on modern 1975), as well as his other writ
his book
in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright "Science as aVocation," 52. Max Weber, Mills, Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1946), 152-53. Essentially, I suggest that modernist architects conceived of their professional practice when sense of the term:Weber writes that science, in the Weberian a is not just the pursuit of concrete knowledge pursued as vocation, but an attempt to answer Leo Tolstoy's question, "What shall we do, and how shall we arrange our lives?" The true scientist, Weber writes, must be as a vocation
Sartoris. La concepci?n po?tica de la arquitectura, 1901-1998 (Valencia, 2000), 13 8^42. See also Bletter, introduction to Behne, Modern Functional Building, 30-31 (see n. 1); and Bourdieu, Distinction, 164, 170. about "type" 73. Other examples from the 1920s might be the discussions or "form." See Adrian Forty, Words and A Modern Vocabulary of Buildings: Architecture 307. From the postwar years, 161-68, (New York, 2000), on the value of "history," and on debates on monumentality, typology serve as ready examples. 74. Stanford Anderson, ture," in Harry Mallgrave, "Sachlichkeit or Realist Architec and Modernity, ed., Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of 1993), 322-60. and the Bauhaus," repr. in Lodder,
able to "give himself an account of the ultimate meaning of his own conduct" 53. Bourdieu, Distinction, 50-53 (see n. 26); Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art on a Coy Science (New Haven, 1989), 147. History: Meditations 54. For amore extensive discussion of this point, see Bourdieu, Distinction, 153. "Architecture" (see n. 16). 56. See Anderson, "Fiction of Function" (see n. 2); Banham, Theory and n. "Modern Movement" (see n. 2); Jordy, "Sym 2); Colquhoun, Design (see n. "The Mathematics of the Ideal bolic Essence" and Colin Rowe, (see 2); 55. See Passanti, Villa," in Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cam
(Santa Monica, Modernity 75. Christina Lodder, "VKhUTEMAS Constructive Strands 76. There possibles. in Russian Art are "as many Each
1914-1931
fields of preferences . . . of these worlds provides
(London, 2005). as there are fields of stylistic a small number of distinctive devia ... the for the
gestures which,
as a system of differences, differential functioning most allow the fundamental social differences to be expressed tions, total field of these fields offers well-nigh inexhaustible possibilities
1976), 1-28. bridge, Mass., 57. Ciucci, "IImito" (see n. 2). 58. See, for example, Levine, Frank Lloyd Wright (see n. 2). 59. Anderson, "Fiction of Function," 19-31; Wolf Tegethoff, Rohe: The Villas and Country Houses (Cambridge, Mass., Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies 1991); Evans, / 64:2, "Paradoxical 2005 Mies van der
pursuit of distinction." Bourdieu, Distinction, 226. "'Art Professions,'" 77. Lipstadt, 400 (see n. 26). art-historical practices, see Preziosi, Rethinking Art 78. On contemporary History (see n. 53); his Art ofArt History (see n. 12); and Robert S. Nelson and Richard Schiff, Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago, 1996). 79. See, for example, Clark, Farewell to an Idea; Charles ernism-, and Smith, Modernisms History (see n. 1 for all). 80. For a discussion of the relationship of non-modernism Harrison, Mod
1985); Fritz (Cam
van der Rohe on the Building Art Symmetries"
bridge, Mass., 166 JSAH
(see n. 40); Hays,
and anti-mod
JUNE
see my "Coda: Reconceptualizing in ernism to modernism, theModern," 308-9 (see n. 69). and Legault, Anxious Modernisms, Goldhagen 81. Although "modernity" is sometimes used as awooly, difficult-to-define on which much empirical infor an explicable phenomenon it in is fact term, mation, analysis, and insight is readily available. Among many other sources, see Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of (Stanford, 1990); Gid Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age dens, Modernity 1991); and Hall, Modernity (see n. 7). 82. See Goldhagen 11-23. and Legault, introduction toAnxious Modernisms, 83.1 first suggested a dimensional analysis (the term is drawn from the social in my "Coda," 301-23, where I proposed three sciences) of modernism (Stanford, structuring dimensions. In my current project, "Rethinking Modernism in I have further developed these ideas, for example by incor
Mass., 85. On
1985), 326. the distinction between instrumental and theoretical reason, and The Theory of Com
the relationship between them, see J?rgen Habermas, municative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization 339-402 1984), 143-272 (onWeber), on communicative reason, Habermas, 86. J?rgen Habermas, icalDiscourse, 3 36-67. "The Normative (on Adorno Communicative Content
of Society (Boston, and and Horkheimer); Action II, 1-111. Philosoph
ofModernity,"
Illustration Credits
Figure Figure Figure Figure 2. Biblioth?que de laVille, La Chaux-de-Fonds 3. Stadtverwaltung, Potsdam 4. Gerlach 5. Courtesy Arizona Photo-studio of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, Taliesin West,
Architecture," a fourth dimension, which theorizes the formal language of mod porating ernism. For discussions of the coda, see Hilde Heynen, "Coda: Engaging inHeynen and Hubert-Jan Henket, eds., Back from Utopia: Modernism," Modern Movement The Challenge of the (Rotterdam, 2002), 378-98; and Iain Boyd White, York, introduction to his Modernism 2003), 26-27. For a critique review of Anxious Modernisms in JSAH 60 (Dec. 2001), 528-30; and my and Ghirardo's response reply, JSAH 61 (June 2002), 263. see Thomas 84. For a description of the specific dynamics of a discourse, introduction to Habermas, and the Spirit of the City (New of this approach, see Diane Ghirardo,
Scottsdale, Figure Figures Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure
6. Photograph by Jan Versnel Architectuurinstituut 7, 11.Nederlands 8. Photograph by Peter Blundell-Jones 9. Photograph byWerner Moser 10. Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin 12. Photograph by John Ebstel The History 13.ManfredoTafuri, of Italian Architecture, 4 (1915)
Philosophical Discourse, vii-xvii; and in the Theory of Communicative "Reflections on Rationalization McCarthy, in Richard Habermas andModernity Action," J. Bernstein, ed., (Cambridge, McCarthy,
1944?1985
1989) (Cambridge, Mass., Figures 14, 15. Jahrbuch des deutschen Werkbundes
SOMETHING
TO TALK ABOUT
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Something to Talk about: Modernism, Discourse, Style Author(s): Sarah Williams Goldhagen Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural

should This within approach.

temporary we door not fence

is the word a notion The of

The moment we open the is

to a formalistic a "style" within ...

contemporary to life that

movement slumbers uncon

likely conjure up a sturdy parade of familiar formal tropes.

that the discipline might

The Birth of Modernism

1941).9 In both these early narrative

and Oud stressed Mies, sometimes hiding an innate

ers they described

less by the interiors

and others responsible

The Paradigm of Style and Anomalies

that its sub

tradition defined style as a collec

tinue to appeal to style asmodernism's

or less stable and definable in W?lfflin's

approach was the

relationship forms, in and of themselves,

style and content: the way to meaning.

vidual work of art, therefore would

2 Charles-Edouard Villa Schwob, 1916-17

Ludwig Mies addition 1924

van der Rohe,

........... .._ ...

.. X ........ ... ...i;.

by architects who designed well-known

participated in orientation. Typically, modernist

indisputably historians discuss these

alies that rightly challenge us to rethink received

or of all of them together?by

Frank Lloyd Wright, 1923. Photographed

Figure Summer Stuart, Pieters, 1940-41. in 1940

6 Gerrit Rietveld, House Breukelen Verrijn St.

the Netherlands, Photographed

into the ranks of so-called other architects

Sachlichkeit. within the

externalization of modernism Zevi opposed rationalist unequal

prac early archi Most has been

period, to this the

as Bruno so-called and

mainstream. approach again

into the nature

conventional to our comprehension

St. John Wilson

to, or the modern is

1910s and 1920s or the early post-World War

eral ways. movement by a coherent

impression a group political some of

the modern united Fur who

constituted set of aesthetic

architects doctrines.22 the architects

admire flourished not as amarginalized

to the stylistic paradigm by

an especially vexing challenge

many of these architects repeatedly demonstrates

istic tropes while

is also artificially unified,

cific socio-critical political ideology is conjoined