Chapter One—
Architecture As Art and Profession

Building is the activity by which human beings make their shelter and their mark upon the earth. It is as closely associated with the celebration of power and the sacred as with humble everyday uses. Although beautiful and significant buildings have been produced in every society since ancient times, architects first laid a lasting claim to the responsibility for designing them during the Italian Renaissance.

The patronage of the new city-states and a wealthy merchant class encouraged the expression of a new sense of monumentality and a new style. Beginning in the late fourteenth century, patrons who wanted to sponsor special buildings looked for talent among craftsmen who were trained in design and experienced in managing large workshops. Most architects of the early Renaissance, therefore, came from the ranks of stonecutters (on their way to becoming sculptors), goldsmiths, cabinetmakers, and painters. The fifteenth century brought new requirements: State architects were frequently involved in civil engineering projects, notably hydraulic works; more important, improvements in artillery compelled cities to build new and more complex fortifications.^[1] Neither civic nor military buildings required new construction methods, but they did require design skills only rarely found among master masons.

Because they could rely on the established competence of workers in the building crafts, the designers of buildings were able to appropriate for themselves the intellectual task of conceiving the entire project. The first

architects were not only freed from the stigma of manual work, they gained prestige from the complexity, the civic importance, and the ancient aesthetic lineage claimed for the new style of building. Assisted by humanist theoreticians like Leon Battista Alberti, able to respond to central concerns of the state, and supported by the keen interest of amateur patrons, architects became the first artists to move closer to the ruling class, into an intermediate social status inaccessible to mere craftsmen.

As the new style consolidated into conventions of design, the architects gave a disciplinary foundation to their field, based on two-dimensional abstract representations of buildings, on built exemplars, and on the theoretical work of men like Alberti and Antonio Filarete. With design as their specific competence and a theoretical foundation for their art, architects increased the distance between themselves and traditional builders, for design, theoretical discourse, and practical treatises could be studied. Training in the skills and the discourse of architectural design increasingly became the hallmark of the architects for the elite and, later on, the central element of professionalization.

In capitalist societies, architecture emerged as a profession that possesses artistic, technical, and social dimensions. The emphasis placed on each varied in different times and places. However, the existence of engineering as a separate profession precluded almost everywhere a strictly technical concentration.^[2] In the face of engineering's more-established position, it was strategically easier for architects to base their professional claims on the aesthetics of construction than on technological mastery or scientific methods. Thus, the image and identity of modern architecture remained centered on the subordination of technology to design.

Design gives the purpose of building a form. It defines the telos , the building's reason for being, which transcends technique and utility. For the eminent historian and critic Reyner Banham, the specific characteristic of Western architecture is "the persistence of drawing—disegno —as a kind of meta-pattern that subsumes all other patterns. . . . Being unable to think without drawing," he says, with some exaggeration, "became the true mark of one fully socialised into the profession of architecture."^[3]

Beyond what Banham argues, design did make architecture an academic subject, and the new style of the Renaissance was important in the social ascent of architects. A sociologist, David Brain, underscores the persistent significance of style in the nineteenth-century professionalization of architecture. Now as then, style is a principal way in which buildings claim the status of architecture. The rhetorical aspects of style introduce buildings

into a system of interpretation and justification that is at the core of professional discourse.^[4]

From a sociological point of view, discourse includes all that a particular category of agents say (or write) in a specific capacity and in a definable thematic area. Discourse commonly invites dialogue. However, in architecture (as in all professions), discourse is not open to everyone but based on social appropriation and a principle of exclusion. Laypersons are not entitled to participate in the production of the profession as a discipline.^[5]

The discourse of architecture is based on a contested premise that it must always seek to prove. Critics, historians, and practitioners of architecture operate on the assumption that only what legitimate architects do deserves to be treated as art and included in architectural discourse. I call this basic exclusionary principle the ideological syllogism of architecture: "Only architects produce architecture. Architecture is an art. Architects are necessary to produce art."

Although the syllogism is necessary to found the discipline's discourse, it is compromised by a contradiction characteristic of this profession. The discourse of architecture is constructed autonomously, by experts who are accountable only to other experts. However, in order to continue "formulating fresh propositions," disciplines need to show how their rules become embodied in a canon, and the canon of architecture consists of beautiful or innovative built exemplars. These buildings are not and cannot be exemplars of the architect's autonomous application of knowledge and talent alone. They are also striking manifestations of the architect's dependence on clients and the other specialists of building, be they rival professionals or humbler executants. I call this dependence heteronomy , because it contrasts radically with the autonomy that is always considered a defining attribute of professional work.

In sum, because the discourse of architecture is ultimately based on its practice, and because this practice points to a fundamental heteronomy, the basic syllogism is as much an ideological position as a functioning principle of exclusion. The dialectics of discourse and practice (or of autonomy and heteronomy) are salient in architecture. They are particularly significant in the analysis of its discursive shifts.

Twice in our century, Western architecture has gone through significant changes in both discourse and realizations. In the orthodox historiographic accounts, submerged currents of stylistic change seem to have produced both times the architectural conceptions of elite designers. Indeed, despite architecture's characteristic dependence on patrons or clients for its work,

the histories of architecture locate the origins of change within the discursive field itself, in the theories and ideas of architects.

The first and most radical shift in the discourse of architecture culminated in the Modern Movement of the 1920s in Europe. An adapted European modernism became the architectural style of international capitalism after World War II. The second shift originated in reaction to the debased architecture that, however unwanted, derived from modernism. Arising against the latter's universalistic claims, the postmodern revision refuses formal and ideological unity (and indeed does not appear to have any).

The subject of my study is postmodernism as it occurred in the United States roughly from 1966 to 1985. On the one hand, postmodernism is undeniably connected to architectural discourse: What became of European modernism in the United States (and spread from here to the whole world) was both the target of postmodern attacks and the antithesis that gave postmodernism much of its substance. Thus, I shall deal at some length with the discourse of architectural postmodernism itself.

On the other hand, I hold the general hypothesis that changes in ideas and styles correspond to (and attempt to make sense of) structural changes lived through and perceived by strategically located groups of people. In ways that should not be prejudged but always explored empirically, cultural change may also correspond to broad changes in social structure. Given this hypothesis, I take changes in aesthetic preference and taste among architects not as signs of whim or trendiness, nor as indications of idealist reorientation, but as symptoms of changes in architects' conceptions of their professional role and in the conditions of their practice. In postmodern discourse, the model of European modernism is related as much to practical conceptions of the architect's role and to changes in the way architects must make a living as to their formal imagination.^[6]

Elites, Art, and Profession

In any profession, the elites play a crucial part in the elaboration of discourse; their important position in the discursive field is precisely what makes them professional elites. This implies theoretically that elite standing depends on the perceived discursive capacity of particular producers in specialized areas of the production of culture. At the same time, elite standing in the field is what entitles its beneficiaries to make and continue making authoritative contributions.

In architecture, historians assign to a handful of noted designers a privileged position in the making of discourse. The architectural elite is

anointed in relative autonomy, yet my postulate about the fundamental heteronomy of architectural practice requires me to examine the connections between the elite and other sectors of the profession. The importance of built exemplars in architectural discourse suggests a situation more complicated than the (increasingly blurred) dichotomy of "high" and "popular" forms in other art media.^[7]

The expansion of a market for architectural services did not happen on any substantial scale until our century. In this market (which licensing is intended to protect) the vast majority of clients need relatively standardized competence from their architects. It is true that the site, if nothing else, makes each architectural commission to some extent unique; but other requirements (including the budget) are relatively standardized for most types of buildings. Besides respecting the budget, the primary demand of the program (the mandate that the architect receives from the client) is that the building be adequate for the social functions it must serve.

Adequacy implies a notion of at least minimal comfort and efficiency. Distinctiveness and pleasantness (let alone beauty) are secondary considerations for the typical client. The resulting standardization of architectural requirements creates a distinction between ordinary and extraordinary projects. The standard project can be ordinary, but when a project has cultural significance, the projected buildings must look and feel extraordinary. Under such circumstances, clients tend to seek designers noted for their artistic talent.

The elite of noted designers comprises varied abilities and different kinds of practices. Yet their number is very small and they often travel in the same circles—with each other, with "cultivated clients," and with the cognoscenti. Even for this select group, the first requirements of the architectural task are couched in terms of professional service: to satisfy the client by a design that is technically sound, serves the program well, and respects the budget.

Large architectural firms (an American invention dating from the late nineteenth century) are known, sought after, and handsomely paid for providing this kind of service efficiently in very large and very costly projects.^[8] These complex firms assemble and organize many of the other professions involved in production of the built environment (engineers, landscape architects, planners, interior decorators, construction managers, and the like), with architects occupying the top position in the hierarchy. From the practical professional point of view, these firms offer clients unmatched guarantees of competence, efficiency, reliability, and technical support. To employed architects, they offer the prospect of regular career advance-

ment. Yet public fame, the aura of architecture as art, and the creator's aspirations to immortality are seldom, if ever, attached to the rationalized "corporate" form of professional practice.^[9]

Indeed, the persistent claim of architects to a special role in the process of construction (against and, in fact, above the rival claims and encroachments of other specialties) depends on implicit ideological appeals to the telos , the cultural significance, and the noble tradition of architecture. Not merely adequate building but culturally significant building is the lasting confirmation of architecture's professional claims. It follows that the charismatic authors of these buildings and their extraordinary practice serve as ideological warrant for the normal or routine practice of the profession as a whole. The obvious distance between these two segments of architecture is not so great as to be atypical among professions.

In all professions, in fact, there is a "discursive center," an ideal place where knowledge and discourse are produced. The social and intellectual distance between the discursive centers of the knowledge-producing professions and their underlying ranks is so considerable, in fact, that we may legitimately wonder whether any of these apparently well-delimited fields has any unity beyond its name.

And what is in a name? The reciprocal indifference of the various strata of specialists suggests that the unity of specialized fields of knowledge is illusory. In addition, the different strata frequently regard one another with contempt, animosity, and resentment, suggesting an antagonistic concern with the disciplinary frame that binds them nominally together.

In architecture, distance and indifference (and at times resentment) are perceptible in the different orientations of architectural schools.^[10] These qualities are visible in the different conceptions, promoted by professional organizations of different level and scope, of what makes good architecture, and they are present as well in the distinct and unreconciled concerns contained within the major professional associations. Irritation toward the professional publications and awards that emphasize "design" is often and openly expressed by both ordinary practitioners and heads of large firms. Distance (though not ill feelings) reflects the realities of a clearly segmented market, in which architectural firms specialize in the provision of services that are, in fact, quite substantially different.

In this profession, the charismatic bias of the ideology of art, exalting and mystifying the centrality of the "masters of design," may intensify resentment. At the center, there is Art, Architecture, Immortality; away from the center, there is service, building, business, and money if one is lucky.

Clients' demands tend to divide the field of architecture into specialized segments. In most segments and for most clients, aesthetic concerns have no place. The more pragmatic architects resent the "unbusinesslike" reputation of their noted confreres. And yet, if they heed, even subliminally, the "art" in the profession's discourse, this constitutes an assertion (however unconscious) of professional autonomy against the clients, or the market. Historians, critics, and the cultivated public uncritically take the work of the elite designers as representing the whole field. However maddening, this usurpation of the telos of construction shows that there is a telos . The work of artist-architects, which easily seems superfluous or frivolous from the standpoint of commercial and corporate practice, argues tacitly against the superfluity of any architect's service. Thus, the pragmatic majority derives professional legitimacy from the presence in the same field of the very small elite of artist-architects.

That "art" contributes ideological legitimacy to "service" still does not mean that this profession has any unity beyond its name. Even minimal unity implies a relationship (to some extent reciprocal) between the elite of artist-architects and the other sectors of the profession.

Institutional Bridges in Ideology and Practice

The professional service that architects provide coordinates the different dimensions of construction. This coordination subordinates "firmness, commodity and delight" to the economic imperative of the budget and to the formal imperatives of the design. One critic suggests that elite designers cultivate the distinction between "ordinary" and "extraordinary" design. Indeed, in the relational system of architectural objects, artistic and innovative architecture stands out against the necessary background of ordinary design.^[11]

Ideological benefits may go both ways, but the architectural field is made up of more than just ideology. The "pure" designers need the technical competence and economic efficiency of service-oriented professionals, not least to assuage the client's fear of the artist's unpredictable, headstrong, and profligate reputation. The "designer" firms benefit directly from the competent firms whose work seldom gets published and never gets awards. In the United States, where a period of apprenticeship is obligatory for professional registration, design firms benefit from hiring technically proficient personnel trained by the others.^[12]

Contact and communication among professional segments occur through the labor market and also directly—in schools, professional orga-

nizations, publications, and awards programs. I have mentioned them in relation to the divisions and conflicts they incorporate, yet, by the same token, professional institutions, which pretend to some autonomy from uncontrollable market forces, can also bridge differences.

In the United States, architectural societies, like all professional organizations, perform corporative functions for the profession as a whole at the national, regional, and local level. Professional organizations confer recognition by bestowing office, awards, and other honors. Especially at the local level, these official accolades do two things; First, they identify deserving practitioners to their peers; second, they give them authority vis-à-vis potential clients.

Schools, of course, are central institutions for all fields that claim to produce and transmit specialized theoretical and applied knowledge. Besides teaching standard technical competence, architecture schools teach conceptions of design, relying less on abstract theory than on the analysis of great exemplars, on the studio, and on the critical evaluation of students' work. The studio simulates practical problems for which apprentice architects must find realistic solutions; the use of critics and juries may be seen as a proxy for the fact that real architectural work is always submitted to the ultimate judgment of outsiders.

These distinctive pedagogies introduce a fantasized and idealized notion of architectural practice, perhaps an inevitable result of the abstract approach of schools. But they also bring students into direct contact with real practitioners. Designers of local or national fame are the most desirable visitors, for their presence gives luster to the students, their teachers, and the school, even in the institutions that care little about artistic design. In turn, designers' willing participation in the juries offers them a chance to influence the formation of future architects. Being known and respected in local or national schools has other, more practical implications: Students fight for the honor to help out in the noted architects' rush jobs and peak work periods (the famous "charrettes" of architectural jargon), and, after graduation, they apply to their offices in numbers large enough to keep elite firms well supplied with "the best" at low wages.

Schools, then, are both an audience of choice and a recruiting pool, especially for practitioners with design reputations. Moreover, ambitious artist-architects have always sought (and increasingly found, since the 1950s) the support of academic positions. These provide prestige, a complement to the income from an always uncertain profession, and contacts useful in building their practices. In architecture, as in all other disciplines,

future professional ties and networks are formed to a large degree in schools.

The autonomous discourse of a profession—the knowledge and justifications it produces by and for itself—is articulated, transmitted, and, above all, received in schools. This is so in architecture, even though the pivotal place of built exemplars in architectural discourse gives practice inescapable primacy.^[13] Schools broadcast architecture's canon, its standards of evaluation, its judgments of taste, and the challenges that arise to future practitioners and to others who shall never practice. Students are the main readers of professional journals and the main audience for the profession's system of awards and rewards. Therefore, different architectural tendencies and orientations find their followers primarily in schools.

Publications are the third important bridge across professional segments. Schools provide audiences and followings for new ideas, which can rapidly become trends, but architectural journals promote imitation itself. Important, innovative, or just fashionable designs are repeatedly published in practically all the professional journals of the world. Because of the unmoveable nature of architectural objects, illustrated journals and "picture books" (even more than serious and long treatises) perform an essential discursive function: They constitute what I would call, after André Malraux, the imaginary museum of world architecture. They provide tangible raw material for the canon, the system of interpretation and justification that consecrates buildings as architecture.

Architects in commercial or service-oriented practices do not ignore "beautiful pictures." Whatever they think of architecture as art, they still must provide their clients with designs—that is to say, buildings with forms and looks. Even in the less design-oriented segments of the profession, illustrated publications become a "research tool," a catalog of solutions and ideas.^[14]

The rapid inclusion and widespread circulation of design innovations in the repertory of the architectural profession generalize elements of its discourse, linking the form-givers, the architects "with ideas," with the rest. The effect is bilateral, however: Publication spurs on the rapid formation of trends, to which innovators, in turn, must react if they want to preserve their leadership and their distinctiveness in design.

In sum, the institutional bridges that connect different segments of this profession are also centers for the production and reproduction of discourse. Schools, professional societies, foundations, institutes, editorial boards, specialized publishers, and (because architecture is an art) muse-

ums and art galleries all concur in reinforcing the special place of the elite form-givers, creating, through this elite, a measure of ideological and practical unity in this divided profession.^[15]

Autonomy and Heteronomy in the Discourse of Architecture

Every profession that claims to be based on knowledge produces and reproduces culture: not in its specialized body of knowledge and its canon only but also in its codified practices, its explicit and implicit norms, its ways of making sense of rules and legitimizing practices. All these components constitute a discursive field.^[16] Specific categories of specialists profess in specific discursive fields, in which and by means of which they act with authority. By virtue of the expertise they require, all professions and all disciplines claim the right to create their discourse autonomously. They respect, that is, the outside boundaries set by nonexpert authorities; yet, in principle, they brook no interference from the latter.

In architecture, despite its stark differentiation and stratification, disciplinary legitimacy is founded on the aesthetics of design, a situation that gives elite designers a privileged position in the field. Elite standing is further aggrandized by the charismatic ideology of art. Yet, outside the delimited discursive field of professional architecture, even the elites' authority is undermined by their inescapable dependence on clients and on other technical experts. The ideological autonomy that our society accords to professionals and, even more so, to artists cannot hide the fundamental heteronomy of architectural work.

I have repeatedly mentioned how important it is that exemplars be built. Even the specialists' most autonomous creation—the canon produced for their own use and the systems of justification to which it gives rise—implicitly acknowledges the heteronomous conditions of architecture's existence. The discourse of architecture is autonomous as long as it is on paper: drawings, words, ideas, but not buildings. At the heart of the profession's identity there is a radical and deeply felt distinction between what is imagined and what is realized, between "paper architecture" and architecture that is built. Hear, for instance, Michael Graves, a world-renowned American architect of the postmodern period, known for his buildings as well as for his exquisite drawings, which sell dearly to art collectors:

I was known as the "Cubist Kitchen King," the painter and the architect, all kinds of things that would say "Good here, but he hasn't built." . . . My life has been changed so dramatically by virtue of the fact that I had no work for so

long! I can say to you that I did a lot of work, and I did work night and day every day. . . . Not very much was built of significance, of any size, and that fear that you will never work again, or that you will never get proper work, adequate work, is with you. And as we have said in the office for the last few years, it is very, very difficult how to learn to say "no" to somebody who calls.^[17]

Being a "real" architect depends on making architecture, and this depends on a crucial factor that no architect controls, unless he (more rarely she) builds for himself. Clients—their wills, their tastes, their money—control commissions. And commissions are not only the livelihood for which architects must compete; they are what allow architectural exemplars to exist. Architecture must be built precisely because the claim to be an art privileges sensory experience, which goes beyond mere form and plan. Once architectural ideas have been built, the task of historians and critics is to organize them discursively, transforming a collection of separate finished buildings into a system of architectural exemplars.

The client always influences the completed exemplar through a program, which represents not only economic constraints but the building's social reason for being. The program is the principal sociological reason that architectural objects are not only stylized but typed. Architectural judgment cannot avoid considerations of type or implicit judgments of propriety, which is a composite of size, plan, looks, and materials, all of which should be historically and locally adequate to the building's social function. Thus, the client's program places conditions upon the kind of symbolic capital architects accumulate in the discursive field just as directly as the client's initial selection of a designer.^[18]

Much more than the idiosyncrasies of the clients, it is the nature of their programs and the types of buildings that constitute different areas of normal architectural practice. Because satisfied clients repeat their choices, their architects tend to concentrate on types of design and to be specialized by clients' needs. The specialization induced by clients creates special market niches, which have the well-known effect of containing competition. In architecture, the lines of containment correspond broadly with building types.

But then, does not the segmentation of practice make short shrift of the ideological and material links that I have described between artist-architects and other professionals? If specialization lines tend to harden into structural barriers, if most architects cannot realistically expect to stray very far from their usual kinds of clients and types of design, if exemplars introduce the dictates of the market within the discursive field, in what sense are the "master designers" a professional elite?

The answer must be that insofar as architects consider themselves architects, they are implicitly participants in a common discursive field. In other words, when architects talk or think about architecture, they have primarily other architects in mind or across the table (even if only to curse what the "worthless rascals" are doing to the art, the profession, or the business). The common discursive field holds autonomy and heteronomy together in a permanent and constitutive contradiction. Some critics call this basic contradiction the "double coding" of architecture (speaking to the client, or to the public, and to other architects); some architects call it a duty to deceive: They must satisfy the client, but they must "make architecture," even despite the client's wishes.

Because of this duplicity, because architects take the discursive field of architecture as their frame of reference, clients' wills cannot account for the development of new concepts of architecture nor even entirely for their consolidation into styles. Innovation depends on new ideas, and the significance of the latter depends on the problems they address and claim to resolve in the discursive field.

Since dependence on the client is inescapable, I will briefly outline how it works in relation to architectural change. First, clients have the power to choose architectural innovators and thus help their reputations in the delimited field of architecture. They also have the power to lift the barriers of specialized practice and look for architects across market segments. Today, the increasing popularity of architectural competitions as methods of selection indicates a willingness to do precisely this.

Second, more significant than the client's choice of designer is the identity of the client or of the building's prospective users. If there arise new kinds of clients who have the means of commissioning architecture, they are likely to generate new programs that express new or different outlooks. This is even truer where new needs or new users must be served. In turn, new programs are more likely than the usual ones to present architects with new problems in both the social and the aesthetic aspects of design. New problems open up opportunities for innovative solutions. It follows that the combination of new clients with new social needs should present the best conditions for architectural change. yet these are still external or heteronomous factors: They may help explain the context of architectural innovation, but they do not directly explain its substance or evolution, which depend on the evolution of the discursive field itself.

The autonomous pursuit of architecture and the heteronomous conditions of its making insert a permanent contradiction into the heart of the profession's practice and even of its discourse. We can expect from the professional ideology tacit attempts to reduce or deny this tension. The cultural signifi-

cance of building is an ideological theme that serves as a bridge between the contradictory terms: It provides many of the important reasons that make clients want to buy architecture, rather than merely shelter, and that lead them to go for this to experts in the design of beautiful and significant artifacts. Not surprisingly, the discourse of the experts is organized around the axiom that architectural beauty (as they define it) has extraordinary cultural importance.

From the fifteenth century to the present day, the learned discourse of architecture has intended to educate potential clients in this axiom. Alberti encouraged patrons of the new style of the Renaissance in these terms: "Since all agree that we should endeavor to leave a reputation behind us, not only for our wisdom but for our power too, for this reason we erect great structures, that our posterity may suppose us to have been great persons."^[19] Important buildings, whether for private or collective use, are usually erected because powerful individuals want them. Alberti suggests that architecture may be delightful to enjoy in private but is much more important to the patron's glory for all to see in public, now and in the distant future. The axiom of cultural significance is founded on the public existence and visibility of architecture.

The new architecture of fifteenth-century Florence was meant to celebrate that city's emergence as a major Italian state and to convey the sense that the new state transcended fragmented feudal power.^[20] Closer to our age, Marshall Berman's childhood reminiscence of the glorious apartment buildings of the Bronx's Grand Concourse also confirms the public essence of architecture: "We couldn't afford to live in them," he says, "but they could be admired for free, like the rows of glamorous ocean liners in port downtown."^[21]

For the philosopher Suzanne Langer, the essence of architecture is also public and collective. In Langer's aesthetics, each art symbolizes human feeling through forms that spin a distinctive primary illusion. The plastic arts use "visual substitutes for the non-visible ingredients of space experience . . . in order to present at once, with complete authority, the primary illusion of a perfectly visible and perfectly intelligible total space." Architecture converts an actual place into a virtual place, one that exists only as artistic illusion. Langer calls this specific architectural illusion an "ethnic domain," because public architecture, being inseparable from ritual, abstracts "the total pattern of life" from all the physical, mental, and behavioral fragments that signify a culture to those who live in it.^[22]

Alberti's encouragement hinted at something else, something transhistorical in the desire that powerful but mortal men (it is, indeed, mostly men who are powerful) have for lasting buildings. Modern clients are far

from even knowing that they want the public symbols of glory that the Malatesta or the Medici wanted. Yet architects, either in their dutiful deception of the client or in the elaboration of autonomous discourse for their own use, cannot fail to invoke and articulate the public properties of architecture.

Indeed, it is the public face of buildings that detaches them from the personal and private requirements of their owners' programs. Significant buildings can express the ethnic domain or acquire cultural significance only in public. Besides, all buildings participate in the making of urban fabric. In cities, buildings present to anonymous viewers, now and for many years to come, a system of relationships in which the sponsors' ambitions and the designers' aspirations implicitly counterpose cultural significance to crass utilitarianism, with results that vary in their critical openness or in their sensitivity to the manifest culture.

Thus, the peculiarity of architecture among the arts and the professions is that it contributes to culture not through discourse and codified practices alone but also, and crucially, through artifacts that are useful and can be beautiful. The artist's imagination labors here not with representation but, as Langer says, "by exemplifying the laws of gravity, statics and dynamics."^[23] Architecture is a public and useful art, an art that cannot disguise its social and collective origins, for it must convince a client, mobilize the complex enterprise of building, inspire the public (and not offend it), and work with the culture, visual skills, and symbolic vocabulary not of the client only but of its time.^[24] The contradiction of autonomy and heteronomy inherent in making architecture and architecture's eminently public character give it emblematic sociological significance.

The Relevance of Discursive Battles

Architectural schools and distinctive pedagogies, professional organizations and journals, market-induced specialization and associations, the public interest piqued by the general press, all serve as channels for the circulation and the reproduction of architectural ideas, inducing imitation and promoting stylistic trends. But this is not all. The occupational identity formed and nourished by these means can include a deeper attention to the idea of architecture as art.

Normal architectural practice is oriented to service and commercial interests, inevitably heteronomous, and often subordinate and alienating. To compensate for these disadvantages, it may prompt broad attention among architects to the discourse that exalts the artistic dimension of their

trade. It does not have to be conscious attention: it may well be only distracted, or nostalgic, or resentful. Appropriately, a Philadelphia architect with a "normal" practice quips that the annual design awards of the journal Progressive Architecture are "True Confessions for architects." Awards for "pure" design (and "pure" design itself) are pipe dreams, this architect thinks; nonetheless, these dreams engage deep and unspoken yearnings and thus offer architects a fantasy, one that supports their ideological claim to be artists, not mere crafts-people. Technological advances, after all, are the province of engineers and manufacturers; and being a commercial hack or a good employee is nothing to fantasize about. Art and celebrity are the stuff of which individual dreams are made in this profession.

Two kinds of struggle in the discursive field of architecture are able to elicit at least the unconscious attention of ordinary professionals. Neither is unique to architecture, but they both appear repeatedly in the modern politics of culture.

The first kind of struggle is framed in specialized terms, even though it may implicate several art media in an aesthetic movement and exceed the boundaries of a delimited "art world." Specialized cultural debates matter most of all to the producers and other specialists of the field rather than to clients. The reason, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued for scientific fields, is not purely intellectual and disinterested. Rather, there are special interests at stake: The outcomes of disputes among experts affect each field's internal hierarchy, rankings, networks of influence, and personal standing—all the strategic positions by means of which symbolic capital is formed and resources of wealth and power claimed.^[25]

When "purely" aesthetic challenges reverberate through the medium of discourse in the professional field of architecture, they can evoke support or opposition from heterogeneous sources. Debates that originate among different factions of the design elite can thus become (as in other specialized fields) the occasion for conflicts and alliances of another sort. What is distinctive in architecture is the role that clients' choices can play in the resolution of the debate. Controversy is fierce, but where a project reaches the stage of realization, controversy must normally be tempered at least enough to assuage the clients' fears (if not quite to accommodate their wishes).

The second kind of cultural struggle draws the first into a broader (and hazier) frame, but it is a different phenomenon analytically. The impulse for the first kind of struggle comes from within the field, picking up steam from possible coalitions with insiders or related outsiders as it unfolds. The second kind of struggle has its own specific language and objectives, but

the impulse comes from the outside: In specific historical circumstances, the modern politics of culture are played out against the background of larger social conflicts, from which delimited fields borrow intensity and substance. These are the distinctive moments of the Western art avant-gardes. On the one hand, formal aesthetic challenges are infused with the resonance of political and moral struggle. On the other hand, debates that are still couched in esoteric language and concerned with specialized issues may come to move along with larger movements: The dissenters, not content with challenging discourse alone, may attempt to renegotiate the power relationships within and around their special field of practice and may, in fact, attack its established protective boundaries.^[26]

The modernist phase of twentieth-century architecture, distinguished by an ideological moment of birth, clearly illustrates the struggle of a political-aesthetic avant-garde. In the 1920s, new visions of architecture inflamed the profession's discourse by seeking to transcend the internal divisions and to forge anew the institutions of practice. My study will show that political fervor was not characteristic of the postmodern transformation yet not entirely absent from its early phases.

Battles in the discursive field of architecture are as narrow and specialized as in any other field. However, the utility, the visibility, and the public character of architecture tend to give to its battles a metaphorical significance greater than in other arts and even other professions. Indeed, I believe that the ideas of architectural innovators have shaped the distinctive public face of our modernity.

Architecture has provided potent symbols for our century, and its evolution has been taken as a mirror for the discontinuities in the substance and quality of our collective experience. Recent philosophers and critics, in particular, have taken the vehement reaction to modernism in architectural discourse as a starting point and a central metaphor in the debate on postmodernism.^[27] I, too, believe that architecture engages the sociology of culture in broader and deeper ways.

From the last century on, architects have retreated from the aspiration of "building cities" and instead have moved toward the design of single objects, however gigantic or prototypical. While there are exceptions to this trend, design is still a most significant public function.^[28] Architecture has lost the connection with the organization of state power, a connection it had in the age of the baroque, but it still provides the most effective symbolic expression of the state's presence. Second, it remains the most visible image of magnificence that private or corporate wealth can buy. Third, it has descended into social reality and entered the domain of mass con-

sumption. Fourth, utility and a new vocation called some of the leading modern architects of the 1920s to revise architecture's connection with mass housing. Modern architecture intervenes, therefore, in dense fields of social relations, expressing social needs in both standard programs and in its vocabulary of forms, symbolizing social relations, channeling our movements through space, and providing our lives with a stage and a physical code.

It is evident from my approach and from the attention I pay to the modernist background that I plan to participate in the present debate regarding the transformation of modernism. I believe, however, that probing the conditions of work and the orientations toward design of an elite of cultural producers will yield a great deal more insight than any consideration of cultural change in the abstract. Accordingly, a large part of my investigation is based on in-depth interviews conducted in 1988–90, primarily with the members of a loose, heterogeneous, and eclectic elite: the architects identified by peers and critics as significant protagonists in the transformation of modernism in the United States from 1966 to 1985.^[29]

The first part of this book serves as background. It consists of this chapter and of an analytical overview of twentieth-century architectural history, which acquaints the nonspecialist with the substance and scope of architectural change and with the cast of characters it involved. I pay special attention to architectural modernism in Weimar Germany as the tacit model (or the explicit foil) of the subsequent transformation.

In the second part, I examine the structural underpinnings of the recent phase of architectural change. Chapter 3 concentrates on postindustrial restructuring and its urban effects, suggesting some links between postmodern revisionism in architecture and the larger process with which it has roughly coincided. In chapter 4, I turn to the structure of architectural practice and how elite architects perceive it at present. I conclude with an analysis of different types of elite careers or, more precisely, different paths to elite standing in the profession.

The third part is directly concerned with the emergence, adoption, and meaning of postmodernism in American architecture. As the title ("The Revision of the Modern") indicates, I understand postmodernism more broadly than architects usually do, as a revisionist movement that includes many different tendencies. Chapters 5 and 6 are also based on my extended conversations with architects and on their published writings: I describe, first, how these noted architects think and talk about their work. Second,

I analyze how they view design, the architects' common competence, and its recent evolution.

Finally, in chapters 7 and 8 I extend the roster of elite architects to all the noted designers who participated as jurors in the Design Awards Program of the journal Progressive Architecture from 1966 to 1985. Based on the awards and, especially, on published transcripts of the proceedings, my analysis composes a narrative of the postmodern transformation viewed from the most autonomous level of the discursive field: For, indeed, the awards are given for "paper architecture," a stage at which the client has provided only a program but no other restrictions. In chapter 7, the analysis of these twenty years of debate takes one building type (the private house) as its point of departure. The changes discovered by holding the type of building constant are followed in chapter 8 across the whole spectrum of the juries' discussions.

These chapters result from related but differently based empirical probes. Their unity comes from the guiding themes of the investigation: art and profession, aesthetics and utility, discourse and building, extraordinary and ordinary design, autonomy and heteronomy. Even for a recognized elite, these are essential dilemmas, rooted in the contradictions of architectural practice.