PART THREE—
THE REVISION OF THE MODERN

Chapter Five—
Architects and Creative Work

"You could not help getting [from Louis Kahn] this sense of hope that architecture was ultimately poetry and art, transcending accommodation, shelter, and program." This statement has the generality of a cliché. Yet Charles Gwathmey pronounced it with absolute conviction, and one can see it emanating from a man's serious involvement in his work. Less celebrated architects than Gwathmey also take it for granted that art and meaning make architecture more than mere building. Here is, for instance, the principal of a commercial firm with a three-generation history and a more recent one of making production drawings for many famous designers: "I think art has a lot to do with architecture. . . . What you want is a businessman who is willing to spend a little bit of money so the buildings you are designing have an ability to say something. We have a number of jobs that we think have a lot of art in them." The creation of meaning—"saying something"—still appears to be the distinctive quality of architecture, but it is implicitly quantified and made into a commodity. If "a lot of art" can go into a building, it is also possible to put in "a little" or none. One can only tell when it is "enough" by the money it costs.

The skeptic might see these two preceding statements as candor on the one hand and pretension on the other. Yet architects are wont to repeat (with variations) Gwathmey's notion that architecture must transcend the requirements of practice and therefore go beyond its conditions of existence. Joan Goody, for instance, treats architecture as the architect's secret

intention in a constrained process. She does not try to say what it is , except the undefined beauty that could not be quantified and is not paid for: "Architecture is the most valuable, the hardest to make of the things that we do. . . . They pay us to be sure they make it through the building inspectors and the zoning, that the clients will be happy, that they are rented . . . but the extra layer of beauty we have to sneak in." Because of general properties inherent in building, it is difficult to articulate what architecture is . Architects' occupational ideology forms around this difficulty.

As physical artifacts, buildings do more than articulate spaces within their shells: They also make the space around and between them perceptible and organized. As significant artifacts, buildings give spatial expression to the social relations and basic social hierarchies that inform a culture, nourishing its language and cosmology with spatial metaphors.^[1] In this sense building is like music or poetry: It is impossible to fully describe in words what has been created, for our ability to describe depends on experiencing with our senses an artifact that has "feeling and form."

Each culture has its specific building arts, and in ours architecture is that which our architects do. In Western culture, architects profess to be specialists in transforming the complexity of buildings into beauty. Art critics and architectural historians specialize in telling us what that beauty consists of, but architects lay claim to its creation. Their claim implicitly rests on a syllogism characteristic of this profession: Architecture is an art. Only architects produce architecture. Architects are necessary to produce art.

The profession of architecture depends on clients, on executants, and on rival professions to whom it is often subordinate in the field of construction. This means that the profession of architecture is not autonomous but rather is fundamentally heteronomous. Yet architects "own" both the name and the discourse of architecture; the basic syllogism affirms and preserves the profession's identification with beautiful buildings. When noted designers grant interviews, the syllogism is tacitly taken for granted: The lay interviewer must identify architecture with what respondents do; otherwise no interviewer would be asking them about their work and their views.

While the syllogism of architecture establishes the profession's collective authorship of buildings, authorship for elite architects (the "gurus," as the press says) merges with charisma derived from the ideology of art. The syllogism and the authorship it claims are basic prerequisites of architectural ideology.

This ideology assumes that the art of architecture transcends the utilitarian and technical tasks of building. Beauty is what justifies a building's

permanence in time and its significance in history. Architects with an exalted conception of their work aspire to do something beyond the practical services that clients require. Directly, in their work, and indirectly, in what they say about it, they make rhetorical choices intended to prove architectural quality to their peers, their clients, themselves, and something undefined they call "the public"—in this order.

In this chapter I consider, first, how architects articulate the object of architecture (the thing to which they are committed) and the subject of architecture (their role as author). We should not expect them to penetrate what the critic Reyner Banham, borrowing an image from science, calls architecture's "classic 'black box,' recognised by its output though unknown in its contents."^[2] Rather than the specific substance of architecture, their rhetorical constructions reveal different parameters and expressions of the occupational ideology.

The contours of this ideology become clearer in the second section, where I examine the orientations that architects have toward three ways of seeking transcendence in their work: by creating meaning for their buildings, by emphasizing the craft of architecture, and by highlighting the enhancement of life that architecture provides. Each represents for elite designers an attempt to transcend the narrow mandate of their work.

Architecture's Subject and Object

Architects talk about the art of architecture in four main ways: in general terms that do not tell us how it is different from other forms of building; in personal terms that focus on the frustrations of a misunderstood and threatened enterprise; in very specific terms that explain what they want to achieve in particular projects and how they go about it; and in prescriptive terms that offer specific critiques or variations on the theme "this is not architecture."

There is no theory of architecture or, as one historian writes, "none that has not been used to justify totally different styles of architecture over the past two centuries."^[3] Peter Eisenman, the architect and cultural entrepreneur, thinks that architecture lacks "cultural power" because it lacks theoretical foundations. This implicitly explains why architects have difficulty imposing their syllogism, or, which is the same, their own distinction between architecture and building, on the public and potential clients. Comparing architecture to law and economics, Eisenman argues that architecture has always vacillated between extracting theory after the fact from realized projects and engaging in "ideological practice," which proceeds

from developed theory. The opposite of theory is, for him, the business of architecture; only theory can provide autonomous criteria for judging the results of practice: "In architecture, the theory is under-valued because it does not matter. . . . Everything is concerned with selling, with the media. We seem to have no corrective, no notion of what the discipline is against which to measure results."^[4] Eisenman's argument implies that "the capacity to shape society as law and economics do" depends on the recognition of professional criteria by the state and by relevant others: "When the government wants a legal opinion it goes to the Harvard Law School or the Stanford Law School for advice. When there is a question of development or environmental concern, nobody goes to the architecture schools for advice."^[5] Now, in the United States as in Europe, practicing architects (rather than academics) invariably sit on fine arts commissions, design review boards, and city planning committees, even if their advice is often ignored. Eisenman's point is that they are not taken seriously because their expertise does not rest on autonomous theory.

Eisenman's argument was part of an exchange with Henry Cobb, whose reply (as the senior partner in I. M. Pei's firm rather than the chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, which he was at the time) is significant. Architecture, Cobb implies, must choose between doing anything and advancing as a purely theoretical form of knowledge. But the choice is already made: In order to exist, architecture needs realizations. Invoking the theoretical authority of an outsider, Cobb cites Michel Foucault: Architecture belongs among the composite practices (like the practice of government) that the Greeks called techne; it is "a practical rationality governed by a conscious goal."^[6] Cobb then implicitly returns to the basic syllogism of architecture, suggesting that it is bound to fail: "Architecture by definition gives three-dimensional form to the society from which it springs, portraying it in a form so vivid and influential that it has the status of a cultural artifact; on the other hand, this cultural power does not invest architects or architecture with the kind of direct manipulative power that . . . lawyers and the law or economics and economists have in the shaping of society."^[7]

The culturally significant, socially valued, and long-lasting products of architecture are both the insignia of clients' power and the expression of architects' autonomous artistic aspirations. Historically, the problem of authorship was that the architect had to distinguish his contribution from the power of the patron. In addition to this, modern architects must also fight for place in ever-more-complex rosters of building specialists.

As a form of cultural production, modern architecture must simultaneously convince and deceive the client. For Vittorio Gregotti, this cunning is the architect's critical duty:

Modern culture involves a radical discontinuity: it is a critical culture, it cannot be organic vis-à-vis the society that exists. Because [Albert] Speer and [Marcello] Piacentini wanted to be organic, they interpreted our relation with nazism and with fascism. The typical duplicity of the architect is precisely that of having in mind two different goals simultaneously—architecture as autonomous culture and the client.

Yet, because the autonomous culture of architecture matters only to other architects, they must resolve ideologically the problems of authorship and of "double coding" the object—for the client and for the cognoscenti.

In the public, nonspecialist discourse of architects, the ideological construction of architecture moves on a continuum between two poles: On the one hand, discourse must establish the architect as the creative subject of architecture, proclaiming the superiority of the idea over its realization. On the other hand, it must construct the significance of the created object in a mostly "nonarchitected" environment, emancipating the building from either utilitarian or hedonistic vocations. The rhetorical strategies by which practitioners sustain the collective claims of their profession move imperceptibly from one focus to the other. My argument is that both remain central, even though contemporary professional ideology has abandoned the "strong programs" with which they were once associated.

Let us begin with the architect as subject in Le Corbusier's manifesto of 1923:

The Architect, by his arrangement of forms, realizes an order which is a pure creation of his spirit; by forms and shapes he affects our senses to an acute degree and provokes plastic emotions; by the relationships which he creates . . . he gives us the measure of an order which we feel to be in accordance with that of our world, he determines the various movements of our heart and our understanding; it is then that we experience the sense of beauty.^[8]

While few architects would dare to talk in these terms today, the glorified role that architects seek among other design professionals silently evokes them. Architects' willingness to assume practical and legal responsibility for all aspects of good construction (functional and environmental performance, beauty of form and adeptness of space, respect for materials and structural economy) implicitly asserts authorship.^[9]

Similarly, the fact that architects' discourse almost inevitably veers toward description or graphic exhibition of their intentions, moves, and

procedures in specific designs indicates another way in which architects claim creative responsibility. Indeed, it is not only the case that architects feel more comfortable with specifics than with generalities but also that the active "I" of their descriptions assigns them a protagonist's role, rivaled only by the buildings they claim as their creations.

The fusion of creation and creator comes through in the prose of Louis Kahn, the great American architect, who reinvigorated the principles of Beaux-Arts planning learned from his teachers in Philadelphia:

Architecture is a thoughtful making of spaces . . . spaces which form themselves into a harmony good for the use to which the building is to be put.

I believe the architect's first act is to take the program that comes to him and change it. Not to satisfy it, but to put it into the realm of architecture, which is to put it into the realm of spaces. An architectural space must reveal the evidence of its making by the space itself.^[10]

Architects often say that architecture animates inert matter. This ability of architecture is captured in common language that employs anthropomorphic terms (walls rise and turn corners, roofs drop, windows look down, moldings run, buildings have character) and in more vivid metaphors in architects' discourse (spaces form themselves and slide into one another, fifty-story buildings cannot stop rotating, and an urban square leaks space). Beaux-Arts teaching was centered on the generative properties of the plan—a principle as important for Le Corbusier ("the plan is the generator" that "holds in itself the essence of sensation," he wrote) as it was later for Kahn.^[11] The phrase "the powers of the plan" is a specialist's way of metaphorically attributing powers of agency to built space. This metaphor links the architectural principles of modernism to the social-engineering orientation of its professionals.

Incorporating, among other things, the idea of the generative plan, the Modern Movement developed a more absolute principle: The exterior of a building must be an expression of its structure and its interior. But the principle could be knowingly contradicted (as it often was by modernist masters), and the facade could be built up as the boundary between the inside and the outside. Yet the principle that form must follow plan and structure (a more exact phrasing than "form follows function") rephrases the general conception that architecture is the active organizer of space. This is the architectural counterpart of the "strong program" of architectural determinism, which extends (on an ideological level) the agent powers of architecture from space to its occupants.

For an architectural determinist, "architectural design has a direct and determinate effect on the way people behave." Writing in the 1960s, the

sociologist Alan Lipman observed: "In this psychologically and sociologically conscious period, the profession's traditional belief that it satisfies aesthetic 'needs' can be extended to psychic and social 'needs.' It is difficult to imagine a more gratifying belief, one which could better recompense the architect for the vicissitudes of his professional activities."^[12] No contemporary architect would credit architecture with reordering social powers; yet traces of the basic metaphor of architectural agency survive. Paradoxically, they inform the formalist emphasis on architecture's aesthetic meaning.

Obviously, architecture must have some purpose and meaning for people who devote their lives to it. The point is that even Richard Meier, an architect known for his uncompromising aestheticism, attributes to architecture the power to create and convey meaning for society in general: "I am not sure [that architecture] shapes or reorders society, but I think it gives some focus, some sense of purpose or meaning that otherwise might not be there in the chaos of our time."^[13]

"Meaning" has become an essential ideological justification of postmodern revisionism. Having retreated by will or by force from exalting architecture as an agent of social reform to exalting its single products as works of art, their authors must still insist on making them "speak."^[14] Signification, as Meier suggests, extends beyond the signifier.

The idea of communicating through architecture is old. One historian sees in the eighteenth century the emergence of "a tradition in architectural writing . . . of ignoring the origins and importance of 'style' and of explaining architecture away as a consequence or a manifestation of something else."^[15] In the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo noted that Notre Dame, "the gospel of stone," had lost its powers of denotation to the printed word; connotation, however, is never lost. It was therefore logical that a profession rendered doubly insecure, by the disintegration of its neoclassicist language and by the revolutionary change in the relations of patronage, would look for justification outside its own canon.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the advance of academicization has changed the substance of architectural criticism and extended its public. Criticism uncovers methods of composition and spatial results that are not only difficult to interpret but even to see by untrained eyes. Yet academicization also promotes the continuing search for external theoretical legitimacy: It goes on, looking to science and technology or, on the aesthetic side, to philosophy and literary theory.^[16]

Despite all the talk, architecture cannot be read like a written language: The basic vocabulary of doors, windows, walls, ceilings, floors, and columns

does not compose a text to be read but a building to be lived in. Functional elements and ornamental figures are more readily accessible than "spatial grammars," yet they are inseparable from practical and historical connotations. Therefore, the conventions of building type, the multiple practical functions, and the social origins of buildings always persist as "impure" associations in the viewer's memory.

In sum, theory or, more simply, the esoteric analysis of architectural objects cannot displace whatever it is that the large numbers of viewers or users "read" in them. An obvious contention is that people mainly see size, place, and use in a context that is always already social—a meaning as far from the "purely architectural" as its users' behavior is from being caused by the built environment.

Transcendence and Ideology

In the discourse of contemporary American architects, three ways of seeking transcendence in one's work stand out: First, architects seek to create meaning for their buildings, an effort that can be called signification; second, they emphasize the process, the quality, or the craftsmanship that goes into thinking architecture; and, third, they highlight the enhancement of life that architecture provides as it looks beyond clients and users to a general notion of human fulfillment. These orientations are not incompatible, although they can become contradictory.

In the aesthetic inheritance of modernism, art should not represent something outside itself but should reveal the very process of its making and the conflicts overcome in its creation. For this aesthetics of specialists and cognoscenti, serious architecture is one that shows the tensions the architect has attempted to resolve. As one critic puts it, writing of Le Corbusier's 1930 house in Chile: "[It] displays an intention not only of accommodating the occupants' basic needs but of creating a basic confrontation between architecture as an abstract idea and architecture as craft and tradition."^[17] Despite ideal or actual confrontations, meaning, craft, and service all concentrate on the single architectural object. All three orientations to some extent reflect an ideological distance from the obligatory team work of more comprehensive projects; they reflect a turn toward individuality.

Signification

Robert Venturi called on architects to enrich the experience of architecture by making deliberate use of the multiple connotations of the architectural

sign. "A valid architecture," he proclaimed in 1966, "evokes many levels of meaning and combinations of focus: its space and its elements become readable and workable in several ways at once."^[18] Contemporary critics tend to see a clear bifurcation in the search for meaning in architecture: on the one hand are the heirs of modernism, who concentrate on signification accessible to still very small circles of specialists and cognoscenti; on the other, traditional postmodernists (who should more properly be called premodernists) deliberately look to the past of architecture for symbolic associations, accepting the "impure" pomp, power, and grace that the past evokes.

I mentioned in chapter 2 Robert Stern's distinction between "traditional" and "schismatic" postmodernism, as well as Charles Jencks's proliferating categories.^[19] Whatever the validity of the classifications, all the revisionist tendencies remain within the basic parameters of the architectural ideology. None rejects the identification of architecture as an art, and all equate this art with what architects do. Furthermore, in the revision of the modern, all the tendencies are interested in signification. Even the self-proclaimedly radical "deconstructive" tendency appropriates for architecture the task of communicating the "impossibility of meaning." Here, for instance, is Peter Eisenman's text for a hotel competition in Barcelona:

The resulting form and space no longer can mean in the conventional sense of architectural meaning. . . . In this sense it means nothing. But because of this meaning nothing, another level of potential significance previously repressed by conventional meaning is now liberated. . . . Thus this project not only symbolises the spirit of new Spain in the world of 1992, but also the new world of an architecture possible for the 21st century.^[20]

If embodying the Zeitgeist seems a bit much for a hotel, we should remember that formalism elides considerations of program and function and thereby hints at the waning of distinctions between commercial and "high" art.

Signification crosses the boundaries of approach and style, adding its quest for transcendence to the syllogism of architecture. While architects seldom challenge the Western idea of art as personal expression, they professionalize it: Signification (like beauty) becomes a manifestation of their expertise. They and no others will determine what there is to be said and how to say it best. But, of course, to whom they say it (the client, the users, or the ideal audience) determines in large part the formal strategies of architectural signification. Proposing signs that will be legible only to certain publics creates at the same time special market positions for their makers.

For a theoretically sophisticated formalist like Eisenman, being misunderstood and accused of arrogant hermeticism is, on the one hand, the inevitable consequence of being at the avant-garde:

Essentially the profession sees itself as providing comfort. It is a consumer profession, and the elite is not producing comfort. . . . Deconstruction deals with the questions of text and absence and displacement . . . certainly too much for the public to deal with, but it's not too much for a literate public. There is a class of literati, but what is interesting about them is that they have no sensitivity to architecture at all! The intellectual public, which is appealed to by philosophers, scientists, theologians, literary critics, are only interested in comfort when it comes to architecture .

On the other hand, Eisenman is accumulating an impressive international track record from his special market niche: "I get clients, basically, that no one else will get, because there is no one else occupying my territory. I beat Michael Graves in Cincinnati because I took the, quote, 'radical risky position,' the unsettling, unstable position, and I've always done that from the first of my clients. . . . The thing is how do I remain unestablished?"

Communicating with the "happy few" and shocking the rest is the classic position of the avant-garde. Traditional postmodernists reject in principle the elitism of this position. With different architectural elements, different measures of eclecticism, and different degrees of reflexive irony or seriousness, architects like Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Michael Graves, Robert Stern, Stanley Tigerman, Thomas Beeby, Stuart Cohen, William Pedersen, and even Philip Johnson (to mention only some we have encountered) rely on traditional or vernacular forms to make their architecture more accessible. In other words, they aspire to a different and possibly a much broader market than Eisenman.^[21]

The different stages of Michael Graves's work illustrate different levels of tension between broadening "meaning" (and thereby reaching a larger public) and veering too far from the narrow professional foundation of fame, toward an architecture that strives to delight on "the other's" terms. Of all the American postmoderns, Graves has probably the most consistently sought to use the simple elements of architectural composition—doors, windows, walls, ceilings, floors, and columns—in a personal language. In the early 1970s, he moved away from an abstract formal repertoire derived mainly from Le Corbusier toward a vocabulary that he thought richer and more intelligible: color and figures and meanings taken from the "high" traditions of the Renaissance and mannerism. He explained his gradual shift from schismatic to traditional postmodernism this way:

We can't have any purposeful ambiguity in our language unless there are abstractions. But at the same time we run the risk, if we are not figurative enough, of losing our audience. There has to be some balance between what is figurative, what is associational, what is understood as symbolic in terms of its figural association, and what is multifaceted in the sense that the abstraction allows the several readers . . . to read what they want into the composition.^[22]

For the historian Alan Colquhoun, Graves's formal choices reflected a "nostalgia for 'culture' which is characteristically American, and . . . depends on the existence of a type of client who has similar—though less well defined—aspirations." Graves's work of the late 1970s was becoming "a meditation on architecture," in which "the substance of the building does not form part of the ideal world imagined by the architect. . . . The objective conditions of building and its subjective effect are now finally separated." Graves's architecture was becoming image.^[23]

In the 1980s, Graves's work for an emblematic client, the Disney Corporation, completed the passage toward an architecture that is pure sign. Disney epitomizes the culture industry's tremendous capacity to create mythical figures and the most effective simulacra of real "places." The audiences for these images never share in direct social relationships—the lifeblood of traditional communities and autochthonous myths.^[24]

Doing architecture for Disney sends multiple messages beyond the buildings themselves. In the new world of indirect and mediated social relationships, Graves's implicit message to architects is that architecture as it used to be can no longer compete with the connotative powers of the culture industry. In the Swan and the Dolphin hotels at Disney World, Graves designs "cosmic cartoons in toto, their shapes abnormally few, obvious and vast."^[25] Yet "entertainment architecture," as the company defines it, and expensive hotels designed for "vast conventions of sober-suited executives" are not cartoons. In a tightly controlled private town with not a shadow of democratic government, the architecture points beyond itself and beyond Mickey Mouse: The Magic Kingdom represents a phantom public life—one, however, that must be paid for . The architecture, like all the other forms of delightful simulation, is a piece in the vast marketing strategies of the archetypal postindustrial corporation.^[26]

Precisely because they represent extreme cases of image-making, Michael Graves's brilliant designs for Disney illustrate inescapable problems of architectural signification. Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt school critic, saw architecture as "the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction." He saw that architecture, like the cinema to which he compared it, pointed a way

out of the "rapt attention" and the reactionary aestheticism that surround art in Western culture. Architecture, embedded in social relationships, was appropriated habitually "by use and by perception or, rather, by touch and by sight."^[27]

Benjamin was wrong about the culture industry. Disney's world of paid entertainment proves that most people pay attention not to architecture but yes to the fantastic images and associations it connotes. The viewers do not relate either to each other or to the architecture by habit or use but rather by the imaginary bonds of spectacle.

For the critic Mark Girouard, modern architecture had failed "to produce images of enjoyment or entertainment or images of domesticity with which any large number of people could identify."^[28] The case of Disney architecture, like the architecture of films to which it is so close, reiterates the dilemma of contemporary art: caught between the esoteric advancement of a specific art and signifying something for a broader public—essentially by giving it what (artists think) people want. Only world-famous architects, whose names have market value, actually ever face a choice that stark. Even so, the client always has the last word.

With clients less experienced than Disney in the creation of images, the choice is already made: Architects who aspire to make a mark on architecture—the subject of professional discourse—seek the client's license, in order to communicate with those who pay attention. Thus, despite Venturi's original pleas for a nonelitist "pop" architecture, the traditional revision of modernism has been identified chiefly with the revival of the neoclassical language and with the search for a vernacular style.

Contextualism, the hallmark of postmodernism, inflects the architecture of single buildings toward the discovery or invention of vernacular forms. For the public, contextualism tends to mean only conformity with what is already there. For the designer, it means that signification emerges from the insertion of one object within a preexisting system of built objects and from their spatial and temporal relations. The predominance of neoclassicism (among other high styles of architectural history) has a reason: it has a long history in the urban environment. In the visual and vital chaos of many modern cities, there is no vernacular and no discernible "context" capable of ordering the design of single buildings. In this account by William Pedersen, we detect an almost inevitable return to the tried language of the "high" architectural tradition:

Since most of the contexts we were building in gave off confusing and contradictory signals, wasn't it possible for the building itself to be composed of different pieces, each drawn in reference to different conditions within the context?

. . . Certainly, a large building could be more sensitively scaled to the city if it was made up of distinct pieces. . . . [But] the individual building could only go so far in representing the complexity of the city. Consequently, our buildings became less complex. . . . The issue of the tall building, addressing the public realm, presenting a facade to the street which would join other buildings to make a continuous and cohesive unity out of the street, became a dominant preoccupation in our work. We started to introduce classical compositional techniques, primarily those that were aimed at encouraging the textural environment and unification of surface.^[29]

In suggesting the difficulty of contextual design, Pedersen shows that accommodating the single building to its environment can be a supreme expression of architectural craft. A new object can be fitted into its surroundings if the architect pays enough attention to detail and creatively interprets the past and present context. But it can also be made to fit in mass and facade if the architect uses rapid gestures and a silhouette, vocabulary, and ornament that satisfy zoning boards and commercial clients. The emphasis on craftsmanship does not reject signification but the quick creation of illusion.

Craftsmanship

Architectural craftsmanship requires care, technical competence, proverbial attention to details, subtle handling of spaces, efficient and elegant interpretation of the program, and ingenious and sensuous use of materials; above all, perhaps, it requires considering the consequences that each move implies. Craftsmanship takes time —and time in architecture is, of course, money. An inventive designer can achieve scenographic solutions and brilliant effects in less time than it takes the craftsman architect to design a small building. This is one reason developers are not the latter's typical or choice clients.

Craftsmanship entails a reverence for embodied perfection. The perfect objects produced deserve permanence and respect. Indeed, craft-oriented architects emphasize that their designs will last—or would last, if construction was as good as the care that went into the designs. Well-crafted architecture seems "naturally" contextual, like the architecture the great Bay Area architect and educator William Wurster called anonymous—so married to the site, so simple and so lasting, that it looks like a Tuscan farmhouse or a wood barn in California, something that has always been there. For Joseph Esherick, an architect in Wurster's tradition, "the ideal piece of architecture is one that you don't see." The disappearance of the architect as creative subject is, of course, a rhetorical strategy, for viewers and

users know that these perfect syntheses cannot just happen, that an invisible human subject was responsible for devising what was made to be forgotten.

Although independent of size, well-crafted architecture connotes both an emphasis on control and a close relationship with the client, both of which seem easier to obtain in the design of smaller projects—notably private houses, unique commissions in which the client-user has a personal stake.

Houses occupy a large place in Stanley Tigerman's practice. Predictably, he sees small projects as a much more fertile ground than large-scale buildings for the development of new architectural ideas. This is, in part, because small buildings admit his playful vision of architecture "as commentary," even as joke (as in Bruno Taut's motto of 1920, "Down with seriousism!"), while all the enormously expensive "humorless buildings . . . are the joke." The owner of several south Florida burlesque houses, dying of intestinal cancer, came to Tigerman to ask him to design a beach house. Tigerman decided he could only try to make him laugh. Accordingly, he developed (and explained to everybody) the plan of the very successful "Daisy House" as a phallic emblem. Ten years later, its main occupant was still alive!

Tigerman's account of his practice typifies the emphasis on craftsmanship, including the ideological notion that the match with the client is "made in heaven":

It's like when I was a teenager, you would see an attractive girl . . . you'd never let her know that you wanted to go out with her! You wanted her, somehow , mysteriously, to find you. So I have been waiting for them mysteriously to find me. I don't want to find anybody. . . . I just want to sit and do work. Of course, I don't want too much. . . . If you have too much work, you can't do it well. You can't. You start doling it out to the people in your office to do. I only want the work that I can do well . . . . Whatever it is. If it's a back porch, a little store, a house, a skyscraper, a business, it's a building! I want to do what somebody comes to me and wants me to do. . . . I don't do marketing. I resent architects who do it. What I think an architect should do is sit in his or her office and work .

Tigerman is such a public figure in Chicago, so active talking, writing, teaching, drawing, exhibiting his work, and organizing events, that it might indeed be true he does not need to do more than that to find clients. As we know, discursive activity is a necessary amplifier for the craftsman-architect's work. Yet discursive activity is not quite enough for Tigerman; he may prefer his small practice, but he has been actively involved with

Stern at Euro-Disney and with Bruce Graham of SOM in the now defunct possibility of a Chicago Fair.

In theory, craftsmanship should not be a primary orientation toward architectural work but an ancillary one, an orientation to supplement others. It can be pressed, of course, into the making of architecture as art with meaning of its own. Yet, as Holmes Perkins perceptively notes, originality and craftsmanship are two different dimensions, and architectural judges perceive them as distinct and reward them differently. When Perkins was at Harvard in the 1930s, "the people who were real leaders in our eyes were breaking new ground. . . . One of the dilemmas in breaking new ground is that the new is almost always crude, and it takes maybe another generation or so to polish it up. I think the difference between the polished up version and the original is very very visible!" Because craftsmanship ultimately chooses integrity of process over other aspects of architectural work, it may orient itself toward "perfection," away from the possibility of failure (which lurks in expressing "meaning" or, simply, original ideas). Yet because craft work recognizes the primacy of the client's needs, it has affinities with the form of transcendence that I have called the enhancement of life.

Enhancing Life

The close relationships that architects like Tigerman establish with their clients show their concern for their clients' purposes. In addition, architects show a concern for clients' lives that is typical of the architectural craft.

Architectural craftsmanship tends to see architecture as providing a setting for social life. Speaking for many architects, Joan Goody declares, "It's a bad setting if it obstructs that life and makes itself the star." She describes her idea of a good setting a little less modestly:

Architecture . . . can be intellectual in the way it is conceived, but it's got to appeal to the senses once it is built. . . . It feels good when light enters in such a way that it opens up a space rather than making it oppressive or cramped; when the proportions of a facade feel comfortable, in harmony; when the materials, colors, textures are appealing to the eye. This is a sensuous reaction, as opposed to an intellectual one, where you need a scorecard to understand that one piece of a structure alludes to something that's three blocks away and another is an ironic comment on something else three centuries away. I think one should be able to respond to a building with one's eyes and one's body.^[30]

"Feels good . . . comfortable, in harmony"—these are dimensions of architecture that a theoretician like Peter Eisenman despises. While all

professional architects (and all professionals!) try in different ways to ennoble the service they render for money, this form of transcending mere service tends to steer architects toward certain types of clients and especially users. The aspiration to enhance life by means of architecture rises above the commonplace by exalting the concrete needs that are served. Therefore, its choice settings are those that represent the needs of everyday life: houses, workplaces, roads, airports, schools, community centers.

Insofar as the first motive is not profit but augmenting the quality of life, the creation of new needs (or rather, the direction of unrecognized needs toward new forms of fulfillment) is the contribution of all professions to the civilizing process.^[31] Architects who spend unpaid labor time on projects they hold important seem close to that in intention.

Joan Goody, once again, illustrates how to serve unrecognized needs. In my interview with her she discussed the renovation of worse than half-abandoned public housing at Boston's Harbor Point. Cross-ventilation had been the overriding concern of all public housing from 1945 to 1960, resulting in the cross-shaped concrete towers "tossed around" in such a way that they "line up next to one another and become a single wall." Her "selective demolition" has re-created the traditional grid system of streets and opened each one to a vista of the harbor. Besides making it safe for people to get home, "the point was to get people to walk on the street."

Rob Quigley explained that the single-room project for the homeless "was neither an apartment building nor a hotel, and the building codes penalized the design of such an animal," and then described almost apologetically how he worked on the developer's idea: "A working wall that incorporates the toilet in the room, a sink with garbage disposal, a spot for a microwave oven for rooms that are 10 by 10 feet. These are simple little trivial things, but it is a precedent setting idea, that you can have a bathroom not legally called a bathroom. . . . What it means in comfort, dignity, sense of privacy to not have to walk to a common toilet at night is unmeasurable." Not surprisingly, Quigley echoes the vision of the Frankfurt architects in the 1920s, the vision that Paul Tillich called "a religion of everyday life."^[32] The issue here is not transcending service but, much more ambitiously, transcending life itself by enhancing its "everyday-ness": making efficiency gracious and grace efficient.

The aims of architecture, as Sir Henry Wotton defined them in 1624, were tripartite:

. . . the end must direct the Operation.
The end is to build well.
Well building hath three conditions:
Commodite, Firmenes and Delight .^[33]

Few elite architects are inclined to care about comfort only, and few define signification independently of delight, except, at their most theoretical, the "deconstructive" architects with their philosophy of "violating" and rupturing form. Most architects seem to believe that "delight" is still possible and acceptable in a world like ours. Too often, they slide into believing that beautiful architecture is good in itself.

The central objective of ambitious design is to achieve this good and the "firmness" that will make it last. To their peers and to interested circles, architects of recognized talent seem able to achieve it more often than others. In the following chapter, I examine, first, how they explain the process, basic to their work, which they call design. Second, I consider the revision of modernism through the eyes of its protagonists, exploring how it has affected their way of conceiving their work.

Chapter Six—
Design and Discourse in a Period of Change:
The Protagonist's View

To Reyner Banham, the persistence and centrality of drawing, the Renaissance disegno, make for the distinctiveness of our building art. It follows in his logic that computer-aided design may well have destroyed the mystique of drawing, and hence of architecture, "not by mechanising the act of drawing itself, but by rendering it unnecessary."^[1] Obviously, the process of design includes an ability to draw, as well as the much more basic competence to read two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional space. But my analysis will show that Banham greatly underestimates the complexity of what architects call design.

I begin with two eloquent accounts by Adrian Smith and Diane Legge, both of them partners at SOM-Chicago. Their firm makes available to them the most sophisticated computer technologies that exist and the technical support required to use them efficiently. It is therefore instructive to consider how they describe the formal origins of a design. In studios, architects draw as they speak about what they draw. But the accounts presented here do not rely on the combination of "drawing and speaking," which Donald Schön identified with "the language of designing" in direct observations of teaching studios. Yet, Smith and Legge think in terms of the "normative design domains" that Schön recognized.^[2]

Both Smith and Legge are explaining to a lay interviewer (with faint echoes, perhaps, of how they talk to clients) the emergence of a composition. In Smith's account, siting and form predominate; precedent and the "felt path," the user's experience of moving through the created spaces,

are most salient in Legge's. Both make brief technical references, either directly to structure and technology in the case of Smith, or indirectly, by representing problems in the language of measurement or by common technical notations such as "scale" and "section." Both give much importance to the constraints of program; Legge alludes vaguely to those of cost.

In the language of the French Beaux-Arts, architects often call their first approach to a specific design problem the parti: in Stanley Tigerman's words, "the plan-wise organization of something, typologically, categorically, so that you can understand it formally, not by function, but by formal type ." Adrian Smith explained the genesis of a parti for the Rowes Wharf complex on Boston Harbor, an invited developer-architect competition that SOM won out of a field of eight. The Redevelopment Authority's guidelines required that the Broad Street axis remain open down to the water, and Smith's solution ultimately included a spectacular arch spanning the space between two corps of building:

As you look at the city from the air . . . as it hits the water's edge, it fans out: You see all these finger piers sticking out into the water. It was just very apparent that this building had to have a continuation of those fingers sticking out of the water and that there should be an urban edge which relates to the strong street that rims it. In between the finger piers and the city is this highway that makes a very strong kind of figural piece through the city. . . . The client and his people and we, we all felt that we wanted to have some strong kind of figural piece that could be identified and identifiable as the project's memory of things.

Smith is not talking about composition but relating the genesis of a governing conception. The idea, at this level, is still vague; if it involved drawing, it would be one of the rapid sketches (sometimes clay massings) with which lay people identify, so wrongly, the architect of genius. The configuration of the site plays a determining role, which is immediately modulated by the guideline's constraints and the client's wishes; as Smith continued, he moved quickly in technical and political directions: "The arch came about from the fact that we had to span about 80 feet. If we built over it at all, we had to span it. . . . The arch became an important kind of entry way into the city. Our initial designs did not have it, because I did not think we would win the competition if we spanned over [laughs], but after we won, we were allowed to change it!"

Diane Legge reiterated the primacy of a governing idea:

All of the work I had done in architectural school, plus the work I had done for firms, was very small-scale. It seemed to me that a large project probably was, in a sense, a collection of smaller projects put together. In the end that's how

you tackle it. . . . [Yet] in order to work at a large scale you have to think of it as a single problem. . . . We try to reduce it basically to one overriding idea that directs this very large project. Once that idea is established, and you have tested it and made sure that it will work, then that idea translates itself into different subsets that influence the components of the project.

Her commentary summons up the idea of the architect's governing role in a complex design process. This role is in almost perfect correspondence with the role that primary producers assume in the flexible, "postindustrial" organization of production.^[3] Her concrete example is a vivid illustration of the architect's imagination at work:

So, for example, I am working on a race track for Arlington park. . . . We believed that the overriding idea of the grandstand in the new complex should be a long, low building in the tradition of the older great race tracks. . . . (But we have a much more energetic and large program than you normally see in European race tracks; you can see in section it is a tallish building, because you have to get up to 30,000 people in it.) . . . The magic of racing is being outside and seeing the horses. So that was the basic idea. Now, how do you carry that out? You've got to keep the grandstand open; it has to have a roof, but it is not enclosed. The building is as long as we could make it: 800 feet long. (We really can't make it longer than that because of price constraints.) The paddock . . . needs to be a place where the pageantry of horse racing in the greatest tradition of the sport is played out, and so we've brought in earth: It's an amphitheater with a great walking ring at the center, and people move from the building out to the track and back into the garden space. So the long, low relationship . . . to the ground, to the scale of the horse, of a person, is played out through the whole building. . . . And yet, 30,000 people can be there at the same time, all experiencing this flow of "look at the horses, go out and watch the race, come back and look at the horses," so there is a flow back and forth. . . . You think of the massing of the building being long and low in the traditional sense.

In Legge's account, the building's particular looks come well after the directive form and the program:

Then, as you begin to think of the exterior, you still keep that in mind. . . . So we looked for the larger buildings that you see in the Midwest, and actually barns and stables were very close. . . . The building is all in white, it has clapboard siding on it and long verandas and porches on the back, so it always has a sense of the barnlike roofs that you see in the Midwest. It's all white, like all our barns here, and stables. And you just keep layering and layering the architectural ideas and solutions onto the original concept.

Smith and Legge can use computers both to generate drawings or materials specifications and to simulate how a building would look in its urban context (SOM's software can take a specific site in a specific city and peel it away, like an onion, from different viewing points). Yet there is no way

that a computer could have provided the creative effort that seems guided by experience, by the intuition of directive form, and by constraints. In these accounts, the process of design apparently begins, in Diane legge's words, by synthesizing "literally thousands of ideas and bits of information in our heads."

Both accounts are highly contextual. In Smith's, the urban context seems to immediately suggest the form; the arch is identified later as a physical and symbolic organizer of space—a gateway to the city. In Legge's explanation, the context consists of precedents, which she first takes from traditional interpretations of the building type (she accepts both the character and formal conventions of the race track grandstand) and, second, creates from a Midwestern vernacular, regionalizing a design characterized by its type. Her eloquent references to the imagined movements and evolving feelings of clients inside the building suggest how good she must be at talking to clients.

Neither Smith nor Legge refer to "high" architectural precedents. They are both talking to a lay interviewer, and it may be that only architects with an academic bent commonly use historical antecedents as a sort of shorthand in conversations among themselves. Contrast their accounts with this excerpt from an interview that a Chicago architect conducted with Thomas Beeby (just appointed dean at Yale) about the firm's work:

Right, there is a progression. First, National Bank of Ripon and the Fultz House were both sort of Miesian/Palladian schemes, with nine-square-bay partis . Then, with the Champaign Library and Hewitt Associates, . . . there are free-form figural elements, vaguely Corbusian, as filtered through John Hejduk, juxtaposed with the more Miesian, orthogonal pieces. . . . The bank in Northbrook . . . comes from Kahn, but is also based on a little tomb by [Friedrich] Gilly. It's German, super austere classicism. . . . There used to be this magic little book floating around here, the German neo-Classicists. . . . It had Gilly, von Klenze, Laves, as well as Schinkel.^[4]

To the layperson, the account seems unbearably pedantic. It suggests, however, that elite designers may well take their formal cues directly from the evolution of types or from architectural history, while nonelite followers take it from what is current. If this hypothesis were true, then while Beeby looked at Schinkel, the ordinary architect would look at what Beeby published or at SOM. In any case, the architect's creativity does not consist of inventing original forms but in discovering how to use form as a directive concept.

For Donald Schön, designing is a reflexive "conversation with the materials of a situation."^[5] The designer evaluates the implicit potentials of some

initial decisions and considers them in the light of criteria drawn from the normative design domains (see note 2). But constraints were weak and cost did not play any part in the teaching situation Schön studied. Contrast how Charles Gwathmey describes a work process in which thinking-as-drawing plays a large part:

Bob [his partner, Robert Siegel] and I talk the problem through at length, all the aspects of it. We evaluate all the information and all the constraints and prioritize the components of all the parts of the problem: site, overlaid with program, overlaid with budget . . . . We get a deep picture of what the problem is. Then we respond as architects, not as philosophers or theoreticians. We take notes that are drawing notes about form and plan and section simultaneously. Quickly, right after that, there is a notion of image, but it is not preconceived. And we try to make a building . . . whose idea has longevity . . . strong enough in its own right and tolerant enough to adapt, to readapt, to be renovated, and still to withstand as a recognizable valid idea. (emphasis added)

All architects repeat that there is no good architecture without a program, which means that there can be no real design work without constraints. Constraints also mean that the emphasis on one directive concept in Smith's, Legge's, and even Gwathmey's account is either provisional or a rhetorical strategy. Once the real process of design gets going, devising alternatives becomes an integral part of it. William Pedersen gives another reason that alternatives are fundamental to designing:

It is one thing to design a building, and another to convince a client of that design . . . . I presented [to the City University of New York] what I thought was an excellent solution, but because it was the only solution I presented, I gave them no means of comparison. . . . An architect has the obligation, I learned, to present many possibilities. Then the logic of the right choice will be more evident. I went back and worked out six or seven alternate schemes and presented them in clay massing models. The next presentation went much better. I had given them the tools by which they could get involved in the problem.^[6]

The overriding importance of program and constraints in real design situations suggests, in fact, that the active part of designing involves politics more than drawing or even imagining. Politics means, among other things, trying to commit the client to an idea and deciding what and when to compromise. Joseph Esherick speaks for many architects in affirming: "When I spend time talking to clients, I call that design . Same if I am arguing with our central engineer."

For elite architects, design is emphatically not only drawing, nor even essentially drawing. It is both creative synthesis and an eminently political activity: the negotiated assumption of full responsibility for construction.

The directive ideas of form (and, just as important, the details of the plan and the construction) must be expressed in the technical language of architectural thinking-drawing. Yet two collaborative and potentially conflicting processes are essential in the formation of ideas and details: What Steven Izenour of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates calls "the tussle" with the client and, just as important, the ongoing critique of a collaborative team. When architects emphasize program, they evoke the client's active or silent presence. But the profession's traditional ideology of charismatic authorship and the related emphasis on directive, and therefore singular, form tend to ignore the vital collaboration of the team. In the offices of great designers, ideology insures (at least for a while) the professional staff's complicity with this neglect.

Returning to the acknowledged "tussle" with the client, Denise Scott Brown's story about the firm's and Venturi's approach to design suggests that excellent designers listen perhaps better than others; however, they also know how to stand firm for their directive ideas, once they are formed.

A lot of times people say things like "You sound as if you really listened to us. You didn't look as if you were going to ram something down our throats." That's very important. Bob listens. But there comes a time, and it may be a year into the process, when he says "Look, it's been decided now. Don't try to change pieces because it won't work that way." . . . The president of Princeton [University] tells a beautiful story about it. One of the trustees had questions whether that flattened column with the tiger on top in front of Wu Hall should be there at all, and whether it should have a tiger on top. Bill Bowen pushed Bob. He imitates Bob crossing his arms and saying: "I am perfectly happy with my tiger." And Bill Bowen said "OK." . . . You try to be as negotiable as you possibly can, but there comes a time when you can say, even in the tussle , "Look, for the way this building is happening, you really do need the stairs going in this direction. If you go in the other, then we will need a whole new point of departure, a whole new philosophy." Saying "take that element off the building because I don't like it" will lose you your architects. The architects will feel their baby has broken a leg.

So, good design is clearly more than satisfying the client. It is, in Cesar Pelli's words, "choosing what you can control, because you cannot do everything." It is quitting a client who wants to mix and match parts of different alternatives, as Joan Goody did, because architecture is not "a Chinese restaurant, where you order one from column A, one from column B." It is Frank Gehry talking about the program for the Los Angeles Disney Concert Hall to the members of the orchestra, one by one, to help them find the "Ten Commandments" essential to the project: "One is the fidelity of the musical delivery, and with that the experience of listening to the

music which connects with the way the lighting works and the room is designed. That means you cannot select an acoustician who comes in and says 'Either you do it this way or like that' because then . . . you are saying that the acoustics is more important than the experience of listening to the music."

In sum, not all design is a political activity: Good design becomes political because its authors have a competence, and often a reputation, on which to stand, and that gives them authority and something to defend. This competence is complex. It consists not only of aesthetic talent, which must bow to the belief that "everyone has his own taste." It does not consist only of thinking-drawing formal ideas that organize space. Good design is imagining building. Among other things that mere building technicians do not normally pursue, this implies the sensitivity to materials for which Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn are rightly famous.

The architects I interviewed still speak eloquently about materials. Materials do not matter to the architectural imagination because they are precious. Although elite architects like the luxury of expensive materials, they insist that architecture does not depend on it; somehow, they are more articulate when they talk about cheap materials, perhaps because there is not much that needs to be said about travertine, except that it does not age well in certain climates.

For instance, Cesar Pelli's long-standing interest in the architectural possibilities of glass dates from his work in the commercial practices of DMJM and Gruen, to which clients came "looking for building, not for architecture." As a designer, he was free to concentrate mainly on the building's enclosure or "skin," for the designs were for the most part standard spaces. Pelli explains that his commitment to glass as a material that is both cheap and architecturally "active" dates from that period:

Several architectural decisions were necessary to create the appropriate conditions for the delightful surprises of interpenetration and overlap. First is the dominance of the glass wall; the glass is not contained in a frame or hanging from a fascia. Second is the presence of a thin grid of mullions that define the surface of the glass and the form of the building. Third, the thinness of the mullions and their minimum projection . . . do not obscure the reflections; they help maintain the plane of the glass and the tightness of the surface. Fourth, the choice of tinted glass. . . . Fifth, the balance of outdoor and indoor light, which allows both reflections and transparent perception to take place at the same time. Sixth (although minor), the glass wall brought to eye level, where most of the points of reference, inside and out, occur. Seventh, the position of the building in relation to its immediate environment; the environment becomes absorbed in the architecture; through transparency the figure becomes ground and in the reflections the ground becomes figure.^[7]

A cheap material like glass became a worthy substitute for stone and a hallmark of classic modernism; Pelli suggests that the fragility and transparency of glass make it now a symbolic medium for a new phase of our modernity.

Frank Gehry also became famous while using the humble, mass-produced materials of the industrial age. The choice was initially dictated by economics: Gehry worked for a long time with tight budgets, very unlike today's $100 million budget for the Disney Concert Hall. His imagination, primarily similar to that of a plastic artist, found enormous possibilities in omnipresent materials like corrugated metal and chain-link fencing.

What fascinated me about the chain-link from the beginning (I never liked it either!) was that the amount of it that's been installed into the world culture is staggering! And there was so much denial about it! And when you used it intentionally, everybody hated you for it, and that really excited me! . . . I said in one lecture "I do not know what's ugly and what's beautiful," and it got quoted. I said it in the spirit of a lawyer who asks "What is the law?" It's a good question to ask. . . . "How do you put a box around this thing they call Law?" How do you put a box around beautiful and ugly? I've been confused about it because things I find beautiful sometimes are the things people find ugly, and vice versa. And they have immediately tagged ugly something that's made with cheap materials.

His friend, the painter Michael Heizer, thought that with expensive, lasting materials there could be a chance that someone, some day, would eventually like Gehry's work. But Frank was more interested "in the momentary and what was going on and how I saw it" than in architectural permanence. The irony is that his stucco and chain-link are holding up better than the precious, fancy buildings: "No, it won't last the two thousand years! but I did a little house in stucco that looks as good as anything, and that was 1964. . . . There is a little travertine building down the street that Dan Dworsky did. The travertine is not as nice as it was; it has lost its feeling, it has lost its spark, where my funny little stucco building has retained the energy I put in it. . . . It's the idea that counts more than the object. " Whatever the size, the scale, the function, the environment, and the cost of a project, architecture for these architects should be about ideas that transcend mere service to a program. While drawing is only a specialist's "language," design is the creative process (technical and political, hence collaborative) that gives content and substance to the ideas. The process is so complex and so difficult that ideas have to be controlled: Ethically, they should not interfere with the client's needs (in practice the client often has the power to forbid this interference). Joseph Esherick says about Frank

Gehry and powerful architectural ideas: They "can actually help solve the very particular problem that he has in front of him. But not if he lets his search for a particular Weltanschauung get in the way. . . . I think he will always remain responsible to the task at hand. Nobody ever said that you cannot give to a project more than what's in your contract." Ultimately, Esherick believes there is so much to think about in designing architecture that it is pure romanticism to think one can even remember the Zeitgeist:

That's the problem with historicism: You've got so much to do that you cannot assume a historicist position without excluding the whole process of design. Nobody I know can integrate it into the complexity of the issues—the methods are sloppy, vague, heuristic. . . . What really happens is that they solve the problem by very ordinary methods and then they lay all this historicist junk on it. It is a sort of add-on thing. The same if you have some particular world view: You have one, and it exists, but I wouldn't be able to consciously go through designing with the idea that somehow I am going to express my world view or that of my social group! It is conceivable that I may have two different ideas (and I consider it a failure if I only have two!), and then I might say which one is the more likely expression of my particular world view. . . . You can never tell, I might take the least likely! The process is very messy and, you know, you just do it!

Good designers trust their own competence. Professional and artistic self-confidence are necessary for the apparently arrogant task that involves imposing a form upon a site and taming a program, if necessary by means of an arbitrary discipline. In the legend of the genius architect with a manic ego, the formal discipline is an act of the creative will, but, as the designers tell us, architectural form is never invented. It is taken from a historical and typological repertoire and from a canon that, it is true, has been broken open by architecture's most recent evolution. It is to the architects' personal visions of this process of change that I now turn.

Modernism, Postmodernism, and Beyond

This is not the place to review the flood of literature on modernism and postmodernism; while architectural discourse may have started the flood, it is now a small stream compared to the rivers of literary criticism and philosophical debate. The American architects on whose views I draw belong to different generations, represent different types of practice, and are at different stages of their careers; nonetheless, a majority of them have played an important role in the revision of the modern. Postmodern revisionism is in part a generational challenge. It is intertwined with the intellectual construction of "modernism" as its target. How architects view

modernism and its revision obviously depends on their age and professional status; less obviously, the kind of professional transcendence to which they aspire influences their construction of the postmodern passage. They are able to say more about the passage itself than to draw a conclusion from an evolution still in the making. Tolerance of eclecticism, which has replaced the International Style, appears to have left them with a sense of malaise, as if something very important had been lost and could only be recaptured now as a historical memory.

The Defense of Corporate Modernism

Since challengers and defenders need to construct their enemy, it is helpful to start with an interpretation of modernism that brooks no doubts about how it was practiced in the United States. For the late Gordon Bunshaft, "the period after the war, until about 1970, is probably the greatest and most unique building period in the history of architecture. . . . We were building a kind of architecture that was not derivative from anything—maybe that will be bad or good, I don't think anybody can judge now, but it was unbelievable and it became worldwide and there was a tremendous amount." Bunshaft does not distinguish the derivative modernism appropriated by American business from the modernism of Le Corbusier (as much his idol as most revisionists') and Mies van der Rohe. Formally, it is the same architecture, and his generation "owned" it. He does not see any difference either between his kind of modernism and the schismatic revisions of architects who try to redefine modernist aesthetics at the source: "The best work that is done today is all modern." There has been no revision. Bunshaft limits the postmodern challenge to the eclectic historicism of the "gray" variety ("ugly on purpose," like Venturi's buildings, or "freaks," like Graves's, or "copies," like Stern's), and it has failed. He complains about the proliferation of Venturi's lunette windows all over Long Island houses (yet he does not consider houses "important architecture") but never mentions the modernist glass boxes that spread all over the world mainly because they were relatively cheap to imitate. He caps his defense by resurrecting the aesthetic enemy of the 1920s and 1930s modernists: "Victorian is now back. If somebody can tell me there is any aesthetic quality in Victorian, I'll eat my shirt. It's all heavy, clumsy, and overstuffed."

Bunshaft's polemic traces an unbroken formal line from the beginning of our century to the 1970s. Other defenses of modernism admit its formal complexity, as does Bruce Graham, who belongs to the cohort of SOM-Chicago partners following Bunshaft.

Graham takes care to distinguish the American modernism of the 1890s from that of Europe in the 1920s, which was "a highly revolutionary movement, inspired by painting and poetry, against the history of Europe, against imperialism, and mainly against the First World War." The first American modern architecture, as Sullivan and Wright have themselves claimed, "was actually a result of building cities in a hurry . . . rather than a negative idea. And it was a search for a democratic expression in architecture, one that expressed the people. . . . The European movements were completely devoid of decoration, while Sullivan and Wright were decorative, and [their] symbols, like the onion, were symbols of Chicago and the Midwest." But when Graham drafts a sanitized version of post-World War II modernism, he does not maintain his previous distinction between ideological and commercial orientations. Graham's Hancock and Sears towers were going up in Chicago when architecture, like other professions in the late 1960s, began to stir. In the late 1980s, Graham was about to retire but was still at the apex of professional power. In my interview with him he took the 1988 special issue of Progressive Architecture on private houses and dismissed all but one from the field of architecture with a common theme: "What does this mean to building cities? It's fashion, it's nice, but so what?" This rhetorical move is an integral part of a defensive reaction to the attack on the modernist aesthetic.

Graham (like Bunshaft) appropriates postmodern contextualism for his side, citing the convincing example of his Banco de Occidente in Guatemala City ("The building is not air-conditioned, it is all naturally ventilated, naturally lit, with colors that deal with Guatemala, which is not the same as Mexico, quite different"). By avoiding the accusation of ignoring (or destroying) the context, an accusation frequently waged against the International Style, he thus opens the way to a protective account of the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s: It was only the result of what clients wanted and of what a public insensitive to cities allowed. On the one hand, government ("with a lot of influence from Europe and a lot of Easterners who looked at it as social scientists") dumped people into buildings that were "abstractions."^[8] On the other hand, clients prevented architects from putting shops on the ground floor "to bring people in and make the building part of the street."

The 1960s changed the public's perception of buildings and their role: "At first, it was probably in universities, not so much Vietnam, as simply a consciousness of looking around and seeing how ugly things were. And that because a power for architects to use, so we used it " (emphasis added).

Graham credits Jane Jacobs for much of this change. But for younger architects, it was Vietnam.

The Populist Challenge

Stanley Tigerman makes a forceful connection between events of the 1960s and the discourse of his profession: "Bob Venturi was to architecture what Vietnam was to America: . . . They both made the subject fall from grace. . . . The Vietnam War was one of the most stunning examples of a country coming to grips with its own imperfection. Similarly, architecture was thought to be high art . . . until Venturi came along and pointed out that Las Vegas was part of our heritage and that this was OK."^[9] Instead of focusing on the confusion of the 1960s and the complexities of architectural discourse, I will take the postmodern challenge strand by strand.

In the excerpt above, Tigerman, like many of his contemporaries, combines two distinct processes that converged for a time in the delimited field of American architecture: One was the broad social and political ferment of the 1960s; the other a critique of what the aesthetics of modernism had become. The political movement fueled a professional critique that had started independently before the late 1960s. In this composite movement, the definition of the object of criticism determined to a large extent where the challenge would be headed.

Briefly, the different phases of the postmodern challenge were as follows. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the concern of younger architects with their role in society transpired in architectural discourse about form and meaning. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, as the political movement ebbed, discourse veered toward transforming architectural objects; it seemed crucial then to obtain architectural legitimacy for diverse kinds of professional realizations. In other words, the challengers by and large kept themselves within an established professional identity, limiting their defiance to challenging the boundaries of legitimate professional discourse. As defiance ebbed and business more or less as usual returned in the late 1980s, the social and formal dimensions of architecture tended once more to diverge. Because of the legitimacy that had been gained for projects of all sorts, small-scale architectural craftsmanship emerged as a credible alternative to subordinating one's talents to power. Let us consider how these elite designers see different moments of this passage.

Tom Wolfe has flippantly dismissed the barren functionalist vocabulary of the once hegemonic International Style as "workers' housing."^[10] Yet its

most visible embodiments were quite the opposite: the towers that changed streets and urban skylines in the United States and the world during the long boom that ended in the mid-1970s. A younger generation of architects, having as yet no vested interest in the design of downtown office buildings, could afford to attack simultaneously the architectural language and its foremost type of building. Corporate architects could not.

We understand, then, why Bunshaft's formalist defense completely avoids the issue of building types and also why Graham concedes the negative urban effects of freestanding monoliths without questioning their presence or functions; why, in fact, he dissolves objections to the skyscraper's program into a technocratic ideology about the physical "building of cities." We can imagine younger architects responding to Graham that suburban houses for the rich are distinctly less harmful than crowding the world with office buildings, even though they may be just as inane for society and the collective welfare.

Tigerman's combined reference to Vietnam and Las Vegas is more perplexing. First, the barrenness and brutal antiurbanism of International Style skyscrapers had capitalist sponsors. A government fully identified with capitalist interests was waging a savage war against Vietnam, and losing it. It was easy to defy the whole by challenging its parts. Metonymy was a major rhetorical recourse, not of architecture only but of most disciplinary challenges in the 1960s.

An exhausted International Style continued clothing the same tall boxes of capitalist architecture with eclectic detail. For some revisionists (such as the New York Five), opposition meant a search for general architectural principles and a return to a truthful form of modernism. For most architects, it was imperative to find a new kind of urbanism. Many elite designers of the postmodern phase—including Graves, Eisenman, Stern, Tigerman, Venturi, and Scott Brown—started their careers with research into new types of urban housing and planning.

As we have seen, urban renewal was a more proximate factor of architects' dissent than the looks of corporate architecture. Black insurrections responded to segregation and displacement, not primarily to the housing provided, which was always too scarce. Yet the different appearance of public projects accentuated the stigmatizing power of segregated housing, rendered unlivable by lack of maintenance, vandalism, and tenants' problems.

While few architects mistook the public "high rise" for the ghetto, several younger ones discovered architecture's social dimension through their work with lower-class communities threatened by urban renewal.^[11] This

moved them further away from social engineering ideas and closer to conceptions of housing and planning despised by the International Style.^[12] For Tigerman, the 1960s were the turning point:

[It was] the first time I saw a visceral, poignant human connection that would have an architectural implication. . . . The social view was obviously intrinsic to the modernism of Europe in the Teens and the Twenties, but never in America. Because I was teaching and working for the group that Saul Alinsky had put together, a black group on the South Side that was fighting the University of Chicago and the city, and because I was working in Bangladesh, and East Pakistan was on its way to a revolution . . . all these things conspired to subvert the way I had been trained as an architect. . . . At Yale there was nothing that collapsed the distance between an architect and his or her work. What we learned was "Architecture" with a capital A.

This is where Venturi and Las Vegas come in.

The "populist" challengers were not naive about consumer culture. But in order to reject the urban uses of "high" architectural language, they had to find something to put in its place. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour's Learning from Las Vegas was therefore serious research in architectural form . It was followed by the exhibit "Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City" and the unpublished Learning from Levittown . Scott Brown has explained many times that the research was, first, about trying to extend architectural services to "taste cultures" that have nothing to do with architects' work or upon which it is imposed. Second, it was about analyzing the ugly and ubiquitous cityscapes of America, not to glorify the "ruthless shlock of casino culture," as has been written, but to learn what was architecturally worth preserving—for instance in South Street, Philadelphia, where a low-income black community, assisted by Scott Brown, was fighting a freeway. Third, the objective was to erase the barriers between "high" and populist vocabularies and symbols to make a modern architecture, which the Venturis conceive unremittingly as an art of its time. They and many "populist" followers understood both the research and the challenge as exercises in cultural humility; Scott Brown asked rhetorically in a reply to Kenneth Frampton: "Why must architects continue to believe that when 'the masses' are 'educated' they'll want what architects want? I distrust the presumption behind the social critique that a society which gives freer rein to its architects and planners will find its life improved."^[13]

Critics from both the left and the right criticized postmodern "populism" from the vantage point that sees architecture as uncompromised art. But while a conservative such as Hilton Kramer defended the established "high" art of modernism, a leftist such as Frampton inveighed against

"populist" notions in the name of "critical" architecture, the idea that architecture must sever its ties to (capitalist) modernization.

Frampton had summoned architects to reject the bulldozing, "tabula rasa tendency" of modernism and to divorce architecture from modernization. "The capacity of the body to read the environment in terms other than those of sight alone" is the public's ability that architecture needs in order to develop its full potential. Critical architects must heed the tactile and tectonic principles of architecture and hold them above the scenographic dimension. An architecture of "critical regionalism" thus opposes "the rhetorical techniques and images of advertising," from which the "populists" were borrowing architectural purpose. "The communicative or instrumental sign," Frampton warned, "seeks to evoke . . . the sublimation of a desire for direct experience through the provision of information."^[14] In fact, Frampton's idea of critical architecture returns to an ideological concentration on the aesthetic and semiotic properties immanent in single architectural objects, as if they were by themselves capable of reversing the effects of modernization. The effect is to render the real social implications of building even more opaque.

Ironically, a most representative illustration of the divergent understandings of architecture's functions comes from two traditional postmodernists: One is Robert Stern; the other, the influential European "theoretician" Leon Krier, bases his critique of modernism on the counterutopian vision of a classic preindustrial city that never existed.^[15] The object of their disagreement is the urban-renewal plan for a public-housing complex commissioned from Charles Moore's firm. To Krier, Whitman Village is just "a kind of nostalgic suburban collage": "It was the ideal of CIAM to build buildings in the park . . . whereas if you want to make an urban composition that has some complexity, you need . . . the relationship between public and private, you need big collective buildings in relation to private buildings, and so on." Stern's counterattack looks beyond buildings and composition:

You deny not only the American suburb, but also all those parts of cities you admire that don't conform to your view. . . . This is public housing made to look like rich man's housing; it is not made to look like "existence minimum" even though it is.  . . . Moore has picked up the thread of making cheap housing in the image of luxury housing—a thread, like so many others, which was thrown out in the revolution of the '20s.^[16]

Stern falls for the illusion that class can be spirited away, but he understands that people sandwiched between a railroad and a highway do not need any more stigmatizing physical signs than those. Krier completely

ignores both class and race, not least the need for cheap housing in Huntington, New York. In his abhorrence of modernism, he refuses to acknowledge that, in the early 1970s, the likely alternatives to Whitman Village were either bleak modernist towers or nothing.

The final word, however, belongs to Cesar Pelli. In the same debate, he accurately observes that architects are affected by "how good the architecture is, regardless of how good it is for people, regardless of how good it is in terms of signification." At the end of the 1970s, the protagonists of postmodern revisionism were retreating toward the traditional ideology of architecture: What one object is (or looks like) reaches universal significance by its excellence—or by its connection to the ideas of beautiful form and truthful expression. In 1977, for the second edition of his pathbreaking Complexity and Contradiction , Robert Venturi wrote the usual modest rejection of architectural totalities: "The architect's ever diminishing power and his growing ineffectualness in shaping the whole environment can perhaps be reversed, ironically, by narrowing his concerns and concentrating on his own job." But, astonishingly, he concludes: "Perhaps then relationships and power will take care of themselves."^[17]

Should architects accept a limiting program in a project with social merit or refuse to compromise their architectural principles? And, having chosen practice over theory, whom should they try to please—the users or themselves—when programs are always determined by clients? Robert Stern argues forcefully for pleasing the client and (hopefully speaking) the user, an attitude that avant-garde architects in the European mode consider the worst sin of uncritical postmodernism: "We are not in the business of educating or transforming human nature. We are in the business of responding to the human condition. We are not reformers or revolutionaries. I don't think that is cynical at all. I think it is much more cynical to say, screw it; they'll understand eventually what it is."^[18]

In the careers of ambitious architects, the idea of trying to serve differentiated publics of modest means tends to last for a limited time. As the example of Moore's Whitman Village illustrated, the programs offered to socially responsible architects are limiting, their possibilities and their qualities often insulting to those they are meant to serve. They are easy commissions to discard once greener pastures have opened up. Then, when the main choice is among commissions that are for the exclusive use of the rich (like private houses), or that tend to be used much more frequently by the upper-middle strata than by others (like museums, theaters, or the much-desired commissions in prestigious universities), or that are intended to make their owners rich (like most commercial and developers' build-

ings), architectural discourse logically turns once again exclusively upon itself and upon the intrinsic virtue of its creations.

The postmodern challenge in architecture started with nonacademic and nonspecialist aspirations. For all architects, the new revisionist concern with the plastic and formal aspects of architecture defied attempts to "scientificize" it and reduce it to construction systems. The political activism of the 1960s merged with the architectural criticism of corporate modernism, going against both its style and its favored building types. The early phase of postmodernism harbored hopes of developing a different type of urbanism and significant public commissions. The hopes floundered in the recession of the 1970s and disappeared in the political reaction of the 1980s. The issues of "scenographic" versus "architectonic" value, "historicism" versus "modernism," "signification" versus "craftsmanship" may still be infused with rhetorical fervor, but, to repeat Rob Quigley's diagnosis, "the laypeople couldn't care less what architects think."

By the late 1970s the modern/postmodern debate in American architecture returned to the aesthetic and business components of the professional ideology and ended there. Retrospectively, many elite designers think it was "all only about style." A curious continuity is thereby implied between what modernism became in the United States and its recent revision, since style is architecture's only hallmark in the absence of new programs. For Joseph Esherick, protected against the International Style's excesses by both Bay Area regionalism and his own sense of craftsmanship, "modernism in architecture is a lot of different things, but the attack was on it as a style. . . . That wasn't the issue to begin with, but it was inevitable that postmodernism become a style because it was in those terms that the battle got joined in the first place." Let us consider how some of the protagonists now see the battle and the battlefield.

The Return to Architectural Discourse

What elite architects say about the transition to (or through) postmodernism focuses on three interrelated matters. First is the place of modernism in the evolution of architecture, on which place notions of continuity or discontinuity depend. Second is the focus on formal freedom and the question of appropriate sources for a contemporary architecture, from which derives the consistency, or the diversity, of architectural vocabularies. Third is the problem of controlling diversity, which entails the question of "sce-

nographic" versus "tectonic" principles or its proxy—applied signs (or decoration) versus structural and technological aspects of architecture.

Much of the academic debate still centers on how the European Modern Movement became the American International Style and incorporates questions that architects asked in Europe soon after World War II. To a revisionist movement that tends to concern itself increasingly with form, the movement's contrast with Europe before and after the war seems stark. It appears, in particular, that no other version of the Modern Movement than one reduced to architectural—hence professional—discourse may ever have crossed the Atlantic.

In the evolution of architectural taste, no other architect practicing in the United States has played as important a part and for as long as Philip Johnson has. No one doubts that the set of modernist rules that he and Henry Russell Hitchcock brought to New York in 1932 was already divorced from the collective aspirations of Europe in the 1920s. Johnson doubts it least of all. Divorcing aesthetics from politics was a conscious and deliberate attempt on his part to reconstruct the traditional ideology of architecture. Johnson says it was imperative for him to return "the conception of [architecture] as an art and whether [it] looks good or not" to the forefront; he claims to have modeled his attitude on Mies: "There were all those who didn't like Mies because he wasn't an architect who did housing, and he said, 'Well, you give the workers some more money and we can build them some wonderful housing.' Marvelous answer. It undercut all the bleeding hearts."^[19] The faith and excitement Johnson says he felt in 1932 were definitely about architecture, not social democracy. Yet the period impressed upon him, the aesthete and arbiter of taste, a specific kind of architectural morality: "I cannot free myself from starting designs with the program as outlined by me or my clients. I know that other periods have begun with shapes and only later shoehorned the uses into the shapes. I am too 'modern,' too puritan for pure form. I am, in spite of speeches to the contrary, a functionalist; but perhaps, in contradiction, also an eclectic."^[20]

With the perspective of age and historical erudition, Johnson considers that defining clear phases of architectural change, as he once tried to do, is problematic. The traditional emphasis on the history of forms has the merit of simplifying the problem. If one takes the customary characterization of European modernism as an ideological and political movement, Johnson says, then the International Style was ending in 1932, but he could not have known it. He knew, however, that only the epigones took as prescriptions stylistic principles that the masters felt free to apply as they

pleased. Now, he sees the aesthetics of the decade 1922–32 as just one polemical episode of antihistoricism that turned dogmatic: "postmodernism is really . . . legitimizing eclecticism, which is paradoxically essentially pre-Modern Movement."^[21]

Johnson the postmodernist thus reconstructs a formal continuity longer than Bunshaft's. For if architectural reformism begins in romantic responses to the industrial revolution, the modernist style belongs to the longue durée of Western architectural history. This is also the stance of traditional postmodernists like Stern, Beeby, or Stuart Cohen or eclectics like Cesar Pelli. Modern architecture is for them the Western architecture that emerged after the Gothic; it is the whole architectural corpus produced by specialized designers of buildings.^[22] From the "long" perspective, postmodernism, as Cohen says, was "reentering architecture."

Johnson the modernist indirectly introduces the focus on formal freedom and diversity. Unwilling to dismiss so easily a stylistic revolution that he promoted, he issued in 1977 a verdict about the work of Venturi and Stern applied many times since then to his own skyscrapers: nothing new in plan or section, "essentially coating modern architectural space with a new dress." In fact, Johnson understood early on that postmodernism justified not only "a style for each job" but also the license to experiment, at least in surface, with form and applied ornament. This was his reading of Venturi's plea for "decorated sheds," though Johnson was not about to coat them with "symbols of the ordinary."^[23]

Among the elite practitioners who are now in their early or mid-fifties, all except Peter Eisenman recognize that the postmodern challenge, even stripped of its social aspirations, gave them three things: a new concern with context, a concern for creating single architectural objects as identifiable "places," and, above all, the freedom to choose formal sources from the entire repertory of architecture. Within the latter, the radical, heroic phase of European modernism can be given the ordinary place of one more historical source. Architects who still consider themselves modernists simply choose that source; they too welcomed postmodernism as a movement of ideas in Venturi's theoretical work.

Charles Gwathmey (whom Vincent Scully describes as "unreconstructedly International Style") is a good example:^[24] "Learning the lessons of history, for a student from the late fifties and sixties who was in the throes of dogmatic modernism, . . . forced us to a critical reevaluation of why we did things. The postmodern debate was confrontational, motivational. For us, it confirmed our commitment to cubism, to abstraction, to principles that are insistently pure." Logically, since Gwathmey confirmed his stylistic

convictions in the debate, he is severe with the work of eclectic historicists. Like Esherick, however, he attacks them mainly on the grounds of craftsmanship and "tectonics," accusing them of having a "sloppy" attitude toward detail and materials. In fact, many architects who, like Gerald Horn or Rob Quigley, bear no grudge against historicist or "pop" allusions (and may even contemplate using them at times) complain about the indirect effects of postmodernism: Architects tend to neglect real technical improvements, and manufacturers tend to concentrate on untested cosmetic innovations, such as the ubiquitous sheets of glass-thin granite.

The fear and resentment here are not based on style but on its implications. The victory of developers' "scenographies" accompanies the reduction in the expected life of an office building from a hundred to perhaps thirty years. The architectural historian Leland Roth comments that "the ethic in building today seems to be 'Don't build anything that lasts beyond the depreciation period allowed by the IRS.'" And another historian echoes the structural concerns of the architects I interviewed: "Unless you use the same materials and methods, if you try to mimic the style of McKim Meade and White [the great Beaux-Arts turn-of-the-century firm], you might be giving your client a headache in twenty years."^[25]

For Craig Hodgetts, the issue of architectural vocabulary is profound. He believes that architectural expression is, first of all, technological: using the technologies that are available in novel ways and exploring their aesthetic and symbolic capability, in the tradition of the Modern Movement. In the 1970s, Hodgetts was exploring social architecture (industrial park modules, community centers, youth centers, mobile theaters) in a "high-tech" vocabulary. He implies that the emergence and commercial success of traditional postmodernism may have cost him his career: It "ruined something that was an important way of working to me. There were no clients, simply no one in the United States. That's why Richard Rogers [the architect of the Beaubourg in Paris and Lloyd's in London] is still not built here, because we have a society that is extremely insecure about its lineage."

Traditional postmodernists like Stern, Beeby, Graves, Cohen, and (most ideological of all) the "theoretician" Leon Krier, or the planners Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, curiously echo some of the modernists' architectural determinism. Implying once again that cultural objects may have the power to reshape lived culture, they hope to prepare "a cultural resynthesis," or even a regeneration of cities and suburbs, by giving the past a physical presence.

The elite architects who have come out of the International Style opting

for an abstract or a "technological" idiom see postmodern traditionalism as pure nostalgia for a past that never existed. In what is now a cliché, they say it is "the architecture of Reaganism." Aware that their own modernism is just another style in a chaotic plurality, they see in this plurality the true expression of the Zeitgeist . Frank Gehry puts it this way:

I would say, "Gee, I'm of our time, I'm using chain-link and corrugated because it's a time of belt-tightening and unpretentiousness." Well, it isn't. It is a time of Reagan and Michael Graves, so I don't know what's of our time. That is my interpretation of the present, and Michael is making his, . . . and they both can coexist at this time. That's the present , that they can both coexist and that's the interesting thing, finally.

Less predictable than Gwathmey's, Hodgetts's, or Gehry's is Venturi's condemnation of traditional postmodernism. In the 1982 Walter Gropius Lecture at Harvard, he began observing that traditional, or historicist, postmodernism, as "the major manifestation of the new symbolism," had not achieved authentic diversity. Not only had it seldom drawn from both "high art and Pop—Scarlatti and the Beatles": too often, it had copied the past instead of engaging it in reflexive dialogue. Thus, by lack of irony, postmodernism had failed to illuminate the provisional present. Worse yet, these unnamed postmodernists "have substituted for the largely irrelevant universal vocabulary of heroic industrialism another largely irrelevant universal vocabulary—that of parvenu Classicism with, in its American manifestation, a dash of Deco and a whiff of Ledoux. . . . [This] transition . . . manifests architects' continuing formalist predilection for simplification. " In an indictment reminiscent of Frampton's warning to him against the rhetorical strategies of advertising, Venturi diagnoses the co-optation of the postmodern challenge: "Formal simplicity and symbolic consistency make architecture easy to identify, name, copy, learn, teach, promote, publicize, publish, draw, and exhibit."^[26]

Today, architects are bitter about what Venturi's emphasis on reproducible architectural discourse was only hinting at: It is easier for the press to make "stars" when their style is identifiable by the broad public, easier still when it shows consistency and can be readily appreciated. Architectural work that lends itself easily to reproduction and diffusion contrives to make an oeuvre out of single buildings scattered all over the world. This coherent existence "on paper" is an ultimate blow to the notion of architecture as organizer of the human environment.

Cesar Pelli, erasing the great majority of architects from view, explains that the fame of the architect and the constitution of "signed" oeuvres require eclecticism: "No architect worth his salt is going to say 'O.K., I am

going to design background buildings that nobody will notice.' We don't have anonymous architecture anymore; there are no anonymous architects. They all have names and they want their names known. Also, that's just about the only way today to get new work."^[27] The statement could not be clearer: Architecture and individual architects that clamor for attention are both easier to sell .

If architects' views of the postmodern shift is to be characterized by one statement, it should be that they look with reluctance at the formal and stylistic freedom they have acquired. Autonomy within the discursive field is undoubtedly much greater than in the early 1960s. Yet the elite architects who have lived the generational challenge of the 1960s are aware that the fame and glamor of a few do not compensate for the profession's weakness or its strategic withdrawal into discourse. The glamor, the seductive exemplars, and the heated discourse attract a growing number of recruits to a perennially weak profession that has trouble guaranteeing them a future. The freedom to imagine and conceive appears to have been paid with irrelevance and exacerbated professional segmentation.

Even the most famous of architects cannot be quite sure that their work is followed by anyone. Their manufactured charisma, vested in objects that may not last, sounds hollow. The temptation is therefore great to reactivate the old ideology: Perhaps as critiques, perhaps as sources of cultural change, objects of art can transcend the social relations in which they are born.

In the next two chapters, I turn to a broader roster of architects and to a more general reconstruction of the postmodern transition. To close this analysis of personal accounts, let us hear a voice very far from the "star system," definitely of the professional elite, yet outside the main currents of architectural discourse. Justifying the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects that he had just received in 1989, Joseph Esherick suggests why, beyond modernism and postmodernism, architecture may matter still:

[This] is an award that goes to a bunch of ideas and attitudes rather than to any individual. It recognizes ideas that exist all over this country and a lot of unrecognized people who are, for one thing, serious . I think they have a traditional view of architecture: It is just automatically required that it should meet all of the technical demands; but beyond that, beauty is appropriate , and I think architecture ought to make you feel better. It ought to leave people the opportunity of being, doing whatever it is they want to do rather than fit people into a system or a style. . . . I don't think it should necessarily control social requirements or make people feel better for what it does; it should never get in the way . . . . The ideal piece of architecture to my mind is one that you don't see.

Chapter Seven—
Mapping a Paradigm's Demise:
The View from a Symbolic Reward System

Established professions, academic disciplines, and other organized forms of cultural production periodically bestow honors and distinctions upon some of their members. These annual events represent more than just rituals that call the attention of specialist audiences and the interested public to the names of distinguished individuals. They are exercises of autonomous authority, by which the symbolic gatekeepers of each specialized field try to preempt the judgment of outsiders with their own.

Even in the most insulated fields, producers of culture seldom hold the ultimate "purse strings." Symbolic rewards are therefore easier for them to control than material ones. If, as is often assumed, lack of control over material resources compromises creative freedom, symbolic rewards administered by creators themselves should, in contrast, encourage innovation. However, symbolic gatekeepers have their own personal standing and ideological positions to defend.

How the elites of a field deal with innovation may test their objectivity, but the autonomy of symbolic rewards systems resides elsewhere. Organized producers of culture affirm the superiority of their judgments by striving to establish a "feedback link" between that which they do control and that which they do not. The symbolic rewards that elites grant to their colleagues are intended to impress the elites' judgments on relevant outsiders and to make the acquisition of material rewards more likely. In turn, achievements that bring fortune and public fame are reinterpreted in terms of a field's specialized discourse so as to bring more symbolic recognition.

Both strands in this feedback link reinforce the elite position of the symbolic gatekeepers.

If the qualities that experts choose to reward appear indifferent or undesirable to the outsiders who hold the purse strings, the feedback link obviously fails, and failure is endemic in architecture because the profession's attachment to aesthetic values is often at odds with what clients want most—service and commodity. The symbolic rewards that the profession autonomously grants to itself matter only to special kinds of clients. Thom Mayne of Morphosis, a much-awarded Los Angeles firm, thinks that the clients who plan to use the building themselves are the only ones who care. "With the somewhat shaky clients who are not all that secure . . . they have already spent much too much time and too much money, all this investment on a young architect that nobody knows. . . . You bring them the AIA award, the chapter, the national, PA , all the awards, and they feel they have made the right choice and they might make it again." From the point of view of business, awards and recognition by user groups (such as hospitals or school boards) or specialized user-oriented publications (for instance, Health Facilities Management ) are just as important. In fact, they are more likely to bring new commissions.

Yet, for the design elite constituted by official recognition, the profession's own symbolic rewards are obviously important, and they are also important to any architect who aspires to participate in the making of architectural discourse.^[1] Both elites and followers share the feeling that no one understands architecture, or no one cares. The symbolic rewards administered by the profession thereby acquire the aspect of consolation prizes: Like other specialists engaged in esoteric pursuits, architects distribute them to one another to reaffirm the importance of what they do.

Regardless of how outsiders view them, symbolic rewards express the internal dynamics of specialized fields. In a process in which specialists address other specialists, honors and awards embody the models and standards that the field's elites (legitimizing their judgment by their position) want to encourage or uphold. But as standards change, so do the honors and awards that are administered. The evolution of symbolic rewards reflects what constitutes good work, legitimate innovation, and acceptable challenges to cultural authority in the eyes of the symbolic gatekeepers.

Thus, professional awards are both an official badge of approval and a significant indicator of change in a profession's discourse. But we must not forget that awards—like the slick architectural magazines that publish them and other noted buildings—mystify both the collaborative aspects of architectural work and its harshly competitive reality.^[2] Design awards help to

perpetuate not only the profession's attachment to its artistic identity but also the charismatic ideology of single authorship.

This chapter and the next examine a system of adjudication for symbolic rewards in American architecture over the years 1966–85. In a period that saw the rise and the normalization of postmodern revisionism, the judges' responses to the work of their peers represented deliberate attempts to influence the evolution of architectural discourse. These responses are the data on which I base my interpretation of the shift in architecture.

The Annual Design Awards of Progressive Architecture

The source of my data is the annual awards program for architectural design of a professional magazine, Progressive Architecture (PA , in the profession's lingo). It is a fertile source for a number of reasons.

First, the program's declared intention is to identify the major trends in design for the year ahead. The January awards issue is an obvious boost for the journal's wide readership.^[3] According to the editor, it is "eagerly awaited by the American architectural community. Even the cynics . . . pounce upon a copy to see who among their colleagues was premiated, to comment upon and to criticize the choices, to examine them (or scoff at them) for indication of current trends."^[4] Predictably, the editors believe in the program's efficacy, but so do many others in the profession. In 1967, for instance, at the beginning of postmodernism's ascendance, one judge worried in this way about the three design awards (out of nineteen) given to Venturi and Rauch: "This magazine is going to be coming out in January and every kid is going to be turning the pages and saying, 'Wow! this is it this year!' You'll see half-moons swinging all over the place!"^[5]

Second, the program has become a professional institution in its own right. In the thirty-five years since it started, 224 renowned judges "have reviewed some 26,000 submissions and chosen 849 for recognition."^[6] In 1980, the medal of the American Institute of Architects recognized PA 's design awards as "the catalyzer of the best talent and work in this country for years, producing a lively contest between—and a valid platform for—both young and older professionals to test their ideas."^[7]

Being a judge is an honor that the most famous architects are eager to list on their résumés. Ceasar Pelli, former dean of the Yale School of Architecture and twice a juror in the period under study, sees the design awards as "the only continuing program of architectural criticism . . . done by top level architects of the selected work of their peers."^[8]

Every year brings numerous submissions that are easily recognized as those from the most prestigious names in architecture. Rob Quigley, who was a judge in 1987, describes the screening process:

There are 700 projects in front of you [in fact, 790 for that year in Architectural Design alone], and the quality level is incredibly high. In the first ten minutes projects by famous architects go on the floor . . . literally on the floor because you have them all on a big table and you start discarding and you know you are throwing Philip Johnson's and Michael Graves's work on the floor. . . . Of course they all submit; they see a PA award as enormously prestigious; they all want that sanction from the community of architects. Michael Graves submitted seven projects for one award.

Third, the PA awards program illustrates one profession's effort to establish a feedback link between symbolic and material rewards; its goal is "to recognize the most promising architecture before construction, thus supporting forward-looking schemes when they are most vulnerable to compromise."^[9] The juries give awards to "paper architecture" (schemes, renderings, plans, and sometimes models with accompanying text). Yet the submissions must be for real clients, even if still in the project stage. The candidates are supposedly close enough to a real commission to have developed fairly complete schemes for their probable client. The program transforms this probability into a symbolic reward, by which it seeks to insure both the commission and the integrity of the design.

Finally, and most important from my point of view, PA is the only journal that accompanies iconographic presentations with excerpts of the judges' debates. Caring not to offend anyone, the sanitized transcripts do not reproduce either the most heated exchanges or the actual dynamics of the jury. Still, they tell us a great deal. The excerpts convey the editorial staff's opinion of what was important in the discussions, which judges dominated the proceedings, and what trends are represented in the awarded projects. PA 's Annual Design Awards Program can therefore be seen as a complex set of messages that professional elites send to their peers and followers with the important mediation of the magazine's editorial staff.

The awards may be pooh-poohed as irrelevant by the designers who do not get them and even by those who get many, like Steven Holl, who says "an award may give you a little push, but it doesn't make a client find the money if he doesn't have it." But Thom Mayne, whose firm first received national attention through PA 's awards, is emphatic in his support:

The first four years . . . we were working out of my own home. Mike [Rotondi, his partner] was working for someone else, I was teaching . . . and the PA awards can be seen as a competition. It is a way of motivating yourself, you know. . . .

Publication is the termination of a project. . . . PA is an incredibly useful program, an opportunity for people who are not gentlemen architects, like we certainly are not, to be there, to establish some sort of presence. . . . For our firm [the awards] did that: they established our presence, period. It's the only way that you get some kind of recognition, that you become known within the profession . (emphasis added)

PA 's editor, John Morris Dixon, who has been making a second career in architect selection committees, invokes the insider's knowledge he has gained to argue that awards influence from within the development of professional careers:

The word of an award seeps through a network. The influence is not direct . . . it wouldn't get you this or that commission; it makes you more likely to appear on a list of possible . . . anything: possible jurors in a competition, possible participants in an invited competition, possible architects for a job. In a committee for architect selection, everyone is asked to write a list of who should be contacted, and then the list is brushed over and boiled down and everyone is asked for qualifications. When [architects] submit qualifications for a job, all those awards are in there. They never leave them out. If they've been on our jury that's never left out either.^[10]

Progressive Architecture's Juries

American architectural magazines do not have the authority of some of their European counterparts or the institutional aura of the American Institute of Architects. The juries and the selection process must give legitimacy to the sponsor rather than the other way around. PA , therefore, chooses its judges for their eminence and their representative positions in the field.

In addition, the editorial staff must hold on to the magazine's readership. Balancing the juries is therefore an important concern: If one year's decisions have been controversial, the editors tend to load the next year's jury in the opposite (or in a different) direction. The authority of the jurors is to some extent on the line, and they tend to respond self-consciously to what they perceive as bias in the previous year's awards. This double balancing may impart a pendular movement in style and type to both the awards and the entries. The contestants, knowing the judges' names through the program's announcement in June, often tailor their submissions to what they assume to be the jury's preferences.

Thus, in a time of growing eclecticism, the choices of both PA jurors and editors may tacitly induce a yearly pattern of action and reaction. Yet,

as we shall see, the turning points in the PA awards juries correspond faithfully to turning points in the profession's discourse.

The editors' concerns with readership and with professional legitimacy command the basic composition of the juries, while the magazine's "trendiness" means that the editors will try hard to represent the leading edge of architectural discourse. John Morris Dixon says that the only selection rules are serious reputation and regional balance. Yet a former member of the editorial staff insists that the magazine adopted parameters that are not merely geographic, but stylistic and technical as well: no more than two "avant-garde" designers, as long as they were well known, and always one juror to represent concern with social issues, user needs, or technical solutions. Geographic spread used "to mean a West Coast architect, until the Californians became too 'avant-garde.'" Then balance had to be sought elsewhere, and such questions as "Does anyone know somebody in Arizona?" started popping up at editorial board meetings.^[11]

The expert in technology is often an engineer, as if in recognition that few architects are competent to judge complex technological issues on their own. Similarly, it was acknowledged after 1971 that architecture and planning have taken separate paths; a team of two specialists was invited thereafter to judge the entries in urban design and planning. Since 1974, the eight-member jury has consisted of three teams: four judges in the most numerous category of architectural design, two each in urban design and in the new category of "research." After a first day of screening, the jury comes together in the last day to discuss each team's nominees. Architectural design invariably elicits the most disagreement.

The juries' debates provide a direct insight into the making of architectural discourse. The choice of jurors, the jurors' choice of winners, and the editorial staff's choice of comments worth recording give us, over the years, a microcosmic view of the recent history of American architecture, built or unbuilt. Although the entries give substance to the symbolic gatekeepers' reflections and delimit their range of choices, the rejected entries (which would be the architectural historian's choice object of study) are unfortunately not available for analysis. For the sociologist, the juries themselves, in their capacity as symbolic gatekeepers, are the real protagonists of the awards rituals.

Analysis of their debates confirms, first of all, one theoretical assumption: Judgments of architectural quality are inseparable from normative conceptions of the architect's social role and from realistic concerns with practice. From 1966 to 1985, one revisionist tendency emphasized archi-

tectural aesthetics abstracted from program and function. Yet even that exclusive emphasis on the autonomous evolution of form may be construed as a strategic response to the practical circumstances of the profession (see Appendix).

The years 1966–85 may be considered a period when one paradigm was destroyed but no other rose to take its place. My analysis starts in 1966, the year that Robert Venturi published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture , his call to reject a frozen and reductive modernism. I look at this beginning in the first section. In the second, I explain the importance of the private house in the juries' debates. I use it, in the third, as a tool for mapping the emergence of different revisionist trends.

The Onset of Revisionism

When the awards program started in 1954, the hegemony of the International Style seemed assured. In the early years, the juries "talked a lot about 'good design' and 'work that could be truly called progressive,' but they rarely spelled out exactly what they meant; it was assumed that anyone would know what was meant and that any explanation or justification of the jury's choices would be superfluous."^[12] The first PA First Award went to the Back Bay Center in Boston, a multiuse development by an "all star" team that included Walter Gropius's Architects Collaborative, Pietro Belluschi, Carl Koch, and Hugh Stubbins; the project itself was a megalithic expression of urban-renewal modernism. Yet, even then, jurors of impeccable modernist credentials found the ensemble of submissions poor in "gaiety, excitement, fancy."

Three years later, Thomas Creighton, then the editor of PA , noted "an obvious, restless search on the part of many talented people in many parts of the country, for plasticity and an expression which has an emotional, rather than a withdrawn intellectual impact."^[13] Among other "new but backward-thinking movements," he detected a trend (which was to dominate the PA contest during the years 1958–63) toward neoclassical forms and symmetrical compositions.

Even through the lens of a symbolic reward system, even "on paper," modernist hegemony seemed fragile. No sooner was it recognized by the incipient program than it began to be challenged by judges who partook in the "restless search" of the late 1950s. The dissatisfaction of the elites betrayed the profession's seeping discontent with its own interpretation of an imported style.

Ten years later, aesthetics were subsumed under a larger challenge. For John Morris Dixon, PA 's editor since 1972, intellectual and political questioning, which aimed at the core of the profession's identity, rushed an always partial stylistic consensus to its demise. "Good or progressive design is no longer the sole criterion for premiation; in fact, in recent years some juries have seriously questioned whether design, as it is traditionally understood, should even be a criterion for judgment. . . . Now the jury questions even the program, and asks whether a building should happen at all."^[14]

The 1960s and 1970s were years of ferment for much more than just American architecture. Politics energized American culture; multiform attacks spread outward from many centers against all that was taken for granted. The men and women who came of professional age in those years, especially if their own youth or their ties to the university kept them in contact with the student movement, were not likely to remain untouched. On PA 's juries, the men and, since 1974, the women placed among them in response to the feminist movement, also could not ignore what was happening.

Frank Lloyd Wright had died in 1959 and Le Corbusier in 1965; Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were to die in 1969; despite the important presence of Louis Kahn, there was no successor in sight. In 1966, architecture as a cultural force was without leaders and seemingly without direction. In his editorial for the 1966 PA awards issue, Jan Rowan commented: "Dissatisfaction with much of the work currently being done is increasing each year. . . . Different jurors, with different backgrounds, experiences, attitudes and aims make remarks that are becoming repetitively similar; the only change is the increasing intensity of dissatisfaction." For Rowan, the problem was the frustration of architects subjected to "lack of vision and direction on the part of those whom they serve—individual clients, corporate clients, institutional clients, and society at large."^[15] But the 1966 judges diagnosed a different, endogenous disease: "overdesign," the exaggerated display of architectural skill.

Only Charles Bassett, partner in the San Francisco office of Skidmore Owings and Merrill, represented unalloyed International Style aesthetics on the jury. Kevin Roche was the collaborator and successor of Eero Saarinen, known among architects as an early advocate of "a style for each project." Vincent Scully, Yale's charismatic architectural historian, was an early critic of corporate modernism and a supporter of both Louis Kahn's and Venturi's departures from the canon. William Conklin, the designer of the new town of Reston in Virginia, had a strong reputation for sensitivity to context and an early commitment to preservation. Even the jury's engi-

neer, August Komendant, had been for years Louis Kahn's consultant and collaborator.

The reaction against buildings that tried "to knock your eye out" became this jury's consensual criterion, as singled out by Scully: "These winners probably represent on the part of the jury a tendency toward selecting the most modest project , toward urban renewal, toward the working out of a few simple problems. . . . What we're really having here is a movement out of the '50s when monumentality developed."^[16] Kevin Roche, an architect not noted for inconspicuous design, complained that every project was "based on an exercise considerably beyond the needs of the problem," and Bassett joined him in deploring the immaturity of the submissions ("You give a guy a box of sand, and by noon he's got a mountain!"). August Komendant, on his side, implied that "art" is to blame for design without principles: "Architects . . . think architecture is art, but it isn't. There must be guiding principles behind it. So many of these designs are too rich, too soft, without principles. . . . How much Lou Kahn there is, but done so badly!"^[17]

The judges' condemnation of overdesign conveyed their sense of being at the end of an architectural era. Lamenting the exhaustion of inventiveness that marred the submissions, Scully implied that there had been better sorts of monumentality: "When you look at this group . . . the general effect is not sculptural at all, but is a kind of weakening out . . . of gentling out of a lot of the forms that were around a few years ago. . . . We are representing a kind of disgust with [monumentality's] last and sick phases."^[18]

Their preference for modesty, however, did not extend to the designer's role. The charismatic conception of the architect as artist lurks in this unattributed exchange about the Second Award, an alternate urban-renewal scheme designed by Troy West for a Pittsburgh citizen group:

—It has the passion of one man's image.

—A very strong scheme, and therefore gratifying in the abstract sense to the architect. I'm reacting to it as a great building and huge, empty spaces.

—The steps go up, but the building they're going toward goes down, which is really a sensational thing. It's such a great ruin .

—The resultant form has nothing to do with what's going on. It's preconceived from.

—All art is form, and form is the meaning of any work of art. In architecture, all conceptions, all attitudes, all studies in the end are form. . . . You have the embodiment here of a tremendous force, of a terrific and . . . tragic vision of the character of life. It's not a good solution or a bad one. It's a tremendous and moving and stupendous sense of what it is like to be here in the vast city.^[19]

The jury's call to abandon heroic aesthetics appears to proceed from a tightening of formal standards, not from a revision of professional identity. To the five different judges on the jury, architecture seemed to have veered so far toward sculptural grandiloquence and surface innovation that they rejected all formal experiments as trite. Still, they bestowed their First and Second awards to grand and ambitious projects: In Cesar Pelli's and Anthony Lumsden's First Award for a new urban nucleus in the Santa Monica mountains ("the first time I have seen a city which is a building, where the whole community is a building," as one judge put it), the governing ideal is still the total control of the built environment, the creation of whole public spaces through the design of single buildings.

To Scully, a veteran of the battles against the destruction of New Haven by urban renewal, the rejection of modernist planning was political. It was practical for Conklin, who had realized an alternative in Reston. The logical response to isolated monuments was the concern for the urban context apparent in Scully's vague exhortations to "design . . . for the way the street ought to be."^[20] Five years after Jane Jacobs's epoch-making Death and Life of Great American Cities , this group of designers did not have an alternative sense of urban public space to propose against the comprehensive planning derived from the Modern Movement, other than to respect streets that were still there.

The call for restraint in the design of single buildings appears as a moral as much as an architectural plea. Yet caution and restraint did not count for much in the jury's conception of the architect's authority. From 1966 to 1985, the tension between a utopian (or perhaps even a critical) vision of architects' social role and a realistic assessment of their modest capacity for social intervention underlies the debates of PA juries.

The design entries considered by PA 's judges feature different building types. In discussing them, the juries implicitly assign different values to different kinds of architectural practices. This is nowhere clearer than in their responses to the single-family house, which, throughout this period, is a focus of implicit confrontation between the ideology and the practice of architecture.

The House As Double Metaphor

"There are only four cases where an individual house is not embarrassing," Vincent Scully declared in 1966: "(1) if it is a specially useful prototype of a mass urbanistic development; (2) if it does something really important on a street or a square, to teach us something about urban design; (3) if it

represents a breakthrough in plastic imagination, even if it might not be justifiable in terms of a house; or (4) if it is ironic, and thus expresses the human condition."^[21] Scully does not say anything specific about how the single-family house could meet common needs and be beautiful or about technological and economic efficiency. Underlying his criterion of architectural legitimacy, we find, in the following order, references to (1) the classic Deutsche Werkbund concern with Typisierung , the elaboration of standardized prototypes appropriate for mass production;^[22] (2) the emergent emphasis on adjusting single interventions to the urban context; and (3) the architect as creative artist, for whom the private house is a field of experimentation or the medium for an existential statement.

Scully's prescriptions for the architecturally valid house avoid the tension between professional service and art characteristic of the architect's idealized identity. He makes no reference to the profession's obligation to serve a client and a site well but gives equal weight to the potential for affecting the environment on a large scale and the creation of formal or symbolic values. He thus transforms the difficult tension between "commodity" and "delight" into the difference between large-scale problem solving and artistic expression, which may come in any scale.

In deeds and words, Scully had expressed his conviction that the foremost duty of architects is to struggle for the humanization of redevelopment plans, if necessary by working directly for the government.^[23] The implications are different when architects with corporate clients (architects such as Bassett and Roche) deny the architectural legitimacy of the private house. By dismissing small-scale practice from the domain of "important architecture," they restrict the latter to projects that are no less privately owned yet become "public" by their sheer size.

We shall see next how the recognized and the ignored architectural functions of the house fared in the juries' debates. In brief, Scully's emphasis on Typisierung did not seem utopian in the mid-1960s, despite the intensification of the Vietnam War and the domestic consequences it portended; the Housing Act of 1970, for instance, was still ahead. The waning of government support for public housing and the eclipse of large-scale work during the recession of the 1970s would change the juries' notions of what was possible. But it was not economic realism alone that compelled them to readmit the single-family house, on its own merits, as part of "Architecture." Inside the profession, revisionism mounted a multipronged attack against what the elites identified with modernism considered exemplary.

Architectural critics responded, on the one hand, to urban protest, for which stopping urban redevelopment often was an immediate objective. On the other hand, a major revisionist strain asserted the primacy of design and of meaning, for which any building type could be the vehicle. This was a strain identified with theorists (notably, Peter Eisenman at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Affairs) and young architects with strong ideas and small practices.

To illustrate how the house becomes a sign for all the divisions of architecture, let us skip forward to an exchange among the divided judges of 1977:^[24]

Dinkeloo: We have too many houses. If this is architecture, let's forget it.

Hodgetts: The houses have content; at least they have ideas.

Dinkeloo: The individual house has no place in American culture any more.

Hodgetts: Rather than 'no place,' it has a rare place.

Gwathmey: The house has always been a critical reference point in design. It is a complex building. Architects learn by doing them.

Hodgetts: An expensive house can afford to be an important benchmark. They should be as idiosyncratic as possible.

Gwathmey: We are tending to make value judgments about houses that we don't make about other building types.^[25]

So why does this particular building type serve as lightning rod for the different values held by divided professional elites?

A preliminary consideration is that the majority of PA 's architectural entries almost always consists of private houses. Because residential commissions represent a good part of the practice of small and beginning firms, the private house is a good symbol of the artisan side of architectural work.^[26] In the juries' debates the single-family house becomes a metaphor for each side in the antinomies of professional practice. In this sense, the house is an ideological proxy for the opposition between the rationalization of professional work in large firms and large projects, on the one hand, and the practice of architecture as a craft and perhaps an art, on the other hand. As a symbol for the organization of architectural work, the house metaphorically sums up a chain of implicit oppositions. These extend from the substantive opposition between "corporate" and "artisan" forms of practice to much larger ideological antinomies: art and business, traditional and modern organization of production, fantasy and discipline, frivolity and seriousness. This is not all, however.

Expensive private houses are an obvious symbol of the architect's dependence on wealthy individuals. Taken as metaphor for a subordinate

and trivial professional role, the house governs a different set of ideological oppositions, best summed up by the contrast between house and housing. This set counterposes the socially inconsequential design of single objects to the comprehensive shaping of built environments; individualistic self-expression to collective responsibilities; the private to the public dimension of architecture; architecture as art to architecture as service to society; and luxury to need.

As a metaphor for both actual practice and ideal social role, the house generates two different sets of semantic oppositions. The judges must evaluate program , which embodies the clients' mandate, and design , in which architects manifest their competence and imagination. Their evaluations entangle the two semantic sets. Displacing terms and meanings from one large metaphor to the other, the judges' emphasis moves back and forth from program to design, according, no doubt, to the relative quality of different types of submissions but also to the ideological position the judges defend.

By keeping the building type constant, my focus on the single-family house allows a clearer view of the contending positions in a self-transforming professional discourse. The juries start with a technocratic notion of social responsibility, expressed in a modernist bias toward large-scale work. While they do not critique urban-renewal projects directly (in part because exemplars seldom reach PA 's contest), their critique appears indirectly in the revaluation of the private house. It proceeds from two main sources: One is the priority accorded to design over program, thus overriding the service aspects and the social function of architecture; the other is a concern with preservation, opposed by definition to the wholesale demolition of the existing stock of buildings. In both cases, as one critic notes, architectural discourse tends to confuse "disalienated" objects (buildings that have been saved from the ordinary fate of for-profit construction—ugliness or sterile functionality—by either inventive design or preservation and reuse) with the utopian disalienation of the social relations housed in these buildings.^[27]

The Private House As a Barometer of Change

In the first years of the period 1966–85, few juries were interested in private houses. Then, in the 1967 PA awards, postmodernism made a strong appearance in Robert Venturi's "architecture of allusion" and in the presence of Charles Moore, another leader of the movement, among the judges. Musing over Venturi and Rauch's four submissions, the planner

David Crane summed up (with unwarranted optimism) this jury's ecumenicism: "I am interested in the fact that in the next twenty years we are going to build as many cities as we have already built. Someone like Venturi is not interested in that; he is interested in individual, particular, special things. But I agree . . . that architecture really is bigger than either my architecture or Venturi's; it's a more inclusive thing ."^[28] The inclusive line thus reconciled the design of single architectural objects with that of whole environments. In 1968, the judges' twelve awards (among which were one house, a church, a chapel, and a high school addition) appeared to continue the same line. And yet, though much had happened between the lines in 1968, the judges contradicted the professional diversity recognized by the awards by their unanimous endorsement of large-scale projects as architecturally superior.

Lawrence Anderson, dean of Architecture and Planning at M.I.T., identified large projects with progress. Since the future of materials development resided in industrialized construction, the individual house was not important to him, "not on the technical end, anyway." For the planner Richard Dober, "a multi-client aspect" explained the higher quality of large-scale work, and SOM's engineer Fazlur Kahn, the brilliant designer of the type of structure that supported the tallest buildings in the world, concurred: "The large projects seem almost always to be more rational . . . . One of the reasons . . . is because large projects involve more people and bring in other disciplines as a total team." The architect Gunnar Birkerts, known for his industrial, corporate, and institutional practice, underlined that the new and challenging problems posed by large-scale projects were "really purifying for our profession." Finally, Romualdo Giurgola, the noted architect and educator who had come from Rome to study with Louis Kahn, began by observing that the issue was not size but meeting "the real needs of today," yet he immediately corrected himself. Because architects could not take large design projects as "a personal exercise," the greater discipline required by these projects made them architecturally superior: "A more genuine architectural language has always been set by projects of a comprehensive nature that have influenced the character of smaller ones."^[29]

The 1968 jury had many large institutional projects and two remarkably innovative experiments in low-cost housing from which to choose. Their bias, which can easily be stretched to include corporate modernism, appears not in the nature of the awards but in the slippage in the emphasis of architectural meaning: from socially responsible large projects to the virtues of large scale per se. This slippage associates design discipline with

"multiclient" and "multispecialist" teams, emphasizing both technical innovations that require economies of scale and aesthetics that can be generalized across building sizes. Conversely, the small-scale projects are denounced—in Birkerts' words, for extreme "form-consciousness" that leads to the fashionable monotony of sloped roofs and diagonal lines. "The older guys [meaning more established architects] did not go for it, because they have a chance to play around with the real stuff, and big things too."^[30]

The attribution of intrinsic superiority to large-scale work reproduces the notions of architectural significance reflected in the established professional hierarchy and in accepted career patterns. The 1968 judges did insist that the individual house should be a "laboratory for experimentation," but this seems no more than a cliché, belied by the notion that large-scale work (and, indirectly, the program) is the primary generator of innovation. In successive years, as the PA editors begin to include the revisionist representatives of small "idea firms," the inclusion of what might be called "boutique architecture" becomes less of a token gesture.

In 1970, two architects of equivalent though antithetical fame—Robert Venturi and Bruce Graham of SOM-Chicago, the architect of the Hancock and Sears skyscrapers—pick up the issue of the single-family house. Venturi places it neatly on the artisan side of architectural practice:

On one level, this kind of house is insignificant and is not responding to the social crisis. But in a funny kind of way you solve problems by indirect routes, and who can say that the little house for the rich man is not one of them. Architects don't get many research grants as yet and especially for a young man who is lucky enough to have a rich uncle, it's a fine opportunity for experimenting. . . . I think the architect is essentially a craftsman who can do what the society allows him to do . . . . Thank goodness there's an opportunity for the young architect who does not want to go immediately into an organization to do his individualistic thing!

Graham's response mixes and displaces meanings from the two metaphorical sets:

You could use [a house] as an experiment with the technical tools. For instance, if someone has designed an expensive prefabricated house, it would be very relevant. It also gives you the opportunity to create new spaces, a kind of poetry, an experiment with a new way of life. A lot of people resent this since it implies that their present way of living isn't so good. . . . I am not really interested in anyone's love affairs, therefore I'm not interested in a house that becomes too personal—then it's not really for others to discuss. I think it has always been true that great houses have had social impact . . . . Breuer's early houses . . . were all related to one another so that they became a sequential group of art forms, and for this reason . . . they were very important.^[31]

Starting with technology (as a good modernist should), Graham moves quickly to embrace its "opposite," architecture as art. Endowing art with the capacity to change life, as did the European modernists, he nods in passing to the criticism of architects who impose their own preferences on the users. Then, in a sarcastic tone, he opposes the personal dimension of a small-scale design and the collective responsibility of architecture. But he refers to the architect's social role only to confuse it, as he equates "social impact" with great art in a specific reference to the Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer.

This is still an ambiguous and reluctant endorsement of the designer's ability to transcend even inconsequential programs. Art transcends service if it acquires a direct social function. The ambiguity disappears in later juries with the affirmation of the tendency that Richard Pommer has aptly called "architectural supremacism."^[32]

"Supremacism" appears in Peter Eisenman's 1975 pronouncement that the architectural potential of the house lies precisely in the fact that its program is well known, conventional, and insignificant: "Most other types of buildings differ from houses precisely because the functions are so explicit; consequently they have no room for any kind of statement about iconography, meaning or intention; the ideas are subsumed in the program."^[33] Eisenman's tribute to the house relies on the building's potential as a metaphor for the architect's ideal role but reverses the positive values, from social responsibility and service to self-expression and art. Yet the preeminence of design over program is an ideological position that corresponds to specific conditions of practice. Supremacism is therefore still addressing, even if silently, the antinomies of practice evoked by the first house metaphor.

This was 1975, two years into the worst recession since the end of World War II. The New York Five had just been created by the Museum of Modern Art and the press. Peter Eisenman had been at the helm of New York's Institute for Architecture and Urban Affairs since 1967. His architectural record consisted of unbuilt projects and a few houses, as did that of Michael Graves, Eisenman's former colleague at Princeton and fellow member of the New York Five. Seven years later, during the shorter recession of 1981–83, Graves had won the Portland and Humana competitions and left small-scale work behind. Nevertheless, in the PA jury of 1982 he still traced a mixed connection, romantic and realistic, between design talent, the private house, and the architect's practice.

In that jury, the planner and feminist historian Dolores Hayden complained about the award conferred to Ralph Lerner, a young man on the

Princeton faculty: "This mountain-top palace for a Brazilian tycoon seems to come out of the far distant past, when one thinks about architecture as a service for the very rich and the very remote." Graves rushed to his colleague's defense: "I would be quite delighted to have this architect design a city hall or a children's home or almost any other kind of project involving the public at large because of the incredible sensitivity to . . . [our] size and proportion . . . as we occupy the rooms . . . [and] as we identify collectively."^[34] While Graves sees talent as an inalienable asset that the individual transfers from project to project, the hidden reference to the constraints of practice is unmistakable: Young architects demonstrate their talent in whatever way they can. Viewing residential commissions with favor and asserting the primacy of design thus merge in defense of the potential of architects who do small-scale work.

In fact, the ideological "art" element present in both semantic sets is what joins the individualistic, artistic side of the house as metaphor for the architect's social role to the "artisan" side of the house as metaphor for architectural practice. This joining, however, is not only ideological: it involves a realistic assessment of the work available to architects—young and not so young—in hard times. Recessions, we could fairly say, make realism compulsory.

In 1976, one year after Eisenman's proclamation of design, the entries were reduced to an all-time low of 462; nothing seemed to deserve a First Award for architectural design, but four out of ten citations went to private houses. The architect Arthur Cotton Moore voiced the jury's regret that good multifamily housing projects and planned developments had been as absent as good commercial buildings: "The major thing that's going to happen in cities is commercial and speculative investment development [a prescient statement, as we know]. . . . The few submissions we had were inept, obviously indicating that the architects had no actual power or causal role in these things . They were absolutely just fluff. . . . In the end we have to fight like demons to keep from picking all single-family houses."^[35] Raquel Ramati, juror for planning and urban design, noted that even in the very competent plans she had seen, the architect's influence was missing. Nor were architects involved "in the design of suburbia or of mobile homes, where most people really are affected." Stating the obvious, she confirmed Moore's interpretation: Architects' concentration on the house was a strategic but forced retreat "into an ever smaller realm where [they] can operate."^[36]

To conclude this point: The revisionists' reappraisal of the single-family house proceeds from an ideological view of "pure" design that reflects the

practice of architects with nothing better (or bigger) than single-family houses to do.

Concurrently with the rise of "architectural supremacism," a complex revaluation of the house was emerging from the critique of large urban complexes and from the preservation movement. The preservation movement's historical beginning may be traced in the accounts of the East Coast architects I interviewed. John Morris Dixon remembers "about 1960 marching to save Penn Station," the grandiose 1910 building by McKim Mead and White, replaced by the drab anonymity of Madison Square Garden Center at the end of the 1960s. The preservation movement, Dixon believes, reversed more than a decade of academically induced, doctrinaire contempt for historic architecture:

I think our generation [he graduated from M.I.T. in 1955] had a kind of aversion to recognizing the value of historical structures. . . . But as soon as these things began to happen, you had to think of what it was about these buildings that made them worth preserving. I had had very little exposure . . . only one course, in my senior year, at M.I.T. Seeing them as I did, working on the AIA Guide for New York, I began to learn to identify and distinguish historic styles.

Preservation and contextualism compose what I call a principle of "environmental nondisturbance." In a blanket reaction to modernist urban renewal, it induces a revaluation of the house as a potential art object, not despite its program but for its nonobtrusive program. Let us examine the steps involved in this reassessment.

Disdain for the single-family house is a logical complement of the "large-scale bias" that transforms the undeniable public impact of large projects into a significant public good. This bias is aligned on the public, collective side of the house metaphor, bespeaking the architects' ambition to play a significant social role. But significance is a contested notion, as is the role of architects in large urban complexes that rarely satisfy the users' conception of what is good. The ambition to have a positive effect on collective welfare reflects long-standing utopian aspirations. But the exclusion of the users from the planning and design of public projects almost inevitably gives a technocratic slant to professional ambitions. In contrast, the single-family house can be revalued as an antidote to the invasive and technocratic implications of large buildings. Both the preservation movement and the emphasis on craftmanship are pivotal in this new set of attitudes toward the urban house.

Preservation appeared in the 1960s as a middle and upper-middle class response to the destructive invasion of cities by urban renewal. The juries' taste for different architectural vocabularies shifted various ways during

the period under study. Yet preservation and reuse became the focus of a movement that outlasted, for instance, the concern with energy-saving design following the 1973 oil crisis. The PA awards began to reflect this crucial change of attitudes in 1969. The award given to James Polshek for the headquarters of the New York State Bar Association—three old townhouses renovated and connected by a multilevel terrace to a new building in back—was hailed by Roger Montgomery "as possibly the most portentous of all the projects that we finally selected," a sign of modern architects' "coming of age . . . in terms of their leadership of responsible preservation efforts."^[37]

Preservation obviously influenced the architecture of historicist and vernacular allusion that architects call "postmodernism," although architects express regard for the past in different ways. One way is image, which emphasizes fitting single buildings into their environments by choosing appropriate proportions, vocabulary, and ornament for their facades. Urban contextualism preserves the preexistent architectural order by "writing in" new components, as it were, in a compatible design language.^[38]

Contextual and sympathetic design applies to all building types, but the house comes in through the preservation movement's essential concern with program—more exactly, with making preservation and reuse a premise of all new programs. Thus, with its simple, conventional, and flexible program, the relatively nonintrusive town house becomes a favorite object of the urban "nondisturbance principle." At the same time, its constructional complexity redirects the designer's attention from formal innovation to craftsmanship, another facet of the house as metaphor for antitechnocratic architecture.

The potential for successful collaboration between architects and users is more likely to be realized in a small and manageable project, especially one as dear to its occupants as the private home, than in any other kind. Thus, as the metaphor for practice, the house may come to represent a "publicness" more subtle than what either large size or collective ownership imply: In the process of applying expert knowledge, diminishing the distance between the professional and the layperson is a way of opening the process and increasing the client's access to knowledge. However, gentrification and other types of residential reuse in cities most often limit the reduction of distance to relatively affluent clients. The antitechnocratic potential thus remains circumscribed within the relations of good craftsmanship.

The craftsman does not look to change the canon of his or her métier but to produce a lasting object, adequate to its functions, its circumstances,

and its users. In architecture, attention to the program predisposes the craftsman to respect the environmental considerations imposed by the site. Although the concentration on doing a task well for its own sake can apply to all projects, it is compromised by the complex division of labor (and by industrialized construction) in the largest ones. Small scale makes it possible for the professional to practice architecture as service, design, and construction.

A craftsman tends to respect traditional type-forms—conventional cultural notions of what an office building, a factory, a school, a church are supposed to look like. Despite its merits, this respect for type-forms appears conventional by contrast with loftier architectural aspirations. Craftsmanship and propriety tend to be prime criteria of evaluation when the juries, having withdrawn from technocratic ambitions, also become critical of an abstracted notion of "Art." In a period of paradigmatic demise, these criteria are insufficient to reconstruct a consensus.

The conflict of standards was strikingly illustrated in 1978, when the presence of Natalie de Blois on the jury subtly infused gender into the debate. She resisted giving a First Award to a large suburban residence and was outvoted by Charles Moore, Richard Meier (the most prominent of the New York Five, known for uncompromising aesthetic purism and allegiance to Le Corbusier), and Edward Bain, partner in a first-rank Seattle firm. The implicit ideal of a well-crafted, adequate solution runs through her objections to equating overdesign with art:

Richard likes it because of the form, I dislike it because of the form. The forms and the spaces inside are so confused, the whole thing is so arbitrary that the resulting spaces are small and cramped. . . . It is tedious to approach the building on the long walkway. There is no service entrance for the kitchen, for bringing in groceries, removing garbage. . . . An enormous amount of space is used for circulation . . . [and given] to closets, to toilets. There has been an awful lot of effort to create a jungle gym on the outside.

Charles Moore's rebuttal is remarkable: "Given the incredible and altogether gratuitous task that he has taken on, . . . [he] does manage to bring it off with power, verve and a sense of danger." He responds to a casual question by de Blois that such a house could not have been designed by a woman: "It has a kind of aggression that one has associated with males. With all my strong reservations about it and my sense that it is just on the verge of collapse and chaos, I'm strongly attracted to it and I want to give it some really fancy prize."^[39] While the three men took the large family house as "the appropriate setting for an experimentation process," it is difficult to imagine a woman endorsing power, a sense of danger, and male

aggression in a house . Craftsmanship informs de Blois's sense that a house should serve the client's purpose with propriety and within conventions, the opposite of an "incredible and gratuitous" task. It also restrains her from encouraging originality.

The house, as building type and metaphor, has held program constant, letting the emphasis on design per se fluctuate according to the jury's position. The contending positions are now in place, but they are not permanent: modernist dogmatism is definitely on the wane. Yet there is not one clear successor. For this reason, eclecticism must be tolerated. The architectural supremacists' emphasis on design admits historicism for single buildings and contextual "blending in" as much as daring, idiosyncratic, theoretical new departures from modernist abstract geometries. While the concern with preservation and "nondisturbance" nourish both historicism and a return to the craft of building, the connection with art and theoretical developments remains more closely wedded to audacious formal invention. On both counts, the notion of the architect's social and public role appears to be either suspended or drastically revised.

We may proceed now to analyze the chronological transformation of architectural discourse during the period 1966–85. This period encompasses two declines of construction during the 1960s, the severe recession of 1973–76, and Reagan's recession in 1981–83. At its center, there is a professional crisis. The juries' debates increasingly reveal the double toll taken by the economic recessions and the internal crisis of meaning. Architectural supremacism, which makes a clear entry into the jury's debates in 1975, is a turning point. I take the priority accorded to design as an attempt to find a symbolic resolution for the internal crisis. This ideological reordering cannot resolve (even symbolically) the real crisis of the profession, but it still becomes a principal axis of the postmodern transformation.

1.
Le Corbusier. Plan Voisin for the rebuilding of Paris. Model. 
1925. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

2.
Maya Lin. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 
Washington, D.C. 1982. Photo: Charles Larson.

3.
Walter Gropius. Apartments at Siemenstadt, 
Berlin. 1929–31. Photo: Roland Schevsky.

4.
Bruno Taut. Hufheiser Siedlung, Britz, Berlin. 1925–31. Photo: Roland Schevsky.

5.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson. Seagram building, New York. 
1956–58. Photo: Ezra Stoller. Courtesy of Joseph E. Seagram and Sons, Inc.

6.
Philip Johnson John Burgee. AT&T World 
Headquarters, New York. 1984. Photo: Richard Payne.

7.
Venturi and Rauch. Vanna Venturi's house, Philadelphia. 1962. Photo: 
Rollin la France. Courtesy of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates.

8.
Joseph Esherick and Associates. Sea Ranch, Calif. 1965. 
Photo: Peter Dodge. Courtesy of Esherick Homsey Dodge Davis.

9.
Stanley Tigerman. Daisy House, Porter, Ind. 1976–78. 
Photo: Howard N. Kaplan. Courtesy of Tigerman McCurry.

10.
Robert A. M. Stern. Residence at Chilmark, Martha's Vineyard, Mass. 
1983. Photo: Wayne Fuji. Courtesy of Robert A. M. Stern, Architects.

11.
Esherick Homsey Dodge Davis. An early example of urban reuse: shops 
at the Cannery, San Francisco. 1966. Courtesy of Esherick Homsey Dodge Davis.

12.
Cesar Pelli. Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles. 1971–75. Photo: author.

13.
Michael Graves. Municipal Services Building, Portland, Oreg. 1980. 
Photo: Paschall/Taylor. Courtesy of Michael Graves, Architects.

14.
Kohn Pedersen Fox with Perkins Will. Procter and Gamble Headquarters, 
Cincinnati. 1985. Photo: Jack Pottle/ESTO. Courtesy of Kohn Pedersen Fox.

15.
Cesar Pelli and Associates. World Financial Center, New 
York. 1981–87. Photo: Cesar Pelli. Courtesy of Cesar Pelli 
and Associates.

16.
Venturi Rauch Scott Brown. Gordon Wu Hall, Princeton 
University. 1980. Courtesy of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates.

17.
Kohn Pedersen Fox. 333 Wacker Drive, Chicago. 1979–83. 
Photo: Barbara Karant. Courtesy of Kohn Pedersen Fox.

18.
Adrian Smith/SOM. Rowes Wharf, Boston. 1987–88. Photo © 1987 
Nick Wheeler/Wheeler Photographics. Courtesy of SOM.

19.
Diane Legge/SOM. Race track. Arlington, Ill. 1989. 
Photo: Hedrich-Blessing. Courtesy of SOM.

20.
Gwathmey Siegel. Taft residence, Cincinnati. 1977. Photo: Richard Payne. 
Courtesy of Gwathmey Siegel and Associates and Richard Payne.

21.
Michael Graves with Alan Lapidus. Disney World Dolphin Hotel, Lake Buena 
Vista, Fla. 1990. Photo: Steven Brooke. Courtesy of Michael Graves, Architects.

22.
Frank Gehry. Edgemar Center, Santa Monica, Calif, 1984–88. Photo: Tom Bonner.

23.
Peter Eisenman with Richard Trott. Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio 
State University, Columbus. 1989. Photo © Jeff Goldberg/Esto.

24.
Joan Goody. Renovation of Harbor Point, Boston. 1989. Photo: 
Anton Grassl. Courtesy of Goody Clancy and Associates.

25.
Koning, Eizenberg. Affordable housing, 5th Street, Santa Monica, 
Calif. 1988. Photo: Grant Mudford. Courtesy of Koning Eizenberg.

26.
Rob Quigley. Baltic Inn, San Diego, Calif. 1987. Courtesy of Rob W. Quigley.

Chapter Eight—
The Autonomous Transformation:
Paper Architecture, 1966–85

In 1966, the PA judges recorded extreme dissatisfaction with the architecture they were seeing. Though normative in tone, their response to the submissions was mixed in content. They recommended aesthetic modesty while desiring for the architect an implicitly powerful role.

A deliberately nonmonumental and simple architecture is not incompatible with important interventions in the built environment. In our century, antiheroic architectural standards and high social impact have marked the alliance of modernism with social democracy. However, in the mid-1960s, the architectural profession was on the verge of discarding a modernism that had become frozen and unprincipled at the same time.

As the last unifying hold of the modernist paradigm dissolved, confusion increased. In the juries' debates, the internal crisis of the discipline became apparent in the disconnection between program and design—the constitutive elements of architecture that symbolize, respectively, social function (through the mandate architects receive) and aesthetic competence.^[1]

The professional elites who serve as gatekeepers in the PA awards program have no client, no sponsor, and no user to please, only themselves and their peers. Their debates represent, therefore, highly autonomous instances of professional discourse. In this chapter, I consider those debates chronologically and analyze, first, the rise of architectural supremacism in a profession marked by the political impact of the 1960s. I show this rise not as a paradox but as a strategy for restoring professional identity. Second, I examine how the contest about the place of image and sign in architecture intensified as an ambiguous outcome of the formalist strategy.

The lionization of celebrity architects by the "star system" and the use of their signatures to valorize both real estate and luxury objects parallel, ironically, architecture's loss of power as a specialty of construction. Architectural formalism insists on the "art value" of architecture. Calling attention to the transformation of art and artists into commodities highlights only one of the contradictions that plague architectural work. At the end of this period, contradictions and structural weaknesses return, unresolved, to the center of the juries' preoccupations. After the phase of struggle and polemics, the irreducible pluralism of postmodern architectural discourse may be interpreted quite simply. It mirrors the conditions of practice in the contemporary United States, meeting their structural divisions with a conciliatory eclecticism.

1966–75: The Reclaiming of Design

When architects respond to specific programs, they work with type-forms. As David Crane put it to the 1967 jury: "We start with names for certain problems—house, shopping center, apartment building, etc. These names have already designed it before we start."^[2]

The variety of building types expresses a complex and changing hierarchy of social needs. The type, importance, and visibility of the buildings are already present in their programs, which connote the unequal professional status of the architects from whom they are commissioned. In contrast, the concentration of architects on design stresses the distinctive competence shared in principle by all legitimate practitioners. It thus reaffirms professional unity. The problem, however, is whether the diversity of type-forms admits any common quality of architectural design beyond basic technical competence.

The modernists' answer to nineteenth-century eclecticism was a unified interpretative framework or style. The abstract geometries and industrial forms of the new style sought to express the idealized rationality and the universality of modern construction. As a by-product of its postwar triumph, the modernist style was stretched and weakened beyond recognition. Postmodern revisionists then moved to disconnect aesthetics and symbolism from construction, opening the door to a plurality of design codes. We have seen some judges meeting the disorder of resurgent eclecticism with principles that were moral as much as architectural—such as the recurrent generic appeals to simplicity and modesty. Others welcomed the new ecumenicism of taste.

On the one hand, the inclusive architecture proclaimed by Charles Moore in 1967 admitted the ineradicable diversity of architectural types. Inclusiveness subsumed professional inequalities within the embrace of one profession, in which all can produce "architecture." On the other hand, the disconnection of aesthetics from construction dissolved common standards of judgment, forcing the juries to judge a work as being "good, of its kind." To many architects, this meant that the professional elites were incapable of issuing any coherent message about what architects are supposed to do .

Yet, as long as all other things were equal, the expanded conception of architectural legitimacy replaced an exhausted aesthetics with a sense of liberation and discovery. So it was for the 1969 jury. Meeting after a 6 percent rise in the volume of new construction, judging more entries and picking more winners than in 1968, the jury exuded a tone of exalted optimism. "The pluralism of aesthetic intentions today is something we have to recognize. . . . Everything is alive simultaneously," declared Roger Montgomery. His sanguine advocacy of Lester Walker and Craig Hodgetts's expandable, demountable, and economic rental building for an industrial park—"Come on, be bold, do something, make a gesture. Brave New World is around the corner!"—echoed Cesar Pelli's forecast: "In five years . . . there's going to be a radically different architecture. . . . We are not concerned with objects anymore, but with process. We are not concerned with detail, but with emotional responses. We are not concerned with order and clarity, but with excitement."^[3]

Process is activity, not product; emotional response and excitement are effects, not criteria of good design. The jury's First Award was conferred in part on an effective image . Witness this exchange between Cesar Pelli and Lewis Davis, principal of a respected strong-service firm in New York:

Davis: We're not in control of what we build or how we build. The politicians are making the decisions; the bureaucrats are doing all the planning; and whatever drifts down to us we do the best we can. . . . And the technological, industrial breakthrough is not going to be made by the architects. It's going to be made by Boeing, or GE, or Westinghouse. They have hundreds and hundreds of architects working on this right now.

Pelli: The First Award is dealing with technological images—not technology, but a technological image. Images are what architects deal with.

R. M. Gensert, the engineer on the jury, had to remind the architects that the image of architecture as progressive technology was no longer persuasive:

Gensert: Architecture should express occupancy of the building and not the Machine Age. This so-called new image is a loss of identity. It says that what goes on inside a building, where it sits on the site, and how it relates to other buildings is meaningless. You could put this on a mountain or . . . in a valley and you'd get the same thing.

Pelli: Like a car.

Gensert: I don't live in my car.

Pelli: You sure do. More people have cars than have houses and the same car is used in Texas or in Alaska, New York City or Dubuque . . .

Davis: I don't feel we're giving it a "design" award but a "message" award.^[4]

Architects learned to exalt their own social role through the symbolism of futuristic technological icons in the progressive modernist battles of the 1920s. As Robert Gutman ruefully remarks, "Expressing technological ideas through symbols and images makes architecture appear relevant," even when architects have lost technological control to other specialists in the construction process.^[5]

In 1969, designers whose vision was still governed by the geometric forms and technological allusions of modernism could develop a common symbolic strategy. In following years, the proliferation of aesthetic codes made it increasingly difficult for the judges to agree. Short of explicating their reasons, most of them appeared content to have their own preferences recognized, if necessary by trading off one award for another.

As the juries retreated toward case-by-case adjudication, the basic dimensions of service and craftmanship took precedence over the divisive issue of design but left the disciplinary crisis unaddressed. Service, indeed, ignores the architects' artistic and theoretical aspirations, while craftmanship, in its characteristic concentration on the perfect object, rises only occasionally above the isolated building. Neither one resolves the problems of conceptual and symbolic content brought forth by postmodern revisionism. The architect Earl Flansburgh noted in 1972 that technological competence is not what makes architecture: "The fact that an extremely difficult problem has been overcome . . . to me only brings [the architecture] up to ground zero. I think we should not give an award if the problem was difficult, if the architect simply solved it but did not advance the art."^[6] Yet the crisis of modernism meant, precisely, that architects no longer agreed on what was art. And if there is no agreed-upon stylistic code within which to work, it becomes impossible to appraise "advances." Furthermore, the plurality of design codes only compounded that of professional roles.

In different ways, each possible way of being an architect was called

into question in the 1960s. Take, for instance, the design of mass housing. Critics within the profession anathematized technocratic "big projects," yet independent architects had practically no part in the mass production of suburban houses or mobile homes. Or take urban planning and redevelopment: The influence of architects was challenged by the rival profession of planning, yet architects shared the blame for the displacement of former residents and the awfulness of buildings. The modernism of the large architectural firms continued to thrive, yet a new generation of architects attacked it from below for its sterility and subservience to business interests. The expanding alternative careers in the academic world brought regular income to teachers of architecture yet could not help them put their new ideas into practice. The growing academicization of architecture nourished the intellectual debate but contributed also to what critics have called graphism, "a fascination with the evocative power of drawings and models."^[7]

In this situation of disarray, architects looked outside their field for some compelling way of reconstructing the parameters of their discipline. Two European scholars identify "populism" and "scientism" as the two main ways. The former took user participation as the sole determinant of good design, putting it in place of obsolete stylistic norms; the latter sought to make architecture "rational" by means of imported scientific methodologies.^[8]

Scientism officially entered the process of symbolic rewards in 1974: The PA awards program recognized architectural research as a separate category. A good part of what came under this rubric incorporated changes in construction technology that minimized aesthetics.^[9] Populism, under the tutelage of Community Development Grants, inspired the search for alternatives in community architecture and advocacy planning. Attuned to this development of the 1960s, the 1975 jury made user needs (or the methodology to represent them) into a normative standard of PA 's urban design awards.

In the architectural juries, populism emerged in the democratization of both building types and symbolic sources. Charles Moore was the first to argue in 1967 that architects must become the interpreters of popular culture. He praised Venturi's submissions as an effort "that seems to me of enormous importance, to include a set of allusions to our cultural heritage à la T. S. Eliot and allusions to the pop life that would hopefully bring a set of architectural forms into a much deeper meaning for the people who are using them."^[10]

Architects like Moore and Venturi were pursuing an iconography and a

set of associative symbols to which large strata of users could relate immediately and with delight. To some critics, this pop-art inspiration either led to an objectionable revaluation of kitsch or was a mockery of low-brow taste, performed ironically for the pleasure of the cultured public. In the 1970 jury, Timothy Vreeland objected to Venturi himself that a symbolic architecture was impossible; architects, he said, did not share symbolic codes with the vast public. Venturi rebutted:

We live in a communication era teeming with symbols. Don't forget that words and letters, which inundate almost all of our environment, are symbols. We like to say we haven't an accepted set of symbols the way the Middle Ages had, but we do, via all the advertising media, in great variety and complexity. The valid base of often superficial supergraphics is that it is architecture connecting with the idea of communication in space.^[11]

We must note for future discussion that Venturi accepts without qualms the metaphorical passage of architecture into the dematerialized realm of signs. Turning then in reciprocal praise to Charles Moore's First Award, he added his well-known plea for the "ordinary." Moore's Pembroke College Dormitory at Brown University

in one sense is symbolic because it is ordinary architecture and is symbolic in being ordinary. But in another sense, it is anonymous and fits in very beautifully with the programmatic way of living of college students who really want to do their own thing in this building and there's no reason why the architect should be doing his personal thing . . . . In its anonymity, [this architecture] marks the stage before the symbolic appliqué comes back. Architecture is now in between—the architecture itself is the decoration; this is doing all it can to be commonplace . . . and can thus take the decoration.^[12]

The architect acknowledges that it is not his meaning that matters. Yet at no time does Venturi suggest that an architect ought to yield either his authority or his strategic interests to choices determined by "the people." The architect designs the structure and will also design the applied decoration that Venturi wants to bring back.

Here, the designer's task is to provide the anonymous (though decorated) shed where the users live as they want and create their own meanings. Venturi phrases the architect's mandate exclusively in terms of design, keeping it securely within his professional purview and forestalling moves to wrest control away. But he offers no solution to the problem of standards.

Timothy Vreeland had intimated that "ordinary" architecture runs a double risk: failing to convey its popular symbolism to "the people" while losing in aesthetic persuasion and turning off the "happy few." Vreeland's

alternative was to emphasize the technical mastery of structural and mechanical construction. But technology does not go beyond "ground zero," and it is the monopoly of engineers. Design thus remains the crucial thing.

When symbolic gatekeepers cannot strike a balance between constructional and aesthetic competence; when they reject formal experimentation but no longer have a formal tradition on which to rely; when they distrust innovators yet are bored with the commonplace, the notion of good architecture seems to dissolve. Professional service and technical competence often appear as recourses against trendiness, as in these representative positions:

The results of the jury's work seem to say to me that we are voting against fashion fascism. . . . Perhaps this jury is saying that there are no establishment rules, but only tasks to be tackled .^[13]

Just take a guy who has an office and he has a problem. . . . What is the body of information . . . that he can lean upon to help him solve it? It's a tradition. He can make a competent response. I object to using the word architecture as "the art of it," because it's so subjective.^[14]

Some very old fashioned basic questions . . . like the clarity of circulation and the clarity of the process of building and how that comes through in the space itself . . . get sacrificed or ignored for the sake of a certain literal kind of architecture, an architecture that has its roots in words and in abstract geometry rather than in space and the light that goes on in space.^[15]

But old-fashioned common sense is dull. The following position is equally significant: "The only things that catch my eye are those things which indicate a new direction or a fresh approach.^[16] The problem, as we know, is that there are no clear standards and no tradition by which to judge the merits of novelty. Judging each case on its own merits, the juries of the early 1970s concentrated instead on the architects' response to the programs. In the heated political climate, they gradually shifted their doubts from the service itself to that which architects were asked to serve. Questioning the programs became for these professional elites a corrosive exploration of the legitimacy, and ultimately the powerlessness, of their profession.

In 1971, the latent tensions between program and design took an antiarchitectural and antiprofessional tone. The jury rewarded the following: a fifty-five acre retreat in Texas, in which the designers provided only three anchoring points for a VW camper and one masonry fireplace, for being "non architecture—nature" or, at least, "a different kind of imagery"; the

"straightforward anonymity" of an office building in Oregon; and the idea, not the concept, of modular housing by Fred Koetter and Jerry Wells—three programmatic options which, were they to become prevalent, would eliminate most of the profession's work.^[17]

Other juries exaggerated the architect's responsibility not to but for the program, as did Moshe Safdie and Earl Flansburgh in discussing the 1972 awards:

Safdie: We attach a responsibility to the architect in having gone along with any program. . . . That is where our value judgment comes in about how land should be used.

Flansburgh: Let's say that an architect questions whether or not a school should be under a railway and, having questioned it, finds it is physically possible, and he has successfully done it, even though it may not have been anything we thought ought to have been done.

Safdie: It is crazy for us to give recognition to a scheme that has solved something which we think in the context of schools is wrong.^[18]

Unlike the antiarchitectural choices of 1971, this kind of questioning leaves the professional assumption of competence and authority intact. However, challenging the program to the point of turning the commission down places the architects' function in jeopardy, forcing them to admit that socially responsible architecture is impossible.

In the context of the symbolic adjudication of the early 1970s, some gatekeeping elites were urging others to question the program while presumably continuing with "business as usual" in their own practices. Their dialogue during these years is marked by rhetorical sensitivity to social concerns. The mounting doubts are compensated by a sense of professional solidarity.

Thus, in 1973, one juror reminds the others that the submissions "were sent to P/A by architects to be judged by architects . . . because existing procedures, processes and institutions have not satisfied real, given problems that have to do with what architecture is." In other words, "what architecture is" matters mostly, if not exclusively, to other specialists, and the autonomous award process gives it the recognition that practice cannot. And Hugh Hardy, of the New York firm Hardy Holzmann Pfeiffer, a rising architectural star, adds, "At least it isn't gloomy. . . . People haven't given up. It may be silly and naive, but they're still out there trying —which is remarkable, really, considering where the society stands."^[19]

Shifting the blame to society is a realistic justification for going on with business, but business would not continue "as usual" for long. The reces-

sion hit building and architecture in 1973. At the end of that year, Paul Kennon, the director of design of Caudill Rowlett Scott (one of the largest firms in the United States, based in Texas) prefaced the jury's expression of interest in preservation with the warning that "we are running out of money as a nation."^[20]

The economic downturn amplified the crisis of standards and the turmoil within the profession. In the face of grave external difficulties and of internal uncertainties about architecture, the settled normalcy of professional life seemed an impossible pretense.

Meeting in the middle of the recession, the architectural jury of 1974 conferred nine citations and only one award, for the recycling of an old factory building in Massachussets. The architect and planner Barton Myers proposed an award for "the concept of urban homesteading, although it was not submitted, to call attention to that and other movements in housing." Although his colleagues on the jury refused to change the terms of the award program, they adopted Myers's message. Devising titles that stressed the moral implications of different kinds of projects, they put "Recycle" and "Environmental Response" on the positive side; on the negative side, their strict design categories ("The Machines" and "Le's Maisons," from Mad magazine's parody of the New York Five's cult of Le Corbusier) ridiculed the two most fashionable idioms of the moment.^[21]

The judges did not see their quest for responsible performance as moralizing but as good policy, a way to rebuild credibility in the midst of a serious economic crisis. Jacquelin Robertson, urban design juror with Denise Scott Brown, gave a more direct and practical response. To Scott Brown's criteria ("quality of life, way of life, and kinds of living in these environments"), Robertson saw the need to add a nontraditional roster of client groups. As he affirmed, unexceptionally: "If the client groups effectively don't include developers, then architects will have only a tiny effect on what is built."^[22]

In the middle of the most severe recession since World War II, the majority of architects must have been well aware of the fragility of their professional status. A collectivity in crisis is more likely to seek reassurance in the restoration of traditional identity than to plunge forward into uncharted lands. Neither the critique of programs nor the extraarchitectural concerns of the early 1970s were likely to reduce professional anxieties.

In this context, affirming the importance of design and formal search restores the traditional occupational identity of the architect. On the PA

juries, the move was announced by Peter Eisenman as early as 1975. Uncommonly articulate and cultivated, Eisenman was committed by force of circumstances to developing architecture theoretically . He started by making his position clear: "For the record, I would like to say that in contradistinction to last year's jury, this year's reasserts the necessary aspect of architectonic quality and development toward a solution, as opposed to process only or good intention. I think this restatement of the architect's role, the spatial answer to a programmatic statement, is reassuring. "^[23]

Eisenman did more than just reassure. Having stressed the intrinsic virtues of design as the specific competence of the architect, he moved then to propose a full-fledged ideological interpretation of the architect's role as avant-garde artist. Here is how he praised an expensive house in a dense Miami suburb by Rem Koolhaas and Laurinda Spear:

This house is above all a critical gesture at architecture today and at society. . . . It breaks from the Corbu tradition; there's no Venturi, no Giurgola, none of that; it's a-stylistic and that's what I like about it. It's one of the few submissions that makes a comment about the suburb, the private house, the way it occupies space, about the metaphorical nature of our personal lives. It's a kind of utopistic gesture in the midst of this awful middle-class suburbia; it thumbs its nose at the middle-class, and in the end it's a poetic gesture of the sort you can perhaps only do in a private house.^[24]

This rapid turn away from the wider social role that architects had sought during the 1960s may surprise. But Eisenman appeals, on the one hand, to the ideological assimilation of aesthetic with social and political avantgardism.^[25] On the other hand, the profession's disarray called for a restorative strategy.

For the critics Tzonis and Lefaivre, the emphasis on design is a recurrent "narcissistic" reaction of architecture to market downturns. Narcissistic formalist emphasis makes the architectural object "precious, alluring, desirable"—in a word, saleable.^[26] The plurality of design codes legitimized what it was economically imperative to explore: the search for a more seductive and widely pleasing architecture. Within the profession's new discourse, one could invoke Venturi's intellectual authority in justification of symbolic forays across the barrier between "high" and "popular" culture.

Nothing, however, was further from pleasantness than the architectural intentions of Peter Eisenman. His contempt for traditional postmodernism was declared; his experiments with linear or planar elements generated abstract forms; what he described as "a logical and linear sequence of moves" presupposed and revealed, as in chess, the existence of rules. In a

written dialogue with himself, Eisenman justified the hermeticism of this work: "When one denies the importance of function, program, meaning, technology, and client—constraints traditionally used to justify and in a way support form-making—the rationality of process and the logic inherent in form become almost the last 'security' or legitimation available."^[27] In Oppositions, the heavily theoretical journal edited by Eisenman, the critique of modernist architecture, which had started as the critique of a socially embedded activity, had rapidly become disembodied. In his analysis of the journal's eleven years, Vincent Pecora notes that "opposition" becomes purely internal dissent within the discursive field of architecture. In that shift "can be read much of the development of postmodernism as a self-proclaimed 'deconstruction' of an earlier and monolithic humanist tradition. . . . Architectural thinking once again reveals where the primary critical values are always already to be found: in the defamiliarization of built form by built form, in the autonomous dialogue of architecture with itself."^[28] In this internal dialogue, Eisenman's ideological assertion of the primacy of design had unintended consequences. Design is only the general ability to provide spatial answers to a program. In severing appearance from structure, the demise of modernism had multiplied the conventional idioms of architecture; the looks of the architect's spatial answers had become indeterminate. Architectural supremacism could heretofore be invoked to legitimize any kind of stylistic experiment.

To recapitulate: aggravated by the economic recession, the disciplinary confusion of architecture had endangered traditional notions of professional identity. Reestablishing design and the development of form as central criteria of excellence was a restorative strategy. It strengthened the shared and distinctive competence of architects but was unable to reunify the aesthetic codes.

Moreover, since form can be explored graphically, the primacy of design helped reduce the generational "achievement gap," for it allowed young architects to produce and be taken seriously "on paper." In other words, it allowed them to start their careers without waiting for rare commissions. "Graphism," however, could not provide constructional experience, and it left untried architects open to counterattack by their more experienced elders. In the following ten years, underneath the stylistic differences, we find the PA juries rephrasing the profession's historical cleavage between art and service as a conflict between formalism and construction. This opposition captured, without resolving, the structural divisions of the profession.

1975–85: Conjugating Contradictions

By 1975, pluralism was on its way to official acceptance. Yet the formal and stylistic diversity of the submissions could not please all the PA judges at the same time.^[29] The debates of this period show various strategies by which the juries implicity sought either to contain or to deny professional disunity.

The rarest strategy by far was the deliberate choice of one stylistic tendency over the others, as happened with "traditional" postmodernism in 1980. The typical strategy was agreeing to disagree, either procedurally, by accepting divided votes, or substantively, by finding projects that offered something for everybody. This strategy compromised the rearticulation of common standards, but any effort to rearticulate them would have been divisive in the crisis atmosphere of the 1970s. Later, with construction on its way to recovery and "style" or "image" as common scapegoats for what was wrong with architecture, that effort became less divisive. Redefining standards became almost a ritual of the 1980s juries.

The main line of conflict in 1975–85 was drawn between the predominance of images and a more traditional holistic conception of architecture. Predictably, what the PA judges thought of a project on paper often contrasted with their opinion of it as built form. But in all cases the juries were judging only drawings. Therefore, the contrast is only symbolic; it connotes a cleavage, with generational overtones, in their way of imagining architecture. If, as Henry Cobb suggests, the training of an architect "should be about learning how to construct a concept of space through graphic means without actually having to build a space,"^[30] then the more seasoned and pragmatic architects should be better able to imagine buildings from drawings and also less willing to suspend this act of imagination.

Large-scale commercial projects objectively contribute to the practical separation of structural and formal responsibilities. On the one hand, the predominance of industrialized construction tends to limit the architects' intervention to exteriors, public rooms, and circulation schemes.^[31] On the other hand, the recent appearance of trained construction managers further tends to take away from architects the function (traditional in the United States) of coordinating multiple building specialists. In contrast, custom-made, small-scale projects allow architects to retain craftsmanlike control over the building process.

It is logical, therefore, that the cleavage between "paper" and "built" form should have appeared many times in the discussion of single-family houses. We have tracked it in Natalie de Blois's objections to the three

men on the 1978 jury, while its generational connotations were clear but unexpected in the systematic alignment of the modernists Harkness and Dinkeloo against Gwathmey and Hodgetts. Here is an example:

Hodgetts: OK, there is a need for "commodity" building, architecture without a capital A, but it is not award material. Society needs a certain stable and comfortable framework, but it is not the architect who needs to do that. Architects can stimulate, they can focus on certain very important things. To me the role of a jury involves that too.

Harkness: Do you have to have an "idea," or can you do something that might have been done ten years ago and you are doing it well?

Gwathmey: What makes architecture a great place is where ideas are working, where there is speculation .

Hodgetts: Is [the architect] a technician who moves forward with a lot of craft and aesthetic sensibility, a curator, or a space explorer?^[32]

One would expect the younger architects to defend what is truer of smaller projects than of big commercial ones: the crafting of design, the careful control of building by ideas. They are, however, in open polemic with their elders' experience. Their vague notion of architectural "ideas" descends from an ideological rejection of the axiom that form emerges from structure.

In turn, the older architects choose to read the advocacy of "ideas" as a cavalier attitude toward the client and as professional irresponsibility. Thus, while Hodgetts justifies the complex abstraction of Peter Eisenman's House X because it has "two lobes," one for the support of the family, the other for the intellectual nourishment of the architectural community, Dinkeloo blurts out: "You're saying 'If you can find a sucker, let him have it!'"^[33] More gently, Natalie de Blois had answered Richard Meier in the same vein:

De Blois: It's a nice looking building. It's a lot better than most.

Meier: I don't see any idea in the building that has any redeeming value.

De Blois: Does a house have to have an idea?

Meier: I think every building has to have an idea.

De Blois: You may not think it's an idea. . . . It addresses itself to solar problems, heating problems; they are properly ventilated, shaded, there's cross-ventilation. The idea is kind of basic, but they've certainly forgotten it in many places.^[34]

De Blois's position was a dissenting one in 1978. Yet many judges were to react with increasing dissatisfaction against "meaning" and "ideas," which seemed to presage a dangerous slide into mere "image." Then, as we know, concerns with construction and service return to the fore. But

bringing design back from image-making is difficult without the modernist symbiosis of structure and form.

The analysis of symbolic adjudication in these years suggests that a tactical solution was to identify historicist and eclectic postmodernism as the culprit. However, not even the partial consensus about a whipping boy could alleviate the dissolution of common standards. Let us follow this process step by step to its ambiguous outcome.

We have heard Cesar Pelli calling in 1969 for emotional responses and excitement. Ten years later, an established and sedate jury similarly celebrated architecture as "the making of objects and spaces which are events. "^[35] Neither exciting events nor stylistic eclecticism have to be superficial or facile. In fact, most juries took pains to denounce, case by case, what they saw as trendiness—either contrived originality or imitation without any architectonic or programmatic reason. However, the divorce of appearance and construction having authorized eclecticism, evaluators could not invoke a shared language of design against the seduction of "effects." Without a positive countervalue, the denunciations of facile effects converged in the early 1980s upon a negative: the "antimodern" imagery of eclectic postmodernism. Predictably, the reasons for this negative agreement were different and often incompatible.

Unreformed modernists, while they admitted variations and faintly historicist or neoclassical forms, had never accepted that structure and site do not by themselves generate form. On the other hand, "schismatic" modernists (such as the New York Five or Craig Hodgetts and Frank Gehry) detested in "traditional" postmodernism the nostalgia for an irrecoverable past, the symbolic association of neoclassical ornament with imperial power, the repudiation of the present and its doubts.^[36] The schismatic revisionists accepted the separation of building and appearance, without abandoning the notion that architecture must somehow embody the Zeitgeist. Yet, in truth, some of them recognized that eclecticism was the precise postmodern expression of the times.

For instance, in the awards program of 1983, the two younger jurors (George Baird, a Toronto architect and educator, and the young Bay Area architect Mark Mack) disagreed with the famous British architect James Stirling and with Alan Chimacoff, professor at Princeton and winner of many awards for his sober and elegant work. The older men argued for the architectonic quality of a small neo-Gothic chapel added to a Gothic Revival cathedral in Ontario. Baird and Mack objected to the figurative symbolism of the chapel, invoking the obligation to "reinterpret architectural form" and "reflect our times a little better."^[37]

Like James Stirling, Peter Eisenman did not object to historicism in itself but objected to its adoption without serious architectural and architectonic reasons. For Eisenman, "the burying of modern architecture by the 'postmodern' savants (who one suspects have always known it is easier to sell a pitched roof than a flat one)" was a deliberate attempt to excise the critical potential of architecture.^[38] The "pristine, ideal forms" of modern architecture

not only have been in decline stylistically . . . but have also lost the capacity to sustain the once-symbolic iconography of their often literal machine forms. In their place has arisen something called "postmodernism," a catchall term . . . for every form of non-mechanistic and eclectic imagery. The ruin and the fragment have become the staple iconography of the new "follies" of this new "-ism" . . . the collaged fragments of Robert Stern's or Michael Graves' historic icons—pediments, gables, cornices and moldings grafted together and disassociated from their formal and functional contexts.^[39]

Returning to the PA awards program, the rejection of "historicist post-modernism" had there a more proximate cause: its apparent enthronement by the 1980 jury. What strikes one most in the debates of this jury is not the intention to grant hegemonic status to a style but the acceptance of image as a central and legitimate concern of architecture.

The 1980 design jury consisted of an established local professional from Boston and three men—Frank Gehry of Los Angeles, Helmut Jahn, partner for design in the Chicago firm of C. F. Murphy Associates, and Robert Stern—who were each to claim a place among the best-known architects of the decade. Helmut Jahn had been chosen for balance because of his Miesian allegiances, but his opposition to most of the chosen projects did not make a dent.^[40] The jury recognized thirteen small-scale projects, mostly residential, out of nineteen.^[41]

Perhaps because of the entries' relative quality, Stern's taste for historical eclecticism appears to have carried the day. One staff member later observed in jest, "We ended up giving an award to anything that had a pediment." The resultant triumph for "traditional" postmodernism was to provoke an uproar among the readers of PA.^[42] In their discussion of the most controversial awards (Michael Graves's three house projects), the judges staked out a significant terrain:

Jahn: These houses . . . only address themselves to a particular element of architecture which is the aesthetic, cultural side, and not to the side that deals with the more real problems . . . of getting buildings built.

Stern: The aesthetic is the only important thing about building. When architects get together to talk about the state of their art, aesthetics is the only interesting thing, although there may be many ways to talk about it and many ways to define it.

Gehry: The forms are simple, and there's clarity in them, and no complication about building them that I can see. The complication is in transferring the aesthetic quality implied by drawings.

Jahn voices constructional and professional objections clearly. Gehry's contention is that building may not capture the beauty that Michael Graves renders on paper. A different concern with paper architecture surfaces in the comment of Blanche van Ginkel, urban design juror, about a house in Delaware by Venturi Rauch and Scott Brown. "A paper facade," she thought, marred the house's beautiful organization of volume. This exchange followed:

Stern: Well, the taste for paper—thin planes—seems to pervade our times.

Gehry: And this example is well done, it's really American.

Jahn: Are you saying that anything goes in America?

Stern: Yes, that's the nature of the American experience . . . a very pluralistic society with diverse cultural heritages and regional styles . . .

Gehry: Forgetting the imagery, what a beautiful composition!

Jahn: But why?

Stern: Because it's built in America and it uses American techniques and because composition is composition.^[43]

Stern, invoking national culture and defending paper thinness, appropriates for architecture the immaterial power of images , even if he seems to believe in some universal criterion ("composition is composition"). What he understands by image is clarified later on:

Van Ginkel: I see most of the submissions as representing the very rich desserts of a very rich people, and you're not going to find how to make good, wholesome, whole-wheat bread out of them.

Stern: . . . Wholesome whole-wheat bread . . . has been translated as safe and sanitary housing—the most depressing environment to live in imaginable.

Van Ginkel: No, they're not wholesome . . . they're the packaged white bread, without soul.

Stren: The need to embellish architecture  . . . can be applied to all buildings in all sectors of our society. The impoverishment, the quest for minimalism, has too often been translated into "make it simple and cheap and get on with it."

Preiser: If you publish this kind of work, some public-housing decision maker will say "Hey, yeah, let's make some porticoes and columns and adorn our public housing."

Stern: I would hope so. If the portico stands for a front door to a building, whether it's a single-family house or a 30-story high-rise . . . that would contribute enormously to the dignity of the people who go in and out of the buildings.^[44]

With generous intentions, Stern is drawing architecture, through ornament and embellishment, into the domain of illusion.

In the colonization of aesthetics by marketing, the designed commodity (a piece of a building, a pair of blue jeans) and the designer's signature are intended to confer instant status and instant identity upon the consumer/owners of the image. Status is traditionally connected to the stylization of life in real (albeit amorphous) communities.^[45] With the mass media and the mass market, stylized signs of status become comprehensible and accessible to enormous audiences that share nothing except diffuse meanings in a universe of proliferating signs. In a disconnected society, the most readily available form of identity is as a consumer of significant commodities. Indeed, the consumption of signs is one of the crucial processes on which analysts predicate postmodern culture, and the United States has been far ahead of any other society in both the mass production and the mass consumption of goods that are images and of signs that are values.^[46]

What we see here is a new stage in the long and uncertain march of Western architecture from the service of plutocratic status ambitions into the domain of popular consumption. The postmodern medley of historical styles allows the designer to offer not only whole architectural compositions but also fragments as status-conferring signs.^[47] Eclectic postmodernism reclaims the aristocratic lineage of architecture by allusion, not so much in the service of ideological nostalgia as in that of differentiated mass consumption. In the process, the architect's name becomes itself a sign to be consumed.

In the PA juries, a majority of the elite adjudicators overtly resisted the assimilation of architecture into postindustrial consumption. The "pastiche architecture" that James Stirling derided was easy to recognize and easy to target. The choice of it as target perpetuated the impression of a lingering stylistic battle against modernism; but it is important to recall that the demise of the modernist canon had institutionalized "stylistic debate" within the profession. Style no longer meant a hegemonic compositional approach nor the convergent characteristics of spatial organization and vocabulary that distinguish the architecture of a historical period. To the established architects whom the editors favored for the juries after 1980, "style" meant rhetorical design gestures and closeness to fashion.

Rapidly co-opted by developers and corporate builders, the cheapness of applied ornament and the pleasing, accessible looks of "traditional" post-modernism typified the inclusion of architecture in the aesthetics of product differentiation. Beyond this, the jurors seemed to fear a progressive and irremediable leaning of architecture toward the fashion-determined cycles of nondurable goods. As Alan Chimacoff put it, the alternative was either "to impose limits of style . . . in a permissive age in which there are no accepted canons of judgment" or to "look beyond style . . . to a basic quality of architectural organization or space-making."^[48]

In the architectural discourse of the 1980s, style seems the opposite of permanence. In part, this reflects the increasing importance of graphic diffusion. Publications and exhibitions accelerate the conversion of superficially identifiable novelties into stylistic trends. The most telling effect is on aspiring and apprentice architects, seduced by an architecture that accents superficial and rapidly recognizable traits.

Conversely, resistance to style as image and effect emphasizes the constructional use-values that "real" architecture traditionally provides. Constructional principles reveal purely rhetorical departures from architectonic sobriety, but they cannot unify design unless form is once again ideologically predicated upon structure.

In the 1980s, modernism was gone, as ideology and as style. The professional elites could not ignore that novelty is in itself much of the excitement that clients (and architects) look for. Besides, they had no way of ruling out diversity and no desire to do so. The 1980s' recurrent calls for unity were unable to generate a uniform language of design, and they reflect the typical professional drive toward unified discourse rather than actual reintegration.

The architectural jury of 1981 (by deliberate editorial decision, we may surmise) included neither "avant-garde" nor "traditional" postmodern representatives.^[49] Its chairman—Romualdo Giurgola, whom we met in 1968—opened the debate with a message of exemplary vagueness:

The manifestoes have been issued, the polemics written and now the time has come for the painstaking working through of all that has been proclaimed. This return in the cycle of the Modern Movement is the period of reintegration . . . and it is this quiet yet intense search for unity which we found manifested again and again in this year's presentations.^[50]

Giurgola was offering reconciliation, redefining the discursive battles of the recent past as cycles of a single, long movement. The jury, on the other hand, condemned the building type that embodied facile innovation best,

rejecting all the large office buildings submitted (there were many, thanks to the private building boom). Robert Frasca explained: "When we struggled with the big office buildings, we found that, though they all tried to say something different, they obviously had nothing to say. "^[51]

It was no longer size or building type that makes architecture "dumb" but the commercial demand for distinctiveness, passed on by architects as some sort of meaning. An architecture "speaking" in too many tongues (for too many ideal audiences but too few kinds of users) encouraged this subterfuge. In Giurgola's opening statement, reintegration ultimately depended on subjective qualities for, indeed, "quiet and intensity" suggest personal efforts that yield "unity" only by the action of some unnamed invisible hand.

Subsequent juries became more explicit in stating few prescriptive criteria: Architecture must establish physical connections to its context (as William Pedersen asserted in 1985); "ideas" must go beyond the surface, involving, in James Polshek's words, context, technology, appropriateness to human habitation; ambiguity makes for experiential richness. . . . The prescriptions are general, easy to endorse even from contradictory positions.^[52]

For instance, in 1984, the eminent German architect O. M. Ungers, former dean of architecture at Berlin's Technical University and chairman at Cornell, specified in this abstract way the permanent and universal qualities of architecture:

First, clearly expressed concepts which in turn lead logically to the form and style of the building. . . . The elements are ordered under a higher ruling principle. Second, . . . an urban quality  . . . even in the rural context, because I find it rather naive, these days, to design houses . . . that pretend to be part of the nice, unspoiled world. . . . The third quality [is] the dialectical aspect of architecture . . . . The initial idea should be exposed to its dialectical opposite, thereby leading to higher complexity.

Julia Thomas, a Los Angeles architect, chair of the board of a development company, declared herself in total agreement with Ungers, yet went on to invoke the opposite principle, consumer appeal:

We can find more excitement in American cooking and restaurants now than in architecture. . . . [The entries] are still addressing issues that were addressed in the magazines a year or two ago, and they are still searching for a unifying theme. . . . I do not park in parking structures as they are now organized and would not live in most of the houses presented here.^[53]

The profound differences of conception among the jurors were unresolved. In consequence, the only explicit push toward unity was their deter-

mination to accept plurality in the canon and in their own persuasions, for it was better to select strong designs of different tendency than to water down the awards in a futile search for agreement. Basic forms and plans could be legitimately historical (to the point of imitative reconstruction, as in the neo-Gothic chapel I mentioned), but fragmentary historicism was ostracized. In fact, the symbolic gatekeepers made the repudiation of "incoherent" historicist allusions a substantive indicator of their own seriousness. Defining a common antagonist, however, did not reconstruct a common identity.

Toward the end of the period, the critic Kenneth Frampton recognized the "refreshing . . . absence of any dominant trend" yet deplored the fact that "the continuity of the Modern Movement as a critical culture is still inadequately represented."^[54] To Frampton, "critical" means the (necessarily autonomous) architectural discourse that transcends serving the client or pleasing the public. As he had explained in another context, "Architecture can only be sustained today as a critical practice if it assumes an arrière-garde position, that is to say one which distances itself equally from the Enlightenment myth of progress and from a reactionary, unrealistic impulse to return to the architectonic forms of the preindustrial past." The strategy that Frampton calls critical regionalism "mediate[s] the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place."^[55] Despite Frampton's allegiance to social architecture, his analysis concentrates on discourse regardless of the social function it serves. Here, Frampton understands the critical much as Peter Eisenman does the ideological: as the noblest potential of architecture, yet one which expends its critique solely within the bounds of the disciplinary canon.^[56]

Frampton found that Eisenman's project for the Ohio State Wexner Center for the Visual Arts and Bernard Tschumi's red kiosks for the park of La Villette in Paris were the only rigorous modern works among the awards of 1985. Not much is "regional" in Tschumi's fragmented diagonals, except perhaps the effort to express the conflict and discontinuity of a great city. Eisenman's design, on the other hand, has resulted in one of the decade's most interesting "contextual" buildings.

As the university's leaflet points out, the diagonal line that organizes the building on its site represents "the convergence of the campus and city grids" (the former skewed by 12.25 degrees from the latter in Frederick Olmsted's 1880s design). The intersection of the two grids organizes the complex internal spaces; outside, it commands a "scaffold-like structure, a delicate layering of rhythmic grids rising toward infinite space." Seen through the variously patterned curtain wall and the skylights of the long

sloped corridor, the white lattice frame accompanies the visitor's ascension toward the exhibition rooms.

For Vincent Scully, the abstract contextualism of the diagonal is in part responsible for "a spatter of small forms blocking the major ceremonial entrance" to the campus's central oval.^[57] Indeed, the diagonal roof of the underground theater interferes with the broken brick towers and partially hides the arch that Eisenman uses to invoke the Armory, "a treasured landmark" that was located on the site until it burned down in 1958. The "contextual" towers are not powerful or large enough, says Scully, to keep the eye on the building and its grid. But they are Eisenman's parody of historicism, representing not the past itself but the impossibility of resurrecting it. The building's complex allegory takes on not the constructional principle of modernism but its abstract geometries. It is a deeply revisionist creation.

The dilemma of disunity subsists, however, The atmosphere of pluralism may be refreshing, but Tschumi, Eisenman, or new architects like Steven Holl each adds only one more voice to those the cognoscenti recognize. Separated from critical analysis of a building's social function and meaning, even the return to the forms of early modernism appears as just another stylistic gesture, or as a merely personal search.

Architectural formalism goes hand in hand with artistic individualism. Eric Moss, a young Los Angeles architect, made the point in response to Frampton's comments:

People like Venturi, [Norman] Foster, Stirling and Graves really did move architecture toward a new stance. The architectural kit is now filled with another set of parts—symmetry, historical references, contextualism. Ten thousand people are now dipping into four lexicons. For this reason, I certainly wanted to find works that attempt to end run the conventions, old and new, by delving deeply into personal issues.^[58]

Contrast Moss's "personalism" with the last part of James Polshek's statement the year before:

We are moving away from producing architecture as pastiche, architecture as marketing, architecture as packaging, architecture as a kind of self-generating animus wherein the next project flows from the previous one by virtue of its . . . conscious loading with "meaning" . . . defined primarily by the architect with no relevance for those using the building.^[59]

Return then to Eisenman's distinctions among types of practice: Excising the commercial is not enough to resolve the divergence of service and meaning. Professional motivations (in which the "concern with society at

large" is obviously open to contestation and conflict) still clash with both aesthetic and ideological ambitions.

Thomas Beeby—perhaps out of his own experience at the helm of a smaller firm in Chicago, the city where the large architectural firm was invented and still predominates—voiced still another kind of insurmountable division. Anchoring the antinomies of postcrisis and postmodern architecture in the sociological reality of professional practice, he observed:

Another paradox of today seems to be the incredible schism that exists between the large commercial work done by big firms and the more self-conscious artistic work being done by small practitioners. If these two disparate professional groups could only learn from each other, it is possible that architecture of the quality of Richardson or Sullivan would be possible once more. The apparent disdain existing between these two groups tends to vitiate the impact that architects have on the built world of today.^[60]

Eisenman presented differences of orientation in architectural practice as voluntary choices. Frampton's exhortations to critical regionalism also emphasized voluntarism. Beeby's statement recognizes that, beyond the architect's individual choice, contemporary architecture is determined by segmented market niches and unbridgeable structural divisions. Its identity, reproduced by schools and in discourse, and its nominal unity, maintained with much effort by the organized profession, are both grafted onto the divided basis of practice.

Form Follows Practice

The PA system of symbolic rewards has given us a microscopic view (particular but detailed) of architectural discourse during the instatement of postmodern pluralism. To follow the juries negotiating the boundaries of legitimate architecture, I have had to ignore the important issues discussed in urban design (energy conservation, transportation, preservation, interpretation of the American urban vernacular). I have ignored also the attempts to systematize architecture and the varied investigations considered under the rubric of research. The design focus mirrors in its very narrowness a basic problem of architecture's traditional identity.

Design is an essential part of the profession's specialized discourse and the core of the PA awards program. Because it is open, this program reflects the interaction between professional elites who hold the key to semiofficial discourse and practitioners who aspire to participate in its making.

In the twenty years under study, the architectural language associated with the hegemony of large firms ceased to be dominant in the discourse

of the profession. The initial impulse came from dissatisfaction with a paradigm stretched beyond recognition. The design elites did most of the stretching, although dissatisfaction reached far beyond their narrow circles, as indicated by the reception of Venturi's book in 1966.

In academic enclaves, opening architecture to other disciplines appeared as a path to reconstruction. But soon, the sixties proferred one with much broader appeal: It involved small firms, community advocates, academics practicing on the side, students, and users in the task of redefinition. As the 1960s turned into the crisis of the 1970s, untried intellectual architects moved to rescue "pure" design from what they saw as external diversions and meretricious seductions.

At the specific level of the "pure" geometric idioms adopted, the "architectural supremacism" proposed most notably by the New York Five could only fail. Various vocabularies (allusive and figurative or abstract) and various ways of doing architecture competed on the unsettled architectural scene. The "supremacists" were too young, too intellectual, and too idiosyncratic to be able to provide a unifying code for a profession in the throes of both intellectual uncertainty and economic crisis.

Yet, at a deeper level, supremacism as ideology aimed at restoring the professional identity of architecture and the confidence of younger professionals in their own basic competence. Tacitly accepting a retreat from larger social ambitions, the advocates of pure design were extremely successful in reconstructing the architect's traditional artistic role.^[61] They did not have (or not yet) either enough professional power or sufficiently compelling solutions to rule out competing views. This came later on.

Established professionals and even the principals of large firms had to accept both eclecticism and professional diversity into the profession's discourse. Only thus and only then could there be enough support for ostracizing the most superficial and spectacular gratifications of postmodernism. The chosen target was eclectic historicism. Earnest historical reconstructions, attuned to the enthusiasm for preservation, seemed acceptable and are now considered serious.^[62] More than admitted, the ideas of traditional postmodernism about context (working with the context and respecting its fabric) have passed into architectural common sense, as has tolerance of plurality.

The passing of the polemical phase means also a return (at times with a vengeance) to professional common sense. My analysis may have overstated the disjunction between program and design because I was considering the uncertainty about standards at the level of pure discourse. In practice, as we know, architects always design for the program and with

the program in mind. Therefore, the juries' insistence on constructional quality and their condemnation of architecture-as-image reveal something more than concern for the program.

Surface imagery, rhetorical persuasions, and status appeal are what clients, in particular "professional" commercial clients, hire architects to provide. An autonomous conception of the architect's mandate, including a firm hold on architectonics, is what elites need to defend as their expertise. Their contrasting purpose may be interpreted as ideological resistance, not only to the severe but circumstantial threat posed by the recession of the 1970s but also to the long-term reduction of the architect's role in industrialized construction.

The lionization of celebrity architects is part of the client's marketing strategy and a sign of architecture's proximity to the culture industry. In this guise, it helps to valorize both real estate and luxury objects. But insofar as "signature architects" become mere consultants in styling, the negative side of their celebrity is the loss of power of architecture as an occupation.

We should not, however, take postmodern revisionism as the discursive expression of a surrender. The profession has not simply accepted a more superficial version of its ancient role as the dresser of power and the provider of its emblems, now far less durable than in centuries past. Paradoxically, it is the ineradicable segmentation of the profession that helps preserve a repertory of possible roles.

Among these varied roles, the modernist attempt to negotiate a responsible public function for the architect has left an indelible mark and a selfcritical legacy. By 1985, in the messages issued from the PA juries, architecture had returned to all the concrete and divisive variety of its practical existence. As if to complete the cycle, the 1987 jury, celebrating thirty-three years of PA awards, gave two First Awards to affordable housing.

One went to apartments in simple modern language by Hank Koning and Julie Eizenberg for the Community Corporation of Santa Monica; the other to three little houses for needy families in Madison County, Mississippi, inspired by traditional vernacular forms—the work of Samuel Mock-bee, Thomas Howorth, and Coleman Coker for Madison Countians Allied Against Poverty. The jury, noting that "nothing seemed to have happened" in low-income housing in the last decade, praised the Santa Monica design for its artistic interest, its internal courtyard, and a presentation that could almost be used to build. The Mississippi houses, praised by one juror for their architectural and climatic competence, showed that "elegance has nothing to do with cost." Their design, said the historian Thomas Hines, "is timeless; it speaks to both the condition and the aspirations of the people

for whom it is designed." Perhaps, another juror added, the human qualities of the little houses could become "possibilities for much more elaborate, substantial housing schemes."^[63]

The "restless search" that the editor had noted in the third year of the PA awards program seemed to have come home thirty years later to varied, local, and specific conceptions of architecture. There, if art happens, it is precisely as a conquest over the social, ecological, constructional, and economic requirements from which architecture cannot be abstracted.

Chapter Nine—
Conclusion

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the revision of architectural discourse coincided with challenges waged from inside the profession against the architect's subservience to power. The coincidence came from different groups of architect-activists taking dogmatic modernism (which had made architecture part and parcel of the relentless modernization of cities) as a common enemy.^[1]

In the United States, modernism-as-modernization primarily referred to the large-scale urban renewal that started in the 1950s. In the late 1970s, an extraordinary wave of real estate speculation succeeded the momentous economic crisis and spurred on architectural revisionism (at least of one kind). Clients with more credit than capital wanted their buildings to look rich, playful, and different. Developers' much-vaunted discovery of design contributed to the fame of a few "signature architects," but their main criterion in selecting design was and continues to be product differentiation. Postmodernism was bound to become tainted by its alliance with invidious status distinction, "image-making," and mere visual variety.

Architects' commissions and the glamor associated with the profession in the 1980s registered the effects of financial deregulation and the redistribution of income from poor and middle strata to the wealthiest. When architects and critics scoff at traditional postmodernism as an architecture "for the age of Regan," they refer mainly to style . Few architects identify an age by the types of commissions that became prevalent or extinct. Yet

the architectural sign of the period was less a style than the overabundance of office and retail space, luxury hotels, rich men's homes, and cultural institutions for the elite.

During the revision of the modern, divergent ideals clustered around the conflict between "image" and the "reality" of architecture. These terms can be read as transpositions of the basic disjunction between conception and execution in architects' work, for architects always design images (plans and working drawings are technical images of the building to be) while others do the building. That image and reality occupied a central place in the postmodern contest suggests that something was perceived to be changing (by will or by chance) in the architect's basic social identity.

The problematic relations of architectural image and reality call into question the place of aesthetic conception in the economy of building. If, indeed, architects are increasingly and primarily hired to embellish buildings and attract customers with images and symbols, their social function has changed. In Scott Lash's words, symbols have "a purchase on meaning but not on reality"; unlike signs, symbols have no referents. Buildings (or cities) do not refer to anything, they are. They can function as symbols, but their reality is overwhelmingly material and utilitarian. They are not circulating goods (cultural or material) but the primary stage of life and commerce on which goods are exchanged and consumed.^[2]

If the best architcctural work becomes the projection of symbolic and cultural significance, then architects are resigned to abandon to others the material design of the environment. It may, of course, be argued that they have never designed but a very small part of it. At issue, however, is their collective intention to provide the keynote.

Architectural supremacism, a professional ideology that extolled design for design's sake, rose in the mid-1970s on a contested and insecure professional scene. In the beginning, it had attempted a return to the imperious and autonomous self-definition of modernism, but it was too late. Not only did supremacism abandon earlier efforts to rethink cities gutted by modernism-as-modernization; its proponents did not have the professional power to restore modernism by a "working through" of partially developed aesthetic possibilities. Yet tacitly admitting all building types to the legitimacy of architecture in reality functioned as a reconstructive strategy.

At the same time, an ideal of environmental "nondisturbance" was inspiring a powerful middle-class movement, risen to preserve what was left of the ravaged urban fabric. This movement was also in part too late.

The precedent of massive urban displacement and the explosive protest of poor residents cast a different retrospective light on the preservation movement.

Its goals transposed the urgency of urban protest into an aesthetic and nostalgic ideological key, dear to cultivated and politically empowered professionals. In turn, the historicist or populist styles of architectural revisionism transposed the concerns of preservation—care for the old, the meaningful, the picturesque, the layered diversity of the urban fabric—into eclectic allusions to the remote or recent past of architecture. The resulting pastiches often collate fragments that never had a historical existence together, with disturbing effect. Perhaps more disturbing is the dim sense that pastiche harbors a double reversal of collective concerns: First, pastiche reverses the concern with security and a decent life into concern for the old neighborhoods in which these people live; second, it reverses the concern for preservation into a preoccupation with cute historical allusions.

Rejecting traditional postmodernism became de rigueur among professionals in the second part of the 1980s, but this should not conceal other facts. First, any style can be impressed in the service of speculative profit. Second, the urban working class and the poor suffered more from renewal than from remodeling and restoration. Third, the emphasis on context, the respect for the labyrinthine streets and motley construction of living cities is one of traditional postmodernism's most positive and significant contributions. Fourth, the proponents of contextualism can help invest even preservation with oppositional force. Last, at the level of the architectural objects themselves, the essence of postmodernism is not one style but the tolerance of multiple languages.

If "a thousand flowers bloomed," it is because the growing numbers of architects found (with difficulty) increasingly diverse clients for a great variety of projects. Either these diverse clients wanted stylistic novelty and excitement, or they could be convinced to accept new and momentarily different architectural idioms. A recession that aggravated the perennial structural problems of the profession pressed all but the most recalcitrant dogmatists to accept, even to encourage, the blooming. When postmodern pluralism is expressed in these terms, the situation after 1980 becomes clearer.

Architecture emerged from its double crisis with a restorative professional ideology—the formalist emphasis on pure design—and a pluralism that applied both to styles and building types. Having reconstructed the

traditional identity of the architect-as-artist, formalism helped designers to effect a strategic retreat toward the individualism of one-of-a-kind commissions.

In the United States of the 1980s, social commissions and democratically oriented public architecture had all but vanished. The ideological comfort that formalism tendered to architects was excellence for excellence's sake, in either the playful or the rigorous delights of an eclectic discourse. The profession of architecture thus entered the speculative boom of the 1980s with new gatekeepers and a varied design elite but neither a common style nor a common vision. No group had enough power or enough influence to propose a direction, much less enforce common standards for the disparate professional enterprise. Yet the adoption of traditional postmodernism as favored style of the real estate boom made it easy to take it for a dominant style and blame it for what was happening to architecture.

Denying legitimacy to the use of architects as scenographers or stylists and of architecture as "packaging" matches the revaluation of craftmanship and service, which architects emphasized when aesthetic standards became uncertain. But despite their importance, constructional and pragmatic standards cannot define what architecture will look like (except multiple in form).

In sum, in our century architectural modernism went from technocratic social engineering to the service of corporate power. With the loss of social impetus, the aesthetic vision became routine. Strains and revisions multiplied at the level of discourse, quickening aesthetic disintegration. When an activist generation ignited political dissent and criticism inside the profession, the primacy of practice forced the symbolic gatekeepers to admit the ineradicable de facto diversity of architects' work.

Viewed from this angle, postmodern pluralism is a legacy of the antiauthoritarian politics of the 1960s, but the transformative impulses were contained within the specialized limits of a still weak and basically untransformed profession. The most substantial change was therefore in architecture's official discourse. The oppositional content of postmodernism (its emphasis on urban community, its advocacy of accessible design and authentic symbolism) struggles on within practices perforce devoted to the places of work, life, and leisure of the new urban middle class.

Architecture and Cultural Transitions

I have shown throughout this study that architecture is special, both as an intellectual discipline and as a professional practice. Despite this overde-

termined specificity, its recent evolution suggests that transitions in the production of culture may have some common traits. I submit them as tentative hypotheses.

First of all, the study of architecture indicates that change in specific cultural discourses has local origins. This goes further than the well-established notion that modern cultural practices are "self-legislating."^[3] Identifiable impulses toward change start within the specialized practices of identifiable agents and within specific circles of producers. Thus, what I was able to show about postmodern revisionism concerns the specialized discourse of architecture in the United States in a specific period.^[4] The post-modern accent on relativism and particularism agrees with the localism of architecture, the practice of which begins in a concrete locality, even if it can go international after that.^[5]

Second, discontinuities within specialist discourses do not necessarily respond to much more vast external discontinuities. World War II's awesome sequence of stasis, destruction, and reconstruction brought the Modern Movement from a minority position (already past its prime in the mid-1930s) to a universal and totalizing style. In turn, the global triumph of a banal and impoverished modernism compelled architects to react. The monotony and dreary sameness they call "exhaustion of forms" set in early, crying for aesthetic innovation and theoretical rearticulation. Not the catastrophic discontinuity of war but a later movement of young and educated people meant that a younger generation did both tasks.

Third, youth and education would not have been as significant without large numbers. The pressure of numbers within a delimited field deserves special attention for it is likely to engender competition for finite rewards. Competition, in turn, has been related to cultural innovation in settings as diverse as Islamic religion, nineteenth-century French painting, and twentieth-century American science.^[6]

The booming economy probably absorbed most of the fast-growing numbers of architects produced by American schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Nevertheless, pressure for elite standing was bound to increase in the narrow and self-contained circles that make up the "scene" in major art centers, the "circuit" of elite graduate schools, the boards of major journals, and the juries of major contests. Moreover, the strongest push for aesthetic innovation and typological diversity coincided with the mounting pressure of "overproduced" architects on a field beset by the economic crisis of the 1970s. Without prejudging in any way the form or the content of cultural innovation, I expect that a larger number of players makes it more likely to emerge. Architectural postmodernism thus reinforces the

rough correlations between numbers, competition, and innovation in the narrow ranks of specialized producers of culture.

Fourth, the partial overlap of personnel creates concrete connections between specialized cultural fields and larger political and social movements. The latter inspire and sustain within the former homologous actions of dissent, the objective of which is to redefine dominant intellectual paradigms and prescriptions about the specialists' roles.

Postmodernism could not have replicated the deliberate and fiery merger of artistic and political avant-gardism of the 1920s, for the revolutionary conditions of 1918 were not present in the 1960s in countries rich enough to afford an architecture. Yet what oppositional content there is in architectural postmodernism derives from the phase when, on both sides of the Atlantic, the New Left was raising its antitechnocratic banner.^[7]

Implicit in the above points is a fifth one, the most important corollary of cultural specialization: The interaction between producers of culture and their potential audiences (and even, if one so wishes, the expression of the Zeitgeist ) is always mediated by conditions of the producers' practices and by the historical circumstances that surround them. From this sociological position, it follows that bypassing the specific and localized analysis of cultural practice is unsound. Rushing to determine what cultural objects "say," one risks ignoring the experience of those by whom culture is "spoken" and of those to whom it "speaks."

Two things stand out in the practice of the American design elite during the postmodern transition. One is the sheer complexity of the architectural task, a good part of which is the economic and organizational difficulty of keeping the business of architecture going. To paraphrase Joseph Esherick, there is no time at all to think of the Zeitgeist .

Besides, even if an architect conveys a personal vision of the times, polysemic objects are always open to multiple and conflicting interpretations. Yet in architecture one interpretation clearly prevails upon any designer's message. Although building type is understood through and by means of stylistic conventions, the social function that type denotes is more broadly and immediately accessible than style or aesthetics. The idea that significance can be exhaustively explained by the author's intention is thus conspicuously doubtful in architecture.

The second thing that stands out is the convergence of parts of architectural work with parts of the culture industries. The material base of this convergence is clearer than its moral and social implications, and I will limit myself to sketching the former.^[8]

Postmodernism has marked the ascendancy of small- and medium-sized idea firms within the discourse, not the business, of American architecture.^[9] Their relations with organizational clients recall those of the creative technical producers with the organizational and managerial core of the culture industries. Like musicians for record companies or independent producers for television, architectural firms have no tenure beyond their project contracts. Because the smaller firms organize production in an almost artisanal way, overhead costs tend to be relatively low. If costs are reliably controlled, the firms enjoy full autonomy: The high level of professional competence (for which architects are presumably hired) makes it too costly for the sponsor to deny them responsibility.

Product selection occurs in architecture, as in the culture industries, at the "input boundary." Architects propose a range of alternatives (much expanded by postmodernism) to clients; like managers in the culture industries, large clients sponsor a selected sample for realization. In the large developers' offices, there is increasing professionalization of both "talent scouts" and marketing personnel, charged with co-opting the "mass media gatekeepers" (although in a minor way, compared to the culture industries). In the culture industries, book, music, film, or TV critics can strategically block or facilitate the "diffusion of particular fads and fashions."^[10] In architecture, media critics have probably less power.

Elite designers do their own marketing to find clients, but big commercial clients market the architects, their names, and their personas as part of the commercial packaging of a new project. However, star architects' access to reputedly autonomous critics (and, for some exceptional designers like Robert Stern, access to their own television programs) does not sell more products. It can "sell" a project to users and the architect's ideas to the vast ranks of followers in schools and offices across the land. Therefore, in architecture, the "diffusion of fads and fashions" does not depend as much on the general media as on the organized profession, the specialist press, and especially the system of training institutions. The design process is still too complex and too highly professionalized, and, above all, building is still too expensive for clients and banks to permit momentary fads.

These caveats suggest that elite architects see image-making as a qualitative jump, more than just a further loss of control over the construction process. The decrease in the fiscal life of buildings, the multiplication of images from which clients can choose, and the increase in the media's emphasis on the architect as "culture hero," all conspire to subject stylistic

conventions (the most noticeable sign of a building's architectural aspiration) to rapidly exhausted trends. Architects have not only moved closer to providing images instead of buildings; the life cycles of the images themselves have moved closer to those of the fashion and culture industries. The providers of these images can run after newness or imitation, for the decisive factor is what each can add to rental or resale values.

As an activity, postmodern architecture epitomizes material forces that tend to erase the differences between "high" and "mass" cultural production. Hired for their creativity and granted freedom to innovate, specialized cultural producers constrict their creative autonomy in anticipation of the client's choice. A subtler and more pervasive heteronomy channels cultural practices in the general direction of what sponsors can accept. This is in marked contrast with the autonomy of discourse.

Indeed, in most cultural fields, academic expansion and the continued growth of educated audiences allow increasing theoretical sophistication to develop in discourse. Architecture reveals a dialectic that appears with variations in many cultural fields: The autonomy of discourse encourages technical producers to take risks in cultural practice, while the costs of realization (a good indicator of producers' dependence on markets and funding) hold them back. This general condition helps us understand why theorists and philosophers take architecture as a pivotal allegory of post-modernism.

Architecture and the Postmodern Allegory

Postmodernism has been presented as a period, a new aesthetics, a theory, a philosophy, a new epistemology (by Lyotard), a "structure of feeling" (borrowing Raymond Williams's expression), a "regime of signification" (by Lash), a dominant in the cultural logic of late capitalism (by Jameson), or its fragmented consciousness (by Harvey).^[11] In all these versions, the shift is of concern mainly for the intellectuals who theorize it. Yet the "over-theorized" phenomenon of postmodernism is in fact not theorized at all. A phenomenon for which each theorist provides a disparate objective basis, if not a different theory, is incomprehensible as a whole.^[12] If postmodernism indeed represents an ongoing transformation of culture, it should be approached modestly, part by empirical part.

In this discordant chorus, however, a minimal consensus seems to form around architecture. Philosophers like Habermas and Lyotard take opposite stands on the universality of rational claims yet concur in making archi-

tecture a parable of the postmodern moment. They give modernism, not postmodernism, as the reason for architecture's conspicuous place in their theories.

Lyotard understands the modernist project as "a last rebuilding of the whole space occupied by humanity." Its abandonment is the first step in Lyotard's definition of the postmodern.^[13] His second, more-developed point is that postmodern means "incredulity toward metanarratives." The great philosophical justifications from which Western knowledge drew sustenance and legitimation have become unnecessary. In particular, the metanarrative of universal emancipation through science has become untenable; there need be no more proof than a list of names—Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam.^[14] Architecture, intimately linking modernism to modernization understood as social progress, points to this terrible discontinuity.

Habermas, more precise than Lyotard, disentangles modernism from its consequences. Everyone deplores "the soulless 'container' architecture, . . . the solitary arrogance of the unarticulated office block, of the monstrous department stores, universities and congress centers, . . . the lack of urbanity and the misanthropy of the satellite towns," but the Modern Movement is "still the first and only unifying style since the days of classicism," a style born from the avant-garde spirit, powerful enough to create its own models and itself become classic, from the outset international, from the outset aiming to penetrate everyday life.^[15]

The valence is different but the diagnosis is the same. The program of architectural modernism in the 1920s was so strong and (Habermas fails to add) its co-optation by capitalist democracies after the war so complete that the challenge against it acquires emblematic clarity.

Yet how can architecture so readily become an emblem of change? No other art (except film) is as expensive, which means that new ideas take longest to materialize. And no other recognized art is as useful and as intimately linked to economic investment and the fate of cities. The two attributes are at odds yet concur in lending architecture allegorical power.

First, change in architecture takes much longer to become visible than in other arts; as a corollary, architects become famous (and, to clients, trustworthy) late in life. The mid-fifties is an advanced age for a "young Turk." Ideas are therefore expressed on paper, in words and drawings, with a kind of extremism that would be unthinkable (if not undoable) in cement and steel. The debates and battles are not only more vehement on paper: They last longer than in other visual arts, insofar as it takes much longer to get to the "real thing."

Habermas, Lyotard, Jameson, Derrida, and others are theoreticians: they follow discourse more closely than any other medium. "Paper" architecture captivates them both by the starkness of the modernist project and the fervor of the challenge. Architectural discourse, moreover, is free to dress itself up with all the important words that populate their philosophical and literary debates: postmodern, poststructuralism, deconstruction, marginalization, estrangement, "the unconscious of pure form."^[16] Is it any wonder that they should ignore how little the structure of dominant building types has changed or how the architect's intervention is circumscribed to "facade and lobbies?"^[17] Architectural change, for the philosophers, happens in words as much as in built exemplars.

The exemplars, long as it takes to build them and hard as it is to build them as designed, give architecture the opposite kind of force: the presence of ineluctable materiality. Indeed, these are not words, not paper, not merely texts, but buildings. They must (even by law) be sound. Formidable or modest, they occupy a place, they transform a landscape, they loom in front of our eyes, they can be inhabited. They are the stage of power, commerce, worship, toil, love, life. The art of architecture has never abandoned the "sphere of our sorrow," has never moved into the rarefied domain that art occupies in bourgeois ideology. It is among us.

Against the overintellectual discourse of postmodernism (by which I mean a debate addressed to intellectuals alone), we experience architecture sensuously, holistically, and, as Benjamin pointed out, habitually and in a state of distraction.^[18] In an intellectual culture governed by the abstraction of the linguistic metaphor, the materiality of architecture is inescapable. This is the art that does not represent and does not signify but is .

It is, in part, the environment, a formidable capital investment, the archetypal durable good, not a commodity but the container of commodities. What happens in architecture will be received, in due time and distractedly, by people who will not have access to other arts. As the stage of social life, architecture (good or bad) becomes the embodiment of a historical period.

A Personal Closure

The sociologist's job is in large part analysis and demystification, but this should not rule out deeper meanings and experiences. So, in the end, I will state my own perplexity about our architecture. Throughout the book I have avoided passing any judgment on its products; yet, I could not hide my sympathy for those architects who try hard to find opportunities for a

social practice. Equally, I find in the modernist architecture of Germany and Holland in the 1920s the promise, for lack of a better word, of democratic and egalitarian aesthetics: The decent, dignified housing exudes repose and sometimes attains beauty. Moreover, it makes the great monuments legitimate.

Architecture is praised as a knowledge combining aesthetics and technique, theory and practice. It is often praised today for its distinctive, critical, and holistic pedagogy. From the modernist phase onward, it has also presented a model for the enlightened exercise of expertise. The high-rise buildings and the postwar new towns have tarnished that model, although there too the case is neither one-dimensional nor closed.

In the commons and winding rows of cottages in a lower-income Swedish suburb, for example, the signs of careful planning are almost moving: playgrounds, sand boxes ready for the icy winter, bike paths, common laundry facilities, meeting rooms, sheds where people keep the tools for painting, cleaning, gardening together. Only on such a background, I thought, can architectural monuments cease to be at the same time "documents of civilization and barbarism."^[19] But I am fully aware that works of beauty often seem to require quite a different soil to rise. Architecture's ritual and aesthetic power can exceed the social circumstances of its production.

Vincent Scully notes that the most beloved and visited architectural work of the profligate 1980s was not a hotel nor a museum but the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Its designer was not a famous architect but a young woman, Maya Lin, still an undergraduate, who rose from a vast field to win the 1981 competition with a black marble wall inscribed with the names of the dead. Today, crowds walk silently along the wall, reading names, looking for the one they know, touching it. The arrow-shaped wall points at one end to the obelisk and at the other to the Lincoln Memorial. The pomp of the monuments to great men dissolves into fifty thousand or so names; the wall shimmers with the dark light of grief, sloping imperceptibly toward the open sky. Memory has found a lasting form.