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.