Chapter Two—
Architectural Change in the Twentieth Century

The search for a new architecture started with the theoretical quest and visionary projects of French rationalist architects in the late eighteenth century. Working during the French Revolution, the generation of architects born about 1760 sought to express the reign of Reason in a way that included a new "respect for the properties of the material" and a preference for the elementary geometries of an abstracted classicism.^[1]

Later, in the nineteenth century, restoration and reaction attempted to contain both the spirit of the French Revolution and the social consequences of industrialization. The ascendant bourgeoisie, without lineage and uncertain of its position in a reactionary and monarchic Europe, favored for its new buildings and newly acquired mansions the picturesque and romantic associations of historical revivals. Thus, in Europe and the colonies, bourgeois architects built the elegant side of the new capitalist world in the eclectic image of an invented past and transformed the architecture of the colonized into different brands of exoticism.

Italicist, Grecist, Orientalist, and neo-Gothic styles had this in common: They all sharply differed from the utilitarian yet often striking forms that the revolution in production and transportation had erected without the help of any architect. Experiments with new materials and technologies, with new building types and kinds of architectural commissions, prompted deeper changes in the conception of architecture than did all the formal novelties. After World War I, in the revulsion against an old order and the

convulsions of a new birth, multiple experiments converged toward the new architecture.

The new form of building (das neue Bauen , as it was called in what seemed its German stronghold before Hitler banned it) was a minority position in a very conservative profession. But during a brief moment in the 1920s, it appeared to have both forged the century's architecture and given the architect a new social identity. In the words of one architectural historian, "between 1925 and 1928, in only three years, there emerged in Europe the idea that in the field of architecture an 'irreversible' transformation had taken place, one that no longer concerned only small avant-garde groups but had actually taken shape in the public mind in numerous countries."^[2] This idea was a wild exaggeration. And yet, the ones to give this new movement credence were not the historiographers of the new movement, nor its patrons alone, but above all its enemies. Barbara Miller Lane's masterful study suggests, in fact, that Adolf Hitler's persecution of the Modern Movement achieved two things: One, it gave the modernists' minority position more importance than it had had and an aura of progressivism that not all the victimized artists deserved; and, two, the diaspora caused by Hitler's persecution of the Modern Movement was ultimately responsible for the belated triumph of the new aesthetics.^[3]

In the 1930s, then, the Modern Movement was faltering under the blows of cultural policy in Nazi Germany. Elsewhere, modern architecture was in retreat. In the Soviet Union, the Russian constructivists, whose aesthetic ideas had been essential for the West European artists (especially the architects), were silenced by Stalinism. Architecture was suffering everywhere from the effects of the depression. Parts of the modernist experiment continued timidly through the 1930s—in the Netherlands, in Scandinavia, sporadically in England, and in the United States, where some German émigrés had taken refuge. But a mellower attitude toward tradition and the vernacular became perceptible almost everywhere, even in the work of Le Corbusier, the apostle of modernism. In public commissions, the end of the 1930s saw a return to monumental classicism, not only in the totalitarian states but even in Holland; it was prevalent in France, where the Modern Movement had never been widely accepted, as also in the United States.^[4]

War engulfed the world at the beginning of the next decade. But, even before the deluge, the heroic phase of architectural modernism was over. What happened, and what did it mean? These are questions not only for us; contemporaries sought answers to them as well. In fact, the historiographic reconstruction started very soon, with the result that the discursive

power of the modernists within the profession of architecture was multiplied.

Many publications on the national and international dimensions of the Modern Movement had accompanied its ascendancy.^[5] But two historical interpretations that appeared in the stagnant climate of the 1930s became standard works: The 1936 work by Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius , traced the origins of the Modern Movement until 1914; the 1938–39 Harvard lectures by Siegfried Giedion, the former secretary of the International Congress for Modern Architecture (or CIAM), were published in 1940 under the title Space, Time, and Architecture: Growth of a New Tradition.^[6] The titles themselves are telling. Pevsner's reference to William Morris suggests that for Pevsner the movement was not only an aesthetic response to industrial production but a deeply critical one. In Giedion's "new tradition" the Modern Movement crowns, as a new beginning, the long chain of Western architectural history.^[7] For both men, the fundamental event in the history of modern architecture is capitalist industrialization.

I begin this analytical survey of modern architecture by looking at its industrial background and, more briefly, at some architectural responses to the effects of industrialization. Second, I introduce the canonic cast of characters of the Modern Movement, such as one finds it in architectural history books. Third, I consider the ideas, achievements, and architectural language of the Modern Movement, focusing for detail on Weimar Germany, the epicenter of architectural modernism before World War II.

The story resumes after the war: I briefly cover the transformation of modernism into an American yet truly "International Style" in order to introduce the theoretical "antifunctionalism" of the 1960s, mainly through the work of Robert Venturi. Finally, I look at the gradual passage of revisionist (or postmodern) architects into the "establishment," concluding with some of the questions that inform my study of postmodernism.

The Industrial Matrix of Architectural Modernism

In nineteenth-century Europe and America, urbanization and the slow democratization of social life created new social functions and needs. Work, commerce, transportation, schooling, health, and pleasure demanded buildings for which there were no direct precedents. In the sphere of production, as in that of leisure, the predominant needs were those of the industrial bourgeoisie and of a middle class with enough money to spend.

Thus, on one side of industrial capitalism, there were the factories and warehouses that served production most directly. In the second part of the century, the railways called for the iron bridges and the magnificent stations that are the true monuments of the industrial revolution, while grandiose ports, piers, and storage facilities followed the development of the world economy. In the 1890s, the first "tall office buildings" of Chicago and New York added still another building type to the modern metropolis. Banks and stock exchanges belonged by their appearance to a separate domain.

On the other side of industrial capitalism, there were theaters and opera houses, concert halls and museums, libraries and city halls and post offices, and also elegant apartment buildings and department stores, in which the new civilization displayed and marketed an undreamed-of profusion of commodities. Sharp distinctions of appearance—of construction too, but above all of style—separated the world of work, where the bourgeoisie faced its class antagonist (the industrial working class), from the world of culture, where it still confronted the social ascendancy of the old aristocracy.

The first effect of the industrial revolution was therefore to relegate architecture to the domain of pomp, affluence, and leisure, sharply dividing it from work and capitalist production. Second, modern industry produced cast iron, steel (in large quantities after 1870), reinforced concrete, and glass—the new construction materials required by the expansion of capitalism. By the second half of the century, skeletons of cast and wrought iron (later on of steel and ferroconcrete), often used in conjunction with modular glazing, had displaced the massive supporting walls of the past in all large utilitarian structures.^[8] From the 1890s on, electricity and mechanical ventilation freed construction from natural light and air circulation, making it possible for architecture to seem immaterial.^[9] Electricity opened the unprecedented, magical vision of buildings fully lighted and floating, like ocean liners, in the night. Innovative architects were prompted to exploit the potential of new technologies and new materials that had been used for the first times in the new industrial and utilitarian buildings.

Indeed, the mechanization and rationalization of manufacturing served architects and everyone else as a permanent reminder of the enormous potential of mass production and standardized components. The world fairs, with their demand for huge covered spaces and rapid construction, helped fix international attention on the new methods of building. Two extraordinary technological achievements are worth mentioning, for they excited the enthusiasm of large publics. The first is the Crystal Palace, built for the first great exhibition of 1851 in London: 800,000 square feet covered

with glass, four times the area of St. Peter's in Rome. Its designer, Joseph Paxton, a gardener and estate manager, took from the construction of greenhouses the idea of entirely prefabricated units. A contemporary considered it "a revolution in architecture from which a new style will date."^[10]

The second unprecedented achievement is the 1,000-foot iron tower designed for the 1889 exhibition in Paris. The Eiffel Tower immortalized the name of one of the greatest constructors of iron bridges of his time, but it did much more than that: In itself and through the work of painters like Robert Delaunay, it gave modernity its urban icon. In 1925, Le Corbusier wrote:

The Eiffel Tower has been accepted as architecture.

In 1889 it was seen as the aggressive expression of mathematical calculation.

In 1900 the aesthetes wanted to demolish it.

In 1925 it dominated the Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts. Above the plaster palaces writhing with decoration, it stood out as pure crystal.^[11]

Third, the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower illustrate some less direct but no less important implications of the industrial revolution: Its technological feats did not signify a gain in either intellectual or social status for nineteenth-century architects. Engineers and other technical devisers, including the industrial entrepreneurs themselves, were the mythical protagonists of capitalist industrialization and the beneficiaries of the middle class's enthusiasm for technology.

Henceforth, a central part of the modernist architects' task of redefining their field would deal with the machine (representing the whole of technology and industry) and with the rival figure of the engineer, the machine's symbolic master. One ideological strategy had been evolving since the beginning of the century: It took the industrial builder and the engineer as the "noble savages" of the new age. Later, Le Corbusier learned from Walter Gropius to admire American industrial building and to pronounce engineers as naïve form-givers who have "retained a natural feeling for large compact forms fresh and intact." But the engineer's naïveté about artistic traditions implies that aesthetic leadership properly belongs elsewhere: to the architects, obviously, who must move to reappropriate it.^[12]

A fourth consequence of industrial modernity for artists (and ambitious architects considered themselves artists) was kitsch, the peculiarly modern form of a bad taste that is always expressed in consumption. Capitalist industrialization was directly and indirectly responsible for the flowering of kitsch. Given that the working class's capacity to spend was limited throughout the nineteenth and a good part of the twentieth century, kitsch

appeared as a distinctive taste of the expanding middle class. In Clement Greenberg's words, kitsch "is vicarious experience and fake sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but always remains the same. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers, except their money—not even their time."^[13] From William Morris on, modern artists opposed the kitsch of industrial capitalism, while at the same time many took the incipient mass culture for their subject. Painting, especially, represented the vulgarity of new forms of urban leisure (repulsive and fascinating at the same time) for an elite audience, which for the most part supported capitalist society in all but its standards of taste.

The sense of estrangement of the progressive artist is to be found in the objective duplicity of producing art that is critical of the class for whom one works. It is compounded by knowing that this class's system of production is always looking to seize, after domestication, the forms that the avant-garde produces. For the historian Thomas Crow, the essence of modernism lies in responding to this estrangement: "In search of raw material, mass culture strips traditional art of its marketable qualities, and leaves as the only remaining path to authenticity a ceaseless alertness against the stereotyped and the pre-processed. The name of this path is modernism, which is . . . vulnerable to the same kind of appropriation. . . . Mass culture is prior and determining; modernism is its effect. "^[14]

If, as Hermann Broch suggests, kitsch is always a system of imitation, then the architecture of exotic medleys and historicist revivals was a full participant in the production of kitsch.^[15] But for the architects the central problem cannot only be to find a way out of kitsch while still accepting the advantages of the machine age.

From 1842 (the date of Edwin Chadwick's report entitled Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population in England ), it was official that the ugliness and banality of the industrial city were merely ancillary to the appalling living conditions of the urban poor. If visual and decorative artists could define their problem as keeping one step ahead of middle-class kitsch, architects of good conscience could not. Because of the utilitarian essence of building, even the purest and most radical architecture was a silent reminder of its opposites: the absence of decent shelter for the working poor and uncontrolled urban growth.

Neither the most influential idea of nineteenth-century urbanism (Ebenezer Howard's Garden City, of which a minimal example was raised at Letchworth in 1905) nor the bureaucratic measures passed before World War I in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Britain, and Germany involved

architects in conceptual or actual work on new dwelling types. It took a world war to change the parameters of the housing question.^[16]

In sum, capitalist industrialization and the countermovements it awakened were the moving forces of modernity. Perhaps no one has expressed with more power than Marx the entwining of the objective and the subjective, the negative and the affirmative, in this staggering experience:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.^[17]

To instate a protective separation between civilization (the German Kultur ) and the economy, the bourgeoisie sought the security of "ancient and venerable prejudices." In art and architecture, it looked to the traditional embellishments of life to display its wealth and legitimize its rule. Even when some educated bourgeois began to follow modern art in their taste, the narrow bourgeois democracies (just like the fascist and bureaucratic socialist regimes of the 1930s) held tight to the giant buildings in baroque or neoclassic style and the vast empty spaces that symbolized the state.

Thus, the majority of elite nineteenth-century architects went on as in the ancien régime , lavishing their imagination on the better commissions—those that employed "noble" materials like stone and marble and conventional methods of masonry building, at least for their decorated facades. Yet, to more searching minds, the revivals and the eclectic medleys seemed painfully unadapted both to modern technology and to the problems of modern social life. But for architecture to change in purpose and content, for architects to tackle the question of mass housing, social policy (indeed, social relations) had to change. Meanwhile, architectural progressivism was perforce limited to mounting formal attacks and advancing either purely formal or utopian alternatives.

Formal and Ideological Responses

In the 1890s, decorative artists began searching for unity in a novel approach to decoration. Art nouveau made its appearance at the Paris exhibition of 1900, giving a European reputation to the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde. Retrospectively, Le Corbusier wrote a sarcastic comment:

A dazzling handful of those works was displayed in which nature, giving geometry time off for a rest cure, twists the life out of those building and craft materials which normally suffer from it. . . . People began then to talk about Decorative Art. And skirmishes broke out. . . . Houses were dreamed up with the rhythm of the living stem of wild clematis (Gallé). . . . Water, earth and sky, the Botanic Gardens and the Natural History Museum—they were all there to be explored with ineffable love for the creatures of the Good Lord. Ruskin had softened our hearts.^[18]

Art Nouveau architecture gave a new formal expression to iron and cement construction, spreading a profusion of natural motifs in harmony with the severe structure of its buildings, or converting structural members into decoration, as in Hector Guimard's famous iron gates for the Paris Metro.

Furniture had been prominent in the development of Art Nouveau. Furniture is not only something that architects without building projects can design but also something that workers can hope to buy sooner than a house. Yet the furniture revealed where the movement was retrograde, for it required craft production. The more lasting design innovations moved soon, and resolutely, to purify forms in anticipation of mass production.^[19] Architecture also began to move further away from decoration before the war: the design of furniture and household objects was in some cases a direct inspiration, but a strong impulse came both from fine arts and from the economics of industrial building. This double impulse pushed architects to look in geometric form for a symbolic reconciliation of their art with technology and science.

On the one hand, modern art was attempting on its own to come to terms with scientific discoveries.^[20] With the rise of abstraction, visual artists based their work on "lines, planes, surfaces, volumes, the interpenetration of figures and geometric solids, in sum, on categories of pure visibility which until then had been considered especially relevant for architecture."^[21] The experiments of the Russian supremacists, the cubists, and the De Stijl group in Holland suggested entirely new conceptions of space to architects, who were often members of the same avant-garde circles.

On the other hand, some architects had been looking for the "truth of building" in the styleless architectonics of industrial builders.^[22] In 1908, the Viennese Adolf Loos, distilling his American experience of fifteen years before, castigated Europe's cultural "stragglers and marauders" in the famous pamphlet "Ornament and Crime." There was no need "to discover the style of our age," he proclaimed against the German Werkbund—the organization of artists, craftsmen, manufacturers, and intellectuals formed in 1907: "We already have the style of our age. . . . The evolution of culture

is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects. . . . Ornament is wasted labor power and hence wasted health."^[23]

The German Werkbund, however, harbored advanced principles of design among its different factions. The architect and Prussian official Hermann Muthesius, one of the Werkbund's founders and its moving force, represented most coherently the nationalist and rationalizing vision of the prewar Werkbund. The central objectives were to raise the average quality of German products; to develop an aesthetically valid style for machine-produced goods; to insure industrial positions for artists, who would direct themselves to design prototypes (Typisierung ), as would architects, fully aware of the need for workers' housing; to rely on proportions and, in architecture, on the abstracted neoclassicism of Schinkel and Semper. In the words of one historian, "exactness, simplicity and regularity of form were seen not simply as functional requirements of the machine, but expressive and even symbolic desiderata, in themselves expressions of the power, economy and efficiency of modern social and economic organization; hence their value lay beyond the mode of execution."^[24] The affinity of this section of the Werkbund with modern industry was supported by the presence of Peter Behrens among its founding members. Architect, graphic artist, and director of the Düsseldorf School of Applied Arts, Behrens occupied from 1907 to 1914 the post of artistic director of the AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitats Gesellschaft) and was charged with the responsibility for redesigning "the company's buildings, products and publicity material, from the celebrated turbine hall [of 1909] right down to tiny publicity seals."^[25]

Two principles, which we must keep distinct, fused in the modernist rejection of applied ornament. On the one hand, rationalization was invoked by Loos as a principle of industrial and economic efficiency, against the Werkbund's purified and classicizing notions of style. On the other hand, the rejection of ornament and the purification of forms was held to have moral connotations, a principle that aligned progressive architects with an artistic and ideological movement.

Because they represented Platonic solids and were easier to produce by machine, simple geometric forms and volumes made it possible to assimilate designed artifacts (including buildings) with machine production, hence technology, hence science. A new poetry of form thus signaled architects' ambitions to change their role from the embellishment of leisure to the equipment of production.

Purified form harmonized with the potential of the new industrial materials, especially glass. Together, form and materials opened the way toward

a new conception of built space. In the United States, Frank Lloyd Wright had not only formed, before the German Werkbund, the idea of transforming industry through art; by 1908, he had already carried to maturity principles of architectural composition that so impressed the Europeans.^[26] His work was published and exhibited in Berlin in 1910 and 1911. Ludwig Hilberseimer, the uncompromising planner of the Bauhaus, remembers its effect:

This exhibition was a big event. It was surprising to observe how Wright, starting from the traditional house, had succeeded in creating something radically new. He was already at the point of perfecting what others were still looking for: his projects expressed and demonstrated a new sense of space. . . . It was as if someone had suddenly opened the shutters in a dark room, flooding it with air and light.^[27]

The signs of a new architecture had therefore emerged before the war, not in the work of Wright only but in Holland, in the industrial architecture of Germany and Italy, in France, England, Austria, and Belgium. And, as is always the case with innovative architecture, there had also been more manifestoes and drawings than buildings of a revolutionary stamp.^[28]

The experience of war and revolution was the dividing line between modern tendencies and a Modern Movement. The diverse tendencies did not coalesce into one after the war, as some histories would pretend, but the war imparted to the progressive architects born in the 1880s a new urgency and a new hope in their work. Like many of their generation, they were convinced that Europe had been given "a second chance." And architecture would necessarily occupy an important place in the new order.

In the revolutionary Berlin of 1919, the Work Council for Art proclaimed with the quasi-religious fervor of expressionism the need for a democratic art. Yet it was clear that utility would have to be a component in the artists' move toward "the people." The decisive role of architects in the Council (from Walter Gropius and the noted critic Adolf Behne, who directed it, to Bruno Taut, who chaired the architecture committee) insured recognition of architecture's primary ideological place:

Art and people must form a unity.

Art shall no longer be the enjoyment of the few but the life and happiness of the masses.

The aim is alliance of the arts under the wing of a great architecture.

Foreshadowing its architects' involvement with the democratic government, the Council advanced six preliminary demands. Demand 1 read,

"Recognition of the public character of all building activity, both State and private. . . . People's housing as a means of bringing all the arts to the people. Permanent experimental sites for testing and perfecting new architectural effects." Demands 2 to 4 asked for "the dissolution of the Academy of Arts, the Academy of Building and the Prussian Provincial Art Commission in their existing form"; freedom from all state interference in the new institutions and radical transformation of training in architecture, arts, and handicrafts and revitalization of the museums. The provocative fifth demand called for "destruction of artistically valueless monuments as well as of buildings whose artistic value is out of proportion to the value of their material, which could be put to other uses. Prevention of prematurely planned war memorials." The manifesto closed by demanding "a national centre to ensure the fostering of the arts."^[29]

The next year was Le Corbusier's turn. Yet the tone of his series for L'Esprit nouveau, the journal he had founded, was different. First, Le Corbusier asserts, "It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today: Architecture or Revolution. Then, he goes on to explain this surprising alternative:

If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts with regard to the houses and look at the question from a critical and objective point of view, we shall arrive at the "House-Machine," the mass production house, healthy (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful. Beautiful also with all the animation that the artist's sensibility can add to severe and pure functioning elements. If existing property arrangements were changed, and they are changing, it would be possible to build. . . . The morality of industry has been transformed: big business is today a healthy and moral organism . . . we have Revolution in method and in the scale of the adventure. . . . There has been Revolution in methods of construction. . . . Architecture or Revolution. Revolution can be avoided.^[30]

Even though Le Corbusier implicitly addresses himself to industry rather than to the state, the texts of the period are consistent about the place of architecture. Their ideology is architecture, and it is married to a general confusion about the rationalization of production and the conciliation of class conflict. Architecture as ideology could admit opposite political tendencies, as long as the state was in favor of massive building programs and of the new forms that the architects took for proxies of truth, goodness, justice, and progress.

Before introducing the main protagonists of this movement in which architecture became ideology, we must consider what they had in common.

The first and most important thing that modernist architects shared was the experience of World War I. Certainly, the war had been different for the victors and the vanquished, for the countries that were battlefields and those that were not. Yet the war gave a tragic urgency to the rejection of the bourgeois past, animating the intellectuals' romantic identification with the revolutionary movements of postwar years.

The only total break with the past had been realized, so it seemed, by the Russian Revolution. During the 1920s the USSR hovered in the background of architectural modernism (especially for the Germans) as an open alternative to the restoration of the bourgeoisie and the frustrations of architects' hopes.^[31]

From the first months of the war, the shortage of credit, materials, and labor had stopped civilian construction, exacerbating the already severe housing conditions faced by the poor. In Britain, rent control was introduced early, in 1915, and later in France and Germany. In Germany, where average rents had quadrupled since 1914, housing legislation was passed in the final months of the Reich and incorporated into the republican constitution of August 1919. The stage was set for the immense efforts in social housing of the Weimar Republic, a program hailed by contemporaries (and others since) as the foundation of modernist architecture.^[32]

A second element that progressive architects shared was their prewar contacts with the avant-gardes. Fired by fervent belief in the transformative capacity of art, the contacts continued after the war, yielding in part to the more deliberate organization of new centers and new networks in the 1920s. The desire to help construct a new society and a new way of life transformed the former avant-gardists into artistes engagés .

Dutch architects, their country having been spared the devastation of the war, had continued working; many progressives among them had already passed from the avant-garde into the service of the government before the war. Later, the Scandinavian, the Austrian, and the German architects followed the same path to work in town planning and in the design of mass housing for democratic governments.

Last but not least, modernist architects had in common with other intellectuals of both the left and the right an ideological faith in technology and industrial rationalization that can be summed up by "the idea of technology as a social arbiter."^[33] After the war, the belief required extra faith, for the demonstrated potency of modern industry would have to be turned from destructive to (literally) constructive use. The model for modernity came from America, symbolized by Taylorism and Fordism. Social democrats, with some confusion, saw in Frederick Taylor's ideas of scientific manage-

ment the means for overcoming scarcity through increased productivity and for submitting the capitalist entrepreneur to the objective dictates of "science." The capitalist would thus become an industrial expert, like his engineers, with no special rights of control attached to his property claims.

Rationalization seemed to promise architects an especially important role. The historian Mary Nolan has followed the concerted efforts of philanthropic and state agencies to "Taylorize" the housewife's work in Weimar Germany, but, she says, the "effort to create modern, scientific homes and efficient homemakers" was international. The decade of the 1920s saw the formation of a modern female working class and, in consequence, middle-class "reformist" efforts to create "a new woman," neither independent nor sexually liberated but capable of rationally organizing her home and her family.^[34]

The Weimar architects, imagining everything, from the existenz minimum dwelling, to the kitchen as the housewife's laboratory, to the design of appliances no German working-class family could yet afford, were much ahead of Le Corbusier in realizing the "machine tool" house, which he only projected. In the general enthusiasm about rationalization, the way things looked was important. By proclaiming the unification of the life of work and the life of leisure under the sign of rationality and ever-increasing productivity, the appearance of houses and objects symbolized modern technology.

The rationalization of production along Taylorist lines promised an ever-expanding national product that could therefore bypass the need for income redistribution policies by the government. Conflicts would be resolved, in this technocratic dream, by an expert elite, to which progressive architects quite logically wanted to belong. The vision could appeal, the historian Charles Maier points out, to Italian fascists, German or Scandinavian social democrats, or even Lenin in Russia—the latter because the issue of class conflict supposedly had not been denied but decided. Analogously, both left- and right-wing artists in Germany could adopt the Neue Sachlichkeit (the new objectivity), pretending to have superseded the expressionism from which they still derived impetus and form.^[35]

Maier interprets the shift toward Fordism in the late 1920s as the reinstatement of entrepreneurial power over technocratic ambitions. Extensive cartelization and centralization of the economy had been achieved, yet the domestic markets remained very narrow, precisely because no redistribution had taken place. In most European countries, industrialists feared the saturation of internal markets and the loss of competitiveness abroad. Fordism, to them, was not primarily a Model-T in every home but a way of

cutting labor costs and standardizing production. Ultimately, "rationalization in Europe . . . served a conservative business community seeking to exploit, first, the transition to overall non-inflationary monetary conditions, then the prosperous but increasingly saturated market of the later 1920s."^[36]

Whether modernist architects had been able to realize part of their vast dreams or not, they remained close to the productive and technocratic vision of rationalization. By their choice of a style and by their conception of collective and individual dwellings, they hoped to influence—even more, to compel—the inhabitants' choice of a rational and a communal life. Modernist architects lived the change of architecture as a thoroughly objective and rational way to insure their place in a reconstructed social order. Almost inevitably, as the depression deepened and hope disappeared, they once again subconsciously took architectural aesthetics for a new social order and their own new vision as the only radically new form that had taken root in postwar society.

Modernism's International Cast of Characters

The canonical account of the cast of characters can be kept brief. Five men are the recognized masters of twentieth-century architecture: the American Frank Lloyd Wright, born in 1869, well before the Europeans of the 1880s generation; the Germans Walter Gropius (1883–1969) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969); the Swiss-born Parisian Charles Edouard Jeanneret, alias Le Corbusier (1887–1965); and the Finn Alvar Aalto (1898–1976). But geniuses, no matter how extraordinary, do not make a movement, nor do they effect a cultural change. The incomplete roster that follows still suffers from the emphasis on charismatic individuals typical of art history books. I can only say in apology that it is only intended to acquaint the reader with names that recur in architectural discourse.

In France, after having worked briefly in Peter Behrens's Berlin office and in Paris for Auguste Perret (known for his mastery of innovative construction in concrete), Le Corbusier founded with the painter Amédée Ozenfant the review L'Esprit nouveau in 1920. There were other modernist architects in France, but their often important work practically disappears in the presence of Le Corbusier's influence.^[37] Le Corbusier the artist—architect, painter, sculptor—has so dominated twentieth-century architecture by his command of form and the diversity of his achievements as to evoke Michelangelo. Le Corbusier the writer and publicist gave to the Modern Movement its most inspiring manifestoes as well as concrete methodologies of urban planning and design.

France did not have the practical legislation in favor of mass housing that Germany had, nor did it experience the latter's political upheavals. Le Corbusier found neither a large audience for his experiments in the design of prototype housing nor a large following among architects.^[38] His plans for the contemporary city were first shown in 1922, elaborated in the 1925 Plan Voisin for the center of Paris, and formed into doctrine in the "Athens Charter," which he signed for the CIAM meeting of 1933. His plans were to have a lasting and powerful impact on urban planning after World War II. Le Corbusier's early leadership was therefore based on his projects, his theoretical work, and his role in CIAM.^[39]

The Modern Movement's true epicenters were Holland and Germany. In Holland, a group of artists gathered since 1917 around the review De Stijl , from which they took its name, put into practice the uncompromising abstraction learned from the painters Piet Mondrian and Theo van Does-burg, the group's tireless propagandist. De Stijl was an avant-garde response to the young architects grouped around H. P. Berlage in Amsterdam, who sought, instead, to reconcile the new architecture with tradition.

The major figures of Dutch architectural modernism were the De Stijl members J. J. P. Oud, Cor Van Eesteren, Gerrit Rietveld (for his formal inventions), and Willem Dudok, who came from the Berlage group tendency to work in the planning office of Hilversum, Holland, in 1915. For all their advocacy of abstract decomposition and systematic contrast of adjacent elements, the De Stijl architects (with the exception of Gerrit Rietveld, known especially for his work in small houses and furniture) had to temper their approach as soon as they started building. It was as Rotterdam's city architect from 1918 on that Jacob Oud produced some of the most remarkable housing districts of the Modern Movement. Cor Van Eesteren, Amsterdam's planner, was with Le Corbusier a major influence in CIAM's approach to urbanism after 1930. These and younger architects—like J. A. Brinkmann and A. C. Van der Vlugt, designers of the 1927 Van Nelle factory (which, for Le Corbusier, "removed all the former connotation of despair from that word 'proletarian'")^[40] —continued to advance modernist architecture in Holland when it had been silenced in Germany.

In the 1930s and 1940s, modernism managed to survive in Sweden and Denmark. In Sweden, young architects were struggling to adapt modernist principles to the incipient social democratic housing program. Despite the conversion to modernism of the noted architect of the romantic school, Erik Gunnar Asplund, the most remarkable monuments were still identified with the romantic revival, in particular Ragnar Ostberg's masterpiece, the Stockholm City Hall. Danish modernism of the 1930s followed that of

Sweden, with the exemplary work of Arne Jacobsen. But the most original talent, Alvar Aalto, was in Finland, whose most famous architect, Eliel Saarinen, had left for America in 1923. Aalto, an early member of CIAM, had started building along strict modernist lines; but in 1933, with the competition for the sanatorium at Paimio, and in 1935, with the library at Viipuri, Aalto came into his stride, achieving rapid renown. Early on, his work was hailed with that of Frank Lloyd Wright as a distinctively modern correction to the excesses of modernist dogma.

A word should be said about Italy because of three things: the presence of futurism and its visionary architect, Antonio Sant'Elia, before World War I; the Fiat-Lingotto factory (which was finished in 1926 and captured the imagination of contemporaries); and the international significance its architecture would gain after World War II. Italy's Modern Movement worked under fascism; in 1931, the short-lived Italian Movement for a Rational Architecture opened its exhibition with a deliberate attempt to put itself at the service of the fascist government and enlist its support. From 1930 until his death in 1936, Edoardo Persico, in the journal Casabella , provided a lucid international perspective on the Modern Movement. Individual architects (among whom the most gifted was Giuseppe Terragni, who died in 1942) obtained several commissions, notably Rome's projected Universal Exhibition, but architectural work became increasingly politicized in the late 1930s. The "moderns" veered definitively toward the clean neoclassicism for which the regime is known.

In Germany, examples of the new architecture blossomed in smaller towns where the younger architects found municipal appointments or commissions: in Celle with Otto Haesler, in Dessau with Walter Gropius, in Stuttgart with the Weissenhof housing exhibition of the Deutsche Werkbund. The Bauhaus, the school for the applied arts reorganized by Gropius in Weimar from 1919 to 1925, then in Dessau, was the movement's foremost training institution in art and theory. Occupying a special position, Eric Mendelsohn's modernist expressionism reached great commercial success when construction resumed after 1924. With the stabilization of the currency, Berlin and Frankfurt became the vital centers of the Modern Movement, demonstrating the shift that had been taking place from a still vigorous expressionism toward the colder geometries and rationalizing ideas of the Neue Sachlichkeit .

In Berlin, modernist architects of different tendencies—Bruno and Max Taut, Hugo Häring, Otto Bartning, Fred Forbat, Hans Henning, Hans Scharoun, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius (after leaving the Bauhaus in 1928)—became involved in the

remarkable program of public housing organized by Martin Wagner, appointed director of planning for the Greater Berlin in 1926. In Frankfurt, the progressive mayor Ludwig Landmann appointed Wagner's counterpart, Ernst May, in 1924 and supported him unfailingly until he decided to leave for the Soviet Union in 1930 with part of his team.

In the 1920s, German modernist architects produced striking isolated masterpieces (such as Mendelsohn's department store in Chemnitz, the rich villas by Wassili and Hans Luckhardt in Berlin, Gropius's building for the Bauhaus school at Dessau, Mies van der Rohe's 1926 monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, his German pavilion for the Barcelona exhibition of 1929, or the Villa Tugendat at Brno in 1930), even though they did not obtain a single large commission.

The monument of German modernism was mass housing: During the brief years between 1924 and 1930, Wagner and May's organizing talents assured Germany's international leadership in the Modern Movement. The innovations of Germany's radical architects made up in controversy for the small part they actually designed of what was built.^[41] The American housing expert Catherine Bauer recalls the European movement's original principles:

At that time the new architecture was wedded to a pair of principles which gave the word "functional" a double meaning: (1) The full use of modern technology and its honest expression in design; and (2) a scientific approach to human needs and uses in programming, planning and design. . . . For a brief period, much of the resulting architecture fulfilled the principles of both movements [the professional and the social democratic movement] to a very considerable extent. What I saw in Europe in 1930 was so exciting that it transformed me from an aesthete into a housing reformer.^[42]

The depression interrupted the most ambitious construction projects, until they were resumed as public works. In Germany, the Nazis were as interested as the social democrats in continuing with the housing programs, but they were vehemently opposed to the Modern Movement for aesthetic and symbolic reasons. Their opposition contributed in large part to giving German modernists their prominent position in twentieth-century architectural discourse. Because of the enormous international resonance of its architects, Germany merits special consideration.

Germany: Social Architecture As Monument

During the period of hyperinflation, little was built in Germany. Most modernist works recorded by history books before 1924 were isolated projects,

such as Erich Mendelsohn's expressionist Einstein observatory tower at Potsdam in 1920 and Gropius's forceful Municipal Theater in Jena of 1922. Older or less radical architects, like Hans Poelzig, Paul Bonatz, and Fritz Höger, got important commissions in the 1920s and after. Yet, at Gropius's new school for the applied arts (the Bauhaus) in Weimar, around the avant-garde groups in Berlin, and around the pivotal figure of Martin Wagner, planning director for the borough of Schöneberg since 1919, the new concepts of functional building and planning were widely discussed.^[43]

Attacked early on by the conservatives and the Nazis, the radical architects relied on their social democratic sponsors; after 1924, they organized themselves in a nationwide group, Der Ring, in which Mies van der Rohe played an important part. For its historian, Barbara Miller Lane, the battle between modern and traditional design was definitely centered on housing: "The distinction between the new architecture and other buildings was . . . most clearly apparent in dwelling design. And although many of the most famous buildings executed in the new style were institutional structures like the Bauhaus or commercial buildings like Mendelsohn's department stores, the radical architects received the largest proportion of their commissions in public housing."^[44] The state's housing function was therefore the foundation of the Modern Movement in Germany, as it had been in Holland.

The crucial factors for success in Germany were cheap land (permitting a remarkably generous ratio of covered floor area to sites) and low-cost financing, funded by the house equity tax, which Martin Wagner had conceived. The Hauszinsteuer was redistributive: It taxed existing buildings whose outstanding mortgages had been swept away by the tremendous inflation to finance new construction at very low interest. The housing program depended directly and crucially on these funds.

The active core of the German program was the public-interest organizations, the regulations of which barred public-housing participants from trading their dwelling on the market or making profits on resale. The nonprofit corporations set up by the trade unions and other organizations (including the Bauhutten, self-help construction cooperatives that Wagner started in Berlin) acted as the clients for the government-financed housing projects.^[45] The modern German Siedlungen (the outlying housing projects and, more specifically, Bruno Taut's famous project in Berlin-Britz) prompted a British observer to write: "If the new movement in the arts is going to produce a Utopia, that utopia will be found in Germany and the centre of it in Berlin. All the forward-looking ideas, ideals, enthusiasms, and tendencies of the century have found a home there."^[46]

"Utopia" indeed, for the harsh living conditions and the terrible scarcity of housing in the dense German cities were modified only for a minority. The Berlin projects had common features, which one scholar describes as follows: "An outlying site; public transit linkage to the urban center; a clear, identifiable image and sense of containment; shops, meeting rooms, day-care centers and other facilities; subtle arrangements of buildings and streets to create outdoor community areas and nodal points; concentration of dwellings on one-tenth of the site; and a careful integration of trees, gardens and other landscape features."^[47] Site plans, dwelling plans, and communal facilities were required by the municipal governments' housing offices; room sizes, full exposure to the sun in at least one room, cross-ventilation, and minimal numbers of windows were similarly required. In Berlin as in Frankfurt, the new flats contained unheard-of luxuries: a water closet, a bathtub, and central heating. In Frankfurt, May's team had developed a new system of construction and even mass-produced kitchen equipment that was sold in packages. The escalation of costs had forced May's designers to research the minimum ratio of "space, air, light and warmth that man needs." These were minimal standards of "spartan oversimplification," as Catherine Bauer says, but they were important and new, and they were augmented, as in Berlin, by communal facilities for washing and drying, "schools, shops, guest houses, churches . . . a theatre . . . and large areas of open space."^[48]

When planning and building standards decided so much, what, then, did architecture contribute? First of all, the architects were not separate from the planners: To mention but a few of the most noted designers, Gropius at the Bauhaus, his successor in Dessau, Hannes Meyer, Bruno Taut, and Häring participated directly in the research that was going on everywhere. May's existenz minimum , while minimal indeed, was conceived as a right and hence as a tool for political organization.

Second, the Modern Movement was not monolithic. The still impressive 1929 achievement of Siemenstadt in Berlin (the work of Bartning, Forbat, Häring, Gropius, Scharoun, and others) exhibits its remarkable variety. The influential expressionist Hugo Häring, for instance, rejected the cost-effective conceptions of the predominant Sachlichkeit for an organic understanding of functionalism. He wrote in 1927, "the important thing is to envision a house by starting from the inside, from the actual processes of living. . . . The spaces will be attuned to their purpose." In a personal reply, Mies not only pointed back to the tyranny of cost but also to that of overdesign: "You keep torturing yourself to find out exactly what people want. Just build a large enough shed and let them do inside what they want to!"^[49]

Third, neither economic nor technical efficiency can resolve problems of plan and form, even if the parameters are fixed. A designer's intervention is therefore decisive in determining a project's appearance. In the heated political climate of Europe between the two world wars, forms, appearance, and symbols were important as signals of political and ideological identity. If this was so for most citizens, it must have been particularly important for architects.^[50]

Indeed, for decades, architects had been trained to take conflicts about style and form as a proxy for the battles they were not able to fight. To many in the generation of modernist architects, the war had rendered all things from the past meaningless and repulsive. As Bruno Taut calmly remembered in 1929: "It was not possible for anyone to make use of any pre-war traditions, for that period was perforce regarded as the cause of the misfortunes of the past, and because every achievement of those days seemed more or less to hang together with the origins of the war."^[51] Nine years earlier, in his brand new journal Urban Architecture Ancient and Modern , Taut had rhapsodized:

Down with the respectability of sandstone and plate-glass, in fragments with the rubbish of marble and precious wood, to the garbage heap with all that junk! . . . "Oh, our concepts: space, home, style!" Ugh, how these concepts stink! Destroy them, put an end to them! Let nothing remain! . . . Death to everything stuffy! Down to everything called title, dignity, authority! Down with everything serious! . . . In the distance shines our tomorrow. Hurray, three times hurray for our kingdom without force! . . . Hurray and again hurray for the fluid, the graceful, the angular, the sparkling, the flashing, the light—hurray for everlasting architecture!^[52]

Reality has a sobering effect on architects; yet these statements suggest the spirit Taut brought to his task as the principal architect for the Gehag (the building cooperative for the federation of industrial unions in Berlin) and for Berlin's Planning Office, under Martin Wagner's directorship. What architecture stood for was clearly spelled out in Taut's famous Hufheisen Siedlung in Berlin-Britz (the "horseshoe" project, for the shape of the main apartment complex surrounding ample gardens), which, with about one thousand units, was Gehag's first major project.

Except for the horseshoe, the other half of the Siedlung, designed for the civil servants' building society by two traditional architects, was not different in site plan or function—row houses and apartment buildings, structures only two rooms deep. The buildings, however, sported pitched roofs, traditional garb, and dull color against Taut's clean, perfectly flat roofs, square windows and openings, and pure white (or pure red) walls:

"the unmistakable signs of truly collective building," as Taut explained in writing. And to make it lastingly clear, the band of apartments he designed facing the Degewo project "was the most uncompromisingly geometric of all, almost fortress-like, and painted a deep red. The message . . . required as little interpretation as the raised fist salute of the communists."^[53]

Not all the modernist Siedlungen were as extreme, nor as deliberately provocative. But these buildings either stood outside the dense, wretched life of the city or appeared within it as a fragment of utopia. In Germany, architecture became embodied ideology.

It was in Germany, too, that the Modern Movement first presented itself to the public as an international force. In 1927, on the occasion of the exhibition of the German Werkbund for the applied arts, the city of Stuttgart agreed to let Mies van der Rohe organize a district of permanent houses for the upper middle class. On the outskirts of town, Mies devised the plan for the sloping Weissenhof site and invited some of the best modern architects to design prototype houses: Le Corbusier, the Austrian Josef Frank, the Dutchmen Jacob Oud and Mart Stam (Ernst May's collaborator), and twelve Germans—among whom were Mies himself, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Hans Scharoun, Bruno and Max Taut, as well as Peter Behrens and Hans Poelzig (two representatives of the older generation). Twenty thousand people a day visited the Weissenhof. It was at the Weissenhof, too, that the idea of forming a permanent international congress of modern architects emerged: The next year, the CIAM met and took root.^[54]

For the promoters, the Weissenhof had successfully demonstrated the international unity and the rational quality of the new architecture. According to its most exhaustive historians, the Weissenhof "so hardened the opposition of modernist and antimodernist architectural styles that they came to be widely read as political signs of nationalism versus internationalism."^[55] After 1927, while observers spoke of an international movement, the opposition closed its ranks against a "betrayal" of German patriotism.

For the most political of the modernists, the Siedlungen demonstrated that the tasks of architecture go beyond form yet also that form inevitably comes to represent a hierarchy of values. In the new monuments of a new age, architecture had demonstrated that style means more than style itself.

The Americans Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson were among those who came to Germany to observe the new style. In the 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, they introduced the Modern Movement to the United States as a style , giving its American name of "International Style" to the new architecture. Their reading of the move-

ment fell far short of its intentions and its depth, while their forced reduction of many formal tendencies to one—the Weissenhof's Sachlichkeit —was clearly wrong. But their emphasis on style and form pointed to the essential and specific means by which architecture goes beyond itself.

The Revolution in Style and Purpose

The new architecture was rooted in the extraordinary conditions of optimism and despair of the postwar years. Its spirit was that of a movement. But what were its properly architectural foundations? In the almost prescriptive catalog for the 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Hitchcock and Johnson summarized its stylistic principles in these words: "There is, first, a new conception as volume rather than as mass. Secondly, regularity rather than axial symmetry serves as the chief means of ordering design. These two principles, with a third proscribing arbitrary applied decoration, mark the productions of the international style."^[56]

The modernist conceptions of space and plan were self-consciously founded on a constructional fact: The structural cage of steel or ferroconcrete had eliminated the wall's function of providing support. Walls could therefore be reduced to a membrane (of which glass gave the most literal expression), fitted between the columns of the cage or placed in advance of it like a screen. The interior planes, similarly freed of all supports but the skeleton, could become open geometries. In these the designer could place partition walls, stairs, and other service elements without disturbing the immateriality of three-dimensional space but, on the contrary, articulating it and composing it. On the facade, the openings (always the most important elements of the boundary between inside and outside) could fade into the skintight walls: The characteristic windows became a strip reaching toward the edges, sometimes turning them; or sometimes, as in Gropius's Fagus factory of 1914, the window became a vertical pane of glass, showing off the sculptural form of the spiral staircase inside.

In the architecture of the 1920s, wrote Hitchcock and Johnson, "the prime architectural symbol is no longer the dense brick but the open box. . . . The great majority of buildings are in reality, as well as in effect, mere planes surrounding a volume."^[57] Geometry and standardization unified the composition enough to make the hallowed principle of axial symmetry unnecessary. The new buildings could be articulated less compactly, over a larger expanse, displaying the different functions served by each part.

The purified geometry and the architectonic strictness of the Modern Movement's aesthetics were perfectly compatible with the call for standardized constructional units. The call was born of necessity, and, in their ambition to play a significant role in the expected social reconstruction, the architects heeded it. Transforming architecture implied transforming the architect, and this, indeed, went beyond constructional efficiency. If the functionalist principles had been truly followed, the architect would have faded into a team—not (or not only) a team of artists and craftsmen, as Gropius wanted in the first Bauhaus period, but a research and experimental team of engineers, planners, and social scientists. This simply did not happen. In Germany, for instance, the pressures of cost, politics, and ideology hardened May's approach into dogma. Catherine Bauer Wurster reports that in 1930 "Ernst May and his architects decided they had achieved the perfect site-plan, the ultimate, universal solution. It was a rigidly geometrical scheme . . . solely geared to a narrow system of standardized solar orientation."^[58] After the brutal interruption of the depression and an even more terrible war, modernism resurrected, indeed, as an architectural style. The famous innovators reverted to the charismatic prima donna role of the architect for whom aesthetic expression comes before function and urbanity.

The responsibility commonly attributed to Hitchcock and Johnson for this involution is as unlikely, given the pressure of circumstances, as it is immaterial. Their stylistic reading subtracted desire and technocratic will from the formal choices: the desire to be modern and the will to deliver social engineering by means of art.^[59] Yet, by highlighting choices that were neither architectonic nor social but aesthetic, their interpretation uncovers something that was already incipient in 1932.

The surface, they say, had to look smooth and continuous even if large plates of stone or metal sheathing were unavailable or too expensive. To avoid the suggestion of mass or weight, small glazed tiles or very smooth stucco were the next best thing.^[60] White was chosen for aesthetic reasons as a unifying agent (it looked precisely like snow). The distinctive and controversial flat roof, despite Le Corbusier's attempts to borrow technical justifications from the Mediterranean vernacular, was also an aesthetic choice. While gabled roofs looked heavy to the American critics, to the Europeans they symbolized the past; instead, the flat slab of the modern roof underlined the continuity and the weightlessness of the interior volume it bounded. Extremely impractical in rain and snow, the flat roof perfected a form whose geometry alluded both to the eternal and to the "man-made" industrial world.

To a certain extent the stylistic principles that Hitchcock and Johnson outlined followed Le Corbusier's "Five Points of a New Architecture" of 1926. Le Corbusier and his partner Jeanneret stayed clear of philosophical justifications in this text, prescribing form in almost exclusively technical terms. We already know the flat roof, the free plan, the long window, the skinlike facade. The fifth is unique to Le Corbusier: the "pilotis," tall foundation columns of reinforced concrete that elevate the house, making it seem like an object that has landed there, not risen from the ground up. "The house is in the air," Le Corbusier says, "away from the ground; the garden runs under the house, and it is also above the house, on the roof."^[61] Here, nature is reintroduced into the built environment, but within a single building. The urbanistic principle (in which Hitchcock and Johnson had no interest) became Le Corbusier's guide in his approach to the city, which he articulated for CIAM in the Athens Charter of 1933. The coherence between the unit and the city, the part and the whole, signals the architect's intention to claim a total role involving both construction and planning.

In the Plan Voisin for the reconstruction of Paris, presented by le Corbusier at the exhibition of 1925, the green zones (what is left to "nature" in his strictly zoned modern city) become like the unifying tissue, devoted to human recreation, on the skeleton of free-standing buildings. The skyscrapers of the business districts and the residential slabs, "about a hundred and fifty feet high, with glass walls, standing on pillars," are disposed in zigzag over green areas like towers in a park. The residential districts and their communal amenities are clearly separated from the downtown, as are motorways from pedestrian ways. The motorways, classified by the type of traffic they serve, organize the whole: In the Algiers plan, for instance, a curvilinear roadway tops a rounded "viaduct slab" of dwellings designed by the inhabitants in different styles.^[62]

In the best new districts of Holland, Germany, and Scandinavia, the Modern Movement created distinctiveness and variety, forming enclosures, establishing hierarchies of spaces, breaking blocks of houses, even using symmetrical arrangements. The standards, as we have seen, were preestablished: cross-ventilation, no more than two units per landing, an ideal height of three to four stories, collective amenities, and green spaces compensating for the exiguity of existenz minimum units. A favorite plan, which the German Siedlungen inherited from prewar projects, was the courtyard-type, with buildings located on the perimeter of the block and open space inside. Under real and ideological pressures, planners like May and Ludwig Hilberseimer replaced it with the rigidly parallel rows familiar to us since

the end of World War II. Efficiency was becoming dogma and pushing out architecture.^[63]

Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin and his Radiant city were ideal applications of the Athens Charter; they worried little about implementation or cost. Based on a decisively technocratic attitude, instating the strict separation of the "four key functions: residence, work, recreation (during free time) and circulation," the Charter contemplated a new city within a comprehensive regional plan. Green spaces, parks, woods, sports fields, stadiums, and beaches occupied a much larger place than that occupied by the cities' historical patrimonies.

Historical and architectural monuments, the Charter declared, shall be preserved . . . if they are the expression of a preexisting culture and if they are in the general interest . . . if conserving them does not require that populations be kept at a sacrifice in unsanitary conditions . . . if it is possible to correct the disadvantages of their presence by radical measures: for instance, by detouring vital circulation arteries or even by moving centers heretofore considered unchangeable. . . . The destruction of the slums around the historical monuments will allow the creation of green spaces. . . . To use . . . styles of the past for new building constructions in historical areas has nefarious consequences . To continue with such usage or to introduce such initiatives will not be tolerated in any way.^[64]

The Charter's rigid and dogmatic abstraction still echoes a common attitude of 1920s modernity: a desire to open the city up, to lighten its fabric, to decentralize. Thus, despite the enormous distance between the militant utopia of the Plan Voisin and the plans realized by the German and the Dutch, a new aesthetic conception of space informs them both.

"Space perception," writes the psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, "occurs only in the presence of perceivable things."^[65] In the streets of an old city, we are aware of space that is carved out, packed in the recesses of the houses, spreading out and surging high in the piazzas like water contained in a pool. The architect Steven Peterson points out that this kind of space "is perceived as the form of the 'in-between' itself."^[66] This is profoundly different from the space experienced in any expanse punctuated by separate objects, which appear to generate space and nail it down around them. There is too much space there for us to feel that space is itself being formed: The objects have forms that animate the space around them, but they concentrate attention upon themselves. The conspicuous forms of the Plan Voisin, like the office buildings and shopping malls of suburban America or the Las Vegas strip, impart to their unbounded backgrounds a vibrant

but abstract life. Space around them appears empty: "It is perceived as the tension and direction in between things," says Peterson, who calls it "anti-space."

In practice, the wide and asymmetric spacing of the modernist buildings requires more space than the old streets; in turn, the zigzagged apartment slabs permit both population density and the circulation of air and light on all sides. Free-standing buildings, moreover, have no "backside," which in nineteenth-century tenements or even in the back alleys of bourgeois neighborhoods hid ugliness and decay behind decorated facades. On the one hand, the modernists' social engineering demanded air, light, trees, green spaces—health and hygiene, as Le Corbusier repeated—for the new districts. Much open space was needed for their ideal housing and the roads they imagined (built, as in America, for workers' automobiles). On the other hand, indefinite and formless space had the aesthetic merit of accenting the pure geometrical forms of the self-standing canonical buildings. In the modernist monument of Brasilia, most strikingly, space becomes something natural, like ether, organized by the geometrical grid, fluid and dynamic like the highway.^[67]

The notion of space as a positive entity in which architecture occurs had transformed architectural thought at the turn of the century. "Henceforth," says the historian Alan Colquhoun, "architects would think of space as something preexistent and unlimited, giving a new value to ideas of continuity, transparency and indeterminacy."^[68] Technology, which made it possible to eliminate the load-bearing wall, had also enabled architects not only to think but to build in space and with space rather than hollow out sequences of rooms in a masonry mass. Much later, a contemporary American architect, James Ingo Freed, recalled what it felt like to learn the new conception of space from Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology in the 1950s: "At that time, we were made to feel the tangibility of space; we could swim in it like a fish swims in water. Space was a metaphysical solid. You didn't have to confine yourself to the surface of a wall to imbue a building with symbolism; space itself had iconic and symbolic value."^[69] In modernist interiors, open space seems to reject turn-of-the-century bourgeois clutter, which a 1906 Berliner described in this manner:

An endless, narrow and totally obscure corridor stretches out ahead. . . . Then we enter the front room. . . . Harshly painted ceilings, admittedly senseless, hideous and foolish, but "rich." An elaborately over-decorated tiled stove, smeared with gilt-bronze paint and huge double doors crowned right up to the ceiling . . . made of a wood so poorly treated that the resin of the knotholes seeps through the layers of oil paint. The leftover wall space is covered with glossy gold wallpaper.^[70]

Can we not understand that the modernists displaced and condensed political and architectural meanings? Half a century after the Weissenhof, the Museum of Modern Art revived in a controversial exhibition the architectural drawings of the French École des Beaux-Arts. An American architect, William Conklin, gave an important explanation of what the modernist revolution had meant:

The violence of the revolution speaks of something which the modernists saw in the Beaux-Arts as incredibly antagonistic, alien, morally wrong and personally hateful . . . Gropius, Corbu, Mies saw banishment of historical imagery as a prerequisite for the new free world they were fighting for. . . . The inner heart of the modernists' revolution was [a] reversal in the rank order of human activities, totally upsetting what they saw as the topsy-turvy values of the Beaux-Arts.^[71]

Le Corbusier's powerful icons of modernity—the silos, ocean liners, airplanes, and automobiles that so often inspired the free sculptural parts of his buildings—evoke the unbounded space of their "natural habitat." But the free, fluid space of 1920s modernism can also evoke in the viewer the desire to defeat its opposite: the knickknacks, the dense, disorderly old streets, even the closed world of late nineteenth-century geopolitics.

After a war marked by the clash of imperialist powers over colonial territory, could these radical manipulators of space, these resolute internationalists, these technocratic remakers of cities have chosen except by compromise the cramped, full spaces of the past? The best buildings and projects of modernism created tense, symbolically charged space, which ideally penetrated the physical mass of architecture and made it seem ethereal. But after the polemical phase, after the diaspora that separated the Central Europeans from the soil and the ideas in which they had been formed, after another world war, as modernist buildings frequently turned bland or dogmatic, the space in which they happened also lost its dynamic qualities. Blank space paralleled barren buildings.

The German émigrés who were to change the course of American architecture arrived in the late 1930s, well after the closing of the Modern Movement's heroic phase.^[72] Many critics concur with the assessment of the historian William Jordy that, in America, "the efforts of assimilation and popularization, together with the profusion and variety of commissions . . . did little to counter the relaxation that customarily accompanies the success of any radical venture."^[73] It was in a "relaxed" American version that architectural modernism, after World War II, set out to become hegemonic.

After all the commercialization, the rigidification, the variations, the regressions, the excesses, and even the achievements, the critique of the

modern style followed many tracks. Besides the important reconsideration of historicism and eclecticism, the specific revision of the modernist conception of space followed two significant lines: It returned to formal experiments with abstract space, albeit in singular buildings; and, conversely, it rejected the abstract and rigidly zoned urban spaces of modernism, in the name of the density and continuity of city fabric.

The Americanization of Modernism

William Jordy gives a vivid description of the cityscape that spread from America to the world during the long building boom after the end of World War II:^[74] "Overnight, it seemed, the skyscraper silhouette of brick and stone at the heart of large American cities gave way to highly polished reticulated metal and glass walls nearby. In the suburbs and countryside, a comparable style appeared in low, spreading shopping centers, schools and industrial complexes. From the United States, the style spread throughout the world."^[75] The most characteristic buildings of the second half of the twentieth century are undoubtedly American. From the American suburbs, depending on region and income category, came either the model Cape Cod cottage of the Levittowns or the flat California-style ranch house. From the cities came the glass tower, exhibiting a reticulated structure tightly draped in a "curtain wall," geometrical panels, preferably of glass, leaving little place to architectural fancy.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe perfected the model in the American phase of his work. It had structural precedents in the Chicago commercial buildings of the end of the nineteenth century, in the best industrial architecture of America, and in Mies's theoretical thinking of the 1920s and 1930s. His greatest American victory, his perfect archetype, one of the great canonical buildings of the twentieth century, is a glass tower: the Seagram building in New York, which he designed with the collaboration of Philip Johnson from 1954 to 1958.

Sybil Moholy-Nagy's harsh evaluation of the diaspora architects in America is worth quoting at some length. Their hope (and that of their U.S. sponsors) that they would revolutionize architecture by "science and technology' fizzled rapidly. Instead, the United States got an academic revolution:

Architectural school programs were reformed in the Bauhaus image. This was such an improvement over what the watered down Beaux-Arts education had offered, that the lack of distinguished building design by the imported architect educators was gladly overlooked. . . . Mies van der Rohe seemed to be wholly a

part of that slow death when he finally arrived in this country in 1937. . . . Yet he was the only one of the diaspora architects capable of starting a new life as a creative designer following World War II, because to him technology was not a romantic catchword, as it had been for the Bauhaus program, but a workable tool and an inescapable truth.^[76]

Mies started bringing the structural frame to the surface in his work at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1939. Architectural historians see a direct line between the IIT and America's first glass tower, Pietro Belluschi's Equitable building in Portland (1944–47). By the early 1950s, there were three more: the United Nations Secretariat in New York (which, under the coordination of Wallace Harrison, the architect of the Rockefeller Center, had taken and botched Le Corbusier's ideas); Mies van der Rohe's twin towers on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago; and the Lever House by Gordon Bunshaft of SOM-New York (Skidmore Owings and Merrill, America's largest architectural firm and leading provider of towers for the corporate world). The Lever House and Eero Saarinen's General Motors Technical Center at Warren, the one standing, the other lying down, became the models for corporate America's ubiquitous glass and steel presence.^[77]

Indeed, at the end of the Korean War it became economically feasible to replace reinforced concrete cages by steel frames, which could be rapidly assembled and welded into place. In the hands of developers, Mies's severe dictum "less is more" became a practical program of cheap construction covering the world with "cost-accountant buildings that bear no trace of human imagination: three-dimensional graphs of optimal efficiency, seemingly designed by computers for insects."^[78]

What spread all over the world in the 1950s and 1960s was a style, which the critic Michael Sorkin aptly calls "Multi national," implying the connection (which a younger generation would often try to make) between the end of American hegemony and the demise of the Inter- (or Multi-) national Style:

The period of expansion and corporate wealth of the fifties and sixties demanded a truly imperial building program . . . overweaning government buildings, opulent palaces of culture, majestic corporate headquarters in urban and suburban versions (the same building done either vertically or horizontally), giant retail complexes, vast highways and sprawling pseudo-Georgian suburbs were thrown up in the heavy ersatz classicism of the Multinational Style. . . . The multinational mentality, unlike the modernist, had a profound sense of the symbolic utility of architecture, subscribing as it did not to the philosopher's truth, but to the sophist's.^[79]

Architectural critics have retrospectively discovered how difficult it was for the premier American architects of the 1950s, trained in the modernist

doctrine or influenced by it, to find a convincing language. Suzanne Stephens, considering the work of five important (and eclectic) architects, shows their work caught between the axiomatic interdiction of applied ornament and the desire of giving at least visual interest to the dull uniformity of standardized structures: Their historicist or expressionist design tendencies surface either as monolithic sculptural forms or in decoration disguised as structure. The exception is Louis Kahn, the most profound influence and the only teacher of the group. Only in his work does Stephens see the revival of a centuries-old monumental conception of "space and light and a molding of space with mass."^[80]

Other critics blamed the superficiality of Gropius's and Breuer's teaching at Harvard for the lack of passion and the superficiality of modernism in America. A sophisticated architectural analysis by Klaus Herdeg starts with the observation that the most influential American architects of the 1950s and 1960s graduated from Harvard during Gropius's tenure from 1937 to 1953—I. M. Pei had his first (and brief) teaching job there after the war. With the exception of Pei (the only American architect to be taken right out of the academy to head the architectural office of the legendary developer William Zeckendorf), the careers of these men followed similar patterns of development, from small residential to larger institutional commissions. What matters to Herdeg, however, is their approach: a frozen division between a design's formal qualities and the underlying solution, pragmatic and tending to the standardized. Reading Gropius's teaching methods back into these men's works, Herdeg detects a design attitude that leads to formalism in the pejorative sense: "that is, connoting the employment of forms for purely literal or superficial reasons such as visual variety . Formalism in this sense implies a total non-recognition of the multiplicity of meanings a form may have: intrinsically, as part of a structure or system of forms or a fragment of imagined or real wholes; iconographically, as a cultural symbol; and empirically, as a functional clue."^[81] More interesting, however, are the examples Herdeg gives of Gropius's teaching at Harvard. Gropius's master class exercises ask students to reconcile the modernist emphasis on "the mass production of standardized building parts" with "man's desire for individuality," suggesting the master's own effort to get attuned to the road taken in postwar America: individualist over collectivist values, variety and choice over uniformity, distinction (however superficial) over standardization, and, far in the future, a postindustrial over an industrial economy.^[82]

The modernism of Europe in the 1920s had sought to merge aesthetic innovation with economic rationality, signifying how architects rejected

their subaltern and constricted role in bourgeois culture. The industrial source of the new architectural language stridently proclaimed the abolition of coded barriers between collective work and private life. The modernists had translated the myth of rationalization "above the class struggle" into a symbolism of machine productivity, reading into both the essence of modernity: Their architecture was thus a metaphorical conduit from the surface of bourgeois life to the rational and instrumental core of capitalist production. But now, in a thoroughly rationalized capitalist system, the metaphor was lost: the new language became only an accessory to the expression of corporate power, and the architect turned into an expert in aesthetics, struggling with a role more prestigious, yet less integral, to capitalist production than that of the industrial designer. Compared to the excessive hopes of the heroic phase, the fate of modern architects seemed to have become the superficial celebration of the new prosperity. A frozen style seemed to echo the self-satisfied conformism of the culture. Here and there, the heroic monumentality of some achievements (in particular the new Third World city centers of Brasilia, Chandigarh, or Dacca) contradicted the architects' fate, if not quite yet their official style—only to prove their inadequacy vis-à-vis urban problems that hardly waited for the cement to set before cropping up to destroy the best projects' intentions.

The most intractable and urgent problem, indeed, was not form (as architects are always prone to believe) but, once again, the city. What suburbanization meant for cities in the United States has been analyzed, studied, and many times described, though no urbanist had on the American architectural profession an impact comparable to that of the journalist Jane Jacobs. In her 1961 bestseller The Death and Life of Great American Cities (parts of which had previously appeared in Architectural Forum ), Jacobs used social science studies and her own observations to denounce the destruction of old and viable neighborhoods.^[83]

Highways headed for the suburbs and the corporate and speculative towers of the "Multinational Style" had committed indiscriminate "unslumming" against populations that were left behind. Stable city dwellers, who had never been offered a chance for gradual improvement of their habitat, were forced instead into rapidly "reslummed" public-housing projects. The city of megalithic structures that had taken shape was like another world, meant to be seen from a speeding car on a circling freeway. Jacobs celebrated instead the diversity, the spontaneity, and vital disorder of the pedestrian's city, its public life—the "collage city," where human beings can work in and live in and see whole buildings rather than only their bottoms or their tops.

American architects in the early 1960s may have harbored a utopian sense of what architecture should do, but they did not have the power to reverse the course of urban planning and building. Moreover, the architects trained in the modernist spirit often saw a technocratic promise in urban renewal, something vaguely reminiscent of Le Corbusier's dictum "Architecture or Revolution." The young men and women who rushed into advocacy work in the late 1960s reversed the dictum: Architecture in their mind could cause revolution. In consequence, they interpreted Jane Jacobs as calling for the kind of architecture that does not do too much harm.

Read in this light, Jacobs's book is a fitting prelude to the almost simultaneous work of Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which he wrote in the early 1960s.^[84] Venturi's book can be taken as the beginning of the story of American postmodernism, a story analogous to (but also very different from) that which was simultaneously unfolding in Europe.^[85]

While young American architects were directly confronted with ghetto revolts, Vittorio Gregotti recalls that CIAM ended in a crisis provoked by a more distant "other": Starting in 1952, the young South American architects burst on the scene attacking not only Josep Luis Sert (Le Corbusier's disciple and Gropius's successor at Harvard) but even the sacred figure of Le Corbusier himself. They mounted a counterexhibition "to demonstrate that architectural functionalism had become merely an instrument of capitalist profit."

In Europe, functionalism and CIAM were buried together by the deliberate reintegration of architecture with history and regionalism. The reinterpretation of the Modern Movement, says Gregotti, was not a historicist search for its "purest forms" but historical: Architectural modernism took its proper place, as one expression of a complex, now exhausted phase in the "history of modernity." Similarly, the German historian of postmodernism Heinrich Klotz sees it "as primarily a designation for a break of continuity, pinpointing the fact that the tradition of the Modern Movement in architecture has ceased to be a continuum."^[86] From this perspective, it is not possible to resuscitate either modernism or what preceded it through formal gestures but only to provide images of a discontinuous past.

Complexity and Contradiction

In postmodernism, as in all architectural movements, words and drawings came before buildings. Philip Johnson, the historian who introduced the International Style to the United States, the architect who collaborated

with Mies, the patron of architecture par excellence, the propagandist of all architectural novelties, has repeatedly declared that Robert Venturi "revolutionized architecture in 1966 with his book." He considers "the freedom that Venturi gave us" as the first factor in the 1970s revision of modernism.^[87]

Although Complexity and Contradiction stays clear of contemporary urban issues, it can be taken as the architectural counterpart of Jacobs's defense of the city as it already exists. The affinities with Jacobs's urbanism emerge in Venturi's loving attention to history, in the preference he shows for urban examples, in his eclectic and inclusive taste, in the obvious effects that Rome had on his culture and his theory. It is a theory attentive to sixteenth-century mannerism, the exaggeration of architectural elements for aesthetic or dramatic effect. Venturi sees mannerism as an expression of the resurgent desire for complexity and the tolerance of contradictions, both of which have followed reductive periods of Western architectural history. Here is how Venturi declares himself against "orthodox modern architecture":

I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. . . . I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning. . . . I prefer "both-and" to "either-or," black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white. . . . But an architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole. . . . It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less.^[88]

Venturi's sources are mostly Italian, in the Renaissance, mannerist, and baroque periods, extending to the English and French eighteenth century, and rescuing from neglect the early twentieth-century work of Sir Edwin Lutyens, the architect of imperial New Delhi, the Philadelphian Frank Furness, and Louis Sullivan. Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, and Louis Kahn complete Venturi's "canon": This critical detachment vis-à-vis the Modern Movement indicates that, for Venturi, it can already be treated as "a source," like any other period of architectural history.

History was a subject excised from Gropius's Bauhaus program and paid only superficial attention in American architectural schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Therefore, Venturi's careful recovery of historical tradition and his treatment of parts of the Modern Movement as history signal a double break with the still-reigning pedagogy.

As in all documents that have influenced modern architecture, the subtext of Complexity and Contradiction is the renegotiation of the architect's role with self, profession, and society. From this sociological point of view,

these are the most salient points of Venturi's "gentle manifesto" (see also table 1):

1. "Unorthodox" architects must design in terms adequate to the complexity of the client's programs. The increasing complexity of the architectural program is a fact of contemporary life. The concern with formal purity of orthodox modernist architects is better suited to single-function buildings than to complex programs. The office building with its repetitive modular units is therefore the fitting archetype of American modernism.

While Venturi seems to indulge rhetorically in the conceit that some architects get to choose what they do, he is also implicitly comparing other architects' situations to his own at the time. The great majority of architects who work as independent or self-employed professionals are likely to encounter small projects and very modest budgets, which nonetheless can have programs as complex as the larger ones. Venturi's implicit insistence that architects must be committed to the client's needs simply restates the principle of architecture's professional morality.

2. Despite all the dogmatic declarations of the Modern Movement, form does not follow function: Venturi asserts that there are no good architectural reasons (as against economic or constructional ones) why it should. If exclusions of nonstructural elements (decoration, eclectic details, etc.) are not justified by functionality but by ideology, that ideology ought to be rejected as aesthetically irrelevant—as an encumbrance that often conceals the aesthetic preferences and choices of the modernist masters.^[89]

In reaction to the nineteenth-century nostalgic appropriation of many pasts, the Modern Movement has chosen to create unity and order by classification—namely, the separation and specialization of elements at all levels of the built environment. This rigorous emphasis on order reflected the heroic and utopian vision of an architecture that was going to remake the world. Now that the urban world has been remade, the exclusionary principles—unity, order, purity—have become a totalizing ideology that excludes the projection and communication of all meaning but one: the implacable and impersonal order of the machine (or, more precisely, as the South American architects told CIAM, the implacable order of profit).

3. Architecture has multiple meanings (it is polysemic, as we would say today), and the elements by which it projects meaning may be "contradictory to the form, structure and program with which they combine." In the extremely controversial book of 1972, learning from Las Vegas, Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour extended to mass culture the problem of signification in architecture. Orthodox architects, they argued, are

dissatisfied with the monotonous and unexpressive rigor of the dominant code but still imprisoned by the dogmatic exclusion of ornament. Therefore, they veer toward monumental expressionism. But the study of architectural history teaches that there are two basic types of "signifiers"—"the duck" and "the decorated shed":

Where the architectural systems of space, structure, and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form, this kind of building-becoming-sculpture we call the duck , in honor of the duck-shaped drive-in . . . illustrated in God's Own Junkyard by Peter Blake. Where systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them. This we call the decorated shed . The duck is the special building that is a symbol; the decorated shed is the conventional shelter that applies symbols. . . . We think that the duck is seldom relevant today, although it pervades Modern architecture.^[90]

4. The unorthodox architect rededicates him- or herself to the creation of meanings that are ambiguous, complex, and contradictory—like modernity itself. A contemporary architecture is therefore realistic; it should adapt itself modestly to what exists, using conventions to create the unconventional. Throughout history, decoration has been (and should be again) an important way of creating meaning through image.

In his book, Venturi offered the Pop painter, "who gives uncommon meaning to common elements by changing their context or increasing their scale," as a role model: "The architect who would accept his role as combiner of significant old clichés—valid banalities—in new contexts as his condition within a society that directs its best efforts, its big money and its elegant technologies elsewhere, can ironically express in this indirect way a true concern for society's inverted scale of values ."^[91]

5. Decoration is now permissible. Other means available to the unorthodox architect for generating form include:

• Inflection, the art of the fragment, the achievement of a difficult unity through inclusion: Inflected parts are partial elements that maintain their identity and diversity yet are more integral to the whole than uninflected parts. They correspond to formed space (as opposed to fluid and continuous space).

• Emphasis on the wall: a boundary, between two spaces, to which decoration and symbols are attached. It induces simultaneous awareness of what is significant on either side.

• Emphasis on the facade: It allows urbanity and leads to revaluation of the street. In Learning from Las Vegas , the facade becomes the locus

of permissible ornament, the essential part of the decorated shed, which itself is the cheap and meaningful architecture for our time.

• The unresolved building: It can accommodate growth and changing programs. Venturi legitimizes it by reference to literature: Poets and playwrights acknowledge dilemmas without solutions.

• The vast symbolic repertories of history and popular culture: American vernacular is commercial culture, which can be adopted in earnest with a view to making it "all right."

Concerning this last point, Venturi has been maligned enough to be quoted exactly: "In God's Own Junkyard , Peter Blake has compared the chaos of commercial Main Street with the orderliness of the University of Virginia. Besides the irrelevancy of the comparison, is not Main Street almost all right? Indeed, is not the commercial strip of Route 66 almost all right? As I have said, our question is what slight twist of context will make them all right? Perhaps more signs, more contained."^[92] In sum, Venturi responded to the Miesian dictum "Less is more" with the playful populism of "Less is a bore!" His realism about the contemporary conditions of architecture in America corrected Mies's naïveté about speculative building:^[93] His challenge was directed against an architecture that, having become commercial and corporate in the image of American postwar power, still pretended to the aspirations of peaceful internationalism, unity, and universality of another era.

To understand the liberating effects of the first manifesto of postmodernism, we must understand several points. First, we must not omit the fact that Venturi, with a teaching job at an elite university, a small office, and little work, enjoyed a total though unwanted freedom from corporate dictates. While perhaps not original nor too scholarly, Venturi's wide-ranging and intelligent explication of his own taste provided serious intellectual legitimation for the repressed components of architectural delight.

Second, Venturi complemented the admission of ornament with an emphasis on symbolism, making it easier for architects to achieve originality and variety in small-scale, nonmonumental (and relatively cheap) architecture.

Third, the insistence on the relation of the part to the whole and of structure to use merged with the keen practical awareness that buildings seldom have ideal sites. This amounted to giving the context primacy. In Learning from Las Vegas , Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour would recommend an architecture of urban infill: The ugly and ordinary building, when artfully and carefully designed, is the truly extraordinary one in an

urban fabric torn asunder by monumental and original "ducks." It is important to point out that "ugly and ordinary" and "infill" are the only kinds of commissions at which most architects can get a crack.

Fourth, in Learning from Las Vegas , Venturi and his associates made good on the promise to reveal the communicative potential of clichés. Under the acknowledged influence of the sociologist Herbert Gans, they were in fact consciously erasing the high modernist barrier between high and low culture. Last but not least, because of their love for European cities and buildings (not despite it), Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour (like Gans and Jacobs) managed to find possibilities for complexity and contradiction, enjoyment and diversity, collages and layers of meaning in an American environment.

Taken together, Venturi's two books draw an optimistic picture of the potential of American cities, most evident in the deliberately shocking comparison of private and public spaces in eighteenth-century Rome with the Las Vegas Strip. Venturi's theoretical work is essentially a critique of modernist architecture, calling it pompous, humorless, ugly, and harmful. For an architect, there is nothing wrong with concentrating on modest, small-scale architecture.

Venturi's challenge clearly has liberating aspects: the unsentimental recovery of history, the respect for the context, the desire to communicate, the openness to many cultural codes or, in the words of the movement's popularizer, Charles Jencks, a characteristic double-coding . On the one hand, postmodern work displays modern technology and expresses the modern purposes of the buildings (if necessary with esoteric means that only architects understand); on the other hand, it expresses the desire to communicate with a larger audience through conventional signs.^[94] Modernity is embedded ironically in the past, which gives modernity meaning and which only arrogance can presume to leave forever. Yet, as one critic observes, the liberating message is totally professional—addressed to other architects, safely contained within architectural discourse: "The oppositional pose Venturi strikes primarily guarantees one thing—that the architect remains safely insulated from all those "complexities and contradictions" outside the boundaries of the discipline, a discipline increasingly defined precisely by such insulation. His later juggling with the terms form and symbolism only thickens the walls."^[95] A large and growing segment of the American architectural profession was ready for Venturi's iconoclastic message. Tongue-in-cheek, Hugh Hardy, the principal of the very successful "young" New York firm Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, described the mood: "We rejected the fifties, we rejected the AIA, we rejected midtown,

we rejected contracts, we rejected working drawings, we rejected design, we rejected everything but clients."^[96]

The Incorporation of Postmodernism

If the new principles of design were to pass from books, or the pages of student journals, or even the award pages of Progressive Architecture into the built environment, clients had to be found. For architects inspired by Venturi's call, it would seem that only openness to new kinds of clients could allow the momentous passage. Thus, the early postmodern commissions tended to come from clients who demanded to approve the project by absolute majority vote (as happened to Charles Moore for a church near Santa Monica), clients in the antipoverty projects, clients in community development, friends with some or little money, academics who wanted to renovate their suburban houses, and so on. Few such commissions are noted by the established profession, unless they launch their architects toward more prestigious undertakings. The exhibitions of "new" architects' work (built or unbuilt, big or small), such as those organized by the Architectural League of New York City or by the Museum of Modern Art, were intended to have that amplifying effect.^[97]

Up to this point, the new architecture was largely consonant with what Andreas Huyssen considers the emancipatory phase of postmodernism in the 1960s. Architectural imagination seemed to divide itself between an elaboration of a futuristic technological symbolism, prevalent in the work of European architects like Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Renzo Piano, and a return to either historical sources or abstract formalism. Nevertheless, there was in the architectural discourse of the late 1960s a sense "of rupture and discontinuity, of crisis and generational conflict." In the work of Venturi, Charles Moore, and many other known and unknown architects, there is a populist attack on the idea of "architecture as art," a "vigorous, though . . . largely uncritical attempt to validate popular culture" and become at last organically attached to a client of democratic origins.^[98]

I emphasize "architectural discourse ": Postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s was still largely a change "on paper." Given the scale of what the new architects were building, the spotlight turned only on their published or exhibited work. Important and novel in this respect was the foundation, in 1967, of the New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Affairs, of which Peter Eisenman was the guiding spirit and intellectual leader until 1983. With the publication of the journal Oppositions in 1973, the Institute adopted an ambitious "European model"; the main objective was to give

American architecture the theoretical analysis that neither its schools nor its professional journals provided.^[99]

A series of colloquia at the Museum of Modern Art and a book called Five Architects created a revisionist group where there was none. The press made "the New York Five"—Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey, and John Hejduk—into a media event, followed by controversies about the "gray" architecture of historicist and vernacular inspiration (Venturi, Charles Moore, Robert Stern, Alan Greenberg, among others) and the "white" tendency. The latter (of whom Richard Meier is the most consistent representative) preferred abstract formalism and turned for inspiration to early modernist work (always and above all Le Corbusier, the Italian Terragni, or the Russians Tatlin and Melnikov). The moment of enthusiasm and emancipation seemed to be fading gradually into discourse—picture books, some drawings, a great deal of esoteric writing.

In 1977, Charles Jencks's influential book, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture , in a sense tried to do for postmodernism what Giedion had done for the Modern Movement. Bringing together architectural works from all over the world, Jencks offered an evolutionary tree of architecture from 1960 to 1980 which recognized six major tendencies: historicism; straight revivalism; neo-vernacular; ad hoc urbanist; metaphor metaphysical; and postmodern space. Twenty-four subtendencies straddle the main boundaries, while some major figures appear in different periods all across the tree (casting great doubt on its "evolutionary" accuracy).^[100]

Robert Stern's grouping of revisionist trends is simpler and therefore more useful to the lay reader. Stern groups stylistic manifestations according to the predominance of a "schismatic" or a "traditional" sensibility. Schismatic revisionism attempts to continue "modernism's aspiration toward a clean break with the Western Humanist tradition." But in its most radical form, it rejects even modernism's faith in art; it falls then into the paradox of the avant-gardes, which proclaim the dissolution of art while continuing to produce new work with artistic aspirations. Traditional revisionism accepts "the cultural tradition of Western Humanism of which it holds modernism to be a part"; in particular, it seeks reintegration "with the Romanticism which flourished between 1750 and 1850." These tendencies, which we should more properly call pre modern, correspond to the eclectic historicism for which architects reserve the label of "postmodernism." Venturi, whose intentions were in part to make an architecture of invented or reconstructed "American vernacular," marks yet a different path.^[101]

However, an indirect advantage of Jencks's work is that it symbolizes by its exaggeration the formalist mood. The year that Nixon was reelected to his second term, 1972, is for Jencks the year that the Modern Movement died (and not because Jencks pays any attention to the forthcoming moratorium on new public housing). On July 15, at 3:32 P.M., the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis was finally put out of its misery by dynamite. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki according to the most progressive ideals of CIAM, it had received an award by the AIA in 1951. It died a long, agonizing death under the coercive management and the rage of its poor black residents.^[102] For Dolores Hayden, a progressive historian and designer, this was a signal: "Architects long frustrated by the conditions of work in the profession rushed to follow [the] new aesthetic adventures and abandon their sense of guilt and frustration about the larger problems of patronage for housing."^[103]

Hayden exaggerated too, focusing only on the elite of architects who make stylistic changes. In fact, there was little to show for the new architecture. In 1972, Venturi had a residence for old people and his mother's house as major built works. Charles Moore, chairman of the Department of Architecture at Yale since 1965, had made larger contributions: in partnership with Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull, and John Whitaker, Moore had produced a much-noted "postmodern" Faculty Club for the University of California at Santa Barbara and a condominium for Sea Ranch on the northern California coast in a vernacular style that Joseph Esherick, also a Sea Ranch architect, had been practicing since the 1940s.

Regionalism in the late 1960s was still largely confined to the West Coast. Soon Frank Gehry was to develop an abrasively original "new vernacular" that flaunted its Los Angeles roots. But the achievements of the new regionalisms of the early 1970s, in California, Illinois, New England, New Mexico, like those of the East Coast historicist "grays" and abstract "whites," were, with few exceptions, small, suburban, isolated, and residential.

Architects who design visible public projects or high rise buildings are not necessarily more influential with their peers than those who innovate in small and private buildings, but the former group's work is inherently more public. Architectural change becomes a public matter only when it exceeds the bounds of discourse and the sphere of the cognoscenti. This means that the new forms must either be widely used or widely viewed.

Public awareness of postmodernism required visible changes in International Style's archetypical creations. With some exaggeration we can say that, to be visible, architectural revisionism demanded the demise of the

glass box. Nobody outside architecture schools or art galleries would have cared to derive the practical implications of Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture or noticed the architecture of Charles Moore, Joseph Esherick, or Chicago's Stanley Tigerman. Something else had to happen. And since American Siedlungen are produced by Mr. Levitt, not Martin Wagner, the larger firms or the architects who design for corporations and developers had to get involved in the new design modes.

The first large-scale realization was the reflective glass pacific Design Center, designed by Cesar Pelli for Victor Gruen Associates in 1970 and dubbed the Blue Whale by the locals. For Heinrich Klotz, this strongly defined irregular shape was like "a gigantic fragment" that stands "as an anti-monument" in the middle of Los Angeles's urban "nowhere."^[104]

John Portman, the Atlanta architect and developer, showed the way to countless followers with his monumental atrium hotels—odd-shaped fortresses of glass or concrete on the outside, domesticated pseudo-nature inside. In the early 1970s, Atlanta's Hyatt Regency and the San Francisco Embarcadero Center proved that the transformation of the glass box could attract crowds just to see the inside of a building. In 1974, Philip Johnson and his partner John Burgee cut the tops and the sides of their twin glass boxes at Pennzoil Place in Houston and rotated them around a low triangular atrium: The box was going out of style.

With Michael Graves's winning design for the 1979 Municipal Services Building Competition in Portland, Oregon, and the mounting publicity around Johnson and Burgee's design for the AT&T headquarters in New York, traditional postmodernism—inspired by classical motifs and composition—had its first monuments. In 1984, the AT&T building appeared on the skyline, coiffed with a broken pediment of clear mannerist inspiration, meeting the street on a monumental classical arch, symmetrical lower porticoes, and a glass arcade on the back. The art historian Vincent Scully commented:

AT&T's stance has the effect of making the other new buildings around it look obsolete. Why do they have flat tops, we ask? Why is the corner of one of them cut away and the lower floors of another slanted outward? In a way, they don't look like buildings at all, and in an urbanistic sense they are not. They are objects, scaleless, which happen to be large and are set down in a city.  . . . Johnson . . . has clearly looked at older urbanistic models, at Rockefeller Center, for example. But it is here, in fact, that his design gives pause, insofar as it is thinner, less generous, more brittle than that of his models. Is this a matter of economics as Cesar Pelli claims it to be?^[105]

The AT&T, followed by Graves's building for the Humana Corporation in Louisville in 1982, ushered in the boom in office building of the 1980s.

Aware that design "made news," the press gave increasing space to the new looks of buildings, providing the architects with free glamor and the developers with free publicity.^[106]

By the mid-1980s, neotraditionalism in various guises had become a favorite dress of corporate headquarters and "upscale" new developments. The rising firm of the 1980s—Kohn Pedersen Fox of New York—tried hard to "design for the street" and to impart architectural dignity to objects whose mass and scale are objectively antiurban in any city except New York. KPF is appropriately known for the extraordinarily adroit marketing of designs that carefully revalue the contextual gestures and vocabularies of the 1920s and 1930s.^[107] In New York's Battery Park City development, the different architects of Rector Place, its residential crown jewel, look to older New York models to create a rentable and much more massive scenography. The "anchor" of the project, Cesar Pelli's 1981–85 office complex, gives 1930s' sculpted tops to twin towers much more thickset than their models. Vincent Scully, like many other critics, noted the contradiction between the sources to which postmodern design alludes and the constrictions of contemporary construction:

The thin curtain wall, which Pelli insists is the only viable cladding under present economic circumstances, creates an insubstantial and transparent effect consorting strangely with the mountainous massing of the buildings as a whole and very different from the densely articulated surfaces of the earlier skyscrapers. But . . . the buildings do seem to stretch and loom, creating a great landing place off the Hudson, ringed by vast, magical beings, mediators with the World Trade towers behind them.^[108]

The feeling of standing in the middle of a fantastic scenography (massive, yet thin-skinned; looking solid, yet clad in granite sheets thin as glass; looking profusely decorated, through painted-on, vaguely "traditional" details) becomes a common effect of postmodern designs. In fact, the designers often seek to create estrangement through the deliberate contrast between the formal evocation of the urban past and its impossible restoration in the present. Other postmodern designs (which Klotz calls "container architecture") deliberately look unfinished, presenting themselves as giant fragments of a whole that is nowhere.

The designs of Helmut Jahn for the old Chicago firm of C. F. Murphy (which Jahn now owns) are fantastic examples of both things. Jahn's most distinguished work is probably the 1988 United Airlines Terminal at O'Hare Airport. The structure is remarkable both for its efficiency and for the tall, airy space created by a "technical" vocabulary of light metal arches, glass, and neon. Like an airplane, it suggests the impossible: solid lightness

and simple grandeur. Yet Jahn's skyscrapers and public buildings are more striking: In Chicago, the cut-out cone of his Illinois State Center (1983) "appears to be a whittled-down leftover from a previous environment";^[109] while the Board of Trade expansion and the Northwestern Station tower form glass and "cold" materials into evocations of the 1920s with a powerful but estranging effect. In Philadelphia, Jahn's 1986 Liberty Place alludes to William Van Alen's 1930s Chrysler building in New York in a wondrously reflective glass cladding, recalling a softened-down fantasy by the futurist Antonio Sant'Elia as much as Van Alen's model.

Finally, in the 1980s, the historicizing approach of Adrian Smith, partner at SOM-Chicago, and of David Childs, partner at SOM-New York, brought to the new style an accolade from the premier modernist bastion. Postmodernism had developed into a style that American business and real estate could live with.

Postmodernism started as a movement within architectural discourse, but many charged it with broader resonance. Toward the mid-1980s, new forms of architectural design appeared to have become closely integrated into a new phase of capitalist production and consumption.

There are two directing lines to this story. One is the development of dissenting ideas and new conceptions of design, against a dominant but weakened paradigm. The other is the conditions of practice, on which architects depend to realize new ideas and which, in turn, depend on social forces that architects do not control. The last part, and its connections with opportunity and constraint in architectural work, can be described objectively. For the details of the story, and for insights into the meaning of change, I turn mainly to the protagonists themselves.

Architects draw ideas from the internal evolution of their discipline. For them to realize these ideas, autonomy and heteronomy, the two opposite and conflicting terms, must somehow be reconciled. The visibility of architectural change—and therefore the marks it may leave on our culture—depend on this compromise. It is my contention that architectural change primarily reflects the architects' interpretations of their own situations and possibilities in a changing society. The social and political environment creates opportunities and constraints for the work of these peculiar experts. In a society devoted to profit, their specialty includes the possibility of creating delight or memorable experiences through the complex medium of usable buildings.