1. The crisis in architectural standards at this point evokes (even if faintly) Thomas Kuhn's account of a science nearing paradigmatic change. The modernist continue

paradigm had been central for over a decade, even if it never produced the massive dogmatism of scientific work. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

2. Progressive Architecture (hereafter, PA ), Jan. 1967, 168.

3. PA , Jan. 1969, 141, 140, 104 (emphasis added).

4. PA , Jan. 1969, 146-47 (emphasis added).

5. Robert Gutman, Architectural Practice: A Critical View (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 35.

6. PA , Jan. 1972, 58.

7. Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, "The Architecture of Narcissism," Harvard Architecture Review 1 (1980): 54.

8. Tzonis and Lefaivre, "Architecture of Narcissism," 55.

9. See in this regard Göran Wallén's instructive paper on Swedish architecture, "The Scientification of Architecture," in Gernot Böhme and Nico Stehr, eds., The Knowledge Society: The Growing Impact of Scientific Knowledge on Social Relations (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1986).

10. PA , Jan. 1967, 144.

11. PA , Jan. 1970, 79 (emphasis added).

12. PA , Jan. 1970, 134-35 (emphasis added).

13. Ulrich Franzen, PA , Jan. 1971, 71 (emphasis added).

14. Louis Sauer, PA , Jan. 1972, 59 (emphasis added).

15. Moshe Safdie, PA , Jan. 1972, 58-59.

16. John Johansen, PA , Jan. 1973, 93.

17. PA , Jan. 1971, 71ff.

18. PA , Jan. 1972, 58.

19. Don Stull and Hugh Hardy, PA , Jan. 1973, 92 (emphasis added).

20. PA , Jan. 1974, 55.

21. PA , Jan. 1974, 55. "It's all this damn mechanical aesthetic," said Denise Scott Brown of "The Machines." Commenting on the best example, she said: "It's a shame to spend all that money making a new old barn, why do you need that sophistication?" And Herb Greene, architect and professor at the University of Kentucky, commented that "Le's Maisons" were "degrading to Le Corbusier," in whose work "things happen not just around the building, but in the content of the forms. These people have . . . absorbed [the schema] only by taking planes and right angles." Robertson knowingly explained to the others that "It's really more Cornell than Yale. It's Colin Rowe through Peter Eisenman, and then transferred to the less polemical members of the group" Ibid, (67-68).

22. PA , Jan. 1974, 52.

23. PA , Jan. 1975, 55 (emphasis added).

24. PA , Jan. 1975, 46 (emphasis added). When completed, the house was widely published nationally and internationally, launching Arquitectonica, the firm founded in 1977 by Spear, Bernardo Fort-Brescia, and other young architects, to rapid success.

25. On the changing sociological content of the avant-garde see Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), in particular 9-15.

26. Tzonis and Lefaivre, "Architecture of Narcissism," 57. break

27. Peter Eisenman, House X (New York: Rizzoli, 1982), 38, 36. With House X , Eisenman moved toward "decomposition," "deconstruction," and meaning: "House X is strongly colored by metaphoric ideas of ruin, decay, and falling to pieces, but it attempts to use these ideas in a totally different fashion from the postmodernists. . . . The imagery of House X is rooted in a pervasive and explicit ideological concern with a cultural condition, namely, the apparent inability of modern man to sustain any longer a belief in his own rationality and perfectability" (34).

28. Vincent Pecora, "Towers of Babel," in Diane Ghirardo, ed., Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), 55.

29. Indeed, in these ten years, the juries conferred a First Award only in 1977, 1979, 1980, and 1985. As in all their awards and citations, the divided jury of 1977 managed to agree on a First Award for different reasons, picking a residence for twenty-four Buddhists in the coastal mountains of California, by Bernard Maquet. In 1979, the First Award went to a remarkable and very beautiful engineering feat: the Ruck-a-Chucky Bridge in Auburn, California. T. Y. Lin International were the structural engineers, with Hanson Engineers, Inc., as consultants; Myron Goldsmith of SOM-Chicago was in charge of architectural design. In 1980, two young Argentinian architects and educators, Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti, won the award for an urban design that connected two levels of the Rhode Island School of Design by a system of steps and walks. In 1985, Silvetti received an award for an architectural intervention that visually linked four public squares in the Sicilian town of Leonforte. The fact that the bridge was exceptional in the history of the awards and that the same architect received two First Awards out of four given suggests that "events" (as the judges called the bridge) and consistent excellence are recognized even in the absence of clearly spelled-out criteria of evaluation.

30. Henry Cobb, "Forum on the Beaux-Arts Exhibition," Oppositions 8 (1977): 174.

31. A visible effect of this limitation is illustrated in this rhetorical question by Natalie de Blois about a "developer's" building: "Why is so much attention lavished on making the exterior as urban and varied as possible, and yet, when one goes inside, the space is all equivalent?" PA , Jan. 1978, 79.

32. PA , Jan. 1977, 49 (emphasis added).

33. PA , Jan. 1977, 61.

34. PA , Jan. 1978, 65-66 (emphasis added).

35. None of the 1979 jurors was a celebrity or a flamboyant revisionist. They were Fred S. Dubin, president of Dubin Bloome Associates of New York and Hartford; Barry Elbasani, vice president of Elbasani Logan Severin Freeman of Berkeley; Anthony Lumsden, former collaborator of Cesar Pelli, still at DMJM as vice president and director for design; and Werner Seligmann, formerly of Cornell, dean of the School of Architecture at Syracuse University. The quotation is from Elbasani, PA , Jan. 1979, 69.

36. For the distinction between "postmodernism" and "schismatic modernism" see chapter 2 and Robert Stern, "The Doubles of Postmodern," Harvard Architecture Review 1 (1980): 75-87. When I interviewed Hodgetts, Gehry, and Thom Mayne in 1989, they were all quick to pick up (while asking me for a sociological explanation) what was by then a cliché--namely that historicist postmodernism, in particular the work of Michael Graves, was the architecture "of the age of Reagan." continue

See Mary McLeod's perceptive analysis, "Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism," Assemblage 8 (1989): 23-59.

37. PA, Jan. 1983, 84, 96.

38. As we have seen, when Eisenman argues for architecture's "ideological" capacity to project a different vision of the world, his primary concern is the discipline's exploration of its own language and problems. He is concerned neither with the social conditions under which architecture is practiced nor even with who, besides some chosen architects and critics, receives the projected message.

39. Eisenman, House X, 34.

40. At forty, Helmut Jahn was already at the top of a firm known for its very large projects. He was to buy it in 1982. Coming from Germany to Chicago in 1966, Jahn was soon taken under the wing of Gene Summers, formerly Mies's close collaborator; he moved to Murphy Associates with Summers and remained when Summers left. Although his international fame was yet to come, his Monroe Center project had been cited by PA in 1978, and the Rust-Oleum corporate headquarters in Illinois had been much noticed. The other jurors participated in the heated final debates, without being able to modify their outcome. For urban design, they were: John Kriken, director of urban design and planning at SOM-San Francisco, and Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, director of the School of Architecture at the University of Toronto and partner in van Ginkel Associates. For research: Wolfgang Preiser, partner in Architectural Research Consultants and codirector of the Institute for Environmental Education of the University of New Mexico, and Francis Ventre, chief of the Environmental Design Research Division at the National Bureau of Standards.

41. Even the larger projects were not that large. They included, besides the First Award to Machado and Silvetti's urban design for the Rhode Island School of Design: Arquitectonica's apartment house in Miami, Backen Arrigoni and Ross's condominium in San Francisco, a Public Works Service Center in Evanston, Illinois, by Sisco Lubotsky with Stuart Cohen, a YWCA in Houston by Taft Architects, and the literal historicism of renovations and additions to a hospital in Bayonne, New Jersey, by John Blatteau for a large Philadelphia firm.

42. See John Dixon's thoughtful editorial "Modernism Fights Back" ( PA, March 1980). The choice of readers' "Views" in February and March of 1980 is extensive but sanitized, no doubt, for the sake of advetising income. The two most frequent complaints were the abandonment of pluralism and . . . Michael Graves. The only supporting letter published came from William Conklin. The most surprising came from Charles Gwathmey, award winner in 1973, juror in 1977: "The PA Design Awards program has become a self-serving and a predictable insidious recurrence. For many years it was Moore and clones, now it is Graves and clones, with the ethic clearly being the more eclectic, decorative and unbuildable, the better" (April 1980, 4). One reader summarized the two feelings: "Rogers, Stern, Gehry and Jahn have arrived at a consensus which eliminates the many directions of thought prevalent in recent years to state in unmistakable terms that the future of architectural design is 'Gravely Obfuscated Embellishism.' Gravely because it is a narrow genre of design principally initiated by Michael Graves, although obliquely assisted by Meier, Venturi and, most recently, Tigerman." Another connected it to the types of commissions: "The opportunity to pursue [this] kind of architecture . . . is available only continue

to those who dabble with the personal statements associated with custom-built houses out in the country. Even at that, I would seriously question the livability of some of these stylistic tours de force " (March 1980, 14).

43. PA, Jan. 1980, 98, 105 (emphasis added).

44. PA, Jan. 1980, 88 (emphasis added).

45. The classic theory of status groups, which derive status honor from a specific style of life and protect it through restrictions on social intercourse, is based on Max Weber. See "Class, Status, Party," in Hans Gerth and C. W. Mills, eds., From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). The most comprehensive modern adaptation is Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

46. A now classic philosophical statement on the colonization of aesthetics is Jean Baudrillard's For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981). Two interesting sociological analyses are Craig Calhoun, "The Infrastructure of Modernity: Indirect Relationships, Information Technology and Social Integration," in Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser, eds., Social Change and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), especially Chaps. 4 and 17. Stuart Ewen's All Consuming Images (New York: Basic Books, 1988), though not a theoretical analysis, offers a rich and somewhat rambling description of the consumption of style in contemporary culture. See, in particular, his discussion of architectural form, pp. 199-232.

47. In their famous essay, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno commented on the manipulation of fragments and detail for effect (and for profit): "When the detail won its freedom, it became rebellious and, in the period from Romanticism to Expressionism, asserted itself as free expression, as a vehicle of protest against the organization. . . . The totality of the culture industry has put an end to this. Though concerned exclusively with effects, it crushes their insubordination and makes them subserve the formula, which replaces the work. The same fate is inflicted on whole and parts alike. . . . The so-called dominant idea is like a file which ensures order and no coherence. The whole and the parts are alike. . . . Their prearranged harmony is a mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art" ( Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1989), 125-26.

48. PA, Jan. 1983, 84.

49. The judges were all fellows of the AIA: Richard Stein of New York, past chairman of the AIA energy task force; Robert Frasca, design partner of the large firm Zimmer Gunsul Frasca of Portland, Oregon; George Hartman of Hartman and Cox in Washington, D.C.; and Romualdo Giurgola, 1980 winner of the competition for the most important government building of the postwar period, the Australian Parliament in Canberra.

50. PA, Jan. 1981, 119 (emphasis added).

51. PA, Jan. 1981, 119 (emphasis added).

52. See William Pedersen and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, PA , Jan. 1985, 84, and James Polshek, PA, Jan. 1984, 87.

53. PA, Jan. 1984, 86-87 (emphasis added). break

54. PA, Jan. 1985, 85.

55. Kenneth Frampton, "Towards a Critical Regionalism," in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 20, 21. See also chapter 6 above.

56. For Eisenman, commercial practice, motivated by the market and the pure benefit of the client, differs from professional practice, in which "designing the most square feet for the least cost is mediated by a concern for society at large." Professional practice, when "mediated through a set of a priori forms that are thought to have a quality unto themselves" becomes artistic or aesthetic . But ideological practice is motivated by ideals, "a position on what should be the case, as opposed to what is, in terms of society, of building, of symbolism" ("Interview: Cesar Pelli and Peter Eisenman," Skyline, May 1982, 23).

57. Vincent Scully, "Theory and Delight," PA, , Oct. 1989, 87.

58. PA, Jan. 1985, 85 (emphasis added).

59. PA, Jan. 1984, 87 (emphasis added).

60. PA, Jan. 1982, 110. Beeby's observation is supported by sociological research. Blau's study of New York architects during 1974-79 showed that the small and flexible entrepreneurial offices fared better in times of crisis than the large firms with corporate clients. Moreover, looking at the awards received by the firms, Blau established that those few small firms that had acquired characteristics of rational organization and management typical of larger and more bureaucratic firms were more likely to do exceptionally good work than the latter (Judith Blau, Architects and Firms (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1984), Chap. 5.

61. This interpretation is congruent with Ann Swidler's two models for the study of culture, settled and unsettled. See her "Culture in Action," American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 273-86.

62. Architectural elites, however, seem much more doubtful about the merit of faithful historical imitations than their most famous advocate, Prince Charles of Britain (advised in architectural matters by Leon Krier).

63. PA, Jan. 1987, 86-90.