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PART I
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In 1865, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was the first institution of higher learning in the United States to offer instruction in architecture with Columbia in 1881 the first one in a university. To learn their history after 1896 students had a textbook published by a Columbia professor who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.1 Another history appeared the same year in England with its instruction including now-familiar drawings.2 In the 1905 edition, Banister Fletcher revised its featured memetic image that ornamented the “Tree of Architecture” whose roots are nourished by “influences” labeled as Geography, Geology, Climate, Religion, Social, and History, putting atop the tree’s “MODERN STYLES” the Flatiron Building, Daniel H. Burnham, New York, 1901–02.
Fletcher’s handbook remains in print without the tree and expanded to an elephantine omnium gatherum, but Hamlin’s was made obsolete by books based on the urtext of Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–83), a 1934 immigrant to England from Germany published in 1943 titled An Outline of European Architecture (London: Penguin Press). He confined himself to Europe, and he scanted everything before Charlemagne. What happened earlier in Greece and Rome is “not part of our Western civilization.” It needs some mention only because “it had much influence on the early centuries of Western formation.” Constantly expanded and much more inclusive, the historicism it made available now permeates our understanding of the architecture’s past and present.
Pevsner’s history appeared after the third wave of change had washed over architecture and was now expanding all across the globe. The first wave pervaded the 19th c. when nations, confronted with unsettling, dramatic change, welcomed models for the current practice from earlier, valued eras to associate the present with a past. In France, the models immediately predated the Revolution and became vehicles to deny the ravages of 1789 and retrieved the grandeur of prerevolutionary France as we see, for example, in the OPÉRA, CHARLES GARNIER, PARIS, 1861–75. Britain reached back to a broader range of earlier eras to feed its 19th c. eclecticism. In the second wave, new building technologies and materials were used for an expanded retrieval from the past as architects labored to adapt traditional styles to modern functions, with the Flatiron Building given the prize atop Fletcher’s Tree.
The third wave broke when the Flatiron Building was less than two decades old. It rejected any role for traditional styles, and on the leading edge of progress installed the newly invented Modernist styles serving Modernity, and this change was quickly absorbed into the narrative of the history of architecture.
The narrative that has dominated for the better part of the 20th century has been written under the shadow of a certain philosophy of history known as Historicism. This philosophy rejected beliefs in universal, objective ideas that transcend empirical reality. It asserted the primacy of the particular over the universal. It affirmed the relativism of cultural values that could only be studied according to the unique context and time from which they purportedly emerged. It opposed the beliefs according to which the laws of Nature and human nature changed little and replaced them with the belief that nature and society are in constant change. This change follows some determining patterns, but these patterns did not derive from universal ideas; rather, they are located within the immanently changing values of an incessantly changing culture.
The more forceful exponents of Historicism claimed to have discovered the laws that underlie history and saw historical events as purportedly evolving in a certain direction that was determined by overarching narratives (e.g. the notion of the arrow of time).3 Accordingly, architectural forms were said to be evolving following determining historical forces, and these forces were in turn evolving in a particular direction – a direction that modernist artists and architects were particularly adept at manifesting. Other concepts, such as that of a Zeitgeist (a spirit of a given time frame), of a Weltanschauung (a world-view, a world-image), and of teleology and progressivity, merged with Historicism, thus making it a dominant cultural force.
Architectural historians of a historicist bent of mind from Pevsner on applied these general conceptions developed in the philosophy of history and in social science to architectural knowledge. They wrote narratives using stylistic classifications where each period is qualified by its own unique style and each style distinguished by an inexorable break or rupture from previous styles. Such a construct became a vessel for historicist claims in architecture in which stylistic ruptures were assured by determinist forces operating in history. Once teleological thinking came to permeate this construct, historical styles came to be seen as steps leading to the apotheosis of Modernism, as if by necessity.
Historicism carries several notions into the narrative’s plot. One is that the many people involved in bringing a building into existence, from architects to building officials and bankers, want what they build to be “of its time.” In architecture as in nature that has been untouched by humankind, change has been an evolution that led from slime to humankind and to modern sciences’ command of nature. Evolution in nature and in technological progress demonstrates that in progress, there is only forward movement and no looking back. In both, each step was a step “of its time,” ape to human, buggy to auto, Greek temple to skyscraper, and so too must the architect’s buildings be today.
This historicist narrative treats the traditional historical narrative as obsolete. Traditional narratives presented the cosmos as a stable and dynamic whole with an enduring order, harmony, and proportionality and with unpredictable and inexplicable changes. Things and creatures had fixed natures, with humans uniquely endowed with a nature that includes reason, memory, skill, will, and a moral conscience or soul to use in confronting change and for practicing the social and political arts of living with others to find the happiness that is offered by gaining insight into the good, the true, and the beautiful. The histories written in that world told tales of great events that illustrated those qualities at work, none greater, according to the ancient historian Thucydides, than the Peloponnesian War, “the greatest disturbance in the history of the Hellenes, affecting …I might almost say, the whole of mankind” (Rex Warner trans. ¶1). He explained his purpose:
It will be enough for me… if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.
(¶22; emphasis added)
Thucydides’ narrative presents change occurring within a long-term constancy composed of ups and downs that occur in the nature of things and largely outside our control. There is no arrow pointing upward into inevitable progress. Instead, there is the mythical decline from an age of gold seen in Athens with a different story told in Jerusalem.
The historicist narrative flourished within the growing skepticism and empiricism in the 18th c. and eagerly absorbed the next century’s rapidly expanding knowledge of buildings in distant times and places. Historians cataloged this material according to formal, stylistic similarities that slotted buildings into the succession of eras or periods, and by the century’s end, they had connected an era’s style of buildings to properties of other products of the time to identify the period’s common cultural images or Weltanschauungen. The extent and longevity of the periods varied from broad and long-lived as in the sequence ancient to gothic to modern revival styles, to slices of whatever span of time stylistic distinctions could support.
This history of architecture that justifies Modernist styles, and the Modernist styles that extend the history of architecture ever farther away from even recently acclaimed buildings now commands the global culture of architecture. It is the possession of those who teach, practice, learn, build, finance, write about, and form the opinions that people have about buildings. It requires a building to be “of its time,” and it treats any earlier style or formal property as a threat to Modernity’s continued progress.
Assisting this worldwide hegemony has been the validity Modernism has claimed by its absorption of technology into what it calls the evolution of architecture. The theory of evolution has nature do its work without human intervention, and when those forces are put to work in human society, progress is assured. Using the rigor and methods of empiricism that produce demonstrable progress in technology and shaking free of inherited myths and beliefs that saw human society as sequences of ups and downs across an overall average, societies can extend their predestined upward path.
This Modernity rejects traditional beliefs formulated in Athens and Jerusalem, and adapted and interpreted by civil communities ever since. It rejects the position that judgments concerning right and wrong, like those dealing with the presence or absence of the beautiful as the counterpart to the good, are trustworthy, whether held by individuals or by the communities they live within. It dismisses as fancy a body of beliefs and conclusions of reason that have guided actions since their formulation in ancient Athens and Jerusalem with its three fundamental principles.
First, human nature is enduring. Thucydides suggested as much in the passage quoted earlier, and so do the natural law premises of the Declaration of Independence. Each individual has a unique nature, but it is a human nature and not that of some other being. We can enter into a contract with another person but not with a horse or a dog. Socrates was unique as an individual, and he was also unique among humankind.
Second, the individual’s human nature seeks fulfillment by doing the good, knowing the truth, and enjoying the beautiful. These are moral qualities that no other species possesses. Each person has a different capacity to fulfill the ideals of each, and every person knows that perfect and complete attainment is impossible in our mortal lives, but every person finds happiness in pursuing them.
Third, people are naturally sociable. Aristotle noted that they assemble into three kinds of groupings, each with a purpose, and that they can be joined by synoecism: individuals into families to assure the perpetuation of the race, families into tribes or villages to exchange expertise and labor to assure their sustenance, and these then into political entities or cities to attain the good life. Humans are equipped to make cities, which do not appear as if by nature’s evolution or technology’s progress but through the efforts of individuals who work together in communities to achieve the fullness of human nature. To be the good city where each individual can thrive is the aspiration of every community. In it, the members of the city bring their special talents and unique abilities to the common forum to support a common enterprise, including the physician, the lawyer, and the public official. The life available in the good city has been pursued in this way in varied forms across the millennia, and the architect was among those making lasting and conspicuous contributions to that common pursuit, until the radical rupture at the dawn of the 20th c.
With Modernism, the architect placed a higher emphasis on the historicist Weltanschauung – understood as the set of images that are proper for production by the technological society – than on the common good architects are called to serve as citizens. Architects and historians recast changes of style as architecture’s natural evolution, gave technology the upper hand in serving functions and forms, and applied to architecture and the arts the same idea of progress as understood in science and technology. The architect is uninterested in interrogating the past to find the best way to serve the common good and seek beauty as the counterpart to justice, although that has been the architect’s traditional role and method. To that end we present here several propositions that point the way toward their reformulation.
Proposition One: reforming architecture requires loosening the restrictions of historicist determinism and the limitations of stylistic classifications keyed to the Zeitgeist and replacing it with a history of architecture that offers architects a wider realm for assisting them in their practice.
The prevailing narrative of the history of architecture dissuades architects from consulting past experience for assistance in designing in the present. Its interest is on the change from period to period and building to building, not in the continuity of the formal properties of buildings serving similar roles in succeeding years and eras.
We argue here that historians and architects can usefully investigate, interpret, and present the wisdom gained by the experience of the minds and hands that have been building throughout centuries and millennia. This body of wisdom and knowledge resides in the buildings and cities we still admire and are lovingly cataloged within stylistic classifications by historians, but they are presented as belonging to the past with nothing to offer the present. We argue that to the contrary, this wisdom can be synthesized and put to use in the present. It must be done judiciously and not indiscriminately, and most emphatically not by the unthinking copying of past forms and for reasons no more profound and important than satisfying an emotional nostalgia for a preferred past age(s). Rather, we emphasize the optimal interaction between imitation and invention – a conceptual couple that has been the driving creative force behind architectural and artistic expressions down to a century ago when it fell into disrepute. A little later we will discuss the inseparability of this couple.
Our contact with the past gives us access to a vast experience with the building mind that rational analysis shows to be successful and can and should be maintained and sustained as well as reveals proven failures that we ought to discontinue. This cumulative experience with the judicious use of the mind theoretical and the mind practical is embodied in the traditions and conventions of the art of building. Conventions (con venire: to come together) have developed through repeating and improving successful experiences and discontinuing failed ones, and they provide a major portion of the content of tradition (traditio: handing over). Early experiments lead to established experience, and established experience leads to mature expression. There is no stasis.
To build is a natural act whether it be to feather a nest or serve a civil order. It is done to fulfill certain purposes. In human experience, using the conventions transmitted through the art of building necessarily develops in close relationship to existing, local, cultural contexts and experience, and it uses the available building materials and technologies. As conventions become deeply anchored ...
