Rebuilding Babel

Modern Architecture and Internationalism

Mark Crinson

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784537128
• eBook ISBN: 9781786722034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Much of modernist architecture was inspired by the emergence of internationalism: the ethics and politics of world peace, justice and unity through global collaboration. Mark Crinson here shows how the ideals represented by the Tower of Babel - built, so the story goes, by people united by one language - were effectively adapted by internationalist architecture, its styles and practices, in the modern period. Focusing particularly on the points of convergence between modernist and internationalist trends in the 1920s, and again in the immediate post-war years, he underlines how such architecture utilised the themes of a cooperative community of builders and a common language of forms.The 'International Style' was one manifestation of this new way of thinking, but Crinson shows how the aims of modernist architecture frequently engaged with the substance of an internationalist mindset in addition to sharing surface similarities.
Bringing together the visionaries of internationalist projects - including Le Corbusier, Bruno Taut, Berthold Lubetkin, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe - Crinson interweaves ideas of evolution, ecology, utopia, regionalism, socialism, free trade, and anti-colonialism to reveal the possibilities heralded by modernist architecture. Furthermore, he re-connects pivotal figures in architecture with a cast of polymath internationalists such as Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, Julian Huxley, Rabindranath Tagore and H. G. Wells, to provide a richly detailed socio-cultural framework. This is a book crafted for students and scholars of architecture and art theory, as well as for those interested in the history of twentieth-century optimism about the world and its architecture.

1 THE ARCHITECTONIC OF COMMUNITY

To start at the beginning, or somewhere near it. Behind much of what follows is the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, that compelling myth of the unity of mankind dispersed and its common goals shattered, a myth that justifies monotheistic religions in their desire to promulgate a singularity of faith. Yet, on re-reading, the biblical story seems both astonishingly abrupt and only apparently straightforward, so much so that at first it seems unlikely it could have inspired its subsequent history.

After the Flood, as Genesis 11 in the King James version tells us, ‘the whole earth was of one language’ and mankind conceived the idea of building a great city from brick in the ‘land of Shinar’. At the centre of this city – which we learn is called Babel – a tower is built ‘whose top may reach unto heaven’. God is deeply impressed by the enterprise. ‘Behold’, He says in verse 6, ‘the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.’ If one might gloss His words, God recognises the possibilities of concerted human action, action directed towards a common goal, communicated and directed with clarity through one language. There is ambiguity, of course. Could the referent in ‘and this they begin to do’ be a disparaging ‘this’, as in ‘only this’ or ‘this folly is all they can get up to’? Is it a good thing or a bad thing that restraints now seem broken? Is imagination itself to be condemned and deplored, or is it simply what makes men different? And is the problem as much that men are unified, as that they have imagined something that breaks restraints? What there is no doubt about is that the tower is sound, and that this soundness has resulted from the common enterprise, which God acknowledges.

The most significant ambiguity in the story – and surely one of the main reasons for its mythological power – is caused by a break after these words in verse 6 and then a leap to those of the next verse. The divine word does not profess God’s motivations, intentions or reasons; but then in biblical history mankind was used to His sudden, impulsive punishments. God shifts from observing the tower and apprehending its qualities in one moment, to terminating any possibility of its completion the next: ‘Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ He has not smashed the tower but He has robbed its builders of the possibility of completing it; because they no longer speak the same language, they cannot work in consort. What happens next is that the once-happy, united community is further destroyed by having its members scattered across the world, so ending the building of the city.¹ One imagines these groups spreading like ants disturbed at the collapse of their anthill, though a more typological link is with the expulsion from Eden and its similarly shattering effects on language (language’s identity with things in one; language’s singularity in the other). Instead of describing the dispersal, the rest of the chapter gives us a rather orderly inventory of the ‘generations of Shem’. A further ambiguity of the story happens not in its recounting but earlier, in the previous chapter of Genesis. Here the generations produced by Noah’s offspring, Shem, Ham and Japheth, are described and it is apparent that they have spawned many tongues, many cities, and many nations. All of this is then contradicted by the beginning of Chapter 11 – ‘And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.’ There is no reconciling what we learn from the two chapters, even if we interpret the Babel of Chapter 11 as a more definitive dispersal of what had already begun in Chapter 10.

As a consequence of this short, fractured and contradictory tale (as well as in non-biblical versions of it), Babel’s meanings and implications are more complex than is sometimes thought, and it is this complexity that has produced the numerous subsequent interpretations. There is, for instance, the way the story echoes the locking-out from the Adamic state of identity between words and things, now in the form of a locking-out of the identity between words and people. But while ‘the doctrine of the arbitrariness of the sign eliminates the myth of a natural language’,² the dispersal of language has not eliminated the myth of a world language. Most confusing, however, is that the word ‘Babel’ has stood either for the unified building effort or for the disabling multitude of languages, the incomprehensible ‘babble’ of tongues. Indeed, the two versions that Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted of this subject can each be understood according to these alternatives. The first (of 1563 and now in Vienna) shows a veritable compendium of building trades and crafts, but the tower itself is patently impossible to complete and absurd in its construction with little or no relation between the Colosseum-inspired exterior and the nightmarishly complex interior.³ (Colour Plate 2) Conversely, the second of Bruegel’s towers (of c. 1568 and now in Rotterdam) presents a more unified and solid building, without an interior so at odds with its exterior. It is also more serene: the sky is less animated, the town at rear has disappeared, and the foreground is emptied of its busy masons and king. Neither painting shows a wrathful God, but the collective power of a skilled and organised human community is closer to realising utopia in the later work, even if that utopia has reduced mankind to antlike status.

The Tower of Babel was often celebrated, particularly before the Enlightenment, as an image of the glory of human achievement, a pushing of man’s technical means to unprecedented levels. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a veritable glut of Tower images focusing on the technologies used to build it, the skill and multitude of its fabricators, the massive solidity of its structure, as well as the unity and community of its builders or the wise ruler that guided its construction.⁴ Unlike the story in Genesis, where no details of the tower’s form or appearance are given other than its material (brick) and its height (which ‘may reach unto heaven’), these early modern towers are mostly round in plan. They are made up of a number of stepped towers or are conical in silhouette and a ramp spirals around them. They tend to show the Tower in the act of creation before any divine wrath and they tend to emphasise the chthonic, earth-clinging nature of the structure, rather than its challenge to the sky-god above. In these details they may have been guided by Herodotus’s description (in his Histories) of a later tower in Babylon. The images often seem ambivalent about whether we should admire the tower builders or deplore the hubris of their inhuman ambition. When they indicate the folly of the enterprise it is usually by showing the unfinished tip of the tower breaking into the clouds and, sometimes simultaneously, a crumbling of part of the fabric or an outbreak of fire. Either Protestant or Catholic propaganda might be at work: the folly of Rome in assuming God’s authority, which had led to schism in the Church, or the calling-back of the peoples of the world ‘to a new linguistic and ideological reunification by the Jesuit Tower’, as the truth of the biblical source was re-asserted in the Counter Reformation.⁵

Internationalism also has two aspects in Tower of Babel imagery. Either it stands for the people of the world sharing a language and pulling together in a coordinated and communal enterprise. Or it is the peoples of the world, scattered but with the memory of some previous unity, who, though now separate, might constitute similar units of a whole, a comity. Labour, language, community, aspiration through construction – these are the themes of the myth.

For many Enlightenment thinkers, what was essential to any project of rationalism was the restoration of a state of things before God’s wrath, some way of dealing with the diversity of cultures across the world, of restituting the means of unity and doing this particularly in the form of communication. While Descartes and Leibniz had been concerned with the feasibility of a universal language in the seventeenth century, Herder, Rousseau and Kant all argued in the following century for a balance between national identities and new forms of international order and understanding.⁶ For reason to progress, the establishment of universality was essential and the best tools for this were civil society and law, using the rational means of argument, knowledge and language. There was an urgency about this with the emergence of romantic nationalism and the heady if destabilising effects of revolutionary France. Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1796) is the supplest of these arguments and the one with the longest influence on internationalism.⁷ The pamphlet was written immediately after the Treaty of Basle of 1795, a settlement notorious for dividing Prussia from its allies, bolstering the territorial integrity of revolutionary France and creating the conditions for France’s emergence as a new kind of European power. For Kant, peace had nothing inevitable about it, rather war was the natural state of things so peace had to be ‘formally instituted’. Similarly, the very creation and proliferation of nation states had a natural state of friction and potential conflict about it, and this too had to be guarded against; coexistence would be achieved through a heightened cosmopolitan moral disposition. The dispersal of humanity after Babel and the consequent linguistic and religious differentiation could not be reversed for Kant. There could be no international state, or world government, because this was both inherently contradictory and not the will of the nations. So the best way to guard against the warlike natural state of things and to create the conditions for perpetual peace was through a league or ‘pacific federation’ of nations, each joining with another and creating a kind of network of alliances. Such a federation would accept that Babel had happened, that nations are separate states ‘which are not to be welded together into a unit’ and must therefore co-exist by mutual self-interest in ‘an equilibrium of forces and a most vigorous rivalry’.

Although Babel is never mentioned in Perpetual Peace and Kant prefers to invoke ‘nature’ as the reason for the way things are,⁸ the Tower had been an important reference point in his more foundational philosophical text The Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Here Kant compared his attempt to vindicate reason with the motivations of those who built the Tower. The lesson for Kant was that reason could only be built with limited means and that we have to acknowledge these limitations and ‘proportion our design to the material which is presented to us’.⁹ The materials available to the thinker who constructs an edifice of reason by necessity position that thinker in the equivalent of what for the builder is the empirically learned and determined, the knowledge and judgment of the senses: ‘the supply of materials sufficed merely for a habitation, which was spacious enough for all terrestrial purposes, and high enough to enable us to survey the level plain of experience.’ By contrast, and reverting to Genesis, a vaunting project to reach heaven regardless of means can only lead to failure, conflict and the dispersal of efforts: ‘the bold undertaking designed necessarily failed for want of materials – not to mention the confusion of tongues, which gave rise to endless disputes among the labourers on the plan of the edifice, and at last scattered them over all the world, each to erect a separate building for himself, according to his own plans and his own inclinations.’ We need to know what the limits are on our plans if we are to build a ‘secure home’, one that enables us to survey and reformulate the ‘plain of experience’ so that we go beyond both conformity and fantasy. Thus is architecture invoked, via the Tower of Babel, to clarify what Kant names ‘the architectonic of pure reason’.

When G. W. F. Hegel explored the idea of human unity, in his lectures on aesthetics between 1818 and 1829, he too made explicit use of the Tower of Babel myth and its ramifications for architecture. For Hegel the lessons of the tower were not in its destruction but in the community of purpose that had created it. For if, as Hegel quotes Goethe, what is sacred is what ‘links souls together’ then the concerted effort that went into the tower is itself ‘holy’, and this cooperation is the ‘first content of independent architecture’. In other words, the tower’s significance is not in referring to a belief system but in fashioning nature directly ‘out of the resources of the spirit’:¹⁰

In the wide plains of the Euphrates an enormous architectural work was erected; it was built in common, and the aim and content of the work was at the same time the community of those who constructed it. And the foundation of this social bond does not remain merely a unification on patriarchal lines; on the contrary, the purely family unity has already been superseded, and the building, rising into the clouds, makes objective to itself this earlier and dissolved unity and the realization of a new and wider one. The ensemble of all the peoples at that period worked at this task and since they all came together to complete an immense work like this, the product of their labour was to be a bond which was to link them together (as we are linked by manners, customs, and the legal constitution of the state) by means of the excavated site and ground, the assembled blocks of stone, and the as it were architectural cultivation of the country.¹¹

Hegel understands the tower as a metaphor for many more things than just unified language. More than the utilitarian building, but not yet resorting to the resources proper to sculpture, architecture is from this inaugural moment a monument with meaning, and thus far more than the secure and rationally built house as characterised by Kant. For Hegel, architecture is the instantiation of a bond; it drives people beyond merely customary or familial links and makes a community out of them. It is the ethical state. It is the beginning of art. A powerful ruler might have been necessary in order to bring such a large group together, but the effect of their common work is to do away with the need for continued patriarchy because a building community achieves its own bond in the form of the tower.¹² Its fall, which Hegel passes over in one sentence, is also not the catastrophic punishment and catalysis of conflict that others saw in it. Rather than a failure – of technologies, aspirations, and delusions of divinity – the tower’s ruins are a reminder of the means towards the concert of nation states and the progress of Reason.

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Kant and Hegel, and Bentham after them, provided a language for internationalism, a way of thinking it through in terms of cooperation, peace, and codes of behaviour beyond the nation. By the mid- and late nineteenth century many disciplines, organisations and professions had claimed internationalist credentials. International law, for instance, was originally driven by a desire to use law and the expertise of a supposedly impartial supra-political professional class, to transcend turmoil between nations: hence the calls in the 1851 Universal Peace Congress in London, contemporary with the Great Exhibition, to create a Code of International Law, as well as the establishment of the Institute of International Law in Ghent in 1873.¹³ Among the early jurists pushing for international institutions were the Scot James L. Lorimer and the Swiss Johann Kaspar ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Architectonic of Community
• 2. World Knowing – Otlet, Geddes, Neurath
• 3. Well-Ventilated Utopias – Le Corbusier, CIAM and European Modernism in the 1920s
• 4. Echo Chamber – The International Style and its Deviations
• 5. Outwards – Lewis Mumford, Regionalism and Internationalism
• 6. Another World – Post-War CIAM, India and the Marg Circle
• Epilogue – After the Tower
• Notes
• Colour Plates