Newcastle University (Inghilterra)
Nathaniel Coleman received BFA and BArch degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design, a Master of Urban Planning degree from the City College of New York and MSc and PhD degrees in the history and theory of architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. He has practiced architecture in New York and Rome. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Newcastle University, UK, where he has also served as director of the architecture program. He previously taught in the US, including at the University of Pennsylvania, the Boston Architectural Center, and Washington State University. He is a recipient of a Graham Foundation grant and three British Academy research grants. His first book, Utopias and Architecture was published in 2005.
Abstract
In the field of architecture (as in most corners of modern life), new technology - even the very idea of technology - is often embraced uncritically as though it alone could solve individual, social, political and economic problems.
As a consequence, the persistently utopian dimension of architecture has, especially since the nineteenth century, been turned upside down to reveal a surprisingly consistent capacity for giving dystopia a form. The relative newness of this condition begs for interrogation. For example, it is worth examining why it is that at the very moment architecture was explicitly cast as utopian it developed a stubbornly dystopic propensity.
In an effort to begin imagining ways out of the current enduring predicament, this paper explores the sources of architecture’s dystopian turn. The apparent parallels between the emergence of dystopian literature (especially with Zamyatin’s We) and then contemporary developments in architecture are considered. Whereas literature could entertain the consequences of unbridled technological progress, especially when unhinged from ethical restraint, the tendency in architecture, from at least the mid-nineteenth century onward, was to cultivate an obsession with progress and technique, which would have been all but impossible before the Enlightenment. Perhaps such developments have something to do with the arrogance of vision, demonstrated for example in the grandiose late eighteenth century schemes of Boullée, that reveal the seeds of a modernist inclination to dream in absolute terms, the legacy of which forms the major part of the built environment constructed since 1850 and that we inhabit today.
In sum, the thesis of this paper is that for architecture to return to its utopian potential (away from overconfident plans denuded of a social dimension or any regard for future inhabitants) requires overcoming the dominance of technology over techné that underpins its dystopian turn.
The strength of utopia has always lain in its literary form. Various other forms - utopian social theory, millenarianism, the experimental community - can for a time substitute for the literary utopia; but if it languishes too long, so does utopia. The question of utopia in the twentieth century therefore turns on the fate of the literary utopia.1
1. Introduction
In the field of architecture (as in most corners of modern life), new technology - even the very idea of technology - is often embraced uncritically as though it alone could solve individual, social, political and economic problems. As a consequence, the persistently utopian dimension of architecture has, especially since the nineteenth century, been turned upside down to reveal a surprisingly consistent capacity for giving dystopia a form. The relative newness of this condition begs for interrogation. For example, it is worth examining why it is that at the very moment architecture was explicitly cast as utopian it developed a stubbornly dystopic propensity. Such developments have something to do with the arrogance of vision, demonstrated for example in the grandiose late eighteenth century schemes of the French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728-1799), that reveal the seeds of a modernist inclination to dream in absolute terms, the legacy of which forms the major part of the built environment constructed since 1850 that we inhabit today.
In sum, the thesis of this paper is that returning architecture to its utopian potential (away from overconfident plans denuded of a social dimension or any regard for future inhabitants) will require overcoming the dominance of technology over techné that underpins its dystopian turn.
The idealism of modern architecture promised a better world, socially, physically and politically. It was intended to become the physical counterpoint to wide ranging reforms. In order to achieve these it would partner with science and technology to achieve a ‘brave new world’. At least this is how standard histories of modern architecture, most of which call it utopian, represent the period. As most inhabitants of the modern city readily acknowledge, whatever the aims of modern architecture might have been, its legacy is mostly an alienating landscape. To suggest that the results of modern architecture in the city leave much to be desired is at the very least an understatement. It is the aim of this paper to examine how a movement with a supposedly utopian agenda for social transformation framed by the renewal of cities could have so frequently resulted in its opposite:
a dystopian wasteland that thoughtlessly betrays our ‘right to the city’.
The apparent parallels between the emergence of dystopian literature (especially with Zamyatin’s novel We) and then contemporary developments in architecture is worth considering. Whereas literature could entertain the consequences of unbridled technological progress, especially when unhinged from ethical restraint, the tendency in architecture, from the mid- nineteenth century onward was to cultivate an obsession with progress and technique that would have been all but impossible before the Enlightenment.
As it turns out, most modern cities are far more cognate with the architectural
1 Krishan Kumar, ‘Utopia and Anti-Utopia in the Twentieth Century’, in Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, R. Schaer, G. Clays, L. T. Sargent (eds.), New York & Oxford, New York Public Library /Oxford university Press, 2000, p. 251.
settings described in We (written 1921-22), depicted in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927) or suggested by the character of Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936) than they are with some utopia realized.
2. A brighter future?
The dystopian atmosphere of many modern cities results, at least in part, from a confusion about utopian projection in the first place.
Although it is a commonplace within the discipline to describe much modern architecture as confirming the failure of utopia (or as a utopian failure or even as a failed utopia) it is actually quite hard in all but a very few instances to see how what was being proposed or built was in any way actually utopian, rather than simply an exaggerated realization of already existent trends, which is usually the purview of dystopias rather than of utopias. Utopias envision an overall social transformation (perhaps even a return of some sort of imagined golden age), revealing potential conditions not yet conceivable (or immediately achievable) in the present. Simply augmenting, intensifying or exaggerating possibilities already resident in the present are not enough of a change for a plan to be considered a utopia.
Likewise, making claims for the framework of a new condition, suggesting for example that its realization alone would be enough to bring about the imagined transformed conditions, is not enough to realize a utopia.
Perhaps the great failure of modern architecture in its efforts to give utopia flesh resides in the naïve, deterministic and instrumentalist belief of architects that an architectural framework alone - absent of nearly any sensitivity to the social history of its intended inhabitants - would be enough
“to effect a basic transformation in the human condition”.2 However, now that I have introduced utopia as an intention of modern architects, it is necessary to note that nowhere could I identify an instance where modern architecture was voluntarily called ‘utopian’ by modern architects. Although it is possible to identify links of influence between nineteenth-century utopian socialists, William Morris for example, and the aims of a very limited number of modern architects (Le Corbusier for example), claims for the utopianism of modern architecture are attached to it primarily by critics, historians and younger architects born mostly between the wars, or who began practicing in earnest no earlier than the 1960s. In short, nominating modern architecture as utopian is always either pejorative or a lamentation.3
Bernard Tschumi (b. 1944), who planned the Parc de la Vilette in Paris (designed 1983) and designed some of its structures, effectively articulated the post-1968 position of many architects born between 1918 and 1945.
Most people concerned with architecture feel some sort of disillusion and dismay. None of the early utopian ideals of the twentieth century has materialized, none of its social aims has succeeded. Blurred by reality, the ideals have turned into redevelopment nightmares and the aims into bureaucratic policies. The split between social reality and utopian dream has been total, the gap between economic constraints and the illusion of all-solving technique absolute.4
2 Frank E. Manuel, ‘Towards a Psychological History of Utopias’, in Utopias and Utopian Thought, F. E. Manuel (ed.), Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1966, p. 70.
3 For an extended discussion on utopias and architecture, see Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture, London: Routledge, 2005.
4 Bernard Tschumi, ‘The Architectural Paradox’ (1975), reprinted in Architecture of Disjunction, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1996, p. 27.
In my estimation, Tschumi’s comments reveal longing and frustration in equal measure. However, the utopianism he ascribes to the ‘twentieth century’ (more precisely to the first generation of modern architects and the promise of the architecture they designed), is largely inferred from the general project for social change - as an adjunct of sweeping technological optimism - that can certainly be identified with the movement.
Architects in the midst of establishing modern architecture were highly reluctant to characterize their project as utopian, and understandably so. In a cultural context framed by the ascendancy of communism and capitalism, both of which are equally hostile to utopianism, only a foolish architect would commit the professional suicide that would come with nominating himself as utopian. More importantly, however, is the degree to which first generation modernist architects wanted to construe themselves as rationalists.5 The work of architectural historian and theorist Manfredo Tafuri supports such a view. According to him:
The end of utopianism and the birth of realism are not automatic moments in the formative development of the ideology of the “modern movement”. On the contrary, around the 1830s, realist utopianism and utopian realism began to overlap and complement each other. The decline of social utopianism confirmed ideology’s surrender to the politics of things created by the laws of profit. Architectural ideology, in both its artistic and urban forms, was left with the utopia of form as a project for recuperating the human Totality in the ideal Synthesis, as a way of mastering Disorder through Order.6
Tafuri’s observation illuminates the difficulty of making claims for the utopianism of modern architecture from its outset. In fact, according to him, the very genealogy of modern architecture conspires against such a reading. If by the 1830s ‘architectural ideology’ was already ‘left with the utopia of form’ only to fulfil its project, it can be no wonder that the supposed utopianism of the modern movement during the twentieth century would be incapable of achieving anything - in most instances - beyond a simulacrum of utopian frameworks. If Tafuri’s reading is accurate, as I believe it is, Tschumi’s disappointment and that of many of his contemporaries becomes problematic: if modern architecture was never utopian anyway, why lament the apparent failure of its utopian project? (That is unless some justification is required for a retreat into the ‘utopia of form’, with the freedom from any broader social responsibility that comes with it, that Tafuri identified as emergent anyway as early as the 1830s.)
Tafuri’s greatest disappointment with the so-called avant-garde architects of the post-modern period, beginning in the 1960s, was that their attempt to redeem architecture from its ideological crisis - as identified by Tschumi above - almost always quickly became a retreat into the relative safety of a ‘utopia of form’, which is really not any kind of utopia at all.
A visit to the Parc de la Villette, especially a visit to the strikingly red ‘follies’
designed by Tschumi for the park, reveals this mode of escape. The high accolade that could be paid to these structures is that they are primarily useless;
an aspiration confirmed in Tschumi’s calling them ‘follies’.
5 It is worth noting that with the challenges arising to confront the master narratives of both communism and capitalism, it is viable in the post-modern epoch to nominate oneself as utopian, as long as it is done with great care. The only twentieth- century architect I can identify who openly made claims to utopianism is Buckminster Fuller (see especially his book Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), however, he was not so much a utopian as a futurologist, or at best a technological utopian (rather than social utopian).
6 Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’, Contropiano 1 ( January-April 1969), Stephen Sartarelli (trans), reprinted in, Architecture Theory Since 1968, K. Michael Hays (ed), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Columbia Books of Architecture, 2000 p. 15.
It is worth emphasizing here that both positively and negatively, modern architecture is recollected as utopian primarily by individuals who were (or are) either disappointed by it failures or others who desired (or desire) to overcome modernism and leave it behind. Perhaps identifying the nomination of modern architecture as utopian as primarily a post hoc analysis of it based on its shortcomings (or failure) is not enough to confirm that it never actually had a utopia dimension to begin with. Consequently, my contention here is that the conventional proposition that modern architecture was utopian significantly exaggerates the original objectives of even its most determined practitioners. More helpful is to consider what calling something utopian connotes. In common parlance, ‘utopia’ is equivalent to ‘impossible’.
So, in this regard, if modern architecture is generally accepted as having been utopian in its aims meaning ‘doomed to failure before the start’ - it is less painful to accept that in most instances, twentieth-century building has been mostly incapable of providing suitable environments for individual and social life.7 In a passage seemingly confirming both the dubiousness of modern architecture as utopian and this identification as such as an indication of failure, Joseph Rykwert argued that,
It is perhaps the fate of fudged and ill-considered utopias to end in squalor quickly. But the speed with which Gropius’ slab skyscraper in the park, which seemed such a splendid idea to a Western European and even American haute-bourgeoisie only [fifty or sixty] years ago, decayed into the horrific square miles of Lefrak towers has left planners rather breathless: the shabby utopia had become the exemplar for the biggest boom in world history.8 There are a number of things Rykwert alludes to that are relevant in the context of the present discussion. Obviously enough, a ‘fudged and ill- considered utopia’ will be unrealizable at best or transform into something much worse when established. Rykwert’s identification of Gropius is significant. Although he also discusses Le Corbusier in the same article, it really is Gropius’ model of the ‘slab skyscraper in the park’ that became the standard issue throughout the world. Overall, Gropius’ species of modern architecture has been far more influential in actual practice than Le Corbusier’s. A key reason for this is Gropius’ embrace of standardization, machine production and the efficiencies of the factory, including team work.
In short, his model was far more apparently economical and efficient to build than Le Corbusier’s. It was also much more of a diagram, lacking in the potential subtleties Le Corbusier’s ever transforming model, which made what Gropius’ had on offer that much easier to understand and realize.
For my purposes here, Rykwert’s characterization of Gropius’ ‘slab skyscraper in the park’ as having ‘decayed into the horrific square miles of Lefrak towers’, certainly describes a realized dystopian vision rather than a utopian one. Lastly, Rykwert’s observation that ‘the shabby utopia had become the exemplar for the biggest boom in world history’ suggests that the efficiencies modern architecture staked out for itself made it much more the hand maiden of real estate speculation and emergent global capitalism than of utopia. Or as Renato Poggioli observed, ‘architectural functionalism’
7 This reading is confirmed by the following: ‘Of all the criticisms that modern architecture has had to endure since the 1960s, the one of utopianism has apparently had the most impact. It seems that, by now, almost everybody is convinced that modern architecture’s was its most harmful attribute. Its utopian aspirations are usually seen as completely bound up with paternalistic, not to say totalitarian attitudes, and are for that reason discredited and put aside.’ (Hilde Heynen,
‘Engaging Modernism’, in Back from Utopia: the Challenge of the Modern Movement, Hubert-Jan Henket & Hilde Heynenp (eds.), Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002, p. 382).
8 Joseph Rykwert, ‘Learning from the Street’, Lotus 11, 1976, reprinted in The Necessity of Artifice, New York: Rizzoli, 1982, p. 105.
(another name, along with ‘international style’, for the modern architecture under discussion here) was destined to become ‘the cliché of the building industry’.9 Nevertheless, the generalized claim - by historians, critics and architects - that modern architecture was somehow utopian is enough to require serious consideration of whether or not it was ever thus.
Manfredo Tafuri, it is worth emphasizing, is one of the very rare thinkers on architecture who consistently questioned the actual utopian- ness of modern architecture:
[T]he utopian trend in nineteenth century politics was to have only very indirect relationships with the ideas of the “modern movement.” Indeed, those relationships, which have been recognized for the most part by present-day historians, between the utopias of Fourier, Owen, and Cabet and the theoretical models of Unwin, Geddes, Howard, or Stein, on the one hand, and those of the Garnier-Le Corbusier current, on the other, are but suppositions in need of careful verification. It is likely that these relationships will come to be considered as functional and as forming part of the same phenomena one wishes to analyze by means of them.10
The value of Tafuri’s critique rests in his attempt to break the link between utopian socialism and the modern movement in architecture (or at the very least mounting a challenge to it). Once divested of its utopian nameplate, a more balanced consideration of modern architecture could ensue. Architecture divested of some of the freight it has been made to carry for at least the past fifty years could free up architects to perhaps expend less energy distancing themselves from the received myth of utopia in relation to the modern movement. Such conserved energies could then be redirected to reconsidering the very limited band of reality that currently preoccupies architects: technically efficient provision of services on the one hand, and novel images for consumption on the other. Predominantly missing from this horizon is any sense of the social dimension of architecture, especially the nuanced role it can play in the lives of individuals and institutions.
By running from utopia, even as dystopia continues to be constructed, architects delude themselves into thinking they are doing something by maintaining, as Tafuri put it, “impotent and ineffectual myths … illusions that permit the survival of anachronistic ‘hopes in design.”’11
3. Dystopias and Architecture
Dystopias are exaggerated or pointed depictions of present conditions.
They are also a form of social commentary highlighting in an extreme manner contemporary injustices and brutality that would likely remain otherwise unobserved. By illuminating present shortcomings, dystopias act as warnings of a sort; arguing for moderation in the face of certain excess.
As such, dystopias, like technological utopias, are limited by what already exists or is possible or to what might emerge out of the present if taken to its logical extreme, unhindered by any mediating checks or balances.
So, while the worlds depicted in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932),
9 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Gerald Fitzgerald (trans.) Cambridge Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1968, p .83.
10 Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, Barbara Luigia La Penta (trans.), Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1976, p. 44.
11 Ibid, p. 182.
Zamyatin’s We or Lang’s Metropolis, for example, are certainly not exact replicas of their authors’ contemporary environment, they are nonetheless bound to it. If dystopias had no reference points in the present they would be incomprehensible and the value of the warning they sound would be meaningless. The poignancy of dystopias resides in their capacity to be, at one and the same time, compelling works of fiction and revealing, albeit distorting, mirrors on the present (utopias may also require the present - or even a distant past - for a reference point but their objective is much more some not yet that is nearly impossible to imagine arising out of present conditions without some significant transformation).
Architecture, which when built is something like a fictional account actualized, can be very much like a utopia, technological or otherwise.
Less expected is the capacity of architecture for realizing dystopia as well.
Strictly speaking, this is impossible: architecture is made in the present and dystopias describe a present exaggerated into the future. Nevertheless, the architecture of the twentieth century has often found itself in a double bind;
at once acting as the inspiration for dystopias (or at least lending them the beginnings of a context), and at the same time seeming to confirm the worst fears of dystopias by providing a framework for the very excesses they warn against. It is as if architects, as often as not, were innocent of any gauge by which they could anticipate the possible effects of their efforts or the ill-use their works could be put to. Strangely, if dystopias act, at least in part, as some kind of moral or ethical compass, many architects seem unable to get the point. Perhaps they set out to give dystopia flesh precisely because they themselves have no such compass with which to chart their own efforts.
An interesting example of this is Rem Koolhaas who seems intent on self- consciously realizing almost every excess of the built environment that dystopias warn against. His so-called ‘retroactive manifesto for Manhattan’, Delirious New York (1978) is a compelling example of this. In it, Koolhaas extols the virtues of congestion and excess, setting the foundations for his project to spread manhattanization across the globe.
Tafuri’s explanation for the sorry condition of architecture is that the logic of capitalism, according to which architecture - more so than almost any other endeavour -is organized necessarily precludes the realization of anything other than, what I am calling here, dystopia. If Tafuri is correct, and I am grudgingly beginning to think that he is, the building industry is best at building a hostile environment precisely because it is at the vanguard of the highly organized modes of production, consumption and social control that most dystopias warn against.
4. Dystopian Cities
The consumer city (the city most of us now inhabit) is a city of predominantly infantile pleasure seeking. It is a place voided of resonances, characterised by spectacle and driven by the desire for the ever more effective movement of goods, services, people and traffic. Economies of efficiency is
the core value animating decisions in the remaking of most cities; that and entertainment. In these ways, the contemporary city resembles the settings of We and perhaps even more so of Brave New World. Accepting that both books are social satire and thus given to extremes in making their points about too much planning, the modern city is, or at the very least aspires to be, a setting well-adapted to the organizational excesses detailed in both novels.
The stark divisions of functions, as well as of social and economic classes, that characterize the contemporary city are akin to the society described in Brave New World but also to the world depicted in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, except that the ‘depths below’ depicted in the film are now on the surface, hidden from view by fences and other physical barriers, especially, highways. The legacy of the worst excesses of the modernism in architecture and urbanism reveal the dystopic propensity of both. Our inheritance from the modern movement is a divided city, where spectacle and consumption dominate by subsuming the other spaces of earlier cities, particularly places of encounter; platforms where sociability, citizenship, fellowship and perhaps even democracy once might have emerged.12 The modern city-cum-shopping mall or theme park is not an exclusively post-modern deformation of the modern movement, it simply ‘re-brands’ the divisions - the ‘four functions’ (housing, work, recreation and traffic) of the Athens Charter envisioned to produce a rationalized (and thus more regimented city) in response to the machine.13 The resulting city, which is still being built in most parts of the world, continues to betray any lingering hopes in design that contemporary civilization might be capable of producing a multi-dimensional, nuanced, and liveable built environment.
The city of entertainment offers up a kind of pervasive narcotic to its inhabitants. Pleasure-seeking and the night-time economy are opiates (a soma of sorts, if you will) that provides an escape from the dreary repetitiveness of evermore managed existence, especially in the workplace. The office building, which, along with the shopping mall, is the most pervasive building type, is also the most dystopic. No matter its guise, there is very little incentive for places of work (or of learning or of healing, among others) to be anything but dreary factories that perhaps offer an arena for illusions of success. On reflection, maybe office buildings do offer a setting for accomplishment in some very narrow sense; nevertheless they are more than anything dreary, over-organized environments best adapted to routinized activities. Offices and office work can even do mental and physical harm to employees (in the form of sick-building syndrome and repetitive stress disorder for example).
The divided world of Lang’s Metropolis, the infantile world of Huxley’s Brave New World and the clockwork world of Zamyatin’s We are all with us today, albeit not in any form exactly as described or depicted in those works but perhaps in a form even more insidious precisely because apparent normality renders its effects acceptable and thus as invisible as they might seem inevitable. The city of the twentieth-century (and the emerging one of the twenty-first century) is the ideal setting for the continuing dominance of human resource management and planning, and thus of dystopia.
12 Michel Foucault discusses some aspects of such ‘other spaces’ in his essay ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ (1967), reprinted in Neil Leach (Ed), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, London:
Routledge, 1997, pp. 350- 356. Also available on-line, in a slightly different version and translation from http://
foucault.info/documents/
heteroTopia/foucault.
heteroTopia.en.html (accessed on-line 19 April 2007). Also helpful is Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man,New york, W. W. Norton &
Company, 1974.
13 CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne), Charter of Athens:
tenets, 1933, reprinted in Ulrich Conrads (Ed), Programmes and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, pp. 137-145.
5. Fordism, Taylorism and Architecture
The most compelling evidence in support of my reading that modern architecture must result mostly in dystopian settings (despite the supposedly utopian aims of many theorists and practising architects), derives from what dystopian visions (such as were elaborated on in Metropolis, Modern Times, We and Brave New World) share with the foundations of modern architecture.
In a recent, well-researched, book, Fordism and Taylorism are identified as providing the building blocks for the so-called avant-garde modernist architecture that emerged between the late years of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth.14 What is remarkable about this book is the innocence of its author, Mauro F. Guillén, with regard to the well-documented limitations and failures of modern architecture in so many instances. He is also innocent of the degree to which the finest works of architecture during the twentieth century and now in the twenty first are those conceptualized as somehow operating beyond the limits of excessive reason.
Although Guillén is keen to show the originary relationship between Taylorism and Fordism as evidence of the hidden aesthetic dimension of scientific management (which perhaps he accomplishes), it is just this data - drawn from the writings of a number of the so-called pioneers of the modern movement in architecture - that makes my case for me. What Guillén unwittingly provides with his study is a linking document that explicitly explains the reservations a number of recent architectural writers have had regarding the deterministic hubris of modern architecture, which I identify here as its dystopian undercurrent.15 It is precisely the Fordist and Taylorist aspects of modern architecture that in so many instances have assured that its results will be dystopic, especially when the claims made for it are that it is somehow utopian. If what is conventionally called utopian with regards to modernist architecture (from its early twentieth century or late-nineteenth century origins through its dominance after 1945 and continuing today) is actually a species of social engineering dreaming combined with efficiency and maximized productivity derived from the theories of scientific management, then it is no wonder that so many people never feel quite at home in the modern city.
The attraction for architects and planners of machines, industrial production and theories on the optimized organization of everything from private life to labour and the city is understandable. Because of their newness, the postulates suggested by such developments were irresistible; especially compelling was the post-Enlightenment promise of such things to blow away the cobwebs of the Ancien Régime. Just like in We and Brave New World, the pioneers of modern architecture felt compelled - in a distinctly modernist way - to view history, the old, the past and tradition as confining at best and dangerous at worst. Thus, significantly lacking from the thought processes of all but the most gifted modern architects was the degree to which tradition and innovation are inexorably linked. The finest architects of the twentieth century had no doubts about this; the best architects of the twenty first century will certainly share a similar perspective and will
14 Mauro F. Guillén, The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical: Scientific Management and the Rise of Modern Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 2005).
15 A number of studies on architecture published during the last 30 years have identified, in one way or another, the limitations of scientific reason with regard to maintaining a poetic and social dimension for architecture while providing welcoming environments.
Some of these include:
Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture (London:
Routledge, 2005), Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture:
A Critical History, Third Edition (London: Thames
& Hudson, 1992), Alberto Perez-Goméz, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980).
remain, like their predecessors, a painfully rare occurrence in a culture that values economy, efficiency, newness, novelty and spectacle above all else.
Perhaps another reason for architects’ uncritical willingness to adapt themselves, their profession and their productions to the dictates of scientific management is simply a matter of self-interest: in the modern world, popes, kings, princes and emperors were replaced by the state and industrialists as the great patrons of building.
If architects were to secure commissions they would need to learn the emerging language and processes of Taylorist and Fordist organizational and production techniques. (This was certainly true for Le Corbusier, who, regardless of how much he paid lip service to such things was always at his best when his work interpreted the past, explored the irrational and located itself within a continuum of architectural significance capable of transcending the narrow confines of the present.) Accordingly, to stay in the game, architects had to remake architecture in the image of engineering, which from the outset was far more professional - systematically organized and quantifiably assured - than architecture. Reorganization of architectural practices along the lines of Taylorist principles thus coincides with a growing emphasis on engineering, mass production, modularization and rationalized methods of design and construction. In this way, both the organization of architectural offices (as well as architectural education) and the resulting buildings became conditioned by such processes. However, all of this has come at a great cost:
the rationalization of architecture has separated it from the fine arts tradition of which it was long a part, resulting also in a world of architectural objects equally severed from the same tradition.
It is conceivable that the reason why so much modern architecture seems to be cognate with the negative reality portrayed in We and Brave New World is the degree to which Taylorist and Fordist conceptions of reality, especially in the form of targets and management mindsets, have come to provide the cultural dominant for the present condition. In myriad ways, modern society does indeed seem to be so thoroughly organized according to the principles of scientific management that it would have been nearly impossible for architects to have acted otherwise than to provide a normalizing context that would be seen to confirm the inevitability of such a condition (no matter how much they might claim to be avante-garde or autonomous).
With the above in mind, it could hardly be surprising that the two most influential dystopias (or if you prefer anti-utopias) of the twentieth century split Taylorism and Fordism between them: Taylor provides organizational schema for the One State in We and Ford for the World State in Brave New World. The significance of this cannot be overstated. The chilling worlds described in both novels depended on the excesses of scientific management and production line values to give them any sense. If these same values lie at the foundations of modern architecture and city planning (and both attempted to give these values a form), it can be no wonder that the result in most instances is dytopic. The supposedly utopian aims of modern architecture could never have succeeded because the fundamental organizing vision of its
project was borrowed from bad social science. Extended to its logical extreme Taylorism and Fordism result in a world of ever narrowing finiteness, assuring foreclosure of the imagination, and with it a severely diminished possibility for any relevant architectural poetic.
So many modern settings are characterized by a deterministic rigidity that derives from mostly schematic visions that it is worth considering if something might be amiss in the very origins of such work.
Arguably, the Taylorist or Fordist aspect of modern architecture will only be capable of projecting a dogmatic static order, which would, as it were, by design, make them unable to receive the unanticipated emotional and social exigencies that always arise out of everyday life. Sorely lacking from the conceptualizations and results of much modern architecture - especially when the efforts is to project an ideal - is a suppleness or complexity capable of responding to ‘time and necessity’.16 The aim of finality, or absoluteness, is the most chilling aspect of Zamyatin’s We. Utopias always turn mean when attempts to put them into practice envision a certain conclusion that must be realized once and for all. If modern architecture was revolutionary, as in many ways it actually was, a key limitation was the general conviction that its transformation was the final one, leaving little or no space, both in its theorizations and realizations, for the irrational otherness that life always brings with it to renew whatever setting may momentarily house it. As Zamyatin observed, “Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number.”17
6. End in the form of a beginning
Utopia’s defamation by communism and capitalism alike makes it into a genuine alternative to the banalities proffered by the master narratives of both. Utopia is not some ‘middle way’ (akin to neo-liberalism) but rather stakes out a territory of otherness that is at once optimistic and capable of overcoming the poverty of imagination that marks the current epoch in all sectors of public life, including architecture. If modern architecture failed in its promise of a better future through reform, by trading in utopian dreams it could not deliver on for a dystopian reality it could easily build everywhere, it is not because modern architecture was wrong headed in construing itself as utopian in the first place, which it very rarely, if ever, did anyway, but rather its failure was staked out from the start because its vision was never bold enough to begin with. Dogged by insecurity, manifest as a need to be seen as technologically rational and nearly scientific, most modern architects, save perhaps for Le Corbusier and a few others, were unable to infuse their work with the imaginative complexity that could have made it into a counterform for renewed social life.
The claim that modern architecture was utopian and that utopias always harbour absolutist ideologies has served a double purpose, on the one hand, the architecture coming after the modern must be superior to it because it has overcome the utopian fallacy, on the other,
16 Alberti recommended that
although we should certainly
‘project a city by way of example’ it must ‘nonetheless conform to the requirements of time and necessity’. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, 4.2, 96.
17 Yevgeny Zamyatin,
‘On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters’, quoted in Mirra Ginsburg,
“Introduction”, Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (New York:
Avon Books, 1987), p. x.
an architecture devoid of a social dimension - necessary to protect it from utopian excess - must be a good thing in comparison to the wrong- headed fantasies spun by the first generation of modern architects. As it turns out, the so-called post-modern architecture, in most of its guises, has simply replaced modernist earnestness with frivolity often verging on the thoughtless but certainly ironic in most instances.
The story of modern architecture told in the present is often as a- historical as the one attributed to the modernists who all supposedly wanted to dash history and do away with tradition. In reality, the best modern architects, Le Corbusier and Aalto for example, followed by Kahn and van Eyck, have been more than knee-deep in the past, especially in the idea that radical invention requires a tradition to interpret. It is the lesser masters and the mediocre followers who needed to do away with the enriching tethers to the past: in this scenario, if a debunked past, of necessity severed from influencing the present, is neutralized, what comes after, no matter how poor quality, will bask in the gleam of newness-value simply because it is contemporary.
More significantly still, the most sophisticated practitioners of modern architecture, including those just noted, actually attempted to make a link to the pre-Enlightenment past of architecture, even as they moved forward. Unlike so many of their contemporaries and the many generations of architects who have followed, these architects sought to invent an architecture shaped around the rituals of everyday life in the way architects had once generally done, as a matter of course, until the seventeenth century.18 Consequently, nuanced practice, even in the twentieth century, was characterized by a preoccupation with:
The nature of our responses to the world of artifacts, [and] the way in which groups and communities appropriate space ... are, in the last reduction, almost inevitably about problems of form. ... Perhaps, if there is to be a place for the architect’s work within a future social fabric, he will have to learn to deal with such problems again.19
As Tafuri observed, in the present, architects happily go about inventing forms without utopia. The missing utopian aspect of this endeavour is suggested by Rykwert: it would include a preoccupation with the social dimension of architecture, which architects had been traditionally uniquely well-suited to consider. In Rykwert’s terms, this would be a deep consideration of the ‘problems of form’ he describes as requiring an understanding of the ‘nature of our responses to the world of artifacts’, especially ‘the way in which groups and communities appropriate space’.
Such knowledge is now the province of social scientists but its absence from the range of most architects’ design processes results in the overwhelmingly frustrating built environment that has been creeping across the planet evermore speedily in the post World War II period.
18 For a discussion of these transformations in architecture taking place from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, see Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns : The Architects of the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press, 1980; Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1983 and Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, Third Edition: Revised and Enlarged, London:
Thames & Hudson, 1992;
Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture, London:
Routledge, 2005.
19 Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1980, p. 470.
