Making Architecture Great Again
Fake Architecture: Politicizing
aesthetics
By John Henry,
Architect
It is with a great measure of ambivalence that I
write this. The reason being: I grew up
in a fascinating land rich with ancient archaeological treasures, and my
university training taught me to follow and love only Modernist tenets. I appreciate both sides of this polemic. I see great and poor design on both
sides. But over the years I noticed an
extreme bias of one side against the other and only in the past few did the ‘disenfranchised’
side respond with intelligence and force.
This mirrors our current political stasis where one side, “tolerant”,
actually does not wish to hear at all from the other. The side marginalized for years and years may
now even see legislation supporting their view and preference.
I graduated with a Master in
Architecture from Texas A&M University in 1978. As Rush Limbaugh likes to say:
our ‘minds were full of mush’. Students absorb whatever their professors
espouse. We went to college with hopes and dreams and expected reality to
accept what we had learned and the world to hire us to exercise our newly
acquired skills and theories. This seemed to work (the modern approach)
in the commercial world but not in the residential. And as clinical as my Bauhaus inspired
training seemed to be, there was never a political connection to style or
design. In fact, all personal beliefs,
other than design theory, was not discussed in any of my classes. As we slowly realized, in the art and
architecture world of the 40s to present day especially, things were not as
neutral and antiseptic as we were led to believe.
Architecture was supposed to be apolitical. It
was a process, explained by our Gropius educated Dean, that was a culmination
of analysis and problem-solving. We
never heard it connected with any particular dogma other than purely an
academic development based on technology.
The history of architecture
before the advent of Modernism and the International Style was treated as a
series of notable construction adventures by primitives to fantastical
expressions and devotions to Greek and Roman gods and Caesars, to 17th
and 18th-century monarchs, despots, to Fascists, mixed in with a mish-mash
of experimental classical revival styles, mostly based on the Western Tradition
– but finally abrogated -- that culminated in the most acceptable manner of
building from the 1940s to the present day – namely, Modernism.
It wasn’t clearly explained why
this break occurred, or why the previous 2,500-year culmination of creative
enterprise was abandoned completely except that economics and expediency were
the main culprits. And there was absolutely no return. We never asked why. The previous two and a half millennia were
reduced to museum curiosities, never to be repeated. Or else.
One did not design any building with classicizing
features in the Universities after the theories of a group of European
architects made their way through academia (and were supported by big pocketed
investors/developers). To go classical/traditional was out of style,
backward thinking, against the best theories of architecture; it was
verboten. In fact, only Notre Dame finally turned to a full curriculum
with an emphasis on classical architecture. The frou-frou of traditional
architecture was replaced by a machine ethic expressed in glass, steel and
concrete. It was ‘honest’.
Let’s fast forward to the recent
news that the Trump Administration is looking to put in place an emphasis, and
legislative guidelines, favoring traditional architecture for new government
buildings. While architects in general may find this a seriously rude
signal that would stifle creativity, architects of strong ‘progressive’ minds
are calling this a crusade against the free expression they have enjoyed for so
many years but especially an affront to their beloved Modernist beliefs and
self-declared unassailable conventions.
We have finally confirmation, evident from several
recent politically charged critiques, that Modernism – and its progressive
offshoots – is indeed an architecture of the left. Like the left-leaning
media on which we have accepted as the norm, Modernism and its genetic progeny
have pervaded our environment for 80 years or more, has infected nations
worldwide with its seemingly inert tenets, and is rarely challenged.
Supported by academia and the leftist art world and glossies, it has been the
de facto norm. The inescapable conclusion is that artistic expression,
like political thought, has been governed by the left for decades now.
In a recent U.K. based opinion piece seen on
failedarchitecture.com, the writers claim that traditional architecture is
favored by the ‘European Right’. It follows that the left prefers
Modernism, no? The article goes on to say that “There is clearly a reaction
taking place against modern architecture, led by conservative voices and
members of the New Right” (underline is in the article). The authors
then label right-wing architecture critics as a ‘motley crew’, and consequently
that proponents of classicism are white supremacists. They contrast
traditional architectural expression against modernism, warning that the latter
“…faithfully mirrors the ambiguities, complexities, and struggles of the
contemporary urban experience, to be replaced with a singularly white, European
image of human progress.”
Where have we heard this malarkey before? Why
in our recent Democrat vs. Republican dialogues. The right is racist, the
left inclusive, etc. What we have experienced since the 40s has been an
intolerance of Modernists to accept any argument favoring Traditional
architecture. This is no doubt a parallel of the current political
malaise.
The web article above is just one
of many recent clearly voiced associations of Modern art and architecture with
the left and Traditional with the right. The left has disguised its
agenda for over half a century in our American politics and public realm, employing
aesthetics and media/education to gently but forcefully assert their nascent
and overt programs which are actually politically charged with clear
objectives.
This connection occurred to me several years ago
because the arts intelligentsia, headed by the left through any logical
accounting, has marginalized traditional fine arts for years – sculpture,
painting, architecture – in favor of a free form aesthetic that eschews
ambiguity, impressive self-referential theoretics, to nihilism.
The more recent ‘progressive’
Modern architecture, since its inception has made a point to stray as far away
from any notion of classicism or cultural heritage or even common conception of
‘building’. From amoebas on stilts to crumpled cans and wavy disconnected
metallic surfaces, with jarring incoherent interiors that appear to be inspired
by ‘20s German film sets (as in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari which was
said to ‘explore the twisted realm of repressed desires, unconscious fears, and
deranged fixations’ – Anton Kaes), the imagery is an anti-architecture in the
traditional sense, evidently against the 2,500-year tradition inherited from
Athens and Rome and then taken up by French and other European royalty and
nobility.
The left has co-opted the arts,
news, and media in order to overwhelm the sensibilities of our citizenry,
educate our children in the most liberal mores, but especially to crush the
right’s core beliefs. The left’s views on family values, reproduction and
sexual mores, immigration, policing, governance, and politics in general is
reflected in the often-dystopian and bizarre images of architecture for private
and public commercial buildings that have been erected in the last 80 years.
The funny thing is, after
graduating and starting my practice, I noticed how rare modern design was
represented in private housing. I was subconsciously disappointed on one
hand, yet on the other, happy to design traditional houses! (I had to
take on an ongoing research project into the great ‘Western Tradition’ - Classicism,
purchasing hundreds of texts and visiting/experiencing/documenting countless
landmark buildings in Europe and in the United States, as the underlying theory
and proper execution was not sufficiently explained to me and millions of other
architects matriculating under Bauhaus ‘Start From Zero’ design principles.) In
fact, apart from Modern revivals every few years, the preponderance of private housing
– large and small – has been in traditional and regional styles.
Four walls and a pitched roof seemed to be sufficient, from small
Medieval dwelling to early Renaissance palaces.
The left absolutely abhors a traditional pitched roof. It really is comical to what lengths they
will go to avoid it.
Like Trump’s large middle-class following and
appeal, the humble traditional looking house with its recognizable (and
endearing) details and proportions is preferred to anything that resembles a
spaceship. The disconnect with Modern public and commercial architecture
in the late 60s was finally answered by the profession’s academic’s
cartoon-like Post-Modern designs. These also failed to hit the mark for a
true Traditional architecture but they could not go back to the origins and
replicate the exact proportion, details, etc. due to an expected leftist ruling
critical media backlash. Beauty and proportion were not in the Modernist
vocabulary. The idea was that anyone could train their ‘eye-mind-hand’
and create suitable buildings and become architects. The notion of talent
was not discussed. Solve the ‘problem’ and the result will have an innate
‘correct’ or acceptable form.
Houses with pitched roofs rarely
have the problems of modern houses with typically flat roofs. Traditional
houses have less window and more wall and thus are more energy efficient.
They have fewer wild intersecting planes and dissimilar structural elements and
thus less prone to long term upkeep and repair; they are easier and more
economical to build. The same advantages are documented in traditional
commercial and public buildings. The costs to build the crazy distorted
music venues, museums, and other privately funded projects is 2 to 5 times that
of a Euclidean design and create a host of problems not found in traditional
architecture including how to build, where to start even, how to seal against
the weather, how to make accessible for long term maintenance, etc.
My idol in school was Frank Lloyd Wright, a fierce
individualist and the model of Ayn
Rand’s hero in The Fountainhead.
Wright was also an avowed socialist. He eventually abandoned his Usonian
houses to beat the Modernists at their own game. He capitulated to the
left. Philip Johnson reintroduced an all-glass house, based on Mies’s
model, and influenced a generation of architects. He then dallied in Post
Modern design, working-in traditional elements to his large projects later in
his career. In the mid-40s however, Johnson was invited by the
Nazis to Warsaw and joined the high brass to watch the city get bombarded and
burn to the ground. Others, like Corbu
were fascist sympathizers.
My first shock that there was no neutral
design world was evident in a photo published in a well circulated trade
magazine of high profile modern and post-modern architects supporting gay
rights in the late ‘70s. I couldn’t rationalize this anomaly, as I had
never read any architect taking such a politically charged stand, and only
years later realized how prevalent leftist liberal leanings were shared by so
many artistic professionals.
Classical architecture has been used by despots,
namely Nazis and Italian Fascists, to impress the oppressed. Classicism
though was adopted by our early founders to express the freedom of democracy
reflected in our greatest and widely recognized monuments and public/government
buildings including the Jefferson Memorial, U.S. Capitol, and White House.
These and other historical forms derived from ancient and European architecture
were adopted and replicated/mimicked by 18th and
19th-century American architects into the fabric of our towns and
cities. They are preferred by many over the completely out of scale and
anti-urban, anti-human scaled Modern monstrosities.
It is time to Make Architecture
Great Again. If Traditional architecture represents the Right and we have
been made to suffer for so many years by the insipid and overbearing blank and
scale-less buildings ascribed to Modernism and thus the Left, then the public
deserves a reconnection to a historical progression of the fine arts
exemplified in government buildings and other monuments, that was severed
after the industrialized building systems (though well employed at the time) to
quickly rebuild the catastrophes of two world wars.
Is this payback, is this
retribution? Is it time to get even? Perhaps. But I would
call it a long-awaited correction and a Return to Tradition to establish a more
human connection between buildings and the people who must occupy and be
inspired by them. We have had enough of ‘Federal Modernism’,
deconstruction and its cousins, and are tired of having our sensibilities
ordered by the left without question. A push towards an at least
acceptable option of having period style historical buildings erected by our
tax dollars is not out of the question.
But there should be no question
at this point, that the architecture of the left is a social and political
statement, namely Modernism; that like ‘blue state’ politics, it represents
liberalism socialism, and tends towards even communism. Traditional architecture is then deduced to
be supported by the right, or conservatives.
In this country, the blasphemous arts and modern architecture are
Democrat supported media platforms.
Republicans, on the whole, support traditional forms of art and construction,
prefer it, and should have the right to build the same for public installations. It would be nice if the Antifa - left art
critics were to shut up for a protracted period – and get out of the way. Executive Order is welcomed. Mr. President: like the fake news, we are
tired of being served Fake Architecture for so many years. Let’s achieve a more fair and balanced
distribution of design theory and practice.
What would a world where
beautiful buildings predominate look like? Something like this:
The painting above is by Michael
Gandy, 1820. It is a landscape
representing English architect John Soane’s unbuilt work. Can you imagine an alternative universe built
solely of Modern style buildings? I
would fear it.
++++++++++++++++++++
John
Henry is based in Orlando, Florida. He
holds a Bachelor or Environmental Design and Master of Architecture from Texas
A&M University. He spent his early
childhood through high school in Greece and Turkey, traveling in Europe --
impressed by the ruins of Greek and Roman cities and temples, old irregular
Medieval streets, and classical urban palaces and country villas. His Modernist formal education was a basis
for functional, technically proficient, yet beautiful buildings.
The
drawings and work above were all designed by John Henry, drawn by hand, except
as noted otherwise.
Photos
by Harvey Smith Photography
