Totalitarianism in Germany and Italy

The global Great Depression of 1929–33 did not in itself cause the unraveling of Europe's fragile political stability of the 1920s, but it certainly accelerated its demise. The reasons for the vast economic downturn were myriad and complex. Economic expansion in both the United States and Europe had been strong between 1924 and 1929, and financial speculation abounded. The injection of American money into Germany through the Dawes Plan, beginning in 1924, created not only an artificial economic boom (by 1926 Germany would again push past Great Britain in industrial production) but also a situation of fiscal dependency. In addition, there was the problem of war reparations, which Germany could not and, later, would not repay. The crash of the American stock market in October 1929 in itself simply signaled a period of deflation. A dramatic fall in industrial production led to a fall in the price of consumer goods, a fall in wages, and a sharp rise in unemployment. With the collapse of two German banks in 1931, the world's system of credits and currencies was thrown into disarray. Communists and socialists blamed the deteriorating situation on laissez-faire capitalism. Capitalists and financiers blamed the problem on the conservative monetary and fiscal policies endorsed by politicians.

Durand and Quatremère de Quincy

If the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 has long served as the dividing line between premodern and modern European history, it was in many ways a symbolic one. The event (which liberated but five prisoners and two madmen from a prison already scheduled for demolition) represents, on the one hand, the collapse of the “old regime” in France and the aristocratic and clerical privileges it protected, on the other hand, the dawning of a new era of individual rights and democratic government. The social and political implications of the French Revolution were certainly not felt in France alone. The period 1789–1815 was an exceedingly convulsive one for a still largely feudal Europe, now forced to undergo a radical reconsideration of the existing body politic. Wars and related incidents of social unrest were nearly continuous. And to these cataclysms must be added, in the more advanced states, the economic pressures of the Industrial Revolution. In the end, modern values for the first time become clearly discernible, manifesting themselves no less in architectural thought than in other cultural fields.

The political and military events neatly encapsulate the stages of progressive turmoil. The unrest in France in the summer of 1789 led to a “Declaration of the Rights of Man” (emulating the American model) and a limited or constitutional monarchy.

ciam and Team 10

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s ciam had remained very much in the hands of Le Corbusier and Giedion. The fourth ciam congress, held aboard the S.S. Patris II in 1933, produced (ten years later) the document published by Le Corbusier as the “Athens Charter,” which became the definitive statement of the organization's objectives and planning policies. It was in many of its details synonymous with Le Corbusier's “Radiant City” proposals. With the collapse of modernism in Germany in the mid-1930s, Le Corbusier assumed an even more powerful role. The fifth ciam congress was held in Paris in 1937, and Le Corbusier arranged his Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux at the Paris Exposition as a propaganda display for the organization. The theme was the functional city. The Spaniard José Luis Sert and the Dutchman Cornelis van Eesteren joined the inner circle of the organization in these years, but the German occupation of much of Europe in the 1940s dispersed once again the remnants of ciam.

The saving grace for ciam turned out to be England, which after the founding of mars (Modern Architecture Research Group) in 1933 had grown increasingly active.

Spenglerism versus Taylorism

The “war to end all wars” involved nearly every country in Europe, as well as the United States, Canada, Turkey, Japan, Australia, Indochina, India, and several colonial countries in Africa. It put into uniform over fifty million troops and greatly advanced the lethal possibilities of modern warfare with such military innovations as long-range artillery, poison gas, tanks, airplanes, battleships, submarines, and machine guns. Altogether ten million soldiers died on the battlefield, and over twenty million were maimed. Turkey alone lost one-fourth of its adult male population. In Poland over four million people were killed or made homeless. In the end, sadly, it was agreed by everyone that the entire event scarcely had to happen. It came about almost accidentally through a mixture of diplomatic blundering, national arrogance, and anachronistic treaty obligations.

For two of the principal contestants – France and Germany – the war was little more than a resumption of the hostilities of 1870–1. Military alliances came first. In 1879 Germany had formed a pact with Austria-Hungary and Russia, which Italy joined in 1882. When in 1890 the new German emperor, Wilhelm II, decided not to renew the treaty with Russia, France took the occasion to sign an alliance with that country.

François Blondel and the French Academic Tradition

Architectural thought in France at the start of the seventeenth century, like that in Italy and Spain, was predicated on the notion that the art of architecture participated in a divinely sanctioned cosmology or natural order: a stable grammar of eternally valid forms, numbers, and proportional relations transmitted to the present from ancient times. Jean Bautista Villalpanda, in his 1604 commentary on the prophet Ezekiel and Solomon's Temple, attempted to prove that these numbers and proportions not only were compatible with the Vitruvian tradition but were given to Solomon directly by God himself. Within a few years, this tenet, more broadly considered, would meet philosophical resistance in the person of René Descartes (1596–1650). In his Rules for the Direction of the Mind, written sometime before 1628, Descartes noted: “Concerning objects proposed for study, we ought to investigate what we can clearly and evidently intuit or deduce with certainty, and not what other people have thought or what we ourselves conjecture.” In this clash of two different systems of values – inherited tradition and the confident power of human reason – resounds the first stirrings of modern theory.

Descartes's third “rule,” as he termed it, is even richer in its implications.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, histories of modern architecture generally followed the lead of the practitioners of the 1920s, who tended to stress the conceptual “divide” separating the architectural thought of the late nineteenth century from that of the early-twentieth century. The basis for positing such a divide was the belief that “modern” architecture, in particular the so called functional architecture that came into vogue in the 1920s, was the inevitable terminus of Western architectural development, at least as far as its formal language. Early practitioners of modernism were nearly unanimous in stressing their “break” with the past and in rejecting the possibility of returning to historical or stylistic themes in design. The chasm separating the “then” and the “now” was deemed to be unbridgeable.

Architectural theorists in the 1970s and 1980s took a very different view of the matter. Some argued that “history” needed to be reintroduced into design to counter the “loss of meaning” or the inherent limitations of earlier functionalism. They claimed the modern vocabulary of nonhistorical forms had exhausted its artistic possibilities and in the process it had become both tedious and inhuman. The essential “postmodern” idea was to replace this presumed monovalency of form and function with a layered polyvalency of meanings, which in turn would enrich and reinvigorate form.

Historiographic models and teleological expectations also radically changed before and during these two decades.

The American Skyscraper

Of the two images of the American landscape most often published in European architectural journals in the 1920s – the grain silo and the skyscraper – it was the latter that was more intriguing to European observers. More so than the automobile and the ocean liner, more so than the airplane and the assembly line, the skyscraper served as a quintessential metaphor for American modernity, even if European building codes and zoning laws would not permit its construction at home. It was an icon of industrial prowess, of technological innovation and advanced assembly methods, of the new, more dynamic, more prosperous world. After a “Gothic” design won the Chicago Tribune competition of 1922, however, it was also seen by many Europeans as a sign of American architectural confusion and cultural backwardness.

This view was not restricted to Europeans, for American practice had its share of homegrown critics during these years. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, in his Modern Architecture (1929), saw the skyscraper as America's singular calling but also its greatest architectural failing: “The skyscraper therefore awaits the first American New Pioneer who will be able to take the engineering as a basis and create directly from it a form of architecture.” The bold drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright had failed Hitchcock; the art deco designs of the 1920s had failed him; the visionary explorations of Hugh Ferriss had failed him.

1968

Architectural theory is conventionally said to be a phenomenon born out of a tradition and therefore one that generally operates by evolution rather than by revolution. In quiet times this is generally the case. Very little, if anything, is ever new to architectural theory, and often generations of architects grapple with the very same issues, albeit within a changing historical context. But theory, too, is almost always visibly shaken by momentous intellectual, political, and economic events. The intellectual foment surrounding the Enlightenment defined one such moment within the course of Western history. World War I made its mark on theory, and the Great Depression ushered in a new era of thought. The year 1968 seems to define another such moment.

Nineteen sixty-eight was above all a year of political convulsion and violence. In Europe the year opened and closed with the uplifting and disheartening events in Czechoslovakia. In early January, Antonín Novotný, the first secretary of the Communist Party, was ousted from his position by the Slovak Alexander Dubček (1927–93), who promised “socialism with a human face.” With the further removal of Novotný loyalists from the cabinet in March, the “Prague Spring” became a cause of worldwide celebration. The country's censorship laws were quickly revoked, and people in the streets reveled in their newfound freedom of expression.

An encounter with the architectural ideas of the past few centuries is a little like rushing upon a sleeping Proteus – the mythical sea god and herdsman of seals who (to Odysseus) had the power to take all manners of shapes. One has to hold on fast as theory evolves through its many guises until at last it is forced to reveal its true identity. In the seventeenth century, it was codified and was more or less restricted to one or two academies; its main ideas were expounded through lectures and treatises. During the Enlightenment, it steps out into the public forum for the first time, and nonacademic viewpoints begin to challenge accepted academic dogmas. The rise of national identities and the availability of architectural journals in the nineteenth century vastly expanded and facilitated theoretical discourse. And of course the manifestos of the twentieth century were usually short, minimalist polemical statements, sometimes cogently reduced to axiomatic diagrams or simple sketches. We shall take architectural theory in its broadest sense and define it simply as the history of architectural ideas, literary or otherwise. Further, as every generation possesses the need to define itself in relation to what exists, architectural theory has almost always been a reaction to the past.

The present work seeks to narrate the main lines of modern architectural thought from 1673 to the troubling year of 1968. These dates may appear arbitrary, but they have a foundation. These dates may appear arbitrary, but they have a foundation. To start with, the words theory and modern both first came into prominence in the late seventeenth century.

The German Enlightenment

The turmoil that engulfed the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the early 1830s marked the beginning of the decline of that institution's control over much of European architectural theory. The institution itself would of course survive the nineteenth century and continue well into the twentieth, but French dominance in architectural theory would now gradually diminish. The new but still unrecognized challenger on the horizon in 1830 was Germany. Few would suspect that by century's end this once rural and divided country would dominate European theory at large.

This development is all the more remarkable if we consider how late an independent Germanic line of thought formed. Germany's artistic “provincialism” in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had everything to do with its political and economic fragmentation. Germany existed during this period not as a country but as a medieval affiliation of over 300 states and cities, nominally confederated under the aegis of the ancient Reich, or Holy Roman Empire. These entities were largely feudal in constitution, not always German speaking, both Catholic and Protestant in religion, and variously ruled by an assortment of emperors, kings, counts, dukes, margraves, bishops, and electors. Fifty-one of these entities functioned as free cities, led by the Hanseatic trading centers of the north.

The Tradition of American Classicism

Architectural theory in the United States, as we might expect, was a relatively late developing phenomenon – a philosophical luxury rarely engaged in before the 1840s. But this does not mean that national characteristics in thinking were not evident before this date. If American architecture in the beginning was heavily influenced by the cultural values and historical perspectives of European settlers, it soon exhibited important differences from European architecture, variations forced on it by the new geographic and cultural milieu. For one thing, American architects lacked ready access to the monuments of the past – the architecture of Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance – or those models that provided the immediate context for European historical conceptions. Then there were the economic and physical hardships of pioneering life, which quickly tempered the pretensions of European culture with a necessary respect for frugality and practicality. We should also take into account the unspoiled and mostly unpopulated landscape of North America with its large distances and scale, which helped to foster a generally rural or antiurban outlook.