Age Of The Masters: A Personal View Of Modern Architecture.
by Reyner Banham.
Harper & Row. 170 pp. $15.00.
Age of the Masters is a brief, informal examination of traditional modern architecture and its underlying premises by an eminent English historian and critic of 20th-century building. The book is an updated version of Banham’s Guide to Modern Architecture, which was originally published in 1962. For the most part, the text has been expanded rather than revised: several of the essays have been extended and twelve critiques have been added, but the new critical views are quite consistent with those of the Guide.
The book’s structure is episodic and fragmentary: the first of its two sections contains five essays which explore the notion of modernity and the essential constituents of contemporary design—form, function, construction, and space. The second consists of illustrated critiques of about forty-five buildings, assessed singly or together in small groups. Both the historical span and stylistic range are generous: the structures date from 1908 to 1968 and include engineered forms as well as Expressionist and early and late International Style designs.
The two versions of Age of the Masters straddle a historical divide of fifteen years or so, during which time modern architectural theory and practice have been subjected to radical reappraisals, both from inside and outside the professional ranks. The forthright attacks of Robert Venturi and Jane Jacobs, to mention only two of the better-known critics, have challenged many important presuppositions: that meaningful contemporary architecture need be monumental rather than modest and informal, and inventive rather than conventional; that it must abandon all the forms and lessons of the past before the certain vision of a vastly superior future; and that architects’ own personal values reflect universal preferences and provide uniformly acceptable standards for design. While the revisionist views have had a far more noticeable impact to date on theories than on buildings, their implications are profound and they are largely responsible for the present spiritual malaise of architectural theory itself.
Surprisingly, Age of the Masters reflects little of the revisionist temper. Banham remains convinced that traditional modern architecture is still philosophically tenable if not appropriate in the mid-70’s, and he vehemently defends his position. As such, the book is interesting not only because it describes the architecture of the modernist “heroic age” but because it is itself a document of important pre-revisionist ideological canons, vividly articulated and illustrated. As a theoretical period piece, it might hold considerable interest for present architects who wish to seek out such familiar philosophic landmarks as are located here either in order to confirm new positions or to reaffirm the validity of their earlier ones.
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Banham’s slightly anachronistic version of modern architecture is gloriously optimistic. For him, architecture
is more than a commentary on the human condition—along with war and peace and love and death and pestilence and birth, abundance, disaster, and the air we breathe, it is the human condition.
Architects have stoically borne this burden, accepting “moral responsibility for virtually the whole of the human environment,” taking it “almost as a given right to apply their talents to any problem that required solving.”
The revisionist mood of today has left the profession bereft of the innocence which once allowed it to sustain romantic attitudes like these. Many architects no longer feel that environmental design is capable of resolving large social and economic questions. Their once-supreme confidence both in architecture itself and the “new” is, after all, precisely what led them to conspire, in the early 60’s, with developers and government to promote large-scale urban renewal as a social panacea. Many of the aesthetic tenets of modern architecture, moreover, now appear tyrannical: the compulsive preoccupation with spatial continuity and doctrinaire all-white surfaces in residential interiors militates against privacy and precludes unstudied, comfortingly cluttered assemblages of furniture and other personal possessions.
The somewhat simplistic rationalist theory of design which emerges in Banham’s critiques of individual buildings is equally estranged from current notions. Ban-ham posits respect for function and utilization of an up-to-date building technology as the two conditions of well-designed architecture. But the conventional “form follows function” thesis, of which this is a representative expression, does not satisfactorily account for good design, even though it is widely used. “Function” evokes mechanistic images that are inappropriate in describing the many different sorts of design factors, only some of which impose calculable limits on building forms. An interior doorway, narrower than two feet, for instance, may be a hazardous fire exit, but doors do not simply become more functional as they get larger. Once the critical minimum is satisfied, there may be no simple way to determine an optimal door size. Ironically, functions quite often end by following forms: just as new furniture is designed to fit through conventionally-sized doorways, so new behavior patterns develop accommodating these restrictions. The pre-1960 notion of “functional determinism”—that functions are directly accountable for the appearance of forms—is useful primarily as a negative criterion: it is obvious when a particular form does not work, but it is not always possible to evaluate the relative efficiency of buildings as if they served discrete mechanical ends.
“Functional determinism” in Banham’s use obscures another, more obvious fact of design: buildings have considerable aesthetic and psychological impact upon their users. Architecture helps sustain attitudes toward the world and toward the self, both by embodying these in symbolic images and by providing appropriate settings for activities. Such considerations tend to be deemphasized in Banham’s brief, and are especially lacking in his discussions of such Expressionist architects as Eero Saarinen and Michel de Klerk, or the eccentric and inventive Mid-westerner, Bruce Goff.
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The other architectural criterion that figures strongly in Banham’s accountings—also foreign to many of today’s concerns—is that of technological currency. Discussing innovative engineering solutions to the problem of spatial enclosure (such as Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, which in the early 1960’s were generally accorded little architectural significance), he warns:
. . . electronics and other “non-architectural” studies are further means to extend our control over environments, and if architects cannot make them part of their art then the human race may decide to disencumber itself of the art of architecture, just as it has disencumbered itself of the arts of witch-doctors and rain-makers.
Unfortunately, the precept that designers should seek out innovative construction technology in order to encourage its social acceptance belies certain economic realities which have become apparent in the United States during the last ten years. It may be that architects who have experimented with advanced technology have made their clients pay for the privilege. Until relatively recently, for example, brick masonry rather than pre-cast panels was the cheapest available exterior wall system in New York high-rise residential buildings, and there are still no signs that prefabrication has become a practical alternative to conventional building techniques (aside from the phenomenon of the mobile home). Actually, the vehemence of Banham’s utterances on the subject suggests that technology holds other interests for him than its own potential benefits; along with his preoccupation with the utilitarian he seems to harbor a futurist urge to embrace technology’s utopian promise, and to take a positive delight in the prospect of an irrepressible technological juggernaut dooming the most highly prized cultural manifestations to transiency. He relishes the thought that Mies van der Rohe could never find the perfect joint detail, because “sophisticated technological culture” would “offer him a better component tomorrow.”
In Age of the Masters Banham proselytizes not only in behalf of earlier modernist ideas but also those of the Independent Group and the closely allied New Brutalist architects who espoused the cause of English Pop culture in the early 1950’s. These movements criticized the English cultural establishment for its distance and insulation from the economic and social realities newly emergent in mid-20th-century life and represented above all by American consumer society. English Pop’s inner circle, which included Banham, Lawrence Alloway, and Eduardo Paolozzi, among others, collected American commercial advertisements, ascribing rich iconic value to them, and found in Detroit and Madison Avenue the models for an economically revitalized society. The New Brutalist admiration for America’s hard-headed pragmatic solutions to everyday problems probably accounts to some extent for Banham’s fascination with a building technology that is sometimes no more than merely capable.
The social concomitants of English Pop were even more important; postwar English society was inspired by the prospect of greater upward mobility but still somewhat under the influence of the old class structure. It is possible to see how, in this context, the ideals of functionalism and technology, taken as exclusive design criteria, assumed new significance for Banham and his circle, because in theory they transcended existing cultural values and the social systems associated with them. Functional buildings were metaphors of democracy, devoid of social symbolism.
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Because many of the architectural issues that absorb Banham reflect the 1950’s English cultural situation, they will not seem so urgent to an American audience long accustomed to the dubious blessings of technology as well as to social mobility. The American reader’s sense of dissociation will probably carry over to Baham’s discussion of buildings in this country. The New Brutalist ideology does not account for the monumentality so pervasive in American architecture, and Ban-ham does not openly address himself to the phenomenon: he talks around monumentality in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, castigates it in Louis Kahn, and omits all references to the work of such central figures as Paul Rudolph, Kevin Roche, John Andrews, Cesar Pelli, and Gerhard Kallman in which he would have to confront the issue head-on. While he is quite partial to Buckminster Fuller and Charles Eames, it is in the image of the “radical hotrodder” Bruce Goff that he finds a “more purely American vision.” Goff is a kind of cultural “natural,” untainted by “formal academic training”; he is both an agent for democratization—“consumer-oriented, sensitive to grassroots public moods . . . at home in Marlboro country,” and at the same time a willing heir to a rich technological fortune, drawing ad hoc on an amalgam of industrial sources for his structural vocabulary. Appearing to search for the true identity of American architectural culture, Banham actually extrapolates from it those images which most clearly embody his own critical ideals.
Banham’s idiosyncratic perceptions of this country’s architecture contribute to a long-standing transatlantic dialogue between European and American culture, in the course of which there has been considerable misunderstanding on both sides. American architecture has generously offered refuge to European forms but invariably only after these have been divested of the encumbering ideological trappings in which they were initially conceived. Europeans, on the other hand, have used America as a cultural “mirror” of their own concerns; consequently they have been extremely selective about the images of America they wish to retain and have subjected them to extensive cropping and retouching.
Banham’s ideas are nevertheless extremely important, and his observations of what is unique and consequential in both American and in general modern architecture have often been brilliant. The strong catalytic effect of his writing upon readers is not accidental: his knowledge of the modern movement, enriched by years of relentless research, is probably as extensive as any historian’s, and he has been both inventive and resourceful in devising critical and literary strategies to promote architectural attitudes. Not only does he stand apart from many of his peers in these respects, but his unabated enthusiasm, even in Age of the Masters, offers a positive example of what is so lacking in the passionless and cynical criticism that is the norm these days. But if his critical vision has been penetrating, the plausibility of his views is often severely compromised by his inability to resolve the struggle for authority within himself between the historian and the concerned citizen. His erudition is too often employed in misleading ideological assaults, and even on occasion in venomous jibes that merely serve to alienate rather than to persuade. This is a pity, for just at the moment traditional modern architecture needs all the friends it can get.
