Urban Outfitters
From a Cause to a Style:
Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City
by Nathan Glazer
Princeton. 320 pp. $24.95
Architecture is the one art that is always performed in public; we cannot dodge it in the way we can dodge books, paintings, or light opera. Like it or not, buildings are right before our eyes, and we are made aware of their changing fashions as we are of changing fashions in clothing. It would be a dim observer indeed who did not know that red granite stripes, travertine panels, and curved sheets of titanium have gone the way of the zoot suit, and that the current season strongly favors the thin wooden slat and fishnet aluminum mesh.
Still, one can watch the fickle changes of surfaces and still not know exactly what is going on, or why, just as one can observe a ship being repainted a different color each week and have no inkling of its course. In fact, an observer on the shore might have a better idea of the ship’s course than a passenger on deck. Where urban architecture is concerned, seldom has there been so perceptive a watcher as Nathan Glazer.
An eminent urban sociologist, Glazer has written such classic texts as Beyond the Melting Pot (with Daniel P. Moynihan) and The Lonely Crowd (with David Riesman), and has been a contributor to Commentary for over a half-century. But if issues of race and ethnicity have been the main theme of his career, matters of architecture and urban planning have always concerned him. As early as 1958 he wrote “Why City Planning Is Obsolete,” an early sign of his misgivings about the course of American urban renewal. Such misgivings would become widespread wisdom after Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) delivered a final blow to the whole utopian project of urban renewal. But lately Glazer has come to have misgivings about those misgivings, and to think that along with its utopian strand, something essential and irreplaceable may have gone out of modern architecture. From a Cause to a Style is his effort to assess what that might have been.
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This volume collects eleven essays and public lectures, the earliest dating as far back as 1991 and a few slightly revised. Their subjects range widely: the state of the city-planning profession, the nature of monuments and memorials today, a case study of urban renewal in East Harlem, and so forth. Compilations of this kind often amount to less than the sum of their parts, but in this instance the parts achieve the coherence and integrity of a well-thought-out book.
For Glazer, the peculiar essence of architectural modernism was its indissoluble union of aesthetic and social impulses. Such celebrated visual motifs as strips of ribbon windows, sheer planes of wall purged of ornament, and open and flowing floor plans expressed an urgent aesthetic agenda: a will to clarify and simplify form. Yet these were but the visual manifestations of an equally urgent public imperative, which aimed at nothing less than the comprehensive reform of society through the elimination of its own encrusted ornamentation—that is, petty distinctions of class and affiliation.
At some point between the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, however, modern architecture lost its sense of social mission. Several developments played a part in this, and Glazer was fortuitously placed to observe them at close hand. The one to which I have already alluded was the failure of large-scale urban renewal and social-housing projects, a failure that was just becoming clear when Glazer joined the Housing and Home Finance Agency (the forerunner of HUD) in the administration of John F. Kennedy.
Although the idea of social housing had been at the core of European architectural modernism from the beginning, it had originally been of little interest in America, where housing was the business of the private sector. Not until the Depression did the federal government begin building low-rent “projects,” at first tentatively and then massively in the postwar period as urban renewal reshaped the face of most American cities. And yet, by the time Glazer joined the government in 1961, there were already warning signs of trouble ahead as the dream of peaceful new urban communities was giving way to starker realities of crime, drugs, and vandalism.
The pride of urban-renewal projects was the mighty Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis (designed by Minoru Yamasaki, architect of the World Trade Center). Built in 1952, it was already in a parlous state, so heavily vandalized by its tenants that much of it was uninhabitable. Glazer served on the committee to study how the project might still be salvaged. It could not be; with the widely-televised dynamiting of several of its massive towers in 1972, America’s great postwar urban-renewal campaign was more or less over.
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In retrospect, according to Glazer, it is clear that the failure of this one particular enterprise acted to discredit the utopian impulse in architecture altogether—thereby releasing architects from their sense of social obligation. In one of his keenest insights, Glazer shows how the avant-garde modernists of the early 20th century, like Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, for all their aesthetic radicalism, had aspired in their work to the ideals of “normality and reproducibility.” They were
form makers and image creators. But in contrast to their heirs and successors today—Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, and add whom you will—one has to note that they seemed to eschew extravagance, sensation, and shock in form and image in favor of the creation of what they hoped would become a normal, accepted, and reproducible urban environment, indeed the ordinary environment, rather than an eye-popping intrusion into it.
By contrast, today’s “star architects” seek to add to the frisson of their work by creating buildings that stand out from both the normative and the normal. This is not to say that contemporary architects do not speak of society; they do, incessantly. But, as Glazer suggests, they no longer do so with a sense of collective purpose. The vocabulary of modern architecture has always had a strongly Marxist tinge, which in mid-20th-century modernism focused itself on the problem of the urban poor and the cause of bettering their living conditions. Today’s architectural discourse, Glazer points out, leans on a different element in the vocabulary of Marxism—namely, its accent on “catastrophism” and the apocalyptic.
“Subverting the Context,” an essay of Glazer’s that draws lessons from the fate of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981), is a case study in just this sort of catastrophism. A particularly aggressive work of public sculpture, Tilted Arc thrust a 120-foot-long slash of Cor-Ten steel across the plaza in front of the Jacob Javits Federal Building in downtown New York, until it was finally removed at the pleading of virtually everyone who used the building, from judges to janitors.
Glazer makes much of Serra’s unconcealed scorn for those users, as well as his insistence that their discomfort was a good thing, that making them uncomfortable was virtually a moral obligation on his part. According to Serra, works “built within the contextual frame of government, corporate, educational, and religious institutions run the risk of being read as tokens of these institutions.” In other words, if he did not “subvert” the government building by means of his sculpture, he would be complicit in its (presumed) crimes.
For Glazer, this pretentious disdain makes a striking contrast with the actions of England’s Prince Charles, who for a time in the 1980’s became Britain’s most important architectural activist—working diligently to reform architectural education and to address the problems of social housing and other urban woes. How ironic, writes Glazer, that the putatively reactionary prince should have seemed closer to the reformist spirit of mid-century modernism than the putatively radical Serra and his defenders among the cultural establishment, loftily dictating taste to the masses and mocking their inability to grasp sophisticated aesthetic ideas.
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A wise and humane book, From a Cause to a Style exudes the authority that comes from a lifetime’s mature consideration of its subject. (I found only one error: it is not Benjamin Franklin who teeters atop Philadelphia’s City Hall but William Penn, the author of America’s first utopian city plan.) Glazer has a gift for dealing with the most controversial issues without bombast or cant, a gift that is evident in the quietly reasonable tone that is the mark of all his writing. If the subject matter of From a Cause to a Style is dispiriting, at least the sense that calm minds are still keeping a wary eye on events is consoling, and perhaps all the consolation one can hope for.
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