7/30/2019 Ruins of Modernity: The failure of revolutionary architecture in the twentieth century

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RRUINS OF MODERNITY:

THE FAILURE OF REVOLUTIONARY

ARCHITECTURE

IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

TE

ursday

b 7, 2013

0 PM

LOCAT

Kimmel Ce

Room

60 Washington Sq

NYC, NY 1

CONFIRMED PANELISTS

PETER EISENMAN

REINHOLD MARTIN

JOAN OCKMAN

BERNARD TSCHUMI

& MORE

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Let us not deceive ourselves, Victor Hugo once advised, in his iconic Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Architecture is dead, and will never come to life again; it is destroyed by the power of the printedbook. Both as a discipline and a profession, architecture lagged behind the other applied arts. Even

when measures toward modernization were finally instituted, many of the most innovative,

technically reproducible designs were hived off from the realm of architecture proper as mere works

of engineering. Toward the beginning of the twentieth century, however, fresh currents of thought

arose within the field to lend architecture a new lease on life. Avant-garde architects emulated

developments that had been taking place in both the visual arts (Cubism, Futurism) and scientific

management of labor (Taylorism, psychotechnics), advocating geometric simplicity and ergonomic

efficiency in order to tear down the rigid barrier dividing art from life. Most of the mi litant members

of the architectural avant-garde sought to match in aesthetics the historical dynamism the

Industrial Revolution had introduced into society. Machine-art was born the moment that art pour

lartdied. Art is dead! Long live the machine-art of Tatlin! announced the Dadaists George Groszand John Heartfield in 1920.

The modernists project consisted in giving shape to an inseparable duality, wherein the role of

architecture was deduced as simultaneously a reflection of modern society as well as an attempt to

transform it. Amidst the tumult and chaos that shook European society from the Great War up

through the Great Depression, revolutionary architects of all countries united in opposition to the

crumbling order of bourgeois civilization, attaching themselves to radical political movements.

Forced out of Europe by fascism and subsequently out of the USSR by Stalinism, the architectural

avant-garde fled to North America. Following a second global conflagration transposed into the

postwar boom context of America with the GI Bill, Europe under the Marshall Plan, and Japan under

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McArthur the modernists now reneged on their prior commitment to spur on social change.

Abandoning what Colin Rowe had called that mishmash of millennialistic illusions, chiliastic

excitements, and quasi-Marxist fantasies, they instead accommodated themselves to the planning

agencies and bureaucratic superstructures of Fordism. European modern archi tecture came to

infiltrate the United States, largely purged of its ideological or societal content; where it became

available, not as an evident mani festation or cause of socialism, he wrote, but rather as dcor de la

viefor Greenwich, Connecticut or as a suitable veneer for the corporate activities of enlightened

capitalism. Indeed, the International Style that premiered in 1932 at MoMA under Johnson and

Hitchcocks highly selective curatorial oversight had already been stripped down to its barest formalelements. Looking to revitalize revolutionary modernism, Reyner Banham thus declared in 1962:

Even when modern architecture seemed plunged in i ts worst confusions it could still summon up a

burst of creative energy that gave the lie to the premature reports of its demise. Modern archi tecture

is dead; long live modern architecture!

Only a decade later, however, Charles Jencks calculated in his book on Post-Modern Architecture

that it was possible to date the death of Modern Architecture to a precise moment in time (July 15,

1972 at 3:32 pm, with the detonation of Yamasakis much-maligned Pruitt-Igoe complex in St.

Louis). Today it is postmodernism that appears to be aging badly. But if postmodernism, which stood

for the end of the end (Eisenman), is itself at an end, does this mean the end of the end of the

end? Just another stop along the way in an endless cycle of endings? Or perhaps another beginningof a modernist renaissance? This prospect could prove bleaker yet. In archi tecture, writes Owen

Hatherley, addressing the issue of post-postmodernism, typically postmodernist devices seem to

have entered a terminal decline, as historical eclecticism and glib ironies have been replaced by

rediscoveries of modernist forms albeit emptied of political or theoretical content. But does this

trend represent a break with postmodernism or does it merely mark the arrival of the pseudo-

modernism of contemporary architecture?

In light of these considerations, Platypus thus asks: Where does architecture stand at present, in

terms of its history? Are we still were we ever postmodern? What social and political tasks yet

remain unfulfilled, carried over from the twentieth century, in a world scattered with the ruins of

modernity? Does utopias ghost (Martin), the specter of modernism, still haunt contemporarybuilding? How can architecture be responsibly practiced today? Is revolutionary architecture even

possible?

Sammy Medina (Architizer, Platypus Affiliated Society)

Ross Wolfe (The Charnel House, Platypus Affiliated Society)