If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog. Older posts are in the archive on the right.
Other links: The Band on Gab; The Band on Oneway
So we've finally reached the point where the stage was set for Modernism in architecture. To simplify, we have three overlapping factors: Architecture as a discourse or "Art", elite ambition, and the Enlightenment myth of teleological human progress. These are categorically different - architecture is a cultural and academic area, the elites are the faces of economic and political power, and progress effects everything differently. Nor are they inevitable. One reason it has taken so long to get here is the necessity of showing that historical teleologies are fake, and that the current "system" is no more than an accumulation of disinformation, poor decisions, and unintended consequences.
Rose Pauson House, 1939-42, destroyed 1943
This digital recreation of a lost Wright captures his organic architecture, which was inspired by the surroundings. Local materials make it seem like an extension of the desert. Wright's approach was a potential alternative to the Modernism that we got.
It is essential to remember when facing the globalist left that it didn't have to go down this way. The myth of progress allows them to ignore the past and dodge accountability. Never forget that where we are today is the consequence of deliberate, knowingly dyscivic, choices.
Architecture refers to the professional structure, schools and institutions, critics and other influencers, and the social mores of the client classes. Like most "intellectualized" fields in the "new" economy, it is elitist, globalist, and converged to anti-Western ends. It is more cultural hive mind than single institution, where wrongthinkers are weeded out organically at the lower levels. Suppression is not really needed when everyone agrees.
Bannister Fletcher, The Tree of Architecture , from the 1954 edition of his History of Architecture (1896)
This diagram shows the history of architecture as an evolutionary sequence of national period styles. This has been roundly pilloried by Postmodernists as Eurocentric, which it is, but that was how Architecture was conceived at the time.
At the theoretical level, Architecture has its own "language" - unstated assumptions and frames of reference, critical models, discursive patterns, trusted authorities, lexicons of terms, etc. This is critically important. It responds to the world outside it, but that response is always filtered through the language of Architecture. The terms can change - Eurocentrism gets replaced by Postmodernism - but the structure lives on.
Look closely at any institution that completely changes its belief system while maintaining its authority in society.
The elites employ the architects and fund the influencers without participating in the language of Architecture directly. In one way this makes them enablers - it is the Architecture world that tells the elites what to like and awards them "sophistication" for supporting the most inhuman swill. But this undersells them. The elites don't participate in the "discourse" because they ultimately don't care. Their goals are to increase power through centralization, meaning any dyscivic assault will do - Modernism, Postmodernism, Hi-Tech Modernism - the details are irrelevant so long as organic communities are erased.
Older historical styles may have been elite impositions, but they did prioritize an attractive appearance. For Modernists and after, attractiveness is an external master or reference to be rejected in the name of artistic purity.
The elites will support the any and all absurdity and perversion in the "cultural" fields so long as they keep pumping out a corrosive stream of social poison.
Click for source.
Progress simply refers to the common modern error that flawed, finite human beings are moving inexorably towards a better state. The Enlightenment bait and switch that still haunts us today is offering something contingent and circumstantial as a universal law. We see it all the time. Increases in technology and wealth brought about by specific historical circumstances magically transform into the way of the world. Throw in the myth of egalitarianism and you have the foundational incoherence of globalism.
Step one: all humans are fungible, but...
...human nature is progress.
Any differences must be inequity. At least the lying simpletons at Ben and Jerry's think so.
Before turning to mythology to explain outcomes, perhaps consider more empirical data:
... like documented cognitive differences.
But that would require honesty from a truly pathologically dishonest company, and policies that reflect real differences.
This can never happen with the current globalist elite, because admitting the truth would put the kibosh (RIP Stan Lee) on important anti-Western weapons.
There are no programs or aid that can integrate low IQ populations into advanced societies. The only possible outcome is a perpetual dependent class to drain wealth and destabilize society.
This is by design.
Progress has infected Architecture, but, as we would expect, this is filtered through the language of that field. This takes a couple of forms:
Progress in style - the idea that there is some sort of perfection in building and it is the role of the architect to move towards that. Esoteric and occult groups buy into a lot of this, only they think of the perfection as something formerly known but now lost. Modernists reject the past for an ideal that had not yet been discovered. It is this obsession with the next big thing that makes Architecture a cultural weapon for globalists because it makes the past retardaire and tradition something negative.
Oscar Niemeyer, Oscar Niemeyer International Cultural Centre, opened 2011, Avilés, Spain
Apparently, Niemeyer’s barren empty space is supposed to represent "a place open to humankind" but just reflect for a moment on how unwelcoming it is. It is uninteresting and uncommunicative - the usual anti-human sterility that elevates paper concept over lived experience, aka the erasure of culture.
Progress in society - the idea that the architect has an obligation to "improve" society by shaping the environment. Empty buzzwords about sustainability, greenness, urban villages, renewal, and the like slap a positive-sounding fig leaf on the authoritarian erasure of the past.
SOM, Jiangxi Greenland Zifeng Tower, opened 2015, Nanchang, China
It doesn't matter if this giant prism could be anywhere - it's certified LEED !
In the build-up to Modernism in the 19th century, social progress was measured by improvements in technology and centralization and driven by the false faith in human perfectibility. Architecture hit a crisis when this social change become so extreme that renewal architecture in general is seemed old-fashioned.
It is important to understand how technological progress reorients Western historical attitudes. Empiricism is cumulative, and therefore engaged with the past. Modernism asserts that changing material conditions mean our acquired cultural wisdom about human nature can be jettisoned as well. As if replacing carriages with cars fundamentally transformed the driver's genetic code.
The endless quest for the new is actually hostile to wisdom, since awareness of empty ephemera is the sign of sophistication. This is the era of the avant-garde - the metastasis of Marxist revolutionary thinking to the cultural sphere, where "shocking" "bourgeois" sensibilities is the main aesthetic goal. And like all leftist "revolution", it quickly becomes totalitarian once it attains power. Notice how the is no institutional cry for rebellion against the inanity that is art or architecture today.
Jeff Koons, Play-Doh (one of five versions), polychromed aluminum, 315 x 386.7 x 348 cm, 1994-2014
This piece pulled almost $23,000,000 at a recent auction. If the art market were an international money laundering scam, how would it appear different?
So architecture has to come up with a new language that better reflects the image of modern progress without recourse to the past. For Modernists, this meant finding the "essence" of Architecture as a thing in itself completely disconnected from tradition. Best not point out that the very notion of Architecture as a distinct art was based on now-rejected tradition, lest someone assume that the field is an animated carcass twitching to currents of globalist money, elite pretension, and grift.
William B. Tabler, Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown, 1959, Pittsburgh, PA
Apparently Architecture, a discursive figment of a rejected unenlightened past, has an essence. And Modernists can detect it, presumably by odor.
They would have you know that it had to look like this for reasons. Until suddenly it didn't.
BFLS, Strata SE1, 2007-10, London
Postmodernism means different things in Architecture and philosophy. Theoretical or cultural Postmodernism rejects rejects any possibility of certainty or "master narratives" while writing in languages and enjoying academic sinecures. No truth has its benefits. Architectural Postmodernism is just one of several styles that appeared after the fake rules of Modernism - a master narrative - was tossed in Postmodern culture.
Digital architecture is another. These are basically just ordinary modern buildings with surface decorations made to look "digital". Seriously. It looks destabilized like Deconstructive architecture, but Deconstructivism works with broken and fragmented forms while Digital architecture works with surface ornament.
All the Postmodernisms acknowledge that the essence is nonsense, since discourses have no real substance outside of consensus. In other words, they admit their field is a twitching carcass but keep it anyways because it is lucrative and prestigious.
How does something this stupid take hold?
To stay with essences, the essence of Romanticism is groundless belief in all sorts of emotional things. This was described as misplaced faith in an earlier post. Looking for metaphysical properties in a materialist universe is how you get to such pearls of incoherence as aimless progress, empirically false rationalism, and all the other subtle intelligence tests that self-described smart people routinely fail. We can add magical essences of materials and crafts to that revelatory list.
James Northcote, John Ruskin, 1822, oil on linen, 126.7 x 101 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London
English Romantics like Pugin and Ruskin correctly identified the dyscivic impact of the Industrial Revolution, but were intellectually unable to address the problem in practical terms. While 19th century factory life was soul-killing, only someone who looked like this could claim that Medievals labored out of joy.
Click for The Seven Lamps of Architecture - Ruskin's theory of renewal.
Edward Burne-Jones, Laus Veneris ,1873-78, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne
The Pre-Raphaelites were heavily influenced by Ruskin's ideas. But it was all rhetoric - the historical knowledge of a modern pagan LARPer combined with an aristocratic Victorian sensibility masquerading as a cultural restoration.
The problem that they identified was that modern industrial life was "inathentic". It wasn't foreign rulers, globalist elites, abusive social conditions, or the substructure of financial control that destroyed the national culture, it was inauthenticity.
What is unclear is whether the most authentic work is related to the most sincere pumpkin patch.
For followers of Ruskin, like the Pre-Raphaelites or the Arts and Crafts Movement in general, "authentic" work was based on an imaginary Medieval craftsman with good hygiene who was notably not a subsistence farmer, as 90+ percent of Medievals were.
Wightwick was built and decorated according to Arts and Crafts principles from the faux-Tudor to the furnishings and rugs. There's a who's who of that scene here, including William Morris and the Pre-Rapaelites.
They were correct to note that an organic integrated community is socially healthy, but they promote that most mindlessly irritating of self-serving leftist lies: that given the option not to, humans will universally choose to work.
Stop and think for a moment about how often you've heard some globalist utopian shill bleat out some variation this theme: "unlocking" the latent creative potential of low IQ, handout dependent masses by giving them more free stuff. It is utterly retarded, but uttered over and over. Finding fulfillment in hard work is a particular biosocial tendency that is not transitive.
It wasn't history as much as a projection of their distaste for industrial modernity. The paradoxical thing is that the Arts and Crafts Movement contributed two huge big ideas to the road to Modernism:
Authenticity - work can provide a fulfilling sense of purpose if it enables personal goals. That is very different from some sort of metaphysical essence that mystically appears in certain tasks. This is a Romantic idea that skulks into Modernism in a couple of ways.
Alan Reiach, Eric Hall and Partners, Appleton Tower, completed in 1966, University of Edinburgh
Truth to materials is a form of animistic faith that believes inanimate objects possess material essences that set the limits of human creativity. You can't blame the talentless hack who designed this eyesore - the concrete made him!
No distinction between art and craft. Treating all elements of a functional design with a high degree of artistic care was a way to ennoble workers and bring beauty into people's lives. It is obvious that an aesthetically pleasing environment is psychologically beneficial, whatever your tastes. There is still lots of talk about bringing down elitist barriers around "the Arts", but from within highly exclusive institutional subcultures with towering barriers to participation.
The vast majority of working architects are employed by large firms or follow established trends in small practices. The ones who are actually involved in setting the trends are few in number. The Band is using capital A Architecture to distinguish the Art, or institutional structure, or discourse, or whatever, from working with clients and contractors to design buildings for a living.
Small a architecture is a legitimate vocation, capital A a web of institutional influence, made starchitects, critical media venues, and the socio-cultural markers of the client class. Job prospects for one depend on the economy in general and state of the construction industry in particular. The other? A bit like making the NBA, if the spots were awarded on the basis of navigating opaque and often sociopathic, subcultures.
The Romantics were fundamentally unserious, but if we put aside the Shire for a moment, there are some worthwhile points to consider. Humans are most fulfilled in organic communities defined by shared culture, faith, and meaningful work. Well made goods are appealing - look at the shoddy quality of everything found in every collectivism.
What doomed this escapist Medievalism was its backwards view - there was no more room for tasteful Gothic revivals in the face of Progress than any other historicism. But no one other than the Masons were buying Pythagorean harmonies anymore either. So if Architecture was to maintain its place of privilege, it needed to justify itself in this new age. The answer was essences - the essence of the materials used, the function of the building, the cultural zeitgeist, the nature of the discipline - anything that could outsource authority and justify their existence.
Kazimir Malevich, Black Circle (1924), conceived in 1915, painted 1924, oil on canvas, 106.4 × 106.4 cm, Russian Museum
The "essence" of painting as colors on a plane meant moving towards flatness - the essential quality of colors on a plane - was necessary.
Seriously.
Time to think for a second. Read this again: The "essence" of painting as colors on a plane meant moving towards flatness - the essential quality of colors on a plane - was necessary. How do you even begin a productive conversation with someone whose cognitive limitations allow them to believe this, and who will defend it with the passion of a zealot?
So Architecture needed a new essence, and while this could be logically nonsensical, it absolutely could not reference the past.
Art Nouveau was like the Arts and Crafts Movement in that it was more of a general design style than a strictly architectural one, and for treating functional objects like works of art. But it avoided any reference to the past - classical or medieval - for an entirely new aesthetic based on the marriage of nature and Modernity. Since history was off limits, designers turned to the natural world - the signature whiplash curves of the Art Nouveau are exaggerated and stylized plant stems.
Jules Lavirotte, Lavirotte Building, 29 Avenue Rapp, 1901, Paris
Despite some slick designs and use of modern materials, the Art Nouveau was not a viable alternative for the mass housing, industrial, and commercial needs and passed as fads tend to do.
American Frank Lloyd Wright became prominent with something he called the Prairie Style, so named for the landscape of his Midwestern home. For Wright, architecture should reflect the local environment, so his Prairie Style houses had a low profile inspired by the flat landscape.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Darwin D. Martin House Complex, 1903-05, Buffalo, New York
Here it is moved from its Prairie home to New York, but the idea was that it was an American architecture, drawn from the American landscape, as opposed to the historicisms of Europe and empire.
Wright was like the Art Nouveau designers in that he followed the Arts and Crafts idea of extending artistry to practical elements. Looking inside, you can see that the furniture and fixings have a consistent style that resembles the house.
This ticks off the essence box - the natural landscape is a stable foundation that can be applied anywhere, will look different in different areas, has room for individual creativity and no historical references. The problem is the same as any man-made rule - it's made up. Natural inspiration is a fine design principle that is pleasing to the eye, but there is nothing inherent in it that can force you to do anything.
Steven Holl, Knut Hamsun Centre, completed 2009, Hamarøy, Norway
"Building as a body, creating a battleground of invisible forces". Supposedly there is inspiration from old Norse churches and sod roofs, but we still end up with ugly, intrusive polyhedra.
Modernism rejected the underlying premise of the Prairie Style with the claim that art is autonomous. L'art pour l'art as the French called it. This was a compelling idea for the art world because it meant that they were independent of external control - ignoring the financial substructure of power, of course. In reality, it is compounded error arising from the initial false premise that Arts had universal principles that defined them.
Casa do Pereto, 1974, Fefe Mountains, Portugal
This stone house is ignored by architectural theorists but popular with visitors. It is architecture but not Architecture, unless the Architecture world notices it. The it gets a made up name like paleo-ecoforming or some other gibberish string of evocative syllables.
There is no "essence" of Architecture, because Architecture is an imaginary category, and its existence depends on our consensus agreement. It is real conceptually because it is something that we have established through tradition, but it is not a set of inviolate principles found "out there". Vocation, not ultimate reality.
But reality doesn't matter if there is the money and collective social investment in the delusion. Architecture and Art became external realities because the power elites treated them as such with funding and status. Typical of lotus eaters, Modernists chafed under the limitations required to maintain the culture that made their fields possible, and in an attempt to break free of any social responsibility at all, suddenly discovered logic:
Horace Vernet, Pope Julius II Ordering Bramante, Michelangelo, and Raphael to Build the Vatican, 1827, oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris
As things-in-themselves, Arts can't be defined as extensions of something else. Modernists claimed painting for academies or churches put art in the service of an external agenda. To distinguish Art from advertising, propaganda, news media, etc., it could not be subservient to anything other than its own rules and expectations.
The question of design quality is unasked.
Obviously this is patently absurd. An artist cannot survive without revenue, and whether one paints for clients, government grants, or some other patronage, art is produced for an external motivation. Architecture is even more tied to the outside, given construction costs. Even the most self-motivated design has to do something.
Rem Koolhaus, House of Music, completed 2005, Porto, Portugal
Click for a site with a lot of pictures.
No matter how ugly and alienating in its autonomy, the massive polyhedron does actually have to perform the necessary functions of a concert hall. Architects do have to provide an element of client satisfaction, though the highest levels are mostly exempt.
Modern architectural practice is sort of a cross between art and engineering - appearance based, but grounded in practicality. This had consequences for the essence of Architecture as an autonomous art. Painting could be colors on a flat surface, but Architecture can't be detached from reality in the same way.
The Band has hammered the circumstantial/universal bait and switch because it is so fundamental to all the theorizings that led up to Modernism. If you are not aware of it, it is easy to miss, and that makes it harder to see through the inanity of theoretical prattlings.
Ancient Sumerian cosmological map
Theory is always presented as if universal, but when you look at it historically, it is always responding to specific things from a particular point of view. This is one reason why old theories seem so ridiculous in a different context.
Ancient cosmologies explained everything to the people who came up with them, but outside of that context they can be seen for what they are: products of circumstance.
Take autonomy. Over the last few posts, we have looked at the historical circumstances leading to the definition of autonomous arts by unique essences. The essence of painting - its defining base characteristic - was colors on a surface. The essence of architecture? What it does and what it is made of.
Eustace L. Conder, Roger Conder, Sydney G. Follet, and Reginald Reynolds, Retiro Mitre Railway Station, 1909-15, Buenos Aires
Beaux-Arts and other decorative facades are skins. They are attractive ornaments unrelated to the form or function of the building.
This makes them "false" in relation to the essence of Architecture.
Autonomy meant getting rid of the "false" Beaux-Arts approach of applying decorated facades. Louis Sullivan and the Art Nouveau fail because their designs are non-traditional, but are still applications of decoration to a pre-existing structure. It also meant freedom from external reference or contextualization, so Wright gets thrown off the Modernist bus as well.Taking inspiration from your surroundings is a form of contextualization, so the purity of his buildings are compromised by an outside consideration.
So what is the essence that replaces false fronts and client whims? This is where Sullivan's theory outlives his practice, because his rule form follows function metastasized into a central pillar of Modernist "thought". Arranging Architectural forms to reveal what the building does, rather than where it was or what it resembled, is perfect, autonomous self-reference.
Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, Guaranty Building, completed 1896, Buffalo, New York
Sullivan was still thinking of design in pre-modern terms, as something applied to a structure to make it more visually appealing. You can see it in his choice of the ornate Art Nouveau style for his building's decorations.
Form follows function on a Sullivan high-rise in practical and abstract ways. Practically, the main divisions of the design align with the organization of the interior spaces. Abstractly, it reflected the essence of the building-type - the thing that defined it as a category - which is tallness.
A Beaux-Arts design like the McKim, Mead & White one in the last post breaks the defining upward flow of the building, while Sullivan's lines are all vertical.
This is where truth to materials - another 19th century canard - shuffles in. This can be thought of as a form of animistic faith that the raw materials have the power to override human creativity and predetermine design possibilities.
The Prairie Style passes truth to materials muster because the horizontal profile is true to the shape of the heavy roof timbers and bricks, and the heavy furniture to the essence of solid wood.
This is not an exaggeration. It is literally that "theoretical".
The picture comes into focus. These are internal theoretical issues for Architecture, not concerns that were on the minds of the power elites or the general public, but they set the style. To generalize, with pictorial commentary:
Modernism is Architecture that is autonomous in turn of the 20th century terms because it outsources design to properties of the building itself. This is utterly arbitrary, but so long as suckers put their money down, the charade continues
.
Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, Fagus Factory, 1911-13, Alfeld on the Leine, Lower Saxony, Germany
One of the first truly Modern buildings. There is no decoration other than the structure, and the materials - steel frame, glass curtain walls - dictate the appearance. It is autonomous in that there is no reference to anything other than what it is made of and what it does. The simple geometric massing and huge windows are there to provide the light, air circulation, and workspace needed for a factory. If the arrangement is conventionally attractive, that is incidental.
But there was one more essence to consider...
...The Spirit of the Age
Within the world of Architecture, one big complaint with the Beaux-Arts and other traditional styles was that they were old-fashioned. Their pre-modern symbolism was irrelevant to the modern world because the harnessing of steam power fundamentally reoriented human nature towards Utopian collectivism under oligarchic rule. On a more fundamental level, looking back to tradition blasphemes against the idol of Progress. So it isn't enough that the new architecture be autonomous, true to materials, and reflective of function. It had to capture the essence of the new Modern age.
What does industrial progress look like in a building?
This means taking a look outside the world of Architecture to the functional architecture of the Industrial Revolution - the cost-efficient brick and iron buildings and the technical innovations that made them possible. In the next post, Modernism takes over.
Joseph Paxton, Crystal Palace, for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851, London
No comments:
Post a Comment