Criticism after utopian politics

Zoltan “Pac” Pobric
The Brooklyn Rail
May 3rd, 2013
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Following up on yesterday’s “advice to critics,” I thought it would be appropriate to include a reflection on the state of criticism today. This short article was written by my friend Zoltan “Pac” Pobric, an editor of the Platypus Review. A few other pieces on the subject have been written lately that I’d recommend, such as Ben Davis’ “Crisis and criticism” and Laurie Rojas’ “Confronting the ‘death’ of art criticism.” Pac’s piece is posted here for its exceptional clarity and concision, qualities lacking in much of what passes for “criticism” in the present.

Originally published on The Brooklyn Rail‘s website. The image is Charles Baudelaire photographed in 1855.

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There has been no lack of talk, for the past ten or so years, of some kind of “crisis” in art criticism. James Elkins, Arthur Danto, Katy Siegel, Hal Foster, et al.; everyone seems to have some stake in the failure or ineptitude or impossibility of critical thought. Elkins says that judgment should return; Danto says it’s unnecessary. Siegel says critics have little, if any, real power, and Foster, when pressed, seems to conclude that contemporary criticism is too confused to pin down, which of course is true. Yet all the hand wringing has little to do with criticism per se. The deeper problem, no doubt, is political, and all the anxiety about whether or not we understand contemporary art and culture is misplaced from a deeper distress: do we even understand the world we live in? What’s unclear is not only how we got to our present historical condition, but also, by default, what progress beyond it would look like.

Jacques-Louis David, Death of Marat, 1793. Oil on canvas, 63 3/4 × 50 3/8". Royaux des Beaux-Arts/Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels.

Jacques-Louis David, Death of Marat, 1793. Oil on canvas,
63 3/4 × 50 3/8″. Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.

Nor does culture seem to offer any directive past the impasse, although the problem isn’t the lack of excellent contemporary art. There is good art today, as there always has been. The deeper problem is that no one seems to be able to recognize it. Art, of course, relies on a receptive audience, and the fundamental question is whether or not one exists today. If even art, like politics, does not seem to be on the verge of a major breakthrough, that may simply be because we cannot imagine what that breakthrough might be.

Our historical moment is a peculiar one. We exist in a quite different universe from the political environments that produced Diderot, writing about the Salon on the eve of the French Revolution; or Baudelaire on Courbet in the wake of the Revolutions of 1848; or even Greenberg, writing about Abstract Expressionism at a time when Trotskyism was still a serious, if increasingly untenable, political position. Our climate is more pessimistic, and progress is more elusive. Revolutionary change is nowhere on the horizon today, as it was for the best critics of the past. Continue reading

Advice for critics

Walter Benjamin, Virginia
Woolf, & Roland Barthes

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Image: Raoul Hausmann,
The Art Critic (1919-1920),

Walter Benjamin

“The critic’s technique in thirteen theses” (1928)

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I. The critic is the strategist in the literary battle.
II. He who cannot take sides should keep silent.
III. The critic has nothing in common with the interpreter of past cultural epochs.
IV. Criticism must talk the language of artists. For the terms of the cenacle are slogans. And only in slogans is the battle-cry heard.
V. “Objectivity” must always be sacrificed to partisanship, if the cause fought for merits this.
VI. Criticism is a moral question. If Goethe misjudged Hölder­lin and Kleist, Beethoven, and Jean Paul, his morality and not his artistic discernment was at fault. [One can hear echoes of Kant’s Critique of Judgment in this passage].
VII. For the critic his colleagues are the higher authority. Not the public. Still less posterity.
VIII. Posterity forgets or acclaims. Only the critic judges in face of the author.
IX. Polemics mean to destroy a book in a few of its sentences. The less it has been studied the better. Only he who can destroy can criticize.
X. Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
XI. Artistic enthusiasm is alien to the critic. In his hand the artwork is the shining sword in the battle of minds.
XII. The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
XIII. The public must always be proved wrong, yet always feel represented by the critic.

Man Ray, photo portrait of Virginia Woolf (1935)

Man Ray, Photo portrait of Virginia Woolf (1935)

Virginia Woolf

“The decay of essay-writing” (1905)

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The spread of education and the necessity which haunts us to impart what we have acquired have led, and will lead still further, to some startling results. We read of the over-burdened British Museum — how even its appetite for printed matter flags, and the monster pleads that it can swallow no more. This public crisis has long been familiar in private houses. One member of the household is almost officially deputed to stand at the hall door with flaming sword and do battle with the invading armies. Tracts, pamphlets, advertisements, gratuitous copies of magazines, and the literary productions of friends come by post, by van, by messenger — come at all hours of the day and fall in the night, so that the morning breakfast table is fairly snowed up with them. Continue reading

Heidegger’s Nazism

A review of Victor Farías’
Heidegger and Nazism (1987)

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This one’s from the archives. I stumbled across it today while trying to dig up another file. Upon rereading it, I was surprised to see that I still agree with most of the sentiments it conveys. Of course, there are some bits that annoy me that I’d like to change, but I’m going to post it as is. Don’t be too hard on me; it’s from 2006.

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Very little can be written concerning Victor Farías’ polemical Heidegger and Nazism which has not already been extensively discussed. Since its release in French translation in 1987, the book has been the subject of furious criticism, defended by an army of staunch advocates while simultaneously decried by a host of equally resolute detractors. For both extremes this work merely provided a pretext for debate. The battle lines had for the most part already been drawn: the response on either side to its publication was generally automatic. More judicious commentators have since been able to appreciate the truly groundbreaking revelations of Farías’ study, at the same time recognizing its severe limitations. The question of an author’s reasons for conducting this sort of investigation must inevitably arise, after all, given the controversial nature of the issues at stake. This was no small undertaking on his part. The painstaking archival process by which Farías gathered his data was carried out systematically over the course of several years. This no doubt casts some suspicion on his motives. Moreover, the striking lack of ambiguity in his results (which invariably implicate Heidegger as a loyal Nazi all along), combined with a number of questionable arguments and characterizations he makes, only serves to damage the integrity of his otherwise impressive research. So what might then be salvaged from Farías’ contentious analysis? The reader might proceed with cautious reservation, acknowledging the disturbing discoveries it relates while sifting out its more dubious insinuations.

Brief memorandum circulated by Heidegger addressing the students at Freiburg, 1934

Brief memorandum circulated by Heidegger
addressing the students at Freiburg, 1933

We shall begin by examining the general methodology of the text. The technique Farías employs throughout in assessing Heidegger’s thought is primarily external. That is to say, the book does not look to excogitate the subtle nuances and abstractions of Heidegger’s philosophy from within. Instead, Farías devotes most of his attention to relatively minor documents (memos, speech transcripts, personal correspondences, etc.). Continue reading

The architecture of slums

A few ideas and a debate

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Image: UGO’s award-winning project for
a concentrated slum in Dharavi (2013)

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The following are some introductory notes by Leopold Lambert of the Funambulist blog, followed by a transcript of the debate:

Last week, an interesting architectural debate occurred on Ethel Baraona Pohl‘s facebook about an award-winning project that proposed a hypothetical architectural project to relocate the population of the largest slum in Asia, Dharavi in Mumbai. The online comments, including the one on facebook, are not known to be the most appropriate place for deep discussions; however, this time, an interesting debate occurred between a dozen of people (some of them like Ethel, Fosco Lucarelli, Cesar Reyes, and Nick Axel are well-known from this blog’s readers), who could be said to all agree about the symptoms that can be detected in this project yet, who do not necessarily agree on what should be an architectural role in the defense of the victims of globalized capitalism. Since then, Ethel and Cesar wrote a synthesis on dpr-barcelona‘s blog, and I decided to add to it a few thoughts in addition than the entire transcript of the debate, in order to give it a form of archival (see at the end of this note).

This debate comes at a moment where I wonder what is this recent tendency from architects to draw things that they did not design. I explored similar considerations in a year old article entitled provocatively “Why Do Architects Dream of a World Without Them?” and I would like to continue such reflection here. Whether we talk of Gezi Park’s temporary structures built by the occupiers, the various standard elements of Chinese cities, or the now well-known Torre David (see past article) in Caracas, there seems to be a common need for architects to appropriate, in their own language, the eminent characteristics of these “architectures without architects.” Is it a strange unconscious means from them to retroactively claim an architecture that they did not design? Or rather, is it a way for them to understand the logic of construction/function of these spaces by interpreting them through a language that they are familiar with? This second hypothesis has the merit of a form of humility, recognizing that the role of the architect in his or her transcendental version, is not necessarily something that these structures lack. Continue reading

Through iron and glass, darkly

A review of Douglas Murphy’s
Architecture of Failure
(2012)

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Image: Cover to Douglas Murphy’s
Architecture of Failure (2012)

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The following review was published in shortened form several weeks ago in Radical Philosophy 181. Included here are some passages that were excised from the final printed version, as well as some footnotes.

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Douglas Murphy’s debut, The Architecture of Failure (2012), is an odd and unsettling monograph. The book begins with a description of our present moment as heralding “a new period of Ruinenlust,” in which there exists a preponderant passion for the ruins of modernity, as opposed to Romanticism’s earlier infatuation with the ruins of antiquity. Like his peer, the British architecture critic Owen Hatherley, Murphy sets out to recover through his study the image of “a potential future that only existed in the past.”1 Whereas Hatherley approaches this theme head-on, however — directly confronting the avant-garde legacy in his 2009 manifesto, Militant Modernism — Murphy prefers to address it more obliquely.2 The Architecture of Failure looks at the spans of time that bracket the modern movement on either side. Murphy opens with an examination of the “ferro-vitreous” age, from Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851 to Dutert’s 1889 Galerie des Machines. The second half of the book covers the drift from exhausted postwar modernism toward the renewal of architectural transparency following the turbulence and upheaval of 1968.3

Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao (1997)

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Certain peculiarities complicate what is otherwise a solid and convincing, if perhaps a bit oversubtle, thesis. One of The Architecture of Failure’s more confusing features is the structural asymmetry of its two sections. While the first part of the book is devoted to an interpretation of three specific buildings of the iron and glass age — the glamorous Crystal Palace at Hyde Park, its decidedly less spectacular reincarnation at Sydenham two years later, and the ill-fated Albert Palace off the River Thames — the second part instead deals with three general trends within post-’68 architecture — trends that Murphy christens Solutionism, Iconism, and Virtualism.7 This imbalance can be slightly disconcerting for readers who anticipate a continuation of detailed analyses of individual structures beyond the earlier chapters. To be sure, the chapters on Solutionism (postmodernism/“high-tech,” roughly) and Iconism (post-structuralism/“decon,” again roughly) include passing treatments of Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Center in Paris and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.8 But Virtualism, a kind of Deleuzean neo-baroque, finds no built equivalent. Its reality is instead displaced onto the unconstrained imaginary space of digital “diagrams,” allowing for infinitesimally intricate, schizoid patterns of design.9

In fact, there is a way in which the second half of the book almost forms a microcosm of the original Crystal Palace at Hyde Park described in the first. Following a brief interlude near the middle where Murphy touches on the modernist moment, the architectonic of his argument opens up, beginning to resemble the format of a classic nineteenth-century Expo. Solutionism, Iconism, and Virtualism are itemized, stereotyped, and put on display, as if laid out in booths or pavilions that the reader-flâneur can wander spectrally to and from. If not an historicist inventory of styles, The Architecture of Failure at least in this respect showcases the various ideologemes, mannerisms, and rhetorical conceits that comprise contemporary architecture. Murphy recapitulates this Expo effect in miniature modules, outlining the characteristics that most exemplify each tendency.

Patrik Schumacher, architects' hotel in Belgrade

Patrik Schumacher, architects’ hotel in Belgrade

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But Murphy’s sympathy for interdisciplinary usages of “Theory” only extends so far. His criticism of the role it has played in recent architecture is twofold. At one level, he objects to its superficiality. Murphy has little patience for building proposals that look to press “Theory” into service in order to fulfill arbitrary stylistic ends. He therefore faults some practitioners for “bringing theory into architecture as a purely aesthetic device.”13 Relatively speaking, however, this part of Murphy’s criticism is rather tame. Its other side is, by contrast, far more damning. For insofar as it supposedly constitutes a form of “radical critique,” he contends, “Theory” functions to exonerate architects in advance for whatever oversights or questionable design decisions they might make. It becomes a kind of ritualistic gesture, simply “a way of avoiding a wider self-criticism.”14 By citing the right authors and referencing the right texts, the book alleges, architects are able to set up an ideological smokescreen so as to disguise the actual content of their activity.

Murphy does not mince words condemning such methods, however. Those who rely on them are, to his mind, nothing more than “conservatives masquerading in ‘radical’ clothes.”15 Still, The Architecture of Failure wisely refrains from committing the opposite error of denying all legitimacy to theoretical explorations of architecture. Generally speaking, the stance Murphy adopts toward the predominance of “Theory” in the field of contemporary architecture is far more nuanced than those that either blithely celebrate its sophistication or sneeringly dismiss it out of hand. Ultimately, his appraisal of its effect is historical in the way it gauges the cumulative influence of “Theory” upon the discipline: “Difference is becoming standardized, the unique is becoming generic.”16

Exterior of Paxton's 1851 Crystal Palace, Hyde Park

Exterior of Paxton’s 1851 Crystal Palace, Hyde Park

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“The Crystal Palace was certainly one of the most significant early moments of modern capitalism,” Murphy writes. “Indeed, it is widely described as the moment in which modern (or even postmodern) capitalist culture was born, the point at which the gaze of capitalism first turned back upon itself and the symbolic value of the products that it was consuming; the very beginnings of ‘the spectacle.’”18 This spectacular reflexivity, whereby men stand transfixed before the products of their labor, is part and parcel of the phenomenon of reification. Incidentally, this also allows Murphy to establish a homology between the Crystal Palace (1851) and the Pompidou Center (1971) in relation to their time. Whereas the former recalls liberal policies of laissez-faire and free trade promulgated by Cobden and the Manchester School, the latter conjures up associations with neoliberal policies of deregulation and financialization as formulated by Hayek and the Austrian School:

The Pompidou Center marks the largest attempt to elaborate the theoretical and practical concerns of the period in a single building; and we can compare it to the Crystal Palace in a number of interesting ways: both were commissioned by the state, both were conceived within the context of periods of social unrest, both called for an unprecedented program of display…Finally, both were “radical” designs by relative outsiders, won through public competition. Rogers and Piano’s winning design…hinged upon notions of flexibility; the building would be a massive shed with little or no internal division; massive moveable internal spaces serviced entirely from their periphery would be created; the designers would merely provide the space for “events,” with all the post-’68 connotations that the word brought up.

Once again Murphy emphasizes the element of “social unrest” that lay behind the building of the structure, in this case the Pompidou Center. The passage is packed with a number of embedded references, which might be briefly borne out: “flexibility” suggests the well-known Marxian interpretation of neoliberalism as a regime of “flexible accumulation”;19 the description of Pompidou as a “massive shed” calls to mind Brown and Venturi’s populist ideal of the “decorated shed”;20 the word “event,” as Murphy mentions in passing, acquired unmistakable political overtones after the “events” of 1968 (particularly in French Theory).21 As before with the Crystal Palace, the Pompidou is understood as a spatial manifestation of broader historical forces. Murphy draws another parallel between the two buildings, this time in terms of their epochal significance. “[J]ust as the Great Exhibition can be analyzed as marking a fundamental shift, the birth of the modern consumer,” he writes, “the Pompidou Center can signify the shift into the postmodern world of consumption.”22

Figure 4: Centre Pompidou in Beaubourg under construction (1971)

Centre Pompidou in Beaubourg under construction (1971)

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All this should raise some questions regarding the nature of the “failure” contained in the book’s title. What sort of failure is Murphy investigating in The Architecture of Failure? Though the author insists that the issues discussed in the text are “as much architectural issues as any other kind,” it is difficult not to feel that there is something more at stake.25 Murphy is engaging in a species of ideology critique — a “critique of architectural ideology” in the vein of Tafuri.26 Some of the failures portrayed in the book are strictly architectural in character, but more often than not these failures attest to deeper political failures that have taken place in society over the last sesquicentennial. Murphy’s The Architecture of Failure skillfully maneuvers over diverse historical terrain without ever losing sight of this central thematic, using architecture as a lens through which the political regression of recent times may be viewed with melancholic lucidity.

Notes


1 Murphy, Douglas. The Architecture of Failure. (Zero Books. Washington, DC: 2012). Pgs. 1-2.
2 Compare: “We have been cheated out of the future, yet the future’s ruins lie about us, hidden or ostentatiously rotting. So what would it mean, then, to look for the future’s remnants?” Hatherley, Owen. Militant Modernism. (Zero Books. Washington, D.C.: 2009). Pg. 3.
3 Murphy, The Architecture of Failure. Pg. 76.
4 Ibid., pg. 138.
5 Ibid., pg. 139.
6 Ibid., pg. 3.
7 The book’s structure runs as follows. Part I — the Crystal Palace at Hyde Park: ibid., pgs. 12-23; at Sydenham: ibid., pgs. 24-43; the Albert Palace: ibid., pgs. 44-60. Part II — Solutionism: ibid., pgs. 77-98; Iconism: ibid., pgs. 99-118; Virtualism: ibid., pgs. 119-137.
8 On Pompidou: ibid., pgs. 84-86, 97, 118; on Guggenheim Bilbao: ibid., pgs. 100, 113-116, 121.
9 On “diagramming”: ibid., pgs. 123-125, 127, 134; on “schizophrenic processes”: ibid., pg. 122.
10 On Schumacher: ibid., pg. 135; on Eisenman: ibid., pg. 105.
11 Ibid., pg. 103.
12 On Derrida: ibid., pgs. 20-21, 38-39, 59-60, 107, 109, 119; on Benjamin: ibid., pgs. 34-35, 59-60; on Deleuze and Guattari: ibid., pgs. 122-130, 134. On the irony: ibid., pgs. 100-101.
13 Ibid., pg. 107.
14 Ibid., pg. 104.
15 Ibid., pg. 111.
16 Ibid., pg. 136.
17 Ibid., pgs. 22-23.
18 Ibid., pg. 23.
19 Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. (Blackwell Publishers. Cambridge, MA: 1990). Pgs. 141-172.
20 Brown, Denise Scott and Venturi, Robert. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. (MIT Press. Cambridge, MA: 1972). Pgs. 87-89.
21 Some prominent examples include Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. (Columbia University Press. New York, NY: 1994). Pgs. 89, 93,187-192. Original from 1968.
…….Barthes, Roland. “Writing the Event.” Translated by Richard Howard. The Rustle of Language. (University of California Press. Los Angeles, CA: 1986). Pgs. 149-155. Original from 1968.
…….Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Translated by Alan Bass. The Margins of Philosophy. (The Harvester Press. Chicago, IL: 1982). Pgs. 307-330. Original from 1971.
22 Murphy, The Architecture of Failure. Pgs. 84-85.
23 Ibid., pg. 69.
24 Ibid., pg. 80.
25 Ibid., pg. 23.
26 Tafuri, Manfredo. “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology.” Translated by K. Michael Hays. Architectural Theory since 1968. (The MIT Press. Cambridge, MA: 1998). Pg. 29.

PROUN

The “way station” between
painting and architecture

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Image: El Lissitzky,
PROUN 1-C (1919)

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From “Theses on the PROUN: From painting to architecture” (1920)

Not world-illusion
but world-reality

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We have named PROUN a station on the path to the construction of the new form. […] From being a simple depicter the artist becomes a creator (builder) of forms for a new world — the world of objectivity. This does not mean the creation of a rivalry with the engineer. Art has not yet crossed paths with science.

2. PROUN is understood as the creative construction of form (based on the mastery of space) assisted by economic construction of the applied material. The goal of PROUN is progressive movement on the way to concrete creation, and not the substantiation, explanation, or promotion of life.

The path of the PROUN does not lie within the narrowly limited, fragmented, and isolated scientific disciplines — the builder consolidates them all together in his own experimental investigation.

The path of the PROUN is not the incoherent approach of separate scientific disciplines, theories, and systems, but is rather the straightforward path of learned influence over reality. […]

Continue reading

What is imperialism? (What now?)

Larry Everest (RCP-USA), Joseph
Green (CV), James Turley (CPGB)

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Image: Soldiers in Petrograd hold up a
banner reading “Death to imperialism!
Victory to the Red Army” (1920)
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Platypus Review 59 | September 2013

On April 6, 2013, a panel on “What is Imperialism? (What Now?)” took place during the Platypus International Convention at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The panel was motivated by the ten-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and aimed to discuss whether we are any closer to understanding what imperialism is and the relationship between anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. This panel brought together Larry Everest from the Revolutionary Communist Party (USA), Joseph Green from Communist Voice, and James Turley of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and was moderated by Lucy Parker of Platypus. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation. Video is available here.

James Turley: Imperialism poses a series of problems for us as Marxists and they can broadly be divided into theoretical problems and political problems. The theoretical problems are characterized by the sharp inequalities between states, and this is as much a feature of the global order as the very obvious inequality and exploitative relations between classes. This arrangement has serious effects on how the class struggle plays out in different countries. Imperialism also poses a problem of the historical periodization of capitalism. This is the problem of imperialism as a particular stage of capitalism. Even if imperialism is not a particular stage, it is still in this historical sense a kind of carbon dating mechanism. With regard to political problems, it is clear that imperialism, as a system of unequal relations between states, is a way in which state power is organized globally. In this sense, the paramount political problem facing us as Marxists and revolutionaries, if we want to overthrow capitalism globally, is that the highest level of state power requires a serious political challenge.

British_empire_Color

Imperial map of the world showing British colonial might, 1886

Another issue which has come up, particularly in the last ten years, but which really has existed since at least the early days of the Comintern, is the attitude that we take to forces that are not strictly speaking of the Left but that nevertheless confront and oppose imperialist powers in military conflicts or in other ways. This issue, of course, has caused a serious division on the Left. The guidebook for how we have traditionally dealt with this as a movement is Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), which is a sort of brief and very empirical analysis of the nature of imperialism. The background for Lenin’s work was the much larger debate over colonial policy and imperialism in the Second International that began in 1896. Karl Kautsky, who was the foremost theorist of the Second International, wrote a series of articles called Socialism and Colonial Policy arguing that early empires — such as those of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch — were effectively pre-capitalist in nature. They did not export capitalist relations of production, but rather were coercive, absolutist exploitation operations. According to Kautsky, these empires gave way, with the ascent of England as an imperial power, to what he called “Manchesterism.” This was free-trade imperialism. Instead of having coercive and brutal operations — this is Kautsky’s view by the way, it is obviously not true — what you had was the elimination of trade barriers and the expansion of capitalism as a system. Kautsky was writing in 1896 and 1897, by which point it was clear that the mechanisms which led to the First World War were accelerating, and the German state was attempting to acquire colonies. Kautsky’s argument is that the Scramble for Africa and similar forms of late-nineteenth-century imperial expansion are an expression of pre-capitalist forces in Germany and other states, and that this imperialism is actually reactionary with regard to “Manchesterism.” Continue reading

Trellick Tower: The fall and rise of a modern monument

Fosco Lucarelli and
Mariabruna Fabrizi


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Image: Ernö Goldfinger’s monumental
Trelleck Tower in London (built 1972)

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Drawing by San Rocco / Salottobuono
Published in San Rocco Magazine
№ 5 — Fall 2012 [Scary Architects]
Reposted from the blog microcities

Recalling his first job experience, a certain gentleman still remembers the horrified faces of his friends after revealing he was just about to start working at Ernö Goldfinger’s architectural firm. In retrospect, he admits, it was pretty much like the reaction of the peasants to young Harker’s sister when he announced that his brother was going to visit Count Dracula.

Few architects, if any, would earn as much public loathing as Goldfinger during the 1960s and ’70s, and it is not by chance that Ian Fleming’s villain was named after him.

Ernö Goldfinger in front of Trellick Tower_45687163_8

Hated for his short temper as well as for his architectural production, Goldfinger — a lifelong Marxist who practiced in Perret’s atelier — embodied the last phase of heroic, utopian modernism, and experienced its subsequent fall in public opinion.

The socialist utopian ideology associated with the Brutalist style was a perfect fit in the context of the British post-war housing shortage, and the development of high-rise buildings in the relatively flat London boroughs was initially touted by the government as a modern, forward-looking solution. If high-density housing was the setting, then concrete was to be the protagonist. For two decades, practicality had been aesthetics: being economical, flexible and indestructible, concrete became a metaphor for “the future” and acquired enough respect to be emphatically exposed on the façades of large buildings.

Starkly aggressive, with its thirty-one floors towering over a low-rise neighborhood, Goldfinger’s 1972 Trellick Tower in London is a tragic syntax comprising raw concrete, deep shadows, and sky bridges evoking the purified silhouette of a mediaeval castle. With its uncompromising materiality — which inelegantly quotes Le Corbusier — the tower is a daring presence in London’s post-war landscape, an expressionistic monument for the masses. Continue reading

Yesterday’s tomorrow is not today

Hugh Ferriss’ modernity

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Image: Rendering by Hugh Ferriss
of the UN Building proposal (1947)
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What’s so fascinating about [Hugh] Ferriss is what makes him so different to his near-contemporary Iakov Chernikhov. While the latter made fantasy cities out of bizarre amalgams of what did exist and what hadn’t yet been invented, Ferriss drawings take the actually constructed and make it look utterly unreal.

Owen Hatherley, “Fairytales and real estate” (2007)

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many

T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” (1922)

It’s an odd feeling one gets from time to time, that the future we remember was more futuristic than our own. And yet it’s unmistakable. The moment we inhabit is a peculiar retrogression upon the past; its temporality is all off.

Architectural sketch by Hugh Ferriss, 1917

Architectural sketch by Hugh Ferriss, 1917

Architectural sketch by Iakov Chernikhov, late 1930s

Architectural sketch by Iakov Chernikhov, late 1930s

Hatherley’s observation regarding the perpendicular paths of Ferriss and Chernikhov — paths that converge around the right angle of modernity — extends further than he even imagined. Whether working from unreality to reality or vice versa, the two celebrated draughtsmen charted a collision course from their respective points of origin. This might even be seen to represent a pattern of nonsensuous dissimilarity, inverting the old Benjaminian trope.

Meeting somewhere along the middle in the early 1930s, at least within the realm of ideas, the drawings of Ferriss and Chernikhov thereafter approximate each other visually (in terms of sensuous similarity) the further out one moves diverging from this date. That is to say, Ferriss’ sketches become more pronouncedly gothic the earlier on one looks. A tenebrous crayon rendering from 1917, shown above, amply illustrates this fact. Oppositely, Chernikhov’s sketches began exhibiting numerous gothic features toward the end of the 1930s, becoming progressively gloomier along the way. No one denies the influence of Hugh Ferriss over the comic-book city of Gotham; producers of the new Batman movies just announced would do well to take a look at Chernikhov’s later works for inspiration, especially after their blunder casting Ben Affleck as the dark knight. Continue reading

Event review: Le Corbusier/New York

Sammy Medina and Ross Wolfe

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Saturday, June 8th, 2013
Center for Architecture
Museum of Modern Art
New York, NY

Originally published at Former People:
A Journal of Bangs and Whimpers
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“Le Corbusier/New York” was billed as a two-day international symposium focusing on the architect’s relationship to the city, and featured such luminaries within the field as Jean-Louis Cohen, Kenneth Frampton, Peter Eisenman, Stanislaus von Moos, and Mary McLeod, along with a host of other lesser-known critics and historians. Jointly organized by the Center for Architecture together with the Museum of Modern Art, the event was held at the former’s downtown headquarters on the occasion of the latter’s upcoming exhibit, Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes. Barry Bergdoll, the chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA, was on hand to preside over several rounds of the discussion. With headlining acts like these, the space was predictably packed to the gills. Somewhere around two hundred people attended the symposium.

Le Corbusier in New York, 1946

Le Corbusier in New York, 1946

Beneath this general rubric of Corbusier’s relationship to New York City, the quality of the presentations varied widely. The first batch was composed of papers decidedly more academic, even scholastic, in character. Of these first few twenty-minute talks (though they frequently ran over time), the one by Mardges Bacon “On the Streets of the Vertical City: Le Corbusier in New York, 1935” was perhaps the most compelling. In all likelihood, this owed  its fidelity to the historical record of Corbusier’s actual visit to the city in that year, rather than to speculation about the impact the city might have had in concept — in the abstract. Bacon carefully traced his ambivalent impressions of New York as he encountered it in person for the first time, no longer forced to make do with the visual descriptions or the photographic documentation of others. She explained the great modernist’s awe before the sheer verticality of Manhattan, and his profound admiration for skyscrapers’ use of the latest building materials and techniques. In Corbusier’s view, the real tragedy was that such modern methods were forced to fit the framework of such antiquated zoning laws. Continue reading