Originally posted by
jordanb
Reading this thread and others on the same theme, I think it’d be useful to list a series of responses to the main fallacies that I see appearing here and other places where modernism is defended.
Modernist Fallacy #1: True creativity comes from a vacuum
It seems that every other creative endeavor, be it writing, musical composition, painting, sculpting, etc evolves by “evolving” earlier themes, and they do so consciously. A writer or a composer is willing to talk quite frankly about his “influences.” For instance, a composer might say he was heavily influenced by Dylan. Really what he’s saying is that his work is derivative of Dylan’s, but be that as it may he’s still being creative if he’s adding to it.
If you study to be a writer, you read the great past works. A painter will study the great paintings. Maybe a novice painter will even set himself to copying exactly Rembrandt or Monet. When they perfect their craft they will begin breaking the rules established by those painters to produce something unique and original, but they know that they first have to learn from the past.
Consider writing. It is very easy to chart through history when various things we now take for granted were invented. The first English novel, for instance was Robinson Crusoe . After that, novel writing took off but things in novels that we now take for granted like character development and dialogue weren’t completely defined until hundreds of years after that book, and vestigial structures like the travelogue farce were abandoned as novels became more accepted by readers. The point is that the novel evolved slowly out of that book into its present, fairly standardized form, because hundreds of writers were willing to be derivative. Now, although novels are very standardized, that does not prevent people from doing profound and original things with the format.
But Architects don’t want to be “polluted” by such structures so they alone among the creative professions refuse to study past works. “Derivative” is an evil word in architecture, the worst insult you can use. Architects can be influenced by things like trees or philosophy, but not other architecture. Even when architects are influenced, they try to obscure the fact and hope nobody notices, as Ablarc demonstrated a while back with Wright’s hidden Inka influences.
Modernist Fallacy #2: Reviving old styles is dishonest
The question is, who is being dishonest about what, and to whom are they being dishonest? If you were hiking through Northern Virginia and suddenly came upon a large complex of Classical buildings, would you say “my goodness, I must have stepped into Ancient Athens!” or would you conclude that you must have stumbled upon the seat of some large, modern, democratic government, a government that used neoclassical architecture to demonstrate its commitment to the original Greek notions of Democracy?
Steel: You live in Chicago, right? Have you ever mistook Chicago Union Station for a Greek temple, or the University of Chicago for a medieval monastery? Both of those things knowingly used architectural styles that were not strictly “of their time.” One could argue that UoC was being dishonest because they built the campus to look as if it were ancient and storied despite the fact that it was an instant University in an instant Metropolis. But the architects saw their work as not reflecting what the University was, but rather, what it aspired to be. Now over one hundred years after its founding I think we can conclude that their dream was a success and the architecture fits it very well.
Modernist Fallacy #3: Everything before Modernism is now obsolete
This is where Jaws was attempting to go with his rocket ship analogy. Does the fact that rockets exist mean that we should give up everything that existed before them even when the earlier transportation technology remains perfectly adequate?
I’m not convinced the world has changed as much in the past century as Modernists seem to think it has. The Greeks discovered the Golden Ratio as being a proportion that was particularly beautiful. Is there something about the modern eye that makes that ratio obsolete? Are we so changed that architects should no longer consider such anarchic knowledge?
Have you ever looked at the top of the old Board of Trade building? How many people in Chicago do you think were worshiping Roman goddesses in 1930? Isn’t that stature of Ceres anarchistic, then? Dishonest ornamentation, even, perhaps. Or perhaps the architects saw such imagery as a cultural holdover from ancient times that perfectly represented the activities that occurred in the building below.
Modernist Fallacy #4: We should because we can
After outlawing the use of anything that came before, Modernists went on the deep end on the other direction deciding that anything that was made possible by all of the technological advances of the 20th century should be built. That’s what you end up with when your entire philosophy is “novelty for the sake of novelty,” which is what you get when you declare anything derivative to be evil.
But just because you can put twenty tones of concrete in a big platform hovering twenty feet above the entrance to the building doesn’t mean you should. People don’t like to feel like they’re walking under the head of the hammer of the Thunder God while trying to gain entrance to the building, and the architect should be sensitive to that.
And what’s more, when you abandon the neoclassical to build government buildings that look like Battle Droids, what does that say to the civil servants who work in them, and what does that say to the populace about their Government?
Modernist Fallacy #5: Buildings should make you think
Architecture is not, or at least, it should not, be a purely creative endeavor. There is an “in-your-face” aspect to architecture that doesn’t exist in painting or writing. If people have to live in and around your angst-driven manifesto on the futility of man, many will not appreciate it. Architects must use creative faculties but they should do so to produce buildings that represent communal values, to produce structures that are valuable to the community as a whole.
If that means that there’s little meaning behind them, or if the imagery is mostly trite (again, neoclassical public buildings referencing the greek agora to demonstrate our cultural commitment to democracy). If you don’t like producing such things, then you’re in the wrong profession. Why not switching to something where personal expression is less destructive, like sculpture?
Modernist Fallacy #6: That some modernist structures are popular validates the Modernist dogma
If you blindfolded me and put me in a basketball court with a bunch of balls, I’d eventually get a few through the hoop, even if hundreds would end up in the stands. How long are Modernists going to skate on the Bilbao success? And anyway, often when Modernism is successful it’s because the architect cheated and used historical but heavily obscure styles (witness again Wright and Inka).
I’d like to add to this Modernist Fallacy #6a: There’s no difference between the Iconic and the Vernacular. Modernism manages to produce—from time to time—some great iconic structures. But the fact is that there is a very small market for such structures and the vast majority of the buildings built in this would aught to “fit in” to their existing context. What would Paris look like if every building tried to be as unique and iconic as the Eiffel Tower? (Ablarc put together a wonderful photo thread that illustrated that point as well).
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