Das industriell entwickeltere Land zeigt dem minder entwickelten nur das Bild der eignen Zukunft[1]. (Marx 1867)
The epoch of consumption in which we live, characterized by the globalisation, by the tearing down of life’s certainties and by the fickleness our existence, more and more hectic and forced to keeping up with the inclination of the group to avoid feeling out of place or outright excluded, is well described by Zygmunt Bauman, in the Liquid modernity (2000), and it recalls what a few years previous Jean-François Lyotard recognized as the postmodern condition (1979). In both cases the most relevant aspect of it all is the impossibility to pinpoint a center of reference.Besides the brief digression of the skyscrapers, the huge
industrial buildings and infrastructures – so very much
praised by Loos (1921), Le Corbusier (1923, 1937) and Mendelshon (1926)
– for a long time it was believed that American architecture,
as well as the culture, was dependent and heavily influenced by the
European one. As observed by Peter Blake (1993, 1996)[4] Besides the brief digression
of the skyscrapers, the huge industrial buildings and infrastructures
– so very much praised by Loos (1921), Le Corbusier (1923,
1937) and Mendelshon (1926) – for a long time it was believed
that American architecture, as well as the culture, was dependent and
heavily influenced by the European one. As observed by Peter Blake
(1993; 1996) and Tom Wolfe (1981), at the end of WWII the
US university colleges and the schools of architecture
adjusted to the principles postulated by Mies, Gropius and the Bauhaus.
Before the arrival of the European masters, the "modern" schools in
America were probably only two – Frank Lloyd
Wright’s Taliesin and Eliel Saarinen’s Cranbrook
(who had moved to the US in 1923) – in the 40s they had
almost all made the grade. Also, after the arrival of the European
masters, the American teaching system that had been so strongly
inspired by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, did not seem to exist anymore,
and the ones that had supported it were by then oriented elsewhere
(Blake, 1993: 44).
Mies van der Rohe arrived in the US in 1937 thanks to the invitation of
the young Philipp Johnson to build a country-house for Stanley Resor in
Jackson Hole, Wyoming. In 1938 he settled down in the States for good,
accepting, this time, the invitation made by John Holabird to take the
position of director of di Armour Institute School of architecture in
Chicago (which later on became the Illinois Institute of Technology).
Walter Gropius, after the distancing from the Bauhaus because of his
political leanings to the left, found shelter in London, where he
worked with Maxwell Fry from 1934 until 1937. Invited to the United
States, he took over the department of architecture at the Graduate
School of Design in Harvard until 1952, when he was invited
by MoMA to organise the exhibition: Bauhaus: 1919-1928[5].
In 1932 New York’s MoMA had organized the
exhibition The
Modern Architecture: International Exhibition[7], curated
by Henry-Russel Hitchcock, Philip Johnson, Alfred H. Barr and Lewis
Mumford, aimed at documenting the birth and the growth of the Modern
Style that from that moment on became known as “International
Style” (Hitchcock-Johnson, 1932). An exhibition that more
than any other initiative had promoted the Modern Movement (the
European one in particular) in the US (Riley, 1992). From that moment
on the International Style became known as “the new American
style”, as reminded us by Tom Wolfe (1981) and Peter Blake
(1996).
At that time, the most important publications fulfilled some sort of
"didactic" purposes, in order to allow audiences and architects to
approach the “new style”: The International Style:
Architecture since 1922 (Hitchcock, Johnson, 1932); An Introduction to
Modern Architecture (Richards, 1940); What is Modern Architecture?
(Bauer Mock, McAndrew, 1942); they also witness its promotion: An
outline of European architecture (Pevsner, 1943); Architecture:
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Modern Architecture (Hitchcock,
1958); or else they introduce the the modern masters: Pioneers of the
Modern Movement, from William Morris to Walter Gropius (Pevsner, 1936).
Henry Hobson Richardson, Henry Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright were
included in marginal chapters, amid Romanticism, Art Nouveau and the
proto-modern. Lewis Mumford stated in his The Brown Decades (1931),
«There is still no accurate, authentic, intelligent, and
fairly exhaustive history of American architecture» (Mumford,
1931: 254).
Bruno Zevi’s first publication Verso
un’architettura Organica (1945) and the following Storia
dell’architettura moderna (1950), are the original evidence
of an initial and exhaustive study that puts together architecture and
American masters.
For the first time in the history of architecture, the characters and
the newly born discourse around American architecture, assumed a
determinant and paradigmatic role aimed to observe and interpret the
growth of modern architecture. Zevi wrote (1945), "Numerous histories of modern architecture have been published in the
last few years, mainly in the US and in England, and some of them are
really excellent. Generally speaking though, those histories come to a
conclusion after having dealt with the first generation of modern
architects and the major masters who worked mainly in Germany and
France […] I propose instead to search for a guideline
delving through the architecture of the most recent years; rather than
a sort of history, it should appear as a chronicle, even though it is
already obvious that we can see an intellectual and artistic attitude
towards architecture worthy of expression. The best contemporary
architects are heading forward, towards a kind of architecture that
here has been given a name: organic" (Zevi 1945: 11-12).
The meaning given to the term organic in Zevi’s book (1945:
63-64), was changed by William Lescaze’s words: "Organic is
the word which Frank Lloyd Wright uses to describe his own architecture
[…] This adjective was first applied to architecture by
Wright’s first employer, Louis Sullivan […]. As
Claude Bragdon […] explained […] architecture
throughout the world and down the ages has been bisected by an
inevitable duality, having been either organic (and as such following
the law of natural organisms) or arranged (i.e. according to some
Euclidean ideal devised by man)" (Lescaze, 1942: 78-79).
With Zevi, Wright and the Organic Poetics of the architects of the Bay
Region, Aalto and Scandinavian Empiricism became the reference point of
Modern architecture; instead of Giedion and Gropius mechanization,
instead of the CIAM and Le Corbusier. America, according to Zevi,
became the cultural epicenter, the country able to put forward an
alternative in opposition to the scientific assumptions and the
regulations imposed by the Existenzminimum and the CIAM[8].
The last catalogue of the exhibition, OfficeUS Manual
(Gilabert, Miljački, Carrasico, Reidel, Schafer, 2014), a showcase of
all the American firms’ "good practices’’
aimed to ultimate, undisputed success; a proper manual of business
management for architects. Visitors, walking through the US pavilion at
the XIV Architecture International Exhibition of Biennale di Venezia,
were literally invested by the humongous quantity of projects that
Americans had carried out all over the globe.
An unnecessary sort of revelation, as the awareness and perception of
American supremacy in the field of architecture, and not just in that
one, was already a global phenomenon that did not need any further
demonstration.
Armand Mattelart clearly stated (2000) that the only country
in the world that, because of its sphere of influence, deserved the
name of “global society” was the United States.
Because of its maturity, American society was the one that was
enlightening the path of the other nations. In political terms it was
not possible anymore to talk about the US’ "cultural
imperialism” at the expense of the rest of the world because
its cultural industry together with its models of organization were
actually recognized as universal. What the US offered was a global
paradigm of modernity, a behavioral model of values destined to be
imitated all over the planet, which led Mattelart to prospect a new
global society extrapolated from the archetype born and bred in the New
World.
In terms of architecture it suffice considering how common it is the
practice of building skyscrapers; originally an American archetype, an
exclusively American construction - the only examples of tall
buildings, prior to the 1920’s, were visible in New
York and Chicago – today skyscrapers are the "new"
constructions most commonly displayed on the planet. Its great success
comes essentially from the simultaneous representativeness of
modernity, a symbolic value and the "Reklame Arkitektur" (Hilberseimer,
1927), because «The Medium is the Massage»
(McLuhan, 1967).
The skyscraper though, is not the only protagonist of such a
phenomenon. Enormous has been the success of chained-brand hotels,
clothing franchises, fast food chains, large groceries stores, shopping
malls, multinationals’ headquarters (other buildings
"originally" American), that nowadays they are globally widespread and
adopted in geographical contexts very different from one
another, promoting the creation of urban landscapes that
little by little end up denying their original peculiarities and
contributing to the creation of what the French anthropologist Marc
Augé called the Non-Lieux [non places] (1992). Buildings, or
multi units constructions elevated to be representative of modern
societies, as well as developing countries, for their unfamiliar flair
and their intrinsic quality to be endlessly repeated, easily
transmigrated anywhere in the world without exceptions, which for
people it is very comforting, because we feel protected from the
"risk" of being "surprised" by "unusual" or "unknown"
environmental contexts, and, at the same time, alienating because a it
appears as a universal place exactly the same anywhere we go.
During the early years of this third millennium, we have registered the
increasing realization of edifices that deliberately resort to
exceptional and daring solutions, as well as to sophisticated
techniques to make those solutions the more possible, creating
environmental contexts explicitly artificial and disengaged from
locally affecting situations. At the basis of the most recent
guidelines in terms of research, planning and the building techniques
to make it all possible, is the belief that construction models do not
necessarily need to be rooted in their own local contexts (the most
appreciated aspect that has contributed to its great success and global
promotion), ultimately severing the more direct ties with the local
communities.
In the US, the number of building initiatives characterized by works of
the highest technological standards have more and more multiplied since
the 1950s. Besides the skyscrapers, that we have already mentioned, in
the labs of MIT, researchers have developed study programs and
prototypes of houses powered by solar energy (Barber, 2014; Barber,
2016) and prefabricated, modular ones made of plastic (Behrendt, 1958;
Plastic Houses, 1956). Gradually – at the MIT Media Lab
– thanks to the extraordinary development of digital
technologies, AI and domotics, it was soon possible to think about
self-sustainable homes and to the Cities of Bits: the Smart
Cities (Mitchell, 1995).
It was soon noted (McLuhan, 1962) that worldwide media literacy would
have facilitated globalisation, but also that the newly acquired
electronic interdependence reproduced a kind of image of the world that
recalled a global village (McLuhan, 1962: 31).
According to McLuhan, the technocratic discoveries have recreated the
"field", whereby we live in a single restricted space resounding with
tribal drums. That is why, today’s preoccupations regarding
the "primitive", are just as banal as those ones for "progress" in the
nineteenth century and just as irrelevant if we think about our
problems (McLuhan, 1962: 31), McLuhan states clearly that Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. "Time" has ceased, "space"
has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous
happening (McLuhan, 1967: 63).
However, this kind of global model of modernity imposes, on one side, a
consideration on the very concept of development, and on the other, on
the issue of the cultural, regional and identity instances that Kenneth
Frampton exposed in Critical Regionalism: modern architecture and
cultural identity (Frampton, 1980: 313-327).
For a long while now, it has been believed that the current process of
development – the so-called linear one – has almost
exhausted and dissipated the resources of the planet and that
globalization has jeopardized, if not actually annihilated, the
diversities and cultural complexities of the many nations and countries
of the world.
If the first statement may be true though, the second one still needs
to be verified. Oddly enough, globalization is a phenomenon that has
given a great propulsion to most identity instances in the last few
decades, and it is also very noticeable that the issues pertaining the
depletion of the planet resources and the consequent worldwide crises,
correspond to the increasing, counter actions taken as measures of
compensation and resilience advocated by Critical Regionalism.
For those reasons, today, we ask ourselves if the US model of growth,
and of all of those that look at them as an example, can be actually
replicated; in other words, can the developing countries, or the less
developed ones – like Marx believed – follow on the
footsteps of the United States of America? A country of huge
dimensions, with unlimited (it was thought) mineral underground
deposits and enormous oil fields. A land of abundance, projected
towards a great future with endless possibilities.
At this point, the answer is very predictable and the question is a
rhetorical one. Of course the opportunity nowadays, can not be anymore,
and for almost anybody, the ones that have given the US such
unquestionable leadership. The historical digression of linear
development and consumerism of which the US have represented the model
(Galbraith, 1958), is no longer (and has been so for a long time)
viable and sustainable, not only for ethical reasons but also for the
necessity to preserve the balance, already distraught and
almost [?][11]
irreversibly compromised of our planet (Schumacher 1973).
However, today, the most popular buildings in the world are precisely
skyscrapers, shopping malls and, by association, the redeeming, almost
"salvific", Smart Cities, elevated to role models for a new
equilibrium: city, society and the planet. Models brought
about and developed in the United States and, in time, scattered and
assimilated all over the world, so that, as stated by Mattelart (2000),
global society is nothing but the extrapolation of an archetype born
and bred in the New World.
Those buildings though, as well as the Smart
Cities, that have been adopted as global models, require huge amounts
of power and highly functioning scientific, technical and IT systems. A
paradoxical, ridiculous, if not tragic predicament, whereby countries
much less developed use those models unconditionally, as pointed out
by Richard Sennett and bringing about the obvious question in
terms of planning of how it can be possible, that a country such as
India, with a larger part of the population that has no access to
drinkable water or to local medical surgeries, a country that has no
sewer system, tries to follow on such path doomed with failure, by
planning one hundred brand new Smart Cities (Sennett, 2018: 162).
Clearly, the inertia with which developing countries, or less developed
ones than the US, want to reach the highest tops of developmental
growth is a still open issue. Unfortunately, though, the
linear model and global economic development – models adopted
by all the industrialized countries, and supposedly not just them
– have wasted and eroded the planet’s resources,
produced an incredible quantity of waste materials and almost erased
regional and local cultural diversities.
In those simple terms, the culture of Critical Regionalism that also
belongs to all the individuals that sensed that the possibility of a
continuous and endless growth was purely delusional, will probably find
today a renewed and necessary collocation.
In order to hinder the current growth model, perhaps will not be enough
to apply the suggestions of Critical Regionalism or the research for a
more circular model of consumption based on a smaller scale, regional
standard of production – as put forward by Ernst Friedrich
Schumacher (1973); but it is certainly very probable that the many
countries of the world will need to formulate new models of –
critical – rethinking following each one their own
inclinations, opportunities and local, (possibly regional ?) culture.
Frampton stated,
Critical Regionalism tends to flourish in those cultural interstices
which in one way or another are able to escape the optimizing thrust of
universal civilization. Its appearance suggests that the received
notion of the dominant cultural centre surrounded by dependent,
dominated satellites is ultimately an inadequate model by which to
assess the present state of modern architecture (Frampton 1980: 317).
That would be very reassuring and we would be very happy to believe it.
Notes
[1] The country that is more developed industrially only shows to the less developed, the image of its own future.
[2] Generally speaking the beginning of the Cold War is chronologically set in 1947 with the ratification of the National Security Act (18 September, 1947) and it symbolically ends with the fall of the Berlin wall (1989) and the dissolution of the URSR (1991). Here instead, we indicate 1945 as the beginning of the Cold War, in juxtaposition with George Orwell's text, that as a reaction to the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaky, writes the article “You and the Atomic Bomb” (1945): «The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes […] that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours»..
[3] In the USA were to emigrate: Theodor W. Adorno (1939), Josef and Annie Albers (1933), Herbert Bayer (1938), Peter Blake (1940), Max Beckmann (1933), Marcel Breuer (1937), Serge Chermayeff (1940), Albert Einstein (1938), Enrico Fermi (1938), Walter Gropius (1937), George Grosz (1933), Victor Gruen (1938), Max Horkheimer (1933), Fritz Lang (1934), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1940), Peter Lorre (1935), Thomas Mann (1939), Erich Mendelsohn (1941), László Moholy-Nagy (1937), Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (1937), Piet Mondrian (1940), Mies van der Rohe (1933), Berta and Bernard Rudofsky (1941), Josep Lluís Sert (1939), Hans Richter (1940), Arnold Schoenberg (1933), Georg and Maria Ludwig von Trapp (1938), Oskar Wlach (1940), Bruno Zevi (1940) and many others (the date indicates the year of arrival in the USA).
[4] Peter Blake's observations pertaining to the influences of the European masters that emigrated to the US, belong to rather recent publications, although they go back to the early 1950s as documented in No Place Like Utopia (Blake, 1993), risalgono ai primi anni Cinquanta..
[5] Bauhaus: 1919-1928 [MoMA Exhibition. #82, December 7, 1938-January 30, 1939].
[6] Road to Victory [MoMA Exhibition #182, May 21-October 4, 1942], Airways to Peace [MoMA Exhibition #236, July 2-October 31, 1943].
[7] Modern Architecture: International Exhibition [MoMA Exh. #15, February 9-March 23, 1932]
[8] Let us not forget that Zevi, because of the fascist government racial laws, left Italy in 1939, going first to London and then, in 1940, to the United States, later graduating at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, directed at the time by da Walter Gropius, and discovering Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1943 he went back to Europe aboard a naval ship that arrived in Glasgow. As a refugee he then goes back to London and the US Army puts him in charge of the planning of military camps and prefabs in preparation for the D-day in Normandie. In London he attends the RIBA library and puts together his first book, Verso un’architettura organica.
[9] Modern Architecture, U.S.A. [MoMA Exhibition #767a, May 18-September 6, 1965].
[10] The work of Albert Kahn, Ford's architect (Bucci, 1992), is very emblematic, especially pthe construction of the industrial compounds in Russia.
[11] The question mark indicates the uncertainty of such a statement. We still do not know if we have irreversibly disrupted the stability of the planet or if we are still in time to intervene on the process already triggered by deforestation, by air and water pollution… caused by the greenhouse effect, by tornadoes, by the rising of the level of the oceans, by the melting of glaciers and the ice cap… by pandemics.
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