Thus Spoke the ~ber-architect:The Architecture of the Heroic Myth ADNAN MORSHED Catholic University

The Russian emigre Ayn Rand's now-classic novel logical-that could have created Ronchamp, The Fountainhead (1943) began with a lofty dedi- the Barcelona Pavilion, or Taliesin West. cation: "I offer my profound gratitude to the great And there would be no modern architecture profession of architecture and its heroes who have as we know it without individual, creative given us some of the highest expressions of man's acts of the sort represented by these great genius..."' The novel ends with an equally trium- bui~dings.~ phant portrayal of its protagonist, architect Howard Roark. After his swashbuckling struggle against Rand brought to light, albeit in a literary medium, the mediocrity of the common man, all manner and Blake later reiterated a point that has been of collectivism, moral depravation, and corporate crucial to the early-twentieth-century conceptualiza- capitalism, Rand writes, "there was only the ocean tion of Modern architecture: that is, the architect and the sky and the figure of Howard Roark." While as hero, an embattled messiah who would shoulder Rand's broader objective in the novel, as she reit- the responsibility of remedying a seemingly chaotic erated many times later, was "the projection of an world through uplifting de~ign.~ ideal man," it was hardly coincidental that Rand viewed the architect as a solitary hero, an un- This paper inquires into the heroic myth of the ar- daunted idealist who fought a lonely battle against chitect and how it relates to, and affects, for that society's ills. Having done extensive research on matter, the various ways we experience, perceive, the architectural culture of the 1920s and '30s, Rand evaluate, and teach architecture. If modern archi- consciously modeled her hero Roark on a real-life tecture flourished in the early twentieth century architect, Frank Lloyd right.' Did this conflation based in part on the heady promises of social change of the imaginary and the real bear any significance through the visionary designs of the heroes, how for the modernist architectural pedagogy and pro- might we assess the broader scope of such promises fession? However we view Rand's homage to the within the modernist architectural pedagogy? Do heroic modern architect, it reverberated in uncannily modernist architectural curricula perpetuate the similar rhetorical terms in architect, architectural heroic myth that somehow favors a facile apprecia- critic, and long-time editor of the Architectural tion of 'master" architects and, thereby, spawns a Forum Peter Blake's preface to his 1960 book The globalizing culture of image-ridden architectural Master Builders : practices? If such consequences signal a failure in education, what can we do about it? Could critical history and theory play an important role in enabling This book is a tribute to them by one archi- architects to better understand architecture not as tect whose generation owes most of what it a high art of exclusive monument-making, but as a knows about architecture to Le Corbusier, responsive building profession that could both rep- Mies, and Wright. It is also an affirmation resent and influence society in a wide spectrum of of a fading belief: that the history of art is possibilities: from aesthetic avant-gardism to social written by artists, not by "forces." There is justice, from ecology to public participation? no "force1'-economic, sociological, techno- In order to address these questions, I would first THUS SPOKE THE UBER-ARCHITECT 187

like to explore the architect's heroic image within the architect as savior of the culture of modern the early-twentieth-century discourse of modern American society... savior now as for all civilizations architecture that emerged with a master narrative heretof~re."~Le Corbusier's manifestoes, Towards of cultural renewa~.~The underlying assumption a New Architecture and The City of To-morrow and was that there was an inherent connection between Its Planning, both published during the 1920s, had architecture and the condition of society; between already advanced similar polemics about the archi- architecture and human behavior and wellbeing; tect's social calling. His famousnhand-into-the-pic- and that architecture could play a transcenden- ture-frame" image offers a poignant visual case in tal role in making the world a better place. The point. The symbolic extension of his powerful hand early twentieth century was ripe for such cultural over the paradisiacal mathematics of the Ville con- attitudes. The perceived social tranquility based temporaine signified not only the literal embodiment on Victorian morality was already lost. Western of the modernist planner's godlike gaze, but also a societies were hit by a plethora of disparate stimu- magical unveiling of an impending state of infinite li-Freudian psychology, Einstein's relativity, mass progress, harmony, and happiness. InSpace, Time media, photography, television, Cubism, Futurism, and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion theorized Modern and unprecedented urban growth. The resulting architecture's social aspirations in millennia1 terms.q psychosis created a cultural maelstrom in which it A new era was dawning, Giedion claimed, one that was impossible for architectural theorists, as Col- manifested itself through the visual culmination of lin Rowe would put it, not to see for architecture a functional, socially beneficial, and universal archi- a grand, redeeming social role.6 Clinging to the tecture. Lurking behind Giedion's prophecies was remnants of lgth-century Romantic individualism, none other than the larger-than-life architect, who the architect positioned himself as a solo catalyst would wage a protracted aesthetic battle against for cultural regeneration.' A platonic, spartan, and disorder and effete traditionalism in architecture universal architectural idiom devoid of bourgeois and city planning, ultimately helping build an ideal decadence would be his vehicle to achieve this goal. world attuned to modern science and technology. Under the hero's tutelage, the phoenix of modern Not surprisingly, the heroes of Giedion's space-time utopia, he imagined, would rise from the ashes of conception in architecture were none other than lgth-century cities with their laissez-faire planning Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and dysfunctional architecture. and Alvar Aalto, figures who have ever since been canonized as high priests of Modern architecture's The classisizing spirit that pervaded fin-de-siecle secular fellowship in survey book after survey book. architectural discourse demanded that the architect In one way or another, history survey courses on divest himself of all sorts of regressive sentimen- Modern architecture have often been the narratives talism. Instead it exhorted him to be objective, of architect-heroes and their spectacular edifices. dispassionate, impersonal, and abstractive about When William Curtis noted that "[tlhe Robie House, his mission. Philosophical materialism allowed the Villa Savoye, the Barcelona Pavilion, the town him to see reality and social wellbeing through the center at Saynatsalo, the Kimbell Art Museum, the lens of emerging technologies. Emboldened by the church at Bagsvaerd ...are among the buildings in ideologies of progress, Darwinian evolution, and the modern tradition to possess ...extraordinary technological determinism, the architect assumed, depth," he canonized, if not consciously, modern if rather innocently, a post-Vitruvian role (i.e. a architecture exclusively in terms of its spectacular role that goes beyond the regimental aspirations of high points. Vitruvius triad of utilitas, firmitas, and venustas) in reshaping the world in terms of his own conception The depiction of the architect as an avant-garde hero of reality. This therapeutic service-enabled by ar- was entwined with the Bauhaus flirtation with der chitecture and, more important, the architect's role Neue Mensch, the New Man. Distilled from Social in its quasi-prophetic deliverance-became a kernel Darwinism, popular utopianism, and, more impor- myth of modern architecture, one that provided tant, Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of the ~bermensch, the fledgling movement with an idealistic gloss and the New Man, was projected as the harbinger of a solidified its social foundation. recharged Western industrial society," It was hardly surprising that generations of architects-among At the height of his career Frank Lloyd Wright them, Le Corbusier, Gropius, Ludwig Hilberseimer, declared, if not so coincidentally, that he "saw Erich Mendelsohn, and Rohe-hoisted the Nietzs- utopian dreams-many architecture schools during chean torch and fancied themselves ~bermenschen the 1920s and 1930s embraced this model of the or the New Men. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathus- architect-hero." The modernist architectural peda- tra (1883-85)-a book from which I borrow the gogy, as the Bauhaus model exemplified, sought to title of my own paper-was a canonical text for the define as well as valorize the architect through an ~x~ressionists,~'and most avant-garde architects, epistemology of ahistorical aesthetic autonomy, a including Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus masters, process that encouraged, if not exclusively, mimetic in various ways drew on it in order to idealize their desires among architecture students. Blake noted, own role in transforming the world into a veritable "[tlhe first decades of the modern movement had utopia.12 But if utopia was a state of perfection ad their heroes and the habit of hero worship has be- infinitum, its shaper-the architect-hero-inhabited come deeply ingrained."I6 As architectural practice a similar atemporal realm, one that remained invul- adjusted to the increasing institutional demands of nerable to any historical exigencies. professionalization, and especially facing the chal- lenges of engineers, modernist architectural cur- The problem with such a conceptualization lies, as ricula in one way or another internalized the heroic the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco's analysis of the myth for self-legitimacy. The Vitruvian architect Superman's immortality reveals, in its paradoxical (described in the oldest extant book on architecture treatment of time.13 The architect-hero, conceived De Architectura Libri Decem) exuded authority by this way, does not belong to any specific time, a con- commanding encyclopedic knowledge (in geometry, dition that leads to the breakdown in the structure of history, philosophy, music, medicine, law, and as- temporality. Like the heroes of ancient mythologies, tronomy); and he later re-emerged as the Renais- he inhabits an epistemological vacuum, so to speak, sance man (in the writings of Alberti, for instance), where he does not err or change, thereby giving rise the figurehead of society who identified strongly to an archetypal persona. He substitutes his histori- with the classical past. Yet within the modernist cal development with mythic repetition, implicating architectural discourse, the heroic persona of the his position with an immobile metaphysics, in which architect became the crucial index of modernity's his archetypal persona remains impervious to any collective fantasies about social emancipation. historical and social scrutiny. Despite his vociferous Bearing seductive promises of cultural rebirth, the attack on modern architecture's presumed sterility heroic myth granted the modernist apologists a and false social premises in Form Follows Fiasco theoretical framework to look beyond classicism's (1974), Blake's 1996 homage enshrined his "Master purported aesthetic autonomy and Ecole des Builders" at the high altar of frozen time: Beaux-Arts' elitist academicism in order to include a grander vision of social justice. Le Corbusier's penultimate declaration in Towards a New Architec- Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank ture concerning the stunning equation between the Lloyd Wright set a standard for the rest of powers of architecture and revolution became one us against which we will be judged in the of the originary mantras of modernist architectural years to come. I offer no apologies for outlook. Henceforth, the modern architect stood having paid homage to them in the late like a secular god at this imagined intersection of 1950s, and, despite certain reservations architecture and social revolution. advanced since then by Jane Jacobs and others-including myself-I offer no apolo- Heroism is a broad concept that negotiates between gies for paying additional homage to them complex social sentiments and cultural conditions, in the 1990s. We may not see the likes of as well as people's notion of the lofty. Heroes fulfill them again for some time to come.14 popular ideals and they rise above the common folk by creating or performing the extraordinary. In significant ways, Blake's tribute to the heroes of My purpose here is not to propose an anti-heroic modern architecture echoes the atemporal mythos aesthetic, or to offer a false choice between the of Eco's redefined Superman. heightened heroics of Le Corbusier and the pedes- trian sensibilities of Jane Jacobs, or between indi- Seeking to come to terms with the shifts in archi- vidual genius and collective method, but to highlight tectural attitude-from eclecticism and Beaux-Arts the pedagogical as well as professional pitfalls of academicism to modernism and its new sociology of THUS SPOKE THE UBER-ARCHITECT

uncritical hero-worshipping and to identify areas in Such a placement crowned the architect-hero, who, the architect's education that require critical revi- unencumbered by any historical impurities, alone sion in order to enable him the intellectual rigor could build the promised utopia on the tabula rasa necessary to practice a responsive and responsible which, allegedly, was the originary ground of mod- architecture. The modernist curriculum-one that ern Architecture. places strong, sometimes monolithic, emphasis on individual genius-has generally failed to develop Postmodernism, on the other hand, carefully cho- an inclusive framework that addresses culture, poli- reographed its emergence as a paradigm shift by tics, economy, and environment as vital conditions introducing what its theorists called a self-critical from which both architecture and its heroic figures irony to the architectural discourse. By claiming that might emerge.I7 modern architecture's master narrative died a tragic death in 1972 with the demolition of St. Louis's Because courses engaging students with critical Pruitt-Igoe housing project, the Postmodern theorist history and social theories are at best peripheral Charles Jencks in one way or another announced within the curriculum, architectural education still the demise of the modernist hero-architect; instead revolves mostly around formal design instruction, he championed the historical import as an allegory one that often over-emphasizes the spectacular for both architectural authenticity and the displace- and monumental. The overriding consideration in ment of the hero. In a similar vein, Vincent Scully, the modernist education has been specularity, an in his preface to Venturi's Postmodernist mani- aesthetic outlook often deriving from the visual, festo Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture ahistorical appreciation of great form-givers of (1966), appeared to rush too quickly to consecrate the past and present. In other words, the profes- Venturi as the diametrically-opposed "other" to Le sional nature of architectural education has largely Corbusier, or as an anti-hero, who catalyzed the remained insulated from current socio-cultural shift of perspective 'from the Champs-Elysees to developments. From early on students begin to Main street."19 But, in hindsight, we know that perceive architecture through the lens of Le Cor- during the 1980s and 1990s, posing themselves busier, Wright, or Louis Kahn, and, more recently, as the sole custodians of the historicist discourse Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, that would buttress an authentic architecture, and Tadao Ando. Learning from good architects is Postmodernist architects, such as Venturi, Charles a great idea, but possessing the critical faculty to Moore, and Leon Krier, perpetuated the same pa- assess their work within a broader context of culture triarchal heroism that had earlier mobilized modern and society could be a even greater idea. Since the architecture's visions of social change through an tumultuous 1960s when a countercultural ethos be- individualist ethos. While architectural historians gan to seep into architecture, historians, theorists, and theorists have critically assessed and contested and architects, such as Jane Jacobs, Bernard Ru- modern architecture's building contribution, a key dofsky, and Robert Venturi, have made compelling factor in this 20th-century aesthetic movement to arguments to dethrone the architect from godlike the broader architectural discourse had gone unin- heights by proposing the alternative notions of vestigated: that is, the myth of the architect as a community design, nonpedigreed architecture, and hero with grand reformist aspirations, a myth that pop. Yet, architectural education seems still to be endures even today. In February 2003, when Daniel stuck tragically within the individual-genius mode Libeskind was named the winner in the World Trade that modern architecture passionately championed Center project competition, the ensuing media hype during the 1920s, a period Curtis has called the around him was only the latest manifestation of "heroic age" of architecture. Despite the increased the modernist architect-hero as celebrity, and now intellectualization of education, residues of modern media star. architecture's difficult relationship with history still haunt architecture schools. Modern architecture's As much as they inspired us with masterpieces, the heroes of modern architecture also left us a legacy foundational claim that it evolved from a vacuum of failed utopias, conceived from prophetic heights, outside of history proper as a prerequisite for a method criticized by the now-cliched phrase "plan- creating the authentically new necessitated a ning from above." In some ways, they resembled concomitant mythology of the hallowed architect's Charles Baudelaire's "Albatross," the graceful bird placement outside an evolutionary c~ntinuum.'~ that soared in the sovereign space of the sky, but remained clumsy on the ground, since "he cannot design and planning and presented the New York park walk because of his great wings." It is time archi- commissioner Robert Moses's planning as its climax. See tectural education incorporated a post-Roarkian, also Rowe, The Architecture of Good Intentions, 30-43. post-heroic discourse. lo Wolfgang Pehnt, "The 'New Man' and the Architecture of the Twenties" in J. Fiedler, Social Utopias of the Twen- FOOTNOTES ties: Bauhaus, Kibbutz and the Dream of the New Man (Wupperthal, 1995). I Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943; New York, 1971), 14. l1 See Julian Petley, 'The Architect as Ubermensch," in Wolfgang Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture (London, Philip Hayward, Picture This: Media Representations of 1973), 41. Visual Art and Artists (London, c1988) and Andrew Saint, I' Among many others, Le Corbusier read Zarathustra "The Architect as Hero and Genius," in The Image of the as early as 1908, see Jean Louis Cohen, "Le Corbusier's Architect (New Haven, 1983). Nietzschean Metaphors," p. 311; Mendelsohn in 1911, ' Peter Blake, The Master Builders: Le Corbusier, Mies Neumeyer, "Nietzsche and Modern Architecture," 293; Taut van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright (1960; New York and read it as early as 1904, Iain Boyd Whyte, Bruno Tautand London, 1996), xv. the Architecture of Activism (New York, 1982), 85. This is a common theme in architecture survey books. l3 Umberto Eco, "The Myth of the Superman" Diacritics See, for instance, William Curtis, Modern Architecture (Spring 1972). Since 1900 (1982; New Jersey, 1983); Manfredo Tafuri l4 Blake, The Master Builders, preface to the paperback and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture/l (1976; New edition (1996), x. York, 1986); and Blake, The Master Builders, 417. Curtis l5 See Joseph Esherick, "Architectural Education in the wrote: '...the protagonists of the modern movement of Thirties and Seventies: A Personal View," in Kostof, the 1920s... shared a commitment to social improve- Spiro, ed., The Architect, Chapters in the History of the ment through design and a feeling for the progressive Profession (New York, 1977) and 3. A. Chewning, "The potential of modern-technology ...Despite a degree of Teaching of Architectural History during the Advent of alienation intrinsic to their avant-garde position, they Modernism 1920s-1950s," in Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, thought of themselves as the prophets of a new society The Architectural Historian in America (A symposium in and as preservers of higher values: their Utopias com- celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of bined apocalyptic expectation with a vein of nostalgia," the Society of Architectural Historians; National Gallery Modern Architecture Since 1900, 386. For an insightful of Art, Washington, D.C., 1990). exposition of the heroic theme, see also Vincent Scully's introduction to Robert Ventury, Complexity and Contradic- l6 Blake, The Master Builders, 417. tion in Architecture (The Museum of Modern Art Papers l7 The modernist curriculum's monolithic espousal of on Architecture, 1966). certain principles has been described by Blake: "Like all of my contemporaries, I had been educated to accept a number of clear and idealistic precepts regarding architec- ' See, for instance, Curtis, Modern Architecture Since ture, planning, urban design, and related matters. Most 1900, 386, and Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Archi- of these precepts had been developed in Europe and in tecture, the Growth ofa New Tradition (1941; Cambridge, the United States between 1920 and 1950 by a handful of 1959), 290-293. extraordinary pioneers whose visions dominated our lives, Colin Rowe, The Architecture of Good Intentions: Towards first as students and then as practitioners." Peter Blake, a Possible Retrospect (London, 1994). Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn't Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers ofModern Design: From Wil- Worked (Boston and Toronto, 1974), 9. liam Morris to Walter Gropius (1936; Middlesex, 1960),

2 1. lXVincent Scully, "Introduction," in Robert Venturi, Com- "rank Lloyd Wright, A Testament (New York, 1957), plexity and Contradiction in Architecture (The Museu m of 24. Modern Art Papers on Architecture, 1966), 16. ' Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture. Giedion's work '' vincent Scully, "Introduction," in Robert Venturi, Com- was first delivered in lecture form at Harvard in 1938-39. plexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 9- 11. It chronicled the history of three centuries of modern