Thus Spoke the ~Ber-Architect: the Architecture of the Heroic Myth

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

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