The Fiction of Function Stanford Anderson Assemblage, No. 2

The Fiction of Function Stanford Anderson Assemblage, No. 2. (Feb., 1987), pp. 18-31. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0889-3012%28198702%290%3A2%3C18%3ATFOF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P Assemblage is currently published by The MIT Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/mitpress.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Thu Jul 12 23:11:38 2007 Stanford Anderson The Fiction of Function To the memory of Roy Lamson The polemics of postmodernism insist on the centrality and the nai'vetk of the concept of function within modern architecture. It is the error and the fruitlessness of this Stanford Anderson is Director of the postmodern position that I wish to reveal. My title, "The Ph.D. Program for History, Theory, and Fiction of Function," may suggest one simple and negative Criticism of Architecture at the Massa- chusetts Institute of Technology. assessment of the role of function in the making of architecture. On the contrary, I wish to unpack several possible and related references that may be drawn from this title - references that have served architecture well, and not only in modern times. Perhaps I should acknowledge immediately that I was driven to my topic by the thesis of an exhibition and book by Heinrich Klotz, both titled Modern and Post-Modern. Klotz's slogan is "Fiction, not function." The slogan is an effective evocation of his thesis: that the distinction between modern and postmodern may be found in the shift of focus from function to fiction. With Klotz, this is also a normative distinction, justifying the support of postmodern architecture as against any form of continuity with the modern. Labeling modern architecture as functionalist for polemical purposes is not new, and one may wonder whether the issue needs to be joined again. However, the exaggerated association of modernism with functionalism is recurrent, and now Klotz's catalogue has received the award of the International Committee of Architectural 1 (frontispiece). Ernst May, Critics. Frankfurter Kuche, model kitchen for the low-income My argument will be that "functionalism" is a weak con- housing estates designed by cept, inadequate for the characterization or analysis of any May in Frankfurt, 1925-30. architecture. In its recurrent use as the purportedly defin- assemblage 2 ing principle of modern architecture, functionalism has An important corollary of Hitchcock and Johnson's empha- dulled our understanding of both the theories and practice sis on the primacy of style was their rejection of "function- of modern architecture. Further, if one then wishes, as alism." Thus within the pr0gressii.e architecture of the many now propose, to reject modern architecture, this is preceding decade, they distinguished works of architecture done cvithout adequate kno~vledgeof what is rejected or that were functionalist and those that were not. Now it is what that rejection entails. Thus I wish first to argue that, true that there were those architects of the 1920s and within modern architecture, functionalisni is a fiction - 1930s ~vhoLvere prepared to fly a functionalist banner and fiction in the sense of error. Later, I wish to incorporate to resist discussions of form, let alone "style." For Hitch- function within a richer notion of fiction - that of story- cock and Johnson, the archdemon of functionalism was telling. Hannes Meyer, who, for example, in his time at the Bau- haus, constructed diagrams of circulation and sunlight that The Fiction of Function in the Modern claimed to show the "factors determining a plan." Far from Movement as Viewed from 1932 functionalism being the crux of modern architecture, it was precisely the a\,oidance of functionalism, as recognized To undermine the notion of f~inctionalisniwithin modern by Hitchcock and Johnson, tliat allowed inclusion under architecture, we may return to a topic that is now, per- the mantle of the International Style. The senlinal figures haps, all too familiar: the exhibition and book titled The within the style Lvere said to be, of course, Ludcvig Mies international Style, organized by Henry-Russell Hitchcock \.an der Rolie, Walter Gropius, J. J. P. Oud, and Le Cor- and Philip lohnson for the hluseuni of hlodern Art in busier. New ~orkcity in 1932.' No doubt it is possible to exag- Hitclicock and Jolinson's insistence on style, then, might gerate the importance of the International Style exhibition, have dra~vna line of demarcation between certain parties yet its inordinate influence on the understanding of rnod- in modern architecture, as behveen tlie apparent function- ern architecture must be admitted. "The International alism of Meyer and the sophistication of Mies's Tugendhat Style," a tern1 coined for the exhibition to label a group of house of 1930. But this line is not tlie one tliat marks exceptional and inventi\t cvorks of the 1920s, imposed it- inclusion or exclusion fro111 the International Style exhibi- self to the extent that eve nocv find it difficult to refer to tion. If we take the authors' poleniic against functionalism modernist works of tliat period by any other name. More as tlie crux of their work, we would ha1.e to recognize that insidiously, the limited group of buildings exhibited in some of those architects u.110 Lvere included ~vouldnot New York and tlie meager concepts of tlie International lia\.e been unconlfortable cvith serious discussions of func- Style exhibition continue to put se\.ere limits on ~vhatwe tion. Consider Gropius's studies of the density of Zeilenbau know of the henties - not to mention the contraints on housing according to a criterion of sun angle or his Sie- extending tlie corpus of modern architecture to the thirties. mensstadt housing, which is organized as relentlessly as At the heart of the polemic of Hitclicock and Johnson cvas any housing by a so-called f~inctionalist.On the other an exercise in connoisseurship. The authors sought to de- hand, if we take as central the authors' visual criteria for fine tlie \.isual traits that assured the commonality of true the "International Style," Lve n-ould be hard-pressed to un- modern architecture and thus establislied a style -tlie derstand their exclusion of the League of Nations competi- first proper style since neoclassicisni. blodern architecture tion entry b!. tlie archfunctionalist Hannes hle!,er (which Lvas not only given its place within the niillenial history of easily nleets all the International Style criteria) while ac- art, but given a place of honor. All this was apparently cepting 4lies's Barcelona Pa\.ilion (lvhich, if not concerned accomplislied despite the remarkably inadequate st!,listic with mass, is also not concerned with volume). Furtlier- criteria offered: \.olume rather than mass; regularity rather more, Lve must recognize that some of tlie heroes of Hitch- than symnietr!.; and tlie avoidance of ornament. cock and Johnson were ne\.er conifortable with tlie "style" Anderson enterprise, certainly not the meager formal enterprise pro- posed in the International Style. More important than these first points about the demarcation attempted by Hitchcock and Johnson is the distortion their position introduced into any analysis of the thought and work of the progressive architects of that period. It may be useful to recognize "functionalism" to the extent that one can find some na'ive functionalist arguments to contrast with Hitchcock and Johnson's antifunctionalist rhetoric. However, any serious examination of the buildings at issue will reveal that none of them, whatever the surrounding rhetoric, can be explained functionally. It was a fiction that function provided a crucial line of demarca- 2. Hannes Meyer, ~eterschule, tion within modern architecture. Basel, 1927 The Postwar Fiction of Function in the Modern Movement In an address to the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1957, the justly renowned architectural historian John Summerson argued that functionalism, in the sense of faithfulness to program, provided the unifying ~rinciplefor modern ar~hitecture.~With Summerson, function became not only a common, but also a positive, trait of modern architecture (though there is a sense that Summerson accepted this fact rather fatalistically). The modern architects who responded to Summerson accepted his claims, at best, with some diffidence. Summerson himself soon disavowed his hypothesis, but the equation of modernism with functionalism continues to recur. The advocates of so-called Post-Modernism adopt the still more untenable position that it is a functionalist line of demarcation that separates all of modernism from successor positions. They brand the whole of modernism as functionalism; the nayvet6 andlor inadequacy of functionalism is cogently argued; the ra- tional rejection of functionalism then implies the rejection of modernism.

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