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Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Modernism Author(S): Alina A Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Modernism Author(s): Alina A. Payne Source: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Sep., 1994), pp. 322-342 Published by: Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/990940 Accessed: 15/10/2009 16:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. 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/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sah. 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. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Society of Architectural Historians is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. http://www.jstor.org Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Modernism ALINA A. PAYNE University of Toronto To date Rudolf Wittkower'sArchitectural Principles in the Age of History is not simply the repository of unchanging facts, but a Humanism of 1949 remainsa fundamentalevaluation of Renaissance process, a patternof living and changing attitudesand interpretations. As such it is of our own natures. To turn backwardto a architecturalaesthetics. Although not unique in having achievedsuch deeply part past age is not just to inspect it, to find a patternwhich will be the paradigmaticstatus within its discipline,its simultaneousimpact upon same for all comers. The backwardlook transformsits object; every architectural remains It is that production unprecedented. preciselythefact spectator at every period-at every moment, indeed-inevitably thiswork captured the imagination of two traditionallydistinct groups at a transformsthe past according to his own nature.... History cannot momentin historywhen exchangesbetween the two seemedleast likely to be touched without changing it.1 occurthat constitutesthe startingpointfor this inquiry.Based upon an examinationof Principles against the Renaissanceliterature it so So WROTE SIGFRIED GIEDION in 1941. Though intending to categoricallysupplanted, against its art historicaland broaderintellectual make an apology for the engaged reading of history that character- context,as well as againstcontemporary architectural theory, the argument izes his Space, Time andArchitecture,Giedion nonetheless points to presentedhere proposes a deepercultural continuity between the discourse of a fundamental condition of history writing, namely to the modernistarchitecture in the 1940s and 1950s and thereadings of history relationship between past and present in the manufacture of thatwere conceived at thesame time. In conclusionit is arguedthat beyond historical narrative. The fact that his deliberate stance exceeds affordingspecific insight into the historicityof our constructionsof the only in degree of self-consciousness that of any historian confront- Renaissance,such a patternof exchangebetween history writing and ing the amorphous material that constitutes the past is accepted by criticism/theoryalerts us tothe complex symbiosis that existed between these now as an undisputed truth. The revisionist impetus behind the two reflectiveactivities at thevery heart of modernismitself scholarship of the past two decades testifies to an increasing urgency to distinguish between history as an objective process within which we are located and historicity as a certain way of This article is part of a larger investigation on the exchanges between aware of historical narrativesand architecturaltheory in the formative years of being this fact.2 modernism. A version of this paperwas read at the 1993 CAA meeting in Seattle. I am most grateful to Mrs. Margot Wittkower who graciously agreed to assist me in my work and answered many of my queries regardingevents and issues raised here. I would also like to thankJoseph Sigfried Giedion," Daedalus105 (1976): 189-203. On the same topic, see Connors, who most generously undertook to find answers to my two essaysin SigfriedGiedion 1888-1968. Entwurfeiner modernen Tradition questions relatedto Rudolf Wittkower'slife. Finally, I would like to thank (Zurich, Museum fur Gestaltung, 1 February-9 April 1989): Sokratis Hans-Karl Liicke and Rebekah Smick, whose comments on an earlier Georgiadis, "Sigfried Giedion und die Krise der kritischen Historiogra- draftwere most helpful. phie," 224-31; and Werner Oechslin, "Fragen zu Sigfried Giedions 1. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture(Cambridge, Mass., kunsthistorischen Pramissen," 191-205. For Giedion's intellectual pro- 1941), 5. This is a theme that preoccupied Giedion considerablyand one file, refer to SokratisGeorgiadis, SigfriedGiedion. Eine IntelektuelleBiogra- he had alreadyexpounded on in his doctoral dissertation ("Spatbarocker phie (Zurich, 1989). und romantischerKlassizismus" [Munich, 1922]) for Wolfflin. That his 2. Though by now the literatureon the problem of historicity and its position had not been the norm for art history writing as it constructed impact upon the nature of interpretation is vast and ranges from the itself into an institution was acknowledged by Giedion himself: "Histori- conceptual readings of Hayden White to the systematic cataloguing of ans quite generally distrust absorption into contemporary ways of historiansby Heinrich Dilly or the philosophical investigationsof Gianni thinking and feeling as a menace to their scientific detachment, dignity, Vattimo, the status of the discussion as a still-active debate is highlighted and breadth of outlook.... The historian must be intimately a part of his by a recent (and spirited) exchange published in New LiteraryHistory 17 own period to know what questions concerning the past are significant to (1986): Keith Moxey, "Panofsky's Concept of 'Iconology' and the it.... But it is his unique and nontransferabletask to uncover for his own Problem of Interpretationin the History of Art," 265-74; Arthur Danto, age its vital interrelationshipswith the past.... To plan we must know "Commentary,"275-79; David Summers, "Intentions in the History of what has gone on in the past and feel what is coming in the future. This is Art," 305-21; Steven Z. Levine, "Moxey's Moxie and the Summers of not an invitation to prophecy but a demand for a universal outlook upon '84: Intention and Interpretationin the History of Art-A Commentary," the world." Ibid., 6-7. On Giedion's polemic with established historical 323-31; David Summers, "David Summers Replies," 333-49. For practice, see Spiro Kostof, "Architecture,You and Him: The Mark of examples of the synthetic approachesreferred to above see Hayden White, 322 JSAH 53:322-342, SEPTEMBER 1994 PAYNE: WITTKOWER AND MODERNISM 323 In architectural scholarship, modernism (and following from of Renaissance forms and culture on the Continent has been this, the nineteenth century, an area known to have been linked with the debate on renouvellementin France, and, in particularly affected by modernist orthodoxy) has claimed the Germany, with a nationalist political and cultural program and a lion's share of attention in this process of re- and self- drive towards an aesthetizationof science and power.5 examination. Official accounts such as Giedion's and Pevsner's, However, now that the architecturalhistory of modernism is overtly proselytizing and deliberately seeking to participate in the being rewrittenand its dependence on nineteenth-centuryaesthet- then-current theoretical debates called for such a recharting.3 Less ics laid bare, it seems appropriateto recognize that one dimension attention has been paid to histories of the more distant past is missing from this revisionist project, namely the evaluation of effected in the years of high modernism: apparently removed the historicalnarratives modernism produced, or, in other words, from the crucible of modernist discourse due to their (historical) of the exchanges between the present and the past that character- subject matter they seemed insulated from its issues. The fact that ized this moment in history. In architecture where-witness this period coincided with the consolidation of the craft of Giedion-theory and history are uneasy albeit traditionalbedfel- (art/architecture) history writing into an institution with a lows, such an evaluation of their reciprocal relationship should positivist orientation and programmatic separation from theory prove particularly welcome. Not only would it provide an and criticism probably further reinforced such a view. On the opportunity to identify blind spots in our historical corpus but it occasions when creative exchanges and overlaps between architec- would also reveal how the historical and theoretical imaginations tural history and theory/criticism
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