Architecture Or Techno-Utopia

Friedrich St. Florian. Imaginary Space, 1968. 112 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101300138611 by guest on 25 September 2021 Architecture or Techno-Utopia FELICITY D. SCOTT In August 1976, l’Architecture d’aujourd’hui published a dossier prepared by Brian Brace Taylor, entitled “New York in White and Gray.” Tracing various lines of demarcation emerg- ing around the battle of the “Grays” and the “Whites” (also known as “inclusivism” versus “exclusivism,” or “neorealism” versus “neorationalism”),1 this issue marked the first appear- ance of Manfredo Tafuri’s article, “The Ashes of Jefferson,” which appeared alongside Robert Stern’s “Gray Architecture as Post-Modernism, or, Up and Down from Orthodoxy.”2 In “The American Night Time,” chief editor Bernard Huet’s introduction to this “not-the-bicentennial issue,” the conjunction of New York’s “urban crisis” and its concentration of the “most highly-refined architectural ‘avant-garde’” was used to reflect on American cultural imperialism and to posit it as a “warn- ing.” Pointing to the “perfect (and illusory) correlation between a mode of modern architectural expression, functional and effi- cient, and the economic and technical development of the most advanced form of capitalism,” Huet noted the long-standing fascination this correlation held for both French architects and their clients. As its counterpart in the 1970s, he posited the nos- talgic contemplation by American architects of both the Parisian Beaux-Arts and the modernist avant-garde. For Huet, American architecture was characterized by a “generalized architectural consumption” that collapsed dis- tinctions between commercial modernism and the polemics of both the Grays and the Whites. Architectural production, he proposed, was caught between two consumer systems: “one is based upon the market value of construction, where architecture is reduced to the level of symbol; the other one, which is more recent, integrates architectural production into the art market and addresses itself to the artistic and speculative enjoyment of the collector or museum.” If John Portman, Philip Johnson, and Kevin Roche would serve as examples of the former—of architecture “completely immersed in the system of production”—Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, and Robert A. M. Stern would be situated together in the latter category, con- demned, in Huet’s analysis, to “asking themselves questions endlessly about a language emptied of all substance, through the production of paper architecture or unique, luxury objects.” For Huet, perhaps editorializing Tafuri’s text, which followed, both “uncritical submersion” within the system of production and “slavish submission” to a perverse private enjoyment would be insufficient “to get out of this impasse.” Nor would placing “oneself outside the system of production” have any Grey Room 03, Spring 2001, pp. 112–126. © 2001 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 113 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101300138611 by guest on 25 September 2021 effect. Paying homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer,” he proposed, “The solution for us can only emerge by placing ourselves within these relationships so that we may transform them.”3 Like Huet, Tafuri would also position the Grays and the Whites together in a single category. Despite the apparent polarization, their debate remained caught as dialectically opposed poles within a common project of recuperating architectural semantics. “The theme of ‘resemanticization’ is central” for both camps, Tafuri argued; “only the instruments employed to reach such an objective vary.”4 For him, however, the question remained, To what was this common resemanticization opposed? Stern answered this most succinctly, pointing to late modernism. He explained that “the ‘White and Gray’ debate is not (as has been suggested in the press) an encounter between polarities such as might have occurred in 1927 between advo- cates of the Beaux-Arts and apostles of International Style modernism.” Rather, he went on, this negotiation of the 1970s took the form of an “ongoing dialog” that shared a common goal: “to chart out and clarify a direction which architecture can take now that the orthodox Modernist Movement has drawn to a close.”5 For Stern, writing on behalf of both his own “Post- Modern” position and Peter Eisenman’s “Post-Functionalism,” it was “safe to say that the orthodox Modernist Movement is a closed issue, an historical fact.” With reference to the piv- otal importance of Arthur Drexler’s 1975 exhibition, The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Stern suggested that “Modern architecture might find a way out of the dilemma of the late Modern Movement by entering a period where symbolism and allusion would take their place alongside issues of formal composition, functional fit, and constructional logic.”6 For Stern, the symbolism and allusion, sought after by the post- modern architecture of the Grays, was to be “a cue system that helps architects and users communicate better about their intentions.”7 Indeed, architecture was to speak again, to “com- ment” on the present. “‘Gray’ buildings,” Stern proposed, “have facades which tell stories.”8 To this Tafuri would famously reply, “[N]othing remains but to gather around the hearth to listen to the fables of the new grannies.”9 Like the conventional codes and normative aesthetics of “orthodox modernism,” this talking architecture remained mired in myth and would prove as disturbing to the Italian his- torian. In another, contemporaneous context, Tafuri proclaimed the advent of semiology and structuralism in architecture.10 Yet with respect to the Gray and White debate, he was prompted to ask, “But what does the ‘recovery of the semantic’ mean? Why establish, today, such an objective? And of what, ultimately, must the architectural signs ‘speak of again.’”11 With respect to this “resemanticization,” one could embark on many trajectories, but here I want simply to follow one, ques- tioning how the resemanticization that was central to the staging of a Gray and White debate effectively foreclosed alternative 114 Grey Room 03 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101300138611 by guest on 25 September 2021 reevaluations of modernism. While debates on architectural meaning were ostensibly played out over the death throes of late modernism, with most modernist tropes figured as merely straw men,12 the “modernist orthodoxy” cited by Stern was clearly not the main threat to either the White’s neo-avant-garde position or that of the “post-avant-garde” Grays. What their par- ticular return to semantic codes foreclosed was not only the modernist shibboleths of “formal composition, functional fit, and constructional logic,” but also the investigations inaugu- rated by what Peter Cook would refer to as “experimental architecture.” This, in Cook’s terms, would open the discipline up to its complex articulation with contemporary technology; it was nothing less than “to experiment out of architecture.” 13 | | | | | The suppression of experimental architecture through the terms of the Gray/White debate was noted at the time by Richard Pommer, a critic for Artforum. In an article entitled “The New Architectural Supremacists,” Pommer pointed to the emer- gence of the New York Five as a modernist counterpoint to “the architectural recognition granted in the ’60’s to commercial, consumer and science-fiction imagery.” Recounting the events of a symposium held at the Rhode Island School of Design in the Spring of 1976, Pommer noted, “Eisenman divided the mem- bers of the symposium into opposing camps, a false avant-garde of the ’60’s, and a true modernism of the ’70’s. He included himself in the latter.”14 Relegated to the former category were a number of experimental architects; along with Peter Cook, Eisenman included Michael Webb, Hans Hollein, Friedrich St. Florian, and, at least in part, Arata Isozaki.15 For Pommer, Eisenman’s modernism consisted primarily of the formalist analyses of Clement Greenberg mixed with that of Eisenman’s teacher, Colin Rowe. Earlier in the decade, in the introduction to Five Architects, Rowe had assimilated commercial modernism and the emergent experimental lineage (then still forging transformations in the functionalist para- digm). He described the former (in his terms “the camp of success”) as simply a less self-conscious version of the latter, the “true believers.” Such “true believers,” Rowe explained, which included any prospect of a postwar European avant-garde, were naively committed to the authenticity of the modern movement’s social and political agenda in the face of its actual failure. In attempting to revitalize the radical promise of modernism, they remained “obliged to detach [themselves] from success.” For Rowe, however, this was already a lost battle. After listing a “succession of fractional style phases”—among which he included Team 1016—he singled out Archigram, “in terms of which involutions,” he insisted, “any consideration of architecture in the Nineteen Seventies must be based.” Indeed, he continued, the two camps (the camp of success and the true believers) “have, by now, so much interpenetrated, so infected Scott | Architecture or Techno-Utopia 115 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101300138611 by guest on 25 September 2021 one another, so much exchanged arguments and apologetic, appearances and motifs,

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