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Sometimes a Colonnade Is Just a Porch Oz Volume 22 Article 10 1-1-2000 Sometimes a Colonnade is Just a Porch Thomas L. Schumacher Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/oz This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Schumacher, Thomas L. (2000) "Sometimes a Colonnade is Just a Porch," Oz: Vol. 22. https://doi.org/ 10.4148/2378-5853.1354 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Oz by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Sometimes a Colonnade Is Just a Porch: Concerning a Facade in Pittsburgh Thomas L. Schumacher the building’s facade. The project Coupling contemporary architecture wasn’t about glorifying Hitler, said to the evils of Adolf Hitler is a devastat- one of the students, “The use of the ing condemnation. Were it limited to images was more of a medium to this sound-and-light show this could show the negative connotations the be seen as an unfortunate incident, but building conveyed.”2 soon afterwards a group of architec- ture professors at CMU chimed in with Thus began an article in theChronicle their opinions, and some concurred of Higher Education, a publication of with the demonstrators evaluation.3 the AAUP. The Chronicle piece concen- Quite simply, our students and their trated on the sanctions that these five mentors have misread both the how students faced when their little cha- as well as the what of architectural rade was taken for racist propaganda, symbolism. This essay is intended to explaining, “...some passersby didn’t explain and contextualize these opin- get it...Jewish students, in particular, ions and evaluations. I will first trace thought it was tasteless—or worse, a a particular mind-set of contempo- Fig. 1. CMU Purnell Arts Center, 1999, Michael Dennis Associates. Photo Schumacher glorification of Nazism.” rary American architects that leads them to mistakenly associate some The history of modern architecture ugly, unfunctional, out of context, or The Purnell Center is part of a cam- very general architectural forms with in the twentieth century, and into the irrelevant. It must be Communist or pus-wide master plan by Dennis’s very particular political orientations. twenty-first, is periodically concerned Fascist; or worse, Nazi. firm. This building presents a re- Second, I will briefly criticize some with the questions: who is Modern, petitive brick-colonnaded facade to of the critics’ further evaluations of what is Modern, what is Modern The new Purnell Arts Center at a quadrangle, and faces an almost the building. enough, and what does Modern Carnegie-Mellon University has been equal loggia, also designed by Dennis. mean in social and political terms? condemned for allegedly resembling The protesters limited themselves to In our nation’s capital we find fasces In a practical sense, the ideological the architecture of Albert Speer. The the facade of the Purnell Center, not carvings on Memorial Bridge and battles between the “Moderns” and building, designed by Michael Dennis its internal organization or spaces, the Lincoln Memorial. In the United the “Ancients” over the past century and Associates,1 [Fig. 1] was the venue which presumably do not remind States Senate, the Marshall brings have resembled the politics of a banana for a political “demonstration.” them of Nazi rituals and practices. out a fasces at the beginning of im- republic. You are either a communist Despite the fact that the building portant legislative events. Pick up a or a fascist, and neither side will admit Four architecture majors and a possesses no detail stylistic simi- pre-Roosevelt dime, and you’ll find a that there is any position in between, or drama major...thought the univer­ larities to the classicism of Albert fasces on the verso. The fasces was an outside the line between those poles. sity’s new arts center was reminiscent Speer—it is patently Modern in style ancient Roman emblem (which is why Likewise, both Modernists and Clas- of oppressive buildings of the Third and detail—our student protesters it could be used on American archi- sicists have attempted to associate Reich. So they applied for a $500 obviously thought that the very pres- tecture), but it was also the symbol of their ideas and styles with politically grant and presented an art exhibit ence of a certain number of repetitive the Italian Fascist Party. It is banned acceptable motives, and their enemy’s in protest: They bathed the building bays, along with open loggias of a in Italy, the same way the swastika ideas and styles with politically sus- in red light and projected images particular vertical proportion, were is banned in Germany. Aside from pect movements. It’s not enough to of Adolf Hitler, Nazi buildings, and enough to link the building to fascist/ visiting Italians, only those Ameri- 44 call your adversary’s building stupid, goose­stepping German soldiers onto nazi architecture. cans who know Italian history even take notice of the fasci on our build- it stemmed from the Classical or the Fast forward to the inter-war period: early twentieth century, but also for ings. Had the student protesters at Medieval. Architects who didn’t totally the style battles between the World those architects who, through Giedi- CMU projected a fasces instead of a embrace the most extreme directives Wars for the hearts and minds of the on’s lens, began to view even American swastika, passersby would not have and forms of the International Style general public and the power elite were governmental architecture of the 1930s stopped. Yet all these emblems are (e.g., Robert Mallet-Stevens and W.M. waged in Europe, not America. The as “fascistic” (small ‘f ’). This was be- much less abstract than Michael Den- Dudok) were relegated to a second- European Modern movement came cause the Jazz Age/Depression Era ar- nis’s facades in Pittsburgh. What is class category.4 Others (e.g., Peter to America with Mies van der Rohe chitecture of the nation’s capital, along it about our students’ sensibilities Behrens and Auguste Perret), who ap- and Gropius just before World War II, with various train stations, courthous- and education that encourages com- peared to be “almost-modern” were de- and was wholeheartedly embraced by es, and numerous post offices across parison with Speer, and would most picted as “transitional figures.” Doubt- American architects only after that war. the land, looked vaguely like the only likely lead them ignore the fasces on less, these architects never thought Any association with anti-fascist and twentieth century non-International the Lincoln Memorial? of themselves as “transitional,” but as anti-totalitarian politics that the Eu- Style buildings these post-World War II the saying goes, “the propaganda of ropean Modern movement architects architects knew. The public, of course, The Purnell Center is indeed remi- the victor becomes the history of the assumed for themselves was irrelevant has always considered Washingtonian niscent of some of the architecture of vanquished.” in America. Hence, it was unnecessary neo-Classicism the very quintessence the first half of the twentieth century. to contrast the modernists with the of democracy, some of it even built With its long colonnades, pilasters, and A small sampling of the eclectic clas- traditionalists on this side of the At- under the ultra-liberal Works Progress moldings, the building refers back to sical architecture that wasn’t deemed lantic vis-à-vis political orientation. Administration. the period of academic and traditional proto-modern was also included in None of the Americans who practiced architecture, the styles which graced the histories of Modern architec- traditional architecture after World In the 1950s and 1960s, when the “New many of our famous college campuses. ture. It was presented as counterfeit War I was even examined. As famous as Monumentality” of Edward Durrell To grasp why some architects, and and dangerous. They were the bad they were in their own day, they became Stone, Minuro Yamasaki, Harrison only architects, might object to this guys (e.g., McKim, Meade & White non-persons by the 1950s. American and Abramovitz, and others was in we must rummage the historiography and Richard Morris Hunt). This was architects educated after 1945 knew vogue in the United States, some ar- of modern architecture that was the in contrast to the equally derivative who the bad guys of the 1930s were in chitects thought they saw a resem- underpinning of post-war architectural (albeit neo-Medieval) work of H.H. Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union, blance to the totalitarian design of the training. Richardson, which was presented as but knew nothing of Americans whose thirties. A few critics even imagined proto-Modern. Louis Sullivan, Rich- architecture was stylistically similar that they could discern the generic The popular histories of twentieth cen- ardson’s heir in the apostolic suc- to that of Marcello Piacentini, Boris salient characteristics of a “fascistic” tury architecture were written in the cession to Frank Lloyd Wright and Iofan, Paul Ludwig Troost, and Albert (small ‘f ’) architecture: lack of “human 1930s and 1940s. The single most influ- beyond, had claimed in 1893 that the Speer. Names like Paul Cret, Bertram scale” (whatever that means), rhetori- ential book to have been published in Classicism of the Chicago Columbian Goodhue, Ralph Adams Cram, Arthur cal columns or piers, vast unadorned English was Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Exposition would set back the course Brown, and John Russell Pope were surfaces. Again, their fears were not Time and Architecture, first issued in of architecture by fifty years.
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