Architecture and the Ethics of Authenticity 31
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ARCHITECTURE AND THE ETHICS OF AUTHENTICITY 31 Architecture and the Ethics of Authenticity TOM SPECTOR Oklahoma State University Silos, mills, sheds, and refineries: Across most approach to architecture. Though architects of Oklahoma's gently rolling prairie found these ideas to be adequately motivating countryside these artistically uninformed for many years, these justifications eventually structures often provide the only vertical proved to be hollow. Instead of providing punctuation to a landscape otherwise made of worthy goals and ideals, the belief in the mostly horizontal lines. One of the pleasures necessity and the transformative effects of of teaching architecture here is to participate modernism turned out mainly to legitimize in the intellectual progress of students -- only another set of aesthetic preferences. As many of whom hail from rural areas and have Virginia Postrel heralds with undisguised traveled little - as they eventually come to pleasure: "Modern design was once a value- regard these structures with much the same laden signal -- a sign of ideology. Now it's just admiration expressed for them some 80 years a style, one of many possible forms of ago by Le Corbusier in his rallying polemic personal aesthetic expre~sion."~All that is left against the arbitrariness of nineteenth century after giving up on the quest to 'get it right' in architecture; Ven Une ~rchitecture.' Like Le the metaphysically and ontologically strong Corbusier, many of my students would have sense, is to 'get it right-for me.' Although their work emulate these structures' aesthetic pursuit is still considered an unselfconscious formal muscularity, frank important facet of a fully human existence, it materiality, and technological pragmatism; is primarily as a form of individual pleasure- aesthetic qualities that emerge indirectly from taking and self-discovery; not as a vehicle for having only usefulness in mind. Most students societal improvement. would gladly trade in whatever cultural elan they gain along the way in studio, during Since aesthetic preference can no longer find summer semesters in Europe, or in cover behind such notions as progress or architectural history class, for the ability to advancing human solidarity, to express create work with such qualities, and Iwouldn't oneself aesthetically these days is to be disagree with them. utterly exposed. This more radical sense of the arbitrariness of aesthetic preference has, The yearnings of today's students to capture of course, occurred within the context of the the authority of unselfconscious design demise of positivism in all the arts: The idea emerge from a different, and more radical, of aesthetic progress has become sheer sense of the arbitrary than Le Corbusier naivety, vanity, nostalgia or all three. We can confronted. In place of what in hindsight no longer count on necessary beginning appears to be the relatively narrow problem of points, nor on convergence towards important the arbitrariness of the prevailing style and ends. Movement occurs, surely, but it is the backwardness of taste, they experience rudderless at the same time it is willful. Arthur aesthetic pursuit itself as arbitrary. When Danto perfectly diagnoses this radical sense of pushed to answer: "Why this form? Why this the arbitrary: "It is part of what defines material?" Le Corbusier would have cited the contemporary art that the art of the past is pressing, inescapably rational logic of available for such use as artists care to give it. contemporary technology, industrial What is not available to them is the spirit in production, and the Zeitgeist coalescing to not which the art was made."3 The safest merely permit, but to require, a modern response to the challenge "Why this form?" is 32 GElTING REAL: DESIGN ETHOS NOW "Why not? Do you have something better?" overcome the limitations of what Charles The Corbusian reply, "Because it is the correct Taylor has identified as our culture of formIu4 can no longer be given. authenticity; a culture which so prizes the living of authentically individual lives that the What remains after draining off a sense of exercise of choice and self-expression are all common purpose and direction in one's artistic that are left as ultimate goods.6 The apex of work is that the expression of aesthetic vision such a culture is to live the life of the 'artist', through the art objects one creates for public and most architecture students indeed cite the display, if the object is truly the result of desire to exercise artistic creativity as the personal vision instead of the deliberate primary reason they enter architecture school repackaging of popular taste, must ultimately (The opportunity of making the world a better be an attempt to advance one's will. Form can place runs a distant second.)' Taylor argues no longer be good because it is heading us in that when choice and self-expression are the right direction, but only because enough elevated over a regard for the content of one's people assert a preference for it. Thus, the choices, culture becomes susceptible to the entirely reasonable yearning arises for things paired dangers of the trivialization and that take their forms by necessity, rather than flattening of all values. We architecture by the assertion of someone's artistic professors oblige our students' desire to be willfulness over the rest of us; a preference creative artists by giving them instruction in for 'mere real things' over art objects. Sensing the compositional techniques of what can only the willfulness behind the art object, a be called neo-modernism, (or modernism lite: willfulness whose objective cannot be trusted, modernism sans its bloated ideology), which, we sensibly recoil. Such real things as silos with its premium placed on abstract and sheds -though quite likely imposing composition and turning away from forms of structures which alter their immediate the past, turns out to be an ideal medium for environments - are created without the added the expression of one's individuality but imposition of willful artistic intent. They can inevitably an uncomfortable fit with the stay enmeshed with the countryside, or we imperatives of community. Thus, while neo- can single them out for aesthetic appraisal. modernism no longer entails the moral Artworks, contaminated with aesthetically baggage of improving the lot of mankind, this informed intentions, only rarely merge with void in values has been amply filled by its the scenery. Instead, they all too often seek ability to facilitate students' personal journeys us out; they won't leave us alone. They try of expression much more ably than could, too hard. We seek refuge from them in the say, classicism, with its anachronistic ontology real and the everyday. "Why are you asserting of correctness. Architectural neo-modernism is all this art on me?" we ask. We cannot live in tailor-made for the culture of authenticity, for such a suffocating environment as the not only does it eschew ontologies, in its thoroughly artistically intentioned one. Adolph employ one could never be accused of Loos' story of the "Poor Little Rich Man" whose pandering to popular taste. environment is so completely designed that he "was precluded from all future living and This freedom of self-expression modernism striving, developing and desiring" comes encourages, however, does not come without back to haunt us again, but attuned to a cost. For now, in addition to the desire to slightly different situation. Whereas Loos was clothe the personal exposure they experience satirizing 'total design,' we are concerned just for having design tastes, students also instead to avoid 'total art.' What we desire feel the tremendous burden of having to from the silo or shed (or for that matter, a somehow justify a design vocabulary which is relaxed interior with a 'lived in' look) is presented as at bottom a matter of personal nothing less than artless art. preference, and therefore beyond justification in the strong sense of having an ethical, The Declining Fortunes of Authenticity ontological or metaphysical basis. Grain silos and mill buildings do not have to account for The attraction of unselfconscious design stems themselves in this way. Somehow, their status from more than the hypocritical desire to as mere objects insulates them from all this. cloak aesthetic preferences in claims of necessity in order to surreptitiously have one's This status is not, however, invulnerable. It way. It is symptomatic of a desire to has, in fact, long been under attack by the art ARCHITECTURE AND THE ETHICS OF AUTHENTICITY 33 world. Ever since Duchamp presented his Duchamp's Bottlerack and Fountain and readymades, art has repeatedly subverted Warhol's Brillo Box and real bottleracks, and blurred the status of mere objects. Since urinals, and Brillo boxes can only be the idea of aesthetic progress is now, understood from the point of view of the ironically, a thing of the past, a work of art no intentionality built into the artwork by the longer has to take certain forms to be artist and the cultural, historical context in progressive, hence it can now look like which those intentions were sown. Lacking anything. Danto greets this turn of events these culturally emergent properties, Margolis with enthusiasm: "These artistic possibilities thinks, art simply fails to exist.12 For Margolis, are but realizations and applications of the then, it is the status of art, not of mere real immense philosophical contribution of the things, that is at risk. 1960s to art's self-understanding: that artworks can be imagined, or in fact The question of what makes something a work produced, which look exactly like mere real of art is not, of course, quite the inverse of things which have no claim to the status of art the problem troubling my architecture at all, for the latter entails that you can't students.