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Enchanted Catastrophe ENCHANTED CATASTROPHE What an amazing country where the houses are taller than churches —FERNAND LÉGER AFTER VISITING THE UNITED STATES FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 19311 “What is this new religion?” he wondered, and then concluded: “It’s Wall Street that dominates this new world with all of its height.”1 Léger’s astonishment may seem dated today, when luxury high-rises and tall office buildings have come to appear more banal than transcendent, and stands in contrast to the more sensationalistic response of his friend Le Corbusier, who quipped that New York’s skyscrapers were “too small” when he visited the city four years later. Yet his ultimate point remains remarkably acute: “the vertical push is in line with the economic order.”2 For in contrast to the traditional image of the religious spire, the capitalist transformation of the tall tower typology has come to represent the Americanization of metropolitan modernity, and although ostensibly secular, it continues to be mystified to this day. The skyscraper is more than just a symbolic icon of capitalist power, however, for as Carol Willis argues in her study Form Follows Finance, it is also direct index of financial investment and real estate speculation.3 Léger apparently recognized this not long after the stock market crash of 1929 when he wrote: “Wall Street has gone too far in transforming everything into speculation. Wall Street is an amazing abstraction, but catastrophic. American vertical architecture has gone too far….”4 1. Fernand Léger, “New York,” in Fonctions de la peinture (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2004), 152-3. Translations by author. First published in Cahiers d’Art VI, numbers 9-10 (Paris, 1931), and in English in Functions of Panting, translated by Alexandra Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1973). 2. Ibid., 153. 3. Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995). In addition, as investor Andrew Lawrence has argued, booms in skyscraper construction may be interpreted indexes of economic crises and boom and bust cycles, from the Panic of 1907 and the Stock Market crash of 1929 to the Oil Crisis of the 1970s, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, and the World Financial Crisis of 2008. Lawrence presented his thesis for Dresdner Kleinwort Benson research in 1999 under the title “The Skyscraper Index: Faulty Towers.” For further discussion, see Andrew Lawrence, “Talking Tall: The Skyscraper Index,” Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat Journal, Issue II (2012), 42-44. See also “Towers of Babel” in The Economist (March 28, 2015). 4. Fernand Léger, “Le Mur, l’architecte, le peintre,” in Fonctions de la peinture, 177. Translation mine. First published as “Discours aux architectes” in Quadrante (Milan) II no. 5 (September 1933), 44-77. 183 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/THLD_a_00017 by guest on 26 September 2021 HAACKE CREATIVE DESTRUCTION, MODERNIST ENCHANTMENT, AND THE VERTICAL TURN Such fascination with the catastrophic potential of speculative verticality may be compared in illuminating ways to the more scholarly concept of “creative destruction,” which refers to the process by which capitalism depends on crisis and ruin in order to innovate and expand.5 As the Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter explained it in his classic study Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, which was published in 1942 a decade after he settled in the United States, creative destruction is the “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”6 While Schumpeter referred most famously to the metaphor of a violent storm to represent his theory, leading to the often-cited trope “Schumpeter’s gale,” he also conceptualized it in distinctly architectural terms: “In breaking down the pre-capitalist framework of society, capitalism thus broke not only barriers that impeded its progress but also flying buttresses that prevented its collapse.”7 As we shall see, similar comparisons between capitalist development and gothic or religious architecture became especially commonplace in transatlantic discourse about the rise of modernist Manhattan, and even attempts to critique the hubris of the city from the outside ended up dwelling on its apparently enchanting verticality. Both the spectacular image of the skyscraper as well as the forces of creative destruction that helped enable its development came to be endowed with an aura of the technological sublime,8 and this mythologized power became especially fascinating and disturbing for French visitors to New York, who viewed the city’s ascendance as a growing challenge to the cosmopolitan hegemony of Paris from the roaring twenties to the dawn of the so-called “American century.” For, if Paris had been seen as the “capital of the nineteenth century,” as Walter Benjamin called it, then New York evidently came to supplant it as the cultural, economic, and mythologized capital of the twentieth century. 5. Marx and Engels introduced the argument that the contradictory, self-destructive power of bourgeois society leads to the periodic “annihilation” (Vernichtung) of capital through “explosions, cataclysms, crises,” and Werner Sombart was the first to formalize the term “creative destruction” (schöpferische Zerstörung) in his 1913 essay “War and Capitalism.” However, it was ultimately Schumpeter who expanded on this concept most in his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. For a more general consideration of this idea in relation to the development of New York City, see Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 6. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Routledge, 1994). 82-3. 7. Ibid., 139. Many critics have since developed upon this theory in various ways. Especially notable in studies of modern urbanization is Marshall Berman’s classic book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, which includes a chapter on the “Innovative Self-Destruction,” although it is perhaps the Marxist critic David Harvey who has engaged with Schumpeter’s concept most directly and extensively over the years. As he explains it, “creative destruction is embedded in the circulation of capital itself. Innovation exacerbates instability, insecurity, and in the end, becomes the prime force of pushing capitalism into periodic paroxysms of crisis.” David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 106. 8. Leo Marx introduced the concept of the American technological sublime in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 194-7. David Nye developed it further in American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). On the idea of the “sacred skyscraper,” see Thomas A.P. Van Leeuwen, The Skyward Trend of Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 184 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/THLD_a_00017 by guest on 26 September 2021 ENCHANTED CATASTROPHE Long before Michel de Certeau wrote his often-cited essay “Walking in the City,” which begins with a view from the top of the newly- constructed World Trade Center in order to critique its panoptic power over pedestrian life, French reflections on New York oscillated between wondrous awe and fearful suspicion. While Léger’s essays on the city are relatively under-recognized, more well-known interwar examples include whole books by Paul Morand and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who became famous for their outright fascism, and Le Corbusier, who read their writings and was evidently influenced by them.9 Among the many French intellectuals and artists who found exile in New York during the war was Claude Lévi-Strauss, who ended up writing about his memories of the city several decades later. And soon after the war came to an end, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir embarked on solo adventures to the United States and joined the growing discourse of twentieth- century américanisme through remarkable travel essays of their own. Despite their many differences, each of these French writings on New York express a similar sense of awe with regard to the city’s kyscrapers, especially in contrast to the dominant Christian verticality of Europe, and a critical distance concerning the destructive potential of American ascension more generally. For above all, New York came to be seen as not only a “vertical” or “standing city” [ville debout], as Céline first called it in his novel Journey to the End of the Night, but also an “enchanted catastrophe” [catastrophe féerique], as Le Corbusier put it soon afterward: New York is a vertical city, under the sign of the new times. It is a catastrophe with which a too hasty destiny has overwhelmed courageous and confident people, though a beautiful and worthy catastrophe. Nothing is lost. Faced with difficulties, New York falters. Still streaming with sweat from its exertions, wiping off its forehead, it sees what it has done and suddenly realizes: “Well, we didn’t get it done properly. Let’s start over again!”10 Because this fascination with American verticality was concerned with the creative destruction of capitalist urbanization in particular, it was markedly different from the “Babel complex” that Roland Barthes saw in the French mythologization of the Eiffel Tower.11 In turn, it was not simply resisted, but also in some ways embraced. As Le Corbusier 9. As Mardges Bacon notes, Le Corbusier studied and annotated his copy of Morand’s book especially closely, and may have even taken it with him on his trip. Other French writings about New York that he considered include Georges Duhamel’s Scènes de la vie future (1930) and André Maurois’ En Amérique (1933), as well as an early 1926 essay by Christian Zervos, the editor of Cahiers d’art (in which Léger later published his essay on the city). Zervos’s account was published in the first issue of the journal and was illustrated with a flashy, kinetic photograph of Times Square allegedly taken by Fritz Lang for Erich Mendelsohn’s photo-essay Amerika.
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