The Role of Modernism in "New Historicist" Architecture: As Seen Through the Work of Johnston Marklee
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The Role of Modernism in "New Historicist" Architecture: As Seen Through the Work of Johnston Marklee DES 3367: Today's architects' ambitions: in search of a new narrative canon Michael Matthews M. Arch II May 1st, 2017 The Role of Modernism in "New Historicist" Architecture - Matthews The upcoming 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial poses the question: what is the role of history in contemporary architecture? Is there too much emphasis on "newness" in contemporary practice? And can contemporaneity be informed instead by a careful re-evaluation of historical architecture? The artistic directors of the 2017 Biennial, Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee of the Los Angeles-based practice Johnston Marklee, have been exploring such topics in their own work. Their office is at the forefront of an emerging school of thought in contemporary practice called "New Historicists". Coined by Alejandro Zaera-Polo, who has attempted to classify 21st Century architectural practices into comprehensive taxonomies, the group of New Historicists are identified by their intent to embrace "historically-informed design". The term — "New Historicists" — is at once excitingly open-ended and confusingly ambiguous. It does not clearly capture the exact attitude towards history. And so the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial offers a unique opportunity for this group of practitioners to explore what exactly this attitude might entail. Until then, one can seek to understand the meaning of historically-informed design through an analysis of the writings and built work of one of New Historicism's main ambassadors: Johnston Marklee. The label "New Historicists" is ambiguous partially because of the ambiguity already inherent in the term "history". What about history exactly? It could be pointing towards the consciousness of the history of a physical site (the spatial), the specific language and of historical architecture (the stylistic), or of the architectural agenda of a previous era (the disciplinary). To Johnston Marklee, a historical perspective seems to encapsulate all of these interpretations of the word history and tries to combine them into a holistic perspective: approaching history from all angles. In a recent 2017 interview with Archinect, Johnston Marklee reject contemporary architecture's obsession with newness. Since the advent of computers as a design tool, the digitalization of architecture has created an attitude that every single project needs to be a complete departure from what came before it, and to try out something that has yet been explored architecturally. But this fixation with newness often comes at the expense of the quality of the built artifact — it's as if the simple act of being new has become more important than the building itself. In the digital age, newness has become a tyrannical force. Mark Lee summarizes its effects: 2 The Role of Modernism in "New Historicist" Architecture - Matthews " Now we feel that with today's abundance of information, with the abundance with the overflow of images, everything becomes almost ahistorical, everything is flatlined, everything has become available. At this moment, our understanding of history, of understanding where things come from, is more important than ever. So it’s not tyrannical. This is something that is positive." ("Johnston Marklee Tackle the “Tyranny of Newness”, Archinect, 2017) In this statement, there are echoes of Francis Fukuyama's landmark essay "Now is the End of History", in which Fukuyama argues that liberal democracies have plateaued as the final form of governance and will not evolve into something different, signaling the end of history. It suggests that we have entered into a new era defined as being atemporal. Johnston Marklee are tapping into this broader ideological shift, and explicitly denouncing the idea that history is no longer relevant in today's age. It is initially surprising, then, that Johnston Marklee simultaneously identify as New Historicists and as Modernists. After all, modernists had such a hostile view of history. At the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Walter Gropius famously ridded the school of historical artifacts as well as eliminated historical survey classes from the curriculum, deeming them no longer relevant. One of the core values of modernism was to strip architecture of its ornament or of any direct reference to the past or to convention, and to instead embrace abstraction as a means of divorcing architecture from precedent. It is only possible to be both historicist and modernist in contemporary times; such a combination would have been contradictory in the early modernist era. This is due in large part to the dominance of the Beaux-Arts design methodology immediately prior to the advent of modernism. There was one, dominant prevailing narrative of how to design a building according to the Beaux-Arts ideals: symmetrical, hierarchical, neoclassical, et. al. To assert its legitimacy, modernism needed to fully dismiss its forbearer — the Beaux-Arts style was so predominant that the two could not peacefully co-exist, and could only exist in opposition. Meanwhile, in the vacuum and multiplicity of contemporary architectural ideologies, an architect is more free to pick and choose different approaches, or to hybridize supposedly contradictory approaches, as in the case of historicism meets modernism. 3 The Role of Modernism in "New Historicist" Architecture - Matthews The precise role of Modernism in the work of Johnston Marklee was addressed in their 2017 interview with Archinect. Mark Lee writes: " I would say we are certainly modernists. I mean modernist is a big disposition, there are many different strains in terms of modernism... We believe in modernism in terms of progress, but for us progress has to be embedded within the long cultural tradition. We believe in a much more evolutionary model than revolutionary model, let’s say. That’s why an understanding of history is very important for our practice. We see our practice coming from many layers of history that came before us." ("Johnston Marklee Tackle the “Tyranny of Newness”, Archinect, 2017) A key distinction between the historicist and the modernist disposition is concerning the tabula rasa. Modernism, ever devoted to the idea of the plinth divorced from context, embraced the tabula rasa mentality out of the drive to assert itself against predominant architectural thought of the Beaux-Arts School. The plinth became a symbol of an architectural strategy to announce the introduction of a completely new purely abstracted design logic, alienated from historical and physical context. Conversely, as Johnston Marklee articulated in the "Tyranny of Newness", a contemporary embrace of modernism can be more attuned to the many layers of history. It can address many the different schools of thought of modernism, or even of other historical eras. New Historicists are modernists while at the same time fully rejecting the attitude of the tabula rasa, and instead choosing the tabula strata: from a blank slate to a layered slate. This shift from a denouncement of history to the collection of history is most notable for its shift in tone: history moves from something negative to something completely neutral. This neutrality is encapsulated in Johnston Marklee's 2017 interview in Metropolis Magazine: " We see history really as something that is neutral. It’s neither positive or negative in the way our predecessors thought. We don’t see history as something that one is subjected to or something that has to be reacted against, as happened with Modernism. Nor is it something that you have to latch onto, like the architects of previous generations were doing with Postmodernism. Instead, we see history as being intelligence accrued over 4 The Role of Modernism in "New Historicist" Architecture - Matthews time." ("Johnston Marklee Says Its Time for Architects to Rediscover Architecture”, Metropolis, 2017) It's important to clarify that New Historicism does not reject newness itself, but rather the necessity of newness. There is a freshness to the work of Johnston Marklee and that of other New Historicists that demonstrates how newness can emerge from the adaption of architectural history to contemporary times. Often, it seems newer and fresher than the work of more outwardly formal architecture, which is more a prisoner of newness, flailing to create novelty through over-expressivity, bombast, iconicity, and formalism. One of Johnston Marklee's preeminent upcoming projects, the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, United States, demonstrates this delicate mix of newness through historicism, of an homage to modernism, and of an embrace of the many layers of history. A discussion of the Menil Project, however, must begin with Renzo Piano's original contribution to the Menil Campus in 1986, as it provides a very convincing precedent. The project very successfully integrates into an unusual physical context for a muesum: a low-slung neighborhood of wooden bungalows in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston. Piano's response is at the perfect scale relative to the surrounding neighborhood in that it is small enough to fit in but large enough to stand out. The project combines a vernacular, shed-like facade with a high-tech canopy of ferrocement "leaves". Both elements are highly contextual, with the gray, wood board siding mirroring the surrounding bungalows, and the delicacy of the cement trellis system responding to the pervasive oak canopy of the Montrose neighborhood. As is often the case