This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Summer 2001, Number 14. To order this issue or a sub- scription, visit the HDM homepage at <http://mitpress.mit.edu/HDM>. © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher Canons in Crossfire On the Importance of Critical Modernism, by Charles Jencks THE IDEA THAT THERE IS A CANON of Tradition of literature that always modern architecture is, paradoxically, needed asserting, upholding, and insisted upon by people who know reevaluating by those of supposedly perfectly well that there is no such superior sensibility.1 Harold Bloom re- thing. Neutral, abstract, and in some cently has defined a broader set of variant of the International Style, this great works in his defense of an em- great white canon causes mental snow- battled tradition, and he has given it a blindness, convincing people that a suitably definitive appellation, The single modernism exists—at the same Western Canon.2 time as they dismiss the idea as absurd. For Alfred H. Barr and the This contradiction, entrenched in the founders of the Museum of Modern architectural landscape, opens up im- Art, the canonic story of Modern art portant issues; but before pursuing led from Neo-Impressionism through them, let us consider other fields Fauvism to Cubism, the Bauhaus and where canons carry a bigger charge, Modern Architecture (capitalized, as for instance, religion, literature, and the gospel ought to be). This canonic Modern art. trajectory led directly to Abstract Art, For the Pope there are the canonic and it determined the arrangement of scriptures and doctrines that define works in the galleries of MoMA right Catholicism, and it falls to the Vati- into the 1980s. This canon also justi- can’s Congregation for the Doctrine of fied a view of history as aiming toward the Faith and its prefect, Cardinal abstraction as its goal, and, at the same Ratzinger, to define those canons. Suc- time, validated the major bloodline of cessor to the Inquisition, this Congre- Modern artists from Picasso through gation effectively shores up orthodoxy Jackson Pollock, a lineage sanctioned and expels those who deviate from the in the critical writings of Clement doctrinal line, such as the creative Greenberg. This orthodoxy lasted un- Catholics Matthew Fox and Hans til just last year, when the refurbish- Kung. For F.R. Leavis, and many liter- ment of MoMA—and of course of ary critics, there was a canonic Great Post-Modernism too—forced an en- HARVARD DESIGN MAGAZINE 1 What Makes a Work Canonical? Canons in Crossfire tire reevaluation of the collection, at both a museum and radical, both “the ernists—exerted creative forces that which point a messy and interesting American canonization of something lasted far longer. Ludwig Mies van der set of plural categories led to a recon- that had been done,” the Establish- Rohe was a power to reckon with in ceptualization of the history of mod- ment, and adversarial? “Easy,” he an- the 1920s and 1960s. Le Corbusier, ern art. The new groupings, swered with stunning pragmatic Frank Lloyd Wright, and Alvar Aalto, categorized by subject rather than his- nonchalance, “It succeeded. You who with Mies made up the big four, torical period, varied in cogency, as can still have the paradox and fortu- were seminal for decades. And Louis did the similar new arrangement at the nately go on designing anyway you Kahn, James Stirling, Norman Foster, Tate Modern in London. (T his shift in like.” Canons are there to be affirmed Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, and canons is, of course, only a provisional and broken according to a logic no Rem Koolhaas, the little six, each had attempt to contend with the challenge one understands. Modernism means two small periods of influence. But of pluralism. One looks forward to the both the triumph of corporate con- these protean characters, to stay rele- next, and more considered, synthesis.) formity and its constant overthrow, an vant and on top, also had to reinvent For Sigfried Giedion, as I was idea I would christen “Johnson’s Con- themselves every ten years or so. taught at Harvard in the 1960s, there fusion,” since he pointed it out so The notion that there is a “ten-year was a “New Tradition” of Modern ar- clearly.3 rule” of reinvention for the creative chitects that needed defending and Direct contradictions are no harder genius in the 20th century has been promoting (subtracted of Expression- for the High Church of Modernism well argued by the Harvard cognitive ists and others who did not fit within than they are for the Vatican. In fact, scientist Howard Gardner. In Creating the canon according to CIAM). For both thrive on them. We are back at Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Bruno Zevi, there was a similar great the paradox with which I started; but through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Pi- tradition, but it culminated in the very before addressing it directly, I want to casso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and blisher architects Giedion had dismissed as rehearse the architecture of the last Gandhi, Gardner studies these major “transitory facts.” And so it went, and century and, with the aid of a diagram, Modernists, showing how they made so it goes. When I was a young histo- put forward the proposition that there breakthroughs or creatively shifted rian studying under Reyner Banham, I is also a tradition that bubbles away their thinking every ten years.5 In a re- wrote a paper, “History as Myth,” under the surface: critical modernism. cent book, Le Corbusier and the Contin- which showed how each successive Whereas canonic modernism today ual Revolution in Architecture, I have historian rewrote the script of mod- dominates the academies and institutes found the same pattern in this the ernism by putting back into the story of architecture, as well as the architec- Proteus of design. As the Hayward some of what the previous critic had ture of big-city downtowns, critical Gallery put it, polemically, in the title excised, only to perpetuate a new bias modernism is a creative avant-garde of a 1987 retrospective, Le Corbusier of his own. Banham was no exception always reloading its canons in response was the “Architect of the Century.”6 to the rule, as he enjoyed pointing out, to a perceived imbalance and, of Well, could this be possible—even be- and when once questioned on this course, a creative opportunity. fore the century was over and Frank process of historians’ one-upmanship Glance at the evolutionary tree of Gehry was given a shot at the title? I and asked how to explain it, he said, the 20th century that I have construct- think the answer is “yes,” as I argue at “apostolic succession.” Modern archi- ed around six underlying traditions.4 length and as the diagram shows. Le tectural historians, like defenders of Clearly, the main narrative does not Corbusier appears on this chart at five the True Faith, were people of the belong to any building type, move- points: as the seminal designer of the book; they passed on beliefs by study- ment, or individual. It quickly dismiss- “Heroic Period” of the 1920s; as a ing and worshipping in the same es any idea of a single canon—white, forceful thinker of a new (and rather church. machine aesthetic, abstract, or mini- unfortunate) urbanism; as the leader of The delicious irony of this situation malist. Rather, it displays a competi- CIAM and the movement to design was inescapable, for the tradition be- tive drama, a dynamic and turbulent mass housing after the war; as a har- ing canonized was purportedly based flow of ideas, social movements, tech- binger of Post-Modernism with the on revolution; one has to remember nical forces, and individuals, all jock- church at Ronchamp and the symbolic hard what modernism once claimed to eying for position. A movement or an architecture of Chandigarh; and, at the be: avant-garde, revolutionary, new, individual may be momentarily in the end of his life, as a forerunner of idealistic, utopian. The idea of being public eye and enjoy media power, but High-Tech, with his pavilions in Brus- radical and progressive and shocking such notoriety rarely lasts more than sels and Zürich. No other architect carried modernism throughout the five years and usually not more than was so creative in so many different 19th century and up to the 1930s. two. It is true that certain architects of traditions. Not for nothing was he How, I once asked Philip Johnson, the previous century—how strange seen as “the Picasso of architecture”; could the Museum of Modern Art be those words ring for Old Mod- and importantly for my argument, the of Harvard the President and Fellows © 2001 by College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the pu 2 HARVARD DESIGN MAGAZINE SUMMER 2001 What Makes a Work Canonical? Canons in Crossfire seminal buildings of each of his cre- there are few women. An urbanism tortions. If not wholly inclusive it is, at ative periods expressed different both more feminine and also more co- least, balanced in its selective effects. canons. (Many critics and architects, herent would have been far superior to As can be seen in the classifiers on the including Nikolaus Pevsner and James the characteristically masculine, over- far left of the diagram, the tree is Stirling, were upset when Ronchamp, rationalized, and badly related boxes based on the assumption that there are with its primitive expression, seemed that have marred our cities.