One-Way Street

Britain's Best New Buildings

The Royal Institute of British Architects just named the best new buildings in Britain. Classicists throughout Britain are up in arms over the selection. Of the 92 buildings on the list, "there is not a doric column or a Tuscan pediment to be seen," according to the Guardian's Robert Booth. Quinlan Terry, Prince Charles's favorite architect (enough said there), calls the awards "a con" and accuses the RIBA of being "style fascists"--never mind actual fascists' love of classical architecture. Terry has protested the awards by refusing to submit an entry.

Whatever side you take depends, I guess, on how you define "new." Richard Rogers archly comments, "modernism has always been a shock and it seems some people are taking a rather long time to recover." The Royal Institute has sufficiently recovered, it seems. The RIBA claims that only architectural quality was considered, not style.

So not a single neo-classicist building is among the top 92 buildings built in the UK in the past year? That seems improbable. I'm a partisan on the side of modernism, but I wonder if 92 praise-worthy modernist buildings were built on the entire planet in the past year.

If their comments are any indication, the RIBA like their buildings large and just a touch peculiar. Heatherwick Studio's East Beach Cafe, designed to look like flotsam, is "both strange and captivating; weird but lovable." Ian Simpson's slab highrise in Manchester is a "landmark 50-storey tower" with "the excitement and bravura of the Manhattan tradition." David Chipperfield's BBC Scotland building in Glasgow, pictured above, is a  "singularly awe-inspiring volume." Maybe you have to be there; in the photo, it looks like a storage container.

Maybe ornamentation is a sin and monumentality is an eternal architectural value, but so are balance, harmony, and proportion. Modernist buildings, when they are good, have these properties. These are also neo-classical values. Either Britain's disgruntled classicists have forgotten these verities, or the RIBA has.

Unforgiving Years

For a brief period in the 1920s, Soviet culture was among the most dynamic and creative in all Europe. During a visit to Moscow in 1927, Walter Benjamin remarked on the "improvisatory" nature of post-revolutionary Russia. But even during Benjamin's visit the lights were starting to dim. By the time Stalin consolidated power in the early 1930s, Soviet culture was well into its extended Socialist Realist phase, with its beaming factory workers, overflowing wheat harvests, and tractors that look like they're about to burst into song.

But what if Soviet culture had retained its creativity throughout the 1930s? Victor Serge (real name: Victor Lvovich Kibalchich) certainly would have been one of its literary stars, and he would have been much better known today.

That we have any Serge novels, let alone the seven he managed to publish, is something of a miracle. He lived a tough life. Born to penniless anti-czarists in Brussels, Belgium, Serge watched his younger brother starve to death. His first career choice was being an anarchist. That career ended with a four-year term in a French prison. His second career as a Soviet agent based in Berlin concluded with an ill-considered decision to join the Trotskyites' battle against Stalin. In 1928 he fled the USSR for Paris, where he began his third career, as a writer.

Serge's tense years in Paris dodging Stalin's murderous agents formed the bases became the basis for Unforgiving Years, his last novel, written in 1947 and first published in France in 1971. The novel, like all his novels, was written in French, and it's available for the first time in English in a translation by Richard Greeman. The action opens in the weirdly calm days before the outbreak of World War II, when Parisians were preoccupied with lurid crimes and adulterous affairs. Serge's hero is known by various names, but the narrator calls him D. We meet him immediately after he has decided to quit the Soviet secret service because he's lost faith in the communist revolution. Unfortunately for D, it was no easier to quit Soviet intelligence than it was to quit the Mafia. He knows he's doomed, but he sticks around for a few days trying to persuade two women, Nadine and Daria, to escape the French capital with him.  Nadine reluctantly agrees to leave with him, but Daria flatly refuses, partly because D is prone to anguished and confused ruminations on his own principles--not a good quality when the history's bloodiest conflict is starting to ignite. Serge depicts D's thought process with a prose style that combines the energy and conviction of agitprop with the refined inventiveness of high modernism. The default viewpoint is third person, but the point of view can switch at any time, such as when D asks himself,

What is "conscience"? A residue of beliefs inculcated in us from the time of primitive taboos until today's mass press? Psychologists have come up with an appropriate term for these imprints deep within us: the superego, they say. I have nothing left to invoke but conscience, and I don't even know what it is […] I'm behaving almost like a believer. I cannot do otherwise: Luther's words. Except that the German visionary who flung his inkwell at the devil went on to add, "God help me!" What will come to help me?

The big newspapers don't have a conscience (he had bribed them often enough, through savvy intermediaries, to know that) and the little ones don't count. The big writers wouldn't believe me.

Here both idea and self are disintegrating. The abrupt conceptual shifts (from Freud to Martin Luther to newspapers) mirror the pronoun shifts (us, I, he, me). The idea of a conscience has suddenly ceased to have any substance, and yet D clings to it like a lifeline. Years of covert identities have dissolved D's  present self, a process that mirrors his own statelessness and the coming historical catastrophe.

After the first section, the narrative itself fragments into pieces. The second section follows Daria's journey from an isolated Kazakh village to the siege of Leningrad. The third section strikes even further afield, covering the final battle for Berlin. This section is the most unexpected and perhaps explains why Serge had such trouble finding publishers and readers during his lifetime: Serge, a dedicated Bolshevik, sympathizes with ordinary Germans to a degree that can get mawkish at times. Serge rewrites the Nazi period in Germany as a class struggle: ordinary Germans suffered greatly, while wealthy Germans survived the war with their properties and their political connections intact.

The final section sorts out the final fates of the main characters, whose storylines sometimes get lost in the historical shuffle. Despite their ontologically reduced states, D, Nadine and Daria embody the idea of humanism, which endures, but just barely. Serge died in Mexico shortly after completing the novel, physically and emotionally exhausted. Yet, he seemed made for strife. He was like a raw nerve experiencing some of the darkest episodes in modern history like a raw nerve. It's as if he couldn't live in peacetime. Unforgiving Years is Serge's most personal novel in the sense that it's about a mind under the stress of war, looking for core beliefs while facing the existential void.

Modernism and Its Discontents

In his magisterial new book Modernism: The Lure of Heresy the intellectual historian Peter Gay makes some puzzling claims. Most comprehensive accounts of modernism divide it into at least two strains, one that saw something to retain in Western culture, and another that wanted to trash the whole thing and start all over again. But Gay claims that "liberalism" was the '"fundamental principle of Modernism."  Surely by "liberalism" Gay can't mean the way the word is currently used and abused in the United States. Gay is a historian, so perhaps he's referring to the eighteenth-century uses of the word to mean "open-minded" and "unorthodox." This early sense would accommodate André Breton's remark that "the simplest surrealist act consists of dashing into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can, into the crowd."

There was a whole brand of modernism that was all about exploring the limits of unorthodoxy. If you want an overly vivid demonstration of this tendency, just watch, if your castration anxiety will allow you, the first scene of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien andalou in which a man slits a woman's eyeball with a razor. But the modernist movement also includes the decorous T.S. Eliot, the fey artificer Andy Warhol, the dreamy mythologizer William Butler Yeats, and the solemn demythologizer Walter Benjamin. None of these people would be comfortable being labeled a "liberal" as the term is currently used. Benjamin certainly would have sneered at it as inadequate to what he was trying to do.

The second questionable claim Gay makes is his assertion that World War I inspired "few striking innovations in high culture." True, the most innovative artworks of the first two decades of the twentieth century were created before hostilities broke out: Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1913) and Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), but the most insouciant artwork of the century was created at the war's sour peak: Duchamp's Fountain (1917). Irish literature before the Great War was Yeats and John Millington Synge; afterwards it was James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Ezra Pound spent the pre-war years tinkering with Symbolism and the fustier reaches of romanticism. After the war Eliot overturned everything in English poetry with The Waste Land. By comparison, the Second World War was aesthetically barren. Abstract Expressionism, the most original post-war movement, owed a considerable debt to interwar painting, while John Cage was Dada with a piano.

Then there's the great modernism/post-modernism divide. Gay argues that modernism eventually ran out of gas, then sold out.  Duchamp's Fountain and L.H.O.O.Q. (pictured above) are now art museum gift shop items. The theater of the absurd has been picked apart in heavily-footnoted Ph.D. dissertations.  Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein threw up their hands at any political commitment and reveled in the cheesier aspects of popular culture.  The last warhorses of antagonistic modernism are Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. Among younger authors cutting edge lit is now about losing your memory.

But in his epilogue--maybe Gay wants us to see post-modernism as an epilogue to modernism--Gay pays a visit to Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim and sees in the brash curlicues signs of modernism's old anarchic energy. But in general, modernism "has had a good long run," Gay sighs, but now it's pretty much over with. Whether he's right or not is the subject of another book.

You Look Fabulous

The Getty Museum has acquired 252 photographs by Irving Penn. The photographs, condescendingly called "The Small Trades," represent a departure in content, if not form, for the fashion photographer. The photographs feature workers posed in Penn's trademark blank stage, in full body length, with the subject gazing serenely back at the camera. The Getty acquired the "Small Trade" photographs because they round out the career of an important American photographer. Virginia Heckert, an associate photography curator at the Getty, is "very excited" about the acquisition, which doesn't mean anyone else has to be.

The problem isn't fashion photography, per se. Fashion photography is unique because it finds an eternal value, beauty, in the transitory, fashion. The glimpse of something enduring within the fleeting formed the basis of Baudelaire's definition of modernism. Later, Walter Benjamin picked up this view for his own understanding of modernism and its relation to the culture at large.

But "The Small Trades" are not fashion photographs. They are portraiture of an elaborately staged, and class-conscious, kind. Why Penn should turn his attention to the lumpenproletariat isn't clear, but, now that they're in the Getty Museum, for us the question is, what do Penn's photographs tell us about the history of photography?

One explanation is offered by Heckert, who says Penn's photographs are "really about the subject presenting himself in a more intimate setting to his photographer. It's a more psychological relationship between the artist and the subject." Maybe Penn got tired of looking at vacuous models and wanted someone more interesting looking back at him. What's clear is that Penn wasn't interested in changing the nature of his medium's relation to its audience. These are photographs for the same cultivated middle classes that were consumers of his fashion photography.

In his writings on the history of photography, Walter Benjamin distinguished between those photographers who mystified the process of creativity, and those who opened up it. (He made the same distinction, by the way, amongst architects and filmmakers.) Penn may have placed the working classes at the center of his photography, but he doesn't allow his subjects to appropriate (Benjamin used the word "absorb") his mode of seeing.

Take a look at Penn's photograph of a waiter, "Garcon de Cafe -- Raoul," shot in Paris in 1950. Raoul is a vivid individual--no anonymous, plasticized model here. But there's nothing particularly illuminating here for another waiter. The subject has been completely decontextualized, utterly shut off from lived experience. Furthermore, you can practically see the process of commodification gathering around him. He is the model of the "Parisian waiter" at the exact time when the French tourism and leisure industries were assuming their present form to accommodate the masses of American tourists flocking to Europe after World War II.

Whether he's photographing a fashion model or a charwoman, Penn reduces his subject to a drama staged for the benefit of a controlling male gaze. It elicits the clichéd response, "You look fabulous," which is at once complementary and dismissive. Of course, one could argue that that's pretty much the essence of fashion, but at the same time, fashion is supposed to be something one inhabits. It allows one to control, to a certain extent, what semiotic messages one wants to send. Penn's crucial innovation, arguably, isn't the famous gray background, but the full body shot. The subject of the photograph is a whole thing with no outside--no inside, either. Nothing individual sticks out. Even Raoul's jaunty tray is off balance, a mere prop that doesn't express anything individual. In Penn's photographs, there is no place to hide, and no place to inhabit, either.

The King of the Nineteenth Century

Richard Driehaus, a Chicago investor, is an evangelist for outmoded design styles. He's best known as the money behind the Richard H. Driehaus Prize for classical and traditional architecture, awarded to the architect who can best ignore the last 120 years of architectural history. The most recent winners were Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, founders of the New Urbanism movement.

Next spring Driehaus will open the Richard H. Driehaus Museum of Decorative Arts in the in the Nickerson Mansion, a brooding Italianate mansion marooned in a neighborhood of anonymous condo buildings and cheesy tourist traps. As a preview of sorts Driehaus gave Robert Sheroff of the New York Times a tour of his house a few blocks away from the museum. Standing in his 1887 Queen Anne mansion, Driehaus proclaims, "Modern architecture has become totally homogenized and uninteresting. We're losing our sense of who we are, how we developed and where we're going. One streetscape in Prague is worth all of Dubai, visually."

He's certainly right about Dubai, the world's first fully surreal city. And if all he sees of Chicago is the few blocks between the offices of Driehaus Capital Management on East Erie Street and his house near Lake Shore Drive, then he has a point about Chicago as well. That patch of the city is as affluent as it is architecturally vapid.  But in the context of the architectural scene in the city as a whole, his statement is startling at best and disingenuous at worst. The most homogenized and uninteresting architecture in Chicago is being built in its gentrifying neighborhoods, where low-rise condo buildings run the gamut from workmanlike vernacular to wretched eclecticism. On the other hand, there have been a number of recent buildings created in the city's modernist tradition of fusing technology and form. The most recent example is Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton's Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, a brilliant reinterpretation of the transitional modernism of Sullivan, Root, and Burnham. The Spertus Institute is just one example of a return of daring and genuinely creative architecture in the city.

As for Driehaus's Victorian pile, Sheroff puts it as nicely as he can, calling it "overtly theatrical." The house is an exercise in rococo eclecticism. Besides reflecting the prima donna impulses of its owner, the guiding principle of the house is turn-of-the-century neo-classicism, a period that saw the first flowering of architectural modernism in Sullivan's Auditorium Building and Root's Monadnock, as well as the first anti-modernist backlash in everything from Jungenstil to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Driehaus's house is less a showcase for haute bourgeois style than an obsessive return to a traumatic moment in history. The house isn't quite the oppressively opulent Second Empire style that Walter Benjamin saw as the expression of a reactionary bourgeois consciousness, but Driehaus has a taste for a theme Benjamin saw in late nineteenth-century European culture. The house abounds in images of petrified nature, from the Baccarat chandelier to a bronze bust of the 19th-century French actress Rachel. As a cultural form, petrified nature was dialectical in that it expressed a desire to arrest progress and, at the same time, retrieve a forgotten image from the past so that it may become real in the future.  It's interesting to note that the centerpiece of the house is the most overtly modernist: its two-story Art Deco living room. The rest of the house reflects the desires of a bourgeoisie that wants to feel at home anywhere in the world. For a wealthy Chicagoan stranded at the edge of the prairie, that also meant forging a cultural connection to Paris, which Benjamin called the capital of the nineteenth century.

Despite Dreihaus's implacable resistance to modernism--to the century in which he's lived most of his life--his alternative is incoherent. His 21st-century neo-classicism re-enacts the revivalist wars of the nineteenth century. One resolution of those battles between the revivalists was Chicago's fusion of  vernacular styles and emergent technology. Before the 1890's, the city was a mix of crude wood frame houses and equally crude copies of European styles.  Surely Dreihaus doesn't want to return to this rough-hewn period in the city's history. His house is a wish image for a culture we never had to begin with. 

Gargoyles and the Great Tradition

The New York Times published two long articles on architecture yesterday, each addressing a major controversy within the field. I'll take up each in turn, starting with Robin Podgrebin's profile of Robert A.M. Stern, the dean of the Yale School of Architecture.

The main message of the article is that one of the most important architecture schools in the US is led by an aggressive traditionalist who nevertheless has encouraged a diversity of stylistic viewpoints. Stern's broad-mindedness is all the more remarkable in light of the sneering attacks on him as the architect of choice for any client who wants to rebuild the nineteenth century. Podgrebin quotes New York magazine's snarky dismissal of Stern as "an architect who specializes in the best nostalgia money can buy." Stern is unapologetic about his own practice, asserting that "there is a parallel world out there — of excellence." He goes on to claim that "You can't have a world that is built of only original things, where every shape is different from every other. You can, but then it becomes a World Fair. You can't have caviar five nights in a row." I don't see why we can't have a world of original things. Isn't that what architects do--create unique objects in the world?

Anyway, only an ideologue would insist on an absolute dividing line between the traditional and the modern, and even though his language lapses into polemics sometimes, Stern is not an ideologue.  His opposition between avant-garde architecture and "excellence" is tendentious, but he has a point about the relentlessly new.  It's not possible to reinvent architectural language with each new project. As Walter Benjamin pointed out, the shock of the new can become lacerating after a while. Worse, it can give a false sense of progress. It's entirely possible to be absolutely up to date in one's design tastes and still be retrograde in everything else.

However, it seems equally problematic to pretend that nothing has changed at all. "Tradition" can mean a lot of different things; it's a word that gets abused more than the "modern." Stern wants to be known as an architect of the traditional. Does this have any other meaning besides "the opposite of modern"? The term "neo-classical," which is sometimes applied to Stern's work, is hardly any more specific. Too often it also means little more than the not-modern. There are many traditions--in architecture and elsewhere. Invoking the traditional is an act of inclusion and exclusion. This isn't a bad thing; it's merely something to be aware of when someone says they're a traditionalist. Modernism was a famously exclusionary movement, but generally speaking modernists were more honest in their exclusions than traditionalists. When Stern, or anyone else, says he or she is a traditionalist, it doesn't mean they're drawing upon a stable, immutable set of customs from the past as a whole. Furthermore, just as embracing the modern has the fringe benefit of seeming hip and cool, the traditional conveys a sense of responsibility, duty, sacrifice, and excellence. I suspect that the secondary effects of both styles, for a lot of people, are their main attractions.

Finally, traditionalism isn't the same thing as historicism. A lot of new, custom housing in the traditional style--i.e., nothing too modern or too small--is not only ostentatious and wasteful, but stylistically incoherent. I used to live near a townhouse complex advertised as luxury housing. The Georgian-styled façades apparently didn't convey luxury strongly enough, so the architect endowed each unit with its own a set of gargoyles. At the same time, the traditional isn't the same thing as the nostalgic. Building in the Georgian style doesn't mean someone is nostalgic for tricorne hats and horse dung in the streets. The Georgian can also invoke the time when the middle classes were willing to risk their lives for liberty. In this case the Georgian can serve as a rebuke to people who aren't willing to risk their tax cuts for our nation's foundational principles. As for the Georgian with gargoyles—I have no idea what that could mean.

On Reading Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson enjoyed a professional life many English professors would love to have lived, but he rarely, if ever, makes it on to History of Literary Criticism syllabi. Wilson wrote on anything he wanted to write on, in exactly the ways he wanted to write about them. He had the good fortune to come of age during the flowering of literary high modernism, and part of the pleasure offered by the new Library of America editions of Wilson's work is reading a first-hand account of American modernism as it unfolded. The first volume of the Library of America set opens with a remarkable essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald, written in 1923. Fitzgerald had just published This Side of Paradise; The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night were still ahead of him. Wilson begins his review with invective worthy of Dale Peck. Wilson comes close to calling his fellow Princetonian a functional illiterate and proclaims, "He has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without many ideas to express." Then, in a characteristic turn, Wilson tells us that Paradise "commits almost every sin that a novel can possibly commit; but it does not commit the unpardonable sin: it does not fail to live." That last assertion, "it does not fail to live," would be greeted with incredulous laughter in an MLA session, but Wilson's evaluation of Fitzgerald's prospects as a novelist was dead on.

Wilson also had prescient things to say about Wallace Stevens and e.e. cummings, although he used a critical language closer to belle lettres than to post-structuralism. He's irritated by cummings's mannerisms (as I've always been), but his overall assessment of cummings's style is odd: Wilson says the broken lines and lack of punctuation appear "ugly" on the page. Wilson was an early champion of Ernest Hemingway--so early, in fact, that he's disappointed to discover that he wasn't the first American critic to review Hemingway's work. In his later life Wilson turned into a cranky misanthrope, but in the 1920's he was still susceptible to a celebrity worship. He pads his first writings on Hemingway with long quotes from letters Hemingway sent him thanking him for the early notices and promising to look him up the next time Hemingway was in New York. It's characteristic of Wilson to be star struck even before the novelist was a star.

We can't return to writing like Wilson did in the Twenties and Thirties. Only a person who had a nineteenth-century education in the classics written in dead languages would demand a novel have life. His highly opinionated and deeply felt responses to literary works have more in common with bloggers than professors--or newspaper book critics, for that matter. Reading the early Wilson is like an RSS feed from a blogger keenly attuned to an incomparably rich literary culture. He wrote with the blogger's freedom from institutional constraints with the man of letters' confidence he embodied a shared sense of aesthetic and ethical values. When literary modernism went into retreat after World War II, Wilson lost interest in contemporary writing, turning instead to the nineteenth-century literary culture of his youth. Consequently, his later writings failed to live.

Exurbia Is the New Urbanism

Yesterday the Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the founders of New Urbanism, were named the winners of the 2008 Richard H. Driehaus Prize.  If you haven't heard of it, the Driehaus Prize is the conservative, anti-modernist alternative to the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which is also funded by a rich Chicagoan. If you've never heard of New Urbanism, recall the eerily perfect small town in The Truman Show, with nary a blade of grass out of place. The film was shot in Seaside, Florida, the most famous example of New Urbanist planning.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk were responsible for laying out the basic principles of New Urbanism. Duany and Plater-Zyberk wanted urban space to look like a cross between Mayberry and New Haven, with a dash of the Upper West Side thrown in. Theirs is a vision of what small-city American life would be like if Wal-Mart had never happened. Some of the principles seem reasonable enough, such as the requirement that housing remain in close proximity to a commercial center. Others are just asking to be violated, like the prohibition against garages. Still others sound suspiciously like social engineering: the New Urbanist spaces, which can be found mostly in suburbs, are meant to prepare residents for full-on urban life. In short, the hearts of New Urbanists may be in organic culture, but their minds are as totalizing as Le Corbusier's urban schemes. 

I'm both a dedicated modernist and a bike-train commuter,so I'm of two minds about New Urbanism. The modernist in me is scornful of any aesthetic program that pretends the twentieth-century never happened. The bike commuter in me, speaking with the smugness of someone with a small carbon footprint, says everyone should live within walking (or biking) distance of their workplace and the businesses they patronize most frequently. The kinds of urban spaces the New Urbanists are trying to create very closely resemble the types of communities my wife and I have chosen to raise our children. But while our life right now is New Urbanist, it may not always be so. While I can ride my bike to a wine shop in downtown Wilmette and hop on the CTA to ride to my job in the River North section of Chicago, the reality of living in a large metropolitan area like Chicago is that I can only take a job in the North Shore suburbs or in the city. Naperville, one technology center in the area, is a hateful two-hour commute away. Even Schaumburg, where I worked during the dot com boom, is a traffic-clogged twenty miles from my home. One job change and my entire low-emission lifestyle goes out the window. I might as well commute in a Hummer.

Supposedly, Duany and Plater-Zyberk came up with the idea for New Urbanism while attending graduate school at Yale in the 1980s, and New Urbanism smacks of the self-contained--but nevertheless highly appealing--environment of the college town. A lot more of our urban and suburban areas should resemble Charlottesville, Virginia or Eugene, Oregon, but the reality of development in the 2000s, with the gravitational pull of new office complexes and Wal-Marts at the metropolitan fringes,  means that exurbia is the new urbanism.

The Classicists Strike Back

The Chicago Tribune's Blair Kamin reports on an obscure battle in the endless war between the traditionalists and the modernists. Last year the U.S. General Services  Administration chose Thomas Gordon Smith, once the dean of the Notre Dame  School of Architecture, as its chief architect. Smith was a neo-classicist determined to put a stop to the rampant modernism infecting public buildings--the Thom Mayne Syndrome, if you will. Smith wanted government buildings to return to the classical style of the early Republic--forgetting not only twentieth-century modernism, but also nineteenth-century Beaux Arts style. However, the modernists won this particular skirmish, forcing the GSA to relegate Smith to an advisory role.

Then Carol Ross Barney (I seem to recall that she was the first woman to head up an architecture firm in Chicago, but I could be wrong about that) was chosen to design a federal building and courthouse in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Republican Senator Richard Shelby objected to Barney's abstract take on classicism. Perhaps he found it too feminine. The job went to another Chicago architect, Thomas Beeby, whose Harold Washington Library Center is so aggressively classicist it's actually kind of lurid.

I don't know what Senator Shelby and the GSA had in mind for Tuscaloosa, but I would imagine they would be happy with an architectural version of the Roman legion classicism of Jean-Jacques David's Oath of the Horatii. There's nothing inherently wrong with classicism. As Richard Meier and Mies van der Rohe have both demonstrated, classicism and modernism aren't irreconcilable. But in the current context of our now tattered imperial ambitions and widespread cultural reaction, the GSA's turn toward the classical recalls an early flash point in the battle against the modern, Weimar Germany. Walter Benjamin dismissed Weimar neo-classicism as a "symptom of reaction," a revolt against modernity led by conservative elites. Benjamin regarded post-Renaissance classicism as inherently deceptive, flattering power with false totalities. Baroque allegory was one of several movements that tried to cut through its specious harmonies. Baudelairan proto-modernism was another.  Benjamin was heavily influenced by early modernism and the baroque as he refined his critical practice in the 1920's. Benjamin used a baroque eye to recognize how conservatives were using classicism to show "the compatibility of Weimar and Sedan," of  traditional German culture and militarism--years before Hitler made the combination the house style of the Reich.

The Weimar Republic existed in times even more politically charged than our own, and most likely the GSA classicists simply want people to trudge up marble steps before they do government business. But it's important to note that for all the objections voiced against modernism (ugliness, obscurity, reckless indifference to popular tastes and the messiness of history), classicism has its own baggage. It's not just a bunch of stately columns.

A City of Art

The real estate developer Hines has unveiled plans for a new 75-story tower by French architect Jean Nouvel to be built on land once owned by MoMA, which, under the terms of a complicated real estate deal, will receive three floors of the new building for exhibition space. The 40,000 additional square feet of space, Nicolai Ouroussoff implies, will make up for the shortcomings of the museum's three-year-old expansion, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi.

A building that's one half curatorial do-over and one half commercial opportunism doesn't promise to be anything but bland and exploitative, but happily, and unexpectedly, the developer chose the more daring of the two designs Nouvel was asked to submit. Ouroussoff goes so far as to proclaim that the building "promises to be the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation." Nouvel's gothic design departs not only from the restrained rationalism of Taniguchi's addition, but also from the heroic rationalism of the recent crop of supertalls under construction in Chicago. The Chicago towers use the new core and outrigger method of constructing  very tall skyscrapers. One advantage of the new method is more direct access to windows, but at the cost of a thick core. Nouvel's building uses external buttressing, a method common in post-World War II skyscrapers such as Chicago's John Hancock building. In fact, the building on the MoMA site resembles an Expressionist version of the Hancock tower, making the Nouvel's design fit more easily into the Modernist tradition than its extravagantly gothic structure might initially suggest.  Oh, and the VP's are going to love having their skyline views obscured by a steel buttress cutting across their windows.

The Nouvel design is also traditionally Modernist in its self-contained, city-within-a-city design that both intensifies the congestion of its Midtown setting and offers a respite from it. The MoMA block is developing into a city of art. Containing itself within one block, it segments itself off from the information economy structures surrounding it. In the city of art, skyscrapers sprout from sculpture gardens and galleries sprawl across buildings. The newest addition to the MoMA block underscores the tension between art and commerce within the museum, as well as the conflict between artists and the institutions of art that have defined the sequence of avant-garde art movements since Dada. Ouroussoff balefully notes that Hines is more daring and innovative than the Museum of Modern Art has been in recent years, indicating that the concepts of Madison Avenue marketing are currently ahead of the concepts that shape contemporary American art.

Delirious Chicago

Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York is a book specifically about New York City, but I think it goes a long way in explaining the architecture of irrational exuberance now infecting Chicago.  A depressed real estate market and an overburdened infrastructure haven't put a damper on some of the more delirious projects either active or proposed in the city, including the new Trump Tower, the Waterview Tower, the whirligig building, and most remarkably, the Chicago Spire.

Contrary to the popular belief that it takes a giant ego to build a skyscraper in New York, Koolhaas suggests it takes a bit of craziness. Koolhaas traces the origins of modern Manhattan to early twentieth-century Coney Island, which was inspired by "hopelessly obstinate desire to record and preserve a mirage." Luna Park, for instance, is the first city of towers.  The amusement park's towers, built in 1903, are pure illusion with no function other than to "overstimulate the imagination and keep any recognizable earthly realities at a distance." 

When towers finally migrate to Manhattan, they are, in a sense, functional illusions.  Their developers justify the giant buildings by claiming that businesses need them.  In this view tall buildings are inevitable, as if they were a plant native to Manhattan Island.  However, these giant climate-controlled machines for producing paperwork only appear to be rational.  Not only do skyscrapers exceed the human proportions of the Renaissance city, they also exceed the control of architects, who can no longer impose their individual wills on them.   Koolhaas sees the skyscraper as "the instrument of a new form of unknowable urbanism.  In spite of its physical solidity, the Skyscraper is the great metropolitan destabilizer: it promises perpetual programmatic instability."  The Empire State Building, for instance, has no real reason for being, and its hyper-efficient construction processes assumed a life of their own. The building is thoughtless.  "Pure product of process," Koolhaas writes, "Empire State can have no content.  The building is sheer envelope."

If the Empire State building is a kind of empty rationalism, an ego with neither an unconsciousness nor a  superego, the Rockefeller Center is an irrational fantasy realized in small, rational steps. Combining a concentrated urbanism and an artificial nature, Rockefeller Center is a collection of towers incorporating pre-modernist layers.  The towers rise from "the fabricated meadows of the new Babylon, the pink flamingos of the Japanese Garden and imported ruins donated by Mussolini." They are perfect Benjaminian objects--the sedimented, mythic past at the core of the modern.

Rockefeller Center, the "Garden City aloft," is the epitome of what Koolhaas regards as the fundamental principle of New York City: Manhattanism.  Koolhaas points out that New York architects and city planners have never really been serious about reducing congestion.  In fact, "the real enterprise of Manhattan's architects" is a "culture of congestion," which is the final expression of the inner logic of Manhattan's grid, laid out in 1807.  The traffic-clogged streets become Venetian canals, while buildings are cities within cities, islands in a modernized Venice.  New York City, like Nietzsche's Venice, is a collection of solitudes.

Manhattanism is congestion for congestion's sake, along with a pragmatism so obsessive that it becomes a kind of poetry. Manhattanism explains why Le Corbusier, the great rationalist architect of modernism, failed to realize if any of his grand schemes in New York.  Corbusier's Radiant City, which Koolhaas describes as "a majestic flow of humanist non sequiturs," is a proposal to erase all the great, crazy ideas upon which Manhattan was built and replace them with a uniform set of towers evenly planted in green spaces. He wanted to purify the city, and give its residents light and air. But he failed to comprehend New Yorkers' neurotic attraction to traffic and pollution, offering only the efficiency of banality in exchange.

Koolhaas sees architecture as an essentially otherworldly profession.  Architects are always designing for the great flood that will sweep away all of the historical clutter of cities. This may explain why Santiago Calatrava was inspired to design a 2,000-foot-tall sliver of ice in Chicago just as the Great Lakes are receding because of global warming. His invocation of snail shells in the building's design resembles the petrified remains of prehistorical global disasters.  Possibly the building's tepid and incredulous reception so far is because there's something apocalyptic about it.  Furthermore, I'm not sure that Chicagoans are ready to admit that the pragmatism of "the city that works" has reached the excessive, crazy, and poetic dimensions of Manhattan.

Treasures of the Soviet Avant-Garde

Nicolai Ouroussoff takes a wary look at Sergey Gordeev, a Russian real estate mogul with a weakness for Soviet avant-garde architecture. Ouroussoff first catches up with Gordeev at a symposium for the MoMA exhibition, "Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922-32," which features Richard Pare's photographs that convey "the fragile state of so many architectural monuments built in that heady era." Soviet architecture was lampooned as having all the subtlety of a construction boot, but actually much of it was delicate in appearance, as well as, occasionally, in structure. Early Soviet culture--before 1924 especially--was improvisatory and experimental. For a brief moment it may have been the most authentically avant-garde culture in history. Although Ouroussoff has his doubts about Gordeev's unlikely enthusiasm for Constructivism (note that the file name of the photograph of the Melnikov House above starts with "oligar," as in "oligarch"), it makes sense that the primitivist capitalists of contemporary Russia would feel an affinity with the Soviet avant-garde, with its touching faith in progress and the future in the midst of emerging totalitarianism.   

The 3 Penny, Plus Shipping and Handling, Opera

Dave Kehr takes a look at the Criterion Collection's re-release of G. W. Pabst's 1931 film adaptation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The 3 Penny Opera. As Kehr notes, Pabst was a logical choice for the adaptation--he was trained in the theater--but Brechtian experimental theater was evidently not to his tastes. Pabst let some songs go only as long as he could stand them, while others he couldn't bring himself to film at all. Although the original 1928 play was a popular success, Pabst's film version wasn't.

Pabst is invariably classified as a realist, and Brecht is often classified as one as well, albeit with less certainty. Pabst and Brecht each represented very different examples of what happens when realism is imbued with an explicit or implicit political purpose. Pabst was the most prominent film director of the neue Sachlichkeit ("the new objectivity") which entered German society and art during the 1920's. Reacting to the overwhelming phenomenon of defeat and economic collapse after World War I, Germans were determined to see things objectively, but in a way they never had before: infected by cynicism, disillusionment, and an almost masochistic sense of resignation to things are they are. In his best-known film, The Joyless Street (1925), Pabst's static, unblinking camera eye watches as two young women, one of them played by Greta Garbo in her German film debut (by the way, if you want to know why people made such a fuss over her, watch the scene in which she first appears), sell themselves into prostitution to save their financially ruined families. With no sentimentality or symbolism whatsoever, Pabst follows the women as they amuse wealthy clients at opulent blackmarket nightclubs while the women's families scramble for food. 

Brecht's 3 Penny Opera might seem farcical and frivolous by comparison, but Brecht's play represents a very different approach to the same social problem. Instead of Pabst's shrugging depiction of exploitation, Brecht wanted to use the theater to involve his working class audiences in a broad political and philosophical vision of the material struggles that divided society. He set out to restore realistic art the principles of play, artistic experimentation, and genuine aesthetic gratification that the neue Sachlichkeit mopes had replaced with the downcast reflection of the world. Brecht overcame the age-old dilemmas of a didactic theory of art (to teach or to please?) in a vision that was scientific in the best sense: imbued with curiosity along with a willingness to experiment and to fail, popularly and aesthetically. Brecht was proud of the popular success of The 3 Penny Opera with the same working classes Pabst sequestered in the dreary back streets of Vienna, and for a brief time he and Walter Benjamin thought they'd found the recipe for a genuinely Marxist aesthetic practice. Alas, Brecht's plays were met with indifference when performed for workers in an actual Marxist state (East Germany), and his exuberant estrangement effects fell out of favor with post-war Western intellectuals under the spell of Samuel Beckett.

Pabst's 3 Penny Opera, restored from the original camera negative in 2005, recalls a time when depressed Germans were looking for a way out of their miseries, and Brecht offered a vision of a very different future than the one that eventually unfolded.

Traces of the True

Yesterday I introduced Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics. I'd like to take a closer look at his remarks about modernism, which, in all their ambivalence, bear a striking resemblance to Walter Benjamin's sometimes contradictory writings on modernism.

The full force of Rancière's claim that the political and the aesthetic are intricately related becomes clear when he takes up the issue of technology and the aesthetic. "The aesthetic regime of the arts," he writes, "is the true name for what is designated by the incoherent label 'modernity.'" Under the aesthetic regime the arts freed themselves from all the old rules, but, at the same time, neglected mimesis, the salient quality of the previous regime, the poetic. The loss of mimesis meant art cut itself off from the "spheres of collective experience." This appeal to the experiential nature of art and modernity is familiar from Benjamin, as well as Oakeshott and the British Marxists of the 1960's, when Rancière was an Althusserian. The Marxist tradition, in its Western European manifestation, mourned the general decline of experience in modernity, when cultural and economic forms had less and less to do with how people actually lived. Worse, the abstraction of economic relations--and modern art--drained ordinary experience of all substance and precluded most forms of collective political action.

And yet, virtually all of Rancière's examples of the aesthetic intervening in the political occur under the aesthetic regime of the arts, when art had supposedly retreated from collective experience into contemplation of its own perfect forms. In his discussion of Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Rancière expresses some reservations about Benjamin's essay, as everyone does, then goes on to acknowledge how much he's learned from it--again, as everyone does. Rancière makes the startling claim that literature and painting were, in effect, the true leading edge of modernity. Following Benjamin, Rancière points out that literature discovered the subject matter of photography before photographers did. In fact, the great Realists Balzac, Hugo and Flaubert broke down the opposition between high and low culture long before reproductive technologies did. Rancière concludes,

On the one hand, the technological revolution comes after the aesthetic revolution. On the other hand, however, the aesthetic revolution is first of all the honour acquired by the commonplace, which is pictorial and literary before being photographic or cinematic.

This is where Rancière is far more interesting than his complaints about modernism. He says that literature conducted a symptomatic investigation of history long before historians or scientists did. By extension (Rancière himself doesn't make these claims), the economic theory of Adam Smith isn't possible without the rise of the pastoral tradition in English poetry during the eighteenth century, nor psychology possible without the Romantic poets. Freud himself once admitted that everything he discovered about the human psyche was already known to the Romantics. Stephen Greenblatt shows us in his study of Columbus's diaries in "Marvelous Possessions" that the entire conquest of the New World was made possible by writing.

Rancière concludes his remarks about technology's role in modernity with a Benjaminian flourish. As Benjamin knew, we can no longer see ordinary life directly because we no longer trust mimesis. Instead, as Rancière puts it, "the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And the ordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure." First of all, this is a pretty succinct description of Benjamin's critical practice. Second, the social sciences, with their dry empiricism and disdain for the figurative, were in fact founded upon the phantasmagoric nature of the true, only they've forgotten this origin. Rancière accuses modern art of just this type of forgetting, only to explain how we can't see ordinary life, the fertile ground of the political, unless we see it aesthetically.

Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics

We've been taught that Richard III is a political play, but what about A Midsummer's Night Dream? Picasso's Guernica is obviously political, but can we say the same thing about Malevich's Black Square? If we were inclined to talk about Black Square as a political work, how would we do that?

Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible gives us a way to talk about the political meaning of art that's both powerful and limited. He makes historical comparisons easy, but his theory of art and the political doesn't offer a means to read a work closely for its political implications, although he doesn't preclude such a reading. He also regards modernism as something of a historical dead end, a view I don't share. Rancière's theory of art and politics is worth considering, at the very least, because it's elegant and simple. According to Rancière, art is one means by which a culture determines what is perceived and what enters language, as well as who gets to do the perceiving and writing or painting. In short, art represents a distribution of the sensible. He says that art

is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.

Art has its own way of doing and perceiving, and changes in aesthetics cause epochal changes in ways people perceive and reflect upon the world around them.

In this short book Rancière provides few examples that exemplify this or that distribution of the sensible, but two examples stand out, each marking an important change in Western culture.

The first involves the arrival of Renaissance quattrocento painting, which introduced three-dimensional space in order to capture the immediacy of live speech and action. Giotto and those who followed him eschewed not only the iconic work of the Middle Ages, but also Plato's separation of art and living. The return of two-dimensional pictoral space in Modernism, Rancière claims, reflects a technology-saturated world of pages, screens, and interfaces between different media, including different artistic genres. Malevich's Black Square, for example, depicts the interface between typography and painting, a prevalent theme in a lot of explicitly political art in High Modernism. That this interface now strikes us as commonplace doesn't vitiate its initial impact or the political gesture of pointing to emergent forms of life.

Modernism not only broke down the neo-classical separation of the arts from each other, it also incorporated new subject matter into high art. The plein air painters of the mid-nineteenth century were one strain of the massive re-distribution of the sensible during the 1800's. Another was literary Realism, which emerged around the same time. Rancière discusses the proto-modernist Flaubert, who refused to give any particular emphasis to anything that found its way into his fiction. When Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education first appeared, they were hailed as democratic, even revolutionary works, "despite Flaubert's aristocratic situation and political conformism," Rancière dryly adds. For Rancière, Flaubert's indifference to the bourgeois material of his fiction

is the result of a poetic bias: the equality of all subject matter is the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is this indifference after all if not the very quality of everything that comes to pass on a written page, available to everyone's eyes? This equality destroys all of the hierarchies of representation and also establishes a community of readers as a community without legitimacy, a community formed only by the random circulation of the written word.

This last remark, with which I disagree, points to an affinity Rancière has with Walter Benjamin, whom I also disagree with about the possibility of the novel as the basis for community, or less abstractly, of exchangeable experience. In my next post I'll talk more about Rancière's debt to Walter Benjamin.

The Best 21st-Century Chicago Buildings, So Far

Chicago has always considered itself to be the birthplace of modern architecture, even though it's only recently bothered to preserve the important buildings in the development of modernism. After the Sears Tower was completed in 1974 the city underwent a prolonged aesthetic slump, but now the city is on a hot streak architecturally, notwithstanding a few duds like the fat man in the bathtub renovation of Soldiers Field.

The trio of supertalls currently under construction have been getting a lot of press lately, and Chicago Magazine looks at ten distinguished smaller-scaled buildings completed since 2000. Overall, it's a good list, although, of course, one could quarrel with some of the choices and oversights. One glaring omission is Rem Koolhaas's McCormick Tribune Campus Center at IIT. The more I see of  Perkins + Wills' Boeing Building, the more I like it.

Here are a few brief observations on some of the buildings on the Chicago list.

The Contemporaine (2006), Perkins + Will. This building is only a few blocks from where I work, and I must have walked past it a dozen times before I happened to glance up and saw what a remarkable building it is. It's the best residential building in River North, by far, but it doesn't relate well to the street. The exterior is forbidding, even a little grubby, especially on the Grand Street side. And the street-level store, which sells vintage Swedish modern furniture, is cramped and dark. But above street level, it's a great building. Judging from the profusion of plants that overflow the balconies, the residents really like living there. Ralph Johnson, the principal designer of the building, has another striking building at 1 N. Halsted.

The Spertus Institute of  Jewish Studies (2007), Krueck & Sexton Architects. I haven't made it over to Michigan Avenue yet to check this building out, but it's already gotten a lot of attention. Considering it's the premier street in the city, Michigan Avenue doesn't have much good architecture. Stanley Tigerman's Gap Store is an exception, and the Spertus Institute may be another, although it may also be an ordinary building with a quirky facade. It's worth checking out once it's finished.

The Sofitel (2002), Jean-Paul Viguier, architect. This building is the best of the new lux hotels, although I like the Park Hyatt more than some of the critics I've read. The Sofitel is clean and elegant, like Richard Meier's best buildings. The interior, though, is another matter. My wife and I looked at the Sofitel for our wedding reception. The cheesy main staircase and ballrooms reminded my wife, who lived in France for a year, of the tacky socks French men like to wear. Still, the exterior is what Chicago's W hotels would like to be, but aren't.

Jay Pritzker Music Pavilion (2004), Frank Gehry, architect. I don't know--I don't think this is such a great building. Sitting in the stands under the canopy is nice enough, if only because one can say, "we have curlicues of our own, just like Bilbao and LA!" To be fair, I would imagine a bandshell is a tough shape to work with, and Gehry's effort is a lot better than the old Petrillo bandshell. Standing outside the Pavilion, though, the swirls look like cheap theatrical props. Whatever effect Gehry was going for with his signature design motif totally vanishes once you step out into Millennium Park. A great building should be great from every angle, not just from the one the architect prefers.

A Tale of Two Buildings

Today Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin reports on some good news and some bad news. The good news is that the famous ornamental ironwork on Louis Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott & Co. State Street store will be restored, with help from a grant from the city of Chicago's Department of Planning and Development. The bad news: wrecking crews suddenly descended on the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church (photo above, courtesy of this person's Flickr account) in the Pilsen section of the city. The 1965 modernist structure was designed by Edward Dart, who also designed Water Tower Place, which is where Oprah lives.

This tale of two buildings illustrates the precarious state of many modernist buildings, especially the smaller structures outside urban centers.  There are well-publicized instances of important modernist buildings being threatened with demolition. The Ameritrust Tower story turned out badly: it's going to be demolished. Other buildings enjoyed happier endings: Mies van der Rohe's Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC, a glass steambox with broken elevators, will be renovated. Eero Saarinen's Bell Laboratories complex in Holmdel, NJ will retain most of its important architectural features in a redevelopment.

Smaller modernist structures have fared less well. Kamin warns that Chicago's preservation rules only reliably protect buildings built before 1939, leaving virtually all post-World War II structures vulnerable to a quick pull down. Part of the problem is our definition of the historical. Anything Victorian is indisputably historical. The pre-Victorian is positively sacred, as Philadelphia discovered when the Bookbinder's restaurant wanted to tear down a nondescript 18th-century building for a parking lot expansion. The threatened building was a homely little box of no historical or aesthetic interest except for being old. Nevertheless, there was a loud public outcry for its preservation. People were still squabbling about it when I moved from Philly a few years ago.

Mid-sized modernist commercial buildings find themselves in a Russian roulette of redevelopment. The Beekman Theater on the Upper East Side of New York was demolished in 2005. The previous year another important modernist theater was renovated beyond recognition. Modernist houses are even more vulnerable. They're often viewed as obsolete and, because the modernist domestic architecture aesthetic called for small houses on large lots--Philip Johnson's Glass House is only 1,700 square feet, but is surrounded by acres of property--they're tantalizing targets for tear-downs. Some municipalities are finally moving to preserve their mid-century houses. New Canaan, Connecticut is trying to save its 90 mid-century modern residences. My new home town, Wilmette, Illinois, supposedly has a program to preserve its mid-century modern structures, but judging from the obese McMansions wedged in among the mid-century houses in my neighborhood, the program hasn't been very effective.

Not only can they be beautiful objects in their own right, mid-century modern buildings were built during a pivotal era in the history of middle-class American life.  Modernism was already over a half-century old when the American middle classes introduced it to their main streets and welcomed it in their private homes. Mid-century modernism was the first design aesthetic that corresponded to the middle class's social and political position. Leaving behind the architectural styles of pre-capitalism, the American middle classes finally built structures that reflected the industrial, technological, and political changes their class had brought about. The endangered quality of these structures says a lot about our current historical consciousness.

Intimacy in Global Space

Nicolai Ouroussoff pays a visit to the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, who won the Pritzker Prize in 1992. Although Siza has never attracted the international attention that flashier architects like Frank Gehry have enjoyed, Ouroussoff declares that Siza "has steadily assembled a body of work that ranks him among the greatest architects of his generation, and his creative voice has never seemed more relevant than now."

Why is this architect who has hardly built anything outside the Portuguese-speaking world so relevant? To begin with, Siza's buildings are "mesmerizing," an adjective Ouroussoff uses twice to describe Siza's work. In contrast to, say, Santiago Calatrava, who is known for his giant ice sculpture buildings, or Hemut Jahn's techno minimalism, Siza's modernism is warm and sensual. He's a sort of Alvar Aalto of the sub-tropics. However, the key to Siza's work is not just his use of materials, but the way he arranges space.

Ouroussoff tours three Siza buildings, including the architect's latest project, the Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Ouroussoff locates the essence of Siza's work in the experience of walking through his buildings, in the way materials and spaces unfold as one walks, slowly, through each room. The progressions of spaces within the Iberê Camargo museum, for instance, "forge a closely calibrated architectural narrative, regulating your pace through the site." The museum features galleries around a central atrium. Connecting the galleries are long, dark passageways with small windows affording glimpses of the cityscape (image above, swiped from the New York Times article). Ouroussoff remarks, "the passageways are . . . a way of drawing out the time spent in thought, allowing us to absorb more fully what we have just experienced. In a way they are Mr. Siza's rejoinder to the ruthless pace of global consumerism."

This is an architecture of phenomenology rather than symbolism. The unfolding of gallery and passageway, interior space and framed cityscape, enacts Bachelard's dialectic of division, of inside and outside, yes and no, which Bachelard warns, can come to "govern all thoughts of positive and negative." Siza may offer contemplative spaces, but that doesn't mean his spaces aren't as controlling as any other modernist architectural form.

Ouroussoff writes that Siza's spaces are a rejoinder to global capitalism and "the bold and delirious forms churned out by celebrated architects today [that] mirror social upheavals," while serving "to camouflage the damage." The reverie of a maternal, womblike, space that's both sheltering and remote is a symptomatic response to the experience of an unheimlich modernity. On this level Ouroussoff's view of Siza is nostalgic. Siza's work is elegant, and the appeal of a warm modernism is enduring, but one should be aware of what Siza excludes. Two more expansive models for a Latin American modernism are the more permeable spaces of Enríque Norten and the more socially-conscious buildings of Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha.

Siza's work encapsulates modernism's still unresolved dilemma between embracing technology as the essence of modernity and revealing technology's bad side. His work may be nostalgic, but then again so is all modernism at this point. Besides, as Walter Benjamin has taught us, nostalgia can also point to unresolved social conflicts. Siza's buildings address a social need for intimate public space in which we can contemplate artworks--or other people. What's remarkable, even revolutionary, about Siza's public buildings is that they offer a hierarchy of intimacy that we've largely lost even within our own homes, dispersed, as they are for Americans, in the horizonless suburbs or stacked indifferently in the city, with every space wired to every other one.

Coop Himmelb(l)au's New Akron Art Museum

Yesterday was the official opening of the extension to the Akron Art Museum. The new extension, designed by the Vienna-based firm Coop Himmelb(l)au, has been given the unpromising nickname of "space junk" by grumpy Akroners unhappy with the building's jarringly postmodern forms. Blair Kamin likes the unconventional outside of the building but deducts points for tame conformity of the galleries. Despite grumblings of dissent, he says architect Wolf Prix's extension "delivers a jolt of energy to a  reviving Middle American city."

Akron was once the rubber capital of the world, but now it's trying on some other identities. While some Akroners may not be too keen on their new piece of Austrian exotica, the brash, jumbled forms of Prix's extension perfectly represent the historical plight of a smokestack city trying to reinvent itself as a  post-industrial urban space.

It's no small exaggeration to say that Akron once existed solely to make tires. The city exemplified Plato's segregation of artisans from other forms of public life, including political discourse (artisans didn't have the time to bother themselves with the affairs of the polis). This strict limitation to making and doing carried over to the city's attitude about the fine arts. The core Akron Art Museum is a Renaissance Revival building originally constructed as a post office. That the art museum was housed in a building with such modestly functional origins says much about the city's preference for artisanal and representation art. Appropriately, the museum's 1850 to 1950 collection is heavy with representational and regional art.

To a significant degree the museum's post-1950 collection remains true to representational art. One of its prized pieces is Chuck Close's photorealist painting Linda. But the post-war collection, considered to be the museum's strength, also includes artworks that break down the traditional division of fine arts into painting and sculpture, each with their own ranges of appropriate subject matter. Two examples of paradigm-breaking artworks are the Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo's installation Atrabiliairios and Frank Stella's Diepholz, which combines both painting and sculpture. These postmodern works have narrative and linguistic dimensions totally foreign to the purely optical American Impressionism of the 1850-1950 galleries.

Replacing the purity of vision with the raucous play of image and word is a familiar postmodern move, and one that's analogous to the recent history of Akron itself. Once it made tires; now it's trying to find its place in the trans-national circulation of words and symbols in the globalized economy. Making and doing have been replaced by the analysis of symbols and signs. The Internet-based economy dissolves all the old divisions between copy and original, word and image, two and three-dimensional space.  Prix even refers to his extension of the Akron Art Museum as a "three-dimensional sign."

Prix divided the extension into three sections: "Gallery Box," "Crystal," and " Roof Cloud." Each section is stylistically distinct, but all three represent a radical departure from the original building. Prix's discontinuities and disruptions place him squarely in postmodernism's late, traumatic phase (as opposed to its early, carnivalesque phase). The "space junk" extension signals an abrupt departure from the grand historical narratives of industrialization (bounty for all, eventually) and Renaissance humanism (toward a perfect humankind)--an aesthetic departure as abrupt and traumatic as the departure of manufacturing jobs from Akron.

The Search for the Modern: Cheeverville

Our search for the modern has taken a decisive turn. After a long search for affordable modern design house, we're due to close next week on a 1955 split level in Wilmette, IL. We're buying the house "as-is" and remodeling it. The story of our remodeling effort will be told in a new blog called The Next Mid-Century, which will be maintained by my wife Sarah. (Gee, I hope she links to my site someday.)

Our search for a modern house has been much more difficult than it should have been. Modernist design originally meant embracing the technological and the mass-produced. A century later modern design has become an elite realm of exquisite objects reserved for connoisseurs. A reproduction four-shelf bookcase designed by Marcel Breuer, the last director of the Bauhaus, retails for $2,225. Mass-produced objects from a socialist design school have become as fetishized as any hand-made period piece from the reign of Louis XIV.  It's as if Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" was never written.  There are, of course, instances of modern design that attempt to change the world around it rather than sealing itself off within glass walls: Helmut Jahn's Near North Apartments in Chicago and Andrew Zago's Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit are two examples I've discussed in this space. Ikea is another example of modernism for the masses. Still, for the most part the design objects available to people of ordinary means are historically inaccurate reproductions from earlier, less democratic stages of capitalism.

We're not yet sure who designed our Wilmette house, but it's not a typical suburban split level. Best known for its posh pre-World War II lake front homes, a large part of Wilmette resembles the post-war suburban landscape of John Cheever's fiction, with its restless commuters and free-flowing cocktails. We looked at several houses built in the 1950's and early '60's that still had their original owners and much of their original decor. You could practically hear the martini shakers. Our house has gently pitched roofs, off-center lighting fixtures, awning windows, a cramped '50's kitchen, and no garage. The house is near that quintessential mid-century object, the interstate.

We're halfway between the last mid-century and the next, and we're now cognizant of our moment in natural history as well as the history of middle-class American life. So we're going to turn our 1955 house into a green home in order to save the planet. As my wife's blog will no doubt show, going green will not only be a complicated construction project, but also a complex ethical project.  There's a new mid-century modern to be created. Next month we'll start planning it all out while drinking martinis on our back porch.