How things got to be the way they are now
Vincent Scully
The events of the past fifteen years have been truly amazing. An entire way of thinking about architecture has been called into question and, in many instances, has already been almost entirely replaced by other sets of ideas in the minds of the young. I refer in general to what Europeans have normally
called the Modern Movement but specifically to that aspect of it which has in America usually been described as the International Style. That style was rigorously exclusive and puristically hermetic and, it must be admitted, rather paranoiac in its conceptual stance. Its urbanism was therefore destructive
of the traditional city, while its individual buildings were normally hostile to those which preceded them and with which in consequence they got along very badly. In Europe those catastrophic results were rationalized as a necessary clearing away of old styles of life, and the levelling process which ensued was patiently suffered as an inevitable step toward the creation of a new, socialist society. The old architecture was seen as the embodiment of upper class attitudes, the new, however as yet partial and faulty, as the first signs of a new proletarian language of form. Those hopes, or illusions, have by now been sadly deceived. Modern architecture has accommodated itself most comfortably to the objectives and methods of the capitalist entrepreneur, the ruthless
devloppeur at his worst.
It has enabled him to build sloppily, nastily, and without love for anyone or anything, neither for those who use his constructions nor for the materials out of which they are made. Applied urbanistically in somewhat more idealistic, governmental terms, the principles of modern urbanism have produced ever more thorough-going horrors. One notes the nightmare of Créteil.
In America, the Modern Movement was seen in more purely formalistic rather than in sociological or even in methodological terms. This was at least a more realistic view, since intentions and methods in architecture must be judged by the environments they produce--by, that is, their forms. It is true that some European pedagogues in America, especially Gropius, confused the shape of the problem by in fact separating form and method: the latter functionally and structurally deterministic, the former neo-De Stijl. Because of this, and because few social hopes ever really rode on the International Style in American thinking, it came as little surprise that Modern Architecture was soon perceived to be serving Mammon more successfully than it did Marx, and that Gropius himself was able to produce one of the most urbanistically destructive of all corporate skyscrapers, the Pan American building. This, like a typical Bauhaus design object, and over the objections of Emory Roth, the hard-nosed collaborating architect, was placed on a cross axis to the existing tower of the Grand Central Office Building and so destroyed the shape and the sweep of Park Avenue forever. It is a sign of the developing power of cities to protect themselves and of the growing determination of their citizens to fight for their existence that New York was later able, through legal means, to prevent the destruction of the rest of Grand Central Station by Gropius' disciple, Marcel Breuer. Since that time, the preservation, conservation, and rehabilitation of old buildings and of old neighborhoods as a whole has become the major hallmark of advanced urbanistic thinking in America. Only the remaining bureaucrats of the Redevelopment Agencies, who obdurately continue to wear headlights for brains, are still trying to rip cities apart for those ravishing high speed connectors which Le Corbusier and Giedion hailed. They are still doing enormous damage, but their days are numbered for many deep reasons, ranging from ethics to energy, which can best be discussed later. Too late, however, for millions of America's poor, who were dispossessed of their neighborhoods under Redevelopment's Middle-Class Socialism of the nineteen-sixties, whereby a coalition of suburbanites with Center City merchants and bankers tore the fabric of our towns apart for the benefit of the automobile and its shopping center trade. How like the Ville Radieuse the result came to look: cars rushing through the empty space, large corporate structures standing in vast areas of parking. And why not? Le Corbusier's vision had finally come to pass, since the poor, as he had demanded long ago, had at last been banished from the town.
The same thing happened in the new Corbusian city of Brasilia. It is no wonder that young European architects like the Kriers, with those awful examples before their eyes, have turned back to traditional European urbanism, as in Leon Krier's project for La Villette, where solid blocks of housing and traditionally scaled streets - from which, however, the automobile has largely been banished--reassert traditional, pre-Modern Movement values once more. One can only applaud the intentions of such architects no less than the stern beauty of their forms. It is true, perhaps, that the polemic they now support was proposed in America fifteen years or more ago, when the ravages of Redevelopment first became apparent there. Plenty of American writing in this vein exists from that period, some of it published in Zodiac and other European publications. It is sometimes forgotten, too, that the suburb and the strip are fundamental urbanistic realities in America, entities of their own which need not destroy Center City, and they are not likely to change except under the pressure of energy shortages whose effects may conceivably lead, however, toward more decentralization rather than less if the problem of transportation can be solved. Hence American architects have had to deal realistically with America's existing urbanistic patterns, and in the past fifteen years, largely through the example of Robert Venturi, they have increasingly learned how to do so and how to create a reasonable and humane architecture out of the process. That is why architects like Robert Stern can propose "Subway Suburbs" rather than new Karl Marx Houses for the devastated centers of our
towns. The symbol of freedom and achievement in America is still the single-family house, and the fact that the Nazis, for example, consciously made use both of that program and of vernacular forms in order to disperse the solidarity of the working class should not blind Europeans to the different set of conditions obtaining in the United States. There the population does not like to think of itself as working class, but leaving that perhaps regrettable turn of mind aside for a moment, it does not want to inhabit large project blocks either and has none of the sense of unity, pride, and defiance in their Gemeinde Bauten that the working people of Social Democratic Vienna so heroically showed and so splendidly embodied in their buildings.
The Viennese workers were living as they wanted to live; that is exactly what American workers need to do, and what they want, rightly or wrongly--and his sorry performance as a social engineer during the International Style period indicates that it is not for the architect to say--is a house. Moreover, it is not easy to grasp, unless one has seen it, how devastated urban America has become, what vast empty areas, as in the South Bronx, are now available on existing rapid mass transit lines for building up in quite moderate density as single family homes with the symbolic values which those who will inhabit them want to have.
Here we touch on one of the terrible facts of the present moment, especially in the United States. It is the agony of the black population, now legislated into civil equality but crushingly disadvantaged, under-employed, badly educated, isolated in fearsome ghettoes, and rapidly coming to the conclusion that they have nothing whatever to hope for from society. Their desperation and the terror of their anger haunt urban America in ways few Europeans have had occasion to experience. Only a massive program of jobs, housing, and education at the national level has the slightest hope of saving them (which means, of course, everyone else as well), and such a program is highly unlikely in the state of public opinion and government policy. Priorities lie with non-productive military spending, and this, coupled with the rising price of oil, is creating a runaway inflation which is rapidly destroying the middle class and may well end by bringing the whole economic structure down. Somehow, though, there is still work for architects to do--more than there was a few years ago, and the rising prices are still finding customers to pay them. Yet, under these threatening circumstances, it is no wonder that "The Presence of the Past" as it is now functioning in American architecture, has to do largely with a reassessment of traditional, vernacular values by architects and critics alike. There is a strong feeling, comparable to that which produced the first Shingle Style in the eighteen-seventies and eighties, that America has forgotten some of its most important virtues and that they need to be revived once more. Among these is a resistance to consumerism, a belief that we once got along well with a lot less and would be better off to do so again. Related to that point of view, now as in the eighteen-seventies, has come a new interest in the forms of vernacular architecture, especially those deriving from the American tradition of domestic building in wood. The most striking fact to be observed in architecture throughout the country is precisely this reappearance of vernacular and traditional forms, from the Shingle Style of Venturi, Moore, and Stern (though they all do other things as well) to the hallucinatory combinations of styles practised by T. Gordon Smith and the academically "correct" if rather Lutyens-like classicism of Allan Greenberg. It is clear that a liberation has occurred in the United States which is, simply in terms of
conceptual freedom, far beyond anything which has happened in Europe during the past fifteen years. That liberation began to take shape through the work and teaching of a man whose reputation throughout the world has now attained mythic proportions. I refer of course to Louis I. Kahn. It is especially striking that the influence of Kahn has been one thing in America and another in Europe. The facts are apparent: Kahn broke up the International Style as a set of forms. He brought mass and weight back to architecture, not in terms of late Corbusian sculptural gymnastics but in directly structural terms. As he developed, Kahn began to take the process of building itself apart and to reconstitute it in beautifuily clear, lucid, rationalized ways, in terms of structure and function alike. In the Yale Art Gallery of 1951-53 he stated his intention, even if the results were as yet not wholly clear. At Trenton in 1955 he penetrated back to the ultimate questions: geometry and material, ideal and real, man in the center and the first archetypal environmental shapes of square and circle taking position around him. By 1960, at the University of Pennsylvania, the function has reshaped the building as a set of towers - a wholly non-International Style form. The structure articulates the mass into a totally integrated body, the product of a system--or so it appears--rather than of a whim. A tragic solemnity results. Yet the functional analysis is highly arbitrary. It doesn't really work too well: the work spaces are small, the services complicated and there is no sun protection. But Kahn goes on. At Rochester he reshapes the wall in terms of environmental layering, reconstitutes the space and rnassinq in terms of his newly conceived theory of Form and Design.
Through this he reconciles the idealist neo-Platonic abstraction of the International Style with a realistic concern for material reality and functional particularity. Ideal Form is in the mind: it is subjected to pressure from the specific demands of the program and so deforms itself to a certain extent. If
it is pushed too far to retain its integrity as a shape, a new Form is sought. An equilibrium is found, for Kahn always a geometric one. The principles of the Beaux-Arts in which Kahn had been trained at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1920's now reassert themselves. Space is analyzed according to function but is systematized according to the demands of the structural fabric. An eloquent dialogue is set up between frame and screen. The method is very close to that of the neo-Greek of Labrouste at the Bibliotheque Ste. Genevieve of 1843-50, since brilliantly studied by Neil Levine. (Arthur Drexler's enormously influential exhibition of Beaux-Arts drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975 derived in large part from these developments.) By the early sixties Kahn's reassessment of the past had given him a new grasp on what he wanted to do, and the mature masterpieces appeared: Bryn Mawr, Salk, Fort Worth, the Mellon Center - the latter his last building and the most strictly neo-Greek of all. In it the pervasive presence and influence of Mies van der Rohe's work in America is recalled.
If we see Mies' American buildings for what they were, a union in the schematic terms of the Modern Movement of the neo-Greek and classicizing tradi-
tions which had both had a place within the old Beaux Arts academic system--and which were indeed of its Real and Ideal sides--we can perhaps
understand how the pre-conditions for Kahn's further breakthrough, back to traditional mass and body, existed in the United States more than they did in Europe. Still, Kahn's work, like Mies', remained abstract and schematic in detail. He too rigorously avoided eclectic quotations or, in other than structural terms, decoration of any kind. If he goes back to Rome, as he does from 1950 onward, under the influence of Frank E.' Brown and others, the results are structural and geometric. He develops Roman brickwork and reverses the Roman relieving-arch and lintel technique to produce his Brick Order for India and Bangladesh. With all this his buildings there become more and more abstract. Their scale is universal, hard to particularize. Though developed out of considerations of function (primarily the reception of light) and structure, they seem to escape such rational identifications and to move out into some timeless, motionless landscape of dream. This is clearly what Kahn wanted. So he ignored Roman decoration and Roman semiotics alike, avoiding the gesture of
the building as symbolic embodiment or urban sign.
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His buildings must be still, wholly silent, essential, immanent, not compromised by action. This quality in Kahn's work was to exert the strongest influence in Europe, perhaps in part because it was easier to idealize Kahn at that distance, or perhaps, more basically, because of the deeply seated European tradition of Ideal, Neo-Platonic design. In America, among Kahn's most important students, colleagues and followers, the effect was different. Kahn's new forms became suggestions for active gestures. A good example is his famous project for Roman "ruins wrapped around buildings" as sun protectors for the Salk Community Center. They are pure facades but are organized in an ideal, abstract, timeless context. Venturi takes them, as in his Guild House of 1960, and turns them into the American false front to set the scale of Main Street and to gesture toward it as a sign. "Main Street is almost all right," Venturi was to say, so turning right around the I nternational Style's destructive contempt for the urban vernacular. To enhance the point of his decisive gesture Venturi calls the abstract metal sculpture which crowns his facade a television aerial (which it is not), so endowing it with sign values at once realistic, popular, and ironic. Kahn reacted bitterly to that realism and attacked it in public. His design remained Ideal, and abstract, and was thus still linked in part to International Style puristic objectives. Venturi's moves to the real and the associational and thus brings back the third component of 19th-century Beaux-Arts style: the associational and symbolic one.
Labrouste's Bibliotheque Ste. Genevieve, for example, was not only functional and structural but also consciously descriptive and symbolic, invoking with its spare but dense decoration the heroic and civilized graces of the past and inscribing the names of the writers of its books upon its screening walls.
It was precisely in this turn toward symbol that Venturi's work exerted its greatest impact. It was the essential component needed to bring architecture wholly to life once more, because human beings live by symbols, and when those are touched the core of the human adjustment to life is affected. So Venturi's epoch-making Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, of 1966, which dealt largely with our physical responses to architectural form, was joined by his Learning From Las Vegas, of 1972 (written with Denise Scott-Brown and Steve Izenour), which dealt largely with symbolism in associational terms. In his enthusiasm for this renewed dimension, Venturi may sometimes have tended to separate the physical and associational effects of form more than they in reality can or should be (they are both learned responses, largely culturally coded, and they both cannot help but convey and embody meaning--so that ignoring the empathetically physical, for example, can reduce the semiotics of architecture to an overly restrictive linguistic mode), but his ability to derive architectural expression from the popular culture was the final break with the International Style's snobbery of form. So his work picked up the vernacular, whether of New York apartment houses at Brighton Beach (such a magnificent adjustment to the site and so terrifying to some of its jurors) or of the signs of the strip in the leap and shout of his Fire Station No.4 for Columbus, Indiana. Starting back exactly where Frank Lloyd Wright had begun in 1889, with the archetypal frontal gable, he revived the Shingle Style tradition and produced new examples of a living vernacular in his Trubek and Wislocki houses on Nantucket. As the old sym- bols come alive the attitude toward creation changes. Where, for example is the architect as romantically conceived if a true vernacular holds sway? In a healthier position, one might answer, but the bulk of the architectural profession, trained to believe that it was not only the guardian of esoteric experience but also reinvented the wheel in every design, at first did not think so. Hence the rage which Venturi's work aroused among professionals was unequalled for knee-jerk violence since that which had been directed against Le Corbusier almost two generations before. And, despite the 180° difference in objectives and forms, the reason was the same: the nerve had been touched. One could not help but realize that the rules of the game had changed. Architecture was wholly real and dangerous once more. Out of this revitalization has grown the lively dialogue which now exists among architects in the United States. They, of all artists and critics (with of course some spectacularly sullen exceptions), are now the most liberated and therefore have the most to say, the liveliest ideas, and the greatest capacity to sustain argument and disagreement with wit and good humor, avoiding the paranoid reactions of the International Style period. That old way had indeed come to be a shouting of slogans, precisely because it had unrealistically sought to exlude vast and natural areas of artistic experience, especially those related to associational values. The new way is, as Charles
Moore pointed out, an inclusive one. It is interested in everything. Anything may be of value and may suggest new and better things. Those European architects and critics who are most wedded to ideological considerations have tended to become irritated at this American attitude.
It is my belief that they should not be. Concern for truth wherever it may lead, for reality however upsetting, for experience and knowledge however counter to preconceptual patterns, cannot help but lead toward a better grasp of the substructural facts of things and thus toward a better architecture no less than a juster society and a more rational world. They surely cannot help, in any event, but set the stage for a more varied, resonant, and effective architecture, and it seems to me that this present exhibition in Venice offers enormous promise for that. It is not the decayed detritus of a betrayed Modern Movement, as some would probably like to see it, but the yeasty material, just beginning to rise, of the more humanly complex architecture which could, under proper economic and political conditions, help shape a better human future. Perhaps many other important architects should have been included in it, but were excluded because their work did not seem especially relevant to the chosen theme. One thinks in Europe of any number of people from Bbhm to Lasdun, in America of Roche Dinkeloo, Richard Meier, Eisenman, and many others. Among them the absence of Jaquelin Robertson is especially regrettable not only because of Robertson's special link with Southern traditions but also because his Seltzer house of almost a decade ago was one of the first and best
examples of the new movement toward traditionally based forms.
With that qualification, the present selection is enormously rich and various and, it seems to me, shows a greater concordance of objectives and methods between Europeans and Americans than might at first sight be apparent. If, for example, Neo-Rationalism may seem Idealist in method, and the Americans we have so far mentioned Realist, that distinction can break down when we consider the relation of both sides to the central issue, which has to be the urban structure and its architectural vernacular.
Here, as we have noted, the Kriers, Culot, and others have rejected Le Corbusier's cataclysmic automobile urbanism out of respect for traditional and vernacular values. This parallels Venturi's revival of Main Street. Archetypal differences remain: the European tradition of the solid city, the American passion for the open road.
Hence plaza vs. strip. Which is more realistic than the other depends purely on the cultural context. Ethical differences between them might be a matter of dispute. But both are in revolt from the International Style. Or take vernacular forms. Ungers' eloquent studies of typologies, followed by those of Kleihues and others, are concerned with contextual urbanistic relationships in traditional situations rather than with puristic style. This parallels the new American interest in preservation and contextual design.
Similar principles now seem to guide Stirling's recent work, strengthened and solidified by its close contact with Neo-Rationalism and with contextual
urbanistic requirements such as those which helped shape his great entries in the various German museum competitions. It is regrettable that his magnificent entry for Cologne, the most spectacular of all those urban settings, did not receive the prize. Rossi most of all, the very heart of the Neo-Rationalist movement, seems to owe much of his poetic power to his ability to tap, with De Chirico, the hauntingly evocative tradition of Italian historical and vernacular architecture. True enough, there is a tragic dimension to his work which is most rare in America. Le Corbusier's late buildings embodied a rather muscular heroic activism at once French and Hellenic, but Rossi's buildings and projects have in them a special Italian sweetness and sorrow. They are drenched in time and memory, in the deprivations no less than the splendors of the centuries and, half in love with death, in the somber recollection of Fascism's perversion of the Italian dream. At last, artfully seeming to cast the flatulent subtleties of "design" aside, Rossi penetrates to the simplest of
archetypal and vernacular shapes, as if discovering them for the first time like a child. Out of this comes the little theater for the Biennale, as pure as a child's castle floating on the lagoon. Inside, the tubular structure creaks and deforms according to the swelling of the waters, moving counter to the movement of the wooden shell that encloses it. At the same time, it may be surpising to note that Rossi's gables, his square windows with crossed mullions, and his general adaptation of "dumb" vernacular forms, can all be matched in Venturi's work, as in the Trubek House, and the two find a common ancestor in some of Wright's early buildings, such as the house of Spring Green for his aunts, of 1887. Again, Neo-Rationalism and Venturi connect, and indeed they both look quite solid, conservative, and sternly neo-classical in comparison with a good deal else that is going on at the moment, from the Gaudi-like choreographies of Bofill and Portoghesi in Europe to the whole extraordinary scramble of activity in the United States. Here the career of Charles Moore is instructive. Moore is surely, with Venturi, the major architect of the new liberation. His early espousal of Shingle Style influence and his exploitation of the system of formal deformation first described by Kahn has clarified itself over the years into a kind of design that is increasingly receptive to the special needs of particular situations. In pursuit of that particularity Moore has on the one hand moved toward the vernacular forms of the area in which he is working while on the other he has developed a lively method of client participation, most significantly that of the citizens who will be affected by urban planning projects. Moore has used television to make such contacts with the public and, armed by the extraordinary quickness of his intellect and of his capacity to perceive relationships, will design and re-design the area under consideration before their delighted eyes and according to their every suggestion. His Piazza d'italia in New Orleans should be seen in this light as an urban fantasy, a community stage set, one of the most recent spin-offs of that influence of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli which was so curiously important in America for a while during the nineteen-fifties. With quick-change urbanism of this kind, involving free play with forms of every conceivable cultural coding, Moore has succeeded in turning architecture into a kind of happening. This may well be the most intelligent and appropriate of his many contributions to the contemporary scene. It makes architecture at once immediately responsive - not to say responsible--to public taste and de-mythologizes it to the point where it can readily be seen as the construction of the entire environment and so directly susceptible to change according to social requirements and symbolic needs. Venturi and Scott-Brown have also been aproaching urbanistic question in similar ways, working directly with the inhabitants of disadvantaged neighborhoods to help explore methods through which more directly symbolic forms can be achieved. Hence Moore's play has a serious social and economic base. Sterns's Subway Suburb project, referred to earlier, should be seen in much the same light. The vernacular layout and houses that Stern proposes are right in that line of thinking and are symptomatic of the general development of his design. This is significant beyond itself because of the fundamental shift it demonstrates away from an early desire to be inventive at all costs toward the present natural preference for vernacular propriety and traditional order. Stern has played, along with Jencks, a considerable role in the formulation of the Post-Modern theoretical position, and such is mirrored in his work. He now seeks not the abstract originality of the Modern Movement but the cultural code (should we once again say "style") which is involved in each design instance. Stated in older architectural terms, he is now openly eclectic and looks for those precedents, types, and directly traditional forms which seem appropriate to the program and situation at hand. Much of his work is straight Shingle Style down to the original details, and it should be contrasted with his earlier New Shingle Style work where he derived general suggestions from the older buildings and then at once abstracted and distorted them. He has always had a gift for adaptation, as his truly grand and tragically baffled project for Welfare Island showed, but he is now seeking to adapt directly from tradition rather than, as he did in that instance, from the work of Venturi, who was his original and essential master in theory and design.
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Frank Gehry's work seems much more modern in the way the Post-Modernists use the term, but it shares the happy-go-lucky character that they tend to applaud. It is indeed a collision between modern architecture and the omnipresent Stick-Style, Shingle-Style, Shack-Style traditions of the West Coast. It seems to celebrate the structurally complex conjunction of all the many virtues that have kept the level of domestic architecture in California so high and interesting now for more than a hundred years. Thought it actually resembles less the lively vernacular of the region than Moore's brilliant essays do, it still seems to symbolize the rebelliously ad hoc state of mind which has sustained that vernacular throughout the years. It is crankily anti-elitist, so recalling aberrant proletarian philosophers of the region such as Hofer. In that context the outrageously eclectic combinations of T. Gordon Smith seem almost a mainstream effort, hardly strange at all. Smith's classical orders begin to resemble those of Maybeck in their Baroque-Primitive power while his interweaving of styles, though usually more purposely staccato than those of the past, can still seem obdurately Californian. But Smith stands alone in America, I think, in the haunting aura with which he can endow his images. The same is true of his baroque planning, which delights such generous Romanists and students of the Baroque as Norberg-Schulz. For an American critic of my age it recalls the clandestine essays in the reverse curve that used to be made thirty years ago, suggested by the intersecting cuvilinear patterns of Hadrian's Villa or by their European Baroque successors. But, characteristically for this generation, though with an idiosyncratic command of their rhythms which is apparently all his own, T. Gordon Smith dares to bring them forward and to
sustain them as serious architectural proposals. His parody of classical forms suggests those initiated by Venturi in some highly influential colored drawings of a few years ago, and like those they seem to make the antique and Renaissance traditions intellectually accessible to us through their irony. Such parody is rigorously condemned by Greenberg. He wants to have his classic tradition straight--even though, of course, the scale of his forms is strongly influenced by his pioneering studies of Edwin Lutyens, who was clearly, at his best, a distinguished parodist himself. It now seems true that Lutyen's greatest work, such as his memorial to the dead of the Somme at Thiegual, achieves a tragic grandeur beyond that attained by any other architects of the twentieth century, including Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. But it is his inspired wit and freedom with Renaissance details which account for much of his enormous vogue today. He is the semi-divinity of the Post-Modernists, a role which he himself would in all likelihood have found appropriately ridiculous. But Greenberg sees nothing strange in a direct, non- parodied revival of the classical tradition. He points out that architects continued to practise it right through much of the Modern Movement. In this his stand parallels that of a fairly coherent group of young English architects (among a few of whom, it is true, a repellently reactionary stance, smelling of the whip and irrelevant to the issue, may unfortunately be sometimes distinguished), but
Greenberg is now in the process of completing a commission, a new Brant House, in which the viability of his method will be tested at full scale as he adapts the client's chosen model, Mount Vernon, to a contemporary situation. This is as far from the Modern Movement as anyone can get and as directly involved with bringing the past unashamedly into the present. One awaits the controversy which will erupt when the house is completed. It should be an interesting one, involving as it must do the assumption of some basic attitude toward non-ironic historicism.
All this is very far from the suave games played with past and present by Tigermann in Chicago, which have driven the dominant Miesians of the region into the usual paroxysms. But the most challenging and problematical of the younger middle-aged talents right now seems to me to be that of Michael Graves. Here it is clearly a garden tradition which is parodied, a tradition of rustication and mouldering ruins at once melancholy and picturesque. The feeling is of eighteenth-century Romantic-Classicism, so that Graves' design accompanies (and perhaps reflects) the dominant concerns of some of the most interesting critics of the present time, such as Frampton and Rykwert, who have taught at Princeton with Graves. But Graves has his own special poetry, as well as remarkable pictorial gifts. It is in fact a painter's freedom with which he endows his architecture, embellishing its surface with boldly conceived decoration on an outrageous scale, employing forms unthinkable in contemporary architecture a few years ago, and involving types of associations which were once even more wholly suspect. His massive two-dimensionality (if one may be allowed that conjunction) is also involved in the renewed interest in architecture as sign, and this connects Graves' work to that of Venturi. It should indeed be pointed out that such "rusticated" design was revived precisely when Venturi tacked the curved one-by-one to the facade of his mother's house and began thereby to evoke signs and associations related to experiences of the classical past. The enormously scaled details of the temple and palace facades for Venturi's little minimal house project to which I referred earlier,
also playa part in this sequence. In Graves' work the rustication takes on new richness, freedom, and plastic power. The great keystones drop; the colors
turn autumnal, deep and earthy. The cavern returns in memories of Serlio's horrendous doorways, and as the shapes recombine the mass as a whole begins to develop contour rather than merely silhouette. The whole begins to respond. The pencil excavates the paper, digging out grottoes, pushing back the forest (usually mythical, but the gardener's instinct is sound) which surrounds the dwelling, setting up responses of plan to elevation that are beginning to make an intrinsic organism out of the natural and the man-made components of the design. Much yet remains purely pictorial: how long would the tacked-on rustication survive in the rain? And that graphic dominance, in which Graves is clearly one of the leaders, now shapes a con- siderable amount of contemporary work. As in the later eighteenth century, a large percentage of the projects shown by younger architects are fundamentally fantastic in character. They are eye-stopping precisely because they are conceived of as drawings, and these are now regarded as works of art themselves and are sold as such. Graves is thought to support his office in this way. The influence of the neo-Rationalists from Rossi to the Kriers has reinforced that direction; it perhaps even initiated it. Rossi's incomparably evocative cityscapes and awesome projects, Leon Krier's highly articulated, primitively powerful buildings as little cities, have set a standard of graphic imagination and power hard for the young to resist, even when the forms involved have little to do with the
particular programs they are working on. It is the pull of the visual, which all artists must feel. But it is even more the tug of the archetypal, the recognition--among the compromises and complexities of modern life - of primitive simplicities, landscapes, and sculptural beings. It is a fascinating development, and in many ways, as we have noted, it parallels that of the eighteenth century, especially of the period just before the revolutions occurred but when their future scenes and processes were already being imaged in artists' prophetic eyes.
Yet, lest the present graphic renaissance be viewed too freely in terms of imminent social catastrophe, mention should be made of the extraordinary architectural accomplishment of Rem Koolhaas, who, with his OMA group, has brought the skyscrapers of New York to life. Something more than ten years ago skyscrapers had begun to rehabilitate their reputation, which had always been high among the public but low among modern critics obsessed with the Ville Radieuse and Chicago. Now the work of Koolhaas and his group has turned them into persons. They come crowding before our eyes as loved and benevolent beings, each more charming than the next, all of them now seen by us as consummate achievements of human art. Koolhaas has not only humanized them but has also made them accessible once more as models, not only for his own glowing projects but also for skyscraper building in general. It is safe to say that if skyscrapers vontinue to be built, the Art Deco sweethearts of New York, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State, the RCA Building and all of Rockefeller Center, will suggest forms even stronger than Johnson's AT & T project to challenge Citicorp's graph paper and suburban shopping mall. It is a splendid example of how a portion of the recent past which was lost can be brought back into contention and of how everyday living and simple joy in the environment can be immeasurably enriched thereby.
It is salutary, though, that another, more rigorously pragmatic set of suggestions for architectural form now exists as a counterweight to the graphic, the
romantic, and the linguistic-symbolic tendencies. I refer here to those proposed by the challenge of the energy shortage, which may yet entirely reshape the way of life of the urban world. In America those young architects (and they are by and large all young) who concern themselves with energy problems tend to be a totally different group from that which now practices the most avant-garde pictorial and linguistic design in New York, Princeton and New Haven.
They tend to be young people who graduated from architecture schools during the revolutionary years of the late sixties and early seventies and who wished to explore vernacular building and, often, more agrarian ways of life. David Sellers was one of the first of those architects and indeed, going to Vermont after graduating from Yale in 1965, he was well before his time. He tried then to redesign architecture from the ground up but came into his own as the problem began to shape itself around the house as a recycling eco-system and a creator rather than simply a consumer of energy. Now groups of younger designers such as those who form the Total Environmental Action office in Harrisville, New Hampshire, have carried the movement along what seems to be its logical path: toward a simple vernacular architecture which is deformed and reconstituted according to the requirements of new passive and active energy
systems. It is remarkable how close the vernacular itself everywhere is already adapted to some requirements, which are fundamentally those of living with nature where possible, against it (as with insulation) only where absolutely necessary. This attitude is apparently counter to the needs of big business, at least as it probably incorrectly understands its own problems. Solar energy, for example, has so far received very little intelligent assistance from government. The latter reflects the objectives of the large corporations which it serves and therefore prefers energy sources which take enormous sums of money to harness and which can be sold at a profit. Hence it puts its money on nuclear power, and, where forced into the solar field, tends to favor fantastic schemes like those for space stations reflecting the sun's heat down to the earth and distributing it, for a price, through one of the well-known brand names. But the very essence of the harnessing of solar energy lies in its applicability to small individual units, the installation of such passive and simple systems costing nothing to run (though as yet something substantially additional to construct).
Such systems can supply more than two-thirds of the energy requirements, for example, of any house anywhere in the United States right now: bringing sun into the house where it can heat some substance (water, tile, whatever) which can store such heat and then give it off inside the volume of the building during the hours of darkness when the external skin of the house can, conversely, be closed against its loss.
Thus the building begins to breathe in and out; it opens and closes.
Its forms evolve according to the suggestions of that process and are thereby linked to their vernacular forebears with their central fireplaces, taut skins, and operable shutters. The fact that small buildings can so far be most efficiently developed for solar energy is itself suggestive of future urbanistic patterns as a whole. The decentralization that Wright so consistently demanded is now suggested, but here the question of transportation comes to the fore. How can the automobile either become energy efficient or be replaced by various types of mass transit? The latter will probably take place sooner of later in any event. The result need not be catastrophic. Such systems can be infinitely more flexible in terms of scattered living than the automobile lobbies would like us to believe. It was once possible, for example, to travel allover the state of Connecticut, U.S.A., by trolley cars. Their abandoned roadbeds can still be seen deep in the woods of far-off rural areas. The system apparently reached almost everywhere. It could do so again.
The challenge is there. The crisis in energy is one of the realities which must shape the environment of the future if it is to function at all. Architects, no doubt, will prefer the more spectacular and concentrated urban forms which an architecture attuned to energy problems will surely make it possible to design some day: vast shining collectors for metropolitan groupings, windmills massed along the ridges, whirling in the updraft, a whole science-fiction landscape out of Archigram, delightful to imagine. Some of this architectural dream, a tenacious one over the past hundred years, may indeed come about, but it is more likely that the reality will be gentler, smaller in scale, humbler, and more like the way things used to be before consumerism shaped the world. In the United States especially it might well playa part in reviving that spare, thrifty, threadbare way of life that was once the American's pride. The steps that architects are now taking to renew contact with tradition and with the vernacular may therefore be the first acts in a long process, one which will eventually involve political and social reformation as well.
Vincent Scully, "How things got to be the way they are now" in Architecture 1980: The Presence of the Past - Venice Biennale (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), pp. 15-20.
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