It was only a few years ago that one of the most prominent architectural historians declared (during a symposium at Yale dedicated to urban aesthetics) that ours were times of "mild manifestoes" and that revolutions were over. Four years later, revolts and confrontations are a common phenomenon in both the cities and the universities.
This article was written before the April '69 events at Harvard. Its basic concern is with the theory of design, but it is important to stress here that the recent events strengthen its general thesis: that just as architecture schools and the profession are isolated from the mainstream of life, so too are substantial parts of the university-at-large and established professionalism in general.
The "upside down pyramid" implies neither a paradox in the phenomenon of learning nor a symbol of power (or class) struggle within the universities. The rules of the flow of knowledge from the more wise to the less wise body are still true. But as in the case of the paradox of the Maxwell demon, a reversed flow (an inverted pyramid) can be created if an appropriate controlling device is applied. Changing human goals, emerging priorities in culture, and thus redefinition of the profession (in its role and in its content), can be devices that generate a direction in the learning process opposite from that traditionally accepted.
Metaphors are always misleading. What is implied here is not a general rule but rather the suggestion that the reversal of several phenomena in our culture should be taken not as symptoms of a pathology leading to disaster but rather as a demonstration of normal evolutionary change.
What we are observing in the attitudes of the students is more than "a trivial issue of morality." They ask for a new kind of knowledge to be offered to them by the schools of architecture. The opposing concepts of "educational relevance" versus "academic impartiality," "student participation" versus "academic freedom," reveal the social framework within which the younger generation demands a change in the identity of architecture.
Architecture is among the very few professions that have suffered from an identity crisis so many times and within such a short period. Most likely the recent crisis we are observing is the last.
In order to understand why the profession is now passing through such a decisive moment we have to refer briefly to the previous debates on the identity of architecture and (tied with them unavoidably) on the role of the architect.
It was felt from the beginning of the nineteenth century that there was something arbitrary in the decisions about Form in architecture. A search for the justification of the selection of form started developing. This search was connected closely with an inquiry into the raison d'être of the architectural profession. It was a long debate during which new reasons for Form making led to new apologies for them. Thus the history of architecture over the last hundred years can be characterized as both a breathless arena of styles and theories and, simultaneously, a severe courtroom for designers and critics.
Choissy argued about Form through "a new system of
proportioning (which) has made its way; where the laws of harmony will be no
other than those of stability."
Ruskin's position can be described with the above phrase if one substitutes the word "honesty" for "stability." "Empathy," which was Worringer's word, stands as an ambiguous middle ground between Hegel's "alienation" and Freud's "sublimation."
"Morphology" served the same purpose. It was a body of loosely connected theories which tried to justify Forms as long as they obeyed a simple mathematical description, especially if through this description one could associate a certain man-made form with a natural one. Its origins can be referred to the tradition of Pythagorism as well as to the writings of Goethe. During its peak many ideas coming from D'Arcy Thompson cross-fertilized with Gestalt Psychology (and overtones of Jung).
Strangely the best summary of this attitude can be found in another of Ruskin's phrases, that "Beauty is founded on the laws of natural Forms," if one substitutes the word "man-made Form" for "Beauty."
All the theories that were mentioned here have one common characteristic which was accepted by the architectural profession, scholars and academics. They accept the condition that Form must be present in the end product of design, that a kind of visually comprehensible order is requisite. This arbitrary conclusion trapped the architectural profession in a dead end corridor. Each of those theories deteriorated quickly as soon as it was proven that their capacities to explain and predict the organization of the man-made environment were extremely limited and their reasoning superficial. It was an opinion that confused the prima facie domination of a visual consistency over the man-made environment with the fundamental necessity for the preservation of this order as it was imposed by a rule, if not divine, at least biological.
Architects and architectural critics were cut out from the studies that took place in several other fields showing that visual order was cultural in its essence and temporal in its character; that although it was a dominant cultural determinant for the organization of society or human behavior in the culture of magic, it has become in the contemporary culture a powerless left over, a fetish or a superstition.
The preoccupation of architecture with Visual Order and space was and is an obstacle to the understanding of the conscious or latent determinants of organization of the contemporary society and human behavior. That was the reason that functionalism (the first attempt to move architecture away from its obsolete thinking) deteriorated so quickly into a stylistic proposal.
The motto, "form follows function," was a great liberation but at the same time misled the profession. It brought back the arbitrary necessity of Form through the backdoor. This tragic insistence on Form (which led to the irrelevancy of the architectural profession in our time) can be observed in the manner the Bauhaus school, the center of functionalism at its peak, fluctuated during its short life.
Although the school declared its aim to work for the solution of major and broad problems of the human habitat, it isolated its students and teachers from the contemporary social and technological problems. Despite the opposite impression that exists now "contemporary events like Hitler's putsch of 1923 or the central German rising made little impression on staff or students, who were surprisingly behind the times in their reading, ignoring such newer talents as Kafka, Brecht and Benn." The elements of "basic design," whether applied in technology or in education, did not come out of a vigorous analysis of the machine or the cultural milieu. They were offered by the painters and through them by theosophism which dictated the principles and the logic. Or they were expected to develop simply through a "good all-round training for hand and eye" as the "first step in mastering industrial processes."
The Bauhaus formal vocabulary, if we want to be exact, did not become a style. It was a style which made "every tea-glass a problem in constructive aesthetics." Despite the proclamation of Gropius that architecture was built sociology it was an artificial play-world extending its limits within a cube whose "sides were yellow, red, blue, white, gray, black" where people "sat and slept on furniture like colored geometry... lived in houses like colored sculpture..."
It was only in 1928 that the newly appointed director Hannes Meyer established "an architectural course based on scientific principles," an interdisciplinary mosaic of science-oriented lectures. Psychologists, sociologists, economists were called to generate a kind of thinking "as distinct from the formalistic Bauhaus style" in Meyer's words.
Besides the introduction of interdisciplinary studies in the curriculum and the insistance on tieing them with results in the studio, Meyer, within his brief career, tried to create a new identity for architecture through several educational innovations. Those changes in the school were extremely prophetic and controversial for their time as well as topical for our time.
The establishment of advocacy architecture as an essential part of design education accepting... "the structure and the vital needs of our community as given. ..(through) the widest possible survey of the people's life." This approach did not deteriorate into another ideal project, but was quickly translated into a studio within the school which resulted in 90 workers flats build in Dessau-Torten Estate. (I do not know of any ghetto workshop in our schools of architecture that can boast of a project of such magnitude).
Meyer felt that essential for the establishment of new ideas in the Bauhaus was lithe democratization of the studies" through the student participation on the decision making of the school. The students also shared design royalties with the teachers for designs produced in the school.
The necessity to recruit students with dedication and talent from the working classes rather than keep up with the existing policy of the Bauhaus accepting primarily priviledged students that wanted to follow the aura of the famous masters.
But the dream was very short. Meyer was dismissed without notice during the period of the vacations when the school was closed. The dismissal of the director was followed by student demonstrations, the expulsion of a number of students and the restoration of peace with "the help of the police in order to restore a modicum of discipline," by Mies Van der Rohe the new director.
With Mies as a Director, the Bauhaus returned to the old fallacies of Architecture. To insure the safety of this counter reformation "the students were no longer allowed to have any voice in the organization of the teaching. Sociological subjects and notions were banished, particularly from workshop activities. Scions of the exclusive classes appeared again amongst the students and in the workshop; exclusive furniture was being made from exclusive material."
What happened to the Bauhaus despite all the supressive measures is well known. It did not survive the menace of the Nazis. What happened to Mies in America is also well known. The attempts of
Meyer to give a new identity to architecture were equally frustrated later in Russia, although for different reasons and in a different manner.
Functionalism failed not only because of its inability to defend itself against the official or the underground formalism, but also because as a theory and a method of design, it was a crude tool.
Its principles were static. It could not deal with phenomena that were changing over time. Its logic was simplistic. Its categories were arbitrary. They never went beyond what Levi Strauss would call the "superficial system of reality."
Even cruder than the theory were the results of the theory on environment "split apart by the schizophrenic mechanism of deterministic thinking."
Thus, the identity that functionalism assigned to architecture was under question again. The attacks came from several sides. In America (and especially through the dissenting students of Gropius) this reaction was an excuse to restore the most unacademic neoclassicism that was ever produced.
In Europe, the criticism came from inside the stronghold of functionalism, the C.I.A.M. In 1947, a young group of architects decided that they should loin their efforts around the possibility of a new kind of architecture. That was the beginning of TEAM 10.
The reaction of TEAM 10, although sporadically conservative and looking towards the past with nostalgia, was basically constructive and optimistic. The architects in the group were not concerned with the production of a grandiose theory. On the contrary, they stressed as a methodological principle the importance of dealing with the particulars of a "situation" rather than a universal classification system. The work of architecture was to them an aggregation of "places," parts of space where "events" happen. Thus, "events" necessitated a finer grain than the abstract universal of functions to describe the peculiarities and the variations of human behavior within the environment.
Their approach towards visual form was rather peculiar. Although they recognized that "event" and "place," rather than "form," were the priorities in the design of an environment, they felt that the quality and success of a place depended on its visual manifestation, what they called, "sense of place." The visual determinants of the comprehension" of a space; it was on them that a place's success or failure relied.
It is obvious that when Bakema spoke of "the spatial expression of the whole population" or Peter Smithson of the "socio-plastics," or even when the group discussed "style," their attitude towards visual order was very different from the primary colours and basic shapes of the Bauhaus.
TEAM 10 searched for a spatial language, which they recognized as a constant need of any culture with a possibly variable expression. This could elucidate "the pattern of human association," "man's link with society."
Several members of the group were involved in a kind of part time urban analysis. The indian pueblos, the Dogon, downtown St. Louis, as well as Spalato, were examined on that basis. The results were extremely touching commentaries on the use of space for a poetic metaphor, but had very little to do with the particular forces that determined the environment.
The preoccupation with built form and the visual form of the designed environments again limited the architects from going farther and understanding the underlying, invisible, but real patterns that organized behavior in the buildings they were observing or creating. Thus, "places" could have been empty, despite all the efforts to insert "sense" in them, while "events" could be happening somewhere else and in an unpredictable manner. Architects again missed the opportunity to credit an identity for their profession. After many years of vacillation, Peter Smithson complained that "architects have still not found a built-mode. ...where it can all happen" while Soltan accepted that "the whole concept of agglomeration is today in the process of losing its definitive physico-visual character," assuming of course that we ever had one in our contemporary culture.
What has been discussed up to now covers what architects and most of the schools of architecture approach as facts beyond the professional preoccupation. Studies of the identity of architecture are only considered in rare instances. Usually, the "compositional" process, "the expression of the structure or of the spirit" of the building and the points of departure and arrival in the synthesis of an architectural work on the student's desk or the professional drafting table. The use of buildings is usually forwarded to the "behavioral scientists" (and their social purpose to sociologists)!
No wonder a student outside this esoteric system resists as much as he can joining the game. It looks so painful and fruitless to him. On the other hand, he feels helpless and frustrated because of his inability to grasp the secret of the undeniable realities of the environment and, consequently to explain, for instance, the attraction of Harvard Square and Holyoke Center Plaza or the repulsion of the MIT student center. The measure of success or failure of such a reality is not offered to him by any academia in a systematic, scholarly way. The student gets even more frustrated when he
discovers the discrepancy between the architect's intentions, dictated by his private values, and the user's attitudes. He finds, for example, that the community room of The School of Architecture at Yale, approximately designed to signify community, is the most empty room in the whole building. Or that people in the same building prefer to enter from the side service door rather than to use the intended entrance (although this entrance is appropriately shaped to "receive" people). Or he learns that he has to draw a through line to bring the university into the Arts Building in a diagram, but that when in place of the line a ramp is built through the building, the sad reality is that nobody comes through. The student agrees with Raphael's notion of painting all the arts and sciences conversing in the same space to signify their unity, but he questions whether a single space workshop for a whole school will in tact unify its departments. He finally does pot miss those "pre-elevator" days of the past when stairs had "no goal," since he feels his life is short and full of burning goals which nobody hesitates to frustrate, to h is despair.
The acceptance of the priority of other rules besides the visual and formal-compositional ones does not lead automatically to solutions. As a matter of fact the last identity crisis of architecture came out of the attempts to have an architecture as "built sociology," analyzed completely by science.
As the city of forms was spreading across the drafting boards allover the world, a different approach began to develop. It was a concern, for the first time, with the processes that take place in space rather than the shapes of space. To a certain degree it was a reaction to the fact that compositional considerations on the urban scale were becoming progressively less important in relation to the man-made environment and that "social issues" were probably more vital.
It was back in the Bauhaus years when architecture was proclaimed as "built sociology" by Gropius; we saw that the priority of "visual order" was actually what misled any attempt to an alternative approach. But now at last we have a very clear statement that although environmental design deals primarily with space, the most important task is to find and organize what is distributed through space. With this priority spelled out, the environmental studies committed themselves to become a scientific discipline. But the development of a science is a long, difficult process.
Planners, urban designers and later architects asked about the man-made environment the same question that Abbé Mably, two centuries ago, asked about society: is it "a branch of physics?" They rushed into the form of the methodology rather than its aims. It is almost ironic that there was more concern and discussion over the structure of the scientific models, and consequently of the environmental models, than there was over their task. (A formalistic hang-up?)
It was never, for example, spelled out that as long as a scientific model does not provide any explanatory and predictive function, its descriptive value is secondary and its overall property limited.
The basic fault was that the attitude was adopted that this innovation was a revolution more of the type of Kuhn's than of Hegel. This state of mind meant that the adopted changes were nor a direct response to outside pressures or conflicts which demanded a resolution. Several times, instead or a deeper internal understanding of the nature of the problem, they offered a misunderstanding or new methodologies derived from without.
The new methodologies were tried basically in the field of planning but their influence was strong enough to cause one more identity crisis in architecture, also. They were derived from the latest developments in the fields of applied mathematics: information theory and cybernetics.
Those two closely connected fields had a universal impact on all sciences generally and in particular on the sciences dealing with human behavior. Their application and misapplication were very similar, in both cases exaggerated in importance. In a very similar manner also they created a strong enthusiasm in the beginning, followed by bitter disappointment.
Brillouin, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of information theory, described it as "a new scientific theory ...born during the last few years ...(which) ...attracted a great deal of interest and has expanded very rapidly ...initially the result of a very practical and utilitarian discussion ...enables one ...to snow a very direct connection between information and entropy." In the back of this abstract statement there was a formidable implication: the establishment of a direct connection between idea and matter, culture and technology, energy and mental construct.
Obviously, this was an ideal tool to be applied in the problem of the man-made environment. Unfortunately it was not with in the potentials of information theory to provide such a service. Thus, it was not enough to replace the "locational physical place" by the vague and static notion of distribution of information-flow and interaction in space. The great promise that the city will be faced ''as a social process operating in space" ended up finally with very few "social" ingredients and very minor characteristics of "process."
Parallel expectation and disappointments were brought about by the other branch, the methodology of the computer. From Ulm to Berkeley, there was a similar excitement on those two branches. Chomsky describes a similar situation in linguistics and behavioral sciences: "their (the new methodologies) imminent availability reinforced the belief that it would suffice to gain a theoretical understanding of only the simplest and most superficially obvious phenomena -everything else would merely prove to be more of the same ...and apparent complexity would be disentangled by the electronic marvels. "
Optimistic faith in scientific competence did not finally lead to the expected Science of the man-made environment. Although it broke a large number of the fetishes of the architectural profession, especially the belief in the visual order as an organizing principle of design, it did not accomplish the major breakthrough that all new sciences achieve in their emergence.
The last identity crisis of architecture emerged as soon as the younger generation lost any faith even in the "scientification" of the field. Apathy and pessimism were the feelings that followed. It had been only a changing of the guards: the "atelier" and the "academy" were replaced with the "university" and the "interdisciplinary studies."
The studies that came out of those institutions were in the majority interesting in their ability to describe environmental aspects, very weak in ability to explain them, and almost impotent in their predictive abilities.
Those failures were not due only to the fact that the attempts were new and experimental. The mathematicians accused the social scientists that they misinterpreted several of the concepts of information theory. But the basic reasons for the lack of success were deeper and they cannot be faced as phenomena isolated from the historical reality within which they developed. At the heart of those failures was the attempt to create a science of the man-made environment as a phenomenon related to society considered without any reference to the nature of the human society.
Marx and Freud knew very well that in the creation of a new science the consideration of the particulars of the phenomenon under study were more important than the general similarities through the overall field of sciences. They took this position even if it implied a not so "scientifically" pure system; that is a system in accordance with the rest of the sciences.
The assumption was that this consistency would develop gradually in the future by proceeding deeper into the problems. On the other hand, the students of the man-made environment tried to achieve a scientific purity by detaching themselves from a large part of the reality of their problems, the social reality.
Thus, they tried to formulate the laws of the basically social processes that take place in the space of the man-made environment, taking society in its present condition as a self-evident fact. Discussions about its transience, the denial of its existence and its denigration were supposed to be "ideological" questions, debates of preference and not of science.
Melvin Webber, in his key essay of the fifties, opened a new vista by going beyond the "locational behavior of various types of establishments ..." and the "physical plan ...as an end in itself," the leftovers of the "architectural heritage" of planning. On the other hand, his refusal to commit himself to a methodology depending on the three-dimensional aspects of the environment did not guarantee his success. His intention to isolate problems that were connected with ideological questions implied the acceptance, silently, of the ideology of the present status quo as an ideology.
Thus, the intellectual becomes very much the ideal savant, as described by Comte, who "would explain as well as guide those developments by seeing them whole, understanding and interpreting them, but not questioning their inevitability any longer." Melvin Webber and Richard Meier et al saw themselves indeed as "intellectual midwives of modernity, instead of its traditional critics."
The fifties were typical not only of the optimism about the use of the "scientific method" in solving social problems but also of the effort to end the role of ideology in culture.
"Today... ideologies are exhausted" proclaimed Daniel Bell dealing "with the social changes in America of the fifties." The Congress for Cultural Freedom, an intermating group of prominent scholars, came simultaneously to the same conclusion, that the "end of the Ideological Age" had come. The university at last could be landscaped again according to the blueprints of the "groves of Academe" where elaborate studies of "singling out one value without linking it to others... (was the)... routine... not only in books on the urban problem but in the more than 20 recent reports of Presidential task forces." There was also the alternative kind of academic gardening, which Jacques Barzun , the former provost of Columbia, called "paralysis through over-analysis:" the involvement with issues of "interaction" and systems analysis where "complexity and contradiction" were accepted up to the point that they would not include anything that could offend "academic impartiality."
The "misdirected central thrust of the academic community," to quote Robert Wood, is responsible in the schools of architecture not only for engaging students into a futile game of perpetuating and perfecting arbitrary, irrelevant and obsolete hows without questioning the whys of their discipline, but also for not engaging them in the most important issues.
As I said before, those developments should be considered within the framework of their historic context. The end of ideology had another version in architecture and planning. With less jargon and not in such a technocratic way as before, the point of the "pragmatists" was to accept the reality and have "a good word for everything that is happening... whether segregating or integrating."
The academic impartiality and the fear of value judgments degenerated into the remarkable banality of the fetishism of the facts. Levittowns were good, but slums were good too, together with mobile homes. Above all Los Angeles was good because people still moved there, and highways were good since cars passed through. Everything was good because it reflected different "life styles." The role of the scholar was that of a 19th century illustrator: to depict and record any minute nuance of the existing reality. Society was assumed to let those things grow, since growth was a good thing, a growth whose cost most university scholars never bothered to consider as part of their responsibility.
This article has concentrated, and perhaps too extensively, on the exclusive alleys that the architectural profession bypassed. All of them up to now have proven to be dead ends. But I hope I have not created the impression that this is the search for an identity that caused the decline and fall of the profession of architecture. It was the wrong search and basically for the wrong reasons.
It is not through less analysis but through more relevance that the profession and its schools can find the credit they lost. The most fundamental organization underlying the man made environment which cannot be ignored is that it is a system based on the rules of privilege and profit.
The "sociology" with which architects have been working and have accepted up to now implied the framework of inequality and exploitation, whether performed by the state or corporation, allover the world. It was not "social" (i.e., communal) in the least.
An analysis which considers contemporary slums and ghettoes, pollution and congestion as isolated effects with no connection to our highway, super-jet and giant cultural center programs, is a very inadequate one. Certainly it could explain very little of the crisis we face and it will predict less of the ones that will come. There is no systematic approach to my knowledge that investigates (in a non- piecemeal way) this fundamental truth.
But the basic problem lies beyond the simplistic notion of economic classes. Plans for the liquidation of slums can be conceived and achieved soon but this liquidation will be useless if no action is taken against the liquidation of humanity which is happening at an increasing rare in our environment.
It is the class of people versus the class of fetishes, the formalistic objects, the technological gadgets, the bureaucratic institutions. The alienated city of the fetishes grows and drains the human everyday. In this case the architectural professions and the client (most professions together with their clients) profit, until the user is pushed to the position of the underprivileged. The acceptance of the desires and goals of the system that recognizes a single individual and his values as the client-decision maker of the environment (where the state acts as an individual also) has resulted in the disintegration of human contact within our man-made environment.
In the individual-client system the transactions necessary for the completion of a certain function have been mechanized as a result of technological short cuts. Optimization of the technological solutions is pursued single-mindedly without consideration of the resultant social and psychological costs.
This concept of growth considered the product of man as a separate and independent entity from man. But this acceptance, derived from the idea of man separate from man, ended up furthering the separation between man and man.
An architecture created outside a human context does not lead to a "social architecture." The new context of architecture the students are after, recognising the community as a client, cannot be satisfied by assignments of "community buildings" or "low-cost" housing. It requires a fundamentally new approach to design in general which creates architecture that supports and generates the activities and interests of humanity as a community.
It the profession is not ready to practice such an architecture, what can a school do? Professor Daniel Bell, summarizing an ambitious interdisciplinary study of the Year 2000 commented that "the group did not deal with 'the future of culture,' man's continuing effort to find transcendental meaning amid the contemporary disorientation... the new hedonism of the young with its rites of pleasure... the problems of violence, whether through such institutions as the military or in the more sporadic; outbursts of the irrational." One wonders in that case what such a large group of specialists in social studies can be thinking about the Year 2000 and whether Daniel Bell's excuse that the scholars functioned "depending on one's temperment" is an appropriate one.
Maybe Shadrach Woods' remark on a similar occasion can be used again: "If this is what the university has to say about possible futures, then one is tempted to say to the university, 'Go back to sleep. '"
The universities are very similar to the professions in one aspect. As "the professional ...tends to define his problems according to the technique that he has mastered" the teacher tends to define his teaching according to the field he has mastered. From this point of view it is obvious that wisdom on a subject can be disastrous on the whole if this subject has happened to be ill defined. It is a paradox (that Veblen described once) which suggests that the upside down pyramid of the students is not a bad idea. It is rather preposterous in this instance to make the argument of academic freedom.
We have described the shortcomings of the university sufficiently. What about the potentials? We already see the desire to create "instant salvation" by avoiding academic poverty for the sake of ghetto poverty. This is an activity which is highly symbolic, but also very similar to the New York "well-meaning suburbanites (who) march to the slums, paint brush in hand, instead of marching on Washington, where the only solution lies," or (to paraphrase in the case of architecture) instead of developing a relevant methodology and profession.
It is still my belief that the new will come out of the universities. The universities and within them the schools of architecture, face a dilemma: either to accept themselves as communities (a rare, physical and social phenomenon in our world), even if that implies the shape of an upside down pyramid, or to adopt "the Baconian vision of knowledge as power." If by any chance the second alternative is chosen, the following scene may take place on an everyday basis in the educational process:
"A motorboat was framed in
the open window.
The child, facing his score,
hardly moved …as
the motorboat passed through his
blood .…
"Are you really sure, for the
last time now,
are you sure you don't know what
it means?"
Again the motorboat passed by.
The lady was taken aback by such
stubbornness.
Her anger abated, and she so
despaired at being
so unimportant to this child who,
by a single
gesture, she could have made to
answer her, that
she was suddenly aware of the
sterility of her own
existence ."