1980 Harvard Publication Series

Published by the
Department of Architecture Graduate School of Design Harvard University
@ Copyright 1980 by Alexander Tzonis

This paper is a synopsis of an opening lecture on the architecture of the 1980's given in Delft June 1979 for the annual meeting of the
alumni of the Schools of Architecture of Holland, a contribution for
the Forum Architecture Conununication Territoire on "Energy and Autonomy" in Lausanne, 26-29 January 1979 and an article on "The Narcissist Phase in Architecture" (with L. Lefaivre), for the Harvard Architectural Review, no. 1, 1980.

At the risk of adding to the existing confusion about the current state of architecture, of lapsing into stale debates and of rushing headlong into soon disproven prophecies, we shall try in this brief introduction to explain and criticize the architectural developments of the 1970's and to hazard some predictions about the next decade.
First we shall attempt a sketch of the salient features of the present situation and, by placing it in the light of past decades and centuries, see to what extent the "post-modernism"1 of the 1970' s was a step forward. We shall then turn to the conditions which allowed this tendency to exist and prosper.
The Characteristics of the Current Phase of Architecture
The designs of the 1970's were characterized as rationalistic, realistic, delirious, dead, optimistic, as the heritage of Palladianism, as an avantgarde, as exercises in Chomskyan linguistics, as a meta-marxist redifinition of architecture, as the third typology, and most unexpectedly of all perhaps, as the stuff of which "apories" are made.2
The flurry of inconsistent descriptions was the expression of variety among critics, but it also reflected the stylistic eclecticism of the designs themselves: some imitating Le Corbusier or Terragni, some borrowing from the surreal architectural settings of de Chirico or the official architecture of Facist Italy, others recalling the American Streamline style of the 1930's. If one adds to this diversity German Expressionism and the Beaux-Arts tradition, which also left their mark on many of the new designs, the result is admittedly confusing. The obvious conclusion to draw is that it is not easy to identify an overall formal or iconographic vocabulary for the architecture of this decade. Yet, for all their visual differences, these designs embodied the same general attitudes toward architecture. Succinctly put, these were:
1) formalism, a marked preoccupation with the purely visual features of architectural designs;
2) graphism, a fascination with the evocative power of drawings and models;
3) hedonism, a tendency to view the design as an object of gratification only;
4) elitism, the conviction that the architect is the supreme judge of the quality of the built environment;
5) anti-functionalism, the rejection not only of the functionalist aesthetic but, often, of the very idea of function itself.
To many, especially those architects who were formed in the 1960's, this was an unexpected turn of events. Neglect for the outward appearance of buildings and contempt and mistrust for architectural drawings had become the rule. This period combined a liking for the ascetic and the ordinary with an aversion to "high brow" discussions. These, along with an enthusiastic support for user participation and the consultation of experts, were forcasted for the 1970's.
But for those who experienced the 1950's, these developments evoked a certain familiarity -- the 1950's, that so easily forgotten depressing moment in human history, the world of what Giedion called the "playboys", of what Aldo van Eyck called the "primadonnas", of what Jerzy Soltan called the "enemy of modern architecture from within"; a time when the Procrustes Club3 thrived in America and Neo-Liberty flourished in Italy in the midst of a revival of Piranesi, of the Chicago Exhibition of the 1890's, of Tiffany lamps, of the Beaux-Arts and of City Beautiful.
But the real origins of the recent developments go much deeper.
The Roots
Hedonism as an architectural attitude can be easily traced back as early as Abbot Suger's raptured descriptions of the magnificent ornamentation in the Church of Saint Denis or Alberti's delight in gems and the beauty of harmonious architectural proportions.4 Buildings came to be seen as sources of pleasure and sensual gratification. Renaissance authors tell us that the enjoyment of a building was analagous to contacting the body of a lover and of the same nature as that experienced in the erotic act. Formalism and graphism become predominant in the Renaissance architectural treatises and manuals.y Elitism further turned the appreciation of architecture into something private with meaning only for a select few rather than for society at large. We find this argument developed once more during the Renaissance in the discussions on the superiority of architecture's being a "liberal art" versus a lowly mechanical one.6 As for anti-functionalism, we can safely say that by the mid-eighteenth century it had begun to take the form of a doctrine, notably in some of the writings of Piranesi and Algarotti.7
This journey through time might help us set the record straight about the genealogy of these characteristics. But more important than chasing after forerunners of ideas is explaining their recurring patterns. The emergence of formalism, graphism. hedonism, elitism and anti-functionalism today as in the past are linked not with a unique force, but with a cluster of forces, each contributing its part.
Architecture of Fantasy and Desire
There is a strong association of these characteristics of architecture with the commercial revolution of the early Renaissance, the new world order which dissolved traditional tribal or other non-economic medieval relations in order to reorganize society from the point of view of the logic of the market. The emergence of formalism, graphism, elitism and hedonism in architectural thinking gradually replaced the archaic, divinatory, cosmological, tribal meanings of design products with profane ones in order to present the objects as precious, alluring, desirable and thus to awaken in the spectator the need for possession and transaction. The new attributes stressed the visual properties of the object, directing attention to line, surface and shape, to the play of light and shadow over it, thereby confirming the preciousness of the object as well as the rules which make it valuable.
Formalism, graphism, hedonism and elitism in architecture created a world of fantasy and desire and thus helped the market become more operable and more socially legitimate through the creation of a special mentality: the psychology of the consumer. They helped break away from the affective tribal ties and the archaic relations to the world of transactions and exchanges.
Architecture of Reality and Control
But architecture during the Renaissance rise of the market was not only devoted to illusion and appetite and to making architecture strictly for the consumer. It was also an architecture of reality and control, an architecture of production.
This is the other side of architecture of the period, espoused by the shrewd contractors of the palazzi, the fortifications, the villas and the canals. The same people gave birth to the science of engineering, to the design of the optimally solid and economic building fabric.
However complimentary the illusion of consumption and the reality of production seem on an abstract plane, they are in reality deeply contradictory, for they demand conflicting behaviors: insatiability and restraint. Consequently, the architecture of desire and the architecture of production are competitors and hedonism, formalism, graphism and elitism the antipodes of the preoccupations of the engineer. This conflict gradually increased until the beginning of the eighteenth century when an early form of functionalism began to appear as a generally acceptable compromise between the two in the writings of Fenelon, Fremin, Cordemoy II and later Frezier, Laugier, Soufflot and Milizia.8
Functionalism
The reconciliatory role of functionalism consisted in finding beauty in utility, thus satisfying the hedonistic, formalistic and graphic demands while giving the appearance of having yielded to efficiency and effectiveness, that is to say the objectives of the engineer. With the creation of functionalism - the work aesthetic - the drive for consumption and the will for production seemed at last to be working as one.
It is interesting to note that the functionalist solution was developed in those aspects of design which science -concentrating with mechanics on the stability and durability of the fabric of the building - had not yet been touched: the visual organization and the plan of the building.
Because straight lines and right angles make the thinking behind the building appear "geometrical", functionalist designs begin to look as if they had been designed on engineering boards. Hence, more recently, the use of cubes, prisms and cylinders thought of as "technological" shapes - as if made by machines. We find also free irregular shapes in this case as if "organically" grown by the machine of nature. And hence the functionalist techniques of covering masonry walls and even plain carpentry by plaster or plywood which has been colored, polished, chopped and tinted to imitate machine made steel, aluminum or plastic.
Was functionalism hypocritical, sophostic, demagogic, closet schizophrenic, or was it an iconic, utopian vision of a reconciliation to come? Did it express dark, manipulatory interests of the market in order to help it maintain its hegemony over society or did it express the aspirations of the avant-garde? These are difficult questions and they become more so when one considers that, in addition to the efforts to compromise utility with hedonistic imagery, functionalism in close connection with the Welfare State tried to overcome the increasingly deep conflict and separation that the commercial revolution introduced between the affluent and the deprived.
When Welfare State policies began to be put into operation in order to overcome the inequalities worsened by the commercial revolution and to reform society with as little pain and waste as possible, functionalism was called upon to help in the reformist efforts. It now tried to bridge not only beauty and utility, but richness and poverty.
The Crisis of Functionalism
The path of functionalism was not without pitfalls. Its ambivalent character made it both attractive and vulnerable. It was condemned for being boring, deadening and dry each time the market yielded to the desirability of conspicuous consumption - whenever, in the words of Lewis Mumford, there was a "premium upon the mask" of buildings - and it was thrust aside for its fakeness, superficiality and concern for "skin" rather than "essence" whenever problems arose that required the real problem solving techniques of engineering -countertendencies of the type economic historians have much to say.
Functionalism was simultaneously attacked from both these sides for the last time during the early nineteen-sixties, the last moments of a major boom in the western world, when both the expansion of the market and
the broad application of new technology were needed. It, like all the concommitants of the Welfare State, was bitterly criticized as too rigid and old fashioned to help maintain the rate of growth and respond to new demands. Consumer Sovereignty was on the rise with its cultural repercussions: the relativistic idea of the "incommensurable" subcultures making up on an equal basis a pluralistic republic of cultures replacing the traditional model of unilateral progress.
Scientism9
The two major counter functionalist movements that arose were scientism and populism. Scientism rejected the functionalist formulas in its search for more efficient methods of determining space use and visual organization in buildings and turned instead to the methods employed by engineers in solving structural problems. Within the
scheme of this "soft engineering", design problems were fitted into a problem solving framework in order to make every step of the process easy to analyze, measure and place in rational succession.
A more careful study of what was taking place in architecture at that moment reveals that in a large number of such efforts there was a preoccupation with the image of science rather than its essence. As with functionalism which had originated as an iconography of functionality, precision and economy, scientism generated design "processes" as if science were being utilized. No wonder substantial changes were never achieved in architectural practice. Even in architectural education - where the movement placed all its weight - there were no substantial modifications.
The new imagery occasionally helped legitimize applications of new science and technology in building during the nineteen-sixties by creating a favorable aura around it, a positive mythology.
Populism10
Populism, on the other hand, tried to develop a "political" architecture reflecting the desires and aspirations of the "people" and not of experts, the elite, as functionalism did or any other kind of professional architecture of the past.. The "people" were every group of users of a project who were the only legitimate validators of its plan. Professionals, it was argued, further alienated the user from the product; the distance had to be bridged by a brand new process of design.
There were several proposals for eliminating the distance between the people and the elite, the user and the architect:
1) The designer integrates norms derived from ordinary popular objects into the official set of norms of architecture. A new style is therefore developed, a popular style although created by the designer himself.
2) New norms are integrated into architecture obtained through the observation of life styles of user groups, with the help of behavioral and social scientists acting as intermediaries - we may say as translators - between user and designer.
3) The users are free to express their desires and aspirations within a shell which is only "half-determined" by the architect and his norms.
4) The norms and aspirations of the users are "incorporated" by the architect who identifies completely with the community of users and becomes their "advocate."
5) The user groups directly "participate" in the design of the project which will affect them.
6) The architect designs only components which the users build in a "self-help" manner.
The weaknesses of populism were many:
-It was superficial to claim that architecture suffered mainly from excessive professionalism and reduce all problems of architecture to relations between designer and user.
-It was naive to expect that if the users were given more say in the design decision process a more human environment would develop, that users had a more positive attitude towards other users than professionals did.
Like scientism, populism was a movement created by new professionals in search not only of a more human profession, but also of jobs. Even if the budgets allocated to populist projects were in general meager, there were tendencies to inflate work, to self perpetuate, to reproduce conditions for furthering employment.
Preoccupied completely with the idea of the autonomy of the user group as populism was, it failed not only to comprehend the complexity and evolution of human relations and the deeper patterns of dependence and domination in society, but by encouraging fragmented activism, erecting what Richard Sennett has called barricades from within, it weakened potentials of collective pressure for change.
A New Crisis
Like most of the reactions of the 1960's, populism and scientism were impatient, extreme enterprises that disrupted conceptual and institutional structures. In the end the archaic participation of user groups and the over analysis of the design decision making process hardly made buildings more desirable or their production more efficient. On the contrary, a spirit of constant criticism and questioning impeded the execution of many projects, slowed down architectural production and, in some cases, brought it to a complete halt. In a situation of rising costs of construction, the outcome was not far from catastrophic.
Schools fared no better. Skills quickly disappeared from the curriculum, never to be replaced, or worse yet, to be replaced by completely inoperative new techniques. At least one generation of students graduated without basic skills in drawing, drafting or conceiving the schematic physical plan of a building.
The movements that beset architecture in the early 1970's were hardly the brightest nor the easiest in its history. The efforts of scientism and populism had appeared to the general public as dangerous and fruitless acrobatics. Functionalism's schematic thinking had lost its capacity to justify inoperable solutions. There was a decline in the amount of building, a shrinking of resources and a tightening of constraints. As a result it seemed that many of the basic traditional qualities of architecture were continually being eroded. The decreasing expectation of economic benefits made the future of architecture more and more grim both as a service profession and as a creative activity.
Narcissism
The recent phase of architecture may be seen as a reaction to this depressing state of affairs. From this point of view, it may be called narcissistic,11 to employ the term in its psychoanalytic sense.
We shall rely on the analogy between the psychological state of an individual and of a group in the hope of clarifying the recent ambiguous expressions of architecture. Narcissism is characterised by the confusion between the consciousness of control of the self over the self and of the self over the outside world. This is the state in the development of a child where the self is not yet detached from the things of the external world when the "omnipotence of thoughts" dictates a great deal of his or her acts.
A person may regress to this state after facing an acute disaster, such as the death of a loved one, when it is obvious from the outset that no measures can redeem the catastrophe. The form it takes is the denial of the painful incident. This regression can occur even under minor stresses and frustrations; before an examination, for instance, the extent of the regression and of the belief in the "omnipotence of thought" varies with the intensity of the frustration and satisfies motives to different degrees.
In social groups, a professional group for instance, a grave loss or a major frustration can provoke similar symptoms of regression: denial of reality and a take-over of the "omnipotence of thoughts" in its collective thinking.
In the most recent phase of architecture, the preoccupation with formalism, hedonism, graphism and elitism to a certain extent helped to shield a number of practitioners from an unpleasant situation, allowed them to shift with an easy conscience from practical measures to a realm of mental constructs. It was an attempt to overcome recent frustration, to deny the separation between reality and desire, and to turn inward for approval to the closed world of peers or of the drawing board, where everything is possible. This collective narcissism caused architects to confuse the sense of wielding well some of the tools of their profession with the impression of acting upon the man-made environment in a meaningful way. Basically it enabled a feeling of omnipotence to replace a sense of wretchedness.
Movements evolve as a result of the psychological idiosyncracies of persons driven by personal interests and engaged in conflict and cooperation with others through reciprocities, dependencies, obligations and dominations - what Norbert Elias calls "human figurations."12
Architecture is not completely capable of reproducing its own conditions of existence - it is autonomous only up to a point - and cannot be wholly detached, as it tends to be in many works of architectural history and criticism, from certain events: the period of accelerated economic growth and expansion of the late fifties and early sixties, the attempts of the mid-sixties to promote technological innovation and diversified consumption followed by a world wide recession, an economic and energy crisis, crisis of the state of legitimation and fiscal solvency, the lack of apparent economic and political direction (at even the highest levels of decision-making), and the laxness of most of the social and political agents of change. These are characteristics of what is commonly referred to as late or advanced capitalism and have played an important role in the surge of the 1970' s towards "new professionalism", an attempt to bolster the damaged status of the architectural profession at the expense of broader considerations linked to the technological, economic, psychological, cultural and economic aspects of the man-made environments.
This mood, which we have seen from inside the profession as arising from a narcissistic retreat to a make-believe world where the architect still reigns supreme and as a denial of the present difficulties in the market, appeared almost simultaneously in Milan, Barcelona and New York. A multi-national economy and an international system of architectural education and press make it possible for so-called advanced thinking to crop up in so many parts of the world which, regardless of local differences in tone and emphasis, and in spite of unequal national economic development, allow international dialogue. A word of caution should be inserted here about vulgar economic determinism. Indeed, a student of the development of architectural movements might find that the reverse is also true. Places which appear to be closer to the core of late capitalism may display a less advanced discussion. This is partly because they lack the necessary conceptual and institutional vehicles (as in the case of Germany where they were severely shaken during the 1930's and some parts of the United States where they simply never existed). Such cases present paradoxical instances of retardation in specialized debates.
If populism and scientism were naive in their approach to the historical, social and cultural setting of architecture, narcissism disregarded it completely or denied it. This position is usually explicitly stated in the writings of narcissistic designers or critics; at times, however, it is necessary to dig beneath the semiological and marxist phraseology of "avantgardist" manifestos to unearth the presuppositions and implications of unstated architectural values.
The same negation of social and scientific outlooks in design results when a capital importance is assigned to the drawing and to the model, elevating them as a means to an end in the design process. A project, however simple it may be to implement, involves some technical thinking and collective involvement, and its maintenance and use brings it into contact with scientific or social constraints. A drawing implies the possibility of form existing independent of technical and social limitations.
In the elitism of the modern phase of architecture, anti-social and unscientific attitudes are explicitly presented as merits. Hedonism also makes a building appear as an end in itself, an object of pleasure to satisfy the desire of a sole individual. Hedonism liberates design from the obligations of scientific rigor and social accountability.
In this new phase, there is an absence of human concern, an inability to acknowledge facts incompatible with evidence; issues of form are handled with the greatest naivete and arbitrariness. If anything was achieved by the human and social sciences during the last hundred years it was to demonstrate that the desires of individuals are not expressions of a private internal self but of self-expressing internalized social forces, or of a self in constant interaction with a collective environment.
The perception of beauty depends on the physical characteristics of the object as well as on the social framework within which the characteristics of the object assume a meaning. A form arouses pleasure like a message which can be understood and appreciated in the mind but also in the framework of a code which is collectively produced and socially validated. An approach which concerns itself only with one point of view reduces the possibilities of explaining the phenomenon of beauty with totality.

The narcissistic trend had an undeniable impact on the world of architects. But its place: in history promises to be a minor one. It was a development concerned with the marginal aspects of architecture, contrary to scientism and populism which aimed at the heart of the profession. While populism and scientism were clumsy avantgardes which hinted at future directions for architecture, narcissism is a minor conceptual and institutional reaction. It recalls another group which, disgusted with the materialism, opportunism and cunningness exhibited in the conflicts and alliances of seventeenth century absolutist France, chose a different path. These were the precieux.13 They indulged in the creation of a private language for discussing only matters of pleasure. They chose names from classical mythology for one another and even put to paper their fantasies about their encounters in an ideal mythological world. Whatever this strange game of allegory owed to prior archaic ritualistic traditions which had been highly intergrated in society, by the seventeenth century it amounted only to a kind of anachorisis - in other words, a retreat from social life, combined with a narcissistic turn inward to an unreal world. Because of the precieux' refusal to come to terms with the real world and their subsequent inability to develop tools for dealing with it, the impact of this group on both their contemporaries and on future generations was very small indeed.
The shortcomings of the narcissistic phase are apparent. But the forced fun in the rhetoric, the tortured rotations, mirrorings, repetitions and projections, the broken tempo of building compositions, the adolescent disco manner of current projects, conceal a bitter critique of the pitiful decay of the institution of architecture and, with it, the sunken hopes for a human environment physically and socially well-tempered.
By detaching themselves from reality, narcissists in fact only underlined the marginalization of a profession which clings to its traditional weaknesses with sentimental inflexibility. For all their subtlety, their private requiems to modern architecture only further intensified the isolation and helplessness of the profession.
The moments that have occurred recently in architecture are hardly the easiest or brightest in its history. Innovative thinking is late in coming and basic skills are swiftly being lost. The schematic thinking of functionalism has been rejected, and it is difficult for its deceiving arguments to be brought back to justify inoperable solutions. Neither is there any chance that the simpleminded proposals of populism and scientism will fill us again with false optimism and lead us to unworkable solutions. But sadly, the rejection of these alternatives has not brought us a coherent mass of experience, a body of knowledge gradually and systematically accumulated, from which architecture will be able to draw constructive advice for future action. It has led only to denial and sterile polemics, a characteristic of architecture since the mid-nineteenth century, poisoning the relation of architect to user and client, and that of educator to student.

The ills of the architectural profession and education cannot be blamed entirely on shrinking budgets for buildings. They are also due to the self-indulgence of its preoccupation with private dialogues carried out
in spatial and graphic puzzles - the natural outcome of its peculiar type of cheerful pessimism - and above all to its spirit of narrowness, obstinacy and arrogance, which is ineffectual in improving the architectural condition from any point of view.
The Aftermath of Narcissism
Despite its shortcomings, the narcissist phase contains important material for study. Taken as a critique, implicit behind the rhetoric, drawings and tortured buildings, it has contested the incompleteness of the architectural approaches of populism and scientism that disregarded the importance of the visual organization of the environment. It has also revealed the rich potential contained in the unique tools of architecture, such as graphic figuration, which are mostly untouched and even unrecognized by other fields in science and engineering. Narcissism has also pointed the finger at the decay of a once most promising institution of modern times; its projects try to detach themselves from reality but only make the marginalization of the architect and of architecture more obvious. But this loss is only seen inwardly as it affects the profession - with a sentimental inflexible attachment to its traditional weaknesses - instead of from the vantage point of the overall cultural and social developments which are constantly renewing conceptual and institutional structures.
It is not so much the decay of institutions or ways of thinking which ought to worry us. What is more serious is the deeper and more general crisis related to the failure of present mechanisms - architecture being one among them - that reproduce the social code or environmental organization which weaves the deeper ties of human community: what Durkheim would have called 'representations collectives.' 14
Narcissism, like populism and scientism, is unable to arrest the loosening of this social fabric. None of the attempts since the 1960's to renew architecture have investigated the interaction between design and human relations. Thus, despite their various points of contention, all these trends - populism, scientism and narcissism - remain critiques.
Need for New Knowledge
Today, in its haphazard evolution, narcissism is causing architects to lose basic skills related to fundamental human needs. It is also making architecture lose touch with the phenomena of cultural and social change because a deeply rooted conservatism exists behind the irrationality and closed nature of its thinking. It is a poor criticism that condemns with- out explanation. It makes a profession vulnerable to whims, pressures, and interests, unable to develop a body of stable and defensible norms. If architecture is to outgrow these problems, it must stop validating its projects with ideas gathered elsewhere, haphazardly and eclectically. It must become a discipline which carries on, in addition to design, its own research studies. It must generate new knowledge for guiding its new products, focusing on their impact, both mechanical or symbolic, upon social organization and human relations. Any project, whether a container of operations, a complex of signs, or an allegorical construct, acts upon human ties. It controls them in the cybernetic sense through physical and conceptual means, and in the political sense by channeling the flow of human power, reinforcing or weakening dependencies, domination and reciprocity.
Such investigations go beyond the simple and semi-automatic science of extrapolating from ethology and questionnaire data to design, and beyond the transposition of engineering formulas to environmental problems.
These investigations will have to combine the empirical scientific study of the present with the scientific study of the past.
Need to Study History
This urge for a return to history in the study of architecture should not be confused with the return to history as propagated by narcissism. The latter has attacked functionalism, populism and scientism for trying to make a new architecture without reference to the past - in fact for ignoring the very context within which architectural objects are read and understood. But it has only, in turn, used history as a refuge, a hermitage, a treasure island of architectural forms accumulated through time. The historicism of the narcissist phase, departing from an important observation and criticism, reverted swiftly to a promotion of formalism. This is far from the view of history as a tool for studying the present and preparing for the future, as a means for identifying the interaction between architecture and human relations, a way for designers to evolve a better sense of appropriateness in the practice of architecture.
The recent phase of architecture has also presented history as a means of purification, of stripping architecture of its "fake glamour" and of its "seductive influence" and of removing its "ideological mask". It is seen as part of a larger program of gradual, complete destruction of culture, as the product of a "ruling arbitrary power". This use of history, as a tool in a campaign of destruction and salvation dialectics with its undertones of cultural terrorism, is in complete opposition to what the present article proposes. The claim that this stripping process could turn back the cultural evolutionary clock and return architecture to its origins, to a promised land of primitive purity and freedom, is a curious one, to say the least. Primitive archaic societies differ from the mythological image we create of them. There is no trace among the vast documentary evidence on primitive societies of the "purity" and "freedom" to which some critics of the recent phase of architecture seem to be attached. Such a misguided "purification" process would only leave architects, and the society at large, worse off than they are today, bearing the curse of the fragmented self without enjoying any of the achievements of contemporary culture and technology.
For the moment this brand of socio-therapeutic use of history, fortunately, remains rather ineffectual. It serves only as a passport to formalistic escapades for those to whom too much architectural purism would have given a guilty social conscience. Moreover, one can hardly ask the average designer to negate ideology and to reach deep, and with the aid of history, find the naked "structure" of architecture (likened to a Chomskyan "syntatic structure"), a pre-ideological, invariant essence of man. This analogy is certainly founded on speculative thinking. It is not at all clear, from the scientific point of view, how, when and in what form this architectural "structure" will be found and what guarantees the validity of the results of this search.
In the end, ironically, this para-scientific thinking, for all its anti- functionalism, resembles that of the functionalists. In the past, functionalist designs were validated with free reference to engineering; now some designers search for justification in linguistics. It must be added that functionalist projects - Utzon's design for the Sydney Opera House is an eloquent witness - embraced engineering to the same extent that architecture today embraces linguistics. That is, hardly at all.
Humanistic Architecture
We have tried to identify the major characteristics of the architectural reactions of the 1970's, to locate them historically and explain them in relation to the web of forces of a social, cultural and economic development. Furthermore, we have voiced our reservations about the current situation. We would like now to turn to what we see as the emerging movement in architecture during the decade which begins in a few months. We tried to found our predictions not so much on wishful thinking as on our reading of the desires, especially of the younger generation, for a more realistic and at the same time more socially accountable humanistic architecture.
These are notions whose roots lie with the cultural revolution of the end of the Middle Ages, but whose meaning goes beyond the tight framework of the production-consumption cycle and of the division of the haves and the have-nots.
This turn-about will be partly the result of a reaction within architecture, polarization against the theories and practices of narcissism, and partly the impact of the appearance of the new generation of architects who, in seeking their own identity, will probably identify negatively with the previous generation. But it will also be the outcome of new social and economic developments which will bypass the architectonic opposition of the anti-modernists and have a regenerative impact on architecture.

We have already discussed the relation between the roots of hedonism, formalism, graphism and elitism in architecture and the rise of the market, between the subsequent developments and the crisis of functionalism and the ascent and fall of the welfare state and the state of the consumer sovereignty. We now focus on the relation between the coming phase of modern architecture and the foreseen developments of economy and society in the advanced industrialized democracies.
The welfare state and the state of consumer sovereignty are fading. The market itself is now retiring from the role of the dictator of human relations. Recent efforts to restore good old fashioned libertarianism will probably last as long as the current retro clothes fashion. The 1980s point to a new direction.
The Public Household
Society and economy are undergoing a major transformation towards what Daniel Bell - echoing previous writings of I.M. Finley and Karl Polanyi on the "aristotelean" economy - has called The Public Household.15
According to this view, the economy continues to move toward a higher degree of interdependence: everyone comes to depend more on everyone else, as do social groups and nations. In this economic environment the market gradually plays a less important role as a controlling mechanism of human relations, as a "principle of justice" and it is used instead as a vehicle for spreading information. The necessity for public goods is progressively recognized. Hedonistic individualism is spurned, although individual differences are treasured and encouraged. Thus true political liberalism flourishes and the surveillance and punishment functions of a strong bonapartist state become unnecessary and disappear.
These social and economic transformations are closely linked to architecture's new search for humanism and to the emergence of universality of man and dignity of man as the leading ideals in architecture.
The Universality of Man and the New Architecture
The idea of the universality of man has had, since the Renaissance, two meanings. It has referred to the common - thus universal - make-up of man which led to the commonality of human experience; and it also has been used to describe individuals linked through relations of reciprocity to a common - thus universal - bond of community. Cultural expressions, ac- cording to the second point of view, are capable of weaving human associations. They do this by projecting an image of unity in a community, existing independently of the individuals. It is a picture of society as a sui generis organism assembling individuals universally.

From Alberti to Arnheim, hedonistic, psychological theories of architectural aesthetics saw the universality of man in the first sense, as the common human mind, the common human aesthetic reactions to objects, albeit interacting individually in the privacy of the mind with these objects.
The contemporary idea of the universality of man is not founded on the belief that all people are similar - the common human nature - but on the conviction that the satisfaction of human needs is a goal to be pursued not for one or for some but for all.
This commitment goes beyond the idea of social involvement that was fashionable in the populist sixties, conceiving society in terms of fragments of consumer, occupational, street corner, band and gang groups of consciousness and it is also diametrically opposed to the tenet of the narcissistic seventies of pleasure being only a private affair, privately eminated and privately enjoyed. It is based on the realization that the origin of human needs is not private but social - in other words, human needs do not express individual internal forces but a cluster of human relations which ultimately includes humanity and that the satisfaction of these needs is also the outcome of a social effort - it cannot be reached except through collective action which, once more, ultimately requires the cooperation of humanity.
Architecture and Social Change
All that is correct, it may be argued, but these social and economic transformations, such as the eventual emergence of a "public household" approach to society and economy, interesting as they are to the architect as a citizen, do not actually relate to architecture. Architecture can only wait to see such transformations arrive, it cannot contribute to their coming about. It cannot surpass the limitations which conceptual, institutional, social structures impose. No improvements towards rationality and social accountability in architecture can be made prior to other structural changes.
The impact of such a pseudosociological dogma has been damaging to social change and to the architectural profession, contributing to its crisis and marginalization. It has led to the naive idea that professional action is always inferior to political activism.
A careful historical investigation reveals that the development of architecture, as well as of most professions, is neither independent of the process of social change nor a passive receptor of it, and that the evolution of architecture and society are interwoven.

But the links demonstrated are infinitely more complex than the two-step, simplified, one way deterministic model which sees only social change first and a new kind of professional action second. In these cases, one finds architecture having been able to evolve by taking advantage of competing interests and groups in order to promote theories and practices which went beyond the limits of institutional and conceptual frameworks of time, beyond the dominant social order. Such innovations may have been small but their contribution to social change was hardly negligible.16
We are not referring to the influence of messianic literature in architecture nor to utopian projects, but to subtle opportune professional interventions - the avantgardes of architecture - which ever since the Renaissance have brought change, even within static overall conditions.
The degree of social effectiveness of architectural interventions, under such circumstances, depends on the capacity to comprehend the context within which these interventions operate. Knowledge and understanding of the social impact of design, of the relation between built form and social formation, are therefore fundamental preconditions to any humanistic design.
The question of knowledge and understanding in relation to professional action brings us to the second fundamental humanistic idea that should be incorporated into modern architecture: the idea of dignity.
The Dignity of Man and the New Architecture
The idea of dignity, as it emerged during the Renaissance, opposed the fatalism of deterministic astrology.17 Ever since, it has continued to be in sharp contrast to other forms of fatalism and determinism. It stands for acting consciously and responsibly, for being aware of the nature of confines and consequences related to action and for choosing alternatives on the basis of knowledge and understanding.
Modern architecture has mostly ignored this idea, opting for justification after the fact and decision before evaluation.
The story of modern architecture up to this moment is a sequence of efforts exhausted, schemes interrupted, projects abandoned to the ravages of time or to the transfigurating zeal of the opponents of modernism. The immaturity of the conditions both social and economic may be blamed for such a pathetic state of affairs. But we have already described cases where lack of understanding has brought failure after failure and precipitated crises in modern architecture.

Nor can lack of sincerity on the part of architects, a presumed conspiratorial plot, be blamed for the counter-intended effects of the modern plans, such as:
- the ideal housing schemes which only helped to sell real estate or cars, the new building prototypes which advanced building materials and contractors fees, or garden apartments that turned into live-in prisons or havens for crime.
- the idea of universal norms of modern architecture to bring about guarantees for a minimal decent living which turned out to be instruments of disciplinary socialization employed to make man into an efficient and effective productive cog.
- the campaigns of modern architecture for participatory design which ended up as a tool for cooptation or coersion or aiding the new tribalism and curtailing the effectiveness of collective action.
It is obvious therefore that strengthening the capability of the profession to understand the context within which it operates is a priority of the next phase of modern architecture, the humanistic phase. Which means that, in addition to creating and implementing design, architecture must also generate knowledge about the instruments through which its interventions may be most effective, knowledge about the social impact of design, about the relation between built form and social formations.
Such research will have to investigate projects in their totality, as mechanical constructions and as containers of activities, as micro-environments and as complexes of signs, as controls of human relations which channel the flow of power, reinforce or weaken dependencies, dominations and reciprocities. Such studies are more complex than any- thing architecture has undertaken up till now. They go beyond the simple science of extrapolating from mechanical to human relations, from ethological to social patterns - on which scientism relied so many times in the past.
As a result new methods and techniques of research have to be developed. A basic feature of the new humanistic approach is the introduction of a historical point of view. Only through the study of their complex unfolding in time can the relations between built form and social formation be comprehended.

NOTES

1 A term coined in relation to the arts of the 1970's and later applied to architecture by Charles Jencks in Post Modernism.

2 A large number of architectural journals were preoccupied with these issues, especially Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, Architectural
Design, Lotus and Oppositions. Some of the articles presented were:
Eisenman, P., "Notes on Conceptual Architecture: Towards a definition", Casabe11a, Volume 35, number 359-360 (December 1971), pp 48-58
Rowe, C., "Piecemeal Social Engineering", Architectural Review (August 1974), pp 6-61
Stern, R., "Stomping at the Savoye, Five on Five", Architectural Forum, Volume 138 number 4 (May 1973), pp 49-53
Tafuri, M., "European Graffitti, five x five= 25", Oppositions, Volume 5, pp 36-74
Frampton, K., "Fronta1ity vs. Rotation", Five Architects, (New York: Wittenborn 1972~ pp 9-13
Frampton, K., "Two or Three Things I Know About Them: A Note on Mannerism", Architectural Design, Volume 47, number 5 1977, pp 315-318
Giorgo1a, R., "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Five on Five", Architectural Forum, Volume 138, number 4 (May 1973) pp 46-57
Scolari, M., "Les Apories de l'Architecture", l"Architecture d' Aujourd 'hui, number 190, April1977
Huet, B., "Forma1isme, R~a1isme", l' Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, number 190, April.1977 Quoted in A. Rossi "Une Education Rea1iste" l'Architecture d'Aujour'hui, number 190, April1977
Aymonino, C., 'tUne Architecture de l'Optimisme", l'Architecture d'Aujourd'hu!, number 190, April1977
The most perceptive critique so far of the recent phase of architecture is Pommer, R., "The New Suprematists", Art Forum, October 1976, pp 38-43.

3 The Procrustes Club whose aim was to stretch or chop the specifications of the user to fit the creativity of the designer was devoted
to the pleasure of form, whether built, glued or drawn. Openly elitist and outspokenly anti-functionalist, it was something of an exaggerated but by no means unique architectural manifestation of the culture of the 1950s. The architecture department at Yale University to which
most of the members were affiliated, followed the same approach although in a milder form. Paul Rudolph was the central figure, the organizer, the pedagogue, the example. Architectural drawings and cardboard models became important because they turned the project into a purely visual object. Ah, those elaborate shadowed perspective sections, those immense stripe-veiled drawings, those white impeccable models roughly chopped in the early hours of the day! They sent electric sparks down the spine of many a young visitor to Rudolph's studio. The role of Philip Johnson too was primordial. Through frequent visits he monitored, encouraged, supported. But if he was the undeniable 'eminence grise' of the department, Vincent Scully was its prime mentor. Through his highly charged and massively attended history lectures, he expanded the influence of the approach to future architects and, perhaps more importantly, to future clients. In this same capacity, the role of Carol Meeks, another important architectural historian at Yale, was also notable.

The department viewed history courses as essential to the understanding of studio work. Through its filter Le Corbusier was screened and purified. What remained - his formalist, anti-technological, anti-comfort, anti-social dimension - was arranged side by side with reproductions of Piranesi engravings, Greek temples, Tiffany lamps. In another strain of anti-functionalist formalism, Beaux-Arts schemes from the American Vitruvius and plans of the Chicago exhibition were in- cluded. This extraordinary collage created a closed and self-reinforcing idealized world.

Probably the most obvious trend in the Procrustes Club - functionalism-bashing, a term coined by Reyner Banham in his article in T.L.S. February 17,1978, p. 191 - can be traced to some extent to the writings of Banham himself. But Banham's historical investigations were combined with what was perceived as a wayward passion for technology and popular imagery. It is in the Giedion of the late writings that we find the real grandfather of the Procrusteans and a great-grandfather of the most recent phase of architecture. Giedion's opening of the way for formalism, graphism, hedonism and elitism was a Betrayal of functionalism (since he made a career of being its extreme propagandist). Henry-Russell Hitchcock was also among the early subverters of functionalism. With the publication of The International Style (1932), Hitchcock and Johnson reduced it ( a much broader movement by far) to a style and thereby demolished Functionalism without even the hink of an attack. (This was possible not only because of their masterly capabilities as strategists but also because of the internal weaknesses, confusion and even dishonesty of functionalist thinking).

4 Abbot, Suger. De Administratione, between 1144-49 (edited and translated E. Panofsky).
Alberti, L.B., De Re Aedificatoria, 1685 (translated into English by James Leoni and edited by J. Rykwert, 1955, London).

5 Colonna (Columna), Francesco, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Venice 1499.

6 The issue is raised in, among others, Alberti, L.B., op. cit., Di Giorgio, Fr. in his Trattati (C. Maltese ed., 1971, Milan) and Barbaro, D., I dieci Libri..., 1556.

7 Piranesi, G.B., Parere sul1'Architettura, 1765.

8 Fenelon, F. de S. de 1a Mothe, Les Aventures de Te1emaque, 1699, Paris.
Fremin, M. de, Mémoires Critiques, 1702, Paris.
Cordemoy, Abbe J.L. de, Nouveau Traite, 1706, Paris.
Frezier, A.F., Dissertation Theorique..., 1738, Paris.
Laugier, Abbé M.A., Essai sur 1 'Architecture , Paris, 1753., Observations sur 1 'Architecture, Paris, 1765.
Soufflot, J.G., Mémoire sur l'Architecture Gothique, Lyons, Academie des Sciences, April12, 1741.
Milizia, Fr., Principj.i di Architettura Civile, 1781.

9 A term coined by the authors in 'History of Architecture as a Social Science', proceedings from the conference of the same name
at the Kunsthistorisch Institut der Ryksuniversiteit, Utrecht, held 16-19 May 1977 (Utrecht, June 1978).

10 A term coined by the authors in 'In de Naam van het Vo1k' (The Populist Movement in Architecture) Forum, number 3, 1976, Bauwe1t, 10 January 1975.

11 See Freud, S., Totem and Taboo (1913) p 84, and 'Notes on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis' in Collected Papers, III, p 293.

12 Elias, N., Human Figurations, Amsterdam, 1977.

13 For further information about the literary works of the precieux, see Niderst, A., Madeleine de Scudery, Paul Pe1isson et leur Monde, Paris, 1976. Unfortunately no full socio-politica1 study of the precieux has been published so far.

14 E. Durkheim and M. Mauss, "De Quelques Formes de Classification..." Annee Sociologique, Volume VI (Paris, 1901-02) pp 1-72.

15 Bell, D., The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York, 1976.

16 A recent study by Bruno Fortier, Michael Foucault et al (Les Machines a Guerir, Bruxe11es, 1979) demonstrates this most clearly.

17 Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, ed. E. Garin, Florence, 1942.