Rethinking Architecture

A Reader in Cultural Theory

Neil Leach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134796281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Brought together for the first time - the seminal writing on architecture by key philosophers and cultural theorist of the twentieth century.
Issues around the built environment are increasingly central to the study of the social sciences and humanities. The essays offer a refreshing take on the question of architecture and provocatively rethink many of the accepted tenets of architecture theory from a broader cultural perspective.
The book represents a careful selection of the very best theoretical writings on the ideas which have shaped our cities and our experiences of architecture. As such, Rethinking Architecture provides invaluable core source material for students on a range of courses.

PART I
MODERNISM

THEODOR W.ADORNO

German philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) was a leading member of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. He was appointed its director in 1959. Adorno’s thought is informed by a range of German thinkers, and his work could be described as a heterodox Marxism with a strong Freudian influence. Thus commodity fetishism and the role of the unconscious form a crucial part of his thinking. From Hegel, Adorno inherited the notion of the dialectic, but appropriated it in its negative form. He opposed the Hegelian notion of ‘identity’ thinking, and championed instead a way of seeking to ‘describe’ an object negatively, by what it could not be, seeking to arrive at an approximation of the ‘truth’ through a ‘constellation’ of such negative critiques.

In his aesthetic theory, Adorno recognized the emancipatory potential of art. Through its autonomy, art offered a vision of an alternative world. It negated reified consciousness and rejected the dominant order. However, only autonomous art—art that required the engagement of the viewer—could offer this resistance. Adorno therefore distinguished between art and the products of the culture industry whose purpose was largely that of distraction and amusement.

In the essay ‘Functionalism Today’, Adorno addresses the question of architecture and exposes the paradoxes within Adolf Loos’s treatment of functionalism and ornament. The purposive and the purpose-free arts, according to Adorno, can never be absolutely separated. They are held in a dialectical relationship. Purpose-free arts often have a social function, while there can be no ‘chemically pure’ purposefulness. Thus functionalism in architecture can never be pure functionalism. ‘The absolute rejection of style’, Adorno concludes famously, ‘becomes itself a form of style.’ In his championing of functionalism, Loos had dismissed ornament as the decadent product of erotic symbolism. Yet, as Adorno argues, even the functional may attract the symbolic. Symbols are born of the need to identify with one’s surroundings, and humans attach symbolic significance to even the most technical of objects, such as the airplane or the car.

The essay is an attack on the meanness of postwar German reconstruction. Against the ‘false’ objectivity of Neue Sachlichkeit, Adorno argues for an architecture of sustained aesthetic reflection, an architecture ‘innervated’ by the imagination. Above all, he calls for an architecture of generosity, which ‘thinks more of men than they actually are’.

Although criticized for his elitist treatment of art and for his deeply pessimistic approach to the Enlightenment, Adorno remains a figure of enduring appeal. In particular his early and incisive critique of the culture industry has exerted a marked influence on theorists of postmodernity such as Fredric Jameson.

FUNCTIONALISM TODAY

I would first like to express my gratitude for the confidence shown me by Adolf Arndt in his invitation to speak here today. At the same time, I must also express my serious doubts as to whether I really have the right to speak before you. Métier, expertise in both matters of handicraft and of technique, counts in your circle for a great deal. And rightly so. If there is one idea of lasting influence which has developed out of the Werkbund movement, it is precisely this emphasis on concrete competence as opposed to an aesthetics removed and isolated from material questions. I am familiar with this dictum from my own métier, music. There it became a fundamental theorem, thanks to a school which cultivated close personal relationships with both Adolf Loos and the Bauhaus, and which was therefore fully aware of its intellectual ties to objectivity (Sachlichkeit)¹ in the arts. Nevertheless, I can make no claim to competence in matters of architecture. And yet, I do not resist the temptation, and knowingly face the danger that you may briefly tolerate me as a dilettante and then cast me aside. I do this firstly because of my pleasure in presenting some of my reflections in public, and to you in particular; and secondly, because of Adolf Loos’s comment that while an artwork need not appeal to anyone, a house is responsible to each and everyone.² I am not yet sure whether this statement is in fact valid, but in the meantime, I need not be holier than the pope.

I find that the style of German reconstruction fills me with a disturbing discontent, one which many of you may certainly share. Since I no less than the specialists must constantly face this feeling, I feel justified in examining its foundations. Common elements between music and architecture have been discussed repeatedly, almost to the point of ennui. In uniting that which I see in architecture with that which I understand about the difficulties in music, I may not be transgressing the law of the division of labour as much as it may seem. But to accomplish this union, I must stand at a greater distance from these subjects than you may justifiably expect. It seems to me, however, not unrealistic that at times—in latent crisis situations—it may help to remove oneself farther from phenomena than the spirit of technical competence would usually allow. The principle of ‘fittingness to the material’ (Material-gerechtigkeit)³ rests on the foundation of the division of labour. Nevertheless, it is advisable even for experts to occasionally take into account the extent to which their expertise may suffer from just that division of labour, as the artistic naiveté underlying it can impose its own limitations.

Let me begin with the fact that the anti-ornamental movement has affected the ‘purpose-free’ arts (zweckfreie Künste)⁴ as well. It lies in the nature of artworks to inquire after the essential and necessary in them and to react against all superfluous elements. After the critical tradition declined to offer the arts a canon of right and wrong, the responsibility to take such considerations into account was placed on each individual work; each had to test itself against its own immanent logic, regardless of whether or not it was motivated by some external purpose. This was by no means a new position. Mozart, though clearly still standard-bearer and critical representative of the great tradition, responded in the following way to the minor objection of a member of the royal family —‘But so many notes, my dear Mozart’—after the premier of his ‘Abduction’ with ‘Not one note more, Your Majesty, than was necessary.’ In his Critique of Judgment, Kant grounded this norm philosophically in the formula of ‘pur-posiveness without a purpose’ (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck). The formula reflects an essential impulse in the judgment of taste. And yet it does not account for the historical dynamic. Based on a language stemming from the realm of materials, what this language defines as necessary can later become superfluous, even terribly ornamental, as soon as it can no longer be legitimated in a second kind of language, which is commonly called style. What was functional yesterday can therefore become the opposite tomorrow. Loos was thoroughly aware of this historical dynamic contained in the concept of ornament. Even representative, luxurious, pompous and, in a certain sense, burlesque elements may appear in certain forms of art as necessary, and not at all burlesque. To criticise the Baroque for this reason would be philistine. Criticism of ornament means no more than criticism of that which has lost its functional and symbolic signification. Ornament becomes then a mere decaying and poisonous organic vestige. The new art is opposed to this, for it represents the fictitiousness of a depraved romanticism, an ornamentation embarrassingly trapped in its own impotence. Modern music and architecture, by concentrating strictly on expression and construction, both strive together with equal rigour to efface all such ornament. Schönberg’s compositional innovations, Karl Kraus’s literary struggle against journalistic clichés and Loos’s denunciation of ornament are not vague analogies in intellectual history; they reflect precisely the same intention. This insight necessitates a correction of Loos’s thesis, which he, in his open-mindedness, would probably not have rejected: the question of functionalism does not coincide with the question of practical function. The purpose-free (zweckfrei) and the purposeful (zweckgebunden) arts do not form the radical opposition which he imputed. The difference between the necessary and the superfluous is inherent in a work, and is not defined by the work’s relationship—or the lack of it—to something outside itself.

In Loos’s thought and in the early period of functionalism, purposeful and aesthetically autonomous products were separated from one another by absolute fact. This separation, which is in fact the object of our reflection, arose from the contemporary polemic against the applied arts and crafts (Kunstgewerbe).⁵ Although they determined the period of Loos’s development, he soon escaped from them. Loos was thus situated historically between Peter Altenberg and Le Corbusier. The movement of applied art had its beginnings in Ruskin and Morris. Revolting against the shapelessness of mass-produced, pseudo-individualized forms, it rallied around such new concepts as ‘will to style’, ‘stylization’ and ‘shaping’, and around the idea that one should apply art, reintroduce it into life in order to restore life to it. Their slogans were numerous and had a powerful effect. Nevertheless, Loos noticed quite early the implausibility of such endeavours: articles for use lose meaning as soon as they are displaced or disengaged in such a way that their use is no longer required. Art, with its definitive protest against the dominance of purpose over human life, suffers once it is reduced to that practical level to which it objects, in Hölderlin’s words: ‘For never from now on/Shall the sacred serve mere use.’ Loos found the artificial art of practical objects repulsive. Similarly, he felt that the practical reorientation of purpose-free art would eventually subordinate it to the destructive autocracy of profit, which even arts and crafts, at least in their beginnings, had once opposed. Contrary to these efforts, Loos preached for the return to an honest handicraft⁶ which would place itself in the service of technical innovations without having to borrow forms from art. His claims suffer from too simple an antithesis. Their restorative element, not unlike that of the individualization of crafts, has since become equally clear. To this day, they are still bound to discussions of objectivity.

In any given product, freedom from purpose and purposefulness can never be absolutely separated from one another. The two notions are historically interconnected. The ornaments, after all, which Loos expulsed with a vehemence quite out of character, are often actually vestiges of outmoded means of production. And conversely, numerous purposes, like sociability, dance and entertainment, have filtered into purpose-free art; they have been generally incorporated into its formal and generic laws. Purposefulness without purpose is thus really the sublimation of purpose. Nothing exists as an aesthetic object in itself, but only within the field of tension of such sublimation. Therefore there is no chemically pure purposefulness set up as the opposite of the purpose-free aesthetic. Even the most pure forms of purpose are nourished by ideas—like formal transparency and graspability—which in fact are derived from artistic experience. No form can be said to be determined exhaustively by its purpose. This can be seen even in one of Schönberg’s revolutionary works, the First Chamber Symphony, about which Loos wrote some of his most insightful words. Ironically, an ornamental theme appears, with a double beat recalling at once a central motif from Wagner’s ‘Götterdämmerung’ and the theme from the First Movement of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. The ornament is the sustaining invention, if you will, objective in its own right. Precisely this transitional theme becomes the model of a canonical exposition in the fourfold counterpoint, and thereby the model of the first extreme constructivist complex in modern music. Schönberg’s belief in such material was appropriated from the Kunstgewerbe religion, which worshipped the supposed nobility of matter; it still continues to provide inspiration even in autonomous art. He combined with this belief the ideas of a construction fitting to the material. To it corresponds an undialectical concept of beauty, which encompasses autonomous art like a nature preserve. That art aspires to autonomy does not mean that it unconditionally purges itself of ornamental elements; the very existence of art, judged by the criteria of the practical, is ornamental. If Loos’s aversion to ornament had been rigidly consistent, he would have had to extend it to all of art. To his credit, he stopped before reaching this conclusion. In this circumspection, by the way, he is similar to the positivists. On the one hand, they would expunge from the realm of philosophy anything which they deem poetic. On the other, they sense no infringement by poetry itself on their kind of positivism. Thus, they tolerate poetry if it remains in a special realm, neutralized and unchallenged, since they have already relaxed the notion of objective truth.

The belief that a substance bears within itself its own adequate form presumes that it is already invested with meaning. Such a doctrine made the symbolist aesthetic possible. The resistance to the excesses of the applied arts pertained not just to hidden forms, but also to the cult of materials. It created an aura of essentiality about them. Loos expressed precisely this notion in his critique of batik. Meanwhile, the invention of artificial products—materials originating in industry—no longer permitted the archaic faith in an innate beauty, the foundation of a magic connected with precious elements. Furthermore, the crisis arising from the latest developments of autonomous art demonstrated how little meaningful organization could depend on the material itself. Whenever organizational principles rely too heavily on material, the result approaches mere patchwork. The idea of fittingness to the materials in purposeful art cannot remain indifferent to such criticisms. Indeed, the illusion of purposefulness as its own purpose cannot stand up to the simplest social reality. Something would be purposeful here and now only if it were so in terms of the present society. Yet, certain irrationalities—Marx’s term for them was faux frais—are essential to society; the social process always proceeds, in spite of all particular planning, by its own inner nature, aimlessly and irrationally. Such irrationality leaves its mark on all ends and purposes, and thereby also on the rationality of the means devised to achieve those ends. Thus, a self-mocking contradiction emerges in the omnipresence of advertisements: they are intended to be purposeful for profit. And yet all purposefulness is technically defined by its measure of material appropriateness. If an advertisement were strictly functional, without ornamental surplus, it would no longer fulfil its purpose as advertisement. Of course, the fear of technology is largely stuffy and old-fashioned, even reactionary. And yet it does have its validity, for it reflects the anxiety felt in the face of the violence which an irrational society can impose on its members, indeed on everything which is forced to exist within its confines. This anxiety reflects a common childhood experience, with which Loos seems unfamiliar, even though he is otherwise strongly influenced by the circumstances of his youth: the longing for castles with long chambers and silk tapestries, the utopia of escapism. Something of this utopia lives on in the modern aversion to the escalator, to Loos’s celebrated kitchen, to the factory smokestack, to the shabby side of an antagonistic society. It is heightened by outward appearances. Deconstruction of these appearances, however, has little power over the completely denigrated sphere, where praxis continues as always. One might attack the pinnacles of the bogus castles of the moderns (which Thorstein Veblen despised), the ornaments, for example, pasted onto shoes; but where this is possible, it merely aggravates an already horrifying situation. The process has implications for the world of pictures as well. Positivist art, a culture of the existing, has been exchanged for aesthetic truth. One envisions the prospect of a new Ackerstrasse.⁷

The limits of fun...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: MODERNISM
• PART II: PHENOMENOLOGY
• PART III: STRUCTURALISM
• PART IV: POSTMODERNISM
• PART V: POSTSTRUCTURALISM
• SOURCES
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MAJOR WRITINGS