White Gods and Cringing Natives

By ROBERT HUGHES

Tom Wolfe's look at architecture gets it half right

The past ten years have proved a weird time for architecture, and weirder still for its public. In America, vast numbers of new buildings go up. Whole avenues seem to rise overnight, like sprouting plants in a time-lapse movie; status, constantly in flux, is one big slide area. With the action, there goes an equal ferment of fashion and criticism. Classical modernism is defended as archaeology and derided as a failed Utopia. In its place, though more visible on the drawing boards than the streets, there is something some observers have conveniently named "post-modernism." But is that a movement, a style or just a journalistic label? The walls of the labyrinth, made of paper as much as brick, shift and recompose themselves erratically.

To systematize it all, to reconcile the buildings and the slogans, demands a degree of bravery verging on folly. Nobody would accuse Tom Wolfe of lacking either. And so, in he goes, promising to make sense of the past few decades of American architectural taste with a short book, published this month, titled From Bauhaus to Our House (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 143 pages, $10.95). Wolfe has talent as a stirrer, but his text bears out John Stuart Mill's remark that "the second-rate superior minds of a cultivated age .. . are usually in exaggerated opposition against its spirit."

Wolfe's argument is simple enough.

Before 1920 there was an American architecture, epitomized by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. But in the '30s its heritage was cast away for a mess of ideological pottage, cooked up in the Bauhaus by various Germans and mittel Europeans under the sway of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. This wholly alien style--monastic, severe, technology obsessed and full of socialist implications, smelling of Utopia and garlic--was brought to America, a country that (as Wolfe argues in one of his more dizzying transports of sociological fancy) had no need for worker housing and was therefore ill-fitted to use it.

Christened the International Style by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, it was taken up by the Museum of Modern Art, shed its "real" aim (which was to house workers in Utopian communities) and became the house style of American capitalism. Soon the land was covered with glass boxes erected in helpless middle-class submission to intellectual fashion. Nobody liked these buildings then. Nobody wants them now. From sea to shining Seagram, it was a big waste of time. But the legacy is permanent, because the International Style created "Compounds," an entrenched dictatorship over taste centered in the Eastern universities. These Compounds wanted to impose abstract dogmas on the real world of American desires and American fantasies. Nobody since has been able to get out of this straitjacket.

Later architects, from Robert Venturi to Michael Graves, may seem to be coming out in favor of vernacular, complexity, decoration, memory and whatnot--the whole postmodernist bag of tricks, from Cape Cod shingles to Roman arches--but are all pointy-headed clones of the Compound, still seeking to exalt the Word (theory and manifestos) over the Act (workable buildings). Real populist architecture has no chance. Within the taste centers, Wolfe says, "there was no way for an architect to gain prestige through an architecture that was wholly unique or specifically American in spirit." What was this spirit, this ignored Zeitgeist? Tailfins and Empire: "the Hog-stomping Baroque exuberance of American civilization." Those who did serve it were banished as apostates, and become the heroes of Wolfe's narrative: John Portman, Morris Lapidus, Eero Saarinen and Edward Durell Stone.

That, stripped of the nudging and stylistic razzle-dazzle that pad the book to length, is the gist of Wolfe's argument. It looks familiar, as travesties must. The dismantling of modernist dogma has been going on for ten years or more; it has been a prime staple of architectural criticism and practice throughout one of the most intense periods of building in American history. Everyone, including Wolfe, knows something about it. But he brings nothing new to the argument except, perhaps, a kind of supercilious rancor and a free-floating hostility toward the intelligentsia. The late bird has got half the worm. The Right Stuff, his best book, sandwiched between his two weakest, The Painted Word and this one, showed how accurate an eye Wolfe has for manners, fantasies, customs and hype, and how he can rise to a kind of ravenous comic brilliance when engaged with a subject he respects. There is no feeling of engagement in From Bauhaus to Our House, no sense that he particularly cares about architecture at all, unless it can be shown up as the carapace of intellectual folly. This gives his argument a coarse and hasty air.

Nothing piques him more than the sight of Europe influencing America: the White Gods, Gropius and Mies, land among the prostrated natives and colonize them, as simply as that. But, of course, it was not that simple. What happened was not invasion, but long reciprocal exchange, intellectual barter, as it were. From about 1900 on, European modernism in architecture was imbued with American imagery, preoccupied with issues that became central to the International Style. The Grid, the load-bearing frame and light skin of the new buildings, came to Europe from the Chicago School, whose leader was Louis Sullivan. The Bauhaus ideal of the open plan was transmitted to Germany by Frank Lloyd Wright. Adolf Loos' messianic rejection of ornament in the early 1900s, which became such a fetish with the International Stylists, came straight out of his infatuation with American machine culture. Le Corbusier derived a good deal of his architectural syntax from the "functional" shapes of American grain elevators, docks and airplanes. And when European modernists in the early '20s dreamed up their Wolkenkratzers (cloud scratchers), the nearest the German language could come to the alien Yankee concept of a skyscraper, critics accused the modernists of deserting their native traditions and caving in to transatlantic cultural imperialism.

And so what Wolfe's naive fable of White Gods and Silver Princes ignores is a much more dramatic interchange than he can see. American architectural ideas, and fantasies about Yankee technology, were distilled and elaborated in Europe, where they contributed to a messianic style. It came back across the Atlantic in the '30s and '40s, and then was academized. Without doubt, the reign of the curtain wall and the spread of a debased sort of rubber-stamp corporate modernism were helped by the factors Wolfe lists: fashion, snobbery, herd instinct and the colonial cringe. Mainly, the glass box won because it was cheap to build. But it just might be that the American patrons of mainstream modernism were not as dumb or masochistic about their glass boxes as Wolfe thinks. What if they felt, on some instinctive level, that those cost-efficient termitaries with one marble foyer and a thousand Sheetrock cells disclosed some truth about power, authority and social organization in American corporate life, a truth which the captains of industry and business embraced? What if the glass box was the all-American self-expression that Wolfe claims is not there? His book does not broach that possibility, yet it makes more sense of upper Sixth Avenue or downtown Houston than all his rattlings about the passivity of corporate clients. But then, there was probably no time to inspect the matter. He had a book to finish.

The text has some virtues, some manically funny apergus, such as the glimpse of reverent Yalies hand-washing the baby's diapers to pay for the pair of Mies Barcelona chairs, those comfortless icons of secular progress. But its flaw, apart from Wolfe's shaky grasp of architectural history, is that he looks with his ears. Architects tend to write manifestos when they are not being asked to build. Given the choice between what architects wrote about architecture, and what they actually built, Wolfe believes the words every time. This leads him into some strange fluffs, like his mistaken notion that Mies van der Rohe contrived the 1958 Seagram Building as "worker housing, utterly nonbourgeois." If Wolfe cannot see what august luxury that Grid contains, he literally does not know how to see architecture.

Most discriminations in From Bauhaus to Our House are dissolved in a hunt for conspiracies. Edward Durell Stone's late buildings like the U.S. embassy in New Delhi or the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., are, by any conceivable standard, maladroit and glitzy, but Wolfe will have none of that; he thinks the dread Compound laid Stone's name low not because he was a poor designer but for the crime of deviationism. Alas, the politics of architecture were never so simple.

They lie inextricably tangled between aesthetics, money and ideas. But dealing with ideas, at least on the level this subject needs, is not Wolfe's forte. As in The Painted Word, he ends up doing what he accuses his bogies of: the meaning of the work is drowned in a spate of "theory," and each time the theory is undercut by Wolfe's stridently commonsensical attitudes. These, after a while, read like condescension, as a rigid adherence to the surface usually does. Plus c,a change, plus c'est la meme pose. --By Robert Hughes

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