Till We Have Built Jerusalem - Westminster Bookstore · A Chicago Jew of culture. ... T. S. Eliot. Table of Contents Preface xi Introduction xvii Part One ... Knowledge originates

Till We Have Built Jerusalem

Religion and Contemporary Culture Series

Edited by Peter Augustine Lawler

Till We Have Built Jerusalem

Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Philip Bess

ISI BooksWilmington, Delaware

2006

Bess, Philip, 1952–

Till we have built Jerusalem : architecture, urbanism, and the sacred / Philip Bess. — 1sted.— Wilmington, Del.:ISI Books, 2006.

p. ; cm.

ISBN-13: 978-1-932236-96-5 ISBN-13: 978-1-932236-97-2 ISBN-10: 1-932236-96-1 ISBN-10: 1-932236-97-X

1. Cities and towns. 2. Architecture. 3. Architecture and society. 4. Spirituality in arch-tecture. 5. City planning. I. Title.

NA2543.S6 B47 2006936820720.1/03—dc22 0607

ISI BooksIntercollegiate Studies InstituteP.O. Box 4431Wilmington, DE 19807-0431www.isibooks.org

Book design by Beer Editorial & Design

Manufactured in the United States of America

Copyright © 2006 Philip Bess

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

For all persons of goodwill, but especially

For Howard Decker

who saved Fenway Park

For Leon Krier

who in seeking goodness and beauty also seeks God

and

In grateful memory of Philip Rieff

1922–2006

A Chicago Jew of culture

What life have you, if you have not life together?

There is not life that is not in community,

And no community not lived in praise of God.

T. S. Eliot

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Introduction xvii

Part One: Cities and Human Flourishing

1. Virtuous Reality: Aristotle, Critical Realism, and the Reconstruction of Architectural and Urban Theory .............................3

2. Democracy’s Private Places ......................................................................... 31

3. Design and Happiness ................................................................................. 37

4. The Architectural Community and the Polis: Thinking about Ends, Premises, and Architectural Education ............... 51

Part Two: The Sacred and the City

5. Making Sacred: The Phenomenology of Matter and Spirit in Architecture and the City ........................................ 65

6. Beyond Irony: Biblical Religion and Architectural Renewal ................... 79

7. A Dutch Master and the Good Life ........................................................... 95

8. Design Matters: The City and the Church..............................................107

9. Sacramental Sign, Neighborhood Center:

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A Proposal for Catholic Churches in the Twenty-First Century ..........135

10. Religion and New Urbanism .................................................................151

Part Three: New Urbanism

11. The Polis and Natural Law: The Moral Authority of the Urban Transect .......................................157

12. New Urbanism and Politics: A Conservative Case for Urbanism......189

13. After Heroes: Nietzsche or Chesterton? ...............................................193

Part Four: Critical Essays

14. Architecture and Otherness ...................................................................217

15. Peter Eisenman and the Architecture of the Therapeutic ..................227

16. St. Colin Rowe and the Architecture Theory Wars ............................237

17. The Rhetorician of Urbanism ................................................................257

18. The Old Urbanism ..................................................................................269

Postscript: In the Neighborhood ....................................................................275

Appendices

A. The New Urbanism: From Aristotle and God to Baseball .....................279

B. The Case for Fenway Park .........................................................................291

Index .................................................................................................................297

Introduction

I am a traditional urbanist; I profess traditional urbanism. Like virtually all architects my age, however, I was educated as a modernist; and it is my non-architectural academic background (confirmed by some thirty years of living in urban neighborhoods in Boston and Chicago) that has caused me to rec-ognize traditional urbanism as the larger normative context within which to think about, do, and teach architecture. That background, broadly speaking, is the 2,500-year-old tradition of Aristotelian-Thomist virtue ethics and natural law theory, historically (and now, in my opinion, unavoidably) linked to bibli-cal religion, dogged in its uncommonly sophisticated defense of philosophical common sense. My allegiance to that tradition—my happy participation in and defense of the religious and metaphysical realism of Western culture—makes me in most schools of architecture today practically unemployable, and almost certainly untenurable.

The genuine goods of modernity—political freedom, broad material prosperity, antibiotics—notwithstanding, modernity’s intellectual vision is increasingly narrow, its spiritual sensibility alternatively therapeutic or flat. The breadth and depth of the older Aristotelian-Thomist intellectual and spiritual tradition, its contrast to the most celebrated academic discourses of our own day, and its pertinence to architecture and urbanism are suggested by the older tradition’s respective views of knowledge, ethics, and politics. Knowledge originates in the senses conjoined to an active intellect, which on the basis of sense experience naturally understands things according to type (“type” itself, of course, being—unlike things themselves—an intellectual construct, albeit a necessary one). Knowledge of the world—including the understanding known as “science,” and the know-how known as “art”—and of

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any particular thing in the world, while never complete, can nevertheless be true; and a rudimentary understanding of anything includes knowledge of its efficient, material, formal, and final causes. Ethics and politics in this tradi-tion are related to each other, and the subject matter of each is the good life for human beings—which itself is related intrinsically to life in a city (polis). The good life for any individual human being is the life of moral and intel-lectual excellence lived in communities—a “community” being any group of persons who pursue a common end. The ultimate human community is the city, Aristotle’s community of communities, the foremost purpose of which is the best life for its citizens. Every city is constituted by overlapping ecologi-cal, economic, moral, and formal orders; and it is with the latter order of the city that architects and town planners are primarily though not exclusively concerned.

Anyone who knows anything about the state of both contemporary higher education and contemporary architecture knows that these are not the views of knowledge, ethics and politics that currently prevail in either schools of archi-tecture or the architectural profession. “Knowledge” today is always accompa-nied by quotation marks, and the Aristotelian/Thomist tradition of communal virtue ethics is deemed nostalgic in an individualist culture by definition and evidentially deficient in communitarian enterprises. Nevertheless, examples of such enterprises and their attendant virtue-ethics sensibility remain in the world, if you pause to think and know where to look for them. One place they remain is in the culture of baseball; and more than a small portion of my early professional life was spent studying and promoting traditional neighborhood baseball parks precisely because baseball parks continue to function as commu-nal symbols in ways that few modern building types are still able to function.1 The corruption of professional baseball by periodic drug scandals and mis-placed corporate business interests notwithstanding, there remains today a discernable “community of baseball;”2 and baseball parks are its visible archi-tectural symbols. Of these, none is more beloved than Chicago’s Wrigley Field 1. Baseball parks are not a subject with which this book deals specifically and at any length, except briefly in the Appendices. Readers interested in some of my ballpark-related work may refer to my City Baseball Magic and/or Inland Architecture.2. Baseball is, I have said elsewhere, like the Catholic Church: divinely inspired, sufficiently simple to be taught to children, sufficiently complex to satisfy the highest intellect, and never entirely free from corruption in either its members or its leadership.

Introduction . xix

[Fig. 1]. The attraction of Wrigley Field typically is attributed either to nostalgia or to the alleged “authenticity” that it has accumulated over its ninety-two-year history. But I have come to think it more likely that Wrigley Field appeals because it simply is a good place in a good place, i.e., because it’s a good baseball park in a good neighborhood. Wrigley Field is an object lesson in the relationship between architecture and urbanism that you don’t have to be a student of architecture to understand and appreciate. It’s a specific example of a recognizable though increasingly rare type, a traditional neighborhood ballpark; and a strong case can be made that the neighborhood contributes as much to the character of the ballpark as vice versa. This suggested to me something with broader im-plications that I have subsequently pursued both professionally [Fig. 2] and intellectually: that Wrigley Field’s appeal has far less to do with being “of its time” than it has to do with embodying in a particular way tried and tested good urban and architectural types. And this in turn prompted me to begin calling into question certain fundamental assumptions of both contemporary architectural education and contemporary architectural practice.

There are very few architecture schools in the United States where a commitment to tradi-tional urbanism—and to architecture as a civic art concerned with durability, comfort, beauty and decorum—is both shared by the faculty and co-herently embedded within the architectural cur-riculum; but somehow I have been blessed to be associated with two of them. One is the Andrews

Fig. 1. Wrigley Field, Chicago, 2001: view from the upper deck looking east.

Fig. 2. Counter-proposal for a new Chicago White Sox neighbor-hood ballpark (1987–1988), by Thursday Associates. View to northeast, with proposed Armour Field (top) and site of old Comiskey Park as public park (center).

xx . Till We Have Built Jerusalem

University Division of Architecture, located in Berrien Springs, Michigan, about one hundred miles east of Chicago, where I taught from 1993–2003; the other is the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame, where I currently teach and since January 2004 have been the director of graduate studies. Andrews—affiliated with and operated by the Seventh-day Adven-tist church, a Protestant religious community that participates in but consci-entiously locates itself at the margins of secular culture—is comparatively el-emental, humble, and austere in its approach to traditional architecture and urbanism. In contrast, Notre Dame—though it too teaches architecture and urbanism with reference to a similar understanding of the relationship of ar-chitecture and urbanism to human well being—is inclined to do so (as Cath-olics are wont) in ways both austere and flamboyant; and occasionally with arguably too much concern for the opinion of secular culture.

Regardless, the two architecture programs have several things in com-mon in addition to their countercultural—more aptly, their older cultural—promotion of traditional architecture and urban design. One is that the ad-ministrative leadership in both places cares about ideas—about truth—and respects those who do likewise, even in disagreement. A second is that both

are communities of intellectual inquiry located in communities of faith. Setting aside the religious beliefs (and agreements and disagreements about such) that are the raison d’etre of the larger com-munity within which each of these architecture schools are located, it is noteworthy that the com-munal form of each school is essentially Aristo-telian. That is to say: both Andrews and Notre Dame have architecture programs that promote the architect as an ideal character type who ought to embody certain intellectual and moral virtues directed toward a common good, by means of which the individual architect also achieves his or her own good. Thus, even though there is a long

Fig. 3. Aaron Valentin, student project, 2000. Courtesy of the Andrews University Division of Architecture.

Introduction . xxi

history of architectural patronage within Catholicism, and virtually no historic culture of architecture within Seventh-day Adventism, each school—by its very nature as a genuine community—has in-herent affinities for understanding and sympathizing with the fundamental idea that traditional architecture and tradi-tional towns and neighborhoods are the physical forms of community. Hence Andrews’s self-characterization (virtually unique among contemporary ar-chitecture schools; though perhaps not too far from Notre Dame’s self-under-standing as well) as an architecture program that

offers an accredited professional degree emphasizing the craft of build-ing and design for communities, within a context of Christian service. We strive to prepare students to use practical reason and to make good moral and aesthetic judgments in the design of buildings, neighbor-hoods, and cities.3

Both Andrews and Notre Dame are better able to pursue their distinc-tive architectural and educational missions by the fact that their faculties are comparatively collegial, their respective student bodies small (approximate-ly 250 total architecture students, graduates and undergraduates, at Notre Dame; some 120 architecture undergraduates at Andrews), and their curricu-la structured toward clearly articulated ends. Though both programs ground architecture in building construction, Andrews focuses more on vernacular building traditions [Fig. 3] and Notre Dame more on classical traditions of architectural expression [Fig. 4]; but both find common cause in traditional urbanism [Figs. 5–6]. Andrews students graduate with a comparatively “un-

3. Andrews University Division of Architecture promotional literature, 2001.

Fig. 4. Domiane Forte,Oakland, California Cathedral counter-proposal graduate thesis project, 2004. Courtesy of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture.

xxii . Till We Have Built Jerusalem

theoretical” education compared to Notre Dame graduates, notwithstanding that both are in fact firmly rooted in a theory of architecture as a craft4 (and notwithstanding that neither exhibits the fancy for critical theory charac-

4. “Craft” is used here in the sense of “skilled artistry” rather than the popular connotation of “handmade.” The most cogent brief discussion of authority, reason, and innovation in the context of a craft tradition of which I know is the following, from Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1988 Gifford Lec-tures subsequently published as Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition:

[S]tandards of achievement within any craft are justified historically. They have emerged from the criticism of their predecessors and they are justified because and insofar as they have remedied the defects and transcended the limitations of those predecessors as guides to excellent achievement within that particular craft. Every craft is informed by some conception of a finally perfected work which serves as the shared telos [“end” or “purpose”] of that craft. And what are actually produced as the best judgments or actions or objects so far are judged so because they stand in some determinate relationship to that telos. . . . So it is within forms of intellectual enquiry, whether theoretical or practical, which issue at any particular stage in their history in types of judgment and activity which are rationally justified as the best so far. . . . [R]easoning within a craft [tradition therefore] . . . differs strikingly from [the rea-soning] of [modern rationalists]. The [modern rationalist] aims at providing timeless, universal, and objective truths as his or her conclusions, but aspires to do so by reason-ing which has from the outset the same properties. From the outset all reasoning must be such as would be compelling to any fully rational person whatsoever. Rationality, like truth, is independent of time, place, and historical circumstances. . . . What [this] view entails is an exclusion of tradition as a guide to truth [emphasis added]. . . . By contrast, just because at any particular moment the rationality of a craft is jus-tified by its history so far…[to] share in the rationality of a craft requires sharing in the contingencies of its history, understanding its story as one’s own, and finding a place for oneself as a character in the enacted dramatic narrative which is that story so far. The participant in a craft is rational qua participant insofar as he or she con-forms to the best standards of reason discovered so far, and the rationality in which he or she thus shares is always, therefore—unlike the rationality of the [modernist] mode—understood as a historically situated rationality, even if one which aims at a timeless formulation of its own standards which would be their final and perfected form through a series of successive reformulations, past and yet to come. The authority of a master within a craft is both more and other than a matter of exemplify-ing the best standards so far. It is also and most importantly a matter of knowing how to go fur-ther and especially how to direct others towards going further, using what can be learned from the tradition afforded by the past to move towards the telos of fully perfected work [emphasis added]. It is in thus knowing how to link past and future that those with authority are able to draw upon tradition, to interpret and reinterpret it, so that its directedness towards the telos of that particular craft becomes apparent in new and characteristi-cally unexpected ways. And it is by the ability to teach others how to learn this type of “knowing-how” that the power of the master within the community of a craft is legitimated as rational authority.

Introduction . xxiii

teristic of many other architecture programs); and graduates of both schools come out knowing and caring about how buildings are put together, and un-derstanding the difference between a foreground building and a background building and the proper place of each.

Is it an accident that academic architectural programs of this type are located in religious institutions at the margin of the contemporary culture of architecture and architectural education, and their work appreciated more by the lay public than by the profession? I think not; and who knows what impact Notre Dame and Andrews graduates will eventually have upon ar-chitecture and urbanism? At the present time however, the Congress for the New Urbanism (which largely bypasses the contemporary culture of academic architecture, though not for lack of trying to engage it) is shooting straight for the heart of the contemporary building culture by first challenging and then engaging and converting the public officials, legislators, planners, traffic engineers, bankers, developers and homebuilding industry practitioners and executives who are collectively responsible for the vast majority of new build-ing being done today in the United States—almost all of which is in the form

Fig. 5. (above) Andrew von Maur, graduate thesis project, 2003. Courtesy of the Univer-sity of Notre Dame School of Architecture. Fig. 6. (left) Andrew von Maur, graduate thesis project, 2003. Courtesy of the Univer-sity of Notre Dame School of Architecture.

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of sprawl development, and almost all of which is done with minimal or no assistance from architects.

This is not the place to rebut the litany of false charges hurled repeatedly at the New Urbanists from the increasingly insular compounds of academic architecture; nor would there be any point in defending every detail of every project done under the New Urbanist umbrella. But it is the place to mention my active participation over the last decade on several New Urbanism and traditional architecture-related listservs, an involvement in a contentious and cooperative cyber-community that has also led to my expanded involvement in several “meat-world” communities. Aside from the friendships and profes-sional opportunities [Figs. 7–9] that have followed that participation, what these wide-ranging conversations have also driven home to me is the basic intellectual and cultural seriousness of the New Urbanist enterprise. Not only is New Urbanism itself an internally contentious communitarian movement pursuing communitarian objectives; the New Urbanists are also the only folks around with a coherent alternative to sprawl development. New Urbanists are relentlessly (if selectively) self-critical in subjecting their theories to both the literal marketplace and the marketplace of ideas, correcting and refining their theories and practices toward the renewal and improvement of traditional town and urban neighborhood life. And whether they know it or not—and some of them do—the philosophical and anthropological assumptions of the New Urbanists are at least implicitly Aristotelian, and therefore represent an important counter-gesture to our ruinously individualist culture, of which both suburban sprawl and contemporary architecture are manifest physical expressions.

Of course, not all New Urbanists are anxious to acknowledge that tradi-tional urbanism may require a more communal and less individualist culture to sustain it, any more than some religious believers will be anxious to acknowl-edge that their embeddedness in suburban sprawl functions to compromise their religious and communal objectives, or than some academic architects will happily concede that the structure and premises of most contemporary archi-tecture schools direct the majority of their graduates to an increasingly marginal role in the shaping of the built environment. So if there is a mild contrarian po-lemical edge to at least some of what follows, it is in part against the notion that

Introduction . xxv

suburban American life—both as it exists in America and as a product America exports—is the apex of blessedness and human civiliza-tion; against the notion that a strictly secular and utilitarian city (even with good traditional urban form) is sufficient for human flourish-ing; and also against the idea that “Jerusalem” is entirely ours to build. But these are the large issues; they lurk sometimes in the background and sometimes in the foreground of the chap-ters that follow.

from top to bottomFig. 7. Proposal for a new village in Ada, Michigan (1999), by the Anderson-Bess Design Group, partial plan view. Fig. 8. Proposal for a new residential square in Wasilla, Alaska (2004), looking south. Drawing by An-drew von Maur, courtesy of Thursday Associates. Fig. 9. Proposal for a new residential square in Wasilla, Alaska (2004), looking east. Drawing by Andrew von Maur, courtesy of Thursday Associates.

L

VI

Beyond Irony: Biblical Religion and Architectural Renewal

Late in the twentieth century we have come to expect architects, especially ac-ademic architects, to be somewhat eccentric. Having this reputation to main-tain, architects in recent years have begun flirting with religion, adopting its vocabulary to describe their architectural intentions. One has to know where to look for it, but evidence of this phenomenon abounds in schools of archi-tecture and in professional journals. Among the required reading of a newly matriculated student of architecture, at least one book will be by religious his-torian Mircea Eliade. An observer at any given review of student work will hear students speak solemnly of “sacred space,” invariably contrasted with “profane space.” There must by now be a small army of young architects who believe (under the spell cast by charismatic Princeton professor and architect Michael Graves) that their task is to design buildings that will serve as the representation of various “rituals” and “myths” of our culture. Not so long ago, the School of Architecture of the University of Illinois at Chicago devoted an entire issue of its annual journal Threshold to the topic of religion and ar-chitecture, and a well-known Chicago architect, Stanley Tigerman, has even advanced—in public—the remarkable thesis that “postmodernism is a Jewish phenomenon.”

One does well to be skeptical of this architectural piety, if only because twentieth century architects are notorious for plundering other disciplines for material to justify their own work. In asking why the outbreak of religion-speak,

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it helps to understand that contemporary architects are once again confronting a “crisis of meaning” in architecture. Whatever else it is, the religious rhetoric being employed by architects is a polemical device, lending a vague aura of the numinous to the current reaction among architects against the functional ratio-nality of modern architecture. But it is noteworthy that even if this rhetoric is not as superficial as it seems, it is remarkably hermetic; it has virtually nothing to do with the professed beliefs of any specific religious community.

As architects search for a resolution to the apparently never-ending in-tellectual crisis of modern architecture, it is not difficult to understand their reluctance to turn for inspiration to the orthodoxies of Jewish and Chris-tian religion. A disheartening essay could be written about how Jewish and Christian leaders continue to accept as gospel the functionalist emphases of modern architecture. The consequences of this are distressingly familiar: the proliferation of churches and synagogues resembling that “spiffyish little altar-in-the-round job of cream-colored pressed-garbage bricks, shaped like a hatbox with a hatpin pointing out and upwards . . . [with] shoddy work-manship and materials” that one of John Updike’s characters tried to burn to the ground in A Month of Sundays. But such an essay is going to have to wait. Rather than damning the aesthetic sensibilities of the current caretakers of the biblical religious traditions, I would rather reconsider the possible relation-ship of those traditions and architecture to one another, and the proper role of each in public life. The role of religion in public life is currently the subject of heated debate; and while this debate is not my primary concern here, it impinges upon another debate about the nature and meaning of architecture: whether architecture should be understood primarily as an autonomous art or a civic art. One can better understand the central issues of the architectural de-bate by first considering the features that distinguish traditional architecture from modern architecture.

Traditional Architecture and Modern Architecture

Architecture, traditionally understood, is inherently complex—an art both utilitarian and high. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, the first-century a.d. Roman who authored the oldest known treatise on architecture, defined architec-ture as the practice of building with a regard for firmitas, commoditas, et venus-

Beyond Irony . 81

tas—durability, convenience, and beauty. As a species of the genus building, architecture has a utilitarian imperative—for durability and convenience, or, in contemporary parlance, for structure and function. But if a primary task of the architect is to satisfy certain utilitarian requirements, the essential task is to build beautifully. Though a poorly constructed, clumsily functioning building will not delight regardless of any “architectural” features employed to please the observer, a building that is well constructed and smoothly func-tioning cannot be regarded as architecture unless there is an appropriate and successfully executed aesthetic intent.

Architecture is meaningful in many ways related only peripherally to the society and culture of which it is part. It is possible, for example, to under-stand certain formal qualities of a building as a response to the laws of physics, to which architecture is, inevitably, subject. It is also possible to understand architectural form as a response to constraints of site or climate. Nevertheless, the foremost meaning of architecture, that feature which makes architecture a high art, has very much to do with social and cultural context. Tradition-ally, the primary meaning of architecture has been to symbolize institutional order. Architecture embodies civilization, the moral order we call culture. The buildings that have traditionally been recognized as architecture—pal-ace, house, tomb, capitol, court, temple, church—physically represent the in-stitutions that commission them. Architectural historian Norris Kelly Smith writes that such buildings stand for

the institutionalized patterns of human relatedness that make pos-sible the endurance of the city, or of society, or of the state. . . . An institution is . . . an established framework, a pattern of relatedness among men, a mode of grouping within which the individual experi-ences membership and finds some basis for making decisions, passing judgments, determining goals. Like a building, the institution claims for itself a size and power to endure which greatly exceed those of the ephemeral human being. By virtue of its size, it is able to shelter and protect its members, not simply from the elements, but from that de-structive individualization . . . with which every urban society is in some measure threatened.1

1. Norris Kelly Smith, On Art and Architecture in the Modern World (University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada, 1971), 78–79.


Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the institutional connotations of ar-chitecture were expressed in architectural hierarchies that clearly sought to unite the aesthetic with the civic—that is to say, the aesthetic with the moral. Again, Norris Kelly Smith describes the situation nicely:

For millennia on end the buildings of our cities made manifest an in-stitutional hierarchy: the size, cost, and complexity of an edifice were directly related to the power and public significance of the institution that it symbolized. The palace and cathedral were large, the mayor’s mansion and the parish church were of medium size, and the shop-keeper’s house was small. But, with the introduction of the steam en-gine, the hierarchy began to break down. Factory buildings were often much larger than churches and courthouses, but their size had little metaphorical value. The rise of the “factory system” more or less co-incided with the [French] revolution of the late eighteenth century, which undermined the hierarchical scheme of things in another way. The factory began to afford a new kind of membership for its workers, just as factory production tended in the long run to promote a new definition of what constitutes “civilization”—a definition that has been increasingly bound up with the idea of standard of living and nonhierarchical equalitarianism.2

Although works of architecture still connote the institutions that com-mission them, the architectural hierarchies fractured by the rise of the factory system are now completely shattered. This is best seen in the proliferation of the high-rise commercial and speculative office building. The size, cost, and complexity of contemporary works of architecture continue to symbolize the most powerful institutions in modern society; but the purpose of such insti-tutions, though important, is hardly “to shelter and protect its members . . . from that destructive individualization” with which every urban society is threatened.

The destruction of traditional urban architectural hierarchies is not the only dramatic change in the architecture of the modern world. New notions of

2. Norris Kelly Smith, “Crisis in Jerusalem”, The Chicago Tribune Competition: Late Entries, Vol. II, Stuart Cohen and Stanley Tigerman, eds. (New York: Rizzoli Press, 1980), 106.

Beyond Irony . 83

what constitutes “civilization” have undermined not only the old institutions that promoted civility, but also the values of permanence and durability that once characterized the architecture associated with those institutions. Both the massiveness and the spatial and formal hierarchies that characterized particu-lar examples of traditional architecture were rapidly abandoned in the early decades of the twentieth century by what came to be known as the modernist movement in architecture. Modernist apologists thought of modernity pri-marily in terms of the increasing influence of advanced industrial technology and the social reforms it was supposed to engender. Arguing that “authentic” architecture necessarily reflects the spirit of the age, modernist architects—most notably such Europeans as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Wal-ter Gropius—sought to invent an architecture appropriate to their “Machine Age” era. In addition to their advocacy of industrial materials and methods of construction, modernists argued for a peculiarly modern aesthetic charac-terized by non-hierarchical free-flowing space and figural objects, structural honesty, unadorned ideal form, and functional rationality. This revolution in architectural style was accompanied in Europe by the rhetoric of utopian poli-tics common among the avant garde in the years immediately following 1917. Even Americans, less politically doctrinaire, seemed moved by such visions of technological utopia as the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress World’s Fair, which had as its motto “Science finds, Industry applies, Man conforms.” In the salad days of modernism, architects spoke as if utopia would follow the tri-umph of modern architecture as naturally as summer follows spring. The mod-ernist vision was captured in Europe by city planning projects by architects such as Antonio Sant’Elia, Tony Garnier, and Le Corbusier; and in America by those old W.P.A. post office murals, in which streamliners cross fields of ripening wheat toward a city of gleaming skyscrapers, into which freighter dirigibles unload cargoes, and toward which the masses below ascend upon giant escalators.

Modernity and Civility

Within a generation, the modernist revolution in architecture was a fait accom-pli. But even the most ardent contemporary devotees of modern architecture may be inclined to agree that social and political relations in modern societies


since the 1920s have not been untroubled. Empirical evidence prompts the suspicion that modernist social fantasies underestimated the pervasiveness of what theologians call sin, while overestimating the redemptive power of steel, glass, and electricity.

Contemporary thinkers are reconsidering ideas of natural law and an ethics of virtue in light of the two-hundred-year experience of modernity, and many are concluding that Aristotle may have been right after all: there is indeed a relationship between virtue and human well-being. The assertion is once again being made that technology is rightly understood as a tool—very important, but not imbued with redemptive (or for that matter, damning) power. Instead, it is proposed that social and individual well-being also de-pends upon the possession of the civilizing virtues, of civility. Many moderns question, if not dispute, the identification of virtue with civility. History sug-gests, however, that every civilization has encouraged the knowledge-expand-ing and self-restraining virtues among the citizens thought to matter. The premise of the American democratic experiment is that every citizen matters. In our century, civility cannot be taken for granted; it is both appropriate and essential that civility be encouraged and perpetuated.

How is civility—the cultivation of virtue—encouraged in modern so-ciety? The most powerful institutions of modern life—bureaucratically or-ganized government, large business corporations, labor unions, various news media—seem essential insofar as they provide most of the framework of law, goods, and information necessary to civilized life in the modern world. Nev-ertheless, such institutions themselves cannot generate or maintain the habits of virtue necessary to a civilized society, though they themselves depend upon a minimal pervasiveness of such habits. In the United States, the flagship of modern societies, citizens are educated in intellectual and moral virtues pri-marily by other institutions, all in the public realm but most of private origin, and many voluntary in nature. Among these institutions, in addition to the family, are the thousands of churches and synagogues, elementary and sec-ondary schools, colleges and universities, neighborhood groups and volun-tary associations, and foundations of aesthetic, philanthropic, medical, and social service purpose that exist throughout our country. One of the primary functions of these institutions is to encourage some or all of those perennial

Beyond Irony . 85

virtues—courage, temperance, justice, prudence; faith, hope, love; the various arts and sciences—that both define civilized life and make it possible. Much attention has been focused in recent years on these institutions as “mediating structures”—that is, institutions that mediate between the individual and the primary institutions of modern societies, providing a semblance of order and meaning to both. But it seems equally accurate to call them “civilizing institu-tions”—a designation especially useful when addressing architects, in order to discourage their tendency to think of civilization as something that is es-sentially aesthetic or technological rather than essentially moral.

Given the present reevaluation of modernity, it is not surprising that many contemporary architects are having serious second thoughts about modernism. Modern architecture—abstract, figural, pure, a-contextual, ma-chine-like—continues to be built today, but has been under siege ever since the publication in 1966 of Robert Venturi’s “gentle manifesto,” Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Venturi’s book was the opening salvo in what became something of a war between the modernists and the architectural movement that Venturi inadvertently fathered, loosely characterized as post-modernism. To this day Venturi insists that he considers himself a modernist, but his work and that of many of his younger contemporaries differs notice-ably from orthodox modernism in at least five respects. First, in contrast to the modernist preference for purity of form and space, postmodernists promote an ordered (at best) spatial and formal complexity. Second, where the modernist building is an isolated object, freestanding, pulled back from the street, the postmodernist building is contextual, and not necessarily conceived as a free-standing object. It tends to maintain the traditional spatial continuity of the urban street and to emphasize the importance of the building facade; by so do-ing, postmodernist buildings are also “urban fabric” that serve also to define traditional urban figural spaces such as streets and squares. Third, whereas modernists were doctrinal in their rejection of ornament and decoration on buildings, postmodernists are aggressively (albeit superficially) ornamental. Fourth, whereas modern architecture was in both conception and appearance an intentional rupture with, even an assault upon, the past (notwithstanding the classical formation of its pioneers), postmodernism is relentless in its “ref-erences” to architectural history; “find the historical allusion” was for a while


the favored parlor game among the architectural cognoscenti. Finally, whereas modernism, however inadequate its vision, was utopian, postmodernists gen-erally eschew an ideal vision, adopting instead an attitude of irony expressed most often through the juxtaposition of caricatured elements of classical ar-chitecture with standard modern construction.

Notwithstanding these departures from modernism, postmodernists have retained certain fundamental attitudes common to modernists. Both tend to view architecture as an autonomous art related only accidentally to ei-ther the demands of durability and convenience or the institutions that com-mission it. Both implicitly view culture as being in its essence something oth-er than moral: for modernists “modern culture” is defined by its technology, whereas postmodernists seem to understand culture as a function of aesthetic self-reference. Modernist and postmodernist buildings are both characterized by a high degree of abstraction that goes hand-in-hand with a devaluation of matter. Modernists tend to be latter day Platonists, minimizing and abstract-ing building forms to better approximate their formal “essence.” Postmodern-ists tend to be gnostics, devaluing actual buildings in favor of their “meaning.” Both seem to mistrust the “imperfection” of matter in favor of the “perfection” of architectural ideas—including, for postmodernists, the perfection of archi-tectural ideas about imperfection. Finally, postmodernists persist in believing with their modernist predecessors that it is somehow their duty to represent the spirit of the age—as if their vocation is to photograph the exterior of the bus in which they are riding. This has led a few celebrated contemporary ar-chitects to appropriate the hula-hoop rubric of “deconstruction,” resulting in an architecture of “fragments” and “ruins,” the better to represent the decay of our culture and the disorder of the universe. Such work is occasionally charac-terized as “witty,” its apparent purpose being to shock those of us ignorant of our lives, our culture, and the world into recognizing that life in the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima is now, for the first time, uncertain.3 Artificial

3. Harvard theologian Gordan Kaufman and New York architect Peter Eisenman are among many contemporary theologians and architects insisting [in the early 1980s] that the Holocaust and the Bomb should radically redefine the agendas of theology and architecture, respectively. The merit of such assertions seems dubious. One new item on the theological agenda seems mandated by the Holocaust: Christians need to continue their reassessment of the relationship of Christianity to Judaism, to affirm theologically the historical priority and continuing validity of the faith of Israel.

Beyond Irony . 87

ruins were a popular feature in eighteenth-century English gardens, meant to encourage strollers to gaze upon them and feel a satisfying melancholy; only in our century have architects begun to suggest that we inhabit them.

Beyond Irony

Modernity is a fact from which we who are alive may take more or less plea-sure, depending in part upon our access to modernity’s particular constella-tion of goods and services. Its moral worth is genuinely ambiguous, like that of most other identifiable historical “eras.” There is something admirable about loving one’s own time, something akin to loving one’s family, race, sex, or country—a sort of loyalty toward those huge facts over which we have no control, but which so invariably influence our character. But we see clearly the dangers of an uncritical patriotism, a loyalty that holds one’s family, race, sex, or country to be the arbiter of right and wrong, but which itself is not subject to any standard of moral judgment.

Similarly, though we cannot avoid being moderns, we can certainly avoid being modernists. This truth seems to have escaped the keepers—and the builders—of the Temple of Art. Even if we accept the premise that our culture is in decay, or accept the apparently more troublesome long-range implications of modern physics, it hardly follows that such facts mandate celebration. It has long been common knowledge that all men and women are mortal, but this has not kept human beings from valuing the services of skillful physicians. “To value anything simply because it occurs,” observed C. S. Lewis, “is in fact to worship success, like Quislings or men of Vichy. Other philosophies more wicked have been devised: none more vulgar.”

If one assumes that representation of the zeitgeist should be the archi-tect’s a priori intention rather than history’s a posteriori judgment, one may find architecture intended as a symbol of entropy and cultural decline to be intellectually, morally, and aesthetically satisfying. But in light of the renewed interest in the relationship of virtue and institutions to the well-being of citi-

This new business must be distinguished however from the continuing duty of moral theologians to address issues of good and evil, and war and peace, in a century of genocide and nuclear weap-ons. The angst of contemporary academics contributes little if anything new to consideration of the perennial problems of theodicy. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the making of architecture.


zen and society, perhaps the time has come for both architects and critics to reexamine the tradition that linked architectural aesthetics with civic virtue. As European architect Leon Krier put it, “To forbid good architecture because we live in terrible times is absurd.” Modernists may have been either naïve or disingenuous in proclaiming that modern architecture and technology would usher in utopia. But surely they were no more so than their postmod-ernist successors, who profess to see in the harmonious nature of traditional urban architecture a sign of harmonious social relationships—and who then use this “insight” to justify the creation of ruins to symbolize our allegedly fragmented culture. There is little evidence to suggest that the passionate, violent, self-centered citizens of, say, twelfth-century Venice, or fifteenth-century Florence, or sixteenth-century Rome differ in essence from those of contemporary New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. The social institutions that civilized their instincts differ from those that (however imperfectly) civilize ours; but there is no reason why the architecture of the third millen-nium cannot again serve the primary symbolic purpose it served in earlier eras—the representation, in orderly, durable, functional, and beautiful build-ings, of institutions that enable and encourage us to live as civilized human beings. This does not preclude innovation in architecture. It merely requires a clear understanding that if architecture is not solid and harmonious; if it is not pleasing to the mind and senses; if it does not endure through time; if it does not make specific and figural places in a manner that allows human be-ings to feel “at home”; if, in short, it lacks affinity with the enduring virtues it should symbolize, it is failing to fulfill its most singularly legitimate social and symbolic function.

This idea is not original, which may be why so few contemporary archi-tects seem willing to embrace it. It is a contention made from within an en-dangered four-thousand-year-old tradition of architecture understood—often explicitly, always implicitly—as a civic art. As I have tried to suggest, contem-porary architecture (modern and postmodern) ruptures this tradition in a fun-damental way that has little to do with those issues of style (classical, Roman-esque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, et al.) that are the focus of art history survey courses. The study of architectural styles and their social location is a legitimate and intrinsically interesting pursuit. But the defense of traditional

Beyond Irony . 89

architecture need not entail the defense of a particular style: “traditional” is not, for instance “classical,” though classicism is certainly traditional, and re-mains even now an architectural discipline that some practice with elegance and élan. Nor is the twentieth century lacking for examples of traditional ar-chitecture. The work of McKim, Mead, and White, Bertram Goodhue, and Cass Gilbert in New York; of Burnham and Root, Louis Sullivan, and the Prairie School in Chicago; of Bernard Maybeck, and Greene and Greene in California; these names count for only a small portion of a longer list of early-twentieth-century American architects whose work was stylistically eclectic, but who practiced out of this traditional understanding of architecture. Their work that remains standing in our cities—that has not been bulldozed in a rush of thoughtless development—is being recognized as a very precious but fragile link to that now seemingly distant past in which cities were regarded as the proper abode of civilized men and women.

What are the visual characteristics of such an architecture, characteris-tics identifiable apart from questions of style, and equally appropriate to the twenty-first century or the twelfth? I have touched upon them earlier, but they bear elaboration. Traditional architecture is an architecture of physical and symbolic substance; of buildings with surface shadow and depth associ-ated with thick walls and moldings, penetrated by window and door open-ings—in contrast to the thin, taut, shadowless “skins” of our contemporary, vi-sually dematerialized architecture; of buildings that look like buildings rather than machines, or ocean liners, or mirrored reflections of other buildings. The traditional architectural task is to employ within budgetary constraints avail-able technologies and materials to create durable and convenient buildings made beautiful by the skillful composition, accent, and celebration of the es-sential elements of building: walls, columns, beams, floors, ceilings, windows, doors, stairs, roofs. It is this aesthetic intent that distinguishes “architecture” from the essentially pragmatic purposes of “building.” But this intention has traditionally been constrained by considerations social as well as economic. Traditional architecture promotes spatial, formal, and decorative hierarchies appropriate to the dramas of public and private life, and is biased toward mak-ing its grandeur proportionate to its function and the communal significance of the institution for and by which it has been commissioned.


The problem of hierarchy is central to the renewal of architecture as a civic art. The word hierarchy itself grates upon many a modern democrat’s egalitarian ear, and persons of good will can differ on the degree to which an egalitarian society is desirable. But an egalitarian physical environment is life-less: the richness of the built environment depends absolutely upon a sense of hierarchy. One need not relinquish democratic political sympathies in order to advocate architectural hierarchies. What architectural hierarchies require is not some sort of social caste system, but rather a revived notion of the common good, and a renewed appreciation of the manner in which certain kinds of institutions promote both communal and personal well-being.

The idea that architecture (and architects) should share a role in the pro-motion of civility is problematic in modern societies. One can imagine without too much difficulty a revival of traditional architectural concerns with respect to buildings commissioned by “civilizing institutions.” But the fact remains that the institutions of our society which commission the most prominent buildings are not the institutions whose primary role is to encourage civility. This means that the most prominent buildings built today will not be symbols of civility until and unless architects can persuade clients, critics, and political officials that even an office building can be a symbol of the civitas if it is beauti-ful, durable, and subject to the spatial and formal hierarchies that municipali-ties should establish for the common good.4 Though I think they should be, perhaps the temple and the statehouse need not be—as they have been prior to the twentieth century—the dominant buildings of a civilized society. Perhaps a revival of traditional architecture in a world of modern institutions is pos-sible if the physical city itself can again be seen as and built into the symbol of civility and virtue. It would be presumptuous to assume the inevitability of such a change of public consciousness about either architecture or the city, but it is an idea worth considering, if not a polemic worth advancing.

4. Again, there are early-twentieth-century precedents for this. In Chicago, for instance, the Wrig-ley Building, the Tribune Tower, the Stone Container Building, 333 N. Michigan Ave., the Chi-cago Board of Trade, the Rookery, and the Railway Exchange Building and its several distinguished companions that front Grant Park and Lake Michigan—all of these are excellent examples of office buildings the designs of which were governed by traditional architectural concerns. There used to be many more, but Chicago suffers from a peculiar social disease—call it a habitual if not “tradition-al” compulsion to be modern—that periodically causes it to demolish its best architecture in favor of developer-financed high-rise boxes designed in poor imitation of Mies van der Rohe.

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