LETTERS
 

David Mayernik, Sept 2007:
WHY WE’RE LOSING THE BATTLE WITH MODERNISM (ACTUALLY, WHY WE’RE NOT EVEN ON THE BATTLEFIELD)

 
Dear Poliphilo,

Classical architects are generally, by nature, optimists. We have a solid faith in both the potential of human artistic achievement and the public’s ability to recognize it. At the same time, for better or worse, we mostly see our work in opposition to Modernism: to some extent, even the nature of how classicism is practiced and argued for today depends on the (presumed) Modernist position. We would like to believe we are winning (or can win) that battle against Modernism, partly because we think we’ve countered all of their arguments, and partly because we presume the public will see the rightness of our position once it’s presented to them. If we think we’re winning, though, we’re wrong. Very wrong.

We would like to discount the professional publications that show only Modernist work, but the reality is they are only documenting who really is getting the major public commissions. Sure, they ignore all of the classical houses being built, and if they ever do manage to publish something on the movement it is accompanied by substantial critical baggage. To be honest, though, has classicism achieved any kind of cultural legitimacy in the last two decades? On the contrary, it was probably easier to win a PA Award as a classicist in 1983 (John Blatteau for the Bayonne Hospital) than it would be today. More importantly, are we even getting the public commissions, especially the urban ones? How many major American cities have commissioned a significant classical urban project in the last quarter century? Here the exceptions prove the rule. One only has to look at the recent competing proposals for additions to Philadelphia’s classical Public Library, or Frank Gehry’s selection to add onto the same city’s classical Art Museum, to realize how much out of the loop we really are.

As for the head to head with Modernism, we’ve been consistently, and effortlessly, brushed aside from academia to the critical press. Indeed, are we even on the Modernists’ radar screen? What, in fact, do they think of us? Mostly, they don’t think of us at all. But we instead seem to be obsessed with them.

I would argue that the way classicism has been defined and promoted in the last two decades has handicapped the movement in achieving any kind of cultural legitimacy, keeping us mostly on the professional margins. Some of those attitudes and strategies at fault I would list as:

  1. Classicism is morally right. Yawn. Prof. David Watkin, one of the great contemporary apologists for classicism, in his book Morality and Architecture dismantles the spurious Modernist connections between architectural style and morality. Unfortunately for us, his argument cuts both ways: if the Modernism/morality link is a fiction, then so are all such links. And then there are the supposed collateral benefits of classicism; to take one example, the ecology of traditional building (to which I am sympathetic): how many classical projects are actually built with truly traditional methods and an interest in ecology or sustainability?
  2. Classicism is humble, not ego-driven like Modernism. Really? In reality, the great classicists of the past, and their patrons, were often driven by an excessive desire to exceed past achievements (one thinks of virtually every architect of the Renaissance, and the builders of all the great cathedrals). If a city wants to put itself on the map today with a grand public building, why on earth would they hire an ego-less classicist? Contemporary classicism for them is simply comfort food, not cuisine.
  3. Classicism is mythopoeic tectonics. Huh? Modernist preoccupation with tectonics went out with the death of Mies van der Rohe, and the obsession with being tectonically-correct also means that many classicists are suspicious even of some of the great moments in their own tradition. The tectonic definition of, and argument for, classicism manages at once to water down the language and eliminate any other kind of poetics, while surrendering to an out of date early Modernist polemic—engaging the Modernists in a battle in which even they are no longer interested. Well done.
  4. Classicism is a big tent. Is it really? In fact, diversity within the classical position has mostly been suppressed over the years in order to present a “united front.” Only Traditional Building magazine has had the courage to present alternative points of view from within the movement, especially in its annual Roundtable discussions. The message this uniformity projects (which I am arguing is not only monolithic but also soporific) is not only unconvincing, it confirms the Modernist opinion that we’re all just crypto-fascists with a single-minded devotion to an overly simplified ideology.
  5. Start small, build up to the big stuff. Good luck. How many residential clients of classicists also hire them to do their corporate headquarters, or get them commissions at the college where they sit on the board? Sure, it happens, but more not than often (apart from Robert A. M. Stern, of course). The fault lies not with residential architects but with the movement’s failed polemics.
  6. Start with the background buildings, ignore the foreground buildings for now. And for good. The Modernists will be perfectly happy to let us provide the context for their monuments until the cows come home. Indeed, they love the clash of opposites, so we make them look even more cutting edge than they actually are. It’s hard to imagine how we’ll ever accede to the front row given the weakness of the rest of our position.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: Modernism isn’t the enemy, banality is. Let’s face it, there’ll be no retreat from Modernism in the foreseeable future. Instead of complaining about the Gehry’s and Hadid’s of the world, we should be pushing to measure up to the best of our own tradition in order to compete with them as equals. I certainly don’t mean modernizing classicism, but rather stretching it intellectually the way that Bramante and Michelangelo did. If we were capable of that, we might actually find that we’d have a place at the table with the Modernists: they might not like us, but they’d at least respect us. As it stands, they don’t even take most of us very seriously.

The paradox is that while we’ve been busy arguing that classicism is not a style, we have proven ourselves incapable of talking about anything but style. In my own experience, my Modernist colleagues have been willing to engage me and my work when I have shown that I am interested in the bigger issues that have little to do with stylistics: issues like memory, narrative, rhetoric, poetics, complex formal structures, etc. Debating among ourselves about whether the Composite order is really classical or not is a complete waste of time. So, here are some alternative arguments that might pull us out of our current futility:

  1. Classicism isn’t necessarily morally superior to Modernism, but it is more beautiful. We all know it’s the beauty of great classical buildings that brought us to this position in the first place; however, most classicists don’t make a big distinction between the truly beautiful and the merely attractive within pre-Modern architecture. We have a pretty sloppy scale of aesthetic values within our tradition, mostly because we think anything is better than Modernism. The “anything but that” attitude is a resignation to mediocrity. The only architect who would put up a slide of a small town in nineteenth century America alongside one of a magnificent street in Paris is a contemporary classicist.
  2. Classical means the best. Period. It is a way of thinking, of making sense, but it’s not a philosophy of life (like stoicism), nor a pseudo-religion (like Masonry), nor a way of life (like vegetarianism). If we accept that it means the best, we have no choice but to aspire to equal the best of the tradition with our work. And at every level: form, durability, meaning, craft, etc. While this may be, for now, largely impossible, we can’t shrink from the implications of our choice. If we’re going to fail, let’s at least try to fail grandly. History will judge us by those standards whether we embrace them or not.
  3. The definition of a good classical building never depended until the late eighteenth century on “tectonics.” Can we please move on from the Abbé Laugier and that “wretched poor man’s hut,” as Alberti called it? Like Leon Battista, “I wish to start with grander matters.”
  4. Let’s really make classicism a big tent. Actually, let’s make it a big mud pit and get in and wrestle. Really thrashing out the big ideas publicly would not only be healthy, it would dispel the notion that we’re all marching in lockstep.
  5. I have no idea how we get to do the important urban monuments now with the polemical mess we’ve created, but while we’re stuck in the legacy of the last twenty years of going nowhere let’s at least make some courageous proposals for urban projects that measure up to the great cities of the past. If they won’t let us build, we can at least dream.
  6. Let’s start big, and work down to the little stuff. At least conceptually. This is as much a problem of education as anything else. Anyone who learns to do a great classical public building can do a block of background infill in his or her sleep. But, I’m sorry, it simply doesn’t work the other way around.

    Many may not accept the premise here that things are looking dire; but a degree of objective looking around should be a wakeup call. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but watching us flounder over the last two decades has been excruciating. If anyone has any better ideas, I’d love to hear them: after all, it is a “big tent.”

     


    L E T T E R S