The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 28 February 2011
by Tom Wolfe
In 1997, an open competition was held to redesign San Francisco's historic Union Square. There were scores of entries. There were many ideas, from the conventional to the radical, from conservative to wildly inventive. The original winning entry, however, elicited incredulous gasps from the general public. To most, the drawing was completely illegible. It was a dark and angular maze of shadowy lines and kinked spaces. It didn't look like a place anyone could occupy. It entirely ignored specific competition constraints. And it's avant-garde incomprehensibility completely dazzled the jury. It didn't get built that way, of course. There was nothing there to build. What did get built was an unimpressive, but popular design, a second judging demanded by a baffled public. A new public square opened in 2002 and now receives millions of visitors per year. But the competition cast in sharp contrast the insular, intellectual and abstract world of modern architecture and the run-of-the-mill tastes and desires of the vast majority, the public who will populate or ignore the space that they, after all, paid to have constructed. The architects and architecture writers were left trying to explain the virtues of the opaque winning contest entry. Their annoyance at having to do so was palpable. We don't explain art to the masses, surely. If the masses don't get it, that merely reflects upon the education of the masses, and the constraints of a citizenry with pedestrian tastes. (That the square was meant for pedestrians seemed to slip their minds.)
And this brings us to Tom Wolfe's screed on twentieth century architecture, in particular the towering figures of the Bauhaus, the International Style and post-modernism. The book itself is a stirring indictment of the notion of the brave and solitary architect, dictating his art to the teeming masses who, without even knowing it, yearn to live in his refined and godlike spaces. And why should he? The architecture that people, Americans in particular, seem to find most comforting looks suspiciously as though designed by committee, appealing to a lowest common denominator. An architect is an artist, and the best art comes from uncompromising dedication to a vision. But architecture is funny that way. To build something that someone would want to pay for and to live in requires compromise with the clients' needs and desires. Twentieth century architectural history is full of men (and it is almost all men) who insist on their peculiar visions and that the client must be grateful to live within a work of art at all. To ask otherwise is apostasy. This is Tom Wolfe's main critique in this book, which created a brief stir in the architectural community when it was published in 1981, in the early days of post-modernism. The book is personal, quirky, sharp and witty. Wolfe looks at the great architects of the Bauhaus and the singular almost cult-like dedication to their ideas, and points out the contradictions in an architecture supposedly designed for the masses but only accessible to the wealthy. This is a theme that is repeated in architecture. The glossy magazines tout new designs, but these are hardly ever truly affordable. In the meantime, the public veers toward the cozy, Victorian or art-and-crafts style. Even our supermarkets go this way, and vast acreage of suburban sprawl grows ever more homogeneous across the country. It is hard to tell what Wolfe himself makes of all this. His story is more to the point of illustrating the contradictions in great twentieth-century architecture. In his witty indictment, he is, to this reader's mind, spot-on. In the thirty years since this book was published, architecture has changed some. We can hardly say whether we're in the midst of a "style" at the moment, unless that style is the trend in "green" building (again, usually far more expensive than the average home-owner could afford). But there are architects who still insist on their visions. Frank Gehry, for example, has littered the landscape with twisted constructions that are hardly architecture at all. Writers and intellectuals continue to gasp in near-religious awe at certain modern structures. And, in the meantime, much mediocrity is perpetrated on the public, who, after all, have to live with these things. Wolfe seems to see that the twain shall never meet. And yet, didn't architect Michael Graves design appliances to be sold at Target? ("Good design should be accessible to all." he said, and he's one of the few who have followed through on a statement repeated regularly by architects over the past century.) What happens to great design when it comes as inexpensive and plentiful plastic gewgaws sold at the five and dime?
Also by Wolfe: [The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test]
[Other books about Architecture]