The New Radicals

I’ve been stewing thoughts from my previous post for a while now and I might be ready to put some of them into a coherent form. I was thinking about what makes buildings successful or not successful in our culture and realized that we have radically lowered the bar of success, as we have in just about every other area of our culture.

I found some notes from an old article in Metropolis by Andres Duany in which he gives a critique of the (then) new IIT Student Center by Rem Koolhaas. It was probably the best and most honest critique I’ve seen of Koolhaas, and it draws a line in the sand for Architecture as a whole that I think we all need to recognize. I’ll give you a couple of the highlights (it’s a bit lengthy, but worth it):

…By chance the building opens at the moment that I arrived. I am watching students as they use it for the first time. It is a big complex. They are wandering about, looking around and then simply getting down to inhabiting the espresso counter, computer terminals, billiard tables, cafeteria, sitting on the steps. They get comfortable quickly.

The scene is inhabited by kids who look, dress, move, sit, have haircuts and talk just like the building looks. They are as integral as those elegant little figures in the Schinkel plates.

The building is exactly designed for them. This is the generation that uses "random" as an ambiguous term of praise and opprobrium. They are content to be there, and the building is easy on them, and absorbs whatever they are doing.

It is a perfect embodiment of the fundamental "whatever" sensibility. The plan is random, except where it is very rational. The details have a certain integrity except where they are junky. It is laid back, except for certain edgy moves. It is artless except in those places where it is stunningly clever. It is impossible to dislike because it is not trying to be liked. It's, like, OK, cool. . . whatever.

The building is as appropriate to our nerd/tech jocks as Mies' campus once was for the neat, white-shirted engineers of the second industrial age.

Mies’ buildings are now trashed, of course. But not as a matter of maintenance--it is that these students by their very presence trash them. So long as Western culture continues its dismal run, Rem's building is immune. It will absorb decline with the dignity of Rome ruined by Visigoths. This building will never be trashed because its technos is already trashy. The aluminum floor is MADE to be scuffed. It is a scuff magnet. Its fatalism is stunning. Rem describes it as junk space. Scuff is the new patina; delamination is the new rustication. It is one of the most resilient buildings that I have ever seen.

At the opening there was a display describing the design intentions. The building fulfills them perfectly. Rem is one of the very, very few architects who builds what he says. The bullshit quotient is zero. The execution is absolutely honest. It may salvage modernism yet--even if that is achieved by lowering the bar so.

…Modernism--which is a history of failure--must evolve at a tremendous rate in order to evade the taint--the stink--of failed expectations. That was then. . . look at this now! It will work this time. Trust us... Society continues to grant modernist architects one more chance again and again. Well, Rem's epicenters approach success. They may yet save the reputation of modernism, perhaps they will even justify three-quarters of a century of cities destroyed and landscapes consumed. But, then again, they may also exhaust modernism, because what is being proposed is so conventional.

…He is the most useful of our researchers. He is correct. It is just that some of us do not agree to tolerate the situation described. Of the engaged intellectuals, Rem is one of those who is critical by revealing the reality. But then there are also those who are critical by attempting to change that reality. The IIT building reflects reality--the buildings of say, Yale, reform it.

Yes, the students at Yale dress down and slouch like those at IIT, but their buildings engage them differently. While the IIT building makes them comfortable in all their slovenly goofiness, the buildings at Yale make them look out of place--somewhat ridiculous--as if amiable but clueless barbarians were inhabiting the constructions of a great vanished civilization. At Yale the students and the architecture are at odds. But there is the chance that the architecture will prevail; that some of the students, over time, will sit straighter, dress more fittingly, converse and socialize in a more sophisticated manner. These buildings engage in a civilizing mission, and the young learn to respect the mastery of their predecessors.

In this war for western culture, there are those who consider the Yale campus a famous victory, won against astounding odds. For them Rem's IIT building must be a great defeat. We should salute Rem for a brilliantly conceived and executed 30-year campaign. We will not soon recover from the impact of this building.

There are buildings that reflect society, buildings that comment on society, and buildings that endeavor to change society. The fact that so many of today’s star architects are more interested in reflection or commentary than in true change is itself reflective on a modernism that has lost its edge and decayed into a simple status quo. This is what we do--turn out more commentaries on materiality, fluidity, and the power of 3D modeling software to interpret how an analysis of particle physics can create my next building skin. While we sit in our studios and attempt to shove our next brilliantly innovative analysis of modern man down our client’s throat the public cries out for a few simple things: firmness, commodity, delight.

I find myself thinking of G.K. Chesterton and his defense of Orthodoxy as the true radicalism. Why do many of the buildings of our past continue to delight, comfort, and inspire while the majority of our current inventions offer so little of substance? We seem to be clamoring for real change in many other facets of our society (government, most notably), yet we continue to accept esoteric social commentary from our “star” architects (yes Eisenman, I’m talking to you, the one who admittedly wouldn’t occupy his own work). There are people that are just beginning to realize that we have made a conscious break with our architectural tradition and it just might be time to examine the schism again. This is not Classical Revival; it is another Renaissance for everything beautiful. All hail the New Radicals.