New Orleans Drops Acid

I brought this up in a comment below from my Corbusier post and wanted to give the visual. The picture you have just seen is a proposed house designed by Rotterdam based MVRDV for Brad Pitt's Make it Right Foundation. I want to unequivocally state that I have a lot of respect for any organization trying to improve the lives of the inhabitants of New Orleans before I completely trash this particular effort (if you can call it an effort).

That being said, I'm at a loss for why this would ever be considered as an option for a fabric type of architectural building. What I mean is that there would be multiple iterations of this project, possibly on the same street. What could certainly pass as the folly of a single eccentric has no place as a valid or informed response to the society, culture, and environment of New Orleans. And yet there are still people out there who are absolutely bumfuzzled by the idea that people don't immediately fall in love with the pure genius of the deconstructivist dystopianism of the thing.

As a postscript I will say that the houses actually under construction aren't nearly this bad, though I'm still less than enthused with the effort to dialogue with traditional New Orleans history and forms. More to come...

Le Corbusier, Mixing the Kool-Aid

I want to share what I believe to be the central theme from Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture (1924):

A great epoch has begun.
There exists a new spirit.
Industry, overwhelming us like a flood which rolls on toward its destined ends, has furnished us with new tools adapted to this new epoch, animated by this new spirit.
Economic law inevitably governs our acts and our thoughts.
The problem of the house is a problem of the epoch.
The equilibrium of society today depends upon it.
Architecture has for its first duty, in this period of renewal, that of bringing about a revision of values, a revision of the constituent elements of the house.
Mass production is based on analysis and experiment.
Industry on the grand scale must occupy itself with building and establish the elements of the house on a mass-production basis.
We must create the mass-production spirit,
The spirit of constructing mass-production houses.
The spirit of living in mass-production houses.
The spirit of conceiving mass-production houses.
If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts in regard to the house, and look at the question from a critical and objective point of view, we shall arrive at the "House-Machine," the mass-production house, healthy (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful.
Beautiful also with all the animation that the artist's sensibility can add to severe and pure functioning elements.

Just read it a few times and realize that there is a significant body of architectural education that rests primarily upon this foundation. And yet there are those who would still insist that the state of architectural education in this country is not cultic in its abhorrence of anything daring to remember the past. I'll be working on a few posts based on this manifesto from Le Corbusier and I thought I would throw it out there prior to analyzing it to death.

Idiot's Guide to Architecture

An interesting piece from across the pond. It would seem that many of those in charge of urban planning policy in the UK are a little peeved that the public prefers "pastiche". If people don't like your ideas, define the opposition out of the game.

I Know What I Want, and I Want it Now

Tim over at Old World Swine hasa wonderful post on the artless nature of disposable crap. He makes some good points that many people ignore in our short-sighted culture. There is an effective, yet forgotten virtue known as generational building that is in danger of following the Dodo into oblivion.

Quality is expensive, which is exactly why quality should be attained over time, or even generations. Even if I can't afford to build an entire solid masonry house with a lifespan of hundreds of years for the grandchildren of my grandchildren, I could possibly build a good foundation now. Maybe throw up some cheap studs for a room or two. Next year I could replace a couple of walls with masonry. Maybe five or ten years down the road I can put a slate roof on it. Maybe after 50 years of this type of effort I could have a house that will easily stand for 500 years or more. Is it worth it? Probably not, I'll just go and buy the bargain basement starter home with the 20-30 year lifespan and move up the housing ladder as necessary. The grandkids will be fine...

Bar Code Buildings

For your light, uplifting Friday reading I direct you to this article. Very sad, but unfortunately very true in my mind. And to add to the sadness I heard that Paris is considering removing its height limitations on new construction. I can't wait to see SOM's contribution to the new and improved Paris skyline of tomorrow...

Workday Blues

Unfortunately a very hectic work schedule is keeping me pinned down at the moment. I’ll spare a few minutes to vent off some accumulated hot air regarding my current workload in the hopes of introducing you to the joys of everyday architecture:

1.) Why is it a valid excuse that the maintenance department of a certain school district refuses to entertain the possibility of any lighting other than 2x4 fluorescent fixtures because they don’t want the hassle of dealing with more than one type of bulb?
2.) Related to #1 – Why is the maintenance department even allowed to have the final say on which type of lighting is or is not appropriate for a school clinic? Apparently maintenance concerns over the horrors of dealing with two bulbs overshadow clinical needs.
3.) It has been revealed to me that vinyl coated chain link fence is a wasteful extravagance, even if it is mere pennies more than normal old chain link. And you certainly can’t propose to use vinyl coated fencing right next to a school that has the normal version – that would make the poor rusting normal fence people jealous of the breathtakingly gorgeous vinyl coated version next door. Heavens, we can’t have that…
4.) Cheapness is a virtue never to be questioned, regardless of the utterly depressing environment that cheapness forces onto our kids.

Opening a brewery sounds more and more enticing each day. Anybody have half a million floating around they want to get rid of?

A Treasure Trove

OK, there is so much good stuff floating around on the INTBAU site that I know I'll be referring to quite a bit as I sift through it. The few essays I've read so far have been great, check it out for your humanist architecture fix. I knew Prince Charles was good for something...

Metaphysics...Oh Joy!

I’ve decided to take a step back from the religious application of architecture to focus a little more energy on widely accepted architectural theory in general. I ran across a very well written, though fairly long, essay entitled The Ideology of Architecture by Peter Kellow. It’s worth a read if you’re at all interested in architectural theory or the role of ideology in modernist thought. It is an exposition of the ideological underpinnings of the modernist movement and their relationship to the metaphysics of both Hegel and Plato. Though it sounds incredibly tedious it is remarkably well done. I want to excerpt a paragraph from fairly late in the essay:

It is very rare that a Modernist architect will even use the word "beauty", for, when the criteria for assessment of quality are metaphysical, a word that evokes the human senses and individual appreciation is hardly appropriate. The vocabulary is rather that of "innovative", "cutting edge", "iconic" - words that distance us from our natural instinctive reaction to our environment. In relation to this, I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the whole training of architects in our time is a training of how not to use our eyes, how not to be sensitive to beauty, in order to be able to focus absolutely on the importance of abstract concepts. And this must be the source of the split between non-architects and architects. The former use their eyes. The latter have been trained to be visually blind, as a glance at the buildings that are paraded as having merit in the architectural journals will confirm. The result of abandoning beauty in art and architecture is the same as the result of abandoning morality in politics and philosophy – inhumanity. And surely again the twentieth century achieved inhumanity in architecture and built environments that surpassed absolutely anything that had ever been seen before.

Quite a strong statement, but one I can certainly back up from my own experiences in architectural education. The arguments in juries are always metaphysical; there is the sole task of justifying your work through some sort of ideological construct that bends the architecture to a metaphysical will rather than a sensual will. That’s not to say that beauty was never discussed, but only that beauty had been in some sense reduced to a degree of the platonic ideal. The closer the architecture came to platonic absurdity while avoiding looking like platonic absurdity, the more “beautiful” it was. Beauty was no longer a sensual judgment, but a metaphysical one. It was as if they wanted to take humanist language and subordinate it to their ideology so as to appear to remain interested in a sensual appreciation of architecture.

What I have found baffling as I think about contemporary architectural theory is that the ideologies share the same DNA with those of Nietzsche and Marx, yet there has not been the sound rejection of those ideologies by similar principles. There has been the public backlash, but this has not been able to open the closed system of the architectural elite. There is a self-fulfilling cycle of life between competition juries and awards, architectural media, and architects that creates a closed loop of circular reinforcement that even public outcry can do very little against.

I’m still working on digesting much of this information. It’s as if over the past few months I have finally had my “Neo” moment of emergence from The Matrix and the difficulty now is to supplant ingrained ideology with reality. The re-education is a daunting task, but oh so immensely liberating. I no longer feel like I need to climb into my little populist closet and flagellate myself for wanting to see more Bernini (OK, I know it’s a stretch - I’ll take Bob Stern instead) and less Gehry.

Papa on Art

I cannot recommend highly enough the wonderful book The Spirit of the Liturgy by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who we all know has a new name now. There is a great chapter dealing with images in the church and it has been excerpted here (part I) and here (part II). I think it is important reading for those who have been involved in discussing the role of Christian art. Hopefully it can provide some fruitful discussion on how Christianity should approach art in our current state. I’ll include a not-so-short excerpt here to at least get you interested, but please do read the links above and let me know what you think.

…What is more, art itself, which in impressionism and expressionism explored the extreme possibilities of the sense of sight, becomes literally object-less. Art turns into experimenting with self-created worlds, empty "creativity", which no longer perceives the Creator Spiritus, the Creator Spirit. It attempts to take his place, and yet, in so doing, it manages to produce only what is arbitrary and vacuous, bringing home to man the absurdity of his role as creator.

Again we must ask: Where do we go from here? Let us try to sum up what we have said so far and to identify the fundamental principles of an art ordered to divine worship.

…The complete absence of images is incompatible with faith in the Incarnation of God. God has acted in history and entered into our sensible world, so that it may become transparent to Him. Images of beauty, in which the mystery of the invisible God becomes visible, are an essential part of Christian worship. There will always be ups and downs in the history of iconography, upsurge and decline, and therefore periods when images are somewhat sparse. But they can never be totally lacking. Iconoclasm is not a Christian option…

…The image of Christ and the images of the saints are not photographs. Their whole point is to lead us beyond what can be apprehended at the merely material level, to awaken new senses in us, and to teach us a new kind of seeing, which perceives the Invisible in the visible…

…There must, of course, be no rigid norms. Freshly received intuitions and the ever-new experiences of piety must find a place in the Church. But still there is a difference between sacred art (which is related to the liturgy and belongs to the ecclesial sphere) and religious art in general. There cannot be completely free expression in sacred art. Forms of art that deny the logos of things and imprison man within what appears to the senses are incompatible with the Church's understanding of the image. No sacred art can come from an isolated subjectivity…

…But what does all this mean practically? Art cannot be "produced", as one contracts out and produces technical equipment. It is always a gift. Inspiration is not something one can choose for oneself. It has to be received, otherwise it is not there. One cannot bring about a renewal of art in faith by money or through commissions. Before all things it requires the gift of a new kind of seeing. And so it would be worth our while to regain a faith that sees. Wherever that exists, art finds its proper expressions.

The New Iconoclasts

After thinking about the last post for a while I came upon my real critique of contemporary Christianity: it is iconoclastic. The pictorial representations of our faith - the prayers wrought in many different materials - have become wasteful fancies in the post-modern world. Even the most simple and venerable cross has gone missing lately, displaced by the video screen.

In a rare occurrence, I’ll allow Mr. Luther himself to speak to the basic issue here:

“I am not of the opinion” said Luther, “that through the Gospel all the arts should be banished and driven away, as some zealots want to make us believe; but I wish to see them all, especially music, in the service of Him Who gave and created them.” Again he says: “I have myself heard those who oppose pictures, read from my German Bible. … But this contains many pictures of God, of the angels, of men, and of animals, especially in the Revelation of St. John, in the books of Moses, and in the book of Joshua. We therefore kindly beg these fanatics to permit us also to paint these pictures on the wall that they may be remembered and better understood, inasmuch as they can harm as little on the walls as in books. Would to God that I could persuade those who can afford it to paint the whole Bible on their houses, inside and outside, so that all might see; this would indeed be a Christian work. For I am convinced that it is God’s will that we should hear and learn what He has done, especially what Christ suffered. But when I hear these things and meditate upon them, I find it impossible not to picture them in my heart. Whether I want to or not, when I hear, of Christ, a human form hanging upon a cross rises up in my heart: just as I see my natural face reflected when I look into water. Now if it is not sinful for me to have Christ’s picture in my heart, why should it be sinful to have it before my eyes?”

Financial considerations aside, I agree wholeheartedly with Luther that the visual expression of the gospel is vital to the spread of the faith as well as the spiritual nourishment of the faithful. To put faith to image is to paint windows into heaven, just as sacred music accomplishes. Why then would we condemn the building to background when it can just as easily shout praise to God along with the choirs and instruments within? Why has music become the only widely acceptable artistic sacrifice, while sacred art and architecture languish in the realm of the unnecessary?

Even a simple shelter can offer praise to God. Money buys the materials and labor, it is the worshipful designer that arranges them to point to God. The house of the Church should always be a gospel in whatever material it consists of, regardless of the relative cost. This gospel is not ritualistic at heart, but symbolic. It is not a gospel for the rich and it’s not a gospel for the powerful. If I’m building one church for a million dollars or ten churches for a million dollars, I’m going to make sure that they all intrinsically point to God no matter what.

Heavenly Worship

The note of a church should be, not that of novelty, but of eternity. Like the Liturgy celebrated within, the measure of its greatness will be the measure in which it succeeds in eliminating time and producing the atmosphere of heavenly worship.

- Sir Ninian Comper (1864-1960)

If I could sum up my thoughts on ecclesiastical Architecture as well as Sir Comper I would be busy writing a book now. I think this one sentence should be watermarked in the tracing paper of every single designer tasked with putting form to the sacred. We are currently mired in an age where sacred space is solely an armature for the experience of worship or liturgy. While we continually trumpet the ability of music to help us enter the heavenly realm, we have reduced the building to mere scenery, a bland backdrop upon which to paint the worship experience. The trouble with this is that never in the history of mankind has there existed a bland backdrop of a building. The useful mental construct of neutral architecture is a farce, impossible and unwarranted.

Take as an example the recent glut of ascetic, pristine white rectangular rooms constructed for the housing of fine art. Popular architectural opinion would hold that these rooms constitute a blank slate upon which to view the objet d’art. This is nothing less than patently absurd coming from the same design professionals who claim the same pristine boxes epitomize the triumph of Information Age, IBM clean-room-esque, media-centered architecture in the brave new world of post-modernism. Architecture has never been, and never will be, neutral. Why would we wish it so? While we used to demand artful neutrality from our journalists, we never required it of our artists. The very act of putting form to space necessitates a viewpoint, an objective feeling we wish to create in the inhabitants. We set a psychological scene before the first object is ever encountered in a given space. While a Rothko painting might happily inhabit and dialog with a clean white box, it would set up a tangible dissonance in any room of the Vatican Museum’s Pinacoteca.

The obvious subsequent observation when confronted with the glut of supposedly neutral worship venues is to condemn them all as a thinly-veiled appeal to the theatrical, performance-minded culture of our age. While the churches claim to provide (and may in fact succeed in providing) an experience of heavenly worship apart from the visual, they do so against the clamorous backdrop of an architecture firmly rooted in our present societal avarice and pleasure. Whether it is the converted strip mall or the unmodified theatrical arena, we are deliberately housing God in a timely box. There are situations when this practical necessity is laudable as a stop-gap measure to get the church to the people – fast and efficient. We have, however, elevated this convenient practicality to the realm of the desirable and fashionable, condemning the urge to properly house our worship as worldly, sinful excess. We have abrogated our interest in eliminating time from the House of God and have shackled our worship firmly to the aesthetic spirit of our age. St. Barbara, help us!

First We Kill the Architects

The New York Times publishes a counter-cultural method of city-building - in the interest of self-preservation I would substitute Developers for Architects in step one.

R.I.P. Regionalism

As you approach universality, you also approach non-specificity. The emergence of a global culture is causing the increasing abandonment of local culture in favor of a more universally palatable homogeneity.

Though readily apparent in many areas, I will of course use architecture as a prime example. In times past architecture was a reflection of the responses of a local population to its environment, climate, and cultural heritage. As communication has increased, architecture has dealt with a perpetually increasing (though increasingly non-specific) scope of influence on its design. Where you could once identify the region a particular American home was built in, you now encounter a huge number of “custom” homes with no regional character. More accurately, you find homes employing the watered down usage of just about every regional character – a Chimera of non-specific American regionalism. There is little regard for cultural memory as a depository for solutions to common regional problems. In Global Culture, Frank Gehry works everywhere, from L.A. to the Czech Republic. The only difference is the amount of the heating/cooling bills.

Even when you can find reference to local culture, it is not as a solution to some regional problem but as a surface nod to the past. This is not to say that all architectural precedent is purely functional, but that such precedent embodies a cultural reality of climate, geography, spirituality, or organization. Architects are good at making the obligatory head fake towards the preservation of local character and then lobbing the Hail Mary in hopes of getting their latest “critical” interpretation of post-modern humanity in the pages of Architectural Record.

The final question boils down to this: Is globalization killing culture? Does the virtue of “tolerance” coupled with a desire to create the global village inadvertently smother any condition under which local culture can endure or progress? More importantly, does the new interconnected, universally acceptable culture provide as much enrichment or value as local, backwards, ethno-centric, existing culture?

Obviously that’s way too many questions without answers. Maybe some of you out there can help me out on that. Extra credit if you can help me figure out how Christianity plays into the same issue.

Groundhog Day

Ah, subjectivity, the bane of architecture students everywhere. I have been intrigued by the notion that modernism only allows the truly talented and inventive to reach the level of “good”. I have felt for a while now that contemporary architecture has defined success out of its routine reach. The push for relentless innovation and formal invention has been directly responsible for many “good” architects failing to achieve what modernism has defined as “great” (and therefore taking on the unfortunate and unwarranted mantle of a failed visionary).

I don’t think that the architects of the past were any better than the architects of today. I do however feel that our predecessors were given what we largely lack today: a mastery of the architectural solutions that we already know to be successful and a public that valued stable, time-tested architectural solutions. Given these two things, architects were prepared to provide the public with a nearly endless stream of “good” architecture. Every once in a while a visionary would appear and successfully introduce something incredibly novel or inventive that would then provide a new tool for the community of architects. Today is a different story altogether. We have defined “good” architecture as being innovative and new, creating a huge building catalogue of failed social interventions and innovations undertaken by “good”, but less than visionary, architects.

You can see this same process at work in the great Renaissance schools of painting. Artists were taught the techniques of visionaries in the hopes of producing many people who could create beautiful art. Unfortunately our modern cult of the lone artistic visionary has produced an army of talented people trying in vain to be the latest and greatest thing at the expense of true beauty and cultural precedent. We have also so successfully instilled the principle that imitation is the greatest taboo of our art that students are scared to cite so much as a precedent for any project whatsoever. Once again, if we could just get over ourselves maybe we could get back to creating “good” art and architecture.

Thinking about this has helped me immensely to reconcile some things in my head. I realize now why I have such an admiration for some truly great works of modernism while at the same time harboring a newfound respect for the classical tradition and those attempting to re-introduce it into our architectural heritage. The crux is this: there are great artists and architects out there that produce great work that is then viewed with an awe that prevents it from being replicated and absorbed into the greater whole. We are so scared of copying greatness, of being unoriginal, that we will continue to produce crap in the unending quest for the greatness we have already been shown numerous times…welcome to Groundhog Day!

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.

The Wow

As I look at the state of contemporary architecture through the lens of orthodox rather than evangelical thought, I am finding that my ideas of a rigorous modern approach to architecture are beginning to change as well. You have to understand that this has been a bit of a tough pill to swallow; my architectural education was rooted in classic Bauhaus modernism, though in the later years the computer was beginning to introduce a definite post-modern, relativistic bent with all of its blobs and Gehry-isms. Classicism, however, was out of bounds – it just didn’t exist in any meaningful way. It was there to be admired, but never emulated. It was as if architectural precedent began with Corbusier, anything before that was neatly contained in the history classroom and wasn’t to be unleashed in studio. With that background, I began to take a hard look at contemporary church architecture and made a realization…modernism forgot to bring The Wow.

The Wow is admittedly a vague architectural concept, but it’s one I would certainly be fluent in were I involved in designing sacred spaces. Loosely defined, The Wow is the act of unconsciously stopping conversation upon entering a sacred space – often accompanied by a tingling in the spine and goosebumps. While I’m sure there are callous souls out there that will never know the joys of The Wow, I’m sure most people can relate to being in a space that made you just stand silent and realize that life can in fact be transcendent. Interestingly enough, The Wow can also often be experienced at places of supreme natural beauty – Niagara Falls, The Grand Canyon, seeing the Milky Way on a clear night. The bottom line is this: beauty is not always subjective. If you tap into The Truth you unleash The Beauty, because as it was once known: Veritas et Venustas. Truth is Beauty.

Modernism lost The Wow along with its organic link to the past. You can look through architectural history and see the gradual development and evolution of forms, spaces, and ideas – always standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before. But something different happened with Modernism. Faced with a Brave New World and the promise of clear sailing in the machine age, modernism abandoned the ballast of historical precedent and sailed on as if the storms of the barbaric past were left behind. Modernism is utopian; it proposes an untenable ideal that rejects the idea of classic beauty (Truth) precisely because it rejects the idea of classic evil. Then of course post-modernism piled on by proposing many beauties but no truth. Thus the strip mall is beautiful to those who admire the wealth gained by spending as little as possible on as much as possible.

Where does that leave me as I look at contemporary architecture? I am forced to rethink my modernist aesthetics. Notice I didn’t say “reject” my modernist aesthetics, just rethink them. Modernism embraced the Machine Age by abandoning precedent and forging a new path. I need to embrace the Digital Age while restoring precedent and an organic link to human history.
In short: What would Bauhaus be if it brought The Wow?