Newspaper Article

WINDOWS INTO THEIR WORK: ARCHITECTS AS WRITERS

Thomas S. Hines teaches history and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of "Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture.", Hines, Thomas S

1985

Overview

While social concerns would be eagerly developed by planners and architects of the 1920's and 30's, his esthetic commitment to historical forms would be resuscitated only in the 60's and 70's by the postmodern school of radical eclecticism. The leading defender of modernism, meanwhile, was [Louis Sullivan]'s disciple Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959). Wright's literary style owed much to Sullivan and their common hero, Whitman. Both architects could soar to the level of poetry, but they could also compromise the effect in mannered redundancy. Both also tended to rail too stridently against enemies. There were significant differences in their writing as well. While Sullivan's bore the mark of the earnest Victorian, one senses in the style of his disciple a writer with an unmistakable twinkle in his eye. ''I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life,'' Wright confessed, ''from too intimate contact with my own furniture.'' I N his autobiography and other writings, Wright was frequently more effective when he was not writing about his own or his contemporaries' architecture but describing the natural world. ''Why is any cow, red, black, or white, always in the right place for any picture in the landscape?'' he asked. ''Like a cypress tree in Italy, she is never wrongly placed. Her outlines quiet down so well into whatever contours surround her. A group of her in a landscape is an enchantment.'' Even as a chauvinistic ''modern'' and ''American'' architect, Wright could speak and write convincingly, as in his seminal essay ''The Art and Craft of the Machine,'' first delivered as a talk at Jane Addams's Hull House in 1901. ''The machine is here to stay,'' he said. ''It is the forerunner of the democracy that is our dearest hope. There is no more important work before the architect now than to use this normal tool of civilization to the best advantage instead of prostituting it as he has hitherto done in reproducing with murderous ubiquity forms born of other times and other conditions and which it can only serve to destroy.'' In the 60's and 70's, the other side of Mr. Johnson's architectural identity kept re-emerging. ''I am a historian first and an architect only by accident,'' he admitted in 1960, ''and it seems to me that there are no forms to cling to, but there is history.'' As his own work went into a period of stripped but unabashed classicism and then in the 70's and 80's into more explicit quotations of historical references, he was accused, as he had been in his Miesian days, of jumping on the bandwagon of the latest trends. While he enjoyed confounding critics with the mock admission that he had sold out, he had also helped, particularly in his writings, not only to articulate the meaning of ''modernism'' but to define and orchestrate the postmodern revolt. B UT however influential Mr. Johnson's writings were, the great manifesto of the incipient revolution came from an architect of the next generation, Robert Venturi, in his now classic treatise, ''Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture'' (1966). ''I am for messy vitality over obvious unity,'' Mr. Venturi said. ''Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox Modern architecture.'' He then juxtaposed a series of telling dualities, the first adjective in each case a statement of his own position, the second that of the modern movement he was attacking: ''I like elements that are hybrid rather than 'pure,' compromising rather than 'clean,' distorted rather than 'straightforward,' ambiguous rather than 'articulated,' perverse as well as impersonal . . . conventional rather than 'designed,' accommodating rather than excluding, redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. . . . I include the non sequitur and proclaim the duality. . . . Blatant simplification means bland architecture.'' Then he announced, ''Less is a bore.''

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: ARCHITECTURE / BOOKS AND LITERATURE / Burnham, Daniel P / Corbusier, Le / HINES, THOMAS S (PROF) / Johnson, Philip Noel / Sullivan, Louis / Wright, Frank Lloyd