Part I- An International Style
In 1930, two good friends, both in their early twenties, decided to embark on an architectural driving tour of Europe. They documented their trip in pictures. But these were no ordinary men -- the first, Henry-Russel Hitchcock became a leading architectural historian, and the second, Philip Johnson, became one of the preeminent architects of his generation. Their trip and pictures were developed into the first exhibition on architecture in New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1932, along with an essay to accompany the exhibit. Johnson and Hitchcock called it The International Style. Three basic commonalities ran through this new style:
- Architecture as Volume
- Regularity
- The Avoidance of Applied Decoration
The first, architecture as volume, is the most powerful of the three. Most buildings before 1920 had heavy and thick exterior masonry walls; by the 1930's, structural engineering had conquered steel, so that with a steel skeleton, walls became “merely subordinate elements fitted like screens between the supports….” Instead of small windows spaced apart from one another, repeated holes punched into a couple feet of brick, “entire facades are frequently cantilevered and the [glass] screen walls set some distance outside the supports.” And while “[t]he apparent tensions of a masonry wall are directly gravitational,” in contrast, “[t]he apparent tensions of screen walls are not thus polarized in a vertical direction, but are felt to exist in all directions, as in a stretched textile.” Thus, “[t]he effect of mass, of static solidity, hitherto the prime quality of architecture, has all but disappeared; in its place there is an effect of volume, or more accurately, of plane surfaces bounding a volume.” All above quotes are from the essay.
Hitchcock and Johnson choose Mies Van der Rohe’s pavilion in Barcelona as illustrative of the first principle, and it is indeed a masterwork of using planes to shape space. I visited Barcelona in September of 2014, and actually visited the park in which the pavilion still stands. But I did not realize it at the time, and missed the opportunity to see the revolutionary thin planes of marble, shallow reflecting pool, and perfectly placed statue. In place of pictures I should have taken, here is a sketch, with the roof made transparent:
Mies Pavilion -- Barcelona, Spain
The second concept, regularity, derives from the regular spacing of supports in a steel skeleton, which are so spaced as to equalize the stress and strain on each support. Exterior aesthetics should also feature this underlying regular rhythm.
The third concept, the avoidance of decoration, is self-explanatory.
Hitchcock and Johnson note Corbusier’s Villa Savoy is one of the very best examples of the international style – it features thin planes defining space, a structure elevated on regularly spaced pilotis, or metal stilts, and is utterly stripped of exterior decoration:
Villa Savoy -- Poissy, France
Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, in Illinois, also illustrates the international style, but has slightly thicker steel stilts that elevate it only about 5 feet off the ground. A large plane of a terrace is in front of the house, giving the house the appearance of resting on a pedestal.
PART II- ANTI-OBJECT
In 2006, just over 75 years after The International Style was written, one of Japan’s leading architects, Kengo Kuma, wrote an essay entitled “Anti-Object.” Kuma’s thesis was that the success of modernism as an architectural movement hinged on an architecture that turned houses into objects.
First off, let me note that Mr. Kuma is a wonderful essayist. Given his native Japanese, he is surprisingly adept at English prose and metaphor. His intellect is exceptionally various and curious, effortlessly drawing from philosophy, economics, and history to shape his ideas.
He starts his essay with a lesser-know German modernist architect, Bruno Taut, who lived in Japan from 1933 to 1936, just after the International Style exhibition occurred in New York. While modern, Taut did not follow the International Style. Kuma describes Taut as one of the first architects to reject the notion of architecture as object. He created an architecture that Kuma describes as anti-object. To explore what he means by "object" and "anti-object," Kuma launches into a series of dichotomies.
First he notes Taut studied at a school in Germany where the philosopher Immanuel Kant is buried. Kant's gravestone included the inscription "The starry heavens above and the moral law within me." The quote was echoed in Kant's philosophy, which was also based on dichotomies. Taut's architectural impulses were torn between romanticism and objectivism. Kuma contrasts this with Descartes' mind/body dualism that asserted the mind independently existed (via thought) from the body. But Locke and Hume questioned the validity of this dichotomy:
"All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience."
To Locke and Hume, the mind is not independent of the body, but inextricably connected to the bodies' experience. Thought does not emerge from a void. Kuma then contrasts Kant's naturalistic English landscape garden with the regular and repeating geometrical shapes of the French garden. Kuma finally circles back to the topic at hand, arguing, "[w]hereas architecture can be construed as an independent object - as an autonomous figure cut off from the ground - a garden is a continuum, the ground itself." Interconnection is truth to Kant, and to Kuma.
This brings us to his central thesis: modernism succeeded by objectifying architecture, distinguishing it from the surrounding landscape such that it could be easily perceived from a distance as distinct geometric forms. Most critically, modernist buildings could be easily captured by a camera -- the reproduction of images to a mass audience. In other words, the pictures had to "show the entire building, which requires sufficient distance between subject and object," and the "building had to have forms and details predicated on being viewed from a distance," meaning "pure, easily recognizable shapes." Likewise, "textures that could only be viewed up close got in the way," and textures that appeared different from multiple vantage points resulted in "the inability to present a single unambiguous overall image."
His thesis cuts to the heart of my own project -- to define an ideal architecture, and in particular, to use photography as a tool in that pursuit. So I have some skin in the game, so to speak.
Kuma does not mention the International Style by name, but it is undoubtedly at the heart of his criticism. For example, Kuma describes Corbusier's pilotis as creating an object distinct from the environment -- they literally elevate the white geometric shape of the Villa Savoy above the ground. Similarly, Mies Van der Rohe's Farnsworth house is described as distinct from its environment because, like art, it is placed on a pedestal.
Kuma describes the objectification of architecture as the "stimulation of the public's desire for new houses as new products," noting that at the same time that department stores became a necessary context in which to sell objects called "products," art museums became a necessary context in which to sell objects called "private houses" to the middle class. This is a not so subtle slap at Philip Johnson, as he became the MoMA's first curator of architecture after the success of the first show on International Style. This also brings to mind the great success modern art museums (and their museum stores) have had in commercializing the experience of art to ever-increasing crowds of people, while other general art museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art have struggled to make ends meet. (See: 2 Art Worlds: Flush MoMA, Struggling Met)
According to Kuma, people "were sustained in their isolation by the dream of escape from their mediocrity through the possession of attractive objects." This also struck a chord within me, as I've often wondered if my attraction to architecture is, at least in part, a desire to distinguish myself from all those other people living lives of quiet desperation. My life must have more meaning, the argument goes, because my experiences of beauty (via architecture) are deeper, truer, and thus more meaningful. But am I deceived by good photography? Confusing mediocrity with middle class? Is the purchase of an object that provides an experience, such as a house, a more elaborate but still ultimately superficial exercise in consumption, or an opportunity to heighten sensation and provide a more meaningful experience? Worse yet, if its both, how am I to tell the difference?
After admiringly describing a basement that Bruno Taut remodeled in Japan, Kuma then puts forth several examples of his own architecture that he describes as anti-objects. His first example is a hill top viewing platform that is nearly invisible from below the platform - the approach to the platform enters a tall narrow slot in the top of the mountain. From inside the slot, the viewer can climb a main set of stairs that brings them to the first and lowest platform, on the left in my sketch below. A series of elevated walkways allows a viewer to walk above the slot, and gain a few more views of the surrounding islands and ocean, before climbing a couple more sets of stairs to the highest viewing platform, on the far right in my sketch below:
Kiro-san Observatory -- Kiro-san, Yoshiumi-cho, Imabari-shi, Ehime, Japan
The viewing platform is essentially a slot in the top of the mountain. It's almost as if Kuma was observing Frank Lloyd Wright's maxim to never build a structure directly on top of a hill, but instead make it of the hill by placing it just below the top. Kuma takes this idea to the next level, by removing the top of the hill, and making it negative space. His viewing platform could not be more "of" the hill than this. The two platforms, rectangular forms cantilevered out over the edges of his slot, are still below where the top of the hill would have been, in keeping with Wright.
Next Kuma describes a house overlooking the ocean that features a room on the second floor surrounded by water. Kuma went to great lengths to ensure the water feature is not visible from outside of the house, and even put wood slats above the room, so as to prevent the water from being seen from the air.
Kuma concludes that "[t]oday, we too must deal with the issue Taut confronted. We have been made to recognize the limitations of a world ruled by objects. The individual is not an autonomous, solitary object but a thing of uncertain extent, with ambiguous boundaries. So too is matter, which loses much of its allure the moment it is reduced to an object, shorn of its viscosity, pressure and density. Both subject and matter resist their reduction into objects. Everything is interconnected and intertwined."
Kuma's anti-object thesis strikes me as a creative retread of anti-materialism and consumerism. Architecture that is easily reproducible via photography and mass media is Veblen's conspicuous consumption on steroids. It exchanges the designer handbag for the house featured in Dwell magazine. It's undoubtedly true that modern architecture rose to prominence in the 1930's in part because of its distinct and recognizable forms. But it's hard to argue that other societal trends, including a new found fascination with science and its ability to improve all aspects of life, did not play a more significant role.
As a side note, perhaps in an effort to clarify the primary contrast of his essay, Kuma defines modernism by the International Style, focuses on the east-coast-centric definition of modernism. Corbusier famously called the house a machine for living, contributing to the focus on science and technology. Yet Hitchcock and Johnson have been criticized for giving short shrift to Frank Lloyd Wright and R.M. Schindler, who both built thoroughly modern houses in the 1920's that blended with their surroundings, and were anything but machines. Kuma's ideas for an anti-object was seeded long before he was born.
Yet perhaps Kuma's thesis is more applicable today, given the resurgence in interest in all things mid-century modern. The soaring rates of inequality create ever larger groups of people that can afford massive masterworks of architecture. Yet is the success of mid-century modern revival stores such as Design Within Reach, and glossy magazines like Dwell, actually indicative of a resurgence of modern architecture? Or just a clever repackaging of surfaces and furniture, typically in condos, that has little or nothing to do with actual architectural form? The connection between objectification, consumption, and modern architecture is less than clear.
I agree with Kuma that the success of any art form should not depend solely on its ease of marketability, but that does not seem to be the original motivation for the international style. Technology enabled a painting style (cubism) to come to life as architecture. The removal of excess decoration was a natural impulse when steel allowed buildings to be finally free of the complications of brick. The marketability and photogenic nature of modern architecture merely coincided with other stylistic impulses. Kuma confuses cause and effect by implying the ease of marketing taints the object being marketed.
This also raises the key question: why blame the object and not the objectifier?
If the experience of architecture can be divided into at least two categories -- the external (walking up to a building, and around it) and the internal (being inside of it)-- why go through so much trouble of hiding the external?
Surely there are other ways to acknowledge the power of the external while reinforcing the greater importance of the internal -- the every day lived experience. People spend many more hours inside their houses than outside of them, admiring them from a distance. Yet even if Kuma is right in arguing that everything is connected (it is), and that we ought to design buildings to emphasize this (we should), must we really remove the pleasure of approaching a building from the outside? Of walking through the garden, as it were, to the door?
At least here, I believe Kuma has gone too far in denying the viewer the opportunity to objectify a building. By all means, blend the building with the surrounding landscape and/or other buildings, make it diffuse into its environment. Re-emphasize the primacy of the internal by avoiding distinct geometric forms, and Corbusier's bright white stucco and pilotis. Integrate stone, wood, and water into the exterior. But don't hide the house, or bury it underground. Don't force the viewer to enter a tunnel cut into a hillside, however ever dramatic the eventual view may be. Let the viewer know they have arrived -- at what, they may not know, but give them the pleasure of standing back and seeing what they are about to enter.