Architecture Culture 1943-1968

A D o cu m e n ta ry A nthology

J o a n O ckm an
with the collaboration of Edward Eigen

Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

C o lu m b ia Books of A rc h ite c tu re / 1\1ZZ0LI

\. - » N t « VO Hit
In tro d u c tio n

1943— a year with nothing special about it, situated perhaps at the point of inflection
between the sum o f the errors made and the dawn o f a new start.1

The years delimited by this book appear at once close and distant. Part of the lived
experience of the generation currently dominating the senior ranks of the profession
and schools, they span a period that has only recently come into critical focus. With the
passage of the last quarter century, it is now possible to view with some clarity the
developments that followed the “heroic" epoch of modern architecture. The present
selection of writings aims to broaden this knowledge and to illuminate the role of
ideology in architecture’s evolution since the Second World War. It has been culled
from a great variety of sources, reflecting the diversity of the field and the proliferation
of published material. Limited to the literary record, it must necessarily be read In
context of the contemporary buildings and projects.
“Architecture culture" underwent a significant transition during these years. In
retrospect, they may be said to constitute the interregnum between modernism and what
is now called postmodernism. Modernist architecture became dominant while being
subjected to increasingly intense questioning. The traumatic events that marked the
end of the war— the revelation of genocide on a previously unfathomable scale of
organization and brutality, and the advent of atomic warfare— could only engender a
profound crisis in rationalist thought. An ethos of progress predicated on functional
determination and technical advancement offered, as many architects realized, no
guarantees as far as humane values were concerned. Even as standardized building,
scientific planning, and development of new technologies accelerated after the war in
the context of reconstruction and rehousing, continuing the positivist orientation,
prewar doctrine began to be revised along some of the following lines:

1. a reconciliation and integration of functionalism with more humanistic concerns:

symbolic representation, organiclsm, aesthetic expressiveness, contextual relationships,
and social, anthropological, and psychological subject matter;
2 . a recovery of premodernist and antimodernist themes— above all, history, and with
it, monumentality, the picturesque, popular culture, regional traditions, antirationalist
tendencies, decoration, etc.— within a perspective of “evolution";
3. a replacement of functionalism by othertheories like structural ism, semiology, and
sociology as new bases for a “scientific” determination of form;
4. neo-avant-gardism: a reassertion of the critical or radical side of modernism, but
in a more ironic and dystopian context;
5. an outright rejection of modernist Ideology as fatally linked to the Ills of urban
development and modernization, and recourse to politics or (conversely) aestheticism
and autonomy.

This cultural critique was bound up with the ongoing trajectory of modernization. The
mobility afforded by mass availability of automobile and air transport, the globalization
of Information and communications, and demographic and territorial shifts produced
major changes In contemporary life. Primary among these was the rapid growth of the
residential suburb, especially in the United States. On the global scale, postwar
geopolitical reconfigurations inflected not only ideological positions but long-range
planning strategies. The war also catalyzed a second industrial revolution, bringing to
the construction site a new array of synthetic materials— plastics, resins, fibers— and
putting in place the infrastructure for electronic and cybernetic technology.

C risis or c o n tin u ity?

We begin in the middle of things, at the turning point of the Second World War. As
historic capitals and cultural centers were being devastated in Europe and parts of
Asia, pawns in a strategic and tactical game of aerial warfare, the first Liberty ships
were being launched from the United States. Major victories in Italy, North Africa,
Russia, and the Pacific and the decisive mobilization of American technical capability
successively shifted the balance in favor of the Allied armies.
“Architecture” was hardly of primary consideration in 1943 amid a cataclysmic
world picture. Yet many architects around the world, if not militarily engaged, were
already employed in drawing up plans for the postwar rehabilitation of cities, towns,
and villages. Those charged with the program of reconstruction had not only to
address the urgent needs of rehousing and rebuilding, but also to project a vision of
postwar society. On the one hand, the war had proven the potency of coordinated
functional planning and industrialized production, confirming modernist ideology. In
a pictorial essay entitled “Design for War,” the editors of Architectural Forum wrote,

After m any decades o f functionalist preaching, this century is today producing

functionally designed objects for the first time on a tremendous scale. In other words,
in an extreme em ergency we turn unquestioning to functional design. It is important to
note that these products o f ingenuity, economy, and utmost exploitation o f limited
materials have quite unconsciously becom e the m ost satisfying designs o f our
machine civilization.2

Yet the massive destruction of human life and the built fabric through this formidable
instrumentality provided a more cautionary and ambivalent lesson.
The issue, as it now appeared to planners, was how to convert the vast war
machine to the needs of peace. The Athens Charter, the official codification of functionalist
urbanism, was published in German-occupied France in 1943, a decade after the
fourth congress of the Congrès Internationaux d ’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) drew
it up. Appearing under the imprint of the French CIAM group, it had been edited by Le
Corbusier anonymously in 1941— for fear of antagonizing the fascist caretakers in
Vichy, who were to spurn his grand urban schemes a year later— and contained an
introduction by the playwright and urbanist Jean Giraudoux. The latter heralded, with
a trepidation unknown to those who drafted the charter in 1933, “the threshold of this
new age.”3Le C orbusierfor his part reflected that the current mobilization, wresting the
French economy from its previous stagnation, would be the war’s major positive
outcome. As he stated in Sur les quatre routes, also published during the war years,

In wartime the farsighted have realized immense possibilities in an alliance between

the planners a nd industry. The war itself has bequeathed to the country a working plant.
A quantity o f the elements o f housing can be p ro duced in factories: dry assembly; the
prefabricated house. Provision o f housing will becom e the largest, the m ost urgent, the
m ost fruitful item o f the industrial program.4
 In America the potential of transforming wartime production to meet the desperate
need for housing was immediately grasped by Buckminster Fuller, among others.
Before the war’s end he turned his energies to persuading a Kansas aircraft manufacturer
to retool its factory for the fabrication of low-cost metal houses. By 1946 his “Dymaxion”
prototype was readied and exhibited to an enthusiastic public. Yet already a strong
countercurrent was in motion. "Let Bucky Fuller put together the dymaxion dwellings
of the people so long as we architects can design their tombs and monuments,” as
Philip Johnson— having in 1932 been the emissary of European modernism in
America— was to put it. Johnson's remark, an ironic commentary on a statement made
by Adolf Loos half a century earlier, reflected a widespread desire that emerged during
the war years and became an ongoing debate of the period: for a "new monumentallty.”5
In 1943 Sigfried Giedion, José Luis Sert, and Fernand Léger, all taking refuge from
the war in New York City, jointly wrote a paper entitled “N ine Points on Monumentallty.”
In it they voiced the desire to invest modern architecture with new means of collective
expression. Despite its traditional association with authoritarian regimes, they argued,
monumental ity was not incompatible with democracy. It was, Instead, a "true expression”
of the human spirit, capable of being conveyed In a language of modern forms and
materials. Their statement translated (consciously or not) the espéranto of a proud and
powerful nation on the eve of world triumph. Both the Isolationism and the anticapitalist
criticism of the late 1930s had subsided in the United States. Succeeding them was
aclim ate of magnanimous Internationalism, epitomized in Wendeil Wilkie’s best-selling
book of 1943, One World, and soon to be focused on the building of the United Nations.
A world rid of its recent tyrannies required, they sensed, appropriate symbolic forms.
The most potent reconciliation between an “architecture of dem ocracy” and the
modern sensibility was offered by Frank Lloyd Wright in these years. The second
volume of his Autobiography appeared in 1943 with its credo “ In the Nature of
Materials." In It he continued his crusadefor an "organic" architecture placing m achine
technology in the service of hum anistic values. Also published in 1943 was Ayn
Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, inwhlchtheW rlghtlanprotagonlstwas rom anticized
Into a full-blow n Am erican sym bol: the m odernist genius-architect, at first thw arted
by an uncomprehending society, then triumphantly vindicated for his foresight and
Individualism. Wright, of course, could hardly have been imagined any larger than life.
The same year, he sent a petition to the United States government requesting a
mandate to build his suburban dream, Broadacre City, throughout the entirety of
America. Fie solicited signatures from John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller,
Walter Gropius, Flenry-Russell Flltchcock, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Robert Moses,
and fifty others.6 In this respect, Wright and Fuller (and Moses for that matter) were
alike— they believed in thinking “in the biggest way that you know how.”7
If bravado was possible in a country that had come through the war physically
unscathed, in Europe the day of inflated conceptions had passed. Pragmatism and
relief tinged with hope characterized the Immediate postwar period. In the war-
damaged areas of the Western countries, rebuilding proceeded quickly, providing
major new jobs for architects. The work was carried out with dedication, if sometimes
shoddy results. In England forced austerity inspired a disciplined and on occasion
distinguished design of schools, housing, and towns. Le Corbusier's Unité d'Flabitation
rose In Marseilles, a supreme emblem of the functionalist aesthetic. Yet on its
completion, the very singularity of this great urban ship— intended prototype of a
convoy that never materialized in the French landscape— lent It a tragic dimension. Its
sculptural presence and surreal roofscape “spoke" with a new poetics.
CIAM, meeting in 1947 in Bridgwater, England, after a decade of inactivity,
reaffirmed its earlier stance on functionalism but put new emphasis on spiritual and
emotional values. Two themes were introduced: aesthetics, and how to bring modern
architecture to the “man on the street." The first, passionately advanced by the young
Aldo van Eyck, was, like Le Corbusier’s credo of “ineffable space," a call for an infusion
of poetic imagination into architecture. The second, bound up with the monumentality
debate, became increasingly urgent as Stalin’s social realism pervaded Eastern
Europe, obliterating the culture of modernism that had thrived there prior to the war.
With heightening Western perception of Soviet repression, America appeared a
beacon of freedom and opportunity. The architectural emigres from Germany who
entered this country starting in the mid-1930s— Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Erich Mendelsohn, and others— found an environment receptive
to their ideas. Bruno Zevi, who finished his education in America during the war, went
home to Italy bearing W right’s message of organicism, while the French architect
Marcel Lods reported to his compatriots, after a tour in 1946, his “enthusiasm and
euphoria" at witnessing the products of American civilization. Alvar Aalto, visiting the
United States in 1940 at the height of Russo-Finmsh hostilities, also was drawn to
America during the war years. His country’s pact with the Nazis halted further contacts;
in 1943 he found himself obliged to head an entourage of Finnish architects to inspect
German military installations, hosted by Albert Speer, Hitler's new armaments minister.
But afterthe war he returned to teach and build Baker House at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. His infatuation was not to last, though. At first eager to establish a base
here, he soon became critical of the excessive materialism of American culture.

T h e A m e ric a n iza tio n of m o d ernism

With the aid sent by America under the Marshall Plan, Western Europe largely
recovered from the postwar emergency by the early 1950s. It now braced for a different
onslaught as the progressive modernism it had exported to the United States in the
1920s and 1930s recrossed the Atlantic in the reverse direction. Along with the material
goods of the new pax Americana came a new set of cultural values.

The American invasion of Italy brought not only peace and national liberation, the end
of destroyed cities and prostitutes, but also chewing gum, powdered milk, and Coca-
Cola, and first and foremost the idea of “comfort" and the mechanization of the home.
The myth of the refrigerator was born . . ®

If the great symbolic client of modern architecture had been the proletariat, heroic
protagonist of an idealistic socialism, that of the period after was the middle class. For
geared-up capitalist economies now facing the threat of overproduction, the American
slogan of “better living through technology” was a manifest destiny. Focus shifted from
production to consumption, marketing, and “planned obsolescence"; from “revolutionary
producers” to a new class of consumers happy to leave behind the asperities of
Existenzminimum, desirous of an ever higher standard of living and the leisure to enjoy
it. The emphasis on the domestic environment gave women a central role in the
marketplace even as they were denied one in the workplace (a contradiction that would
have political consequences by the 1960s). From Germany Year Zero to Miracle in
Milan to La Dolce Vita: the route led from the rigors of scarcity to an “aesthetics of
plenty.”9By the end of the decade the "economic miracles" created by the reorganization
of West European production to serve technocratic and acquisitive ends had made the
world ripe for full-blown consumerism. Whether the culture purveyors would play an
affirmative or a critical role in this formation was not yet, however, clearly discerned.
For some, the transformation of functionalism from socialist to capitalist utopia
occurred seamlessly. To Gropius there was ostensibly little disjunction In adapting the
program of the Bauhaus, where he had first aspired to a partnership between art and
industry, to American managerial democracy. Only a shift In rhetoric signaled the
change: from "totality," an all-encompassing synthesis of art and handicraft or
industrial production, to “team," a well-coordinated group of specialists. Ironically, the
new corporate professionalism of the 1950s— soon decried by sociologists as
engendering a society of “organization men”— was the antithesis of the cultural and
social nonconformism embodied in the diverse group of personalities at the Bauhaus.
At the H ochschulefür Gestaltung in Ulm, West Germany, which opened In 1955
ontheBauhausm odel, the contradictions were only gradually elucidated in successive
restructurings of the curriculum. An Initial conception of the designer as creator of gute
Form (Max Bill’s position) gave way to that of the designer as captain— "coordinator"—
of industry (Tomás M aldonado’s), retreating by the m id -1960s Into a critical theory of
design largely confirming the Frankfurt School’s critique of culture. Abraham Moles, a
lecturer on information theory at Ulm, would write,

functionalist doctrine... is essentially an ascetic doctrine and manifestation o f a certain

philosophy o f life: that of scarcity, of rational application o f existing means for clearly
defined purposes. Within certain sectors of culture functionalism will retain its validity.
But recently functionalism has entered a critical period due to the growth of affluent
society__ Functionalism necessarily contradicts the doctrine o f affluent society which
is forced to produce and to sell relentlessly.... [The latter] creates a system o f neokitsch
b y accumulating objects in the human environment. At this point the crisis of
functionalism becomes manifest.10

Symptomatic was the fact that functionalism was now increasingly perceived as
a stylistic manifestation linked to an earlier historical period. As such, it was doubly
condemned: too abstract and elitist for the symbolic populism promulgated in the
communist countries under Stalinism, it was too abstract and antnndividualistic for
those in the Western countries paranoiacally professing "freedom .” While the
consolidation of state power in Eastern Europe left architects little leeway for opinion,
in the United States for several years McCarthylsm created a xenophobic climate for
many of the same émigrés the country had welcomed earlier. A public housing project
in Los Angeles by Richard Neutra was quashed In 1951 as "creeping socialism."11
Yet this was simply demagoguery on both sides, a battle of Ideology fired by the
intensifying Cold War. Khrushchev, seizing power shortly after Stalin's death in 1953
and more pragmatic in economic matters, reinstated functionalist building and
outlawed decorative excesses. Meanwhile the cost-effectiveness implicit in a stripped
aesthetic was hardly lost on capitalist builders and speculators. Big business became
the second major client for postwar architecture. The new multinational corporations,
surrogates for governments struggling to preserve their spheres of influence around
the world, offered lucrative commissions. The leading architects were soon more
preoccupied with corporate or government headquarters and single-family houses
than with solutions to factories and social housing. Modernism, as now reinterpreted,
largely meant a frame with repetitive components. Flexibility became interchangeability
as the “modular plan” replaced the free plan and “form fo llo w e d ] form.”12
The ubiquitous glass curtain wall turned out to be, paradoxically, a plane as
absolute as the Iron Curtain. As with the new American painting of these years,
successfully proselytized by the ex-Marxist art critic Clement Greenberg, an abstract
aesthetic sublimated disturbing subsurface contents.13 In architecture, Henry-Russell
Hitchcock and Philip Johnson's selective and formalistic adaptation of the modern
movement, propounded two decades earlier, had a similar effect. As the received
version of modernism by the 1950s, the authors’ denatured concept (more nuanced
in its original formulation) enabled architecture to be abstracted from specificities,
making possible a truly “international style." It now penetrated all corners of the world,
including the newly decolonized “Third World" countries aspiring to Western living
standards, at times hybridizing local vernaculars. An exception to themostly superficial
efforts at contextualism was Le Corbusier’s work in Chandigarh, a brilliant, if flawed,
effort to wed Indian tradition to modernism. Closer to home, Lewis Mumford touted the
“native and humane” regionalism of the San Francisco Bay area. The language of
corporate hegemony w asalso inflected with personal inputs. Yet the subjective design
approaches that now proliferated, from the eclecticism of Johnson himself or Edward
Durell Stone to the sculptural expressionism of Eero Saarinen in America, or the
virtuosities of Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil and Kenzo Tange In Japan, were the other side
of the glazed grids perfected by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. “Form was king.’'1'1
In American design education as well, the postwar revaluation of modernism
tended along formalist lines. Starting in the late 1930s, the presence of Gropius at
Harvard, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design, and Mies van der Rohe at
Illinois Institute of Technology grounded American pedagogy in traditions established
at the Bauhaus. The didactic exposition of modernist form and materials led in many
instances to refined and sophisticated results. In others, overemphasis on functional
expression produced the clichés of the "decorated diagram .’’15Possibly the old Beaux-
Arts orientation had been exorcised only superficially. Louis Kahn, a charismatic
presence at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania during the 1950s and 1960s,
arrived at his own synthesis. Meanwhile, at an educational outpost like the University
of Texas at Austin, an innovative curriculum was predicated on rigorous analysis of
form . The English architect-historian Colin Rowe, who was to influence two generations
of American students (the later one postmodernist), linked modernism to academic
tradition in his rereadings of modern architecture, calling into question the sociotechmcal
Zeitgeist that had been an article of faith for preceding historians.
A similar argument was made, though with opposite consequences, by Reyner
Banham in his seminal Theory and Design in the First Machine A ge (1961) and in Italy
by Giulio Carlo Argan. For the latter writers, and for other inheritors of the “functionalist
tradition.” the relation between "ethics” and “aesthetics” remained a vexed one. Peter
and Alison Smithson in England, initially affected by the neo-Palladiamsm of the
Wittkowerian school, soon began challenging the modernist establishment in less
academic ways, seeking a “socioplastic” basis for design. Under the banners of Team
10 and the New Brutalism they promoted an architecture of "growth and change,”
seeking inspiration in the spontaneity of popular culture and anthropological sources,
and rejecting ClAM ’s mechanistic model of urbanism for more empirical "patterns of
association.” John Voelker, a cofounder of Team 10, articulated the new concerns:
Images:
1930. The frame building and the multilevel high-rise city, images which contained a
complete urban system.
1950. Random images drawn from many sources containing single ideas which, one
b y one, contribute to, change, and extend the experience of space.
Program:
1930. To popularize the already established style o f the modern movement— didactic.
1950. To search for a plastic system which reciprocates and intends in architectural
form existing ecological patterns.
Method:
1930. To categorize the general situation and to develop it through the dialectical
manipulation o f the categories made.
1950. The empirical observation o f particular situations and development through the
architectural expression o f those unique patterns observed within them.
Technique:
1930. To replace existing buildings and cities with new categorically formulated
elements.
1950. The time-conscious techniques o f renewal and extension derived from the
recognition o f the positive ecological trends to be found in every particular situation.
Results:
1930. Prototype buildings and master plans, each charged with the full "international"
urban program. Irrespective o f location— didactic,
1950. Building in unique situations. The elements articulate and resolve the ecological
patterns, and provide instruments o f research into possible developm ent o f each
location.16

Spearheaded by Tearn 10's critique, the breakup of C lAM at the end of the decade was
a major symbolic event. The organization had greatly broadened its base during the
postwar period, drawing participants from all over the world to its ninth congress in Aix-
en-Provence in 1953, and feting the completion of Le Corbusier’s Unité d ’Habitation
in Marseilles on this occasion. But the nocturnal celebration on the building’s roof
augured the end of the dream of rationalism. The “youngers,” as the incipient Team 10
thought of themselves, were in an oedipal relationship with the generation of the
masters, reverent but restive. Le Corbusier himself was now building Ronchamp. Three
years later, absenting himself from ClAM ’s last official congress, held at Dubrovnik, he
acknowledged the incurable rift:

It is those who are now forty years old, born around 1916 during wars and revolutions,
and those then unborn, now twenty-five years old, born around 1930 during the
preparation o f a new war and am idst a profound economic, social, and political crisis—
who thus find themselves in the heart o f the present pe rio d the only ones capable of
feeling actual problems, personally, profoundly, the goals to follow, the means to reach
them, the pathetic urgency o f the present situation. They are in the know. Their
predecessors no longer are, they are out, they are no longer subject to the direct im pact
o f the situation.17

By 1959 CIAM was gone. Its “museum meeting’’ at Henry van de Velde’s Krôller-Müller
in Otterlo succeeded in consigning modernism— now the “great tradition"— to history.
From m e tro p o lis to global v illa g e
If the manifesto was the generic expression of the emergent aspirations of the early-
twentieth-century avant-gardes, indeed of the period of high modernism itself,18 its
moment was over by the midcentury. An architecture culture largely in retrenchment
after the war, engaged in reconstructing its interrupted developm ent or else
institutionalizing itself in the professional and academic mainstream, was not disposed
to such a positive form of enunciation. The missionary spirit that had once animated it
deflated in a widening breach between theory and practice.
The dissolution of the unitary formation previously coalesced underthe banner of
Cl AM further tended to produce a fragmented succession. In England, historian John
Summerson wrote of British architecture in the 1950s:

... the old notion o f a party line, a "cause" to be argued and supported by any amount
of didactic talk, no longer has the slightest relevance, any more than the notion of "the
international style" o f the thirties has the slightest relevance. ... We are no longer in the
period of "towards an architecture. ’’ It is architecture or nothing. A nd if it is architecture,
it is architecture continually redefined— not in words but in forms.19

Across the continent, in Italy, revisionism was the order of the day. The bourgeois
tradition that modernism had repressed was now recuperated by means of a new
emphasis on historical continuity and contextualism, lent credence by the editorial
activity of Ernesto Rogers at Casabella-Continuità. So eclectic was the architecture
emerging out of the rationalist legacy that Rogers was led to remark that the only new
orthodoxy in Italian architecture was that of heterodoxy itself.20
Yet despite— or because of—this apparent vacuum, a "culture of criticism" began
to reemerge. Indeed in Italy, where fascism and modernism had had a particularly
involved relationship, an exceptionally high level of intellectual debate persisted from
the earlier period. During the 1930s, Casabella had functioned as a rallying point for
Italian rationalism under the legendary figures Edoardo Persico and Giuseppe
Pagano. After the war, this tradition continued in critical battles of position, if not
polemic, waged in the architectural press. Within a few years after the war, despite
economic scarcity, at least a dozen significant journals concentrating on architectural
subjects were publishing. In the 1950s, when Rogers renovated Casabella adding the
suffix Continuità, it was the most dedicated journal “of tendency” in the world.21
Elsewhere the major journals were more typically geared toboosting the profession.
Yet in England, notwithstanding the general lackof position-taking noted by Summerson,
critical discourse was forwarded in the Architectural Review, where the postwar editors,
once staunch modernists, now championed Swedish informality and townscape
picturesque with nearly equal fervor. By 1953 the Review had a less sentimental
interlocutor in Architectural Design, redesigned by the young Theo Crosby with an eye
to the increasingly important student readership.
The theory-practice split was likewise ingrained in the American professional
journals, which now publicized a mainstream modernism. Yet in Los Angeles Arts and
Architecture under John Entenza positioned itself more critically relative to new work.
Inaugurating its “Case Study Houses” program in 1945, it sponsored innovative
designs by Californians like Charles Eames and Richard Neutra. “Little magazines,"
often of academic provenance, also cropped up as forums for debate, like Yale School
of Architecture’s Perspecta, founded in 1952 by George Howe, responsible for early
expositions of Kahn’s work and ideas.
Later in the decade, more tendentious publications appeared, aligned with
specific movements. In 1958 Le Carré bleuwas launched in Helsinki, to function largely
asavehicleforTeam 10ideas,andL//m waspublished by the HochschulefurGestaltung.
Thefirstnum beroftheavant-garde/nfem af/ona/S/fuaf/on/sfalsoappeared.advancing
a “unitary urbanism.” In 1959 Van Eyck became principal editor of Dutch Forum,
making it another arena for the post-CIAM critique. The first (and only) issue of
Metabolism came out in Japan in 1960. During the 1960s the postwar media reached
a new threshold with the transformation of the architectural journal into a radical project
in itself. In the paper polemics of the British Archigram, its first broadsheet published
in 1961, and other groups, the “antiarchitecture" position vividly unfolded.
This diverse activity worked to break down national parochialisms and to
penetrate countries isolated by geography, technological backwardness, and
repressive political regimes. It preceded and followed the shifting cultural axis: from
Europe to America, as well as to places outside the usual centers of ferment, where
crucial architectural developments were occurring— Scandinavia, Japan, South
America, Eastern Europe, India. Nor was the expanded journalistic network solely
responsible for the circulation of ideas. The internationalization of firms, prestige
associated with the commissioning of foreign architects, the cosmopolitanism of the
schools, wider travel, and other mechanisms of dissemination contributed to the
universalizing of architecture culture. At the same time, decolonization allowed voices
to be heard (or images seen) from regions that a Eurocentric architecture had long
ignored or relegated to exotica. The great metropolises virtually synonymous with
modernism earlier in the century found themselves reduced to the scale of historical
nodes in what would be described by Marshall McLuhan In 1964 as a global village.22
ThatsameyearthesuccessofBernardRudofsky's "Architecture without Architects”
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York underscored the desire of
architects to look outside their discipline for new meaning and less egotistic models.
The economic boom of the 1950s had slowed by the beginning of the 1960s, while the
Cold War warmed into the tense confrontation of the Cuban missile crisis and an (outer)
space race. The resurgence of a leftist critique of culture and steady American
escalation of Its misguided adventure in Vietnam now elicited a wave of anti-
Americanism. Some architects attempted to regain control over a troubling reality
through a return to technological solutions and scientific methodologies, while others
translated their criticism Into sociopolitical protest and utopian prophecy. Still others
em braced popular culture or its countercultural spin-offs, learning to like Levittown or
building domes in the desert.
The first tendency constituted a belated success for rationalism, now as a
metalanguage. Structuralism, having originated earlier in the century, replaced the
existentialist A ngst of the 1950s as privileged intellectual current. Linguistic, semiotic,
and typological approaches to design flourished on the border between science and
culture, affording methods andmodelsto the technically minded wing of theprofession—
architect-planners like Kevin Lynch, Christopher Alexander, Yona Friedman— as well
as to new theoreticians of architectural history and form like those in Venice or at the
Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York C ity, the latter founded In 1967,
On the critical-activist side, the range of responses ran the gamut from the social
reformism spurred by Jane Jacobs in America to Archlgram ’s futurism. While Jacobs
preached an urbanism continuous with the fabric of the city, Archigram projected a
house for the year 1990 with adjustable walls and floors, inflatable furniture, a hovercraft
bed-capsule, and robotized servicing. Despite their different visions, though, the two
were linked by the vehemence of their attack on modernism and the breadth of their
impact. Cultural connections bridged international boundaries in unprecedented
ways. The radical school had protagonists in Japan, Italy, France, Austria. As Hans
Hollein was to put it, “Anybody who wants to be on good standing has to have a plug­
in city project in his pocket or an inflatable text-pavilion.”23
The student protests of 1968 would seem to represent a culmination in the course
of late modernism, at least within a broader cultural perspective, and were proclaimed
to be such by intellectuals. Herbert Marcuse wrote in TheEndofUtopia0967), “Historical
possibilities must be thought according to forms that put the accent on rupture rather
than continuity with past history, on negation rather than on the positive, on difference
rather than progress."24 Inevitably, though, the regressions that followed the revolts in
the universities counter such a periodization. With regard to architecture, the strikes
that closed the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in France after 250 years largely failed to bring
about the sweeping professional and social reforms to which radical architects
aspired. Instead, the first wave of postmodernism in the 1970s vindicated many values
epitomized by the old academy. In 1975 the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
bastion of modernism, would mark the return of historicism with a major exhibition on
Beaux-Arts architecture.25 The publication in 1966 of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture and Aldo Rossi’s Architecture o f the City proved a truer
portent of the two decades to come than the short-lived “events of May.”

H is to ry is n ot a tre e
The preceding sketch barely evokes the rich dynamics of a period as complex and
disparate as that represented in this anthology. Indeed, the heterogeneity of the
subject matter poses special problems for the volume as a whole. Within the purview
of contemporary “architecture culture" falls the widest possible range of formal,
technical, and institutional considerations, all variously intersecting with intellectual
models, modes of production, and modes of consumption.
It is with the realization of the diversity of the field rather than out of eclectic criteria
of selection that visions as different as an early meditation by Gaston Bachelard on the
spatial poetics of the house and Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion proposal of nearly the
same date both find a place here. Urbanism Is the subject of this volume as much as
architecture, especially as the relationship between the two disciplines remained a
critical issue after the war. Also deemed “architectural” are documents like Nikita
Khrushchev’s dictum on functionalism and Robert Moses'sassault on utopian planning—
two ideologically opposite statements, but both revealing in terms of the way different
levels of spatial production (what used to be called the base and superstructure) act
upon each other. The decision to organize the presentation chronologically rather than
thematically stemmed from the desire not to suppress such interrelationships. At the
same time, in order to give the reader an indication of some threads interwoven in the
book, cross-references— on occasion suggestive rather than direct— have been
provided In the margins of the introductory articles.
One of the immediate problems of defining the criteria for the selections was to
reconsider the meaning of the “docum ent” during the period at hand. As Michel
Foucault has pointed out, the primary task of historical work in our time is the
“questioning of the docum ent.” In particular, what is an architectural document?\n the
case of architecture, the relationship between written, graphic, and built record—
reductively seen as a relationship of theory or criticism, representation, and practice—
is particularly Intricate. Material of the type that follows Intervenes In both the production
and reproduction of the built world; it is part of the construction of historical space. This
reflection gives rise to a rather broad definition of document here. Rather than requiring
that a text have had a specific reception or novelty when It appeared, we found it more
useful to consider the document as a manifestation im plicated in a significant way with
a major constellation of discursive thought o r practice Thus along with many “classics,"
a certain amount of material has been Included whose Importance could only become
apparent in retrospect.
In some cases, an obvious choice has been omitted for reasons of length— to
avoid having to make meddlesome cuts— but also on occasion in the interests of
drawing the reader's attention to a lesser known writing. We have also sought, when
appropriate, to make available previously untranslated material rather than reissue that
which already exists; thus a number of writings appear In English for the first time. In
other instances, a text was chosen more for “Internal” reasons: because It had a
significant connection to another in the book, or conversely, to avoid redundancy.
Through the process of selection we have also tried to convey a sense of the time
that an idea or conception entered architectural discourse. With regard to Team 10, for
instance, the “Doom Manifesto," though less crystallized than some other statements,
pinpoints the coalescence of that group's thlnklngas Itoccurred right after ClAM's ninth
meeting. On the other hand, history is as much a matter of arrivals as departures. Frank
Lloyd Wright's statement of 1943 is a synthesis of his previous thinking at a moment
when his position had great impact. Naturally, despite the attempt to be as discriminating
as possible In such choices, the ultimate compilation represents a subjective and
occasionally pragmatic judgm ent and makes no claim to be exhaustive or “correct.”
On the contrary, the reader Is Invited to argue with both its inclusions and omissions.
(It might be stated in anticipation that a few of the latter were owed to the difficulty of
obtaining a text efficient enough to accommodate the present format.)
In line with the above notion of timeliness, we have placed the documents in
sequence according to their original date of utterance or writing, when this could be
ascertained, rather than the date they were first published. This was done in view of the
fact that ideas in architecture often have a significant half-life prior to reaching print.
Occasionally this caused complications when the author made later revisions. Such
problems have been adjudicated on an individual basis, and the version of the text here
adopted is indicated in the introductory article or source note.
Editing of documents has been kept to a minimum throughout, except that
spellings have been Americanized and typographical and other obvious errors
corrected when these had no reason to be perpetuated. As a general policy as little
excerption or Internal cutting as possible was done, where It was unavoidable, the
Intervention has been indicated by three dots in brackets. Unbracketed ellipses
belong to the original text. The Illustrations in the book are those that accompanied the
document originally, or a selection of them, unless otherwise Indicated. Unascribed
translations are the editor’s. Finally, every attempt has been made to secure permission
for publication from the appropriate copyright owner or owners. This information
appears in the source note accompanying each document. Oversights are sincerely
regretted and, upon proper notification, will be rectified In future editions of this book.
How to read a compendium of this type? In different ways: as a sourcebook, as
a narrative, or— in the spirit of the flaneur— just by browsing. The introductory articles
provide, in very abbreviated form, some background for the documents and are written
so that the latter may be read independently. Selective bibliographic references in the
articles and at the back of the book offer some points of departure for further study.

Joan Ockman
August 1992

Notes
1. Le Corbusier, Looking at City Planning, trans. Eleanor Levieux (New York: Orion Press, 1971 ). p. 1.
2. Architectural Forum, September 1943, p. 4.
3. Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter, trans. Anthony Eardley (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973),
p. xix. See also Sigfried Giedion, "CIAM at Sea: The Background of the Fourth (Athens) Congress," trans.
P. Morton Shand, Architects1Yearbook 3 (1949), pp. 36-39.
4. The Four Routes, trans. Dorothy Todd (London: Dennis Dobson Limited, 1947), p. 15 (translation
modified). Original French edition 1941.
5. PhilipJohnson, “Where Arc We At7" in Architectural Review, September 1960, p. 175. See also Johnson's
earlier “War Memorials: What Aesthetic Price Glory?" Art News 44 (September 1945), pp. 8-10,24-25 Loos
had written, “Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument Everything
else, everything which serves a purpose, should be excluded from the realms of art" ("Architecture," 1910)
6. Wright’s decentralist vision ol society was first conceived in the early 1930s and further elaborated
during the postwar period in When Democracy Builds (1945) and The Living City! 1958). For the document
mentioned, see John Sergeant, Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Houses: The Case for Organic Architecture
(New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1976), p. 201.
7. See Designing a New Industry: A Composite of a Series of Talks byR. Buckminster Fuller, 1945-1946
(Wichita: Fuller Research Institute, 1946), p. 9.
8. Vittorio Gregotti, “Italian Design 1945-1971. "in Emilio Ambasz.ed , Italy: The New Domestic Landscape
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972), p. 322 (translation modified)
9. A phrase first coined by Lawrence Alloway in 1959, See Alloway's essay “The Independent Group:
Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty," in the catalogue of the same title, ed David Robbins
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 49-53
10. “Functionalism in Crisis,” ulm 19/20 (August 1967), p. 24
11. See Thomas Hines Richard Neutra andthe Search for Modern Arch/fecfure(NewYork:OxfordUniversity
Press, 1982), pp. 229-30.
12. Matthew Nowicki, "Origins and Trends in Modern Architecture" (1951) in this volume, pp,150-56.
13. See Serge Guilbaut, “The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America: Greenberg, Pollock, or from
Trotskyism to the New Liberalism of the ‘Vital Center, trans, Thomas Repensek, in Francis Frasclna, ed
Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (New York: Plarper and Row, 1986)
14. Robert Venturi’s characterization. See his prefacetothesecondedition of Complexity and Contradiction
in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), p. 14
15. For a critical assessment of the Gropius pedagogy at Harvard, see Klaus Herdeg, The Decorated
Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983) A
history of postwar American architecture education remains to be written
16. Published in Oscar Newman, New Frontiers in Architecture: CIAM 59 in Otterlo (New York: Universe
Books, 1961), p. 16.
17. Letter to CIAM 10, Dubrovnik. In Newman, New Frontiers in Architecture, p. 16
18. As exemplified by Ulrich Conrads's antbotogy Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-CenturyArchitecture,
trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970). Conrads’s book goes up to 1963
19. Introduction to Trevor Dannati, Modern Architecture in Britain (London Batsford 1959), p 28
20. See Ernesto Rogers, “L’Ortodossia dell’eterodossia," Casabella 216 (June-July 1957), pp 2-4.
“Continuità o crisi” is the title of an editorial by Rogers in Casabella 215 (April-May 1957), pp 3-4
21. On the relations between theory and practice in postwar Italy and France and the architect's
Intellectual role, see Jean-Louis Cohen's valuable La Coupure entre architectes et intellectuals, ou les
enseignements de Titalophilie (Paris: Ecole d'Architecture Paris-Villemin, 1984).
22. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 20.
23. Architectural Design, February 1970, p. 62.
24 As cited by Jean Baudrillard in Utopie: Revue de sociologie de lurbain, May 1969, p. 14.
25. The catalogue of the exhibition is Arthur Drexler, ed., The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977). The events of 1968 figure on one page of this 500-page volume.