Dennis Hollingsworth

Slippery

When Philip Johnson died, I passed on reading the preprepared obits that usually come flooding out of the various lockers of the media.

When I was a kid architect, Charles Jencks had already coined the term Postmodernism, and the slapdash-history-rummaging -quotational early form of this kind of architecture was already running out of gas. Peter Eisenman was set and ready to pop as the papa for PoMo Part Two: Deconstruction. Architects like Stanley Tigerman began to fade from view, "Learning from Las Vegas" kept Venturi in the spotlight. P.Johnson just floated past that sinking wreck of Arch Theory, untouchable. He was a gamey old sage by that time. His amorality oozed but it didn't diminish his aura, indeed it enhanced his appeal for the transgressive types among us. And while he did little to contribute to the Decon era, he was still a becon to navigate by.

Later, long after school, I began to read of hints that some of the big heros were kind of stinky. Reading online back in the early days of the internet, on that great site, City Journal, I found that ( a problematic essay however... the author, Roger Scruton, wants us to recreate pattern books again) Le Corbusier's ideas led to human warehousing in the outskirts of French Cities.

Of course, they didn't call it control: socialists never do. Le Corbusier's project to demolish all of Paris north of the Seine and replace it with high-rise towers of glass was supposed to be an emancipation, a liberation from the old constraints of urban living. Those dirty, promiscuous streets were to give way to grass and trees?open spaces where the New Socialist Man, released from the hygienic glass bottle where he was stored by night, could walk in the sunshine and be alone with himself. Le Corbusier never asked himself whether people wanted to live like this, nor did he care what method would transport them to their new utopia. History (as understood by the modernist project) required them to be there, and that was that.

Here's another trenchant slice from City Journal, this time from Theodore Dalrymple in 1995:

In the circumstances, who can be surprised that the architectural style, if style it can be called, of Le Corbusier came to dominate the construction of public housing, even though it had already proved disastrous in the one place, Marseilles, where Corbusier had been given full rein? It was the simplest and cheapest means of complying with the now-sacrosanct Parker Morris standards. Besides, Le Corbusier was a kindred spirit to bureaucrats and town planners?not just an architect but a visionary and would be social reformer; Of Paris he wrote: "Imagine all this junk, which until now has lain spread out over the soil like a dry crust, cleaned off and carted away, and replaced by immense clear crystals of glass, rising to a height of over 600 feet!" In this spirit, much of my city, especially the terraced housing of the working class, was cleaned off and carted away, to be replaced by Le Corbusier's " vertical city . . . bathed in light and air." Some light, some air!

I began to connect some of the dots plotted when I was younger, books like Defensible Space and the roll back of housing blocks inspired by the great Corbu such as Pruitt Igoe (the architect of which, Minoru Yamasaki, was the self same designer of the World Trade Center!). Leon Krier critiqued Modern City Planning in Houses, Palaces and Cities.

It sometimes seemed as if all we had to choose from ranged between dominator Fascists or control freak Marxists (maybe this was a natural consequence from the way architecture had to be taught: as if one had the ability... or responsibility to control all human factors in the built environment for example). Somewhere out there in architectural education land were a few lives unexamined. I had learned so much and knew so little... there's so much more to learn.

Then came this article:

I leave it to others to determine whether Johnson's amorality bears a relationship to the chilly skyscrapers he built, or whether his politics influenced the celebrated glass-walled house he designed for himself, whose brick interior he once said had been inspired by the brick foundations of a "burned-out wooden village I saw," presumably in Poland. But his death makes me think that the rest of us should occasionally reflect a bit harder about why we find it so easy to condemn the likes of Prince Harry, a silly, thoughtless boy, and so hard to condemn Philip Johnson, a brilliant, witty aesthete. Or why it was thought scandalous when an allegedly anti-Semitic Ukrainian businessman was allowed to ride on Colin Powell's plane to Kiev last week, while Johnson, who once wrote a positive review of "Mein Kampf," lectured at Harvard University. Or why the Nuremberg tribunal didn't impose the death penalty on the urbane Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, or why the Academy Awards ceremony in 2004 solemnly noted the death of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's filmmaker, or why Herbert von Karajan, a Nazi Party member who never apologized at all -- party membership, he once said, "advanced my career" -- continued to conduct orchestras in all the great concert halls of Europe. We may think we believe any affiliation with Nazism is wrong, but as a society, our actual definition of "collaboration" is in fact quite slippery.

In the end, I suspect the explanation is simple: People whose gifts lie in esoteric fields get a pass that others don't. Or, to put it differently, if you use crude language and wear a swastika, you're a pariah. But if you make up a complex, witty persona, use irony and jokes to brush off hard questions, and construct an elaborate philosophy to obfuscate your past, then you're an elder statesman, a trendsetter, a provocateur and -- most tantalizingly -- an enigma.

(emphasis mine)

And today, checking into the SCA PruessPress site blog, it was an interesting coincidence to hear this tune.