interviews | |  | | From "half modern, half something else" , Martin Beck, published 2003. Introduction You just republished "The Language of Post-Modern Architecture" for the seventh time. What prompted this latest new edition, 11 years after the last, and 25 years after the first? Since the publication of the sixth edition in 1991 the most important development has been the way the sciences of complexity have moved from a peripheral position to a central one. Whereas in the 1960s these things were all on the edge -- complexity and contradiction, complexity and the city, and complexity and the life sciences -- they now are at the center of how people think the universe works. This shift is mostly external to architecture, but it has to do with the underlying ideas of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture: that is multivalence and complexity. The notion of interrelationships between things being as important as the things themselves, which makes for complexity. So much of Modernism has privileged the reductivism inherent in its own paradigm. Post-Modernism is based on a different view according to which things emerge out of other things and this process is generally formulated under the terms of complexity theory. My argument has always criticized the univalence of Modernism, and its recurrent tendencies to reduce the city, as Abbé Laugier said in the 18th Century, to a primitive hut. The reason to re-edit the book is that now the computer is used by architects to deal with complex systems in a way that didn't exist when Venturi and Stirling were practicing. Now smooth complexity, the ability of the computer to blend and blur complex requirements, has come to the foreground. In crude terms that's the reason for the 7th edition. I am surprised at how fast architecture changes all the time and incorporates external ideas and transforms itself. There is a way in which architecture is always undergoing continual revolution - something my blob diagrams in the book reveal. So one should have a new edition every ten years-maybe? Context In the early 1970s you published three books [Architecture 2000 (1971), Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (with Nathan Silver, 1972), and Modern Movements in Architecture (1973)] the themes of which shift from engaging with a Modernist paradigm to engaging with the environmental movement to re-addressing the history of Modern architecture from a pluralist perspective. Giventhat you wrote your thesis with (the Modernist) Reyner Banham, I wonder if this sequence of topics reflects an intellectual transitionfrom modernism to setting the ground for what you then defined as postmodernism? You are missing here the first book I edited with George Baird called Meaning in Architecture-this came out in 1969. It was a hypertext with ten contributors who commented on each other's work, and counter-comments were published in the margins of the articles. We had Ken Frampton stating one position, George Baird another, Banham a third, Aldo van Eyck a fourth, and so on. In a way it was a postmodern dialogue with a lot of modernists. I think you're right to stress the pluralism in Modern Movements. I put the "s" in movements, a conscious move. I felt that the interpretation of modernism as put forward by Siegfried Giedion (who was my teacher at Harvard), Nikolaus Pevsner (who I tried to work with but who rejected my entreaties), and Banham (who accepted me quickly) excluded too many people. Even though they didn't agree among themselves, the view of modernism that they collectively defined was too limited. I was sensitive to the fact that the Expressionists were repressed as well as the Constructivists. My essay "History as Myth" in Meaning and Architecture deals with the question of how historical suppression works mythically in different periods, and how it is inevitable that all history is based on interpretation and relevance. My argument tried to get history writing into a different space so one could become aware of that systematic, mythical bias. Within Adhocism there is a rough way of treating pluralism as a bottom-up reality. I was aware of the ecology movement, but would say not enough aware. Had I thought about it more coherently as a paradigm I would have seen that Rachel Carson's book from 1960 Silent Spring was, like Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities from 1961, a key text that opened up postmodernism. They both questioned the progressivist myth, and the unforeseen consequences of progress. On the other hand, so much of postmodernism of the Lyotard-kind, is anti-enlightenment and I have strenuously denied that this variant is an acceptable kind. For me, postmodernism has always been both modern and critical of modernism. But it's true, a lot of people don't understand it that way, which is one of the reasons I've dropped the phrase postmodern from the main title of the seventh edition. The book is now called it The New Paradigm in Architecture because the word postmodern has become so contested and confused that it almost means nothing -- or everything. You mention in the introductions to The Language of Post-Modern Architecture that the project started in essay format, indicating that the arguments were developed over time in the first half of the 1970s. Could you elaborate on the discursive contexts, such as structuralism and semiology, the emergence of the "post-modern" in other disciplines etc. that were formative for developing the arguments you put forward. My chapter in Meaning and Architecture was based on Lévi-Strauss. There was definite interest in Saussure and in French Structuralism. I have never been a great fan of Roland Barthes. But, of course, the French approach was a definite formative influence, no question. In a way we were trying to put meaning back into architecture because signification was the great taboo or the great undiscussable element-and for so many other reasons. Partly because as a profession, architects only see trouble when thinking about architecture on the level of public content. We thought, well, if you can't address meaning then you can't really address expression - the World Trade Center projects bring up this problem in an extreme form. American foreign policy in the Middle East, its relationship to Muslim cultures, Jewish cultures and terrorism in general. Thus there are the political and social reasons for addressing meaning. Until architects can bring meaning into their architecture, it is impoverished. And, you know, minimalism is the most reduced of all the impoverished. As far as I'm concerned Meaning in Architecture was trying to say there is no blank slate, the slate can't be voided. It all goes back to the fluid conditions of the 1960s. The counter-culture is, of course, the key idea that started so much of postmodernism. Articulation The first 1977 edition of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture is structured into three parts. In the first one you trace the crisis of modernist functionalism and what you call "the death of modernism," the middle part introduces a linguistic communication model for architecture and the third, shorter one describes contemporary as well as historical examples for what you frame under the term "post-modern architecture." The driving distinction is articulated in terms such as "univalent" and "polyvalent." Can you elaborate on these two markers and how this distinction notes a difference to modernist thinking? Polyvalence has to do with multiple links between things and how meaning is created in these relationships. Within the modernparadigm there is a complexity paradigm, and yet in architecture, as opposed to literary theory, it had been repressed or not articulated. Modern literature dealt explicitly with complexity and you can see it in the work of T.S.Eliot, William Empsom and James Joyce. You could say architecture tends to be overwhelmed by the reductivist paradigm. In The Language of Post-Modern Architecture I was interested in finding, in its earliest modern state, an architecture of complexity based on meaning. That is why I ended with Gaudi's Casa Batlo because I could see that his architecture was socially and politically motivated. The building is built to assert the small-scale independence of Catalonia against the large scale "dragons of Spain and Castille". It was a Secessionist building in both senses of the word - it seceded from Spain and it related to the art movement of that name. It created a relation to the street, the context and the history of Barcelona. For instance St. George is the patron saint of Barcelona and on the façade of Casa Batlo he kills the dragon. Characteristically, Ken Frampton and modernist critics would dismiss Gaudi as kitsch; a "freak and a fantast" were the very words that Nikolaus Pevsner used. This is typical of a protestant, northern repressive character calling someone he doesn't like a "freak." "Constable Frampton", another protestant policeman would deny, as Pevsner had fifty years earlier, that Gaudi was a fountainhead and a worthwhile, seminal architect: I heard him call Gaudi kitsch in an Art Net Lecture in London, 1978. I thought Casa Batlo was clearly a standard in 1977 because I couldn't think of any better building to illustrate the thesis of complexity. That included of course the work of Robert Venturi, buildings that were putting forward similar ideas. But the built architecture did not yet articulate them. That's one of the curious things-you have ideas, the ideas are around and they're shared, but there may not be a building, or set of buildings, that fully illustrates them. So in the first edition I was forced into the ridiculous position of claiming a pre-modern building of Gaudi's was a postmodern harbinger of change-because I had nothing else. Venturi's buildings had not been as interesting as his theory of complexity and contradiction. Seven years later, by 1984, the New Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart by James Stirling and Michael Wilford was, I think, the best example of Robert Venturi's complexity and contradiction. Reception The reactions, specifically by American architectures such as Robert Stern, Michael Graves, and Charles Moore were very favorable. What was the reception like in other contexts? The book was translated into eleven languages, went into multiple editions, and was embarrassingly popular. All over the world in fact, but particularly behind the Iron Curtain it had a following. I was in Prague in the early 1980's and they had copies of the book which had been churned out by hand, on mimeograph paper. And it was the same in China and in Russia and other satellite countries, partly because modernism had taken root there and was really conformist, in a way much more virulently repressive than it was in the West. So the reception was different in different cultures. It also fit into the growing American counter-culture and mainstream practice in other ways. These multiple readings illustrate the idea of reception theory, as indeed postmodernism itself: that different cultural codes extract differing messages from the same text. How did "the modernists," specifically someone like Reyner Banham to whom you had a personal relationship perceive your arguments? My former tutor and professor, Peter Reyner Banham, hated it. There is a recent book on Banham in which this is analyzed quite amusingly by another of his students, Nigel Whitely, and it shows how Banham would attack the book and attack me, his student.* He and I had a curious relationship. Although he disliked postmodernism which he did dismiss as rubbish, at the same time he acknowledged it-contradictorily-as extremely important rubbish. Banham really thought out of two sides of his head. On the one side he was very hip and fashion-led, and on the other he was a good critical character who would do his homework. In a sense postmodernism caught him between these two views: the populism and scholarship, the pop and the traditional architectural cultures. So the reaction was extremely negative in reviews and yet begrudgingly positive in unfathomable ways. You could say that there was a conflict between his theory of popular culture - which would justify postmodernism - and his visceral dislike of its styles and literary conceits. Differentiation and Terms The Language of Post-Modern Architecture was re-editioned a few months after its initial publication with a substantially elaborated third chapter that introduces a series of new terms, such as "Revivalism", "Neo-Vernacular," "Radical Eclecticism." What was the urgency for this immediate extension and differentiation? In England, for instance, where revivalism was the only coherent alternative to modernism those terms articulated the pluralism. Postmodernism was clearly many things rather than one thing, a rainbow coalition of difference which was opportunistically getting together under the same umbrella. And I had to acknowledge that variety. The modernists discussed it as one thing, so I wanted to elaborate that it was many things. Especially in America where anything with funny facades and formal sculptural shapes was considered postmodern. There the issue of meaning was not thought of as especially important so I thought to distinguish issues of meaning from issues of pure form. Sculptural architecture was not necessarily postmodern as was often thought, but rather Late Modern. As postmodernism turns into a conscious tradition and elaborates itself, it starts multiplying its own "isms" just as modernism did. In fact from one viewpoint it almost became part of modernism. That made the situation very confusing. Therefore you have to use terms that are a little bit more precise and differentiating. On the one hand, there was postmodern classicism which suddenly became a huge world movement, but of many types. There was a minimalist classicism done by, say, Mario Botta in Switzerland; then an eclectic version followed by Stirling in this country, Britain; then a more representational type, followed by Venturi, Moore, and a thousand others in America; then a heavy concrete classicism of Ricardo Boffill in France and Spain; or an ironic type by Arata Isozaki in Japan, and, of course a fundamentalist version that of Aldo Rossi in Italy. He's the European exemplar. Postmodern classicism all of a sudden synthesized the different strands and became almost monolithic in itself. It was soon done without any thought, just as the International Style was replicated in the twenties. I obviously didn't agree with that slackening. History The exhibition "The Presence of the Past" at the Venice Biennalle 1980 marked an international breakthrough for postmodern architecture. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture was reeditioned and further elaborated upon in 1981. How did the historicist orientation of the "The Presence of the Past" impact the third edition and how did that reflect a cultural condition at the beginning of the 1980s? It was the particular position of Paolo Portoghesi and Robert Stern that turned the exhibition in that direction. I was somewhat critical of that, but not entirely. You are right to see that as another shift like the one I just mentioned-postmodern classicism. There was a postmodern historicism and for architects like Philip Johnson, Stern and Portoghesi "The Presence of the Past" was extremely important because they, in different ways, were trying to legitimize some continuities that the modernist rupture with history had created. Gropius and others had said, "we can't teach history", that "modernism is a unique", period, and that "it forms a discontinuity with the past". But, again, if you go to literature you see that language continues on in spite of ruptures and that it has to do with the bricolage and transformation of the past. At best Portoghesi et al were trying to do what T.S. Eliot was doing, that is weaving together, out of the fragments of the past, a new present. One can agree with part of the impetus, and historicism certainly had a great effect on American architecture, which became, as a result of it, full of historical references. A lot of people understand that type simply as the postmodernism, and this approach originates with the 1980 exhibition, with Stern and Graves and Johnson. I regretted it and argued "no, postmodernism has more to do with communication and the pluralist culture than with historicism". Historical references are just one of the aspects of that pluralism, but I never saw it as the fundamental orientation. By the mid-1980s when I started writing about the architects following this lead I became critical of the turn. It's a turn that leads very quickly to "pomo", a degraded form of postmodernism, which ultimately killed it. You see that in the sixth and seventh editions of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture where the "pomo" becomes explicit, and kitsch. In the seventh edition as a sign of that, I illustrated Michael Graves' building in Portland blowing up, like Pruitt-Igoe. Within the framework of postmodern architecture how would you distinguish between historicism and historicity as two conflicting frameworks for establishing a relationship to history? Well, historicism already has two quite different meanings. It means, on the one hand, what Karl Popper termed the 'poverty of historicism,' signifying the belief in some deterministic trend of history, the appeal to history as having an inevitable direction. Then there's the historicism in the nineteenth century sense, which is the appeal to different historical periods, a kind of revivalism of difference. In other words, a revivalism that isn't straight but rather evocative. In say the Brighton Pavilion of John Nash, you would have historical quotes as a form of communication, a reference to India and the Gothic. The postmodern historicism of the 1980s was this type, a referencing of historical architecture in a conscious and ironic way. However, if one understands historicity as a deeper interpretive project you would find this fluid type with Aldo Rossi and his interest in the historical city. But also the European fundamentalists, such as Matthias Ungers, were looking for historical archetypes and forms. So there are basically three types of historicism. Format/Design/Photography The first five editions of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture follow a book format and that is articulated in the first edition in1977. The specific design features (typography and page layouts) reflect what one could call a pragmatic book aesthetics common for architectural books at the time. Did the change of format and design in the sixth edition from 1991, when it became a coffee table book, reflect a changing aesthetic climate? Or a different function, circulation, and position of the book within culture at large? You're partly right. But at that time it was not common in the architectural world to have an argument with so many photographs - like a slide show. One of the reasons for the book's success was the fact that it had a lot of photographs and new, important buildings were illustrated in it. And that was partly because I was lucky enough to travel and lecture at all these different places and I could take photographs that weren't all that expensive to reproduce. They were also different from the standard fare, less glossy and plasticized. The book had a strong photographic backbone and was, in a sense, a lecture turned into a book, with all the faults and immediacy of that medium. The positive aspect was the freshness. However, the problem was that it became an argument by image, or at least an image-led discussion. Later in 1991 it was turned into a coffee-table book, not by me but by my publisher, and against my better judgment and desire. That transformation more or less killed its polemical spirit, and its low price. Now the seventh edition brings it back to the kind of book I wanted, which is of course based on image and text, but rather more tightly connected than in a coffee table book. Yet, it's a hybrid book, I hope a 'critical-readable-coffee-table'. The seventh edition is partly problematic because there is so much material in it. But this is responding to a certain kind of complexity, to the plurality of what is happening. It has all the mess of history in it. History is messy--it doesn't always have a clear path, even if it has a certain coherence. I think there's both coherence and mess in the book. One of the features of the book that has noticeably evolved over the various editions is the way buildings are photographed as well as how these photographs are structured into the book. Since you also took lots of photographs for the books I am wondering what constitutes the transformation of architectural photography over the course of the seven editions; and, related to that, if you think that there is a reciprocal influence between photography and postmodern architecture? The different feel is partly a result of going to full color in the sixth edition and using the slides that I happened to have: but, of course, Postmodern architecture is colour while modern architecture is black and white. One of the things I learned when quite young is that it is better to use your own photographs than those of other people because a) you know them b) you prove you were at the building c) they don't cost anything, and d) they're fresh. Most buildings are represented again and again by the same shot by a professional photographer. These pictures are technically of higher quality than my 35mm slide, but that medium allows me more flexibility. I am not under the onus of the architect, and can take my own view of the building from my angles, or my understanding. The seventh edition has more color still and a better layout. We have been able to get the text and image to work closer than ever. It's still not as good as I would like, but for me it's definite progress. For image, text, design and thought to be completely consonant with each other is, of course, an ideal. From the first to the latest edition of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture the book grew considerably. As you said, arguments had to be refined and new developments taken into account. Looking at the editions as a collection they reflect, in an abstract as well as concrete way the development of a discourse. In some interesting way, they also double your basic marker about polyvalence, discursively and on the level of the book format. You used the term evolvotome to describe this process. Evolvotome was a phrase I used in the fourth edition of What is Post-Modernism?, 1995. The computer had allowed me to rewrite and reconsider a changing situation and to better clarify my thoughts; to reduce mistakes and show change in the ideas, and in design itself. An evolvotome-hideous word though it may be-is a new kind of book that is written while history is being created. In a sense, it is a series of snapshots that show what the feeling and ideas were like at that particular point, when the tome went to bed as it were, and had to be printed. It has all the immediacy of the "I was there, this is what happened" situation which Banham correctly identified as necessary for historical writing. What follows is that you never get a coherent picture of history and a coherent book because both are evolving all the time. Although it has certain directions, real history is chaotic and fluctuates. It is truly multiform, and yet there are chreodes, there are broad developments, or highways of movement that you can talk about coherently. So it's that curious mixture of the two aspects of history which an evolovotome seeks to capture; but, maybe, never quite does. to think of the seven editions as a single collection must be maddening because, for instance, if you bought the third edition you would find that there's a lot of repetition with the sixth edition. But I see it more as if the first edition is being rewritten, and reminted like a coin. And you're saying, well, it may not be "what really happened in history". That takes me back to the first thing I wrote on "History as Myth": that to capture what "really happened" is impossible. But what you're getting in an evolovotome is the layering of narratives, a palimpsest which has a certain truth to it. Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2002. TOP | |
