From Bauhaus to Our House
From Bauhaus to Our House
Tom Wolfe
This is the last of three Me Decade books (OK, this was written in 1981, but it still reeks of Carter-malaise and is entirely Reagan-morning-in-America-free) of social criticism written by Tom Wolfe, and it shows. While still identifiably and enjoyably Wolfe, he is getting a bit exhausted. He freely cannibalizes the previous two works (Painted Word and Radical Chic). Whereas in Painted Word, it was the modern art critics whose theories turned in “ever-decreasing concentric circles” before disappearing into their “fundamental aperture”; here it is the modern architecture theorists, and so on.
This book is flatter, less clean, but nonetheless as insightful as the other two. It also, at 111 pages with lots of pictures, spacing and margins, weighs in at the same punching weight as its brethren.
Wolfe delves into the question of why we, the greatest, stompingest, most extravagant nation in the history of nations, have been afflicted with a sparse, Spartan, non-celebratory, neutered architecture of “glass boxes” piled high.
Wolfe ably traces the ailment back to a gaggle of Dieters in German architecture in the 1920s. They’d invented a holistic theory of building buildings that were theoretically pure, beautiful, and consistent, and also rejected such frivolities as how much space, air, light, ornament, and decoration actual living people wanted in their buildings. These theories became immensely popular in the States when their progenitors crossed the pond as war refugees and were quickly installed in the high seats of architecture academe.
Preparing the way for this Coming of the White Gods, was Philip Johnson as John the Baptist. The 26-year-old Johnson and colleague spread the gospel in the form of a 1932 Met show saluting the Europeans:
“Museum catalogue copy, which is a species of forced labor or gun-at-the-temple scholarship, is notorious for its sophistry, when it isn’t patent nonsense. But “The International Style” was literature of a higher order. It shone… with the hallucinatory clarity of a Church of Galilee Walker handbill. The two men were baying at a silvery, princely moon.”
Wolfe presents the battles rather nicely, but it seems that this sliver of a book isn’t up to the size of its task. Unlike Radical Chic, which dealt with the smarmy inhabitants of a couple square miles of northern Manhattan; and Painted Word, whose art world coterie is perhaps 10,000 strong; architecture implicitly encompasses the several million structures erected in the United States each year. And Wolfe, while focusing on a handful of those architect critics, never does quite connect how much or how little impact this hand on the country – it seems as if the theories inflicted on us a few ugly wimpy showcase buildings in each urban center, but is that really perfidy, or simply part of the grand experiment of America?
All in all, $11.16 for a long magazine article that does not quite comprehensively survey sixty years of architecture might be a bit rich for y’all. If you’re a completist, an architect, or a ravenous Tom Wolfian, then this book is for you. If not, then you’d most likely be sufficiently satisfied sticking with his superior “Radical Chic.”
