Thinking About Modernism & Classicism
By Carroll William Westfall
They “shall be models of taste and good architecture, and of a variety of appearance, no two alike, so as to serve as specimens for the Architectural lecturer. “
— Thomas Jefferson, concerning the ten pavilions at the University of Virginia
Modernist architecture has its roots in the Enlightenment way of thinking that separates, parses, dissects, cuts apart and isolates with the hope that an improved understanding of physical nature external to the sensitive and intellectual parts of man can improve man’s lot. It produced the possibility of separating architecture from the city, and it led to the thought that architectural and urban form are different things. But note: the modernist form of this way of thinking is of fairly recent origin.
This modernist way of thinking stands one thing in opposition to another–in this case, architecture on the one hand, the City on the other. To think in oppositions, a form of thinking that can be called dialogic, is not exclusively modernist. It derives from a habit of mind standing at the very basis of the western tradition. This was the western tradition that had built cities we love that were assaulted by the eighteenth century philosophers who were themselves capable of building cities we can love and would love to be able to build now, and it was the tradition those same philosophers evoked as they did their assaulting. Both the assaulters and those who built what was assaulted used it, so it is clear that dialogic thinking does not in itself lead architecture to destroy the city. Instead, it is a particular form, the modernist form, of dialogic thinking that has led us to this pass.
The modernist form of dialogic thinking is the form that is most familiar to us today and virtually defines the modernist frame of mind. It has been formed over the last few centuries, has been sanctioned by the paradigm of the natural sciences in which there is one right formulation for a piece of knowledge–for example, Galileo’s discovery that stresses in beams increase according to the square of their length or Einstein’s observation that E=MC2. This procedure leads to useful and accurate observations that allow us to predict behavior in the natural world. The statements can be proven–they are either right or wrong. The opposite of a true statement is one that is in error. There is no compatibility between the opposition of right and wrong in this field of knowledge.
The nineteenth century vastly expanded our knowledge of the aspect of the natural world that could be known through the application of this new empirical natural science.
Meanwhile, it sought to apply the same methods of analysis and the same standards of accuracy and achieve a similar predictability in other aspects of nature, namely, in understanding the nature of man. By analogy with the world of the natural sciences, the proposition was formulated that something is either right or wrong, that if something is one thing it cannot be another. It then came to be believed that that method of empirical analysis and the application of reason to observations can lead to indubitably true propositions concerning the affairs of people, propositions that are objective, free of individual idiosyncrasy and subjectivity and, because they rise above individual judgment, avoid the risk of being wrong. There was a tremendous bonus here–no one has to be responsible for the consequences of actions that arise from purely objective forms of knowledge.
The result of all this is our current single-minded concentration on single things existing in a world that is knowable, objective and measurable and in which truth or validity is independent of individual judgment. Thus we say, This is a city, This is architecture, This is what an architect does, This is what I do when I am not an architect, etc., treating each as a separate compartment of thought and action, and of responsibility.
This concentration on single things conjoined with our habit of mind to see things in opposites has produced our current ways of thinking about many important things, among them architectural design. Note, for example, that design issues are framed as oppositions: technology versus design, economy versus beauty, client versus architect, modern versus traditional, center versus edge, and, in a larger realm touching architecture, nature versus culture and the current and inescapable quandary ranging around public versus private.
There is nothing new in these formulations. Oppositions like these have provided the stuff and substance of thought about the city ever since the Greeks taught us how to think and discovered the origins of the city in nature. But the use we make of dialogic thinking has changed, and therein lies the mischief.
Dialogic thinking posits pairs–this and that, the one and the other, and so on. The way we think about pairs today, in modernism, can be called antinomial thinking. The pairs form antinomies, that is, each part of a pair can be shown to be logically coherent and complete and must therefore stand in contradiction to the other. Not only are they contradictory, they are irreconcilable even though both claim a common basis of proof, namely, in empirical observation and its interpretation based on reason. A rational person cannot maintain that both parts of the pair are true. He has to make a choice: center or edge; nature or culture; public or private.
This modernist or antinomial thinking has its corollary in another idea borrowed from the empirical sciences dealing with observations revealing the laws of nature, namely, the idea that it is the nature of things producing observable phenomena to change, that there is nothing more enduring than change, indeed, there is nothing enduring except change and that there is nothing absolute except change. These changes are measured against various constants and against the only enduring ground for observing change, those of time and place. These become the constants the historian uses to measure change in the human condition just as the natural scientist uses them to measure changes of states in the nature he examines. The modern condition is to acknowledge this, to accept this, to work with this. Constant change is the modern condition, a relentless. ongoing, enduring change within which we cast our lives and destinies. The only way to live at peace with this ongoing change is to confront it with the methods of the natural sciences. Thus, architecture becomes first of all a technical skill and an extension of the social sciences. If it is not that, it is the complete opposite–the extension of individual genius in which the architect stands outside the forces operating around him and answering no other standards than those he himself sets for himself and which arise in his intuition. Either way–as technocrat and social scientist or as intuitive genius – he is responsible to absolutes (those of science and of his own genius) and is beyond the reach of the judgment of others.
There are alternatives to modernist antinomial thinking within dialogic thinking. They are classical forms which are still valid (the rational basis of the world has not changed). The kind of alternative one would find useful depends upon the kinds of pairs he is confronting.
Dialogic thinking posits pairs–this and that, the one and the other, and so on. The way we think about pairs today, in modernism, can be called antinomial thinking. The pairs form antinomies, that is, each part of a pair can be shown to be logically coherent and complete and must therefore stand in contradiction to the other. Not only are they contradictory, they are irreconcilable even though both claim a common basis of proof, namely, in empirical observation and its interpretation based on reason. A rational person cannot maintain that both parts of the pair are true. He has to make a choice: center or edge; nature or culture; public or private.
This modernist or antinomial thinking has its corollary in another idea borrowed from the empirical sciences dealing with observations revealing the laws of nature, namely, the idea that it is the nature of things producing observable phenomena to change, that there is nothing more enduring than change, indeed, there is nothing enduring except change and that there is nothing absolute except change. These changes are measured against various constants and against the only enduring ground for observing change, those of time and place. These become the constants the historian uses to measure change in the human condition just as the natural scientist uses them to measure changes of states in the nature he examines. The modern condition is to acknowledge this, to accept this, to work with this. Constant change is the modern condition, a relentless. ongoing, enduring change within which we cast our lives and destinies. The only way to live at peace with this ongoing change is to confront it with the methods of the natural sciences. Thus, architecture becomes first of all a technical skill and an extension of the social sciences. If it is not that, it is the complete opposite–the extension of individual genius in which the architect stands outside the forces operating around him and answering no other standards than those he himself sets for himself and which arise in his intuition. Either way–as technocrat and social scientist or as intuitive genius – he is responsible to absolutes (those of science and of his own genius) and is beyond the reach of the judgment of others.
There are alternatives to modernist antinomial thinking within dialogic thinking. They are classical forms which are still valid (the rational basis of the world has not changed). The kind of alternative one would find useful depends upon the kinds of pairs he is confronting.
One kind of pair can be called complementary. For example, we recognize that male and female are opposite parts of a pair, but we would not call the difference between them antinomial. Instead, they are complementary because together male and female make up humankind and we recognize humankind to be made up of different kinds. Unlike the antinomial claims we make about center versus edge and nature versus culture, we do not think of male and female as existing at opposite extremes from one another and incapable of being brought together in some sort of general middle containing them both–unless we apply antinomial thinking to complements, which is perhaps what we are doing with some of the current extreme forms of feminism and multiculturalism.
Another kind of pair might be called antithetical–for example, truth and falsehood, courage and cowardice, charity and hubris. They stand at extremes as black does to white without any intervening grays. One part of knowledge is the ability to recognize which extreme provides true happiness and move towards it. In doing so, one recognizes that what actual people, who are imperfect, can attain is a proportionate balance between the extremes. Antithetical thinking in human affairs requires an understanding of how hope stands in relation to despair and where aspiration is relative to actuality.
Finally, some other pairs are neither complementary nor antithetical–for example, center and edge, nature and culture and public and private. Note, for example, that a person cannot occupy both the center and the edge at the same time and that the natural and the cultural are different as are public and private actions. But note also that in these terms, the one defines the other. There is no center unless there is an edge, no world of nature untouched by cultivation as soon as man has trod in the natural world, no public without private interests and no private interests independent of a public existence.
Current thought would take these last two kinds of pairs to be antinomial, but a more useful way to treat them is as classic dialogic pairs. Classic dialogic thinking is at an antinomial extreme from antinomial thinking. It accepts a pair and seeks the mean between them, which it does by interposing a mediating term. Thus, both the intent and method of dialogic thinking is different from antinomial thinking. Antinomial thinking explores the extremes of the pairs and takes its pleasure in reveling in the discoveries. It makes enemies of the one against the other, as for example the new against the old, knowledge against inspiration, the technocrat-social scientist architect against the intuitive genius architect and architecture against the city.
Classic dialogic thinking is very different. It seeks proportionate accommodations between center and edge, nature and culture, etc. Instructive is the origin of our use of the term culture. It was coined within a framework of antinomial thinking to designate those things which stood opposed to nature when people began to think of themselves as being in opposition to nature. In the older, dialogic tradition, culture was a special form given to nature. Without nature there was no culture, and without culture, nature was useless to man. Mediating between nature and culture was art, or, more accurately, artifice or techne, that is, a practice guided by knowledge and skill aimed at making nature useful to man. The highest form of such artifice, the arch techne, was architecture.
The analogue to architecture in the affairs of men is city building, or the political life. The city is the locale for the exercise of the unique art dealing with another aspect of nature, this time, the nature of man. The city uses the political skill of the statesman and, in a democracy such as ours, the citizen who is also skillful at something else, say, at practicing architecture or at making money. The city is a special part of nature because among the most natural of the things people enjoy, indeed, among the most natural things they seek in the world formed by dialogic thinking, is the political life lived in both public and private ways in the city. The city is a special part of nature because it requires careful cultivation, the term cultivation signifying culture put into action. The city is the center of nature, the center which has become civilized through the efforts of people. Something that is civilized is the most like the city and the least like the wilderness which stood opposed to the city.
Antinomial thinking can deal only with one pair at a time while classic dialogic thinking reconciles a number of terms at once. It does this by finding what they have in common and putting them into like classes of things–and hence the term classical thought. Think for example of the group of man and nature, buildings and nature, the city and nature and the materials used to form man, buildings and the city in their raw form in nature and in their finished form in a design. For man and nature we can think antinomially of man versus animals, or trees, or rocks or some combination of things in nature and separate from man. Alternatively, in dialogic thinking, we can see man as a natural being made of the same things as other things in nature but different from them Similarly, we can think of buildings, the city and the materials of buildings and cities and the kinds of people as being different, or we can see them as a class in which the various members are brought together by the artifice that cultivates them for the uses of mankind–the artifice of the architect, of the city builder, of the statesman, of the citizen. Antinomial thinking would produce disparate pairs at war with one another. Classical, and still current, dialogic thinking would see human artifice as a means of bringing all of these different things into concord and it would use terms such as goodness, truth and beauty, not accuracy, precision, predictability or popularity, to judge the success of that artifice.
The cities, towns, villages and rural landscapes we value and attempt to learn from, whether here or abroad, were built within the tradition of classical dialogic thinking. And so were the things we most value in the liberal, democratic, political tradition of the West, that is, in the tradition we inherited and which we in America have enriched. Let me illustrate with a passage demonstrating how language worked when people thought like that:
“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
This is from a still-current political document about the civil life and its cultivation in nature. It is a document that explains that there are “truths” we “hold” “to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and so on. It is a document that considers nature to be important to people because of its enduring qualities, not because it is constantly changing. And it is a document drafted by people who looked at human experience both past and present to discover those truths, not at human activities as if they were merely other parts of the physical, material universe. These people understood that architecture, history, and political science were parts of the humanities, not of the social sciences, that is, they were part of the curriculum covering the subjects required of a person who is free and who wishes to protect and enjoy his freedom, and not the part based on its correspondence to the science Galileo, Newton and Einstein made from investigating nature. And it was drafted by people who knew that common sense caution and practical, political experience were, as Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist No.31, a “necessary armor against error and imposition” arising from claims supported on reason alone, just as they were also a hedge against what he called“obstinacy, perverseness, or disingenuity.” Edmund Burke would soon use similar terms to decry the excesses of the French Revolution, while in today’s terms Hamilton and Burke would be referring to pursuing a social agenda to reach a long-term social goal no matter the immediate cost on one extreme and on the other extreme to maintaining a political position because it corresponds to a dogmatically
held ideological position.
The city built by the people who wrote that document was to be the enduring city. That city is as enduring as the light that makes sunsets and the sunrises that convert the night into day. Like that light, it cannot be seen unless something reveals it – as a beautiful sunset reveals light while portending darkness, and as a day seems brightest when it follows them darkest night.
One of the fundamental tasks of the architect of such a city is to reveal the enduring truths of nature–for example, the fundamental truth of justice, that all people are created equal and are endowed with their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Another fundamental task of the architect is to provide places where those rights can be guaranteed and that happiness can be pursued. Doing so is the responsibility of those with the skill and training of architects. Chronicling how architects have acquitted themselves in undertaking this responsibility in changing circumstances over time is a noble task for – indeed, it is the responsibility of – historians.
In exercising their responsibility, architects embody enduring universals even as they address the transient and circumstantial and the immediate needs and desires of individuals–the ones that make money for builders, give pleasure to users and provide fame for architects while facilitating the accomplishment of quite particular tasks. Form does follow function, and always has, but delight does not arise from merely satisfying function nor from merely providing stability, and not even from their combination. To commodity and firmness must be added design to produce delight. Commodity, firmness and delight are three cumulative and finally inseparable qualities. That is what tradition has taught, and the modern condition, despite the claims of the modernists to the contrary, has not provided a valid, civil alternative to that teaching.
The buildings and open areas embodying the qualities of commodity, firmness and delight form the enduring city. The enduring city addresses the particular, actual and current means, needs, desires and moments that permeate life and form its immediate stuff and substance, but it also does more. It brings culture to nature and combines the two into an amalgam taking the form of design and construction, or art and material, and drawing on both knowledge and intuition (or science and genius, or technology and invention, if those are the terms of choice) to produce something that serves what design, construction, art and material serve, namely, the task of living happily by living with others in the political life.
In doing so, the enduring city joins the present with the past so that the past can provide experience to draw upon in reconciling seeming antinomies through dialectic, and it joins it to the future where the fruits of the concord and reconciliation can be enjoyed.
Per force, the center is the most important place in such a design. The center is where people come together in the public life. In the enduring city the center has priority over the edge where people disperse into the wilderness of their private concerns.
In the enduring city, politics – i.e., the art of living well together–is more important than architecture. The citizen is more important than the architect, or, to be more precise, the architect as citizen is more important than the architect as technocrat, as social scientist or as genius-artist. It is political need and service that brings buildings into existence, and it is therefore the political purpose of a people rather than the artistic preferences of architects that must establish the primary character of a building’s design. Certainly, without the art of the architect; there is no architecture: there is instead mere building. But just as certainly, without the dominance of the public role of the building there is mere private expression. For private expression to become architecture, there must be public content. Recall that among the ancient Greeks who taught us how to live well, the term for the public person was politicos while that for the private person was idiotos. To put these ideas in their shortest, aphoristic form: the enduring city serves the most important art, the art of being a citizen.
None of this is the dominant, current doctrine. Current doctrine puts the other nature of the city in the dominant position. The name of this nature is change. The city of change is composed of buildings built on particular sites, at particular times, with particular materials using the latest technologies and presenting the most current styles, and it does nothing more. The buildings of current doctrine are the works of architects who as architects are first of all artists rather than citizens. They address immediate needs and satisfy particular desires, usually the private needs and desires of those who pay the architect, needs and desires that increasingly impoverish public value even as they increase private value. In this city the edge where private interests are dominant has priority over the center where people come together in public. This is the city of idiots.
In this city the current moment is of greater moment than the past and the future. The past must be pushed away from the present in order for us to see how much different the present is from the past. And since the nature of this city is change, there is no sense in concerning oneself with the future since the only thing we can know about the future is that it will be different from the present. To prove that proposition we have historians to chronicle how much has changed between now and the past. It is obvious that the city named change is out-of-date the moment it is built. It is as evanescent, and can be as stimulating, as a sunset. Like any sunset, it is in the nature of this city to fade into night, or to turn into the left-over debris that increasingly chokes the centers of our cities and litters our countryside.
The city of antinomies, the city of current doctrine, the city seen merely as nature versus culture, of center versus edge, and, we might add, of public versus private, is the modernist city. It forces each individual to be separated from every other individual by defining him as that rather than this; no one can be both, or some part of both, or, most importantly, some mean between both. Nor can he be enlarged by something that includes him and his fellows and which is larger than himself, namely, the public life of the city of which he is one citizen. The modernist city sees each building and other part of a city as unique and without any important characteristics in common with other buildings and parts of cities in general and of that city in particular. Such people and buildings never make a whole. They cannot make a city; There are merely parts of cities, all of them of a different age, purpose, quality, state of newness and so on.
The alternative to the modernist city can be called the traditional or the classical city. This city is not something of the past. It is vitally important for us to recognize that for all the differences between the earlier form this city has taken and anything we know today in this country, this traditional, classical city can also be called the American city, town, or village. The origins of this city are in the discovery by the Greeks that people live best when they cultivate their natures in the city. The Greeks discovered that people, culture, nature and the city are four aspects of the same thing and that that thing as a whole provided the basis for the ongoing investigation we call the Western tradition. The Romans and the Renaissance Italians and French enlarged that insight, but they failed to provide the essential ingredient for its implementation in the United States. Therefore, there can be no direct transmission from the old world to the new.
The American city builders introduced an essential, new ingredient into the western tradition. They did this when they rejected their predecessor’s single-minded attitude about the center and its use. The predecessors of the American tradition interpreted the center as a particular, unique place, the single place in which a particular individual lived his political life and pursued his pleasures.
The founders of this nation dismissed this identification of the center with one unique, particular place. Like their classical predecessors, they saw the center as the most public, but unlike those predecessors and working with the northern traditions that had grown up in opposition to the Mediterranean world, they discovered that for any particular individual, there is no one center. Instead, there are many centers, and thus many different kinds of public.
In like manner, there are also many kinds of edges, and many kinds of private. An edge is therefore not the division between city and wilderness or between nature and culture. An edge is a demarcation between different centers. There now is no longer any wilderness, although there are rustic areas preserved to simulate wilderness. Similarly, there is no private life in an absolute sense. There are instead areas where one may pursue the private pleasures he seeks and others where the pleasures available only through public life are sought. Indeed, it is the case now as it was when the Greeks first discovered it that the greatest happiness is pursued in the public life, in the center, where the mean between the extremes of nature and culture, of center and edge, of public and private and of building as private expression and building as public architecture seek reconciliation in justice and beauty. The good city, the city of classical dialogic thought, the city we seek to build is the enduring city, the city whose nature is to seek the mean. It is not the city of change, the city of modernist antinomies, where life consists of brilliant sunsets that become night and have no promise of a dawn.
The anatomical and mechanical illustrations on pages 7 and 8 are taken from Diderot’s ENCYCLOPEDIA. The illustration on page 9 is the plan of the Pantheon.
Carroll William Westfall is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Virginia.