Theories and Manifestos of Contemporary Architecture. Ed. by Ch. Jenks and K. Kropf. Academy Edition. 1997. P.312
Charles
Jencks
The Volcano and the Tablet
Why do politicians and architects write manifestoes? When Karl Marx
wrote The Communist Manifesto he was not trying to produce a piece of
literature - nor interpret the world, as he said, but change it. Our century,
as Ulrich Conrads has shown in his book Programmes and Manifestoes on Twentieth-Century Architecнture
(1964) has turned the architectural manifesto into a predictable event. Unнable
or unwilling to advertise, an architect must become well known in other media
besides buildings. Other professionals use the manifesto for the same reaнson
and the surprising thing is that, although politicians, theologians and artists
all write them - constantly - they do not give the genre much thought. It is a
curious art form, like the haiku, with its own rules of brevity, wit and le mot
juste.
The first architectural manifesto, or rules for decorum, was God's Ten
Commandments. Plato called God 'the architect of all things', and architects
play God when they make arbitrary decisions and adopt one theory rather than
another. In the Bible the ultimate creator had several distinct personalities
which He used effectively, in opposition to each other: abstract creator,
warrior-Lord, law-giver and personal friend. As Jack Miles shows in his
psycho-history, God, A Biography (1995), the warrior type, the Lord, inspires
fear and awe, like a cosmic force, a hurricane or flood. He does this as a
prelude, just before he shows compassion and tells people what kind of
buildings they should construct. The good manifesto mixes a bit of terror, runaway
emotion and charisma with a lot of common sense.
In Exodus, when Moses is leading the Israelites out of
The motives for destruction - to inspire fear in order to create unity
and orthoнdoxy - are fairly transparent and they lead to the first declaration
of architectural Minimalism in the famous Decalogue of Commandments. Moses,
braving much cosmic terror of lightening and thunder, takes his tablets up
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are inscribed the rules against
representation. "Thou shalt not make unto thee
any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is
in heaven above, or that is in earth beneath . . . ' Why this injunction
against icons and images? Because Thou shalt
have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not
bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous
God . . . 7 Just to prove the point He destroys the architecture and cities of
those who fall into idolatry, even those of the Israelites.
Enforcing purity and orthodoxy, we will see, is still a tactic of
Modernists, Late Modernists and Prince Charles, with his Decalogue of Ten
Principles. These were delivered, as a religious leader might do, in a
manifesto called A Vision of Britain. Those who write manifestoes are jealous
prophets who call the class to order by damning other teachers. If God first
appears to Moses in fire and thunder as He lays down the great moral code of
'thou shalt and shalt not',
then his final presence in architecture is equally threatening. Moses gives the
laws a monumenнtal setting and puts the tablets in 'the ark of the covenant'.
Then, 'When Moses had finished his work, the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting,
and the Presence of the Lord filled the Tabernacle . . . Over the Tabernacle a
cloud of the Lord rested by day, and fire would appear in it by night, in the
view of all the house of Israel throughout their journey'.
The image of God is arresting. What is a cloud by day and fire by night?
A volcano. It is this irresistible display of violence
and strength which makes the manifesto memorable and psychologically impressive.
There is one more important aspect to the genre: the personal element. 'The
Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend', and there
are many other passages which personнalise the message,
to both Moses and the chosen people. The most effective maniнfestoes, such as
Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture (1923)
constantly address the reader as 'you' and reiterates
the joint 'we' until an implied pact is built up betнween author and convert. A
manifesto must manifest its message to you, personally.
The volcano (the explosion of emotion), the tablet (the laws and
theories) and the personal voice; to these three tropes and strategies have
been added a few more. AWN Pugin, in the beginning of
the nineteenth century, gave architecture the good/bad comparative drawings in
his Contrasts and, ever since the lecture with two slide projectors caught on
in the 1920s, it has been the stock-in-trade of polemicists. All four
strategies are evident in Coop Himmelblau's
Architecture Must Blaze, a New Modern manifesto of 1980. Here we find The Bad -
Biedermeier -versus The Good - an architecture that
'lights up' - and the two are distinguished in the first person plural ('We are
tired of seeing Palladio and other historical
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masks')- Here is the Tablet of Virtues -
architecture that is 'fiery, smooth, hard, angular' etc. And
the volcanic violence - 'architecture must blaze' and 'bleed, whirl, even
break'.
Violence and the irrational are hallmarks of the New Modern manifesto,
as one can see with the writings of Tschumi, Kipnis, Wigley, Woods and others.
Often critical of Modernist humanism as too anthropomorphic, it proffers a type
of anti-humanism. This was Peter Eisenman's reading
of Foucault and the new paradigm coming out of
Eisenman
is the Le Corbusier of the late twentieth century, at least with respect to
formulating new theories. Theory is a kind of congealed manifesto, its violence
subtracted to become acceptable in the groves of academe. Since there are more
academic architects alive than ever before, there is more theory produced, much
of it written in a turgid and impenetrable style. Still, as Le Corbusier and Eisenman prove, theory is an engine
of architecture and, like the concetto in the
sixteenth century, the machine which invents new types of building, new
responses to the city. Ours is an age of theories responding to a changing
world, to the global economy, ecological crises and cultural confusions. In
effect, these are a second type of volcano and they disrupt normal architecture
and provoke the response of Rem Koolhaas,
Ian McHarg and Christian Norberg-Schulz,
to mention only three of the theorists reprinted here. Eisenman,
with his 'Cardboard Architecture' of 1972, and his work, also shows that theory
can keep architecture honest as well as inventive. This is no small matter in a
period which has seen most architects sucнcumb to the comfort industry.
The fact that Eisenman should write a Late
Modern manifesto in 1972, defending the autonomy of form, and then four years
later jump to a New Modernism that 'displaces man away from the centre of his
world' brings out a surprising aspect of contemporary architecture. At least it
surprised me, after Karl Kropf and I forced the
contributors into the four main pigeonholes you will find. The classification
system we used reveals that a few architects jump between traditions. For
instance, sometime after 1980, Leon Krier slid from
Post-Modern to Traditional; Kenneth Frampton, usually attacking Post-Modernism,
produced his highly influential essay supporting it - 'Critical Regionalism' -
in 1983, before jumping back to
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Late Modernism, with his writings on tectonics in 1989. From the seventies to (he eighties, Robert Stern moved from
Post-Modernism to Traditional, Christopher Alexander from Late to
Post-Modernism, and so it goes. There are interesting reasons for these jumps
which may tell us something important about the period.
First of all, the protean creator, like Michelangelo, may go through
four periods simply because he is so creative - in his case from Early to High
Renaissance and then from Mannerism to Baroque. Eisenman
is an example of this restless self-transformation. Secondly, the maverick,
like Philip Johnson, may jump back and forth because, as Johnson says, he and
his audience get bored. Third, and most important, a change may signify a shift
in culture and the development of an architect. It often represents a response
to new pressures, explosive non-architecнtural growths: in short, the second
type of volcano.
The fact that most architects stay loyal to one approach is quite
obvious and it allows traditions to grow in opposition to each other - dialectically
- and thus produce a varied environment, a maximum choice for society. Yet
there are a few architects who not only cut across categories in time but do
not fit happily into any tradition. With these, the more unclassifiable ones,
there is always the tempнtation, as with those such as Frank Gehry and Eric Moss, to invent sui
generis labels. Here the strategy would become
unwieldy and lead to confusion. Hence we have limited ourselves to four major
approaches, classified by the most prevaнlent definer, and placed the fifth,
the ecologists, within the expansive Post-Modнern tradition. Why? Because their attacks on overdevelopment, the mechanistic paradigm
and economism are all critical of Late Modernism.
Capsule
Definitions
It is always reductive to define growing, complex movements, always
foolhardy because it can never be done satisfactorily,
and always necessary - in order to clarify the issues at stake. Thus the
following four:
Traditional
architecture, whose greatest exponents here are Leon Krier,
Demetri Porphyrios and
Prince Charles. This movement backwards quite obviously builds on past models,
often classical, which are modified piecemeal with an attention to context and
the elaboration of construction and the vernacular. The ideals of tradiнtional
architecture are a classical proportion that reflects an ordered cosmos, harнmony,
a seamless integration of past and present and the use of timeless, Platonic
forms. Traditional architecture, although it never completely died, reasserted
itнself in the mid-seventies as it, like Post-Modernism, reacted to urban dissolution
and the housing failures of Modernism.
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Late Modern architecture is pragmatic or technocratic in its social
ideology and, from about 1960, takes many of the stylistic ideas and values of
Modernism to an extreme in order to resuscitate a dull (or cliched)
language. A pronounced emphasis on technology and the autonomy of form, the
exaggeration of a previнous rhetoric, characterises
the architecture, as often happens in 'Late' periods. Late Modern architecture,
also facing the popular rejection of the 'dumb box', developed after
New Modern architecture is deconstructive of Modern forms and ideas, herнmetic
in coding, often fragmented and dissonant in form, self-contradictory by inнtention,
anti-humanist and, spatially, explosive. Often the intention is to weave
opposites together and deconstruct traditions from the inside, in order to highнlight
difference, otherness and our alienation from the cosmos. Beginning in the late
1970s as a reaction to both Modernism and Post-Modernism, it has been inнfluenced
by the philosophy of Derrida and the formal language of the Constructi
vists - hence its most
visible manifestation, Deconstructivism.
Post-Modern architecture is doubly-coded - the combination of modern
techнniques and methods with something else (often traditional building) in
order for architecture to communicate with both the
public and a concerned minority, usuнally other architects. Since
post-modernists wish to restitch the fragmenting
city, without being traditional, and communicate across the classes and
professional divides, they adopt a hybrid language - even foreground
architecture as a lanнguage itself. Post-Modern ecologists also adopt a
double-agenda which criticises Modernism and
Traditionalism while, at the same time, selecting elements from both of them.
Post-Modernism as a rainbow coalition of those who resist or critiнcise Modernism started in the 1960s; as a movement it
only came together in the mid-1970s with my article, reprinted herein.
Manifesto
Logic
Those definitions, however, are academic, theoretical, bloodless - not
something to leave home for (the ultimate aim of a good manifesto). They are
necessary for cool ratiocination and comparison, which is why they are
included, but I defy you to repeat them verbatim, without looking. Manifestoes,
however, are jack-hammered into the mind, like a painful experience (and only
recently have neurologists found the painful mechanisms that cement old horrors
into our brains). They are repetiнtive, incantatory, responding to the
imperatives of history, hoping to ward off catasнtrophe with magic or logic.
They are like first grade recitation, responses in church:
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Post-Modern
is paradox - After Now, Post-Present
Post-Modern
is 'posteriority', after all time
Post-Modern
is the desire to live outside, beyond, after
Post-Modern
is time-binding of past, present, future
Post-Modern
is the continuation of Modernism and its transcendence. If they scanned and
rhymed, such verses could be set to music and be more memoнrable. At best, the
propositions of a manifesto verge on self-parody and are funnier when serious.
Post-Modernism
is crossing boundaries, crossing species
Post-Modernism
is operating in the gap between art and life
Post-Modernism
is Cambozola Cheese (illicit hybrid with the best
genes of Mrs Camembert and Mr
Gorgonzola)
Post-Modernism
is the rabbi's advice to his son: 'Whenever faced with two extremes, always
pick a third'.
Post-Modernism
revisits the past - with quotation marks
Post-Modernism
revisits the future - with irony
Post-Modernism
is acknowledging the already said, as Eco has already said, in an age of lost
innocence.
Manifestoes use any rhetorical tools available-rhymes, bad jokes, puns,
outraнgeous untruths (think of Baudrillard) - and
they always mint new metaphors, in an attempt to persuade. When the Cathedrals
were White, Le Corbusier's poнlemical book of the
1930s, was meant to instil the new white spirit into
the 'land of the timid', that is, Americans, New
Yorkers - but a moment's cogitation would have revealed that the cathedrals
were never white. Like the Parthenon, and Greek temples which always looked
white to the purist's wishful gaze, they were, originally, painted (which does
not sound right to the Minimalists and the jealous God).
Manifestoes are poetry written by someone on the run (like Trotsky's
polemic after the Revolution written while fighting the Whites, jumping on and
off his militarised train). They have an hysterical, telegraphic quality (or today an Internet
truncation) as if the sender did not want to pay for extra syllables. Architects,
such as Aldo van Eyck, are adept at these gnomic
utterances, wordtruncks that collapse space-time into
neologisms such as 'builtform'. These are directed at
other architects, to hypnotise them. The general
public would stop reading - but that does not deter the polemicist, who is
looking to tantalise a sect. To read a polemic, you
already have to want the expected outcome since the manifesto is made more to
keep an audience united than to convert the heathen.
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As you read the following manifestoes and theories, note this logic and
the way ideas unfold in time, as if there were a Zeitgeist at work. The section
on Post-Modernism reveals an impending sense of crisis within Modernism, or
within the environment due to Modernism, and each of the following traditions
also shows a similar mood. Crisis, or the feeling of imminent catastrophe, is
one more reason why the 'volcano' is as deep a metaphor as the 'tablet' - pure
theory - for without the motive to change the world the manifesto would not be
written. In our time, we might reflect with irony, as opposed to the Christian
or Modernist time, that a collection of manifestoes and theories must show
difference: ie, show the pluralнism and dialectic between
manifestoes which each one denies. This is why a puriнfied, Modernist
collection, such as that of Ulrich Conrads, mentioned
at the outset, is no longer possible.
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