It is somewhat jarring to find more than one positive reference to Tom Wolfe in Learning from Las Vegas—a collaboration by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour dating from the 1970s. After all, Venturi and his collaborators are the subject of enormous satirical scorn in Wolfe's own architectural criticism, specifically his 1981 From Bauhaus to Our House: a needlessly polemical send-up of modern architecture which—in light of Venturi et al.'s friendly citations to his work a few years earlier—now seems an act of gratuitous ingratitude. And while it's possible that Wolfe's ribbing was understood on all sides as friendly banter, his words about the architects have somewhat too much of the tang of personal ressentiment to be entirely explained away in this manner.
It may appear, to be sure, that there is no contradiction in all this. Venturi et al. and Wolfe arguably had the same polemical target: both were directing their volleys against the puritanical strictures of modernist architecture, with its insistence on a total absence of decoration, its stern and humorless adherence to a set of minimalist guidance, its spurning of any explicit reference or allusion in the architecture to anything other than the form of the building itself.
Venturi et al.—in seeking a way out of this school of thought—argue that "pure form" does not exist—that even the most abstract mass only acquires meaning through implicit reference to conventional associations and webs of historically-contextual allusions. All the Moderns were accomplishing by the late twentieth century, therefore, was to continue to make unacknowledged and unconscious references to architectural ideas from late nineteenth century industrialism, rather than the environment currently around them. The enormous "glass boxes" that they constructed in unvarying succession (Wolfe's phrase) had not really managed to eschew historical references or conventional meanings—their allusions were simply all to one bygone epoch and set of ideas frozen in time that they expressed through their own construction.
Wolfe objects (at unnecessary length and with excessive heat) to the same blinkered inflexibility and lack of self-awareness in high modern architecture. One therefore might regard him and Venturi et al. as sharing the same project. Yet, Wolfe regards these authors, and especially Venturi (often dubbed the prophet of "postmodernism" in architecture) as false rebels: licensed court jesters permitted to twit the king so long as they do not leave the confines of the throne room. In vindication of his argument, Wolfe points to one of the few structures the authors ever cite as an example of their own work, illustrating their preferred theoretical method applied in architectural practice. It is the Guild House in Pennsylvania. And it is, essentially—for all its creators' crowing—just a big box with no decoration.
Wolfe really does have a point here. One regards the pictures of Guild House—reproduced in Learning from Las Vegas—and scans them in vain for signs that would herald some historically-decisive rupture with midcentury modernism. Here is no farrago of postmodern pastiche and bricolage. No elaborate references to myriad sources mixing high and low elements of culture. Instead, one sees a neutral brick building, in the shape of a conventional polygon.
We learn from the text of Learning from Las Vegas that the heresy in the edifice was to be found in its use of an enlarged and slightly-cartoonish sign spelling "Guild House" in the front (the touch that made the building a "decorated shed" (good), which makes explicit self-conscious references, as opposed to a "duck" (bad), which unintentionally references things through its own construction (the alleged crime of most high modern structures). The building also had an exposed television aerial, which was seen as even more daring—constituting as it did a kind of "decoration." But these are departures from orthodoxy so subtle as to wholly escape the notice of the uninitiated.
So far, one is in agreement with Wolfe. Where he seems to go off the rails is in his unnecessarily vituperative and sweeping condemnation of modernism on purely aesthetic grounds. He seems to take for granted that we all share his instinctive revulsion for the bland formalism and minimalism of high modernist architecture. This presumption of a shared common taste becomes the basis for his class critique of twentieth century architects: accusing them of imposing dry and inaccessible elite standards of taste—founded in academic theory rather than human preferences—on middle-class clients who lack the cultural self-confidence to fight back.
Wolfe's thesis breaks down somewhat, therefore, if the modernist buildings he condemns aren't actually as ugly and odious and he makes them out to be. I can't claim to have a fully-informed judgment on the matter, but I will say that I went through and looked up images of many of the buildings he spends the most time condemning. Uniformly, I found them to be more interesting and aesthetically pleasing than he implies; and I—no student of architecture myself—would much rather pass any of them on the street, or inhabit one myself, than some highly-decorated beaux-arts monstrosity. Take a glance at the works of Philip Johnson after reading Wolfe's screed, say, and I think you will find they actually look a lot cooler than you were led to expect.
Wolfe, however, takes it as given that the buildings are ugly, and that the canons of modernism can only ever appeal to the brain rather than the heart or the gut of the ordinary person, and that they therefore must constitute an elite conspiracy imposed on the rest of us against our will. Such a critique surely goes too far in both its loathing of modernism and the importance it attaches to the whole question one way or the other. (Try as I might, I cannot see why any of this implicates the future of western civilization, even if modern architecture really were as uniformly ugly and devoid of human interest as Wolfe submits.)
The question of class that Wolfe's critique raises bears more discussion, however, since it is ultimately one that Venturi et al. are unable to avoid as well. One will never know why Wolfe—successful man of letters and icon of the new journalism—felt himself to be irredeemably scorned by and boxed out of the U.S. intellectual "elite." I'm not convinced he actually was, as Venturi et al.'s friendly citations to his work go some way to suggest. But whatever its sources, the Wolfean ressentiment proves fertile grounds—as it so often does—for humor, wit, and satire of the "punching up" variety, so I guess I'm glad it's there. Wolfe couldn't have written such an amusing (if at times overwrought) denunciation of modern architecture if he didn't feel its makers were somehow personally sneering at him and his values and aesthetic preferences.
What's odd though is that Venturi et al. here once again claim to be on Wolfe's side, joining forces with the common man against the snobs. After all, the point of Learning from Las Vegas is exactly what the title suggests: contemporary architecture shouldn't be any more afraid of borrowing from or making reference to contemporary commercial architecture than it is to the vernacular architecture of bygone eras. There is no intrinsic reason, they argue, not to borrow from the "low-brow" sources of contemporary architecture—casinos, strip malls, grocery stores, etc.—unless we take it as a given that we should feel contempt for the sort of people who make and inhabit such buildings. The authors describe how they were accused of being "Nixonites" and "hardhats," by other architectural critics, for their openness to incorporating middle-class and suburban references—and they pointedly ask whether this is really a political critique or merely "old-fashioned class snobbery."
Even as the authors position themselves as critics of elitism, however, the suspicion here once again arises—is this another false rebellion? After all, Venturi et al. hasten to reassure the reader that incorporating references to suburban and middle-class culture will not "remove the architect from his or her status in high culture." (Phew!) The design student picking up the book need not fear that by imbibing its lessons they will thereby forfeit their own claim to being high-brow, or sink to the level of the inhabitants of the suburban tract housing the authors describe (perish the thought!). But how are they to pull this off? How are they to incorporate these middle-brow influences without being tainted by them? Venturi et al. resort at this stage to an old postmodern standby: they should incorporate them ironically.
The authors even propose this use of irony in a somewhat utopian light—seeing it as the path to ultimate class reconciliation. "Irony may be the tool with which to confront and combine divergent values in architecture for a pluralist society," they write, "and to accommodate the differences in values that arise between architects and clients. Social classes rarely come together, but if they can make temporary alliances in the designing and building of multivalued community architecture, a sense of paradox and some irony and wit will be needed on all sides." In other words, everyone will get what they want from a postmodern architecture: the clients will get their ugly decorations that evoke their middle-class cultural values and reference-points, and the architects will get to subtly mock them in the very act of creating these travesties.
Regarded for more than a few seconds, such as scheme for class unity does not seem all that promising. It depends, for one thing, on the notion that the clients and inhabitants of the ironically-designed buildings are not going to notice the joke that is being played on them. They will not perceive and take offense at the fact of being subtly mocked. And what basis, other than the snobbery the authors claim to deplore, could there be to assume people would be so stupid as not to notice this?
Secondly, the notion that the "irony and wit" will somehow flow in both directions (being "needed on all sides," as they put it) is disingenuous, because it is incompatible with the differential in power, influence, and status that the authors themselves have just acknowledged. The architect, in mocking the inhabitants of a future building, can only ever be "punching down" against people with no ability—at least not architecturally—to fight back. This unfair element is only exacerbated when the buildings are being designed—as was the authors' beloved Guild House—for low-income seniors. In what way are these inhabitants in a position to benefit from having a cartoonish sign hung over their door as a form of intended but disguised mockery, or to fire back at the designers with a fusillade of "irony and wit" of their own?
Wolfe, therefore, is not wide of the mark in alleging that Venturi et al. are engaged in a somewhat spurious enterprise. Their theoretical proposals cannot quite be harmonized with their architectural practice. And if their ideas on this score should not be taken at face value, perhaps their apparently-enthusiastic citations of Wolfe should not be either? Perhaps this is the source of his apparent ingratitude in his later book—perhaps he detected in their seemingly-admiring references to Wolfe something of the same implied condescension as found in their architectural "references" to suburban and middle-brow culture: their fondness for Wolfe's prose being somehow akin to their winking exposure of the TV antenna on the roof of Guild House.
After all, Venturi et al. describe Wolfe as writing, in one section, "Pop prose." I think this was by no means intended in a derogatory sense. The authors admire Pop art as a high-brow re-appropriation of the iconography of consumerism—they see it as art reclaiming the clichéd detritus of commercial civilization by placing it in a new context (the "Campbell soup can in a museum," as they put it), and presumably mean to imply that Wolfe's literary treatments of Las Vegas, California surfing subculture, auto races, etc. are accomplishing something similar in written form.
But I would not put it past Wolfe's prickly sense of ressentiment not to detect in even this innocuous and complimentary epithet a subtle put-down. After all, Wolfe states at one point in From Bauhaus to Our House (terrible title, I know)—referring to a different context in which he was called upon to offer a "pop perspective" on an architectural issue: "this word, 'pop,' had already come to be one of the curses of my life." Perhaps, then, we detect in Venturi et al.'s single stray reference to Wolfe writing "Pop prose" the snub that launched a thousand words.
Unless, I suppose, they were all just good friends, and what we are seeing here is merely "a sense of paradox and some irony and wit [...] on all sides," in which case I am the one who wasn't in on the joke.
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