Glass Boxes

 Earlier this summer, I wrote a post on this blog about a wacky new internet conspiracy theory that purports to trace the decline of Western civilization to the growth of modernist architecture. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say, the theory regards the appearance of big formalistic glass boxes on the avenues of major cities, during the twentieth century, as an aesthetic scar so ghastly that it could not possibly have been self-inflicted. No way people wanted these buildings, the theory goes. Therefore, they must have been planted there in order to cover up the evidence of the luxurious global superstate that preceded their existence, and which ought to have been our true birthright, if only they (who, exactly? architects?) had not conspired to deprive us of it. 

Now, there are a couple things that never made sense to me about this theory. The most significant of these is that I think modernist architecture actually looks cool. I never understood why it would need an explanation other than its manifest aesthetic qualities. People can complain all they want about the dullness and interchangeability of "glass boxes" in the abstract, but actually go online and look up photos of some of the masterworks of Louis Kahn or Philip Johnson, say, and tell me truly you don't think they are at least occasionally awe-inspiring. What would require a diabolical conspiracy, by contrast, would be an attempt to corrupt the cold purity of high modernism and cover it over with extraneous flutings and doo-dads. 

Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that modern architecture elicits strong feelings of rage on the part of many viewers. I have to acknowledge the potency of these feelings, even if I am hard put to understand them. I've written before about the excessive vitriol that Tom Wolfe expended on this subject, for one. Likewise, a character in Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers at one point opines that modernist architecture crystalizes better than anything the "disintegration of values" that besets out civilization. "And in this," he writes (the character speaking is a professor of philosophy who is writing his thesis on the subject), "[...] lies the significance [...] of the fact that an epoch which is completely under the dominion of death and hell must live in a style that can no longer give birth to ornament." 

The philosophy professor in Broch's novel reaches this rather startling conclusion (namely, that modernist architecture has destroyed civilization) through a surprisingly logical sequence of steps. He associates the aesthetic of high modernism in architecture, plausibly enough, with the puritanism and iconoclasm of early Protestant theology. Both, he maintains, are an attempt to deploy a process of rationalization to boil down a particular system of values to its inmost core. But this use of reason can only proceed so far without undermining its own foundations. It must stop at a certain point, and leave behind some hard kernel or residuum of irrationality--a single principle that must simply be assumed as self-evident within that field of endeavor. 

And so, modern life has ended up being subdivided into an ever greater number of autonomous realms, each of which pursues its one central principle as far as it can go, to the exclusion of all others. Business recognizes only justifications of gain and loss as a reason for action; modern war tolerates the use of any means so long as they serve the single-minded goal of victory (other sorts of considerations or reasons for acting being relegated to an autonomous "ethical" realm that is wholly separate); modern religion must be purged of all elements of pomp and all extrinsic aids to piety--and modern architecture too, finally, must be stripped of everything that is not pure edifice-- the building itself. There is to be no ornament, because ornament is not the function of a structure. 

Thus, by roundabout means, Broch's professor (and the author too, perhaps) would come to agree in a sense with the conspiracy theorists: modern architecture destroyed civilization and robbed us all of our birthright. And in fairness to this admittedly sweeping theory, the priests of modern architecture often did sound a lot like puritans. Donald Barthelme, who was the son of a modernist architect himself, has noted in interviews that high modernism was a kind of surrogate religion for its practitioners. In his novel Paradise, starring a modernist architect (perhaps modeled on his father), he writes of the movement's "heroics and mock-heroics." There was plainly something quixotic-- an element of Zwinglian zeal--behind the modernist impulse to tear down all the frills and frippery of prior forms. 

And so, perhaps, this conspiracy theory like so many others is getting at a real and deep-seated cultural angst, but it is doing it in overly literal-minded form. People feel like the aesthetics of high modernism represent a falling away from something -- a declension from prior greatness-- and so they just assert that this must be literally true, in the most direct sort of way: they claim that the modernist buildings were an actual attempt to supplant and erase the legacy of a prior glorious superstate that was beautiful and unified. 

These conspiracy theories, then, are just an updated exercise in romanticism: an attempt to revive a mythic past that never existed. And there, we must counter them with more of Broch: for as much as he criticized modernity, he also reminded us that romanticism is an illusion. There is no going back, at least not by any direct path. The only way past the disintegration of values, for Broch (and for us all), is through.