"The time has come to Humanise" (Thomas Heatherwick)
Just the same as there are Global Warming deniers, there are Postmodernism Deniers. It doesn´t matter that floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, wildfires, droughts are multiplying each year and that there is precise scientific evidence of the consequences of planetary reheating due to our consumption patterns. There are even accurate predictions of what´s going to happen in couple of decades, yet there are people who say it´s a hoax. Particularly people in the oil business, and the politicians lobbied by them. A coincidence? Hardly…
So my question is, who is benefiting from denying Postmodernism? Cause for me, a Postmodern Baby (I keep repeating this), Postmodernism is as real as global warming. And I am not alone in that.
But before going into the who, let´s look at some of the evidence. In today's article we will dwell into another recent and scary book called Humanise, by architect Thomas Heatherwick (Pinguin 2023) who chews on every postmodern idea there is but fails to acknowledge it.
We are going to use it as a case study of this pervasive phenomena that keeps recurring still in the first quarter of the 21st century. I have written about it in several articles. Not specifically about the topic, but any time I found it somewhere, I felt so outraged that I felt compelled to write about it. Thank God Jim Venturi and Anita Naughton just finished and premiered their documentary STARDUST on Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, to write off some of the wrongs circulating everywhere. It couldn´t have been better timed.
The first time I saw this phenomenon of Postmodernism Deniers was in a book I bought at the Canadian Center for Architecture right after seeing Sylvia Lavin´s show about precisely this topic – postmodernism bashing – I came to understand later… She called her show Postmodernism, Facts and Myths, presenting facts (evidence) where Postmodernism Deniers created Myths to undermine the complexity, richness and importance of Postmodernism. The show, a little too brainy for the masses was nonetheless inspiring and wonderful. When I got to the bookstore there were lots of books on the show's theme, that is postmodernism, but one in particular caught my attention, not in a nice way. It was Martin Reinhold´s book called Utopia´s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, again (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Already the title felt disrespectful, so I decided to buy it. Funny that Martin was my sister's door neighbor at her Columbia University´s cheap apartment for professors, and luckily she had already moved to Paris when I wrote my article Facts and Myths: Architecture and postmodernism, still. The title was mixing up the titles from Lavin´s show with Reinhold´s book. I wrote it for DAMn magazine issue 71 (an issue titled On Postmodernism), and there I coined the term Postmodernism Deniers for the first time, not knowing I would keep coming to it over and over again. I invite you to read the article on my web site or if this book of essays I am compiling made it into the real world, you know what I am talking about. It's the second essay.
Quoting the article, One of the big questions of the late history of architecture is why, after half a century, postmodernism hasn’t been yet historicized properly? It is true that when Postmodernism started to surface (way before Charles Jencks gave it the name) it received a lot of heat and criticism by the old guard. Even before it, Neoliberty in Italy in the 50s was also attacked by high modernists for trying to include historical architecture as part of their modern tradition. Robert Venturi was there at the time at the Academy of Rome and befriended Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909-1969). What I find surprising is that after a quarter into the 21st century it still wants to be bashed and denied!
When I wrote my article back in 2019, I felt a bit unsure of my boldness in critiquing a Columbia University professor, but I felt so strong about my ideas, and so outraged by his sarcasm and blatant disrespect of someone like Bob, that I went for it, and surprisingly the magazine editors as well.
So what was my delight when in the fall of 2023 my intuitions were rewarded at the symposium for yet another show on Postmodernism in Germany, where I saw (online) Martin Reinhold, who was invited as a speaker, making the biggest ridicule possible with his lecture on neo-con and fascist architecture. As I rightly suspected, Martin doesn´t like Postmodernism, I think partly because he just doesn’t get it. He lacks panache 😊 I wonder why they keep inviting him into the Postmodern discourse. He is like a terrorist.
The symposium was part of an exhibition at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn called Everything at Once Postmodernity 1967-1992. You could have also dated it few years earlier. Unfortunately, I never got to see the show, curated by Kolja Reichert and Eva Kraus, but they posted online the 13 hours symposium, which was better than any TV series I have ever seen.
The Symposium was called Post Postmodernism: a map for the present. It felt that the whole show and specially the symposium was trying to reclaim the reality of Postmodernism and its influence on today's culture. As the curators said in the presentation “The present started with Postmodernism” (sorry modern fundamentalists). To me this was giving the finger to Postmodernism Deniers. And besides Reinhold, everybody else invited (older and younger generations – the POST and the POST POST) were totally in sink and aligned with the meaning and value of postmodernism and the exhibition/symposium. Even Sylvia Lavin, whose lecture was not at her level. The Americans came to Germany with an agenda. Thank God for James Wines on zoom! He saved USA´s dignity. But Postmodernism denying is anchored in the United States and England (more on it later).
You cannot understand the present without understanding the past. So what these deniers are trying is very troublesome, and insulting for my generation, and Kolja´s, who were born into it. Don´t take anybody’s childhood away! And it was fun and rebellious and irreverent, as well as deep, brainy, intellectual, complex and most important GORGEOUS. Postmodernism Deniers keep bringing up the worst stuff to make their point, like Thomas Heatherwick does in his book. But as with any style, movement or whatever you want to call it, there is greatness and there is mediocrity. I´d say you have to gauge it by the best, not by the worse. I´ll come to this later again too.
Anyway, I wrote a huge commentary on the symposium which is both on my Blog (on my website), and maybe in this book. I would love you are a reader reading it on paper and I am talking to the future, just like Jean Cocteau used to do. He thought his biggest readership was yet to come and so he would write to them as an oracle. He was funny. He was dead when I was born, so there it is. I love him. Denise Scott Brown used to say the same. Given the last half century I´d say she was totally right. Their ideas have never been more current than today. I loved the symposium for saying it. And the 2023 Humanise book is a great testament to it, even if Thomas doesn’t want people to know it. As Pat Finn notices in her book review on Archinect "Like many before him, Heatherwick blames the modernist International Style," and as she says it is a bit old hat indeed, but he fails to acknowledge that postmodern ideas are all over the book. As his subtitle reads "The British designer’s new book powerfully argues against generic glass and concrete boxes, but does it point the way toward more human cities?" we will dwell on this further down. I am telling you already, Patrick has a good intuition in asking this question...
Postmodernism is the key to our present and the hinge between two revolutions – the industrial and the digital. It has elements of both. It heralds the future and puts modernism in the near past. But more on this later too. (I wonder how long this will end up being! I just go until everything is out, and I have been simmering this one for months! I bought the book last winter).
There are several types of Postmodernism deniers. There is one particularly vicious type, which is not exactly denying Postmodernism as such, but is better distorting what Postmodernism was, in order to serve different agendas, depending on who is using this strategy. Martin Reinhold, for example, falls into this category, and if in his Utopia´s Ghost book it was more elusive, although pervasive once again, the lecture on neo-con neoclassicism when invited to a postmodern symposium gave him in with splendor, and embarrassment. For me the best part of his lecture was when he called Robert Stern a neo-con 😊. He got that right! But like with Robert Stern, he did not get Postmodernism so well. I really doubt Reinhold is ever invited again to another lecture on the topic. You should have seen Kolja´s face, the curator, after Reinhold´s intervention! He just could not believe it. “Who invited this guy?” He even said few words to disassociate his premise for the show from Martin´s presentation in a disturbed tone he could not conceal.
This operation of distorting the sources, and backtracking, works best with younger generations, born in the 90s or after, and who did not live Postmodernism. I call this specific brand of deniers the hyenas, who want to eat at the corpse real deniers try to leave behind. Robert Stern would fall into this category for sure.
For illustrating this specifically, I will refer again to one of my writings, I wrote for my Blog as well, called Less is a Bore, indeed. The only thing Venturi has ever regretted saying, by the way, was Less is a Bore – because he came to love Mies later on – but everybody repeats that now. At the Miró Foundation I came across this book in December 2022 by Owen Hopkins (England, 1984), who calls himself an architecture historian, called Less is a Bore (Phaidon 2020). While reading it, or better looking at it (since there is barely no writing), I got so angry and infuriated. The book is a propaganda for Robert Stern and corporate PoMo, using Venturi´s title to give it a stamp of validity (or cynically to laugh at him), but it is very consciously omitting or hiding many of the most important sources of postmodern architecture and putting so much derivative stuff that when you finish the book, if you are an alien, you really think Postmodernism was really ugly, tacky and corporate.
Not doing it chronologically just helps to organize it better to serve this historical manipulation, with Robert Stern and Philip Johnson together on a double spread in the first pages. See Jim Venturi and Anita Naughton´s documentary for a full story on these two. And go read the full and long review I wrote on this book if you are interested in the details of the distortions and omissions operations. I find the whole thing so opportunistic, sad and mostly so mediocre. And of course, after putting together this very troublesome misguiding anthology of postmodern pastiche, Owen got a great job as the director of the Farrell Center – a center for architecture in Newcastle created by the architect Terry Farrell. Farrell, who came later on to Postmodernism, of course is in the book and even with a quote! What a coincidence isn't it?
There is another Postmodernism Deniers book from 2023 by Elie G. Haddad, another architecture scholar and Dean at the Libanese American University. Haddad spent few years in American Academia at Penn University, Cincinnati and Boston Architectural College. His book is called “Modern Architecture in a Post-Modern Era” (Lund Humphries, 2023). He has less finesse and the title just gives him away from the start. Already reading his preface you can see he has understood nothing to the topic he is making a book about. He writes: “While some movements, such as Post-Modernism aimed at undermining the very foundation of the Modernist project...” WRONG. Then he calls Venturi a neoclassical! Poor guy he met Robert Stern 😊 But when he writes his chapter “Post-Modernism around the world” check him out. This is how the chapter begins: “This selective survey of the main advocates of the new movement, namely Venturi, Graves and Stirling, does not, of course, do justice to a number of architects who were EQUALLY INFLUENTIAL in spreading the new gospel, from ROBERT STERN, Quinlan Terry [who the fuck is he? I googled him and he is nother neoclassical guy 😊] and TERRY FARRELL (again)...” See how he met Stern!
Of course this scholar had a stint in American academia and the book is published in London! What´s with the UK? Must be the Brexit fascist thing. Sorry Robert Stern but you are far from being equally influential 😊. Not even close man! Now I understand better why I saw him running after Martino Stierli after a lecture on Venturi, Martino gave at a New York private Club. This kind of abrasive and aggressive energy is all over these books. It was funny seeing Martino running away from him. I find the whole attitude and jealousy for Venturi at 80 years old kind of sad though.
In here we can introduce again our first question with which we started this article. Who is benefiting from denying (or obscuring) Postmodernism? I would say Robert Stern is one of them for sure and my intuition says Terry Farrell too! The hyenas who want to eat at the remains after they killed the beast. It is plainly to see in Haddad´s book who can´t even write POSTMODERNISM in one word. My computer can! Haddad writes it like Charles Jencks did. Another clue for you. In Less is a Bore, the bad book on Postmodernism ( from 2023 as well), it is so eye soaring as well. And of course Martin Reinhold has a quote in it too.
But I am not finished with Owen Hopkins (1984) yet. He is a late Postmodern Baby, but I have the feeling in England the 80s were not as fun and irreverent as in Spain or Germany 😊 In Owen´s childhood, Margaret Thatcher was too prominent. 80s corporate postmodern in England must have been brutal. Margaret has a quote in his book too! We all have just one childhood after all.
I wrote about this already as well in my book review, but I saw in Owen´s website how he sees himself as a kind of “Cultural Leader” (he says of himself). I see him like a sort of Charles Jencks, who was not mean spirited, just not sophisticated and intelligent enough for the cause he was championing. So he made a mess with Venturi and Scott Brown ideas. Since he was in England I can see how Postmodernism there would have been really complicated and distorted.
Now Owen has found this new name for a whole new generation of architects who drink from precisely postmodernism sources. He even says the media has “mis-characterized as postmodern revival” (I think the media sees them alright! just as they did in the German symposium calling them the Post Postmodern generation). For Owen they are something else, and something, most importantly, HE has named, and in passing, he is trying to dissociate from postmodernism. He calls these young mostly European architects Multiform. We call them postmodernists, not even revival. It is a continuation of a tradition they have very well absorbed, and at last came a generation that has really understood what Postmodernism was, with its complexity and contradictions and its sophistication and wit. Unlike Owen, judging by his book Less is Bore.
Like Jencks, Owen has not even invented his term either, he has borrow it from somewhere else. ´Multiforms´ was a term adopted by art critics and historians to describe the group of Mark Rothko´s paintings between 1947 and 1949, in transition to his mature style. And it seems that the title was only used after Rothko´s death in 1970 anyway. It sounds so weird for Mark already.
I am convinced this is where our art historian has taking it from. Like with Jencks´s book on postmodernism, Owen Hopkins statements on his website are sometimes painful to read. They are so vacuous and he sounds so confused. Like here for example: In so far as Multiform appropriates certain design tactics of postmodernism, it does so because of the equivalence between that moment of transition and our present one.
So he recognizes they drink from postmodern sources. Why doesn´t he want to call them Postmoderns or Post Postmoderns, like the Germans did? If there is an equivalence it is because we are still in the same fucking moment of transition Owen. We are transitioning to the digital era. Postmodernism happened cause a new society emerged, the Information Society (the first huge computers are form the 60s), when the digital was born and communication technologies developed, and we are still transitioning and this is why younger generations find those ideas still mega relevant for their practice. Our present started with postmodernism, as Kolja said.
Or he also says: Multiform accommodates multiple states of being and existing. Welcome to the Postmodern Era Owen. Architect Kerstin Thompson (Melbourne 1965) is another postmodern baby from the first generation and it is interesting what she says in an interview with writer and museum advisor András Szánto: “When I was studying in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we read a lot about post-structuralism, a lot about the undoing of the boundaries. That interest in gray zones and in-between conditions continues to interest me.” Post-structuralism and Multiculturalism are postmodernism phenomena.
Some of these young architects Owen calls Multiform, were part of another book on another postmodern icon, the Austrian architect Hans Hollein, and it is amazing to see and read how well THEY understood early postmodern ideas, unlike Owen. The book was published after Owen´s book and it is kind of giving him the finger... Venturi Scott Brown did not appreciate Jencks all that much either, I am afraid. Anyway, I won´t go into detail (I already did in the book review) but I will say that Owen, as part of a new generation, is being used by the old guard of deniers as part of this strategy to erase and distort Postmodernism as much as they can for new generations. The book Less is a Bore is such a great example of it.
In writing this article a memory came back to my consciousness. It was during a meeting with Roselee Goldberg, the founder of Performa in NY, who lived in London early in her career and was the girlfriend of Postmodern french architect Bernard Tschumi. We were having a drink at the Bowery Hotel, were she was living for couple months. We talked about art and architecture and I brought up postmodernism and how I wanted to write about it. She became almost violent in her antagonism, urging me to drop it, as if it was the past and not interesting anymore. She even told me it would not be good for my career to dwell on such a subject. Flip out! This was 2018. Funny Roselee how so many other people are still talking about it...
I feel she is connected with this Dark Side of the Modern and wanted to make me feel bad about it. Always pay attention when somebody makes you feel bad about something, they are giving themselves away and you should totally pursue that, precisely. I remember her anger well. She gets angry easily 😊. I feel now, in retrospect, that somebody gave her this assignment. So I am adding her in this essay, while the interview I did with her for DAMn magazine is not part of my Book of Interviews. I only have the real deal over there. I am following the advice her husband Dakota gave me one evening at Lucien: “Never settle for less.” I never do Roselee. Looks like you do, though... 😊 Not only that, she also developed MY IDEA for Gaetano Pesce I gave his personal assistant Anna, even when I had published an interview with her for DAMn magazine to promote her and her biennale... Postmodernism deniers and hyenas for you. Bully the sweet girl, use her to promote yourself, take her ideas and don't let her work for Gaetano Pesce. Amazing, isn't´it?
Humanize the Art the World.
The last example I wanted to give before diving into Thomas Heatherwick´s book is from Rem Koolhaas, which I have also written about in my essay The Future is not Written. I discovered reading the Oppositions Reader that he had copied from Aldo Rossi his whole theme “Elements of Architecture” for the Venice Biennale in 2014 where he was the chief curator. In fact I believe he got the idea reading Rafael Moneo´s article in the Opposition Reader. What troubles me again is he is obscuring his sources and presenting these older and postmodern ideas as novel and as his. The only novelty was the presentation. This is exactly what Heatherwick does in his book, presenting old ideas as if he had thought about them all alone. And I guess that even for Rem Koolhaas, postmodern ideas still are so contemporary as well! A pity he doesn't acknowledge them either. He tends to talk down on postmodernism, despite being so postmodern himself 😊 I find a lot of people very confused with this.
So let's look into detail now into Humanise, the book on Postmodern ideas (Penguin 2023) by Thomas Heatherwick and his ghost writer Will Storr. Thomas was too busy to write his own manifesto. The first thing that caught my attention was how much it looked like Rem Koolhaas´ books! You know 500 pages, little text, lots of graphics to explain ideas put together in a collagee way, informal, kind of fashionable, always a bit encyclopedic and diagrammatic, etc
I found the book in an English bookstore in Barcelona totally by chance. Not looking for an architecture book there. The name is good, cause it caught my attention, and when I opened and flipped the first pages it started with Barcelona and Gaudí, and since it was cheap I decided to buy it, having no idea who Thomas Heatherwick was. Or so I thought!
When I arrived home and googled him I realized to my dismay I had bought the book from the architect who built that horrible titanium looking Escher-Nest pay-to-go-up-and-down-some-stairs structure in that segregated neighborhood for rich people in the Hudson Yards. The name is also kind of pretentious: The Vessel going nowhere. I was bothered. I felt duped. But because of it I felt even more intrigued! How could I have wanted to buy the book from an architect whose construction I knew and hated with passion?
So I read all of it. I felt angered at times and others I agreed with what he says. The thing is people said it already before him, as Pat Finn remarks in his Archinect´s book review, it´s the old high modernist critique. What Pat fails to say is, it's the classic postmodern critique of late modernism. And like Rem Koolhaas, precisely, Thomas is selling it to you as if he had discovered the wheel. He got Koolhaas really good: “How to sell yourself as an innovator using other people's ideas while presenting them as novel and yours.” People these days are also copying a lot Steve Jobs and his presentations as the prophet of the universe, I feel.
The book is of course dedicated “to the passers-by” who have no idea about architecture history. But since architects barely buy books anymore, or so they say, I think it is smart to widen the audience, but not to sell them whatever. The book has great points, it is drinking on the past 50 years of architecture theory. We need not only to Humanise architecture I would say... Architecture is a reflection of society, and if you find Architecture not very human these days I would turn on the news. Specially the news on the Middle East. Let´s Humanise people in power and corporate lobbies too, please. Let's Humanise the Military Industry Complex!! They really need it. The world is getting so fascist and so stupid, and architecture a reflect of it many times, mere spectacle. And most of Thomas´s book is centered around this spectacle quality in architecture. You can like Gaudí or a Cistercian convent. Both are great but very different. I have the impression Thomas gets bored easily. For me the best of Casa Milà it is not its facade, as he raves, but its circular floor plans and amazing bright and breeze interiors. This is 1916!
In the same way I found his book “by chance” in Barcelona, Thomas found a book on Gaudí one afternoon in Brighton in 1989 as a student, he recalls. I feel he got more for his money 😊 He had given up on the idea of pursuing building design in his arts & crafts school because “architecture felt cold, impenetrable and uninspiring.” Poor thing... A switch in his brain flicked on, he says (and Will Storr writes) when he picked up Gaudí´s book.
His own book starts with Gaudí and the city of Barcelona. Gaudí opened for him a crack he says, and there is a collage with a crack in p.27 with his buildings inside (not Gaudi´s). When you turn the page the Sagrada Familia is there, then Barcelona's Gothic neighborhood. And very interestingly, the long opening of the book with Barcelona´s examples, finishes with one great building: Ricardo Bofill´s Walden 7, built in 1975 and a key example of Postmodern architecture in Spain. Even Haddad knows this 😊
As Thomas explains “Walden 7 was built as a social housing for people lower on the socioeconomic ladder (…). This isn't an expensive structure made from expensive materials for expensive people” he writes [unlike Heatherwick's Vessel structure in NY] “and yet huge amounts of care and attention have been poured into its design.” A pity he ignores that despite its amazing facade the building inside doesn't really work and I heard Bofill say in an interview with Fernando Galiano that this building was a failure for him. Architecture is not making facades. He should have used Bofill´s Muralla Roja (his real masterpiece) but then the opening Chapter on Barcelona wouldn't have worked as well. Thomas also fails to say this is a Postmodern building. Of Gaudí's Pedrera he does say it is a modern building, and although it is correct – depending on your definition of modern. Why Gaudí is modern and Bofill is not postmodern? Here is a clue to the whole book... And all within the first chapter about Barcelona! [I feel it is almost dedicated to me, so I oblige].
Here is a clue to who Postmodernism Deniers are catering to: THE MODERN ERA. It would seem as if Thomas were trashing modern architecture in his book: “the hundred year catastrophe,” he calls it, but not really, since he calls Gaudí modern. So for Thomas modern is good. But what he is doing is omitting Postmodernism all together, despite starting his book with Walden 7 as a key example of his main thesis! In fact “Postmodernism” is only mentioned once and in page 289 as a “derivation of modernism”. This sounds like Martin Reinhold with his ghost of utopia.
If you read above "Modernism comes in different varieties"! Like Heinz food! Just to say Modernism is everything and Postmodernism just a flavor. Also it is a wink to Warhol and his Campbell's Soups, that come in different flavors. A pitty Postmodernism and Pop go hand in hand. Read Wikipedia below... Seriously Thomas, this is so well known, I am really surprised by your lack of knowledge. Warhol mentions 3 times Venturi in his phone diaries with Pat Hackett. Funny Thomas doesn´t even know about Bob and Denise! [I also just realized that Bells are Camp !! 😊 I am sure the pun there did not go unnoticed by Andy]. And Camp is so queer and postmodern.
See how Thomas writes postmodernism like Haddad: Post-Modernism. It hurts Postmodern Deniers so much it is a thing or even a word on its own 😊 but the internet doesn't have this problem.
And now another clue, guess who is the ONLY architect mentioned as postmodern? You just saw him.... Philip Johnson !!! With his At&t building copying the Vanna Venturi House... While Venturi is not mentioned in the whole book! The hyenas I was talking about. They'll eat the corpse left by postmodernism deniers gladly. It is funny Walden 7 is not Postmodern for the authors. Early Postmodernism is so good, the poor hyenas still want it for themselves 😊. I like Thomas, he understood it all! Secretly he loves early postmodernism, obviously, and dislikes Johnson´s derivative corporate style. See how we agree? These Fake News books are very confusing but so revealing if you know how to read them. You have to do the same with mainstream media these days anyway. We are trained. Complex and Contradictory times we are living indeed Bob 😊
But going back to Thomas´s example of good architecture with Bofill´s postmodern building, which has all the early postmodern qualities that he manages to notice. Early postmodern architects were really concerned with social equality, unlike Philip Johnson, as early modernists did as well. As Thomas doesn´t fail to notice “Walden 7 isn´t mean and small, as you might expect from an affordable housing project. Instead, it is deep and grand and pierced dramatically by shadows and shimmering blue tiles. Walking inside, it feels like entering an alien palace from a work of science fiction.”
As International Style and Modern Architecture had gone corporate by the 1950s, in their brake with late moderns, early postmodern young architects embraced social housing. Venturi´s Guild House (1964-67) is a house for the elderly, and Charles Moore completed seven affordable housing projects and designed several housing schemes that were never built. The Graham Foundation gave a grant in 2009 to Richard W. Hayes for his research and later exhibition "Social Responsibility in an Era of Postmodernism: Charles W. Moore and Affordable Housing"
Architecture is a lot about its clients. I took a look at Thomas´ clients and he is far from humanizing the world. No social housing on view... He, together with his team of 300 architects have great projects, no doubt, but they all cater to the upper echelon I afraid. Maybe the passers-by can look at it from the outside 😊 How humanizing! I find there are other demographics more in need of humanity. Is a business school humanizing? A vodka distillery? A playground for billionaires in Manhattan? Is it Google really making the world a better place? Not sure... If you are going to make such a statement about Humanizing the world you need work far more social and engaged, I would say. Being pretty is not enough. The pyramids are amazing too! They died building them by the dozens. Louis XVIth built such engaging, gorgeous and fascinating architecture and people were starving to death. And don´t get me started with the Church. The Marquis de Sade already wrote about it extensively and ended up in jail for it 😊 Justine went to a gorgeous convent 😊 In fact there is an argument for inhumanity and amazing architectures of the past.
The Industrial revolution at first was a lot about social equality, they wanted to mass produce what only the elite could enjoy until then. That is pretty humane. Humanity is sometimes ugly, but democratic. Today we have IKEA. Modern architecture at first was really about Humanizing societies by raising the living standards of people on the lower echelon. You think modern boxes are inhuman? Try living with no electricity, hot water, small or no windows and share one toilet with all your neighbors. The firsts inhabitants of those modern “boring” buildings were elated Thomas. I recommend you to watch the documentary “The Pruitt-Iggoe Myth.” It is all there. The problem was not the architecture, but the politics that ensued and segregated populations. Whatever you build for a ghetto is inhumane. Ghettos are inhuman, not architecture. The Warsaw ghetto had very nice traditional low-housing with moldings and decorations on their doors and windows, and was inhuman.
The problem was (as always is) that the early modern Humanizing dream turned out to be so profitable that greed showed up and distorted its initial ethos. And then came WWII, which was War at an Industrial scale. They just had to try it! Sadly for us, when people saw all the profits they could make with industrialization it became fast, a lot about GREED as well. Just what Google, Thomas´client, is doing right now with Surveillance Revenues and Behavioral Surplus Data. The new Eldorado these days or as Shoshana Zuboff writes The New Frontier of Power. Was the internet a great invention! In 30 years they turned it into an aggressive infomercial surveillance platform. I am glad Thomas has a chapter on greed. At least he understood that.
You see Thomas, early postmoderns also thought half a century ago that the modern movement was failing to people. Agree “cold, boring, corporate, uninspiring, etc” this is why Postmodernism came to be in the first place. I love how Thomas relishes Barcelona's Barrio Gótico´s decoration – “the gargoyles and intricate moldings above windows and doors, (...) nothing is flat in the Gothic Quarter!”, or the decorations of the Vancouver Hotel “it triggers a delicate cascade of emotions,” he says and Will Storr writes. When Bob Venturi said that in the 60s – we needed decoration back in architecture – they called him reactionary! Now it seems obvious, ins´t it? I know... And everybody does too Thomas.
You might know the British architect Sr Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944). Not a modern. Venturi adored him and even helped save his buildings from demolition and helped restore his importance to British society who thought of him as too extravagant at the height of the Modern. Somehow he had vanished into obscurity and Bob brought him back. He remained lifelong friends with his children if I recall correctly.
The way people like Bob and Denise, Charles Moore, Aldo Rossi, Ettore Sottsass, Hans Hollein, James Stirling etc have paved the way for us Thomas... You own them a little respect for the fights they have fought, so you can have a paperback on humanizing architecture with their ideas.
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown came up with the concepts of “The Duck and the Decorated Shed” in their controversial book “Learning from Las Vegas” (1974). These are two variants of how you can make architecture communicate, to be more humane as Thomas calls it. All Venturi´s work is about the semiotics of buildings really. As Jim Venturi posted last night on his instagram “It's not about space: it's about communication.” As Thomas points out a bit more colloquially “there are hints of stories everywhere I look.” Before the Gutenberg Press architecture was the medium of transmission of knowledge. Not manuscript culture. You could read all the buildings “Just like the words and the symbols of La Sagrada Familia,” true again Thomas. Denise would say, Thomas is “Learning from Gaudí.” In Gaudi´s Gothic revival church, this historical quality of architecture as text is very present, despite being so modern 😊 Maybe Gaudí was actually a Postmodern too 😊 I knew this gay film critic who always said “We are all gay!” What is the renaissance but an equivalent of Postmodernism. They went to Greece and Rome as an inspiration for their paradigm shift. Bob even says Modern architecture is doing just the same, appropriating Industrial and machine aesthetics. I would say “We are all Postmodern!” 😊
But going back to Las Vegas... While the Duck was more sculptural, communicating with its shapes the meaning of the building (Bilbao's Guggenheim or the Long Island Duck itself, that duck meat shop they made internationally famous with the book, although I see in the slide they got it from Peter Blake´s God´s own Junkyard (1964) ), the Decorated Shed is a box with decorations, like the Vancouver Hotel or Lutyens Grosvenor State. As an example, Bob gives in his Gentle Manifesto the Renaissance palazzo, which over centuries has been recycled for other uses, due to its flexible plan. Bob and Denise were in favor of the Decorated Shed, as being more sustainable over time (can adapt to changing needs) and less expensive to build. Thomas will touch upon this also further in his book. We'll get there.
I agree with Thomas that Barcelona is a great city architecture-wise compared with anywhere in the UK. It is funny here they understood Postmodernism very well. There might be a link there. I don't know what's going on with the UK and architecture theory but younger generations seem very confused with postmodernism over there! Must be Thatcher's legacy or Charles Jencks´s !! In the UK they arrived too late to the party...
After the first chapter with Barcelona as a great example of lively architecture, comes the next chapter: “The Hundred Year Catastrophe”. He says at the end of chapter one: “Sometimes in the early decades of the 20th century, as the Marine Building and Casa Milà were being constructed, there was an astonishing revolution in the way we thought about buildings. A radical new set of ideas about how they should look swept through academic and professional circles, and then took over the world.”
I find a bit superficial to summarize the whole Modern Movement and industrial Revolution with a change of looks. Revolutions are not made by looks. The whole thing is so epidermic.
So the hundred year catastrophe is the modern movement and Le Corbusier the bad guy going forward in the book. As the Archinect book review points at, there is nothing new in this critique, it´s the typical 60s critique to high modernist functionalism. Its language and simplifications are a bit childish and I have to say, sort of misguiding, when not completely populists. When I look at Thomas´s firm, I see the legacy of modern architecture and postmodernism, I really don't find anything that different from other practices working today. Revolutions are hard to come by. As Bob said, “there is a time to be revolutionary, and a time to be evolutionary.” We are still in the evolutionary phase. At least in architecture, which always lags behind. Gaudí was revolutionary. Le Corbusier was revolutionary. Venturi and Scott Brown were evolutionary. Thomas´ work is popularizing evolutionary ideas. He applies Postmodern theory to digital manufacturing processes.
One of the early people who theorized about this in the 90s is French architect, theorist, philosopher and mathematician Bernard Cache (1958). You can watch a 1998 lecture at the AA called "Towards a contemporary ornamentation" where he defines his practice Objectile as "non-standard conception and production", for a Non-Standard Architecture. I think this is what Thomas tries to tell us a quarter of a century later. I saw Cache lecture in L´École Spéciale d´Architecture in Paris in 2005 while studying there my Erasmus and understood completely nothing. It was all about parametric architecture and computational mathematics. I just had bought my first computer 5 years earlier and was struggling with AutoCAD 12 😊 He was pioneering with what today is common practice, that is using computer technologies, parametrization and robots to be able to mass-produce non identical elements. Another pioneer on the subject is French architect François Roche, whose practice deals with robotics, but his is a more artistic-philosophical approach. Both of them are very influenced by Gilles Deleuze though, the postmodern philosopher with his A Thousand Plateaus (your multiplicity of experiences here Owen). Bernard Cache even wrote some of his books with him. Thomas though, knows more than everybody, and trashes philosophical theory as well. "During a student's time at university, there's also, in my opinion, too much emphasis on the work of elite architecture theorists." Derrida is the target here. Here he uses Derrida´s text on "deconstruction" which was used by that trend Philip Johnson (again) made a fashion of with a show at MoMA on Deconstructivism (1988). That show put in the map people like Frank Gerhy, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, etc. What is interesting is that right at the same time, the 90s, you had architects following Derrida and making superficial gestures, a very epidermic conception of architecture which came and went like any fashion does, and then you have architects following Deleuze and theorizing and practicing on the real developments architecture is experiencing, and what has come to define the practice 25 years later. You just read the wrong people Thomas. I read Deleuze never Derrida.
I´ll repeat Kolja´s sentence again: Postmodernism is the key the our present. The thing is that back then few people had access to these technologies and they were very expensive (both Cache and Roche were teachers and used University robots and labs). Cache even partnered with some company who built these technologies to develop his ideas. Finally 20 years later the industry has caught up with it, and firms like Heatherwick´s are reaping the fruits. As Jim Venturi would call this type of professional, Thomas is a popularizer. You have the innovators (Venturi, Bernard Cache), the popularizers (Philip Johnson, Thomas Heatherwick) and the commodifiers (Walmart, Ikea).
In fact, I have another story for Thomas. In my last year of architecture I took an optional class on mathematics and parametric architecture. I was curious to all this algorithmic language (I managed to follow for two thirds of the course, but by April I was lost, but they were sweet about it). The pity also was we used an obsolete language it turns out (welcome to Spain), but I got the idea. Our teachers were working on the construction of Gaudí´s Sagrada Familia, doing parametrizations of Gaudí´s curvilinear madness. As an end of the year excursion they took us on a site visit to the temple. It was spectacular, we saw how they were building it and went everywhere visitors couldn´t go. What most astonished me is how Gaudí was building it so raw, and these people, a century later, were using all these complicated computer programs, digital printers for mock ups and digital fabrication processes to do what he could do just with his mind, intuition and knowledge. A century later, it looks as revolutionary as ever. Even the way they build it today is sort of wimpish. They create solid concrete structures and then they put the skin around it to then remove the concrete. He would build it hole. Today they don't dare. Plus the encyclopedia-thickness of safety code building regulations.
It is true that industrialization was such a revolution for architecture, people got too excited with it and wanted to forget about everything that happened before, and Postmodernism just said “Hey! We have a lot to learn from the whole of architecture history [this got everybody so confused], cause this is looking a bit too simple and ugly.” Exactly what Thomas has just discovered. It was not about history, but about learning from different approaches to the same topic. Any master, in any discipline, has an immense knowledge of everything that came before (and doesn't talk or write like a child). As I heard a Dutch women say in a presentation of Jim Venturi and Anita Naughton´s documentary in Rotterdam “Venturi did for architecture what Warhol did for art.” At the core of their ideas, was popular culture, not populism. What does people want? Not architects. They had this boutade that infuriated people back then about how great was the ugly and ordinary 😊 They were really breaking away from a very rigid, elitist, male dominant white culture and embracing pop and the everyday. You should hear Dave Hickey on the topic. He understood it right away at a time were people like a young Rem Koolhaas or a young Charles Jencks didn´t. And as artists are still getting inspired by Warhol (a postmodern artist), so architects are still inspired by Venturi and Scott Brown ideas. Like Thomas is.
And again, as Kolja said: Postmodernism is the key to our present. I am going to repeat it a thousand times. The digital revolution for the moment is only perfecting the tools to do the same things we can do today but faster, cheaper and non-standard. But as this new era is advancing fast, and Artificial Intelligence conquering the world, somebody might come very soon with a really revolutionary proposal. It is not humanizing architecture. The world needs humanizing for sure, but we all know it already. The revolution might come in buildings that are self-sustainable, that breathe O2, that move with the sun to catch solar energy, buildings you can eat (I don't know). Thomas Heatherwick´s buildings, despite its crafty façades, are very traditional. His UK pavilion called "seeds Cathedral" seems to me to be a copy of François Roche's dust studies. Roche´s proposal for an art gallery/museum was using electrostatique energy to gather dust as the materiality for the façade. A performative building. Almost 10 years later and despite looking electrostatique, Thomas´s UK pavilion in Shanghai looks like a very expensive and complicated solution to just look cool. Nothing in this building is changing anything to architecture, whereas Roche´s investigations are trying to conquer, as his firm name said at some point, "New Territories." Gaudí looks cool but it is not a new territory Thomas. Quite the contrary... His genius is nobody that came after can do what he could. There comes a handful of those in a century (Gaudí, Einstein).
François Roche had this other experiment too of connecting a bull to a structure, in his office in Indonesia, and it made the structure function without artificial energy! He had another building whose facade grew out from the vegetation invading the site, so you wouldn't need any construction materials but the site and a net to contain the vegetation, thus creating walls.
About his Hypnosis Chamber (2005) Roche explains:" We don’t want to use technology as a new propaganda of the future but more as a vector of subjectivity, individual and collective, to reintroduce uncertainty, vibes of time, and fears of sleeping comfort. The other is to accept that architecture cannot resolve all human parameter, as a pure objectivization of desire. We will integrate the hypnosis experiment inside the habitat itself, as a new “function.” This paradigm includes the way to escape from the human condition, similar to the utopia/dystopia of the Somnambulism movement, as a touchable “star gate.”
The hypno-chamber is produced as an indoor chamber, an immersion zone, where an hypnosis session has been registered and help citizen to escape from their alienated social condition."
I believe it is in this kind of thought processes where discussions about technology get interesting and a new path can start to form. You need a lot of intellectual education for it, being only a very good craftsman I am afraid won´t do it.
Underneath Frank Gerhy´s Guggenheim skin you have boring boxes all the same and a very rigid plan. Is Gerhy that different from Le Corbusier? He might be Le Corbusier in drag 😊 Jokes aside, Frank is also an artist of his time, with his sculptural investigations. In the 90s he broke a milestone of what you could do with this incipient technology. He was a postmodern too at first with his deconstructed beginnings, and he evolved thanks to digital technology and manufacturing processes into what he is know for today. Thirty years later and everybody is using these techniques but has architecture really changed that much? Ask Gaudí! I don´t think so. While Bernard Cache advocated for a cheap way of making non-standard elements, Gehry managed to build Bilbao in 1997, which was not cheap. Today Bernard´s dream is closer than ever and Thomas is reaping the fruits.
Why Frank Gerhy is not in his book either? Thomas is not generous.
On another note, believe it or not Thomas, every architect tries to do their best. It is true that we have built tons of garbage during the 20th century. When buildings were so hard to build, they were not treated as investments or speculation operations. They had a much higher call. If it takes three generations to build something, you might not think about fast returns that much. What changed was society's values. Victor Hugo in his book Nôtre Dâme de Paris (1831) dates the end of architecture with the end of the Middle Ages already, with the appearance of the Gutenberg press. He was lucky not to make it to the 20th century. Buildings were thought to carry immortal ideas, manuscripts being so easy to burn. With the appearance of the printed book, immortality is assured in its repeated ad infinitum technology, much cheaper than building construction. When architecture was the transmitter of culture, all the arts worked together as a Gesamtkunstwerk to write the stories of peoples and their cultures. And this changes with the press. As Hugo beautifully writes (himself):
“L´architecture a été jusqu´au 15eme siècle le registre principal de l´humanité (…) que le genre humain enfin n´a rien pensé d´important qu´il ne l´ai écrit en pierre. (…) Qu´un edifice est un livre bien autrement solide, durable et résistant! Pour détruire la parole écrite il suffit d´une torche et d´un Turc. Pour démolir la parole construite, il faut une révolution sociale, une revolution terrestre. (…) Au 15ème siécle tout change. (…) La pensée humaine découvre un moyen de se perpétuer non seulement plus durable et plus résistant que l´architecture, mais encore plus simple et plus facile. L´architecture est détronée. Aux lettres de pierre d´Orphée vont succéder les lettres de plomb de Gutenberg. Le Livre va tuer l´édifice.” (p.246)
(Up until the 15th century architecture has been the main register of humanity (…) that the human race finally thought of nothing important that it did not write in stone. (…) That an edifice is a much more solid, durable and resistant book! To destroy the written word all it takes is a torch and a Turk. To demolish the constructed word, we need a social revolution, an earthly revolution. (…) In the 15th century everything changed. (…) Human thought discovers a way to perpetuate itself that is not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but even simpler and easier. The architecture is dethroned. The stone letters of Orpheus will succeed the lead letters of Gutenberg. The Book will kill the building.)
This book was in fact dedicated to the Middle Age´s Parisian architecture, that was being demolished at a fast speed after the French revolution. It was a real cultural massacre they did in Paris, claiming those were buildings of the Monarchy and represented the oppressor. A cheap excuse for the newly arrived in power for enriching themselves with land speculation. Victor Hugo wrote several incendiary articles in the press denouncing the crimes being perpetrated and someone commissioned him a book to develop these ideas. He wrote this masterpiece in only three months, working day and night! (as he was procrastinating and got an ultimatum from the publisher). A most wonderful book.
Let me add few quotes here, which are funny in this context and written in 1831 (before the Hundred Year Catastrophe):
“L´invention de l´imprimerie est le plus grand évènement de l´histoire. C´est la révolution mère. C´est le mode d´expression de l´humanité qui se renouvelle totalement.”
(The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. This is the mother revolution. It is the mode of expression of humanity which is completely renewed).
Such a revolution would transform architecture for ever. And according to Hugo not in a good way.
“Aussi voyez comme à partir de la découverte de l´imprimerie l´architecture se dessèche peu à peu, s´atrophie et se dénude. Comme on sent que l´eau baisse, que la sève s´en va, que la pensée des temps et des peuples se retire d´elle! Le refroidissement est à peu près insensible au 15ème siècle, la presse est trop débile encore (…). Mais dès le 16ème siècle, la maladie de l´architecture est visible; elle n´exprime plus essentiellement la société; elle se fait misérablement art classique; de gauloise, d´européenne, d´indigène, elle devient grecque et romaine (…). C´est cette décandence qu´on appelle Renaissance. Décandence magnifique pourtant, car le vieux génie gothique, ce soleil qui se couche derrière la gigantesque presse de Mayence, pénètre encore quelques temps de ses rayons tout cet entassment hybride d´arcades latines et de colonnades corinthiennes.
C´est ce soleil couchant que nous prenons pour une aurore.”
(Also see how, from the discovery of printing, architecture gradually dries up, atrophies and becomes denuded. How we feel that the water is receding, that the sap is leaving, that the thought of times and peoples is withdrawing from it! The cooling was almost imperceptible in the 15th century, the press was still too weak (…). But from the 16th century, the disease of architecture is visible; it no longer essentially expresses society; it miserably becomes classical art; from Gallic, European, indigenous, it becomes Greek and Roman (…). It is this decadence that we call Renaissance. Magnificent decadence, however, because the old Gothic genius, this sun which sets behind the gigantic press of Mainz, still penetrates for a while with its rays all this hybrid pile of Latin arcades and Corinthian colonnades.
It is this setting sun that we take for dawn.)
So when Thomas, in his chapter of THE ARCHITECT (he goes after) talks about the Renaissance, “This started to change in the late 16th century, when complex styles from Renaissance Europe became fashionable” he says, I am sorry to tell him again, but it is much deeper than a question of fashion.
But let me add few more quotes from Victor Hugo to elevate ourselves and humanity a little here, I find his explanation somehow more nourishing:
“Cependant, du moment où l´architecture n´est plus qu´un art comme un autre, dès qu´elle n´est plus l´art total, l´art souverain, l´art tyran, elle n´a plus la force de retenir les autres arts. Ils s´émancipent donc, brisent le joug de l´architecture, et s´en vont chacun de leur côté. Chacun d´eux gagne à ce divorce. L´isolement grandit tout. La sculpture devient staturaire, l´imagerie devient peinture, le canon devient musique. On dirait un empire qui se démembre à la mort de son Alexandre et dont les provinces se font royaumes. (…) quand le soleil du moyen-âge est tout à fait couché, quand le génie gothique s´est à jamais éteint à l´horizon de l´art, l árchitecture va se ternissant, se décolorant, s´effaçant de plus en plus. Le livre imprimé, ce ver rongeur de l´édifice, la suce et la dévore. (…) Elle est mesquine, elle est pauvre, elle est nulle. Elle n´exprime plus rien, pas même le souvenir de l´art d´un autre temps.”
(However, from the moment architecture is no longer just an art like any other, as soon as it is no longer the total art, the sovereign art, the tyrant art, it no longer has the strength to retain the other arts. They therefore emancipate themselves, break the yoke of architecture, and go their separate ways. Each of them wins from this divorce. Isolation increases everything. The sculpture becomes statuary, the imagery becomes painting, the cannon becomes music. It looks like an empire which dismembered at the death of its Alexander and whose provinces became kingdoms. (…) when the sun of the Middle Ages has completely set, when the Gothic genius has forever disappeared from the horizon of art, architecture will tarnish, fade, fade more and more. The printed book, this gnawing worm of the building, sucks it and devours it. (…) She is petty, she is poor, she is worthless. It no longer expresses anything, not even the memory of the art of another time).
And then he has a very interesting part where he makes a difference between a craftsman and an artist (this is for Thomas):
“Réduite à elle même, abandonnée des autres arts par ce que la pensée humaine l´abandonne, elle appelle des manueuvres à défaut d´artistes. Le vitre remplace le vitrail. Le tailleur de pierre succède au sculpteur. Adieu toute sève et toute originalité, toute vie, toute intelligence. Elle se traîne lamentablement d´atelier en atelier de copie en copie.”
(Reduced to itself, abandoned by the other arts because human thought abandons it, it calls for maneuvers in the absence of artists. The window replaces the stained glass window. The stonemason succeeds the sculptor. Goodbye to all sap and all originality, all life, all intelligence. She drags herself miserably from workshop to workshop from copy to copy.)
And another very funny part of this amazing chapter “Ceci tuera celà” (This will kill that) – an ode to architecture and books – when juxtaposed to Thomas´ critique of 20th century modern architecture it makes me laugh:
“À partir de François II, la forme architecturale de l´édifice s´efface de plus en plus et laisse sailler la forme geometrique, comme la charpente osseuse d´un malade amaigri. Les belles lignes de l´art font place au froides et inexorables lignes du géomètre. Un édifice n´est plus un édifice, c´est un polyèdre. L´architecture cependant se tourmente pour cacher cette nudité. (…) De François II à Louis XV, le mal a crû en progression géométrique. L´art n´a plus que la peau sur les os. Il agonise misérablement.”
(From Francis II onwards, the architectural form of the building faded more and more and allowed the geometric form to protrude, like the bony framework of a emaciated patient. The beautiful lines of art give way to the cold and inexorable lines of the surveyor. A building is no longer a building, it is a polyhedron. Architecture, however, goes to great lengths to hide this nudity. (…) From François II to Louis XV, evil grew in geometric progression. Art is nothing more than skin and bones. He is dying miserably).
And lastly: “L´architecture ne sera plus l´art social, l´art collectif, l´art dominant. Le grand poème, le grand édifice, le grand oeuvre de l´humanité ne se bâtira plus, il s´imprimera.”
(Architecture will no longer be social art, collective art, the dominant art. The great poem, the great building, the great work of humanity will no longer be built, it will be printed).
I think the Renaissance argument of how architecture changed makes more sense with Victor Hugo than with new fashions or the miserable architect. Gaudí came after them and was very much a genius-architect. Every era has great architecture. The 20th century too. But when overpopulation rears its ugly head and you have to build a lot – and it is somehow easy to do and people can make fast money on it – then things get complicated. The world was different when it didn´t house 8 billion humans. Some things were easier. Others not though. I say that as a woman.
That we have done a poor job with the building environment? Sure. Maybe you could write a book about how mediocre humanity is... Then you might want to call your book “Educate.” Gaetano Pesce made a difference between “Architettura e Edilizia.” Italians have this word for something that is a building but doesn´t achieve to be Architecture. It´s mere construction. For Gaetano Architecture is an art, and there is very little of it out there. See Thomas, nothing new there either... These days, with the digital revolution and all these 3D, parametric, BIM and whatever software and new building materials and technologies the doors to creativity are getting wide open. But as Victor Hugo points out, you actually need “une pensée” (a thought).
An artist is not a craftsman Thomas. This is what many people are forgetting about these days: creativity is about ideas, not about the last gyzmo. Have you noticed how mediocrity loves Artificial Intelligence? 😊 They think that's it! They don't realize AI is as smart as they are. It doesn't think for you, but with you, sorry 😊All revolutions are social revolutions. Industrialization and Communism for example go hand in hand. Technology can spearhead social changes, as we have seen with the Gutenberg press, which according to Marshall McLuhan is the model for every invention humanity has made ever since. Even Artificial Intelligence. We are now in a similar place of technology transforming society, but we are still in the transitional phase. This is why the new technology is approached still with the old models and ideas. François Roche understood this, and is venturing on to "New Territories" already. Thomas, you are not. More like Old Territories 😊
This will change soon. It is the nature of inventions that first you use them with the old paradigms and slowly paradigms shift. And I agree with Thomas it is about Humanizing, all real revolutions always are. Reason I bought the book. But then when he develops his thesis, it is quite superficial. He is saying quite obvious things any architect knows. Oh! But I forgot this book is for the passers-by... And to actually promote his firm.
I'll repeat this, most of Thomas´ work is good. I am sure he has a great team of professionals and he himself is a good designer-craftsman. What this book tries to do – educate the passers-by about architecture – would be great if it was more generous. But when you use other people's ideas without quoting them, hide examples of people who came before you to look like a pioneer to the uneducated, distort history and create a naif narrative to ultimately serve you and the work you do, you are actually being a little dishonest.
In fact, when I searched him on the internet, after buying the book, and discovered he had done that horror Nest-Escher Vessel thing, I scrolled down to look for more projects, and I was surprised with them. Some are really nice! Like the work of so many other architects working today. I have to say I started reading the book with interest after looking at his work. But the omissions, simplifications and appropriations felt very aggressive.
I feel Thomas´ book is more of a marketing campaign. This might be the reason why he did not have the time or the need to write it himself. He must be a good seller, which is paramount to get clients. I wonder how much of his projects he actually does these days. With such a big corporation and being the frontman of it, he must spend his days traveling and getting clients. A lot of the most valued and revered professionals do write down their novel ideas. But that is if you have novel ideas... But to write down other people's ideas and sell them as yours as if you were Steve jobs with the Iphone, I am not buying. And if the ideas you are using are Bob and Denise´s, you just have bad luck. I owe them a lot to not say it. Sorry Thomas. It is not personal. So let's continue with the book.
Now we go on trashing minimalism! Not Gaudí for sure, but this book about tastes in architecture is so superficial it is painful. Minimalism is not boring, this book is !!
His main thesis appears in p.87: “When I think about this catastrophe, and I think about these buildings, I always come back to this word. So here it is: BORING.” (We are far from Victor Hugo here 😊 And in p.289 he says of Postmodernism “different flavors of boring.” I don't think he is that uneducated. Walden 7 is postmodern and he loves it! But he omits the term Postmodern when referring to architecture he likes. Postmodernism Denier in full swing. I feel maybe somebody approached him with this idea for making and paying for this book. Philip Johnson as the only postmodern gives it away. Still controlling the scene from the grave, thanks to Robert Stern his quasimodo. I even saw a recent documentary on Jane Jacobs with a dead Philip Johnson speaking, Robert Stern and they didn't invite the urban planner Denise Scott Brown who is still alive and was part of the effort of saving South Street in Philadelphia back in the 60s and who was all about Jacobs and social justice. I don't see Philip as a social justice advocate. Why have Philip with Jane Jacobs and not Denise? Same old thing... Quasimodo making sure his dead master is happy in hell. You can smell Robert Stern behind all these Postmodernism Deniers new publications. Mostly because they have him first every time while omitting or misinterpreting Venturi, like saying he was a neoclassical 😊 Stern is not very sophisticated with this either. He compensates his lack of creativity with an abrasive pushy behaviour that I don't think helps his cause. Although he did manage to build a lot of mediocre and even very ugly buildings for tasteless millionaires thanks to Philip.
Below we have a housing complex designed by Robert Stern, The Corsair, which is named for the private yacht that Gilded Age mega-financier J.P. Morgan kept in the harbor. Although it has all the decorations and nice materials Thomas claims for a humane architecture, this is boring and ugly as hell. I feel humanity disintegrating here. And the best of all is this project is only 2 years old !! I thought it was from the 90s, but no. This was build in 2022. If you close your eyes I agree that those balconies in front of the water, with huge windows and tons of space are humane. Having millions makes for a very humane lifestyle but not for great taste many times. And I would say that these wedding cake architectures can be alienating to the passers-by, specially if they can't afford it or don't feel invited. Humanity is not a facade.
So to contradict Thomas, boring and ugly can be human and not a minimalistic box.
And below a housing complex by SANAA almost twenty years older! Which is minimal, gorgeous, sophisticated while way more humble and small. Not catering to a tasteless elite but to an educated and sophisticated middle class. Which one is more humane (and cool)?
“Less is a bore” was coined by Robert Venturi back in the 60s or 70s. Funny, it is the only thing he regrets having said and now everybody is using it. Thomas´s 500 page book can be summarized with Bob´s aphorism. Here I would say Less is More 😊 Yet he doesn't mention Venturi once! Owen Hopkins also liked it for his book omitting Bob´s work. But when you read Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and then Humanise, which says “I hope to have convinced you that we're under attack from a plague of boringness, and that it is really a global catastrophe” there is no doubt to what is a real manifesto and what is a derivative propaganda to give your firm a messianic halo. The style in which it is written is as if people on top of boring were a little idiotic. The sophistication of Venturi´s mind, thoughts and ideas, and his mastery of the English written language will never be shadowed by this children story of the big bad wolf of modernism. If only, this book just gives us the temperature of what poor and simulacra times we live in. The catastrophe goes on I would say!
So then we go on to study: “The anatomy of boring.” And he asks: “What actually boring really means?” I´ll tell you: too flat, too plain, too straight, too shiny, too monotonous, too anonymous, too serious, and the list stops here. But then he has a spread where buildings with these attributes are not boring! And he asks “When is boring boring?” In the next pages the word boring appears like a 1000 times. It feels like the Cat in the Hat book.
Jim Venturi taught me the difference between American television and British television. He said that American television talked and treated viewers like children who need to be constantly entertained. It is true that children get bored pretty fast. In contrast he said British television treated people like adults. Thomas, despite his origins, has commissioned a book for children, or for American television viewers 😊 Or maybe is that an American is funding this book. Given Philip Johnson is the only Postmodern in it, my theory has some chances to be correct. Let's give more credit to the passers-by please and tell them the truth in a mature way! Many passers-by have college education.
If part I was about human and inhuman places, in Part II we are going to see “How the cult of boring took over the world.” A bit like in Mars Attack. When you turn the page you find a question: “What is an architect?” And soon we find out Thomas is not actually what the RIBA calls an architect, he is more of a craftsman. And for him the architect is at fault for all the boring out there! Forget about small budgets, greedy speculation, corrupt politicians, totalitarian building regulations and uncultivated corporate clients (some of this he mentions in passing in the last pages of the book). We, the architects, are to blame. “What is an architect anyway?” He asks in p.166... I don't want to sound too Freudian or Jungian but I see here some shadow work to do.
As I said before, Venturi Scott Brown were also questioning architects who thought they knew better what people wanted. It was back then a powerful profession, very elitist and upper class. But Oh, Lord have the times changed... We are in danger of extinction! So I did not appreciate this part of trashing architects so much. If Barcelona is so good architecturally Thomas is because it has a great architectural tradition and school, and architects have all the power in building construction (all the responsibility too) unlike in the UK or the USA. Or so it was until very recently. Even in Spain this is changing fast. As a helicopter approaches my home, construction companies and engineering groups are slowly eating away at what was before architects competences. The humanist architect bothers them. You want to Humanize architecture by removing the humanist part of it? Seriously...
To support his thesis of the uselessness of licensed architects he goes on to paraphrase another postmodern trend from the 1960s. I think we all have Bernard Rudofsky´s book of Architecture without architects (1965).
Will Storr who did his research well, provided us with many examples à la Rudofsky of gorgeous constructions in remote places by past cultures done with traditional techniques learned and passed from generation to generation. Denise, who is from South Africa had lots of slides she took in the 1950s of the homes of African clans, built with mud and with the most gorgeous painted geometric decorations on its facades... It is part of the postmodern ethos to embrace multiculturalism, and it was back then when this openness to the non-white, non-western traditions started to invade mainstream discourse (Cubism was so avant-garde). It is great to see it here! But again, he fails to mention Bernard. This is just paraphrasing postmodern ideas.
In western cultures of the past, he says, they did not have architects either and still amazing architecture. That is very incorrect as well. They had architects since Greek times at least. Have your heard of the Parthenon? Ictinus, who built it, was one of the most celebrated architects from Athens in the 5th century bc. But it is true individuals built themselves their homes with their hands using their traditions. Tradition is a great thing for architecture. José Antonio Coderch (Barcelona, 1913-1984), one of Barcelona's most revered 20th century modern architect, was so concerned with the loss of that savoir-faire. This is why Catalan modern architecture uses traditional building construction techniques. Also because there was no money in the impoverished Franco fascist era to do a more technological modern architecture as in the north or the USA. A kind of honesty: “we don't have steel but bricks here.” This honesty with materials and tradition with Catalan modern architecture makes for a gorgeous modern vernacular. We are just a step away from postmodernity here.
When you have a building tradition, you´ll have tested solutions that work. You have the most sublime constructions done by individuals building their homes. For some African tribes, Irish peasants, Ibiza fishermen towns, Japanese villagers, etc etc you find amazing examples. These days those crafts and traditions are lost among citizens indeed and favelas in Brazil or Mexico are far from elevating the soul. Thomas talks about guilds and artisans like him, (how convenient) who knew their tradition and their crafts. “Up until the 16th century, construction projects in Britain were designed and managed not by architects but by craftsmen known as ´master builders.´” And then came the Renaissance and the ego of the architect. Do you see he has a little problem with architects? “This started to change in the late 16th century, when complex new styles from Renaissance Europe became fashionable.” With the fashion thing again! “This was the beginning of a DANGEROUS divide. (…) that continues to this day. A new kind of person came into being: an individual who understood these grand new Renaissance ideas. THE ARCHITECT. The architect wasn´t a maker.” I hear the shadow pain here... “By the beginning of the 19th century, architects had completely separated themselves from the makers (…). Architects now weren´t craftsmen by background. (…) The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) was established in 1834, and it officially defined the architect as separate from the makers. In 1890 it became obligatory for all architects in Britain to register with the institute. It was now illegal to call yourself an architect unless the institute approved of you. THE DANGEROUS DIVIDE HAD BEEN COMPLETED AND FORMALISED. The seeds of FUTURE CATASTROPHE were sown.” it does sound scary! But it is false that there were not architects, or that those lay down the bricks.
“Architects were not makers of buildings anymore. They had become white-collar intellectuals, elevated and validated by the British monarchy yet disconnected from the creative process of making. Meanwhile, the artisans and craftspeople who made everything were relegated, and were seen as blue-collar workers who had no right to a creative voice in the realization of buildings.”
This scary tale of the evil architect sounds a bit too simplistic, don´t you think? Even for a passer-by. The fact is architects and artisans collaborate and always have. Specially in the Gothic era according to Victor Hugo. Jose Antonio Coderch treated better his artisans and construction people than his clients almost. As Thomas the artisan collaborates with the architects he has hired for his architecture firm. I agree that the more mediocre the architect, the more egomaniac and dismissive of artisans and others (but that happens with everything), the better the architect the more he listens to everybody´s expertise. A film-maker doesn´t film his movies, he collaborates. Architects have transversal knowledge artisans lack, and I agree with Thomas they should know about construction techniques and materials to be able to design better. The good ones always do. Mies van der Rohe´s father was a stonemason. It really shows in his buildings! The architect, like the filmmaker orchestrates a symphony of elements. Architects in the past had a book of rules on how you built things. This set of limitations were great for creativity. The best architects made masterpieces and the worse ones couldn't do too much harm. And since mediocrity abounds, it worked really well.
Gaudí was also an architect Thomas. We went to the same school in fact 😊 He was also at the Barcelona´s RIBA equivalent. He loathed school and wanted to start working right away. But he did not carve his stone. His genius was in his mind! Ideas are the work of architects. They pay you for your ideas. Now and in antiquity. Gaudí was an intuitive structural engineer, something architects are still responsible for in Spain and not in England. The intuition he had to calculate and design structures was really that of a genius. My math teachers said that some of the things he built, they don't even know how he did them! His models of charges are of a beauty and sophistication an artisan might not be able to think of. Yet he was not looking for beauty in doing those. They were working models. Beauty is a result of invisible forces. Those models are ideas, concepts, not craft, not beauty. Today they are considered works of art on their own and a key element to understand the artist´s process and his work. When you look at the model you can see how the facade aesthetics was not his main concern. The whole temple is here with its weights and charges. And THIS is what architecture is.
I agree that in England architecture education is not very good. They train designers and artists but not so much architects. I went to visit the AA on a trip to London on my second or third year of school and by chance I saw the final year projects´ presentation. I was appalled and confused. Nothing if built would stand up! 😊 It was very conceptual, but architecture is also a building endeavor. I think this is related to Thomas´ preoccupations. It is not architecture education´s fault per se, but Britain's politics. With my 7 hours a week of Structural Calculus and 6 hours a week of Construction techniques and pathologies, we had a good idea of how things worked. Even if I was a nullity in physics and structural calculations, repeating both subjects so many times, in every year, really gave me an intuition of how forces behave and how things must be built (just don't make me calculate it please 😊) By the third year I was building kinetic sculptures though! So the fact that in England you train architects with a poor construction building education is not a reason to bulldoze the whole profession! If I were you I would advocate to better train architects over there. The education you receive cannot be equated to an artisanship. You are an exception Thomas, but I read in your book you do lack intellectually some kind of architectural education, especially in urban planning (I´ll come to this later). Venturi described himself as an artist who thinks. To be able to think far you need an outstanding amount of knowledge. Pick any so-called genius of any time in history and they are immensely knowledgeable in every area of their profession, and also of others. There is no other way!
Now let´s quote again Philip Johnson from p.182. He is mentioned again! It´s a page with 5 architects´ quotes on Architecture as Art and the first one and with a bigger font size is from Philip! SEE WHO IS BEHIND THIS BOOK? He says: “Architecture is art, nothing else.” Then Julia Morgan, Paul Rudolph, Richard Meyer and Frank Lloyd Wright, who says “The mother art is architecture.” And on the following page he criticizes them for this: “Architects see themselves as artists.” But then in p.440 he writes “I do not believe the problem is that architects see themselves as artists” and do you want to know why he says that? Because he sees himself as an artist 😊 So why make all this so complicated? Even in p.443 he says “Unleash the artist!”
“The real problem, he says, is that what they do most of the time cannot be called art.” You could say exactly the same for many artists showing in art galleries today. I think it is human condition and that we live in a really poor era culturally speaking. Gaetano Pesce agreed there is little real relevance out there. Real art is hard to make. This book is such a testament to it.
Gaetano says there are maybe two real architects in a generation. And for your information Thomas, Le Corbusier, the God of Boring, was one of them. Thomas in p.441, says regarding a gallery built by an artist in collaboration with an architect “it did give me a glimpse of a possible future in which artistic thinking would be allowed to once again flourish in the art of architecture.” The thing is, I don't think it ever left it Thomas. In fact any really good architect is an artist. An artist who thinks, as Bob said. It is when architecture is an art. Building fancy or luxurious shit for rich people is not art. If you don't believe me scroll up and look at Robert Stern again 😊 Or ask Frank Gerhy!
Herzog & de Meuron have been decades collaborating with artists. Not a new idea either... I am seeing now on internet a lecture by Jacques Herzog at the Symposium Art and Architecture hosted by The Chinati Foundation in 1998 titled "Collaborations with Artists, Lecture, Symposium, Marfa, 25-26 April 1998" which also on their web site. Bob and Denise hired John Baeder and Stephen Shore in the late 60s or early 70s to do work for them. Again, it feels as if he is like discovering the wheel. That postmodern Walden 7 he so much loves from the 70s comes from Bofill´s office. I don´t know if Thomas knows that Bofill was expelled from school and was not licensed in Spain when he built that. He finished in Switzerland, but wasn´t an architect for Spain. And his early office had painters, poets, artists and funny party people of all sorts. This is why early Bofill is the best. The second generation postmodernism he did after, more corporate and conservative is way uglier. He changed the artists for the politicians and it really shows in his work. So even if Thomas is correct, it is far from being a new thing. Interdisciplinarity or Intermedia as Dick Higgins from Fluxus called it, or hybridism as many others, like Dan Graham, refer to it, is a postmodern condition. Those grey areas and blurring of boundaries Kerstin was talking about.
Le Corbusier was an amazing painter, writer, architect, technology lover, and one of the best architects of the 20th century. I find it disrespectful and lacking education to call him the “God of Boring”. Until we get to Ronchamp in p.244. And he says it is “One of the best buildings I'd ever seen in my life.” What about LaTourette, The Philips pavilion, Chandigarh, all his villas, etc
I think this book is about styles and Thomas´ taste more than about architecture. Romchamp is great. Some think that La Tourette is better. But La Tourette has straight lines and is not so extravagant so it doesn´t make the Gaudí case. I think Thomas might like Friedensreich Hundertwasser (Viena 1928-2000) too. I really miss him in this book about engaging, Guadiesq and curvilinear facadism! It is very human indeed 😊
But somehow I personally prefer Adolf Loos (Viena 1870-1933) who wrote "Ornament and Crime" (1908) and who has confused more people than Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, I would say. When you are too good people do not understand you. There is a recent book by Joseph Masheck on Aldolf Loos called The Art of Architecture (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2013) where more than a century later, still tries to explain the guy's ideas! When you are too sophisticated they make a mess with your ideas, it happened to Loos, to Corbusier, to Mies, to Venturi, etc. People understand their level of thinking, or lower. Never higher. When you are too intelligent and complex, only people at your level can really understand you. Everybody else understands less and wrong. And this is the tragedy of great ideas! It might take a century of human evolution, and still... This is why I really like what I read of Masheck´s book:
Widely regarded as one of the most significant prophets of modern architecture, Adolf Loos was a star in his own time. His work was emblematic of the turn-of-the-century generation that was torn between the traditional culture of the nineteenth century and the innovative modernism of the twentieth. His essay 'Ornament and Crime' equated superfluous ornament and 'decorative arts' with underclass tattooing in an attempt to tell modern Europeans that they should know better. But the negation of ornament was supposed to reveal, not negate, good style; and an incorrigible ironist has been taken too literally in denying architecture as a fine art. Without normalizing his edgy radicality, Masheck argues that Loos's masterful "astylistic architecture" was an appreciation of tradition and utility and not, as most architectural historians have argued, a mere repudiation of the florid style of the Vienna Secession. Masheck has read Loos as a witty, ironic rhetorician who has all too often been taken at face value. Far from being the anti-architect of the modern era, Masheck's Loos is 'an unruly yet integrally canonical artist-architect'.
He believed in culture, comfort, intimacy and privacy and advocated the evolution of artful architecture. This is a brilliantly written revisionist reading of a perennially popular architect.
Thomas examples of engaging interiors in p.333-335 (Yayoi Kusama for Louis Vuitton, Verner Panton Fantasy Landscape, and theatrical overcrowded spaces) some would find them a bit too much. They are great as punctuation, but not as the norm. I wouldn't want to live in a world so saturated all time. Silence, calm, harmony, emptiness are qualities in design and architecture human beings crave as well. Architecture is a backdrop to human experience, it is not Disneyland. All this book is so superficial, so based on personal taste, that it is painful. This is why he is contradicting himself throughout the book.
So now I want to talk about crafts. Because artisans are not artists. They are artisans. Some artisans are artists but not all them. I myself have the past years gone into the world of craft. Ten years ago I started doing glass sculpture and recently I started ceramics. I have worked for a year in a high-end company of metal craftsmen for architecture. Believe me when I tell you that those Russians were not artists and had the most amazing craft knowledge. For my glass and ceramics I went to artisan studios to learn the crafts. In both of them I found animosity from the part of some craftsmen and women, who got angry that I was from the start doing weird stuff despite barely knowing the craft. Something that surprised me is how little creativity artisans in general actually have. Ettore Sottsass used to say that as well. I loved reading that in on of his writings. They got pissed at him as well 😊 Artisans know their craft really well, but many times they lack ideas. Art is about ideas. They look like Gothic artisans indeed, repeating their traditions really well but failing to innovate drastically. I think it is a beautiful thing when artists and artisans work together. Then you have some very creative artisans like Thomas, and looking at his projects it is obvious he collaborates with many artisans, industrialists and architects. What an architect does. Architecture is a collaboration.
I just think it is very hard to achieve excellence. With all his great intentions for humanizing the world and that Nest-Escher-Vessel thing Heatherwick Studio built in the Hudson Yards is still so horrible. Pay to climb stairs to look at an awful view because everything around you is 15 times higher than you. And you can't even have a coffee there. Talk about not humane. Try a hamster wheel next! I heard it is so fun. Thomas did not really heard about Postmodernism or The Empire State Building (great views!).
As Bruce Mau said in the 90s: “Now that you can do anything what are you going to do?” If the answer is some mega expensive stairs going nowhere and doing nothing, well, for me this is precisely what you shouldn´t be doing. Even if you can, and some crazy billionaire pays for it. To have restrictions, limitations, a tradition or a set a rules to abide from is most of time really helpful as we already saw. It applies here. Infinite budgets are many times a hindrance to creativity.
Let´s set this straight. In general the human being is mediocre. To make something amazing now and then, we make so much garbage. What was saved from the wreck of history are a few great examples. Today that we can do anything, we are still building tons of garbage with and without architects. But the percentage of painful architecture increases when there is not an architect, be sure of this Thomas. As he points out in p.285 “just 6 percent of all homes in the UK are actually designed by architects, whilst in the US it's thought to be 1-2 per cent.” And it really shows !! American houses outside cities are almost made out of cardboard!
In Spain architects design and build all the housing, or most of them. Maybe this is why architecture here is so good! Spain does not have star-architects so much like in the US and the UK. What they have here is an amazingly solid and pervasive 2nd league and a huge architectural and construction culture. So wherever small town you go in Spain you are going to find amazing urban planning, public space and architecture. It is centered around construction and very importantly around the architect´s HUMANISTIC EDUCATION. THIS is architecture. It looks like in the UK it is not. Don´t trash architectural education, make it better. Cause as you can see in UK´s and USA´s home-building industry Architecture without Architects TODAY doesn't work as well as some centuries ago, when it was a necessity, not a business. Today removing the architect from construction building endangers the precise thing Thomas is claiming he wants to care for in his book. As as architect friend was complaining to me the other day, clients are mostly Finance Groups and they don't really care about architecture. You have to fight to get anything through.
And you know also what? Those Gothic architectures might be amazing, but they were torching people alive on Sundays in the public square for the enjoyment of families. The past was not more humane. Those Gothic temples were being built to scare and overpower peasants. God is like the Wizard of Oz. They were for the Glory of the Church and to keep the narrative going. Before the modern era wars were always religious too. But did they build amazing things! The Church is the biggest Real Estate company in the planet. The got there first and have all the best spots. Only Inditex is competing today with them. All to say that this 20th century “boring” architecture is maybe more humane, depending on the perspective you have on what humane means. This Humanizing theme by making pretty facades is not correct in my opinion. Seriously, when I look at his work I don't see any humanistic revolution going on, just nice buildings for rich people. Is it a luxury Shopping Center really making humanity happier as a whole? Tip: if you can't afford the things in the mall they have a garden for you on the rooftop.
Do you know who is really Humanizing architecture? Someone like Lacaton & Vassal. But they don't need a pretentious manifesto for saving the world. Their facades are sexy and cheap and they manage to increase considerably the square footage of the buildings they work on, whose users are low income people. THAT IS REVOLUTIONARY. It doesn't look as fancy as the 3D rendering of the luxury Shopping Center, which I personally find quite ugly on top of everything, but it is way more humane and revolutionary.
Here in Spain I see now so many young practices working on low-income housing projects just copying this and doing great work. Lacaton & Vassal have created a new paradigm for low-income housing with their intermediate spaces, and a real solution for the hundreds or thousands of "boring towers" that populate the outskirts of our metropolises. Tore those down is just impossible and unsustainable, so they transformed them, increasing their surface. Imagine you had a 60sqm apartment and after your facade renovation you have 100sqm! Talk about a renovation! 😊 It is incredible. More humane in architecture than giving more space and light to a small and dark apartment, for the same price, it doesn't exist. Lacaton & Vassal are the humanizing architects. It doesn't look like an apple store like Heatherwick Studio´s projects because it looks like humans do. The ugly and ordinary Venturi was talking about is this same human quality. If you look at the Seoul luxury mall rendering and this image below, I feel Thomas is part of the problem he is critiquing. Luxury is not humane. A fancy facade can be more than pretty as this masterclass in real architecture shows us.
When you really bring something new to the world it catches on fire. They worked in Africa and learned from people who built there with anything they had. For them it is not fancy and expensive digital fabrication, but cheap greenhouse construction elements to lower costs and have nicer spaces. And they are such artists that it looks fucking amazing. But they can also do Museums! Their Palais de Tokio in Paris, renovating an existing structure by leave it to its bare essentials created a before and after in the Museum world. Let's listen to architect Kerstin Thompson again on the subject: “When I was back in Paris, in 2003, the Palais the Tokyo had just been opened after Lacaton & Vassal´s renovation in the late 90s. Again, what I enjoyed was the looseness. They had a tight budget, so they did more editing than adding. I remember the café as part of the lobby space. It was teeming with young people who looked like they used the museum to hang out on a regular basis. That intrigued me. I liked its unpreciousness, its rawness. It challenged notions about the white-walled museum. I must say, it's hard to get curators to move away from that model.”
Craftsmanship is not relevant here. Ideas and concepts for living are what generates architecture and innovation. Not technology, not fancy materiality. I am so tired of people thinking technology is everything, when it is just a tool for the creativity. From the hammer to AI. And as we saw with Gaudí, the facade comes really much later in the process. it is not what architecture is about. They teach you this in architecture school as well.
Catalan architects Harquitectes in Sabadell are also working in that direction, economy of means, construction expertise and invention and a lot of artistry. They have a social housing building for the elderly in Mallorca (2021-2022) whose walls are made out of the ruins of the demolished building from that site. Talk about recycling! The brief asked them to tore it down, so they mixed the stones and debris of the demolition with concrete to build the structural walls of the building.
This process was done so carefully that the walls from the inside look like sediments. It is of a beauty, ecology and economy of means that is real poetry. And THAT is humanizing. The facade is elegant and not a spectacle.
Urban planner Manuel de Solà Morales and Denise Scott Brown with Bob talked always about making urbanity. It is not having these spectacular buildings everywhere. In fact they feel that is a loss of urbanity. It shows Thomas did not study architecture and misses urban planning education. Bob and Denise talked about second glance architecture. It is ok it is a backdrop too. It doesn't have to be calling attention all the time. If you have a “boring” building with lots of activity on the ground floor, it will be a very human architecture, cause it allows for live to blossom. In my opinion architecture is humane when humans use and live a space with freedom and joy. Who cares how it looks ultimately if it works? (Lacaton & Vassal Palais de Tokyo). Nothing important in this world is about looks. Is the city of Lagos pretty? Yet it is amazing, because it is vibrant and alive. There is nothing I dread more than fancy design in dead BORING places that according to Thomas look humane. They build such nice housing in horrible gated communities all over the world... Ghettos for the rich. So ugly my God. I call this a confusion of priorities.
When your priorities are right and you have a novel idea, the world takes it. You don't need to write a book for it. Below I add few projects of young Catalan architects doing social housing à la Lacaton & Vassal. I don't think this is copying them. L&V just gave the world of architecture a solution as important as la Maison Domino of Le Corbusier was in the early 20th century.
So continuing with Thomas the Impostor book, after trashing architects and glorifying artisan knowledge he goes into biographical mode. His grand-mother, an influence for him, was a textile designer, she worked for the architect Ernö Goldfinger. It's funny Denise also worked for him in London in the 50s. A high modernist! I guess another boring person 😊 Denise said he was a bully though. Read the book if you want to know about Thomas beginnings, education, dreams and his interest in “making.” Here we depart a bit from the “manifesto.” It is a book about Thomas Heatherwick and how great he is, and how his path into architecture is the right one. All architecture is boring (not in Barcelona) and he has arrive to save us all. For that his firm is building the second Google headquarters 😊
He says “To be clear, this is a generalization [all the book is]. Just like other artists such as painters, novelists and musicians, architects have been vulnerable to being swept up in the artistic fads and FASHIONS of their time.” I think he is projecting now...
Let's make a pause here, it´s the second time we have the word FASHION in architecture, and it seems as a problem for him, while at the same time following the last trends in digital manufacturing and focusing so much on appearance alone! What fashion basically is.
I think he confuses what “fashion” really means. The Modern Movement is not a fashion, it is our culture. We might agree fashion is awful for architecture, unfortunately for him, he kind of builds very fashionable buildings himself. An in general, Thomas, when you are looking at architecture from the sole viewpoint of its facade – what this book is talking about exclusively – and catering to that spectacle quality you so much miss in the ugly and ordinary landscape of our lives, you are in the “dress and fashion department.” Annabelle Selldorf lamented when I interviewed her, that the profession of architecture was disappearing and now you were a facade maker. This book is precisely advocating for it. Maybe if Thomas had studied architecture he would have another perspective on this matter. And although Venturi was about communication, his floor plans are works of art. As Martino Stierli showed on that lecture where Stern was unsuccessfully stalking him, Guild House´s floor plan is that of a Baroque Church. There is so much more to architecture than its facade and materiality. And this book is all about the facade of buildings. And that is not architecture, it´s facadism. But being a craft person I understand where he comes from, for him that craft quality of materiality is important. The materiality of his firm´s buildings is very interesting indeed. The material research work they do wonderful.
This book is kind of awful.
To answer Pat´s rhetorical question from his article in Archinect, if this is really humanizing anything? The answer is no, but Ted talks are great to get rich clients, and you get to feel a little like Steve Jobs for 15 minutes.
So I wanted to dwell a little on what art or architecture is about. A Japanese Architect or Landscape designer would tell you it is not about something that you see. The Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003), architects love so much, would tell you that sculpture is not about its mass. Real art is about an invisible and intangible quality that the visible enables to occur. Art is an emotion that happens in you through something you see, but that visible element is just the doorway that connects us with that mysterious part of existence, that knowledge we have and can't quite comprehend. Art is a bridge to the unknown.
Architecture is more complex because it is first of all a practical thing, to house people and protect them. To enhance their quality of life. You can do this very well in a boring-looking building if it has the right organization, light and space. Architecture is not a decor. When architecture is art it has that invisible extra element that elevates your spirit and life experience, I agree. You don't know exactly what it is but you feel happy and elated. I would say it is about space more than what contains it. Space is invisible. How things look is important, but how things feel is way more important. I rather live in a huge bright space in an ugly building, than in a tiny boutique apartment.
When I walk on the street, it is not how fancy the facades are that engages me, although I love to look at them from the bus, it is the activities happening on the ground floor, the life and social interactions that happen there. The human connections that urban organization allows for. It is never about pretty facades. It is about engaging life experiences. That is what architecture is all about. The Google building in NY kills street life wrote Richard Sennett in his book Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the city (Penguin, London 2019). This wonderful book might be the antithesis of Thomas´ book, and I couldn´t stop reading it with delight. So humane. I think Richard nails it. It is about ETHICS and not aesthetics. To be human is not about wearing the last Balenciaga shirt. It is about people and how well they can live together and how happy they are.
When you study architecture, that humanist education that teaches architects to allow for life to happen, how the facade looks is a later stage in all the preoccupations. It is almost a consequence of all the decision making you have to do to accommodate a program and its users within a budget. A consequence. Maybe you have an idea when you start, but it is certainly not the core of the profession.
In p.252 Thomas trashed Mies van der Rohe too. If Le Corbusier was the God of Boring, Mies is "the Virgin Mary.” I almost don´t know what to say, but I feel less bad to write this article when I read him disrespecting the best architects of our modern era. Again here, Thomas sees only boring boxes, when other people feel the sublime of his airy architecture and Mies central concept of connecting space with nature. Mies is so japanese. Mies was all about nature. He dematerialized the facade to invite nature and the environment inside. And Mies materiality is also spectacular. “Like Modernists painters and sculptors, the architects privileged order over complexity and sought to represent pure forms” Thomas explains. I am sorry to contradict you here again, but Complexity and Order and not mutually exclusive. In fact it is the complexity of Mies´ architecture that creates this incredible sense of order. Same with Kazuyo Sejima. They make 50 models before arriving to a solution. The opposite of Order is Chaos, not Complexity. In fact, Complexity needs a lot or order if you want it work.
If you think of Russian Constructivist artists and architects, it was all about mysticism. Geometry and abstraction at first, during the 20th century, were considered things from the outer world. This is why you have all these early mystics painting geometric forms, like Hilma af Klint or Annie Besant in her book "Thought forms". If you think about Byzantine Icons, full of geometry, and where Constructivism drinks from, it is again a portal to somewhere else. Eastern philosophies are much less materiality oriented than western ones. Chinese architectures of the past were all about the idea of the building, they did not care if it was built 300 years ago or 20. In fact when a structure burned down they would just built it exactly the same again. And that way of thinking permeates in the whole of their culture. The modern movement from Frank Lloyd Wright to Mies, are indebted of that way of thinking. Wright´s architecture cannot be understood without Japan (and Japan without China). One of my favorite buildings in Barcelona is the Mies van der Rohe pavilion. It´s like a japanese tea House! They tore it down in 1929 after the Expo! Like Thomas, they could not understand why that was interesting. It was rebuilt during the postmodern era, and now it is our crown jewel.
But as scholar Pier Vittorio Aureli writes in his book Architecture and Abstraction (MIT Press 2023_ translated into Spanish by Puente Editores 2024), abstraction is far from being a question of style. The book departs from Peter Halley´s main thesis on geometry from his essay "Abstraction and culture" (1991) where he posits say that geometric pure forms are not an innocent metaphysical formal device or a "fashion" (to use Thomas´poor terminology), but they represent hidden wider cultural and historical forces at play around us. Vittorio´s book tries to overcome the more superficial and formal notion and insert the relationship between architecture and abstraction within bigger social and political context.
In fact Aureli, in a chapter called "Architecture, geometry and money" traces back to egypt and ancient China this dissociation between the "mind" and the "hand." He says it is precisely through the dominance of geometry to master the land and build big infraestructures, that the divide between intellectual labor and manual labor grows. Money is the biggest abstraction of all, and he says than with the development of commerce that the divide between "mind" and "hand" amplifies. It was not Renaissance fashions after all 😊
This book alone cancels every statement Thomas makes in his. Vittorio explains how the term architecture -- a combination of the greek terms arché and tekton -- means "initiate" or "govern" (arché) and "artisan" (tekton). So since the greeks, the role of the architect was to govern the artisan. He also tells us that already in the IVth century before Christ, Plato wrote that architects differ from construction builders in that they did not build with their hands, but that they gave orders to construction builders to achieve the desired construction. He also points at the difference between between this one and the modern architect of the Renaissance who spent less time on site, but that's about it. Despite being the main artisan, the contribution of the architekton didn´t consist on a craft, but on his theoretical knowledge. Something the passers-by I am sure would be happy to know. Unlike master builders, architects were expected to be experts in a wide range of artisanal and constructive approaches and technologies.
All the narrative in Thomas´book is at best inaccurate and many times just false.
I understand Thomas does not like geometric abstraction, but I feel it is more a question of taste, seeing the buildings he likes and the ones he doesn't. He criticizes amazing architecture for not being expressive and curvy, and chooses examples very expressionistic for what he claims to be “humane” architecture. It is true that the modern movement turned into a cold joke of saving costs in many instances but that it is another topic altogether, more like what he says in p.292 “Why does everything look like profit?”
And Postmodernism addressed precisely that more than half a century ago. Money gone sour? Sure, just like with the internet. You came very late with your book Thomas. The passer-by won´t know it though... Today architects work very different than in the 50s. Specially younger generations. Like Thomas they learned from postmodernism. This “Cult of Modernism” he claims to be against is in reality what this book is catering to somehow, by obliterating all postmodern theory. And Gaudí is modern don´t forget. Thomas is against bad modern and against postmodernism. He is very exclusive like the moderns were!
In p.323 he even asks: “Why so many of the world´s new buildings look like greed? Because the ultimate customer in our capitalist world is not the public,” he says. I wonder if he is being cynical here? This sentence sounds like coming straight out from Shoshana Zuboff´s book The age of Surveillance Capitalism. The public is not the customer anymore for Google, Facebook (for them it never was), X and any company part of the internet of things, either. We are the raw material of a capitalist extraction logic, where our privacy and basic rights are being assaulted with every action we take on our phones. And Google is at the top of this pyramid of GREED (indeed) which is endangering even our own democracies. And Thomas is their architect!! So please spare me the bullshit.
You want to humanize the world? Talk to your clients please, and tell them to stop making money out of invading our privacies and selling our personal data to everybody. Tell them to stop stalking humanity! Tell them to help politicians to regulate the limits of this new technologies and to respect people's constitutional rights. Tell them to stop wanting to control our behavior and influence our decision making, to sell us crap and more dangerously to elect people in power who are antidemocratic and will cater to their greedy thirst for power and money. Tell them to respect democracy a bit more, please. It would be much more helpful than this book and any building you will ever build. Humanize your clients, architecture is fine.
Because all this extravagant and exciting architecture is sometimes more fascist than humane, if you ask me. Mere spectacle. Just like San Pedro in the Vatican is. The bad vibes in there, Oh My God. With Bernini, Borromini and all. Thomas writes in p.337 “We must stop seeing the world and weighing its value, through the lens and scale of money.” OK: Stop working for Google. “We must get angry.” You should get angry at what your client is doing to democracies... I know I am. I also got angry with your book. “A new movement to re-humanise the world must begin.” Tell your clients as well, who use humans as if we were coal mines.
And jokes a part, it is true that the 20th century built very fast and cheap. There were, as Thomas also says, major city devastation through wars in Europe, people moving from the countryside to cities at an enormous rate in western societies, and economic growth and a demographic explosion. Now this is happening similarly in China and other fast growing economies, and they are building horrible towers too like mushroom. They had to build so fast they didn´t manage to make it better. But then I have seen on screen other amazing architectures there too. Thomas´ work is so common if you go to China. I saw Beijing the other day on TV and I was flipping out. Already Herzog & de Meuron in 2002-2008 were rocking it! And talk about materiality. Sorry but I don´t see what´s Thomas´ new contribution to the world of architecture that needs a manifesto and a social movement!
But even if China has plenty of these exciting buildings Thomas is advocating for, the reality of the housing industry is a real catastrophe indeed. And how do you humanise this?
The answer lays with Lacatton & Vassal rather than with Thomas Heatherwick I am afraid. I think what needs to happen now is to take these places that were and are being built fast and cheap and improve them. I can totally see the Lacatton & Vassal paradigm for social housing towers exported to China! We cannot tear down anymore. It is so unsustainability. Architecture (with war) is the most contaminating human endeavor. We can´t keep tearing down buildings, we need to reuse them and re-adapt them, and use creativity to do so. These inhumane towers could be the skeleton from improved social housing as we have seen. And not only aesthetically, but transform the existing structures into something better, and even bigger apartments for human life. Chinese are going to love this. They live in really small spaces.
This is precisely why Bob and Denise said back in the 70s that it was better the Decorated Shed than the Ducks. Charles Jencks said they were wrong in their own theory and appropriate it for himself to postulate the exact opposite, that Ducks were more interesting. And so early Postmodern humble architecture turned into the extravagant corporate tacky pastiche it became popular for, and reason why Bob made sure to say HE was NOT postmodern. And of course, Philip Johnson, the Godfather, saw an opportunity there to appropriate for himself postmodernism (and fuck Bob and Denise) and promoted Jencks´ theories. Only 2 years after Jencks book Post-modern Architecture (1977), Philip Johnson made the cover of TIME magazine heralding the arrival of Postmodernism with his At&t building model. Robert Venturi never had a TIME magazine cover. This was Johnson´s style, gather mediocrity like Stern and Jencks around him, empower them and have them work for him. See how Stern in his 80s is still working for him !! The quality I like most of Robert Stern is his loyalty to Johnson. It is endearing.
The truth is, it is hard to add anything to a very specific shape. Early Postmodernism was very ecology-concerned as well. Denise wrote several articles for James Wines´magazine. All Wines production with his collaborative practice SITE, his architecture and environmental design studio, was centered around the awareness of our planetary exhaustion. This is the thinking behind advocating for Decorated Sheds. Jencks failed to understand it. Thomas agrees with Bob & Denise once again! In p.383 “We should insist on a world in which building designers use a 1000-year mindset (…). The tower of London will celebrate its 1000th birthday this century. It´s been a prison, a Royal Mint, a home for the crown jewels, a venue for art and a zoo.”
The Tower of London is a Decorated Shed and Thomas is paraphrasing Bob Venturi. It is a huge stone box with decoration indeed.
Thomas´ buildings are mostly DUCKS though. He claims sculptural architecture is sustainable cause by being pretty nobody will want to tare it down... Good luck with that! Nothing changes more than taste. Remember gorgeous Lutyens?
First of all taste changes every 20-30 years or so, completely. Maybe your children generation will find your architecture so boring or ugly or weird they will want to change it. Denise would say “you always dislike your mother´s dress and love your grand-mother´s.” If you want the building to survive it is because spatially it can be re-adapted. They might change the facade and that's it. Richard Sennett was saying this exact same thing, and was using as an example a sort of black glass coiled type of structure by Forster and partners, very beautiful and sculptural and not boring at all, but with little capacity for a change of use given the curly envelop twisted around some core which was bespoke for a very precise program. The building will have problems to find new owners whenever its current use will end, according to Sennett.
“We must demand a world that is less boring” Thomas says... I personally don´t find the word boring at all. Quite the contrary, I find it super exciting. So rich and full of possibilities. I find that never before in time architecture has been more diverse, and this is due in part to postmodernism. The information era and its digital revolution has open the gates to creativity (as Bruce Mau said) and since the 90s an economic explosion has poured into construction building with so many examples of exciting, outrageous, megalomaniac and spectacular buildings. Does that make for a better world? Not necessarily.
New York is quite an ugly city architecture-wise, and probably one of the most exciting, non boring cities in the planet. New York is ugly and exciting! It is more like a sculpture park or a cemetery with all its vertical slabs (cemeteries are fantastic by the way) than your typical cute and ancient European city, yet it is more exciting in general. The energy of that city doesn´t rest in its facades or its corporate ugly buildings like the Google one. It rests on its people. Is New York Humane? A lot and not at all. It is this complexity and contradiction (again Bob), this richness in its fabric, its hyper-density (we could cite here Delirious New York, Rem, a pity you are now putting your cowboys boots and going Country-fascist) its crazy energy, its constant motion and movement, the flow of peoples of every corner of the world that makes a free, vibrant and exciting place.
What makes a city alive? I don´t think it is pretty facades. As Anna Heringer says "It's never just about a building. It´s much more about the social structures you can create." These new smart cities in Asia must have amazing facades and besides being mega boring, they are scary and dangerous for humanity. The issue is somewhere else. In Living and Dwelling Richard Sennett addresses precisely this. It is about organizing life and organizing freedom. Urban planning is the area of expertise to address such issues. Not building facades. The scale in which you work is paramount. It is not the same a city built for the car, that a city built for pedestrians. To me that is the first thing to consider when addressing the passers-by. A city you can walk is humane. A city you must drive everywhere is going to be less humane whatever the architecture there.
Not-boring places (or boring places) are about human activity or the lack of it. Architecture and urban planning organize precisely this. Modernist towers in the middle of nowhere with no good transportation system, no schools, little or no commerce, no civic and social centers are a social problem. The problem is not the towers and their ugly facades. Look at the Upper East Side! Such ugly boring buildings in general and it costs a fortune to live there. Look at it! Huge buildings with small windows, boring facades, uninspiring building design, etc. But you have some of the most important cultural institutions in the country within blocks, Central Park close to it, a rich and vibrant commerce, schools and hospitals nearby, and all the things that makes an urban enclave exciting. I was surprised my first time there with the ugliness of the richest neighborhood in NY! The richest neighborhood in Paris look VERY different. But New York is less boring than pretty Paris! Now in New York they have build the Hudson Yards, for the mega rich and I have to say it is much less interesting than the Upper East Side. Less exciting, less New York, more boring rich. It is my opinion and experience that wealth can be the most boring thing of all. Wealth is so preoccupied with pretty facades, like Thomas, and misses on life completely.
In the second half of the 20th century, specially, we have built a lot, and now we need to fill and finish these areas, bringing all that is missing, all that creates a vibrant city, bettering the structures already there, bringing parks, libraries, public and civic buildings, ground floor commerce activity, to generate the kind of complex life you need for experience not to be “boring.”
Even in Barcelona, which is now a metropolis, all the new construction is occurring in the outskirts -- the metropolitan area -- and fast growing smaller towns, which were dull and gray 30 years ago, are now full of greenery, new civic and cultural places, nicer housing, and more communication. Life comes in with a diversity of programs, uses, movement, activity, energy, etc. This is what makes places not boring. Not pretty facades.
If this book does something, it is to show how a rounded humanist architectural education is still paramount to understand all aspects of city life and architecture. This “peer-learning” Thomas advocates for in his book I don´t buy it. My best teachers were incredibly knowledgeable. Having worked for the Venturi´s has given me a depth of thinking about urban and architecture matters I would have never had with “peer-teaching.” Youth needs mentoring. Do you think it is a coincidence that Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe all worked for Peter Behrens? His AEG Turbine Hall (1908-1909) is considered one of the precursor examples for the birth of the modern movement. We need mentors, we need very well educated and intellectual teachers Thomas and add peer-learning workshops if you want. Great! But we need to live in world of experts who can transmit their knowledge onto the next generation. And to live in close proximity to them is important. This is what British college campus was all about, to live with your professors.
As a designer you can make wonderful objects, that can contribute very positively to the symphony of city life. The more diversity the better, with some order. But the problem with a lack of humanity these days does not lay in facade building. Facades are fine. If you really want to work in architecture helping to humanize the world, the job is not in materiality so much. It´s in social work. Who are the most in need? Who the system is leaving behind? What kind of building we must do not to contribute to the planet climate crisis? Do we really need to keep building that much? Is it time for a recycled architecture? Vitruvius said that building was a lesser harm in architecture but the main goal was to facilitate human activity. Can we facilitate human activity without building? Like François Roche in the early 90s making a façade of a property by containing the growing vegetation with a net. He did not build walls, just put a net near a forest and let the forest grow (instead of cutting its trees). To me those are much more relevant and interesting questions. How TIME builds the structure with nature, and instead of degrading materials, you have a growing and luscious green façade.
François Roche is also an artist who thinks, like Bob said, and is extremely intellectual and cultivated. I like his funny texts on his web site: "The inspector and I almost missed the place, which was, of course, the architect's original intention." Funny that for getting a permit to build this, since it was so uncommon and strange, he convinced the local authorities it was Conceptual Art 😊 I don't know if this is true or invented in Bruce Stirling´s dystopian funny text, but it could totally be correct. It is also nice to see a science-fiction writer writing for an architect´s little story about his project. You can feel the love with his ideas all over the work and the process. It is not a TED talk.
When I read such a pretentious title -- HUMANISE -- and find only aesthetics concerns, it really bothers me. This is why I am writing this piece. Postmodernism already thought about all of this, and the world changed because of it. And this book is paraphrasing all those ideas omitting the sources. And after those theories in the 60s and 70s came people like Herzog & de Meuron (materiality experts) who had Aldo Rossi as their mentor and proudly say it, or Norman Foster (curvy shapes and technology) to name just two very obvious, and a whole culture that followed. I really do not see what is the revolution you are bringing us.
The way forward for humanizing the world with more pragmatic architecture at a larger scale is headed by people like Lacatton & Vassal (Pritzker Price 2021) or Harquitectes, building cheaper, bigger and without demolishing anything, while being so gorgeous at the same time. Today it is about bettering the world, not creating it anew. Technology is going to do just that. The planet is so full already! It's time for chiseling (in sculptor's lingo). Tomorrow might bring real paradigm changes, and I really believe François belongs there. His musings on possible dystopian futures are extremely forward thinking, and being so artistic serves him well given the present reality and architecture being such a slow endeavor. As Denise and Jean Cocteau said, HIS READERS might not be born yet!
They are all paving the way for the profession and a whole new generation of young practitioners are following them. Of course there will always be amazing one of a kind structures, but what can you do to create a SYSTEM that will improve life conditions for a majority of people? A system that builds without generating pollution (or you want to use that pollution for a building facade). A system that will build in the desert by 3D-printing building blocks with sand. THIS is what is interesting today. What Thomas explains in his book, you need nice doorways, textured facades, little cherry on the top (he gives a recipe) is so banal. I learned nothing with this book, but the worse is that the passers-by will be misinformed by Thomas´ lack of generosity from all the sources he took his ideas from.
Thomas before you want to humanize the world I recommend you humanize yourself first, and treat kinder all the people that came before you and whose ideas are in your book. I don't think you are that ignorant when you say Philip Johnson is what Postmodernism is. Then you work for Google... Seriously I just think you are cynical or that Corporate extravaganzza (you work for) asked you to write this book to trash real architects (there is a witch hunt these days) and promote digital fabrication and construction builders. That you did not write it yourself sends some signals in that direction. The God of Boring wrote all his books!
And now after 22 pages, let´s dwell onto our main question here: Who is benefiting from obscuring and/or denying, Postmodernism?
I started responding to this question in my piece about the symposium Post Postmodernism: a map for the present, at the Bundeskunsthalle. Postmodernism hurt a lot hardcore macho modernists when it appeared, and that wound never healed. Back in the 60s, but specifically in the more vitriolic 70s, the critic was vicious! They called people like Robert Venturi populist, reactionary, arrogant, etc. And I am talking about architects like Rem Koolhaas or Charles Jencks, who later embraced their ideas with more or less success and understanding. Architects like Gordon Bunshaft from SOM were scared and upset, their macho heroics were going to be left behind, so they were kind of aggressive with Venturi Rauch & Scott Brown on panels and public commissions committees. Others like Robert Stern were green of envy (and still are). Even inside their Venturi Rauch and Scott Brown office the more modernists type (Like Rauch and Vreeland) were not very happy with where they were going with their Las Vegas and Levittown studios. John Rauch was adamant not to turn the Learning from Levittown studio into another book! He believed Learning from Las Vegas was hurting their architectural commissions. Some really intelligent and sophisticated people like Vincent Scully, Dan Graham or Dave Hickey got it right away, of course, and wrote about it on their defense since the beginning. But since what these early postmoderns did was to observe what was happening to society and trying to adapt, by the 80s everybody was jumping into a wagon that had gotten loose thanks partly to Jencks and Johnson.
I can't stress enough that Postmodernism (as Jencks named it 15 years after the first buildings and writings started to appear) was trying to update the Modern movement´s original ethos. Society was changing so fast and architecture was frozen in a corporate dream of everlasting power, domination and greed. The industrial era was giving way to the Information era, and paradoxically the economic boom that ensued WWII and the defeat of fascisms (in theory), created a new generation of people who wanted to be peaceful, happy and free 😊 and loathed the war culture their country was immersed in since. If an American granny from the 60s saw the pervasive daily violence of her country today, the school shootings and mass murders, she would not believe it. I doubt people bought AK rifles in the 60s for their home protection. It is getting very ugly over there...
So while the USA was agonizing in a murderous war in Vietnam, their youth was taking the streets to demand peace and race, social and gender equality. They were going after the patriarchy and any other artificial hierarchy who abused its power. The Civil Rights Movement, gay rights, women rights, post colonial theories, Post-structuralists theories, are all born with Postmodernity. The world was going from black & White modernism to colorful postmodernism. The Modernist agenda was not the only one that needed an update, the social contract of western democracies did too. In Obama´s campaign this was one of his key arguments, how the United States constitution was a beautiful yet imperfect set of rules, since it did not work for everybody. Our task in the postmodern era is to extend those rights to everybody. THIS, I BELIEVE, IS AT THE CORE OF POSTMDERNISM DENIERS´ CRUSADE.
Let´s make the World Modern Again !!
It is not a coincidence to see these days a rise in fascism everywhere, and the attack to women's rights, racism rearing its ugly head again and Postmodernism Deniers.
My thesis in the symposium article was that it is the Corporate system ruling today behind this embrace of the Modern. Even if the world has changed so much in the past half century, people running all major corporations are still mostly white dudes, and that kind of abrasive testosterone 50s macho culture still nauseates our multicultural reality, forcing on us the worst kind of politicians so they can keep deluding themselves in their primacy and everlasting cowboy dreams. Why do you think Donald Trump slogan is “Let's make America great again” like in the CORPORATE MODERN 50s. Meaning let's make American macho, white and racist again. He could have well said “Lets´s make America HATE again.” These days he is dropping his pants to big Business, looks like the regular American is not hateful enough to vote for him. When it is time, in fact, for collaboration, peace, empathy, and human coexistence. It is a planetary reality, climate change being just the proof that there is only one path to the future. Well, they also deny climate change, not only postmodernity.
Back in the 70s, at the height of postmodernism, climate emergency awareness was as informed and aware of the real dangers ahead of us. Corporate culture did not listen, and marched ahead. Today we cannot not listen anymore. Donald Trump is the revelation of all those violent delusional selfish and fascist agendas, and it sadness me how many people are going with him to keep milking the earth resources and pay less taxes. It is sad to see it in the art world too. Wealth is selfish and narcissistic in their worse and more uneducated version. But to me that fascist sociopath with mental problems who wants to be a dictator is the biggest proof of how dead all that culture is. It's imploding in its hate and stupidity. Kamala should win next Tuesday with a margin. But let's see how hypocritical everybody is over there... Kamala represents the postmodern ethos (a brown woman, from a multicultural background, not from privilege and with a great education and preparation) and Trump the Modern agonizing one (fascist white male millionaire idiot). She is kind and empathic, and he is a sociopath hater and a wannabe dictator. It is obvious who should win, don´t you think?
I say here (October 31st) she is wining next Tuesday. We have been fighting 50 years to get here, and they want it or not, there is no way back. And even if she lost, there is still no way back. It will only prolong the agony. Society has changed, the future is not fascist, because the future is smarter than this. The information era brought about an enormous social change and you just can't put that back in a box. This is why it looks so ugly in the DysTrumpian side! It's their putrefaction.
Transitions are slow, and the corpse of that mentality is agonizing, hence the violence we see today everywhere. Taking Victor Hugo´s beautiful sentence: C´est le soleil couchant qu´ils prennent pour une aurore.
(It is the setting sun that they take for an aurora)
As architect Anna Heringer, I quote before, says in her book Form Follows Love “Capitalism is not a natural force. It is run by humans, and we can change it.” We are going in the long haul towards a new corporate culture, clean, solidary, sustainable, creator of good (social and environmental), even if the New Frontier of Power is running on the old model. There seems to be an inertia in companies like Facebook or Google – the new Industrialists of the information era – to keep abusing resources to get as rich and powerful as possible, disregarding anything that doesn’t fuel their unlimited ambitions. So not sustainable. The problem is that today those resources are us, human beings. But they are nothing new in terms of their modus operandi. Same old fascist agenda. And I'll repeat this, the world has changed. If they don´t, sooner or later, they will be obsolete too.
And it is a company like Google who hires Thomas Heatherwick, who then hires somebody to write a Postmodernism Denier manifesto. Anna Heringer doesn´t build for companies like Google, but she builds housing, schools, temples with all sustainable materials and techniques in the Global South for so-called poor people. Maybe it is that the future is female indeed! A little more for sure. As my friend Anthony used to say “The genie is out of the lamp, and the genie is the woman.” Or Gaetano Pesce with his Mattress Man. “Man is asleep” he says... There was a time to build the world, now it is the time to take care of the world. A more feminine perspective. But men and women have male and female in them. We need to balance those energies in all of us. There are lots of misogynists women out there too! In his first election a 53% of white women in America voted for Trump the misogynist. In this one 60% of women voted for him, and they were not black...
The counterpart of the misogynist macho man, is the Barbie type woman who is mega competitive and jealous of other women: “I am a fascist girl in a fascist world.” Did you see how in the movie being a feminist was equated with degrading and abusing men? A lot of work to do still girls !! The fascist misogynist girl secretly has integrated the fascist agenda inside her, and so she likes the fascist macho type of guy. The Ken type of guy, sweet, kind and not aggressive is laughed at in the movie (Ryan Gosling totally earned his Oscar nomination). The best example of this is when her husband sleeps with another woman and she goes after the woman, calling her a whore (even if she is single and betraying nobody) instead of leaving her unfaithful husband. Or when her husband sleeps with a female friend, and she stops seeing the friend and keep living with the son a bitch. Those women even think of themselves as feminists some times! While secretly catering to the patriarchal system where women are mothers or whores, and men Gods who can do as they please. Like racism, it is a profound and engrained crass in western culture that we are very very slowly cleaning away. A lot of shadow work as a society to do here as well. Women specially.
So my theory is that this new Frontier of Power, who thanks to globalization is making more money than nobody ever made before (from Google, to Facebook, to X and Tesla, to Starbucks, to Zara, to Amazon) need a cultural system to uphold them. They say Mark Zuckerberg feels and wants to emulate Julius Cesar (check out his hair style); but there's no need to go that far back in imperial emulation. To me, they are looking back to the titans of the industrial era. Those Robber Barons à la JP Morgan and Rockefeller, who made so much money and created such monopolies that they bought the system in passing. In their thirst for infinite power, they weakened democracy. Just as it is happening right now.
This Gilded Age gave way to the modernization of society and the modern movement. Le Corbusier was all enraptured with the look of all those industrial machines and facilities in America, and his architecture copied those aesthetics – grain silos, steam ships, elevators and skyscrapers – and the new cathedrals became train stations, industrial and manufacturing buildings, International Fairs made out of steel structures and glass, like the Crystal Palace, etc. The manufacturing buildings in Soho (New York) are of an elegance, opulence and beauty only the nobility enjoyed in the past. The new money had arrived and wanted to show off. Culture became a means to dust their lack of birth, in a society still very classist based on land property and exploitation rather than industry. This is the case of the United States civil war and also WWI in Europe. WWII just consolidated the triumph of capitalism. I really want to read Stefan Zweig´s book The World of Yesterday, mailed to his publisher a few days before Zweig and his spouse took his life in 1942 in Brazil. He just did not want to live in the new Europe after the war. A lot was lost for greed and domination. Culture is not a profit machine and the old world somehow cherished values the new money had no time for.
But the USA also had their old and new money. The Pulitzer prize, Carnegie hall, the Rockefeller center, etc all come out of this desire to build a respectable name, more than a real love for the arts. WHAT WAS LOST WAS A REAL LOVE FOR CULTURE. Funny how today's new money abuses the art world for the same reasons. Not for the art so much. But do they love the merchandising !! In the last MoMA expansion, by Diller & Scofidio + RENFRO (2019) one of the main changes in the lobby is the size and location of the store! It is the storefront of the museum now. You can buy a souvenir without paying the 30$ to enter the gallery. MoMA is a store and a museum too 😊 Art in Times if Hypercapitalism... For being a private non-profit organization they are all about profit! But it is true that the budgets for shows must be astronomical. I remember the first time I saw -- in an American Museum -- how you had to go through the giftshop to exit an exhibition! I was flabbergasted. Now it is everywhere. Now at MoMA you can even enter the shop without even seeing an art show 😊 Bansky has to make the second part to his documentary. I have the title: Entrance through the giftshop 😊
Despite gaining many things with modernization, culturally I feel we have lost a lot as well. Specially in what culture meant for society, especially to people with access to it (of course). It was not a small business. One of the advantages about old money, is that it didn't care about money. Talking about money was tacky, and in Europe it still is not very elegant. Nouveaux Riches are all the time trying to let others know how wealthy they are, mostly because they feel inadequate with themselves and their lack of real education they are painfully aware of. They want to belong and they think with money it is enough. Or maybe they fear that if they don't show it, their inner poverty will show up instead.
Old European aristocracy was many times very poor. Someone had drank all the family fortune at some point. But what mattered was your culture and education. That was the most important, and showed your class and value. They were poor but they spoke several languages, played the piano or the violin and knew their classics and were enthralled with poetry and literature. Honor and elegance were paramount. I kind of miss that primacy of culture and education. Having only money is very poor. I just saw yesterday on the New York Times how Trump is threatening to eliminate the whole Department of Education! Talk about idiots and poverty.
New money has arrived today as well and they are buying the art market and insulting everybody with their lack of knowledge, education and sophistication coupled with their pretensions to dictate the narratives. Now it´s international puppy day at museums every month and the horoscope is big on MoMA instagram posts. They want to give themselves that halo of wealth only culture still gives you. They don´t understand it has to be earned, not bought. And so it is grim and sad out there. François Roche wrote me it was time for artists to go back to the underground 😊 I see it! The return to fascism is so visible in the art world, as that wonderful article by UK artist James Gardner on realist painting and fascism beautifully explained. It is titled "Realism and Fascism: An Essay on the Tyranny of Capital in the Art Market." So poignant. I am adding it here so you can go read it. One of the best articles I have read. And I am sure he wrote it himself too, Thomas!
A low point in culture, that's all. Gilles Deleuze said it already in the 80s (when all this really started to blossom with Reagan and Thatcher). A very poor era... And it was just the beginning! Look at us now! It's the Trump and Putin era. This too shall pass. Let's hope !! ☺️ I am really curious about that movie on Reagan. I bet you anything he is like a good guy! He is their hero! Barbie and Reagan, the movies...
It is funny because with democracy and the democratization of knowledge, you don't have to be rich to be rich. A friend calls it “The aristocracy of the mind” and I love it. You see today everywhere all these mega wealthy and mega poor people, with no taste or culture whatsoever, trying to dictate what culture is (of a sadness); and then you have a very middle class super well educated population who run all the galleries and museums worldwide (and are probably all taking some kind of antidepressants). To me this is the beauty of democracy.
In the murderous and terrible 20th century, all was not lost. Social change and the betterment of living and working conditions did occur. Now culture is not the fiefdom of the elite exclusively. More people have access to more and better information, education and opportunities, and the work is far from being done. And this is precisely what is at stake now. The middle class is being abused and decimated by this new unbalance of power. The new money wants it all for itself. Greed is getting out of hand. It is not solidary, empathic or even democratic. Reason why thanks to Google, Facebook, X and their digital likes, they are trying to manipulate which politicians get elected to rob us faster and better. Elon Musk spent 175 million dollars on Trump's campaign! I feel he bought twitter for him 😊 a bit earlier, poor baby was banned from the platform for being a hater. Now the hater is the president of the USA! Elon Musk was boasting he had won the election for him, and he is probably right. But thank God for the US economy that Elon Musk is going to be in charge of the finances, not the guy who bankrupted his daddy´s Real Estate company 6 times !!! Mary L. Trump wrote it was too late when Trump senior realized how limited his son was in fact. I think there are higher people in power who know a little better than let Trump to really run the country. He is the media guy.
Trump´s campaign was genius in that it was catering to the old energy oil business and to the new digital corporate landscape. A win-win. A landslide. Like this nobody gets angry for a lack of attention and low taxes. This is exactly how Adolf Hitler won in Germany. Even half of France became Nazi in 1940 for money reasons. Check the poster "The men of the trusts sold France to Hitler." Greed has only one ideology: MONEY FOR ME.
There were lots of warning signs coming from England already back then, but the money and backing by the new Industrialists was too strong and persistent. They wanted to make a lot of money then too! The book How Democracies Die (Pinguin Random House, 2018) by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explains it all too well. THIS IS HOW. Let's see how Trump mutates into a full blown dictator now.
My theory is that the reason why the Modern Era is so appealing to them, is because it was the previous time for Corporate Splendor, before all those social and human rights demands came to be. After WWII – what it is called The War at an Industrial Scale with its destructive power – and the difficult post-war years, social and ecological movements blossomed like mushroom everywhere. The Postmodern era had arrived. By the 70s the most vicious (and fascist) side of Corporate power (around the oil business) was angry with all that hippie lovie-dovie generosity and liberalism. As Jane Mayer tells in her book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, (Doubleday 2016) a group of old billionaires white, male, racists and misogynists created a group of their kin to start funding the return to conservative values by flushing money everywhere, from politics to academia, to nurture their worldviews and agendas and influence what people thought. Even they didn't want Donald Trump. They wanted Mitt Romney, whose father, George Romney, was Richard Nixon's secretary of Housing and Urban Development. But this is what their investments and manipulations have created – a sort of Frankenstein – and so they have to go with it. These old white male fascist billionaires are in competition with the new Frontier of Power, who is also getting quite fascist with their new global power. Getting them all together was a visionary idea Donald! Maybe it is that too much power can only be fascist. I always think of Gollum from the Lord of the Rings – a parable for the nature of power – who becomes a monster for possessing the ring too long. Nothing else matters to him but that shiny symbol of power. Like today, they don't even care about climate change, despite all having grand-children! Like Gollum, they stopped caring even for their own people.
It is not by coincidence that I saw this Postmodernism Denying thing in Academia first. Martin Reinhold is from Columbia University. Their department of architecture history was since 1972 in good company, with high modernist priest Kenneth Frampton, who hates postmodernism. I wonder if he hired Martin! Haddad also taught in the US and is now Dean of an Architecture school in his hometown in Libanon. Another Dean and Postmodernism Denier is Jonathan Massey, dean and a professor of architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. I read about him through one of his students, who was angry of how he trashed Robert Venturi, by also deforming and distorting postmodernism by misinterpreting Bob and Denise´s ideas. He was so angry, the courageous young student wrote a paper to explain to him how wrong he was! I loved that 😊 But the student was so young he didn't know what postmodernism was anymore (Postmodernism Deniers have done a good job). He was defending Bob by calling him a Mannerist! Bob would have loved that 😊 That young student was angry about how that Dean was writing about Bob!
At MoMA they let Robert Stern Boycott Complexity & Contradiction in Architecture 50th anniversary edition´s presentation by its author and the museum's architecture department´s director Martino Stirli, by having it coincide with Stern´s 80th birthday. Nobody at MoMA knew? I am sure many people from the museum got invited to the birthday party. And they went! Cause we were like 15 people celebrating the book!
So I wanted to tell you this other story from another famous and venerated academic at Harvard university and art critic and founder of October magazine who had the nerve to tell me he did not not know what Postmodernism was. I have told this story couple other times. I even went to Harvard to glue a glass graffiti saying “Postmodernism is real” in front of the professors building next to the Carpenter Center. I am talking about Benjamin Buchloh, who was invited to a Warhol Symposium for the occasion of Warhol´s last retrospective at the Whitney in 2018, which had an emphasis on his later and sometimes overlooked work (70s and 80s) at the height of Postmodernity. I think I read the curator´s show Donna de Salvo saying how she wanted to have even more of that period (a great idea) but somehow they curbed her enthusiasm. Same Postmodernism Deniers? All Andy´s work is postmodern somehow, but in the last two decades it is undeniable. I mean The last Supper in pink Camouflage print, the Money paintings or the Hammer and Sickle (all part of the show) are so funny, irreverent and so contemporary they did not get it at the time. I see Jeff Koons a lot in this sort of double edge irony and playfulness with capitalists symbols. There is love and irony in both their work. Like with Koons, they thought it was Warhol´s selling himself to Capitalism, when he was in fact laughing at it with complicity. As Venturi, he was so misunderstood. This is why de Salvo´s proposition was so interesting. I would like to see a show of Koons and late Warhol actually. It would be powerful and would help understand both artists more.
So I went to the symposium and I was kind of surprised nobody would talk about postmodernism! But when Buchloh showed up with his lecture of the Shadows paintings (1978-79) and spent 40 minutes talking about early 20th century expressionist cinema, besides of being kind of boring, it was pissing out of the pot. All cause he had done a lot of personal work on the subject and he was being the typical lazy academic. If it is true that the Shadows series are very cinematic, like a flame flickering in time and space, Warhol thought more about the stroboscopic light at a discotheque than about Eisenstein or Murnau I am afraid. He referred to the them as Disco Décor. I liked how in the exhibition the Screen Tests (1964-1966) where totally seen as portraiture, whereas in the shadow paintings it looks like a moving image. It was the first time I really understood the screen tests as a wink to the art of portraiture, with their stillness and by the way it was showcased at the museum. I believe Warhol´s work seats in a terrain in between painting and photographic and moving image, which is so postmodern. Hybridizations. His work is a series of inquiries about the power of image. He is the artistic counterpart to Walter Benjamin´s ruminations about the reproducibility of image in the age of mechanical reproduction.
So I rushed to the microphone when the round of questions came and told him I thought there was an elephant in the room! I said that after quoting art critic Irving Sandler (1925 – 2018) who had championed Abstract Expressionists modern heroes and later wrote a book on Postmodern artists. I did that precisely so he could not dismiss my arguments, but he did anyway, when I said the elephant in the room was postmodernism. Mocking me, he said he did not know what that was! This was even more surprising considering that October magazine came about at the height of Postmodernity and they were supposedly advocating for it. Or so I thought... I have come to find October magazine not very accurate, and kind of confusing. Dan Graham said they totally misunderstood Michael Asher. Buchloh again. Then I saw him in another lecture with Orozco (the son), praising him and his boring macho heroics, and it all seemed so endogamic and kind of boring.
I just felt Buchloh had a Postmodernism Denier agenda, coming into this symposium with his expressionistic cinema expertise. It probably came from Harvard university. I would also say that, after all, he is a Modern Baby! Cause the guy has no dementia yet. Donna left the Whitney after that. I wonder also if she felt a lack of freedom with all this business of the major survey of famous American artist and everybody-who-is-paying agendas in the mix. She went back to her alma matter at DIA, and funny enough they got the Shadows series in 2019 as a permanent exhibition. Those series are very conceptual indeed and minimalists. All terrain of Postmodernity and the 70s. A grand way to give Buchloh the finger 😊
I finally came to understand how Academia in America, with all their big bucks donors, are so very vulnerable to certain narratives. Just like the Libertarian fund their mission and targeted universities, nostalgic Make America Modern Again do to. They could be the same people! And now with Google & Co it has never been so easy to manipulate public opinion. Fake News are everywhere, and in disguise. What I find so painful these days is the misuses of language, concepts and ideas. Nothing seems to mean anything anymore. People waving the flag of Democracy and are eroding them, like the Spanish government is doing, people who call themselves liberals and are attacking journalists (again in Spain), art businesses catering to fascists because they are paying instead of protecting artists who are bullied by them, etc. Everything is getting so ugly and so stupid... it just cannot last! These next fours years are going to be painful, but there will come a day when we will look back at this and won't be able to believe it happened. As the adage says “if you are going through hell keep going.” Look how people lived a century ago and look at us now.
Even if you don't believe it, THIS IS PART OF THE CHANGE.
Last week, the princess of Spain, Leonor de Borbón, gave her annual awards “Princesa de Asturias” to people of merit in arts, science, culture and sports. This year the winners were very carefully chosen for their democratic and antifascist activism. All were people whom with their practice helped highlight situations of injustice and who advocated and promoted democratic ideals. I have never felt this monarchic in my life. 😊 Talk about old money! They have their priorities in the right place. The Spanish crown helped bring Spanish Democracy to existence and now it is an institution who works to protect it, while the political arena is disintegrating in their own corruption and lack of decency. The fact that Spain is not honoring the old king Juan Carlos Primero, and has him living in exile for some petty corruption (while we are seeing this administration being part of the biggest corruption scandal in Spanish democracy), when he was the artifice of our democracy, just tells you how much in Spain the antidemocratic tune is also playing in the background like the Hamelin Flute player. And all the rats are following! Another book that just came out Objectivo: Democracia (Objective: Democracy) in Spain by Juan Fernández-Miranda (1979) wants to explain to new generations how Spanish Democracy came to be. Juan is also a Postmodern Baby and like a good Postmodern Baby he loves his democracy. 😊
The Modern era was very violent. The worst atrocities you cannot even imagine on your own, were done to people in the name of science and industry. From gassing people to the H bomb. The proto-internet was even born then. Now they want to control our every move and even facial expressions to guess what we feel and want, to then change it for what interests them. The end of our species if we let them. What differentiates us from animals is our capacity to think, and now they want to even take that away from us!
It is getting very ugly out there. No wonder you don´t like postmodernity! Postmodernity doesn´t like you either. You are the PAST, coming back like a zombie to pester with your greedy stench all the social advance we have made in the past half century. You and your poor sad money, and your thirst for power are so over. This is not the 50s nor the 90s, sorry. Talk about the PAST. Kamala is the future, even if she lost. She did not lose, the world and the USA did. Not ready for the future yet (and it's not Google glasses). The world is still way too misogynist. Have you noticed Trump only loses against women? 😊 And the white one coming from from privilege got more votes than the brown daughter of immigrants. They say it is because nobody knew her. She was vice-president for four years! 😊
You already won Kamala. Losing today is winning tomorrow! If you are winning today, you should question yourself 😊
Violence and fascist aggression is invariably the tactic of losers. The sadness is hate sells well with the unhappy, the frustrated, the uneducated and people left behind. Fascists understood that well. All Trump rhetoric is based on division, hate and fear. He does need some kind of healing... Thomas´ book has a little this rhetoric as well, of the evil and good, even if he shares some of the views in this article, the truth is Postmodernity was a humanizing force and he is obscuring that. The truth is also Architects build much better architecture than big Construction and engineering Groups. Architects are the humanist element of building construction, and corporate structures and financial funds are slowly finding architects superfluous, and bothersome, like in Thomas´ book. This book caters not to the passers-by but to a new corporate logic in building construction where they don't want architects so much, just to make a pretty facade, as the whole thesis of this book rests on. I think this is why Thomas didn't even bother to write it. It looks like a commission. When I have something to say I assure you I am going to write it myself. I couldn´t dictate this anyway, even if I wanted 😊 Writing happens writing, just like painting happens painting. In p.394 Thomas has a double spread that reads “Elephants in the room.” The Elephants in the room from 2023 are not “Go back to the past” nor “Too expensive” nor Decoration”, the elephants in the room are Google and their corporate peers. And why this book was giving me nausea. I have a fine detector for bullshit.
And so they think they won. Elon Musk, JD Vance and their people in that corporate sphere of power are going to use Trump to implement all the deregulation and attacks to our rights they possibly can. 175 millions is peanuts compare with what Elon Musk plans to make with their sociopath in da-house. But they are just losing everyday. And the USA is going to lose for 4 years now. We all are, but maybe it is necessary. THIS is the world we need to leave behind. I truly believe in a corporate system that is sustainable and kind, made from postmodern and not modern ideas. That it doesn´t enrich itself by disenfranchising others, by labor exploitation or damaging the planet.
As Jean Cocteau said “We must do today what everyone else will do tomorrow.”
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