“I once saw the owners of [“modern” houses] driven to the edge of sensory deprivation by the white & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & sparseness of it all. They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness and colour.”
-Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe’s “From Bauhaus to Our House” explores chronologically the development of architecture’s International and Modern style, primarily focusing on one, single quality that architects have sought about to bring into their ‘new’ design- “non-bourgeoisity”. First outlining the cause of the upheaval against aristocratic architecture, Wolfe went on to mock the race to achieve the Bauhaus quality and to publish new manifestos - “The battle to be the least bourgeois of all became somewhat loony.”. Many of the time, whether something is bourgeoise or not is subjected to the reasoning and the perception of each designer or critic. I do agree here and think that how “the building design itself [has been] directed at “illustrating this month’s Theory of the Century” has resulted in some impractical constructions while those that are “worth it” are left in the shadows. Take the infamous Pruitt-Igoe project as an example. The scale itself, reflecting the economicalness and the grandeur of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, is foreshadowing - a complex consisting of 33 buildings each 11 stories high, all laid out on a 57-acre land. The structure is designed with covered walkways being the main circulation route which only provides a public space to commit crime. The skip-stop lift system, which only stop at the 1st, 4th, 7th and 10th floor, initially designed to encourage intermingling of residents, only add to the problem. It was later found that this system is unsuitable and dangerous, as it provides opportunity for planned molestation. Of course, such rigid system that is causing problem is pulled down in 1972.
To speak of American’s perception of the European as those that have accomplished a higher level of artistic and intellectual achievement , Wolfe’s text only endorse and give evidence to such phenomenon. In fact, this is used as the very reason of how the Bauhaus movement is imported into the American culture. Wolfe criticises how this is unsuitable, as the context in which the architecture is put in is different. The state of Europe at that moment when the movement was founded lend itself nicely to the school’s motto: “starting from zero” - Germany in rubbles, “crushed in the war and humiliated at the Versailles”, while America rises from the mist of the war unharmed, placing herself at the top of the Western world.
However, the American was not greatly influenced, at least, in the mid- and latter part of the 20th century, as we see the emergence of new and radical, though casted into anathema at the time, architects such as Eero Saarinen and Edward Stone. I was particularly impresses by how Saarinen managed to break out of the cuboid mold and instead establish user-environment dialogues through the use of space and form. His TWA terminal significantly defied the Modernist’s ideal - though it made use of honest materials (concrete, metal and glass), the structure exhibits a curve-linear roof (instead of a flat-topped one) and an expressionistic zoomorphism- an eagle which makes the form of the architecture itself. These kinds of building provides the much needed “antidote”, giving us structures that are not engulfed by the “white & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & sparseness”, as said by Wolfe, “of it all”.
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