Despite Appearances

Mark Foster Gage, the Robert A. M. Stern Professor of Architecture at Yale University, wants to build a “world that is more humane, habitable, beautiful, and just.” This, he believes, is to be achieved by improving the aesthetic quality of the built environment. In the preface to On the Appearance of the World, published in the University of Minnesota’s Forerunners series, he tells us how he arrived at this insight. Riding his 1200cc Triumph Bonneville motorcycle from San Francisco to New York allowed him the “contemplative solitude” from which to survey the tragic state of all points in between. “There are no Parises, Kyotos, Sydneys, or Romes between the American coasts,” he laments. Gage, unless intending some geographical revelation, is unhappy about the appearance of the flyover states. This, he argues, is all the fault of “twentieth-century architectural practices and urban theories,” as demonstrated by the “appalling ugliness” of cities like Reno, Omaha, and Des Moines.

Gage attributes his insight to the unique perspective of having “unfiltered and over-whelming access to appearances around you,” an advantage to be enjoyed, or in this case not, from the saddle of an expensive motorcycle. Maybe, as he rode through Iowa, he took advantage of there being no state law requiring motorcyclists to wear a helmet to get closer still to the appalling ugliness. In any case, he reports his dismay at the appearance of the “office boxes clad in featureless glass, beige stucco strip malls, endless parking lots, and even more endless … suburban sprawl.” He is not wrong. These are the familiar features of the built environment of the US. But we need to look deeper than immediate impressions to understand how this came to be.

Before what is now known as Iowa was seized by European settlers, 80 percent of its land consisted of tallgrass prairie. Today, less than 0.1 percent of the original ecosystem remains. But even from what little prairie is left, one can imagine the kind of beauty the entirety of Iowa once possessed. The landscape now—small pockets of urban and suburban settlement in a sea of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and cornfields and even the roads on which Gage rides his motorcycle—is the product of an ongoing environmental catastrophe visited on the Indigenous peoples and ecologies of the Midwest. Beyond the fleeting impressions of the traveler there is, after all, a historical reason for the “appearance of the world.”

Gage adopts an equally unreflective perspective on twentieth-century suburban sprawl. “It takes no particular genius,” he writes, “to connect the dots between aesthetics being removed from architectural education in the years surrounding World War I and a subsequent century of fantastically ugly and inhumane built environments produced by architects almost completely ignorant of aesthetics as a discourse.” Not only is the connection he proposes, by his own admission, “entirely unprovable,” the existence of the dots connected is questionable. Gage is unwilling or unable to furnish the reader with any evidence of the removal of aesthetics from architectural curricula in the 1910s.

Gage follows the preface, in which these remarks appear, with one chapter on ancient Greece and the history of aesthetics and another on the relationship between aesthetics and architecture, art, and perception. He then presents and passes judgment on a series of aesthetic categorizations of his own definition. This series self-servingly progresses from “The Anti-Aesthetic,” which according to Gage is the worst kind, to “Speculative Aesthetics”—in which “aesthetic qualities convey a gestalt sense of the set of ideals that the designer has for the future of the built environment”—which is the best. In the chapter “Architecture’s Aesthetic Allergy,” he claims that modernism is to blame for the suppression of aesthetics in the built environment throughout the twentieth century and on to the present day. Gage cites Le Corbusier’s call for the “rational contemplation of form” in Towards a New Architecture (1923) as evidence, but it isn’t clear that this is the suppression of aesthetics that Gage takes it to be, unless you think that reasoning and sensing, or thinking and seeing, are essentially opposed ways of experiencing the world. This position would, anyway, be difficult to defend without ignoring Le Corbusier’s work: Consider the “purist” paintings, the colored walls, and the expressive use of concrete, to give just a few examples of his far from antiaesthetic output.

Some elaboration on the sweeping assertion that the architecture of the twentieth-century built environment is universally “ugly and inhumane” would have also been useful. Certainly examples to confirm his claim—Gage provides none—could be called up, but so too could counterexamples. Without discussion of either, or of the criteria of judgment being applied, we are left only with Gage’s word to go on. That word, like much of what Gage has to say in On the Appearance of the World and elsewhere, comes from an anticritical position that first appeared in the elite architectural schools of the US, as well as in London’s Architectural Association, almost three decades ago. In Gage’s version of this position, architecture theory and history have been excessively concerned with the social and historical context of architecture, and it is now high time to address form and appearance. Not the least issue with this proposition is that if you confine your understanding of architecture to its appearance, you are going to miss all the ways that architecture, including its appearance and form, is often an instrument of power, wealth, and oppression.

Gage, for instance, doesn’t acknowledge the entirely provable fact that suburbanization was purposefully employed in the US as a tool of racial segregation. Rather than the product of “urban theory,” it was motivated by money, undergirded by structural racism, and facilitated by the development of road transport. Following World War II, the Federal Housing Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs provided loans to prospective homebuyers, excluding Black buyers and favoring those wanting to purchase places in the suburbs. This policy also ensured that these new homeowners, now tied to long-term mortgage commitments, saw that their financial interests were tied to those of capitalism at the time of the Cold War and the second Red Scare.

In Gage’s account, however, the main issue with suburbanization is its ugliness, for which the alleged failings of architectural education are held responsible. This also requires us to believe that those who moved to the suburbs did so despite their ugliness. In fact, the aesthetics of most midcentury suburban housing was carefully calculated to appeal to the consumer’s simultaneous demands for modernization and homeliness through such features as brick fireplaces and floor-to-ceiling windows. Elements of prairie and ranch styles were also incorporated to evoke the settler mythos of American family life. Perhaps such consideration is absent from Gage’s book because it smacks of the kind of critical and “neo-marxist” thinking he not only abhors but finds culpable, along with architectural education and modernism, for the “appalling ugliness” of everything in the built environment between New York and California. For Gage, critical theory no longer has “anything further to offer to architecture.”

The “hard anti-aesthetic position” established with modernism, claims Gage, was further consolidated by something that “would later come to be called the ‘Critical Project’ in architecture.” This term, capitalized as a proper name, is not something that has ever been in established usage in architecture or its criticism. What it does here, though, is summon up the foreboding presence of some dark force overseeing the suppression of aesthetics in architecture over the past century. This Critical Project then serves as the foil against which Gage can project his righteous condemnation of the “ugliness” of the built environment.

Gage argues that the Critical Project has concerned itself with revealing “the underlying, and often unseen political, social, and economic power structures in which we live.” As a brief description of the agenda of critical theory, that sentence is fair. But from it Gage arrives at an untenable conclusion: that the “Frankfurt School” and “Marxist critical theory” are antiaesthetic foes that, like modernism, must be defeated so that aesthetics can live once more. No matter that Theodor Adorno, probably the single most significant Marxist critical theorist of the twentieth century, devoted the better part of his substantial writings to music and culture, or that his magnum opus was dedicated to and titled Aesthetic Theory (1970). Never mind that critical theory originated from the thought of Kant and Hegel, essential figures in the philosophy of aesthetics. To be suspicious of appearances is not the same as being opposed to the enjoyment of appearances. You can enjoy how a building looks and criticize the ends to which it is used. You can even explore the thought that the one might be somehow related to the other.

But On the Appearance of the World has no room for such thinking. (What anticritical theorist would want to be caught thinking dialectically, after all?) The book instead leaves readers with false choices between speciously opposed terms: reasoning and feeling, criticism and enjoyment, politics and beauty. To paraphrase a well-worn piece of business humor: You don’t have to be a Hegelian to see that these oppositions can be overcome, but it helps. Maybe we can agree with Gage that strip malls and parking lots are ugly. But is the solution for architects to be properly educated in aesthetics? Does Mark Foster Gage Architects, presumably practicing what they preach, design strip malls in the Midwest? No. They design for the superrich in the Gulf region—a spa resort and luxury hotel for the Neom development in Saudi Arabia, for instance. Does Peter Zumthor, widely recognized for his concern with making architecture beautiful, design office blocks in Omaha? Also no. He designs thermal spas in Switzerland and museums in Los Angeles. Let’s connect those dots and note that this happens because architecture follows the flow of capital—and not because architects themselves choose to be mercenaries for hire (though some do) but rather because they are subject to the same economic pressures as everyone else. Strip malls are not designed by world-famous or Ivy League architects because there is no good economic reason for them to be. What they look like is what will do for those who use them, and what luxury resorts look like is what is required to attract the wealth of those who can afford to stay at them.

Gage is right that architecture matters because it establishes “the visual framework of human perception,” but changing the contents of that framework is not something that can be left to architects and their aesthetic sensibilities alone. It also cannot be achieved without critical reasoning. Approaching architecture solely through its appearance will not help you understand why things appear as they do or how they could appear otherwise. The aesthetics of architecture are driven by and for the accumulation of capital, where and when its movements determine. This is not an “anti-aesthetic” position; it is, more simply, a critical one.