The Architecture of Influence: The Myth of Originality in the Twentieth Century by Amanda Reeser Lawrence. University of Virginia Press, 280 pp., $50.
In the introduction to his magisterial 2012 book The Future of Architecture Since 1889, the late historian Jean-Louis Cohen commented that he found it “impossible to limit a history of the relationships structuring twentieth-century architecture to a list of aesthetic ‘influences,’”—a term, he adds, that he has “consciously avoided.” In this desire to move beyond his predecessors’ influence-based approaches, Cohen was hardly alone. Important new works of architectural history are more likely to deal with such varied topics as the politics of construction labor, the exercise of colonial authority through building projects, or the patterns of usage of a particular building type than with the influence of, say, Frank Lloyd Wright on Mies van der Rohe. As the field has concerned itself with architecture’s implication in the workings of the world, its prior emphasis on delineating those internal linkages has faded.
Amanda Reeser Lawrence, a professor at Northeastern University, feels that the pendulum has swung too far. Her recent book The Architecture of Influence: The Myth of Originality in the Twentieth Century (2023) makes the case that despite its shortcomings, influence remains an indispensable tool of analysis for historians. Lawrence’s conception of the term is rather traditional. Taking a cue from the historian Sigfried Giedion, she draws connections between buildings through visual pairings: Mies’s Farnsworth House (1951) is paired off with Philip Johnson’s Glass House (1949), and Le Corbusier’s La Tourette monastery (1960) with Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles’s Boston City Hall (1968). Lawrence frames this as an act of “recuration,” prompting us to “imagine [that] the paintings in a museum were removed from their long-standing placement within a room focused on a time period or an artistic movement, and instead shuffled into new groupings based on color, subject, size, or, more pointedly, their shared attitudes toward earlier works.”
Often spending no more than a few pages on each work, Lawrence moves briskly through the last hundred years of American architecture, sorting projects into seven categories of influence. The Glass House is a “copy” of the Farnsworth House (despite having been completed earlier, as Johnson had caught glimpse of Mies’s proposal before even lifting a pencil), whereas Boston City Hall is an “emulation” of La Tourette; “revivals” include Peter Eisenman’s experimental houses of the 1970s that riffed on Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s purist villas of the 1920s. A few quirkier buildings appear, too, like the Parthenon constructed for the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition in Nashville (a “replica” of the Athenian original) and Julia Morgan’s Hearst Castle on the central coast of California (a madcap “compilation” of a variety of precedents built in stages from 1919 to 1947). In each case, Lawrence supplements visual comparison—she often places similar views of two buildings next to each other à la an art history slide comparison—with summary narrative.
The primary conclusion that Lawrence draws from all this is, as she puts it, “that pure originality is a myth, that all architecture inevitably comprises mixes and mashups and derivatives and generalizations of earlier ideas, and, most importantly, that this fundamental unoriginality in no way diminishes creativity but rather enables it.” Instead of looking down on derivative projects, Lawrence suggests we celebrate the many ways in which they repurpose or reconfigure history. The book’s title refers to the literary critic Harold Bloom’s well-known The Anxiety of Influence (1973), but Lawrence pushes back against Bloom’s emphasis on difficulty and struggle. “The exchange between past and present emerges as a place of ecstasy rather than unease,” she writes, positing influence “as an enaction of critical and interpretive jouissance.” This affective recasting—the suggestion that the value of influence lies in the creative pleasure it affords—leads Lawrence to write in positive terms of almost every project she discusses and to make architects like Johnson, who spent much of his career clumsily adapting other people’s work, into rather easy protagonists. The persistent villains of her study, by contrast, are critics with a bugbear for “unoriginality.” It is on these grounds that Lawrence argues for the importance of the Glass House, claiming that Johnson’s “copy” transformed how Mies’s “original” was received and understood. She later extends this thinking to Johnson and partner John Burgee’s much-maligned 1986 University of Houston College of Architecture, the façade of which imitates an unbuilt scheme by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. (The two designs appear on the book cover.) Johnson himself did not consider the university project to be very successful, as Lawrence herself noted in an earlier journal article. Nonetheless, she claims here that “the hostility” of critics toward it—Franz Schulze, Johnson’s biographer, memorably called it an “exercise in stylistic disentombment”—reflected a refusal to consider copying “a legitimate aspect of architectural design.”
This affective recasting—the suggestion that the value of influence lies in the creative pleasure it affords—leads Lawrence to write in positive terms of almost every project she discusses and to make architects like Johnson, who spent much of his career clumsily adapting other people’s work, into rather easy protagonists.
Lawrence is persuasive in suggesting that even as literal a replica as the Nashville Parthenon decontextualizes and reconfigures the past—in that case, by co-opting ancient Greek form to assert American dominance and romanticize the history of the antebellum South. And she is right that originality is prized and even fetishized in architecture, as in other fields: A work’s being novel is often a justification for its being considered significant. Understanding the cultural and economic forces that drove originality to become so important in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is an important task, with ramifications for how design is conceived today. But those interested in this line of thought would be better served reading Boris Groys’s On the New (Verso, 2014) than The Architecture of Influence, as Lawrence prefers to argue against originality rather than historicize it. This leads her to treat novelty as monolithic and to overestimate the significance of her assertions. Sorting works into copies and replicas is not nearly as provocative as Lawrence seems to believe, and one wonders whether the myth of “pure originality” is still a worthy target of criticism in 2024. In the 1960s and 1970s, rebellious young architects, building on the work of historians like Rudolf Wittkower and Colin Rowe, undermined dominant modes of modernism by pointing out that they were less original than they seemed, instead arguing for an architecture that exposed its links to the past. The success of those arguments is precisely what prompted Johnson and his contemporaries to begin selling historicist façades to wealthy clients throughout the 1980s. Does Lawrence mean to call for a return to the gleeful days when Johnson served up warmed-over Ledoux in Houston, and Disney, with the assistance of Robert A. M. Stern and others, built an entire faux-historic town in central Florida? If not, she needs to explain what makes her argument different from those earlier ones (even if not entirely “original”) and to address the risk of an architecture of unoriginality morphing into Stern-style populism for the rich. But such explanations are nowhere to be found.
The Architecture of Influence contains a number of factual errors. The CATIA system used in the design of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao (1997) was not the firm’s “proprietary software” but was developed by a French aircraft maker. Joseph Giovannini was never the architecture critic for the New York Times. And Eisenman did not study “within a Beaux-Arts framework at Princeton”; he attended Cornell before going on to receive graduate degrees at Columbia and the University of Cambridge. Then there is the much larger matter of the Glass House. Summarizing a 1950 essay in which Johnson enumerates his design influences, Lawrence takes notice of the architects he cites—Mies, Le Corbusier, Ledoux. But she overlooks one source. The brick cylinder that Johnson describes as the house’s “main motif,” was, he writes in his essay, “not derived from Mies but rather from a burnt wooden village I saw once where nothing was left but foundations and chimneys of brick.” Johnson encountered this chilling scene on a 1939 trip sponsored by Germany’s Nazi regime, during which he accompanied German military units as they invaded Poland, setting down his impressions in a series of fawning dispatches for American audiences.
Glass House Kristin Tata
Why, in a book on influence, in a section on a house whose architect went so far as to publish a list of his influences, does Lawrence feel the need to leave out only the one that is fascist—and indeed to never mention Johnson’s well-known support for Hitler? It isn’t just Johnson: Lawrence sidesteps the political affiliations of almost all the figures she discusses. There is no room in her conception of influence for sources associated with political, social, cultural, or religious movements, nor for cities or places that are not already famous within architectural history. The problem is not an excessive focus on aesthetics: As the example of the Glass House demonstrates, such broader sources of influence are of great importance both in the design and the study of built form. The problem is rather the rigid bounding of a canon, the insistent limiting of influence to the relationship between one celebrated building and another, one illustrious architect and another. The critiques of canonicity that have become prevalent in recent years—and for good reason—are not so much disputed as ignored.
This narrowness is also what prevents Lawrence from achieving another of her stated aims, counteracting the veneration of the lone “architectural ‘genius.’” In practice, Lawrence’s method props up rather than unravels this myth. By treating canonical architects as the primary figures from whom influence emanates and upon whom it acts, she effaces the countless others who shaped the buildings discussed; project teams, contractors, engineers, clients, et al. are all rendered secondary if not invisible. Lawrence asks us to see the line of influence between the Farnsworth House and the Glass House as bidirectional, but all this does is shuffle around pieces that were already on the chessboard: We continue to speak of Mies and Johnson instead, say, of Edith Farnsworth. Even Denise Scott Brown is left out of a section on Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown’s Franklin Court project of 1976.
The critiques of canonicity that have become prevalent in recent years—and for good reason—are not so much disputed as ignored.
Near the end of the book, Lawrence invokes “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir,” Manfredo Tafuri’s 1974 essay on the conceptual extravagances of architects like Eisenman. Yet she misses Tafuri’s point. The Italian historian, too often tarred as a miserabilist, did not castigate Eisenman for abandoning the utopianism of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes: The prescription he offered was for criticism, not architecture. Criticism, he argued, needed to shoulder the task of breaking the “magic circle” that such work drew around itself—instead of taking Eisenman’s formal games on their own terms, it needed to assess how that hermetic retreat from utopian ambition was forced by political and economic conditions that precluded societal transformation.
Lawrence is right, I think, that influence is worth taking seriously, for regardless of whether historians are paying attention, influence continues to shape how architects and the public alike conceive of aesthetics. But critics and historians need to do so by breaking the magic circle surrounding both influence and originality and interrogating how these concepts structure pervasive ways of seeing the world. However enchanting and pleasurable it may be, endlessly rearranging the paintings in the museum cannot substitute for the difficult work of asking why the museum needed to be built, why some works gained entry to its collection while others did not, and why it continues to hold such allure today.