Muscle Worship

The spread of the Covid pandemic across the world by spittle and sputum can be seen, perhaps perversely, through an ironic lens. In its original use, to conspire meant misting oneself in the malodorous perspirant of collective malfeasance. But the lockdown measures instituted in response to the virus, far from mitigating the conspiratorial contagion through the physical separation of groups, unleashed it, leading, according to some watchdogs, to a wave of political reaction that doesn’t flinch from the F-word. The psychosis that causes today’s resistance-trained young men to “associate sometimes real, positive change in their lives with fascism,” as one UK study picked up by the Guardian and other liberal news outlets reports, is nurtured not in strip-mall CrossFits or in meagerly furnished urban gyms but in the virtual rec rooms of Reddit. Subreddits, evidently, are full of big-brother admonishments to not sweat the small stuff, to keep at it and harden oneself in anticipation of the future battle with the purple-haired progeny of George Soros.

The prehistory of this “fascist fitness” is selectively covered in The Advanced School of Collective Feeling (2023). Mussolini’s platoon of architects—Luigi Moretti, Luigi Figini, and Franco Albini, among them—dreamt up modern palaestrae in which the new man planched and preened while reciting the party line. (“Believe, obey, fight” went the slogan.) By the looks of the rudimentary equipment, pumping iron had yet to take its place in right-wing liturgy; the persistence of gymnastic rings, rowing machines, and balance balls in these designs bespeaks a mannered, rather than martial, commitment to good trim. Only punching bags recall the hyperemic reflex that signposts conventional masculinity. A sly eroticism is easily conjured by all those taut climbing ropes and pulleys. Gossamer black netting, preposterously provisioned for privacy, courts kink. Veiny white marble glistens with the sudoriferous splendor of clenching bodies. To whom did they belong? The ideal user Moretti and his camerati envisioned was less black-shirted street tough or bootlicker than Nietzschean bureaucrat, suavely self-composed yet hellbent on unlocking the code of the future, which, of course, led directly to the past.

Curiously, modernism’s libidinal economy does not figure much in Nile Greenberg and Matthew Kennedy’s inventory of the protospaces of exercise. They are instead attentive to innovations in spatial program. More specifically, the seamless integration of fitness into the locus of modernist speculation: the home. Through the interventions of Marcel Breuer and Charlotte Perriand, who spent the latter half of her career in Japan, the dojo came to invade the domus. This incursion marks a progressive advance, according to the authors, because it “expanded and modernized ‘the domestic’ in such a way as to connect even an isolated inhabitant to a more collective project.”

For Greenberg and Kennedy, then, the modern is not merely a temporal marker or an aesthetic ascription. To a generation of artists and architects it served as an aspiration—a call to reimagine the inputs and configurations of culture. Art and life were to be made coterminous, one bleeding into the other. In the matter of transubstantiation, the crucial site is the body. Conflict roosts there, but so does imagination. The key idea is self-construction, and the cult of the modern body, the authors write, pressed heavily on the modernist project.

The Advanced School charts the developmental path of physical culture, beginning with Emile (1762), in which Rousseau expounds on the benefits of a “natural education” and the reciprocal merits of ballplaying and book learning. Greenberg and Kennedy shortcut this durée through a series of clever segues. The Turnplatz in Napoleonic Berlin was a petting zoo–like environ where young men, as initiates to the calisthenic craze spread by turnvater (“gym father”) Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, pommel-horsed their way to national sovereignty—or would have done so, had the conservative forces that soon succeeded in ousting the occupying French not padlocked the aerobic pen. Through the Second Empire orator François Delsarte, whose rule books stressed the importance of conveying “emotional truth” in performance, group calisthenics acquired a scenographic inflection. Acolytes of Delsarte (he died the year of the first German unification, the young turners’ foremost aspiration) spread the gospel of “harmonic gymnastics” to East Coast acting schools and subsequently to Hollywood, where adherents of Helios and Pheme were, by the late 1910s, publicizing the virtues of wellness and came to desire homes that reflected this preoccupation. Back on the Continent, “sport” was hailed by political agitators for its ability to inculcate collectivity among the demos on the road to socialism or, when it proved the easier route, fascism. A seeming detour through the perspiration lockers of the foregoing fasci points up the perils of muscle worship.

As a transatlantic idée fixe fusing Enlightenment rationality, thespian intensity, and the intoxications of “secret knowledge,” physical culture claimed to have access to the universal. Usually in history when this happens, a particular is elevated to a standard against which all others are found wanting. For the so called functionalists who are the protagonists of The Advanced School—a precocious Breuer and his politically dexterous don Gropius; the Marxist iceman of ideology Hannes Meyer, from whom Greenberg and Kennedy borrow their evocative title; Moretti, master of evasion; Perriand, delightful and sportif—that standard was a heteronormative male body. Evidently, among the dire exigences faced by interwar Europe was the housing of a new fraternal order of athletes, airmen, and administrators in bachelor pads with en suite saunas and tanning decks.

Projects such as Breuer’s House for a Sportsman, created for the Berlin Building Exposition of 1931, and Cesare Scoccimarro, Pietro Zanini, and Ermes Midena’s House for an Aviator, mounted at the 1933 Milan Triennale, fall neatly into the category of “exhibition architecture.” (Albini’s 1936 Room for a Man drops the Ken-doll descriptors altogether.) Though their motives varied—they ranged from guild showcases to commercial fillips—trade expos were also huge sinks for architectural invention, which allowed itself to be carried off by the winds of profligacy; so it is with hindsight that interwar critics can be excused for attaching the label, derogatorily, to Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich’s Villa Tugendhat (1930), located outside Brno in present-day Czechia. Among the hillside home’s extravagances was a retractable window wall, its burring motor buried in the basement, and the sumptuous regard for materials (“ebony, travertine, onyx, chromed steel, ‘milk glass,’” Greenberg and Kennedy enumerate) it shared with Mies and Reich’s Barcelona Pavilion of around the same date. Built for an industrialist and his family, the house served as a residence for only a few short years before entering an extended period of decline described from the book’s jump. Of the undignified uses thrust onto Tugendhat for the duration of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, it is its adaptation as a stable that rhymes with the fate of that other modernist imago, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s Villa Savoye (1931), which flunkies of the Wehrmacht had converted into a hayloft.

But Greenberg and Kennedy are more interested in the remodelings given to the Brno abode by successive occupants. Turnover was high. Stripped of its decorousnes—“first by German troops, then Soviet”—the bedraggled villa was taken over by an experimental institute whose founder, a local dance teacher, commandeered its open living spaces and expansive roof terrace in the name of physical culture. A rehabilitation clinic moved in next. Pictures from this chapter of the building’s life depict the synchronized movements of teenage girls undergoing spinal therapy. Seated cross-legged against a backdrop of gridded windows (perfunctory replacements for the expensive large panes of glass that had been destroyed years earlier), they hoist medicine balls above their heads as their instructor appears from behind an opulent freestanding onyx wall. Two pupils facing opposite directions back up against the same cruciform chrome column to reset their postures. These architectural details—the hallmarks of decadent transitional-period Mies—alone recall the place’s affluent origins.

Rather than lament the house’s drift from masterpiece to medical center (an unlikely course corrected by two subsequent reconstructions, the first occurring in the 1980s after the clinic closed and the second concluding around a decade ago), Greenberg and Kennedy structure their narrative around it. This casual perversion of program, they suggest, is not a defect but evidence of modernism’s commitment to possibility: Only an architecture of open-endedness could champion men of perfect poise as an archetype and yield, graciously, to the needs of fragile or imperfect bodies; parrot the superiority of masculine resolve and nurture the tremulous spirit of girlhood; enable a functionalism of fleshpots and furnish the machines with which to house all of humanity. Gazing back at the artifacts of Die Neue Welt—Meyer’s 1926 panegyric hailing Hollywood, modern industry, and the Mensendieck gymnastics system as forging a “world community” with a “common fate”—Greenberg and Kennedy aren’t struck by the hubris of their prescriptions; rather, in the remnants of failed utopias an aura of ambiguity prevails.

Failure is the register of modernist historiography. How could it not be? “The modern architecture of the 1920s and ’30s was above all characterized by a sweeping reconsideration of the rituals of daily life,” the pair write. Note the liturgical charge of that line: Modernism in its many modes attempted to shuffle off the weight of the fetishes of religion and tradition, but it did so by substituting the fetish of the human body. It doesn’t serve their argument for the authors to acknowledge this for what it is—a capitulation, and a politically ambivalent prelude to the programmatic dehumanization of bodies and the largest military catastrophe in history. Even so, they assert (echoing Jürgen Habermas) that World War II

Contested as a site of political and cultural speculation before the war, the future became the exclusive property of the US State Department and its corporate beneficiaries after it. In 1953, at the behest of the Tile Council of America, Breuer produced a mock-up for a “bathroom of the future,” complete with a built-in vanity, glittering tesserae, and inappositely, a boxer’s speed bag suspended above the bathtub. The design, which appended a walled-in court for sunbathing, recalled the tentative, mirrored interiority of Richard Neutra’s Mensendieck House in Palm Springs of fifteen years earlier but with none of the erotic frisson. Only the presence of an Eames fiberglass armchair, released in 1950, inaugurating the midcentury as we have come to know it, gestures at novelty. The molded plastic scoop resting on a cat’s cradle of thin metal supports is unassuming to the point of inanity. Its guileless, somewhat obtuse pose—it’s impossible to imagine Christine Keeler straddling an Eames—denotes the qualities that the art directors of the Pax Americana would soon come to embrace: affable, anerotic, commodifiable. Modernity you could feel yourself at home in.

The gap between function and “livability” is where modernist architecture tells on itself or becomes extremely interesting, depending on where one’s aesthetic and political sympathies lie. Because The Advanced School draws so heavily from exhibition architecture and so little from, say, the workers’ housing built in social-democratic Frankfurt or revolutionary Moscow, whose designs really did try to break with bourgeois mores while also providing for the individual dweller, it will likely frustrate those who find themselves aligned with the latter camp. The authors also fail to meaningfully engage with critiques bemoaning “the undeniably Eurocentric bent of the modern canon,” however dogmatic and pervasively banal they have become.

If Greenberg and Kennedy can be accused of tunnel vision, the tunnel isn’t very long. The large-font text runs just forty-five pages, with archival photographs, line drawings, and clip art–like caricatures padding out the remaining two-thirds of the book. The photographs make for an engaging portfolio, all gamboling Bauhauslers and terrace-dwelling ingénues, creatures of sun and good cheer. The picture-book cartoons, which abstract their supple shapes as though using police chalk, are filler. Wedged between them are a series of floor plans, the purpose of which, presumably, is to register the gradual encroachment of balconies and galleries on the territory of supper and slumber. The effect of the drawing style (denuded of color/fill, with contextual cues abstracted away) is anodyne, not unlike the ironizing genericness that gives cover for the mild hero worship evident in Greenberg’s design work (imagine Mies on Quaaludes). Indeed, for a book about stimulus, its contents discursively unfold at the pace of a resting heart rate, spiking only in the final pages of the text where the authors articulate the need for a cultural revolution in the here and now. Perhaps this is fitting: Manuals advertising the advantages of a particular exercise regimen are prone to tedium and hyperbole.

The question remains: Does a proclivity toward fitness make one a fascist? The connection is faintly insinuated by Theodor Adorno’s F scale, a questionnaire (one of several) prepared in 1947 for the purposes of rooting out fascoid tendencies among the American public. The section relating “power and ‘toughness’” to the “authoritarian personality” would seem to be relevant, where toxic appeals to virility (or the “exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness”) and conspiracy fuse in the clammy exertions of the gym. To share breath with one’s fellow dumbbell is to inhale the vapors of misinformation. Funny ideas hitch a ride on rivulets of sweat. Plosives are micro projectiles, aerosolizing anomic feeling. So slicked, the gym becomes a breeding ground not just for staph but also snotty crotchets about biological determinism and the despotism of a soy-based diet.

But the F scale and the wider project of sociological typecasting are bunk. (Or else, what are we to make of the unofficial and cheekily named Swole Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America, a groupuscule of Harringtonian he-men formed in parallel with the would-be carabinieri who have struck fear in the hearts of so many liberal news pundits?) To argue otherwise is to ratchet up a keyboard Kulturkampf that keeps us on the treadmill, kicking up discursive dust while remaining, stultifyingly, in place. As for the edifying political postulates signified by polished chrome and abstemious solaria, these, too, are illusory. The Advanced School magnifies a peculiar facet of modernism, with the aim of refracting its light onto the present. The view is a bit dim, but the authors at least get the vibe right: A politics that aims for cultivating “collective feeling” is immensely preferrable to one that invokes “the collective body.”