I read Owen Hatherley’s assessment of the C20 monograph series (“Buildingsromans,” #46/47) with great interest, as a fellow admirer—and sometime scholar—of postwar British architecture, particularly that “anonymous” stuff that makes up the everyday urban environment. I share his belief in both the quality of much of the municipal architecture that was produced for the welfare state in Britain and elsewhere and in the importance of its preservation and adaptation as a matter of cultural and political urgency. And I likewise share his belief that the history and theory of buildings should be made broadly accessible through the institutions of architecture and the work of architectural historians, as it was to great effect in the postwar period.
But certainly contributors to NYRA are not above the historical bloviating that Hatherley condemns. (Indeed, bloviating might even be the magazine’s house style. Criticism without a little bloviation is like a steak-frites without a glass of red wine—what’s the point?) However predictable it may have been, I was confounded by Hatherley’s assertion that American architects like Herman Jessor and Roland A. Wank “changed far more people’s lives than a Louis Kahn or a Peter Eisenman ever could.” One understands of course what Hatherley is insinuating with his attack on the coastal elite (a dangerous game in Trump’s America and a bit rich from a Goldsmith’s-educated Londoner), but it would appear he misses two crucial points. First, the “anonymous” architects he celebrates were educated by people (who were educated by people); they read books; they were affected by what they saw in the magazines. How many lives have been changed by the influence of an Andrea Palladio or a Mies van der Rohe on the design of the ordinary buildings that ordinary people inhabit? Without the formal and theoretical models of a Louis Kahn or a Peter Eisenman—two of the most influential American architects of the second half of the twentieth century—we would not have the same American architectural culture (to say nothing of global architectural culture) that we have now. Of course one might dislike that culture and the institutions—from the Ivy League to the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies—that have fostered it (and fostered this little socialist rag as well). But one cannot argue with its profound influence on generations of both “anonymous” and more well-known architects who have built much of the public, and private, architecture in America over the past sixty years or so. Every day I pass office parks in my suburban environs that bear the indelible imprint of Kahn; I would venture to guess that no educator has educated more leaders of architecture schools than Peter Eisenman has. The architecture produced under the direct and indirect influence of architects like Kahn and Eisenman has arguably changed just as many (and likely many more) lives than Jessor or Wank’s buildings have changed, whatever their no doubt considerable aesthetic and social merits.
The second point Hatherley misses is the sheer number of people who have been in Kahn’s and Eisenman’s actual buildings. Some have perhaps even been changed by them. In addition to the usual handful of small houses, commercial buildings and public facilities, Kahn is architect of art museums and academic buildings across the United States, a factory, a university campus in India, and the parliamentary complex of Bangladesh, the eighth most populous country in the world; Eisenman is also an architect of buildings on large university campuses, as well as a convention center, a professional football stadium that has hosted three Super Bowls, a cultural complex in one of the most significant religious pilgrimage sites in the world, and the vast Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005) in the center of Berlin, all projects that have been visited by millions since they were built. These are not architects who merely bloviated and doodled—though, of course, those who bloviate and doodle tend to have unparalleled influence on the course of ordinary built architecture for ordinary people. (See Le Corbusier, without whose model the architecture of the British welfare state would have been very different indeed.)
But even if Kahn and Eisenman were just bloviators and doodlers, what’s the point of this bit of transatlantic culture war? As Hatherley knows well, the dissolution of the social fabric that architecture once played an essential role in constructing is not the responsibility of those architects who are committed to rigorous formal and theoretical expression—particularly those like Kahn or Eisenman who would happily have built more public buildings should they have had the opportunity. Rather the dissolution of public life—and with it, democracy and free expression—is the responsibility of those rapacious capitalists and corrupt politicians for whom all good leftists should save their ire.