https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0106-2460
Abstract
In December 1967 Oswald Mathias Ungers convened an international congress on “Architectural Theory” at the TU Berlin. The proceedings of this event were published in German one year later. Here, two excerpts from those proceedings are published in English for the first time: the opening address given by Ungers, and a lecture by Colin Rowe. Ungers’ welcoming remarks emphasise the importance of discussing architecture’s theoretical foundations in a time of mounting protests, major technological innovations and an intense phase of building activity in the city of Berlin. He openly questions whether historical insights remain relevant, or whether they burden contemporary practice. Rowe responds by dissecting architecture’s engagement with history. Rather than analysing the present situation, Rowe delves into modernism’s historical subconscious and demonstrates how the threat of crisis has been used to fuel two enduring myths: architects as saviours of society; and their buildings as an index of the times.
Introduction
Oswald Mathias Ungers convened the international congress on “Architectural Theory,” which took place at the Technische Universität (TU) Berlin from December 11 to 15, 1967. Such leading architectural historians and theoreticians as Reyner Banham, Kenneth Frampton, Sigfried Giedion, Jürgen Joedicke, Julius Posener, Colin Rowe, and Adolf Max Vogt were invited to speak.Footnote1 While Ungers is somewhat coy in his welcoming remarks, it is clear that the symposium aimed to draw attention to architectural theory as an academic subject that might confront current challenges and thus play a role in ongoing changes in architectural education, perhaps in the form of a new course incorporated into the curriculum of the TU Berlin. This early expression of faith in “architectural theory” (understood as a distinct model of intellectual inquiry, as it would continue to be until the 1990s) must be situated within the opening of architectural discourse to a broader range of methods from the humanities and social sciences, alongside the publication of important treatises on urban planning and environmental design theory, the founding of PhD programmes in History, Theory and Criticism at several American universities, and the appearance of new journals such as ARCH+ (first issue in 1967) and Oppositions (first issue in 1973), which presented themselves, at least to some degree, as journals of architectural theory.Footnote2
In Ungers’ opening address to the assembled speakers and audience, he questions whether architectural theory should be defined primarily in relation to “social phenomena, technical conditions, historical experience,” or “immanent formal laws.” Rather than answering this query in the moment, he keeps the debate open, and thus leaves a question mark hovering over each of the speakers across the next four days. Later, when reflecting on his motivations for organising the event, Ungers was more candid: “I wanted to revive the theoretical line of men such as Sörgel, Lipps, Semper, Wölfflin, Sitte, Hildebrand, Schmarsow, Riese, Worringer, Simmel, Frey, Behne, and others.”Footnote3 However inspiring, none of these untimely teachers is invoked in Ungers’ introductory remarks. Instead, he gestures at the possibility of a “kind of formal expression that is independent of history” and asks, pessimistically, “whether the historical experience that we have inherited can still be put to good use,” or whether it has become a burden, a kind of onerous “mortgage debt on our intellectual edifice.”
Ungers concludes his remarks with a cautionary tale borrowed from a different untimely teacher, namely Jonathan Swift. The story Ungers tells is based on Part III of Gulliver’s Travels in which the protagonist encounters the floating island of Laputa inhabited by an educated, but narrow-minded cohort of scientists who, for all their knowledge, fail to make any positive changes in the quality of life in their kingdom.Footnote4 Projecting back some forty years in time, Ungers reimagines the leaders of the modern movement as a group of scientists who somehow managed to visit Laputa.Footnote5 When they returned, they dreamt up “an academy of designers” tasked with conjuring up any number of outlandishly ambitious proposals. While these projects multiply, without ever reaching fruition, the country and its houses fall into ruin. Ungers’ retelling of Swift strikes an ominous tone, but the message is clear: may we not repeat the mistakes of the Laputans and their followers! This riff on the ivory tower of architectural academia can be read as a warning to the assembled architectural theorists but also from the critical viewpoint of the “at least two thousand” politically engaged students who attended the congress, and who were eager to work out how they, as future architects, could change society and the world.Footnote6
For Ungers, it was obvious that the congress on architectural theory also needed to respond to the social turbulence in Berlin. A wave of student protests had been set in motion against the perceived authoritarianism of the German government and capitalist exploitation more broadly. Tensions between the left-wing student movement and the authorities had been growing since 1966 and erupted on June 2, 1967. During a demonstration against the official state visit of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to West Berlin, a policeman shot a student, Benno Ohnesorg. His death fuelled the leftist radicalisation of student activism and the demand for the reform of education, media and political institutions. Spurred by the poor student housing conditions, the students at the TU Berlin were eager to interrogate the democratic character of urban planning, housing politics in relation to the building industry, and the architect’s role within the political system.
To this student audience, the theoretical and historical questions posed in the lectures of Sigfried Giedion, Kenneth Frampton and Colin Rowe seemed “superficial, or, at least, marginal.”Footnote7 Their deconstructions of the history and intellectual underpinnings of modernism, however critical, failed to resonate with the students’ own concerns. When Giedion presented his latest book and his schema of the three spatial conceptions, he was met with a round of full-throated “boos.” Students unrolled a banner reading “Alle Häuser sind schön, hört auf zu bauen” (“All houses are beautiful, stop building”), and stormed the conference hall, chasing the historians and theoreticians from the room. Soon after, in February and March 1968, major demonstrations against the Vietnam War engulfed the streets of Berlin. The “Stop Building” slogan expressed the students’ anti-authoritarian rejection of the system. Their act was also a clear demand for a more politicised approach to architectural education and architectural practice, focused on the city and its inhabitants.
Although Ungers must have understood that the “ruining” of the congress by the students, and their radicalisation, was part of a larger movement, in April 1968 he felt rejected and decided to leave the TU Berlin to teach at Cornell University, where Colin Rowe was among the staff.Footnote8 The conference had marked a turning point, which later acquired an almost mythical status in Ungers’ recollections. In the months before the congress, he had been working towards a set of reforms that would modernise architectural education and take the students’ concerns into account. Not only through his words, but through his actions, he had shown solidarity with their cause. On June 2, for example, he was the only faculty member who cancelled his studio and joined in the protest against the Shah’s state visit. Later, he criticised the police for having sought a confrontation. On another occasion he let students use his office to print leaflets.Footnote9 But when it came down to it, Ungers was neither a revolutionary nor a conservative. As he later reported, he had told the students: “You can have evolution with me but not a revolution; neither a revolution against objects nor against people.”Footnote10 By the end of 1967, he had lost the backing of the students as the gap widened between his reformist position and their increasing radicalism.
Colin Rowe, by contrast, was an apolitical man who, in the words of Ungers, “did not understand the Zeitgeist.”Footnote11 Rowe had little sympathy for the students’ political activities, and because of this disinterest, they seemed to have little appreciation for his intervention. Rowe’s contribution to the congress, translated here, was nevertheless an original and nuanced attempt to dispel the illusion that modernist architecture is a discipline based on rational principles and modes of action. His lecture, “Crisis in the Culture Cabinet,” works through a sequence of quotations from modernist architects and their defender-interpreters to show the pervasive and blinding role played by two foundational myths. According to the first historicist myth, the modernist architect is a prophet, propelled towards the future by the current of time, uniquely capable of anticipating and interpreting the Zeitgeist. In the second myth of the Golden Age, the architect assumes the mantle of the saviour of society. They alone can avert the imminent catastrophe and build a “New Jerusalem.” By unmasking both of these myths as the myopic fictions that they are, Rowe attempts to deconstruct and discredit the utopian foundations of modernist architectural discourse—a theme which resonates with Ungers’ earlier invocation of the misguided Laputans. While the majority of Rowe’s remarks do the work of dismantling, there are a few moments where he reveals a faint glimpse of what might come out of all his demystification, namely the return of a historically enriched formalism.Footnote12
One must envision Rowe delivering his indictments of the early-twentieth-century interpreters of modernism in front of several of the key figures themselves. He does not shy away from quoting Giedion and Banham, who were among his fellow presenters at the conference and presumably among the audience for his talk. While Rowe continued to develop many of these ideas in his subsequent publications, the oral mode of presentation here seems to bring an urgency and an immediacy to the argument. At the same time, the high density of quotations, even by Rowe’s standards, sets the lecture apart from the other contributions to the congress. Since these quotations were originally read aloud and then presumably translated into German for the published proceedings, the editorial team at the TU Berlin chose not to take the additional step of providing attributions. Here, in the translated version we have traced the quotations back to the English-language publications that Rowe was most likely to have used. This work has revealed “Crisis in the Culture Cabinet” to be a particularly fecund seedbed for Rowe’s later writings. Many of the quotations and references produced here re-appear in texts such as Neoclassicism and Modern Architecture (1973), Collage City (1979), and most notably in Rowe’s late book-length essay The Architecture of Good Intentions: Towards a Possible Retrospect (1994), drawn from the Preston H. Thomas Memorial Lectures he delivered under the same title at Cornell in 1982. In this work Rowe devotes entire chapters to concepts introduced more concisely in Berlin: on “Epistemology,” “Iconography” and “Eschatology.”
Of these three themes, it is the latter, “Eschatology,” concerned with the study of “last things,” that comes closest to the untimely. But being a projection backwards from the future, it is a different kind of untimely than most of the other examples explored in this issue—and a singularly dangerous deployment of the concept in Rowe’s diagnosis. Moving in the opposite direction, the idea that one might counter an all-consuming presentism by turning to an untimely past is hinted at in Rowe’s lecture but never explicitly described. “Crisis in the Culture Cabinet” is not an indictment of history per se. Rather, Rowe’s significant efforts are directed towards a freeing of historical enquiry from its misguided use by any who claim to give voice to the Zeitgeist. In one telling passage, Rowe states that “architecture’s very modernity and its awareness of ‘time’ secretly mean that the architect is obliged to function as a historian.” But it is the secretive nature of this function that poses the problem, not the historical awareness itself. Modern architects failed by doing their historical interpretation clandestinely. What would a more open engagement with history look like? In Berlin, Rowe does not offer many clues and, in this respect, he is revealed to have more sympathy with the student protesters than he realised. Both were busy dismantling systems before either had clearly articulated an alternative.
Oswald Matthias Ungers—Introduction to the Symposium
Ladies and Gentlemen,
On behalf of the faculty, I would like to welcome you to the opening of the symposium on architectural theory and architectural criticism. We are very pleased that our initiative has been so well received by everyone taking part and—as I am happy to observe—it has also been received with great interest by the public.
When we decided to organise this symposium about half a year ago, we started with the idea that after a period of extensive construction activity, and on the cusp of development on an even larger scale, it was a good time to investigate architecture’s theoretical foundations. It was not yet entirely clear which phenomena should serve as the basis for a theoretical framework, or what kind of findings we might expect. We wondered whether social phenomena, technical conditions, historical experiences, or immanent formal laws should primarily be recognised as the planes of reference.
We are facing new challenges in society, which is something I certainly don’t need to explain to you here in Berlin. The emergence of different communities, interest groups and forms of opposition is not some random, temporary phenomenon, but one that must be taken absolutely seriously.
In the technical field, completely new methods and procedures are being developed. Computer technology will not fail to have an impact on architecture, and mass production continues to have aesthetic and theoretical consequences. Just think of the prognoses regarding population growth and the automation that will inevitably follow. The question must be asked whether the historical experience that we have inherited can still be put to good use, or whether it is merely a mortgage debt on our intellectual edifice that incurs unnecessary interest and needs to be paid off as soon as possible.
Finally, the question arises: Is there such a thing as a manifestation of immanence in the formal? A formal expression that is independent of history, independent of the respective technical means of realisation and of social references? We had a seminar here at the university last week with Peter and Alison Smithson that dealt with the related question of neutrality as a consciously formal attitude towards reality, independent of historical circumstances.
In view of what I have very briefly touched on here, the symposium, which has no explicit theme as such—and deliberately so—does contain the following content, and I do believe that a theme will emerge from the presentations.
To begin with, what phenomena can be identified and what insights can be drawn from them, and furthermore, can any hypotheses be derived, and can any conclusive theories be put forward based on these hypotheses? The symposium will—I hope—reveal if this is possible. But it will already have fulfilled its purpose if it simply provides some food for thought on the theoretical foundations of architecture.
The symposium would not have been possible without generous financial support from various sources. Funding was provided by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), the Senator für Bau- und Wohnungswesen (Senator for Construction and Housing), and from the Technical University, with particular support from the Rector.Footnote13 I would very much like to thank everyone for their help.
To conclude the introduction and to mark the start of the symposium, here is a short story, ever so slightly modified, that I have borrowed from the “ages.”
Some forty years ago, a number of people made their way to Laputa. After staying there for five days, they returned with very superficial knowledge, but with a host of fanciful ideas. Upon their return, these people began to take a dislike to everything, and they made plans to overhaul the way the arts were organised on a brand new basis.
To this end, they obtained a royal patent to establish an academy of designers, and in this college, the professors set about inventing new rules for architecture.
Their project is based on the principle of one man doing the work of ten; a palace is to be built in a week from materials so durable that it will stand forever without needing repair. All the fruits of the earth shall ripen whatever the season, and yield one hundred percent more than they currently do. A number of similarly feelgood proposals were made, with the only drawback being that none of these projects is ever realised. In the meantime, the whole country lies fallow and desolate, the houses are falling apart, and the inhabitants are left without clothes and food. Instead of being discouraged, the designers pursue their plans with fifty times the vigour, driven on by hope and despair.
One might almost believe that Jonathan Swift had an inkling more than two hundred years ago of what was going to take place here between the 11th and 15th of December 1967. Woe betide him if his suspicions are confirmed!
Colin Rowe—Crisis in the Culture Cabinet
Reyner Banham concludes his book Theory and Design in the First Machine Age with the following words:
It may well be that what we have hitherto understood as architecture, and what we are beginning to understand of technology are incompatible disciplines. The architect who proposes to run with technology knows now that he will be in fast company, and that, in order to keep up, he may have to emulate the Futurists and discard his whole cultural load, including the professional garments by which he is recognised as an architect. If, on the other hand, he decides not to do this, he may find that a technological culture has decided to go on without him. It is a choice that the masters of the Twenties failed to observe until they had made it by accident, but it is the kind of accident that architecture may not survive a second time.Footnote14
All this may well be as true as it is plausible. Perhaps architecture really is facing a crisis, and perhaps the serious architect really will be forced to make the kind of radical sacrifices that Banham describes. It is by no means impossible that this might happen. On the other hand, however, we need to recognise that these phrases belong to a certain type of chess move in architectural criticism that will be familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the literature on modern architecture.
In this sense, Banham’s juxtaposition of technology and architecture parallels the classic distinction made by Le Corbusier, who contrasts, on the one hand, the “engineers [who actually] produce architecture, for they employ a mathematical calculation which derives from natural law,” who are “healthy and virile, active and useful, balanced and happy in their work,” real people who “fabricate the tools of their time,” and on the other hand, the pitiful spectacle of architects who are “disillusioned and unemployed, boastful or peevish” and design nothing but “houses and moth-eaten boudoirs.”Footnote15
This syndrome of the energetic engineer and the weary architect can easily be extended further. For example, it can be taken as an indication of the potential threat to the social structure posed by a tragic rift. The famous last chapter of Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture, titled “Architecture ou révolution,” is a dramatic accentuation of the entire book, and is just as effective as Banham’s concluding sentences, which lend immediacy and urgency to his otherwise academic and sober explanations.
The machinery of Society, profoundly out of gear, oscillates between an amelioration, of historical importance, and a catastrophe.Footnote16
It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today; architecture or revolution.
The same statement can also be found in La Ville Radieuse: “On the day when contemporary society, at present so sick, has become properly aware that only architecture and city planning can provide the exact prescription for its ills, then the time will have come for the great machinery to be put in motion.”Footnote17
Remarks of this kind are far too common in the defence of modern architecture to simply be ignored. They appear in statements from various individuals whose intellectual dispositions are intrinsically quite different. In Lewis Mumford’s earlier works, for example, the fear of impending cultural catastrophe is consistently one of his most persistent and insistent preoccupations. The same values can be discerned behind the title that Richard Neutra chose for one of his books: Survival Through Design.Footnote18 Frank Lloyd Wright even gives a reason for this exercise in prophetic vision, and that reason is—as might have been predicted—the machine.
“Because of the machine itself, architecture was now bound by its own nature to be prophetic,” says Wright, and he continues: “Thus awakening to action, we architects had to become effective soon—or our civilization would destroy its chances for its own culture. Instead of by the handle, man had taken the dangerous new tool by the blade.”Footnote19 And finally: “In this sense I saw the architect as saviour of the culture of modern American society; his services the mainspring of any future cultural life in America—saviour now as for all civilizations heretofore.”Footnote20
The architect as the saviour of society—for all the extravagance of the claim, this is obviously the logical conclusion of Le Corbusier’s insistence that architecture can overcome society’s shortcomings. While it is true that neither of these two themes (which are both prominent in the literature) seems to have attracted the attention of critics or historians of the modern movement, it is also easy to see why this is the case. The views widely held among its interpreters point to the conclusion that modern architecture means nothing more and nothing less than taking a rational approach to the demands of construction, and that this approach differs from all those that preceded it in the lack of a formal bias on the part of the designer and in the striking refinement of its scientific methods; that modern architecture should be seen as a logical conclusion drawn from a given set of data, which in turn represent factual components of the contemporary world, and that it is for this reason—namely a relationship to reality based purely on common sense—that modern architecture has attained the authority it enjoys.
This is undoubtedly what the typical bias of many works on modern architecture looks like. It is said that a break has been made with irrationality and morbid sentimentality. Architects are no longer so caught up with the question of form that they close themselves off to everything else; they have recognised their duty to create appropriate living conditions for their fellow human beings; they are no longer the purveyors of private luxury for the rich and privileged, but enlightened master builders “for a population with nothing like the leisure for luxuries” enjoyed by the grand noblemen of earlier times; architects are the servants of the masses and not of the individual.Footnote21 They take pains to study functionalities in depth: if they have to build a soap factory, they familiarise themselves with all the processes of soap production, and if they have to build a kindergarten, they first acquire the knowledge of how everything works in a kindergarten.Footnote22
These are all conceptions of modern architecture that any sensible and considerate person will still affirm. The brief summary given here is taken from a book published a quarter of a century ago, Nikolaus Pevsner’s An Outline of European Architecture; but a similar extract could easily be made from a large number of other sources, and in each case the result would be more or less the same. The ultimate conclusion would always be that the architect has finally acquired the objective neutrality of the scientist: without the constraints of dogma, free from the restrictions of traditional authority, unfettered by the prevailing cultural models, fearless, unbiased, and no longer speculative, the architect has finally acquired the ability to see things as they are.
My need to criticise these views will doubtless already be clear from my choice of words. Beyond that, however, the question arises as to how it is possible to penetrate to the heart of this whole web of assertions, which, though never entirely consistent, are remarkably closely connected and which, despite their often surprisingly memorable formulation, clearly represent highly entrenched investments of emotional and intellectual capital. Breaching this ideological fortress was indeed partly my intention in bringing up the idea of crisis and the associated notion of the architect as saviour, both of which are themes that are consistently found intertwined with thought processes that are in themselves inherently rational. These themes are, I think, significant, and although bringing them to public attention is on a par with undermining a widespread conception of modern architecture, at the same time, if insights such as these keep on appearing, it would be both unscientific and unwise to dismiss them as simply trivial. “Historiography,” says Jacob Burckhardt, “lives to a large extent from what its sources and monuments reveal, be it unintentionally or unconsciously, or even through falsification, to say nothing of what they choose to deliberately emphasise, defend or glorify.”Footnote23
With these remarks and this quotation, I have divulged my intention and the subject of my enquiry. In order to be able to explain what modern architecture does—and thus what modern architecture is all about—I am not so much interested in what architecture or its defenders proclaim and advertise, but rather in what they unconsciously presume and thus unintentionally betray. In other words, I am interested in whether it is possible to gather scattered, but frequently recurring points of reference and assemble them into a coherent whole.
In order to construct such a synthesis, I shall have to proceed as if sailing a boat into the wind. And since I am going to have to tack back and forth, I am in no position to allow myself the luxury of direct and logical argumentation. Instead of trying to develop an argument logically, therefore, I will try to present it as I find it.
I was approached a few years ago with the idea of writing a book on modern architecture, and once my interest had been sparked, I began to sketch a broad outline of my vision for such a project. I was drawing to some extent on both Sigfried Giedion and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, but I had a few ideas of my own that I also wanted to develop, and so laid out the framework of my book accordingly. I rolled out a section of history in much the same way as one would roll out a map. It began with the various revolutions of the late eighteenth century and extended almost all the way to the present. Within this timeline, I then traced various manifestations and developments in order to follow them through to their eventual synthesis in modern architecture.
So far, so good. I found the framework for the book convincing and was just about to start working on it when the question arose as to why, and for what purpose, I should bother producing a historical outline. My subject was modern architecture—a movement that emphatically proclaims its concern for the present and its focus on the future. Why, then, should a book about modern architecture be structured historically?
The answer to this question, of course, is easy to find. By discarding all the baggage of traditional culture and going back to the elemental, the architectural profession sought to align its modus operandi with that of the scientist. Whilst this might guarantee “objectivity” and the architectural end product may very well appear to be “of the present” and could thus be considered modern on the grounds of its rational and scientific content, an additional demand was always lurking in the background. For an unreserved devotion to “the scientific” was not only to be seen as good in itself, it was also conceivable as a quality demanded by the age.
The demand of our time for realism and functionalism must be met. Only then will our buildings express the potential greatness of our time.
Our utilitarian buildings can become worthy of the name of architecture only if they truly interpret their time by their perfect functional expression. Footnote24
These observations by Mies van der Rohe are not atypical. For while it may seem as though “objectivity” is guaranteed through the precise observation of use, production and effectiveness, there was obviously always the requirement, on the other hand, that architecture has to be an expression and a product of its time, and that the architect must act in full awareness of the needs of the age.
Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space; living, changing, new.Footnote25
The New Architecture [… is] simply the inevitable logical product of the intellectual, social and technical conditions of our age.Footnote26
These two definitions by Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius get right to the heart of the matter. That these definitions might originate from any period earlier than the present seems barely conceivable; but if it is their heightened sense of an “epoch” or an “age” that makes them seem so essentially new, then it is now appropriate to point out the connection between this high value assigned to purely temporal terms of distinction and other related ways of thinking.
“Yesterday is dead”; “the unreserved affirmation of the present presumes a ruthless rejection of the past”; “every age demands its own form”; “neither yesterday nor tomorrow, only today can be given form”; “it is impossible to move forward while looking backwards”; “he who lives in the past cannot be progressive”; “architecture is dependent on its time”; “we depend on the spirit of our age”; “day by day our epoch determines its own style”; “architecture, which is the expression of its time, has issued an ultimatum.”
It is hard to imagine a debate on modern architecture devoid of claims as insistent and emphatic as these; it is now time, therefore, to emphasise that claims of this kind are always linked to a number of other ideas, all of which take the same things for granted: relentless change and the need to facilitate it.
There is [says Walter Gropius] no finality in architecture—only continuous change.Footnote27
Modern architecture is not a few branches on an old tree—it is new growth coming right from the roots.Footnote28
It is a movement in a constant state of flux.Footnote29
The architect should conceive buildings not as monuments, but as receptacles for the flow of life which they have to serve.Footnote30
Good architecture should be a projection of life itself.Footnote31
The modern architect sees nothing as fixed. He analyses the functions of a building without prejudice, examines how it could best be built [… in order to then] find the new forms and effects that emerge … as a stimulus for accepting a truly creative act that is in harmony with contemporary life and aspiration.Footnote32
The vitalistic insistence on concepts such as growth, life, change, movement, and flow, and—on the other side of the equation—the rejection of prejudice, bias, dogma, the insistence on the significance of “our age” of “today”: these are all aspects of a mindset that evidently believes one of the paramount realities of our age to be this age itself—and which therefore considers it imperative that the architect should enter into a meaningful creative relationship with this constantly changing and self-renewing present.
It is a way of thinking that is so very familiar to us that we are often barely conscious of its existence; yet this conception of the determining reality of time is an all-pervasive one, even if it is hardly ever recognised and never examined. We now also understand why the bird’s-eye view of the last two hundred years has been such an indispensable component of mainstream tracts on modern architecture. If only because of the great emphasis on growth and change that the architects of today feel compelled to make when there is a need to expound on their practice and point of view, it stands to reason that we are forced to introduce some representation of growth and change, that is to say, some form of history.
This much is obvious. But the apparent contradiction between a forward-looking architecture and its explanation by means of historical derivation should now be worthy of at least some attention. For in times more rationalist and naïve than our own, the explanation of modern architecture—had it been possible at the time—would have been based not so much on a historical digression as on a “logical” or “scientific” critique.
At such times, critics would have set out to determine the “status” or “essence” of the species intended to be the object of enquiry, and being inclined to regard this species as an unchanging category of being, they would have occupied themselves with what they took to be its permanent characteristics. Assuming that the object’s principles were determinable, and its ultimate ends were known, critics would then have divided this entity, of which they had such a clear conception, into subdivisions and analysed the structure.
The habit of elaborating the principles of architecture (including contemporary buildings) in this way began in the Renaissance, continued through the eighteenth century, survived the nineteenth century wherever architecture was regarded as a systematic occupation, and has more or less persisted to the present day. If we take a look at the books in which architects attended to the task of explaining their discipline to the public and their colleagues, the nature of the titles is revealing: Regole generali di architettura; Idea dell’architettura universale; Elements of Architecture; Principes de l’Architecture; Elementae Architetturae; Elements et théorie de l’architecture; and more recently, Principles of Architectural Composition.Footnote33 These titles have been plucked almost at random, and yet they hint in each case at the author’s opinion that there is something like a quintessence of architecture. This then is an “idea,” a “law,” a complex of “principles” or a “theory,” the effects of which can be broken down into “elements” and which, despite all the transformations seen in architecture, can obviously be considered in itself to be unvarying. Always concealed in the background is the Platonic theorem once described by Louis Sullivan’s Parisian maths teacher that “our demonstrations shall be so broad as to admit of NO EXCEPTION!”Footnote34 Whenever subjected to close scrutiny during this period, the typical view of architecture always seems to have been that it exemplified and depended on this abstraction.
This method of interpretation was still very popular even as late as the 1920s, although by this time the postulate of the quintessence of architecture had already become rather flimsy. It was only with the realisation that this method had all but disappeared, and was in any case of little use, that we returned to the clear-cut obligation to create interpretations on a historical basis.
To regard all things in their historical setting appears, indeed, to be an instructive procedure of the modern mind. We do it without thinking, because we can scarcely think at all without doing it. […] What is peculiar to the modern mind is the disposition and the determination to regard ideas and concepts, the truth of things as well as the things themselves, as changing entities, the character and significance of which at any given time can be fully grasped only by regarding them as points in an endless process of differentiation, of unfolding, of waste and repair. […] Historical-mindedness is so much a preconception of modern thought that we can identify a particular thing only by pointing to the various things it successively was before it became that particular thing which it will presently cease to be.Footnote35
This description of the state of things as it begins to emerge dates back to the 1920s and Carl Becker’s Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, and although this constellation of contemporary thought has since become generally acknowledged, the possibility that it might also extend to architecture barely seems to have been considered. But if critics have almost without exception placed modern architecture in a historical context (perhaps, like me, “without thinking,” since they were hardly able to “think at all without doing it”) they have also placed modern architecture in a historical context because it was precisely this context in which the modern architect saw their work as being embedded.
In other words, when an architect sets himself or herself apart from a historical backdrop, they do so in order to emerge from the historical process as a kind of protagonist. The architect considers it their duty to do what the times demand of them. They strive to be creative without actively co-operating with the past. But while this maximises the architect’s knowledge of the techniques and demands that characterise the present, they are still forced to turn to history for advice if they want to learn how to recognise and accurately interpret the present, which they consider to be more real than the previous age. In order to be able to highlight what is new, the architect must distinguish it from what is not new. So, while modern architecture often seems to ask the architect to function as a scientist, architecture’s very modernity and its awareness of “time” secretly mean that the architect is obliged to function as a historian.
Of course, this is more of a rhetorical description of the situation, and it is to a certain extent an exaggeration. But for all the exaggeration, it is still fair to say that a charged and complex relationship to historical thinking is indeed one of the most characteristically and prominently “modern” features of the modern movement in architecture. That architecture represents—and must represent—an index of history; that nothing can have artistic value if it does not also have historical significance; the idea that just as history is a process of constant change, architecture must also reflect this flexibility if it is to be authentic. Taking all of this into account, it should be obvious that it is impossible to adequately analyse the modern tendency in architecture without becoming aware of this tacitly accepted idea.
Moreover, it should also be obvious by now that the incursion of such ideals of historical significance inevitably places architecture at a very great distance from all those simplistic agendas that seek to define it in terms of function and technology. For while its functional and technological criteria tend to be most widely recognised in architects’ explanations, we can now see how a distinctly intangible form of content is constantly imposing itself alongside these criteria; and although this intangible content cannot be grasped, it is felt in a way that is just as real as steel and concrete. It is the spirit of the age.
However we wish to view the Zeitgeist, whether as a universal spirit, something irresistible, suprarational, impersonal, all-pervading and wise, or simply as a grand historical abstraction, there is little doubt that the notion of a Zeitgeist, though a very elastic concept, is one of the crucial components of modern thought. “I would rather interrogate that unwritten law of our own convictions, the spirit of our age,” said Marcel Breuer in 1934.Footnote36 By questioning the spirit of the times and seeing oneself as the neutral executor of the will of an entire epoch, the transformative architect of the twenties and thirties found it quite easy, along with Mies van der Rohe, to “refuse to recognise problems of form.”Footnote37 So far as theory was concerned, these problems were no longer the architect’s concern, and forms no longer seemed to be the result of free choice, but were instead the imperative of evolutionary development. By perceiving oneself in this way, as a mediator between the unconscious demands of the day and the technical means at one’s disposal, the architect was, in the same vein as Frank Lloyd Wright, perfectly capable of interpreting aesthetic preferences as prophetic intuitions. And so the architect was able to serve not only as a neutral assistant to technology, but also as the midwife to a historically inevitable future.
Although we are mostly aware of all this today, it is something we rarely talk about. We are aware of the problem that arises in this domain between the ideal of unvarnished factuality and its exact opposite. For if architecture is supposed to be, on the one hand, simply a matter of rational building, and at the same time the embodiment or reflection of the spirit of the times, then we are forced to draw one of two conclusions: either the epoch is purely materialistic and is only satisfied with an expression of technology, or else it possesses such refined powers of selection that it is able to identify technology as the true expression of its spirit. But if either of these two possibilities seems unlikely (as in fact they both are), then we are forced to assume that although modern architecture may be a translation of the spirit of the age into the three-dimensional, for this very same reason, it can hardly be a question of purely rational building and nothing more.
This raises the crucial question: is technology the referee here? Is the Zeitgeist the judge? How has the symbiotic state in which these two doctrines coexist not been recognised as such? Once again, the answer seems very simple: these ideas have not been thoroughly investigated. The mind of the architect was occupied with more pressing tasks: they were busy anticipating the Golden Age.
That visions of a coming Golden Age were of fundamental importance in the development of modern architecture also seems to be a point that is generally accepted, but not generally thought of, once again, as something requiring further investigation. If we point out that there are two sides to the defence of modern architecture—a widely propagated ideal of technological determinism and a less clearly defined notion that embraces a historical perspective—if we come to see in this combination some grounds for the typical turn to historical exposition, then it is certainly useful now to turn our attention to the way in which the defenders of modern architecture mark out the terrain to which they attach so much importance.
According to tradition, it is divided into three sections, namely the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and each is given a rating: good, bad, and potentially good.
In this sense, the period of the eighteenth century, rated “good” and marking the beginning of the series, is considered an era of visual harmony, a period characterised by a high degree of order, in short: a time in which all architects were found to adhere to basic principles. The antithesis to this state of affairs can be found in the nineteenth century, in which the principal characteristics are visual chaos, obsessive individualism, a lack of standards, the arbitrary reaction to various stimuli, and an almost indescribable diversity. It is this nineteenth century that Nikolaus Pevsner called “a diseased century,”Footnote38 a century that Sigfried Giedion was inclined to describe as suffering from “a schism between its thought and feeling.”Footnote39 Together with the normative eighteenth century, it confronts our own epoch with a question. For while the twentieth century did indeed witness an architectonic revolution, and while a new architecture made it possible once again to give adequate consideration to problems and to make proper use of tools, and while this presents the opportunity to achieve a balance that is a match for the order of the eighteenth century, it is as yet unclear whether the twentieth century will be able to put this potential to good use.
This is probably the most important and seductive content for the framework provided by the three-part historical synopsis. We are presented with a drama in three acts—with a beginning, a middle, and an as yet undetermined end—and we are encouraged to co-operate in its resolution. With an incomplete third act, we are inclined to think that it is up to us to resolve it, and if we do not fulfil this obligation and bring things to a happy conclusion, this drama—which potentially belongs to the teleological genre of the happily-ever-after—will inevitably end in a completely different style, namely a tragic one.
The threat of an imminent catastrophe (or at least a state of decline) that can only be averted by the actions of the architect—a common subtext of the critic-historian’s message—is of course the same theme that is expressed in undisguised form in Le Corbusier’s statement, “It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today,”Footnote40 and in Wright’s view of the architect as the “saviour of the culture of modern American society.”Footnote41 One might confront assertions such as these with haughty condescension; but one can also analyse them—not in terms of their veracity, but simply as documents that may perhaps shed light on a certain heated, stirred up, creative state of mind. The three-part structure of history can also be understood in the same way.
When we examine the typical “history of modern architecture,” we tend to see a very familiar pattern emerge. In the good old eighteenth century (which sometimes almost seems to become the good old Middle Ages), we appear to have the equivalent to the Garden of Eden and, in the rise of middle-class industrialism, the equivalent to the temptation of the serpent. And then comes apostasy, a fall from grace, followed by a nineteenth century that is oddly reminiscent of the Old Testament, with characters that curiously seem to evoke Moses and Isaiah, Ezra, Samuel, and Job, and even figures that are decidedly reminiscent of John the Baptist. The great reverence for the genealogy of the Saviour—his lineage down from Adam via David—has also been reproduced in an interesting fashion by the historians of the modern movement, and they have felt obliged to construct a similarly idealised and unblemished family tree.
So let’s extend this framework a little further and briefly try to focus our attention on each of its constituent parts.
First, there is the Garden of Eden, the Golden Age, which is perceived as the original state of humanity. This is followed by the splitting of the personality, the Fall that initiates the historical process. Then mitigating circumstances are discovered: ways and means for redemption are determined, and the possibility of rebirth appears. Whether the very idea of resurrection is illusory or not, the idea of rebirth can hardly be anything other than encouraging; it is probably not surprising that whole cultures, believing their rebirth to be imminent, were lifted out of themselves in a very short time and taken in a radically different direction by this overwhelmingly powerful prospect.
—But for now, let us return to the narrower circle of our historical deliberations.
Western culture clearly received a very brief surge of spiritual energy of this kind some sixty to seventy years ago. It was a decisive moment and the form in which it appeared was not easy to comprehend. It was a very condensed period, and by its very nature, it certainly wasn’t logical. It was rife with internal contradictions and by no means easy to analyse, but whatever else we might say about it, we at least know (and have been told often enough) that beneath all the diversity of this early twentieth-century world lay a certain revulsion. It was a revulsion to formalism, complacency, and the conventional. It was a feeling that would, in extreme cases, develop into the conviction that the social order was infected and choking, that it was dying of an incurable disease, and ripe for destruction.
Nevertheless, the emotional atmosphere of the time was not just a matter of “après moi le déluge.” In fact, it was quite the opposite. It was a case of “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Not that it was optimistic in any kind of ingenious way, but because it was full of expectation, and also full of inspiration, despite the reluctance, or perhaps because of it, to believe that certain elements were still healthy. Knocked out of joint and dying, the present was nevertheless harbouring the embryo of a vital and balanced future. A new world was in the process of being born; like a phoenix it was to rise from the ruins of the old, and since its birth was paradoxically both preordained and yet uncertain, it would require the determined efforts of all people of good will to bring on its imminent arrival. Meanwhile, however, with time so short and the crisis looming, people had to get themselves ready by anticipating the arrival of the new order.
The constellation of ideas sketched out here is admittedly one that is common to all processes of revitalisation. However, it is no less effective if it turns out to have had its impact in an era of scepticism and in a cosmopolitan culture; to the contrary, at the turn of the century, even in a sceptical age, there were probably very good reasons for adopting these guiding principles. But this is not the place to go into the countless crosscurrents, the nihilistic alternatives, the righteousness and confusion that the idea of rebirth brought forth in the first decades of the twentieth century. Suffice it to say, at this point, that if we come to believe that we are faced with the threat of a spiritual death that will lead to certain apocalypse, and at the same time sense the hope of a spiritual rebirth that might lead to a new millennium, then we are confronted with the moral and biological problem of salvation. Even if these centuries-old dogmas with an evangelistic methodology are presented to us as dogmas that are in conflict with those that announce the impending dissolution of society and its potential improvement, the problem is no different. For while the two possibilities are constantly being pushed back and forth, a question of conscience arises that no responsible person can ignore.
At this point, when disgust with the dominant tone has led to the assumption that there is no salvation to be found by working within the framework of existing institutions, traditional processes or orthodox attitudes, one may as well—as a pleasantly blunt instrument of criticism—start to sketch the image of a hypothetical age. Discovering the means of rebirth for such a hypothetical age will not be easy, one might imagine; assuming the absence of a new religious orientation or a noble political conviction to provide a partial substitute, the hoped-for means of rebirth must obviously be sought elsewhere, presumably in the creative capacities of the human mind. But here again, difficulties arise. For the hypothetical age feels disgust precisely due to the fact that the creative faculties are perceived as being inherently unhealthy. Before they can be detoxified, they need, it is believed, certain injections. They need certain fuels, before they can be ignited. The problem arises as to where these much needed spiritual vaccines and flammable catalysts are to be found.
Under these conditions, the essential combustible fuels and spiritual vaccines can only be imported. That is to say, they must be found beyond the limited sphere that is conventionally thought of as culture; either in peasant, proletarian or even scientific environments, or alternatively, in other cultures, preferably those that are suitably distant in terms of space or time. Under such circumstances, the idea of the noble savage—farmer, proletarian or engineer—can once again appear peculiarly persuasive. Even the very ancient, that which seems to predate the decline, can again become significant, and in a similar fashion, the completely new can present itself as exempt from the need for injections by proving its affiliation with the future.
For a hypothetical age that feels the kind of compulsions we have just outlined, we might assume, among other things, that new technological developments will be of paramount importance and seem authentic and real. Among the sciences, the most recent additions will probably be esteemed, and in the arts, attention is likely to swing back and forth between primitivism and futurism, alternately finding gratification in the archaic and the experimental. Such an age, we further surmise, may place a special burden of responsibility on the arts, for it is the arts that offer the most immediate reassurance of the hoped-for liberation. Nor do we need to emphasise that the arts, for their part, will certainly receive a powerful stimulus as a result of their new status. Their individual boundaries will be dissolved; they will no longer be separate disciplines with specific problems, particular materials, individual techniques, and defined results. They will be forced to abandon their old nature. What then follows is a mass destruction of conventional vanities. With the experiment seen as a sign of grace and transformation as proof of new life, the artist takes on the role of the messiah and appears as the apostle of the future, whose slightest discovery is experienced as a sign of cultural salvation.
It is fair to say that it was something of this nature and something essentially very similar to a religious conversion that had a decisive influence on the psyche of the architect at the beginning of the twentieth century. For this reason and no other, the architectonic revolution of that time cannot be fully captured by a rationalist explanation, even if it is open to one. If we really want to be able to interpret it, I believe we should look not so much outwards, at external manifestations in the world of architecture, but inwards, at the unconscious motivations that influence us. In this respect, what I have attempted to do in my remarks should be seen merely as a preliminary exploration.
I have tried to demonstrate that the modern direction in architecture, which we are so often inclined to see as firmly grounded in facts, is rather a development that is largely determined by the assimilation of two great myths, both of which are fuelled by the threat of crisis and the prophecy of catastrophe. I have first sought to sketch out what might be referred to as the historicist myth, according to which the unforgiving, inexorable course of time pulls us irresistibly into the future, so that it becomes the duty of the architect to swim with this current, evidently receiving private radar messages from the Zeitgeist on just where it might be heading. Secondly, I have tried to characterise the myth of the Golden Age, according to which an impending, devastating catastrophe can only be averted through the activity of the architect, who, once self-indulgence has been set aside, can begin to lay the foundations for a just and well-balanced society, for a New Jerusalem, which will then truly be the final and definitive phase in the course of history.
This attempt to dig through the collective subconscious of Golden Age dreams and apocalyptic visions has indeed become something of a favourite pastime of late, and usually seems to be conducted in an attempt to discredit manifestations in which traces of these kinds of dreams and visions are to be found. Similarly, the idea of the Zeitgeist is no longer one that stands out in terms of intellectual respectability. Whilst both sets of these fantasies are open to ironic criticism, this hardly excuses us from examining such myths about the course of history or the end of time—especially when we are all half-convinced that they actually have some degree of influence on the development of modern architecture. However, if we want to stand firmly by the belief that the development of modern architecture is nothing other than the result of consciously applied reason, or if we are determined to believe that the future of architecture is now irrevocably fixed as a matter of technology, then the fantasies I have been discussing will, of course, seem irrelevant. But if we are concerned with what architecture is, rather than what it should be, then we should be prepared to recognise that to some extent, beliefs which are not tested, perceptions which are not analysed, and myths of which we are barely aware will all, inevitably, determine the shape of the things we create.
So it seemed as if the persistent prophecy of a crisis was leading to the feeling that we don’t have much time left and that we ought to make intelligent, beneficial and constructive use of the remaining time at our disposal. That is to say, we need to concern ourselves not with desires, but with necessities; not with the individual, but with the universal; with facts, not speculation; with action instead of talk; with reality instead of illusions; with facts rather than ideas; with the public, not the private; and with what is essential and natural, rather than any of the pleasing accomplishments that civilisation has to offer.
But the insistent prophecy of a crisis, which inevitably leads to a radical abandonment of everything that seems trivial by comparison, also provided an eminently dramatic backdrop for the architect’s work, while simultaneously offering modern architecture the opportunity to step forward and present itself as a dynamic system of belief. Such insistence lent the architect’s spatial decisions the persuasive power of moral judgement; it burdened these decisions with the fate of society, and since it gave an aesthetic preference the aura of prophetic insight into human destiny, it was also able to give the impression of elevating architectural practice far beyond mere questions of personal taste.
In this way it became possible to imbue what were supposed to be purely empirical issues, regarding function and technology, with a spiritual and universal aspect; it became possible to give the new architecture the veneer of being the logical product of the here and now, and at the same time something that reached beyond the present. It was no longer just a matter of steel and glass, concrete, stone, and mortar; it was also mystical in nature and transcendental, such that a modern building no longer needed to be experienced in terms of its visual impact and practical usability, but was rather to be understood as an external, visual embodiment of the present, or as a symbol of the more perfect order that the future was going to provide.
Seen in this way, namely as a response to a crisis, the modern tendency was invested with supreme responsibility. As soon as the idea of a crisis became the bedrock on which an entire system of architectural theology was built, the modern building inevitably became the sacred image of this faith.
As we know, the image of a saint does not primarily exist for the sake of aesthetic contemplation: it is designed to arouse religious feeling, and its aesthetic value is of secondary importance. Something similar characterises our example from modern architecture. The building might have fulfilled the physical requirements, it might have had aesthetic qualities, but basically, it was there, in its own special way, to allow certain cultural fantasies to be lived out. It was an icon of change, an icon of the future, an icon of a wholesome society, an icon of technology: a magical, therapeutic symbol. This iconographic significance of modern architecture, which has so often been denied, can perhaps provide an explanation for the influence that such a severe tendency was able to exert.
I must just say in closing, however, that I do not deny the existence of crises. I know very well that they are real. Nevertheless, I feel obliged to point out that the fact of the crisis always comes hand in hand with the accompanying myth. I also feel compelled to point out, in conclusion, that we are so accustomed to the myth of the crisis that we would probably all feel a little lost if a critic should fail to serve it up.
Translated into English by Duncan Brown, from the German text produced by Ivika Ots.
A Note on the Translation
This text is a translation of a translation. Rowe did study German-speaking intellectuals under Rudolf Wittkower in London, but it seems almost certain that he presented his Berlin speech in English, with Ivika Ots subsequently translating a transcription into German for the symposium publication. German grammar seems to magnify the tendency in the text—and of the time—to assume that all architects are male, which is one element we have taken the liberty of adapting. While this translation makes available a missing piece of Rowe’s scholarly output, it remains a strange exercise to translate so exacting and carefully constructed a text back into the language in which it was first composed.
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Additional information
Notes on contributors
Oswald Mathias Ungers
Oswald Mathias Ungers (1926–2007) was a leading voice among architects and architectural theorists in the later half of the twentieth century. He enrolled at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe in 1947 to study with Egon Eiermann and went on to open his own practice in Cologne in 1950. Over the ensuing decades Ungers developed a design approach based on the rigorous use of pure, typically orthogonal, geometries in residential designs and a later sequence of institutional projects that combined exacting formalism with a sensitivity to the historical patterns of the urban fabric. At the same time, Ungers shaped architectural discourse as an educator, first at the Technische Universität Berlin, where he joined the faculty in 1963 and assumed the position of chair in 1965. He left Berlin in 1968 to become the chair of the department of architecture at Cornell, a position he held until 1975. Over his lifetime Ungers amassed a significant collection of books and architectural models, which are preserved today in the Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft (UAA) in Cologne.
Colin Rowe
Colin Rowe (1920–99) was an iconoclastic architectural theorist, historian, critic and teacher who authored a series of highly influential texts that transformed architectural thinking in the post-war period. Rowe enrolled at the University of Liverpool to study architecture but was called up for military service in 1942 and enlisted in the Royal Air Force. After the war he resumed his education at the Warburg Institute where he studied with Rudolf Wittkower and cultivated a unique approach to historical interpretation. In his subsequent publications, “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa” (1947), “Mannerism and Modern Architecture” (1950), and “Chicago Frame” (1956), Rowe combined a rare talent for formal analysis with insightful and often unexpected connections to episodes in intellectual history and other social and cultural phenomena. Over the following decades, he expanded his theoretical reflections to include the history of urban form and he mounted a potent critique of modernist urban planning. With Rowe’s gifts as a storyteller, he captivated multiple generations of young architects, first as a tutor at the Liverpool School of Architecture, then at the University of Texas at Austin, and above all at Cornell University, where he taught from 1962 until his retirement in 1990.
Steven Lauritano
Steven Lauritano is the University Lecturer in Architectural History at Leiden University and a member of the Centre for the Arts in Society. He received his PhD in the history of art from Yale University and the Master of Architecture from Princeton University. His research examines the intersection of architecture and antiquarianism, the history of architectural preservation, and the reciprocal relationships that connect historiography and design. Ongoing projects include the study of Fischer von Erlach’s enigmatic vases in the Entwurff einer historischen Architectur, research on the collection and display of African architectural elements, and a book manuscript on Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s diverse experiments with architectural re-use. His essays and translations have appeared in academic journals including Perspecta, Gradient, Dimensions, and Pidgin.
Wouter Van Acker
Wouter Van Acker is engineer-architect and associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where he teaches architectural theory and a master’s design studio on adaptive reuse. He is director of hortence, ULB’s research centre for architectural history, theory and criticism. He received his PhD and Master in Engineering and Architectural Sciences from Ghent University. His doctoral dissertation explored the tensions between particularism, transnationalism and universalism in the epistemology and utopian projects of Paul Otlet (1868–1944). His more recent scholarly interests include the history, theory and preservation of postmodern architecture, and the operativity of history in architectural design. Among his co-edited journal issues and volumes is Architecture and Ugliness: Anti-aesthetics and the Ugly in Postmodern Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2020). His research has been published in such academic journals as Fabrications, ARQ, Perspectives on Science, Joelho, Knowledge Organisation, and Revue Belge de philologie et d’histoire.
Duncan Brown is an editor and translator (French, German and Spanish into English), specialising in art, architecture, and social and political sciences. A graduate from the University of East Anglia, he translates, edits and proofreads texts for art books, catalogues, and academic publications. Based in London, his clients include major European museums and galleries, publishing houses, academic institutions and journals, art foundations, and production companies, as well as artists, writers, and academics. Previous projects with an architectural theme include publications on Henry van de Velde, Juliaan Lampens, Jacques Moeschal, and 150 Houses You Need to Visit Before You Die.
Notes
1 The editors would like to express their gratitude to Anja Sieber-Albers and the UAA (Ungers Archiv fürArchitekturwissenschaft) and to David Rowe for granting permission to publish an English translation of these texts. The full roster of speakers at the congress included: Friedrich Achleitner, Reyner Banham, Peter Blake, Lucius Burckhardt, Ulrich Conrads, André Corboz, Günther Feuerstein, Kenneth Frampton, Sigfried Giedion, Otto Graf, Antonio Hernandez, Jörn Janssen, Jürgen Joedicke, Gündüz Özdeş (listed in the program, but not published in the proceedings) Julius Posener, Colin Rowe, Eduard F. Sekler, Sam Stevens, and Max Adolf Vogt. For the conference proceedings, see Jörg Pampe, ed., Architekturtheorie: Internationaler Kongress in der TU Berlin, 11. bis 15. Dezember 1967 (Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin, Lehrstuhl für Entwerfen VI, 1968).
2 Christa Kamleithner, “Architekturtheorie um 1967: eine Umwelttheorie,” in Architekturwissenschaft. Vom Suffix zur Agenda, ed. Juan Almarza Anwandter, Jan Bovelet, Michael Dürfled, Eva Maria Froschauer, Christine Neubert, Peter I. Schneider and Gernot Weckherlin (Berlin: Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, 2021), 190–208, 194.
3 Oswald Mathias Ungers, “He Who Did Not Understand the Zeitgeist,” in Reckoning with Colin Rowe: Ten Architects Take Position, ed. Emmanuel Petit (New York: Routledge, 2015), 65–72, 67.
4 The “short story” Ungers tells is based on Part III of Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, in which the protagonist encounters the island of Laputa. See Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships (London: Benjamin Motte, 1726). Ungers only references the island of Laputa, but in Swift’s satire, Gulliver’s experience with the Laputans is immediately contrasted with his brief visit to Glubbdubdrib (part III, chapter VII), an island where the governor is a skilled necromancer who can summon any historical figure from the dead, command them to answer any question and expect them to tell the truth, since “Lying was a Talent of no Use in the lower World.” Confronted with these powers, Gulliver summons a parade of historical figures in rapid succession, from Alexander the Great and Hannibal, to Caesar and Brutus, and an entire host of “the Destroyers of Tyrants and Usurpers, and the Restorers of Liberty to oppressed and injured Nations” whose names “it would be tedious to trouble the Reader with.” See Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ed. David Womersley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 285–93. The story echoes Ungers’ own stated desire to use the TU Berlin conference to “revive the theoretical line of men such as Sörgel, Lipps, Semper,” etc. See note 3.
5 In his retelling of Swift, Ungers states “a number of people made their way to Laputa […] some forty years ago.” He also specifies that they stayed in Laputa for five days. Given the date of the conference (1967), Ungers most likely refers to the founding meeting of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) at the Chateau de la Sarraz in Switzerland in 1928. Ungers’ comparison is a bold one considering Sigfried Giedion’s prominent role in the founding of CIAM and his presence at the TU Berlin congress.
6 Ungers, “He Who Did Not Understand the Zeitgeist,” 69.
7 Hartmut Frank, “‘Alle Häuser sind schön, hört auf zu bauen’,” Stadtbauwelt 74, no. 80 (1983), 354–58, 354; quoted in Alessandro Toti, “Reform or Revolution: Architectural Theory in West Berlin and Zürich (1967–72),” Architectural Theory Review 28, no. 1 (2024), forthcoming, based on his doctoral dissertation: Alessandro Toti, “West Berlin Marxist Architecture Groups (1963–1977): A History of Housing, Planning, Education and Struggle” (PhD diss., University College London, 2023).
8 Apparently, Ungers had earlier attempted to bring Colin Rowe to the TU Berlin to chair the architecture department, but Rowe declined the offer in 1966 and Ungers instead assumed the role. See Cynthia Davidson, “Observations on Snowballs,” Log 46 (2019), 60.
9 Toti, “Reform or Revolution,” forthcoming in this journal.
10 Rem Koolhaas and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “An Interview with O. M. Ungers,” Log 16 (2009), 82.
11 Ungers, “He Who Did Not Understand the Zeitgeist,” 67.
12 Joan Ockman, “Form without Utopia: Contextualizing Colin Rowe,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57, no. 4 (December 1998), 448–56.
13 Kurt Weichselberger, an Austrian statistician, served as Rector of the Technical University Berlin (1967–68). He was also present at the opening of the Architekturtheorie Kongress and made the welcoming remarks before Ungers’ introduction.
14 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970 [1960]), 329–30.
15 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (London: John Rodker, 1931; orig. 1923), 14–15.
16 This quotation and the following one come from the chapter “Architecture or Revolution,” in Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 269.
17 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of our Machine-Age Civilization, trans. Pamela Knight, Eleanor Levieux, and Derek Coltman (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), 143. English translation of Le Corbusier’s La Ville Radieuse, first published in 1933 and reissued with modifications in 1964.
18 Richard Neutra, Survival Through Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).
19 Frank Lloyd Wright, A Testament (New York: Bramhall House, 1957), 23.
20 Wright, A Testament, 24.
21 Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (London: John Murray, 1948; orig. 1943), 214. With more context: “Those who are doubtful about the blessings of the Modern Movement in architecture often say that the strongest argument against it is the very fact that its most representative examples are stations, factories, office buildings and the like. Now this is certainly not an accident. It would not be possible to find anything like the same number of good contemporary buildings for private luxury as for workaday use. But then, does not the architect to-day build for a population with nothing like the leisure for luxuries which patrons of the Baroque enjoyed? Must that not change the style, if it is a genuine style?”
22 Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture, 214–15.
23 Jacob Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte (Berlin: W. Spemann, 1908), 3. This text was edited and adapted for publication from 1898–1902 by Burckhardt’s nephew, Jakob Oeri, based on a course of lectures that Burckhardt had delivered on various occasions between 1872 and 1885 and at one time attempted to prepare in the form of a book himself, before abandoning the project around 1880.
24 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “Architecture and the Times” (1924), in Mies van der Rohe, ed. and trans. Philip C. Johnson (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1947), 186, 187.
25 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “Aphorisms on Architecture and Form” (1923) in Mies van der Rohe, ed. and trans. Johnson, 183.
26 Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, trans. P. Morton Shand (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 20.
27 Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture (New York: Harper and Row, 1943), 75.
28 Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, 91.
29 Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, 91.
30 Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, 93.
31 Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, 4.
32 While we suspect this quotation must also come from Gropius, we have not been able to locate the specific passage.
33 Sebastiano Serlio, Regole generali di architettura sopra le cinque manière de gli edifici … (Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1537); Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea dell’architettura universale (Venice, 1615); Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture (London: John Bill, 1624); André Félibien, Des principes de l’architecture, de la sculpture, de la peinture, et des autres arts qui en dependent (Paris: Coignard, 1676); Julien Guadet, Éléments et théorie de l’architecture: cours professé à l’École nationale et spéciale des beaux-arts, 4 vols (Paris: Aulanier & Co., 1901–1904); Howard Robertson, The Principles of Architectural Composition (London: Architectural Press, 1924).
34 Louis Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Press of the American Institute of Architects, 1924), 221, later quoted by Colin Rowe in “Neoclassicism and Modern Architecture,” Oppositions 1 (September 1973), 14.
35 Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932), 18–19.
36 Marcel Breuer, from “Where do we Stand?” a speech delivered in Zurich in 1934. The original typescript is preserved in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. The transcript was published in the Architectural Review (April 1935): 136. The quotation in context: “Don’t all of us get sick of everything after a time? Doesn’t everything, even architecture, become tiresome in the end? Isn’t our thirst for change greater than we care to admit? Here we reach a point where logic ceases to be logical, where consistency loses sense, and anticipation is impossible, because history provides examples for and against. It were easy, but futile, to indulge in prophesy. I would rather interrogate that unwritten law of our own convictions, the spirit of our age. It answers that we have tired of everything in architecture that is a matter of fashion.”
37 Mies van der Rohe, “Aphorisms on Architecture and Form,” 184. The full aphorism reads: “We refuse to recognize problems of form, but only problems of building./Form is not the aim of our work, but only the result./Form, by itself, does not exist./Form as an aim is formalism; and that we reject.”
38 Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture, 198. The quotation with more context reads: “it was a grave symptom of a diseased century that architects were satisfied to be storytellers instead of artists. But then painters were no better. They too, to be successful, had to tell stories or render objects from nature with scientific accuracy.” Special thanks to Lieske Huits for this reference.
39 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959; orig. 1941), 17. Giedion expresses this idea throughout the book (see also pages 13, 393, 761, 762), but the wording Rowe uses here can be found on page 17.
40 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 269.
41 Wright, A Testament, 24.