Postmodernism and Antimodernism in Contemporary British Architecture

Postmodernism and Antimodernism in Contemporary British ArchitectureAuthor(s): Michael RustinSource: Assemblage, No. 8 (Feb., 1989), pp. 88-103Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171016 .

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Michael J. Rustin is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology at North East London Polytechnic.

1. Carl Laubin, Opening Day, 1982

Michael Rustin

Postmodernism and

Antimodernism in

Contemporary British

Architecture

Preamble

In the past few years, architecture has become a topic of significant public controversy in Britain. A scheme for extending the National Gallery, which had previously been accepted by its trustees, was described by the Prince of Wales as "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a well- loved friend." In response to the ensuing outcry, approval was withdrawn, a new competition held, and a postmodern design by Robert Venturi declared the winner. A mile or two east from Trafalgar Square, another public row broke out over a project, prepared over many years by the devel- oper Peter Palumbo, to construct what would have been a Mies van der Rohe-designed building in London. This, in its turn, was condemned by the Prince as a "glass stump," and approval was withheld by the City Corporation.

It is unusual to say the least, for members of the British Royal Family to become embroiled in cultural controversy. But the issues of what is to be built, by and for whom, now have resonance beyond questions of taste. The Prince of Wales has chosen to identify himself with attacks on modernism in architecture coming from two directions. On the one hand, he has attacked these prestigeful projects on historic sites, thus identifying himself with a traditionalist position. But on the other, he has also become actively involved with the problems of the inner city, not only of housing and planning but of unemployment and poverty as well. The conservative implications of his attitude toward architecture are to some degree balanced, or at least com-

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assemblage 8

plicated, by his social concerns, which are by no means shared by other architectural traditionalists and which have indeed been patronizingly attacked by a leading Thatcher- ite politician, Norman Tebbit. Influencing the Prince of Wales on these matters has been his choice of Rod Hackney, the founder and leader of the "community architecture" movement ("social architecture" is its equivalent in the United States), as an adviser and friend.' Community architecture - the advocacy of small-scale, self-built or client-controlled, local renovation and rehabilitation schemes, propelled Hackney to the presidency of the Royal Institute of British Architects, largely, it seems, on the strength of the Prince's patronage and the high media visi- bility this has given him. In a period in which the architectural profession has been subject to fierce criticism, not only in well-publicized royal speeches, but also in polem- ics against mass housing and large-scale urban redevelop- ment such as Alice Coleman's Utopia on Trial, architects voted to place at their head one of the main critics of their profession.2 This indicates that at least in Britain postmodernism has quite some way to go before achieving popular status and that simpler reactions to modernism, whether from the Right or the Left or both at once, are more firmly based in public feeling. Charles Jencks, the foremost advocate and publicist for postmodernism in Brit- ain, recently described community architecture as having the aesthetics of the "do-it-yourself" (home decorating) shop. 3

Also momentarily fashionable in British society (in the milieu of political debate on the Left) are the concepts or buzzwords of Fordism and post-Fordism. These concepts, following Gramsci's seminal essay on Fordism in America, have been developed as explanations of the salient features of the political economy of late capitalism, in France by writers such as Alain Lipietz and M. Aglietta and in the United States by M. J. Piore and C. F. Sabel.4 These ideas have been vigorously applied to the British scene by writers such as Stuart Hall, Charlie Leadbeater, and Robin Murray. A document in the September and October 1988 issues of the monthly Marxism Today (the official journal of the small British Communist Party, but for many years the liveliest center of revisionist thinking on the British Left) points to the dramatic changes during the last

Thatcherite decade in the old landscape of mass production, mass consumption, central state welfare, and organized class conflict. Instead of trying to defend the "welfare state" against these transformations, it argues, the Left must respond to a world in which a diversified form of consumption has emerged, individualism is rife, bureau- cratic welfare is unpopular, and a wider field of antago- nisms that embraces feminist, green, and ethnic movements and publics has displaced the traditional oppo- sitions of class. While this document was ostensibly intended as a step toward a new Communist Party mani- festo, its publication coincided with the much larger and more important Labour Party Conference of October 1988, and its intended audience goes far beyond the minuscule number of British communists. As expected, this interven- tion has been eagerly seized on by important figures in the Labour Party, and by the Left-liberal press, as a major contribution to the discussion of the future of the Left after Thatcher. One of Labour's most intelligent leaders, Bryan Gould, has commented enviously that the tiny Communist Party, unlike Labour, "travels light" in ideological terms and can rethink its positions in terms far more radical than allowed by the cumbersome machinery of the Labour Party and its dominant trade union membership. In this context, the concepts of Fordism and post-Fordism provide a fertile paradigm for making sense of a broad process of social, economic, and cultural change.

These ideas have a considerable purchase on the social meanings of modernism and postmodernism in architecture and various other manifestations of contemporary culture. A number of analysts of the post-Fordist political economy have perceptively characterized postmodern culture as its distinctive expression. Scott Lash and John Urry, writing of this process of change through their slightly different formulation of the antithesis of organized and dis- organized capitalism, see postmodernism as the cultural expression of a more diversified and fragmented society and see its driving energy as deriving from the centrality of consumption to the modern economy.5 The new service class, generated by the economy's evolution away from material production and manual work and toward the production and exchange of information and services, responds to cultural goods that emphasize difference and

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that permit the display of discriminatory abilities acquired through a prolonged learning process and through an intense familiarity with commodities and the media that sell them. The "public spaces" of the postmodern era are

places designed, above all, for a social experience of con-

sumption. The characteristic postmodern environments of Fanueil Hall in Boston, Inner Harbour in Baltimore, South Street Seaport in New York, and their Covent Gar- den and Camden Lock equivalents in London, are precisely this kind of deliberately lively and (within limits) diversified consumer marketplace. The interior atriums of

Trump Tower or the Citycorp Building in New York provide this sort of amenity on an even more contained, artifi- cial, and discreetly policed scale, at specifically targetted levels of luxury and ostentation.6

The Modern Movement in the Era of Fordism

The analysis of postmodernism as the expression and product of post-Fordism invites us to reconsider the meaning of the modern movement itself in terms of Fordism. Modern- ism can be understood as shaped by the dominant interests, claims, and hopes of the Fordist era, in the antipathy toward which can be recognized the motivation for many of the current attacks on modernism's legacy. Fordism is characterized, in this analysis, as a system of mass production and of mass consumption, each reciprocally tied to the other. Without mass production, there could be no mass markets, but without mass consumption, systems of mass production could not realize economic returns. Ford- ism is also a system of regulation. The mass-production economy requires stability and predictability to maintain an environment in which large investments in plants and machinery can be made with reasonable hope of return over the relatively long period of amortization. Historically, stability and predictability of systems of production and consumption were obtained within the factory, by organiz- ing the workforce and regulating conflict with it through negotiation with recognized trade unions.7 Rising and stable consumer demand was secured through the development of mass communications, involved directly in advertising lines of commodities and indirectly in promot- ing a more uniform consumerist life-style - consider, for

example, the importance of life-style images of cigarettes, automobiles, and fashion in the heyday of Hollywood. A healthy and literate labor force was ensured through the growing involvement of the state in education, income maintenance, and health. Government involvement in welfare also helped to maintain conditions of relative political harmony and stability. Finally, from the period of the New Deal onwards, governments took an important role in the management of the economy as a whole, intervening to maintain a level of consumer demand and an overall volume of activity to ensure profitability for capital.

The modern movement in architecture and industrial design anticipated the shape of this new economic and political system and sought to give it appropriate symbolic expression. The ideas of rationality, functionality, and the scientific (in implicit or explicit opposition to values of tradition, decorum, and religion) were expressions of faith in the power of reason to transform the conditions of life, and in the machine as the material embodiment of this transformation. The leaders of the modern movement sought patronage and commissions from interests and institutions that they saw as part of the emerging industrial age, whether these were institutions of progressive capital, of labor (once it obtained political power), or of the state itself. Modernism was always closely linked with the idea of modernization, the transformation of societies in directions that would expand material powers, increase the welfare and sometimes the political power of the masses, and create infrastructures of housing, transportation, and welfare that would support mass production and consumption. It was, as postmodernism is not, a committed movement - that is to say, an attitude of ideological and cultural conviction that new forms of expression were inherently linked with, and vital to, the development of new human

possibilities.

Clearly, modernism took different shapes in the different national cultures in which it implanted itself. In Weimar Germany, its most important crucible, modernism was

integrally tied to the program of social democracy, both as the design philosophy of mass production and mass con-

sumption promoted by the Bauhaus and in the objective to provide the mass housing, factories, and schools of the

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new era.8 The more centralist environment of France led to a different idea of the agency imagined as the crucial bearer of the modernizing message and aesthetic - Le Corbusier's dramatically dirigiste conceptions of planning and mass housing, depending on the strong role of the state. In the United States, one thrust was individualist, as interpreted by Frank Lloyd Wright in his concern with the independent homestead and in his vision of the dispersed city.9 But from an early stage the modern style was also appropriated for the design of industrial and commercial buildings - Manhattan to this day possessing the most spectacular concentration in the world of works of the modern movement. The arrival of 6migre architects in

flight from Nazism, and their absorption by the dominant patronage system of corporate capital, signified the trans- mutation in its passage across the Atlantic Ocean of the dominant force and definition of modernization. A modern movement that before World War II had been associated with the rise of social democracy (and even, briefly, of social revolution) was now appropriated by the most advanced sector of world capitalism. The great attraction of the modern (in both architecture and painting) for the elites of the United States was that it allowed national cultural competition to take place, through the work of citizens (born or adopted) of the United States, on more or less equal terms with the cultural production of the Old World. The International Style was, in effect, the Ameri- can style in the postwar period.

Perry Anderson has pointed out how the modern movement defined itself only by what it was opposed to, consist- ing in positive substance of a heterogeneous conjunction of styles and tendencies that pointed in wholly different directions.'0 The intensity of the movement was generated by the strength of the resistance to modernity of the numerous anciens regimes of Europe. " The claims of science, rationality, universalism, secularism, urbanism, the claims, above all, of the mass of citizens, become intelligible as the components of a radical and transformative conscious- ness only when measured against the authoritarianism, traditionalism, religionism, nationalism, and aristocractic privilege that still in 1914 dominated most of Europe, through the autocracies of the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Romanoffs. The intensity and fervor of modernism

can be best understood as nurtured in reaction to this context of suffocating hierarchy and authoritarian power, achieving a short-lived utopian and millenarian release after World War I when these regimes were overthrown.

While the modern movement challenged an absolutist system of beliefs, power, and social status, its advocates mostly did so not by rejecting all absolute claims and truths, but by postulating alternative absolutes. The mod- erns fought faith with faith, even dogma with dogma. Unlike the postmodernists, whose key discovery is that there are no valid universal claims to universal truth, value, or beauty at all, for the protagonists of modernism, a deep structure of truth was usually to be found once the surfaces of distortion, tradition, or authority were swept away. 12 This latent depth could lie, it was thought, in the reality of unconscious desire, as analyzed in the studies of Freud, or of a hitherto unrecognized subtlety, complexity, opacity, and intensity of feeling, as explored in the writings of the great modernist novelists. Some even sought to demonstrate that burning away the surface of inauthentic language and expression would reveal an underlying lode of religious and cultural tradition - this was the "modernist" project of the traditionalist Right. In architecture, faith was placed in rationality, which was seen as giving access to architecture's authentic ideals, in contrast with the mere idolatry of banal, imitative traditionalism. What these various positions shared was the extreme force of belief and commitment that motivated their advocates. That the cultural struggle against the anciens regimes was an intense and often heroic one is something easily forgotten by those who deride modernism today.

Britain, not surprisingly, formed a special zone in this cultural battleground. It scarcely had, or appeared not to have, an ancien regime. It had responded to pressures for democracy by compromise and concession, establishing after each moment of class confrontation a new equilib- rium that allowed a further period of moderated class hegemony. It had persuaded the middle-class products of the first industrial revolution to accept their subordination to a preindustrial, aristocratic system of status and power.13 It then succeeded in persuading the leading segments of the working class that they, too, had their own given place in

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this organic order. A maritime orientation and empire also strongly insulated Britain against European intensities of ideological conflict; the British believed that they were different from, and better than, everyone else. This system of carefully negotiated social relations, under aristocratic leadership until well into the twentieth century - even until Mrs. Thatcher's modernization, in one view - did not allow much scope for the formation of a cadre of mili- tant oppositional intellectuals. When intellectual reinforce- ments from the Continent arrived, as Perry Anderson has described, their main ideological contribution to British intellectual life was to emphasize the virtues of its British- ness - that is to say, its moderation, its freedom from dogma (often equated with any systematic theory), its spirit of compromise and commonsense.'4

In this climate, modernism came late and remained mar- ginal in British culture. This was a country in which the most powerful promodernist circle - the Bloomsbury group - existed as a coterie within upper-class life, seeing itself between the world wars as a quiet force for reform and enlightenment, in touch with the administrative heart of the state, but also with many of the most active intellectual and artistic tendencies. Of course a force for modernity that could be this cosily encapsulated within the dominant class (which enjoyed an official intellectual as well as political opposition) constituted only the mildest of challenges to established orthodoxies.

In the field of architecture, British modernism traced an unusual ancestry for itself. Where elsewhere in Europe, the modern movement identified itself with the power for good of science and the machine, in Britain it claimed its origins in the Arts and Crafts movement, in the organicist and romantic legacies of Ruskin and Morris."I Perhaps the modern movement's most influential exponent, a socialist refugee from Germany, Nickolaus Pevsner, has also been, in another guise, one of the greatest forces for architectural conservation in his time. The series of architectural guide- books he founded, and at first wrote, The Buildings of England, is a comprehensive inventory and description of the entire national architectural heritage. Published by Penguin Books, originally the socially conscious pioneers of the paperback book, this series is the happiest of mar-

riages between conservationism and popular education. Yet, in other national contexts, it would have seemed an unexpected mission for a leading ideologist of the modern movement.

Pevsner clarified this paradox in his own writing. In The Englishness of English Art, he describes the essence of the national culture as infused with organicism and particularism - qualities that he describes as the "picturesque."'6 Modernism, when it came, conformed to national type. Britain, uniquely, developed a modernism of the small town, the national compromise between the urban and the rural known as the "garden city," and, in its postwar form, the "new town."7 The national style of suburban house and garden was adapted to modern materials and styles, but only to a certain point. Not until after World War II and the arrival of social democracy did architects of the modern movement begin to obtain substantial patronage and commissions, principally through local authorities such as the London County Council and through appointed bodies such as the New Town corporations. The new aesthetic announced itself in the Festival of Britain of 1951, of which the Royal Festival Hall is the only surviv- ing building. Then came the spate of urban house and apartment building by local authorities, initially objects of pride and optimism; the school-building program, perhaps the most lasting achievement of British modernism; and a number of other public commissions by elite institutions such as universities, which provided work for a number of major architects. This was modernism at least a quarter of a century late, and, at first, in a deliberately modest and toned-down national style. The simple red-brick formalism of London Transport architecture - another public service with a popular design mission - had pioneered this approach in the prewar period.

A similar aesthetic of decent functionalism emerged in the 1960s in the sphere of home furnishings and equipment. One such instance was the founding of the Habitat stores by Terence Conran. Conran has related his impatience, as he grew up after the war, with the over-decorated and status-conscious fussiness of domestic interior design - each level of society slavishly aping its superiors in its choice of decor, only on a smaller scale. And he has

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described the revelatory experience of seeing ordinary household kitchenware in France - useful, well-formed, brightly colored objects, with no pretence to be what they were not. So the idea that beauty follows function came to British homes, especially their kitchens, and on a much more diffused scale than in an earlier, somewhat precious fashion for "Scandinavian" styles among the new middle class.

Both the buildings of English modernism and the functionalism of postwar domestic and, indeed, office design can be seen as the aesthetic expression of a Fordist age, qualified by British vernacular and organic themes. Conran emphasized the mass-produced, machine-made attributes of his goods by shelving them in dense rows, giving his shops the atmosphere of a light and spacious warehouse: He apparently had to tell his first store manager to stop laying out the goods as if for a precious still life or livingroom set in a theater. But the domesticity of the earlier period of this development, of which the new towns were the most prominent icon, in the 1960s suffered from a malign conjunction between a new generation of architects wanting to renew the authentic spirit of urban modernism, against the cosy spirit of English suburban compromise, and public and private developers, who, seeing large opportunities in the inner city, pressured for higher densities of development and rates of return. The vogue for the construction of high-rise apartment blocks, for the rebuilding of commercial centers, and for the large- scale renewal of traffic systems (sometimes at the expense of part of a city's historic core) gave a harsh and overbear- ing tone to later postwar modernism. Industrialized building methods achieved their zenith of popularity and apparent cost-effectiveness; local authorities were under pressure to build more, and for less. The second generation of modern British architects attempted an internal renewal of the modernist spirit, after the tame compromises of some earlier postwar developments, but, in an unfortunate meeting of architectural intransigence and industrial technique, produced some particularly austere and unfriendly buildings.

The last stage of British Fordism, just before its regulatory compromises of social class and antagonistic institution

began to fall apart, was one in which the route to modernization was sought through an ever-larger scale and comprehensiveness of organization and planning. This expansionary period of public interventionism, the 1960s and early 1970s, witnessed many schemes for town center demolition and renewal, housing estate construction, centralized hospital building, campus construction on green field sites, and another wave of new towns. The London Barbican development in the private sector and the Thamesmead New Town in the public sector are but two examples of the heavy-handed constructions conceived in this period.

The Critique of British Modernism Since the early 1970s, a vigorous counterattack has been waged against the modern movement in architecture and town planning, in both Britain and the United States. Charles Jencks cites 1972 as the canonical date, marking the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis.'8 Cameras were on hand to capture this occasion that supposedly demonstrated the futility of a whole era of building and planning and that, by implication, deserves to be repeated many times over. Here, indeed, was an explo- sive revenge against the modern movement, expressing in its iconic role the intense negative passions aroused by modern architecture.

The critique of the rationalism of the modern movement has come from several directions. But although it presents itself chiefly in aesthetic terms, we cannot neglect to note its intersection with wider social and political arguments. It is the dominant institutions of the Fordist era, the class coalitions that they represented, and the values and interests that they advanced which are under attack in this critique of their urban and architectural forms - not just a style. Thus in Britain the critique of the massified style of some public-housing programs in the cities has been accompanied by the virtual end of public housing as such. While the failures of urban renewal and town planning have been fully and comprehensively repudiated, no equivalent outrage is directed at the homelessness and beggary that are in ever greater evidence on the streets of London, New York, and other urban centers. The achievements of

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the postwar public-housing program in terms of housing standards are more-or-less forgotten, abandoned as legiti- mate objectives of policy.

The corporatist compromises of Fordism were not attacked only from the Right, of course. The events of 1968 revealed a radical reaction to the uniformity of a mass consumer culture and claims for self-expression and identity (against "one-dimensional man") that could be given shape as programs of either the Left or the Right. But while in the late sixties it seemed that a radical individualism and utopianism of the Left was the dominant current of feeling, it has subsequently become clear that both the individualist and the traditionalist wings of the Right were recharged by these new currents, and with more substantial effects. The antirationalist reaction to the technicism and utilitarianism of the Fordist era found expression in a rediscovered reverence for tradition; in conservationist attitudes to nature; in demands for individual self-expression; in a valorization of the "receptive," nonaggressive traits of character deemed to be "feminine" against "masculine" attitudes of aggression, violence, and competition; and in a rediscovery of the worth of various kinds of particularism, including those of ethnicity and place. Each of these imag- inary identities and moral communities became a focus for aesthetic articulation, in contest against the alleged techno- cratic impersonality of the modern. These new claims of "difference" did not map well onto the established antago- nisms of class politics and they tapped both conservative and radical traditions of thought and feeling.

Nonetheless, while the ideological allegiance of these "post-class," post-Fordist, and postmodern tendencies was, in traditional terms, ambiguous, it was clear that the main bearer and articulator of these new messages occupied a distinctive niche in the changing class structure of rich societies. The voice that was loudest in making these new cultural claims belonged to the new service class. These groups provided if not a mass base then at least a leadership for each of the new social movements that were seek- ing to broaden and redefine the political agenda in terms of a greater differentiation of "life spaces." As already sug- gested, the public spaces that have become leading spatial symbols of postmodern culture were designed to appeal

precisely to members of this emerging class, whose distinctive resource in social and economic life was its newly acquired cultural capital. These were the consumers that would determine the success of the marketplaces of life- style. Preference, at least in protected public spaces, for the multiethnic as opposed to the monoethnic and for a diversity of associations and significations in the commodities on sale and the buildings and decors on display presup- posed a degree of sophistication and cultural mobility on the part of the intended consumers. Neither design for the masses nor simple conformance to existing cultural pat- terns quite suits the experience of persons who are conscious of having had a better education than their parents and who value the personal and social choices enabled by their own earning power and by their habituation to choos- ing, buying, and using myriad consumer commodities. Styles that retain the signs of "the modern," yet that also allow the expression of a variety of particular identities and affinities are consonant with the needs of members of this new class. Even the styles of the past have to be marketed to these groups as new fashions, in the manner of Laura Ashley.

The diversity and self-reflectiveness, superficial or other- wise, of the postmodern is a product of producer as well as consumer interests. Commodities and styles do not mate- rialize out of the air in response to consumer needs, but must first be imagined, designed, and marketed. In fashion, graphics, writing, music, or architecture, producers are attentive to both originality and ceaseless change. New

technologies - the techniques of "flexible specialization" - both permit and necessitate a high rate of turnover of

designs and the targetted marketing of products in particular arenas of life-style.19 In these markets the designer becomes a key player in the production process. The cele- bration of style, difference, and sophistication of professional language becomes a function of the competition of

producers with one another, as well as of the competition of consumers for their emblems of status and identity.

Thus, in the United States, the advocates of the postmodern have sought to save the modern tradition as a usa- ble idiom from unpopular association with the monolithic

power of corporations and governments, and especially cor-

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porations and governments in unholy alliance. It has been pointed out that Venturi's advocacy of "complexity and contradiction" was, in fact, an argument for architecture, with its tradition of commitment to individual expression and identity, against planning, with its apparent tendency toward the uniform and totalitarian.20 His defence of popular and commercial forms of expression, in Learning from Las Vegas, sought to disengage his profession from its association with moral and aesthetic improvement, with high- minded East Coast corporatism, we might say.21 This argument also implicitly endorsed a move of the center of cultural gravity away from the Europeanized and more liberal east to the sunbelt. But, of course, as Tom Wolfe has acidly pointed out, Venturi remained a modernist, moving the tradition toward the unabashed populism and commer- cialism of what later became the Reagan era, while hoping also to replenish the modernist architectural tradition from within.22 The modernist tradition has been so thoroughly assimilated by the corporate elite of the United States, and so fully adopted as its imperial idiom, that there could hardly be a question of its repudiation. No historical alternative is available in this culture that does not lead back- wards toward Europe and its influence - in opposition to the present orientation of American power. The attempts to enhance the density of reference and historical evoca- tion of buildings in the postmodern style even now risk seeming merely pretentious in a cultural context without density of historical memory, appearing as an American version of a mid-Atlantic style.

In Britain, by contrast, it has seemed feasible to attempt the complete repudiation of modernism.23 After all, the modern movement had arrived late, and seemed to have ended, so far as architecture and urban design were concerned, in complete disaster in the 1970s. "The heritage industry," as Robert Hewison's recent book calls it, has been flourishing like no other in the United Kingdom, with a new museum opening, on average, every week.*24 Marketing Britain as a living historical museum has been one of the largest and most successful national enterprises of the past two decades, growing in size and revenues as the "modern" sector of manufacturing has declined. Because the industrial revolution took place initially in the north and midlands, and because the upper classes

retained their attachment to the country over the city, there remains a large architectural legacy of an aristocratic culture and society, readily available for reoccupation and rehabilitation. The location of new information-based industries in the south and east and the concentration of financial services in the City of London permit those status groups that have gained most from the unevenly distrib- uted prosperity of the eighties to choose a countrified life- style, in the time-honored manner of the English upper class, even though their livelihood depends on the activi- ties of the metropolis. It is easy, living in this country, to imagine that the best things about it from an aesthetic point of view predate industrialism and the modern, in any form. The continu- ing absorption of the British in matters of social status and their aesthetic preference for the symbols of the country over those of the city provide a soil in which traditionalist ideas can flourish. As the example of Pevsner, but also, earlier, of the revolutionary socialist William Morris, shows, reverence for the historic heritage of British architecture and its spirit of place has never been confined to the Right. The conservationist movement in its various forms has grown enormously in support over recent years. While in important respects this movement has been a vehicle for the interests of the owners of landed property (through tax concessions, development control) and for a culture of nostalgia and hierarchy, it too has by no means been exclusively a movement of the Right. Demands to protect the countryside and coastline, to create public access to the land, to develope nature reserves, and to extend conservation to a variety of urban and industrial buildings and sites of historical interest have long mobi- lized both radical and conservative support. One reason for the failure of the green movements to emerge as an independent political force in Britain may be that their sup- porters traverse the social spectrum, and find homes in every party. So far as architecture is concerned, the traditionalist position has been articulated most substantially by a high conservative philosopher, Roger Scruton, notably in The Aesthetics of Architecture, and by an architectural historian associated with the same High Tory periodical, David Watkin, in Architecture and Morality.25 Scruton argued

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that the meanings of buildings lie primarily in their reference to the historical tradition of architecture. Any dis- crimination of the qualities of a building depends, in his view, on an understanding of its style and on the expecta- tions that the elements of a building combined as a style set up in those who experience them. This emphasis on tradition and style was counterposed to the modernist commitment to a theory of pure expression, whether held to derive from function or from the abstract properties of space. Scruton criticized the advocates of the modern movement for their belief that style could be replaced with a form of building that would directly or truthfully represent function - the idea of a wholly transparent architecture, so to speak. What Scruton's argument clarified was that the choice of economy or simplicity ("less is more," in Mies van der Rohe's classic phrase) was itself a choice of rhetoric, not a transcendence of rhetoric, as it sometimes claimed to be. This failure to recognize that any architecture must involve a systematic form of expression can per- suasively be said to have been responsible for the undue depletion of expressive form that became the major cul-de- sac of architectural modernism. The reductionism of this extreme functionalist position is perhaps parallel to the reduction, in orthodox Marxist thought, of political forms to the class interests that they are held to represent. The effect is similarly to render political forms and institutions "invisible," since they are supposed to be wholly the expression of something extraneous to them. The conse- quences of this blindness for socialist thought and practice hardly need to be spelled out.

However powerful and valid Scruton's argument for the inescapability of style and form of expression may have been, his attempt to limit its point and reference to tradition was much less convincing. The logic of recognizing the autonomy of language points not exclusively toward the past, as Scruton claimed, but in the direction of an aesthetic pluralism, toward a diversity of possible languages and kinds of meaning. This is, in fact, the direction the argument has taken recently with respect to several art forms, including architecture.

In the fields of literary and cultural studies, the discovery of the autonomous properties of form has made possible

the analysis of a diversity of genres of writing as well as forms of expression in other media. To make sense of the huge variety of cultural communications brought about by new technologies, extended education, and democracy, analysts of culture in the 1960s realized that they had to cease to apply only a single canon of realist representation to all literary and dramatic forms. Emphasis on the ethical or social "content" of art was to a greater or lesser degree displaced by interest in symbolic forms and structures themselves. Even writers in the Marxist tradition such as Lucien Goldmann and Raymond Williams devoted their main analytic attention to the development of symbolic forms and to the response of these forms to the pressures of social experience, largely rejecting the earlier model of material base and symbolic superstructure. The displace- ment of positivism in Anglo-American philosophy, with its privileging of descriptive scientific discourse over all others, had a similar effect: an implicit materialism (of an individualist kind) was replaced with an epistemological pluralism and relativism. Various tendencies of thought were influential in bringing about this greater openness and pluralism in the analysis of cultural forms, in anthropological explorations of modern life as well as in the study of the mass media. Among these were interactionist and ethno- graphic approaches in sociology and anthropology, which provided ways to understand the symbolic expressions of the diversity of life-styles. Even more important analyti- cally, and more open to theorization, was the development of structural linguistics and its cultural applications as a theory of signs.26 While these "postrealist" and "post- humanist" approaches enabled a much greater sophistication of analysis, adequate to a much wider variety of objects, it was also possible, at a certain point, to feel that the emphasis on the autonomy of symbolism had gone too far and that fundamental human issues were being lost from sight. Critical here was the shift from "structuralist" to "poststructuralist" discourse. Whereas the former mode of analysis sought to retain the idea of a unity of discourse, even if embodied in innate structures of mind rather than in the external objects of thought, poststructuralism stressed the fragmentation and arbitrariness of discourse, dependent as it was on contingency, individual will, or the play of desire.27

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These arguments in the broader field of cultural analysis found their reflection in architectural theory. Many sought escape from the apparent deadend of functionalist or expressionist modernism in its most dogmatic forms. The plurality of doctrines and fashions in other fields of expression had its parallels in a profusion of architectural idioms, which together perhaps constitute a postmodern situation in the plain descriptive sense of replacing anything like a modernist hegemony. Neorationalism, "critical regional- ism" and neovernacular architecture, "late modernism," neoclassicism, "social" or "community" architecture, the movement for urban design, and traditionalism and revivalism of the English kind are only some of the recent tendencies. Most are based on a recognition that architectural expression is autonomous and complex and that aesthetic decisions cannot follow automatically from any single canonical source of authority or justification, whether func- tional or stylistic.

Recognition of the complexity of architectural expression, against the grain of the utilitarianism and expressive mini- malism of the 1970s, did not, of course, necessarily point in a revivalist or traditionalist direction. For one, serious scholars of the modern movement could point out that its major figures had not, after all, broken with the entire architectural tradition of the West, but, on the contrary, in rejecting imitation and superficial forms of decoration, had sought a return to fundamentals. This was the argument of Colin Rowe's essays on Le Corbusier, who was seen to be concerned with classical ideas of proportion even while rejecting the entire Beaux-Arts vocabulary of ornament.28

Similarly, while Gothic styles had given rich expression to individual craftsmanship, and could thus be read as a cele- bration and commemoration of the power of creativity, Gothic builders made no secret of their pride in solving technical problems, in spanning large spaces or concentrat- ing the load-bearing thrust of a building so as to remove the mass from a wall. The engineers of the nineteenth century, or the "high-tech" modernists of the present day, could be seen as part of this different, nonclassical tradition. Commitment to local vernacular styles could likewise take the form of neoconservative revivalism, commercial or suburban populism ("Main Street is almost alright"), or a radical democratic approach to self-building and the

responsibility of the professional architect to the community client.

Scruton's Aesthetics of Architecture confined itself to some of the underlying theoretical premises of these debates, ignoring their manifestations in recent architectural litera- ture. Scruton recognized that the nature of architectural expression and symbolism was the crucial issue in the debate with modernism, and he set out to refute theories of architectural language that might be compatible with modernism or that might lead in a merely pluralist and open direction, including that taken by European or American postmodernism. He thus critically considered psychoanalytical, Marxist, and semiological approaches to cultural forms. His contension here was, in part, with ideas taken up by the cultural Left, often a major preoccupation in his work. Central to his argument was an insis- tence on the idea of an architectural tradition or style, in preference to that of an architectural language or languages.

The main point of this contrast is that whereas languages have referents to objects outside language (a denotative or descriptive function), traditions and styles are held to have connotative functions alone, referring through similarity and difference only to other works. This argument thus forms the epistemological foundation for the idea that architectural expression is in essence a dialogue with the past, demanding of its public familiarity with its idioms and traditions. A further condition for architecture is the actual existence as living forms of shared idioms with which artists and the public can be familiar - something that can no longer be taken for granted. It has been an important (and relevant) criticism of late modernism that its antinomian approach to the established conventions of art has dissolved the means of coherent expression, substi- tuting for it an individualist and readily exploitable state of anarchy. Reaction to this state of affairs has led some English art critics whose political sympathies lay on the Left to move toward a neoconservative position on aesthetic questions. 29

Clearly differences exist between the languages of art and language as literally understood. As Alan Colquhoun has pointed out, languages in art are part of the subject of a

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work, not merely its medium."0 The relation between sig- nifier and signified, which we take for granted in literal communication, is a principal focus of interest in the communications of art. What makes language an illuminating basis for understanding works of art is the complexity of its relations to experience; and these different relations and functions can be seen to correspond to different approaches to and theories of art. Clifford Geertz, following Alton Becker, classified the functions of language as follows: first, reference to phenomena or experience outside language itself; second, internal consistency or coherence; third, relation to other symbolic communication (connotation); and fourth, reference to the intention or state of mind of the speaker.31 The communications of art share all these characteristics, though in different degrees; and distinct aesthetic approaches or ideologies depend upon giving one or other of these, or combinations thereof, particular emphasis.

Although Scruton claims to deny that architecture makes use of language (not entirely consistently in his own text), his argument in fact privileges one communicative function - that of relations of connotation to other articula- tions in the same genre - over all others, especially those of external reference.32 This position seems in its own way as reductionist as those it attacks. Either the need to relate to tradition condemns architecture (or any other art) to repetition or variation restricted within a prescribed range or else "tradition" must be defined in an arbitrary or discre- tionary way, so as to allow only privileged variants. Mod- ernism is thus excluded (not quite in principle, though near enough) either due to its explicit repudiation of the architectural vocabulary and syntax of the past or, presum- ably - if it is argued that this was merely a rejection of surface features - because such continuities as can be found are deemed to be insufficiently dense or meaningful.

Yet, if communications in art or architecture lack any nec-

essary reference to some aspects of experience outside of a tradition, it is unclear why any variation should occur or be deemed desirable or pleasurable at all. A consistent hieratic traditionalism in which all significant change is

prevented can indeed be imagined. There have been authoritarian cultures with these rules, and Scruton's polit-

ical writings sometimes give the impression that he might be comfortable in one, though he writes from the stance of someone in strenuous opposition to what he still sees as an established orthodoxy of the Left. (This is not everyone's view of Mrs. Thatcher's Britain.)

Scruton sets out to establish a basis for his aesthetic theories in the work of Kant: he thus argues that the function of imagination (or "seeing as") is central to apprehending works of art and interprets imaginative response largely in terms of relation to the apprehension of differences and similarities within a tradition of expression. It seems to me, however, to misread Kant's aesthetic theories to appropriate them for traditionalism. Kant argued in the Critique of Judgment that aesthetic response arises as a result of a rela-

tionship between the experiencing self and external objects. It is, he claimed, neither a form of understanding of physi- cal nature (science) nor one of rational law (morality), but instead an expression of the unity and harmony of percep- tions faced with the disorder and chaos of experience. Therefore the experience of art is, above all, one of the realization of order and coherency, achieved in the work

by the artist, and in the mind of its viewer through a

response to the work, which to some degree relives the

experience of the artist in making it.

This account allows us to see the many dimensions

required by works of art. For the experiences of disorder and disharmony that works of art resolve are not exclu-

sively or necessarily a consequence of the state of forms of

expression themselves. Works of art make use of an expressive form or language, as their precondition, and necessar-

ily make reference to some "tradition" of language, just as

speech makes reference, in Saussurean terms, to language itself. But they also, as their essential activity, give form to some kind of experience, which may be of personal emotion, or of social sentiment, or of achieved understanding. The experience whose pressure gives rise to works of art

may be one of problems of communicative forms them-

selves, but there is no reason to see this as an exclusive

preoccupation of artists. It is important to understand that both the experience given shape in the work and the means used to give form to experience are equally a part of

the work. It is possible, as the critics of modernism have

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been able to show, for expressive forms to become so depleted in vocabulary or technique or texture as to make any complex expression very difficult. But the opposite condition can and does also arise, in which the orthodoxies of permitted expression are so rigid and controlling as to prevent the emergence or recognition of current experience in art. This was the state of affairs to which the modern movement reacted in its attack on the traditionalism of the anciens rigimes of the nineteenth century, and this is the state of affairs to which the traditionalists might return us, if they could.

Recognition of the multidimensionality of works of art, representing what in psychoanalytic terms has been described as a relationship of container and contained, allows us to respect the relevance of a variety of different analytical perspectives in their understanding." Works of art may try to create a symbolic form for the experience of a society, and therefore the analysis of changing forms of social experience, for instance, in terms of modes of production or social structures, may help to explain what these works of art do. (It is hard to understand the realist novel, for example, without reference to its social subject.) Works of art may also seek a symbolic form for individual states of mind and emotion. Thus psychoanalytic investiga- tions of the nature and origins of such states of mind will also have explanatory power in relation to certain kinds of work. It may be argued in response that works of art are inherently formal in character and that such extraneous dimensions should be considered simply as background information. This is, in effect, Scruton's position, allowing him to acknowledge the seeming or partial relevance of these "external" dimensions of works of art (he gives a rea- sonably sympathetic account of Kleinian-influenced architectural and art criticism, for example), while still claiming them to be irrelevant to the work's true nature and worth. But while interpretations blind to the properties of forms and means of expression can in truth be crass and reductionist, explanations that attend only to textual relations, and to the place of works in a tradition, easily become merely academic.

Rudolf Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (cited as an exemplary work by Scruton)

emphasized the Christian Platonism that underlay much Renaissance building, ideas of mathematical proportion being associated with divine harmony and giving rise to the characteristic orderliness and proportion of Renaissance church architecture. A similar point was made by Otto Von Simson, who, in writing about the Christian symbolism of Gothic cathedrals, linked the ideas of illumination and structure to Christian conceptions of proportion and harmony. Of course these architectural traditions and the great works produced within them were not determined by religious or philosophical systems of meaning. On the other hand, they are unimaginable without the existence of such shared experiences to which formal expression could be given. In a similar way, the modern movement can be regarded as motivated by the desire to find symbolic expression, or equivalents, for an experience of the world in which different transformative belief systems, new kinds of citizenship, and a new relation to nature were central issues. The practical functions that buildings are expected to perform can be seen as the particular center of uncer- tainty around which aesthetic decisions must be made, adequacy to this purpose being one precondition for an apt or harmonious resolution to the problem. New functions, and the symbolic terms in which they are defined, thus necessitate new architectural solutions.

The Post-Fordist Present

The neoconservative contribution to the postmodern architectural debate in Britain has been distinctively large, for the social reasons given above. Nevertheless, this tendency is far from having achieved the position of an antimodern- ist orthodoxy. For one, the relations between the neoliberal and the traditionalist strands of conservative thinking are uneasy, even though open conflict between them is inhib- ited by their shared enmity toward the Left and toward the previous corporatist compromise. Also, for the advanced sectors of business, oriented toward European and Ameri- can markets, the "modern" sometimes remains an attrac- tive model, especially where its association with big government and central planning has been attentuated. Thus in the new London Docklands development an anar- chic conglomeration of styles are visible, ranging from refurbished fine Victorian warehouses, to neovernacular

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2. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Canary Warf, London, 1988

housing, to the high-tech styles of late modern architecture, to compromise designs - such as the plans for the oversized Canary Wharf complex - which seek to soften the impact of their up-to-date technology and scale with conventional styling. The absence of central planning for this remarkable development has led to unusual architectural variety, not, as a whole, to revivalism.

The prestige won overseas by certain leading British architects - Rogers, Foster, Stirling - in contexts more hos- pitable to modernism, has also had its effects on their reputation and acceptability in England. So, after many years without commissions in Britain, Stirling has recently been able to undertake important work (for example, the Tate Gallery Extension in London and the Liverpool Tate), and while he has widened the range and complexity of historical reference in his recent buildings, his identity as part of the modernist tradition can hardly be in doubt. Similarly, the Lloyds building in London by Rogers is one of the most intransigent modern buildings ever to be con- structed in the city. Last year the Royal Academy's deci- sion to mount their first exhibition of modern architecture for a quarter of a century, an exhibition that included

imaginative designs for the replanning of central London, and an implicit critique of some appalling choices in recent architectural commissions (notably the cancellation of a project by Foster Associates for a new broadcasting house), was a significant counterattack by the advocates of the modern, who retain considerable influence in architectural education and journalism.34 And though the community architecture movement carries no great significance from the viewpoint of major architecture, it is important that the opposition to centralized and commercially driven planning has come from the grass-roots, demanding a more democratic relation between architects and community, and not merely from traditionalists of the Right.

It is far from clear what shape this post-Fordist economy and society will ultimately take. While the new Right may appear firmly in control, the reality is that the long-term political leanings of the new service class, and thus of the whole society, are far from determined. The most striking feature of the post-Fordist social landscape is the great diversity of interests and moral communities that coexist and conflict within it. Changes taking place within the fab- ric of civil society - for example, the growing concerns

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IIi .. . . . . .

$1 772 :

3. Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn, The Changing Picture of Docklands, 1983

about both the man-made and natural environment - and demands for more responsive social institutions may have as much lasting influence as the modernizing and individualist drive that has recently dominated British political life.

With the decline of the Fordist mode of production and the virtual destruction of its system of regulation and compromise by Mrs. Thatcher, a period in which the ideology of modernism in architecture had some influence over major public agencies has come to an end. But, on the other hand, postmodernism is little more at present than the discursive space in which alternatives to this particular cultural hegemony can be fought over. The existence, as a consequence of these changes, of a cultural debate that is both theoretically informed and pluralistic now makes it at least possible for different aesthetic options to be clarified and argued out.

We may best hope that a diversity of architectural idioms, each rooted in particular subcommunities and traditions, will continue to develop. It seems unlikely that any single aesthetic orthodoxy will succeed in establishing itself, such as the members of the modern movement fought for against its powerful establishment opponents, or as the traditionalists, combatting what they see as their establishment enemies, now imagine might be restored. While the advocates of postmodernism often seem to defend a singu- larly trivial and empty notion of eclecticism and diversity, they are at least right that in democratic, fully enfran- chized societies aesthetic difference is both unavoidable and desirable. The passions of the modern movement (and perhaps even of neotraditionalism) may be fruitful within a framework of discourse that no tendency succeeds in cap- turing for itself. Both the openness of the discourse and the intensity of commitments within it must be defended if the postmodern is to be a serious and tolerable cultural condition.

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Notes 1. On community architecture in Britain, see Nick Wates and Charles Nevitt, Community Archi- tecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). 2. Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial (London: Hilary Shipman, 1985).

3. His discussion of this appears in Charles Jencks, The Prince, The Architects and the New Wave (Lon- don: Academy Editions, 1988).

4. Gramsci's idea of Fordism appears in Selections from the prison Notebooks, ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith (London: Law- rence and Wishart, 1971), pt. 2, sec. 3. See also Alain Lipietz, Mir- acles and Mirages (London: Verso, 1987); M. Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (London: Verso, 1979); and M. J. Piore and C. F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

5. See Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organised Capitalism (London: Polity Press, 1987), and John Urry, "Cultural Change and

Contemporary Holiday-Making," Theory, Culture and Society 5, no. 1 (February 1988).

6. On issues of contemporary public space, see the articles by M. Walzer, M. J. Rustin, and M. Berman in Dissent (Fall 1986). Also see the articles by Peter Hall, David Harvey, and M. J. Rustin, among others, in the catalogue to the XVII Triennale, International Exhibition on World Cities and the Future of the Metropolis, Milan, 1988.

7. See Piore and Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide.

8. See Barbara Miller Lane, Archi- tecture and politics in Germany, 1918-1945, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1985); and John Willett, Art and Politics in the Weimar Period (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

9. See R. Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (Cam- bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977).

10. See Perry Anderson, "Modern- ity and Revolution," New Left Review 144 (March-April 1984), and Marshal Berman's reply in same issue.

11. See Arno J. Mayer, The Persis- tence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pan- theon, 1981).

12. For a critique of some post- modernist assumptions, see M. J. Rustin, "Absolute Voluntarism: A Critique of a Post-Marxist Concept of Hegemony," New German Critique 42 (Winter 1988).

13. See Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

14. Perry Anderson, "Origins of the Present Crisis," New Left Review 23

(January-February 1964), and idem, "Components of the National Culture," New Left Review 50

(July-August 1960).

15. See Nickolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modem Design (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960).

16. Nickolaus Pevsner, The

Englishness of English Art (London: Architectural Press, 1955).

17. See Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, ed. F. Osborn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1955). See also Fishman, Urban

Utopias.

18. Charles Jencks, What is Post- Modernism (New York: Academy Editions, 1986); and idem, Post- Modernism: The New Classicism in

Art and Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1987).

19. See Robin Murray, "Life After Henry (Ford)," Marxism Today (October 1988).

20. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966).

21. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenow, Learn- ing from Las Vegas, rev. ed. (Cam- bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977).

22. See Tom Wolfe, From Bau- haus to Our House (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983).

23. See Clive Aslet, Quinlan Terry: The Revival of Architecture (Lon- don: Viking, 1986).

24. Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987).

25. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (London: Methuen, 1979); David Watkin, Morality and Architecture (London: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1977); see also idem, The Rise of Architectural History (London: Architectural Press, 1980).

26. On the context of this, see Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies: Two

Paradigms," in J. Curran et al., eds., Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader (London: Sage, 1986).

27. See Peter Dews, Logics of Dis- integration (London: Verso, 1987); Andreas Huyssen, "Mapping the Postmodern," New German Cri-

tique 33 (Fall 1984); and Theory, Culture & Society 5, nos. 2-3

(June 1988), a special issue on

postmodernism.

28. Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976).

29. See Peter Fuller, Images of God: The Consolations of Lost Illu- sions (London: Chatto and Windus, 1985). See also Fuller's new journal Modern Painters, as well as the defence of his new position, "Over- weening Treachery, and Such Like," Art Monthly 116 (May 1988). 30. See Alan Colquhoun, Essays in Architectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981). 31. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowl- edge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), chap. 1.

32. Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture. These issues are dis- cussed in more detail in M. J. Rus- tin, "English Conservatism and the Aesthetics of Architecture," Radical Philosophy 40 (Summer 1985).

33. See W. R. Bion, "Attention and Interpretation," in Seven Ser- vants: Four Works by Wilfred R. Bion (New York: Jason Aronson, 1977). See also M. J. Rustin, "Post- Kleinian Psychoanalysis and Post- modernism," forthcoming in New Left Review.

34. See Deyan Sudjic, New Archi- tecture: Foster, Rogers, Stirling, exhibition catalogue (London: Royal Academy, 1986).

Figure Credits 1. Architectural Design 58, nos. 1-2 (1988): 56.

2. Courtesy of the author.

3. Photographs by Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn.

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Documents

Postmodernism and Antimodernism in Contemporary British Architecture