Wolfe's Bau-Wow House

FROM A DISTANCE, Larsen Hall looks like a single, enormous brick. The building, which squats on a small parcel adjacent to Radcliffe Yard, is not in fact one brick, but thousands of them, piled humorlessly on top of one another. A couple of windows, arranged with all the logic of key-punch holes, break through the clay curtain, but they are aberrations. This building says BRICKS and little else. No one listens.

How this comic opera of a structure--and thousands of its cursed cousins of modern architecture--made their regrettable appearances on the scene is the subject of Tom Wolfe's latest book. In From Bauhaus to Our House, Wolfe asks the devastatingly simple questions that modern architecture has never been able to answer. Most importantly, Wolfe asks why the "boxes" on which almost all modern work is based, continue to be built when no one likes them. Not the architects. Not the builders. And especially not the people who live or work in them. Yet the glass boxes, the brick piles, the cement monoliths rise relentlessly from our cities and towns.

To answer his questions, Wolfe examines the roots of the architectural profession and emerges with a devastating indictment of...well...virtually everyone, from the theory-obsessed architects to their intellectually intimidated clients. Wolfe has shown us our sins and we may now follow him out of the darkness.

This is now the Wolfe speciality. He is the leading debunker of our time. You like modern painting? Well, you are wrong because modern painting is all theory and no substance. Such was the message of The Painted Word in 1974. You liked the astronauts? Well, you are wrong because they are frail, neurotic humans like the rest of us--the message of The Right Stuff, 1979. And now, Wolfe has passed the word that we are wrong if we liked any building in the Western Hemisphere constructed after World War II--a few Miami Beach hotels and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright excepted. There is something a little cranky about all this; Wolfe has a tendency to whine, albeit amusingly.

But he is lucky (and smart) because in Bauhaus he has found a subject that badly needs debunking. Just because Wolfe didn't like modern painting doesn't mean there is anything wrong with it; paintings have no function but to provoke and entertain, and that is the province of personal taste. But architecture is different. It affects us everyday, and when it fails us, our lives are the poorer for it. And, sayeth the prophet Wolfe with characteristic grace and enthusiasm, architecture has failed us on a grand scale:

In short, this has been America's period of full-blooded, go-to-hell, belly-rubbing wahoo-yahoo rampage--and what architecture has she got to show for it? An architecture whose tenets prohibit every manifestation of exuberance, power, empire, grandeur, or even high spirits and playfulness, as the height of bad taste.

We brace for a barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world--and hear a cough at a concert.

The problem, all agree, is the Box, and Wolfe seeks out the origins of the architecture we love to hate. In the world of modern architecture, all roads lead to the Bauhaus, that post-World War I citadel of artistic in Germany. There, under the leadership of the "Silver Prince," Walter Gropius, scores of young socialists (in name only) planned the rebuilding of Europe after the Great War. Because these folks were socialists, self-described friends of the workers, they would design for the working class with the materials of the industrial age. The Bauhaus crowd rejected anything tainted by the bourgeoisie; as Wolfe tells it, they regarded bourgeois as an epithet. "To be non-bourgeois," Wolfe writes, "art must be machine-made." And so the (tool) die was cast.

The Americans of the Lost Generation soon came over to study at the Bauhaus, then the Bauhaus folks came over here to flee Hitler. By the 1930s, the group had a label, "International Style," and an icon, Le Corbusier, and they had taken over the art world. Their manifestos and polemics killed trees from Paris to Pasedena, and the message was clear: we are going to create workers' housing from workers' materials, and the clients be damned if they don't want it. The clients-be-damned pose had an interesting side benefit. The gods in the International Style pantheon tended to write more than build. And the Depression was on anyway: "New building had come to almost a dead halt. This made it even easier for the architectural community to take to the white gods' theories," Wolfe writes.

But when the building boom started after the war, Gropius, Le Corbusier and epigones Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Phillip Johnson dominated the profession. So Americans yielded to the wishes of their architectural betters. We had just created the American century, transformed the post-war world into an American plaything, our private domain:

There was no way whatsoever to avoid the fashions of the architectural compounds, no matter how esoteric they might become. In architecture, intellectual fashion was displayed fifty to a hundred stories high in the cities and in endless de Chirico vistas in the shopping malls of the new American suburbs.

That, on the 68th page of Wolfe's airy 143-page volume, is the climax. From then on, it's merely the sad story of how an assertive intellectual vanguard forced the wretched glass boxes on corporations and federal agencies, which offered nary a peep of protest. Wolfe's best point--his most incisive, yet also the most obvious--is that this "worker" housing repelled any workers who had to live in it. They hated the International "vision of highrise hives of steel, glass, and concrete separated by open spaces of green lawn." The people tried anything to inject some of the hated bourgeois decorations into their "less-is-more" slums. And the architects' reaction? Well, the worker was "intellectually undeveloped" so, "in the meantime, the architect, the artist and the intellectual would arrange his [the worker's] life for him."

And what could anyone do? There were extreme cases of protest--one International Style housing project, Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis was recently destroyed because everyone hated it so much. But mostly people learned to tolerate the boxes, egged on by the architect, relentless propaganda. They couldn't build worth a damn, Wolfe says, but they sure did write persuasively.

Of course, Wolfe is an unabashed layman with a superficial familiarity with much of the work; his analysis of Frank Lloyd Wright misses much of the old man's influence, and his indictment of Louis Kahn rings a bit hollow. Furthermore, he misses the point of the renewed interest in classicism, exemplified by Phillip Johnson's plans for the still-incomplete AT&T building in New York City. Wolfe views the neo-classicism merely as Gropius in Roman ropes, when it may reflect more deeply the wide dissatisfaction with the glass box.

But no matter. Taken in its entirety, From Bauhaus to Our House builds a compelling case against the whole profession. But don't just take his word for it. Pick up the latest copy of Architectural Record, a slick (six dollars a pop) monthly journal. On page 98, there appears an evaluation of two important architects. The story begins:

Any self-respecting compendium of the reigning avant-garde would be incomplete without Rudolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti (associate professor of architecture at Harvard). They have secured their position as active--and influential--participants in the current architectural (r)evolution by virtue of their academic curricula vitae: impeccable academic credentials and a firm portfolio brimming with exquisite drawings of unrealized projects.

What was that? Academic credentials? Unrealized projects? Yes, it's true. These "influential" men have never built anything. Their ideas--like those of most influential architects of the past 30 years--work best, if they work at all, on paper. Scorning real buildings, many architects continue to play with theory at the expense of practice. And, as Wolfe points out in this dandy little book, they do so at their--and especially our--peril