The home of the Utopian impulse was architecture rather than painting or sculpture. Painting can make us happy, but building is the art we live in; it is the social art par excellence, the carapace of political fantasy, the exoskeleton of one’s economic dreams. It is also the art nobody can escape. One can live quite well (in a materialistic sense) without painting, music, or cinema, but life of the rootless is nasty, brutish, and wet.

Rational Design

What city represents modernity? Most people would say Manhattan... because of its Promethean verticality... But one of the greatest modern architects, Le Corbusier, thought otherwise. He called New York a tragic hedgehog... The idea of a New York moralisé is, of course, a joke to Manhattanites; they refused to take Corbusier seriously, and they were right... One of the lessons of our century, learned slowly and at some cost, has been that when planners try to convert living cities into Utopias they make them worse... But some of the greater minds of the twentieth century have thought otherwise, and from 1880 to 1930, when the language of architecture changed more radically than it had done in the preceding four centuries, the ideal of social transformation through architecture and design was one of the driving forces of modernist culture. Rational design would make rational societies. “It was one of those illusions of the 20s,” recalls Philip Johnson, who with the architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock christened this new movement the International Style. “We were thoroughly of the opinion that if you had good architecture the lives of people would be improved; that architecture would improve people, and people improve architecture until perfectibility would descend on us like the Holy Ghost, and we would be happy for ever after. This did not prove to be the case.”

Utopia was the tomb of the Id... It is worth remembering that one of Corbusier’s aphorisms in the early twenties, when Europe was torn by radical unrest, was “architecture or revolution” as though the impulses towards social violence came down to errors of housing... In their belief that the human animal could be morally improved, and that the means of this betterment was four walls and a roof, the Europeans who created the modern movement - Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Bruno Taut, Antonio Sant’ Ella, Adolf Loos, and Le Corbusier, to name only the best known among them - formed a concentration of idealist talent uncommon in architectural history. It expressed itself more in hypothesis than by finished buildings. The most influential architecture of the twentieth century, in many ways, was paper architecture that never got off the drawing board. And only in the twentieth century did earlier schemes acquire such retrospective importance. pp.164-165

Ecole des Beaux-Arts

For most of the nineteenth century, architecture had nothing to say about this (proletarian] misery, and nothing to do with it. By the word “l’architecture’, an educated Frenchman of 1870 did not mean public housing, factories, or workers’ clubs. He meant ceremonial buildings that demonstrated the important public functions of a bourgeois bureaucracy: banks, ministries, museums, railway stations and palaces. The heyday of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which governed all French architectural practice and was the decisive influence on design in the rest of Europe and in America, was also, by no coincidence, the time of France’s greatest colonial, industrial and governmental expansion... (Such monumental buildings are demonstrations of condensed “surplus value” - acres of marble, bronze... an impossible architecture today, because the craft traditions that built it are either extinct or too expensive to use on a public scale. Compared to today’s public architecture - mean, scaleless, tacky, and intimidating - such a building is an act of generosity; it assures the private citizen that he or she is the reason for the State.

Anti-Decor Argument

By 1900 in the eyes of a few gifted and missionary designers scattered across Europe, architecture itself had become a symbol of inequality; and decorated architecture even more so. The distrust of decor in early modernism was not simply an aesthetic and economic matter. It was deeply rooted in moral attitudes as well.

Among architects, the anti-decor argument began in earnest during the rise of the second-last universal decorative style in the world: the Liberty Style... or Art Nouveau.., a final gesture before the hand and its work were swamped by the machine product... It presupposes a time for inspection parallel to the amount of free time necessary to follow, savor, and digest the coiling rhythms of Marcel Proust’s sentences: leisure, the property of a class.

In contrast to this class-bound opulence, modernist architecture was to be a democratic answer to social crisis, or so the founding fathers of the International Style believed. To them, the very idea of Modernity signified a unique fusion of romance and rationality, and it sprang from the same roots as Marxism... Technology meant precise function, a weeding out of the superfluous: in a word, planning... People, no less than their shelters, needed replanning. Revise the shelter and one improves the people. Re-educate the people and they will grasp the necessity - the moral necessity - of a new form of shelter... Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe in Germany, no less than Le Corbusier in France, believed in this mirage of the architect as seer and sociological priest. Architecture could reform society. pp.166-168

Adolf Loos (1870-1933)

The architect who launched the attack on decorated architecture was Adolf Loos (1870-1933), a Czech who lived in Vienna. Between1893 and 1896, Loos worked for a time in Louis Sullivan’s office in Chicago. Sullivan was not only a great poet of the structural grid but an inventor of ornament to cloth it; yet he too speculated about radical plainness: “It could only benefit us if for a time we were to abandon ornament and concentrate entirely on the erection of buildings that were finely shaped and charming in their sobriety.”

Loos was not content to take this remark as motto [Steiner House of 1910 Vienna].. The tone of Loos’s objections.., can be grasped from the title of an essay he wrote in 1908, Ornament and Crime... Loos believed that art was libidinous... and identified body-painting as the root of ornament... The abolition of ornament... was as necessary a social discipline as toilet-training... “A country’s culture can be assessed by the extent to which its lavatory walls are smeared... I have made the following discovery and I pass it along to the world: The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects.”.

Clearly, Mies van der Rohe’s dictum that “less is more” begins with Loo’s messianic belief that ornament was excrement. To what anguish in the nursery, to what enforced play with cubical blocks (those marvels of infant education, standardized and made popular in Germany in the early 19th century), Loo’s hygienic fanaticism may have been due cannot be known; but one might suppose, after reading him, that anal repression ranked as a contribution to the origins of the International Style along with plate glass and stucco. Nonetheless, Loos also expanded his horror of ornament into a reasonable economic theory. “Omission of ornament,” he pointed out “means a reduction in manufacturing time and an increase in wages. The Chinese carver works for sixteen hours, the American worker for eight. If I pay as much for a smooth cigarette case as for an ornamented one, the difference in working time belongs to the worker. And if there were no ornament at all.., man would only have to work four hours instead of eight, because half of the work done today is devoted to ornament. Ornament is wasted labor power and hence wasted health.” And what would be the result of the cleansing? “The time is nigh, fulfillment awaits us! Soon the streets of the city will glisten like white walls. Like Zion, the holy city, the capital of Heaven. Then, fulfillment will come!”… and when it did... that fulfillment arrived by osmosis from America.

Futurists

Meanwhile other European visionaries were taking a somewhat different approach to the ideal of a new architecture for a new age. This was very much the issue with the Futurists.., endowed it with overtones of social reform and equitable pay for labor that so attracted Loos. Like the Futurists painters, the two architects connected with the movement (Antonio Sant’Elia and Mario Chiattone who wrote the Futurist Manifesto of Architecture, 1914) were enraptured by the glamour of the machine... Technology would reform culture... but there was no way of building a new city without wrecking an old one:

Futurist architecture had to mean the dynamiting of the past... Some of the drawings are intriguing predictions of Russian Constructivist themes and Sant’Elia’s Futurist liking for mobility ran very close to Constructivism when he announced: “a new ideal of beauty, still embryonic, but whose fascination is already being felt by the masses... We have lost the sense of the monumental, the heavy, the static; we have enriched our sensibilities with a taste for the light, the practical, the ephemeral and the swift.” His paper on architecture... did much to fix the imagery of concrete cliffs and multi-level highways... that would modulate popular fantasies about the future for another forty years. pp. 168-172

Louis Henry Sullivan (1856-1924)

But the essence of architectural - as distinct from engineering - modernism lay in Chicago. In 1871, a fire razed the commercial center... architects, sensing the opportunities that Christopher Wren had had after the Great Fire of London, came seeking work... Louis Henry Sullivan (1856-1924) was, by general agreement, the giant of Chicago building and one of the precursors of modernist architecture: not because he ‘invented’ the load-bearing steel frame, but because he worked out and shaped its aesthetic and functional content with such mastery.

Steel Frame

The basic idea for steel-frame building already existed in wood. It was called the balloon frame... made possible by the advent of two new technologies: sawmills turning North American forests into an endless supply of sized timber and the manufactured nail... You could put up a balloon frame in a fraction of the time it took to build a brick or stone wall, or do the laborious hewing, notching and chinking on a log cabin. No special skills were needed; anyone who could wield a hammer and saw and knew the sharp from the blunt end of a nail, could make his own house.

If the frame were steel and its skin glass and prefabricated panels of metal or terra cotta, one had the germ of the skyscraper. The problem with high construction in brick or stone is that beyond a few stories the load-bearing solid walls must be so thick at the base to carry its own weight and resist the bending and overturning moments within the structure... in 1891, the architects Burham & Root had pushed bearing-wall construction as high as it could go - 16 stories (Monadnock Building) ... The invention that rendered high-rise possible in any material had been ... in 1857 by American Elisha Otis; it was the safety elevator.

A steel frame dispenses with mass. All substances deflect when loaded; their use depends on how much they deflect under what load and whether they spring back. What makes a material useful... the relative relationship between strength and stiffness…. within four years of the Monadnock Building, Burnham & Root finished the steel-framed Reliance Building (1894) with its wide ‘Chicago windows’ - a big central pane flanked by two high narrow ones - virtually reduced the wall to a stack of transparencies separated by narrow opaque bands. But the man who grasped the poetics of the steel-frame was Sullivan. His Guaranty Building in Buffalo (1895) states the lyrical theme for all skyscrapers - verticality. It was clearly divided into 3 parts: base, shaft and flat-topped roof with a jutting cornice...

But Sullivan’s greater achievement was to make the grid as expressive as the height... With the Carson Pine Scott department store in Chicago (1899), Sullivan stated this with utmost lucidity. Its fenestration is plainly controlled by its structural grid... (but] the plainness of the upper floors forcibly contrasts with the ground-floor treatment... a decorated plinth, ornamented with complex cast-bronze panels... (One of the people who worked on their design was Sullivan’s precocious assistant Frank Llyod Wright, then barely out of his teens.) Purists of the International Style...once treated this dichotomy as a weakness...

The American skyscraper intrigued the European public as the equivalent of the Eiffel Tower and the Wolkenkratzer (‘cloud-scratcher’). It was identified with democracy with which Sullivan agreed: “With me architecture is not an art, but a religion, and that religion but part of Democracy.” But the American modular grid did not catch on in Europe: reluctance to surrender any central part of the old city and the conservatism of official architects. pp. 172-175

Reinforced Concrete

The second material of the future Utopia was reinforced concrete. Concrete is strong in compression but weak in tension. But if steel rods are placed where tension occurs it becomes very strong annihilating the limits of stone and brick. And because it is a thick liquid when poured concrete can be molded into any shape opening a world of expressive form whose analogies lay not in previous architecture but in the tiny structures of the natural world that microscopy and photography, between 1880 and 1920, had been revealing - seed pods, bracts, umbels, diatoms, plankton, the lacy architecture of coral. Audacious feats were done in concrete:

Eugene Fryssinet’s airship hanger at Orly, German Max Berg’s Jahrhunderthalle ‘Century Hall’ in Breslau with the largest dome in the world -200 ft vs 143 for the Pantheon and 138 for St. Peter’s

Sheet Glass

The supreme Utopian material was sheet glass... stained glass had enjoyed a ... sacramental reputation... Sheet glass acquired a different aura of meaning. It was the face of the Crystal, the Pure Prism. It meant lightness, transparency, structural daring. It was the diametric opposite of stone or brick... It therefore had an importance for some German architects that verged on the mystical. “The surface of the earth,” wrote Paul Scheerbart in 1914, “would change totally if brick buildings were replaced everywhere by glass architecture. It would be as if the Earth clothed itself in jewelry of brilliants and enamels. The splendor is absolutely unimaginable.., and then we should have on earth more exquisite things than the gardens of the Arabian Nights. Then we should have a paradise on earth and would not need to gaze yearningly at the paradise of the sky.”

Walter Gropius (1883-1969)

The generation of northern European architects who came of professional age between 1910 and l920 was profoundly charged by a sense of the millennium - the literal renewal of history... the beginning of the twentieth century. This, as the architectural historian Wolfgang Pehnt has pointed out, “was probably the last time when [architects] felt themselves to be a community of the chosen, probably the last time when they surrendered themselves to the cult of genius with a clear conscience.” On the most familiar level, the Bauhaus - the monastery of craft and design, intended by its founders to rise as the collectively made “crystal symbol of a new faith” in Walter Gropius’s phrase - cannot be understood, either as an ideal or a real set-up, outside its framework of mystical Expressionism... mainstream modernist architecture owed much more to German Expressionism than one might suppose, and one connection between them was not only glass but a Nietzchean, Romantic idea of the architect as the supreme articulator of social effort, a Master Builder beyond politics, and (almost literally) a Messiah. “There are no architects today, we are all of us merely preparing the way for him who will once again deserve the name of architect, for that means: Lord of Art, who will build gardens out of deserts and pile up wonders to the sky.” Thus Walter Gropius... in an official manifesto the Arbeitsrat fur Künst (Work-Council for Art) in 1919. In less than 15 years, what came was not the Lord of Art but the Lord of the Flies, Adolf Hitler. Yet who could have foreseen that? No ideal of building has detached itself more gladly from material or political reality than those forms of Expressionist architectural theory which were digested into “functionalism” by Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and even Le Corbusier.

...lt extended freely into German writing... Hermann Hesse’s 1943 novel Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game)... Glass architecture was pacifist architecture, the very image of exalted vulnerability which given a new social contract would remain forever intact. The glass building was either perfect or it was not there...

Since there was no prospect of building any of them, the designs took on an extreme of speculative magniloquence... secular temples... Wassily Luckhardt (1889-1972) ... vast ‘Tower of Joy’... Bruno Taut (1880-1938) Alpine Architecture pp. 175-178

It was the image of the pure and glittering prism, rather than ‘functional’ theory that gave its generating idea to the early work of Ludwig

Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)

Later, Mies would reject the Expressionist content of the ice-palace, but his work always retained an obsessive interest in formal absolutes...

In Mies’s work, the irregularities of “alpine architecture” and its glass walls are tamed; the ice-palace is married to the Chicago grid. Mies’s influence was out of proportion with the number of his buildings because, at root, they were about the same thing: formal absolutes approached by the rectilinear use of industrial materials. It is to Mies that the modern corporation owes its face; glass was the essence of the skyscraper and the skyscraper has become the essence of the modern city- a parade of thin films hung on steel skeletons... the epitome of reason - straight lines, rational thought and extreme refinement of proportion and detailing. “He believed in the ultimate truth of architecture,” recalls Philip Johnson, “and especially his architecture: he thought it was closer to the truth, capital T, than anyone else’s because it was simpler and could be learned, adapted on and on into the centuries...”

“Architecture is the will of the age conceived in spatial terms,” Mies announced in his 1923 “Working Theses’, [the architect] must reject all aesthetic speculation, all doctrine, and all formalism.”... There was no room in this scheme for individual fantasy for, as Mies chillingly put it, “the individual is losing significance, his destiny is no longer what interest us.”

His most perfect building... the German Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona Exhibition... pure architecture, having no function except self-display... the idea had many progeny... Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut ... the Seagram Building in New York (1958) the most expensive curtain wall ever hung on a steel frame, but the most elegant as well - the elegance of the Void, an architecture of ineloquence and absolute renunciation... Though it carried no specific political loading, his style - so abstract, so regular, so obsessed with clarity of detail and repetition of units, so fond of the crystalline mass as a single dominating form -tended to appeal to the authoritarian mind. pp.178- 184

Town Planning

Mies was not interested in town planning, but his German and French colleagues in the 1920s were. The central image of the new architecture was not the single building. It was the Utopian town plan, and the planners of the time saw their paper cities with the detachment granted to possessors of the bird’s-eye view...most... had in common was an alarming obsession with social hygiene...

At the humane and possible end of the scale, there were projects like the English garden cities of which the prototype was Letchworth... or at the higher level of density, the Cite lndustrielle conceived by the French architect, Tony Gamier with its carefully organized social functions.. But at the other end of the scale of social invention, the garden reared itself up and became a ziggurat, and the architectural planner a pyramid-builder. Societies must now forget the horizontal axis and group themselves around the vertical.

The lyric poet of this idea was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret “Le Corbusier’ the crow-like one. At the level of the single building, one of the most gifted architects who ever lived but on the scale of the town plan, one of the most relentlessly absolutists. His manifesto of town planning The City of Tomorrow (1924).

“The right angle,” he declared,” is as it were the sum of forces which keep the world in equilibrium... In order to work, man has need of constants. Without them he could not put one foot before the other... The right angle is lawful, it is part of our determinism, it is obligatory.”

“my dream is to see the Place de Ia Concorde empty once more, silent and lonely these green parks with their relics are some sort of cemeteries... In this way the past becomes no longer dangerous to life but finds instead its true place within it.” Such was Utopia’s revenge on history. But Corbusier’s particular enemy was the street... a hatred of random encounter, which expressed itself in a city totally dedicated to rapid transit.

Yet though he failed as a sociological architect, Corbusier was a great aesthete and his power to invent form was extraordinary... His formal language was based on a passionate enjoyment of two systems of form which seemed diametric opposites: classical Donic and the clear, analytic shapes of machinery.., strove to celebrate ... the ‘White World’ - the domain of clarity and precision, of exact proportion and precise materials, culture standing alone - in contrast to the ‘Brown World’ of muddle, clutter and compromise, the architecture of inattentive experience.

Villa Savoye (1931) ... perhaps the finest example... of what would come to be known as the International Style. pp. 184-19 1

When they coined this phrase in 1932, Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock had in mind the generating structure of modern architecture

- the steel or concrete grid with non-load bearing walls. But the hallmarks of the International. Style went beyond that, and were summed up in

the sense of etiquette the Villa Savoye conveyed. One consequence of the grid was an emphasis on truth-telling - no decoration... This meant that even solid walls ought to look like membranes... Then the bulk of the structure could appropriately be seen as volume generated by the intersection of planes with space flowing round them, rather than mass or simple structure.

The “open plan” was not invented by architects of the International Style. They took this basic idea from their diametric opposite, the great American FLW who had designed in terms of “organic” spatial flows based on Japanese traditional architecture... (Wright’s Collected Works, covering his mainly domestic designs from 1893 onwards, was published in Germany in 1910 and its influence was immense). But the International Style refined open planning to a pitch of abstraction that Wright would not have accepted, and the refinement had to do with material; a wall that did not carry the roof could be pierced at will, or simply dissolved into horizontal bands of opacity and transparency... this needed a Platonic substance to build it:

something thin.., mass-producible in units and weatherproof. This substance was never found and that is why so many International Style buildings ... ended up cracked, stained and crumbling.., after a few year’s exposure to the elements. pp. 191-192

Bauhaus

the main theater of the machine aesthetic and the International Style in Europe during the 20s was Germany and its center was a school in Weimar named the Bauhaus... which ever since has been synonymous with rationalized, sharp-edge, machine-based style. No other school in this century has had such an effect on European thought because the structure and philosophy of Bauhaus had an even greater influence than its actual designs.

The school was created in 1919 when under Walter Gropius(1883-1969) two older institutions were fused - the Grand Ducal Academy of Art dating from the mid-l8th century and the Arts and Crafts School set up in 1902 by a leader of the Art Nouveau, Belgian Henry van de Velde. The word ‘Bauhaus’ means “House for Building” and carried overtones of Bauhütten or lodges where in the Middle Ages, masons and designers working on cathedrals were housed. This suggested a close society of craftsmen (the German Freemasons also traced its Image to the Bauhütten). The image of the cathedral as a symbol of Utopian collectivism was part of the Bauhaus myth. The school’s first manifesto, written by Gropius, had as its frontpiece a woodcut of a starlit cathedral by Lyonel Feininger. The influence of both Marx and William Morris is plain with its call for a unity of creative effort in all branches of design.

Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they can be rescued only by the conscious, cooperative efforts of a/I craftsmen...

Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen, without class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist! Together let us desire, conceive and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity, and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like a crystal symbol of the new faith.

In 1907 Gropius joined the studio of Germany’s leading industrial designer, Peter Behrens (1868-1940). For a time, Behrens employed not just Gropius but also Le Corbusier and Mies van den Rohe - a concentration of talent unrivaled since the Cinqencento. Behren’s chief client was AEG, or the German General Electric Company. He was the first to carry out what became a familiar corporate practice - a complete package of visual style, supervising the design of everything used, from letterhead and catalogues to arc-lamps and factory buildings. He came as close as any designer to creating a general style of design aimed at mass production of a wide range of products. This was not lost on Gropius, e.g. his design for the Fagusshoe factory in 1911 where he reduced the walls to a glass skin stretched between columns and made the corners of the building transparent completing the ideal of the glass prism.

But Bauhaus had no architecture department until 1924. Until then it taught students nothing about structural mechanics, building codes, strength of materials or site procedures. In fact Gropius began by stressing wood, partially because of shortages of other materials. But he also believed that in the spiritual confusion of a lost war, only craft- in its most traditional sense could be the guiding thread... fed on traditional materials and a collectivist society... Gropius’ form of communism was Expressionist, not Marxist, and the idea of art as a quasi-religious activity dominated Bauhaus.

Gropius hired Johannes Itten as the first head teacher under whom Bauhaus was host to every sort of romantic nitwits including the so-called Inflation Saints. The citizens of Weimar were puzzled at first, then suspicious and finally hostile because their taxes were paying for this introverted commune of people in smocks. Where was the collaboration with industry? Where were the promised designs?

Sensing the mood, Gropius fired Ittens in 1923 and replaced him with Hungarian Constructivist Laslo Moholy-Nagy who took charge of the Basic Course - the metal workshops. He then organized an exhibition “Art and Technology: A New Unity” but this did not placate the authorities who cut the Bauhaus budget so far that it closed in 1925 and moved to Dessau. But the exhibition was the hinge-point in Gropius’ career. No more wood; the Dessau Bauhaus was all steel, concrete and glass. The school he announced would henceforth address itself to practical questions: mass housing, industrial design, typography, layout, photography and the “development of prototypes.”

Mass housing was a great social issue in Weimar Republic. From l924 with the Deutschmark stabilized, the government began to build flats, housing blocs and houses for 8 years. A great deal of the work was done by International Style architects: Gropius, Bruno Taut, Eric Mendelsohn and Ernst May (a committed communist who became director of municipal building in Frankfurt).

The demonstration piece was built in 1927 - the Weissenhof, or ‘White House’, in Stuttgart. While overbuilt compared to real public housing it set the style. But all tended to a principle of minimal housing - rooms less than 7 feet high. But because they were all built by Weimar Republic by Communists or Jews with Arab-like flat roofs instead of racially healthy pointed German roofs, the Nazi did not applaud. In other ways, however, they were impeccably totalitarian. pp. 192-199

The main influence of Bauhaus, however, was on applied design. By 1928 Gropius had resigned to private architecture practice and the workshops tended to dominate. The view was that it was harder to design a first-rate teapot than a second-rate picture. This philosophy of Bauhaus did more to dignify the work of modernist designers than any other cultural strategy of the last half century at least until the foundation of the design collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Much emphasis was placed on compact furniture for mass housing with a strong link with industry. Students were encouraged to design in terms of mass-production. Royalties were split between the school and the designer and half of the school’s share went into a welfare fund for experimental designers whose work was too ‘advanced’. But the demand for Bauhaus purity was usually too small to justify mass production and hence the rarity of Bauhaus objects today.

Furniture

The classic was furniture. Most radical designs were by architects - Marcel Breuer and Mis van der Rohe inside Bauhaus and Le Corbusier, outside. The idea flowed from FLW’s “Organic Architecture”. In 1910 he said:

It is quite impossible to consider the building as one thing, its furnishings as another... The very chairs and tables, cabinets and even musical instruments, where practicable, are of the building itself, never fixtures upon it.”

So furniture played its part in the great reform of planning which was to do away with the idea of architectural space as “a composite of cells arranged as separate rooms.” Wright was the pioneer of built-in furniture and the European Modernists followed his cue to an extreme. When visible, furniture should be pared down to its formal essence, made into space-frames... e.g. Breuer’s Wassily strap-and-chrome armchairs. The skeptics pointed out, however, that while styles in furniture change, the human body does not and much of the new furniture seemed to insist that it should. They were in fact a kind of ecclesiastical furniture designed to mortify the flesh of worshipers at the shrine of absolute form.

But the most severe rebuke to the body was done earlier by a Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld, a member of a Dutch idealist group called de Stiji - ‘the Style’ suggesting a final consensus about form and function at the end of history , the ultimate style. Members included sculptor George Vantongerloo, painters Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian and architect J.P. Oud. Their ideas influenced but went beyond Bauhaus. Thus Rietvald’s ‘Red and Blue Chair’ of 1918 transcended ordinary functionalist discomfort; it is not furniture but sculpture; a 3-D development of the 2-D pattern of grid and primary colors that formed the paintings of Van Doesburg and Modrian.

The aims of de Stijl were clear and unattainable. Sickened by the Great War, believing in the end of capitalist individualism, its members wanted to be international men. Their art was conceived as a form of supranational discourse, a ‘universal language’. It would contain no curved lines which were “too personal.” Bauhaus compromises with comfort were unacceptable. The grave spiritual classicism would bring about the millennium of austerity and understanding.

But art cannot cure nationalism. De Stijl survives mainly because of Mondrian, one of the supreme artists of the 20th century. And in his late work after he moved to New York in 1940, the passion for nature that suffuses his early years came back as a vision of the Ideal City... his late Manhattan paintings... They are not simply metaphors of New York. Still less can they be read as plans. But they are diagrams of the kind of energy and order that could and still can be seen beneath the quotidian chaos... once one has seen Broadway Boogie-Woogie, the view from a skyscraper down into the streets is changed forever.

Architecture & Design

And why should his paintings still move us whereas the Utopian city plans of architects do not? Partly because the space of art is the ideal one of fiction. Things in it are not used and never decay... are incorruptible.., the building blocks of a system that has no relationship to out bodies, except through the ocular perception of color.

Architecture and design, on the other hand, have everything to do with the body. Without complete respect for the body, there is no workable or humane architecture. Most classics of Utopian planning have thus come to look inhuman. Who believes in progress and perfectibility anymore? Who believes in masterbuilders or formgivers? ... Corbusier’s war on Paris became a tradition among architects. It was waged on cities all over the world after 1945 producing the zones of tower blocks and deserted walkways that make up the collective face of modern mass housing... These are the new landscapes of urban despair - bright, brutish, crime-wracked and scarred by the vandalism they invite.

And so Brasilia is emblematic. The last half century, in architecture, has witnessed the death of the future. Like the Baroque, or the High Renaissance, the modern movement lived and died... The crucial point, however, is that the lessons of modernism can now be treated as one aesthetic choice among others, and not as a binding historical legacy. The first casualty was the idea that architects and artists can create a working Utopia. Cities are more complex than that and the needs of those who live in them less readily quantifiable. pp. 199-211