When I was a child, my grandmother would take me downtown to do her errands. We would drive past the War Memorial on the way to town, and as we left. It always looked abandoned. I never saw anyone standing around it, going in, or coming out. I would hold my breath and look away, praying my grandmother would not stop there.
No one told me what the building was for, so I imagined its purpose. It was a place where evil, dark ghosts lived. They had to live somewhere, after all. That building offered them unimaginable rooms with no doors or staircases, only windows that did not open, but which they could fly through. Every surface was abrasive and would hurt you if touched. There was no water in the building. I would have nightmares in which that building would be my destination, or I'd find myself outside of it after I had specifically run away from it. If you found yourself inside, there was no escape. Underground there was a maze of tunnels that went nowhere, and were inescapable.
A little older, I began to think it was an art museum, perhaps through misunderstanding an overheard conversation. That made as much sense as a house of ghosts. I imagined people looking at incomprehensible art in dark galleries. I imagined you had to be part of a cult to be able to see the art. I imagined the art all had evil magical powers. If someone wasn't part of the cult, the art would send out a bolt of electricity to hurt the person.
We never visited the memorial, so I had no way to dispel these interpretations. When I was 13, we moved away from Milwaukee, and the building fossilized in my childhood memory as creepy concrete haunted house that nobody dared go near.
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I see it now an artistic gesture at the public's expense.
From an expressive point of view, this building makes sense as a war memorial. It's just as ugly and disorienting as war is. But I don't think Eero Saarinen intended dystopian ugliness. I think he strove to express some ideals of modernism. The Coubusian pilotis. The raw concrete. The geometries. The building remains iconic for me as it speaks to humanity's ability to be blinded by theory and groupthink. Saarinen may well have received accolades from fellow modernist architects, but he still scared the shit out of a little kid, and I think, offended a lot of regular people who might have wanted a less visually hostile and perhaps emotionally meaningful war memorial to visit.
My step-grandfather served in the Army, landed at Normandy in mid-June, 1944, then walked across France to Germany. He came home uninjured, but lost his sight in the 1960's to glaucoma, just a years before I was born. I remember him mostly sitting in the living room, listening to the Brewers game, getting blitzed on bourbon and ice. We often went to his VFW for dinner. The restaurant had a lovely view over Lake Michigan, and a band on special occasions. It was a lovely place to go. We never visited the war memorial. I do not know what he felt about it. I'm offended for him that building meant to honor his service is a monument to an architect's ego.
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I don't want to recommend what a war memorial should look like. It's precisely theory-driven design that I object against. The Vietnam war memorial in Washington is modernist and successful, I think, because it lists all the names of the Americans who served and died. That personal connection makes it meaningful. The physical design, that it is a black granite scar in a lawn is almost beside the point. If the architecture does the job it is intended to do, for educated and uneducated users alike, I have no problem with it.
Here is my small, unambitious endeavor: to redefine the entire endeavor of designing and building our environment; to base it in human reality, rather than aspirations, and always, inexticably, in beauty and usefulness. Let the realm of art explore the ugly, the places we can choose to visit, or not. Let the Saarinen war memorial be built, in a private location, with private funds, for private appreciation. Let the public enjoy visiting a war memorial, by making it attractive in some way--perhaps simply through the personal connection of the Washington Vietnam war memorial, or an architecture that celebrates courage, duty and fighting for what is right, or any other approach that remains true to human nature -- that we build towards beauty and usefulness. I want architectural design driven by use and beauty.
While usefulness has been often neglected (don't get me going on glass doors), it is mainly through an understanding of beauty and its role in defining humanity that we can back out of the blind alley we've been down for the last hundred years in architecture.
The springboard is an insight that Darwin had, for which he was much derided. Backing out of millennia of thinking was hard for his contemporaries, as it remains today... Darwin realized that in addition to natural selection, evolution is driven by sexual selection. This is an aspect of the process whereby we choose mates,and it is driven by the species-specific appreication of beauty. The Descent of Man is Darwin's coherent argument, and it is hard to dispute, considering the peacock's tail. The peacock's tail is utterly useless to his survival, and in fact something of an impediment. But as the male uses it to attract a mate, it is essential to the survival of his genes into the next generation. It is the tail that the peahen finds beautiful. (That we see beauty in it as well suggests there is some cross-species commonality in the proerties of beauty, but that's a whole other topic).
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The attraction of beauty is core to our innate desires, not just sexually, but universally. Cyril Smith argued Darwin's insight succinctly:
Man’s capacity for aesthetic enjoyment may have been his most practical characteristic, for nearly all the industrially useful properties of matter and ways of shaping materials had their origins in the playful search for beauty. Beauty is at the root of man’s discovery of the world around him, and makes him want to live.
We should not train architects to design without beauty any more than we should train doctors to work on bodies without healing them, or lawyers to argue cases without striving for justice. Without beauty, we remove from their endeavor the primary human motivation to explore and make.
We must reintegrate the attraction of beauty into all we make and do. This is no naive statement about a childish or commercial understanding of beauty as a feminine concept, but of beauty as the term that encompasses all aesthetic attraction and enjoyment. We have to want to visit a War Memorial, no matter what else its structure expresses. And if its structure attracts us emotionally, rather than repells us, it is successfully beautiful. The intellectual attraction of the play of concepts is a different matter, accessible perhaps to an intellectual elite, but not to everyone. And a public space is for everyone.
Consider the places and people and objects of your life-- what are you attracted to? Therein you will find beauty. Is there absrract, intellectual beauty in Saarinen's War Memorial? Yes and no, just as one can argue there is beauty in pain and fear, and yet that is obviously a distortion of the concepts.
Our anthopomorphism, our metaphorical ways, and our narcissism all drive our perception of beauty in the rest of creation. We see, feel, hear and experience the resonances both strongly and literally (chruch steeples and penises; mountains we name the Grand Tetons), but mostly subtly, and tangetially. How is a beautiful song like a beautiful man or woman? There is something in the feelings we have when we listen that touches on the feelings we have with a beautiful person, especially one that we love.
Beauty is inherently sexual, non-intellectual, non-rational, and it drives fundamental choice of who and what we want to be a part of. When we echo the human body and behavior, both male and female, in our environment, in the objects we make we achieve a core attractiveness that makes us want to use the object. We tap into our evolutionary drive--the one that makes us want to live, which is desire itself.
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We are idiots for believing the grand illusion that cultures across the globe have cultivated: that our core humanity resides somehow in transcending and denying our animal bodies and natures. The concept of our souls, the concepts of purity. These are words the pretend to speak to realities, but in fact are only real words that refer to the feeling we get when we speak or hear them.
Modernist architecture is the church of material and mechanical purity. There is no human in it, not even a pure soul.
Left alone, without "education", humans will make beautiful objects that help them live their lives. Go back far enough in time, and you will find all things made were to the best of our abilities and with the most beauty of our abilities.
The blind alley begins when we develop a division of labor (agricultural societies. Government, bureaucracy, ownership). When we make for a loved one whom we know well, we will always make beauty. We want to attract and help the people we love.
When we make for a stranger, we work for a profit. Beauty and usefulness become concepts negotiated by the shadows of words, argument, and persuasion. We have arrived in Aristophanes The Clouds, and the "hunting in shadows" of Vitruvius.
The disconnect between maker and user is the core blind alley that obscures our ability to understand and create attractiveness, enjoyment and beauty in our work.
Even Classical architecture, e.g. the Parthenon, was not meant to be human architecture. It was a temple for a god. It was meant to create awe in all who saw it. Nobody lived inside. We forget this when we build McMansions with columns holding up great porticos. We are pretending to live in the house of a god. Classical architecture invites the divine to dwell among us, but separately. It honors what we do not understand, and revere. We go wrong when we think we are gods.
Modernism is an aggressive Fuck You of Ugliness. It is a Rape of the Soul, a Sadean embrace of an amoral world in which we can act as our relative power permits. Hence the emphasis on making materials perform wonders such as glass and steel skyscrapers. The design sweeps away the past, which is to say all residual human values. It randomly chooses the industrial age--what materials and machines are capable of doing that man is not--as its new God. It inspires awe and fear, just as ancient Persepolis did to a nomadic tribesman who had only ever known a tent before walking under its columns. And it asks of us to be abstract gods to enjoy it.
Every time I get a splinter in my shop, every time I stub my toe, every time I get the flu and am bedridden for days, every time I get hungry, or cold, or stop thinking clearly from fatigue, or start crying at a song that reminds me of a person I lost, I am reminded of the flesh and blood person I am. Mies van der Rohe demands that I stand like a well-tailored mannequin in his rectilinear spaces and vast arid plazas, seen by him with the same values he applies to his perfect lines and geometries. The geometrical glass towers of Mies van der Rohe denies any place to my blood, my snot, my shit and piss, or my tears. Life itself, in all its messiness, is not welcome in his designs.
Only when we make for our well-known and well-loved ones will we create beauty again. Only when we reconcile the division between the head that thinks and the hand that makes. When the architect is not a separate profession from the mason, when there is no need for the two of them to talk or argue, when they are one and the same, and us, then we will fill our made world with beauty, again.
And we can move away from the misguided aesthetics we have become accustomed to.
For a coda, here's a thought:
What if language itself is the source of most human unhappiness?
Language is undoubtedly a really useful communication tool. But what if it is also a hoplessly flawed, inadequate, imperfect and garbled system for thinking?
What if all linguistic thinking leads us astray from the reality we otherwise know intimately through emotions? Language gives us the concepts of truth, goodness, and beauty, and yet we cannot find perfect experiences or representations of them in reality. Maybe reality isn't the illusion Socrates suggests it is, but language usedas thought is?
What if true human thought resides in emotions, visual and aural conceptions and manipulations, and in the grammar of conscious actions. If Chomsky is to be believed, we have only had language for the last 50,000 years. To ntoe, we have been making sophisticated tools and living in complex social structures for up to 3 million years. How, then, did we manage for so long and get so much done without language?
At a stroke, all the great minds of history, and all their great ideas, become ornamental -- even and most especially the many philosophers who have suggested we see but as in a glass darkly. As communciation, to inspire true non-verbal thought and action, their verbally-expressed ideas have been useful, but only as they have inspired actions. What great mind has stopped speaking entirely, or thinking in words, to attain a higher level of understanding? We would not have heard of them except second hand. We have a few historical examples of this, perhaps to make the point of the rarity of the wisdom.
My questions themselves are flimsy little things. I leave that to the great rhetoricians, who, in spite of a near uniform history of misleading people, remain as popular as ever. These questions, when usefully applied, lead to an experiment: stop trusting what you think, and start trusting what you do.
You do, or you do not.
These are your only decisions, for better and for worse. Let the thoughts and ideas, both intrusive and sought, be ornamental to your life--more like a sound track, than your computer code.
I beleive that modern architecture became a game of words (geometry is a language) intentionally disconnected from anything and everything that human beings do. That disconnect, still praised in the academies of the world, has led us to praise, even enjoy, horror, dysfunction, and pain. Only when we get out of our words and back into our heads and our hands will we create beauty, usefulness, truth and goodness, and live better.
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