The Spectacle of the Innocent Eye

[1]

In its May 1991 issue Spy magazine, a popular journal of celebrity scandal and gossip, printed an article titled “Master Philip and the Boys,” exposing architect Philip Johnson’s use of his connections in the worlds of architecture, art, high society and big business to build up the reputations of his “kids,” the five most well-known members of the architectural vanguard of the United States in the 1980s (Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, Frank Gehry, and Robert Stern).[2] The author of the Spy article suggested that the regular dinners that Johnson and the kids held at New York’s élite Century Club were staging-grounds for an architectural conspiracy devoted to its own advancement. The presence of the top U. S. architects at these meetings, he continued, could only be construed as conspiratorial or monopolistic. Certainly, he wrote, “If all the heads of the auto companies had regular black-tie dinners in a private dining room of their club, or if Sununu and Baker and Bill Bradley and Sam Nunn and Ted Kennedy did, we might think the concentration of power was both remarkable and possibly suspect.”[3] Architecture, we were reminded, like all artistic fields, includes among its most important unstated assumptions the idea that accomplishment is eventually rewarded with recognition from the field, but if architecture’s ostensibly most accomplished living members are rewarded with that celebrity on the basis not of talent but of connections, this would be scandalous, the replacement of meritocracy with oligarchy.

But while Spy asked: “Twentieth-century American architecture: stately domain of visionaries who boldly thrust their ideas upon the skyline, or cynical fiefdom of a shrewd geezer foisting his pets on society?”[4] the architectural media did not attempt to answer the question. Progressive Architecture was alone among the big architectural magazines to even note the article’s existence: calling it “hyperbolic” but not elaborating, instead diverting attention to Johnson’s newest projects.[5]

On the other hand, my discussions with architects lead me to believe that knowledge of this conspiracy was rather widespread in the U.S. before the Spy article. Library research confirmed that the issue had already been raised in the architectural literature, albeit with little impact. The most detailed discussion of the conspiracy, Richard Plunz and Kenneth Kaplan’s 1984 essay “On ‘Style’”[6] received little public response in the field, only a citation in Douglas Davis’s essay “New York in the Next Century: Fragments from a Post-Post-Modern Diary” as “a working assumption that is widely held, by virtually every architect or critic with whom I worked and talked in the years when I practiced architectural criticism as a weekly trade, or craft.”[7] The only other response I was able to find was from Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in their article “American Architecture Seen From a Dark Alley.” Tzonis and Lefaivre did not dispute the article’s thesis, although they did dispute a handful the article’s more minor facts (involving the Procrustes Club at Yale, a group only incidental to the article). While Tzonis and Lefaivre’s article ultimately praised Kaplan and Plunz, the article is in a Dutch journal that can hardly be said to be a significant part of the American architectural discourse.[8] While architect and critic Michael Sorkin mentioned the conspiracy a number of times in his essays on contemporary architecture now collected in his book Exquisite Corpse, again there was no attempt by anyone in the architectural media to pick up his argument and deal with it, perhaps because Sorkin wrote them principally for theleft-leaning Village Voice.[9] But this knowledge was not confined to the discipline. Already in 1983, the case of Philip Johnson and his promotion of the kids was picked by Steven M. L. Aronson as an exemplar of media and professional control for his book on the machinery of promotion and self-promotion, Hype.[10]

Yet these essays remain isolated and are not referred to in either the popular or scholarly architectural press. The protest they raise against the dominance of the upper echelons of the architectural profession by a small cadre of individuals in cahoots with each other is minuscule compared to the amount of material published on them. Most of this material is uncritical, consisting only of a discourse of fashion associated with color photographs of projects. The small amount of it which is critical never questions the legitimacy of the role Johnson and the kids play in the profession.[11]

I soon confirmed an even more disturbing fact that I had previously only heard as rumor: Johnson was involved in fascist causes in the 1930s and that his friends in the discipline had done their best to keep this covered up. As I will document in chapter two, among scholars of American fascism, Johnson is known not as an architect but as an extremist figure, closely allied with the prime theorist of the movement, Lawrence Dennis. For Dennis the future of a homegrown fascist movement rested on those who were already members of the élite but not yet in power — such as Harvard-educated Dennis himself or fellow Harvard grad Johnson — and their willingness to work with the fascist insurgency. Johnson worked with Dennis and also served as an aide to Father Charles Coughlin, who attracted large numbers of individuals through his radio addresses which moved steadily from populist to Right-wing to outrightly antisemitic and pro-Hitler. In 1939, Johnson’s involvement in Coughlin and Dennis’s cause reached a peak as he served as the German correspondent for Coughlin’s newspaper Social Justice and the isolationist Today’s Challenge. In such capacity, Johnson accompanied the Nazis on their invasion into Poland, reporting back with articles that served as German propaganda.[12]

Johnson apparently abandoned such interests in 1940, and has recently tried to explain away his actions by arguing that he was “…brought up with the prejudices of my class and background and all that. I was fascinated with power.”[13] Power has always fascinated Johnson and he has carefully built up a position of power in the discipline over the years. Hence, while the knowledge of Johnson’s fascist past has been widespread throughout the discipline, it has also remained largely ignored, carefully guarded by the kids — notably Stern and Eisenman — and their allies. While the Paul de Man and Heidegger scandals rocked disciplines in the 1980s, Philip Johnson, whose own past was as disreputable as either of the two, if not more, become more popular than ever by curating an exhibit on Deconstructivist architecture.

The relentless publicizing of Johnson and his kids incorporates Johnson’s power in the field as something beneficial for architecture as discipline. For example, in an essay in the catalog of the 1980 Venice Biennale, a landmark show in the international dissemination of postmodernist architecture, Emilio Battisti put Johnson at the head of an “extremely compact” group of postmodernists (read: his kids) that stays together even though the philosophies within vary greatly. Johnson’s power, Battisti argued, is the logical expression of an intellectual successfully operating in the public realm to promote his interests. Battisti concluded his essay by praising Johnson’s role in the field: “I believe that Johnson has demonstrated in an extremely cultured and unified way that architecture and power are terms that can still be united.”[14]

Perhaps this capacity for incorporating criticism is why Johnson didn’t appear worried by the Spy piece and instead of standing in its way, cooperated. He appeared glad to pose in a special photo session for the magazine with his two favorite kids, Stern and Eisenman. Perversely enough, Johnson and the kids seemed to be enjoying being exposed and mocked.

We can better come to terms with why Johnson and the kids cooperated with Spy by turning to the argument in German theorist Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason. Sloterdijk opposes two ways of thinking: that of the contemporary cynic versus that of the ancient and kynic. In the ancient world, he explains, the kynic was an individual who mocked everyone publicly, bringing the high down by exposing them with his “crude unmasking gaze.”[15] Appealing to us with the voice of the kynic is precisely the strategy of Spy magazine, which derives its attraction (and hence, salability) through its most common tactics, such as exposing who-slept-with-whom-to-get-something.[16] The kynic’s gaze, as Sloterdijk explains, “wants to acknowledge the ‘raw,’ animal, and simple facts above which the lovers of higher things like to place themselves.”[17] Hence, Spy prints photographsof the Queen of England picking her nose. By bringing the celebrity from the heights of refined things down to the animalistic impulses of the low and the everyday, Spy is kynical, subverting class, if only for the moment. Thus, the article on the kids, exposing what happens in the back rooms of architecture, is firmly within Spy’s tradition of kynical mocking.

Unfortunately, Sloterdijk concludes, we are now in a period of modern cynicism and this is how we can explain Johnson and the kids’ behavior toward Spy. “Discontent in our culture,” Sloterdijk explains, “appears today as universal, diffuse cynicism.”[18] Because the tools of Enlightenment (by which Sloterdijk means the process of unmasking or demystifying ideology) have, through mass education, become available to many individuals, many college-educated people are aware of the critique of ideology (for Sloterdijk ideology means false consciousness) but continue to operate in the same position they were in before, even though they now know what is going on. The modern cynic understands what false consciousness is, Sloterdijk explains, but uses it to his own ends to pull a fast one. Modern cynics act fundamentally in their own self-interest, as Sloterdijk put it, “to see to it that they are not taken for suckers.” In the face of cynicism, the traditional critique of ideology is helpless, serving only to bolster the case of the cynic by allowing him a knowledge of his weak points. Yet this cynic is defined by a vulnerability kept in check by a strong instinct for self-preservation that allows him to keep working even after he realizes the meaninglessness of his work. As the cynic says to himself, I have to work, we all have to work, and “Others would do it anyway, perhaps worse. Thus the new, integrated cynicism even has the understandable feeling about itself of being a victim and of making sacrifices.” This new melancholy cynicism therefore is tied to a nostalgia for the innocent, naive days when knowledge was not compromised. But, Sloterdijk writes, it is precisely this defense mechanism that blocks the possibility of employing any kind of ideology-critique against the cynic: it is “enlightened false consciousness.” The cynic firmly believes that what he is doing is based upon false premises, but just as firmly, believes that the current power-structure of society forces him to act as if the premises were true.[19]

Sloterdijk’s valorization of the kynic however does not give him any priority over the cynic. While the kynic is honest, his honesty has little impact on the cynic who points out that the whole dirty truth that the kynic smears him with is true, but, well, so what? Thus the reaction of Johnson and his kids to the kynicism of the Spy article is typical of the cynical mood. Their reaction makes the conspiracy a public secret: Spy is right, there is a conspiracy, but, well, so what?

For this dissertation to be another exposé of Philip Johnson’s architectural star-making machine along the lines of Spy would be reductive: the discipline could dismiss it either as paranoiac or as blatantly obvious, perhaps even as a cynical validation of the system, just as the Spy article ultimately served as a means of further promotion for Philip Johnson and his kids who provided interviews to fill in the details and posed for photographs that made them look like celebrities. For the publicist, after all, bad publicity is better than no publicity. By giving the appearance of deeper levels of debate, the truth is concealed and hegemony is served, or as Guy Debord would say, the logic of the spectacle dictates that “that which appears is good, that which is good appears.”[20]

On the other hand, just as someone must finally say that the Emperor is not wearing any clothes, the non-cynic must disclose the public secret. Not everyone is a cynic and for those of us who aren’t, a better understanding of the cynical mentality and its manifestations in architecture could perhaps be useful in formulating a strategy of resistance. The first step towards eliminating cynicism has to be its recognition. Cynicism is a way of stepping away from reality, to defer its consideration for another time. But this deferment cannot be endless. Hegemony is a process directed toward an end, but is not an end itself. Hegemony can only exist if it is incomplete. While recuperation is a danger, remaining silent to avoid this danger is cynical. By exposing the operations of the public secret, we learn more about the real conditions of our discipline and based on this knowledge make our choices. While our choices are still within ideology, we will find that some choices are better than others: not every choice has to be cynical. My dissertation is intended to facilitate such choices (and is in itself such a choice) by exposing the meaning masked underneath the spectacle, at once obvious and completely hidden to the reader. In this project not only do I hope to expose Johnson and his kids’ conspiracy, I also hope to show how the conspiracy operates, what conditions have enabled it and what its continued operation means for the discipline.

It is my thesis that, just as cynicism pervades latter-day society, so too it has come to pervade architecture. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine an aspect of how cynicism came to be prevalent in architecture. This strengthening of cynicism emerges out of specific relations in late twentieth century society, a society that we can come to terms with by turning to Guy Debord’s incisive analysis of it as the society of the spectacle. Under the sign of the spectacle, we will eventually be able to draw a relation between visual culture and capital that can be used to explain a number of seemingly incompatible strands of investigation in this dissertation: the appearance of the kids in architectural discourse; architectural theorists’ interest in creating a formal visual language ultimately based on design technologies that also form the basis of modern advertising layout; the concurrent interest in stripping the architecture student of her preconceptions about architecture to create what would be referred to as “the innocent eye”; and the increase in public popularity of the architectural drawing and of architecture culture in general.

The “spectacle,” Debord explains, is “capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.”[21] While pre-spectacular capitalist society was dominated by reification — the replacement of lived relations by commodity relations — in spectacular society the commodity has been replaced by the image. As consumers of the spectacle, our experience of the world is deferred and instead, our attention turns toward its representation, its spectacularization.[22] This attention is itself a form of labor, as the spectacle demands that we devote our time to participate in it, if we wish to be successful members of society. Successful participation makes us feel as if we are united with the rest of the world, yet this unreal feeling masks the reality of the division of labor and the real differences between individuals, classes, and social groups.[23] As our attention is turned toward the spectacle, it comes to dominate our social lives, masking out reality. As Debord writes, “Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world.”[24] The consumer’s attention to the commodity is essentially a fetishistic worship of the image: the wearing of T-shirts that advertise commodities, the collection of little objects like stickers, key chains, or baseball caps bearing brand names and logos for products. There is no real gain to the consumers from these objects — many of which cost more not less than comparable items without advertising — except as signs to the consumer and others that he or she has successfully integrated into the system of the spectacle and has graduated from consuming mere items to consuming images.[25] While the image of the product promises what Debord calls “a dazzling shortcut to the promised land of total consumption…ceremoniously presented as the decisive entity,” when it is bought and brought home it becomes vulgar, revealing its poverty, the result of the misery of its production. The reality of the mass-produced commodity is, however, masked by the appearance of the next object begging to be acknowledged, an interchange that reveals the fraud inherent in the promise of satisfaction.[26]

The spectacle reflects what Ernest Mandel has called “late capitalism,” the period in which areas of culture that have traditionally remained relatively independent to capitalism become colonized by it. Late capitalism is marked not by a postindustrial economy taking over from industry, as some historical analysts would argue,[27] but by the industrialization of the last precapitalist enclaves.[28] This expansion of industrialization, creating further divisions of labor where there previously were none, is the result of capital seeking out areas in which to invest.[29] While the vanguard of certain arts held out some resistance to commodification to some degree until relatively recently, this has rapidly changed. While both architect and painter traditionally produced items for sale, the architect designed plans for a unique building, the painter painted a unique painting. More and more it is the reproduction of these items that sustains the artist. In the case of the architectural vanguard, the architect becomes a producer of mass-produced architectural objects: drawings, models, books, teapots, façades, and television shows. Evidence of this growth of the commodity-image in culture over the last thirty years can be seen around us every day: museums and galleries have become places for the upper middle class to visit  — to see and be seen — as well as places to sell — both off the walls and in the bookstore and café — and in the mall we can find Structure,  a chain clothing store based on a theme of architecturalness, coffeepots made by architect Michael Graves, and books on the latest architectural trends.[30] The aestheticizaton of everyday life that the members of the Werkbund had hoped for appears to have made great advances,[31] but somehow something seems to have fallen amiss and the unity between art and life has simply not taken place. Rather than being a place of integration, however Structure is a space of alienation.

This change in architectural production is based on the spread of architectural reproduction as image and to a progressive elevation of the architect as a celebrity, again an image. Paradoxically, while the vanguard operates at a level of unprecedented cultural influence, the typical architect works as a technician, rarely if ever working as a designer of buildings with any significant formal qualities.

This shift is not however the product of a direct relationship between an economic base and a cultural superstructure. Rather, disciplines have their own localized forces that get spun in general directions by their interaction with the economic base. In this case, the historical analysis within this dissertation will show that the inability of postwar American modern architecture to provide adequate disciplinary boundaries (i.e. ways of thinking and teaching the practice of architecture, what it is, and what the architect does) and the ability of a new paradigm to provide the same at the cost of restricting the scope of architecture, is coupled with the exponential commodification of architecture, through reproduction to enable an architecture of the commodity-image.

The result is that in architecture, social discourse is replaced by a spectacular discourse. Presented with a series of images, we are given the illusion of choice, an illusion that I will argue, underlies the ascent and the conspiracy of the kids.

Spectacle and conspiracy are intimately linked today: if spectacle is the public representation of a certain kind of power, covert action is the private representation.[32] Yet more and more the secret is public as well, creating an amnesiac effect around itself by virtue of the spectacle. In the spectacle, illusory but seemingly natural relations are created: not only is the connection between the object and its production obscured, the object itself is obscured in favor of the representation of the object. The spectacle serves to distract attention from the reality of production and from class relations.

The amnesiac distraction created by the spectacle has only grown stronger in the years since Debord first diagnosed it. While Nixon had to resign after the Watergate scandal, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton have stayed in power after their respective scandals (Iran-Contra/ Iraq/Waco, Whitewater) by playing the card of the public secret, making the spectacle into the secret.[33] As Debord explains, “the highest ambition of the integrated spectacle is still to turn secret agents into revolutionaries, and revolutionaries into secret agents.”[34] Hence the success of Ollie North’s spectacular defense during the 1980s. North made the secret public: he became an entertainer, an action hero explaining to the American people that secrecy and covert action were essential for the honorable and honest in government. After firing North, former-actor Reagan stated that North had become a “national hero” and that his story would “make a great movie.”[35] As I will demonstrate in chapter two, in a similar manner Philip Johnson, in his role as the comedian of architecture makes everything into a joke and in doing so is able to create a discipline-wide forgetting of his fascist past, thus becoming the most powerful of American architects and by being cynical, being beyond reproach. As Debord points out, in the spectacle as it is constituted today, “Many things may be unauthorized; everything is permitted. Talk of scandal is thus archaic.”[36]

I have already referred to the “conspiracy” of the kids a number of times and by now the reader may well be wondering why I use this peculiar term. By looking for a “conspiracy” I do not, however, mean that we should look for the workings of an evil, secret hand in architecture as a postmodern, architectural version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a turn of the century antisemitic fiction purporting that  the Jews had a demonic conspiracy to take over the world.[37]As Sloterdijk explains, the Protocols, as interpreted by the Nazis, “projected the anonymous effects of the system onto demonic ‘intentions’ so that even confused simple citizens did not lose the ‘overview.’” In any investigation of conspiracies, we must guard against the overinvestment of fictional hidden conspiracies with powers beyond their possible reach as means of simplifying complex realities.[38] There is the danger, for both conspiracy theorists and theorists of conspiracy theory, to see the conspiracy as being all-powerful. Certainly that is not our case with the kids. By no means are they all powerful. In this situation, the conspiracy theorist adopts (or is perceived to have adopted) a paranoid system of knowledge that creates connections where there are none. Yet this kind of critique, often from the ideological Right, serves to denigrate the use of history. If there are no collusions then why bother? Noam Chomsky points out that in contemporary discourse the phrase “conspiracy theory” is used to discourage analyses of institutions by equating it with paranoia.[39] Hence it was the concept of conspiracy theory as overloaded and paranoiac that architectural critic Kenneth Frampton alluded to when he mentioned that the architectural group that preceded the Kids and with which he was associated with, the New York Five, is viewed (although by what presumably unsavory or misguided types he doesn’t say) as “the conspiracy of the Five.”[40]

But sometimes paranoia is the appropriate reaction. After all, the Protocols were indeed the product of a conspiracy, although not a Jewish one but rather an antisemitic one run by Czar Nicholas II’s secret police. Arguably, all history writing and interpretation is paranoid, making vast connections between phenomena far apart in logical space. Paranoia can be an appropriate epistemological model. But if that is the case, then our means of obtaining historical knowledge would be so compromised that we might as well shut down right now. I believe, however, that historical knowledge remains useful as a way of understanding the construction of contemporary (social) structures. Nevertheless, I trust that the derogatory connotations of “conspiracy” remain with it throughout this dissertation in order to point to architecture’s resistance to institutional analysis.

The overinvestment in hidden forces that Frampton tries to deflect hints at a tradition of associating conspiracy theories with the ideological Right. The verb “to conspire” itself comes from the Latin conspirare, to breathe together, in other words, to find oneself partaking of the same air as one’s allies, no doubt the result of occupying a dark, secret, and enclosed space. In English, conspiracy takes on the added meaning of a transgression against the law. Hence perhaps the appeal of the conspiracy theory to the Right: the conspiracy is a secret act of a collective agency against the law. Indeed, Left subversive activities against the State have taken place, or been plotted in conspiratorial circles. But in reality, the enemies of the Right have no monopoly on acts of collective agencies or law-breaking, as Watergate amply demonstrated (although some Right-wing conspiracy theorists would see Watergate as a plot of the Left media to discredit Nixon, or alternately, as evidence that Kissinger, not Nixon, was in charge).

Nevertheless, to dismiss the possibility of conspiracies because of the traditional association of conspiracy theory with the ideological Right would also be a dangerous mistake. Conspiracy theory as well as conspiracies have come from all sides of the political spectrum. In his survey of American conspiracy theories David Brion Davis discovers a characteristically American preoccupation with theorizing conspiracies. This preoccupation, he explains, is in part due to a traditional American belief that this country is a Jeffersonian democracy without traditional orders. Any class or collective action, be it the organization of an élite gentleman’s club, a Political Action Committee or a trade union, will arouse suspicion, especially during difficult times.[41]

In a similar way, Fredric Jameson has discussed the recent proliferation of conspiracy theory movies such as Three Days of the Condor or JFK as attempts to map the unrepresentable scope of the global system of late capitalism. The impossibility of finding a space outside of global capitalism from which to critique it directly, Jameson writes, necessitates the development of indirect ways of representing the system and thus conspiracy steps in as an allegory for the subterranean yet pervasive control of late capitalism.[42] Borrowing his theory of allegory from Walter Benjamin, Jameson sees an allegory as a structure that contains within itself both its direct meaning as well as something else.[43] Thus, conspiracy can be used to describe how everything is “Functionally inserted into larger institutional schemes and frameworks of all kinds, which nonetheless belong to somebody…”[44] Further, he argues, conspiracy can serve as a tool to indirectly unify the individual act and its location within the collective by being able to account for “a potentially infinite network, along with a plausible explanation of its invisibility.”[45]

One immediate problem with Jameson’s theory of conspiracy is that his own ability to describe late capitalism undermines the epistemological validity of the conspiracy as an attempt to represent something unrepresentable. If Jameson can analyze capitalism directly, just what value do the more indirect conspiracy theories have, except as symptoms of anxiety? I contend that Jameson’s attention to conspiracy solely as an allegory for late capitalism still leaves room for the analysis of actual conspiracies and their role in our society as opposed to conspiracy-theory driven literature and film. While the Left has traditionally followed Marx into the study of large-scale economically-driven phenomena, ignoring the actions of individuals and the historical use of lines of descent and their connection to the genealogy of ideas, the latter represent a valid sphere of analysis themselves.[46] As inheritances of money, goods, and land are passed down along the most unlikely lines, so too are inheritances of symbolic and cultural capital (see my discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of these terms below) in the form of the “intellectual tradition” and trade secrets (both data and methodology) and in the form of positions of power, status, and respectability. The conspiracy, in other words, serves as a special form of a class’s reproduction of itself. Determining the material conditions that permit this particular conspiracy of the kids to take place would, I believe, allow us to understand its role within the discipline.

On the surface of our specific investigation, we see the classic symptoms of the conspiracy: the kids act in secret (as will be elaborated in chapter three) and transgress an unwritten social contract among architects against influence-peddling and monopoly-control in an effort to seize power in the discipline. Like any good conspiracy, there have to be secrets and one of the secrets in this particular conspiracy is obvious: Johnson and the kids suppress any traces of social networks in their architecture. Their work is specifically meant to be a discourse of form, a discourse without any societal — or political — ramifications.

The context for the conspiracy of the kids is however provided by a larger structural conspiracy, a paradigm-shift in architectural education in the 1960s. The conspiratorial aspect of this paradigm-shift is that, composed of an unquantifiable number of agents in the discipline and an unquantifiable percentage of recent architectural work, be it buildings or theory, it manifests itself as an indefinite network that cannot be fully mapped and remains generally invisible.

Yet this structural conspiracy is that of a discipline being mobilized by the demands of professionalization to move in one particular direction much as Jameson’s global system tends towards hegemony, even if both the paradigm-shift in architecture and Jameson’s global economic system contain contradictions within themselves and the conspirators — especially the minor ones far removed from the center (in this case not Johnson and the kids but rather the architects who simply accept the system) — are often not aware of the extent of the conspiracy. The unmistakable, albeit mediated, coincidence of these large-scale economic changes with certain disciplinary interests fits into Jameson’s description of conspiracy as totality, extending the reaches of global capitalism as far as possible.

I hope to show the successful conspiracy of the kids is related to a paradigm-shift within the discipline of architecture or structural conspiracy toward what I will call “cardboard architecture.” Although the term is generally associated with the early work of architect Peter Eisenman, cardboard architecture actually has a lineage preceding Eisenman’s appropriation, and I will use it to cover the reproductively-driven, surface-obsessive work of both the kids and the related methods of thinking and performing architectural design in the most prestigious American schools of architecture.

This paradigm-shift toward “cardboard architecture” was an indirect result of economic and sociocultural changes that affected the discipline. As postwar modernism’s popularity waned during the 1960s and the alternatives of design methods, engineering, behaviorism and communications theory threatened architecture as a discipline by reducing its claim to scientificity, many architectural educators turned to a formalist “cardboard” architecture of complex, shallow spaces molded by thin walls. Certainly other responses to the demands of the discipline could have been made, but cardboard architecture appeared in the right place at the right time. Likewise cardboard architecture’s claim to architecture as an art carried an implicit demand that it be represented by some number of visible architect-heroes to disseminate its high-art status to the public. Other structural conditions of the field, such as the concentration of power in few hands, these in turn often controlled by Philip Johnson, and the primarily oral means of transmitting information presented a bias towards the dominance of these architect-heroes by an élite, relatively close-knit group of architects from the academy.

Thus this structural conspiracy provides a context for the conspiracy of the kids: while it was not a conspiracy in the sense of having been coordinated from the start by its members, it was a conspiracy in the sense that once the opportunity presented itself, the kids took advantage of a sociological tendency towards a concentration of power in ever-tightening circles. They then began to plot amongst themselves to ensure the successful continuation of a system that greatly benefited them. The concept of “conspiracy” thus offers a means of mediating between individual agents and structural changes. In this sense, it denotes the shadowy zone that Fernand Braudel describes in which

active social hierarchies were constructed on top [of the market economy]: they could manipulate exchange to their advantage and disturb the established order. In their desire to do so — which was not always consciously expressed — they created anomalies, ‘zones of turbulence’ and conducted their affairs in a very individual way. At this exalted level, a few wealthy merchants in eighteenth-century Amsterdam or sixteenth-century Genoa could throw whole sectors of the European or even world economy into confusion, from a distance. Certain groups of privileged actors were engaged in circuits and calculations that ordinary people knew nothing of. Foreign exchange, for example, which was tied to distant trade movements and to the complicated arrangements for credit, was a sophisticated art, open only to a few initiates at most. To me, this second shadowy zone, hovering above the sunlit world of the market economy and constituting its upper limit so to speak, represents the favored domain of capitalism, as we shall see. Without this zone, capitalism is unthinkable: this is where it takes up residence and prospers.[47]

In architectural discourse, and even more in the popular media, this zone is isolated and treated as the realm in which architecture happens and it is here that today’s architectural celebrities exist: from this realm come the architects about whom most monographs and articles are written. But it is also the realm in which architects who have accumulated enough symbolic capital (i.e. recognition as authorities in the field) can make decisions that then affect the profession as a whole. The difficulty of reconciling the “shadowy zone” to architecture as discipline and profession, however, leads to large and uncomfortable leaps in scale when the historian or critic who is unaware of this structure finally does attempt to locate the individual, celebrity architect in a context.

The kids inhabit this anomalous realm, appearing to be in competition with each other, offering ostensibly a serious competitive discourse at the highest levels of architecture in what would seem to be an architectural parallel to Arthur Schlesinger’s notion of the ideal “vital center,” in which the good government would balance between the control of the informed opinions of the loyal left (the democrats) and the loyal right (the republicans).[48] The vital center, however, like the debate between the kids was a mythic ideal at best: while on certain levels there has been disagreement between political factions, on the whole, there is more alliance than dissent on the shape of the government. As C. Wright Mills argues in his book on the Power Élite, the selection of the power élite out of both loyal left and loyal right provides a continuity underlying the long-term operation of the government. Shifts that do come about are the result of institutional realignments: the business élite slipping in front of the military, or vice versa. On the other hand, the long-term tendency of the government has been towards the accretion and consolidation of power in ever more centralized form.[49] Analogously, the successful conspiracy organized by Philip Johnson and the kids, aims not at overthrowing the existing order but rather at filling the highest positions attainable with its members. The ideal of the vital center as great balance, however, is really conservativism in disguise, an ideal of a society that works through the autonomous structural forces of the market. Because the different forces appear to balance each other in a competitive manner, the élite can look at itself and say: “there can’t possibly be a conspiratorial élite, while we know each other, we are at odds on so many issues, we are just the result of success in a free competition” and thereby disappear into the structure of the economy.[50]

The conspiracy of agency and the structural conspiracy intersect in the structural trend toward greater and greater concentration of power in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals. This trend has been traced in aesthetic fields by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his numerous works which I will discuss at length in chapter four of this dissertation. In both cases, social networks tend to create successful social reproduction, allowing those in power to hand-pick their successors. In addition, frequently overlapping interests, such as Johnson’s roles as architect, businessman, art patron, and socialite, reinforce the connections between those in different power circles.[51]

But Johnson’s control in setting an agenda in American architecture is if anything, even more blatant than the control of any political power élite: in 1932 he popularized modern architecture with the exhibit on modern European architecture at MoMA he put on with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, in the 1940s and 1950s, his work with and book on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe helped popularize the German modernist, later in the 1950s and in the early 1960s Johnson was in the forefront of a move toward a more eclectic and monumental architecture such as that of his New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, in the 1970s Johnson’s interest in postmodern architecture helped that movement take center stage, and in the 1980s, Johnson’s sponsorship of the MoMA exhibit on Deconstructivist architecture helped bring that to the fore. Certainly American architecture has gone through a large number of changes since 1932 and it would no doubt have gone through many of them without Johnson’s intervention, but he has undeniably been the mediator in a remarkable number of cases. The phenomenal reputation he has acquired as a result, combined with his mobility in the circles of high society have made him into a strong power broker, ideally positioned him to lead the vanguard of architecture, which he did.

And yet Johnson wasn’t just in the right place time at the right time. That is a necessary precondition: the power-broker needs to be able to take advantage of multiple, overlapping networks, but he also needs to be interested in doing so, i.e. he must possess a will-to-power.[52] For his part Johnson has been fascinated by power in a consistent way at least since his mid-twenties, as his fascist past shows. But it was this same fascination with power that has always driven Johnson, as can be seen from the quote he takes from Friedrich Nietzsche to explain his interest in architecture: “In architectural works, man’s pride, man’s triumph over gravitation, man’s will to power assume visible form. Architecture is a veritable oratory of power made by form.”[53] Yet Johnson’s obsession with power didn’t just focus on architectural production, he believes he is not a great designer[54] so instead he has actively played the role of power broker and dispensed power so as to design not just buildings but also himself and the shape of architecture.[55]

Johnson’s belief that architecture is a ‘veritably oratory of power made by form’ raises the question of how the contemporary architect has been represented arises: what are the implications of the architect as Howard Roark, driven by his own will-to-power to create his own aesthetic (and here I am using the male pronoun to emphasize the phallologocentricism of this ideal no matter what the sex of the architect)? This demand of aesthetic over all else harkens back to a crucial moment in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy when the philosopher of will remarked:

The entire comedy of art is neither performed for our betterment or education nor are we the true authors of this art world. On the contrary, we may assume that we are merely images and artistic projections or the true author, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art — for it only as an aesthetic phenomenon  that existence and the world are eternally justified — while of course our consciousness of our own significance hardly differs from that which the soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented on it.[56]

But then what of those of us who do not fancy ourselves Nietzschean supermen? If we know about Johnson and his kids and their conspiracy and dismiss it, what can we be but cynics? If we choose to do nothing and not face this reality, then we are co-conspirators, cynics, and even what Sloterdijk calls double agents. If one knows that one is playing a role in an institution that is only attempting to further its hegemonic role, then one is essentially a double agent. Here the question of where one’s self is located arises: is the agent a cog in the machine of the institution or is he there to subvert it? If one does not know, or worse, does not care, then a certain loss of identity follows,[57] one becomes a co-conspirator. If we turn cynical about the role of Johnson and the kids in architecture and say it is just part of architecture and we can’t do anything about it, we play our role in the larger structural conspiracy in the field, acknowledging and thereby legitimating its figureheads and their cynical agenda.

But to recruit co-conspirators, both the conspiracy of agency and the conspiracy of structure need subjects which they obtain through the disciplining of students in the design studio. By “discipline” I mean that set of boundaries that denote a proper domain of a discourse to its practitioners and the disciplining or training both implicit and explicit that makes a subject conform to these boundaries.[58] In other words, my use of the term “discipline” combines Michel Foucault’s definition of it as the boundaries of a field of discourse determined by what can and can not be asked, and Althusser’s notion of problematique, which he defines as “the system of questions commanding the answers given by the ideology,” which itself acts as an answer to the problems of the time.[59]

Therefore, an understanding of the disciplining of the architectural subject in postwar architectural education is critical to this dissertation, for not only does the paradigm-shift take place most strongly within the academy, it is also in the academy that the context for the work of the kids and its reception is established. In order to do this I will show that the situation of the kids as architectural celebrities is tied to the same process of subject-formation that constitutes the disciplining of the architectural subject.

I have so far identified the Howard Roark subject-position, that of a heroic, autonomous architect who strives to maintain architecture as discipline and sees architecture as a formal expression of will-to-power, an author whose signature will be readily discernible in his work. There is also another subjective position seemingly at odds with this, that of the architect who typically works in a large office, an architectural MTV consumer, a subject acting as little or nothing more than a function of media oversaturation flipping through channels of flow attracted to whichever pattern catches the eye, and if ever getting a chance, he or she will only design architecture reflecting the prevailing whims of fashion, disappearing into the anonymity of architectural production.

But there has often been a motion of reciprocation between vanguardist[60] attempts to situate the subject (either as producer or as viewer) outside (or at least in a better position within) the space of the contemporary situation and a projection of the subjective position of the next more structurally advanced moment in capitalism.[61] Thus in modern architecture two trends co-existed, one toward both architect as hero and one toward architect as anonymous worker-producer. This kind of contradiction is not however simply an inconsistency to point out and leave at that, instead, it is an integral part of the capitalist system. Louis Althusser has explained that the proper use of the concept of contradiction is not that of the Hegelian dialectic in which only one contradiction exists at one time, magically resolved only to move history closer toward philosophy and Spirit, but rather to see history composed of contradictions, “overdetermined” in a complex way by their dependence on and reciprocal effect toward the structure as a whole. Contradictions, as Althusser points out, do form the weakest links in the system and thus are effective points at which to locate critique.[62] This unhappy flux between a subject posited as a way to step outside the system and  a subject who prefigures the subject required by the next moment of capitalism’s growth is precisely such a contradiction that architecture as a discipline has been able neither to suppress nor to satisfy. Instead, it appears that this attempt to train a new subject for capital’s spread in architecture is masked (consciously or unconsciously) as a way of freeing the architect from capital’s negative affects.

The contradiction described is replayed on a societal level. If on the one hand, the spectacular society demands us to be switching machines, like the second model of the architectural subject, there is also a societal demand for us to be solid citizens, to be mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, to know our place in society, to go to church, or at least vote, to hold down a steady job and not sabotage our company. This flux, between Howard Roark and the MTV consumer, is a determining contradiction of this society, although it does not control us completely. As agents we still have room to act, as I will discuss in the conclusion.

But while this flux seems to leave no way out for any of us, I believe that this is primarily a question of how the subject and individual have been construed in recent theory. It is possible to theorize our existence as agents with both the ability to act against ideology and the ethical responsibity for our actions.

Louis Althusser in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” explains that “Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects,”[63] in other words, Ideology[64] calls to us, as if it was a friend hailing us with the phrase “Hey, you there.” By responding to our friend, we occupy a space, acknowledging that we are indeed that subject who he called. By responding to ideology, we are also put in a place.

Peter Stallybrass, however, in his essay “Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text” points out a historical imprecision in Althusser’s statement.[65] Stallybrass explains that etymologically the word subject refers to “that which has been thrown under,” and “To be a subject is to be subjected, to be under the dominion of the governor.” But the era of the governor or monarch is the era of feudalism, which of course has been replaced by capitalism. Stallybrass continues: “It would surely be more exact to say that within a capitalist mode of production, ideology interpellated, not the individual as subject, but the subject as individual.”[66] Stallybrass explains that the subject is a historical legacy of monarchism in which one is subjected to another’s will, while the individual is the product of a bourgeois valorization of individual rights.

This perhaps allows us to better understand why in recent (post-structuralist) theoretical discourse, driven by an anti-bourgeois — but not necessarily Marxist — sentiment, the individual and the subject, still often used interchangeably, have become such problems. The author is dead,[67] and even subjects are blasted apart,[68] in attempts to historicize the notion of the by now rather conflated notions of subject and individual (post-structuralist theorists tend not to adequately reflect on the difference between subject and individual). But post-structuralist theory has been unable to develop this much further: ethically and politically, the dispersal of the subject results in a passivity in the face of interpellation by the seemingly monolithic forces of language, desire, ideology.

Post-structuralist theory of subjectivity has come to be substituted more and more for a proper theory of who we are. Originally informed through examinations of fictional texts it now claims to explain everyone’s day-to-day existence. The subject, as Paul Smith writes in his book Discerning the Subject, “is by and large a passivity, something at the behest of forces greater than it.”[69] This makes sense in fiction, but it does violence to agency and our material existence. As Smith explains

current conceptions of the ‘subject’ have tended to produce a purely theoretical ‘subject,’ removed almost entirely from the political and ethical realities in which human agents actually live and that a different concept of the ‘subject’ must be discerned or discovered.[70]

Under the sign of the subject and its dispersal, post-structuralist theorists are ultimately dealing with a fictional, rather than real dispersal.

Some kind of entities — which we will call agents — within bodies do exist, as we can see when a body of thought that can be characterized by its dispersal of the subject/individual is so obsessed with its own subjects/individuals. Post-structuralism is, after all, a realm of (generally Western European white male) heroes: Barthes, Baudrillard, Deleuze & Guattari, Derrida, de Man, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan. As a brief glance across a bookshelf on literary criticism will show, it is these proper names that dominate the discourse of post-structuralism. Thus, while theoretically eliminating the subject, post-structuralists are, in fact, far from dispensing with it (or even more properly, a concept of the individual) practically.

Instead, Smith suggests that Althusser’s interpellated or

Dominated ‘subjects’ do not maintain the kind of control for which the word ‘individual’ might suggest, but neither do they remain consistent or coherent in the passage of time: both they and the discourse they inhabit have histories and memories which alter in constitution over time. Additionally, the interplay of differing subject-positions will make some appear pleasurable and others less so; thus a tension is produced which compels a person to legislate among them. So, in that light, it can be said that a person is not simply determined and dominated by the ideological pressures of any overarching discourse or ideology but is also the agent of a certain discernment. A person is not simply the actor who follows ideological scripts, but is also an agent who reads them in order to insert himself into them — or not.[71]

Smith sums up the differences between agents, individuals and subjects

The human agent will be seen here as the place from which resistance to the ideological is produced or played out, and thus as not equivalent to either ‘the subject’ or the ‘individual.’

‘The individual’ will be understood here as simply the illusion of whole and coherent personal organization, or as the misleading description of the imaginary ground on which different subject-positions are colligated.

And thence the commonly used term ‘subject’ will be broken down and will be understood as the term inaccurately used to describe what is actually the series or the conglomeration of positions, subject-positions, provisional and not necessarily indefeasible, into which a person is called momentarily by the discourses and the world that he/she inhabits.

The term ‘agent,’ by contrast, will be used to mark the idea of a form of subjectivity where, by virtue of the contradictions and disturbances in and among subject-positions, the possibility (indeed, the actuality) of resistance to ideological pressure is allowed for (even though that resistance too must be produced in an ideological context).[72]

Replacing the use of subjectivity by agency serves a number of essential theoretical purposes. By bringing back responsibility into the subject, it creates an ethical imperative: unlike the passive, even dispersed subject, subjected to discursive formations and flows of desire, the subject as agent exists, located in a body, and is responsible for its actions. The ethical dimension of the subject as agent allows us to re-invest the agent with a political dimension.

Thus, when I write about a conspiracy of agency, I write about how agents act together to achieve their own goals. That these goals — fame, power in the field, the admiration of others — are ultimately ideological is beside the point. The kids have chosen, they have intentionally acted, and the result is this conspiracy of agency. The kids read an ideological script, or rather, series of scripts, notably that of a structural conspiracy appearing as the paradigm-shift toward cardboard architecture and acted in their own interest. The paradigm of architectural thinking that I call “cardboard architecture” is concerned primarily with form and vision both as a way of resisting the creeping spread of technology and deterministic trends that would dilute the formal element in architecture and is necessitated by its heavy investment in photoreproductive technologies, while at the same time it represents and influences the transition to a late capitalist architecture of spectacle that takes hold in the later 1970s.

As a shorthand for this dissertation, I use the terms “the kids” and “cardboard architecture,” to refer to the above-mentioned group and paradigm shift respectively. But along what legitimate lines can I proceed? The group I am looking at is small: two core members (Peter Eisenman and Robert A. M. Stern) around one mentor (Philip Johnson) and perhaps three or four other central individuals (Richard Meier, Michael Graves, and since the late 1970s Frank Gehry), as well as a somewhat amorphous, shifting group of fellow travelers (Charles Gwathmey, Stanley Tigerman, Jaquelin Robertson, for example), and is marked by its diverse imagery. To come up with some kind of name based solely on their design principles would become, in essence, a stylistic analysis. Johnson’s term “the kids,” is, on the other hand a sociological grouping, expressing the relationship they have with Johnson as well as their presentation of themselves through the sixties and seventies as a young generation of “kids” just entering practice.

As the major players on the architectural cutting-edge since the 1970s, the kids have at times been grouped together, although this has rarely been done by virtue of their connection with Johnson. When critics or historians have tried to create some kind of group out of these individuals (for example to deflate the battle between the Whites and the Grays), they have generally been grouped together as formalists,[73] but what formalism might mean in this context has not been drawn out. As a rubric, “formalism” is of about as much use as “(post) structuralism” or “(post) modernism”: in architecture Oscar Niemeyer, Hugo  Häring, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe are among the many architects who have been called formalists at one point or another. Obviously, there is much room to maneuver within such a position and thus a more serious question would be: how do the kids use the concept of form? This question will serve to animate my discussion of their theory and practice.

“Cardboard architecture,” on the other hand is currently associated with Peter Eisenman’s work from the late 1960s and early 1970s but has had a broader application historically. The term was first used derogatorily in Frank Lloyd Wright’s critique of Corbusian modern architecture in his 1930 lecture “The Cardboard House.”[74] For Wright, the unrelenting advocate of an “organic,” tectonic, ground-hugging architecture, “most new ‘modernistic’ houses … look as though cut from cardboard with scissors, the sheets of cardboard folded or bent in rectangles with an occasional curved cardboard surface added to get relief. The cardboard forms made are glued together in boxlike forms — in a childish attempt to make buildings resemble steamships, flying machines, or locomotives. … Of late, they are the superficial, badly built product of this superficial, new ‘surface-and-mass’ aesthetic falsely claiming French painting as a parent.”[75]

“Cardboard architecture” was resurrected by the middle 1960s when Robert A.  M. Stern rebelliously referred to the work of the new generation of architects then in their twenties and thirties as “cardboard architecture,” marking out a distance from Wright and instead aligning their work with that of the architectural avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s as the “order of the day” for the new generation of architects then entering practice.[76]

Likewise, Peter Eisenman developed cardboard architecture into a theoretical conception of a deliberately atectonic, cardboard-model-like architecture.[77] Eisenman would use the term’s negative connotations to his advantage, as at one point when he explained that “‘Cardboard,’ usually a derogatory term in architectural discussion (as Baroque and Gothic were when first used), is used here deliberately as an ironic and pre-emptory symbol for my argument.” Thus, “cardboard architecture” already carried within it a certain built-in defense for its proponents.

Cardboard architecture for both Eisenman and Stern is an architecture of thin walls,sometimes of shallow spaces, denying the possibility of a tectonic materiality of architecture. As Wright referred only to the cardboard house, so cardboard architecture is concerned primarily with the domestic project, avoiding public works and significant engagement with the social realm. Cardboard architecture’s great strength, Eisenman explained, was the way it unloaded the building’s connotations of structure and function, foregrounding its form. Significantly, this unloading was done in the reproduction when, confronted by an image, Eisenman’s ideal viewer would ask: “is this a building or is it a model?”[78] As Rosalind Krauss has written, cardboard architecture’s modelness brings to mind a number of properties generally associated with the model: “generating form, … exploring ideas, quite apart from the necessities of real structure or the properties of real material.”[79]

The depthlessness of cardboard architecture, its attention to shaping space with thin, planar walls and abandonment of structure and mass, is the result of the spectacular attention to the image and its reproducibility in late capitalism that I discussed above.[80] This lack of depth does not correspond to a lack of meaning. Rather, it takes place concurrently with a vertiginous production of meaning created through a proliferation of ambiguity. Yet cardboard architecture’s meaning is fixated at the formal level of image, the result of a paradigm-shift within the discipline that consisted of a turning inward upon architecture as a field with foundations in the creation of form.

This turn inward is expressed by a change in the architecture’s referent. No longer does architecture primarily refer to the modern age and faith in its continued progress and in technology, as it did in modern architecture. Instead, cardboard architecture refers primarily to its formal generation. While its formal discourse acts as the kind of modernist self-criticism that art critic Clement Greenberg located as the mark of true modernism, the turn to architecture’s formal self also involves a turn onto its accumulated knowledge, i.e. its history and its historical forms and principles of design. Thus, by re-introducing history to architecture in a more direct way, a break with modern architecture is historicized, allowing its discussion as well.[81]

But cardboard architecture does not exist as an autonomous movement. Rather its spread is the product of a specific moment in the discipline of architecture and its interface to a larger sociopolitical condition, the structural conspiracy mentioned above. The paradigm-shift to cardboard architecture is historically located at a point of crisis for liberalism in Cold War America. Liberalism, as a willingness to dispense with old ideas that have outlived their usefulness in order to preserve the existing order, was embodied after World War II in the form of the Schlesinger’s “vital center.” During the first twenty years after the War, the massive growth of American business and government drove a building boom that made architecture into big business with the emergence of firms such as Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. But just as the predominant method of teaching and theorizing about architecture in the early part of the century, the model of the École des Beaux Arts in Paris collapsed under the weight of new demands from society, American modern architecture failed to deliver on its promises and came under attack from critics who found it sterile and void of reference to humanity and from architects who found its poorly defined method of teaching inadequate for the complex conditions of the day. Not coincidentally, the political/economic establishment that American postmodernism served appeared to collapse in the mid-1960s as America lost its mythical position as the one undefeatable and just world power abroad and liberalism failed to solve social problems at home.

The question of what an architectural vanguard could still  do arose. Some architects turned to pop imagery, others to megastructures, still others to eclectic sources. Hope continued for the redemption of architecture through science via engineering or behaviorist theory. The upshot of this redemption was, however, the loss of architecture’s formal aspect and hence, its claim to the status of Art or even to its claim to be an independent discipline. Another critique came toward the end of the 1960s as radical architects threatened to do away with the discipline of architecture entirely and concern themselves with social activism.

Instead a program grounding architecture in form first became popular. Developed in the early 1950s at the University of Texas at Austin by John Hedjuk, Colin Rowe, and Robert Slutzky — among others — this formal approach, rested on the importation of a visual grammar to analyze and produce architecture from the Vorkurs, or preliminary course, as it was taught at the Bauhaus by László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers, both of whom immigrated to the United States after the rise of Nazism and established schools of visual education dedicated to redefining American art education to train students for a field of design then undergoing the same professionalization as architecture. The codification of this research by Moholy-Nagy’s collaborator Gyorgy Kepes, and its appropriation by postwar educators in architecture, created a new way of educating the architect’s eye which then spread throughout the United States. Coupled with a small number of other influential texts such as Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction, cardboard architecture offered a return to the formal aspects of the discipline.

Thus, “cardboard architecture” as I will use the term in this dissertation, refers to a broad paradigm of which the kids are a part, not so much a similarity in formal motifs or a “style” as a change in the way architecture as a discipline is thought, a restructuring of architecture itself in the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s. To this end, I will discuss how this new paradigm emerged and came to dominate the teaching of the architectural student.

Cardboard architecture’s overriding concern with form shows the limitations of traditional architectural criticism. While cardboard architecture can be analyzed formally, on its own terms, understanding its significance must transcend form. Even if cardboard architecture is concerned in part with an archaeology of style, a historiographic method based on style would not be able to apprehend the unities that exist beyond simple sets of visual characteristics.[82] Thus, investigating this material poses serious challenges to the conventional architectural historian who would attack the material through either formalistic or stylistic analyses. Likewise, a careful step-by-step reconstruction of the causal structure of the events or what Rosalind Krauss calls “an art history of the proper name” which would reduce all artistic production to an exact biographical meaning, arresting its ambiguities[83] would fail to apprehend the complexities inherent in the topic. Instead, the purpose of this dissertation is to make history live in the present by asking how this aspect of the discipline of architecture is constructed, tracing a specific kind of architectural theory as it becomes a new formation of power within the discipline of architecture to come to a better understanding of architecture today.

It is a serious mistake to the argue that the spectacle controls society completely, on the other hand, it does permeate it, reappearing in different form and at different locations. In this project I will investigate the spectacle in architecture and its effects: the celebrity status of the kids, the elision of uncomfortable history, the increased attention to the architectural object, the proliferation of architecture museums and the media as well as an entire system of architectural education.

The latter is in many ways the model for the reception induced (hypnotically perhaps, or even subliminally) by the manifestation of spectacle: the vision of the innocent eye. In the architectural education of the innocent eye, the architect tells the student they must learn to see with the eye of a child. The student must abandon all preconceptions and conventions, i.e history and agency, are be forgotten in favor of a truth-taking state. The architecture student who succeeds in seeing with the innocent eye operates in a subjective world of form, manipulating not so much objects but light impressions on the retina.

To historicize this ahistorical vision however, requires going beyond the bounds of a traditional disciplinary historiography that would seek to write a story of the great men in the field and that refuses to take into account inter- or extra- disciplinary transactions prevents an understanding of the discipline.[84] To understand the development of the innocent eye in architecture we must turn to its sources: the eighteenth and nineteenth century theories of child education and child art as well as the twentieth century attempts to radicalize vision and professionalize art. By doing so, we can see the assumptions that still lie just below the surface of the innocent eye.

So too with Philip Johnson: if we want to come to an understanding of his role in the architectural spectacle, we must turn to the extradisciplinary events of his life in the late 1930s. The result is that investigating not just what goes on within the discipline but also extradisciplinary transactions might prove uncomfortable, even intolerable for the discipline. Certainly architecture as a discipline and as a profession will continue to exist, and this text will not magically do away with it. On the other hand, it could serve to question some of the more oppresive myths of its disciplinarity.

In order to address the questions raised in this introduction, in this project I will trace the structural transformations in the discipline of architecture, their context, and how they lead us to the paradigm of cardboard architecture along with the activities of the public agents of this change — Philip Johnson and the kids — in their spectacular appearance. To do this I will examine the descent of the idea of the innocent eye from Rousseau’s critique of convention and the elevation of natural child learning in his Émile, through nineteenth century theories of vision and child art education, its codification in the modernist art educational theory first established in the Bauhaus in the 1920s, and the reception in architectural pedagogy of the 1960s. I will also focus on Philip Johnson’s fascist past and the collaboration between him and his kids in the construction of their public persona. The chronological scope of this dissertation will end at roughly 1980, when the kids’ power in the field was consolidated and they began to be widely recognized outside of architecture — roughly the same time that handbooks of design begin to codify cardboard architecture as a set of principles of design.[85]

This is an appropriate time to discuss a critical issue: the documents used in this dissertation. Some readers might wonder why I do not refer to archival material and interviews, the so-called “primary sources” of the historian (especially the disciplinary historian who wishes to narrow focus rather than broaden it). I do not do so because of my domain of inquiry: I am analyzing the operation of the public secret in architecture. I am not trying to expose the private secrets of these architects, I am not writing a biography or monograph on any of these individuals or movements. Thus, I limit my research to the zone in which this public secret plays itself out: publications about architecture. To bring in interviews and archival materials would be to look at material outside of the public secret.

The public secret is a phenomenon of the spectacle, a cynical secret that kept a secret by being exposed and then dismissed (“everyone knows that, who cares?!”) or repressed (“we don’t need to talk about that…”). The role of Philip Johnson’s fascist sympathies, the postwar cover-up and his spectacular machine of power in the field are, as I have stated at the outset of this dissertation, well-known in the discipline. What is remarkable is that they have not been discussed seriously, but rather left hidden in plain view through the operation of the public secret.

That the issues that I am addressing in this dissertation — issues ultimately about the construction of spectacle — have so far only tentatively been addressed is testament to the stupefying power of the spectacle. If the spectacle’s purpose is to make the obvious questions unaskable, then the   the role of a critique of the spectacle is to expose why those questions are unaskable.

But why look at these architects if writing about them would only feed their spectacular image? If everything that appears is good, then would their appearance in this dissertation not serve to simply add a new twist to their media personalities? My answer to this question is that the spectacular structure against which I struggle does not and cannot exert total control. As agents, we still have some kind of choice, even if it is always within ideology. Even if architecture, history, and theory are all more and more dominated by the spectacular structure of dissemination, tensions between this domination and the contingency of the conditions of our historical existence create contradictions in which we can operate.

This is not to appeal to any notion of a transcendentally real positivistic discourse of “Truth.” All statements are historically contingent and change their meaning within their context and “Truth” is always elusive. On the other hand, scientists continue to run experiments even after having learned of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and it is hard to deny that in many cases their results continue to be valid in our world, if only on a temporary and contingent level. While finding out “the Truth” isn’t possible, it is possible to find that some things are truer than others. Cats do not live in the water, for instance is a contingent truth, not “the Truth,” but certainly truer than a statement that cats live primarily in the water. My goal, in this project, is to find not “the Truth,” but rather contingent truths about the working of the spectacle in architecture.

This dissertation will be divided into six chapters: chapter one, “Architectural Education: The Turn to Cardboard” will give a background to the structural conspiracy of socioeconomic and disciplinary changes from 1945 until roughly 1970 that privileged the paradigm-shift toward cardboard architecture; chapter two, “Philip Johnson’s History: Fascism and Repression” will set up a background to the rise of the kids by exploring the Nietzschean power that their mentor Philip Johnson has devoted himself to attaining as promoter of architecture, fascist sympathizer, and architect; chapter three, “The Kids: Avant-Garde as Conspiracy of Agency” will explore the rise of the kids as a conspiracy of agency and its reception in architectural discourse; chapter four “The Architectural Object: Drawing and Spectacle” will explore the changes in architectural production and reproduction between 1970 and 1980 that consolidated the position of both cardboard architecture and the kids; chapter five “the Architectural Subject: The Innocent Eye and Discipline” will explore the educational manifestation of cardboard architecture, the disciplining of the architectural student under the paradigm of the innocent eye; and a concluding chapter will tie together the themes of conspiracy, spectacle and vision.

Thus, Chapter One, “Architectural Education: The Turn to Cardboard” will explore the paradigm-shift to cardboard architecture, an attempt to shore up the faltering boundaries of architecture as a discipline. In the 1960s a belief spread among architects and non-architects that both the modern architecture of postwar America and the liberal ideology of the vital center that it represented were failing in their self-appointed tasks to save the world. Architecture as discipline entered a period of crisis as its autonomy as a discipline was threatened on the one hand by engineering, behaviorism, and statistical methods that promised to achieve architecture’s results with scientific precision and on the other hand by counter-cultural critiques that promoted doing away with architecture as a profession altogether.

The disciplinary response was to abandon lingering claims to social responsibility and restrict architecture’s domain to a rigorous formal system, specifically cardboard architecture. To explain cardboard architecture’s development, its genealogy in the theories of graphic art developed by Josef Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes will be traced and it will be demonstrated that at root of both graphic art and architectural attempts to create a visual language is the internal demand for a proper object and rigorous means of discussion in the field.

The development of cardboard architecture is driven by a conspiracy of structure, mobilized by the demands of professionalization to move in one particular direction along with an alignment of extradisciplinary events. This structural conspiracy denotes an indefinite network in architecture and in society that cannot be fully mapped and remains generally invisible, often even to the conspirators themselves.

The extradisciplinary events that architecture had to react to were the failure of liberalism and the danger of the anti-institutional, radical critique of the late sixties. These changes were not however innocent, rather they were cynical, avoiding the dangers of a radical critique of institutions by discounting them and laying the foundations for the return of traditionalism in the eighties. It is under the sign of this shift that a new class of architects emerged, the academicians who retained mastery over the visual language that cardboard architecture was based on. Of these, a small number would serve as public heroes, presenting cardboard architecture to the world outside. Hence the emergence of the kids, as heroes of cardboard architecture was made possible by conditions within the discipline. Combined with the postwar need to validate architectural discourse in the studio, a new class of architects emerged: the architects of the academy, in particular, the kids.

Chapter Two, “Philip Johnson’s History: Fascism and Repression” examines the power broker for the kids, Philip Johnson. Johnson’s obsession with creating a culture of power and élites is documented and analyzed in this chapter as it appears long before the kids while he is a promoter of the International Style and afterwards a fascist, and through his cynical rebuilding of his life and image as architect after the war. Thus we set up a background against which to consider his later activities with his kids. Johnson’s relentless Nietzscheanism, his will-to-power, his attempt to rebuild his life and the conspiracy to cover up Johnson’s role as a fascist are explored in depth.

Chapter Three, “Philip’s Kids: Avant-Garde as Conspiracy of Agency” will discuss the rise of the kids to the top of American architecture with the help of Johnson in the later 1960s and 1970s as it exemplifies the architectural manifestation of the rise of cynical, spectacular culture.

The rise of Johnson and his kids is a spectacle, existing at the level of image, both of the architect and his work, through representation, reproduction and dissemination. In order to investigate a spectacle, one is forced to look at the structures through which it operates. The work of the kids is thus placed in a context here through an examination of the function of exhibits, debates, magazines, books, and journals in the production of the spectacle of the kids through their emergence in the context of the debate between the “formally-oriented” Whites, led by Eisenman, and the “social-oriented” Grays, led by Stern. This debate, often regarded as the starting point of serious architectural criticism in the United States is in fact a product of a conspiracy by Stern and Eisenman to promote themselves. Ultimately the debate serves to publicize the visual grammar examined in chapter one.

While Johnson and the kids locate the value of their discourse in its bringing of pluralism to architecture, Hal Foster has correctly observed that the differing levels of meaning inherent in a pluralist architecture tend not to provide “something for everyone” but rather stratify the audience into discrete classes based on possession of cultural capital. This analysis can be extended by comparing architectural pluralism with the “writing between the lines” espoused by conservative theorist Leo Strauss. According to Strauss, truly great philosophers and leaders have known the truth, which is that there is no truth, but if they were to freely publicize this, they would be either subject to persecution or worse, civilization would disintegrate under the trauma of such knowledge. Instead, in order to communicate their knowledge, the philosophers would execute a series of tactics of diversion and concealment and cynically write their real text “between the lines” of the apparent text.

I will show that for Johnson and the kids, the architecture of pluralism is in reality an architecture “writing between the lines.” The conspiracy of the kids can be seen as an allegorical representation of architecture’s embeddedness in larger networks of social relations and how the rejection of such an idea leads to a notion of architecture. Thus the cynical formalism of the kids is fundamentally Nietzschean, writing a deep cynicism between the lines.

In Chapter Four, “the Architectural Object: Drawing and Spectacle,” I examine the intersection of the structural conspiracy and the conspiracy of agency in the conspiracy of spectacle through which cardboard architecture and the kids solidified their positions. This conspiracy of spectacle appears as the new popularity of architectural representation that encouraged the phenomenal growth of the architectural media and led to new modes of experiencing architecture, an increase in the discipline’s popularity for the public and new patterns of patronage. But these changes led to the further spectacularization of vanguard architecture as more and more the forefront of architecture appeared to be not buildings but images that could sold as commodities.

The conspiratorial aspect of this change is twofold, reflecting the division between the conspiracy of agency (the kids) and the conspiracy of structure (cardboard architecture). The kids were deeply involved in some of the most important moves toward the popularization of the architectural drawing and model and at the same time profited from it, having their work frequently exhibited. Their interest in and the popularity of their drawing may well be because of the derivation of cardboard architecture’s formal method from the two-dimensional image and in the image of the cardboard model, as discussed previously and its resulting appropriateness for the medium.

After discussing the rise of the architectural drawing, I will explain the kids’ attempt to create what amounts to a prosthetic aura or cult-value for their cardboard architecture. Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” explained that the aura, or cult-value, of a work of art is broken down by techniques of reproducibility but he did not predict the phenomenal growth of reproduction and marketing that re-creates aura in prosthetic form in terms of spectacle, the cult of personality and image. While solidity and depth are both characteristics of aura in an architectural object and are evacuated by cardboard architecture’s shallowness, attention to surface-level phenomenon, and propensity for being seen largely in reproduction, they are reestablished in terms of formal density, theoretical depth, and the fetishism of the image. The rise of the architectural drawing, done by the hand of the architect himself, replaces the aura of the architectural object with a fetish of the image: aura is replaced by spectacle.

Thus the question of how architecture turns into spectacle under late capitalism will be addressed. Architecture will be shown to be not just a means of production under late capitalism, but also a spectacular lifestyle available for consumption.

In Chapter Five, “The Architectural Subject: Innocent Eye and Discipline,” emphasis shifts to the kind of subjects cardboard architecture produces through an examination of its reduction of subjectivity to the “innocent eye” or the “eye of the child.” According to the pedagogy cardboard architecture, a student would learn to see or “read” images by voiding herself of the preconceptions that she would have accumulated before entering into the first year of study by working through a series of formal exercises in an attempt to grasp the fundamental elements of a visual language. The teaching of this visual language is predicated upon an attempt to teach the student how to see with the eye of a child, to strip him of learned conventions — and subjectivity — and take on what these educators refer to as “the innocent eye.” In this chapter I will historically locate the development of the model of this innocent eye in nineteenth century changes in the study of perception and education.

After exploring the historical genealogy behind the innocent eye in the writings of John Ruskin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, its development in nineteenth century child-art education, and its arrival in architectural pedagogy and thinking, I will examine the writings of four cardboard architects, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Michael Graves, and Richard Meier, in order to shed light on its particular repercussions in architecture.

I will then turn to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural capital to show how the innocent eye serves as a special form of an academic class’s reproduction of itself. I will discuss the role of the innocent eye in legitimating a particular form of academic class and how by reducing the subject to a retinal phenomenon it is linked to the reproducible image and accommodates in advance recent technological changes for which the ideally-configured subject would be a switching machine.

Chapter Six, the conclusion, ties together cynicism, the spectacle, the conspiracy of the kids and the paradigm of the innocent eye. Using Jules Henry’s psychoanalysis of sham, we can see the conspiracy of the kids masking material reality with an autonomous, disengaged architecture. Of all the kids, I will examine Peter Eisenman in particular because of his intense fascination with power and with a liberating, subversive practice of architecture based on post-structuralist ideas of subjectivity. Eisenman’s fascination with himself is related to Jacques Lacan’s mirror-stage as a humanist attempt to define his Self, a project at odds with Eisenman’s supposedly anti-humanist stance. Finally, I suggest a radical alternative to the innocent eye in terms of a genealogical vision that would endeavor to see what lines of descent the innocent eye suppresses: the exploitation that is production and the violence that results from the spectacularization of ideas and images.

An alternative to political romance is to be an architect, for those who actually have the necessary talent for architecture. …

— Arthur Drexler[86]

By looking at the emergence of cardboard architecture as a shift between two paradigms analogous to the process of paradigm-shift in the sciences delineated by Thomas S. Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions we can see it less as a genetic, evolutionary change and more as a change responding to the political, professional, and sociological needs of the discipline.

Instead of seeing ‘progress’ or change in scientific theory as a linear series of revolutions or as a steady genetic development, Kuhn argues that change in science consists of shifts in paradigms, models by which the members of a discipline define their domain of inquiry and methods of operation.[87] As a discipline’s practitioners realize that the new paradigm is capable of solving problems that the old one cannot a shift between paradigms takes place. The shift is rarely, however, a clean break from the past. The elements of future paradigms are often latent in the present, if only as unsolved and hence marginalized problems. In the arts competing paradigms can even coexist temporally, separated by a spatial difference created by the practitioners themselves, marking themselves out within the larger discipline.[88]

In our case, the existing paradigm of modern architecture and what it represented and was associated with, postwar political liberalism, were incapable of solving problems of a decaying social structure and were severely critiqued on those grounds. However, the critique did not come from the new paradigm which was also incapable of solving this problem. Rather, the practitioners of the new paradigm suggested that the old paradigm was at fault for having included the social realm within its domain of problems in the first place. Abandoning concern with the social, the new paradigm coalesced around form. In other words, rather than there being a problem posed and subsequently solved, the discipline’s scope changed to eliminate the problem from its domain of inquiry.

The result was a new way of teaching and thinking architecture based on the analysis of architectural objects into constituent elements and forces composing a visual grammar of elements such as line, plane, center, periphery, tension, shear, volume, extension, compression, and rotation.[89] In architectural schools this method is often still taught to first year students through analyses of existing buildings, cubist paintings, and through exercises concerned with evacuating the student’s existing preconceptions to return to the “innocent eye.”

Other competing paradigms such as Miesian modernism, corporate modernism, Wrightian organicism and design methods, existed at the time of the shift and continue to exist with varying degrees of interaction with cardboard architecture. But it is the cardboard architecture that provided a context out of which many of the well-known programs and personalities of the 1970s and 1980s emerged.[90] By choosing to discuss this dominant paradigm, by no means do I intend to valorize it over the others. My purpose is to ask why it came about and achieved the position it did.

The most striking paradigm-shift of the century however, was from the composition-oriented model of classicism advocated by the architects trained in the method of the École des Beaux-Arts to the International Style, coming about when the proponents of the latter could solve problems of economy, technology, new types, progress, and social intervention for which its predecessor could not account.

By the early 1950s, the Beaux-Arts system was rapidly heading toward extinction and International Style modernism was at its pinnacle, however with the new movement unable to generate a satisfactory teaching method, its validity as a conceptual system began to be called into question.[91] This failure was in part the result of a change in the institution of the design jury. Under the Beaux-Arts system which lasted into the 1930s and 1940s in North American schools of architecture, the jury was conducted in private and projects would be returned with a letter grade and perhaps some comments. By the late 1960s, however, almost all design juries were held in the open, if not available to the general public, at least to design students who were expected to sit in and learn from the critique. The reason for this change is unclear: perhaps it was the result of an influx of veterans into the schools following the establishment of the G. I. Rights Bill and the consequent need for professors to have more respect for their older and more demanding students or alternatively, it may have been due to the influence of popular professors at prestigious schools opening up their juries to the public and in so doing daring others to follow their example, the design jury in the 1950s and 1960s allowed students and the public to see it in the process of criticism.[92] Serving on the jury thus became a performance in which the critic would be judged by students, public, and other jurors on the perceptiveness of what he or she said and a strong, rigorous analytic method was needed. Architectural educators swiftly found a model that would facilitate this discussion of the architectural object in the work of contemporary art educators, who were being driven by similar needs to establish a system of design based on compositional principles.

Within architectural history, an over-emphasis on the postwar influence of Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius has by now all but eclipsed the impact of another aspect of the Bauhaus in the United States, a philosophy of visual education which ultimately has had a more enduring legacy in architectural education than that of either Mies or Gropius.[93] Its significance lies as an inquiry into means of disciplining the eye, as an attempt to establish a visual grammar derived from existing modern works, notably cubist paintings, and in so doing, look back to modernism of the 1920s.

This attempt to teach the student to see comes out of the Vorkurs, the preliminary course of the Bauhaus, as it was taught under Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy. The two, taking over the course in 1923, divided the responsibilities of teaching the preliminary course along their own interests: Albers taught the materials or workshop component and Moholy-Nagy taught two-dimensional form.[94] Their goals for the Vorkurs consisted of erasing the students’ preconceptions and habits of seeing and instead teaching them a new visual grammar that changed their means of perception and enabled them to traverse the difficult terrain of the accelerated modern condition. This new perception consisted of what Peter Galison, in his recent work on the Bauhaus, has described as the means of coping that both the Bauhausler and the Vienna Circle of logical positivist philosophers tried to use to deal with the condition of modernity: the creation of a language based on the construction of statements from elemental units derived from analysis.[95]

Moholy-Nagy’s interest in education and visual language stemmed from his early attempts to politicize art. Badly wounded in World War I, he returned to his native Hungary and engaged in Leftist politics. In 1922, he and Alfred Kemény put forth a statement calling for the introduction of motion in art. As the arbiter for the Book of New Artists of 1922, he included works by Lissitzky, Rodochenko, van Doesburg, Mondrian, Ernst, Schwitters, Klee, and Kandinsky, and as a result became known as the leading spokesman for Constructivism.[96] He had been exposed to the similar ideas of the Russian Constructivists. In Berlin, Moholy-Nagy became a member of an intellectual circle that included Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, and Siegfried Kracauer. There, Marxist ideas were discussed and Moholy-Nagy became interested in turning Constructivism toward art education.[97]

A critical component of Albers and Moholy-Nagy’s pedagogical system was Wassily Kandinsky’s analytical theory of drawing which provided a new way of analyzing art and visual relationships in a grammar consisting of relationships between simple elements and forces.[98] Kandinsky taught two courses complementing Albers and Moholy-Nagy’s preliminary course at the Weimar Bauhaus: an introduction to the “Basic Elements of Form”and an introduction to color for the mural workshop.[99] Kandinsky’s goal was to communicate inner states expressible only through forms to the viewer. Thus, in his own work, he gradually eliminated the object in favor of abstract forms and forces.[100] In teaching, his analytical theory of drawing replayed his move toward abstraction by steadily eliminating the object, analyzing it to the point of disappearance using his theories of artistic form as the result of motion, expressed in his book Point to Line to Plane.[101] Kandinsky wanted his students to find the forces or tensions in objects which he believed would develop a “language.”[102] A typical exercise would begin with the creation of a simplified drawing of a still-life showing the horizontal, vertical and diagonal axes of the forms and their interrelationships. Then, a second stage of analysis would bring out the structural network in the arrangement of forms through different colors and line weights. In the third stage, the objects would become transformed into tensions between forces emphasizing dramatic movement. These highly abstracted drawings would then serve as the basis of compositions.[103] Albers and Moholy-Nagy saw the use of breaking down a complex entity into a series of forces and adopted Kandinksy’s method for teaching their own students.

In addition to using Kandinsky’s theory of forms, Albers and Moholy-Nagy drew on the work of the former master of the preliminary course, Johannes Itten. While hostile to the mystical elements of his teaching, they eventually adopted his method of breaking relationships in art down into binary elements such as transparent-opaque, smooth-rough, rest-motion, much-little, light-dark along with his use of the grid as a method for organization.[104]

With the appointment of the Communist Hannes Meyer to the directorship of the Bauhaus in 1928, Moholy-Nagy, by then having abandoned his interests in politicizing art, resigned[105] while Albers remained, in spite of protests from leftist students who saw his formal interests as irrelevant, until its closing in 1933. Both were eventually to come to the United States: Albers in 1933, to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Moholy-Nagy in 1937, after a decade in England as a commercial designer, to found the New Bauhaus in Chicago. The New Bauhaus dissolved after one year but was reborn in substantially the same form as the School of Design, later to be renamed the Institute of Design.[106]

Art in the United States, like architecture, was in a moment of difficult transition. The dissolution of the Beaux-Arts and the shift toward a theoretically unarticulated modernism in art schools created an urgent need for a reworked system of art education. Added to this was the sense, among both art educators, students and capitalist leaders, that the task of the majority of artists would move away from the production of public art, such as monumental sculpture or portraiture, toward visual communication, i.e. packaging, industrial design, typography. Trying to take advantage of this change and wanting to create an alliance with a school of design in the city, Chicago’s Association of Arts and Industries invited Moholy-Nagy in 1937 to found the New Bauhaus.[107]

While Moholy-Nagy’s school was officially directed towards granting architecture degrees, its real contribution to architectural pedagogy lay in its preliminary courses of design. Moholy-Nagy saw the architect with a design education being able to create a unified exterior and interior, with furniture, textiles, lighting and color unified with the building.[108] While acknowledging that the correct solution of a building should rest upon the “social, economic, technological, hygienic,” the “real architectonic conception,” he argued, was space.[109] Space creation was to be a matter of relationships between spaces, fluid and changing, interpenetrating, and was to be taught in his design courses.[110]

Moholy-Nagy’s ultimate goal was to train designers capable of working anywhere in the visual field. The new art education would not just train artists, Moholy-Nagy argued. Instead, it would train anyone to do creative work by bringing their emotional and intellectual sides into the activity. For Moholy-Nagy, there were already too many “free artists,” who were trained to fulfill the role of the genius-artist, a position few would ever be able to attain. Instead, he believed that while the universal training in his school might help create some successful free artists, all the students would be well-trained to work “as designers and craftsmen who will make a living by furnishing the community with new ideas and products.”[111]

Thus Moholy-Nagy, who had at one point espoused photography and reproduction as a means for communicating revolutionary messages, became the director of the first significant school for teaching advertising and commercial art in the United States.

The Bauhaus had maintained longstanding contacts with the philosophical group known as the Vienna Circle and thus when Moholy-Nagy founded his New Bauhaus, it was not unusual that he would convince four logical positivists from the Unity of Science movement at the University of Chicago to lecture there, among them Rudolf Carnap, a leader of the Vienna Circle, and Charles Morris, who had been the principle American contact of the Vienna Circle. Morris was the most active, and, in the prospectus to the New Bauhaus, wrote that “we need desperately a simplified and purified language in which to talk about art…in the same simple and direct way in which we talk about the world in scientific terms. For the purposes of intellectual understanding art must be talked about in the language of scientific philosophy and not in the language of art.”[112] In a course summary at the end of the first year, Morris explained that it was not just a language of art that was being discussed but art as language when he wrote “The treatment of science was based on the study of the interrelationship of the terms of the various sciences; the aim was to show the unity of science by showing how all the terms of the sciences can be stated progressively on the basis of a few terms drawn from the everyday language. … We are now discussing the question as to how far art can be regarded as a language.”[113]

Moholy-Nagy shared with the logical positivists the belief that the complexities of the modern condition would be understandable only through a new, purified, objective language. In the summation of his educational principles, his Vision in Motion, he expressed his fears for the postwar world:

To state the case is almost too simple:

The industrial revolution opened up a new dimension — the dimension of a new science and a new technology which could be used for the realization of all-embracing relationships. Contemporary man threw himself into the experience of these new relationships. But saturated with old ideologies, he approached the new dimension with obsolete practices and failed to translate his newly gained experience into emotional language and cultural reality. The result has been and still is misery and conflict, brutality and anguish, unemployment and war.[114]

This idea that alienation and strife was the result of perception being out of step with the times was a quite common one at this time, as for example, in Sigfried Giedion’s popular history of the modern movement Space, Time, and Architecture. Both Giedion and Moholy-Nagy discussed this alienation condition in terms of the division of thinking and feeling, arguing that the artist, by integrating the two, could lead society towards a balanced state.[115]

Like Giedion, Moholy-Nagy felt that space-time was the single biggest issue for the contemporary artist/architect. Rather than focusing on Einstein’s theory of relativity, as Giedion did, Moholy-Nagy conceived of space-time in terms of speed and also in terms of its applicability to warfare. Writing at the start of the Cold War, he felt that the nation’s economy would continue to be mobilized as a war economy in the conceivable future and he felt that his teaching method would train students for this condition. Moholy-Nagy felt that the conditions of war were bound up with an acceleration that required participants to change their perception of distances from spatial relations to temporal relations.[116] To illustrate this, he gave the discovery of radar as an example of the results of a new perception of space-time applied to war, measuring the distance to some object not through space but through the amount of time it takes for radio signals to traverse it.[117] Beyond such scientific changes, Moholy-Nagy offered his system of education as a model for thinking through complex logistical relationships of space-time that might be encountered by a military strategist controlling an area and needing to make provision for huge mobilizations of men and resources in time and space.[118] He believed that his educational system of “vision in motion” would teach this new spatial conception to postwar America:

There is, for example, the hope that it will help in grasping future problems and vistas, enabling us to see everything in relationship, that it will furnish us with the right concept of cooperation and defense against aggression, where again space and time are inseparably intertwined.[119]

For the most part, however, Moholy-Nagy’s work served industry. Moholy-Nagy had been on the near-Left at the Bauhaus, even so, his work was generally considered formalist and irrelevant by Hannes Meyer and the Communist students. In Chicago, however, Moholy-Nagy reformulated his political stance to write that “The so called ‘un-political’ approach to art is a fallacy. Politics is taken here, not in its party connotation, but as a way of realizing ideas for the benefit of the community.”[120] Perhaps he felt that by reorienting his work in this direction, the potential danger of his left-of-center political role at the Bauhaus could be deflected into a lesson in civics so as not to scare off any Communist-fearing Americans.

As he had done at the Bauhaus, to teach the new visual language to students and make them learn how to see, Moholy-Nagy began with a three-semester foundation course.[121] Instruction in the visual language was a means of making sure that the student would be able to remove his preconceptions of what art should be and give him an innocent eye that would see the world as a child would.[122] This shaping of the innocent eye is the key to the disciplining of the architectural subject that will be discussed in chapter four.

Moholy-Nagy’s Institute of Design was paralleled by Josef Albers’s work at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where, having been recommended to the administration by Philip Johnson, who had met him on a visit to the Bauhaus, he came to teach in 1933 and remained until it underwent internal convulsions in 1948 when he left to reorganize the art department at Yale which, significantly, would be renamed the Department of Design.[123] Albers, like Moholy-Nagy, hoped to reform American art education by disciplining the student’s eye so that he or she could learn to see clearly. Indeed, Albers’s concern at Yale was not with any kind of professional training but with teaching how to see. Albers did not want to educate an artist in the classical sense of the term, or as he called him “an [sic] big artist”[124], although at the same time he abandoned the concern that he had shared with Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus for training a student to be a professional designer. Albers was not concerned with giving a student a marketable skill at the end of her education.[125] Instead, he restricted his teaching to the development of the student’s consciousness so that she could, through art, learn to think. Albers felt “you can build the general character through art — you can incite interest in science, in knowledge of any kind…any exploring and discipline and so on, can all be developed within art.”[126] To this end, Albers sought to teach the student how to see and how to use tools to clearly articulate what she saw.[127] Thus, he wrote

Drawing we regard as a graphic language. Just as in studying language it is most important to teach first the commonly understood usage of speech, in drawing we begin with exact observation and pure representation. We cannot communicate graphically what we do not see. That which we see incorrectly we will report incorrectly. We recognize that although our optical vision is correct, our over-emphasis on the psychic vision often makes us see incorrectly. For this reason we learn to test our seeing, and systematically study foreshortening, overlapping, the continuity of tectonic and of movement, distinction between nearness and distance.[128]

To achieve this end, Albers created a series of exercises to break old psychic habits of seeing and establish eye-hand coordination based on his teaching in the Bauhaus Vorkurs. There, while Moholy-Nagy concentrated on two-dimensional exercises, Albers began by emphasizing three-dimensional exercises involving left-over materials and a greater emphasis on a sense of tactility.[129] At Black Mountain College, Albers manifested this interest in the properties of materials in the “constructive” studies that he gave to students in which he investigated how changes in form changed the nature of materials both visually and structurally. With time, however, he moved towards “matière” studies or “combinative” exercises with material surfaces in which, through placement and proportion, the student would attempt to create an optical illusion that would fool the eye and hence, educate it to its own limitations.[130]

Albers’s concern with the figure-ground relationship came out of this attention to the optical illusion.[131] Albers had been interested in the perception of figure-ground since his time at the Bauhaus, where he met the Gestalt psychologists. According to the terms of Gestalt psychology, where the figure-ground was developed, we perceive visually through wholes embedded in our perception. The figure-ground is a reversible image in which the figure can be read as the ground and vice-versa depending on the context. The ultimate lesson of the figure-ground was that it made context essential to the understanding of a work. Albers felt that this was a sociological concept, that if you learned that the significance of the figure-ground depends on its context, you would also learn that people were also important not intrinsically, but because of the relationships they were in.[132]

While Moholy-Nagy created a visual language and the principles of “space-time” and Albers provided some of the basic perceptual concepts of disciplining the eye, Gyorgy Kepes provided the coherent theoretical and practical means of doing so. Kepes, a fellow Hungarian, had known Moholy-Nagy in Germany and had left at about the same time, arriving in the United States in 1937, coming to teach at Moholy-Nagy’s school in Chicago.

Like Moholy-Nagy and Albers, Kepes was interested less in a theory for an avant-garde  painting than a theory for a visual rhetoric to be used in communicating messages. Communication, Kepes believed, would best be achieved through clarity and effective design through the purposeful direction of the eye around the canvas. He felt that vision isn’t pure, but rather compromised by both physiological and psychological limits which gave rise to the laws of visual organization.[133] According to these laws, no visual unit could exist by itself, rather it had to be part of a dynamic visual relationship.[134]  To exploit this, Kepes wrote, one would use ambiguous meetings and overlappings of shapes in visual space.[135] From these principles, Kepes mapped out a series of relationships such as transparency, interpenetration, compression, overlapping, closure, and tension. Like Moholy-Nagy, Kepes gave examples from modern art — often from the Cubists George Braque, Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso — for the student to follow.

Cubism, for Kepes and Moholy-Nagy, held the value of depriviliging the position of the fixed observer in Renaissance perspective.[136] After so many years with perspective, Moholy-Nagy wrote, our vision had become ossified and we could no longer see the objects around us. In the first phase of cubism, perspective would be replaced by the simultaneous representation of space and time. In the second phase of cubism, the object being represented would drop out and instead the cubists would investigate the conditions of pictorial arrangement and analyze the picture-plane itself. He wrote: “The picture-plane is activated by cutting and penetrating it, by turning it about and pulling off its skin.” The consequences were that cubism had “shaken us out of a visual lethargy.”[137]

Thus while their innocent eye was intended to be derived from universal and atemporal principles, Moholy-Nagy and Kepes began by looking back at cubism, already an historical moment. While its consequences could not initially be understood, Moholy-Nagy argued, we now have the tools to understand their historical significance. Thus, the innocent eye was never really innocent, but rather was contaminated by history from the start. Modern art was no longer just a matter of vanguardism but also a matter of carrying on the modern tradition.[138] This sense that an original moment in modernism had been lost but could be recovered in order to continue the tradition was shared by much of postwar art and architecture in the United States.

Before turning to the transference of the pedagogical system of Albers, Kepes, and Moholy-Nagy into cardboard architecture, it is necessary to discuss the most immediate alliance between the system of visual education outlined and architecture, that under Walter Gropius at Harvard. Gropius had been associated with Moholy-Nagy and Albers since his directorship of the Bauhaus and remained close to them.[139]

Gropius was significantly affected by the theories of Albers, Moholy-Nagy and Kepes and in his Scope of Total Architecture, he cited them as being the exponents of a new visual grammar.[140] For Gropius, vision was mediated by the subconscious. But since the teacher cannot teach the subconscious, he would instead have to show the student reality by bringing the student to the unprejudiced condition of a child. To illustrate his point, Gropius quoted Thomas Aquinas saying “I must empty my soul so that God may enter.” Like Albers, Gropius believed that the optical illusion would affect the subconscious and thus felt that a grammar of how visual forms can influence subconscious sensations must be established. For Gropius however this grammar was restricted to optical illusions with concrete outcomes. The eye was like the lens of a camera, he argued, its distortions mappable.[141]

Gropius adopted the preliminary course for Harvard with the intent of teaching the student a visual language, however research into form was primarily done with three-dimensional structures, avoiding analytic drawing. The student would work in a group, studying actual programs so as to “focus all activities of the group on the social aim of improving the life of the community.” The student would also have to spend time in the field, observing the construction of a building because Gropius believed it would teach the student the experience of the practical part of the profession. History studies would help the student refine his thinking, but would not be taught before the third year so that the great achievements of the past would not discourage the beginner from his own creation.[142]

Like Moholy-Nagy and Kepes, Gropius tried to get away from the idea of the designer as an artist and toward the architect “as a coordinator, a man of vision and professional competence, whose task is to unify the many social, technical, economic and formal problems which arise in connection with building.” Maintaining that the university, with its “bookish climate” was unhealthy to the architect, Gropius believed that the teaching of architecture should be returned from the drafting-board to where it belonged: the workshop. It appears that Gropius was unwilling to do away with the architecture program, not to mention his position, at Harvard and start anew, so instead he organized the Harvard educational system around workshops and fieldwork. Hand in hand with this idea of the architect as a coordinator of means of production was Gropius’s emphasis on teamwork, which would prepare architects for the “vital task of becoming coordinators of the many individuals involved in the conception and execution of planning and building tasks.” The new role of the Gropius-trained architect was to be a supervisor over standardized building systems. This negation of the individualized artist-architect, Gropius believed, would “lead the students to good “anonymous” architecture rather than flashy “stunt design.”[143]

But this is precisely where Gropius’s program and its derivatives differed from what would follow. Certainly, Harvard under Gropius educated a number of incredibly successful architects — such as John Johansen, Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, Paul Rudolph — but this success was predicated not so much on design excellence as on a combination of the program’s reputation as a continuation of the Bauhaus then being promoted as both modern and practical as well as the program’s creation of an instrumentalized architecture of building coordinators deploying standardized systems.[144] Such a technologized architecture responded ideally to the demands of postwar capitalism for economical, large-scale building.

That Albers, Moholy-Nagy, Kepes, and Gropius were successful in the United States is due not solely to their bringing in a foreign aesthetic and convincing some mythical naive Americans of the aesthetic correctness of their work or even its use as a way of reunifying the alienated subject. Rather, having laid the foundations for a production-oriented professionalization of art and architecture as design in the Bauhaus, in the United States they found a nation that had begun to adopt modern design but that demanded a system  that could be taught and reproduced for the needs of the postwar capitalist expansion in building and marketing.

At nearly the same time that Gropius’s system reached its apex, in the early 1950s, a different reading of visual grammar began that was to have a tremendous and impact on architectural pedagogy, remaining a foundational element even today. In 1953 a group of educators retrospectively known as the “Texas Rangers,” formed around Harwell Hamilton Harris, Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas in Austin, consisting primarily of Colin Rowe, Bernard Hoesli, John Hejduk, Robert Slutzky, Lee Hodgden, John Shaw, and Werner Seligmann (who arrived a couple of years later). While in retrospect their program seemed revolutionary, at the time it caused such controversy that within three years all of the Rangers had been dismissed or left their teaching positions at Texas.[145]

In the early 1950s, the dominant system of architectural education, derived from the teaching methods developed at Harvard, revolved around teaching students how to make buildings that would work functionally and structurally but was not usable as a means of discussing the formal basis of the work.[146] Thus, much of the criticism in reviews consisted of either “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” The Rangers felt that this wasn’t a coherent enough structure and the discussion needed to be reorganized along a more effective model, analogous to that of the defunct École des Beaux-Arts system.[147]

The Rangers believed in architecture as idea, a revolutionary concept for the time. If architecture was idea, then it would have to be rigorous: if it was formal, it would have to have a logic of form.[148] Thus, for example, John Hejduk, who would later go on to transmit the fundamental research of the Rangers at Cooper Union explained his need to develop a methodology based on a reduction to the basic elements of architecture, “columns, piers, walls, beams, edges, and so forth” as appearing “With the beginning of teaching. I had to get things in order. To order one’s teaching, on a rational basis. … I developed it from a methodological condition. Method. Method. Do you know what I mean? Basic architectonic construction method: am I making myself clear?”[149] In other words, there was a calculated attempt by Hejduk and at least some of the other Texas Rangers to come up with a new method of architecture that would have a rational basis. Building with the basic elements of architecture, the “columns, piers, walls, beams, edges, and so forth,” the new architecture would be put together in a visual language or visual logic of architecture.

The work of the Texas Rangers has to be seen against two seminal articles by Polish-born American architect Matthew Nowicki. In two articles in 1949 and 1951, Nowicki established the possibility for a new way of teaching modern architecture when he wrote that it had become a style from which one could extract compositional principles. Nowicki argued that any idea that form followed function had to be tempered by an acknowledgment that a flexible space would result from a functional analysis and there would be no need for that space to resemble any other unless a style existed, to inform the architect.[150]

This possibility of teaching the composition of modern architecture was an essential insight driving the teaching of the Texas Rangers. For the Rangers, the canonical works of modern architecture formed the basis for their research. Under Bernhard Hoesli and Werner Seligmann, the first and second year design courses included analyzing what they saw as the best works of modern architecture through models and diagrams of their interacting spatial and formal systems such as columns, enclosure, or circulation.[151]

The art pedagogical system of visual grammar was reformulated in the article “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” by Rowe and Slutzky.[152] Rowe, an Englishman, was a former student of the state-of-the-art formal analysis of Rudolf Wittkower who had taught future luminaries of English architecture James Stirling and Robert Maxwell at the University of Liverpool after the war.[153] Slutzky was a graduate of Josef Albers’s Master’s Studio at Yale and had also studied with Burgoyne Diller, an early follower of Mondrian’s neoplasticism in America.[154] The article was circulated at Texas and became part of the school’s intellectual background, later becoming disseminated throughout the United States. Published in 1963 in Perspecta 8 and republished in Colin Rowe’s book Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, it would become the foundational text for cardboard architecture.[155]

At the outset of their essay, Rowe and Slutzky expressed a concern with the rigorous use of vocabulary that would become have identified as an essential feature of the paradigm-shift: how talk of “‘Simultaneity,’ ‘interpenetration,’ ‘superimposition,’ ‘ambivalence,’ ‘space-time,’ ‘transparency’” had muddled the meanings of the words. “Transparency,” they explained meant the “absence of guile, pretense, or dissimulation,”[156] but it in Kepes’s Language of Vision, it had come also to reflect ambiguity. It was this ambiguity that they wished to promote.

Moholy-Nagy and Kepes, however, promoted glass as the medium of transparency in architecture. Against this “literal” transparency of materials, Rowe and Slutzky proposed a “phenomenal” transparency of space derived from Kepes and Moholy-Nagy’s discussion of pictoral transparency in terms of the overlapping of objects in shallow space and turned to cubism, which they saw, as Slutzky has explained, as a transition between classical representation and abstraction.[157] Their interest in moving away from glass as a material object toward spatial relationships can be seen as part of the Rangers’ reaction against tactile emphasis of Bauhaus-influenced education.[158]

Like Kepes and Moholy-Nagy, Rowe and Slutzky derived their argument from a two-dimensional theory of graphic representation. Looking at analytical cubism they suggested another list of terms as its defining characteristics:

Frontality, suppression of depth, contracting of space, definition of light sources, tipping forward of objects, restricted palette, oblique an rectilinear grids, propensities towards peripheric development.

Analytical Cubism they suggested, could be characterized as a “pulling to pieces and reassembly of objects”[159] but, “above all we are conscious of a further shrinkage of depth and an increased emphasis which is now awarded to the grid.”[160]

To illustrate, the authors turned to analytical Cubist paintings: Delaunay’s Simultaneous Windows of 1911 and a Juan Gris Still Life of 1912. “both included objects which are presumably transparent, the one windows, the other bottles; but while Gris suppresses the literal transparency of glass in favor of a transparency of gridding,” they wrote, “Delaunay accepts with unrestrained enthusiasm the elusively reflective qualities of his superimposed ‘glazed openings.’” Gris, they continued, “weaves a system of oblique and curved lines into some sort of shallow, corrugated space” while Delaunay’s forms, “are nothing but reflections and refractions of light which he presents in terms analogous to Cubist gridding.”[161]

Shallow space, like that used by Gris, they explained “implies” that it is “cerebral,” intellectual, ambiguous, and playful. In a second essay written at the time but published much later, Rowe and Slutzky argued that

In all instances their [Moholy-Nagy and Kepes’s] transparency — our phenomenal transparency — has taken place within a highly abstracted and intellectualized work of art; and in every case it has been the product of the most undeviating regard for formal structure, of the most remorseless and sophisticated visual logic.[162]

But for architecture, a critical translation would have to be made in the first essay between two and three dimensional space:

… in considering architectural rather than pictorial transparencies, inevitable confusions arise. For, while painting can only imply the third dimension, architecture cannot suppress it. Provided with the reality rather than the counterfeit of three dimensions, in architecture, literal transparency can become a physical fact; but phenomenal transparency will be much more difficult to achieve — and is, indeed, so difficult to discuss that generally critics have been entirely willing to associate transparency in architecture exclusively with a transparency of materials.

The authors addressed this mistaken assumption by turning to the comparison Sigfried Giedion made between Picasso’s L’Arlésienne  and Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus to support of his idea of transparency of glass. They agreed with Giedion that the painting indeed has “planes apparently of celluloid through which the observer has the sensation of looking; and, in doing so, no doubt his sensations are somewhat similar to those of an observer of the workshop wing of the Bauhaus,” a literal transparency of materials. But they explained that “L’Arlésienne has the fluctuating, equivocal meaning which Kepes recognizes as characteristic of transparency; while the glass wall at the Bauhaus, an unambiguous surface giving upon an ambiguous space, seems to be singularly free of this quality…”[163]

To illustrate an ambiguous spatial design embodying the phenomenal transparency of space Rowe and Slutzky turned to Le Corbusier’s villa at Garches. There, the transparency of the building did not come from glass but rather from a system of spatial stratification. Phenomenal transparency in architecture, they explained, would come from “our being made conscious of primary concepts which ‘interpenetrate without optical destruction of each other.’”[164] Thus they wrote:

[At Garches] there is that contradiction of spatial dimensions which Kepes recognizes as characteristic of transparency. There is a continuous dialectic between fact and implication. The reality of deep space is constantly opposed to the inference of the shallow; and, by means of the resultant tension, reading after reading is enforced. The five layers of space which, vertically, divide the building’s volume and the four layers of space which cut it horizontally will all, from time to time, claim attention; and this gridding of space will then result in continuous fluctuations of interpretation.

By replacing Giedion’s literal transparency of glass with a phenomenal transparency of space, Rowe and Slutzky hoped to create a rigorous, and ambiguous, even disturbing view of architectural form and language. At the same time, they rejected Moholy-Nagy and Kepes’s interest in a visual rhetoric that would communicate explicit messages and instead desired only to communicate the conditions of the architectural object itself to the observer. While the art theorists were interested in a professionalization and instrumentalization of the aesthetic, Rowe and Slutzky were interested in purifying it in a Greenbergian way — reducing architecture to the manipulation of shallow space, to them the purest condition of architecture.

Significantly, in a 1950 essay by Rowe on “Mannerism and Modern Architecture,” he suggested that the prime concern of this ideal condition of architecture was its effect on the eye:

In this idea of disturbing, rather than providing immediate pleasure for the eye, the element of delight in modern architecture appears chiefly to lie. An intense precision or an exaggerated rusticity of detail is presented within the bounds of a strictly conceived complex of planned obscurity; and a labyrinthine scheme is offered which frustrates the eye by intensifying the visual pleasure of individual episodes, in themselves only to become coherent as the result of a mental act of reconstruction.[165]

Rowe demonstrated this process in his “La Tourette” essay of 1961 where he described such a bewildering romp through a building in which sense only came in a gestalt at the end, the result of reflection on the part of the architect. Rowe’s visitor to La Tourette, is reduced to an eye dragging a body around:

A certain animation of contour — the oblique cut of the parapet and the intersection with the diagonal of the belfry — will focus his eye and lead him on. … the eye which was previously directed toward the left of the church facade, towards the point of entrance, is now violently dragged away towards the right.

But the conditions of the building are such that Rowe’s visitor is dramatically bewildered:

…the visitor is so placed that he is without the means of making coherent his own experience. He is made the subject of diametric excitations; his consciousness is divided…[166]

Rowe’s visitor would be able to make sense of the building only after a period of reflection on the cinematic sequence of episodes he had encountered:

… by a combination of themes that one might have thought were obliged to remain forever separate, Le Corbusier has been able to instigate sensations of both tension and compression, openness and density, torsion and stability; and, by doing so, he has been able to guarantee a visual stimulus so acute that only very retrospectively does the observer begin to be aware of the abnormal experience to which he has been subjected.[167]

This idea of a mental act of reconstruction that would explain the building as a gestalt even while the individual elements, presented in cinematic spatial sequence would only frustrate, would become a key component of most sophisticated thinking in cardboard architecture, notably that practiced by Eisenman and Graves and we will return to this in chapter five.[168]

After leaving Texas, the Rangers splitting up and recombining in various places both in the U. S. and abroad, developing and spreading their ideas.[169] After a year teaching at Cornell University, in 1958 Rowe went to Cambridge University where he taught until 1962, partaking of a dynamic situation in which other teachers like Colin St. John Wilson taught and influencing a significant group of students, notably Peter Eisenman and Anthony Vidler. He returned to Cornell in 1962 where Hodgden, Shaw, and Seligmann would eventually come to teach as well. Since the sixties, Rowe has continued his project of evacuating extra-formal ideas from architecture while teaching history as a quarry for design ideas without a genetic or Hegelian basis.[170] The “Cornell school” became a major force in the sixties and seventies, teaching the new pedagogy to a large number of influential teachers such as Klaus Herdeg, Fred Koetter, Michael Dennis, Alan Chimacoff, Thomas Schumacher, and Michael Graves.[171] Bernhard Hoesli went on to run the program at E.  T.  H. in Zurich where Werner Seligmann would teach. Hejduk and Slutzky, on the other hand, went to Cooper Union and established a particularly influential method of education.

Since Texas, Hejduk had attempted to refine architectural pedagogy, in his words, to “order one’s teaching, on a rational basis,” to create a rigorous methodology for architectural design based on construction of elements that he would list as “columns, piers, walls, beams, edges, and so forth.” This method, Hejduk argued, would allow concentration at the level of detail.[172] The research by Hejduk and Slutzky at Cooper Union was documented by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in November 1971 and an accompanying catalog, Education of An Architect: A Point of View[173] which served as the most complete record and also as the most coherent statement for dissemination of the architectural paradigm that began to come together at Texas, as directly applied to teaching.

Emphasizing vision from the title itself on, Education of an Architect: A Point of View aimed to lead the student to the innocent eye through the exploration of the primary condition of architecture as the compositional shaping of space, in turn re-entrenching the artistic autonomy of the discipline and making it stronger through self-critique. Architect Ulrich Franzen announced this as the intent of the project in his introduction to the catalog. Carving out a space away from both Vincent Scully’s “new conservativism” and the chaos in the university of the late ‘60s, Franzen wrote, the educators at Cooper were unique for their commitment to establishing new connections between the mind and the hand through training in a radical visual perception. In a reference to the kind of attention to visuality that Kepes promoted, Franzen quoted Harold Rosenberg, who wrote that the new forms of visual perception established by Cubism and Futurism were necessary to comprehend the rhythms of the big city life. The unstated implication thus was that the educators at Cooper Union were able to get their students out of the morass of unrest that characterized the late sixties by giving them a new way of seeing. This radical visual perception would be taught to the students during their formative years and would be formed by a continuation of the foundational principles of modern art and architecture, derived a visual language from historical analysis of the modern masters, notably Mondrian and Le Corbusier.[174] Franzen referred to Rowe and Slutzky’s “Transparency” as an example, albeit textual, of such a historical analysis leading to visual research.

In the first project that the student would encounter, Hejduk gave the students a Nine-Square grid in order to force them to understand the elements of architecture, which he listed as “grid, frame, post, beam, panel, center, periphery, field, edge, line, plane, volume, extension, compression, shear, etc.” together with generating an inquiry into the meaning of plane, elevation, section and details and a grasp of the relations between two-dimensional drawing, axonometric drawing, and model. From all this, Hejduk wrote, “an understanding of the elements is revealed — an idea of fabrication emerges.”[175] Robert Slutzky adds that in the Nine-Square grid problem and its extensions, an “in-depth investigation of binary architectonic relationships” would take place. According to Slutzky, the intense involvement with the project would demand both “re-evaluation and modification of previously held architectural prejudices.”[176]

With the theoretical weight of Rowe and Slutzky’s essay on “Transparency,” the visual impact of the comprehensive system of education elaborated at Cooper Union, and the appointment of a large number of graduates of both schools as faculty members throughout the United States,[177] the work of the Texas Rangers and the research at Cooper Union spread to many schools of architecture in the United States, becoming codified in a series of textbooks of principles of architectural composition such as Francis D. K. Ching’s Form, Space, and Order or Pierre von Meiss’s The Elements of Architecture: From Form to Place.[178]

This kind of approach to visual grammar or principles of composition explains architecture as a set of purely formal rules which were derived from the canon of art and architecture. Explaining architecture in terms of form however obscures the role of the architectural object within the social and cultural processes in which it is embedded, whether it is the canonical object being read or the experimental object under construction. Thus, the deductive aspect of the visual grammar, i.e., its legitimation of a search for principles in the architecture of near and distant past gives motive to a retreat to alternate pasts, to the nationalism of American architecture, the authenticity of tradition in classical architecture, and to the avant–garde of the 1920s and 30s as perceived through the exhibit The International Style in which modern architecture is read as style in a field void of politicized content, a field in which van Doesberg, Corbusier, Meyer, and Terragni can all coexist peacefully.

The formal emphasis in the paradigm of cardboard architecture was bolstered by the early work of Robert Venturi. While Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Modern Architecture has generally been analyzed in terms of its interest in popular culture,[179] for the purposes of discussing the new paradigm Venturi’s book is significant for the way he carves out a role for architecture restricted to aesthetics. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Venturi refused to consider connections between architecture and “other things,” notably technology or the social sciences which he believed result in “diagrammatic planning.” To the contrary, Venturi argued, “The architect’s ever diminishing power and his growing ineffectualness in shaping the whole environment can perhaps be reversed, ironically, by narrowing his concerns and concentrating on his job. Perhaps then relationships and power will take care of themselves.”[180]

In order to turn the architect’s concentration to his or her job, Venturi proposed an analytical model based on the New Criticism in literary theory. From the New Critics, Venturi took an interest in ambiguity and in breaking down a text into its constitutive elements,[181] and putting it back together without forcing an artificial unity upon it.[182] This resulting architecture of ambiguity would embody the complexity and contradiction of the title, a complexity that Venturi argued was immanent in architecture because of the impossibility of accomplishing a totally successful building in terms of functional, situational, and structural limitations within any purified, idealized architectural object. Like the earlier art educators, Venturi referred to the Gestalt psychology argument that context determines meaning, but he extended it in a way they did not foresee: to argue that architects should use conventional elements in unconventional ways and unconventional elements in conventional ways in order to create meaning. Venturi drew a parallel between this deliberate misuse of architectural form and the swerve from ordinary language that T. S. Eliot used to create a definition of poetry, writing that both allowed us to see things in a different way.[183]

It was not, however, sheer force of argument which led to the acceptance of cardboard architecture as a paradigm for thinking and teaching architecture in the United States. Rather, just as the International Style, a specific version of modern architecture, became popular in the United States with help from domestic economic and political considerations[184] so did cardboard architecture: it was in the right place at the right time.

The United States came out of the Second World War as the preeminent world power. While its chief rival the Soviet Union had lost 7 million troops and around twice that number in civilians, the U.S. had only lost 300,000. Ravaged by war, Britain, Japan, Germany, and France all were dependent on America for their basic subsistence.[185] As a result, by 1945 the United States was in better shape economically than it was in 1939, at the start of the war. The United States had come out of the Second World War as the preeminent world power and during the postwar years between 1945 and 1965 the American economy grew tremendously while in Europe and Japan growth was absorbed by the task of reconstruction. The unprecedented growth allowed the government, under a program of domestic liberalism, to both fund social programs and keep taxes low and in so doing keep the rich, the middle class and the poor all thinking that their condition would only improve. The 1960s were the high point of modern American liberalism: under the glamorous figure of John F. Kennedy racism was on the decline, the welfare state appeared to be succeeding, economic management seemed to have been perfected, and the space program was showing the power of American technology. Foreign policy was still a success: free trade was helping the economy, the comprehensive test ban was the first step toward the control of nuclear weapons and the Kennedy doctrine of peace anywhere at any price was in force.[186] It was, in many ways, the age of National Geographic Magazine, in which American tourists and scientists visited the world and were loved by all, both grateful, liberated Europeans of the father countries and bare-breasted natives alike while the achievements of the space program and the beauty of the country at home were celebrated.

It was also during this period that the proponents of modern architecture allied themselves with the government and with business, equating modern architecture and the faith in progress held by liberalism.[187] A landmark of modernism’s arrival in the United States was Buildings for Business and Government, a catalog for the exhibit of the same name held at MoMA 25 February — 28 April 1957. The buildings illustrated were Edward Durrell Stone’s United States Embassy for New Delhi, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s United States Air Force Academy, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building, Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center, SOM’s Chase Manhattan Bank building, and Minoru Yamasaki’s terminal building for St. Louis’s Lambert Field. Of the postwar building boom and the adoption of modern architecture, Arthur Drexler, the director of the exhibition, wrote, “[I]t is a national enthusiasm for the act of building itself that is carrying architecture into livelier realms.”[188] Drexler went on to link modern architecture and America’s representation of itself : “Emboldened perhaps by its present role in world affairs, the United States no longer demands that major government commissions be executed in antique styles. The embassies being built abroad by the State Department, as part of a program which began in 1946, and the new Academy for the United States Air Force, look like what they are: modern American buildings.”[189]

Two decades later, Drexler would state that the show “was very popular with the public and did the profession a lot of good. It established the fact that modern architecture had arrived and was no longer a controversial subject. From then on the issues were how good is it, and how do you make it better.”[190]

But golden ages have historically tended to be underpinned by crisis and this one proved no exception. The postwar perception that the stability of the United States was in danger from both outside, in terms of atomic war with the Soviets, and inside, in terms of subversive-instigated social collapse or from military-industrial totalitarianism, gave impetus to a new ideology of the center. This ideology was given eloquent form in Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. In this book, Schlesinger attempted to outline a course for politics in the age of anxiety. Schlesinger believed that facing the horrors of the Holocaust, the atomic war in Japan and the Stalinist purges led the West to reverse its previous assumption, held since the Enlightenment, that man is perfectible and that progress toward the good is inevitable.[191] With the newfound insecurity, Schlesinger wrote, our objective becomes to “defend and strengthen free society” through whatever means possible short of war. Such defense would be best accomplished by steering a course through the political center by balancing both near-left and near-right elements.[192] The result would be to dialectically dispense with old ideas that had outlived their usefulness without actually posing a threat to the governing institutions.

In retrospect at least, the collapse of the American Empire seemed to begin with the collective psychic trauma following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963,[193] and certainly by the assassination of his brother Bobby in 1968, collapse was well underway. As European nations began to recover their positions in the world order, the basic structural discrimination against African Americans led to the realization that racism was still alive and also to inner-city riots, and the unexpected expansion of a police action in Vietnam into an unpopular war led people to worry that the program of liberalism had failed.

In architecture, the liberal ideal of an alliance between government, business, the common man, and architecture became suspect. The largely successful attempts to sell modern architecture to both architects (through architectural periodicals) and the general public (mainly through traveling exhibitions and catalogs generated by the Museum of Modern Art and the publicity generated by these in turn) had domesticated modern architecture for American consumption by reducing it to images of Enlightened progress. But the reality of buildings built in a cheapened modernism during the postwar building boom by the likes of Emery Roth and Sons, convinced many that modern architecture was a disaster. The alliance of modern architecture with the policies of urban renewal in order to construct massive government complexes and public housing only served to amplify feelings as the fabric of the existing American city came under siege.

Already in 1961 Architectural Forum editorJane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities[194] marked the rising discontent among citizens who felt that the alliance of modern architecture and big government was ruining the city by eliminating streets and squares in favor of an inhuman ideal of Corbusian towers in parks and in the process losing the chaos and liveliness that made cities human. Architects keenly felt the emerging crisis and many reacted to it by turning to the still-promising social sciences.

By the mid-sixties, the threat to architecture from scientism was coupled with a critique of architecture’s capacity to attain the kind of revolution promised by Le Corbusier. This sense of loss was directly related to the loss of faith in the American postwar mission of giving progress and democracy to the world. Vincent Scully, in his postscript to Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy wrote that Paul Rudolph’s Art & Architecture Building and the Kennedy presidency both marked the beginning of a tragic age of modernism through their out-of-date empiricism and mistaken heroic confrontationalism that had little idea of their consequences.[195] The crisis of the International Style and postwar American politics went hand-in-hand. Modern architecture as constituted within the postwar United States, was the architecture of postwar liberalism, the myth of the happy alliance between government, business art, and the common man and as that gave way, so did its architectural representation.[196]

Worldwide, as modern architecture defeated the remanents of other forms of practice, the vanguard moved away from it and toward an attempt to mediate being-in-modernity with an appreciation of the past.[197] The revolt in the vanguard against this fabricated orthodoxy of modern architecture began from within during the mid-50s with the first postwar generation of architects: Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen, and Minoru Yamasaki. Some of the earlier proponents of the International Style like Edward Durrell Stone and Walter Gropius, especially in their projects for American embassies, intended to mesh with local tradition. Still, this kind of work too easily associated itself with modern architecture, and while it could already mark a crisis within the International Style[198], it did not yet mean a distance from it.

Instead, a vocal contingent in the discipline began to turn to the possibility of salvation in the application of the sciences. A representative argument for this kind of study in the university was given in a lecture at the A. I. A. National Convention in 1966 by Nathan Marsh Pusey, then president of Harvard University.[199] Pusey drew a parallel in the cause of the coming shift in architectural education and “leap forward” in the 1930s from the blend of engineering and Beaux-Arts to modern architecture and its concern with technology, materials, methods, and society. Likewise, Pusey explained, the new crisis, a lack of consideration for context, required a redirection of architectural education.[200] Thus, he suggested that the architect study

Economics, sociology and social psychology, government and law, administration and administrative services, public health, science of all kinds, (especially the engineering, technological and computer sciences) and perhaps above all, a deeper understanding of humanity and an acquisition of concern and compassion for humanity (should I say, education for wisdom)[201]

Pusey linked this renewal of architecture to a staving off of social collapse, stating that the new frontier was in the dilapidated inner city where cheap attempts to provide public housing and where the Enemy (his capitalization, a code for Communism and perhaps Black Power movements) may yet win the hearts of the neglected underprivileged.[202] Pusey’s position was liberal: greater compassion for the underprivileged to ensure that they not disrupt social order.

Just as it had for the politics of the vital center by 1967 the crisis in architectural pedagogy reached a fever pitch, in the form of the “Princeton Report.” Prepared by the Dean of the architecture program at Princeton, Robert Geddes, for the American Institute of Architects, the Princeton Report reflected a growing lack of confidence in the standard postwar system of education. The basic structural problem with the profession, it argued, was the same contradiction as that which Moholy-Nagy, the Chicago Federation of Arts, Albers, and Kepes had diagnosed before the war: architectural education was still training its students to be artistic geniuses instead of draftsmen and specialists in technology-based or behaviorism-based subfields.[203]

The Princeton Report reflected a state of turmoil in architectural education. A contemporary survey of architectural educators by Progressive Architecture found that something was wrong with architectural education, although just what and how to solve it remained unclear to the participants. Nevertheless, with or without a clear path, change was already approaching: within the three years prior to the Princeton Report, twenty-three new department heads were appointed and eighty-one percent of schools had instituted or were planning to institute significant changes in their curricula. Many schools moved away from architecture as the art of building toward architecture as the science of constructing spaces. Thus, just as Moholy-Nagy and Albers renamed their schools, many schools were to be renamed: no longer Schools of Architecture, they became Schools of Environmental Design.[204]

A major component of this scientifist threat to the idea of the architect as an artist was the development of the “design methods” school.[205] Deriving their method from the engineering fields of systems analysis and operations research and its interpretation in Christopher Alexander’s Notes Towards A Synthesis of Form[206], the proponents of design methods attempted to simulate the actual performance of an architectural object in terms of the behavior of individuals using it through computer models. But there were real problems with design methods that limited its applicability and eventually stopped its growth: the convoluted texts that design methods generated were a dead end, making a calculus textbook seem like easy reading. Working with then-scarce computers and obtaining the large data-sets necessary to construct the mathematical models of design methods further confined design methods to a well-endowed university departments and large architectural firms.[207]

Another threat to the discipline came from varying alliances within the student counterculture and from advocacy planning, the attempt to organize groups of citizens to counter monomaniacal government projects or participate in the design process. Significantly, Columbia University’s School of Architecture was the site of one of the first major clashes of the time between students and administration on a college campus and a major trigger was an issue of space: the university’s exploitation of Harlem residents living below the cliff that was Morningside Heights and its attempt to build a gymnasium in the public park. At the same time, various factions in the counterculture attempted to create spaces, using media imagery and quasi-mythological elements from technology, such as the Fuller dome, inflatables, and indigenous building traditions.[208] But these extra-disciplinary maneuvers collapsed as the counterculture began to wane and communes such as Dome City would eventually be abandoned. Likewise, as the reality of the Nixon administration sank in during 1969, advocacy planning encountered more and more resistance and by the mid-1970s was ridiculed by architectural educators as the embodiment of the worst excesses of the late 1960s in architecture.[209] Certainly there were real failures in the anti-institutional movements of the period. But a real critique of the legitimacy of the discipline’s foundations took place in the hands of radical groups such as the Anarchitecture group, Ant Farm, and the advocacy planners.[210]

These critiques shook the foundations of postwar modernism. It was no longer able to defend its territory, but the alternatives the critiques proposed threatened architecture as an autonomous discipline with a legitimate claim to a specific body of knowledge by reducing it to a science, at the hands of the behaviorists and communication theorists (or alternatively, at the hands of the technologists and engineers then beginning to fill the offices of the major architectural firms) or by giving architecture and its design to whoever needed it, as the anti-art counterculture proposed. None of these alternatives were attractive for as a means of continuing architecture as a formal art. Thus in 1972 Kenneth Frampton would write “today we find architecture suspended between applied art and social science; as a field of concern, more alienated than any other from a satisfactory rapport with both society at large and the university in particular.” In opposition to this unhappy circumstance, Frampton presented the “underground academy” of Cooper Union under John Hejduk, its task to focus only on the matter at hand: architecture.[211]

Indeed, for architecture to maintain its identity, a statement about its autonomy had to be made. This need for architecture to maintain its identity necessitated the development of a new specialist class of designers in architecture. As Magali Sarfatti Larson has explained in her book Beyond the Postmodern Facade, the growth of this class was tied to the claim of architects to a special role in society dependent on the “noble tradition” of the field. The architect’s role is tied to the idea that she or he brings “not merely adequate building but culturally significant building.”[212]

In an essay on John Hejduk’s work written in 1980, “In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions,” Peter Eisenman elaborated on one of his perennial concerns, the autonomy of architecture. Eisenman explained that “since we all know that all building is not architecture, we must look beyond the mere elements of building to find the critical distinction [between building and architecture].” For Eisenman, the turn “inward to the discipline itself to what could be described as ‘work on the language,’” was itself the distinguishing factor between architecture and building.[213]

Here Eisenman pinpoints the reason for cardboard architecture’s success: it offered a task for the discipline that was purely formal but had the trappings of rigor. The Texas research coupled with Venturi’s analysis and atectonic work took hold as a new paradigm, a stronger, deeper formalism that could lay claim to modern architecture’s legacy simply by rejecting its claims to influence society. It would be only a matter of time before many educators were won over by one form or another of this method and cardboard architecture would become the dominant mode of design in the more elite American schools of architecture.

The commission of choice for these architects was a radical departure from the large public commissions popular with their predecessors. Instead, under the influence of a declining economy, large cuts in government spending on housing, and from the arguments of the design methods school and advocacy planners, it became apparent that the small-scale commission was more manageable. With the building boom of the mid-1960s being tempered by the recession of the early 1970s that only worsened and finally did become catastrophic with the OPEC oil embargo of 1975, the single-family house became the object of choice for design.[214]

The cardboard architects, as a specialist class in architecture devoted to justifying the discipline’s existence marked a new high-brow architecture culture that would initially appeal to architectural design faculty and students through its sophisticated formal constructions and language of visual grammar. The intellectual guise of this work led the academy had once again come to the forefront of the discipline, displacing the more anti-intellectual and businesslike architectural practice. Except for a brief moment with Mies and Gropius in the 1940s, the teaching of architecture always appeared to be behind the times. As recently as 1963, a past president of the A.  I.  A. could write: “For reasons I do not pretend to comprehend, schools of architecture have rarely been in the forefront of professional thought. … Professors rarely push back the boundaries of architectural theory.”[215] Fifteen years later, it would be the academy that would appear to be at the forefront led by architectural design and new investigations of architectural theory.[216]By 1985, Robert Gutman would note that with the building boom and the new media attention being given to postmodern architecture, the number of students in professional architecture programs had doubled (since 1965) and the profession was among the fastest-growing in the U. S. Yet at the same time, a definite trend continued in the profession toward the employment of (generally well-known) architects to design not entire buildings but only their facades and representational.The academic response was the growth of design, downplayed since the end of the Beaux-Arts system, at the expense of structures, environmental control systems, and other fields of more applied concern.[217]

The dominance of the design studio marked the emergence of the academic architect, an architect with a post-professional degree taken relatively soon (within the first decade) in one’s career and whose principal accomplishment is teaching and “paper architecture.” Prior to this, the norm was to complete a five year bachelor’s degree and enter into architectural practice. Further education would generally be completed after some length of time spent in practice, where some measure of success would have been achieved. In this sense, the kids are precursors of the situation today where an academically-minded architecture student can enter the academic setting immediately.

The failure of the liberal paradigm during the 1960s generated a period of intense questioning. Since then part of education has been to show the tenuousness of our information and to stress the development of critical thinking. All this, no matter how naive, is a form of ideology critique. While Marxist class analysis is not by any means the norm in American education, questioning of previously unquestioned issues is. We are all taught not to accept the words of educators and authors as truth but rather question them. That we continue to operate as if these issues — discipline, in this case — exist is part of the move toward the next phase, the society of cynicism.

With the failing promise that knowledge inevitably brings advancement, both American politics and architecture moved toward a culture based on cynicism. As we defined it in the introduction, cynical culture is the culture in which ideology is no longer “false consciousness” that we cannot see past, but rather as something that we know is wrong but we do anyway. In politics, the shift to cynical culture was marked with the ascension of Nixon, in architecture, by a return to form to avoid confronting the social realm. Thus architects no longer tried to mobilize the disadvantaged to improve their living conditions but they also did not address their own plight: by the 1970s, as young architect Herbert Muschamp wrote in his polemical File Under Architecture, the true condition of architecture was as the fulfilled promise of the White City of Daniel Burnham’s Columbian Exposition, a city where the architect’s place was on the thin veneer of façade. The architect, Muschamp argued, had become chiefly a designer of façades for buildings built by developers and engineers.[218]

It is within this context that cardboard architecture took hold. Faced with the failure of its methods and threatened with its own dissolution, American architecture consolidated a paradigm-shift without destabilizing the discipline. Under the formal virtuosity of a new vanguard, among whom were architects such as Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier, architecture was offered a means of containment. By restricting their domain to formal research, the vanguard of architecture could represent precisely what would distinguish and legitimate architecture as a discipline: notions of genius, singularity and presence. Thus in his preface to Five Architects, a vastly influential book that we will return to at length in chapter three, the director of MoMA’s department of architecture and design, Arthur Drexler, was able to posit that “An alternative to political romance is to be an architect, for those who actually have the necessary talent for architecture.”[219]

Drexler opposed architecture and social commitment, and a liberal ideology of the vital center was effectively replaced by an cynical culture in the political realm and in American architecture.[220] The architecture of the Whites, devoid of social implications, concerned only with the formal language of cardboard architecture then consolidating its didactic position, served as an exemplar to strengthen the discipline. The old liberal compromise between formalism and functionalism was found wanting, the possibilities of anti-architecture were found too dangerous and, as a result, the experiment planted at Cornell and Cooper Union found fertile, freshly disturbed ground, in need of occupation, and became standard operating procedure for much of architectural pedagogy into the 1990s.

Thus the paradigm-shift in architectural education in the 1960s can be mapped as a structural conspiracy of a discipline being mobilized by the demands of professionalization and threats to its identity to move in one particular direction much as Jameson has explained the global system tends towards hegemony. Composed of an unquantifiable number of agents in the discipline and an unquantifiable percentage of recent architectural work, be it buildings or theory, it is an indefinite network that cannot be fully mapped and remains generally invisible. The mediated alignment of large-scale economic changes with internal disciplinary drives fits into Jameson’s explanation of conspiracy as totality, extending the reaches of the global system everywhere, an indefinite network that cannot be fully mapped and remains generally invisible.

Some people cannot understand why I have been loyal to Philip. But he is one of the few architects one can talk to about ideas. Do you know anyone else who pretends to be anti-intellectual who reads Nietzsche in German?

— Peter Eisenman[221]

While cardboard architecture began to spread within schools of architecture during the 1960s, it achieved wider acceptance with the public and within the profession as a whole only in the 1970s, through its personification in the group of architects — Peter Eisenman, Robert A. M. Stern, Michael Graves, and Richard Meier — that Philip Johnson has called his “kids.” As their power broker, providing the kids with commissions, financial assistance and publicity and receiving publicity in return, Johnson has been able create an unprecedented architectural spectacle.

In both this and the following chapter, I will trace how Johnson, as Steven M. L. Aronson writes in his book Hype, has “in effect designed his own life” by exploiting the mechanisms of patronage that control much of architectural production in the American community.[222] Johnson it appears, wants to be remembered, in Peter Eisenman’s words, as “the most powerful architect since Bernini.” For his part, Johnson says that this phrase is an attempt to make himself more important by making Johnson seem more important.[223] Indeed, the process of promotion and self-promotion between Johnson and the kids has always been a co-operative one, each side using the other to legitimate itself as I will show in the next chapter.

Johnson’s goal, as we will see, is to go down in history, as Eisenman explains: “Philip is enormously concerned about how history will view him.” But as his biographer Franz Schulze says of him: “Power and respect. That’s what he wants most of all. And in order to gain these things, in order to draw attention to himself, he puts on a naughty show for that purpose primarily. But naughtiness is a means, not a goal.”[224] Indeed, as I will explore in detail below, Johnson has always wanted power, and he has achieved this power in art, architecture, and high society through his position as a patron of the arts and architect and has exploited it as a power broker. In this chapter we will examine the role of power in Johnson’s life before he met the kids in order to set the stage for the discussion of his embrace of the kids in chapter three. The focus will be on how in the 1930s, after first acting as a power broker in the”International Style” exhibit of 1932, Johnson’s devotion to his own will-to-power and his attempt to attract attention to himself led him to become an activist in American fascist politics.

In this and subsequent chapters I will use the term fascism to denote to a historical phenomenon, a transnational political movement that also possessed within itself individual fascisms which at times were at odds with each other. I will show that Johnson was involved in and aligned with a particular form of American fascism. In this, he also demonstrated a sympathy with, if not necessarily an alignment with other forms of fascism such as that of the Italian Fascist party and the German National Socialist party. At the same time, I also hope to demonstrate that Johnson subscribed some of the most racist beliefs that appeared in fascism, notably a political stance in which the will-to-powerof a nation obliterates its enemies, including any Others living in its midst in the interest of an aesthetic, racial purity.

First, we must turn to Johnson’s interest in acquiring influence. In the cynical culture discussed in the introduction and in chapter one, power relations replace relations of merit. The most powerful agent in cynical culture is the power broker, and as we will see in the next chapter in Johnson has been a very successful power broker. Johnson’s power is not however the result of any proficiency at architectural design, management or even teaching. Rather it is a carefully calculated function of his intersecting roles as a socialite, an architect, and a benefactor of the arts.

In his book Friends of Friends: Networks and Coalitions anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain analyzes the means by which the power broker collects and distributes power. Boissevain distinguishes between the two distinct types of resources that can be used for distributing power: first order resources — such as money, jobs, dispensations of law — controlled directly by an individual; second order resources are contacts with other people who have access to first and second order resources. While a patron controls only first order resources, the far more effective power broker manipulates both first and second order resources. A power broker occupies a point where multiple communication channels intersect and desires to take advantage of it. A successful power broker is located at a point in which the communication channels are particularly useful to her or his purposes, is able to devote the necessary time to the manipulation of the network and is talented enough to be able to stay ahead of her competitors. A succesful power broker must therefore be a constant innovator, an expert at constantly reconfiguring his network.[225]

Johnson’s success as a power broker has led a number of critics and even Johnson himself to conclude that he will be best remembered not for his design but for his patronage. Johnson’s protégé, New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger, has stated that Johnson proves “how far you can go without a creative intelligence,” and that instead Johnson’s great accomplishment was that he “was the man who invented networking, and he always managed to create the sense that he was essential.” Johnson agrees, stating on one occasion that “I’m not a form giver, I’m no Mies, I’m not Wright, I wish I were,”[226] and on another that “my place in history is as a helpful, quite important transitional figure that would lead the next generation to a wild outburst of something that naturally I can’t foresee. I do not think I make forms people will emulate, I’m not creating; I’m creating attitudes.”[227] One of his favorite kids, Robert Stern, has described Johnson as “a truly great salesman for anything he wants to sell, either his own ideas or somebody else’s ideas. If he wants to sell Bob Stern to somebody, he can make me look like butter. He’s amazing. Amazing. When he goes after something and advocates it, you believe that he has believed this thing for his whole lifetime, that it’s a kind of religious catechism for that moment — this inner zeal, it’s amazing to watch.” His biographer Franz Schulze agrees: “That’s where his genius is. He’s a great propagandist, a guy who knows how to sell the product.”[228]

Johnson’s power brokerage was made possible through personal wealth and his class status. His father Homer was a lawyer in then-booming Cleveland, attaining enough monetary and social capital to become a trustee at Oberlin College and a member of all the right clubs. Homer Johnson filed the patent papers for an aluminum extraction process for its inventors in exchange for a large stock holding. In turn his coming-of-age gift to his son consisted of Alcoa stocks.[229] The stock took off soon after, making the younger Johnson a millionaire by the time he was twenty.[230] Of his wealth, Johnson has remarked, “The first rule in architecture is to be born rich; the second rule, failing that, is to marry wealthy. There isn’t any third rule — you’ve got to do one of those two things.”[231]

At school in Harvard, Johnson began to make the right friends, notably Alfred Barr, who would be one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and would bring Johnson in to run the department of design.[232] There Johnson’s first foray into the making of architecture took place in 1932 when he and his friend architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock organized the show “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition.” The show traveled around the United States for three years and, together with the catalog “Modern Architecture” and a book they co-authored, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, was instrumental in bringing a depoliticized vision of modern architecture as style to America.[233] Examining Johnson’s role as co-curator exhibit is essential as a background for understanding both his later fascination with right-wing politics and his interest in maintaining a careful separation between architecture and politics.

Eisenman has pinpointed the 1932 exhibit as a pivotal moment in Johnson’s life. It must have been clear to Johnson, Eisenman explains, that an architecture based on two forces “one, the moral sanction given to the forms of the machine society; the other, the political sanction given to the polemics of the machine society” intersecting at a node of “functionalism” would “have a certain paralyzing effect on any form of aesthetic idealism.”[234] Thus in Johnson’s architectural writings between 1931 and 1933, Eisenman traces a conspiracy to remove functionalism and any moral or political basis from modern architecture:

Johnson used his writings to construct a very intricate counterposition to functionalism. Careful, clever, moving among people and ideas in the half-light of the euphoria of the late twenties and early thirties, he cut quietly and subtly at the moral and political roots of the dual doctrine and of modern architecture. He did so not with theory or polemic, but by infiltration — by developing a fifth column that paraded as the standard-bearer of that dual doctrine, seemingly marching alongside the cadre of architectural modernists who carried the enthusiasm of those early years.

The slogan of Johnson’s fifth column was “the International Style,” as Eisenman explains, a term expressly chosen to negate any possible association between modern architecture and a Left political position:

This was the ultimate reduction. From ‘Modern Movement’ to ‘Modern Architecture’ to ‘Modern Style’ to ‘International Style’: in the first transformation, the ideological content implied by the word ‘movement’ was neutralized by the word ‘architecture’; in the second transformation, the neutrality of ‘architecture’ gave way to the non-ideological implications of ‘style’; and in the last transformation, the politically explosive term ‘international’ became attached as merely an adjectival appendage to the notion of style. Moreover, the final incarnation of the term did not even include the notion of ‘modern.’[235]

The coupling of “international” and “style” did indeed subvert the Marxist implication of “Internationale” in the former, making it acceptable for American consumption but also making it fit for Johnson’s idea of style.[236] In this linguistic change, Eisenman locates the impetus for the absorption of modern architecture into the myth of the American dream, the “orthodox modernism” that was to be replaced by cardboard architecture, as described in chapter one.

This transformation of the Modern Movement into the International Style — the linguistic transformation marking the actual transformation — was to characterize American architecture until the late sixties. Furthermore, what can be seen in retrospect to have been a clever manipulation of the ideology of the Modern Movement in Europe transformed a pluralistic conception of the good society into an individualistic model of the good life and thus reduced a cultural alternative to a stylistic nicety.

This reduction of modernism to a discussion of style drained out the ideological implications of the European architecture of the twenties and packaged them neatly into a consumable fashion that was to burst rampant onto the American scene after World War II. Corporate imagery in the guise of modern architecture inevitably became an object of consumption. Considering the ultimately left-wing ideology implicit in much of what was in the twenties the mainstream Modern Movement in Europe, it is not surprising that Johnson would have attempted to subvert these implications. Whether this transformation was a conscious endeavor is not an issue; the fact remains that in Johnson’s writing this ideology is reduced to style.[237]

Yet Eisenman is too quick to see the mainstream Modern Movement as left-wing. Recent research by Richard Pommer and Christian F. Otto shows that the idea of an international style could be traced back to pre-World War I Werkbund circles and its ideology was not always leftist. As far back as 1913, they explain, architecture writer Karl Scheffler predicted a “unified style of modern utilitarian architecture [that] will probably develop more or less uniformly throughout the entire civilized world.” Significantly however, Scheffler believed that this “grand but rather neutral modern international architectural style will not compare in artistic power to the deep resonant force of the old architectural style” as it would be compromised by the weakness of democratic society. Scheffler’s solution was to adopt an expressly Nietzschean view of society, for a new architecture worthy of comparison with the old style could only arrive if modern societies demanded a “voluntary despotism” that would settle political and cultural issues.[238]

Thus even before Johnson arrived, there was a Nietzschean influence in the movement,[239] as Pommer and Otto write, “a style fashioned by an élite but demanding universal acceptance.” This influence was at times actively conspiratorial, as Sigfried Giedion recollected, in a 1927 assembly of an international group involving among others, “the idea was broached by Mies, I believe, that ‘the movement must now be cleaned up.’ The group named a number of people who would carry out the secret purification, that is, supply the press with articles, hold exhibitions, etc. These were Mies, Gropius, Oud, Stam, Corbusier, [Hans] Schmidt (of the Swiss collective) and [Cornelius van] E[e]steren in view of his focus on city planning.” Although this group fractured and split apart renewed attempts to establish an architectural élite again took place at the first meeting of CIAM and at the Weissenhof housing exhibition of 1927. The constituency of the architectural élite was shaken up following Weissenhof as Communist Hannes Meyer became the head of the Bauhaus and subsequently lost his position to the “conspicuously apolitical” Mies.[240]

Johnson’s interest in the International Style was only part of a larger Nietzschean influence in architecture that he appears to be quite aware of and tried to promote against its enemy, the Communist influence.[241] Thus, while Meyer did receive some attention in the MoMA exhibit and books, his “functionalism” was attacked and the project was also marked by the near-complete absence of Soviet architecture, even though as Richard Guy Wilson points out, the Museum’s director Alfred Barr had traveled in the U.S.S.R. and written about its architecture in 1929.[242]

Johnson’s goals in establishing the contents of the exhibition weren’t always political: Johnson saw himself as patron, although within that role was also the beginning of his power brokerage. Johnson’s role in this vein apparently began early in 1930, when he acted as patron to Mies van der Rohe, convincing his mother that Mies should redesign his New York apartment and thus bringing the German modernist’s his first work to the United States. Yet while the design was Mies’s, Johnson believed that through his patronage it would be also be his, writing to his mother that it would be “the first room in my latest style in America.”[243] But if this was still part of Johnson’s role as patron, he would swiftly begin to be a power broker. Starting in the summer of 1930 Johnson also attempted to get a house for his family’s property in Pinehurst, North Carolina built by another leading modernist J. J. P. Oud and also invited proposals from American modernists Clauss & Daub.[244]

Johnson would have been able to see himself as creator through his power brokerage, dispensing commissions to architects he favored. He would recommend to the Bowman Brothers that they design a prison because the secretary of MoMA’s Board of Trustees was Samuel Lewishon, also on the New York State commission on prisons. Through his family connections, he would be able to make possible Richard Neutra’s design of an all-Aluminum bus for Alcoa and a commission for Claus & Daub to build a number of gas stations for the Standard Oil Company. Johnson would seek commissions for Mies with the Rockefellers as well. He donated his time to the 1932 MoMA exhibit and took care of its financing. Thus, as a consequence of his wealth and his connections, early on in his career Johnson had already became both patron and power broker and in response to a rebuke from Barr, Johnson would write, “I did not resent your sermon in the slightest. After all what I want most to do is be influential and if there is a method why not learn it.”[245]

Johnson’s power brokerage also had a negative effect: there were rejections from the International Style exhibit. While architect Rudolf Schindler asked to be included, Johnson refused to do so on the basis of stylistic grounds. Schindler would remain largely unknown in the United States, whereas his contemporary Richard Neutra, who was included, would receive vast amounts of publicity.[246]

Also at this point, Johnson’s power brokerage began to align itself with his interests in his own architectural design. In a letter to his mother in 1930, Johnson wrote

I got father’s letter on the boat. … He may rest assured I have no more intention of doing any building at this my youthful age. There are too many problems I should like to work out first. The strategic time is later, though if I had all the money in the world I would just build continuously, keep on experimenting.[247]

By 1934, it was apparently more propitious for Johnson to design. Early in the year he redesigned the New York duplex that he and his sister Theodate lived in and began work on Alfred Barr’s apartment.[248] By the end of the year, however, Johnson had abandoned designing and many of his duties at MoMA in favor of his next encounter with power.

It is hard to tell what link, if any, exists between Johnson’s work at MoMA and his interest in right-wing politics, although as I will explain below, the two parts of his life were clearly not separate. For now, we can at least conclude this much: prior to his involvement with fascism, Johnson was already interested in reducing architecture to form and was already set against the left in architecture.[249]

Johnson was apparently interested enough in Nazism in 1932 to attend a Hitler rally. Kurt Andersen writes, “In the early thirties, he [Johnson] says, ‘my Jewish friends [in Germany], I noticed, weren’t enthusiastic about the Nazis, but they were still there.’ He says he did attend a Hitler rally in 1932, but was unmoved (he was ‘dazzled,’ according to the biographer [Franz Schulze].”[250] The biographer of the Museum of Modern Art’s Alfred H. Barr, Alice Goldfarb Marquis confirms Schulze’s assessment: “During the middle thirties, when Johnson returned from a trip to Germany with glowing admiration for Hitler, the museum’s liberal adherents were so angry they refused even to speak to him.”[251]

It apparently took until 1934 however for Johnson and his companion from Harvard and MoMA, Alan Blackburn to be driven to action by the writings of a fellow Harvard alum, Lawrence Dennis, a man who described himself as “the Alfred Rosenberg, the intellectual leader of American Fascism, the No. 1 intellectual Fascist of America.” While Dennis had been a banker, it was as former chargé d’affaires in Managua, Nicaragua that he achieved his first real taste of power, becoming powerful enough to be called the “kingmaker” in Latin American circles. Dennis earned criticism from the U. S. government for supporting the conservative rebels against the Nicaraguan government in the revolution of 1926-27 and resigned soon after.[252] Dennis developed a sophisticated theory of the possibilities for an American fascism during the early 1930s. Later that decade, Dennis would receive substantial support from the Nazi government to promote their cause in the United States. From April to October of 1936, he took a tour of Europe where he met the real Alfred Rosenberg as well as Mussolini and attended Nazi rallies and indoctrination classes at the Amerika Institut in Berlin. Back in the U. S., Dennis made contact with a number of Nazi agents, including George Sylvester Viereck, a German living in America who wrote for Social Justice (although he also wrote for the mainstream press) and who would eventually funnel Nazi money into Dennis’s propaganda efforts and be imprisoned for acting as a paid agent of the Nazi government.[253] According to a postwar interrogation of the first secretary of the German embassy to the U. S.[254] and an examination of the embassy’s files,[255] Dennis also acted as a paid agent of the Nazi government, although, as will be described below, he would never be convicted.

But Dennis’s main import remained his theoretical attempt to develop an American fascism.[256] Perhaps Johnson and Blackburn were attracted to their fellow alum Dennis’s stand toward the privileged: “Within a nation, the endowment of a reasonable number of loafers with a comfortable income from invested capital is no great calamity, provided they loaf in a way to entertain agreeably the populace”[257] But more likely, they were attracted by his central belief that capitalism was doomed and fascism was the only alternative to communism, which would result in the possibly brutal end of those in “the house of have”[258]

For Dennis, fascism was bound up with the question of élites:

For the present purpose, then, let us define fascism as a revolutionary formula for the frustrated élite in an extended crisis of the prevailing social system of liberal capitalism. If fascism comes, it will be, first, the product of prolonged conditions of a thoroughly objective character, conditions which liberal leadership will have failed to improve; and, second, the product of subjective reactions to these conditions by those of the menaced and injured members of the élite who have a will to power and a will, through the capture and use of power, to change conditions they find intolerable.[259]

Dennis defined the “élite” as follows:

Every social order is essentially a phenomenon of leadership, for leadership is one of the most important or significant things about it. As a scheme of purposes, a social order is mainly the expression of the composite will of a dominant class and, as a body of achievements, it is largely the result of the leadership, management, choices, social planning, and control exercised by members of a minority.

Dennis continued by specifying a more statistical definition of the élite as “including capitalists deriving most of their income from property, business enterprises and farmers, the professional classes, and generally, the employed whose salaries are considerably above the average, or say, above $3000 a year for the entire country.” Thus, Dennis’s élite would have been a rather large group, “roughly one-third of the gainfully employed, or over fifteen million persons.”[260] Within this group, he mapped out the “in-élite,” members of the élite “profoundly influential on social affairs”[261] as opposed to those without power, the “out-élite.”

Dennis’s first step in the fascist resolution to the crisis of capitalism was to get the right élite into power. If the current in-élite as a whole was no longer able to adequately govern — as he believed the ongoing Depression proved — then a new in-élite, drawn from the ranks of the out-élite, would have to be installed in the form of a new, fascist government.[262] In this way Dennis defended fascism: since all societies were really run by élites, at least fascism was not hypocritical, unlike communism or liberalism it “frankly acknowledges, or rather boasts, that its élite rule,”[263] And if the economy performed better and the masses were objectively happier under fascism than they could be under communism or liberalism, Dennis concluded, then indeed it was America’s only choice.[264]

The fascist élite, Dennis believed, would be distinguished by the means by which it disciplined itself. Rather than adhering to a liberal idea of law, which he believed was bound to degenerate into a product of legal clerks, Dennis argued for an internalized self-discipline, “the ruling principles governing the élite must be made a part of their conditioned reflexes, or their habitual and almost involuntary reactions, rather than a part of a legal code.”[265] To this end, Dennis’s fascism would use “the science of propaganda, indoctrination, education, group conditioning, and a rational scheme of personal motivations, to make the élite behave according to a desired pattern.”[266]

Thus Johnson and Blackburn, armed with Dennis’s ideas, fell in love with politics. In December 1934 they made front-page news in the New York Herald Tribune with what the paper called a “Sur-Realist Political Venture.”

The Herald Tribune noted that “their politics are not without a certain surrealist flavor. Their party, to be called quite simply ‘The National Party,’ is distinguished from all other political aggregations, juntas, parties, or groups, past and present, by a complete lack of platform or program. They plan to pick one up as they go along, possibly in Louisiana,[267]” where they hoped, as they put it, to “study the methods of Huey Long,” the Kingfish, the popular senator from Louisiana.

The two had begun their new party in April 1934 with Blackburn as leader and Johnson as co-founder, a flying wedge as their logo, “The Need for One Party” as a slogan, and “gray shirt” as the party uniform. Composed of one hundred members, the party had all of its meetings in Johnson’s duplex apartment on East Forty-ninth street. Indeed, the whole project was very much Johnson and Blackburn’s. The two had known each other since they were boys at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, had gone to Harvard together and wound up at the Museum of Modern Art where Blackburn was the executive director.

But the lack of a program for the party did not necessarily make the party into a complete joke. Blackburn explained that “We feel that we were tremendously honest with our fellows in telling them that there was no program, but there wasn’t. We dislike intellectualism, you see. As soon as a thing’s put into words it means something else. Intellectuals don’t have the third dimension. you don’t just put a lot of professors together and stir them around in a cauldron and get something wonderful. There’s got to be more than that.”[268] The added element, they believed, would be an emotional force comparable to a religious drive and a dedication to one’s cause, whatever it might be. The anti-intellectualism that Blackburn mentioned would come to serve Johnson well in his role as the anti-intellectual who read Nietzsche in the original German.

The two had not yet decided whether their party would be revolutionary or not, but they felt that “it was time for a new epoch” and had decided to found a party to usher it in back in 1932 — just as Johnson would have been completing his work in the International Style exhibition — after reading Lawrence Dennis’s Is Capitalism Doomed? The first meeting of the party consisted of sixteen people, including Johnson’s German manservant. After two more meetings in the spring, the two leaders took a coast-to-coast tour of the United States to get a feel for its people and their desires and returned to continue their party’s growth. Dennis himself came to lecture to party members.

While Blackburn stated that they were no more interested in Long than in Roosevelt or Upton Sinclair, Johnson replied that they were much more interested in him than in Sinclair as he had usurped the power of the courts as well as any other power in Louisiana. Blackburn added that “We might like to talk to Long. Of course, he might not like to talk to us. We don’t know.”[269]

Huey Long was considered by many American fascists to be their “man on horseback.”[270] Whether he actually harbored fascist or proto-fascist leanings is irrelevant to the question at hand.[271] Johnson and Blackburn admiration of Long’s dictatorial seizure of power in Louisiana combined with his massive popular support was complimented by that of that of Lawrence Dennis, who called him “the nearest approach to a national fascist leader.” As Dennis argued, “It takes a man like Long to lead the masses. I think Long’s smarter than Hitler but he needs a good brain trust.”[272]

Apart from meeting Long and perhaps serving as his brain trust they hoped that in Louisiana they could “develop [themselves] by doing the sort of things that everybody in New York would like to do but never has time for. We may learn to shoot, fly airplanes, and take contemplative walks in the woods.”[273] As “people in New York exercise too little,” they would exercise, Blackburn stated “and we’re going to relax and we’re going to absorb the atmosphere. We get our impressions not by investigations but by osmosis. We found out all about Washington at poker parties.”

The two had high opinions of themselves, as Blackburn stated, “Our strongest emphasis is on personnel. Johnson and I are two very personal guys.” “We’re adventurers,” Johnson added, “with an intellectual overlay, so we’re almost articulate, but not quite.” On the other hand, what they lacked in articulateness, the two might make up for with by learning to shoot. The reporter for the Herald Tribune noted that Johnson’s office at the Museum of Modern Art was filled with catalogs of firearms. Blackburn, they told the reporter, was in favor shooting with large pistols. Johnson on the other hand, favored the submachine gun.[274]

A half century later Johnson explained his interest in Long as the result of his “moral sense” forcing him to wonder “Why is it that a country with more money than the rest of the world put together has people living the way they do? It doesn’t make any sense. This is why I supported Huey Long when I was young. Huey didn’t help much but I thought he might, I was grasping at straws. I didn’t become a communist the way all my classmates did, but I still believed in the social values that they were concerned with.”[275] Still, the idea of a Gray Shirted National Party was, if not fascist, at least developed out of fascism. On the other hand, in the early thirties fascism, at least in its Italian form was a fairly popular political alternative in the United States.

Long did not take up the offer of help from the gray shirts and the New Orleans gambit failed.[276] By 1936 the two young Harvard graduates had moved back up to Johnson’s midwestern home turf, to join up with Father Charles E. Coughlin, a Ross Perot-like figure with tremendous grass-roots appeal based on his weekly radio programs. Coughlin was virulently anti-Communist and anti-Roosevelt, who in his eyes was also a Communist.[277] With his right-wing extremism, popular support, a powerful organization in his National Union for Social Justice, a weekly journal known as Social Justice, weekly radio programs, and a natural gift for oratory, Coughlin, was the other possible candidate for an American fascist leader in Dennis’s eyes.[278] Indeed, within two years, he would become notorious as a fascist and Nazi sympathizer and one of the leaders of antisemitism in the United States.

Blackburn gave a speech on the plight of youth at the convention for Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice, both supported the Coughlin-endorsed Union party presidential candidate William Lemke, contributing $5,000 to his campaign[279] and Johnson ran for the Ohio state legislature on the Union Party ticket and won, only to abdicate his position.[280]As members of Coughlin’s organization, Johnson and Blackburn’s main assignment was to ensure that Coughlin’s weekly journal Social Justice was published on time by the Cuneo Press in Chicago. In September of that same year, they organized a rally for Coughlin in Chicago at which eighty thousand spectators paid fifty cents each to hear Coughlin and Lemke.[281] The duo also helped Coughlin financially: for two years, sponsoring The Voice of Youth, a series of Sunday afternoon broadcasts on radio station WSPD, Toledo.[282]

Prior to 1938, Social Justice’s program was Right-wing but not yet rabidly so. The paper’s stated concerns were ostensibly to save capitalism from communism and Fascism by avoiding debt, making industry pay a decent living wage to the worker and to avoid any American involvement in future wars, which Social Justice’s writers believed might take place to defend English interests in Asia. As for antisemitic remarks, what references were made in regard to Jews were generally defenses of Coughlin against charges of antisemitism leveled by some vague opponent.

But a great deal of American fascist literature was set out in this way. On the surface, the literature would not appear antisemitic and Pro-Nazi, discussing the topics only in terms of how the writer was being attacked by liberal members of the media (read: Jews) who were slandering him by calling him antisemitic and Pro-Nazi. Deeper down, however, certain other themes emerged. The defenses often argued that Coughlin was not against all Jews, only those who were part of a conspiracy of the international banking élite, notably the Rothschilds, the bankers of the federal reserve system. The bankers were public enemy number one as far as Coughlin was concerned, controlling the West through their diabolical manipulations of monetary systems and exploitation of credit. To any student of conspiracy theory, this is one of the classic Right-wing conspiracies popular since the early part of the century. In this theory, the equation of bankers with Jews was made on the grounds that Jews were usurers. The crime of the Jew/banker was that he did not work for his money but rather took it from others. Following a Jamesonian notion of conspiracy as allegory, it should be quite clear that the bankers conspiracy was an allegory for the capitalist system and its global reach. This process of allegorizing was, however, not innocent, but rather driven by a desire to preserve capitalism and ostracize the Jews. It eventually equated the influence of bad Jews with the negative effects of capitalism with the conclusion that if those Jews were somehow removed, capitalism would return to its natural harmony.[283]

Support for the fascist governments tended to be indirect in pre-1938 Social Justice, consisting principally of mocking the English and their government. Conditions in Germany were not so bad, a typical article would argue, and it would continue, Germany’s need for expansion was justified, just as America’s manifest destiny was.[284]

One of the classic Social Justice tactics was a contest composed of a weird series of panels from comic strips with the characters asking questions such as “Why is Father Coughlin not a fascist?” or “What is a Totalitarian State?” to which one would select a multiple choice answer (after committing to a subscription) in order to have a chance at winning a prize in the thousands of dollars, no small sum in the thirties. While superficially similar to the much later Situationist practice of co-opting or détourning comic strips, in reality this game was precisely its opposite, for instead of commenting on the image with words that were at odds with it, Social Justice would use the image to lure the reader into the question. The image would often have absolutely nothing to do with the words, except to jazz them up.

Creating a spectacle was also a typical technique used by salesmen who would hawk Social Justice on the street. It is there, outside of print, and thus to a certain extent outside of accountability, that the real agenda of the journal would be disseminated and Jews were the target. One salesman explained that “You got to create terror somewhere. You got to terrorize the Jews.” To do this he and a group of his collaborators would insult Jewish-looking passersby. Another tactic was to position a weeping child on a streetcorner. When a passerby would stop and ask what was the matter, the child would reply “A big Jew hit me for selling Social Justice.” Soon a crowd would gather and take up a collection to buy the child’s newspapers.[285] Thus the salesmen would provide a interpretive guide to the paper’s tales of “bankers” and “internationalists.” That the paper would not openly attack Jews in print would only serve as further evidence of the corruption of the Jews — if he had nothing to hide, why would the Jew hit the child?[286] Although we have no direct evidence whatsoever of his involvement with the selling of the paper on the street, Johnson’s role in the paper’s production would suggest that he would have been aware of this activity, if not involved in formulating it.

Johnson wrote his first piece sympathetic to the Nazis on “Architecture in the Third Reich” for the Harvard magazine of the arts Hound and Horn, in an issue dated 1933.[287]The date of this article coincides with the general period in which defenders of the new modern architecture, among them Walter Gropius lobbied the newly-appointed Minister of Propaganda JosefGoebbels who they believed might have sympathies with modern architecture.[288] Similarly, Johnson’s piece held out a strong hope that under the Third Reich architecture would continue its advancement.

Johnson explained that as yet “It would be false to speak of the architectural situation in national socialist Germany. The new state is faced with such tremendous problems of reorganization that a program of art and architecture has not been worked out.” The situation had however been decisively altered: “Die Neue Sachlichkeit is over. Houses that look like hospitals and factories are taboo.” This much would probably not disappoint Johnson, who as we described above was set against it. In addition, he observed “the row houses which have become almost the distinguishing feature of German cities are doomed. they all look too much alike, stifling individualism.” Instead, he wrote, apparently with approval

architecture will be monumental. That is, instead of bath-houses, Siedlungen, employment offices and the like, there will be official railroad stations, memorial museums, monuments. The present regime is more intent on leaving a visible mark of its greatness than in providing sanitary equipment for workers.

Johnson pointed out that the actual form of this monumental new architecture was “as yet completely unknown,” although he believed it was certain that

Germany as the birthplace of modern architecture can hardly go back to Revivalism since there exist no architects who could or would design in styles. Nor is it possible that they will adopt the Bauhaus style. It is not monumental enough and it has irretrievably the stamp of Communism and Marxism. Internationalism, all the ‘isms’ not [sic] in vogue in Germany today. Somewhere between the extremes is the key; and within the Party are three distinct movements each of which may win out.

The first of these movements he disapproved of:

the forces of reaction, with Paul Schultze-Naumburg at the head. He is the enemy of anything which has happened in the last thirty years. His book Art and Race, contains the most stupid attacks on modern art which he considers mere interest in the abnormal, a point of view which he defends by showing juxtaposed clinical photographs of physical abnormalities and modern paintings. In architecture, he approves of nothing since the War…

But reading Johnson’s own words, we see that in no way does he actually criticize any Schulze-Naumburg’s racism, only his reactionary view against modern art. Nowhere in these texts by Johnson is there any criticism of Schultze-Naumburg’s racism.

Johnson linked another member of this group, Paul Erwin Troost to Hitler, and the latter’s aspirations to architecture, he wrote “makes the outlook depressing.”

He was guardedly optimistic about the second group, represented by the Kampfbund fur Deutsche Kultur, whose architectural hero was Paul Schmitthener, the newly appointed director of Prussian state art schools. Johnson wrote that “Though an outspoken enemy of Die Neue Sachlichkeit he claims modernity. His houses are sound, well proportioned but uninspired adaptations of the vernacular of the early 19th century, much in the same feeling as the best adaptations of the best adaptations of the Cape Cod farmhouses in America. His larger buildings are in a half-modern tasteful style, better really than much work in Germany more modern in intention.”

Finally there was the third group, “composed of the young men in the party, the students and revolutionaries who are ready to fight for modern art.” While the fight had revolved around painting, Johnson explained that

In architecture there is only one man whom even the young men can defend and this is Mies van der Rohe. Mies has always kept out of politics and has always taken his stand against functionalism. No one can accuse Mies’ houses of looking like factories. Two factors especially make Mies’ acceptance as the new architect possible. First Mies is respected by the conservatives.

Even the Kampfbund fur Deutsche Kultur has nothing against him. Secondly Mies has just won (with four others) a competition for the new building of the Reichsbank. The Jury were older architects and representations [sic] of the bank. If (and it may be a long if) Mies should build this building it would clinch his position.[289]

Johnson concluded by expressing hope that the new Germany will adopt a Miesian monumentality:

A good modern Reichsbank would satisfy the new craving for monumentality, but above all it would prove to the German intellectuals and to foreign countries that the new Germany is not bent on destroying all the splendid modern arts which have been built up in recent years. All revolutions, seemingly against everything of the past, really build on the positive achievements of the preceding decades. Germany cannot deny her progress. If in the arts she sets the clock back now, it will run all the faster in the future.[290]

Hence, according to Johnson then a new German architecture would validate the government’s intents in the modern arts.

While Johnson continued to be involved in the art and architecture world between 1933 and 1936, we have no evidence that these two seemingly contradictory obsessions of his resolved themselves in any way. His main contact among architects in Germany, Mies van der Rohe left Germany for New York in 1938 after first coming over to the United States in 1937 at the invitation of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Resor, who, at Johnson’s suggestion, invited Mies to be the architect for their guest house.[291]

Johnson continued to promote a monumental architecture, hoping to get Mies to do the façade for MoMA’s new building. These intents can be seen in a 1936 letter he wrote to Alfred H. Barr on the Goodwin and Stone design of the new quarters for the Museum of Modern Art: “I know you will snort, the building is Jewish. It looks like an upper Fifth Avenue front.” Instead Johnson had hoped for “a temple of art…the most beautiful and useless building in the world, small galleries, dark, cool and gorgeous…I mean a lot of wasted space. One should enter a museum up steps and one should be impressed and rather afraid to enter.”[292] Thus for Johnson, a monumental architecture which one would be “rather afraid to enter” would serve as the antidote to the commercialism of Jewish architecture.

Around 1939,[293] Johnson became Social Justice’s European correspondent. After the Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria, Father Coughlin and Social Justice veered to the extreme Right. In May 1938 Coughlin organized his Christian Front, a movement in which the common antisemitic cause was generally not hidden. At typical Front meetings Social Justice would be sold, Coughlin would be praised, Jews would be attacked as “communists, international bankers, and war mongers.” At some meetings Fronters went so far as to call for the liquidation of all Jews in America, called Hitler the “savior of Europe” and ended the meeting with the Nazi salute.[294] The paper itself soon became notorious for the deceptive propaganda practices it deployed to further the cause of the American fascists, for reprinting a speech by Goebbels essentially unchanged under Father Coughlin’s name, as well as for its publication of antisemitic texts such as a serialization of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, andperhaps most notoriously for defending the Nazis after Kristallnacht.[295]

During Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, of November 9-10, 1938 the Nazi party lashed out at German Jews, brutally attacking them, burning synagogues and destroying their businesses. The police cooperated and 20,000 were taken prisoner and the ensuing pogrom continued for a month. Polls showed that of the Americans who knew of the event disapproved and President Roosevelt declared “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in twentieth-century civilization,” and recalled the ambassador to Berlin. The event received extensive coverage in the American media. The New York Times, for one, featured the pogrom on its front page for the next two weeks. During his radio broadcast of November 20, however, Father Coughlin blamed the Jews themselves as responsible for the economic and social sufferings of Germany since the Treaty of Versailles. Using forged documents prepared by the Nazis, Coughlin pointed to Communism as led by Jews. “Nazism,” he explained, “was conceived as a political defense mechanism against Communism and was ushered into existence as a result of Communism.” While he did express some sympathy for the Jews who were victims of the pogrom, he also declared that not until Jewish leaders attacked Communism and any Jewish Communists could their plight be improved.[296] Indeed, internal German communiqués show that Coughlin himself was in contact with the German government during the following years and, while eventually unhappy with the Germans’ treatment of Catholics, also allied himself with them against the Red Menace.[297]

While Coughlin’s speech was condemned in the press, it also struck a chord in many Americans and emboldened them to make their antisemitism public. Coughlin received more, not less support as a result of the speech. According to Dinnerstein, “In December 1938, 45 radio stations carried his weekly address that 3.5 million Americans listened to regularly; another 15 million had heard him at least once. Two-thirds of his loyal followers and more than half of those who tuned in occasionally subscribed to his views while polls showed that the lower the economic class, the larger the percentage of people who approved the radio priest’s views. … His office received approximately 80,000 letters a week, 70 percent of which came from Protestants, and it took 105 staff members to read them.”[298]

Coughlin’s popularity made antisemitism more acceptable to many and made it difficult for government officials who wanted to avoid controversy to support the admittance of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria into the country.[299] Since the fate of many of these refugees was death in the Holocaust, Coughlin’s antisemitism is in no way innocent of its deadly consequences, which not so well hidden in the first place.

It is for this Social Justice, no longer the populist voice of the early 1930s but the voice of the extreme Right in the late 1930s, openly sympathetic to the Nazis and antisemitic that Johnson would become the foreign correspondent. At the same time he would also write for Today’s Challenge, the “official organ” of the American Fellowship Forum, an organization dedicated to carefully disseminating Nazi propaganda to business leaders and Park Avenue types.

The Forum was first conceived in Berlin during 1936 by Lawrence Dennis and Friedrich Auhagen, a German who, funded by the German Embassy, traveled the U. S. giving lectures, and would eventually be convicted of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.[300] Dennis wrote for Today’s Challenge but was not among its official directors.[301] Instead Auhagen was the director of the Forum. The other Nazi agent Dennis maintained contact with, George Sylvester Viereck, served as contributing editor and wrote for Today’s Challenge as well until a dispute over compensation led him to resign.

The two articles Johnson wrote from Europe for Today’s Challenge were calculated to put down the French and English and make Germany seem less of a threat at a time that tensions in the United States were rising because of fears that America would follow England into a war with Germany.

Johnson’s first piece as foreign correspondent for Today’s Challenge, written in London and Paris in 1939, expressed these ideas. In London, he explained, there are “only two topics of conversation this summer: the Servant Problem and the next war.” The Servant problem was of no interest to Americans, Johnson wrote, so he would omit it, but by starting his article with it, he immediately associated the English attitude toward the war with foolishness, haughtiness and trivial desires of an old and stubborn people. Johnson described the scene:

publicity on the War was ubiquitous and, to say the least, very disquieting. In shop windows there are little signs saying ‘Don’t give way to fear. We got through last time all right. We’ll win through again.’ The newspapers carry editorials that run something like this: ‘Do not be frightened. Hitler may not attack tomorrow. Take your vacations just as if times were normal.’ The radio blares: ‘Be calm in an air raid. You must get used to seeing blood spattered on the pavement. You must help the maimed and the dying and not lose your head!’[302]

In contrast, Johnson described Parisians as having a fatalistic attitude of défense passive which he described in Nietzschean terms as “the will to escape, not active courage — the will to win. … It is not that they lack courage, but that it takes a protective, negative form. They feel they will win the next war, but they feel no thrill in the thought of victory.”[303] If the attitude toward war was negative, then so was the unity of the French people behind the Daladier government, “a unity of compromise, not of strength. No one forgets that Daladier is Premier faute de mieux, that he is there, not because he is a leader, but because he can best compromise the disparate views of those who back him. He is their slave, and his decree laws are cautiously framed not to offend any one group. And the factions refrain from throwing him out, but only for the moment, and only because of Adolf Hitler.” The lack of unity led to a “government that is weak in spite of being a kind of dictatorship”[304] and hence to an inability to make substantive decisions in foreign policy.antisemiticantisemitic

All this is rather accurate: there is no evidence that Johnson is seriously distorting the facts. On the other hand, Johnson’s article singles out the weaknesses of the French and English and portrays the latter as sick of waiting and ready to drag the world into war. In the context of a Right-wing journal sympathetic to the Nazi government and aimed at generating anti-war sentiment among highbrow Americans, however, the article serves to substantiate ideas that there is nothing inherently unreasonable about the Nazi stance toward Poland and that the West is overreacting and in any event would be unable to defend itself against the Nazi war machine, requiring the U.S. to bail them out once again.

On the other hand, in the same article, Johnson expressed sentiments not dissimilar from those of the antisemitic subtext then in circulation in the pages of Social Justice and Today’s Challenge,

Another serious split in French opinion is that caused by the Jewish question, a problem much aggravated just at present by the multitude of émigrés in Paris. Even I, as a stranger in the city, could not help noticing how much German was being spoken, especially in the better restaurants. Such an influx naturally makes the French wonder, not only about these incoming Jews, but also about their co-religionists who live and work here and call themselves French. The facts that Blum and the men around him are Jews, that there are two Jews in the present cabinet, Messrs. Zay and Mandel and that the Jewish bankers Mannheimer, de Rothschild and Lazard Freres are known to stand behind the present government all complicate the situation.

The position taken by the Daladier government on this question is an interesting commentary on its policies in general. There are two decree laws which concern the press, one against publishing propaganda paid for by a foreign government. Under these laws, the patriotic weeklies Le Defi and La France Enchainee were just recently suppressed, presumably for getting money from Hitler; but L’Humanité, which no one doubts gives out Russian propaganda, paid for by Russia, has been left alone. What is freedom of the press and for whom is it done, the French ask.[305]

This lengthy citation is necessary to show the clever transition between the first and second paragraphs. This transition moves from a discussion of the Jewish question in France to “The position taken by the Daladier government on this question…,” a position which Johnson faults because it suppresses Hitler-backed publications. If the Daladier government suppressed publication getting money from Hitler, then the internal logic of the piece would be that the government suppressed antisemitic publications and that was wrong. Hitler after all, was offering a solution, which to a well-read American touring Europe in 1939 could not have been terribly difficult to discern.

Johnson wrote a similar piece, “Aliens Reduce France to an ‘English Colony’,” published in Social Justice on July 24. In this article he explained that while the American papers were trying to make the French seem, as he put it, “unified and courageously prepared for the worst,” in reality “Just the opposite is true: they are afraid for the future. They are unprepared, split into a thousand factions.” Unity, Johnson explained, was only a “pious hope” for Daladier to make speeches about. “You cannot have unity between French nationalism and Russian Communism any more than between health and sickness,” he explained, his remarks italicized for emphasis. Instead, of unity among the French people, the “Lack of leadership and direction in the State has let the one group get control who always gain power in a nation’s time of weakness: the Jews.” Johnson insinuated that the Jews were doing better under the new government, writing, “Some French believe they are better off now than they were in the regime of Blum and his assistants, Messrs Blummel, Gombach, Bloch and Moch. But a great many Frenchmen say to me ‘What have we gained in changing from one clique to another? Are Messrs Mannheimer, Dreyfuss, de Rothschild, Zav and Mandel any better?’”

Johnson pointed out that Catholicism was still “not allowed the right of assembly or instruction” and instead “It would seem that only Jews have freedom in the Third Republic. Small wonder one hears so many reports of growing antisemitism among the common people of France.” To emphasize, he quoted an instance of this justified antisemitism:

But let France speak for herself. The following was told me by a patriotic French woman, a well-known writer and journalist, whose name I must withhold for obvious reasons.

‘My heart aches for the future of my country. When I see my beloved city of Paris overrun with German, Czech and Hungarian Jews, I say to myself are these the “Frenchmen” who with their “French” cousins are to rule France? And am I not even to be allowed to raise my voice against it?

‘Where is the France of Louis XIV?’ Our Blums and Mandels have lost us our natural allies, Italy and Spain; and England treats us like a colony.

‘With our internal affairs in the hands of the Jewish bankers, our foreign affairs in the hands of Great Britain, and our country rent by dissension, what is to be the end for France? Who will save her?’[306]

After a tour of the Balkans and Turkey with his sister Theodate, Johnson found himself in Munich at the outset of the war and accompanied the German army into Poland in his capacity as correspondent for Social Justice and Today’s Challenge.[307] In an article on Germany, Johnson explained his was to be an objective look into the German situation, something that had become hard to do given the anti-German and pro-British “indoctrination” and “propaganda” that the American newspapers had inflicted upon their people.[308] Johnson anticipated criticism of his position, as he put it: “If I say, ‘the Germans have plenty to eat,’ which is true, I am pro-Nazi. If I make the ultra-neutral statement that the war is only a war of two imperialisms, which is also true, I am, according to our distinguished guest from overseas, Mr. Duff Cooper, making propaganda for Nazism.”[309] On the contrary, Johnson explained, the American journalists are the propagandists, pointing to a statement by “one of the well known journalists,” perhaps Shirer, who “told me in a moment of unusual candor, ‘I don’t see why the Germans don’t throw all of us American correspondents out of the country. We are poison to them and their cause.’”[310] That a journalist reporting objectively on Nazi Germany necessarily cast a negative cast on the situation apparently did not occur to Johnson.

In a telegram to the German Foreign Ministry dated 21 November 1939, Hans Thomsen, the Chargé d’affaires in the German embassy to the United States explained why the reporters weren’t thrown out: “The most effective tool of German propaganda in the United States,” he wrote, “is, as heretofore, the American correspondents in Berlin who, as for example, the New York Times correspondent Brooks Peters in yesterday’s Sunday edition, give detailed descriptions as to their being carefully and courteously treated by German officials, and are not being handicapped by pre-censorship as on the Allied side. The Embassy is therefore endeavoring to induce suitable American journalists to visit Germany.”[311]

While Johnson did not describe his treatment by German officials, he did paint Germany in a starkly better light then he did Britain or France. Hitler, like Lenin, Johnson wrote, had provided his people with a positive revolutionary ideal for which they were prepared to sacrifice their lives. The preconditions of revolution, “starvation, oppression, suffering” were “very far from being sufficient to cause a revolt.” Those opposed to Hitler constituted a diverse group — from “lawyers who miss the good old days when lawyers were looked up to and paid well” to “artists who resent the official disapproval of their art” — incapable of uniting on a common front.[312] It wasn’t so bad at all, Johnson explained

none of those opposed to Hitler that I know would prefer the liberalism of the Weimar Republic to National Socialism as a system of government. They remember too well the humiliation of the Versailles treaty, the misery of inflation and the later miseries of mass unemployment. They remember that the Weimar Republic brought civil strife, battles of brother against brother; and such civil war to them was more hateful than the World War. They do not like Hitler, but they feel that if Hitler were not Hitler but some imaginary person that would be nice in their own particular way, then National Socialism or rather national socialism, would be a good idea. Such thoughts are not the stuff of revolutions.

Also, no matter what the objections they have to Hitler, close to 100% of the Germans appear to approve of one particular part of Hitler’s work — his foreign policy. … since 1911, Germany has been growing rapidly. Even the bitterest foes of the National Socialist ideology are proud of German greatness. This natural pride in their power and success stultifies foreign criticism of their methods or their morals. Similarly, we Americans would not have brooked any criticism of our doctrine of ‘manifest destiny’ in the 19th century when we were busy conquering our empire in the west. So today the Germans are impervious to the moral admonishment that they ought not to conquer their neighbors. Conquest is good or bad, depending on who does it, you yourself or somebody you don’t like.[313]

One wonders whether Johnson didn’t mention the Jews because so many had by now been arrested or fled or whether he was deliberately suppressing the question.

Nowhere does Johnson mention the plight of the Jews in Germany, a fact that was so pervasive that he could not have missed it. Already in 1936, journalist and historian William Shirer, who as we will soon discuss, Johnson called that “irresponsible journalist” describes the transformation of German life against the Jews that he saw taking place every day:

In the first year of the Third Reich, 1933, they had been excluded from public office, the civil service, journalism, radio, farming, teaching, the theater, the films; in 1934 they were kicked out of the stock exchanges, and though the ban on their practicing the professions of law and medicine or engaging in business did not come legally until 1938 they were in practice removed from these fields by the time the first four-year period of Nazi rule had come to an end.

Moreover, they were denied not only most of the amenities of life but often even the necessities. In many a town the Jew found it difficult if not impossible to purchase food. Over the doors of the grocery and butcher shops, the bakeries and the dairies, were signs, ‘Jews Not Admitted.’ In many communities Jews could not procure milk even for their young children. Pharmacies would not sell them drugs or medicine. Hotels would not give them a night’s lodging. And always, wherever they went, were the taunting signs ‘Jews Strictly Forbidden in This Town’ or ‘Jews Enter This Place at Their Own Risk.’ At a sharp bend in the road near Ludwigshafen, ‘Drive Carefully! Sharp Curve! Jews 75 miles an Hour![314]

For reporting that some of these signs had been removed for propaganda purposes during the 1936 Olympics Shirer was threatened with expulsion and attacked in the German Press and media. By the time Johnson was a reporter himself three years had passed and conditions had only deteriorated.

There is simply no way that after all the time he had spent in Germany and with all of his contacts there Johnson could have been ignorant of the vicious campaign against the Jews. After Kristallnacht, the American press began to buzz with the question of the resettlement of Germany’s Jews.[315] If Johnson had been in Germany at this time, then of course the tragedy would have been even more apparent to him. For a young man so involved in politics, Johnson cannot have been unaware that the climate in Germany did not just condemn the Jews with words, but with violence and murder as well.

Shirer recounted Johnson’s appearance as a correspondent in his Berlin Diary:

Dr. Boehmer, press chief of the Propaganda Ministry in charge of this trip, insisted that I share a double room in the hotel with Philip Johnson, an American fascist who says he represents Father Coughlin’s Social Justice. None of us can stand the fellow and suspect he is spying on us for the Nazis. For the last hour in our room here he has been posing as an anti-Nazi and trying to pump me for my attitude, I have given him no more than a few bored grunts.[316]

Shirer’s Berlin Diary can also serve as means of contextualizing what Johnson may have seen. The entry on Johnson was at Zoppot, near Danzig on September 18, 1939. That day, only a little over two weeks into the invasion of Poland, Germany was wrapping it up, dispensing with the last stubborn units of resistance from isolated units of the Polish army.[317] On his way out from Berlin to Danzig, Shirer recalled “In the woods in the Corridor the sickening sweet smell of dead horses and dead men. Here, the Germans say, a whole division of Polish cavalry charged against hundreds of German tanks and was annihilated. The next day, on September 19, Shirer watched a battle going on two miles north of Gdynia and he and an unspecified “we” (perhaps Johnson, perhaps other reporters) “had been awakened … in our beds … by it. At six a.m. the windows in my room shook. The German battleship Schwelsig-Holstein, anchored in Danzig, was firing shells from its eleven-inch guns over our heads.” Shirer and fellow reporter Joe Barnes agreed the scene from the hotel was “tragic and grotesque” as the Polish army desperately held out against the efficient and technologically advanced German war machine. In the afternoon, the press corps drove to the Danzig Guild Hall to hear a speech by Hitler in which the Fürher announced, as Shirer explained it that, “Poland would never be re-created on the Versailles model and that he had no war aims against Britain and France, but would fight them if they continued the war.[318]

In using Shirer’s account to contextualize Johnson, we have to turn to Johnson’s reaction to Shirer’s passage about him. In a 1973 interview in which Charles Jencks confronted Johnson with the passage from Shirer, Johnson explained “Shirer’s a very irresponsible journalist…very third rate writer…” Nevertheless, Johnson did not deny being in Danzig, only spying for the Nazis, saying “Yes it was that night in Danzig that Shirer writes about. But uh…I really, I’d suppose that anyone who wasn’t actively crusading was suspicious and I probably did lean over backwards…no I was wrong…I hoped something good would come out of it. No this was before concentration camps were started of course. But still no excuse. Speer has it right, I know, but of course I weren’t no spy.”[319] Having no evidence one way or another, we cannot decide whether Johnson was a spy or not. On the other hand, his statement about the concentration camps is quite wrong. The first concentration camp, Dachau, was opened in 1933 although the systematic extermination of the Jews began only in 1941. Violent antisemitism was institutionalized by 1939, especially after Kristallnacht. While Johnson’s negative opinion of Shirer was shared by Joseph Goebbel’s propaganda ministry which condemned him in 1936 for exposing Nazi antisemitism, recent obituaries for Shirer have argued that he was certainly not a “very third rate writer.” The Washington Post referred to him as “one of the giants of 20th century American journalism,”[320] England’s Daily Telegraph commented that Shirer “had probably seen more of Hitler’s Reich than any other non-German,”[321] The Guardian called Shirer’s later book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich “the definitive version” of those events’ history,[322] and of Shirer’s Berlin Diary, Reuters wrote that it was “praised for its simple documentation of survival amid horror.”[323]

Roughly a month before the evening with Shirer near Danzig, Johnson had been in Poland in Berlin, Danzig, Lodz, and Warsaw in the space of a week and he summarized his impressions in an article for Social Justice, bylined from Danzig, Poland. On his way into Poland, albeit driving his American car and offering his American passport, Johnson was arrested by the Polish police at Kepno for taking pictures (never published), “After eight hours of grilling,” Johnson explained, “they finally let me go.” This interrogation Johnson wrote, was triggered by the Polish government’s jitteriness, as he put it “Their nightmare is, of course, the Germans. They see Germans behind every tree.”

The Polish police chief showed Johnson the entire population of Kepno at work digging trenches in the fields as a defense against invasion. The chief, Johnson recalled, told him “Tell the Germans what you saw, tell them what a glorious spirit of patriotism burns in the breasts of the Poles. We shall hold them! We shall fight them till we die.” Upon returning to Germany, Johnson wrote, “I told some Germans about the trenches. They roared with laughter. I could easily see why, for I, too, had noticed the rows on rows of armored cars and tanks near the border, which could easily cross those little trenches without even pausing.” Johnson explained that he “felt sorry for the earnest, patriotic Poles” who were no match against such a the German army. Of course, Johnson was right in his assessment, the Poles were no match.

But the rest of Johnson’s article took a different turn. Poland, he explained was not a unified nation. Only 20 of the 35 million people in the country were Poles, the rest were “Jews, Ukrainians, White Russians, and Germans, all of whom dislike the Poles.” Hence Johnson’s reaction “When I first drove into Poland, the countryside was a shock to me. Like most Americans who learned their geography since the World War I was brought up to think of Poland as a country which looked much like the other countries of Europe.” Instead, Johnson wrote, “Once on the Polish side [of the Polish-German border], I thought I must be in the region of some awful plague. The fields were nothing but stone, there were no trees, mere paths instead of roads. In the towns there were no shops, no automobiles, no pavements and again no trees. There were not even any Poles to be seen in the streets, only Jews!” Johnson saw the Jewish-populated area as backwards: “As I drove through the towns, the whole population out of sheer curiosity would run along beside the car, which was very easy for them since I had to drive 10 miles an hour because of the bad roads. The region reminded me of what I had imagined Siberia to look like. For hours I drove through this countryside without seeing another automobile, or coming to a town which might remind me of Europe.”

But the Jews were not just in the countryside. Johnson explained that the industrial city of Lodz was a “slum without out a city attached to it.” Like the countryside, Lodz was backwards, with an incomplete sewage system, inadequate housing, “no central square, no park, no trees at all, and no public building bigger than one of our courthouses.” Since Johnson’s visit to Lodz took place on a Saturday, he explained, “the city looked more mournful than usual for most of the shops were closed on the Jewish Sabbath.” In Lodz, while the Jews made up only 35% of the population, “dressed in their black skull-caps and with their long beards they seem more like 85 per cent. Their section of town is poorer than the rest. The 60,000 Germans who live in Lodz are rather well suppressed now although the big industries of the city still bear German names.”

What Johnson sees is highly significant. Johnson’s statement that in this part of Poland he felt he was “in the region of some awful plague” where there were no Poles, “only Jews” is classically antisemitic, equating the Jews with a disease upon the European race. We have evidence that this reading is not mistaken in a statement Johnson made in 1970 in which he said “…I was anti-Semitic too, but never like that (like Coughlin).”[324] Nevertheless, Johnson was writing material that used standard antisemitic clichés for Coughlin and the use of imagery of the plague of course begs the metaphor to be extended so that the plague could be eradicated.

Warsaw offered a contrast for Johnson, “It is a Western capital in an Oriental setting. There are trees and baroque palaces and parks. Here, the upper class speaks French. Here, the nobility has quarreled for centuries over the question of leadership and have kept their country weak, and here the Greater Poland propaganda is given out.”

Danzig was likewise a contrast. Johnson explained that the city was surprisingly quiet, “I had to pinch myself to believe I was in the so-called center of European tension. Danzig is the quietest spot I have yet been in all Europe.” The people of Danzig were happy, “The beaches and cafes are full on Sundays, there is no unemployment, no suffering, no oppression of any kind.” At the same time, Johnson called Danzig “the most German city I have been in.” The Poles had nothing to lose by giving up Danzig peacefully, Johnson wrote, explaining that they do not use the Vistula river which enters into the sea at Danzig and do not even use the port at Danzig heavily, preferring instead Gdynia, the artificial port that Shirer and perhaps Johnson would later witness burning.

Johnson’s description of Danzig is largely confirmed by Shirer’s visit to Danzig on August 11th, described in his Berlin Diaries: “For a place where the war is supposed to break out, Danzig does not quite live up to its part. Like the people in Berlin, the local inhabitants don’t think it will come to war. They have a blind faith in Hitler that he will effect their return to the Reich without war. … Among the population, much less tension than I’d expected.” But Johnson left out a key point: Danzig wasn’t just German, by this point it had become Nazified and militarized. Shirer explained that “The Free City is being rapidly militarized, German military cars and trucks — with Danzig license plates! — dash thorough the streets. … The town completely Nazified.”[325]

But Johnson did argue that the Polish Corridor was bound to cost Poland: “no matter how things turn out, Poland is 100 per cent sure to get the worst of it!” Johnson cited “the only realistic Pole” he met as stating the solution to Poland’s problems. An invasion by either the Red Army or the Germans would spell the end of Poland, “The only solution is an understanding with Germany which though painful for us, is nevertheless the lesser evil.”[326] Johnson thus advocated precisely the position that the Germans had wanted.

“This ‘Sitdown’ War. Heavy Engagements of the Fortnight Have Been on Economic and Moral Front,” Johnson’s final article for Social Justice, was published on November 6 1939. Unlike his previous two Social Justice articles this one noted no location, and was almost certainly written from the United States. Again Johnson poked at the English, explaining that although in the ‘Sitdown War’ the military situation had not changed in the last week, in the Economic war, Germany had the edge by having the “Italo-Jugoslavian-Hungarian-Roumanian entente” and “Russian-Baltic bloc” neutral and hence unwilling to participate in the anti-German blockade while England could only escape Germany’s counter-blockade “by keeping her navy on the water, an attempt which to date is only moderately successful.” Somehow Johnson was able to conclude that “As yet, nobody can blockade anyone very seriously.”

In the moral war, the object of which, he explained was “to gain friends and allies and to undermine the morale of the enemy” Germany had a slight edge. England, whose goal was to convince the nations of the world to join it, was failing, Johnson explained, by not being willing to engage in the fight herself. In addition, Germany had already attained her war goals, as shown by her military inaction and her “peace offensive in the ‘talk’ sphere” while England’s goal, “the destruction of Hitlerism” was “a large order requiring an extremely aggressive war against the best armed nation in the world; an aggressive war which she is not waging.”[327]

While this article was largely factual and the inaction of the Phoney War as it was known in England had demoralized both it and France, it is noteworthy that Johnson did not discuss the other events of the last two weeks of October and first few days of November. Meanwhile the Netherlands and Switzerland were preparing for invasion, Pope Pius XII issued his first encyclical, condemning racism, dictators, and treaty violations, and even Mussolini reshuffled his war cabinet, replacing pro-Nazi members with neutral members. Johnson’s biggest omission was the question not of the moral war but of morality in the war: while he had talked only of the Danzig corridor in his previous article, Germany and the Soviet Union had partitioned Poland.

Johnson’s only article during this period that was not informed by immediate events in the news was written for Today’s Challenge, “Are We A Dying People?” The article was based on a premise that the population rate within the U.S. had been falling and that Americans were in danger of dying out. In the first few pages of the article, Johnson brings forth visions of deserted ghost towns and a population decline from 140 million in 1930 to 100 million in 1990. Families were apparently failing to reproduce enough. Midway through the article, however, Johnson displaced population decrease in absolute terms with a decrease in the population of the white race, writing: “This decline in fertility, so far as scientists have been able to discover, is unique in the history of the white race.”[328] If the decline was in the white race, however, and yet for much of the article he discussed the nation as if the absolute population was going to decline then it would appear that Johnson considered the non-white population less than human. Thus, the ghost towns Johnson describes would not be empty, but would appear desolate the same way as he would describe in his later Social Justice article in which he depicted a Polish countryside overrun by Jews.

“In short,” Johnson wrote, “the United States of America is committing race suicide.”[329] Race suicide was not however, simply a matter of numbers. Johnson found birth control of value, explaining:

There are many women who, for reasons of health, should not have any children and many more who should have but few. Also, birth control, or even sterilization, may be useful in cases of inheritable diseases or idiocy. In this sense, of course, birth control helps the future of the race and is eugenic.[330]

The future of the white race, he explained, was threatened by “the lack of desire we have children and this lack of will is the result of the values of life in our western civilization.” For Johnson, these negative values were “Individualism” and “Materialism.”[331] This could be remedied by thinking in terms of the greater good of the race.

…by their lack of will to live and grow, [Americans] themselves accelerate the already rapid decline in births. I have heard many educated men talk in this way: ‘Well if we are not the fittest to survive, nature will wipe us out. The Japanese may be more fit to survive. Remember Darwin.’

But this appeal to Darwin is merely a cloak for weakness. For surely the will to live is a factor in determining what is ‘fittest. ’ If we will to live and grow, we shall be fitter than the Japanese. If we sit back and look at the situation purely ‘objectively,’ the Japanese are very likely, with their strong will to live, to become fitter to survive than we.

The course of nature is not pre-destined. Human will is a part of the biological process. Our will, for example, interferes, constantly in the world of the lower animals. When English sparrows threaten to drive out our songbirds, we shoot the sparrows, rather than letting nature and Darwin take their course. Thus the songbirds, thanks to our will, become the ‘fittest’ and survive.[332]

Johnson’s article has to be seen in the context of the eugenics movement. Eugenics, historian Daniel J. Kevles points out, took hold in the United States because of societal changes — “industrialization, the growth of big business, the sprawl of cities and slums,” and massive migration from Eastern and Central Europe that strained the country and triggered fear among its established citizens.

Established Americans, the descendants of the English, Germans, and Scandinavians who settled in the U. S. largely prior to the 1890s felt threatened by these social changes and connected them with the influx of Polish, Jewish, Russian, Italian, Irish, and Eastern European immigrants. As statistics showed that immigrants bred at a much higher rate than the established Americans and at the same time showed that criminal activity and insanity were on the increase the eugenicists among the established Americans pointed to a link between the two. Like Johnson, they saw the specter of race suicide in indications that the Nordic or Anglo-Saxon Americans bred at a lower rate than the foreigners. The eugenicists, as Johnson would do later, predicted “race suicide,” and “national deterioration” as the consequence of these trends. Only eugenic measures for the immigrants and increased fertility for the established could fend off the destruction of the race. Even Johnson’s reference to the Japanese can be traced to eugenicist beliefs that “the yellow or Oriental peril” threatened the West with its increased fertility.[333]

This side of the eugenics movement is linked also to the curbs on immigration put in effect by the United States government in the early part of the century.[334] The Statue of Liberty that would accept the “huddled masses,” was put up while immigration was still predominantly from the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon lands. Historians have traced the reason for this turn to attitudes toward immigration that developed in the U.S. in the later nineteenth century. While the image of America as a haven from persecution and economic misfortune had developed by then, until the 1890’s immigrants tended to come from Northern and Western Europe: Great Britain, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Ireland. These immigrants were predominantly Protestant and easily assimilated into the population, although the Irish being more Catholic than Protestant, often poorly educated, destitute, and traditionally the victims of English imperialism had an unhappy history of persecution upon arrival in the States. By the turn of the century, however, migration from the North and West had ended and was replaced by immigrants arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe. These immigrants immediately appeared different: they were poorer, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, or Jewish, and through their language, names, appearance, and tendency to congregate together, often in slums born of poverty and exploitation from factory owners, alarmed the earlier immigrants.[335]

The established Americans reacted with alarm. Madison Grant’s best-selling The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916 wrote that “The new immigration contained a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken, and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish ghettos. Our jails, insane asylums, and almshouses are filled with this human flotsam and the whole tone of American life, social, moral and political, has been lowered and vulgarized by them.”[336] In reaction to these sorts of fears, during the early part of the century quotas on immigration from Europe began to appear, along with a number of restrictive laws that would make it so difficult for Jews escaping from Nazi Germany to enter the country that Hitler himself was able to state “Through its immigration law, America has inhibited the unwelcome influx of such races as it has been unable to tolerate in its midst. Nor is America now ready to open its doors to Jews fleeing from Germany.”[337]

In April, 1924, the Immigration Act was passed with overwhelming majorities in Congress, limiting the influx of foreigners. As Kevles explains, “The act limited the influx to the United States, from any European country, through 1927, to a small percentage of the foreign-born of the same national origin recorded in the census of 1890. The shift of the reference point back by two decades, to a date when fewer Eastern and Southern European immigrants were in the country, made immigration more discriminatory for newcomers from those areas.” The permanent version of the law was structured around the national ancestries of U. S. residents in the 1920 census.[338]

Johnson’s earlier reference to the Jewish refugees in Paris brings up the question of Jewish immigration. During the period when the Nazis ruled Germany it was very difficult for Jews to immigrate to the United States precisely because of the attitude of the established Americans, like Johnson. Thus while in the nineteenth century, the American government had established a long history of allowing oppressed peoples (admittedly only European and Jewish oppressed peoples) into the country as refugees, in the case of the Jews of Nazi Germany, it faltered, not only failing to respond, but deliberately hindering immigration and hence sending asylum-seekers to their deaths.[339] In this respect, Johnson, who having traveled extensively through Germany during the 1930s, must have seen that this article’s implicit demand to keep the Jews out of the United States could only result in terror for them.

Thus the question that Johnson leaves unanswered arises: if, because they were in the way of the white race, should the Jews, who Johnson already disliked, be shot like the sparrows, or since he used a different metaphor, if the Jews were a plague, shouldn’t Europe be disinfected of them?

Given that Johnson already knew he was a homosexual but at least earlier in the decade felt uncomfortable enough about it to have a nervous breakdown, this piece could be seen as an attempt to rationalize his choice as the result of a particular cultural and political situation that did not make “normal” (hetero)sexuality possible. Indeed, in his study of the fascist self, Klaus Theweleit has explained that it is a mark of fascist thought that homosexuality be permissible given the intolerable conditions of society.[340] In contrast, the successful fascist community would not be forced to take such desperate measures but would rather be hetero-sexualized, as Lawrence Dennis’s wife described in a letter to her husband during his 1936 trip to Germany.

When this reaches you, you will be in Deutschland, in Berlin right in the heart and pulse beat of that wonderful nation where men are he-men and women are so womanly. I would give my life for a little of that warmth right now. … Be nice to all the Germans for me and specially to those brave women who are making babies for Hitler and being slaves so happily and willingly to their men.[341]

For Johnson he-man-ness was also a question of will-to-power. In his article Johnson continued:

nature endowed most of us, though not our intellectuals and scientists, with a will to live, a will to power. This will to live, the will to love, is present in every woman’s heart; the will to live, the will to expand, to be some one is present in every man’s heart. And it is not primarily a will to personal economic well-being; it is bigger and broader.[342]

Perhaps Johnson held out hope that his homosexuality was an aberration caused by conditions that would change in the new order. Whatever his belief on that topic, it is the same will-to-power that Johnson would later quote Nietzsche as being the motivation for architecture, the same will-to-power that he has always sought ever since.[343]

Also in 1939, under the guidance of Dennis, Johnson translated Werner Sombart’s Weltanschauung, Science and Economy.[344]Sombart had been an influential German sociologist in the early part of the century and began to explicitly support the Nazi party by the 1930s. Significantly, Sombart was also responsible for theoretically connecting the critique of capitalism to antisemitism via racial archetypes.[345] Weltanschauung, Science and Economy is not a particularly important text in Sombart’s oeuvre and it also does not address the question of race, but translating did give Johnson a chance to bring some of the methodology Sombart developed in the 1930s to the American public. To what extent Johnson was a follower of Sombart’s is unclear, but what is significant is how Sombart’s work can be used to get a handle on Johnson’s writing.

Significantly, the translation was for the Veritas press, a publishing house funded by the German government through the German Library of Information.[346] Veritas press books generally promoted both German culture and nature, covering a strange scope of material including medicine, children’s books such as Spotty the Flying Dog and Chester,  a story about a cat; and books on politics and war. But as Thomsen, the German Chargé d’affaires wrote to his superiors, “The German Information Library in New York was developed into an institute of propaganda. … The Information Library, in addition, provides numerous organizations, newspapers and individuals with information and propaganda material on Germany.”[347]

Hence, with Veritas press functioning as an instrument of German propaganda, the question of how Johnson’s translation fit in arises. While there could be a possibility that the text was innocuous and meant to deflect investigation from the press, this does not entirely appear so. After a protracted discussion of the difference between Weltanschauung, Wissenschaft and economics, Sombart concluded his essay with an assessment of contemporary German economic theory. The trend, he wrote, is to abandon the “old ‘liberal’ economics” for a new, national theory with the main ideas “that all science should be close to living reality, that the people as a whole must be the center of consideration, that all economics is ‘political’ and that economic theory must take account of that fact.”[348] Sombart’s main criticism of the movement is that

the young men are right, but they cannot prove it, for they lack a thorough philosophic training and education, which cannot be replaced by the strongest will or the most ardent enthusiasm. … While the younger generation is aimlessly running about, the enemy is lying in ambush, ready at any minute to reconquer the battlefield which he has about lost today.[349]

In other words, Nazi theory was not up to its practice. This criticism might very well be the motivation for the translation of the book. Seeing the Christian Frontists, the German-American bund members, the Silver Shirts, and the other factions of the American fascist insurgency splintered and largely uninfluential, Johnson and Dennis could perhaps have come to the conclusion that what was needed was not just enthusiasm or will but also a theory that would give a solid grounding to the movement and help it become united. Sombart’s book would thus have formed a complement to Dennis’s writings and perhaps a foundation to an American theory of fascism based on Sombart’s economic studies. The translation was not received well in journals of sociology and reviewers noted a number of incorrect translations.[350]

On January 26, 1940, Johnson gave a speech at a meeting at a Springfield, Massachusetts Turn Verien (Germanic gymnastics hall) meant to create members for the Forum. According to a Springfield Evening Union account of Johnson’s speech, he painted a picture of a country ready to go to war on account of British interests. “[T]he United States today is more of a British colony than it ever was before.” Johnson, calling himself a foreign correspondent, explained that American newspapers were deceiving the public about the European war. Of the New York Times, he declared that had only British correspondents in Europe, who would send back only articles favoring their country’s positions. According to the account, “He facetiously suggested that President Roosevelt be asked to stop the printing of all newspapers in this country and to have them printed in London instead.” Johnson went on to cite a picture that appeared in the Springfield Evening Union the previous month depicting victims of the war and said that it was taken in Brooklyn. Johnson continued to cite the anti-German propaganda in the American papers: “The newspapers lied about the war in Poland, he said, averring that the countryside was not made destitute as reported. He said only one town actually was destroyed and the half of another. The first town had been used as a fort, he said.” In contrast, as early as September 14, 1939, Shirer wrote, “D. and H. and W., who were at the front for three days this week, say that almost every other town and village in Poland they saw was either half or totally destroyed by bombs or artillery.”[351]

On the other hand, the paper stated that “Mr. Johnson described the Poles as bitterly disappointed by the failure of the British to send aid and he said one Pole said to him, ‘Never believe an Englishman.’” Johnson continued by citing numerous examples of improper behavior by the British: the Opium War of 1839, the Boer War, the levying of tribute in India, Churchill’s abandonment of the Finns against the Soviet army. Supporting the belief that the Germans were too strong to fight, “Mr. Johnson said that the German people are much more united now than in 1914, as witnessed by a birth rate which is a third higher. He said the German people shouted with joy when they learned of the pact with Russia, declaring that a group in the National Socialist Party had favored alignment with Russia and that part of the army saw a large tactical advantage to such a move.”[352]

But as the year continued, 1940 turned out not to be the start of a brilliant new future of fascism in the United States but rather was to be the end of Johnson’s involvement with the movement. A lecture by Johnson was scheduled for March 1 in New York City.[353] After that we have no more evidence of Johnson’s involvement with the American Fellowship Forum or Coughlin’s Social Justice. Indeed, the American Fellowship Forum dissolved swiftly after by the end of 1940, was under investigation as a Nazi front.

On August 28, 1940 the American Fellowship Forum began to be subjected to scrutiny in front of the House of Representatives Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities — chaired by Martin Dies and hence known as the Dies Committee — when subpoenas were served and George F. Bauer, chairman of the executive committee of the Forum, Charles Dale Siegchrist, Jr., secretary of the editorial board of the Forum, Ina A. Gotthelf, secretary of the Forum, and Richard Koch, member of the Forum’s executive committee and one of the organization’s founders were formally examined. On September 10, the Forum’s director, Friedrich Auhagen was formally examined and as was Ferdinand A. Kertess on September 11.[354]

The Dies Committee’s “white paper” on November 21, 1940 detailing a Nazi conspiracy in the United States was front-page news throughout the country, and while Johnson was not implicated in the conspiracy, the Forum and its leaders Kertess and Auhagen were, and Johnson would probably have been aware that having an organization one was active in called an “instrument of German propaganda” on the front page of the New York Times was not a good career move.[355]

The Dies committee itself was the direct forerunner of the McCarthy committee and drew an intense amount of criticism for its totalitarian methods, notably operating on hearsay and unreliable evidence, accusations unaccompanied by proof, and most significantly for our purposes, its political bias. While the committee’s ostensible mission was to investigate un-American activities on both the Left and the Right it was frequently taken to task for its obsession with the Left[356] and on the other hand it frequently received favorable reviews from the Right, including Coughlin’s Social Justice. Dies himself stated that he had intended to discredit the CIO and paralyze the left-wing element in the Roosevelt administration.[357] To say that the Forum was the victim of a proto-McCarthyite investigation would be incorrect. On the contrary, it would appear that had Johnson been a member of a Communist group, he would have received more investigation than he actually did.

After the Dies Committee, a special grand Jury was formed to conduct a massive sedition trial against, twenty-nine individuals including Viereck (already in prison on another charge), Dennis, but also American fascists Joseph C. McWilliams, founder of the American Destiny Party, George Deatherage, organizer of the Knights of the While Camelia and the American Nationalist Confederation, William Dudley Pelley, organizer of the Silver Shirts, and Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling, a raving anti-Semite and pro-Fascist. In Henry Hoke’s It’s A Secret, a book investigating the secret grand jury indictments, Hoke mentions that Johnson was called as a witness in 1942 (probably in the case of Father Coughlin, who was not indicted) and again in 1943 (probably for Lawrence Dennis, who was).[358] By then, Hoke explains, Johnson had told him “that he had dissociated himself from the pro-Fascist movement and that he was to have been a witness for the Government in the sedition trial. This change of heart was brought about, Johnson claims, when he realized how fortunate he was to be an American citizen criticizing democracy, rather than a German citizen criticizing Nazism.”[359]

It appears that Johnson never had a chance to testify. Like the Dies committee, the sedition trial was a strange affair, undermined by the government’s decision to try a group of often unrelated, though generally sinister individuals grouped only by being accused of sedition, of having, as the indictment charged ‘conspired, combined, confederated and agreed together to commit acts prohibited by Section 9 of Title 18, U.S. Code (Smith Act) in that they with intent to interfere with, impair and influence the loyalty, morale and discipline of the military and naval forces of the United States would advise, counsel, urge and cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty by members of the armed forces.”[360]

The government’s goal of connecting these individuals was unrealistic. While almost these individuals were pro-Nazi, evidence of a conspiracy was lacking, and the government was unable to prove any deliberate attempt to influence members of the armed forces to be disloyal. On a practical level, putting the maniacal Mrs. Dilling on the stand rightly caused the judge to see this as detrimental to other defendants such as Dennis and Viereck, who, if Fascist and pro-Nazi, were certainly not raving. The defiance of many of the twenty-eight defendants made justice generally impossible. As Neil Johnson (probably no relation) explains in his book on Viereck:

By August 28, when a two-week adjournment was ordered for vacation, one of the defendants had died, and two had been granted motions of severance because of obstreperous conduct. Six defense lawyers and one defendant serving as his own counsel had been fined a total of $1,000 for contempt of court. One lawyer had in fact been barred from the courtroom. Some of the defendants had to be persuaded by their counselors to stop wearing grotesque false faces and signs reading ‘I am a Spy.’[361]

The trial lasted for eight months before the presiding Chief Justice Eicher finally died and a mistrial was declared. At that point 500 mistrial motions had been made by defense counselors, 18,000 pages of trial transcript had been entered and only thirty-nine of one hundred witnesses were heard. While the government attempted to retry the defendants, the U.S. District Court of Appeals struck down the indictment on the grounds that “Under the circumstances, to permit another trial, which conceivably would last more than a year, with new prosecutors and newly appointed counsel for the defendants, with the eventual outcome, in serious doubt, would be a travesty on justice.”[362]

Why Johnson really gave up his interest in Nazi Germany and in an American fascism is unclear but there are two likely possibilities. The first, Johnson’s own, is that upon realizing the true nature of the Nazi regime, Johnson was no longer able to support it and sometime after his Springfield lecture of January 27 1940, and probably before the Congressional investigation began interrogating Forum members in late August of that year, he abandoned his fascist leanings. As he explained, “I was never an America Firster, I felt we were going to get into it, and I wanted to be in the American Army.”[363]

The problem with this account in that Johnson’s essays in Social Justice and Today’s Challenge and his lectures at Philadelphia, Springfield, and New York indicate an individual convinced of his ideas. Certainly, Johnson’s January 1940 speech in Springfield, Massachusetts was fully in accord with the sentiments of the American Firsters. Why he would decide to abandon this position in spring or summer of that year when he had already spent a significant amount of time in Germany during the late 1930s and must have been able to recognize the true nature of the Nazi government quite a bit earlier is hard to understand.

A second explanation is simpler: by the late spring of 1940 it had became apparent to Johnson that the Forum was going to be investigated and some of its members might even go to jail. Johnson made the only smart move and abandoned the Forum, at some point even helping the government investigation against his former colleagues who were now only trouble for him.

That year, Johnson returned to architectural design, renovating a third apartment for himself[364] and enrolling as an architecture student in Gropius’s program at Harvard.

In what remains of this chapter, I will address the postwar reception of Johnson’s political activities and his own self (re) fashioning. So far I hope to have proved that during the 1930s, Philip Johnson was indeed a fascist, subscribing to fascist politics and actively participating in the movement. It appears that given the socioeconomic turmoil of the period both in the U. S. and abroad, Johnson believed that a fascist revolution might take place in the U. S. Driven by his will-to-power he desired not only to maintain his interest but to become an activist in the movement, apparently hoping to become one of Dennis’s in-élite. Most disturbingly however, he promoted a vision of a racially cleansed America limited to Americans of Western European descent and actively argued for antisemitism at a time when it was readily apparent that to do so was to call for the return of Jewish refugees to the terror of Nazi Germany.

The reason why it is so critically important to this dissertation is that it is so consistent with the philosophy of power that he continues to espouse to this day. As recently as 1988 Johnson explained that in his view “We[architects]’re the kept people of power. We are only the instruments of power.”[365] Perhaps Johnson’s interest in power is indeed his reason for enjoying architecture so thoroughly, as he put it, “Architecture in the main is something that is more apt to be run by popes, kings and generals than by public vote. And so I got interested in getting things done in a grand way.”[366]

While as detailed above, knowledge of Johnson’s actions in the late 1930s was widespread among historians of the Coughlinites and the American fascist movement, and Shirer’s best-selling Berlin Diaries must have alerted those who knew him of what he was up to by the early forties,[367] in architectural discourse the issue of Johnson’s Nazi activities was covered-up remarkably well, either omitting the period entirely or following the cynical model of the public secret, the tactic of acknowledgment and dismissal of the issue as irrelevant. The first acknowledgments of Johnson’s fascism in any texts on art and architecture appeared only around 1973, contemporaneous with the publication of Sheldon Marcus’s Father Coughlin. The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little Flower.

Even before publication, Marcus’s book drew attention to Johnson’s past in Israel. By the 1970s, Johnson had been involved in a number of commissions for Israeli clients. In 1972 an article by Chaviv Kna’an appeared in the leading Israeli journal Haaretz, pointing out that Marcus’s book contained evidence that Johnson, a participant in a master plan for a united Jerusalem had an antisemitic past. Kna’an wrote that Teddy Kollek, then Mayor of Jerusalem, told him he had known of Johnson’s past when Johnson was ready to participate in the project. Johnson explained to Kollek that he had been a member of Coughlin’s organization and that his views had changed after he arrived in Europe and seen the results of Hitler’s antisemitism. Of course, this is an inaccurate statement: Johnson did much of his writing for Coughlin, not to mention Today’s Challenge after he had visited Germany in 1939. No matter what his personal relations with Coughlin and Dennis, Johnson was not a German citizen writing for the dominant Nazi regime but rather an American citizen with no real obligation to be a writer for either periodical. Johnson apparently donated his services to the Jerusalem master plan and, quite ironically given his antisemitic past, for a nuclear reactor on the Shorek river.[368]

Russell Lynes’s “Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art” Good Old Modern was also published in 1973. Lynes recounted Johnson’s departure from the scene in some detail, citing the December 1934 articles from New York City newspapers and “the first the trustees heard of Johnson’s plan to quit the Museum for politics was when Nelson Rockefeller introduced Edward James Mathews, a young architect who was working on Rockefeller Center, to Johnson as the chairman of the Museum’s Department of Architecture. According to Mathews, Johnson said, ‘Oh I’m leaving in three weeks to be Huey Long’s Minister of Fine Arts.’” But Lynes made the whole affair appear to be over once Long “gave Johnson and Blackburn very short shrift” and generally exonerated Johnson, instead pinning the blame on Blackburn:

they were soon back in New York. Blackburn never returned to the Museum staff; Johnson, who many thought was Blackburn’s dupe, not only returned to the Museum but eventually became a trustee and the Museum’s official architect, a part of this portrait to be considered in its place. The trustees agreed with Abby Rockefeller that ‘every young man,’ as she said at the time, ‘is entitled to one bad mistake.’[369]

In the winter 1973 Architectural Association Quarterly, Charles Jencks’s piece “Philip Johnson — The Candid King Midas of New York Camp” appeared. Unfortunately, while Jencks raised Johnson’s fascism and even went so far as to bring up the question of the fascist appearance of the New York State Theater and the rising belief that fascism of some sort was rampant in the United States, Jencks dropped the ball very quickly by following a section in which Johnson admitted to being in Danzig where Shirer saw him with an earlier section of interview in which Johnson and Jencks agreed that most of the Modern Movement’s great architects were simply pragmatists and would take a job that no matter who would offer it to them. Bizarrely, Johnson touched on Albert Speer,

Oh, reading Speer is one of the really exciting things. Have you read the architectural section? Oh, but read the architectural part. Because Speer was an extremely sensitive man and really a businessman architect — he’d be good in America, a really great skyscraper architect, an organizer. But with this mad architect — uh — Hitler, who didn’t have any intention to run the country at all — during the war. Spent the time designing — and made the drawings himself sometimes. Oh, you must take a glance at the book.[370]

Jencks responded:

What the … HITLER! An architect? Mad architect? Somehow it made a lot of fortuitous sense as if Johnson had suddenly illuminated a whole are of the architect’s dreams, the secret desires and warped fantasies which usually cannot stand the light of day and remain hidden — even to the architect himself. But Hitler! A Thousand Year Reich…[371]

Yet just as Jencks picked up on this moment of insight into both the identity of the contemporary architect and on Johnson as archtypical contemporary architect, he sidestepped it in an analysis of Johnson’s 1963 Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery. Jencks explained that the building was clearly based on Fascist and Nazi designs of the thirties and noted Johnson’s care for his materials, but then wrote of the interior “The whole space glows with a lemon-yellow hue of gilded sunlight — honey curtains, gold carpets, golden staircase, gold-leaf lighting discs whirling above like flying saucers made out of 14 carat bullion — Johnson has this kind of failed Midas touch — everything he touches turns to gold…leaf.”[372] Johnson’s loss of heroic belief after his work with Mies led him into camp, Jencks wrote, “At best — in his self-mocking comments or his Sheldon Museum — he attains a level of candid introspection and exaggeration usually reserved as moments of truth for the court jester.”[373]

In this Jencksian light, Johnson’s reading of Speer would reveal to us a moment of truth about ourselves: the fascism that is inherent in architecture as it is constructed today and indeed, as we will see at the end of chapter three, Johnson’s fascism does indeed reveal the fascism in the identity of the architect, but Jencks in letting Johnson off as the court jester, Jencks allowed him to play one of his stock roles: Johnson not as kynic, but as cynic — revealing to us an open secret about himself: a secret that he knows we will not do anything about it. And indeed, there was no reaction to this piece in the architectural press.

Also in 1973, John W. Cook and Heinrich Klotz’s published an interview with Johnson in their book Conversations with Architects.[374] This interview was remarkable as evidence for what Johnson’s mindset was by this point, how it informed his architecture, and how for him architectural will-to-power was more important than any moral concerns about the legitimacy of any project he might build.

Johnson himself turned the interview toward the question of responsible patronage when he brought up Hitler:

Hitler…was, unfortunately, an extremely bad architect. The only thing I really regret about dictatorships isn’t the dictatorship, because I recognize that in Julius’s time and in Justinian’s time and Caesar’s time they had to have dictators. I mean I’m not interested in politics at all. I don’t see any sense to it. About Hitler  —  if he’d only been a good architect!

HK [Heinrich Klotz]: Mussolini didn’t object to good architecture.

PJ: At first. He built the Casa Fascismo in Como, a perfectly fine building. And lots of Terza Roma is good, but you can’t talk about it because it was done by Mussolini. But if you go to Rome today, you’ll find that the Terza Roma was much better than what’s been done in the Republic, in the same area, since the war. So let’s not be so fancy pants about who runs the country. Let’s talk about whether it’s good or not.

Thus, for Johnson, it appears that the ethics of patronage is irrelevant, only the quality of the design left behind, “whether it’s good or not.” This was clarified in the subsequent exchange:

JC [John Cook]: Is there a commission which you would refuse?

PJ: Of course not, I’d work for the devil himself.

JC: Are there ethical standards an architect must reflect?

PJ: There are building standards. I disobeyed them in the Epidemiology Building at Yale. That’s a sin against the Holy Ghost. The real sin is to build something that stands there and says ‘Philip Johnson’ on it and isn’t right.

JC: Not that Hitler may have commissioned it.

PJ: No! Whoever commissions buildings buys me. I’m for sale. I’m a whore. I’m an artist. What did Michelangelo say when Julius locked him up? What the hell difference does it make who locks whom up? It’s what you do when you get locked up that …

JC: When you build, let’s say, two toilets, one for black, one for white, does it matter?

PJ: My dear man, I was brought up in the South. It’s always had separate facilities. My habits and everthing conditions me to do what my client says. It never crosses my mind. Now it would, of course. Now of course, I’d object because of all the publicity, but it never crossed my mind when I was a kid that there was anything wrong when I saw two sets of toilets. It seemed very silly.

JC: But now you would?

PJ: But now I have to. I’m influenced by public opinion. I gave up the commission I had from the Governor to do the office building in Harlem, for the simple reason that I was convinced it wasn’t very good politics for a white man to do a buliding up there. As it turned out, I was more than right because the blacks won’t even let a black architect do a commission there. Wasn’t it political pressure more than moral pressure? I don’t give a damn who builds a monument for blacks. Who cares?[375]

Johnson’s racist “Who cares?” indicates that little had changed in his view of which race was superior. As for ethics, Johnson apparently believed that one only has to be accountable in the court of public opinion.

HK: Do you prefer to build for a dictator or for democracy?

PJ: Well, I prefer democracy because it’s a little easier, I think, but maybe not. A dictator might be a friend of mine. I’d prefer a democracy for a simple reason: that I would get a better chance. In the pluralistic system, there’s more chance of finding a patron. A dictator says either yes or no. If you’re on the outs, you’re out. Why did Mies leave Germany? He didn’t give a damn who was running the government, but Hitler liked pitched roofs. That’s why he left Germany. He didn’t leave in 1933. He stayed until 1937, after all.

Johnson continued to talk about Mies, saying that he wasn’t liked by the Communists — “It’s not popular now to call yourself that. Now it’s the New Left, which is much more respectable and really much sweeter, because they don’t carry guns so much. Not as aggressive.” — for his use of “silk and matching marble slabs.” Johnson then digressed on Hannes Meyer, stating that while he liked Meyer’s architecture, he didn’t like “what he said.”

You see, in those days I hated Hannes Meyer because I thought that the shit of the Neue-Sachlichkeit Weltanschauung [new objectivity as world-view] had something to do with architecture. The only mistake I made was to try to think that somehow the political opinion had something to do with the architecture. Not true at all! At that time I was just anti-functionalist, you see. I was never anti-Marxian. Who cares who runs a country! I still believe that. I loved Stalin. He was splendid because I thought he was going to bulid something. I felt as a youth that anybody that built was good. Of course, Hitler was a terrible disappointment, putting aside the social problem…

HK: But you hoped that he might…

PJ: Of course. I think it shows in my article perhaps, written for a Jewish magazine in 1940.[376]

Johnson’s remark that “Hitler was a terrible disappointment, putting aside the social problem…” is remarkable: apparently we are to believe that the Holocaust was a “social problem,” a “disappointment,” that shattered illusions. But what illusions could Johnson have had, going to Hitler’s Germany in 1939? Johnson went on to more thoroughly debunk any lingering myths of Mies’s flight from Gerbeing motivated by distaste for Hitler’s politics. Here Johnson seems not so much to attack Mies but rather to create a new myth of Mies as a true architect, just like Johnson, apolitical, or rather committed to a particular politics of architecture. During a discussion of Johnson’s project for Welfare Island, Cook asked:

JC: Are you seeking an environment which inspires people, improves them?

PJ: Reactionary! I never improved anyone. To entertain, yes. To excite, yes. Not to improve.

JC: Let’s say that excitement is improvement. It’s better than boredom.

PJ: Well, if you’re a maffioso numbers man, it would be hard to improve you, but I hope to amuse you. So the numbers man will stand on this corner and not on that. I’ve just the place for the maffioso numbers man.

HK: So, instead of killing someone, he might do something, he might even play.

PJ: Oh, nonsense. That’s improvement. He’ll go on killing his people, but I hope to amuse him in between.

HK: You’re very Nietzschean.

PJ: Well, he’s my God.

JC: But you have admitted that you are a moralist.

PJ: That’s it. And Nietzsche was. Was ist vornehm? [What is superior?] Remember those chapters in Der Wille zur Macht? In other words, vornehm to him was good. He wouldn’t dare use the word ‘good,’ but what he thought was good — aristocratic! In other words, his highest values of conduct. He had the highest, you see, but he would have denied it if you had accused him of it because he was as objective as hell. He was a moralist. So you can’t help being a moralist, as much as I pretend I’m not.[377]

But the kind of moralist Johnson was is the key: a Nietzschean moralist, for whom good was the vornehm, that which had the will-to-power. Here the interview turned to monumentality in architecture. Klotz again,

HK: In one of your articles, probably the best known one, “The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture,” you state that functionalism alone cannot create good architecture. Your effort to get away from the International Style, from the Miesian style, appears to have been a quest for a new monumentality. It seemes also that you were consciously longing for beauty independent of function. In the same article, you also state, using the words of Nietzsche, a building should express the ‘will to power,’ should be ‘will to power.’

PJ: Oratory. I read it in German. Then I found an English translation.

HK: Architecture as ‘will to power,’ doesn’t that mean monumental architecture, as we were discussing earlier?

PJ: All architecture is monumental.[378]

Johnson explained that “The word smacks of Napoleon and Hitler, and all sorts of terrible things” but that he didn’t mean to use it that way at all. Johnson then became elusive, saying that since in the U. S. “Monumentality is vorbei [passé], as it is in Germany. I use it mainly to … just to annoy.” This lead Cook to point out that Johnson’s use of the term was inconsistent and its definition was unclear. Johnson agreed: “Apparently, it is not clear at all.”

Eventually, Johnson explained: “The desire for immortality is the only proper aim. How are you going to be immortal without a monument?” [379] Thus, Johnson’s goals remained really quite consistent: he wanted to be immortal. Architecture was to express his will-to-power, be a monument to his will.

Remarkably, in the Foreword architectural historian Vincent Scully could only remark “In the interview with Philip Johnson, I find Cook and Klotz unnecessarily tedious — with their bits about travertine and Hitler and all. But everybody baits Johnson, and he asks for it and usually comes dancing through it with a fine, brittle, Balanchine-like rigor — as he does here.”[380] Cook and Klotz’s persistent questioning of Johnson — which, if anything should have been even more insistent — is bizarrely reduced to tediousness. Philip is unscathed, healthier for the experience.

In 1973, Kenneth Frampton published an introduction bracketing a reprint of three articles on architecture written by Johnson during the 1930s in Oppositions 2 (see chapter three for a discussion of Oppositions and its editors’ technique of bracketing articles) refers obliquely to Johnson’s past and then excuses it, writing

Our presentation of these hitherto little known texts by Johnson are seen in this context, for Johnson more than any other architect of his generation, entered the political arena in earnest. Despite his origin, these are the writings of a man of the Prussian Enlightenment for all that this particular moment had finally spent itself in the morass of the First World War. That Johnson’s romantic allegiance to this moment in the Thirties (the moment of Schinkel and Hegel as well as that of Mies) contributed to his involvement with fascism is by now the stuff of history. Nevertheless, it is by no means beyond the crisis of our time. Henry Ford’s peremptory dismissal notwithstanding, history is a vast wave, the breaking of which we cannot see. We cannot repudiate politics for they return to haunt us, since the intrinsically public aspect of architecture presents an inherently political object. …

…Johnson’s barely concealed distaste for the program of Die Neue Sachlichkeit, his anticipation of the new monumentality, his indifference to the culture of social welfare, his super-annuated idealism, his discomfort at the unnecessary vulgarity of cultural racism-in all this his division from Catherine Bauer, the one other American critic of modern architecture who had his respect is perfectly clear.[381]

It is also perfectly clear that in this text Frampton is either ill-informed about the extent of Johnson’s activities or is being disingenuous. As we have discussed above, in relation to the article, Johnson criticizes Schulze-Naumberg not for his “cultural racism” but for his attack on modern architecture.

Frampton’s agenda is to present the Johnson articles — all of which were originally published in architecture or art journals and were far easier to find than his hardcore fascist writing — as examples of a man thinking far ahead of his peers, anticipating the new monumentality and at the same time acknowledging the nearly-forgotten (by the 1970s) contributions of Muschenheim, Clauss and Daub, Lilly Reich and Howe and Lescaze in the formation of a new architectural sensibility. In the short biography following the introduction, there is no mention of Johnson’s support of and participation in the American Fascist movement and his time in Germany as a correspondent for Social Justice. Remarkably, Frampton, then a critic and historian appealed to an amnesiac model of history to vindicate Johnson: “his involvement with fascism is by now the stuff of history.”

Johnson’s fascism continued to pop up only to be dismissed. In 1977, Calvin Tompkins again raised Johnson’s fascism in a New Yorker profile of Johnson. Tompkins described Johnson’s involvement in fascist politics and even questioned the lack of reaction to it:

One of the interesting things about Johnson’s career is the apparent ease with which he lived down his flirtation with Fascism. The reference to him in Shirer’s best-selling book was very damaging, of course, and he lot friends over it — but only temporarily. Even his Jewish friends seemed to make allowances. Edward M. M. Warburg, a wealthy Harvard classmate whose New York apartment Johnson had done over in severe modern style in 1932, thinks that the friendships that Johnson made over there ‘crossed his wires,’ so to speak and that it was out of loyalty to these friendships that he began to entertain some of the doctrines of Nazism. ‘I think the idea that Philip was anti-Semitic at any time is impossible’ Warburg said recently. ‘Perhaps his weakness was that he didn’t react strongly enough against anti-Semitism. In any case, it never seemed to stop his relationship with me or with Lincoln Kirstein.’ In 1957, when Johnson’s political past was brought up as a possible obstacle to his election as a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III settled the matter by saying she thought that ‘every young man should be allowed to make one large mistake.’ The shadow of his mistake no doubt pursues him to this day, but, far from blighting, or even delaying, his career, it seemed to propel him into the one decision he should have taken at the start, which was to become a practicing architect.[382]

For Tompkins, Johnson’s fascism was a positive role in his life. While not condoning Johnson’s fascism, Tompkins also did not attack it, something that might not have been possible in an article for the gentile New Yorker and would have been even more difficult since Johnson was shown the article before publication and made suggestions as to its content.[383]

But if Tompkins had brought up Johnson’s fascism again, the architectural press continued to clean up for Johnson. For example, Andrea O. Dean raised the issue only to let Johnson handle it:

In 1934, Johnson suddenly abandoned his museum career for a foray into right wing politics. It is a period of his life which he discusses only partially. As Calvin Tompkins wrote in a New Yorker profile of Johnson, ‘[This] mistake seemed to propel him into one decision he should have taken at the start, which was to become a practicing architect.’ How so?

‘I was childish,’ explains Johnson. ‘I ran for the Ohio state legislature and had a lot of fun. But, I’m very poor with people, I don’t judge them properly and I don’t handle them properly. I’m much too impolitic and too direct and crude. I don’t really understand the way other people’s minds work. I miss that very much; it’s something my colleague, Mr. Pei, has in abundance. He’s a wonderful person. Nobody ever said I was a wonderful person.

‘But, anyway, I was no good in politics. So, that was a dead end and I was sitting her in New York twiddling my thumbs and said, ‘That’s a damn fool thing to do with the rest of your life.’ So, I went back to Harvard to study architecture. It was the hardest decision of my life, because I would be 15, 16 years older than the rest of the kids. That seemed awfully hard to take, but it wasn’t hard at all.[384]

Johnson’s fascist past thus became “a foray into right wing politics,” a childish incident, even if Johnson was in his thirties and had already proved quite mature in his achievements at the Museum of Modern Art.

While the 1980s were a general time of reckoning for ex-Nazis and collaborators in academia such as Paul de Man and Martin Heidegger, a discourse on Johnson’s role failed to develop. While by 1993, there had been over 300 articles published on de Man’s collaboration[385] and architecture theorist Mark Wigley had been driven to take over the terrain of the Heidegger discussion for architecture[386], public discourse on Johnson did not exist. Perhaps in late 1993 or 1994 when Franz Schulze’s critical biography of Johnson will be published we can hope for serious discussion of this issue. Even Elaine S. Hochman’s book Architects of Fortune. Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich, an attempt to attribute to architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe possible collaboration with the Nazi government, did not mention his friend Johnson’s express fascism and support of the Nazis in any way.[387]

Yet the architectural media has not been ignorant of this issue, just not interested in discussing it. Thus, ten years after Frampton’s deflection of criticism away from Johnson, the issue was again dismissed in an ode to Johnson by New York Times architecture critic Joseph Giovannini as something the architect was perfectly willing to discuss, although Giovannini apparently was only willing to dismiss:

While living in Germany, he attended Nazi rallies, with friends who were German fascists, and returned to America only after the outbreak of the War. William L. Shirer in “Berlin Diary,” published in 1941, described Mr. Johnson as an “American fascist.” No one has accused the architect of anti-Semitism, but rather of bad personal and political judgment. It is widely known in architectural circles here that the architect has given much autobiographical information about this and other aspects of his life to Mr. Eisenman, for publication after Mr. Johnson’s death.

Apparently for Giovannini this was enough: as long as we know the truth about Johnson when he is dead, then we can be comfortable with him.[388]

The first significant attempt to deal with Johnson’s fascist past was by architect and critic Michael Sorkin in a 1988 Spy magazine article.[389] A response came at a 1989 gala at the prestigious Arts Club in Chicago. Architects were invited to make critical statements about Chicago buildings, in one project, Robert Macsai took a model of Philip Johnson’s 190 S. LaSalle Street office building and turned it into a likeness of Auschwitz: adding a smokestack from which smoke curled, a flag with a swastika above the main entrance, and the motto from Auschwitz’s gate: “Arbeit Macht Frei.” On the back of the building was a slot with reprints of Sorkin’s article from the 1988 issue of Spy. The project appeared only in the Chicago Tribune, not in any architectural publication.[390] Likewise the Spy article did not receive any attention in the architectural media. John Burgee, Johnson’s partner during much of the 1970s and 1980s, responded by saying that “It’s the same old stuff rehashed. Spy’s just a little nastier…Young men make mistakes. It was a short interlude, he realized the error, and he’s always said so,” and by 1992 Johnson dismissed the entire period, saying that “I lost my mind.”[391]

Johnson’s Nazism came up again in the May 1993 issue of Vanity Fair in a preview of Schulze’s book and an interview with Johnson by Kurt Andersen, formerly editor of Spy. Even now Johnson’s attitude toward his past seems flippant. While Johnson does state that “I have no excuse [for] such utter, unbelievable stupidity. … I don’t know how you expiate guilt.” Yet, when asked today if he would have built for Hitler in 1936, Johnson replies “Who’s to say? That would have tempted anyone.”[392] Johnson seems to really say that he is making no excuses. He says that the during the time he lived in Germany, he wanted “to see what a country at war was really like” and that he “had always been interested in the German language,” and “brought up with the prejudices of my class and background and all that. I was fascinated with power.”[393] This wasn’t, however, the passing fancy of youth. Johnson’s visits in Nazi Germany took place after he had achieved some considerable status at MoMA and was not the brief infatuation of some misguided teenager but rather took up five years of his late twenties and early thirties.

And when asked about precisely what he did between 1934 and 1939, the 86-year old Johnson’s memory gets “fuzzy” according to Andersen. Schulze believes that “Philip’s memory has been affected by what has happened in the past 10 years vis-à-vis the revelations of people’s pasts in the 1930s. Paul de Man, Heidegger, T. S. Eliot … all kinds of people whose anti-Semitic statements or whose pro-Fascist statements have come to light. Since I’ve known Philip, I think he has become a little cagier, a little bit more guarded in his willingness to discuss these things. To what extent he’s flimflamming me, I don’t know. I believe that there are things about his past that he hasn’t told me. And I can’t blame him for that.”[394]

Instead, when told that the Schulze biography might attract a lot of attention, Johnson replied “Well, sex and Nazism can do that,” referring to the supposed revelations of his homosexuality and his Nazi past.[395] While Johnson’s hiding his homosexuality in the age of AIDS[396] would be considered reprehensible by some queer theorists, his implicit equation of hiding his homosexuality and hiding his Nazi past is revolting. Johnson would appear to believe that one is just as “bad” as the other, denigrating homosexuality and conversely domesticating Nazism as something that “bad boys” do. As Johnson asked the New Yorker to delete references to his homosexuality in a 1977 profile by Brendan Gill so that he would be able to get what he called the “job of my life,” the AT&T building[397], Johnson apparently expected that his Nazism ought to be covered up so that he wouldn’t get into trouble.

Johnson is vague about what he did, stating that he regrets that he was involved with politics because he was “a lousy politician. Unbelievably bad. I couldn’t make a public speech, and Huey Long was crazy. I wasted a lot of years in which I could have been designing.”[398] Yet Huey Long is rather safe: the Kingfish, as far as he is remembered, is a part of Americana. Johnson is not interested in talking about his activities in Nazi Germany, his activities for a Nazi-funded propaganda movement expressly aimed to convince the American people that Germany wasn’t the enemy. There is absolutely no gesture toward his past behavior unless he is confronted by direct questioning, nothing even as paltry as a letter to an architectural magazine regretting his past action. Johnson still seems to be upset that the whole matter was ever mentioned and still appears to hope that it will all be forgotten so that we can get down to the business of appreciating him for his role as architect and patron.[399]

Lingering hopes that Johnson’s past and its impact on his role in the discipline could be discussed openly diminished later in 1993 with Herbert Muschamp’s article “A Man Who Lives in Two Glass Houses,” a kick-off to a new wave of Johnson-praising publications.[400] As mentioned in chapter one, when he was a young architect Muschamp attained some notoriety with his polemical critique of the profession of architecture File Under Architecture, and after he replaced Johnson’s friend Paul Goldberger as the regular architecture critic for The New York Times, his columns seemed remarkably candid and ready to criticize the profession and establishment. But in his article on Johnson, Muschamp appears to have capitulated to the long-standing tradition of Johnson-admiration at the Times.

Muschamp begins his article by pointing to early German modernists’ hopes in the cleansing power of glass to lead to a new society of transparency, “a light-filled realm of freedom and candor.” If Johnson’s New Canaan Glass House represents a literal translation of these hopes of transparency, Muschamp points to another more phenomenal version of the Glass House that also exists for Johnson: “the fishbowl of fame that he has inhabited most of his life.” Muschamp argues that “Even those who detest Johnson and his architecture will grant his disarming candor. Always quicker than his critics to concede his faults, Johnson long ago perfected the art of self-deprecation as a shield against attacks by others. When an architect routinely belittles his own work, calls himself a whore and makes no secret of the fascist sympathies that overtook him in the 1930’s, where’s the fun in trying to take him down a peg or two?”[401] But Muschamp overstates the case: Johnson belittles his own work so that others will find it pointless to do so but also so that he can position himself not as an architect but as a great trendsetter; Johnson calls himself a whore because to him the ideal architect is a whore, which he defines as an instrument of power unmediated[402]; and as I have already pointed out, to say that Johnson makes “no secret of his fascist sympathies” is simply not accurate. Muschamp praises this phenomenal transparency in Johnson’s behavior. While he does temper his treatment of Johnson by indicting him for his abandonment of the social implications of architecture, Muschamp ultimately concludes that Johnson’s Glass House (whether it is the literal or the phenomenal Glass House, Muschamp doesn’t say) deserves emulation by the new breed of socially oriented architects because, “For more than 40 years it has been a showcase for qualities of mind that remain exemplary: curiosity, pragmatism, the ability to conceive order and also to question it, receptivity to new ideas along with skepticism that salvation lies with any one of them, and the freedom to imagine forms of architecture even Philip Johnson never dreamed of.”[403]

After graduating from Harvard in 1943, Johnson went into the army for two years. He served as Private First Class Philip Johnson at Fort Belvoir, Virginia as a latrine orderly.[404] It appears that even with Johnson’s fluent German, he was not to be trusted with a more responsible task such as translation, work in the intelligence service (a sort of Harvard club by this point), or an assignment overseas. Still, it would be better than the fate of the innocent Japanese-Americans interned in concentration camps during the war.[405] Of the experience Johnson concluded recently, “It was awfully good for me, you see. I was so goddamned snobbish. A spoiled brat you see.”[406]

After the end of the war, Johnson began reconstructing his life, working on his (literal) Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut and his (phenomenal) glass house of fame. Understanding the Glass House is critical to a better understanding of Johnson. As Eisenman puts it, “Johnson is at his most opaque when he is speaking of himself — the historian speaking of the architect, the critic reviewing his own book, the architect presenting his house.” The best place to start searching for the opacity, the materiality of the Glass House is thus to turn to Johnson’s own presentation of it to the public in the September 1950 issue of the English journal Architectural Review. Johnson’s article consisted of a series of images with explanations by Johnson. Not all the images were of the Glass House, instead, the first ten images were of what Johnson cited as its precedents: the approach from Le Corbusier’s 1931 Farm Village Plan, Schinkel’s Casino in Glienicke Park, and from Choisy’s plan and perspective of the Acropolis; formal influences from paintings by van Doesburg and Malevitch; and purity from Claude Nicholas Ledoux’s Maison des Gardes Agricoles and Mies van der Rohe’s ideal arrangement of the Illinois Institute of Technology and Farnsworth House. Thus much as Sigfried Giedion did for Walter Gropius in his Space, Time, and Architecture, Johnson established his work as drawing together formal moments from history. Jeffrey Kipnis suggests that Johnson’s essay on the Glass House was the first architect’s essay to be equal in status to the work. This “coequivalence between theory and design” in the Glass House essay was, Kipnis argues, responsible for the new symbiosis of theory and practice in the works of architects such as Robert Venturi, Leon Krier, Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman.[407] However, by reducing history to a slide-show of formal events, Johnson’s photo essay effectively eliminates it. The materiality of the image, the context that lies in between the slides is never examined. History, in Johnson’s essay is about image, not materiality.

After the historical images deriving a lineage for his house, Johnson offered images of the Glass House with captions explaining its different elements. Under a picture of the house illuminated at night, Johnson wrote:

The cylinder, made of the same brick as the platform from which it springs, forming the main motif of the house was not derived from Mies, but rather from a burned-out wooden village I saw once where nothing was left but the foundations and chimneys of brick. Over the chimney I slipped a steel cage with a glass skin. The chimney forms the anchor.[408]

Since Johnson spent the war in the United States, it would appear that Johnson must have seen this village during his trip into Poland in 1939, the countryside of which he explained in his article for Social Justice, was full of Jews. Was this a village of Jews?

The form of the chimney itself raises questions: a cylinder, a much more industrial form than the rectangular form that one would use in a house. While of course a cylinder is formally much more dynamic than a rectangle within a rectangle, form alone did not have to determine Johnson’s chic. Could this choice of form have been deliberate, to refer to the chimneys of the crematoria that Johnson must have known about by the time he built the house? And does caging the chimney have a meaning, possibly implying protection or rebuilding? And if Johnson is obliquely referring to a crematoria, not to a village, what does it mean that the chimney is a working one with a shower inside of it?[409]

Johnson’s statement that the chimney/cylinder was “made of the same brick as the platform from which it springs” also requires analysis. The idea of this chimney rising from the ground, literally from the ashes of the burnt-out village, would appear to refer to a phoenix, but the phoenix of what? Possible answers might be the rebirth of Johnson himself, of the Jews after the Holocaust, or alternatively, of Germany after the war, perhaps even a rebirth of fascism. Complicating matters is that this is could also refer not to a phoenix but to an organic metaphor that could be either innocuous or even sinister use. In his book The Face of the German House, Schultze-Naumberg, the theorist of cultural racism in architecture who Johnson found disagreeable, explained that the German house

gives one the feeling that it grows out of the soil, like one of its natural products, like a tree that sinks its roots deep in the interior of the soil and forms a union with it. It is this that gives us our understanding of home [Heimat], of a bond with blood and earth [Erden] for one kind of men [this is] the condition of their life and the meaning of their existence.[410]

If this wasn’t enough to make our interpretation of the cylinder/chimney seems to collapse under the weight of possible meanings, what could Peter Eisenman mean when he wrote

How are we to interpret such a metaphor? Who builds a house as a metaphoric ruin? Why the burnt-out village as a symbol of one’s own house? But further, that Johnson should reveal the source of his imagery seems the most telling of all: the Glass House is Johnson’s own monument to the horrors of war. It is at once a ruin and also an ideal model of a more perfect society; it is the nothingness of glass and the wholeness of abstract form. How potent this image will remain long after all of us have gone, as a fitting requiem for both a man’s life and his career as an architect! I know of no other architect’s house that answers so many questions, has such a symbiotic relationship with personal atonement and rebirth as an individual.

In a more general context, the Glass House prefigures for me the parallel anxiety of post-World War II architecture. It remains the last pure form, the final gesture of a belief in a humanism so debilitated by the events of 1945. And at the same time it contains, in the image of that ruin, the seeds of a new conception of an architecture that is not for the reification of an anthropomorphic man, but exhibits a more relativistic condition, a parity between man and his object world.[411]

But Eisenman’s evocation of atonement and rebirth was in an introduction to Johnson’s collected writings,probably approved of by Johnson before publication and the question of both audience (Johnson? those who know Johnson’s past? those who don’t? a future audience after the revelation of his past?) and author (Eisenman? Eisenman + Johnson? even Johnson?) only serves to overdetermine the passage, already written in a coded language. But the mention of an ideal society raises another issue: if the Glass House itself is a “monument of a more perfect society,” what society would this be? Certainly, as I discussed above, Johnson has shown no interest in transforming society through architecture. Eisenman depicts the Glass House as the representation of a perfect, rational society — represented by the completely symmetrical glass and steel structure — with the horror of war — the chimney, a major moment of asymmetry — inside it. Could this be the project of Johnson’s fascism in built form?[412]

On the other hand, confining one’s reading to Johnson’s caption from his Architectural Review articleleads to another conclusion: Johnson is notmaking any statement about the horrors of war, but rather he is making a statement about the architect’s eye. Faced with the terrible sight of the burned-out wooden village, Johnson does not care what happened to the people who lived there: all he cares about is the form he sees.

Indeed, Johnson’s postwar writings and lectures have been devoted to a rising tenor of apoliticism coupled with formalism. But one can never really be apolitical for being apolitical is a political stand in itself as we can see in a 1960 talk to the Architectural Association in London in which he drew a parallel between politics and architecture in the 1920s and 1930s:

In Rotterdam in 1925 I saw my first Neo-Plasticist building, and for the first time I found everything serene, simple, and uncluttered. Primary little colors were things that one could defend. One could defend the straight line. One could, and one did, feel passionately about things, as about politics in the thirties. All my friends were members of the Communist Party then, or close to it. They do not mention those things now! It is a great help in life if one can feel passionately about things. I am too far gone in my relativistic approach to the world to care very much about labels. I have no faith in anything.[413]

Johnson’s companion Alan Blackburn is omitted and one has to question whether Johnson really had no friends among the Coughlinites, Dennis supporters, and outright American and German Nazis that he met? By saying that all his friends were members of the Communist Party and now don’t mention it, Johnson deflects any question of his own historical culpability. Johnson’s neutrality wasn’t neutral, on the contrary, it was a turn toward cynicism: away from the straight line toward not having faith in anything, a calculated, cynical means of avoiding a confrontation with his own history.

As Johnson implicitly pointed out in the lecture at the Architectural Association, for him architecture and politics actually did go hand in hand. If he purported to abandon politics, he also moved away from his mentor, Mies van der Rohe. Instead, Johnson turned his architectural interests toward an obsession with historical eclecticism, calling himself a “violently anti-Miesian … traditionalist” in 1959 and basing his architecture on his dictum that “We cannot not know history.” But this statement of reaction against the amnesiac force of modernity wasn’t what it seemed. Johnson didn’t want real historical investigation, any digging that might uncover shaky foundations. Rather, he said, “I try to pick up what I like throughout history.”[414] Johnson’s approach to history was formal: picking up what he liked for its visual properties and discarding the rest. “We cannot not know history,” in this case did not refer to his own historical culpability, but rather was served to point to a history of image that he could pick from as he liked.

But returning to Johnson as a lecturer, if he was in demand as a lecturer for the American Fellowship Forum back in the 1930s, he was again in demand as a lecturer from the 1940s through the early 1960s (and would once more be in demand from 1976 on). The form of these lectures is themselves architectural, as Vincent Scully has explained:

we might argue that Johnson’s lectures (in which medium most of the ideas in his writings originally took shape) have on the whole been even more effective and influential than his buildings. The latter, it is true, have some special qualities, essentially humanistic ones; moderate scale and a general air that can only be described as taut and tasteful. The lectures, though much in the same clear and deceptively brittle mode, have more body and bite to them. They are, perhaps paradoxically, more physical than the buildings; they project the kind of primitive architectural dance that the buildings tend to lack. They can, for example, make an audience experience architecture’s spatial physicality by situating its members in space with an intense physical awareness of familiar lecture halls that they never had before. I can vividly remember Johnson doing exactly that in malevolent old Room 100 at Yale in 1947. Now, in the 1970’s, he is still the only lecturer who can make Rudolph’s terrifying Hastings Hall behave. He stands right in the middle of the deadly perspective and at once sanctions and controls it. Taking up something equivalent to the fourth ballet position in which Rigaud painted Louis XIV, he forces the concrete masses back and keeps them there. He invokes architecture by his presence even more than by his words. He is so good at controlling an audience that he can be a shameless demagogue when the mood hits him.[415]

In other words, Johnson’s lectures, if we are to take Scully at his word, are themselves a Nietzschean architecture based on one man’s will-to-power. Indeed Scully’s description of one man at perspectival center projecting “the primitive architectural dance,” not by his words but by his presence, riveting the audience in its own space, its presence and thus capable of controlling seems to be almost too close to a description of a fascist spectacle.

At the same time, Johnson continued to cultivate the phenomenal Glass House of fame. Johnson continued to work at MoMA, where his assistant was the young Ada-Louise Huxtable, who would later, after being recommended for the job by Johnson, become The New York Times’s architecture critic.[416] For a time Johnson was unable to return to his position as the official director of the department of architecture and design, telling Peter Blake, who would become the curator, that “some of my trustees can’t forget my Nazi past and would resign if I become the official director of the department.” Blake added, “We maintained the fiction — I was the head of the department of Architecture and Industrial Design, and Philip was a sort of unofficial consultant. Nobody, needless to say, was fooled.”[417] In 1947 however, Blake left the Museum and Johnson was able to rejoin the staff formally as Director of the department and stayed there until 1954 when he hand-picked Arthur Drexler, the department’s curator since 1951, as his successor.[418]

All the while, Johnson maintained his contacts among patrons, artists and architects, running teas for students and professors at Yale and elaborate lunches at the Glass House for the cosmopolitan vanguard such as Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham, and Andy Warhol and high society such as George Balanchine, Lincoln Kirstein, Mrs. Bliss Parkinson, Edward M. M. Warburg and eventually Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. As Johnson expanded his network of high society contacts and as MoMA grew to become the world’s most important showplace of contemporary art,[419] Johnson was able to become among the biggest power brokers in the art world. By the late 1950s, being liked by Johnson meant that an artist had achieved a significant coup and being bought by Johnson mean that the artist had established himself. Johnson’s unique position can be gauged from a remark by a dealer that Johnson would be the only collector he would give a fifty-percent discount to, saying “I’d give that to get an artist in his collection.”[420]

In 1966, Johnson put together a book about his own work which he then reviewed for Architectural Forum. Beyond the curiosity of Johnson reviewing a book he made about himself, however, Johnson laid out how he meant the book to be received. With its “paper heavy, lots of color, generous type, excellent cover design,” it would make “Cocktail tables look handsome…” While Johnson refused to evaluate his own work, he argued that “the value of this book…is the new way of showing architecture,” through brilliant Technicolor. “The text,” written by his old friend Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Johnson exclaimed “is faultless. … a lucid, critical essay that well might stand as a paradigm for the monographs on living architects. Although commissioned by Johnson, he indulges in no hyperbole. He says something in each sentence, and what he disapproves of, what he finds positively ugly, he mentions not at all. He accentuates the positive without flattery or sycophancy.”[421]

Thus in his review, Johnson explained precisely what he wanted out of a monograph on an architect: to be visually seductive and to have a text in it that would say something, neither obviously flattering nor attacking the work. Significantly though, Johnson does not show any interest in what the text says. For him, the spectacle of saying something is enough. What is said is irrelevant, except that the book must neither disapprove of the architect’s work nor flatter it.

Johnson’s book, however, marked an end point: from 1966 until 1972, Johnson seemed to disappear from the architectural vanguard. Instead, having formed a firm with John Burgee, he attracted massive commercial commissions such as the 1968-73 IDS Center in Minneapolis and the 1972-76 Pennzoil Place in Houston.[422] And although Johnson also continued to work behind the scenes as the Director of the Architectural League of New York with the Lindsay administration and had a television show “Eye on New York,” he became increasingly unpopular at universities. As the energy of the late sixties led students to question the validity of architecture as a discipline, they turned toward external sources, such as the work of Buckminster Fuller, and rejected Johnson. Robert A. M. Stern condescendingly explained:

The reality of the matter is that in the unintelligible brutalizing of educational goals and standards which accompanied the, for me, rather more intelligible protests by university students and faculties over political situations at home and abroad in the time between Vietnam and Watergate, Johnson became persona non grata at most campuses. While architecture students mindlessly groped through a period of virulent anti-professionalism, of street-corner surveys, and courses in “how-to-build-your-own-yurt,” Johnson came to be regarded as the enemy. All that articulate intelligence, cunning wit, and a much too substantial corpus of work alienated him from a generation of students who believed that those were precisely the most irrelevant attributes and achievements an architect could possess. Willing though the students of the late sixties were to sit for six, eight, nine befogged hours before a Buckminster Fuller, they would not offer even a quarter of an hour to Johnson, because they sensed in advance that Johnson knew about Fuller and knew about architecture, and could and would tell them about the differences between the two.[423]

For the first time since he was a fascist, Johnson was not a hero.

I don’t understand why we can’t have dinner with whom we want to, but everybody makes it out as if we’re making a goats-and-sheep out of it. Jealous. Jealous. Jealous.

— Philip Johnson[424]

In 1976, ten years after his decline in popularity began, Johnson remade himself once again, this time as the wise mentor of the next generation of architectural celebrities. By recruiting his “kids” to bring him back into the public eye, Johnson would set the stage for his greatest period of fame and power in the field. By 1979, his writings — minus the articles for Social Justice and Today’s Challenge — had been published as an elegant book, a number of articles in the vanguard architectural journal Oppositions had been dedicated to him, he was the subject of an exhibit and catalog at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies, on the cover of Time magazine as the representative of “American Architects: Doing Their Own Thing,” and had won the A.  I.  A. Gold Medal, as well as the very first Pritzker Prize, an international award roughly equivalent to an architectural Nobel. At the same time, his new firm Johnson/Burgee was a financial success with a number of major skyscrapers to their credit. As Johnson put it, “When Neimee gives you the Cartee Blanchee, by God you know you’ve arrived.”[425] Johnson was unrivaled. He succeeded in designing his own life. His will-to-power had won Johnson fame and almost certainly that place in the history-books that he so desired.

The kids Johnson had befriended appeared not so much as a group, but as the vanguard of American architecture, divided by debate into two polemically opposed groups: the Whites and the Grays, a grouping which retrospectively has appeared to prefigure the division between (late or neo-) Modernism and Postmodernism and has been cited seen as a turning point for American architectural discourse, towards real debate and discussion.[426] Underneath this opposition, however, lay the alliances of power in the vanguard.

In this chapter we will examine Johnson’s rise to power and the symbiotic relationship he has had with the architects he calls his kids. As with Johnson’s fascist past, discussed in the last chapter, so too the question of the architectural vanguard’s dominance by the circle of Johnson and his kids has barely been mentioned in architecture, although it is accepted as an operating assumption by many architects, especially those involved in academia and trying to create vanguard work. After explaining the conspiracy of the kids, i. e. who the kids were, how they came to be so influential and how they worked with Johnson to become architectural celebrities, we will analyze why this has been repressed and show that this gossiping about this conspiracy of the kids points back to the question of agency.

Before they were Johnson’s kids the handful of members of the generation that graduated architectural school around 1960 and comprised a vanguard of cardboard architecture — most notably Stern and Eisenman — used the media, both internal and external to architecture to promote their own work and the work of other members of the vanguard and managed to obtain a remarkable degree of influence over the perception of their generation in architectural discourse.

The first of the kids to take advantage of the media and the first to make the all-important connection with Philip Johnson was Robert Stern. In his mid-twenties, Stern attended Yale’s architecture school where he met Johnson, a frequent visitor and critic. Johnson and Stern became friends, as one of Stern’s roommates from Yale explained: “You’re in your early twenties, and there’s this Gatsby-like figure with pots of money who’s helping you find work, and you can’t help but be seduced.” Stern benefited from Johnson’s patronage and Johnson would often call up Stern at the studio in order to ask him to do research for him.[427]

Thus when he became editor of the Yale department of architecture’s student journal Perspecta’s double issue 9/10, Stern was able to draw upon financial support from Johnson, who had previously been published within Perspecta. The money was not misplaced: published in 1965 the issue immediately became an important landmark in architectural discourse by containing pre-publication excerpts of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, an essay by the rising architectural star Charles Moore, historians Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Vincent Scully. “Whence and Wither: The Processional Element in Architecture” by Johnson appeared in the journal at Stern’s request.[428] The level of sustained thinking about architecture in the journal was a remarkable event in American architecture at the time, drawing considerable attention to its young editor.[429]

Upon graduating, Stern, then twenty-six, was appointed Program Director of the Architectural League of New York by Johnson, who had created the post in order to inject life into the League. Again, Johnson was not disappointed, as Program Director, Stern organized exhibits of work by the rising stars of the profession: Charles Moore, Robert Venturi and Mitchell/Giurgola.[430] But Stern’s most significant move as Program Director of the Architectural League was, with funding from the American Federation of the Arts and more help from Johnson, to put on the show 40 Under 40 in the galleries of the Federation during 1966, send it on a nationwide tour and publish its catalog. Deriving the title from a show organized by the League in 1941, Stern attempted to define a new generation whose time had come.[431] The show consisted of forty projects (not forty architects) by architects under forty years of age selected by Stern with Johnson’s supervision, then chairman of the Current Work Committee of the Architectural League.[432]

Not all of the architects in 40 Under 40 became well known, but it is remarkable that so many future architectural celebrities were present, even if they were not to be heard from in press again for years (one major exception would be John Hejduk, who Stern says he immediately regretted not including[433]): Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, Charles Moore, Jaquelin Robertson, Werner Seligmann, Stern himself (included at Johnson’s insistence), Stanley Tigerman and Robert Venturi. By then Meier and especially Moore and Venturi, were already well-known and their inclusion served to legitimate the other, less well-known architects. Many of these architects knew each other, working and teaching in the New York City area: Tigerman and Stern had been at Yale together, where Charles Moore was had recently become the head of the architecture department, Stern had worked as a designer in Meier’s office from 1965-1966,[434] Eisenman was Meier’s cousin and had known him since high school and both had taught at Princeton with Michael Graves.[435] Thus 40 Under 40 served to map a network of connections among young (principally New York city-based) architects.

Stern’s goal in 40 Under 40 was to define a new generation in architecture, historically locating it in relation to what came before. Stern argued that in the architecture of the new generation one could see Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto and Louis I. Kahn as dominant influences. From Aalto, the influence was his mature works: Baker House at M. I. T., the Town Hall at Saynatsalo, and the cultural center at Wolfsburg. Kahn’s influence was in terms of thought–processes and compelling images. Significantly, in what was an allusion to Richard Meier’s formally stunning Smith House,[436] Stern wrote that it was not Corbusier’s recent beton brut work that inspired the new generation but rather his work of the 1920s and 1930s, leading them toward what Stern called “cardboard architecture,” which was, he wrote, “for many the order of the day with an almost fanatical zeal being shown by some to re–create not only the spirit of an earlier architecture but also its monuments.” In terms of philosophy, Stern saw Venturi’s complex and contradictory architecture and the writings of Charles Moore and his partner Donlyn Lyndon as related and important new statements that also provided imagery to the new generation.[437] In citing Moore and Lyndon, Stern was alluding to a position he shared with them in which architecture would be defined as the making of places through form, rejecting any attempt to make architectural design determined by structural or functional requirements.[438] Stern summed up “the aims and ideals of the forty under forty” in one paragraph :

an architecture responsible to program, yet one that casts aside the shibboleths of functional and structural determinism in favor of a frank recognition of the primacy of form; an architecture which seeks to accommodate the often conflicting demands of urbanistic responsibility and specific program and not gloss over one or the other.[439]

Thus, along with the previous allusion to Moore and Lyndon, Stern established a defining characteristic of the new architecture: a primacy of form over function and structure. What consolation architecture would give to its context would come from form. The reference to “shibboleths” probably refers to Johnson’s then-unpublished essay on “The Seven Shibboleths of Our Profession,” (1962) in which Johnson indicted contemporary modern architecture’s preoccupation with functional and structural determinism, the same shibboleths that Stern would argue against.

Stern concluded his introduction in a curious manner, stating that “for the first time in fifty years there appears to be no revolution in architecture.” The significance of this statement remains vague, but can probably best be read in the context of Stern’s intent for 40  Under  40 as a polemic against two articles: Henry–Russell Hitchcock’s “The Evolution of Wright, Mies, and Le Corbusier,”[440] in Perspecta 1 and Adolf Placzek’s “Youth and Age in Architecture” in the Stern-edited Perspecta 9/10.[441]

In his article, Hitchcock defended the commonplace that the architect should not expect recognition until after age forty, arguing that even though Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier ended their formal training early, they were not yet mature and hence they voluntarily subjected themselves to a period of investigation within classical architecture, a period that, Hitchcock wrote, served as a “needed corrective to a rebellious romanticism.”[442] From its context in one of the first issues of one of the first university-affiliated journals of architecture in the United States, it appears that Hitchcock’s condescending tone arose from an assumption that his audience in a student journal would be over-eager students needing to be brought down to earth by his wise admonishments.[443] Students, he wrote should realize that even the great masters did not achieve their first masterpieces until age 35 for Wright, 39 for Le Corbusier, and 43 for Mies. “Their message is only too obvious,” Hitchcock expounded, “so all I will say to you in conclusion is: ‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry.”[444]

By the time of Stern’s Perspecta 9/10, the general tone of the articles indicated an understanding that the journal would be read not only by students but also by other architects and academics. Historian Adolf K. Placzek, encouraged by Stern to encounter the Hitchcock article and test its claims outside of architecture,[445] found it valid, arguing in contrast to the other arts, greatness in architecture is never achieved until middle age because of the stern requirements of the discipline, namely the responsibility to material realities of function and structure and the need to develop a network of social contacts for patronage.[446] Yet while Placzek didn’t point it out, the latter requirement could be alleviated by the beneficence of a well-connected patron, a method Stern was testing out at precisely the same time.

Perhaps then, Stern’s remark about there not being a revolution in architecture could be extrapolated to mean that if there was no revolution, one did not have to start from scratch but rather could build on the existing order and on what one’s predecessors had left and if there were no revolution then patronage relations would be left intact, for the new generation to plug into.

While Stern says that he believed that he was having the first and last word on the subject,[447] and indeed 40 Under 40 accurately mapped the players of the new generation, the shape of that terrain had begun to shiftas groups and alliances formed within it. The most important of these groups was the Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment (CASE), formed prior to 40 Under 40, in the fall of 1964, while Stern — who was never to be a member — was still in graduate school. The first meeting was held in Princeton and organized by Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves, then both faculty members there, and included Stanford Anderson and Henry Millon from MIT, Michael McKinnell, the co-victor (along with is with his firm Kallmann, McKinnell, and Knowles) of the most prestigious recent competition in the States, that of the Boston City Hall, Eisenman’s teacher at Columbia[448] and a representative of what his partner Gerhard Kallmann called “action architecture,”[449] historian Vincent Scully from Yale and the young architects Robert Venturi, Tim Vreeland, Richard Meier, Jaquelin Robertson, and Giovanni Pasanella. After the first meeting however, McKinnell, Venturi and Scully would not come again. In retrospect, Eisenman sees Venturi’s failure to come as the beginning of a split in American architecture that still holds today, isolating Venturi from the mainstream of architectural discourse.[450]

Eisenman, the ostensible leader, explained CASE’s significance in an interview in the early 1980s: “Probably every leading architect of our generation in this country was at one time or another involved in that group. We were all young and wet behind the ears. We would meet in the country with no publicity and talk about architecture. … That group honed our capacity to criticize one another. We had nothing to lose. There was no camera on us. Nobody knew we were doing it. It wasn’t only for the initiated; it wasn’t an ‘in’ group. We were doing it because we wanted to get together.”[451]

But in retrospect, a certain conspiratorial air did surround CASE: after Venturi’s departure after the first meeting, CASE became more and more of an exclusive group. As Eisenman explains, the meetings were held undercover and were closed to the public, CASE was, he writes, “more like a secret society…for the benefit of its members…an unknown group”[452] than the publicity-conscious model architectural group of the early 1960s Team X, which also followed the European avant-garde, at least in propensity for publicity and manifesto.

A number of other individuals became associated with CASE over the five years during which it continued to meet, among them Kenneth Frampton, a young architectural critic brought in from England to serve on the editorial board of a proposed CASE publication that never came to fruition. CASE’s goals became evident rather quickly. According to Frampton, CASE was motivated by “a quite conscious intention to establish a movement” on the grounds of a re-reading of the European avant-garde as opposed to what he called “the very empirical post-Kahnian position of the time” in which Kahn’s followers were unable to take up his investigations and proceed with them in an original way.[453]

Of the other members of CASE, Colin Rowe became the spiritual leader of CASE due to his role as the catalyst in the re-reading of the architectural avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930, which he had begun with his article on “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,” of Le Corbusier and Andreas Palladio and more significantly the article on “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal” discussed in chapter one and as part of an English connection for CASE. Rowe had recently returned from England, where he and his old friend Jim Stirling, Thomas Stevens, and Robert Maxwell (who would eventually come to the United States and become the head of the Princeton architecture department) were involved in research along roughly the same lines.[454] The English connection was in large part through Eisenman, who had written his dissertation at the University of Cambridge, with the aid of among others Rowe and Anthony Vidler, then a student at Cambridge who eventually came to the United States in the 1970s and would work on Eisenman and Frampton’s journal Oppositions as an architectural critic and historian.[455]

In 1967 two public exhibitions served to establish CASE’s direction for the rest of its existence. The Museum of Modern Art show “The New City” publicly displayed an attempt to re-read the European avant-garde and to re-think the possibilities of an urbanistic interest in architecture.[456] The other show, John Hejduk and Robert Slutzky’s “Diamond Exhibition” was held at the Architectural League, perhaps a way for Stern to apologize for his omission of Hejduk from 40 Under 40.[457]

The New City exhibit is remarkable principally for being one of the last moments in which the architectural vanguard allied itself with government social policy. Yet it was also an attempt to deal with the fading role of architecture on the urban scene. The New York City Planning Commission had finally decided to abandon it thirty-year attempt to design a master physical plan for the city. In its place would be ‘process planning,’ involving the use of cost-benefit programming and computer simulation techniques to achieve urban planning that would be independent of architecture and urban design.[458]

With the co-sponsorship of New York City Mayor John Lindsay, the Museum of Modern Art’s Architecture and Design Department under Arthur Drexler commissioned a major response to the Planning Commission: a set of four studies meant, according to Drexler, to illustrate what architects and urban planners believed could be done with the city. The shared design goals, Drexler argued, were a belief in deriving design from the immanent conditions of the city: “to elicit urban form from the character of the place, the time, the institutions and the people.”[459]

The scale of the project was massive, choosing to demonstrate urban design on the one part of Manhattan that could be exhibited in MoMA without raising fears among the museum’s patrons for the continued existence of their homes: an area roughly contiguous to the heart of Harlem from 96th street to 155th street from the Hudson River to the East River also including the very southern tip of the Bronx and Randalls and Ward Islands.

In order to explore these issues, the museum commissioned four teams — composed of a remarkable percentage of CASE’s membership — each corresponding to a university: Cornell, Columbia, Princeton, and MIT. The Cornell team, composed of Colin Rowe, Thomas Schumacher, Jerry Wells, and Fred Koetter proposed something that would, textually at least, anticipate Rowe and Koetter’s later Collage City, a deliberate attempt to mediate between two existing conditions of city existing there: the traditional city, “a solid mass of building with spaces carved out of it” and the modern city “an open meadow within which isolated buildings are placed” carved out of the fabric by earlier mechanisms of urban renewal.[460] The Columbia team, Jaquelin Robertson, Richard Weinstein, Giovanni Pasanella, Jonathan Barnett, and Myles Weintraub suggested a megastructure over the open railroad tracks running the length of Park Avenue from 97th to 134th street to simultaneously relieve the area of a major blight and provide a new focus. The Princeton team, Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves, also submitted two megastructures, this time located on the Hudson river, one combining a stadium above a sewage disposal plant, a research center for Columbia and/or CUNY, the other a conference and convention center and hotel, with a public plaza rotated into it for good measure. The MIT team, Stanford Anderson, Robert Goodman, and Henry A. Millon, submitted a project to reshape the geography along the Harlem and East Rivers, creating in the process three new lakes for boating and swimming and which would serve as focal points for redevelopment efforts.

In all four cases, hope was expressly held out for the transformational possibility of renewal. Drexler offered his opinion that “technically and economically” the projects were feasible and “their cost compares favorably with a few months of modern warfare.”  [461]

Not everyone was agreed that the New City was really concerned with social welfare. A direct attack came in the March 1967 issue of Architectural Forum, where C. Richard Hatch, executive director of the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH) wrote “God knows we need to be shaken out of our apathy in the face of increasing urban decay, but the present group of projects will not do it because they do not contain the important elements of utopian plans — a strong idea about the function of a place in the total fabric, and about the way men might live together — or the strength of detail required by practical proposals.”[462] In all cases, Hatch wrote, an over-eager will to form took precedence over any consideration for the existing inhabitants of Harlem. Instead, the projects tended to create ‘solutions’ by inserting new functions for an area that would display existing jobs and people, in today’s language: gentrification. In the New City, the transformational potential of the architecture on society was converted, as was so much of modern architecture in the United States, from a relation of mutual transformation between architecture and society to a more complete symbiosis between architecture and capital. Hatch’s stern critique may have given the impetus for Drexler, and perhaps by implication Eisenman and Graves, to abandon any pretense of social reform at all by the time of Five Architects, as we will see below.

While the New City exhibition was intended as a rereading of the avant-garde, a more formal rereading was given by the Hejduk and Slutzky show “The Diamond and the Square.” The exhibit, consisting of a series of paintings on the theme of the square by Slutzky and houses by Hejduk that originated from rotated squares and triangles, ending in diamond configuration intentionally reminiscent of Mondrian’s paintings. Hejduk’s work, while ostensibly architecture, did not appear constructable at all. Rather, it marked a rereading of the architectural avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s in terms of form motivated by the visual logic advocated by Rowe and Slutzky in their earlier “Transparency” essay.[463]

Yet where Rowe and Slutzky organized their essay around shallow space motivated by its two-dimensional origins in painting, Hejduk turned it on end to achieve an even greater two-dimensionality, or cardboard-ness. As he explains in a text that accompanied the publication of the Diamond Houses in 1969.

…When a square form in plan is drawn in isometric, it appears to the eye as a three-dimensional projection. When more than one floor plan is projected in isometric, it builds up quite naturally and still appears as a three-dimensional representation. When the diamond is drawn in isometric and has a plan of more than one floor, a very special phenomenon occurs. The forms appear two-dimensional; the stories overlap each other in primary two-dimensional vision. The form tips forward in isometric towards the picture plane; they are three-dimensional yet a stronger reading of two-dimensionality predominates.[464]

The aftermath of the New City and Diamond and the Square exhibitions resulted in the final chapter of CASE, the emergence of a splinter group that as Frampton has explained was “committed to a re-reading of the European avant-garde in terms that were quite strongly formal.”[465] Thus in 1968,[466] the splinter group held CASE Seven in MoMA, with Eisenman, Graves, and Meier in attendance together with a number of individuals who had not previously been involved with CASE: Hejduk and Slutzky, Charles Gwathmey (who had taught at Princeton with Graves[467] and whose own re-reading of the European avant-garde in his house and studio on Long Island were beginning to attract attention in the architectural media), Arthur Drexler, James Stirling, and Joseph Rykwert.[468] Arthur Drexler, as Director of MoMA’s Architecture and Design department, played the role of the sponsor and indeed would be the patron of New York CASE and their successors the New York Five until Johnson took over that role in the mid-seventies. Kenneth Frampton, then visiting from England, gave an introductory critique and Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk and Meier each presented a project. A lively debate followed.[469]

The projects presented at the session together with Frampton’s critique were to become the book Five Architects, arguably the most influential single book in the discipline during the 1970. Five Architects served as a fantastic promotional device for its participants. Known interchangeably as the New York Five, the Five, or the Whites — for the white appearance their architecture took on in the predominantly black and white publication — Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, and Meier went on to become some of the major architectural celebrities of architecture in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s.

The arrival of the book and the group (most of the members of which have since denied ever existed) out of a closed session gave the project an air of conspiracy, as Kenneth Frampton has explained in a retrospective talk on the emergence of the New York Five: “I suppose I am here because I am perceived as being part of the conspiracy — the conspiracy of the Five.”[470]

Ultimately though, the publication of Five Architects was the work of one man: Peter Eisenman. One day in the New York art and architecture bookstore of George Wittenborn, Eisenman, who has described himself as a “regular,” approached the owner and mentioned that he had a idea for a book to be published from the tapes of CASE Seven. Wittenborn agreed on the condition that the architects put up their own money for the edition of five hundred copies. Eisenman initially thought to call the book Cardboard Architecture, but the other members of the group refused, feeling the title to be too associated with Eisenman’s own work. Wishing already to somewhat defuse the bounds of the group, they decided against the alternative title of the book Case Seven and instead chose to put only their names — “Eisenman Graves Gwathmey Hejduk Meier” centered on the cover of the book.[471]

No illustrations of the architects’ work appeared on the cover which may have recalled Johnson’s 1966 book — the same volume that would make “Cocktail tables look handsome…”[472] — with its use of emphatic black Helvetica type on a stark white background. The format was also roughly the same size as Johnson’s book, but took the rectangular folio format and expanded it into the rather unusual format of a square roughly 10 1/2 by 10 1/2 inches. The book was divided into two sections, thirteen or so pages of prefatory texts by Arthur Drexler, Colin Rowe, and Kenneth Frampton establishing the theoretical linkage and justification for the work which was presented in 120 subsequent pages divided so that each architect received exactly twenty-four pages. Eisenman and Meier would introduce their own work, Graves’s work was introduced by William La Riche while Gwathmey and Hejduk provided no introductory texts. Each architect presented two projects: one from the original CASE Seven meeting and one from the intervening years, except for Hejduk who presented three. The prefatory texts of the first fifteen pages would be graphically distinguished from the introductions by Eisenman, Meier and La Riche by being set in two-columns while the latter were set in a three-column format.

Throughout the book, black and white images were the rule: the lack of color reproduction obscured the color in Graves’s work, although one color image, a projection of Hejduk’s Bernstein House, did exist. Almost all the renderings were hard line, ink drawings without any gradations of tone.

The first brief statement in the book, which by virtue of its location one could take to be the most significant as a means of drawing in a reader was the preface by Arthur Drexler. Drexler explained that the book was the result of the 1969 CASE meeting held “at the invitation of the Museum (of Modern Art)’s Department of Architecture and Design…” Thus Drexler, the Director of the MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, opened the book under the sign of MoMA. And Drexler pointed out that “with only a little exaggeration,” the work of the five architects could “be said to constitute a New York school.” Drexler continued to point to the similarities amongst the New York school: similarities in form, scale, material. Drexler even pointed to the didactic aspect of these projects as examples of the visual language of cardboard architecture that was still being refined and popularized: “Historically they are continuing what Gropius and Breuer (and before them Richard Neutra) began with their first houses in the United States: the development through small scale residential work of a teachable vocabulary of forms, but this time without some of the doctrinaire restrictions of the German preoccupation with ‘functionalism.’” Instead, Drexler wrote, the work of the Five was formally based on the early works of Le Corbusier, on the work of Giuseppe Terragni, and on Louis Kahn’s use of the diagonal in the plan.

Drexler took the opportunity to completely reverse his position from his stance in the New City exhibit catalog, dismissing social reform as a consideration:

We are all concerned, one way or another, with social reform. But the concern for reform has flavored all discussion and criticism of anything that claims to be architecture first and social reform second. That architecture is the least likely instrument with which to accomplish the revolution has not yet been noticed by the younger Europeans, and in American is a fact like a convenient stone wall against which architectural journalism can bang heads.

An alternative to political romance is to be an architect, for those who actually have the necessary talent for architecture. The young men represented here have that talent (along with a social conscience and a considerable awareness of what is going on in the world around them) and their work makes a modest claim: it is only architecture, not the salvation of man and the redemption of the earth. For those who like architecture that is no mean thing.[473]

Thus, by constructing the authentic, genius architect in opposition to the political romantic, Drexler created a radical binary opposition, perhaps informed by Stern’s position against revolution in 40 Under 40. Architecture, according to Drexler, cannot really be architecture unless it concerns itself solely with the domain within its own parameters. Drexler’s statement that “We are all concerned, one way or another, with the social realm,” empties any expressly political position of meaning. If we are all concerned with society, then we don’t have to pay any particular attention to it, it comes naturally. In addition, the “considerable awareness of what is going on in the world” he attributes to the Five can’t be found in any of the work shown in Five Architects. While Eisenman, Graves, and Meier had already participated in designing urban housing by this time, this is not what is represented in Five Architects. Instead, all of the projects were the same building-type: single family houses that only the very rich could afford, set in idyllic country settings, with the exception of Hejduk’s work which floats in the stark white void of the glossy paper rather than being set on a site. The point of this conscious decision to avoid anything to do with housing[474] is that there is no purpose in reproducing it if the audience for the book is architects and it is also a catalog for prospective purchasers, and what is being sold is the building as an art object.

Eisenman was fully in agreement with this attitude and has since stated that “Their [the Five’s] common interest was only in formal concerns as opposed to social, political, or cultural concerns which were the dominant issues of the time in America. When you look back at the years 1968 and 1969, it was a very strong gesture to make a book like Five Architects. It was the time of student discontent and Vietnam. To lecture on formal ideas at schools was a very strange thing.”[475]

As Drexler did in the preface, Colin Rowe constructed a social-reform-obsessed monolithic modernism to demolish in his introduction. While modern architecture “lost something of its original meaning” when it became institutionalized in the late 1940s, he wrote, it was never supposed to possess any meaning in the first place. Iconographic content was supposedly off limits and modern architecture was simply functionalism.[476] Thus Rowe conveniently equated one very limited, if influential view of modern architecture as functionalism, with all of modern architecture itself, leaving out the vast wealth of iconographic content in canonical modern architects such as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Alvar Aalto to name but a few.

Yet paradoxically Rowe did not mark any formal distance between the Five and the International Style of the 1930s, stating that if these buildings had been built in 1930s Europe and publicized by writers of the time such as Alberto Sartoris or F. R. S. Yorke, they would be “exemplary of the heroic periods of modern architecture…one can imagine the tourists and almost concoct the historical evaluations.” Instead, the simulation of buildings of the 1930s proved to be a problem, presenting us with a “heresy.” After all, as architecture had progressed beyond this kind of appearance, returning to it meant a reappropriation of modern architecture as a style. But, Rowe argued, returning to the theses first postulated by Matthew Nowicki in the late 1940s, modern architecture had always been a style: if buildings with programs as different as a factory and an art museum could look alike, this was because they were built in the same style.[477]

Rowe drew the conclusion that once the social revolution promised by modern architecture failed to take place, then “theory and practice were disrelated” and modern architecture’s theory was revealed to be a means of placating guilty feelings about artistic production by displacing the architect’s responsibility into “scientific, or historical, or social processes.”[478]

The idea that modern architecture had to be expressive of its age led, Rowe wrote, to “[t]he idea that any repetition, any copying, any employment of a precedent or a physical model is a failure of creative acuity is one of the central intuitions of the modern movement.”[479] But again Rowe paradoxically argued that the adherence to the injunction against repetition, a theory formulated in the 1920s, was already a repetition (of Futurist tenets one assumes), as guilty of nostalgia as the repetition of form would be.[480]

The result of this theoretical failure of modern architecture was the appearance of a series of alternatives: Miesian neo-classicism, the New Brutalism, the Futurist Revival, the Shingle Style, and Neo-Liberty — not to mention the attempt to replace architecture by the computer in the design methods school. But all these alternatives failed, Rowe concluded, because they still believed in a better world through architecture. The Five did not. Instead, he wrote, they accepted that a revolution in thinking took place in the early part of the century, creating “profound visual discoveries” the implications of which had yet to be fully worked through. Such a task required more than one generation of architects and the Five were simply carrying on their research in the tradition.[481]

The Five, Rowe wrote, “are neither Marcusian nor Maoist; and lacking any transcendental sociological or political faith, their objective — at bottom — is to alleviate the present by the interjection of a quasi-Utopian vein of poetry.” Assuming a theory of pluralism, Rowe wrote, “It is what some people and some architects want; and therefore, in terms of a general theory of pluralism one must wonder how, in principle, it can be faulted.”[482]

Frampton’s essay “Frontality vs. Rotation” attempts to link the work of the Five together. Their work, he wrote, has certain common features, explaining that it “suffers from a certain inflation of scale. They imply much larger structures, and at first glance it is difficulty to assess their true size, since they are all shown without any anthropomorphic key.” The lack of human scale would therefore make the buildings take on the appearance of a cardboard model. Frampton continued by explaining that “they all appear to derive from a common cultural base in as much as almost all of these designers know each other quite well. On occasion in the past, some have even worked together, and thus they share a comparable ethos in their respective positions.”[483] This ethos, Frampton wrote was established on the grounds of their knowing each other and working together. But rather than being the result of mere “mutual friendship or team work,” he continued, the Five share a deep influence from Le Corbusier and the reading of his work through Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky’s article, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,”[484] which as explained in chapter one was the most important theoretical statement motivating cardboard architecture.

The rest of Frampton’s essay was confined to a virtuoso formal reading, exploring an analytical accompaniment to the work of the Five. Frampton located a series of formal conceits in the Five’s projects. The first, giving the essay its title was the projects’ play between frontality and rotation, unresolved in the cases of Eisenman, Graves, and Meier; the second, again for Eisenman, Graves, and Meier was the “‘erosion’ of the surface, or of the structure, or of the mass, or of all three.” All the houses, except for Gwathmey’s, he explained appear to be “indifferent to the general building culture. They are concerned more with a ‘cult of form.’”[485] Frampton’s ‘cult of form’ appears to be a code for the formal research of the moment that we have classified as ‘cardboard architecture.’

Eisenman presented two articles on his House I and House II. Of the texts relating to the individual projects, Eisenman’s were the most theoretically dense. Eisenman began by explaining his conception of “cardboard architecture.” By taking a usually derogatory term to describe his work (and remember it was at one point meant to describe the work of the Five), Eisenman hoped that it would function as “an ironic and pre-emptory symbol” for his argument. “Cardboard,” Eisenman wrote, “is used to question the nature of our perception of reality and thus the meanings ascribed to reality. Thus it is not so much a metaphor describing the forms of the building but rather its intention. For example, models are often made of cardboard, so the term raises the question of form in relation to the process of design: is this a building or is it a model?” And indeed, Eisenman’s photographs of his House II (especially the one on page 25 which may have been a photograph of a cardboard model or alternatively of the house under construction) were meant to play upon this ambiguity by breaking any connection between house and the ground by placing the crest of a hill between house and viewer, throwing its physicality, or lack of, into question.[486] Cardboard was ultimately meant to “shift the focus from our existing conception of form in an aesthetic and functional context to a consideration of form as a marking or notational system” and to “signify the virtual or implied layering which is produced by the particular configuration.”[487]

Eisenman explained that his Houses were based on an attempt to go beyond both architectural form as the result of programmatic dictates and the creation of “aesthetically pleasing objects.” Form, for Eisenman, would ideally be independent of program and of aesthetic considerations, rather it would be “a problem of logical consistency; as a consequence of the logical structure inherent in any formal relationship.” Thus, House I, was “an attempt to find ways in which form and space could be structured so that they would produce a set of formal relationships which is the result of the inherent logic in the forms themselves, and, second, to control precisely the logical relationships of forms.”[488] Eisenman attempted to do this by “unloading” the existing meanings of the forms through deception: what appeared to be the structural beam and columns of the house were in fact non-structural, marking two separate formal  structures. The rectilinear columns and beams, Eisenman explained, marked the residue of cross-layering of planes while the round columns marked the intersections of two planes. By removing two columns, from his system, Eisenman hoped to create an implied diagonal and at the same time, make the whole formal structure more difficult to read. This was Eisenman’s hope: that anyone interested in discerning the formal systems in House I would have to take them apart, in their mind.[489] Thus his ultimate goal in House I was to bring the reader into an awareness of the “deep structure” of the building, a formal structure separate from the building’s actual structure. The deep structure could not directly be perceived but would have to be based on an inner analysis of the building.

This deep structure would be based on something if not identical than at least akin to the visual language outlined in chapter one. As Eisenman explained,

The particular way that the formal structure [in House II] is developed through a diagonal shift manifested in a structural redundancy is perhaps only one means to make such formal concepts as compression, elongation, and frontality become operative. It remains for future work to examine the nature of the general principles or architectonic rule underlying these relationships which might help define a broad range of formal structures and their transformations.[490]

In fact, Eisenman had already spent a great deal of time on precisely this topic: his 1963 dissertation, The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture, was concerned with a theoretical elaboration of a language of architecture, an attempt to work through the same problems that Rowe, Slutzky, and Hejduk were concerned with by investigating the consequences of the deformations an ideal architectural object would be subjected to from prosaic matters such as site, program, circulation.[491] What Eisenman was ultimately proposing in these texts was a reworking of that same idea: that a project could be read not as the consequence of function or as the product of an artistic consciousness but rather as the result of the logical consequences of a series of formal transformations combining and re-combining basic formal elements, an exemplary performance in the visual language.

Graves presented his work with an essay “Architecture as World Again” by William La Riche. The title of the essay referred to Mircea Eliade’s explanation that primitive man would recapitulate his vision of the universe in the design of his house and La Riche attempted to explain Graves’s work in those terms. Graves’s theory thus was not altogether dissimilar to the theory of architecture Eisenman proposed in his dissertation. La Riche saw in Graves’s work a tension between the internal architecture, or controlling geometry of the ideal object and its physical context, comparing this tension in Graves’s work to a similar tension between the ideal object of Greek temples and their unique sites. Graves would mediate this tension in the Hanselmann Residence by focusing on layering space in a manner corresponding to Eliade’s stages of initiation and in the Bennacerraf Residence by representing aspects of the world in his building — the roof terrace as a representation of the ground plane — and extending the building into the world — by making the sky into an infinite ceiling for the room and allowing trees to become columns in the wall of the room.[492]

Meier, like Eisenman, chose to explain his own work and began by explaining that his work was, as A. N. Whitehead stated of philosophers and businessmen, intended “to re-create and re-enact a vision of the world, including those elements of reverence and order without which society lapses into a riot, and penetrated through and through with unflinching rationality.” Like La Riche on Graves, Meier explained that there are two interdependent aspects to the house: “one ideal and abstract,” the controlling geometry, the vision of the world possessed by the architecture, “the other real and analytical,” the problems posed by the “site, program, circulation and entrance, structure and enclosure.”[493] Thus, mediating between the real and the ideal, Meier’s project was also similar to Eisenman’s early work.

Gwathmey’s work was not explained, although the site, program, and construction for each project were listed. Given this list and Gwathmey’s concern with depicting the relationships between his houses in his illustrations — one project was composed of two buildings, the other of three — and the complex geometry of the houses, the same real/ideal dichotomy appeared to be at work in his projects.

Hejduk’s projects included lists as well — one for program, one for surfaces, and one for idea-concept — but the role they played seemed to be different. The program list — “Garage, Walk, Entry, Living, Dining, Kitchen, Gallery, Storage, Bathroom, Bedroom” for House 10, “Entry Walk, Living, Dining, Kitchen, Music-Library, Bathrooms, Bedrooms” for the One-Half House and “House” for the Bernstein house seemed to be more a parody of the idea of program than anything else. Attempts to find the disparate elements in House 10 would be frustrated: the house was much more about an abstract geometry than anything else. This reading was supported by the abrupt “House” entry for the Bernstein House which served to poke fun at the other two lists. The surfaces list served to describe the appearance of the house: “Glass As Shown, Interior Walls-White, Exterior Walls-Stainless Steel or Chrome” for House 10, “Exterior-yellow, blue, red, black, white, gray” for the Bernstein House, and “Glass as Shown, Interior walls-white, Exterior walls-white” for the One-Half House. Finally, the ideas behind Hejduk’s projects were embodied in a third list that would recall some of the means of putting objects together — and the three projects were obsessively concerned with putting together simple geometries in relationships — using compositional principles of a visual language. Thus for House 10, the Idea-Concept list was “Horizontal Extension, Hypotenuse, Three-Quarter Figure, Point-Line-Plane-Volume, Bio-Morphic — Bio-Technic, Structure, Time, Projection,” for the Bernstein House, “Color-exterior-primaries, interior-white,” and for the One-Half House, “One half of a square, One half of a circle, One half of a diamond.”[494] Thus, Hejduk’s work differed from that of the others in its lack of concern with the site, representing only whatever compromises the architect may have had in his own mind.

Paradoxically, Five Architects received its biggest boost through scathing criticism at the hands of a rival group, the Grays or Five on Five, led by Robert A. M. Stern. Perversely, Eisenman and Stern had a long friendship throughout the 1970s. As Stern described it, his friendship with Peter Eisenman, as based on “the very oppositeness of his nature from mine and his point of view from mine is my perfect alter-ego: ‘If I didn’t invent Peter Eisenman who would have?’”[495] The feeling was mutual: in another interview, Eisenman explained “If Stern had not existed, I would have had to invent him, and vice versa.”[496]

Thus the symbiotic pair invented the battle between the Whites and the Grays. Eisenman explains that he called up his pal Stern, “knowing how eager he was to insert himself into the scene, and dropped a little piece of bait in front of him. I said, ‘Robert, why don’t you organize five or your friends to write book reviews on the Five. Wouldn’t that do a really neat stunt?’ Stern got Suzanne Stephens at Architectural Forum and the magazine’s new editor Bill Marlin to print critiques of the Five Architects book by five other architects — Stern, Jaquelin Robertson, Romualdo Giurgola, Charles Moore, and Allan Greenberg — in a section of the May 1973 issue under the heading of “Five on Five.” While Eisenman believed that the criticism he had asked Stern for was harsh, he also realized that as Arthur Drexler always told him, “It doesn’t matter how critical they are, as long as they spell your name right.”[497]

While the essays were critical, they also shared the Five’s obsession with architectural form. Stern’s essay set out to compare Five Architects to Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steve Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas, but, apart from setting up the latter book as “helping us at least to break from the hot-house aesthetic of the 1920’s, to see familiar things in fresh contexts, and to assimilate diverse experiences into our work,”[498] Stern would not make elaborate. He did not discuss the work of the Five except in terms of form and whether the houses would be comfortable or not. Likewise, Jacquelin Robertson criticized the “Machines in the Garden” for being “high art objects” and being part of “an elitist game” but did not elaborate. In contrast Charles Moore almost praised the buildings for their meticulous attention to form. Allan Greenberg sought a “Lurking American Legacy” in the buildings as manifestations of the Shingle Style. Only Romaldo Giurgola’s critique of “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” questioned whether Five Architects actually addressed a responsible theme, although much of his own firm Mitchell/Giurgola’s work was similar to the Five’s both in terms of commission — houses and corporate buildings — and in terms of subscribing to cardboard architecture.[499]

The second five — and especially their leader, Stern — did not disagree with the basic contention of Five Architects: that architecture is about form.This should not be surprising, given the origins of the group in a Stern- Eisenman conspiracy. Stern and Eisenman weren’t just friends, they shared certain ideas about architecture as Stern acknowledges in retrospect:

We were concerned with the break-up of the seemingly monolithic modern movement; and we were both contemptuous of the kind of stylish appliqué Modernism that we saw around us as well as the anti-architectural philistinism that was the unfortunate by-product of the student movements of the late 1960s. I was only too familiar with the latter, as much from teaching experiences at Columbia as from my own student days at Yale where its earliest manifestations could be seen in the back-to-the-woods, architecture-as-act movements of the 60s. Though Eisenman and I approached the situation from quite opposite points of view, we each saw the so-called revolutionary conditions of architecture of the 60s as ideologically confused, artistically debilitated, nihilistic, and anti-intellectual. Although these student movements supplied a necessary criticism of the then current scene and made it obvious the hypocrisy that afflicted our national political attitudes towards the war in Vietnam and the situation of minorities at home, it hadn’t led to anything positive in terms of architectural production. What had begun as a useful critique of a situation proved unable to develop a positive direction of its own; it had no firm commitment to form-making or even a coherent political or social programme. It was against things but not for things.[500]

This confirms Stern’s statement of the principles of Gray architecture in his 1976 article “Gray Architecture: Quelques Variations Post-Modernistes Autour de l’Orthodoxie,” for the French periodical L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Stern explained that the debate between the Whites and Grays was not as critical as that between the International Style and the defenders of the Beaux-Arts but rather as two approaches towards solving the same problem: the lack of meaning in orthodox modernism. Abandoning the division between the Inclusivists and the Exclusivists, Stern defined the debate in terms of his own conception of Post-Modernism and Eisenman’s conception of Post-Functionalism. Stern accepted Goldberger’s contention that both groups were primarily interested in form. The main distinction was again that Post-Functionalism was concerned with culturally autonomous, universal form, while Post-Modernism was concerned with history, physical context, and the sociopolitical and cultural milieu. Significantly, however, Stern rejected any idea that Post-Modernism would align itself either with sociology, or with the “technico-socio-professional” determinism of the modernist orthodoxy. Post-Modernism Stern explains “affirme que l’architecture est faite pour l’oeil comme pour l’esprit et qu’elle inclut à la fois une formation conceptualisée de l’espace et les modificaions circonstacielles qu’un programme peut faire subir à cet espace.”[501]

The principal distinguishing points that Stern cited between the Whites and the Grays were the latter’s recourse to ornament and historical reference. While there can be no question that Stern criticized the Five for their adherence to Corbusian forms, his definition of Gray architecture was remarkably similar to what Colin Rowe outlined for the Whites in his introduction to Five Architects:

One finds at the root of the ‘gray’ position a rejection of the anti-symbolic, anti-historical, hermetic and highly abstracted architecture of orthodox modernism. Gray–ness seeks to move toward an acceptance of diversity; it prefers hybrids to pure forms; it encourages multiple and simultaneous readings in its effort to heighten expressive content. The layering of space characteristic of much ‘gray’ architecture finds its complement in the overlay of cultural and art-historical references in the elevations. For ‘gray’ architecture, ‘more is more’.

‘Gray’ buildings have façades which tell stories. These facades are not the diaphanous veil of orthodox modern architecture, nor are they the affirmation of deep structural secrets. They are mediators between the building as a ‘real’ construct and those allusions and perceptions necessary to put the building in closer touch with the place in which it is made and beliefs and dreams of the architects who design it, the clients who paid for it, and the civilization which permitted it to be built; to make buildings, in short, landmarks of a culture capable of transcending transitory usefulness as functional accommodation. ‘Gray’ buildings are very much of a time and place: they are not intended as ideal constructs of perfected order; they select from the past in order to comment on the present.[502]

The point of Gray architecture for Stern was the same as that of White architecture for Rowe: both rejected orthodox modernism, both sought hybrid rather than pure form, both encouraged multiple and simultaneous readings, both hoped for a layering of space, and both were historical, given the Whites use of historical reference in their return to the forms of Le Corbusier. Both Whites and Grays subscribed to cardboard architecture consists of shallow spaces and thin partitions made possible by the American balloon frame. In much of the work of the Grays as well as the Whites Shallow spaces and planes are made to interact through a system of layering and superimposition of thin screens, creating an interplay between frontal plane and depth.[503]

Paul Goldberger, the architectural critic for the New York Times, a student of Vincent Scully in Yale and a close friend of Johnson, Stern, and Meier, was instrumental in creating and publicizing the image of the Five.[504] Goldberger’s article “Architecture’s ‘5’ Make Their Ideas Felt” defined the debate between the Five and the Five on Five as an important occurrence in architecture.[505] Goldberger began the article with what was by now a commonplace : that the architectural profession was in crisis because “The idea of traditional, high-styled building is under attack from students who see it as irrelevant to social concerns and avant-gardists who see it as technologically backward.” Thus, he wrote, “it is all the more amazing that the talk of the New York architectural world today centers largely around a group of five architects who have rejected the notion of architecture as a social tool, rejected prefabrication, rejected fads of computer design, megastructures, and other bits of super technology and, instead have concentrated their efforts on what is perhaps the most traditional — and elevated — architectural problem of all: the making of form.”[506]

The persistent naming of the group as the Five Architects, the New York Five, and the Whites was symptomatic of an attempt to give definition to a new phenomenon, and expressed the attempt to make sense of what this group was. Goldberger recalled another architect’s description of the Eisenman and Stern groups as “the whites and the grays,” repeating names that would stick from then on. The dialogue between the two groups, Goldberger wrote, “created a period of deep architectural thought that was not seen throughout the nineteen-sixties.”[507]

As evidence of the Five’s importance, Goldberger pointed to the Milan Triennale where they, along with Robert Venturi, were the only architects invited to represent the United States. Thus while the Five were principally from New York, they were beginning to represent the state of the architectural discipline in America.[508]

When Paul Goldberger came back to the debate with his article “Should Anyone Care About the ‘New York Five’? … or about their critics, the ‘Five on Five’?” he attempted to blur the boundaries between the two groups. Goldberger established the Five’s critics as the “Yale-Philadelphia axis, the Kahn-Venturi-Scully school,”[509] finally settling on “the Inclusivists.” Goldberger pointed out the similarities in the work between the groups: both work at a small scale, spurn technology, and “want to make architecture in a fairly traditional way, and in a way in which form is a crucial factor. Both are elitist.” Given these similarities and the Grays’ critique of the Five principally on art historical grounds, he wrote, “it is not altogether surprising that the debate around the Five all seemed a lot of Eastern academic claptrap to many architects who practice neither in New York nor along the celebrated Yale-Philadelphia axis.” History, Goldberger explained, would show that there were other possibilities — he cited Kevin Roche, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, Giovanni Pasanella, Cesar Pelli and Davis Brody — that would not fit neatly into either group. Moreover, Goldberger continued, the groups themselves were rather artificial: from Eisenman to Meier was a rather long stretch, as was the distance between Venturi, Giurgola, and Moore. The main distinction between the groups, he concluded, was an adherence to the forms suggestive of Le Corbusier among the Five and an interest in a much broader spectrum of forms for the Grays. Ultimately, Goldberger explained, both groups were obsessed with form and did not really represent a chasm across which all American architecture was divided.[510]

To bring the debate to the rest of the country, the debate between the Whites and the Grays became face-to-face at the Los Angeles symposium known as “Four Days in May.” This event served as a spectacle, clearly showing the rest of the nation where debate was in architecture, and that was in the East, in New York. According to Los Angeles architectural historian Thomas Hines, the event “revealed that most of the tensions of the previous year had been diffused and that the work and attributes of the various armies had remarkable similarities as well as differences,” the “poisoned arrows” flying mainly between Vincent Scully and Colin Rowe.[511] The lesson of the debate of the Whites and Grays, that creating a polemical group was an event that would garner notoriety was not lost on other architects: the hosting architects (Tim Vreeland, once a member of CASE, Anthony Lumsden, Frank Dimster, Eugene Kupper, Cesar Pelli, and Paul Kennon) for the debate between the Whites and Grays in L. A. became known as the Silvers. The Silvers were a rather different group from their East coast colleagues, proud of their pragmatism and generally working on large commercial projects such as skyscrapers and office buildings consisting of large “warehouse spaces,” distinctively sheathed in thin, often undulating reflective membranes of glass.[512] In 1976, in an event entitled “Four Days In April,” the Silvers presented their work publicly and discussed it both with an audience and with California historian David Gebhard, and architects Charles Moore, John Hejduk, and James Stirling.[513] While their work, less formally sophisticated and more obviously commercial, received far less attention than that of the Whites and Grays, the mirrored curtain-wall of the Silvers crept over many American cities in the late 1970s and 1980s. For Pelli, who appeared to be the leader of the Silvers, the group was a ticket out of Los Angeles. Soon considered a rising star of the architectural vanguard, Pelli would be one of Johnson’s kids by 1978.[514]

Emulation of the Whites and the Grays would continue in Chicago with Stanley Tigerman’s group, the Chicago Seven (Tigerman, Tom Beeby, Larry Booth, Stuart Cohen, James Ingo Freed, Jim Nagle, and Ben Weese, later to expand to eight with Helmut Jahn and finally to eleven with Cindy Weese, Ken Schroeder, and Gerry Horn) a play on the name of the radical political faction from the late 1960s known as the Chicago Eight. More like the Whites and Grays than the Silvers, the Chicago Seven shared the ideals of architecture as form and cardboard architecture. Through their show “Chicago Architects” displayed at the Cooper Union and in Chicago during 1976,[515] the Chicago Seven were able to counter the image of Chicago as irrevocably bound to Miesian architecture. For Tigerman as for Pelli, the Chicago Seven was a major publicity coup and by 1978, he would be one of Johnson’s kids.[516]

The popularity of the Five led to a reprint of Five Architects by Oxford University Press in 1975. Significantly, this edition featured a postscript by Philip Johnson, dated April 1, 1974 (April Fool’s Day), in which he defended the Five from their critics by arguing that they were not a group:

There seems little sense in assembling these five architects in one book. They no doubt felt they would collectively receive more exposure as five than as five ones. They were right. As five, they have been attacked and defended, praised and vilified.

In common, all they have is talent; they are interested, as artists millennia before them have been in the art of architecture. I feel especially close to them in this world of functionalist calculation and sociometric fact research.

Thus while on the one hand, Johnson denied that the architects should be grouped together, he also turned his argument around and pointed out that indeed they shared an interest in the art of architecture as distinctly opposed to the scientifist theories that we mapped out as threatening the disciplines identity in chapter one. After admiring the work of each of the Five individually, Johnson concluded by expressing hope that more books such as this would be published for “Books call attention to architecture, force the reader (viewer) to focus, and generally arouse amusement or disgust.”[517]

By the second edition of Five Architects, the Whites and the Grays begin to splinter up. The Grays were the less coherent group, more diverse in terms of geographical base, scale of commission, and interest in architectural education, soon Stern appeared to be the only Gray, invoking Charles Moore and Robert Venturi every now and again. After his development of the term “post-modern” in 1976 Stern began using it in place of “Gray.” Eisenman also began calling his work by a different term, this time “post-functionalism.”[518] Stern explained:

I would like to suggest that the “White and Gray” debate is not (as has been suggested in the press) an encounter between two polarities such as might have occurred in 1927 between advocates of the Beaux-Arts and apostles of International Style modernism. Rather, this debate has grown into an on-going dialogue between two groups of architects who, in their built work and theoretical investigations, are actively seeking to chart out and clarify a direction which architecture can take now that the orthodox modern movement has drawn to a close. …

…The struggle for both groups, then, is to return to our architecture that vitality of intention and form which seems so absent from the work of the late modernists.[519]

Also in 1976, it became apparent that something had happened to Michael Graves’s work: chunky structures, façades, and pediments supplanted the cubist-inspired International Style. Meier and Gwathmey began moving away from building houses and teaching and towards building multimillion dollar projects. About this time Hejduk moved away from the mainstream of the architectural vanguard, towards his “architecture of pessimism.”[520]

Also since the reprint, the members of the Five began to disassociate themselves from the group. Apparently, once the publicity value of the group became exhausted, the architects began to feel that they were best represented as individuals rather than as members of a group. Both Meier and Gwathmey have denied the existence of the Whites as a group. Meier explains “we taught in similar institutions, we went to one another’s juries, but there was no official group. It was simply a group of people who talked to one another at the time.”[521] Although Gwathmey agrees that “it wasn’t a group. We were all associated through teaching and we’ve been friends and not friends over the years.” he also recounts how at a dinner to celebrate a show by John Hejduk in 1979 “We all laughed about it, you know, because it was a kind of time and incident that provoked enough interest to make what’s happening today available–meaning that there’s a huge debate about architecture and its relevance, and post–modernism and how it relates, if it does, and so forth.”[522] While Gwathmey argues that the Five was not a school but rather an essential publication initiated by Eisenman it was nonetheless crucially important because it “began the whole discussion among architects, teachers and students about the ideas of architecture.”[523] Five Architects and “Five on Five” made it “possible for architects to communicate and have a dialogue.”[524] Of course, by maintaining affiliation with a group that is crucial to the history of architecture and at the same time denying its existence, Gwathmey is able to both be part of something historically significant and is able to maintain his own individuality.

On the other hand, CASE, the Whites, to some extent the Grays, and Philip Johnson’s kids have been closed circles of élite architects tied together by their mutual acquaintance since the early 1960s, their concern for making their own work public and for promoting an formal architecture.

By 1978, the changes in architecture were so prominent that they had become news to the general media, promising to transform the American cityscape: an entire section of the November 6 issue of Newsweek was devoted to the new architecture. There was a revolt afoot among architects, the writer of the article explained and architects were getting sick of orthodox modernism.[525] One page of the section was devoted entirely to the Five, a remarkable event for a mass-circulation newsmagazine. In it the writer defended his selection of the Five by explaining that “Nothing sums up the spirit of the new architecture better than a loose collective of architects known in the field as ‘The New York Five.’”[526]

As we have already seen, the ascent of both Stern and the New York Five was in large part based on publications: 40 Under 40, Five Architects, “Five on Five.” This position was consolidated by Eisenman when at the same time as he was plotting to publish Five Architects, he became one of the founding editors of Oppositions, a journal of architectural discourse centering around theory, criticism, and history, that from 1973 to 1984 served as the house publication of Eisenman’s Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies.[527]

The Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) played a major role in the New York scene during the 1970s. Founded by Eisenman in 1967 under the sponsorship of Cornell University and the Museum of Modern Art and perhaps with the help of Philip Johnson in its conception,[528] was originally meant to address urbanistic intentions. Early projects were often sponsored by government agencies such as U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, New York State’s Urban Development Corporation, and National Institute of Mental Health, and students often came from Cornell’s Urban Design Program headed by Colin Rowe.[529] Much valuable research into urban design went on, such as “New Urban Settlements” by Eisenman and Emilio Ambasz, Kenneth Frampton and Susana Torre’s “Low-Rise High-Density” housing prototypes and the On Streets book edited by Stanford Anderson. In the mid-seventies, the school expanded with a number of courses of study established for students with varying degrees of architectural knowledge. Also in 1974, the Evening Program of lectures was begun.[530] Eisenman’s efforts to create a center for the New York scene around IAUS were remarkably successful. Eisenman brought in architects and critics from abroad, principally Europe and Japan, introducing New Yorkers to the work of foreign architects and simultaneously, introducing the work of the New York vanguard to foreigners. During one three-year period, the Institute had 375 speakers, many of whom were from abroad.[531]

Oppositions and the related Oppositions books series played a crucial role for the IAUS by putting its concerns into print. Oppositions stated was goal: to provide a forum for different conceptions of architecture. For the first two issues, the typography of the name of the journal announced this dialogical agenda: Oppositions, its second letter “P” outlined to imply a movement between position-taking and opposition to the status quo as well as to imply “Zero Positions,” an allusion to Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero and an attempt to reduce architecture to nothing and start from scratch.[532]

Each issue was divided along five thematic headings: Oppositions, Theory, History, Documents, and a final section composed of Reviews, Letters, and for a few years at the start, Forum, the proceedings of Oppositions Forums held at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies. Image was the essential content of the Forum section which was illustrated with photographs of the participants at the Forums and cocktail parties that followed, whose names inevitably appeared on the list of sponsors on the gatefold, as Joan Ockman in her article on Oppositions has correctly pointed out.[533] The purpose of this section appeared to be to illustrate that architectural discourse was going on at the IAUS and that it was very, very hip to be seen in the in-crowd there.

The Oppositions section consisted of an examination of current work of architecture. Joan Ockman has provided a list of names of the architects examined in chronological order between 1973 and 1980: “Robert Venturi, Richard Meier, Werner Seligmann, James Stirling, Aldo Rossi, the Five Architects, Venturi again, Stirling again, Meier again, Aldo van Eyck, Philip Johnson (his writings, not his buildings), Giuseppe Terragni (resurrected, I believe to fill a hole in the issue), Michael Graves, Rossi again, Mario Botta and the Ticino school, Venturi a third time, the Japanese Hiromi Fuji, and the Japanese ‘new wave’ including Isozaki, Shinorhara, Ito, and Ando.” Ockman points out that for Rossi, Botta, and some of the Japanese, this was the first significant attention they received in the American media.

The composition of the list reveals its that whatever the stated intents of the journal, it remained confined to a narrow scope: the Five as a group, Meier on his own (twice), Michael Graves on his own (once), Venturi (three times), Philip Johnson, Werner Seligmann (associated with the Five through his ties with Rowe and Hejduk since the days of the Texas Rangers), only one dead architect (Terragni), and the rest rising stars of the international circle. Of these, Stirling was tangentially associated with the Five because of his friendship with Colin Rowe since the 1940s and Rossi had taught at the IAUS. In other words, the group was very select and, at least in its treatment of American architecture, did not go beyond a very narrow circle.[534] Also interesting is that — excepting the Europeans Botta, Rossi, van Eyck, the Japanese minus Isozaki, and the long deceased Terragni — all of the architects were listed on Oppositions’ gatefold at one time or another as individual sponsors for the journal.

Ockman has pointed out that the differences of opinion between the three founding editors were a major feature of the magazine, appearing “almost as a badge of honor,” and that the “controlling metaphors for the publication became those of ‘arena’ and ‘forum.’” While this would appear to make a unified front impossible, this was in the editors’ minds the glorious new age of pluralism, when diversity of opinion would be celebrated. But as we will discuss below, a pluralist viewpoint is still a viewpoint with distinct implications. But of course this diversity was circumscribed, as Ockman explains, all three were united from a negative standpoint by their opposition to the mainstream, but also in their commitment toward the continued viability of architecture as discipline.[535]

In the theory section, the magazine was the first exposure of contemporary currents in European architectural criticism to Americans.[536] Yet this introduction to European, principally Italian, architectural thinking was biased. Recent research by Belgin Turan shows that introductions given inevitably stripped the hard-line Marxist connotations of authors such as Aldo Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri, making them into neo-Marxists at best, if not expressly nonideological. Thus for example, the first introduction of Manfredo Tafuri’s work in Oppositions 3 is bracketed by an introduction explaining that it is “profoundly marked by his philosophical position within the dialectic materialist approach…developed by means of modern theoretical concepts drawn from French and Italian structuralism,” a rather roundabout way of indicating that Tafuri was a Marxist.[537] Beyond the bracketing effect of the introductions, the translation of the works of Italian theorists in Oppositions — and in books published at MIT Press generally under the label of Oppositions books — also deliberately made the texts seem ambiguous in cases where they were quite clear about their Marxist implications.[538] The subject matter that the Italian theorists wrote on also had an impact on the way their work was received. Tafuri’s choice of the New York Five as subject matter in the first article on “L’Architecture dans Le Boudoir” helped elevate the Five still further. Here was an Italian architectural historian of enormous import and what was he writing about? The Five. Yet Tafuri himself became aware of the conservative subtext underlying Oppositions and titled his next article for Oppositions (again on the Five) “European Graffiti,” a scrawl meant to deface the pristine, white architectural surface of the establishment that he believed the journal presented.[539]

Thus while Oppositions and its two companion series of publications, Oppositions books and Oppositions catalogs were responsible for bringing more sophisticated theoretical investigation from the continent to American architecture, they soon had another effect: to ensure that the reception would not hurt architecture as discipline. As Vincent Pecora has explained, “a third of the way into the journal’s eleven-year run, the oppositional project that began as a critique of architecture had ‘evolved’ into the analysis of architecture as critique.”[540] Counter-disciplinary potential ended with the re-assessment of the journal’s aims as expressed in the editorial in Oppositions 9 to begin to explore “the critical practice of architecture.”[541]

It was this unwavering commitment to the critical practice of architecture as a discipline that ultimately undermined Oppositions’ oppositional role. By holding out a demand for architecture to continue, the editors of the journal excluded an entire range of critique and, because Oppositions was the journal of the architectural vanguard in the 1970s, in many ways it set the limits for architectural discourse. As Drexler and Rowe had praised the Five for concentrating on architecture, so the editors of Oppositions would only concentrate on the making of architecture as it could be practiced in the office and the design studio. Critiques that might endanger the legitimacy of architecture and its discourse, such as that of Gordon Matta-Clark and the Anarchitecture group were not addressed at all. Indictments of the architectural establishment, such as Herbert Muschamp’s File Under Architecture[542] did not merit any notice.

The relationship between Matta-Clark and Eisenman is of particular importance. In a now notorious incident, Matta-Clark was invited to exhibit a project for the IAUS’s December 1976 show on conceptual developments in modeling, Idea As Model. Having heard that Meier, Gwathmey, and Graves were to participate, Matta-Clark said “these are the guys I studied with at Cornell, these were my teachers. I hate what they stand for.” Originally Matta-Clark was supposed to take a room at the institute designed by two of the teachers that was a stark white box without windows and stack it in the exhibit as a statement against architects, later rebuilding it albeit in modified form so that the room would have parts of the wall on hinges serving as windows. Instead, Matta-Clark came in at 3 am while the show was being set up and shot out every window in the room with an air-gun. In each empty casement, he put a photograph of a new housing project in the Bronx where the windows had been blown out. For Matta-Clark, this project[543] epitomized an oppressive will to build formally sophisticated architecture standing against human suffering. The Fellows of the Institute, headed by Peter Eisenman, hated the piece and ordered it removed. Eisenman’s comments about the piece put the whole issue into perspective: Eisenman likened it to Kristallnacht.[544]

Eisenman’s use of Kristallnacht was cynical: this was 1976, the time when Eisenman was cementing his alliance with his new friend Philip Johnson. It is extremely doubtful that Eisenman did not know of his patron’s fascist background. After all, Frampton had already stated that Johnson’s fascism was the “stuff of history.”[545] By allying himself with Johnson without a word on his fascist past, Eisenman was committing his own violence against history.

Ultimately, Eisenman’s dislike of the Matta-Clark project is probably tied to Eisenman’s steadfast belief in architecture as a discipline. This belief showed up recently when in the same symposium in which he called Denise Scott Brown Robert Venturi’s “surrogate,” Eisenman called the Matta-Clark work “a very aggressive act.” Eisenman reaffirmed his commitment to architecture as discipline, explaining that “It is very easy to chop up buildings and call it a critique of society, but it is no longer architecture. I think there are big differences between a criticism of society, sculpture, environmental art, fringe drawings, marginalia, et cetera, and architecture.”[546]

But to return to the early 1970s and Johnson’s role in the rise of the kids. At the start of the decade all of Johnson’s work of the 1960s, such as his grandiose New York State Theater at Lincoln Center seemed dated and he had, for a time, lost his position as a member of the vanguard. Franz Schulze explains that “At the end of the 60s, when a new generation was rising up in American architecture — the Venturis, the Moores, the Sterns, the Eisenmans, and so on — Philip was off the pace. All of a sudden, they were ushering in a new kind of revolution and they caught him off guard. He was behind the times for a while. And then he caught up, of course, very cannily.”[547]

This catching up took the form of drawing Eisenman and Stern nearer towards him. Eisenman himself states that “Philip was always troubled by how people of the intellectual establishment viewed him. And [in the early 70s] I was somebody who clearly did not regard him that way. I reinvented Philip. In a sense, we were inventions of each other.” Johnson was happy to play along. As Eisenman states, Johnson “has the almost pathological need to be one step ahead of everybody else. Philip was always looking, prowling, for young talent. He was like the CIA, you know, monitoring activities.”[548] In turn, Johnson introduced Eisenman to the world of high society and to well-heeled patrons and helped fund Eisenman’s projects, such as Oppositions and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and even gave a Eisenman “a long-term loan which you don’t ever have to pay back” of ten thousand dollars to help rebuild his house after a fire had damaged it in 1976.[549]

Also that year, while recovering from heart surgery, Johnson read his friend Robert Stern’s biography of architect George Howe and began spending time talking to Stern about reviving pre-modern architecture and thus Stern, as representative of the emerging post-modern architecture, became an important ally as well.[550] Johnson was able to pick up both Stern and Eisenman, sitting in between their two seemingly opposite positions as what Kenneth Frampton calls “an ambivalent patron.”[551] But Johnson was not ambivalent; rather he was cynical and canny about his patronage so that when one vanguard appeared to be at the fore he would be associated with it and when the other replaced it, he would still remain the patron of the avant-garde.

By this point Johnson had cultivated substantial friendships with the critical establishment, notably the critics at the New York Times: his former assistant Ada Louise Huxtable and Paul Goldberger, the promoter of the Five. Goldberger’s role as a supporter of Johnson and the kids was assured early on: while he was an undergraduate at Yale, he was plucked by the Johnson to be Huxtable’s successor. During the 1970s and 1980s Goldberger would frequent the Four Seasons and was a member of the Century Club.[552] As a result, Goldberger had a great loyalty to Johnson and the kids, ensuring that when time came for such projects as Johnson/Burgee’s Times Square Redevelopment proposal, he would eagerly support them.[553]

Johnson’s architectural business picked up in the 1970s as well as a result of his cultivation of upper-class contacts. Johnson made friends with Gerry Hines, a real-estate developer in Houston who brought him to the world of developers and venture-capital, not only giving him commissions for six of his own skyscrapers but also introducing him to powerful figures such as the chairman of Penzoil, for whom Johnson/Burgee built Penzoil Place. With a number of very-large projects completed and a large and experienced staff in place, the firm became a serious contender for more patrons wishing to build such projects.[554] In his role as power broker Johnson went on to introduce some of the kids to Hines to build houses for him, including Stern, Gwathmey, and Charles Moore, although Gwathmey’s project was not accepted by the “local design controls” at Martha’s Vineyard and Stern took it over instead

Johnson reemerged to the public with his endorsement of the New York Five in the postscript to the second (1975) edition of Five Architects. By allowing Johnson to endorse their work, the Five implied a reciprocal endorsement for Johnson. And indeed Stern and Eisenman paid Johnson back for his patronage in the late 1970s. Eisenman staged an exhibition on Johnson at the gallery of the IAUS and the two were instrumental in the production of a barrage of Johnson publicity.[555]

In 1977 both Eisenman and Stern continued their tribute to Johnson with essays on the Glass House in Oppositions.[556] These articles were followed in 1978 by the ninth in the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies’ series of catalogs, Philip Johnson: Processes. The Glass House, 1949 and The AT&T Corporate Headquarters, 1978.[557]

Writings, a collection of Johnson’s essays edited by Stern with an introduction by Eisenman and a foreword by Vincent Scully was published in 1979.[558] Johnson’s Nazi past was omitted throughout. Scully’s foreword and Peter Eisenman’s introduction contained no hint of the matter although one of Stern’s commentaries euphemistically stated that “The realities of economic depression tended to trivialize issues of style, and in 1934 Johnson quit the Museum to enter on a strange political and journalistic career, returning to architecture only in 1940.”[559] A bibliography at the end by Johnson’s companion David Whitney omitted Johnson’s journalism for Social Justice and Today’s Challenge.

Thus during the mid-seventies, Johnson has succeeded in remaking his life once again. His activities in the late 1930s, brought up by Russell Lynes and Charles Jencks in 1973 and then by Calvin Tompkins in 1978 were not an issue. Thus it may come as no surprise that Johnson’s world-view was unabashedly cynical: who could not be cynical in a discipline that ignored his guilt? Perhaps Johnson could feel the sense of relief when in the first public lecture he had given in some years, at Columbia University on September 24, 1975, he exclaimed:

The day of ideology is thankfully over. Let us celebrate the death of the idée fixe. There are no rules, only facts. There is no order, only preference. There are no imperatives, only choice; or to use a nineteenth-century word, “taste”; or a modern word, “take”: “What is your ‘take’ on this or that?”[560]

Philosophically, it seems to me we are today anarchistic, nihilistic, solipsistic, certainly relativist, humorous, cynical, reminiscent of tradition, myth-and-symbol-minded rather than rationalist or scientifically minded. What makes a building satisfactory — the word “beautiful” is more than ever treacherous — to Stern or Venturi, for instance is bound to be different from what is satisfactory to me. Vive la difference, we live in a pluralistic society.[561]

Johnson’s statement recalls Daniel Bell’s End of Ideology thesis: that events such as the Holocaust, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Gulag have left the positions of the Right and Left exhausted while on the other hand, the rise of the Welfare State and the transformation of capitalism toward a gentler system have essentially ended ideology. Thus, as Bell writes, in the West, a consensus has emerged on the general good of the Welfare State, and decentralized power. With ideology over, Bell concludes that in politics one is left with a rational discourse as to how to carry out “the middle way” of piecemeal social reform.[562] For both Bell and Johnson, ideology means a passionate attempt to transform political ideas into actions. The result of abandoning youthful passion is a wonderfully transformed society, in which Schlesinger’s “vital center” of a loyal near-Left and loyal near-Right joust valiantly to determine the middle way that we can all follow safely.

But pluralism isn’t innocent and Bell and Johnson’s belief in the vital center assumes that the vital center is nonetheless the correct position to take. Johnson and Bell’s assumption that ideology has disappeared is of course mistaken: while Johnson means to be playful when he calls it “cynical” it is precisely this moment of playfully calling his world-view cynical that embodies Peter Sloterdijk’s cynicism as false consciousness or ideology, as defined in the introduction to this dissertation. To reduce every debate in architecture or politics to a position within a pluralistic forum is to domesticate any debate that would position itself as polemical and exclusive of other positions, forcing it into a position of having to compromise. The effect upon any critique of the legitimacy of the architectural discourse would be to reduce it to a discursive formation within the field, just as Oppositions would do to Manfredo Tafuri’s critiques. Pluralism snowballs, appropriating critique rather than engaging it.

For Johnson, pluralism appears to be a way to transparently represent the interests of the patron. Pluralism, he argues, is about facts and the facts are that one builds for power. As he explains, “The Modern Movement disintegrated because architects’ morale changed from salvation through architecture to survivalism-is-all-we’ve-got-left, damn-lucky-to-have-a-job.” The pragmatic response to this disintegration, mapped by Drexler in Five Architects as the adoption of form wasn’t bad at all for Johnson, rather, as he said, “the descendent of that you-can-do-good-by-having-social-housing-done-by-teamwork Gropius ideal, the architecture-as-a-weapon-of-social-reform-thing — that’s the one I hate.”[563] Here then Johnson shows us that all positions within architectural pluralism are not relative, as Johnson just pointed out, some are reprehensible, some are superior, notably his own. It is at the head of this architectural pluralism that Johnson positions himself.

In discussing the implications of pluralism for this dissertation, I will draw extensively on Hal Foster’s argument in his essay “Against Pluralism.”[564] Foster effectively argues that pluralism is intimately tied to the free market. Foster explains that a burgeoning art market in the 1970s required a diversity beyond the strict criteria of late modernism.[565]

The result is, however, not an arena of contending polemics but rather, according to Foster, “of vested interests, of licensed sects: in lieu of culture we have cults. The result is an eccentricity that leads, in art as in politics, to a new conformity: pluralism as an institution.”[566] A death of art is necessary for pluralism, Foster explains, because it allows us to enter a state of grace that allows for all styles.

While pluralism’s advocates speak of freedom and democracy, this does not mean that they advocate such goals politically, instead pluralism is highly conservative. In the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, art was adversarial, if not in Bürger’s terms of sublating art into life, then in Adorno’s terms of a complex autonomy standing against consumption. When we are dealing with the kids, however, artistic production stands against political engagement and can equally be autonomous (without any intent of being subversive) or devoted to a dialogue with the past with traditionalist aims. On the contrary, an absolute, anti-pluralist demand in art would not necessarily imply the end of all opposition. Instead, polemics would be submitted to the open forum in order to generate opposition. Only when everything is relative does argument amount to nothing.

In post-modern architecture, Foster writes, “the use of such images [from the history of architecture] is justified as ‘egalitarian,’” but this egalitarianism is false: historical images have different meanings for different groups. In other words, egalitarianism interpellates the subject, leaves her “fixed — by class, education, and taste. … Such architecture stratifies as it juxtaposes, and condescends as it panders (some will get this, it says, some that).”[567]

This stratification of readings goes beyond the historical reference that Foster examines as Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological research into art museums shows. The very language of architecture used by the vanguard and taught in the best schools serves to stratify. The lower strata will misunderstand the intent of the work (in this case, as I will discuss at length in chapter five, there is not a direct relation between strata and money: while there is an indirect relation, the reading is based primarily on architectural training), the middle strata will sense the beauty of the project and perhaps some of the formal manipulation of the work, and only the upper strata, the architecturally trained, will be able to understand the real argument of the work.

Proper understanding of a work of art is based on a lifelong process of acculturation. The child of upper-cultural-class parents encounters art objects frequently and is able to create a sort of subconscious classification structure that allows her to differentiate works into these classes. The child whose parents do not take her to the museum is handicapped from the start. Secondary education in the history of art, especially that which purports to reject the teaching of styles and dates for more sophisticated concepts simply intensifies this division as the student who already has the acquired skill to differentiate between a Picasso and Juan Gris is so many steps further ahead.[568]

On the other hand, the lower one’s class, the greater the need to justify the work of art by appealing to extrinsic, non-formal values, such as its age, the labor involved in its production or its subject matter.[569] The lower class visitor is especially hard pressed to explain recent art, which has fewer external cues for her to work with.[570]

But pluralism was what Johnson continued to preach as he and the kids had their ascendancy as the new leaders of the architectural profession in design recognized by their prominence in the 1978 convention of the American Institute of Architects. That year, their mentor Philip Johnson was awarded the American Institute of Architect’s highest honor, its Gold Medal. In his acceptance speech, Johnson, who was becoming the figurehead of the postmodern movement through his widely publicized AT&T building, stated that architecture was in the midst of a “shift in sensibility so revolutionary that it is hard to grasp because we are in the middle of it.” This shift, he explained, was away from modern architecture toward a respect for history, an interest in symbolism and ornament, and a respect for the traditions of the context. Again, Johnson traced the shift to a change in ideology, the result of a disillusionment with progress. For Johnson, this new era would be characterized by a combination of pragmatism and pluralism. “Goodness sakes,” he exclaimed,

the Bible says, ‘The house of my Lord has many mansions.’ Or the more contemporary Chairman Mao: ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom.’ Diversity is the name of the game. The pluralism of our culture, that pluralism also applies to architecture, and we can welcome it. There isn’t one of the kids here today speaking at the convention that would do the AT&T building the way John Burgee and I did, yet they all respect our privilege and right and beauty to design it exactly that way. God bless the kids, God bless architecture.[571]

The A. I. A. Gold Medal also marked the first public appearance of Philip’s “kids,” as he referred to them in his acceptance speech. The A. I. A. had asked Johnson to “choose a handful of architects representing a multiplicity of directions on the cutting edge of architecture to present a seminar on “Design in Transition,” and Johnson brought the kids: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, Charles Moore, Cesar Pelli, Robert Stern, Stanley Tigerman. The two sessions of the seminar consisting of slide shows by each of the eight architects and a panel discussion were the “surprise hits” of the convention according to the A. I. A. Journal, attracting large audiences.[572]

Since the late seventies, Johnson and the kids installed themselves in New York City’s prestigious Century Association. Composed of roughly 2,000 members, the Century accepts its members on the basis of their merit in fields such as journalism, cultural philanthropy, or government. During the eighties the association’s roster boasted such luminaries as John Linsay, John Chancellor, Tina Brown, Tom Wolfe, Jacqueline Onassis, Arthur Schlesinger, and Robert Caro.[573] The Century Club itself is a sort of secret society, whose members are castigated for publicly criticizing other club members for revealing what goes on within club walls. For example, when club member Brendan Gill wrote an article attacking the anti-Semitic bigotry and “vicious” philosophy of a recently deceased member — mythologist Joseph Campbell — fellow members were infuriated. As Gill explains, “A lot of Centurions were shocked by my temerity, and there was some merit to their objections. They consider this privileged territory, a secret society saying ‘You and Joe can have your disputes about Jews and blacks or anything else, but if it happens within the walls of the club, it shouldn’t be talked about publicly.’”[574]

It is in this already exclusive organization that Johnson along with his two protégés Eisenman and Stern created what Richard Plunz and Kenneth Kaplan call an “Inner Club” in which the kids and other significant members of the architectural profession attend dinners held every month or two.[575] Composed of Johnson, Eisenman, Graves, Meier and Stern, dressed in dinner jackets, the Inner Club meets at the Henry Platt Library, a private room in the club. At various times John Burgee, Henry Cobb, and Jaquelin Robertson have also been members. Other frequent attendees who are not necessarily members of the Century Association include Emilio Ambasz, Alan Colquhoun, Raul de Armas, Frank Gehry, Charles Gwathmey, Arata Isozaki, Robert Maxwell, Cesar Pelli, and Stanley Tigerman. At a typical dinner, a popular architecture critic, often from the European Left, gives a private talk followed by a critique at the hands of the Inner Club. Among these guests, according to Plunz and Kaplan, have been “Alvin Boyarsky, Giorgio Ciucci, Alan Colquhoun, Francesco Dal Co, Kurt Forster, Kenneth Frampton, Hans Hollein, the Krier Brothers, Rafael Moneo, Aldo Rossi, and Anthony Vidler.”[576]

Certainly similar networks of individuals have existed throughout history. It is natural that talented individuals in the same discipline would congregate together. But Plunz and Kaplan argue correctly that the Inner Club is detrimental to architecture in that it serves as a means of social reproduction in which the Club reproduces the kids and their social standing by disseminating and consolidating their power.[577]

But this conspiracy isn’t any secret. As mentioned in the introduction, critic Douglas Davis has called the existence of the kids and the circle of hangers on around them “a working assumption that is widely held by virtually every architect or critic with whom I worked and talked in the years when I practiced architectural criticism as a weekly trade, or craft.”[578]

Outwardly, it might seem curious that this power structure is discussed primarily in magazines such as Spy and Vanity Fair and yet receives little treatment as a group in either academic or professional journals of architecture.[579] On the other hand, the very public display of this serves to annihilate the need for internal discourse within the discipline. Once it has been acknowledged, the cynic knows that nobody needs to discuss it; if the conspiracy is nothing more than the facts of life in architecture, can you do about it except go along?

Johnson himself explains the reasoning behind the lack of genuine discourse in the field in his interview for Hype, Steven M.L. Aronson’s book on the operation of fashion-making and power-brokerage in various fields.When Johnson states that Stern hates Meier, the interviewer replies that on the contrary Stern “sings Meier’s praises.” Johnson explains that Stern used to say bad things until he straightened him out:

…Stern took my advice. Oh he does. And now he’s generous about his competitors, because he understands that to talk down a competitor hurts yourself, not the competitor. I also taught him that architects must not publicly criticize other architects in print.[580]

Thus Johnson’s role has been to teach the kids how to behave, how to make connections, how to become stars and to fund them both directly through monetary assistance, and indirectly through his power brokerage. In return, the kids have paid tribute to him by discussing him over and over as an architect of ground-breaking significance.

The public irruption of the conspiracy of Johnson and the kids was in the “P-3” conference held at the University of Virginia Charlottesville in November, 1982 and published as the Charlottesville Tapes by Rizzoli. The conference, financed in part by Johnson and Rizzoli, was hosted by Eisenman and his then-partner Jacquelin Robertson. In their letters of invitation, the two signed themselves “P-3.” Among the participants were most of the kids, the Inner Club, and a number of other respected architects, all of whom presented a previously unpublished work for critique. The conference was closed to the public.[581] The P-3, Kaplan and Plunz argue, somehow alludes to Philip Johnson and Peter Eisenman’s initials, but more sinisterly it is a direct allusion to the secret and illegal Italian Masonic Lodge Propaganda Due, P-2 for short.

Propaganda Due was at the time of the conference, being investigated as a neofascist conspiracy aimed at replacing Italy’s parliamentary democracy with presidential rule and implicated in the unraveling Banco Ambrosiano/Vatican Bank scandal by the Italian government. The massive P-2 scandal exposed 963 members, including Cabinet ministers, members of Parliament, army and police generals, bankers, and journalists and toppled the government of Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani. Bizarrely, among its membership P-2 could count Angelo Rizzoli, the head of the Rizzoli publishing empire, arrested in 1983 for embezzling $19.6 million from his company. Beyond its American role as a publisher of art and architecture books, at the time Rizzoli owned a substantial part of the Italian media, including the Italian equivalent of the New York Times, Corriere della Sera.[582]

While Gianfranco Monacelli, the president and chief executive of Rizzoli’s American operations, maintained that they were autonomous from the distressed Italian parent company, he not only helped fund the P-3 conference, he attended as the only outsider allowed into the actual sessions and posed with the architects for a group photo on the cover, perhaps pointing to the importance of the media in American architecture today as a sort of invisible hand. While suggesting that there is some kind of link between P-2 and P-3 is no doubt an exaggeration, the tactlessness of the jest, perpetrated in part by the ex-fascist Johnson is remarkable. The threat of a neofascist conspiracy composed of large percentage of the most powerful figures in Italy connected to Argentinean military and Peronist regimes was no joking matter. Further, in its tongue-in-cheek way, the link between P-2 and P-3 points to an actual conspiracy, namely that of the kids and the Inner Club, and how very wicked and truly sly and therefore marvelous its organizers are.

In this light, what Guy Debord has written about P-2 is also revealing about P-3: both take advantage of the same societal conditions:

Never before has censorship been so perfect. Never before have those who are still led to believe, in a few countries, that they remain free citizens, been less entitled to make their opinions heard, wherever it is a matter of choices affecting their real lives. Never before has it been possible to lie to them so brazenly. The spectator is simply supposed to know nothing, and deserve nothing. Those who are always watching to see what happens next will never act: such must be the spectator’s condition. People often cite the United States as an exception because there Nixon eventually came to grief with a series of denials whose clumsiness was too cynical: but this entirely local exception, for which there were some old historical causes, clearly no longer holds true, since Reagan has recently been able to do the same thing with impunity. Many things may be unauthorized; everything is permitted. Talk of scandal is thus archaic. The most profound summing-up of the period within the whole world entered shortly after Italy and the United States, can be found in the words of a senior Italian statesman, a member, simultaneously of both the official government and the parallel government, P2, Potere Due: ‘Once there were scandals, but not anymore.’[583]

In order to discuss the implications of the kids as conspiracy, I will have to draw extensively on the argument of C. Wright Mills, whose book The Power Elite remains unsurpassed as proof of and study of the implications of the existence of a high-level elite in American society. In twentieth century American society, Mills writes, the progressive growth of the institutions such as the military-industrial complex, the corporate structure, and the government, has meant a corresponding increase in the power of those at the top of these structures, “the power elite.”[584] The relatively small circles of individuals that belong to the power elite make control so much easier for those who know how to operate the system and the overlapping of membership of individuals in institutionally different parts of the elite.[585]

The rise of the power elite is a structural phenomenon Mills explains, not a conspiracy in the sense of a conspiracy of agency having been co-ordinated from the start by its members, but rather a structural conspiracy. The American power elite took advantage of a specific sociological tendency towards a concentration of power in ever-tightening circles, but once the power elite arose its members quite naturally began to plot amongst themselves and here a conspiracy of agents arose to ensure the successful continuation of a system that greatly benefited them.[586]

Similarly, while Philip Johnson and the kids could not have developed the structural condition of architecture as an institution today, they have exploited it to their advantage. Johnson was the first on the scene and his ascent to power was very much a question of being in the right place at the right time as well as being a particularly canny individual. Likewise the kids emerged to fit the need described in chapter one for architects who would represent the discipline as an autonomous field basing its legitimacy on formal competence. It is probably safe to go further and say that if it had not been for Johnson and the kids, some other individuals would have appeared as an architectural power elite. But such a deterministic argument shouldn’t be used to validate the power elite. Here we can identify the subterranean return of Arthur Schlesinger’s concept of The Vital Center which was discussed in chapter one above. The Vital Center appeared to have failed, but it had no replacement and, at least during the time-frame that Schlesinger was concerned with (American history after World War II), it never really existed in the first place. The notion that America’s government would balance between the control of a loyal left and loyal right was a myth, impossible to hold in the era of the power elite. While on certain levels there has been disagreement between political factions, on the whole, there is more alliance than dissent. The power elite provides the continuity underlying the rule of the government. What shifts have come about are the result of institutional realignments: the business elite slipping in front of the military, or vice versa. The tendency of American government, beyond any current political trend, towards the accretion and consolidation of power in ever more centralized form remains essentially unopposed.[587]

Opposition is an almost impossible task against a power elite that controls so much. While actual counter-conspiracies of the underprivileged have emerged from time to time in order to attack the power elite, they have generally remained ineffectual and have been pointed to by the power elite in order to justify their own policies.[588] The power elite, on the other hand, tend towards conservatism. Mills explains that this trend is a psychological demand that belonging to the power elite makes on its members.[589] Successful conspiracies such as that organized by Philip Johnson and the kids, tend to aim not at overthrowing an existing order but rather at filling the highest positions of the power elite attainable with its members. The idea of the balanced vital center, however, is really conservativism  — or its predecessor nineteenth century liberalism — in disguise, a model of society that supposedly works through the autonomous structural forces of the market. Pointing to this anonymous, dynamic structure, the elite can look at itself and say, how can we really exist? Certainly we know each other but we are at odds on so many issues. Our eliteness is the result of success in a free competition. Thus, theoretically speaking the elite disappears into the structure of the economy and likewise the kids or the Five disappear into the structure of the economy of the architectural media.[590]

This market is however by no means free: Generally composed of men of similar social standing and education, the power elite must maintain and reproduce itself in order to survive and this can only be accomplished properly in the free market, in other words, a market structured to respond to their will. Thus, the power elite is not directly based on merit, “it is selected and formed,” as Mills writes, “by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity, which prevail in their society.”[591]

The power elite of architecture is very much part of what we defined in the introduction with the aid of Peter Sloterdijk as “cynical culture,” the culture in which ideological action is exposed yet is still engaged in. Thus Johnson and the kids could pose for Spy: cynicism is, as Sloterdijk points out, what Nietzsche really referred to when he described the Eternal Recurrence of the Same: when faced with the impossibility of truth, one turns disingenuous and enters into a state of being revolving around strategy and tactics, a thinking about and armoring of oneself in defense from the impossibility of the outside.[592]

Indeed, throughout history, there has been a strain of conspiracy — the conspiracy that exists for the sake of breaking rules, and for its own advancement — that has maintained an anti-ethical impulse in which, as leader of the Levantine Assassins, Rashid al-Din Sinan is said to have proclaimed: “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted” or as his master Hasan-i-Sabbah II announced to the faithful during the fast of Ramadan: “the Imam of our time has sent you his blessing and his compassion, and has called you his special chosen servants. He has freed you from the burden of the rules of Holy Law, and has brought you to the Resurrection” and, after proclaiming that “In this world all is action and there is no reckoning, but in the world to come all is reckoning and there is no action,” Hasan invited his congregation to feast.[593] Perhaps like the Assassins, Sex Pistols, the Situationists, or the Dadaists of Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century,[594]this is a life-giving Nietzschean, and Dadaist movement. Philip Johnson, as Peck’s bad boy is the ultimate architectural punk. Following this train of thought we could conclude that Philip Johnson and the kids are just living in accordance with the highest principles of this punk anti-faith.

But perhaps not. In his recent Comments On the Society of the Spectacle the leader of the Situationists, Guy Debord states that since their near-Revolution in 1968, the spectacle has acquired a new, more hegemonic form in the “integrated” spectacle. One of the characteristics of the integrated spectacle is the proliferation of secrecy and conspiracies among the controllers of the spectacle. Debord explains that “Networks of promotion/control slide imperceptibly into networks of surveillance/disinformation. Formerly one only conspired against an established order. Today, conspiring in its favor is a new and flourishing profession. Under spectacular domination people conspire to maintain it, and to guarantee what it alone could call its well-being. This conspiracy is a part of its very functioning.”[595] It is this kind of conspiracy that the Johnson and the kids are engaged in.

During the 1980s such a body of thought as defined by Leo Strauss became extremely influential among neo-conservatives in the United States government. For Strauss, philosophy tells the truth, which is that truth does not exist and that those few individuals who are not deceived live by their wits and their own will-to-power. In order not to destroy society (or alternatively, have it destroy the philosopher), the philosopher must hide the truth, disseminating it into esoteric moments, “in between the lines” of the text so that the untrained reader would have no access to it.[596] Strauss’s goal then is to cultivate “the wise,” an elite of political philosophers that would exert influence over politicians and lead society. These “wise” are separated from the “vulgar” masses by their capacity to live with the truth. Because the wise can live with truth in a way that the vulgar cannot, it is up to the wise to deceive the vulgar so that they do not perceive the truth. The difference between the wise and the vulgar is so great, that Strauss argues that the standards applying to the wise are in no way the same as to those applying to the vulgar. Instead, the wise is allowed to go beyond morality, or as the analyst of Strauss’s work, Shadia Drury, writes, “Everything is therefore permitted to the philosopher in his efforts to seek his own good.”[597]

Like Johnson, Strauss surrounded himself with “young men who love to think,” his intellectual heirs such as Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, who spread his vast influence in conservative academia. The Straussian conspiracy spread into a number of elite university government departments most notably to the Claremont Graduate School, the training ground for many of the high officials in the State department and other top government positions.[598]

The danger with the kids is the danger of a Straussian architecture, in spirit, if not in direct intent. Peter Eisenman has intimated that after 1945, there is no “Truth” left, and architecture thus itself loses any possibility of meaning:

With the scientifically orchestrated horror of Hiroshima and the consciousness of the human brutality of the Holocaust it became impossible for man to sustain a relationship with any of the dominant cosmologies of his past; he could no longer derive his identity from a belief in a heroic purpose and future. Survival became his only ‘heroic’ possibility. The technocratic model, which was really just a disguise for the anthropocentric one, brought down the entire cosmological matrix. For the first time in history, man was faced with no way of assuaging his unmediated confrontation with an existential anxiety.[599]

But a Straussian, architect — or alternatively a Nietzschean architect following Nietzsche’s division between the overmen and the masses — would achieve an elite position through a careful analysis of conditions and a response to these changes. Straussian architecture would be available to be read on a number of levels, stratifying its audience and leaving its real meaning only for those who are ready to understand it, the same condition that architectural pluralism fosters.

In this chapter we have mapped the rise of a conspiratorial elite to power in architecture. Having, I hope proved it is possible to see the kids as an actual conspiracy, perhaps even a Straussian one, it is time to analyze the way conspiracy of Philip and the kids is perceived by other members of the architecture culture. As I explained in the introduction, the conspiracy of Philip and the kids is gossiped about readily yet it is rarely openly questioned in the architectural media. This denial is due to the nature of this conspiracy. If this conspiracy theory is Jamesonian, i.e. an allegory, then we have to discern what is behind this conspiracy that is so difficult to utter straightout, that requires a conspiracy to represent it.

The answer to this question is almost banal in its obviousness, yet it turns out to be the most difficult part of architecture for academics and (at least the successfully conditioned) architecture students to admit: the collective nature of architecture. As sociologist Dana Cuff explains in her Architecture: The Story of Practice, a book remarkable for its straightforward assessment of the profession, the popular image of the architect is, if one goes to the architecture studio and asks the students, on the surface, that of the individual, Howard Roark, the hero of the Fountainhead, that of Frank Lloyd Wright, of Le Corbusier, of Johnson or the kids: the architect as artist, as builder. Yet this is precisely the kind of architect that is the rarest. Today’s architect is not free to do what she wants, rather her autonomy is severely compromised by the facts of architectural practice: outside of school one designs not for oneself but for patrons.[600]

Thus, the conspiracy theory of the kids, which exists as a subversive bit of insider gossip to many architects, academics, and architecture students, allegorically represents a patronage network that controls access to the highest echelons of the field and is further representative of the problem of patronage itself. Patronage is the single most overriding psychic problem of today’s architect, unable to build the kind of independent projects she has always wished to and has felt she has been trained to. Instead, the architect winds up utterly compromised, in an economic situation that leaves him or her far from their dreams. A doctor will still do roughly what she expected to do when she conceived of her career as a child: she will still heal patients. On the contrary, as we will discuss in the next chapter, the typical architect will almost certainly not have an autonomous role in constructing buildings as works of art in his lifetime. Nothing would change if Philip and the kids were to die in the wake of an explosion of a large car-bomb fortuitously placed in front of the Century Club. Other architects would take their place swiftly. The structure of architecture as discipline, while perhaps somewhat autonomous in its surface stylistic manifestations, does not remain autonomous of the realities of late capitalism.[601]

Johnson and the kids have a structural function as celebrities in the field of architecture. Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno have explained that when looking at a celebrity, the majority of people realize the statistical impossibility of ever being on the screen and instead chalk up the celebrities’ achievements to luck. The audience member realizes that they could be on the screen, but that in today’s world, they never will be: fate has dealt them the wrong hand and they will never be famous. Instead, they will rejoice in identifying with those who do achieve such success.[602] But of course it isn’t just pure luck in this case. Luck is an illusion because after all it would not signify pure luck but rather knowing how to pull the strings.

Pulling the strings and the desire to pull the strings points to a secondary meaning of this allegory: agency. The kids were neither a product of a discursive formation, nor a product of the structural alignments of the previous chapter. Rather, they acted, reading the ideological script provided by the structural conspiracy and manipulated discourse in the field to create their own conspiracy, a conspiracy of agents.

But here we must ask for a moment precisely who are these agent? Why isn’t Johnson, the former anti-Semite a little disturbed by working with them: after all, they’re Jews! Some, like Eisenman and Tigerman, have gone so far as to identify post-modernism, one of Johnson’s movements with a Jewish condition?[603] How did this strange twist come about?

The answer to this question brings up another nasty secret in American history: quotas in the university. The anti-Semitism that Johnson advocated in the 1930s was heinous, but not isolated. During the 1920s, following the lead of Harvard where Johnson was a student, universities dealt with the “problem” of what to do with increasing numbers of Jewish students by imposing quotas.[604] The result was that for nearly thirty years many Jews were excluded from American higher education and with it, good careers.

After the end of World War II, the situation changed. Quotas were done away with in universities and Jews were no longer the subject of such open anti-Semitism in general.[605] The Jews of the kids’ generation were able to achieve far more than previous generations, both in architecture and elsewhere. Johnson, living in and around the New York city area, where the greatest concentration of Jews in the United States is located simply made the right decision: “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” one imagines him saying.

As we have discussed at the end of chapter one, the function of architects like the kids is to legitimate the profession by validating its artistic aspect. After all this it should not be surprising that in 1984, the kids — Eisenman, Graves, Meier and Stern — who have been involved the longest and most consistently were selected by their friend and then editor of Progressive Architecture, Suzanne Stephens for her 1984 article in Vanity Fair on “The Fountainhead Syndrome.” Stephens argues that in the years between 1970 and 1980 a new breed of Howard Roarks emerged to embody the Fountainhead hero’s ego–oriented persona. All four share a view of architecture as an aesthetic problem of form and meaning.[606] The four are not committed to change society, she writes, but rather to their own personal visions. The new Howard Roark, she writes, “believes that corporations, developers, and the media can be seduced into supporting his architecture.”[607]

Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark was a hero for her as a lone man (and he has to be a man, in Ayn Rand’s work virtuous women exist but they are unable to achieve the greatness of their male counterparts and instead achieve their greatest moments when being raped) who stands against the masses with his vision of the future. In this construction, the architect stands as a Nietzschean figure, bathed in the light of the truth which is ultimately the will-to-power (which Nietzsche and following him Johnson and Eisenman in turn identify with architecture) against the forces of philistinism. Indeed the very word “architecture” stems from the Greek arche-techne, roughly “master craftsman.” Thus, a division of labor is created, in which a single building master with expertise is privileged over others, the masses.

If the architect, with his expertise, is privileged over all others then just as Stephens writes, he should seduce everyone into his vision. The successful architect is a liar, a double-agent, a conspirator. The popular construction of the architect as Howard Roark is itself the very image of the Nietzschean overman or the Straussian philosopher. And yet as Johnson reminded us at the outset of this dissertation, all along Nietzsche had understood the architect and given him a special role: “In architectural works, man’s pride, man’s triumph over gravitation, man’s will to power assume visible form. Architecture is a veritable oratory of power made by form.”[608]

In a recent debate with Leon Krier, an architect who has on occasion attempted to resurrect the architecture of Albert Speer on the grounds that it is ideologically neutral,[609] Peter Eisenman explained just what it means to be an architect in Nietzschean terms:

As I was preparing for this debate there was only one book that I thought it necessary to read and that was Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra because it is a book that both Leon and I understand very well and it probably brings us very close together. I believe that it was on page 61, (although I’m not certain as I didn’t bring the book with me. I don’t like reading from prepared script because I respond to the presentness of this situation) but it was something about the creator. What Nietzsche says is that the creator is a lonely person and must always stand apart from and perhaps against the mass, and will always be in a sense outside and alien to the existing order. In that sense, I guess that I agree with Leon that the creator must have a degree of certainty to do that. I think that Nietzsche then asks the question, how does one have the right to be a creator? In other words, how does one have the right to stand outside? What is that right that allows one to arrogate to one’s self that possibility?

My answer to that question is that people who are not creators don’t think about that right. They remain within the mass always. I don’t think we are talking today about those individuals, architects sometimes, poets, physicists, whoever has had that need to stand outside and therefore the right to stand apart. To be those wanderers who always understand what presentness is because the need to creation is always involved in presentness. Great architecture, I would argue, has never been liked by the masses. The great monuments always have been, in their time, not necessarily liked or understood. We do not know, when we build today, whether we have either caught the spirit of our time because it’s an elusive thing; nor whether we catch the presentness or whether we are building, as Leon said, in the spirit of all time. I think it’s the willingness of the creator to take that risk; the risk of being alone and of attempting to define that elusive condition. That is what makes an architecture of presentness.[610]

This drive to identify the architect with Nietzsche’s overman underscores the pervasiveness of Nietzscheanism in our culture, especially in art, architecture, and the historiography of those fields. In terms of the latter, a fundamental Nietzschean impulse underlies Heinrich Wölfflin’s basic project for art history — the same basic project which still motivates so much of art and architecture history today — to mark out “the significant, the solemn, and the grand” from what Frampton would call “the stuff of history.”[611] Here too we can locate the greatest danger from Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism: the idea that life is only justifiable as an aesthetic phenomena, and thus we overmen must make our life a total work of art,[612] designing our own life — just like Philip Johnson. This call to aestheticize politics was the basic programme of Nazi Germany and a driving force in the Holocaust.[613]

What does it mean to live and even build after 1945? Eisenman explains that he believes that it means to live with a perpetual anxiety. Is this anxiety indeed the anxiety of living and knowing that the same ideology that is being quite literally sold to us every day and that we ourselves reproduce wittingly or unwittingly is in many fundamental ways responsible for these horrors and doing one’s best to fight it? Or is this the anxiety that is the hidden misery of the cynic,[614] acknowledging that no matter what happened, no matter what we see, we are still fundamentally conducting business as usual and indeed that it must go on?

Architects today, unlike architects in the forties and fifties, work for the media, although they may think they’re working for their clients.

— Arthur Drexler[615]

So far we have discussed two conspiracies: the structural conspiracy of a discipline under internal pressure to refine its object and methods of study and a changing sociopolitical climate combining to favor cardboard architecture and the conspiracy of agency between Philip and the kids, motivated by a need to make history while suppressing the social implications of their work: the very aspect by which they rose to prominence (i.e. social networking and patronage).

These two conspiracies intersect in a third: the conspiracy of spectacle through which cardboard architecture and the kids solidify their positions. This chapter will explore the conspiracy of spectacle as it appears in the new popularity of architectural representation that encouraged the phenomenal growth of the architectural media and led to new modes of experiencing architecture, an increase in the discipline’s popularity for the public and new patterns of patronage. At the same time, however, these changes led to the further spectacularization of architecture as its object began to include not buildings but images that could sold as commodities.

The conspiratorial aspect of this change is twofold, reflecting the division between the conspiracy of agency (the kids) and the conspiracy of structure (cardboard architecture). The kids were deeply involved in some of the most important moves toward the popularization of the architectural drawing and model and at the same time profited from it, having their work frequently exhibited, receiving exposure and commissions for its sale. Public interest in and the popularity of their drawings is a result of cardboard architecture’s derivation of its methodology from two-dimensional images and from the image of the cardboard model, as discussed previously and its resulting appropriateness for the medium.

After discussing the rise of the architectural drawing, I will explain the kids’ attempt to create a prosthetic aura or cult-value for their cardboard architecture. Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,”[616] explained that the aura, or cult-value, of a work of art is broken down by techniques of reproducibility but he did not predict the phenomenal growth of reproduction and marketing that re-creates aura in prosthetic form in terms of spectacle, the cult of personality and image. Thus, while solidity and depth, both characteristics of aura in an architectural object, are evacuated by cardboard architecture’s shallowness, attention to surface-level phenomenon, and propensity for being seen largely in reproduction, they are reestablished in terms of formal density, and the fetishism of the image.

While architectural drawings and reproductions had been appreciated for their formal qualities by audiences outside of the discipline at least as far back as Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Vedute di Roma and a number of important exhibits of the drawing were mounted in the late 1960s and 1970s — notably Hejduk and Slutzky’s Diamond and Square and The Education of an Architect — it was during 1976 and 1977 that the architectural drawing proliferated in the museum and gallery as an art object and attracted an unprecedented degree of popularity. This new appreciation of the architectural drawing was catalyzed by the exhibit on The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts shown at the Museum of Modern Art from 29 October 1975 through 4 January 1976 and the bookof the same name published in 1977 as a companion to the exhibit.[617] The display of a system of architecture — that of the École — entirely through the medium of drawing set the stage for the new appreciation of architectural drawing on its own terms. That these drawings consisted mainly of works produced by students concerned primarily with winning competitions on the basis of their formal abilities and drawing style only added to the effect.[618]

Arthur Drexler, who as director of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design was responsible for the show, explained that with the Beaux-Arts exhibition he had hoped to stimulate thinking about architectural education, which he felt had fallen apart due to the failure of the Bauhaus as a system of teaching architecture in the United States. The exhibit on the École, he hoped, would provide a clear-cut system of design principles to contrast with the current predicament and in so doing force architects to reexamine the entire system of architectural education.[619] Drexler believed that the École could provide useful ways of thinking anew about architecture’s relationship to history.[620] Drexler worried about the crisis of overproduction in architectural education, leading to thousands upon thousands of graduates all over the world entering a field which, with its combination of middle-class professionalism and artistic meaning, appeared attractive but was unable to support them.[621] Indeed, the École exhibit served to introduce the museum-going public to the possibility of architecture as a field that could produce something to hang on a wall and thereby expand the market.

The exhibit was immediately recognized as a historic moment in which the discursive field was opened up to a consideration of a historicist mode of design within MoMA, itself long considered the bastion of modernism.[622] As mentioned in chapter one, the need to work through the trauma of the École system had been recognized as early as August 1954 — when its last vestiges were dying out in the United States — in Colin Rowe’s “Roots of American Architecture: An Answer to Mumford’s Analysis.”[623] Rowe’s argument, that the revolution of modern architecture had been completed within the United States, albeit in de-ideologized form, and that it would now seem possible to cut through the mythology of the modern movement to look at the Beaux-Arts and the 1893 Columbian Exposition for what they really were,[624] was nevertheless too early for the majority of American architects. Yet Rowe’s statement that the revolution of modern architecture had been won echoed Philip Johnson’s 1952 declaration that “The battle of modern architecture has long been won.” It was this statement, written for the Museum of Modern Art catalog Built in USA: Post-war Architecture, that Arthur Drexler attacked in his The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts.

Drexler’s intents after the early 1970s are rather difficult to read, and his relationship with the kids was often rocky, as we will see later in this chapter.Indeed, it is hard to say what sort of design Drexler hoped the exhibit would stimulate. His essays  on the École exhibition criticize cardboard architecture’s adherence to the axomometric and model and to modernist forms and his complaints about state of architectural education are also curious in light of cardboard architecture’s potent role in that field. On the other hand, Drexler still supported the equivocation of architecture and pure form making as he did in Five Architects, arguing against the link between form and necessity of function and structure in modern architecture, instead proposing that form should be responsible only to the architect, writing “Forms are manipulated in order to make explicit whichever of these external validations the architect affirms as the most satisfying explanation of the nature of existence.”[625] In Drexler’s view border control needed to be re-established between architecture and building, the former being “the domain of freedom of action, conscious choice, and ulterior motives; [while] the latter is the domain of minimum effort in response to external necessity.” Modern architecture, he wrote, attempted to remove this distinction in favor of the utilitarian response to external necessity, even if such a conflation was impossible in practice.[626]

But Drexler’s intent was also to criticize the use of modernist form in cardboard architecture as the following passage reveals:

When for architects modernism’s conceptual truths seemed finally to exclude possibilities rather than embrace them, a saving impulse to escape the engineering or utilitarian style found expression in whatever would seem to contradict it — in a taste for contradiction as an end in itself. But before built form can be understood to embody contradiction, both the rule and its exception must be present and intelligible. Hence the characteristic problem for modern architecture in its post-Miesian phase: it acknowledges freedom by seeking to embody divergent possibilities (which it chooses to see as contradictions), but it has not yet dared to relinquish the reductionist imperative of the engineering style. Devised to tell the ‘truth’ about necessity, its form language is now the only language available. And so it happens that the one necessity modern architecture cannot freely confront is the necessity for freedom.[627]

If Drexler criticized Venturi’s taste in contradiction in this passage, he also criticized the Five, who believed that modern architecture’s “form language is now the only language available” and in another he probably referred to Rowe and Slutzky when he wrote that the derivation of architecture from painting might be a problem, “that architecture, for example, ceases to be architecture to the extent that it becomes painting or sculpture — even though the doctrinal history of the modern movement has involved the opposite assumption.”[628]

Instead, Drexler understood that what he called “the proper instruments” of the architect’s own thinking — the drawing and the model necessarily — determined architecture:

Whether they begin, mediate, or conclude the design process, the surrogates of built form now dominate it. Among the surrogates the model is preeminent. Its effect on the architect’s thought does not seem problematic because we still believe that when we think of the ‘reality’ we have in mind an actual building. But when the primary object of the architect’s deliberations is the model itself, the ‘real’ building stands to it in the interesting but superfluous relationship of a giant copy of an egg to its miniature original. We would be unwise to dismiss this as inconsequential, when we are quick to recognize that for the nineteenth century, and for the École des Beaux-Arts above all, it was the exquisite drawing that finally replaced the actualities it claimed to describe.[629]

Both drawing and model dictated what students would do when they made drawings. But the tendency to miniaturization of the cardboard model was a problem for Drexler, apparently because of its tendency to create “reductive form,” downplaying the role of such elements as light and shadow.[630] Likewise photography came under scrutiny for being an inaccurate representation: by presenting the building with “a selective and hallucinating clarity,” the “one-point perspective characteristic of much architectural photography in the 1950s made diverse modern buildings seem parts of a continuous image revealed in monthly installments, teaching us to see architecture as the photographer saw it. Photographs thus come to serve as exemplars at the very beginning of the design process, encouraging the student to draw effects of scale and perspective that can be seen only through a wide-angle lens with adjustments to eliminate vertical convergence.”[631]

The École des Beaux-Arts furnished an antidote in what Drexler called “drawing as scenography” as a base for an architecture of “non-reductive form” that would generate some kind of post-modernism, although precisely in what shape is hard to tell.[632]

Drexler’s comments and the exhibit brought swift reaction from the cardboard architects. Eisenman defended the model as a conceptual tool against Drexler’s attack with the show at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies on “Idea as Model” which we mentioned in the previous chapter. An Oppositions Forum was set up twelve days after the show closed, on 22 January 1976, to discuss the exhibit and the proceedings were published in Oppositions 7 in the context of an entire issue edited by Anthony Vidler on the theme of nineteenth century academic architecture. The panelists were generally enthusiastic about being able to see the architecture of the Beaux-Arts at MoMA, although many of speakers were negative about the emphasis on drawings, which indicates that this was still a rather early moment in the ascent of the drawing as architecture.[633]

Vidler proved to be the most insightful of the Forum panelists, explaining that:

Ironically the schools that now produce recognizable modern styles — Yale, Princeton, the Institute, and its affiliates — have essentially reverted to a real Beaux-Arts (in the very best sense of course) attitude to design; most students of Eisenman, Graves, and the like can easily assimilate the lessons, if not the styles, of the student work on display at the Museum, into their own work. They have, after all been working with Colin Rowe’s edition of Letarouilly for some time.[634]

Princeton under Graves and the Institute under Eisenman were the strongholds of cardboard architecture pedagogy and thus what Vidler was referring to was cardboard architecture as an academic discipline of architecture based on carefully set out rules of composition, oriented toward not architecture but its means of representation in the drawing as well as model. All of these were, after all, part of cardboard architecture since its beginning.

In 1977 the Architectural League of New York, then still under Robert A.M. Stern’s presidency, and the American Federation of Arts sponsored an exhibition entitled 200 Years of American Architectural Drawing together with a book of the same name by David Gebhard and Deborah Nevins.[635] With its broad historical scope, the exhibit would serve a transitional role, mediating between the popular reception of drawings of the past in the École des Beaux-Arts exhibit and the popular reception of contemporary architectural drawings to come.

In the book, the authors offered an explanation for the lack of scholarly attention that they perceived was being paid to the architectural drawing. Research into American architectural drawings was a difficult task, they wrote, because such renderings were not treated as works of art themselves and hence public institutions and collectors were not interested in their preservation until relatively recent times. But the emerging status of the drawing as a collectable — and hence marketable — artwork can be seen in the captions indicating the ownership of the drawings. While the caption attributes the ownership of the drawing to the “Collection of…” allowing for the possibility of architectural drawing as an artwork worthy of collection, the owner generally tended to be the architect responsible for the drawing.[636] Few actual collections or collectors existed at this point. Nevertheless, the possibility had been raised: architectural drawings were art works that could be owned, bought and sold.

Significantly, Gebhard and Nevins linked a lack of interest in intellectual issues among American architects with the “almost nonexistent” use of architectural drawings to solve theoretical problems.[637] Gebhard explained that architectural drawing was essential to theoretical work:

American architecture of the mid-seventies is in a much more splintered position than in any period since the 1930s. Though this division exhibits itself through style, its actual basis is due to a diversity of intent. And if the intent has intellectual substance, drawings remain, as in the past, the principal means to convey it.[638]

The group of contemporary architects Nevins and Gebhard picked was telling: Michael Graves, Mitchell/Giurgola, Peter Eisenman, Hardy Holzman and Pfeiffer, Frank Gehry, Charles Moore and William Turnbull, Venturi and Rauch, and John Hejduk. The list would be a start in establishing whose architectural drawings would be considered interesting. The stakes were high. As Gebhard wrote,

Most contemporary architects, historians, and critics would either deny or feel uneasy about claiming the primacy of the drawing, but if they are uneasy with what has been termed ‘paper’ architecture as opposed to ‘real’ architecture, they may well be indicating that their primary allegiance is to building, not to architecture.[639]

That Gebhard and Nevins’s book was only a start became evident as contemporary architectural drawings expanded into the gallery system during the fall of 1978 with three major exhibits of architectural drawings held in New York at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Drawing Center, and the Leo Castelli Gallery.

The catalog for the first two exhibits was edited by Robert Stern, who was also the organizer of the Drawing Center show and was published by the English journal Architectural Design under the title “America Now.” Significantly, the implication of the title was that by 1978, American architecture could be represented best not by images of buildings but by drawings. This was only logical as these exhibits did an excellent job of representing the work of the kids, as Stern wrote: the works in the exhibits illustrated “the debate between the late Modernist group and the Post–Modernists, a debate which has taken earlier form as one between ‘exclusivists’ and ‘inclusivists’, ‘Whites’ and ‘Grays.’” The drawings selected, would lead to an understanding of contemporary architecture by showing how architectural drawing would be “a part of the conceptual process.”[640] This resurgence of interest in drawing, Stern wrote, was the result of an opposition to the modernist emphasis on building three-dimensional models which, by focused on three dimensional form at the expense of surface. Most of the architects selected by Stern to submit their drawings were expected: Graves, Venturi, Eisenman, Mitchell/Giurgola, Greenberg, Venturi, Moore, Tigerman and Stern himself. The exhibit at the Cooper Union, organized by Richard Oliver, was broader in its scope but also included its share of the cardboard architectural vanguard: Moore, Stern, Hejduk and Venturi.

Stern traced the return to drawing to the Museum of Modern Art with its exhibit of the work of Cooper Union students later presented in the book Education of an Architect: A Point of View, an exhibition organized by Emilio Ambasz on “Architectural Studies and Projects” and the Beaux-Arts exhibit of 1975. The latter exhibit, Stern wrote, brought home the narcissism of modernism sealed off from everyday experience and from high culture. How the drawings by the École students or by the architects he selected for his exhibit addressed reality he didn’t explain, but significantly Stern did link the economic reality of the lack of opportunity for architects in the 1970s and the production of the drawing.[641]

The title of the Castelli show, “Architecture I,” implied its role as the first of its kind: architects had invaded New York’s top art gallery. Featuring architects Emilio Ambasz, Raimund Abraham, Richard Meier, Aldo Rossi, James Stirling, and Robert Venturi along with artist Walter Pichler,[642] the show moved away from the work of the kids and toward a more diverse and international group, even if it the individuals involved were frequently mentioned in Oppositions and the New York scene.

Castelli’s next show of architectural material attracted notoriety for its departure from the simple sale of the architectural drawing.[643] Known as “Architecture II: Houses for Sale,” the 1980 show featured drawings and models of houses designed by eight architects — Moore, Cesar Pelli, Ambasz, Eisenman, Arata Isozaki, Cedric Price, Vittorio Gregotti, and O. M. Ungers — specifically for the show. Following the trend toward the single-family detached house as an object of investigation,[644] each project consisted of a house on a minimum of one acre of land. The price of each house would be roughly $250,000 and the architect would retain a 7 per cent commission. The gallery could now sell not only architectural drawings but entire projects “on spec” for prospective clients.

The Castelli shows were matched by the opening of the Max Protetch gallery in 1979, specializing in architectural drawings. In establishing his gallery, Protetch turned to his friends kid Peter Eisenman and Five Architect alum John Hejduk to ask them for advice. Protetch explains that the two were upset to learn that the first show at his gallery was by kid Michael Graves, “Of course, they thought I’d be showing their work first,” Protetch says, “but Graves just seemed so right at the time.” Indeed, the show was a critical and financial success establishing both Graves and Protetch at the forefront of the architectural design scene.[645]

The ascendancy of the drawing was only confirmed when in 1979, Stern and Nevins collaborated on a book titled The Architect’s Eye: American Architectural Drawings from 1799-1978. While the book’s historical scope dictated the inclusion of few contemporary architects, the inclusion of Graves and Eisenman among the handful underscored how important it was to be one of the kids.[646]

By the start of the 1980s, a number of cardboard architects, notably Graves and Eisenman were no longer simply working for clients but also for dealers and galleries who would sell the work and would also produce designs of small domestic objects. Architects in the vanguard became obsessed with this secondary production and with preserving drawings that they would have once discarded. As Protetch explains, “Young architects save every scrap of paper.”[647] With good reason: the architectural drawing continued to become more popular: by 1982, a signed poster by the hottest architect of the time, Michael Graves, could sell for $1,000 at the Max Protetch gallery while an original drawing commanded in the thousands.[648] In this way market conditions began to determine architecture in a more direct way, allowing dealers to speculate on architects whose work was considered profitable. The reproduction of the architects’ work and of their images — via interviews, television shows, and exhibits — became paramount to their success.

The importance of this publicity to architects can be seen in what was in the culminating moment in the ascent of the architectural reproduction: Arthur Drexler’s “Transformations in Architecture” exhibit at MoMA in 1979. The exhibition drew criticism for its method of presentation: one image per building, covering 406 separate buildings.[649] Drexler explains that his intent “was to show how an architectural idea becomes devalued through a process of repetition and variation, until it loses its original quality and intent and becomes something very different.” But equally important, we can see that whatever their worries about the reproduction, architects were terribly concerned about being represented, even if the exhibit drew negative conclusions. The principle of the spectacle applied: that which is good appears, that which appears is good. Alternatively, Drexler’s own principle could be used: “It doesn’t matter how critical they are, as long as they spell your name right.”[650] Thus when Drexler omitted John Hejduk, the Five mobilized to counteract, as Drexler explains, “Peter conducted one of his round-the-clock terror campaigns” to boycott the show until Hejduk was reinstated. While he was not successful in getting Hejduk reinstated, Eisenman’s boycott achieved a remarkable amount of publicity.[651]

In 1981, looking back at the 1976 “Idea as Model” exhibit at the IAUS, the same exhibit where Matta-Clark shot out the gallery windows and that was meant as a counter to the emphasis on drawing at Arthur Drexler’s École des Beaux-Arts exhibit, Richard Pommer was able to conclude that architecture had irrevocably changed. Models and drawings had been taken up by the galleries and at the same time architects had learned to sell them and collectors learned to buy them. “Architects have lost their virginity,” he wrote, “No longer is it possible to believe that confining architecture to paper and cardboard will keep it free from the dirty ways of the street.” Thus, Pommer explained that while the exhibit had been intended to stand against Drexler’s pro-drawing Beaux-Arts exhibit and prove the viability of the model as means of creatively investigating architecture, it was superfluous by 1981: both drawing and model had become architecture.[652]

As drawings invaded the gallery, other objects designed by architects, such as coffee pots, tea services and jewelry, became hot items, soon commanding high prices in galleries. In 1979 the Italian tableware manufacturer Alessi commissioned a dozen architects — among them Richard Meier, Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Oscar Tusquets, Alessandro Mendini, Stanley Tigerman, Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi, and critic Charles Jencks — to create tea and coffee services. The hand-made versions were displayed in the Max Protetch gallery as “Architecture in Silver” in 1983. Each set, ranging in price from about $10,000 to $30,000 for the Meier piece, was treated as an art object, signed and limited to an edition of ninety-nine (which, if all the pieces were sold would make the entire project worth well over $10 million).[653] While Alessi had intended that the projects could be mass-produced for everyday use, the majority of them turned out to be too difficult and costly to manufacture. Still, Rossi’s espresso makers can be found in many shopping mall coffee stores. By 1988, Michael Graves, had sold more than 100,000 of what Spy magazine called “his $115 yuppie-porn ‘birdie’ tea kettles.”[654] By 1994 the price had gone up to $125 and he had sold half a million. Inspired by his success, Graves opened a store dedicated to his own designs and counting T-shirts with his signature on them, watches, teakettles and a host of other Graves designed or signed objects, and accounting for variations in color and size there were 1,300 unique items in the store.[655]

Beginning in 1982, another major production of architect-design objects took place when Cleto Munari asked sixteen architects to design jewelry. Barbara Radice, in her introduction to a 1987 book on the collection, explained why the particular architects were selected:

When talking of very famous architects, no more than about thirty names are likely to be raised. They are the same names that come up again and again on the panels of international shows and competitions, the same who exchange polite criticisms and views in the pages of newspapers. They are the beloved protagonists of the great architectural telenovela incessantly fueled by corporate and society gossip broadcast by magazines and reviews and echoed by students’ intellectuals, and pursuers of celebrities.

Their is no cultural event of significance that can do without their very special presence, support, or advice. Their success as a category is perhaps due to the fact that they are forced by circumstances to be at the same time artists, intellectuals, businessmen, and managers. They are not always able to pull this off but it does make them into the most complex, protean Renaissance figures in the whole professional scene.

The architects included a number of the usual suspects, among them Eisenman, Graves, Meier, Tigerman, Venturi and other generally less familiar Italian names. The point, however, was made, architecture was, as Radice put it, “translated into gold.”[656]

The profitability of the architectural market for the media was made clear when Rizzoli entered into the architectural publishing market in 1980. During the next four years, the company published nearly 150 books and 50 editions of journals on architecture. Employing Kenneth Frampton as a special consultant, from the start Rizzoli was associated with the vanguard and with the postmodern movement, achieving remarkable success by publishing Charles Jencks’s The Language of Postmodern Architecture, which sold 30,000 copies by 1985, a very high sales figure in the art book market.[657]

The frenzy over architecture in galleries was matched by museums. Prior to the flurry of activity beginning in 1976 there was little opportunity to see architecture in the museum but by 1984 there were twenty-five to thirty museums with significant architecture exhibits, five in New York City alone, including the Philip Johnson Gallery in the Museum of Modern Art.[658]

One of the most important international proselytizers for architecture in the museum was art historian Heinrich Klotz, who was instrumental in the founding of the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt in 1984.[659] According to Klotz, the German Architecture Museum came out of his desire to preserve the records of the evolution of buildings by contemporary architects and also to help disseminate the work of innovative architects such as Venturi and Moore in Germany. The collection rapidly expanded — by 1987 the museum owned more than 35,000 drawings, 150 paintings, and 350 scale models — driving Klotz to seek out a new outlet for the display of the material.[660]

Such an outlet appeared at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, under Thomas Krens, its director during the 1980s. Krens, whose success at Williamstown landed him a job as Director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, has been called “the prototypical new director”[661] for his combination of strongly formalist art historical training and management skills, given him by an advanced degree in art history (an MFA from SUNY-Albany) but also an MBA (from Yale), an ideal combination for an art director who would become one of the key figures in the controversial move toward “de-accessioning” — i.e. selling — works of art from museum collections in order to buy more attractive ones. The museum, in this paradigm, as Krens’s predecessor at the Guggenheim noted, would state “not only feed itself, it must excrete.”[662]

Krens’s ideas about the museum came out of a particular background that shared many similarities with the kids. As an undergraduate, Krens had studied at Williams with art and architecture history professors S. Lane Faison, William H. Pierson and Whitney Stoddard. By the mid-1980s Williams College art history graduates of Krens’s generation controlled a remarkable number of key posts in the American museum world, the most notable among them being Krens himself, Kirk Varnedoe ‘67 (director of painting and sculpture at MoMA), Robert T. Buck ‘61 (director of the Brooklyn Museum), James N. Wood ‘63 (director of the Art Institute of Chicago), Roger Mandel ‘63 (director of the Toledo Museum of Art) and Earl A. “Rusty” Powell III ‘66 (director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). The graduates credited their education under Faison, Stoddard, and Pierson as the reason for their success, agreeing that it was the formal training they received that was responsible. The trio of professors attempted to instill an appreciation of the object rather than a scholarly approach to the history of art. The result was that while the students were unprepared for graduate school, being totally unfamiliar with the basic literature and the art journals, they were extremely well-trained visually. This turn inward was a part of a general educational phenomenon at Williams: its students felt that they were bred for success, trained to be aggressive members of the elite. Williams college students who tended to be from well-off backgrounds, were able to cultivate their social graces at the college. Williams graduates have been notoriously loyal both to their college and other alumni and with their wealth and cultivation, it was assured that a large number of them would appear on museum boards.[663] This confluence then of a formal visual training and a conspiratorial old-boy network, ultimately served the purposes of social reproduction and advancement of the Williams graduates in a way surprisingly similar to that of the kids.

Upon his return to Williams in the early 1980s as the director of its college art museum, Krens swiftly proved that he had learned his lessons well: he quickly took the small college museum with a two man staff (himself and the janitor) and a $45,000 budget and expanded the staff to thirty, the budget to $1.5 million, and at the same time built an $8 million addition by Charles Moore that more than doubled the museum’s space.[664] Appropriately, the shows that Klotz and Krens brought from Frankfurt were displayed in the new space. Krens’s management involved the extensive computerization of the Williams museum as well. His faith in computer technology was reflected in his development of a large database on the financial history of major art museums, part of his general interest in the financial aspects of the art world, demonstrated by his plans to co-author a book on “The Economic Future and Purpose of the Art Museum.” Krens’s management skill was recognized by the Yale School of Management’s invitation to him to give a series of lectures as “Executive-in-Residence” in the fall of 1988.[665]

Soon after arriving at Williams, Krens began working on yet another idea, this time an ambitious $66 million project for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in which a massive factory complex in nearby but economically depressed North Adams would be converted into the United States’ largest museum of contemporary art and architecture. Mass MoCA would revolve around exhibits of architecture, minimalist art, and would be heavily computerized in its infrastructure and would attract artists interested in working with computers as well.[666] While nearly a decade after it was started, Mass MoCA seems unlikely to ever get past the planning stage, Krens’s ambition there and at Williams landed him a job at the Guggenheim, where he proposed to use Mass MoCA as a satellite museum to display 300 large Minimalist works purchased from the collection of Italian art collector Count Giuseppe Panza.[667]

Krens’s attraction to Minimalism appears to stem from its marketability. Here then, the reasond for this lengthy diversion. Since the 1970s, art museums have become more and more involved with architecture and with capitalism. The involvement of art museums with capital, Rosalind Krauss explains, requires three fundamental conditions: a larger inventory, explaining Krens’s purchase of the Panza collection as well as the more general capitalistic movement of museums into areas which had previously been left undeveloped, i.e. architecture[668]; more physical outlets, hence Mass MoCA; and a leveraging of the collection by moving it into the credit sector.[669]

Krauss points out that this change in the museum’s idea of itself parallels a historical change in the interpretation of Minimalism towards converting the subject into nothing more than an optical ray. The new interpretation of Minimalism, Krauss writes, is

… the aesthetic rationale for the [economic] transformation I am describing. The industrialized museum has a need for the technologized subject, the subject in search not of affect but of intensities, the subject who experiences its fragmentation as euphoria, the subject whose field of experience is no longer history, but space itself: that hyperspace which a revisionist understanding of Minimalism will use it to unlock.[670]

If Krauss is right about the role of Minimalism in the late capitalist art museum, then architecture plays an analogous role: Minimalism’s hyperreality is that of the innocent eye, the understanding of space through the forgetting of history, the paradigm that the pedagogy of cardboard architecture aimed to create which we will return to in chapter five. If Minimalism offered the museum a subject reduced to a retina searching for stimulus, that was exactly what cardboard architecture would offer as well.

As Krauss’s discussion of the museum points out, new systems of dissemination cannot be treated in isolation from the period’s new forms of reception. Indeed Walter Benjamin has explained that modes of perception, means of production, and means of depiction are all linked by their material conditions.[671] The dominant mode of perception for architecture has traditionally been, as Benjamin, put it, “absent-minded,” apprehended not so much through contemplation as through distraction.[672]

While for some architects and aficionados, architecture can at times be comprehended through contemplation and indeed the method of teaching design through analysis in cardboard architecture is a means of stimulating such thinking, for most people architecture is rarely if ever contemplatively engaged. The appearance of architecture in museums and galleries and the proliferation of the architectural image in the media however served to make that architecture into such an object of contemplation.

One way to describe this change is through analogy: when Andy Warhol placed the Campbell’s soup can in front of our eyes, he simultaneously confronted us with its banal reproduced nature and made us contemplate the image of the object itself. Thus, in a certain way, Andy Warhol’s project is an early moment in cultural studies, making us engage the production that we normally discard as waste, in this case advertising. Placing a plan or axonometric on a wall and making the viewer read it puts the viewer in a similar situation. We should all judge, the drawing on the gallery wall implies, and if we approve, perhaps we will pay for it either from the gallery or the museum bookstore.

The result a transformation in the direction of the image becoming architecture itself and architecture becoming image. This transformation should, from our discussion of the spectacle in the introduction, be readily identifiable as a spectacularization of architecture. But, the spectacularization of architecture also serves to give it a prosthetic aura. As architecture is more and more subject to a total eradication of its aura through reproduction, it resists it with a prosthetic aura.

In his essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin explained that mechanical reproduction makes a work of art dependent on it in order to be made visible. This dependence removes some of the artwork’s aura, i.e. the artwork’s claim to presence, originality and authenticity through its long association with ritual. Likewise, cardboard architecture would appear to evacuate solidity and depth associated with architecture via its thinness, shallowness, attention to surface-level phenomenon instead of mass, and hence would lessen the presence of the object and hence its aura.

On the other hand, the spectacularization of architecture as image, hanging on the gallery wall or printed in a book or magazine serves as a prosthetic aura. Material conditions since Benjamin have changed somewhat: while to a certain extent, the reproduction of the image devalues its aura by removing its appearance of originality, at the same time, a prosthetic aura gives the image a new cult-value. The rise of the architectural drawing, done by the hand of the architect himself, replaces the aura of the architectural object with a fetish of the image: aura is replaced by spectacle.

Indeed, cardboard architecture is marked by an attempt to recover an aura for the architectural object. As chapter one explained, fear that the discipline might collapse under internal and external pressures drove a number of architects and educators to turn their attention as much as possible to form, to devote renewed attention to the object in order to affirm its presence and make it real. The dense and sophisticated formal techniques that followed — as exemplified in Five Architects — demanded a reception similar to their production: a reception not of absent-minded perception but of active contemplation. To merely walk through House I and attempt to make an empathic but distracted connection with the space, as one could do at, for example, the slightly earlier Lincoln Center, would not be a competent mode of reception.

The turn to the drawing — and also to theory — served as means of providing a suitable contemplative mode of reception for cardboard architecture. Yet it is also a means of marketing architecture, of offering it up for consumption. This analysis is supported by similar conclusions by Manfredo Tafuri in his Theories and Histories of Architecture. Tafuri notes “the crisis of the object” in modern architecture,[673] caused by the loss of aura and presence that Benjamin identified with the modern art object. Tafuri contends that during the postwar period, the architectural object is suspended in a dialectic between its disappearance through consumption and the reinforcement of its aura. This dialectic is however, none other than a reflection of the flux that we first pointed out in the introduction: between a heroic solid, present subject (the Howard Roark) and the switching machine (the MTV consumer).

The image of the architect aided the creation of a prosthetic aura. We have already discussed how the kids sold themselves in terms of creating the impression that something was happening. Evidence of how thoroughly a cult-value was created for the architect can be found in the new obsession of architects in the late 1970s with fashion.[674] While Philip Johnson insists that fashion has nothing to do with an architect’s success, he has been described as a clotheshorse by Robert Stern and not without reason: in typical contradictory form, Johnson has been the leader of fashion in the movement. Of Stern, Johnson explains, he “was a slob, you see. Oh ya, and then he got married to a Gimbel and got into the chips, and he said to himself, ‘Philip Johnson is a clotheshorse, it must have something to do with success, I’ll be a clotheshorse too.’”[675]

This obsession with fashion may have something to do with the Nietzschean idea of the total work of art, of designing one’s life, creating an image that we discussed in chapter three. The architect must have a signature in his clothes, just as he has a signature in his buildings.

In the introduction to Cleto Munari’s collection of jewelry by architects that we have previously mentioned, Barbara Radice explains the look that the architectural celebrity has:

Big architects are often progressive intellectuals; even those regarded as more conservative always manage to cultivate some fad or snobbism that sets them apart. In general, they are better dressed than artists, travel a great deal and are always calling each other on the phone. When they are not talking about the financial problems which eternally afflict them or about work, they know how to have a good time and are open to adventure. They can be recognized by a special quality in their gaze, conveying an amused, cynical detachment, and by the sly smile of those who possess secret information.[676]

Radice’s adulation of the cynical architect is that of a person enthralled by the architect’s image. It is crucially important then that cynicism itself is a constituent part of the image of the architect, who by appearing in possession of secret information, a conspirator, just appears more fascinating.

This image of the architect as a man who has designed his own life, a Nietzschean or Howard Roark standing well-dressed in the light of the dawn of his own will is, however as mentioned in chapter three, countered by the grim reality of the profession.

The Howard Roark is finding it harder and harder to maintain his position. Architectural sociologist Robert Gutman explains that while architects sense that their profession is constantly in decline, this is in fact a mistaken impression stemming from the years immediately after 1968, a period characterized by recession in the building trades that devastated the profession. But in reality, receipts of architectural firms achieved respectable growth, a twenty-five percent increase (after inflation) between 1972 and 1982. These ten years however, were buoyed by the success of a handful of large firms with one hundred or more employees. Receipts at the vast majority of architectural firms, small firms with less than twenty employees, declined. Thus demand for architectural services has grown, but in a way that has encouraged Fountainhead architects to believe that demand is shrinking. The desirable architect is not a hero but a technician specializing in HVAC, detailing, CAD, specifications, publicity, or the business. For the design-based architect who dreams of a small firm of a handful of people and retaining a large amount of autonomy over his projects the period has been one of dwindling opportunity.[677] It is Howard Roark who is most at odds with the reality of the architect today.

Paradoxically the heroes of the discipline are not the technicians but the Howard Roarks and instead of embracing technical training, schools, which already produce a vast oversupply of graduates for a profession unable to absorb them,[678] still generally treat design as the most important part of architecture, embracing the formally-based cardboard architecture. Architecture is still sold to most students as being about design, about form, and ultimately about the will-to-power as expressed through form. The logic of the design-oriented school is, as Gutman points out, rather twisted: most schools resist considering the question of oversupply by arguing that whatever their eventual employment prospects, students continue to submit a high number of applications to schools.[679]

Ironically whereas in law, students call themselves “law students,” in medicine “medical students,” in architecture students call themselves “architects” even though chances are that this will be the only time that they will ever be able to call themselves architects and say that they spend most of their time designing. This view, that the student is a member of the profession, is the result of the notion that the properly trained architecture student is able to see architecture in a way that only other architects can.[680]

Architecture, as taught in the design studio, is becoming not a means of production, but rather a means of consumption, ultimately a means of selling commodities. Architecture students, failed architects and wannabe-architects became a public for a market oriented at them, a market selling books, periodicals, architect-designed accessories and accessories for architects. Even working as an architect can be a product in itself: at many of the top firms in the architectural vanguard (Peter Eisenman’s is one example), the student intern is unpaid.

The creation of this educational market can be explained by comparing it to the creation of desire through advertising. In a typical magazine advertisement, we are shown a photograph and product, sometimes pictured, sometimes existing only in a caption. The ad works by making us draw a series of connections that are given to us as natural: the photograph is somehow similar to the product and if we want to buy the product, we will somehow achieve a similar state to whatever is being represented in the photograph. Thus, in an early 1980s ad teen model Brooke Shields is pictured wearing Calvin Klein jeans with the caption “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins.” There is of course a notorious pun in the caption, that Brooke Shields did not wear any underwear underneath her skintight Calvins, leading the viewer to a satisfaction in knowing this titillating fact about the young model. The effect is that we are supposed to know who Brooke Shields is and what she represents (i.e. youth, sex appeal). If we make the successful connection with the ad, we realize that if we wear Calvins (preferably without underwear) we will be sexy, young, and sexually dangerous just like Brooke.

Thus, the ad offers up a connection for us to naturalize: Brooke Shields/sex/Calvin Klein jeans and also offers us the possibility of the product giving us significance. Whoever did not identify with Levi’s or Gloria Vanderbilt and wished to instead identify with the underwearless Brooke, would buy Calvin Klein jeans. The product served to differentiate us. This differentiation complicates class structure, obscuring it to a certain extent (although the lower class would probably not be able to buy Calvin Kleins and would probably have to be satisfied with whatever glamour Dickies and K-Mart jeans offer as their advertisements tend to promote value rather than make any attempt at glamour). Advertising leads us into a system of social differentiation based primarily on consumption, obscuring our relations to our work, changing them into questions of ‘lifestyle’ which could again be bought as a product.[681]

Architecture continues to become more and more spectacularized as we can see in Structure,  a chain clothing store based on a theme of architecturalness. The message of Structure is that if you can’t be a Fountainhead architect, you can at least wear architecture-clothes and live vicariously through Eisenman’s newest book[682] or if you preferred to define yourself with Michael Graves, you could wear the Dexter shoes that he promoted and use yellow trace in the studio.[683] In the world of the advertisement, there are so many options to us that we are made to feel free and productive by exercising choice among them. While we cannot be Peppers and members of the Pepsi Generation at the same time but neither of these contradicts our eating of a Three Musketeers candy bar. We form meaning for ourselves out of the combination of these different codes. Yet these processes of filling in are again not ones of production but rather of consumption, not free, but rather confined to restricted, banalized channels. There are correct and incorrect choices and that is what the student can learn at school, by being disciplined, as I will explain in the next chapter.[684]

It is in this sense that the student is able to live out the fantasy of designing one’s life. The aestheticizaton of everyday life that Modernists had hoped for appears to have made great advances,[685] but somehow something seems to have fallen amiss: the unity between art and life has simply not taken place. Rather than being a place of integration, the Structure store is a space of alienation. The Nietzschean promise of designing your own life is an empty one when sold in a store.

The reason for this emptiness is its vulgarity: the student almost always cannot be the Fountainhead architect she wants to be. The misery of this reality and the misery of production that created the very objects that they, as consumers attempting to make an image of themselves — rather than as individuals trying to grow — bought, is embodied in the very spectacle of architecture itself. Only the possibility that the next product will bring them architecturalness, will serve as the decisive entity to keep the charade in play.[686]

Words tend to become tools of knowledge…tend to increase interest in the values of the description of things and not in things themselves…words are for the mind, not the eye. Words…deny us the mysterious communication by the eye.

— Philip Johnson as quoted by Peter Eisenman[687]

In this chapter I will explore the politics of the pedagogy of cardboard architecture by examining its goal, the reduction of subjectivity to the “innocent eye” or the “eye of the child,” showing its materiality and its genealogical roots in nineteenth century theories of society and education.[688] As I will explain, at the interstice between child and professional art education arose the belief that training of visual perception provides the subject with a means of perceiving relationships in general.

After exploring the genealogy of the innocent eye and its arrival in architectural pedagogy and thinking, I will examine the writings of two cardboard architects who have been among its more noted educators, John Hejduk and Peter Eisenman, in order to shed light on its particular repercussions in architecture.

Finally, mobilizing Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of taste, I will discuss the role of the innocent eye in legitimating a particular form of academic class and how, by reducing the subject to a retinal phenomenon, it is linked to the reproducible image and accommodates in advance recent technological changes for which the ideally-configured subject would be a switching machine.

The phrase itself “the innocent eye” is generally attributed to late nineteenth century art critic John Ruskin and it is to Ruskin as advocate of the innocent eye that we must turn to clarify the concept’s genealogy.[689]

The phrase was apparently first coined by John Ruskin when in his Elements of Drawing he explained that in order to learn to draw one needed “the innocence of the eye…a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify.” This innocence is lost to us, Ruskin continued, as we learn conventional ways of seeing from society: “having once come to conclusions touching the signification of certain colours, we always suppose that we see what we only know, and have hardly any consciousness of the real aspect of the signs we have learned to interpret.”[690]

Ruskin explained that as opposed to most people, blinded by preconceptions of the visual world, “a highly accomplished artist has always reduced himself as nearly as possible to this condition of infantile sight.”[691] Aiming his Elements of Drawing at the development of this condition of infantile sight, Ruskin started the student not with direct observation but with abstract, formal lessons: shading squares evenly with a pen, producing smooth gradations of tone, gradually moving on to the representation of light and shadow and only with time into color and composition.

Ruskin initially developed his method and wrote the Elements of Drawingwhile at Working Man’s College in London in the 1850s where he hoped to train his lower class students in artistic skills. As he explained:

(irrespective of the differences in individual temper and character) the excellence of an artist, as such, depends wholly on refinement of perception, and that it is this, mainly, which a master or a school can teach; so that while powers of invention distinguish man from man, powers of perception distinguish school from school. All great schools enforce delicacy of drawing and subtlety of sight.[692]

Ruskin did not however intend his system to be only a means of teaching artists and craftsmen, he offered it as a means of training the upper-class élite to increase their powers of observation. Appointed the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University in 1869, Ruskin took on a new pedagogical imperative: beyond the professional training of artists and even art appreciation he intended to teach the student to draw as an essential component of a general, liberal education for the upper classes. Drawing was, Ruskin believed, not just a useful skill, but rather the means for training in visual perception.[693] This subtlety of sight, he hoped, would lead to “a power of the eye and a power of the mind wholly different from that known to any other discipline, and which could only be known by the experienced student — he only could know how the eye gained physical power by attention to delicate details.”[694]

Ruskin’s desire to train the student to think by training him to see was not isolated. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought two developments significant for our purposes: a new scopic regime, or way of conceiving how we see, and a new attention to the art education of the child through perceptual training. Both had a significant impact on modern art theory and instruction of which Ruskin’s concept of the innocent eye was only one, particularly mature moment.

The first change was the result of an optical revolution that Jonathan Crary has explored in The Techniques of the Observer. Crary explains that in the eighteenth century model of vision, the eye was thought to be a transparent lens reflecting the reality of the outside world into the quiet, dark room of the inner soul. In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century this model was replaced by one of embodied vision in which the eye was no longer transparent but rather acted as a distorting element capable of producing visual effects in its own right.[695] With this understanding of the fallible eye many artists began to realize that the Western system of perspective was an inadequate means to represent reality.

But this embodiment of vision in the body paradoxically also led to its disembodiment in Ruskin’s autonomous opticality. Ruskin’s innocent eye had predecent in eighteenth and nineteenth century case studies of blind individuals who had been healed. The case of a thirteen-or fourteen-year old boy healed by William Chelsden in 1728 was particularly influential on optical theorists and philosophers of the time.[696] According to Chelsden, his patient initially “knew not the shape of anything, nor any one thing from another, however different in shape of magnitude” and for two months could not understand pictures, having “consider’d them only as party-coloured planes, or surfaces diversified with paint; but even then he was no less surpriz’d, expecting the pictures would feel like the things they represent…and asked which was the lying sense, feeling or seeing?”[697] Similarly, Ruskin’s attempt to do away with convention in vision was an attempt create an eye that would register not a perception of the world but a perception of vision itself, as it reacts to external stimuli and to its own distortions by somehow shutting off the mental processing of the image.

Ruskin’s method of learning to draw by copying perception rather than preconceptions of the order of the outside world stood in contrast to the system of classical perspective. The color fields Ruskin described were devoid of any signification, any correspondance to objects, existing only at a level of pure opticality.

More directly, the innocent eye is also the direct result of Ruskin’s obsession with drawing from observation. Drawing was his means of understanding the world, hence his recommendation of drawing as a way of learning to think. As Kristine Ottesen Garrigan has written in her work on Ruskin,

Drawing was for him a prime method of recording facts and impressions, whether of nature or of art, as well as a way of ‘learning the difficulty of the thing’ — a method of study he frequently commended to his readers. Despite his profound pleasure in mountain scenery or splendid sunsets, therefore, and his minute observation of minerals or leaves, Ruskin in fact spent a great deal of his time looking at the world as a surface rendered in drawings and paintings — or else he was in the process of reducing three-dimensional reality to a surface himself.[698]

The color fields Ruskin described were devoid of any signification, existing at a level of pure opticality.Ruskin’s innocent eye was a moment of pre-linguistic understanding, a pure moment of perception and undivided, lived experience. Thus it is an anticipation of what philosopher Edmund Husserl called the phenomenological ‘reduction.’ While there is probably no causal relationship between Ruskin and Husserl, the implications of Husserl’s ideas and Derrida’s criticism of them have a direct bearing upon this analysis of the innocent eye.Husserl begins his analysis of our consciousness of time by drawing on a description of how we see when we open our eyes:

When we open our eyes, we see into Objective space — this means (as reflective observation reveals) that we have a visual content of sensation which establishes an intuition of space, an appearance of things situated in such and such a way. If we abstract all transcendental interpretation and reduce perceptual appearance to the primary given content, the latter yields the continuum of the field of vision, which is something quasi-spatial but not, as it were, space or a plane surface in space. Roughly described, this continuum is a twofold, continuous multiplicity. We discover relations such as juxtaposition, superimposition, interpenetration, unbroken lines, which fully enclose a portion of the field, and so on.[699]

As Ruskin explained that the child can see the true shapes of things because it is unencumbered by the weight of convention, Husserl argued that at the moment we open our eyes we can see the true shapes of the visual field, recapitulating Chelsden’s patients experience on a microscale. This vision, Husserl explained, could not give us “Objective-spatial relations,” but instead gave us a phenomenal intuition of space.[700]

Hence the main argument of Husserl’s phenomenological project: if we cannot experience the Objective world, we have to bracket it as phenomenon. By executing the phenomenological reduction, bracketing the entire world, we can return to the origins of our knowledge which our everyday thinking obscures. The phenomenological residuum, all that is left unaffected by the phenomenological reduction is the region of Being that phenomenology aims to study: pure consciousness, the present of self-presence.[701]

In his book on Husserl, Speech and Phenomenon, Jacques Derrida addresses precisely this question of presence. For Husserl, the moment of self-presence would have to be utterly pure, free of outside contaminants such as language or time. Language would make no sense in a moment of consciousness in which everything would be present to itself. Temporality could not enter into this pure instant to avoid contaminating it with signs, as Derrida writes, “The present of self-presence would be as indivisible as the blink of an eye.”[702]But Derrida deconstructs this moment by suggesting that there must be a duration to the blink that closes the eye: the present of self-presence can only occur in comparison with, and hence as an aspect of, temporality he explains.[703] Husserl’s instant of self-presence is a myth, reproducing logocentrism’s faith in presence and mistrust of language at a particularly sophisticated level.

Derrida’s critique of Husserl holds significant implications for the model of the innocent eye. Both Husserl and Ruskin believed that reducing one’s vision to a momentary point of pre-linguistic seeing, would create a heightened subjectivity, a pure eye caught-up in the act of being able to devote itself to pure seeing through the jettisoning of all other contaminants. Language, temporality and hence history would be excluded from the innocent eye, its greatest enemies. And as Derrida has shown, the innocent eye is a false moment, forever unattainable.

The embodiment of the eye and its subsequent autonomization in perception is tied to the second change in visual culture that concerns us. The interest that Ruskin showed in visual education was not isolated, but rather was part of a long struggle among educators to recognize child art as a productive activity, capable of producing both interesting results and training the child’s perceptions. It is during this attempt to direct child art in productive ways that the concept of a primal visual language would be worked out.[704]

The new attitude toward child art traced its beginnings to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s basic premise of education outlined in the first sentence of his Émile: “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.”[705] In Émile Rousseau imagined that he was in a woodland chateau, raising the rich orphan after whom the book was named. For Émile’s education, Rousseau rejected education through discipline, contending that it produced tyrants and slaves. Instead, he believed that the boy should learn by experience and that the task of the teacher was to provide appropriate stimuli.

These stimuli would control the child through deception, offering the boy choice but controlling him through the choices available:

Let him always think he is master while you are realy master. There is no subjection so complete as that which preserves the forms of freedom; it is thus that the will itself is taken captive. Is not this poor child, without knowledge, strength, or wisdom, entirely at your mercy? Are you not master of his whole environment so far as it affects him? Cannot you make of him what you please? His work and play, his pleasure and pain, are they not, unknown to him, under your control? No doubt he ought only to do what he wants, but he ought to want to do nothing but what you want him to do. He should never take a step you have not foreseen, nor utter a word you could not foretell.[706]

Most of the child educators who followed Rousseau provided visual activities for the child, letting him follow his own innocent eye. Chief among this pedagogy’s early proponents was Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1745-1827). In a move that prefigured later turns to primitivism, Pestalozzi attempted to map a system of education based on an examination of how a peasant woman would instruct her children.[707] The result was a system based on teaching what he called “Anschauung…the immediate and direct impression produced by the world on our inner and outer senses — the impressions of the moral world on our moral sense and of the physical universe on our bodily senses.”[708]

Anschauung, Pestalozzi believed, following Rousseau’s system of education, could not be directly taught but could and had to be fostered under the care of the instructor. The analogy he gave was of a plant in the garden: the gardener would plant a seed and would have to provide a proper balance of conditions for it to grow.[709] Rather then force students into drills and disciplinary exercises, Pestalozzi’s instructor would devise coherent, nurturing activities in the form of observations of objects for children to engage in. Pestalozzi privileged vision over orality, stating that the child should ideally be shown the object, although if the object might not be at hand, the youngster could be shown its image. Thus, the instructor was not to use words to describe an object as that would lead to a conventional interpretation that would be divorced from actual perception.

While Pestalozzi urged the student to express Anschauung through sounds, images, and concepts, the creation of images was his foremost concern. The student would be encouraged to perceive more clearly by observing, measuring and drawing objects. In particular, Pestalozzi believed that the child needed to study “the simple elements of the laws of form,” an alphabet of geometric forms, such as lines, shapes, and angles in order to learn to observe and represent abstractions. Once the language of form was mastered and the student could draw, Pestalozzi believed, she or he could begin the study of actual writing.[710]

Pestalozzi’s work reverberated throughout nineteenth century education. Its most significant line descent came through Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) who made visual language as a prime component of education. While in architectural history Froebel is principally seen as the creator of a somewhat odd game of blocks that the young Frank Lloyd Wright played with,[711] Wright’s experience was not at all extraordinary. Froebel had a pervasive influence in late nineteenth and early twentieth century education.[712] In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the use of Froebel’s system was widespread and many children were exposed to it, among them not only Wright but also Wassily Kandinsky and Le Corbusier and other artists and architects of the first half of this century.[713]

Froebel conceived of mental development as the unfolding of inner aims through the learning of the world and the self. Concentrating on the early years of child development, Froebel called his school a kindergarten, a garden of children along Pestalozzian lines in which the seed of the child would be given a nourishing environment. Activity was at the center of his educational method and Froebel felt that play was both the means by which children would express themselves and the means through which they would become educated. To create a productive condition for play, Froebel developed a series of didactic materials, the most widely known and influential of which were his Gifts and Occupations.

Developed between 1835 and 1850, the Gifts and Occupations were intended to teach a child unity in diversity through form as well as the mathematical relations that govern the harmony of the universe. The Gifts consisted of a series of objects given to children at intervals from the age of two months upwards to age six. The first Gift was made up of six soft woolen balls in the three primary and three secondary colors to introduce the ideas of similarity and contrast. The second added a wooden sphere, cube, and cylinder in order to teach the children tactility, lightness and heaviness, different shapes and other qualities. The following Gifts consisted of blocks that could be subdivided to teach students construction. Later Gifts introduced drawing and the succeeding Occupations consisted of activities such as sewing on cards with threads of different colors, paper cutting, and clay modeling.[714]

Political conservatism following the 1848 uprisings led the Prussian government to suspect anything deviating from standard schooling practice and ban Froebel’s kindergarten system. In response, both Froebel and Pestalozzi’s systems were taken up by a number of prominent women who disseminated their ideas throughout Europe and North America. In the United States, the kindergarten movement met with some success after being introduced as simultaneously a place for upper-class children to learn the principles of art and as a proper foundation for an industrial education.[715] The Froebelians sought in their method an alternative to the rationalized, dehumanizing industrial civilization — a resistant subject, able to express itself and understand visually, generally for the well-off — while the Pestalozzian system was advocated by educators attempting to come up with new methods of educating the masses in drawing for industry, principally in textiles, to generate artisans capable of endlessly producing new designs for the consumer’s desiring eye.[716]

Another crucial development in Froebel’s philosophy was his tenet that a child’s development recapitulated the history of his race.[717] In succeeding years it became a commonplace among educators to think of an individual child’s development recapitulating all human development. This theory, known as biogenetics, was summed up in 1874 by one of its originators, Heinrich Haeckel, in a now-famous law: “…the history of individual development, or Ontogeny, is a short and quick recapitulation of palaeontological development, or Phylogeny.”[718] Haeckel’s scientific findings only seemed to confirm the earlier notions of Goethe and Hegel who drew parallels between the education of the world through historical development and the education of the child in the classroom.[719]

English philosopher and psychologist James Sully took up the thesis of recapitulation, arguing that the child’s evolution was “a brief résumé of the more important features in the slow upward progress of the species.”[720] For Sully, “a number of characteristic traits in children’s drawings are reflected in those of untutored savages.”[721] Sully followed Froebel’s idea of the child’s development: “the child’s eye at a surprisingly early period loses its primal ‘innocence,’ grows ‘sophisticated’ in the sense that instead of seeing what is really presented it sees, or pretends to see, what knowledge and logic tell it is there.”[722] Against these corrupting influences of convention, Sully looked to a sense of abstraction in a child’s early drawings: “The abstract treatment itself, in spite of its inadequacy, is after all, in the direction of a true art, which in its essential nature is selective and suggestive rather than literally reproductive.”[723] An early idea of the visual language is latent in Sully’s observation that “The little artist is still much more a symbolist than a naturalist.”[724] Until corrupted by convention, Sully’s child attempted to represent by using drawing as a language rather than a mirror of reality: “The little descriptor does not need to compare the look of his drawing with that of a real object: it is right as a description anyhow.”[725]

English educator Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), as one commentator remarked, ‘gave Émile an English nineteenth-century setting’[726] by applying evolution to the study of child education. Influenced by Rousseau via Pestalozzi, Spencer followed Lamarckian evolutionary principles in arguing that the mind is an organ which can be developed through use and exercise. Spencer believed that with each successive generation, the properly exercised brain would evolve further and he regarded children’s attempts to draw as pleas for precisely the kind of training they needed to continue the evolution of Homo Sapiens, visual training.[727] Art, Spencer explained, is tied to science in its emphasis on observation and visual training would serve as a means of increasing a child’s observational faculties and hence benefit scientific thinking.[728]

Spencer also contributed to the pool of ideas that would form the visual language by pinpointing a link between art and language in what he called the major evolutionary step in cave painting and hieroglyphics: “Strange as it seems then, all form of written language, of painting, of sculpture, have a common root in those rude drawings of skins and cavern walls.”[729]

The most influential of child art educators in the early twentieth century was however Franz Cizek, an associate of the Vienna Secession. Cizek believed that in their art children followed “eternal laws of form” that also existed in primitive art.[730] Cizek explained that ancient, primitive and child art obeyed the same laws so long as they were uncorrupted by education.[731]

Working in the Froebelian paradigm, Cizek felt that the child should, rather than trying to copy nature, reach within, where symbolically grounded art would be found.[732] To let the child grow and follow his or her own potential, in his class for children at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, Cizek purported to let child rather than instructor take control of the direction of his art. In practice, however, Cizek had a preconceived idea of child art that often resulted in Secessionist designs and apparently discouraged children from pursuing ideas that did not conform to it.[733]

In spite of Cizek’s coercion of his children his endless interest in proselytizing for child art profoundly influenced artists in the twentieth century. Cizek was closely associated with artists and architects of the Secession, among them Otto Wagner, Josef Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, Karl Moser, and Gustav Klimt.[734] Like the Secession artists, from the time he arrived at the academy onward, Cizek rejected the established ideas of art which he saw around him, believing that they were inconsistent with the demands of modernity, as this quote from Cizek’s disciple Wilhelm Viola shows:

I once saw Cizek sitting with a book by which he was completely carried away. If I remember correctly the title of the book was ‘Picture Book of an American Architect.’ There was nothing to see except long streets of giant American cities, bridges, grain elevators, trains, etc. ‘That is creative,’ he said. ‘But painters should be forbidden to imitate or copy nature, which can be done much better by photographers. Art can only come out of creativeness. Then it is strong and elementary. Otherwise it is not art.[735]

The 1898 The Child As Artist exhibit held in the Hamburg Museum was a landmark in establishing the links between child and primitive art in its juxtaposition of drawings by local schoolchildren, Indian children, and Eskimo art to prove their similarities.[736] The appeal to the childlike was tied to the Enlightenment notion that distance in space (away from the West) equaled distance in history, a history that in turn was recapitulated by the development of the child. Thus, for evidence of the primal vision, one could look both to the child and the noble savage.[737]

Both Ruskin’s innocent eye and the child art educator’s idea of a visual language of simple objects as a means of learning to see were imported into modernist art education under Johannes Itten’s Vorkurs at the Bauhaus. Itten believed that “every pupil is burdened with a mass of learned material which he must throw off in order to arrive at experience and his own awareness.”[738] Instead, Itten taught what he believed was the fundamental artistic language of composition based on harmony and contrast.

When Moholy-Nagy took over Itten’s post as director of the Vorkurs in 1922, he was confronted with and adopted parts of Itten’s basic theory of teaching that was in accord with his own constructivist ideals, even if Itten’s intuitive method proved problematic.[739] As I have discussed in chapter one, Moholy-Nagy was to take on this interest in opticality and, with Kepes, attempt to use a scientific analysis of movement in vision as a basis for a design theory.

Moholy-Nagy was aware of the history of the innocent eye and referred to the child art theorists Froebel, Pestalozzi and Cizek is his writings.[740] Albers, who appears to have shared Moholy-Nagy’s attitudes to the innocent eye, was influenced by Ruskin’s writingsin particular, explaining that he wanted “to open eyes,” and frequently quoting Ruskin from volume 3 of Modern Painters: “the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, — all in one.”[741]

Walter Gropius shared his former colleagues’ interest in a new way of seeing, and in his Scope of Total Architecture, he cited them as the exponents of a new visual grammar,[742] before going on to describe his own idea of visuality.

For Gropius, vision was mediated by the subconscious. But since the teacher cannot teach the subconscious, he must instead show the student reality. In order to do this, he must strip the student of intellectual knowledge and bring him to the unprejudiced condition of a child. Gropius quoted Thomas Aquinas to support his argument as saying: “I must empty my soul so that God may enter.” Visual communication, Gropius explained, is more direct than verbal communication, owing to its access to the subconscious, and a grammar of how visual forms can influence subconscious sensations must be established. For Gropius, this grammar would be restricted to optical illusions with concrete outcomes. The eye, which he saw as analogous to a camera, have distortions that would be objective and measurable. With the knowledge of these distortions the architect would be able to make designs to stimulate the retina of the observer for greatest effect.[743]

This is the point at which Klaus Herdeg has critiqued the Gropius/Harvard teaching method in his book The Decorated Diagram. The diagram was, Herdeg explains, the diagrammatic, dull, unaesthetic plan of the Gropius/Harvard method while the “decoration” consisted of form intended to induce a retinal excitement in the observer’s eye.[744] While this retinal stimulation was meant to trigger pleasure, even desire, Herdeg explains that it ultimately impoverished form by removing any sense of precedent as well as the potential for the creation of wanted and control of unwanted metaphoric meaning.[745]But The Decorated Diagram is not just any analysis of the early postwar years. Rather, closely allied to cardboard architecture and Colin Rowe’s position within it, Herdeg’s book is the product of a point of view that shares cardboard architecture’s attitude toward vision.[746] By looking at what Herdeg argues for we can generate a reentry point into our investigation of cardboard architecture.

Herdeg’s interest is always one internal to architecture. The retinal stimulation of the decorated diagram is faulty, Herdeg argues, because proponents of Gropius’s method are unable and unwilling to create a formal structure that would give the visual appearance of the building an underlying unity.[747] But Herdeg’s own ideal formal structure was ultimately limited to issues of site, circulation, and a localized idea of the building’s function. Herdeg’s goal was to unify formal research in the studio through what he called “a rational design discourse” based on a “critical theory of history of forms, spaces and objects.”[748] In the concluding paragraph of his essay, Herdeg explicitly stated his intentions as follows: “in the service of the primacy of form and space in architecture…to establish that visual truths are equal to verbal and visual truths, to clarify some ‘old’ mid-twentieth-century confusions about what architecture ought to be, and to encourage a sharper, more independent, and certainly more critical eye for future encounters with architecture.”[749]

Herdeg thus re-states the pedagogical method of cardboard architecture: to hone vision to a rigorous, formal apparatus by teaching it a visual language. Rather than mapping the subconscious, Herdeg’s project maps forms as handed down from the tradition of architecture. It is precisely this kind of knowledge that is necessary to construct the visual language of cardboard architecture and later in this chapter I will explain how this history of visual truths is essential for the properly functioning innocent eye.

The document of the pedagogical system under John Hejduk and his influence at Cooper Union, Education of An Architect: A Point of View offered a persuasive and influential model of what cardboard architectural education should be, especially in its first year.[750] By examining it we can better begin to understand the roll of the innocent eye in cardboard architecture.

Emphasizing vision from the title itself on, Education of an Architect: A Point of View aimed to lead the student to the innocent eye through the exploration of the primary condition of architecture as the compositional shaping of space, in turn re-entrenching the artistic autonomy of the discipline and making it stronger through self-critique. Ulrich Franzen announced this as the intent of the project in his introduction to the catalog where he uses the Rowe and Slutzky Transparency essay to relate the underlying premises of architecture at the Cooper Union. The importance of the essay for the pedagogy at Cooper Union Franzen explained is in its use of “a trained eye without recourse to irrelevant ‘meaning,’” the innocent eye. This “trained visual sensibility,” as Franzen called it, a “reawakened connection between eye and mind,” is formed to act as nothing less that an eye in the hurricane of chaos and upheaval of the late sixties and early seventies.[751]

Hejduk himself had been interested in training the eye since his first project as a student in Cooper Union in 1947. In a two-dimensional studio taught by Henrietta Schutz, Hejduk and his fellow students spent a year creating an illustrated book for Aesop’s fables. Hejduk later explained that this exercise “was one of unique importance as a tool for the introduction to architecture. Through a rigorous discipline it trained the eye (visual sensibility) and the hand (tactile sensibility). We learned how to handle a paint brush, and began the exorcising of one’s innate feelings toward color, form and space.” This exorcising was accomplished by a long period of training with pure forms until the student learned about visual relationships. “Story telling came later,” Hejduk wrote. Meaning, language, and subjectivity could be tackled only once the innocent eye was attained.[752]

Hejduk appears to have followed Schutz’s example throughout his pedagogy and his own work, at least until the change in his design methodology around 1974 to what he calls “an architecture of pessimism.”[753] The problems, or “probings” as Hejduk calls them, of his early projects were, he states, derived from Schutz’s two-dimensional design class.[754]

In his Texas Houses, developed during his years at Texas, Hejduk attempted to refine the visual language that he would go on to teach at Cooper Union:

The Texas Houses are the result of a search into generating principles of form and space in architecture. There is an attempt to understand certain essences in regard to architectural commitment with the hope of expanding a vocabulary. …

The realization that works in the Arts are the embodiment of specific plastic points of view, that the mind and the hand are one, working on primary principles, and of filling these principles through juxtaposition of basic relationships within the vocabulary of point, line, plane, volume, opened up the possibility of argumentation.[755]

Hejduk explained that he arrived at the Texas Houses through a deterministic and logical method of design: “The first moves are arbitrary but once the arbitrary beginning is committed, once the initial intuitions are experienced, it then becomes necessary that the organism proceeds through its natural evolution.” Since the nine-square grid had been invented by the Texas Rangers, it is perhaps not surprising that all of Hejduk’s Texas Houses were based on a nine-square grid.

In Hejduk’s next major project, the Diamond series, he addressed the relation between two-dimensional painting and representation and three-dimensional architectural space by tipping axonometric drawings on end to ceate flattened effects. He explained his method in a text that accompanied the publication of the Diamond Houses in 1969.

…When a square form in plan is drawn in isometric, it appears to the eye as a three-dimensional projection. When more than one floor plan is projected in isometric, it builds up quite naturally and still appears as a three-dimensional representation. When the diamond is drawn in isometric and has a plan of more than one floor, a very special phenomenon occurs. The forms appear two-dimensional; the stories overlap each other in primary two-dimensional vision. The form tips forward in isometric towards the picture plane; they are three-dimensional yet a stronger reading of two-dimensionality predominates.[756]

Hejduk’s concern for geometry thus became tied into a concern with the effects of representation on architecture and its perception. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, contemporary with the Education of an Architect exhibit and catalog, Hejduk was involved in a series of houses dominated by an uncompromising geometric condition. These projects were neither built nor expected to be built, rather they existed solely as experiments. Perhaps because the projects only existed in representation, Hejduk’s work during this period had a thin, atectonic quality, at its most solid only the thickness of cardboard in a model. This reached its culmination in Hejduk’s Wall House, a project organized around a thin wall that served no purpose except to force the architect to deal with its formal implications.

Hejduk linked the thinness of his architecture, presence and instantaneity:

The wall itself is the most ‘present’ condition possible. Life has to do with walls; we’re continuously going in and out, back and forth, and through them. A wall is the quickest, the thinnest, the thing we’re always transgressing, and that is why I see it as the ‘present,’ the most surface condition. … The wall is a neutral condition. That’s why it’s always painted gray. And the wall represents the same condition as the ‘moment of the hypotenuse’ in the Diamond houses — it’s the moment of greatest repose, and at the same time the greatest tension. It is a moment of passage. The wall heightens that sense of passage, and by the same token, its thinness heightens the sense of it being just a momentary condition…what I call the moment of the ‘present.’[757]

In other words, it is the thinness of the formal architecture derived from two-dimensions that gives it presentness, but this presentness is achieved only momentarily, at the level of the phenomenological reduction, which as we pointed out above with the help of Derrida cannot exist, being made impossible by the existence of language and history.

As we mentioned in chapter one, in his Complexity and Contradiction, Robert Venturi argued that complexity and contradiction were immanent to architecture because of the fundamental impossibility of accounting for functional, structural, and situational limitations within the pure, ideal form that architecture as an art of geometry drives toward. Peter Eisenman’s dissertation on “The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture,” done under the tutelage of Colin Rowe, is a contemporary attempt to deal with exactly these same issues and a document that is a telling record of cardboard architectural thought as it came together in the early 1960s, remaining unsurpassed in the scope of its argument.[758]

Eisenman defined the central concern of his dissertation as “the logical inter-action of formal concepts. … to establish that considerations of a logical and objective nature can provide a conceptual, formal basis for any architecture.”[759] Eisenman believed that this “logical inter-action of formal concepts” could be derived from studying the works of the modern masters Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright and Giuseppe Terragni, in which Eisenman located the essence of a formal language of architecture. As he explained of Le Corbusier’s discussion of form in his four compositions “Implicit in Le Corbusier’s diagrams are the vocabulary, grammar and syntax of a formal language: the intention here is to make them explicit.”[760]

Eisenman believed that a proper architecture would mediate between a virtual architectural reality of generic, transcendent, universal form and prosaic constraints forcing the “generic” form into a “specific” form that “still refers to, or is derived from, the generic.” The universal form would be a basic, Euclidean solid. Each solid would have a dynamic of its own, Eisenman explained, determining its role in a formal language and the formal forces it would generate.[761] In architecture, Eisenman explained, the geometric solids are the only “absolute points of reference.”[762]

Derived from each generic form would be a series of properties:

These would be volume, mass, surface, and movement: movement being considered as a property of generic form, essential to the experience and therefore the comprehension of any architectural situation. These properties will provide the basic vocabulary for a formal language, that will clarify the conceptual, as well as the pictorial aspects of a specific situation.[763]

Thus from the study of generic forms and their properties a formal language would arise, Eisenman explained. It appears that this organization within the generic condition metamorphosed, with the help of Noam Chomsky’s linguistics, into Eisenman’s notion of architectural deep structure which we discussed in chapter three. It is within this deep structure of architecture that the innocent eye re-emerged for architecture.

Also in chapter three we examined Eisenman’s House series. To recap and elaborate: Eisenman’s House series was, at least until House VI, based on seemingly arbitrary formal transformations set in motion upon cubes somehow predisposed to transform along the lines of the nine-square grid. Thus the series was something of an extension of Hejduk’s Texas Houses. Indeed, where Hejduk attempted to work through the parameters of a logical architectural language, Eisenman explained that his Houses were an attempt to go beyond both architectural form as the result of either programmatic dictates or the creation of “aesthetically pleasing objects.” Form, for Eisenman, would ideally be independent of both program and aesthetic considerations, rather it would be “a problem of logical consistency; as a consequence of the logical structure inherent in any formal relationship.” In other words, architecture as idea again. Eisenman believed that, as he wrote,

The capacity to understand, as opposed to experience, this intention does not depend entirely on the observer’s particular cultural background, his subjective perceptions, or his particular mood at any given time, all of which condition his usual experience of an actual environment, but rather it depends on his innate capacity to understand formal structures.[764]

This innate capacity would be the deep structure that Eisenman hoped to address through his House series. But Eisenman’s attempt to produce an architecture of deep structure was predicated on a stripping away of cultural information, “an attempt to separate the actual physical environment from its traditional relationship to function and meaning, to neutralize the influence of these on the viewer.”[765] The result is an innocent eye, derived from the transformational processes of the visual language of cardboard architecture.

The alienation of the observer from her usual experience, what Eisenman called “an attempt to alienate the individual from the known way in which he perceives and understands his environment,”[766] has been a characteristic of Eisenman’s work ever since. While this alienation-effect could be seen in terms of modernist alienation-effects following perhaps Russian Formalism and Viktor Schlovsky’s notion of ‘making-strange,’Eisenman’s emphasis on the observer’s competence is a legitimate problem: who has this competence, how does one achieve it? The competence Eisenman would like us to have is purely formal, it is the competence possessed in the moment of the innocent eye as it is stripped of common perception and aware of a higher, absolute, and architectural reality.

As Rosalind Krauss has explained, “In Eisenman’s mind it was the conceptual or virtual house that should take precedence in the viewer’s experience of his building. In that sense, it was only the latter that was the real building.”[767] This duality between a built and a real, virtual house is again a legacy of Eisenman’s dissertation project, however the built-building is only a supplement for the virtual building, but its very impurity makes it a dangerous supplement, threatening Eisenman’s project.

Connected to the virtual house is Eisenman’s idea of the transformational process that determines itself. Eisenman’s idea of setting up an entirely rational transformational process and letting it work itself out appears to be his goal in his House series and in his dissertation and is similar to the Hejduk’s project with the Texas Houses. By tracing through these transformations the viewer would appear to be able to understand the process that led to the generation of the resultant house. But the transformations that Eisenman presents, even with an explanatory text, are devilishly tricky to read, almost impossible to understand, demanding the highest order of competence in architectural form. The transformations appear to be arbitrary, existing solely to illustrate concepts of cardboard architecture such as shear, rotation, or interpenetration. Indeed, this could be Eisenman’s intention, as he explains, by House IV

the transformational methods…were specifically constructed to be largely self-propelling and therefore as free as possible from externally determined motives. A ‘logical formula’ that is, a step-by-step procedural model was established. Then basic elements such as line, plane, and volume were set in motion, resulting in an object that appeared to ‘design itself.’ Whether the result would be architecture, or would have ‘architectural features’ such as plan or facade, etc. was not a consideration of the process or a criterion for evaluation. In this sense the problem for the architect was not to design an object, but to search for and establish a transformational program free from traditional authorial constraints.[768]

The result would be an architecture out of our control, Eisenman explained, an architecture of anxiety for our age of dislocation.[769]

There is a serious problem with Eisenman’s project, however: Eisenman’s houses remain houses. For example, on his study drawings Eisenman does not just write “House IV,” he writes “House IV, Falls Village,” locating it in as a product, no longer a process. The autonomy of the transformational process is compromised by the house’s ultimate houseness. No matter how oddly or inconveniently shaped, floors, rooms, kitchens, bathrooms and closets do appear. The appearance of these rooms makes it obvious that the transformational process has not been autonomous but on the contrary has been carefully guided by Eisenman’s hand to produce a desired result. What we previously saw as either a maddeningly rational or alternatively completely irrational series of transformational processes turns out to be prosaic: to create a compromise between the virtual house and the realities of getting it built. Further, as Rosemarie Haag Bletter has written:

For Eisenman all formal relationships and spatial transformations of his designs are a result of what he regards as the inherent logic of the forms themselves. This is an unusually passive explanation of the design process: for once Eisenman has not taken full credit for his own actions. Unlike logic, architecture does not require a logical framework that would exclude other truths. Despite his insistence on logic, one must remember that it was he who selected the forms that are to be submitted to a ‘logical’ manipulation. Artistic, willful choice in the initial design must precede any possible logical justification. And no inherently formal system, such as the use of the golden section, the Modular, or Eisenman’s own deformation of a cube, is quite so logical that it would not allow the presence of other equally logical systems.[770]

The problem in Eisenman’s logic can be seen in the way confusion arises in his transformational processes. The observer tends to react to Eisenman’s transformational diagrams with a sense of having lost track between the initial stages, which seem clear enough, and the later, stages, at which the different options posed at the start are somehow resolved and converted into a House. By insisting on making these projects buildable, and actually getting them built, Eisenman only compounds the problem. At the end of the process, even if it is an end that Eisenman maintains is only a frame of a cinematic process of transformation, the disjuncture between the actual building and the process becomes pronounced. How is one to reconcile a space generated by an autonomous transformation process with its role as a closet? No matter how inconvenient Eisenman’s houses, they do work, and thus pose the question of their autonomy even more urgently.

Thus not only is Eisenman’s transformational process not autonomous, but rather determined by the end product, its very logic is problematic as well. But these problems are just footnotes. Ultimately it is the vertigo induced by a viewing of Eisenman’s transformational processes that problematizes his entire project. The anxiety or alienation caused by the transformational process by removing the viewer’s common perception to bring them to a formal architectural reality, i.e. the condition of the innocent eye.

Likewise, Alan Colquhoun has described Michael Graves’s houses as executing a “reduction” that requires the observer to abandon preconceived notions of what a house is and “carry out a reconstruction of the object” in his mind. The condition hoped for is the “tabula rasa, the primal statement.”[771] As described in chapter one, this is an idea that Rowe had voiced as far back as 1950 when, he wrote of “a labyrinthine scheme … which frustrates the eye by intensifying the visual pleasure of individual episodes, in themselves only to become coherent as the result of a mental act of reconstruction.”[772]

Both Eisenman and Graves’s moments of apprehension are manifestations of the cognitive apprehension of architecture explained in the previous chapter. The cognitive apprehension of the object has a goal: the moment when everything fits in a gestalt.

An active “contemplation” of architecture is not by any means at odds with the notion of the innocent eye, but rather points out another of its characteristics. Returning to Ruskin for a moment: the innocent eye comprehends the tableau as a whole. Suddenly for Ruskin, the world makes sense as a form. The innocent eye sees in gestalts and that is what Rowe’s mental act of reconstruction, Eisenman’s virtual building and Graves’s reduction are about. The object is completed not piecemeal, but all at once, as gestalt. All at once, the process of mental reconstruction disappears and only the reconstructed object is left, at least for the blink of an eye, if that moment could exist.

Today these pedagogical methods have been augmented but not replaced. Eisenman’s recent studio at the Harvard Graduate School of Design shows that his concern is primarily with a formal language of scaling. This language is whole, with clear rights and wrongs for Eisenman, even if the students question his ability to verbalize the rationale behind what is good and what is bad.[773] Indeed, for Eisenman, the innocent eye has remained the real issue for teaching, as he explains,

There’s a danger in getting students too late, which I think is real problem with graduate schools. Students who have studied English literature or philosophy have minds and egos that are very well developed. It is difficult to break down that kind of thinking, to get them to give up the ego structure that they have spent years forming, to think in a totally different way. That is a real problem.[774]

Breaking down the ego is a prime goal of the innocent eye, but it is also a goal of the tradition of discipline and by referring to genealogy of discipline as elaborated by Michel Foucault we can elaborate how the innocent eye belongs to a tradition linking education and violence, a tradition in which another, not so innocent eye, the eye of the panopticon would exert its control.

In his Discipline and Punish, Foucault described the demise of the mnemotechnology of torture in which the will of the sovereign, offended by the criminal act, was expressed onto the criminal’s body through torture. As a public spectacle of savagery, torture made clear the power relations within society, even raising the possibility that the audience, once sufficiently accustomed to seeing the blood flow might see the violence of the sovereign as a challenge and take matters into their own hands and revolt.[775] Punishment vested in such power of an individual sovereign was haphazard, dependent on his irregular and discontinuous application of power, leaving some subjects free to practice a constant illegality.[776] With the rise of the bourgeois society, a new technology was needed, as Foucault describes it, “a technology of subtle, effective, economic powers, in opposition to the sumptuous expenditure of the sovereign.”[777] This new punishment was not meant to punish less but rather to punish better.

The key to the new art of punishing, the reformers discovered, was not to exact a system of penalties as retribution or vengeance but rather to make the punishment identical to the crime preceding it: to arouse the punishment in the mind of any individual dreaming of the crime. In other words, to create a natural link between crime and punishment, inculcating the power that punishes into all citizens minds to manifest itself before they deviate from the law.[778] The prison was the result of this new mode of punishment, a location where the criminal, seen no longer as a glamorous individual but as a patient, would be re-educated.[779]

In the model prison of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, architecture and vision came together as a means of regulation. As Foucault described the building for us:

at the periphery, an annular building; at the center, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to confine in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker, or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.…Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness [of the dungeon] which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.[780]

The surveillance of the inmate would be absolute. If the supervisor was not watching him, even if there was no supervisor there at all, the prisoner could not know and would be obliged to behave as if he was. This was Bentham’s explicit intention, leading him to came up with a number of schemes to mask the presence (or absence) of the guardian.

Bentham, a Utilitarian, conceived of this device as a universal mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Not just a prison for criminals, the panopticon was a diagram of power, a way of defining power relations between everyday men for the greatest good. The individual in the panopticon was not the tyrant but rather it could be anyone. Thus the panopticon moved the prison within the individual, removing its concrete walls and replacing them with borders patrolled internally by the disciplined individual. This sort of carceral thought had the effect of inserting itself more deeply into society, creating “corrective technologies of the individual.”[781] These attempts to instill self-discipline and thus create “docile bodies” were thus more in line with that goals of an increasing democratic state in which power relations were expressed more subtly (and hence pervasively) and rationally than in the earlier absolutist impositions of power from above.

Soon after the docile body was discovered in discipline, social engineers discovered the body as an entity that could be trained through methods derived from scientific research. In this way the body would be trained as if it was a machine, capable of being measured and, through refinement, capable of increased utility and productivity. This too was the disciplinary thought at work: outside of the carceral, disciplining took root first in the military and then in education where the power of the individual was converted into ‘aptitude’ which the discipliner sought to increase and in doing so redirect the power that might result from it to increase the domination of the individual, making it more obedient as it became more useful. The body would become more useful as it was trained by regulating itself.[782]

It is here that we can return to the model of the innocent eye and clarify its aims somewhat. The goal of this didactic method is to create a subject void of any preconceptions or thoughts outside of those of the discipline, in other words, to correct the student’s subjectivized vision, to normalize its illegalities and transgressions, substituting the hyperdevelopment of a sterilized organ, the (innocent) eye and its prosthetic extension, the hand. As Ulrich Franzen explained in the middle of the storm of social upheaval, the eye remains calm, focused on architecture.

The idea that the innocent eye is a site of discipline is again not unique to cardboard architecture. The method of training the beginning student to see, from Ruskin, through Moholy-Nagy and Kepes was a continued process of disciplining and as with the project at Cooper Union, it was rarely apolitical. For example, recall from chapter one Moholy-Nagy’s attempt to link his theory of visual education with military logistics as a model for thinking through complex logistical relationships of space-time that might be encountered by a military strategist controlling an area and needing to make provision for huge mobilizations of men and resources in time and space.[783] Indeed, Moholy-Nagy’s model of pedagogy and vision, which we have already located a fully-worked out art theory of the innocent eye, was bound up in the method and assumptions of discipline. If it was to remain an isolated incident, it would not be of much significance. Surely late twentieth century architectural educators — even those at Cooper Union — do not intend to train architects as potential soldiers. However, Moholy-Nagy’s interest in the military shows the continued presence of the docile body described by Foucault translated into specifically visual interests and it is this visual disciplining that has passed down from Moholy-Nagy to architectural generation.[784]

The notorious conditions of training the architecture student (notably the first year student): long hours in the design studio, “pulling all nighters” in order to get unreasonably large projects done, is one of the most disciplinary moments still remaining in modern education today, serving to purge the student of their bodily needs of rest and sleep. Only the student whose body can become docile and cease to resist the relentless production of drawings and models can become an innocent eye. The docile body serves as a mark of initiation into architecture.

What then is being reproduced by the education of the innocent eye? To what end are ‘docile bodies’ or rather ‘docile eyes’ being produced? Surely the terms of presence and logocentricism, which Derrida located in Husserl’s phenomenological reduction and which we likewise located in the innocent eye, are being reproduced. Surely an annihilation of socially-constituted subjectivity takes place when the student is told to forget everything she has ever learned (experienced). But what else? Why has the innocent eye appeared specifically at this moment in culture when reproduction is in its ascendancy?

As we have established, the innocent eye is not an eye void of preconceptions and historical baggage but rather has its own history, or as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu writes, “The ‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education.”[785] This quote brings us to Bourdieu’s own important analysis of the naïve gaze as a socially constructed phenomenon. Bourdieu explains that consumption of art is “an act of deciphering, [or] decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code.”[786] The cultural competence needed to perform this act of deciphering, Bourdieu continues, is the result of our upbringing and functions as an indirect marker of class (not all capitalists go to museums and not all proletarians don’t, but you are more likely to run into a member of the upper bourgeoisie in a museum than a proletarian). Those privileged to encounter art at an early age tend to have an advantage over those who do not and the amount of time spent in contact with such objects in one’s youth is again an indirect function of one’s class.[787]

For the return to zero of the naive gaze, the observer has to understand the codes involved in a work of art and be willing to jettison them, as Bourdieu writes, “a naïve gaze could only be the supreme form of the sophistication of the eye … presuppos[ing] successful mastery of the code of codes.” The naive spectator, or for that matter, the naive artist, cannot hope to understand a work of art the production of which is so inscribed in an internal discourse about its own field. Only an observer with the highest level of competence — the visual training that an architect would get as a result of the innocent eye — will be able to properly read the work. The pedagogy of the innocent eye reproduces itself, allowing the greatest reward for those most able to divest themselves of their identity outside of its demands.[788] The innocent eye keeps matters in check.  The evacuation of any kind of extra-visual activity eliminates all but a rarefied, retinal subject in the student. Indeed, what could a student say about their own conditions of existence within a purely visual rhetoric of beam, column, wall and compression, shear, or rotation?

That the patron of the building, if it was built, would not fully understand becomes irrelevant, so long as he understands that there are individuals who understand the work. Among architects it is a commonplace to say that only someone with a proper architectural training can understand a complex architectural work. That the patron admires it and wishes to purchase it is incidental. Even the non-architect architectural critic/historian’s role is incidental, perhaps even unwelcome: after all, they will never really understand it, only obfuscate it and do violence to it.[789] The real audience, the audience that can read between the lines, is the audience of the book and journal, the audience already trained in visual language necessary to decode the work. Further, since not even all architects possess the visual competence to understand this highly complex architecture and of those, not all like it — many would prefer Kevin Roche or the New England Colonial Style to Peter Eisenman or 1970s-era Robert Stern — that group has to be narrowed down as well: to a rather small audience with the right competence.

But even further, the historical development of the innocent eye is a question of a certain specific kind of art, not just a renewed formalism, but a formalism obsessed with reproduction. It is worth quoting Bourdieu at length for his description of the historical development of the innocent eye itself:

‘pure’ gaze is a historical invention linked to the emergence of an autonomous field of artistic production, that is, a field capable of imposing its own norms on both the production and consumption of its products. An art which, like all Post-Impressionist painting, is the product of an artistic intention which asserts the primacy of the mode of representation over the object of representation demands categorically an attention to form which previous art only demanded conditionally.[790]

This is highly significant: that the innocent eye is based on the internal demands of an art which favors the “mode of representation over the object of representation.” So too, an architecture obsessed with its own representation requires an innocent eye as its mode of reception.

The teaching of the visual language is again not neutral. As Bourdieu explains, in the learning of such a formal aesthetic theory, previously encountered phenomena in art are recapitulated, giving the student the means to discuss what they had previously known intuitively. Again, the student with the good background is favored in this education.[791]

Significantly, the good background is composed of academic capital. Bourdieu explains that “[a]cademic capital is in fact the guaranteed product of the combined effects of cultural transmission by the family and cultural transmission by the school (the efficiency of which depends on the amount of cultural capital directly inherited from the family).”[792] In other words, academic capital is a certain form of class marker (even if this class structure is morphed out of economic class). Only those educated at the right school, possessing the right class background to be able to facilitate trips abroad and a familiarity with and appreciation of contemporary art and architecture will be able to make the successful transformation into the cultural aristocracy.

In my use of Bourdieu’s argument on the formation of the cultural aristocracy, I am bending it to accommodate what is a new phenomenon: the pedagogue-theorist-aesthete. At the pinnacle of Bourdieu’s pyramid is an aesthete schooled in the university but still a breed apart from the academician. With the ascendance of highly complex works existing entirely (or primarily) in reproduction, a new pinnacle in the pyramid emerges on which academicians take over the cultural aristocracy by virtue of their possession of the highest form of cultural competence, in other words, by virtue of their having accumulated academic capital to the highest degree.[793] In architecture, this coincides with the ascendancy of a formalist architecture tied to reproduction.

We have already mentioned a persistent flux marking the theory we have been looking at, between a whole subject posited against the dispersive forces of rapidly accelerating modernization and a subjective position that would prefigure the next moment in late capitalism’s demands on the discipline. However, rather than being anomalous behavior restricted to this level, this flux between the incompatible ideas of the subject as alternatively resistant and reactive permeates multiple areas of postwar culture. One example would be the contradiction between the subject as the (collaborative) fragmented, dispersed consumer reacting to impulses generated by advertisements at the same time expected to be a (resistant) solid subject in the context of the nuclear family. It is remarkable that this tension between these two subjective positions is most evident at spatial points: the single family house and the automobile both are domains in which subjectivity is meant to be established under the guise of freedom and individuality yet, through an incessant conformity, both are also demarcations of the anonymousness, interchangeability and hence dispersal of the subject.

Such contradictions can be found again and again. To conflate often radically different cultural discourses in a notion of a monolithic and hegemonic culture is to create a total theory that, precisely because of its claim to totality and to having located an all-powerful hegemony, shuts off any space for operating outside of itself and does its own hegemonic violence to the cultural field. While there are hegemonizing forces in our culture, they can often be at odds with each other. There can be no total theory such as Baudrillard would have us buy into. Different cultural discourses and different disciplines act at least partly under their own internal drives.[794] It is in fact contradiction — as Althusser pointed out — that we have room to stand to analyze and act.

Cardboard architecture is but one of these discourses that contribute to the formation of social subjects: there are many more, both inside and outside architecture that are expressly at odds with it. Yet even within itself, cardboard architecture often manifests this contradictory flux between a moment resistant to the acceleration of capital, pointing to a way out of the unhappy present grounded in the subject’s presence and belief, and a moment that prefigures (and in doing so perhaps even serves to accelerate) the next subjective position of the artist or architect demanded by capital: the dispersed switching machine dissolving in a wash of flows of capital.

This dialectic between subjective solidity and dissolution is inherent in the image and can generally be read out of any image-based art theory, for example in Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes’s landmark texts. If the trained eye is the means for uniting the subject fragmented by industrialization, it is also the means for producing images that sell by leading the eye around in a particularly effective means of fascination. This contradiction is especially great at the end of Kepes’s Language of Vision, when he argues that the properly executed advertisement would serve a double purpose: “They could disseminate socially useful messages, and they could train the eye, and thus the mind, with the necessary discipline of seeing beyond the surface of visible things, to recognize and enjoy values necessary for an integrated life.”[795]

Since Moholy-Nagy and Kepes and since cardboard architecture’s ascent, the information explosion has radically altered parts of our society. Since the innocent eye grounded the subject in reality perceived through the momentary flash, it also destabilized it: reality could not exist in a wash of color and light, or in other words, pure information. It is this same flow of pure information that the commodity takes on when accelerated to its fastest speed (i.e. the highest amount of recirculation) yet.

Architecture and speed theorist Paul Virilio has connected the increasing speeds of capital circulation and the destabilized existence of the eye watching the video screen to the disappearance of the conventional city. Virilio’s theses have an unfortunate tendency to be total and to give little room to contradiction: thus, while on the one hand the city is disappearing as Virilio states, on the other hand, the precipitous decline of the American city in the 1960s appears to have abated, even if it is to the forces of gentrification.

Nonetheless, Virilio’s argument is useful to us in that, if not accepted as total, it does indeed show us a tendency in our society. Today, Virilio explains, the city has virtually disappeared, eliminated by electronics and the nomadism of structural unemployment. Markers, landmarks and monuments by which to map our space are getting harder to find. Communal space had linked to the mnemotechnology of Euclidean geometry but now both are disappearing. We can explain what Virilio means by recalling rhetoric’s art of memory in which signifieds are joined with specific places in what is a Virtually Real space of memory. In one particularly famous example, you remember a nautical theme by placing an anchor in a room in a house that you build in your mind. As you pass from room to room in the house, you read the contents of the room and are able to construct a speech.[796] The city itself was such a virtual reality: a mark through its streets would reveal its history through its buildings and monuments but with the end of the city we find it more and more difficult to map history through space.[797]

Instead we begin to map in terms of speed and electronic evaluation. Depth of time replaces the depth of field. Perspective is radically destabilized by the collapse between the observing subject and the point of vision: if the view is not your eyes but that of some camera in Bosnia seeing only milliseconds ago, the classical model of vision is no longer tenable: distance and depth in space are no longer related.[798]

This crisis of dimensionality, as Virilio calls it then appears as a crisis of the whole, a crisis of substantive, continuous and homogeneous space inherited from classical geometry, in favor of the relativity of an accidental, discontinues and heterogeneous space, one in which the parts and the fractions, the points and the various fragments became once more essential, as if they were an instant, a fraction or fragmenting of time. Digital technology replaces the smooth curve of the analog with the jagged edge of the discrete unit. This fragmentation, and the decline of the classical model of vision is exposed in a new way of seeing:

Where once the aesthetics of the appearance of an analogical, stable image of static nature predominated, we now have the aesthetics of the disappearance of a numerical, unstable image of fleeting nature, whose persistence is exclusively retinal — namely, that of the sensitization time, which eludes our conscious attention, once the threshold of 20 milliseconds was crossed — just as with the invention of the ultra-speed camera, whose one million images per second exceeded the composition time of 24 images per second.[799]

The retinal perception required for video and computer technology is momentary: the perception of the innocent eye. Without having planned it, cardboard architects and the innocent eye furnished a means of perception which anticipates the retinal flux generated by the computer screen, a moment uncannily similar to the moment inside of Hejduk’s planar wall. Likewise, Eisenman’s transformational process and the whole visual grammar of cardboard architecture anticipates the mode of architectural production that one instinctively enters when confronted by a computer program for three dimensional modeling such as Paracomp’s Swivel 3D: making complex objects out of object primitives with surfaces that like cardboard architecture’s surfaces are smooth and pixel-thin, subjecting them to transformations and combining them. The innocent eye is the eye for perceiving in the computer age: meant to ground the subject in an instantaneous presence, it sets up a training and mode of research ideal for a vertiginous registration of fleeting impressions gazed at by an out-of-focus eye, taking pleasure not in the information but in the registration of the impressions themselves.

In this dissertation I have traced a flux between two seemingly contradictory identity positions held by many architects and students of architecture: the Howard Roark, a heroic, autonomous architect who strives to maintain architecture as discipline and sees architecture as a formal expression of will-to-power and the MTV consumer, a subject acting as little or nothing more than a function of media oversaturation flipping through channels of flow attracted to whichever pattern catches the eye. Neither position is privileged — both are equally fixated on the effects of power.

A parallel can be drawn between this flux and the effects of ideology in late capitalism. Citizens of the late capitalist, first world state are on the one hand expected to be consumers and on the other ethical, autonomous subjects, solid citizens. In this way advanced capitalism, as Terry Eagleton explains “oscillates between meaning and non-meaning, pitched from moralism to cynicism and plagued by the embarrassing discrepancy between the two.”[800] This flux, Eagleton continues, is something that most of us recognize. Today we are too smart to really believe what the “official rhetoric” would like us to believe. Our reaction to this, is however, rather twisted: as Eagleton describes it: “First, a disparity sets in between what society does and what it says; then this performative contradiction is rationalized; next, the rationalization is made ironically self-conscious; and finally this self-ironizing itself comes to serve ideological ends.”[801].

This ironic self-consciousness serving ideological ends is a reappearance of Sloterdijk’s definition of cynicism recounted in the introduction to this dissertation. The cynic knows the effects of his or her action, but he or she still does it, in a sense conspiring with ideology. Slavoj Zˇizek,in his analysis of Sloterdijk’s concept of cynicism suggests that this means that we have not really gotten over ideology: cynicism is part of the game that the ruling ideology has already accommodated. But Zˇizekthen makes a crucial move: if we turn back to Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism — that relations between things take over relations between people — and combine it with a cynical world view, we learn that belief can be embodied in things.

Zˇizekuses the example of the Tibetan prayer wheel to demonstrate this way of thinking: we write a prayer on a piece of paper and put it into the wheel. Turning the wheel we make it pray for us at a greater speed than we ever could while we think whatever we want. This is the idea of the double agent restated: if we invest our things with beliefs, we can think whatever we want and let the things do our thinking for us instead. Thus, if we let Dan Rather get upset over the day’s news, we can avoid having to get upset ourselves.[802]

The architect can invest the architectural object with a certain belief-system and avoid having to believe in the believe system himself or herself. Thus Peter Eisenman tells us that his newest buildings are post-structuralist, subversive, and liberating.[803] With his buildings performing for him,[804] Eisenman can be free to pursue his own concerns with gaining power in the discipline, concerns which — as I will discuss below — have little to do with post-structuralism, subversion, or liberation and have everything to do with adulation of the author. This is an architecture of cynicism: an architecture that gives architects carte blanche to act however he or she may want. The successful architect becomes a conspirator, deploying jamming devices to operate undercover.

Yet it is also true that not everybody understands — or at least not everybody subscribes to — this cynicism. Otherwise, architecture students would not still believe that hard work and the development of an innocent eye will eventually lead them to be the next Michael Graves, or the next Richard Meier. For a very few, no doubt it will, but along the way chances are good that they will come to understand first-hand the cynicism underneath it all and allow their yellow or white trace to be subversive for them. As Aronson writes, there are a lot of architects waiting for Philip Johnson invite them for lunch at the Four Seasons.[805]

We can get another handle on this cynicism by looking at an alternative psychoanalysis developed by psychologist Jules Henry in his essay “Sham.” Against Freud, Henry argues that our psychology is based on a fundamental crisis not of the repression of sexuality but of repression itself. For Henry it is the repression of the truth (and sexuality is just one of the aspects of this) that causes our trauma. Since childhood, we have to adjust to the fact that life is lived as a sham. “Whoever does not learn to accept sham as reality,” Henry argues, following Albee’s play Tiny Alice, “deserves to be shot.”[806] Sham is cynicism, the rationale for the spectacle.

Henry however holds out hope for change. He posits four stages in the history of mankind: living sham and believing it to be the truth, seeing through sham while using it (cynicism), understanding sham and knowing how to fight it, and finally a utopian world without sham. While there have always been people in the first two stages, as a rule, Henry writes, our civilization is moving from stage one to stage two.[807]

In this scheme, the innocent eye is an attempt to return to stage one masked as an attempt to reach stage four. The teachers of cardboard architecture who knew that they were making a choice to deliberately reject any inquiry beyond form and yet achieved their own positions not just through their formal virtuosity but through their (social) networking skills were thus at the forefront of architectural sham.

Jonathan Vankin, in his survey of conspiracy theories and theorists, Conspiracies, Cover-ups, and Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America, uses Henry’s psychoanalysis to explain the popularity of conspiracy theory in contemporary American culture. Vankin explains that it is not a paranoid dysfunction in the minds of conspiracy theorists but rather,

The dysfunction is with American society, maybe even civilization as a whole. The structure of civilization itself requires mass adherence to faith in the institutions that built civilization and make it run. … We have to believe the institutions are functioning in our best interests. We have to believe what the people within those institutions assure us to be true. If not, we’re sentenced to a life on the edge, filled with frustration, indignation, confusion, and perhaps what society calls insanity.

The conspiracy theorists I encountered question our authorities, and, because they do, they skirt the fringes of society.[808]

Vankin explains that the urge to map conspiracies is an attempt to map the structure of Jules Henry’s sham:

Henry would have understood conspiracy theorists well. ‘Sham gives rise to coalitions because usually sham cannot be maintained without confederates.’ In other words, to keep civilization afloat requires a conspiracy. ‘In sham,’ Henry goes on, ‘the deceiver enters into an inner conspiracy against himself.’

Conspiracy theorists resist joining the ‘inner conspiracy.’ They can’t lie to themselves, like Colin Wilson’s ‘outsider’ who ‘cannot live in the comfortable insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.’ The more they strip through the sham, the madder they appear.

‘I anticipate a geometric increase in madness,’ says Jules Henry, ‘for sham is the basis of schizophrenia and murder itself.’

To understand conspiracy theorists, I now believe, is to first understand that civilization is a conspiracy against reality.[809]

Vankin’s analysis gives us a handle on Jameson’s formulation of conspiracy theory, the attempt to allegorically map the unrepresentable, i.e. pierce through sham. Likewise, if architecture today is based on sham, or is at least part of the sham, then it is natural that conspiracy theories of architecture — the Inner Club, Philip Johnson was a fascist — would begin to arise. But these conspiracies are real. This however shouldn’t surprise: if society’s structure is conspiratorial then it only follows that conspiracies take place.

As I pointed out in chapter three, in his Comments to Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord hints at the continuing conspiratorial construction of our society under the spectacle, explaining that “the highest ambition of the integrated spectacle is still to turn secret agents into revolutionaries, and revolutionaries into secret agents.” Among this society’s characteristics, he wrote, would be: “generalized secrecy; unanswerable lies; an eternal present.”[810]

The reason for this secrecy and its need to “eradicate historical knowledge,” and “drive the recent past into hiding,” Debord continues, is so that the purveyors of spectacle would have “above all the ability to cover its own tracks — to conceal the very progress of its recent world conquest. Its power already seems familiar, as if it had always been there. All usurpers have shared this aim: to make us forget that they have only just arrived.[811]

Indeed, the kids have only just arrived. The dominance of the discipline and in particular its means of reproduction — the educational apparatus — by architects trained in the innocent eye is a recent event.

As I noted in chapter one, the failure of the liberal paradigm during the 1960s generated a period of intense questioning. Taking place first as a critique of institutions, this questioning was internalized as a vague “critical thinking” within the same institutions. While I would never advocate that educators abandon the development of critical thinking, I also believe that we have to realize the cynicism of absorbing the critique of the discipline into the discipline, a move toward the society of cynicism.

But full recuperation is impossible and absorbing the critique into the institution provides a basis for its eventual undermining or radical transformation. Teaching critical thinking in the university might produce students who understand the cynicism that informs everyday life — especially within the university — and who just possibly might refuse to take it anymore. At the same time, as a result of the shift of production from industry to information, the university is becoming more and more central to society. The cynical absorption of critique into the university is evidence of the importance of keeping the university stable at all costs. After 1968, the possibility that revolution will come from within the walls of the university, or at least will be staged on those walls is real.

All forms of sham however continue to resist the consciousness that can emerge from a confrontation with our existence in the social matrix of production and with the historical creation of structures of sham such as cynicism, the spectacle, or the innocent eye. We must continue to ask questions such as the one asked by Jon Michael Schwarting: “Why is Philip Johnson celebrated as playful and iconoclastic rather than viewed more simply as the most articulate spokesman for the dominant ideology?”[812]

We must also guard against the cynical response: “that’s the way it is.” As Debord has written, in today’s spectacle “Many things may be unauthorized; everything is permitted. Talk of scandal is thus archaic The most profound summing-up of the period within the whole world entered shortly after Italy and the United States, can be found in the words of a senior Italian statesman, a member, simultaneously of both the official government and the parallel government, P2, Potere Due: ‘Once there were scandals, but not anymore.’”[813] When an international group of architects can name itself P3 after P2, then we have to realize how close we are to the spectacle in architecture.

The spectacle is also what drives the appearance of the innocent eye in architecture. The innocent eye, even in Ruskin’s hands, was based on a distance from the original that evacuated depth, made vision into an image. The development of the innocent eye and the visual language in the work of Moholy-Nagy and Kepes was aimed at teaching students how to create effective two-dimensional advertising. That it has been translated as cardboard architecture points to a spectacularization at the heart of architecture today: its reduction to image, which Debord has pointed out “concentrates all gazing and all consciousness.”[814]

Under the sign of the spectacle, we are able to draw a relation between vision and capital that can be used to explain a number of seemingly incompatible strands of investigation in this dissertation: the appearance of the kids in architectural discourse; architectural theorists’ interest in creating a formal visual language ultimately based on design technologies that would also form the basis of modern advertising layout; the concurrent interest in stripping the architecture student of her preconceptions about architecture to create what would be referred to as “the innocent eye”; and the increase in public popularity of the architectural drawing and of architecture culture in general.

Yet there is hope after all. While recuperation is constantly ongoing — for example Jean Baudrillard’s cynical recuperation of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle —recuperation can never be complete. The spectacle, sham, or cynicism still serve to hide material reality by deferring its consideration to another day. But this deferment cannot be endless. Working toward exposing spectacle, sham, and cynicism is not in vain. It provides a counter that can help us, as agents, make our choices. Our choices are certainly ideological, but certainly some choices are better than others. The choices that lead to the release of a political prisoner for example, or the clean-up of a toxic waste site, most of all the day-to-day choices of lived reality.

As architects, theorists or historians of architecture, we can help expose the workings of sham in our field by examining its own disciplinary states. Remarkably, while during the late 1980s and early 1990s, some architectural theorists began questioning the epistemological claims of architecture with the tools of Derridean post-structuralism, few architects have questioned the field as a discipline. There is a striking absence of questioning of the tenability of the author-figure in architecture as theorists from outside the discipline have noted.[815]

The strength of the architect/author-figure in architecture is the result of architecture’s particular means of producing artifacts such as buildings, drawings, teapots or texts. In order to approach this phenomenon, we can use an analysis of the making of artifacts and their function in our society by Elaine Scarry in her book The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World. Scarry explains that “the act of human creating includes both the creating of the object and the object’s recreating of the human being, and it is only because of the second that the first is undertaken: that ‘recreating’ action is accomplished by the human makers and must be included in any account of the phenomenon of making.” In this light, commodity fetishism’s error is in its concern only with the re-creation of people through objects, omitting the first half of the equation.[816]

In many situations, the creation of the artifact is hidden to some extent. Thus, as Scarry writes,

as one maneuvers each day through the realm of tablecloths, dishes, potted plants, ideological structures, automobiles, newspapers, ideas about families, streetlights, language, city parks, one does not at each moment actively perceive the objects as humanly made; but if one for any reason stops and thinks about their origins, one can with varying degrees of ease recover the fact that they all have human maker, and this recognition will not jeopardize their usefulness. Though these objects … usually have no personal   signatures affixed to them, they will have a general   human signature.  … The individual person who is one of the life-risking builders of the Golden Gate Bridge will, as he crosses that object fifty years later, think to himself, ‘I’ve got my fingerprints all over that iron’; the rest of us, periodically struck with the recognition that this dazzling object is ‘made,’ will see the fingerprints too, though we will not know to whom they belong. The signature will be general, not specific.[817]

Before the laborer’s general signature however, certain artifacts contain another signature, that of the designer. As a society we give far more privilege to the designer, usually an individual. Thus, while we might admire the work of builders of the Flatiron building, it is more likely that we will admire Daniel H. Burnham for his design. While a traditional architectural historian could make an argument that Burnham is the one who did the “real work,” the thinking, even that becomes problematic when we realize that like many architects, Burnham had a large office in which not only drafting but also design-work was carried out by the other workers. Yet we speak of Burnham as the designer, knowing that in doing so we will be placing the building in the context of a series of objects signed by him.

The reason for this simultaneous attention to and repression of the signature is because of the nature of the visibility of the signature. As Scarry explains, “whether or not the first half of that action is visible will depend on whether the visibility will interfere with its reciprocating task.” Whereas the appearance of an architect’s signature helps us celebrate the act of creating and purports to make it easier to understand, the signature of the architectural object’s other makers: its builders and sometimes its patrons occlude the traditional understanding of architectural creation.

But the idea of the architect as hero or Howard Roark designing the building sets the author/architect at the core of a rock-like discipline with patriarchal tendencies.[818] The patriarchal foundation of the architect as author or authority can be seen reproduced in the relationship of the kids to Philip Johnson. Even the name of the group as the kids, a name repeated over and over again by Johnson and some of the group’s members is a fundamentally patriarchal one of parent to child. The inscription of the Father (Johnson) serves as the Law.[819]

As the kids have begun to take on more frequent and larger projects and their offices have expanded, the commodity fetishism of their work and their identity as author has increased and this too reveals a problematic aspect of the architectural vanguard. While the architectural celebrity is treated as an individual with a signature style, the reality is that his style is determined by a number of individuals, whose work is generally unrecognized, unless they too become celebrities. A larger office in which the project becomes a collaborative work between the head of the office and his assistants is very different from a project which is done by one person alone, yet nowhere is the staff of the kids celebrated. Rarely do they exist as independent faces, at most they exist as names, perhaps with a title such as “Project Architect.” This is a serious problem within the aesthetics of architecture. The kids do not even go as far as modernist firms, such as Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (where if anything, one knew that Messrs. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill had nothing to do with the design) or The Architects Collaborative did in breaking down the identity of the architect-hero. The position of authority is in the name of the architect, reinforcing the romantic image of the lone, struggling artist, the Howard Roark.

Since of all the kids, Peter Eisenman is the only one whose work can be accepted in any way as post-structuralist, and his theoretical project is generally portrayed as a repeated attempt to attack notions of pre-existent, humanist subjectivity,[820] the fact that Eisenman’s work is strongly connected to the notion of Peter Eisenman as its author[821] makes him a particularly compelling test-case to examine the contradiction between the author’s identity and what philosopher David Goldblatt has called “the dislocation of the architectural self.”

Goldblatt in fact also focuses on Eisenman as the exemplar of the dislocation of the architectural self. This architectural self, Goldblatt explains, is “the self   that works within the context of a traditional architecture, an architecture of everyday practice.” It is that self which is constructed by the tradition of architecture and its “own hierarchical presuppositions…complicated in the tradition of architecture, through schooling, apprenticeship and professional reward as well as by the usual devices of enculturation.” Goldblatt finds Eisenman’s project compelling because he attempts to dislocate this architectural self, to create a strategy “to remove the architect as a source of resistance to non-traditional architecture so that design can begin from a dislocated vantage point.”

But here Goldblatt unwittingly runs into the problem with Eisenman. The removal of the architectural self is done within the discipline, using the disciplinary tactics of the innocent eye. While Eisenman attempts to remove any reference to anthropomorphism in his architecture, his architecture is still ultimately about his self.

Goldblatt compares Eisenman’s dislocation of the architectural self with Nietzsche’s description of the ecstatic Dionysian:

forgetting is mechanism at work for Nietzsche in the self’s abrogation. What is negated by virtue of forgetting is ‘one’s civic past and social rank,’ one’s everyday or commonplace self. And since in Nietzsche’s unreified notion of Will, it is analytic that willing is willing towards an end, ‘our personal interest in purposes,’the dropping of such civil or social ends is also the negation of the will. The artist of The Birth of Tragedy is without will, replaced perhaps by impulse, in unmediated contact with some kind of primordial being or ‘original Oneness’ and becomes identified with it. The artist becomes ‘exempt from the embarrassing task of copying reality.’ ‘He  … strides with the same elation and ecstasy as the gods he has seen in his dreams. No longer the artist, he has himself become a work of art: the productive power of the whole universe is now manifested in his transport.’ Nothing much in this paper turns on this early romantic notion of being in direct touch with some thing-in-itself, a view Nietzsche was later to reject. Rather, the point to be emphasized here is that some self, in some manner or other, has been dislocated from the ordinary self by art.[822]

But of course it is here that Goldblatt’s argument ultimately fails him. It is not that nothing much turns on Nietzsche’s conception of the artist but rather that everything does. The artist as the work of art, having designed his own life brings us to the irreconcilability of Eisenman and the myth of the dislocated self.

The basic premise of Goldblatt’s article is the adoption of the paradigm of architecture as critique in which the subject is generally construed as being produced within the text, be it a book or a building. In this view, humanist thought put a Cartesian subject in the role of an originating agent of meaning, rock-solid, centralized, and real, not coincidentally similar to our model of the Howard Roark. The humanist subject is seen as valorizing “man” at the expense of differences such as gender or class. A true post-humanist art would counter this reduction of difference by fragmenting the subject, destabilizing it by emphasizing such features as incompleteness, fragment, uncertainty, and seriality. Paradoxically, it should be added, this valorized condition parallels the frequent description of (post) modernity as the process of social, technological and cultural modernization which is characterized by its fragmentation and the dispersion of the subject, i.e. the condition of the MTV viewer.[823]

But Eisenman’s intents are more complicated: in a recent interview, Eisenman states “I act through architecture. How else to prove I’m here?…There’s no one behind my work but me. I am not selfish or immoral — I just want to be more everyday for me. To live fully, I have to uncover the Self.” Eisenman goes on to explain where he looks for his Self: “I look for my Self in your mirror, not in my mirror. That would be narcissism.”[824]

In other words, Eisenman voyeuristically looks in the mirror of the observer who has performed for him, a performative mirror. Given Eisenman’s interest in post-structuralist thought and in psychoanalysis, it would be hard to imagine that Eisenman is not aware of the role of the mirror in Lacanian psychonalysis. Therefore we cannot take Eisenman’s suggestion lightly but must take it to point to Lacan’s concept of the mirror-stage, the transition by which a child attains a Self.

Lacan’s mirror-stage occurs between six and eighteen months, and consists of the child’s constituting her own identity through her reflected image. From an undifferentiated, oceanic state, the child moves to the knowledge of itself as separate, a primary alienation. It is here that the Imaginary realm develops, a pre-linguistic and pre-temporal state in which the child, having seen itself in the mirror, believes in its own bodily wholeness and completeness, the ideal state of the Innocent Eye. Only later does the child enter into language and lose the Innocent Eye, the stage of the Symbolic, a world of conventions that the child had no way of shaping.[825]

An architecture of the mirror-stage would thus offer a regression to the Imaginary, the realm of the Innocent Eye, a vision of the Self glossing over the fissure that really exists between subject and object.[826]

While he hopes to find this proof not in himself but in his recipient subject, Eisenman nonetheless feels that through architecture he can live fully, be a “Self,” a whole Ego. In this moment of slippage, Eisenman sets out his intentions, perhaps unaware of their implications. Like the child (with its innocent not having read Lacan yet eye), Eisenman falls into the trap of believing in the mirror image that offers an image of the Self.

But this is just another way of amplifying the displacement that Eisenman attempts to make. Eisenman’s texts, be they buildings or figures on a page worry for him. Peter Eisenman is held unaccountable, made whole by the work.

This is the problem with Eisenman. He himself is rock-solid. At Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, he is followed around by a coterie of hangers-on who want to get into hisinner circle. Somehow, however, this doesn’t seem to matter to theorists who discuss Eisenman.

Instead of asking about the architect, the discipline, and the institutional role of the architectural academy, we confine our interest entirely to projects and texts. While that has always been a generally accepted practice within at least a subset of historians and critics and makes a certain amount of sense, it allows the architect to let his projects perform for him or her and it allows the reader to bracket off everything beyond the form of the building and the theory of the text (if even allowing the text in at all). It is, as Zˇizekwould say, cynical. Eisenman (and through him Johnson, the (ex?-) fascist architect with the guilty past) is able to avoid culpability by saying that his projects are all that matters. In other words, Eisenman’s project is totemic: he doesn’t have to worry, his projects worry for him. Saved by his projects, Eisenman doesn’t have to account for his actions.[827]

Here we can return to the theory of agency outlined in the introduction and also replay the dialectic of the MTV consumer and Howard Roark. While as we might expect the MTV Consumer is the post-structuralist subject, a switching machine, unable to break from the cycle of information consumption and information flows that it is subjected to. Howard Roark on the other hand, deludes himself into believing he is a rock-solid individual, impervious to the subjecting forces of discursive formations, living instead through its desire and is unable to form a relationship with society except through opposition to the masses and perhaps eventual praise from them.

A theory of agency, however, would maintain that our actions are still our own. The agent as a site of resistance to ideological pressure is unable to escape ideology, but is not automatically a privileged position. On the contrary, as explained above agency invests the subject with responsibility. We are all already agents. “Agency” is little more than a concept that we can use to understand where we can exert our power of resistance. We are subjected, but we are also agents, capable of acting. If we adopt an ideology of acting for itself, i.e. an ideology of will, or for ourselves, i.e. an ideology of will to power, we can wind up as Howard Roarks, Philip Johnsons or Peter Eisenmans.

But while we are all under the sign of the spectacle, if there is still some decency left in us we can still recognize the lie of sham and not exploit it by becoming cynics. Instead of being cynics then, let us conclude with a possible retrospective methodological manifesto for this and future projects.

In chapter one and more extensively four, I discussed the innocent eye within the paradigm of cardboard architecture and critiqued its oculocentric divorce from material reality. But we cannot totally damn vision the way some art critics do.[828] After all, we still see, we still read, our goal is still a simple Enlightenment one : to to see more clearly, to cast light on that which is hidden by the sham. Vision isn’t all bad, its just some of our cultural constructions that are negative.

 I would now like to extend this discussion in the light of Jacques Lacan’s discussion of the gaze. Defining this “gaze,” Lacan writes,

In the scopic field, everything is articulated between two terms that act in an antinomic way — on the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them. This is how one should understand those words, so strongly stressed in the Gospel, They have eyes that they might not see. That they might not see what? Precisely, that things are looking at them?[829]

Architects and historians of architecture will recall that Le Corbusier was also obsessed with “eyes that do not see” and alluded to the existence of the gaze by printing the phrase in the context of a series of photographs of ocean liners and airplanes. The eyes that do not see are on a one level, the eyes of those who do not see the beauty of the objects, but on another level, the eyes are already within these objects: the portholes from which someone might catch us looking.

Lacan on the other hand explains that when we look at an object, it gazes back at us, disturbing our relation with it. But we are already in that which stares back at us. Lacan clarifies this with an anecdote about how as a young man he would work on a fishing boat. An uneducated worker on the boat with Lacan points to a sardine can floating in the water. He asks Lacan “You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!”[830] But in the translation something is lost. The can is “le can,” the can is masculine. “La can” doesn’t even make sense in French. But Lacan’s name is La-can. With this anecdote Lacan points out that contained in the gaze are class — the gaze of the worker who knows Lacan is there for the summer before returning to the university while he is there for good — gender — la can and le can — and the possibility that, through its gaze we are already present in the object we look at and that simultaneously we find ourselves turned from a condition of subjects looking at objects into objects being gazed at by other subjects.

The easiest way to verify the power of the gaze is a walk down any street. The gaze of others disturbs us, our gaze disturbs them. We do not like to be watched. At home, the possibility that the walls have eyes (or ears: while Lacan’s gaze is set up in visual terms, it could be extended into the aural realm as well) unnerves us.

If the innocent eye is the eye of the architect, the eye developed by Rousseau and Ruskin, there is another eye developed by the very same authors, not an innocent eye at all but an eye able to see what the innocent eye tries not to.

To conclude, let us we turn back to the originators of the innocent eye: Rousseau and Ruskin. The appropriation of Rousseau and Ruskin by art educators to promote a pedagogy of the innocent eye, disembodied and unsoiled by society or pre-existing subjectivity is curious, even bizarre when we are confronted by the fact that these very same authors also put forth remarkably similar accounts of vision that — on the surface at least — were diametrically opposed to this model.[831]

After describing the ideal education in Émile, later in that very same textRousseau wrote of “A problem which another child would never heed [that] would torment Émile half a year”: Émile and the instructor would go to an elegant dinner with wealthy people where the two would be dazzled by the many guests, servants, dishes, and elegant china. In Émile’s ear the instructor would whisper “How many hands do you suppose the things on this table passed through before they got here?” The virus, the Trojan horse, is successfully implanted in the child’s mind and the result is a crisis:

In a moment the mists of excitement have rolled away. He is thinking, considering, calculating, and anxious. The child is philosophizing, while philosophers, excited by wine or perhaps by female society are babbling like children. If he asks questions I decline to answer and put him off to another day. He becomes impatient, he forgets to eat and drink, he longs to get away from table and talk as he pleases. What an object of curiosity, what a text for instruction. Nothing has so far succeeded in corrupting his healthy reason; what will he think of luxury when he finds that every quarter of the globe has been ransacked, that some 2,000,000 men have laboured for years, that many lives have perhaps been sacrificed, and all to furnish him with fine clothes to be worn at midday and laid by in the wardrobe at night.[832]

Over a hundred years later, in 1875 Ruskin too would write in Letter Fifty-six of his Fors:

Let us consider, then, how many conditions must meet; and how much labor must have been gone through, both by servile and nobile persons, before this little jaunty figure, seated on its box of clothes, can trot through its peaceful day of mental development.

(I.) on dry bread and onions, must have pruned and trodden grapes; — cask-makers, cellarmen, and other functionaries attending on them.

(II.) Rough sailors must have brought the wine into the London Docks.

(III.) My father and his clerks must have done a great deal of arithmetical and epistolary work, before my father could have profit enough from the wine to pay for our horses, and our dinner.

(IV.) The tailor must have given his life to the dull business of making clothes — the wheelwright and carriage-maker to their woodwork — the smith to his buckle and springs — the postillion to his riding — the horse-breeder and breaker to the cattle in his field and stable, — before I could make progress in this pleasant manner, even for a single stage.

(V.) Sundry English King and Barons must have passed their lives in military exercises and gone to their deaths in military practices, to provide me with my forenoons’ entertainments in ruined castles; or founded the great families whose servants were to be my hosts.

(VI.) Vandyck and Velasquez, and many a painter before them, must have spent their lives in learning and practising their laborious business.

(VII.) Various monks and abbots must have passed their lives in pain, with fasting and prayer; and a large company of stonemasons occupied themselves in their continual service, in order to provide me, in defect of castles and noblemen’s seats, with amusement in the way of abbeys and cathedrals.[833]

Thus, opposed to two critical moments of the innocent eye we have two moments of what could perhaps best be termed a genealogical vision, capable of an awareness of the genealogy of an object as it is embedded in a social matrix of production. This genealogical vision would embody an awareness of the history that Walter Benjamin reminds us is always there, no matter how suppressed:

the cultural heritage we survey has an origin that we cannot contemplate without horror: it owes its existence not merely to the effort of great geniuses who created it, but to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is not a single artifact of culture that is not simultaneously an artifact of barbarism. And just as no artifact is free of barbarism, so too the process of its reception, by means of which it has been passed on from one recipient to the next, is equally fettered.[834]

To this end, Benjamin theorized a materialist way of seeing what he called “dialectical images.” Benjamin projected a stereoscopic vision: out of two two-dimensional images we would see a third, three-dimensional one with depth. Appropriating this technique from architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, Benjamin would read out today’s life from the forms of the recent past, then the forms of the nineteenth century.[835]

Genealogical vision aims to recover the recuperated meaning of an image. In this way it is related if not identical to the détourned vision of the Situationists, a vision that seeks out the meaning hidden in the acts of appropriation that make up the spectacularized image. While the spectacle swallows up revolutionary critique by presenting a false transparency, Situationism exposes the opacity of the object: that which has been repressed in the recuperation.[836]

In the discourse of high aesthetics, it is the innocent eye that survives and flourishes, not the genealogical vision, the vision that sees the gaze of the Other, the misery of the object’s production and the suppression of the marks of the hand of the producer, the vision of the dialectical image. This vision does the simplest thing possible: it looks sham in the face and says “I know who you are, even if I will now be shot.”

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page 49. School of Design in Chicago. Build… Peter Hahn and Lloyd C. Engelbrecht, ed. 50 Jahre Bauhausnachfolge. New Bauhaus in Chicago, (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv: Argon, 1987), 111.

page 50. School of Design in Chicago. The Education of the Eye. Hahn and Engelbrecht, ed. 138.

page 56. Roger Delaunay. Simultaneous Windows. Colin Rowe and Robert Slutkzy, Transparence. Réelle et Virtuelle, (Paris: “Droits de Regards” Les Éditions du Demi-Cercle, 1992), 45.

page 57. Juan Gris. Still Life. Rowe and Slutkzy, 46.

page 58. Pablo Picasso. L’Arlésienne. Rowe and Slutkzy, 55.

page 59. Bernard Hoesli. Analysis of Villa Garches according to Rowe & Slutzky’s Principles of Transparency. Rowe and Slutkzy, 88.

page 68. John Hejduk. The Nine-Square Grid Problem. John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works 1947-1983, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 37.

page 69. Students at Cooper Union. Solutions to the Nine-Square Grid Problem. Kenneth Frampton, “Notes from the Underground,” Artforum April 1972, 41.

page 73. Robert Venturi. Frug House. Cardboard Models. Vincent Scully, The Shingle Style Today or The Historian’s Revenge, (New York: George Braziller, 1974), figures 93-94

Page 100. Alan Blackburn and Philip Johnson as the Gray Shirts. Kurt Andersen, “Philip the Great,” Vanity Fair, June 1993: 136.

Page 105. Father Charles Coughlin addressing his public. Charles J. Tull, Father Coughlin and the New Deal, (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1965), 127.

Page 106. Rally of 80,000 for Father Charles Coughlin in Chicago organized by Philip Johnson, 1936. Sheldon Marcus, Father Coughlin. The Tumultous Life of the Priest of the Littfle Flower, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973), 129.

Page 124. Danzig before the German Invasion, 1939. Robert Kee, 1939. In the Shadow of War. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1984), 259.

Page 155. Philip Johnson. The Glass House at Night. Architectural Review, CVIII (September 1950), 14.

Page 162. Philip Johnson at his Glass House. David Whitney and Jeffrey Kipnis, Philip Johnson: The Glass House, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 113.

Page 174. John Hejduk. Diamond House B. John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works 1947-1983, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 246.

Page 175. John Hejduk. Diamond House B. Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 247.

Page 185. Peter Eisenman. House II. Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, Richard Meier, Colin Rowe and Kenneth Frampton, Five Architects, (New York: Wittenborn & Company, 1972), 24.

Page 186. Michael Graves. Benacerraf House. Eisenman, et. al. Five Architects, 46.

Page 187. Michael Graves. Hanselman House. Eisenman, et. al. Five Architects, 58.

Page 188. Richard Meier. Smith House. Analytical Diagrams. Eisenman, et. al. Five Architects, 111.

Page 189. Richard Meier. Smith House. Eisenman, et. al. Five Architects, 117.

Page 190. Charles Gwathmey. Gwathmey House and Studio. Eisenman, et. al. Five Architects, 63.

Page 191. Charles Gwathmey. Gwathmey House and Studio. Eisenman, et. al. Five Architects, 65.

Page 192. John Hejduk. One-Half House. Eisenman, et. al. Five Architects, 102

Page 193. John Hejduk. House 10. Projection E. Eisenman, et. al. Five Architects, 92.

Page 198. Stern and Hagmann. Saft House, East Hampton New York. Scully, The Shingle Style Today, figure 112.

Page 199. Jaquelin Robertson. Madden House. Scully, The Shingle Style Today, figures 124-125.

Page 219. Philip Johnson leads the discussion at the 1978 A.I. A. Convention. “Convention ’78:Remarks by Gold Medalist Johnson” A. I. A. Journal (July 1978), 18.

Page 220. Philip Johnson and his kids at the 1978 A. I. A. Convention. “Convention ’78: A Lively Discussion About Design,” A. I. A. Journal (July 1978), 28.

Page 239. Installation view of “The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Barbaralee Diamondstein, ed., American Architecture Now II, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 64.

Page 252. The Philip Johnson Gallery, Museum of Modern Art. Diamondstein, ed., American Architecture Now II, 63.

Page 273. Friedrich Froebel. Kindergarten Gifts. Michael J. Lewis, Apprendre de toutes pièces/Toys that Teach, (Montréal: Centre Canadien d’Architecture, 1993), 13.

Page 279. Walter Gropius, the eye compared to a camera. Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1955, originally published 1943), following 64.

Page 285. John Hejduk. Wall House. Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 294.

Page 286. Peter Eisenman. Spatial Analyses. Peter D. Eisenman, The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture, Ph.D. Trinity College, University of Cambridge, 1963.

Page 287. Peter Eisenman. House II. Transformational Diagrams. Peter D. Eisenman, “Cardboard Architecture,” Casabella no. 374 February 1973), 20.

Page 288. Peter Eisenman. House II. Transformational Diagrams. Eisenman, “Cardboard Architecture,” 21.

Page 304. Kazys Varnelis. Architecture as Blobs. 1994 . Swivel 3d Pro Model. Original work. Private Collection. Ithaca, New York.