Michael Ennis
Modern Problems
Why Dallas is embracing an old architectural vision of what the world could be.
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It all adds up to a remarkable if spontaneous architectural duet: the communist bureaucrats in Beijing announcing themselves to the world with exactly the same visual vocabulary as the conservative plutocrats in Dallas. Of course, it’s easy enough to point out that just as our globe is becoming, in economic terms, a “flat earth” (writer Thomas Friedman’s coinage for the increasingly level playing field on which the affluent West and up-and-comers like India and China are now competing), the cultural playing field is also getting noticeably flatter, with architects, artists, and their ideas racing across it at the speed of a broadband connection. But that still doesn’t answer the question of why modernism, having had a stake driven through its heart by critics on both the left and the right, has been revived to lead this new world culture.
To understand what Modernism 2.0 (or 2.1) really means requires some insight into the rise and fall of last century’s version. The familiar mythology is all about monster egos like Picasso and Wright or tormented martyrs like Van Gogh and Pollock. But much of the modernist vision was shaped just after World War I by lesser-known artists and architects who wonkishly embraced technology and mass production, intent on transforming the entire world into a total work of art. Russia’s gifted avant-garde ardently championed the Soviet revolution at its outset, for a few incandescent years creating groundbreaking abstract art and graphic design; their concepts for public buildings remain breathtakingly advanced even today. Germany’s post—World War I ferment produced the Bauhaus, the fabled aesthetic think tank where many of Europe’s most innovative artists, architects, and designers reinvented everything from public housing to typefaces. The politics of this multinational modernism were egalitarian and utopian; oppressed workers, the survivors of the millions who had perished in the trenches of the war to end all wars, were the intended beneficiaries of an era of radical innovation, peace, and progress.
Europe’s new masters had their own vision, however, and in short order both Stalin and Hitler purged their moderns (the latter perceptively denouncing modern art as “nothing but an international communal experience”). By the time World War II was under way, much of the most fecund generation of European modernists—including most of the Bauhaus brain trust—had fled to the United States, sparking a postwar explosion of avant-garde American art and architecture. In 1949 Life magazine asked if Wyoming native Pollock was “the greatest living painter in the United States.” By the mid-fifties, unadorned glass-and-steel boxes in the International style of former Bauhaus director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had not only claimed New York’s skyline but were transforming heartland cities like Chicago and Houston. And all across America, cultural conservatives could be depended on to complain that modernism was a communist front.
The avant-garde marched on, however, until more-liberal voices turned against a movement that seemed to have lost its social conscience along the way. By the early seventies, even many artists found pared-to-the-bone late modern art a mandarin exercise by and for a cultural elite. Architecture critics protested that cookie-cutter glass boxes had overwhelmed existing neighborhoods, with no respect for picturesque local “context” or customs. Environmentalists regarded the glass towers, inherently cold in the winter and hot in the summer, as energy hogs.
The fall from grace was swift. By the time apostate modernist Philip Johnson, previously America’s most devout Miesian, gleefully announced postmodernism’s formal coming out at the American Institute of Architects convention in Dallas in 1978, he was already building the world’s first postmodern skyline in Houston. It was the ideal pairing: The postmodern disdain for modernist social engineering, along with the boisterous anything-goes aesthetics that freed architects to mix and match historical periods like fashion separates (Johnson might top one building with Gothic spires, another with a little Greek temple), perfectly suited Houston’s unzoned anarchy and unfettered boom-and-bust economy. Soon, buildings dressed up in phony period costumes mirrored the nation’s nostalgic mood as we began to turn back the clock on the New Deal—Great Society social agenda. It was an era that was fittingly bracketed by a pair of two-term conservative “cowboy” presidents, the first having played one in the movies, the other buying his ranch on the eve of his election.
But the tarted-up, selectively remembered past didn’t serve postmodern architects as well as it did postmodern-era politicians; too many overornamented, aimless historical pastiches too often proved that more was a lot less. Meanwhile, a new generation of modernists was also breaking out of the Miesian box but doing so with complex, fluid abstract forms and high-tech “skins” that allowed buildings as open and transparent as Mies’s to be far more energy efficient. The best modernists also became astute urban planners, carefully designing projects that respected their surroundings and historic neighbors. By the beginning of this century, modernism had begun to win back its audience and, in places as far-flung from each other as Dallas and Beijing, attract a fresh generation of clients.
The appeal of the new-look modernism lies, in part, in a revival of the old “international communal experience” that Hitler found so at odds with his vision of Aryan supremacy. In an era of global problems like climate change and terrorism, most of the world has already concluded that the solutions aren’t the exclusive domain of one nation or culture but instead require a global creative consensus; even the lone superpower can’t go it alone. But there’s also a resonance buried deeper in our collective psyche, a paradoxical nostalgia for the future—that is, a need to restore the sense of hopefulness and wonder we used to feel about the future. Throughout the midsection of the last century, utopian World’s Fairs featuring cutting-edge architecture and themes like “The World of Tomorrow” were galvanizing global events. Astronauts were national heroes, not tabloid fodder. Basic scientific theories were the handmaidens of human progress rather than attacks on the authority of ancient scripture. We had fears, but they were worthy of our ambition: A powerful ideological competitor, armed with thousands of nuclear warheads, challenged us daily on air, land, sea, and in outer space. Today our existential threat is a tiny cabal of cave-dwelling primitives.
So perhaps what we see in modernism now is a path back to the future, a chance to renew the optimism and progressive imagination of the mid-twentieth century with the tools of the twenty-first. The first time around we attempted to engineer a modern utopia with an enthusiasm that was naive and a self-confidence that grew arrogant. But after years of trying to make the clocks run backward, we no longer have the luxury of cautious steps; we need some measure of utopian thinking and planning simply to prevent a terrible global dystopia. What we’re telling ourselves in Dallas and Beijing—or even as we wait in line at MoMA—is that the clock is racing forward again, at a pace we never expected, and the answers we need may well be found in our visions of futures past.
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