All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
I collected my first volume of essays in 1991, my introduction bid a stirring farewell to critical writing, promising that I’d devote myself exclusively to architectural practice henceforth. So much for promises. A dozen books later, here is another one. It probably won’t be the last. Of course, writing is an architectural practice—ohne Theorie, keine Revolution and all that. However, as I have been obliged to rediscover repeatedly since the pieces in that first volume were drafted in the fearless flush of resistance to the onerous world of commissions and compromises, I had written myself into something of a corner. I’ve bitten quite a few hands, many of which, it turned out, might otherwise have been feeding me. Nevertheless, architectural flesh always proved tasty to me, and the urge to chomp has continued. In retrospect, it’s clear that my sunny animus was costly and I haven’t found much architectural work in this town. And much of my design work has itself been adversarial, a long march of counter-proposals for vexed situations that have won me a certain amount of cred but haven’t exactly opened the door to the plump commissions that a person of feeling such as moi thinks his due. Ironically, my studio now has a number of projects in China, a place where I am known almost entirely through images.
Still, I’ve persisted, and a great deal of work has been drawn, if not built. My studio has become a specialist in what we call “unsolicited master planning.” This work has also informed my writing, which has tried to balance the claims of social justice with the unassailable specificities of taste. At a time when the homogenizing impacts of global capital are one of the greatest threats to our subjective differences, artistic invention is an ever more crucial hedge against the depredations of planetary sameness. So, the parallel inventions of writing and designing have shared aims: the struggle for a progressive environmental politics and a simultaneous broadening of architecture’s artistic horizons. In both my own work and that for which I have been an advocate, I’ve tried to help secure an expressive space that is at once free and focused. Much of my affirmative writing has thus been in support of comrades on the disciplinary margins: the starchitects don’t lack for flacks.
Although my own formal proclivities grow unabashedly from a number of sources—including the alternative modernities represented by architects like Michael de Klerk, Bruce Goff, Oscar Niemeyer, Konstantin Melnikov, Hermann Herzberger, Alvar Aalto, Antonio Gaudi, Erich Mendelssohn, Bucky Fuller, and, of course, Frank Lloyd Wright. I also have a special affinity for the Camillo Sitte branch of urbanism, one that finds particular inspiration in the crazy-quilts of Prague, Fez, the Hutongs of Beijing, or the juxtaposition of twisty streets and rotated skyscrapers in lower Manhattan. I especially love the spontaneous weirdness and exaggeration of hippie communes, the caves of Cappadocia, the towers of Yemen, or the stoned-out-of-his-gourd chops of Guarino Guarini. What I don’t like is uniformity, especially rolled out as The Only Way, whether in the form of the modernist existenzminimum, the suburbs, or the Prisoner-esque New Urbanist package: there will always be some limits to tolerance. Interrogating such limits is the task of criticism. This is what Aldo Van Eyck was up to.
Do forgive the piety of all of the foregoing. It’s motivated by my inner Pangloss, by a deep desire to live and work in a world that’s decent, delightful, and beautiful. A world where everyone has the right to architecture.
1
The Second-Greatest Generation
Never Trust Anyone Over . . . ?
For the past twenty years I have been over thirty, the actual milestone having occurred slightly before the lapsing of the 1970s (which was when much of the 1960s actually occurred). And I’m not the only one. As the boomer bulge in the bell curve grinds toward oblivion, we are driven to ask: what has the aging of youth culture meant for architecture?
Youth, of course, is strictly a cultural matter. My generation is by self-definition—the only definition that ever counted for us—young. Architecture, the “old man’s profession,” has never been congenial to us (among others). We certainly returned the favor: bridling at the “man,” many of us rebelled, abandoning architecture, heading for the woods, building by hand, advocating for communities, drawing, making trouble, laying the groundwork for the cultural revolution.
This didn’t really work out as we planned. The world seems not to have changed along the lines of the image we had for it. Somehow the “liberating” mantra of sex, drugs, and rock and roll changed into the nightmare of AIDS, Prozac, and MTV. How much of a hand did we have in this cultural devolution?
The Clinton Library
Limiting politics to resistance or selling out has not served us entirely well. Our own first president illustrates the sheer porousness, the corruptibility, of these categories. Clinton is not exactly one of us, in the same way that any member of student government during the late 1960s was not exactly one of us, but rather something between a quisling and a geek (depending on whether one focuses on politics or style). Now we are witnessing the spectacle of two co-generationalists running for the presidency. These—the eternal frat boy and the sell-out student government type—give the lie to certain fantasies about the triumph of the counterculture. Sixty percent of George W. Bush’s class at Yale—the class of 1968, no less—voted for either Richard Nixon or George Wallace. Al Gore elected to go to Vietnam. Patrician universities, with their solid ruling-class values and their various schools of social architecture, have a way of countering countercultural agendas, it seems.
And they have a way of promoting the middle of the road. When the time came for Clinton to choose an architect to design his shrine in Little Rock, did he turn to an architect his own age? Did he seek to radicalize the repository via form or effect? Not at all. He made his choice from the slightly older generation, choosing an architect not quite old enough to be his (absent) father but certainly old enough to Wally his Beaver. The first boomer administration runs from its roots, affecting the same brain-dead Hollywood style that answers the question “Rock and Roll Museum?” with “I.M. Pei” (designer of the first “modern” presidential library). And we haven’t heard much lately from the presidential sax, not since Clinton was trying to persuade us that he shared our values (we’ll keep our pain to ourselves, thanks).
Blah Blah Blah
The political rebellion of the 1960s announced itself in the characteristic speech of the late twentieth century: first person. But the self-promoting, self-conscious “I” of my generation has been hobbled by our awareness of the unconscious, which has hovered over us like a specter. This unconscious has not only promised the possibility of a “liberation of desire” from social constraint, it has also rallied skepticism of our best intentions. The unconscious, after all, always trumps the conscious as a cause of action and thus of political striving. Beneath the desire to do good lurks a neglected child. Behind the orderliness of minimalism lies crap in the pants. Politics itself has been reduced to just another symptom; it dares not promise a cure for fear of being labeled the dupe of its own neuroses.
Whether this is a proper reading of Freud is really not the issue; it is the reading that undermined our sense of the world’s reliability and our own political will, producing a special generational uncertainty principle. We all have our styles of superego, and this combination of license and guilt has distinguished us, on the one hand, from the “greatest generation” of our parents who—dammit—had something unequivocal to fight for, and, on the other hand, from the Gen X-ers and Y-ers, the Reaganjugend, whose traumas seem so fifties, inflicted by the pressures of consumption, rather than rebellion. Thus questions of influence acquire for us a special anxiety. The unflagging hegemony of the sixty-something and seventy-something cadre that rules, that formulated the parameters of the depoliticized, desocialized post-modernity that swept architecture in the seventies and eighties, needs a violent shaking from the left.
No More Second-Hand Dad
What to do when the parents in your own family romance are the stalwarts of the avant-garde? That we received our lessons in artistic rebellion at twice-second-hand somewhat diminished our sense of their originality. Avant-gardism is about rupture, overthrow, the father-murderous rage of art. Classic early-twentieth-century avant-gardism wanted a radical reworking of the visual aspect of architecture and a reinvention of the process of production.
The postmodern “avant-garde”—compromised by