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The jargon of authenticity. Modernism and its (non)politicalposition

Hilde Heynen

Introduction

Before World War 2, modernism in architecture was clearly ingrained with leftist ideas.

Although not all modernist architects were really interested or active in the political arena, the

dominant tendency within the pre-war CIAM went quite far in advocating ideas such as

collective living or giving priority to public over private housing. After the war this situation

changed, because modernists in the West could usually not afford to be considered defending

‘communist’ ideas. In the United States the Cold War condition resulted in the emergence of a

‘high modernism’ that was associated with individualism, consumerism and corporate

industrialism. In Western Europe the establishment of the welfare state led to a slightly

different situation. Modernist architects became either active in the planning and design of

huge public programs (housing being one of them), or they concentrated on the development

of sophisticated designs for individual homes. Whereas the public housing programs rapidly

turned into purely technocratic undertakings, the shift towards individual homes was partially

justified through a discourse on authenticity (vaguely inspired by Heidegger and other

philosophers). This discourse considered the relationship between the individual and the mass

in cultural rather than political terms. It was nevertheless instrumental in a Cold War that was

fought not just on military and political grounds but also on the battlefield of the home. The

home was turned into a site that, thanks to its level of commodities and comfort, proved thesuperiority of the West’s political system that promoted individual ownership. This resulted in

an awkward position for those modernist architects who adhered to the left wing of the

political spectrum, since their leftist political ideas were no longer compatible with the

intellectual tendencies dominant in modernist architectural discourse.

The political position: Walter Benjamin and Karl Teige

The leftist position of early modernism can best be demonstrated by referring to the

interpretations developed by Walter Benjamin and Karl Teige. Walter Benjamin, influenced

by Marxist and messianic ideas, interpreted the architecture of the Modern Movement asheralding the coming of a new, classless society. Whereas the nineteenth century, according

to him, had given prominence to the cultivation of a private existence in the enclosure of

abundantly decorated interiors, the twentieth century put forward a totally different ideal of

dwelling:

"The 20th century with its porosity and transparency, its longing for light and air put an end to dwelling in the old sense of the word. (...) Art Nouveau shook

the etui existence to its foundations. By now it is deceased and dwelling is

reduced: for the living by hotel bedrooms, for the dead by crematoria." (quoted in Heynen 1999, 113)

A new architecture was flourishing, an architecture that, with its qualities of transparency andspatial interpenetration, anticipated the new society to come. Benjamin perceived the porosity

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of modern architecture as the spatial prefiguration of a future social condition. He linked

spatial interpenetration and transparency with the openness and flexibility that would be

characteristic of a new form of society:

"Giedion, Mendelsohn, Corbusier turned the abiding places of man into a transit area for every conceivable kind of energy and for electric currents and radio waves. The time that iscoming will be dominated by transparency." (quoted inHeynen 1999, 114)

According to Benjamin, the new transparency instructed individuals to adapt to new

conditions of life that have more to do with transience and instability than with permanence

and being rooted. Things would no longer be available for individual appropriation and

consumption. The sober and smooth aspect of Neue Sachlichkeit interiors rather pointed

towards collective use, anonymity and emancipation. Dwelling would no longer be recorded

in ineradicable imprints, but would be accommodated in changeable constructions and

transitory interiors with hard and smooth surfaces. Glass in important in this respect, for it

connotes for Benjamin transparency and openness:

“It is not a coincidence that glass is so hard and smooth amaterial to which nothing can be fastened. It is also cold and sober. Things that are made of glass have no 'aura'. Glass isthe enemy par excellence of secrecy. It is also the enemy of property." (quoted in Heynen 1999, 115)

Benjamin regarded glass as a material that literally expresses the transparency of the new

society that would be founded on revolutionary lines. Elsewhere he confirms that

"To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par

excellence." (quoted in Heynen 1999, 116)Benjamin implied that, because it is inimical to secrecy and property, glass should be

regarded as a material that literally expresses the transparency of the new society that would

be founded on revolutionary lines. A society of this sort, he claimed, has the political

'radioscopy' of sexuality and the family, as well as of the economic and physical conditions of

existence, as part of its programme and therefore it is completely uninterested in protecting

privacy in the home.

The transparency and openness of the New Building thus pointed for Benjamin to a

revolutionary, classless society based upon emancipation and flexibility. He interpreted the

New Building as part of the avant-garde’s attack on bourgeois culture. Just like surrealism and

constructivism, it was preparing humankind for a new life to come. The New Buildingschooled inhabitants and users to adapt to new social conditions, which prefigured the future

transparent society.

Karl Teige, the Czech poet and architectural critic, argued along similar lines in his 1932 book

The Minimum Dwelling . Teige’s position was that of a convinced Marxist as well as an

advocate of modern architecture. Having attended the 1929 CIAM congress in Frankfurt and

the 1931 one in Brussels, he was familiar with European modernism and its solutions to the

housing problem. He refused, however, to deal with housing as just a matter of adequate

architectural models or planning regulations. According to him, the housing problem was

deeply rooted in the basic structures of the capitalist system itself, and only a political

revolution could therefore offer a real solution. As far as he was concerned, all the efforts of

modern architects to develop new ideas and plans could only come to fruition in a new social

system based upon the collective possession of the production apparatus.

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He nevertheless underlined how modern architecture’s new types contributed to the

progressive development of dwelling patterns. Teige differentiated between four historical

stages of dwelling. In the primitive dwelling everything is contained within a single universal

dwelling space of undifferentiated functions. The second stage is a negation of this primitive

dwelling. This second stage refers to the most developed bourgeois model of dwelling in

which all the functions – economic, social and biological ones – have been differentiated anddelegated to a specific room. The third stage, the ‘proletarian abode’ or the dwelling of the

classes of the subsistence minimum, is the negation of this first negation, containing only the

bare minimum of a sleeping place. The fourth and final stage foresees a ‘collectivist

reconstruction of dwelling’ in which all the functions are centralized and collectivized, except

for the individual live-in cells. This is the path that, according to Teige, modern architecture is

prefiguring, as exemplified in works of Ernst May, Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray or Mosei

Ginsburg (Dom Kommuna).

Like Walter Benjamin, Teige read architectural space as evidence of social conditions. He

quoted at length the analyses by Marx and Engels arguing that the structure of the bourgeois

family was based upon the overt and hidden slavery of women. Women were obliged to takeup the burden of domestic work, which prevented them from taking part in public production.

Teige extended this analysis to the bourgeois dwelling:

“Not unlike the bourgeois family, the layout of the bourgeois dwelling is

equally based on the enslavement of women (as an expression of that type of

family). Today’s woman does not realize how oppressed she has become by

this form of dwelling. Today’s family homes, whether villas or rental

apartments, enslave the woman-housewife in equal measure with their

uneconomical housekeeping routines. Private life in today’s dwellings is

obliged to closely conform to the dictates of bourgeois marriage.” (Teige

2002, 170)

Because of this, Teige advocated that the new minimum dwelling for the working classes

should be conceived of in a radically different way. Given the fact that proletarian families

did not really have a family life anyhow – because the reality of production conditions forced

them to devote too much time to commuting and working hours, so that the only time they

spent at home was for sleeping – he argued that this situation should be taken as an

opportunity to develop a new way of collective living. The minimum dwelling should thus

contain for each adult a live-in cell with a bedroom annex sitting room, but without a kitchen

or further facilities. All these facilities should be made available as collective services, the

pattern of family life would thus be broken up and each individual, man as well as woman,

could free him- or herself from this burden in order to fully exploit his or her potential for participation in public life. (Figure 1) His book explored several experimental schemes that

work with such a new conception of dwelling, dealing with a lot of specific examples ranging

from American ‘hotel skyscrapers’ over German and Swiss homes for single adults to dom-

kommunas in Sovjet Russia.

Even if Benjamin’s and Teige’s interpretations were more radical than those of the majority

of modernist architects, they nevertheless adequately formulated the ideological connotations

that were widely spread in the twenties. Modernist architecture was perceived by many – its

advocates as well as its critics – as embodying aspirations for a more egalitarian, just and

emancipated society, where collectivity and anonymity would be more important than

individualism and privacy. With its concern for the Existenzminimum and rational urban lay-

outs, CIAM was pursuing a course that considered social issues such as mass housing of theutmost importance. This clear alliance between architectural and political ideals, however,

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would not be maintained indefinitely. It already shifted in the thirties and early forties, to give

way to a completely different constellation in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The changing outlook after World War 2

The cultural climate during the Cold War period was severely affected by the political

situation. Recent studies stress again and again how the Cold War was not just a matter of

military and political campaigns, but was also conducted on the cultural front. The most

obvious evidence for this intertwining of cultural and political forces can be found in the

history of the ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’, a CIA-sponsored organization that financed

operas, orchestras, painters and other intellectuals to promote American culture abroad.

(Saunders 2000) But also outside this most blatant form of political exploitation, there were

many links between cultural production and political propaganda.1 Edward Steichen’s

acclaimed exhibition The Family of Man was a case in point. It consisted of 503 pictures, the

work of 273 photographers covering 68 nations, and was first presented as an installation in

the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1955. (Figure 2) Its aim was to clarify theuniversality of the condition of humankind, by depicting moving images of individuals and

families across the globe, engaged in everyday acts which show their warmth, vulnerability

and intimate connections. As Eric Sandeen points out, this exhibition became – unwittingly

perhaps – an instrument in the hands of American foreign policy:

“As Steichen’s work moved abroad, it became part of the projection of

American foreign policy goals. Wherever the national presence needed to be

felt, the exhibition could be counted upon to reassure that American values

were local values. (…) According to Allen Sekula, a critic of The Family of

Man , the exhibition entered willingly into the cultural warfare against the

Russians.”2

Another example of the entanglement of economic, political and cultural concerns can be

found in the Hilton hotels built in Europe, Africa and the Near East. As Anabel Wharton

points out, the construction of the Hilton International Hotels in a modern ‘American’ idiom

did serve political and ideological purposes:

“That Hilton International hotels were political is not my hypothesis, but

Conrad Hilton’s claim. Hilton explicitly represented his international hotels as

ideological, in the popular sense of ideology as propaganda. He repeatedly

reported that Hilton International hotels were constructed not only to produce

a profit, but also to make a political statement on the host countries. In hisautobiography he wrote: ‘Let me say right here, that we operate hotels abroad

for the same reason we operate them in this country – to make money for our

stockholders. … However, we feel that if we really believe in what we are all

saying about liberty, about Communism, about happiness, that we, as a nation,

1 Serge Guilbault for example examined the relationship between Cold War policies and abstract expressionism

in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War (1983).

Nora Sayre and Peter Biskind are among those who analysed Hollywood’s role in the Cold War. George Lipsitz

looked at social patterns in Class and Culture in Cold War America (1982). See Robert Griffith’s essay on “The

Cultural Turn in Cold War Studies” (http://american.edu/bgriff/rghome/TheCulturalTurn.htm - consulted 7 May

2004).

2 Eric J. Sandeen, “The Family of Man on the Road to Moscow”, in Lori Lyn Bogle (ed.), The Cold War. Volume5: Cold War Culture and Society, Routledge, London, 2001, pp. 57-72, quotation p. 62-63.

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must exercise our great strength and power for good against evil. If we really

believe this, it is up to each of us, our organizations and our industries, to

contribute to this objective with all the resources at our command.’” (Wharton

2001, 8)

The modernism of Conrad Hilton’s hotels was indeed a far cry from that defended byBenjamin and Teige. It shared with pre-war modernism the preference for sober, repetitive

and non-ornamental forms, and for transparency. (Figure 3) The meanings that were attached

to these forms however differed dramatically from those pursued by the early modernists. In

the case of the Hilton hotels, modernism was moulded into an architectural style that

conveyed ideas of comfort, luxury and monumentality. The hotels were positioned in their

foreign locations as icons of American culture, where the luxuries of air conditioning and

swimming pools could be enjoyed by those who could pay for them. By towering over their

surroundings, they related to their environment only by way of spectacular views that

guaranteed distance, isolation and superiority. For the local elite, who often invested in them,

they functioned as islands of an affluent, postcolonial Western economy that harboured the

promise of a peaceful world brought about by universal capitalism – regardless of the socialinequalities and injustice that went along with it. American high modernism was thus forged

into an anticommunist mode that was ideologically quite opposite to that of European early

modernism.

The transformation of modernism was also visible in the trajectory followed by CIAM. A

juxtaposition of the topics of the pre-war and post-war CIAM conferences is telling. Whereas

the pre-war CIAMs focused on The Minimum Dwelling (Frankfurt 1929), Rational Lot

Development (Brussels 1931) or The Functional City (Patris 1933), postwar meetings rather

discussed a Synthesis of the Arts (Bergamo 1949), The Heart of the City (Hoddesdon 1951) or

The Charter of Habitat (Aix-en-Provence 1953). Post-war CIAMs thus turned away from

purely functional and technical concerns regarding mass housing and urban planning, tohighlight more general and cultural themes related to issues of creativity, poetics and human

well-being. This transformation was not completely unrelated to the political situation of the

times.

Immediately after the war, Europe and the world had been divided into two spheres of

influence, a Western one and a communist one. The impact of this division was visible on

several fronts, including the cultural one. The official discourse of most countries in Eastern

Europe thus became very critical of modernism in architecture. They mistrusted the Bauhaus

legacy, declaring that it stood for an architecture which was formalist and imperialist. Anders

Aman starts his book Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era with

two telling quotations:

“Two camps are today realizing their contradictory world pictures and

ideologies. On the one hand, the camp of democracy, socialism, and peace –

with the Soviet Union as its main bastion – and on the other the camp of

imperialism, economic crisis, and warmongering. The contest between these

ideologies is also being waged in architecture.” (From a resolution adopted

by the National Congress of Polish Architects, 20-21 June 1949)

“We are against the Bauhaus. Why? We are against the Bauhaus because

Functionalism is the height of imperialist cosmopolitanism, the height of

decadence and decay.” (Kurt Liebknecht at a cultural conference of the

German-Soviet Friendship Union, 2-4 November 1951)

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This rift is also visible within CIAM. Giedion documented for example an exchange between

the Polish Helena Syrkus and the Italian Richard Rogers in the 1949 Bergamo meeting.

Syrkus pleaded for an art that would respond to the needs of the people, and to that end one

should have greater respect for the past and defend one’s national culture. Rogers on the other

hand stressed the need for quality of art, and thought that people must be given the means to

come near to art rather than that art would have to diminish itself in order to come near to the people. Thus respect for the past did not mean repetition of the past to him, but rather keeping

its spirit alive. (Giedion 1958, 86-88) Between the lines of this exchange one can clearly

discern how Syrkus’s argumentation was close to the doctrine of socialist realism, whereas

Rogers values authenticity and timeliness, cultural values that were becoming more and more

dominant in aesthetic discourses in the West.

In turning away from technical and quantifiable matters, CIAM thus shifted its focus towards

themes that were more in line with what the West considered to be non-political concerns. If

CIAM’s pre-war discourse bore socialist overtones, and could easily be read as an appeal to

authorities to directly engage in mass housing and urban planning, its post-war debates

centered more on aesthetic and cultural issues, staying away from concerns which could bedeemed directly political. This shift was already announced in the thirties, when the most

radical left-wing architects such as Hannes Meyer, Hans Schmidt or Ernst May were loosing

influence and Le Corbusier gradually gained the upperhand. (Ciucci 1981) The Cold War

climate only reinforced this evolution, with the formerly radical architects silenced or

compromised, Gropius settling in his American situation, and a younger generation coming to

the fore whose political outlook was basically shaped by the values of capitalism. (Moholy-

Nagy 1965)

The change in tone can be observed in Giedion’s work too. Whereas his pre-war books had

constructed an image of the Modern Movement which stressed it’s progressive and liberating

ideals, his later works praise other values. His 1928 Bauen in Frankreich, Eisen, Eisenbeton

for instance hailed Durchdringung – interpenetration – as the basic concept of the newarchitecture. The term refers to certain spatial configurations, but also evokes all kinds of

metaphorical meanings. (Figure 4) It stands for a disabling of hierarchical models and for a

weakening of borders, on all levels - social as well as architectural. In this manner a mutual

relation is created between the new concept of space and a social reality. The new architecture

thus was deliberately presented by Giedion as being closely bound up with social

developments or even as anticipating them, the metaphorical use of the term Durchdringung contorting social mobility, emancipation and liberation.

In comparing his later (and more famous) Space, Time and Architecture (1941) to the earlier

book, it is clear that his outlook changed rather fundamentally. Whereas in the first book the

new architecture was bound up with processes of social emancipation, in Space, Time and Architecture this connotation was no longer crucial. The social implications that were inherent

in Durchdringung were not transferred to the concept of space-time. Social and political

connotations had been purged along with all references to social experiments and to the

revolutionising aims of the new architecture. The shift became even more outspoken in the

1958 booklet Architecture You and Me, which records his post-war intellectual development

by tracing his contributions to the CIAM debate. His main themes now had to do with

aesthetic values, with the gap between creative art and the ruling taste, with the demand for

imagination, with organically growing art. He closely followed the fascinations of the time,

such as the interest in organic and primeval forms or the new regionalism evident in the work

of Frank Lloyd Wright or Kenzo Tange. (Figure 5)

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Giedion’s concerns at that time were shared with a lot of other important voices in the

architectural discourse. In 1950 for instance Bruno Zevi published Towards an organicarchitecture, which states that organic architecture is planned for human happiness, not just in

material terms, but also in psychological and spiritual terms. In 1954 Martin Heidegger’s

remarkable essay on ‘Building, dwelling, thinking’ came out, which qualified ‘genuine

building’ as something that cannot be objectified or discussed in technical terms, but rather had to do with a truthful, authentic relation of builder and inhabitant to the whole of reality,

described as ‘the fourfold’ (heaven, earth, divinities, mortals). Heidegger initiated what

Adorno critically called The Jargon of Authenticity: an idiom of speech that was full of

references to thorough sounding concepts such as ‘the deeply human’ or ‘the genuine’, but

that – according to Adorno at least – failed to address in any serious way conditions of social

injustice and oppression.

It seems indeed as if in this period the big theme of architectural modernism ceased to be its

social calling. The central focus now rather became the battle against the ruling taste, against

kitsch. This is also discernible in the more provincial discourses that were conducted for

example in Belgium. A critic like Albert Bontridder claimed in 1963 that “The courage of thecreative capacity has become, in the domain of architecture, a crucial factor to escape from

stagnation and to answer the needs of the immediate tomorrow.” (Bontridder 1963, 6) Around

the same time, Geert Bekaert also advocated the idea of authenticity: “We must assume (…)

the real beauty of life with its radical demand of authenticity and humanity.” (Bekaert 1985,

353) Whereas the pre-war generation of modernists had been convinced that the only

resistance against their ideas came from a lack of knowledge and of openness, the post-war

generation was confronted with the puzzling fact that resistance remained wide-spread and

that the popular taste ran against their notions of sobriety and purity. They thus came to see

the ‘ruling taste’ (Giedion’s term) as the main thing to overcome in their battle for

modernism.

The search for authenticity ran parallel to a shift in what was seen as the most importantcommission for modern architects. If many in the pre-war period had agreed that social

housing was the most crucial task architects faced, its importance now diminished in favour of

a focus on individual houses and public buildings. As Joan Ockman has observed:

“If the great symbolic client of modern architecture had been the proletariat,

heroic protagonist of an idealistic socialism, that of the period after [the war]

was the middle class. (…) Focus shifted from production to consumption,

marketing and ‘planned obsolescence’; from ‘revolutionary producers’ to a

new class of consumers happy to leave behind the asperities of

Existenzminimum, desirous of an ever higher standard of living and the

leisure to enjoy it.”(Ockman 1993, 16)

Thus the realm of the individual home became of primary importance, in America as well as

in Western Europe. And here, again, the effects of the Cold War were not negligible.

3. Domesticity as battle ground

According to Elaine Tyler May the celebration of home and family in the US in the

immediate post-war period was greatly inspired by the Cold War. She sees a parallelism

between the political doctrine of containment, which supposedly would put a limit to the

impact of the Soviet Union, and the inward turn towards domestic values that characterisedthis era:

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“Containment was the key to security. (…) The power of the Soviet Union

would not endanger national security if it could be contained within a clearly-

defined sphere of influence. But the term also describes the response to other

postwar developments. The terrifying destructive potential of the atomic bomb

would not be a threat if it could be contained, first in the hands of the United

States and later through peaceful applications. (…) In the domestic version of

containment, the ‘sphere of influence’ was the home. Within its walls,

potentially dangerous social forces of the new age might be tamed, where they

could contribute to the secure and fulfilling life to which postwar women and

men aspired.” (May 1988, 13)

This parallelism was also played out in the famous 1959 kitchen debate between Richard

Nixon, then vice-president of the US, and Nikita Khrushchev, premier of the Soviet Union.

(Figure 6) The debate took place when Nixon visited the American National Exhibit in

Moscow, which featured – alongside several other things (among them Steichen’s Family of

Man) – a replica of an American kitchen. In front of this unlikely décor Nixon and

Khrushchev argued about the relative merits of the socialist versus the capitalist model of

society. For Nixon, the model kitchen full of appliances represented the quintessence of the

American life-style, based upon a clear division of gender roles – male breadwinner, female

homemaker- and a wide choice of consumer goods. He argued that the superiority of the

American model was evident from the fact that Americans could enjoy such a comfortable

home with such an abundance of commodities:

“There are 44 million families in the United States. Twenty-five million of

(them) live in houses or apartments that have as much or more floor space

than the one you see in the exhibit. Thirty-one million families own their own

homes and the land on which they are built. America’s 44 million families own

a total of 56 million cars, 50 million television sets and 143 million radio sets.

And they buy an average of nine dresses and suits and 14 pairs of shoes per

family and per year.” (quoted in May 1988, 163)

By 1959 the suburban model had conquered America. When the men who had fought the

Second World War in Europe and in the Pacific came home, the women joyfully left their

office jobs and their factories to make room for the men, and both succumbed to the domestic

ideal of the suburban house on the small plot somewhere outside the city. All over America

suburbia was being constructed on a massive scale, Levittown being only the best known of

many of such immensely popular residential areas. (Figure 7) The suburban house was such a

huge success because it embodied a series of values that were highly appreciated in this

period: individual ownership, a well contained family which would secure warmth, love and

protection, the possibility to indulge in an affluent lifestyle made affordable by the national

economic prosperity (which in its turn was propelled by the massive demand for consumer

goods such as washing machines and television sets), and the prospect of living in an

harmonious neighbourhood among like-minded people - without that is the racial and social

tensions thought typical of the inner cities.

The suburban model was exported to Europe too. Thanks to the Marshall plan economic

reconstruction happened fairly rapidly in those countries that accepted American help. As part

of the economic boost housing construction took off on a major pace. This housing

construction happened in mainly two different modes: public housing and private initiative. In

most countries of Western Europe the public housing programs were rather extensive, being part of the establishment of the welfare state. Such was the case e.g. in the Netherlands,

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France or the United Kingdom. Another huge part of the new housing stock was being built

by private initiative, to cater for a market that increasingly opted for the suburban model

already popular in the States. In Belgium, always an inbetween country, both modes were

being stimulated – public housing by the law Brunfaut (1949) and private initiative by the law

De Taye (1948). The law Brunfaut was pushed through by the socialist party, which was in

favour of public initiative, whereas the law De Taeye was promoted by the catholic party.

Especially the law De Taye has had a major influence on the Belgian residential pattern. It

encouraged small scale private initiative by offering subsidies to private builders, and setting

up a mortgage system that allowed builders to borrow up to 90% of the value of their

property. The effects of this law reached about 100 000 beneficiaries during the first 5 years,

which meant 20 000 new dwellings annually built according to this system or about 75% of

all new homes. Very specific for the Belgian system is that most of these dwellings were built

not as part of a bigger scheme, but as a one-time enterprise initiated by the owner/inhabitant

who hired an architect to design the house and a contractor to build it. The design of

individual homes thus became the major occupation for Belgian architects.

The law De Taye was very much in tune with the values of private ownership and privateinitiative that were being heralded in the Cold War climate as distinguishing the Western

model from the communist one. The catholic politician De Taeye argued that this law would

allow the workers to make their dreams come true:

“One’s own yard is first and foremost the realization of a dream held dear by

any worker, it is a form of small property. De small owner feels responsible

for the continuation of his property that is part of the national patrimony. At

the same time he feels more security, more independency, more self-reliance.

Responsibility and self-reliance are at the basis of the development of the

human person, which is our highest goal. In more practical terms

responsibility and self-reliance are also crucial for private initiative and for

the urge to save (…).” (quoted in Strauven 1983, 60)

The law for sure had a major impact and has allowed for a situation in which in Belgium, by

now, about 70% of the people inhabit a house they own. It also was responsible for the

enormous suburban sprawl that now characterises the landscape – especially in the Northern

part of the country. This sprawl mostly consists of houses built according to popular taste

which favours pitched roofs and a ‘rural’ outlook. (Figure 8) Among the tens of thousands of

individuals homes thus built, however, there has always been a marginal amount designed by

creative architects who came up with really remarkable products. This was a field in which

modernist architects could and did excel, and in which they could pursue their longing for

‘authenticity’.

The life and work of Renaat Braem (1910-2001) is teemed with the contradictions and

paradoxes that arose from this situation. A communist from his youth onwards, he was

educated as an architect at the Academy in Antwerp, where he combined a rather traditional

education with a lively interest for avant-garde experiments going on around him. His early

designs already convey his fascination with constructivism and the work of Le Corbusier,

with whom he landed an internship in 1935-1937. His writings of that time suggest that he

belonged to the politically radical fraction of modernist architects, pleading for a total

architecture, the result of an integration between all the arts, which would respond to the ideal

of a socialist society and a new culture of tomorrow. Architecture, according to him, should

visualize the possibilities of such a different society, bringing its inhabitants into liberated andopen relationships with one another. (Strauven 1983, 32)

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With this background, it is not surprising that Braem was among the best Belgian architects

working in the public housing sector. His postwar social housing complexes are among the

best that was produced in Belgium at the time. The Kiel estate in Antwerp (1949-1950) and

the model quarter at the Heysel, Brussels (1957-1963) (Figure 9) are justly renowned for their

innovative lay-outs and dwelling types. Although they have been criticized a lot in the

contemporary conservative media as well as by post-modernist critics of the late seventies andeighties, they nevertheless remain standing among the most interesting experiments in social

housing conducted in Belgium. According to Braem’s biographer Francis Strauven (who

clearly prefers the Antwerp project to the Brussels one), both these projects were

manifestations of Braem’s utopianism combined with a certain pragmatism and an urge to

adapt the CIAM models to specifically local circumstances. Both were also manifestations of

his belief that through architecture, inhabitants could be educated to tune in with socialism

and to leave behind their old-fashioned life-styles and religious beliefs. If the latter belief soon

proved to be untrue, Braem was too occupied with his public and private commissions to

seriously think through the possible implications of this state of affairs for his political and

architectural convictions.

Just like other Belgian architects, Braem took on mostly private assignments, building a

multitude of individual, one-family dwellings. His first such commission was for his own

home, built in 1935. (Figure 10) This is a modest, semi-detached dwelling with a garage, a

studio for the office and a private garden. The house was designed as a constellation of

prismatic volumes, with large glass surfaces opening to the garden and clearly influenced by

the De Stijl aesthetics of Rietveld and Van Doesburg. It was austere, sober and functional,

with a rational kitchen and living rooms that were adequate for a family of two (Braem and

his wife did not have children). There was a light and airy dining room and a somewhat

darker, more intimate area for sitting around the hearth – this corner sensually appealing

through its different textures (brick chimney, heavy textiles, a soft floor) and decorative

objects (like Mexican figures and shells). In this sensitive approach the search for authenticityis already recognizable – doing away with all kinds of representative and kitschy elements in

the home, replacing them with ‘honest’ materials and references that directly appeal to the

senses.

In the postwar period Braem designed such one-family houses in an increasingly naturalist

and organicist formal language. Even though he never changed his political outlook, he

considered the private dwelling “a shell for one family, the dwelling type that was, is and

remains the most important problem for the art of building” (a statement dated 1954 – quoted

by Strauven 1983, 32). Thus he was in a sense an enthusiast contributor to the making of the

urban sprawl that covered Belgium, although he condemned the results of the Belgian laissez-

faire politics on political and aesthetic grounds. This condemnation was most clearly stated in

his 1968 booklet Het lelijkste land ter wereld (The ugliest country in the world). His criticism

was clearly permeated by the jargon of authenticity:

“The tiny front yards of the De Taeye dwellings do not deliver space, nor

nature, but a minimum version of pseudo-nature. The little houses themselves,

regimented according to street plans drawn without any imagination or to the

whim of land speculators, are usually built according to plans to which an

architect contributed nothing but his signature. They offer nothing but pseudo-

living space, a sheltered and enclosed place, but no space for dwelling.

Everything about them is false. The façade has nothing to do with the plan.

(…)The façade is meant to give a semblance of affluence through fake stonelintels and ornaments. (…)Front yard lined with a gravel path which covers

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almost the entire space. In the remaining four square meters four tulips and

one geranium, a picket fence of crumbling masonry with a small iron gate,

which is beyond switching and therefore left permanently open. Exaggerated?

Look around you. 99% of what was built after liberation looks like this. We

were liberated from barbarity, but occupied by ugliness.” (Braem 1968, 45-

46)

He advocated an architecture that would account for what he called the ‘sacred’ character of

dwelling, an architecture that would dignify the home as a place where life is sanctified,

where it is lived in a conscious way. In that way the proper basic values of building and

dwelling could be respected instead of destroyed by a cacophony of forms. Remarkably,

though, he aligned his call for authenticity and ‘sacredness’ with illustrations that depicted

linear cities and huge megastructures containing a multitude of anonymous living units.

(Figure 11) Braem’s discourse thus constituted a remarkable mixture of the modernist plea for

honesty and genuineness with a politically motivated appeal for the collectivization of the

land. In this argument the idea of ‘authenticity’ seamlessly merged with an anti-capitalist

policy, which was rather exceptional among the post-war modernists. Not only was itexceptional, it also seemed somewhat inconsistent. For in those cases where he had most

opportunity to design in a way that would account for the authenticity of dwelling – in the

private dwellings that is – his formal language markedly differs from the one he applied in his

big schemes for social housing or in his utopian drawings of future linear cities. His

architecture thus seemed to imply that the authenticity strived for would vary in accordance

with the social status of the clients – which admittedly is an odd conviction for a communist.

The contradictions prevalent in the life and work of Renaat Braem are a clear indication of the

double bind in which modern architecture found itself in the postwar period in the West. On

the one hand its protagonists continued to fight an ideological battle defending modern

architecture’s superior qualities against a popular taste that increasingly favored other styles.To avoid an alignment with the politically ‘bad’ guys of communism, however, their

arguments turned cultural, stressing more and more the issue of authenticity and less and less

the social concerns that had been primordial in the pre-war period. On the other hand it was

only after the war, in the reconstruction period, that modernist architects got the opportunity

to build on a large scale the major housing schemes central to their pre-war agenda. The

economical and material constraints applicable in those cases, however, usually prohibited the

architects of demonstrating in any convincing way the ‘authenticity’ that supposedly was the

hallmark of modern architecture. In a general sense, they thus failed to reach the goals they

formulated for themselves, both in their private dwellings, which were never capable of

appealing to a large public, and in their public housing, which turned technocratic and

unidimensional to the point of utter tristesse.

References

Adorno, Theodor W., The Jargon of Authenticity, Northwestern University Press, Evanston,

1973

Aman, Anders, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era. An Aspect

of Cold War History, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1992

Bekaert, Geert, Verzamelde Opstellen. 1. Stapstenen 1950-1965, Gent, 1985Bontridder, Albert, Dialoog tussen licht en stilte, Helios, Antwerpen, 1963

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Braem, Renaat, Het lelijkste land ter wereld, Davidsfond, Leuven, 1968

Ciucci, Giorgio, "The Invention of the Modern Movement", Oppositions, N° 24, 1981, pp. 69-

91

Giedion, Sigfried, Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton, Klinkhardt &

Biermann, Leipzig, 1928; translated by J. Duncan Berry, with an introduction by SokratisGeorgiadis, Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in FerroconcreteThe Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica (Cal.), 1995

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Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1980

Giedion, Sigfried, Architecture You and Me. The Diary of a Development, Oxford University

Press, London, 1958

Heidegger, Martin, “Building Dwelling Thinking”, in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language,

Thought, Harper & Row, New York, 1975

Heynen, Hilde, Architecture and Modernity. A Critique, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1999May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound. American Families in the Cold War Era, BasicBooks,

s.l., 1988

Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl, “The Diaspora”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol.

24, N° 1, 1965, pp. 24-25

Ockman, Joan, Architecture Culture 1943-1968, Rizzoli, New York, 1993

Saunders, Frances Stonor, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and

Letters, The New Press, New York, 2000

Strauven, Francis, Renaat Braem. Architect, AAM, Brussels, 1983

Teige, Karel, The Minimum Dwelling , translated and introduced by Eric Dluhosch, MIT

Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 2002

Wharton, Annabel Jane, Building the Cold War. Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001

Zevi, Bruno, Towards an Organic Architecture, Faber and Faber, London, 1950

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