The Artist as Political Hero: Reflections on Modern Architectural Theory

The Artist as Political Hero: Reflections on Modern Architectural TheoryAuthor(s): David MilneSource: Political Theory, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Nov., 1980), pp. 525-545Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/190660 .

Accessed: 08/05/2014 16:26

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Political Theory.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 16:26:58 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sage

http://www.jstor.org/stable/190660?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


THE ARTIST AS POLITICAL HERO Reflections on Modern Architectural Theory

DA VID MILNE University of Prince Edward Island, Canada

L 1LTHOUGH THE REALM OF ART occupies an important place in contemporary political theory, especially prominent in literature critical of bourgeois order, it has not in itself (as an area of political theory) been taken very seriously. Indeed, this neglect has gone on, curiously enough, even while the heroes of art-Beethoven and Stravinsky, Balzac and Proust, Michelangelo and Picasso-are themselves elevated by a romantically inclined public to virtually superhuman status. Such hero-ranking has all seemed politically tangential. Yet, at least since the early nineteenth century, there has developed within the arts a distinctive body of political theory, much of it built around the highly charged figure of master artist. In its essentials, such a political theory pointed to an emerging world order to be ushered in and stabilized by a great prophetic leader. It was not difficult for a generation immersed in romantic theory to see in the master artist precisely such a political actor, and in his art, legislation for the world. So carefully, indeed, had the romantics prepared the ground for such an artistic legislator and his messianic politics that the idea, in one form or another, has penetrated much of twentieth-century art and ideology.

A study of this political theory in modern architectural thought, for example, shows both the seriousness of the architects' undertaking to reorder the world by very practical instrumentalities of architecture and city planning and the profession's unwavering fascination with the

A UTHOR'S NOTE: I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for research assistance which made this article possible. I also wish to thank Charles Taylor of Oxford University-for his helpful c omments and Frances Frazer and John Smith of the Universitjy of Prince Edward Islandfor their editorial assistance.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 8 No. 4, November 1980 525-545 ? 1980 Sage Publications, Inc.

525



526 / POLITICAL THEORY / NOVEMBER 1980

heroic. ' For, whatever one's prejudices on the current debate concerning the failure of modern architecture, it is impossible to avoid being struck by the sheer scope and grandeur of the enterprise the -makers of modern architecture" self-consciously undertook. Recent work into the historicism of the modernist movement in architecture has opened up, but not highlighted sufficiently, the high-altitude giddiness that accompanied the leaders' claim to be "makers of the age." Looking back on the statements of modern architectural pioneers, we can now see that their incessant claims about singlehandedly remaking the whole world and bringing in the millennium were literal, not figurative.2 And unless we are to write off the giants of modem architecture as outlandishly egotistical fools, this presents us with a puzzle: How to account for the fact that our finest architectural minds have harboured such patent delusions of grandeur?

The answer to that puzzle takes us, it seems to me, not so much into the realm of the future, where the would-be architectural radicals liked to think of themselves as exclusively residing, but rather into the past- indeed, into the very sentimental house of romantic and essentially Victorian preoccupations. To architectural modernists who thought they had spent their youth fighting the Victorians, such a remark would have seemed particularly outrageous. But in spite of the reverence we unfailingly accord to far-seeing, truly "original" artists (itself a Victorian legacy!), the leaders of modern architecture were no more able to escape their own past than the rest of us. Only the excitement over the new buildings, the evident signs of a new architectural epoch, prevented historians of architecture from placing the pioneers' futurist rhetoric into historical perspective. Once they did, they could not help noticing how worn and dated it all was.3 For the whole movement was essentially sustained by an amalgam of older romantic elements, the most striking of which was the grafting of Hegelian historiography onto the romantics' nostalgic cult of the poetic hero. Although this made for a heady political theory thoroughly intoxicating the leaders of modern architecture, the last thing they would have wanted us to note is its Victorian, old-fashioned ring-not only because they shared Thoreau's belief that "only what we have touched and worn is trivial-our scurf, repetition, tradition, conformity," but because it would have detracted from their own heroic standing.4 If Mies were right that "he who lives in the past cannot advance," it would certainly not do for the modernists to be caught indulging in romantic daydreams.5 Yet what is the realist to make of the modernists' inflated, even Neoplatonic, sense of themselves and of their metaphysical mission?



Milne MODERN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY 527

The answer to that puzzle, I repeat, takes us back into the central preoccupations of the Romantic Age. Gropius, Mies, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, all of these pioneers sought in their different ways to achieve through architecture that unified synthesis for which men had been yearning ever since the Enlightenment. Although the modernists liked to poke fun at alleged Victorian superficialities, they themselves made off with the whole Victorian heritage. At both points of the puzzle-namely the nature of the "mission" and its "missionary" resolu- tion-the modernists simply pinched the theory from their immediate pre- decessors. This theory suggested, on the one hand, that the world was now merely a half-way house toward a possible new age of paradisaical blessedness, and, on the other, that the artist would be a thaumaturgical agent summoning the new age into being. It was the Victorians who sensed that they lived in "an era of changefrom the past to the future," who lived 'between two worlds, one dead or dying, one struggling but powerless to be born."6 It was they, too, who bestowed such dignity on the artist as 'the original man, the Seer whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capability of all into Thought.... Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night . . . from no-being into being, from death into life."7 This was an intoxicating doctrine, especially for those who felt called upon to assume the age's heroic mantle, and the leaders of modern architecture drank deeply of it.8 Thus, when Walter Gropius took hold of these two poles by declaring that ""today we are living between two civilizations: the old one went to pieces, the new one is just in the making" and by turning to the artist as "society's seer and mentor," he was only parroting the same Victorian truths shared by all the other, so-called modernists.9 If then, we want to understand modern architectural theory rather than to expound it, to grasp its self-conscious heroics and its self-righteousness, we must look to the past. To do so necessarily imperils the revolutionary's claim to be a wholly contemporary and original "event" and for that reason is not much encouraged by those who have their eye steadfastly on the future.'0 To shirk this, however, leaves us without effective means of coming to terms with the rise of the hero and his works.

THE DA WN OF CRISIS A ND THE DESCENT OF THE HERO

Now when Gropius declared that the "old civilization went to pieces," he dramatized the backdrop of alleged confusion and chaos against




which the architectural heroics of the modernists were played out. But, a certain sense of historical discontinuity, of living on time rather than within it, was a pervasive and often disquieting sensation for the educated classes throughout the century. The causes are complex but certainly include the initial excitement and the later shock and apprehension occasioned by the French Revolution, the apparent menace of industrialization and urbanization, and the dramatic erosion of confidence in the Bible and in religious truth. All of these seemed to suggest that the old order was irretrievably passing away. Of course, this did not send everyone into morbid retreat or nostalgic reverie, but it did force even revolutionary minds to rethink and to recast their sense of themselves and of their destiny. This was especially true when much of the exuberant enthusiasm unleashed by the revolutionary events in France turned to disbelief, bitterness, and anxiety in the face of the Terror. It was true, too, when the dream of plenty stood transfigured into a nightmare of poverty and squalor, and revelation itself mocked and unceremoniously disputed. In a sense, the nineteenth century was a critical moment of truth for Western man who had, centuries before, set in motion distinctively modern ideas about man, society, and the universe, which were only now bearing their doubtful fruit. In an age of falling icons, it was not surprising that everyone made for cover, each seeking meaning in his own way, but generally huddled, revolutionary and conservative alike, under the metaphysical roofs of history or nature. "

Of course, once the people were gathered there, they sent up a call for the century's prophets, interpreters, and saviours, indeed for all those who might read from within the new framework the providential plan: Hegel and Marx consciously undertook this task, as did many would-be heroes in the arts.'2 For out of the disasters of the French Revolution, the reliance on the thoughts and acts of the far-seeing and prophetic hero became even more pronounced than in normal times. It was he, it was believed, who would again weave a unified meaning into the lives of men. And if a poet like Wordsworth could offer himself so boldly for such a task 'My spirit, thus singled out, as it might seem For holy services, [singled out in a time] of hopes o'erthrown ... of dereliction and dismay [to bring mankind tidings of comfort and joy]"), why not the more rightful master of the public realm, the architect?'3 In the following words, Le Corbusier claimed for the architect-poet of the twentieth century the same noble Wordsworthian mission:

Who is the visionary, the interpreter of the event, the prophet who moves ahead of the march of events? The poet?



Milne / MODERN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY / 529

Who is the prophet? He who, is the crisis of the times, knows how to see events, knows how to read them. He who perceives the relations, who indicates the relations, who orders relations, who proclaims relations.

The poet is he who shows the new truth.'4

This preoccupation with crisis and with the political role of poetic knowledge runs continuously through the romantic generations from the late eighteenth century to our own time. It reflects, of course, not only an extraordinary expansion in the self-esteem of the artist, but his rise to the exalted rank of the hero. This celebration of the artist begins in earnest with Goethe, Schiller, and the German romantics, is advanced in England by Byron and other leading poets, as well as by Gothic novelists, such as Sir Walter Scott, finds its way both into much of the philosophy of the period and into chronicles of medieval and ancient times.15 The artist received the full impramatur of the hero, however, only after his inclusion in Thomas Carlyle's famous Lectures on the Hero. 6 After that, the artist could be seen as one of the great men of history, "sent into the world [to be] the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain."17

Obviously, this doctrine would have established a deep hold on the mentality of the age in any case, but it enjoyed unexpected prominence after the debacle of the French Revolution. For not only did this stirring example of mass action ironically give birth to a new towering hero in Napoleon Bonaparte, but it seemed to demonstrate both the need for, and the imminence of, social change and the futility of purely external mass action to bring it about. 18 Such conclusions reinforced the romantic idea of the philosopher-seer or the poet-prophet who might lead the mass where the mass itself could not successfully go. Thus out of the abortive action of a mass political movement came a new politics built around the figure of the all-seeing hero. Here was a doctrine to which many artists and philosophers-indeed all sensitive thinkers appalled with the results of the French Revolution-could turn; scores of them did so. This reliance on the political role of the visionary hero became a wholly characteristic stance for the romantics, who pressed the idea into service to fill the vacuum left by the self-defeating politics of mass action. The impending apocalypse could then be ushered in by the redemptive imagination, an abortive "outer revolution" superceded by an "inner" act of the creative will-by a "revolutionary mode of imaginative perception, accomplishing nothing less than the "creation" of a new world."'9




This is the hidden meaning of Le Corbusier's famous slogan "Architecture or Revolution." The artist believed that he possessed a political knowledge that was the only alternative to a violent and probably fruitless revolution. Frank Lloyd Wright had this notion in mind when he offered his "aesthetic state" of Broadacres as the only alternative to death and revolution, just as Le Corbusier did when he predicted the overthrow of the ruling classes unless they adopted his Radiant City vision.20 Underneath the argument, of course, lay the conviction that only art could unite society and that only a revolutionary art which distilled the universal spirit of our age would do. All of the architectural pioneers of modernism believed in these conventional truths and they lent a very special political colouring to their thought. Ultimately, the root of such ideas goes back at least to Schiller (if not to Plato) in the assumed congruence between the aesthetic and the political and moral: 'If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice, he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom."2'

It was on such suggestive Neoplatonic links between art and politics that the nineteenth-century faith in the creative artist as a special kind of political hero was founded. In their disgust with the course of the French Revolution, many artists-such as Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley in England and Holderlin and Novalis in Germany-popularized the idea of a total societal revolution accomplished by artistic imagination. When the architectural modernists spoke of "masterbuilding" or "legislating" their vision onto the world, they had the same apocalyptic politics in mind. Of course, as the "advance guard" of a new world struggling to be born, the artists see first, before "'the politician, the economist, and even the scientist," the approaching death of the old order and can show in their works the road to the future.22 For is this not the work of the Seer and Prophet? And had not Carlyle already warned that the political hero could come in any form of his choosing, bringing knowledge of the new order that men so grievously lacked?

Hero, Prophet, Poet-many different names in different times and places, do we give to Great Men.... I will remark again.., that the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest, or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men. . . . I fancy there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator, Philosopher.23

Here lies the seed for much of twentieth-century architecture's heroic theory of the artist. The true poet, as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier,



Milne I MODERN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY / 531

and so many other architects fancied themselves, carried knowledge of a secret philosophical code embracing the reconstruction of the whole world and bore a legislative mandate to remake the age accordingly.24 The architects took seriously the romantic political theory of the artist and insisted on acting on it. Since Gropius believed the artist "the prototype of the total man" in an age falling to pieces, it was only fitting that the artist prepare for us a new "total" architecture, "embracing the entire visible environment from the simplest utensil to the complicated city."25 Similarly, since Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mendelsohn called themselves respectively "saviour," 'shepherd," and "'advance guard," it is safe to assume that they thought us in need of a defense and spiritual guidance that they felt peculiarly qualified to offer.26 Such hubris was a by-product of the artist's own inflated sense of himself. For they were heroes, even if (perhaps because) they remained unrecognized by the architectural profession for a long initial time of troubles.27 They took grim comfort from the conviction that the world would come around to their vision soon enough, since their prophetic idea was something that "all men were not far from saying, were longing to say."28 It was always this way with the hero. He occupied so privileged a relation to ontological ground that what he gives mankind is already a sacred gift from the inner universe of truth to the outward universe of experience.29 For the hero comes, to use Carlyle's words, "direct from the Inner Fact of things;-he lives, and has to live, in daily communion with that . . . [he] is portion of the primal reality of things."30

ONTOLOG Y A ND THE SEEING E YE

No one can read intelligently the heroic story of modern architectural history and theory, at least as it is presented by the pioneers themselves or by special advocates of modernism, without recognizing how far the very credibility of the hero depended on the peculiar metaphysics of nineteenth-century thinking. Just as the hero as poet was largely a romantic fixation that twentieth-century architects borrowed to suit their purposes, the special ontological setting within which the artist was said to be a hero was also taken over in a pretty wholesale manner.

One of the most intriguing of nineteenth-century intellectual habits was to make history and nature seats of the divine. As numerous writers have noted, Nietzsche most unkindly, this transposition may have been effected to rescue the Christian world view which, at least as a literal doctrine, was under increasing strain at this time. Whatever the cause,




the effect of it was to make history and nature very special realms, the "reading" of which became the special prerogative of the age's would-be heroes in philosophy, science, and art.

On the one hand, of course, the special sanctity of nature as an ontological realm had long been recognized. Indeed, when Aristotelean and medieval thought became increasingly suspect, it was nature herself who steeled the confidence of men of modern science such as Galileo because she was already assumed to be God's book, susceptible of being read by daring scientific thinkers such as himself.31 The dazzling success of this enterprise, especially in physics, confirmed the scientists' assumption of the superiority and lawfulness of nature's inner realm lying behind the illusions of mere sense experience. It gave a tremendous boost to Neoplatonism and the two-world view with which it was originally associated.32

Of course, it was precisely the estrangement of the phenomenal world from this inner realm of nature that worried the romantics so much and that set them on a course of reunification of these realms. This Neoplatonic quest is at the root of the artistic radicalism at the turn of the twentieth century and best explains, I think, the modernists' desperate search for a "universal" architecture.33 Romantic theory had already pointed toward such a reconciliation of matter and spirit into a new whole through a "higher art" that, like nature herself, would unite "freedom" and "necessity" in a "'harmony of laws."34 This was precisely the harmonious unity that the leaders of modern architecture sought either in organic or other universal formulations of architecture. For over a century, there were many writers and philosophers calling for a kind of artistic statesman who could carry out the romantic mandate to unify the age, so that there would be no more estrangement and division. According to Whitman, He would hold the "pass-key of hearts," resolving "all tongues into his own"; he would be "the joiner."35

In a short time [declared Schelling] there will no longer be any difference between the world of thought and the world of reality. There will be one world, and the peace of the golden age will make itself known for the first time in the harmonious union of all sciences.

Perhaps he will yet come who is to sing the greatest heroic poem, comprehending in spirit what was, what is, what will be, the kind of poem attributed to the seers of yore.36

This hero would bridge matter and spirit just as self consciously as does Paolo Soleri with his exotic architectural sketches. And he would




use nature as readily as did the early romantic generation as a kind of holy ground.37 We all know that Frank Lloyd Wright and the entire organic school of architecture depended on this transcendental understanding of nature, but we often fail to recognize that even a giant like Le Corbusier also saw his role in the traditional romantic manner as a heroic wresting from nature of her inner secrets and their imaginative transference into a "universal" architecture.38 Erich Mendelsohn also understood the heroic dimensions of the modern architect's task in its aim to "restore the broken balance between God-made and man-made," to build so that "man will have returned, once more, to the oneness of nature, to the secret of creation-the universal rules-from where he started."39 The romantic theory of the hero as artist depended on this Neoplatonic understanding of nature with which the hero, thanks to his "seeing eye," has "a privileged relation."40

The other ontological pole sustaining the metaphysics of twentieth- century architecture has been a Hegelian vision of history. This became an alternate refuge for nineteenth-century writers seeking to recast and shore up a Christian version of mankind's destiny.41 It was almost as though the embarrassment of revelation or the inscrutability of a purely theological God forced men to look for His reification and substantiation in the "readable" realms of nature and history. As for the latter, recent architectural writings show the effects of the modernists' Hegelian historicism on twentieth-century architecture and need not be repeated here.42

But the sense that history revealed a hidden pattern of development, each stage an essential epoch in the journey of mankind toward a glorious and predetermined end, gave rise to the need for the all-seeing hero who could discover and make manifest the meaning of history. The demand for the hero became even more acute as the feeling of epochal decline together with a struggling future zeitgeist seized the imagination of the Victorian age. Predictably enough, the artist fought for the heroic mantle with the philosopher, but since the artist was usually presumed to have superior intuitive insight, a "natural instinct for things to come," it was easy enough for the leaders of modern architectural art to see themselves as seers of the spirit of time (history) as well as space (nature).43 After all, the cry had gone up for the all-seeing heroic artist for at least a century before the giants of modern architecture appeared to answer the age's prayers.44 Declaring one and all that "we are . . . at the beginning of an epoch . . . which will be guided by a new spirit," whether extracted from hidden nature or history, the modernists felt that they could be the noble instruments of an uncompromising world spirit.45




Such are all great historical men-whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World-Spirit. They may be called Heroes, inasmuch as they have derived their purposes and their vocation . . . from the concealed fount-one which has not attained to phenomenal, present existence-from that inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surfaces, which impinging on the outer world as on a shell, bursts it in pieces.46

A revolution precipitated by the apocalyptic inner eye, the artist as grand statesman of "this great piece of architecture we call the social state," the heroic myth of the mediaeval Masterbuilder-such was the romantic legacy weaving its way through the literature of twentieth- century architecture.47 As Carlyle noted, all of it seemed to center on the magic of the discerning eye: "A Hero . . . has this first distinction, which indeed we may call first and last, the Alpha and Omega of his whole Heroism, That he looks through the show of things into things."48

No doubt Ruskin, who had inherited Carlyle's enthusiasm for the artistic hero, had a good deal to do with popularizing this ideal in modern architecture. When readers of Ruskin, such as Wright, could declare the true artists the people's 'anointed prophets and kings" and Le Corbusier unabashedly call them "les peres de la soci6te," we can see how deeply committed they were to the special political properties of artistic insight.49 Even the quasi-religious character of the modern movement had its roots in this exclusive act of seeing, as Ruskin makes clear: "The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.... To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion-all in one.... To be a Seer."50

For the organic school, this meant boring into nature's inner, Neoplatonic realm, penetrating "into the sacred mystery of the Uni- verse; what Goethe calls 'the open secret' . . . 'the Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the bottom of Appearances', as Fichte styles it."'51 Frank Lloyd Wright was ready to show his indebtedness to this Neoplatonic idea, indeed following Carlyle and his romantic forbears in likening this inner realm to music.52 "All inmost things, we may say, are melodious, naturally utter themselves in Song.... See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it."53 Although the musical metaphor does not appear in the work of Le Corbusier, even he had a deep stake in the Neoplatonism of nature, as Paul Turner's study of his early education makes clear.54 To penetrate this realm required "the seeing eye"-what Wright called "Imagination," Gropius and many others "intuition," "metaphysical powers"-through which. man "discovers the immaterial space of inward vision and inspiration. This conception of space," Gropius




noted, "demands realization in the material world."55 Whatever the differences of architecture between modernist schools, the same hero engaged in drawing out and applying truths from some inner realm appears before the reader again and again. Thus, the modernists, speaking of past ages of neglect, could with Holderlin -all say, in the end: Holy Plato, forgive us! grievously have we sinned against you."56

Although all of the modernists believed in some kind of Neopla- tonism and in the heroic artist, there was an undeniable tension among them according to the relative emphasis each brought to bear on one side or other of this mystical relation. For those who stressed the ontological realm too strenuously, especially the mighty spirit of history, the role of the personal hero himself was in danger of becoming eclipsed altogether. This was a fate only hinted at by Gropius, but often carried through to its grim, logical conclusions by Mies van der Rohe. In his insistence that the great buildings of the past were "significant to us as creations of a whole epoch rather than as works of individual architects . . . impersonal by their very nature," he buried the very identity of the hero.57 While still clinging to the artist as an unsung seer, he made him (as well as the very idea of individuality) disappear into the spirit of time in much the same manner as other champions of historicism were to do:

The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us. The decisive achievements in all fields are impersonal and their authors are for the most part unknown. They are part of the trend of our time toward anonymity.58

This was not at all an unusual danger in the nineteenth-century theory from which Mies was drawing his idea. Nor, indeed, was its opposite. In fact, for those who believe in the ontological significance both of history and hero, the danger still remained that either pole could be squeezed out drastically by the other. Marx's thought was a good example of the former danger, Carlyle's of the latter. Although the disappearance of the hero is less likely when moving from the metaphysical ground of nature, it too, like "the ground of history can be a threatening one, a ground that if overemphasized can swallow up the hero."159 But despite Mies and the dangers of the hero's absorption into either history or nature, most of the artists of modernism, including Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier (for all their other differences), belonged on Carlyle's side of the magnetic divide.

This reliance on heroism was carried into the modernists' pathetic portrait of the isolated artist, whose leadership is spurned by a materialistic and fallen people. This, too, was a romantic indulgence of ancient vintage. Indeed, much of the fondness that sensitive Victorians



536 1 POLITICAL THEORY / NOVEMBER 1980

such as Ruskin or John Stuart Mill felt for the hero was due to his presumed ability to banish crass bourgeois values and reinstitute cultivated, aristocratic, and chivalrous virtues.60 This dependence on heroics to refurbish capitalism reached fantastic proportions with Ruskin's appeal for a 'chivalry of labour."61 No sensitive reader could make his way through the wnrtings of modern architecture without noting similarly lofty denunciations of capitalist greed together with heroic posturing and endless architectural cures for society's ills.

As for the age's failure to turn to its "men of vision" for leadership, no one wrote more sorrowfully of the 'pathos of distance" between artistic seer and his people than Walter Gropius. Like the Victorians before him, he complained of a "gulf between the public and the creative artist, who is misunderstood and underestimated in his true value, as if he were an expendable luxury member of society."62 He complained too of the age's chaotic, contradictory tendencies that, with "no common basis of understanding," leave the creative artist desolate and alone.63 Only when the democratic age "bestows the highest prestige upon the artist," can his plight and that of democracy itself be redressed.64

The role of the artist will then be to find the humanized image for society's aspirations and ideals. By virtuc of his ability to give visible symbols to significant order, he may once again become society's seer and mentor ... and a custodian of its con- science.65

These were commonplace sentiments among the heroes of modern architecture. The extravagant expectations of great men and the painful distance necessarily separating them from less exalted mortals were essential parts of the romantic heritage. Indeed, an aura of pride and suffering was thought to be an appropriate manifestation of the prophetic hero, especially if he were unlucky enough to be born an artist in a capitalist sea of materialism.

These ideas gave to the work of the architectural genius, who wished to restore a sense of the ideal in such a setting a special poignancy. Though pointing to different ideals of nature and history, the famous buildings of modern architecture all announce in one way or another this high moral purpose. Set Mies van de Rohe's Farnsworth House alongside Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, for example, and, despite the obvious differences, the idealistic tone, the philosophical gravity, moral intent, and ideological seriousness of the enterprise cannot be missed. Each could be a fitting work for the high-minded artistic hero Gropius described above-each a "humanized image for society's




aspirations and ideals." There was something in each of them that spoke of our philosophical past, but neither of them was anything but a metaphorical statement belonging, so their creators hoped, to the future. This was the poetic legislation around which a new civilization would grow up, the architecture itself a 'crystallization of its inner structure." For was not architecture, according to Mies, a "real battleground of the spirit" and had not Carlyle already counselled that there was in the poetic hero something of the "Politician and the Legislator"?66

What also made the architectural leader seem a compelling political figure was the presumed link between his art and society, the congruence between architecture and political order.67 Because architecture was said to give vital and enduring expression to any political regime, the leaders of modern architecture fancied at times that architecture itself could be the principal means for bringing in the new age of spirit. This was why, in the absence of a unified modern state and consciousness, Wright, Gropius, or Le Corbusier kept offering their architectural models and social principles as "'master keys" to such a world. It was in keeping with such sentiments that Mies declared that "Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit. Architecture wrote the history of the epochs and gave them their names."68

Under these circumstances, it was exceedingly tempting for the leaders of modern architecture to denigrate the retrogressive leadership of those who had responsibility to direct the state and other institutions in modern life and to take unto themselves more and more of the authority of "'true" policymakers.69 Certainly Wright and Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller, and scores of other gifted poetic seers loved to indulge this fantasy of power and to scoff at the credentials of merely institutional leaders.70 This was a seductive doctrine even if the realities of the client-architect relation brought the architectural leaders rudely down to earth on more than one occasion. But the conviction that they were makers of the age in the wide political sense intended by Carlyle and other Romantics never entirely deserted them, even while the gulf between their architectural ideal and the inexorable face of time was dangerously widening.

THE EROSION OF MODERN A RCHITECTURA L THEOR Y AND THE FALL OF THE HERO

Nineteenth-century visions of history and nature provided shel- ter and protection for a time, but it was not long before these sacred




realms too withered, leaving the would-be heroes who had purported to discern their special "spirit" exposed and dated. This has been as much the sorry fate of ambitious philosophical enterprises, like that of Hegel, as it is of the architectural modernists. For the hero was only viable so long as the special ontological zone which he was to "read" was itself convincing. As history and nature passed through experience, the metaphysical meaning that was said to inhere in them simply failed to arise, the "divine" patterns behind the chaos of appearances or the flux of time yielding little of stable or determinate truth.7' Thus, in one way or another, the secularization of the Christian meaning of our history attempted during the romantic period has not retrieved and made good that legacy; it has, on the contrary, presented us all the more forcefully with the spectre of nihilism. This absence of a metaphysical center for ordering our experience has been recognized as the characteristic condition of the twentieth century, plaguing all those, like the artist, who would wish to speak to the human condition within some commonly accepted understanding.

The discovery of the problematical character of history and nature has, of course, pulled the floor out from underneath modern architectural theory.72 Needless to say, it has, at the same time, shattered the reputation of past metaphysical seers and made the very idea of heroic postures quite comic. In the perspective of our own time, we will not only be forced to acknowledge the obvious failure of the modernists to redefine, to reconstitute, and to make durable our age through a believable architectural imagery, but to see their romanticizing over the hero as a dubious route toward a public world founded on a stable set of meanings.

In a curious sense, the architectural leaders stated these realities themselves when they spoke of past architecture as "the deeply rooted, un-self-conscious imagery of people who shared a common code."73 While recognizing the absence of such a unified metaphysical understanding in our time, they were nonetheless so deluded by the romantics' yearning and belief in the hero that they increasingly came to see themselves, the architects, as the principal means of providing such unity.74 Thus it was architecture or revolution, salvation through the light of the artist's inner eye or defeat through arbitrary, political means.75 This was the ground on which the modernists stood, fending off the challenges of all other elites, including those institutional leaders who had traditionally been the patrons of architectural art. It was the artist who was to lead and to teach.



Milne I MODERN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY / 539

Gropius was candid enough to acknowledge this new political relation in the modern world. After recognizing the crucial role institutional leadership had played in raising up all great architecture, he declared that there are, in present circumstances, only the "authoritative rem- mants" of such leadership left. Against the achievements of past rulers who gave authority and direction to the architectural "masterbuilder," the modern world threatened to produce only doubtful work under fractured power and incompetent leadership.

All these systems [Athens, imperial Rome, renaissance Italy, Japan] have produced magnificent results in one period or another, but they no longer have roots in our modern world. Even if some authoritative remnants are still around in the form of large corporations and institutions, this cannot conceal the fact that the architect and artist of the twentieth century has to face a completely new client and patron- the average citizen or his representative whose stature, opinion, and influence are uncertain and difficult to define compared to the authoritarian lord of the past ... this citizen, as of now, is not at all in the habit of extending his vision beyond his immediate business concerns, because we have neglected to educate him for his role as cultural arbiter.76

Such has been the sorry fate of architecture and of the public realm in the liberal-democratic mass age. Under these circumstances, the leadership responsibilities vested in the architectural hero were inflated correspondingly. "The grandeur of the mission of [modern] architecture and town planning," Le Corbusier observed, was to redeem mankind, "to bring joy and not merely efficiency to the men of the machine age."77 Such work was the "decisive act of governing," where politics "resumed their true purpose, which is to lead towards the realization of a given era's destiny."78 This was fitting work for the long-awaited bard, indeed for any of Carlyle's Heroes since it presupposed an ability to see reality behind appearances-a Neoplatonic ability Le Corbusier naturally presumed to be vested exclusively in the poetic artist. Such self-serving convictions doubtless nursed Le Corbusier's heroic self, especially in the face of public disappointments and criticisms (Oust as it did the other modernists), but they were not likely to be a sound basis for ongoing architectural theory and practice. Though he and the other modernists were too close to these romantic convictions to see where they would necessarily lead them, the heroic movement in architecture was already heading toward a crash that would bring down the hero and the vanity of his work.




That the failure of modern architecture should now be so recognized seems a poignant but, nonetheless, fitting end to this story. For the hero's prophetic vision-precisely that which gives him power, stature, and conviction among men-is also by an ironical turn of justice precisely that which "blinds" him and precipitates his fall. On the one hand, accursed pride rides with the hero so that his special gift, as Gropius put it, is handicapped by "unwarranted jealousies and confu- sions".79 Modern architecture has had those in profusion. But, on the other hand, even where the architect-hero is predisposed to collabo- ration with others, the hero's epistemological conceit invariably leads him to underrate the existential world and to overrate the ideal. The flaws here consist in the hero's mistaken confidence in bridging the gap between experience and reality, in his vain reliance on the mere power of the inner realm to subdue the world, and in his insensitivity to the experiential world itself within which we must live, find meaning, and act.80 These have been the grim dangers to which Neoplatonism has always been drawn, but they are especially fatal in the public realm of architecture.

The neoplatonist forgets that even if architecture is to disclose an ontology, to declare, in the relative permanence that architecture always affords, some powerful metaphysical view of the world, it still cannot serve its public function nor endure as apublic statement for long unless it finds its roots in the "code" of the experiential world. It is most unlikely, moreover, that a metaphysical vision capable of sustaining men through time can be disclosed in an instant through any architectural metaphor. Nor is order itself, despite Carlyle and all the romantic rhetoric concerning the law-giving hero, simply a talismanic "gift" brought to a people from an outside realm. This is why architecture has never arisen simply as a metaphysical statement outside time, but rather in the heart of the experiential realm itself as testaments to institutions around and within which men live out their lives.8' The modernists, who found in the modern world no real unifying roots nor evidently any public institutions they thought worthy of celebration, could not "invent" them even though the myth of the ordering hero gave that mistaken idea some measure of credibility. In that sense, none of the architectural solutions proferred by the modernists could really save us. In the end, despite all the romantic yearning for the apocalyptic hero, he was really no substitute for a public realm conscious of itself, its history, and its architectural needs.




NOTES

1. See Norris Kelly Smith's essays in his On Art and Architecture in the Modern World: A Collection of Essays (Victoria, B.C.: American Life Foundation for the University of Victoria, B.C., 1971) and David Watkin, Morality and Architecture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).

2. Ibid., esp. his essay on the millenary folly of modern architecture. 3. Watkins' book makes this quite clear as does Smith's sensitive study on Frank

Lloyd Wright. Norris Kelly Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Study in Architectural Content (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966).

4. Thoreau, quoted in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 414.

5. Mies van der Rohe, "1924: Architecture and the Times," cited in Philip C. Johnson, Mies van der Rohe (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1947), p. 191.

6. Walter E. Houghton, Tlze Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 1, 10. The latter quotation is a slight misquoting of Mathew Arnold's 'Stanzas from the Grande Charteuse" (1855).

7. Thomes Carlyle in P. C. Parr, ed., Carlyle's Lectures on Heroes, Hero- Worship, and the Heroic in History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), p. 19-20.

8. The best evidence of the imbibement of this theory appears plainly in their own writings. One of the leading nineteenth-century writers in architecture, John Ruskin, passed a good deal of this romantic theory on to the pioneers.

9. Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture: World Perspectives (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956), p. 51; Walter Gropius, Apollo in the Democracy: 7he Cultural Obligation of the Architect (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 32.

10. It was Norris Kelly Smith who spoke of this "expectational philosophy of historicism, one of the side-effects of which is that it always deprives the present of any sufficient kind of value; for it makes all past things seem relevant only to past situations (Greek art for the Greeks, Roman art for the Romans) and the present relevant only to a future that never arrives" (Norris Kelly Smith, "Millenary Folly: The Failure of an Eschatology," in Smith, On Art and Architecture. See Watkin, MoralitYandArchitecture for another treatment of this future-dominated tunnel vision in the thought of Nicholas Pevsner. Obviously, this kind of thinking also shielded the hero himself from scrutiny, making his validity rest on the larger, eschatological question.

11. 1 will take up later these twin poles of meaning in the theory and practice of modern architecture. For those interested in exploring the theme further, see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971).

12. See Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism. Hegel was quite explicit concerning the matter, while Marx simply scoffed at Christianity's other-worldliness and then appro- priated and inverted its vision. See Nietzsche for the Christianized theory in Marxism and Hegelianism. The Old Testament prophetic tradition was, of course, an essential element in such thinking. See Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mfind, esp. ch. 12.

13. William Wordsworth, "The Prelude." Cited in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism p. 6. On architecture's special link to the public realm, see Smith in any of the works already cited. On the special role of the artist hero, probably the earliest known




formulation of the theory of the artist as divine "unifier" in a broken world of sense experience would be Plotinus in postclassical Greece. See Arnold Hauser, The Social Histor;' of Art, 4 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 1: 106.

14. Le Corbusier, News World of Space (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1948). 15. See Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, esp., ch. 12. 16. Carlyle, Lectures. 17. Ibid., cited in Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, p. 314. 18. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, pp. 330-365. 19. Ibid., p. 338. 20. See Frank Lloyd Wright, When Democracy Builds (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1945) and Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (London: Architectural Press, Percy Lund, Humphries, 1929), p. 30.

21. J.C.F. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793). Cited by Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 350.

22. Erich Mendelsohn, Three Lectures in Architecture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944), pp. 24, 21.

23. Carlyle, Lectures, p. 71. 24. It was for this reason that the modernists demanded that the architect have a

philosophy and a system of ethics. See, for example, Gropius, Scope of total Architecture, pp. 169-170.

25. Gropius, Apollo in the Democracy, pp. 7, 9. 26. Frank Lloyd Wright, A Testament (New York: Horizon, 1957), p. 24; Le

Corbusier, Aircraft (London: Studio, 1935); and Mendelsohn, Three Lectures, p. 24. 27. Much of this complaining about not being recognized early for the geniuses that

they were is a little overdone, especially by Frank Lloyd Wright. See Robert C. Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Interpretive Biography' (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). This became a familiar part of the pathos surrounding the idealization of the masters of modern architecture.

28. Carlyle, Lectures, p. 19. 29. For an interesting criticism of this Neoplatonic tyranny in Western metaphysical

thought, see Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 2 Vols. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), Vol. 1.

30. Carlyle, Lectures, p. 41. 31. Various works treat this Renaissance view of science including E. A. Burtt, 7he

Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Ph;'sical Science: A Historical and Critical Essay, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1932) and R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945). The implications of these ideas in modern architectural theory are treated in David Milne, "Social and Political Theory in Modern Architecture: A Study of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier" (Ph.D. diss. University of Toronto, 1975).

32. Ibid. 33. Needless to say, it also fired up the philosophers in their search for a universal

history with laws of development as sure and inexorable as those of nature herself. This is the basis for the Hegelian and Marxist enterprise as well as for Compte and the rise of the idea of a social science.

34. See Schiller in an early statement of this faith in Abrams, Natural Supernatural- ism, p. 212.

35. Walt Whitman, "Song of the Answerer."




36. Schelling, cited in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 224. 37. Soleri betrays his romantic mandate even in the somewhat pretentious title of his

work. Paolo Soleri, Te Bridge Between Matterand Spirit is Matter Becoming Spirit: The Arcology of Paolo Soleri (Garden City, N.Y : Anchor Books, 1973).

38. See an extended argument on this point in Milne, "Social and Political Theory.' 39. Mendelsohn, Three Lectures, pp. 47-48. 40. Walter L. Reed, Meditations on the Hero: A Studi' of the Romantic Hero in

Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 10. 41. Abrams treats this theme with magisterial power, even if he perhaps underplays

newer elements and changes in the romantic mentality. The religious roots of the thought of Hegel, Marx, and many other philosophers have been explored by many writers and need not detain us here.

42. Smith, On Art and Architecture; Watkin, MoralitY and Architecture. 43. Mendelsohn, Three Lectures. p. 25. 44. The call was sent out by virtually all of the German romantic writers and by

English poets such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. Whitman's incantation to the imminent architectural heroes who would "understand and justify" the age, swearing that "you shall be glorified in them" was altogether typical (Whitman, "Song of the Rolling Earth"). Gropius was probably referring to this tradition when he complained that not enough of the great architects were ready to work cooperatively in a "team" approach to the remaking of the age. This was running squarely against the heroic tradition as Gropius well knew, so the advice fell largely on deaf ears.

45. A. James Speyer, Mies van der Rohe (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1968), p. 9.

46. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophkr of History, Trans. J. Sibree (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857), p. 15.

47. Wright, cited in Smith, Frank IoYld Wright, p. 10. 48. Carlyle, Lectures. p. 50. 49. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Japanese Print: An Interpretation (New York: Frank

Uoyd Wright Foundation and Horizon Press, 1967), p. 66; Le Corbusier, Des canon, des munitions ... merci! des logis, S. V.P. (Boulagne-sur-Seine: Les Presses de AndreTouron et Cie, Les editions de L'Architecture D'Aujourd 'hui, 1938), p. 66.

50. Ruskin, cited in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 376. 51. Carlyle, Lectures, p. 73. 52. See this notion analyzed in Smith, Frank Llo;d Wright. The idea goes back to

Goethe and is frequently repeated by the romantics thereafter. 53. Carlyle, Lectures. pp. 75-76. 54. Paul Turner, "The Beginnings of Le Corbusier's Education, 1902-1907," Art

Bulletin, 53 (June 1971). 55. Walter Gropius, Ise Gropius, and Herbert Bayer, eds., Bauhaus 1919-1928

(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939). This selection is taken from Walter Gropius, "The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus," originally published in 1923 in Munich, p. 24.

56. Holderlin, cited in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism. p. 238. 57. Mies, cited in Philip C. Johnson, Mies van der Rohe (New York: New York

Graphic Society, 1977), p. 191. 58. Ibid., pp. 191-192. 59. Reed, Medlitations on the Hero, p. 16.




60. See Houghton, Vic torian Frame of Mind. pp. 316-324. Whitman in the following lines suggested something of the shame which would overcome the bourgeoisie in the moment of the hero's coming:

What is your money-making now? What can it do now? What is your respectability now? What are your theology, tuition, society, traditions, statute-books, now?

Walt Whitman, "Song of the Broad-Axe." 61. Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, p. 319. 62. Gropius, Apollo in the Democracy, p. 4. 63. Ibid, pp. 10-11. 64. Ibid, p. 30. 65. Ibid, p. 32. 66. Mies van der Rohe, -1950: Address to Illinois Institute of Technology," in

Johnson, Mies van der Rohe, p. 204. 67. For an earlier treatment of this theme concerning architecture and the state, see

Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright. 68. Mies van der Rohe, "1950." 69. For an early statement of this idea, note Whitman's declaration concerning the

Hero's role as superior to that of institutional leaders: "Their [America's] Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall." Walt Whitman, 'By Blue Ontario's Shore."

70. Such carping at obsolete and old-fashioned elites went on ceaselessly in one way or another. The only general exception (at least some of the time) was the great business leader, the corporation director, who won the admiration of Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus leaders, and often of Wright. This was an interesting point in itself, especially in view of their attacks on the acquisitive spirit of capitalism.

71. This was one of the fatal flaws in Hegel's world-view as Charles Taylor's recent work indicates. Charles Taylor, Hegel (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975); The breakdown in any single paradigmatic view of nature, such as motivated the modernists, is now recognized by virtually all philosophers of science. See Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding, Vol. 1. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

72. Not many architects are aware of this. Their own reactions to critical works on the failure of modern architecture, such as that of David Watkin cited earlier, indicate this fact. No one has, to my knowledge, brought home to thenr the equally improbable foundation of nature for an authoritative architecture, though that will come too when the work of contemporary philosophers of science reach and permeate the field.

73. Gropius, Apollo in the DemocracY. p. 76. 74. Of course, there was always a good deal of confusion about this matter. Often the

architectural modernists simply wished to see such a unified spirit or zeitgeist arise of its own accord, which would then simply leave them their rightful roles as "interpreters" of such a spirit. When it did not do so readily however, when the "chaos" of the modern world's "contradictory tendencies" continued, the temptation to impose such unity became irresistible. Then the problem became how to make the age live up to the architectural statement that they wished to bestow upon it. This was waging a very tenuous "revolutionary" war indeed.

75. See Smith, On Art and Architecture, for the millenary folly of modern architecture.




76. Gropius, Apollo in the Democraci, p. 49. 77. Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier Talks with Sludentsfrom the Schools of Architecture.

trans. Pierre Chase (New York: Orion, 1961), p. 34; Le Corbusier, Creation is a Patient Search. Trans. James Palmes (New York: Praeger, 1960,) p. 14.

78. Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, p. 8; Le Corbusier, The Radiant Citj. (New York: Orion, 1964, p. 67.)

79. Gropius, Apollo in the Democracy. p. 66. 80. This argument is advanced at greater length in my dissertation. 81. See Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright.

David Milne is Associate Professor at the Universiti' of Prince Edward Island. Canada. In this and other articles, he continues work first begun in his dissertation on "Social and Political Theory in Modern Architecture: A Studs' of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier."



The Artist as Political Hero: Reflections on Modern Architectural Theory

Documents

Transcript of The Artist as Political Hero: Reflections on Modern Architectural Theory