___ ||||||. That’s modern architecture.
(((((( )))))). That’s contemporary architecture.
:-), :-(, :-|. That’s historical architecture here in Prague.
Okay I know it’s much more complicated than that.
Modern architecture, meaning the movement that ran from the 1920s to roughly the 1970s (although there are still practitioners of it today), was not about planes and lines, or not only. (Actually, in Mies van der Rohe’s school at the Illinois Institute, they did spend an entire year, if memory serves, drawing just straight lines. Which I’m not criticizing! I know more now about how modern architecture developed because in 1999-2020, I contributed heavily to a book about modernist architect, David Hovey Sr. It is supposed to be out soon.)
I understand that modern architecture, and modernism, was and is an intent to embrace the new, particularly in technology, and to get rid of the unnecessary, the frivolous, and the redundant.
Thus you have buildings like Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, which he famously described as “almost nothing.” When finished in 1956, it startled with its huge sheets of glass and bare girders. It was a technological achievement building a span that wide with no interior supports. And of course it had no ornament! No doo dads.
I’m not arguing that something wasn’t achieved. The clean lines of Crown Hall are beautiful, as are those of Mies’e Seagram’s building on Park Avenue and 52nd street in New York City. And there is something ridiculous about a skyscraper having gargoyles, even on ones as famous as the Woolworth or Singer buildings, built in downtown Manhattan in the early 20th century. Though to contradict myself, I love the chrome gargoyles on the Chrysler building uptown.
Contemporary architecture, stuff built roughly in the last generation, is something different. Architects like Frank Gehry took the next step and said the building itself can be a gigantic piece of ornament, and can even be frivolous in feeling and appearance. Form can follow Feeling. Because of computers and other development, architects could actually draw or mold something in free form, and see it built that way. That was impossible before the right software was pilfered from the defense contractors. (That’s another whole story.)
I particularly love Gehry’s work. His whimsical Disney hall in Los Angeles is well, whimsical. I also understand Gehry’s work more deeply, having interviewed him and visited a building of his under construction for a New York Times Magazine story in 2001. (A story that is no longer available online, because, I was told it’s been, removed until the Times works out a legal dispute with whoever represents freelancers over copyrights. Right now, it’s as if it didn’t exist.)
Of course there have been other form of architecture in the last century, but most, with the exception to some extent of post-modernism, eschewed any direct ornament.
Prague where I am now is filled with ornate buildings, most of them built between 1400 and 1930. And seeing them daily, it’s really hitting me how much we lost when we gave all that up. In particular we lost big when we gave up the human figure, whether it be a head or an entire body. Walking around this city on the banks of the Vltava river, I am surrounded by smiles, frowns, and muscular and bosomed torsos at various levels.
Stepping back to consider urban design (as opposed to architecture), let me say that Prague has the greatest collection of Parisian-style apartment buildings I have ever seen. I think Prague has more Parisian-style apartment buildings than Paris. In Prague, where they were built a generation or two later than Haussmann’s in Paris, they are everywhere. And as on the Right Bank of Paris, they are all the same height, which gives a city a great feeling. Height limits may be a whole separate newsletter.
So just to clarify: Prague has its medieval and renaissance areas. And then it has block after block of these Parisian-style apartment buildings, that were mostly built in the late 19th and early 20th century. The city was clearly imitating Paris, not uncommon then. It did a good job. I would like to understand better what explosion of economic or imperial activity created this explosion of nice buildings. Clearly it somehow fits into the Austrian-Hungarian empire, which Prague was a part of until World War I ended.
But getting back to exteriors.
To decorate: It’s strikes me that this is just a basic human impulse, and we give up a lot when we ask that an object itself, whether a cup or a building, be both functional and decorative. Why not have color, texture, lines or even faces?
Another thing that was lost when we gave up human figures on buildings is the human element, the work of the people who actually made them. I’m still learning, but my understanding is that workmen carved many of the figures I am admiring by hand. Like this figure here, which is over a doorway around the corner from our apartment. I can’t say for sure this was carved by hand (as opposed to a mold), but it appears to have been so to me. It’s just so expressive.
I am helped in this line of thought by a neat novel I read shortly before moving to Prague, The Gargoyle Hunters (Knopf 2017), by John Freeman Gill. In his day job Gill writes the Streetscapes column for The New York Times. So he knows his NYC architectural history. He paints a picture of the anonymous craftsmen who carved out the various figures that still decorate the older buildings in New York, those that survived. These men (and they were surely all men) didn’t consider themselves artists. They were craftsmen, practicing a skilled trade. We lost a lot when we lost them.
Here’s another doorway. This certainly appears to have been carved right out of the rock. Can you imagine entering this every day?
The modernists like Walter Gropius rejected all this. Gropius, who led Harvard’s architecture school in the 1930s and after World War II, reportedly didn’t even want his students to learn about historical architectural styles. He felt they might get contaminated. And like children working to reject the worlds of their parents, Gropius and others (I feel) pushed a kind sneering at the Beaux-Art design that is all over Prague. I sense the modernists encouraged viewers to regard figures on buildings as pretentious, trivial, stuffy and silly. Or all about communicating status, which really any nice architecture does.
But here’s one thing they are: expressive. You can say so much with a face or a body. This can just be an emotion, or can be some sort of story. Here’s one of my favorites so far. It’s a Greek or Roman warrior standing on a dragon raising his dagger, all quite a few floors up on the corner of a fancy apartment building.
With the abandonment of ornament, architecture became more about creating spaces. Some architects describe their job that way: creating space.
But here’s the thing: the interior spaces of the older buildings are often better than the modern ones. That’s my experience. It’s the Victorian and Beaux-art buildings that have the bay windows that let in the light, the balconies and the high ceilings. It’s the modern and modernist buildings that have boxy rooms. If modernism didn’t even give us better interior spaces, what did it give us?
But before I go all reactionary here, I remember that modernism gave us the Iphone, which for all its negatives, is clearly great. Steve Jobs, father of the Iphone and Apple, was a modernist to his soul. And his love of rationality, of eschewing wasted effort and steps, led him to create this devise which was, like Mies’ Crown Hall, “almost nothing.” Jobs would have been happy if the Iphone had been invisible. And the Iphone, at least under Jobs, was not just about how it looked, but how it functioned. The software was Modern. Everything aimed you at the shortest distance between two points. That’s good. And can you imagine how ridiculous the Iphone would look if it had scroll-y stuff on the sides?
So on that uncertain note, I end here, and leave more questions than answers. I will continue my walks around Prague. I would like to find out more about who made all these great figures, and how.
Here’s some late-breaking content. Just as I was about to send this out, a friend, who actually figures in some of the events mentioned in this newsletter, sent me a Substack newsletter whose author goes into a semi-rant about just what I’ve been writing about. Check it out here. Remember the Tartarians!
What Am I Reading
Thinking Like A State (Yale 1998), by James C. Scott. It’s better I did not read this book before writing my last book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies (Texas 2012), because I would have had to rewrite the whole thing. More on this later.
What Am I Watching
Nothing worth mentioning at the moment.
Please forgive any errors of grammar or spelling you find, as well as missing or duplicated words. All my copy editors were busy, and I didn’t want to delay sending this out. I know from experience I’m a terrible copy editor, but it’s time to hit “Send.”