The World Wide Church of Modernism
The World Wide Church of Modernism
A heretic’s view
The photo above is the Electrical Shop at Garden Island, Sydney. It was built in 1905, 14 years before the Bauhaus opened.
According to the architectural history books, Modernism in architecture dates from 1850 and Joseph Paxton’s iron and glass Crystal Palace, but it didn’t really get going until Walter Gropius established The Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany in 1919. And it really took off when its leading teachers left Germany for the architectural schools of the United States after Hitler closed the Bauhaus in 1933. Bauhaus Modernism was taught in architecture schools across America from where it flowed to the rest of the world becoming the basis of every architect’s training in the second half of the 20th century.
The cultural desert of post-war Australia was a perfect place for a Modernist Architect to start from zero and in 1948 Harry Seidler came to Sydney to do just that. Having studied under Bauhaus teachers Walter Gropius and Joseph Albers and having been Marcel Breuer’s chief assistant for a couple of years, Harry Seidler had the best Modernist credentials of any architect in Australia. He was also a Modernist evangelist. Speaking of his first Australian commission (his mother Rose’s house at Wahroonga), he said, “I wouldn’t allow my poor mother to have anything in the house not consistent with the religion: Modernism”.
The World Wide Church of Modernism became the established architectural religion in Australia when The Rose Seidler house won the Sulman Prize in 1952. Its creed includes the following articles of faith:
Starting from zero
According to Tom Wolfe, in his book From Bauhaus To Our House, the young architects and artists who came to the Bauhaus in the 1920s were zealous idealists. They talked about starting from zero, which referred to nothing less than re-creating the world.
Thinking big
Inspired by Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, the big Modernist ideas for starting from zero often involve detonating everything in the vicinity and building a whole new neighbourhood of multi storey towers in a garden setting (for example Harry Seidler’s schemes for The Rocks and McMahons Point).
Old things are bad.
For Modernists, old stuff like heritage gets in the way of starting from zero. Heritage is not functional. Tom Wolfe wrote that functional was one of several Bauhaus euphemisms for 'non-bourgeois' and noted that flat roofs, sheer unadorned facades and no overhanging cornices were preferred Bauhaus forms because 'pitched roofs and cornices represented the “crowns” of the old nobility, which the bourgeoisie spent most of its time imitating’.
Neat and clean is beautiful
Modernists tend towards anal retentiveness and Modernist spaces are spotlessly clean, neat, tidy and ruthlessly ordered. Historically this comes from the Bauhaus ideal to replace the unhygienic slums of early 20th century Europe with new, healthy and high-rise worker housing and finds expression in floor-to-ceiling glass walls to let in the healthy sunlight and in stainless steel kitchens inspired by the antiseptic operating theatres in hospitals.
Innovation is a virtue.
Because the old is considered dirty, unhygienic and bourgeois, Modernists worship innovation, which became a virtue in the 20th century with the rise of the growth economy and its handmaiden, built-in obsolescence.
Simplicity is good
Modernists like simple shapes and simple geometry. The most influential and most copied 20th century building is a simple flat roofed rectangle with floor-to-ceiling glass on all four walls (Mies Van Der Rohe’s holiday shack for Dr Edith Farnsworth). This, despite the fact that it fails to provide any privacy, any place to hang your pictures, is the opposite of energy efficient and cost a bomb (exemplifying Mies’ dictum, “less is more expensive”).
Building as Art
Modernists believe their buildings can stand alone like pieces of sculpture. Photos of them in the style magazines are framed to avoid the unfortunate juxtaposition of the buildings and their surrounds and messy things like people, pets and personal affects are excluded.
Control every aspect of the building.
“The Design of all Buildings, large or small, aims to become a "gesamtkunstwerk", a totally integrated work of art, with interior design, furnishings, equipment and selected artworks receiving equally dedicated attention to become a cohesive whole” (from Harry Seidler’s website).
It is a bitter truth that so much of what has been built in the Modernist era is truly bad. As well, most people do not share the Modernists articles of faith adhered to by architects and have turned to draftsmen and builders for the Non-Modernist houses they prefer. These account for around 90% of houses built, are mostly badly designed, show little understanding of the architectural styles they attempt to emulate and lack any sympathy for their surrounds.
For the sake of our cities, to get a better share of the housing market (possibly) and to conform to Basix (the new sustainability index for buildings), I believe architects need to abandon the cult of Modernism. But first they need to de-program the mind-control that enslaves them to it. The could start by considering that,
Modernism is just another style of architecture, like Romanesque or Art Deco.
Eclectic and pastiche are not dirty words. Pastiche means “any work of art consisting of motifs borrowed from one or more masters or works of art”. Much of today’s so-called “contemporary” architecture is really “Modernist pastiche”.
People actually live in the houses. They want to be able to express themselves in them and to make them their own. Architects need to facilitate this desire rather than imposing values and forms that make it impossible.
Not everyone shares the Modernist zeal for hygiene, neatness and simplicity. Many people are untidy, messy, love complexity and enjoy a framed view.
All buildings need to respect their context. The building designed to stand alone as a piece of sculpture often ends up being a piece of unsympathetic “look-at-me” featurism, which is completely out of character with its surrounds.
In his book, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander takes up some of these themes in criticising Modernism for its failure to accommodate basic human needs. He also attempts to identify those elements in buildings and towns that appeal at a visceral, emotional and archetypal level, a welcome antidote to the dry, intellectual and esoteric appeal of Modernism.
Talks and articles
An article for the Hunters Hill Trust Journal August 2005