From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe, Washington Square Press (Pocket Books) 1981
Review: Call this a Hate Read. I like Wolfe's work - The Right Stuff is spot-on. Bonfire of the Vanities was great when it was serialized in Rolling Stone (the movie? not so much). But I really didn't like what Wolfe was saying here, and like less the way he was saying it. But at the same time, he has a point - a lot of modern architecture varies between non-descript and outright ugly - big glass boxes without a lot of style or personality.
Mind you, he's not wrong. Our cities have been overtaken by the big glass box. South Lake Union is full of them. But he ascribes this blandification to a group of architects in Germany that set themselves up as the end-all and be-all high priests, and their followers refining the process to the point that they abandon the physical plane altogether and enter the domain of theoretical architecture, which is planned but never built. And ultimately blaming the consumer and end user for not standing up to these architectural bullies.
Wolfe's text is as overwrought as the architectural ornamentation he mourns. His verbiage is dense and he fits as many obscure references in a he can. He comes off as that dinner party bore eager to share his opinions and width of knowledge without regard to who gets in the way. Here's a reference to a medieval philosopher, there a listing of archaic architectural features. And of course the de rigeur Latin reference that no one who went to college in the Midwest would understand. Tempora mutantur.
Ultimately, he is of that brand of Intelligentsia that scores its points by attacking other Intelligentsia. And he had become a brand, right down to his ice cream suit and smarmy literary pretensions. Heck, even the cover design of this particular edition says it is more about the author than the subject.
Much like critiques of modern literature that seem to begin and end at the MFA programs, Wolfe defines his world very narrowly, and then judges it for being so limited. For him, modernism is an exit to nowhere. Frank Lloyd Wright is mentioned but then discarded from the discussion, even though he did some of same overrunning of his client desires as his German colleagues, and in addition contributed more to American architecture. Brutalism doesn't show up because it is not German enough. The Craftsman and Unosian houses don't even exist. The US Steel Building in Pittsburgh, Sears (now Willis) Tower in Chicago and Transamerica Tower in SF were extant when he wrote this, but apparently didn't make a dent in his arguments.
The book was written in the 1980s, talking about movement introduced in the 1920s. We are forty years further along, and I wonder what Wolfe would declare about PPG Place in Pittsburgh (A glass box with crenellations!) or The Seattle Library (which looks like it belongs on the back end of a Star Destroyer) or the multi-colored MOPOP in Seattle (identified by Ron Judd, a local columnist, as "The Wreck of the Partridge Family bus"). What about the sextoy-shaped Gherkin in London? The Cell Phone, which melts cars in the adjacent parking lot? Or that monstrosity of the ultra-thin glass box in New York City, the toothbrush box on Billionaire's Row, a thin glass box that towers over all the other glass boxes?
What would he say about open floor plans? The unification of controls, so only one set of switches commands the lights of an entire floor? The removal of false ceilings of asbestos tile, replaced by exposed HVAC systems, giving large rooms a comfy boiler-room feel. And on the consumer level, the rise of "snout houses", also called "Garage Mahals". where the street view is just he driveway and a garage (and are placed on tiny lots that barely demand a lawnmower).
But I digress.
The thing is, it is not (exclusively) the design habits of the Bauhaus school that evolved us to the current state. Advances in material science and design has brought about this change as well. We have moved from exterior walls as a primary means of support of the structure to facades that hang on steel frameworks, and most recently to strong central cores that allow those building-wide open floors. We ended up with these big, boxy buildings in part because we made it easier and more efficient to make them taller and bigger.
So that may be the heart of my dislike, no, my active hatred, of this text - it offends my engineering sensibilities. Science and commerce, not art, got us to this point.
Literally I exited this book feeling dumber than when I went in. It is a rare thing to dislike a book this much and still finish it. I feel a need to do more research in architecture just so I can fully elucidate my dislike of this slender volume. So I guess there is that. If you want a better take on the architectural blunders of the past and present, here's a young woman who has been picking on them on TikTok for some time. And it in turn led me to a podcast on modern architecture. And both are more illuminating and entertaining about the subject than this book.
More later,
