The Spectacle of the Innocent Eye:

Vision, Cynical Reason, and

The Discipline of Architecture in Postwar America

A Cornell University Dissertation

Ithaca, New York 1994

1994 by Kazys Varnelis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without
permission in writing from the author.

Table of Contents
Introduction

Are The Kids Alright?

Cynicism, Spectacle, And Conspiracy
Subjects And Agents
The Kids And Cardboard Architecture
Critical Historiography And The Innocent Eye
Outline

4
8
25
30
35
38

1 Architectural Education: The Turn To Cardboard

43

The Demise Of The cole Des Beaux-Arts

The Bauhaus In America: Vision In Motion
Gropius At Harvard
The Texas Rangers
Cooper Union And The Search For Form
Venturi And The New Critics
The Vital Center: Postwar Liberalism In The United States
The Decline Of Liberalism
The Threat To The Discipline
Cardboard Architecture
Cynicism In Architecture

44
45
55
57
65
67
68
71
72
75
77

2 Philip Johnsons History: Fascism And Repression

80

Philip Johnson As Power Broker

The In-lite
Reading Johnsons Fascist Writings
The Response To Johnsons Fascism
Philip Johnson As Architect

80
88
97
124
138

3. Philips Kids: Avant-Garde As Conspiracy Of Agency

146

Robert Stern And Perspecta 9/10

40 Under 40
CASE
The New City
Diamond And The Square
Five Architects
Whites Vs. Grays
Oppositions
Johnson Catches Up
Pluralism

147
148
151
154
156
157
165
174
179
183

The Kids As Conspiracy

P-3: The Kids As Conspiracy In The 1980s
Power Elite And Cynical Culture
Ethics Of Conspiracy
Conspiracy As Allegory
Nietzsches Architecture

187
188
190
192
194
197

4 The Architectural Object: Drawing And Spectacle

200

The Discovery Of The Drawing: Momas cole Des Beaux Arts Exhibit
The Contemporary Drawing
Yuppie-Porn: Teapots And Jewelry
Architecture In Museums
Architecture As Spectacle
The Architecture Student As Connoisseur

201
205
210
212
215
218

5 The Architectural Subject: Innocent Eye And Discipline

222

The Innocent Eye

The Child-Art Movement
The Primitive Eye
The Artists Eye
The Architects Eye
Hejduks Eye
The Eye Eisenman Made
Panopticism
The Innocent Eye As Product Of Class Reproduction
The Auto-Dissolution Of The Eye

223
228
232
235
236
238
240
246
249
251

6 Conclusion

255

Sham: Psychoanalysis Of Disingenuity

Peter Eisenmans Mirror
The Gaze

257
263
266

Bibliography

271

Philip Johnsons Writings For Social Justice And Todays Challenge

Prewar Philip Johnson And Fascism In The U. S. And Elsewhere
Postwar Philip Johnson And His Relation To The Kids
40 Under 40, The Whites And The Grays, And Related Developments
Postwar United States History
Texas Rangers, Architectural Education, And The Discipline Postwar
The Innocent Eye And The Visual Language Before Architecture
Architecture As Image
Conspiracy And Spectacle

271
271
276
280
294
295
302
307
311

Methodology

313

List Of Illustrations

320

Appendix I A Philip Johnson Chronology, 1932-1945

324

Appendix II Philip Johnson Documents, 1934-1940

329

Introduction
In architectural works, mans pride, mans triumph over gravitation, mans will to power
assume visible form. Architecture is a veritable oratory of power made by form.
Friedrich Nietzsche, as quoted by Philip Johnson, as quoted by Peter Eisenman1
Are the Kids Alright?
In its May 1991 issue Spy magazine, a popular journal of celebrity scandal and gossip,
printed an article titled Master Philip and the Boys, exposing architect Philip Johnsons use of
his connections in the worlds of architecture, art, high society and big business to build up the
reputations of his kids, the five most well-known members of the architectural vanguard of the
United States in the 1980s (Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, Frank Gehry, and
Robert Stern).2 The author of the Spy article suggested that the regular dinners that Johnson and
the kids held at New Yorks lite Century Club were staging-grounds for an architectural
conspiracy devoted to its own advancement. The presence of the top U. S. architects at these
meetings, he continued, could only be construed as conspiratorial or monopolistic. Certainly, he
wrote, If all the heads of the auto companies had regular black-tie dinners in a private dining
room of their club, or if Sununu and Baker and Bill Bradley and Sam Nunn and Ted Kennedy did,
we might think the concentration of power was both remarkable and possibly suspect.3

1. introduction to Philip Johnson, Writings, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 10.
Originally in Johnson, The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture, informal talk to students,
School of Architectural Design, Harvard University, December 7, 1954; published in Perspecta 3
(1955), 40-44, reprinted in Johnson, Writings, 140.
2.

John Brodie, Master Philip and the Boys, Spy (May 1991): 5058.

3.

Brodie, 52.

5
Architecture, we were reminded, like all artistic fields, includes among its most important unstated
assumptions the idea that accomplishment is eventually rewarded with recognition from the field,
but if architectures ostensibly most accomplished living members are rewarded with that celebrity
on the basis not of talent but of connections, this would be scandalous, the replacement of
meritocracy with oligarchy.
But while Spy asked: Twentieth-century American architecture: stately domain of
visionaries who boldly thrust their ideas upon the skyline, or cynical fiefdom of a shrewd geezer
foisting his pets on society?4 the architectural media did not attempt to answer the question.
Progressive Architecture was alone among the big architectural magazines to even note the
articles existence: calling it hyperbolic but not elaborating, instead diverting attention to
Johnsons newest projects.5
On the other hand, my discussions with architects lead me to believe that knowledge of
this conspiracy was rather widespread in the U.S. before the Spy article. Library research
confirmed that the issue had already been raised in the architectural literature, albeit with little
impact. The most detailed discussion of the conspiracy, Richard Plunz and Kenneth Kaplans
1984 essay On Style6 received little public response in the field, only a citation in Douglas
Daviss essay New York in the Next Century: Fragments from a Post-Post-Modern Diary as a
working assumption that is widely held, by virtually every architect or critic with whom I worked
and talked in the years when I practiced architectural criticism as a weekly trade, or craft.7 The
only other response I was able to find was from Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in their
article American Architecture Seen From a Dark Alley. Tzonis and Lefaivre did not dispute the
articles thesis, although they did dispute a handful the articles more minor facts (involving the
Procrustes Club at Yale, a group only incidental to the article). While Tzonis and Lefaivres article
ultimately praised Kaplan and Plunz, the article is in a Dutch journal that can hardly be said to be

4.
5.
6.
7.

Table of Contents, Spy (May 1991): 4.

Keeping up with Philip, Progressive Architecture, vol. 72 (August 1991): 152.
Richard Plunz and Kenneth Kaplan, On Style, Precis 5 (1984): 33-45.

Douglas Davis New York in the Next Century: Fragments from a Post-Post-Modern
Diary, New York Architecture: 1970-1990, ed. Heinrich Klotz, and Luminita Sabau. (New York:
Rizzoli, 1989) 51-53.

6
a significant part of the American architectural discourse.8 While architect and critic Michael
Sorkin mentioned the conspiracy a number of times in his essays on contemporary architecture
now collected in his book Exquisite Corpse, again there was no attempt by anyone in the
architectural media to pick up his argument and deal with it, perhaps because Sorkin wrote them
principally for the left-leaning Village Voice.9 But this knowledge was not confined to the
discipline. Already in 1983, the case of Philip Johnson and his promotion of the kids was picked
by Steven M. L. Aronson as an exemplar of media and professional control for his book on the
machinery of promotion and self-promotion, Hype.10
Yet these essays remain isolated and are not referred to in either the popular or scholarly
architectural press. The protest they raise against the dominance of the upper echelons of the
architectural profession by a small cadre of individuals in cahoots with each other is minuscule
compared to the amount of material published on them. Most of this material is uncritical,
consisting only of a discourse of fashion associated with color photographs of projects. The small
amount of it which is critical never questions the legitimacy of the role Johnson and the kids play
in the profession.11

8.

Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, American Architecture Seen From a Dark Alley,
Forum voor architectuur en daarmee verbonden kunsten 29.2 1985): 87-88.
9. Michael Sorkin, Exquisite Corpse: Writing on Buildings, (New York: Verso, 1991). The
limited nature of these anti-kids writings can be further emphasized by noting that Sorkin, Davis,
and Kaplan and Plunz were all based in New York at the time, the city in which the conspiracy
takes place.
10.

Steven M. L. Aronson, Hype, (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1983).
Significantly, in addition to his own analysis, Aronson includes his extensive interview with
Johnson on his use of hype. It should be added that Aronson is not unfamiliar with architecture
and has written extensively for Architectural Digest. An excerpt from Aronsons interview with
Johnson was printed in prior to publication as Philips List, Skyline, April 1983, 18-19.
Skyline was the house publication of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies and
had a strong pro-kid bias, featuring frequent interviews between Eisenman and whoever he
thought was important in the field. Johnson, Graves and Meier would frequently come in for
praise and while Stern was often criticized, he was covered as a major figure. An earlier piece
signed by Ernesto Casarotta, delineated recent changes in the line-up of the kids by describing
it as a soccer team (as for the authors name: Ernesto would seem to indicate Stern, while the
sports interest and Casarotta would seem to indicate Eisenman perhaps they wrote it together)
see Quarta Roma: Report from Rome, Skyline, August 1, 1978, 6. Thus in the context of
Skyline, Aronsons interview served to show who was whoat least in Johnsons eyes.
11.

On the architectural medias role in preserving the reputations of architects and its
tendency to carefully sidestep any significant issues see Jon Michael Schwarting, Postscript,
Beatriz Columina, ed., Architectureproduction, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988),

7
I soon confirmed an even more disturbing fact that I had previously only heard as rumor:
Johnson was involved in fascist causes in the 1930s and that his friends in the discipline had
done their best to keep this covered up. As I will document in chapter two, among scholars of
American fascism, Johnson is known not as an architect but as an extremist figure, closely allied
with the prime theorist of the movement, Lawrence Dennis. For Dennis the future of a homegrown
fascist movement rested on those who were already members of the lite but not yet in power
such as Harvard-educated Dennis himself or fellow Harvard grad Johnson and their
willingness to work with the fascist insurgency. Johnson worked with Dennis and also served as
an aide to Father Charles Coughlin, who attracted large numbers of individuals through his radio
addresses which moved steadily from populist to Right-wing to outrightly antisemitic and proHitler. In 1939, Johnsons involvement in Coughlin and Denniss cause reached a peak as he
served as the German correspondent for Coughlins newspaper Social Justice and the isolationist
Todays Challenge. In such capacity, Johnson accompanied the Nazis on their invasion into
Poland, reporting back with articles that served as German propaganda.12
Johnson apparently abandoned such interests in 1940, and has recently tried to explain
away his actions by arguing that he was brought up with the prejudices of my class and
background and all that. I was fascinated with power.13 Power has always fascinated Johnson
and he has carefully built up a position of power in the discipline over the years. Hence, while the
knowledge of Johnsons fascist past has been widespread throughout the discipline, it has also

252. Note that the architects Schwarting targets as the objects of this whitewash Eisenman,
Hejduk, Meier, Venturi, Stern and Johnson are roughly the same as the architects I am singling
out in this dissertation. On Johnson, Schwarting asks a question that I hope to answer: Why is
Philip Johnson celebrated as playful and iconoclastic rather than viewed more simply as the most
articulate spokesman for the dominant ideology?
If limited to a bibliography of material in the Avery online index of architectural periodicals
(a very incomplete index including only entries catalogued since 1980) the information on these
six architects consists of 114 single-spaced pages of twelve point Courier type. The amount of
literature on Johnson and the kids is so large as to be essentially unsurveyable. Vast databases
such as NEXIS (which is, significantly, one of conspiracy theorist/creator H. Ross Perots favorite
sources of information) provide so much information on recent architectural topics as to make the
historians ideal of a total grasp of the literature simply no longer possible, at least for one person.
On the other hand, these same databases, which I have used extensively in the writing of this
dissertation allow us to examine the surface of this overinformation for moments of flux that might
prove to contain greater densities of information, or aberrant information that would stand out
from the mass, which remains essentially homogenous.
12.

Extensive documentation of Johnsons activities is provided in chapter two.

13.

Johnson quoted in Andersen, 151.

8
remained largely ignored, carefully guarded by the kids notably Stern and Eisenman and
their allies. While the Paul de Man and Heidegger scandals rocked disciplines in the 1980s, Philip
Johnson, whose own past was as disreputable as either of the two, if not more, become more
popular than ever by curating an exhibit on Deconstructivist architecture.
The relentless publicizing of Johnson and his kids incorporates Johnsons power in the
field as something beneficial for architecture as discipline. For example, in an essay in the catalog
of the 1980 Venice Biennale, a landmark show in the international dissemination of postmodernist
architecture, Emilio Battisti put Johnson at the head of an extremely compact group of
postmodernists (read: his kids) that stays together even though the philosophies within vary
greatly. Johnsons power, Battisti argued, is the logical expression of an intellectual successfully
operating in the public realm to promote his interests. Battisti concluded his essay by praising
Johnsons role in the field: I believe that Johnson has demonstrated in an extremely cultured and
unified way that architecture and power are terms that can still be united.14
Perhaps this capacity for incorporating criticism is why Johnson didnt appear worried by
the Spy piece and instead of standing in its way, cooperated. He appeared glad to pose in a
special photo session for the magazine with his two favorite kids, Stern and Eisenman.
Perversely enough, Johnson and the kids seemed to be enjoying being exposed and mocked.
Cynicism, Spectacle, and Conspiracy
We can better come to terms with why Johnson and the kids cooperated with Spy by
turning to the argument in German theorist Peter Sloterdijks Critique of Cynical Reason.
Sloterdijk opposes two ways of thinking: that of the contemporary cynic versus that of the ancient
and kynic. In the ancient world, he explains, the kynic was an individual who mocked everyone
publicly, bringing the high down by exposing them with his crude unmasking gaze.15 Appealing
to us with the voice of the kynic is precisely the strategy of Spy magazine, which derives its
attraction (and hence, salability) through its most common tactics, such as exposing who-slept-

14.

Emilio Battisti, Philip Johnson: Images, Architecture 1980: The Presence of the Past:
Venice Biennale, (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), 62.
15.

Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1987, originally published in two volumes as Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), 3.

9
with-whom-to-get-something.16 The kynics gaze, as Sloterdijk explains, wants to acknowledge
the raw, animal, and simple facts above which the lovers of higher things like to place
themselves.17 Hence, Spy prints photographs of the Queen of England picking her nose. By
bringing the celebrity from the heights of refined things down to the animalistic impulses of the
low and the everyday, Spy is kynical, subverting class, if only for the moment. Thus, the article on
the kids, exposing what happens in the back rooms of architecture, is firmly within Spys tradition
of kynical mocking.
Unfortunately, Sloterdijk concludes, we are now in a period of modern cynicism and this
is how we can explain Johnson and the kids behavior toward Spy. Discontent in our culture,
Sloterdijk explains, appears today as universal, diffuse cynicism.18 Because the tools of
Enlightenment (by which Sloterdijk means the process of unmasking or demystifying ideology)
have, through mass education, become available to many individuals, many college-educated
people are aware of the critique of ideology (for Sloterdijk ideology means false consciousness)
but continue to operate in the same position they were in before, even though they now know
what is going on. The modern cynic understands what false consciousness is, Sloterdijk explains,
but uses it to his own ends to pull a fast one. Modern cynics act fundamentally in their own selfinterest, as Sloterdijk put it, to see to it that they are not taken for suckers. In the face of
cynicism, the traditional critique of ideology is helpless, serving only to bolster the case of the
cynic by allowing him a knowledge of his weak points. Yet this cynic is defined by a vulnerability
kept in check by a strong instinct for self-preservation that allows him to keep working even after
he realizes the meaninglessness of his work. As the cynic says to himself, I have to work, we all
have to work, and Others would do it anyway, perhaps worse. Thus the new, integrated cynicism
even has the understandable feeling about itself of being a victim and of making sacrifices. This
new melancholy cynicism therefore is tied to a nostalgia for the innocent, naive days when
knowledge was not compromised. But, Sloterdijk writes, it is precisely this defense mechanism
that blocks the possibility of employing any kind of ideology-critique against the cynic: it is

16. At the same time, Spys manipulation of photographs, for example its forged picture of
a naked, pregnant Bruce Willis (in reference to wife Demi Moores naked and pregnant pervious
appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair), serves a similar role. While image manipulation
questions the veracity of everything in Spy, it also serves as a dtourned reminder that in todays
media, images are altered as a matter of course.
17.

Sloterdijk, 145.

18.

Sloterdijk, 88.

10
enlightened false consciousness. The cynic firmly believes that what he is doing is based upon
false premises, but just as firmly, believes that the current power-structure of society forces him to
act as if the premises were true.19
Sloterdijks valorization of the kynic however does not give him any priority over the cynic.
While the kynic is honest, his honesty has little impact on the cynic who points out that the whole
dirty truth that the kynic smears him with is true, but, well, so what? Thus the reaction of Johnson
and his kids to the kynicism of the Spy article is typical of the cynical mood. Their reaction makes
the conspiracy a public secret: Spy is right, there is a conspiracy, but, well, so what?
For this dissertation to be another expos of Philip Johnsons architectural star-making
machine along the lines of Spy would be reductive: the discipline could dismiss it either as
paranoiac or as blatantly obvious, perhaps even as a cynical validation of the system, just as the
Spy article ultimately served as a means of further promotion for Philip Johnson and his kids who
provided interviews to fill in the details and posed for photographs that made them look like
celebrities. For the publicist, after all, bad publicity is better than no publicity. By giving the
appearance of deeper levels of debate, the truth is concealed and hegemony is served, or as Guy
Debord would say, the logic of the spectacle dictates that that which appears is good, that which
is good appears.20
On the other hand, just as someone must finally say that the Emperor is not wearing any
clothes, the non-cynic must disclose the public secret. Not everyone is a cynic and for those of us
who arent, a better understanding of the cynical mentality and its manifestations in architecture
could perhaps be useful in formulating a strategy of resistance. The first step towards eliminating
cynicism has to be its recognition. Cynicism is a way of stepping away from reality, to defer its
consideration for another time. But this deferment cannot be endless. Hegemony is a process
directed toward an end, but is not an end itself. Hegemony can only exist if it is incomplete. While
recuperation is a danger, remaining silent to avoid this danger is cynical. By exposing the
operations of the public secret, we learn more about the real conditions of our discipline and
based on this knowledge make our choices. While our choices are still within ideology, we will find

19.
20.

Sloterdijk, 3-9.

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983; first published
as La socite du spectacle, Paris: Editions Buchet-Chastel, 1967; reprinted Paris: Champ Libre,
1971; first English translation Detroit: Black & Red, 1970, revised edition 1977.), section 12. As
this edition is unpaginated, references are to section numbers.

11
that some choices are better than others: not every choice has to be cynical. My dissertation is
intended to facilitate such choices (and is in itself such a choice) by exposing the meaning
masked underneath the spectacle, at once obvious and completely hidden to the reader. In this
project not only do I hope to expose Johnson and his kids conspiracy, I also hope to show how
the conspiracy operates, what conditions have enabled it and what its continued operation means
for the discipline.
It is my thesis that, just as cynicism pervades latter-day society, so too it has come to
pervade architecture. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine an aspect of how cynicism
came to be prevalent in architecture. This strengthening of cynicism emerges out of specific
relations in late twentieth century society, a society that we can come to terms with by turning to
Guy Debords incisive analysis of it as the society of the spectacle. Under the sign of the
spectacle, we will eventually be able to draw a relation between visual culture and capital that can
be used to explain a number of seemingly incompatible strands of investigation in this
dissertation: the appearance of the kids in architectural discourse; architectural theorists interest
in creating a formal visual language ultimately based on design technologies that also form the
basis of modern advertising layout; the concurrent interest in stripping the architecture student of
her preconceptions about architecture to create what would be referred to as the innocent eye;
and the increase in public popularity of the architectural drawing and of architecture culture in
general.
The spectacle, Debord explains, is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it
becomes an image.21 While pre-spectacular capitalist society was dominated by reification
the replacement of lived relations by commodity relations in spectacular society the commodity
has been replaced by the image. As consumers of the spectacle, our experience of the world is
deferred and instead, our attention turns toward its representation, its spectacularization.22 This
attention is itself a form of labor, as the spectacle demands that we devote our time to participate
in it, if we wish to be successful members of society. Successful participation makes us feel as if
we are united with the rest of the world, yet this unreal feeling masks the reality of the division of

21.

Debord, 34 For a use of the spectacle as a means of art historical investigation,

although one that is not without some difficulty in terms of its application of a historical specific
analysis to a period it was not intend for, see T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the
Age of Manet and His Followers, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), esp. 9-10.
22.

Debord, 1.

12
labor and the real differences between individuals, classes, and social groups.23 As our attention
is turned toward the spectacle, it comes to dominate our social lives, masking out reality. As
Debord writes, Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world
one sees is its world.24 The consumers attention to the commodity is essentially a fetishistic
worship of the image: the wearing of T-shirts that advertise commodities, the collection of little
objects like stickers, key chains, or baseball caps bearing brand names and logos for products.
There is no real gain to the consumers from these objects many of which cost more not less
than comparable items without advertising except as signs to the consumer and others that he
or she has successfully integrated into the system of the spectacle and has graduated from
consuming mere items to consuming images.25 While the image of the product promises what
Debord calls a dazzling shortcut to the promised land of total consumptionceremoniously
presented as the decisive entity, when it is bought and brought home it becomes vulgar,
revealing its poverty, the result of the misery of its production. The reality of the mass-produced
commodity is, however, masked by the appearance of the next object begging to be
acknowledged, an interchange that reveals the fraud inherent in the promise of satisfaction.26
The spectacle reflects what Ernest Mandel has called late capitalism, the period in
which areas of culture that have traditionally remained relatively independent to capitalism
become colonized by it. Late capitalism is marked not by a postindustrial economy taking over
from industry, as some historical analysts would argue,27 but by the industrialization of the last
precapitalist enclaves.28 This expansion of industrialization, creating further divisions of labor

23.

Debord, 72.

24.

Debord, 42.

25.

Debord, 67.

26.

Debord, 69-70.

27.

Notably Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social

Forecasting, (New York: 1973).
28.

Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, rev ed. (London: NLB Atlantic Highlands Humanities
Press, 1975, first published as Der Sptkapitalismus, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), 387. Mandel
writes that the industrialization of the sphere of reproduction constitutes the apex of this
development [of late capitalism].

13
where there previously were none, is the result of capital seeking out areas in which to invest.29
While the vanguard of certain arts held out some resistance to commodification to some degree
until relatively recently, this has rapidly changed. While both architect and painter traditionally
produced items for sale, the architect designed plans for a unique building, the painter painted a
unique painting. More and more it is the reproduction of these items that sustains the artist. In the
case of the architectural vanguard, the architect becomes a producer of mass-produced
architectural objects: drawings, models, books, teapots, faades, and television shows. Evidence
of this growth of the commodity-image in culture over the last thirty years can be seen around us
every day: museums and galleries have become places for the upper middle class to visit to
see and be seen as well as places to sell both off the walls and in the bookstore and caf
and in the mall we can find Structure,

a chain clothing store based on a theme of

architecturalness, coffeepots made by architect Michael Graves, and books on the latest
architectural trends.30 The aestheticizaton of everyday life that the members of the Werkbund had
hoped for appears to have made great advances,31 but somehow something seems to have
fallen amiss and the unity between art and life has simply not taken place. Rather than being a
place of integration, however Structure is a space of alienation.
This change in architectural production is based on the spread of architectural
reproduction as image and to a progressive elevation of the architect as a celebrity, again an
image. Paradoxically, while the vanguard operates at a level of unprecedented cultural influence,
the typical architect works as a technician, rarely if ever working as a designer of buildings with
any significant formal qualities.
This shift is not however the product of a direct relationship between an economic base
and a cultural superstructure. Rather, disciplines have their own localized forces that get spun in
general directions by their interaction with the economic base. In this case, the historical analysis
within this dissertation will show that the inability of postwar American modern architecture to
provide adequate disciplinary boundaries (i.e. ways of thinking and teaching the practice of

29.

Mandel, 389.

30.

On the explosion of architecture culture, see Robert Gutman, Architectural Practice:

A Critical View, (New York: Princeton, 1988), 92.
31.

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Capitalism, (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1991),48.

14
architecture, what it is, and what the architect does) and the ability of a new paradigm to provide
the same at the cost of restricting the scope of architecture, is coupled with the exponential
commodification of architecture, through reproduction to enable an architecture of the commodityimage.
The result is that in architecture, social discourse is replaced by a spectacular discourse.
Presented with a series of images, we are given the illusion of choice, an illusion that I will argue,
underlies the ascent and the conspiracy of the kids.
Spectacle and conspiracy are intimately linked today: if spectacle is the public
representation of a certain kind of power, covert action is the private representation.32 Yet more
and more the secret is public as well, creating an amnesiac effect around itself by virtue of the
spectacle. In the spectacle, illusory but seemingly natural relations are created: not only is the
connection between the object and its production obscured, the object itself is obscured in favor
of the representation of the object. The spectacle serves to distract attention from the reality of
production and from class relations.
The amnesiac distraction created by the spectacle has only grown stronger in the years
since Debord first diagnosed it. While Nixon had to resign after the Watergate scandal, Reagan,
Bush, and Clinton have stayed in power after their respective scandals (Iran-Contra/ Iraq/Waco,
Whitewater) by playing the card of the public secret, making the spectacle into the secret.33 As
Debord explains, the highest ambition of the integrated spectacle is still to turn secret agents into
revolutionaries, and revolutionaries into secret agents.34 Hence the success of Ollie Norths
spectacular defense during the 1980s. North made the secret public: he became an entertainer,
an action hero explaining to the American people that secrecy and covert action were essential
for the honorable and honest in government. After firing North, former-actor Reagan stated that
North had become a national hero and that his story would make a great movie.35 As I will

32.

See in particular Michael Rogin, Make My Day!: Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial

Politics, Representations 29 (Winter 1990): 99-123.
33.

Cf. Rogin, 117.

34.

Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, (London: Verso, 1990; first
published as Commentaires sur la socit du spectacle (Paris: Editions Grard Lebovici, 1988)),
11
35.

Reagan quoted by Rogin, 118.

15
demonstrate in chapter two, in a similar manner Philip Johnson, in his role as the comedian of
architecture makes everything into a joke and in doing so is able to create a discipline-wide
forgetting of his fascist past, thus becoming the most powerful of American architects and by
being cynical, being beyond reproach. As Debord points out, in the spectacle as it is constituted
today, Many things may be unauthorized; everything is permitted. Talk of scandal is thus
archaic.36
I have already referred to the conspiracy of the kids a number of times and by now the
reader may well be wondering why I use this peculiar term. By looking for a conspiracy I do not,
however, mean that we should look for the workings of an evil, secret hand in architecture as a
postmodern, architectural version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a turn of the century
antisemitic fiction purporting that the Jews had a demonic conspiracy to take over the world.37As
Sloterdijk explains, the Protocols, as interpreted by the Nazis, projected the anonymous effects
of the system onto demonic intentions so that even confused simple citizens did not lose the
overview. In any investigation of conspiracies, we must guard against the overinvestment of
fictional hidden conspiracies with powers beyond their possible reach as means of simplifying
complex realities.38 There is the danger, for both conspiracy theorists and theorists of conspiracy
theory, to see the conspiracy as being all-powerful. Certainly that is not our case with the kids. By
no means are they all powerful. In this situation, the conspiracy theorist adopts (or is perceived to
have adopted) a paranoid system of knowledge that creates connections where there are none.
Yet this kind of critique, often from the ideological Right, serves to denigrate the use of history. If
there are no collusions then why bother? Noam Chomsky points out that in contemporary
discourse the phrase conspiracy theory is used to discourage analyses of institutions by
equating it with paranoia.39 Hence it was the concept of conspiracy theory as overloaded and
paranoiac that architectural critic Kenneth Frampton alluded to when he mentioned that the
architectural group that preceded the Kids and with which he was associated with, the New York

36.

Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 22

37. That the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were an antisemitic text and that Johnsons
kids are Jewish brings up the question of antisemitism. Johnson, as I will show, was an admitted
antisemite and Nazi sympathizer in the late 1930s. For more details, see chapter 2 and on the
question of how the (formerly?) antisemitic Johnson and the Kids get together, see chapter 3.
38.

Sloterdijk, 113-115.

39.

Noam Chomsky in the movie Manufacturing Consent. Noam Chomsky and the Media.

16
Five, is viewed (although by what presumably unsavory or misguided types he doesnt say) as
the conspiracy of the Five.40
But sometimes paranoia is the appropriate reaction. After all, the Protocols were indeed
the product of a conspiracy, although not a Jewish one but rather an antisemitic one run by Czar
Nicholas IIs secret police. Arguably, all history writing and interpretation is paranoid, making vast
connections between phenomena far apart in logical space. Paranoia can be an appropriate
epistemological model. But if that is the case, then our means of obtaining historical knowledge
would be so compromised that we might as well shut down right now. I believe, however, that
historical knowledge remains useful as a way of understanding the construction of contemporary
(social) structures. Nevertheless, I trust that the derogatory connotations of conspiracy remain
with it throughout this dissertation in order to point to architectures resistance to institutional
analysis.
The overinvestment in hidden forces that Frampton tries to deflect hints at a tradition of
associating conspiracy theories with the ideological Right. The verb to conspire itself comes
from the Latin conspirare, to breathe together, in other words, to find oneself partaking of the
same air as ones allies, no doubt the result of occupying a dark, secret, and enclosed space. In
English, conspiracy takes on the added meaning of a transgression against the law. Hence
perhaps the appeal of the conspiracy theory to the Right: the conspiracy is a secret act of a
collective agency against the law. Indeed, Left subversive activities against the State have taken
place, or been plotted in conspiratorial circles. But in reality, the enemies of the Right have no
monopoly on acts of collective agencies or law-breaking, as Watergate amply demonstrated
(although some Right-wing conspiracy theorists would see Watergate as a plot of the Left media
to discredit Nixon, or alternately, as evidence that Kissinger, not Nixon, was in charge).
Nevertheless, to dismiss the possibility of conspiracies because of the traditional
association of conspiracy theory with the ideological Right would also be a dangerous mistake.
Conspiracy theory as well as conspiracies have come from all sides of the political spectrum. In
his survey of American conspiracy theories David Brion Davis discovers a characteristically
American preoccupation with theorizing conspiracies. This preoccupation, he explains, is in part

40.

Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton and Charles Gwathmey, Five + Ten: A

Symposium held at the School of Architecture, Spring 1981, Colonnade 1.1 (Spring 1982), 3, see
also chapter two of this dissertation for a discussion of the New York Five and their relation to the
kids.

17
due to a traditional American belief that this country is a Jeffersonian democracy without
traditional orders. Any class or collective action, be it the organization of an lite gentlemans
club, a Political Action Committee or a trade union, will arouse suspicion, especially during difficult
times.41
In a similar way, Fredric Jameson has discussed the recent proliferation of conspiracy
theory movies such as Three Days of the Condor or JFK as attempts to map the unrepresentable
scope of the global system of late capitalism. The impossibility of finding a space outside of global
capitalism from which to critique it directly, Jameson writes, necessitates the development of
indirect ways of representing the system and thus conspiracy steps in as an allegory for the
subterranean yet pervasive control of late capitalism.42 Borrowing his theory of allegory from
Walter Benjamin, Jameson sees an allegory as a structure that contains within itself both its direct
meaning as well as something else.43 Thus, conspiracy can be used to describe how everything
is Functionally inserted into larger institutional schemes and frameworks of all kinds, which

41. See the introduction and afterward to David Brion Daviss The Fear of Conspiracy.
Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present, (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1971), xiv-xvii, 361-362. Daviss book is an excellent general anthology of
American conspiracy theories. The ur-essay for the study of American conspiracy theory is
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. While historically significant,
Hoftstader considers conspiracy theories deviations from reality and does not provide a
reasonable account for their existence.
42.

Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World
System, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 9. Compare this to Davis: We have
suggested that in a fluid, competitive, and heterogeneous society there has been a continuing
fear of hidden, monolithic structures which would at once exclude the majority of people and
impose a purposeful pattern on otherwise unpredictable events. This also sounds remarkable
like the process of writing history, which has of course always been about conspiracy theory: the
guiding of history in the hands of the very few, be they architects of the canon, political leaders, or
alternatively, the historians.
43.

The pertinent passage from Benjamin is:

Any person, any object, any relationship can mean anything else. With this possibility a
destructive, but just verdict is passed on the profane world: It is characterized as a world
in which the detail is of no great importance. But it will be unmistakably apparent,
especially to anyone who is familiar with allegorical textual exegesis, that all of the things
which are used to signify derive, from the very fact of their pointing to something else, a
power which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane things, which
raises them onto a higher plane, and which can, indeed, sanctify them.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, (London: NLB, 1977; written
between May 1924 and late March/early April 1925, first published as Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels (Berlin: 1928)), 160.

18
nonetheless belong to somebody44 Further, he argues, conspiracy can serve as a tool to
indirectly unify the individual act and its location within the collective by being able to account for
a potentially infinite network, along with a plausible explanation of its invisibility.45
One immediate problem with Jamesons theory of conspiracy is that his own ability to
describe late capitalism undermines the epistemological validity of the conspiracy as an attempt
to represent something unrepresentable. If Jameson can analyze capitalism directly, just what
value do the more indirect conspiracy theories have, except as symptoms of anxiety? I contend
that Jamesons attention to conspiracy solely as an allegory for late capitalism still leaves room
for the analysis of actual conspiracies and their role in our society as opposed to conspiracytheory driven literature and film. While the Left has traditionally followed Marx into the study of
large-scale economically-driven phenomena, ignoring the actions of individuals and the historical
use of lines of descent and their connection to the genealogy of ideas, the latter represent a valid
sphere of analysis themselves.46 As inheritances of money, goods, and land are passed down
along the most unlikely lines, so too are inheritances of symbolic and cultural capital (see my
discussion of Pierre Bourdieus definition of these terms below) in the form of the intellectual
tradition and trade secrets (both data and methodology) and in the form of positions of power,
status, and respectability. The conspiracy, in other words, serves as a special form of a classs

44.

Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 11.

45.

Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 9.

46.

Conspiracy theory is related to the study of how elites emerge, a vast field of political
science. The classic texts from the late nineteenth and early part twentieth century by Michels,
Mosca, and Pareto are all Right-wing, aiming specifically at modern democracy and Marxism,
arguing that the incompetence of the masses and their consequent need to be lead makes elites
both structurally inevitable and beneficial to democratic society. See Robert Michels, Political
Parties. A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, (Glencoe,
Illinois: The Free Press, 1958; first published in 1915); Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class,, ed.
Arthur Livingston (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939; first published as Elementi di Scienza Politica
(1895)); and Vilfredo Pareto, Sociological Writings,, ed. S. E. Finer (New York: Frederick A.
Praeger, 1966), and Pareto, Mind and Society, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1935). A
useful summary is T. B. Bottomore, Elites and Society, (New York: Penguin Books, 1966).
Bottomore explains that the 1935 translation of Paretos Mind and Society is the principal text that
brought the idea of elites into British and American social and political writing, 7. On Mosca and
Paretos politics, see Bottomore, 15-17.
Social anthropologists have also seen society in terms of shifting alliances of patronclient, clique and network relations. See in particular Jeremy Boissevain, Friends of Friends.
Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions, Pavilion Series (Social Anthropology), ed. F. G. Bailey
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974).

19
reproduction of itself. Determining the material conditions that permit this particular conspiracy of
the kids to take place would, I believe, allow us to understand its role within the discipline.
On the surface of our specific investigation, we see the classic symptoms of the
conspiracy: the kids act in secret (as will be elaborated in chapter three) and transgress an
unwritten social contract among architects against influence-peddling and monopoly-control in an
effort to seize power in the discipline. Like any good conspiracy, there have to be secrets and one
of the secrets in this particular conspiracy is obvious: Johnson and the kids suppress any traces
of social networks in their architecture. Their work is specifically meant to be a discourse of form,
a discourse without any societal or political ramifications.
The context for the conspiracy of the kids is however provided by a larger structural
conspiracy, a paradigm-shift in architectural education in the 1960s. The conspiratorial aspect of
this paradigm-shift is that, composed of an unquantifiable number of agents in the discipline and
an unquantifiable percentage of recent architectural work, be it buildings or theory, it manifests
itself as an indefinite network that cannot be fully mapped and remains generally invisible.
Yet this structural conspiracy is that of a discipline being mobilized by the demands of
professionalization to move in one particular direction much as Jamesons global system tends
towards hegemony, even if both the paradigm-shift in architecture and Jamesons global
economic system contain contradictions within themselves and the conspirators especially the
minor ones far removed from the center (in this case not Johnson and the kids but rather the
architects who simply accept the system) are often not aware of the extent of the conspiracy.
The unmistakable, albeit mediated, coincidence of these large-scale economic changes with
certain disciplinary interests fits into Jamesons description of conspiracy as totality, extending the
reaches of global capitalism as far as possible.
I hope to show the successful conspiracy of the kids is related to a paradigm-shift within
the discipline of architecture or structural conspiracy toward what I will call cardboard
architecture. Although the term is generally associated with the early work of architect Peter
Eisenman, cardboard architecture actually has a lineage preceding Eisenmans appropriation,
and I will use it to cover the reproductively-driven, surface-obsessive work of both the kids and
the related methods of thinking and performing architectural design in the most prestigious
American schools of architecture.
This paradigm-shift toward cardboard architecture was an indirect result of economic
and sociocultural changes that affected the discipline. As postwar modernisms popularity waned

20
during the 1960s and the alternatives of design methods, engineering, behaviorism and
communications theory threatened architecture as a discipline by reducing its claim to scientificity,
many architectural educators turned to a formalist cardboard architecture of complex, shallow
spaces molded by thin walls. Certainly other responses to the demands of the discipline could
have been made, but cardboard architecture appeared in the right place at the right time.
Likewise cardboard architectures claim to architecture as an art carried an implicit demand that it
be represented by some number of visible architect-heroes to disseminate its high-art status to
the public. Other structural conditions of the field, such as the concentration of power in few
hands, these in turn often controlled by Philip Johnson, and the primarily oral means of
transmitting information presented a bias towards the dominance of these architect-heroes by an
lite, relatively close-knit group of architects from the academy.
Thus this structural conspiracy provides a context for the conspiracy of the kids: while it
was not a conspiracy in the sense of having been coordinated from the start by its members, it
was a conspiracy in the sense that once the opportunity presented itself, the kids took advantage
of a sociological tendency towards a concentration of power in ever-tightening circles. They then
began to plot amongst themselves to ensure the successful continuation of a system that greatly
benefited them. The concept of conspiracy thus offers a means of mediating between individual
agents and structural changes. In this sense, it denotes the shadowy zone that Fernand Braudel
describes in which
active social hierarchies were constructed on top [of the market economy]: they could
manipulate exchange to their advantage and disturb the established order. In their desire
to do so which was not always consciously expressed they created anomalies,
zones of turbulence and conducted their affairs in a very individual way. At this exalted
level, a few wealthy merchants in eighteenth-century Amsterdam or sixteenth-century
Genoa could throw whole sectors of the European or even world economy into confusion,
from a distance. Certain groups of privileged actors were engaged in circuits and
calculations that ordinary people knew nothing of. Foreign exchange, for example, which
was tied to distant trade movements and to the complicated arrangements for credit, was
a sophisticated art, open only to a few initiates at most. To me, this second shadowy
zone, hovering above the sunlit world of the market economy and constituting its upper
limit so to speak, represents the favored domain of capitalism, as we shall see. Without
this zone, capitalism is unthinkable: this is where it takes up residence and prospers.47

47.

Fernand Braudel The Structures of Everyday Life. The Limits of the Possible, (New
York: Perennial Library/Harper and Row, 1981; originally published as Les Structures du
quotidian: le possible et limpossible, Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1979) 1 of Civilisation and
Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, 24.

21
In architectural discourse, and even more in the popular media, this zone is isolated and
treated as the realm in which architecture happens and it is here that todays architectural
celebrities exist: from this realm come the architects about whom most monographs and articles
are written. But it is also the realm in which architects who have accumulated enough symbolic
capital (i.e. recognition as authorities in the field) can make decisions that then affect the
profession as a whole. The difficulty of reconciling the shadowy zone to architecture as
discipline and profession, however, leads to large and uncomfortable leaps in scale when the
historian or critic who is unaware of this structure finally does attempt to locate the individual,
celebrity architect in a context.
The kids inhabit this anomalous realm, appearing to be in competition with each other,
offering ostensibly a serious competitive discourse at the highest levels of architecture in what
would seem to be an architectural parallel to Arthur Schlesingers notion of the ideal vital center,
in which the good government would balance between the control of the informed opinions of the
loyal left (the democrats) and the loyal right (the republicans).48 The vital center, however, like the
debate between the kids was a mythic ideal at best: while on certain levels there has been
disagreement between political factions, on the whole, there is more alliance than dissent on the
shape of the government. As C. Wright Mills argues in his book on the Power lite, the selection
of the power lite out of both loyal left and loyal right provides a continuity underlying the longterm operation of the government. Shifts that do come about are the result of institutional
realignments: the business lite slipping in front of the military, or vice versa. On the other hand,
the long-term tendency of the government has been towards the accretion and consolidation of
power in ever more centralized form.49 Analogously, the successful conspiracy organized by
Philip Johnson and the kids, aims not at overthrowing the existing order but rather at filling the
highest positions attainable with its members. The ideal of the vital center as great balance,
however, is really conservativism in disguise, an ideal of a society that works through the
autonomous structural forces of the market. Because the different forces appear to balance each
other in a competitive manner, the lite can look at itself and say: there cant possibly be a
conspiratorial lite, while we know each other, we are at odds on so many issues, we are just the

48.

See Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company for The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1949).
49.

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 267.

22
result of success in a free competition and thereby disappear into the structure of the
economy.50
The conspiracy of agency and the structural conspiracy intersect in the structural trend
toward greater and greater concentration of power in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals.
This trend has been traced in aesthetic fields by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his numerous
works which I will discuss at length in chapter four of this dissertation. In both cases, social
networks tend to create successful social reproduction, allowing those in power to hand-pick their
successors. In addition, frequently overlapping interests, such as Johnsons roles as architect,
businessman, art patron, and socialite, reinforce the connections between those in different
power circles.51
But Johnsons control in setting an agenda in American architecture is if anything, even
more blatant than the control of any political power lite: in 1932 he popularized modern
architecture with the exhibit on modern European architecture at MoMA he put on with HenryRussell Hitchcock, in the 1940s and 1950s, his work with and book on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
helped popularize the German modernist, later in the 1950s and in the early 1960s Johnson was
in the forefront of a move toward a more eclectic and monumental architecture such as that of his
New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, in the 1970s Johnsons interest in postmodern
architecture helped that movement take center stage, and in the 1980s, Johnsons sponsorship of
the MoMA exhibit on Deconstructivist architecture helped bring that to the fore. Certainly
American architecture has gone through a large number of changes since 1932 and it would no
doubt have gone through many of them without Johnsons intervention, but he has undeniably
been the mediator in a remarkable number of cases. The phenomenal reputation he has acquired
as a result, combined with his mobility in the circles of high society have made him into a strong
power broker, ideally positioned him to lead the vanguard of architecture, which he did.
And yet Johnson wasnt just in the right place time at the right time. That is a necessary
precondition: the power-broker needs to be able to take advantage of multiple, overlapping

50.
51.

Mills, 336.

For another example this time in terms of the repressive effects of overlapping
interests between boards of trustees for industry, universities, and media, see Ben Bagdikian,
The Media Monopoly, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983).

23
networks, but he also needs to be interested in doing so, i.e. he must possess a will-to-power.52
For his part Johnson has been fascinated by power in a consistent way at least since his midtwenties, as his fascist past shows. But it was this same fascination with power that has always
driven Johnson, as can be seen from the quote he takes from Friedrich Nietzsche to explain his
interest in architecture: In architectural works, mans pride, mans triumph over gravitation, mans
will to power assume visible form. Architecture is a veritable oratory of power made by form.53
Yet Johnsons obsession with power didnt just focus on architectural production, he believes he
is not a great designer54 so instead he has actively played the role of power broker and
dispensed power so as to design not just buildings but also himself and the shape of
architecture.55
Johnsons belief that architecture is a veritably oratory of power made by form raises the
question of how the contemporary architect has been represented arises: what are the
implications of the architect as Howard Roark, driven by his own will-to-power to create his own
aesthetic (and here I am using the male pronoun to emphasize the phallologocentricism of this
ideal no matter what the sex of the architect)? This demand of aesthetic over all else harkens
back to a crucial moment in Nietzsches Birth of Tragedy when the philosopher of will remarked:
The entire comedy of art is neither performed for our betterment or education nor are we
the true authors of this art world. On the contrary, we may assume that we are merely
images and artistic projections or the true author, and that we have our highest dignity in
our significance as works of art for it only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence
and the world are eternally justified while of course our consciousness of our own

52.

Cf. Jeremy Boissevain, Friends of Friends. Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions,

Pavilion Series (Social Anthropology), ed. F. G. Bailey (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974).
Boissevains book is an excellent study of the power broker, to which I will return to in chapter
two. On the will-to-power necessary for the power broker, he writes Thus brokers we must
accept as a given quality a willingness to manipulate other persons although in some cases
and here I am thinking of certain academic colleagues among others the brokers concerned
are not fully aware of the degree to which they in fact manipulate others. 154
53. as quoted by Peter Eisenman, introduction to Philip Johnson, Writings, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1979), 10. Originally in Johnson, The Seven Crutches of Modern
Architecture, informal talk to students, School of Architectural Design, Harvard University,
December 7, 1954; published in Perspecta 3 (1955), 40-44, reprinted in Johnson, Writings, 140.
54.

Kurt Andersen, Philip the Great, Vanity Fair June 1993: 137-138.

55.

Cf. Aronson, 297.

24
significance hardly differs from that which the soldiers painted on canvas have of the
battle represented on it.56
But then what of those of us who do not fancy ourselves Nietzschean supermen? If we
know about Johnson and his kids and their conspiracy and dismiss it, what can we be but cynics?
If we choose to do nothing and not face this reality, then we are co-conspirators, cynics, and even
what Sloterdijk calls double agents. If one knows that one is playing a role in an institution that is
only attempting to further its hegemonic role, then one is essentially a double agent. Here the
question of where ones self is located arises: is the agent a cog in the machine of the institution
or is he there to subvert it? If one does not know, or worse, does not care, then a certain loss of
identity follows,57 one becomes a co-conspirator. If we turn cynical about the role of Johnson and
the kids in architecture and say it is just part of architecture and we cant do anything about it, we
play our role in the larger structural conspiracy in the field, acknowledging and thereby
legitimating its figureheads and their cynical agenda.
But to recruit co-conspirators, both the conspiracy of agency and the conspiracy of
structure need subjects which they obtain through the disciplining of students in the design studio.
By discipline I mean that set of boundaries that denote a proper domain of a discourse to its
practitioners and the disciplining or training both implicit and explicit that makes a subject conform
to these boundaries.58 In other words, my use of the term discipline combines Michel Foucaults
definition of it as the boundaries of a field of discourse determined by what can and can not be
asked, and Althussers notion of problematique, which he defines as the system of questions
commanding the answers given by the ideology, which itself acts as an answer to the problems
of the time.59

56.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, (New York:
Vintage Books., 1967), 52.
57.

Sloterdijk, 113-115.

58.

A parallel could be drawn between the academic/professional discipline and the

conspiracy as patriarchal groups organized around rites of initiation and passage and borderdefense in order to ensure the proper social reproduction of the group. A discipline in crisis would
thus be one unable to safeguard a proper transmission of genetic material, giving rise to
excessive numbers of mutations, sometimes beneficial, sometimes fatal. This dissertation is just
such a mutant. The question arises: will it be beneficial, destructive, or merely a stunted growth?
59.

Louis Althusser, For Marx, (London: Verso, 1977; first English edition London: Allen
Lane, 1969; first French edition, Paris: Franois Maspero, 1965), 67 n. 30.

25
Therefore, an understanding of the disciplining of the architectural subject in postwar
architectural education is critical to this dissertation, for not only does the paradigm-shift take
place most strongly within the academy, it is also in the academy that the context for the work of
the kids and its reception is established. In order to do this I will show that the situation of the kids
as architectural celebrities is tied to the same process of subject-formation that constitutes the
disciplining of the architectural subject.
Subjects and Agents
I have so far identified the Howard Roark subject-position, that of a heroic, autonomous
architect who strives to maintain architecture as discipline and sees architecture as a formal
expression of will-to-power, an author whose signature will be readily discernible in his work.
There is also another subjective position seemingly at odds with this, that of the architect who
typically works in a large office, an architectural MTV consumer, a subject acting as little or
nothing more than a function of media oversaturation flipping through channels of flow attracted to
whichever pattern catches the eye, and if ever getting a chance, he or she will only design
architecture reflecting the prevailing whims of fashion, disappearing into the anonymity of
architectural production.
But there has often been a motion of reciprocation between vanguardist60 attempts to
situate the subject (either as producer or as viewer) outside (or at least in a better position within)
the space of the contemporary situation and a projection of the subjective position of the next
more structurally advanced moment in capitalism.61 Thus in modern architecture two trends coexisted, one toward both architect as hero and one toward architect as anonymous workerproducer. This kind of contradiction is not however simply an inconsistency to point out and leave
at that, instead, it is an integral part of the capitalist system. Louis Althusser has explained that
the proper use of the concept of contradiction is not that of the Hegelian dialectic in which only

60.

For the purposes of this dissertation, it is necessary to distinguish between

vanguardism, the attempt to situate oneself at the innovative cutting-edge of artistic practice,
implying both genealogy and the quest for the new (even if that quest has to lead one toward the
past in order to get ahead of the present) and the historical avant-garde, the attempt to break
down the division of art and life (or high and low), as defined by Peter Brger, Theory of the
Avant-Garde, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, originally published as the
second edition of Theory der Avantgarde, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974, 1980), 53-54.
61.

This kind of flux is also identified in the reception of minimalist art by Rosalind Krauss
in her article The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Art Museum, October 54 (1990): 3-17.

26
one contradiction exists at one time, magically resolved only to move history closer toward
philosophy and Spirit, but rather to see history composed of contradictions, overdetermined in a
complex way by their dependence on and reciprocal effect toward the structure as a whole.
Contradictions, as Althusser points out, do form the weakest links in the system and thus are
effective points at which to locate critique.62 This unhappy flux between a subject posited as a
way to step outside the system and a subject who prefigures the subject required by the next
moment of capitalisms growth is precisely such a contradiction that architecture as a discipline
has been able neither to suppress nor to satisfy. Instead, it appears that this attempt to train a
new subject for capitals spread in architecture is masked (consciously or unconsciously) as a
way of freeing the architect from capitals negative affects.
The contradiction described is replayed on a societal level. If on the one hand, the
spectacular society demands us to be switching machines, like the second model of the
architectural subject, there is also a societal demand for us to be solid citizens, to be mothers and
fathers, husbands and wives, to know our place in society, to go to church, or at least vote, to
hold down a steady job and not sabotage our company. This flux, between Howard Roark and the
MTV consumer, is a determining contradiction of this society, although it does not control us
completely. As agents we still have room to act, as I will discuss in the conclusion.
But while this flux seems to leave no way out for any of us, I believe that this is primarily a
question of how the subject and individual have been construed in recent theory. It is possible to
theorize our existence as agents with both the ability to act against ideology and the ethical
responsibity for our actions.
Louis Althusser in his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, explains that
Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects,63 in other words, Ideology64 calls to us, as if it

62.

Louis Althusser, Contradiction and Overdetermination in For Marx, 89-116.

63.

Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Lenin and Philosophy
and Other Essays, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 160.
64.

Ideology itself is a concept that needs to be defined for the purposes of this
dissertation, especially for architects who often equate ideology with the theory informing ones
work. The best introduction to the term is Terry Eagleton, Ideology: an introduction, (New York:
Verso, 1991). For an example of the architectural use of ideology as theory informing ones work
see Peter Eisenman and Leon Krier, My Ideology is Better Than Yours,
Reconstruction/Deconstruction, ed. Andreas C. Papadakis. An Architectural Design Profile,
(London/New York: Academy Editions/St. Martin's Press, 1989) 6-18.

27
was a friend hailing us with the phrase Hey, you there. By responding to our friend, we occupy a
space, acknowledging that we are indeed that subject who he called. By responding to ideology,
we are also put in a place.
Peter Stallybrass, however, in his essay Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text
points out a historical imprecision in Althussers statement.65 Stallybrass explains that
etymologically the word subject refers to that which has been thrown under, and To be a
subject is to be subjected, to be under the dominion of the governor. But the era of the governor
or monarch is the era of feudalism, which of course has been replaced by capitalism. Stallybrass
continues: It would surely be more exact to say that within a capitalist mode of production,
ideology interpellated, not the individual as subject, but the subject as individual.66 Stallybrass
explains that the subject is a historical legacy of monarchism in which one is subjected to
anothers will, while the individual is the product of a bourgeois valorization of individual rights.
This perhaps allows us to better understand why in recent (post-structuralist) theoretical
discourse, driven by an anti-bourgeois but not necessarily Marxist sentiment, the individual
and the subject, still often used interchangeably, have become such problems. The author is
dead,67 and even subjects are blasted apart,68 in attempts to historicize the notion of the by now

65.

Peter Stallybrass, Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text, Cultural Studies, ed.
Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 593-610.
See also the discussion on Stallybrasss work 610-612 and an excellent discussion on Althusser,
Stallybrass, and agency in Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in
Shakespeare, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 165.
66.

Stallybrass, 593.

67.

The three most important essays on the death of the author are Roland Barthes, The
Death of the Author, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath. (New York: Noonday Press, 1977;
originally published as La mort du lauteur, Mantia V, 1968) 142-148, Jacques Derrida,
Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences, in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) and Michel Foucault, What Is An Author?,
Language, CounterMemory, Practice, ed. D.F. Bouchard. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1977; originally published in Bulletin de la Socite franaise de Philosophie, 63, no. 3, 1969, 73104), 113-138.
68.

The dispersal of the subject is commonplace in post-structuralist discourse although

the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari goes far in this direction, perhaps to an extreme.
See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983) and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (London: Athlone Press, 1988).

28
rather conflated notions of subject and individual (post-structuralist theorists tend not to
adequately reflect on the difference between subject and individual). But post-structuralist theory
has been unable to develop this much further: ethically and politically, the dispersal of the subject
results in a passivity in the face of interpellation by the seemingly monolithic forces of language,
desire, ideology.
Post-structuralist theory of subjectivity has come to be substituted more and more for a
proper theory of who we are. Originally informed through examinations of fictional texts it now
claims to explain everyones day-to-day existence. The subject, as Paul Smith writes in his book
Discerning the Subject, is by and large a passivity, something at the behest of forces greater
than it.69 This makes sense in fiction, but it does violence to agency and our material existence.
As Smith explains
current conceptions of the subject have tended to produce a purely theoretical subject,
removed almost entirely from the political and ethical realities in which human agents
actually live and that a different concept of the subject must be discerned or
discovered.70
Under the sign of the subject and its dispersal, post-structuralist theorists are ultimately
dealing with a fictional, rather than real dispersal.
Some kind of entities which we will call agents within bodies do exist, as we can
see when a body of thought that can be characterized by its dispersal of the subject/individual is
so obsessed with its own subjects/individuals. Post-structuralism is, after all, a realm of (generally
Western European white male) heroes: Barthes, Baudrillard, Deleuze & Guattari, Derrida, de
Man, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan. As a brief glance across a bookshelf on literary criticism will
show, it is these proper names that dominate the discourse of post-structuralism. Thus, while
theoretically eliminating the subject, post-structuralists are, in fact, far from dispensing with it (or
even more properly, a concept of the individual) practically.
Instead, Smith suggests that Althussers interpellated or
Dominated subjects do not maintain the kind of control for which the word individual
might suggest, but neither do they remain consistent or coherent in the passage of time:

69.

Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1988), xxxiii
70.

Smith, xxix.

29
both they and the discourse they inhabit have histories and memories which alter in
constitution over time. Additionally, the interplay of differing subject-positions will make
some appear pleasurable and others less so; thus a tension is produced which compels a
person to legislate among them. So, in that light, it can be said that a person is not simply
determined and dominated by the ideological pressures of any overarching discourse or
ideology but is also the agent of a certain discernment. A person is not simply the actor
who follows ideological scripts, but is also an agent who reads them in order to insert
himself into them or not.71
Smith sums up the differences between agents, individuals and subjects
The human agent will be seen here as the place from which resistance to the ideological
is produced or played out, and thus as not equivalent to either the subject or the
individual.
The individual will be understood here as simply the illusion of whole and coherent
personal organization, or as the misleading description of the imaginary ground on which
different subject-positions are colligated.
And thence the commonly used term subject will be broken down and will be understood
as the term inaccurately used to describe what is actually the series or the
conglomeration of positions, subject-positions, provisional and not necessarily
indefeasible, into which a person is called momentarily by the discourses and the world
that he/she inhabits.
The term agent, by contrast, will be used to mark the idea of a form of subjectivity
where, by virtue of the contradictions and disturbances in and among subject-positions,
the possibility (indeed, the actuality) of resistance to ideological pressure is allowed for
(even though that resistance too must be produced in an ideological context).72
Replacing the use of subjectivity by agency serves a number of essential theoretical
purposes. By bringing back responsibility into the subject, it creates an ethical imperative: unlike
the passive, even dispersed subject, subjected to discursive formations and flows of desire, the
subject as agent exists, located in a body, and is responsible for its actions. The ethical
dimension of the subject as agent allows us to re-invest the agent with a political dimension.
Thus, when I write about a conspiracy of agency, I write about how agents act together to
achieve their own goals. That these goals fame, power in the field, the admiration of others
are ultimately ideological is beside the point. The kids have chosen, they have intentionally acted,
and the result is this conspiracy of agency. The kids read an ideological script, or rather, series of
scripts, notably that of a structural conspiracy appearing as the paradigm-shift toward cardboard

71.

Smith, xxv.

72.

Smith, xxxv.

30
architecture and acted in their own interest. The paradigm of architectural thinking that I call
cardboard architecture is concerned primarily with form and vision both as a way of resisting the
creeping spread of technology and deterministic trends that would dilute the formal element in
architecture and is necessitated by its heavy investment in photoreproductive technologies, while
at the same time it represents and influences the transition to a late capitalist architecture of
spectacle that takes hold in the later 1970s.
The Kids and Cardboard Architecture
As a shorthand for this dissertation, I use the terms the kids and cardboard
architecture, to refer to the above-mentioned group and paradigm shift respectively. But along
what legitimate lines can I proceed? The group I am looking at is small: two core members (Peter
Eisenman and Robert A. M. Stern) around one mentor (Philip Johnson) and perhaps three or four
other central individuals (Richard Meier, Michael Graves, and since the late 1970s Frank Gehry),
as well as a somewhat amorphous, shifting group of fellow travelers (Charles Gwathmey, Stanley
Tigerman, Jaquelin Robertson, for example), and is marked by its diverse imagery. To come up
with some kind of name based solely on their design principles would become, in essence, a
stylistic analysis. Johnsons term the kids, is, on the other hand a sociological grouping,
expressing the relationship they have with Johnson as well as their presentation of themselves
through the sixties and seventies as a young generation of kids just entering practice.
As the major players on the architectural cutting-edge since the 1970s, the kids have at
times been grouped together, although this has rarely been done by virtue of their connection with
Johnson. When critics or historians have tried to create some kind of group out of these
individuals (for example to deflate the battle between the Whites and the Grays), they have
generally been grouped together as formalists,73 but what formalism might mean in this context
has not been drawn out. As a rubric, formalism is of about as much use as (post) structuralism
or (post) modernism: in architecture Oscar Niemeyer, Hugo Hring, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
are among the many architects who have been called formalists at one point or another.
Obviously, there is much room to maneuver within such a position and thus a more serious
question would be: how do the kids use the concept of form? This question will serve to animate
my discussion of their theory and practice.

73.

See for example Rosemarie Bletter, Review of Five Architects Eisenman, Graves,
Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier and Five on Five, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
(May 1979): 205-207.

31
Cardboard architecture, on the other hand is currently associated with Peter Eisenmans
work from the late 1960s and early 1970s but has had a broader application historically. The term
was first used derogatorily in Frank Lloyd Wrights critique of Corbusian modern architecture in
his 1930 lecture The Cardboard House.74 For Wright, the unrelenting advocate of an organic,
tectonic, ground-hugging architecture, most new 'modernistic' houses look as though cut from
cardboard with scissors, the sheets of cardboard folded or bent in rectangles with an occasional
curved cardboard surface added to get relief. The cardboard forms made are glued together in
boxlike forms in a childish attempt to make buildings resemble steamships, flying machines, or
locomotives. Of late, they are the superficial, badly built product of this superficial, new
surface-and-mass aesthetic falsely claiming French painting as a parent.75
Cardboard architecture was resurrected by the middle 1960s when Robert A. M. Stern
rebelliously referred to the work of the new generation of architects then in their twenties and
thirties as cardboard architecture, marking out a distance from Wright and instead aligning their
work with that of the architectural avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s as the order of the day
for the new generation of architects then entering practice.76
Likewise, Peter Eisenman developed cardboard architecture into a theoretical conception
of a deliberately atectonic, cardboard-model-like architecture.77 Eisenman would use the terms
negative connotations to his advantage, as at one point when he explained that Cardboard,
usually a derogatory term in architectural discussion (as Baroque and Gothic were when first

74.

Frank Lloyd Wright, The Cardboard House, The Future of Architecture, (New York: A
Meridian Book. New American Library, 1970; reprint of a hardcover edition published by Horizon
Press, Inc. 1953; originally given as a lecture in Princeton 1930) 143-162.
75.

Wright, 144-145.

76.

Robert A.M. Stern, ed., 40 Under 40: An Exhibition of Young Talent in Architecture,
(New York: The Architectural League of New York, 1966). Perhaps Stern was responding to Sibyl
Moholy-Nagy who wrote of the projects by Robert Venturis published in the Stern-edited
Perspecta 9/10: "These cardboard models, which retain their cutout two-dimensionality even
when they have been built" in Architects without Architecture, Progressive Architecture April
1966: 234
77.

Peter D. Eisenman, Cardboard Architecture, Casabella no. 374. February (1973).

Eisenman did, however, envision cardboard architecture as existing beyond his own work and at
one point wished to use the phrase as a title for the book now known as Five Architects. See
Peter Eisenman, Five + Ten: A Symposium held at the School of Architecture, Spring 1981,
Colonnade vol. 1, no 1 (Spring 1982), 7 and chapter two below.

32
used), is used here deliberately as an ironic and pre-emptory symbol for my argument. Thus,
cardboard architecture already carried within it a certain built-in defense for its proponents.
Cardboard architecture for both Eisenman and Stern is an architecture of thin walls,
sometimes of shallow spaces, denying the possibility of a tectonic materiality of architecture. As
Wright referred only to the cardboard house, so cardboard architecture is concerned primarily
with the domestic project, avoiding public works and significant engagement with the social realm.
Cardboard architectures great strength, Eisenman explained, was the way it unloaded the
buildings connotations of structure and function, foregrounding its form. Significantly, this
unloading was done in the reproduction when, confronted by an image, Eisenmans ideal viewer
would ask: is this a building or is it a model?78 As Rosalind Krauss has written, cardboard
architectures modelness brings to mind a number of properties generally associated with the
model: generating form, exploring ideas, quite apart from the necessities of real structure or
the properties of real material.79
The depthlessness of cardboard architecture, its attention to shaping space with thin,
planar walls and abandonment of structure and mass, is the result of the spectacular attention to
the image and its reproducibility in late capitalism that I discussed above.80 This lack of depth
does not correspond to a lack of meaning. Rather, it takes place concurrently with a vertiginous
production of meaning created through a proliferation of ambiguity. Yet cardboard architectures
meaning is fixated at the formal level of image, the result of a paradigm-shift within the discipline
that consisted of a turning inward upon architecture as a field with foundations in the creation of
form.
This turn inward is expressed by a change in the architectures referent. No longer does
architecture primarily refer to the modern age and faith in its continued progress and in
technology, as it did in modern architecture. Instead, cardboard architecture refers primarily to its

78.

Peter Eisenman, Cardboard Architecture: House I, 15.

79.

Rosalind Krauss, Death of a Hermeneutic Phantom: Materialization of the Sign in the

Work of Peter Eisenman, Houses of Cards, ed. Peter Eisenman. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987), 173.
80.

On depthlessness in postmodernism, see Jameson, Postmodernism, or, 12-13.

My interest in cardboard architecture as a means of mapping the recent architectural vanguard in
terms of their concern with surface and reproducibility is similar to that in R. E. Somols My
Mother My House, 63.

33
formal generation. While its formal discourse acts as the kind of modernist self-criticism that art
critic Clement Greenberg located as the mark of true modernism, the turn to architectures formal
self also involves a turn onto its accumulated knowledge, i.e. its history and its historical forms
and principles of design. Thus, by re-introducing history to architecture in a more direct way, a
break with modern architecture is historicized, allowing its discussion as well.81
But cardboard architecture does not exist as an autonomous movement. Rather its
spread is the product of a specific moment in the discipline of architecture and its interface to a
larger sociopolitical condition, the structural conspiracy mentioned above. The paradigm-shift to
cardboard architecture is historically located at a point of crisis for liberalism in Cold War America.
Liberalism, as a willingness to dispense with old ideas that have outlived their usefulness in order
to preserve the existing order, was embodied after World War II in the form of the Schlesingers
vital center. During the first twenty years after the War, the massive growth of American
business and government drove a building boom that made architecture into big business with the
emergence of firms such as Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. But just as the predominant method
of teaching and theorizing about architecture in the early part of the century, the model of the
cole des Beaux Arts in Paris collapsed under the weight of new demands from society,
American modern architecture failed to deliver on its promises and came under attack from critics
who found it sterile and void of reference to humanity and from architects who found its poorly
defined method of teaching inadequate for the complex conditions of the day. Not coincidentally,
the political/economic establishment that American postmodernism served appeared to collapse
in the mid-1960s as America lost its mythical position as the one undefeatable and just world
power abroad and liberalism failed to solve social problems at home.
The question of what an architectural vanguard could still do arose. Some architects
turned to pop imagery, others to megastructures, still others to eclectic sources. Hope continued
for the redemption of architecture through science via engineering or behaviorist theory. The
upshot of this redemption was, however, the loss of architectures formal aspect and hence, its
claim to the status of Art or even to its claim to be an independent discipline. Another critique
came toward the end of the 1960s as radical architects threatened to do away with the discipline
of architecture entirely and concern themselves with social activism.

81.

See Jorge Silvetti, On Realism in Architecture, Harvard Architectural Review 1

(March 1980; article completed March 1978): 12-15.

34
Instead a program grounding architecture in form first became popular. Developed in the
early 1950s at the University of Texas at Austin by John Hedjuk, Colin Rowe, and Robert Slutzky
among others this formal approach, rested on the importation of a visual grammar to
analyze and produce architecture from the Vorkurs, or preliminary course, as it was taught at the
Bauhaus by Lszl Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers, both of whom immigrated to the United States
after the rise of Nazism and established schools of visual education dedicated to redefining
American art education to train students for a field of design then undergoing the same
professionalization as architecture. The codification of this research by Moholy-Nagys
collaborator Gyorgy Kepes, and its appropriation by postwar educators in architecture, created a
new way of educating the architects eye which then spread throughout the United States.
Coupled with a small number of other influential texts such as Robert Venturis Complexity and
Contradiction, cardboard architecture offered a return to the formal aspects of the discipline.
Thus, cardboard architecture as I will use the term in this dissertation, refers to a broad
paradigm of which the kids are a part, not so much a similarity in formal motifs or a style as a
change in the way architecture as a discipline is thought, a restructuring of architecture itself in
the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s. To this end, I will discuss how this new
paradigm emerged and came to dominate the teaching of the architectural student.
Cardboard architectures overriding concern with form shows the limitations of traditional
architectural criticism. While cardboard architecture can be analyzed formally, on its own terms,
understanding its significance must transcend form. Even if cardboard architecture is concerned
in part with an archaeology of style, a historiographic method based on style would not be able to
apprehend the unities that exist beyond simple sets of visual characteristics.82 Thus, investigating

82.

On the other hand, the frequent denial of the existence of style by historians of
architecture is the product of the instrumental relation of the discipline to architecture. When
architects began to discuss modern architecture as the style that dismantles all style, the
historians were only too willing to follow. Thus, inquiry into change in architectural production as a
function of fashion and trend-following has not been pursued by historians. Tom Wolfe has
accurately said Style is a subject that only outsiders should deal with It gets you no thanks
whatsoever within the field. The moment you try to indicate that there might be an element of
fashion in ideas, in esthetic approaches, you become the victim of the most opprobrious
anathema, of abuse that is quite breathtaking. Lecture at Pratt Institute, quoted in Tony
Schwartz, Tom Wolfe: The Great Gadfly, The New York Times, December 20 1981: Section 6, p
46.
On the end of style in architecture, see also Vincent Pecora, Towers of Babel, Out of
Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture, ed. Diane Ghirardo. (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay
Press, 1991) 46-76.

35
this material poses serious challenges to the conventional architectural historian who would
attack the material through either formalistic or stylistic analyses. Likewise, a careful step-by-step
reconstruction of the causal structure of the events or what Rosalind Krauss calls an art history
of the proper name which would reduce all artistic production to an exact biographical meaning,
arresting its ambiguities83 would fail to apprehend the complexities inherent in the topic. Instead,
the purpose of this dissertation is to make history live in the present by asking how this aspect of
the discipline of architecture is constructed, tracing a specific kind of architectural theory as it
becomes a new formation of power within the discipline of architecture to come to a better
understanding of architecture today.
Critical Historiography and the Innocent Eye
It is a serious mistake to the argue that the spectacle controls society completely, on the
other hand, it does permeate it, reappearing in different form and at different locations. In this
project I will investigate the spectacle in architecture and its effects: the celebrity status of the
kids, the elision of uncomfortable history, the increased attention to the architectural object, the
proliferation of architecture museums and the media as well as an entire system of architectural
education.
The latter is in many ways the model for the reception induced (hypnotically perhaps, or
even subliminally) by the manifestation of spectacle: the vision of the innocent eye. In the
architectural education of the innocent eye, the architect tells the student they must learn to see
with the eye of a child. The student must abandon all preconceptions and conventions, i.e history
and agency, are be forgotten in favor of a truth-taking state. The architecture student who
succeeds in seeing with the innocent eye operates in a subjective world of form, manipulating not
so much objects but light impressions on the retina.
To historicize this ahistorical vision however, requires going beyond the bounds of a
traditional disciplinary historiography that would seek to write a story of the great men in the field
and that refuses to take into account inter- or extra- disciplinary transactions prevents an
understanding of the discipline.84 To understand the development of the innocent eye in

83.

On the art history of the proper name and its relationship to other historiographies of
art, see Rosalind Krauss, In the Name of Picasso, in The Originality of the AvantGarde and
Other Modernist Myths, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985) 23-40.
84.

In this, I hope I am responding to Mark Jarzombeks call for a critical historiography to

replace disciplinary historiography. That Jarzombek makes this polemic in an introduction to an

36
architecture we must turn to its sources: the eighteenth and nineteenth century theories of child
education and child art as well as the twentieth century attempts to radicalize vision and
professionalize art. By doing so, we can see the assumptions that still lie just below the surface of
the innocent eye.
So too with Philip Johnson: if we want to come to an understanding of his role in the
architectural spectacle, we must turn to the extradisciplinary events of his life in the late 1930s.
The result is that investigating not just what goes on within the discipline but also extradisciplinary
transactions might prove uncomfortable, even intolerable for the discipline. Certainly architecture
as a discipline and as a profession will continue to exist, and this text will not magically do away
with it. On the other hand, it could serve to question some of the more oppresive myths of its
disciplinarity.
In order to address the questions raised in this introduction, in this project I will trace the
structural transformations in the discipline of architecture, their context, and how they lead us to
the paradigm of cardboard architecture along with the activities of the public agents of this change
Philip Johnson and the kids in their spectacular appearance. To do this I will examine the
descent of the idea of the innocent eye from Rousseaus critique of convention and the elevation
of natural child learning in his mile, through nineteenth century theories of vision and child art
education, its codification in the modernist art educational theory first established in the Bauhaus
in the 1920s, and the reception in architectural pedagogy of the 1960s. I will also focus on Philip
Johnsons fascist past and the collaboration between him and his kids in the construction of their
public persona. The chronological scope of this dissertation will end at roughly 1980, when the
kids power in the field was consolidated and they began to be widely recognized outside of
architecture roughly the same time that handbooks of design begin to codify cardboard
architecture as a set of principles of design.85

excellent forthcoming book on the innocent eye and the transactions between art appreciation
and psychology underscores a crucial subtext of the paradigm of the innocent eye: its pervasive
use as a model for uncritical disciplnary historiography.
85.

See for example Geoffrey H. Baker, Design Strategies In Architecture, (London: Van
Nostrand Reinhold (International), 1989), Francis D. K. Ching, and Pierre von Meiss, The
Elements of Architecture: From Form to Place, 1990; originally published in French as De la
forme au lieu, Lausanne, Switzerland: Presses polytechniques romandes, 1986).

37
This is an appropriate time to discuss a critical issue: the documents used in this
dissertation. Some readers might wonder why I do not refer to archival material and interviews,
the so-called primary sources of the historian (especially the disciplinary historian who wishes to
narrow focus rather than broaden it). I do not do so because of my domain of inquiry: I am
analyzing the operation of the public secret in architecture. I am not trying to expose the private
secrets of these architects, I am not writing a biography or monograph on any of these individuals
or movements. Thus, I limit my research to the zone in which this public secret plays itself out:
publications about architecture. To bring in interviews and archival materials would be to look at
material outside of the public secret.
The public secret is a phenomenon of the spectacle, a cynical secret that kept a secret by
being exposed and then dismissed (everyone knows that, who cares?!) or repressed (we dont
need to talk about that). The role of Philip Johnsons fascist sympathies, the postwar cover-up
and his spectacular machine of power in the field are, as I have stated at the outset of this
dissertation, well-known in the discipline. What is remarkable is that they have not been
discussed seriously, but rather left hidden in plain view through the operation of the public secret.
That the issues that I am addressing in this dissertation issues ultimately about the
construction of spectacle have so far only tentatively been addressed is testament to the
stupefying power of the spectacle. If the spectacles purpose is to make the obvious questions
unaskable, then the the role of a critique of the spectacle is to expose why those questions are
unaskable.
But why look at these architects if writing about them would only feed their spectacular
image? If everything that appears is good, then would their appearance in this dissertation not
serve to simply add a new twist to their media personalities? My answer to this question is that
the spectacular structure against which I struggle does not and cannot exert total control. As
agents, we still have some kind of choice, even if it is always within ideology. Even if architecture,
history, and theory are all more and more dominated by the spectacular structure of
dissemination, tensions between this domination and the contingency of the conditions of our
historical existence create contradictions in which we can operate.
This is not to appeal to any notion of a transcendentally real positivistic discourse of
Truth. All statements are historically contingent and change their meaning within their context
and Truth is always elusive. On the other hand, scientists continue to run experiments even
after having learned of Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle and it is hard to deny that in many
cases their results continue to be valid in our world, if only on a temporary and contingent level.

38
While finding out the Truth isnt possible, it is possible to find that some things are truer than
others. Cats do not live in the water, for instance is a contingent truth, not the Truth, but certainly
truer than a statement that cats live primarily in the water. My goal, in this project, is to find not
the Truth, but rather contingent truths about the working of the spectacle in architecture.
Outline
This dissertation will be divided into six chapters: chapter one, Architectural Education:
The Turn to Cardboard will give a background to the structural conspiracy of socioeconomic and
disciplinary changes from 1945 until roughly 1970 that privileged the paradigm-shift toward
cardboard architecture; chapter two, Philip Johnsons History: Fascism and Repression will set
up a background to the rise of the kids by exploring the Nietzschean power that their mentor
Philip Johnson has devoted himself to attaining as promoter of architecture, fascist sympathizer,
and architect; chapter three, The Kids: Avant-Garde as Conspiracy of Agency will explore the
rise of the kids as a conspiracy of agency and its reception in architectural discourse; chapter four
The Architectural Object: Drawing and Spectacle will explore the changes in architectural
production and reproduction between 1970 and 1980 that consolidated the position of both
cardboard architecture and the kids; chapter five the Architectural Subject: The Innocent Eye and
Discipline will explore the educational manifestation of cardboard architecture, the disciplining of
the architectural student under the paradigm of the innocent eye; and a concluding chapter will tie
together the themes of conspiracy, spectacle and vision.
Thus, Chapter One, Architectural Education: The Turn to Cardboard will explore the
paradigm-shift to cardboard architecture, an attempt to shore up the faltering boundaries of
architecture as a discipline. In the 1960s a belief spread among architects and non-architects that
both the modern architecture of postwar America and the liberal ideology of the vital center that it
represented were failing in their self-appointed tasks to save the world. Architecture as discipline
entered a period of crisis as its autonomy as a discipline was threatened on the one hand by
engineering, behaviorism, and statistical methods that promised to achieve architectures results
with scientific precision and on the other hand by counter-cultural critiques that promoted doing
away with architecture as a profession altogether.
The disciplinary response was to abandon lingering claims to social responsibility and
restrict architectures domain to a rigorous formal system, specifically cardboard architecture. To
explain cardboard architectures development, its genealogy in the theories of graphic art
developed by Josef Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes will be traced and it will be

39
demonstrated that at root of both graphic art and architectural attempts to create a visual
language is the internal demand for a proper object and rigorous means of discussion in the field.
The development of cardboard architecture is driven by a conspiracy of structure,
mobilized by the demands of professionalization to move in one particular direction along with an
alignment of extradisciplinary events. This structural conspiracy denotes an indefinite network in
architecture and in society that cannot be fully mapped and remains generally invisible, often
even to the conspirators themselves.
The extradisciplinary events that architecture had to react to were the failure of liberalism
and the danger of the anti-institutional, radical critique of the late sixties. These changes were not
however innocent, rather they were cynical, avoiding the dangers of a radical critique of
institutions by discounting them and laying the foundations for the return of traditionalism in the
eighties. It is under the sign of this shift that a new class of architects emerged, the academicians
who retained mastery over the visual language that cardboard architecture was based on. Of
these, a small number would serve as public heroes, presenting cardboard architecture to the
world outside. Hence the emergence of the kids, as heroes of cardboard architecture was made
possible by conditions within the discipline. Combined with the postwar need to validate
architectural discourse in the studio, a new class of architects emerged: the architects of the
academy, in particular, the kids.
Chapter Two, Philip Johnsons History: Fascism and Repression examines the power
broker for the kids, Philip Johnson. Johnsons obsession with creating a culture of power and
lites is documented and analyzed in this chapter as it appears long before the kids while he is a
promoter of the International Style and afterwards a fascist, and through his cynical rebuilding of
his life and image as architect after the war. Thus we set up a background against which to
consider his later activities with his kids. Johnsons relentless Nietzscheanism, his will-to-power,
his attempt to rebuild his life and the conspiracy to cover up Johnsons role as a fascist are
explored in depth.
Chapter Three, Philips Kids: Avant-Garde as Conspiracy of Agency will discuss the rise
of the kids to the top of American architecture with the help of Johnson in the later 1960s and
1970s as it exemplifies the architectural manifestation of the rise of cynical, spectacular culture.
The rise of Johnson and his kids is a spectacle, existing at the level of image, both of the
architect and his work, through representation, reproduction and dissemination. In order to
investigate a spectacle, one is forced to look at the structures through which it operates. The work

40
of the kids is thus placed in a context here through an examination of the function of exhibits,
debates, magazines, books, and journals in the production of the spectacle of the kids through
their emergence in the context of the debate between the formally-oriented Whites, led by
Eisenman, and the social-oriented Grays, led by Stern. This debate, often regarded as the
starting point of serious architectural criticism in the United States is in fact a product of a
conspiracy by Stern and Eisenman to promote themselves. Ultimately the debate serves to
publicize the visual grammar examined in chapter one.
While Johnson and the kids locate the value of their discourse in its bringing of pluralism
to architecture, Hal Foster has correctly observed that the differing levels of meaning inherent in a
pluralist architecture tend not to provide something for everyone but rather stratify the audience
into discrete classes based on possession of cultural capital. This analysis can be extended by
comparing architectural pluralism with the writing between the lines espoused by conservative
theorist Leo Strauss. According to Strauss, truly great philosophers and leaders have known the
truth, which is that there is no truth, but if they were to freely publicize this, they would be either
subject to persecution or worse, civilization would disintegrate under the trauma of such
knowledge. Instead, in order to communicate their knowledge, the philosophers would execute a
series of tactics of diversion and concealment and cynically write their real text between the
lines of the apparent text.
I will show that for Johnson and the kids, the architecture of pluralism is in reality an
architecture writing between the lines. The conspiracy of the kids can be seen as an allegorical
representation of architectures embeddedness in larger networks of social relations and how the
rejection of such an idea leads to a notion of architecture. Thus the cynical formalism of the kids
is fundamentally Nietzschean, writing a deep cynicism between the lines.
In Chapter Four, the Architectural Object: Drawing and Spectacle, I examine the
intersection of the structural conspiracy and the conspiracy of agency in the conspiracy of
spectacle through which cardboard architecture and the kids solidified their positions. This
conspiracy of spectacle appears as the new popularity of architectural representation that
encouraged the phenomenal growth of the architectural media and led to new modes of
experiencing architecture, an increase in the disciplines popularity for the public and new
patterns of patronage. But these changes led to the further spectacularization of vanguard
architecture as more and more the forefront of architecture appeared to be not buildings but
images that could sold as commodities.

41
The conspiratorial aspect of this change is twofold, reflecting the division between the
conspiracy of agency (the kids) and the conspiracy of structure (cardboard architecture). The kids
were deeply involved in some of the most important moves toward the popularization of the
architectural drawing and model and at the same time profited from it, having their work frequently
exhibited. Their interest in and the popularity of their drawing may well be because of the
derivation of cardboard architectures formal method from the two-dimensional image and in the
image of the cardboard model, as discussed previously and its resulting appropriateness for the
medium.
After discussing the rise of the architectural drawing, I will explain the kids attempt to
create what amounts to a prosthetic aura or cult-value for their cardboard architecture. Walter
Benjamin, in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility, explained that
the aura, or cult-value, of a work of art is broken down by techniques of reproducibility but he did
not predict the phenomenal growth of reproduction and marketing that re-creates aura in
prosthetic form in terms of spectacle, the cult of personality and image. While solidity and depth
are both characteristics of aura in an architectural object and are evacuated by cardboard
architectures shallowness, attention to surface-level phenomenon, and propensity for being seen
largely in reproduction, they are reestablished in terms of formal density, theoretical depth, and
the fetishism of the image. The rise of the architectural drawing, done by the hand of the architect
himself, replaces the aura of the architectural object with a fetish of the image: aura is replaced by
spectacle.
Thus the question of how architecture turns into spectacle under late capitalism will be
addressed. Architecture will be shown to be not just a means of production under late capitalism,
but also a spectacular lifestyle available for consumption.
In Chapter Five, The Architectural Subject: Innocent Eye and Discipline, emphasis shifts
to the kind of subjects cardboard architecture produces through an examination of its reduction of
subjectivity to the innocent eye or the eye of the child. According to the pedagogy cardboard
architecture, a student would learn to see or read images by voiding herself of the
preconceptions that she would have accumulated before entering into the first year of study by
working through a series of formal exercises in an attempt to grasp the fundamental elements of
a visual language. The teaching of this visual language is predicated upon an attempt to teach the
student how to see with the eye of a child, to strip him of learned conventions and subjectivity
and take on what these educators refer to as the innocent eye. In this chapter I will

42
historically locate the development of the model of this innocent eye in nineteenth century
changes in the study of perception and education.
After exploring the historical genealogy behind the innocent eye in the writings of John
Ruskin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, its development in nineteenth century child-art education, and
its arrival in architectural pedagogy and thinking, I will examine the writings of four cardboard
architects, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Michael Graves, and Richard Meier, in order to
shed light on its particular repercussions in architecture.
I will then turn to sociologist Pierre Bourdieus analysis of cultural capital to show how the
innocent eye serves as a special form of an academic classs reproduction of itself. I will discuss
the role of the innocent eye in legitimating a particular form of academic class and how by
reducing the subject to a retinal phenomenon it is linked to the reproducible image and
accommodates in advance recent technological changes for which the ideally-configured subject
would be a switching machine.
Chapter Six, the conclusion, ties together cynicism, the spectacle, the conspiracy of the
kids and the paradigm of the innocent eye. Using Jules Henrys psychoanalysis of sham, we can
see the conspiracy of the kids masking material reality with an autonomous, disengaged
architecture. Of all the kids, I will examine Peter Eisenman in particular because of his intense
fascination with power and with a liberating, subversive practice of architecture based on poststructuralist ideas of subjectivity. Eisenmans fascination with himself is related to Jacques
Lacans mirror-stage as a humanist attempt to define his Self, a project at odds with Eisenmans
supposedly anti-humanist stance. Finally, I suggest a radical alternative to the innocent eye in
terms of a genealogical vision that would endeavor to see what lines of descent the innocent eye
suppresses: the exploitation that is production and the violence that results from the
spectacularization of ideas and images.

43

1 Architectural
Cardboard

Education:

The

Turn

to

An alternative to political romance is to be an architect, for those who actually have the
necessary talent for architecture.
Arthur Drexler86
By looking at the emergence of cardboard architecture as a shift between two paradigms
analogous to the process of paradigm-shift in the sciences delineated by Thomas S. Kuhn in his
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions we can see it less as a genetic, evolutionary change and
more as a change responding to the political, professional, and sociological needs of the
discipline.
Instead of seeing progress or change in scientific theory as a linear series of revolutions
or as a steady genetic development, Kuhn argues that change in science consists of shifts in
paradigms, models by which the members of a discipline define their domain of inquiry and
methods of operation.87 As a disciplines practitioners realize that the new paradigm is capable of
solving problems that the old one cannot a shift between paradigms takes place. The shift is
rarely, however, a clean break from the past. The elements of future paradigms are often latent in
the present, if only as unsolved and hence marginalized problems. In the arts competing
paradigms can even coexist temporally, separated by a spatial difference created by the
practitioners themselves, marking themselves out within the larger discipline.88
In our case, the existing paradigm of modern architecture and what it represented and
was associated with, postwar political liberalism, were incapable of solving problems of a
decaying social structure and were severely critiqued on those grounds. However, the critique did

86. Arthur Drexler, preface to Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John
Hejduk, Richard Meier, Colin Rowe and Kenneth Frampton, Five Architects, (New York:
Wittenborn & Company, 1972), 1.
87.

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Foundations of the Unity of

Science, ed. Otto Neurath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970, second enlarged edition;
first published in 1962), 10-33.
88.

Kuhn, 208-209.

44
not come from the new paradigm which was also incapable of solving this problem. Rather, the
practitioners of the new paradigm suggested that the old paradigm was at fault for having
included the social realm within its domain of problems in the first place. Abandoning concern
with the social, the new paradigm coalesced around form. In other words, rather than there being
a problem posed and subsequently solved, the disciplines scope changed to eliminate the
problem from its domain of inquiry.
The result was a new way of teaching and thinking architecture based on the analysis of
architectural objects into constituent elements and forces composing a visual grammar of
elements such as line, plane, center, periphery, tension, shear, volume, extension, compression,
and rotation.89 In architectural schools this method is often still taught to first year students
through analyses of existing buildings, cubist paintings, and through exercises concerned with
evacuating the students existing preconceptions to return to the innocent eye.
Other competing paradigms such as Miesian modernism, corporate modernism,
Wrightian organicism and design methods, existed at the time of the shift and continue to exist
with varying degrees of interaction with cardboard architecture. But it is the cardboard
architecture that provided a context out of which many of the well-known programs and
personalities of the 1970s and 1980s emerged.90 By choosing to discuss this dominant paradigm,
by no means do I intend to valorize it over the others. My purpose is to ask why it came about
and achieved the position it did.
The Demise of the cole des Beaux-Arts
The most striking paradigm-shift of the century however, was from the compositionoriented model of classicism advocated by the architects trained in the method of the cole des
Beaux-Arts to the International Style, coming about when the proponents of the latter could solve
problems of economy, technology, new types, progress, and social intervention for which its
predecessor could not account.
By the early 1950s, the Beaux-Arts system was rapidly heading toward extinction and
International Style modernism was at its pinnacle, however with the new movement unable to
generate a satisfactory teaching method, its validity as a conceptual system began to be called

89.

For an example of this kind of thinking in action see the two works by Geoffrey H.
Baker, Design Strategies In Architecture, (London: Van Nostrand Reinhold (International), 1989)
and Le Corbusier: An Analysis of Form, (London: Van Nostrand Reinhold (U. K.), 1984).
90.

See also Jorge Silvetti, Attuali Tendenze Dell'Architettura U.S.A./Contemporaries

Tendencies in USA Architecture, Metamorfosi n. 6-7, Settembre 1987: 4-10. To gauge this kind
of attention, one could take a quick look at contemporary books in catalogs of architectural
bookstores and the three major publishers of architectural books: the MIT Press, Rizzoli, and the
Princeton Architectural Press among other sources.

45
into

question.91

This failure was in part the result of a change in the institution of the design jury.

Under the Beaux-Arts system which lasted into the 1930s and 1940s in North American schools
of architecture, the jury was conducted in private and projects would be returned with a letter
grade and perhaps some comments. By the late 1960s, however, almost all design juries were
held in the open, if not available to the general public, at least to design students who were
expected to sit in and learn from the critique. The reason for this change is unclear: perhaps it
was the result of an influx of veterans into the schools following the establishment of the G. I.
Rights Bill and the consequent need for professors to have more respect for their older and more
demanding students or alternatively, it may have been due to the influence of popular professors
at prestigious schools opening up their juries to the public and in so doing daring others to follow
their example, the design jury in the 1950s and 1960s allowed students and the public to see it in
the process of criticism.92 Serving on the jury thus became a performance in which the critic
would be judged by students, public, and other jurors on the perceptiveness of what he or she
said and a strong, rigorous analytic method was needed. Architectural educators swiftly found a
model that would facilitate this discussion of the architectural object in the work of contemporary
art educators, who were being driven by similar needs to establish a system of design based on
compositional principles.
The Bauhaus in America: Vision in Motion
Within architectural history, an over-emphasis on the postwar influence of Mies van der
Rohe and Walter Gropius has by now all but eclipsed the impact of another aspect of the
Bauhaus in the United States, a philosophy of visual education which ultimately has had a more
enduring legacy in architectural education than that of either Mies or Gropius.93 Its significance

91. On the failure of the Bauhaus method as a teaching system in the United States, see
Arthur Drexler, interview with Barbaralee Diamondstein, ed., American Architecture Now II, (New
York: Rizzoli, 1985), 65.
92.

Kathryn H. Anthony, Design Juries on Trial: The Renaissance of the Design Studio,
(New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1991) 11. Michael Graves, a student during this period,
agrees with the latter view, in Anthony, 87.
93.

In American Skyscrapers and Weimar Modern: Transactions between Fact and Idea,
The Muses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation, ed. Jarrell C. Jackman, and Carla M.
Borden. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983) 153, 163n.1, Christian F. Otto
cites William H. Jordys The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century (New
York: 1976) as a telling example of the overemphasis on the personality (in this case Mies). For a
much more balanced view of the architectural diaspora, see the Otto piece or Jordys own The
Aftermath of the Bauhaus in America: Gropius, Mies, and Breuer, The Intellectual Migration:
Europe and America, 1930-1960, ed. Donald Fleming, and Bernard Bailyn. (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968, 1969) 485-543.
There may be a link between Miess belief in elementare Gestaltung, the creation of form
beyond style, based on the elements of space, plane, line, structure, and materials and MoholyNagy and Alberss visual grammar. This concept was apparently developed in the context of a

46
lies as an inquiry into means of disciplining the eye, as an attempt to establish a visual grammar
derived from existing modern works, notably cubist paintings, and in so doing, look back to
modernism of the 1920s.
This attempt to teach the student to see comes out of the Vorkurs, the preliminary course
of the Bauhaus, as it was taught under Josef Albers and Lszl Moholy-Nagy. The two, taking
over the course in 1923, divided the responsibilities of teaching the preliminary course along their
own interests: Albers taught the materials or workshop component and Moholy-Nagy taught twodimensional form.94 Their goals for the Vorkurs consisted of erasing the students preconceptions
and habits of seeing and instead teaching them a new visual grammar that changed their means
of perception and enabled them to traverse the difficult terrain of the accelerated modern
condition. This new perception consisted of what Peter Galison, in his recent work on the
Bauhaus, has described as the means of coping that both the Bauhausler and the Vienna Circle
of logical positivist philosophers tried to use to deal with the condition of modernity: the creation of
a language based on the construction of statements from elemental units derived from analysis.95
Moholy-Nagys interest in education and visual language stemmed from his early
attempts to politicize art. Badly wounded in World War I, he returned to his native Hungary and
engaged in Leftist politics. In 1922, he and Alfred Kemny put forth a statement calling for the
introduction of motion in art. As the arbiter for the Book of New Artists of 1922, he included works
by Lissitzky, Rodochenko, van Doesburg, Mondrian, Ernst, Schwitters, Klee, and Kandinsky, and
as a result became known as the leading spokesman for Constructivism.96 He had been exposed
to the similar ideas of the Russian Constructivists. In Berlin, Moholy-Nagy became a member of
an intellectual circle that included Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, and Siegfried Kracauer. There,

what Richard Pommer has called the new radical abstraction, derived from Dutch De Stijl,
Russian Constructivism and the remnants of Dada, that overthrew the revived Expressionism of
the immediate postwar years. In this circle, associated with Hans Richters magazine G. moved
figures like Ludwig Hilberseimer, Theo van Doesburg and El Lissitzky all of whom apparently
subscribed to elementare Gestaltung. Mies did not appear to pursue this as a goal in his teaching
in the United States, further he did not share Moholy-Nagy or Alberss interest in cubist painting or
need to replace the artist by the designer. On elementare Gestaltung and Miess interest in it see
Richard Pommer and Christian F. Otto, Weissenhof 1927 and the Modern Movement in
Architecture, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 11-15.
94. Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed: Sources and Design, (London: The Herbert
Press, 1985), 101.
95.

Peter Galison, Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism,

Critical Inquiry Summer 1990: 709-752.
96.

Mark Roskill, Klee, Kandinsky, and the Thought of Their Time, (Urbana: University Of
Illinois Press, 1992), 122-3.

47
Marxist ideas were discussed and Moholy-Nagy became interested in turning Constructivism
toward art education.97
A critical component of Albers and Moholy-Nagys pedagogical system was Wassily
Kandinskys analytical theory of drawing which provided a new way of analyzing art and visual
relationships in a grammar consisting of relationships between simple elements and forces.98
Kandinsky taught two courses complementing Albers and Moholy-Nagys preliminary course at
the Weimar Bauhaus: an introduction to the Basic Elements of Form and an introduction to color
for the mural workshop.99 Kandinskys goal was to communicate inner states expressible only
through forms to the viewer. Thus, in his own work, he gradually eliminated the object in favor of
abstract forms and forces.100 In teaching, his analytical theory of drawing replayed his move
toward abstraction by steadily eliminating the object, analyzing it to the point of disappearance
using his theories of artistic form as the result of motion, expressed in his book Point to Line to
Plane.101 Kandinsky wanted his students to find the forces or tensions in objects which he
believed would develop a language.102 A typical exercise would begin with the creation of a
simplified drawing of a still-life showing the horizontal, vertical and diagonal axes of the forms and
their interrelationships. Then, a second stage of analysis would bring out the structural network in
the arrangement of forms through different colors and line weights. In the third stage, the objects
would become transformed into tensions between forces emphasizing dramatic movement.
These highly abstracted drawings would then serve as the basis of compositions.103 Albers and
Moholy-Nagy saw the use of breaking down a complex entity into a series of forces and adopted
Kandinksys method for teaching their own students.

97.

Roskill, 136.

98.

On Kandinsky see Roskill also Will Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky. Life and Work,
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1958), Paul Overy, Kandinsky. The Language of the eye, Books
That Matter (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969) and Clark V. Poling, Kandinsky: Russian and
Bauhaus Years 1915-1933, (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1983).
99.

Naylor, 87.

100.

See Beeke Sell Tower, Klee and Kandinsky in Munich and at the Bauhaus, Studies in
the Fine Arts: The Avant-Garde, ed. Stephen C. Foster (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981; a
revision of a Ph.D thesis at Brown university, 1978), 88.
101. Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane. Contribution to the Analysis of the
Pictorial Elements, ed. Hilla Rebay (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the
Museum of Non-Objective Painting, 1947; first published in 1926 as Punkt Und Linie Zu Flche,
ninth in the series of fourteen Bauhaus books, edited by Walter Gropius and L. Moholy-Nagy).
102.

Kandinsky, 112.

103.

Poling, 68-69.

48
In addition to using Kandinskys theory of forms, Albers and Moholy-Nagy drew on the
work of the former master of the preliminary course, Johannes Itten. While hostile to the mystical
elements of his teaching, they eventually adopted his method of breaking relationships in art
down into binary elements such as transparent-opaque, smooth-rough, rest-motion, much-little,
light-dark along with his use of the grid as a method for organization.104
With the appointment of the Communist Hannes Meyer to the directorship of the Bauhaus
in 1928, Moholy-Nagy, by then having abandoned his interests in politicizing art, resigned105
while Albers remained, in spite of protests from leftist students who saw his formal interests as
irrelevant, until its closing in 1933. Both were eventually to come to the United States: Albers in
1933, to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Moholy-Nagy in 1937, after a
decade in England as a commercial designer, to found the New Bauhaus in Chicago. The New
Bauhaus dissolved after one year but was reborn in substantially the same form as the School of
Design, later to be renamed the Institute of Design.106
Art in the United States, like architecture, was in a moment of difficult transition. The
dissolution of the Beaux-Arts and the shift toward a theoretically unarticulated modernism in art
schools created an urgent need for a reworked system of art education. Added to this was the
sense, among both art educators, students and capitalist leaders, that the task of the majority of
artists would move away from the production of public art, such as monumental sculpture or
portraiture, toward visual communication, i.e. packaging, industrial design, typography. Trying to
take advantage of this change and wanting to create an alliance with a school of design in the
city, Chicagos Association of Arts and Industries invited Moholy-Nagy in 1937 to found the New
Bauhaus.107

104.

Johannes Itten, Design and Form. The Basic Course at the Bauhaus, (New York:
Reinhold Publishing Company, 1964; originally published in German as Mein Vorkurs am
Bauhaus. Gestaltungs- und Formenlehre. Ravensburg: Otto Maier Verlag, 1963): 8-12, 34.
105. On Meyer and Moholy-Nagys relations, see K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the
Posthumanist Subject. The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer, (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1992), 128-129.
106.

For the most complete chronology and collection of source documents for both the
Bauhaus and the New Bauhaus/School of Design/Institute of Design see Hans Maria Wingler, ed.
The Bauhaus. Weimar Dessau Berlin Chicago, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M. I. T. Press, 1969,
first published in German as Das Bauhaus, Cologne: Verlag Gebr. Rasch & Co., Bramsche and M
DuMont Schauberg, 1962, second revised edition 1968). Reprinted in Wingler are the attacks on
Albers and Meyers successor Mies van der Rohe by communist students who found Alberss
preliminary course irrelevant to problems of material production and Miess belief in a new age
to be a metaphysical delusion, 170, 173. On the New Bauhaus and the School/Institute of Design
in Chicago, see 578-613.
107.

On the art situation in prewar America, the reasons behind Moholy-Nagys coming to
Chicago, and his work there see Modernist Marketing: The Consumer Revolution and the

49
While Moholy-Nagys school was officially directed towards granting architecture degrees,
its real contribution to architectural pedagogy lay in its preliminary courses of design. MoholyNagy saw the architect with a design education being able to create a unified exterior and interior,
with furniture, textiles, lighting and color unified with the building.108 While acknowledging that the
correct solution of a building should rest upon the social, economic, technological, hygienic, the
real architectonic conception, he argued, was space.109 Space creation was to be a matter of
relationships between spaces, fluid and changing, interpenetrating, and was to be taught in his
design courses.110
Moholy-Nagys ultimate goal was to train designers capable of working anywhere in the
visual field. The new art education would not just train artists, Moholy-Nagy argued. Instead, it
would train anyone to do creative work by bringing their emotional and intellectual sides into the
activity. For Moholy-Nagy, there were already too many free artists, who were trained to fulfill
the role of the genius-artist, a position few would ever be able to attain. Instead, he believed that
while the universal training in his school might help create some successful free artists, all the
students would be well-trained to work as designers and craftsmen who will make a living by
furnishing the community with new ideas and products.111
Thus Moholy-Nagy, who had at one point espoused photography and reproduction as a
means for communicating revolutionary messages, became the director of the first significant
school for teaching advertising and commercial art in the United States.

Container Corporation of Chicago and Marketing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus in
America, chapters one and two James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture.
Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983). See also Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy. Experiment in
Totality, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M. I. T. Press, 1969; originally published by Harper and
Brothers, 1950). An overview of Moholy-Nagys art theory is found in Joseph Harris Caton, The
Utopian Vision of Moholy-Nagy, Studies in Photography, No. 5, ed. Diane M. Kirkpatrick (Ann
Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1984; revision of authors Ph.D. thesis, Princeton
University, 1980).
Finally, for a contemporary view of the change in art education toward modernism and
design and a chapter specifically on Moholy-Nagys school in Chicago, see Ralph M. Pearson,
The New Art Education, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1941). See also Peter Hahn
and Lloyd C. Engelbrecht, ed., 50 Jahre Bauhausnachfolge. New Bauhaus in Chicago, (Berlin:
Bauhaus-Archiv: Argon, 1987).
108.

Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 22.

109.

Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 59.

110.

Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 63.

111.

Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 22.

50
The Bauhaus had maintained longstanding contacts with the philosophical group known
as the Vienna Circle and thus when Moholy-Nagy founded his New Bauhaus, it was not unusual
that he would convince four logical positivists from the Unity of Science movement at the
University of Chicago to lecture there, among them Rudolf Carnap, a leader of the Vienna Circle,
and Charles Morris, who had been the principle American contact of the Vienna Circle. Morris
was the most active, and, in the prospectus to the New Bauhaus, wrote that we need desperately
a simplified and purified language in which to talk about artin the same simple and direct way in
which we talk about the world in scientific terms. For the purposes of intellectual understanding
art must be talked about in the language of scientific philosophy and not in the language of
art.112 In a course summary at the end of the first year, Morris explained that it was not just a
language of art that was being discussed but art as language when he wrote The treatment of
science was based on the study of the interrelationship of the terms of the various sciences; the
aim was to show the unity of science by showing how all the terms of the sciences can be stated
progressively on the basis of a few terms drawn from the everyday language. We are now
discussing the question as to how far art can be regarded as a language.113
Moholy-Nagy shared with the logical positivists the belief that the complexities of the
modern condition would be understandable only through a new, purified, objective language. In
the summation of his educational principles, his Vision in Motion, he expressed his fears for the
postwar world:
To state the case is almost too simple:
The industrial revolution opened up a new dimension the dimension of a new science
and a new technology which could be used for the realization of all-embracing
relationships. Contemporary man threw himself into the experience of these new
relationships. But saturated with old ideologies, he approached the new dimension with
obsolete practices and failed to translate his newly gained experience into emotional
language and cultural reality. The result has been and still is misery and conflict, brutality
and anguish, unemployment and war.114
This idea that alienation and strife was the result of perception being out of step with the
times was a quite common one at this time, as for example, in Sigfried Giedions popular history

112. Charles Morris, The Intellectual Program of the New Bauhaus, unpublished
typescript, 1937, folder 87 in the Institute of Design Collection, The University Library, Special
Collections department, The University of Illinois at Chicago, quoted in Peter Galison,
Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism, Critical Inquiry Summer
1990: 748.
113.

Morris, Intellectual Integration, unpublished typescript, n. d., F73-199; 1-2, Institute

of Design Collection, University of Illinois at Chicago quoted in Galison, 749.
114.

Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, (Chicago: Paul Theobald for i. d. (Institute of

Design) Books, 1947), 10.

51
of the modern movement Space, Time, and Architecture. Both Giedion and Moholy-Nagy
discussed this alienation condition in terms of the division of thinking and feeling, arguing that the
artist, by integrating the two, could lead society towards a balanced state.115
Like Giedion, Moholy-Nagy felt that space-time was the single biggest issue for the
contemporary artist/architect. Rather than focusing on Einsteins theory of relativity, as Giedion
did, Moholy-Nagy conceived of space-time in terms of speed and also in terms of its applicability
to warfare. Writing at the start of the Cold War, he felt that the nations economy would continue
to be mobilized as a war economy in the conceivable future and he felt that his teaching method
would train students for this condition. Moholy-Nagy felt that the conditions of war were bound up
with an acceleration that required participants to change their perception of distances from spatial
relations to temporal relations.116 To illustrate this, he gave the discovery of radar as an example
of the results of a new perception of space-time applied to war, measuring the distance to some
object not through space but through the amount of time it takes for radio signals to traverse it.117
Beyond such scientific changes, Moholy-Nagy offered his system of education as a model for
thinking through complex logistical relationships of space-time that might be encountered by a
military strategist controlling an area and needing to make provision for huge mobilizations of men
and resources in time and space.118 He believed that his educational system of vision in motion
would teach this new spatial conception to postwar America:
There is, for example, the hope that it will help in grasping future problems and vistas,
enabling us to see everything in relationship, that it will furnish us with the right concept of
cooperation and defense against aggression, where again space and time are
inseparably intertwined.119
For the most part, however, Moholy-Nagys work served industry. Moholy-Nagy had been
on the near-Left at the Bauhaus, even so, his work was generally considered formalist and
irrelevant by Hannes Meyer and the Communist students. In Chicago, however, Moholy-Nagy
reformulated his political stance to write that The so called un-political approach to art is a

115.

On Sigfried Giedion and his discussion of thinking and feeling, see Kazys Varnelis,
Reading the Literature of Modernity: History and the Flatiron, Cornell University M. A. thesis,
1990 and Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject, 13-21.
116.

For a critical discussion of acceleration, speed, and the war economy, see Paul
Virilio, Pure War, Foreign Agents Series, ed. Jim Fleming, and Sylvere Lotringer (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1983) and Speed and Politics. An Essay on Dromology, Foreign Agents Series, ed.
Jim Fleming, and Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986).
117.

Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 266.

118.

Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 268.

119.

Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 266.

52
fallacy. Politics is taken here, not in its party connotation, but as a way of realizing ideas for the
benefit of the community.120 Perhaps he felt that by reorienting his work in this direction, the
potential danger of his left-of-center political role at the Bauhaus could be deflected into a lesson
in civics so as not to scare off any Communist-fearing Americans.
As he had done at the Bauhaus, to teach the new visual language to students and make
them learn how to see, Moholy-Nagy began with a three-semester foundation course.121
Instruction in the visual language was a means of making sure that the student would be able to
remove his preconceptions of what art should be and give him an innocent eye that would see the
world as a child would.122 This shaping of the innocent eye is the key to the disciplining of the
architectural subject that will be discussed in chapter four.
Moholy-Nagys Institute of Design was paralleled by Josef Alberss work at Black
Mountain College in North Carolina where, having been recommended to the administration by
Philip Johnson, who had met him on a visit to the Bauhaus, he came to teach in 1933 and
remained until it underwent internal convulsions in 1948 when he left to reorganize the art
department at Yale which, significantly, would be renamed the Department of Design.123 Albers,
like Moholy-Nagy, hoped to reform American art education by disciplining the students eye so
that he or she could learn to see clearly. Indeed, Alberss concern at Yale was not with any kind
of professional training but with teaching how to see. Albers did not want to educate an artist in
the classical sense of the term, or as he called him an [sic] big artist124, although at the same
time he abandoned the concern that he had shared with Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus for training
a student to be a professional designer. Albers was not concerned with giving a student a

120.

Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 76.

121.

Serge Chermayeff, Architecture at the Chicago Institute of Design, Design and the
Public Good. Selected Writings 1930-1980 by Serge Chermayeff, ed. Richard Plunz. (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The M. I. T. Press, 1982; from an article, "Architecture at the Chicago Institute of
Design," published in L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, February 1950), 253-254.
122. In his inaugural lecture at the New Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy called for the creation of
an art engineer with the eye of a child. See Allen, 57. See also Lszl Moholy-Nagy, The New
Vision and Abstract of an Artist, The Documents of Modern Art, ed. Robert Motherwell (New York:
Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1949 fourth revised edition, The New Vision originally published in
German as Von Material zu Architektur, Munich: Albert Lagnen Verlag, 1928, revised and printed
in English as The New Vision, New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, Inc, 1930 and New York: W.
W. Norton, 1938.), 21.
123.

Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College, (Cambridge,

Massachusetts: The M. I. T. Press, 1987), 8-9. See also Martin Duberman, Black Mountain. An
Exploration In Community, (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972).
124.

Duberman, 58.

53
marketable skill at the end of her

education.125

Instead, he restricted his teaching to the

development of the students consciousness so that she could, through art, learn to think. Albers
felt you can build the general character through art you can incite interest in science, in
knowledge of any kindany exploring and discipline and so on, can all be developed within
art.126 To this end, Albers sought to teach the student how to see and how to use tools to clearly
articulate what she saw.127 Thus, he wrote
Drawing we regard as a graphic language. Just as in studying language it is most
important to teach first the commonly understood usage of speech, in drawing we begin
with exact observation and pure representation. We cannot communicate graphically
what we do not see. That which we see incorrectly we will report incorrectly. We
recognize that although our optical vision is correct, our over-emphasis on the psychic
vision often makes us see incorrectly. For this reason we learn to test our seeing, and
systematically study foreshortening, overlapping, the continuity of tectonic and of
movement, distinction between nearness and distance.128
To achieve this end, Albers created a series of exercises to break old psychic habits of
seeing and establish eye-hand coordination based on his teaching in the Bauhaus Vorkurs.
There, while Moholy-Nagy concentrated on two-dimensional exercises, Albers began by
emphasizing three-dimensional exercises involving left-over materials and a greater emphasis on
a sense of tactility.129 At Black Mountain College, Albers manifested this interest in the properties
of materials in the constructive studies that he gave to students in which he investigated how
changes in form changed the nature of materials both visually and structurally. With time,
however, he moved towards matire studies or combinative exercises with material surfaces in
which, through placement and proportion, the student would attempt to create an optical illusion
that would fool the eye and hence, educate it to its own limitations.130
Alberss concern with the figure-ground relationship came out of this attention to the
optical illusion.131 Albers had been interested in the perception of figure-ground since his time at
the Bauhaus, where he met the Gestalt psychologists. According to the terms of Gestalt

125.

Harris, 160, also Duberman 61.

126.

Albers in Duberman, 62.

127.

Duberman, 60.

128.

Harris, 17.

129.

Harris, 17.

130.

Harris, 78.

131.

Harris, 83.

54
psychology, where the figure-ground was developed, we perceive visually through wholes
embedded in our perception. The figure-ground is a reversible image in which the figure can be
read as the ground and vice-versa depending on the context. The ultimate lesson of the figureground was that it made context essential to the understanding of a work. Albers felt that this was
a sociological concept, that if you learned that the significance of the figure-ground depends on its
context, you would also learn that people were also important not intrinsically, but because of the
relationships they were in.132
While Moholy-Nagy created a visual language and the principles of space-time and
Albers provided some of the basic perceptual concepts of disciplining the eye, Gyorgy Kepes
provided the coherent theoretical and practical means of doing so. Kepes, a fellow Hungarian,
had known Moholy-Nagy in Germany and had left at about the same time, arriving in the United
States in 1937, coming to teach at Moholy-Nagys school in Chicago.
Like Moholy-Nagy and Albers, Kepes was interested less in a theory for an avant-garde
painting than a theory for a visual rhetoric to be used in communicating messages.
Communication, Kepes believed, would best be achieved through clarity and effective design
through the purposeful direction of the eye around the canvas. He felt that vision isnt pure, but
rather compromised by both physiological and psychological limits which gave rise to the laws of
visual organization.133 According to these laws, no visual unit could exist by itself, rather it had to
be part of a dynamic visual relationship.134 To exploit this, Kepes wrote, one would use
ambiguous meetings and overlappings of shapes in visual space.135 From these principles,
Kepes mapped out a series of relationships such as transparency, interpenetration, compression,
overlapping, closure, and tension. Like Moholy-Nagy, Kepes gave examples from modern art
often from the Cubists George Braque, Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso for the student to follow.
Cubism, for Kepes and Moholy-Nagy, held the value of depriviliging the position of the
fixed observer in Renaissance perspective.136 After so many years with perspective, MoholyNagy wrote, our vision had become ossified and we could no longer see the objects around us. In
the first phase of cubism, perspective would be replaced by the simultaneous representation of
space and time. In the second phase of cubism, the object being represented would drop out and
instead the cubists would investigate the conditions of pictorial arrangement and analyze the

132.

Duberman, 68.

133.

Gyorgy Kepes, Language of Vision, (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944), 34-45.

134.

Kepes, 51.

135.

Kepes, 60.

136.

Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 35.

55
picture-plane itself. He wrote: The picture-plane is activated by cutting and penetrating it, by
turning it about and pulling off its skin. The consequences were that cubism had shaken us out
of a visual lethargy.137
Thus while their innocent eye was intended to be derived from universal and atemporal
principles, Moholy-Nagy and Kepes began by looking back at cubism, already an historical
moment. While its consequences could not initially be understood, Moholy-Nagy argued, we now
have the tools to understand their historical significance. Thus, the innocent eye was never really
innocent, but rather was contaminated by history from the start. Modern art was no longer just a
matter of vanguardism but also a matter of carrying on the modern tradition.138 This sense that
an original moment in modernism had been lost but could be recovered in order to continue the
tradition was shared by much of postwar art and architecture in the United States.
Gropius at Harvard
Before turning to the transference of the pedagogical system of Albers, Kepes, and
Moholy-Nagy into cardboard architecture, it is necessary to discuss the most immediate alliance
between the system of visual education outlined and architecture, that under Walter Gropius at
Harvard. Gropius had been associated with Moholy-Nagy and Albers since his directorship of the
Bauhaus and remained close to them.139
Gropius was significantly affected by the theories of Albers, Moholy-Nagy and Kepes and
in his Scope of Total Architecture, he cited them as being the exponents of a new visual
grammar.140 For Gropius, vision was mediated by the subconscious. But since the teacher
cannot teach the subconscious, he would instead have to show the student reality by bringing the
student to the unprejudiced condition of a child. To illustrate his point, Gropius quoted Thomas
Aquinas saying I must empty my soul so that God may enter. Like Albers, Gropius believed that
the optical illusion would affect the subconscious and thus felt that a grammar of how visual forms

137.

Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 37.

138. On the modern tradition and Kepes see Sigfried Giedions introduction Art Means
Reality in Kepes, 6-7. Giedion writes that continuity, not vanguardism, is the key to continuing
modernism as a vital movement.
139.

For Walter Gropiuss educational program see the February 1950 issue of
L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui dedicated to him and his program at Harvard: especially Walter
Gropius, Blueprint for An Architect's Education, 68-74. See also the critique of the Harvard
system by Klaus Herdeg, The Decorated Diagram, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M. I. T. Press,
1983) which has some useful information on the curriculum.
140.

Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, World Perspectives, ed. Ruth Nanda
Anshen (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1955, originally published 1943).

56
can influence subconscious sensations must be established. For Gropius however this grammar
was restricted to optical illusions with concrete outcomes. The eye was like the lens of a camera,
he argued, its distortions mappable.141
Gropius adopted the preliminary course for Harvard with the intent of teaching the student
a visual language, however research into form was primarily done with three-dimensional
structures, avoiding analytic drawing. The student would work in a group, studying actual
programs so as to focus all activities of the group on the social aim of improving the life of the
community. The student would also have to spend time in the field, observing the construction of
a building because Gropius believed it would teach the student the experience of the practical
part of the profession. History studies would help the student refine his thinking, but would not be
taught before the third year so that the great achievements of the past would not discourage the
beginner from his own creation.142
Like Moholy-Nagy and Kepes, Gropius tried to get away from the idea of the designer as
an artist and toward the architect as a coordinator, a man of vision and professional competence,
whose task is to unify the many social, technical, economic and formal problems which arise in
connection with building. Maintaining that the university, with its bookish climate was unhealthy
to the architect, Gropius believed that the teaching of architecture should be returned from the
drafting-board to where it belonged: the workshop. It appears that Gropius was unwilling to do
away with the architecture program, not to mention his position, at Harvard and start anew, so
instead he organized the Harvard educational system around workshops and fieldwork. Hand in
hand with this idea of the architect as a coordinator of means of production was Gropiuss
emphasis on teamwork, which would prepare architects for the vital task of becoming
coordinators of the many individuals involved in the conception and execution of planning and
building tasks. The new role of the Gropius-trained architect was to be a supervisor over
standardized building systems. This negation of the individualized artist-architect, Gropius
believed, would lead the students to good anonymous architecture rather than flashy stunt
design.143
But this is precisely where Gropiuss program and its derivatives differed from what would
follow. Certainly, Harvard under Gropius educated a number of incredibly successful architects
such as John Johansen, Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, Paul Rudolph but this success was
predicated not so much on design excellence as on a combination of the programs reputation as
a continuation of the Bauhaus then being promoted as both modern and practical as well as the

141.

Gropius, 24.

142.

Walter Gropius, Blueprint for An Architect's Education, L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui

February 1950: 68-74.
143.

Gropius, Blueprint, 74.

57
programs creation of an instrumentalized architecture of building coordinators deploying
standardized systems.144 Such a technologized architecture responded ideally to the demands of
postwar capitalism for economical, large-scale building.
That Albers, Moholy-Nagy, Kepes, and Gropius were successful in the United States is
due not solely to their bringing in a foreign aesthetic and convincing some mythical naive
Americans of the aesthetic correctness of their work or even its use as a way of reunifying the
alienated subject. Rather, having laid the foundations for a production-oriented professionalization
of art and architecture as design in the Bauhaus, in the United States they found a nation that had
begun to adopt modern design but that demanded a system that could be taught and reproduced
for the needs of the postwar capitalist expansion in building and marketing.
The Texas Rangers
At nearly the same time that Gropiuss system reached its apex, in the early 1950s, a
different reading of visual grammar began that was to have a tremendous and impact on
architectural pedagogy, remaining a foundational element even today. In 1953 a group of
educators retrospectively known as the Texas Rangers, formed around Harwell Hamilton Harris,
Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas in Austin, consisting primarily of
Colin Rowe, Bernard Hoesli, John Hejduk, Robert Slutzky, Lee Hodgden, John Shaw, and Werner
Seligmann (who arrived a couple of years later). While in retrospect their program seemed
revolutionary, at the time it caused such controversy that within three years all of the Rangers had
been dismissed or left their teaching positions at Texas.145
In the early 1950s, the dominant system of architectural education, derived from the
teaching methods developed at Harvard, revolved around teaching students how to make
buildings that would work functionally and structurally but was not usable as a means of
discussing the formal basis of the work.146 Thus, much of the criticism in reviews consisted of
either I like it or I dont like it. The Rangers felt that this wasnt a coherent enough structure and

144.

See Herdeg, The Decorated Diagram, 3, 95.

145.

Alexander Caragonne. The Texas Rangers. Notes from the Architectural

Underground. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994) promises to fill in the gaps in this
account.
146.

See Gropius, Blueprint for An Architect's Education, 68-74. That Gropiuss program
was not unique even at the time he came to the United States can be seen in Education of the
Architect, Architectural Record September 1936: 201-214.

58
the discussion needed to be reorganized along a more effective model, analogous to that of the
defunct cole des Beaux-Arts system.147
The Rangers believed in architecture as idea, a revolutionary concept for the time. If
architecture was idea, then it would have to be rigorous: if it was formal, it would have to have a
logic of form.148 Thus, for example, John Hejduk, who would later go on to transmit the
fundamental research of the Rangers at Cooper Union explained his need to develop a
methodology based on a reduction to the basic elements of architecture, columns, piers, walls,
beams, edges, and so forth as appearing With the beginning of teaching. I had to get things in
order. To order ones teaching, on a rational basis. I developed it from a methodological
condition. Method. Method. Do you know what I mean? Basic architectonic construction method:
am I making myself clear?149 In other words, there was a calculated attempt by Hejduk and at
least some of the other Texas Rangers to come up with a new method of architecture that would
have a rational basis. Building with the basic elements of architecture, the columns, piers, walls,
beams, edges, and so forth, the new architecture would be put together in a visual language or
visual logic of architecture.
The work of the Texas Rangers has to be seen against two seminal articles by Polishborn American architect Matthew Nowicki. In two articles in 1949 and 1951, Nowicki established
the possibility for a new way of teaching modern architecture when he wrote that it had become a
style from which one could extract compositional principles. Nowicki argued that any idea that
form followed function had to be tempered by an acknowledgment that a flexible space would
result from a functional analysis and there would be no need for that space to resemble any other
unless a style existed, to inform the architect.150
This possibility of teaching the composition of modern architecture was an essential
insight driving the teaching of the Texas Rangers. For the Rangers, the canonical works of
modern architecture formed the basis for their research. Under Bernhard Hoesli and Werner
Seligmann, the first and second year design courses included analyzing what they saw as the

147.

Werner Seligmann, The Texas Years and The Beginning at the ETH Zurich 195661, Bernhard Hoesli. Architektur Lehren, (Zurich: Eidgenssische Technische Hohschule, Institut
fr Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur, 1989), 7.
148.

Warren, 98.

149.

John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works 1947-1983, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 35.

150.

Matthew Nowicki, Origins and Trends in Modern Architecture, Magazine of Art

November 1951: 273-279. See also his earlier article Matthew Nowicki, Composition in Modern
Architecture, Magazine of Art March 1949. On Nowickis importance see Robert A. M. Stern,
Notes on Post-Modernism, Robert A. M. Stern: Selected Works, Architectural Monographs No.
17, (London and New York: Academy Editions/St. Martin's Press, 1991), 115.

59
best works of modern architecture through models and diagrams of their interacting spatial and
formal systems such as columns, enclosure, or circulation.151
The art pedagogical system of visual grammar was reformulated in the article
Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, by Rowe and Slutzky.152 Rowe, an Englishman, was a
former student of the state-of-the-art formal analysis of Rudolf Wittkower who had taught future
luminaries of English architecture James Stirling and Robert Maxwell at the University of
Liverpool after the war.153 Slutzky was a graduate of Josef Alberss Masters Studio at Yale and
had also studied with Burgoyne Diller, an early follower of Mondrians neoplasticism in
America.154 The article was circulated at Texas and became part of the schools intellectual

151.

Seligmann, 9-10. At this time Rowe discussed the possibility of a composition book
for modern architecture modeled on the Beaux-Arts composition books, notably Julien Guadets
Elments et thorie de larchitecture of 1902, in a book review, see Colin Rowe, Talbot Hamlin.
Forms & Functions of 20th Century Architecture, 1952, Art Bulletin, June 1953): 169-174. While
Rowe argues that Guadets principles have become invalid, he sees modern architecture as
advancing a peripheric scheme of composition that could be analyzed and disseminated. At the
same time however, the Rangers would also look to architecture further away in time for ideas,
notably the work of Palladio and the Renaissance. See Warren, 98.
152. Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, Perspecta:
The Yale Architectural Journal 8, 1963): 45-54. The article was reprinted with a commentary by
Bernhard Hoesli as Transparenz, LeCorbusier Studien 1, (ETH: Basel/Stuttgart, 1968). The third
edition of this book contained an appendix by Hoesli. A French translation,Colin Rowe and Robert
Slutkzy, Transparence. Relle et Virtuelle, (Paris: Droits de Regards Les ditions du DemiCercle, 1992), has recently been published in a book series edited by Paul Virilio.
For a discussion of the genesis of these articles, see Robert Slutzky, Rereading
Transparency, Daidalos 33 (15. September 1989): 106109 and Werner Oechslin, prface to
Transparence. Relle et Virtuelle, 7-29.
On the essay see also Rosemarie Haag Bletter, Opaque Transparency, Oppositions,
Summer 1978: 121-126. Bletters review essay is a formal critique of the project, primarily
attacking Rowe and Slutzkys distinction between literal and phenomenal space as being an
inadequate means of classifying architectural space. The surprise she expresses at the
pedagogical use of the essay in the ETH 1968 edition indicates that she was not aware that Rowe
and Slutzkys goal was design pedagogy rather than historical analysis. She does however raise
a number of good points about the difficulty of translation from painting to architecture and the
authors use of Gestalt psychology in the Transparency II essay.
A more substantial critique is byK. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist
Subject. The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer, (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1992), 151-168.
153.
154.

Peter Cook, Colin Rowe Observed in Action, Art Net, vol. 1, no. 1, 1975: 3.

On Slutzkys relationship with Albers, see his entry in Josef Albers. His Art and His
Influence, (Montclair, New Jersey: Montclair Art Museum, 1981), 53. In light of the discussion on
the innocent eye to be undertaken in chapter four, it is significant to quote Slutzky on his
relationship with Albers, It was he who most forcefully, but with a hidden compassion, stripped
the blinders from my prejudiced eyes and succeeded in flinging open the doors to a wondrous

60
background, later becoming disseminated throughout the United States. Published in 1963 in
Perspecta 8 and republished in Colin Rowes book Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, it would
become the foundational text for cardboard architecture.155
At the outset of their essay, Rowe and Slutzky expressed a concern with the rigorous use
of vocabulary that would become have identified as an essential feature of the paradigm-shift:
how talk of Simultaneity, interpenetration, superimposition, ambivalence, space-time,
transparency had muddled the meanings of the words. Transparency, they explained meant
the absence of guile, pretense, or dissimulation,156 but it in Kepess Language of Vision, it had
come also to reflect ambiguity. It was this ambiguity that they wished to promote.
Moholy-Nagy and Kepes, however, promoted glass as the medium of transparency in
architecture. Against this literal transparency of materials, Rowe and Slutzky proposed a
phenomenal transparency of space derived from Kepes and Moholy-Nagys discussion of
pictoral transparency in terms of the overlapping of objects in shallow space and turned to
cubism, which they saw, as Slutzky has explained, as a transition between classical
representation and abstraction.157 Their interest in moving away from glass as a material object
toward spatial relationships can be seen as part of the Rangers reaction against tactile emphasis
of Bauhaus-influenced education.158

universe of color, a universe that to this day I explore. Albers became for me an anchor and a
beacon of retinal intelligence and intuition.
On Burgoyne Diller, see Barbara Haskell, Burgoyne Diller, (New York: Whitney Museum
of Art, 1990) and Nancy J. Troy, Mondrian and Neo-Plasticism In America, (New Haven,
Connecticut: Yale University Art Gallery, 1979).
155.

See Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Culture 1943-1968. A Documentary Anthology,

(New York: Columbia Books on Architecture/Rizzoli, 1993), 205 and Christian Hubert, In
Response to Michael Hays: Pre-Scripts for Post-Moderns? in Beatriz Columina, ed.,
Architectureproduction, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 220. On Rowes
influence on American architectural education in more general terms, see James Warren, Colin
Rowe and the Butterfly Effect, Progressive Architecture vol. 71 no. 7 1990): 98 Kenneth
Frampton and Alessandra Latour, Notes on American Architectural Education: From the end of
the Nineteenth Century until the 1970s, Lotus International 27 1980): 28-30 and Peter Eisenman,
Re:Working Eisenman, (London: Academy Editions, 1993), 128.
156.

Rowe and Slutzky, 160.

157.

Slutzky, Rereading Transparency, 106.

158.

On the hostility towards the Bauhaus/diaspora interest in tactility, see Slutzky,

Rereading Transparency, 106.

61
Like Kepes and Moholy-Nagy, Rowe and Slutzky derived their argument from a twodimensional theory of graphic representation. Looking at analytical cubism they suggested
another list of terms as its defining characteristics:
Frontality, suppression of depth, contracting of space, definition of light sources, tipping
forward of objects, restricted palette, oblique an rectilinear grids, propensities towards
peripheric development.
Analytical Cubism they suggested, could be characterized as a pulling to pieces and
reassembly of objects159 but, above all we are conscious of a further shrinkage of depth and an
increased emphasis which is now awarded to the grid.160
To illustrate, the authors turned to analytical Cubist paintings: Delaunays Simultaneous
Windows of 1911 and a Juan Gris Still Life of 1912. both included objects which are presumably
transparent, the one windows, the other bottles; but while Gris suppresses the literal transparency
of glass in favor of a transparency of gridding, they wrote, Delaunay accepts with unrestrained
enthusiasm the elusively reflective qualities of his superimposed glazed openings. Gris, they
continued, weaves a system of oblique and curved lines into some sort of shallow, corrugated
space while Delaunays forms, are nothing but reflections and refractions of light which he
presents in terms analogous to Cubist gridding.161
Shallow space, like that used by Gris, they explained implies that it is cerebral,
intellectual, ambiguous, and playful. In a second essay written at the time but published much
later, Rowe and Slutzky argued that
In all instances their [Moholy-Nagy and Kepess] transparency our phenomenal
transparency has taken place within a highly abstracted and intellectualized work of
art; and in every case it has been the product of the most undeviating regard for formal
structure, of the most remorseless and sophisticated visual logic.162
But for architecture, a critical translation would have to be made in the first essay
between two and three dimensional space:

159.

Rowe and Slutzky, 162.

160.

Rowe and Slutzky, 163.

161.

Rowe and Slutzky, 164

162.

Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal (Part 2),
Architecture Culture 1943-1968. A Documentary Anthology, ed. Joan Ockman. (New York:
Columbia Books of Architecture/Rizzoli, 1993; written 1956, originally published in Perspecta
13/14 (1971), p 286-301), 218.

62
in considering architectural rather than pictorial transparencies, inevitable confusions
arise. For, while painting can only imply the third dimension, architecture cannot suppress
it. Provided with the reality rather than the counterfeit of three dimensions, in architecture,
literal transparency can become a physical fact; but phenomenal transparency will be
much more difficult to achieve and is, indeed, so difficult to discuss that generally
critics have been entirely willing to associate transparency in architecture exclusively with
a transparency of materials.
The authors addressed this mistaken assumption by turning to the comparison Sigfried
Giedion made between Picassos LArlsienne and Walter Gropiuss Bauhaus to support of his
idea of transparency of glass. They agreed with Giedion that the painting indeed has planes
apparently of celluloid through which the observer has the sensation of looking; and, in doing so,
no doubt his sensations are somewhat similar to those of an observer of the workshop wing of the
Bauhaus, a literal transparency of materials. But they explained that LArlsienne has the
fluctuating, equivocal meaning which Kepes recognizes as characteristic of transparency; while
the glass wall at the Bauhaus, an unambiguous surface giving upon an ambiguous space, seems
to be singularly free of this quality163
To illustrate an ambiguous spatial design embodying the phenomenal transparency of
space Rowe and Slutzky turned to Le Corbusiers villa at Garches. There, the transparency of the
building did not come from glass but rather from a system of spatial stratification. Phenomenal
transparency in architecture, they explained, would come from our being made conscious of
primary concepts which interpenetrate without optical destruction of each other.164 Thus they
wrote:
[At Garches] there is that contradiction of spatial dimensions which Kepes recognizes as
characteristic of transparency. There is a continuous dialectic between fact and
implication. The reality of deep space is constantly opposed to the inference of the
shallow; and, by means of the resultant tension, reading after reading is enforced. The
five layers of space which, vertically, divide the buildings volume and the four layers of
space which cut it horizontally will all, from time to time, claim attention; and this gridding
of space will then result in continuous fluctuations of interpretation.
By replacing Giedions literal transparency of glass with a phenomenal transparency of
space, Rowe and Slutzky hoped to create a rigorous, and ambiguous, even disturbing view of
architectural form and language. At the same time, they rejected Moholy-Nagy and Kepess
interest in a visual rhetoric that would communicate explicit messages and instead desired only to
communicate the conditions of the architectural object itself to the observer. While the art
theorists were interested in a professionalization and instrumentalization of the aesthetic, Rowe

163.

Rowe and Slutzky, Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, 168.

164.

Rowe and Slutzky, Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, 168.

63
and Slutzky were interested in purifying it in a Greenbergian way reducing architecture to the
manipulation of shallow space, to them the purest condition of architecture.
Significantly, in a 1950 essay by Rowe on Mannerism and Modern Architecture, he
suggested that the prime concern of this ideal condition of architecture was its effect on the eye:
In this idea of disturbing, rather than providing immediate pleasure for the eye, the
element of delight in modern architecture appears chiefly to lie. An intense precision or an
exaggerated rusticity of detail is presented within the bounds of a strictly conceived
complex of planned obscurity; and a labyrinthine scheme is offered which frustrates the
eye by intensifying the visual pleasure of individual episodes, in themselves only to
become coherent as the result of a mental act of reconstruction.165
Rowe demonstrated this process in his La Tourette essay of 1961 where he described
such a bewildering romp through a building in which sense only came in a gestalt at the end, the
result of reflection on the part of the architect. Rowes visitor to La Tourette, is reduced to an eye
dragging a body around:
A certain animation of contour the oblique cut of the parapet and the intersection with
the diagonal of the belfry will focus his eye and lead him on. the eye which was
previously directed toward the left of the church facade, towards the point of entrance, is
now violently dragged away towards the right.
But the conditions of the building are such that Rowes visitor is dramatically bewildered:
the visitor is so placed that he is without the means of making coherent his own
experience. He is made the subject of diametric excitations; his consciousness is
divided166
Rowes visitor would be able to make sense of the building only after a period of reflection
on the cinematic sequence of episodes he had encountered:
by a combination of themes that one might have thought were obliged to remain
forever separate, Le Corbusier has been able to instigate sensations of both tension and
compression, openness and density, torsion and stability; and, by doing so, he has been
able to guarantee a visual stimulus so acute that only very retrospectively does the

165.

Colin Rowe, Mannerism and Modern Architecture, Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1976; originally published in Architectural Review,
1950), 45.
166.

Colin Rowe, La Tourette, Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, (Cambridge,

Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1976; originally published in Architectural Review, 1961 under
the title Dominican Monastery of La Tourette, Eveux-Sur Arbresle, Lyon), 188. I am indebted to
Greig Crysler for drawing the importance of this essay to my attention.

64
observer begin to be aware of the abnormal experience to which he has been
subjected.167
This idea of a mental act of reconstruction that would explain the building as a gestalt
even while the individual elements, presented in cinematic spatial sequence would only frustrate,
would become a key component of most sophisticated thinking in cardboard architecture, notably
that practiced by Eisenman and Graves and we will return to this in chapter five.168
After leaving Texas, the Rangers splitting up and recombining in various places both in
the U. S. and abroad, developing and spreading their ideas.169 After a year teaching at Cornell
University, in 1958 Rowe went to Cambridge University where he taught until 1962, partaking of a
dynamic situation in which other teachers like Colin St. John Wilson taught and influencing a
significant group of students, notably Peter Eisenman and Anthony Vidler. He returned to Cornell
in 1962 where Hodgden, Shaw, and Seligmann would eventually come to teach as well. Since the
sixties, Rowe has continued his project of evacuating extra-formal ideas from architecture while
teaching history as a quarry for design ideas without a genetic or Hegelian basis.170 The Cornell
school became a major force in the sixties and seventies, teaching the new pedagogy to a large
number of influential teachers such as Klaus Herdeg, Fred Koetter, Michael Dennis, Alan
Chimacoff, Thomas Schumacher, and Michael Graves.171 Bernhard Hoesli went on to run the

167.

Rowe, La Tourette, 200.

168.

See for example John Hejduks essay Out of Time and Into Space, Mask of
Medusa. Works 1947-1983, ed. Kim Shkapich. (New York: Rizzoli, 1985; originally published in
French as Hors de Temps dans LEspace in LArchitecture dAujourdhui, September/November
1965; reprinted in English and Japanese in A+U, May 1975), 71-75.
169. Seligmann, 8. See also Christian F. Otto, Orientation and Invention: History of
Architecture at Cornell, The History of History in American Schools of Architecture, 18651975,
ed. Gwendolyn Wright, and Janet Parks. (New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of
American Architecture and Princeton Architectural Press, 1990) p 115 119 and footnote 38, p
122 for two songs about the Texas Rangers.
170.

For Rowe on his own ideas on education see Colin Rowe, Architectural Education in
the USA. Issues, ideas, and people. A Conference to explore current alternatives, Lotus
International 27 (1980, originally a paper written for a conference held in 1971 at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York): 43-46.
Hejduk has on occassion attacked the work of Rowe et. al. at Cornell: After the Texas
thing reached Cornell, it dried up. It became academic. They took Corb, analyzed him to death,
and they squeezed all the juice out of himThe warm Texas breeze hit the chill of Ithaca and
then rained itself out. quoted in Rowe and Slutzky, Transparence. Relle et Virtuelle, 9. One
wonders if the same could not be said of Hejduk, substituting perhaps Mondrian for Corb.
171.

Frampton and Latour, 29 also Werner Seligmann and Gianni Pettena, Le Origini
concettuali/On the Conceptual Origins, Architectural Teaching USA/LInsegnamento
dellarchitettura in USA, ed. Joel Bostick, and Gianni Pettena. (Florence: La Casa Usher, 1985),
17. James Warren states that By now [1990] architecture schools between Boston and

65
program at E. T. H. in Zurich where Werner Seligmann would teach. Hejduk and Slutzky, on the
other hand, went to Cooper Union and established a particularly influential method of education.
Cooper Union and the Search for Form
Since Texas, Hejduk had attempted to refine architectural pedagogy, in his words, to
order ones teaching, on a rational basis, to create a rigorous methodology for architectural
design based on construction of elements that he would list as columns, piers, walls, beams,
edges, and so forth. This method, Hejduk argued, would allow concentration at the level of
detail.172 The research by Hejduk and Slutzky at Cooper Union was documented by an exhibition
at the Museum of Modern Art in November 1971 and an accompanying catalog, Education of An
Architect: A Point of View173 which served as the most complete record and also as the most
coherent statement for dissemination of the architectural paradigm that began to come together at
Texas, as directly applied to teaching.
Emphasizing vision from the title itself on, Education of an Architect: A Point of View
aimed to lead the student to the innocent eye through the exploration of the primary condition of
architecture as the compositional shaping of space, in turn re-entrenching the artistic autonomy of
the discipline and making it stronger through self-critique. Architect Ulrich Franzen announced
this as the intent of the project in his introduction to the catalog. Carving out a space away from
both Vincent Scullys new conservativism and the chaos in the university of the late 60s,
Franzen wrote, the educators at Cooper were unique for their commitment to establishing new
connections between the mind and the hand through training in a radical visual perception. In a
reference to the kind of attention to visuality that Kepes promoted, Franzen quoted Harold
Rosenberg, who wrote that the new forms of visual perception established by Cubism and
Futurism were necessary to comprehend the rhythms of the big city life. The unstated implication
thus was that the educators at Cooper Union were able to get their students out of the morass of
unrest that characterized the late sixties by giving them a new way of seeing. This radical visual
perception would be taught to the students during their formative years and would be formed by a
continuation of the foundational principles of modern art and architecture, derived a visual

Washington are filled with an entire generation of professors and deans who have studied from,
or under, Rowe. And architecture education has not been the same since. in Warren, Colin
Rowe and the Butterfly Effect, 98.
172.
173.

John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works 1947-1983, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985) 35.

John Hejduk, Education of An Architect: A Point of View, (New York: The Cooper
Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 1971). For some discussion of the book, its
impact and its relation to its successor, also of the same title, and the possibility (or impossibility)
of reading a book produced by a school of architecture about itself see Val K. Warke, Education
of an Architect and Tadao Ando: The Yale Studio & Current Works, The Journal of Architectural
Education 43.4 (Summer 1990): 45-50.

66
language from historical analysis of the modern masters, notably Mondrian and Le

Corbusier.174

Franzen referred to Rowe and Slutzkys Transparency as an example, albeit textual, of such a
historical analysis leading to visual research.
In the first project that the student would encounter, Hejduk gave the students a NineSquare grid in order to force them to understand the elements of architecture, which he listed as
grid, frame, post, beam, panel, center, periphery, field, edge, line, plane, volume, extension,
compression, shear, etc. together with generating an inquiry into the meaning of plane, elevation,
section and details and a grasp of the relations between two-dimensional drawing, axonometric
drawing, and model. From all this, Hejduk wrote, an understanding of the elements is revealed
an idea of fabrication emerges.175 Robert Slutzky adds that in the Nine-Square grid problem and
its extensions, an in-depth investigation of binary architectonic relationships would take place.
According to Slutzky, the intense involvement with the project would demand both re-evaluation
and modification of previously held architectural prejudices.176
With the theoretical weight of Rowe and Slutzkys essay on Transparency, the visual
impact of the comprehensive system of education elaborated at Cooper Union, and the
appointment of a large number of graduates of both schools as faculty members throughout the
United States,177 the work of the Texas Rangers and the research at Cooper Union spread to
many schools of architecture in the United States, becoming codified in a series of textbooks of
principles of architectural composition such as Francis D. K. Chings Form, Space, and Order or
Pierre von Meisss The Elements of Architecture: From Form to Place.178
This kind of approach to visual grammar or principles of composition explains
architecture as a set of purely formal rules which were derived from the canon of art and
architecture. Explaining architecture in terms of form however obscures the role of the

174.

Ulrich Franzen, Introduction, Education of An Architect: A Point of View, ed. John

Hejduk. (New York: The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 1971) 5.
175.

Hejduk, 7.

176.

Slutzky in Hejduk, 23.

177.

See Werner Seligmann and Gianni Pettena, Le Origini concettuali/On the

Conceptual Origins, Architectural Teaching USA/LInsegnamento dellarchitettura in USA, ed.
Joel Bostick, and Gianni Pettena. (Florence: La Casa Usher, 1985), and Frampton and Latour,
31.
178.

See Geoffrey H. Baker, Design Strategies In Architecture, (London: Van Nostrand

Reinhold (International), 1989), and Le Corbusier: An Analysis of Form, (London: Van Nostrand
Reinhold (U. K.), 1984), vii. Pierre von Meiss, The Elements of Architecture: From Form to
Place.

67
architectural object within the social and cultural processes in which it is embedded, whether it is
the canonical object being read or the experimental object under construction. Thus, the
deductive aspect of the visual grammar, i.e., its legitimation of a search for principles in the
architecture of near and distant past gives motive to a retreat to alternate pasts, to the
nationalism of American architecture, the authenticity of tradition in classical architecture, and to
the avantgarde of the 1920s and 30s as perceived through the exhibit The International Style in
which modern architecture is read as style in a field void of politicized content, a field in which van
Doesberg, Corbusier, Meyer, and Terragni can all coexist peacefully.
Venturi and the New Critics
The formal emphasis in the paradigm of cardboard architecture was bolstered by the
early work of Robert Venturi. While Robert Venturis Complexity and Contradiction in Modern
Architecture has generally been analyzed in terms of its interest in popular culture,179 for the
purposes of discussing the new paradigm Venturis book is significant for the way he carves out a
role for architecture restricted to aesthetics. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Venturi refused to
consider connections between architecture and other things, notably technology or the social
sciences which he believed result in diagrammatic planning. To the contrary, Venturi argued,
The architects ever diminishing power and his growing ineffectualness in shaping the whole
environment can perhaps be reversed, ironically, by narrowing his concerns and concentrating on
his job. Perhaps then relationships and power will take care of themselves.180
In order to turn the architects concentration to his or her job, Venturi proposed an
analytical model based on the New Criticism in literary theory. From the New Critics, Venturi took
an interest in ambiguity and in breaking down a text into its constitutive elements,181 and putting it
back together without forcing an artificial unity upon it.182 This resulting architecture of ambiguity
would embody the complexity and contradiction of the title, a complexity that Venturi argued was
immanent in architecture because of the impossibility of accomplishing a totally successful
building in terms of functional, situational, and structural limitations within any purified, idealized
architectural object. Like the earlier art educators, Venturi referred to the Gestalt psychology
argument that context determines meaning, but he extended it in a way they did not foresee: to

179.

See for example, Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, Third
ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 290.
180. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Museum of Modern Art
Papers on Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977 second edition; first
published 1966), 14.
181.

Venturi, 13.

182.

Venturi, 20.

68
argue that architects should use conventional elements in unconventional ways and
unconventional elements in conventional ways in order to create meaning. Venturi drew a parallel
between this deliberate misuse of architectural form and the swerve from ordinary language that
T. S. Eliot used to create a definition of poetry, writing that both allowed us to see things in a
different way.183
The Vital Center: Postwar Liberalism in the United States
It was not, however, sheer force of argument which led to the acceptance of cardboard
architecture as a paradigm for thinking and teaching architecture in the United States. Rather, just
as the International Style, a specific version of modern architecture, became popular in the United
States with help from domestic economic and political considerations184 so did cardboard
architecture: it was in the right place at the right time.
The United States came out of the Second World War as the preeminent world power.
While its chief rival the Soviet Union had lost 7 million troops and around twice that number in
civilians, the U.S. had only lost 300,000. Ravaged by war, Britain, Japan, Germany, and France
all were dependent on America for their basic subsistence.185 As a result, by 1945 the United
States was in better shape economically than it was in 1939, at the start of the war. The United
States had come out of the Second World War as the preeminent world power and during the
postwar years between 1945 and 1965 the American economy grew tremendously while in
Europe and Japan growth was absorbed by the task of reconstruction. The unprecedented growth
allowed the government, under a program of domestic liberalism, to both fund social programs
and keep taxes low and in so doing keep the rich, the middle class and the poor all thinking that
their condition would only improve. The 1960s were the high point of modern American liberalism:

183. Venturi, 43-44. For the relationship between Venturi and literary criticism, as well as
a good critique of his formalist project, see Vincent Pecora, Towers of Babel, Out of Site: A
Social Criticism of Architecture, ed. Diane Ghirardo. (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press,
1991) 48-52.
184.

See chapter 16 of Richard Pommer and Christian F. Otto, Weissenhof 1927 and the
Modern Movement in Architecture, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). The authors
assert that the alignment between democracy, liberalism, and the International Style was the
result of the adoption of the Heimatstil and Neoclassicism by the Nazis and their corresponding
rejection of modernist architecture (the rejection of modernism within the Soviet Union was of
course also essential to its success in the West). The idea that the enemy of my enemy is my
friend would lead western governments to adopt modernist architecture, as Pommer and Otto
write, to become the sign after World War II of what was taken to be the historically revealed
truth that there was only one paradigm of modern existence, the way of Western liberal
democracy and industrial capitalism. 165
185.

Walter Russell Mead, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition, (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), 11-12.

69
under the glamorous figure of John F. Kennedy racism was on the decline, the welfare state
appeared to be succeeding, economic management seemed to have been perfected, and the
space program was showing the power of American technology. Foreign policy was still a
success: free trade was helping the economy, the comprehensive test ban was the first step
toward the control of nuclear weapons and the Kennedy doctrine of peace anywhere at any price
was in force.186 It was, in many ways, the age of National Geographic Magazine, in which
American tourists and scientists visited the world and were loved by all, both grateful, liberated
Europeans of the father countries and bare-breasted natives alike while the achievements of the
space program and the beauty of the country at home were celebrated.
It was also during this period that the proponents of modern architecture allied
themselves with the government and with business, equating modern architecture and the faith in
progress held by liberalism.187 A landmark of modernisms arrival in the United States was
Buildings for Business and Government, a catalog for the exhibit of the same name held at MoMA
25 February 28 April 1957. The buildings illustrated were Edward Durrell Stones United States
Embassy for New Delhi, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrills United States Air Force Academy, Mies
van der Rohes Seagram building, Eero Saarinens General Motors Technical Center, SOMs
Chase Manhattan Bank building, and Minoru Yamasakis terminal building for St. Louiss Lambert
Field. Of the postwar building boom and the adoption of modern architecture, Arthur Drexler, the
director of the exhibition, wrote, [I]t is a national enthusiasm for the act of building itself that is

186.
187.

Mead, 43-44.

For an example of the use of modern architecture as global propaganda for the cold
war United States see the Architecture series of the Forum Lectures on the Voice of America,
published in pamphlet form by the U.S. Information Agency. The series consisted of twelve
lectures in 1960-61, each on a different topic by the Vincent Scully, William Jordy, Mario
Salvadori, R. Buckminster Fuller, Louis I. Kahn, William Hartmann (of Skidmore, Owings, and
Merrill), Philip C. Johnson, Paul M. Rudolph, Minoru Yamasaki, Victor Gruen, and Henry-Russell
Hitchcock. Hitchcock was the coordinator of the series and gave the opening lecture on The Rise
to World Prominence of American Architecture and the closing lecture on Looking Forward. In
his first lecture, Hitchcock situates American architecture as a leader in world architecture, unique
in its friendly reception to foreign migrs and influenced by both European and Japanese
traditions. I, 7.
In the closing lecture, Hitchcock contemplates geopolitical battle in architectural terms
when he writes It is hazardous to look forward in any field of human activity; yet some thirty
years ago various writers on modern architecture of whom I was one foresaw the triumph of
what Mr. Johnson and I then christened the International Style (in the title of a book published in
1932). The Hitlerite and Stalinist reactions against the modern architecture of the Western World,
initiated in fact the year after that book, have not survived. Moreover the International Style, which
seemed to many of our compatriots un-American and even possibly subversive in 1932, has all
but come to be accepted outside the United States as the American Style. I, 1. Hitchcock sees
the technical aspects of American architecture as leading the world and cites the most serious
problem for the U.S. as the rebuilding of the city core. He ends hoping that the American
architects will rise to their task and offer a model for the world to follow.

70
carrying architecture into livelier

realms.188

Drexler went on to link modern architecture and

Americas representation of itself : Emboldened perhaps by its present role in world affairs, the
United States no longer demands that major government commissions be executed in antique
styles. The embassies being built abroad by the State Department, as part of a program which
began in 1946, and the new Academy for the United States Air Force, look like what they are:
modern American buildings.189
Two decades later, Drexler would state that the show was very popular with the public
and did the profession a lot of good. It established the fact that modern architecture had arrived
and was no longer a controversial subject. From then on the issues were how good is it, and how
do you make it better.190
But golden ages have historically tended to be underpinned by crisis and this one proved
no exception. The postwar perception that the stability of the United States was in danger from
both outside, in terms of atomic war with the Soviets, and inside, in terms of subversive-instigated
social collapse or from military-industrial totalitarianism, gave impetus to a new ideology of the
center. This ideology was given eloquent form in Arthur Schlesingers The Vital Center: The
Politics of Freedom. In this book, Schlesinger attempted to outline a course for politics in the age
of anxiety. Schlesinger believed that facing the horrors of the Holocaust, the atomic war in Japan
and the Stalinist purges led the West to reverse its previous assumption, held since the
Enlightenment, that man is perfectible and that progress toward the good is inevitable.191 With
the newfound insecurity, Schlesinger wrote, our objective becomes to defend and strengthen
free society through whatever means possible short of war. Such defense would be best
accomplished by steering a course through the political center by balancing both near-left and
near-right elements.192 The result would be to dialectically dispense with old ideas that had
outlived their usefulness without actually posing a threat to the governing institutions.

188.

Arthur Drexler, Buildings for Business and Government, (New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, 1957), 5.
189.

Drexler, 6.

190.

Drexler, American Architecture Now II, 69.

191.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company for The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1949), 1-10.
192.

Schlesinger, 10.

71
The Decline of Liberalism
In retrospect at least, the collapse of the American Empire seemed to begin with the
collective psychic trauma following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963,193 and
certainly by the assassination of his brother Bobby in 1968, collapse was well underway. As
European nations began to recover their positions in the world order, the basic structural
discrimination against African Americans led to the realization that racism was still alive and also
to inner-city riots, and the unexpected expansion of a police action in Vietnam into an unpopular
war led people to worry that the program of liberalism had failed.
In architecture, the liberal ideal of an alliance between government, business, the
common man, and architecture became suspect. The largely successful attempts to sell modern
architecture to both architects (through architectural periodicals) and the general public (mainly
through traveling exhibitions and catalogs generated by the Museum of Modern Art and the
publicity generated by these in turn) had domesticated modern architecture for American
consumption by reducing it to images of Enlightened progress. But the reality of buildings built in
a cheapened modernism during the postwar building boom by the likes of Emery Roth and Sons,
convinced many that modern architecture was a disaster. The alliance of modern architecture
with the policies of urban renewal in order to construct massive government complexes and
public housing only served to amplify feelings as the fabric of the existing American city came
under siege.
Already in 1961 Architectural Forum editor Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great
American Cities194 marked the rising discontent among citizens who felt that the alliance of
modern architecture and big government was ruining the city by eliminating streets and squares
in favor of an inhuman ideal of Corbusian towers in parks and in the process losing the chaos and
liveliness that made cities human. Architects keenly felt the emerging crisis and many reacted to
it by turning to the still-promising social sciences.
By the mid-sixties, the threat to architecture from scientism was coupled with a critique of
architectures capacity to attain the kind of revolution promised by Le Corbusier. This sense of
loss was directly related to the loss of faith in the American postwar mission of giving progress
and democracy to the world. Vincent Scully, in his postscript to Modern Architecture: The
Architecture of Democracy wrote that Paul Rudolphs Art & Architecture Building and the Kennedy
presidency both marked the beginning of a tragic age of modernism through their out-of-date

193.

However, this was chiefly symbolic. On the myth of Camelot see Noam Chomsky,
Rethinking Camelot, (Boston: South End Press, 1992) and Bruce Handy, One Brief Tarnished
Moment, Spy November 1993: 30-42.
194.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (New York: Random
House, 1961).

72
empiricism and mistaken heroic confrontationalism that had little idea of their

consequences.195

The crisis of the International Style and postwar American politics went hand-in-hand. Modern
architecture as constituted within the postwar United States, was the architecture of postwar
liberalism, the myth of the happy alliance between government, business art, and the common
man and as that gave way, so did its architectural representation.196
The Threat to the Discipline
Worldwide, as modern architecture defeated the remanents of other forms of practice, the
vanguard moved away from it and toward an attempt to mediate being-in-modernity with an
appreciation of the past.197 The revolt in the vanguard against this fabricated orthodoxy of
modern architecture began from within during the mid-50s with the first postwar generation of
architects: Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen, and Minoru Yamasaki. Some of the earlier proponents
of the International Style like Edward Durrell Stone and Walter Gropius, especially in their projects
for American embassies, intended to mesh with local tradition. Still, this kind of work too easily
associated itself with modern architecture, and while it could already mark a crisis within the
International Style198, it did not yet mean a distance from it.
Instead, a vocal contingent in the discipline began to turn to the possibility of salvation in
the application of the sciences. A representative argument for this kind of study in the university
was given in a lecture at the A. I. A. National Convention in 1966 by Nathan Marsh Pusey, then
president of Harvard University.199 Pusey drew a parallel in the cause of the coming shift in

195.

Vincent Scully, Modern Architecture. The Architecture of Democracy, The Great

Ages of World Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1974 revised edition; originally published
1961), 51-52.
196.

The parallel between the decline of modern architecture and the decline of the
American empire (as concretized in the Vietnam war) is also drawn by Stanley Tigerman in
Versus: An American Architects Alternatives.
197. The best contemporary discussion of the postwar metamorphosis of the modern
movement in architecture is chapter two of John Jacobus, Twentieth-Century Architecture. The
Middle Years 1940-65, (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1966).
198.

As early as 1962, an Italian critic could look at this work as evidence of crisis. See
Mario Manieri-Elia, L'Architettura Del Dopoguerra in U. S. A., L'Architettura Contemporanea.
Serie speciale dell'Universale Cappelli, ed. Leonardo Benevolo Casa Editrice Licinio Cappelli
S.p.A., 1966), 48-49.
199.

Nathan Marsh Pusey, The Needed New Man in Architecture, Second Purves
Memorial Lecture, A. I. A. National Convention (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
June 29, 1966). The Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Design at the time, Jose Luis Sert,
enthusiastically supported Puseys recommendations, i.

73
architectural education and leap forward in the 1930s from the blend of engineering and BeauxArts to modern architecture and its concern with technology, materials, methods, and society.
Likewise, Pusey explained, the new crisis, a lack of consideration for context, required a
redirection of architectural education.200 Thus, he suggested that the architect study
Economics, sociology and social psychology, government and law, administration and
administrative services, public health, science of all kinds, (especially the engineering,
technological and computer sciences) and perhaps above all, a deeper understanding of
humanity and an acquisition of concern and compassion for humanity (should I say,
education for wisdom)201
Pusey linked this renewal of architecture to a staving off of social collapse, stating that
the new frontier was in the dilapidated inner city where cheap attempts to provide public housing
and where the Enemy (his capitalization, a code for Communism and perhaps Black Power
movements) may yet win the hearts of the neglected underprivileged.202 Puseys position was
liberal: greater compassion for the underprivileged to ensure that they not disrupt social order.
Just as it had for the politics of the vital center by 1967 the crisis in architectural
pedagogy reached a fever pitch, in the form of the Princeton Report. Prepared by the Dean of
the architecture program at Princeton, Robert Geddes, for the American Institute of Architects, the
Princeton Report reflected a growing lack of confidence in the standard postwar system of
education. The basic structural problem with the profession, it argued, was the same contradiction
as that which Moholy-Nagy, the Chicago Federation of Arts, Albers, and Kepes had diagnosed
before the war: architectural education was still training its students to be artistic geniuses instead
of draftsmen and specialists in technology-based or behaviorism-based subfields.203
The Princeton Report reflected a state of turmoil in architectural education. A
contemporary survey of architectural educators by Progressive Architecture found that something
was wrong with architectural education, although just what and how to solve it remained unclear
to the participants. Nevertheless, with or without a clear path, change was already approaching:
within the three years prior to the Princeton Report, twenty-three new department heads were
appointed and eighty-one percent of schools had instituted or were planning to institute significant
changes in their curricula. Many schools moved away from architecture as the art of building
toward architecture as the science of constructing spaces. Thus, just as Moholy-Nagy and Albers

200.

Pusey, 3.

201.

Pusey, 5.

202.

Pusey, 10-11.

203.

Robert L. Geddes and Bernard P. Spring, Final Report. A Study of Education

Sponsored by the American Institute of Architects, (Princeton University: December 1967).

74
renamed their schools, many schools were to be renamed: no longer Schools of Architecture,
they became Schools of Environmental Design.204
A major component of this scientifist threat to the idea of the architect as an artist was the
development of the design methods school.205 Deriving their method from the engineering fields
of systems analysis and operations research and its interpretation in Christopher Alexanders
Notes Towards A Synthesis of Form206, the proponents of design methods attempted to simulate
the actual performance of an architectural object in terms of the behavior of individuals using it
through computer models. But there were real problems with design methods that limited its
applicability and eventually stopped its growth: the convoluted texts that design methods
generated were a dead end, making a calculus textbook seem like easy reading. Working with
then-scarce computers and obtaining the large data-sets necessary to construct the mathematical
models of design methods further confined design methods to a well-endowed university
departments and large architectural firms.207
Another threat to the discipline came from varying alliances within the student
counterculture and from advocacy planning, the attempt to organize groups of citizens to counter
monomaniacal government projects or participate in the design process. Significantly, Columbia
Universitys School of Architecture was the site of one of the first major clashes of the time
between students and administration on a college campus and a major trigger was an issue of
space: the universitys exploitation of Harlem residents living below the cliff that was Morningside
Heights and its attempt to build a gymnasium in the public park. At the same time, various
factions in the counterculture attempted to create spaces, using media imagery and quasimythological elements from technology, such as the Fuller dome, inflatables, and indigenous
building traditions.208 But these extra-disciplinary maneuvers collapsed as the counterculture

204.

Revolution in Architectural Education, Progressive Architecture March 1967: 136.

205.

See Gary Moore, ed., Emerging Methods in Environmental Design and Planning,
(Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1970). J. Christopher Jones, Design Methods, (New York: John
Wiley, 1970) and Geoffrey Broadbent and Anthony Ward, ed., Design Methods In Architecture,
(London: Lund-Humphries, 1969).
206. On Alexanders influence see Stephen Grabow, Christopher Alexander. The Search
For a New Paradigm in Architecture, (Stocksfield, Northumberland: Oriel Press Ltd. of Routledge
& Kegan Paul PLC, 1983).
207.

See C. Ray Smith, Supermannerism: New Attitudes in Post-Modern Architecture,

(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), 16
208.

Even though it was organized by the Museum of Modern Art, the challenge of formal
imagery posed by Bernard Rudofskys exhibit and catalog Architecture Without Architects. A
Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture, (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co.,
1964) was a crucial incentive to the counterculture to attack the discipline of architecture by
pointing to the strength of extradisciplinary sources.

75
began to wane and communes such as Dome City would eventually be abandoned. Likewise, as
the reality of the Nixon administration sank in during 1969, advocacy planning encountered more
and more resistance and by the mid-1970s was ridiculed by architectural educators as the
embodiment of the worst excesses of the late 1960s in architecture.209 Certainly there were real
failures in the anti-institutional movements of the period. But a real critique of the legitimacy of the
disciplines foundations took place in the hands of radical groups such as the Anarchitecture
group, Ant Farm, and the advocacy planners.210
Cardboard Architecture
These critiques shook the foundations of postwar modernism. It was no longer able to
defend its territory, but the alternatives the critiques proposed threatened architecture as an
autonomous discipline with a legitimate claim to a specific body of knowledge by reducing it to a
science, at the hands of the behaviorists and communication theorists (or alternatively, at the
hands of the technologists and engineers then beginning to fill the offices of the major
architectural firms) or by giving architecture and its design to whoever needed it, as the anti-art
counterculture proposed. None of these alternatives were attractive for as a means of continuing
architecture as a formal art. Thus in 1972 Kenneth Frampton would write today we find
architecture suspended between applied art and social science; as a field of concern, more
alienated than any other from a satisfactory rapport with both society at large and the university in
particular. In opposition to this unhappy circumstance, Frampton presented the underground
academy of Cooper Union under John Hejduk, its task to focus only on the matter at hand:
architecture.211
Indeed, for architecture to maintain its identity, a statement about its autonomy had to be
made. This need for architecture to maintain its identity necessitated the development of a new
specialist class of designers in architecture. As Magali Sarfatti Larson has explained in her book

209. Margaret Crawford, Can Architects be Socially Responsible?, Out of Site. A Social
Criticism of Architecture, ed. Diane Ghirardo. (Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1991), 38-39.
210.

See also Thomas A. Dutton, Introduction: Architectural Education, Postmodernism,

and Critical Pedagogy, Voices in Architectural Education, ed. Thomas A. Dutton. Critical Studies
in Education and Culture Series, (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1991) xix.
211.

Kenneth Frampton, Notes from the Underground, Artforum (1972), p 40. See also
K. Michael Hays, Tracking Architectural Theory: Preston Thomas Lectures at Cornell University,
1990, unpublished lectures, and Peter Blake, No Place Like Utopia. Modern Architecture and the
Company We Kept, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 290-297. Blake writes after a brief joust
with radicalism, the schools of architecture especially those at yuppie universities began to
produce new generations of elitist architects who instinctively knew which side their bread was
buttered on. 297

76
Beyond the Postmodern Facade, the growth of this class was tied to the claim of architects to a
special role in society dependent on the noble tradition of the field. The architects role is tied to
the idea that she or he brings not merely adequate building but culturally significant building.212
In an essay on John Hejduks work written in 1980, In My Father's House Are Many
Mansions, Peter Eisenman elaborated on one of his perennial concerns, the autonomy of
architecture. Eisenman explained that since we all know that all building is not architecture, we
must look beyond the mere elements of building to find the critical distinction [between building
and architecture]. For Eisenman, the turn inward to the discipline itself to what could be
described as work on the language, was itself the distinguishing factor between architecture
and building.213
Here Eisenman pinpoints the reason for cardboard architectures success: it offered a
task for the discipline that was purely formal but had the trappings of rigor. The Texas research
coupled with Venturis analysis and atectonic work took hold as a new paradigm, a stronger,
deeper formalism that could lay claim to modern architectures legacy simply by rejecting its
claims to influence society. It would be only a matter of time before many educators were won
over by one form or another of this method and cardboard architecture would become the
dominant mode of design in the more elite American schools of architecture.
The commission of choice for these architects was a radical departure from the large
public commissions popular with their predecessors. Instead, under the influence of a declining
economy, large cuts in government spending on housing, and from the arguments of the design
methods school and advocacy planners, it became apparent that the small-scale commission was
more manageable. With the building boom of the mid-1960s being tempered by the recession of
the early 1970s that only worsened and finally did become catastrophic with the OPEC oil
embargo of 1975, the single-family house became the object of choice for design.214
The cardboard architects, as a specialist class in architecture devoted to justifying the
disciplines existence marked a new high-brow architecture culture that would initially appeal to
architectural design faculty and students through its sophisticated formal constructions and
language of visual grammar. The intellectual guise of this work led the academy had once again
come to the forefront of the discipline, displacing the more anti-intellectual and businesslike

212.

Larson, 8.

213.

Peter Eisenman, In My Father's House Are Many Mansions, 7 Houses, ed. Kenneth
Frampton. IAUS Exhibition Catalogues, (New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies,
1980) 8-10.
214.

Magali Sarfatti Larson, Behind The Postmodern Facade: Architectural Change in

Late Twentieth-Century America, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 194-202.

77
architectural practice. Except for a brief moment with Mies and Gropius in the 1940s, the teaching
of architecture always appeared to be behind the times. As recently as 1963, a past president of
the A. I. A. could write: For reasons I do not pretend to comprehend, schools of architecture
have rarely been in the forefront of professional thought. Professors rarely push back the
boundaries of architectural theory.215 Fifteen years later, it would be the academy that would
appear to be at the forefront led by architectural design and new investigations of architectural
theory.216By 1985, Robert Gutman would note that with the building boom and the new media
attention being given to postmodern architecture, the number of students in professional
architecture programs had doubled (since 1965) and the profession was among the fastestgrowing in the U. S. Yet at the same time, a definite trend continued in the profession toward the
employment of (generally well-known) architects to design not entire buildings but only their
facades and representational.The academic response was the growth of design, downplayed
since the end of the Beaux-Arts system, at the expense of structures, environmental control
systems, and other fields of more applied concern.217
The dominance of the design studio marked the emergence of the academic architect, an
architect with a post-professional degree taken relatively soon (within the first decade) in ones
career and whose principal accomplishment is teaching and paper architecture. Prior to this, the
norm was to complete a five year bachelors degree and enter into architectural practice. Further
education would generally be completed after some length of time spent in practice, where some
measure of success would have been achieved. In this sense, the kids are precursors of the
situation today where an academically-minded architecture student can enter the academic
setting immediately.
Cynicism in Architecture
The failure of the liberal paradigm during the 1960s generated a period of intense
questioning. Since then part of education has been to show the tenuousness of our information
and to stress the development of critical thinking. All this, no matter how naive, is a form of
ideology critique. While Marxist class analysis is not by any means the norm in American
education, questioning of previously unquestioned issues is. We are all taught not to accept the

215. Philip Will, The Future of the Architectural Profession For This We Teach, The
Teaching of Architecture. 1963 A. I. A.-A. C. S. A. Teacher Seminar, ed. Marcus Whiffen.
(Washington: American Institute of Architects, 1964), 10-11.
216.

See The Future of Architecture: Polemicist-Theorist Progressive Architecture May

1977: 68 and David Dunster, A Comeback for Architectural Theory, Progressive Architecture
May 1977: 80-83.
217.

Robert Gutman, Educating Architects: Pedagogy and Pendulum, The Public face of
architecture: civic culture and public spaces, ed. Nathan Glazer, and Mark Lilla. (New York,
London: Free Press; Collier Macmillan, 1987), 443-471.

78
words of educators and authors as truth but rather question them. That we continue to operate as
if these issues discipline, in this case exist is part of the move toward the next phase, the
society of cynicism.
With the failing promise that knowledge inevitably brings advancement, both American
politics and architecture moved toward a culture based on cynicism. As we defined it in the
introduction, cynical culture is the culture in which ideology is no longer false consciousness that
we cannot see past, but rather as something that we know is wrong but we do anyway. In politics,
the shift to cynical culture was marked with the ascension of Nixon, in architecture, by a return to
form to avoid confronting the social realm. Thus architects no longer tried to mobilize the
disadvantaged to improve their living conditions but they also did not address their own plight: by
the 1970s, as young architect Herbert Muschamp wrote in his polemical File Under Architecture,
the true condition of architecture was as the fulfilled promise of the White City of Daniel
Burnhams Columbian Exposition, a city where the architects place was on the thin veneer of
faade. The architect, Muschamp argued, had become chiefly a designer of faades for buildings
built by developers and engineers.218
It is within this context that cardboard architecture took hold. Faced with the failure of its
methods and threatened with its own dissolution, American architecture consolidated a paradigmshift without destabilizing the discipline. Under the formal virtuosity of a new vanguard, among
whom were architects such as Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier,
architecture was offered a means of containment. By restricting their domain to formal research,
the vanguard of architecture could represent precisely what would distinguish and legitimate
architecture as a discipline: notions of genius, singularity and presence. Thus in his preface to
Five Architects, a vastly influential book that we will return to at length in chapter three, the
director of MoMAs department of architecture and design, Arthur Drexler, was able to posit that
An alternative to political romance is to be an architect, for those who actually have the
necessary talent for architecture.219
Drexler opposed architecture and social commitment, and a liberal ideology of the vital
center was effectively replaced by an cynical culture in the political realm and in American
architecture.220 The architecture of the Whites, devoid of social implications, concerned only with
the formal language of cardboard architecture then consolidating its didactic position, served as

218.

Herbert Muschamp, File Under Architecture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press,

1974).
219.

Arthur Drexler, preface to Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey,

John Hejduk, Richard Meier, Colin Rowe and Kenneth Frampton, Five Architects, (New York:
Wittenborn & Company, 1972), 1.
220.

A similar observation is made in Blake, No Place Like Utopia, 309-310.

79
an exemplar to strengthen the discipline. The old liberal compromise between formalism and
functionalism was found wanting, the possibilities of anti-architecture were found too dangerous
and, as a result, the experiment planted at Cornell and Cooper Union found fertile, freshly
disturbed ground, in need of occupation, and became standard operating procedure for much of
architectural pedagogy into the 1990s.
Thus the paradigm-shift in architectural education in the 1960s can be mapped as a
structural conspiracy of a discipline being mobilized by the demands of professionalization and
threats to its identity to move in one particular direction much as Jameson has explained the
global system tends towards hegemony. Composed of an unquantifiable number of agents in the
discipline and an unquantifiable percentage of recent architectural work, be it buildings or theory,
it is an indefinite network that cannot be fully mapped and remains generally invisible. The
mediated alignment of large-scale economic changes with internal disciplinary drives fits into
Jamesons explanation of conspiracy as totality, extending the reaches of the global system
everywhere, an indefinite network that cannot be fully mapped and remains generally invisible.

80

2 Philip Johnsons History: Fascism and

Repression
Some people cannot understand why I have been loyal to Philip. But he is one of the few
architects one can talk to about ideas. Do you know anyone else who pretends to be antiintellectual who reads Nietzsche in German?
Peter Eisenman221
Philip Johnson As Power Broker
While cardboard architecture began to spread within schools of architecture during the
1960s, it achieved wider acceptance with the public and within the profession as a whole only in
the 1970s, through its personification in the group of architects Peter Eisenman, Robert A. M.
Stern, Michael Graves, and Richard Meier that Philip Johnson has called his kids. As their
power broker, providing the kids with commissions, financial assistance and publicity and
receiving publicity in return, Johnson has been able create an unprecedented architectural
spectacle.
In both this and the following chapter, I will trace how Johnson, as Steven M. L. Aronson
writes in his book Hype, has in effect designed his own life by exploiting the mechanisms of
patronage that control much of architectural production in the American community.222 Johnson it
appears, wants to be remembered, in Peter Eisenmans words, as the most powerful architect
since Bernini. For his part, Johnson says that this phrase is an attempt to make himself more
important by making Johnson seem more important.223 Indeed, the process of promotion and
self-promotion between Johnson and the kids has always been a co-operative one, each side
using the other to legitimate itself as I will show in the next chapter.
Johnsons goal, as we will see, is to go down in history, as Eisenman explains: Philip is
enormously concerned about how history will view him. But as his biographer Franz Schulze
says of him: Power and respect. Thats what he wants most of all. And in order to gain these
things, in order to draw attention to himself, he puts on a naughty show for that purpose primarily.

221. Peter Eisenman in Charles Jencks, Peter Eisenman. An Architectural Design

Interview, Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, ed. Andreas Papadakis, Catherine Cooke, and
Andrew Benjamin. (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 149
222.

Kurt Andersen, Philip the Great, Vanity Fair June 1993, 297.

223.

Aronson, 154.

81
But naughtiness is a means, not a

goal.224

Indeed, as I will explore in detail below, Johnson has

always wanted power, and he has achieved this power in art, architecture, and high society
through his position as a patron of the arts and architect and has exploited it as a power broker.
In this chapter we will examine the role of power in Johnsons life before he met the kids in order
to set the stage for the discussion of his embrace of the kids in chapter three. The focus will be on
how in the 1930s, after first acting as a power broker in theInternational Style exhibit of 1932,
Johnsons devotion to his own will-to-power and his attempt to attract attention to himself led him
to become an activist in American fascist politics.
In this and subsequent chapters I will use the term fascism to denote to a historical
phenomenon, a transnational political movement that also possessed within itself individual
fascisms which at times were at odds with each other. I will show that Johnson was involved in
and aligned with a particular form of American fascism. In this, he also demonstrated a sympathy
with, if not necessarily an alignment with other forms of fascism such as that of the Italian Fascist
party and the German National Socialist party. At the same time, I also hope to demonstrate that
Johnson subscribed some of the most racist beliefs that appeared in fascism, notably a political
stance in which the will-to-power of a nation obliterates its enemies, including any Others living in
its midst in the interest of an aesthetic, racial purity.
First, we must turn to Johnsons interest in acquiring influence. In the cynical culture
discussed in the introduction and in chapter one, power relations replace relations of merit. The
most powerful agent in cynical culture is the power broker, and as we will see in the next chapter
in Johnson has been a very successful power broker. Johnsons power is not however the result
of any proficiency at architectural design, management or even teaching. Rather it is a carefully
calculated function of his intersecting roles as a socialite, an architect, and a benefactor of the
arts.
In his book Friends of Friends: Networks and Coalitions anthropologist Jeremy
Boissevain analyzes the means by which the power broker collects and distributes power.
Boissevain distinguishes between the two distinct types of resources that can be used for
distributing power: first order resources such as money, jobs, dispensations of law
controlled directly by an individual; second order resources are contacts with other people who
have access to first and second order resources. While a patron controls only first order
resources, the far more effective power broker manipulates both first and second order resources.
A power broker occupies a point where multiple communication channels intersect and desires to
take advantage of it. A successful power broker is located at a point in which the communication
channels are particularly useful to her or his purposes, is able to devote the necessary time to the
manipulation of the network and is talented enough to be able to stay ahead of her competitors. A

224.

Eisenman and Schulze quoted in Andersen, 154.

82
succesful power broker must therefore be a constant innovator, an expert at constantly
reconfiguring his network.225
Johnsons success as a power broker has led a number of critics and even Johnson
himself to conclude that he will be best remembered not for his design but for his patronage.
Johnsons protg, New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger, has stated that Johnson
proves how far you can go without a creative intelligence, and that instead Johnsons great
accomplishment was that he was the man who invented networking, and he always managed to
create the sense that he was essential. Johnson agrees, stating on one occasion that Im not a
form giver, Im no Mies, Im not Wright, I wish I were,226 and on another that my place in history
is as a helpful, quite important transitional figure that would lead the next generation to a wild
outburst of something that naturally I cant foresee. I do not think I make forms people will
emulate, Im not creating; Im creating attitudes.227 One of his favorite kids, Robert Stern, has
described Johnson as a truly great salesman for anything he wants to sell, either his own ideas
or somebody elses ideas. If he wants to sell Bob Stern to somebody, he can make me look like
butter. Hes amazing. Amazing. When he goes after something and advocates it, you believe that
he has believed this thing for his whole lifetime, that its a kind of religious catechism for that
moment this inner zeal, its amazing to watch. His biographer Franz Schulze agrees: Thats
where his genius is. Hes a great propagandist, a guy who knows how to sell the product.228
Johnsons power brokerage was made possible through personal wealth and his class
status. His father Homer was a lawyer in then-booming Cleveland, attaining enough monetary
and social capital to become a trustee at Oberlin College and a member of all the right clubs.
Homer Johnson filed the patent papers for an aluminum extraction process for its inventors in
exchange for a large stock holding. In turn his coming-of-age gift to his son consisted of Alcoa
stocks.229 The stock took off soon after, making the younger Johnson a millionaire by the time he
was twenty.230 Of his wealth, Johnson has remarked, The first rule in architecture is to be born

225.

Jeremy Boissevain, Friends of Friends. Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions,

Pavilion Series (Social Anthropology), ed. F. G. Bailey (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), 6, 147168.
226.

Andersen, 137-138.

227.

Joseph Giovannini, Philip Johnson Designs for a Pluralistic Age, New York Times
January 8 1984: Section 2, 29.
228. Schulze in Andersen, 154. Schulzes book will be Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: a
biography, (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1994).
229.

Terence Riley, The International Style: Exhibition 15 and the Museum of Modern Art,
(New York: Rizzoli/Columbia Books of Architecture, 1992), 205.
230.

Andersen, 138.

83
rich; the second rule, failing that, is to marry wealthy. There isnt any third rule youve got to do
one of those two things.231
At school in Harvard, Johnson began to make the right friends, notably Alfred Barr, who
would be one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and would bring Johnson
in to run the department of design.232 There Johnsons first foray into the making of architecture
took place in 1932 when he and his friend architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock
organized the show Modern Architecture: International Exhibition. The show traveled around the
United States for three years and, together with the catalog Modern Architecture and a book
they co-authored, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, was instrumental in bringing a
depoliticized vision of modern architecture as style to America.233 Examining Johnsons role as
co-curator exhibit is essential as a background for understanding both his later fascination with
right-wing politics and his interest in maintaining a careful separation between architecture and
politics.
Eisenman has pinpointed the 1932 exhibit as a pivotal moment in Johnsons life. It must
have been clear to Johnson, Eisenman explains, that an architecture based on two forces one,
the moral sanction given to the forms of the machine society; the other, the political sanction
given to the polemics of the machine society intersecting at a node of functionalism would
have a certain paralyzing effect on any form of aesthetic idealism.234 Thus in Johnsons
architectural writings between 1931 and 1933, Eisenman traces a conspiracy to remove
functionalism and any moral or political basis from modern architecture:
Johnson used his writings to construct a very intricate counterposition to functionalism.
Careful, clever, moving among people and ideas in the half-light of the euphoria of the

231.

Philip Johnson interviewed in Barbaralee Diamondstein, ed., American Architecture

Now II, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 153.
232. Anderson, 138. On Johnsons role at MoMA and MoMAs role in shaping
architectural tastes, see also Peter Blake, Architecture is an art and MoMA is its Prophet,
ARTNews (October 1979): 97-101.
233.

The most complete document of this exhibit is Riley. See also Helen Searing,
International Style: The Crimson Connection, Progressive Architecture February 1982: 88-91
and Richard Guy Wilson, International Style: the MoMA exhibition, Progressive Architecture
February 1982: 92-105.
234.

Peter Eisenman, Introduction, Philip Johnson. Writings, ed. Robert A. M. Stern, and
Peter D. Eisenman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 11. Eisenmans analysis of
Johnsons work is from Writings, Eisenman and Sterns 1979 edition of Johnsons collected
essays, a book compiled as a tribute to their mentor. Thus, Johnson may have expressly advised
Eisenman on what to write, but if he did not, we can with a reasonable degree of certainty,
assume that Johnson agrees with Eisenmans conclusions.

84
late twenties and early thirties, he cut quietly and subtly at the moral and political roots of
the dual doctrine and of modern architecture. He did so not with theory or polemic, but by
infiltration by developing a fifth column that paraded as the standard-bearer of that
dual doctrine, seemingly marching alongside the cadre of architectural modernists who
carried the enthusiasm of those early years.
The slogan of Johnsons fifth column was the International Style, as Eisenman explains,
a term expressly chosen to negate any possible association between modern architecture and a
Left political position:
This was the ultimate reduction. From Modern Movement to Modern Architecture to
Modern Style to International Style: in the first transformation, the ideological content
implied by the word movement was neutralized by the word architecture; in the second
transformation, the neutrality of architecture gave way to the non-ideological implications
of style; and in the last transformation, the politically explosive term international
became attached as merely an adjectival appendage to the notion of style. Moreover, the
final incarnation of the term did not even include the notion of modern.235
The coupling of international and style did indeed subvert the Marxist implication of
Internationale in the former, making it acceptable for American consumption but also making it
fit for Johnsons idea of style.236 In this linguistic change, Eisenman locates the impetus for the
absorption of modern architecture into the myth of the American dream, the orthodox
modernism that was to be replaced by cardboard architecture, as described in chapter one.
This transformation of the Modern Movement into the International Style the linguistic
transformation marking the actual transformation was to characterize American
architecture until the late sixties. Furthermore, what can be seen in retrospect to have
been a clever manipulation of the ideology of the Modern Movement in Europe
transformed a pluralistic conception of the good society into an individualistic model of the
good life and thus reduced a cultural alternative to a stylistic nicety.
This reduction of modernism to a discussion of style drained out the ideological
implications of the European architecture of the twenties and packaged them neatly into a
consumable fashion that was to burst rampant onto the American scene after World War
II. Corporate imagery in the guise of modern architecture inevitably became an object of
consumption. Considering the ultimately left-wing ideology implicit in much of what was in
the twenties the mainstream Modern Movement in Europe, it is not surprising that
Johnson would have attempted to subvert these implications. Whether this transformation

235.
236.

Eisenman, 15.

See also Helen Searing, International Style: The Crimson Connection, Progressive
Architecture, February 1982: 90. Bizarrely, given Johnsons anti-Left stance, his first mention of
the term in print is in reference to Joseph Urbans design for The New School of Social Research,
where the Frankfurt School relocated after fleeing the deteriorating situation in Germany. See
Philip Johnson, The Architecture of The New School, Writings, ed. Robert A. M. Stern, and
Peter D. Eisenman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; originally published in Arts, XVII
(March, 1931), 393-98) 32-36.

85
was a conscious endeavor is not an issue; the fact remains that in Johnsons writing this
ideology is reduced to style.237
Yet Eisenman is too quick to see the mainstream Modern Movement as left-wing. Recent
research by Richard Pommer and Christian F. Otto shows that the idea of an international style
could be traced back to pre-World War I Werkbund circles and its ideology was not always leftist.
As far back as 1913, they explain, architecture writer Karl Scheffler predicted a unified style of
modern utilitarian architecture [that] will probably develop more or less uniformly throughout the
entire civilized world. Significantly however, Scheffler believed that this grand but rather neutral
modern international architectural style will not compare in artistic power to the deep resonant
force of the old architectural style as it would be compromised by the weakness of democratic
society. Schefflers solution was to adopt an expressly Nietzschean view of society, for a new
architecture worthy of comparison with the old style could only arrive if modern societies
demanded a voluntary despotism that would settle political and cultural issues.238
Thus even before Johnson arrived, there was a Nietzschean influence in the
movement,239 as Pommer and Otto write, a style fashioned by an lite but demanding universal
acceptance. This influence was at times actively conspiratorial, as Sigfried Giedion recollected,
in a 1927 assembly of an international group involving among others, the idea was broached by
Mies, I believe, that the movement must now be cleaned up. The group named a number of
people who would carry out the secret purification, that is, supply the press with articles, hold
exhibitions, etc. These were Mies, Gropius, Oud, Stam, Corbusier, [Hans] Schmidt (of the Swiss

237.

Eisenman, 16.

238.

Scheffler translated, quoted, and analyzed in Richard Pommer and Christian F. Otto,
Weissenhof 1927 and the Modern Movement in Architecture, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), 159-160. Chapter 16 of this book is an excellent discussion of the lineage of the
idea of the International Style.
239.

In tracing this Nietzschean thread, I must point out that the reception of Nietzsche is
particularly complex. More than many thinkers, Nietzsche had different readers on both the Right
and the Left with vastly divergent agendas, selecting what they wanted from his works. In this
light, we have to be careful when we speak of Nietzscheanism to recognize the impossibility of
reducing the reception of Nietzsche to a totality. On the other hand, one can indeed trace the
genealogy of particular forms of Nietzscheanism. The Nietzschean thread that I am concerned
with is characterized by its emphasis on the will-to-power as the determinate of great art and the
notion of an artistic lite. In Johnsons case this Nietzschean thread is married to a fascist Right
Nietzscheanism of will and lites. It is my contention that the latter lies embedded in the former.
By predicating itself on a privileging of the aesthetic over life, and concerning itself with
separating the high from the low, vanguardist Nietzscheanism lays a foundation for fascist
Nietzscheanism. On the reception of Nietzsche see Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy
in Germany 1890-1900, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) and Geoffrey Waite, The
Politics of The Question of Style: Nietzsche/Hlderlin, Identity of the Literary Text, ed. Mario J.
Valds, and Owen Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 246-273.

86
collective) and [Cornelius van] E[e]steren in view of his focus on city planning. Although this
group fractured and split apart renewed attempts to establish an architectural lite again took
place at the first meeting of CIAM and at the Weissenhof housing exhibition of 1927. The
constituency of the architectural lite was shaken up following Weissenhof as Communist Hannes
Meyer became the head of the Bauhaus and subsequently lost his position to the conspicuously
apolitical Mies.240
Johnsons interest in the International Style was only part of a larger Nietzschean
influence in architecture that he appears to be quite aware of and tried to promote against its
enemy, the Communist influence.241 Thus, while Meyer did receive some attention in the MoMA
exhibit and books, his functionalism was attacked and the project was also marked by the nearcomplete absence of Soviet architecture, even though as Richard Guy Wilson points out, the
Museums director Alfred Barr had traveled in the U.S.S.R. and written about its architecture in
1929.242
Johnsons goals in establishing the contents of the exhibition werent always political:
Johnson saw himself as patron, although within that role was also the beginning of his power
brokerage. Johnsons role in this vein apparently began early in 1930, when he acted as patron to
Mies van der Rohe, convincing his mother that Mies should redesign his New York apartment and
thus bringing the German modernists his first work to the United States. Yet while the design was
Miess, Johnson believed that through his patronage it would be also be his, writing to his mother
that it would be the first room in my latest style in America.243 But if this was still part of
Johnsons role as patron, he would swiftly begin to be a power broker. Starting in the summer of
1930 Johnson also attempted to get a house for his familys property in Pinehurst, North Carolina

240.

Giedion translated, quoted, and analyzed in Pommer and Otto, 158. See also
Pommer and Otto, 122-124 and 149.
241.

See Pommer and Otto, 163.

242.

Richard Guy Wilson, International Style: the MoMA exhibition, Progressive

Architecture February 1982: 103. The absence of Soviet architecture from the seminal selection
in the exhibit may have made it easier for promoters of modern architecture during the Cold War
to omit it as well and helped ensure that it would not be absent from the canon of modern
architecture until its recovery began in the late 1960s.
Johnsons dislike of Meyer and the Russian Constructivists might also be read against
what K. Michael Hays calls the posthumanism in Meyers architecture. K. Michael Hayss
Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject. The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig
Hilberseimer, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1992), esp. 149-184.
243.

Johnson to Mrs. Homer Johnson, Philip Johnson papers, 7 July 1930 quoted in Riley,
35. See also Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins, New York 1930.
Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars, (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 472.

87
built by another leading modernist J. J. P. Oud and also invited proposals from American
modernists Clauss & Daub.244
Johnson would have been able to see himself as creator through his power brokerage,
dispensing commissions to architects he favored. He would recommend to the Bowman Brothers
that they design a prison because the secretary of MoMAs Board of Trustees was Samuel
Lewishon, also on the New York State commission on prisons. Through his family connections,
he would be able to make possible Richard Neutras design of an all-Aluminum bus for Alcoa and
a commission for Claus & Daub to build a number of gas stations for the Standard Oil Company.
Johnson would seek commissions for Mies with the Rockefellers as well. He donated his time to
the 1932 MoMA exhibit and took care of its financing. Thus, as a consequence of his wealth and
his connections, early on in his career Johnson had already became both patron and power
broker and in response to a rebuke from Barr, Johnson would write, I did not resent your sermon
in the slightest. After all what I want most to do is be influential and if there is a method why not
learn it.245
Johnsons power brokerage also had a negative effect: there were rejections from the
International Style exhibit. While architect Rudolf Schindler asked to be included, Johnson refused
to do so on the basis of stylistic grounds. Schindler would remain largely unknown in the United
States, whereas his contemporary Richard Neutra, who was included, would receive vast
amounts of publicity.246
Also at this point, Johnsons power brokerage began to align itself with his interests in his
own architectural design. In a letter to his mother in 1930, Johnson wrote
I got fathers letter on the boat. He may rest assured I have no more intention of doing
any building at this my youthful age. There are too many problems I should like to work
out first. The strategic time is later, though if I had all the money in the world I would just
build continuously, keep on experimenting.247
By 1934, it was apparently more propitious for Johnson to design. Early in the year he
redesigned the New York duplex that he and his sister Theodate lived in and began work on

244.

Riley, 35.

245.

Riley, 37.

246.

Wilson, 102.

247.

Johnson to Mrs. H. Johnson, 20 June 1930, quoted in Riley, 205.

88
Alfred Barrs

apartment.248

By the end of the year, however, Johnson had abandoned designing

and many of his duties at MoMA in favor of his next encounter with power.
It is hard to tell what link, if any, exists between Johnsons work at MoMA and his interest
in right-wing politics, although as I will explain below, the two parts of his life were clearly not
separate. For now, we can at least conclude this much: prior to his involvement with fascism,
Johnson was already interested in reducing architecture to form and was already set against the
left in architecture.249
The In-lite
Johnson was apparently interested enough in Nazism in 1932 to attend a Hitler rally. Kurt
Andersen writes, In the early thirties, he [Johnson] says, my Jewish friends [in Germany], I
noticed, werent enthusiastic about the Nazis, but they were still there. He says he did attend a
Hitler rally in 1932, but was unmoved (he was dazzled, according to the biographer [Franz
Schulze].250 The biographer of the Museum of Modern Arts Alfred H. Barr, Alice Goldfarb
Marquis confirms Schulzes assessment: During the middle thirties, when Johnson returned from
a trip to Germany with glowing admiration for Hitler, the museums liberal adherents were so
angry they refused even to speak to him.251

248.

See Stern et. all, New York 1930, 272-4 for the best account and illustrations of
Johnsons second apartment.
249. At this point it seems pertinent to bring up Eisenman again: [Johnsons] attack is on
the ideology of modernism and not on the politics of international. Again he is clearing ground
for himself, and the International Style thus becomes both the label and the sanction for his own
latent ideological beliefs. Often in such games of hide-and-seek the smoke screens become
confused with the reality. One often falls into intellectual traps that in fact were set for others. 17.
By this point, who the smoke screen has been put up for (for the reader or for Eisenman), and
who put it up (whether Johnson, or Eisenman, or both) is impossible to tell, but it seems to me
that there is a possibility that Eisenman is hinting that Johnsons involvement with fascism comes
out of a political position he took against the influence of the left in art and architecture.
250.

Kurt Andersen, Philip the Great, Vanity Fair June 1993: 138. This is probably the
Nazi-Rally he attended with art critic Helen Read. See Margret Kentgens-Craig, BauhausArchitektur: Die Rezeption in Amerika, 1919-1936, (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993), 55,
155. On 55 Kentgens-Craig locates the rally in Berlin, on 155 in Potsdam.
RemarkablywhileKentgens-Craig pays particular attention to the reception accorded to Mies and
Gropius by the FBI and the suspicion of the authorities that they might be engaged in subversive
activities, she does not discuss Johnsons own activities beyond this footnote, which seems to
exist not to situate Johnson but rather Read
251.

Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern, (Chicago:
Contemporary Books, 1989), 84

89
It apparently took until 1934 however for Johnson and his companion from Harvard and
MoMA, Alan Blackburn to be driven to action by the writings of a fellow Harvard alum, Lawrence
Dennis, a man who described himself as the Alfred Rosenberg, the intellectual leader of
American Fascism, the No. 1 intellectual Fascist of America. While Dennis had been a banker, it
was as former charg daffaires in Managua, Nicaragua that he achieved his first real taste of
power, becoming powerful enough to be called the kingmaker in Latin American circles. Dennis
earned criticism from the U. S. government for supporting the conservative rebels against the
Nicaraguan government in the revolution of 1926-27 and resigned soon after.252 Dennis
developed a sophisticated theory of the possibilities for an American fascism during the early
1930s. Later that decade, Dennis would receive substantial support from the Nazi government to
promote their cause in the United States. From April to October of 1936, he took a tour of Europe
where he met the real Alfred Rosenberg as well as Mussolini and attended Nazi rallies and
indoctrination classes at the Amerika Institut in Berlin. Back in the U. S., Dennis made contact
with a number of Nazi agents, including George Sylvester Viereck, a German living in America
who wrote for Social Justice (although he also wrote for the mainstream press) and who would
eventually funnel Nazi money into Denniss propaganda efforts and be imprisoned for acting as a
paid agent of the Nazi government.253 According to a postwar interrogation of the first secretary
of the German embassy to the U. S.254 and an examination of the embassys files,255 Dennis
also acted as a paid agent of the Nazi government, although, as will be described below, he
would never be convicted.
But Denniss main import remained his theoretical attempt to develop an American
fascism.256 Perhaps Johnson and Blackburn were attracted to their fellow alum Denniss stand

252.

C. Gerald Fraser, Lawrence Dennis, 83; Advocated Fascism, The New York Times
August 21 1977: 40.
253.

Rogge, 174-180. On Vierecks particularly bizarre life see Niel M. Johnson, George
Sylvester Viereck, (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1972).
254. Charles Higham, American Swastika, (Garden City, New York: Doubleday &
Company, 1985), 55, 67. For a first-hand account of Denniss activities, including his
antisemitism, albeit at the rather late date of 1942, see John Roy Carlson (pseudonym for Arthur
Derounian), Under Cover. My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America, (New York: E. P.
Dutton & Co., 1943), 462-468.
255.

O. John Rogge, The Official German Report, (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1961;
presents material in the authors report of September 1946 to the Department of Justice,
supplemented by items from Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945, Series C (19331937) and Series D (1937-1945).
256.

The seminal work on native American fascism is Morris Schonbachs Native

American Fascism During the 1930s and 1940s, Modern American History. A Garland Series, ed.
Robert E. Burke, and Frank Freidel (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985; originally submitted as
a Ph.D thesis (University of California at Los Angeles: 1958)). In contrast see the excellent study

90
toward the privileged: Within a nation, the endowment of a reasonable number of loafers with a
comfortable income from invested capital is no great calamity, provided they loaf in a way to
entertain agreeably the populace257 But more likely, they were attracted by his central belief that
capitalism was doomed and fascism was the only alternative to communism, which would result
in the possibly brutal end of those in the house of have258
For Dennis, fascism was bound up with the question of lites:
For the present purpose, then, let us define fascism as a revolutionary formula for the
frustrated lite in an extended crisis of the prevailing social system of liberal capitalism. If
fascism comes, it will be, first, the product of prolonged conditions of a thoroughly
objective character, conditions which liberal leadership will have failed to improve; and,
second, the product of subjective reactions to these conditions by those of the menaced
and injured members of the lite who have a will to power and a will, through the capture
and use of power, to change conditions they find intolerable.259
Dennis defined the lite as follows:
Every social order is essentially a phenomenon of leadership, for leadership is one of the
most important or significant things about it. As a scheme of purposes, a social order is
mainly the expression of the composite will of a dominant class and, as a body of
achievements, it is largely the result of the leadership, management, choices, social
planning, and control exercised by members of a minority.
Dennis continued by specifying a more statistical definition of the lite as including
capitalists deriving most of their income from property, business enterprises and farmers, the
professional classes, and generally, the employed whose salaries are considerably above the
average, or say, above $3000 a year for the entire country. Thus, Denniss lite would have been
a rather large group, roughly one-third of the gainfully employed, or over fifteen million
persons.260 Within this group, he mapped out the in-lite, members of the lite profoundly
influential on social affairs261 as opposed to those without power, the out-lite.

of Nazi intents in the Americas, Alton Fryes Nazi Germany and the American Hemisphere 19331941, Yale Historical Publications (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).
257.

Lawrence Dennis, Is Capitalism Doomed?, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932), 39.

258.

Lawrence Dennis, The Coming American Fascism, (New York: Harper & Brothers,

1936), xi.
259.

Lawrence Dennis, Portrait of American Fascism, The Strenuous Decade. A Social

and Intellectual Record of the 1930s, ed. Daniel Aaron, and Robert Bendiner. (Garden City, New
York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970; originally published in The American Mercury, XXXVI
(December, 1935), 404 13), 327-328.
260.

Dennis, 229. In this Dennis is apparently basing his idea of elites on Vilfredo Paretos
theory of governing and non-governing elites which became popular in Britain and America in the

91
Denniss first step in the fascist resolution to the crisis of capitalism was to get the right
lite into power. If the current in-lite as a whole was no longer able to adequately govern as
he believed the ongoing Depression proved then a new in-lite, drawn from the ranks of the
out-lite, would have to be installed in the form of a new, fascist government.262 In this way
Dennis defended fascism: since all societies were really run by lites, at least fascism was not
hypocritical, unlike communism or liberalism it frankly acknowledges, or rather boasts, that its
lite rule,263 And if the economy performed better and the masses were objectively happier
under fascism than they could be under communism or liberalism, Dennis concluded, then indeed
it was Americas only choice.264
The fascist lite, Dennis believed, would be distinguished by the means by which it
disciplined itself. Rather than adhering to a liberal idea of law, which he believed was bound to
degenerate into a product of legal clerks, Dennis argued for an internalized self-discipline, the
ruling principles governing the lite must be made a part of their conditioned reflexes, or their
habitual and almost involuntary reactions, rather than a part of a legal code.265 To this end,
Denniss fascism would use the science of propaganda, indoctrination, education, group
conditioning, and a rational scheme of personal motivations, to make the lite behave according
to a desired pattern.266
Thus Johnson and Blackburn, armed with Denniss ideas, fell in love with politics. In
December 1934 they made front-page news in the New York Herald Tribune with what the paper
called a Sur-Realist Political Venture.
The Herald Tribune noted that their politics are not without a certain surrealist flavor.
Their party, to be called quite simply The National Party, is distinguished from all other political
aggregations, juntas, parties, or groups, past and present, by a complete lack of platform or

1930s. On Pareto, see T. B. Bottomore, Elites and Society, (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), 78.
261.

Dennis, 234.

262.

Dennis, 246.

263.

Dennis, The Coming American Fascism, 245.

264.

Dennis, The Coming American Fascism, 246.

265.

Dennis, The Coming American Fascism, 243.

266.

Dennis, The Coming American Fascism, 253.

92
program. They plan to pick one up as they go along, possibly in

Louisiana,267

where they hoped,

as they put it, to study the methods of Huey Long, the Kingfish, the popular senator from
Louisiana.
The two had begun their new party in April 1934 with Blackburn as leader and Johnson
as co-founder, a flying wedge as their logo, The Need for One Party as a slogan, and gray
shirt as the party uniform. Composed of one hundred members, the party had all of its meetings
in Johnsons duplex apartment on East Forty-ninth street. Indeed, the whole project was very
much Johnson and Blackburns. The two had known each other since they were boys at the
Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, had gone to Harvard together and wound up at the
Museum of Modern Art where Blackburn was the executive director.
But the lack of a program for the party did not necessarily make the party into a complete
joke. Blackburn explained that We feel that we were tremendously honest with our fellows in
telling them that there was no program, but there wasnt. We dislike intellectualism, you see. As
soon as a things put into words it means something else. Intellectuals dont have the third
dimension. you dont just put a lot of professors together and stir them around in a cauldron and
get something wonderful. Theres got to be more than that.268 The added element, they believed,
would be an emotional force comparable to a religious drive and a dedication to ones cause,
whatever it might be. The anti-intellectualism that Blackburn mentioned would come to serve
Johnson well in his role as the anti-intellectual who read Nietzsche in the original German.
The two had not yet decided whether their party would be revolutionary or not, but they
felt that it was time for a new epoch and had decided to found a party to usher it in back in 1932
just as Johnson would have been completing his work in the International Style exhibition
after reading Lawrence Denniss Is Capitalism Doomed? The first meeting of the party consisted
of sixteen people, including Johnsons German manservant. After two more meetings in the
spring, the two leaders took a coast-to-coast tour of the United States to get a feel for its people
and their desires and returned to continue their partys growth. Dennis himself came to lecture to
party members.
While Blackburn stated that they were no more interested in Long than in Roosevelt or
Upton Sinclair, Johnson replied that they were much more interested in him than in Sinclair as he

267.

Two Quit Modern Art Museum for Sur-Realist Political Venture, New York Herald
Tribune December 18, 1934: 1, 17.
268.

1.

Blackburn quoted in Two Quit Modern Art Museum for Sur-Realist Political Venture,

93
had usurped the power of the courts as well as any other power in Louisiana. Blackburn added
that We might like to talk to Long. Of course, he might not like to talk to us. We dont know.269
Huey Long was considered by many American fascists to be their man on
horseback.270 Whether he actually harbored fascist or proto-fascist leanings is irrelevant to the
question at hand.271 Johnson and Blackburn admiration of Longs dictatorial seizure of power in
Louisiana combined with his massive popular support was complimented by that of that of
Lawrence Dennis, who called him the nearest approach to a national fascist leader. As Dennis
argued, It takes a man like Long to lead the masses. I think Longs smarter than Hitler but he
needs a good brain trust.272
Apart from meeting Long and perhaps serving as his brain trust they hoped that in
Louisiana they could develop [themselves] by doing the sort of things that everybody in New
York would like to do but never has time for. We may learn to shoot, fly airplanes, and take
contemplative walks in the woods.273 As people in New York exercise too little, they would
exercise, Blackburn stated and were going to relax and were going to absorb the atmosphere.
We get our impressions not by investigations but by osmosis. We found out all about Washington
at poker parties.
The two had high opinions of themselves, as Blackburn stated, Our strongest emphasis
is on personnel. Johnson and I are two very personal guys. Were adventurers, Johnson
added, with an intellectual overlay, so were almost articulate, but not quite. On the other hand,
what they lacked in articulateness, the two might make up for with by learning to shoot. The
reporter for the Herald Tribune noted that Johnsons office at the Museum of Modern Art was

269.

Blackburn quoted in Two Quit Modern Art Museum for Sur-Realist Political Venture,

17.
270.

On Long see Stanley High, Star-Spangled Fascists, in The Strenuous Decade. A

Social and Intellectual Record of the 1930s, ed. Aaron, and Bendiner; originally published in The
Saturday Evening Post, CCXC (27 May 1939), 5-7, 70-72) 339-354.
For a favorable commentary by Lawrence Dennis on Huey Longs role in American
fascism which probably informed Johnson and Blackburns interest in the Senator, see his
Portrait of American Fascism, 326-338.
271.

See Marcus, 273-276.

272.

Dennis quoted in Marcus, 276.

273.

Two Forsake Art to Found a Party, The New York Times December 18 1934: 23.
There is also a contemporary New York Post article Gray Shirts to See Huey/To Put Hooey in
Politics cited in Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern. An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern
Art, (New York: Athenaeum, 1973), 92.

94
filled with catalogs of firearms. Blackburn, they told the reporter, was in favor shooting with large
pistols. Johnson on the other hand, favored the submachine gun.274
A half century later Johnson explained his interest in Long as the result of his moral
sense forcing him to wonder Why is it that a country with more money than the rest of the world
put together has people living the way they do? It doesnt make any sense. This is why I
supported Huey Long when I was young. Huey didnt help much but I thought he might, I was
grasping at straws. I didnt become a communist the way all my classmates did, but I still believed
in the social values that they were concerned with.275 Still, the idea of a Gray Shirted National
Party was, if not fascist, at least developed out of fascism. On the other hand, in the early thirties
fascism, at least in its Italian form was a fairly popular political alternative in the United States.
Long did not take up the offer of help from the gray shirts and the New Orleans gambit
failed.276 By 1936 the two young Harvard graduates had moved back up to Johnsons
midwestern home turf, to join up with Father Charles E. Coughlin, a Ross Perot-like figure with
tremendous grass-roots appeal based on his weekly radio programs. Coughlin was virulently antiCommunist and anti-Roosevelt, who in his eyes was also a Communist.277 With his right-wing
extremism, popular support, a powerful organization in his National Union for Social Justice, a
weekly journal known as Social Justice, weekly radio programs, and a natural gift for oratory,
Coughlin, was the other possible candidate for an American fascist leader in Denniss eyes.278
Indeed, within two years, he would become notorious as a fascist and Nazi sympathizer and one
of the leaders of antisemitism in the United States.
Blackburn gave a speech on the plight of youth at the convention for Coughlins National
Union for Social Justice, both supported the Coughlin-endorsed Union party presidential
candidate William Lemke, contributing $5,000 to his campaign279 and Johnson ran for the Ohio

274.

Two Quit Modern Art Museum for Sur-Realist Political Venture, 17.

275.

Johnson in Diamondsteen, 160.

276.

Peter Blake leaves the reason for Longs disenchantment to the imagination, writing,
Huey Long took one look at this bunch of , Dwight Macdonald told me many years
later, and had them escorted out of his presence, across state borders. in his No Place Like
Utopia. Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 104105.
277. David H. Bennett, Demagogues in the Depression. American Radicals and the Union
Party 1932-1936, (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1969), 228.
278.

Marcus, 276.

279.

Bennett, 248.

95
state legislature on the Union Party ticket and won, only to abdicate his

position.280As

members

of Coughlins organization, Johnson and Blackburns main assignment was to ensure that
Coughlins weekly journal Social Justice was published on time by the Cuneo Press in Chicago.
In September of that same year, they organized a rally for Coughlin in Chicago at which eighty
thousand spectators paid fifty cents each to hear Coughlin and Lemke.281 The duo also helped
Coughlin financially: for two years, sponsoring The Voice of Youth, a series of Sunday afternoon
broadcasts on radio station WSPD, Toledo.282
Prior to 1938, Social Justices program was Right-wing but not yet rabidly so. The papers
stated concerns were ostensibly to save capitalism from communism and Fascism by avoiding
debt, making industry pay a decent living wage to the worker and to avoid any American
involvement in future wars, which Social Justices writers believed might take place to defend
English interests in Asia. As for antisemitic remarks, what references were made in regard to
Jews were generally defenses of Coughlin against charges of antisemitism leveled by some
vague opponent.
But a great deal of American fascist literature was set out in this way. On the surface, the
literature would not appear antisemitic and Pro-Nazi, discussing the topics only in terms of how
the writer was being attacked by liberal members of the media (read: Jews) who were slandering
him by calling him antisemitic and Pro-Nazi. Deeper down, however, certain other themes
emerged. The defenses often argued that Coughlin was not against all Jews, only those who
were part of a conspiracy of the international banking lite, notably the Rothschilds, the bankers
of the federal reserve system. The bankers were public enemy number one as far as Coughlin
was concerned, controlling the West through their diabolical manipulations of monetary systems
and exploitation of credit. To any student of conspiracy theory, this is one of the classic Rightwing conspiracies popular since the early part of the century. In this theory, the equation of
bankers with Jews was made on the grounds that Jews were usurers. The crime of the
Jew/banker was that he did not work for his money but rather took it from others. Following a
Jamesonian notion of conspiracy as allegory, it should be quite clear that the bankers conspiracy
was an allegory for the capitalist system and its global reach. This process of allegorizing was,
however, not innocent, but rather driven by a desire to preserve capitalism and ostracize the

280. Andersen, Philip the Great, 138. See also Andrea O. Dean, Conversations: Philip
Johnson, AIA Journal June 1979: 46.
281.

Sheldon Marcus, Father Coughlin. The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little
Flower, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973), 127-130. On Coughlin see also Bennett and
Charles J. Tull, Father Coughlin and the New Deal, (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University
Press, 1965).
282.

Message of Youth To Nation Given in New Radio Program, Social Justice

November 16, 1936: 10. and Young America Has Visions, Dare We Make Them Real?, Social
Justice January 4 1937: 12. After this, mention of Blackburn in Social Justice ends.

96
Jews. It eventually equated the influence of bad Jews with the negative effects of capitalism with
the conclusion that if those Jews were somehow removed, capitalism would return to its natural
harmony.283
Support for the fascist governments tended to be indirect in pre-1938 Social Justice,
consisting principally of mocking the English and their government. Conditions in Germany were
not so bad, a typical article would argue, and it would continue, Germanys need for expansion
was justified, just as Americas manifest destiny was.284
One of the classic Social Justice tactics was a contest composed of a weird series of
panels from comic strips with the characters asking questions such as Why is Father Coughlin
not a fascist? or What is a Totalitarian State? to which one would select a multiple choice
answer (after committing to a subscription) in order to have a chance at winning a prize in the
thousands of dollars, no small sum in the thirties. While superficially similar to the much later
Situationist practice of co-opting or dtourning comic strips, in reality this game was precisely its
opposite, for instead of commenting on the image with words that were at odds with it, Social
Justice would use the image to lure the reader into the question. The image would often have
absolutely nothing to do with the words, except to jazz them up.
Creating a spectacle was also a typical technique used by salesmen who would hawk
Social Justice on the street. It is there, outside of print, and thus to a certain extent outside of
accountability, that the real agenda of the journal would be disseminated and Jews were the
target. One salesman explained that You got to create terror somewhere. You got to terrorize the
Jews. To do this he and a group of his collaborators would insult Jewish-looking passersby.
Another tactic was to position a weeping child on a streetcorner. When a passerby would stop

283.

That this reading can be made does not by any means make it less heinous. It is
remarkably similar to the deflection that Hitler made by distinguishing between Jewish and
German capitalism. See George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology. Intellectual Origins of
the Third Reich, (New York: The Universal Library (Grossett and Dunlap), 1964), 292. See also
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno:
The illusory conspiracy of Jewish bankers financing Bolshevism is a sign of innate
impotence, just as the good life is a sign of happiness. The image of the intellectual is in
the same category: he appears to think a luxury which the others cannot afford and
he does not manifest the sweat of toil and physical effort. Bankers and intellectuals, the
exponents of circulation, form the impossible ideal of those who have been maimed by
domination, an image used by domination to perpetuate itself.
Dialectic of Enlightenment, (New York: Continuum, 1991; first published in English
translation, Herder and Herder, 1972, originally published in German as Dialektik der Aufklrung,
Amsterdam: Querido, 1944), 172.
284.

296.

See for example the Social Justice article of 13 February 1939 quoted in Schonbach,

97
and ask what was the matter, the child would reply A big Jew hit me for selling Social Justice.
Soon a crowd would gather and take up a collection to buy the childs newspapers.285 Thus the
salesmen would provide a interpretive guide to the papers tales of bankers and
internationalists. That the paper would not openly attack Jews in print would only serve as
further evidence of the corruption of the Jews if he had nothing to hide, why would the Jew hit
the child?286 Although we have no direct evidence whatsoever of his involvement with the selling
of the paper on the street, Johnsons role in the papers production would suggest that he would
have been aware of this activity, if not involved in formulating it.
Reading Johnsons Fascist Writings
Johnson wrote his first piece sympathetic to the Nazis on Architecture in the Third Reich
for the Harvard magazine of the arts Hound and Horn, in an issue dated 1933.287 The date of this
article coincides with the general period in which defenders of the new modern architecture,
among them Walter Gropius lobbied the newly-appointed Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels
who they believed might have sympathies with modern architecture.288 Similarly, Johnsons piece
held out a strong hope that under the Third Reich architecture would continue its advancement.

285.

Carlson, Under Cover, 32-33. See also Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn,
SABOTAGE! The Secret War Against America, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942), 151-152.
286. Schonbach calls Coughlin the most effective force in generating anti-Semitism [in
the U. S.] in the late 1930s and early 1940s. p 286.
One would have to contrast this to Alan Brinkleys discussion of Coughlins antisemitism
in appendix 1 of his Voices Of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression,
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982). Brinkley concludes that Coughlins antisemitism was the result
of disappointment and desperation after his political failure in 1938. Unfortunately Brinkleys
agenda is to recuperate Long and Coughlin as populist voices of protest and his account is at
odds with the contemporary observations of Coughlins antisemitism cited by Schonbach among
others.
Haskel Lookstein in Were We Our Brothers Keepers? The Public Response of American
Jews to the Holocaust, 1938-1944, (New York: Vintage, 1988; first published New York: Hartmore
House, 1985) attributes much of the reluctance on the part of American Jews and the Roosevelt
administration to help the German Jews after Kristallnacht to the American antisemitism
nourished by Coughlin, 31-32, 90-92.
287.

Charles Jencks, who states that Johnson wrote the piece after his engagement with
Huey Long is mistaken, Philip Johnson The Candid King Midas of the New York Camp, Late
Modern Architecture, (New York: Rizzoli, 1978; originally published in Architectural Association
Quarterly, Winter 1973) 155.
288.

Barbara Miller-Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945, (Cambridge,

Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968), 176.

98
Johnson explained that as yet It would be false to speak of the architectural situation in
national socialist Germany. The new state is faced with such tremendous problems of
reorganization that a program of art and architecture has not been worked out. The situation had
however been decisively altered: Die Neue Sachlichkeit is over. Houses that look like hospitals
and factories are taboo. This much would probably not disappoint Johnson, who as we described
above was set against it. In addition, he observed the row houses which have become almost
the distinguishing feature of German cities are doomed. they all look too much alike, stifling
individualism. Instead, he wrote, apparently with approval
architecture will be monumental. That is, instead of bath-houses, Siedlungen,
employment offices and the like, there will be official railroad stations, memorial
museums, monuments. The present regime is more intent on leaving a visible mark of its
greatness than in providing sanitary equipment for workers.
Johnson pointed out that the actual form of this monumental new architecture was as yet
completely unknown, although he believed it was certain that
Germany as the birthplace of modern architecture can hardly go back to Revivalism since
there exist no architects who could or would design in styles. Nor is it possible that they
will adopt the Bauhaus style. It is not monumental enough and it has irretrievably the
stamp of Communism and Marxism. Internationalism, all the isms not [sic] in vogue in
Germany today. Somewhere between the extremes is the key; and within the Party are
three distinct movements each of which may win out.
The first of these movements he disapproved of:
the forces of reaction, with Paul Schultze-Naumburg at the head. He is the enemy of
anything which has happened in the last thirty years. His book Art and Race, contains the
most stupid attacks on modern art which he considers mere interest in the abnormal, a
point of view which he defends by showing juxtaposed clinical photographs of physical
abnormalities and modern paintings. In architecture, he approves of nothing since the
War
But reading Johnsons own words, we see that in no way does he actually criticize any
Schulze-Naumburgs racism, only his reactionary view against modern art. Nowhere in these
texts by Johnson is there any criticism of Schultze-Naumburgs racism.
Johnson linked another member of this group, Paul Erwin Troost to Hitler, and the latters
aspirations to architecture, he wrote makes the outlook depressing.
He was guardedly optimistic about the second group, represented by the Kampfbund fur
Deutsche Kultur, whose architectural hero was Paul Schmitthener, the newly appointed director of
Prussian state art schools. Johnson wrote that Though an outspoken enemy of Die Neue
Sachlichkeit he claims modernity. His houses are sound, well proportioned but uninspired
adaptations of the vernacular of the early 19th century, much in the same feeling as the best
adaptations of the best adaptations of the Cape Cod farmhouses in America. His larger buildings

99
are in a half-modern tasteful style, better really than much work in Germany more modern in
intention.
Finally there was the third group, composed of the young men in the party, the students
and revolutionaries who are ready to fight for modern art. While the fight had revolved around
painting, Johnson explained that
In architecture there is only one man whom even the young men can defend and this is
Mies van der Rohe. Mies has always kept out of politics and has always taken his stand
against functionalism. No one can accuse Mies houses of looking like factories. Two
factors especially make Mies acceptance as the new architect possible. First Mies is
respected by the conservatives.
Even the Kampfbund fur Deutsche Kultur has nothing against him. Secondly Mies has
just won (with four others) a competition for the new building of the Reichsbank. The Jury
were older architects and representations [sic] of the bank. If (and it may be a long if)
Mies should build this building it would clinch his position.289
Johnson concluded by expressing hope that the new Germany will adopt a Miesian
monumentality:
A good modern Reichsbank would satisfy the new craving for monumentality, but above
all it would prove to the German intellectuals and to foreign countries that the new
Germany is not bent on destroying all the splendid modern arts which have been built up
in recent years. All revolutions, seemingly against everything of the past, really build on
the positive achievements of the preceding decades. Germany cannot deny her progress.
If in the arts she sets the clock back now, it will run all the faster in the future.290
Hence, according to Johnson then a new German architecture would validate the
governments intents in the modern arts.
While Johnson continued to be involved in the art and architecture world between 1933
and 1936, we have no evidence that these two seemingly contradictory obsessions of his
resolved themselves in any way. His main contact among architects in Germany, Mies van der
Rohe left Germany for New York in 1938 after first coming over to the United States in 1937 at
the invitation of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Resor, who, at Johnsons suggestion, invited Mies to be the
architect for their guest house.291

289. Philip Johnson, Architecture in the Third Reich, Oppositions 2 (January 1974;
originally published in Hound & Horn, 1933): 92-93.
290.

Johnson, Architecture in the Third Reich, 93.

291.

David A. Spaeth, Mies van der Rohe, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 102.

100
Johnson continued to promote a monumental architecture, hoping to get Mies to do the
faade for MoMAs new building. These intents can be seen in a 1936 letter he wrote to Alfred H.
Barr on the Goodwin and Stone design of the new quarters for the Museum of Modern Art: I
know you will snort, the building is Jewish. It looks like an upper Fifth Avenue front. Instead
Johnson had hoped for a temple of artthe most beautiful and useless building in the world,
small galleries, dark, cool and gorgeousI mean a lot of wasted space. One should enter a
museum up steps and one should be impressed and rather afraid to enter.292 Thus for Johnson,
a monumental architecture which one would be rather afraid to enter would serve as the
antidote to the commercialism of Jewish architecture.
Around 1939,293 Johnson became Social Justices European correspondent. After the
Hitlers Anschluss of Austria, Father Coughlin and Social Justice veered to the extreme Right. In
May 1938 Coughlin organized his Christian Front, a movement in which the common antisemitic
cause was generally not hidden. At typical Front meetings Social Justice would be sold, Coughlin
would be praised, Jews would be attacked as communists, international bankers, and war
mongers. At some meetings Fronters went so far as to call for the liquidation of all Jews in
America, called Hitler the savior of Europe and ended the meeting with the Nazi salute.294 The
paper itself soon became notorious for the deceptive propaganda practices it deployed to further
the cause of the American fascists, for reprinting a speech by Goebbels essentially unchanged
under Father Coughlins name, as well as for its publication of antisemitic texts such as a
serialization of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and perhaps most notoriously for defending the
Nazis after Kristallnacht.295

292.

Johnson quoted in Helaine Ruth Messer, MoMA: Museum in Search of an Image,

Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University, 1979, 70-71 and reprinted in Marquis, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.,
169.
293. By this I mean articles with Johnsons byline only appear after that point. I have been
unable to find any evidence that he wrote any of the unsigned articles that filled Social Justices
pages and it is possible that he wrote other articles without signing them. In Social Justice, byline
articles were the exception rather than the rule. Evidence that Johnson did write other articles is
that in there were a number of articles from Germany in Social Justice in the late thirties and
Shirer called Johnson the corespondent for Social Justice although Johnson only signed three
articles, as far as I have been able to ascertain. Since Johnson states that he visited the
Sudetenland before its fall in 1938, certainly not a tourist trip, it seems reasonable to assume that
he was Social Justices corespondent at that time as well. Johnsons statement that he was in the
Sudetenland, is in Philip Johnson, Polands Choice Between War and Bolshevism Is a Deal
With Germany, Social Justice September 11 1939: 4.
294.
295.

Dinnerstein, 120-121.

On Father Coughlins deceptive practices, see Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth
Briant Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda. A Study of Father Coughlins Speeches for the Institute
for Propaganda Analysis (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939). Bizarrely, much of
their argument is made through pictograms. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis also publicized

101
During Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, of November 9-10, 1938 the Nazi party
lashed out at German Jews, brutally attacking them, burning synagogues and destroying their
businesses. The police cooperated and 20,000 were taken prisoner and the ensuing pogrom
continued for a month. Polls showed that of the Americans who knew of the event disapproved
and President Roosevelt declared I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in
twentieth-century civilization, and recalled the ambassador to Berlin. The event received
extensive coverage in the American media. The New York Times, for one, featured the pogrom
on its front page for the next two weeks. During his radio broadcast of November 20, however,
Father Coughlin blamed the Jews themselves as responsible for the economic and social
sufferings of Germany since the Treaty of Versailles. Using forged documents prepared by the
Nazis, Coughlin pointed to Communism as led by Jews. Nazism, he explained, was conceived
as a political defense mechanism against Communism and was ushered into existence as a
result of Communism. While he did express some sympathy for the Jews who were victims of
the pogrom, he also declared that not until Jewish leaders attacked Communism and any Jewish
Communists could their plight be improved.296 Indeed, internal German communiqus show that
Coughlin himself was in contact with the German government during the following years and,
while eventually unhappy with the Germans treatment of Catholics, also allied himself with them
against the Red Menace.297
While Coughlins speech was condemned in the press, it also struck a chord in many
Americans and emboldened them to make their antisemitism public. Coughlin received more, not
less support as a result of the speech. According to Dinnerstein, In December 1938, 45 radio
stations carried his weekly address that 3.5 million Americans listened to regularly; another 15
million had heard him at least once. Two-thirds of his loyal followers and more than half of those
who tuned in occasionally subscribed to his views while polls showed that the lower the economic
class, the larger the percentage of people who approved the radio priests views. His office

an analysis in which they compared a speech by Coughlin to one by Propaganda minister Joseph
Goebbels on the same page in order to demonstrate that the former was substantially derivative
of the latter. Schonbach, 300.
On antisemitism and support of the Nazis by Coughlin and in Social Justice see Marcus,
146-207. Virtually all works dealing with antisemitism in America during the late 1930s mention
Johnson. The most complete history of American antisemitism, with a particularly detailed section
on Coughlin is Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994), 115-127.
On Coughlin see also George Britt, The Fifth Column is Here, (New York: Wilfred Funk,
Inc., 1940), 105-109. Johnson is mentioned briefly on 106.
296.
297.

Dinnerstein, 116-117.

Memorandum by the Director of the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry, 11

August 1939, published in United States Department of State, Documents on German Foreign
Policy, (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1956), Series D, Volume VII, 32.

102
received approximately 80,000 letters a week, 70 percent of which came from Protestants, and it
took 105 staff members to read them.298
Coughlins popularity made antisemitism more acceptable to many and made it difficult
for government officials who wanted to avoid controversy to support the admittance of Jewish
refugees from Germany and Austria into the country.299 Since the fate of many of these refugees
was death in the Holocaust, Coughlins antisemitism is in no way innocent of its deadly
consequences, which not so well hidden in the first place.
It is for this Social Justice, no longer the populist voice of the early 1930s but the voice of
the extreme Right in the late 1930s, openly sympathetic to the Nazis and antisemitic that Johnson
would become the foreign correspondent. At the same time he would also write for Todays
Challenge, the official organ of the American Fellowship Forum, an organization dedicated to
carefully disseminating Nazi propaganda to business leaders and Park Avenue types.
The Forum was first conceived in Berlin during 1936 by Lawrence Dennis and Friedrich
Auhagen, a German who, funded by the German Embassy, traveled the U. S. giving lectures, and
would eventually be convicted of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.300 Dennis wrote

298.

Dinnerstein, 118.

299.

Dinnerstein, 144. See also Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died. A Chronicle of
American Apathy, (New York: Random House, 1967) and Haskel Lookstein, Were We Our
Brothers Keepers? The Public Response of American Jews to the Holocaust, 1938-1944, (New
York: Vintage, 1988; first published New York: Hartmore House, 1985).
300.

On Auhagen and the American Fellowship Forum see Rogge, 102; Sayers and Kahn,
158-164 (Johnson is mentioned briefly on 159); Britt, 39-42 and the Investigation of Un-American
Propaganda Activities in the United States. Special Committee on Un-American Activities. House
of Representatives. Seventy-Sixth Congress. Third Session on H. Res. 282 (Washington DC:
1940) Appendix Part II, Section XI: 1063-1068. For the origins of the American Fellowship
Forum, see Rogge, 181 and the Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities, 1063-1081.
On p. 1065 Auhagen mentions Johnson by name: we had such men as Philip Johnson speak
[at Forum meetings] of his impressions in war-time Germany. This goes to show that the
American Fellowship Forum has by no means conducted its lectures and discussions on a onesided pro-German basis, but has always attempted to present both points of view
simultaneously. Yet this is clearly a disingenuous statement: judging from Johnsons writing in
Todays Challenge, if was not pro-German, he certainly wasnt anti-German. Auhagens appeal to
Johnsons name, however, tends to indicate that Johnson was cleared by the government prior to
September 10, 1940, the date of the interview.
Also see Jay Field, The American Fellowship Forum: Guide to An American Munich,
The Anti-Nazi Bulletin June, 1940: 8-9. Field sums up his assessment of the group as an antidemocratic, anti-Semitic, Nazi-inspired group attempting to guide us toward an American
Munich. 9. More recently, Frye comes to essentially the same conclusion about the Forum
(albeit without mentioning antisemitism) in Nazi Germany in the American Hemisphere, 98.

103
for Todays Challenge but was not among its official

directors.301

Instead Auhagen was the

director of the Forum. The other Nazi agent Dennis maintained contact with, George Sylvester
Viereck, served as contributing editor and wrote for Todays Challenge as well until a dispute over
compensation led him to resign.
The two articles Johnson wrote from Europe for Todays Challenge were calculated to put
down the French and English and make Germany seem less of a threat at a time that tensions in
the United States were rising because of fears that America would follow England into a war with
Germany.
Johnsons first piece as foreign correspondent for Todays Challenge, written in London
and Paris in 1939, expressed these ideas. In London, he explained, there are only two topics of
conversation this summer: the Servant Problem and the next war. The Servant problem was of
no interest to Americans, Johnson wrote, so he would omit it, but by starting his article with it, he
immediately associated the English attitude toward the war with foolishness, haughtiness and
trivial desires of an old and stubborn people. Johnson described the scene:
publicity on the War was ubiquitous and, to say the least, very disquieting. In shop
windows there are little signs saying Dont give way to fear. We got through last time all
right. Well win through again. The newspapers carry editorials that run something like
this: Do not be frightened. Hitler may not attack tomorrow. Take your vacations just as if
times were normal. The radio blares: Be calm in an air raid. You must get used to seeing
blood spattered on the pavement. You must help the maimed and the dying and not lose
your head!302

301.

Dennis and Johnson may have shared office space together on East Forty-Second
Street, see testimony of Ferdinand A. Kertess, Special Committee on Un-American Activities.
House of Representatives. Seventy-Sixth Congress. Second Session on H. Res. 282,
Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States. Executive Hearings,
(Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1942) vol. 5, 2452. In other areas,
Kertesss testimony seems problematic (for example on the relationship between Todays
Challenge and the American Fellowship Forum), and so this too may be inaccurate. Further,
Denniss letterhead consistently states his address as 40 Wall Street, except for the mailing list of
Transition World News which lists him at 420 Warwick Avenue, West Englewood, New Jersey.
The American Fellowship Forums address was 11 West 42nd Street. A letter by Dennis to the
Forum is exhibit no. 197 of Special Committee on Un-American Activities. House of
Representatives. Seventy-Sixth Congress. Third Session on H. Res. 282, Investigation of UnAmerican Propaganda Activities in the United States. Appendix-Part II. A Preliminary Digest and
Report on the Un-American Activities of Various Nazi Organizations and Individuals in the United
States, Including Diplomatic and Consular Agents of the German Government, (Washington, DC:
United States Government Printing Office, 1940), 1308. The mailing list is on p. 1030. Another
address for the Forum is given on p. 1063 room 2942, 11 West Twenty-second Street, New York
City. There is some possibility that Kertess may have mistakenly meant 40 Wall Street rather
than E. 42nd Street.
302.

Philip Johnson, London and Paris Midsummer 1939, Todays Challenge AugustSeptember 1939: 19.

104
In contrast, Johnson described Parisians as having a fatalistic attitude of dfense passive
which he described in Nietzschean terms as the will to escape, not active courage the will to
win. It is not that they lack courage, but that it takes a protective, negative form. They feel they
will win the next war, but they feel no thrill in the thought of victory.303 If the attitude toward war
was negative, then so was the unity of the French people behind the Daladier government, a
unity of compromise, not of strength. No one forgets that Daladier is Premier faute de mieux, that
he is there, not because he is a leader, but because he can best compromise the disparate views
of those who back him. He is their slave, and his decree laws are cautiously framed not to offend
any one group. And the factions refrain from throwing him out, but only for the moment, and only
because of Adolf Hitler. The lack of unity led to a government that is weak in spite of being a
kind of dictatorship304 and hence to an inability to make substantive decisions in foreign
policy.antisemiticantisemitic
All this is rather accurate: there is no evidence that Johnson is seriously distorting the
facts. On the other hand, Johnsons article singles out the weaknesses of the French and English
and portrays the latter as sick of waiting and ready to drag the world into war. In the context of a
Right-wing journal sympathetic to the Nazi government and aimed at generating anti-war
sentiment among highbrow Americans, however, the article serves to substantiate ideas that
there is nothing inherently unreasonable about the Nazi stance toward Poland and that the West
is overreacting and in any event would be unable to defend itself against the Nazi war machine,
requiring the U.S. to bail them out once again.
On the other hand, in the same article, Johnson expressed sentiments not dissimilar from
those of the antisemitic subtext then in circulation in the pages of Social Justice and Todays
Challenge,
Another serious split in French opinion is that caused by the Jewish question, a problem
much aggravated just at present by the multitude of migrs in Paris. Even I, as a
stranger in the city, could not help noticing how much German was being spoken,
especially in the better restaurants. Such an influx naturally makes the French wonder,
not only about these incoming Jews, but also about their co-religionists who live and work
here and call themselves French. The facts that Blum and the men around him are Jews,
that there are two Jews in the present cabinet, Messrs. Zay and Mandel and that the
Jewish bankers Mannheimer, de Rothschild and Lazard Freres are known to stand
behind the present government all complicate the situation.
The position taken by the Daladier government on this question is an interesting
commentary on its policies in general. There are two decree laws which concern the
press, one against publishing propaganda paid for by a foreign government. Under these
laws, the patriotic weeklies Le Defi and La France Enchainee were just recently

303.

Johnson, London and Paris Midsummer 1939, 23.

304.

Johnson, London and Paris Midsummer 1939, 24.

105
suppressed, presumably for getting money from Hitler; but LHumanit, which no one
doubts gives out Russian propaganda, paid for by Russia, has been left alone. What is
freedom of the press and for whom is it done, the French ask.305
This lengthy citation is necessary to show the clever transition between the first and
second paragraphs. This transition moves from a discussion of the Jewish question in France to
The position taken by the Daladier government on this question, a position which Johnson
faults because it suppresses Hitler-backed publications. If the Daladier government suppressed
publication getting money from Hitler, then the internal logic of the piece would be that the
government suppressed antisemitic publications and that was wrong. Hitler after all, was offering
a solution, which to a well-read American touring Europe in 1939 could not have been terribly
difficult to discern.
Johnson wrote a similar piece, Aliens Reduce France to an English Colony, published
in Social Justice on July 24. In this article he explained that while the American papers were
trying to make the French seem, as he put it, unified and courageously prepared for the worst, in
reality Just the opposite is true: they are afraid for the future. They are unprepared, split into a
thousand factions. Unity, Johnson explained, was only a pious hope for Daladier to make
speeches about. You cannot have unity between French nationalism and Russian Communism
any more than between health and sickness, he explained, his remarks italicized for emphasis.
Instead, of unity among the French people, the Lack of leadership and direction in the State has
let the one group get control who always gain power in a nations time of weakness: the Jews.
Johnson insinuated that the Jews were doing better under the new government, writing, Some
French believe they are better off now than they were in the regime of Blum and his assistants,
Messrs Blummel, Gombach, Bloch and Moch. But a great many Frenchmen say to me What
have we gained in changing from one clique to another? Are Messrs Mannheimer, Dreyfuss, de
Rothschild, Zav and Mandel any better?
Johnson pointed out that Catholicism was still not allowed the right of assembly or
instruction and instead It would seem that only Jews have freedom in the Third Republic. Small
wonder one hears so many reports of growing antisemitism among the common people of
France. To emphasize, he quoted an instance of this justified antisemitism:
But let France speak for herself. The following was told me by a patriotic French woman,
a well-known writer and journalist, whose name I must withhold for obvious reasons.
My heart aches for the future of my country. When I see my beloved city of Paris overrun
with German, Czech and Hungarian Jews, I say to myself are these the Frenchmen who
with their French cousins are to rule France? And am I not even to be allowed to raise
my voice against it?

305.

Johnson, London and Paris Midsummer 1939, 26.

106
Where is the France of Louis XIV? Our Blums and Mandels have lost us our natural
allies, Italy and Spain; and England treats us like a colony.
With our internal affairs in the hands of the Jewish bankers, our foreign affairs in the
hands of Great Britain, and our country rent by dissension, what is to be the end for
France? Who will save her?306
After a tour of the Balkans and Turkey with his sister Theodate, Johnson found himself in
Munich at the outset of the war and accompanied the German army into Poland in his capacity as
correspondent for Social Justice and Todays Challenge.307 In an article on Germany, Johnson
explained his was to be an objective look into the German situation, something that had become
hard to do given the anti-German and pro-British indoctrination and propaganda that the
American newspapers had inflicted upon their people.308 Johnson anticipated criticism of his
position, as he put it: If I say, the Germans have plenty to eat, which is true, I am pro-Nazi. If I
make the ultra-neutral statement that the war is only a war of two imperialisms, which is also true,
I am, according to our distinguished guest from overseas, Mr. Duff Cooper, making propaganda
for Nazism.309 On the contrary, Johnson explained, the American journalists are the
propagandists, pointing to a statement by one of the well known journalists, perhaps Shirer, who
told me in a moment of unusual candor, I dont see why the Germans dont throw all of us
American correspondents out of the country. We are poison to them and their cause.310 That a
journalist reporting objectively on Nazi Germany necessarily cast a negative cast on the situation
apparently did not occur to Johnson.
In a telegram to the German Foreign Ministry dated 21 November 1939, Hans Thomsen,
the Charg daffaires in the German embassy to the United States explained why the reporters
werent thrown out: The most effective tool of German propaganda in the United States, he
wrote, is, as heretofore, the American correspondents in Berlin who, as for example, the New
York Times correspondent Brooks Peters in yesterdays Sunday edition, give detailed
descriptions as to their being carefully and courteously treated by German officials, and are not

306.

Philip Johnson, Aliens Reduce France to an English Colony, Social Justice July 24

1939: 4.
307.

Editors introduction to Philip Johnson, Inside War-Time Germany, Todays

Challenge November-December 1939: 17.
308.

Johnson, Inside War-Time Germany, 17.

309.

Johnson, Inside War-Time Germany, 17. Judging from Johnsons reference to our
distinguished guest suggests that Johnson also gave this article as a lecture.
310.

Johnson, Inside War-Time Germany, 17.

107
being handicapped by pre-censorship as on the Allied side. The Embassy is therefore
endeavoring to induce suitable American journalists to visit Germany.311
While Johnson did not describe his treatment by German officials, he did paint Germany
in a starkly better light then he did Britain or France. Hitler, like Lenin, Johnson wrote, had
provided his people with a positive revolutionary ideal for which they were prepared to sacrifice
their lives. The preconditions of revolution, starvation, oppression, suffering were very far from
being sufficient to cause a revolt. Those opposed to Hitler constituted a diverse group from
lawyers who miss the good old days when lawyers were looked up to and paid well to artists
who resent the official disapproval of their art incapable of uniting on a common front.312 It
wasnt so bad at all, Johnson explained
none of those opposed to Hitler that I know would prefer the liberalism of the Weimar
Republic to National Socialism as a system of government. They remember too well the
humiliation of the Versailles treaty, the misery of inflation and the later miseries of mass
unemployment. They remember that the Weimar Republic brought civil strife, battles of
brother against brother; and such civil war to them was more hateful than the World War.
They do not like Hitler, but they feel that if Hitler were not Hitler but some imaginary
person that would be nice in their own particular way, then National Socialism or rather
national socialism, would be a good idea. Such thoughts are not the stuff of revolutions.
Also, no matter what the objections they have to Hitler, close to 100% of the Germans
appear to approve of one particular part of Hitlers work his foreign policy. since
1911, Germany has been growing rapidly. Even the bitterest foes of the National Socialist
ideology are proud of German greatness. This natural pride in their power and success
stultifies foreign criticism of their methods or their morals. Similarly, we Americans would
not have brooked any criticism of our doctrine of manifest destiny in the 19th century
when we were busy conquering our empire in the west. So today the Germans are
impervious to the moral admonishment that they ought not to conquer their neighbors.
Conquest is good or bad, depending on who does it, you yourself or somebody you dont
like.313
One wonders whether Johnson didnt mention the Jews because so many had by now
been arrested or fled or whether he was deliberately suppressing the question.
Nowhere does Johnson mention the plight of the Jews in Germany, a fact that was so
pervasive that he could not have missed it. Already in 1936, journalist and historian William

311. Telegram by Hans Thomsen, Charg dAffaires in the German embassy to the
United States to German Foreign Ministry, 21 November 1939, published in United States
Department of State, Documents on German Foreign Policy, (Washington: United States
Government Printing Office, 1956), Series D, Volume VIII, 433-434.
312.

Johnson, Inside War-Time Germany, 18-20.

313.

Johnson, Inside War-Time Germany, 20.

108
Shirer, who as we will soon discuss, Johnson called that irresponsible journalist describes the
transformation of German life against the Jews that he saw taking place every day:
In the first year of the Third Reich, 1933, they had been excluded from public office, the
civil service, journalism, radio, farming, teaching, the theater, the films; in 1934 they were
kicked out of the stock exchanges, and though the ban on their practicing the professions
of law and medicine or engaging in business did not come legally until 1938 they were in
practice removed from these fields by the time the first four-year period of Nazi rule had
come to an end.
Moreover, they were denied not only most of the amenities of life but often even the
necessities. In many a town the Jew found it difficult if not impossible to purchase food.
Over the doors of the grocery and butcher shops, the bakeries and the dairies, were
signs, Jews Not Admitted. In many communities Jews could not procure milk even for
their young children. Pharmacies would not sell them drugs or medicine. Hotels would not
give them a nights lodging. And always, wherever they went, were the taunting signs
Jews Strictly Forbidden in This Town or Jews Enter This Place at Their Own Risk. At a
sharp bend in the road near Ludwigshafen, Drive Carefully! Sharp Curve! Jews 75 miles
an Hour!314
For reporting that some of these signs had been removed for propaganda purposes
during the 1936 Olympics Shirer was threatened with expulsion and attacked in the German
Press and media. By the time Johnson was a reporter himself three years had passed and
conditions had only deteriorated.
There is simply no way that after all the time he had spent in Germany and with all of his
contacts there Johnson could have been ignorant of the vicious campaign against the Jews. After
Kristallnacht, the American press began to buzz with the question of the resettlement of
Germanys Jews.315 If Johnson had been in Germany at this time, then of course the tragedy
would have been even more apparent to him. For a young man so involved in politics, Johnson
cannot have been unaware that the climate in Germany did not just condemn the Jews with
words, but with violence and murder as well.
Shirer recounted Johnsons appearance as a correspondent in his Berlin Diary:
Dr. Boehmer, press chief of the Propaganda Ministry in charge of this trip, insisted that I
share a double room in the hotel with Philip Johnson, an American fascist who says he
represents Father Coughlins Social Justice. None of us can stand the fellow and suspect
he is spying on us for the Nazis. For the last hour in our room here he has been posing

314.

William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A History of Nazi Germany,
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), 233-234.
315.

Lookstein, 37-45.

109
as an anti-Nazi and trying to pump me for my attitude, I have given him no more than a
few bored grunts.316
Shirers Berlin Diary can also serve as means of contextualizing what Johnson may have
seen. The entry on Johnson was at Zoppot, near Danzig on September 18, 1939. That day, only
a little over two weeks into the invasion of Poland, Germany was wrapping it up, dispensing with
the last stubborn units of resistance from isolated units of the Polish army.317 On his way out from
Berlin to Danzig, Shirer recalled In the woods in the Corridor the sickening sweet smell of dead
horses and dead men. Here, the Germans say, a whole division of Polish cavalry charged against
hundreds of German tanks and was annihilated. The next day, on September 19, Shirer watched
a battle going on two miles north of Gdynia and he and an unspecified we (perhaps Johnson,
perhaps other reporters) had been awakened in our beds by it. At six a.m. the windows in
my room shook. The German battleship Schwelsig-Holstein, anchored in Danzig, was firing shells
from its eleven-inch guns over our heads. Shirer and fellow reporter Joe Barnes agreed the
scene from the hotel was tragic and grotesque as the Polish army desperately held out against
the efficient and technologically advanced German war machine. In the afternoon, the press
corps drove to the Danzig Guild Hall to hear a speech by Hitler in which the Frher announced,
as Shirer explained it that, Poland would never be re-created on the Versailles model and that he
had no war aims against Britain and France, but would fight them if they continued the war.318
In using Shirers account to contextualize Johnson, we have to turn to Johnsons reaction
to Shirers passage about him. In a 1973 interview in which Charles Jencks confronted Johnson
with the passage from Shirer, Johnson explained Shirers a very irresponsible journalistvery
third rate writer Nevertheless, Johnson did not deny being in Danzig, only spying for the Nazis,
saying Yes it was that night in Danzig that Shirer writes about. But uhI really, Id suppose that
anyone who wasnt actively crusading was suspicious and I probably did lean over
backwardsno I was wrongI hoped something good would come out of it. No this was before
concentration camps were started of course. But still no excuse. Speer has it right, I know, but of
course I werent no spy.319 Having no evidence one way or another, we cannot decide whether
Johnson was a spy or not. On the other hand, his statement about the concentration camps is
quite wrong. The first concentration camp, Dachau, was opened in 1933 although the systematic
extermination of the Jews began only in 1941. Violent antisemitism was institutionalized by 1939,
especially after Kristallnacht. While Johnsons negative opinion of Shirer was shared by Joseph

316.

William Shirer, Berlin Diary. The Journal of a Foreign Corespondent 1934-1941,

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 213.
317.

Shirer, Berlin Diary. The Journal of a Foreign Corespondent 1934-1941, 626.

318.

Shirer, Berlin Diary. The Journal of a Foreign Corespondent 1934-1941, 212-216.

319.

Jencks, 157.

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Goebbels propaganda ministry which condemned him in 1936 for exposing Nazi antisemitism,
recent obituaries for Shirer have argued that he was certainly not a very third rate writer. The
Washington Post referred to him as one of the giants of 20th century American journalism,320
Englands Daily Telegraph commented that Shirer had probably seen more of Hitler's Reich than
any other non-German,321 The Guardian called Shirers later book The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich the definitive version of those events history,322 and of Shirers Berlin Diary, Reuters
wrote that it was praised for its simple documentation of survival amid horror.323
Roughly a month before the evening with Shirer near Danzig, Johnson had been in
Poland in Berlin, Danzig, Lodz, and Warsaw in the space of a week and he summarized his
impressions in an article for Social Justice, bylined from Danzig, Poland. On his way into Poland,
albeit driving his American car and offering his American passport, Johnson was arrested by the
Polish police at Kepno for taking pictures (never published), After eight hours of grilling,
Johnson explained, they finally let me go. This interrogation Johnson wrote, was triggered by
the Polish governments jitteriness, as he put it Their nightmare is, of course, the Germans. They
see Germans behind every tree.
The Polish police chief showed Johnson the entire population of Kepno at work digging
trenches in the fields as a defense against invasion. The chief, Johnson recalled, told him Tell
the Germans what you saw, tell them what a glorious spirit of patriotism burns in the breasts of
the Poles. We shall hold them! We shall fight them till we die. Upon returning to Germany,
Johnson wrote, I told some Germans about the trenches. They roared with laughter. I could
easily see why, for I, too, had noticed the rows on rows of armored cars and tanks near the
border, which could easily cross those little trenches without even pausing. Johnson explained
that he felt sorry for the earnest, patriotic Poles who were no match against such a the German
army. Of course, Johnson was right in his assessment, the Poles were no match.
But the rest of Johnsons article took a different turn. Poland, he explained was not a
unified nation. Only 20 of the 35 million people in the country were Poles, the rest were Jews,
Ukrainians, White Russians, and Germans, all of whom dislike the Poles. Hence Johnsons
reaction When I first drove into Poland, the countryside was a shock to me. Like most Americans
who learned their geography since the World War I was brought up to think of Poland as a
country which looked much like the other countries of Europe. Instead, Johnson wrote, Once on

320.

Editorial, The Washington Post, January 1, 1994, A22.

321.

Obituary of William L Shirer, The Daily Telegraph, December 30, 1993, 21.

322.

The Evil Exposed, The Guardian, December 30, 1993, 15.

323.

WILLIAM SHIRER, AUTHOR OF NAZI STUDY, DIES AT 89, December 29, 1993,
Wednesday, BC cycle. Via NEXIS.

111
the Polish side [of the Polish-German border], I thought I must be in the region of some awful
plague. The fields were nothing but stone, there were no trees, mere paths instead of roads. In
the towns there were no shops, no automobiles, no pavements and again no trees. There were
not even any Poles to be seen in the streets, only Jews! Johnson saw the Jewish-populated area
as backwards: As I drove through the towns, the whole population out of sheer curiosity would
run along beside the car, which was very easy for them since I had to drive 10 miles an hour
because of the bad roads. The region reminded me of what I had imagined Siberia to look like.
For hours I drove through this countryside without seeing another automobile, or coming to a
town which might remind me of Europe.
But the Jews were not just in the countryside. Johnson explained that the industrial city of
Lodz was a slum without out a city attached to it. Like the countryside, Lodz was backwards,
with an incomplete sewage system, inadequate housing, no central square, no park, no trees at
all, and no public building bigger than one of our courthouses. Since Johnsons visit to Lodz took
place on a Saturday, he explained, the city looked more mournful than usual for most of the
shops were closed on the Jewish Sabbath. In Lodz, while the Jews made up only 35% of the
population, dressed in their black skull-caps and with their long beards they seem more like 85
per cent. Their section of town is poorer than the rest. The 60,000 Germans who live in Lodz are
rather well suppressed now although the big industries of the city still bear German names.
What Johnson sees is highly significant. Johnsons statement that in this part of Poland
he felt he was in the region of some awful plague where there were no Poles, only Jews is
classically antisemitic, equating the Jews with a disease upon the European race. We have
evidence that this reading is not mistaken in a statement Johnson made in 1970 in which he said
I was anti-Semitic too, but never like that (like Coughlin).324 Nevertheless, Johnson was
writing material that used standard antisemitic clichs for Coughlin and the use of imagery of the
plague of course begs the metaphor to be extended so that the plague could be eradicated.
Warsaw offered a contrast for Johnson, It is a Western capital in an Oriental setting.
There are trees and baroque palaces and parks. Here, the upper class speaks French. Here, the
nobility has quarreled for centuries over the question of leadership and have kept their country
weak, and here the Greater Poland propaganda is given out.
Danzig was likewise a contrast. Johnson explained that the city was surprisingly quiet, I
had to pinch myself to believe I was in the so-called center of European tension. Danzig is the
quietest spot I have yet been in all Europe. The people of Danzig were happy, The beaches and
cafes are full on Sundays, there is no unemployment, no suffering, no oppression of any kind. At
the same time, Johnson called Danzig the most German city I have been in. The Poles had
nothing to lose by giving up Danzig peacefully, Johnson wrote, explaining that they do not use the

324.

Philip Johnson, October 21, 1970 quoted in Marcus, ix. This appears to be in a
personal interview with Marcus. No other information on the quote is given.

112
Vistula river which enters into the sea at Danzig and do not even use the port at Danzig heavily,
preferring instead Gdynia, the artificial port that Shirer and perhaps Johnson would later witness
burning.
Johnsons description of Danzig is largely confirmed by Shirers visit to Danzig on August
11th, described in his Berlin Diaries: For a place where the war is supposed to break out, Danzig
does not quite live up to its part. Like the people in Berlin, the local inhabitants dont think it will
come to war. They have a blind faith in Hitler that he will effect their return to the Reich without
war. Among the population, much less tension than Id expected. But Johnson left out a key
point: Danzig wasnt just German, by this point it had become Nazified and militarized. Shirer
explained that The Free City is being rapidly militarized, German military cars and trucks with
Danzig license plates! dash thorough the streets. The town completely Nazified.325
But Johnson did argue that the Polish Corridor was bound to cost Poland: no matter how
things turn out, Poland is 100 per cent sure to get the worst of it! Johnson cited the only realistic
Pole he met as stating the solution to Polands problems. An invasion by either the Red Army or
the Germans would spell the end of Poland, The only solution is an understanding with Germany
which though painful for us, is nevertheless the lesser evil.326 Johnson thus advocated precisely
the position that the Germans had wanted.
This Sitdown War. Heavy Engagements of the Fortnight Have Been on Economic and
Moral Front, Johnsons final article for Social Justice, was published on November 6 1939.
Unlike his previous two Social Justice articles this one noted no location, and was almost
certainly written from the United States. Again Johnson poked at the English, explaining that
although in the Sitdown War the military situation had not changed in the last week, in the
Economic war, Germany had the edge by having the Italo-Jugoslavian-Hungarian-Roumanian
entente and Russian-Baltic bloc neutral and hence unwilling to participate in the anti-German
blockade while England could only escape Germanys counter-blockade by keeping her navy on
the water, an attempt which to date is only moderately successful. Somehow Johnson was able
to conclude that As yet, nobody can blockade anyone very seriously.
In the moral war, the object of which, he explained was to gain friends and allies and to
undermine the morale of the enemy Germany had a slight edge. England, whose goal was to
convince the nations of the world to join it, was failing, Johnson explained, by not being willing to
engage in the fight herself. In addition, Germany had already attained her war goals, as shown by
her military inaction and her peace offensive in the talk sphere while Englands goal, the

325.
326.

Shirer, 174.

Philip Johnson, Polands Choice Between War and Bolshevism Is a Deal With
Germany, Social Justice September 11 1939: 4.

113
destruction of Hitlerism was a large order requiring an extremely aggressive war against the
best armed nation in the world; an aggressive war which she is not waging.327
While this article was largely factual and the inaction of the Phoney War as it was known
in England had demoralized both it and France, it is noteworthy that Johnson did not discuss the
other events of the last two weeks of October and first few days of November. Meanwhile the
Netherlands and Switzerland were preparing for invasion, Pope Pius XII issued his first encyclical,
condemning racism, dictators, and treaty violations, and even Mussolini reshuffled his war
cabinet, replacing pro-Nazi members with neutral members. Johnsons biggest omission was the
question not of the moral war but of morality in the war: while he had talked only of the Danzig
corridor in his previous article, Germany and the Soviet Union had partitioned Poland.
Johnsons only article during this period that was not informed by immediate events in the
news was written for Todays Challenge, Are We A Dying People? The article was based on a
premise that the population rate within the U.S. had been falling and that Americans were in
danger of dying out. In the first few pages of the article, Johnson brings forth visions of deserted
ghost towns and a population decline from 140 million in 1930 to 100 million in 1990. Families
were apparently failing to reproduce enough. Midway through the article, however, Johnson
displaced population decrease in absolute terms with a decrease in the population of the white
race, writing: This decline in fertility, so far as scientists have been able to discover, is unique in
the history of the white race.328 If the decline was in the white race, however, and yet for much of
the article he discussed the nation as if the absolute population was going to decline then it would
appear that Johnson considered the non-white population less than human. Thus, the ghost
towns Johnson describes would not be empty, but would appear desolate the same way as he
would describe in his later Social Justice article in which he depicted a Polish countryside overrun
by Jews.
In short, Johnson wrote, the United States of America is committing race suicide.329
Race suicide was not however, simply a matter of numbers. Johnson found birth control of value,
explaining:
There are many women who, for reasons of health, should not have any children and
many more who should have but few. Also, birth control, or even sterilization, may be
useful in cases of inheritable diseases or idiocy. In this sense, of course, birth control
helps the future of the race and is eugenic.330

327.

Philip Johnson, This Sitdown War. Heavy Engagements of the Fortnight Have Been
on Economic and Moral Front, Social Justice November 6 1939: 9.
328.

Philip Johnson, Are We a Dying People?, Todays Challenge June-July 1939: 29.

329.

Johnson, 30.

330.

Johnson, Are We a Dying People?, 31.

114
The future of the white race, he explained, was threatened by the lack of desire we have
children and this lack of will is the result of the values of life in our western civilization. For
Johnson, these negative values were Individualism and Materialism.331 This could be
remedied by thinking in terms of the greater good of the race.
by their lack of will to live and grow, [Americans] themselves accelerate the already
rapid decline in births. I have heard many educated men talk in this way: Well if we are
not the fittest to survive, nature will wipe us out. The Japanese may be more fit to survive.
Remember Darwin.
But this appeal to Darwin is merely a cloak for weakness. For surely the will to live is a
factor in determining what is fittest. If we will to live and grow, we shall be fitter than the
Japanese. If we sit back and look at the situation purely objectively, the Japanese are
very likely, with their strong will to live, to become fitter to survive than we.
The course of nature is not pre-destined. Human will is a part of the biological process.
Our will, for example, interferes, constantly in the world of the lower animals. When
English sparrows threaten to drive out our songbirds, we shoot the sparrows, rather than
letting nature and Darwin take their course. Thus the songbirds, thanks to our will,
become the fittest and survive.332
Johnsons article has to be seen in the context of the eugenics movement. Eugenics,
historian Daniel J. Kevles points out, took hold in the United States because of societal changes
industrialization, the growth of big business, the sprawl of cities and slums, and massive
migration from Eastern and Central Europe that strained the country and triggered fear among its
established citizens.
Established Americans, the descendants of the English, Germans, and Scandinavians
who settled in the U. S. largely prior to the 1890s felt threatened by these social changes and
connected them with the influx of Polish, Jewish, Russian, Italian, Irish, and Eastern European
immigrants. As statistics showed that immigrants bred at a much higher rate than the established
Americans and at the same time showed that criminal activity and insanity were on the increase
the eugenicists among the established Americans pointed to a link between the two. Like
Johnson, they saw the specter of race suicide in indications that the Nordic or Anglo-Saxon
Americans bred at a lower rate than the foreigners. The eugenicists, as Johnson would do later,
predicted race suicide, and national deterioration as the consequence of these trends. Only
eugenic measures for the immigrants and increased fertility for the established could fend off the

331.

Johnson, Are We a Dying People?, 32.

332.

Johnson, Are We a Dying People?, 32.

115
destruction of the race. Even Johnsons reference to the Japanese can be traced to eugenicist
beliefs that the yellow or Oriental peril threatened the West with its increased fertility.333
This side of the eugenics movement is linked also to the curbs on immigration put in
effect by the United States government in the early part of the century.334 The Statue of Liberty
that would accept the huddled masses, was put up while immigration was still predominantly
from the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon lands. Historians have traced the reason for this turn to
attitudes toward immigration that developed in the U.S. in the later nineteenth century. While the
image of America as a haven from persecution and economic misfortune had developed by then,
until the 1890s immigrants tended to come from Northern and Western Europe: Great Britain,
Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Ireland. These immigrants were predominantly
Protestant and easily assimilated into the population, although the Irish being more Catholic than
Protestant, often poorly educated, destitute, and traditionally the victims of English imperialism
had an unhappy history of persecution upon arrival in the States. By the turn of the century,
however, migration from the North and West had ended and was replaced by immigrants arriving
from Southern and Eastern Europe. These immigrants immediately appeared different: they were
poorer, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, or Jewish, and through their language, names, appearance,
and tendency to congregate together, often in slums born of poverty and exploitation from factory
owners, alarmed the earlier immigrants.335
The established Americans reacted with alarm. Madison Grants best-selling The Passing
of the Great Race, published in 1916 wrote that The new immigration contained a large and
increasing number of the weak, the broken, and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the
lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched,
submerged populations of the Polish ghettos. Our jails, insane asylums, and almshouses are
filled with this human flotsam and the whole tone of American life, social, moral and political, has
been lowered and vulgarized by them.336 In reaction to these sorts of fears, during the early part

333.

Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human
Heredity, (New York: Borzoi Book/Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 71-72. Johnsons article is heavily
indebted to eugenic discourse that been popular in the early part of the century but by the late
1930s had been largely left behind by those eugenicists who could be considered scientific.
Johnsons discussed eugenics in terms that would have been contemporary twenty years earlier,
or alternatively, in the realm of the radical Right or in Nazi Germany. See Kevles, 164-175.
334. Madison Grant, who wrote The Passing of the Great Race (1916) is notable in this
context. Both a eugenicist and an advocate of immigration quotas, his best-selling works had a
great influence on the government decision to impose quotas on immigration. See Kevles, 75, 96104.
335.

Morse, 130-133.

336.

quoted in Morse, 133-134.

116
of the century quotas on immigration from Europe began to appear, along with a number of
restrictive laws that would make it so difficult for Jews escaping from Nazi Germany to enter the
country that Hitler himself was able to state Through its immigration law, America has inhibited
the unwelcome influx of such races as it has been unable to tolerate in its midst. Nor is America
now ready to open its doors to Jews fleeing from Germany.337
In April, 1924, the Immigration Act was passed with overwhelming majorities in Congress,
limiting the influx of foreigners. As Kevles explains, The act limited the influx to the United States,
from any European country, through 1927, to a small percentage of the foreign-born of the same
national origin recorded in the census of 1890. The shift of the reference point back by two
decades, to a date when fewer Eastern and Southern European immigrants were in the country,
made immigration more discriminatory for newcomers from those areas. The permanent version
of the law was structured around the national ancestries of U. S. residents in the 1920 census.338
Johnsons earlier reference to the Jewish refugees in Paris brings up the question of
Jewish immigration. During the period when the Nazis ruled Germany it was very difficult for Jews
to immigrate to the United States precisely because of the attitude of the established Americans,
like Johnson. Thus while in the nineteenth century, the American government had established a
long history of allowing oppressed peoples (admittedly only European and Jewish oppressed
peoples) into the country as refugees, in the case of the Jews of Nazi Germany, it faltered, not
only failing to respond, but deliberately hindering immigration and hence sending asylum-seekers
to their deaths.339 In this respect, Johnson, who having traveled extensively through Germany
during the 1930s, must have seen that this articles implicit demand to keep the Jews out of the
United States could only result in terror for them.
Thus the question that Johnson leaves unanswered arises: if, because they were in the
way of the white race, should the Jews, who Johnson already disliked, be shot like the sparrows,
or since he used a different metaphor, if the Jews were a plague, shouldnt Europe be disinfected
of them?
Given that Johnson already knew he was a homosexual but at least earlier in the decade
felt uncomfortable enough about it to have a nervous breakdown, this piece could be seen as an
attempt to rationalize his choice as the result of a particular cultural and political situation that did

337.

quoted in Morse, 145.

338.

Immigration quotas are of course still in effect: hence our return of the Haitian boat
people to Haiti, in no small part linked to metaphors of disease from abroad through HIV hysteria
about the Haitian (read: African) body.
339.

Morse, 121-129. On antisemitisms role in isolationism during the period before the
United States entered the war, see also Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America 1939-1941,
(Chicago: Imprint Publishers, 1990), 252-256.

117
not make normal (hetero)sexuality possible. Indeed, in his study of the fascist self, Klaus
Theweleit has explained that it is a mark of fascist thought that homosexuality be permissible
given the intolerable conditions of society.340 In contrast, the successful fascist community would
not be forced to take such desperate measures but would rather be hetero-sexualized, as
Lawrence Denniss wife described in a letter to her husband during his 1936 trip to Germany.
When this reaches you, you will be in Deutschland, in Berlin right in the heart and pulse
beat of that wonderful nation where men are he-men and women are so womanly. I
would give my life for a little of that warmth right now. Be nice to all the Germans for
me and specially to those brave women who are making babies for Hitler and being
slaves so happily and willingly to their men.341
For Johnson he-man-ness was also a question of will-to-power. In his article Johnson
continued:
nature endowed most of us, though not our intellectuals and scientists, with a will to live,
a will to power. This will to live, the will to love, is present in every womans heart; the will
to live, the will to expand, to be some one is present in every mans heart. And it is not
primarily a will to personal economic well-being; it is bigger and broader.342
Perhaps Johnson held out hope that his homosexuality was an aberration caused by
conditions that would change in the new order. Whatever his belief on that topic, it is the same
will-to-power that Johnson would later quote Nietzsche as being the motivation for architecture,
the same will-to-power that he has always sought ever since.343

340.

Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989;

originally published as Mnnerphantasien, Volume 2. Mnnerkrper: Zur Psychoanalyse des
weissen Terrors (Verlag Roter Stern: 1978)), volume 2, chapter on Homosexuality and the White
Terror, 306-345. Confirmation of Theweleits hypothesis about the co-existence of seemingly
contradictory attitudes toward homosexuality in the military can be seen in Spys investigation on
homoeroticism and homosociality co-existing with gay-bashing in the U. S. Navy, Larry Doyle,
Hey, Sailor! I Want You For U.S. Navy, Spy, March 1993, 46-55.
341. Rogge, 176. This fits with Denniss idea of the role of woman under fascism as
subservient to man, see Dennis, Fascism and Woman, chapter 20 of The Coming American
Fascism, pp. 258-269.
342.
343.

Johnson, Are We a Dying People, 36.

While regrettably there is no room for a history of Nietzscheanism here, it is at least

worth pointing out that Johnsons Nietzscheanism returned cynically after the war and this is a
prime characteristic of postwar Nietzscheanism, as Sloterdijk explains in his Critique of Cynical
reason, xxvii.

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Also in 1939, under the guidance of Dennis, Johnson translated Werner Sombarts
Weltanschauung, Science and Economy.344 Sombart had been an influential German sociologist
in the early part of the century and began to explicitly support the Nazi party by the 1930s.
Significantly, Sombart was also responsible for theoretically connecting the critique of capitalism
to antisemitism via racial archetypes.345 Weltanschauung, Science and Economy is not a
particularly important text in Sombarts oeuvre and it also does not address the question of race,
but translating did give Johnson a chance to bring some of the methodology Sombart developed
in the 1930s to the American public. To what extent Johnson was a follower of Sombarts is
unclear, but what is significant is how Sombarts work can be used to get a handle on Johnsons
writing.
Significantly, the translation was for the Veritas press, a publishing house funded by the
German government through the German Library of Information.346 Veritas press books generally
promoted both German culture and nature, covering a strange scope of material including
medicine, childrens books such as Spotty the Flying Dog and Chester, a story about a cat; and
books on politics and war. But as Thomsen, the German Charg daffaires wrote to his superiors,
The German Information Library in New York was developed into an institute of propaganda.
The Information Library, in addition, provides numerous organizations, newspapers and
individuals with information and propaganda material on Germany.347
Hence, with Veritas press functioning as an instrument of German propaganda, the
question of how Johnsons translation fit in arises. While there could be a possibility that the text
was innocuous and meant to deflect investigation from the press, this does not entirely appear so.
After a protracted discussion of the difference between Weltanschauung, Wissenschaft and
economics, Sombart concluded his essay with an assessment of contemporary German
economic theory. The trend, he wrote, is to abandon the old liberal economics for a new,

344.

Werner Sombart, Weltanschauung, Science and Economy, (New York: Veritas

Press, 1939).
345. On Sombart and antisemitism see Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology,
Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1984), 130-155.
346.

Top secret telegram by Hans Thomsen, Charg dAffaires in the German embassy to
the United States to German Foreign Ministry, 21 November 1939, published in United States
Department of State, Documents on German Foreign Policy, (Washington: United States
Government Printing Office, 1954), Series D, Volume XI, 362.
347.

Telegram by Hans Thomsen, Charg dAffaires in the German embassy to the

United States to German Foreign Ministry, 21 November 1939, published in United States
Department of State, Documents on German Foreign Policy, (Washington: United States
Government Printing Office), Series D, Volume VIII, 433.

119
national theory with the main ideas that all science should be close to living reality, that the
people as a whole must be the center of consideration, that all economics is political and that
economic theory must take account of that fact.348 Sombarts main criticism of the movement is
that
the young men are right, but they cannot prove it, for they lack a thorough philosophic
training and education, which cannot be replaced by the strongest will or the most ardent
enthusiasm. While the younger generation is aimlessly running about, the enemy is
lying in ambush, ready at any minute to reconquer the battlefield which he has about lost
today.349
In other words, Nazi theory was not up to its practice. This criticism might very well be the
motivation for the translation of the book. Seeing the Christian Frontists, the German-American
bund members, the Silver Shirts, and the other factions of the American fascist insurgency
splintered and largely uninfluential, Johnson and Dennis could perhaps have come to the
conclusion that what was needed was not just enthusiasm or will but also a theory that would give
a solid grounding to the movement and help it become united. Sombarts book would thus have
formed a complement to Denniss writings and perhaps a foundation to an American theory of
fascism based on Sombarts economic studies. The translation was not received well in journals
of sociology and reviewers noted a number of incorrect translations.350
On January 26, 1940, Johnson gave a speech at a meeting at a Springfield,
Massachusetts Turn Verien (Germanic gymnastics hall) meant to create members for the Forum.
According to a Springfield Evening Union account of Johnsons speech, he painted a picture of a
country ready to go to war on account of British interests. [T]he United States today is more of a
British colony than it ever was before. Johnson, calling himself a foreign correspondent,
explained that American newspapers were deceiving the public about the European war. Of the
New York Times, he declared that had only British correspondents in Europe, who would send
back only articles favoring their countrys positions. According to the account, He facetiously
suggested that President Roosevelt be asked to stop the printing of all newspapers in this country
and to have them printed in London instead. Johnson went on to cite a picture that appeared in
the Springfield Evening Union the previous month depicting victims of the war and said that it was
taken in Brooklyn. Johnson continued to cite the anti-German propaganda in the American

348. Werner Sombart, Weltanschauung, Science and Economy, (New York: Veritas
Press, 1939), 57.
349.
350.

Sombart, 59.

Frank H. Knight, Weltanschauung, Science and Economy, The American Journal of

Sociology XLVI 2 (September 1940): 247-248. Also Nicholas Mirkowich, Sombart, Werner.
Weltanschauung, Science and Economy, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science 213 (January 1941), 218-219.

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papers: The newspapers lied about the war in Poland, he said, averring that the countryside was
not made destitute as reported. He said only one town actually was destroyed and the half of
another. The first town had been used as a fort, he said. In contrast, as early as September 14,
1939, Shirer wrote, D. and H. and W., who were at the front for three days this week, say that
almost every other town and village in Poland they saw was either half or totally destroyed by
bombs or artillery.351
On the other hand, the paper stated that Mr. Johnson described the Poles as bitterly
disappointed by the failure of the British to send aid and he said one Pole said to him, Never
believe an Englishman. Johnson continued by citing numerous examples of improper behavior
by the British: the Opium War of 1839, the Boer War, the levying of tribute in India, Churchills
abandonment of the Finns against the Soviet army. Supporting the belief that the Germans were
too strong to fight, Mr. Johnson said that the German people are much more united now than in
1914, as witnessed by a birth rate which is a third higher. He said the German people shouted
with joy when they learned of the pact with Russia, declaring that a group in the National Socialist
Party had favored alignment with Russia and that part of the army saw a large tactical advantage
to such a move.352
But as the year continued, 1940 turned out not to be the start of a brilliant new future of
fascism in the United States but rather was to be the end of Johnsons involvement with the
movement. A lecture by Johnson was scheduled for March 1 in New York City.353 After that we

351.

Shirer, 209.

352.

Forum Speaker Feels the U. S. Will Be in War Within Year, Springfield Evening
Union (January 27 1940): 8. Auhagen also gave a speech at the Forum meeting, although
Johnsons speech was the main event for the paper. See also Special Committee on UnAmerican Activities. House of Representatives. Seventy-Sixth Congress. Third Session on H.
Res. 282, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States. AppendixPart II. A Preliminary Digest and Report on the Un-American Activities of Various Nazi
Organizations and Individuals in the United States, Including Diplomatic and Consular Agents of
the German Government, (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1940),
2156 interrogation of Rudolf Mangold by Representative Jerry Voorhis. Voorhis reads a headline
in the Springfield Evening Union of January 27 on the Johnsons speech entitled Johnson Forum
Speech called Propaganda. Strangely enough this isnt the title of the article and nowhere in the
article is the speech called propaganda. Admittedly, this headline could have pointed to this
article from some other page and I have been unable to obtain other copies of this article.
353.

New York Branch To Hold Meeting On March 1st, The Forum Observer February
29 1940: 2. The Observer elaborates: Mr. Philip Johnson, one of our favorite speakers, will
deliver some highly interesting, factual information concerning recent world-events. We are
delighted to have Mr. Johnson speak for us again, for it is an unusual privilege and pleasure to
hear his hard-hitting, penetrating debunking of propaganda. The back page of the issue includes
a partial reproduction of an invitation to another Johnson lecture, held by the Philadelphia Branch
of the American Fellowship Forum on the subject Fact and Fiction in the Present War.

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have no more evidence of Johnsons involvement with the American Fellowship Forum or
Coughlins Social Justice. Indeed, the American Fellowship Forum dissolved swiftly after by the
end of 1940, was under investigation as a Nazi front.
On August 28, 1940 the American Fellowship Forum began to be subjected to scrutiny in
front of the House of Representatives Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities
chaired by Martin Dies and hence known as the Dies Committee when subpoenas were
served and George F. Bauer, chairman of the executive committee of the Forum, Charles Dale
Siegchrist, Jr., secretary of the editorial board of the Forum, Ina A. Gotthelf, secretary of the
Forum, and Richard Koch, member of the Forums executive committee and one of the
organizations founders were formally examined. On September 10, the Forums director,
Friedrich Auhagen was formally examined and as was Ferdinand A. Kertess on September 11.354
The Dies Committees white paper on November 21, 1940 detailing a Nazi conspiracy in
the United States was front-page news throughout the country, and while Johnson was not
implicated in the conspiracy, the Forum and its leaders Kertess and Auhagen were, and Johnson
would probably have been aware that having an organization one was active in called an
instrument of German propaganda on the front page of the New York Times was not a good
career move.355
The Dies committee itself was the direct forerunner of the McCarthy committee and drew
an intense amount of criticism for its totalitarian methods, notably operating on hearsay and
unreliable evidence, accusations unaccompanied by proof, and most significantly for our
purposes, its political bias. While the committees ostensible mission was to investigate unAmerican activities on both the Left and the Right it was frequently taken to task for its obsession
with the Left356 and on the other hand it frequently received favorable reviews from the Right,

354. Special Committee on Un-American Activities. House of Representatives. SeventyEighth Congress. First Session on H. Res. 282, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda
Activities in the United States. Appendix-Part VII. Report on the Nazi Front Movement in the
United States. First Section Nazi Activities, (Washington, DC: United States Government
Printing Office, 1943) 26-30.
355.

Henry R. Dorris, Dies Links Nazi Agents Here to Propaganda, Espionage; Strife with
Japan Sought, The New York Times` November 22, 1940: 1, 13. The white paper is apparently
reproduced as Special Committee on Un-American Activities. House of Representatives.
Seventy-Sixth Congress. Third Session on H. Res. 282, Investigation of Un-American
Propaganda Activities in the United States. Appendix-Part II. A Preliminary Digest and Report on
the Un-American Activities of Various Nazi Organizations and Individuals in the United States,
Including Diplomatic and Consular Agents of the German Government, (Washington, DC: United
States Government Printing Office, 1940). On the forum see 1063-1113.
356.

Dies give his account of his work in Martin Dies, The Trojan Horse in America, (New
York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1940). Significantly, while 303 pages of the book are devoted to
the Communist fifth column, only 42 are on the Nazi and fascist movements in the U.S. For

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including Coughlins Social Justice. Dies himself stated that he had intended to discredit the CIO
and paralyze the left-wing element in the Roosevelt administration.357 To say that the Forum was
the victim of a proto-McCarthyite investigation would be incorrect. On the contrary, it would
appear that had Johnson been a member of a Communist group, he would have received more
investigation than he actually did.
After the Dies Committee, a special grand Jury was formed to conduct a massive sedition
trial against, twenty-nine individuals including Viereck (already in prison on another charge),
Dennis, but also American fascists Joseph C. McWilliams, founder of the American Destiny Party,
George Deatherage, organizer of the Knights of the While Camelia and the American Nationalist
Confederation, William Dudley Pelley, organizer of the Silver Shirts, and Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling, a
raving anti-Semite and pro-Fascist. In Henry Hokes Its A Secret, a book investigating the secret
grand jury indictments, Hoke mentions that Johnson was called as a witness in 1942 (probably in
the case of Father Coughlin, who was not indicted) and again in 1943 (probably for Lawrence
Dennis, who was).358 By then, Hoke explains, Johnson had told him that he had dissociated
himself from the pro-Fascist movement and that he was to have been a witness for the
Government in the sedition trial. This change of heart was brought about, Johnson claims, when
he realized how fortunate he was to be an American citizen criticizing democracy, rather than a
German citizen criticizing Nazism.359
It appears that Johnson never had a chance to testify. Like the Dies committee, the
sedition trial was a strange affair, undermined by the governments decision to try a group of often
unrelated, though generally sinister individuals grouped only by being accused of sedition, of
having, as the indictment charged conspired, combined, confederated and agreed together to

criticisms of Diess work, see the standard work, August Raymond Ogden, The Dies Committee.
A Study of the Special House Committee for the Investigation of Un-American Activities,
(Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1945) and William Gellermann,
Martin Dies, (New York: The John Day Company, 1944), and the particularly angry National
Federation for Constitutional Liberties, Investigate Martin Dies!, (New York: National Federation
for Constitutional Liberties, 1942). A responsible recounting and analysis of Diess role in the
House Committee on Un-American Activities, as well as the later and more famous McCarthy
hearings is Walter Goodman, The Committee. The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee
on Un-American Activities, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968). A survey of the entire
history of the Committee, from the Left and hence staunchly opposed to the Committees anti-Left
and pro-Right bias is Charlotte Pomerantz, A Quarter Century of Un-Americana. A TragicoComical Memorabilia of HUAC, (New York: Marzani & Munsell, 1963). The latter work is
accompanied by a large number of political cartoons.
357.

Ogden, 152.

358.

Henry Hoke, Its A Secret, (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946), 29, 32.

359.

Hoke, 122.

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commit acts prohibited by Section 9 of Title 18, U.S. Code (Smith Act) in that they with intent to
interfere with, impair and influence the loyalty, morale and discipline of the military and naval
forces of the United States would advise, counsel, urge and cause insubordination, disloyalty,
mutiny and refusal of duty by members of the armed forces.360
The governments goal of connecting these individuals was unrealistic. While almost
these individuals were pro-Nazi, evidence of a conspiracy was lacking, and the government was
unable to prove any deliberate attempt to influence members of the armed forces to be disloyal.
On a practical level, putting the maniacal Mrs. Dilling on the stand rightly caused the judge to see
this as detrimental to other defendants such as Dennis and Viereck, who, if Fascist and pro-Nazi,
were certainly not raving. The defiance of many of the twenty-eight defendants made justice
generally impossible. As Neil Johnson (probably no relation) explains in his book on Viereck:
By August 28, when a two-week adjournment was ordered for vacation, one of the
defendants had died, and two had been granted motions of severance because of
obstreperous conduct. Six defense lawyers and one defendant serving as his own
counsel had been fined a total of $1,000 for contempt of court. One lawyer had in fact
been barred from the courtroom. Some of the defendants had to be persuaded by their
counselors to stop wearing grotesque false faces and signs reading I am a Spy.361
The trial lasted for eight months before the presiding Chief Justice Eicher finally died and
a mistrial was declared. At that point 500 mistrial motions had been made by defense counselors,
18,000 pages of trial transcript had been entered and only thirty-nine of one hundred witnesses
were heard. While the government attempted to retry the defendants, the U.S. District Court of
Appeals struck down the indictment on the grounds that Under the circumstances, to permit
another trial, which conceivably would last more than a year, with new prosecutors and newly
appointed counsel for the defendants, with the eventual outcome, in serious doubt, would be a
travesty on justice.362
Why Johnson really gave up his interest in Nazi Germany and in an American fascism is
unclear but there are two likely possibilities. The first, Johnsons own, is that upon realizing the

360. Indictment, U.S. v. Winrod, et. al., 1942, quoted in Neil Johnson, George Sylvester
Viereck, 243-244. There were actually three indictments, of which this is the first. The third,
reprinted in Maximilian St.-George and Lawrence Dennis, A Trial on Trial. The Great Sedition
Trial of 1944, (New York: National Civil Rights Committee, 1946), 114-122, is the one under the
defendants were finally tried (Viereck was under indictment throughout, Denniss name was only
added in the third trial). Contrasting St.-George and Denniss book against Hokes Its A Secret
and O. John Rogges The Official German Report is a rather extreme example of difference in
interpretation.
361.
362.

Neil Johnson, George Sylvester Viereck, 247-248.

Judge Bolitha Lawss decision quoted in C. Gerald Fraser, Lawrence Dennis, 83;
Advocated Fascism, The New York Times August 21 1977: 40.

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true nature of the Nazi regime, Johnson was no longer able to support it and sometime after his
Springfield lecture of January 27 1940, and probably before the Congressional investigation
began interrogating Forum members in late August of that year, he abandoned his fascist
leanings. As he explained, I was never an America Firster, I felt we were going to get into it, and
I wanted to be in the American Army.363
The problem with this account in that Johnsons essays in Social Justice and Todays
Challenge and his lectures at Philadelphia, Springfield, and New York indicate an individual
convinced of his ideas. Certainly, Johnsons January 1940 speech in Springfield, Massachusetts
was fully in accord with the sentiments of the American Firsters. Why he would decide to
abandon this position in spring or summer of that year when he had already spent a significant
amount of time in Germany during the late 1930s and must have been able to recognize the true
nature of the Nazi government quite a bit earlier is hard to understand.
A second explanation is simpler: by the late spring of 1940 it had became apparent to
Johnson that the Forum was going to be investigated and some of its members might even go to
jail. Johnson made the only smart move and abandoned the Forum, at some point even helping
the government investigation against his former colleagues who were now only trouble for him.
That year, Johnson returned to architectural design, renovating a third apartment for
himself364

and enrolling as an architecture student in Gropiuss program at Harvard.

The Response to Johnsons Fascism

In what remains of this chapter, I will address the postwar reception of Johnsons political
activities and his own self (re) fashioning. So far I hope to have proved that during the 1930s,
Philip Johnson was indeed a fascist, subscribing to fascist politics and actively participating in the
movement. It appears that given the socioeconomic turmoil of the period both in the U. S. and
abroad, Johnson believed that a fascist revolution might take place in the U. S. Driven by his willto-power he desired not only to maintain his interest but to become an activist in the movement,
apparently hoping to become one of Denniss in-lite. Most disturbingly however, he promoted a
vision of a racially cleansed America limited to Americans of Western European descent and
actively argued for antisemitism at a time when it was readily apparent that to do so was to call
for the return of Jewish refugees to the terror of Nazi Germany.
The reason why it is so critically important to this dissertation is that it is so consistent
with the philosophy of power that he continues to espouse to this day. As recently as 1988

363.

Philip Johnson, quoted in Calvin Tompkins, Profiles: Philip Johnson, New Yorker
May 23 1977: 48.
364.

Stern, et. al., New York 1930, 272-4.

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Johnson explained that in his view We[architects]re the kept people of power. We are only the
instruments of power.365 Perhaps Johnsons interest in power is indeed his reason for enjoying
architecture so thoroughly, as he put it, Architecture in the main is something that is more apt to
be run by popes, kings and generals than by public vote. And so I got interested in getting things
done in a grand way.366
While as detailed above, knowledge of Johnsons actions in the late 1930s was
widespread among historians of the Coughlinites and the American fascist movement, and
Shirers best-selling Berlin Diaries must have alerted those who knew him of what he was up to
by the early forties,367 in architectural discourse the issue of Johnsons Nazi activities was
covered-up remarkably well, either omitting the period entirely or following the cynical model of
the public secret, the tactic of acknowledgment and dismissal of the issue as irrelevant. The first
acknowledgments of Johnsons fascism in any texts on art and architecture appeared only around
1973, contemporaneous with the publication of Sheldon Marcuss Father Coughlin. The
Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little Flower.
Even before publication, Marcuss book drew attention to Johnsons past in Israel. By the
1970s, Johnson had been involved in a number of commissions for Israeli clients. In 1972 an
article by Chaviv Knaan appeared in the leading Israeli journal Haaretz, pointing out that
Marcuss book contained evidence that Johnson, a participant in a master plan for a united
Jerusalem had an antisemitic past. Knaan wrote that Teddy Kollek, then Mayor of Jerusalem,
told him he had known of Johnsons past when Johnson was ready to participate in the project.
Johnson explained to Kollek that he had been a member of Coughlins organization and that his
views had changed after he arrived in Europe and seen the results of Hitlers antisemitism. Of
course, this is an inaccurate statement: Johnson did much of his writing for Coughlin, not to
mention Todays Challenge after he had visited Germany in 1939. No matter what his personal
relations with Coughlin and Dennis, Johnson was not a German citizen writing for the dominant
Nazi regime but rather an American citizen with no real obligation to be a writer for either

365. Philip Johnson, quoted in Jane Kay Holtz, Philip Johnson: Architect of Kings,
Technology Review (August 1988), from NEXIS information system, no page numbering
available.
366.

Philip Johnson, quoted in Michael Wise, Scraping the Sky: The Eternal Architect;
Even at 86, Philip Johnson Has No Small Plans, The Washington Post December 3 1992: Style
section, D1.
367.

See also Peter Blakes recollections of discussions with Bertrand Russell about
Johnsons background in No Place Like Utopia, 105.

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periodical. Johnson apparently donated his services to the Jerusalem master plan and, quite
ironically given his antisemitic past, for a nuclear reactor on the Shorek river.368
Russell Lyness Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art Good Old Modern was
also published in 1973. Lynes recounted Johnsons departure from the scene in some detail,
citing the December 1934 articles from New York City newspapers and the first the trustees
heard of Johnsons plan to quit the Museum for politics was when Nelson Rockefeller introduced
Edward James Mathews, a young architect who was working on Rockefeller Center, to Johnson
as the chairman of the Museums Department of Architecture. According to Mathews, Johnson
said, Oh Im leaving in three weeks to be Huey Longs Minister of Fine Arts. But Lynes made the
whole affair appear to be over once Long gave Johnson and Blackburn very short shrift and
generally exonerated Johnson, instead pinning the blame on Blackburn:
they were soon back in New York. Blackburn never returned to the Museum staff;
Johnson, who many thought was Blackburns dupe, not only returned to the Museum but
eventually became a trustee and the Museums official architect, a part of this portrait to
be considered in its place. The trustees agreed with Abby Rockefeller that every young
man, as she said at the time, is entitled to one bad mistake.369
In the winter 1973 Architectural Association Quarterly, Charles Jenckss piece Philip
Johnson The Candid King Midas of New York Camp appeared. Unfortunately, while Jencks
raised Johnsons fascism and even went so far as to bring up the question of the fascist
appearance of the New York State Theater and the rising belief that fascism of some sort was
rampant in the United States, Jencks dropped the ball very quickly by following a section in which
Johnson admitted to being in Danzig where Shirer saw him with an earlier section of interview in
which Johnson and Jencks agreed that most of the Modern Movements great architects were
simply pragmatists and would take a job that no matter who would offer it to them. Bizarrely,
Johnson touched on Albert Speer,
Oh, reading Speer is one of the really exciting things. Have you read the architectural
section? Oh, but read the architectural part. Because Speer was an extremely sensitive
man and really a businessman architect hed be good in America, a really great
skyscraper architect, an organizer. But with this mad architect uh Hitler, who didnt
have any intention to run the country at all during the war. Spent the time designing
and made the drawings himself sometimes. Oh, you must take a glance at the book.370
Jencks responded:

368. Chaviv Knaan, Philip Johnson A Member of the International Committee for the
Building of Jerusalem was an Active Anti-Semite, (translation, original title and article in Hebrew,
Haaretz, July 16, 1972.
369.

Lynes, 92-93.

370.

Johnson quoted in Jencks, 157-158.

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What the HITLER! An architect? Mad architect? Somehow it made a lot of fortuitous
sense as if Johnson had suddenly illuminated a whole are of the architects dreams, the
secret desires and warped fantasies which usually cannot stand the light of day and
remain hidden even to the architect himself. But Hitler! A Thousand Year Reich371
Yet just as Jencks picked up on this moment of insight into both the identity of the
contemporary architect and on Johnson as archtypical contemporary architect, he sidestepped it
in an analysis of Johnsons 1963 Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery. Jencks explained that the
building was clearly based on Fascist and Nazi designs of the thirties and noted Johnsons care
for his materials, but then wrote of the interior The whole space glows with a lemon-yellow hue of
gilded sunlight honey curtains, gold carpets, golden staircase, gold-leaf lighting discs whirling
above like flying saucers made out of 14 carat bullion Johnson has this kind of failed Midas
touch everything he touches turns to goldleaf.372 Johnsons loss of heroic belief after his
work with Mies led him into camp, Jencks wrote, At best in his self-mocking comments or his
Sheldon Museum he attains a level of candid introspection and exaggeration usually reserved
as moments of truth for the court jester.373
In this Jencksian light, Johnsons reading of Speer would reveal to us a moment of truth
about ourselves: the fascism that is inherent in architecture as it is constructed today and indeed,
as we will see at the end of chapter three, Johnsons fascism does indeed reveal the fascism in
the identity of the architect, but Jencks in letting Johnson off as the court jester, Jencks allowed
him to play one of his stock roles: Johnson not as kynic, but as cynic revealing to us an open
secret about himself: a secret that he knows we will not do anything about it. And indeed, there
was no reaction to this piece in the architectural press.
Also in 1973, John W. Cook and Heinrich Klotzs published an interview with Johnson in
their book Conversations with Architects.374 This interview was remarkable as evidence for what
Johnsons mindset was by this point, how it informed his architecture, and how for him
architectural will-to-power was more important than any moral concerns about the legitimacy of
any project he might build.

371.

Jencks, 158.

372.

Jencks, 159.

373.

Jencks, 159.

374.

John W. Cook and Heinrich Klotz, ed., Conversations with Architects, (New York:
Praeger, 1973).

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Johnson himself turned the interview toward the question of responsible patronage when
he brought up Hitler:
Hitlerwas, unfortunately, an extremely bad architect. The only thing I really regret about
dictatorships isnt the dictatorship, because I recognize that in Juliuss time and in
Justinians time and Caesars time they had to have dictators. I mean Im not interested in
politics at all. I dont see any sense to it. About Hitler if hed only been a good
architect!
HK [Heinrich Klotz]: Mussolini didnt object to good architecture.
PJ: At first. He built the Casa Fascismo in Como, a perfectly fine building. And lots of
Terza Roma is good, but you cant talk about it because it was done by Mussolini. But if
you go to Rome today, youll find that the Terza Roma was much better than whats been
done in the Republic, in the same area, since the war. So lets not be so fancy pants
about who runs the country. Lets talk about whether its good or not.
Thus, for Johnson, it appears that the ethics of patronage is irrelevant, only the
quality of the design left behind, whether its good or not. This was clarified in the subsequent
exchange:
JC [John Cook]: Is there a commission which you would refuse?
PJ: Of course not, Id work for the devil himself.
JC: Are there ethical standards an architect must reflect?
PJ: There are building standards. I disobeyed them in the Epidemiology Building at Yale.
Thats a sin against the Holy Ghost. The real sin is to build something that stands there
and says Philip Johnson on it and isnt right.
JC: Not that Hitler may have commissioned it.
PJ: No! Whoever commissions buildings buys me. Im for sale. Im a whore. Im an artist.
What did Michelangelo say when Julius locked him up? What the hell difference does it
make who locks whom up? Its what you do when you get locked up that
JC: When you build, lets say, two toilets, one for black, one for white, does it matter?
PJ: My dear man, I was brought up in the South. Its always had separate facilities. My
habits and everthing conditions me to do what my client says. It never crosses my mind.
Now it would, of course. Now of course, Id object because of all the publicity, but it never
crossed my mind when I was a kid that there was anything wrong when I saw two sets of
toilets. It seemed very silly.
JC: But now you would?
PJ: But now I have to. Im influenced by public opinion. I gave up the commission I had
from the Governor to do the office building in Harlem, for the simple reason that I was
convinced it wasnt very good politics for a white man to do a buliding up there. As it
turned out, I was more than right because the blacks wont even let a black architect do a

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commission there. Wasnt it political pressure more than moral pressure? I dont give a
damn who builds a monument for blacks. Who cares?375
Johnsons racist Who cares? indicates that little had changed in his view of which race
was superior. As for ethics, Johnson apparently believed that one only has to be accountable in
the court of public opinion.
HK: Do you prefer to build for a dictator or for democracy?
PJ: Well, I prefer democracy because its a little easier, I think, but maybe not. A dictator
might be a friend of mine. Id prefer a democracy for a simple reason: that I would get a
better chance. In the pluralistic system, theres more chance of finding a patron. A
dictator says either yes or no. If youre on the outs, youre out. Why did Mies leave
Germany? He didnt give a damn who was running the government, but Hitler liked
pitched roofs. Thats why he left Germany. He didnt leave in 1933. He stayed until 1937,
after all.
Johnson continued to talk about Mies, saying that he wasnt liked by the Communists
Its not popular now to call yourself that. Now its the New Left, which is much more respectable
and really much sweeter, because they dont carry guns so much. Not as aggressive. for his
use of silk and matching marble slabs. Johnson then digressed on Hannes Meyer, stating that
while he liked Meyers architecture, he didnt like what he said.
You see, in those days I hated Hannes Meyer because I thought that the shit of the
Neue-Sachlichkeit Weltanschauung [new objectivity as world-view] had something to do
with architecture. The only mistake I made was to try to think that somehow the political
opinion had something to do with the architecture. Not true at all! At that time I was just
anti-functionalist, you see. I was never anti-Marxian. Who cares who runs a country! I still
believe that. I loved Stalin. He was splendid because I thought he was going to bulid
something. I felt as a youth that anybody that built was good. Of course, Hitler was a
terrible disappointment, putting aside the social problem
HK: But you hoped that he might
PJ: Of course. I think it shows in my article perhaps, written for a Jewish magazine in
1940.376
Johnsons remark that Hitler was a terrible disappointment, putting aside the social
problem is remarkable: apparently we are to believe that the Holocaust was a social problem,
a disappointment, that shattered illusions. But what illusions could Johnson have had, going to
Hitlers Germany in 1939? Johnson went on to more thoroughly debunk any lingering myths of

375.
376.

Klotz and Cook, 36-37

Cook and Klotz, 38. I have been unable to trace Johnsons reference to this article in
a Jewish magazine. Perhaps he could be referring to one of his Todays Challenge articles
albeit in a twisted way.

130
Miess flight from Gerbeing motivated by distaste for Hitlers politics. Here Johnson seems not so
much to attack Mies but rather to create a new myth of Mies as a true architect, just like Johnson,
apolitical, or rather committed to a particular politics of architecture. During a discussion of
Johnsons project for Welfare Island, Cook asked:
JC: Are you seeking an environment which inspires people, improves them?
PJ: Reactionary! I never improved anyone. To entertain, yes. To excite, yes. Not to
improve.
JC: Lets say that excitement is improvement. Its better than boredom.
PJ: Well, if youre a maffioso numbers man, it would be hard to improve you, but I hope to
amuse you. So the numbers man will stand on this corner and not on that. Ive just the
place for the maffioso numbers man.
HK: So, instead of killing someone, he might do something, he might even play.
PJ: Oh, nonsense. Thats improvement. Hell go on killing his people, but I hope to amuse
him in between.
HK: Youre very Nietzschean.
PJ: Well, hes my God.
JC: But you have admitted that you are a moralist.
PJ: Thats it. And Nietzsche was. Was ist vornehm? [What is superior?] Remember those
chapters in Der Wille zur Macht? In other words, vornehm to him was good. He wouldnt
dare use the word good, but what he thought was good aristocratic! In other words,
his highest values of conduct. He had the highest, you see, but he would have denied it if
you had accused him of it because he was as objective as hell. He was a moralist. So
you cant help being a moralist, as much as I pretend Im not.377
But the kind of moralist Johnson was is the key: a Nietzschean moralist, for whom good
was the vornehm, that which had the will-to-power. Here the interview turned to monumentality in
architecture. Klotz again,
HK: In one of your articles, probably the best known one, The Seven Crutches of Modern
Architecture, you state that functionalism alone cannot create good architecture. Your
effort to get away from the International Style, from the Miesian style, appears to have
been a quest for a new monumentality. It seemes also that you were consciously longing
for beauty independent of function. In the same article, you also state, using the words of
Nietzsche, a building should express the will to power, should be will to power.
PJ: Oratory. I read it in German. Then I found an English translation.

377.

Cook and Klotz, 39.

131
HK: Architecture as will to power, doesnt that mean monumental architecture, as we
were discussing earlier?
PJ: All architecture is monumental.378
Johnson explained that The word smacks of Napoleon and Hitler, and all sorts of terrible
things but that he didnt mean to use it that way at all. Johnson then became elusive, saying that
since in the U. S. Monumentality is vorbei [pass], as it is in Germany. I use it mainly to just to
annoy. This lead Cook to point out that Johnsons use of the term was inconsistent and its
definition was unclear. Johnson agreed: Apparently, it is not clear at all.
Eventually, Johnson explained: The desire for immortality is the only proper aim. How
are you going to be immortal without a monument?

379

Thus, Johnsons goals remained really

quite consistent: he wanted to be immortal. Architecture was to express his will-to-power, be a

monument to his will.
Remarkably, in the Foreword architectural historian Vincent Scully could only remark In
the interview with Philip Johnson, I find Cook and Klotz unnecessarily tedious with their bits
about travertine and Hitler and all. But everybody baits Johnson, and he asks for it and usually
comes dancing through it with a fine, brittle, Balanchine-like rigor as he does here.380 Cook
and Klotzs persistent questioning of Johnson which, if anything should have been even more
insistent is bizarrely reduced to tediousness. Philip is unscathed, healthier for the experience.
In 1973, Kenneth Frampton published an introduction bracketing a reprint of three articles
on architecture written by Johnson during the 1930s in Oppositions 2 (see chapter three for a
discussion of Oppositions and its editors technique of bracketing articles) refers obliquely to
Johnsons past and then excuses it, writing
Our presentation of these hitherto little known texts by Johnson are seen in this context,
for Johnson more than any other architect of his generation, entered the political arena in
earnest. Despite his origin, these are the writings of a man of the Prussian Enlightenment
for all that this particular moment had finally spent itself in the morass of the First World
War. That Johnsons romantic allegiance to this moment in the Thirties (the moment of
Schinkel and Hegel as well as that of Mies) contributed to his involvement with fascism is
by now the stuff of history. Nevertheless, it is by no means beyond the crisis of our time.
Henry Fords peremptory dismissal notwithstanding, history is a vast wave, the breaking
of which we cannot see. We cannot repudiate politics for they return to haunt us, since
the intrinsically public aspect of architecture presents an inherently political object.

378.

Cook and Klotz, 43.

379.

Cook and Klotz, 43-44.

380.

Scully in Cook and Klotz, 7.

132
Johnsons barely concealed distaste for the program of Die Neue Sachlichkeit, his
anticipation of the new monumentality, his indifference to the culture of social welfare, his
super-annuated idealism, his discomfort at the unnecessary vulgarity of cultural racism-in
all this his division from Catherine Bauer, the one other American critic of modern
architecture who had his respect is perfectly clear.381
It is also perfectly clear that in this text Frampton is either ill-informed about the extent of
Johnsons activities or is being disingenuous. As we have discussed above, in relation to the
article, Johnson criticizes Schulze-Naumberg not for his cultural racism but for his attack on
modern architecture.
Framptons agenda is to present the Johnson articles all of which were originally
published in architecture or art journals and were far easier to find than his hardcore fascist
writing as examples of a man thinking far ahead of his peers, anticipating the new
monumentality and at the same time acknowledging the nearly-forgotten (by the 1970s)
contributions of Muschenheim, Clauss and Daub, Lilly Reich and Howe and Lescaze in the
formation of a new architectural sensibility. In the short biography following the introduction, there
is no mention of Johnsons support of and participation in the American Fascist movement and
his time in Germany as a correspondent for Social Justice. Remarkably, Frampton, then a critic
and historian appealed to an amnesiac model of history to vindicate Johnson: his involvement
with fascism is by now the stuff of history.
Johnsons fascism continued to pop up only to be dismissed. In 1977, Calvin Tompkins
again raised Johnsons fascism in a New Yorker profile of Johnson. Tompkins described
Johnsons involvement in fascist politics and even questioned the lack of reaction to it:
One of the interesting things about Johnsons career is the apparent ease with which he
lived down his flirtation with Fascism. The reference to him in Shirers best-selling book
was very damaging, of course, and he lot friends over it but only temporarily. Even his
Jewish friends seemed to make allowances. Edward M. M. Warburg, a wealthy Harvard
classmate whose New York apartment Johnson had done over in severe modern style in
1932, thinks that the friendships that Johnson made over there crossed his wires, so to
speak and that it was out of loyalty to these friendships that he began to entertain some
of the doctrines of Nazism. I think the idea that Philip was anti-Semitic at any time is
impossible Warburg said recently. Perhaps his weakness was that he didnt react
strongly enough against anti-Semitism. In any case, it never seemed to stop his
relationship with me or with Lincoln Kirstein. In 1957, when Johnsons political past was
brought up as a possible obstacle to his election as a trustee of the Museum of Modern
Art, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III settled the matter by saying she thought that every
young man should be allowed to make one large mistake. The shadow of his mistake no
doubt pursues him to this day, but, far from blighting, or even delaying, his career, it

381.

Kenneth Frampton, Philip Johnson. Rejected Architects, Creative Art, 1931. The
Berlin Building Exposition of 1931, T-Square, 1932. Architecture in the Third Reich, Hound &
Horn, 1933, Oppositions 2 (January 1974): 81.

133
seemed to propel him into the one decision he should have taken at the start, which was
to become a practicing architect.382
For Tompkins, Johnsons fascism was a positive role in his life. While not condoning
Johnsons fascism, Tompkins also did not attack it, something that might not have been possible
in an article for the gentile New Yorker and would have been even more difficult since Johnson
was shown the article before publication and made suggestions as to its content.383
But if Tompkins had brought up Johnsons fascism again, the architectural press
continued to clean up for Johnson. For example, Andrea O. Dean raised the issue only to let
Johnson handle it:
In 1934, Johnson suddenly abandoned his museum career for a foray into right wing
politics. It is a period of his life which he discusses only partially. As Calvin Tompkins
wrote in a New Yorker profile of Johnson, [This] mistake seemed to propel him into one
decision he should have taken at the start, which was to become a practicing architect.
How so?
I was childish, explains Johnson. I ran for the Ohio state legislature and had a lot of fun.
But, Im very poor with people, I dont judge them properly and I dont handle them
properly. Im much too impolitic and too direct and crude. I dont really understand the
way other peoples minds work. I miss that very much; its something my colleague, Mr.
Pei, has in abundance. Hes a wonderful person. Nobody ever said I was a wonderful
person.
But, anyway, I was no good in politics. So, that was a dead end and I was sitting her in
New York twiddling my thumbs and said, Thats a damn fool thing to do with the rest of
your life. So, I went back to Harvard to study architecture. It was the hardest decision of
my life, because I would be 15, 16 years older than the rest of the kids. That seemed
awfully hard to take, but it wasnt hard at all.384
Johnsons fascist past thus became a foray into right wing politics, a childish incident,
even if Johnson was in his thirties and had already proved quite mature in his achievements at
the Museum of Modern Art.
While the 1980s were a general time of reckoning for ex-Nazis and collaborators in
academia such as Paul de Man and Martin Heidegger, a discourse on Johnsons role failed to
develop. While by 1993, there had been over 300 articles published on de Mans collaboration385

382.

Tompkins, 49-50.

383.

Andersen, 155.

384.

Dean, 46.

385.

Ortwin de Graef, Serenity in Crisis: a Preface to Paul de Man, 1939-1960, (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska, 1993), 179.

134
and architecture theorist Mark Wigley had been driven to take over the terrain of the Heidegger
discussion for architecture386, public discourse on Johnson did not exist. Perhaps in late 1993 or
1994 when Franz Schulzes critical biography of Johnson will be published we can hope for
serious discussion of this issue. Even Elaine S. Hochmans book Architects of Fortune. Mies van
der Rohe and the Third Reich, an attempt to attribute to architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
possible collaboration with the Nazi government, did not mention his friend Johnsons express
fascism and support of the Nazis in any way.387
Yet the architectural media has not been ignorant of this issue, just not interested in
discussing it. Thus, ten years after Framptons deflection of criticism away from Johnson, the
issue was again dismissed in an ode to Johnson by New York Times architecture critic Joseph
Giovannini as something the architect was perfectly willing to discuss, although Giovannini
apparently was only willing to dismiss:
While living in Germany, he attended Nazi rallies, with friends who were German fascists,
and returned to America only after the outbreak of the War. William L. Shirer in Berlin
Diary, published in 1941, described Mr. Johnson as an American fascist. No one has
accused the architect of anti-Semitism, but rather of bad personal and political judgment.
It is widely known in architectural circles here that the architect has given much
autobiographical information about this and other aspects of his life to Mr. Eisenman, for
publication after Mr. Johnson's death.
Apparently for Giovannini this was enough: as long as we know the truth about Johnson
when he is dead, then we can be comfortable with him.388
The first significant attempt to deal with Johnsons fascist past was by architect and critic
Michael Sorkin in a 1988 Spy magazine article.389 A response came at a 1989 gala at the
prestigious Arts Club in Chicago. Architects were invited to make critical statements about
Chicago buildings, in one project, Robert Macsai took a model of Philip Johnsons 190 S. LaSalle
Street office building and turned it into a likeness of Auschwitz: adding a smokestack from which
smoke curled, a flag with a swastika above the main entrance, and the motto from Auschwitzs

386.

Mark Wigley, Heideggers House: The Violence of the Domestic, D. Columbia

Documents of Architecture and Theory 1 1992): 91-120.
387. Elaine S. Hochman, Architects of Fortune. Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich,
(New York: Fromm International Publishing Company, 1990).
388.

Joseph Giovannini, Philip Johnson Designs for a Pluralistic Age, New York Times
January 8 1984: Section 2, 29.
389.

Michael Sorkin, Where was Philip?, Exquisite Corpse: Writing on Buildings, (New
York: Verso, 1991, originally published Spy, October 1988) 307-311.

135
gate: Arbeit Macht Frei. On the back of the building was a slot with reprints of Sorkins article
from the 1988 issue of Spy. The project appeared only in the Chicago Tribune, not in any
architectural publication.390 Likewise the Spy article did not receive any attention in the
architectural media. John Burgee, Johnsons partner during much of the 1970s and 1980s,
responded by saying that Its the same old stuff rehashed. Spys just a little nastierYoung men
make mistakes. It was a short interlude, he realized the error, and hes always said so, and by
1992 Johnson dismissed the entire period, saying that I lost my mind.391
Johnsons Nazism came up again in the May 1993 issue of Vanity Fair in a preview of
Schulzes book and an interview with Johnson by Kurt Andersen, formerly editor of Spy. Even
now Johnsons attitude toward his past seems flippant. While Johnson does state that I have no
excuse [for] such utter, unbelievable stupidity. I dont know how you expiate guilt. Yet, when
asked today if he would have built for Hitler in 1936, Johnson replies Whos to say? That would
have tempted anyone.392 Johnson seems to really say that he is making no excuses. He says
that the during the time he lived in Germany, he wanted to see what a country at war was really
like and that he had always been interested in the German language, and brought up with the
prejudices of my class and background and all that. I was fascinated with power.393 This wasnt,
however, the passing fancy of youth. Johnsons visits in Nazi Germany took place after he had
achieved some considerable status at MoMA and was not the brief infatuation of some misguided
teenager but rather took up five years of his late twenties and early thirties.
And when asked about precisely what he did between 1934 and 1939, the 86-year old
Johnsons memory gets fuzzy according to Andersen. Schulze believes that Philips memory
has been affected by what has happened in the past 10 years vis--vis the revelations of peoples
pasts in the 1930s. Paul de Man, Heidegger, T. S. Eliot all kinds of people whose anti-Semitic
statements or whose pro-Fascist statements have come to light. Since Ive known Philip, I think
he has become a little cagier, a little bit more guarded in his willingness to discuss these things.
To what extent hes flimflamming me, I dont know. I believe that there are things about his past
that he hasnt told me. And I cant blame him for that.394

390.

Paul Gapp, Edifice Complex. Well-Designed Barbs at Center of Arts Club Gala,
Chicago Tribune February 19 1989: Arts section, p 12.
391.

Michael Wise, Architecture: The Deconstruction of Philip Johnson, 86, The

Independent November 11 1992: 17; John King and Teresa M. Hanafin, Lots & Blocks; Spy
Points a Finger, Boston Globe October 16 1988: A35.
392.

Johnson quoted in Andersen, 154.

393.

Johnson quoted in Andersen, 151.

394.

Schulze quoted in Andersen, 138, 151.

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Instead, when told that the Schulze biography might attract a lot of attention, Johnson
replied Well, sex and Nazism can do that, referring to the supposed revelations of his
homosexuality and his Nazi past.395 While Johnsons hiding his homosexuality in the age of
AIDS396 would be considered reprehensible by some queer theorists, his implicit equation of
hiding his homosexuality and hiding his Nazi past is revolting. Johnson would appear to believe
that one is just as bad as the other, denigrating homosexuality and conversely domesticating
Nazism as something that bad boys do. As Johnson asked the New Yorker to delete references
to his homosexuality in a 1977 profile by Brendan Gill so that he would be able to get what he
called the job of my life, the AT&T building397, Johnson apparently expected that his Nazism
ought to be covered up so that he wouldnt get into trouble.
Johnson is vague about what he did, stating that he regrets that he was involved with
politics because he was a lousy politician. Unbelievably bad. I couldnt make a public speech,
and Huey Long was crazy. I wasted a lot of years in which I could have been designing.398 Yet
Huey Long is rather safe: the Kingfish, as far as he is remembered, is a part of Americana.
Johnson is not interested in talking about his activities in Nazi Germany, his activities for a Nazifunded propaganda movement expressly aimed to convince the American people that Germany
wasnt the enemy. There is absolutely no gesture toward his past behavior unless he is
confronted by direct questioning, nothing even as paltry as a letter to an architectural magazine
regretting his past action. Johnson still seems to be upset that the whole matter was ever
mentioned and still appears to hope that it will all be forgotten so that we can get down to the
business of appreciating him for his role as architect and patron.399

395.

Johnson quoted in Andersen, 132. This quote was repeated in the popular media, for
example see Overheard, Newsweek May 17 1993: 23 and Los Angeles Daily News, Sex and
Nazis a Selling Point, Vancouver Sun May 7 1993: Entertainment section, C6.
396.

Johnsons homosexuality has been widely known for years among architects and in
the art world. His living arrangement with his companion David Whitney was mentioned
previously in Martin Filler, Philip Johnson: Deconstruction Worker, Interview May 1988: 102.
397.

Anderssen, 155.

398.

Johnson in Diamonsteen, 160.

399.

Since the Vanity Fair article, outside of architecture, which of course has remained
silent on the topic, Johnson occassionally has been slammed by the media for his Nazism and his
system of patronage. For example, The fact that Johnson is now the best-known living architect
in America tells us a lot of uncomfortable things that we need to know about the shape of
contemporary culture. Ever since he was a young man Johnson has been more than usually
adept at grabbing the museums directorships that count and co-opting more talented juniors to
his cause, binding them with the time-honored custom of ring-kissing patronage. The years of
Johnsons ascendancy have been a period that has been distinguished by the extreme cowardice
of those who ought to know better, who ought to have tried to wrest his fingers from the levers of
power. Johnson discovered that he was gay and cracked up. Taking himself off to the libertine

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Lingering hopes that Johnsons past and its impact on his role in the discipline could be
discussed openly diminished later in 1993 with Herbert Muschamps article A Man Who Lives in
Two Glass Houses, a kick-off to a new wave of Johnson-praising publications.400 As mentioned
in chapter one, when he was a young architect Muschamp attained some notoriety with his
polemical critique of the profession of architecture File Under Architecture, and after he replaced
Johnsons friend Paul Goldberger as the regular architecture critic for The New York Times, his
columns seemed remarkably candid and ready to criticize the profession and establishment. But
in his article on Johnson, Muschamp appears to have capitulated to the long-standing tradition of
Johnson-admiration at the Times.
Muschamp begins his article by pointing to early German modernists hopes in the
cleansing power of glass to lead to a new society of transparency, a light-filled realm of freedom
and candor. If Johnsons New Canaan Glass House represents a literal translation of these
hopes of transparency, Muschamp points to another more phenomenal version of the Glass
House that also exists for Johnson: the fishbowl of fame that he has inhabited most of his life.
Muschamp argues that Even those who detest Johnson and his architecture will grant his
disarming candor. Always quicker than his critics to concede his faults, Johnson long ago
perfected the art of self-deprecation as a shield against attacks by others. When an architect
routinely belittles his own work, calls himself a whore and makes no secret of the fascist
sympathies that overtook him in the 1930s, wheres the fun in trying to take him down a peg or
two?401 But Muschamp overstates the case: Johnson belittles his own work so that others will
find it pointless to do so but also so that he can position himself not as an architect but as a great
trendsetter; Johnson calls himself a whore because to him the ideal architect is a whore, which he
defines as an instrument of power unmediated402; and as I have already pointed out, to say that

climate of Berlin in the 1930s to frolic with the Brown Shirts he discovered himself. Deyan Sudjic,
A Case of Vanity, The Guardian 1993: 4 or in reference to Barbra Streisand and Philip
Johnsons attempts to attract the interest of Bill Clinton on the basis of their claims as artists, I
think that most artists are just one step short of being crazy people, that theyre vain and
unbalanced, and that of all the artists in the great Western world, Americas are, sad to say, the
most ignorant and the dumbest. Richard Grenier, Hollywood Cadre Superstars, The
Washington Times June 2 1993: G3.
400. As the new pro-Johnson publications Muschamp cited David Whitney and Jeffrey
Kipnis, Philip Johnson: The Glass House, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993) and Peter Blake,
No Place Like Utopia. Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept, (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1993. Muschamp, 37.
401.

Herbert Muschamp, A Man Who Lives in Two Glass Houses, The New York Times
October 17 1993: Section 2, Arts & Leisure, 1.
402.

Johnson made this statement at the P-3 conference held at the University of
Virginia Charlottesville in November, 1982 the proceedings of which were published as The
Charlottesville Tapes, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 19. He has frequently referred to the architect as

138
Johnson makes no secret of his fascist sympathies is simply not accurate. Muschamp praises
this phenomenal transparency in Johnsons behavior. While he does temper his treatment of
Johnson by indicting him for his abandonment of the social implications of architecture,
Muschamp ultimately concludes that Johnsons Glass House (whether it is the literal or the
phenomenal Glass House, Muschamp doesnt say) deserves emulation by the new breed of
socially oriented architects because, For more than 40 years it has been a showcase for qualities
of mind that remain exemplary: curiosity, pragmatism, the ability to conceive order and also to
question it, receptivity to new ideas along with skepticism that salvation lies with any one of them,
and the freedom to imagine forms of architecture even Philip Johnson never dreamed of.403
Philip Johnson as Architect
After graduating from Harvard in 1943, Johnson went into the army for two years. He
served as Private First Class Philip Johnson at Fort Belvoir, Virginia as a latrine orderly.404 It
appears that even with Johnsons fluent German, he was not to be trusted with a more
responsible task such as translation, work in the intelligence service (a sort of Harvard club by
this point), or an assignment overseas. Still, it would be better than the fate of the innocent
Japanese-Americans interned in concentration camps during the war.405 Of the experience
Johnson concluded recently, It was awfully good for me, you see. I was so goddamned
snobbish. A spoiled brat you see.406
After the end of the war, Johnson began reconstructing his life, working on his (literal)
Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut and his (phenomenal) glass house of fame.
Understanding the Glass House is critical to a better understanding of Johnson. As Eisenman
puts it, Johnson is at his most opaque when he is speaking of himself the historian speaking
of the architect, the critic reviewing his own book, the architect presenting his house. The best
place to start searching for the opacity, the materiality of the Glass House is thus to turn to
Johnsons own presentation of it to the public in the September 1950 issue of the English journal
Architectural Review. Johnsons article consisted of a series of images with explanations by
Johnson. Not all the images were of the Glass House, instead, the first ten images were of what

a whore. See for example his interview in Barbaralee Diamondstein, ed., American Architecture
Now II, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 157.
403.

Muschamp, 37.

404.

Jencks, 153 and Tompkins, 50.

405.

On Americas historical amnesia of the internment of Japanese-Americans, see

Michael Rogin, Make My Day!: Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics, Representations 29
(Winter 1990): 111-112.
406.

Andersen, Philip the Great, 151.

139
Johnson cited as its precedents: the approach from Le Corbusiers 1931 Farm Village Plan,
Schinkels Casino in Glienicke Park, and from Choisys plan and perspective of the Acropolis;
formal influences from paintings by van Doesburg and Malevitch; and purity from Claude Nicholas
Ledouxs Maison des Gardes Agricoles and Mies van der Rohes ideal arrangement of the Illinois
Institute of Technology and Farnsworth House. Thus much as Sigfried Giedion did for Walter
Gropius in his Space, Time, and Architecture, Johnson established his work as drawing together
formal moments from history. Jeffrey Kipnis suggests that Johnsons essay on the Glass House
was the first architects essay to be equal in status to the work. This coequivalence between
theory and design in the Glass House essay was, Kipnis argues, responsible for the new
symbiosis of theory and practice in the works of architects such as Robert Venturi, Leon Krier,
Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman.407 However, by reducing history to a
slide-show of formal events, Johnsons photo essay effectively eliminates it. The materiality of the
image, the context that lies in between the slides is never examined. History, in Johnsons essay
is about image, not materiality.
After the historical images deriving a lineage for his house, Johnson offered images of the
Glass House with captions explaining its different elements. Under a picture of the house
illuminated at night, Johnson wrote:
The cylinder, made of the same brick as the platform from which it springs, forming the
main motif of the house was not derived from Mies, but rather from a burned-out wooden
village I saw once where nothing was left but the foundations and chimneys of brick. Over
the chimney I slipped a steel cage with a glass skin. The chimney forms the anchor.408
Since Johnson spent the war in the United States, it would appear that Johnson must
have seen this village during his trip into Poland in 1939, the countryside of which he explained in
his article for Social Justice, was full of Jews. Was this a village of Jews?
The form of the chimney itself raises questions: a cylinder, a much more industrial form
than the rectangular form that one would use in a house. While of course a cylinder is formally
much more dynamic than a rectangle within a rectangle, form alone did not have to determine
Johnsons chic. Could this choice of form have been deliberate, to refer to the chimneys of the
crematoria that Johnson must have known about by the time he built the house? And does caging
the chimney have a meaning, possibly implying protection or rebuilding? And if Johnson is

407.
408.

Kipnis, Philip Johnson: The Glass House, xiii.

Philip Johnson, House at New Canaan, Connecticut, Writings, ed. Robert A. M.

Stern, and Peter D. Eisenman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; article originally
published in Architectural Review, CVIII, (September, 1950), 152-9), 223.

140
obliquely referring to a crematoria, not to a village, what does it mean that the chimney is a
working one with a shower inside of it?409
Johnsons statement that the chimney/cylinder was made of the same brick as the
platform from which it springs also requires analysis. The idea of this chimney rising from the
ground, literally from the ashes of the burnt-out village, would appear to refer to a phoenix, but the
phoenix of what? Possible answers might be the rebirth of Johnson himself, of the Jews after the
Holocaust, or alternatively, of Germany after the war, perhaps even a rebirth of fascism.
Complicating matters is that this is could also refer not to a phoenix but to an organic metaphor
that could be either innocuous or even sinister use. In his book The Face of the German House,
Schultze-Naumberg, the theorist of cultural racism in architecture who Johnson found
disagreeable, explained that the German house
gives one the feeling that it grows out of the soil, like one of its natural products, like a
tree that sinks its roots deep in the interior of the soil and forms a union with it. It is this
that gives us our understanding of home [Heimat], of a bond with blood and earth [Erden]
for one kind of men [this is] the condition of their life and the meaning of their
existence.410
If this wasnt enough to make our interpretation of the cylinder/chimney seems to collapse
under the weight of possible meanings, what could Peter Eisenman mean when he wrote
How are we to interpret such a metaphor? Who builds a house as a metaphoric ruin?
Why the burnt-out village as a symbol of ones own house? But further, that Johnson
should reveal the source of his imagery seems the most telling of all: the Glass House is
Johnsons own monument to the horrors of war. It is at once a ruin and also an ideal
model of a more perfect society; it is the nothingness of glass and the wholeness of
abstract form. How potent this image will remain long after all of us have gone, as a fitting

409.

For charitable readings of the chimney see Kenneth Frampton, The Glass House
Revisited, Philip Johnson: Processes. The Glass House, 1949 and The AT&T Corporate
Headquarters, 1978., ed. Kenneth Frampton. (New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban
Studies, 1978), 51.
Johnsons obsession with chimneys continued into the 1980s at the Glass House
compound with his study a small building composed almost entirely of two chimneys, one
smallish square one which functions a real chimney for a fireplace and a much larger conical flue
which lights his desk. Vincent Scully written of the building: Out in the empty meadow he
placed his most problematic Folly of all: a little abstract white-stuccoed building, adrift in space.
Its disoriented geometry called up the haunting work of Aldo Rossi, along with some of Rossis
own sources in Boulles conical chimneys, with their sinister contemporary reminiscence of
death-camp crematoria. in Philip Johnson: The Glass House Revisited, Architectural Digest
November 1986, reprinted in David Whitney and Jeffrey Kipnis, Philip Johnson: The Glass
House, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 155. Of course Scully doesnt elaborate on
Johnsons relation to the crematoria.
410.

Paul Schultze-Naumberg quoted in Barbara Miller-Lane, Architecture and Politics in

Germany, 1918-1945, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968), 139.

141
requiem for both a mans life and his career as an architect! I know of no other architects
house that answers so many questions, has such a symbiotic relationship with personal
atonement and rebirth as an individual.
In a more general context, the Glass House prefigures for me the parallel anxiety of postWorld War II architecture. It remains the last pure form, the final gesture of a belief in a
humanism so debilitated by the events of 1945. And at the same time it contains, in the
image of that ruin, the seeds of a new conception of an architecture that is not for the
reification of an anthropomorphic man, but exhibits a more relativistic condition, a parity
between man and his object world.411
But Eisenmans evocation of atonement and rebirth was in an introduction to Johnsons
collected writings, probably approved of by Johnson before publication and the question of both
audience (Johnson? those who know Johnsons past? those who dont? a future audience after
the revelation of his past?) and author (Eisenman? Eisenman + Johnson? even Johnson?) only
serves to overdetermine the passage, already written in a coded language. But the mention of an
ideal society raises another issue: if the Glass House itself is a monument of a more perfect
society, what society would this be? Certainly, as I discussed above, Johnson has shown no
interest in transforming society through architecture. Eisenman depicts the Glass House as the
representation of a perfect, rational society represented by the completely symmetrical glass
and steel structure with the horror of war the chimney, a major moment of asymmetry
inside it. Could this be the project of Johnsons fascism in built form?412
On the other hand, confining ones reading to Johnsons caption from his Architectural
Review article leads to another conclusion: Johnson is not making any statement about the
horrors of war, but rather he is making a statement about the architects eye. Faced with the
terrible sight of the burned-out wooden village, Johnson does not care what happened to the
people who lived there: all he cares about is the form he sees.
Indeed, Johnsons postwar writings and lectures have been devoted to a rising tenor of
apoliticism coupled with formalism. But one can never really be apolitical for being apolitical is a
political stand in itself as we can see in a 1960 talk to the Architectural Association in London in
which he drew a parallel between politics and architecture in the 1920s and 1930s:

411.

Peter Eisenman, Introduction, Philip Johnson. Writings, ed. Robert A. M. Stern, and
Peter D. Eisenman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) 25.
412.

It is significant that the return of the repressed the death within Johnsons past
is in the form of a chimney, a common focus of the home. One might be tempted to see this as a
moment of Freuds unheimlich, the uncanny or unhomely in architecture, what Anthony Vidler has
described as the fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to
become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream. Vidler also explains that for Freud the
uncanny incorporated his observations of war trauma and shell shock. Anthony Vidler, The
Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1992), 7.
On the topic of the uncanny in architecture in general, see Vidlers introduction to his book, 3-14.

142
In Rotterdam in 1925 I saw my first Neo-Plasticist building, and for the first time I found
everything serene, simple, and uncluttered. Primary little colors were things that one
could defend. One could defend the straight line. One could, and one did, feel
passionately about things, as about politics in the thirties. All my friends were members of
the Communist Party then, or close to it. They do not mention those things now! It is a
great help in life if one can feel passionately about things. I am too far gone in my
relativistic approach to the world to care very much about labels. I have no faith in
anything.413
Johnsons companion Alan Blackburn is omitted and one has to question whether
Johnson really had no friends among the Coughlinites, Dennis supporters, and outright American
and German Nazis that he met? By saying that all his friends were members of the Communist
Party and now dont mention it, Johnson deflects any question of his own historical culpability.
Johnsons neutrality wasnt neutral, on the contrary, it was a turn toward cynicism: away from the
straight line toward not having faith in anything, a calculated, cynical means of avoiding a
confrontation with his own history.
As Johnson implicitly pointed out in the lecture at the Architectural Association, for him
architecture and politics actually did go hand in hand. If he purported to abandon politics, he also
moved away from his mentor, Mies van der Rohe. Instead, Johnson turned his architectural
interests toward an obsession with historical eclecticism, calling himself a violently anti-Miesian
traditionalist in 1959 and basing his architecture on his dictum that We cannot not know
history. But this statement of reaction against the amnesiac force of modernity wasnt what it
seemed. Johnson didnt want real historical investigation, any digging that might uncover shaky
foundations. Rather, he said, I try to pick up what I like throughout history.414 Johnsons
approach to history was formal: picking up what he liked for its visual properties and discarding
the rest. We cannot not know history, in this case did not refer to his own historical culpability,
but rather was served to point to a history of image that he could pick from as he liked.
But returning to Johnson as a lecturer, if he was in demand as a lecturer for the American
Fellowship Forum back in the 1930s, he was again in demand as a lecturer from the 1940s
through the early 1960s (and would once more be in demand from 1976 on). The form of these
lectures is themselves architectural, as Vincent Scully has explained:
we might argue that Johnsons lectures (in which medium most of the ideas in his writings
originally took shape) have on the whole been even more effective and influential than his

413.

Philip Johnson, Informal Talk, Architectural Association, Writings, ed. Robert A. M.

Stern, and Peter D. Eisenman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; previously unpublished
lecture give at the Architectural Association, School of Architecture, London, November 28, 1960)
109.
414.

Philip Johnson, Whither Away Non-Miesian Directions, Writings, ed. Robert A.

M. Stern, and Peter D. Eisenman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; originally given as a
speech at Yale University on February 5, 1959), 227.

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buildings. The latter, it is true, have some special qualities, essentially humanistic ones;
moderate scale and a general air that can only be described as taut and tasteful. The
lectures, though much in the same clear and deceptively brittle mode, have more body
and bite to them. They are, perhaps paradoxically, more physical than the buildings; they
project the kind of primitive architectural dance that the buildings tend to lack. They can,
for example, make an audience experience architectures spatial physicality by situating
its members in space with an intense physical awareness of familiar lecture halls that
they never had before. I can vividly remember Johnson doing exactly that in malevolent
old Room 100 at Yale in 1947. Now, in the 1970s, he is still the only lecturer who can
make Rudolphs terrifying Hastings Hall behave. He stands right in the middle of the
deadly perspective and at once sanctions and controls it. Taking up something equivalent
to the fourth ballet position in which Rigaud painted Louis XIV, he forces the concrete
masses back and keeps them there. He invokes architecture by his presence even more
than by his words. He is so good at controlling an audience that he can be a shameless
demagogue when the mood hits him.415
In other words, Johnsons lectures, if we are to take Scully at his word, are themselves a
Nietzschean architecture based on one mans will-to-power. Indeed Scullys description of one
man at perspectival center projecting the primitive architectural dance, not by his words but by
his presence, riveting the audience in its own space, its presence and thus capable of controlling
seems to be almost too close to a description of a fascist spectacle.
At the same time, Johnson continued to cultivate the phenomenal Glass House of fame.
Johnson continued to work at MoMA, where his assistant was the young Ada-Louise Huxtable,
who would later, after being recommended for the job by Johnson, become The New York
Timess architecture critic.416 For a time Johnson was unable to return to his position as the
official director of the department of architecture and design, telling Peter Blake, who would
become the curator, that some of my trustees cant forget my Nazi past and would resign if I
become the official director of the department. Blake added, We maintained the fiction I was
the head of the department of Architecture and Industrial Design, and Philip was a sort of
unofficial consultant. Nobody, needless to say, was fooled.417 In 1947 however, Blake left the
Museum and Johnson was able to rejoin the staff formally as Director of the department and
stayed there until 1954 when he hand-picked Arthur Drexler, the departments curator since 1951,
as his successor.418

415.

Vincent Scully, Foreword, Philip Johnson. Writings, ed. Robert A. M. Stern, and
Peter D. Eisenman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 7.
416.

Andersen, 151.

417.

Blake, No Place Like Utopia, 108. Johnson did return to the department in 1947, but
in what capacity?
418.

Arthur Drexler, interviewed in Barbaralee Diamondstein, ed., American Architecture

Now II, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 62.

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All the while, Johnson maintained his contacts among patrons, artists and architects,
running teas for students and professors at Yale and elaborate lunches at the Glass House for
the cosmopolitan vanguard such as Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham, and Andy Warhol and
high society such as George Balanchine, Lincoln Kirstein, Mrs. Bliss Parkinson, Edward M. M.
Warburg and eventually Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. As Johnson expanded his network of high
society contacts and as MoMA grew to become the worlds most important showplace of
contemporary art,419 Johnson was able to become among the biggest power brokers in the art
world. By the late 1950s, being liked by Johnson meant that an artist had achieved a significant
coup and being bought by Johnson mean that the artist had established himself. Johnsons
unique position can be gauged from a remark by a dealer that Johnson would be the only
collector he would give a fifty-percent discount to, saying Id give that to get an artist in his
collection.420
In 1966, Johnson put together a book about his own work which he then reviewed for
Architectural Forum. Beyond the curiosity of Johnson reviewing a book he made about himself,
however, Johnson laid out how he meant the book to be received. With its paper heavy, lots of
color, generous type, excellent cover design, it would make Cocktail tables look handsome
While Johnson refused to evaluate his own work, he argued that the value of this bookis the
new way of showing architecture, through brilliant Technicolor. The text, written by his old friend
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Johnson exclaimed is faultless. a lucid, critical essay that well might
stand as a paradigm for the monographs on living architects. Although commissioned by
Johnson, he indulges in no hyperbole. He says something in each sentence, and what he
disapproves of, what he finds positively ugly, he mentions not at all. He accentuates the positive
without flattery or sycophancy.421

419. On the growth of MoMA in the fifties and its link to Cold War politics see Serge
Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the
Cold War, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Philip Johnsons old friend Peter Blake writes of a secret, invisible network slightly
conspiratorial in naturemade up of homosexuals and their friends at MoMA in the late 1940s.
133-135.
Blake also reminisces about the culture at Philips Glass House see Blake, 150-151 and
he points out that although his influence was considerable, it was hardly broadly enough to
corrupt more than a handful of Yalies. Louis Kahn once said to me that he thought Philip was
profoundly evil. 308
420.

Sophy Burnham, The Art Crowd, (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1973), 38-

39.
421.

Philip Johnson, Review of Philip Johnson: Architecture 1949-1965. By Philip

Johnson, Architectural Forum 125 (October 1966): 52-53, reprinted in Philip Johnson, Writings
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 255-256. On the review, see Ujjval Vyas, The
Hidden I: A Review of Philip Johnson, Restructuring Architectural Theory, ed. Marco Diani, and
Catherine Ingraham. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1989; the same collection

145
Thus in his review, Johnson explained precisely what he wanted out of a monograph on
an architect: to be visually seductive and to have a text in it that would say something, neither
obviously flattering nor attacking the work. Significantly though, Johnson does not show any
interest in what the text says. For him, the spectacle of saying something is enough. What is said
is irrelevant, except that the book must neither disapprove of the architects work nor flatter it.
Johnsons book, however, marked an end point: from 1966 until 1972, Johnson seemed
to disappear from the architectural vanguard. Instead, having formed a firm with John Burgee, he
attracted massive commercial commissions such as the 1968-73 IDS Center in Minneapolis and
the 1972-76 Pennzoil Place in Houston.422 And although Johnson also continued to work behind
the scenes as the Director of the Architectural League of New York with the Lindsay
administration and had a television show Eye on New York, he became increasingly unpopular
at universities. As the energy of the late sixties led students to question the validity of architecture
as a discipline, they turned toward external sources, such as the work of Buckminster Fuller, and
rejected Johnson. Robert A. M. Stern condescendingly explained:
The reality of the matter is that in the unintelligible brutalizing of educational goals and
standards which accompanied the, for me, rather more intelligible protests by university
students and faculties over political situations at home and abroad in the time between
Vietnam and Watergate, Johnson became persona non grata at most campuses. While
architecture students mindlessly groped through a period of virulent anti-professionalism,
of street-corner surveys, and courses in how-to-build-your-own-yurt, Johnson came to
be regarded as the enemy. All that articulate intelligence, cunning wit, and a much too
substantial corpus of work alienated him from a generation of students who believed that
those were precisely the most irrelevant attributes and achievements an architect could
possess. Willing though the students of the late sixties were to sit for six, eight, nine
befogged hours before a Buckminster Fuller, they would not offer even a quarter of an
hour to Johnson, because they sensed in advance that Johnson knew about Fuller and
knew about architecture, and could and would tell them about the differences between
the two.423
For the first time since he was a fascist, Johnson was not a hero.

was originally published in Threshold 4 (October 1988)) 122-128. The book itself was Philip
Johnson, Philip Johnson. Architecture 1949-1965, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966).
422.

Martin Filler, Hierarchies for Hire, Thinking the Present: Recent American
Architecture, ed. K. Michael Hays, and Carol Burns. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,
1990), 26-27.
423.

Stern in Johnson, Writings, 258.

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3. Philips Kids: Avant-Garde as Conspiracy of

Agency
I dont understand why we cant have dinner with whom we want to, but everybody makes
it out as if were making a goats-and-sheep out of it. Jealous. Jealous. Jealous.
Philip Johnson424
In 1976, ten years after his decline in popularity began, Johnson remade himself once
again, this time as the wise mentor of the next generation of architectural celebrities. By recruiting
his kids to bring him back into the public eye, Johnson would set the stage for his greatest
period of fame and power in the field. By 1979, his writings minus the articles for Social Justice
and Todays Challenge had been published as an elegant book, a number of articles in the
vanguard architectural journal Oppositions had been dedicated to him, he was the subject of an
exhibit and catalog at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies, on the cover of Time
magazine as the representative of American Architects: Doing Their Own Thing, and had won
the A. I. A. Gold Medal, as well as the very first Pritzker Prize, an international award roughly
equivalent to an architectural Nobel. At the same time, his new firm Johnson/Burgee was a
financial success with a number of major skyscrapers to their credit. As Johnson put it, When
Neimee gives you the Cartee Blanchee, by God you know youve arrived.425 Johnson was
unrivaled. He succeeded in designing his own life. His will-to-power had won Johnson fame and
almost certainly that place in the history-books that he so desired.
The kids Johnson had befriended appeared not so much as a group, but as the vanguard
of American architecture, divided by debate into two polemically opposed groups: the Whites and
the Grays, a grouping which retrospectively has appeared to prefigure the division between (late
or neo-) Modernism and Postmodernism and has been cited seen as a turning point for American
architectural discourse, towards real debate and discussion.426 Underneath this opposition,
however, lay the alliances of power in the vanguard.

424.

Philip Johnson quoted in John Brodie, Master Philip and the Boys, Spy (May 1991):

53.
425.

Johnson quoted by Vincent Scully in Vincent Scully, Foreword, Philip Johnson.

Writings, ed. Robert A. M. Stern, and Peter D. Eisenman. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1979) 6.
426.

For example see, Steven W. Hurtt, Introduction, Five Architects: Twenty Years
Later, (Forestville, Maryland: Anaconda Press for the University of Maryland, 1992) 1 and Peter
Eisenman, in Five + Ten: A Symposium held at the School of Architecture, Spring 1981,
Colonnade 1.1 (Spring 1982), 8 as well as Gwathmey in Five + Ten, 9

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In this chapter we will examine Johnsons rise to power and the symbiotic relationship he
has had with the architects he calls his kids. As with Johnsons fascist past, discussed in the last
chapter, so too the question of the architectural vanguards dominance by the circle of Johnson
and his kids has barely been mentioned in architecture, although it is accepted as an operating
assumption by many architects, especially those involved in academia and trying to create
vanguard work. After explaining the conspiracy of the kids, i. e. who the kids were, how they
came to be so influential and how they worked with Johnson to become architectural celebrities,
we will analyze why this has been repressed and show that this gossiping about this conspiracy
of the kids points back to the question of agency.
Before they were Johnsons kids the handful of members of the generation that
graduated architectural school around 1960 and comprised a vanguard of cardboard architecture
most notably Stern and Eisenman used the media, both internal and external to architecture
to promote their own work and the work of other members of the vanguard and managed to
obtain a remarkable degree of influence over the perception of their generation in architectural
discourse.
Robert Stern and Perspecta 9/10
The first of the kids to take advantage of the media and the first to make the all-important
connection with Philip Johnson was Robert Stern. In his mid-twenties, Stern attended Yales
architecture school where he met Johnson, a frequent visitor and critic. Johnson and Stern
became friends, as one of Sterns roommates from Yale explained: Youre in your early twenties,
and theres this Gatsby-like figure with pots of money whos helping you find work, and you cant
help but be seduced. Stern benefited from Johnsons patronage and Johnson would often call up
Stern at the studio in order to ask him to do research for him.427
Thus when he became editor of the Yale department of architectures student journal
Perspectas double issue 9/10, Stern was able to draw upon financial support from Johnson, who
had previously been published within Perspecta. The money was not misplaced: published in
1965 the issue immediately became an important landmark in architectural discourse by
containing pre-publication excerpts of Robert Venturis Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture, an essay by the rising architectural star Charles Moore, historians Henry-Russell
Hitchcock and Vincent Scully. Whence and Wither: The Processional Element in Architecture by
Johnson appeared in the journal at Sterns request.428 The level of sustained thinking about

427.
428.

Brodie, 54.

On Johnsons relationship with Perspecta see Robert A. M. Stern in Whitney and

Kipnis, eds. Philip Johnson. The Glass House. 17-18

148
architecture in the journal was a remarkable event in American architecture at the time, drawing
considerable attention to its young editor.429
40 Under 40
Upon graduating, Stern, then twenty-six, was appointed Program Director of the
Architectural League of New York by Johnson, who had created the post in order to inject life into
the League. Again, Johnson was not disappointed, as Program Director, Stern organized exhibits
of work by the rising stars of the profession: Charles Moore, Robert Venturi and
Mitchell/Giurgola.430 But Sterns most significant move as Program Director of the Architectural
League was, with funding from the American Federation of the Arts and more help from Johnson,
to put on the show 40 Under 40 in the galleries of the Federation during 1966, send it on a
nationwide tour and publish its catalog. Deriving the title from a show organized by the League in
1941, Stern attempted to define a new generation whose time had come.431 The show consisted
of forty projects (not forty architects) by architects under forty years of age selected by Stern with
Johnsons supervision, then chairman of the Current Work Committee of the Architectural
League.432
Not all of the architects in 40 Under 40 became well known, but it is remarkable that so
many future architectural celebrities were present, even if they were not to be heard from in press
again for years (one major exception would be John Hejduk, who Stern says he immediately
regretted not including433): Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, Charles Moore,
Jaquelin Robertson, Werner Seligmann, Stern himself (included at Johnsons insistence), Stanley
Tigerman and Robert Venturi. By then Meier and especially Moore and Venturi, were already
well-known and their inclusion served to legitimate the other, less well-known architects. Many of
these architects knew each other, working and teaching in the New York City area: Tigerman and
Stern had been at Yale together, where Charles Moore was had recently become the head of the
architecture department, Stern had worked as a designer in Meiers office from 1965-1966,434

429.

The issue was recognized as unique in its time. See Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Architects
without Architecture, Progressive Architecture April 1966: 234, 236, 240, 246, 254, 258.
430.

Robert A. M. Stern, The Old 40 Under 40, A Retrospective Glance, A+U 73

(January 1977): 30.
431.

Robert A.M. Stern, ed., 40 Under 40: An Exhibition of Young Talent in Architecture,
(New York: The Architectural League of New York, 1966).
432.

Stern, 40 Under 40, vii.

433.

Stern The Old 40 Under 40, 31

434.

In Meiers office, Stern worked on the Renfield House and on urban analysis of the
Bronx. The experience, he acknowledges, influenced him. Thomas S. Hines, Citizen Stern: A

149
Eisenman was Meiers cousin and had known him since high school and both had taught at
Princeton with Michael Graves.435 Thus 40 Under 40 served to map a network of connections
among young (principally New York city-based) architects.
Sterns goal in 40 Under 40 was to define a new generation in architecture, historically
locating it in relation to what came before. Stern argued that in the architecture of the new
generation one could see Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto and Louis I. Kahn as dominant influences.
From Aalto, the influence was his mature works: Baker House at M. I. T., the Town Hall at
Saynatsalo, and the cultural center at Wolfsburg. Kahns influence was in terms of thought
processes and compelling images. Significantly, in what was an allusion to Richard Meiers
formally stunning Smith House,436 Stern wrote that it was not Corbusiers recent beton brut work
that inspired the new generation but rather his work of the 1920s and 1930s, leading them toward
what Stern called cardboard architecture, which was, he wrote, for many the order of the day
with an almost fanatical zeal being shown by some to recreate not only the spirit of an earlier
architecture but also its monuments. In terms of philosophy, Stern saw Venturis complex and
contradictory architecture and the writings of Charles Moore and his partner Donlyn Lyndon as
related and important new statements that also provided imagery to the new generation.437 In
citing Moore and Lyndon, Stern was alluding to a position he shared with them in which
architecture would be defined as the making of places through form, rejecting any attempt to
make architectural design determined by structural or functional requirements.438 Stern summed
up the aims and ideals of the forty under forty in one paragraph :
an architecture responsible to program, yet one that casts aside the shibboleths of
functional and structural determinism in favor of a frank recognition of the primacy of
form; an architecture which seeks to accommodate the often conflicting demands of
urbanistic responsibility and specific program and not gloss over one or the other.439

Portrait of the Architect as Entrepreneur, Architecture and Urbanism Extra Edition: The
Residential Work of Robert A.M. Stern July 1982): 228.
435.

A project by Graves and Eisenman for the Jersey Corridor, a linear city, is in Wendy
Buehr, New Designs for Megapolis, Horizon 1966: 56-64. The two were known collectively as
Eisengraves. See Ralph Bennett, Recollections, Five Architects: Twenty Years Later,
(Forestville, Maryland: Anaconda Press for the University of Maryland, 1982) 7. Also see
Eisenmans recollections of the period, especially of his interactions with Graves and Rowe in
Frdric Levrat, Dossier. Peter Eisenman, LArchitecture dAujourdhui 279 (1992): 98-115.
436.

Stern The Old 40 Under 40,32.

437.

Stern, 40 Under 40, ivv.

438.

See Robert A. M. Stern, New Directions in American Architecture, (New York:

George Braziller, 1969), 70.
439.

Stern, 40 Under 40, v.

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Thus, along with the previous allusion to Moore and Lyndon, Stern established a defining
characteristic of the new architecture: a primacy of form over function and structure. What
consolation architecture would give to its context would come from form. The reference to
shibboleths probably refers to Johnsons then-unpublished essay on The Seven Shibboleths of
Our Profession, (1962) in which Johnson indicted contemporary modern architectures
preoccupation with functional and structural determinism, the same shibboleths that Stern would
argue against.
Stern concluded his introduction in a curious manner, stating that for the first time in fifty
years there appears to be no revolution in architecture. The significance of this statement
remains vague, but can probably best be read in the context of Sterns intent for 40 Under 40 as
a polemic against two articles: HenryRussell Hitchcocks The Evolution of Wright, Mies, and Le
Corbusier,440 in Perspecta 1 and Adolf Placzeks Youth and Age in Architecture in the Sternedited Perspecta 9/10.441
In his article, Hitchcock defended the commonplace that the architect should not expect
recognition until after age forty, arguing that even though Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe, and Le Corbusier ended their formal training early, they were not yet mature and hence
they voluntarily subjected themselves to a period of investigation within classical architecture, a
period that, Hitchcock wrote, served as a needed corrective to a rebellious romanticism.442
From its context in one of the first issues of one of the first university-affiliated journals of
architecture in the United States, it appears that Hitchcocks condescending tone arose from an
assumption that his audience in a student journal would be over-eager students needing to be
brought down to earth by his wise admonishments.443 Students, he wrote should realize that
even the great masters did not achieve their first masterpieces until age 35 for Wright, 39 for Le
Corbusier, and 43 for Mies. Their message is only too obvious, Hitchcock expounded, so all I
will say to you in conclusion is: Dont be in too much of a hurry.444

440.

Henry RussellHitchcock, The Evolution of Wright, Mies, and Le Corbusier,

Perspecta 1 (Summer 1952), 815.
441.

Stern confirms this reading in Robert A.M. Stern, Over and Under Forty: A Propos
the 'Crise Quarante Ans' among Second Generation American Modernists, A+U October 1976:
19.
442.

Hitchcock, 12.

443.

The only other significant journal prior to Perspecta had been Task, which flourished
briefly in the heady days of Harvard in the 1940s.
444.

Hitchcock, 15. Significantly, Hitchcock continues his interest in architects ages in his
introduction to the 1966 Philip Johnson book. Hitchcock begins the essay citing Johnsons age
(already sixty) and the possibility that Johnson could continue working into his seventies.

151
By the time of Sterns Perspecta 9/10, the general tone of the articles indicated an
understanding that the journal would be read not only by students but also by other architects and
academics. Historian Adolf K. Placzek, encouraged by Stern to encounter the Hitchcock article
and test its claims outside of architecture,445 found it valid, arguing in contrast to the other arts,
greatness in architecture is never achieved until middle age because of the stern requirements of
the discipline, namely the responsibility to material realities of function and structure and the need
to develop a network of social contacts for patronage.446 Yet while Placzek didnt point it out, the
latter requirement could be alleviated by the beneficence of a well-connected patron, a method
Stern was testing out at precisely the same time.
Perhaps then, Sterns remark about there not being a revolution in architecture could be
extrapolated to mean that if there was no revolution, one did not have to start from scratch but
rather could build on the existing order and on what ones predecessors had left and if there were
no revolution then patronage relations would be left intact, for the new generation to plug into.
CASE
While Stern says that he believed that he was having the first and last word on the
subject,447

and indeed 40 Under 40 accurately mapped the players of the new generation, the

shape of that terrain had begun to shift as groups and alliances formed within it. The most
important of these groups was the Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment
(CASE), formed prior to 40 Under 40, in the fall of 1964, while Stern who was never to be a
member was still in graduate school. The first meeting was held in Princeton and organized by
Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves, then both faculty members there, and included Stanford
Anderson and Henry Millon from MIT, Michael McKinnell, the co-victor (along with is with his firm
Kallmann, McKinnell, and Knowles) of the most prestigious recent competition in the States, that
of the Boston City Hall, Eisenmans teacher at Columbia448 and a representative of what his

Hitchcock also finds it remarkable that one of Johnsons first works, the Glass House, could
instantly become both a classic and a statement of modern architecture. Philip Johnson, Philip
Johnson. Architecture 1949-1965, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 8.
445.

Stern, Over and Under Forty 20.

446.

Adolf K. Placzek, Youth and Age in Architecture, Perspecta 9/10 (1965).

447.

Stern, The Old 40 Under 40, 30.

448.

On Eisenmans relation to Kallmann and McKinnell, see Peter D. Eisenman, Two

Teachers: A Personal Reflection, The Architecture of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood, ed. Alex
Krieger. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Graduate School of Design/Rizzoli,
1988) 95-97. See also Peter Eisenman in Peter Eisenman & Frank Gehry. Fifth International
Exhibition of Architecture of the Biennale. 8 September 1991 to 6 October 1991. (New York:
Rizzoli, 1991), 5.

152
partner Gerhard Kallmann called action

architecture,449

historian Vincent Scully from Yale and

the young architects Robert Venturi, Tim Vreeland, Richard Meier, Jaquelin Robertson, and
Giovanni Pasanella. After the first meeting however, McKinnell, Venturi and Scully would not
come again. In retrospect, Eisenman sees Venturis failure to come as the beginning of a split in
American architecture that still holds today, isolating Venturi from the mainstream of architectural
discourse.450
Eisenman, the ostensible leader, explained CASEs significance in an interview in the
early 1980s: Probably every leading architect of our generation in this country was at one time or
another involved in that group. We were all young and wet behind the ears. We would meet in the
country with no publicity and talk about architecture. That group honed our capacity to criticize
one another. We had nothing to lose. There was no camera on us. Nobody knew we were doing
it. It wasnt only for the initiated; it wasnt an in group. We were doing it because we wanted to
get together.451
But in retrospect, a certain conspiratorial air did surround CASE: after Venturis departure
after the first meeting, CASE became more and more of an exclusive group. As Eisenman
explains, the meetings were held undercover and were closed to the public, CASE was, he writes,
more like a secret societyfor the benefit of its membersan unknown group452 than the

449.

This influential text outlined an architecture opposed both to consideration of a social

aim and to Johnsonian eclecticism, advocating instead a difficult architecture that would
celebrate the act of building by paying close attention to the articulation of mass careening into
space. See G. M. Kallmann, The Action Architecture of a New Generation, Architectural Forum
October 1959: 133-137, 244.
450. See the discussion in K. Michael Hays and Carol Burns, ed., Thinking the Present:
Recent American Architecture, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1990), 130 where
Eisenman blasts Venturi: I am always amazed when Denise [Scott Brown] and it is Denise,
not Robert Venturi, because Robert never comes to these things. He is always too busy. He was
always too busy, even when he didnt have any work, to engage in any debate. He set up the
debate and the refused to play. And then, when they complain about critics not treating them
fairly, it is perhaps because the critics are tired of the fact that they dont want to play. As one of
the only people who has written about this period and set up the period, Robert has a
responsibility to come and not try to send a surrogate. [Boos from the audience.] I have never had
a chance to face him. I always end up facing you [Denise Scott Brown]. I like you. I have no
problem with you. I just want to know why, since Robert walked out of a Case meeting in 1963,
and since Michael and I have tried to engage Robert Venturi in debate, he has never shown up.
451.

Eisenman, interviewed in Barbaralee Diamondstein, ed., American Architecture Now

II, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 72-3.
452.

Eisenman, Five + Ten, 6.

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publicity-conscious model architectural group of the early 1960s Team X, which also followed the
European avant-garde, at least in propensity for publicity and manifesto.
A number of other individuals became associated with CASE over the five years during
which it continued to meet, among them Kenneth Frampton, a young architectural critic brought in
from England to serve on the editorial board of a proposed CASE publication that never came to
fruition. CASEs goals became evident rather quickly. According to Frampton, CASE was
motivated by a quite conscious intention to establish a movement on the grounds of a re-reading
of the European avant-garde as opposed to what he called the very empirical post-Kahnian
position of the time in which Kahns followers were unable to take up his investigations and
proceed with them in an original way.453
Of the other members of CASE, Colin Rowe became the spiritual leader of CASE due to
his role as the catalyst in the re-reading of the architectural avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930,
which he had begun with his article on The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, of Le Corbusier and
Andreas Palladio and more significantly the article on Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal
discussed in chapter one and as part of an English connection for CASE. Rowe had recently
returned from England, where he and his old friend Jim Stirling, Thomas Stevens, and Robert
Maxwell (who would eventually come to the United States and become the head of the Princeton
architecture department) were involved in research along roughly the same lines.454 The English
connection was in large part through Eisenman, who had written his dissertation at the University
of Cambridge, with the aid of among others Rowe and Anthony Vidler, then a student at
Cambridge who eventually came to the United States in the 1970s and would work on Eisenman
and Framptons journal Oppositions as an architectural critic and historian.455
In 1967 two public exhibitions served to establish CASEs direction for the rest of its
existence. The Museum of Modern Art show The New City publicly displayed an attempt to reread the European avant-garde and to re-think the possibilities of an urbanistic interest in
architecture.456 The other show, John Hejduk and Robert Slutzkys Diamond Exhibition was

453.

Frampton, Five + Ten, 4.

454.

Frampton, Five + Ten, 3.

455.

On the English connection and Eisenmans role in it, see Frampton, Five + Ten, 3.
Also see Ralph Bennett, Recollections, Five Architects: Twenty Years Later, (Forestville,
Maryland: Anaconda Press for the University of Maryland, 1982) who explains that Eisenman
brought back an incredible parade of literate Englishmen who knew ideas, buildings, and
architecture which were absolutely new and compelling. They included Frampton, Vidler, Eardley,
Gowan and others; Thomas Schumacher reminds me of some graffiti seen in the School at the
time, The Eardley bird catches the Wurmfeld said Peter, Gravely as he Vidlered on the Peak., 7
456.

Frampton, Five + Ten, 4.

154
held at the Architectural League, perhaps a way for Stern to apologize for his omission of Hejduk
from 40 Under 40.457
The New City
The New City exhibit is remarkable principally for being one of the last moments in which
the architectural vanguard allied itself with government social policy. Yet it was also an attempt to
deal with the fading role of architecture on the urban scene. The New York City Planning
Commission had finally decided to abandon it thirty-year attempt to design a master physical plan
for the city. In its place would be process planning, involving the use of cost-benefit
programming and computer simulation techniques to achieve urban planning that would be
independent of architecture and urban design.458
With the co-sponsorship of New York City Mayor John Lindsay, the Museum of Modern
Arts Architecture and Design Department under Arthur Drexler commissioned a major response
to the Planning Commission: a set of four studies meant, according to Drexler, to illustrate what
architects and urban planners believed could be done with the city. The shared design goals,
Drexler argued, were a belief in deriving design from the immanent conditions of the city: to elicit
urban form from the character of the place, the time, the institutions and the people.459
The scale of the project was massive, choosing to demonstrate urban design on the one
part of Manhattan that could be exhibited in MoMA without raising fears among the museums
patrons for the continued existence of their homes: an area roughly contiguous to the heart of
Harlem from 96th street to 155th street from the Hudson River to the East River also including the
very southern tip of the Bronx and Randalls and Ward Islands.
In order to explore these issues, the museum commissioned four teams composed of
a remarkable percentage of CASEs membership each corresponding to a university: Cornell,
Columbia, Princeton, and MIT. The Cornell team, composed of Colin Rowe, Thomas
Schumacher, Jerry Wells, and Fred Koetter proposed something that would, textually at least,
anticipate Rowe and Koetters later Collage City, a deliberate attempt to mediate between two

457. It is hard to tell whether this show was a product of Sterns tenure as program
director which ended in 1966. At this point (1966-67) Stern was also working with Johnson on
Eye on New York, a television series on urbanistic developments in New York and on Mayor
Lindsays Task Force on Urban Design. See Stern in Writings, 156.
458.

C. Richard Hatch, The Museum of Modern Art Discovers Harlem, Architectural

Forum March 1967: 38.
459.

Arthur Drexler, The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal. An exhibition at The
Museum of Modern Art, New York. January 23-March 13, 1967, (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1967), 22.

155
existing conditions of city existing there: the traditional city, a solid mass of building with spaces
carved out of it and the modern city an open meadow within which isolated buildings are placed
carved out of the fabric by earlier mechanisms of urban renewal.460 The Columbia team, Jaquelin
Robertson, Richard Weinstein, Giovanni Pasanella, Jonathan Barnett, and Myles Weintraub
suggested a megastructure over the open railroad tracks running the length of Park Avenue from
97th to 134th street to simultaneously relieve the area of a major blight and provide a new focus.
The Princeton team, Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves, also submitted two megastructures,
this time located on the Hudson river, one combining a stadium above a sewage disposal plant, a
research center for Columbia and/or CUNY, the other a conference and convention center and
hotel, with a public plaza rotated into it for good measure. The MIT team, Stanford Anderson,
Robert Goodman, and Henry A. Millon, submitted a project to reshape the geography along the
Harlem and East Rivers, creating in the process three new lakes for boating and swimming and
which would serve as focal points for redevelopment efforts.
In all four cases, hope was expressly held out for the transformational possibility of
renewal. Drexler offered his opinion that technically and economically the projects were feasible
and their cost compares favorably with a few months of modern warfare.

461

Not everyone was agreed that the New City was really concerned with social welfare. A
direct attack came in the March 1967 issue of Architectural Forum, where C. Richard Hatch,
executive director of the Architects Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH) wrote God knows we
need to be shaken out of our apathy in the face of increasing urban decay, but the present group
of projects will not do it because they do not contain the important elements of utopian plans a
strong idea about the function of a place in the total fabric, and about the way men might live
together or the strength of detail required by practical proposals.462 In all cases, Hatch wrote,
an over-eager will to form took precedence over any consideration for the existing inhabitants of
Harlem. Instead, the projects tended to create solutions by inserting new functions for an area
that would display existing jobs and people, in todays language: gentrification. In the New City,
the transformational potential of the architecture on society was converted, as was so much of
modern architecture in the United States, from a relation of mutual transformation between
architecture and society to a more complete symbiosis between architecture and capital. Hatchs
stern critique may have given the impetus for Drexler, and perhaps by implication Eisenman and
Graves, to abandon any pretense of social reform at all by the time of Five Architects, as we will
see below.

460.

Rowe, Schumacher, Wells, Koetter in The New City, 24.

461.

Drexler in The New City, 22.

462.

Hatch, 38.

156
Diamond and The Square
While the New City exhibition was intended as a rereading of the avant-garde, a more
formal rereading was given by the Hejduk and Slutzky show The Diamond and the Square. The
exhibit, consisting of a series of paintings on the theme of the square by Slutzky and houses by
Hejduk that originated from rotated squares and triangles, ending in diamond configuration
intentionally reminiscent of Mondrians paintings. Hejduks work, while ostensibly architecture, did
not appear constructable at all. Rather, it marked a rereading of the architectural avant-garde of
the 1920s and 1930s in terms of form motivated by the visual logic advocated by Rowe and
Slutzky in their earlier Transparency essay.463
Yet where Rowe and Slutzky organized their essay around shallow space motivated by
its two-dimensional origins in painting, Hejduk turned it on end to achieve an even greater twodimensionality, or cardboard-ness. As he explains in a text that accompanied the publication of
the Diamond Houses in 1969.
When a square form in plan is drawn in isometric, it appears to the eye as a threedimensional projection. When more than one floor plan is projected in isometric, it builds
up quite naturally and still appears as a three-dimensional representation. When the
diamond is drawn in isometric and has a plan of more than one floor, a very special
phenomenon occurs. The forms appear two-dimensional; the stories overlap each other
in primary two-dimensional vision. The form tips forward in isometric towards the picture
plane; they are three-dimensional yet a stronger reading of two-dimensionality
predominates.464
The aftermath of the New City and Diamond and the Square exhibitions resulted in the
final chapter of CASE, the emergence of a splinter group that as Frampton has explained was
committed to a re-reading of the European avant-garde in terms that were quite strongly
formal.465 Thus in 1968,466 the splinter group held CASE Seven in MoMA, with Eisenman,
Graves, and Meier in attendance together with a number of individuals who had not previously
been involved with CASE: Hejduk and Slutzky, Charles Gwathmey (who had taught at Princeton

463.

Frampton, Five + Ten, 4-5.

464. Introduction to catalog the Diamond in Painting and Architecture, 1967 reprinted in
John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works 1947-1983, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 49.
465.

On the impact of the exhibits on the emergence of the splinter group, see Eisenman,
Five + Ten, 6.
466.

In an interview, Meier states that the CASE meeting was in the fall of 1971. This
appears to be a mistake on his part. See Barbaralee Diamondstein, American Architecture Now,
(New York: Rizzoli, 1980), 105.

157
with

Graves467

and whose own re-reading of the European avant-garde in his house and studio

on Long Island were beginning to attract attention in the architectural media), Arthur Drexler,
James Stirling, and Joseph Rykwert.468 Arthur Drexler, as Director of MoMAs Architecture and
Design department, played the role of the sponsor and indeed would be the patron of New York
CASE and their successors the New York Five until Johnson took over that role in the midseventies. Kenneth Frampton, then visiting from England, gave an introductory critique and
Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk and Meier each presented a project. A lively debate
followed.469
Five Architects
The projects presented at the session together with Framptons critique were to become
the book Five Architects, arguably the most influential single book in the discipline during the
1970. Five Architects served as a fantastic promotional device for its participants. Known
interchangeably as the New York Five, the Five, or the Whites for the white appearance their
architecture took on in the predominantly black and white publication Eisenman, Graves,
Gwathmey, Hejduk, and Meier went on to become some of the major architectural celebrities of
architecture in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s.
The arrival of the book and the group (most of the members of which have since denied
ever existed) out of a closed session gave the project an air of conspiracy, as Kenneth Frampton
has explained in a retrospective talk on the emergence of the New York Five: I suppose I am
here because I am perceived as being part of the conspiracy the conspiracy of the Five.470
Ultimately though, the publication of Five Architects was the work of one man: Peter
Eisenman. One day in the New York art and architecture bookstore of George Wittenborn,
Eisenman, who has described himself as a regular, approached the owner and mentioned that
he had a idea for a book to be published from the tapes of CASE Seven. Wittenborn agreed on
the condition that the architects put up their own money for the edition of five hundred copies.
Eisenman initially thought to call the book Cardboard Architecture, but the other members of the
group refused, feeling the title to be too associated with Eisenmans own work. Wishing already to
somewhat defuse the bounds of the group, they decided against the alternative title of the book

467.

Gwathmey, Five + Ten, 8.

468. Peter Eisenman, Five + Ten: A Symposium held at the School of Architecture,
Spring 1981, Colonnade vol. 1, no 1 (Spring 1982), 10.
469.
470.

Eisenman, Five + Ten, 6.

Kenneth Frampton, Five + Ten: A Symposium held at the School of Architecture,

Spring 1981, Colonnade vol. 1, no 1 (Spring 1982), 3.

158
Case Seven and instead chose to put only their names Eisenman Graves Gwathmey Hejduk
Meier centered on the cover of the book.471
No illustrations of the architects work appeared on the cover which may have recalled
Johnsons 1966 book the same volume that would make Cocktail tables look handsome472
with its use of emphatic black Helvetica type on a stark white background. The format was also
roughly the same size as Johnsons book, but took the rectangular folio format and expanded it
into the rather unusual format of a square roughly 10 1/2 by 10 1/2 inches. The book was divided
into two sections, thirteen or so pages of prefatory texts by Arthur Drexler, Colin Rowe, and
Kenneth Frampton establishing the theoretical linkage and justification for the work which was
presented in 120 subsequent pages divided so that each architect received exactly twenty-four
pages. Eisenman and Meier would introduce their own work, Gravess work was introduced by
William La Riche while Gwathmey and Hejduk provided no introductory texts. Each architect
presented two projects: one from the original CASE Seven meeting and one from the intervening
years, except for Hejduk who presented three. The prefatory texts of the first fifteen pages would
be graphically distinguished from the introductions by Eisenman, Meier and La Riche by being set
in two-columns while the latter were set in a three-column format.
Throughout the book, black and white images were the rule: the lack of color reproduction
obscured the color in Gravess work, although one color image, a projection of Hejduks Bernstein
House, did exist. Almost all the renderings were hard line, ink drawings without any gradations of
tone.
The first brief statement in the book, which by virtue of its location one could take to be
the most significant as a means of drawing in a reader was the preface by Arthur Drexler. Drexler
explained that the book was the result of the 1969 CASE meeting held at the invitation of the
Museum (of Modern Art)s Department of Architecture and Design Thus Drexler, the Director
of the MoMAs Department of Architecture and Design, opened the book under the sign of MoMA.
And Drexler pointed out that with only a little exaggeration, the work of the five architects could
be said to constitute a New York school. Drexler continued to point to the similarities amongst
the New York school: similarities in form, scale, material. Drexler even pointed to the didactic
aspect of these projects as examples of the visual language of cardboard architecture that was
still being refined and popularized: Historically they are continuing what Gropius and Breuer (and
before them Richard Neutra) began with their first houses in the United States: the development
through small scale residential work of a teachable vocabulary of forms, but this time without
some of the doctrinaire restrictions of the German preoccupation with functionalism. Instead,

471.
472.

Eisenman, Five + Ten, 7.

Philip Johnson, Review of Philip Johnson: Architecture 1949-1965. By Philip

Johnson, Architectural Forum 125 (October 1966): 52-53, reprinted in Philip Johnson, Writings
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 255-256.

159
Drexler wrote, the work of the Five was formally based on the early works of Le Corbusier, on the
work of Giuseppe Terragni, and on Louis Kahns use of the diagonal in the plan.
Drexler took the opportunity to completely reverse his position from his stance in the New
City exhibit catalog, dismissing social reform as a consideration:
We are all concerned, one way or another, with social reform. But the concern for reform
has flavored all discussion and criticism of anything that claims to be architecture first and
social reform second. That architecture is the least likely instrument with which to
accomplish the revolution has not yet been noticed by the younger Europeans, and in
American is a fact like a convenient stone wall against which architectural journalism can
bang heads.
An alternative to political romance is to be an architect, for those who actually have the
necessary talent for architecture. The young men represented here have that talent
(along with a social conscience and a considerable awareness of what is going on in the
world around them) and their work makes a modest claim: it is only architecture, not the
salvation of man and the redemption of the earth. For those who like architecture that is
no mean thing.473
Thus, by constructing the authentic, genius architect in opposition to the political
romantic, Drexler created a radical binary opposition, perhaps informed by Sterns position
against revolution in 40 Under 40. Architecture, according to Drexler, cannot really be architecture
unless it concerns itself solely with the domain within its own parameters. Drexlers statement that
We are all concerned, one way or another, with the social realm, empties any expressly political
position of meaning. If we are all concerned with society, then we dont have to pay any particular
attention to it, it comes naturally. In addition, the considerable awareness of what is going on in
the world he attributes to the Five cant be found in any of the work shown in Five Architects.
While Eisenman, Graves, and Meier had already participated in designing urban housing by this
time, this is not what is represented in Five Architects. Instead, all of the projects were the same
building-type: single family houses that only the very rich could afford, set in idyllic country
settings, with the exception of Hejduks work which floats in the stark white void of the glossy
paper rather than being set on a site. The point of this conscious decision to avoid anything to do
with housing474 is that there is no purpose in reproducing it if the audience for the book is

473.

Arthur Drexler, preface to Peter Eisenman, et al., Five Architects, (New York:
Wittenborn & Company, 1972), 1. Similarly, in a 1973 interview, Philip Johnson makes the
statement that I asked one of the Negro architects who was here the other day what he did all
the time. He says, I go to meetings. Every single night. Every single night. Hes bankrupt, by the
way. In other words, he doesnt fit into our culture, but he thinks the only thing to do with
architecture is to meet with these community people every single night of his life. Johnson in
John W. Cook and Heinrich Klotz, ed., Conversations with Architects, (New York: Praeger, 1973),
35.
474.

Eisenman, Five + Ten, 7.

160
architects and it is also a catalog for prospective purchasers, and what is being sold is the
building as an art object.
Eisenman was fully in agreement with this attitude and has since stated that Their [the
Fives] common interest was only in formal concerns as opposed to social, political, or cultural
concerns which were the dominant issues of the time in America. When you look back at the
years 1968 and 1969, it was a very strong gesture to make a book like Five Architects. It was the
time of student discontent and Vietnam. To lecture on formal ideas at schools was a very strange
thing.475
As Drexler did in the preface, Colin Rowe constructed a social-reform-obsessed
monolithic modernism to demolish in his introduction. While modern architecture lost something
of its original meaning when it became institutionalized in the late 1940s, he wrote, it was never
supposed to possess any meaning in the first place. Iconographic content was supposedly off
limits and modern architecture was simply functionalism.476 Thus Rowe conveniently equated
one very limited, if influential view of modern architecture as functionalism, with all of modern
architecture itself, leaving out the vast wealth of iconographic content in canonical modern
architects such as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Alvar Aalto to name but a few.
Yet paradoxically Rowe did not mark any formal distance between the Five and the
International Style of the 1930s, stating that if these buildings had been built in 1930s Europe and
publicized by writers of the time such as Alberto Sartoris or F. R. S. Yorke, they would be
exemplary of the heroic periods of modern architectureone can imagine the tourists and almost
concoct the historical evaluations. Instead, the simulation of buildings of the 1930s proved to be
a problem, presenting us with a heresy. After all, as architecture had progressed beyond this
kind of appearance, returning to it meant a reappropriation of modern architecture as a style. But,
Rowe argued, returning to the theses first postulated by Matthew Nowicki in the late 1940s,
modern architecture had always been a style: if buildings with programs as different as a factory
and an art museum could look alike, this was because they were built in the same style.477
Rowe drew the conclusion that once the social revolution promised by modern
architecture failed to take place, then theory and practice were disrelated and modern
architectures theory was revealed to be a means of placating guilty feelings about artistic
production by displacing the architects responsibility into scientific, or historical, or social
processes.478

475.

Eisenman, Five + Ten, 7.

476.

Colin Rowe, Introduction, Five Architects, 3.

477.

Rowe, 4.

478.

Rowe, 6.

161
The idea that modern architecture had to be expressive of its age led, Rowe wrote, to
[t]he idea that any repetition, any copying, any employment of a precedent or a physical model is
a failure of creative acuity is one of the central intuitions of the modern movement.479 But again
Rowe paradoxically argued that the adherence to the injunction against repetition, a theory
formulated in the 1920s, was already a repetition (of Futurist tenets one assumes), as guilty of
nostalgia as the repetition of form would be.480
The result of this theoretical failure of modern architecture was the appearance of a
series of alternatives: Miesian neo-classicism, the New Brutalism, the Futurist Revival, the
Shingle Style, and Neo-Liberty not to mention the attempt to replace architecture by the
computer in the design methods school. But all these alternatives failed, Rowe concluded,
because they still believed in a better world through architecture. The Five did not. Instead, he
wrote, they accepted that a revolution in thinking took place in the early part of the century,
creating profound visual discoveries the implications of which had yet to be fully worked through.
Such a task required more than one generation of architects and the Five were simply carrying on
their research in the tradition.481
The Five, Rowe wrote, are neither Marcusian nor Maoist; and lacking any transcendental
sociological or political faith, their objective at bottom is to alleviate the present by the
interjection of a quasi-Utopian vein of poetry. Assuming a theory of pluralism, Rowe wrote, It is
what some people and some architects want; and therefore, in terms of a general theory of
pluralism one must wonder how, in principle, it can be faulted.482
Framptons essay Frontality vs. Rotation attempts to link the work of the Five together.
Their work, he wrote, has certain common features, explaining that it suffers from a certain
inflation of scale. They imply much larger structures, and at first glance it is difficulty to assess
their true size, since they are all shown without any anthropomorphic key. The lack of human
scale would therefore make the buildings take on the appearance of a cardboard model.
Frampton continued by explaining that they all appear to derive from a common cultural base in
as much as almost all of these designers know each other quite well. On occasion in the past,
some have even worked together, and thus they share a comparable ethos in their respective
positions.483 This ethos, Frampton wrote was established on the grounds of their knowing each

479.

Rowe, 5.

480.

Rowe, 7.

481.

Rowe, 7.

482.

Rowe, 8.

483.

Frampton, 9

162
other and working together. But rather than being the result of mere mutual friendship or team
work, he continued, the Five share a deep influence from Le Corbusier and the reading of his
work

through

Colin

Rowe

and

Robert

Slutzkys

article,

Transparency:

Literal

and

Phenomenal,484 which as explained in chapter one was the most important theoretical statement
motivating cardboard architecture.
The rest of Framptons essay was confined to a virtuoso formal reading, exploring an
analytical accompaniment to the work of the Five. Frampton located a series of formal conceits in
the Fives projects. The first, giving the essay its title was the projects play between frontality and
rotation, unresolved in the cases of Eisenman, Graves, and Meier; the second, again for
Eisenman, Graves, and Meier was the erosion of the surface, or of the structure, or of the mass,
or of all three. All the houses, except for Gwathmeys, he explained appear to be indifferent to
the general building culture. They are concerned more with a cult of form.485 Framptons cult of
form appears to be a code for the formal research of the moment that we have classified as
cardboard architecture.
Eisenman presented two articles on his House I and House II. Of the texts relating to the
individual projects, Eisenmans were the most theoretically dense. Eisenman began by explaining
his conception of cardboard architecture. By taking a usually derogatory term to describe his
work (and remember it was at one point meant to describe the work of the Five), Eisenman hoped
that it would function as an ironic and pre-emptory symbol for his argument. Cardboard,
Eisenman wrote, is used to question the nature of our perception of reality and thus the
meanings ascribed to reality. Thus it is not so much a metaphor describing the forms of the
building but rather its intention. For example, models are often made of cardboard, so the term
raises the question of form in relation to the process of design: is this a building or is it a model?
And indeed, Eisenmans photographs of his House II (especially the one on page 25 which may
have been a photograph of a cardboard model or alternatively of the house under construction)
were meant to play upon this ambiguity by breaking any connection between house and the
ground by placing the crest of a hill between house and viewer, throwing its physicality, or lack of,
into question.486 Cardboard was ultimately meant to shift the focus from our existing conception
of form in an aesthetic and functional context to a consideration of form as a marking or notational

484.

Frampton, 13.

485.

Frampton, 12..

486.

On this trick, a reverse representation, see Christian Hubbert, Ruins of

Representation, Idea As Model, ed. Kenneth Frampton, and Silvia Kolbowksi. Institute for
Architecture and Urbanism Catalogues, (New York: Rizzoli, 1981), 19.

163
system and to signify the virtual or implied layering which is produced by the particular
configuration.487
Eisenman explained that his Houses were based on an attempt to go beyond both
architectural form as the result of programmatic dictates and the creation of aesthetically
pleasing objects. Form, for Eisenman, would ideally be independent of program and of aesthetic
considerations, rather it would be a problem of logical consistency; as a consequence of the
logical structure inherent in any formal relationship. Thus, House I, was an attempt to find ways
in which form and space could be structured so that they would produce a set of formal
relationships which is the result of the inherent logic in the forms themselves, and, second, to
control precisely the logical relationships of forms.488 Eisenman attempted to do this by
unloading the existing meanings of the forms through deception: what appeared to be the
structural beam and columns of the house were in fact non-structural, marking two separate
formal structures. The rectilinear columns and beams, Eisenman explained, marked the residue
of cross-layering of planes while the round columns marked the intersections of two planes. By
removing two columns, from his system, Eisenman hoped to create an implied diagonal and at
the same time, make the whole formal structure more difficult to read. This was Eisenmans hope:
that anyone interested in discerning the formal systems in House I would have to take them apart,
in their mind.489 Thus his ultimate goal in House I was to bring the reader into an awareness of
the deep structure of the building, a formal structure separate from the buildings actual
structure. The deep structure could not directly be perceived but would have to be based on an
inner analysis of the building.
This deep structure would be based on something if not identical than at least akin to the
visual language outlined in chapter one. As Eisenman explained,
The particular way that the formal structure [in House II] is developed through a diagonal
shift manifested in a structural redundancy is perhaps only one means to make such
formal concepts as compression, elongation, and frontality become operative. It remains
for future work to examine the nature of the general principles or architectonic rule
underlying these relationships which might help define a broad range of formal structures
and their transformations.490
In fact, Eisenman had already spent a great deal of time on precisely this topic: his 1963
dissertation, The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture, was concerned with a theoretical

487.

Eisenman, 15.

488.

Eisenman, 15.

489.

See chapter 5 for a more detailed discussion of this topic.

490.

Eisenman, 27.

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elaboration of a language of architecture, an attempt to work through the same problems that
Rowe, Slutzky, and Hejduk were concerned with by investigating the consequences of the
deformations an ideal architectural object would be subjected to from prosaic matters such as
site, program, circulation.491 What Eisenman was ultimately proposing in these texts was a
reworking of that same idea: that a project could be read not as the consequence of function or as
the product of an artistic consciousness but rather as the result of the logical consequences of a
series of formal transformations combining and re-combining basic formal elements, an
exemplary performance in the visual language.
Graves presented his work with an essay Architecture as World Again by William La
Riche. The title of the essay referred to Mircea Eliades explanation that primitive man would
recapitulate his vision of the universe in the design of his house and La Riche attempted to
explain Gravess work in those terms. Gravess theory thus was not altogether dissimilar to the
theory of architecture Eisenman proposed in his dissertation. La Riche saw in Gravess work a
tension between the internal architecture, or controlling geometry of the ideal object and its
physical context, comparing this tension in Gravess work to a similar tension between the ideal
object of Greek temples and their unique sites. Graves would mediate this tension in the
Hanselmann Residence by focusing on layering space in a manner corresponding to Eliades
stages of initiation and in the Bennacerraf Residence by representing aspects of the world in his
building the roof terrace as a representation of the ground plane and extending the building
into the world by making the sky into an infinite ceiling for the room and allowing trees to
become columns in the wall of the room.492
Meier, like Eisenman, chose to explain his own work and began by explaining that his
work was, as A. N. Whitehead stated of philosophers and businessmen, intended to re-create
and re-enact a vision of the world, including those elements of reverence and order without which
society lapses into a riot, and penetrated through and through with unflinching rationality. Like La
Riche on Graves, Meier explained that there are two interdependent aspects to the house: one
ideal and abstract, the controlling geometry, the vision of the world possessed by the
architecture, the other real and analytical, the problems posed by the site, program, circulation
and entrance, structure and enclosure.493 Thus, mediating between the real and the ideal,
Meiers project was also similar to Eisenmans early work.

491. Peter D. Eisenman, The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture, Ph.D. Trinity
College, University of Cambridge, 1963. See also chapter 5.
492.

William La Riche, Architecture as World Again?, Five Architects, (New York:

Wittenborn & Company, 1972) 39-41, 55.
493.

Meier, 111.

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Gwathmeys work was not explained, although the site, program, and construction for
each project were listed. Given this list and Gwathmeys concern with depicting the relationships
between his houses in his illustrations one project was composed of two buildings, the other of
three and the complex geometry of the houses, the same real/ideal dichotomy appeared to be
at work in his projects.
Hejduks projects included lists as well one for program, one for surfaces, and one for
idea-concept but the role they played seemed to be different. The program list Garage,
Walk, Entry, Living, Dining, Kitchen, Gallery, Storage, Bathroom, Bedroom for House 10, Entry
Walk, Living, Dining, Kitchen, Music-Library, Bathrooms, Bedrooms for the One-Half House and
House for the Bernstein house seemed to be more a parody of the idea of program than
anything else. Attempts to find the disparate elements in House 10 would be frustrated: the house
was much more about an abstract geometry than anything else. This reading was supported by
the abrupt House entry for the Bernstein House which served to poke fun at the other two lists.
The surfaces list served to describe the appearance of the house: Glass As Shown, Interior
Walls-White, Exterior Walls-Stainless Steel or Chrome for House 10, Exterior-yellow, blue, red,
black, white, gray for the Bernstein House, and Glass as Shown, Interior walls-white, Exterior
walls-white for the One-Half House. Finally, the ideas behind Hejduks projects were embodied in
a third list that would recall some of the means of putting objects together and the three
projects were obsessively concerned with putting together simple geometries in relationships
using compositional principles of a visual language. Thus for House 10, the Idea-Concept list was
Horizontal Extension, Hypotenuse, Three-Quarter Figure, Point-Line-Plane-Volume, Bio-Morphic
Bio-Technic, Structure, Time, Projection, for the Bernstein House, Color-exterior-primaries,
interior-white, and for the One-Half House, One half of a square, One half of a circle, One half of
a diamond.494 Thus, Hejduks work differed from that of the others in its lack of concern with the
site, representing only whatever compromises the architect may have had in his own mind.
Whites vs. Grays
Paradoxically, Five Architects received its biggest boost through scathing criticism at the
hands of a rival group, the Grays or Five on Five, led by Robert A. M. Stern. Perversely,
Eisenman and Stern had a long friendship throughout the 1970s. As Stern described it, his
friendship with Peter Eisenman, as based on the very oppositeness of his nature from mine and
his point of view from mine is my perfect alter-ego: If I didnt invent Peter Eisenman who would

494.

Hejduk, Five Architects, 87, 93, 103.

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have?495

The feeling was mutual: in another interview, Eisenman explained If Stern had not

existed, I would have had to invent him, and vice versa.496

Thus the symbiotic pair invented the battle between the Whites and the Grays. Eisenman
explains that he called up his pal Stern, knowing how eager he was to insert himself into the
scene, and dropped a little piece of bait in front of him. I said, Robert, why dont you organize five
or your friends to write book reviews on the Five. Wouldnt that do a really neat stunt? Stern got
Suzanne Stephens at Architectural Forum and the magazines new editor Bill Marlin to print
critiques of the Five Architects book by five other architects Stern, Jaquelin Robertson,
Romualdo Giurgola, Charles Moore, and Allan Greenberg in a section of the May 1973 issue
under the heading of Five on Five. While Eisenman believed that the criticism he had asked
Stern for was harsh, he also realized that as Arthur Drexler always told him, It doesnt matter
how critical they are, as long as they spell your name right.497
While the essays were critical, they also shared the Fives obsession with architectural
form. Sterns essay set out to compare Five Architects to Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown,
and Steve Izenours Learning from Las Vegas, but, apart from setting up the latter book as
helping us at least to break from the hot-house aesthetic of the 1920s, to see familiar things in
fresh contexts, and to assimilate diverse experiences into our work,498 Stern would not make
elaborate. He did not discuss the work of the Five except in terms of form and whether the
houses would be comfortable or not. Likewise, Jacquelin Robertson criticized the Machines in
the Garden for being high art objects and being part of an elitist game but did not elaborate. In
contrast Charles Moore almost praised the buildings for their meticulous attention to form. Allan
Greenberg sought a Lurking American Legacy in the buildings as manifestations of the Shingle
Style. Only Romaldo Giurgolas critique of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie questioned
whether Five Architects actually addressed a responsible theme, although much of his own firm
Mitchell/Giurgolas work was similar to the Fives both in terms of commission houses and
corporate buildings and in terms of subscribing to cardboard architecture.499

495.

Charles Jencks, Dialogue With Robert A. M. Stern, Robert A. M. Stern: Selected

Works, Architectural Monographs No. 17, (London and New York: Academy Editions/St. Martin's
Press, 1991) 131.
496.

Thomas S. Hines, Citizen Stern: A Portrait of the Architect as Entrepreneur,

Architecture and Urbanism Extra Edition: The Residential Work of Robert A.M. Stern July 1982):
229.
497.

Eisenman, Five + Ten, 8.

498.

Robert A. M. Stern, Stompin at the Savoye, Architectural Forum May 1973: 46.

499.

See Kenneth Frampton, Introduction to Ehrman B. Mitchell and Romaldo Giurgola,

Mitchell/Giurgola Architects, (New York: Rizzoli, 1983), 8.

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The second five and especially their leader, Stern did not disagree with the basic
contention of Five Architects: that architecture is about form.This should not be surprising, given
the origins of the group in a Stern- Eisenman conspiracy. Stern and Eisenman werent just
friends, they shared certain ideas about architecture as Stern acknowledges in retrospect:
We were concerned with the break-up of the seemingly monolithic modern movement;
and we were both contemptuous of the kind of stylish appliqu Modernism that we saw
around us as well as the anti-architectural philistinism that was the unfortunate by-product
of the student movements of the late 1960s. I was only too familiar with the latter, as
much from teaching experiences at Columbia as from my own student days at Yale
where its earliest manifestations could be seen in the back-to-the-woods, architecture-asact movements of the 60s. Though Eisenman and I approached the situation from quite
opposite points of view, we each saw the so-called revolutionary conditions of
architecture of the 60s as ideologically confused, artistically debilitated, nihilistic, and antiintellectual. Although these student movements supplied a necessary criticism of the then
current scene and made it obvious the hypocrisy that afflicted our national political
attitudes towards the war in Vietnam and the situation of minorities at home, it hadnt led
to anything positive in terms of architectural production. What had begun as a useful
critique of a situation proved unable to develop a positive direction of its own; it had no
firm commitment to form-making or even a coherent political or social programme. It was
against things but not for things.500
This confirms Sterns statement of the principles of Gray architecture in his 1976 article
Gray Architecture: Quelques Variations Post-Modernistes Autour de lOrthodoxie, for the French
periodical LArchitecture dAujourdhui. Stern explained that the debate between the Whites and
Grays was not as critical as that between the International Style and the defenders of the BeauxArts but rather as two approaches towards solving the same problem: the lack of meaning in
orthodox modernism. Abandoning the division between the Inclusivists and the Exclusivists, Stern
defined the debate in terms of his own conception of Post-Modernism and Eisenmans conception
of Post-Functionalism. Stern accepted Goldbergers contention that both groups were primarily
interested in form. The main distinction was again that Post-Functionalism was concerned with
culturally autonomous, universal form, while Post-Modernism was concerned with history,
physical context, and the sociopolitical and cultural milieu. Significantly, however, Stern rejected
any idea that Post-Modernism would align itself either with sociology, or with the technico-socioprofessional determinism of the modernist orthodoxy. Post-Modernism Stern explains affirme
que larchitecture est faite pour loeil comme pour lesprit et quelle inclut la fois une formation
conceptualise de lespace et les modificaions circonstacielles quun programme peut faire subir
cet espace.501

500.

Robert A. M. Stern, Notes on Post-Modernism, Robert A. M. Stern: Selected Works,

Architectural Monographs No. 17, (London and New York: Academy Editions/St. Martin's Press,
1991), 113.
501.

Robert A. M. Stern, Gray Architecture: quelques variations post-modernistes autour

de lorthodoxie/Gray Architecture as Post-Modernism or Up and Down from Orthodoxy,
LArchitecture dAujourdhui no. 186, August/September 1976): 83, XL.

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The principal distinguishing points that Stern cited between the Whites and the Grays
were the latters recourse to ornament and historical reference. While there can be no question
that Stern criticized the Five for their adherence to Corbusian forms, his definition of Gray
architecture was remarkably similar to what Colin Rowe outlined for the Whites in his introduction
to Five Architects:
One finds at the root of the gray position a rejection of the anti-symbolic, anti-historical,
hermetic and highly abstracted architecture of orthodox modernism. Grayness seeks to
move toward an acceptance of diversity; it prefers hybrids to pure forms; it encourages
multiple and simultaneous readings in its effort to heighten expressive content. The
layering of space characteristic of much gray architecture finds its complement in the
overlay of cultural and art-historical references in the elevations. For gray architecture,
more is more.
Gray buildings have faades which tell stories. These facades are not the diaphanous
veil of orthodox modern architecture, nor are they the affirmation of deep structural
secrets. They are mediators between the building as a real construct and those allusions
and perceptions necessary to put the building in closer touch with the place in which it is
made and beliefs and dreams of the architects who design it, the clients who paid for it,
and the civilization which permitted it to be built; to make buildings, in short, landmarks of
a culture capable of transcending transitory usefulness as functional accommodation.
Gray buildings are very much of a time and place: they are not intended as ideal
constructs of perfected order; they select from the past in order to comment on the
present.502
The point of Gray architecture for Stern was the same as that of White architecture for
Rowe: both rejected orthodox modernism, both sought hybrid rather than pure form, both
encouraged multiple and simultaneous readings, both hoped for a layering of space, and both
were historical, given the Whites use of historical reference in their return to the forms of Le
Corbusier. Both Whites and Grays subscribed to cardboard architecture consists of shallow
spaces and thin partitions made possible by the American balloon frame. In much of the work of
the Grays as well as the Whites Shallow spaces and planes are made to interact through a
system of layering and superimposition of thin screens, creating an interplay between frontal
plane and depth.503
Paul Goldberger, the architectural critic for the New York Times, a student of Vincent
Scully in Yale and a close friend of Johnson, Stern, and Meier, was instrumental in creating and
publicizing the image of the Five.504 Goldbergers article Architectures 5 Make Their Ideas Felt

502. Stern, XL. I use the English text here because it is virtually identical to the French. In
the previous instance, the English text appears to be overly condensed.
503.

C. Ray Smith observes this shared similarity in Supermannerism, 244-245.

504.

Aronson, 323.

169
defined the debate between the Five and the Five on Five as an important occurrence in
architecture.505 Goldberger began the article with what was by now a commonplace : that the
architectural profession was in crisis because The idea of traditional, high-styled building is
under attack from students who see it as irrelevant to social concerns and avant-gardists who see
it as technologically backward. Thus, he wrote, it is all the more amazing that the talk of the New
York architectural world today centers largely around a group of five architects who have rejected
the notion of architecture as a social tool, rejected prefabrication, rejected fads of computer
design, megastructures, and other bits of super technology and, instead have concentrated their
efforts on what is perhaps the most traditional and elevated architectural problem of all: the
making of form.506
The persistent naming of the group as the Five Architects, the New York Five, and the
Whites was symptomatic of an attempt to give definition to a new phenomenon, and expressed
the attempt to make sense of what this group was. Goldberger recalled another architects
description of the Eisenman and Stern groups as the whites and the grays, repeating names
that would stick from then on. The dialogue between the two groups, Goldberger wrote, created
a period of deep architectural thought that was not seen throughout the nineteen-sixties.507
As evidence of the Fives importance, Goldberger pointed to the Milan Triennale where
they, along with Robert Venturi, were the only architects invited to represent the United States.
Thus while the Five were principally from New York, they were beginning to represent the state of
the architectural discipline in America.508

505.

Paul Goldberger, Architecture's '5' Make Their Ideas Felt, The New York Times
November 26 1972: 33, 52. See also Goldbergers nostalgic look at the Five twenty-five years
later, Paul Goldberger, A Remembrance of Visions Pure and Elegant, The New York Times
January 3 1993: Arts & Leisure, 29.
506.

Goldberger, Architecture's '5' Make Their Ideas Felt, 33.

507.

Goldberger, 33.

508.

Also Thomas L. Schumacher in his Recollections, Five Architects: Twenty Years

Later, (Forestville, Maryland: Anaconda Press for the University of Maryland, 1992), 8, explains
that the Triennale secured an international audience for the Five. Significantly, many countries
decided against participating at the Triennale in the lingering aftermath of May 1968, the collapse
of the Triennale that year, and the cultural critique that ensued. The architecture section
organized by Aldo Rossi, in which the Americans participated and which gave the appearance of
an international Rationalist movement was considered remarkable by contemporary observers
for its return to architecture as discipline. See Franco Raggi, 15 Triennale 15, Casabella June
1974: 17-41. On the Rationalist movement, see the more propagandistic Architettura Razionale,
XV Triennale di Milano: Sezione Internazionale di Architettura, (Milan: Triennale di Milano, 1973)
and Ezio Bonfanti, Gianni Braghieri, Franco Raggi, Aldo Rossi, Massimo Scolari and Daniele
Vitale, ed., Architettura Razionale, (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1973) and the hostile Charles Jencks,
Irrational Rationalism: the Rats since 1960, The Rationalists, ed. Dennis Sharp. (New York:
Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1978), 208-230.

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When Paul Goldberger came back to the debate with his article Should Anyone Care
About the New York Five? or about their critics, the Five on Five? he attempted to blur the
boundaries between the two groups. Goldberger established the Fives critics as the YalePhiladelphia axis, the Kahn-Venturi-Scully school,509 finally settling on the Inclusivists.
Goldberger pointed out the similarities in the work between the groups: both work at a small
scale, spurn technology, and want to make architecture in a fairly traditional way, and in a way in
which form is a crucial factor. Both are elitist. Given these similarities and the Grays critique of
the Five principally on art historical grounds, he wrote, it is not altogether surprising that the
debate around the Five all seemed a lot of Eastern academic claptrap to many architects who
practice neither in New York nor along the celebrated Yale-Philadelphia axis. History, Goldberger
explained, would show that there were other possibilities he cited Kevin Roche, Hardy
Holzman Pfeiffer, Giovanni Pasanella, Cesar Pelli and Davis Brody that would not fit neatly into
either group. Moreover, Goldberger continued, the groups themselves were rather artificial: from
Eisenman to Meier was a rather long stretch, as was the distance between Venturi, Giurgola, and
Moore. The main distinction between the groups, he concluded, was an adherence to the forms
suggestive of Le Corbusier among the Five and an interest in a much broader spectrum of forms
for the Grays. Ultimately, Goldberger explained, both groups were obsessed with form and did not
really represent a chasm across which all American architecture was divided.510
To bring the debate to the rest of the country, the debate between the Whites and the
Grays became face-to-face at the Los Angeles symposium known as Four Days in May. This
event served as a spectacle, clearly showing the rest of the nation where debate was in
architecture, and that was in the East, in New York. According to Los Angeles architectural
historian Thomas Hines, the event revealed that most of the tensions of the previous year had
been diffused and that the work and attributes of the various armies had remarkable similarities
as well as differences, the poisoned arrows flying mainly between Vincent Scully and Colin
Rowe.511 The lesson of the debate of the Whites and Grays, that creating a polemical group was
an event that would garner notoriety was not lost on other architects: the hosting architects (Tim
Vreeland, once a member of CASE, Anthony Lumsden, Frank Dimster, Eugene Kupper, Cesar
Pelli, and Paul Kennon) for the debate between the Whites and Grays in L. A. became known as

509. According to Stern, Colin Rowe coined the phrase in a lecture to the Architectural
League in spring 1974. Robert A.M. Stern, Yale 1950-1965, Oppositions 4 October 1974: 62.
See also Mimi Lobell, Postscript: Kahn, Penn, and the Philadelphia School, Oppositions October
1974: 63-64.
510.

Paul Goldberger, Should Anyone Care About the New York Five? or about their
critics, the Five on Five, Architectural Record February 1974: 111-116.
511.

Thomas S. Hines, Citizen Stern: A Portrait of the Architect as Entrepreneur,

Architecture and Urbanism Extra Edition: The Residential Work of Robert A.M. Stern (July 1982):
230.

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the Silvers. The Silvers were a rather different group from their East coast colleagues, proud of
their pragmatism and generally working on large commercial projects such as skyscrapers and
office buildings consisting of large warehouse spaces, distinctively sheathed in thin, often
undulating reflective membranes of glass.512 In 1976, in an event entitled Four Days In April, the
Silvers presented their work publicly and discussed it both with an audience and with California
historian David Gebhard, and architects Charles Moore, John Hejduk, and James Stirling.513
While their work, less formally sophisticated and more obviously commercial, received far less
attention than that of the Whites and Grays, the mirrored curtain-wall of the Silvers crept over
many American cities in the late 1970s and 1980s. For Pelli, who appeared to be the leader of the
Silvers, the group was a ticket out of Los Angeles. Soon considered a rising star of the
architectural vanguard, Pelli would be one of Johnsons kids by 1978.514
Emulation of the Whites and the Grays would continue in Chicago with Stanley
Tigermans group, the Chicago Seven (Tigerman, Tom Beeby, Larry Booth, Stuart Cohen, James
Ingo Freed, Jim Nagle, and Ben Weese, later to expand to eight with Helmut Jahn and finally to
eleven with Cindy Weese, Ken Schroeder, and Gerry Horn) a play on the name of the radical
political faction from the late 1960s known as the Chicago Eight. More like the Whites and Grays
than the Silvers, the Chicago Seven shared the ideals of architecture as form and cardboard
architecture. Through their show Chicago Architects displayed at the Cooper Union and in
Chicago during 1976,515 the Chicago Seven were able to counter the image of Chicago as
irrevocably bound to Miesian architecture. For Tigerman as for Pelli, the Chicago Seven was a
major publicity coup and by 1978, he would be one of Johnsons kids.516
The popularity of the Five led to a reprint of Five Architects by Oxford University Press in
1975. Significantly, this edition featured a postscript by Philip Johnson, dated April 1, 1974 (April
Fools Day), in which he defended the Five from their critics by arguing that they were not a
group:

512.

Charles Jencks, The Los Angeles Silvers: Tim Vreeland, Anthony Lumsden, Frank
Dimster, Eugene Kupper, Cesar Pelli, Paul Kennon, A+U October 1976: 9-20 and Images From
A Silver Screen, Progressive Architecture (October 1976): 70-77.
513.

Four Days in April, L. A. Architect April 1976: 1.

514. Wayne Fujii, Interview: Philip Johnson on Philip Johnson, GA Document Special
Issue 1: 19701980 Summer 1980: 1220.
515.

On the Chicago Seven see Stanley Tigerman interviewed in Barbaralee

Diamondstein, ed., American Architecture Now II, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 224.
516.

Fujii, 20.

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There seems little sense in assembling these five architects in one book. They no doubt
felt they would collectively receive more exposure as five than as five ones. They were
right. As five, they have been attacked and defended, praised and vilified.
In common, all they have is talent; they are interested, as artists millennia before them
have been in the art of architecture. I feel especially close to them in this world of
functionalist calculation and sociometric fact research.
Thus while on the one hand, Johnson denied that the architects should be grouped
together, he also turned his argument around and pointed out that indeed they shared an interest
in the art of architecture as distinctly opposed to the scientifist theories that we mapped out as
threatening the disciplines identity in chapter one. After admiring the work of each of the Five
individually, Johnson concluded by expressing hope that more books such as this would be
published for Books call attention to architecture, force the reader (viewer) to focus, and
generally arouse amusement or disgust.517
By the second edition of Five Architects, the Whites and the Grays begin to splinter up.
The Grays were the less coherent group, more diverse in terms of geographical base, scale of
commission, and interest in architectural education, soon Stern appeared to be the only Gray,
invoking Charles Moore and Robert Venturi every now and again. After his development of the
term post-modern in 1976 Stern began using it in place of Gray. Eisenman also began calling
his work by a different term, this time post-functionalism.518 Stern explained:
I would like to suggest that the White and Gray debate is not (as has been suggested in
the press) an encounter between two polarities such as might have occurred in 1927
between advocates of the Beaux-Arts and apostles of International Style modernism.
Rather, this debate has grown into an on-going dialogue between two groups of
architects who, in their built work and theoretical investigations, are actively seeking to
chart out and clarify a direction which architecture can take now that the orthodox modern
movement has drawn to a close.
The struggle for both groups, then, is to return to our architecture that vitality of
intention and form which seems so absent from the work of the late modernists.519
Also in 1976, it became apparent that something had happened to Michael Gravess
work: chunky structures, faades, and pediments supplanted the cubist-inspired International
Style. Meier and Gwathmey began moving away from building houses and teaching and towards

517. Philip Johnson, Postscript, Five Architects, (New York: Oxford University Press,
1975 edition only), 138.
518.

Stern deployed Post-Modernism to describe his work and Post-Functionalism for

Eisenmans, although he clearly attributed the latter phrase to Eisenman in Stern, Gray
Architecture, 83, XL.
519.

Stern, Gray Architecture, 83, XL.

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building multimillion dollar projects. About this time Hejduk moved away from the mainstream of
the architectural vanguard, towards his architecture of pessimism.520
Also since the reprint, the members of the Five began to disassociate themselves from
the group. Apparently, once the publicity value of the group became exhausted, the architects
began to feel that they were best represented as individuals rather than as members of a group.
Both Meier and Gwathmey have denied the existence of the Whites as a group. Meier explains
we taught in similar institutions, we went to one anothers juries, but there was no official group. It
was simply a group of people who talked to one another at the time.521 Although Gwathmey
agrees that it wasnt a group. We were all associated through teaching and weve been friends
and not friends over the years. he also recounts how at a dinner to celebrate a show by John
Hejduk in 1979 We all laughed about it, you know, because it was a kind of time and incident that
provoked enough interest to make whats happening today availablemeaning that theres a huge
debate about architecture and its relevance, and postmodernism and how it relates, if it does,
and so forth.522 While Gwathmey argues that the Five was not a school but rather an essential
publication initiated by Eisenman it was nonetheless crucially important because it began the
whole discussion among architects, teachers and students about the ideas of architecture.523
Five Architects and Five on Five made it possible for architects to communicate and have a
dialogue.524 Of course, by maintaining affiliation with a group that is crucial to the history of
architecture and at the same time denying its existence, Gwathmey is able to both be part of
something historically significant and is able to maintain his own individuality.
On the other hand, CASE, the Whites, to some extent the Grays, and Philip Johnsons
kids have been closed circles of lite architects tied together by their mutual acquaintance since
the early 1960s, their concern for making their own work public and for promoting an formal
architecture.
By 1978, the changes in architecture were so prominent that they had become news to
the general media, promising to transform the American cityscape: an entire section of the
November 6 issue of Newsweek was devoted to the new architecture. There was a revolt afoot

520.

See Frame 5 of John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works 1947-1983, (New York:
Rizzoli, 1985), especially p 90.
521.

Barbaralee Diamondstein, American Architecture Now, (New York: Rizzoli, 1980),

522.

Gwathmey in Diamondstein, 66.

523.

Gwathmey in Diamondstein, 65.

524.

Gwathmey, Five + Ten, 9.

106.

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among architects, the writer of the article explained and architects were getting sick of orthodox
modernism.525 One page of the section was devoted entirely to the Five, a remarkable event for a
mass-circulation newsmagazine. In it the writer defended his selection of the Five by explaining
that Nothing sums up the spirit of the new architecture better than a loose collective of architects
known in the field as The New York Five.526
Oppositions
As we have already seen, the ascent of both Stern and the New York Five was in large
part based on publications: 40 Under 40, Five Architects, Five on Five. This position was
consolidated by Eisenman when at the same time as he was plotting to publish Five Architects,
he became one of the founding editors of Oppositions, a journal of architectural discourse
centering around theory, criticism, and history, that from 1973 to 1984 served as the house
publication of Eisenmans Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies.527
The Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) played a major role in the New
York scene during the 1970s. Founded by Eisenman in 1967 under the sponsorship of Cornell
University and the Museum of Modern Art and perhaps with the help of Philip Johnson in its
conception,528 was originally meant to address urbanistic intentions. Early projects were often
sponsored by government agencies such as U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development, New York States Urban Development Corporation, and National Institute of Mental
Health, and students often came from Cornells Urban Design Program headed by Colin
Rowe.529 Much valuable research into urban design went on, such as New Urban Settlements
by Eisenman and Emilio Ambasz, Kenneth Frampton and Susana Torres Low-Rise High-

525.

Douglas Davis, Designs for Living, Newsweek November 6 1978: 82-91.

526.

Douglas Davis, Five Frontiersmen, Newsweek November 6 1978: 86.

527. The two principle articles on Oppositions are Vincent Pecora, Towers of Babel, Out
of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture, ed. Diane Ghirardo. (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay
Press, 1991) 46-76 and Joan Ockman, Resurrecting the Avant-Garde: The History and Program
of Oppositions, Architectureproduction; volume 2 in the series Revisions: Papers on Architectural
Theory and Criticism, ed. Beatriz Colomina. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988) 180199. For the overseas reaction to Oppositions, see the contemporary article Giorgio Muratore,
Oppositions. A Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture, Controspazio September 1975:
70 and an article describing a meeting between the editors of Oppositions, Controspazio, Lotus,
A.M.C., and Arquitecturas Bis: Lluis Domnech, After the Modern Architecture, Arquitecturas-bis
November 1976: 21.

102.

528.

Stern in Writings, 156

529.

The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, Casabella December 1971: 100-

175
Density housing prototypes and the On Streets book edited by Stanford Anderson. In the midseventies, the school expanded with a number of courses of study established for students with
varying degrees of architectural knowledge. Also in 1974, the Evening Program of lectures was
begun.530 Eisenmans efforts to create a center for the New York scene around IAUS were
remarkably successful. Eisenman brought in architects and critics from abroad, principally Europe
and Japan, introducing New Yorkers to the work of foreign architects and simultaneously,
introducing the work of the New York vanguard to foreigners. During one three-year period, the
Institute had 375 speakers, many of whom were from abroad.531
Oppositions and the related Oppositions books series played a crucial role for the IAUS
by putting its concerns into print. Oppositions stated was goal: to provide a forum for different
conceptions of architecture. For the first two issues, the typography of the name of the journal
announced this dialogical agenda: Oppositions, its second letter P outlined to imply a movement
between position-taking and opposition to the status quo as well as to imply Zero Positions, an
allusion to Roland Barthess Writing Degree Zero and an attempt to reduce architecture to nothing
and start from scratch.532
Each issue was divided along five thematic headings: Oppositions, Theory, History,
Documents, and a final section composed of Reviews, Letters, and for a few years at the start,
Forum, the proceedings of Oppositions Forums held at the Institute of Architecture and Urban
Studies. Image was the essential content of the Forum section which was illustrated with
photographs of the participants at the Forums and cocktail parties that followed, whose names
inevitably appeared on the list of sponsors on the gatefold, as Joan Ockman in her article on
Oppositions has correctly pointed out.533 The purpose of this section appeared to be to illustrate
that architectural discourse was going on at the IAUS and that it was very, very hip to be seen in
the in-crowd there.
The Oppositions section consisted of an examination of current work of architecture. Joan
Ockman has provided a list of names of the architects examined in chronological order between
1973 and 1980: Robert Venturi, Richard Meier, Werner Seligmann, James Stirling, Aldo Rossi,
the Five Architects, Venturi again, Stirling again, Meier again, Aldo van Eyck, Philip Johnson (his
writings, not his buildings), Giuseppe Terragni (resurrected, I believe to fill a hole in the issue),

530.

See Suzanne Stephens, Notes from the Sidelines, and Margot Jacqz and Kenneth
Frampton, The IAUS at 15, Skyline December 1982: 33.
531. Paul Goldberger, Ideas and Trends. Architecture
Internationalism, The New York Times June 1 1980: sc. 4, p 9.
532.

Ockman, 182.

533.

Ockman, 189.

Approaches

New

176
Michael Graves, Rossi again, Mario Botta and the Ticino school, Venturi a third time, the
Japanese Hiromi Fuji, and the Japanese new wave including Isozaki, Shinorhara, Ito, and Ando.
Ockman points out that for Rossi, Botta, and some of the Japanese, this was the first significant
attention they received in the American media.
The composition of the list reveals its that whatever the stated intents of the journal, it
remained confined to a narrow scope: the Five as a group, Meier on his own (twice), Michael
Graves on his own (once), Venturi (three times), Philip Johnson, Werner Seligmann (associated
with the Five through his ties with Rowe and Hejduk since the days of the Texas Rangers), only
one dead architect (Terragni), and the rest rising stars of the international circle. Of these, Stirling
was tangentially associated with the Five because of his friendship with Colin Rowe since the
1940s and Rossi had taught at the IAUS. In other words, the group was very select and, at least
in its treatment of American architecture, did not go beyond a very narrow circle.534 Also
interesting is that excepting the Europeans Botta, Rossi, van Eyck, the Japanese minus
Isozaki, and the long deceased Terragni all of the architects were listed on Oppositions
gatefold at one time or another as individual sponsors for the journal.
Ockman has pointed out that the differences of opinion between the three founding
editors were a major feature of the magazine, appearing almost as a badge of honor, and that
the controlling metaphors for the publication became those of arena and forum. While this
would appear to make a unified front impossible, this was in the editors minds the glorious new
age of pluralism, when diversity of opinion would be celebrated. But as we will discuss below, a
pluralist viewpoint is still a viewpoint with distinct implications. But of course this diversity was
circumscribed, as Ockman explains, all three were united from a negative standpoint by their
opposition to the mainstream, but also in their commitment toward the continued viability of
architecture as discipline.535
In the theory section, the magazine was the first exposure of contemporary currents in
European architectural criticism to Americans.536 Yet this introduction to European, principally
Italian, architectural thinking was biased. Recent research by Belgin Turan shows that
introductions given inevitably stripped the hard-line Marxist connotations of authors such as Aldo
Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri, making them into neo-Marxists at best, if not expressly
nonideological. Thus for example, the first introduction of Manfredo Tafuris work in Oppositions 3
is bracketed by an introduction explaining that it is profoundly marked by his philosophical
position within the dialectic materialist approachdeveloped by means of modern theoretical

534. Ockman, the former managing editor of Oppositions, makes the same observation,
writing of the intentional exclusivity of the magazine, 192
535.

Ockman, 193

536.

Ockman, 192.

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concepts drawn from French and Italian structuralism, a rather roundabout way of indicating that
Tafuri was a Marxist.537 Beyond the bracketing effect of the introductions, the translation of the
works of Italian theorists in Oppositions and in books published at MIT Press generally under
the label of Oppositions books also deliberately made the texts seem ambiguous in cases
where they were quite clear about their Marxist implications.538 The subject matter that the Italian
theorists wrote on also had an impact on the way their work was received. Tafuris choice of the
New York Five as subject matter in the first article on LArchitecture dans Le Boudoir helped
elevate the Five still further. Here was an Italian architectural historian of enormous import and
what was he writing about? The Five. Yet Tafuri himself became aware of the conservative
subtext underlying Oppositions and titled his next article for Oppositions (again on the Five)
European Graffiti, a scrawl meant to deface the pristine, white architectural surface of the
establishment that he believed the journal presented.539
Thus while Oppositions and its two companion series of publications, Oppositions books
and Oppositions catalogs were responsible for bringing more sophisticated theoretical
investigation from the continent to American architecture, they soon had another effect: to ensure
that the reception would not hurt architecture as discipline. As Vincent Pecora has explained, a
third of the way into the journals eleven-year run, the oppositional project that began as a critique
of architecture had evolved into the analysis of architecture as critique.540 Counter-disciplinary
potential ended with the re-assessment of the journals aims as expressed in the editorial in
Oppositions 9 to begin to explore the critical practice of architecture.541

537.

Introduction to Manfredo Tafuri, LArchitecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of

Criticism and the Criticism of Language, Oppositions 3 (May 1974): 37. Dialectical materialism,
was the code for Marxism used by the Frankfurt School during their exile in the United States.
538.

Belgin Turan, unpublished essay on Architecture of the City, Cornell University,

1993.
See also Jean-Louis Cohen, Larchitettura intellettualizza: 1970-1990, Casabella 586587 (Gennaio-Febbraio 1992): 102. Cohen writes that the American side was characterized by its
replacement of the critical paradigms of the Frankfurt School with the history e le sfide urban
and that the Tafuri translation is disgraziatamente sfigurate nella versione desunta da unaltra
traduzione.
As if to prove a point to the paranoid historian, Steve Piccolos English translation of
Cohens article in the American edition of Casabella leaves out these phrases as well as others,
without which much of the article turns into a description of the American reception of European
theory in the 1970s and 1980s instead of an analysis of its political agenda.
539.

Tafuri, The Ashes of Jefferson, note 8, p 364.

540.

Pecora, 56. Pecora also points to the latent presence of the interest in a critical
architecture in Oppositions from its inception.
541.

Oppositions 9, p 2.

178
It was this unwavering commitment to the critical practice of architecture as a discipline
that ultimately undermined Oppositions oppositional role. By holding out a demand for
architecture to continue, the editors of the journal excluded an entire range of critique and,
because Oppositions was the journal of the architectural vanguard in the 1970s, in many ways it
set the limits for architectural discourse. As Drexler and Rowe had praised the Five for
concentrating on architecture, so the editors of Oppositions would only concentrate on the making
of architecture as it could be practiced in the office and the design studio. Critiques that might
endanger the legitimacy of architecture and its discourse, such as that of Gordon Matta-Clark and
the Anarchitecture group were not addressed at all. Indictments of the architectural
establishment, such as Herbert Muschamps File Under Architecture542 did not merit any notice.
The relationship between Matta-Clark and Eisenman is of particular importance. In a now
notorious incident, Matta-Clark was invited to exhibit a project for the IAUSs December 1976
show on conceptual developments in modeling, Idea As Model. Having heard that Meier,
Gwathmey, and Graves were to participate, Matta-Clark said these are the guys I studied with at
Cornell, these were my teachers. I hate what they stand for. Originally Matta-Clark was
supposed to take a room at the institute designed by two of the teachers that was a stark white
box without windows and stack it in the exhibit as a statement against architects, later rebuilding it
albeit in modified form so that the room would have parts of the wall on hinges serving as
windows. Instead, Matta-Clark came in at 3 am while the show was being set up and shot out
every window in the room with an air-gun. In each empty casement, he put a photograph of a new
housing project in the Bronx where the windows had been blown out. For Matta-Clark, this
project543 epitomized an oppressive will to build formally sophisticated architecture standing
against human suffering. The Fellows of the Institute, headed by Peter Eisenman, hated the piece
and ordered it removed. Eisenmans comments about the piece put the whole issue into
perspective: Eisenman likened it to Kristallnacht.544

542.

Herbert Muschamp, File Under Architecture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press,

543.

The project in the photographs may have been Richard Meiers Twin Parks.

1974).

544.

On the Window-Blow Out piece see the statement by Andrew Macnair, the curator of
the IAUS exhibit in Mary Jane Jacob, ed., Gordon Matta-Clark. A Retrospective, (Chicago:
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985), 96. In the catalog to the exhibit Richard Pommer wrote
"Another exhibit may have had greater possibilities. The late Gordon Matta-Clark wanted to show
photographs of vandalized New York windows against panes broken for the occasion at the
Institute, but at the last minute, with the cold air coming in, his exhibit was pulled. A pity, whatever
the reasons: it would have called attention to the rival conceptions of younger artists, who often
seem less afraid of social statements than these architects do." As the catalog essay for the
exhibit, Pommers piece would almost certainly have had to pass inspection by Eisenman, thus
while Pommer first states that it was the cold air that led to the exhibit being pulled, he
immediately backtracks, stating whatever the reasons, suggesting another reading that he
would been unable to make in a catalog for the IAUS. Richard Pommer, The Idea of "Idea as

179
Eisenmans use of Kristallnacht was cynical: this was 1976, the time when Eisenman was
cementing his alliance with his new friend Philip Johnson. It is extremely doubtful that Eisenman
did not know of his patrons fascist background. After all, Frampton had already stated that
Johnsons fascism was the stuff of history.545 By allying himself with Johnson without a word on
his fascist past, Eisenman was committing his own violence against history.
Ultimately, Eisenmans dislike of the Matta-Clark project is probably tied to Eisenmans
steadfast belief in architecture as a discipline. This belief showed up recently when in the same
symposium in which he called Denise Scott Brown Robert Venturis surrogate, Eisenman called
the Matta-Clark work a very aggressive act. Eisenman reaffirmed his commitment to
architecture as discipline, explaining that It is very easy to chop up buildings and call it a critique
of society, but it is no longer architecture. I think there are big differences between a criticism of
society, sculpture, environmental art, fringe drawings, marginalia, et cetera, and architecture.546
Johnson catches up
But to return to the early 1970s and Johnsons role in the rise of the kids. At the start of
the decade all of Johnsons work of the 1960s, such as his grandiose New York State Theater at
Lincoln Center seemed dated and he had, for a time, lost his position as a member of the
vanguard. Franz Schulze explains that At the end of the 60s, when a new generation was rising
up in American architecture the Venturis, the Moores, the Sterns, the Eisenmans, and so on
Philip was off the pace. All of a sudden, they were ushering in a new kind of revolution and they
caught him off guard. He was behind the times for a while. And then he caught up, of course, very
cannily.547
This catching up took the form of drawing Eisenman and Stern nearer towards him.
Eisenman himself states that Philip was always troubled by how people of the intellectual
establishment viewed him. And [in the early 70s] I was somebody who clearly did not regard him
that way. I reinvented Philip. In a sense, we were inventions of each other. Johnson was happy
to play along. As Eisenman states, Johnson has the almost pathological need to be one step
ahead of everybody else. Philip was always looking, prowling, for young talent. He was like the

Model", Idea As Model, ed. Kenneth Frampton, and Silvia Kolbowksi. Institute for Architecture
and Urbanism Catalogues, (New York: Rizzoli, 1981), 6.
545.

Frampton, Philip Johnson. Rejected Architects, Oppositions 2 (January 1974):

81.
546.

Peter Eisenman in K. Michael Hays and Carol Burns, ed., Thinking the Present:
Recent American Architecture, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1990), 131.
547.

Schulze, quoted in Andersen, 152.

180
CIA, you know, monitoring

activities.548

In turn, Johnson introduced Eisenman to the world of

high society and to well-heeled patrons and helped fund Eisenmans projects, such as
Oppositions and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and even gave a Eisenman a
long-term loan which you dont ever have to pay back of ten thousand dollars to help rebuild his
house after a fire had damaged it in 1976.549
Also that year, while recovering from heart surgery, Johnson read his friend Robert
Sterns biography of architect George Howe and began spending time talking to Stern about
reviving pre-modern architecture and thus Stern, as representative of the emerging post-modern
architecture, became an important ally as well.550 Johnson was able to pick up both Stern and
Eisenman, sitting in between their two seemingly opposite positions as what Kenneth Frampton
calls an ambivalent patron.551 But Johnson was not ambivalent; rather he was cynical and
canny about his patronage so that when one vanguard appeared to be at the fore he would be
associated with it and when the other replaced it, he would still remain the patron of the avantgarde.
By this point Johnson had cultivated substantial friendships with the critical
establishment, notably the critics at the New York Times: his former assistant Ada Louise
Huxtable and Paul Goldberger, the promoter of the Five. Goldbergers role as a supporter of
Johnson and the kids was assured early on: while he was an undergraduate at Yale, he was
plucked by the Johnson to be Huxtables successor. During the 1970s and 1980s Goldberger
would frequent the Four Seasons and was a member of the Century Club.552 As a result,
Goldberger had a great loyalty to Johnson and the kids, ensuring that when time came for such

548.

Eisenman, quoted in Andersen, 152

549.

Andersen, 152.

550.

Andersen, 152.

551.

Kenneth Frampton, Zabriskie Point: la traietorria di un somnambulo, Casabella.586587 (Gennaio-Febbraio 1992): 9.

552.

Michael Sorkin, Why Goldberger is So Bad: The Case of Times Square, Exquisite
Corpse: Writing on Buildings, (New York: Verso, 1991, originally published Village Voice, April 2,
1985) 102. As the Village Voices writer on architecture, Michael Sorkin maintained a steadily
anti-Johnson/kids/Goldberger stance, stating that: The main problem with architecture in this
country is the stranglehold that people like Johnson and Stern have on its institutional culture, the
way in which schools, museums, patrons, and the press call their tunes, excluding so many
others. America architecture is too important to be held prisoner by a bunch of boys that meets in
secret to anoint members of the club, reactionaries to whom a social practice means an invitation
to lunch, bad designers whose notions of form are the worst kind of parroting. It is for being the
unquestioning servant of the these that I accuse Paul Goldberger, 108.

181
projects as Johnson/Burgees Times Square Redevelopment proposal, he would eagerly support
them.553
Johnsons architectural business picked up in the 1970s as well as a result of his
cultivation of upper-class contacts. Johnson made friends with Gerry Hines, a real-estate
developer in Houston who brought him to the world of developers and venture-capital, not only
giving him commissions for six of his own skyscrapers but also introducing him to powerful figures
such as the chairman of Penzoil, for whom Johnson/Burgee built Penzoil Place. With a number of
very-large projects completed and a large and experienced staff in place, the firm became a
serious contender for more patrons wishing to build such projects.554 In his role as power broker
Johnson went on to introduce some of the kids to Hines to build houses for him, including Stern,
Gwathmey, and Charles Moore, although Gwathmeys project was not accepted by the local
design controls at Marthas Vineyard and Stern took it over instead
Johnson reemerged to the public with his endorsement of the New York Five in the
postscript to the second (1975) edition of Five Architects. By allowing Johnson to endorse their
work, the Five implied a reciprocal endorsement for Johnson. And indeed Stern and Eisenman
paid Johnson back for his patronage in the late 1970s. Eisenman staged an exhibition on
Johnson at the gallery of the IAUS and the two were instrumental in the production of a barrage of
Johnson publicity.555
In 1977 both Eisenman and Stern continued their tribute to Johnson with essays on the
Glass House in Oppositions.556 These articles were followed in 1978 by the ninth in the Institute
of Architecture and Urban Studies series of catalogs, Philip Johnson: Processes. The Glass
House, 1949 and The AT&T Corporate Headquarters, 1978.557

553.

The depth of this complicity was such that according to Michael Graves, he once
came to Johnsons office and found Paul Goldberger sitting at a typewriter, writing a story on
Johnson. See Filler, Deconstructing Philip Johnson, 109.
554.

interview with Johnson in Aronson, 309-310

555. For a contemporary critique of the 1978 Johnson frenzy, see Michael Sorkin, Philip
Johnson: The Master Builder as Self-Made Man, Exquisite Corpse: Writing on Buildings, (New
York: Verso, 1991, originally published The Village Voice, October 20, 1978) 7-14.
556.

Robert A. M. Stern, The Evolution of Philip Johnsons Glass House, 1947-1948,

Oppositions 10, Fall 1977: 56-67 and Peter Eisenman, Behind the mirror: on the writings of Philip
Johnson, Oppositions 10, Fall 1977: 1-13.
557.

Kenneth Frampton, ed., Philip Johnson: Processes. The Glass House, 1949 and The
AT&T Corporate Headquarters, 1978, (New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies,
1978).

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Writings, a collection of Johnsons essays edited by Stern with an introduction by
Eisenman and a foreword by Vincent Scully was published in 1979.558 Johnsons Nazi past was
omitted throughout. Scullys foreword and Peter Eisenmans introduction contained no hint of the
matter although one of Sterns commentaries euphemistically stated that The realities of
economic depression tended to trivialize issues of style, and in 1934 Johnson quit the Museum to
enter on a strange political and journalistic career, returning to architecture only in 1940.559 A
bibliography at the end by Johnsons companion David Whitney omitted Johnsons journalism for
Social Justice and Todays Challenge.
Thus during the mid-seventies, Johnson has succeeded in remaking his life once again.
His activities in the late 1930s, brought up by Russell Lynes and Charles Jencks in 1973 and then
by Calvin Tompkins in 1978 were not an issue. Thus it may come as no surprise that Johnsons
world-view was unabashedly cynical: who could not be cynical in a discipline that ignored his
guilt? Perhaps Johnson could feel the sense of relief when in the first public lecture he had given
in some years, at Columbia University on September 24, 1975, he exclaimed:
The day of ideology is thankfully over. Let us celebrate the death of the ide fixe. There
are no rules, only facts. There is no order, only preference. There are no imperatives,
only choice; or to use a nineteenth-century word, taste; or a modern word, take: What
is your take on this or that?560
Philosophically, it seems to me we are today anarchistic, nihilistic, solipsistic, certainly
relativist, humorous, cynical, reminiscent of tradition, myth-and-symbol-minded rather
than rationalist or scientifically minded. What makes a building satisfactory the word
beautiful is more than ever treacherous to Stern or Venturi, for instance is bound to
be different from what is satisfactory to me. Vive la difference, we live in a pluralistic
society.561
Johnsons statement recalls Daniel Bells End of Ideology thesis: that events such as the
Holocaust, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Gulag have left the positions of the Right and Left
exhausted while on the other hand, the rise of the Welfare State and the transformation of
capitalism toward a gentler system have essentially ended ideology. Thus, as Bell writes, in the
West, a consensus has emerged on the general good of the Welfare State, and decentralized
power. With ideology over, Bell concludes that in politics one is left with a rational discourse as to

558.

Philip Johnson, Writings, ed. Robert A. M. Stern, and Peter D. Eisenman. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1979).
559.

Stern in Writings, 44.

560.

Philip Johnson, What Makes Me Tick in Writings, 260-261.

561.

Johnson, What Makes Me Tick, 261.

183
how to carry out the middle way of piecemeal social

reform.562

For both Bell and Johnson,

ideology means a passionate attempt to transform political ideas into actions. The result of
abandoning youthful passion is a wonderfully transformed society, in which Schlesingers vital
center of a loyal near-Left and loyal near-Right joust valiantly to determine the middle way that
we can all follow safely.
But pluralism isnt innocent and Bell and Johnsons belief in the vital center assumes that
the vital center is nonetheless the correct position to take. Johnson and Bells assumption that
ideology has disappeared is of course mistaken: while Johnson means to be playful when he
calls it cynical it is precisely this moment of playfully calling his world-view cynical that embodies
Peter Sloterdijks cynicism as false consciousness or ideology, as defined in the introduction to
this dissertation. To reduce every debate in architecture or politics to a position within a pluralistic
forum is to domesticate any debate that would position itself as polemical and exclusive of other
positions, forcing it into a position of having to compromise. The effect upon any critique of the
legitimacy of the architectural discourse would be to reduce it to a discursive formation within the
field, just as Oppositions would do to Manfredo Tafuris critiques. Pluralism snowballs,
appropriating critique rather than engaging it.
For Johnson, pluralism appears to be a way to transparently represent the interests of the
patron. Pluralism, he argues, is about facts and the facts are that one builds for power. As he
explains, The Modern Movement disintegrated because architects morale changed from
salvation through architecture to survivalism-is-all-weve-got-left, damn-lucky-to-have-a-job. The
pragmatic response to this disintegration, mapped by Drexler in Five Architects as the adoption of
form wasnt bad at all for Johnson, rather, as he said, the descendent of that you-can-do-goodby-having-social-housing-done-by-teamwork Gropius ideal, the architecture-as-a-weapon-ofsocial-reform-thing thats the one I hate.563 Here then Johnson shows us that all positions
within architectural pluralism are not relative, as Johnson just pointed out, some are
reprehensible, some are superior, notably his own. It is at the head of this architectural pluralism
that Johnson positions himself.
Pluralism
In discussing the implications of pluralism for this dissertation, I will draw extensively on
Hal Fosters argument in his essay Against Pluralism.564 Foster effectively argues that pluralism

562.

Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, (The Free Press: Glencoe, Illinois, 1960), 373-375.

563.

Johnson in Aronson, 308.

564.

Hal Foster, Against Pluralism, Recodings, (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985) 13-32.

184
is intimately tied to the free market. Foster explains that a burgeoning art market in the 1970s
required a diversity beyond the strict criteria of late modernism.565
The result is, however, not an arena of contending polemics but rather, according to
Foster, of vested interests, of licensed sects: in lieu of culture we have cults. The result is an
eccentricity that leads, in art as in politics, to a new conformity: pluralism as an institution.566 A
death of art is necessary for pluralism, Foster explains, because it allows us to enter a state of
grace that allows for all styles.
While pluralisms advocates speak of freedom and democracy, this does not mean that
they advocate such goals politically, instead pluralism is highly conservative. In the avant-garde
of the 1920s and 1930s, art was adversarial, if not in Brgers terms of sublating art into life, then
in Adornos terms of a complex autonomy standing against consumption. When we are dealing
with the kids, however, artistic production stands against political engagement and can equally be
autonomous (without any intent of being subversive) or devoted to a dialogue with the past with
traditionalist aims. On the contrary, an absolute, anti-pluralist demand in art would not necessarily
imply the end of all opposition. Instead, polemics would be submitted to the open forum in order
to generate opposition. Only when everything is relative does argument amount to nothing.
In post-modern architecture, Foster writes, the use of such images [from the history of
architecture] is justified as egalitarian, but this egalitarianism is false: historical images have
different meanings for different groups. In other words, egalitarianism interpellates the subject,
leaves her fixed by class, education, and taste. Such architecture stratifies as it juxtaposes,
and condescends as it panders (some will get this, it says, some that).567
This stratification of readings goes beyond the historical reference that Foster examines
as Pierre Bourdieus sociological research into art museums shows. The very language of
architecture used by the vanguard and taught in the best schools serves to stratify. The lower
strata will misunderstand the intent of the work (in this case, as I will discuss at length in chapter
five, there is not a direct relation between strata and money: while there is an indirect relation, the
reading is based primarily on architectural training), the middle strata will sense the beauty of the
project and perhaps some of the formal manipulation of the work, and only the upper strata, the
architecturally trained, will be able to understand the real argument of the work.
Proper understanding of a work of art is based on a lifelong process of acculturation. The
child of upper-cultural-class parents encounters art objects frequently and is able to create a sort

565.

Foster, 15.

566.

Foster, 15.

567.

Foster, 29.

185
of subconscious classification structure that allows her to differentiate works into these classes.
The child whose parents do not take her to the museum is handicapped from the start. Secondary
education in the history of art, especially that which purports to reject the teaching of styles and
dates for more sophisticated concepts simply intensifies this division as the student who already
has the acquired skill to differentiate between a Picasso and Juan Gris is so many steps further
ahead.568
On the other hand, the lower ones class, the greater the need to justify the work of art by
appealing to extrinsic, non-formal values, such as its age, the labor involved in its production or
its subject matter.569 The lower class visitor is especially hard pressed to explain recent art,
which has fewer external cues for her to work with.570
But pluralism was what Johnson continued to preach as he and the kids had their
ascendancy as the new leaders of the architectural profession in design recognized by their
prominence in the 1978 convention of the American Institute of Architects. That year, their mentor
Philip Johnson was awarded the American Institute of Architects highest honor, its Gold Medal.
In his acceptance speech, Johnson, who was becoming the figurehead of the postmodern
movement through his widely publicized AT&T building, stated that architecture was in the midst
of a shift in sensibility so revolutionary that it is hard to grasp because we are in the middle of it.
This shift, he explained, was away from modern architecture toward a respect for history, an
interest in symbolism and ornament, and a respect for the traditions of the context. Again,
Johnson traced the shift to a change in ideology, the result of a disillusionment with progress. For
Johnson, this new era would be characterized by a combination of pragmatism and pluralism.
Goodness sakes, he exclaimed,
the Bible says, The house of my Lord has many mansions. Or the more contemporary
Chairman Mao: Let a thousand flowers bloom. Diversity is the name of the game. The
pluralism of our culture, that pluralism also applies to architecture, and we can welcome
it. There isnt one of the kids here today speaking at the convention that would do the
AT&T building the way John Burgee and I did, yet they all respect our privilege and right
and beauty to design it exactly that way. God bless the kids, God bless architecture.571

568.

Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art. European Art Museums and Their
Public, (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 1991; originally published as L'amour de l'art: les muses
d'art europens et leur public (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 1969)), 37-39.
569.

Bourdieu and Darbel, 39-44

570.

Bourdieu and Darbel, 68.

571.

Philip Johnson, Convention '78: Remarks by Gold Medalist Johnson, A. I. A.

Journal (July 1978): 22. See also the satiric piece that describes the kids in terms of a baseball
team, by someone with the bizarre pseudonym of Ernesto di Casarotta, Quarta Roma: Report
from Rome, Skyline August 1 1978: 6.

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The A. I. A. Gold Medal also marked the first public appearance of Philips kids, as he
referred to them in his acceptance speech. The A. I. A. had asked Johnson to choose a handful
of architects representing a multiplicity of directions on the cutting edge of architecture to present
a seminar on Design in Transition, and Johnson brought the kids: Peter Eisenman, Frank
Gehry, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, Charles Moore, Cesar Pelli, Robert Stern, Stanley
Tigerman. The two sessions of the seminar consisting of slide shows by each of the eight
architects and a panel discussion were the surprise hits of the convention according to the A. I.
A. Journal, attracting large audiences.572
Since the late seventies, Johnson and the kids installed themselves in New York Citys
prestigious Century Association. Composed of roughly 2,000 members, the Century accepts its
members on the basis of their merit in fields such as journalism, cultural philanthropy, or
government. During the eighties the associations roster boasted such luminaries as John Linsay,
John Chancellor, Tina Brown, Tom Wolfe, Jacqueline Onassis, Arthur Schlesinger, and Robert
Caro.573 The Century Club itself is a sort of secret society, whose members are castigated for
publicly criticizing other club members for revealing what goes on within club walls. For example,
when club member Brendan Gill wrote an article attacking the anti-Semitic bigotry and vicious
philosophy of a recently deceased member mythologist Joseph Campbell fellow members
were infuriated. As Gill explains, A lot of Centurions were shocked by my temerity, and there was
some merit to their objections. They consider this privileged territory, a secret society saying You
and Joe can have your disputes about Jews and blacks or anything else, but if it happens within
the walls of the club, it shouldnt be talked about publicly.574
It is in this already exclusive organization that Johnson along with his two protgs
Eisenman and Stern created what Richard Plunz and Kenneth Kaplan call an Inner Club in
which the kids and other significant members of the architectural profession attend dinners held
every month or two.575 Composed of Johnson, Eisenman, Graves, Meier and Stern, dressed in

572.

Convention '78: A Lively Discussion About Design, A. I. A. Journal (July 1978): 22,
26, 28, 30. See also Wayne Fujii, Interview: Philip Johnson on Philip Johnson, GA Document
Special Issue 1: 19701980 Summer 1980: 20-22 where Johnson discusses his kids with the
interviewer.
573.

Brodie, 50.

574.

quoted in John Blades, My Luncheon with Brendan, The Chicago Tribune October
9 1990: Tempo Section, p 1. Bladess article is based on an interview with Gill at the Century Club
and offers a rare inside look into the goings on there. The Gill article in question is Berndan Gill,
The Many Faces of Joseph Campbell, New York Review of Books, September 28, 1989: 16-.
575.

A more casual Philip Johnson-centered event which the kids attend is his regular
lunch in the Grill Room of the V. I. P.-filled Four Seasons. Johnson himself designed the
restaurant which is located in Ludwig Mies van der Rohes Seagram Building on which Johnson
was technically co-architect.

187
dinner jackets, the Inner Club meets at the Henry Platt Library, a private room in the club. At
various times John Burgee, Henry Cobb, and Jaquelin Robertson have also been members.
Other frequent attendees who are not necessarily members of the Century Association include
Emilio Ambasz, Alan Colquhoun, Raul de Armas, Frank Gehry, Charles Gwathmey, Arata Isozaki,
Robert Maxwell, Cesar Pelli, and Stanley Tigerman. At a typical dinner, a popular architecture
critic, often from the European Left, gives a private talk followed by a critique at the hands of the
Inner Club. Among these guests, according to Plunz and Kaplan, have been Alvin Boyarsky,
Giorgio Ciucci, Alan Colquhoun, Francesco Dal Co, Kurt Forster, Kenneth Frampton, Hans
Hollein, the Krier Brothers, Rafael Moneo, Aldo Rossi, and Anthony Vidler.576
The Kids as Conspiracy
Certainly similar networks of individuals have existed throughout history. It is natural that
talented individuals in the same discipline would congregate together. But Plunz and Kaplan
argue correctly that the Inner Club is detrimental to architecture in that it serves as a means of
social reproduction in which the Club reproduces the kids and their social standing by
disseminating and consolidating their power.577
But this conspiracy isnt any secret. As mentioned in the introduction, critic Douglas Davis
has called the existence of the kids and the circle of hangers on around them a working
assumption that is widely held by virtually every architect or critic with whom I worked and talked
in the years when I practiced architectural criticism as a weekly trade, or craft.578
Outwardly, it might seem curious that this power structure is discussed primarily in
magazines such as Spy and Vanity Fair and yet receives little treatment as a group in either
academic or professional journals of architecture.579 On the other hand, the very public display of
this serves to annihilate the need for internal discourse within the discipline. Once it has been
acknowledged, the cynic knows that nobody needs to discuss it; if the conspiracy is nothing more
than the facts of life in architecture, can you do about it except go along?

576.

Brodie, 50 and Plunz and Kaplan, 37-38.

577. On the role of the metropolitan mans club as a means of facilitating the continued
appropriate reproduction of the upper-class see C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1956), 61.
578.

Douglas Davis, New York in the Next Century: Fragments from a Post-Post-Modern
Diary, New York Architecture: 1970-1990, ed. Heinrich Klotz, and Luminita Sabau. (New York:
Rizzoli, 1989) 51.
579.

Spys repeated interest is admittedly no doubt due to its roots as a magazine of New
York City design culture. The writer of the Vanity Fair piece was at one point the editor of Spy.

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Johnson himself explains the reasoning behind the lack of genuine discourse in the field
in his interview for Hype, Steven M. L. Aronsons book on the operation of fashion-making and
power-brokerage in various fields. When Johnson states that Stern hates Meier, the interviewer
replies that on the contrary Stern sings Meiers praises. Johnson explains that Stern used to say
bad things until he straightened him out:
Stern took my advice. Oh he does. And now hes generous about his competitors,
because he understands that to talk down a competitor hurts yourself, not the competitor.
I also taught him that architects must not publicly criticize other architects in print.580
Thus Johnsons role has been to teach the kids how to behave, how to make
connections, how to become stars and to fund them both directly through monetary assistance,
and indirectly through his power brokerage. In return, the kids have paid tribute to him by
discussing him over and over as an architect of ground-breaking significance.
P-3: The Kids as Conspiracy in the 1980s
The public irruption of the conspiracy of Johnson and the kids was in the P-3
conference held at the University of Virginia Charlottesville in November, 1982 and published as
the Charlottesville Tapes by Rizzoli. The conference, financed in part by Johnson and Rizzoli,
was hosted by Eisenman and his then-partner Jacquelin Robertson. In their letters of invitation,
the two signed themselves P-3. Among the participants were most of the kids, the Inner Club,
and a number of other respected architects, all of whom presented a previously unpublished work
for critique. The conference was closed to the public.581 The P-3, Kaplan and Plunz argue,
somehow alludes to Philip Johnson and Peter Eisenmans initials, but more sinisterly it is a direct
allusion to the secret and illegal Italian Masonic Lodge Propaganda Due, P-2 for short.
Propaganda Due was at the time of the conference, being investigated as a neofascist
conspiracy aimed at replacing Italys parliamentary democracy with presidential rule and
implicated in the unraveling Banco Ambrosiano/Vatican Bank scandal by the Italian government.
The massive P-2 scandal exposed 963 members, including Cabinet ministers, members of
Parliament, army and police generals, bankers, and journalists and toppled the government of
Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani. Bizarrely, among its membership P-2 could count Angelo Rizzoli,
the head of the Rizzoli publishing empire, arrested in 1983 for embezzling $19.6 million from his
company. Beyond its American role as a publisher of art and architecture books, at the time

580.
581.

Aronson, 315.

See The Charlottesville Tapes, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 6 as well as the Hotline
column in the December 1982 Skyline, 35.

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Rizzoli owned a substantial part of the Italian media, including the Italian equivalent of the New
York Times, Corriere della Sera.582
While Gianfranco Monacelli, the president and chief executive of Rizzolis American
operations, maintained that they were autonomous from the distressed Italian parent company,
he not only helped fund the P-3 conference, he attended as the only outsider allowed into the
actual sessions and posed with the architects for a group photo on the cover, perhaps pointing to
the importance of the media in American architecture today as a sort of invisible hand. While
suggesting that there is some kind of link between P-2 and P-3 is no doubt an exaggeration, the
tactlessness of the jest, perpetrated in part by the ex-fascist Johnson is remarkable. The threat of
a neofascist conspiracy composed of large percentage of the most powerful figures in Italy
connected to Argentinean military and Peronist regimes was no joking matter. Further, in its
tongue-in-cheek way, the link between P-2 and P-3 points to an actual conspiracy, namely that of
the kids and the Inner Club, and how very wicked and truly sly and therefore marvelous its
organizers are.
In this light, what Guy Debord has written about P-2 is also revealing about P-3: both take
advantage of the same societal conditions:
Never before has censorship been so perfect. Never before have those who are still led
to believe, in a few countries, that they remain free citizens, been less entitled to make
their opinions heard, wherever it is a matter of choices affecting their real lives. Never
before has it been possible to lie to them so brazenly. The spectator is simply supposed
to know nothing, and deserve nothing. Those who are always watching to see what
happens next will never act: such must be the spectators condition. People often cite the
United States as an exception because there Nixon eventually came to grief with a series
of denials whose clumsiness was too cynical: but this entirely local exception, for which
there were some old historical causes, clearly no longer holds true, since Reagan has
recently been able to do the same thing with impunity. Many things may be unauthorized;
everything is permitted. Talk of scandal is thus archaic. The most profound summing-up
of the period within the whole world entered shortly after Italy and the United States, can
be found in the words of a senior Italian statesman, a member, simultaneously of both the
official government and the parallel government, P2, Potere Due: Once there were
scandals, but not anymore.583

582.

On P-2 see Olivetti Chief Jailed for Fraud, item from the Manchester Guardian in
The Vancouver Sun, April 18, 1992, p E4; 3 Arrested in Milan After Audit of Rizzoli Editore, from
the AP in The New York Times, February 19, 1983, p 30; Secret Handshakes Across the
Atlantic, Latin American Weekly Report, WR-81-22, p 2; Henry Tanner, Italian Elite Embroiled in
A Scandal, The New York Times, p 1; Peter Stoler, Jonathan Beaty, Barry Kalb, The Great
Vatican Bank Mystery; A Tale of Two Deaths, Twelve Investigations and Missing Millions, Time,
September 13, 1982; Rizzoli was named a member of P-2 in 1981 according to an article carried
by Reuters, on February 18, 1983 and available on the NEXIS information service.
583.

Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, (London: Verso, 1990; first
published as Commentaires sur la socit du spectacle (Paris: Editions Grard Lebovici, 1988)),
22

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Power Elite and Cynical Culture
In order to discuss the implications of the kids as conspiracy, I will have to draw
extensively on the argument of C. Wright Mills, whose book The Power Elite remains
unsurpassed as proof of and study of the implications of the existence of a high-level elite in
American society. In twentieth century American society, Mills writes, the progressive growth of
the institutions such as the military-industrial complex, the corporate structure, and the
government, has meant a corresponding increase in the power of those at the top of these
structures, the power elite.584 The relatively small circles of individuals that belong to the power
elite make control so much easier for those who know how to operate the system and the
overlapping of membership of individuals in institutionally different parts of the elite.585
The rise of the power elite is a structural phenomenon Mills explains, not a conspiracy in
the sense of a conspiracy of agency having been co-ordinated from the start by its members, but
rather a structural conspiracy. The American power elite took advantage of a specific sociological
tendency towards a concentration of power in ever-tightening circles, but once the power elite
arose its members quite naturally began to plot amongst themselves and here a conspiracy of
agents arose to ensure the successful continuation of a system that greatly benefited them.586
Similarly, while Philip Johnson and the kids could not have developed the structural
condition of architecture as an institution today, they have exploited it to their advantage. Johnson
was the first on the scene and his ascent to power was very much a question of being in the right
place at the right time as well as being a particularly canny individual. Likewise the kids emerged
to fit the need described in chapter one for architects who would represent the discipline as an
autonomous field basing its legitimacy on formal competence. It is probably safe to go further and
say that if it had not been for Johnson and the kids, some other individuals would have appeared
as an architectural power elite. But such a deterministic argument shouldnt be used to validate
the power elite. Here we can identify the subterranean return of Arthur Schlesingers concept of
The Vital Center which was discussed in chapter one above. The Vital Center appeared to have
failed, but it had no replacement and, at least during the time-frame that Schlesinger was
concerned with (American history after World War II), it never really existed in the first place. The
notion that Americas government would balance between the control of a loyal left and loyal right
was a myth, impossible to hold in the era of the power elite. While on certain levels there has
been disagreement between political factions, on the whole, there is more alliance than dissent.

584. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 3-13.
Millss text is essential for the responsible study of modern theories of conspiracy.
585.

Mills, 18.

586.

Mills, 292-293.

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The power elite provides the continuity underlying the rule of the government. What shifts have
come about are the result of institutional realignments: the business elite slipping in front of the
military, or vice versa. The tendency of American government, beyond any current political trend,
towards the accretion and consolidation of power in ever more centralized form remains
essentially unopposed.587
Opposition is an almost impossible task against a power elite that controls so much.
While actual counter-conspiracies of the underprivileged have emerged from time to time in order
to attack the power elite, they have generally remained ineffectual and have been pointed to by
the power elite in order to justify their own policies.588 The power elite, on the other hand, tend
towards conservatism. Mills explains that this trend is a psychological demand that belonging to
the power elite makes on its members.589 Successful conspiracies such as that organized by
Philip Johnson and the kids, tend to aim not at overthrowing an existing order but rather at filling
the highest positions of the power elite attainable with its members. The idea of the balanced vital
center, however, is really conservativism or its predecessor nineteenth century liberalism in
disguise, a model of society that supposedly works through the autonomous structural forces of
the market. Pointing to this anonymous, dynamic structure, the elite can look at itself and say,
how can we really exist? Certainly we know each other but we are at odds on so many issues.
Our eliteness is the result of success in a free competition. Thus, theoretically speaking the elite
disappears into the structure of the economy and likewise the kids or the Five disappear into the
structure of the economy of the architectural media.590
This market is however by no means free: Generally composed of men of similar social
standing and education, the power elite must maintain and reproduce itself in order to survive and
this can only be accomplished properly in the free market, in other words, a market structured to
respond to their will. Thus, the power elite is not directly based on merit, it is selected and
formed, as Mills writes, by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics of
celebrity, which prevail in their society.591

587.

Mills, 267.

588.

Mills, 14. The idea of a counter-elite, Mills writes, stems from the early day of
Christian tradition. The theoretical power of the counter-elite is the moral superiority of its
members who have been condemned to low positions by the tragedy of circumstance. Of course
the counter-elite conspiracy is a familiar idea for Marxists as well as anti-Semites, and terrorists of
various flavors.
589.

Mills, 15.

590.

Mills, 336.

591.

Mills, 361.

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Ethics of Conspiracy
The power elite of architecture is very much part of what we defined in the introduction
with the aid of Peter Sloterdijk as cynical culture, the culture in which ideological action is
exposed yet is still engaged in. Thus Johnson and the kids could pose for Spy: cynicism is, as
Sloterdijk points out, what Nietzsche really referred to when he described the Eternal Recurrence
of the Same: when faced with the impossibility of truth, one turns disingenuous and enters into a
state of being revolving around strategy and tactics, a thinking about and armoring of oneself in
defense from the impossibility of the outside.592
Indeed, throughout history, there has been a strain of conspiracy the conspiracy that
exists for the sake of breaking rules, and for its own advancement that has maintained an antiethical impulse in which, as leader of the Levantine Assassins, Rashid al-Din Sinan is said to
have proclaimed: Nothing is true. Everything is permitted or as his master Hasan-i-Sabbah II
announced to the faithful during the fast of Ramadan: the Imam of our time has sent you his
blessing and his compassion, and has called you his special chosen servants. He has freed you
from the burden of the rules of Holy Law, and has brought you to the Resurrection and, after
proclaiming that In this world all is action and there is no reckoning, but in the world to come all is
reckoning and there is no action, Hasan invited his congregation to feast.593 Perhaps like the
Assassins, Sex Pistols, the Situationists, or the Dadaists of Greil Marcuss Lipstick Traces: A
Secret History of the Twentieth Century,594 this is a life-giving Nietzschean, and Dadaist
movement. Philip Johnson, as Pecks bad boy is the ultimate architectural punk. Following this
train of thought we could conclude that Philip Johnson and the kids are just living in accordance
with the highest principles of this punk anti-faith.
But perhaps not. In his recent Comments On the Society of the Spectacle the leader of
the Situationists, Guy Debord states that since their near-Revolution in 1968, the spectacle has
acquired a new, more hegemonic form in the integrated spectacle. One of the characteristics of
the integrated spectacle is the proliferation of secrecy and conspiracies among the controllers of
the spectacle. Debord explains that Networks of promotion/control slide imperceptibly into
networks of surveillance/disinformation. Formerly one only conspired against an established
order. Today, conspiring in its favor is a new and flourishing profession. Under spectacular

592.

Sloterdijk, xxviii-xxix.

593.

Bernard Lewis, The Assassins; A Radical Sect in Islam, (New York: Basic Books,
1968), 72-73. Those who subsequently continued to obey the Law were stoned and put to death,
Lewis, 74. See also Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century,
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), 442-443.
594.

And here I am of course only referring to those Assassins, those Sex Pistols, those
Situationists, and those Dadaists as Marcus mythologizes them in Lipstick Traces.

193
domination people conspire to maintain it, and to guarantee what it alone could call its well-being.
This conspiracy is a part of its very functioning.595 It is this kind of conspiracy that the Johnson
and the kids are engaged in.
During the 1980s such a body of thought as defined by Leo Strauss became extremely
influential among neo-conservatives in the United States government. For Strauss, philosophy
tells the truth, which is that truth does not exist and that those few individuals who are not
deceived live by their wits and their own will-to-power. In order not to destroy society (or
alternatively, have it destroy the philosopher), the philosopher must hide the truth, disseminating
it into esoteric moments, in between the lines of the text so that the untrained reader would have
no access to it.596 Strausss goal then is to cultivate the wise, an elite of political philosophers
that would exert influence over politicians and lead society. These wise are separated from the
vulgar masses by their capacity to live with the truth. Because the wise can live with truth in a
way that the vulgar cannot, it is up to the wise to deceive the vulgar so that they do not perceive
the truth. The difference between the wise and the vulgar is so great, that Strauss argues that the
standards applying to the wise are in no way the same as to those applying to the vulgar. Instead,
the wise is allowed to go beyond morality, or as the analyst of Strausss work, Shadia Drury,
writes, Everything is therefore permitted to the philosopher in his efforts to seek his own
good.597
Like Johnson, Strauss surrounded himself with young men who love to think, his
intellectual heirs such as Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, who spread
his vast influence in conservative academia. The Straussian conspiracy spread into a number of
elite university government departments most notably to the Claremont Graduate School, the
training ground for many of the high officials in the State department and other top government
positions.598

595.

Debord, 74.

596. Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss. New York: St. Martins Press,
1988, xiii. Compare this to what Adolf Hitler had to say: Only when knowledge assumes once
again the character of a secret science, and is not [the property] of everyone, will it assume once
more its usual function, namely as an instrument of domination, of human nature as well as that
which stands outside man. originally in Hermann Rauschning, Gesprche mit Hitler (New York,
1940), 40 and quoted in George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political
Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany form the Napoleonic Wars through the Third
Reich, (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991; originally published New York: H.
Fertig, 1975), 199.
597.

On the wise and the vulgar see chapter 1 of Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art
of Writing, (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1952) as well as Drurys analysis in chapter 11 of
her book.
598.

Drury, 194-195. According to a graduate student in Cornells government

department, until the time of the Straight takeover, the department was also heavily Straussian.

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The danger with the kids is the danger of a Straussian architecture, in spirit, if not in direct
intent. Peter Eisenman has intimated that after 1945, there is no Truth left, and architecture thus
itself loses any possibility of meaning:
With the scientifically orchestrated horror of Hiroshima and the consciousness of the
human brutality of the Holocaust it became impossible for man to sustain a relationship
with any of the dominant cosmologies of his past; he could no longer derive his identity
from a belief in a heroic purpose and future. Survival became his only heroic possibility.
The technocratic model, which was really just a disguise for the anthropocentric one,
brought down the entire cosmological matrix. For the first time in history, man was faced
with no way of assuaging his unmediated confrontation with an existential anxiety.599
But a Straussian, architect or alternatively a Nietzschean architect following
Nietzsches division between the overmen and the masses would achieve an elite position
through a careful analysis of conditions and a response to these changes. Straussian architecture
would be available to be read on a number of levels, stratifying its audience and leaving its real
meaning only for those who are ready to understand it, the same condition that architectural
pluralism fosters.
Conspiracy As Allegory
In this chapter we have mapped the rise of a conspiratorial elite to power in architecture.
Having, I hope proved it is possible to see the kids as an actual conspiracy, perhaps even a
Straussian one, it is time to analyze the way conspiracy of Philip and the kids is perceived by
other members of the architecture culture. As I explained in the introduction, the conspiracy of
Philip and the kids is gossiped about readily yet it is rarely openly questioned in the architectural
media. This denial is due to the nature of this conspiracy. If this conspiracy theory is Jamesonian,
i.e. an allegory, then we have to discern what is behind this conspiracy that is so difficult to utter
straightout, that requires a conspiracy to represent it.
The answer to this question is almost banal in its obviousness, yet it turns out to be the
most difficult part of architecture for academics and (at least the successfully conditioned)
architecture students to admit: the collective nature of architecture. As sociologist Dana Cuff
explains in her Architecture: The Story of Practice, a book remarkable for its straightforward
assessment of the profession, the popular image of the architect is, if one goes to the architecture
studio and asks the students, on the surface, that of the individual, Howard Roark, the hero of the
Fountainhead, that of Frank Lloyd Wright, of Le Corbusier, of Johnson or the kids: the architect as
artist, as builder. Yet this is precisely the kind of architect that is the rarest. Todays architect is

599.

Peter Eisenman, Misreading, Houses of Cards, ed. Peter Eisenman. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987), 170, 172.

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not free to do what she wants, rather her autonomy is severely compromised by the facts of
architectural practice: outside of school one designs not for oneself but for patrons.600
Thus, the conspiracy theory of the kids, which exists as a subversive bit of insider gossip
to many architects, academics, and architecture students, allegorically represents a patronage
network that controls access to the highest echelons of the field and is further representative of
the problem of patronage itself. Patronage is the single most overriding psychic problem of
todays architect, unable to build the kind of independent projects she has always wished to and
has felt she has been trained to. Instead, the architect winds up utterly compromised, in an
economic situation that leaves him or her far from their dreams. A doctor will still do roughly what
she expected to do when she conceived of her career as a child: she will still heal patients. On
the contrary, as we will discuss in the next chapter, the typical architect will almost certainly not
have an autonomous role in constructing buildings as works of art in his lifetime. Nothing would
change if Philip and the kids were to die in the wake of an explosion of a large car-bomb
fortuitously placed in front of the Century Club. Other architects would take their place swiftly. The
structure of architecture as discipline, while perhaps somewhat autonomous in its surface stylistic
manifestations, does not remain autonomous of the realities of late capitalism.601
Johnson and the kids have a structural function as celebrities in the field of architecture.
Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno have explained that when looking at a celebrity, the
majority of people realize the statistical impossibility of ever being on the screen and instead
chalk up the celebrities achievements to luck. The audience member realizes that they could be
on the screen, but that in todays world, they never will be: fate has dealt them the wrong hand
and they will never be famous. Instead, they will rejoice in identifying with those who do achieve

600.

Dana Cuff, Architecture: The Story of Practice, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT
Press, 1991). Cuff observes that the inconsistency between architectural image and practice
often generates a conflict between desires for individual control on the part of both firm partners
and novice employees and leads to problems in the firm. See also Magali Sarfatti Larson, Behind
The Postmodern Facade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993) and also Kenneth Frampton, Reflections on the Autonomy
of Architecture: A Critique of Contemporary Production, Out of Site: A Social Criticism of
Architecture, ed. Diane Ghirardo. (Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1991) 17-26.
For networks of influence among American architects see also Roxanne Kuter
Williamson, American Architects and the Mechanics of Fame, (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1991). After looking at the history of American architects since Jefferson, Williamson comes to
the conclusion that a network of influence favors those architects who, in their youth, apprenticed
with other architects in the network. Williamson does not extend this analysis to question what the
existence of this network means in terms of the structure of the discipline.
601.

Compare this with architect and director of the National Endowment for the Arts
Michael Pittass statement that architecture is so pervasiveboth the good and the bad. But to
think of architecture as only the products of Philip Johnson and a handful of other well-known
names is to avoid admitting that pervasive influence. interview in Barbaralee Diamondstein, ed.,
American Architecture Now II, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 195.

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such

success.602

But of course it isnt just pure luck in this case. Luck is an illusion because after

all it would not signify pure luck but rather knowing how to pull the strings.
Pulling the strings and the desire to pull the strings points to a secondary meaning of this
allegory: agency. The kids were neither a product of a discursive formation, nor a product of the
structural alignments of the previous chapter. Rather, they acted, reading the ideological script
provided by the structural conspiracy and manipulated discourse in the field to create their own
conspiracy, a conspiracy of agents.
But here we must ask for a moment precisely who are these agent? Why isnt Johnson,
the former anti-Semite a little disturbed by working with them: after all, theyre Jews! Some, like
Eisenman and Tigerman, have gone so far as to identify post-modernism, one of Johnsons
movements with a Jewish condition?603 How did this strange twist come about?
The answer to this question brings up another nasty secret in American history: quotas in
the university. The anti-Semitism that Johnson advocated in the 1930s was heinous, but not
isolated. During the 1920s, following the lead of Harvard where Johnson was a student,
universities dealt with the problem of what to do with increasing numbers of Jewish students by
imposing quotas.604 The result was that for nearly thirty years many Jews were excluded from
American higher education and with it, good careers.
After the end of World War II, the situation changed. Quotas were done away with in
universities and Jews were no longer the subject of such open anti-Semitism in general.605 The
Jews of the kids generation were able to achieve far more than previous generations, both in
architecture and elsewhere. Johnson, living in and around the New York city area, where the
greatest concentration of Jews in the United States is located simply made the right decision: If
you cant beat em, join em, one imagines him saying.

602.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (New York:

Continuum, 1991; first published in English translation, Herder and Herder, 1972, originally
published in German as Dialektik der Aufklrung, Amsterdam: Querido, 1944), 145.
603. See Stanley Tigerman, Versus: An American Architects Alternatives, (New York:
Rizzoli, 1982).
604.

Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, (New York: Oxford University Press,

1994), 84-91.
605.

See Dinnerstein, 151, 158-160.

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Nietzsches Architecture
As we have discussed at the end of chapter one, the function of architects like the kids is
to legitimate the profession by validating its artistic aspect. After all this it should not be surprising
that in 1984, the kids Eisenman, Graves, Meier and Stern who have been involved the
longest and most consistently were selected by their friend and then editor of Progressive
Architecture, Suzanne Stephens for her 1984 article in Vanity Fair on The Fountainhead
Syndrome. Stephens argues that in the years between 1970 and 1980 a new breed of Howard
Roarks emerged to embody the Fountainhead heros egooriented persona. All four share a view
of architecture as an aesthetic problem of form and meaning.606 The four are not committed to
change society, she writes, but rather to their own personal visions. The new Howard Roark, she
writes, believes that corporations, developers, and the media can be seduced into supporting his
architecture.607
Ayn Rands Howard Roark was a hero for her as a lone man (and he has to be a man, in
Ayn Rands work virtuous women exist but they are unable to achieve the greatness of their male
counterparts and instead achieve their greatest moments when being raped) who stands against
the masses with his vision of the future. In this construction, the architect stands as a
Nietzschean figure, bathed in the light of the truth which is ultimately the will-to-power (which
Nietzsche and following him Johnson and Eisenman in turn identify with architecture) against the
forces of philistinism. Indeed the very word architecture stems from the Greek arche-techne,
roughly master craftsman. Thus, a division of labor is created, in which a single building master
with expertise is privileged over others, the masses.
If the architect, with his expertise, is privileged over all others then just as Stephens
writes, he should seduce everyone into his vision. The successful architect is a liar, a doubleagent, a conspirator. The popular construction of the architect as Howard Roark is itself the very
image of the Nietzschean overman or the Straussian philosopher. And yet as Johnson reminded
us at the outset of this dissertation, all along Nietzsche had understood the architect and given
him a special role: In architectural works, mans pride, mans triumph over gravitation, mans will
to power assume visible form. Architecture is a veritable oratory of power made by form.608

606.

Suzanne Stephens, The Fountainhead Syndrome, Vanity Fair (April 1984): 40.

607.

Stephens, 43

608.

as quoted by Peter Eisenman, introduction to Philip Johnson, Writings, (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1979), 10. Originally in Johnson, The Seven Crutches of Modern
Architecture, informal talk to students, School of Architectural Design, Harvard University,
December 7, 1954; published in Perspecta 3 (1955), 40-44, reprinted in Johnson, Writings, 140.

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In a recent debate with Leon Krier, an architect who has on occasion attempted to
resurrect the architecture of Albert Speer on the grounds that it is ideologically neutral,609 Peter
Eisenman explained just what it means to be an architect in Nietzschean terms:
As I was preparing for this debate there was only one book that I thought it necessary to
read and that was Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra because it is a book that both
Leon and I understand very well and it probably brings us very close together. I believe
that it was on page 61, (although Im not certain as I didnt bring the book with me. I dont
like reading from prepared script because I respond to the presentness of this situation)
but it was something about the creator. What Nietzsche says is that the creator is a lonely
person and must always stand apart from and perhaps against the mass, and will always
be in a sense outside and alien to the existing order. In that sense, I guess that I agree
with Leon that the creator must have a degree of certainty to do that. I think that
Nietzsche then asks the question, how does one have the right to be a creator? In other
words, how does one have the right to stand outside? What is that right that allows one to
arrogate to ones self that possibility?
My answer to that question is that people who are not creators dont think about that right.
They remain within the mass always. I dont think we are talking today about those
individuals, architects sometimes, poets, physicists, whoever has had that need to stand
outside and therefore the right to stand apart. To be those wanderers who always
understand what presentness is because the need to creation is always involved in
presentness. Great architecture, I would argue, has never been liked by the masses. The
great monuments always have been, in their time, not necessarily liked or understood.
We do not know, when we build today, whether we have either caught the spirit of our
time because its an elusive thing; nor whether we catch the presentness or whether we
are building, as Leon said, in the spirit of all time. I think its the willingness of the creator
to take that risk; the risk of being alone and of attempting to define that elusive condition.
That is what makes an architecture of presentness.610
This drive to identify the architect with Nietzsches overman underscores the
pervasiveness of Nietzscheanism in our culture, especially in art, architecture, and the
historiography of those fields. In terms of the latter, a fundamental Nietzschean impulse underlies
Heinrich Wlfflins basic project for art history the same basic project which still motivates so
much of art and architecture history today to mark out the significant, the solemn, and the
grand from what Frampton would call the stuff of history.611 Here too we can locate the

609. See Albert Speer, Leon Krier and Lars Olof Larsson, Albert Speer: Architecture,
1932-1942, [Ed. francaise et anglaise] ed. (Bruxelles: Archives d'Architecture Moderne, 1985).
While the forms of Speers architecture do not in themselves contain an ideology, as I have
attempted to show in this chapter, we live in a socially-constructed world. The forms of Speers
architecture do indeed carry specific meanings to our post-World War II society.
610.

Peter Eisenman and Leon Krier, My Ideology is Better Than Yours,

Reconstruction/Deconstruction, ed. Andreas C. Papadakis. An Architectural Design Profile,
(London/New York: Academy Editions/St. Martin's Press, 1989), 18.
611.

See Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word : Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art,
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 53. In setting a context for Mies van der Rohes

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greatest danger from Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism: the idea that life is only justifiable as an
aesthetic phenomena, and thus we overmen must make our life a total work of art,612 designing
our own life just like Philip Johnson. This call to aestheticize politics was the basic programme
of Nazi Germany and a driving force in the Holocaust.613
What does it mean to live and even build after 1945? Eisenman explains that he believes
that it means to live with a perpetual anxiety. Is this anxiety indeed the anxiety of living and
knowing that the same ideology that is being quite literally sold to us every day and that we
ourselves reproduce wittingly or unwittingly is in many fundamental ways responsible for these
horrors and doing ones best to fight it? Or is this the anxiety that is the hidden misery of the
cynic,614 acknowledging that no matter what happened, no matter what we see, we are still
fundamentally conducting business as usual and indeed that it must go on?

philosophical writing, Neumeyer goes through an essential preliminary investigation of the

pervasiveness of Nietzscheanism in modern art. For an excellent examination of the implications
of Nietzscheanism in recent theory see Geoffrey Waite, The Politics of The Question of Style:
Nietzsche/Hlderlin, Identity of the Literary Text, ed. Mario J. Valds, and Owen Miller. (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1985) 246-273.
My reference to Frampton is admittedly a little twisted: Frampton is not writing about art
but rather explaining his consignment of Johnsons Nazi past to the non-life-giving material of
history. Taking Framptons reference for what it really means is much more disturbing. See
chapter 2.
612. See Neumeyer, 61 also Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of
Wagner, (New York: Vintage Books., 1967), 52. For the quote from Nietzsche see the introduction
to this dissertation.
613.

See Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969,
originally published in English, 1968, first published in German in Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung,
5, 1, 1936) 217-252. See also Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics : the Fiction
of the Political, (Oxford, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA: B. Blackwell, 1990), chapter 7, The
Aestheticizaton of Politics, 62-76.
614.

Recall from the introduction that Sloterdijk diagnoses the cynic as fundamentally a
miserable human being, using cynicism to mask his depression, his loss of innocence. See
Sloterdijk, 3-9.

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4 The Architectural Object: Drawing and

Spectacle
Architects today, unlike architects in the forties and fifties, work for the media, although
they may think theyre working for their clients.
Arthur Drexler615
So far we have discussed two conspiracies: the structural conspiracy of a discipline under
internal pressure to refine its object and methods of study and a changing sociopolitical climate
combining to favor cardboard architecture and the conspiracy of agency between Philip and the
kids, motivated by a need to make history while suppressing the social implications of their work:
the very aspect by which they rose to prominence (i.e. social networking and patronage).
These two conspiracies intersect in a third: the conspiracy of spectacle through which
cardboard architecture and the kids solidify their positions. This chapter will explore the
conspiracy of spectacle as it appears in the new popularity of architectural representation that
encouraged the phenomenal growth of the architectural media and led to new modes of
experiencing architecture, an increase in the disciplines popularity for the public and new
patterns of patronage. At the same time, however, these changes led to the further
spectacularization of architecture as its object began to include not buildings but images that
could sold as commodities.
The conspiratorial aspect of this change is twofold, reflecting the division between the
conspiracy of agency (the kids) and the conspiracy of structure (cardboard architecture). The kids
were deeply involved in some of the most important moves toward the popularization of the
architectural drawing and model and at the same time profited from it, having their work frequently
exhibited, receiving exposure and commissions for its sale. Public interest in and the popularity of
their drawings is a result of cardboard architectures derivation of its methodology from twodimensional images and from the image of the cardboard model, as discussed previously and its
resulting appropriateness for the medium.
After discussing the rise of the architectural drawing, I will explain the kids attempt to
create a prosthetic aura or cult-value for their cardboard architecture. Walter Benjamin, in his
essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,616 explained that the aura, or

615.

Arthur Drexler interviewed in Barbaralee Diamondstein, ed., American Architecture

Now II, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 71.
616.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,

Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969,

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cult-value, of a work of art is broken down by techniques of reproducibility but he did not predict
the phenomenal growth of reproduction and marketing that re-creates aura in prosthetic form in
terms of spectacle, the cult of personality and image. Thus, while solidity and depth, both
characteristics of aura in an architectural object, are evacuated by cardboard architectures
shallowness, attention to surface-level phenomenon, and propensity for being seen largely in
reproduction, they are reestablished in terms of formal density, and the fetishism of the image.
The Discovery of the Drawing: MoMAs cole des Beaux Arts Exhibit
While architectural drawings and reproductions had been appreciated for their formal
qualities by audiences outside of the discipline at least as far back as Giovanni Battista Piranesis
Vedute di Roma and a number of important exhibits of the drawing were mounted in the late
1960s and 1970s notably Hejduk and Slutzkys Diamond and Square and The Education of an
Architect it was during 1976 and 1977 that the architectural drawing proliferated in the museum
and gallery as an art object and attracted an unprecedented degree of popularity. This new
appreciation of the architectural drawing was catalyzed by the exhibit on The Architecture of the
cole des Beaux-Arts shown at the Museum of Modern Art from 29 October 1975 through 4
January 1976 and the book of the same name published in 1977 as a companion to the
exhibit.617 The display of a system of architecture that of the cole entirely through the
medium of drawing set the stage for the new appreciation of architectural drawing on its own
terms. That these drawings consisted mainly of works produced by students concerned primarily
with winning competitions on the basis of their formal abilities and drawing style only added to the
effect.618

originally published in English, 1968, first published in German in Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung,

5, 1, 1936) 217-252. Geoffrey Waite has pointed out that the standard English translation of
Reproduzierbarkiet as Reproduction is misleading. It should be Reproducibility.
617.

Arthur Drexler, ed., The Architecture of the cole des Beaux-Arts, (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, distributed by the MIT Press, 1977), 4.
618.

In the book, Drexler lists the following inventory: This book, like the exhibition that
preceded it, presents some two hundred drawings for architectural projects. One hundred sixty of
them were made by students at the cole des Beaux-Arts and represent virtually every type of
assignment or competition organized by the school. The remaining forty drawings comprise those
made by Henri Labrouste, who was first a student and then master of an atelier, for his
Bibliothque Sainte-Genevive; by Charles Garnier and members of the office he established to
produce his Paris Opra; and by Viollet-le-Duc, also for the Opra. A selection of executed
buildings in France and in the United States is shown in photographs. Apart from the American
examples, the latest of which was completed in 1943, and some eighteenth-century projects
significant for later developments, the survey is limited to what was done by French students and
masters at the cole des Beaux-Arts during the nineteenth century. 8

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Arthur Drexler, who as director of MoMAs Department of Architecture and Design was
responsible for the show, explained that with the Beaux-Arts exhibition he had hoped to stimulate
thinking about architectural education, which he felt had fallen apart due to the failure of the
Bauhaus as a system of teaching architecture in the United States. The exhibit on the cole, he
hoped, would provide a clear-cut system of design principles to contrast with the current
predicament and in so doing force architects to reexamine the entire system of architectural
education.619 Drexler believed that the cole could provide useful ways of thinking anew about
architectures relationship to history.620 Drexler worried about the crisis of overproduction in
architectural education, leading to thousands upon thousands of graduates all over the world
entering a field which, with its combination of middle-class professionalism and artistic meaning,
appeared attractive but was unable to support them.621 Indeed, the cole exhibit served to
introduce the museum-going public to the possibility of architecture as a field that could produce
something to hang on a wall and thereby expand the market.
The exhibit was immediately recognized as a historic moment in which the discursive field
was opened up to a consideration of a historicist mode of design within MoMA, itself long
considered the bastion of modernism.622 As mentioned in chapter one, the need to work through
the trauma of the cole system had been recognized as early as August 1954 when its last
vestiges were dying out in the United States in Colin Rowes Roots of American Architecture:
An Answer to Mumfords Analysis.623 Rowes argument, that the revolution of modern
architecture had been completed within the United States, albeit in de-ideologized form, and that
it would now seem possible to cut through the mythology of the modern movement to look at the
Beaux-Arts and the 1893 Columbian Exposition for what they really were,624 was nevertheless

619.

Drexler in Diamondstein, 70. It is unclear precisely what Drexlers full intents were in
this respect. He was no longer closely involved with cardboard architecture and it difficult to say
along what lines he wished a reform of architectural education.
620.

Drexler, 8.

621.

Arthur Drexler interviewed in Barbaralee Diamondstein, ed., American Architecture

Now II, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 65.
622. See Anthony Vidler, Academicism: Modernism, Oppositions 8, (Spring 1977): 1-5
and Robert A. M. Stern, The Doubles of Post-Modernism, Harvard Architectural Review (Spring
1980), 76.
623.

The relation between Rowe and the show is first raised by George Baird when he
states that one of the historical effects of the Beaux-Arts show is to bring a close this demolition
job begun by Rowe thirty years ago. in William Ellis, ed. Forum: The Beaux-Arts Exhibition,
Oppositions 8, Spring 1977: 160
624.

Colin Rowe, Roots Of American Architecture: An Answer to Mumford's Analysis,

Architectural Review, August 1954: 75-78.

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too early for the majority of American architects. Yet Rowes statement that the revolution of
modern architecture had been won echoed Philip Johnsons 1952 declaration that The battle of
modern architecture has long been won. It was this statement, written for the Museum of Modern
Art catalog Built in USA: Post-war Architecture, that Arthur Drexler attacked in his The
Architecture of the cole des Beaux-Arts.
Drexlers intents after the early 1970s are rather difficult to read, and his relationship with
the kids was often rocky, as we will see later in this chapter. Indeed, it is hard to say what sort of
design Drexler hoped the exhibit would stimulate. His essays on the cole exhibition criticize
cardboard architectures adherence to the axomometric and model and to modernist forms and
his complaints about state of architectural education are also curious in light of cardboard
architectures potent role in that field. On the other hand, Drexler still supported the equivocation
of architecture and pure form making as he did in Five Architects, arguing against the link
between form and necessity of function and structure in modern architecture, instead proposing
that form should be responsible only to the architect, writing Forms are manipulated in order to
make explicit whichever of these external validations the architect affirms as the most satisfying
explanation of the nature of existence.625 In Drexlers view border control needed to be reestablished between architecture and building, the former being the domain of freedom of action,
conscious choice, and ulterior motives; [while] the latter is the domain of minimum effort in
response to external necessity. Modern architecture, he wrote, attempted to remove this
distinction in favor of the utilitarian response to external necessity, even if such a conflation was
impossible in practice.626
But Drexlers intent was also to criticize the use of modernist form in cardboard
architecture as the following passage reveals:
When for architects modernisms conceptual truths seemed finally to exclude possibilities
rather than embrace them, a saving impulse to escape the engineering or utilitarian style
found expression in whatever would seem to contradict it in a taste for contradiction as
an end in itself. But before built form can be understood to embody contradiction, both the
rule and its exception must be present and intelligible. Hence the characteristic problem
for modern architecture in its post-Miesian phase: it acknowledges freedom by seeking to
embody divergent possibilities (which it chooses to see as contradictions), but it has not
yet dared to relinquish the reductionist imperative of the engineering style. Devised to tell
the truth about necessity, its form language is now the only language available. And so it
happens that the one necessity modern architecture cannot freely confront is the
necessity for freedom.627

625.

Drexler, 14.

626.

Drexler, 42-3.

627.

Drexler, 14-15.

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If Drexler criticized Venturis taste in contradiction in this passage, he also criticized the
Five, who believed that modern architectures form language is now the only language available
and in another he probably referred to Rowe and Slutzky when he wrote that the derivation of
architecture from painting might be a problem, that architecture, for example, ceases to be
architecture to the extent that it becomes painting or sculpture even though the doctrinal
history of the modern movement has involved the opposite assumption.628
Instead, Drexler understood that what he called the proper instruments of the architects
own thinking the drawing and the model necessarily determined architecture:
Whether they begin, mediate, or conclude the design process, the surrogates of built form
now dominate it. Among the surrogates the model is preeminent. Its effect on the
architects thought does not seem problematic because we still believe that when we
think of the reality we have in mind an actual building. But when the primary object of the
architects deliberations is the model itself, the real building stands to it in the interesting
but superfluous relationship of a giant copy of an egg to its miniature original. We would
be unwise to dismiss this as inconsequential, when we are quick to recognize that for the
nineteenth century, and for the cole des Beaux-Arts above all, it was the exquisite
drawing that finally replaced the actualities it claimed to describe.629
Both drawing and model dictated what students would do when they made drawings. But
the tendency to miniaturization of the cardboard model was a problem for Drexler, apparently
because of its tendency to create reductive form, downplaying the role of such elements as light
and shadow.630 Likewise photography came under scrutiny for being an inaccurate
representation: by presenting the building with a selective and hallucinating clarity, the onepoint perspective characteristic of much architectural photography in the 1950s made diverse
modern buildings seem parts of a continuous image revealed in monthly installments, teaching us
to see architecture as the photographer saw it. Photographs thus come to serve as exemplars at
the very beginning of the design process, encouraging the student to draw effects of scale and
perspective that can be seen only through a wide-angle lens with adjustments to eliminate vertical
convergence.631
The cole des Beaux-Arts furnished an antidote in what Drexler called drawing as
scenography as a base for an architecture of non-reductive form that would generate some
kind of post-modernism, although precisely in what shape is hard to tell.632

628.

Drexler, 21.

629.

Drexler, 27.

630.

Drexler, 16.

631.

Drexler, 18.

632.

Drexler, 58-59

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Drexlers comments and the exhibit brought swift reaction from the cardboard architects.
Eisenman defended the model as a conceptual tool against Drexlers attack with the show at the
Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies on Idea as Model which we mentioned in the
previous chapter. An Oppositions Forum was set up twelve days after the show closed, on 22
January 1976, to discuss the exhibit and the proceedings were published in Oppositions 7 in the
context of an entire issue edited by Anthony Vidler on the theme of nineteenth century academic
architecture. The panelists were generally enthusiastic about being able to see the architecture of
the Beaux-Arts at MoMA, although many of speakers were negative about the emphasis on
drawings, which indicates that this was still a rather early moment in the ascent of the drawing as
architecture.633
Vidler proved to be the most insightful of the Forum panelists, explaining that:
Ironically the schools that now produce recognizable modern styles Yale, Princeton,
the Institute, and its affiliates have essentially reverted to a real Beaux-Arts (in the very
best sense of course) attitude to design; most students of Eisenman, Graves, and the like
can easily assimilate the lessons, if not the styles, of the student work on display at the
Museum, into their own work. They have, after all been working with Colin Rowes edition
of Letarouilly for some time.634
Princeton under Graves and the Institute under Eisenman were the strongholds of
cardboard architecture pedagogy and thus what Vidler was referring to was cardboard
architecture as an academic discipline of architecture based on carefully set out rules of
composition, oriented toward not architecture but its means of representation in the drawing as
well as model. All of these were, after all, part of cardboard architecture since its beginning.
The Contemporary Drawing
In 1977 the Architectural League of New York, then still under Robert A.M. Sterns
presidency, and the American Federation of Arts sponsored an exhibition entitled 200 Years of
American Architectural Drawing together with a book of the same name by David Gebhard and
Deborah Nevins.635 With its broad historical scope, the exhibit would serve a transitional role,

633. William Ellis, Beaux, Oppositions Summer 1976: 131-134 and William Ellis, ed.
Forum: The Beaux-Arts Exhibition, Oppositions Spring 1977: 160-175.
634.
635.

Vidler in Forum: The Beaux-Arts Exhibition, 173.

David Gebhard and Deborah Nevins, 200 Years of American Architectural Drawings,
(New York: Whitney Library of Design, an imprint of Watson-Guptill Publications for the
Architectural League of New York and the American Federation of the Arts, 1977). The authors
attribute the initiation of the exhibit on which the book was based and the initial funding for the
project to the Executive Board of the Architectural League of New York. Given his connection with

206
mediating between the popular reception of drawings of the past in the cole des Beaux-Arts
exhibit and the popular reception of contemporary architectural drawings to come.
In the book, the authors offered an explanation for the lack of scholarly attention that they
perceived was being paid to the architectural drawing. Research into American architectural
drawings was a difficult task, they wrote, because such renderings were not treated as works of
art themselves and hence public institutions and collectors were not interested in their
preservation until relatively recent times. But the emerging status of the drawing as a collectable
and hence marketable artwork can be seen in the captions indicating the ownership of the
drawings. While the caption attributes the ownership of the drawing to the Collection of
allowing for the possibility of architectural drawing as an artwork worthy of collection, the owner
generally tended to be the architect responsible for the drawing.636 Few actual collections or
collectors existed at this point. Nevertheless, the possibility had been raised: architectural
drawings were art works that could be owned, bought and sold.
Significantly, Gebhard and Nevins linked a lack of interest in intellectual issues among
American architects with the almost nonexistent use of architectural drawings to solve
theoretical problems.637 Gebhard explained that architectural drawing was essential to theoretical
work:
American architecture of the mid-seventies is in a much more splintered position than in
any period since the 1930s. Though this division exhibits itself through style, its actual
basis is due to a diversity of intent. And if the intent has intellectual substance, drawings
remain, as in the past, the principal means to convey it.638
The group of contemporary architects Nevins and Gebhard picked was telling: Michael
Graves, Mitchell/Giurgola, Peter Eisenman, Hardy Holzman and Pfeiffer, Frank Gehry, Charles
Moore and William Turnbull, Venturi and Rauch, and John Hejduk. The list would be a start in
establishing whose architectural drawings would be considered interesting. The stakes were high.
As Gebhard wrote,
Most contemporary architects, historians, and critics would either deny or feel uneasy
about claiming the primacy of the drawing, but if they are uneasy with what has been

Stern, it is interesting to note that the authors also specially acknowledge Philip Johnsons
patronage.
636. Significantly, many architects do not do their own presentation drawings but have
students or specialists execute them. Only when the architect signs the drawing does it acquire
value. Thus the architect is in some sense the collector.
637.

Gebhard and Nevins, 21.

638.

Gebhard in Gebhard and Nevins, 70.

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termed paper architecture as opposed to real architecture, they may well be indicating
that their primary allegiance is to building, not to architecture.639
That Gebhard and Nevinss book was only a start became evident as contemporary
architectural drawings expanded into the gallery system during the fall of 1978 with three major
exhibits of architectural drawings held in New York at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Drawing
Center, and the Leo Castelli Gallery.
The catalog for the first two exhibits was edited by Robert Stern, who was also the
organizer of the Drawing Center show and was published by the English journal Architectural
Design under the title America Now. Significantly, the implication of the title was that by 1978,
American architecture could be represented best not by images of buildings but by drawings. This
was only logical as these exhibits did an excellent job of representing the work of the kids, as
Stern wrote: the works in the exhibits illustrated the debate between the late Modernist group
and the PostModernists, a debate which has taken earlier form as one between exclusivists
and inclusivists, Whites and Grays. The drawings selected, would lead to an understanding of
contemporary architecture by showing how architectural drawing would be a part of the
conceptual process.640 This resurgence of interest in drawing, Stern wrote, was the result of an
opposition to the modernist emphasis on building three-dimensional models which, by focused on
three dimensional form at the expense of surface. Most of the architects selected by Stern to
submit their drawings were expected: Graves, Venturi, Eisenman, Mitchell/Giurgola, Greenberg,
Venturi, Moore, Tigerman and Stern himself. The exhibit at the Cooper Union, organized by
Richard Oliver, was broader in its scope but also included its share of the cardboard architectural
vanguard: Moore, Stern, Hejduk and Venturi.
Stern traced the return to drawing to the Museum of Modern Art with its exhibit of the
work of Cooper Union students later presented in the book Education of an Architect: A Point of
View, an exhibition organized by Emilio Ambasz on Architectural Studies and Projects and the
Beaux-Arts exhibit of 1975. The latter exhibit, Stern wrote, brought home the narcissism of
modernism sealed off from everyday experience and from high culture. How the drawings by the
cole students or by the architects he selected for his exhibit addressed reality he didnt explain,
but significantly Stern did link the economic reality of the lack of opportunity for architects in the
1970s and the production of the drawing.641

639.

Gebhard in Gebhard and Nevins, 70.

640.

Robert A.M. Stern, Drawing Towards A More Modern Architecture, Architectural

Design June 1977: 382383. p 382.
641.

Stern, 383.

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The title of the Castelli show, Architecture I, implied its role as the first of its kind:
architects had invaded New Yorks top art gallery. Featuring architects Emilio Ambasz, Raimund
Abraham, Richard Meier, Aldo Rossi, James Stirling, and Robert Venturi along with artist Walter
Pichler,642 the show moved away from the work of the kids and toward a more diverse and
international group, even if it the individuals involved were frequently mentioned in Oppositions
and the New York scene.
Castellis next show of architectural material attracted notoriety for its departure from the
simple sale of the architectural drawing.643 Known as Architecture II: Houses for Sale, the 1980
show featured drawings and models of houses designed by eight architects Moore, Cesar
Pelli, Ambasz, Eisenman, Arata Isozaki, Cedric Price, Vittorio Gregotti, and O. M. Ungers
specifically for the show. Following the trend toward the single-family detached house as an
object of investigation,644 each project consisted of a house on a minimum of one acre of land.
The price of each house would be roughly $250,000 and the architect would retain a 7 per cent
commission. The gallery could now sell not only architectural drawings but entire projects on
spec for prospective clients.
The Castelli shows were matched by the opening of the Max Protetch gallery in 1979,
specializing in architectural drawings. In establishing his gallery, Protetch turned to his friends kid
Peter Eisenman and Five Architect alum John Hejduk to ask them for advice. Protetch explains
that the two were upset to learn that the first show at his gallery was by kid Michael Graves, Of
course, they thought I'd be showing their work first," Protetch says, "but Graves just seemed so
right at the time. Indeed, the show was a critical and financial success establishing both Graves
and Protetch at the forefront of the architectural design scene.645
The ascendancy of the drawing was only confirmed when in 1979, Stern and Nevins
collaborated on a book titled The Architects Eye: American Architectural Drawings from 1799-

642.

Stuart Greenspan, Architecture I, Leo Castelli Gallery, and ICA Philadelphia,

ArtForum January 1978: 73-74. p 73.`
643. See Douglas Davis, Selling Houses as Art, Newsweek October 27 1980: 111. Paul
Goldberger, Architecture; Exhibiting Dream Houses That Can Really Be Built, The New York
Times October 12 1980: Section 6, p. 117. Hal Foster, Pastiche / prototype / purity: "Houses for
Sale," Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, Artforum 19 7 (1981 Mar. 1981): 77-79 and the catalog to
the show by Barbara Jakobson, writing under the pseudonym B. J. Archer, ed., Houses For Sale,
(New York: Rizzoli, 1980).
644.

See Magali Sarfatti Larson, Behind The Postmodern Facade: Architectural Change in
Late Twentieth-Century America, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 194-202.
645.

Benjamin Forgey, Dealing in the Art of Innovation; Max Protetch and His Two
Decades on the Aesthetic Edge in Washington and New York, The Washington Post December
29 1989: Style, page D1.

209
1978. While the books historical scope dictated the inclusion of few contemporary architects, the
inclusion of Graves and Eisenman among the handful underscored how important it was to be
one of the kids.646
By the start of the 1980s, a number of cardboard architects, notably Graves and
Eisenman were no longer simply working for clients but also for dealers and galleries who would
sell the work and would also produce designs of small domestic objects. Architects in the
vanguard became obsessed with this secondary production and with preserving drawings that
they would have once discarded. As Protetch explains, Young architects save every scrap of
paper.647 With good reason: the architectural drawing continued to become more popular: by
1982, a signed poster by the hottest architect of the time, Michael Graves, could sell for $1,000 at
the Max Protetch gallery while an original drawing commanded in the thousands.648 In this way
market conditions began to determine architecture in a more direct way, allowing dealers to
speculate on architects whose work was considered profitable. The reproduction of the architects
work and of their images via interviews, television shows, and exhibits became paramount
to their success.
The importance of this publicity to architects can be seen in what was in the culminating
moment in the ascent of the architectural reproduction: Arthur Drexlers Transformations in
Architecture exhibit at MoMA in 1979. The exhibition drew criticism for its method of
presentation: one image per building, covering 406 separate buildings.649 Drexler explains that
his intent was to show how an architectural idea becomes devalued through a process of
repetition and variation, until it loses its original quality and intent and becomes something very
different. But equally important, we can see that whatever their worries about the reproduction,
architects were terribly concerned about being represented, even if the exhibit drew negative
conclusions. The principle of the spectacle applied: that which is good appears, that which
appears is good. Alternatively, Drexlers own principle could be used: It doesnt matter how
critical they are, as long as they spell your name right.650 Thus when Drexler omitted John
Hejduk, the Five mobilized to counteract, as Drexler explains, Peter conducted one of his round-

646.

Deborah Nevins and Robert A. M. Stern, ed., The Architects Eye: American
Architectural drawings From 1799-1978, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).
647.

Max Protetch in Art Dealers, ed. Alan Jones, and Laura de Coppet. 1984), 229.

648. Paul Goldberger, Architecture of a Different Color, The New York Times October 10
1982: section 6, p 42.
649.

See Martin Filler, Gran Rifiuto on 53d Street, A+U August 1979: 146-147 and
Response: Arthur Drexler on Transformations, Skyline Summer, 1979: 6.
650.

Eisenman, Five + Ten, 8.

210
the-clock terror campaigns to boycott the show until Hejduk was reinstated. While he was not
successful in getting Hejduk reinstated, Eisenmans boycott achieved a remarkable amount of
publicity.651
In 1981, looking back at the 1976 Idea as Model exhibit at the IAUS, the same exhibit
where Matta-Clark shot out the gallery windows and that was meant as a counter to the emphasis
on drawing at Arthur Drexlers cole des Beaux-Arts exhibit, Richard Pommer was able to
conclude that architecture had irrevocably changed. Models and drawings had been taken up by
the galleries and at the same time architects had learned to sell them and collectors learned to
buy them. "Architects have lost their virginity, he wrote, No longer is it possible to believe that
confining architecture to paper and cardboard will keep it free from the dirty ways of the street.
Thus, Pommer explained that while the exhibit had been intended to stand against Drexlers prodrawing Beaux-Arts exhibit and prove the viability of the model as means of creatively
investigating architecture, it was superfluous by 1981: both drawing and model had become
architecture.652
Yuppie-Porn: Teapots and Jewelry
As drawings invaded the gallery, other objects designed by architects, such as coffee
pots, tea services and jewelry, became hot items, soon commanding high prices in galleries. In
1979 the Italian tableware manufacturer Alessi commissioned a dozen architects among them
Richard Meier, Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Oscar Tusquets, Alessandro Mendini, Stanley
Tigerman, Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi, and critic Charles Jencks to create tea and coffee
services. The hand-made versions were displayed in the Max Protetch gallery as Architecture in
Silver in 1983. Each set, ranging in price from about $10,000 to $30,000 for the Meier piece, was
treated as an art object, signed and limited to an edition of ninety-nine (which, if all the pieces
were sold would make the entire project worth well over $10 million).653 While Alessi had
intended that the projects could be mass-produced for everyday use, the majority of them turned
out to be too difficult and costly to manufacture. Still, Rossis espresso makers can be found in
many shopping mall coffee stores. By 1988, Michael Graves, had sold more than 100,000 of what
Spy magazine called his $115 yuppie-porn birdie tea kettles.654 By 1994 the price had gone up

651.

Drexler in Diamondstein, 69.

652. Richard Pommer, Postscript to a Post-Mortem, Idea As Model, ed. Kenneth

Frampton, and Silvia Kolbowksi. Institute for Architecture and Urbanism Catalogues, (New York:
Rizzoli, 1981) 10.
653.

Joseph Giovannini, Home Desk, The New York Times November 17 1983: Section

C; p 12.
654.

Sidney Falco, Spy The 80s Most Hated. Every Field Boasts a Truly Loathsome
Individual, The San Francisco Chronicle December 30 1989: People Section, p C10. Graves

211
to $125 and he had sold half a million. Inspired by his success, Graves opened a store dedicated
to his own designs and counting T-shirts with his signature on them, watches, teakettles and a
host of other Graves designed or signed objects, and accounting for variations in color and size
there were 1,300 unique items in the store.655
Beginning in 1982, another major production of architect-design objects took place when
Cleto Munari asked sixteen architects to design jewelry. Barbara Radice, in her introduction to a
1987 book on the collection, explained why the particular architects were selected:
When talking of very famous architects, no more than about thirty names are likely to be
raised. They are the same names that come up again and again on the panels of
international shows and competitions, the same who exchange polite criticisms and views
in the pages of newspapers. They are the beloved protagonists of the great architectural
telenovela incessantly fueled by corporate and society gossip broadcast by magazines
and reviews and echoed by students intellectuals, and pursuers of celebrities.
Their is no cultural event of significance that can do without their very special presence,
support, or advice. Their success as a category is perhaps due to the fact that they are
forced by circumstances to be at the same time artists, intellectuals, businessmen, and
managers. They are not always able to pull this off but it does make them into the most
complex, protean Renaissance figures in the whole professional scene.
The architects included a number of the usual suspects, among them Eisenman, Graves,
Meier, Tigerman, Venturi and other generally less familiar Italian names. The point, however, was
made, architecture was, as Radice put it, translated into gold.656

was, accorded by Spy the position of most hated architect in the 1980s. Philip Johnson might
dispute this, in an interview during the early eighties he stated I guess Im the most hated
architect in America, which is a perfectly normal reaction against anyone too outspoken.
Johnson in Barbaralee Diamondstein, ed., American Architecture Now II, (New York: Rizzoli,
1985), 153.
655.

See Phil Patton, Would Retailing Suit Michelangelo?, The New York Times,
February 17 1994, C10. Significantly, while many architecture students would find it hard to
embrace both Graves and Gehry, when Gehry heard about the store he said he wanted a card.
Patton explains:
You know where we are, Frank, replied the puzzled Mr. Graves.
No, Mr. Gehry explained. A card with my name on it. So I can get discounts, like at
Bloomingdales.
Mr. Graves, who takes this in good spirit, reported that such a card was in he works
for Mr. Gehry only.
Recalling the quote from Philip Johnson cited at the start of chapter three of this
dissertation: When Neimee gives you the Cartee Blanchee, by god you know youve arrived.
One can only wonder what Johnson must think of the Graves card, and whether he has one yet.
656.

Barbara Radice, Jewelry by Architects, (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 7.

212
The profitability of the architectural market for the media was made clear when Rizzoli
entered into the architectural publishing market in 1980. During the next four years, the company
published nearly 150 books and 50 editions of journals on architecture. Employing Kenneth
Frampton as a special consultant, from the start Rizzoli was associated with the vanguard and
with the postmodern movement, achieving remarkable success by publishing Charles Jenckss
The Language of Postmodern Architecture, which sold 30,000 copies by 1985, a very high sales
figure in the art book market.657
Architecture in Museums
The frenzy over architecture in galleries was matched by museums. Prior to the flurry of
activity beginning in 1976 there was little opportunity to see architecture in the museum but by
1984 there were twenty-five to thirty museums with significant architecture exhibits, five in New
York City alone, including the Philip Johnson Gallery in the Museum of Modern Art.658
One of the most important international proselytizers for architecture in the museum was
art historian Heinrich Klotz, who was instrumental in the founding of the German Architecture
Museum in Frankfurt in 1984.659 According to Klotz, the German Architecture Museum came out
of his desire to preserve the records of the evolution of buildings by contemporary architects and
also to help disseminate the work of innovative architects such as Venturi and Moore in Germany.
The collection rapidly expanded by 1987 the museum owned more than 35,000 drawings, 150
paintings, and 350 scale models driving Klotz to seek out a new outlet for the display of the
material.660

657.

Paul Gapp, Rizzoli Books Giving the Fashion of Architecture Hard-Cover Coverage,
Chicago Tribune February 3 1985: Zone C; p 14.
658. Robert Gutman, Architectural Practice: A Critical View, (New York: Princeton, 1988),
92. See also Joseph Giovannini, Museums Make Room for the Art of Architecture, The New
York Times May 20 1984: Section 2, p 33.
659.

Heinrich Klotz, The Founding of the German Architectural Museum, Revision of the
Modern: The Frankfurt Architecture Museum Collection, ed. Heinrich Klotz. (London: part of
Architectural Design Volume 55 3/4 1985, 1985) 5-7. The political support for the museum
underlines the conservative high art attitude that has appropriated the architectural drawing. Klotz
writes that support for the museum, which was one of a number of museums founded in Frankfurt
at the time, came from two Social Democrats and the mayor, a Christian Democrat. Liberals and
most Social Democrats saw the project as a conservative programme promoting bourgeois
values. 6.
See also Charles Jencks, In The Steps of Vasari: Charles Jencks Interviews Heinrich
Klotz, Revision of the Modern: The Frankfurt Architecture Museum Collection, ed. Heinrich Klotz.
(London: part of Architectural Design Volume 55 3/4 1985, 1985) 8-16.
660.

Charles Bonenti, Speaking for Post-Modern Architecture, Berkshires Week June

26-July 2, 1987: 6.

213
Such an outlet appeared at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown,
Massachusetts, under Thomas Krens, its director during the 1980s. Krens, whose success at
Williamstown landed him a job as Director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, has been
called the prototypical new director661 for his combination of strongly formalist art historical
training and management skills, given him by an advanced degree in art history (an MFA from
SUNY-Albany) but also an MBA (from Yale), an ideal combination for an art director who would
become one of the key figures in the controversial move toward de-accessioning i.e. selling
works of art from museum collections in order to buy more attractive ones. The museum, in
this paradigm, as Krenss predecessor at the Guggenheim noted, would state not only feed itself,
it must excrete.662
Krenss ideas about the museum came out of a particular background that shared many
similarities with the kids. As an undergraduate, Krens had studied at Williams with art and
architecture history professors S. Lane Faison, William H. Pierson and Whitney Stoddard. By the
mid-1980s Williams College art history graduates of Krenss generation controlled a remarkable
number of key posts in the American museum world, the most notable among them being Krens
himself, Kirk Varnedoe 67 (director of painting and sculpture at MoMA), Robert T. Buck 61
(director of the Brooklyn Museum), James N. Wood 63 (director of the Art Institute of Chicago),
Roger Mandel 63 (director of the Toledo Museum of Art) and Earl A. Rusty Powell III 66
(director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). The graduates credited their education
under Faison, Stoddard, and Pierson as the reason for their success, agreeing that it was the
formal training they received that was responsible. The trio of professors attempted to instill an
appreciation of the object rather than a scholarly approach to the history of art. The result was
that while the students were unprepared for graduate school, being totally unfamiliar with the
basic literature and the art journals, they were extremely well-trained visually. This turn inward
was a part of a general educational phenomenon at Williams: its students felt that they were bred
for success, trained to be aggressive members of the elite. Williams college students who tended
to be from well-off backgrounds, were able to cultivate their social graces at the college. Williams
graduates have been notoriously loyal both to their college and other alumni and with their wealth
and cultivation, it was assured that a large number of them would appear on museum boards.663
This confluence then of a formal visual training and a conspiratorial old-boy network, ultimately
served the purposes of social reproduction and advancement of the Williams graduates in a way
surprisingly similar to that of the kids.

661. Stephen C. Swid, CEO of a publishing and movie-distribution company and a

member of the Guggenheim board, quoted in Philip Weiss, Selling the Collection, Art in America
July 1990: 131.
662.

Thomas Messer, quoted in Weiss, Selling the Collection, 131.

663.

Seth Rogovoy, The Williams Art Connection, Berkshires Week (1988): 6-9, 20.

214
Upon his return to Williams in the early 1980s as the director of its college art museum,
Krens swiftly proved that he had learned his lessons well: he quickly took the small college
museum with a two man staff (himself and the janitor) and a $45,000 budget and expanded the
staff to thirty, the budget to $1.5 million, and at the same time built an $8 million addition by
Charles Moore that more than doubled the museums space.664 Appropriately, the shows that
Klotz and Krens brought from Frankfurt were displayed in the new space. Krenss management
involved the extensive computerization of the Williams museum as well. His faith in computer
technology was reflected in his development of a large database on the financial history of major
art museums, part of his general interest in the financial aspects of the art world, demonstrated by
his plans to co-author a book on The Economic Future and Purpose of the Art Museum. Krenss
management skill was recognized by the Yale School of Managements invitation to him to give a
series of lectures as Executive-in-Residence in the fall of 1988.665
Soon after arriving at Williams, Krens began working on yet another idea, this time an
ambitious $66 million project for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA)
in which a massive factory complex in nearby but economically depressed North Adams would be
converted into the United States largest museum of contemporary art and architecture. Mass
MoCA would revolve around exhibits of architecture, minimalist art, and would be heavily
computerized in its infrastructure and would attract artists interested in working with computers as
well.666 While nearly a decade after it was started, Mass MoCA seems unlikely to ever get past
the planning stage, Krenss ambition there and at Williams landed him a job at the Guggenheim,
where he proposed to use Mass MoCA as a satellite museum to display 300 large Minimalist
works purchased from the collection of Italian art collector Count Giuseppe Panza.667
Krenss attraction to Minimalism appears to stem from its marketability. Here then, the
reasond for this lengthy diversion. Since the 1970s, art museums have become more and more
involved with architecture and with capitalism. The involvement of art museums with capital,
Rosalind Krauss explains, requires three fundamental conditions: a larger inventory, explaining
Krenss purchase of the Panza collection as well as the more general capitalistic movement of

664.

Jennifer Trainer, Thomas Krens Master Museum Maker, Berkshires Week July
10-July 16 1987: 5.
665.

Trainer, 6-7.

666.

Trainer, 6-7.

667.

Significantly, Panza was also an early supporter of Max Protetch, see Benjamin
Forgey, Dealing in the Art of Innovation; Max Protetch and His Two Decades on the Aesthetic
Edge in Washington and New York, The Washington Post December 29 1989: Style, page D1.

215
museums into areas which had previously been left undeveloped, i.e.

architecture668;

more

physical outlets, hence Mass MoCA; and a leveraging of the collection by moving it into the credit
sector.669
Krauss points out that this change in the museums idea of itself parallels a historical
change in the interpretation of Minimalism towards converting the subject into nothing more than
an optical ray. The new interpretation of Minimalism, Krauss writes, is
the aesthetic rationale for the [economic] transformation I am describing. The
industrialized museum has a need for the technologized subject, the subject in search not
of affect but of intensities, the subject who experiences its fragmentation as euphoria, the
subject whose field of experience is no longer history, but space itself: that hyperspace
which a revisionist understanding of Minimalism will use it to unlock.670
If Krauss is right about the role of Minimalism in the late capitalist art museum, then
architecture plays an analogous role: Minimalisms hyperreality is that of the innocent eye, the
understanding of space through the forgetting of history, the paradigm that the pedagogy of
cardboard architecture aimed to create which we will return to in chapter five. If Minimalism
offered the museum a subject reduced to a retina searching for stimulus, that was exactly what
cardboard architecture would offer as well.
Architecture as Spectacle
As Krausss discussion of the museum points out, new systems of dissemination cannot
be treated in isolation from the periods new forms of reception. Indeed Walter Benjamin has
explained that modes of perception, means of production, and means of depiction are all linked
by their material conditions.671 The dominant mode of perception for architecture has traditionally
been, as Benjamin, put it, absent-minded, apprehended not so much through contemplation as
through distraction.672

668.

This goal of expansion into previously undeveloped areas is of course typical of

capitalism by anyones measure, be they Marxist or neo-Conservative in their economic analysis.
Just how conscious it was in the art gallery can be judged by the following statement by Max
Protetch: Most businesses research a market and work toward supplying an existing demand.
Its just the opposite in dealing art. The serious dealer looks for art he likes and tries to convince
the world of its importance. in the Art Dealers, ed. Alan Jones, and Laura de Coppet. 1984), 228.
669.

Krauss, 16.

670.

Krauss, 17.

671.

Benjamin, 221.

672.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,

Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969,

216
While for some architects and aficionados, architecture can at times be comprehended
through contemplation and indeed the method of teaching design through analysis in cardboard
architecture is a means of stimulating such thinking, for most people architecture is rarely if ever
contemplatively engaged. The appearance of architecture in museums and galleries and the
proliferation of the architectural image in the media however served to make that architecture into
such an object of contemplation.
One way to describe this change is through analogy: when Andy Warhol placed the
Campbells soup can in front of our eyes, he simultaneously confronted us with its banal
reproduced nature and made us contemplate the image of the object itself. Thus, in a certain way,
Andy Warhols project is an early moment in cultural studies, making us engage the production
that we normally discard as waste, in this case advertising. Placing a plan or axonometric on a
wall and making the viewer read it puts the viewer in a similar situation. We should all judge, the
drawing on the gallery wall implies, and if we approve, perhaps we will pay for it either from the
gallery or the museum bookstore.
The result a transformation in the direction of the image becoming architecture itself and
architecture becoming image. This transformation should, from our discussion of the spectacle in
the introduction, be readily identifiable as a spectacularization of architecture. But, the
spectacularization of architecture also serves to give it a prosthetic aura. As architecture is more
and more subject to a total eradication of its aura through reproduction, it resists it with a
prosthetic aura.
In his essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter
Benjamin explained that mechanical reproduction makes a work of art dependent on it in order to
be made visible. This dependence removes some of the artworks aura, i.e. the artworks claim to
presence, originality and authenticity through its long association with ritual. Likewise, cardboard
architecture would appear to evacuate solidity and depth associated with architecture via its
thinness, shallowness, attention to surface-level phenomenon instead of mass, and hence would
lessen the presence of the object and hence its aura.
On the other hand, the spectacularization of architecture as image, hanging on the gallery
wall or printed in a book or magazine serves as a prosthetic aura. Material conditions since
Benjamin have changed somewhat: while to a certain extent, the reproduction of the image
devalues its aura by removing its appearance of originality, at the same time, a prosthetic aura
gives the image a new cult-value. The rise of the architectural drawing, done by the hand of the
architect himself, replaces the aura of the architectural object with a fetish of the image: aura is
replaced by spectacle.

originally published in English, 1968, first published in German in Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung,

5, 1, 1936) 217-252.

217
Indeed, cardboard architecture is marked by an attempt to recover an aura for the
architectural object. As chapter one explained, fear that the discipline might collapse under
internal and external pressures drove a number of architects and educators to turn their attention
as much as possible to form, to devote renewed attention to the object in order to affirm its
presence and make it real. The dense and sophisticated formal techniques that followed as
exemplified in Five Architects demanded a reception similar to their production: a reception not
of absent-minded perception but of active contemplation. To merely walk through House I and
attempt to make an empathic but distracted connection with the space, as one could do at, for
example, the slightly earlier Lincoln Center, would not be a competent mode of reception.
The turn to the drawing and also to theory served as means of providing a suitable
contemplative mode of reception for cardboard architecture. Yet it is also a means of marketing
architecture, of offering it up for consumption. This analysis is supported by similar conclusions by
Manfredo Tafuri in his Theories and Histories of Architecture. Tafuri notes the crisis of the object
in modern architecture,673 caused by the loss of aura and presence that Benjamin identified with
the modern art object. Tafuri contends that during the postwar period, the architectural object is
suspended in a dialectic between its disappearance through consumption and the reinforcement
of its aura. This dialectic is however, none other than a reflection of the flux that we first pointed
out in the introduction: between a heroic solid, present subject (the Howard Roark) and the
switching machine (the MTV consumer).
The image of the architect aided the creation of a prosthetic aura. We have already
discussed how the kids sold themselves in terms of creating the impression that something was
happening. Evidence of how thoroughly a cult-value was created for the architect can be found in
the new obsession of architects in the late 1970s with fashion.674 While Philip Johnson insists
that fashion has nothing to do with an architects success, he has been described as a
clotheshorse by Robert Stern and not without reason: in typical contradictory form, Johnson has
been the leader of fashion in the movement. Of Stern, Johnson explains, he was a slob, you see.
Oh ya, and then he got married to a Gimbel and got into the chips, and he said to himself, Philip
Johnson is a clotheshorse, it must have something to do with success, Ill be a clotheshorse
too.675

673. Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, (New York: Harper and Row,
1980, translation of fourth Italian edition published 1976, first Italian edition published 1968), 8097.
674.

On the continued importance of fashion to the architect, see Paul Keers, Fashion:
Why Design is Not Simply Black or WhiteWorking Clothes Arouse Some Trenchant Opinions,
As Paul Keers Discovers/Dressing for the Professions: The Architect, The Financial Times
March 20 1993: XI. See also the extensive list of where architects buy their clothes and
accessories in For That Architect in Your Life, Skyline December 1981: 7.
675.

Aronson, 313

218
This obsession with fashion may have something to do with the Nietzschean idea of the
total work of art, of designing ones life, creating an image that we discussed in chapter three. The
architect must have a signature in his clothes, just as he has a signature in his buildings.
In the introduction to Cleto Munaris collection of jewelry by architects that we have
previously mentioned, Barbara Radice explains the look that the architectural celebrity has:
Big architects are often progressive intellectuals; even those regarded as more
conservative always manage to cultivate some fad or snobbism that sets them apart. In
general, they are better dressed than artists, travel a great deal and are always calling
each other on the phone. When they are not talking about the financial problems which
eternally afflict them or about work, they know how to have a good time and are open to
adventure. They can be recognized by a special quality in their gaze, conveying an
amused, cynical detachment, and by the sly smile of those who possess secret
information.676
Radices adulation of the cynical architect is that of a person enthralled by the architects
image. It is crucially important then that cynicism itself is a constituent part of the image of the
architect, who by appearing in possession of secret information, a conspirator, just appears more
fascinating.
The Architecture Student as Connoisseur
This image of the architect as a man who has designed his own life, a Nietzschean or
Howard Roark standing well-dressed in the light of the dawn of his own will is, however as
mentioned in chapter three, countered by the grim reality of the profession.
The Howard Roark is finding it harder and harder to maintain his position. Architectural
sociologist Robert Gutman explains that while architects sense that their profession is constantly
in decline, this is in fact a mistaken impression stemming from the years immediately after 1968,
a period characterized by recession in the building trades that devastated the profession. But in
reality, receipts of architectural firms achieved respectable growth, a twenty-five percent increase
(after inflation) between 1972 and 1982. These ten years however, were buoyed by the success
of a handful of large firms with one hundred or more employees. Receipts at the vast majority of
architectural firms, small firms with less than twenty employees, declined. Thus demand for
architectural services has grown, but in a way that has encouraged Fountainhead architects to
believe that demand is shrinking. The desirable architect is not a hero but a technician
specializing in HVAC, detailing, CAD, specifications, publicity, or the business. For the designbased architect who dreams of a small firm of a handful of people and retaining a large amount of

676.

Radice, 7.

219
autonomy over his projects the period has been one of dwindling

opportunity.677

It is Howard

Roark who is most at odds with the reality of the architect today.
Paradoxically the heroes of the discipline are not the technicians but the Howard Roarks
and instead of embracing technical training, schools, which already produce a vast oversupply of
graduates for a profession unable to absorb them,678 still generally treat design as the most
important part of architecture, embracing the formally-based cardboard architecture. Architecture
is still sold to most students as being about design, about form, and ultimately about the will-topower as expressed through form. The logic of the design-oriented school is, as Gutman points
out, rather twisted: most schools resist considering the question of oversupply by arguing that
whatever their eventual employment prospects, students continue to submit a high number of
applications to schools.679
Ironically whereas in law, students call themselves law students, in medicine medical
students, in architecture students call themselves architects even though chances are that this
will be the only time that they will ever be able to call themselves architects and say that they
spend most of their time designing. This view, that the student is a member of the profession, is
the result of the notion that the properly trained architecture student is able to see architecture in
a way that only other architects can.680
Architecture, as taught in the design studio, is becoming not a means of production, but
rather a means of consumption, ultimately a means of selling commodities. Architecture students,
failed architects and wannabe-architects became a public for a market oriented at them, a market
selling books, periodicals, architect-designed accessories and accessories for architects. Even
working as an architect can be a product in itself: at many of the top firms in the architectural
vanguard (Peter Eisenmans is one example), the student intern is unpaid.
The creation of this educational market can be explained by comparing it to the creation
of desire through advertising. In a typical magazine advertisement, we are shown a photograph
and product, sometimes pictured, sometimes existing only in a caption. The ad works by making
us draw a series of connections that are given to us as natural: the photograph is somehow
similar to the product and if we want to buy the product, we will somehow achieve a similar state

677.

Robert Gutman, Architectural Practice: A Critical View, (New York: Princeton, 1988),
2-7. Princeton sociologist and architecture fan Gutmans book remains the most realistic
assessment of the architectural profession in late twentieth century America.
678.

Gutman, 24-28.

679.

Gutman, 29.

680.

See for example Andy Pressman, Architecture 101: A Guide to the Design Studio,
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1993).

220
to whatever is being represented in the photograph. Thus, in an early 1980s ad teen model
Brooke Shields is pictured wearing Calvin Klein jeans with the caption Nothing comes between
me and my Calvins. There is of course a notorious pun in the caption, that Brooke Shields did
not wear any underwear underneath her skintight Calvins, leading the viewer to a satisfaction in
knowing this titillating fact about the young model. The effect is that we are supposed to know
who Brooke Shields is and what she represents (i.e. youth, sex appeal). If we make the
successful connection with the ad, we realize that if we wear Calvins (preferably without
underwear) we will be sexy, young, and sexually dangerous just like Brooke.
Thus, the ad offers up a connection for us to naturalize: Brooke Shields/sex/Calvin Klein
jeans and also offers us the possibility of the product giving us significance. Whoever did not
identify with Levis or Gloria Vanderbilt and wished to instead identify with the underwearless
Brooke, would buy Calvin Klein jeans. The product served to differentiate us. This differentiation
complicates class structure, obscuring it to a certain extent (although the lower class would
probably not be able to buy Calvin Kleins and would probably have to be satisfied with whatever
glamour Dickies and K-Mart jeans offer as their advertisements tend to promote value rather than
make any attempt at glamour). Advertising leads us into a system of social differentiation based
primarily on consumption, obscuring our relations to our work, changing them into questions of
lifestyle which could again be bought as a product.681
Architecture continues to become more and more spectacularized as we can see in
Structure, a chain clothing store based on a theme of architecturalness. The message of
Structure is that if you cant be a Fountainhead architect, you can at least wear architectureclothes and live vicariously through Eisenmans newest book682 or if you preferred to define
yourself with Michael Graves, you could wear the Dexter shoes that he promoted and use yellow
trace in the studio.683 In the world of the advertisement, there are so many options to us that we
are made to feel free and productive by exercising choice among them. While we cannot be
Peppers and members of the Pepsi Generation at the same time but neither of these contradicts
our eating of a Three Musketeers candy bar. We form meaning for ourselves out of the
combination of these different codes. Yet these processes of filling in are again not ones of
production but rather of consumption, not free, but rather confined to restricted, banalized

681.

Williamson, 46-47

682.

On the explosion of architecture culture, see Robert Gutman, Architectural Practice:

A Critical View, (New York: Princeton, 1988), 92.
683.

In 1986, in a first-year design studio I attended at Cornell, almost every student used
yellow trace and turned their Borco desk cover to its green side. Two years later, yellow trace had
disappeared from the studio, replaced by white trace and the Borco had been turned to its white
side.

221
channels. There are correct and incorrect choices and that is what the student can learn at
school, by being disciplined, as I will explain in the next chapter.684
It is in this sense that the student is able to live out the fantasy of designing ones life.
The aestheticizaton of everyday life that Modernists had hoped for appears to have made great
advances,685 but somehow something seems to have fallen amiss: the unity between art and life
has simply not taken place. Rather than being a place of integration, the Structure store is a
space of alienation. The Nietzschean promise of designing your own life is an empty one when
sold in a store.
The reason for this emptiness is its vulgarity: the student almost always cannot be the
Fountainhead architect she wants to be. The misery of this reality and the misery of production
that created the very objects that they, as consumers attempting to make an image of themselves
rather than as individuals trying to grow bought, is embodied in the very spectacle of
architecture itself. Only the possibility that the next product will bring them architecturalness, will
serve as the decisive entity to keep the charade in play.686

684. See also Williamson, 71. The proliferation of theory, whatever that is supposed to
mean, in the university appears to be heading down this road of consumption under the sign of
discipline as well.
685.

Jameson, Postmodernism, 48.

686.

Compare this with Debord, 69.

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5 The Architectural Subject: Innocent Eye and

Discipline
Words tend to become tools of knowledgetend to increase interest in the values of the
description of things and not in things themselveswords are for the mind, not the eye.
Wordsdeny us the mysterious communication by the eye.
Philip Johnson as quoted by Peter Eisenman687
In this chapter I will explore the politics of the pedagogy of cardboard architecture by
examining its goal, the reduction of subjectivity to the innocent eye or the eye of the child,
showing its materiality and its genealogical roots in nineteenth century theories of society and
education.688 As I will explain, at the interstice between child and professional art education
arose the belief that training of visual perception provides the subject with a means of perceiving
relationships in general.
After exploring the genealogy of the innocent eye and its arrival in architectural pedagogy
and thinking, I will examine the writings of two cardboard architects who have been among its
more noted educators, John Hejduk and Peter Eisenman, in order to shed light on its particular
repercussions in architecture.
Finally, mobilizing Pierre Bourdieus analysis of taste, I will discuss the role of the
innocent eye in legitimating a particular form of academic class and how, by reducing the subject
to a retinal phenomenon, it is linked to the reproducible image and accommodates in advance
recent technological changes for which the ideally-configured subject would be a switching
machine.

687.

Philip Johnson as quoted by Peter Eisenman in Introduction, Philip Johnson.

Writings, ed. Robert A. M. Stern, and Peter D. Eisenman. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1979) 10. Originally in Johnson, Why We Want Our Cities Ugly. 1967.
688.

The genealogy of modern vision, particularly the scientific research into opticality as it
plays a role in the formation of the modern observer, has been discussed by Jonathan Crary,
Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990). While Crarys research on the scientific redefinition of visual
perception beginning in the 1840s is essential for understanding the shift in perception that lead
to the innocent eye, he does not address the formation of the observer through disciplinary
practices in the education of children and art students where Crarys embodied eye is largely
subordinated to the innocent eye. I believe that Crarys blindness in this respect is more than
anything else a reaction to the continued prevalence of the innocent eye in art historical
scholarship that makes him unable to discern the actual import of the innocent eye to his field and
even in some ways to the innocence of his own project.

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The Innocent Eye
The phrase itself the innocent eye is generally attributed to late nineteenth century art
critic John Ruskin and it is to Ruskin as advocate of the innocent eye that we must turn to clarify
the concepts genealogy.689
The phrase was apparently first coined by John Ruskin when in his Elements of Drawing
he explained that in order to learn to draw one needed the innocence of the eyea sort of
childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what
they signify. This innocence is lost to us, Ruskin continued, as we learn conventional ways of
seeing from society: having once come to conclusions touching the signification of certain

689.

On the innocent eye within Ruskins broader obsession with eyes and visuality, see
Jay Fellows, The Failing Distance. The Autobiographical Impulse in John Ruskin, Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975, especially chapter one. Significantly, in his Mask of
Medusa, John Hejduk cites Fellowss book, 50, 90, includes a lengthy excerpt from it, 55 and
calls Fellows my friend in space, 5. He also dedicates his book Soundings, New York: Rizzoli,
1993 to Fellows, 5.
The most comprehensive treatment of Ruskins innocent eye is in Philippe Junod,
Transparence et Opacit. Essai sur les fondements thoriques de lart moderne. Pour une
nouvelle lecture de Konrad Fiedler, Collection Histoire et Thorie de lArt, ed. Jean-Claude
Marcad, Philippe Junod, Michel Thvoz (Lausanne: editions LAge dHomme, 1975(?)), 158-168.
Ruskins stare and its relation to modernism, are discussed in chapter one of Rosalind Krauss,
The Optical Unconscious, ed. Annette Michelson et al. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT
Press, 1993), 1-32. On the innocent eye as it operated for Ruskin and his English successors
Roger Fry and Clive Bell and see chapter IX, The Analysis of Vision in Form, in E. H. Gombrich,
Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Volume 5 of The A. W.
Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Bollingen Series XXXV (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961,
second revised edition; first published 1960), 291-329. For Gombrich, the innocent eye puts an
end to what he perceives as the dominant tradition of illusionism in art, 313. The innocent eye is
patently impossible, Gombrich argues, because it does not take into account the mental
processes necessary for any perception whatsoever, 298. Gombrichs interest in the innocent eye
ends before the model moves, via the child educators and Bauhaus art theorists, toward the
creation of a visual language and is hence too limited to be applied here.
The innocent eye parallels and perhaps informs Surrealist attempts to defamiliarize our
everyday world, however these attempts often go beyond Ruskins moment into an actual
temporal experience. This raises the point that the innocent eyes moment of illumination is just
one part of a larger class of modernist pursuits of a new (or anti-) vision that perhaps could be
mapped in another project. Following the argument in chapter two of Louis A. Sasss Madness
and Modernism, (New York: Basic Books, 1992), I would suggest that the schizophrenics truthtaking stare in which the world appears to her as both normal but transformed, both unreal and
extra-real through a condition of both absence and overabundance of meaning could be taken as
a model with which to try and understand this kind of vision.

224
colours, we always suppose that we see what we only know, and have hardly any consciousness
of the real aspect of the signs we have learned to interpret.690
Ruskin explained that as opposed to most people, blinded by preconceptions of the visual
world, a highly accomplished artist has always reduced himself as nearly as possible to this
condition of infantile sight.691 Aiming his Elements of Drawing at the development of this
condition of infantile sight, Ruskin started the student not with direct observation but with abstract,
formal lessons: shading squares evenly with a pen, producing smooth gradations of tone,
gradually moving on to the representation of light and shadow and only with time into color and
composition.
Ruskin initially developed his method and wrote the Elements of Drawingwhile at Working
Mans College in London in the 1850s where he hoped to train his lower class students in artistic
skills. As he explained:
(irrespective of the differences in individual temper and character) the excellence of an
artist, as such, depends wholly on refinement of perception, and that it is this, mainly,
which a master or a school can teach; so that while powers of invention distinguish man
from man, powers of perception distinguish school from school. All great schools enforce
delicacy of drawing and subtlety of sight.692
Ruskin did not however intend his system to be only a means of teaching artists and
craftsmen, he offered it as a means of training the upper-class lite to increase their powers of
observation. Appointed the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University in 1869, Ruskin took
on a new pedagogical imperative: beyond the professional training of artists and even art
appreciation he intended to teach the student to draw as an essential component of a general,
liberal education for the upper classes. Drawing was, Ruskin believed, not just a useful skill, but
rather the means for training in visual perception.693 This subtlety of sight, he hoped, would lead
to a power of the eye and a power of the mind wholly different from that known to any other
discipline, and which could only be known by the experienced student he only could know how
the eye gained physical power by attention to delicate details.694

690.

John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, (New York: Dover Publications, 1971) , 2728. The Elements of Drawing also had a critical role to play in the Impressionist movement. See
Lawrence Campbells introduction in the same book, viii-ix.
691.

Ruskin, 27-28.

692.

Ruskin, 12.

693.

Robert Hewison, John Ruskin. The Argument of the Eye, (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1976), 170-2.
694.

Ruskin, quoted in Hewison, 172.

225
Ruskins desire to train the student to think by training him to see was not isolated. The
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought two developments significant for our purposes: a
new scopic regime, or way of conceiving how we see, and a new attention to the art education of
the child through perceptual training. Both had a significant impact on modern art theory and
instruction of which Ruskins concept of the innocent eye was only one, particularly mature
moment.
The first change was the result of an optical revolution that Jonathan Crary has explored
in The Techniques of the Observer. Crary explains that in the eighteenth century model of vision,
the eye was thought to be a transparent lens reflecting the reality of the outside world into the
quiet, dark room of the inner soul. In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century this model
was replaced by one of embodied vision in which the eye was no longer transparent but rather
acted as a distorting element capable of producing visual effects in its own right.695 With this
understanding of the fallible eye many artists began to realize that the Western system of
perspective was an inadequate means to represent reality.
But this embodiment of vision in the body paradoxically also led to its disembodiment in
Ruskins autonomous opticality. Ruskins innocent eye had predecent in eighteenth and
nineteenth century case studies of blind individuals who had been healed. The case of a thirteenor fourteen-year old boy healed by William Chelsden in 1728 was particularly influential on optical
theorists and philosophers of the time.696 According to Chelsden, his patient initially knew not
the shape of anything, nor any one thing from another, however different in shape of magnitude

695.

Jonathan Crary, Modernizing Vision, Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster.
Discussions in Contemporary Culture, (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988) 31-32. and Jonathan Crary,
Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, An October
Book, ed. Joan Copjec, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press, 1990). While Crarys research on the scientific redefinition of visual perception
beginning in the 1840s is essential for understanding the shift in perception that lead to the
innocent eye, he does not address the formation of the observer through disciplinary practices in
the education of children and art students where Crarys embodied eye is largely subordinated to
the innocent eye. I believe that Crarys blindness in this respect is more than anything else a
reaction to the continued prevalence of the innocent eye in art historical scholarship that makes
him unable to discern the actual import of the innocent eye to his field and even in some ways to
the innocence of his own project. A start along those lines has been made in Michael J. Morgan,
Molyneuxs Question. Vision, Touch and the Philosophy of Perception, (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1977). For a broader introduction to these themes in the context of perspective
see also chapter V of Martin Kemp, The Science of Art; Optical Themes in Western Art From
Brunelleschi to Seurat, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 221-257.
The development of the innocent eye in art appreciation is treated in the excellent
forthcoming work by Mark Jarzombek, The Dialectic of the Innocent Eye. Aesthetic
Experientialism in the Twentieth Century. Jarzombeks research into the gendering of the
innocent eye is essential for further research along these lines.
696.

Among them Voltaire, Diderot, and Condillac. See Morgan, 16.

226
and for two months could not understand pictures, having considerd them only as party-coloured
planes, or surfaces diversified with paint; but even then he was no less surprizd, expecting the
pictures would feel like the things they representand asked which was the lying sense, feeling
or seeing?697 Similarly, Ruskins attempt to do away with convention in vision was an attempt
create an eye that would register not a perception of the world but a perception of vision itself, as
it reacts to external stimuli and to its own distortions by somehow shutting off the mental
processing of the image.
Ruskins method of learning to draw by copying perception rather than preconceptions of
the order of the outside world stood in contrast to the system of classical perspective. The color
fields Ruskin described were devoid of any signification, any correspondance to objects, existing
only at a level of pure opticality.
More directly, the innocent eye is also the direct result of Ruskins obsession with drawing
from observation. Drawing was his means of understanding the world, hence his recommendation
of drawing as a way of learning to think. As Kristine Ottesen Garrigan has written in her work on
Ruskin,
Drawing was for him a prime method of recording facts and impressions, whether of
nature or of art, as well as a way of learning the difficulty of the thing a method of
study he frequently commended to his readers. Despite his profound pleasure in
mountain scenery or splendid sunsets, therefore, and his minute observation of minerals
or leaves, Ruskin in fact spent a great deal of his time looking at the world as a surface
rendered in drawings and paintings or else he was in the process of reducing threedimensional reality to a surface himself.698
The color fields Ruskin described were devoid of any signification, existing at a level of
pure opticality.Ruskins innocent eye was a moment of pre-linguistic understanding, a pure
moment of perception and undivided, lived experience. Thus it is an anticipation of what
philosopher Edmund Husserl called the phenomenological reduction. While there is probably no
causal relationship between Ruskin and Husserl, the implications of Husserls ideas and Derridas

697.

William Chelsden, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, XXXIV, 1728,

447-52 quoted in Kemp, 235-236 and more extensively in Morgan, 19-21.
698.

Kristine Ottesen Garrigan, Ruskin on Architecture. His Thought and Influence,

(Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 179. Garrigan makes the
interesting point that Venice is a city in which three-dimensions collapse into two via the flat
regularity of its facades, the shimmering quality of the city in the water that denies the solidity of
the building, and in the dialectic between the city and the image of itself that pervades utterly.
This latter dialectic, she argues, leads to a fusion of art and life. 179-181. Whether this fusion
prefigures a Schulte-Sssean avant-garde (in which art is sublated into life) or the spectacle is left
up to the reader to decide.
Garrigan also raises the point that Ruskins vision may have been impaired in such a way
that he would not have been able to see depth. 184

227
criticism of them have a direct bearing upon this analysis of the innocent eye.Husserl begins his
analysis of our consciousness of time by drawing on a description of how we see when we open
our eyes:
When we open our eyes, we see into Objective space this means (as reflective
observation reveals) that we have a visual content of sensation which establishes an
intuition of space, an appearance of things situated in such and such a way. If we
abstract all transcendental interpretation and reduce perceptual appearance to the
primary given content, the latter yields the continuum of the field of vision, which is
something quasi-spatial but not, as it were, space or a plane surface in space. Roughly
described, this continuum is a twofold, continuous multiplicity. We discover relations such
as juxtaposition, superimposition, interpenetration, unbroken lines, which fully enclose a
portion of the field, and so on.699
As Ruskin explained that the child can see the true shapes of things because it is
unencumbered by the weight of convention, Husserl argued that at the moment we open our eyes
we can see the true shapes of the visual field, recapitulating Chelsdens patients experience on a
microscale. This vision, Husserl explained, could not give us Objective-spatial relations, but
instead gave us a phenomenal intuition of space.700
Hence the main argument of Husserls phenomenological project: if we cannot
experience the Objective world, we have to bracket it as phenomenon. By executing the
phenomenological reduction, bracketing the entire world, we can return to the origins of our
knowledge which our everyday thinking obscures. The phenomenological residuum, all that is left
unaffected by the phenomenological reduction is the region of Being that phenomenology aims to
study: pure consciousness, the present of self-presence.701
In his book on Husserl, Speech and Phenomenon, Jacques Derrida addresses precisely
this question of presence. For Husserl, the moment of self-presence would have to be utterly
pure, free of outside contaminants such as language or time. Language would make no sense in
a moment of consciousness in which everything would be present to itself. Temporality could not
enter into this pure instant to avoid contaminating it with signs, as Derrida writes, The present of
self-presence would be as indivisible as the blink of an eye.702 But Derrida deconstructs this

699.

Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin

Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 23-24.
700.

Husserl, 24.

701.

A good introduction to Husserls project of phenomenological reduction is Joseph J.

Kockelmans, A First Introduction to Husserls Phenomenology, (Louvain: Editions E. Nauwelaerts
for Duquesne University Press, 1967), 133-143.
702.

Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of
Signs, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, ed. John

228
moment by suggesting that there must be a duration to the blink that closes the eye: the present
of self-presence can only occur in comparison with, and hence as an aspect of, temporality he
explains.703 Husserls instant of self-presence is a myth, reproducing logocentrisms faith in
presence and mistrust of language at a particularly sophisticated level.
Derridas critique of Husserl holds significant implications for the model of the innocent
eye. Both Husserl and Ruskin believed that reducing ones vision to a momentary point of prelinguistic seeing, would create a heightened subjectivity, a pure eye caught-up in the act of being
able to devote itself to pure seeing through the jettisoning of all other contaminants. Language,
temporality and hence history would be excluded from the innocent eye, its greatest enemies.
And as Derrida has shown, the innocent eye is a false moment, forever unattainable.
The Child-Art Movement
The embodiment of the eye and its subsequent autonomization in perception is tied to the
second change in visual culture that concerns us. The interest that Ruskin showed in visual
education was not isolated, but rather was part of a long struggle among educators to recognize
child art as a productive activity, capable of producing both interesting results and training the
childs perceptions. It is during this attempt to direct child art in productive ways that the concept
of a primal visual language would be worked out.704

Wild (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973; Speech and Phenomena originally
published in French as La Voix et le Phnomne (Presses Universitaires de France, 1967)), 59.
My discussion of Husserl is indebted to the parallel S. David Deitcher draws between art
instructor Hoyt Shermans flash lab and the Husserlian reduction, in his excellent dissertation
Teaching the Late Modern Artist: From Mnemonics to The Technology of Gestalt, Ph.D. City
University of New York, 1989, p. 88-89. While the methods of mnemonic instruction that informed
Shermans lab (in which slides would be flashed momentarily on a screen in a darkened room for
students of art and members of the armed forces to draw from memory so as to improve their
vision) are not relevant to this dissertation, there are striking parallels in terms of the general
educational presuppositions of Sherman and the art and architectural educators discussed in this
text.
On the Husserlian moment and disembodied vision, see also the work by Deitchers
dissertation advisor Rosalind Krauss, The Blink of An Eye, The States of Theory, ed. David
Carroll. Irvine Studies in the Humanities, (New York: Columbia University Press of New York,
1990). Krauss sites vision within the body and the body in desire. Unfortunately by reducing
vision to desire, she domesticates it, losing the possibility of reading vision in terms of visual
ideology.
703.
704.

Derrida, 64. Derrida also makes the same argument with respect to language.

This link has been pointed out in a number of texts on art history. For a recent
example see J. Abbott Miller, Elementary School, in Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, ed., The
ABC's of snl, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991).

229
The new attitude toward child art traced its beginnings to Jean-Jacques Rousseaus basic
premise of education outlined in the first sentence of his mile: God makes all things good; man
meddles with them and they become evil.705 In mile Rousseau imagined that he was in a
woodland chateau, raising the rich orphan after whom the book was named. For miles
education, Rousseau rejected education through discipline, contending that it produced tyrants
and slaves. Instead, he believed that the boy should learn by experience and that the task of the
teacher was to provide appropriate stimuli.
These stimuli would control the child through deception, offering the boy choice but
controlling him through the choices available:
Let him always think he is master while you are realy master. There is no subjection so
complete as that which preserves the forms of freedom; it is thus that the will itself is
taken captive. Is not this poor child, without knowledge, strength, or wisdom, entirely at
your mercy? Are you not master of his whole environment so far as it affects him? Cannot
you make of him what you please? His work and play, his pleasure and pain, are they
not, unknown to him, under your control? No doubt he ought only to do what he wants,
but he ought to want to do nothing but what you want him to do. He should never take a
step you have not foreseen, nor utter a word you could not foretell.706
Most of the child educators who followed Rousseau provided visual activities for the child,
letting him follow his own innocent eye. Chief among this pedagogys early proponents was
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1745-1827). In a move that prefigured later turns to primitivism,
Pestalozzi attempted to map a system of education based on an examination of how a peasant
woman would instruct her children.707 The result was a system based on teaching what he called

705. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, mile, Everyman's Library (New York: Dutton, 1974;
Everyman's Library edition first published in 1911, first published in French in 1762), 5. For
Rousseaus impact on the child art educators see Stuart MacDonald, History and Philosophy of
Art Education, (London: University of London, 1970), 5. George Boas, in The Cult of Childhood,
Studies of the Warburg Institute, ed. E. H. Gombrich (London: The Warburg Institute, University of
London, 1966) provides the single most sustained attempt to write a history of ideas on the
attraction of the innocent child. Rousseaus impact on the idea of the child as a cultural primitive
to be held up as a pure and unadulterated is, for Boas, the major turning point in the reevaluation
of the child, who had generally been looked down upon until that point. The cult of the child, he
writes, artificially invests the child with qualities that previously had been invested in the primitive.
Curiously, Boas sees the United States as the ultimate center of this phenomenon since the late
nineteenth century. 9.
In what could be, in the right hands, a stumbling-block for contemporary excremental
theory, Boas concludes by historicizing Norman O. Browns argument in Life Against Death that
life will only conquer death when we accept the excremental vision of the child as final as
nothing more than a reworking of the topos of the perfection of the childlike. 102.
706.
707.

Rousseau, 84-85.

Hugh M. Pollard, Pioneers of Popular Education, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood

Press, Publishers, 1974; originally published London: J. Murray, 1956), 23.

230
Anschauungthe immediate and direct impression produced by the world on our inner and outer
senses the impressions of the moral world on our moral sense and of the physical universe on
our bodily senses.708
Anschauung, Pestalozzi believed, following Rousseaus system of education, could not
be directly taught but could and had to be fostered under the care of the instructor. The analogy
he gave was of a plant in the garden: the gardener would plant a seed and would have to provide
a proper balance of conditions for it to grow.709 Rather then force students into drills and
disciplinary exercises, Pestalozzis instructor would devise coherent, nurturing activities in the
form of observations of objects for children to engage in. Pestalozzi privileged vision over orality,
stating that the child should ideally be shown the object, although if the object might not be at
hand, the youngster could be shown its image. Thus, the instructor was not to use words to
describe an object as that would lead to a conventional interpretation that would be divorced from
actual perception.
While Pestalozzi urged the student to express Anschauung through sounds, images, and
concepts, the creation of images was his foremost concern. The student would be encouraged to
perceive more clearly by observing, measuring and drawing objects. In particular, Pestalozzi
believed that the child needed to study the simple elements of the laws of form, an alphabet of
geometric forms, such as lines, shapes, and angles in order to learn to observe and represent
abstractions. Once the language of form was mastered and the student could draw, Pestalozzi
believed, she or he could begin the study of actual writing.710
Pestalozzis work reverberated throughout nineteenth century education. Its most
significant line descent came through Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) who made visual language
as a prime component of education. While in architectural history Froebel is principally seen as
the creator of a somewhat odd game of blocks that the young Frank Lloyd Wright played with,711
Wrights experience was not at all extraordinary. Froebel had a pervasive influence in late
nineteenth and early twentieth century education.712 In the latter half of the nineteenth century,

708.

S. J. Curtis, A Short History of Educational Ideas, (Slough, England: University

Tutorial Press, 1977, fifth edition; first published 1953), 341.
709.

Curtis, 341.

710.

Curtis, 341-345.

711.

Robert C. Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright, his life and his architecture, (New York:
Wiley, 1979), 9.
712.

Froebels significance can be gauged by the words of R. H. Quick, a turn-of-thecentury educator: All the best tendencies of modern thought on education culminate in what

231
the use of Froebels system was widespread and many children were exposed to it, among them
not only Wright but also Wassily Kandinsky and Le Corbusier and other artists and architects of
the first half of this century.713
Froebel conceived of mental development as the unfolding of inner aims through the
learning of the world and the self. Concentrating on the early years of child development, Froebel
called his school a kindergarten, a garden of children along Pestalozzian lines in which the seed
of the child would be given a nourishing environment. Activity was at the center of his educational
method and Froebel felt that play was both the means by which children would express
themselves and the means through which they would become educated. To create a productive
condition for play, Froebel developed a series of didactic materials, the most widely known and
influential of which were his Gifts and Occupations.
Developed between 1835 and 1850, the Gifts and Occupations were intended to teach a
child unity in diversity through form as well as the mathematical relations that govern the harmony
of the universe. The Gifts consisted of a series of objects given to children at intervals from the
age of two months upwards to age six. The first Gift was made up of six soft woolen balls in the
three primary and three secondary colors to introduce the ideas of similarity and contrast. The
second added a wooden sphere, cube, and cylinder in order to teach the children tactility,
lightness and heaviness, different shapes and other qualities. The following Gifts consisted of
blocks that could be subdivided to teach students construction. Later Gifts introduced drawing
and the succeeding Occupations consisted of activities such as sewing on cards with threads of
different colors, paper cutting, and clay modeling.714
Political conservatism following the 1848 uprisings led the Prussian government to
suspect anything deviating from standard schooling practice and ban Froebels kindergarten
system. In response, both Froebel and Pestalozzis systems were taken up by a number of
prominent women who disseminated their ideas throughout Europe and North America. In the
United States, the kindergarten movement met with some success after being introduced as
simultaneously a place for upper-class children to learn the principles of art and as a proper
foundation for an industrial education.715 The Froebelians sought in their method an alternative to
the rationalized, dehumanizing industrial civilization a resistant subject, able to express itself

was said and done by Friedrich Froebel. R. H. Quick, Essays on Educational Reformers.
Longmans, Green, 1904. p. 384 quoted in Curtis, 368.
713.

Lupton and Miller, 18.

714.

Arthur D. Efland, A History of Art Education: Intellectual and Social Currents in

Teaching the Visual Arts, (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1990), 1213.
715.

Efland, 126-7.

232
and understand visually, generally for the well-off while the Pestalozzian system was
advocated by educators attempting to come up with new methods of educating the masses in
drawing for industry, principally in textiles, to generate artisans capable of endlessly producing
new designs for the consumers desiring eye.716
The Primitive Eye
Another crucial development in Froebels philosophy was his tenet that a childs
development recapitulated the history of his race.717 In succeeding years it became a
commonplace among educators to think of an individual childs development recapitulating all
human development. This theory, known as biogenetics, was summed up in 1874 by one of its
originators, Heinrich Haeckel, in a now-famous law: the history of individual development, or
Ontogeny, is a short and quick recapitulation of palaeontological development, or Phylogeny.718
Haeckels scientific findings only seemed to confirm the earlier notions of Goethe and Hegel who
drew parallels between the education of the world through historical development and the
education of the child in the classroom.719
English philosopher and psychologist James Sully took up the thesis of recapitulation,
arguing that the childs evolution was a brief rsum of the more important features in the slow
upward progress of the species.720 For Sully, a number of characteristic traits in childrens
drawings are reflected in those of untutored savages.721 Sully followed Froebels idea of the
childs development: the childs eye at a surprisingly early period loses its primal innocence,
grows sophisticated in the sense that instead of seeing what is really presented it sees, or

716.

Efland, 94-114.

717.

Friedrich Froebel, The Education of Man, The International Education Series (New
York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1887; originally published in German as De
Menschenerzeihung, die Erziehungs- Unterrichts- und Lehrkunst, angesterbt in der allgemeinen
deutschen Erziehungsanstalt zu Keilhau, dargestellt von dem Vorsteher derselben, F. W. A.
Froebel. 1. Band bis zum begonnenen Knabenalter. Keilhau, 1826. Verlag der Anstalt. Leipzig in
Commission bei C. F. Doerffling. 497 S.), 40-1.
718.

Stuart MacDonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, (London: University
of London Press, Ltd., 1970) , 333.
719.

MacDonald, 334.

720.

James A. Sully, Studies of Childhood, New ed. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
for Aberdeen University Press, 1896), 8. On Sully see Gordon Sutton, Artisan or Artist? A History
of the Teaching of Art and Crafts in English Schools, (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1967), 223.
721.

Sully, 395.

233
pretends to see, what knowledge and logic tell it is

there.722

Against these corrupting influences

of convention, Sully looked to a sense of abstraction in a childs early drawings: The abstract
treatment itself, in spite of its inadequacy, is after all, in the direction of a true art, which in its
essential nature is selective and suggestive rather than literally reproductive.723 An early idea of
the visual language is latent in Sullys observation that The little artist is still much more a
symbolist than a naturalist.724 Until corrupted by convention, Sullys child attempted to represent
by using drawing as a language rather than a mirror of reality: The little descriptor does not need
to compare the look of his drawing with that of a real object: it is right as a description
anyhow.725
English educator Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), as one commentator remarked, gave
mile an English nineteenth-century setting726 by applying evolution to the study of child
education. Influenced by Rousseau via Pestalozzi, Spencer followed Lamarckian evolutionary
principles in arguing that the mind is an organ which can be developed through use and exercise.
Spencer believed that with each successive generation, the properly exercised brain would
evolve further and he regarded childrens attempts to draw as pleas for precisely the kind of
training they needed to continue the evolution of Homo Sapiens, visual training.727 Art, Spencer
explained, is tied to science in its emphasis on observation and visual training would serve as a
means of increasing a childs observational faculties and hence benefit scientific thinking.728
Spencer also contributed to the pool of ideas that would form the visual language by
pinpointing a link between art and language in what he called the major evolutionary step in cave
painting and hieroglyphics: Strange as it seems then, all form of written language, of painting, of
sculpture, have a common root in those rude drawings of skins and cavern walls.729

722.

Sully, 396.

723.

Sully, 396.

724.

Sully, quoted in William Viola, Child Art, (London: University of London Press Ltd.,
1944, second edition; first edition published 1942), 8.
725.

Sully, 396.

726.

J.W. Adamson, quoted in MacDonald, 321

727.

MacDonald, 322.

728.

Sutton, 68-70.

729.

Spencer, quoted in MacDonald, 330.

234
The most influential of child art educators in the early twentieth century was however
Franz Cizek, an associate of the Vienna Secession. Cizek believed that in their art children
followed eternal laws of form that also existed in primitive art.730 Cizek explained that ancient,
primitive and child art obeyed the same laws so long as they were uncorrupted by education.731
Working in the Froebelian paradigm, Cizek felt that the child should, rather than trying to
copy nature, reach within, where symbolically grounded art would be found.732 To let the child
grow and follow his or her own potential, in his class for children at the Vienna School of Arts and
Crafts, Cizek purported to let child rather than instructor take control of the direction of his art. In
practice, however, Cizek had a preconceived idea of child art that often resulted in Secessionist
designs and apparently discouraged children from pursuing ideas that did not conform to it.733
In spite of Cizeks coercion of his children his endless interest in proselytizing for child art
profoundly influenced artists in the twentieth century. Cizek was closely associated with artists
and architects of the Secession, among them Otto Wagner, Josef Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, Karl
Moser, and Gustav Klimt.734 Like the Secession artists, from the time he arrived at the academy
onward, Cizek rejected the established ideas of art which he saw around him, believing that they
were inconsistent with the demands of modernity, as this quote from Cizeks disciple Wilhelm
Viola shows:
I once saw Cizek sitting with a book by which he was completely carried away. If I
remember correctly the title of the book was Picture Book of an American Architect.
There was nothing to see except long streets of giant American cities, bridges, grain

730.

Sutton, 263.

731.

Wilhelm Viola, Child Art and Franz Cizek, (Vienna: Austrian Junior Red Cross, 1936),
25. Viola was a disciple of Cizeks and spread his gospel in the English-speaking world through
this book and through his later, much-reprinted Child Art, (London: University of London Press
Ltd, 1944, second edition; first edition published 1942). The second chapter of Violas Child Art is
perhaps the most detailed and sustained inquiry in the relation between child art and primitive art
extent.
732.

MacDonald. 344.

733.

Efland, 198. This can be confirmed from the dialogue between Cizek and his child
artists in lessons that Viola transcribed in Chapter XII of Child Art, 112-193.
734.

MacDonald, 340. Wilhelm Viola in his Child Art and Franz Cizek, writes that They
[the Secessionists] were searching for new art forms. Cizek was in close contact with the leaders
of the Vienna Secession, particularly Otto Wagner, Olbrich, Moser, and Klimt. He showed these
young painters and architects some of the work of his children. There was great rejoicing! Some
went so far as to say that these were the foundations of the new art education. Why go back to
the Chinese, Japanese, ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Negroes? Here was that which they
sought. 12.

235
elevators, trains, etc. That is creative, he said. But painters should be forbidden to
imitate or copy nature, which can be done much better by photographers. Art can only
come out of creativeness. Then it is strong and elementary. Otherwise it is not art.735
The 1898 The Child As Artist exhibit held in the Hamburg Museum was a landmark in
establishing the links between child and primitive art in its juxtaposition of drawings by local
schoolchildren, Indian children, and Eskimo art to prove their similarities.736 The appeal to the
childlike was tied to the Enlightenment notion that distance in space (away from the West)
equaled distance in history, a history that in turn was recapitulated by the development of the
child. Thus, for evidence of the primal vision, one could look both to the child and the noble
savage.737
The Artists Eye
Both Ruskins innocent eye and the child art educators idea of a visual language of
simple objects as a means of learning to see were imported into modernist art education under
Johannes Ittens Vorkurs at the Bauhaus. Itten believed that every pupil is burdened with a mass
of learned material which he must throw off in order to arrive at experience and his own
awareness.738 Instead, Itten taught what he believed was the fundamental artistic language of
composition based on harmony and contrast.
When Moholy-Nagy took over Ittens post as director of the Vorkurs in 1922, he was
confronted with and adopted parts of Ittens basic theory of teaching that was in accord with his
own constructivist ideals, even if Ittens intuitive method proved problematic.739 As I have

735.

Viola, Child Art and Franz Cizek, 28-9.

736.

J. Abbott Miller, Elementary School, in Lupton and Miller, eds., The ABCs of snl,

18.
737. For an introduction to the uses of the primitive in modern art, see Marianna
Torgonovick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, (Chicago: University Of Chicago
Press, 1990) also Rosalind Krauss, Giacometti, "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art, ed. William
Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, distributed by New York Graphic Society Books, Little,
Brown and Company, Boston, 1984) 503-534 and the essays in Rosalind Krauss and Jane
Livingston, ed., LAmour Fou, (New York: Abbeville Press for The Corcoran Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC, 1985).
738.

Itten in leaflet for 1922 Vorkurs exhibit in Hans Maria Wingler, The Bauhaus. Weimar
Dessau Berlin Chicago, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1969, first published in German
as Das Bauhaus, Cologne: Verlag Gebr. Rasch & Co., Bramsche and M DuMont Schauberg,
1962, second revised edition 1968), 64, also quoted in Franciscono, 193.
739.

Franciscono, 240.

236
discussed in chapter one, Moholy-Nagy was to take on this interest in opticality and, with Kepes,
attempt to use a scientific analysis of movement in vision as a basis for a design theory.
Moholy-Nagy was aware of the history of the innocent eye and referred to the child art
theorists Froebel, Pestalozzi and Cizek is his writings.740 Albers, who appears to have shared
Moholy-Nagys attitudes to the innocent eye, was influenced by Ruskins writings in particular,
explaining that he wanted to open eyes, and frequently quoting Ruskin from volume 3 of Modern
Painters: the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell
what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can
think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one.741
The Architects Eye
Walter Gropius shared his former colleagues interest in a new way of seeing, and in his
Scope of Total Architecture, he cited them as the exponents of a new visual grammar,742 before
going on to describe his own idea of visuality.
For Gropius, vision was mediated by the subconscious. But since the teacher cannot
teach the subconscious, he must instead show the student reality. In order to do this, he must
strip the student of intellectual knowledge and bring him to the unprejudiced condition of a child.
Gropius quoted Thomas Aquinas to support his argument as saying: I must empty my soul so
that God may enter. Visual communication, Gropius explained, is more direct than verbal
communication, owing to its access to the subconscious, and a grammar of how visual forms can
influence subconscious sensations must be established. For Gropius, this grammar would be
restricted to optical illusions with concrete outcomes. The eye, which he saw as analogous to a
camera, have distortions that would be objective and measurable. With the knowledge of these
distortions the architect would be able to make designs to stimulate the retina of the observer for
greatest effect.743
This is the point at which Klaus Herdeg has critiqued the Gropius/Harvard teaching
method in his book The Decorated Diagram. The diagram was, Herdeg explains, the

740.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Education and the Bauhaus, in Richard Kostelanetz, ed.,

Moholy-Nagy, (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 167, originally published in Focus, II
(Winter, 1938).
741. Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College, (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1987), 17.
742.

Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, World Perspectives, ed. Ruth Nanda
Anshen (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1955, originally published 1943), 37.
743.

Gropius, 24.

237
diagrammatic, dull, unaesthetic plan of the Gropius/Harvard method while the decoration
consisted of form intended to induce a retinal excitement in the observers eye.744 While this
retinal stimulation was meant to trigger pleasure, even desire, Herdeg explains that it ultimately
impoverished form by removing any sense of precedent as well as the potential for the creation of
wanted and control of unwanted metaphoric meaning.745 But The Decorated Diagram is not just
any analysis of the early postwar years. Rather, closely allied to cardboard architecture and Colin
Rowes position within it, Herdegs book is the product of a point of view that shares cardboard
architectures attitude toward vision.746 By looking at what Herdeg argues for we can generate a
reentry point into our investigation of cardboard architecture.
Herdegs interest is always one internal to architecture. The retinal stimulation of the
decorated diagram is faulty, Herdeg argues, because proponents of Gropiuss method are unable
and unwilling to create a formal structure that would give the visual appearance of the building an
underlying unity.747 But Herdegs own ideal formal structure was ultimately limited to issues of
site, circulation, and a localized idea of the buildings function. Herdegs goal was to unify formal
research in the studio through what he called a rational design discourse based on a critical
theory of history of forms, spaces and objects.748 In the concluding paragraph of his essay,
Herdeg explicitly stated his intentions as follows: in the service of the primacy of form and space
in architectureto establish that visual truths are equal to verbal and visual truths, to clarify some
old mid-twentieth-century confusions about what architecture ought to be, and to encourage a
sharper, more independent, and certainly more critical eye for future encounters with
architecture.749

744.

Herdeg, 89.

745.

Herdeg, 92-96.

746.

Herdeg also describes his project in Wlfflinian terms: The principal method used to
examine and explicate visual as well as verbal formulations is one of analysis and comparison,
rarely used in architectural criticism. Phenomena are laid side by side rather than end to end so
as to avoid implying a rigid cause and effect relationship. Thus the subject matter of the critique
as a whole can remain open to further interpretation by the reader. vii.
747.

Herdeg, 26.

748.

Herdeg, 96.

749.

Herdeg, 99. In this, Herdegs project is quite successful and remains an exemplar for
formal analysis in architecture. Perhaps then it is not surprising that Herdeg thanks Clement
Greenberg, whose conveniently naive inquiries about all those ugly buildings triggered the
writing of this book. vii.

238
Herdeg thus re-states the pedagogical method of cardboard architecture: to hone vision
to a rigorous, formal apparatus by teaching it a visual language. Rather than mapping the
subconscious, Herdegs project maps forms as handed down from the tradition of architecture. It
is precisely this kind of knowledge that is necessary to construct the visual language of cardboard
architecture and later in this chapter I will explain how this history of visual truths is essential for
the properly functioning innocent eye.
Hejduks Eye
The document of the pedagogical system under John Hejduk and his influence at Cooper
Union, Education of An Architect: A Point of View offered a persuasive and influential model of
what cardboard architectural education should be, especially in its first year.750 By examining it
we can better begin to understand the roll of the innocent eye in cardboard architecture.
Emphasizing vision from the title itself on, Education of an Architect: A Point of View
aimed to lead the student to the innocent eye through the exploration of the primary condition of
architecture as the compositional shaping of space, in turn re-entrenching the artistic autonomy of
the discipline and making it stronger through self-critique. Ulrich Franzen announced this as the
intent of the project in his introduction to the catalog where he uses the Rowe and Slutzky
Transparency essay to relate the underlying premises of architecture at the Cooper Union. The
importance of the essay for the pedagogy at Cooper Union Franzen explained is in its use of a
trained eye without recourse to irrelevant meaning, the innocent eye. This trained visual
sensibility, as Franzen called it, a reawakened connection between eye and mind, is formed to
act as nothing less that an eye in the hurricane of chaos and upheaval of the late sixties and early
seventies.751
Hejduk himself had been interested in training the eye since his first project as a student
in Cooper Union in 1947. In a two-dimensional studio taught by Henrietta Schutz, Hejduk and his
fellow students spent a year creating an illustrated book for Aesops fables. Hejduk later
explained that this exercise was one of unique importance as a tool for the introduction to
architecture. Through a rigorous discipline it trained the eye (visual sensibility) and the hand
(tactile sensibility). We learned how to handle a paint brush, and began the exorcising of ones
innate feelings toward color, form and space. This exorcising was accomplished by a long period
of training with pure forms until the student learned about visual relationships. Story telling came

750.

On the influence of The Education of An Architect, see Val K. Warke, Education of

an Architect and Tadao Ando: The Yale Studio & Current Works, The Journal of Architectural
Education 43 4 (Summer 1990): 46.
751.

Ulrich Franzen, Introduction, The Education of An Architect: A Point of View, ed.

John Hejduk. (New York: The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 1971) 5.

239
later, Hejduk wrote. Meaning, language, and subjectivity could be tackled only once the innocent
eye was attained.752
Hejduk appears to have followed Schutzs example throughout his pedagogy and his own
work, at least until the change in his design methodology around 1974 to what he calls an
architecture of pessimism.753 The problems, or probings as Hejduk calls them, of his early
projects were, he states, derived from Schutzs two-dimensional design class.754
In his Texas Houses, developed during his years at Texas, Hejduk attempted to refine the
visual language that he would go on to teach at Cooper Union:
The Texas Houses are the result of a search into generating principles of form and space
in architecture. There is an attempt to understand certain essences in regard to
architectural commitment with the hope of expanding a vocabulary.
The realization that works in the Arts are the embodiment of specific plastic points of
view, that the mind and the hand are one, working on primary principles, and of filling
these principles through juxtaposition of basic relationships within the vocabulary of point,
line, plane, volume, opened up the possibility of argumentation.755
Hejduk explained that he arrived at the Texas Houses through a deterministic and logical
method of design: The first moves are arbitrary but once the arbitrary beginning is committed,
once the initial intuitions are experienced, it then becomes necessary that the organism proceeds
through its natural evolution. Since the nine-square grid had been invented by the Texas
Rangers, it is perhaps not surprising that all of Hejduks Texas Houses were based on a ninesquare grid.
In Hejduks next major project, the Diamond series, he addressed the relation between
two-dimensional painting and representation and three-dimensional architectural space by tipping
axonometric drawings on end to ceate flattened effects. He explained his method in a text that
accompanied the publication of the Diamond Houses in 1969.
When a square form in plan is drawn in isometric, it appears to the eye as a threedimensional projection. When more than one floor plan is projected in isometric, it builds
up quite naturally and still appears as a three-dimensional representation. When the
diamond is drawn in isometric and has a plan of more than one floor, a very special
phenomenon occurs. The forms appear two-dimensional; the stories overlap each other

752.

John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works 1947-1983, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 27.

753.

On the architecture of pessimism, see Hejduk, Mask, 63.

754.

Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 35.

755.

Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 41.

240
in primary two-dimensional vision. The form tips forward in isometric towards the picture
plane; they are three-dimensional yet a stronger reading of two-dimensionality
predominates.756
Hejduks concern for geometry thus became tied into a concern with the effects of
representation on architecture and its perception. By the late 1960s and early 1970s,
contemporary with the Education of an Architect exhibit and catalog, Hejduk was involved in a
series of houses dominated by an uncompromising geometric condition. These projects were
neither built nor expected to be built, rather they existed solely as experiments. Perhaps because
the projects only existed in representation, Hejduks work during this period had a thin, atectonic
quality, at its most solid only the thickness of cardboard in a model. This reached its culmination
in Hejduks Wall House, a project organized around a thin wall that served no purpose except to
force the architect to deal with its formal implications.
Hejduk linked the thinness of his architecture, presence and instantaneity:
The wall itself is the most present condition possible. Life has to do with walls; were
continuously going in and out, back and forth, and through them. A wall is the quickest,
the thinnest, the thing were always transgressing, and that is why I see it as the
present, the most surface condition. The wall is a neutral condition. Thats why its
always painted gray. And the wall represents the same condition as the moment of the
hypotenuse in the Diamond houses its the moment of greatest repose, and at the
same time the greatest tension. It is a moment of passage. The wall heightens that sense
of passage, and by the same token, its thinness heightens the sense of it being just a
momentary conditionwhat I call the moment of the present.757
In other words, it is the thinness of the formal architecture derived from two-dimensions
that gives it presentness, but this presentness is achieved only momentarily, at the level of the
phenomenological reduction, which as we pointed out above with the help of Derrida cannot exist,
being made impossible by the existence of language and history.
The Eye Eisenman Made
As we mentioned in chapter one, in his Complexity and Contradiction, Robert Venturi
argued that complexity and contradiction were immanent to architecture because of the
fundamental impossibility of accounting for functional, structural, and situational limitations within
the pure, ideal form that architecture as an art of geometry drives toward. Peter Eisenmans
dissertation on The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture, done under the tutelage of Colin
Rowe, is a contemporary attempt to deal with exactly these same issues and a document that is a

756.
757.

reprinted in Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 49.

Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 67.

241
telling record of cardboard architectural thought as it came together in the early 1960s, remaining
unsurpassed in the scope of its argument.758
Eisenman defined the central concern of his dissertation as the logical inter-action of
formal concepts. to establish that considerations of a logical and objective nature can provide
a conceptual, formal basis for any architecture.759 Eisenman believed that this logical interaction of formal concepts could be derived from studying the works of the modern masters Le
Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright and Giuseppe Terragni, in which Eisenman located the
essence of a formal language of architecture. As he explained of Le Corbusiers discussion of
form in his four compositions Implicit in Le Corbusiers diagrams are the vocabulary, grammar
and syntax of a formal language: the intention here is to make them explicit.760
Eisenman believed that a proper architecture would mediate between a virtual
architectural reality of generic, transcendent, universal form and prosaic constraints forcing the
generic form into a specific form that still refers to, or is derived from, the generic. The
universal form would be a basic, Euclidean solid. Each solid would have a dynamic of its own,
Eisenman explained, determining its role in a formal language and the formal forces it would
generate.761 In architecture, Eisenman explained, the geometric solids are the only absolute
points of reference.762
Derived from each generic form would be a series of properties:
These would be volume, mass, surface, and movement: movement being considered as
a property of generic form, essential to the experience and therefore the comprehension
of any architectural situation. These properties will provide the basic vocabulary for a
formal language, that will clarify the conceptual, as well as the pictorial aspects of a
specific situation.763

758.

That Eisenmans dissertation itself has had a substantial impact as a statement of

the principles of cardboard architecture, we can cite as evidence Geoffrey H. Baker, Le
Corbusier: An Analysis of Form, (London: Van Nostrand Reinhold (U.K.), 1984) who twenty years
later would cite the work as essential to his project.
759.

Eisenman, 5.

760.

Eisenman, 7.

761.

Eisenman, 13.

762.

Eisenman, 6.

763.

Eisenman, 23.

242
Thus from the study of generic forms and their properties a formal language would arise,
Eisenman

explained.

It

appears

that

this

organization

within

the

generic

condition

metamorphosed, with the help of Noam Chomskys linguistics, into Eisenmans notion of
architectural deep structure which we discussed in chapter three. It is within this deep structure of
architecture that the innocent eye re-emerged for architecture.
Also in chapter three we examined Eisenmans House series. To recap and elaborate:
Eisenmans House series was, at least until House VI, based on seemingly arbitrary formal
transformations set in motion upon cubes somehow predisposed to transform along the lines of
the nine-square grid. Thus the series was something of an extension of Hejduks Texas Houses.
Indeed, where Hejduk attempted to work through the parameters of a logical architectural
language, Eisenman explained that his Houses were an attempt to go beyond both architectural
form as the result of either programmatic dictates or the creation of aesthetically pleasing
objects. Form, for Eisenman, would ideally be independent of both program and aesthetic
considerations, rather it would be a problem of logical consistency; as a consequence of the
logical structure inherent in any formal relationship. In other words, architecture as idea again.
Eisenman believed that, as he wrote,
The capacity to understand, as opposed to experience, this intention does not depend
entirely on the observers particular cultural background, his subjective perceptions, or his
particular mood at any given time, all of which condition his usual experience of an actual
environment, but rather it depends on his innate capacity to understand formal
structures.764
This innate capacity would be the deep structure that Eisenman hoped to address
through his House series. But Eisenmans attempt to produce an architecture of deep structure
was predicated on a stripping away of cultural information, an attempt to separate the actual
physical environment from its traditional relationship to function and meaning, to neutralize the
influence of these on the viewer.765 The result is an innocent eye, derived from the
transformational processes of the visual language of cardboard architecture.
The alienation of the observer from her usual experience, what Eisenman called an
attempt to alienate the individual from the known way in which he perceives and understands his
environment,766 has been a characteristic of Eisenmans work ever since. While this alienationeffect could be seen in terms of modernist alienation-effects following perhaps Russian
Formalism and Viktor Schlovskys notion of making-strange, Eisenmans emphasis on the

764.

Eisenman, 17.

765.

Eisenman, 17.

766.

Eisenman, notes on House IV in Peter Eisenman, ed., Houses of Cards, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987), 150.

243
observers competence is a legitimate problem: who has this competence, how does one achieve
it? The competence Eisenman would like us to have is purely formal, it is the competence
possessed in the moment of the innocent eye as it is stripped of common perception and aware
of a higher, absolute, and architectural reality.
As Rosalind Krauss has explained, In Eisenmans mind it was the conceptual or virtual
house that should take precedence in the viewers experience of his building. In that sense, it was
only the latter that was the real building.767 This duality between a built and a real, virtual house
is again a legacy of Eisenmans dissertation project, however the built-building is only a
supplement for the virtual building, but its very impurity makes it a dangerous supplement,
threatening Eisenmans project.
Connected to the virtual house is Eisenmans idea of the transformational process that
determines itself. Eisenmans idea of setting up an entirely rational transformational process and
letting it work itself out appears to be his goal in his House series and in his dissertation and is
similar to the Hejduks project with the Texas Houses. By tracing through these transformations
the viewer would appear to be able to understand the process that led to the generation of the
resultant house. But the transformations that Eisenman presents, even with an explanatory text,
are devilishly tricky to read, almost impossible to understand, demanding the highest order of
competence in architectural form. The transformations appear to be arbitrary, existing solely to
illustrate concepts of cardboard architecture such as shear, rotation, or interpenetration. Indeed,
this could be Eisenmans intention, as he explains, by House IV
the transformational methodswere specifically constructed to be largely self-propelling
and therefore as free as possible from externally determined motives. A logical formula
that is, a step-by-step procedural model was established. Then basic elements such as
line, plane, and volume were set in motion, resulting in an object that appeared to design
itself. Whether the result would be architecture, or would have architectural features
such as plan or facade, etc. was not a consideration of the process or a criterion for
evaluation. In this sense the problem for the architect was not to design an object, but to
search for and establish a transformational program free from traditional authorial
constraints.768
The result would be an architecture out of our control, Eisenman explained, an
architecture of anxiety for our age of dislocation.769

767. Rosalind Krauss, Death of a Hermeneutic Phantom: Materialization of the Sign in

the Work of Peter Eisenman, Houses of Cards, ed. Peter Eisenman. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987) 176-.
768.

Eisenman, Misreading, 177.

769.

Eisenman, Misreading, 177.

244
There is a serious problem with Eisenmans project, however: Eisenmans houses remain
houses. For example, on his study drawings Eisenman does not just write House IV, he writes
House IV, Falls Village, locating it in as a product, no longer a process. The autonomy of the
transformational process is compromised by the houses ultimate houseness. No matter how
oddly or inconveniently shaped, floors, rooms, kitchens, bathrooms and closets do appear. The
appearance of these rooms makes it obvious that the transformational process has not been
autonomous but on the contrary has been carefully guided by Eisenmans hand to produce a
desired result. What we previously saw as either a maddeningly rational or alternatively
completely irrational series of transformational processes turns out to be prosaic: to create a
compromise between the virtual house and the realities of getting it built. Further, as Rosemarie
Haag Bletter has written:
For Eisenman all formal relationships and spatial transformations of his designs are a
result of what he regards as the inherent logic of the forms themselves. This is an
unusually passive explanation of the design process: for once Eisenman has not taken
full credit for his own actions. Unlike logic, architecture does not require a logical
framework that would exclude other truths. Despite his insistence on logic, one must
remember that it was he who selected the forms that are to be submitted to a logical
manipulation. Artistic, willful choice in the initial design must precede any possible logical
justification. And no inherently formal system, such as the use of the golden section, the
Modular, or Eisenmans own deformation of a cube, is quite so logical that it would not
allow the presence of other equally logical systems.770
The problem in Eisenmans logic can be seen in the way confusion arises in his
transformational processes. The observer tends to react to Eisenmans transformational diagrams
with a sense of having lost track between the initial stages, which seem clear enough, and the
later, stages, at which the different options posed at the start are somehow resolved and
converted into a House. By insisting on making these projects buildable, and actually getting them
built, Eisenman only compounds the problem. At the end of the process, even if it is an end that
Eisenman maintains is only a frame of a cinematic process of transformation, the disjuncture
between the actual building and the process becomes pronounced. How is one to reconcile a
space generated by an autonomous transformation process with its role as a closet? No matter
how inconvenient Eisenmans houses, they do work, and thus pose the question of their
autonomy even more urgently.
Thus not only is Eisenmans transformational process not autonomous, but rather
determined by the end product, its very logic is problematic as well. But these problems are just
footnotes. Ultimately it is the vertigo induced by a viewing of Eisenmans transformational
processes that problematizes his entire project. The anxiety or alienation caused by the

770.

Rosemarie Bletter, Review of Five Architects Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey,

Hejduk, Meier and Five on Five Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians May 1979):
205.

245
transformational process by removing the viewers common perception to bring them to a formal
architectural reality, i.e. the condition of the innocent eye.
Likewise, Alan Colquhoun has described Michael Gravess houses as executing a
reduction that requires the observer to abandon preconceived notions of what a house is and
carry out a reconstruction of the object in his mind. The condition hoped for is the tabula rasa,
the primal statement.771 As described in chapter one, this is an idea that Rowe had voiced as far
back as 1950 when, he wrote of a labyrinthine scheme which frustrates the eye by intensifying
the visual pleasure of individual episodes, in themselves only to become coherent as the result of
a mental act of reconstruction.772
Both Eisenman and Gravess moments of apprehension are manifestations of the
cognitive apprehension of architecture explained in the previous chapter. The cognitive
apprehension of the object has a goal: the moment when everything fits in a gestalt.
An active contemplation of architecture is not by any means at odds with the notion of
the innocent eye, but rather points out another of its characteristics. Returning to Ruskin for a
moment: the innocent eye comprehends the tableau as a whole. Suddenly for Ruskin, the world
makes sense as a form. The innocent eye sees in gestalts and that is what Rowes mental act of
reconstruction, Eisenmans virtual building and Gravess reduction are about. The object is
completed not piecemeal, but all at once, as gestalt. All at once, the process of mental
reconstruction disappears and only the reconstructed object is left, at least for the blink of an eye,
if that moment could exist.
Today these pedagogical methods have been augmented but not replaced. Eisenmans
recent studio at the Harvard Graduate School of Design shows that his concern is primarily with a
formal language of scaling. This language is whole, with clear rights and wrongs for Eisenman,
even if the students question his ability to verbalize the rationale behind what is good and what is
bad.773 Indeed, for Eisenman, the innocent eye has remained the real issue for teaching, as he
explains,

771. Alan Colquhoun, From Bricolage to Myth, or How to Put Humpty-Dumpty Together
Again, Essays In Architectural Criticism. Modern Architecture and Historical Change,
Oppositions Books, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, originally published in Oppositions
12, Spring 1978, pp 1-19) 173.
772.

Colin Rowe, Mannerism and Modern Architecture, Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1976; originally published in Architectural Review,
1950), 45.
773.

See Peter Eisenman, Jonathan Jova Marvel, Margaret B. Reeve and Harvard
University. Graduate School of Design, Investigations in Architecture: Eisenman Studios at the
GSD, 1983-85, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1986).

246
Theres a danger in getting students too late, which I think is real problem with graduate
schools. Students who have studied English literature or philosophy have minds and
egos that are very well developed. It is difficult to break down that kind of thinking, to get
them to give up the ego structure that they have spent years forming, to think in a totally
different way. That is a real problem.774
Panopticism
Breaking down the ego is a prime goal of the innocent eye, but it is also a goal of the
tradition of discipline and by referring to genealogy of discipline as elaborated by Michel Foucault
we can elaborate how the innocent eye belongs to a tradition linking education and violence, a
tradition in which another, not so innocent eye, the eye of the panopticon would exert its control.
In his Discipline and Punish, Foucault described the demise of the mnemotechnology of
torture in which the will of the sovereign, offended by the criminal act, was expressed onto the
criminals body through torture. As a public spectacle of savagery, torture made clear the power
relations within society, even raising the possibility that the audience, once sufficiently
accustomed to seeing the blood flow might see the violence of the sovereign as a challenge and
take matters into their own hands and revolt.775 Punishment vested in such power of an individual
sovereign was haphazard, dependent on his irregular and discontinuous application of power,
leaving some subjects free to practice a constant illegality.776 With the rise of the bourgeois
society, a new technology was needed, as Foucault describes it, a technology of subtle,
effective, economic powers, in opposition to the sumptuous expenditure of the sovereign.777 This
new punishment was not meant to punish less but rather to punish better.
The key to the new art of punishing, the reformers discovered, was not to exact a system
of penalties as retribution or vengeance but rather to make the punishment identical to the crime
preceding it: to arouse the punishment in the mind of any individual dreaming of the crime. In
other words, to create a natural link between crime and punishment, inculcating the power that
punishes into all citizens minds to manifest itself before they deviate from the law.778 The prison

774.

Peter Eisenman, interviewed in Barbaralee Diamondstein, ed., American Architecture

Now II, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 74.
775.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of The Prison, (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1977; originally published as Surveiller et Punir; Naissance de la prison, Paris:
Editions Gallimard, 1975), 73-5.
776.

Foucault, 82-88.

777.

Foucault, 102.

778.

Foucault, 105.

247
was the result of this new mode of punishment, a location where the criminal, seen no longer as a
glamorous individual but as a patient, would be re-educated.779
In the model prison of Jeremy Benthams panopticon, architecture and vision came
together as a means of regulation. As Foucault described the building for us:
at the periphery, an annular building; at the center, a tower; this tower is pierced with
wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided
into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows,
one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside,
allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to
place a supervisor in a central tower and to confine in each cell a madman, a patient, a
condemned man, a worker, or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe
from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the
cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theaters, in which
each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.Full lighting and the
eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness [of the dungeon] which ultimately
protected. Visibility is a trap.780
The surveillance of the inmate would be absolute. If the supervisor was not watching him,
even if there was no supervisor there at all, the prisoner could not know and would be obliged to
behave as if he was. This was Benthams explicit intention, leading him to came up with a number
of schemes to mask the presence (or absence) of the guardian.
Bentham, a Utilitarian, conceived of this device as a universal mode of obtaining power of
mind over mind, providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Not just a prison for
criminals, the panopticon was a diagram of power, a way of defining power relations between
everyday men for the greatest good. The individual in the panopticon was not the tyrant but rather
it could be anyone. Thus the panopticon moved the prison within the individual, removing its
concrete walls and replacing them with borders patrolled internally by the disciplined individual.
This sort of carceral thought had the effect of inserting itself more deeply into society, creating
corrective technologies of the individual.781 These attempts to instill self-discipline and thus
create docile bodies were thus more in line with that goals of an increasing democratic state in
which power relations were expressed more subtly (and hence pervasively) and rationally than in
the earlier absolutist impositions of power from above.
Soon after the docile body was discovered in discipline, social engineers discovered the
body as an entity that could be trained through methods derived from scientific research. In this

779.

Foucault, 112-115.

780.

Foucault, 200.

781.

Foucault, 206-8

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way the body would be trained as if it was a machine, capable of being measured and, through
refinement, capable of increased utility and productivity. This too was the disciplinary thought at
work: outside of the carceral, disciplining took root first in the military and then in education where
the power of the individual was converted into aptitude which the discipliner sought to increase
and in doing so redirect the power that might result from it to increase the domination of the
individual, making it more obedient as it became more useful. The body would become more
useful as it was trained by regulating itself.782
It is here that we can return to the model of the innocent eye and clarify its aims
somewhat. The goal of this didactic method is to create a subject void of any preconceptions or
thoughts outside of those of the discipline, in other words, to correct the students subjectivized
vision, to normalize its illegalities and transgressions, substituting the hyperdevelopment of a
sterilized organ, the (innocent) eye and its prosthetic extension, the hand. As Ulrich Franzen
explained in the middle of the storm of social upheaval, the eye remains calm, focused on
architecture.
The idea that the innocent eye is a site of discipline is again not unique to cardboard
architecture. The method of training the beginning student to see, from Ruskin, through MoholyNagy and Kepes was a continued process of disciplining and as with the project at Cooper Union,
it was rarely apolitical. For example, recall from chapter one Moholy-Nagys attempt to link his
theory of visual education with military logistics as a model for thinking through complex logistical
relationships of space-time that might be encountered by a military strategist controlling an area
and needing to make provision for huge mobilizations of men and resources in time and
space.783 Indeed, Moholy-Nagys model of pedagogy and vision, which we have already located
a fully-worked out art theory of the innocent eye, was bound up in the method and assumptions of
discipline. If it was to remain an isolated incident, it would not be of much significance. Surely late
twentieth century architectural educators even those at Cooper Union do not intend to train
architects as potential soldiers. However, Moholy-Nagys interest in the military shows the
continued presence of the docile body described by Foucault translated into specifically visual
interests and it is this visual disciplining that has passed down from Moholy-Nagy to architectural
generation.784
The notorious conditions of training the architecture student (notably the first year
student): long hours in the design studio, pulling all nighters in order to get unreasonably large
projects done, is one of the most disciplinary moments still remaining in modern education today,

782.

Foucault, 137-138.

783.

Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 268.

784.

On another very similar case, that of art instructor Hoyt Sherman, see S. David
Deitcher, Teaching the Late Modern Artist: From Mnemonics to The Technology of Gestalt, 6-7.

249
serving to purge the student of their bodily needs of rest and sleep. Only the student whose body
can become docile and cease to resist the relentless production of drawings and models can
become an innocent eye. The docile body serves as a mark of initiation into architecture.
The Innocent Eye as Product of Class Reproduction
What then is being reproduced by the education of the innocent eye? To what end are
docile bodies or rather docile eyes being produced? Surely the terms of presence and
logocentricism, which Derrida located in Husserls phenomenological reduction and which we
likewise located in the innocent eye, are being reproduced. Surely an annihilation of sociallyconstituted subjectivity takes place when the student is told to forget everything she has ever
learned (experienced). But what else? Why has the innocent eye appeared specifically at this
moment in culture when reproduction is in its ascendancy?
As we have established, the innocent eye is not an eye void of preconceptions and
historical baggage but rather has its own history, or as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu writes, The
eye is a product of history reproduced by education.785 This quote brings us to Bourdieus own
important analysis of the nave gaze as a socially constructed phenomenon. Bourdieu explains
that consumption of art is an act of deciphering, [or] decoding, which presupposes practical or
explicit mastery of a cipher or code.786 The cultural competence needed to perform this act of
deciphering, Bourdieu continues, is the result of our upbringing and functions as an indirect
marker of class (not all capitalists go to museums and not all proletarians dont, but you are more
likely to run into a member of the upper bourgeoisie in a museum than a proletarian). Those
privileged to encounter art at an early age tend to have an advantage over those who do not and
the amount of time spent in contact with such objects in ones youth is again an indirect function
of ones class.787
For the return to zero of the naive gaze, the observer has to understand the codes
involved in a work of art and be willing to jettison them, as Bourdieu writes, a nave gaze could
only be the supreme form of the sophistication of the eye presuppos[ing] successful mastery of
the code of codes. The naive spectator, or for that matter, the naive artist, cannot hope to
understand a work of art the production of which is so inscribed in an internal discourse about its

785. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, (New York:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984; originally published in French as La Distinction: Critique sociale
du jugement. (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 1979)), 3.
786.
787.

Bourdieu, 2.

Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art. European Art Museums and Their
Public, (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 1991; originally published as L'amour de l'art: les muses
d'art europens et leur public (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 1969)), 44.

250
own field. Only an observer with the highest level of competence the visual training that an
architect would get as a result of the innocent eye will be able to properly read the work. The
pedagogy of the innocent eye reproduces itself, allowing the greatest reward for those most able
to divest themselves of their identity outside of its demands.788 The innocent eye keeps matters
in check. The evacuation of any kind of extra-visual activity eliminates all but a rarefied, retinal
subject in the student. Indeed, what could a student say about their own conditions of existence
within a purely visual rhetoric of beam, column, wall and compression, shear, or rotation?
That the patron of the building, if it was built, would not fully understand becomes
irrelevant, so long as he understands that there are individuals who understand the work. Among
architects it is a commonplace to say that only someone with a proper architectural training can
understand a complex architectural work. That the patron admires it and wishes to purchase it is
incidental. Even the non-architect architectural critic/historians role is incidental, perhaps even
unwelcome: after all, they will never really understand it, only obfuscate it and do violence to it.789
The real audience, the audience that can read between the lines, is the audience of the book and
journal, the audience already trained in visual language necessary to decode the work. Further,
since not even all architects possess the visual competence to understand this highly complex
architecture and of those, not all like it many would prefer Kevin Roche or the New England
Colonial Style to Peter Eisenman or 1970s-era Robert Stern that group has to be narrowed
down as well: to a rather small audience with the right competence.
But even further, the historical development of the innocent eye is a question of a certain
specific kind of art, not just a renewed formalism, but a formalism obsessed with reproduction. It
is worth quoting Bourdieu at length for his description of the historical development of the
innocent eye itself:
pure gaze is a historical invention linked to the emergence of an autonomous field of
artistic production, that is, a field capable of imposing its own norms on both the
production and consumption of its products. An art which, like all Post-Impressionist
painting, is the product of an artistic intention which asserts the primacy of the mode of
representation over the object of representation demands categorically an attention to
form which previous art only demanded conditionally.790

788.

Bourdieu and Darbel, 66.

789.

These commonplaces have been expressed to me by numerous architects,

architecture and history of architecture professors and architecture students from different
schools both in the United States and abroad. They appear to be orally-transmitted and have so
far proved to be impossible to pin down to a text, which would make sense, given their anti-textual
and hermetic bias.
790.

Bourdieu, 3.

251
This is highly significant: that the innocent eye is based on the internal demands of an art
which favors the mode of representation over the object of representation. So too, an
architecture obsessed with its own representation requires an innocent eye as its mode of
reception.
The teaching of the visual language is again not neutral. As Bourdieu explains, in the
learning of such a formal aesthetic theory, previously encountered phenomena in art are
recapitulated, giving the student the means to discuss what they had previously known intuitively.
Again, the student with the good background is favored in this education.791
Significantly, the good background is composed of academic capital. Bourdieu explains
that [a]cademic capital is in fact the guaranteed product of the combined effects of cultural
transmission by the family and cultural transmission by the school (the efficiency of which
depends on the amount of cultural capital directly inherited from the family).792 In other words,
academic capital is a certain form of class marker (even if this class structure is morphed out of
economic class). Only those educated at the right school, possessing the right class background
to be able to facilitate trips abroad and a familiarity with and appreciation of contemporary art and
architecture will be able to make the successful transformation into the cultural aristocracy.
In my use of Bourdieus argument on the formation of the cultural aristocracy, I am
bending it to accommodate what is a new phenomenon: the pedagogue-theorist-aesthete. At the
pinnacle of Bourdieus pyramid is an aesthete schooled in the university but still a breed apart
from the academician. With the ascendance of highly complex works existing entirely (or
primarily) in reproduction, a new pinnacle in the pyramid emerges on which academicians take
over the cultural aristocracy by virtue of their possession of the highest form of cultural
competence, in other words, by virtue of their having accumulated academic capital to the highest
degree.793 In architecture, this coincides with the ascendancy of a formalist architecture tied to
reproduction.
The Auto-Dissolution of the Eye
We have already mentioned a persistent flux marking the theory we have been looking at,
between a whole subject posited against the dispersive forces of rapidly accelerating
modernization and a subjective position that would prefigure the next moment in late capitalisms
demands on the discipline. However, rather than being anomalous behavior restricted to this
level, this flux between the incompatible ideas of the subject as alternatively resistant and

791.

Bourdieu and Darbel, 66.

792.

Bourdieu, 23.

793.

On his opposition between aesthetes and pedagogues see Bourdieu, 68 ff.

252
reactive permeates multiple areas of postwar culture. One example would be the contradiction
between the subject as the (collaborative) fragmented, dispersed consumer reacting to impulses
generated by advertisements at the same time expected to be a (resistant) solid subject in the
context of the nuclear family. It is remarkable that this tension between these two subjective
positions is most evident at spatial points: the single family house and the automobile both are
domains in which subjectivity is meant to be established under the guise of freedom and
individuality yet, through an incessant conformity, both are also demarcations of the
anonymousness, interchangeability and hence dispersal of the subject.
Such contradictions can be found again and again. To conflate often radically different
cultural discourses in a notion of a monolithic and hegemonic culture is to create a total theory
that, precisely because of its claim to totality and to having located an all-powerful hegemony,
shuts off any space for operating outside of itself and does its own hegemonic violence to the
cultural field. While there are hegemonizing forces in our culture, they can often be at odds with
each other. There can be no total theory such as Baudrillard would have us buy into. Different
cultural discourses and different disciplines act at least partly under their own internal drives.794 It
is in fact contradiction as Althusser pointed out that we have room to stand to analyze and
act.
Cardboard architecture is but one of these discourses that contribute to the formation of
social subjects: there are many more, both inside and outside architecture that are expressly at
odds with it. Yet even within itself, cardboard architecture often manifests this contradictory flux
between a moment resistant to the acceleration of capital, pointing to a way out of the unhappy
present grounded in the subjects presence and belief, and a moment that prefigures (and in
doing so perhaps even serves to accelerate) the next subjective position of the artist or architect
demanded by capital: the dispersed switching machine dissolving in a wash of flows of capital.
This dialectic between subjective solidity and dissolution is inherent in the image and can
generally be read out of any image-based art theory, for example in Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and
Gyorgy Kepess landmark texts. If the trained eye is the means for uniting the subject fragmented
by industrialization, it is also the means for producing images that sell by leading the eye around
in a particularly effective means of fascination. This contradiction is especially great at the end of
Kepess Language of Vision, when he argues that the properly executed advertisement would
serve a double purpose: They could disseminate socially useful messages, and they could train
the eye, and thus the mind, with the necessary discipline of seeing beyond the surface of visible
things, to recognize and enjoy values necessary for an integrated life.795

794.

In this discussion of the subject I am strongly influenced by John Tagg, Grounds of

Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics and the Discursive Field, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1992), 15-16, 65-66.
795.

Gyorgy Kepes, Language of Vision, (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944), 221.

253
Since Moholy-Nagy and Kepes and since cardboard architectures ascent, the
information explosion has radically altered parts of our society. Since the innocent eye grounded
the subject in reality perceived through the momentary flash, it also destabilized it: reality could
not exist in a wash of color and light, or in other words, pure information. It is this same flow of
pure information that the commodity takes on when accelerated to its fastest speed (i.e. the
highest amount of recirculation) yet.
Architecture and speed theorist Paul Virilio has connected the increasing speeds of
capital circulation and the destabilized existence of the eye watching the video screen to the
disappearance of the conventional city. Virilios theses have an unfortunate tendency to be total
and to give little room to contradiction: thus, while on the one hand the city is disappearing as
Virilio states, on the other hand, the precipitous decline of the American city in the 1960s appears
to have abated, even if it is to the forces of gentrification.
Nonetheless, Virilios argument is useful to us in that, if not accepted as total, it does
indeed show us a tendency in our society. Today, Virilio explains, the city has virtually
disappeared, eliminated by electronics and the nomadism of structural unemployment. Markers,
landmarks and monuments by which to map our space are getting harder to find. Communal
space had linked to the mnemotechnology of Euclidean geometry but now both are disappearing.
We can explain what Virilio means by recalling rhetorics art of memory in which signifieds are
joined with specific places in what is a Virtually Real space of memory. In one particularly famous
example, you remember a nautical theme by placing an anchor in a room in a house that you
build in your mind. As you pass from room to room in the house, you read the contents of the
room and are able to construct a speech.796 The city itself was such a virtual reality: a mark
through its streets would reveal its history through its buildings and monuments but with the end
of the city we find it more and more difficult to map history through space.797
Instead we begin to map in terms of speed and electronic evaluation. Depth of time
replaces the depth of field. Perspective is radically destabilized by the collapse between the
observing subject and the point of vision: if the view is not your eyes but that of some camera in
Bosnia seeing only milliseconds ago, the classical model of vision is no longer tenable: distance
and depth in space are no longer related.798
This crisis of dimensionality, as Virilio calls it then appears as a crisis of the whole, a
crisis of substantive, continuous and homogeneous space inherited from classical geometry, in

796.

See Francis Yates, The Art of Memory, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960),

797.

Virilio, 27.

798.

Virilio, 28.

441.

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favor of the relativity of an accidental, discontinues and heterogeneous space, one in which the
parts and the fractions, the points and the various fragments became once more essential, as if
they were an instant, a fraction or fragmenting of time. Digital technology replaces the smooth
curve of the analog with the jagged edge of the discrete unit. This fragmentation, and the decline
of the classical model of vision is exposed in a new way of seeing:
Where once the aesthetics of the appearance of an analogical, stable image of static
nature predominated, we now have the aesthetics of the disappearance of a numerical,
unstable image of fleeting nature, whose persistence is exclusively retinal namely, that
of the sensitization time, which eludes our conscious attention, once the threshold of 20
milliseconds was crossed just as with the invention of the ultra-speed camera, whose
one million images per second exceeded the composition time of 24 images per
second.799
The retinal perception required for video and computer technology is momentary: the
perception of the innocent eye. Without having planned it, cardboard architects and the innocent
eye furnished a means of perception which anticipates the retinal flux generated by the computer
screen, a moment uncannily similar to the moment inside of Hejduks planar wall. Likewise,
Eisenmans transformational process and the whole visual grammar of cardboard architecture
anticipates the mode of architectural production that one instinctively enters when confronted by a
computer program for three dimensional modeling such as Paracomps Swivel 3D: making
complex objects out of object primitives with surfaces that like cardboard architectures surfaces
are smooth and pixel-thin, subjecting them to transformations and combining them. The innocent
eye is the eye for perceiving in the computer age: meant to ground the subject in an
instantaneous presence, it sets up a training and mode of research ideal for a vertiginous
registration of fleeting impressions gazed at by an out-of-focus eye, taking pleasure not in the
information but in the registration of the impressions themselves.

799.

Virilio, 36.

255

6 Conclusion
In this dissertation I have traced a flux between two seemingly contradictory identity
positions held by many architects and students of architecture: the Howard Roark, a heroic,
autonomous architect who strives to maintain architecture as discipline and sees architecture as
a formal expression of will-to-power and the MTV consumer, a subject acting as little or nothing
more than a function of media oversaturation flipping through channels of flow attracted to
whichever pattern catches the eye. Neither position is privileged both are equally fixated on the
effects of power.
A parallel can be drawn between this flux and the effects of ideology in late capitalism.
Citizens of the late capitalist, first world state are on the one hand expected to be consumers and
on the other ethical, autonomous subjects, solid citizens. In this way advanced capitalism, as
Terry Eagleton explains oscillates between meaning and non-meaning, pitched from moralism to
cynicism and plagued by the embarrassing discrepancy between the two.800 This flux, Eagleton
continues, is something that most of us recognize. Today we are too smart to really believe what
the official rhetoric would like us to believe. Our reaction to this, is however, rather twisted: as
Eagleton describes it: First, a disparity sets in between what society does and what it says; then
this performative contradiction is rationalized; next, the rationalization is made ironically selfconscious; and finally this self-ironizing itself comes to serve ideological ends.801.
This ironic self-consciousness serving ideological ends is a reappearance of Sloterdijks
definition of cynicism recounted in the introduction to this dissertation. The cynic knows the
effects of his or her action, but he or she still does it, in a sense conspiring with ideology. Slavoj
Zizek,in his analysis of Sloterdijks concept of cynicism suggests that this means that we have
not really gotten over ideology: cynicism is part of the game that the ruling ideology has already
accommodated. But Zizekthen makes a crucial move: if we turn back to Marxs idea of
commodity fetishism that relations between things take over relations between people and
combine it with a cynical world view, we learn that belief can be embodied in things.
Zizekuses the example of the Tibetan prayer wheel to demonstrate this way of thinking:
we write a prayer on a piece of paper and put it into the wheel. Turning the wheel we make it pray
for us at a greater speed than we ever could while we think whatever we want. This is the idea of
the double agent restated: if we invest our things with beliefs, we can think whatever we want and

800.

Terry Eagleton, Ideology: an introduction, (New York: Verso, 1991), 39.

801.

Eagleton, 39.

256
let the things do our thinking for us instead. Thus, if we let Dan Rather get upset over the days
news, we can avoid having to get upset ourselves.802
The architect can invest the architectural object with a certain belief-system and avoid
having to believe in the believe system himself or herself. Thus Peter Eisenman tells us that his
newest buildings are post-structuralist, subversive, and liberating.803 With his buildings
performing for him,804 Eisenman can be free to pursue his own concerns with gaining power in
the discipline, concerns which as I will discuss below have little to do with poststructuralism, subversion, or liberation and have everything to do with adulation of the author.
This is an architecture of cynicism: an architecture that gives architects carte blanche to act
however he or she may want. The successful architect becomes a conspirator, deploying
jamming devices to operate undercover.
Yet it is also true that not everybody understands or at least not everybody subscribes
to this cynicism. Otherwise, architecture students would not still believe that hard work and the
development of an innocent eye will eventually lead them to be the next Michael Graves, or the
next Richard Meier. For a very few, no doubt it will, but along the way chances are good that they
will come to understand first-hand the cynicism underneath it all and allow their yellow or white
trace to be subversive for them. As Aronson writes, there are a lot of architects waiting for Philip
Johnson invite them for lunch at the Four Seasons.805

802. Slavoj Zizek,The Sublime Object of Ideology, (New York: Verso, 1989), 33. See also
Eagleton, 33-35.
803. On the use of what he calls the topos of liberation in architecture, see Mark
Jarzombek, Ready-Made Traces in the Sand: The Sphinx, the Chimera, and Other Discontent in
the Practice of Theory, Assemblage December 1992: 72-95.
804.

Compare this to the notion of performativity in Peter Eisenmans architecture as

suggested by K. Michael Hays in From Structure to Site to Text: Eisenman's Trajectory,
Thinking the Present: Recent American Architecture, ed. K. Michael Hays, and Carol Burns. (New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1990) 65. Hays describes a performative object as one that
makes the observer perform: thus Eisenmans house series forces the observer conceptually
reconstruct the house.
But if Eisenman is a cynic, then the performative object can be see to twice remove him
from the scene of the crime. Eisenman does not worry, the building does not worry, instead the
observer worries.
It appears that Eisenmans performativity comes directly from the the mental act of
reconstruction that Rowe discussed in Mannerism and Modern Architecture, Mathematics of
the Ideal Villa, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1976; originally published in
Architectural Review, 1950), 45.
805.

Aronson, 301.

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Sham: Psychoanalysis of Disingenuity
We can get another handle on this cynicism by looking at an alternative psychoanalysis
developed by psychologist Jules Henry in his essay Sham. Against Freud, Henry argues that
our psychology is based on a fundamental crisis not of the repression of sexuality but of
repression itself. For Henry it is the repression of the truth (and sexuality is just one of the aspects
of this) that causes our trauma. Since childhood, we have to adjust to the fact that life is lived as a
sham. Whoever does not learn to accept sham as reality, Henry argues, following Albees play
Tiny Alice, deserves to be shot.806 Sham is cynicism, the rationale for the spectacle.
Henry however holds out hope for change. He posits four stages in the history of
mankind: living sham and believing it to be the truth, seeing through sham while using it
(cynicism), understanding sham and knowing how to fight it, and finally a utopian world without
sham. While there have always been people in the first two stages, as a rule, Henry writes, our
civilization is moving from stage one to stage two.807
In this scheme, the innocent eye is an attempt to return to stage one masked as an
attempt to reach stage four. The teachers of cardboard architecture who knew that they were
making a choice to deliberately reject any inquiry beyond form and yet achieved their own
positions not just through their formal virtuosity but through their (social) networking skills were
thus at the forefront of architectural sham.
Jonathan Vankin, in his survey of conspiracy theories and theorists, Conspiracies, Coverups, and Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America, uses Henrys
psychoanalysis to explain the popularity of conspiracy theory in contemporary American culture.
Vankin explains that it is not a paranoid dysfunction in the minds of conspiracy theorists but
rather,
The dysfunction is with American society, maybe even civilization as a whole. The
structure of civilization itself requires mass adherence to faith in the institutions that built
civilization and make it run. We have to believe the institutions are functioning in our
best interests. We have to believe what the people within those institutions assure us to
be true. If not, were sentenced to a life on the edge, filled with frustration, indignation,
confusion, and perhaps what society calls insanity.

806.

Jules Henry, Sham, On Sham, Vulnerability and Other Forms of Self-Destruction,

(London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1973; prepared for the Conference on Society and
Psychoses, the Hahnemann Medical College, October 1966. Reprinted from the North American
Review, Vol. 252/3, 1967, p. 6-8) 120-127.
807.

Henry, 127.

258
The conspiracy theorists I encountered question our authorities, and, because they do,
they skirt the fringes of society.808
Vankin explains that the urge to map conspiracies is an attempt to map the structure of
Jules Henrys sham:
Henry would have understood conspiracy theorists well. Sham gives rise to coalitions
because usually sham cannot be maintained without confederates. In other words, to
keep civilization afloat requires a conspiracy. In sham, Henry goes on, the deceiver
enters into an inner conspiracy against himself.
Conspiracy theorists resist joining the inner conspiracy. They cant lie to themselves, like
Colin Wilsons outsider who cannot live in the comfortable insulated world of the
bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. The more they strip through
the sham, the madder they appear.
I anticipate a geometric increase in madness, says Jules Henry, for sham is the basis of
schizophrenia and murder itself.
To understand conspiracy theorists, I now believe, is to first understand that civilization is
a conspiracy against reality.809
Vankins analysis gives us a handle on Jamesons formulation of conspiracy theory, the
attempt to allegorically map the unrepresentable, i.e. pierce through sham. Likewise, if
architecture today is based on sham, or is at least part of the sham, then it is natural that
conspiracy theories of architecture the Inner Club, Philip Johnson was a fascist would begin
to arise. But these conspiracies are real. This however shouldnt surprise: if societys structure is
conspiratorial then it only follows that conspiracies take place.
As I pointed out in chapter three, in his Comments to Society of the Spectacle, Guy
Debord hints at the continuing conspiratorial construction of our society under the spectacle,
explaining that the highest ambition of the integrated spectacle is still to turn secret agents into
revolutionaries, and revolutionaries into secret agents. Among this societys characteristics, he
wrote, would be: generalized secrecy; unanswerable lies; an eternal present.810
The reason for this secrecy and its need to eradicate historical knowledge, and drive
the recent past into hiding, Debord continues, is so that the purveyors of spectacle would
have above all the ability to cover its own tracks to conceal the very progress of its

808. Jonathan Vankin, Conspiracies, Cover-ups, and Crimes. Political Manipulation and
Mind Control in America, (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 258.
809.

Vankin, 259.

810.

Debord, Comments, 11-12.

259
recent world conquest. Its power already seems familiar, as if it had always been there.
All usurpers have shared this aim: to make us forget that they have only just arrived.811
Indeed, the kids have only just arrived. The dominance of the discipline and in particular
its means of reproduction the educational apparatus by architects trained in the innocent
eye is a recent event.
As I noted in chapter one, the failure of the liberal paradigm during the 1960s generated a
period of intense questioning. Taking place first as a critique of institutions, this questioning was
internalized as a vague critical thinking within the same institutions. While I would never
advocate that educators abandon the development of critical thinking, I also believe that we have
to realize the cynicism of absorbing the critique of the discipline into the discipline, a move toward
the society of cynicism.
But full recuperation is impossible and absorbing the critique into the institution provides a
basis for its eventual undermining or radical transformation. Teaching critical thinking in the
university might produce students who understand the cynicism that informs everyday life
especially within the university and who just possibly might refuse to take it anymore. At the
same time, as a result of the shift of production from industry to information, the university is
becoming more and more central to society. The cynical absorption of critique into the university
is evidence of the importance of keeping the university stable at all costs. After 1968, the
possibility that revolution will come from within the walls of the university, or at least will be staged
on those walls is real.
All forms of sham however continue to resist the consciousness that can emerge from a
confrontation with our existence in the social matrix of production and with the historical creation
of structures of sham such as cynicism, the spectacle, or the innocent eye. We must continue to
ask questions such as the one asked by Jon Michael Schwarting: Why is Philip Johnson
celebrated as playful and iconoclastic rather than viewed more simply as the most articulate
spokesman for the dominant ideology?812
We must also guard against the cynical response: thats the way it is. As Debord has
written, in todays spectacle Many things may be unauthorized; everything is permitted. Talk of
scandal is thus archaic The most profound summing-up of the period within the whole world
entered shortly after Italy and the United States, can be found in the words of a senior Italian
statesman, a member, simultaneously of both the official government and the parallel

811.
812.

Debord, Comments, 16.

Postscript, Beatriz Columina, ed., Architectureproduction, (New York: Princeton

Architectural Press, 1988), 252.

260
government, P2, Potere Due: Once there were scandals, but not

anymore.813

When an

international group of architects can name itself P3 after P2, then we have to realize how close
we are to the spectacle in architecture.
The spectacle is also what drives the appearance of the innocent eye in architecture. The
innocent eye, even in Ruskins hands, was based on a distance from the original that evacuated
depth, made vision into an image. The development of the innocent eye and the visual language
in the work of Moholy-Nagy and Kepes was aimed at teaching students how to create effective
two-dimensional advertising. That it has been translated as cardboard architecture points to a
spectacularization at the heart of architecture today: its reduction to image, which Debord has
pointed out concentrates all gazing and all consciousness.814
Under the sign of the spectacle, we are able to draw a relation between vision and capital
that can be used to explain a number of seemingly incompatible strands of investigation in this
dissertation: the appearance of the kids in architectural discourse; architectural theorists interest
in creating a formal visual language ultimately based on design technologies that would also form
the basis of modern advertising layout; the concurrent interest in stripping the architecture student
of her preconceptions about architecture to create what would be referred to as the innocent
eye; and the increase in public popularity of the architectural drawing and of architecture culture
in general.
Yet there is hope after all. While recuperation is constantly ongoing for example Jean
Baudrillards cynical recuperation of Debords Society of the Spectacle recuperation can never
be complete. The spectacle, sham, or cynicism still serve to hide material reality by deferring its
consideration to another day. But this deferment cannot be endless. Working toward exposing
spectacle, sham, and cynicism is not in vain. It provides a counter that can help us, as agents,
make our choices. Our choices are certainly ideological, but certainly some choices are better
than others. The choices that lead to the release of a political prisoner for example, or the cleanup of a toxic waste site, most of all the day-to-day choices of lived reality.
As architects, theorists or historians of architecture, we can help expose the workings of
sham in our field by examining its own disciplinary states. Remarkably, while during the late
1980s and early 1990s, some architectural theorists began questioning the epistemological
claims of architecture with the tools of Derridean post-structuralism, few architects have

813.

Debord, Comments, 22.

814.

Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 3.

261
questioned the field as a discipline. There is a striking absence of questioning of the tenability of
the author-figure in architecture as theorists from outside the discipline have noted.815
The strength of the architect/author-figure in architecture is the result of architectures
particular means of producing artifacts such as buildings, drawings, teapots or texts. In order to
approach this phenomenon, we can use an analysis of the making of artifacts and their function in
our society by Elaine Scarry in her book The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the
World. Scarry explains that the act of human creating includes both the creating of the object and
the objects recreating of the human being, and it is only because of the second that the first is
undertaken: that recreating action is accomplished by the human makers and must be included
in any account of the phenomenon of making. In this light, commodity fetishisms error is in its
concern only with the re-creation of people through objects, omitting the first half of the
equation.816
In many situations, the creation of the artifact is hidden to some extent. Thus, as Scarry
writes,
as one maneuvers each day through the realm of tablecloths, dishes, potted plants,
ideological structures, automobiles, newspapers, ideas about families, streetlights,
language, city parks, one does not at each moment actively perceive the objects as
humanly made; but if one for any reason stops and thinks about their origins, one can
with varying degrees of ease recover the fact that they all have human maker, and this
recognition will not jeopardize their usefulness. Though these objects usually have no
personal signatures affixed to them, they will have a general human signature. The
individual person who is one of the life-risking builders of the Golden Gate Bridge will, as
he crosses that object fifty years later, think to himself, Ive got my fingerprints all over
that iron; the rest of us, periodically struck with the recognition that this dazzling object is
made, will see the fingerprints too, though we will not know to whom they belong. The
signature will be general, not specific.817
Before the laborers general signature however, certain artifacts contain another
signature, that of the designer. As a society we give far more privilege to the designer, usually an
individual. Thus, while we might admire the work of builders of the Flatiron building, it is more
likely that we will admire Daniel H. Burnham for his design. While a traditional architectural
historian could make an argument that Burnham is the one who did the real work, the thinking,
even that becomes problematic when we realize that like many architects, Burnham had a large

815. This absence has been noted by Hal Foster, Architecture Development Memory,
Thinking the Present: Recent American Architecture, and Vincent Pecora, Towers of Babel, Out
of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture, (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1991).
816.

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 311.
817.

Scarry, 312.

262
office in which not only drafting but also design-work was carried out by the other workers. Yet we
speak of Burnham as the designer, knowing that in doing so we will be placing the building in the
context of a series of objects signed by him.
The reason for this simultaneous attention to and repression of the signature is because
of the nature of the visibility of the signature. As Scarry explains, whether or not the first half of
that action is visible will depend on whether the visibility will interfere with its reciprocating task.
Whereas the appearance of an architects signature helps us celebrate the act of creating and
purports to make it easier to understand, the signature of the architectural objects other makers:
its builders and sometimes its patrons occlude the traditional understanding of architectural
creation.
But the idea of the architect as hero or Howard Roark designing the building sets the
author/architect at the core of a rock-like discipline with patriarchal tendencies.818 The patriarchal
foundation of the architect as author or authority can be seen reproduced in the relationship of the
kids to Philip Johnson. Even the name of the group as the kids, a name repeated over and over
again by Johnson and some of the groups members is a fundamentally patriarchal one of parent
to child. The inscription of the Father (Johnson) serves as the Law.819
As the kids have begun to take on more frequent and larger projects and their offices
have expanded, the commodity fetishism of their work and their identity as author has increased
and this too reveals a problematic aspect of the architectural vanguard. While the architectural
celebrity is treated as an individual with a signature style, the reality is that his style is determined
by a number of individuals, whose work is generally unrecognized, unless they too become
celebrities. A larger office in which the project becomes a collaborative work between the head of
the office and his assistants is very different from a project which is done by one person alone,
yet nowhere is the staff of the kids celebrated. Rarely do they exist as independent faces, at most
they exist as names, perhaps with a title such as Project Architect. This is a serious problem
within the aesthetics of architecture. The kids do not even go as far as modernist firms, such as
Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (where if anything, one knew that Messrs. Skidmore, Owings, and
Merrill had nothing to do with the design) or The Architects Collaborative did in breaking down the
identity of the architect-hero. The position of authority is in the name of the architect, reinforcing
the romantic image of the lone, struggling artist, the Howard Roark.

818.

On the questioning of the author in post-modern art see Craig Owens, From Work
To Frame, Or Is There Life After 'The Death of the Author'?, Implosion, (Stockholm: Modern
Museum, 1987).
819.

It is at this very real point of social relations and concurrently at the point of relation
between the figure of the author and the work that one could effectively locate a feminist critique
of architecture. One nontheoretical critique that I could cite as evidence of the patriarchal nature
of architectures star system was made by Denise Scott Brown, Sexism and the Star System in
Architecture, Architecture: A Place for Women, originally written in 1975.

263
Peter Eisenmans Mirror
Since of all the kids, Peter Eisenman is the only one whose work can be accepted in any
way as post-structuralist, and his theoretical project is generally portrayed as a repeated attempt
to attack notions of pre-existent, humanist subjectivity,820 the fact that Eisenmans work is
strongly connected to the notion of Peter Eisenman as its author821 makes him a particularly
compelling test-case to examine the contradiction between the authors identity and what
philosopher David Goldblatt has called the dislocation of the architectural self.
Goldblatt in fact also focuses on Eisenman as the exemplar of the dislocation of the
architectural self. This architectural self, Goldblatt explains, is the self

that works within the

context of a traditional architecture, an architecture of everyday practice. It is that self which is

constructed

by

the

tradition

of

architecture

and

its

own

hierarchical

presuppositionscomplicated in the tradition of architecture, through schooling, apprenticeship

and professional reward as well as by the usual devices of enculturation. Goldblatt finds
Eisenmans project compelling because he attempts to dislocate this architectural self, to create a
strategy to remove the architect as a source of resistance to non-traditional architecture so that
design can begin from a dislocated vantage point.
But here Goldblatt unwittingly runs into the problem with Eisenman. The removal of the
architectural self is done within the discipline, using the disciplinary tactics of the innocent eye.
While Eisenman attempts to remove any reference to anthropomorphism in his architecture, his
architecture is still ultimately about his self.
Goldblatt compares Eisenmans dislocation of the architectural self with Nietzsches
description of the ecstatic Dionysian:
forgetting is mechanism at work for Nietzsche in the selfs abrogation. What is negated by
virtue of forgetting is ones civic past and social rank, ones everyday or commonplace
self. And since in Nietzsches unreified notion of Will, it is analytic that willing is willing
towards an end, our personal interest in purposes, the dropping of such civil or social
ends is also the negation of the will. The artist of The Birth of Tragedy is without will,
replaced perhaps by impulse, in unmediated contact with some kind of primordial being
or original Oneness and becomes identified with it. The artist becomes exempt from the
embarrassing task of copying reality. He strides with the same elation and ecstasy
as the gods he has seen in his dreams. No longer the artist, he has himself become a
work of art: the productive power of the whole universe is now manifested in his
transport. Nothing much in this paper turns on this early romantic notion of being in direct
touch with some thing-in-itself, a view Nietzsche was later to reject. Rather, the point to

820.
821.

See for example Hays, From Structure to Site to Text.

Admittedly, one could substitute Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, or Jacques

Derrida for Eisenman in this equation.

264
be emphasized here is that some self, in some manner or other, has been dislocated
from the ordinary self by art.822
But of course it is here that Goldblatts argument ultimately fails him. It is not that nothing
much turns on Nietzsches conception of the artist but rather that everything does. The artist as
the work of art, having designed his own life brings us to the irreconcilability of Eisenman and the
myth of the dislocated self.
The basic premise of Goldblatts article is the adoption of the paradigm of architecture as
critique in which the subject is generally construed as being produced within the text, be it a book
or a building. In this view, humanist thought put a Cartesian subject in the role of an originating
agent of meaning, rock-solid, centralized, and real, not coincidentally similar to our model of the
Howard Roark. The humanist subject is seen as valorizing man at the expense of differences
such as gender or class. A true post-humanist art would counter this reduction of difference by
fragmenting the subject, destabilizing it by emphasizing such features as incompleteness,
fragment, uncertainty, and seriality. Paradoxically, it should be added, this valorized condition
parallels the frequent description of (post) modernity as the process of social, technological and
cultural modernization which is characterized by its fragmentation and the dispersion of the
subject, i.e. the condition of the MTV viewer.823
But Eisenmans intents are more complicated: in a recent interview, Eisenman states I
act through architecture. How else to prove Im here?Theres no one behind my work but me. I
am not selfish or immoral I just want to be more everyday for me. To live fully, I have to
uncover the Self. Eisenman goes on to explain where he looks for his Self: I look for my Self in
your mirror, not in my mirror. That would be narcissism.824
In other words, Eisenman voyeuristically looks in the mirror of the observer who has
performed for him, a performative mirror. Given Eisenmans interest in post-structuralist thought
and in psychoanalysis, it would be hard to imagine that Eisenman is not aware of the role of the
mirror in Lacanian psychonalysis. Therefore we cannot take Eisenmans suggestion lightly but
must take it to point to Lacans concept of the mirror-stage, the transition by which a child attains
a Self.

822. David Goldblatt, The Dislocation of the Architectural Self, The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism vol. 49 no. 4 (Fall 1991), 341.
823.
824.

See for example Hays, 70.

Eisenman in Dana Cuff, Through the Looking Glass: Seven New York Architects
and Their People, Architects' People, ed. Russell Ellis, and Dana Cuff. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 66, 69.

265
Lacans mirror-stage occurs between six and eighteen months, and consists of the childs
constituting her own identity through her reflected image. From an undifferentiated, oceanic state,
the child moves to the knowledge of itself as separate, a primary alienation. It is here that the
Imaginary realm develops, a pre-linguistic and pre-temporal state in which the child, having seen
itself in the mirror, believes in its own bodily wholeness and completeness, the ideal state of the
Innocent Eye. Only later does the child enter into language and lose the Innocent Eye, the stage
of the Symbolic, a world of conventions that the child had no way of shaping.825
An architecture of the mirror-stage would thus offer a regression to the Imaginary, the
realm of the Innocent Eye, a vision of the Self glossing over the fissure that really exists between
subject and object.826
While he hopes to find this proof not in himself but in his recipient subject, Eisenman
nonetheless feels that through architecture he can live fully, be a Self, a whole Ego. In this
moment of slippage, Eisenman sets out his intentions, perhaps unaware of their implications. Like
the child (with its innocent not having read Lacan yet eye), Eisenman falls into the trap of
believing in the mirror image that offers an image of the Self.
But this is just another way of amplifying the displacement that Eisenman attempts to
make. Eisenmans texts, be they buildings or figures on a page worry for him. Peter Eisenman is
held unaccountable, made whole by the work.
This is the problem with Eisenman. He himself is rock-solid. At Harvards Graduate
School of Design, he is followed around by a coterie of hangers-on who want to get into his inner
circle. Somehow, however, this doesnt seem to matter to theorists who discuss Eisenman.
Instead of asking about the architect, the discipline, and the institutional role of the
architectural academy, we confine our interest entirely to projects and texts. While that has
always been a generally accepted practice within at least a subset of historians and critics and
makes a certain amount of sense, it allows the architect to let his projects perform for him or her
and it allows the reader to bracket off everything beyond the form of the building and the theory of
the text (if even allowing the text in at all). It is, as Zizekwould say, cynical. Eisenman (and
through him Johnson, the (ex?-) fascist architect with the guilty past) is able to avoid culpability by
saying that his projects are all that matters. In other words, Eisenmans project is totemic: he

825.

Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I, Jacques
Lacan, crits: A Selection, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977; a selection from crits,
(Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1966)), 1-7.
826.

See also Hays, 63.

266
doesnt have to worry, his projects worry for him. Saved by his projects, Eisenman doesnt have
to account for his actions.827
Here we can return to the theory of agency outlined in the introduction and also replay the
dialectic of the MTV consumer and Howard Roark. While as we might expect the MTV Consumer
is the post-structuralist subject, a switching machine, unable to break from the cycle of
information consumption and information flows that it is subjected to. Howard Roark on the other
hand, deludes himself into believing he is a rock-solid individual, impervious to the subjecting
forces of discursive formations, living instead through its desire and is unable to form a
relationship with society except through opposition to the masses and perhaps eventual praise
from them.
A theory of agency, however, would maintain that our actions are still our own. The agent
as a site of resistance to ideological pressure is unable to escape ideology, but is not
automatically a privileged position. On the contrary, as explained above agency invests the
subject with responsibility. We are all already agents. Agency is little more than a concept that
we can use to understand where we can exert our power of resistance. We are subjected, but we
are also agents, capable of acting. If we adopt an ideology of acting for itself, i.e. an ideology of
will, or for ourselves, i.e. an ideology of will to power, we can wind up as Howard Roarks, Philip
Johnsons or Peter Eisenmans.
But while we are all under the sign of the spectacle, if there is still some decency left in us
we can still recognize the lie of sham and not exploit it by becoming cynics. Instead of being
cynics then, let us conclude with a possible retrospective methodological manifesto for this and
future projects.
The Gaze
In chapter one and more extensively four, I discussed the innocent eye within the
paradigm of cardboard architecture and critiqued its oculocentric divorce from material reality. But
we cannot totally damn vision the way some art critics do.828 After all, we still see, we still read,

827.

Here again the radical disjuncture between Eisenmans work and his behavior can be
seen in K. Michael Hayss essay From Structure to Site to Text and Eisenmans repeated
attacks on other architects in the discussion that followed the lectures in Hays and Burns,
Thinking the Present: Recent American Architecture, 123-134.
828.

For critics who damn vision see in particular Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory:
Criticism and Postmodernity, (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, International, 1986).
Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious. In contrast see John Tagg, Totalled Machines:
Criticism, Photography, and Technological Change, in Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural
Politics and the Discursive Field, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 115-133
and Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

267
our goal is still a simple Enlightenment one : to to see more clearly, to cast light on that which is
hidden by the sham. Vision isnt all bad, its just some of our cultural constructions that are
negative.
I would now like to extend this discussion in the light of Jacques Lacans discussion of
the gaze. Defining this gaze, Lacan writes,
In the scopic field, everything is articulated between two terms that act in an antinomic
way on the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I
see them. This is how one should understand those words, so strongly stressed in the
Gospel, They have eyes that they might not see. That they might not see what?
Precisely, that things are looking at them?829
Architects and historians of architecture will recall that Le Corbusier was also obsessed
with eyes that do not see and alluded to the existence of the gaze by printing the phrase in the
context of a series of photographs of ocean liners and airplanes. The eyes that do not see are on
a one level, the eyes of those who do not see the beauty of the objects, but on another level, the
eyes are already within these objects: the portholes from which someone might catch us looking.
Lacan on the other hand explains that when we look at an object, it gazes back at us,
disturbing our relation with it. But we are already in that which stares back at us. Lacan clarifies
this with an anecdote about how as a young man he would work on a fishing boat. An uneducated
worker on the boat with Lacan points to a sardine can floating in the water. He asks Lacan You
see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesnt see you!830 But in the translation something is lost.
The can is le can, the can is masculine. La can doesnt even make sense in French. But
Lacans name is La-can. With this anecdote Lacan points out that contained in the gaze are class
the gaze of the worker who knows Lacan is there for the summer before returning to the
university while he is there for good gender la can and le can and the possibility that,
through its gaze we are already present in the object we look at and that simultaneously we find
ourselves turned from a condition of subjects looking at objects into objects being gazed at by
other subjects.
The easiest way to verify the power of the gaze is a walk down any street. The gaze of
others disturbs us, our gaze disturbs them. We do not like to be watched. At home, the possibility

829.

Jacques Lacan, What is A Picture? in The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978; translation of Les Quatre concepts
fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, originally published as v. 11 of the authors Le seminare de
Jacques Lacan), 109.
830.

Jacques Lacan, The Line and Light, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, 95.

268
that the walls have eyes (or ears: while Lacans gaze is set up in visual terms, it could be
extended into the aural realm as well) unnerves us.
If the innocent eye is the eye of the architect, the eye developed by Rousseau and
Ruskin, there is another eye developed by the very same authors, not an innocent eye at all but
an eye able to see what the innocent eye tries not to.
To conclude, let us we turn back to the originators of the innocent eye: Rousseau and
Ruskin. The appropriation of Rousseau and Ruskin by art educators to promote a pedagogy of
the innocent eye, disembodied and unsoiled by society or pre-existing subjectivity is curious, even
bizarre when we are confronted by the fact that these very same authors also put forth
remarkably similar accounts of vision that on the surface at least were diametrically
opposed to this model.831
After describing the ideal education in mile, later in that very same text Rousseau wrote
of A problem which another child would never heed [that] would torment mile half a year: mile
and the instructor would go to an elegant dinner with wealthy people where the two would be
dazzled by the many guests, servants, dishes, and elegant china. In miles ear the instructor
would whisper How many hands do you suppose the things on this table passed through before
they got here? The virus, the Trojan horse, is successfully implanted in the childs mind and the
result is a crisis:
In a moment the mists of excitement have rolled away. He is thinking, considering,
calculating, and anxious. The child is philosophizing, while philosophers, excited by wine
or perhaps by female society are babbling like children. If he asks questions I decline to
answer and put him off to another day. He becomes impatient, he forgets to eat and
drink, he longs to get away from table and talk as he pleases. What an object of curiosity,
what a text for instruction. Nothing has so far succeeded in corrupting his healthy reason;
what will he think of luxury when he finds that every quarter of the globe has been
ransacked, that some 2,000,000 men have laboured for years, that many lives have
perhaps been sacrificed, and all to furnish him with fine clothes to be worn at midday and
laid by in the wardrobe at night.832
Over a hundred years later, in 1875 Ruskin too would write in Letter Fifty-six of his Fors:
Let us consider, then, how many conditions must meet; and how much labor must have
been gone through, both by servile and nobile persons, before this little jaunty figure,
seated on its box of clothes, can trot through its peaceful day of mental development.

831.

I am indebted for to Geoffrey Waite for his citation of Rousseau and Ruskins
genealogical vision in his spring 1993 course on visual ideology.
832.

Rousseau, 153.

269
(I.) on dry bread and onions, must have pruned and trodden grapes; cask-makers,
cellarmen, and other functionaries attending on them.
(II.) Rough sailors must have brought the wine into the London Docks.
(III.) My father and his clerks must have done a great deal of arithmetical and epistolary
work, before my father could have profit enough from the wine to pay for our horses, and
our dinner.
(IV.) The tailor must have given his life to the dull business of making clothes the
wheelwright and carriage-maker to their woodwork the smith to his buckle and springs
the postillion to his riding the horse-breeder and breaker to the cattle in his field and
stable, before I could make progress in this pleasant manner, even for a single stage.
(V.) Sundry English King and Barons must have passed their lives in military exercises
and gone to their deaths in military practices, to provide me with my forenoons
entertainments in ruined castles; or founded the great families whose servants were to be
my hosts.
(VI.) Vandyck and Velasquez, and many a painter before them, must have spent their
lives in learning and practising their laborious business.
(VII.) Various monks and abbots must have passed their lives in pain, with fasting and
prayer; and a large company of stonemasons occupied themselves in their continual
service, in order to provide me, in defect of castles and noblemens seats, with
amusement in the way of abbeys and cathedrals.833
Thus, opposed to two critical moments of the innocent eye we have two moments of what
could perhaps best be termed a genealogical vision, capable of an awareness of the genealogy
of an object as it is embedded in a social matrix of production. This genealogical vision would
embody an awareness of the history that Walter Benjamin reminds us is always there, no matter
how suppressed:
the cultural heritage we survey has an origin that we cannot contemplate without horror: it
owes its existence not merely to the effort of great geniuses who created it, but to the
anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is not a single artifact of culture that is not
simultaneously an artifact of barbarism. And just as no artifact is free of barbarism, so too
the process of its reception, by means of which it has been passed on from one recipient
to the next, is equally fettered.834

833.

John Ruskin, Letter 56 (August 1875), Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and
Labourers of Great Britain, Volume V in The works of John Ruskin, (London: G. Allen, 1903-12)
Volume XXVIII, p 391-392.
834.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Illuminations. Essays and

Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969, originally
written in German, 1940), 256. Modified translation from Geoffrey Waite, Truckin Under a Pink
Sky, Seeing Red, Human Rights/Human Wrongs.ed. Robert Hobbs and Frederick Woodard.
(Iowa City: Museum of Art, University of Iowa, 1986), 72. See also the discussion of this passage
in the same article, 72-73 as well as the historical materialist mode of seeing proposed in

270
To this end, Benjamin theorized a materialist way of seeing what he called dialectical
images. Benjamin projected a stereoscopic vision: out of two two-dimensional images we would
see a third, three-dimensional one with depth. Appropriating this technique from architectural
historian Sigfried Giedion, Benjamin would read out todays life from the forms of the recent past,
then the forms of the nineteenth century.835
Genealogical vision aims to recover the recuperated meaning of an image. In this way it
is related if not identical to the dtourned vision of the Situationists, a vision that seeks out the
meaning hidden in the acts of appropriation that make up the spectacularized image. While the
spectacle swallows up revolutionary critique by presenting a false transparency, Situationism
exposes the opacity of the object: that which has been repressed in the recuperation.836
In the discourse of high aesthetics, it is the innocent eye that survives and flourishes, not
the genealogical vision, the vision that sees the gaze of the Other, the misery of the objects
production and the suppression of the marks of the hand of the producer, the vision of the
dialectical image. This vision does the simplest thing possible: it looks sham in the face and says
I know who you are, even if I will now be shot.

Geoffrey Waite, Lenin in Las Meninas: An Essay in Historical-Materialist Vision, History and
Theory vol. 25 no. 3 (1986): 248-85.
835.

See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing. An English Reconstruction and

Analysis of Walter Benjamins Arcades Project, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press,
1989), especially chapter 9, Materialist Pedagogy, 289-330.
836.

For an excellent discussion of the Situationist project of dtournement as a response

to the spectacles recuperation of revolutionary critique, see Sadie Plant, The Most Radical
Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age, (London and New York: Routledge,
1992), chapter 3, a single choice: suicide or revolution. 75-110. The undigested residues of
the recuperated can be as the Situationists would put it, time-bombs. Recuperation is never safe,
it is always dangerous. Someone can always come along and explode the bombs, given the
proper motivation.

271

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List of Illustrations

Page 20. Howard Roark as the Architect who Refuses to Compromise. from the
movie the Fountainhead.
page 49. School of Design in Chicago. Build Peter Hahn and Lloyd C. Engelbrecht,
ed. 50 Jahre Bauhausnachfolge. New Bauhaus in Chicago, (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv: Argon,
1987), 111.
page 50. School of Design in Chicago. The Education of the Eye. Hahn and
Engelbrecht, ed. 138.
page 56. Roger Delaunay. Simultaneous Windows. Colin Rowe and Robert Slutkzy,
Transparence. Relle et Virtuelle, (Paris: Droits de Regards Les ditions du Demi-Cercle,
1992), 45.
page 57. Juan Gris. Still Life. Rowe and Slutkzy, 46.
page 58. Pablo Picasso. LArlsienne. Rowe and Slutkzy, 55.
page 59. Bernard Hoesli. Analysis of Villa Garches according to Rowe & Slutzkys
Principles of Transparency. Rowe and Slutkzy, 88.
page 68. John Hejduk. The Nine-Square Grid Problem. John Hejduk, Mask of
Medusa: Works 1947-1983, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 37.
page 69. Students at Cooper Union. Solutions to the Nine-Square Grid Problem.
Kenneth Frampton, Notes from the Underground, Artforum April 1972, 41.
page 73. Robert Venturi. Frug House. Cardboard Models.

Vincent

Scully,

The

Shingle Style Today or The Historian's Revenge, (New York: George Braziller, 1974), figures 9394
Page 100. Alan Blackburn and Philip Johnson as the Gray Shirts. Kurt Andersen,
Philip the Great, Vanity Fair, June 1993: 136.
Page 105. Father Charles Coughlin addressing his public. Charles J. Tull, Father
Coughlin and the New Deal, (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1965), 127.

321
Page 106. Rally of 80,000 for Father Charles Coughlin in Chicago organized by
Philip Johnson, 1936. Sheldon Marcus, Father Coughlin. The Tumultous Life of the Priest of the
Littfle Flower, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973), 129.
Page 124. Danzig before the German Invasion, 1939. Robert Kee, 1939. In the
Shadow of War. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1984), 259.
Page 155. Philip Johnson. The Glass House at Night. Architectural Review, CVIII
(September 1950), 14.
Page 162. Philip Johnson at his Glass House. David Whitney and Jeffrey Kipnis, Philip
Johnson: The Glass House, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 113.
Page 174. John Hejduk. Diamond House B. John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works
1947-1983, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 246.
Page 175. John Hejduk. Diamond House B. Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 247.
Page 185. Peter Eisenman. House II. Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles
Gwathmey, John Hejduk, Richard Meier, Colin Rowe and Kenneth Frampton, Five Architects,
(New York: Wittenborn & Company, 1972), 24.
Page 186. Michael Graves. Benacerraf House. Eisenman, et. al. Five Architects, 46.
Page 187. Michael Graves. Hanselman House. Eisenman, et. al. Five Architects, 58.
Page 188. Richard Meier. Smith House. Analytical Diagrams. Eisenman, et. al. Five
Architects, 111.
Page 189. Richard Meier. Smith House. Eisenman, et. al. Five Architects, 117.
Page 190. Charles Gwathmey. Gwathmey House and Studio. Eisenman, et. al. Five
Architects, 63.
Page 191. Charles Gwathmey. Gwathmey House and Studio. Eisenman, et. al. Five
Architects, 65.
Page 192. John Hejduk. One-Half House. Eisenman, et. al. Five Architects, 102
Page 193. John Hejduk. House 10. Projection E. Eisenman, et. al. Five Architects, 92.
Page 198. Stern and Hagmann. Saft House, East Hampton New York. Scully, The
Shingle Style Today, figure 112.
Page 199. Jaquelin Robertson. Madden House. Scully, The Shingle Style Today,
figures 124-125.

322
Page 219. Philip Johnson leads the discussion at the 1978 A.I. A. Convention.
Convention '78:Remarks by Gold Medalist Johnson A. I. A. Journal (July 1978), 18.
Page 220. Philip Johnson and his kids at the 1978 A. I. A. Convention. Convention
'78: A Lively Discussion About Design, A. I. A. Journal (July 1978), 28.
Page 239. Installation view of The Architecture of the cole des Beaux-Arts at
the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Barbaralee Diamondstein, ed., American Architecture
Now II, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 64.
Page 252. The Philip Johnson Gallery, Museum of Modern Art. Diamondstein, ed.,
American Architecture Now II, 63.
Page 273. Friedrich Froebel. Kindergarten Gifts. Michael J. Lewis, Apprendre de
toutes pices/Toys that Teach, (Montral: Centre Canadien d'Architecture, 1993), 13.
Page 279. Walter Gropius, the eye compared to a camera. Walter Gropius, Scope of
Total Architecture, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1955, originally published 1943),
following 64.
Page 285. John Hejduk. Wall House. Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 294.
Page 286. Peter Eisenman. Spatial Analyses. Peter D. Eisenman, The Formal Basis of
Modern Architecture, Ph.D. Trinity College, University of Cambridge, 1963.
Page 287. Peter Eisenman. House II. Transformational Diagrams. Peter D.
Eisenman, Cardboard Architecture, Casabella no. 374 February 1973), 20.
Page 288. Peter Eisenman. House II. Transformational Diagrams. Eisenman,
Cardboard Architecture, 21.
Page 304. Kazys Varnelis. Architecture as Blobs. 1994 . Swivel 3d Pro Model.
Original work. Private Collection. Ithaca, New York.

323

Appendix I A Philip Johnson Chronology,

1932-1945
The following chronology has been compiled from numerous sources, mainly
Franz Schulzes biography.

1932
2 July
Summer

late September
1933
January
Spring
30 January
1934
April

The founding of the Department of Architecture at MoMA is

founded, Philip Johnson is chairman.
Johnson goes to Europe with his mother and sister Theodate.
Leaves them to go to Berlin where he meets up with Helen
Appleton Read, the art critic of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She
takes him to a Nazi rally at Potsdam.
Johnson meets up with his mother and sister and Alfed H.
and Margaret Barr. He remains until October.
Philip Johnson and Alan Blackburn discuss founding a new
party.
Hitler assumes power.
Johnson in Europe. Meets Barr at Ascona on Lake Maggiore.
They argue violently over the of the Nazi regime.
Johnson attends a Hitler rally in Germany.
Johnsons article on The Architecture of the Third Reich
published in Hound & Horn. Schulze states that it was
published late in 1933.

Planning session for the Grey Shirts held at Johnsons

apartment. Several more held throughout the Spring.
June-Late Summer Johnson and Blackburn travel across the country on a factfinding mission for their party.
September?
Hindenberg, the President of the German Republic entrusts
chancellorship to Hitler.
December 18

Two Forsake Art to Found a Party, The New York Times

Two Quit Modern Art Museum for Sur-Realist Political
Venture, New York Herald Tribune describe Johnson and
Blackburns Nationalist Party, and their eminent departure to
go observe the methods of Huey Long.

325
22 December
1935
Late spring-midAugust
9 September
1936

January
February

Spring

8 November
1937
22 March

Summer

Johnson and Blackburn leave for Louisiana.

They go to Washington with Long. Tells them to organize
Ohio.
Johnson bedridden with rhematic fever in New York. Realizes
ties are largely severed with the museum.
Huey Long shot and dies.
By this time Johnson and Blackburns visit to Huey Long has
failed and they have aligned themselves with Father Charles
Coughlin.
Blackburn gives speech on the plight of youth at the
convention for Coughlins party, the National Union for Social
Justice.
The duo help Coughlin financially: for two years, sponsoring
The Voice of Youth a series of Sunday afternoon broadcasts
on radio station WSPD, Toledo. Johnson gives Coughlins
Union Party campaign $5,000. Johnson runs for a seat in the
Ohio Legislature.
Blackburn and Johnson give speeches at the Cleveland
meeting of the Legion for Social Justice.
They make contact with Coughlin, are received cordially and
return to New London to organize a local chapter of the
National Union for Social Jusice.
Johnson declares himself a candidate for the Ohio State
Legislature, runs as a Democrat.
Blackburn and Johnson organize a rally for Coughlin in
Chicago at which eighty thousand spectators pay fifty cents
each to hear Coughlin.
Blackburn and johnson begin a series of broadcasts over
WSPD in Toledo for Social Justice.
Social Justice announces the formation of Youth and the
Nation, a political group organized by Johnson and Blackburn.
They later change the name to the Young Nationalists.
Johnson returns to Germany for first time since 1934 to see
Mies van der Rohe. Encounters festschrift for Hjalmer
Schacht, German economist and Hitlers Minister of
Economics. Impressed by an essay by sociologist Werner
Sombart, Johnson meets him and offers to translate the
essay into English.

326
Early Fall

Blackburn returns to New York to abandon politics and ge

married.

1938
Spring

Summer

Fall 1938 and

Winter
1939
1939
Spring-Summer
19 April

Summer

Johnson spends time with Lawrence Dennis.

Johnson meets with Ulrich von Gienanth, an official of the
German embassy who knew Dennis. Arranges to attend the
Nazi Parteig in Nuremberg to mark five years of power and to
participate in a Sommerkurs fr Auslnder, a course for
foreigners on Nazi politics.
According to Johnson article of 11 September 1939, he is in
the Sudetenland sometime during the year, apparently duing
the German invasion...
Little known about this period: Johnson apparently gives a
series of lectures. Made plans to buy conservative periodical
The American Mercury.

According to testimony by Auhagan, the first public meeting of

the American Fellowship Forum was held on this date.
Lawrence Dennis gives a lecture.
Johnson and his sister Theodate travel in Europe. Visit
London and Paris. Johnson goes to Berlin. From there he and
Frau Viola Bodenschatz, an American journalist married to
Major General Karl Bodenschatz, drive through Poland to
Klaipeda, Lithuania (then in German hands as Memel) and
back, lagerly through the Polish Corridor. Drive through town
of Makw where Johnson sees Jews. Then through Warsaw
and Lodz.
Johnson leaves Frau Bodenschatz in Berlin and rejoins
Theodate for journey through Balkans. Meets Otto Eisler,
Jewish homosexual architect, is told that Gestapo had taken
him prisoner. Johnson notes he is injured.

June-July
July

Publication date of Johnsons Are We a Dying People? in

Todays Challenge.
Translators Preface to Werner Sombart, Weltanschauung,
Science and Economy, (New York: Veritas Press, 1939)
signed by Johnson, dated July 1939, New London, O.

327
July 24

Publication date of Johnsons Aliens Reduce France to an

English Colony, in Social Justice.
August-September Publication date of Johnsons London and Paris Midsummer
1939, in Todays Challenge.
23 August
The German-Soviet nonagression pact. Johnson and
Theodate hear of it while crossing the Bosporus on way back
from Istanbul. They immediately drive back to central Europe,
but Johnsons car fails in Romania. They abandon it, go to
Vienna by train. Theodate heads
Late August
Johnson apparently in Danzig. Around this time, Johnson is
arrested and released by Polish police. Immediately prior to
being in Danzig, he has been in Berlin, Warsaw, and Lodz.
1 September
Germany invades Poland. According to Johnsons Todays
Challenge article of November-December 1939 Johnson is in
Munich at the outbreak of hostilities.
11 September
Publication date of Johnsons Polands Choice Between War
and Bolshevism Is a Deal With Germany in Social Justice.
18 September
William Shirer ordered by Dr. Boehmer, Propaganda Ministry
chief in charge of trip, to share room with Johnson at Zoppot,
near Danzig.
October
According to Johnson, he returns to the United States.
6 November
Publication date of Johnsons This Sitdown War. Heavy
Engagements of the Fortnight Have Been on Economic and
Moral Front, in Social Justice.
NovemberPublication date of Johnsons Inside War-Time Germany, in
December
Todays Challenge November-December 1939.
1940
26 January
Johnson main speaker at American Fellowship Forum
meeting in Springfield, Massachusetts.
27 January
Springfield Evening Union describes Johnson speech of
previous night.
29 February
Forum Observer reports that Johnson will lecture at the
American Fellowship Forum in New York on 1 March 1940.
1 March
Lecture for Johnson at American Fellowship Forum in New
York announced in Forum Observer.
28 August
Members of the American Fellowship Forum begin to appear
under subpeona in front of the House of Representatives
Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities
(Dies Committee).
September
Johnson begins architecture school at Harvard.

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10 September
11 September
21 November
1941
18 December

1942
1 May to 14 May

Dies Committee subpeonas and formally examines Friedrich

Auhagen, the director of the Forum.
Dies Committee subpeonas and formally examines Ferdinand
A. Kertess, one of the founders of the Forum.
Dies committee White Paper published.
Ferdinand A. Kertess appears again before the House of
Representatives Special Committee to Investigate UnAmerican Activities. Is asked if he knows Philip Johnson,
states he does not, but has heard of him from Lawrence
Dennis. States that Johnson and Dennis shared offices
together on E. Forty-Second Street.
Sometime during this period Johnson testifies before the
Grand Jury for the Sedition Trial, probably in its investigation
of Father Coughlin

1943
Johnson testifies again before the Grand Jury for the Sedition
Trial, probably in its investigation of the American Fellowship
Forum and Lawrence Dennis.
Spring
Johnson graduates Harvard, enters the army as a latrine
orderly (See Charles Jencks, Philip Johnson The Candid
King Midas of the New York Camp, Late Modern
Architecture, (New York: Rizzoli, 1978; originally published in
Architectural Association Quarterly, Winter 1973) 153).
by September 16, Dies Committee publishes its Report on the Axis Front
date on Cornell
Movement in the United States Nazi Activities. Includes
University copy
summary of American Fellowship Forum activities mentioning
Johnson as active in both the Forum and Coughlins Social
Justice.
1945
Johnson leaves the army.

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Appendix II Philip Johnson Documents,

1934-1940
Two Forsake Art to Found a Party. The New York Times, December 18, 1934:
23.
Two Quit Modern Art Museum for Sur-Realist Political Venture. New York
Herald Tribune, December 18, 1934: 1, 17.
Philip Johnson. Are We a Dying People? Todays Challenge, June-July 1939:
28-37.
Philip Johnson. Aliens Reduce France to an English Colony. Social Justice,
July 24 1939: 4.
Philip Johnson. London and Paris Midsummer 1939. Todays Challenge,
August-September 1939: 19-26.
Philip Johnson. Polands Choice Between War and Bolshevism Is a Deal With
Germany. Social Justice, September 11, 1939: 4.
Philip Johnson. This Sitdown War. Heavy Engagements of the Fortnight Have
Been on Economic and Moral Front. Social Justice, November 6 1939: 9.
Philip Johnson. Inside War-Time Germany. Todays Challenge, NovemberDecember 1939: 17-25.

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Forum Speaker Feels the U. S. Will Be in War Within Year. Springfield
Evening Union, January 27, 1940: 8.

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