HISTORICISM - ONE BEGINNING OF PM

Post-Modernism as a cultural formation started, at many points and times. It grew

with the counter-culture of the 1960s, the rise of the postindustrial society first in
America, the disenchantment with Abstract Expressionism in the art world, the
growth of a global market and so on.
By contrast, the First World War, Hiroshima and the Holocaust are all markers that
philosophers and historians have seen as turning points, as creating the crisis of
Modernity.
In architecture a case can be made that the shift occurred when Modern
architecture became mass-cult, the historic city was threatened by economic forces,
and architects rediscovered architectural DNA, that is, the continuity of languages and
historic types. This rediscovery created its own form of "crisis."

Debate over styles

In the late 1950s, the question of what period of architecture might be plausibly
revived was fiercely, and rather uncharitably, debated by the English and Italians.
Reyner Banham and his teacher Nikolaus Pevsner launched quite different kinds of
attacks on Italian Neo-Liberty and what they took to be a return to Historicism.
Professor Banham, attacked "The Italian retreat from Modern Architecture" as
"infantile regression," because it went back to a pre-machine-age style.
Pevsner listed the other retreats from the faith and found shades of deviant "neo-
Art Nouveau and neo-De Stijl," neo-this and neo-that sprouting everywhere like
poisonous weeds. The English articles and attacks, lasting from 1959 to 1962, were
meant to wipe out these heresies with a little critical weed-killer, but in the event the
Italians fought back at this Puritanism, what they called "the refrigerator school of
criticism."

Initial examples

One of the most convincing Historicist buildings of the fifties was Paolo
Portoghesi's Casa Baldi 1, 1959-61, an essay in free-form curves definitely
reminiscent of the Borromini he was studying, yet also unmistakably influenced by Le
Corbusier.
Here is the schizophrenic cross between two codes that is characteristic of Post-
Modernism. On the one hand, the enveloping, sweeping curves of the Baroque, the
overlap of space, the various foci of space interfering with each other and, on the
other, the Brutalist treatment, the expression of concrete block, rugged joinery and the
guitar-shapes of Modernism.

Semi - Historicism started in America, in a big way, about 1960 with the major
works of Philip Johnson and the more kitsch variants of Minoru Yamasaki, Ed Stone
and Wallace Harrison.
Yamasaki and Stone produced their sparkling version of what were termed
Islamic" grilles and frills" in 1958 and then "almost-real-Gothic" in 1962. The latter is
the date of Yamasaki's infamous instant arches awaiting their cathedral, in Seattle.
The Historicism is attenuated, embarrassed, half-baked - neither convincing appliqué
nor rigorous structuralism - a problem for many of the architects who left Mies setting
out for decoration (and never quite arrived).
Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson is easily the most accomplished and intelligent of this group; indeed
he probably thought about the problem of Historicism far sooner and longer than
other architects.
His first, tentative break with his mentor Mies van der Rohe was the Synagogue in
Port Chester, 1956. On the outside it was a startling simplification recalling those of
Ledoux; on the inside it was reminiscent of the Soane Museum. These historical
quotes are located within a black picture-frame of Miesian steel, and the absence of
ornament and content mark it as Modernist; so Johnson like so many others - is
looking two ways. But it was his writing, sensibility and support for the young that
were far more important in contributing to Post-Modernism than his buildings.
In 1955 an essay attacking "The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture" exposed
some of the formulae behind which Modern architects hid, or tried to escape res-
ponsibility for formal choice: for instance, the pretence to utility and structural
efficiency were two such "crutches."
Johnson later, in "The Processional Element in Architecture," 1965, also debunked
the spatial rationalizations of the Modern Movement. Playing with traditional shapes
(the redundant segmental arch appears in his Amon Carter Museum 1961 and Folie
1962) these arguments no doubt pushed the door of history open further.
He advanced into this forbidden territory armed with laconic sarcasm:
“Mies is such a genius! But I grew old! And bored! My direction is clear; eclectic
tradition. This is not academic revivalism. There are no Classic orders or Gothic
finials. I try to pick up what I like throughout history. We cannot not know history.”

What keeps Johnson from developing this more seriously is not only his jocular
tone, his preference for surface wit over deeper investigation, but also his Modernist
commitment to pure form, ugly or beautiful - but pure form.
The Historicism of Johnson remains on the level of spotting the source, "sorcery,"
on esoteric codes rather than on more accessible and conventional ones. He thus
never really creates an argument for ornament, regional suitability, or contextual
appropriateness - three potential aids to his eclecticism that might have strengthened
it.

The Japan style

If Johnson and Saarinen can be classified as semi Historicist, or one-half Post-

Modern, then so too can the "Japan Style," and the "Barcelona School" which devel-
oped at the same time, but toward a regionalist expression.
The "new Japan Style," is best exemplified in the sixties work of Kunio Maekawa,
Kenzo Tange, Kiyonori Kikutake and Kisho Kurokawa. It incorporates nationalist and
traditionalist elements within a basically Corbusian syntax. Thus, projecting beam
ends, brackets, torri gates, gentle curves, beveled masts, constructional expression "all
the hallmarks of Japanese architecture in wood" are translated into reinforced concrete
and juxtaposed according to the method of "compaction composition."
Le Corbusier developed this method of Cubist collage, and the Japanese, with their
traditional Zen aesthetics of asymmetrical balance, frequently push it toward the
refined and exquisite. While they use Brutalist materials and smash them through
each other, they still end up with something as elegant as a Tea Ceremony Room
(albeit in concrete). As with Johnson and Saarinen they remain hesitant about
tradition, and wary of a full-blown eclecticism.
As Kenzo Tange remarked in 1958:
“So-called regionalism is always nothing more than the decorative use of traditional
elements. This kind of regionalism is always looking backwards.. .the same should be
said of tradition.”
No one was prepared in the sixties to pose these questions in a radical or
functional way, and so the Modernist suspicion of ornament and convention remained
(while the practice slipped towards regionalism).

STRAIGHT REVIVALISM AND THE POWER OF PARODY

Gothic architecture, it is surprismg to think, survived in England through the

sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries right into the Gothic Revival. It never
entirely died because people liked this "national style," and there were always a few
cathedrals in need of repair.
By the 1980s and the intervention of Prince Charles into the debate it became
obvious that the death certificate was premature. Raymond Erith and then Quinlan
Terry, Leon Krier, Robert Adams and others continued the Classical tradition with
varying invention.

Are there moments when Straight Revivalism is appropriate, without any ironies?
Conrad Jameson would argue "yes" when it comes to housing, particularly mass
housing, where pattern books are called for.
The argument is that Georgian or Edwardian terraces work better than Modern mass
housing, because a tradition - which ever one it is, as long as it is unbroken - contains
more values, and well-balanced ones, than a Modern architect can invent or design.
People enjoy these terraces more than new inventions. They are often cheaper to build
than the system-built alternative, and they fit into the urban context, in language and
scale.
Thus, according to Jameson, one selects a pattern language suitable to the area and
only modifies it piecemeal, if there is need for a new technology: a garage door here,
or a refrigerator there. Otherwise tradition always gets the benefit of the doubt:
architecture is a social craft, not a creative art.

While Jameson's arguments are plausible for mass housing, they are not as
exclusive as he intends. His Radical Traditionalism is just one approach among many,
and there is no reason an architect cannot use it also to send aesthetic and
metaphysical meanings addressed to the few.
Already in the early 1970s, when he was writing, one strand of commercial
revivalism became a major industry: the popular house and speculator's development.
Even more widely influential were the well-known pastiches of Portmeirion,
Disneyland and their world-wide variants.
This tradition developed most quickly in the Far East, Los Angeles and Houston
where Ersatz new towns, or at least vast housing estates, sprung up as fast as a plastic
polymer gone berserk. In Europe, various Ersatz towns were created, especially by the
seashore, such as Port Grimaud (u3), La Galiote, Puerto Banus.
How did such Ersatz become a polemical force in architecture? Through straight
comparison with Modernist new towns. Clearly these mass-produced fabrications
were more humane, appropriate and enjoyable, hence their commercial success.
 An American example of revivalism, which elicited all sorts of response from
architects and critics in the middle 1970s, was John Paul Getty's Museum in Malibu,
California. This captured the debate for a moment because it was such a thorough
going revival (of Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri) and, like Port Grimaud, such a
visible opposition to reigning Modernism.
Architects predictably damned the building as "disgusting," "downright
outrageous," "too learned," "frequently lacking in basic architectural design
judgement," "fraudulent," "recreated by inappropriate technologies" and, of course,
"too expensive" ($10 million - or was it $17 - a mere hors-d'oeuvre for Getty).
These outcries were quickly rebutted by David Gebhardt, an historian who,
unpredictably, was also a supporter of Modernism. He nonetheless found it one of the
most important buildings for ten years, because of its obvious functional
appropriateness and popularity.
By contrast, another Modernist historian Reyner Banham, known for his sometime
celebration of such Pop recreations, condemned the whole thing for its lifeless air, the
"bureaucratic precision" of detailing.
The building became a lightning rod for such opposite opinion and thereby both
over-praised and over-condemned. It is passably fair in its setting, and certainly
delightful to experience as a good replica.

Technology

It accidentally raised the point that our time can indulge, like no other, in accurate
historical virtual reality. Through reproduction techniques (Xerox, film, synthetic
materials) and specialized research (in this case archaeological and landscape
specialists), with high technologies of air-conditioning and temperature control and
new structural capabilities (of putting the whole thing over a parking garage), there
are possibilities beyond the nineteenth-century revival.
We can reproduce the fragmented experience of different cultures and, since the
media have been doing that since 1960, our sensibilities have been expanded. Thanks
to color magazines, travel, and Kodak or, later, the computer and virtual reality,
Everyman has a well-stocked musee imaginaire and is a potential eclectic. He is
exposed to a plurality of other cultures and makes discriminations from within this
wide corpus, whereas previous cultures were stuck with a smaller choice they had
inherited.

By contrast, more serious Japanese architects, such as Mozuna Monta, consciously

travesty the Modern Movement and the Renaissance, making an enigmatic art form
out of parody.
Toyokaze Watanabe weaves Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye and Aalto's Town Hall
into one building, or builds a coliseum inside an Ottoman castle. Monta, who is the
supreme ironist, a man who sees and feels all the cultural confusion of a Japanese
living in Western dress - simultaneously in the twentieth and fifteenth centuries - has
spliced various Renaissance prototypes. In one small house, Michelangelo's Palazzo
Farnese is mixed with Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel and carried out in a black-and-
white Modernist idiom.
The results of such architectural cross-dressing have a certain formal integrity and
interest; the game of architectural chess had these undiscovered forms of checkmate
inherent in its rules.