The International Style.

Late last year, while prowling in a Catholic bookstore, my eye was caught by a book title--E. Michael Jones's Living Machines: Bauhaus Architecture as Sexual Ideology. The book seemed to have a promising thesis: that the dream of a new architecture promulgated by modernist architects in Europe after World War I was founded on a complete and rather stupid disrespect for tradition, particularly that of the integrity of the family. Now here, I thought, were a daring author and publisher and a provocative argument: that architectural Modernism has been not just an aesthetic failure--how boring it often looks--but an ethical one. I confess to being tired of art history that is unfailingly even-handed and detached, and here I caught the scent of blood. However, as I guess I should have expected, the book turns out to be really rather wonky--too bad because the argument, if it were made in a subtle, knowing way, could, I think, be thought-provoking and important.

The story of what critic Nikolaus Pevsner christened the "Modern Movement" goes back to just before World War I. Between about 1912 and 1927 a new look in leading-edge design appeared which has reshaped the way our century lives and our material environment looks. "[T]here exists today a modern style as original, as consistent, as logical, and as widely distributed as any in the past," wrote Alfred H. Barr, Jr., director of the new Museum of Modern Art in New York, heralding the landmark 1932 exhibition called The International Style. The principal book under review here is a new edition of the one that was written to accompany that show. The authors were a pair of young, overprivileged, and rather preachy and aesthetic friends of Barr's who went on to distinguished careers, Hitchcock as a scholar and Johnson as an architect (he is still alive and making a mark). The book was designed to expose "backward" Americans to the radically stripped, futuristic architecture built in Europe and some corners of America in the preceding decade. The authors' heroes were J.J.P. Oud of Holland; Walter Gropius, creator of the Bauhaus in Germany; Mies van der Rohe; and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better-known as Le Corbusier--all of whom, except for Oud and with the addition of Frank Lloyd Wright, are still considered the modern masters. In other words, to a great degree Hitchcock and Johnson wrote the history we still tell about modern architecture.

With a puritanical, missionary zeal, the authors argued that the pale, cubistic, minimalist architecture of new housing-settlements and recreation clubs, which looked so strange beside the Beaux-Arts Classical courthouses and Colonial Revival residences Americans were accustomed to, heralded the advent of a universal style for the twentieth century, the equal of Graeco-Roman classicism, Romanesque, and Gothic. Barr and the authors christened the austere new look the "International Style," a label that has stuck. Claiming only to describe the style, they were (as they themselves later admitted) actually prescribing it, an aim in which they were largely successful until the 1950s.

The book's reissue marks more than a jubilee or nostalgia: it is a sign of the return to favor, after being held in disdain for about twenty years by "Postmodernists," of sharply antitraditional modes of design harking back to those of the 1920s and '30s. So the subtext is about design today, not outlandish-looking villas and housing colonies then. Charles Jencks, the taxonomist of late twentieth-century architecture, calls the new look "Neomodernism," and signs of it are everywhere--suggesting that "Postmodernism," like "Postcommunism," may be too hopeful a term. Neomodernism is seen in the current penchant for exposed steel I-beams, glass-and-steel canopies at street-and roofline, and modernistic, slightly punky decor, with lots of exposed wire and metal, glass bricks, unmolded cherry-hued hardwood, lean tracklighting with tiny bulbs, and attenuated leather-and-metal furniture. Prominent in fashionable coffee-bars, the look is both retrospective and coolly, elegantly "now," like a Chanel suit or handbag. For my part I am tempted to call it "Millennial Modernism"--architecture for the age of CD-ROM, the Internet, and cellular telephones.

The new designers and theorists, whose utopia looks like the sets of Batman Forever, will find much to admire and emulate in Hitchcock's and Johnson's text and dated black-and-white photos, with their intimations of a precision-engineered future. Perhaps we who scoffed at the book only twelve or fifteen years ago, when all the talk in architecture was of comfort and tradition, were blind to its considerable virtues. The text, written by Hitchcock, is pellucid. Based on car tours of Europe, the text and photos documented examples of the radical architecture that had sprung up since 1922. These include such now-familiar icons of modern design as the Bauhaus at Dessau, Germany; Mies's Tugendhat House at Brno, Czechoslovakia; his glass-and-marble pavilion at the Barcelona exposition of 1929; and Le Corbusier's Villa Savoie at Poissy, France, of 1930. But the authors also presented principles, arguing that the new architecture was more than a flash in the pan; rather it was the harbinger of an organic style for the times. (Only five years later, with architectural modernism turned back by European dictators and American millionaires, they might not have been so hopeful.)

The principles of the new architecture, noted Hitchcock, "are few and broad....There is, first, a new conception of architecture as volume rather than as mass." This was to reflect the modern reality of the building as a cagework of steel or concrete with walls that were mere screens or membranes--"curtain-walls." Second, to assert the primacy of plan and function over a priori notions of style and avoid the determined symmetry of the previous generation of Beaux-Arts design, "regularity rather than axial symmetry serves as the chief means of ordering design." His third principle "proscrib[ed] arbitrary, applied decoration," substituting for it skilled handling of proportions and frank but expressive architectural detail dictated by need. Yet, to rescue a place in the new age for the architect as artist and man of taste, Hitchcock insisted that the good designer did not employ these principles mechanically, but with tact and sensitivity; and herein, I think, lies the subtlety of his argument. He, Barr, and Johnson--in keeping with the new MOMA's mission--were seeking a via media between the bald functionalism of sociologists and engineers, for whom aesthetics meant nothing beside the urgent need for decent housing, and, at the opposite extreme, the formalism of traditionalist architects who believed that meaning and legibility in design demanded reference to the Western humanist past. Anyone who has been awake at all in the past decade will sense the resonance of their quite balanced, and in retrospect admirable, argument for our present situation.

The International Style and the example of the new European architecture caused the new style to sweep America by about 1939-41. The process was hastened by the arrival here of several of the modern masters, forced out of Europe by Hitler. Both Gropius and Mies came in 1937 and directed influential American architectural schools until the 1950s. Accordingly, their attitudes were dominant when the war ended. Only Wright really demurred, and by the mid-thirties even his architecture--for instance, Fallingwater, the Kaufmann house in western Pennsylvania, of 1935--was nodding to the International Style.

As with so many phenomena, though, the style's ascendancy contained the seeds of its demise. By the late forties the austere, "honest" architecture Hitchcock and Johnson had celebrated fifteen years before had come to look, frankly, boring, especially in showy, materialist America. Was it for this world of white stucco housing settlements, with nary a trace of ornament and small shopping and community centers, that Allied soldiers and millions of others had died? Even during the war, progressive architects had started calling for a "New Monumentality" in design, which the small, unselfconscious, often left-wing work of the Modernists in the 1920s and '30s could never deliver. Instead, some architects began to look to the powerful and expressive, even primitive, work that Le Corbusier had explored in wartime seclusion in southern France and with which he burst back on the scene when the war ended, especially his Unite d'Habitation at Marseilles, of 1946-52. By the fifties, architects and their clients, especially in the United States, were seeking modes more expansive and expressive than the prosaic International Style of the interwar period.

So began what has been called Late Modernism, a phase that Hitchcock himself coined in his essay of 1951 on "The International Style Twenty Years After," which appears as an appendix here. Embarrassed at the narrowness of his earlier views and willing to tolerate greater stylistic latitude, he predicted that architecture would continue to flow in the stream channeled by the "high" modernism of the 1920s and '30s but said, "I suspect we are entering the `late' phase." For a time architecture seemed to bear him out. The swooping roofs and decorative patterned grilles employed in the late fifties by architects like Minoru Yamasaki, Edward Durrell Stone, and, yes, Philip Johnson himself--who, in the new preface, calls himself a "jumper-arounder"--looked like baroque variations on the old purist themes.

By the 1960s, however, younger architects were in full revolt against what they considered the rigidity and heaviness into which orthodox Modernism had fallen. A rupture occurred. The key event, says art historian Vincent Scully, was the appearance in 1966 of Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, in which, aping the smug, aphoristic style of the High Modernists but turning their aphorisms on their heads, Venturi proclaimed "Less is a bore" and "form evokes function." His ironic play on received architectural pieties, which parallels the parody of the "organization man" and "military-industrial complex" in the Vietnam years, ushered in "Postmodernism." Architects like Venturi and fellow Yalies, Charles Moore and Robert Stern, without denying their place as heirs to the powerful tradition of Modernism, sought to create a complex, multilayered, often witty architecture in which traditional, especially classical, elements appeared, transformed and out of scale. At their worst such designs were what Moshe Safdie called "private jokes in public places," but at its best the movement fostered renewed appreciation for the Renaissance, Mannerist, Baroque, and Neoclassical architectural traditions. The late seventies saw a kind of High Postmodernism in which--for a pertinent example--Johnson's AT&T Building in Manhattan, of 1978, alluded to several kinds of tradition, with its grand, thirties-ish elevator lobby, its subtly articulated shaft of office stories, and its memorable crest after that of a Chippendale highboy.

It is this mood of retrospection or continuity with the past against which the Neomodernism of the late eighties and the nineties has reacted. Neomodernism also evokes a past--that of the visionary High Modernism of the early twentieth century--making it in effect a Postmodern Modernism. The reaction was evident by 1988, when the MOMA, not to be left behind, staged the show Deconstructivism, which Johnson himself organized to celebrate (his own work and) the quite extreme direction being taken toward themes of collision, contradiction, and random chaos by architects like Peter Eisenmann. Architecture since 1990 seems generally tamer than this, replaced by more earnest, sober-sides, and thus buildable "Neo-Modernism," but without doubt the neotraditionalism of the '70s and '80s has waned among the avant-garde.

While admiring the sleek beauty of the current work, I am not in total sympathy with this resurgence of Neomod, which I find, at its worst, bone-chilling, like green hair and blue lipstick or suicide committed in style. Like E. Michael Jones, I feel it harbors deep nihilism--hardly the mood for the millennium. I want to protest, "Haven't we seen and done all this before? Must we fetishize the New and go in search of it again and again?" It seems we must, and the new edition of Hitchcock's and Johnson's book, good as it is, just when we thought it was dead and buried, is a sign of that.