FROM BAUHAUS TO JERRY JONES’ HOUSE In the Bleat, James Lileks writes:
Then again, my books are rebuke to my own culture, since the architecure and art they contain are better than the tiresome products of the contemporary art establishment. This remarkable article in Forbes — not recent, but recently discovered — contains some gas-inducing quotes about the function and purpose of modern architecture, and it’s basically this: the brightest minds of the profession believe it is the duty of the architect to startle, confront, unnerve, dissolve, destroy, and also whip out the willie [to] irrigate the fusty bourgeoise notions like beauty and tradition.
The article discusses a piece that took modern architecture to the woodshed, where it said “look at this woodshed. It’s more humane than anything you design.” Someone wrote a defense, but had to be honest with himself:
Yet Betsky then admitted, “All those critiques might be true.” They are irrelevant, he claims, since architecture must be about experimentation and the shock of the new. (Why this should be the case he does not say.) And sometimes designers must stretch technology to the breaking (or leaking) point: “The fact that buildings look strange to some people, and that roofs sometimes leak, is part and parcel of the research and development aspect of the design discipline.” Ever brave, he is willing to let others suffer for his art.
But as Anne Beatts, one of the original Saturday Night Live writers famously said, “You can only be avant-garde for so long before you become garde.”
The fountainhead (sorry, Ayn) of modern architecture was the Weimar Germany design school, the Bauhaus. It’s celebrating the century of its birth this year, cranking out from 1919 to 1933 (when the National Socialists shuttered its doors), its specialty, what Tom Wolfe called in From Bauhaus to Our House, ultra non-bourgeois socialist worker housing. How ubiquitous — and non-shocking — has their socialist worker housing become? As I write over at Ed Driscoll.com, on the Friday before the Super Bowl, their newest and most famous tenant is “America’s Team.” Tom Landry would flip his fedora if he knew:
(Bumped.)