SCOTT ALEXANDER: Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House.

A prophet is without honor in his own country — or, to put it another way, a disease rarely goes pandemic in the area where it evolved. You need a naive unexposed population before ideas can really explode. Enter the United States.

In the early 1900s, the US still had a colonial inferiority complex. Europe ­­­automatically had the best and classiest of everything: the best intellectuals, the best food, and definitely the best art. A few bold Americans tried to blaze their own cultural trail, but they were overwhelmed by the power of elite Europhilia.

After World War I, some Americans visited Europe and brought back reports that the Bauhaus was pretty cool. Some modern art museums did exhibitions on the Bauhaus. Everyone agreed that they were cooler and better than we were, but nothing really came of it.

Then the Nazis took power in Germany. The socialist Bauhaus architects fled the country. Many came to America, where we colonial yokels responded with star-struck awe. Wolfe, writing before political correctness limited our stock of acceptable metaphors, says:

The reception of Gropius and his confreres was like a certain stock scene from the jungle movies of that period. Bruce Cabot and Myrna Loy make a crash landing in the jungle and crawl out of the wreckage in their Abercrombie & Fitch white safari blouses and tan gabardine jodhpurs and stagger into a clearing. They are surrounded by savages with bones through their noses – who immediately bow down and prostrate themselves and commence a strange moaning chant: The White Gods! Come from the skies at last!

The worshipful colonials immediately gave them every prestigious architecture position in the country. Gropius got the department chair at Harvard. As for Mies, the last director of the Bauhaus collective in Germany:

[He] was installed as dean of architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago. And not just dean; master builder also. He was given a campus to create, twenty-one buildings in all, as the Armour Institute merged with the Lewis Institute of Technology. Twenty-one large buildings, in the middle of the Depression, at a time when building had come almost to a halt in the United States – for an architect who had completed only seventeen buildings in his career – o white gods! Such prostration! Such acts of homage!

And so:

The teaching of architecture was transformed overnight. Everyone started from zero…all architecture became nonbourgeois architecture, although the concept itself was left discreetly unexpressed, as it were. The old Beaux-Arts traditions became heresy, and so did the legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright, which had only barely made its way into the architecture schools in the first place. Within three years, every so-called major American contribution to contemporary architecture . . . had dropped down into the footnotes.

I found this part of the book sudden and jarring. Okay, Americans have always had an unhealthy fascination with European culture – but, really? Everyone abandoned all previous forms of architecture within a three year period just because some cool Europeans showed up? I was left to hunt down hints to the broader story. Some of these come from elsewhere in the book, and some are my own speculation.

Modernism was one of the first examples of what became known as “political correctness.” As Wolfe noted in From Bauhaus to Our House:

As for the compound taboos concerning what was bourgeois and nonbourgeois, these soon became the very central nervous system of architecture students in the universities, as if they had been encoded in their genes. There was a bizarre story in the press at the time about a drunk who had put a gun to the head of an upland Tennessee footwashing Baptist and ordered him to utter a vile imprecation regarding Jesus Christ. The victim was in no mood to be a martyr; in fact, he desperately wished to save his own hide. But he was a true believer, and he could not make the words pass his lips, try as he might, and his brains were blown out. So it was with the new generation of architects by the late 1940s. There was no circumstance under which a client could have prevailed upon them to incorporate hipped roofs or Italianate cornices or broken pediments or fluted columns or eyebrow lintels or any of the rest of the bourgeois baggage into their designs. Try as they might, they could not make the drafting pencil describe such forms.

O white gods.

The near universalism of PC architecture is what led to what Alexander described as “my all-time favorite conspiracy theory, Tartaria:”

Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization – St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers – dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they’re more stylish.

Of course, putting blinkers on architects would be far from the only example of political correctness to emerge from academia, alas.