Children attending the first type of school space, an open-air school, in Benares, India.
Essy Baniassad
Every institution of any form and content, social or intellectual, tends to ossify in time, to drift away from its primary purpose, and to become an impediment to any other primal purpose and vision. It takes a conscious process of continuous deconstruction and resynthesis to resist the drift, and a bold total break with the institution to reverse it.1 CIAM and Ghost 13, among other subsequent events, are, in various degrees, instances of such a process.
The process of this drift is subtle and indistinct since it is an accumulated result of many steps, each one of which in itself may be progressive and well intentioned. But the effect of it, whether in the area of ideas, designs, or education, is evident in the fading glow at the origin of things. Architectural education has been particularly affected by such a drift, due to the increasing replacement of direct observation of reality, the thing, with its abstract familiar derivative, the idea. One correlated effect has been the displacement of learning through exploration by one based on received information, and the changes of schools from centers of discourse and discovery to “academic” corporations. In this process, the proverbial school gathering under a tree—the one-room schoolhouse—has become a labyrinth, the main challenge of which, once you’re in it, seems to be to find your way out: “on the road,” under the sky, under the tree again. There the aim of education is to inspire not to impress, to reveal not to obscure, to extend not to confine, to celebrate not to judge. By contrast the new institutional environment tends to replace knowledge and the reality of things with codes, names, labels, conventions, and rhetorical illusions.
The Summer Arts Institute faculty of Black Mountain College gathers in North Carolina in 1946. From left to right: Leo Amino, Jacob Lawrence, Leo Lionni, Ted Dreier, Nora Lionni, Beaumont Newhall, Gwendolyn Lawrence, Ise Gropius, Jean Varda (in tree), Nancy Newhall (sitting), Walter Gropius, Mary “Molly” Gregory, Josef Albers, and Anni Albers.
Restoring reality to such illusion has been the motive behind the modernist impulse throughout history. This is not associated with modernism as a style, but rather the timeless impulse to remove the haze of history, the established norms and notions, and to regain the childlike physical directness, the “gemlike flame” of untamed imagination.2 Thus modernism reaches for the primal origins and the existential necessity of primitive originality.3
In both form and content the modernist movements and events assume a conscious distance from conventional settings, formats, and orthodoxies, to guard against drifting into the very conventions that they intend to question. This is key to understanding the nature of such movements and their relationship with established institutions. CIAM, Black Mountain College, Ghost Lab, and other such initiatives are not retreats as their settings might suggest. They are staging points with the vision to see, question, engage, influence, and arrest the drift away from the primary purpose of architecture and education, while standing outside of it.4
Ghost 13, “Ideas in Things,” challenged post-CIAM positions in current architectural practice, education, and educational institutions, including many that, while rooted in modernism, have been gradually institutionalized. It did so through a diverse selection of fresh and pioneering work by practicing architects and presentations on architectural history, theory, and criticism.
The presentations and proceedings were not particularly seeking to define a singular position and point of view. What was important here was not agreement or disagreement, but the intensity and sincerity of the proceedings. In a world defined by adopted metaphors of public relations and conventions of corporate and consumer culture, such sincerity and seriousness is itself a radical offering.5 It is the necessary condition to reach past niceties and conventions of ideas and events, and to see the naked idea in the object. The aim of “Ideas in Things” was not the reaffirmation of what is known. It was the discovering of what is obscured by what is known, what is denied by what is offered, and what is excluded by what has become commonplace practice.
Ghost 13 raised a fundamental question that concerns the understanding and engagement with the modernist impulse in any form. How was it that modernism, the impulse to question conventionality, was itself smoothed and vulgarized into a convention, orthodoxy, and an institution? Surely not simply because of the actions of a small group of “pioneers.” It engaged innumerable individual designers, many with a spirit of curiosity, originality, choice, rejection, and critical selection. But there were obviously many more who trained on the deep-seated tendency to see things only in the form of orthodoxies or styles, and they tended to search for a convenient convention to adopt, a form to follow. It was ultimately this tendency that subverted the point of modernism, and formed a new one in the course of its opposition to an existing institution and style.
That training was founded on a style-based view of history, which could only register change in terms of a style; it not only obscured a true sense of history, but it delegitimized it as a foundation of architectural knowledge. The rich ordered chaos of reality lies beyond one view’s reach and range. What it offers is a memoriam to the things past, rather than the eternal presence and relevance of all that exists, date of origin and passage of time notwithstanding; to quote Wallace Stevens, “all history is modern history.”6
This is where education comes in, and the urgency of the theme of “Ideas in Things” comes into focus. It reaffirmed the primal purpose of architecture, where the need for shelter and commodity is ennobled with human aspirations of immortality. It implicitly pointed out the urgency of architecture and its demise where it has been codified, commodified, and institutionalized.
The theme of “Ideas in Things” questions the content of school programs, in their realism and abstractions, as they engage in imaginary worlds and turn away from imaginative observation of discovery and design in the real world. Virginia Woolf’s comment on the relation between the two worlds comes to mind: “We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language.”7
The presentations on design, history and theory, and technology were directed at the status quo in education. They were not statements meant to affirm a further orthodoxy nor to propose a manifesto, but to open the window, as Van Eyck would say. Above all, the most sharply posed question was one implied in the title: “Ideas in Things.” It recalls the well-known distinction between the Cartesian versus the Existentialist position: “I think therefore I am” versus “I am therefore I think.” It also invites a close interrogation of the relationship between languages and physical forms; that is, works of architecture as distinct from literature or science.
In architecture many iconic statements are slogans, metaphors, or riddles whose meaning depends on a key that lies outside the statement and the commonly understood meaning of the words. Such statements are more in the genre of poetry than prose. Some thing, a real entity independent of words, is the key to the riddle. Some of these well-known statements are: “less is more,” “form follows function,” “house is a machine for living,” and “decoration is crime,” etc. The key to the understanding of the phrase “house is a machine for living” is in the design of some actual houses, rather than in the narrow meaning of the word “machine.” Therefore the meaning changes in each case depending on the designer and the actual design. It hardly extends architectural understanding of the work of Le Corbusier. To base an extensive argument on the ordinary meaning of the word “machine” or on “less is more” in a literary sense shows a misunderstanding at best. In all such cases the “idea” is not independent of the real “thing.”8
In architecture, the language of words is a supporting language, but a necessary one for intelligent discourse about “the thing,” design and form, as in the design studio. And that makes the dual “idea-thing” a key concept in the formulation of any program. Despite its appearance this juxtaposition does not pose an irresolvable polarity. “Idea” and “thing” together are elements of a more complex idea-thing concept, the understanding of which is key to safeguarding the studio against realism, a pitfall to which the studio is often susceptible in the attempt to deal with reality. The distinction is well expressed in the words of Wallace Stevens, that “Realism is a corruption of reality.”9
The work and the workings of the studios of the architects who participated in Ghost Lab illustrated the difference and provided examples for valuable reference. Glenn Murcutt’s practice is a clear example of a “studio” at work. His explicit comments should be seen in the context of the passion and the precision that glows in every instance of his work. Similarly the designs by a host of other participating architects offer potent examples, which address the deeper reality of primal conditions in architecture, not disregarding the necessity of transient functions. These are not so much architectural commissions as they are experiments in architectural design, much like explorations in the scientific study of natural phenomena. They go beyond contingent questions and deal with them within a context of essential ones. For them economy is an aesthetic issue not a question of monetary value, and function is defined in cultural norms not anecdotal requirements. Social conditions and imperatives are seen and addressed through their evidence in built form not in received statistics and theories.
For these reasons the study of architecture is ultimately the study of works of architecture and the history of architecture is composed of the body of all such work.
Significantly, the examples of the work presented are all designs for “the house.” The house, as the built form of “dwelling,” is the seminal form in architecture, in that every building is an extension of it. It is a collection of three primal places of human habitat: place of gathering, place of work, and place of solitude. All three places could be in one space, or one place could dominate depending on the primary function of the “house,” assembly, theater, etc. Every value and mythology behind the house extends to every building, and no building, as an extension of the house, becomes a mere diagram of a function; the house is less anecdotal than an expression of a holistic vision of architecture. That vision originates not in “Adam’s House in Paradise,” but in the human primitive home on earth.10 There lies the founding myths of human civilization and the seeds of culture. And the way to study them is to track their embodiment in the total scope of architecture—the house and the city—in their profound material reality; neither to receive them as theoretical abstractions nor to regard them as marketable commodities, but in the history of the subject—Architecture— that defines them and is defined by them. Architectural history is the home of the social, cultural, and ethical content of architecture and its embodiment in each individual work. It is one that embraces life in all its chaos and diversity and brings the past to life as a part of the present. It evolves out of the eternal presence of the origin of the human habitat and underlies all phases of its development in all scales.
As Juhani Pallasmaa notes, “architecture withers when it departs too far from the primary experiences and images of dwelling.”11 It may appear that my stress on the design studio might marginalize the relevance of other subjects in a program. The increasing abundance of information offers rich material for reference and learning. In architecture there is little to teach and much to learn. The increasing number of courses is a further aspect of the institutional drift. It dismembers the subject and reduces the intellectual challenge and the opportunity for exploration. The primary question for a program is how many divisions offer a useful path to study the scope, the complexity, and the unity of the subject. The three-part curriculum—place, craft, community—as suggested by Brian MacKay-Lyons is a good beginning. It identifies the essential domains in a program and guards against teaching too much, recognizing mathematician Alfred Whitehead’s advice: “Do not teach too many subjects,” and again, “What you teach, teach thoroughly.”12
The clutter of courses and extensive “teaching,” however well intentioned, often tends to reduce the courses to mere dissemination of information. It disturbs the solitude the student needs to assimilate and reconstruct the subject. It defeats its own educational objective as it interrupts the natural process of learning, a process with its own inner rhythm. It often brings back to me this childhood memory:
In Iran many relatives who came to visit us would take away cuttings of some quite special roses in our garden to plant in theirs. During a lunch visit my brother asked someone who had taken cuttings a couple of months earlier how the roses were doing. “Not well” she said, “they haven’t even begun to grow roots.” I wondered how she knew that. I asked, “How do you know they haven’t begun to take root?” She said, “I take them out every week and check them.”
1 “In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine.” Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967).
2 Walter Pater. “To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”
3 This should not be mistaken for being stuck in the past. It echoes the modernist impulse to connect back to the primal origins of art. I regard “primitive” as a primal and pre-history or without-history quality inherent in a work and not related to its date. The modernist strives to be free from history and draws upon the primitive for inspiration. The place of “the primitive” is little considered in the formal history of architecture. It is however a key notion in Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy. “Primitive man”—which Worringer did not mean condescendingly—stands “lost and spiritually helpless amidst the things of the external world.” But from this helplessness he draws the vitality to create the “greatest abstract beauty.” Objects are removed from their natural context “with elementary necessity and in an individual form turned into art.” See Sebastian Preuss, “Spiritual Intoxication,” ArtMag 56 (August 2009), an essay on Wilhelm Worringer and Modernism. An example and influence of primitive origins in art is of course Picasso’s work. The false view of “origins” as inconsequential and of negligible cultural impact is the key to the banality and failure of any work adhering to it. By contrast the reconnection to the primal origin in art continues to be a source of energy and vitality as exemplified in the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
4 The Black Mountain College initiative by John Andrew Rice was another notable example. Established in 1933 in North Carolina, Black Mountain College operated until 1957. It had an experimental program combining academic knowledge and practical skills. Josef and Anni Albers, Walter Gropius (Bauhaus), John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller taught there. The board included Albert Einstein and William Carlos Williams. From 1954 to 1957, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley published a literary journal, Black Mountain Review, with contributions by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, et al.
5 Recollection of the point by Susan Sontag in “Simone Weil,” The New York Review of Books (February 1963).
6 Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957).
7 Virginia Woolf, “Montaigne,” in The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1925).
8 This point underlies Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement, in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1922): “What can be shown cannot be said,” and in Daniel Barenboim’s essay “Beethoven and the Quality of Courage”: “It must be understood that one cannot explain the nature or the message of music through words”; Daniel Barenboim, The New York Review of Books (April 4, 2013).
9 To paraphrase Northrup Frye’s understanding of Wallace Stevens, “Realism should be distinguished from Reality: Realism is a surrender of imagination to the external world; Imaginary world: imagination running away from the reality; ‘The purely realistic mind never experiences any passion for reality.’” See Northrop Frye, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1983), 278.
10 “In 1753, Marc Antoine Laugier, the French theorist, proposed the primitive hut as the foundation of architecture in his Essai sur l’architecture. See Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society and Museum of Modern Art, 1972).
11 Juhani Pallasmaa, “Architecture and Human Nature: A Call for a Sustainable Metaphor,” in this volume, 31–40.
12 Whitehead, The Aims of Education.
