THEORY OF UGLY AND ORDINARY
association with Cubism and fitted Le Corbusier’s famous definition, of that time, of architecture as “the skillful, accurate and magnificent play of masses seen in light.”
SYMBOLISM UNLIMITTED
A contradiction between what was said and what was done was typical of early Modern architecture : Walter Gropius decried the term “International Style” but created and architectural style and spread a vocabulary of industrial forms that were quite removed from industrial processes Adolf Loos condemned ornament yet applied beautiful patterns in his own designs and would have erected the most magnificent, it ironic, symbol in the history of skyscrapers if he had won the Chicago Tribune competition. The later work of Le Corbusier started a continuing tradition of unacknowledged symbolism, whose indigenous-vernacular forms, in varying manifestations, are still with us.
But it is a contradiction-or at least the lack of correspondence-between image and substance that confirms the role of symbolism and association in orthodox Modern architecture. As we have said, the symbolism of Modern architecture is usually technological and functional, but then these functional elements work symbolically, they usually do not work functionally, for example, Mies’s symbolically exposed but substantively encased steel frame and Rudolph’s beton brut in concrete block or his “mechanical” shafts used for an apartment house rather than a research lab. Some latter-day Modern architectural contradictions are the use of flowing space for private functions, glass walls for western exposures, industrial clerestories for suburban high schools, exposed ducts that collect dust and conduct sound, mass-produced systems for underdeveloped countries, and the impression of wooden formwork in the concrete of high-cost economies.
We catalog here the failures of these functional elements to function as structure, program, mechanical equipment, lighting, or industrial process, not to criticize them (although on functional grounds they should be criticized), but to demonstrate their symbolism. Nor are we interested in criticizing the functional-technological content of early Modern architectural symbolism. What we criticize is the symbolic content of current Modern architecture and the architect’s refusal to acknowledge symbolism.
Modern architects have substituted one set of symbols (Cubist-industrail-process) for another (Romantic-historical-eclecticism) but without being a ware of it. This has made for confusing and ironic contradictions that are still with us. The diversity of styles (not to mention the syntactical correctness and suave precision) of the architecture of the 1960s might challenge the versatility of a Victoian eclectic of the 1860s.