UGLY AND ORDINARY ARCHITECTURE (161)
Meeting the architectural implication and the critical social issues of our era will require that we drop our involuted, architectural expressionism and our mistaken claim to be building outside a formal language and find formal language and find formal languages suited to our times. These languages will incorporate symbolism and rhetorical applique. Revolutionary eras are given to didactic symbolism and to the propagandistic use of architecture to promote revolutionary aims. This is as true for the symbolism of today's ghetto rebuilders (African militant or middle-class conservative) as it was for the Romantic Roman republican symbolism of revolutionary France. Boulle was a propagandist and symbolist as well as formalist. He saw, as we must see, architecture as symbol in space before. To find our symbolism we must go to the suburban edges of the existing city that are symbolically rather than formalistically attractive and represent the aspirations of almost all Americans, including most low-income urban dwellers and most of the silent white majority. Then the archetypal Los Angeles will be our Rome and Las Vegas our Florence; and, like the archetypal grain elevator some generations ago, the Flamingo sign will be the model to shock our sensibilities towards a new architecture (Fig.145).
HIGH-DESIGN ARCHITECTURE
Finally, learning from popular culture does not remove the architect from his or her status in high culture. But it may alter high culture to make it more sympathetic to current needs and issues. Because high culture and its cultists (last year's variety) are powerful in urban renewal and other establishment circles, we feel that people's architecture as the people want it (and not as some architect decides Man needs it) does not stand much chance against urban renewal until it hangs in the academy and therefore is acceptable to the decision makers. Helping this to happen is a not-reprehensible part of the high-design architect; it provides, together with moral subversion through irony and the use of a joke to gat to seriousness, the weapons of artists of nonauthoritarian temperament in social situations that do not agree with them. The architect becomes a jester.
Irony may be the tool with which to confront and combine divergent valuse in architecture for a pluralist society and to accommodate the differences in values that arise between architects and client. Social classes rarely come together, but if they can make temporary alliances in the designing and building of multivalued community architecture, a sense of paradox and some irony and wit will be needed on all sides.
Understanding the content of Pop's messages and the way that it is projected does not mean that one need agree with, approve of, or repro