UGLY AND ORDINARY ARCHITECTURE
Modern movement. Through excluding a body of traditional practice for the sake of “science,” a vacuum was left filled ironically by a form of permissive : “What appears on the surface as a hard, rational discipline of design, turns out rather paradoxically to be a mystical belief in the intuitive〖 process.”〗^15
FIRMNESS + COMMODITY ≠ DELIGHT : MODERN ARCHITECTURE AND THE INDUSTRIAL VERNACULAR
Vitruvius wrote, via Sir Henry Wootton, that architecture was Firmness and Commodity and Delight. Gropius (or perhaps only his followers) implied, via the bio-technical determinism just described, that Firmness and Commodity equal Delight ; that structure plus program rather simply result in form; that beauty is a by-product ; and that-to tamper with the equation in another way-the process of making architecture becomes the image of architecture. Loius Kahn in the 1950s said that the architect should be surprised by the appearance of his design (Fig. 118).
Presumed in these equations is that process and image are never contradictory and that Delight is a result of the clarity and harmony of these simple relationships, untinged, of course, by the beauty of symbolism and ornament or by the associations of preconceived form : Architecture is frozen process.
The historians of the Modern movement concentrated on the innovative engineering structures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as prototypes for Modern architecture, but it is significant that the bridges of Maillart are not architecture, and the hangars of Freysinnet are hardly architecture. As engineering solutions, their programs are simple and without the inherent contradiction of architectural programs. To traverse a ravine directly, safely, and cheaply or to protect a big space from the rain without intervening supports is or that is required of these structures. The unavoidable symbolic content of even such simple, utilitarian construction and the unavoidable use of what Colquhoun calls typologies were ignored by the theorists of the Modern movement. The not infrequent ornamation of these forms was excused as a deviant architectural hangover, characteristic of the times. But the ornamentation of utilitarian superstructures is typical of all times. The defensive walls of the medieval city were topped with elaborately varied crenelations and studded with rhetorically ornamented gates. The applied decoration of the classic structures of the industrial Revolution (we see them as more classic than innovative) are another manifestation of the decorated shed-for example, the elaborated gusset plates of the frame bridges, or the modified Corinthian capital of the fluted cast- columns in loft building, or the eclectically stylish
15.Ibid.