On Sunday I saw the 1959 film The Diary of Anne Frank and, in its depiction of Anne’s friendship with the son of another family hiding with the Franks in the attic of a Dutch row house in Nazi-occupied Holland, I thought I saw another example of the difference between traditional architecture and modern architecture.
In one of the film’s subplots, Anne, played by Millie Perkins, and Peter Van Daan, played by Richard Beymer, are thrown together in the attic of the row house, serving downstairs as a spice factory. The two teenagers’ friendship turns romantic so slowly that it is barely apparent until near the end, when it is consummated with a gentle kiss shot by the camera in dark silhouette.
That is the traditional progression into love. It can be speeded up or even slowed down further to reflect the personalities and circumstances involved. The more or less subtle steps along the way might perhaps be compared with the succession of classical moldings that mark the transformation of a wall into a ceiling by means of a cornice, or, on the exterior of the house, by the diverse levels of ornament – such as (in rising order) the astragal, cymba reversa, dentils, ovolo, modillions, fascia and cyma recta – that make up the entablature of an ornate classical roof cornice.
The previous sentence, in its representation of architectural progression and multiplicity of scale, might have been written by Palladio, Christopher Wren, or Charles Follen McKim, or, today, by Quinlan Terry or Robert A.M. Stern. So what sort of sentence might have been written by, say, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the founders of modern architecture?
“Wham! Bam! Thank you, Ma’am!”
I do not believe that is an exaggeration. And I don’t deny that Palladio might have felt the urge to WBTYM in his life. Many of us do, today and yesterday, but the urge is, shall we say, less frequently subdued in our modern world. Despite its pretense to an attention to fine detail, Mies’s Seagram Building (1959) cries out “Wham! Bam! Thank you, Ma’am!” It is a blockhead of a building that elbowed its neighbors (until most were replaced by Miesling copies) and poked its finger in the eyes of its observers, as it still does.
The Beijing headquarters of China’s CCTV, by Rem Koolhaas (who is Dutch), is even worse. I have often depicted the building as stomping on the Chinese people. With less direct reference to its form, which looks like a pair of legs walking – China’s authorized nickname for the building is “Big Pants” – it might also be said to be engaged in rape. That act of violence is, of course, the representative evil of the 21st Century, as murder was in the 20th. Not very romantic.
Of course the scene of Anne Frank’s diary is hardly romantic. It is set during World War II with Nazi concentration camps of the Holocaust just over the horizon of the daily lives of the Jewish families hiding out in the Dutch attic. Indeed, the horror of their situation is deepened by the elegant architecture of the Amsterdam street upon which it unfolds. The irony of Germany’s embrace (if it may be so called) in the 1930s of Hitler and Nazism is that it occurred in such an undeniably civilized nation. Notwithstanding the world war that was its end result, Hitler’s takeover of Germany was not quite a WBTYM event. It was more subtle, but it certainly was not romantic.
Am I comparing modern architecture’s takeover of the architectural establishment in Europe and America to Hitler’s takeover of Germany? Serious difficulties beset such a comparison, to say the least. But yes, I am.
The big difference (aside from what many will consider the outrageousness of the idea) is that Hitler was more subtle. The bastard first won an election and then maneuvered his way into a degree of authority that transformed Germany into a dictatorship. By comparison, the modernists’ takeover of the establishment in architecture between 1940 and 1950 seems like a rape. The droogs of A Clockwork Orange come to mind. The trads were unable to resist. Was it PTSD from two world wars and a depression? I don’t know. Anyhow, traditional architecture was the establishment for centuries.
(I hasten to add, as if it were necessary, that I am not comparing the horrors of Nazi Germany to the horrors of modern architecture. A shooting war is more horrific than a bloodless coup in architecture, however far-reaching and dispiriting the consequences.)
I’m sure there will be objections to the path this post has taken since it compared the attic romance of Anne and Peter to the WBTYM that is too often conventional today. Allow me to apologize in advance. A blog post often represents writing gone wild, and it is more like a one-night stand than the slow-motion enchantment of an erudite essay by Hazlitt. Still, I hope the stray, disruptive thoughts of this post will be appreciated by some.