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Title: From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe ISBN: 0-553-38063-X Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 05 October, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.62 (21 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: a showpiece rant
Comment: Wolfe's little book is actually an extended polemic against the Bauhaus school and all its offshoots in architecture and design. Although never boring, I found nothing new here. In fact, I found several direct steals from Robert Hughes's landmark SHOCK OF THE NEW (1980), the book and teleseries which came out the year before Wolfe wrote his little screed. I'd advise anyone interested in pursuing the iconoclast's case against modern architecture to check out this earlier work as well.
Rating: 5
Summary: FALSE 'GODS' OF ARCHITECTURE THROWN DOWN FROM OLYMPUS
Comment: This polemic is a landmark work and should be required reading of any would-be architect to demystify the god-like aura he will be introduced to regarding certain architects of the past. Mr. Wolfe lays the parallel between the pretensions masquerading as art in his earlier seminal work, "The Painted Word", and that of the lofty pretensions of modern architecture, a means to generate lots of money without any real regard to beauty. Within a few chapters and just 128 pages of the softbound (including several dozen black and white photos), he skillfully and unabashedly strips the "clerisies" of the "Silver Prince," the "White Gods," and the "Scholastics" of their reams of air-head theories of 'buildings for the working class' to show the bald pretensions of those seeking not art, but self-adoration!
I treasure my copy of the 1982 pocket book edition with a cover showing a model of the author (in his signature white suit, of course) standing and leaning against a model of a Victorian townhouse complete with the usual porches, turrets and dormer, in preference to the model of a modern and soulless, detailless 'glass block' building next to him. In a rapid and learned language, the author skewers the enormous egos, the blasé pretensions and the artless greed of our modern architects and developers as no on else can. He shows how an intellectual vogue of the 1920s beginning in the Bauhaus of reconstruction Germany found several variations and warpings with new materials and cheaper construction methods to create the 'glass box skyscrapers' with their flat roofs so characteristic of post World War II construction. One would think that to design an efficient building that is somewhat beautiful and within budget would be enough to satisfy any real architect, but here is shown that these would-be 'gods' preferred to build around themselves a worshiping school of acolytes so awed by these silver-tongued devils and so bereft of their own originality, that they caused the architecture schools to elevate these opportunists to an 'Olympus of Architects' from which Mr. Wolfe duly dethrones these supposed 'kings.' This reviewer is an admirer of that uniquely American form of architecture: the Movie Palace, a structure type that these 'elevated' "White Gods" would not even deign to call 'architecture,' so I am delighted that so clever a writer and perceptive a critic took on the task of setting history straight: the ornamentation that we all naturally love DOES belong in and on our buildings as part of the reflection of how God chose to ornament the acme of all architecture, the Earth itself, with flowers and such not directly needed in its superstructure. Form may follow function, but as here pointed out so skillfully, it does not mean that 'Naked is beautiful' in buildings.
While it can be argued that as long as mankind ever more concentrates in squalid megalopolises, it will be necessary to build towering glass boxes to achieve the best use of limited space at a cost a developer can afford. I for one hope to avoid any megalopolis that alienates men from the true God and inflates the egos of man-made 'gods' to darken our lives with tasteless structures of profit only to the rich. Ironically, Mr. Wolfe chooses to reside in New York City with his family and every day must confront the ugly congestion of an 'urban forest' of buildings that block the sun from his life, but evidently not from his heart. In the finale, he heralds a halting return to ornamented structures and even admires some of the achievements of such diverse designers as Frank Lloyd Wright and John Portman, so he leaves one with hope that the fawning adoration of the Bauhaus and its descendents will wane, and that High Tech will cease to be 'High Ugly.' Let us rally to this call for a return to artistry and realize that to repeat the past of European architectural standards is not regression, but a realization that even in new materials of today we can continue to achieve the fine dimensions and proportions of human-scaled cities of ornamental beauty that were realized by our forefathers. (Matthew 23:27)
Rating: 4
Summary: Modern Architecture debunked
Comment: I live a few blocks from the marble lollipops at 2 Columbus Circle: Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art. And as I read the impassioned articles in the New York Times about its impending destruction, I have wondered to myself "What is this strange building, and why do so many people care so deeply about it?".
Tom Wolfe is just the man to tell me. And while he's at it, he put a whole field of endeavor into perspective.
I grew up disliking the "modern" residences that disfigured Haddonfield New Jersey in the 1960s, but being too insecure to say so, and feeling vaguely uneasy about Waterfalls and puzzled about The Fountainhead. Wolfe to the rescue!
It's short; it's sharp; it's funny; it's topical, still; it's entertaining. Buy it, read it and you'll never look at modern architecture in the same way again.
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Title: The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe ISBN: 0553380656 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 05 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: In Our Time by Tom Wolfe ISBN: 0553380605 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 05 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe ISBN: 0553380621 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 05 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby by Tom Wolfe ISBN: 0553380583 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 05 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Pump House Gang by Tom Wolfe ISBN: 0553380613 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 05 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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