The Professor of groupthink: From Bauhaus To Our House by Tom Wolfe

Book Review
From Bauhaus To Our House by Tom Wolfe
First Published in 1981 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux
This Edition Published in 1999 by Bantam

Tom Wolfe, (author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full) the master of identifying and describing what he calls 'the human comedy' (i.e., a witty look into social trends), takes a look at post-World War II architecture in America and doesn't like what he sees. Written in 1980, he is struck by the monotony and ugliness of the buildings, and their clients' willingness to pay for them.

'"O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on eartrh where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today?"'

As Tom Wolfe explains, modern architecture in America can be traced back to post-World War I Germany and Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus School. Influenced by the socialist movement and the ruins of Europe, Gropius and his colleagues start an architectural movement based on the notion of "starting from zero".

"Gropius' interest in the 'proletriat' or 'socialism' turned out to be no more than aesthetic and fashionable, somewhat like the interest of President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic or Chairman Mao of the Republic of China in republicanism. Nevertheless, as Dostoevsky said, ideas have consequences; the Bauhaus style proceeded from certain firm assumptions. First, the new architecture was being created for the workers. The holiest of all goals: perfect worker housing. Second, the new architecture was to reject all things bourgeois. Since just about everybody involved, the architects as well as the Social Democratic bureaucrats, was himself bourgeois in the literal, social sense of the word, 'bourgeois' became an epithet that mean whatever you wanted it to mean. It referred to whatever you didn't like in the lives of people above the level of hod carrier. The main thing was not to be caught designing something someone could point to and say of, with a devestating sneer: 'How very bourgeois.'"

The change in the design and style of buildings was revolutionary:

"It had been decided, in the battle of the theories, that pitched roofs and cornices represented the 'crowns' of the old nobility, which the bourgeoisie spent most of its time imitating. Therefore, henceforth, there would be only flat roofs; flat roofs making clean right angles with the building facades. No cornices. No overhanging eaves. These young architects were working and building in cities like Berline, Weimar, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, atabout the Fity-second Parallel, which also runs through Canada, the Aleutian Islands, Moscow, and Siberia. At this swath of the globe, with enough snow and rain to stop an army, as history had shown more than once, there was no such thing as a functional flat roof and a fucntional facade with no overhand. In fact, it was difficult to imagine where such a building might be considered functional, outside of the Pained Desert. [....]

All masonry, all that gross and 'luxurious' granite, marble, limestone, and red brick was suspect, unless used in obviously non-load-bearing ways. Henceforth walls would be thin skins of glass or stucco. (Small glazed beige ceramic brick were okay in a pinch.) Since walls were no longer used to support a building--steel and conrecte or wooden skeletons now did that--it was dishonest to make walls look as chunky as a castle's."

In 1937 Walter Gropius, escaping the Nazi onslought, came to America:

"The reception of Gropius and his confereres was like a certain stock scene from the jungle movies of that period. Burce Cabot and Myrna Loy make a crach landing in the jungle and crawl out of the wreckage in their Abercombie & Fitch white safari blouses and tan gabardine jodhpurs and stagger into a clearing. They are surrounded by savages with bones thorughout their noses--who immediately bow down and prostrate themselves and commence a strange monaing chant.
The White Gods!
Come from the skies at last! [...]

Such prostrations! Such acts of homage! The Museum of Modern Art honored Gropius with a show called 'Bauhaus: 1919-1928,' those being the years when Gropius headed it. Philip Johnson, now thirty-four years old, could resist the physical precence of the gods no longer. He decamped to Harvard to study to become an architect at Gropius' feet. Starting from zero! [...]

It was emberassing, perhaps... but it was the king of thing one could learn to live with... Within three years the course of American architecture had changed, utterly. It was not so much the buildings the Germans designed in the United States, although Mies' were to become highly influential a decade later. it was more the system of instruction they introduced. Still more, it was their very presence. The most famous creatures in all the mythology of twentieth-century American art--namely, those European artists poised so exquisitely against the rubble-they were...here!...now!...in the land of the colonial complex...to govern, in person, their big little Nigeria of the Arts.

This curious phase of late colonial history was by no means confined to architecture, for the colonial complex was all-pervasive. Stars of the two great movements of European painting, the Cubists and Surrealists, began arriving as refugees in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Leger, Mondrian, Modigliani, Chagall, Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Yves Tanguy--O white gods! The American Scene and Social Realist painting of the 1930s vaniched, never to reappear."

And so the European ideal was taken up by the American architectual elite much as Manhattinites today are in fervor of the New York (Bronx) Yankees. For those who tried to counter the establishment, the punishment was swift and severe, especially within the "elite" architectual world of the university:

"Within the university compounds there was no way for an architect to gain prestige through an architecture that was wholly unique or specifically American in spirit. Not even Wright could do it--not even Wright, with the most prodigious outpouring of work in the history of American architecture. From 1928 to 1935, only two Wright buildings were contructed. But in 1935 he did Fallingwater, a home for Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr., father of one of his apprentices. This structure of conrete slabs, anchored in rock and cantilevered out over a waterfall in the Pennsylvania highlands, was the start of the final phase of Wright's career. He was sixty-eight years old at the time. In the next twenty-three years, until his death at the age of ninety-one in 1959, he idd more than half of his life-s work, more than 180 buildings, including the Johnson Wax headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, Herbert F. Johnson's mansion, Widngspread, Taliesin West, the Florida Southern campus, the Usonian homes, the Price Company Tower, and the Guggenheim Museum. Within the university compounds this earned Wright a reputation like Andrew Wyeth's in the world of paining: okay for a back number.

In a way, the very productivity of a man like Wright, Portman, or Stone counted again him, given the new mental atmosphere in the universities. Oh, it was easy enough, one supposed, to go out into the marketplace and wheedle and vamp and dance for clients and get buildings to do. But the brave soul was he who remained within the compound, stayed years of his career in intellectual competition, doing the occasional small building, where a convenient opportunity presented itself, in the Corbu manner: a summer house for a friend, and addition to some faculty member's house, and--if all else failed--that old standby, the retirement home for Mother, which she paid for. It was no longer enough to build extraordinary buildings to show the world. The world could wait. It was now necessary to win in the competition that took place solely within and between the world of academic architecture."

And so the "human comedy" continued... The fear of "anathema", in the words of the author, was so great, that architecture changed very little from the 1940s to 1980. That resistance to change, however, created even more comedy for those perceptive enough to notice it (solely Tom Wolfe?), as other architects tried to break the mold without being excommunicated from the establishment.

A great story... applicable to any groupthink situation... a Tom Wolfe classic.