From Bauhaus to Our House

Rating:
Summary: "Hilariously flawed"
Review: Oh, Tom Wolf---could....you....have....missed the point...more?

Mr. Wolfe, the thinking man's conservative truly pulls out all the stops in this, a wickedly funny roast of modern architects, and products of their craft.

Witty at times, though Mr. Wolfe seems be as fond of repeating himself as his detested architects were of making glass boxes. I lost count about halfway through, but there the ratio of elipses to words was about 2:1.

The true brilliance of this book is found in the duality of the humour. Wolfe manages to hilariously skewer the deification of European artists, while at the same time unintentionally showing his lack of insight into a subject as broad and far-reaching as modern architecture. The verbal hyperbole is to the point where you don't know if he's actually being serious.

Good Sunday afternoon fun.

Rating:
Summary: Wolfe the essayist is even better than Wolfe the novelist
Review: One doesn't normally think of a book on architecture as being funny, but Wolfe's hilarious evisceration of modern architecture's sacred cows is truly a scream. Wolfe skewers the pretensions and downright foolishness of some of the most famous names in 20th Century architecture, and does so in a manner that is always engaging and fun to read. You may not agree with everything he says, but you certainly won't be bored by his witty and provocative observations. As good as Wolfe the novelist is, Wolfe the essayist is even better.

Rating:
Summary: Tabloid journalism on architecture
Review: The author criticizes several architects from page one to the last page. He trashes and ridicules the Bauhaus style, the Stijl, the International style, the Whites, the Rationalists, Post-Modernism, Gropius, Rietveld, Corbusier, Mies van de Rohe, Breuer, Albers, Philip Johnson, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, Aldo Rossi and the list goes on.... Obvious he is very frustrated that these architectural styles and leading architects have dominated and influenced much of the architecture in America and Europa during the 20th century. The writer, a so-called expert-writer on architecture, writes in a, I must admit, very entertaining writing style. This kind of so-called expertise on architecture and architecture trashing belongs in tabloids. Nevertheless I advise every architecture student and others who are interested in architecture to read this non-academic book. It is fun! After a few pages you already know why the writer expresses his opinions so strongly, he hates the mentioned architects and their products.

Rating:
Summary: read with Painted Word
Review: The Painted Word (1975) & From Bauhaus to Our House (1981)(Tom Wolfe 1931-) It is not necessary to read these two books together, but they really do compliment one another and it is when taken together that they make the most powerful case. The case is that, just as each of us has always secretly suspected, modern art is crap. In fact, not only is it crap, it is intentionally so, more or less as a calculated insult to our middle brow tastes. Indeed, while most of us would consider it the purpose of art to convey beauty, modern artists consider art to be merely a tool for political expression. Logically then, since most of them are, and were, opposed to our middle class, democratic, capitalist, protestant values, modern art is antithetical to virtually everything that most of us believe in.

I say that we have all always intuited that this is true, but it was left to Tom Wolfe, naturally, to declare for one and all that the emperor had no clothes. He does this most forcefully in the opening lines of Bauhaus, which deals with modern architecture, when he says:

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

But the reasons for the sorry state of the arts are most clearly explicated in Painted Word. The essay therein was occasioned by a Hilton Kramer review of an exhibition of Realist artists. On the morning of April 28, 1974, Wolfe picked up the New York Times and read the following by Kramer:

"Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial--the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify."

Kramer's words brought about an epiphany:

All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well - how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not `seeing is believing', you ninny, but `believing is seeing', for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.

Painted Word is an extended riff upon this theme--the idea that art had become wholly dependent on theory. His case builds to the stunning dénouement when an artist named Lawrence Weiner presented the following artwork in the April 1970 issue of Arts Magazine:

1. The artist may construct the piece 2. The piece may be fabricated 3. The piece need not be built Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.

Concludes Wolfe:

And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a "receiver" that may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just "the artist", in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode--and in the moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperature...and came out the other side as Art Theory!...Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.

And it is upon reaching this final state of pure theory that C.S. Lewis pessimistic prediction in The Abolition of Man comes to fruition. When we as a people, no longer capable of forming coherent judgments about quality, no longer confident enough to differentiate what is good from what is bad, end up being forced to accept any old garbage that is hailed by the critics and forced upon us.

Wolfe is at his wickedly funny, subversive best here, pricking the pretensions of the Art world--artists, critics and patrons alike. If you want to know why the establishment reacts so angrily to his novels, you need look no farther than these two dissections of the tastes, or lack of such, exhibited by the intelligentsia in Modern Art. When you pronounce to the world that the opinion makers live in ugly, uncomfortable buildings ands decorate their homes with art which is at best a hoax, at worst a pile of trash, you sort of have to expect that the opinions they deliver won't be all that favorable to you.

GRADE: A+ (taken together)

Rating:
Summary: The Emperor's Palace Is a Facade
Review: This book not particularly well-written (Martin Amis does a much better job at this type of journalistic skewering of our cultural pitfalls) but neither is it poorly written. - The recommendation for it is that it takes on the disfigurement of our landscape that has been progressing since the end of WWII and pulls no punches.

I did my undergraduate work at a small New England liberal arts college (whose name shall remain undisclosed) with beautiful Georgian, Colonial buildings as dormitories and classrooms, dating back to the Nineteenth Century, for the most part. Tourists would come to visit and take pictures of them on the weekends. It was a joy to live and study in these buildings, some of which our founding fathers had visited. The exception was this ugly, squat building on what we called the "Back Campus" constructed during the college's postwar expansion. Everyone agreed it was ugly, which was unusual in a school given to Socratic debate about just about everything. I remember how my Senior guide cringed when she pointed to it during my visit as a prospective student. I always wondered how and why such a building that contrasted so dismally with the school's architecture was chosen............Now I know!

This book is worthwhile if for no other reason than to give the non-specialist an idea of the history of how such monstrosities came to be deemed worthwhile.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: This is an absolutley brilliant and hilarious book that was a total eye-opener to me about why there is so much sterile, ugly architecture in the United States (and elsewhere). I have read sections of this book numerous times. Reading this book is like learning why the sky is blue. You have an explanation you did not have before about why an every day part of your environment is how it is.

Rating:
Summary: Not his best
Review: This is not Wolfe's best as it is basically an extended rant against the influence of Bauhaus architecture, which, while somewhat entertaining, doesn't really explain much. For a better analysis of what Harvard art historian Sigfried Giedion called "the hanging curtain of glass," try his outstanding book, Space, Time and Architecture, which does a much better job of tracing and conceptualizing the evolution of 20th century architecture.

Rating:
Summary: Wolfe wavers w/ weightless work on wunderkind worldbuilders
Review: This is the last of three Me Decade books (OK, this was written in 1981, but it still reeks of Carter-malaise and is entirely Reagan-morning-in-America-free) of social criticism written by Tom Wolfe, and it shows. While still identifiably and enjoyably Wolfe, he is getting a bit exhausted. He freely cannibalizes the previous two works (Painted Word and Radical Chic). Whereas in Painted Word, it was the modern art critics whose theories turned in "ever-decreasing concentric circles" before disappearing into their "fundamental aperture"; here it is the modern architecture theorists, and so on.

This book is flatter, less clean, but nonetheless as insightful as the other two. It also, at 111 pages with lots of pictures, spacing and margins, weighs in at the same punching weight as its brethren.

Wolfe delves into the question of why we, the greatest, stompingest, most extravagant nation in the history of nations, have been afflicted with a sparse, Spartan, non-celebratory, neutered architecture of "glass boxes" piled high.

Wolfe ably traces the ailment back to a gaggle of Dieters in German architecture in the 1920s. They'd invented a holistic theory of building buildings that were theoretically pure, beautiful, and consistent, and also rejected such frivolities as how much space, air, light, ornament, and decoration actual living people wanted in their buildings. These theories became immensely popular in the States when their progenitors crossed the pond as war refugees and were quickly installed in the high seats of architecture academe.

Preparing the way for this Coming of the White Gods, was Philip Johnson as John the Baptist. The 26-year-old Johnson and colleague spread the gospel in the form of a 1932 Met show saluting the Europeans:

"Museum catalogue copy, which is a species of forced labor or gun-at-the-temple scholarship, is notorious for its sophistry, when it isn't patent nonsense. But "The International Style" was literature of a higher order. It shone... with the hallucinatory clarity of a Church of Galilee Walker handbill. The two men were baying at a silvery, princely moon."

Wolfe presents the battles rather nicely, but it seems that this sliver of a book isn't up to the size of its task. Unlike Radical Chic, which dealt with the smarmy inhabitants of a couple square miles of northern Manhattan; and Painted Word, whose art world coterie is perhaps 10,000 strong; architecture implicitly encompasses the several million structures erected in the United States each year. And Wolfe, while focusing on a handful of those architect critics, never does quite connect how much or how little impact this hand on the country - it seems as if the theories inflicted on us a few ugly wimpy showcase buildings in each urban center, but is that really perfidy, or simply part of the grand experiment of America?

All in all,[item price] for a long magazine article that does not quite comprehensively survey sixty years of architecture might be a bit rich for y'all. If you're a completist, an architect, or a ravenous Tom Wolfian, then this book is for you. If not, then you'd most likely be sufficiently satisfied sticking with his superior "Radical Chic."

Rating:
Summary: Tom misses the target
Review: This is Wolfe's second book dedicated exclusively to the fine(r) arts. The first one was "The Painted Word" where he skewers the art world. That was a *great* book. This one is not.

In this book, Tom misses a good opportunity to skewer the architectural world. (Whether or not such world should be skewered is irrelevant to Tom Wolfe. His goal in life appears to be to criticize all aspects of modern culture. Is he a Republican? :)

His major mistake is his oversimplification of the history of modern architecture. By failing to critically distill the difference between movements, he paints himself in a corner of contradictions. He praises Frank Lloyd Wright, but fails to mention that Frank incorporated elements from the Bauhaus school Wolfe loves to hate. He criticizes some of these "paper" architects for designing buildings that are never built, but fails to mention Lloyd Wright did the same too. (In all fairness, Frank did not get famous because of these drawings, unlike Le Corbusier.)

In "The Painted Word", Wolfe took several movements that to the untrained eye appeared different (compare Rothko and Pollock with Warhol) and found the common thread. He then was able to skewer the entire modern art world by criticizing the common thread.

On the other hand, because most of modern architecture (at least during the period the book covers) is organically related rather than a seemingly-obvious break with prior movements, Tom cannot skewer architecture and its follies in the same manner. Instead, he has to attack modern architecture as a whole. Well, that was more than he could chew, so the book is muddy at best. Too bad. It could have been a fun book to read.

Rating:
Summary: Tom misses the target
Review: This is Wolfe's second book dedicated exclusively to the fine(r) arts. The first one was "The Painted Word" where he skewers the art world. That was a *great* book. This one is not.

In this book, Tom misses a good opportunity to skewer the architectural world. (Whether or not such world should be skewered is irrelevant to Tom Wolfe. His goal in life appears to be to criticize all aspects of modern culture. Is he a Republican? :)

His major mistake is his oversimplification of the history of modern architecture. By failing to critically distill the difference between movements, he paints himself in a corner of contradictions. He praises Frank Lloyd Wright, but fails to mention that Frank incorporated elements from the Bauhaus school Wolfe loves to hate. He criticizes some of these "paper" architects for designing buildings that are never built, but fails to mention Lloyd Wright did the same too. (In all fairness, Frank did not get famous because of these drawings, unlike Le Corbusier.)

In "The Painted Word", Wolfe took several movements that to the untrained eye appeared different (compare Rothko and Pollock with Warhol) and found the common thread. He then was able to skewer the entire modern art world by criticizing the common thread.

On the other hand, because most of modern architecture (at least during the period the book covers) is organically related rather than a seemingly-obvious break with prior movements, Tom cannot skewer architecture and its follies in the same manner. Instead, he has to attack modern architecture as a whole. Well, that was more than he could chew, so the book is muddy at best. Too bad. It could have been a fun book to read.