Le Corbusier. Le Plan Voisin, 1925.
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On Architecture Architecture under Capitalism FELICITY D. SCOTT
Rather than asking, “What is the at titude of a work to the relations of production produ ction of its time?” I would like to ask, “Wh at is its position in them?”
—Walter Benjamin In May 1932, on the occasion of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) “International Style” Style” exhibition exh ibition and symposium in New York, Meyer Schapiro published a short review in New Masses entitled “The New Architecture.” Architecture.” Written under u nder the pseudonym p seudonym John Kwait, Schapiro’s Schapiro’s article was the rst in a series of statements sta tements written during the 1930s (and collected in the dossier accompanying this text) that addressed the antinomies inherent in the condition of modern archi tecture under capitalism. Through a series of critical engagements with Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, R. Buckminster Fuller, Fuller, and the Structural Structu ral Studies Associates (Fuller’s (Fuller’s colleagues at the t he magazine ), Schapiro can be seen investigating investigatin g the mutual imbrication Shelter ), of architectu re, technology, politics, polit ics, and capitalism in ways that are not only of historiographic interest. During this period Schapiro attributed a social relevance to architecture that situated it at the forefront of advanced aesthetic practices practices while at the same time he produced a biting and insightful critique of issues at stake in a progressive architectural architect ural project. Even within what is undoubtedly the the different economic and historical conditions condition s of today, today, aspects of this critique retain a cogency that warrants contemporary contempora ry reevaluation. reevaluation. Architecture Architecture or Shelter Sh elter
In his rst review r eview,, “The New Architecture, A rchitecture,”” Schapiro situated sit uated the “International Style” exhibition as “surely the most important” i mportant” in MoMA’s MoMA’s short history. The “social importance” that as a Marxist art a rt historian he recognized in the show was not of cou rse a product of the social convictions conviction s of the organizers, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Hitch cock, Philip Johnson, Johnso n, and Alfred Barr, Barr, nor that of the exhibited exh ibited architects, even though he claimed that they “anticipate “anticip ate the style of a Socialist Social ist Republic.” Republic.” If the distinctly distinct ly technical, “classless,” “classless,” and unsentimental u nsentimental aesthetic of the architecture archit ecture on display could be seen to harbor implicit socialist tendencies, tendencies, any such vocation, as Schapiro pointed out, was complicated by the long-standing relationship between architectural
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modernism and capital. With architecture intimately tied both to commercialism and to the power relations of an industrial society, the discipline’s utopian or progressive potential could only, Schapiro believed, be realized on the level of revolutionary praxis. As Schapiro noted, of those involved in the MoMA show only Mumford, who organized the section on housing, recognized the fundamental socioeconomic issues at stake, even announcing in the symposium of February 19 that architects “must build as if for a Communist government.” 1 Although in this context Schapiro passed lightly over the implications of the qualification “as if,” the implicit disavowal of revolutionary strategies that it entailed would, as we shall see, later come to gure centrally in his critiques of Mumford’s reformist politics. The very same mon th that Schapiro’s review appeared in New Masses, the magazine Shelter carried a refutation entitled “Transition,” authored by Roger Sherman . Shelter was the somewhat unlikely continuation of the magazine T-Square, the “Official organ of the TSquare Club of Philadelphia,” a group presided over by the architect George Howe. In its initial form, as edited by Maxwell E. Levinson, T-Square provided “an open forum for contemporary architectural discussion,” typically containing articles by or on prominent modern architects such as Rudolf Schindler, Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, or Frank Lloyd Wright. The February 1932 issue had included the first installment of Fuller’s three-part exposition on “Universal Architecture,” the rst indication of the magazine’s future direction. In April 1932 its title changed from T-Square to Shelter, with the subtitle Magazine of Modern Architecture. Continuing at this time to promote modernist agendas, its editorial lineup was augmented by associate editors George Howe, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Alfred Barr, and Philip Johnson. Not surprisingly, given the addition of the International Style exhibition’s organizers, Shelter ’s rst issue included the proceedings of MoMA’s “International Style” symposium along with contributions by Neutra and Wright, as well as the second installation of Fuller’s “Universal Architecture.” The May issue, put together by “pro-tem” editor Fuller, was marked by another shift in editorial direction. Not only were Hitchcock and Barr no longer associate editors (Johnson would remain so for one more issue), but the magazine had a new, and symptomatic, subtitle: A Correlating Medium for the Forces of Architecture . Fuller’s “Universal Architecture” would replace the previous editors’ agenda of promoting the International Style. Sherman’s rebuttal formed part of the front section given over to symposium articles delivered by Left: “Symposium: The International Architectural Exhibition,” as published in Shelter , April 1932. Opposite, left: Cover of T-Square, February 1932. Opposite, right: Cover of Shelter , April 1932. 46
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members of the Structural Study Associates (SSA). An introductory note by Henry Churchill described the SSA as “an informal association of those interested in shelter as an industrial, social and philosophic manifest” and situated Fuller as its leader: “The peripatetic guide (peripatetic almost to the point of ubiquity!),” as Churchill put it, “is Buckminster Fuller; the Stoa is the Winthrop Hotel, N.Y.C.” 2 Fuller’s ubiquitous presence would be manifest not only in the group’s charter but in the rhetorical tropes and prose style adopted by many of its members. The SSA’s theoretical aspirations were characterized by a similar “ubiquity.” With regard to their integrated “system” of theoretical postulates and technical questions, we learn from Churchill that “The system is contained, complete”; it was “a tensile web of postulates from a central concept of universality.” 3 In Fuller’s editorial, “Correlation,” an analogous gure of totalizing control was extended toward the readers; the writers’ viewpoints and objectives, he insisted, would only be revealed “by complete consumption of Shelter’s pages, in the exact order of arrangement. ”4 It was in this context that Roger Sherman, SSA, also at that time an editor of Architectural Forum, launched his refutation of Schapiro’s review. It was not surprising that Sherman would be so motivated by the claims of an unknown writer, Kwait, for “The New Architecture” ended with a critical commentary on a housing symposium published in Architectural Forum’s March 1932 issue . Schapiro had cited “Housing the Other Half” by the magazine’s primary editor, Kenneth Kingsley Stowell, in his charge that “liberal architects . . . remain ultimately the highly paid employees of Realtors and builders or are themselves small businessmen with a stake in the common exploitation.” Stowell’s calling for architects to embrace the problem of mass housing as a potentially profitable new market for their expertise had, as Schapiro noted, adopted “the statuesque lingo of
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philanthropic exploitation of the public good.” 5 Strictly following the tenets put forth by Fuller, Sherman’s response agreed with some of Schapiro’s terms but sought to recast the ideal relations between modern architecture, social programs, and the “new society.” Against the internationalism of “Mr. Kwait’s ‘new style,’” Sherman argued that the embrace of indu strialization was distinctly American and offered the prospect of a naturalized mode of shelter emerging spontaneously from a unied and coherent culture. “It is not surprising that the roving tribes of Asia and the nomadic peoples of Arabia live in tents,” wrote Sherman in support of his claims, “Mobility is a requisite for their survival . . . and the resultant shelter is a relatively perfect fulfillment of their needs.” 6 Likewise, the Western Acropolis and the Coliseum reected “more stable and more powerfully organized societies.” America, Sherman went on to propose, revealing the nationalism underlying his conception, had until recently lacked “a national idiom of design or shelter,” and he attributed this situation to both the nation’s “polyglot derivation” and its contentment with “borrowed philosophy, foreign art, [and] unnatural structure.” 7 Seemingly ignorant of the long-standing embrace of industry and Americanist fantasies by European modernists, Sherman claimed that it was only through a recent embrace of industrialization that America had finally “achieved a national characteristic.” Sherman claimed, furthermore, that industry and not sociopolitical ideals was “slowly shaping a rational architectonic emergence.” In contrast to Schapiro’s revolutionary program, this was to be an “ecologic” situation, a natural emanation of technology disturbed only by the adverse effects of the “business-only-for-profit system.” Pointedly attacking Schapiro, Sherman argued that architecture’s adoption of adequate social programs would arise not from “the postulation of a creed or theory” (such as the “tags” and “slogans” he attributed to Schapiro) but would, rather, spring “from the purposeful, systematic correlation of forces. That [a social program] should be the static vehicle of an intellectual dogma is contrary to the dynamics of its own denition.” 8 Preempting by forty years Colin Rowe’s remarks—that in the United States a revolution had already occurred in 1776, rendering radical social reconstruction unnecessary—Sherman argued that the “‘revolution’ has, in fact, arrived.” 9 Once again using the pseudonym John Kwait, Schapiro replied to Sherman by sending a detailed response to Fuller for publication in Shelter ’s next issue . Entitled “Architecture under Capitalism,” it was, as he expected, rejected; but it appea red nonetheless in a perhaps slightly altered version in the December 1932 issue of New Masses.10 Schapiro felt the urgency to respond on account of the avowedly “socialistic” claims made in Shelter by the SSA: “aggressively con-
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cerned,” as he described them, “with architecture as a social instrument and with housing reform as a substitute for revolution.” 11 Although Sherman had conceded that Kwait’s remarks on social change had been “substantially correct,” he had wryly suggested that his reading required “some amplification.” This took the form of Sherman’s suggestion that technology be embraced as a force in itself. That Schapiro’s Marxist social agenda could in any way be confused or collapsed (even strategically) with what he referred to as the SSA’s “uneven mixture of mystical and technical notions and the ill-digested shreds of socialist doctrine” was unthinkable to Schapiro (as it would be, albeit for entirely different reasons, to Fuller) and therefore demanded a substantial disarticulation. Distinguishing their agendas, Schapiro argued that the humanitarian agenda of the SSA did not situate them as a radical, progressive group but rather as a “parasitic cheer-leader in the present campaign to boom the building industry.” Along these lines, he presented the key contribution of Fuller’s Dymaxion shelter as the savvy discovery of a previously untapped industry available for “intensive, large-scale exploitation.” 12 Schapiro would critique the SSA’s claims to an empirical embrace of technology and scientific formulations not only for being conflicted, but also for masking an underlying aestheticism. The SSA, he explained, “remain bohemian and arty in their sentimental view of technology and the social mission of architectu re.” 13 To make his point, Schapiro would single out a project for a theater, or “Festival Shelter,” by an SSA member, Frederick Kiesler. 14 Without naming the architect, Schapiro pointed to the contrast between the editor’s claims for the project’s “cleanliness and integrity” and Kiesler’s own, more avant-garde aspirations, which Schapiro saw as marked by a left-bank aestheticism manifest in the architect’s use of typography, pseudo-scientic formulas, and a manifesto-like prose style. Indirectly acknowledging Kiesler’s relation to the historical avant-garde, Schapiro likened the project to “the mathematical signs in cubist and abstract pictures; they beg us to credit the artist with a superior insight, somehow related to an esoteric, reputable physics.” 15 More signicantly, however, Schapiro pointed to the pernicious effect that the scientism of the SSA had in proposing an ineluctable progression of society driven by the latent or inherent forces of technology. Not only did this elide any prospect at all of class based analysis, he explained, it also entailed a problematic form of vitalism that substituted for real social change—one that insisted on the transformation of the underlying structures and institutions of capitalism—the assumption that a benevolent
Frederick Kiesler. “A Festival Shelter,” as published in Shelter , May 1932.
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capitalism could be harnessed toward the amelioration of social corruption and inequality. Sherman, he noted, “trusts the ‘Americanly preferred evolution’ and would ‘not fight forces, but use them.’” Thus, as Schapiro argued, the SSA pursued, under the banner of the Left, reactionary tendencies that made them potential allies of totalitarian social orders. As reported in Schapiro’s preface, Fuller seems to have responded to the submission of “Architecture under Capitalism” disingenuously, citing a lack of available space within Shelter in which to publish it. Yet when the next issue nally appeared (ve months late) in November, Fuller had taken the step of asserting that “the Kwait article was so effectively answered as to silence Kwait.” 16 Despite such a at and unsubstantiated rebuttal, Fuller felt it necessary to expand the terms of Shelter ’s response. In the section “Bernays, Boogies, Bizness, and Bluff” of the feature entitled “Our Intimate Journal of Summer Events,” the sudden resignation of associate editor George Howe was attributed, rather indirectly, to the New Masses. This somewhat paranoid account, the prose style of which strongly indicates Fuller’s authorship, blamed Howe’s resignation on a misunderstanding in which the New Masses’s Marxist critique had been not opposed to but conated with the program promoted by Shelter. It was reported that while Howe “was in natural sympathy with the whole SSA activity” in early July, the misunderstanding of unnamed businessmen with whom he was afliated had caused him to “[turn] turtle completely on July 13” and resign his position. Without directly asserting the connection, Fuller pointed to the inuence of “an ordered series of meetings, lectures, and written propaganda by the New Masses group which insisted that ‘Art’ have its complete attention focused upon proletarian woes, and objectively seek a revolution through its emotional ministrations.” 17 Such activities, Fuller believed, had led Howe to the erroneous attrib ution of such a radical program to Shelter. The proof was supposedly to be found in a passage cited from Howe’s letter of resignation: As I have explained to you, [wrote Howe] aesthetics and social reform have in my mind nothing to do with each other. As a designer it is a matter of indifference to me whether the mechanical civilization be moral or immoral. If, on the other hand, you ask me to join a movement of social reform, then I say the mechanical civilization is spinach. Howe’s rather strange letter invoking spinach indicates a desire to disengage architecture from ethicopolitical concerns, but it in no way implicates undue influence by New Masses. Nevertheless, according to Fuller, this unfortunate resignation (unfortunate since Howe had offered assistance in pursuing financial support for the
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magazine) had occurred because “publicity-generals” behind “business organizations” had prejudiced Howe against Shelter. This, he claimed, was because those businessmen had only superficially understood the “boldly evolutionary” notions of the SSA and had regarded Shelter ’s critiques of business, land ownership, and proteering as akin to those of the Marxists’ revolutionary program. Shelter ’s attack upon Schapiro then continued by situating his article “The New Architecture” as part of the New Masses’s illicit “attempt to involve new-architecture, as an ‘art’ into its propaganda activity.” Attempting to reverse Schapiro’s accusations of the SSA’s bohemian artiness, Fuller both recognized and misread the centrality of the role of aesthetics within Schapiro’s argument. For amidst Schapiro’s more overt discussions of social relevance, nancial speculation, labor exploitation, and revolution was indeed a set of claims for the aesthetic dimension of architecture. In his articulation of the manner in which modern architecture anticipated the style of a socialist republic, Schapiro pointed to an “indispensable technique and aesthetic” within the work and noted that “artistic characters are appropriate to such ideals.” 18 Shelter ’s rebuttal strategy, however, was precisely and strategically to collapse Schapiro’s interest in the aesthetics of an “international, classless, and practical” architecture with the overt aesthetic program of the International Style proselytized by MoMA. “New Architecture, as a conscious professionalizable art,” it was announced, “is the ambitious objective of the Johnson, Hitchcock, intrinsic-aesthetic group, for the sake of their own personal aggrandizement as ‘connoisseurs’ in the ‘International Style.’” 19 It was this aestheticization of the “scientific development” of architecture that, according to Shelter, allowed for the New Masses ’s propagandistic assimilation of architecture, or what Fuller (presumably) characterized as a “temporary onslaught-ofinclusion by the American revolutionary group, as an aesthetic, and therefore arbitrarily-compromisable activity.” 20 Thus, although Fuller rejected it, it was in the aesthetic dimension that he, as well as Schapiro, recognized the political prospects of architectural practice. Repudiating once again Schapiro’s critique of Shelter ’s aestheticism, Fuller argued that “all aesthetic fringe has been cast aside from the evolutionary growth
R. Buckminster Fuller. “A Streamlined Dymaxion Shelter,” as published in Shelter , November 1932.
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of universal architecture,” leaving nothing “to be grabbed at by these propagandists.” Universal architecture, he insisted, was not “aestheticizable” but purely “instrumental.” Organicism
Although Schapiro would not engage in any further polemical inte ractions with Shelter, Fuller would only apparently have the last word, for Schapiro would continue his critique of the conditions of architecture under capitalism through a new and more variegated opponent, Lewis Mumford. Schapiro’s critique of Mumford would span over four years, from 1934 to 1938, being most explicitly articulated in reviews of Technics and Civilization and The Culture of Cities, both entitled “Looking Forward to Looking Backward.” As with his critique of Fuller and the SSA, Schapiro would be at pains to distance his Marxist convictions from Mumford’s position of liberal reform. Most specically, he rejected Technics and Civilization ’s argument for the disconnection of capitalism from modern technics. In his attempt to redeem technics from the evils of capitali sm, Mumford had forcibly disarticulated the relationships between industry, the market, and labor relations, thereby disablin g the central tenets of Marxist analysis. His narrative of the history of technology and humanity’s enslavement to and subsequent mastery of the machine—a story, Schapiro noted, based less on historical fact than on Mumford’s social program—saw militarism rather than industrialization per se as the central term in the rise of the machine and looked forward to an organically informed biotechnics. Like Fuller, Mumford was seen as having substituted an idea of technology as an independent, evolving force for a notion of class-based revolution. As suggested by the title Schapiro chose for both of his reviews, such an organicist position was understood as far from progressive. Technology, he argued, did not necessarily lead to either socialism or fascism; such a direction was determined by reigning power structures. Mumford’s apotheosis of the mechanical through biotechnics thus entailed the potential of a reactionary step, possibly even becoming “part of a repressive, even fascist movement.” 21 In an unpublished five-page letter of August 15, 1934, Schapiro would clarify to Mumford that he had not intended to call Mumford himself a fascist (“I consider you neither a proto-fascist, nor a nearfascist, nor a social-fascist,” he explained), but rather to point out the need to channel unstable potentials—for instance those of technology or “progressive elements in capitalism”—into a clear program and to situate them in their historical and political context. “[S]ome of the things which you hail as prodromes of socialism might as well make for fascism,” he further explained, “the love of sport, mechanical forms in art, the perfection of machines, etc. were also elements of the
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program of the rst cultural fascists,—the Futurists.” 22 Mumford, it seems, in earlier correspondence not yet found had attempted to turn the tables on Schapiro, accusing him of a mechanistic model of history and even pointing to “the fascist elements in your communism.” 23 He evidently also put forward in his defense a list of elements that were proper to fascism but lacking in his own philosophy. In response, Schapiro refuted Mumford’s attribution of procapitali st and proproperty ideas to fascism, noting that as a popular movement in Italy and Germany fascism was “anti-capitalist [and] against large property.” 24 Schapiro noted, moreover, that fascism claimed totalitarianism to be in the interest of a “mythically homogenous public,” an organicist model that he in turn attributed to Mumford by noting that such unication was “a ction that is continually supported by liberals such as yourself.” “Thus your criteria of fascism,” he concluded, “are reduced to one, patriotic nationalism, which may or may not be a sign of fascism. You overlook, however, a fundamental character of fascism, the destruction of democratic liberties.” 25 This frank correspondence is interesting for the manner in which Schapiro makes his critique of Mumford’s reformist position explicit. With regard to Mumford’s championing of cooperatives, garden cities, and the work of Le Corbusier, Schapiro noted that he did not deny that they were an “advance.” But, he claried, “I attack the social philosophy which says—do not revolt, do not change these intolerable conditions, but let us build garden cities, summer camps for needy artists, sports elds and schools, and eventually socialism will come out of the state of mind generated by these things.” The communist, he argued, does not reject reforms, but only “reformism as a stumbling block to class-consciousness and sound revolutionary tactics.” 26 It would be in his 1938 review of The Culture of Cities that Schapiro would set out his most substantial refutation of Mumford’s organicism. Central to this was a critique of the category of the “organic” itself, which for Schapiro served merely to valorize the object it sup posedly characterized. Pointing to Mumford’s selection of examples— such as Henry Hobson Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store in Chicago and Heinrich Berlage’s Amsterdam Stock Exchange— Schapiro would explicate the manner in which Mumford’s analyses persistently elided social and historical specicity and thus served to mask apologetics for capitalism. Schapiro expanded his critique further with reference to Mumford’s practices of collapsing political and pictorial forms through a form of pseudomorphism that he referred to as “crude analogical thinking.” 27 Announced on the cover of Partisan Review as “Lewis Mumford and the Big City,” Schapiro’s review provides an important account of the contradictions inhering in Mumford’s reading of relations between capitalism, urban and territorial organizations, technology, and aesthetics, and it does so
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through a cogent critique of the impact of substituting for adequate historical analysis a “mystical identication.” 28 Schapiro detected both a similarly “crude analogical thinking” and an equally disturbing form of organicism in Frank Lloyd Wright and Baker Brownell’s Architecture and Modern Life of 1937.29 In his review “Architect’s Utopia,” Schapiro would argue that although Wright and Brownell’s book avowedly treated relations between “Architecture and Social Life” (as indicated in the title of the first chapter), that relation had been reduced to another form of pseudomorphism: mirroring or reection. Similarly eliding historical and socioeconomic analysis, Wright—“the specialist in new environments”—assumed that architecture had an independent role in shaping social life, and this assumption of autonomy had given rise to a “visionary condence” that enabled the architect to believe himself able to “correct society on the drawing board.” 30 Moreover, Wright’s Broadacre City—his home for the “urban refugee”—along with his later project of “redemption by rural housing,” provided Schapiro with a platform to critique the architect’s model of “deurbanization” as undemocratic. Schapiro noted that while this ideal was shared by socialists and anarchists, in Wright’s project it involved putting those dispersed refugees to work within industrial profit ventures that overlooked “the question of class and power.” And, more disturbingly, Wright’s antiurban sentiment was allied with an anticosmopolitan one. This does not gure centrally in Schapiro’s argument, but just as he noted that Sherman and Fuller had naturalized industrialization, here the agrarian tradition in America was cast as an ideal state through the nationalistic rhetoric of “the folk.” This argument thus continued Schapiro’s earlier critique of the underlying agendas of such nationalist sentiments in his “Race, Nationality and Art,” published in Art Front in March of 1936, pointing to the way in which such nationalist “distinctions in art” had been mobilized to claim racial superiority in the interest of oppression. 31
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Architecture
What emerges from Schapiro’s writings and their elicited responses is an important articulation of the contours and fault lines of the debates concerning aesthetics, technology, and politics within the architectural discourse of the 1930s. Relations between architecture and technology are not only considered in relation to capitalism, but to the discourses of nationalism, regionalism, universalism, decentralization, and organicism in operation at the time. If the problematics raised in these texts are clearly historical, the map of this intersection is, nevertheless, distinctly contemporary. This is not to suggest that through them we nd critical models unproblematically applicable to the present, but that those fault lines also inhere within the relations between advanced aesthetic practice, technology, and politics in late capitalism. It is important to note, however, the manner in which the central opposition of communism and capitalism that informed Schapiro’s critical framework has lost aspects of its historical and critical specicity.32 Beyond the failure of communism to stand as a viable alternative to capitalism, the geopolitical landscape has been radically transformed by the almost t otalizing flows of information, commodities, and people within the globalized contemporary condition. And the emergence of a new generation of technologies in turn can be understood to entail a new complex of industrial and social relations to those informing the polemics of the 1930s. Within this condition, insights developed in Mumfo rd’s attempts to theorize alternative territorial models to those of universalism or the nation-state (along with his work on militarism and the megamachine, which investigated systems of organization) have taken on a renewed relevance within contemporary theory.33 Nevertheless, Schapiro’s insightful analyses of “evolutionary” practices—those that assume the benevolence of capitalism and technology and attempt to harness their forces—retain a cogency that warrants reevaluation precisely within this new historical condition. 34 Many of the questions raised by Schapiro continue to (or might in turn) haunt contemporary architectural practice. To the degree to which such problematics persist, there remains the prospect of going back through such critiques in order to push contemporary discourse further rather than passing them by in an elision of historical memory. The model of embracing the forces of capitalism and of developing strategies of working within that seemingly inescapable milieu has, of course, become a mainstay of certain “postcritical” trajectories in architecture. The political implications of such positions have been cast by its protagonists predominantly through a refusal of the critical and theoretical discourses of the last few decades. Even while acknowledging the totalizing condition of capital—and thus the fore-
Frank Lloyd Wright. “Organic Architecture,” including Broadacre City , as published in Architecture and Modern Life, 1937.
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closure of spaces of critical distance—aesthetic practice can investigate other political spaces and other instabilities that remain to be further articulated within this inescapable but complex milieu. Schapiro’s embrace of the social importance of modern architecture during the 1930s is also of contemporary historiographic interest. Although his writings on modern architecture have largely been passed over in the literature on Schapiro to date, 35 they bear directly upon his noted reassessment, between 1936 and 1937, of the social bases of modernist aesthetics. As traced in the following dossier, despite the manner in which architecture was captured within certain problematics, Schapiro attributed to it a social relevance that implicitly situated the discipline at the forefront of advanced aesthetic practice. In other words, even given its condition “under capitalism,” modern architecture was seen to harbor radical potentials that were not initially attributed to modern art. Schapiro ended his review of Wright and Brownell’s Architecture and Modern Life by reiterating a claim he made throughout the 1930s: Despite its imbrication within capitalism, modern architecture sustained a redemptive potential and thus had “a vital bearing on socialism.” 36 In “Architecture Under Capitalism” Schapiro had explained that while technically efcient and accessible media such as cinema and the printed book retained ideological problems, architecture “points to the greatest social possibilities,” even if they were currently hampered by the exploitation of “capitalist society.” 37 In the 1932 pamphlet “Architects and the Crisis: An Open Letter to the Architects, Draughtsmen and Technicians of America,” Schapiro had also directly appealed to the profession to harness this potential, casting it as a solution to architects’ plight during the depression. Positioning the profession as “a favored group in American society” and as the “intellectual and artistic sources of the human environment,” Schapiro went on to explain how the forces of capitalism had caused architects to become either lowly paid servants of business or simply unemployed. 38 In the April 1936 text “Architecture and the Architect,” Schapiro would expand upon his assessment of the devastating plight of the architect. Originally published in New Masses, the article traced the structural causes of widespread unemployment and reduced pay during the depression. The “new character” of the profession—one in which the model of an independent architect operating a small ofce had given way to that of an anonymous worker alienated by the division of labor and operating beneath businessmen—meant that the work was increasingly commodied. 39 According to Schapiro, it was not large-scale work or modern techniques that had led to this “poverty of form.” Rather, adverse socioeconomic factors were to blame, and it was precisely the aesthetic integrity of modern archit ecture
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that was thereby at stake. Pointing to the “inexpensive feeble adjustments of minor surface details” that injected an ersatz artistic component into large-scale housing projects, Schapiro explained such pseudodifferentiation as being symptomatic of an inability to achieve the actual aesthetic qualities of modernism’s use of mass production. Successful cities, Schapiro argued, indicating a way out of the current predicament, were not the product of sheer repetition but had to be the product of architects working collectively, with their imagination and intelligence “unhampered,” on issues of art as well as technique.40 The work of the architect, “allied as a producer” to the workers, was thus contingent upon the successful deployment of an aesthetic function. If modern architecture had the potential to actively transform social conditions through engaging the means of production, it would only do so, Schapiro argued, if its aesthetic dimension was actively engaged in this process. While intimately tied to socioeconomic and technical conditions, the discipline must not just reect those conditions. Immersed in the forces of production, architecture had the ability to adopt an active and critical stance. It would be precisely at this nexus of aesthetics and production that Schapiro would soon recognize a similar critical and self-reflexive capacity inherent in abstract art. That he had not done so yet was evident two months before the appearance of “Architecture and the Architect” when Schapiro delivered “The Social Bases of Art” at the First American Artists’ Congress against War and Fascism. Aligned with the politics of the Popular Front, the three-day congress was held in February at two New York venues, the Town Hall and the New School for Social Research. 41 The opening address was delivered by Mumford, who presented the need for artists to unite against the threat of war and fascism. Depression and repression, he argued, “go hand in hand.” 42 Schapiro began his own remarks by clarifying that “When I speak in this paper of the social bases of art I do not mean to reduce art to economics or sociology or politics. Art has its own conditions that distinguish it from other activities.” 43 Yet, as he went on to argue, although not fully determined by such factors, that which was specific to art, including modern and abstract art, was largely a reflection of the historical conditions under which it was produced. Schapiro famously argued that “the insistently personal character of the modern painter’s work and his preoccupation with formal problems alone” were in fact symptomatic reections of the artists’ condition in modern times. The very content of that supposedly autonomous art, which “appears to be unconcerned with content,” could be traced to the commercial underpinning of modern life, to its culture of consumption and visual spectacle. 44 (In “The New Architecture,” we might note, he had claimed that the buildings were “ more than
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designs or spectacles.” 45) Central to this conception of modern art was the detachment of culture from “practical and collective interests.” This “isolation” of modern artists from “practical activities,” and the “ruthless and perverse character” of their individualism, Schapiro explained, arose with “the rentier leisure class of modern capitalist society” wherein the individual was “simply a consumer, not a producer.” 46 In “Architecture and the Architect,” however, Schapiro’s argument had been the converse. Assured both of architecture’s social function and of its inevitable immersion within the conditions of production, he did not need to argue for connections between architecture and its social and historical context but rather for the value of its aesthetic dimension. Here he argued that architecture’s radical potential arose at the nexus of its “social bases” and its formal and material (i.e., aesthetic) inventiveness (achieved through actively engaging its conditions of production). 47 We might recall here Schapiro’s critique
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of Wright, whose model of reflecting society in architecture was regarded as a fantasy of autonomy, an “Architect’s Utopia” forged at the expense of actually engaging its social bases. In contrast, Schapiro’s utopian model of architectural practice involved a formal and critical experimentation with technologies of mass production. If architecture could realize the aesthetic potentials of modernism, Schapiro implied, it would at the same time harness a critical selfconsciousness that might resist assimilation to the forces of capitalism. While “The Social Bases of Art” intimately tied modernist and avant-garde art to spectacle, “The Nature of Abstract Art,” published in the Marxist Quarterly the following year, would significantly recast the debate. 48 As Thomas Crow points out, “The basic argument remains in place, but we find him using without irony terms like ‘implicit criticism’ and ‘freedom’ to describe modernist painting.” Schapiro, Crow explains, now recognized “some degree of active, resistant consciousness within the avant-garde.” 49 As Serge Guilbaut indicates, in arguing that abstract art was both socially conditioned and at the same time able to “express a critical social consciousness,” Schapiro refuted both Barr’s formalism and the criticism advanced from the communist perspective (that such abstraction had no relation to society): in Guilbaut’s terms, Schapiro “outanked both camps.” 50 The “Nature of Abstract Art” concluded not with an analysis of painting or sculpture but by addressing artists who had tied “their useless archaic activity to the most advanced and imposing forms of modern production.” 51 Schapiro recounted how “In applying their methods of design to architecture, printing, the theater and the industrial arts they remained abstract artists,” understanding their work as “the aesthetic counterpart of the abstract calculations of the engineer and the scientist.” His remarks suggest that he is thinking, initially, of European artists such as those associated with LEF, the Novembergruppe, De Stijl, and the magazine G. Advanced artists, he explained, supported the Bolshevik revolution and collaborated with “the social-democratic and liberal architects of Germany and Holland.” At this point in his text, such collaboration with architects meant that artists were engaged in practical and collective interests that addressed “the stringent rationalization of industry” within their aesthetic project. But he also pointed to the growing inuence of a “reformist illusion,” as encapsulated in Le Corbusier’s slogan “Architecture or Revolution!” 52 This was an illusion, as he had previously argued, that was shared by Mumford and Fuller, one which assumed that technological advances would lead to a peaceful transition to socialism. In Schapiro’s narrative this reformist attitude, which had foreclosed radical potentials in architecture, here also marked a subsequent breakdown in artists’ engagement with architecture and
Top: Le Corbusier. Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928–31. Bottom: Hans Scharoun. Bachelors’ Apartments, Breslau, 1930.
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technology. Schapiro articulated how this collaboration had given way to two distinct reactions that he cast as equally problematic dialectical poles. In the rst instance, under the impact of the depression, both artists and architects had overidentied with the engineer, thus retaining a techno-optimism but “denying the architect an aesthetic function.” 53 Such extreme views, he explained, again recalling his critique of Fuller, were common to “reformists of technocratic tendency.” In Schapiro’s words, “As production is curtailed and living standards reduced, art is renounced in the name of technical progress.” 54 The second instance was a neosurrealist rejection of rationalism and “mechanical abstract styles.” This opposite pole had lead both to what Barr termed “biomorphic abstraction”—characterized by Schapiro as “a violent or nervous calligraphy, or with amoeboid forms, a soft, low-grade matter pulsing in an empty space”—and to a new romanticism found in “pessimistic imagery of empty spaces, bones, grotesque beings, abandoned buildings and catastrophic earth formations.”55 The question of technology stands at the center of Schapiro’s writings throughout the 1930s, a period during which he is at his most dialectical. This focus on technology allows, on the one hand, for a social and material analysis of aesthetic production that overcomes dualities of form and content, as well as the psychologizing he attributes to Mumford and Nikolaus Pevsner. Pevsner’s failure to adequately mediate between the formal and technical aspects of latenineteenth-century architecture, Schapiro argued in his brief but insightful review of Pioneers of the Modern Movement (published in the Zeitchrift für Sozialforschung ), led him to the assumption that the work was the product of imagination or that it expressed moral views.56 On the other hand, it was the embrace of new technology, epitomized for Schapiro in the potentials of modern architecture, that offered the prospect of a utopian and progressive vocation to aesthetic practice. Thus, if in “The New Architecture” technology was invoked against the aestheticism of MoMA’s presentation of architecture, the aesthetic would subsequently emerge as an adequate dialectical counterpart, a counterpart developed in response to the technological vitalism of Fuller and Mumford. Schapiro’s debate with Fuller, in particular, revolved around the status of aesthetics. As we have seen, his accusation that Shelter harbored an arty and sentimental view of technology had prompted Fuller to claim that, unlike the avowedly technocratic program of the SSA , it was the aesthetic dimension in Schapiro’s project that had been (illicitly for Fuller) harnessed for radical, political ends. For Schapiro this aesthetic dimension was not, of course, akin to the aestheticism implied in the codification of an international style. What he recognized within architectural modernism was the prospect of a critical reexive
R. Buckminster Fuller. Dymaxion House Model , with disassembled parts in shipping order, 1927. 60
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capacity, even a utopian dimension, in architects’ aesthetic mediation of the conditions of production, conditions within which the discipline always and already operated. Schapiro’s writings are, of course, addressed to a distinctly different generation of technologies to those informing aesthetic practice today. Yet if the rise of the postindustrial or information age elicits a distinct set of historical questions, the intersection of aesthetics and politics, at which Schapiro situated his analysis, continues to raise pressing questions regarding how architecture is positioned within this technological milieu.
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Notes
1. Meyer Schapiro, “The New Architecture,” New Masses (May 1932): 23. Reprinted in the dossier of Schapiro’s writings accompanying this text. While Schapiro suggests that newspapers did not report this aspect of the symposium, the New York Times did in fact mention Mumford’s remarks. See “Calls the Drive ‘Potential Slum,’” New York Times, 20 February 1932, 10, col. 2. 2. Henry Churchill, “Structural Study Associates,” Shelter 2, no. 4 (May 1932): 3. 3. Churchill, “Structural Study Associates,” 3. 4. Buckminster Fuller, “Correlation,” Shelter 2, no. 4 (May 1932 ): 1. Emphasis in original. 5. Schapiro, “The New Architecture,” 23. Although Schapiro does not cite the exact source, he is quoting from Kenneth Kingsley Stowell, “Housing the Other Half,” The Architectural Forum LVI, no. 3 (March 1932): 217–220. 6. Roger Sherman, “Transition,” Shelter 2, no. 4 (May 1932): 26. 7. Sherman, “Transition,” 26. Schapiro will refute these claims as addressing neither “the peculiarities of the social-economic structu re” nor the historical facts. See Meyer Schapiro, “Architecture under Capitalism,” New Masses (December 1932): 10–13. Reprinted in this do ssier. 8. Sherman, “Transition,” 27. Reversing Schapiro’s claims regarding the socialist tendencies in architectural modernism, Sherman posited that the intentions of architects were “frankly, to make as good a living as their talents w ill enable them.” If, he argued, the work of J.J.P. Oud, Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Mies Van der Rohe had initially been “intuitively true,” it had subsequently been adopted in the cause of “the best-for-least shelter developed industrially in terms of mechanical adequacy for human survival and development.” 9. See Colin Rowe, “Introduction,” in Five Architects (New York: Wittenborn and Company, 1972), 4. 10. Beyond adding preliminary remarks, it appears that some changes were made in Schapiro’s article for inclusion in the New Masses. For instance Schapiro refers to “articles by S.S.A.’s which have a direct interest for the New Masses. ” 11. Schapiro, “Architecture under Capitalism,” 10. 12. Schapiro, “Architecture under Capitalism,” 10. 13. Schapiro, “Architecture under Capitalism,” 13. 14. Kiesler’s project was for an “experimental theater” for the artists’ colony in Woodstock, New York. See Frederick Kiesler, “A Festival Shelter: The Space Theater for Woodstock, N.Y.,” Shelter 2, no. 4 (May 1932): 42–47. 15. Schapiro, “Architecture under Capitalism,” 11. Emphasis in original. 16. “Our Intimate Journal of Summer Events,” Shelter 2, no. 5 (November 1932): 16. Fuller is actually arguing that Kwait’s criticism had already been “answered” in the previous issue—i.e., the issue in which Sherman’s article appeared—and that he is thus simply misguided in his critique. 17. “Intimate Journal,” 16. Also according to this column, the “Art in Revolution” movement had been incited at a meeting of Chicago’s John Reed Club involving a presentation by Diego Rivera (in fact an acquaintance of Schapiro), and it entailed “a complete lack of empirical knowledge of the mechanics-of-evolution of the human phenomenon in its essential economic trends in the North American continent,” a trend that for Shelter was inherently good and simply “embittered by the temporary parasitic ‘prot-disease.’” Such an approach, it was claimed, had “failed to see the sturdy tree that this odious orchid clings to.” New Masses was the primary organ of cultural reportage for the Communist Party. The John Reed Club (originating with the
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New York branch) was an association of artists and writers who were sympathetic to the Communist Party. 18. Schapiro, “The New Architecture,” 23. 19. “Intimate Journal,” 16. 20. “Intimate Journal, ” 16. Emphasis added. 21. Meyer Schapiro, “Looking Forward to Looking Backward: On Lewis Mumford: Technics and Civilization,” New Masses (July 1934): 37–38. Reprinted in this dossier. 22. Letter from Meyer Schapiro to Lewis Mumfo rd, 15 August 1934, 2. Lewis Mumford Papers, Series I. Correspondence: Letters to Lewis M umford. Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania (hereinafter Lewis Mumford Papers). 23. Mumford, cited in Schapiro to Mumford , 3. 24. While it is not clear what Schapiro is setting out to argue in this brief rebuttal, his remark about fascism being against capitalism runs counter to the argument made by Walter Benjamin in the epilogue to the “Work of Art” essay of 1936. What Benjamin famously recognized is that, in allowing the masses a form of expression seemingly against their subjection to existing property relations, fascism preserved those very relations. That expression took the form of the aestheticization of politics, as prominently manifest in the futurists’ aestheticization of technologies of war. “Communism responds,” he concluded, “by politicizing art.” See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reections, ed. Hannah Arendt, 217–251 (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). Schapiro will be clearly against the aestheticization of politics, as evidenced in the second Mumford review. 25. Schapiro to Mumford, 2–3. 26. Schapiro to Mumford, 5. 27. Mumford had, for instance, pointed to afnities between regular frames that ordered “hitherto unrelated lines and solids” in Renaissance painting and the “political consolidation of territory into the coherent frame of the state.” 28. Meyer Schapiro, “Looking Forward to Looking Backward,” Partisan Review 5, no. 2 (July 1938): 12–24. Reprinted in this dossier. 29. If not commented upon by Schapiro, there is also a marked continuity in the interest with ows. The book opens with the suggestion that “The Hudson river tunnel is a glistening conduit through which a large amount of mankind is piped . . . Man is a uid in metropolitan regions. He ows through the rush hours, rolls along the bank-full streets. The tunnel is b uilt for that fluidity. It is a homod uct . . . that interprets to some extent the social character of the times.” Baker Brownell and Frank Lloyd Wright, Architecture and Modern Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1937), 1. 30. Meyer Schapiro, “Architects Utopia: Review of Architecture and Modern Life,” Partisan Review 4, no. 4 (March 1938): 46. Reprinted in th is dossier. 31. Meyer Schapiro, “Race, Nationality and Art,” Art Front (2 March 1936): 10–12. Another version of this paper had appeared under the authorship of Lynd Ward, who acknowledged his indebtedness to Schapiro “for part o f the material contained.” See Lynd Ward, “Race, Nationality and Art,” in First American Artists’ Congress (New York: American Artists’ Congress, 1936), 38–41. If Wright and Brownell seemed to share “the Nazi enthusiasm” about the folk, Schapiro went on to note that this in turn entailed further and dangerous implications: for the authors, “a homogenous racial and national stock is preferable to a ‘balance of stocks.’” 32. Faced with the widespread economic crisis of Western capitalism during the
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depression, in 1932 Communism, and in particular Soviet Russia, provided for Marxists such as Schapiro a model of an outside both to the capitalist structu res of exploitation and the devastating prospects of its impending collapse. This would, of course, change with the news of the Moscow Show Trials and the purges of Soviet intellectuals from 1936 to 1938. These events divided the left and led to a widespread disillusionment among intellectuals both wi th the Soviet Union and the American Communist Party. This would be cemented w ith the signing of the HitlerStalin pact in August 1939. Schapiro himself ended up on the side of the Trotskyists, thus taking the opposite side to the New Masses by 1936. See Serge Guilbaut, “New York, 1935–1941: The De-Marxization of the Intelligentsia,” in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 17–48. 33. For instance, Mumford’s work has been a point of reference in the writings of Paul Virilio on militarism and territory, as well as in that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. See Paul Virilio, L’insécurité du territoire, 2nd ed. (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993 [1976]); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Helen R. Lane, Robert Hurley, and Mark Seem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capita lism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Within recent years this line of thinking has been developed in ever more sophisticated political and theoretical directions than that of Mumford, directions which would signicantly challenge even Schapiro’s most dialectical criticisms. See, for instance, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 34. It should be pointed out, however, that Schapiro’s epistemological framework and methodologies would have rendered him unwilling to positively acknowledge the very different conceptual apparatus informing Mumford’s investigation. Mumford’s work was not, as Schapiro rightly recognized, premised on articulating historical dialectics and formulating historical categories. Schapiro in fact recognized the alternative philosophical lineage to which Mumford was afliated, yet Mum ford’s abstract and ahistorical notion of forces remained symptomatic of mystication. For instance, Schapiro attributed Mumford’s interest in invisible forces to a “Sad dilettante muddle of Whitehead, Bergson and ABC’s of the cosmos!” Schapiro, “Looking Forward,” Partisan Review, 18. 35. A notable exception to this is Andrew Hemmingway, “Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s,” Oxford Art Journal 17, no. 1 (1994): 13–29. Hemmingway’s account also provides relevant biographical information on Schapiro and his position with respect to the New York Intellectuals of this period. 36. Schapiro, “Architects Utopia,” 47. 37. Schapiro, “Architecture under Capitalism,” 12. 38. Meyer Schapiro, “Architects and the Crisis: An Open Letter to the Architects, Draughtsmen, and Technicians of America” (1932), in Worldview in Painting—Art and Society (New York: Braziller, 1999), 168–172. The anonymous pamphlet was published by the Architects’ Committee of the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford. William Z. Foster and James W. Ford were Communist Party candidates in the 1932 presidential elections. 39. Meyer Schapiro, “Architecture and the Architect,” New Masses (April 7 1936): 30–31. Reprinted in this dossier. 40. Schapiro, “Architecture and the Architect,” 31. 41. On the politics of the Popular Front, which set out to forge alliances against
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fascism at the expense of the political differences of its various elements, see Serge Guilbaut, “New York, 1935–1941.” Guilbaut also notes that after the Hitler-Stalin pact and the collapse of the promise o f Soviet Russia, Schapiro rejected the American Artists Congress as Stalinist and fascist. In turn he organized the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. It is interesting to note that, following the Russian attack on Finland, Schapiro called upon Mumford to form an alliance against the Artists’ Congress’s decision to adopt the ofcial Co mmunist Party line on this act of aggression. In a letter to Mumford dated April 12, 1940, Schapiro calls upon him to join dissident members in a meeting in which they would “decide upon some common step, probably resignation” (Lewis Mum ford Papers). 42. Lewis Mumf ord, “Opening Address,” in First American Artists’ Congress (New York: American Artists’ Congress, 1936), 1–2. 43. Meyer Schapiro, “The Social Bases of Art” (1936), in Worldview in Painting, 119. 44. As Schapiro explained, “Although painters will say again and again that content doesn’t matter, they are curiously selective i n their subjects. . . . First, there are natural spectacles, landscapes, or city scenes, regarded from the viewpoint of a relaxed spectator, a vacationist, or sportsman, who values the landscape chiey as a source of agreeable sensations or mood; articial spectacles and entertainments— the theater, the circus, the horse race, the athletic field, the m usic hall—or even works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and technology, experienced as spectacles or objects of art.” Schapiro, “The Social Bases of Art,” 122. 45. Emphasis added. 46. Schapiro, “The Social Bases of Art,” 124. 47. Schapiro also argued for the necessary formal and aesthetic dimension of even the most abstract and technological architectural forms in “The Arts under Socialism” (1937), in Worldview in Painting, 129–132. 48. Meyer Schapiro, “The Nature of Abstract Art” (1937), in Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1979), 189. This was written in response to Alfred Barr’s catalogue essay for his 1936 MoMA exhi bition, Cubism and Abstract Art, and advanced a critique of Barr’s model of artistic transformations, his “theory of [the] immanent exhaustion and reaction ” of styles. 49. Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Cultu re in the Visual Arts,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 3–37. 50. Guilbaut, “New York, 1935–1941,” 25. See also Serge Guilb aut, “The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America,” trans. Thomas Repensek, in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina, 153–166 (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). 51. Schapiro, “The Nature o f Abstract Art,” 210. 52. The work of Le Corbusier in fact poses important and difcult questions for Schapiro. He returns to the wo rk of Le Corbusier as an example of a politically conservative but formally revolutionary architecture in 1957. See Meyer Schapiro, “The Future Possibilities of the Arts” (1957), in Worldview in Painting , 192–199. 53. Schapiro, “The Natu re of Abstract Art,” 211. 54. Schapiro, “The Natu re of Abstract Art,” 211. 55. Schapiro, “The Natu re of Abstract Art,” 211. 56. Meyer Schapiro, “Review of Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 7, nos. 1–2 (1938): 291–293. Translated and included in this dossier.
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