![22
Duanfang Lu
here is to use critical regionalism as an example to highlight a fundamental failure
of contemporary architectural discourse in responding to the reality of other
knowledges. In the words of Frampton, “[t]he fundamental strategy of Critical
Regionalism is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements
derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place [emphasis as in the
original].”74
To achieve this, Frampton suggests taking inspiration from local spec-
ifications such as the light condition, topography, climate, place-form, and so on,
with the tectonic and tactile dimensions stressed. John Utzon’s Bagsvaerd
Church is cited as an example “whose complex meaning stems directly from a
revealed conjunction between, on the one hand, the rationality of normative tech-
nique and, on the other, the arationality of idiosyncratic form [emphasis as in the
original].”75
Frampton’s prescriptions are certainly helpful in moving beyond post-
modernism’s nihilistic play of signs for consumption and to pursue a more sincere
and sensitive architecture. My concern has been that the operation of critical
regionalism preempts the possibilities of local architectural knowledges, as if the
latter do not exist at all. While Frampton is highly critical of the tabula rasa
tendency of modernist design, the local is treated here as an epistemological
“tabula rasa”, which can at best provide some “arational” idiosyncrasies for
metropolitan architectural virtuosity. The drama of critical regionalism can only be
played out with reference to “universal modernism,” which is presumed to be
the only genuine knowledge emanating from rationality. This scenario, however,
is utterly ironic when we consider that the majority of people on Earth still live in
varied types of sophisticated “regional architecture” designed and constructed
by local builders who do not have access to “normative” modernist building
knowledge and techniques. For them, so-called “universal modernism” is merely
another regional reality.
Yet in critical regionalism as articulated by Frampton, the inherited
regional culture is posited as a necessary object for destruction, rather than living
knowledge with the same epistemological significance as “universal civilization”
– read here as Western “scientific, technical, and political rationality.” As such,
one must seek an alien knowledge to defamiliarize with and destruct the regional
culture in order to sustain a critique of universal civilization. Here, critical region-
alism falls well within the jurisdiction of Eurocentric epistemology: other cultures
are construed as unregenerate irrationality waiting to be expelled, although part
of them may be dissected and then reassembled only to revitalize the fading
spirit of Western rationality. By eschewing the possibilities of other knowledges
altogether and projecting modernism’s anxiety with its inner crisis onto other
locales, critical regionalism’s cultivation of regional cultures turns out to be
another operation to sustain modernism’s schizophrenic obsession with itself.
Could the rich regional building traditions not merely be raw material
for metropolitan maneuvers but living knowledges with their own epistemolog-
ical claims in architectural production? Is it possible to launch a critique of
modernism that acknowledges the contemporaneity of multiple epistemic](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5830632-250601214254-2d65a114/85/Third-World-Modernism-Architecture-Development-And-Identity-Duanfang-Lu-Editor-39-320.jpg)
![25
Introduction
is important to recognize not only the histories of different modernities, but also
the legitimacies of different knowledges. Unless other modernities are recog-
nized as legitimate spaces of knowledge production, the march toward social
homogeneity and environmental destruction will remain unchecked. It is time to
enfranchise other spatial rationalities and architectural knowledges to create a
more sustainable, just, and culturally and ecologically rich world. And it is time to
open our architectural education to a multi-logical program that encourages
mutual persuasions amongst different understandings of dwelling and building.
Notes
1 See, for example, James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Jon Lang, Madhavi Desai, and Miki Desai,
Architecture and Independence: The Search for Identity – India 1880 to 1980 (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1997); Edward R. Burian (ed.), Modernity and the Architecture of Mexico
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); Valerie Fraser, Building the New World: Studies in the
Modern Architecture of Latin America, 1930–1960 (New York: Verso, 2000); Sibel Bozdogan,
Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2001); Zou Denong Zhongguo xiandai jianzhu shi [Modern
Chinese Architectural History] (Tianjin: Tianjin kexue jishu chubanshe, 2001); Vikrama
ˉditya
Praka
ˉsh, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2002); Peter G. Rowe and Seng Kuan, Architectural Encounters
with Essence and Form in Modern China (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002); Mark
Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (London: Ashgate, 2003); Elisabetta Andreoli
and Adrian Forty (eds), Brazil’s Modern Architecture (London: Phaidon, 2004); Duanfang Lu,
Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space, 1949–2005 (London: Routledge,
2006); Sandy Isenstadt and Kishwar Rizvi (eds), Modern Architecture and the Middle East:
Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2008); Richard J. Williams, Brazil: Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion Books,
2009); Zhu Jianfei, Architecture of Modern China: A Historical Critique (London: Routledge, 2009).
2 Alfred Sauvy coined the expression (“tiers monde” in French) in 1952 by analogy with the “third
estate,” the commoners of France, as opposed to priests and nobles. The term was used at the
1955 Bandung conference of Afro-Asian countries. For a lucid analysis of the emergence of Third
Worldism, see Gerard Chaliand, Revolution in the Third World: Myths and Prospects (New York:
Viking, 1977).
3 Elbaki Hermassi, The Third World Reassessed (Berkeley, California: University of California Press,
1980).
4 Allen H. Merriam, “What Does ‘Third World’ Mean?” in Jim Norwine and Alfonso Gonzalez, The
Third World: States of Mind and Being (Winchester, Massachusetts: Unwin Hyman, Inc., 1988),
pp. 15–22.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 One of the significant exceptions has been Mark Crinson’s Modern Architecture and the End of
Empire (London: Ashgate, 2003), which covers several geographical areas to present a broad
picture of architecture’s relation to the end of imperialism.
8 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, California: University of
California Press, 1997 [1982]).
9 Jurgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique 22 (1981), pp.
3–14.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5830632-250601214254-2d65a114/85/Third-World-Modernism-Architecture-Development-And-Identity-Duanfang-Lu-Editor-42-320.jpg)
![26
Duanfang Lu
10 Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1982).
11 Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press,
1999); Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, tr. Michael
Bullock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1970).
12 Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press,
1965), p. 19.
13 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, tr. Frederick Etchells (London: John Rodker, 1927);
Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York: Norton, 1932);
Siegfried Gidion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1941); Nikolaus Pevsner, The Sources of Modern
Architecture and Design (New York: Praeger, 1968); Leonardo Benevolo, History of Modern
Architecture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971).
14 Hitchcock and Johnson, The International Style.
15 Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture.
16 Karin Kirsch, The Weissenhofsiedlung: Experimental Housing Built for the Deutscher Werkbund,
Stuttgart, 1927 (New York: Rizzoli, 1989).
17 Paul Overy, “White Walls, White Skins: Cosmopolitanism and Colonialism in Inter-war Modernist
Architecture,” in Kobena Mercer (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernisms (London: Institute of
International Visual Arts, 2005), pp. 50–67.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 56.
20 Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire.
21 Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations
of the World Urban System (London: Routledge, 1990); Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design
in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Nezar AlSayyad (ed.),
Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise (Aldershot:
Avebury, 1992); Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century
World’s Fairs (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1992); Zeynep Çelik, Urban
Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule, Berkeley, California: University of
California Press, 1997); Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism,
and the Colonial Uncanny (London: Routledge, 2005); Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture,
Cities and Italian Imperialism (New York: Routledge, 2007); Peter Scriver and Vikrama
ˉditya
Praka
ˉsh, Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon
(London: Routledge, 2007).
22 Jeffery W. Cody, Exporting American Architecture, 1870–2000 (London: Routledge, 2003).
23 Duanfang Lu, “Exporting Chinese Modernism: Reading the Bandaranaike Memorial International
Conference Hall, Colombo, Sri Lanka,” paper presented at the Chinese Studies of Australian
Association Biennial Conference at the University of Sydney, 7–9 July 2009 (Sydney, Australia);
Duanfang Lu, Unsettled Modernism [Weiding de xiandaizhuyi] (published in both English and
Chinese) (Beijing: China Architecture & Building Press, forthcoming).
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 8.
28 Duanfang Lu, “Third World Modernism: Modernity, Utopia and the People’s Commune in China,”
Journal of Architectural Education, 60, 3 (2007), pp. 40–8.
29 Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building.
30 Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial
Design (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2004).
31 Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form, Chapter 1.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5830632-250601214254-2d65a114/85/Third-World-Modernism-Architecture-Development-And-Identity-Duanfang-Lu-Editor-43-320.jpg)
![28
Duanfang Lu
60 The argument of this section is further articulated in my forthcoming chapter “Entangled
Modernities in Architecture” in Greg Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen (eds.), Architectural
Theory Handbook (London: Sage).
61 R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee (eds and tr.), Land without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of
America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present (Berkeley, California: University of
California Press, 1989), pp. 174–81.
62 Ibid., p. 178.
63 Ibid., p. 181.
64 Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (eds), Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in
Postwar Architectural Culture (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2000).
65 Ibid., p. 11.
66 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,
ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr; trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press, 2002 [1947]).
67 Donald McNeil, The Global Architect: Firms, Fame and Urban Form (New York: Routledge, 2009).
68 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978).
69 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 5.
70 Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, “Postmodernism and the Rest of the World,” in Fawzia Afzal-Khan
and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (eds), The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies (Durham, North
Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 37–70.
71 Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (New York: Routledge,
2005).
72 Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, “The Grid and the Pathway,” Architecture in Greece 15 (1981),
pp. 164–78; William J. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900 (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, 1982); Kenneth Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” Perspecta 20
(1983), pp. 147–62; Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd edn (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1992 [1980]); Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points
for an Architecture of Resistance,” in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern
Culture (New York: The New Press, 1998 [1983]), pp. 17–34; Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre and
Bruno Stagno (eds) Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization (Chichester:
C. Fonds, 2001).
73 Alan Colquhoun, “The Concept of Regionalism,” in Gülsüm Baydar Nal-bantoglu and Wong
Chong Thai (eds), Postcolonial Space(s) (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), pp.
13–23; Keith L. Eggener, “Placing Resistance: a Critique of Critical Regionalism,” Journal of
Architectural Education 55, 4 (2002), pp. 228–37; Gevork Hartoonian, “Critical Regionalism
Reloaded,” Fabrications 16, 2(2006), pp. 123–9.
74 Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism,” p. 23.
75 Ibid., p. 25.
76 Lu, “Third World Modernism.”
77 Liu Yunhe, “Guba jianzhu” [Cuban Architecture], Jianzhu xuebao [Architectural Journal] 9 (1963), pp.
20–7.
78 Wu Huanjia, “Ping xifang shizuo jianzhu” [A Review of Ten Buildings in the West], Jianzhu xuebao
[Architectural Journal] 6 (1964), pp. 29–33.
79 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
80 Ibid., p. 8.
81 Ibid., p. 11.
82 The “evolutionary tree” in Sir Banister Fletcher’s famous frontispiece to A History of Architecture
on the Comparative Method (London: B. T. Batsford, 1897) depicts the evolution of Western
architecture as dynamic and historical while considering the architecture of other cultures
non-historical and having no impact upon the “History of Architecture”.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5830632-250601214254-2d65a114/85/Third-World-Modernism-Architecture-Development-And-Identity-Duanfang-Lu-Editor-45-320.jpg)
Third World Modernism Architecture Development And Identity Duanfang Lu Editor
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- 6. Third World Modernism The first volume to map multiple positions on architectural modernism across the developing world, this book offers an international perspective on the practices and consequences of modernist architecture in the mid-twentieth century. Presenting fresh case studies from Asia, South America, Africa, and the Middle East, experts in this volume challenge canonical architectural historiography which identifies the West as the sole yardstick to measure the beginning and end, success and failure, of modernism. They show that modernism in Third World nations took trajectories radically different from those in developed societies during the same historical period. The intersections between modernist architecture, globalism, developmentalism, nationalism, and postcolo- nialism are explored. Chapters illustrate modernism’s part in the transnational development of building technologies, the construction of national and cultural identity, and the geo-historical entanglements of nations. Creating new openings for cross-cultural analysis of modernism, this provocative book has a key place in the historiography of modern architecture in non-Western societies. Duanfang Lu is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Plan- ning at the University of Sydney and author of Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space, 1949–2005.
- 7. For the New Third World
- 8. Third World Modernism Architecture, development and identity Edited by Duanfang Lu
- 9. First published 2011 by Routledge, 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2011 selection and editorial material, Duanfang Lu; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Third world modernism : architecture, development and identity / edited by Duanfang Lu. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Modern movement (Architecture)--Developing countries. 2. Architecture and society--Developing countries--History--20th century. 3. Architecture and globalization--Developing countries--History--20th century. I. Lu, Duanfang. NA1614.T48 2010 724’.6--dc22 2010015853 ISBN13: 978-0-415-56457-1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-56458-8 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-84099-3 (ebk) This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. ISBN 0-203-84099-2 Master e-book ISBN
- 10. Contents Acknowledgements vii IIllustration credits and sources ix 1 Introduction: architecture, modernity and identity in the Third World 1 DUANFANG LU Part I The will of the age 29 2 The Other Way Around: the modernist movement in Brazil 31 DANIELA SANDLER 3 Depoliticizing Group GAMMA: contesting modernism in Morocco 57 AZIZA CHAOUNI 4 Agrupación Espacio and the CIAM Peru Group: architecture and the city in the Peruvian modern project 85 SHARIF S. KAHATT Part II Building the nation 111 5 Campus Architecture as Nation Building: Israeli architect Arieh Sharon’s Obafemi Awolowo University Campus, Ile-Ife, Nigeria 113 INBAL BEN-ASHER GITLER 6 Modernity and Revolution: the architecture of Ceylon’s twentieth-century exhibitions 141 ANOMA PIERIS 7 This is not an American House: good sense modernism in 1950s Turkey 165 ELÂ KAÇEL Part III Entangled modernities 187 8 Modernity Transfers: the MoMA and postcolonial India 189 FARHAN SIRAJUL KARIM
- 11. Contents vi 9 Building a Colonial Technoscientific Network: tropical architecture, building science and the politics of decolonization 211 JIAT-HWEE CHANG 10 Otto Koenigsberger and the Tropicalization of British Architectural Culture 236 VANDANA BAWEJA 11 Epilogue: Third World Modernism, or Just Modernism: towards a cosmopolitan reading of modernism 255 VIKRAMA ˉ DITYA PRAKA ˉ SH Selected Bibliography 271 Contributors 277 Index 281
- 12. vii Acknowledgements Some of the essays in this volume were first presented at the Society of Archi- tectural Historians 61st Annual Meeting, held in Cincinnati, Ohio, 23–27 April 2008. The editor and contributors wish to express our sincere appreciation to conference participants who offered valuable comments and posed insightful questions. In particular, we would like to thank Professor Nezar AlSayyad, for being discussant of the session ‘Third World Modernism’ and for his unflagging support of our volume. Deep gratitude is extended to Professors Swati Chattopadhyay, Hilde Heynen, Anthony D. King, Jon Lang, Peter Scriver, and Richard Williams for their thoughtful comments. We are also indebted to Geor- gina Johnson-Cook, Pamela McLaughlin, Rob Brown, and Marie Lister for their sensitive work throughout the book preparation and publication process. The editor wishes to express appreciation for the support provided by a Discovery Project research grant from the Australian Research Council, the J. Paul Getty Fellowship, and a small grant from the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Plan- ning, University of Sydney, which have all helped the production of this volume. Aspects of the issues discussed in the Introduction were presented in the Depart- ment of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Department of Geography at Guangzhou University, the Institute of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Melbourne, the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, and at the Second ‘China Architectural Thought Forum’ in Shenzhen. The editor wants to thank her hosts and her audiences for their rigourous engagement and insightful feedback. Many thanks go to Farhan Sirajul Karim and Cassi Plate for their valuable research assistance. Last but not least, Duanfang Lu would like to thank her family for their love, support, and patience.
- 14. ix Illustration credits and sources The editor, contributors and publisher would like to thank all those who have granted permission to reproduce illustrations. We have made every effort to contact and acknowledge copyright holders, but if any errors have been made we would be happy to correct them at a later printing. Cover: © Duanfang Lu Chapter 1 1–3 © Duanfang Lu Chapter 2 1–5 Source: Warchavchik Family Archive 6–7 © The Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi Chapter 3 1 Top Source: Archive ETH Zurich 1 Bottom © Fonds Zevaco, FRAC Orléans 2 © Yannnick Beunard 3 Source: Archive ENA, Rabat. 4 Source: Personal archive of the architects, Rabat. 5 Source: Personal archive of Elie Azagury, now transferred to IFA, Paris 6 © Fonds Zevaco, FRAC Orléans 7 © gta/ETH, Zurich 8 © A+U 9–10 Source: Personal archive of Elie Azagury, now transferred to IFA, Paris 11 © Aziza Chaouni 12 Source: Personal archive of Elie Azagury, now transferred to IFA, Paris 13 © A+U 14 © Fonds FRAC Orléans
- 15. Illustration credits and sources x Chapter 4 1 Source: Sert Collection, Loeb Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Design 2 © El Arquitecto Peruano. 3 © Miró Quesada family 4a and 4b Source: Luis Sert Collection, Loeb Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Design 5 Source: Oficina Nacional de Planeamiento Urbano (ONPU) Plan Piloto de Lima, Lima: Empresa Gráfica T. Scheuch, 1949, p. 28 6 © El Arquitecto Peruano 7 Source: Oficina Nacional de Planeamiento Urbano (ONPU) Plan Piloto de Lima, Lima: Empresa Gráfica T. Scheuch, 1949, p. 30 8 Source: Modern Architecture in Latin America since 1945, Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Catalogue, New York, 1955, pp. 132–33 9 © Adolfo Córdova Chapter 5 1–9 © Yael Aloni Chapter 6 1–5 © Associated Newspapers Ceylon Ltd. 6 © Anoma Pieris 7 © Jack Kulasinghe, National Housing Development Authority Chapter 7 1 Source: Vanlı, Mimariden Konuşmak, vol. 1 (2006), p. 211. Used with permission of the Şevki Vanlı Architecture Foundation. 2 © The Istanbul Metropolitan Branch of the Union of Turkish Chambers of Engineers and Architects 3 Source: Dostluk, no. 19 (28 August 1957), p. 6 4 Source: Dostluk, no. 18 (14 August 1957), p. 3 5 Source: Bütün Dünya, no. 94 (November 1955), p. 627 6 Source: Arkitekt, vol. 19, no. 3–4 (1950), p. 71 7–10 © The Istanbul Metropolitan Branch of the Union of Turkish Chambers of Engineers and Architects
- 16. Illustration credits and sources xi Chapter 8 1 © Farhan Sirajul Karim 2 © The British Museum, London 3–6 © MoMA, NY 7 © National Library of India, Kolkata 8 © National Institute of Design, NID, Ahmedabad, India Chapter 9 1 © George Atkinson 2–4 Source: Colonial Building Notes Chapter 10 1 © Vandana Baweja 2–3 Source: Redrawn by Simon Barrow, based on an axonometric of the Kuwait Mat-Building published in Alison and Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture (New York: Monacelli Press, 2001) 4 Source: Redrawn by Simon Barrow, based on sun diagrams published in Tropical Advisory Service, “Climate analysis and design recommendations for Kuwait Old City” (London, prepared for Peter and Alison Smithson by Tropical Advisory Service, Department of Tropical Architecture, Architectural Association School of Architecture) 5 Source: Redrawn by Simon Barrow based on sun diagrams published in Lorenzo Wong, Climate Register: Four Works by Alison and Peter Smithson (London: Architectural Association, 1994), p. 47. Chapter 11 1–2 © The Aditya Prakash Foundation, Chandigarh
- 18. 1 Chapter 1 Introduction: architecture, modernity and identity in the Third World Duanfang Lu This book examines modernity’s multiplicity by documenting cutting edge research on architectural modernism in the developing world during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Originating in interwar Europe, modernist architecture – as a way of building, a knowledge product, a style-of-life consumer item, and above all, a symbol of modernity – has traversed national boundaries throughout the world. Despite the extensive adoption of modernist architecture in developing countries, standard history books focus on its development in the West. Up until the last three decades, academic inquiry into the built environment in developing societies concentrated on traditional forms. With the exception of the work of a very small number of acclaimed non-Western architects such as Hasan Fathy and Charles Correa, little attention was devoted to modern architec- ture in the Third World, which was considered merely lesser forms of Western modernism. This orientation has been changed as canonical narratives which priv- ilege Western modes of thinking and aesthetics are challenged, and orientalist perspectives on other cultures are debunked. Informed by turbulent theoretical debates throughout the humanities and social sciences, scholarship on the far- reaching variability of modernism has begun to grow, advancing our under- standing of how modernist architecture was adopted, modified, interpreted, and contested in different parts of the world.1 This discourse has focused on national building projects and their confrontation with and assimilation of modernism. Is it possible to transcend binary oppositions such as modern/traditional and core/ periphery while still recognizing the ongoing making of global modernity? Can the history of modernist architecture be more responsive to the realities of other histories? How did architectural modernism develop with reference not only to Western epistemology, but also to the experiences and knowledge of other Third World countries? And how did the implications of modernist architecture continu- ously shift in the context of conflicting relations involving nationalistic concerns, global aspirations, and the problems of underdevelopment?
- 19. 2 Duanfang Lu Third World Modernism aims to address these issues by connecting debates on modernism that have unfolded in different geographic regions in the mid-twentieth century, a historical period characterized by processes including independence, decolonization, nation building, architectural modernization, and the development of the Cold War. The book problematizes the global spread of modernist architecture against this broad socio-political context and highlights what is at stake in the study of the intertwined relationship between architecture, modernity, and identity in the developing world. To think the modern is to think the present, which is necessarily caught in the ever-shifting social, political, and cultural cross-currents. For many decades, modernization was depicted in social sciences as a broad series of processes of industrialization, rationalization, urbanization, and social changes through which modern societies arose. This approach has been heavily criticized for its Eurocentric assumptions in recent years. It assumes, for example, that only Western society is truly modern and that all societies are heading towards the same destination. With the epistemological break triangulated by postmodern, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories, the dominance of progressive histori- cism and its associated binaries (modern/traditional, self/other, center/periphery, etc.) is being challenged. Questions about modernity, understood as modes of experiencing and questioning the present, are being rethought. This book is an attempt to contribute unique perspectives to the crit- ical rethinking of the modern by unraveling the complex meanings of “Third World modernism.” The term “Third World” has been an important addition to the political vocabulary of the past century. First coined by the French demogra- pher Alfred Sauvy in 1952, the phrase gradually gained popularity as a classifica- tion describing the emerging arena of global politics associated with neither Western capitalism nor Soviet socialism in the early 1960s.2 This arena included the developing nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America which shared broad historical, economic, social, cultural, and ideological commonalities: a history of colonization, relatively low per capita incomes, culturally non-Western, and agri- culturally-based economies.3 The meeting of Afro-Asian nations held in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 marked a significant step in the institutionalization of the nona- ligned/Third World identity, which was consolidated through subsequent assem- blies (in Belgrade in 1961, Cairo in 1964, Lusaka in 1970, Algiers in 1973, Colombo in 1976, Havana in 1979, New Delhi in 1983, and Harare in 1986).4 Third World nations were therefore also referred to as “nonaligned nations,” although this was not entirely accurate. For example, despite being part of the Third World, Turkey and Pakistan were not part of the nonaligned membership due to their close ties to Western capitalism via the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) respectively.5 Compared with other alternative phrases such as “developing coun- tries,” “less developed countries,” “non-industrialized countries,” and “the South,” the Third World is more than merely a socio-economic designation. It has come to represent a forceful ideology, a meaningful rallying point, a widely shared
- 20. 3 Introduction mentality, and a unique source of identity. The phrase has proven rhetorically, politically, and theoretically effective.6 Despite the end of the Cold War, the term “Third World” remains viable in contemporary geopolitical vocabulary, as seen in leading scholarly journals such as Third World Quarterly and Journal of Third World Studies. This book is concerned with issues related to the development of modernist architecture in developing societies from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the late 1970s, a period which witnessed the steady growth of Third World solidarity. On the one hand, chapters in this volume demonstrate that there are multiple ways of being modern, which are not the less perfect, incom- plete versions of an idealized full-blown modernity, but constituencies with their own trajectories, discourses, social institutions, and categories of reference. On the other hand, these studies show that as a result of social production under similar historical conditions, and representation of similar values and beliefs, modernist architecture in these societies shared some common characteristics and trajectories that were sharply different from those shared by developed soci- eties during the same historical period. This book uses the concept of “Third World modernism” to describe, analyze, and theorize these distinctive meanings, practices, trajectories, transformations, and consequences of modernist architec- ture in developing countries in the mid-twentieth century. By doing so it aims to overcome the earlier hegemonic assumption which identified the West as the sole yardstick to measure the beginning and end, success and failure of modernism. It shows how canonical architectural historiography has universal- ized experiences with modernity that were actually peculiar to the Euro-American context. Until now, most existing volumes have been monographs on the development of modernist architecture within a single nation or anthologies that focus on a single region.7 Third World Modernism is the first edited volume that addresses the development of architectural modernism in countries across the Third World. It represents an opportunity to map multiple positions in related debates. The book highlights sites of encounter, connection, and negotiation. Many nation-based histories of modern architecture picture architectural histo- ries as disconnected variations, each confined to an a priori state-defined space and following an internal logic. To quote Eric Wolf, this is a “model of the world as a global pool hall in which entities spin off each other like so many hard and rounded billiard balls.”8 In contrast, by mapping the concrete routes to and through modernity, the original scholarship of this volume points to the impor- tance of multiple patterns of interlocking not only between non-Western and Western locales, but also among non-Western ones. Together the essays reveal the intrinsically paradoxical differences at the very heart of the modern, on the one hand, and the geo-historical entanglements of modernities from a global perspective, on the other. In the following, I will discuss “Third World modernism” from four interconnected perspectives, namely, modernism as globalism, modernism as
- 21. 4 Duanfang Lu developmentalism, modernism as nationalism, and modernism as postcoloni- alism, which both sets up theoretical and historical frameworks for the book and introduces the chapters that follow. I will close the chapter with a discussion of the epistemological implications of this study. A significant implication has been that in order to reach a true dialogism, we need to recognize not only the histories of different modernities, but also the legitimacies of different bodies of architec- tural knowledge. It is my hope that the notion of “Third World modernism” will eventually come to represent the aspirations for a more sustainable built environ- ment of humanity. Modernism as globalism The term “modern” originated from the fifth-century Latin term modemus which was then employed to distinguish the Christian present from the pagan past. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, three vital transitions – the discovery of the Americas, the Renaissance, and the Reformation – formed “the epochal threshold” to modern times in Europe.9 While the processes of modernization began around the fifteenth century, the kinds of art, literature, architecture, and music we term “modernism” did not appear until the late nineteenth century. Marshall Berman characterizes modernity as a historical experience that seeks to ceaselessly transform the very conditions that produce it.10 In the same vein, modernism has been a reaction to societal modernization, which is modern in its celebration of newness and the break from tradition, and anti-modern in its critique of modernization’s betrayal of its own human promise. In architectural discourse, the very idea of modernism is culturally and historically constructed into a heroic interwar modernism and a revisionist post- Second World War modernism, which are characterized by different manifesta- tions of the modern in architecture. The modern movement in architecture originated from the avant-garde spirit shared by modernist painting, music, and literature. Compared with their literary and artistic counterparts, whose counter- modern gestures called the authority of Western rationality into question, early modern architects were more allied with societal and industrial modernization. Their manifestos and practices often affirmed the very beliefs and values of modernization being attacked by other streams of modernism: progress, tech- nology, and rationality.11 Walter Gropius in his description of the Bauhaus program, for example, proclaimed that “A breach has been made with the past, which allows us to envisage a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age we live in; the morphology of dead style has been destroyed; and we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling.”12 Similar expressions can be found in the writings of the modern move- ment’s other polemicists such as Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion, the mani- festos of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), and subsequent canonical architectural histories.13 In fact, most technical advance- ments required by modernist architecture took place before the advent of the
- 22. 5 Introduction twentieth century. The significance of the modern movement lies in developing a set of new design and aesthetic principles to correspond to technical conditions that were already in place, as well as forming a cohesive position on modernist architecture among avant gardes. Through a successful cultural politics of self- construction, modernism was associated with a set of positive attributes and gradually attained its ascendancy. By purifying traditional restrictions and deco- ration, reconceptualizing space-time, following the logic of function, and modulizing its components, modernist architecture was considered to embody modern modes of living, thinking and production based on rationality, efficiency, calculation, the obsession with novelty and abstraction, as well as the moral pretension of advancing social and political goals through design practices. Notably, modernism was acclaimed “International” and conceptualized as exem- plifying the positive aspect of globalism: the interests of the entire world were placed above those of individual nations.14 In the polemical picture of the modern movement, the new forms, spatial principles, and technologies of modernism were a matter of universal knowledge unrestrained by national boundaries and an expression of zeitgeist which held an epochal force that no society could escape.15 Modernism conceived as such, however, did not match the actual driving forces behind the development of modernist design at a dynamic forma- tive moment of industrial capitalism. The practices of the Weimar Bauhaus, for example, reflected the initial idea of establishing the Werkbund: to improve the global competitiveness of national industry by integrating mass-production tech- niques and traditional crafts. There were also multiple contesting positions against the transnational claims of early modernists, as shown in the perceptions of the Weissenhofsiedlung at that time. First exhibited in the city of Stuttgart in the summer of 1927, the Weissenhofsiedlung was part of a series of exhibitions with the overall title of “Die Wohnung” (The Dwelling) directed by Mies van der Rohe, and is often considered the moment when modernist architecture first became institutionalized.16 The Weissenhof architecture featured flat roofs, white walls, cantilevered balconies, roof gardens, sun terraces, and large verandas. As these characteristics were initially inspired by Mediterranean, middle-eastern, and north African vernacular buildings, the Weissenhof architecture was assaulted in racist terms by both traditionalists and proto-Nazi critics.17 The Siedlung was nicknamed “Little Jerusalem” soon after its opening in 1927 and its style was frequently sneered at as “orientalist,” “colonial,” or “north African.”18 A satirical postcard with figures of Arabs and camels montaged onto the view of the Weissenhof estate was circulated throughout the 1930s. Conflicts among Western countries preceding the Second World War added additional layers of entanglements. French critics considered the promotion of architectural interna- tionalism an attempt by Germany to impose the style upon western and central European nations. Within Germany, however, cosmopolitanism associated with the international qualities of architectural modernism was frequently used by Nazi propagandists to demean “anti-national” and “rootless” Jewish intellectuals.19
- 23. 6 Duanfang Lu Despite the conflicting views at the early stage of its development, modernism nonetheless achieved its global reach in the subsequent decades. Standard history books fail to problematize this process, as if the worldwide spread of modernist architecture were natural and spontaneous. When the issue is discussed, it usually evokes notions of dissemination, progress, and enlighten- ment. This leaves many questions unanswered: Who initiated the dissemination and for what purpose? How did the meanings of modernism shift during the process? Why was modernism widely adopted regardless of existing regional building cultures? And what were its global cultural, social, environmental, and epistemological consequences? A close examination of these questions reveals that the globalism embodied in modernism has much more complicated meanings beyond those constructed by the early modernists. Indeed, modernist architecture developed at a time when benevolent late colonialism was at its peak.20 Although the common view considers classic form an arm of colonialism and modernism its antithesis, recent studies on colonial modernities show that modernist design and planning were not necessarily a denial of colonialism.21 Instead, the colonies were often employed as laboratories of the newest design ideas, through which the metropolis imposed political and cultural influence upon the rest of the world. While previous models presupposed modernity (and with it modernism) to be the result of economic and technical advancements in Europe, these studies reveal Western expansion through colonization as an indivisible feature of modernity, and colonial modernities as an integral part of global modernity. A number of chapters in this volume extend this argument by looking into the development of modernist architecture under both neocolonialism and Cold War cultural politics, exemplifying the other side of globalism embodied in modernist design practices: that is, viewing the world as an appropriate arena for one nation to project its influence. In Chapter 9 Jiat-Hwee Chang illustrates the production of tropical architecture as technoscientific knowledge in the context of complex socio-political relations between the British Empire and the postcolo- nial nations. According to Chang, there were attempts to replace the earlier modes of economic exploitation and political dominance with new discourses and institutions of welfare and development since the depression of the 1930s. Many new regional research stations in the colonies were established and modeled after the metropolitan model for this purpose. For instance, following the establishment of the Building Research Station in Watford in 1921, which carried out research on building materials and construction methods in order to provide efficient solutions to post-First World War housing shortages, it was proposed that the Colonial Housing Bureau be attached to it and model itself after it. Regional research establishments like this greatly facilitated not only the acceptance of modernist architecture for tropical building but also the continua- tion of British influence after the Second World War. Meanwhile, with the establishment of two co-existing superpowers in the Cold War context, the connotations of modernist architecture went through
- 24. 7 Introduction radical changes. The socialist ideals of its European pioneers were replaced by a commitment to democracy, which was employed strategically to expose the defects of the liberal West’s enemies. Under the new political aura, modernist architecture was Americanized and exported to different parts of the world.22 Chapters 4, 7 and 8 provide fresh evidence of how modernist architecture was promoted via vehicles such as the postwar CIAM, the Ford Foundation, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Peru, Turkey and India as part of the attempts to implement American globalism. In Latin America, Roosevelt’s administration sponsored CIAM members to evangelize new democracies in Latin American countries with the idea of using modernist architecture and planning as a means of modernization during the mid-1940s. In Turkey, knowledge about the “International Style” and American domestic design was widely publicized in the wake of a series of mutual aid agreements between the USA and Turkey in spheres including economy, military, technical assistance, and culture in 1945, which reached its peak with the Marshall Plan. In India, the US policy to promote India as a demo- cratic counterweight to China resulted in a number of influential exhibitions on modernist design organized by MoMA, in addition to financial aid totaling US$10 billion in 1954–64. Although largely neglected by previous observers, some newly inde- pendent countries also exercised globalism through modernist design during the postwar era. In Chapter 5, Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler shows that the planning and design of the Obafemi Awolowo University Campus in Ile-Ife, Nigeria was an organized governmental initiative of Israel. In the context of its political and economic isolation brought about by Arab boycotts, Israel aimed to gain strength through its relations with Third World countries. Decolonization processes in Africa, in particular, were considered a historic opportunity for establishing diplomatic and economic ties. To achieve this objective, Israel initiated comprehensive technical assistance programs in various countries, of which architecture and construction were an integral part. My own research on the development of building projects in Third World countries as part of China’s foreign aid programs shows China as another important player in this.23 Since the founding of the Third World coalition at Bandung in 1955, China has consistently identified itself with the Third World and has considered strengthening cooperation with other Third World nations its basic foreign policy. Extensive Chinese architectural exports began in 1956 as part of overseas aid programs within the Cold War context. In the decades that followed, Chinese architects built construction projects ranging from major national buildings to factories in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Many of these buildings adopted modernist style, among which the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall (BMICH) in Colombo, Sri Lanka, represents one of the most significant examples.24 Designed by Dai Nianci, a prominent figure in the history of modern Chinese architecture, BMICH echoes both postwar tropical architecture and the iconography of Maoist utopianism (Figure 1; see also the
- 25. 8 Duanfang Lu book cover photo). Due to its striking aesthetic appeal, BMICH has become a symbol of national identity and a premier tourist attraction in Sri Lanka. Notably, BMICH successfully hosted the Fifth Non-aligned Summit Conference in August 1976, which in turn helped Sri Lanka project its own global influence among Third World nations.25 Many delegates who attended the confer- ence were impressed with the architecture and facilities of BMICH. It was reported, for example, that Iraq, who had been provisionally selected to host the Seventh Non-aligned Summit Conference in 1982, wanted to construct a similar complex. The Iraq government sought Sri Lanka’s assistance in this respect and planned to send a team of architects and engineers to study the plans. Several other countries such as Pakistan were also interested in constructing something similar, which marked BMICH as an interesting case in modernism’s global dissemination.26 A quick overview reveals the complexity and contradictions involved in the worldwide diffusion of modernism. It suggests that the rise of modernist archi- tecture as a global phenomenon should not be taken for granted. Instead, the global reach of modernism in the postwar era registered the rise of a new world order which marked new forms of control, new ways of collaboration, and new partnerships in international affairs. Global modernist design practices were performed by a wide range of players and tangled with multiple political purposes in the process. On the one hand, it must be more than coincidental that modernism achieved its worldwide hegemony when financial capitalism was on the rise. Affirmed by the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreements, the new financial system achieved circulation, control, and exploitation that did not require that much phys- ical support of locales compared with that required by colonialism. Hence, the new system was abstract and independent of the specificities of place, of which the sterile and faceless modernist architecture served as the proper symbol. Figure 1 Dai Nianci, the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 1973. Photograph taken by the author, 2010.
- 26. 9 Introduction On the other hand, modernism traveled in the name of knowledge transfer, overseas aid, and new forms of cooperation among newly independent countries. Successful modernist design proved effective in helping the nations that offered it to create expanded spaces in the global political arena, as well as bringing international recognition and faster-paced modernization to the host societies. Seen in this light, the postwar spread of modernism not only signaled new relations between Western and non-Western modernities, but also among Third World ones. Today, many studies on non-Western modernities continue to be preoccupied with the centre–periphery dichotomy, while neglecting other relations that used to be so prominent in the actual “postcolonial” vision during the 1950s and 1960s. The emphasis on both types of relations in the formation of Third World modernism, therefore, is methodologically significant, as it allows a theoretical break from the normative historiographical emphasis on the West/ non-West confrontation in much of current postcolonial scholarship. Furthermore, previous accounts highlighted the “immigrant boat” (émigré and refugee architects) as the main vehicle for modernism’s dissemina- tion. Instead, the studies of this volume show that the mediums through which modernist architecture spread were much more diverse and often highly institu- tionalized. Apart from moving about as a means of exercising globalism, modernist architecture also travelled to the Third World on the wings of developmentalism, to which we now turn. Modernism as developmentalism Dipesh Chakrabarty considers colonial historicism to be the colonizers’ way of saying “not yet” to non-European peoples, who were forced to wait until they became “civilized enough to rule themselves.”27 After independence, despite the end of direct colonial rule, the modernist vision of a rationally progressing universal history persisted, which considered that all nations were heading for the same destination; some arrived earlier than others. With the acute self- awareness of the temporal lag turned into a nationalistic aspiration for develop- ment, an all-encompassing project of modernization was at the top of the national agenda of many Third World countries.28 New infrastructure, housing, adminis- trative and educational buildings were constructed to accommodate new functions, new organizations, and new citizens. It is in this broad context that modernist architecture was intimately tied to state patronage and assumed a vital mission in Third World nation building.29 Despite its claims to universality in time and space, interwar modernism was developed at a time when “ascetic objects” were necessitated by economic depression and postwar rebuilding.30 Practically, design doctrines such as “form follows function” and “building = function × economics” articulated by early modernists served particularly well in the developing world where people and institutes constantly struggled with scarce resources and insufficient funds. For example, modernist architecture achieved a decisive victory in China as part of
- 27. 10 Duanfang Lu the “anti-waste” movement in 1955. Modernism was first introduced to China as early as the 1920s, but under Soviet influence revivalist architecture became dominant in the early 1950s.31 1955 saw a major reorientation when a resolution was made which denounced the tendency of impractical extravagances in construction. Nationalistic structures with big roofs and traditional ornamentation were condemned as wasteful under the new austerity policy. The modernist style, considered more economical and efficient, was established as the prefer- able style in development. The promise of modernist architecture in providing affordable and high-density housing also attracted many developmental states to integrate it into their policy interventions. In Singapore, for instance, instead of adopting the incremental approach to low income housing, the state espoused the large-scale development of modern high-rise apartment buildings, which proved effective in achieving comprehensive housing access in the land-scarce city-state.32 Symbolically, the precepts of modernism constructed by early modern- ists as innovative, liberating, universal, and rational were embraced by Third World societies. The formalistic features of modernist architecture, which appeared clean, open, dynamic, and neutral, presented enough distance from both native and imperialist buildings. As such, along with modern factories, bridges, dams, and power plants, the images of modernist architecture frequently appeared in official propaganda publications as representations of modernization. These visible symbols powerfully shaped the desire of the age, the standards against which things were judged, and the collective conscious of what a modern nation should look like.33 In practice, they were often taken as abbreviated signs of order, efficiency, and development, which James Scott has typified as the logic of high modernism, with the city of Brasilia being one of the most striking architectural examples.34 Elsewhere I have argued that an important dimension of Third World modernism has been the utopianization of modernity.35 If utopia is the “expres- sion of the desire for a better way of being and living,” industrial modernity was turned into this better way of being in Third World countries.36 The numerous blueprints sparked by official utopianism in these countries often did not go beyond what had already happened or was happening in the developed world: abundance, industrialization, electricity, and automation.37 It was precisely because modernism had not happened, but was yet to come, that the potential existed to employ the vision to “teach desire to … desire better.”38 A number of recent studies have illustrated modernism’s postwar ascendancy as salvation for underdevelopment as a result of the “education of desire” provided by America-led Cold War cultural politics. Annabel Wharton’s study of Hilton International Hotels built in postwar Europe and the Middle East provides a proper example.39 The luxury hotels that Hilton International constructed abroad in the 1950s and 1960s introduced a remarkable visual contrast to the local architectural forms of host cities such as Istanbul, Cairo, and Jerusalem. Often the highest and most sumptuous building in the town, the Hilton created a
- 28. 11 Introduction dramatic panorama for impoverished local populations and realized a powerful presence of the United States. Such effects were consciously made, as Conrad Hilton acknowledged, “to show the countries most exposed to Communism the other side of the coin – the fruits of the free world.”40 Studies of modernist architecture as the imposition of a specific set of political and cultural values, forms, and knowledge upon developing nations to some extent echo recent post-development discourse in social sciences. Arturo Escobar, for example, argues that developmentalism constructs underdeveloped nations as subjects located in a preliminary stage of historical evolution and thus in need of improvement through development projects in order to be modern, industrialized, and capitalist nation-states. This is done “by creating abnormalities (‘the poor,’ ‘the malnourished,’ ‘the illiterate,’ ‘pregnant women,’ ‘the landless’) which it would then treat or reform.”41 As these subjects adopt policies influ- enced by international agencies, it is precisely the promise of development that provides the conditions for the center to realize its continued surveillance of peripheral nations and their citizens. While existing research reveals power and hegemony involved in the diffusion of modernist forms, knowledge, and technology, it often implies a linear path and reduces the complexities surrounding local appropriations, (mis)inter- pretations, transformations, and resistances. The three chapters in Part I of this volume present a more complicated picture by examining the transplantation of modernist architecture as a two-way process in Brazil, Morocco, and Peru. Importantly, they demonstrate the localization of modernism as a process in which people worked actively to make themselves modern, instead of merely being made modern. They show that modernism entered the local scene much earlier than the launch of the Cold War, and played a powerful role in introducing societies into modernity. The domestication of modernist architecture involved dense local practices of translating, selecting, mixing, and reinventing. The chap- ters highlight two dilemmas in the course of pursuing modernism as develop- mentalism. First, modernist architecture in many developing nations arose at a time when societies lacked the typical prerequisites for modernism, such as industrialization and modern construction technologies. The second problem was to find the balance between the specificities of the local context and the homog- enizing effects of modernist design. In “The Other Way Around: The Modernist Movement in Brazil”, Daniela Sandler offers an account of Brazilian modernism not as an outcome of modernity, but as its harbinger. Canonical narratives consider industrialization as prerequisite for modern construction, modernity as the cultural context for modern forms, and urbanization as the setting for modern typologies. Sandler argues that these criteria would exclude much of the twentieth-century output of Latin American countries. Her analysis concentrates on the ambivalences and contradictories surrounding two important markers of Brazilian modernism: Gregori Warchavchik’s own house on Rua Santa Cruz in São Paulo (1927), known as Modernist House (Casa Modernista), and Lina Bo Bardi’s Museum of Art of
- 29. 12 Duanfang Lu São Paulo, known for its acronym, MASP (1958–68). Sandler argues that the usual transplanted perspective of Warchavchik and Bo Bardi was neither inau- thentic nor inappropriate. The adjustments the designers of the two projects made in the specific context of Brazil might at times seem to veer away from the canon or to result in “failures.” Yet they were nonetheless quintessentially modernist, because the adaptations they made were precisely part of the dynamic and constantly dislocated quality of modernism itself. In “Depoliticizing Group GAMMA,” Aziza Chaouni observes a disjunc- ture in the existing studies of the modernist movement in Morocco between CIAM’s ideas and practices before independence and local reinterpretations of modernism’s precepts after independence. Her chapter concentrates instead on the continuity in the development of modernist architecture in Morocco by looking into the work of a group of young Moroccan and French architects from the 1950s to the early 1970s. Group Gamma, a Moroccan CIAM branch, was established in 1953, which promulgated a modernist architecture in line with Corbusian precepts, yet aspiring to be more in touch with the specificities of the local context, climate, and human habits. Group Gamma formed its architectural ideas under French rule, and put them into practice in its numerous public commissions for the Moroccan state after independence. Group Gamma’s contested modernism was not merely a product of national identity assertion or of a will to rupture with the colonial past, Chaouni argues, but rather a result of a local legacy of contest initiated by architectural experimentations. In “Agrupación Espacio and the CIAM Peru Group,” Sharif Kahatt investigates transfer and transformation that occurred in modernist architecture from the European avant-garde, American modernism, to the creation of a hybrid architectural culture in Latin America. He shows that on the one hand, there were many European and American initiatives to spread modern design in Latin America. On the other hand, there was great interest from local architects who made a great effort to adopt, transform, and deploy imported forms and tech- niques. Led by Luis Miró Quesada, the Lima-based intellectual movement Agrupación Espacio played an important role in this. Kahatt examines the relation- ship between Agrupación Espacio and postwar CIAM by comparing the theories and practices the two adopted in their search for the modern city. Although canonical Latin American architectural historiography assumes that Espacio was CIAM’s “franchise” in Lima, Kahatt’s findings demonstrate that the relationship between these two groups was far more complex. The Peruvian Modern Project led by Espacio turned out to be a product of cultural hybridization rather than a direct borrowing of Western forms. Modernism as nationalism The concept of nationalism is a modern invention, associated with processes of modernization such as urbanization, the development of industrial capitalism, and the push for popular sovereignty that came with the French Revolution and the
- 30. 13 Introduction American Revolution in the late eighteenth century. Europe was radically recon- structed according to the concept after the First World War and the breakup of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The European ideologies of self-determina- tion anticipated the nationalist movements in Africa and Asia, where most coun- tries gained political independence following the Second World War. As many have observed, the nationalism that drove the independence movement was not the same as the post-independence one.42 The national unity formed against an alien force before independence was replaced with the need to cultivate and consolidate national identity in face of multiple contending groups from within. Carefully manipulated built forms played a significant role in promoting a corre- sponding identity in terms of national culture.43 It is rather ironic that modernist architecture, disseminated in the name of “International,” was employed in many Third World countries – Turkey, Brazil, Morocco, Ghana, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Singapore, among others – to represent nationhood, which was generally conceptualized as being rooted in remote antiquity and grounded in cultural uniqueness. A careful dissection reveals that the mechanisms behind this are multi-layered. First, in the context of Third World developmentalism, modernity became the nation’s new identity: something that informed the nation’s new sense of self and directed a people’s imagination.44 What follows is that modernism, the symbol of moder- nity, became a preferred means to project national identity and bring international recognition. Grandiose modernist buildings served as visible representations of a developing nation’s capacity to equal the developed nation on its own terms. Second, stylistic differentiation served as an important strategy in the art of iden- tity making. Despite multiple intersections between modernism and colonialism, the architectural culture of the time managed to establish sufficient distance between modernism and the system of architectural representation under colo- nialism. While architectural classicism was considered authoritative and culturally specific, modernism was welcomed in young nations as a new technology free of the ties of the past and suitable for widespread adoption. Third, it was essen- tial for the postcolonial state to impose a national homogeneity upon a multitude of groups with divergent interests and cultural claims. Very often, the choice of symbols of a specific ethnic group to communicate a unifying national identity aggravated ethnic cleavages. In contrast, the use of modernism, which appeared neutral and universal, could help to reduce social, cultural, political, and religious tensions. A reading of the making of Chandigarh in India illustrates multiple issues involved in modernism as nationalism in a specific Third World context. The building of Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab, took place against the background in which the state was partitioned and lost its capital to Pakistan; many people lost their lives during this process due to religious violence. In Chapter 11 of this volume, Vikrama ˉditya Praka ˉsh argues that apart from symbol- izing both modernization and a new beginning, the adoption of modernism for the design of Chandigarh demonstrated the determination of the Nehruvian
- 31. 14 Duanfang Lu regime to wrap the Indian constitution with an explicitly secular code. Being a modernist rather than a “Sikh” or “Hindu” city, Chandigarh served as a visible negation of former colonizers’ historicist reading of the colonial subjects as reli- gious subjects who were not yet ready to be modern citizens. Here, the constructed non-identitarian quality of modernism was strategically motivated to create a national identity that was modern, secular, and unfettered by colonial historicism. The rejection of New Delhi as the prerequisite of the architectural style of Chandigarh can be understood as the newly independent nation-state’s rejection of Eurocentrism. Chandigarh’s modern architecture, Prakash suggests, should be viewed as the adoption of a non-Western, or non-Eurocentric, modernism. Despite the alleged objectives, the making of Chandigarh, however, was not without its own problems. The grand scale of Chandigarh in many ways echoed that of New Delhi. Despite stylistic differences, both featured large-scale administrative buildings and oversized public spaces, which served the purposes of a search for legitimacy and a demonstration of state power. As Mark Crison observes, compared with the monumental symmetry of New Delhi, the plan of Chandigarh sought to tease off the central axis, “as if the spatial symbolism of democratic power in relation to executive power was being reconfigured rather than reconceived.”45 Like Brasilia, no design attention was paid to the place of unskilled manual workers in the city. As a result, squatters’ settlements grew after the completion of the project.46 The making of Chandigarh hence exemplified a pitfall of modernism as nationalism shared by many post-inde- pendent cities: the construction of a national identity through the modern façade concealed the pressing problems of underdevelopment. There were other tensions surrounding modernism as nationalism; the uneasy relationship between tradition and modernity remains the most striking one. Under colonialism, tradition was mobilized by some nationalists to form a collective denial of colonial modernity, while for others the relation between tradition and modernity did not have to be oppositional – indeed the non-dialogic relation between the two might well be part of colonizers’ strate- gies of differentiation and separation.47 After independence, tradition assumed a new role in cultivating national cultures through a process of what Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have described as “the invention of tradition”: modern nations generally appeared so natural as to require no justification, but in fact they were recent constructs resting on novel practices of manipulating histor- ical consciousness.48 As such, there were attempts to develop a national archi- tecture based on the mixing of modernism and historic precedents even in countries where modernism had become dominant, which were not always successful.49 As Lawrence Vale points out, the cultural richness negated by modernism was sometimes resurrected in cartoon form, reducing architecture to “a three-dimensional, government sanctioned billboard advertising selected aspects of indigenous culture.”50 Still others sought to restore tradition via a discourse of authenticity. National museums were exemplary institutions in such
- 32. 15 Introduction exercises, whose displays meant to transcend the young nation’s divisions and its recent colonial past so as to present a common past and incite aspirations to nationhood.51 According to Ananya Roy, the two moments – the consolidation of modernism through the taming of tradition, and the revival of tradition on the ashes of the modern – are “both part of the same grand narrative of geopolitical order and discursive legitimacy.”52 They both assume a rigidly dualistic narrative that marks the traditional off from the modern, which was inherited from colonial historicism and remains a primary dilemma of Third World modernism even today. The use of modernism in designing major national buildings such as museums and parliament buildings has been addressed by many studies. The three chapters in Part II of this volume explore the role of modernist architecture in search of national identity by looking at three other important building types (the university campus, the exhibition complex, and the residential building). Educational architecture represented a significant segment of post-independent nation building in Africa. Gitler’s chapter investigates the design and construction of Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) campus in Ile-Ife, one of the most important national commissions that followed Nigeria’s independence. Designed by Israeli architect Arieh Sharon in collaboration with his son, and often cited as a master- piece of the Modern style in African architecture, the complex displayed an inter- pretation of national style that contested both mandatory and colonial rule. The strategy was to express a specific ethnic identity, the Yoruba, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups, through a formalistic approach. To be sure, the search for a cultural language combining modernism with African visual heritage was not unique to Sharon and Sharon during this period. Developed from the discourse of Africanism and negritude, this approach to Modernism has been an important part of cultural production in Africa since the 1950s. Sharon and Sharon’s architecture, however, integrated locality in an unambiguous manner, which was rarely seen in large-scale civic commissions at the time. Post-independence exhibitions in Colombo can be viewed as micro- environments for the playing out of Asia’s cold war political alliances, and reflect a marked departure from the colonial tradition of international expositions. In her chapter “Modernity and Revolution: The Architecture of Ceylon’s Twentieth- Century Exhibitions,” Anoma Pieris looks at Ceylon/Sri Lanka as a significant microcosm of the broader processes that were shaping the Third World. In the early 1950s, adopting anti-colonial nationalism, Ceylon moved from postwar domi- nation by a neo-colonial Commonwealth to socialist republicanism. In the years that followed, Ceylon attempted to maintain its independence through non-align- ment despite competing foreign interventions upon her. Using the Colombo Plan exhibition of 1952, Ceylon 65, and the Gam Udawa (Village Re-awakening) exhibi- tions as important registers of national culture and its revolutionary socio-political transformation, the chapter maps the social production of twentieth-century exhi- bitions in Ceylon. Pieris situates modernism and its humanist ideals within the wider socio-political framework which highlighted the emergence of the Third World as a category. The exhibitions she described span several aesthetic
- 33. 16 Duanfang Lu moments in the self-fashioning of the nation-state, providing insights into a specific nationalistic vision that was later terminated by liberalization. The subsequent depoliticization and commodification of aesthetic trends, she argues, signaled the social relevance of that earlier modernity practiced and produced at the margins. In “This is Not an American House: Good Sense Modernism in 1950s Turkey,” Elâ Kaçel questions historical narratives of postwar modernism that take for granted the “Americanization of modernism” in Third World countries without contextualizing the International Style within local discourses of architecture. Drawing upon Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between common sense and good sense, Kaçel suggests that modernism is concomitant with real processes of modernization through which ideologies are turned into common sense, that is, things that are uncritical, passive, and unconscious. In Turkey, the so-called “International Style” was propagated under the postwar sponsorship of the United States as modern culture in the 1950s. The term “Hiltonculuk” was soon coined by the architect and critic Şevki Vanlı to describe a fad among prominent Turkish architects who uncritically modeled their buildings after the Istanbul Hilton Hotel (1952–5). Built at the peak of “Hiltonculuk,” the vacation house that architect Maruf Önal designed for his family in Bayramoǧlu, however, did not fit under the categories either of a formulaic Americanism or of a “perfect medioc- rity.” Through a detailed analysis of Önal’s house, Vanlı’s critique, and the context in which they were situated, Kaçel illustrates how “ordinary” architects employed the relational knowledge networks into which they were embedded to critique popular clichés of postwar modernism and endowed their own architectural prac- tice with a new sense of identity. Modernism as postcolonialism Independence did not mark the sudden disappearance of colonial influence. Instead, the steady progression of decolonialization gradually turned the formerly polarized relation between the metropolis and colonies into a more complicated and ambiguous relationship in various arenas. Despite the residual effects of colonialism, there were more spaces for connectivity, reciprocity, and entangle- ment in the name of development assistance, commercial exchange, knowledge and technology transfer, overseas aid, partnership, and collaboration. How did modernism intersect with this new postcolonial condition? Following James Clifford’s seminal pairing of “roots and routes,” which conceptualizes the borders between fixity and mobility as porous and subject to crossings from both sides,53 I suggest that we need to look at criss- cross paths, flows, and networks that connect multiple platforms as important arenas for the diffusion and development of modernist architecture in the post- colonial context. Despite a flourishing vocabulary of mobility and hybridity in the past two decades,54 global links, flows, entanglements, and networks are still treated as marginalized categories filling in the interstices between bounded territorial units. National or local architectural histories are presented as co-existing
- 34. 17 Introduction but disconnected variations, which has presented difficulties for studies of issues such as the transnational development of design discourses. Much of postcolo- nial scholarship is still preoccupied with a dichotomy that “defines the colonized as always engaged in conscious work against the core.”55 Part III of this volume attempts to go beyond both nation-based historiography and the clear-cut core– periphery model to view connection, dispersion, entanglement, and mobility as an important dimension of Third World modernism. Certainly, the continuing presence of global unevenness means that the positions of different parties in these transactions were not necessarily equal.56 As a result, heterogeneous and peculiar moments and results were generated. The development of modern tropical architecture exemplifies some of such postcolonial moments in the history of Third World modernism. In colonial discourse the term “Tropics” was often used to refer to “colonies,” as if the latter could be defined as a homogenous climatic zone.57 Developed by Otto Koenisgberger, Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, Fello Atkinson and others in the postwar era, modern tropical architecture is regarded as an adaptation of modernist design principles for a distinctive (hot and humid) climatic condi- tion by incorporating passive solar design and ventilation systems, and vernacular building elements such as verandas, louvered windows, and perfo- rated walls. The Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London initiated a diploma in tropical architecture in 1954, and the University of Melbourne established a similar program in 1962. The institutionalization of tropical architecture allowed former colonial powers to maintain their influ- ence in former colonies, on the one hand, and helped train the early genera- tion of Third World architects, on the other.58 In recent decades, with the booming of the tourist industry, neo-tropical architecture has been devel- oped in various parts of the developing world to create exotic and pictur- esque resort hotels for Western tourists. This new landscape, with locals as labour and Westerners as consumers, tends to reproduce social and class relations under colonialism.59 Despite its rich cultural meanings, tropical architecture is still considered a neutral and technical development in much of architectural discourse. Chapters 9 and 10 re-examine the early evolution of tropical archi- tecture as a social phenomenon. Jiat-Hwee Chang’s chapter investigates the under-studied technoscientific dimensions of the circulation and transformation of modernism. There has been little critical scholarship on modernism in relation to the institutionalization of building science in the mid-twentieth century, and the attendant establishment of research stations, changes in architectural education, and the technicalization of architectural knowledge and practice. Chang’s chapter fills the gap by examining the work of the Tropical Building Section of the Building Research Station in Britain and a network of similar research stations working on tropical building problems in the British Empire/Commonwealth during the mid- twentieth century. Drawing on the interdisciplinary scholarship in postcolonial science studies and post-development studies, he reveals the production of
- 35. 18 Duanfang Lu technoscientific knowledge on tropical architecture by these building research stations as a Foucauldian power-knowledge regime, which was inextricably bound up with the politics of decolonization. Chang argues that the technoscien- tific knowledge, as produced and articulated in the name of welfare and moderni- zation, should be considered as a new form of expertise that served to ensure Britain’s ongoing politico-economic relevance in the tropics after formal decolonization. Vandana Baweja’s chapter challenges the binary categories such as center/periphery embedded in the recent histories of tropical architecture. She starts with the career trajectory of Otto Koenigsberger (1908–99), who is best known for his contribution to climatic responsive design. Baweja then contrasts Koenigsberger’s practices with those of Peter and Alison Smithson, who focused on the temporality of the climate and its relationship with architecture at the level of the building form. The chapter ends with a discussion of the shifting discourse of tropical architecture as sustainable design. While canonical architectural histo- ries treat tropical architecture as a commodity exported from the metropolis to the tropics, Baweja’s chapter tells a different story. In the process of imposing architectural knowledge to the tropical Third World, Baweja argues, architects unwittingly developed a body of knowledge that later constituted the intellectual foundation for the discourse of tropical architecture at the AA and was eventually subsumed into the contemporary discourse of sustainable architecture. In the chapter “Modernity Transfers: The MoMA and Postcolonial India,” Farhan Sirajul Karim observes that India’s post-independence practice of domesticity experienced a multi-directional turn. Albeit celebrating a model of affluence, India was experiencing a resurgence that explicitly challenged the indulgence of domesticity and the exuberance of material fetish, a portion of the history of domesticity that had long been veiled by the dominant discursive prac- tice of Western modernity. The ambivalence and tension that emerged from the exchanging of modernity between India and the West are studied through two exhibitions that were organized by MoMA during the 1950s: one about India mounted in New York and titled “Textile and Ornamental Arts of India” and the other about the West, mounted in India and titled “Design Today in Europe and America.” On the one hand, the promotion of modernity of affluence by America sought to demonstrate a fantastic view of future domesticity before an Indian audience. On the other hand, India sought to promote itself as a model of a non- industrial material world. Based on rich first-hand archival material, Karim shows that in a bid to forge a true hybrid of ascetic modernity, Pierre Jeanneret sought to reconcile these two streams by synthesizing the modernist trope of machine- made, luxurious consumer goods with the asceticism of a Gandhian material culture. Finally, Vikrama ˉditya Praka ˉsh’s Epilogue reflects upon the necessity of creating a new framework for understanding modernism as a global construct, in parallel with the discussion of “cosmopolitan modernism” prevalent in art history currently. He calls for the move towards a horizon where “the asymmetries in
- 36. 19 Introduction the postcolonial reading of modernism can be productively drawn into dialogue with the more disciplinary reading of modernism as the negotiation between the universal and the particular.” Spaces of hope60 During a visit to the United States in 1943, Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong noted the differences between China, where contemporary life was engulfed in the thick layers of the accumulated past, and America, where people were future- oriented but nonetheless dominated by an alienating order.61 Ghosts, in Fei’s vision, represented the presence of the specter of the past that continuously haunted the present and made up the very core of being Chinese: “Life in its creativity … melds past, present, and future into one inextinguishable, multilay- ered scene, a three-dimensional body. This is what ghosts are.”62 In contrast, living in brightly lit American rooms, Fei wrote, “gives you a false sense of confidence that this is all of the world, that there is no more reality than what appears clearly and brightly before your eyes.”63 This volume sets out to complicate a picture of Third World modernism in the mid-twentieth century oversimplified by the smooth transfers assumed by the official history of modern architecture. Despite the “false sense of confi- dence” in the universality, rationality, and homogeneity of the modern given by dominant discourses, the chapters of this volume reveal in modernism the constant wrestling with “ghosts” of all sorts that have been there from the very beginning and will not go away. They show that, wrestling with the differences in historical, social, cultural, political, and economic conditions, modernism took heterogeneous trajectories in Third World nations. They also show that these trajectories were radically different from those of developed nations during the same historical period. With the rise of consumption-orientated society and the development of the welfare state amid postwar prosperity, the field of architecture in the West appeared to be coming apart in the mid-twentieth century. Practitioners pursued their idiosyncratic interests in the face of uncertainty over modernity, generating a diverse body of work which Sarah Goldhagen and Réjean Legault have aptly described as “anxious modernisms.”64 While practitioners of interwar modernism were obsessed with the utopian goals of transforming society through revolu- tionary architecture, postwar architects adapted their design vocabularies to the new social and cultural conditions of commercial society.65 In contrast, during the same period of time, Third World architects focused on the explorations of modernism as a means of development, nation building, and identity making. The spread of modernist architecture in developing nations was characterized by a global diffusion of modernist design knowledge and construction techniques, continuing Western expansionist practices, new forms of collaboration and soli- darity, quests for national and cultural identity, large-scale developmental projects, and above all, spaces of hope.
- 37. 20 Duanfang Lu Today, to quote Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the wholly “modernized” earth “radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant.”66 Like never before, modern architecture has reached every corner of the planet. Designers are mass produced based on more or less similar curriculums. Jet travel and new information technology allow architects to design projects at distance with ease.67 “Starchitects” are driven to produce the same theatrical effect everywhere instead of attending to the unique differences of each site. A new level of abstraction is achieved as people, places, and local knowledges are effectively bypassed by globalized processes of architectural production. Even in poorer urban areas and remote rural regions, people choose to build modern style buildings in concrete instead of adopting more sustainable local forms and materials (Figures 2, 3). As a result, indigenous building knowledges and technol- ogies have been disappearing rapidly in many places. The spread of modern architecture (and the lifestyles associated with it), not unlike the spread of chemical pesticides, has produced destructive ecological effects and reduced cultural diversity. It is reported that buildings now account for forty percent of total energy consumption in developed countries. There is an urgent need to correct the tendency of spatial homogenization, which has become fiercer under the spread of a globalized consumer culture in our time. It is against this context that I would like to sketch out the beginnings of a new framework for the study of Third World modernism based on a radical transformative imagining of epistemological diversity in architectural production. As recent postcolonial scholarship has made clear, no chapter in Western moder- nity is complete unless it includes the history of the epistemological violence that European colonial power did to other peoples. During the course of constructing the contemporaneity of other cultures as the primordial prehistory of the domi- nant self, the West dwarfed other knowledges as irrational narratives that should be exorcised for lack of epistemological validity.68 With this calculated refusal, the way was paved for the spread of the sovereignty of Western knowledge throughout the world, which has enduring consequences long after the end of colonialism. On the one hand, other regional intellectual traditions, “once unbroken and alive,” are treated as purely matters of historical research devoid of any theoretical lineage.69 On the other hand, the very regionality of Western thought is masqueraded as uncontestable universalism, whose cognitive formula assumes a central role even in places where realities are completely out of sync with happenings in the metropolis.70 One of the violent effects of the denial of other knowledges has been the establishment of a false historical dichotomy – “Western knowledge” vis-à-vis “native experience” – in social sciences (most notably in anthropology and area studies), which assumes any epistemic cate- gory that makes sense of the latter as belonging to the former. This cognitive inclination is still well with us despite epistemological sophistication brought about by recent theoretical constructs.71 The global sovereignty of architectural modernism and the suppres- sion of other architectural knowledges have had destructive consequences for
- 38. 21 Introduction the built environment across the world. The past five decades witnessed waves of debates that sought to address the ubiquitous problem of placelessness, with the idea of critical regionalism developed by Kenneth Frampton and others being one of the most influential academic propositions since the 1980s.72 Systematic assessments of critical regionalism have been made elsewhere.73 My polemic Figure 2 Modern urban housing in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photograph taken by the author, 2006. Figure 3 Local rammed earth buildings have been increasingly replaced by concrete and brick ones in Kanshi, China. Photograph taken by the author, 2005.
- 39. 22 Duanfang Lu here is to use critical regionalism as an example to highlight a fundamental failure of contemporary architectural discourse in responding to the reality of other knowledges. In the words of Frampton, “[t]he fundamental strategy of Critical Regionalism is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place [emphasis as in the original].”74 To achieve this, Frampton suggests taking inspiration from local spec- ifications such as the light condition, topography, climate, place-form, and so on, with the tectonic and tactile dimensions stressed. John Utzon’s Bagsvaerd Church is cited as an example “whose complex meaning stems directly from a revealed conjunction between, on the one hand, the rationality of normative tech- nique and, on the other, the arationality of idiosyncratic form [emphasis as in the original].”75 Frampton’s prescriptions are certainly helpful in moving beyond post- modernism’s nihilistic play of signs for consumption and to pursue a more sincere and sensitive architecture. My concern has been that the operation of critical regionalism preempts the possibilities of local architectural knowledges, as if the latter do not exist at all. While Frampton is highly critical of the tabula rasa tendency of modernist design, the local is treated here as an epistemological “tabula rasa”, which can at best provide some “arational” idiosyncrasies for metropolitan architectural virtuosity. The drama of critical regionalism can only be played out with reference to “universal modernism,” which is presumed to be the only genuine knowledge emanating from rationality. This scenario, however, is utterly ironic when we consider that the majority of people on Earth still live in varied types of sophisticated “regional architecture” designed and constructed by local builders who do not have access to “normative” modernist building knowledge and techniques. For them, so-called “universal modernism” is merely another regional reality. Yet in critical regionalism as articulated by Frampton, the inherited regional culture is posited as a necessary object for destruction, rather than living knowledge with the same epistemological significance as “universal civilization” – read here as Western “scientific, technical, and political rationality.” As such, one must seek an alien knowledge to defamiliarize with and destruct the regional culture in order to sustain a critique of universal civilization. Here, critical region- alism falls well within the jurisdiction of Eurocentric epistemology: other cultures are construed as unregenerate irrationality waiting to be expelled, although part of them may be dissected and then reassembled only to revitalize the fading spirit of Western rationality. By eschewing the possibilities of other knowledges altogether and projecting modernism’s anxiety with its inner crisis onto other locales, critical regionalism’s cultivation of regional cultures turns out to be another operation to sustain modernism’s schizophrenic obsession with itself. Could the rich regional building traditions not merely be raw material for metropolitan maneuvers but living knowledges with their own epistemolog- ical claims in architectural production? Is it possible to launch a critique of modernism that acknowledges the contemporaneity of multiple epistemic
- 40. 23 Introduction spaces? And could different knowledges be contested and updated not just with reference to Western thoughts and forms but with historical reference to one another? My study on the aftermath of the people’s commune movement in China (1958–60) points to such possibilities.76 During the commune movement, concurrent with sweeping institutional changes, architects boldly experimented with modernist design in rural China, but their proposals rarely progressed from paper. The failure of the commune plan problematized the issue of modernist architecture. As the country was short of steel and concrete, and little state funding was available for rural construction, designers recognized the importance of combining both modern and traditional methods. There arose a new need for collective self-understanding and other knowledges besides those of the West. Hence, 1963 saw a sudden expansion of knowledge of traditional built forms in different parts of the country. Surveys of vernacular architecture were conducted and published, and efforts were taken to integrate local building conventions with modern design. Meanwhile, the influential Architectural Journal (Jianzhu xuebao) started to provide extensive coverage of architecture in Third World countries. The 1963 issues covered architecture in Indonesia, Cambodia, Burma, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Albania, while the 1964 issues added Egypt, Mexico, Ghana, Guinea, and Syria to the list. Unlike typical Western representations, Chinese authors focused on modern developments in architecture rather than the traditional forms of these nations. They paid particular attention to how designers adapted buildings to local social, geographical, climatic, and cultural conditions. In a 1963 report on Cuban architecture, for instance, innovative roof systems for industrial structures and well planned residential districts in Havana were extolled.77 Through these discursive parameters, the architectural practices of other developing countries were linked with those of China, creating a world of synchronic temporality and shared spatiality. As these coeval knowledges fuelled new imaginings of modern Chinese architecture, the early 1960s saw a flourish of design projects with a strong local flavor. The new orientation destabilized the previous discursive framing of “Western modernist architecture,” which became a subject of intellectual contention. This conceptual twist was reflected by Wu Huanjia, who commented on the “ten greatest buildings in the 1960s” selected by the American journal The Architectural Forum.78 Wu found the work of “master architects” (including Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, and Eero Saarinen, among others) “chaotic,” “ugly,” and “sick.” Saarinen’s expressionist TWA Flight Centre, for example, was denounced for the lavish abuse of technology for purely visual concerns. These comments were certainly made under specific historical and political circumstances, but they help to illustrate the matter of fact that there is an “exterior” to an allegedly “universal modernism,” where it may be challenged or even deemed irrelevant. It is from this discursive space that we can start to confront the regionality and finitude of modernism on the basis of other experi- ences. From the above example, we see that the crisis of modernist architecture
- 41. 24 Duanfang Lu in China in the early 1960s differed greatly from its crisis in the West during the same period. Chinese architects were forced to face the historically constituted condition of scarcity after the failure of commune design; it was from this vantage point that they posited modernism among other knowledges and developed a new vision of Chinese architecture. The rich regional building traditions revealed through this example are not “ghosts” of the past to be disenchanted, but knowl- edges that continue to build upon the present. My position here is both similar and dissimilar to that of Dipesh Chakrabarty in his book Provincializing Europe.79 Non-European peoples were considered not yet ready to rule themselves under colonialism.80 Chakrabarty argues that the contemporary historicist framework commits the same error by considering the persisting world of peasants, which involves “gods, spirits, and supernatural agents as actors alongside humans,” an anachronism in Indian polit- ical modernity.81 He sets out to dismantle the linear notion of time by reconcep- tualizing the present as “constantly fragmentary” with diverse ways of being-in-the-world. Like Chakrabarty, I stress the contemporaneity and synchro- nicity of multiple life worlds. Yet unlike Chakrabarty, who focuses on reinstituting a coevalness of irrationalities such as “gods, spirits, and other supernatural beings” with political modernity in India, I seek to build on the coevalness of different rationalities and knowledges. Chakrabarty is correct in his claim that it is better to see reason as “one among many ways of being in the world,” but his designation of the native life world as a phenomenological immediacy fraught with blind faith and superstition tends to repeat the false historical dichotomy between an inherited domain comprised of native religions and customs, and a colonized domain comprised of Western political economy and science. Yet in reality, even Western modernity has never been completely disenchanted – a powerful Christian religion, for example, is always coeval with capitalist moder- nity in countries such as the United States. My contention is that a large part of native life worlds, like the Western ones, are constituted by rationalities and knowledges developed and accumu- lated over time, despite the divine or super-human presences in them. The rich and sophisticated regional building traditions across the world are the testimony. Yet our modern architectural discourse and educational system have effectively delegitimized these other knowledges. With the very regionality of modern Western forms disguised as authentic universalism, modernist design is defined as the only “valid” knowledge taught in design studios everywhere. Other regional building traditions are either ignored or reduced to material for stylistic borrowings or historical research, devoid of any potential as resources for thinking about the present. As long as Western-centric epistemological assumptions remain dominant and other knowledges are considered residual, we are still very much in the shadow of Sir Banister Fletcher’s “Tree of Architecture.”82 I argue that the recognition of other modernities has to be posited at the level of epistemology in order to imagine an open globality based not on asymmetry and dominance but on connectivity and dialogue on an equal basis. It
- 42. 25 Introduction is important to recognize not only the histories of different modernities, but also the legitimacies of different knowledges. Unless other modernities are recog- nized as legitimate spaces of knowledge production, the march toward social homogeneity and environmental destruction will remain unchecked. It is time to enfranchise other spatial rationalities and architectural knowledges to create a more sustainable, just, and culturally and ecologically rich world. And it is time to open our architectural education to a multi-logical program that encourages mutual persuasions amongst different understandings of dwelling and building. Notes 1 See, for example, James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Jon Lang, Madhavi Desai, and Miki Desai, Architecture and Independence: The Search for Identity – India 1880 to 1980 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Edward R. Burian (ed.), Modernity and the Architecture of Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); Valerie Fraser, Building the New World: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America, 1930–1960 (New York: Verso, 2000); Sibel Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); Zou Denong Zhongguo xiandai jianzhu shi [Modern Chinese Architectural History] (Tianjin: Tianjin kexue jishu chubanshe, 2001); Vikrama ˉditya Praka ˉsh, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); Peter G. Rowe and Seng Kuan, Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002); Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (London: Ashgate, 2003); Elisabetta Andreoli and Adrian Forty (eds), Brazil’s Modern Architecture (London: Phaidon, 2004); Duanfang Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space, 1949–2005 (London: Routledge, 2006); Sandy Isenstadt and Kishwar Rizvi (eds), Modern Architecture and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); Richard J. Williams, Brazil: Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion Books, 2009); Zhu Jianfei, Architecture of Modern China: A Historical Critique (London: Routledge, 2009). 2 Alfred Sauvy coined the expression (“tiers monde” in French) in 1952 by analogy with the “third estate,” the commoners of France, as opposed to priests and nobles. The term was used at the 1955 Bandung conference of Afro-Asian countries. For a lucid analysis of the emergence of Third Worldism, see Gerard Chaliand, Revolution in the Third World: Myths and Prospects (New York: Viking, 1977). 3 Elbaki Hermassi, The Third World Reassessed (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1980). 4 Allen H. Merriam, “What Does ‘Third World’ Mean?” in Jim Norwine and Alfonso Gonzalez, The Third World: States of Mind and Being (Winchester, Massachusetts: Unwin Hyman, Inc., 1988), pp. 15–22. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 One of the significant exceptions has been Mark Crinson’s Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (London: Ashgate, 2003), which covers several geographical areas to present a broad picture of architecture’s relation to the end of imperialism. 8 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1997 [1982]). 9 Jurgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique 22 (1981), pp. 3–14.
- 43. 26 Duanfang Lu 10 Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). 11 Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999); Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, tr. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1970). 12 Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1965), p. 19. 13 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, tr. Frederick Etchells (London: John Rodker, 1927); Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York: Norton, 1932); Siegfried Gidion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1941); Nikolaus Pevsner, The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design (New York: Praeger, 1968); Leonardo Benevolo, History of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971). 14 Hitchcock and Johnson, The International Style. 15 Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture. 16 Karin Kirsch, The Weissenhofsiedlung: Experimental Housing Built for the Deutscher Werkbund, Stuttgart, 1927 (New York: Rizzoli, 1989). 17 Paul Overy, “White Walls, White Skins: Cosmopolitanism and Colonialism in Inter-war Modernist Architecture,” in Kobena Mercer (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernisms (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2005), pp. 50–67. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., p. 56. 20 Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire. 21 Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (London: Routledge, 1990); Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Nezar AlSayyad (ed.), Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992); Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1992); Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule, Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1997); Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (London: Routledge, 2005); Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities and Italian Imperialism (New York: Routledge, 2007); Peter Scriver and Vikrama ˉditya Praka ˉsh, Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (London: Routledge, 2007). 22 Jeffery W. Cody, Exporting American Architecture, 1870–2000 (London: Routledge, 2003). 23 Duanfang Lu, “Exporting Chinese Modernism: Reading the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall, Colombo, Sri Lanka,” paper presented at the Chinese Studies of Australian Association Biennial Conference at the University of Sydney, 7–9 July 2009 (Sydney, Australia); Duanfang Lu, Unsettled Modernism [Weiding de xiandaizhuyi] (published in both English and Chinese) (Beijing: China Architecture & Building Press, forthcoming). 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 8. 28 Duanfang Lu, “Third World Modernism: Modernity, Utopia and the People’s Commune in China,” Journal of Architectural Education, 60, 3 (2007), pp. 40–8. 29 Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building. 30 Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2004). 31 Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form, Chapter 1.
- 44. 27 Introduction 32 Belinda Yuen, “Romancing the high rise,” Cities 22, 1 (2005), pp. 3-13. 33 Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building. 34 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 35 Lu, “Third World Modernism.” 36 R. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (London: Philip Allan, 1990), p. 8. 37 Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building. 38 E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (Merlin Press: London, 1977), p. 791. 39 Cody, Exporting American Architecture; Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001); Jane C. Loeffler, The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998). 40 Wharton, Building the Cold War. 41 Arturo Escobar, “Imagining a Post-Development Era? Critical Thought, Development and Social Movements,” Social Text, 31–2 (1992), p. 25. 42 Lawrence J. Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 43 Ibid. 44 Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form, pp. 6–7. 45 Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire, p. 13. 46 Ibid., p. 14. 47 AlSayyad, Forms of Dominance; Nezar AlSayyad (ed.), End of Tradition? (New York: Routledge, 2004). 48 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 49 Duanfang Lu, “Architecture and Global Imaginations in China’, Journal of Architecture 12, 2 (2007), pp. 123-45. Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire, Chapter 7. 50 Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity, p. 54. 51 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 2006), Chapter 10. 52 Ananya Roy, “Nostalgias of the Modern,” in AlSayyad, End of Tradition?, pp. 63–86. 53 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997). 54 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Duanfang Lu, “The Changing Landscape of Hybridity: A Reading of Ethnic Identity and Urban Form in Late-Twentieth-Century Vancouver,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, 11, 2 (2000), pp. 19–28; Nezar AlSayyad, Hybrid Urbanism: On the Identity Discourse and the Built Environment (Westport, CO: Praeger, 2001); Stephen Cairns (ed.) Drifting: Architecture and Migrancy (London: Routledge, 2004). 55 Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 15. 56 Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2007). 57 Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire, Chapter 6. 58 Lai Chee Kien, “Tropical Tropes: The Architectural Politics of Building in Hot and Humid Climates,” unpublished paper presented at the 8th IASTE International Conference, Hong Kong, 12-15 December 2002; cited in Anoma Pieris, “Is Sustainability Sustainable? Interrogating the Tropical Paradigm in Asian Architecture,” in Joo-Hwa Bay and Boon Lay Ong (eds.) Tropical Sustainable Architecture: Social and Environmental Dimensions (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2006), pp. 267-86. 59 Anoma Pieris, “Is Sustainability Sustainable? Interrogating the Tropical Paradigm in Asian Architecture,” p. 279.
- 45. 28 Duanfang Lu 60 The argument of this section is further articulated in my forthcoming chapter “Entangled Modernities in Architecture” in Greg Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen (eds.), Architectural Theory Handbook (London: Sage). 61 R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee (eds and tr.), Land without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 174–81. 62 Ibid., p. 178. 63 Ibid., p. 181. 64 Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (eds), Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2000). 65 Ibid., p. 11. 66 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr; trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002 [1947]). 67 Donald McNeil, The Global Architect: Firms, Fame and Urban Form (New York: Routledge, 2009). 68 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978). 69 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 5. 70 Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, “Postmodernism and the Rest of the World,” in Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (eds), The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 37–70. 71 Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (New York: Routledge, 2005). 72 Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, “The Grid and the Pathway,” Architecture in Greece 15 (1981), pp. 164–78; William J. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900 (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1982); Kenneth Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” Perspecta 20 (1983), pp. 147–62; Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd edn (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992 [1980]); Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: The New Press, 1998 [1983]), pp. 17–34; Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre and Bruno Stagno (eds) Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization (Chichester: C. Fonds, 2001). 73 Alan Colquhoun, “The Concept of Regionalism,” in Gülsüm Baydar Nal-bantoglu and Wong Chong Thai (eds), Postcolonial Space(s) (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), pp. 13–23; Keith L. Eggener, “Placing Resistance: a Critique of Critical Regionalism,” Journal of Architectural Education 55, 4 (2002), pp. 228–37; Gevork Hartoonian, “Critical Regionalism Reloaded,” Fabrications 16, 2(2006), pp. 123–9. 74 Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism,” p. 23. 75 Ibid., p. 25. 76 Lu, “Third World Modernism.” 77 Liu Yunhe, “Guba jianzhu” [Cuban Architecture], Jianzhu xuebao [Architectural Journal] 9 (1963), pp. 20–7. 78 Wu Huanjia, “Ping xifang shizuo jianzhu” [A Review of Ten Buildings in the West], Jianzhu xuebao [Architectural Journal] 6 (1964), pp. 29–33. 79 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. 80 Ibid., p. 8. 81 Ibid., p. 11. 82 The “evolutionary tree” in Sir Banister Fletcher’s famous frontispiece to A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method (London: B. T. Batsford, 1897) depicts the evolution of Western architecture as dynamic and historical while considering the architecture of other cultures non-historical and having no impact upon the “History of Architecture”.
- 46. 29 Part I The will of the age
- 47. 30
- 48. 31 Chapter 2 The Other Way Around: the modernist movement in Brazil Daniela Sandler The study of Brazilian modernism often conjures up a litany repeated by historians and critics. Modernist ideas were allegedly an import from Europe, “out of place” with relation to Brazil’s sociopolitical and material realities.1 These ideas lacked some crucial or essential precondition, producing a paradoxical “modernism without modernity.”2 Brazilian modernism was out of time, lopsided, proposing forms and designs “well ahead of economic and technological realities.”3 It supposedly put the cart before the horse, introducing concepts and proposals that anticipated rather than expressed modernity and modernization.4 The implication is that modernism in Brazil was derivative, imitative, and subordinate to European modernism, and as such was doubly inauthentic: it neither expressed “genuine” Brazilian experiences, nor did it live up to the “original” European models. These contradictions are inextricable from issues of dependency, colonialism, and power relations between center (Europe and, later, North America) and periphery (in this case, Brazil and Latin America). The tensions outlined in the paragraph above are constitutive of the Brazilian experience, and not only in architecture; they are as pervasive as they are irreducible. It is not a matter of demonstrating whether Brazilian modernism was original or subsidiary, modern enough or still lacking, but rather of sustaining these tensions as the analytical fulcrum to understanding modernist architecture in Brazil. This “tense” understanding of modernism, riddled with contradictions, might reverberate not only with other peripheral (or third-world) examples, but also with modernism at the center – if, as Gwendolyn Wright notes, we understand modernism as having come “into being in a world framed by colonialism, where visions for improvement and innovation overlapped with and often caused brutal destruction.”5 Modernism involved from the start an international traffic of ideas in many forms: imposition, transplant, adaptation, exchange; this means that foreignness, alienation, and dislocation are intrinsic to the modernist movement.
- 49. Daniela Sandler 32 I will tease out these issues by analyzing two markers of Brazilian modernism. At the beginning of the movement is Gregori Warchavchik’s own house on Rua Santa Cruz in São Paulo (1927), later known as Modernist House (Casa Modernista). This building has been described variously as the inaugural work of Brazilian modernism, and as a not-quite-there-yet staging of transplanted ideas. At the other end is Lina Bo Bardi’s Museum of Art of São Paulo, known by its acronym, MASP (1958–68). The MASP can also be seen in opposite ways – as an expression of Brazil’s mid-century modernist bravado, and as a critical departure from it. These two works are not intended to encompass all the nuances of Brazilian modernism, but to foreground the issues relevant to my discussion: the relationship between margins and center, and the critical or constructive possibilities of modernism. The Modernist House on Rua Santa Cruz presents an ambiguous modernism, whose adaptations and compromises inadvertently produce a critical perspective on the movement’s basic principles. Four decades later, the MASP provides an intentional critique, but a critique realized from within the tenets and conditions of modernism: an ambivalent building that both deploys and rejects modernist principles.6 The distinction between modernity and modernization is central to my argument. That these two words are often conflated is no accident, but rather, as Nicola Miller argues, a result of both Eurocentrism and technocentrism.7 Miller’s distinction between modernity and modernization is motivated by the unique conditions of Latin America. She describes modernization as: ... historical processes that can roughly be dated to the late eighteenth century and located in (parts of) Europe, namely capital formation and the emergence of capitalist relations of production; industrialization and urbanization; the privileging of empirical science … state bureaucratization ... and the advent of mass politics.8 If modernization refers to specific processes, modernity is an emancipatory project, a vision for socio-political and cultural organization. It is a concept rooted in philosophical explorations,9 but also embedded in political movements and, more diffusely, in social constructs and expectations. Modernity is harder to locate than modernization. It is, following Miller, “a state that is always achievable, but always already deferred,”10 a perpetually receding horizon of social progress, development, and emancipation. But modernity is also realized in and by social exchanges. It is not only a receding horizon but also, at the same time, a socio- cultural reality that exists in relationships and mindsets, in the present. This has implications for the discussion of architectural modernism as an agent of both modernity and modernization. Modernity as a project for material and economic development and socio-political emancipation is not necessarily tied up with the patterns of industrial capitalism and rational bureaucracy prevalent in Europe and North America. Miller proposes a “distinctively Latin American modernity” as imagined by the continent’s intellectuals, artists, and politicians.
- 50. The Other Way Around 33 The Latin American project for modernity is less encumbered by binary oppositions between past and present, and it tempers technocracy and rationalism with “spiritual quest, solidarity, hospitality.”11 Brazilian modernism can be seen as uniquely connected to its context, since architects did not break with the past but looked to it as a source – for Richard Williams, Brazilian modernists even prefigure Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism, “a modern architecture sensitive to place and context, tough, pragmatic and local.”12 These distinctions help recast the conflicts that pervade Brazilian modernist architecture in different terms. Modernization was and has been incomplete, uneven, and in many ways deficient in Brazil when compared to Europe or North America. But this incipient modernization did not preclude the development of a modern consciousness, of modernity as a project and as a mindset. The role of modernism is magnified in this understanding of modernity, as artistic and architectural concepts and designs provide a path of their own to socio-cultural and material transformations. Brazilian modernism – despite being heavily and often directly influenced by European and later North American sources – can be understood as a proactive set of initiatives that were often aware of the gaps between material realities and social goals, and which sought to magnify the role of art, design, and intellectual life in the construction of a modern (if not always fully modernized) society. Ambiguous modernism: the Modernist House Ukrainian-born émigré Gregori Warchavchik is often, if not unanimously, credited with pioneering architectural modernism in Brazil by building what is considered the first modernist house in the country – the house on Rua Santa Cruz – and publishing the earliest texts on modernist architecture in Brazil, starting in 1925.13 For all the recognition of Warchavchik’s contribution, his work occupies a delicate position in accounts of Brazilian architecture. Warchavchik was downplayed in publications about Brazilian modernism, including the Brazil Builds book and exhibition.14 His role was de-emphasized or criticized by Brazilian architects and historians such as Lucio Costa and Carlos Lemos.15 Warchavchik’s work was so underestimated that a later slew of scholars, from Geraldo Ferraz in 1965 to José Lira in 2007, felt compelled to correct the injustice by demonstrating the value of his production and analyzing the omissions and biases of historians and critics.16 The criticism leveled at Warchavchik is twofold. On the one hand, Warchavchik is accused of not being modernist enough, of putting forth a stage-set version of modernism more preoccupied with form and style than with the “substance” of materials, technologies, and volume.17 His modernism is seen as inauthentic, a watered-down version when compared with the “authentic seeds” planted by the “creative genius” of Le Corbusier in his 1937 visit to the country.18 On the other hand, Warchavchik is chided for not being Brazilian enough, for lacking a connection with the “national genius” that expressed itself in Oscar Niemeyer and produced the “unique visage” of Brazilian architecture.19
- 51. Daniela Sandler 34 His starkly geometric, bare-surfaced white houses too greatly resembled European modernism to make an impression on authors such as Philip Goodwin and Henrique Mindlin, who looked to distinguish Brazil’s contributions in the earliest surveys of Brazilian modernism.20 Warchavchik arrived in Brazil in 1923.21 After studying architecture in Odessa, he worked in Italy for Marcello Piacentini, one of the most influential architects in the Fascist regime. Warchavchik studied the novel developments in technique and design in Europe, but under Piacentini he did not practice an unbridled modernism. His move to Brazil unfolded new possibilities: rapid urban growth created unprecedented demand for building, and the professional milieu was less established, offering more freedom to young architects. It is easy to imagine, as Ferraz does, the newly arrived Warchavchik as a kind of fresh emissary of modernism, “bringing his contribution to the new world.”22 In a way Warchavchik might have arrived too early. Modernist architecture in Brazil lagged behind arts and literature. In the 1910s and 1920s, writers and artists experimented with novel techniques and subject matter, drawing from European avant-gardes and from a search for national identity.23 These artists coalesced in collaborative groups, putting forth publications, exhibitions, and events. Despite inner conflicts and dissension, artists and writers displayed a self-awareness of content and purpose, joined in a multifarious Movimento Modernista (modernist movement). Through intellectual debates and interactions with the political and economic élites that patronized them, the modernistas were forced to hone their positions, justify their aesthetic decisions, and clarify their artistic and social mission. This provided a convergence of efforts and principles, however provisional, that in the 1910s and early 1920s was still lacking in architectural circles.24 In the early twentieth century, the most significant attempt to break with architectural tradition was a relatively circumscribed Neo-Colonial movement, which revisited Portuguese colonial architecture as a source instead of Beaux-Arts principles.25 Warchavchik intended his buildings and texts to bring about social and spatial change, to go beyond themselves and carry out a “modernist mission.” Despite his self-consciousness, his first initiatives were isolated both from a wider architectural movement (which did not exist at the time) and from the literary and artistic movement, which by then had considerable impact. Although Warchavchik established relationships and collaborations with modernist artists and intellectuals,26 he was never a central figure in the Movimento Modernista. This isolation might partly explain the less bombastic quality of Warchavchik’s individual contributions not only with relation to the artistic and literary output of the 1920s, but also in comparison with the later, louder architectural movement that gathered around Lucio Costa in the 1930s in Rio de Janeiro.27 When Warchavchik conceived his own house on Rua Santa Cruz, he defined his professional ideals as the search for a “rational” and “logic” architecture, which did not succumb to formalism or style, but expressed the tenets of its own time. These tenets were associated with industrialization,
- 52. The Other Way Around 35 telecommunications, and the “constructive material of our era,” reinforced concrete.28 Warchavchik subscribed not only to principles of European modernism culled from Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, but also to principles of European modernization. In doing so he set himself up for an inevitable clash with the less modernized conditions of production in Brazil, but a clash in many ways subtle and for this reason all the more ambiguous. The contradictions some critics perceive in Warchavchik’s architecture pervaded material, social, and cultural structures in Brazil. Warchavchik’s work did not create these contradictions, but made them tangible, and in doing so, however inadvertently, provided us with a magnifying lens onto particular conflicts of a broader historical context. These conflicts were part and parcel of processes of modernization and visions of modernity in a country marked by a colonial past and by ongoing relationships of economic and political dependency on Europe and North America. Most of Brazil remained underdeveloped by European standards: rural, technologically backward, and dominated by conservative political and cultural values. But Warchavchik settled in São Paulo, which was by then a rapidly growing city, experiencing industrialization, financial growth, and demographic explosion.29 If São Paulo could not compare to New York, London, or Berlin at the time, it nonetheless changed at ever-rising speed, and presented distinctive signs of modern cosmopolitanism: high-rise buildings, traffic, crowds, factories, telegraph lines, lively commerce, electric lights, nightlife, immigration. Warchavchik arrived at the rise of the modernization tide. In hindsight it is easy to point out that the tide did not quite sweep the whole country, but at the time it might have appeared simply as nascent as opposed to insufficient. And Warchavchik was not alone in his perspective. His vision of a machine-age architecture was in synch with the sensibilities of the local avant-garde. The writers and artists of the Movimento Modernista focused insistently on the kaleidoscopic experience of modernization as representative of their place and time: looming skyscrapers, honking automobiles, and throngs of strangers of different classes, ethnicities, and cultural backgrounds.30 Nonetheless, the proposal for modernism articulated in Warchavchik’s texts, starting with the inaugural manifesto “Acerca da Arquitetura Moderna” (On Modern Architecture), published in 1925, appears to historian Renato Fiore as an import from Europe, with little concern for local realities.31 Fiore implies a gap between Europe and Brazil, with both modernism and modernity defined by European standards and thus always already inadequate in the Brazilian context. José Lira suggests a more nuanced reading. Lira notes that Warchavchik spent his first years in Brazil working for a large-scale developing company; this was his first direct contact with Taylorized systems of construction. Lira argues that this experience informed Warchavchik’s conception of a mechanized modernism – indeed, his hope for a widespread modernist architecture of the industrial age – more than European paradigms. At the beginning of the century Warchavchik and many other intellectuals, artists, politicians, and entrepreneurs in Brazil saw themselves at the forefront of a sea-change that seemed promising and
- 53. Daniela Sandler 36 Figure 1 Gregori Warchavchik, House on Rua Santa Cruz, 1927. Courtesy of Warchavchik Family Archive. potentially boundless. Warchavchik did not develop his modernist theory and practice in a vacuum, “without modernity,” but in dialogue with a nascent modernization, which his work could help carry out. But in the promisingly modern city of São Paulo, as Warchavchik found out when he started to build his house on Rua Santa Cruz (Figure 1), it was much cheaper and easier to procure traditional materials and techniques.32 He put it simply: “In São Paulo … concrete is expensive and bricks are cheap.”33 The local labor force was familiar with masonry, wood, and ceramic tiles, and most elements were custom-made on site. Warchavchik could not build a reinforced- concrete structure, but had to use load-bearing masonry walls. He could not find a wide range of industrial products such as handles, frames, mullions, and other fixtures; the few products he found featured traditional designs. Although in his writing he called for an architecture of the industrial age, for his modernist house he had to commission custom-built components. Far from the clean assembly process promised by standardization, Warchavchik had to perform the role of master builder, supervising the local workers and teaching them how to build more efficiently.34 Warchavchik’s adaptations were not immediately perceived as shortcomings. The house made the news in São Paulo, and stood out for its strikingly unadorned, abstract composition as an example of forward-thinking architecture that would pave the way for the future city.35 Soon, however, reinforced concrete became more easily available – Warchavchik himself used it in subsequent buildings. In the 1930s and 1940s, the material was employed with increasing exuberance by Brazilian architects, from the massive pilotis of the Ministry of Health and Education to the sinuous shells and canopies of the Pampulha complex.
- 54. The Other Way Around 37 Compared with these later developments, it was easy for critics such as Carlos Lemos to read Warchavchik’s technical adaptations as fatal flaws: “Warchavchik’s first house is not quite a specimen of Modern architecture. The house on Rua Santa Cruz was made of traditional brick masonry, its extremely ordinary wooden floors nailed to wood beams, its roofing made of vulgar ceramic tiles ...”.36 Lemos’s verdict is symptomatic of Warchavchik’s contested space in narratives of Brazilian Modernism. Warchavchik was not modern enough because of the “incongruity between aesthetics and constructive technique.”37 Lemos was invested in creating a structurally sound narrative for Brazilian modernism, which meant, among other things, asserting parity with Europe. In this light, Warchavchik’s effort seemed at best a proto-modernism that simply prefigured, but did not quite prepare the ground for, the supposedly true modernism of the Ministry of Health and Education, the Pampulha complex, and Brasília.38 For Lemos, the use of traditional materials irrevocably compromised the building’s modernist aspirations. Warchavchik was aware of the discrepancy between his modernist principles and their built results. He explained this by pointing out that concrete in Europe and the United States became popular in part for economic reasons: “In France, Germany and the United States, bricks and ceramic tiles are expensive, while concrete is attractively priced. Thus the aesthetic-economic theories of Le Corbusier and Gropius are justified.”39 If modernist principles called for logic, economy, rationalism, and pragmatism, it seemed only logical to “employ materials that abound in the region where one builds.”40 As I mentioned earlier, Warchavchik had first defined concrete as the quintessential modern substance. Now, however, he questioned its necessity and inevitability. What made concrete, already used by the Romans, essentially modern? Why could not other materials, such as wood and ceramic bricks, undergo radical developments and be seen as modern too? With his disclaimer, Warchavchik laid bare the arbitrariness of concrete as a sign of modernism. Critics were also bothered because Warchavchik’s architecture seemed uncomfortably, although not obviously, formalist. His spare, straight lines were not blatantly personal. But Warchavchik’s refusal to express conventional materials through conventional forms drew attention to the clean, minimalist lines of modernism as a formal choice. Warchavchik defended his design because simple cubic forms “produce work that, in its lines at least, in its conception, corresponds to the present time.”41 We can understand “lines” and “conception” here largely as “form.” This preoccupation with aesthetics struck critics such as Lemos as a departure from supposedly true ideals of modernism such as technique, economy, or social causes. But modernist architecture never did away with formal concerns, even if it often attempted to legitimize them with reference to function, technique, or volume. The emphasis on form is related to the programmatic character of Warchavchik’s architecture. His designs had a didactic, demonstrative intent – each building a speech act in his larger architectural discourse. Warchavchik took
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