Leonardo

Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science by Alberto Prez-Gmez Review by: R. F. Erickson Leonardo, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1985), p. 119 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577887 . Accessed: 15/03/2012 14:26
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demonstrates the international quality of the hopeful dreams which influenced their art. More's the pity that this is not convincingly shown in relation to the nightmares. Although Miss Fletcher specifically states that "antiUtopian art transcends political, economic, national and ideological limitations" and does not "serve as a political tool" (p. 138), the dystopian section of her study, and of the exhibition itself, fails to establish this clearly. We are not given the essence of the Dystopia/Utopia polemic (the seminal nineteenth century Dostoyevsky/Chernyshevsky skirmish not being considered at all). Instead the dystopians are shown to be protesting against definite abuses (Stalinism, Hitler, MacCarthy, bureaucracy, Hiroshima). This accounts for such anomalies as Orwell's 1984 (90% about 1948) being lumped together with Huxley's genuinely dystopian Brave New World as a classic of the genre, whereas Zampatin's equally genuinely dystopian (and thus not specifically political) We is seen as "attacking emerging signs of totalitarian control in the USSR". The art of political protest should be contrasted not with Utopian art but rather with the art of political conformism, rightly accorded no place in this exhibition. The fact that the dystopian nightmares are less sharply defined than the utopian dreams leads to the curiously bland conclusion that both represent a kind of 'humanism', working for measure and synthesis in the waking world by a good, oldfashioned dialectic progression of thesis/antithesis. This is not quite the impression left by the pictures. Nevertheless, this is a thought-provoking, important and accessible study that should help both artists and their public to define their own position and direction in these catastrophically changing times. Reviewed by Kirill Sokolov, 213 Gilesgate, Durham City DH1 1QN, U.K.

Architectureand the Crisis of Modern Science. Alberto Perez-G6mez: MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983. 400 pp., illus. Cloth, $30.00. ISBN: 0-262-16091-9. The author's fundamental proposition is that, through two centuries, architecture was deprived of the power of symbolic communicaion and has never recovered it. In the postGalilean intellectual tradition, certain scientific and mathematical derivatives had the effect of stimulating new theories and, in the process, changed the thinking of architects and builders. In order to demonstrate this thesis, Perez-G6mez, director of the school of Architecture at Carleton University, discusses such subjects as proportion, number, geometry and technology. Beginning with Claude Perrault in the eighteenth century, the argument is carried forward to include the writings of Jacques N. L. Durand in the nineteenth century, and throughout there is an insistence on linking architectural 'failure' to the new science which, he asserts, "implied a radical subversion of the traditional astrobiological world view". As the author describes it, there were two great transformations in thought after Galileo. In the first, at the end of the seventeenth century, the idea that number and geometry constitute a link between the human and the

divine was questioned in both science and philosophy; in the second, at the end of the eighteenth century, there occurred the rejection of any implied Newtonian Platonism and the divorce of faith and reason. The results, for architecture, were to emphasize technical challenges and to create an architecture "deprived of a legitimate poetic content", becoming "prosaic technological process or mere decoration". Thus, Perrault, who is associated in France with progressive architecture, is shown as a rationalist who criticized submission to the ancients and wanted to begin "a continuous line of development in a process of ever increasing rationalization". In the years between Permult (1628-1703) and Durand (1760-1834), all of the following occurred and contributed to the loss, in architecture, of its myth, poetry, and meaningfulness: technology became dominant in architecture;education in architecturebecame formalized; measurement and geometrical drawing became increasingly systematized so that rational planning and programming of construction could become a reality; geometry was applied to mechanics (from Galileo) thus permitting technical control of nature; civil architecture was described as having scientific objectives; technical domination occurred as a result of the exclusion of metaphysical speculation - that is, the road to positivism was taken; the advent of the technical expert was seen; an architect could use descriptive geometry (knowledge of it) to compensate for a lack of familiarity with building techniques; efficiency and economy became demanding (primary) considerations. The book concludes with an analysis of the writings of Durand, who "stressed the irrelevance of any transcendental justification". He emphasized the principle of utility; that is, architecture was necessary for humanity and should serve its needs. There was no other justification, and the form of architecture was derived from the nature of the materials emplOyed. Buildings themselves have no meaning, and the work of the architect is in only two categories - the design of the most convenient building, and the most economical construction of it. There is no doubt that Perez-G6mez makes a convincing explanation for those changes in both theory and practice which have occurred in architecture since the seventeenth century. However, the idea, expressed in the title, of a crisis in modern science is misleading. To define as crisis what science became and what its influences were is to abandon history in favor of a subjective judgment. If one believes that the intellectual transformations that led from Laplace's mechanics to positivism were destructive of certain valued concepts, in architecture or elsewhere, it should be stated as a crisis in Western thought. In consideration of the author's intentions, it must be said that the strength of his analyses and the breadth of his sources and evidence combine to sustain a powerful argument. People interested in why we live today with an architecture that is unrewarding in many ways will find the complex sources of that architecture in this book - an important contribution to our understanding. Reviewed by R. F. Erickson, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, School of Social Sciences, Dept. of Historical Studies, Edwardsville, IL 62026, U.S.A.

Industriekulture:Peter Behrens and the AEG, 1907-1914. Tilmann Buddensieg, ed. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1984. Translated by Iain Boyd Whyte. 520 pp., illus. $75.00. ISBN: 0-262-02195-1. Peter Behrens would have been assured a place in history alone for having had three of the four major architects of the twentieth century as assistants in his studio at one time or another: Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and LeCorbusier. His designs for housing, factories and pavilions are highly regarded as prototypes of the modern idiom in architecture. He is even better known, however, as the first industrialdesigner, i.e. the first individual to successfully design - over a wide range of scales, media and materials the mass-produced artifacts used by a modern industrial society. More importantly, Behrens established precedents for the kind of forms appropriate to such a society and provided a philosophy of industrial design. Behrens studied as a painter and gravitated to the avant-garde group of secession artists who rejected academic traditions. His own early work was in the Jugendstil mode, the German equivalent to the curvilinear art nouveau style. Invited to join an artists' colony in Darmstadt, he designed one of several homes in a model community in that town, later designing furnishings for it marked by sinuous organic Jugendstil lines. He discovered that he had a talent for typography and graphic design, abilities that came to the attention of the A.E.G. (the German General Electric Company) which in 1906 commissioned him to design publicity materials. The following year he moved to Berlin and assumed responsibility for virtually all A.E.G. design activities including new factories, industrial and consumer products, electrical components and instruments,and exhibits and pavilions in which to display the corporation's varied line. Behrens sought to bring the sensibility of the artist to industry, knowing that in the Victorian era 'art' (as ornament) had wrongly been applied to form as a mere embellishment. He saw his role as that of a form giver whose work would be an advanced expression of the industrial age. Although his earliest product designs have touches of Jugendstil's handcrafted appearance, he soon found in simple stereometric forms the basis for rational massproduced artifacts. As sparse and utilitarianas were his A.E.G. arc lamps, electric water kettles and fans, they were forms, he believed, that could not have been created by engineers nor resulted from the mere satisfaction of functional requirements. Industriekulture is narrow in scope, covering only the period from 1907 to 1914 and then only Behrens' A.E.G. work; it does not explore his role as a cofounder of the Werkbund, nor does it examine Behrens' influence upon other designers or upon the Bauhaus, Gropius' school for design and architecture. It is, however, a definitive study of a seminal period in which the course of design was set for a half century or more. Several insightful essays examine Behrens' architectural, transportation, product and graphic design; a later section catalogs these thoroughly. Eleven of Behrens' own writings state his intentions and beliefs concisely. A dozen contemporary reactions to Behrens' work are included for perspective. A final section provides photographic portraits and brief biographies of the

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