In many of the attacks that have taken place in recent months against Donald Trump's sudden neoclassical taste, it seems to have been assumed that this architectural style is itself dictatorial, and that like Woody Allen he wanted to invade Poland every time. listening to Wagner's music, it has been the authoritarian charm of Hitler's favorite architecture that has bewitched the President of the United States. It depends on him that, as in Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia, neoclassicism prevails over other architectural styles: if Trump signs the decree entitled Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again ("making federal buildings beautiful again"), the architecture used in the White House should be "preferred and used by default" in federal buildings in the United States.
The draft that was leaked last February takes advantage to condemn contemporary architecture, which will be officially ugly.
We'll examine the controversial decree in no time, but as for some critics' bias about classic-style architecture, it's best to listen to Adam Nathaniel Furman, a popular British architecture designer and expert whom the Muses have led to the antipodes of the President. from the United States.
His aesthetic totem is the column of archaeological fragments that John Soane, father of the eccentric classicists, erected in the courtyard of his London home, and from which three years ago he was inspired to design a ceramic sculpture in that same place. In both works, capitals with classic columns are stacked on top of others of Hindu or Gothic style, just as the exotic dishes served at the feast of Trimalción were piled up in the stomachs of his guests. It's the kind of diversity Furman likes to celebrate in his work, and for which he will probably never win a contest to design an American post office during Trump's eventual second term.
"Classicism," explains Adam Nathaniel Furman by email, "is a rich and complex language that has been used in many ways to represent different cultures in different places and has embodied ideologies of all kinds. The popularity it has had over the centuries is precisely what has made it so flexible. There is no other that has been used so much and in so many ways: it has represented from Stalin's totalitarianism, French republicanism or Austrian imperialism ".
It has also been, adds Furman, "the language of the queer community , where it was common for its members to refer to their feelings and activities with a code of classical terms. The latter was what initially led me to classicism. From the celebration of male beauty by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, father of art history, the homoerotic photographer Wilhelm Von Gloeden and the diaspora of expatriate gay artists in southern Italy, queer culture was justified (and disguised) by a idealized and sensual architectural, decorative and mythological classicism ".
As a Jew, Furman is also interested in the way in which the Hebrew communities have used and transformed classicism: "They have adapted the formal language of the dominant Catholic culture to the needs and tastes of an often abused minority. Many times, the The results have been beautiful and fascinating. "
A generous interpretation of the Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again decree would allow an architect like Adam Nathaniel Furman to raise his buildings in Trump's America.
Drafted by the National Civic Art Society, a lobby created in 2002 with the mission of "fostering classical tradition" in American architecture and urbanism, the draft of the controversial decree defines classical style as that "derived from the forms and principles of the classical architecture of Greece and Rome. " However, he lists a number of sentinel masters of architecture below to ensure the concept is well guarded: Andrea Palladio and Michelangelo during the Renaissance, Christopher Wren and Robert Adams in the 18th century, and American architects as Charles Follen McKim, author of the now defunct Pennsylvania Station in New York, or John Russell Pope, architect of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.
According to the text, it is these latter buildings and others like the White House or the Washington Capitol that have demonstrated their ability to inspire respect for American democracy and which the people love to view or have as workplaces.
On the opposite side, contemporary architecture appears, favored by a decree issued by the Kennedy government in 1962. Of this architecture, the draft of the National Civic Art Society (NCAS) says that it does not include national values, and that American society considers styles like brutalism or deconstructivism "boring, inconsistent with the environment or architectural heritage, and even simply ugly". Recent buildings like the Miami Court of Justice or the San Francisco Federal Building "have little aesthetic appeal" and have violated the American architectural tradition. It is time, the text concludes, that "federal architecture inspires new respect instead of bewilderment or disgust", for which it establishes that the architecture of classical inspiration is the official one.
Unfortunately for Adam Nathaniel Furman and other designers who love classicism, the logical condemnations that such a proposal has received from associations such as the American Institute of Architects have been added to those of others who have used it to charge against that architectural style. As Furman previously pointed out, communities like queer used classicism to forge their identity, but many critics have preferred to remember Albert Speer, the architect of Hitler.
Neoclassicism, they have said for example, is "fachadismo that pretends to represent glory and truth" and that "refers to an America in which neither women nor people of color could vote." Prejudices that, by identifying classicism with conservatism, fuel the wall of sacred fire that the NCAS aims to build around the "classic architectural style" to protect it from those who, like Adam Nathaniel Furman, take it without wearing white gloves.
Nick Rolinski, a Michigan architect who defines himself as a classicist, predicted for this reason that the NCAS proposal will cost classicism more projects than it will promote. Critic Michael Kimmelman also warned in The New York Times, refusing to sing the virtues of the modern federal buildings that the draft targets: that's the kind of cultural divide that Trump likes to cultivate and exploit. "The trap is to enter the rag of a debate on style," he said.
The postmodern movement, another Trojan horse of classicism
It is true. However, it is not surprising that in this war almost nobody has ridden on the Trojan horse that is postmodern classicism. To begin with, because its initiator, Robert Venturi, was American, and then because, as he writes in the book What is Post-Modernism? (1986) historian and architect Charles Jencks, his architecture started from the idea that the modern movement had failed both for its inability to communicate with its users, and for having dispensed with links to history or the environment. A criticism that, as has been seen before, is very similar to that made by NCAS.
Beginning in the 1960s, Robert Venturi and other postmodern architects such as Michael Graves and Charles Moore attempted to solve these problems by infusing modern architecture with a contextual breath in which classical elements such as Greek columns abounded, rejected like any other historicism by Le Corbusier and company. The achievement of an architecture that communicated with people and with history ended up becoming a goal shared by modern architects like Philip Johnson.
Thus, in the 1980s, the disciple of Mies van der Rohe supported his A&T Building in New York in a classic lodge and culminated it with an ornamental Chippendale- type summit , a turn of events similar to that which the NCAS dreams of achieving with your decree. The difference is that postmodern architects employed classical language with a freedom, wit, and sense of humor that dynamited the NCAS concept of "classical architectural style". Especially when in another part of the draft he equates it to the "traditional architectural style".
This is considered by Owen Hopkins, author of a recent book on postmodern architecture ( Less is a bore , 2020, Phaidon) and curator until February of exhibitions at the Sir John Soane Museum.
"Classical is not necessarily equivalent to traditional, or vice versa. There we have, for example, Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans: it is openly classical, but not traditional," he points out. Conceived as a public space in which the Italian population of New Orleans could meet and celebrate their identity, the square includes a fountain in the shape of the Italian peninsula in which jets of water fall from columns of different classical orders with capitals metallic or neon colors and even two tondos with the face of the architect himself. "To design it, Charles Moore drank Italian culture and architecture in a playful, but totally sincere way. It is rich, powerful, and deeply evocative architecture that has proven to be immensely popular with the people for whom it was designed. Contains the lesson essential of postmodernism: that architects should be free to use classical elements as they wish, and not constrained by a unique 'correct' way of designing, "says Hopkins.
The architect, painter and writer Óscar Tusquets was another of the pioneers of postmodern classicism. His taste for classical culture freed him from International Style orthodoxy, but without dragging him at the feet of another idol. "The first manifesto against the dictatorship of modern architecture - Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture , by Robert Venturi - was published in 1966, and the Spanish translation much later. I finished my architecture studies in 1964. Therefore, in those years modern architecture was seen as an ideal, not as a boredom, "explains Tusquets. "I think classicism has attracted me since childhood. Venturi perhaps gave me the freedom to use it."
The first work representative of Tusquets' postmodern classicism came in 1972 with the Belvedere Giorgina, a house introduced to a Palladian belvedere that Charles Jencks gave as an example of the architecture inaugurated by Venturi. As Jencks writes in The Language of Postmodern Architecture , the Belvedere Giorgina gives the impression of being "a classic building conceived according to International Style aesthetics, or vice versa." With the work of Tusquets, Jencks continues, the modern architect made peace with historicism and allowed himself to use "a directly traditional quotation", although with great care not to go completely down the path of tradition and run into "the reactionaries who they were walking in the opposite direction. "
With Bofill we have come across
It is clear that this second sense is the one undertaken by the National Civic Art Society with its draft. Thus, it is no coincidence that the only contemporary federal building that praises his proposal is the Tuscaloosa courthouse, built in 2011 with that "traditional" architecture that he claims. Nor that, although the text leaves open a door to "experimentation with new styles" (provided they are "respectful of the public"), it does not mention any postmodern classicist. Not even those most attached to tradition like Thomas Gordon Smith.
It is also significant that Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society, agreed to participate in this article and stopped answering emails when asked if a work like Les Espaces d'Abraxas by Ricardo Bofill is classic enough for his decree. .
The few doubts that could be had in this regard were cleared last March, when, just a month after the draft was leaked, Melania Trump unveiled the project for the new tennis pavilion of the White House. The design of the building follows the style of the presidential residence with the same discipline with which the character played by Sissi Spacek in Carrie dressed in the cardigans her mother bought for her.
I am pleased to announce the ground breaking of a new tennis pavilion on the White House grounds. This structure will be a testament to American craftsmanship and skill. pic.twitter.com/6sY3anuOk2
- Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) October 8, 2019"Like most examples of this 'new classicism', it is highly banal and unimaginative," says Adam Nathaniel Furman of the First Lady's tennis hall. "The saddest thing is that people seem to think that the only way to use classicism in design is to be slavishly pedantic and reproduce a small group of past precedents that are considered 'correct'. As you can imagine, I I'm interested in using classical form and language in a radically creative and unusual way to respond to the peculiarities of the 21st century, not to retreat into a kind of conservative arcade. "
Antonio Pizza de Nano, professor of architecture history at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, expresses himself in a similar way, differentiating the classicism used by architects such as Venturi from that proposed by the NCAS. In the first "there was an important component of intellectual irony and a sophisticated elaboration of sources. Instead, contemporary classicist architecture, marked by substantially commercial objectives, turns out to be pedantic copies of solutions consecrated in other times and contexts."
Earlier it was said that the kind of classicism inaugurated by Robert Venturi has the ability to irritate the most orthodox with his own medicine, and this was demonstrated in the 1980s on the occasion of the expansion of the National Gallery in London. The contest was initially won by the studio Ahrends Burton Koralek, but after Prince Charles in 1984 criticized its modern design, defining it as "a monstrous boil on the face of an elegant and beloved friend," words that many critics quickly championed, it was preferred. look for a "more appropriate" solution to the museum's neoclassical architecture. Finally, the project fell into the hands of Venturi and his wife, the architect Denise Scott-Brown.
A neo-neo-neoclassicism 'revival' 'revival'
Known as the "Sainsbury Wing", classic elements of the main façade such as the sequence of pilasters and columns are diluted in the National Gallery extension in a building that presents a more modern aspect as it moves away from Trafalgar Square. The balance between classicism and innovations struck by Venturi-Scott-Brown, however, displeased many traditionalists and also failed to convince pro-moderns. For many purists, it was as if they had complained that JJ Abrams was going to direct a sequel to John Ford's Stagecoach and the movie had just been shot by Quentin Tarantino. The kind of irony critic Justin Davidson seemed to be thinking about when, writing in February about the NCAS draft in New York Magazine, he encouraged designers, should Trump finally sign the decree , answer it by inventing "a new neo-neo-neoclassicism- revival revival " that is both familiar and progressive. "It's been done before," concluded Davidson.
There would be no shortage of candidates to pick up this glove. While Trump dreams of enjoying his tennis pavilion for a second term, the god Apollo continues to gather in his parnassus artists such as Brett Lloyd, a British photographer whose art has taken him to the same landscapes of southern Italy in which Wilhelm von Gloeden made his portraits of nude young men.
Carmelo Rodríguez, founding partner of the Madrid architecture and design studio Enorme Studio, says that the same thing happens in his profession. Bizarre Columns, his popular Instagram account, is a record of the flirtations that the classic column has had in recent decades with the most leading architects and designers of the moment: the Capitello armchair by Studio65 or the caryatids by Manuel Núñez Yanowsky in Paris .
This historical promiscuity reaches the present, where Carmelo Rodríguez assures that the old lady lives a new youth.
"Of course there has been an upturn in classicism. The classical column has returned and is once again part of the collective iconography. It is no longer a taboo as in the modern movement, although there is also no obsession as strong to use it as in postmodernity. It is one more resource within the heterogeneous current scene, less in Spain, but in other countries where inheritance is greater, the trend is clear: there are the Fosbury Architecture studio and the Sbagliato art group in Italy, the architecture firm Point Supreme in Greece. "the Californian architect Andrew Kovacs in the United States; the artist Verena Issel in Germany; Adam Nathaniel Furman, the artist Pablo Bronstein or the set designer Anna Lomax in the United Kingdom," he lists.
A squad to consider in case of a war that, more than against modern architecture, would be against the imagination.
