Vidler: Histories of the Immediate Present

Anthony Vidler’s Histories of the Immediate Present, is, in one way, a narrative of architectural history in the 3rd quarter of the 20th century. He examines the work of four architects: Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, and Manfredo Tafuri. However, his purpose is not simply to compare and contrast the views of these historians, but rather to allow the differences between them to illuminate the various changes and distances of architecture as a discipline from 1920 to the “immediate present.” Indeed the title of book reveals that this was not intended as a linear and chronological index, as evidenced by the inclusion of Kaufmann, who seems attached to another generation of thinkers entirely, but rather reveals that history and formalism should not be bound temporally, but can be seen as much as the historical past as the immediate present can, and should be. In other words, by looking at these authors and how they conceived of various origins of modernism, provided a different way of looking at the present time and space of the postwar era. For example, Vidler uses the example of “type,” which stemmed from the need to rethink planning in the 1950s, had its theoretical roots in the 18th century(2).

In a more direct sense, the authors featured have all responded in different ways to the influences of early 20th century modernism. The early critics of modernism (such as Pevsner and Giedion) were open about their definitions and forms of modernism, and spent most of their efforts in tracing the movement back to a particular time and place, such as the Baroque, Arts and Crafts Movement, even the Renaissance. It was somewhat the worst fear of modernist architects, of being canonized, historicized and labeled a “style.”Although these works are partial narratives based in the author’s own personal viewpoint as to where modernism began, the later critics, those referenced in this book, although concerned more with historical accuracy, were still guilty of the same tendencies of the early critics by using them in various starting points for a new conception of modernism.

Another major point is the rise of history in architecture in the postwar period. It became part of an academic canon that was entrenched in discourse according to the standards of “art historical scholarship” (3) and based in a multidisciplinary context. For perhaps the first time in architecture, theory was being disengaged from design at the same time modernism was being historicized. The early critics constructed widely different but coherent narratives of the origin and development of modernism yet they all saw history as a “determining, unfolding force capable of articulating questions of the past, present, and future of architecture, as well as a belief in some form of sociocultural zeitgeist” (6). The students of this first generation of critics continued this tradition of using history and theory as a means of espousing a certain worldview.

For our own purposes of continuing a narrative, we will mostly be dealing with Vidler’s discussion of Reyner Banham and how his view of modernism contributed to own time and space, and to our own. The title of his chapter on Banham is called “Futurist Modernism” and specifically refers to Banham’s obsession with the Futurists of the 1910s and 20s, as well as his notions of scientific functionalism and the technological aesthetic. Indeed, it is this impetus that led him to write Theory and Design in the First Machine Age; he wanted to throw away academic nostalgia and stimulate discussion on the modernist’s technological aspirations that led to the movement in the first place.

His own academic (or anti-academic, we might say) basis was that under his adviser, Nikolaus Pevsner. Vidler chooses to root Banham’s theory of “image” as having its own historical basis in Pevsner’s theory of the picturesque. Pevsner argued that the picturesque had a major influence on the modern movement. It’s aesthetic discipline, “which was not based on the grid, the axis, the module, but rather upon the free grouping of parts, free juxtaposition of different materials, upon an experimental and tentative approach, which is the guiding principle of the modern movement.” (108) Pevsner uses the Bauhaus buildings of Gropius to illustrate the free grouping, mixture of materials, and free planning as evident of the picturesque discipline in the modern movement. Perhaps most important to Banham however, would be the presence of a moving observer as having an important effect in architecture. For Banham, the viewer and the experience, or the “image” was something which is “visually valuable, but not necessarily by the standards of classical aesthetics” (135) We could call this the neopicturesque.

Banham attempted to radically alter the view of functionalism from the early modernist writers by attempting to base it in science. Banham had issue with Pevsner and Giedion’s view of modernist architecture being essentially functionalist. He thought it was a way to “ignore the formal and stylistic differences of the various avant-gardes in order to provide a defining foundation for architecture modernity” (118) By coming up with his own version of functionalism based in scientific pursuits, he called this search for a new way of thinking “un autre architecture.”

As detailed in the previous essay, Banham spends a significant amount of time discussing the Futurists and mentions that modern architects’ vision of a “machine age future had been betrayed by their adherence to the remains of an academic culture” (121) Therefore, it would be better, according to Banham, to illuminate those that fought for the machine age vision, and this was Marinetti, Sant’Elia, and the Futurists. For him, they were the major force and a major influence on the ideology associated with modernism. For Banham, architecture has nothing to do with form and function in his day, but was torn between tradition and technology instead- academics versus the technological vision. The problem for him was that history, when applied to the modern movement, was caught between the selective memory of Giedion and the “total recall” of the new historians. He felt that only by renewing interest in science and technology can jam architecture out of formalism and historicism entirely.

Finally, Vidler spends the remainder of his discussion on Banham discussing his pursuits beyond architecture, specifically his time spent in Los Angeles. His views of scientific functionalism ultimately led to a wide program that incorporated a large number of urban geographical conditions. His obsession with LA came from its history as a newer city that was not bogged down by any historical architecture yet functioned well without it. His anti-academicism allowed him to embrace all forms of human structure “from the free-way to the hotdog stand.” (142) The book and film that emerged from his time in LA was regarded by critics as a light-hearted “drive-by” with journalistic intent was actually, as Vidler claims, “a tightly constructed text, part manifesto, part new urban geography, that, joined together, form an entirely unique kind of “history”” (154). This new history was intended to see a city, a building, or a place ‘as it is.’ Although the viewer may not like or immediately see what they want in a place, new illuminations and caveats might emerge from this approach. Vidler believes that in this way, Banham radically altered how we see architecture history, and his approach is echoed into the present day.

Vidler, however, questions postmodernist theory. While he says that proponents of revisionist looks at modernism claim that it was a failed attempt at functional promises and technological utopias, a rejection of history in favor of abstraction, ideology out of touch with people, with sterile vocabularies. For these revisionists, postmodernism welcomed history back into the fold, functional program was discarded, the language was populist and in touch with people. Vidler disagrees entirely, and argued that if anything, modernists were too respectful of history, evident by their inherent need to break away from history, they understood it as a “fundamental force, an engine of the social world.” (192) In fact, for Vidler, postmodernism may actually be disregarding history, in favor of a historical “myth.” Conflict was absent from postmodern ideals of society and culture. By proclaiming that modernists willingly broke with history is a counterhistorical move in itself because it implies that history had, in a way, come to its completion, or reached its limits. What Vidler proposes here is that the postmodernists were actually part of a posthistory. Posthistory is applied to the “moment when a human creation reached the stage of when there was no possibility of its further development.” (194) Therefore, for Vidler, postmodernism is a special moment in posthistory. This does not mean that past, current, and future studies are not relevant, but rather what is left in the discourse is the continual perfection of understanding history, of continuous self-reflection by challenging and reevaluating the fixed ideas of our own “historical consciousness.”