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Rich is Right

America is rich, America is right. Architects have always worked for the rich. We are now also working for the right. And that hasn't always been the case during the last hundred years. We had better find out, who we are working for and what we are trying to say.

The traditions and history of architecture have been bound together with the ruling societies of their time. Whether the Mayans or the Shakers, the architects designed the buildings that spoke for the decision makers. From one period to another, the architect looked not to his colleagues for his kudos, but rather to his clients. For a new plan, a new technology, for a different and sometimes new society the architect wanted approval from the priest, the banker, or the corporation.

Approval is easier to come by from a society that has a clear statement to make with ledgers who make those statements. When a society is as confused as today, a society so deep in the change of its value systems, moral, economic, governmental, international, scientific--name it and find confusion--then that society and its rulers and its critics are difficult clients for the architect.

The burden of relating the art of architecture to our clients, in the hope they know what they are talking about, is enormous. That our architecture must work for our society is obvious. Even in the most usual buildings, architecture is the public art that shows people what they've been thinking. And when architecture creates an unusual building with a new technology, it even can nudge social change forward another few inches.

Today we find our post-modern buildings are silly and confused. More than a symptom, they are an infection of our times, our people, our economy-an infection of dehumanization.

There is no question that the trendy post-modern buildings and their garbage are a silliness related to the strange and disastrous goings on in our daily life. Post-modern buildings for the rich who can afford them have the same nonsense quality, the same immaturity that we presently find in our governments, our economy and our behavior. In strange ways buildings even give reinforcement to moral majorities and goofy governments.

If architecture has lost its judgment, it also has had a lapse of memory — a remembrance that this art was part of a revolution that founded America, changed Europe and continues today to create a third and a fourth world of nations. The architects have this unfinished statement to continue, a statement we started more than a hundred and fifty years ago. I want to find that statement again. I want to show that while we have changed our form we cannot change our content.

Our architecture has not been so well studied as our stars. We can tell with more certainty how the universe began two billion years ago that we can explain what preceded Mies prior to 1919. That he was only a recent star in an architectural universe that surely began in the 18th century is without question. That there were as many galaxies in our architectural firmament as there were nations and revolutions and philosopher leaders is also without question. But we have lost our curiosity about the history of these architects and their ideas.

Contemporary architects have some of the same problems as contemporary children: they never can imagine their fathers and grandfathers knew about love. They find it hard to believe the architects and their clients were actively creating a modern architecture two centuries ago. Europe and England of the late 18th century were rich and vibrating not only with new technology but with the American Revolution. America showed to Europe a constitution that promised equality of ideas and the freedom to exploit them. France quickly provided the matching political revolution and their technicians provided their revolution of industry. The rich architectural clientele which was an important by-produce of French industry also emerged in Germany and England. Philosophers talking to an upper middle class conceived the Common Man, and the artists and architects began to work for him.

The Common Man was an idea of the bourgeois intellectuals brought to a powerful reality and a prominence by the industrial revolution. We know about the new wealth that belonged to the new industrialists. What is difficult for us to realize is that the new revolutionary ideas and philosophies also belonged to that new class-that new industrialized bourgeoisie. The household names of revolutionary thinkers and writers Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Voltaire, Rousseau were launched and maintained by the wealth of the bourgeoisie.

The thinking of American and the European bourgeois philosophers (who were also the writers) at the beginning of the 19th century reached across those national boundaries toward a unified internationalism which later led to a concept of international architectural style. The intellectual revolution of the bourgeoisie was uniting their class in the nations of Europe which the elite wars and politics of those countries were keeping apart. The architects working for that united class-for their world of the Common Man&mdash ; began modern architecture.

The architectural revolution already had come some distance when Viollet-le-Duc in France about 1873 was able to make an architectural design statement that shook the Beaux Arts. He said out loud:

We have a sentimental architecture as we have a sentimental public policy and a sentimental war... it is time we gave thought to the application of sober reason, of practical common sense, to consideration of the requirements of the times, of the improvements offered by manufacturing skills, of the use of the economy, of questions of health and hygiene.

"Economy, manufacturing, health and hygiene"... are these words spoken in the French Ecole des Beaux Arts? Tom Wolfe believes only Germans spoke this way. Who were these fancy architects designing for? Workmen? Could it be that there was a new kind of client who thought there was something more important than Napoleon's Rome to rebuild in Paris? Could it be that the French were concerned with people? Could it be that architects still working for the right and for the rich found their clients in the new money created by the industrial revolution? Found their purpose to design buildings, institutions and city plans for functional performance that their new owners could recognize as belonging to their new world?

Another French architect Frantz Jourdain in 1892, five years about the Eiffel Tower, said:

Was it only Greece and Rome which could keep the flame of truth burning? To so condemn humanity forever to classicism seems both monstrous and grotesque. Does everyone use the same words, the same language? When people and things are continually changing, can we use the same architecture? The decoration and the structure of a building must be tackled together as a single concept: the one explaining the other... working and acting together... to idealize the harshness of reality. To remain logical to itself, the modern style must be constantly modified and must not give its allegiance to any distinctive principles: The style would be seen as rigid as classicism if it stuck rigidly to its first experiments...

Out of this single concept of decoration and structure, the French architects who pushed the industrial revolution along, Guimard, Perret, Maillart, developed reinforced concrete, steel framing, and a new design vocabulary to tell the Third Republic what the new French middle class was thinking.

The Germans, the British, and the Austrians had their counterparts. In general the invention, the social changes and new definitions continued for the new rich up to World War I.