Week one reading

1. The Diaspora
Author(s): Sibyl Moholy-Nagy
Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 1965), pp. 2426
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians
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2. 24
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P. Goodwin and E. D. Stone, Museumof ModernArt, New York
City, 1939.
The Diaspora
SIBYL
MOHOLY-NAGY
Diaspora means a scattering of the faithful and was first
applied by St. James to Christian Jews having to live
among heathens. There are two sides to every diaspora.
One is so dark and tragic that no novelist has ever succeeded in formulating the agonies of the creative mind
made homeless. The other side of any diaspora is so excruciatingly funny that again no writer has ever conveyed
the comedy of errors played out by the alien mind anxiously disguised in native costume.
I am a beachcomber of history. This is why I responded
so enthusiastically to an assignment that sent me back to
the desolate shores of our emigration decade. But in spite
of an intense search for clues that would explain the astonishing impact of a handful of refugee designers on the
environmental concepts of this country, I found no fascinating pieces of driftwood, shaped by the complex currents that fill the vast void between Europe and America.
Only the images of small, repetitive boxes had washed
ashore, their disingenuous simplicity pointing to a common dogma as their only possible justification.
And with the interpretation of this dogma starts the
drama and the farce of diaspora architecture. The design
revolution on which America staked the beginning of a
new era in her architectural history was in reality neither
a beginning nor a revolution. It was the conclusion of the
anti-academic protest that had started more than a hundred years ago. Pevsner was more right than he perhaps
intended when he subtitled his popular book on the Pioneers of Modern Design: "From Morris to Gropius." As
with all reformations, the architectural one that had
started with Soane and Schinkel never discarded first
principles: boxed-in spaces, form equilibrium, and an
anxious guardianship over the anthropometric scale. It
merely subtracted what it considered superfluous, without
a flaming desire for new potentialities. In a precise historical analogy to the decay of the Gothic reformation toward
the close of the fourteenth century, Palladian purification
classicism around 1580, and the strangling of Baroque by
a host of theorizing friars in the eighteenth century, the
twentieth-century conclusion of the academic liberation
was mere paper. The Bauhaus program and the charters
of the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne
(CIAM) took up where architectural creation left off.
CIAM was conceived from its beginnings in 1928 as an
endless succession of congresses with an endless publication chain of subcommittee findings. The Bauhaus program in its final crystallization in 1923 defined functionalism as the interaction of art and technology, with the artist as the guilty escapist who had "to be liberated from his
otherworldliness and reintegrated into the everyday working process."
It is puzzling to consider that functionalism should have
acquired such an aura of ideological revelation in Cambridge, Chicago, and the lectures of Sigfried Giedion,
when American builders had practiced it uncompromisingly since constructing the first hogan in Plymouth Colony. This historical irony rests on a total misunderstanding of the term. For the American designer functionalism
meant, and still means, building as economically and as
technologically as possible, with minimum consideration
of personal or esthetic principles. To the diaspora architects functionalism meant pure ideology, visualizing selfevident truths of ethical, esthetic, and social Weltanschauung. What Germany admired most during the 1920os
was pure Kantian non-empirical idealism. Perhaps the
misunderstanding between the two functionalisms would
have been cleared up earlier if fortuitous timing and ample
publicity had not maintained the myth of a "new" architecture. The great depression had made it clear that a
stable economic future had to be grounded on more than
successful stockmarket manipulation. As after all crises,
the public outcry was for better education. In the design
field, Dewey's Art as Experience, published in 1934, pro-
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3. 25
pounded educational tenets that were straight Bauhaus
theory: "Science as the organ of social progress"; "continuous sensory experience to replace learning by recapitulation and retrospection"; "search instead of research";
and "art as the tool of education and therapy." Neither
the Deweyites nor Dean Hudnut, who played such a decisive part in bringing Gropius and ultimately Mies van
der Rohe to American universities, caught on to the fact
that "science and technology" were purely poetic terms
for the European functionalists--as sin and salvation are
for modern theologians. "The tumultuous transformations by the triumphs of science" which Hudnut promised to Harvard would not be made by the diaspora reformers. Not a single structural system used by them up
to 1946 was invented later than 1900oo.
The other passport that secured the entry of the "Makers of Modern Architecture" into this country was The
International Style by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip
Johnson, published in 1932. In its unconcerned mixture
of truth and opinion, quality and cliche, this is an astonishing document, declaring Le Corbusier, Mies van der
Rohe, Walter Gropius, and, of all people, the Dutch architect Oud, the unquestionable leaders of modern architecture. Taking a firm, disdainful stance against, not for
functionalism, Hitchcock and Johnson slew the anti-esthetic, expedient, economic, and socially conscious tendencies of the day with arguments that would have expelled them instantly from Le Corbusier's CIAM, Gropius' Bauhaus, Mies' Werkbund, and Oud's De Stijl. It is
hilarious to read in 1932 about the necessary separation
of architecture and building (on whose absolute unity the
whole Bauhaus idea was founded); about a hierarchy of
esthetic significance (against the fierce renunciation of
"taste and form" in all the patristic utterances); about
regularity of design based on bilateral symmetry (as if
"Fassadenarchitektur" had not become the dirtiest work
in the trade); about stone-granite-marble exteriors as the
only worthy architectural materials (when it was "sozialer
Wohnungsbau" that gave to all four heroes of the book
their reason for being); and about "plan fetishism" (flung
into the pictorial evidence of "expressed interior function" as the law of laws). But no one caught on to this
schizophrenic sleight of hand, least of all the diaspora
architects who only wanted to be accepted.
Architectural school programs were reformed in the
Bauhaus image. This was such an improvement over what
the watered-down Beaux-Arts education had offered, that
the lack of distinguished building design was gladly overlooked by the imported architect-educators. With a tactful shrug America looked the other way when Gropius
and Breuer built those astonishingly ugly little houses,
leading up to that permanent diner, the Harvard Graduate Center. Mendelsohn's Bexhill Pavilion with Chermayeff had stilla faint echo of the bold curves of the Schocken
store and the soaring staircase of the Metal Workers'
Building. But his buildings in Israel proved that a decent
standard of subtractive simplicity, shared by the functional ideologists of the 192os, had been destroyed by the
diaspora. Mies van der Rohe seemed to be wholly a part
of that slow death when he finally arrived in this country
in 1937. His first scheme for the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology is painfully reminiscent of his deadly fascist designs for the German Reichsbank, and the
Krefeld Factory of 1937 proved the old German proverb
that he who lies down with dogs gets up with fleas. Yet he
was the only one of the diaspora architects capable of
starting a new life as a creative designer following World
War II, because to him technology was not a romantic
catchword, as it had been for the Bauhaus program, but a
workable tool and an inescapable truth. There can be little
doubt that the spark that ignited his talent was the Chicago School, just as the Tugendhat House and the Barcelona Pavilion of his European phase owe an acknowledged
debt to Frank Lloyd Wright. His finest achievement, the
Seagram Building in New York, carries Root's Reliance
Building of 1893 to its ultimate perfection.
The halo of greatness and originality surrounding the
Bauhaus teachers gradually became questionable, and the
misunderstanding of the two functionalisms has resolved
itself in a new architectural beginning. The historian,
however, must never forget that more enduring than the
ironies of history is the testimony of an essential evolution. A new beginning is predicated on a total conclusion
which had been achieved by the reformers of the diaspora.
In 1949 at the CIAM Congress in Bergamo, Helena
Syrkus, a Polish State architect, buried Ideological Functionalism. Although her motivations were certainly not
purely architectural, she had the insight and the courage
to tell the old lions that their days were over: "We must
revise our attitude," she said, "the Bauhaus is as far behind us as Scamozzi."'
1. Sigfried Giedion, Architecture, You and Me, Cambridge, Mass.,
1958, p. 87.
The following commentwas made by ProfessorHitchcock, at the
suggestion of Mr. Johnson that he speak about the International
Stylebook:
I seem to remember that toward the beginning something
was said about the presumptive possibility of taking a
series of striking monuments of a given, rather limited
period and attempting to derive from those monuments
some cohesive, though unconscious, program, as for example, at very great length, much greater length than Mr.
Johnson and I, but also with many more monuments to
lean on, Paul Frankl did with the Gothic. We didn't have
a great many monuments to work from. In fact when one
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4. 26
looks back now on the architectural production of the
192os that was relevant to the International Style, it is
fantastically small. In spite of the fact that we think of the
1920os as a period of boom production and the 1930s as on
the whole a period of limited production, the number of
relevant buildings was enormously greater, of course, in
the 1930osthan in the 192os-whether
or not, as it seems
to us at the present point, there occurred a certain "dilution"; that is to say, that the intensity there was in one Le
Corbusier house of the 192os was vastly diluted in however many in the whole world--thousands,
at least, of
Corbusian imitations went up in the 1930s. But
vaguely
looking back at the buildings, where they still exist and
are in good condition, it is obviously true that they do
not, in retrospect, seem to make as intense an impression
as they made when they were new. The situation was
somewhat like what occurred later on Park Avenue: when
the Lever House was built and was alone, it was very exciting; but now that there are ranges of Lever houses all
up and down the avenue, you can't always pick out Lever
House itself. And it seems to me that one thing that happened in the 1930s was that what had been rare and special became common. I suppose in that sense what we wrote
was a kind of prognosis; but worse than that, it has been
suggested by some unkind people that the very fact that
we wrote the book helped, at least in this country, to produce the later situation, that if we had kept quiet there
wouldn't have been such a spread of mediocre imitations
of the great monuments in the 1930s. I am afraid that I
myself can't believe that writers about the arts influence
history to that extent. ? The really influential writers
were not people like Mr. Johnson and myself. They were
still people like Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Today Mr. Johnson's pronouncements on architecture
are backed up by his work; they were not then. Whereas
when you have any point of time in mind-and this was
especially true, it seems to me, in the 192os and 1930sthe configuration of vigorous theoretical writing about architecture with actual, though limited production is significant. When you have both precept and practice to lean
on, the influence of the new is very great; and, at least in
the case of the two twentieth-century architects who seem
so far to be surviving best-Le Corbusier and Wrightthat combination of being skillful, if not technically perfect, writers-exhorters
perhaps more than expositorswith their executed work, even though in many cases
what they said seemed to be in the opposite direction, had
a great deal to do with the total direction of the period.
? When we come to a new figure of the 1930os like Aalto,
it seems definitely true that the fact that Aalto has never
been his own interpreter in books and that, indeed, he has
had very few serious interpreters who are as close to his
thought as, say, Mr. Johnson was close to Mies van der
Rohe's thought, may explain the fact that Wrightian architecture or Corbusier's architecture is a much more
comprehensible thing than Aalto's architecture. I thought
Aalto's architecture was more comprehensible before I
saw it, that is to say, before I went to Finland last year. I
knew it only from a few specimens in other countries. Now
that I have seen the whole-well hardly the whole!, but a
greater range of Aalto-I feel that his interpreters have
been neither close to his thought nor sufficiently informed
of the totality of his work. But that means that we have
not had, in the case of Aalto, who has moved about the
world and built a good deal, the same kind of situation
that existed with the German diaspora. There may actually be an important difference of temperament also. Undoubtedly it is the ghost of Hegel in the background of
certain Germans that motivates them to form a total system. That is certainly not so true of other architects.
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G. Howe and W. E. Lescaze,PSFS'Building,Philadelphia,1932.
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