MEANS AND ENDS. If someone argues that the purpose of studying mathematics is to build self-esteem, and proposes a study method that produces confident students who cannot do long division, then making the counter argument that the study method is a failure will fall on deaf ears. This is, of course, because the study method is in fact a rousing success. It produces exactly what its proponents want. It makes little sense to argue about the means, when you have completely different views about the ends.

Similarly, as last week's New York Times Sunday Magazine shows, postmodern architects are very good at achieving their goals. The stated purpose of architecture according to the post-modernists is conflict, political statement, ridicule, and satire. They want to make you feel uncomfortable and ill at ease in their buildings. This is the explicit design goal.

If you don't think these people are seriously disturbed, see what they have to say about themselves:

But Eisenman, who became known in the 70's for building spare, cubelike houses, has done almost no work on it himself. ''I don't necessarily need or want to live in my own environment,'' he says. ''I mean, my head is not what I want to live in.''

These architects want to destroy the long-established spontaneous order that is architecture. The means they employ are perfectly suited to achieve their ends. They are successful by their own definition of architecture. What is to be gained by directly arguing with them? I am reminded of Paul Johnson's dismissal of the '60s:

Such waves of folly recur periodically in history. The wise historian does not seek too assiduosly to explain them. He merely notes that they occur and have baleful consequences.

So it is with modernistic architecture.

In economics, however, there is still some agreement over ends. Most economists will at least recognize the same set of aims, and argue about the means. I wonder how long this will last. We already see a few economists arguing that inequality is more important than the absolute living standards of the poorest segment of society. Once economic equality becomes the chief end, there can be little useful discussion of means. So, while we still can, let's argue about economics.

Which brings us to this paragraph in an op-ed piece in the New York Times last week by Yale economist Robert J. Schiller:

Reframing the tax system in this way could help deal effectively with one of the world's most serious problems, which is the potential for growing inequality. Highly talented, educated and hard-working people living in less developed countries often earn only a small fraction of what their counterparts in advanced countries earn. As Americans increasingly compete on a world market, there is a serious risk that their jobs will be given to people overseas and their incomes will drop precipitously — producing sudden profit opportunities for other Americans and creating sharp increases in inequality here.

This is a remarkable paragraph. It is a perfect example of the obfuscation and inanity that passes for economics.

Lets start with this assertion: One of the worlds's most serious problems is the potential for growing inequality. Not existing inequality, but the potential for growing inequality. Not poverty today, not lack of clean water and sanitation, but the fact that in the future, some people may get wealthier faster than others. How long is one’s list of the world’s biggest problems if the mere potential for growing inequality makes the cut? Furthermore, for Schiller, it is not inequality between America and the third world, and certainly not inequality between third world regimes and their hapless people that has him worried. For Schiller, one of the world’s most serious problems is the potential for growing inequality within America. While I can understand (but would not agree with) the position of leftists that one of America’s most serious problems is growing inequality within America, it is hard to take seriously anyone who claims that the potential for growing inequality within America is one the entire worlds’s most serious problems.

Schiller is alarmed over the “serious risk” that, in a global economy, America will lose jobs to cheap labor in other countries. But one of the primary results of American jobs moving to third world countries is a decrease in inequality between wealthy America and the poor, less developed nations that get the jobs. If your primary concern is growing inequality, then you should think this is a good thing.

But for Schiller, these jobs are going to “highly talented, educated and hard-working people living in less developed countries.” In other words, theses jobs are going to people who already have a relative advantage within their own country. Thus, inequality is increasing within each particular third world country receiving these jobs. (Note that even if all of the people of an undeveloped country are uniformly destitute, giving some of them jobs will necessarily increase inequality.)

Does the potential for growing inequality within a particular country trump a decrease in overall world-wide inequality?

It is easy to see that anyone who focuses on inequality is likely to be quite confused, conflicted, and generally incoherent when thinking and writing about the implications of economic policy.

The problem is that any change, good or bad, in the state of an economy can increase or decrease inequality. Wipe out every bit of wealth in America and inequality disappears. Confer untold wealth on the poorest 5 percent of Americans and inequality increases. Which scenario would you rather see happen?

But Schiller has deeper problems with the whole economic process. It is not the Americans loosing their jobs to cheap labor overseas that bothers him as much as the sudden profit opportunities for other Americans. But every successful act of entrepreneurship can, and probably does, increase inequality. If an entrepreneur invents, patents, and markets a labor saving device, jobs may be lost and inequality may increase, but overall living standards may rise. Dynamic inequality is an inescapable part of economic growth and better living standards for the world's poor.

NOTHING LIKE A WARM, SPRING DAY, to turn one's thoughts to building.

SCORNAMENT: Friedrich Blowhard has an extremely interesting post on modernism and ornament. Last week there was a front page article in the WSJ on the WWII allied bombing of a particular German city. The city was completely destroyed, and subsequently, in the words of a local historian, "rebuilt without a face." An entire city with no ornament.

I have often thought that true architectural styles are like the human faces of different peoples and races: Endless variation, all beautiful, and many times even more beautiful when mixed up a bit. While there is wide variation in personal preference when it comes to sexual attraction, virtually all people feel comfortable looking upon the human face, regardless of color or particular features. Modernistic architecture, by contrast, is a face with no lips, no protruding nose, and no recessed cavities for the eyes. Modernism is a horribly disfigured burn victim. Some may prefer full lips, some may prefer thin lips, but only a seriously disturbed person prefers no lips on a featureless face.

The contempt for the human nature of architecture by modernists is all too evident. Here is blogger AC Douglas sneering at the only WTC entry with any hint of ornament, emphasis added:

But things could have been worse. Lots worse. We could have been stuck with that cloyingly nostalgic and unimaginatively human-scaled aesthetic insult submitted by Peterson/Littenberg Architecture and Urban Design, and then where would we have been.

It was noted in the comments on another recent Blowhard post that modernistic buildings can look beautiful with a warm yellow or red sun reflecting off them in the late afternoon. This is indeed true. In this case the structure functions much like a distant mountain or butte. But a building is not a mountain, and while the white capped Rockies may make a beautiful backdrop to Denver, they hardly function as nice place to meet someone or have afternoon tea. Similarly, the Sahara desert has its moments, but strange beauty at a distance does not qualify as architecture. A building must be beautiful from a distance and also beautiful close up. Without ornament, it may succeed at the former, but it will certainly fail at the latter.

THE SKYSCRAPER AND MODERNISM. In the Lileks post I note below, he also writes:

When the skyscraper art was new, no one knew what the hell to do with it. They just piled one floor on top of the other, slathered the facades with ersatz classical details, and put out the FOR RENT sign. Eventually the theorists came along - Sullivan, Wright, Corbu, Mies - and each helped shape how their era thought about the tall building as an object of art as well as commerce.

This City Journal article by Robert Adam gives a different perspective.

MODERNISM IS NOT A STYLE. Lileks skewers the two finalists in the WTC design-a-thon, as only he can do. As usual, there are too many good lines to even start quoting, so if you haven’t already, go read the whole thing. However, there are a few points I want to comment on and perhaps take issue with. The first regards modernism. Lileks writes:

I’m not a foe of modernism, and yes, I know how pretentious that sounds - fear not, modernism! I come in peace! I love buildings from every era and style. One Seagram building can transform a medium-sized city’s downtown. Five can depress it. Ten can ruin it.

Well, I am a foe of modernism, and I have no problem saying that the Seagram building sucks. Modernism is not simply another style in a long tradition of styles. It is not Beethoven receiving the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Hayden. It’s not blues, bluegrass, rock or punk. As Lileks notes himself, it is atonal. Modernism is the antithesis of architecture. If the Seagram building were a music CD, it would gather dust on the shelf or serve as a coaster.

It is interesting to ask why a fan of the Seagram building thinks 10 more of them would ruin a city. Now I understand that too much of a good thing is bad for you, but there is something else going on here.

Who would deny that one brownstone on an Upper Eastside street is lonely, 5 is better, and 10 in a row is called charm? Who would argue that Cape May has too many Victorian homes? Who would argue that New York’s main post office was enhanced by the destruction of Penn Station? Every successful urban place has many buildings of the same style repeated in endless variation. This is in fact what makes these places successful. That modernism cannot accomplish this is a fatal indictment.

If you cannot line a street with 5 or 10 buildings of a particular style and have the total effect be greater than the sum of the parts then you are not working with an architectural style. Maybe you are working with art or sculpture, but you are not working with architecture. Think about an entire university campus designed in the putative style of modernism or postmodernism. It’s laughable, it’s silly, it’s absurd. Compare it to Yale, Harvard or Princeton. Case closed.

Coming soon: Why Rockefeller Center is successful in spite of the RCA building (or GE building, or whatever it is called now.)

WOW, I'M ON A BLOGROLL! 2 Blowhards give me a link on their Sekimori designed site. Thank you.

OVER AT THE INVISIBLE HAND, Phillip Murphy has a great Muschamp post.

MODERNIST PRESERVATION. I have been shamed back to blogging by the kind words of some fellow travellers, most recently by one half of 2 Blowhards, whose site looks very interesting. (It also looks really good). I'm going to visit the blowhards on a regular basis. Anyway, I thought I'd try and get back to some regular blogging.

One of the themes of this blog -- wait, I have not posted enough to actually have a theme -- let me start over: one of the themes I would like to explore on this blog is the relationship between Modernism and Socialism on the one hand, and Traditional Building and Capitalism on the other. What Hayek said about mankind might apply to architecture as well: "Man is good neither by nature nor by reason, but by tradition."

I'll start with a clipping from my Muschamp file dating back to to 2000 (Sunday New York Times, December 17). Muschamp wrote a typically sycophantic article on DOCOMOMO, an organization devoted to preserving modernistic buildings and even entire neighborhoods. It would be worth examining what DOCOMOMO means by a modernist neighborhood, and how it differs from federally funded housing project, but for now I want to examine the oxymoron of "modernist preservation."

Muschamp says:

Thanks to Docomomo, preservation is now nullifying the disconnect between past and present that it formally reinforced.

Let me explain this. Preservation was bad when the preservationists were trying to save New York's Pennsylvania Station, now it is good because the preservationists are trying to save the glass boxes and cinderblock shacks of the International Style. Of course, modernistic buildings are the very essence of the "disconnect between past and present." But what would you expect from Mr. Ugly Is Good?

One reason we preserve buildings is to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next. How are good buildings actually built? If there were no pre-modernist buildings for us to look at, we would have no example of how to properly construct a brick wall, let alone a gabled roof. But this is antithetical to the very idea of modernism. Modernism, in all of its manifestations, explicitly rejects the received, accumulated wisdom of our ancestors. Architect Frank Gehry summed this up when he said over thirty years ago, “I want to provide services at the highest possible level, and to do so I have to deal with the real issues, the clearest statement of the problem uncluttered by ‘How was it done before?’” Any building created by a mind “uncluttered by how it was done before” is not worth building in the first place. There is simply no wisdom, knowledge or objective beauty in a modernist building to preserve.

In an earlier article (New York Times, December 24, 1999), Muschamp himself noted the inherent difficulty, if not the sheer stupidity, of preserving the glass boxes so beloved by modernists:

Since the main effect of the glass is to dissolve the boundary between inside and outside, it makes little sense to preserve only exteriors. But interiors, which are usually bland as well as subject to the changing needs of owners and tenants, scarcely seem worth designation.

This gets close to the heart of the problem. Modernists want to tear down the boundaries between inside and outside, private and public. If the technology were available, modernist architects would create shapeless, weightless “buildings” out of invisible “force fields” which would go from transparent to opaque to one-way, all with the flip of three-position switch. This is what they are striving for -- they only use glass because it is an available technology. In this context, preservation is meaningless. In fact, since architecture is really all about creating boundaries, not dissolving them, it is arguably the case that while modernist buildings may qualify as bad art, they cannot rightly be called architecture.

We also preserve buildings for economic reasons. It is expensive to construct a building that is beautiful and will last. We preserved New York’s Grand Central station because it would cost a fortune to build it from scratch. When a modernist building reaches the end of its purposefully short life span, it is cheaper to tear it down and build anew. Lincoln Center, for example, is looking forward to a $1.5 billion renovation in a misguided attempt to preserve itself. As documented in City Journal, it will in all likelihood require another $1.5 billion thirty years from now for the very same reasons it requires such a stupendous sum to fix it today. It makes more sense to tear it down and build it again. Modernist buildings are not meant to last by their architects or their builders. Machines for living and working, as Le Corbusier would say, are to be depreciated and replaced, not lovingly preserved.

Modernist architects suffer from the same misguided philosophy that inspired socialism. In an effort to create their utopias, they sweep away the millennia of accumulated human experience that has produced civilization. They view architecture as a scientific problem to be solved, like Marxist economists view the problem of production as a mere system of equations in wait of a supercomputer powerful enough to solve it, like Hilary Clinton saw health care as a problem that a few bright minds could summarily dispatch. The results are similarly disastrous. Like everyone on the Left, modernist architects are frustrated by rules and conventions. They despise clients who want buildings that, well, look like buildings. No amount of preservation can save modernist buildings because they are built on a foundation of fatally flawed theory and are bound to crumble as surely as socialist economies.

LIZ Le MOND forwards a phenomenal lecture given by Roger Kimball at Yale University. It was the keynote address for a two-day symposium titled “Eisenman, Krier: Two Ideologies.” Kimball is laugh-out-loud funny on Eisenman. I don't know where to start to quote, so read the whole thing. There is an exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture.