Misconstruing modernism

In his article in Sacred Architecture, “Ratzinger, Beauty, and the Church,” [1] Vincent Twomey cites Roger Scruton’s backhanded compliment to Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp (below), acknowledging its “magnificence” but calling it “an expression of private originality” (in Twomey’s gloss). Following Scruton’s conservative traditionalist line, he rules out modernism’s appropriateness for sacred architecture: “by its very nature as modernist, [it is] corrosive of community.” Citing Scruton, he adds that “it cannot produce a modern monumental style that can be shared by others” since it “rejects the notion of common style or form rooted in tradition,” concluding that “without such an agreed style, it is impossible to create the kind of civic space where people can feel at home.”

The attempt by conservative traditionalist partisans to secure the Trump administration’s blessing of its “agreed style” as the official one for federal buildings, a hegemony that these same partisans deplore about modernism in general, is symptomatic of wider debates about issues like abortion for which, in the eyes of their often-horrified secular critics, traditionalists seek to impose their sectarian views on others who profoundly disagree.

The public debate that the push for a traditionalist federal style engendered revealed the essential hubris of its advocates, running far ahead of public opinion. Efforts to ban abortion entirely after Roe vs. Wade was turned back by a Trump-contorted Supreme Court have similarly encountered substantial blowback. The Midterms, advertised as a Republican triumph, foundered on popular distaste for the party’s overreach.

The modernism Scruton abhorred was always a straw man of his own creation. Modernism’s moments of apparent hegemony generally coincided with a lapse into sclerosis. Corporate modernism in the late 1970s exhibits some of “the charm of the fridge” Twomey mentions, but this led quickly to postmodernism, a concerted effort to break through the impasse that bravely if often superficially looked to the past for inspiration.

My long friendship with Thomas Gordon Smith, begun at U.C. Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design in the mid-1970s, coincides with this transition. I first wrote about him as an early postmodernist, [2] and then interviewed him at length as an established architect-educator in a broadly classical tradition. [3] His Richmond Hill House in Richmond, California (below) is one of the high points of postmodernism, but — as Rem Koolhaas, visiting Paolo Portoghesi’s Presence of the Past exhibit at the Venice Biennale, another postmodernist high point, noted at the time — Smith alone, of the participating architects, was actually engaging seriously and creatively with classicism. [4]

In discussing his work in 2017, Smith asserted that he should be seen as a modern architect. His radicalism as a postmodernist was to take classicism seriously as the ground of his own creativity. To that end, he threw himself into understanding classicism — reading the treatises, seeing the buildings, and most of all immersing himself, often by clambering around them to work out how his great predecessors achieved specific effects, especially with natural light. (Smith’s oratorio project, carried out as an American Academy of Rome Fellow, is one example of how he applied this research. [5]) But he also recounted how he visited the great monuments of European modernism, including Ronchamp, and how much he learned from them. He saw that an architect like Louis Kahn, while no classicist, was completely serious, a master in his own way.

Smith lived and died a devout Roman Catholic. I have the program of his funeral, with his marvelous drawings. Much of his work had Church patrons, like the churches of Bernini and Borromini against which he measured it. Yet it was within our here and now that Smith taught and practiced. He wasn’t an ideologue, but more in the lineage of a pluralist like Isaiah Berlin or a poet like the Eliot of the Four Quartets, modern within a tradition that took in and transcended the present, that most of all tried to avoid the aspic of a settled view. His Rural Wisconsin House [top and below], a later work, revisits Richmond Hill House’s postmodern impulse.

Although these are residential, not religious projects, and Smith’s religious work was consistently classical, I don’t think Smith would agree with Scruton’s contention, echoed by Twomey, that modern architecture lacks a sacred dimension and is inherently private rather than communal. (6) His goal was to recover the past as a creative field for architecture, not to exclude modernism as apostasy. The assertion of a “common style or form” is itself specious, disproven by the example of Pugin, who railed against classicism in favor of the Gothic in terms very similar to the postmodern critique of modernism. Mitchell Schwarzer also argues convincingly that in 19th-century Germany, several styles vied unsuccessfully for prominence. (7)

The word “modern” has lost its equivalence to “contemporary” for younger scholars, who see it as a historical period, now supplanted. I haven’t made this transition, because I take Smith’s point about modernism — that it is inherently expansive, with methods of thinking and working that range past style or aesthetics, mere functionality, or a fetish for “beauty” that imagines certain motifs imbue it. I think it’s misconstrued by conservative traditionalists, who would benefit from Smith’s more catholic attitude.

Sources

1. D. Vincent Twomey, S.V.D., “Ratzinger, Beauty, and the Church,” Sacred Architecture 43, 2023, pp. 20–23.
2. John J. Parman, “My Postmodernists,” TraceSF, 12 January 2012, and Urban Issues, Pallas Gallery, 2022, pp. 81–85.
3. John J. Parman, “The Classical Imagination,” Room One Thousand 5, 2017, and Urban issues, Pallas Gallery, 2022, pp. 86–95.
4. Richard John, Thomas Gordon Smith and the Rebirth of Classical Architecture, Andreas Papadakis, 2001.
5. I wrote an introduction to an archive of Smith’s drawings that Marika Wilson Smith has put together, envisioning a catalogue raisonné.
6. My sister wrote to me that when she visited Ronchamp in 1963, “it was pouring and a sea of mud, but still beautiful. Full of pilgrims.”
7. Mitchell Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity, Cambridge, 1995.