01 Modern Architecture Introduction 序
“现代建筑”这个词无疑是模棱两可的。它既可以被用来指代所谓“现代时期”的所有房屋,无视其意识形态基础，当然也可以被更加具体地理解，从而成为一个其自身现代性与求变性的建构意识。后一种定义在历史中通常被同时代的建筑学所引用，而现在那些关于现代建筑历史的作品往往也遵循这一传统。早在十九世纪初，建筑师，历史学家与评论家们就对折衷主义表现出广泛的不满。这个证据确凿的态度反映了一段主要关注改良派与“前卫派”倾向的现代建筑历史，而非试图将整个建造过程当成一个非意识形态的运作，一个中立的领域来处理。
本书试图在历史先锋派的空间理想主义乌托邦与复杂而多元的资本主义文化中自我定位。对于此书，我并未试图使用一种百科全书式的叙事方式，尽管它的确遵循着一个完整的时间序列。并且，也许比起之前那些关于现代主义历史的作品，我更少对其下一个确切的结论，也更少流露出一种洋洋得意的情绪。（因此）这本书由许多小短文所组成，它们既可以被当作一则独立叙事的散文，也可以被视为一个整体中的一个部分，而每一个部分都与一系列反映了建筑对当代外在环境的对抗的重要阶段的主题息息相关。假如本书仍在很大程度上看起来就像一部专门描写大师的史书，那这只可能是因为这就是当代建筑其本身的特性，而并非如有些人声称的那样有关于（建筑的）匿名性。
关于术语：我或多或少地交替使用那些术语，譬如 “现代建筑”，“现代主义”，“前卫”等，试图把20世纪10年代到20年代渐进的一系列运动看做为一个整体。我也偶尔会用“历史先锋派”这个术语，它有着历史化运动的影响，从当代实践区分开来。我不跟随彼得·布尔格（ Peter Bürger）（于1984年出版了《先锋派理论》一书）在一篇关于达达主义摄影蒙太奇的文章中所提出的那样，将一种追求艺术现状以及生产关系的改变的先锋派与一种仅仅希望改变建筑形式的现代主义所区分开来。无疑，这两种截然相反的阵营也能够同时适用于建筑领域。但事实上，两者又并非那么的泾渭分明。而即使是那些最激进的左派构成主义者与马克思主义者如Hanners Meyer，在我看来，也无法摆脱一种唯美主义的倾向。然而考虑到早在审美趣味从古典的学院派艺术理论中脱离之前，它就已经属于一种自发性的范畴之内的话，这也并不十分令人惊讶。且不提上述列举的诸多普遍使用的术语——它们的有用之处恰恰体现在其语义学上的含糊不清——
从一个特定的角度来看，具有普适性的术语例如“现代主义”一词，也同样适用于新艺术运动——如果参照本书所暗示的它真正意义上的时间跨度的话。新艺术运动既是一个时代的开始，也是一个时代的终结，而它的成就以及局限也都属于这种截然相反的特性所导致的结果
现代主义理论的许多方面在如今看来仍是有效的，但亦有很多被归于虚构的领域，并且无法在其表面价值上被接受。这些虚构现在已成为历史，同时需要批判性的解释。以史为鉴便能够预知未来的进程，黑格尔派的这番见解或许是激励那些现代主义运动中领头人物们的主要思想。但是现在几乎没有人相信——如同曾经的现代主义建筑师们看起来相信的那样——建筑师就是某种程度上的预言家，具有得天独厚的优势来看清时代的精神和其形态的象征。
对于十九世纪那些思想先进的建筑师们和他们二十世纪的继任者们，去创造一种可以反映整个时代的统一建筑风格，似乎是一件必要的事，正如之前的那些风格所映射的（它们那个时代的风格）那样。这意味着对于一种退化至折衷主义，且被禁锢在一段只是无限循环而且已经走向灭亡的历史中的学术传统的摒弃。它并不意味着一种这样的摒弃，未来的建筑风格将会回归一种真正的传统，正如被坚信的那样，一个和谐而有机的、存在于每个时代的所有艺术现象之中的联合体。在一些宏大的历史时期，艺术家们是无法自由选择他们为之添砖加瓦的风格的。他们的思维、创造力、眼界已经被一整套的外界形态所限制，而正是这些限制，组成了他们这个世界的全部。（换句话说）艺术家们进入的是一个已定型的世界。对历史的研究揭示了一个道理：正是这些一个个独立的时期构成了一个不能分割的整体。一方面，在每个时期都有自己区别于其他时期的独特元素，而另一方面，这个所有元素聚成一束的有机联合体，本身便具有一种普适性。一个新的时代必须展现以往所有历史时期的艺术特征总和。（未完待續...）
原文
The term ‘modern architecture’ is ambiguous. It can be understood to refer to all
buildings of the modern period regardless of their ideological basis, or it can be
understood more specifically as an architecture conscious of its own modernity
and striving for change. It is in the latter sense that it has generally been defined
in histories of contemporary architecture, and the present book follows this
tradition. Already in the early nineteenth century, there was wide dissatisfaction
with eclecticism among architects, historians, and critics. This well-documented
attitude justifies a history of modern architecture concerned primarily with
reformist, ‘avant-garde’ tendencies, rather than one that attempts to deal with the
whole of architectural production as if it operated within a non-ideological,
neutral field.
It is in the space between the idealist utopias of the historical avantgardes
and the resistances, complexities, and pluralities of capitalist culture that this
book seeks to situate itself. Though not attempting to be in any way
encyclopedic, the narrative follows an overall chronological sequence, and tries
to be, perhaps, less certain in its outcome and less triumphalist than those of
most previous histories of modernism. The book consists of a number of essays
that can be read either as self-contained narratives or as part of a larger whole,
each dealing with a cluster of related themes reflecting an important moment in
the confrontation of architecture with the external conditions of modernity. If it
is still largely a history of the masters, that is because that was the nature of
modernism itself, despite its many claims to anonymity.
A word on terminology: I use—more or less interchangeably—the terms
‘modern architecture’, ‘Modernism’, ‘the avant-garde’, to mean the progressive
movements of the 1910s and 1920s as a whole. I also occasionally use the term
‘historical avant-garde’, which has the effect of historicizing the movement and
distinguishing it from contemporary practice. I do not follow Peter Bürger
(Theory of the Avant-Garde, 1984), who, in the context of Dada photomontage,
distinguishes between an avant-garde that sought to change the status of art
within the relations of production and a Modernism that sought only to change
its forms. That these two polar positions can be applied to architecture is
undeniable. But the line between them is hard to define, and even the work of
the Left Constructivists and Marxists like Hannes Meyer does not, in my
opinion, escape aestheticism. This is hardly surprising, since, before it could be
separated from the classical–academic theory of the arts, aesthetics had first to
become an autonomous category. Apart from the general terms mentioned above
—which are useful precisely because of their semantic vagueness—other terms
are used, either to define well-attested sub-movements, such as Futurism,
Constructivism, De Stijl, L’Esprit Nouveau, and the Neue Sachlichkeit (New
Objectivity), or migratory tendencies within the overall phenomenon of
modernism, such as organicism, neoclassicism, Expressionism, functionalism,
and rationalism. I have tried to explain what I mean by these slippery terms in
the appropriate chapters.
From a certain perspective, general terms such as ‘modernism’ can also be
applied to Art Nouveau—as, indeed, the temporal span of this book implies. To
try to avoid such ambiguities would be to make unsustainable claims for logic.
Art Nouveau was both the end and the beginning of an era, and its achievements
as well as its limitations were the result of this Janus-like perspective.
Many aspects of Modernist theory still seem valid today. But much in it
belongs to the realm of myth, and is impossible to accept at face value. The myth
itself has now become history, and demands critical interpretation. One of the
main ideas motivating the protagonists of the Modern Movement was the
Hegelian notion that the study of history made it possible to predict its future
course. But it is scarcely possible any longer to believe—as the Modernist
architects appear to have believed—that the architect is a kind of seer, uniquely
gifted with the power of discerning the spirit of the age and its symbolic forms.
Such a belief was predicated on the possibility of projecting the conditions of
the past onto the present. For progressive-minded architects of the nineteenth
century and their twentieth-century successors, it seemed essential to create a
unified architectural style that would reflect its age, just as previous styles had
reflected theirs. This meant the rejection of an academic tradition that had
degenerated into eclecticism, imprisoned in a history that had come to an end
and whose forms could only be endlessly recycled. It did not imply a rejection
of tradition as such. The architecture of the future would return to the true
tradition, in which, it was believed, a harmonious and organic unity had existed
between all the cultural phenomena of each age. In the great historical periods
artists had not been free to choose the style in which they worked. Their mental
and creative horizons had been circumscribed by a range of forms that
constituted their entire universe. The artist came into a world already formed.
The study of history seemed to reveal that these periods constituted indivisible
totalities. On the one hand, there were elements unique to each period; on the
other, the organic unity that bound these elements together was itself a universal.
The new age must exhibit the cultural totality characteristic of all historical
periods.
The question was never asked how a cultural totality, which by definition
had depended on an involuntary collective will, could now be achieved
voluntarily by a number of individuals. Nor did it ever seem to have occurred to
those who held this view that what separated the past from the present might be
precisely the absence of this inferred organic unity. According to the model of
the organic unity of culture, the task of the architect was first to uncover and then
create the unique forms of the age. But the possibility of such an architecture
depended on a definition of modernity that filtered out the very factors that
differentiated it most strongly from earlier traditions: capitalism and
industrialization. William Morris, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement,
had rejected both capitalism and machine production, a position that was at
least consistent. But the theorists of the German Werkbund, while they rejected
capitalism, wanted to retain industrialization. They condemned what they saw as
the materialistic values of both Marxism and Western liberal democracy, but
sought an alternative that would combine the benefits of modern technology with
a return to the preindustrial community values that capitalism was in the process
of destroying. The Modern Movement was both an act of resistance to social
modernity and an enthusiastic acceptance of an open technological future. It
longed for a world of territorial and social fixity, while at the same time
embracing, incompatibly, an economy and technology in flux. It shared this
belief in a mythical ‘third way’ between capitalism and communism with the
Fascist movements of the 1930s, and though it would be completely wrong to
brand it with the crimes of Fascism, it is surely no accident that the period of its
greatest intensity coincided with the anti-democratic, totalitarian political
movements that were such a dominant feature of the first half of the twentieth
century.
The conclusion would seem inescapable that the cultural unity and shared
artistic standards—whether deriving from folk or from aristocratic traditions—
demanded by the modern movement from its inception were increasingly out of
step with the political and economic realities of the twentieth century. Based on
an idealist and teleological conception of history, modernist theory seems
radically to have misread the very Zeitgeist it had itself invoked, ignoring the
complex and indeterminate nature of modern capitalism, with its dispersal of
power and its constant state of movement.
The revolution of modernism—partly voluntary, partly involuntary—has
irrevocably changed the course of architecture. But in the process it has itself
become transformed. Its totalizing ambitions can no longer be sustained. Yet, the
adventure of the Modern Movement is still capable of acting as an inspiration
for a present whose ideals are so much less clearly defined. It is the aim of this
book to sharpen our image of that adventure.
本书试图在历史先锋派的空间理想主义乌托邦与复杂而多元的资本主义文化中自我定位。对于此书，我并未试图使用一种百科全书式的叙事方式，尽管它的确遵循着一个完整的时间序列。并且，也许比起之前那些关于现代主义历史的作品，我更少对其下一个确切的结论，也更少流露出一种洋洋得意的情绪。（因此）这本书由许多小短文所组成，它们既可以被当作一则独立叙事的散文，也可以被视为一个整体中的一个部分，而每一个部分都与一系列反映了建筑对当代外在环境的对抗的重要阶段的主题息息相关。假如本书仍在很大程度上看起来就像一部专门描写大师的史书，那这只可能是因为这就是当代建筑其本身的特性，而并非如有些人声称的那样有关于（建筑的）匿名性。
关于术语：我或多或少地交替使用那些术语，譬如 “现代建筑”，“现代主义”，“前卫”等，试图把20世纪10年代到20年代渐进的一系列运动看做为一个整体。我也偶尔会用“历史先锋派”这个术语，它有着历史化运动的影响，从当代实践区分开来。我不跟随彼得·布尔格（ Peter Bürger）（于1984年出版了《先锋派理论》一书）在一篇关于达达主义摄影蒙太奇的文章中所提出的那样，将一种追求艺术现状以及生产关系的改变的先锋派与一种仅仅希望改变建筑形式的现代主义所区分开来。无疑，这两种截然相反的阵营也能够同时适用于建筑领域。但事实上，两者又并非那么的泾渭分明。而即使是那些最激进的左派构成主义者与马克思主义者如Hanners Meyer，在我看来，也无法摆脱一种唯美主义的倾向。然而考虑到早在审美趣味从古典的学院派艺术理论中脱离之前，它就已经属于一种自发性的范畴之内的话，这也并不十分令人惊讶。且不提上述列举的诸多普遍使用的术语——它们的有用之处恰恰体现在其语义学上的含糊不清——
从一个特定的角度来看，具有普适性的术语例如“现代主义”一词，也同样适用于新艺术运动——如果参照本书所暗示的它真正意义上的时间跨度的话。新艺术运动既是一个时代的开始，也是一个时代的终结，而它的成就以及局限也都属于这种截然相反的特性所导致的结果
现代主义理论的许多方面在如今看来仍是有效的，但亦有很多被归于虚构的领域，并且无法在其表面价值上被接受。这些虚构现在已成为历史，同时需要批判性的解释。以史为鉴便能够预知未来的进程，黑格尔派的这番见解或许是激励那些现代主义运动中领头人物们的主要思想。但是现在几乎没有人相信——如同曾经的现代主义建筑师们看起来相信的那样——建筑师就是某种程度上的预言家，具有得天独厚的优势来看清时代的精神和其形态的象征。
对于十九世纪那些思想先进的建筑师们和他们二十世纪的继任者们，去创造一种可以反映整个时代的统一建筑风格，似乎是一件必要的事，正如之前的那些风格所映射的（它们那个时代的风格）那样。这意味着对于一种退化至折衷主义，且被禁锢在一段只是无限循环而且已经走向灭亡的历史中的学术传统的摒弃。它并不意味着一种这样的摒弃，未来的建筑风格将会回归一种真正的传统，正如被坚信的那样，一个和谐而有机的、存在于每个时代的所有艺术现象之中的联合体。在一些宏大的历史时期，艺术家们是无法自由选择他们为之添砖加瓦的风格的。他们的思维、创造力、眼界已经被一整套的外界形态所限制，而正是这些限制，组成了他们这个世界的全部。（换句话说）艺术家们进入的是一个已定型的世界。对历史的研究揭示了一个道理：正是这些一个个独立的时期构成了一个不能分割的整体。一方面，在每个时期都有自己区别于其他时期的独特元素，而另一方面，这个所有元素聚成一束的有机联合体，本身便具有一种普适性。一个新的时代必须展现以往所有历史时期的艺术特征总和。（未完待續...）
原文
The term ‘modern architecture’ is ambiguous. It can be understood to refer to all
buildings of the modern period regardless of their ideological basis, or it can be
understood more specifically as an architecture conscious of its own modernity
and striving for change. It is in the latter sense that it has generally been defined
in histories of contemporary architecture, and the present book follows this
tradition. Already in the early nineteenth century, there was wide dissatisfaction
with eclecticism among architects, historians, and critics. This well-documented
attitude justifies a history of modern architecture concerned primarily with
reformist, ‘avant-garde’ tendencies, rather than one that attempts to deal with the
whole of architectural production as if it operated within a non-ideological,
neutral field.
It is in the space between the idealist utopias of the historical avantgardes
and the resistances, complexities, and pluralities of capitalist culture that this
book seeks to situate itself. Though not attempting to be in any way
encyclopedic, the narrative follows an overall chronological sequence, and tries
to be, perhaps, less certain in its outcome and less triumphalist than those of
most previous histories of modernism. The book consists of a number of essays
that can be read either as self-contained narratives or as part of a larger whole,
each dealing with a cluster of related themes reflecting an important moment in
the confrontation of architecture with the external conditions of modernity. If it
is still largely a history of the masters, that is because that was the nature of
modernism itself, despite its many claims to anonymity.
A word on terminology: I use—more or less interchangeably—the terms
‘modern architecture’, ‘Modernism’, ‘the avant-garde’, to mean the progressive
movements of the 1910s and 1920s as a whole. I also occasionally use the term
‘historical avant-garde’, which has the effect of historicizing the movement and
distinguishing it from contemporary practice. I do not follow Peter Bürger
(Theory of the Avant-Garde, 1984), who, in the context of Dada photomontage,
distinguishes between an avant-garde that sought to change the status of art
within the relations of production and a Modernism that sought only to change
its forms. That these two polar positions can be applied to architecture is
undeniable. But the line between them is hard to define, and even the work of
the Left Constructivists and Marxists like Hannes Meyer does not, in my
opinion, escape aestheticism. This is hardly surprising, since, before it could be
separated from the classical–academic theory of the arts, aesthetics had first to
become an autonomous category. Apart from the general terms mentioned above
—which are useful precisely because of their semantic vagueness—other terms
are used, either to define well-attested sub-movements, such as Futurism,
Constructivism, De Stijl, L’Esprit Nouveau, and the Neue Sachlichkeit (New
Objectivity), or migratory tendencies within the overall phenomenon of
modernism, such as organicism, neoclassicism, Expressionism, functionalism,
and rationalism. I have tried to explain what I mean by these slippery terms in
the appropriate chapters.
From a certain perspective, general terms such as ‘modernism’ can also be
applied to Art Nouveau—as, indeed, the temporal span of this book implies. To
try to avoid such ambiguities would be to make unsustainable claims for logic.
Art Nouveau was both the end and the beginning of an era, and its achievements
as well as its limitations were the result of this Janus-like perspective.
Many aspects of Modernist theory still seem valid today. But much in it
belongs to the realm of myth, and is impossible to accept at face value. The myth
itself has now become history, and demands critical interpretation. One of the
main ideas motivating the protagonists of the Modern Movement was the
Hegelian notion that the study of history made it possible to predict its future
course. But it is scarcely possible any longer to believe—as the Modernist
architects appear to have believed—that the architect is a kind of seer, uniquely
gifted with the power of discerning the spirit of the age and its symbolic forms.
Such a belief was predicated on the possibility of projecting the conditions of
the past onto the present. For progressive-minded architects of the nineteenth
century and their twentieth-century successors, it seemed essential to create a
unified architectural style that would reflect its age, just as previous styles had
reflected theirs. This meant the rejection of an academic tradition that had
degenerated into eclecticism, imprisoned in a history that had come to an end
and whose forms could only be endlessly recycled. It did not imply a rejection
of tradition as such. The architecture of the future would return to the true
tradition, in which, it was believed, a harmonious and organic unity had existed
between all the cultural phenomena of each age. In the great historical periods
artists had not been free to choose the style in which they worked. Their mental
and creative horizons had been circumscribed by a range of forms that
constituted their entire universe. The artist came into a world already formed.
The study of history seemed to reveal that these periods constituted indivisible
totalities. On the one hand, there were elements unique to each period; on the
other, the organic unity that bound these elements together was itself a universal.
The new age must exhibit the cultural totality characteristic of all historical
periods.
The question was never asked how a cultural totality, which by definition
had depended on an involuntary collective will, could now be achieved
voluntarily by a number of individuals. Nor did it ever seem to have occurred to
those who held this view that what separated the past from the present might be
precisely the absence of this inferred organic unity. According to the model of
the organic unity of culture, the task of the architect was first to uncover and then
create the unique forms of the age. But the possibility of such an architecture
depended on a definition of modernity that filtered out the very factors that
differentiated it most strongly from earlier traditions: capitalism and
industrialization. William Morris, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement,
had rejected both capitalism and machine production, a position that was at
least consistent. But the theorists of the German Werkbund, while they rejected
capitalism, wanted to retain industrialization. They condemned what they saw as
the materialistic values of both Marxism and Western liberal democracy, but
sought an alternative that would combine the benefits of modern technology with
a return to the preindustrial community values that capitalism was in the process
of destroying. The Modern Movement was both an act of resistance to social
modernity and an enthusiastic acceptance of an open technological future. It
longed for a world of territorial and social fixity, while at the same time
embracing, incompatibly, an economy and technology in flux. It shared this
belief in a mythical ‘third way’ between capitalism and communism with the
Fascist movements of the 1930s, and though it would be completely wrong to
brand it with the crimes of Fascism, it is surely no accident that the period of its
greatest intensity coincided with the anti-democratic, totalitarian political
movements that were such a dominant feature of the first half of the twentieth
century.
The conclusion would seem inescapable that the cultural unity and shared
artistic standards—whether deriving from folk or from aristocratic traditions—
demanded by the modern movement from its inception were increasingly out of
step with the political and economic realities of the twentieth century. Based on
an idealist and teleological conception of history, modernist theory seems
radically to have misread the very Zeitgeist it had itself invoked, ignoring the
complex and indeterminate nature of modern capitalism, with its dispersal of
power and its constant state of movement.
The revolution of modernism—partly voluntary, partly involuntary—has
irrevocably changed the course of architecture. But in the process it has itself
become transformed. Its totalizing ambitions can no longer be sustained. Yet, the
adventure of the Modern Movement is still capable of acting as an inspiration
for a present whose ideals are so much less clearly defined. It is the aim of this
book to sharpen our image of that adventure.
