The End of Dwelling

Architectural modernism shares with literary modernism an essential

ambiguity concerning the conditions of modernity that it is supposed to

represent. The common ground of modernist architecture and literature, then,

would lie in the nature of both art forms as products of and responses to

the age of modernity. Both art forms, for example, exhibit a twofold

disillusionment with the age: with the poverty of experience, and with the

attempts of bourgeois aesthetic value to mask this poverty; this resolve not

to "prettify" modern experience remains loyal to an authentic vision of the

age.

In architecture, the disillusionment with bourgeois aesthetic value is

to be found in Adolf Loos' attacks on ornament and kitsch, and in Le

Corbusier's call for order, geometry, and purity of form. In literature,

Pound's insistence on the clarity and economy of the concrete image, with

its rejection of sentiment, abstraction, and rhetoric, represents a purity

of form in poetics arising from similar impulses. It is rather a

disillusionment with the age itself that finds expression in Eliot's "The

Waste Land" and in his call for a "mythic method" as a way of "controlling,

or ordering, or giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of

futility and anarchy which is contemporary history".

In both art forms one can find a mimetic relation to the negativity,

the plurality, and the nomadic quality of modern experience. At issue in

architecture is a demystification of "dwelling," with its false promise of

rootedness, permanence, and womblike removal from the shock experience of

the modern. Against such notions of bourgeois GemŸtlichkeit, Siegfried

Gideon develops an architectural theory of transparency, transitoriness,

seriality, and the interpenetration of interior and exterior; the use of

iron, glass, and concrete as the frank disclosure of an architectural

"subconscious"; and the weakening of all hierarchical models such as those

embodied in fa*ades and monumental forms. In this spirit of demystification,

Massimo Cacciari will later champion an architecture of "nihilism". This

"negative mimesis" takes on other forms in the work of Robert Venturi and

Frank Gehry, both of whom create buildings that remain loyal to the

ambiguity, complexity, and contradictory nature of contemporary experience.

Modernist literature offers a number of celebrated analogues to

architecture's unreserved loyalty to this experience. Proust's sprawling,

monumental work of "recuperation" might seem an unlikely example here. But

no work is more dedicated than Proust's to a demystification of "dwelling,"

to the nomadic and transparent nature of the subject, to disclosing what was

concealed, to illuminating the labyrinthine passages of ambiguity and

contradiction, both in the individual psyche and in the social world.

Joyce's great work has all of these qualities of demystification and

transparency, with perhaps an even more systematic emphasis on the

interpenetration of inner and outer experience, and a willful representation

of modern consciousness as conditioned by the aleatory forms of urban space.

However, if we look in literature for an equivalent of the "emptying out" of

style inherent in the nihilistic architecture of Cacciari, we find its

purest form in the language of Samuel Beckett. In the wake of this radical

negativity, the question is whether the more recent postmodern turn toward

"play"-- in literature as well as in architecture-can attain the profound

resonance with contemporary experience that modernism has sounded.

David Spurr

Université de Genéve