In 1969, Florentine architectural firm Superstudio presented its “Continuous Monument: An Architectural Model for Total Urbanization.” This satirical proposal included a series of now iconic illustrations in which the entire planet is encased in a single, urban sprawl of modernist construction.
The Continuous Monument is a surface manifestation of the same uneasy intuition that generates Internet-era urban legends concerning a vast underground complex of office space inhabited by a dark manifestation of rationalism that has come to consume the human condition.
A certain totalising, all-engrossing (making all gross) quality in the current cultural moment conditions us to the point that we may ask whether it is even still possible to build traditional buildings of the sort we see in historic city centers. Of course, the answer is that it is, but a sense of impotent disconnection from the beauty of the past can limit our imagination.
If politics is the art of the possible, it is also de facto often the art of defining the possible, and therefore the impossible.
Social control requires that the scope of action a population views as possible, the aims it considers attainable, be narrowed until the agenda being pursued appears to be the only route available. This is usually done by keeping people hooked on crises, so that policy is always sold as a necessary solution to a pressing emergency.
Today, recovering the sense of possibility, and genuine originality, comes not through trying to originate something new as in a vacuum, thereby re-proposing the principles of drab modernism, but through being true to the origin. Originality as deference for origins.
Early 19th-century German architect Gottfried Semper noted that words to do with building construction often shared elements with descriptors of clothing (such as wand, “wall,” and gewand, “garment,” in German) theorizing the two disciplines, along with others, had a common origin. Specifically, he imagined that a primitive use of fabric for both tents and clothes would have meant that advances in fabric weaving or treating of skins affected the architecture and fashion of the day in tandem: it is “certain that the beginnings of building coincided with the beginnings of textile art,” wrote Semper, meaning that “cladding the walls was therefore the original, its spatial, architectonic meaning the essential; the wall itself being secondary.” The grid of bricks on a wall may differ from the grid of yarn in clothes in terms of their material and technique, but both modulate the same vocation, that of the artisan.
Semper called this the ‘original art’ or “Urkunst.” (Architect Stewart Hicks explores the topic on YouTube, and I would also recommend The Aesthetic City channel from which I am drawing inspiration).
If the visible, patterned textile came before the solid wall, then the visible, ornamented portion of a building, such as its façade, should not be seen as secondary to its ‘bones,’ but respected as having the longer pedigree of the two. Utility does not usurp aesthetics, and understanding construction as a form of weaving retains an essential connection to the character of organic life, rather than becoming untethered from it. The “gross” or denser portion (solid walls) is an extension of the subtle (decoration) even as, for William Blake, the ordinary body is a lower, visible portion of the soul. Symmetrical, ordered geometry in decoration responds to the same imperative, as does the traditional use of biological patterns, magnetizing the mineral kingdom into a semblance of the plant (and occasionally animal) kingdom.
The spiritual significance of modernism and postmodernism in architecture, then, is to place the subtle at the service of the dense, reversing the proper order of things, a cultural triumph of occultism over religion, so to speak. Of a piece with a generalized lack of regard for modesty and intimacy, it tends to show the bones of its buildings in a macabre denuding for the sake of architects in-the-know who appreciate the wink and the nod of an eccentric statement, rather than properly clothing them in wholesome flesh, healthy skin, and beautiful clothes.
Bones and bare essentials are everywhere the same. The lowest common denominator is, just that: common. Surfaces vary, and for that reason, express something specific about the depth which they clothe. Clothes serve as uniforms and costumes, signaling the wearer’s professional or ludic context as well as the community to which he belongs. A proper, spiritually satisfying subordination of wall to cladding, therefore, is more hospitable to a new flourishing of local tastes and identity than modernism.
Superstudio was right to intuit that modern architecture’s vector is towards uniformity. A defense of cultural differentiation and local identity, in contrast, comes by way of creatively tapping the wellsprings of tradition.
