Remix: Utopian Vision vs. American Dream

One apparently deliberate exclusion was Buckminster Fuller‘s geodesic American Pavilion dome at Expo ’67 in Montreal. As far as I can tell, Fuller‘s domes aren’t mentioned anywhere, perhaps because of their association with the also unacknowledged but widespread countercultural movement of lay architecture, equal parts creative anthropology (yurts, stackwall log cabins, tepees) and self-taught Outsider design. This ”professionals only“ bias is inescapable. While insider weirdo Antonio Gaudi is grudgingly allowed a corner, unschooled visionary (and MOCA neighbor) Simon Rodia‘s Watts Towers are nowhere. Such laical critiques of the architecture business strike close to home, developing as they do in response to the user-poisonous grids that devolved from the International Style -- indeed, from any hierarchically mandated vision of shelter. It would have been more truthful to devote at least some space to how bad most architecture is, how most architects kowtow to convention and the bottom line, slapping up strip malls, planned housing communities, salaryman apartments and prisons to earn their daily bread. History, even art history, is written by the winners, and the same strange blind spot that allows academic theoreticians to believe that verbally acknowledging this somehow erases the fact that the winners also own the academy, allows architects (and the rest of ”high culture“) to behave as though we were only a few hundred thousand well-heeled individuals living on a virgin planet.

On my second visit I lightened up. One certainly can’t accuse the curators of failing to address some of these concerns in the content of the show, though the critical element seems to fall off toward the end. As a concept, ”The Skyscraper: A 20th Century Building Type“ doesn‘t exactly raise the hackles. But the exceptional accompanying series of scale models by Roy Thurston certainly does. Running in a chronological line that seems to stretch halfway across the cavernous space, nine meticulously crafted wooden replicas chart the building type’s vertical progression from Adler and Sullivan‘s 1895 Guaranty Building, through the NYC landmarks of the Chrysler Building and Rockefeller Center, to Kenzo Tange’s unreal-looking New Tokyo City Hall.

This time, I was able to disengage from the grand narrative and slip from one pleasurable art experience to another. Art commissioned (the photographs, scale models, etc.) or choreographed (everything else) to illustrate a thesis usually can‘t stand on its own. In the case of ”At the End of the Century,“ it was only through willfully missing the point -- by approaching the artifacts presented as autonomous objects devoid of Historical Importance -- that I was able to shake off the oppressive monumentality of the conceit and see the exhibit for the splendid collection of artwork that it is. I advise you to visit twice.