Towards Understanding Visual Styles As Inventions Without Expiration Dates: How the View of Architectural History as Permanent Presence Might Contribute to Reforming Education of Architects and Designers. ---->>> By Jan MICHL /...
moreTowards Understanding Visual Styles As Inventions Without Expiration Dates: How the View of Architectural History as Permanent Presence Might Contribute to Reforming Education of Architects and Designers.
---->>> By Jan MICHL
/ ABSTRACT: ---->>>
The main thesis of the article is that there are good reasons for seeing the pre-modernist architectural and design idioms as still valid and feasible visual inventions, in contrast to the modernist view that has considered them as stone-dead expressions of past historical periods. The thesis is backed up by philosophical arguments developed by the late British philosopher Karl Popper.
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The article’s first half discusses the central aspects of the modernist theory of architecture, mainly from the perspective of Popper’s critique of what he called “historicism”, i.e. the belief that the course of history is set and that some people are able to discern its direction and therefore act in a historically correct manner. The present author sees modernism as an approach to architecture based on such a belief, and he criticizes the modernist theory as a train of arguments aimed at promoting a special, beyond-fashion standing of the new modernist idiom, as well as of the modernists themselves.
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In its second half, the article juxtaposes the dismissive modernist attitude towards the past architectural idoms with Karl Popper’s epoch-making claim about the existence of what he called “objective knowledge”. This knowledge Popper describes as knowledge without a knowing subject, a kind of knowledge that exists independently of any person, in a realm of its own, and accessible to everybody. An example of such objective knowledge can be the library of books, containing existing theories, hypotheses, discussions, problems and solutions. Here, according to Popper, belongs also the world of knowledge contained in the existing works of art, including architecture and design.
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In the present author’s opinion, Popper’s claim about the existence of objective knowledge throws a novel light on the problem of creativity in general, and with it also on the modernist attitude towards the past. Popper sees human creativity in any area as an activity fully anchored in the objective world of already existing knowledge, and as impossible without such anchorage. This view is pithily summarized in Popper’s remark, that “…if anybody were to start where Adam started, he would not get further than Adam did …”.
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According to the present author, the key feature of the world of objective knowledge is that every single entity belonging to it exists in the present, in parallel with all other entities. The world of objective knowledge is therefore a permanently present world. It is accessible to, and adoptable by, anybody who has an interest in making its content into his own. Being accessible and public, this world is at the same time criticizable and this criticizability is what makes its further creative developments possible. The claim about the objective existence of knowledge then implies that all works of art, including architecture, although diachronic in their origin, exist in a synchronic dimension, in a permanent presence. In the world of objective knowledge, there is therefore no difference between “architecture of the past” and “architecture of the present”, as both exist in the same temporal dimension, i.e. right now.
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If we accept the claim that there is a world of objective knowledge, and that this world is a foundation of human creativity, it will be obvious that the modernist architects did not, and could not, start from zero, simply because it is unfeasible. Modernists all the time operated within the world of existing aesthetic solutions, existing theories, and existing problems, without temporal borders, that is, just as any other kind of creative enterprise in the past. The modernist assertion, that architectural idioms of the pre-Bauhaus past are not to be re-used in the present, because they are visual expressions of no longer existing past conditions, is then seen as hardly more than a way of denigrating the customary revivalist approach to architecture, in order to secure the status of historical necessity for the innovative modernist idiom. Such attitude to the pre-modernist architecture necessarily collided with how the people, who never shared the modernist objectives, i.e. the majority of the public, perceive the architecture and design of the pre-Bauhaus past.
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The present author concludes that there are no reasonable arguments for why the contemporary schools of architecture and design should keep limiting the education of future architects and designers to the modernist visual idiom alone, as they have been doing since the 1950s.
