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July 22, 2003
Lear's Shadow is a fantastic site. I came across it courtesy of wood s lot
This project called Discovery Walk in Kafkatown goes way beyond my few meagre insights into modernist architecture in Australia (here and here). It works with a very sophisticated account of modernist architecture and corporate power in Toronto.
In part one Douglas downplays place in favour of a modernist copying/emulating of the New York skyline in Toronto. He is right to do so. Being modern was being like New York in the second half of the twentieth century. If your city did not look like a cut down version of New York, then it was not modern. Hence Sydney was modern. It had the skyline. Adelaide is not modern. It has no skyline of note. It remains pre-modern.
And Douglas is quite right to suggest that the modernist, commercial office building (ie., the glass skyscraper) has surpassed the civic and religious architecture of our time in monumentality. As he writes:
'Mies [van der Rohe's] style sent the rectangles skyward, seeming both to signal and to reinforce the role of "the commercial" as the successor to religion, and even to civil society itself in North America.'
Toronto got its very own Mies Tower. That is prestige and status for Canadian capitalism. Sydney had to make do with its homegrown Harry Seidler. His roots were also in the rejection of decorative adornments, frivolous subjective trimmings and traditional built forms.
There is a refusal to compromise in the buildings built by these high modernist architects. But their corporate towers in the CBD do signify the projection of power on a massive scale. That is the historical truth this kind of art discloses.
I just cannot read this art work as being oppositional to society. As Douglas says its aesthetic rationality has more to do with homogeneity, hierarchy, and human beings as functional units of a larger, more significant corporate whole that functioned like a machine. That is the political function such buildings have in our society and they are experienced as oppressive forms in terms of the way they function in our lives.
This sort of ahistorical modernism should be dethroned as it's aesthetic brushes the past into the gutter as just so much rubbish; and its buildings fails to offer an alternative vision-- the last conceivable refuge for a different understanding of nature, culture and society to that embodied in the instrumental rationality of corporate Australia.
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