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The Beaux-Arts:A Reconsideration of Meaning in ArchitectureBy John Lobell AIA JournalNovember 1975 Last month, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a show on the American and French Beaux-Arts tradition in architecture. A series of recent circumstances has aroused a renewed interest in the Beaux-Arts tradition, among them the failure of the International Style (or European modern movement) to provide a satisfactory urban environment, the analysis of meaning in architecture made possible by semiology, and the realization that Louis Kahn was as much a Beaux-Arts architect as a participant in the European modern movement. American architecture over the past 100 years has been dominated by four distinct schools: "organic" as represented by Furness, Richardson, Sullivan, Wright, Goff and Soleri; "steel frame" as represented by Jenney, Burnham & Root, Adler & Sullivan, Mies and Skidmore: "Beaux-Arts" as represented by McKim, Mead & White, Burnham, Cret and Kan; and "European modern" as represented by Mies, Gropius, Breuer, Franzen, Johnson, Rudolf and the Five. This article is concerned with the last two, the Beaux-Arts and European modern. (I am using the term "European modern" as somewhat more inclusive than "the International Style," which would include frank Lloyd Wright and be too broad. European modern refers to the European tradition crystallized at the Bauhaus and imported to the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s when Mies became dean at the Illinois Institute of Technology and Gropius and Breuer came to Harvard.) While actually a system of education based on competitions and practiced in the U.S. and France until the 1940s, Beaux-Arts architecture is most widely identified with its style, specifically the use of the classical orders, monumentality and symmetrical plans. The European modern movement rejected those orders as reflective of a culture which had died (despite political attempts to sustain the "Roman empire" up until world War I); it rejected monumentality as inappropriate to democratic society; and it rejected the symmetrical plan as reflective of social and spatial concepts which were also outdated. (In this, the European moderns were not original. One of the major sources for their stylistic directions was Frank Lloyd Wright, who had come to similar conclusions a decade earlier.) But what we are beginning to realize today is that the differences between the Beaux-Arts concept of architecture and the European modern concept are far deeper than either style or organization of plan. The differences lie in two fundamentally different approaches to what architecture is all about. This difference is evident in both methods and the values of the two systems, but might most clearly be seen in the attitudes of the two movements towards "functionalism." The European modern concept of functionalism (expressed today as "defensible space"," "close fit" and "user needs") was very simplistic. There is a physical need, let us say, to get a group of people from one place to another. A "corridor" was designed, its width determined by the maximum number of people, its height by lighting and ventilating needs and a desire to avoid a closed-in feeling, and that was it. Anything else, such as a vaulted ceiling could not be "functionally" justified and was not permitted. Thus, the European modern movement saw a two-step closed circular process: function-form. The function generated the form, and the form in turn served and influenced the function. Semiological investigations (particularly Umberto Ecco) have shown the inadequacy of that analysis. There is a necessary intervening step: the communication of meaning. Thus a form cannot permit a function until it communicates to the user what function is intended. We have to recognize the intent of a door as well as being able to physically fir through it. The European moderns attempted to deny this step and thereby assume the human being to be an automaton. If a person could fit through a door, that was enough. All social, cultural, historical or personal associations which might come with going through a door were denied. Alienation from modern architecture was obvious consequence. The Beaux-Arts approach to function was very different. It was three step circular process: function-form-meaning. Thus the function generated a form which in turn communicated the meaning of the function, as well as facilitating it. Both form and meaning then influenced the function. Given the same problem of getting people from one place to another, the Beaux-Arts architect would not only want to provide sufficient width for people to comfortably pass through, but would also ask where they were coming from and going to. If they were moving from one classroom to another in a school, the meaning of the experience might be quite different than if they were moving from one hall to another in a museum. To convey these different meanings, the Beaux-Arts architect would select from different orders, different forms of ceiling vaulting and different forms of lighting in order to convey difference in scale, formality, intimacy, etc. of the experience. The result might be a width or height far greater than that needed for efficient passage of a given number of people. That additional height or width would be to communicate an attitude bout the experience, rather than just simply permit the activity. Kahn was similarly interested in meaning. In relation to understanding a chapel, he said that first you have a sanctuary, and the sanctuary is a place for those who want to kneel. Around the sanctuary is an ambulatory, and the ambulatory is for those who want to be near. Outside the ambulatory is a court for those who want to feel the presence of the chapel. And the court has a wall. Those who pas the wall just wink at it. This contrasts with Mies's chapel at IIT done as universal space. His chapel is essentially the same as his art and architecture school, his auditorium, his museum, and the Bohack supermarket on Long Island done by Skidmore in Mies's style. Kahn's chapel would communicate the meaning of the place. Mies's looks for a "universality" beyond meaning. The Beaux-Arts system considered architecture to be the ordering of archetypal spaces to espouse and encourage institutional and individual values. The European moderns considered architecture to be nothing more nor less than the solving of stated functional problems. The Beaux-Arts collapsed because the values it espoused had become outdated. However, that does not mean that architecture must be value-free. Today, we realize that the attempt of the European modern movement to be value-free has led to the perversely sterile, alienating, inhuman and ultimately uneconomical and anti-ecological environment so clearly identified with modern buildings. Their fundamentally different attitudes towards value are evident in the educational systems of the two different movements, particularly in the teaching of history. In the Beaux-Arts education, history was integrated into the curriculum. It was taught by architects and was not only a study of the past, but also a study of the elements (orders, building types, columns, vaults, details, etc.) which the students would be using in his or her own building. These elements were also known and understood by the public as well as by architects as they were taught in elementary schools. By contrast, the Bauhaus forbade the teaching of history, wishing to make a complete break with the past. When history was reintroduced in the American offsprings of the Bauhaus (Harvard and IIT), it was taught by art historians and was unrelated to anything else the student did. The intention was, of course, to generate a new architecture based purely on function and on the methods of making buildings, an esthetic borrowed from engineering. However, the human being remained more complex and historical than the proponents of European modernism had expected, and this severing of history never took hold with the public. The only people who bought it were the bureaucrats who saw it fitting their purposes in making office buildings and public housing. By the late 1950s, the sterility of the European modern or International Style glass box or white box approach to architecture had become apparent. Many of the early attempts to break out of the box now look pathetic and ultimately thin. By the early 1960s, the work of Louis Kahn began to show workable alternatives. Kahn's architecture succeeded in regaining a solidity which had been absent earlier. It is now apparent that this "solidity" is not due merely to the use of masonry, but more to the reintroduction of meaning in architecture. Kahn did not design from the functional requirement of the program, but rather asked, "What does this building want to be?" Functional requirements of the program were not merely to be accommodated, but rather to be translated into meaning and then celebrated in form. Kahn had managed the transformation which had eluded the Beaux-Arts earlier. He had abandoned the outmoded symbol system of the classical orders but had retained the use of form as a means of celebrating meaning and value, not just expressing function. In so doing, he opened the way for contemporary architecture to progress in a way more fully integrated with our culture. As a matter of historical interest, he also opened a more meaningful study of the Beaux-Arts movement. The modern movement is now under intense appraisal. In looking at New York City, we find three urban complexes immensely successful on every level. Despite all the rhetoric from the European modern movement about functional urbanism, and the esthetic of he machine, it is Penn Station, grand Central Station and Rockefeller Center, which are functionally, urbanistically, and in terms of transportation, the most successful projects in new York. All three are Beaux-Arts schemes. Today, the most vital explorations in architecture are all in the direction of meaning, exploring the avenues reopened by Kahn and later Venturi. Whereas Kahn reintroduced meaning from history, Venturi reintroduced meaning from everyday life. A pitched roof is generally associated with a house, so when Venturi designed his mother's house, he took advantage of that association rather than denying it, and made a pitched rook. Venturi's pitched roof was distorted, in order to generate a discontinuity with the association and thereby make his own comment, but it is still recognizable as a residential pitched roof. Graves has taken some of Venturi's literary ideas further, and Stern has extended his historical association. Eisenman is interested in the structure of language and deliberately avoids content. Giurgola is working with many of Kahn's ideas. Mimi Lobell is exploring the mythological potential of architectural meaning. In abandoning the Beaux-Arts, we abandoned a rich vocabulary of human meaning. The classic orders referred to masculine and feminine forces, to the human institutions of religion, community and government, and to a considered sense of place. Dealing with these issues through a Beaux-Arts vocabulary would not be appropriate today, but that does not mean a new vocabulary cannot be generated. When the forces of the unconscious could no longer be expressed through the gods, the vocabulary was reestablished in terms of psychology. The European modern movement sought to eliminate meaning itself from architecture. Today, the concern is to reestablish meaning in new vocabularies. I received my architecture degrees and the University of Pennsylvania, and am currently a professor at Pratt Institute. My interests range widely, and include, besides architecture, cultural theory, consciousness, art, Buddhism, mythology, information theory, post-humanism, quantum reality and quantum architecture. We are now in one of the most significant periods of cultural and technological change in history, probably greater in scope than those associated with Newton and Einstein. Developments on a theoretical level in quantum mechanics are now leading to quantum computers that gain their prodigious power through harnessing their siblings throughout the multiverse. Biotech and genetic engineering will bring about new species and the alteration of homo sapiens. Materials engineering and nanotechnology will alter the substances we use. Cosmologists place us in ever expanding infinities of multiple universes. And communications technologies promise that eventually everything will be connected to everything at all times.
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