Mere Style?

Abstract

Introduction In a recent conference session, a young scholar declared that she was looking at her subject matter — the architecture of the New York Five, if I remember correctly — not merely as style, but rather as a complex nexus of cultural and material conditions. The audience nodded knowingly. To 21st century architects and architectural historians, style, it seems, stands for superficiality, formalism, and obsolete periodization; a grand narrative past its sell-by date. Wittingly or unwittingly, the conference speaker placed herself in a long tradition. To reject style(s) was a favourite pastime for 20th century architects and architectural historians alike. From Hermann Muthesius to Rem Koolhaas, style has been associated with lies, deceit, and masquerade. According to Muthesius, modern architecture had to break free from the chains of style, replacing a stifled Stilarchitektur with a ‘living building art' (1902: 67). ‘The “styles” are a lie,‘ proclaimed Le Corbusier in 1923 (2007: 147), a verdict repeated ad verbatim some seventy years later by Koolhaas in his S,M,L,XL glossary, in an entry squeezed in between ‘stupid’ and ‘suicide' (1995: 1188). Ludwig Mies van der Rohe warned not only against recycling old styles but also against seeking new ones, since ‘even the will to Style is formalism' (1923: 1). Enjoying a brief recovery during 1970s and ‘80s postmodernism, style was soon rejected with renewed vigour — just look at Mark Wigley's vehement defence of deconstructivist architecture against accusations of being a style (1988). If modernist architects drove style out of architectural practice, historians followed suit, chasing it out of the history books. Few self-respecting architectural historians use style as their ordering principle any more. Instead, we write histories of types, materials, mediations, constructions, uses — anything to avoid the s-word. In a recent debate on how a new general history of Norwegian architecture might be structured, the organizers stated that their foremost ambition was to get away from the art historians' ‘style-histories' in order to give a truer account of architectural structures and processes. The ambition is in no way unique. Even though the matrix of epochs and styles survives in some architectural history survey courses, students are soon taught to distrust it. If style plays any role at all in contemporary education, it is as a kind of scaffold: an unsightly structure to be dismantled as soon as possible. Style, as Georg Kubler forcefully stated, is ‘a word to avoid' (1979: 163). A student of architectural history in the early 21st century, then, has every reason to treat style with suspicion. To deal with architectural style appears to be the exact opposite of a cultural, contextual, or theoretically informed approach to architecture. From a historical perspective, however, the seeming opposition between culture and style is puzzling. When the term — borrowed from classical rhetoric — entered architectural parlance in the mid- to late 18th century, it had all to do with culture. For Weimar Classicists such as Goethe and Schiller, style signified the ideal essence of culture, purged of individual mannerisms and raised to something universal (Goethe 1789; Schiller 1793). This was the way August Wilhelm Schlegel used the term when he defined style in his 1802 Berlin lectures as ‘the voluntary submission to an artistic principle' (2007: 266) — a sense still echoing a century later in Georg Simmel's thought-provoking definition of style as ‘the unburdening and concealment of the personal' (1998: 216). And while the 18th century's absolute idea of style soon gave way to the 19th century's radically historicised and relativised concept, it was still deeply culturally embedded. For Gottfried Semper for instance — perhaps the most energetic theoriser of style in the 19th century — style was the ‘Übereinstimmung einer Kunsterscheinung mit ihrer Entstehungsgeschichte, mit allen Vorbedingungen und Umständen ihres Werdens' (‘the correspondence of an art-object with its genesis, with all the pre-conditions and circumstances of its becoming'; 1884: 402). Style, for Semper and his contemporaries, was the fingerprint of the zeitgeist, pinpointing the correlation between cultural conditions and artistic expression (Hvattum 2013). No wonder late 19th-century thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche used ‘culture' and ‘style' more or less synonymously, defining the former as the ‘unity of style in all the expressions of the life of a people' (1983: 5). In its 19th-century sense, style was an attempt to grasp the relationship between life and form, or, to put it slightly differently, between cultural conditions and formal, spatial, and material practices. As Alina Payne reminds us, ‘culture was the other side of the style coin' (2012: 157). The tension between an absolute and a relative notion of style lived on throughout the 19th century. Its perhaps most precise articulation is found, as Martin Bressani explores further below, in Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc's famous entry on style in the Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture, where he proclaimed that ‘there is style; then there are the styles'. The ‘styles' are epochal characteristics that ‘enable us to distinguish different schools and epochs from one another'; ‘style', on the other hand,