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The fraught relationships between the idea of monumentality
and the avant-garde practices of modernism have been well
documented. The search for a new vocabulary of architecture
to express the age of industrial production – an age of structural
lightness, social mobility, and bureaucratic efficiency – had
thrown into question all traditional forms of monumentality.
Where an architecture based on the historical styles, whether
classical or Gothic, might rely on scale, ornament, and a sense
of permanence to express monumental themes, the new languages
of abstraction, of technological innovation, and of function,
seemed constitutionally ill suited to such roles. Where
modern architects like Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and
Le Corbusier took on monumental tasks, they tended to utilize
the figurative devices of expressionism rather than seek solutions
in abstract modernism. Of the founders of modernism,
only Adolf Loos, in his designs for his own tomb, recognized
the power of the reduced vocabulary of architecture, embodied
in the simple cube, to express eternal values. Indeed, when Le
Corbusier attempted to monumentalize the museum in the
form of a glass pyramid, he was bitterly attacked by those who
believed that modernism and monumentality were fundamentally
irreconcilable values.
If monumentality was inimical to modernism, then its corollary,
memory, was equally fraught with difficulty. For modernism's
attitude to history itself was one of proud disdain, or rather history
and its nineteenth-century progressive narrative were
there to add authority to modernism's rejection of the past, to
demonstrate the ultimate progress of the historical styles
towards a single universal «styleless» style. As Mondrian
noted, modernism had succeeded in bursting out of the old
«brown» world of historicism, into the new «white» world of
modern utopia. This utopia was one of space, not time, and it
was celebrated in a technology and an abstract vocabulary that
confirmed actions and functions in space as opposed to their
historical context. Thus Le Corbusier's «ineffable space»
erased all but the most significant buildings of the past in a
utopian city fabricated out of transparent glass. Historical buildings
were thereby monumentalized, standing isolated like tomb
stones in a park, while the contemporary city looked towards
an endless future of light and technical progress. If memory
was to be served, as it had to be after the carnage of World
War I, it was by «living monuments,» serving the immediate
needs of society – schools, libraries, museums, and the like.
It was not until the redoubled carnage of World War II that a
sense of the need for what was called a «modern monumentality»
emerged among architects and critics. Not by accident,
the questions began to surface in the early 1940s, culminating
in a set of conferences, books, and articles between 1943 and
1947 that gradually laid out the possibilities for not only a new
monumentality for modern architecture in general, but for a
language of memorialization in itself.
Exiled in New York, the historian Sigfried Giedion, the artist
Fernand Léger, and the architect José Luis Sert, outlined
«Nine Points on Monumentality,» which opened the debate that
Mumford had thought closed forever with his 1938 aphorism
«If it is modern, it is not monumental.» The «Nine Points»
were, in some sense, predictable enough, rehearsing the commonplaces
of classical monumentality in the context of an
assumed new humanism. Monuments were «symbols» for the
ideas of societies, translating «collective forces» into memory,
as a «heritage» for future generations, «links between past and
future.» Modern architects were now challenged to bring back
these expressions of «joy, pride, and excitement,» in new
forms that at once symbolized the new forms of community
and civic consciousness and utilized new technologies and
materials in a fresh way. They proposed that «light metal structures,
curved laminated wooden arches, panels of different textures,
colors, and sizes» when used with equally «light
elements like ceilings which can be suspended from big trusses
covering practically unlimited spans,» might bring new life to
the monument. Further, the new monuments could move,
varying the appearance of the buildings constantly with shadows,
and, at night, with projections of color and form on their
walls. For this purpose, which might be used, the authors
noted, for propaganda and publicity alike, new monuments
should be endowed with vast plane surfaces. Set in landscaped
contexts, with nature joining art through the collaboration of
architects, planners, artists, and «landscapists,» these exciting
forms could be viewed from the air in rapid flight or from a hovering
helicopter. No longer strictly functional, the modern monument
would have an intensely modern lyrical value.1
The «Nine Points» were only the beginning of a veritable
plethora of articles and symposia in the mid-1940s, among
which the conference and publication organized by Cooper
Union professor and architect-planner in exile, Paul Zucker,
stands out for the roster of its participants and the prescience
of their arguments. Contributing to his collection entitled New
Architecture and City Planning: A Symposium, in the section on
«The New Monumentality,» were, among others, Giedion with
a new essay («The Need for a New Monumentality»), George
Nelson, Philip L. Goodwin, Ernest Fiene, and Louis I. Kahn.
In retrospect, the most significant of these was the article by a
young partner of the modernist architects Oscar Stonorov and
George Howe, Louis I. Kahn. As Sarah Goldhagen has noted,
Kahn was not necessarily the obvious choice for such a theme.
Perhaps, as she suggests, his partners asked him to provide an
article where they declined, or, more probably, it was Jean
Labatut, Princeton professor, and architect of the extraordinary
light-spectacle «The Spirit of George Washington,» mounted for
the 1939 New York World's Fair, who, in declining to contribute,
suggested Kahn to Zucker, even as Giedion had suggested
Labatut. Whatever the circumstances, Kahn's article, entitled
simply «Monumentality,» began for Kahn, and for postwar modernism
in general, a fundamental reassessment of the means
by which an abstract, technologically expressive architecture
could be endowed with eternal values.2 His argument centered
on the nature of structure, its architectonic virtues, and the
impossibility of repeating the past.
The giant major skeleton of the structure can assert its right to be
seen. It need no longer be clothed for eye appeal. Marble and
woods feel at ease in its presence. New wall products of transparent,
translucent and opaque material with exciting textures and
color are suspended or otherwise fastened to the more delicate
forms of the minor members. Slabs of paintings articulate the circulation
in the vast sheltered space. Sculpture graces its interior.3
His vision of a new monumentality, developing that of Giedion
and his colleagues, coalesced into a proposal for a national educational
center. Its site was in the countryside, outside the city,
«framed by dark forests defining the interior of broad strokes in
land architecture.» Its structure consisted of a skeleton frame,
whose «gigantic sculptural forms» provided an introduction to a
building comprised of «vast spans» with uninterrupted spaces
beneath and light from above «through an undulating series of
prismatic glass domes.» Illustrated by Kahn's sketches, this
project anticipated many of the themes of his developed monumental
buildings, at the same time as firmly basing all monumentality
on the power of civic community.4
It was these principles that were to inform the designs of the
two unbuilt monuments for the City of New York, the
Memorial to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs, Battery Park
(1966–72) and the Roosevelt Memorial, Roosevelt Island
(1973–74). For the Jewish Martyrs Memorial, Kahn first conceived
of a composition of sixteen, later reduced to seven
glass pillars, each some eleven feet high and ten feet square
standing on a square stone podium. Six of the piers would surround
a central arched pier serving as the chapel. As in his initial
proposal for monumentality in 1944, this project was
literally composed of light; making out of transparency, the
modernist virtue par excellence, a vision of life and hope. The
first proposal for the Roosevelt Memorial also used columns,
this time in stainless steel, but the final approved version
returned, in Kahn's terms, to the origins of architecture itself,
with an open, roofless, space approached by a forced perspectival
route, like some archaic temenos awaiting its temple.5
A study of these two proposals in the light of his first published
article reveals an extraordinary unity in Kahn's thought
and work; indeed, within his memorials, as in the memorials of
Adolf Loos, are embedded the principles of his entire postwar
oeuvre, secular and religious alike. For Kahn, architecture was
above all, and always, an art of memorial, but a living art
memorializing living values, in forms and technologies appropriate
to and expressive of their age and culture: an architecture
of light and structure, space, and silence.
NOTES
1. Sigfried Giedion, architecture you and me: the diary of a development
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958).
2. Louis I. Kahn, «Monumentality,» in Paul Zucker, ed., New Architecture and City
Planning. A Symposium (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944): 577–588.
3. Ibid. 583.
4. For a comprehensive and nuanced treatment of these debates and of monumentality
in Kahn's work, see Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Louis Kahn's Situated
Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001): 24–40.
5. For a description of these two projects and their reception, see Robert A.M.
Stern, Thomas Mellins, David Fishman, New York 1960 (New York: The
Monacelli Press, 1995): 197, 648–649. |
