ART/ARCHITECTURE; Imaginative Leaps Into the Real World
IN architecture, it is always the Thirties. Buildings can never be entirely divorced from social reality, since they make up a good chunk of it. Nor can they be isolated from the world of ideas. They make up a hefty slice of the intellectual sphere as well. With luck, there will always be openings for those who wish to debate whether architecture is best seen as a form of art or one of social service.
Edmund Wilson's idea of the triple thinker, a Thirties concept imported from literature, offers a useful way to look at the debate. First published in 1938, ''The Triple Thinkers'' set forth Wilson's ideal of the writer's relationship to society. The book, a collection of essays, reflected Wilson's disenchantment with Marxism as a way of reforming society or even adequately describing it.
Wilson's triple thinkers (they include Pushkin, James, Shaw and Flaubert, from whom Wilson borrowed the phrase) are unwilling to renounce responsibility either to themselves or to their society. They reject confinement in a private garden of self-cultivation and the frustration of political action. Instead, they seek meaning in the tensions between their inner and outer worlds. These tensions stimulate imaginative leaps into the triple thought: the work of art that functions as a moral guide.
Art for art's sake. Its antithesis (the double thought) is the dedication of art to social reform. The triple thought is the realization that beauty is not some transcendant, eternal abstraction but something that arises from historical circumstances and that can enlarge the historical awareness of an audience.
What brought Wilson's idea up again for me is the recent announcement that the Whitney Museum of American Art has hired Rem Koolhaas to work on a vision plan for the museum's future development. This is the second important commission Koolhaas has received in New York in recent months. He is already working on a plan, which will include a new building, for the cultural district now being developed in Brooklyn by Harvey Lichtenstein, chairman of the Brooklyn Academy of Music Local Development Corporation. Along with Frank Gehry's design for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in lower Manhattan, these projects will raise New York architecture to a level that hasn't been seen since the 60's.
No one has done more to draw architecture back to the cultural arena than Gehry and Koolhaas. The concept of the triple thinker helps explain why. The forthcoming projects by these architects will be art works for the public exhibition of art works. They will not help house the homeless. They may even drive up rents. But as practitioners of triple thinking, these two architects have demonstrated how the art of building can be a morally illuminating act.
Koolhaas and Gehry are both poets. The sources of their lyric gifts are unknowable. Still, when their work is set against the field of architecture today, some qualities stand out. Both, for example, have powerfully ambivalent attitudes toward authority. With Gehry, it comes from the tradition of the modern artist, with Koolhaas from the counterculture of the 60's, but the two have ended up with the same confidence in the architect's expertise.
In an interview more than 30 years ago, Gehry said: ''Our architectural vocabulary is better than our clients'; our visual intellect is more highly evolved; we are the experts and that is why we are hired. I want to provide services at the highest possible level, and to do so I have to deal with the real issues, the clearest statement of the problem uncluttered by 'How was it done before?' or 'Give them what they want' hang-ups.''
These hang-ups signify social as well as architectural norms. Gehry's great gift is to present aesthetic disobedience and urban disturbance as pure exercises in social responsibility. His irregular forms evoke the heated discussion between self and society. Often, his imaginative process resembles an exchange between a piece of modern sculpture (de Kooning's ''Clam Digger,'' say, or Brancusi's ''Kiss'') and the rusted remains of the 19th century industrial city as it morphs into the global cultural marketplace of the 21st.
The sculpture is a sign of subjective perception. The city stands for objective fact. Gehry's expertise is to mediate between these two conditions. Robert Rauschenberg's famous description of himself as someone who works in the space between art and life helps explain the importance this American artist has long held for Gehry. Both negotiate deals for space between imperfect selves and flawed social worlds. These spaces are dedicated to the idea of transforming both self and society.
All great modern building -- from the individual monument to the vernacular urban ensemble -- is the product of triple thinking. If that's an overstatement, it's still as reliable a criterion as any I can think of.
Our time is rich in triple architecture. James Ingo Freed's United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is a masterpiece of the genre. So is Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown have been triple thinking for 40 years. Projects by Jean Nouvel, Philippe Starck, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, Thom Mayne, Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, and other members of the so-called avant-garde, should also be seen as expressive interactions between the architect's creative process and his or her social contract.
As these examples indicate, triple thinking does not produce a particular set of forms or a recognizable style. What it produces is a way of thinking about relationships, on the social and the artistic plane. What it produces is disturbance.
Rem Koolhaas is the most verbally articulate triple thinker in architecture today. A book, not a building, established his reputation, the so-called retroactive manifesto of 1994, ''Delirious New York.'' The book's title fused the two halves of his dialectic. New York is the capital of advanced capitalism. In the absence of a superior analytic tool, the city demands a Marxian interpretation. Delirium, a mental disorder, invites a Freudian reading. These two schools of thought place Koolhaas on a Surrealist playing field. Most architectural games are played on this field today, in fact, even those acted out in ignorance of the boundaries. And, like some Surrealist painters, Koolhaas has the genius to make us forget where we are and know where we are at the same time. We're at once inside our minds and in a post-cold war world, and both of these places have been damaged by history.
The Freudian history is personal, the Marxian history is social, but in both instances a diagnosis is called for. It often seems to me that the architect's task today is to shape spaces that don't make the world more diseased than it is. Koolhaas is a diagnostician who presents his findings in architectural relationships. His rendering of analysis into sensuous form gives these buildings their startlingly immediate sense of life.
Koolhaas's work has long revolved around a dialogue between Europe and the United States. In the early years, it resembled a mid-Atlantic exchange between Mies van der Rohe and Wallace K. Harrison. Mies made light, precise, rational, reductive envelopes of space. Harrison embodied grand, iconic, theatrical gestures, like the United Nations Headquarters and the Trylon and Perisphere at the 1939 New York World's Fair. From these two figures, Koolhaas fashioned a vocabulary of spirals and grids that still informs his designs.
His house for a family in Bordeaux, for instance, is approached by a concrete driveway in the shape of a spiral. The house itself is a rethought, three-story version of Mies's Farnsworth House. The rear wall is punctured with round port-hole windows that recall Harrison's control tower at La Guardia Airport.
New York is no longer the standard bearer of liberal conscience that it was for most of the 20th century. No single art work is going to change this. But imperfect social relationships are the content of the triple thinker's art.
IN his study project for the Museum of Modern Art's 1997 competition to redesign its midtown campus, Koolhaas took circulation as his organizing idea. Using the new Odyssey escalator technology developed by Otis, he proposed a system for moving stairs, platforms and rooms vertically and diagonally through interior space.
He also excised the ground floor from the existing museum, creating a slab that floated over an outdoor space extending from 52nd to 53rd Streets, allowing the city to penetrate the museum envelope. Thus, the design linked the mechanized vertical transport to New York's great horizontal public space, the street.
Koolhaas's notes for the project, which have been privately published, show that he began working out these spatial relationships before arriving at the visual forms of buildings. His goal was to weaken the existing boundaries between private (the museum) and public space (the street). His design resumed the modern task of relaxing the conventions of social and psychological encounter.
You will not need ''Das Kapital'' or ''The Interpretation of Dreams'' to find your way around Koolhaas's vision plan for the Whitney. Koolhaas excels in conveying the idea that architecture is an art of organizing urban relationships, not the styling of discrete objects in space. Whether as journalist, screenwriter, teacher or architect, he has done nothing all his life but study the differences between cities, the extent to which it is in their nature to grow and the role architects play in its unfolding. That is his area of expertise.
Yours, too, perhaps. You are invited to assign your own voices to the spatial and formal sequences Koolhaas devises. In fact, as in a classical course of psychoanalysis, you are expected to do so.
But Americans get spooked when people refer to Marx and Freud in a positive light. This is one of the joys of mentioning them. Freud and Marx! Marx and Freud! Trick or Treat! In our public discourse, one stands for the gulag and nuclear warfare, the other for quackery and the insanity defense. They're unwelcome reminders of imperfection on the golden field of success.
I see no cultural advantage in dismissing the schools of thought initiated by these thinkers. As scientific systems, political parties, substitute religions and sources of illustrational art, they're silly or worse. But they continue to provide useful techniques for describing certain features of historical continuity. Along with the continuing debates over their ideas, Marx and Freud still figure in the cultural landscape where European architects build.
Our dismissal of them, in fact, supports the view, advanced by the London School of Economics professor John Gray, that the United States can no longer be regarded as a Western country. We've rejected the modern tradition of self-examination that holds Western societies together. It is as if freedom, equality, accountability and other strands of social tissue have frayed beyond repair. Or, as some have put it, the United States didn't win the cold war. We were just the second to lose it. Instead of mass famine, we've got reality TV.
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