4.
However much it may seem as if we have lost all patience with idealisation, contemptuous as we are of decorated bridges and gilded statues, we are constitutionally incapable of abandoning the concept itself, for, freed of all its historical associations, the word ‘idealisation’ refers simply to an aspiration towards perfection, an objective with which no one, not even the most rational of beings, may ever be completely unacquainted.
It is in fact not ideals per se that we have forgone but the specific values once honoured by prominent works of idealisation. We have given up on antiquity, we have no reverence for mythology, and we condemn aristocratic confidence. Our ideals now revolve around themes of democracy, science and commerce. And yet we remain as committed as ever to the project of idealisation. Behind a practical façade, modern architecture has never ceased trying to reflect back to its audience a selective image of who they might be, in the hope of improving upon, and moulding, reality.
Idealising ambitions become especially evident whenever the construction of high-profile civic buildings is undertaken. The national pavilions of the World Exposition in Seville in 1992, for example, were in their understated way just as idealistic about their sponsoring countries as Veronese had been in his rendition of the virtues of Venetian government. Finland’s entry, made up of two separate but conjoined halves – a polished steel slab nestling against a curved extension of blond wood – spoke of a society which had succeeded in perfectly reconciling the opposing elements of male and female, modernity and history, technology and nature, luxury and democracy. Taken as a whole, the ensemble comprised an austerely beautiful promise of a dignified and graceful life.
An ideal life in Finland: Above: Monark Architects, Finnish Pavilion, Expo ’92, Seville, 1992
An ideal of a career in banking: Above: Frank Gehry, DZ Bank, Berlin, 2000
The workers of the DZ Bank in Berlin were offered a comparable version of an ideal by their headquarters beside the Brandenburg Gate. While their work itself might often be routine and repetitive, on their way to the cafeteria or a meeting, the bank’s employees could look down into the giant atrium of their building at a strange, elegant conference room, whose lithe forms hinted at the creativity and playfulness to which their solemn bosses aspired.
Oscar Niemeyer, National Congress, Brasília, 1960
Entire cities may even be born out of the wish to summon Schiller’s ‘escort descended from the world of the ideal’. When President Kubitschek of Brazil unveiled plans for the construction of Brasília, in 1956, he vowed that the new capital would become ‘the most original and precise expression of the creative intelligence of modern Brazil’. Deep and high in the country’s interior, it was to be a model of modern bureaucratic efficiency, an ideal to which the rest of Kubitschek’s sprawling, struggling country could pay only insecure and occasional homage. Brasília was intended not to symbolise an existing national reality but rather to bring a new reality into being. It was hoped that with its broad avenues and its undulating concrete and steel buildings, it would help erase Brazil’s legacy of colonialism, as well as the chaos and poverty of her coastal cities. Brasília would bring about the modernity it epitomised. It would create a country in its own image.
Richard Neutra, Edgar J. Kaufmann House, Palm Springs, 1946
The fact that Brasília would end up having its share of beggars and favelas, burnt grass on its spacious thoroughfares and cracks in the walls of its cathedral, would not have dissuaded the champions of idealisation in architecture, any more than would betrayals and incompetence beneath Veronese’s ceiling, stupidity within the Athenaeum, alcoholism and despair in Finland or terminal boredom in the offices of the DZ Bank. For them, such lapses merely underscored the need for idealised forms to stand as a defence against all that remains corrupt and unimaginative within us.
In the modern age, idealisation has proved as attractive in the domestic sphere as in the civic one. The bourgeois couples who lived in Richard Neutra’s mid-twentieth-century steel and glass pavilions in California may at times have drunk too much, squabbled, been insincere and overwhelmed by anxiety, but at least their buildings spoke to them of honesty and ease, of a lack of inhibition and a faith in the future – and would have reminded their owners, at the height of their tantrums or professional complications (when their fury rang out into the desert night), of what they longed for in their hearts.
In 1938, on a remote, rocky outcrop on the island of Capri, the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte conceived a home for himself which would be, as he wrote to a friend, ‘a self-portrait in stone’ (‘ritratto pietra’) and ‘a house like me’ (‘una casa come me’). With its proud isolation, its juxtapositioning of ruggedness and refinement, its unblinking, hardy defiance of the elements, and the aesthetic debt it owed to Ancient Rome on the one hand and Italian modernism on the other, the house did indeed pick up on key traits of Malaparte’s character. Fortunately for visitors, however, it turned out not to be a slavishly faithful portrait of its owner in all his facets – a difficult prospect for any house, certainly, but particularly so in Malaparte’s case, for that would have necessitated the inclusion of pretentious furnishings, dead-end corridors, perhaps a shooting range (he was a Fascist until 1943) and a few broken windows (he liked a drink and then a fight). Rather than reflecting the author’s many foibles, Casa Malaparte, like all effective works of idealisation, assisted its gifted yet flawed proprietor in orienting himself towards the noblest sides of his personality.
5.
The architecture produced under the influence of an idealising theory of the arts might be described as a form of propaganda. The word is an alarming one, for we are inclined to believe that high art should be free of ideology and admired purely for its own sake.
Yet the term ‘propaganda’ refers to the promotion of any doctrine or set of beliefs and in and of itself should carry no negative connotations. That the majority of such promotion has been in the service of odious political and commercial agendas is more an accident of history than any fault of the word. A work of art becomes a piece of propaganda whenever it uses its resources to direct us towards something, insofar as it attempts to enhance our sensitivity and our readiness to respond favourably to any end or idea.
A self-portrait in stone:
Curzio Malaparte (with Adalberto Libera), Casa Malaparte, Capri, 1943
Under this definition, few works of art could fail to be counted as propaganda: not only pictures of Soviet farmers proclaiming their five-year plans but also paintings of peas and lustre bowls; chairs; and steel and glass houses on the edge of the California desert. Taking the apparently perverse step of giving each of these the same label merely serves to stress the directive aspect of all consciously created objects – objects which invite viewers to imitate and participate in the qualities encoded within them.
From this perspective, we would be wise not to pursue the impossible goal of extirpating propaganda altogether, but should instead endeavour to surround ourselves with its more honourable examples. There is nothing to lament in the idea that art can direct our actions, provided that the directions it points us in are valuable ones. The theorists of the idealising tradition were refreshingly frank in their insistence that art should try to make things happen – and, more importantly, that it should try to make us good.