Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Nouveau nor the Bauhaus won the public's affections though the Bauhaus
was striving to rescue the public from the bleak industrial world into which
the mass of people were being submerged—and had been, increasingly, for
nearly two centuries, in cities without soul, greenery, light, or clean air or
water.
Only one urban movement achieved popular success—the one without
a plan or backing, with neither manifesto nor philosophy, without a
spokesman or even a name until well into its maturation. Art Deco prom-
ised to deliver an urban situation veined with the atmosphere of the gar-
den.
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It sentimentally mingled the fruits of industrial progress with
modernity as an aesthetic, but also doted upon nostalgia. Its politics were a
mess and therefore never closely examined because its product, exhilarating
cities and buildings, were completely intoxicating, and still represent the
standard for the modern urban experience. It is the style of the twentieth
century and in it, after 8,000 years, the city had discovered its fullest expres-
sion.Yet Art Deco's exhilarating mixture never specified where its nostalgia
pointed, and, therefore, this same heady and imprecise blend could be found
in the capitalist West, in Hitlerian Middle Europe, and in the pre-Stalinist
East of early Communism.
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No one could misuse the progressivist
Bauhaus; that was instantly apparent to Stalin, who suppressed all vestiges of
Russian modernism, as did Hitler in Germany. But Art Deco was another
matter.
It would be easy to mistake Art Deco for another manufactured popular
culture, but it arrived unbidden, unlike the merchandise of pop culture,
which Clement Greenberg noted,“is a product of the industrial revolution
which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America.”
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Soleri
strives toward a high-tech Italian hill town and Hundertwasser wants a col-
orful medieval streetscape—these are not kitsch solutions though they each
rely on the amiableness of living in circumstances that neither fight the
greater environment nor prove uncongenial to the intense cultural activi-
ties cities foster and (self-servingly) celebrate. These two approaches each
invent and acclaim the pastoral as an escape from the city. (Farmers, despite
their love of the land, failed to devise, then ignored the pastoral mode,
which is deliverance from pressing cares of the city's pace. Now that e-mail
can deliver those cares to our desks at light speed, it is to be seen whether
the “e-pastoral” will be low tech or no tech.) Elemental assumptions of
all three—Art Nouveau, Bauhaus, Art Deco—are found in Soleri's and
Hundertwasser's work.They cannot be understood in purely technological
