Histories of the Immediate Present_ Inventing Architectural Modernism - Anthony Vidler [Writing Architecture] - (2008, The MIT Press)

HISTORIES OF 
THE IMMEDIATE PRESENT 
Writing Architecture series
A project of the Anyone Corporation
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Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism
Anthony Vidler, 2008
A N T H O N Y V I D L E R
THE MIT PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
LONDON, ENGLAND
HISTORIES OF 
THE IMMEDIATE PRESENT 
INVENTING ARCHITECTURAL MODERNISM 
© 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vidler, Anthony.
Histories of the immediate present : inventing architectural 
 modernism / Anthony Vidler.
p. cm. — (Writing architecture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-72051-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Modern movement (Architecture) 2. Architecture—
Historiography. 3. Architectural criticism—Europe—History—
20th century. I. Title. 
NA682.M63V53 2008
724'.6—dc22
 2007020845
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 C O N T E N T S
 FOREWORD: [BRACKET]ING HISTORY by Peter Eisenman
 PREFACE
 INTRODUCTION
1 NEOCLASSICAL MODERNISM: EMIL KAUFMANN
 Autonomy
 Neoclassicism and Autonomy
 From Kant to Le Corbusier
 Structural Analysis
 From Kaufmann to Johnson and Rossi
 Autonomy Revived
2 MANNERIST MODERNISM: COLIN ROWE
 An English Palladio
 Modern Palladianism
 Diagramming Palladio
 Mathematics
 Inventing Modernism
 Mannerism
97
98
107
108
114
116
120
122
125
133
140
157
159
165
168
177
180
184
191
201
233
 The End of Modernism
 Modernist Mannerism: Stirling
3 FUTURIST MODERNISM: REYNER BANHAM
 Modern Picturesque
 Historicism versus Functionalism
 Functionalist Modernism
 Futurism Redux
 Theories and Design
 Program, Science, and History
 “Une Architecture Autre”
 Beyond Architecture: Banham in L A
4 RENAISSANCE MODERNISM: MANFREDO TAFURI
 Architect and Historian
 Revising History
 The Eclipse and Rise of History
 Ideology and Utopia
 Anxiety
 Disenchantments
5 POSTMODERN OR POSTHISTOIRE?
 
 NOTES
 INDEX
Of all the terms in the architectural lexicon, or, for that matter, 
those of painting and sculpture, the one most laden with social 
and political opprobrium is formalism. To be a formalist is to 
be a target for everyone who feels that architecture is a social 
project full of rhetorical symbolism. Yet I was struck, while on 
a recent jury at a prestigious East Coast architecture school, by 
the pervasive inXuence of a new, perhaps more virulent breed of 
formalism, more virulent because it was posed under the banner 
of a neo- avant- garde technological determinism. The nexus of 
this formalism lay in advanced computer modeling techniques 
generated out of complex algorithms that produced parametric 
processes of enormous complexity and consistency, replete with 
their own variability and distortion. The range, variety, and en-
ergy of this work should have appealed to me personally, not only 
because of my memories of that particular institution as a bastion 
of intellectual conservatism, but also in part because this cutting-
 edge- process work was close to an idea of autonomy inherent in 
such authorless processes. Instead, I felt that something was rad-
ically wrong, something that speaks to a more general problem of 
architecture today. It was an autonomy freed from any passionate 
or Wrm ideological commitment. For the sake of argument, let us 
say that this lack of commitment lies squarely at the doorstep of 
such an empty formalism, one that internally determines how its 
products are to be read and interpreted. Both the lack of ideo-
logical commitment and the internally determined meanings 
link this new formalism with an idea of autonomy. But there is a 
second, more problematic idea of autonomy, a disciplinary one 
F O R E W O R D : [ B R A C K E T ] I N G H I S T O R Y
 viii F O R E W O R D
which is deceptively hidden, yet alluded to, in the chronological 
inversions of the title Histories of the Immediate Present.
Formalism, while seemingly emptied today of its critical and 
ideological power, nevertheless Wgured as a locus of resistance to 
postwar modernism. The repetitive or process- based sequenc-
ing of minimalist sculpture, of rationalist architecture, or of 
indexical, syntactic, linguistic analogies derived its formal bases 
from an internally generated system independent of social or 
functional concerns. In this context, the formal must be diVer-
entiated from formalism, the former having an internal value, 
the latter being the empty rhetoric of current shape- making. 
Any internally generated forms that are part of a critical system 
in one sense could be considered as autonomous, independent 
of social or market forces, while still oVering a critique of these 
forces. It is a discussion of autonomy that animates one historian 
in particular in Anthony Vidler’s text, and also might be said to 
animate the author himself. While autonomy is often understood 
as being implied by the formal, the distinction between the two 
is important, especially, today, between the terms disciplinary 
autonomy and formal autonomy. This diVerence seems important 
for Vidler, because it potentially allows him to confront and pro-
pose an answer to the Derridean claims against the possibility of 
a disciplinary autonomy.
In a Wrst, sequential reading of this book, from the chapter 
on Emil Kaufmann to those on Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, and 
Manfredo Tafuri, it appears that Vidler presents a narrative of 
architectural history- writing up to the third quarter of the last 
century. This in itself would be noteworthy, particularly since 
history today is so quickly consumed and forgotten. What is 
important, however, in this book is not the critical diVerences 
between these historians but how their diVerences reveal their 
arguments to be measures of the varied distances charted in ar-
chitecture’s disciplinary evolution, from circa 1920 until today. 
 [ B R A C K E T ] I N G H I S T O R Y ix
Architecture’s uncanny repetitions and recursions, from the for-
malism of Russian ideologues to that of today’s expert renderers, 
for example, suggest that the distances mapped by such histories 
are anything but linear. This is revealed in a Wrst reading of the 
book’s title, as well as in its intellectual genealogy. However, 
while the sequence Rowe- Banham- Tafuri follows that genealogy, 
Kaufmann, positioned as originator, source, and starting point, 
does not. Why begin with Kaufmann, a historian of the Viennese 
school whose work is intellectually of another