Building on What It Means to Be Truly Human

It was a century of big dreams and high hopes for architecture. To the early European Modernists, architecture would be the key element in the creation of a new world order. Houses would become therapeutic tools, cleansing the soul and healing the body. Cities would be ordered with the rational efficiency of the assembly line. Humankind would wipe away the past to build a new Utopian society, one that achieved an ideal balance between humanity, nature and machine.

Those dreams produced some of the best and worst architecture since the Romans. The great Modernist landmarks are testaments both to the seemingly unlimited potential of the Industrial Age and the individual creative imagination. Enter the central hall of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1936 Johnson Wax Administration Building, with its slender mushroom-shaped columns and heavenly light, or gaze up at the swooping forms of Le Corbusier’s 1954 Church at Ronchamp, and the spirit soars. But wander through the sterile streets of Brasilia and the squalor of its surrounding shantytowns and you come crashing back to Earth. The idea that architecture could lead us to a more just society seems naive.

So as the century draws to a close, we no longer believe in universal answers. There is no dominant architectural movement. The future is up for grabs. And the result is a profession marked by a remarkable spirit of openness. Architects feel freer than ever to rummage through the ash heap of history for their models. The dynamic forms of the Soviet Constructivists in the ‘20s, the shifting psychological landscapes of Eileen Grey’s houses in the ‘30s, Carlo Scarpa’s struggle to resolve the conflict between the modern and the historical in the ‘50s--these are the heroic models of an emerging generation. That eclecticism suggests a culture that looks to the marginal, the quirky, the idiosyncratic--in short, the wonderful details and weaknesses of human life--for its inspiration. It is a trend one hopes the profession will carry with it deep into the next century.

In that spirit, here are a few other themes I hope to see endure, or revived, in the coming decades:

Beauty.

Most credit Frank Gehry’s 1997 Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, with making us believe again in architecture’s ability to capture the public’s imagination. But Bilbao’s other great achievement has been to remind us that architecture remains an art--one that can give exquisite pleasure. The building’s forms--sensual, voluptuous, erotic--not only shape the surrounding social landscape but also titillate the senses. And Gehry’s work is not alone.

Other architects have shown a growing desire to explore themes of seduction and beauty in their work. The Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron is known for its use of sensual, unexpected materials. Even Rem Koolhaas--the celebrated Dutch architect known for his cerebral designs--has produced works whose translucent surfaces and carefully controlled views imply a world of hidden sexual tensions. Together, these works suggest a broader cultural shift: the reemergence of a world where the irrational, the beautiful, the surreal and the sexy all play a part.

A culture of competing values.

Raised in a culture devoid of a unifying ideology, where no one architectural style dominates, architects are increasingly apt to take their cues from the psychological and social needs of their clients, or from a building’s physical and historical context. The result has been a climate in which an incredible range of visions can coexist, each representing a radically different set of cultural values. The Paris-based Jean Nouvel’s fetishized urban machines, for instance, may evoke the restlessness of the outsider, while Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza’s delicate abstractions sum up the thoughtful patience of the intellectual. Each work, in turn, must gently balance the designer’s values with the realities of a specific context. The utopia of the past is quickly becoming the heterotopia of the future. And what better way to start building an inclusive, democratic culture for the next millennium?

Architecture’s sense of public responsibility.

If one of the central tenets of the new global culture is profit, then to the contemporary corporate mind, space that doesn’t generate profit seems, well, a waste. But until the Reagan revolution and its aftermath, most still considered public space an essential element of any democracy’s civic fabric, the place where its citizens met to exchange ideas. One of the principal responsibilities of the architect was to shape that common ground. In his 1930 design for a linear city, for instance, Soviet architect N.A. Milyutin included an endless strip of parkland where Soviet Man could exercise his body and forge his sense of communal responsibility. During the ‘60s, the British architecture team Archigram imagined public spaces that functioned as spontaneous festivals, while civic commentator Jane Jacobs argued for the defense of the urban village, with its intimate neighborhoods and casual public contact. These are all models of urban life worth remembering, not only for their experimental vision, but also for their conviction that architecture is a key element in the shaping of our public lives.

Imagining the cities of tomorrow.

Ever since the urban housing disasters of the ‘70s, the image of the modern housing project has elicited shudders of horror. Modern architecture, it seemed, would never create viable communities. So architecture dropped the subject. Who took up the slack? Giant corporations like the Walt Disney Co. and their henchmen, the “new urbanists.” Together, such corporate sponsors and backward-looking city planners have sought to re-create the moral landscape of Middle America. The result has been the construction of a series of pseudo-traditional towns like Celebration, Fla., whose pitched roofs and cozy front porches only disguise the typical ennui and isolation of suburbia.

Are these the great model communities of the future? Or is there an alternative more in tune with contemporary life? The Modernists may have often failed as urban planners, but they understood that any vibrant, living culture must grow out of the realities of its own time, not a nostalgic longing for the past. That notion is worth holding onto as we speed ahead toward the Information Age.