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The Second-Greatest Generation

Never Trust Anyone Over . . . ?

For the past twenty years I have been over thirty, the actual milestone having occurred slightly before the lapsing of the 1970s (which was when much of the 1960s actually occurred). And I’m not the only one. As the boomer bulge in the bell curve grinds toward oblivion, we are driven to ask: what has the aging of youth culture meant for architecture?

Youth, of course, is strictly a cultural matter. My generation is by self-definition—the only definition that ever counted for us—young. Architecture, the “old man’s profession,” has never been congenial to us (among others). We certainly returned the favor: bridling at the “man,” many of us rebelled, abandoning architecture, heading for the woods, building by hand, advocating for communities, drawing, making trouble, laying the groundwork for the cultural revolution.

This didn’t really work out as we planned. The world seems not to have changed along the lines of the image we had for it. Somehow the “liberating” mantra of sex, drugs, and rock and roll changed into the nightmare of AIDS, Prozac, and MTV. How much of a hand did we have in this cultural devolution?

The Clinton Library

Limiting politics to resistance or selling out has not served us entirely well. Our own first president illustrates the sheer porousness, the corruptibility, of these categories. Clinton is not exactly one of us, in the same way that any member of student government during the late 1960s was not exactly one of us, but rather something between a quisling and a geek (depending on whether one focuses on politics or style). Now we are witnessing the spectacle of two co-generationalists running for the presidency. These—the eternal frat boy and the sell-out student government type—give the lie to certain fantasies about the triumph of the counterculture. Sixty percent of George W. Bush’s class at Yale—the class of 1968, no less—voted for either Richard Nixon or George Wallace. Al Gore elected to go to Vietnam. Patrician universities, with their solid ruling-class values and their various schools of social architecture, have a way of countering countercultural agendas, it seems.

And they have a way of promoting the middle of the road. When the time came for Clinton to choose an architect to design his shrine in Little Rock, did he turn to an architect his own age? Did he seek to radicalize the repository via form or effect? Not at all. He made his choice from the slightly older generation, choosing an architect not quite old enough to be his (absent) father but certainly old enough to Wally his Beaver. The first boomer administration runs from its roots, affecting the same brain-dead Hollywood style that answers the question “Rock and Roll Museum?” with “I.M. Pei” (designer of the first “modern” presidential library). And we haven’t heard much lately from the presidential sax, not since Clinton was trying to persuade us that he shared our values (we’ll keep our pain to ourselves, thanks).

Blah Blah Blah

The political rebellion of the 1960s announced itself in the charac­­­teristic speech of the late twentieth century: first person. But the self-promoting, self-conscious “I” of my generation has been hobbled by our awareness of the unconscious, which has hovered over us like a specter. This unconscious has not only promised the possibility of a “liberation of desire” from social constraint, it has also rallied skepticism of our best intentions. The unconscious, after all, always trumps the conscious as a cause of action and thus of political striving. Beneath the desire to do good lurks a neglected child. Behind the orderliness of minimalism lies crap in the pants. Politics itself has been reduced to just another symptom; it dares not promise a cure for fear of being labeled the dupe of its own neuroses.

Whether this is a proper reading of Freud is really not the issue; it is the reading that undermined our sense of the world’s reliability and our own political will, producing a special generational uncertainty principle. We all have our styles of superego, and this combination of license and guilt has distinguished us, on the one hand, from the “greatest generation” of our parents who—dammit—had something unequivocal to fight for, and, on the other hand, from the Gen X-ers and Y-ers, the Reaganjugend, whose traumas seem so fifties, inflicted by the pressures of consumption, rather than rebellion. Thus questions of influence acquire for us a special anxiety. The unflagging hegemony of the sixty-something and seventy-something cadre that rules, that formulated the parameters of the depoliticized, desocialized post-modernity that swept architecture in the seventies and eighties, needs a violent shaking from the left.

No More Second-Hand Dad

What to do when the parents in your own family romance are the stalwarts of the avant-garde? That we received our lessons in artistic rebellion at twice-second-hand somewhat diminished our sense of their originality. Avant-gardism is about rupture, overthrow, the father-murderous rage of art. Classic early-twentieth-century avant-gardism wanted a radical reworking of the visual aspect of architecture and a reinvention of the process of production.

The postmodern “avant-garde”—compromised by a sense of having inherited both its credentials and its topics—is a somewhat different creature. Its intellectual agenda has remained caught in the avant-garde dream of its ancestors. It thus re-covered much of the ground explored half a century ago, redoubling the received critical discourse with its own metacritical commentary, interpolating another layer of interpretation between the “primary” investigation and its own. The magazine October, for example, the bible of post-modernity (and exemplar for our own theorizing), continues to be held hostage by its obsession with surrealism, as with some lost idyll. And architecture carries on with fresh formalisms of the broken (or the perfect) square.

Try as we might, we haven’t been able to get Oedipus out of our edifices; inherited property still defines us. A false patriarchy continues to structure the discipline and practice of architecture, in which a fraternal order of equals is presided over by a simultaneously dead and obscenely alive father, father Philip, in this instance.

Life in the Past Lane

This stalled fascination with former revolutions is the result of a failure of nerve and of invention. It is also evidence of the ideological and psychological trauma that has beset our attempts to formulate an avant-garde in rebellion against an avant-garde to which we desperately desire to remain faithful. The result has been a kind of fission. One by-product is the hyperconservatism of our melancholy historicists. Another is the would-be radicalism that has produced visually novel buildings and rudimentary bridges to the world of the virtual, but which still clings to dusty desires for legitimacy.

The lesson we have been unable to learn is that it takes a lot more rebellion than we have been able to muster to remain faithful to the heritage of the avant-garde.

Market Share

I am not sure the New York Times Magazine did us any favors with its gossipy, prurient cover story on Rem Koolhaas, our momentary laureate. Depicting him as a kind of edgy Martha Stewart who refuses to judge any endeavor “a good thing,” whose mission is the “mission of no mission,” the Times tried to inscribe his fundamental cynicism into the format of the hero-architect, Fountainhead-style. Of course, the paper went for the Hollywood version. Gary Cooper may have behaved like Frank Lloyd Wright, but the models in the background were strictly Gordon Bunshaft.

Sound familiar? The challenge of collapsing the tastemaker and the ideologue is sure to test one side or the other dramatically. Is it possible to be Paul Auster, Sam Walton, and Kim Il Sung at the same time? Will Rem succeed in branding the generic?

Africa Shops at Prada

Jetting into Harvard to administer his shopping seminar, Rem snags a job designing Prada stores. The press praises his strategy of branding: no design “identity,” instead a space where things happen, “an exciting urban environment that creates a unique Prada experience.” A TV camera in the dressing room will permit you (TV’s Big Brother is another Dutch import) to view yourself from all sides at once. Will thousand-dollar shoes move faster when surveilled from all angles? Will there be an algorithm to airbrush away our worst features? Must we buy this privatization of culture? Does the postmodern critique of the museum, the call for tearing down its walls, do anything but free art for the shopping mall? I’ll take Bilbao, thanks.

The trouble with an age of scholasticism is that you talk yourself into the idea that anything is politics. By the time it’s devolved from direct action to propaganda to critical theory, to the appropriation of theory, to the branding of theory, to the rejection of theory, something is lost. Critique stokes its own fantasy of participation. On the one hand, this produces boutique design as social practice, and, on the other, it segues into the more rarefied reaches of recombination. My Russian colleague, Andrei, has been smoking cheap cigarettes that someone brought him from back home. The bright red pack is emblazoned with a picture of Lenin in high sixties graphic style. The make is “Prima,” the brand “Nostalgia,” the smell appalling. What’s next? Lenin Lites and Trotsky 100s? Must we succumb to the speed of this? Can’t we slow the whole thing down?

Nostalgie de la Boue

This new nostalgia (the nostalgia for packaged nostalgia) is everywhere. Now that my generation rules the media, part of us keep busy looting our experience for the rudest forms of exploitation. If you’ve turned on your TV lately, you might have seen That Seventies Show, a slick package of affects, the decade as a set of tics and styles. The expropriation continues to the limits of corporate memory. Advertising nowadays is lush with 1960s themes as fiftyish account executives preside over the wholesale trashing of the culture that nourished them. “I Feel Good”—a laxative. “Forever Young”—invidious irony—incontinence diapers. On Survivor, flaming torches turn the game-show paradise island into Trader Vic’s.

Nostalgic for 1950s and 1960s styles, yet too hip not to be troubled by the accumulated political baggage of the project, this cadre of media masters offers a stance of almost pure cynicism. “I am saying this, but I don’t actually believe it; In fact, I don’t actually believe anything, because it is no longer possible to do so.” With Niemayer or Lapidus or Harrison as the soundtrack (and the Stones, perhaps, playing on the answering machine), they seem to want to suspend indefinitely the moment when they would be obliged to take a position.

A micro-generational conflict now exists among those for whom the 1960s represents a source of anxiety, those for whom the decade still represents possibility, and those for whom it is simply ancient history. Most invested in the middle alternative, I grapple with this legacy, but the particulars grow vague (the feeling stays evergreen).

That Vision Thing

Our fantasies did have vision—the product, mainly, of the working out of certain congruent themes of prior modernisms. Those domes and inflatables and garbage housing were not just technologically and environmentally prescient; they also figured—whether in civil rights or Woodstock variants—in political ideas about the extension, openness, and spontaneity of spaces of assembly. And the canny melding of technological control with an “anti”-technological ideology gave birth to appropriate technology.

The alternative visuality of the 1960s, however, has had only the most marginal impact on architecture. (Many breathe a sigh of relief.) The psychedelic style that included Fillmore posters, the Merry Pranksters bus, and Sgt Pepperesque couture required a certain lag before becoming appropriatable by architecture. We liberated the 1970s supreme Soviet—Venturi, Stern, Moore, Graves, et al.—from the kitsch closet and made it permissible for them to love Vegas and the roadside. But they always had to rationalize their love, to capture it for their outmoded agendas and fantasies of control. We responded with disengagement and irony, as usual.

The “appropriated” art of so many artists of my generation was a typically limp response, immediately gobbled up by the art machine. Having bought into a critical history that denigrated intentions, we then bought into our own ironical reappropriation of intentionality via obsessive proceduralisms and poetic trances. Too late. Narcissism is not the same as self-confidence. Even Seinfeld has been cancelled.

Vive la Différence!

The Whole Earth Catalogue and Our Bodies, Ourselves are our holy books, good news for a political body and a contested environment both. These really were milestones: we’re all a little more gay now, a little closer to the earth, a little more skeptical about the system’s “choices.” The politicization of the personal (as the formula should have been) demands idiosyncrasy beyond the tonsorial and sartorial. Pity about our architecture. So many interesting sites wasted.

It Isn’t Easy Being Green

We always hear that green architecture “looks bad,” and most of it does. At the end of the day, though, separating your trash is probably a greater contribution to world architecture than Bilbao. Well, maybe not Bilbao.

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