A History of Architectural Theory From Vitruvius to the Present

A History of Architectural Theory From Vitruvius to the Present

Zwemmer/Princeton Architectural Press, 1994

Chapter 30. Since I945

Preceding chapters on the first half of the twentieth century omitted certain countries which should receive at least brief mention here.

In Spain Ildefonso Cerdá made a significant contribution to the theory of urban planning in the mid-nineteenth century with his plan for Barcelona of I85g and his two-volume theoretical work of I867. Antonio Gaudí, on the other hand, left no formal statement of his highly original style: From the late nineteenth century to the time of Franco the principal subject of discussion in Spain was the creation of a sense of national tradition and the attempt by a group of architects during the Second Republic (I931-39) to associate themselves with international modernism remained an isolated episode to which few were able to relate. José Luis Sen, a disciple of Le Corbusier, spent most of his life in America, and his theories have ill-defined relevance to the situation in Spain.

The omission of Great Britain from earlier chapters, after the point of Geoffrey Scott's The Architecture of Humanism (I9I4) had been reached and following Britain's dominant international role in architecture theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, might appear even more open to question. Yet perhaps the omission is not as questionable as it at first seems, for in the twentieth century architectural theory in Britain has been virtually replaced by architectural history,' and trends such as neo-Classicism, represented above all by Sir Edwin Lutyens, and the later revival of the Picturesque,' stand in the shadow of historical research. After the Second World War architects such as Alison and Peter Smithson expounded the theories underlying their work, but in general the British contribution to architectural theory remained reserved.

It was not until the twentieth century that Scandinavia began to make its presence felt. The leading figure here is Alvar Aalto (I898-1970), a Finnish architect who took his lead from landscape and natural materials but who left only a few statements of theory.' Equally sparse is the theoretical background of Swedish Neo-classicism, whose chief representative was Gunnar Asplund (I885-I94o). It is not uncommon for pans of the world with little tradition in architectural theory to contribute to architectural history before producing a comparable body of theory. This is true not only of Scandinavia but also of Latin America, where, for instance, Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil and Carlos Raúl Villanueva in Venezuela joined the highest ranks of intérnational architects but left little theoretical material that was much more than an explanation of their own work.

The first emer ence of original ideas in Japan came after the Second World War with attempts to combine European thought with the native historical tradition. Kunio Maekawa (b.I9o5), who had worked with Le Corbusier, conveyed the principles of European modernism to his colleague Kenzo Tange (b.I9I3), who set out to combine these principles with the Japanese tradition of wooden buildings, and who was the first to achieve an influence in the West with a Japanese architecture that drew much of its substance from European sources. The most imponant contribution by Japan to contemporary architectural theory, however, is without doubt what is known as Metabolism, a doctrine proclaimed in I96o in a manifesto published by Kisho Kurokawa (b.I934) and others. Metabolism goes further than European functionalism by applying biological symbols to the evolution

of human society; it fuses the Buddhist tradition with that of European individualism and demands an architecture in which man, machine and space combine to form an organic body.'3 The central idea is that of the individual capsule, a movable, prefabricated unit with a theoretical . status similar to that of the primitive hut in the eighteenth century. The best-known realisation of this idea is Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, in which the Iç4 units, attached to two fixed nucleaei, are intended to be seen as expressing the personality of their occupants. The question of the relationship between prefabrication and individuality is not raised. Kurokawa even claimed that his high technology `meta-architecture', with its notions of organic life-cycles, introduced an ecological system into architecture. His large-scale structures are very similar to the `Mesa City' which Soleri was developing in the United States at almost the same time.

Immediately after I945, when attention in Europe was focused on rebuilding the cities destroyed in the war, there was little published by way of architectural theory. For the German rebuilding programme the theories of functionalism, particularly of the New Architecture, were considered adequate, especially as it was felt that these architects were entitled to some patronage after the Neo-classicism of the Nazi period, with the ideol 414c26e ogical overtones that had so often been laid upon it. From their vantage-point in the United States the main representatives of the New Architecture determined

to a large extent the nature of the buildings erected in the I95os and I96os but they offered no fresh theory. Their view received support from Sigfried Giedion's historical work Space, T'ime and Arrhitecture, which from the moment of its publication defined for a generation or more what constituted `modern architecture'. Rival interpretations such as that given by Bruno Zevi in Towards an Organic Architecture (I95o) made a much lesser impact.

In Germany, where the primary need was to get rid of the ideological ballast that had burdened the subject since the I9zos, it was believed that a new starting-point could be found in the expression of the country's new political consciousness. Such a view was expressed by Adolf Arndt in his address Demokratie als Bauherr in I96I, which however gives the feeling that attention is somehow being diverted from the realities of the situation of architecture. Compared with the developments in the rest of the world, German architecture of the first post-war decade, together with theoretical

works on the subject, seems provincial" - a judgement that is not invalidated by the work of a few outstanding figures such as Hans Scharoun. The VersHrh einer Standortsbs stimmung der Gegenwartsarchitektur (I956) by the Swiss architect Justus Dahinden is not concerned with coming to terms with past ideologies but presents a survey of theoretical and historical material from Vitruvius to Wölfflin, and culminates in speculations on the cycles of history. Dahinden gives pride of place to the problem of form, for which he adduces criteria such as the relationship between support and load, simplicity, and the purity of primitive crystalline forms, combining motifs from aesthetics and the psychology of perception to prodúce a schema at the centre of which is the concept of the creative will. There is no place here for the functional and technological aspects of architecture.

The lack of conceptual clarity in Dahinden's work is typical of most theoretical writing in German after the Second World War. In Germany itself the discussion of theoretical issues had all but dried up during the Nazi years, so that the sense of historical continuity was under threat. The writings of Egon Eiermann (19o4-7o), for example, an important figure in post-war development, are honest and down-to-earth in their practical intent but they hardly amount to a theoretical system.'9 Only with the decline in building activity in the I97os did interest in theory begin to grow again, ani with it the realisation that contemporary architectural theory was in fact lacking,

a lack that had to be made good by improvised statements and reactions. And since contact had been lost with the values and concepts of the past, these statements could hardly conceal their inadequacy. This sense of insecurity in theoretical matters, coupled with the absence of a practical sense of direction, emerged clearly from a series of interviews with German architects edited by Heinrich K otz and published in I977 under the title Architektur in der Bundesrepublik.

Of particular note is the work of Frei Otto (b.I925), who aimed at a new conception of architecture in the commentary with which he accompanied his pneumatic and tent constructions and his experiments with lightweight structures. The keywords in his vocabulary are `natural' and `biological'. His essays show him to be a critical observer of architectural trends, while in his books he deals with technical problems, but without losing sight of his overall conception." In his `bionic theory' he goes beyond earlier biologistic speculations, like those of Neutra, by translating the laws of Nature into immediate construction. For lightweight construction he coined the term `Big', defined as `the ratio of the mass of an object to the product of the force transmitted and the distance over which it is transmitted. The principle of lightweight construction is more important than the question of functionalism, since it provides the link to the aesthetic dimension. Otto does not, however, hold the view of the constructive functionalists `that objects which are functional or lightweight are automatically aesthetic', but, striving to accommodate the historically determined concepts of structural honesty, type and individuality, arrives at his own definition of the aesthetics of lightweight structures: "They become aesthetic at the moment when, without becoming any more unfunctional, they reveal their ideal, `perfect , `true' countenance to the receptive, unprejudiced observer, and when they reflect not only the typical form of all fully perfect, economically functional structures of the same kind but also their common and individual quality, including the variations, i.e. imperfections, typical of individuals.

According to Otto's theory of biological architecture, as applied to lightweight constructions, it is not that an architectural design seeks a technical solution but that the `form-finding processes' are governed by the laws of lightweight construction. As he writes in his critique (I958) of Hugh Stubbins' Kongresshalle in Berlin: "One cannot design such buildings - one can only help them to acquire their ultimate form by constant searching." His demand for the primacy of his `scientific form-finding process' is expressed with great vigour in an article on the roof for the Olympic stadium in Munich (for which he himself supplied calculations), designed by the firm of Günter Behnisch and Partners, whom he accuses of artistic manipulation, concluding: `The desire for a prominent design contradicts the search for the underlying form, a form as yet unknown, but subject to the laws of Nature. If logically enough, this led Otto to investigate the whole question of ecological building. Otto's statement of his position is an exception in the post-war German context while the urge felt by architects who have become successful draughtsmen to express themselves in print has led to little more than semi-critical descriptions of the contemporary scene, satisfying the need to justify their own work. Die Verantwortung des Architekten (I982) by Meinhard von Gerkan is one such work.

A particular contribution to the subject of housing came from Holland in the post-war years. J.H. Van den Broek and Jaap B. Bakema, architects who broke away from the tradition of functionalism, recommended an architecture that found its starting-point in landscape and in basic conce ts such as Space, Nature and Energy, and acknowled ed the rimar importance of aesthetic form. This led to "Structuralism" related to but not reduceable to Structuralism in the literary/anthropological sense) and the Nieuwes Bowen movement, in which Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger (b.I932) have played leading roles. Taking his lead from Gerrit Rietveld, Van. Eyck worked towards a new relationships between interior and exterior in architecture and a formal wealth of interior structuring, quoting Alberti's formula of the house as a town and the town as a house. Working with the structural categories of Cubism, he advocated the use of bold colours, especially as found in the spectrum of the rainbow. His ideas have been put into practice both in new housing estates and in historical quarters in Holland, and have attracted international attention.

The most important influences since I945 have come from the United States where architectural theory has generally been discussed in a more pragmatic and liberal spirit than that which prevailed in Europe during the first half of the century which provided the subject-matter for American post-war debate. Much of the development in America, following the lines of discussion in pre-war Europe, has consisted of a formal assessment of, followed by a gradual movement away from, the positions adopted by the great figures who emigrated from Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, but the theoretical substance has generally been of subsidiary importance compared with actual buildings erected. Indeed, the most successful American architeetural firms, which have constructed buildings combining technology and form in the manner of Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, have paid scant attention to theory. Such is the case, for example with Skidmore, Owings & Merill, a firm which continues to attach prime importance to functionalism and technology, cautiously adapting the aesthetic appearance of their buildings to the trend of the moment. The only poetic content to be found is in the designs and occasional essays of Gordon Bunshaft. Eero Saarinen (I9Io-6I), following in his father Eliel's footsteps, has produced expressive formal solutions using concrete but without developing any new theory.

Published collections of interviews with architects offer a wealth of material on the complex spectrum of architectural discussion in the United States since I945. One of the most instructive cases is that of Philip Johnson (b. I9o6), who came to architecture by way of art history. He was one of the organisers of the exhibition Modern Architecture in New York in I932 and a co-editor of the book The International Style, published the same year ; he then fell under the spell of Mies van der Rohe, on whom he wrote a monograph in I940, and from whose influence he gradually freed himself in the I95os.33 His swing from one extreme to another, on which he has himself wittily and materials, led to isolated realisations of an `alternative architecture' as a counterweight to official trends, but such works are only on the fringes of our subject.

A profound criticism of the functionalist position was put forward by the German philosopher Ernst Bloch (I885-Ig77) in his work Das Prinzip Hoffnung, written between I938 and I947 during his exile in the United States.fo Bloch writes from the standpoint of an independent, `dissident' Marxist ; his book contains a devastating attack on functionalist architecture, which he calls the product of the `ice-cold world of robots, created by the consumer society' (`die eiskalte Automatenwelt der Warengesellschaft'). Emphasising how functionalism spelt death for symbolism, he concluded: "For over a generation this steel-furniture, concrete-cube, tlat-roof creature has stood there, bereft of history, the ultimate in modernity, boring, apparently daring but in reality trivial, claiming to be full of hatred for the cliché in every ornament yet more trapped in stereotypes than any stylistic copy ever was in the bad old nineteenth century.' Bloch demanded a return to `organic ornament', derived not from historical models but from the conditions that govern a new society. Central to his position was the need to overcome functionalism, which he interpreted as the product of capitalism, and a new view of architecture as `an attempt at production in the real human environment,' with room for `organic ornament'. This is not to say that Bloch can be credited with having initiated the anti-functionalist discussion in the United States. He did, however, provide a remarkably far-sighted panorama of the twentieth-century scene, of which later architectural theory seems to be little more than variation and appendix. This applies, for instance, to the writings of Robert Venturi (b.I925), some of them produced in collaboration with his wife Denise Scott Brown (b.I93I), which have received extraordinary acclaim. His ·book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) was described by Vincent Scully as `probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture of 1923.' This is a considerable overestimation yet in its return to the values of the past and to the essential symbolic nature of architecture, it is a work that has had a signal influence.

The target of Venturi's attack is Mies van der Rohe's formula `less is more', a phrase coined to denote a form of aestheticised functionalism. Venturi's response, illustrated by historical examples, is `More is not less', or, in a particularly aggressive formulation, `Less is a bore.' Venturi sets out to put his experience of Mannerism and Baroque to the service of a new concept of architecture by returning to the complexity, in form and substance, of these two styles ; at the same time his experience of contemporary Pop Art turns his thoughts to the everyday world of the consumer society, whose simple commercial and symbolic language he seeks to employ in architecture and urban planning.' `Main Street is almost all right,' meaning that the business districts of modern cities, with their automobiles, their stores and their places of entertainment, give us optical signals which are comparable in their significance to those we receive from the architecture of the past. He has been led to concentrate on the `commercial strip', which he analyses in Learning from Las Vegas (I972),fs significantly subtitled in its revised version `The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form'. Venturi's theories are considerably more clearly expressed here than in his earlier book, with its subjective, bombastic style and superficial use of historical material.

Learning from Las Vegas contains many flashes of insight and brilliant aperçus, but its conclusions are highly questionable. On the one hand it contains striking observations such as the following : `Recent Modern architecture has achieved formalism while rejecting form, promoted expressionism while ignoring ornament, and deified space while rejecting symbols.' But Venturi's own quest for a new architectural symbolism takes the form of an affirmation and aesthetic overvaluation of the everyday world around us, the banal symbols of which he equates with the symbolism of past ages, seriously comparing the night-lit Strip in Las Vegas with the mosaic interior of the Norman church of La Martorana in Palermo and the Amalienburg Palace in Munich,concluding: "The Strip shows the value of symbolism and allusion in an architecture of vast space and speed and proves that people, even architects, have fun with architecture that reminds them of something else, perhaps of harems or the Wild West in Las Vegas, perhaps of the nation's New England forbears in New Jersey. Allusion and comment, on the past ar present or our great commonplaces or old clichés, and inclusion of the everyday in the environment, sacred and profane - these are what is lacking in present-day Modern architecture."

`Fun' is here a more or less sérious architectural criterion, and Venturi gives an analysis of the fair bound eclecticism of Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas to justify his position His critique of functionalism leads to a plea for any kind of eclecticism, formal or historical, which returns to ornament. Architecture becomes a `decorated shed', and ornament is `ugly and ordinary' but at the same time aesthetically assured, as he illustrates by comparing Paul Rudolph's Crawford Manor in New Haven with the Venturi and Rauch Guild House in Philadelphia. From behind a mask of wit and irony he provides a theoretical justification for making totally free use of historical forms such as the `primitive vernacular'. This is the only way in which it is possible to understand how he can decorate the surface of a coffee service tray with the pattern of the paving-stones of the Capitol in Rome. When the high quality of Venturi's own buildings is considered, it can only be assumed that he did not really want his theory to be applied so rigidly. However, this is the meaning he conveys, and his book has the status of a kind of manifesto that ushers in the era of so-called Post-Modernism.

The ideas of Charles Moore have often been compared with those of

Venturi, but to Moore himself the parallels are very limited. They both share a belief that architecture works in the first instance symbolically, although the basis for its symbolic quality is seen entirely differently by each. Moore states his position in Body, Memory and Architecture written in collaboration with the sculptor Kent C. Bloomer and based on a series of introductory university lectures on basic problems in architecture. Moore develops a consistent anthropological conception of architecture architecture is measured by the way it is expérienced by the human body in space.

Starting from the basic elements as objects of human perception - space, site, walls, roof, etc., with the significant reintroduction of the Orders - he comes very close to Renaissance theory.ó In a historical digression on functionalist theory `The Mechanization of Architecture' he presents the eighteenth century's `scientific' conception of architecture as leading away from fundamentals, and bases his own approach on empathy and the principles of Gestalt psychology. For Moore architecture is physical and psychological taking possession of a place by a building's inhabitant who finds confirmation of his own identity in the symbols of individual and historical memory. "We require a measure of possession and surrounding to feel the impact and the beauty of the building. The feeling of buildings and our sense of dwelling within them are more fundamental to our architectural experience than the information they give us." This is a long way from Venturi. Moore sees architecture as the projection of human experience, as valid for the city as for the house The basic task of architecture is the reproduction of `the inner landscape of human beings', as realised in such buildings as the Acropolis in Athens, the Wieskirche in Bavaria, Frank Lloyd Wright's Winslow House, and Moore's own works. Moore's incorporation of the everyday world and of models from the past proceeds, so to speak, from within, whereas Venturi starts from the external symbolic form.

Moore's attitude to the past has varied in the course of time. The Place of Houses (I974, with Gerald Allen and Donlyn Lyndon) is a model-book in the nineteenth-century tradition and puts his own house designs into a historical context. His human-based programme is expressed in the formulation : `Rooms to live in, machines that serve life, and the inhabitants' dreams made manifest.''o A more whimsical attitude towards historical models emerges from his Dimensions. Space, Shape and Scale in Architecture (I976 ; with Gerald Allen), in which the basic elements of architecture are interpreted in a manner similar to that in Body, Memory and Architecture;" a section here on the Villa Hadriana reads like a preliminary description of his Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans of 1977-78.

In the last analysis Moore's use of historical models is as arbitrary as Venturi's. Since it forms part of man's memory and man's identity, the architecture of the past can be made to serve the needs of the present. But instead of replicating a particular historical style, Moore makes ironical, discordant references to it in a new, changed context. For the realisation of his Piazza d'Italia, for instance, he employs the techniques of Pop Art : he introduces the five Classical orders and a fanciful `American' order, which creates an effect of alienation by using modern materials and attaching neon strip-lights to the columns. Yet he takes it for granted that the associative power of the picture-postcard world he has created in his Piazza d'Italia, with Sicily at its centre, will provide a place with which the Italo-Sicilian community of New Orleans can identify. This seems to question Moore's considerable achievements, in the fields of housing and campus buildings. The human-centred aims he sets out in his books cannot be achieved through exercises in historical irony. His Piazza d'Italia is a piece of three-dimensional Pop Art masqerading as architecture. Each in his own way, Moore and Venturi set out to use the architecture of the past as a set of visual signs as seen through the eyes of the twentieth century. The inner meaning of that architecture, however, cannot be transported in this way. The result is a façade architecture laid round a functional shell, laying claim to durability but having an air of impermanence about it. Such fair-booth architecture cannot be a true alternative to functionalism, however justified the opposition to functionalism may be. History and the models of the past are here treated casually and superficially, which is one of the fundamental objections to so-called Post-Modernist architecture, with its use of ironical, eclectic gestures in place of substance and symbol.

The mid-1970s saw an increasing number of works devoted to analysing the reasons for the failure of Modern. Peter Blake, once a disciple of modern architecture becomes in Form Follows Fiasco its most violent critic, calling up the fallacies in Geoffrey Scott's The Architecture of Humanism and setting alongside them what he calls the fantasies' of modern architecture, thereby putting into question such of its basic rinciples as function, open plan, purity, technology, high-rise buildings and so on. The weakness of these two works is that they offer no suggestions as to where alternatives might be found. Likewise Wolfgang Pehnt, surveying what he took to be the demise of Post-Modernism in his Das Ende der Zuversicht (I983), was unable to reach any firm conclusion.

The idea of a `Post-Modern' architecture (variously dubbed Post-Functionalist, Symbolic, Anthropological, etc.) is présent in the work of architects otherwise as different from each other as Philip Johnson, Moore and Venturi, though without the term as such being used. It established itself as a stylistic concept with Charles Jencks's The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, which appeared in the same year (I977) as Blake's Form Follows Fiasco and was followed by a series of works in which Jencks' ideas became more and more frivolous. The term `Post-Modern' has since become a catchword for anything and everything genuinely or allegedly anti-functionalist, embracing the most heterogeneous of trends, and is applied indiscriminately to Neo-Rationalists such as Aldo Rossi as well as to others like the `New York Five'.

Christopher Alexander (b.I936), who came to California from Vienna made a passionate plea in his first book, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (I964), for `an entirely new attitude to architecture and planning, an alternative which will, we hope, gradually replace current ideas and practices. Alexander postulates a design process which shall take account of a mass of independent factors, substantiating his demand with numerous diagrams and mathematical formulae. In fact his approach is not so far from the comprehensive concept of functionalism characteristic of the tradition of Louis Sullivan. Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building (I97y), rhetorical in style, opens with a set of maxims in a manner that recalls Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture, and roceeds with formulaic repetitions and such techniques as the use of a different typeface for the expression of eternal verieties, all of which creates an atmosphere of religiosity to which one can either submit or turn away from in scepticism. Alexander develops an associative theory of "Pattern languages' in architecture - which he sees as `part of nature - and `patterns of events ' which leads to `the quality without a name' in which his timeless way of building' achieves fulfilment. With a dazzling display of conceptual and linguistic virtuosity he produces statements on architecture which by virtue of their very generality, have a certain validity to practical account, but which can scarcely be of any use in practice

In contrast to the high-flown nature of his theories, Alexander's own designs, such as his wooden Linz Café (i98i), are unassuming, though by no means devoid of charm. Conceived merely as a temporary structure, this `alternative design', which was published in the manner of a manifesto, shows a broad discrepancy between idea and reality. However, it is quite conceivable that Alexander's ideas will turn out to be a vital stimulus to the emergence of a new conception of architecture, though they are far from typical of the arguments at present heard in the United States.

No clear line of development can be detected in America, although the ideas of Johnson, Venturi and Moore have had such a widespread effect that hardly a building is constructed today that avoids eclecticism or historical associations of one kind or another. The different paths taken by the individual members of the `New York Five' (Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Richard Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier), who all staned from the formalism of Le Corbusier, are revealing. Graves (b.1934), whose buildings have a highly pictorial quality, shows particularly clearly the move towards an eclecticism of quotations, as in his Public Service Building for Portland, Oregon, which deliberately harks back to American Art Deco; he himself has also made clear his indebtedness to historical, nthropomorphic theories of architecture. Meier (b.I934), on the other hand, has kept to a form of aestheticsed functionalism which he sees as belonging to a great historical tradition, and he rejects the use of ornament in the basis of arguments almost identical to those heard in the I92os.

Thomas Gordon Smith and Stanley Tigerman put forward a case for the totally free use of historical architectural forms based on a collage of traditional ideas that can be described, according to one's taste, as whimsical, ironic or just silly. Tigerman's aim of destroying the Giedion-Pevsner view of the development of twentieth-century architecture was shown in his imaginary second competition (I98o) for the Chicago Tribune Tower, which presented a view of the entries for the actual competition of I922 totally different from that generally accepted Here was a strange attempt to escape from history by inventing alternative history.

The theoretical basis of fashionable high technology architecture, be it fanciful, bombastic or vulgar (e.g. Helmut Jahn or John C. Portman), is sketchy, but in all cases particular regard is paid to the needs and habits of the user. The extent to which this historicist `Romantic' tendency has made its mark on the general public can be seen from the competition for the Southwest Center in Houston (I983), the designs submitted - the winner was Jahn - owing their raison d étre to the Gothic Revival or Art Deco. Discussion of architectural theory in the United States continues to follow a more liberal and pragmatic course than in Europe, though European developments are closely followed. Whereas in America architecture is treated primarily as a matter of technology and form, in most European countries ideological and social questions predominate. In Europe the liveliest discussion of architectural theory since the end of the Second World War has taken place in Italy, where almost all theoretical statements have been characterised by a keen awareness of history. Many historians of art and architecture - Bruno Zevi, Leonardo Benevolo, Manfredo Tafuri, Giulio Carlo Argan - have influenced the course of the debate; conversely, architects have also been active in the historiography of their subject - Paolo Ponoghesi, for instance. Probably the most significant architect in this connection has been Carlo Scarpa (I9o6-78),86 who combined his knowledge of Venice with the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright and with a study of the historical setting, using concrete to achieve solutions that approached the poetic. However, he left no account of the theoretical basis of his work.

In contrast to Germany, activity in Italy resumed after I945 with little interruption, especially in Milan, where a studio like that of the BBPR could survive political change. This is also true, though in a different way, of Pier Luigi Nervi, an engineer working mainly in Rome, who concerned himself with the aesthetic questions related to his structures. Nervi came to the conclusion that scientific calculations were inadequate to demonstrate the functional qualities of a building and that functions and forces need to be made explicit in the design. This realisation, coming from an engineer, spelt the end of a merely structural functionalism, both in theory and in practice.

Developments in Italy since the Second World War have taken many different directions. A constant concern with historical cities has led to a particular emphasis on town planning and local history, two subjects that invariably go hand in hand. Two intluential works have been L úrbanistica e l ávvenire della citt< (igs9) by Giuseppe Samona and Origine e sviluppo della citt< moderna (I964) by Carlo Aymonino. The most important contribution to the theory of urban planning is L árchitettura della citt< (1966) by Aldo Rossi (b.193I),9' who strongly opposes the application of purely functionalist criteria and argues for a return to aesthetic and monumental categories under the banner of socialism. Rossi is a key figure in modern Italian architecture. His early experiences of Stalinist architecture in Moscow and East Berlin have left their marks, both ideologically and formally, while in his numerous writings, as well as in his designs, he has expressed his reactions to the work of theorists old and new-the Revolutionary architects, Milizia, Loos, the Surrealists, Italian Rationalism, Le Corbusier, etc.

The manifesto Architettura Razionale, which Rossi issued on the occasion of the Milan Triennale in I973, gave birth to a movement that was quickly joined by architects from all over Europe, among them Vittorio Gregotti, Giorgio Grassi, Carlo Aymonino, Leon and Rob Krier, James Stirling, Oswald Matthias Ungers and Josef Paul Kleihues. Their designs are characterised by a suggestive pictorial quality or by a precision of presentation that goes back to Durand. The influence of this architecture is exercised more by drawings and designs than by completed buildings; indeed, such drawings are often ends in themselves, as they were with Boullée, whose treatise on architecture Rossi translated into Italian. Architectural drawing becomes compensation for a reality found inadequate, and liberties are taken which would have no méaning if the plan were to be realised. Architects like Massimo Scolari and Rob Krier are primarily draughtsmen who occasionally publish architectural programmes which contain little by way of formally presented theory.

The increasing imprecision of the term `Rationalism' became clear when attempts were made to link the European movement with America - with Venturi, for example - where the theoretical situation was quite different. The only common ground was the concept of a new symbolism in architecture based on a reversion to the past. It was only logical, therefore, that the vague concept of `Post-Modernist' should subsume the `Neo-Rationalist' movement, even though these `Rationalists' generally object to such a tendency. Yet the modern trend, as revealed in exhibitions and their corresponding catalogues, has been to try and make the alliance between Post-Modernism and Rationalism a fact, heedless of what is actually built. This trend can be clearly seen in the activities of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt and the International Bauausstellung (IBA) exhibitions in Berlin in Germany, together with America and Italy, is a centre for architectural experiments in how to build within the historical framework of pre-existing urban structures, and the outcome of the IBA in Berlin, where, under Hardt-Waltherr Hämer and Josef Paul Kleihues, a cautious programme of urban renewal has been carried out, shows the feasibility of these ideas.

Mention should also be made in this connection of the often fundamental influence on architectural theory of psychology and sociology. The return to the symbolic quality of architecture is due on the one hand to historical studies in architectural iconography, on the other to the semiotics of sociologists such as Gillo Dorfles and Umberto Eco. In his book Intentions in Architecture (1963) Christian Norberg-Schulz has incorporated

the findings of investigations in these fields into a new synthesis of criteria for

architectural judgement. New ideas in urban planning have come from Jane Jacobs, with her Death and Life of Great American Cities (igóI) and from Alexander Mitscherlich's Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte (ig65); a while Rudolf Arnheim, working from the viewpoint of perceptual psychology, has produced a logical refutation of functionalism.

There has been no dearth of attempts to bring these and other areas of thought to bear in architectural theory. Niels Luning Prak, for example, using a questionable, methodology in his Language of Architecture (I968), makes architectural aesthetics dependent on social history. An attractive plea for a pluralistic view, accompanied by gently ironical judgements on the dogmas of the past, is contained in Bruce Allsopp's A Modern Theory of Architecture (1977), which - in its remarks on the nature of architectural decoration, for instance - gives a positive slant to the negative conclusions in the books by Brolin and Blake mentioned above, and encourages the treatmerlt of architectural theory in a cautious, undoctrinaire spirit.

In the current theoretical writings of architects there seems no way out of the dilemma of a purely negative reaction to functionalist Modernism. `Post-Modernism' signifies nothing more than a series of heterogeneous attempts to break loose from the functionalist grip. Neo-Historicism, one of the most prominent of these attempts, lacks firm intellectual foundation and, like any primitive historicist tendency, can only lead back to a new form of functionalism. A characteristic recent example of this superficial, ill-considered play with a collective historical memory would seem the monumental housing estates designed by Ricardo Bofill (b.I939), who uses poetic allusions - to Kafka's The Castle, Walden, Abraxas, etc. - to demonstrate his mastery of large-scale Baroque forms and eclectic stylistic quotation, but his theory is refuted by reality.

If architecture and its theoretical reflection are consciously to rejoin a historical continuum, there must be a thorough, unprejudiced appraisal of the situation. The break with the past which is alleged to have taken place in the first half of the twentieth century has in fact severed vital links with tradition in the late twentieth-century mind which cannot easily be restored.

An alternative to functionalism is not to be found in a return to indigenous styles or to a formalistic Neo-classicism, or in any other forms of historical eclecticism. The study of architectural history and theory can only reveal what practical steps might be taken in an age whose aesthetics, technological faith and ecology have been shaken to their foundations.