Formalism as Politics: Colin Rowe’s Modernism in White + Gray

Formalism as Politics: Colin Rowe's Modernism in White + Gray RONN M. DANIEL Can it be argued that the interest of critical writing lies almost entirely in its method ... that such criticism is understood through the forms of its arguments, through the way that its method, in the process of constituting the object of criticism, exposes to view those choices that precede and predetermine any act ofjudgment? -Rosalind Krauss Yesterday, after playing chess, Brecht said: "You know, when Korsch comes, we really ought to work out a new game with him. A game in which the moves do not always stay the same; where the function of a piece changes after it has stood on the same square for a while; it should either become stronger or weaker. As it is the game doesn't develop, it stays the same for too long." -Walter Benjamin I n American architecture ofthe early r97os, as with many things at that time, color was everything; not whites and blacks, but rather whites and grays. The tonal schism had been developing at least since Robert Venturi's polemical call in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (r966) for "elements which are hybrid rather than 'pure', compromising rather than 'clean', distorted rather than 'straightforward' ... [a] messy vitality over obvious unity." ' Astute critics like Vincent Scully and Robert Stern were quick to give Venturi's formalist ideas a political shade, embedding him within American traditions of pragmatism and populism.2 In this way a new architectural vernacular was born, a gray architecture for the gray flannel suited man. Resisting the gray tide was a "camp of true believers - always anxious for authenticity attempt [ing] to work over the results of the revolution so as to make them strange, arcane, difficult ; interesting to the few and inaccessible to the many."3 These architects preferred analytic rigor to messy approximation and European modernism to American pluralism. They designed buildings which were geometrically complex cubes, contextually inhospitable, and almost exclusively white.4 When the two camps came to confront each other at the "White and Gray Conference" at UCLA in May ofr974, architecture critic and historian Colin Rowe must have found himself a good bit bewildered and amused (jig. I). His predicament was apparent. On the one hand, Rowe was the most important patron of the "whites." His student, Peter Eisenman was their chief ideologue and had founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies which served, temporarily, as the intellectual center for the group. The Institute's journal Oppositions was, at that very moment, re-publishing many of Rowe's decades-old essays. As a studio professor at the University ofTexas at Austin some two decades earlier, Rowe had designed (with John Hejduk, another of the whites) the "9-square" grid project whose combinatorial logic underlay so many of the white designs. And as a critic, Rowe's rigorous dissections of LeCorbusier's early modernism , particularly his essays "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa" (r947) and "Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal" (r955-56) gave to the whites their formalist tools. Yet, at the same time Rowe was waltzing with the whites, he was sock-hopping with the grays, whom he had been foreshadowing for years. As ARRIS RONN M. DANIEL Fig. I. Colin Rowe, Texas, I955· (From Alexander Carragone, The Texas Rangers: Notes from an Architectural Underground Cambridge: MIT Press, I995, III, Plate No. JI) early as 1950, Rowe had argued for a connection (as Venturi would later so influentially do) between modern architecture and mannerism.5 In his urban-design studios at Cornell, Rowe had developed compositional strategies based upon inflected contexts, "impure" forms, and deformed typologies, work which would be codified in his 1978 book Collage City (co-authored with Fred Koetter). Alongside of Venturi's own Learning from Las Vegas (I972), Collage City would become the standard handbook of gray urbanism. Thus a paradox at the heart of Colin Rowe's architectural criticism, whites and grays colored from the same pen. How can the historian, eager to categorize and evaluate, account for this influential writer so important to two seemingly exclusive theoretical positions? 6 Where does Rowe fit in twentieth-century architecture's intellectual topography? Perhaps one...