7/29/2019 _reyner_-_Neoliberty_1959

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-'hdrrlritahrmZ R d w , A pd 1959mnmaucdfmm mlof Italian aesthetes, spoke of 10 Stiie Liberty in arecent book (significantly entitled OscilIn,zotti delGilsto) as a style 'very near to us.'Questioned about his attitude to both Neolibertyand its forerunner, Dorfles replied, in a letter fromwhich the following are quotations, 'Today . . . myposition is critical towards the excessive stylistic anddecadent indulgences of certain Milanese and Torinesegroups (including some of the experiments of Aulenti,BBPR, etc.) without, however, considering it purelya piece of provincialism as Zevi does.' This, fromDorfles, should warn us tliat, for Italians, ArtNouveau, or its local variants, has some continuingvalidity that it has lost elsewherc, and he goes onto make a statement tha t opens up a wider questionof more than Italian relevance: 'But 1 am convincedstill, that the future in architecture, as much as indesign generally, lies more in a stylistic continuationof the Art Nouveau than in the Bauhaus-style.'Now the problem of alternatives to the 'Bauhaus-style' is one that clearly exercises the minds ofyounger architects in many parts of the world, evenif they have not, as in England, an explicit hostilityto 'the white architecture of the Thirties.' There is awidespread feeling th at much th at was of value in thearchitecture and theory current before 1914 was lostor buried in ovcr-hasty stylistic formulations in theearly Twenties, and then forgotten during the Aca-demic phase of the Thirties-hence that preoccupationof younger architects, to which Henry-Russell Hitch-cock has drawn attention, with architectural questionsthat were current about the time they were born.But, even if the men of the nineteen-twenties werewrong, and the men of the thirties were stubborn inerror, that is no reason for going back to the beginningand starting al1 over again. Events have moved toofast, even il1 the Forties, for there to be any time forarchitecture to go back and re-puzzle its earlierproblems. Over and above this, there are particularreasons for not going back to Art Nouveau.The only conceivable justification for reviving any-thing in the arts is that the reviver finds himselfculturally in a position analogous to that of the timehe seeks torevive-a return to something like classicalsophistication and affluence in Fourteenth-centuryIta ly justifies the Renaissance architecture of theFifteenth, the achievement of something like Atheniandemocratic sentiment in the early nineteenth justifieste style neo-grec. What undermines these justificationsis the presence of factors that notably were notpresent in the styles revived-christianity in Re-naissance architecture, industrialization in neo-grec-and where these intrusive factors are too large to beoverlooked, the justification must fail.Now a justification of Neoliberty on the basis thatMilanese bmghese life is still what i t was in 1900 isindeed implied in the polemics of Aldo Rossi. Butit wiil not wash, because that life is not a t al1 whatit was at the beginning of the century, as Marinetti,with his fanatical automobilisrn, already recognizedi n Milan in 1909, Art Nouveau died of a culturalrevolution that seems absolutely irreversible: the

domestic revolution th at began with electric coovacuum cleaners, the telephone, the gramophand al1 those other mechanized aids to gracious lth at are still invading the home, and have permanaltered the nature of domestic life and the meanindomestic architecture.Parallel with this domestic revolution there wthorough overhaul of ideas and methods in the plarts generally, marked by such signs as the FoundaManifesto of Futurism, the European discoverFrank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos' OrmnzetttCrim, Hermann Muthesius's lecture to the Wbund Congress of 1911, he achievement of fully Cpainting, and so forth. These mark a watershed indcvelopment of modern architecture; there is a ceconsistency about everything th at has happened sand a schism from what happened before. -4ndNouveau, 10 Stib Liberty, happened before.

It has become a convention, based chieflypaying too much attention to what the masterArt Nouveau claimed they were doing, to regard the first of the new styles, but the evidence of theaffirms that it was the last of the old, in spite osigns of transition tha t can be found in its best wTo revive it is thus to abdicate from the TwenCentury-which may have purely personal attractlike going to live on a desert island, but is no heone's fellow-men, and architecture, for betteworse, concerns one's fellow-men.On the other hand, these objections do no dyapply to the tendency to a de Stijl revival visibAnglo-Saxon eountries, reaching an extserne pas far as England is concerned, in David Gray's rehouse a t Oulton Broad. Even insofar as this revthe forms of Rietveld's work, i t does a t least reforms created since the watershed, still possessimarginal significance. But if the present disquiearchitecture resolve themselves in a crisis of i-such as the Neolibertarians claim is already upo-and raise another cultural watershed, thenRietveld revival, as well, will cease to have anysignificance for us, and Neoliberty will becomrevival of-not a pre-mechanieal culture-but last pre-mechanical culture but one.But al1 such justifications are marginal; the lasignificance of the revolution put in hand in 19that it has given Western architecture the couto look forward, not back, to stop reviving the fof any sort of p s t , middle-clrtss or otherwise.performance of the revolutionaries may not matched their promise, but the promise remainsis real. X t is the promise of liberty, not Libert'Neoliberty,' the promise of freedom from havinWear the discarded clothes of previous cultures, if those previous cultures have the air of tempiTo want to put on those old clothes again is to bMarinetti's words describing Ruskin, like a manhas attained fulI physical maturity, yet wantsleep in his cot again, to be suckled again bydecrepit nurse, in order to regain the nonchalanchis childhood. Even by the purely local standard'Milan and Turin, then, Neoliberty is infaregression.