Troubles in Theory Part III: The Great Divide: Technology Vs Tradition - Thinkpiece - Architectural Review

Troubles in Theory Part III: The Great Divide: Technology vs Tradition | Thinkpiece | Architectural Review 7/28/17, 11(54 AM
Troubles in Theory Part III: The

Great Divide: Technology vs
Tradition
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The great divide: technology vs tradition
The second article of this series examined the way in which post-war
theory, as advanced in The Architectural Review, anticipated, if not
generated, many of the themes that emerged in Postmodernism in the
mid-1970s. The third part traces the divisions that emerged in theory in
the 1960s technologists, system theorists, formalists, historicists and
looks at Reyner Banhams attempt at a solution somewhere between
tradition and technology
Throughout the present century architects have made fetishes of

technological and scientific concepts out of context and have been
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disappointed by them when they developed according to the processes of

technical development, not according to the hopes of architects. A
generation ago, it was The Machine that let architects down tomorrow
or the day after it will be The Computer, or Cybernetics or Topology.
Reyner Banham, The Architectural Review, March 1960
Banhams important book Theory and Design in the First Machine Age
[] is a wonderful and perverse book. I cant follow his parti pris: What
distinguishes modern architecture is surely a new sense of space and the
machine aesthetic. As one minor architect (maybe not even modern) I
have no sense of space nor am I encumbered with a machine aesthetic.
Philip Johnson, The Architectural Review, September 1960
The architect who proposes to run with technology knows that he will be
in fast company, observed Reyner Banham in the conclusion to his
groundbreaking history of Theory and Design in the First Machine Age.
The historian who five years earlier had called for an autre architecture in
the name of the New Brutalism, now advised the architect to discard his
whole cultural load, including the professional garments by which he is
recognized as an architect. It may be, he hazarded, that what we have
hitherto understood as architecture, and what we are beginning to
understand of technology are incompatible disciplines.1 The last images in
the book, as if mimicking Le Corbusiers technique of before and after
images, displayed on one page Le Corbusiers Villa Savoye, and on the
facing page, Buckminster Fullers Dymaxion House project of the same
years, a radical technological criticism of the International Style as
mechanically inadequate.2
Pages from Reyner Banhams Theory and Design in the First Machine. In a nod towards Le
Corbusiers technique of before and after images, Banham juxtaposed Corbs Villa Savoye at
Poissy with Buckminster Fullers Dymaxion House
Fresh from completing his first book, having been appointed as Assistant
Executive Editor at the AR, and with his polemical opposition to the Italian
Neo-Liberty style as infantile regression3 in full swing, Banham launched
a series of banner articles under the heading of Stocktaking 1960 between
January and June 1960.4 Printed on bright yellow paper to contrast with
the brown (history) and blue (criticism) of previous AR layouts, and with
red stars accentuating dates and numbers, these articles summarised what
for Banham represented the conditions for architectural theory and design
in the next machine age.
1960 in architecture, Banham claimed, marked a great divide; following

the expressionism of Ronchamp (which James Stirling had already
characterised as the fundamental challenge to rationalism in the AR in
1956) and John Summersons dismissal of New Brutalism in favour of the
programme a year later, a fundamental change in architectural taste
seemed to have occurred. Somewhere along the line, Banham concluded,
the Modern Movements private mythology of Form and Function has
come apart. Torn between tradition and technology, or as he phrased it,
science and history, the profession needed to re-define its limits in the
midst of these competing bids for intellectual domination.
By tradition Banham meant the stock of general professional knowledge;

by technology, its opposite the exploration of potential through
science. In a dramatic parallel presentation tradition on the left column,
technology on the right Banham told two intersecting but ultimately
separate stories. Architecture defined in terms of its professional history
versus Architecture as the provision of fit environments for human
activities. Banham was concerned at the reaction of the first against the
second the sense that sociology and technology had over-determined
architectural form, and the ensuing move back to architecture, led by the
followers of Rudolf Wittkowers analysis of Renaissance proportions, his
student Colin Rowes investigation of The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,
and the flowering of history teaching by Rowe, Scully and Zevi that in turn
had led to a wave of geometrically inspired designs. Added to this a new
stream of latent historicism had emerged with Neo-Liberty in Italy, Neo-
Classicism in the US and Neo-Historicism of the Modern Movement in
Britain too, all characterised with Neo-Palladianism as Formalist. Even
Banhams earlier espousal of New Brutalism came in for criticism here,
although the Smithsons Hunstanton School and Stirling and Gowans
Ham Common Flats were slightly redeemed by their honest use of
materials.
On the side of technology, Banham had called for a complete revision of

commonplace notions, such as house, and placed Buckminster Fuller at
the head of those who had conducted fundamental research into the
shelter-needs of mankind. Konrad Wachsmann comes in a close second as
a fanatical watchmaker of the joint. Not without an implicit debt to Le
Corbusier, Banham revives the car as a standard of comparison for
architecture, not only as object of technological sophistication, and as
puncturing the myth of a single non-style style, but as irritant that
demands re-definition of the urban environment. Here the Smithsons
House of the Future, Monsanto House and Ionel Scheins plastic dwelling
units seem to open the way to large-unit prefabrication. He concluded by
contrasting Charles Eames conviction in a real continuity in the
architectural tradition, with the lack of caution or finesse exhibited by
scientists towards such tradition, and warning that at any unpredictable
moment the unorganized hordes of uncoordinated specialists could flood
into the architects preserves and, ignorant of the lore of the operation,
create an Other Architecture by chance, as it were, out of apparent
intelligence and the task of creating fit environments for human
activities.5 There were, Banham admitted, certain intellectual freebooters
of the border-land between tradition and technology he cited John
Johansens Airform house as a radical departure from the prevailing Neo-
Palladianism but he was, as his pessimistic summing-up of the Modern
Movement revealed, deeply convinced that, for architects, tradition would
win out in the end.
From a series of banner articles by Reyner Banham

launched in AR February 1960 with Stocktaking. Other articles in the series included The Science
Side (AR March 1960), The Future of Universal Man (AR April 1960), History under Revision (AR
May 1960) and Propositions (AR June 1960). Yellow paper and red stars gave the pages visual
impact
Here though, Banham was and would always remain ambiguously in-
between, as it were inhabiting the margin separating the two columns. His
reception of two of the three contributors to the next article The Science
Side was less than enthusiastic. AC Brothers from English Electric wrote
of weapon system design with respect to the RAF guided missile the
Lightning interceptor, that was designed holistically in tandem with its
fighter aircraft and radar. ME Drummond of IBM (England) wrote of
computers as used in operations research, systems simulation, linear
programming and queueing theory. Drummond himself warned: that as
computers deal in cold, hard facts, they have no aesthetic sense and no
imagination. Banhams only response to the papers was to observe that

even psychology could be assigned a numerical value, as could aesthetics.
Indeed the psycho-physiological relationship between man and
environment was susceptible to mathematicisation. Banham was more
favourable to the third paper of The Science Side. Richard Llewelyn-
Davies, then at the Nuffield Foundation, but soon to become head of the
Bartlett School of Architecture, and Banhams Professor, was concerned to
introduce the social and the biological as opposed to the physical and the
technological into the architectural equation, from the science of visual
perception to group dynamics. He provided a bibliography that for
Banham represented the cutting edge of those facts about the environment
that would if used wisely produce another architecture: it seems to be no
longer a question of whether architects should try and master this mass of
information or not but how much longer they can put it off.
The next article, reporting a discussion between Anthony Cox (Architects

Co-Partnership), Gordon Graham (Architects Design Group, Nottingham),
John Page (Building Science, Liverpool University) and Lawrence Alloway
(Programme Director ICA) and chaired by Banham over a chicken lunch
and wine, clearly demonstrated what Banham knew beforehand, the
confrontation between architecture and a technological society. As
Banham reported, the discussion was sombre, nervous, and occasionally
barbed as it debated the precarious position of the architect in
technological society especially so as his position as universal man was
being challenged on all sides potentially a battered relic, or at most a
qualified technician. But, of course, Banham was not an architect but a
critic and historian, and Pevsners recently graduated PhD student, so he
was bound to introduce history in the fourth article History Under
Revision was the title, and his book precisely revising the history of the
Modern Movement (and not incidentally challenging Pevsners own
Gropius-centred history) was about to appear. In the spirit of overcoming
the father, Banhams contribution to the history section was entitled
History and Psychiatry, although there was little psychiatry in the text.
Rather it was his justification for Theories and History as a sequel to

Pevsners Pioneers of the Modern Movement of 1936. Banhams thesis was
that Pevsner had completed his history with the formation of the
Deutscher Werkbund in 1914 which had created a zone of silence, while
the successive histories of Giedion had in their partisanship (Space, Time
and Architecture hardly mentioned Mies van der Rohe) repressed a
number of architects and had suppressed (psychiatry?) many modern
architects worth reconsidering.
In AR April 1959 Banham voiced polemical opposition to the Italian Neoliberty movement, a quasi
historicist style that turned its back on Modernism
Banhams purpose ironic in retrospect given Manfredo Tafuris attack on

him was that the only position for a true historian to have was outside
architecture. Regarded as a specialist, almost as a consultant, a curer of
souls (psychoanalyst?) at the moment of the ultimate detachment of
architecture from its own tradition, and with the objective responsibility
for ensuring that the architect does not fall into eclecticism and Modern
Movement revivalism, Banham was well aware of the dangers: his
diagnosis must be as nearly infallible as is humanely possible, and to
achieve this he must be as nearly objective as humanely possible, and as
reliably skilled in interpretation as is humanely possible. The responsibility
that awaits him is not a light one. Architecture, no longer able to retain its
Vitruvian innocence relies on the historian to plot its future course. The
results of this analysis, as we know, were not what Banham anticipated.
The technical side continued to be supported by the AR which had
published John McHales essay on Fuller in 1955. But the AR, still
dominated by Hubert de Cronin Hastings and Gordon Cullens Townscape
ideology, seemed to back off the technological side very quickly.
Thus it was not the AR, but Architectural Design under the editorship of
Monica Pidgeon with successive technical editors Theo Crosby, Kenneth
Frampton, Robin Middleton and Peter Murray, that took up the cudgels for
Banhams technological question. In 1965 Banham himself reviewed the
projects of Archigram with reference to the influence of mass-production
on architecture in A Clip-On Architecture,6 while John McHale edited a
special issue of AD in February 1967, 2000+, introduced by Buckminster
Fullers The Year 2000, and largely written by McHale himself under the
title later given to his book, The Future of the Future. As he wrote
presciently, given the next 40 years: Some of the mandatory requirements
of the eco-system are already clear. We need to recycle our minerals and
metals; increasingly to employ our income energies of solar, wind, water
and nuclear power, rather than the hazardous, and depletive, capital
fuels; to draw upon microbiology and its related fields to refashion our
food cycle; to reorganize our chaotic industrial undertakings in new
symbiotic forms so that the wastes of one may become the raw materials of
the other; to redesign our urban and other life-style metabolisms so that
they function more easefully.7
Examples of what Banham described as the Italian retreat from modern architecture, AR April
1959. Ernesto Rogers subsequently retaliated by calling Banham an advocate of refrigerators in
Casabella Continuit, June 1959
In McHales two seminal works The Future of the Future and The
Ecological Context, Banhams aspirations for global scientific knowledge
were realised. What was not realised, however, was the union of tradition
and technology that he thought would emerge from increasing scientific
knowledge. Only a year later, and perhaps in revenge for the Stocktaking
series, Nikolaus Pevsner delivered his 1961 RIBA lecture, under the title
Modern Architecture and the Historian, or The Return of Historicism,
with both Banham and Summerson in attendance; this seemed, even at the
time, to effect a closure to the technological revolution, in its apparent
antipathy to stylistic eclecticism but nostalgia for Modernism, and with its
introduction of the term post Modern architecture for the first time.8
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Only six years later, the return to history was confirmed in Christian
Norberg-Schulzs response to Banham, in his enthusiastic review of
Robert Venturis Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, a book
that he saw was against the prevailing tendency for architects publications
to be dominated by studies on topics taken from sociology and psychology,
economy and ecology, mathematics and communication theory. He
concluded: The only subject which, paradoxically, is missing, is
architecture, defining architecture as the concrete means an architect uses
to solve the tasks he is facing, that is: architectural forms. He concluded,
as Banham had feared, we need more architecture, not less.9
Postmodernism, as Jencks was to coin it in 1965, had arrived.
Footnotes
1. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age,

Architectural Press (London), 1960, pp329-30.
2. Ibid, pp302-03.
3. Reyner Banham, Neoliberty. The Italian Retreat from Modern
Architecture, AR April 1959, pp232-5. Banhams article gave rise
to an equally fierce rebuttal from Ernesto Rogers, who called Banham an
advocate of refrigerators, and a wide-ranging
response from architects and critics that was summarised in AR December
1959, pp341-4.
4. Banham, Architecture after 1960, AR January 1960; Stocktaking, AR
February 1960; The Science Side, AR March 1960; The Future
of Universal Man, AR April 1960; History Under Revision, AR May 1960;
Propositions, AR June 1960.
5. Reyner Banham, 1960: Stocktaking, AR February 1960, p100.
6. Banham, A Clip-On Architecture, Architectural Design, November
1965, pp534-5.
7. John McHale, The Future of the Future, Architectural Design, February
1967, p66. This issue was followed by another, edited by one of Fullers
students, Michael Ben-Eli, who edited a Buckminster Fuller Retrospective
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in AD December 1972. Fuller had bemused his English audience from the
start. Hugh Casson was perplexed as to how to introduce his 1958 RIBA
lecture, settling on so outstanding and remarkable a phenomenon, while
all Ove Arup could say in his vote of thanks was that although there were
many things which he [had] not understood, he was nevertheless, a most
interesting personality. Fuller had obviously overrun his time. R
Buckminster Fuller, The R.I.B.A. Discourse, 1958: Experimental Probing
of Architectural Initiative, RIBA Journal, October 1958, pp415-24.
8. Nikolaus Pevsner, Modern Architecture and the Historian, or the
Return of Historicism, RIBA Journal, April 1961, pp230-60.
9. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Less is More, AR April 1968, pp257-8.
Picture credits
RIBA Library Books & Periodicals Collection

The Architectural Review
Casabella
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Troubles in Theory Part III: The Great Divide: Technology vs Tradition | Thinkpiece | Architectural Review 7/28/17, 11(54 AM

Troubles in Theory Part III: The

The great divide: technology vs tradition

Throughout the present century architects have made fetishes of

disappointed by them when they developed according to the processes of

1960 in architecture, Banham claimed, marked a great divide; following

By tradition Banham meant the stock of general professional knowledge;

On the side of technology, Banham had called for a complete revision of

From a series of banner articles by Reyner Banham

imagination. Banhams only response to the papers was to observe that

The next article, reporting a discussion between Anthony Cox (Architects

Rather it was his justification for Theories and History as a sequel to

Banhams purpose ironic in retrospect given Manfredo Tafuris attack on

1. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age,

RIBA Library Books & Periodicals Collection

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