A Second Modernism
MIT and Architecture in the PostWar
Editor: Arindam Dutta
The objective of this book is to examine the so-called “techno-social” turn in architectural
studies in the immediate aftermath of WWII until the 1980s. Architectural thought in this
period is marked strongly by linguistic, behavioral, computational, mediatic, probabilistic,
generative and cybernetic paradigms. In recent years, architectural historians of the postwar,
focusing their attention towards these paradigms, have increasingly encountered the
influential role of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning in this postwar shift, one that
parallels its central influence in the technological world as well. Indeed, the School in this
period is distinctly characterized by a shift away from architectural formalism, exhibiting
instead a preoccupation with “research” housed in pseudo-laboratory-like cells, each
reflecting the interests of particular group of personnel. A series of micro-institutions,
harvesting both opportunities within MIT’s particular research dispensation as well as
national and international arenas of expertise and funding, set up home at the Institute in
this period, becoming landmark edifices in their often disparate theaters of activity: the
Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS), the Harvard-MIT Joint Center
for Urban Studies, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), the History Theory
Criticism (HTC) Program, the Laboratory of Architecture and Planning, the Environmental
Design Program, the Architecture Machine Group and the Media Lab are all units that
emerged from this “research”-based investment into architecture. A distinctive set of experts
also emerged, never quite central to the architectural field, but luminaries nonetheless at its
penumbra: William Wurster, Gyorgy Kepes, Kevin Lynch, John Habraken, Nicholas
Negroponte. Design training at MIT also reflected these forces, focusing strongly on broad
urban and behavioral modeling practices on the one hand, and techno-social engineering on
Dutta, (Provisional) Introduction
0.
1
the other. This book attempts to marshal the work of scholars already working on these
complex interactions into a single volume, using the MIT archive as a guiding focus.
This shift towards complexity –based research models was not an intuitive shift that
suddenly flowered simultaneously in the minds of architects or planners. Quite to the
contrary, they emerged out of concrete attempts to mine particular institutional and funding
arrangements of the American postwar, both in the sciences and the social sciences, the two
major fronts of national zeal. In 1945, the outlines of the seminal report presented to the
Truman administration, Science: The Endless Frontier, laid out a dichotomy for advanced
university research in the United States until the 1980s that would be definitive not for
scientific research alone. The dichotomy was an older one, between “basic” and “applied”
research, but in the context of the American postwar this distinction drew not so much from
epistemological concerns as from a particular set of agreements made between different
factions. The first was the military’s own appreciation of the continued need to pursue
scientific research at scales commensurate with wartime intensities, given the widespread
realization that the war had been fought less on conventional grounds than on strategies
drawn from technological advantage. The second faction was that of research personnel
directly interested in military applications, these including elements in private industry. The
third – and most important – was the consortium created by major research universities, led
by MIT’s Vannevar Bush and Harvard’s James Conant, to garner moneys made available by
government for scientific research to significantly expand their scope of operations.
Scholarship on American research universities in the postwar has pointed to a peculiar
confluence of interests that defined the research agenda in this period. The 1945 Science
report, made by Bush at the helm of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, put
inordinate emphasis on the primacy of “basic” science as against the government’s interest
in applications-led research. Bush and Conant’s emphasis on basic science was in fact the
flip-side of a political attitude, comprising a strong belief on small government on the one
hand and the individual autonomy of the scientist on the other. That this lurch for autonomy
found a paradoxical audience in what could otherwise be considered the proverbial belly of
the big governmental beast was due a particular attitude on the part of government itself:
that any applied research required a strong background in basic science initiatives and
training before it could bear fruit. This at least was the rationale offered again and again to
Dutta, (Provisional) Introduction
0.
2
Congress for the various requisitions of the first two decades after the Bush report. The
post-war research apparatus thus crucially sat on a paradoxical platform: a belief system
vested in institutional autonomy and non-interference from government in setting research
agendas was thus signally subsidized and expanded by the growth of governmental
investment into scientific research, tentatively at a remove.
(Needless to say, this tenuous paradox lost its plausibility with the neoliberal turn in the
1980s. When the votaries of small government arrived at the center of American
government, this liberal dispensation towards basic science was summarily removed,
crucially depriving American basic science of key sources of public funding. Nixon’s
infamous “enemies list” comprising the Rad Lab’s Jerome Wiesner and Noam Chomsky
being an early case in point. The strings of purses made available with no strings attached
were closed tight again.)
It also goes without saying that the development of American social sciences in this period
were significantly aligned with government interests, even when funded by private
foundation grants, since these in turn themselves coordinated their national and international
objectives with those of the administration and the State department. MIT’s strong suit in
these areas - linguistics, sociology, media sciences, cybernetics, political science, economics –
draws significantly from this dual imperative. Indeed, this paradoxical tableau goes much
towards explaining why research universities in the American postwar were both strong
locations of governmental intervention and the often paid-up “counter-cultural” ethos that
vilified this intervention as elements of the “military-industrial complex.” On the other hand,
even as various kinds of social critics from Lewis Mumford to Langdon Winner declaimed
the exceeding technological determinism of everyday live, technologists turned more and
more to different kinds of social sites as the basis for the ethical reprieve of science: the
Odyssean travel of the microwave oven from military radar being the vaunted case in point.
The “aesthetic” fronts of art and architectural practice, in the face of an exponentially
expanding field of institutional research in these particular knowledge fields, were left to
make of it what they would, and some would. Thus, even before the transition of
pedagogical models from classicist to modern, from Beaux-Arts to the Bauhaus – the effect
a new wartime European diaspora – had been significantly resolved, one sees the imperative
of the second, “systems”-based, revolution superimposed onto the first one. A second
Dutta, (Provisional) Introduction
0.
3
avant-garde, this time drawn more from the positivist legates out of Vienna, Prague and
Cambridge, England rather than Paris, Berlin or Dessau also took hold in the American
scene. An entire dispensation of émigré thought in this period, from Bernard Rudofsky to
Gyorgy Kepes and Eero Saarinen, not to rule out the young Peter Eisenman (via
Cambridge), as well as the homegrown variants – Louis Kahn, Arthur Drexler, the Eames,
Christopher Alexander – can be listed in a series whose work could be described as much as
a counter-modernism, operating at a step away from the late-CIAM deliberations, invested
instead in the “scientific” implications of their trade. Each affects a “research” outlook to
the outcomes of their art, boldly projecting broad social and institutional transformations at
their core, banded often with a strong anti-aesthetic impetus.
MIT would emerge in this time as a key center for this counter-modernism. Studio teaching
in this period significantly reflects – in consonance with its research units – an investment
into complexity and linguistic paradigms, focusing on the mechanisms behind architectural
decision-making rather than the nuances of the architectural object per se. The interest in
catechizing the rationale behind the decisions of a profession in order to expand its
“expertise” – as opposed to conventional virtuousity – is what we can call the determinant of
a “Second Modernism”: the tentative title for this book. All of MIT’s grandees, Kepes,
Lynch, Rodwin, Habraken, Negroponte, William J. Mitchell, and even the historians Hank
Millon and Stanford Anderson in their first phase – can be described as members of this
second template. It is worth nothing that even the inceptors of its historians’, the History
Theory Criticism (HTC) Program, began with a similar sociological investment, with the
strong influence of certain computation and Popperian paradigms. The road between
Cambridge, MA and Washington, DC, so fruitfully traveled by MIT’s scientists, would also
be traversed equally by MIT’s architectural historians with the establishment of the Center
for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art (readers would do well
to note the similarity with Kepes’ CAVS) in 1979.
Schools of architecture have often commemorated themselves in celebratory histories. The
undertaking in this book is somewhat different. Although it uses the MIT archive as its
central basis, it attempts to capture what increasingly appears in current scholarship as a
cogent "phase" or "moment" in the history of postwar American architecture prior to the
onset of postmodernism. Prior to the 1980s, both curricular and research agendas in schools
Dutta, (Provisional) Introduction
0.
4
of architecture in the US comprised strong components of positivist sociology, systems
thinking, as well as heavy borrowings from (little acknowledged) epistemological models
from the field of linguistics. (One only needs to think back to widely-bandied terms like
"urban morphology," "figure-ground," "architectural grammar," to remember this
borrowing.) These epistemological movements between fields speak as much to the hybrid
constitution of a field such as architecture as the attempt by its purveyors and "experts" to
acquire a certain epistemic authority in the institutional matrices of the post-WWII period.
In the context of the 1960s and 1970s, as wartime modes of organization morphed into
expanded interventions into peacetime life, significantly empowering the apparatuses of
demand-management, nowhere was this "techno-social" managerialism more evident than in
a "defense institute" such as MIT. Likewise, as Vietnam cast a pall on this technocratic
ebullience, nowhere was both epistemic mode and epistemic authority more put into
question as at the institute -- both Daper and Chomsky were to become legends within two
entirely opposed factions. Unto the nineteen-eighties, therefore, the history of architecture
and urban planning at MIT encapsulates something like the very core of transitions in
American social and technological life. At the same time, it is because of the specific
embedment of architecture within the technological institute that in the nineteen-eighties,
the epistemic paradigm of the school would face its severest crisis: if before WWII,
architecture at MIT remained a truncated field because of its inability to get rid of its BeauxArts heritage and fully embrace modernism, in the context of the 1980s, as the postwar
consensus fell into disuse and disrepute, MIT architects appear unable to figure out
(manifesting an overt hostility) what to do with postmodernism. As its sister institutions on
the east coast -- the Rowe acolytes, the Graves and Stern hangers-on, the AA infusion, the
Tschumi deconstructivists, and so on -- churned their way through various curricular
transformations, a peculiar loss of conviction wormed its way into MIT architecture: for
twenty years the design faculty did (could) not tenure a single new faculty.
Using 1945 and 1980 as its two bookends, therefore, this book attempts to capture a
"conjuncture" in the history of American architecture when certain external forms of
epistemic authority appeared to offer an internal cohesiveness to the discipline. (Indeed, at
Berkeley, where "architecture" was morphed into the more catholic heading of
"environmental design," the leading edge of teaching was defined not by architects but by
sociologists, anthropologists and the like.) In recent years, the "history of science" and
Dutta, (Provisional) Introduction
0.
5
"science and technology studies" paradigms have strongly affected emergent research work
in the field of architectural historiography, yet another moment in paradigmatic crossfertilization and -legitimization. Inasmuch as this book attempts to recuperate the above
conjuncture amongst technological, aesthetic and architectural thought, it is also an attempt
to use the MIT archive to curate and collate the disparate strands of a burgeoning
historiographic approach. I have made particular efforts to source the work of younger
scholars -- recent Ph.D.s or junior faculty -- whose ongoing work is particularly close to the
issues and events in question. The general tendency amongst this group appears to be to sift
out, behind the extravagant claims of technological competence and epistemic authority,
certain institutional or material limits or constraints that figure or determine social
relationships within the field into particular cohorts or networks. Behind the grandiose,
overarching, claims of the discipline, what is revealed therein is a great deal of uncertainty
about its constitution. Indeed, it is precisely in confronting this radical uncertainty that
books, journals, objects, buildings, technologies are produced, not so much as "solution" but
rather creating the anthropological profile through which "expertise" can be performed,
attributed, realized. This is particularly true of MIT, on the one hand the founding institution
of architectural teaching in the United States, and on the other, on many grounds perhaps a
place where actors within the architectural school in the post-WWII era appeared to go
furthest from a "proper" conception of architecture, producing, in the bargain, a host of
unanticipated frameworks: the Media Lab, CAVS, HTC, and so on.
As mentioned before, a slew of historians have already begun to traverse this muchtrafficked terrain of the arts and sciences in the American postwar, one that points
increasingly to MIT’s nodal role in that traffic. Nonetheless, while MIT looms large on
certain histories of architecture, no research work exists yet that appraises these relationships
from an institutional viewpoint. How did institutional policies, politics and pedagogy
transform themselves to put themselves in accord with the exponential growth of
institutional power and influence, particularly in fields such as architecture, urbanism and
arts, which conventionally held little promise for profit either in the way of military or
commercial products? What new kinds of emphases do we find in the classrooms of the
period, in addition to the published polemics of faculty, and how did these emphases reflect
broader exigencies of what nineteenth century writers euphemistically described as
“establishment”? How were the disparate imperatives of disinterested research, tendentious
Dutta, (Provisional) Introduction
0.
6
research and professional training reconciled or superimposed into “architecture” as a
portmanteau term? How did aesthetic preoccupations, broadly defined, strike ground in the
scientific imaginary, and vice versa?
The contributed essays to this volume focus on disparate facets of MIT’s history, drawn
from the expertise and particular interests of the contributing authors. The essays envisaged
so far focus on a host of issues: the internal dynamics of the departments and the school;
hiring and firing patterns; the intellectual context and dissemination of the ideas of figures
such as Kepes, Lynch, Wurster, Habraken, Millon; the ideas behind the formation of the
various research groups, Architecture Machine Group and the Media Lab, CAVS, HTC, the
Harvard-MIT Joint Center; studio teaching in this period; MIT’s affinity for particular sibling
institutions, Berkeley and Cambridge, UK; the peculiar affinity of this “techno-social”
thought with particular variants of “regionalism” or culturalism; the various consultancy
missions to the “Third World”; and so on. The tone of the book will be that of historical
critique, which is to say that book will attempt to provide the reader with the critical tools by
which to judge the complex determinants of a particular period. The book thus proposed
will not only contain polemical essays by the aforementioned authors, but also comprise
significant visual and documentary extracts from MIT’s archives. From the standpoint of
MIT’s School of Architecture and Urbanism, as it contemplates radical changes in its
administration and pedagogy, it is important that these questions be asked in order to
highlight its former heyday. Such an in-depth historical study is only fitting for America’s
first department of architecture, and it is hoped that the book will be published in 2011 as
part of the Institute’s 150-year celebrations to mark that influential beginning.
In terms of methodological approach, the book brings together a recent trend towards
integration between "Science and Technology Studies" paradigms and architectural history.
With the exception of established scholars such as Reinhold Martin, Felicity Scott, Mark
Wigley, Antoine Picon, etc., this trend is still nascent, implicit in the work of some recently
appointed faculty and doctoral students. In a sense, this work attempts to "capture" that
moment, with MIT as the felicitous archive for exploring these insights. To encapsulate this
trend: writing on technology in architecture has generally tended to manifest itself into
"operative" questions of expressive honesty, historical appropriateness, effects on society,
and so on. Only more recently has this "operativity" itself come into focus as an area of
Dutta, (Provisional) Introduction
0.
7
scholarly interest, in terms of the history of the personnel, the transfer of epistemological
paradigms, the institutional dynamics involved. One implication of this trend is to
disaggregate the paradigms from which architecture is said to emerge: exposing rather a play
of interests, networks, and incentives towards authority over which a discipline casts its
shadow and name.
Dutta, (Provisional) Introduction
0.
8