Where is the Ethnic Architecture?
When I read the posts, it strikes me that many of the disagreements could have been resolved like mist in the morning sun, if the people involved had been able to agree on what they meant by the terms they used.
This conceptual confusion was monumental, and I could give many examples of it, but I prefer to avoid the pitiful battlefields of the art debate, I diffidently confine myself to some short and hopefully unassailable objections.
There is a group of artists in the Nordic countries who want to restore the status of traditional figurative painting, the so-called Retro Guards. The goal is not to crowd out other art movements but to create a situation where different genres can exist side-by-side. So it is today in music, where jazz, opera, pop and everything else can live in peaceful coexistence. It is inconceivable that one critic would condemn an opera based on jazz music’s assessment criteria.
The Retro Guards do not claim, of course, that figurative should be prohibited or non-existent. What they criticise is the now dominant art-directing power structure, which they perceive as grudgeful and exclusive, if not totalitarian.
Modernism in art, during the 1900s, became institutionalised in education, scholarship awards, art galleries and museums. It transformed eventually into postmodernism and then into something we might simply call ‘contemporary art’ (I am referring here not to contemporary art – post-war art – but only to the pure sense of ‘art in our time’).
The terms vary, but the power structure remains the same and decides what is art, what is supposed to represent our time. Regardless of the ‘ism’, art is still creative, innovative and transnational. Working in and developing a tradition is not as accepted in art as in music.
So when a group of figurative artists with an exhibition and a book tries to create attention and respect for the direction of its art, it is cut off at the ankles. The author and poet, Eva Power, did not hesitate to draw parallels with Nazism’s view of art, which is a clear way of illustrating the exclusionary mechanisms that are prevalent in art.
Roughly the same conflict exists within architecture, though postmodernism never became especially powerful, so it is more accurate to speak today about new modernism or avant-garde architecture. When the art of social engineering was abandoned in the 1970s in connection with the failure of large-scale residential areas, architectural education came more and more to focus on the artistic imperative. Knowledge of and interest in architecture’s psychological, social and economic consequences was abandoned.
Perhaps the most crucial moment is documented in the book The City after the Automobile. An Architect’s Vision, (one of its authors, Moshe Safdie, was head of the Urban Design Program at Harvard from 1978 to 1984):
At Harvard, following decades of close association between environmental, political, and architectural issues […] the university decided that study and training in architecture and urban policy did not belong together[…] Architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design […] remained in the Design School, ”purified” of the mundane and ”elevated” to the status of Art.
Architecture is, just like art, institutionally controlled and it was not long before the Harvard model had spread to most architectural schools around the world. The result we see today when newspapers compete to publish images of one avant-garde building after another. Traditional architecture and discussions on behavioural science aspects of buildings were brutally rejected in the same manner as the Retro Guards reject.
The key concept here is ‘physical determinism’ and it is about as ugly as fascism.
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The institutional power structure in architecture is extremely difficult to challenge. It is, both in terms of career and money, costly for an architect to question the system and there is often, therefore, silence.
To illustrate the lack of debate, it can be argued that there is no discussion about the absence of ethnic architecture. In percentage terms, Sweden has taken the largest number of immigrants in Europe for a long time. In public contexts, we are proud of this and the newspapers publish almost daily examples of grievances that need to be addressed or racism that must be fought.
But if we exclude churches, we see only Swedish modernism. In our cities, we see almost no representation of any of our immigrants’ culturally entrenched aesthetic. In the United States, ethnic groups are encouraged to express their identity in the public space, but that would be to argue for something that here at home would soon be silenced with the destructive term ’Orientalism’.