BOOKS
47
mistakesof the past, the architectural
utopia of Wright, the specialist
in new environments, must seem really convincing to those from whom
the economic reality is hidden. Around the private middle-class dwelling
cluster such strong and deep memories of security that the restoration
of the home appears in itself a radical social cure. Throughout his books
Wright insists that architecture is the art which gives man a sense of
stability in an unstable world, and that of all styles of building the
modern is the most "organic." "The old is chaos, restlessness"; the new,
"integral, organic, is order, repose," he writes,--like the modern mystics
of the state and church. In his survey of modern architecture--otherwise
someagre-Wright
tells in detail how he built the Imperial Hotel of
Tokyo on marshy ground, and how this building alone withstood the
earthquake of 1923. But social earthquakes are not circumvented by
cantilevers and light partitions.
In spite of the exaggerations and errors of Wright in giving arch i-
tecturean independent role in shaping social life, the experience of his
professionhas a vital bearing on socialism. But it is just this bearing that
Wright and Brownell, as spokesmen for the middle class, ignore. They
havefailed to recognize-what
must be apparent on a little reflection-
that the progress of architecture to-day depends not only on large-scale
planning and production,
but also on the continuity of this production
and on a rising living standard of the whole mass of the people-condi-
lionsirreconciliable with private control of industry. It is only when all
threeconditions are present that the architect can experiment freely and
control the multiplicity of factors which now enter invariably into his
art. Monopoly capitalism and its political regimes also plan on a large
scale,within certain limits, but they are fatally tied to crises and war
and declining standards of life (not to mention political and cultural
repression) which limit the architect at every point. The masses cannot
affordgood homes and the intervention of the capitalist state in housing
i~
tentative and even reactionary, since it helps to perpetuate lower stan-
dards and supports the familiar speculative swindles. Moreover, even
undermore prosperous conditions, the great mass of architects have no
chancefor original artistic creation; they are salaried workers submerged
in a capitalist office, with little possibility of self-development.
The
architect cannot be indifferent to these as merely economic and material
factors inferior to creative problems. The latter are not posed unless
the architect can really build, and the quality of the solutions depends
in part on the freedom of the architect in realizing his designs. In our
day the best architects have built very little during the last eight years,
at a time when the need of new construction was universally admitted.
Eventhe slight upswing just experienced has already subsided and archi-
tectsface a desperate future. A return to the soil, far from stimulating
architecture, can only depress it further.
MEYER SCHAPIRO
