The Impact of Technology

Abstract

Technology is only a crutch for meaningful composition today. ULRICH FRANZEN The central problem which faces us is that we now design buildings in a cultural situation literally without precedent in human history. The architect is confronted with a totally new order of problems. He might draw a little consolation from this fact. It often seems to him that life is difficult; I think it is difficult, more difficult than it ever was before for architects. The impact of modern industrial technology upon contemporary architecture can be easily traced at every level theory, practice, finished product. The effect is most clear and most poignant at the theoretical level. Nineteenth-century technology set in motion among architects a whole train of speculation as to its significance, its probable course of development and the possible responses of architecture to it. This speculation spread in steadily widening circles, involving all the theoreticians of the past century and a half. Greenough, Pugin, Ruskin, Viollet-le-Duc; Sullivan, Wright and Geoffrey Scott; Le-Corbusier, Gropius and Mumford: all these men were activated by the shock waves of the impact of technology. Nor have these speculations ceased. On the contrary, the implications of technology for architecture are, in many ways, more ominous and obscure today than they were a hundred years ago. These successive waves of speculation are also revealed with great clarity in the architecture of the period. Each has left its deposit and these the historians can trace as easily as the geologist reads his core or the archaeologist his trench. It is a stratigraphy of unparalleled confusion. For though technology, by its sheer mastery of external nature, has made possible unprecedented advances in architecture it has, by the same ironic token, made possible more bad architecture than the world has ever seen before. And this, I think, is our central problem; that for every great building technology has given us, it has given us five million so much worse than was ever possible before that it is not even funny. Architecture unlike the fine arts is at once the prince and the prisoner of the kingdom of necessity. It can never escape the iron laws of physics: indeed its greatest examples are precisely those in which these laws have been most scrupulously observed. The majesty of such constructions as Hadrian's Villa or Chartres Cathedral springs from the most exact and elegant knowledge of the limits and potentials of masonry vaulting. Acceptance, not defiance, of the laws of statics was the basis of all pre-industrial architecture. Because modern technology has so extended man's power over external nature, modern architects have often acted as though these iron laws had been repealed. The result, for perhaps the first time in all history, was bad architecture ugly to look at, unsatisfactory in use. One of today's basic assumptions is that architecture, thanks to moder technology, has made great advances in the past century. In many respects, of course, this is true. But the implication is that these advances have been steady and continuous and that we stand now at some pinnacle of accomplishment. Unfortunately for our complacency, this is not the case. The great germinal structures of the past hundred years are not evenly distributed throughout its span; on the contrary, they fall in clusters, and rather closer to the beginning of the period than to its end. If, for the sake of brevity, we simplify the historical record, then we may take Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace (1851) as marking the opening of an era. Here was the first western structure which clearly demonstrated the arrival of a new period. It not only used the materials of the new technology iron and glass but it used them in an explicitly novel way, purged of all reliance on historically determined form. It is a moot question whether we have advanced a jot or a tittle past Joseph Paxton's accomplishment of 110 years ago. We do not find this new architectural idiom immediately adopted by the West. On the contrary, four or five decades elapse before we find a statement of equal clarity and vigor in Sullivan's use of steel and glass in the multi-story Schlesinger Building of 1899; here was a perfect understanding not only of steel cage construction but, even more important, of the esthetic expression of its essen8