Anonymous architecture as counter-image: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy's perspective on American vernacular
2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13602360802328008
ISSN1466-4410
Autores Tópico(s)Architecture, Modernity, and Design
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes In her biography of her late husband – Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality,1st ed. (New York, Harper and Bros, 1950)) – Sibyl Moholy-Nagy refers to him as ‘Moholy’. In the rest of this text, I will follow her usage. Thus ‘Moholy’ stands for László Moholy-Nagy and ‘Moholy-Nagy’ for Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. Denise Lawrence and Setha Low list Sibyl Moholy-Nagy's book among ‘romantic’ accounts of indigenous architectural forms, with ‘impressionistic cultural descriptions’. As other works in that category they mention Rudofsky's Architecture Without Architecture (1964), Van Eyck's ‘Basket-house-village-universe (1969) and Gardi's Indigenous African Architecture (1973). Denise L. Lawrence & Setha M. Low, ‘The Built Environment and Spatial Form’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 19 (1990), pp. 453–505, p. 458 Application of November, 1952, summarised in the Minutes of the Committee for Scholarships and Special Awards Meeting, Architectural League, New York, 12thDecember, 1952 (AAA, papers of the Architectural League, Box 70). Minutes of the Committee for Scholarships and Special Awards Meeting, Architectural League, New York, 2ndApril, 1953 (AAA, papers of the Architectural League, Box 70). Gwendolyn Wright and Janet Parks, eds, The History of History in American Schools of Architecture 1865–1975 (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1990). Dell Upton ‘Outside the Academy: A Century of Vernacular Architecture Studies, 1890–1990’, in, Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, ed., The Architectural Historian in America (Washington, National Gallery of Art, 1990), pp. 199–213. In her later career Moholy-Nagy would further explore diffusionism — the idea that similar forms of buildings or artefacts found in different regions imply that, one way or another, there must have been some historical contact between these regions. This is a highly controversial position, which was never completely accepted in academia. Hugh Morrison, Early American Architecture. From the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period (New York, Oxford University Press, 1952). This book was certainly known to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, because it was part of a book display organised during an exhibition she co-curated on ‘Architectural Schoolwork in the USA 1954’ (AAA, papers of the Architectural League, Box 56). Vincent Scully, book review, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 12-2 (May, 1953), pp. 29–30. By comparison, Moholy-Nagy's Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture was never reviewed by JSAH, most likely because it was seen as not scholarly enough. In a commentary published years later by JSAH, Moholy-Nagy claimed that her book never passed the ‘footnote test’, which ‘demands that at least half of an article be printed out of context and that at least half of the footnotes prove that what the author has to say has been said already by someone else.’: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Maass for Measure’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 29, N.1 (1970), pp. 60–61, p. 61. AAA, Papers of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, microfilm reel 948 / 0162-0165, frame 0163. Ibid., frame 0164. Letter, 13th August, 1953, to ‘Dear Eugene’, AAA microfilm reel 944. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Materiali Indigeni nell'Architettura dei Coloni Americani’, Casabella, N. 205 (1955), pp. 76–82. Ibid., p. 67. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Environment and Anonymous Architecture’, Perspecta, Vol.3, N.1 (1955), pp. 2–7. This article was republished in Robert A. M. Stern, Alan Plattus and Peggy Deamer, eds, [Re]Reading, Perspecta, The First Fifty Years of the Yale Architectural Journal (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2004), pp. 55–57. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Environment and Anonymous Architecture’, op. cit., p. 77. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture (New York, Horizon Press, 57), pp. 29–30. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Environment and Anonymous Architecture’, op. cit., p. 77. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, op. cit., p. 68. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 182. Moholy-Nagy was well aware of this. In her already-mentioned application to the Architectural League, she claimed: ‘The European migrant who pushed his life's ship away from the shore of the mother continent, had to create new buildings of his own, from the shelters of Iceland to the inland missions of Argentina. He had to transform his heritage under the influence of new climatic, social, and material conditions. What he built grew from a new land. That is why it stands coequal with the building art of the aborigines who were there when he arrived. Their structures — the joined wood houses of the Kwakiutl in Alaska as well as the finely woven mat walls of the Polynesians — grew from the same climatic, social and material conditions. There is a deep unity in anonymous building.’ Application of November, 1952, summarised in the Minutes of the Committee for Scholarships and Special Awards Meeting, Architectural League, New York, 12th December, 1952 (AAA, papers of the Architectural League, Box 70). Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, op. cit., p. 36. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 122. Morrison refers for instance to the ‘log cabin myth’, which suggested that log cabins had been built by the early colonial settlers. In reality however, log-cabin construction was probably introduced by the Swedes and only reluctantly adopted by the English settlers in the eighteenth century. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, op. cit., p. 36. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 23. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Future of U.S. Home Design Calls for Mating of Science with Study of Historic Regional Buildings’, The Wisconsin Architect (August, 1955), pp. 5–7. In the ‘Note on the Genesis of the Manuscript’, she mentioned that she ‘had many attentive audiences all over the country — from Harvard and Yale to Florida and Iowa.’: AAA, Papers of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, microfilm reel 948 / 0162-0165, frame 0164. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Environment and Anonymous Architecture’, op. cit., p. 77. In the 1968 preface to a new edition of her biography of László Moholy-Nagy, she stated for instance: ‘I came to consider the isolation of the original personality as inherent in the creative process whose charges were at best received as a message by those who lead society.’ - contrasting her view with Moholy's conviction that everyone is talented and could develop his or her innate creativity. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy. Experiment in Totality (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1969), p. xi. Diary notes 24th November, 1947: Notebook, p. 46 — AAA microfilm reel 946, frame 507. Although Marjorie Garber does not discuss the gendered nature of the concept of ‘genius’ in her helpful article on the idea of genius — Marjorie Garber, ‘Our Genius Problem’, The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 290, N. 5 (2002), pp. 65–72 — only one possible woman is mentioned (Gertrude Stein) versus tens of men who might qualify. Otto Weininger famously wrote in 1903 that only men could possibly be geniuses, since women were too much determined by their sexuality ever to be able to rise to that status: see Otto Weininger, Geschlecht Und Charakter (Vienna, Wilhelm Braumüller, 1922) and Susan C. Anderson, ‘Otto Weininger's Masculine Utopia’, German Studies Review, Vol. 19, N. 3 (1996), pp. 433–453. Although Sibyl Moholy-Nagy does not refer directly to Weininger, it seems likely that she would have known about his theory, given his popularity in the 1920s in Germany. She uses the word ‘matrix’ quite often, most obviously as the title of her later book on the history of cities: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, The Matrix of Man. An Illustrated History of Urban Environment (New York, Praeger, 1968). It had already occurred in her 1945 novel — S. D. Peech, Children's Children (New York, H. Biltner and Company, 1945), p. 70; in Native Genius of Anonymous Architecture, op. cit., p. 23; and in a related article — Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Environment and Anonymous Architecture’, op. cit., p. 77. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, op. cit., pp. 25–27. Francesca Hughes, The Architect. Reconstructing her Practice (London, MIT Press, 1996): see Editor's Introduction. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, op. cit., pp. 44. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 20. George M. Foster, ‘What Is Folk Culture?’, American Anthropologist, Vol. 55, N. 2, part 1 (1953), pp. 159–173. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, op. cit., p. 33. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 44. Adolf Loos, ‘Architecture’, in, Yehuda Safran & Wilfried Wang, eds, The Architecture of Adolf Loos: An Arts Council Exhibition (London, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985). Francesco Passanti, ‘The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier’, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 56, N. 4 (1997), pp. 438–451. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, op. cit., p. 22. Adrian Forty, ‘Primitive: the word and concept’, in, Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr, eds, Primitive. Original Matters in Architecture (London, Routledge, 2006), pp. 3–14. Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1953), pp. 6–8. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, op. cit., p. 98. Hannelore Rüttgens-Pohlmann, ‘Es muss gelingen, das grosse Kunstwerk meines Lebens.’, Krisenprozess — Identitätsentwicklung — Streben nach Grösse. Rekonstruktion des biographische Verlaufs einer deutschen Emigrantin im Nationalsozialismus, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz (2006), pp. 162–165. Suzanne Marchand, ‘Leo Frobenius and the Revolt against the West’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 32, N. 2 (1997), pp. 153–170. L. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago, Paul Theobald, 1947), p. 98. This ascetic ideal can for instance be gathered from Mart Stam's 1928 formulation: ‘Correct measures are those that conform to our requirements, that fulfill these needs without any pretensions, that do not claim to be more than they are. Correct measures are those that result in a minimum of ostentation. Everything else is ballast. (…) The struggle for modern architecture then is a struggle against pretentiousness, against every excess and for a human scale.’: Mart Stam, ‘Das Mass, das richtige Mass, das Minimum-Mass’, in, Heinz Hirdina, ed., Neues Bauen, Neues Gestalten. Das Neue Frankfurt / Die Neue Stadt. Eine Zeitschrift Zwischen 1926 Und 1933 (Berlin, Elefanten, 1984), pp. 215–216. Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete (Santa Monica, CA., The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995). O. Gueft,'”Genius of the untaught”: book review of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy', Interiors, Vol. CXVII (October, 1957), p. 20. Edgar Kaufmann Jr., ‘“A Refreshing Glance at Western Folk Design”, book review of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Architectural Record (October, 1957), pp. 58+. Herbert Bayer to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, letter of 11th January,1958: AAA microfilm reel 944. Mardges Bacon, ‘Modernism and the Vernacular at the Museum of Modern Art’, in, Maiken Umbach and Bernd Hüppauf, eds, Vernacular Modernism. Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment (Stanford, CA., Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 25–52. See, for instance, Janine Mileaf, ed., Constructing Modernism: Berenice Abbott and Henry-Russell Hitchcock: a Re-Creation of the 1934 Exhibition “The Urban Vernacular of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties, American Cities Before the Civil War” (Middletown, Connecticut, Center, 1993). Sigfried Giedion, Architecture, You and Me. The Diary of a Development (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1958), especially Part 1.On the Ruling Taste, pp. 2–20; Elizabeth B. Mock, If You Want to Build a House (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1946). Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch (1939)’, in, Clement Greenberg, ed., The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgment 1939–1944 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 5–22. Native Genius contained an illustration of a 1940 Dymaxion house, with the comment that ‘to strip down life to the “rationalized” provisions of a standard box reduces the human being to the sole aspect of biological uniformity.’: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, op. cit., p. 42. Ibid., p. 22. Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects — A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1990), p. 3. Monika Platzer, ‘Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky. Introduction’, in, Architekturzentrum Wien and Getty Research Institute Los Angeles, ed., Lessons From Bernard Rudofsky. Life As a Voyage (Boston, Birkhäuser, 2007), pp. 12–34, p. 31. Felicity D. Scott, ‘An Eye for Modern Architecture’, in Lessons From Bernard Rudofsky. Life As a Voyage. op. cit., pp. 172–210, p. 176. Marshall William Fishwick, Probing Popular Culture (New York, Haworth, 2004). James O'Gorman, Connecticut Valley Vernacular (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, ‘Contested Zionism — Alternative Modernism’, in, Haim Yacobi, ed., Constructing a Sense of Place. Architecture and the Zionist Discourse (Burlington, Ashgate, 2004), pp. 17–51. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture in North-America, 2nd edition (New York, Schocken, 1976).
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