JUNE 2007 » book review

Contradictions

James Marston Fitch: Selected Writings
Edited by Martica Sawin
W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 2007
304 pp., paperback, 30 b&w illus, $27.95
ISBN 978-0-393-73229-0

Reviewed by Steven W. Semes

James Marston Fitch (1909-2000) was undoubtedly one of the leading figures in American architectural education and historic preservation of the last half century. Author of American Building: The Historical Forces that Shaped It (1948, with subsequent revised editions) and Historic Preservation: Curatorial Management of the Built World (1982, reissued 1990), he also contributed regularly to Architectural Forum and other publications. He founded (with Charles Peterson) the nation's first graduate training program in historic preservation at Columbia University in 1964 and, following his retirement from academic life in 1979, was a partner in the New York firm of Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners, where he led such important projects as the restoration of Ellis Island.

Perhaps most importantly, Fitch was an early advocate of environmentalism in architecture, promoting what we now call sustainability long before virtually anyone else. The present volume, edited by Fitch's widow, art historian and critic Martica Sawin, is a welcome resource for the study of Fitch's wide-ranging contributions to architecture and preservation.

A leader in these fields, we also find in Fitch's long and active career evidence of the contradictions that have become increasingly evident in contemporary discussions of these subjects. As Carroll William Westfall pointed out in this magazine ("What are the Preservationists Preserving?", July/August 2004), preservation as a discipline is a Modernist enterprise and therefore raises the issue of determining appropriate treatments of historic fabric from within a cultural perspective that defines itself in opposition to the very historic traditions and formal languages that produced the buildings placed in the preservationist's hands. Fitch's views, as expressed by his miscellaneous writings from the period 1931 to 1997 collected in this volume, are paradoxical in exactly this sense, but their contradictions also illuminate for us the diverse strata in contemporary debates about architecture and preservation.

Fitch, a scholar of American architectural history, a leading academic and an eminent professional preservationist, promoted Modernist architecture and vehemently attacked those who sought to recover historical styles as a basis for contemporary practice. His support for the Modernist aesthetic in design – he published a monograph on Walter Gropius in 1960 – was tempered by his protests against anti-urban redevelopment schemes and his bold criticism of what he saw as the excessive abstraction of Modernist architecture and its insensitivity to climate and energy conservation. In summary, Fitch was an advocate for historic architecture who attacked its present-day revival and a defender of Modernist architecture who railed against its logical consequences.

As an historian, Fitch tended to repeat the clichés of Siegfried Giedion and Niklaus Pevsner, celebrating technical innovations but dismissing traditional formal languages and building cultures. His 1947 essay, "The Palace, the Bridge, and the Tower," discusses Joseph Paxton's 1851 Crystal Palace, John Augustus Roebling's 1869 Brooklyn Bridge and Gustave Eiffel's 1876 tower in Paris. In it Fitch applauds the engineers' innovations but sees resistance to them or their modest incorporation into architectural projects as evidence of the obliviousness and irrelevance of 19th-century eclecticism – the same architecture Fitch would spend much of his career trying to save from demolition.

Later essays describe Mount Vernon, Monticello and the Lawn of the University of Virginia, conjuring up vivid images of what life might have been like in late-18th and early-19th-century Virginia. His main interest lies in the material and pragmatic considerations – the social and technological choreography – that drove the planning for these ensembles and, as informative as his accounts are, they say little about why the buildings look the way they do. Throughout his writings, in fact, one has the impression that what a building looks like is simply of no interest to Fitch. He takes pains to insist on the Modernity of Jefferson, meaning his attention to functional requirements, ignoring the profound grasp the Virginian had of the Classical tradition and its iconographic as well as ideological resonance for the new Republic. While Fitch admits Jefferson saw architecture not just as a utilitarian necessity but as a civilizing force, he neglects to describe the content of that civilizing vision and why the Classical orders, for example, were for Jefferson an inseparable element of its expression.

His treatment of the history of Modernism also reflects his architectural iconoclasm. In an essay on Mies van der Rohe, Fitch applauds the "shattering power and purity" of the Barcelona pavilion, "unpolluted by any connotation of a discredited feudal past…freed of decadent motifs and moldy symbols." His significant criticism of Mies focuses on the "contradiction between the real and the ideal," specifically the uninhabitability of the Farnsworth House, given its inoperable fenestration of plate glass and absence of protection from solar gain. What Fitch does not do is draw the obvious conclusion that an architecture of flowing space and abstract planes can only accommodate so much "reality."

In a 1966 essay revisiting and celebrating both the ideals of the Bauhaus school at Dessau and Gropius' buildings for it Fitch insists that the problems of the present day "stem from our having completely abandoned the broad lines of theoretical development that the Bauhaus projected." This allegiance to Modernist orthodoxy comes full circle in "Murder at the Modern," a 1997 essay in which he condemns the Museum of Modern Art for publishing Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966, and then producing in 1977 the exhibition and book, The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. For Fitch, the cardinal sin of Venturi was his attention to "a pictorial architecture with no interest in or knowledge of the functional and environmental aspects of the buildings he was praising or condemning."

Whatever one thinks of Venturi as an architect or scholar, this accusation is patently unfair. Fitch accuses Arthur Drexler, the curator of the Beaux-Arts show and editor of the companion book, with the "discreditation of modernism and its replacement by a kind of eclectic ornamentalism" that ignores "the symbiotic connection between new form and new function." Here again Fitch's anger overcomes his judgment. A committed functionalist to the end, Fitch consistently sees architecture in terms of "firmness" and "commodity" but has no place for any "delight" that is not simply the logical and unadorned expression of the other two.

Fitch declared that proponents of the recovery of historical styles have forgotten the "freedom and esthetic action which the [Modernist] revolution has given them" and no longer understand "what it was like to have been an architect under the dictatorship of fin-de-siecle eclecticism." While considered worthy of preservation, he puts down the traditional architecture of the 19th-century as a "waxwork museum" and a "prison house of antique gesture." These statements, reminiscent of the tirades of Giedion and Pevsner, are shocking coming from a leading figure in historic preservation who devoted his career to protecting the very cultural resources he seems to disdain. We know now that the eclecticism of the 19th- and early-20th centuries was anything but a dictatorship and I needn't detail for readers of this publication the extent of the "freedom" that orthodox Modernism has extended to traditional architects and urbanists over the last several decades. Would this review even be published in a mainstream architectural journal?

So how does Fitch's ideological commitment to Modernism affect his views of historic preservation? For Fitch, it is simply "the curatorial management of the built world." Now if that sounds a bit scary you're in good company. The role of the curator is to evaluate works in a collection and make decisions about their proper care – but if the collection is the entire built world, what then? Does the preservationist assume authority over everything? Fitch further declares "the equal cultural importance of all styles of buildings, folkloristic and vernacular as well as monumental and high style…extending from pre-Columbian dwelling sites to significant skyscrapers."

If all the styles of the world are subject to preservation, and they are all of "equal cultural importance," they are all deserving of perpetual maintenance and restoration – a laundromat as much as the Parthenon. The radical relativism of this view is as breathtaking as its geographical and temporal scope, but Fitch appears not to have squared this relativism with his harsh denunciation of "eclecticism" and the ornamental trappings of "feudalism" – by which he means almost all 19th and early-20th-century architecture. But even the houses of former aristocrats, surely, are no less aspects of the "built world" than the Bauhaus itself, and therefore equally deserving of our attention? Fitch refuses to make judgments about quality except to give preference to what he regarded as an anti-elitist architectural taste.

In truth, the contradiction between passionate preservation advocacy and intellectual commitment to the orthodoxy of Modernism is not Fitch's alone. We might compare it to the massive preservation programs of the post-war Communist states that lavished attention on the palaces and churches of the liquidated former ruling classes, turning them into museums but surrounding them with grim versions of Le Corbusier's Radiant City for the newly liberated working class. This is not an idle comparison, given Fitch's lifelong commitment to the orthodox left – referred to a bit coyly as an interest in "dialectical materialism" in Ms. Sawin's biographical essay. But this attitude was also widespread among the new class of professional preservationists that came to the fore after the Second World War, who saw no contradiction between supporting the goals and techniques of Modernism while working for the preservation of historical buildings and districts. They, like Le Corbusier in his 1925 proposal to demolish virtually all of the center of Paris except for a handful of isolated monuments, sought to preserve surviving fragments of historic architecture in the name of "history" but without according to them any relevance to the problems of contemporary design.

An unspoken truce of sorts seems to have been brokered between the professional elite of preservation and the Modernist architectural establishment from the 1970s onward, as each agreed not to interfere with the core interests and activities of the other. This "gentleman's agreement" did not go unnoticed by the lay preservationists and grass-roots activists, whose motivation was primarily their love of old buildings. Fitch, in a late reflective essay recalling the history of American preservation, noted the gradually emerging conflict between the lay and professional classes: "(The) lay membership has been cool if not actively hostile to its new allies from the professions, a distrust which undoubtedly sprang from the fact that the preservationists have all too often seen architects, engineers, and planners as the principal spokesmen for the very forces of self-styled 'progress' which threatened the historic structures in their communities which they were fighting to preserve."

Fitch seems not to recognize just how well-founded this lay skepticism was and claims that the tension "has tended to abate somewhat in recent years," an assertion exactly contrary to the case. He goes on to admit that it was the lay preservationists "who must be credited with a radical change in the climate of American opinion towards historic buildings and, indeed, toward the past itself." Perhaps Fitch would agree that the lay public understood the issues better than the professionals, but this split has only increased in recent years as the lay public becomes increasingly concerned about the way some preservation commissions have promoted aggressive contemporary designs within their historic districts. Fitch, however, would probably have had little sympathy with this concern; he saw no contradiction in preserving the products of period-revival design while denouncing the architectural culture which produced them:

"The one represented the architectural profession's reliance upon the routine use of historic styles in the day-to-day design of new buildings. The other represented the antiquarian's ambition to save actual old buildings for their artistic and/or historic merit. Although the end products of these two movements might often appear superficially similar, they were basically as different as originals and copies always are."

Fitch was clearly mistaken in this view since, especially in the 1920s, the preservers and the "eclectics" were in many instances the same people, and the aim of eclecticism is certainly not to produce "copies," but to say new things in the old language. He vehemently denied any logical connection between the act of preserving old buildings and the desire to design new ones with similar qualities. But why should people devote so many resources to the preservation of architecture that they no longer believe in? On the other hand, if one values historic urbanism and traditional buildings, why would one actively discourage attempts to build more of what one values in favor of experimental models that frequently result in failure?

Like Fitch himself, the preservation architect today is typically torn between an intellectual commitment to the Modernist program and an emotional affinity for historical architecture. In a candid 1933 article entitled "The Houses We Live In: An Anonymous Lament," Fitch wrote that he was "emotionally satisfied" by the delight of his period-style designs, while "intellectually convinced of their absurdity." This conflict between the head and the heart is one Fitch shared with Carlo Scarpa, for example, and is still commonplace today. It is also unnecessary, since to resolve it one would only have to recognize the rational basis of most traditional architecture and the fundamental Romanticism of Modernist design. But for many Modernist architects, this dichotomy remains irresolvable and perpetuates their "love-hate" relationship with the architectural heritage they are charged with preserving. Add to this a widespread belief in the Hegelian concept of the zeitgeist – the "spirit of the age" and its call for an "architecture of our time" bearing little resemblance to traditional design – and you have the primary motivation for the opposition of mainstream preservationists to additions to historic structures and districts designed in historical styles.

This paradox extends to the arena of education. Preservation architects, as Fitch observed, have not as a rule been trained in the design traditions that produced the buildings entrusted to them. They study architectural history and can identify the various period styles, but they don't learn how to design in the styles themselves. Few preservation architects can draw any of the five orders of Classical architecture and many would not know the difference between an architrave and an antefix. So why do we place responsibility for decisions regarding the preservation and restoration of historic buildings and their surroundings in the hands of persons untrained in the formal language of traditional architecture? Even if they sought it out, where would they find this training when most schools of architecture no longer teach this material? Fitch himself knew the Classical, having begun his career as a designer of period-revival houses in the early 1930s, and the Classical orders were taught briefly during the 1980s at Columbia University (to historians and preservationists, not to architects!); but the gap between the technical and the aesthetic understanding of the typical preservation architect has only continued to grow.

Fitch, to his credit and decades ahead of most of the architectural profession, saw cultural conservation of the built world as an extension of natural resource conservation – preservation as a species of environmentalism. An early student of climatology and the ways buildings facilitate or inhibit comfort by natural means, he called attention to the relationship between preservation and energy conservation as early as the 1940s, noting that "the whole concept of technological obsolescence is…based on miscalculations of the availability of energy." No pre-industrial society could afford to throw away its old clothes, let alone buildings and entire urban neighborhoods. Recycling and adapting buildings to new uses, often multiple times, has been the rule throughout history.

As Quinlan Terry has observed, "real sustainability is a four-hundred-year-old building still in active use." Fitch saw the destruction of old buildings as another aspect of the American culture of waste, along with suburban sprawl and the cult of the automobile. What he did not see was the role of the Modernist program in driving the destructive effects he fought, or the inherent difficulty of developing a genuinely sustainable Modernist architecture in the face of its infatuation with the imagery of industrialism. Fitch also argued for the "moral and psychic nourishment" provided by historic places, but viewed it in anthropological and social rather than aesthetic terms. Beauty appears not to have been an issue for Fitch, but political correctness was. He quite reasonably argued for the preservation of ordinary environments, not just elite and monumental sites, underscoring the importance of a sense of belonging and community.

Then at one point he declares that historic neighborhoods "should be restored for their original populations and not for a new population which has historically no right to be there in the first place." While he clearly meant this as a critique of gentrification, he inadvertently opened up a demographic can of worms. The idea that people have to prove they have a "historical right" to live where they do is disturbing, to say the least, and betrays an underlying authoritarian streak in Fitch's thinking. Fitch's exclusive focus on the "functional" – that is to say the material, technical and programmatic aspects of a building's design and use – often blinded him to the semi-independence of form from these other equally important contributors. The longevity of buildings suggests that they will accommodate many populations and functions during their useful lives and take on a variety of meanings over time. Lacking a theory of formal language, he cannot account for the visual appearance of historic architecture or its attractiveness to people over the long term except to the extent it expresses impersonal historical or environmental forces over which people have no control. Dialectical materialism, it seems, is not a fruitful basis on which to make aesthetic judgments.

Fitch was, like his friend Jane Jacobs – who penned a brief forward to this book of essays – an ardent foe of insensitive urban redevelopment schemes. But here again he confidently strides into the midst of contradiction. Like fellow critics Lewis Mumford and Ada Louise Huxtable, Fitch embraced Modernist design for individual buildings (as well as for furnishings, decorative arts and all the technological gadgets that soon filled homes and workplaces throughout the modern world) but looked with dismay upon many of the effects of Modernist interventions in existing cities.

Fitch joined Jacobs' campaign against the Robert Moses proposal for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a step in Moses' project of turning New York into an American version of Le Corbusier's Radiant City. Fitch and his fellow critics railed against the apparent cooptation of Modernism by unaccountable political and corporate interests and their determination to level large segments of the SoHo and TriBeCa districts, now home to some of New York City's most expensive residential real estate. And yet, unlike Jacobs, neither Fitch nor his colleagues Mumford and Huxtable seem to have acknowledged the extent to which the harms they protested were the direct consequences of the Modern Movement's architectural ideals, which they embraced. None of these critics explained how architectural style and urbanism could be separated without invalidating the whole Modernist enterprise.

Selected Writings is a welcome compilation of the thoughts of this important figure in preservation, but it is also immensely irritating. While Fitch was prescient in many of his criticisms of Modernism, he seems not to have drawn the conclusions that his criticisms logically suggest. It is left to readers of these essays to draw these conclusions, to reject historical and material determinism of all kinds, and put into practice a conservation ethic that embraces the historic built world not as an artifact to be "curated" by museum conservators, but as the free artistic product of ongoing traditions committed to wholeness and continuity in the urban environment. TB

Steven W. Semes, a practicing architect, holds the Francis and Kathleen Rooney Chair in Architecture at the University of Notre Dame. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America and the author of The Architecture of the Classical Interior (W. W. Norton & Co., 2004). His book, The Future of the Past: A Conservation Ethic for Architecture, Urbanism, and Historic Preservation, is in preparation. He was a participant in the Traditional Building Roundtable, "Raising Standards," in the February issue.

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