The
Logos of Architecture and Its Opponents

E. Michael Jones

Fidelity Press

206 Marquette Avenue

South Bend, Indiana 46617

Copyright, Fidelity Press

Cover: Experience Music Project; Seattle, Washington

To Peter and
Christina

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

GREEK
TEMPLES

ATHENS AND
JERUSALEM?

THE PRESENCE
OF ABSENCE

REBELLION
AGAINST METAPHYSICS

LOOKING FOR
MARTYRS

AUT
VITRUVIUS AUT NIHIL

JEWISH
CHURCHES

THEOLOGICAL
SIGNIFICANCE

THE
DECONSTRUCTIVIST CONSPIRACY

DECLINE IN
FERTILITY

JOHNSON'S
SYNAGOGUE

HIGH OEDIPAL
DRAMA

BERLIN'S
MESSIAH

Biographical
Note

PREFACE

George Antheil once said that if he and his friends had to
listen to one more piece of music by Arnold Schoenberg that they all would have
committed suicide. So it was with great rejoicing that the first Jazz band
arrived in Paris in 1919.

What Antheil said about modern music applies a fortiori to
modern architecture. If by, say, 1976, another glass box got built, we would
have all been tempted to jump off its roof and commit suicide. Bauhaus
architecture was nothing special to begin with, and the great post World War II
building boom that spread it throughout the world—from Leningrad to Jomo
Kenyatta University in Nairobi—was bound to cause a reaction. In fact, it
caused two reactions: one Catholic, the other Jewish.

The Logos of
Architecture and Its Opponents describes how Thomas Gordon Smith and
Frank Gehry reacted to the tyranny of Bauhaus architecture in ways that were
architecturally surprising but ethnically predictable. Logos pervades every
aspect of our lives, including the built environment. How we react to Logos,
however, and the kind of buildings we build and get depend on who we are and
how we define ourselves in relation to it.

E. Michael Jones

South Bend, Indiana

July 2012

GREEK
TEMPLES

Enron shares Mr. Gehry's
ongoing search for "the moment of truth"—the moment when the
functional approach to a problem becomes infused with the artistry that
produces a truly innovative solution. This is the search Enron embarks on every
day, by questioning the conventional to change business paradigms and create
new markets that will shape the New Economy. It is the shared sense of
challenge that we admire most in Frank Gehry, and we hope that this exhibition
will bring you as much inspiration as it has brought us.

Jeff Skilling on Frank Gehry

"My buildings look as if they are just thrown
together. We work very hard to achieve this."

Frank Gehry on Frank Gehry

Thomas Gordon Smith, former chairman of the Architecture
Department at the University of Notre Dame, lives in a Greek Temple. Actually,
the statement is not as strange as it sounds. I happen to live in a Greek
Temple too, although not one as grand as Professor Smith's. As a matter of
fact, just about everyone in northern Indiana or southern Michigan who lives in
a house built between, say, 1830 and 1930 lives in a house modeled on a Greek temple. In the two lots behind my house,
there are two massive Greek temples, of the sort that can be found in the Greek
revival pattern books that provided templates for housing throughout the
Midwest during this period. The house just to the southwest of my house has a
porch supported by four massive Corinthian pillars; the house to the southeast
has two porches, one on the first floor and one on the second, and both are
supported by four equally massive Ionic columns. The porch itself, which is
characteristic of Midwest vernacular housing of this period, is a Greek
invention, something which has always symbolized in my mind the openness of
American society in its pre-Imperial mode. The porch is the ideal intermediary
structure between the public and private realms. Florence has many beautiful
buildings, but the people there live in fortresses without porches, more in keeping
with the personality of the Goths who took over Italy after Rome fell and its
connection with Greece and the eastern Empire was severed.

The two Greek temples to the south of my house are white, in
imitation of the Parthenon. Both have been defaced by the addition of first
generation aluminum siding, which, if you'll remember, came in any color you
wanted as long as it was white. Smith's Greek temple, however, defies our
expectations by being audaciously polychrome. The color is the first thing you notice when you approach
the house, which is tucked into the back of a lot at the end of a suburban
cul-de-sac about a mile or so southeast of the Notre Dame campus. The facade is
yellow and orange brick, at the center of which two exquisite Ionic pillars of
Indiana limestone support the roof to a porch that seems less spacious than
what I have come to expect in the Midwest.

The color scheme intensifies in the living room, whose ceiling
is covered with murals of architects and their patrons—e.g., Michelangelo
and Pope Paul III—but reaches its apogee in the dining room, which is again
largely orange and yellow (a cloud of yellow material hangs over the dining
room table) with a large swath of purple serving as the color of the sky in the
mural of Rome's roofscape that adorns one of the walls. That mural was painted
by Ruth Stroik, the wife of Duncan Stroik, one of Smith's colleagues on the
architecture faculty.

The dining room is an oval between the living room and the
kitchen and, like the porch, smaller than I was expecting. Smith got the
proportions for the dining room from Vitruvius, the man who codified the Logos
of architecture, who specified that "dining rooms ought to be twice as long as they are wide. The height of all oblong
rooms should follow the following ratio: add the measure of their length and
width together. From this total, take one-half and use this for the height." Smith also got the
proportions for the limestone pillars of the porch (the ratio of column
diameter to intercolumniation is 1:2.25 and the ratio of diameter to height is
1:9.5) from Vitruvius. Hence the name on the pediment above the door: Vitruvian
House, and the year it was built, Anno MCMXC.

Smith brought Vitruvius with him when he came to Notre Dame in
1989 to take over the chairmanship of an architecture department that was in
danger of losing its accreditation. Instead of creating the South Bend version
of the Box Factory, Smith turned it into one of the few classical departments
in the world, and the only classical department at a Catholic university in America. The change
provoked protests not so much from the modernists, who were already in decline,
as from the postmodernists, who felt that architecture was a matter of
eclecticism and mastering a number of styles.

Smith was a younger member of the generation that rejected
modernism. In 1978 Thomas Gordon Smith was known as a post-modernist, but then
he got a commission to do an entryway at the 1980 Venice Biennale and shocked
the architectural world by coming up with a classical design. His
unapologetically classical design for an entryway wasn't as shocking as it
might have been a few years earlier, because by 1980 postmodernism was in full
cry and since postmodernism meant pastiche anyway, why not do the architectural
version of cut and paste with columns, etc.? Subsequent history would show that
the attraction that columns held for Smith would go deeper than that, but at
the time his doorway was well within the parameters of postmodernism.

The reaction against modernism which came to be known as
Postmodernism began in 1966 when Robert Venturi, a Philadelphia architect
published a book entitled Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Venturi's
book appeared toward the end of the decade during which the giants of modernism
went to their reward in the great glass box in the sky. Frank Lloyd Wright, who
hated the glass box, died in 1959; LeCorbusier, whose Radiant City became the
inspiration for Ford's World Headquarters in Dearborn and every other dreary
suburban office "campus," died in 1965, and both Walter Gropius, the
founder of Bauhaus, and Mies van der Rohe, inventor of the glass box, died in
1969. Three years before the Germans died, Venturi could be heard complaining
that "Modern architects … idealized the primitive and elementary at the
expense of the diverse and the sophisticated." That verdict seemed fair
enough, but then taking that judgment to an extreme in the opposite direction,
Venturi launched a career in which
he gloried in the apotheosis of all of the kitsch and the crud of post-World
War II development, trying to develop his own iconography out of TV antennae
and the flotsam and jetsam of America's strip malls. "Is not Main Street
almost all right?" he wondered, leaving us to wonder which Main Street he
had in mind, "Indeed, is not the commercial strip of a Route 66 almost all
right? ... The seemingly chaotic juxtaposition of honky-tonk elements express
an intriguing kind of vitality and validity, and they produce an unexpected
approach to unity as well."

And so, in
reaction to the box, there arose "the Five"—Charles Gwathmey, Peter
Eisenman, Michael Graves, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier—all of whom were
featured in a exhibition of postmodernism at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972. "We all try to make buildings
that are also ideas," said Gwathmey, but the biggest idea man in the group
was without doubt Peter Eisenman, who founded the Institute for Architecture
and Urban Studies to promote his ideas in 1967. As some indication of where all
this was heading, Venturi published his second book Learning from Las Vegas,
in 1972.

The postmodern movement reached its apogee between 1978, when
Philip Johnson announced his design for the AT&T building in New York and
1984 when the building was actually completed. As a sign that the new
postmodern age had finally dawned, Johnson shocked the architectural world by
placing a pediment on the 660 foot high building that AT&T was planning to
build on Madison Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets. As
a reward for his audacity, Time magazine put Johnson on the cover of its
January 7, 1979 issue. Johnson looked down at the camera with a model of what
was to be the first postmodern skyscraper (or, less reverently, in reference to
the curvy crown, the "Chippendale skyscraper") cradled in his arm
like a latter-day Moses holding the tablets of the new law.

Nineteen Seventy Nine was an important year for a number of
reasons. It was the high water mark of the sexual revolution, which at that
point had morphed into the homosexual revolution. AIDS, which was actually a
form of lifestyle-based poisoning, was still years over the horizon, and the
orgiastic gay bathhouse scene, that would lead to the death of so many
homosexuals, was in full swing in San Francisco and New York, where the AT&T
building was to be built, in many ways as its monument. Nineteen Seventy Nine
was also the year in which Alien, based on H. R. Giger's monster, would
inaugurate a 20-year run of horror movies. Alien was Hollywood's
inchoate commentary on the sexual revolution it had helped create.

And so, on the eve of the conservative reaction, Philip
Johnson became famous for putting a crown on a building. The fact that Johnson
was a notorious homosexual didn't hurt his reputation as the dean of
postmodernism. In fact it helped Johnson articulate the Zeitgeist, because
postmodernism was historical and eclectic and "camp," which made it
naturally attractive to a homosexual whose life was a series of meticulously
constructed facades. "His genius," Franz Schulze says of Johnson,
"was that of a singularly gifted harlequin who forever changed the masks
of style on his own work and conducted his personal relationships with
comparable whimsicality" (New York: Knopf, 1994, p. 4).

The homosexual nature of the AT&T building became apparent
the moment you entered the lobby. Instead of commissioning an original work of
art, Johnson persuaded the company to
let him have the statue which adorned the previous AT&T building.
What seemed innocuous enough when viewed from street level became a homosexual
fantasy once Johnson changed its context. Viewed at a distance the statue that
was known as The Genius of Electricity seemed chaste enough, but once it was
placed in the middle of the lobby of Johnson's building it became, in the words
of his biographer: "a piece of beefcake and high camp, a weightless gay
fantasy levitating in the middle of all that straight hard rock. This was POMO
irony, undiluted. A definitive model for the material pomp that became a near
requisite of skyscraper lobbies during the Reagan '80s (p. 351)."
"What Mr. Johnson has produced from that Pop pediment on down," wrote
Ada Louise Huxtable in the New York Times, "is a pastiche of historical
references and evocative spatial experiences drawn from his admiration of bits
and pieces of earlier monuments, blown up gigantically in unconventional and
unsettling relationships. ... But this building is a monumental demonstration
of quixotic aesthetic intelligence rather than art" (Ibid.).

By 1978, everyone had grown sick of the glass box, which is
what modernism had become. In his postmortem on modern architecture, Tom Wolfe
described what had become a game at the school of architecture at Yale: siting
the glass box. So there was a glass box with a snorkel on it, as a design for
the glass box at the bottom of the ocean, the glass box on the moon, the glass
box on Mars, etc. The Museum of Modern Art's Modern Architects exhibit of 1947,
following on the heels of American's victory over fascism, "had only
quickened a desire in the United States for a lucid, uncluttered manner of
architecture that would suit the country's victorious and forward looking
mood." By 1978, the national mood could be better characterized as
inverted—or perverted. As some indication of both the longevity and the protean
(if not chameleon) character of his architecture, Philip Johnson, the designer
of the first POMO skyscraper, was also the curator of the 1947 Modern
Architects show, which became a showcase for the work of Mies van der Rohe as
well as an "acknowledgment of the worldwide victory of modernism"
(Schulze, p. 178).

By the end of the century, Academics like Philip Bess could
write mockingly of the illusions modernity had generated but left unfulfilled,
most notably, about how

Americans ... seemed moved by such visions of
technological utopia as the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress World's Fair,
which had as its motto, "Science finds, Industry applies. Man
conforms." In the salad days of modernism, architects spoke as if utopia
would follow the triumph of modern architecture as naturally as summer follows
spring. The modernist vision was captured in Europe by city planning projects
by architects such as Antonio Sant'Elia, Tony Gamier, and Le Corbusier, and in
America by those old WPA post office murals in which streamliners cross fields
of ripening wheat toward a city of gleaming skyscrapers into which freight
dirigibles unload cargoes and toward which the masses below ascend upon giant
escalators (Philip Bess, Till We Have
Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred [Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006],
p. 83).

The modernists, according to Bess, had "underestimated
the pervasiveness of what theologians call sin, while overestimating the
redemptive power of steel, glass, and electricity" (Bess, p. 84). Philip
Bess, who is a colleague of Thomas Gordon Smith at the University of Notre Dame
architecture school, doesn't like postmodernism any better. In trying to
articulate its syntax, Bess, however, leaves out the homosexual grammar that
Schulze found so obvious. In trying to define "The intent … of postmodern
architects such as Philip Johnson, Peter Eisenmann, Bernard Tshumi, James
Wines, Stanley Tigerman, Daniel Liebskind, and others," Bess claims that
their work "display[s] the tenor of our era" because it promotes

self-assertion over self-sacrifice; revolt and
entitlement over gratitude; the temporary over the durable; transgression over
prohibition; autonomy and the pursuit of power over obedience to legitimate
authority, and the deliberate blurring of distinctions over the desire to
understand and other things in clear and right relationships to one another (p.
72).

Bess's definition of postmodernism is unsatisfactory for a
number of reasons. It could just as easily be applied to moderns and even, to
some extent, antimoderns (or anti-Germans, like Frank Lloyd Wright, whose
Prometheanism was ably described in Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead). It
also seems to make no distinction between camp postmodernism and what followed
it, which was even more radically subversive of the Logos of architecture, but
in a different way.

Johnson was just two years shy of his 80th birthday
when his monument to homosexual camp was completed. Given his age and
experience Johnson was a crucial link between the modern and the postmodern
architectural eras. But Johnson, everyone knew, was an epigone. In his younger
years he was known as "Mies van der Johnson" in recognition of the
fact that Mies van der Rohe was the genius behind his most famous buildings,
most especially his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.

Philip Johnson was the end of the line in a number of
different ways. He was the pampered son of a well-to-do family from Cleveland,
who became a millionaire in his own right when the Alcoa stock his father gave
him took off during the boom of the 1920s. It was also during the 1920s that
Johnson became habituated to homosexual practice. Johnson's sexual orientation
could be seen as a metaphor for the decline of the WASP ruling class in
America. The same thing had happened a generation earlier in England. It was known as Bloomsbury, the
homosexual literary coterie that came about when their parents' generation
replaced their etiolated Christianity with Darwinism. The eugenic movement was
the sign that the same thing was happening in America. In terms of American
architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright symbolized an American confidence and a
uniquely American reading of modernity that ran aground on unruly
passion—Wright had a weakness when it came to the wives of his wealthy clients—and eventually found issue in a homosexual pasticheur like Johnson, who
had no children either biological or architectural. Homosexuals do not beget
progeny, but if they are powerful they attract a following nonetheless. Johnson
may not have had progeny in any meaningful sense of the word, but he did have a
following among "the younger generation of architects who devoted so much
time sucking up to him," to use Michael Sorkin's unfortunate phrase, and
the leader of that generation of sucker-uppers was Peter Eisenman.

If Johnson's postmodernism is homosexual, Eisenman's is more
ontological—or, to take a term from Eisenman's favorite philosopher, Jacques
Derrida, deontological. Postmodernism, according to Eisenman, is not simply
some

harmless period after modernism, nor does it merely
signify the erasure of modernism and the resurrection of the classical. Rather
it proposes a transgressive or negative aspect which is at the root of its own
definition. It suggests that the relationship and nature of objects and
processes sustained by a previous history are no longer operative. (Peter
Eisenman, Eisenman Inside Out: Selected
Writings 1963-1988 [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004], p.
171).

Since Eisenman has appointed himself the arbiter of postmodern
discourse he is in the ideal position to tell us which ideas are "no
longer operative." The first non-operative idea is "the idea of
original perfection," something which Eisenman derives from Plato and
classical architecture, according to which "these type forms were ideal
and 'natural,' characterized by symmetries, central axes, and a hierarchy of
elemental parts. In the modern, type forms were Platonic and abstract,
characterized more easily by references to dynamic, asymmetric, mechanistic structures
than the hierarchic types of the classical. Each presumes that meaning can
inhere in an object" (p. 171).

Architectural objects no longer have meaning, Eisenman tells
us in a way that makes clear that he means what he says (Eisenman learned about
the non-meaning of architecture from reading Michel Foucault, another favorite
philosopher), because they are created from a world which has lost ontological
meaning. Since there is no longer any "stable origin of the object as
sign," architects can now only design buildings "by proposing a
process which at root is the negative of classical composition, the process [of
decomposition] uncovers (or deconstructs) relationships inherent in a specific
object and its structure, which were previously hidden by a classical
sensibility" (p. 186).

So, according to this hermeneutic, postmodern buildings
are full of sound (the acoustics are terrible) and fury (people don't like
them), signifying nothing, by which we mean not that they don't have any
meaning—every building has meaning—as much as they symbolize the nihilistic
philosophy of the architects who designed them. "The bay," according
to Eisenman,

now becomes merely a counter in an approximation of its
negative—a process of absences and differences. The order or nature of the
object resides in that process with constitutes its differences—the implied
absences between bays. It is a nature now grounded in process, not in being; it
is no longer based on the substance of the object. In decomposition the object
is no longer identical to a substance. It now resides in how the elements are
made and kept, that is, in their processes. It is a form of autonomous making,
different from that of modernism or, for that matter, classicism (Ibid.).

Architecture, as a result, becomes a branch of deontology.
There is no being, and all of our buildings must now reflect that newly
discovered absence.

Peter Eisenman, as I said, was one of Philip Johnson's most
devoted followers. Since Eisenman was not a homosexual, it should have been
obvious that he was destined to come up with his own definition of
postmodernism. Unlike Bess, who can't see that the hidden grammar of
postmodernism is homosexuality, Eisenman is able to derive an even deeper
grammar from homosexual postmodernism, namely, the grammar of subversion.
Postmodernism may be homosexual in its sensibility, but homosexuality is, at an
even more refined level of abstraction, simply subversion in its most basic
form, which is to say subversion of nature. Eisenman was interested in more complex
forms of subversion. This understanding of postmodernism allowed Eisenman and
his coterie to lead that movement into a new era, subsequently known as
deconstructionism. So if modernism gave expression to the American WASP reading
of the Enlightenment in its moment of triumph after the defeat of fascism, then
postmodernism expressed the homosexual subversion of that triumph in sexual
liberation and stylistic relativism of the sort that became regnant during the
America of the '70s, with the ascendancy of cultural icons like Andy Warhol.
Postmodernism was the architectural equivalent of Pop Art, both of which were
campy, effete, and homosexual.

What followed that was Jewish, and Peter Eisenman was its
spokesman. If the message of Venturi and Philip Johnson was "anything
goes," the message of Peter Eisenman was full of prohibitions. If Philip
Johnson's AT&T building was the icon of bathhouses, Studio 54, Andy Warhol,
and camp, Peter Eisenman's writing (he wrote more books than he designed buildings)
bespoke the architecture of political correctness and campus speech codes.
Peter Eisenman is less architect than a commissar whose main job is the
prohibition of impure architectural thoughts. His writing was so full of
implicitly stated "Thou Shalt Nots," it was as if the ADL had gotten
into the business of writing building codes. Peter Eisenman has become the Abe
Foxman of architecture.

According to Eisenman, "the smoke of Auschwitz" has
rendered certain architectural styles morally invalid. People who persist in
the wickedness otherwise known as classical
(or modern) architecture, run the danger of incurring the wrath of commissars
like Eisenman or Daniel Libeskind, who claims that the Holocaust has rendered
the right angle morally suspect. The right angle, Libeskind tells us, "is
a product of a spiritual history ... and when that spiritual history is no
longer decisive, the right angle also changes. Perhaps yesterday's perfection
is no longer 'right' for us." Libeskind dislikes right angles because they
imply "the right, the orthogonal, the vertical versus the horizontal, man
versus woman, earth versus God, light versus darkness, and good versus evil. It
would be easy if the categories were still valid, but so many things have
changed. We no longer operate with the right angle in the sciences, economics,
chemistry, in our daily life. So it seems that we should ask: What do we
operate with? What are our geometries? What are our orientations?" The
only legitimate architecture, in other words, is one that gives form to
"fragments, approximations, [and] indeterminacies …" (Daniel
Libeskind, Jewish Musem Berlin [G & B International, 1999], p. 38).

"I do not
discriminate against the right angle," Libeskind is quick to add,
"there are some right angles in the building of the Jewish Museum,"
which Libeskind designed in Berlin.

Needless to say, Philip Bess, who is now a Catholic after his
conversion from the Baptist faith of his youth, does not like this kind of
talk. He exposes the self-contradictory nature of the deconstructive project,
as proposed by people like Peter Eisenman, by reducing it to paradoxes like the
following: "the anti-truth strategy of the dislocating text is in fact
serving Eisenman's perception of the truth of our cultural condition; and that
Eisenman pursues this strategy faithful and obedient to the imperative that
architecture should accurately mirror the age in which it is produced" (p.
229). Peter Eisenman's architecture, Bess tells us,

embodies in a peculiarly apt and pointed way the spirit
of therapeutic social order: the denial that architecture relates in any
necessary way to (nonexistent) sacred order; the systematic transgression of
architecture's symbolic conventions not in service to any professed
"higher" vision of architecture, but rather because it both can be
done and (in accordance with the allegedly transgressive demands of the
present) should be done; the use, in principle of a handy "text" to
demonstrate his theories; and the practice of architecture as self-fulfillment.
Note well, however, that Eisennman is not the only but merely the most knowing
and articulate theorist and practitioner of "therapeutic
architecture," consciously bringing to contemporary architectural
sensibility tendencies that Rieff and others would argue have been at work in
the larger social and artistic fabric of the west for at least two hundred
years. Eisenman's most obvious contemporaries are his colleagues and
adversaries found in the dislocating and angst-symbolizing sandbox of
deconstruction/deconstructivism (p. 232).

Calling once again upon the writing of Philip Reiff,
Bess calls this school of thought therapeutic because "the therapeutic is
a cultural revolutionary who, unlike previous revolutionaries, seeks not a new,
more correct relationship to sacred order, but rather freedom from sacred
order" (p. 231). Philip Bess knows that he is locked in cultural battle
with people like Peter Eisenman, but his ideological blinders prevent him from
understanding just who the sides are in this battle in the culture wars—even
after he states that case himself. In his recent book Till We Have Built Jerusalem, Bess
notes that "a well-known architect, Stanley Tigerman, has even advanced—in
public—the remarkable thesis that 'postmodernism is a Jewish phenomenon'"
(p. 79). As if shocked by the statement he has just made, Bess's reaction is to
avert his eyes, telling us that "One does well to be skeptical of this
architectural piety," because postmodernism "has virtually nothing to
do with the professed beliefs of any specific religious community."

Why should one "be skeptical of this architectural
piety"? Is Stanley Tigerman an anti-Semite? Why is it considered good form
on the part of Catholics to ignore Jews when they say that something is Jewish?
Well, because the pieties of the American civil religion insist that sects are
divisive and that religious or ethnic identity doesn't mean anything ultimately
anyway. Once again, the conservative Catholic internalizes the commands of his
oppressors. His role, especially when he becomes a professor, is to enforce the
tenets of the American civic religion and the tattered remains of Enlightenment
culture, in this instance by telling us that a Jew like Stanley Tigerman really
doesn't mean what he says, when he claims that postmodernism is Jewish.

Thomas Gordon Smith's reaction was similar. "What
does he know?" Smith said dismissively of Tigerman's claim. Smith's
reaction to Tigerman's comment was especially interesting because Tigerman
hired both Smith and Eisenman to be on the architecture faculty of the
University of Illinois at Chicago, and he hired them because he felt that they
represented an antithesis in architecture, one that neither Smith nor Bess
wants to acknowledge. "So we'll have Eisenman, the deconstructionist, and
Thomas Gordon Smith, the classicist, beating up one another. What I want is to
give the kids a real choice" is how Tigerman framed the issue in the `80s
before Smith moved on to Notre Dame (John, p. 61).

Bess cannot bring himself to admit that
"postmodernism is Jewish," even though he quotes Stanley Tigerman to
that effect, because the very idea of Jewish architecture is an affront to the
American civic religion, which implicitly states that all architectures must be
secular, which is to say, in some sense of the word, Masonic. But if there is
such a thing as Jewish architecture, then, according to the premises of the
Triple Melting Pot, then there must also be Catholic and Protestant
architecture. And once we admit that, we have to inquire into the content of
each, and this is clearly a project that makes Bess uncomfortable, because
Bess, no matter where he goes to church on Sunday, believes in Judeo-Christianity. According to
Bess, there are two kinds of architecture: bad architecture, which is modern,
postmodern, and deconstructive; and good architecture, which is traditional.
"Traditional architecture ... promotes spatial, formal and decorative
hierarchies appropriate to the dramas of public and private life, and is biased
toward making its grandeur proportionate to its function and the communal
significance of the institution for and by which it has been
commissioned." Traditional architecture is "an architecture of
physical and symbolical substance; of buildings with surface shadow and depth
associated with thick walls and moldings, penetrated by windows and door
openings—in contrast to the thin, taut, shadowless 'skins' of our contemporary
visually dematerialized architecture; of buildings that look like buildings
rather than machines, or ocean liners, or mirrored reflections of other
buildings."

Bess gets into trouble almost immediately when he tries
to define the content of traditional architecture as Judeo-Christian. One of
C.S. Lewis's worst books was Mere Christianity. Bess's book on architecture might be
subtitled, in this regard, "Mere Judeo-Christianity." Stanley
Tigerman feels that postmodern and deconstructive architecture is Jewish. Bess
is uncomfortable with Tigerman's description, but he clearly does not like the
architecture Tigerman calls Jewish, and in trying to articulate why he
doesn't like it, he fails to
come with a definition or description as crisp and to the point as Tigerman's.
His main problem, in this regard, is not architectural; it is theological.
Perhaps because of his upbringing as a Baptist, he doesn't understand the
difference between a Catholic and a Jew. As a result, he falls back on the
American civil religion to roll the two groups into one entity known as
Judeo-Christianity, a construct which guarantees that he will never understand
what is going on in the architectural world, certainly not as well as Stanley
Tigerman or Peter Eisenman do. The muddle that is Bess's thought comes out in
passages like the following: "I would like to suggest that certain
features of the biblical (Jewish and Christian) religious traditions share a
continuing affinity with traditional architecture and urbanism."

In order to move this discussion along we have to ask at
this point what Peter Eisenman's religion is. As a hint to Professor Bess, who
thinks that the words "Jewish" and "biblical" are synonyms,
we will make our first necessary distinction: Eisenman's religion is Jewish,
but it is not biblical. His religion is based on the Holocaust. Postmodern or
deconstructive architecture is
then derived from the premise that the Holocaust has redefined everything, from
being to design. In a note on p. 86, Bess attacks both Eisenman and Harvard
theologian Gordon Kaufman for proposing the idea that Holocaust has redefined
architecture, an assertion Bess finds "dubious." Instead of pursuing
that train of thought and telling us why, Bess reverts to his theological mode, which always spells trouble.
"One new item on the theological agenda seems mandated by the
Holocaust," Bess tells us. "Christians need to continue their
reassessment of the relationship of Christianity to Judaism, to affirm
theologically the historical priority and continuing validity of the faith of
Israel … The angst of contemporary academics … has nothing whatsoever to do
with the making of architecture."

Bess is wrong here. When it comes to postmodern and most
especially deconstructive architecture, we are talking about something that is
first and foremost an academic phenomenon, and so the "angst of
contemporary academics" has, to the contrary, everything to do with this
kind of architecture. Because of his ignorance of theology, Bess can neither
explain the source of the Angst nor can he explain how fear gets transmitted
into hatred (phobos means fear and hatred) and how that hatred is used
to forge weapons in the culture wars. If Eisenman's architecture is anything at
all, it is an architecture of ideas. Bess doesn't like Eisenman's ideas, but he
can't deal with those ideas effectively because of his own intellectual
shortcomings. To begin with, Bess can't distinguish between Catholic theology,
which has many important things to say about "the faith of Israel,"
and America's civil religion, which states that all sects are equal (or equally
wrong). Worse still, at certain crucial moments he can't distinguish between
neoconservative ideology and the Catholicism he professes on his lips. ISI,
which is Bess's publisher, and First Things, where many of the articles
included in his book first appeared, are Bess's intellectual gatekeepers, and,
as such, they specify his terms of engagement in the culture wars, terms which,
when dealing with the Peter Eisenmans of this world, will guarantee failure.
"Here is your musket for the culture wars, Phil," the neocon priests
of the civil religion tell Bess. "It represents the severely redacted form
of the Enlightenment which all American conservatives hold dear. It was once
fired by Thomas Jefferson. Now go out and shoot down the postmodernist F-16 (or
the cruise missile known as sprawl) with it."

As we have
stated before, the main tenet of the Enlightenment that still has purchase on
the American conservative mind is the one taken from Lessing's play Nathan
der Weise, namely, that the true conservative or the true American is the
man who rises above the narrow confines of sectarian religion—Protestant,
Catholic, Jew (Christian, Muslim, Jew has fallen out of favor
lately)—and joins with his Enlightened brethren in the religion on which all
men can agree; at one time this religion was known as Freemasonry; more
recently it has come to be known as the conservative movement. Both political
parties are based on this model, and this is the unarticulated dogma which both
informs and cripples Bess's book.

It also cripples the Notre Dame architecture department
in its attempt to fight the culture wars. Professors like Duncan Stroik are
quick to dismiss what Peter Eisenman does as "talkitecture," but in
doing this they fail to see what Philip Johnson and Peter Eisenman knew,
namely, that there is an intimate connection between architecture and discourse. Architects like
Thomas Gordon Smith like to shrug and say, "I'll build my buildings and
he'll build his," but the issue isn't quite that simple, certainly not at
a university school of architecture. The postmodern decontructionists now have
something close to total control over architectural discourse. That, in turn,
means control over architectural education, and control over education means
ultimately control over the kind of building that gets built. To say, as Bess
does, that this takeover of discourse has nothing whatsoever to do with the
making of architecture" is as naïve as it is apodictic. It is also
disingenuous, especially when coming from an academic who has to labor under
these prohibitions of thought and discourse on a daily basis.

According to Tigerman, Classicism, as practiced by
Thomas Gordon Smith and Duncan Stroik, is Catholic, and Postmodernism, as
practiced by Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, and Frank Gehry (born Ephraim
Goldberg), is Jewish. Bess, because of the reasons discussed above, prohibits
himself from entertaining Tigerman's thought. He involves himself, as a result,
in a category mistake which prevents him from understanding the very topic he
wants to discuss. According to Bess, postmodernism is the antithesis of
"Biblical Monotheism," which is the religion of the
"Judeo-Christian heritage." Bess then proposes what can best be
termed ecumenical architecture: "Those who stand within the
Judeo-Christian heritage, and who continue to promote the traditional
understanding of architecture as a civic art, might propose the following: that
sometimes institutions, and even the architecture that symbolizes them, can be
vehicles of grace." The architecture of "Biblical monotheism,"
he continues, "rests upon a few fundamental perceptions: that a
distinction exists between the world and its Creator; that creation is good but
has been corrupted; that the world's Creator is neither indifferent to nor
uninvolved with its continuing existence and its final destiny." Is Peter
Eisenman a believer in "Biblical monotheism" simply because he's a
Jew? Bess never asks the question, but his answer seems to be yes.

Bess has many fine things to say about the Creator and
the goodness of creation, both of which can be derived from the Bible, but does
Peter Eisenman believe all of these things simply because he is a Jew? Judging
from his writings, we would have to say he does not. In fact, as we have come
to learn, the fact that Eisenman is a Jew makes it more likely that he will be,
to use Bess's words, "a cultural revolutionary" rather than a
follower of the Torah, which is the Word of God. The term Judeo-Christianity
does nothing but muddle two things that need to be distinguished, probably the
intent of the word from the beginning. And these two terms need to be
distinguished in the field of architecture because, as Stanley Tigerman
implies, there is no such thing as a Judeo-Christian building. All of the
buildings which Bess admires were built by cultures which consciously discriminated
against Jews. Jews like Eisenman know this; that is why they hate these buildings. America, on the other hand, is
one of the few countries which has allowed Jews to build monumental buildings
(virtually all of them within the past 20 years), and the result, even if Bess
can't bring himself to admit it, is some of the ugliest and most grotesque
buildings in history.

Gehry's oeuvre is probably the best example of what I'm
talking about. Jewish architects are good at subversion. In fact that dominates
what they do. So to give an early (1978) and ultimately unbuilt example of
Gehry's work, "The Wagner Residence (unbuilt, Malibu, CA 1978) ... reveals
the architect's interest in rupturing the rigid, Modernist box." In doing
this, Gehry, "creates the effect of a sculptural mass tumbling down the
slope" (p. 41). Then there is the Peter B. Lewis Building, Weatherhead
School of Management at Case Western Reserve University 1997: "Asked to
design a building representative of the ingenuity of the Weatherhead's student-centered
curriculum, Gehry responded by exploding the standard Modernist box. Two towers
emerge from a rectilinear brick building, with cascades of metal falling from
the towers to the street and, in places, puncturing the brick volume" (p.
248). Then there is the Experience Music Project, Seattle 1995-2000, which
looks like three trash bags sitting next to each other, or as the catalogue of
his work puts it:

The curvaceous forms were sparked by the client's
admiration for the horse-head shaped conference center at the DC Bank Building
[in Berlin] (1995-2001) and grew out of the architect's experiments with broken
guitar pieces. The allusion to a shattered Fender Stratocaster is carried
throughout in a glass sculpture that rides the crest of the building,
suggesting the strings and frets of a guitar neck. The colors - a riot of gold,
pale blue, purple, red and silver - are symbolic reference to various songs and
events from the history of rock and roll, including Hendrix's song "Purple
Haze."

Gehry's design for the (also unbuilt) Guggenheim Museum New
York 1998 is essentially a deconstructed skyscraper—"The rigid forms
characteristic of a skyscraper—the quintessence of New York architecture—are
fractured and recombined with a curvilinear body suggestive of the water's
fluid movement and the energy of the city. The twisting tower is encircled by
rolling metal, evoking the image of a skyscraper jutting through a whirling
cloud.'" The fact that Gehry's design bore an uncanny resemblance to the
collapse of the World Trade Center towers probably militates against the
completion of the project. Deconstruction has its limits after all. Muslim
forms of deconstructivism have given the genre a bad name in lower Manhattan.

Then there is MIT office complex which is "based on the
behavioral patterns of an orangutan village." For some reason, this
concept "was initially met with a less than favorable reaction" in
spite of the fact that the finicky professors were offered the best of both
worlds: "researchers were afforded maximum privacy in their office spaces,
but emerge from them to join with their colleagues in more public settings—much
like primates who live up in the trees and venture down onto the savannah to
engage in collective activity."

Once Jews were allowed to build monumental buildings they
built structures that were not only grotesque, they built buildings which were
consciously "transgressive," to use one of Peter Eisenman's favorite
words. When asked "What role do the visitor's physical being and
self-awareness play for you?" while visiting the ETA Hoffman garden in the
Berlin Jewish Museum, Daniel Libeskind, the architect of that building,
responded by saying that: "The ETA Hoffman garden represents an attempt to
completely disorient the visitor. It represents a shipwreck of history. One
enters it and finds the experience somewhat disturbing. Yes, it is unstable;
one feels a little bit sick walking through it. But it is accurate because that
is what perfect order feels like when you leave the history of Berlin."

So, given Libeskind's assessment of his own magnum opus,
would it be anti-Semitic to say that Jewish architecture is designed to make
you feel "a little bit sick," because that is how Jews like Libeskind
feel when they contemplate "the history of Berlin"? Daniel Libeskind,
if you'll remember, was the man who claimed that right angles were morally
suspect in the wake of the Holocaust. This is significant in this context
because, the ETA Hoffman garden "is the only orthogonal square form" in
the Jewish museum. "It is," Libeskind continues,

the only perfectly right-angled form in the entire
building which has both right angles in plan and right angles in section, and
yet it is the one form which I think people will feel strangely alienated from
after experiencing it. It feels a bit like sailing in a boat; it is like being at sea and discovering
that everything suddenly seems very different. And doesn't Berlin look
different from that exile, even for Berliners who never left the place? It is
an upside down garden with the earth remote inside concrete columns, roots
about, hard ground below, and vegetation intertwined above—out of reach (my
emphasis).

Bess has already told us that he doesn't like buildings like
this, but he can't really tell us why because whenever he attempts to do that
he is brought up short by the contradiction between his politics, which is
American and democratic, and his aesthetics, which is Italian and aristocratic.
That conflict leads him into passages like the following:

There is little evidence to suggest that the passionate, violent,
self-centered citizens of, say, 12th century Venice, or 15th
century Florence, or 16th century Rome differ in essence from those
of contemporary New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. The social institutions that
civilized their instincts differ from those that (however imperfectly) civilize
ours; but there is no reason why the architecture of the third millennium
cannot serve the primary symbolic purpose it served in earlier eras—the
representation, in orderly, durable, functional, and beautiful buildings, of
institutions that enable and encourage us to live as civilized human beings.

No reason? Bess stumbles back and forth in making his
argument, but he can't escape from certain fundamental facts, all of which contradict
both his philosophy of architecture and the American civil religion upon which
it rests. If there is no difference between human nature as it existed in Rome
in the l6th century and as it exists in America now, how is it then
that Rome then produced beautiful enduring buildings and America now generates
ugly monstrosities? If human nature is the same, the difference in architecture must stem from the
differing political and cultural systems in place during these respective eras.
This, unfortunately, leads Bess where he would rather not go, because the
cultures whose buildings he admires most were cultures which discriminated
against Jews. The one thing that 12th century Venice, 15th century
Florence, and 16th century Rome had in common other than the Roman Catholic
faith was the fact that they confined Jews to ghettos, which meant that the
Jews had virtually no say over the public built environment. Conversely,
America, which has even outstripped Poland as the modern paradisus Judeorum,
produced unremittingly ugly and, one would have to say, grotesque
architecture the moment it allowed Jews to build monumental buildings. In fact,
even the modernist buildings of the first half of the 20th century
look comparatively logophilic when compared to the wave of Jewish architecture
which followed it. If there is such a thing as a Judeo-Christiantradition in architecture, how is it that
the first time in history that Jews have been allowed to build monumental
buildings they come up with assaults on common decency like Libeskind's Jewish
Museum in Berlin and Gehry's Experience Music Project in Seattle?

The answer to all of the above questions is Logos. Catholics
and Jews have two fundamentally opposed views of Logos, and those fundamentally
differing attitudes toward Logos find expression in fundamentally different
kinds of buildings. There is no such thing as a Judeo-Christian view of Logos.
Jews rejected Logos when they rejected Christ. For two thousand years that
rejection of Logos found expression in revolutionary activity Now that
virtually every revolution has been successful, Jews get to build revolutionary
buildings as the monument to their success, and these buildings—buildings like
Eisenman's Wexler Center at the University of Ohio, Libeskind's Jewish Museum,
and Gehry's Experience Music Project—are not only ugly and grotesque, they
radiate fear and loathing of Logos. It turns out that Peter Eisenman has been
telling us the truth all along. These buildings are deontological. They are
manifestations of hatred of Logos in stone, or, since the deconstructors hate
stone, anti-Logos in chain link, plywood, zinc, or shotcrete. The one thing
postmodern buildings have in common is their attack on Logos. This includes an
attack on the logos of form that even the first generation of moderns—Gropius,
Mies van der Rohe, and (to some extent) Le Corbusier—preserved. Bess can't
define the problem because—according to the American civic religion which is
the basis of his aesthetics both Jews and Catholics have the same relationship
to Logos.

This comes out in a number of passages, which become
increasingly incoherent the more Bess tries to articulate his neoconservative
aesthetic. At one point Bess tells us that "the history of Christianity (and
Judaism too, for that matter) demonstrates precisely an at least partial
reconciliation of Athens with Jerusalem. This reconciliation occurred
theologically in the writings of the patristic fathers and the medieval
schoolmen. And it occurred pictorially in the Ghent Altarpiece" (p. 97, my
emphasis).

ATHENS AND
JERUSALEM?

So, let me see if I understand this. Judaism brought about a
reconciliation of Athens and Jerusalem? I thought Judaism was Jerusalem. Once
again America's civic religion (Protestant, Catholic, Jew: they're all practically
speaking saying the same thing) intrudes and renders what Bess wants to say
incoherent. (As a way of exculpating Bess of responsibility for statements like
the above, I'm tempted to surmise that an editor at either ISI or First
Things added the parenthetical phrase "and Judaism too, for that
matter." Not even a professor at Notre Dame could write something this
nonsensical. The theology is simply too deficient.) The main issue is the
theology Bess brings to bear in his discussion of architecture. Does
architecture have its own Logos? If so, what is it and how would it be affected
by a "theological agenda … mandated by the Holocaust"? Jews like
Eisenman claim that the "smoke of Auschwitz" has revoked the Logos of
architecture, but is that claim justifiable according to the tenets of the
Catholic theology which Bess professes on his lips? Bess not only refuses to
answer the question, he makes matters worse when he wades into even deeper
theological water by claiming that "Christians need to continue their
reassessment of the relationship of Christianity to Judaism, to affirm
theologically the historical priority and continuing validity of the faith of
Israel."

First of all, Judaism as a religion is not prior to
Christianity. Judaism was created when Jochanan ben Zacchai escaped from
Jerusalem during the siege that led to the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.
The religion that Moses, David, and Solomon practiced died when the Temple was
destroyed and cannot be restored unless and until the Temple is rebuilt. What
replaced that religion wasChristianity,
which is also known as the New Israel. Has Professor Bess ever heard that the
Church is the New Israel? It's in Nostra Aetate. Does he know that Jews
are not the children of Moses? That's in the Gospel of St. John. Does he know
that those who call themselves Jews are really liars and should be known as the
"synagogue of Satan"? That's in the Apocalypse. This is the Catholic
faith which Professor Bess professes on his lips but which never seems to find
its way into his aesthetics. Taken together all of these assertions make up the
part of the Catholic faith that goes contrary to America's civic religion,
which becomes the procrustean bed upon which Professor Bess lays all
architectural assertions before lopping of what doesn't fit.

But at this point let's dispense with all of this abstruse
theological stuff and ask another question: who gave Professor Bess the right
to be the spokesman for the "faith of Israel"? Why is he more
qualified in this regard than either Stanley Tigerman or Peter Eisenman, both
of whom happen to be Jews? By what authority can Professor Bess say that
Stanley Tigerman is wrong when he claims that postmodern architecture is a
"Jewish phenomenon"? Shouldn't a Jew know better than a Catholic
whether something is Jewish or not? Stanley Tigerman also saw a fundamental
dichotomy between the architecture of Thomas Gordon Smith and the architecture
of Peter Eisenman. Was he wrong there too? Or was he saying something that
Bess's neoconservative philosophy simply prohibits him from saying, rendering
him incapable of understanding the real force fields in contemporary
architecture? Bess's "Mere Judeo-Christianity" prevents him from
understanding that the real issue is Logos. Jews and Catholics have a
fundamentally different attitude toward Logos, and this fundamental difference
will find expression in the buildings they design.

Peter Eisenman believes that architecture is based on ideas.
Anyone who has read Vitruvius knows that there is a connection between
"ideas" and architecture. The quality of the architecture, however,
depends on the quality of the ideas. Idea for Eisenman means Jacques Derrida,
the father of Deconstruction. Eisenman even collaborated with Derrida on an
architectural project, one which predictably never got built. When the French
Ministry of Culture and the Etablissement Public du Parc de La Villette
organized a competition for "an urban park of the 21st
century" to be created on a 125 acre site in the northeastern part of
Paris in 1982, the Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi invited Peter Eisenman to
collaborate with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida on the design of a
garden. The construction of the project was delayed and in 1990 was eventually
suspended altogether. According to Jean Louis Cohen, the encounter between
Eisenman and Jacques Derrida marked "the peak of the elective affinities
between architecture and deconstructionist discourse." The failed project
"was intended in some way to reconcile Paris and the suburbs, art and
science, natural and cultural, mineral and vegetable, France and its
immigrants, and so on, in an infinite series of utopic couplings" (Cities
of Artificial Excavation: the Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978-1988, ed. with
an introduction by Jean-Francois Bedard [Montreal: Rizzoli International
Publications 1994, p. 219).

Given the philosophical freight which it was supposed to bear,
one wonders whether any garden would have been up to the task, especially when
one considers that Freud was part of the project as well. In addition to
promoting "an infinite series of utopic couplings" (Was Buena Vista
Park in San Francisco the model they had in mind?), the garden was also
supposed to make manifest "the very processes that underlie the dream work
in Freud's analyses—which take us back to the initial and all too often
forgotten sources of the notion of deconstruction, that is, the psychoanalytic
cure, but also to the specifics of the joint effort undertaken by Eisenman and
Derrida for the La Villette project." That entailed in turn a piece of
sculpture, which Derrida specified would have to be "neither vertical, nor
horizontal, an extremely solid frame that would resemble at once a web, a
sieve, or a grill (grid) and a stringed musical instrument (piano, harp, lyre):
strings, stringed instrument, vocal chore, etc.'"

THE PRESENCE
OF ABSENCE

The garden, according to Jean-Louis Cohen, never got built
because it was "doomed by its very perfectionism." However, "the
drawings remain as a trace of the somewhat crossed purposes of architect and
philosopher." Cohen is disappointed but nonetheless tries to untangle that
trace of crossed purposes. What do Derrida and Eisenman have in common, other
than "the presence of absence"? According to Cohen, they share "a
common penchant for playing with words and meanings (most likely inherited from
Jewish traditions, albeit quite separate ones) was as much in evidence as a
predilection for conspiracy and the subversion of institutions" (Cities,
p. 226). So, it turns out that Stanley Tigerman was right after all.
Postmodern architecture is not only Jewish, it is also, as Cohen points out,
subversive. A homosexual like Philip Johnson may have had the subversion of
nature in mind when he designed his buildings, but Jews like Derrida, Eisenman
and Cohen aim higher. They aim at the subversion of Logos.

Derrida's writings (which are anything but clear) make this
subversion of Logos clear. "Rather than a frontal assault on
metaphysics," writes R. V. Young in At War with the Word, one of
the best books ISI has ever published, "Derrida proposes subversion from
within." That subversion began when Derrida characterized the philosophy
of the West as "Logocentric," a shrewd choice according to Young,
because "it creates discomfort in the secularized heirs of Enlightenment
rationalism by reminding them of the indisputable connection between human
reason, or logos, and the divine Logos," or Christ (p. 62). By rejecting
Christ, the Jews have rejected Logos in all of its forms, including the material
forms of architecture. Derrida is only following this rejection to its logical
conclusion in the most abstract realm of human endeavor, namely, metaphysics.
As a result of this rejection, language has been cut off from Logos. Derrida
explores the implications of that act in his writings:

The surrogate does not substitute itself for anything
which has somehow preexisted it. From then on it was probably necessary to
begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought
of in the form of a being-present, that the center had no natural locus, that
it was not a fixed locus, but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an
infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This moment was that in
which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence
of center or origin, everything became discourse—provided we can agree on this
word—that is to say, when everything became a system where the central
signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely
present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental
signified extends the domain and the interplay of the signification ad infinitum.

What is Derrida talking about here? It's metaphysics of a
peculiar sort. Jewish metaphysics, which is to say, metaphysics at war with the
Logos, who is Christ, which is to say metaphysics which is at war with being
and by necessary implication, at war with itself. When did "Everything
become discourse"? When the Temple was destroyed in 70 AD. Derrida's
passage is an allegory of the Jewish rejection of Logos. It describes the
destruction of the Temple, after which the Jewish people had no priesthood, no
sacrifice, and no Temple, in other words no real presences, no Shekinah, and
instead, after Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai got smuggled out of the temple and
founded the rabbinic school at Javne, Judaism became a Talmudic debating
society, in which quibbling became synonymous with discourse because "The
absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and interplay of
signification ad infinitum."

REBELLION
AGAINST METAPHYSICS

Derrida, to his credit, realizes that the rebellion against
metaphysics is totally futile when he writes: "There is no sense in doing
without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no
language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is alien to this history; we cannot
utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the
form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to
contest." Eisenman is equally aware of this futility. In fact he even
cites the above passage from Of Grammatology explicitly, patiently
explaining that in "Of Grammatology and elsewhere, Jacques Derrida
… argues that in order to dislocate philosophy from its logocentrism one must
employ that very metaphysic in the
dislocation" (p. 225 n 11).

Undeterred by his own caveat, Eisenman attempts the impossible
in his own way—which is to say, in the realm of architecture—when he attempts
to deconstruct the metaphysics of the traditional house. In spite of Eisenman's
efforts, House VI

still depended on certain themes of the early work …
which were later seen to be grounded in the very anthropocentric metaphysic
that they were intended to contravene. The search for essence and autonomy was
none other than a search for an ultimate center and truth, and therefore
contradictory to the effort to
dislocate architecture from its metaphysics of center. … Ironically, therefore,
the houses actually reinforce much of what they were attempting to
dislocate—namely, the search for center inherent in architecture's historic
anthropocentrism was, in fact, the search for essence indicated in the
traditional pursuit of origins and truth. ... This kind of production exposes the
very impossibility of its own project. ... In retrospect, autonomy … can be
seen as a concept which participates in the very metaphysic to be displaced.
... The search for an "architecture itself" can be identified as the
residue of an uncritical belief in the ultimate authority of knowledge, man's
knowledge, as a dominant vector. (p.221).

In other words, Jewish architecture, based on the metaphysics
of Jacques Derrida, is ultimately self-defeating because in attacking Logos it
attacks the very nature of what man is, and man's nature is the only reason any
house gets built. This, of course, does not mean that Jews like Eisenman will
not persist in their self-defeating project, nor does it mean, mirabile
dictu, that he won't be able to find clients to fund his designs, even if
most of them remain unbuilt. Eisenman remains haunted by, in his words, "a
dream of illusory presence" which he cannot exorcise no matter how many
ugly buildings he designs. He is haunted by Logos, because he is a creature of
Logos; he is haunted by what Catholics would call "the real
presence," otherwise known as Christ.

Eisenman's architectural project becomes, as a result, the
abolition of man, and that project commences with the abolition of the house,
something that becomes apparent in his design of House X, also known as the
Aronoff residence, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (also unbuilt, but designed,
1975-77). In House X, Eisenman pioneered the idea of design by
"decomposition," "a process by which he tried to circumvent both
classical composition, based on rules reflecting an underlying order in nature,
and what he termed 'modernist transformation,' a design process generated from
ideal types." As a result of discovering what he considered a new way of
designing homes, Eisenman abandoned the cube and replaced it with four
fragmentary els, three sided portions of a hollow cube: "House X," we
are told, "is the result of the manipulation of four of these els
separated by a cruciform void at the heart of the house, symbolic to
Eisenman of the elimination of the human subject" (my emphasis).

Once again, in his
attempt to discover absence at the center of everything, Eisenman ends up
creating a "cruciform void" as
the symbol of the real presence which he, as the rejector of Logos, both wants to escape and yet
simultaneously also wants to find. In deconstructing the house, Eisenman
discovered the cross. Logos is inescapable. As Derrida discovered, it is also
no respecter of man's intentions. No man can contradict the principle of
noncontradiction, the principle is substantiated in the very act of
contradicting it. Logos is funny that way.

As a result, Jewish architecture becomes unremittingly
autobiographical. This is why people like Eisenman and Libeskind constantly
make reference to Sigmund Freud, whose writings comprise the longest
autobiography in history. Eisenman's designs become not so much commentary or
architecture on the structure of a house, but rather a disguised protocol of
his fears and longings. "These houses," Eisenman writes, referring to
his own designs,

attempt to
have little to do with the traditional and existing metaphysic of the house,
the physical and psychological gratification associated with the traditional
form of house, with what Gaston Bachelard calls "the essence of the notion
of home," its symbolic enclosure. They intend, on the contrary, to
dislocate the house from that comforting metaphysic and symbolism of shelter in
order to initiate a search for those possibilities of dwelling that may have
been repressed by that metaphysic. The
house may once have been a true locus and symbol of nurturing shelter, but in a
world of irresolvable anxiety, the meaning and firm of shelter must be
different. To put it another way, while a house today still must shelter,
it does not need to symbolize or romanticize its sheltering function; to the
contrary, such symbols are today meaningless and merely nostalgic. (p. 214, my
emphasis).

What Eisenman means to say here is that rejection of
Logos leads to anxiety. In the absence of metanoia, the only
satisfaction that someone who is the thrall to anxiety can get is inflicting
that anxiety on others, something which architects can do by restructuring the
physical environment in a disorienting way and getting rich clients to pay for
that restructuring. "In the designs of House III and House VI," we
are told,

several columns "intrude on" and
"disrupt" the living and dining areas as a result of this process.
Obviously, the "disruptions" in House VI could not have come into a
dining area by a design process in the service of the institution of dining.
Nonetheless, these dislocations, these "inappropriate forms," have,
according to the occupants of the house, changed the dining experience in a
real and, more importantly, unpredictable fashion (p. 210).

Your high-priced Jewish architect, in other words, has a
right to make you feel uncomfortable. He has a right to disrupt your meals, and
give you indigestion, and make you pay big bucks for the privilege. And why
does he feel compelled to do this? Certainly, he must lose clients along the
way. He does this because he is driven by fear and loathing of Logos, in this
instance the Logos of the House, as expressed in things like Vitruvius's
description of the Logos of the Dining Room. He is driven by a compulsion for
decentering which is all the more frustrating because it posits the very existence of the center which he wants to
obliterate. Dislocating architecture, as a result,

must dislocate its own meaning. Dislocation involves
shifting but not obliterating the boundaries of meaning and since meaning
necessarily implies absence through the absent referent, the dislocating
architecture must be at once presence and absence. ... The idea of an
architectural text retains its potential for decentering however much tradition
tries to repress it. Only when the architectural text dislocates this
repression is it able to stop reenacting an endless nostalgia for the aura and
authority of traditional presence and begin to explore its own displacing
possibilities (p. 223, my emphasis).

Did Eisenman actually say "endless nostalgia for …
traditional presence"? It's impossible to read such a passage and not see
in it a perverse longing for Christ and Logos, known to Catholics as the
"real presence." Nothing thwarts this longing more than Professor
Bess's ecumenism and his denial that postmodern architecture is fundamentally
Jewish. Can any decent Christian read passages like above, full of longing for
the real presence, and then hand the pleading Jew the stone of ecumenism or the
snake of neoconservative "Judeo-Christianity"? At a certain point, an
attitude like this becomes matter for the confessional.

Eisenman is a member of the first generation of Jews
that got to build monumental buildings. Eisenman hates Logos. Even modern
architecture has too much Logos for Eisenman. Fleeing the Glass Box of
Modernism, Architecture headed off in two separate directions, symbolized by
Thomas Gordon Smith and Frank Gehry. As an alternative to the eclecticism that
had become the norm of postmodernism, Smith proposed Vitruvius, the Roman who
codified the practice of architecture at the time when Caesar Augustus was
turning Rome from brick into marble. Smith's importation of Vitruvius after his
arrival at Notre Dame in 1989 set off a struggle that has continued to this
day, even after Smith is no longer chairman.

Smith was raised Catholic but became an Episcopalian,
and then as a result of studying architecture in Italy and the ministrations of
Father George Rutler, Smith became a Catholic again. Just as rejection of Logos
had architectural consequences for Peter Eisenman, acceptance of the canon of
classical architecture had religious consequences for Thomas Gordon Smith.
After studying architecture in Italy, Smith returned to Catholicism. According
to his biographer, Smith's "scholarly study of the text of Vitruvius …
helped him resolve the direction he wished to pursue in his architecture in the
future: a literate application of classicism, drawing freely on the entire 25
centuries of tradition, that is at once both rich and rigorous, balancing rule
and invention, and which above all demonstrates its ample suitability for
contemporary life" (p. 81).

It turns out that Stanley Tigerman was right when he saw
Eisenman and Smith as representing opposite poles in the field of architecture:

For Smith, the relationship between his Catholic faith
and his interest in classicism had been central to his development as an
architect. He attributes his initial openness to the tradition to his earlier
religious instruction: 'One of the reasons I felt that I was receptive as a
teenager to Catholicism … was the issue of knowing intuitively through Catholic
upbringing that there is a great deal to be learned from the past. However,
while he had been brought up as a Catholic, he had drifted from the church to
join a high branch of Episcopalianism; his return to the fold of Roman
Catholicism took place while he was studying Baroque architecture in Rome, and
therefore occurred at the same time as he seriously embraced classicism in his
architecture. In the wake of his own "reconversion," his wife also
converted to Catholicism. It was this link between his religious and
architectural beliefs, in fact, which made the shift from the ironic
postmodernism of his early California work to a literate classicism possible
during his year at the American Academy in Rome (p.117).

Vitruvius, in some sense, brought Smith back to
Catholicism, and so it was fitting that Smith should bring Vitruvius with him
when he became chairman of the architecture department at Notre Dame because
Vitruvius is the man who articulated the Logos of architecture, something both
human and divine, because architecture is based on the proportions of the human
body, and the human body was designed by God. Symmetria, Vitruvius tells us,
"is the proper agreement among the members of the actual work, and the
relation between the different parts and the whole composition, in accordance
with a certain part selected as standard. In the human body there is a balanced
quality of eurythmia between forearm, foot, palm, finger, and other small
parts; and so it is with the construction of buildings" (Thomas Gordon
Smith, Vitruvius on Architecture [New York: The Monacelli Press, 2003],
p. 67. All translations are from Smith's edition of Vitruvius.)

"The design of a temple," Vitruvius continues,

depends on symmetria, the concept of which architects
must diligently maintain. Symmetria is born from proportion, in Greek analogia.
Proportion is the correspondence of measure between the members of a work and
the whole work to a certain part selected as standard. From this the principle
of symmetria is brought about. Without symmetria and proportion there can be
neither rhyme nor reason in the composition of a temple—that is, unless there
is a precise correspondence of measure like that found in the parts of a
well-formed human being. … The human body is so designed by nature that the
face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lower roots of the hair
is a tenth part of the whole height. The open hand from the wrist to the tip of
the middle finger is exactly the same. ... A rule such as, "The length of
the foot is one-sixth of the height of the body," applies to temples
because it was derived from the human body ... On finding that, in a man, the
foot was one-sixth of the height they transferred this to the column. They
raised the shaft, including the capital to a height six times the thickness at
its base so that the Doric column began to provide buildings with the proportions,
strength and beauty belonging to the body of a man (p. 115).

Vitruvius's analysis of the proportions of the human
body led to Leonardo Da Vinci's famous drawing, showing how the circle and
square are derived from those proportions:

If a person lies flat with hands and feet extended, the
fingers and toes of each hand and foot would touch the circumference of a
circle described by placing a pair of compasses centered on the navel. Just as
the human body yields the circular outline, a square figure can also be found
from it. If we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of
the head, and apply that measure to the outstretched arms, the breadth will be
the same as the height—as in the case of plane surfaces that are perfectly
square.

"Therefore," Vitruvius concludes, "since
nature has designed the human body so that there is a proportional
correspondence between the members and the whole, it seems that the ancients
were right when they established the idea that measures of individual members
in the construction of buildings should also have an exact relation to the
whole composition."

We find a perverse tribute to Vitruvius in Peter
Eisenman's attempt to abolish the idea that buildings should be built to human
scale: "Scale specificity, the reliance on man's dimensions to govern the
object, was but a convention that modernism had retained from the classical
tradition. … Therefore, if the goal was an autonomous object, scale specificity
was an important issue, and the question had to be asked: would it be possible
to create a condition of scale nonspecificity?" (p. 218).

LOOKING FOR
MARTYRS

The answer to that question is "yes," but that
raises a further question: why would anyone want to live in such a building? To
prove that Peter Eisenman is right in his rejection of Logos? The answer to
that question is "yes" as well. Eisenman is looking for martyrs,
wealthy martyrs, martyrs willing to live in uninhabitable buildings to prove
they share Eisenman's undying hatred of Logos. Recursivity is another weapon in
Eisenman's arsenal as he wages war on the Word: "Recursivity, the
recurrence of mathematical shapes through subdivision, is meant to destroy the
primacy of the original; self-similarity, the proliferation of non-identical
shapes, intends to eliminate human scale as a point of reference; and
discontinuity, the fragmentation of geometrical figures, tries to weaken the
power implicit in geometric form" (p. 15). Eisenman's desire to eliminate
the authorial presence of the architect, implicit in the de-anthropomorphizing
process involved in the construction of his houses and excavations is fulfilled
through the computer's ability to create forms without human intervention.
"The computer frees me," he writes, "and produces forms that I
do not understand, and do not even think I like. They contain some magic for
me, some energy, something mystical."

The passage reminds us of early cabalists like John Dee
and their recourse to another form of Jewish magic, one which meant trafficking
in spirits. But the goal remains the same, what Eisenman aspires to when he
argues for "A displacement of man away from the center of the world"
and the abrogation of man's role: "He is no longer viewed as an
originating agent." Given "this condition of displacement, … authorship
can no longer either account for linear development which has a 'beginning' and
an 'end'—hence the rise of the atemporal—or account of the invention of
form—hence the abstract as a mediation between pre-existent sign systems."
Eisenman sees this explicitly as an alternative to "Vitruvius's work"
which,

was an attempt to give a complete account of what he saw
around him, as it existed with some properly authorized conception of what was
structurally sound, useful, and beautiful. … in the form of categorical
treatises that presupposed a universal
and fixed body of knowledge, an immutable category of being grounded in the
final and unchangeable truths, such as that of mathematics and musical
proportions. It was assumed that ends were known and that the only possible
disagreement could exist as regards to means. The direction of these works was
toward the nature of the entity which was assumed to be conceptually clear.
Equally it was assumed that the primary aspect of "architecture's
interiority" evolved from a set of classical principles—immutable rules or
immutable essences that could be broken down into immutable elemental parts.
These categories, despite all conditions of change and invention, once having
been invented were seen as unchanging.

In this regard, Eisenman agrees with Smith, who explains that

In the Greek conception of the relationship of anatomy to
geometry, the modules of the human body are the natural source from which the
abstract circle and square are derived. This is fundamentally different from
both the Egyptian and the modernist conception of how the body relates to
geometry. In ancient Egypt, representations of the body conform to a
predetermined grid. Similarly, Le Corbusier's Modulor Man distorts the human
form to fill a geometric framework.

AUT
VITRUVIUS AUT NIHIL

The failure of modernism (and postmodernism) has led to a
crisis in architecture. Now it is no longer a question of eclecticism and
style. Now it is aut Vitruvius aut nihil. In a very literal sense, young
architects are faced with the choice of either the tradition, as articulated by
Vitruvius, or the nihilism of the deconstructors. Smith makes the choice clear
in his book on Vitruvius, when he writes that "the ideas of decor can only
be engaged within the formal and conceptual language inherited from the Greeks.
Although subsequent architects developed that language in diverse ways, all of
them, whether Vitruvius himself, Palladio, or Perrault, believed that the
classical idiom was a vital language for its time. If a contemporary architect
wishes to engage the tradition Vitruvius represents, sooner or later he or she
will come to [that] fork in the road." Becoming fluent in Vitruvius no
more impedes the architect's freedom than learning spelling and reading impedes
the fluency of a second grade speaker of English. And that is so because
"A serious engagement with the classical tradition depends on accepting a
common language and set of ideas. Thousands of architects have contributed to
this development through buildings, but only one, Vitruvius, catalogued and
organized the ideas and methods of antiquity in order to revive them for his
time and convey them to the future."

Frank O. Gehry is perhaps the least theoretical of the
postmodern Jewish architects, but his congeniality, as a result, has allowed
him to be subversive on a wider scale than Eisenman. Although Gehry is almost
20 years older than Smith, their careers as postmodernists began around the
same time, which is to say in the late '70s. If Smith's debut was the strata at
the Venice Biennale, Gehry's career as a "starchitect" began when he
renovated his home in Santa Monica in 1978. Like Peter Eisenman, Gehry's career
began with a subversion of the house. In fact itbegan with the subversion of his own home, which he
shared at the time with his second wife.
The original house was an unremarkable suburban cottage in Santa
Monica, California, but it became a "cubist collage" when it was
surrounded by familial but decontexualizing materials like chain link fence,
plywood, and corrugated sheet metal—which shocked the architecture world by its
deliberate banality. People felt that the house was being tortured in public,
and they liked the idea:

What really offends is not simply the artistic use of
unconventional materials, but the ongoing presence of the original house, trapped as if it were inside a foreign body. Far from being removed, or simply assaulted, the house is
being tortured in public. That it remains on display is what aroused the anger
of those who lived in similar houses. They felt themselves under attack. Their
reaction was intense. There were protests and hecklers, from the neighborhood,
phone calls and letters to the mayor and to the newspaper; a lawyer down the
street tired to sue Gehry: an architect tried to get the building department to
put him in jail. … An architecture critic would walk his dog on the lawn; and
on two occasions someone fired a bullet through a window. Neighborhood war (my
emphasis).

What followed after the renovation was complete was an orgy
of interpretation, most of it viewing what Gehry had done to his house as some
form of sexual assault. Stanley Tigerman described the house as
"undressing, as seeing through a building." Barbara Goldstein spoke
of the "half-built" house as if it were a half-dressed woman Gehry
was in love with. Gehry's neighbors were offended by the house: "It is a
dirty thing to do in someone else's front yard." The architecture
profession saw this as a sign of the house's authenticity. Reviews were dominated
by the sexualized metaphor of stripping, littered with phrases such as
"undressing," "naked," "exposure,"
"peeking," "hard shell—soft core," "SM house,"
"view of raw building," "perversity,' "disturbing kind of
satisfaction," and so on. But the sexual act they describe is carefully
choreographed. The original structure was "tenderly undressed," in
Gehry's own words. Gehry, in fact, used the word "striptease" to
describe the house:

More than anything else, Gehry wants us to see his house
as a sex act, a striptease. His most insistent descriptions of what he was
trying to do with this house involve voyeurism. He even declares, "I am a
voyeur. I like to see what other people do." When asked, "Is anything
falling apart?" Gehry answers: "Oh you think I do falling aparts. It
is an act. Do you know where I learned that? You know those vaudeville acts
where the guy pulls the string and his clothes fall off? I used to go to a lot
of dirty vaudeville shows when I was a kid in Canada."

Gehry clearly saw what he did to the house as a form of
aggression. It was a carefully calculated attempt to subvert the conventions of
the home that had psychic connections to the failure of his first marriage.
Gehry's second wife Berta, he recounts, "found this beautiful … anonymous
little house, and I decided to remodel it, and … since it was my own building …
explore ideas I'd had about the materials I used here: corrugated metal and
plywood, chain link … And I was interested in making the old house appear
intact inside the new house, so that from the outside, you would be aware
always that the old house was still there."

So, as St. Augustine said, even those who reject you, do
but copy you in a perverse way. Even if
you move into the new house with your new wife, your old wife is still there. So
Gehry's renovation was also like a sex change operation, something that was
becoming, if not popular, then increasingly discussed in the late '70s. Even if
you mutilate you're body, it's still essentially what it was before you
mutilated it, which is to say, essentially male or female. Gehry's mutilated
house was a symbolic reference to the relationship between divorce and the
American suburban dream. And California, where divorce was hardly an uncommon
phenomenon in the late '70s, decided that Gehry had nailed the Zeitgeist, every
bit as much as Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger had nailed it when they produced Alien
around the same time.

I am not the only one who has recognized a connection
between Frank Gehry's renovation of his home in Santa Monica, Alien, and
the Zeitgeist of the late '70s as the aftermath of the sexual revolution of the
'60s. In 1988, Johnson, then 82 years old, curated one more exhibition for the
Museum of Modern Art. Fifty-six years after he organized the groundbreaking
exhibition on modern art in 1932, Johnson was at it again, organizing an
exhibition on "Deconstructivist Architecture" which featured eight
exhibitors: Frank Gehry, Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadidd, Wolfgang
Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky, Rem Koolhaas, and Daniel Libeskind. In the catalogue
Philip talked about the use of warped and disengaged planes, deviations from
parallels and rights angles, and, in Philip's own words in the catalogue
preface, "the diagonal overlapping of rectangular or trapezoidal bars."
But Mark Wigley, who was evidently a fan of Alien, got to the heart of
the deconstructive enterprise when he noted that: "The internal
disturbance has actually been incorporated into the internal structure, the
construction. It is as if some kind of parasite has infected the form and
distorted it from the inside."

"The rooftop remodeling project," he
continued, "is clearly a form that has been distorted by some alien
organism, a writhing disruptive animal breaking through the corner. Some
twisted counter-relief infects the orthogonal box. It is a skeletal monster
which breaks up the elements of the form as it struggles out."

Some of his readers faulted Wigley for not citing the
influence of Jacques Derrida more specifically, but Wigley was way ahead of his
critics in this regard. Wigley was describing what happened after the Derrida
virus got released into a culture, allowing Jews like Gehry, Eisenman, and
Libeskind to take over the Logos of architecture and pervert it from within.
What happened to that culture is that its architecture exploded from within
like John Hurt's stomach in the famous scene from Alien. Traditional
culture ruptured like the cells of a liver infected with malaria parasites. All
the architecture did was embody that ruptured culture.

Given Gehry's perversion of the house, it should come as
no surprise that a pervert like Philip Johnson felt right at home there. Gehry
and Johnson were used to dining together at the power dinners Peter Eisenman
organized at the Century Club, and so it is not surprising that Gehry invited
Johnson to dine at his newly renovated house. "Sitting in the dining room
and looking toward the window of the old house is very surreal," Johnson
explains. "The feeling is of being outside the old house on the driveway—which
is heightened by the asphalt paved floor. So there you are sitting on a
driveway, having dinner, looking back at the old house … when somebody walks
through the old house and you see them through the window from the dining room
area or from the bay window in the kitchen, it's as if you're in a theater, and
there are people on stage" (p. 313).

Johnson seems to
be saying that rough trade and divorce have more in common with each
other than either has with holy matrimony and its architectural expression, the
house. A life based on either divorce or picking up rough trade in men's rooms
requires a radical modification of the house. Those who don't think so are
either stupid or hypocrites, hence all of the accolades that poured down on
both Johnson and Gehry during the course of their architectural careers. Like
Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger, who collaborated on the production of Alien, Johnson
and Gehry were being honest about sex and honest about the fact that it wasn't
pretty once it was wrenched out of its traditional, which is to say, moral
context. So every time you had sex with your latest wife, you couldn't help
noticing the fact that the ghost of your previous wife was still there inside
the newly renovated building like the old suburban house you set out so consciously
to mutilate. Or as Peter Eisenman might have said, the very act of erasure
substantiates the thing you want to erase.

Philip Johnson said of Gehry's house that he liked the
"sense of confusion in the dining room. I asked myself when I was there:
'Am I in the dining room or in the driveway?'" Johnson was referring here
to what Frank Lloyd Wright reportedly asked him on his visit to Johnson's Glass
House when, according to Johnson, he "strode in and said, 'Philip, should
I take my hat off or leave it on? Am I indoors or am I out?'" It was a big
compliment then. It had the effect of positioning Gehry's house in a grand
lineage of masters stretching back through Mies to Wright. In fact, Johnson
even said on another occasion, "it is my house 30 years later."

Gehry's dining room isn't as bad as Peter Eisenman's
dining room, but that's not saying much. The house is, in either case, a
Rorschach test for architects. It is an indication of what the architect thinks
is important in this life. Philip Johnson's Glass House (and the Guest House
which is its counterpart) is indicative of the double life (or "psychic
duality" as Schulze puts it when he claims that Johnson "gravitated
toward the puritan and sybaritic sensibilities" [p. 56] of the practicing
homosexual. The Glass House was "a single room, 56 by 32 feet almost
totally transparent," which gave Johnson, who got the idea from Mies van
der Rohe's Farnsworth House, "the sensation of existing in an environment
separated from nature by only a vitreous membrane[, which] was, for him,
uplifting enough by itself to compensate for the lack of customary household
devices and amenities." The "dull necessities," or the banal
details that make life possible, were relegated to the Guest House, which was "almost
totally opaque, in form exactly the opposite of the latter's delicate
transparency." Johnson was both a puritan and a sybarite. Since he was
unable to reconcile these two parts of his personality, he built himself two
houses to accommodate them separately.

The same homosexual attitude toward the home comes out
in Johnson's comments on the Wiley House, which he saw as "One more
attempt to reconcile the (perhaps) irreconcilable: modern architectural purity
and the requirements of living American families. Why can't people learn to
live in the windowless spheres of Ledoux or the pure glass prisms of Mies van
der Rohe? No they need a place for Junior to practice the piano while Mother
plays bridge with her neighbors. … The client can design downstairs as he
pleases … The architect can design the pavilion above."

When he wanted to have sex with one of the four
different "Mrs. Johnsons" he lived with over the course of his long
life, Johnson would adjourn to the bedroom in the Guest House, which "He
fitted sliding panels along the long walls of the markedly narrow space so that
the door and the two circular windows could be covered and the room made dark
as a tomb. That is how he preferred it when he slept there himself or with
someone, on a low double bed stationed on the longitudinal axis at one end of
the room."

Johnson preferred transparent glass boxes or windowless
monads because in neither instance was he reminded of what the house symbolized
and how his life contravened those norms. Instead, the built environment
bespoke his Promethean triumph over all norms and the transvaluation of all
values, an idea dear to the heart of every Nietzschean. Schulze claims that the
bedroom of the Guest House exuded an "air of mystery, sensuality, and
exoticism" largely because of "the vaulted structure Philip mounted
in inside the room." The bedroom in the Guest House became, as a result,
"a room within a room, its roof suspended below the ceiling, its
supporting columns inside the walls. Lights inserted between roof and ceiling
produced an indirect, almost sacral glow. If the Guest House as a whole was the
opaque counterpart to the transparent Glass House, the bedroom in its
introversion only emphasized that quality of oppositeness."

The duality behind the Glass House vs. the windowless
Guest House bespoke practical issues as well, namely, what to do with the men
Johnson picked while cruising men's rooms the night before. According to the
composer Virgil Thomson, who lived with Johnson for a while, this habit of
picking up "rough trade," Thomson's word, caused problems with
Johnson's sister, with whom he shared a house in New York. Theodate, Thomson
said, "claimed she could never be sure whom she would find sharing
breakfast with Philip on any given morning."

Philip Johnson's Glass House was a homosexual fantasy.
If Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman's desire to subvert the Logos of the house
was born out of their respective divorces, the opposite is true of Smith and
Stroik's rediscovery of the Logos of the classical tradition as manifested in the
houses they have built for themselves and their clients. Both Smith and Stroik
each have six children Stroik's Villa Indiana is a combination of Palladio and
clapboard. It is classical and vernacular in the same way that the Greek
Revival homes were classical and vernacular. Another word for this combination
is America, the America that Tocqueville described after his visit in the
1830s. Smith and Stroik are saying that that America is still possible, even
among the kudzu of suburban sprawl where both men have built their homes.

JEWISH
CHURCHES

The Chapel is another Rorschach test for architects
because it gives an indication of what they think is important about the next
life. Philip Johnson actually recommended Thomas Gordon Smith to Robert
Schuller as the best man to add an addition on the Crystal Cathedral. It was an
example of Johnson's twisted (or should we say perverted?) sense of humor:

Following his "reconversion," Smith's newly
found commitment to Catholicism ruled him out from what might have been a
fascinating religious commission. Philip Johnson, the eminence grise of
American architecture, designed his extraordinary Crystal Cathedral for Dr.
Robert Schuller, the evangelical pastor for the Garden Grove Community church,
California. Three years after the building's completion in 1980, the
congregation had grown to such an extent that Schuller approached the 77-year-old
Johnson to ask if he could recommend an architect to do addition work for the
church. Johnson responded in fulsome terms: I have been thinking of a suitable
architect ever since your letter arrived. The only one with the sensitivity and
I believe the dedication for your kind of work would be a young San Francisco
architect named Thomas Gordon Smith.

A more enduring example of that perversity was Johnson's
Chapel of St. Basil in Houston. Johnson's opinion of Catholics was never very
high. In the Cleveland neighborhood where he grew up, "Roman Catholics
were despised more than Jews, who were in turn thought to be at least more intelligent,
while blacks were looked upon favorably, as an oppressed people waiting to be
freed (albeit by a race, the whites, whose ability to carry out the liberation
was an unstated measure of their superiority)." The prejudices Johnson
picked up in Cleveland didn't prevent him, however, from accepting a commission
from the Basilian Fathers of Houston, Texas in 1957 to build a campus for the
newly founded College of St. Thomas. What the Basilian Fathers got for their
money was a knock-off version of Mies van der Rohe's Chicago Illinois Institute
of Technology campus, complete with faux I-beams. Johnson's exaggeration of
Mies's muscular anti-ornament came across as spindly rather than industrial,
but the good fathers seemed happy enough with the result.

We can draw this conclusion because 40 years later the
Basilians invited Johnson back to complete what he had started by building a
chapel at the north end of his version of Jefferson's mall at the University of
Virginia. Of course, by the mid-'90s, Johnson was no longer a modernist, and so
could not be expected to complete the mall he had started in the style in which
he had started it. So instead of imitation Mies van der Rohe, the Basilian
fathers got imitation Frank Gehry. In this instance that meant a white cube
surmounted by a 3,000 square foot dome covered in 23.5 karat gold leaf. The
building has two unique features. First there is the entrance, which
houstonarchitecture.com describes as "a simple tear in the skin of the
building, slightly pulled back to allow one to tuck themselves inside."
The entrance has subsequently come to be known as "the tent flap,"
inspiring much theologizing about the people of the Old Testament and their
abode while wandering in the desert. The entrance of St. Basil's Chapel left the
critics at houstonarchitecture.com less impressed than the theologians. After a
huffy and condescending, "Architectural beauty, indeed!" they go on
to note that the architectural beauty of the chapel is not "appreciated by
the neighborhood thugs who like to use it as a launching ramp for their
bicycles, leaving tire marks up the side of God's house." The second
unique feature is a 57-foot tall black granite wall which bisects the cube and
leaves as well—again in the words of houstonarchirecture.com—"a mighty
gash" through the gold dome.

The less than enthusiastic response from the Houston
architecture community is probably the reason for the extensive theologizing
that accompanies the description of the chapel on the official website of the
University of St. Thomas. The "mighty gash" of
houstonarchitecture.com becomes now a "cut" opening the golden dome
"to the light and the sky and the infinity of heaven. Thus the dome is not
a vault but an opening." Or perhaps what Johnson had in mind here was a
subversion of the idea of a dome, which symbolizes unity. The dome has been
split into two unequal parts, which means a destruction of its ability to
symbolize both unity and transcendence, two attributes of God.

Another indication that the design of the chapel was
causing problems was an article by Carson Daly, which appeared in the neocon
Catholic journal Crisis shortly after the chapel opened its doors (or
tent flap) to the public. The chapel was so obviously an attack on religious
sensibility that public relations flacks needed to be called in to explain its
true meaning. Dr. Daly's prose is unremittingly breathless, but after a while
the reader finds her enthusiasm cloying and begins to notice beneath it the
unmistakable and disagreeable odor of journalistic prostitution. St. Basil's
Chapel, Dr. Daly tells us, "is not only architecturally arresting, but
also strikingly beautiful" because it "embodies the otherness of
sacred space" by "drawing on the rich resources of traditional church
architecture," like for example, "The black granite wall—57 feet
high, 115 feet long, and almost four feet thick—that diagonally bisects the
main building [and] creates both a strikingly original exterior and
interior." All of us, I am sure, are familiar with Borromini's use of the 57-foot-high
black granite wall. I mean, isn't it a standard device in the repertoire of
"traditional church architecture"?

THEOLOGICAL
SIGNIFICANCE

As we have come to expect, Daly sees theological
significance in "the church's ingenious entrance," because it
suggests to her mind "the relationship between the Old and New
Testaments—with the Yahvistic covenant providing the figurative opening through
with Christians enter into the fullness of their own faith." Does entering
this figurative opening require figurative circumcision? Or has that covenant
been superceded and replaced by the new covenant? Before we can formulate an
answer to that question, Dr. Daly has moved on to "the intriguing use of
indirect natural light" which comes flooding through the "mighty
gash" in the dome as well as through circular holes in the ceiling, which
resemble open manholes, implying of course that "the impressive sculpture
of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom," as well as the entire congregation, are
worshipping in a large sewer.

Daly concludes her apologia for the chapel by saying
that "The Basilians recognized—as their detractors did not—that they
belong to a tradition of taking splendid risks" admitting what was obvious
from the first line of the article, namely, that the chapel had "detractors,"
and that the detractors were causing problems for the university's
administration, which called in Crisis and Daly to brush away their
complaints.

The website description of the chapel indicates that
those detractors haven't gone away in subsequent years. Since there is nothing
that the Basilians can do about the building other than tear it down, the
obviously subversive meaning of the building needs to be defused by the application of large amounts of theology.
This gets done by claiming that Philip Johnson's mockery of the tradition of
sacred architecture was done in the spirit of Vatican II:

Those responsible for the building of the Chapel wanted
to provide a sacred space, which, as Vatican
II desired, would "express in some sense the infinite beauty of God, turn
human minds devoutly toward God" (Dogmatic Constitution on the Sacred
Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 122). This space must also provide a
fitting stage for celebrating the liturgy of the Church. This appropriateness
is measured not merely in terms of convenience for performing the various
ceremonies; the interior of a church must itself help the faithful to focus on
the heart of the Christian mystery celebrated and thus fulfill its other
function, that of being not only a place of prayer, but also, in the words of
Pope Paul VI, "a sign of prayer." It is such when senses and, most
notably, the sense of seeing, lead the heart to what is central in Christian
faith and devotion.

But the more the university's apologists try to salvage
the idea that St. Basil's
chapel turns the human mind "devoutly toward God," the more they have
to confront a number of inconvenient architectural facts, like the fact that
everything in the chapel has been deliberately decentered by the intrusion of
that black granite wall bisecting the dome:

Because of the diagonal position of the granite wall, the
axis of the building shifts almost imperceptibly as one enters it. Facing the
sweeping Renaissance-like facade of the Chapel from the piazza, the visitor
expects the longitudinal axis of the whole Mall to continue also within the
Chapel, as it does in older
churches: through the door in the middle of the facade one's eye encounters the
main altar, with the tabernacle placed on it, in the center of the apse. With our
Chapel, however, this is not the case. To start with, the opening is slightly
off-center; you are led away from the expected central axis. This realization
is confirmed and reinforced as you enter the sanctuary area through a door
which is at an angle to the walls of the cube. Consequently, what you seem to
be walking "toward" most directly is not the center of the back wall
but the place on the wall where the tabernacle is located slightly to the left
of the curved apse. This creates a dynamic tension between the logic of the
Chapel cube and the actual logic of the Chapel interior and makes it possible for things to occupy the
emotional and aesthetic center of the space without actually being at the
physical center. For instance, the crucifix in the apse is not at the geometric
center of the wall or the apse. This drawing of attention to the tabernacle,
with its eternal light, is important for Catholics because it reminds them of
the real personal presence of Jesus Christ in the consecrated Bread reserved in
the Tabernacle.

Commenting on Richard Meier's Church of the Millennium
in Rome, Breda Ennis had a different take on the technique of decentering:
"When the altar and the crucifix are not on the same axis, a visual
'tension' is created which is in no way conducive to prayer or
contemplation." By the time Philip Johnson got around to building St.
Basil's Chapel, he had read enough Eisenman (and, therefore, Derrida) to
understand the meaning of the "center" and how to subvert it and its
meaning architecturally. The defensive tone of the website gives some
indication that the average man in the pew has understood Johnson's intention
better than the architectural theologians the university called on to describe
it on their website.

Even Johnson's acolytes in the architecture profession
recognized the violent animus against the sacred implicit in Johnson's design.
In his book on Johnson's last work (Philip Johnson: Recent Work [London:
Architectural Monograph #44, 1996]), Jeffrey Kipnis explains how the chapel's
"cube is 'sliced' at an oblique angle by a punctured black granite stone
wall which ends by 'crashing' through the galleries on both sides."
Continuing in the same vein, Kipnis goes on to explain how "the entrance
is a warped wall that projects outward like a tent flap." The main thing
one notices in the chapel's "modest interior" is the special effects
lighting which arrives from "hidden sources," like the
"chimney-like light over the statue of the virgin."

What the man in the pew recognized without having to be
told is that the wall bisecting the dome is essentially a line through a
circle, a symbol which when superimposed over a cigarette, means "no
smoking." When superimposed on a chapel, that symbol means "no
worship." As some indication of what the wall meant for Johnson, he used
the wall motif again in another church in Texas, in The John Thomas Memorial
AIDS Bell Wall, at the Cathedral of Hope, in Dallas, Texas, a congregation
"that describes itself as the world's largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgendered church." The best verdict on St. Basil's Chapel came from
columnist Anthony Lewis, who summed up Johnson's career when he wrote, "I
think Mr. Johnson is expressing his disdain for people, and for the society, by
showing that he can produce absolutely any design, however insultingly
inappropriate, and get it built."

Johnson's hatred for religion came out in other projects
as well. Johnson subverted the tradition of sacred architecture architecturally
whenever he could, but when that was not necessary, as in the case of Rev.
Schuller's Crystal Cathedral, which bore no resemblance to a church, he did it
in other ways. The Crystal Cathedral was "A vitreous polyhedron with no
immediately perceptible logic to its shape and a site that hardly distinguishes
it from the motley of the town around it." It was full of

Miscalculations and inconveniences … including poor site
lines from several places, capricious acoustics throughout, and, sorriest of
all, the unavoidable reduction of seats to fewer than three thousand," but
nonetheless it was exactly what Rev. Schuller wanted. Schuller was, in fact, so
pleased with the building that he invited Johnson to take part in the
architectural version of the altar call. Standing there before the 2000 or so
members of the Crystal Cathedral congregation, Johnson was asked by Schuller
"what went through your mind when you designed this beautiful
building?" "I got help," Johnson answered, and then, his voice
breaking with emotion, the "profoundly atheistic" Johnson, the man
who was "disdainful of Christian ceremony" added, "I think you
all know where that help came from."

"Later," his biographer tells us, "when
asked by an interviewer who had witnessed this performance, 'Philip, how could
you?' Philip briefly buried his hands in mock shame, then grinned and replied,
'Wasn't that awful!'"

At moments like this, it's instructive to remember Sir Anthony
Blunt's description of homosexuality in the '30s in London as gay freemasonry.
The homosexual is a natural political subversive because his sexual activity
involves him in the subversion of nature. It's also worth noting that at one
point in history all architects were once masons. Fortuitous or not, the
connection is worth exploring as a way of assessing modern day church architecture.
All of these ugly buildings appearing around the same time and designed by
people who know each other can't be simple coincidence. Michael Rose has
explained how Catholic church architecture in the period following Vatican II
derived from two documents: E. A. Soevik's book Architecture and Worship and
Environment and Art in Catholic Worship, the United States'
Bishops' Committee on Liturgy's adaptation of Soevik's ideas for Catholic
settings. The fact that Soevik was a Lutheran seems not to have troubled the
ecumenically minded liturgists on the USCC staff, but Rose saw architectural
consequences flowing from that fact. "Soevik," Rose writes,
"doesn't believe in the Catholic doctrine of the real presence. His modern
church worship spaces reflect his disavowal of this important Catholic
belief" (Rose, Ugly as Sin, p. 173).

THE
DECONSTRUCTIVIST CONSPIRACY

The deconstructivist conspiracy is, if anything, easier to
document. Peter Eisenman organized a series of dinners at the Century Club in
New York City, to which the
architectural elite (as defined by Eisenman) were invited. Philip Johnson
always held the seat of honor at these gatherings. One can imagine Peter
Eisenman and Frank Gehry and Philip Johnson with tears of laughter rolling down
their cheeks regaling each other with the latest monstrosity which some Church
just commissioned from them. One can imagine a standing contest at the Century
Club architecture dinners—Gehry, Johnson, and Eisenman vying with each other to
see who could be the most outrageous in ridiculing the beliefs of religious
clients and still get the commission. In addition to Johnson's chapel in
Houston, there is Gehry's plywood chapel at Loyola University in Los Angeles,
which did get built. Then there is Peter Eisenman's design for the Millennium
Church in Rome, which fortunately never got built. Michael Rose mentions the
competition for the Millennium Church in Rome in his book Ugly as Sin. "Competitors,"
he tells us,

included deconstructivist architects such as NewYork's Peter Eisenman, whose work
often resembles a train wreck,
and LA.'s Richard Meier, who has never designed a building that wasn't white.
... Eisenman's design suggested that he knew little or nothing about the
Catholic Church or her liturgy, customs and history. His submission depicted a
sanctuary that was disconnected from the nave; in fact, the proposal appeared
to place the nave and sanctuary in different buildings (p. 200-01).

Eisenman's design for an antichurch was ultimately rejected,
but the fact that the commission did go to Richard Meier's "modernist
monstrosity" of three concrete sails and lots of plate glass caused much
consternation among the classical architecture community at Notre Dame. Duncan
Stroik published an article critical of the church in his journal Sacred
Architecture. "The feeling I get from the three curved walls,"
Breda Ennis wrote (A Vacuum in the Spirit: The Design of the Jubilee Church in
Rome, Sacred Architecture, 2004, Issue 9, p. 10), "is of a building
falling in upon itself." This may, in fact, be the most appropriate
symbolic expression of the state of the Catholic Church at the dawn of the
third millennium, but it is hardly a reassuring thought to insinuate into the
minds of worshipers whose eternal salvation depends on the Church, as
symbolized by its buildings. Given the state of the profession, and the
preeminence in it of people like Johnson, Eisenman and Gehry, subversion of
belief and tradition was almost guaranteed the moment "It was decided, for
example, that the architect chosen for the project would not have to be a
Christian believer" (Ennis, ibid.).

The thought still rankles Thomas Gordon Smith, who remembers L'Osservatore
Romano making a big deal out of the fact that Richard Meier was a Jew. All
this means is that the fault lines in American architecture, like the fault
lines in American politics, are ethnic. Just as postmodernism is Jewish, the
postmodern classical revival is Catholic. The breakdown is hardly coincidental,
no matter how much Catholics like Bess want to ignore it. The great divide in
contemporary culture, whether in architecture, or politics, or contentious
issues like abortion, has to do with Logos. Every cultural artifact, in turn,
will be a manifestation of a more fundamental attitude toward Logos because
every man must ultimately decide whether he is for or against Logos. This is
not merely an individual decision; the moment someone becomes a member of the
Catholic Church he has uttered an implicit acceptance of the Logos; the Jew
because of an even more implicit rejection involves himself in the rejection of
Logos in all its forms, from metaphysics to the architecture of the home.

Philip Johnson's architecture mirrors his private life; so
does Peter Eisenman's. The context for Peter Eisenman's deconstruction of the
home revolved around his marriage, which deconstructed in the early '80s. The
same is true of Frank Gehry's
deconstruction of the house. It mirrored
his view of marriage, or its deconstruction into divorce. The architecture of
Thomas Gordon Smith and Duncan Stroik is no different in this regard. Their
architecture mirrors the fact that they are still married to the women who bore
each of them six children. Smith's biographer noticed the same thing: "his
return to the fold of Roman Catholicism took place while he was studying
Baroque architecture in Rome" (p. 117).

Peter Eisenman cites "the smoke of Auschwitz" (p.
170) as the main reason why he and his generation could no longer design
"modern" buildings. The "transcendental signifier" died in
the gas chambers, and the Logos of Architecture (Eisenman sees no fundamental
difference between modern and classical architecture) died along with it (or
Him or Her). Beautiful buildings, no matter how we define that term, are
hopelessly utopian. The failure to achieve this "vision of a sanitized
utopia" (p. 134)

became the primary condition confronting the architects
of a generation which matured in the early 1960s. Their disillusionment and
anger were in direct proportion to modern architecture's failure, as much with
its unrealized aspiration—its castle of purity—as with their own sense of loss
and the impossibility of return; these feelings were directed at the heroic
fathers of modern architecture, both for having been and also for having failed
(p. 135).

What we have here is high Oedipal drama. The "heroic
fathers of modern architecture" have failed just a Freud's father failed
to confront the goy who knocked his hat off in the streets of Vienna. As
in the case of Freud, whose ghost haunts Eisenman's writings as much as the
thought of Jacques Derrida, we need tough Jews to replace the wimpy failed
fathers who let the goyim walk all over them, by, in this instance,
building churches that looked like churches and houses that looked like homes.
That's why Eisenman, Gehry, Libeskind et al. threw away their T-squares and dedicated their lives to
exploding the glass box from within.

One of the major "heroic fathers of modern
architecture" was of course Philip Johnson, a man Eisenman knew
personally. When Johnson died in 2005, virtually all of the obituaries took
note of the fact that he was a homosexual and—more controversial and equally
less well-known—a Nazi. Johnson was drawn to the decadence of Berlin during the
waning years of the Weimar Republic because he was a homosexual. "He
showed me," the art dealer Julien Levy later wrote, "a Berlin night
life such as few would have imagined. The grotesque decadence I was to discover
over and over again in Berlin in those few short weekends [in 1931] could only
be compared, one might suppose to Paris, during the last days of Louis
XVI." However, unlike "Kulturbolschewisten" like
Magnus Hirschfeld and Walter Gropius, Johnson made a seamless transition from Kulturbolschwismus
to Nazism. Johnson attended a Nazi rally in Potsdam in 1932, where "he felt a sexual thrill in his own words at
the sight of 'all those blond boys in black leather' who seemed an exalted
collective crystallization of the liaisons that had both dominated and
liberated him already in Germany" (p. 90).

One year later he attended the famous Nuremberg rally which
celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hitler's Machuebernahme and Johnson
felt overwhelmed at the success of Hitler's fusion of art and political power,
a lesson he never forgot during his years in the architecture profession.
"You cannot imagine the atmosphere," Philip later said. "Like
the [Wagner] Ring," he added, "even if you were at first indifferent,
you were at last overcome, and if you were a believer to begin with, the effect
was even more staggering" (Schulze, p. 134). Later, Johnson drove his
Lincoln Zephyr (which he had shipped over to Europe) inadvertently into the
shtetl of Makow, Poland, whereupon his car was surrounded by admiring Jews.
Johnson, however, was terrified by their attention: "At first," he
said,

I didn't seem to know who they were except that they
looked so disconcerting, so totally foreign. They were a different breed of humanity, flitting about like
locusts. Soon enough I realized they were Jews, with their long black coats,
everyone in black, and their yarmulkes. Something about them ... desperate, as
if they were pleading about something ... maybe because we were Americans with
our American license plates. You know how in your dreams your world sometimes
drops from under you? I felt out of my depth."

Eventually, Johnson's Nazi connections earned him an
invitation from the German Propaganda Ministry to accompany the Wehrmacht in its invasion of Poland, inspiring a
series of articles which appeared in Father Charles Coughlin's magazine, Social
Justice. The articles were unmistakably pro-German in their orientation.
"Once on the Polish side," he wrote. "I thought at first that I
must be in the region of some awful plague. The fields were nothing but stone,
there were no trees, mere paths
instead of roads. In the towns there were no shops, no automobiles, no
pavements and again no trees. There were not even any Poles to be seen in the streets, only
Jews."

He was close enough to the front to see the shelling light up
the night sky and, afterward, the beneficial effect the invasion had had on
Polish society. After Gdynia fell, Johnson traveled through occupied territory
and found that "99% of the town I visited since the war are not only
intact but full of Polish peasants and Jewish shopkeepers." He was more
open in his letters to Frau Bodenscharz, someone the FBI had classified as a
German agent. Describing his return to the Polish town of Makow, where the Jews
had surrounded his Lincoln Zephyr, Johnson wrote that "The German green
uniforms made the place look gay and happy. There were not many Jews to be
seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring
spectacle" (p. 139). Johnson's biographer considers that statement as
possibly "the most unsettling statement that Philip ever put into
writing," but concludes that "he appears to have meant what he said
when he said it."

DECLINE IN
FERTILITY

Johnson seems to have accepted the racism that was the
foundation of Hitler's ideology as well. In an article entitled "Are We a
Dying People?" Johnson complained about a "decline in fertility …
unique in the history of the white race" with no apparent sense of irony
or awareness that he as a homosexual was contributing to that decline. Johnson
laid the blame for this decline at the feet of the American philosophy of
"Individualism and Materialism," which he considered
"eugenically bad."

Given the way the war was going by the early '40s
and given the paper trail he had accumulated during the '30s, Johnson began to suspect that he
was on the wrong side of the Zeitgeist.
He was helped in this
regard by Joseph Barnes, a foreign correspondent with the New York Herald
Tribune, who told him on a trip to the Polish front, "Get out of
fascism and do it now," and the FBI, which in May of 1940 "began to
assemble its dossier on his allegedly dubious activities." That dossier
included "an entry recording that the Office of Naval Intelligence
suspected him as early as June of 1940 of being a spy."

That information became public when Dale Kramer wrote an
article in the October 1940 issue of Harpers entitled "The American
Fascists," describing his fascination with the Nazis. But by then Johnson
was one step ahead of his pursuers. In September 1940 he had broken with the
Nazis and had enrolled in the Harvard School of Architecture. Showing a sense
of timing that would serve him well throughout his career, Johnson arrived at
Harvard a little after Walter Gropius had been hired to steer the department
away from the Beaux Arts tradition toward modernism. Since Johnson had been the
curator for the seminal 1932 MOMA exhibition on modernist architecture, and
since he had written the catalogue for that exhibit, which was now a required
text at Harvard, it became apparent before long that he knew more about the
subject—modern architecture—than most of his professors. Because of his wealth,
Johnson was one of the few students who could not only design but actually
build a building for his student project, which he did when he built himself a
glass box in the manner of Mies van der Rohe in Cambridge. Gropius had built
his house before Johnson, but his house was neither a glass box nor was it
located in Cambridge, where the architecture world could gather in it and
admire Johnson's skill and audacity.

Johnson's Nazi past, however, continued to haunt him during
his days at Harvard. In May of 1941, William Shirer's Berlin Diary appeared
in print, and it contained an account of Shirer sharing a double room
"with Phillip [sic] Johnson, an American fascist who says he
represents Father Coughlin's Social Justice. None of us can stand the
fellow and suspect he is spying on us for the Nazis. For the last hour in our
room here he has been posing as anti-Nazi and trying to pump me for my
attitude. I have given him no more than a few bored grunts" (Schulze, p.
152).

Six months later, the FBI was still on Johnson's case. An
anonymous informant reported on December 8, 1941, one day after the attack on
Pearl Harbor and after America's entry in the war that "In some
quarters," it said, "[it is] believed that [Johnson] has reformed and
is attempting to convince people of his sincerity while others feel that his
present position is covering up his real feelings."

Eventually, Edgar Kauffman, Jr., scion of the Pittsburgh
department store family which had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to do
Fallingwater in western Pennsylvania and Johnson's rival in a power struggle at
MOMA, forced the issue by threatening to expose Johnson's Nazi sympathies to
the New York art world, which was significantly Jewish. Once again Johnson
stole a march on his opponents, this time by showing up at the New York offices
of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith where, according to his
biographer, "he delivered a formal apology for his past sins." The fact
that Edgar Kauffman, Jr. had hired a private investigator to look into
Johnson's activities probably means that his homosexuality was going to be
exposed along with his Nazism. Johnson's confession at the ADL, however,
neutralized whatever Kauffman could have dug up on him, because it was clear
that if the Jews weren't going to make a fuss about Johnson's Nazism, nobody
else was either. Had Johnson offended or criticized the Jews during the period
following his confession, the deal would have been off, but now since the Jews
were on the winning side of history there was no reason for an opportunist like
Johnson to want to do such a thing.

JOHNSON'S
SYNAGOGUE

Besides, Johnson could take revenge in other ways, ways more
appropriate to his role as one of the up-and-coming architects of the
post-World War II period. So as part of his atonement, Johnson volunteered to
design the Kneses Tifereth Israel Synagogue in Port Chester, New York free of
charge. He then got his sly revenge on the Jews by turning their synagogue into
a larger version of the bedroom in the Guest House, the place where he had sex
with the current "Mrs. Johnson" and anyone else he happened to pick
up.

"The raising of a temple," his biographer wrote,
"to a faith profoundly aggrieved by the very forces with which he had
allied himself seemed an irreproachably good thing to do," but since the
synagogue resembles the bedroom in the Guest House, maybe Johnson wasn't
atoning for his sins after all. Maybe he was mocking the religion of the Jews.
The suspicion that the synagogue was a larger version of the sex room in the
Guest House grows when we learn that the 12 by 34 feet long screen behind the
ark of the covenant was designed by Ibram Lassaw, the same artist whose
sculpture decorated the wall in Philip's Guest House bedroom. In the plan for
Knese Tifereth Israel, the canopy over the bed in the sex room was expanded to
cover the whole length of the synagogue auditorium, as if indicating that the
same aegis presided over both spaces.

As part of his atonement to the Jews, Johnson also designed a
nuclear reactor at Rehovot at the request of Shimon Peres, who was told by
Johnson when he came to visit the famous architect at the Glass House in New Canaan, "You know, far
from being an anti-Semite, I've always been a violent philo-Semite." There
was no camp or mockery involved in the design of the Rehovot nuclear reactor,
just the unadulterated and unapologetic worship of power, as manifested by
"The unitary, single room of the reactor, sealed, windowless, and built of
expensively molded concrete, is heavier, lonelier, and more psychically
isolated, more protective of its interior, and more protected by its outer
wall. It brings to mind an Egyptian temple … the sheltered hypostyle hall and
the secret sanctuary." Whether he thought of the reactor as a cosmic sex
room or not, the Rehovot reactor remained, according to his biographer,
"the most lasting thing Philip left to Israel," and one of the things
that seems to have convinced the Jews not to make a fuss about his past.

In death, the world was not as kind to Johnson as it had been
during his charmed life. The Architectural Record referred to him as
"at heart a cynic, an immoralist and a profoundly corrupted character—in
short, an evil influence." Even the obituaries in the gay press were
hardly flattering. One referred to "his homosexuality and his past as a
disciple of Hitler-style fascism. On the latter, he said he spent much time in
Berlin in the 1930s and became 'fascinated with power,' but added he did not
consider that an excuse. 'I have no excuse (for) such utter, unbelievable
stupidity. … I don't know how you expiate guilt.'" In an obituary which
appeared in the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum concluded her
review, unable to say "whether Johnson's amorality" bore "a
relationship to the chilly skyscrapers he built." She was also unable to
explain why some people were punished so severely for their connection with the
Nazis, whereas others, namely Johnson, got off scot-free.

We may think we believe
any affiliation with Nazism is wrong, but as a society, our actual definition of "collaboration"
is in fact quite slippery. In the end, I suspect the explanation is simple:
People whose gifts lie in esoteric fields get a pass that others don't. Or, to put it differently, if you use
crude language and wear a swastika, you're a pariah. But if you make up a
complex, witty persona, use irony and jokes to brush off hard questions, and
construct an elaborate philosophy to obfuscate your past, then you're an elder
statesman, a trendsetter, a provocateur and — most tantalizingly — an enigma.

Michael Sorkin, one of Johnson's most persistent critics
during the latter's life had only one regret in the wake of Johnson's death,
namely, "that he never wrote an autobiography":

How fascinating it might have been to read his own
account of his meetings with Kingfish Huey Long or Father Coughlin, his ride
into Poland following the Wehrmacht, his appreciation of the decor at the
Nuremberg rallies, his real opinion of the younger generation of architects who
devoted so much time sucking up to him, his take on the so-called sexual
revolution. Unfortunately, all that's left is his mediocre, superficial body of
work and his lavish contribution to the politics of narcissism. The end of an era,
let us hope.

One of the most prominent members of "the younger
generation of architects who devoted so much time sucking up to" Philip
Johnson was, of course, Peter Eisenman, the man who felt that "the smoke
of Auschwitz" had changed architecture forever. Eisenman knew that Johnson
was a Nazi because in 1982 he had
appointed himself Johnson's Boswell, if not his de facto biographer.
Their relationship had deepened over the course of the '70s when Johnson became
involved with Eisenman's Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. In
exchange for the money and commissions he provided to Eisenman, Philip was
certified as a member of the avant-garde. Johnson would contribute his own
money to Eisenman's institute, and he would persuade businessmen like Gerald
Hines to contribute money to it as well, because he knew "how much
propaganda meant in elevating and fixing cultural reputations, his own
included. … Where the cultural press is, there reputations are shaped, and
nowhere else; there is power. In the 1970s that was New York. The fact was not
lost on Eisenman, nor on Philip."

The bond which united both the Nazi and the professional
anti-Nazi was will to power, a concept which both men derived from
Nietzsche—Johnson directly and Eisenman via the arcana of Jacque Derrida.
Johnson fueled Eisenman's career by referring to him in public as
"weighted down by erudition and intellection." He spoke of the
"interpenetrating richness" of Eisenman's House I and House II.

Thus it came as no
surprise when Eisenman and Johnson embarked on a literary project together
which began as a series of interviews and seemed destined to become a
biography. The surprises, in this regard, came later. Shortly after the two men
sat down to tape the first set of interviews in the Glass House in New Canaan,
Eisenman bumped into Johnson's partner John Burgee at a parry in Manhattan.
Eisenman, who according to Burgee, was "a little drunk," blurted out
that he was "going to get" Johnson in the upcoming book. "I've got
the goods on him," Eisenman continued, "I've got photographs of him
riding in a Nazi car. Lovers in Cambridge during school. I'm going to pull him
down for good this time."

HIGH OEDIPAL
DRAMA

Once again Eisenman involved himself in high Oedipal drama,
this time the symbolic murder of his own personal architectural father. If
Eisenman could kill the father, he could also sleep with his Mother, which,
since Eisenman was not a homosexual, did not mean the "Mrs. Johnson"
of the 1980s, but rather the profession itself, to which Johnson had provided
such generous access. Eisenman may have been drunk with liquor or drunk with
ambition or drunk with both at the time, but he ended up being undone by his
own drunken ambition. After blurting out his plan to Burgee, Burgee went to
Johnson (in spite of the fact that he was "uneasy about putting myself
between those two") and eventually persuaded him to buy his way out of the
contract with Eisenman.

What followed was even more surprising. The relationship
continued as if nothing
had happened. According to the astonished Burgee, "he [Johnson] and Peter
got cozy all over again. There was really no bad blood. Peter needed the
money—since the book was out of the question now—and Philip gave it to him. It
was a good deal for both of them and they resumed their friendship, with no
further conflict." Eisenman later denied that the incident ever happened.
When Johnson was confronted with the denial, he called Eisenman a liar
("He lies a little," p. 374), but even that didn't terminate the
relationship, forcing Schulze to conclude that, "Each was driven by a
personal ambition he knew was far more easily achieved if the other was kept a
friend rather than made an enemy."

And so the dinners at the Century Club continued because they
were beneficial for both men's careers. "Philip," his biographer
tells us, "was enough of a Nietzschean to realize that Peter [Eisenman]
was good at getting and using power, the very things he had always wanted, and
still did, for himself." Eisenman evidently came to the same conclusion.
He could write about the "eclipse of history," and how "the
consciousness of the human brutality of the Holocaust" made it
"impossible for man to sustain a relationship with any of the dominant
cosmologies of his past," but the "smoke of Auschwitz" didn't
keep Eisenman from sustaining a relationship with a man whom he knew was in
some sense responsible for the Holocaust because Johnson put Eisenman
"within reach of some of the most desirable clientele in the world."
The "smoke of Auschwitz," in other words, was no match for the
bracing breeze emanated from Johnson's access to wealthy clientele and that
filled the sails of Peter Eisenman's career.

The Holocaust, it turns out, is a card that gets played only
on certain occasions. It never gets played, for example, if a Nazi can get you
a lucrative commission. People like Michael Eisner, former chairman of Walt
Disney enterprises, for example, came to Johnson in the mid-'80s when Disney
was involved in huge construction projects in Florida, California, and France, and Eisner was looking for
architects to carry them out. "I gave him the names," Philip is
quoted as saying, "of young architects—Gehry, Eisenman and Graves."
And so Eisenman wasn't going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, not even if the goose turned out to be a Nazi. The "smoke of
Auschwitz" rhetoric was best reserved for public occasions, not when a
commission was at stake. "The smoke of Auschwitz" allowed Eisenman to
prohibit unauthorized designs; it allowed
him to terrorize hapless academics like Professor Bess; it also allowed him to
disrupt the lives of anyone stupid enough to commission a building from him.
Nazism could be used co prohibit other people from doing any number of things.
Nazism is the epitome of evil, but only for the Untermenschen who don't
get invited to dinners at the Century Club. When it comes to the inner circle
of the architecture world, well, it's not a big deal, especially if lucrative
commissions are at stake. At moments like this, Peter Eisenman is only too happy
to "suck up to" the
same people he condemns in his tirades to the masses.

The Jews who were Johnson's "kids" used the
"Smoke of Auschwitz" ploy to take over the field of architecture.
This became nowhere more apparent than in Berlin, the quintessential postmodern
city, the one, judging from its architecture, most infected by the toxins of
deconstruction. Philip Johnson had learned about homosexual liberation there in
the '30s during the decadence of the twilight years of the Weimar Republic.
Then in 1993 Johnson returned in triumph to talk about "the air we
breathed, the people we came to know, the restaurants, the Kurfuerstendamm, the
sex life were all new, all thrilling to a young American. The world was being
created here." (p. 412). The title of Johnson's lecture was "Berlin's
Last Chance—Schinkel, Messel, Mies van der Rohe—and what now?"

The answer, of course, was Jewish architecture. Johnson
returned to Berlin in the '90s to give a lecture there, only to find that his
Jewish "offspring" had already arrived. Gehry had created the
ultimate Giger monster in the horsehead shaped auditorium at the heart of the
DG bank building, a Giger-like fetal monster waiting to burst out of an
otherwise conventional building. Peter Eisenman eventually got to build a
holocaust memorial that looked like a parking lot full of boxes. Germans who
complained about how disruptive it was were denounced as anti-Semites. But it
was Daniel Libeskind who had the final word (or words) in his Jewish Museum, a
snake like building clad in zinc which was in reality a deconstructed Star of
David. As we have come to expect, Peter Eisenman had the last word (or words)
in explaining it all to a world full of Good Germans, eager to get their
meaning from pontificating Jews. "Berlin," Eisenman opined,
"became, after the Second World War, the mirror of a divided world.
Utterly devastated and quartered by the occupation armies, Berlin was cut in
half by the construction of the wall and its virtually impenetrable
'deathstrip' in 1961. ... Berlin today belongs to the world in the largest
sense, that its specificity and identity have been sacrificed on the altar of
modern history, that it is now the crossroads of every place and no
place."

Eisenman uses Freud as his model for the deconstruction of
Berlin. The Jewish architects got to inflict on Berlin the destruction (or
deconstruction) that Freud hoped in vain to inflict on Rome: "The site is
wrenched open, its history exposed in a series of substitutions, erasures, and
impositions of elements. The conceptual basis of the project recalls Freud's
fanciful but frustrating analogy between archeology and 'preservation in the
sphere of the mind. ...' Freud goes on to propose the Eternal City as an
analogue to the mechanics of memory and suggests 'by a flight of imagination'
that 'Rome is not a human habitation but a physical entity' like human
memory."

Berlin became the first postmodern city because it was there,
better than in any other city on earth, that the attack on the German people,
which their architecture demonstrated, could be justified as revenge for the
Holocaust. In the course of that transaction, Berlin also became a cash cow for
Jewish architects, like Daniel Libeskind, who moved there with his family in
1990 after winning the competition for the Jewish Museum in 1989. It was
Libeskind's first commission, and that astonishing revelation was an indication
that something other than skill at architecture was at work in attaining
it—something like skill at dominating discourse, for example.

BERLIN'S
MESSIAH

Libeskind sees himself as Berlin's architectural Messiah
because, as he puts it, "only through acknowledging and incorporating this
erasure and void of Berlin's Jewish life" by the construction of buildings
like Libeskind's Jewish Museum, "can the history of Berlin and Europe have
a human future." Libeskind then goes on to explain how he took
Schoenberg's 12-tone opera Moses and Aron as one model for the Jewish
Museum, especially "the spacing of the music's soundlessness after the
break in the second act. This spacing cannot be continued in any musical form,
but it can exist in the space of the void of architecture. These are the
devices and the thoughts which organized that geometry." "Musical
soundlessness" probably reminded Libeskind of the architectural
formlessness of his building, hence the connection. But, as we have come to
expect, Jewish architects like Libeskind can't really talk for more than a
minute or two before getting around to their Love/Hate relationship with Logos.
"Moses," Libeskind tells us, "is hardly able to endure the
absence of the Word … sixty or seventy instruments play one note and then they
stop. And the voice calls out; it does not sing; on the contrary, it literally
calls out for the Word and for the truth of that absent Word."

So, here we have one more Jewish architect calling "out
for the Word and the truth of that absent Word." Ultimately, however, when
all the disorienting "talkitecture" dies down we are left with Jewish
rejection of Logos as the ultimate explicator of their buildings. The Word is
absent because they have rejected Logos in just about every sense of the word.
In this regard, it is interesting to note the fact that Libeskind chose "a
Broken Star of David," as the other model for his building. The question
that arises then is, who broke the Star of David? The answer is Daniel
Libeskind, because, as St. John could have told them, in rejecting Jesus the
Logos, they rejected Abraham and Moses as well. As an alternative to
Libeskind's Jewish Museum, I would propose Francesco Borromini's baroque
masterpiece, St. Ivo's Church in Rome. St. Ivo's is also based on the Star of
David. Unlike Libeskind's broken star, Borromini's star of David is not broken;
it is fulfilled: "Each of the six triangles of the star is inset with a
circular medallion in mosaic representing one of the six virtues of the Virgin at the time of the
Annunciation, the moment when the law was fulfilled and the Virgin became the
first tabernacle of Christ, thus supplanting the synagogue."

The traditional iconography of Church architecture reminds us
that it was the Jews who broke the Star of David when they rejected Christ and
became revolutionaries. Aristippus reminds us that Logos appears in
architecture before it appears in philosophy,

When the Socratic philosopher Aristippus, having been
shipwrecked and cast upon the Rhodian shore, observed on the sand drawings of
geometrical figures, he cried out to his companions, "Let us be of good
cheer, for I see the traces of human beings." With that he made for the
city of Rhodes and went straight to the gymnasium. There he engaged in
discussions about philosophy and was presented with gifts. (Smith, Vitruvius,
p. 181).

The absence of geometrical figures in Libeskind's Jewish
architecture is a sign that the human beings living in Berlin are on their way
to being abolished. In this
regard, Philip Johnson does have the last word. Any culture that rebels against
God's law—and the sodomy that Johnson sought and found there in the '30s is
certainly such a rebellion—will end up being ruled by Jews. That was the
verdict of the Jesuits writing for Civilta Cattolica in 1890, one
hundred years after the French Revolution. It is also what happened to Berlin
during the '30s. It is also what happened in America during the '70s. The
proximate cause of their hegemony was our decadence, and its most potent symbol
is the grotesque buildings they have built as monuments to their hatred of
Logos.

Biographical Note

E. Michael Jones, Ph.D., editor of
Culture Wars magazine, is the author of Living
Machines: Bauhaus Architecture as Sexual Ideology, and more than twenty
other books, some of which are available for Kindle, including:

Jewish
Nazis

Requiem
for a Whale Rider

L'affaire Williamson: The Catholic Church and Holocaust
Denial

Abu Ghraib and The American Empire

Travels
with Harley in Search of America: Motorcycles, War, Deracination, Consumer
Identity

Lejzor and
Fiszel Sing the Blues: Chess Records and the Black-Jewish Alliance