One hundred years ago, the poet T.S Eliot wrote an article “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in which among other insights he offers this one: “Tradition…cannot be inherited and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature… has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”
Written in 1919, in the fledgling moments of what we now call the modern movement, this poet — one of the greatest of modernist artists — in these few phrases and those that follow argues for a conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written, that while the material of art never improves it is also never quite the same and what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.
This is hardly “what’s past is past” or “what’s old is bad”— the kind of thinking that has come to characterize (or caricature) what we think of as the paradigm of art and architecture in the 20th century (with now the inevitable backlash in some quarters: “what’s new is bad”). Eliot, the modernist, instead argues for a relationship with the art of the past and further that the whole history of art is nothing more (nor less) than a train of thought that revolves. To be “original” may also mean to be “of the origins”.
If architecture can be thought of as built thought, the embodiment of consciousness (events and ideas), then it cannot have a past, present or future. The history of architecture is nothing more (nor less) than the accumulation of thoughts — experience that with a little bit (or a lot) of effort belongs to all of us, and upon which we are free to draw at any time for any purpose or at least to the extent that it furthers our effort to create a novel work of art. Good, bad or indifferent, why would we choose to censor experience? Innovation is nothing more (nor less) than making new (hopefully unexpected and fruitful) relationships among things we already know. Here again Eliot is helpful: “the poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”
Architects more than perhaps any other kind of visual artist seem to have had the greatest trouble with this. Why the uneasiness? Interior designers, who are bricoleurs at heart and by trade (accumulators, collagists), have no problems drawing from whatever they find wherever they find it to create what they call “layered” experiences. They instinctively know that a so-called “ancient” or “modern” object takes on a different meaning when placed in a context not originally of its own—and conversely “ancient” and “modern” contexts mutate when populated with objects not originally of their making. It’s harder than it sounds, and the better the designer, the better the outcome.
We architects are more (or less?) than bricoleurs. We are also partly engineers. We unlike poets do have to respond to economics and mechanics — and this may be part of the problem. Maybe in the last century, this our other role, our obligation to society, has loomed too large, devoured our interests as artists in anything other than what’s right in front of us. To this day, despite all the evidence to the contrary, we persist in the myth that the technology of today (and yes tomorrow!) — construction technology, environmental technology, computing technology — will do all the innovating for us. Or worse: that it’s all about us. We have engaged in willful ignorance as if somehow forgetting is liberating.
We choose otherwise; we choose reconciliation. We choose El Lissitsky and Edwin Lutyens, Antonio Gaudi and Giulio Romano. We reserve the right to be as inspired by the Parthenon as we are the iPhone. More importantly, we choose to seek how our experience of the iPhone changes our relationship with the Parthenon (and vice-versa), how Lissitsky changed (without obliterating) our relationship with Lutyens, or Gaudi, Romano. We choose to play a part in and be played by all history or better yet since we are Americans all our histories that are and will always be alive. We choose to be of one mind with all human experience, a mind, which to paraphrase Eliot, both changes and abandons nothing en route. We choose to be conscious not of what is dead, but of what is already living.