(This article is for editorial and educational purposes only and is not intended in any way for commercial use)
Left: Image from 1972 Levi’s Ad / flashbak.com. , Right: Ground Picture / shutterstock.com
OUR ADOLESCENCE CRISIS that is that young people addled as they are on relentless identitarian activism delivered through social media and the school environment suffer from chronic loneliness is no surprise. To continually cleave into ever more personal and personalized identities is a sure way to lead to social alienation. (Preliminary study for new Student Center at Santa Monica High School, Santa Monica, CA, Johnson Favaro, 2024 above; High school student of the 1970s below left, high school student of the 2020s below right)
“But wait, I’m gay!” I had wanted to shout back near the end of a panel session at a meeting not long ago of the ALS (American Library Association) in response to a thirty-something black librarian’s comment near the end: “Next time let’s not have a panel with only old white men” And I would have added, “You were never considered mentally ill by the medical establishment as I was until the age 17, nor were you ever an illegal person-- not allowed to marry or adopt children-- in most states as I was for most of my life, and forget about colleagues or society I would bet you’ve never been treated as a second class citizen within your own family, nor have you witnessed first-hand as much human suffering as I have -- most of it before you were born—nor will you ever.”
But, thankfully, I didn’t.
Everett Collection / shutterstock.com
Photo by Catherine McGann/Getty Images
THAT ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS GAY would not have occurred to him or anyone else in his lifetime even if he had had intimate relationships with men, physical or otherwise. Same-sex sex has been going on for millennia but the ways in which it has been viewed by its practitioners and society at-large has differed. Not until the 20th century did it congeal into a category of social identification meant to set a group of people apart. (The 16th U.S. president above; 20th century gay activist Larry Kramer, below)
HOW INDEED we might ask does gender identity and/or sexuality confine or direct our sensibilities as architects toward an outcome that only those within our supposedly self-contained identity group could ever perceive or appreciate?
Two decades ago, the gay activist Larry Kramer suggested that because Abraham Lincoln had shared exchanges through letters and even beds with male friends over the years, he must have been gay. And yet in Lincoln’s time not a word was said about it. What are we to make of this and why do we care or do we?
Installation view of Germane Barnes: Columnar Disorder at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2024.
Germane Barnes. Pantheon II, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Nina Johnson. (Greg Carideo/© Germane Barnes)
INCLUSIVE OR EXCLUSIVE is this disingenuous activist exhibition which seems more focused on expressing victimhood and promoting otherness than making art? (Columnar Disorder, Germaine Barnes, Art Institute of Chicago, 2024; courtesy of Architect’s Newspaper)
Tymonko Galyna / shutterstock.com
Designed by Germane Barnes, fabricated by Navillus Woodworks. Migration Column III (detail), 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Designed by Germane Barnes, fabricated by Endicott. Labor Column II, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Germane Barnes and SHENEQUA. Identity Column III, 2024. Courtesy of the artists.
THAT THE CLASSICAL LANGUAGE of architectural ornament has for some come to be associated with colonialism and oppression (just as it has for others with “old school”) is fair enough, but is it inherent in the classical language itself or simply in our relationship with it? Would what’s proposed here mean anything to anyone without the explanation? (Columnar Disorder, Germaine Barnes, Art Institute of Chicago, 2024; courtesy of Architect’s Newspaper)
Some people apparently do, especially in our architecture schools and arts institutions. It is no exaggeration to suggest that we are in America now seized by such pervasive one-dimensional personal identifications with “difference” that have so crippled our institutions that we are unable to address the most fundamental questions facing that most complex and consequential form of art, the one above all others that requires most the collaboration of the most people from the widest array of class, culture and social economic circumstances that any society can produce—that being our architecture, our cities.
Instead, we confuse activism for art. We exploit our differences for personal gain, a cynical game that pitches the in-group against the out-group and vice-versa. In architectural discourse it has reached preposterous levels of distraction. We are to believe that there is such thing as “Gay” or “Black” architecture. Or had women been allowed to participate in the practice of architecture over the millennia it would have all turned out differently. (We’d have fewer towers and more domes?)
Aspern Seestadt street signs, Vienna Austria, 2024 above; Eval Kail, architect, Vienna, Austria, courtesy Lisa Edi for the New York Times, July 17, 2024 via New York Times
EXCLUDED FROM THE PROFESSION have been women for sure, but to then claim that women have also been excluded from the equitable (and enjoyable) experience of buildings and cities in the guise of “claiming feminine space” amounts to a cynical exploitation of societal injustices in order to claim unearned authority within the profession.
Valentin Ivantsov / shutterstock.com
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NIHILISTIC CONTEMPORARY ENVIRONMENTS no matter how generously appointed with stroller storage and well-lit laundry rooms are neither “feminine positive” nor non-discriminatory in their oppression of the human spirit. (Aspern Seestadt, Vienna, Austria, 2024)
THE ROAD TO UNHAPPINESS is paved with identitarian self-segregation and victimhood mentality that may properly diagnose societal injustices and improperly prescribe their remediation. Art cannot be accomplished through activism of this kind so what is the goal of it, what is to be gained from it? (Harvard University GSD Women in Design Conference, November 2018)
We suspect that most of what’s going on is extortion, a power play to leverage victimhood for influence and opportunity. But that some institutions and architects now want to make up for society’s past wrongs by suggesting that there is such thing as identity-based architecture-- which heretofore society has disallowed--misreads what philosophers call the “wrong-making feature” of an injustice. The injustice is that some people, especially women and Blacks, have collectively been excluded from participation, not that as women and Blacks they have a radically different point of view to offer.
The life span of buildings and cities far exceeds the flux of social orders and individual identities within them.(Credit: W.W. Norton, 2024)
The supposedly “scientific” taxonomy of human sexuality out of which first emerged the term “homosexuality” (classifying individuals as “homosexuals”) does not arrive until the mid-20th century in America. (Cover Credit: BORIS ARTZYBASHEF)
That point of view, a popularized, dumbed down version of a socio-philosophical analysis first expressed fifty years as “standpoint theory” – asserts that we can only know from our experience “our truth”, and importantly, no-one else can understand or share in that truth. We are isolated. We will never know what it’s like to be an other. This point of view is disastrous for the practice of architecture—whose very foundation is to know and care for each other.
18th Century Portrait of Michelangelo (image via Sotheby’s)
Michelangelo’s fresco “Ignudi” on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City (c. 1508–12) (via Wikimedia )
THE PROLIFIC REPRESENTATION OF NAKED MEN in drawings, paintings and sculptures produced by Michelangelo supposedly confirms the assertion that he was “gay,” and while there is evidence he had intimate relationships with men the subject matter of his art was conventional for his time even as his execution of it was exceptional)
Ivan Moreno sl / shutterstock.com
THE EXPRESSION OF PERFECTION of the human body in the philosophical and artistic traditions of Greece and Rome has got little to do with sexuality—it’s just hard to show with clothes on. (Laocoön and His Sons, author unknown, ancient Greece, ca. 200 BCE; Roman copy at Vatican City, , above; Zeus or Poseidon, bronze, author unknown; Museum of Athens 460 BCE; Disco bolo of Myron, ancient Greece,460-450 BCE lower right)
Ella_Ca / shutterstock.com Gilmanshin / shutterstock.com
Twenty-first century philosophers and scientists now agree with what wise people have known forever, which is that the concept of a self in our physical, social world is circumstantial, contingent, relational, and fluid. Our selves are both varied and non-existent. None of these selves are fixed. Our skin color is fixed but our character’s content learned, our sex fixed but our gender behavior social. When we assume identity, it cannot but be culturally instantiated.
Everett Collection / shutterstock.com, Paul Rudolph (architect) - (via Wikipedia)
Grabmal von Giuliano II. de Medici (via Wikimedia), Yale Art and Architecture School (via Wikimedia)
yorgen67 - stock.adobe.com
WHOSE GAY? would be not only a pointless question but an anachronistic one having little to nothing to do with the time, society or construction technology not to mention the author out of which the work emerges. ( Left: Michelangelo, the Medici Tomb and Laurentian Library, Florence Italy, 16th C CE; Right: Paul Rudolph, Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, CT and 23 Beekman Place, New York, NY, 1978)
Upper Left: Julia Morgan (via Wikimedia), Upper Right: Paul Revere Williams (via LA Conservancy)
Left: Hearst Castle Abbie Warnock-Matthews / shutterstock.com, Right: Guardian Angel Cathedral Leonard Zhukovsky / shutterstock.com
Dan Schreiber / shutterstock.com, Marina Riley / shutterstock.com
WHO’S BEAUX-ARTS, WHO’S MODERN? Are questions that mattered to these architects more than their gender or skin color as difficult as it must have been to practice within what was (and still is) a white man’s profession (Left: Julia Morgan, Hearst Castle, San Simeon, CA 1919; Paul Williams, Guardian Angel Cathedral, Winchester, NV 1963 and Theme Building Los Angeles International Airport, 1961, Los Angeles, NV)
Our points of view--our differences--are important but in art and architecture they are minute in comparison with the truths we share. As human beings we all experience the world mostly identically if still from different standpoints. Our bodies are roughly the same size, we are mostly ambulatory in the same way, we are most of us upright and orient to a horizon. We all see light and dark, transparent and opaque. What stabilizes our subjectivity is our common experience of the world around us—its objectivity. Even beauty –as illusive as it is to achieve or evaluate or even describe-- is objective and yet cannot be known or achieved except in the context of a stable environment and culture of values.
spatuletail / shutterstock.com
IS WESTERN CULTURE INSTRICALLY BAD? Could have been a question of this black man of the society into which he was born, who instead learned what he could from what it had to offer people of all skin colors.
New Mexico, U.S.A, BGStock72 - stock.adobe.com
Mali, Africa, KOLA STUDIO - stock.adobe.com
Santorini, Greece, gummy-beer - stock.adobe.com
BECAUSE WHY DO WE BUILD sacred places as a species?
Everyone has something to contribute, and no one deserves marginalization. But it is only by sharing points of view that we come to know the world we share. To insist that only subjectivity matters is to foster a kind of bankrupt aesthetic relativism that can only ever paralyze culture and distract from the making of art. Identitarian activism cannot nor will it ever make truthful and lasting art.
New Mexico, U.S.A., Sokimimi Studio - stock.adobe.com, traveller70 - stock.adobe.com
Santorini, Greece, sam- stock.adobe.com, Rawf8 - stock.adobe.com
RED, BROWN, BLACK OR WHITE? In their least sophisticated form buildings and cities are consistent in scale and expression no matter the particulars of the culture or character (or skin color) of the people who make them, because in the end the bodies we all inhabit are more similar than not.
Hal_P / shutterstock.com
Pioneer Plaques / NASA
ARE THESE PEOPLE NAKED because their authors are thinking of sex and sexuality, or are their authors getting at something bigger? ((Vitruvian Man as redrawn by Leonardo Da Vince, above, NASA Pioneer Plaque, 1972)
Even if what Larry Kramer and others believe about Abraham Lincoln is true Lincoln himself would never have identified as “gay” or “homosexual”, terms of identity that did not exist in his lifetime. It would not have occurred to him then any more than people name their sons “Abraham” now. Nor would he have cared-- the abolition of slavery and the preservation of the union being for him what he most cared about--just as we should care less about our identitarian differences and more about how together we will as architects contribute to the transformation of the bland, ugly built world we live in now.
PHYSICAL PRESENCE in the company of one another is the role of any school building—and buildings in general--- particularly one whose very purpose is to enhance student life on campus. (Preliminary study for new Student Center at Santa Monica High School, Santa Monica, CA, Johnson Favaro, 2024 above; Atrium above, section below)
NEXUS OF COMMUNITY is the goal of this building, where students of every cultural and socio-economic background are to live in the presence of and learn from one another. (Preliminary study for new Student Center at Santa Monica High School, Santa Monica, CA, Johnson Favaro, 2024 above; aerial view above, new student center left, new black box theater center, existing Barnum Theater right)