When ruminating on the theme of demolition, I was quickly drawn to an historical object: the February House of Brooklyn Heights, demolished in 1945 (to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway), after a short mythical life as an artists’ commune, notably for writers including W. H. Auden. I thought that February House would serve in-itself as a sturdy frame, or figurative home, for the length of this letter, but my mind soon strolled out to the broader neighbourhood of Brooklyn Heights, where I decided to introduce Rem Koolhaas to Norman Mailer.

To step back, my idea with respect to February House was for it to serve as something of a short circuit between architecture and literature (in the back of my mind too was your book on the architecture of Belgium from last year beginning with Baudelaire’s negative experience of the place).¹ The famed house’s mock-Tudor style alluded to the disdain that a number of well-known American writers of the twentieth century’s second-half would have for architectural modernism—or perhaps more specifically “orthodox modern architecture” as Venturi wrote in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture—and the apparent colonization by such architecture of the post-war American metropolis. Here I thought of Tom Wolfe’s widely derided 1981 critique of modernism, From Bauhaus to Our House, which points to an ironic homology between the crudest modernism-bashing of this era and the crudest postmodernism-bashing of our recent present. In both cases, supposedly formal critiques often masquerade purely economic agendas, evidenced in an opinion piece by a former politician and major aesthete² of the country I write from, which claimed both the modern and postmodern³ as worthy of demolition.

In the New York Times, Paul Goldberger wrote of Wolfe’s Bauhaus book,

The problem, I think—and here we get to the essence of what is wrong with this book—is that Tom Wolfe has no eye. He has a wonderful ear, and he listens hard and long, but he does not seem to see. He does not see, to take but one of so many examples, that Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building is a lush and extraordinarily beautiful object. He understands Seagram only as part of Mies van der Rohe’s theorizing, which means he understands it only as a prototype for a universal architectural style, and not as a unique and even profound work of art.⁴

Whereas Goldberger condemned Wolfe’s lack of eyeballs, in a review of the journalist’s 1975 critique of the now surpassed “modern art” world, The Painted Word, Robert Hughes wrote,

Wolfe has an astute eye for what he knows about: namely, the pretensions of art consumers and the stratagems by which the chic of New York use new art as a tool for social climbing. There he is on home ground, being in every sense part of his frothy and fashion-ruled subject. He was there. But he was not in any of the places where art was made or serious thought about it discussed.⁵

Goldberger’s compliment to Wolfe’s ear for idea and theorization is not relayed in Hughes’ assessment that the writer seemed “to know virtually nothing about the history of art, American or European.” Wolfe’s popularity as a punching bag—maybe a necessary extension of his general popularity—was of course enjoyed by Brooklyn Heights resident Norman Mailer, with a relatively polite line from his New York Review of Books review of Wolfe’s 1998 A Man in Full reading,

Writing a best seller with conscious intent to do so is, after all, a state of mind that is not without comparison to the act of marrying for money, only to discover that the absence of love is more onerous than anticipated.⁶

What interested me here though was that Mailer shared Wolfe’s disdain for broad strokes “modern architecture.” But whereas Wolfe was merely (if not thoroughly) ridiculed for philistine interventions in disciplines or artforms to which he was said to have insufficient knowledge of, Mailer, arguably, made a far heavier intervention, not in an intellectual or creative field beyond “his own,” but in politics. Mailer’s outsider-art 1969 New York Mayoral Campaign (Mailer-Breslin) strikes me as on one hand, Koolhaasian, and on the other, strangely relevant on a thematic level to the CCA’s exhibition and film, To Build Law. In a Dezeen article on Koolhaas’s 2014 Venice Biennale exhibition the publication quotes the architect,

…the Elements exhibition focusses on architectural components such as elevators and escalators, which “have never really been incorporated into either the ideology or the theory of architecture”…⁷

Koolhaas himself had already incorporated elevators into the ideology and/or theory of architecture in 1978’s Delirious New York. A decade prior, Norman Mailer did the same in his mayoral campaign: his proposed policy of “Sweet Sundays” would enforce one day per month without any mechanical transportation, including elevators. In a 2019 EPFL interview regarding your work on Koolhaas/OMA, you say, of the architect’s legacy in the present day,

On one hand, he’s someone who’s broadened the scope of architecture in the world and shown that it can be pleasurable and fun. On the other, everything he stood for is now condemned and considered reprehensible.⁸

With respect to this line I’m drawing between Rem Koolhaas and Norman Mailer, an irony lies in the fact that while Norman Mailer as a person has long been condemned and considered reprehensible, his mayoral campaign’s experimental environmentalism sounds a lot like the sort of projects that contemporary architecture students are often tasked with designing: Mailer wanted to ban all private cars from Manhattan (while also seceding New York City from the state of New York to grant the city itself statehood, and turning Coney Island into something of a Macau-esque special administrative region to boost tax revenue via gambling). Mailer’s New York, or visions of it, were similarly delirious to those Koolhaas would write in the late 1970s, except of course, that everything that the Mailers and Wolfes found alienating in modern architecture, Koolhaas contrarianly celebrated. As the aforementioned EPFL interview-article begins,

“I regard myself as a descendent of the true Modernists,” a young Rem Koolhaas told Dutch journal wonen-TA/BK in 1978. He also said he was not worried about his utilitarian approach to architecture not being fashionable at the time.⁹

Koolhaas 101 lectures, seminars, documentaries etc. tend to begin with the fact that the architect began his adult creative life as a screen-writer; he is a writer-architect as Mailer was (briefly) a writer-politician. In both cases, the writer- prefix seems to have come with some liberties, perhaps simply those awarded by male self-confidence.

Thinking through the examples I’ve laid out above, I’ve arrived at a general principle: writers, broadly speaking, tend to be intellectual dilettantes/extreme generalists. The form of writing, is writing. But the content of writing—whether in non-fiction or fiction—can, and is expected to be, literally anything; boundless. Even if you wander far into unknown territory like Tom Wolfe, you ultimately get away with it and can always shelter behind the comforts of the form of writing, the comforts of style. This made me ask: are architects becoming more like writers, in terms of their dilettantism? Are architects Tom Wolfe-ing their way into fields they know nothing of, or are they making good use of the writer’s generalism? The problem here is that architects are faced with a more complex situation than writers: if writers have boundless fields of content to deal with, but within the clear formal parameters of written language, contemporary architects are being asked to reinvent both their form and deal with infinite variables in content simultaneously. In architecture schools today, students are often faced with studio briefs in which the project’s content is a) humanity suffering from x/y/z apocalypses and the form is b) a yet non-existent building-technology or non-building, or spatial paradigm. They tend not to come up with much within a semester. This is perhaps why Koolhaas, as a young writer transitioning to architecture, saw in “true modernism” a trail to follow: modernism faced the massive expansion of content as mediated by new genres and scales of building type, but within a formal context in which the form of architecture was building. The modernist novel had as its content everything, but knew that its form was words on pages.

Given the reality in which “…the construction industry accounts for at least 38 per cent of carbon emissions globally,” the exhibition and film To Build Law focuses on “contemporary architects cultivating alternative modes of practice.” This in many ways exciting situation, experienced I believe globally, seems to offer a fork in the road: to de-centre the building of buildings from the practice of architecture, or to double-down on the composition of capital-B Buildings. Both roads will inevitably be travelled, and they may converge more frequently than either side’s most confident sectarians might care to acknowledge (afterall, OMA and AMO are mirrors). This raises an interesting question as to what the nature of architecture, of architectural form, actually is, or will be, over the next century and beyond. Again, such a question seems never faced in literature: even when Mallarmé played with the graphic nature of text in the direction of an extreme, this hardly resulted in a negation of writing as form. So perhaps literature is not a useful analogue for architecture’s formal identity crisis. Then again, Keller Easterling enlists Victor Hugo in service of charting the waters of where non-brick and mortar architecture goes.¹⁰ The Eisenmanian search for architectural language seems ongoing, even if Eisenman himself is at odds with the general zeitgeist of architecture’s contemporary institutions,¹¹ which is perhaps partly why he and Elisa Iturbe wrote a book on why it’s hip to be “late.”¹²

If “demolition” serves ultimately as a metaphor in this letter, then it likely speaks to the potential demolition of boundaries between what architects can and cannot, or should, should not do. I don’t know whether contemporary architects have anything to learn from writers or not, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.