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The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture: The Uncompleted Project
The Other Tradition of Modern The Uncompleted Project is a re-edition of an essential work by Colin St John Wilson, architect of the British Library and one of the most eminent voices in architectural theory and practice of the last 50 years. Re-edited and re-designed to Wilson's specifications, and with a new introduction by architect and writer Ellis Woodman, this indispensable title is here made available to a new readership. In The Other Tradition St John Wilson sets out to examine the underlying themes of modern architecture, assessing their impact, influence, and continuing development. Rather than positioning Modernism as a completed historical moment that occurred in the past (and that was formulated in terms of abstract theory and in no way responding to the historic role of architecture as a practical art and the unpredictable necessities of life), Wilson argues for a continuing tradition, an "uncompleted project", sustained against CIAM's rigid orthodoxy by a "resistance movement" exemplified by architects such as Alvar Aalto, Hans Scharoun, Hugo Häring and Frank Lloyd Wright. Figures like Aalto and Scharoun couldn't compete with Le Corbusier's powers on the soapbox and showed little inclination to do so. In a sense, The Other Tradition, is the manifesto that these laconic masters never wrote.
Drawing upon philosophy, history, art and architectural theory, the story of Modernist architecture is here explored both theoretically and through comparative case studies. Professor Wilson's original, insightful and passionate text is accompanied by photographs, plan drawings, sketches and models that further elucidate his argument. As important now as it was when first published The Other Tradition of Modern The Uncompleted Project is a handsome re-edition of a seminal work.
Future In July 2007 Black Dog is publishing Colin St John Buildings and Projects, the definitive monograph on Professor Colin St John Wilson. This erudite, comprehensive publication spans projects from throughout his career.
Drawing upon philosophy, history, art and architectural theory, the story of Modernist architecture is here explored both theoretically and through comparative case studies. Professor Wilson's original, insightful and passionate text is accompanied by photographs, plan drawings, sketches and models that further elucidate his argument. As important now as it was when first published The Other Tradition of Modern The Uncompleted Project is a handsome re-edition of a seminal work.
Future In July 2007 Black Dog is publishing Colin St John Buildings and Projects, the definitive monograph on Professor Colin St John Wilson. This erudite, comprehensive publication spans projects from throughout his career.
- GenresArchitecture
189 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 1995
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January 17, 2023
The distinguished British architect, the late Colin St. John ("Sandy") Wilson said that modern architecture, what he called “the unfinished project” needs a new body of ideas; and this is surely it. Comprehensively argued and wholly convincing, this is a book for a time when meaningless, thin architecture is hyped as great: what he calls ”sensationalist one-liners” noted only for their “brutal indifference for the neighbourhood”. Wilson contends that authentically great architecture of deep and enduring meaningfulness can only be created when the architect pays close attention to a building's practical use; the potential of a building to attain beauty is inseparable from its functional correctness.
In 1786 Goethe visited Verona. Visiting the Roman amphitheatre, a vast semicircular bowl of exactly calculated perfection, he sat in contemplation of its beauty but also its perfect functionality. He realised that because it had been built in response to a generally felt practical need, it transcended that need and was thus able to attain its sublime beauty. But it could not be beautiful without its practicality; its functionality and beauty were synonymous. However, this (notes Wilson) has nothing to do with the “form follows function” of doctrinaire modernism.
Wilson develops his argument by way of the classical tradition in Plato, Aristotle and Vitruvius (investigating their idea of “usefulness”) and Kant (who by dramatically separating form from utility, created modern aesthetics). He suggests that, similarly, since any thinking architect's intention today must be to make buildings of meaning, they must begin by understanding the fine detail of how the building is to be used - but only in order to transcend its functionality. So we're a long way from doctrinaire functionalism here, which he excoriates in his first chapter “What went wrong”, a refreshing attack on Le Corbusier and modernist dogma.
Always entertaining and enlightening, with engrossing illustrations, Wilson's argument develops via analyses of the design approaches of many architects who remained outside the modernist cult or who even, like Hugo Häring, were literally thrown out of the modernists’ first CIAM conference at La Sarraz in 1928. His analysis of Mies’ Berlin National Gallery (1967) is revealing; finally one feels one has understood what is wrong with that deeply disturbing piece of architecture, “a rhetorical urban statement” that as an art gallery is a complete disaster. Because of Mies’ complete incompetence in handling daylight, “all subtle variations in colour, tonal value, and texture are destroyed” which “directly flouts the primary purpose for which the building was commissioned”.
On the other hand Alvar Aalto’s Alborg Museum (1973), where there is a subtle and refined understanding of how light should fall on paintings and that directly generates the architectural arrangments, this important, though only practical, thinking is transcended and the result is an architectural masterpiece. Comparing two summer houses in the south of France, one by Eileen Gray and one by Le Corbusier Wilson demonstrates that Eileen Gray was a modern architect far more able than the so-called "master". Unlike Corb's deeply flawed Villa Mandrot (1929), he shows that Gray’s E1027 house at Roquebrune (also 1929) demonstrates “commanding technical skill”; this is thanks to her far more highly developed “sensibility towards body language”.
The great Hans Scharoun is another of those non-doctrinaire “outsiders” from the modern movement that Wilson calls “The Resistance” a tendency he associates, in a way, with the English Arts and Crafts (Butterfield, Norman Shaw, Mackintosh). In an essay that takes us from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment and Victorian eclecticism, Wilson brilliantly demonstrates that when architects thoroughly understand the functionality and technicalities of a building, the best of them may attain humankind’s highest aspiration: transcendent beauty. Indeed, as in Aalto, an understanding of the practical functionality of buildings, and of the expectations of their users, can make them more and more meaningful the more they are used.
This is marvellous stuff. Wilson’s profoundly, quietly important book is strongly recommended for all thinking architects.
In 1786 Goethe visited Verona. Visiting the Roman amphitheatre, a vast semicircular bowl of exactly calculated perfection, he sat in contemplation of its beauty but also its perfect functionality. He realised that because it had been built in response to a generally felt practical need, it transcended that need and was thus able to attain its sublime beauty. But it could not be beautiful without its practicality; its functionality and beauty were synonymous. However, this (notes Wilson) has nothing to do with the “form follows function” of doctrinaire modernism.
Wilson develops his argument by way of the classical tradition in Plato, Aristotle and Vitruvius (investigating their idea of “usefulness”) and Kant (who by dramatically separating form from utility, created modern aesthetics). He suggests that, similarly, since any thinking architect's intention today must be to make buildings of meaning, they must begin by understanding the fine detail of how the building is to be used - but only in order to transcend its functionality. So we're a long way from doctrinaire functionalism here, which he excoriates in his first chapter “What went wrong”, a refreshing attack on Le Corbusier and modernist dogma.
Always entertaining and enlightening, with engrossing illustrations, Wilson's argument develops via analyses of the design approaches of many architects who remained outside the modernist cult or who even, like Hugo Häring, were literally thrown out of the modernists’ first CIAM conference at La Sarraz in 1928. His analysis of Mies’ Berlin National Gallery (1967) is revealing; finally one feels one has understood what is wrong with that deeply disturbing piece of architecture, “a rhetorical urban statement” that as an art gallery is a complete disaster. Because of Mies’ complete incompetence in handling daylight, “all subtle variations in colour, tonal value, and texture are destroyed” which “directly flouts the primary purpose for which the building was commissioned”.
On the other hand Alvar Aalto’s Alborg Museum (1973), where there is a subtle and refined understanding of how light should fall on paintings and that directly generates the architectural arrangments, this important, though only practical, thinking is transcended and the result is an architectural masterpiece. Comparing two summer houses in the south of France, one by Eileen Gray and one by Le Corbusier Wilson demonstrates that Eileen Gray was a modern architect far more able than the so-called "master". Unlike Corb's deeply flawed Villa Mandrot (1929), he shows that Gray’s E1027 house at Roquebrune (also 1929) demonstrates “commanding technical skill”; this is thanks to her far more highly developed “sensibility towards body language”.
The great Hans Scharoun is another of those non-doctrinaire “outsiders” from the modern movement that Wilson calls “The Resistance” a tendency he associates, in a way, with the English Arts and Crafts (Butterfield, Norman Shaw, Mackintosh). In an essay that takes us from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment and Victorian eclecticism, Wilson brilliantly demonstrates that when architects thoroughly understand the functionality and technicalities of a building, the best of them may attain humankind’s highest aspiration: transcendent beauty. Indeed, as in Aalto, an understanding of the practical functionality of buildings, and of the expectations of their users, can make them more and more meaningful the more they are used.
This is marvellous stuff. Wilson’s profoundly, quietly important book is strongly recommended for all thinking architects.
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