Huffing at architects

Press, 5 June 1982, Page 16

Huffing at architects

From Bauhaus to Our House. By Tom Wolfe. Jonathan Cape, 1981. 143 pp. $22.75 Pity those on whom the American journalist and essayist, Tom Wolfe, turns his incisive, . scathing gaze . before sharpening his quill. In this book the victims “pinned and wriggling” are the last two or three generations of architects, “modern” and “post-modern” alike.

In the course of describing and analysing the origins and- intentions of the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany and the later conquest by the Bauhaus of the architectural establishment of the United States,. Wolfe manages to express a “populist” attitude towards the buildings inflicted on • the public in the name of modern architecture, without, however, taking any crude, stance, elevating the judgment of a New York taxi-driver to the same position as that of an architectural critic. Wolfe sometimes gets carried away by the verve of his argument and his cleverness with words. Surely it is not necessary to run down all the buildings designed by architects whose assumptions and intentions he rightly exposes to

criticism and even ridicule. But this is a . fault worth enduring. It is not necessary to be “up” with . architectural theory and criticism to find this book informative and enjoyable. One , of Wolfe’s gifts has always been to make v worlds apparently remote or esoteric.; from everyday experience, as the worlds . of many preening architects have ■ undoubtedly been, intelligible to a reader . without “inside” information or: experience. Thus- even the’ “common reader” will come away from the book., with a real understanding of what recent - architects both thought they were doing; and were actually doing —. the gap between these two gives Wolfe his opportunities to be his most biting and scathing. The book is of satisfying length — it grew out of magazine articles. At greater length,,. Wolfe’s attitude and style can become annoying. This book lasts just long enough to be delectable without the taste becoming cloyed. Whether it will jolt the architects themselves is not; clear. “Too clever by half. . .” they may mutter and go bn giving the public buildings they think the public should have. — John Wilson.