Determinism

Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite.

-Charles Jencks, The new paradigm in architecture: the language of post-modernism

One of the implications of Jencks famous pronouncement on the death of modern architecture is that of what might be termed architectural determinism. The growing problem of substandard public housing in the 1960s—underfunded, caught in political wrangling at the highest levels, and rife with mismanagement—could be boiled down to a simple problem of poor design. Jencks critique of arid landscaping and crime ridden hallways was linked to CIAM and Le Corbusier. "Good form was to lead to good content, or at least good conduct; the intelligent planning of abstract space was to promote healthy behavior".[1] While ostensibly denying the power of architecture to accomplish such feats, he later cites Oscar Newman's Defensible Space, which is conversely a claim that architecture is capable of promoting unhealthy behaviors.[2] Not mentioned were the deep budget cuts and political pressure the architects had to contend with while they eschewed ideological views ascribed to them.

Jencks aside, there is a larger problem within and outside of architecture in attributing certain powers to architectural space. In the case of Pruitt-Igoe, the notion that a style of architecture had graver effects on the people of St. Louis than deindustrialization, poverty, and racism, obscured these real problems and deflected criticism away from the political and economic institutions that were to blame.[3] In accepting the blame architects were free to offer new architectural solutions to solve these architectural problems, thus the problem of architectural determinism remained unresolved.

Orthodoxy

The idea of orthodoxy is something of a perennial struggle in architecture. Coming from the Greek orthos meaning right or true, and doxa meaning belief or opinion, it has long been used in reference to conformance to religious creeds. A slightly expanded definition: of, pertaining to, or conforming to the approved form of any doctrine, philosophy, ideology, etc.[1] In the history of the modern movement and indeed going back further, there is a propensity to frame debate on architecture in terms of right belief, if one reads the various manifestos and statements.

From the outset architecture is a philosophical endeavor side-by-side with material concerns, thus the way we perceive and conceive of architecture is always the subject of appraisal and revision. The effect of solidifying ideas into an orthodox canon serves as a means to transmit and teach these ideas in a 'correct' form, but also serves to cut off further inquiry and frames other views as false. The debate over Modernism illustrates the pitfalls of orthodoxy, not only in Modernism itself but also in the new schools of thought that crystallized into new orthodoxies.

I think there is enough to chew here for an additional post... In the meantime, I'm sure I am missing some further details and hope to find them in the comments. Rule number one, if there is a book or article out there with relevance to the topic, I'd love to hear about it!

1. "orthodox." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 20 Oct. 2011. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/orthodox>.