Spiro Kostof Lecture

in 1978 and this specific purpose in this creation is to bring together design state fairs across the campus at home different colleges part of the purpose of Lestrange what has resulted be welcome pointed out this is approve transformation these one separately into took advantage of the opportunity her gallery you saw some of the results of that effort at this university we have seen how quickly some programs have approved their national and regional reputation because Marysol when we create we've seen how the quality of teaching quality of collaborations with Silva their focus on the practice I'm your college your faculty and staff your students your alumni and friends are all to be commended for their vision an advance recognition of the benefit tonight is really my honor to introduce a dear friend screw a corsage Sparrow was not educated in the humanities in his native Turkey he came to Yale where received his ph.d and taught for several years in art history and since 1965 he has taught at the University of California Berkeley and I guess I really got to know him almost when I was a visiting professor at birthday I got to do that for one semester and when anybody goes to Berkeley the first device you get his go sit on on sparrows class on Rome he's well-known there as for his teaching for the intellectual excitement and drama of his teaching and it was well worth sitting in a non cross-eyed one time in addition to teaching he's also served as the laundry this kind of the president of the Society of architectural historians member in the MIT visiting committee in the School of Architecture and planning the panelists for the general research program in the National Endowment of the humanities a member of the editorial boards for the design book review for places and for Annie for the architectural history foundation the most recently is known to all of us as the host and the author of the PBS series on television five-part series on design vary by design since 1965 oh he's written and edited a series of a number of books in his field and I think that I want to read to you the titles of these books because I think that they I think it's interesting in 1965 the first book was in order to the orthodox baptistry of Roseanna the second book in 72 was called the case of god the monastic environment of byzantine cappadocia in 1973 he wrote the third Rome traffic and glory traffic and bullring in 1977 he wrote a book called the architect chapters in the history of the profession they actually added advice in 1978 he wrote the Emperor and the doochie in art and architecture in the service of politics and in 1985 history of architecture settings and rituals it seems to me that even the titles of these works tells for me kind of the story of a development in the story and perhaps started out somewhat traditional traditionalist if you writing about temples and the special palaces and he turned in overtime to a student of the way that these architectural works and urban works are interwoven in with the fabric of everyday buildings in the city and also its social and political situation and this inclusive approach and approach to places monuments or artifacts in the culture is what I think makes them so important as a lecturer just to return for a minute to the last book I mentioned which many students he'll probably know as a textbook the history of architecture I'd like to leave just for a second from that was you in the New York Times Book Review written by Langham Alonso to mr. Kosloff architecture is a social act the material theater of human activity he does write burning leon architecture style but it is only one but this is only one of his considerations his broader theme is the embodiment of any architecture of the culture in any architecture of the culture excuse me economy politics technology and ideas at the time in place in which the architecture appeared this is where I think spirit was the exactly perfect historian to come and lead off our and I'd like to help you ask you to help me welcome it's very possible shake thank you Michael Greeks are short you know this by now let's see if I can work this around to my purposes little violence probably helps well it won't work that's fine thank you ladies and gentlemen I'm obviously honored I have to hook this on to where I'm not very technological I'm told to do these things give me a second this is embarrassing there we are I'm honored to be asked to be part of your celebrations I teach in a college called the College of Environmental Design and we take special pride that this phrase invented we are told by our great past leader William Wooster was probably first used by us and again it was a matter of coming together under some stress to bring a disparate and very independent Apartments into one new building and of course all of us to recognize that the arts indeed have to work together they cannot do their salat or solitary incestuous business all by themselves in a corner therefore I think it's fitting probably that I should come to a sister organization that had the same idea and program and also they are flattered to hear what Michael has to say about my work usually these wonderful introductions make your life sound much more important than it really is in this case however I would like to dwell a little bit those books you mentioned because they're germane to my argument this evening I in fact started as an art historian in an art history department quite separate from the architecture department at Yale and moved to Berkeley intentionally I wasn't forced out of Yale I want that established for the record because of a variety of reasons a run of these reasons was that I wanted to teach aspiring professionals it seemed to me that teaching in an art history department one really taught already committed people liberal arts students who thought Artie Speer was another one of these nice subjects to have and it went along with the rest of the liberal arts education I wanted to see how professional students who are not necessarily beholden to these humanistic disciplines but who want to see some kind of relevance of all this history to their practice I wanted to see what that challenge would be like but secondly a secondary reason was that I felt rather uncomfortable with the notion that here I was teaching the history of art in a situation where the implication was that art is really something separate from architecture there might be historians of architecture too in other words we would take a building that of course had the architecture and the arts on its walls on its ceilings and somehow divorce the two as if we were empowered by somebody to decimate a total work turf interests now when I came to here to Berkeley I found out I was expected to do the same only from the other corner I was allowed to talk about buildings the shares as much as I wanted to but I wasn't supposed to touch the art because there was an art history department next door and they did that now the reason why this seemed bothersome to me is that throughout history until really fairly recently as history goes the arts were inseparable it was clear to me that if I can have the first slides which I have to do myself bear with me I'm really paleo technological and I I do the best I can already I'm too too ahead I'm sorry I have to start let's see if I can go there that's the first Oh beautiful thank you so much some kind soul that is doing this for me the notion was that I couldn't see really how you could study a Byzantine church for example and I'm reminding you of it by showing you the Church of some marks in Venice on the left or a Romanesque Abbey Church like the one on the right without merging architectural and art considerations in your discussion this is not only because the sculpture and the mosaic work in these buildings is in fact literally inseparable from the physical construct you can't take them out they're built in but also because it is precisely this artwork that informed the mill the building that told us in fact what it meant to its users in the case of the Byzantine church often you might say that the architectural form was merely the skeleton so a church approved hierarchy of images that costly compromise after a centuries bloody civil war it is not quite credible to us today but back then in the 9th and 10th century AD a hundred year war was fought to decide whether images will or will not appear in the Byzantine church and once the images had one after many thousands died for this cause there was a very strict order in which they were allowed to appear on various Heights and various spaces in the church in other words it was impossible to look at a Byzantine church merely as an architectural artefact a building of matter and Technology and spaces without realizing that it was merely an excuse to create the skeleton for this hierarchy and similarly again it is impossible to look at a Romanesque Church such as the one you see on the right and not realize that the very act of entering it was in noble and given significance by the very precise program of sculpture over the entrance which separate did those who would be blessed from those who would be damned my own work in fact and that's the autobiographical bit that I have to bother you with sorry I'm accustomed to pointing in somebody changes I have to do there we are started with this unprepossessing little building in Ravenna which Michael mentioned a simple brick exterior you wouldn't pay the time of day really as you went by and then an absolutely incredibly resplendent interior of mosaic which was inside the very purpose of this distinction being that you came from the material everyday world to enter the stage of your baptism a building whose inside you saw once in your lifetime and where the very placement of the baptism of Christ in the door over the interior of the church over the font enhanced and made significant the act of baptism for you down below my second book in fact stretched this idea to a much larger canvas the churches that Michael mentioned are in Anatolia in present a true Turkey their rock-cut monasteries in an extraordinarily eerie landscape which we used to call lunar before we found out what the moon really look like and there you see again the effort of anonymous monks whose very livelihood whose very life was dependent on hiding in these rocks nonetheless feeling the obligation of giving them civilised meaning religious fervour with this painful reconstruction of a pictorial scheme such as that done in the capital of Constantinople and then again when I wrote about whoa modern Rome later on it struck me again how under Mussolini in fascist Rome and elaborate conceit to prove the parallelism between the first emperor of ancient Rome Augustus and the Emperor of modern Rome Mussolini and elaborate conceit was Donald in terms of urbanism architecture and the painting and the and the figural Arts in our Piazza such as this one in Rome where with a placement of fascist buildings around the mausoleum of Augustus with the doing of modern art fascist art that will bring out the long continuous history of the Imperial idea in Italy with all of these devices clearly a propagandistic program was being installed here in the heart of the ancient city of Rome in other words all this thing impressed upon me over the years and I come to you therefore impressed with the long tradition of decorating our buildings with the absolute imperative of looking at art and architecture together and I come also curious about why this imperative seems to have declined in the second quarter of our own century in recent decades and perhaps a little anxious about its future now since the future is best left to futurists and futurologists and visionaries my task as a historian is to highlight the past really the issue through past instance and that true derive what our message you must since a survey of the collaboration of the Arts through history would take a semester at least not to say a year I will propose here with your patients to look briskly at five case studies are selected with some purpose from across the centuries to make other point clear to you at the end these will be the Parthenon in the ancient city of Athens in the 5th century BC the palazzo comunale the communal palace the city hall in Siena in the 13th 14th century AD st. Peter's in Rome in the 17th century AD and to us examples United States examples the Boston Public Library the premiere monument of what we used to call the American Renaissance and finally a Rockefeller Center one of the last programs of public art in this country before the disfavor of academics ISM and the triumph of modernism had combined effectively to still a means of popular communication between what we build and who we would like to believe we are to come to my first example and the we'll be very brisk I know they are familiar to you in the month of the hecatomb pay on of every year our own July August in the high hot summer of Attica the citizens of ancient Athens put together a great festival for their eponymous goddess Athena to celebrate her birthday several days this festival went on gains and cultural events and then a daybreak of the final day splendid procession called the Panathenaic procession through the marketplace they moved of a city and out the acropolis which you see here carrying a garment to be worn by the goddess changed every year during this procession the so called pet loss the cavalry went first the horseman of Athens the elders with olive branches young men with the or oil jars that were used in the rituals sacrificial animals and then maidens carrying this garment which had been woven during the year by selected women of the city the entire city then doing honor to their virgin goddess both a goddess of the homegrown hearth and the armed warrior maiden who had saved them from so many disasters including the fairly recent Persian invasions that she had helped her City defend against the goddess then who was known under two guises in the Acropolis as the warrior goddess in the Parthenon which you see here peeking through the columns on the right and in a smaller temple the Artyom as the home goddess dressed in that humble cloak holding a bale of grain and oil our this goddess then are being honored on the hilltop with an entirely new program in the fifth century because the Persians had the old sanctuary a program that was under the direction of a politician Pericles and under one sculptor the sculptor Phidias now the point is important here ensuring that back then in the fifth century BC in such an elaborate urban program one person was designated as artistic director a person was to be in charge of everything buildings and art each building of course under a separate architect many sculptors and painters working but one overseeing mind one overseeing a vision all this knowledge about the goddess about her activities about how she had sought her uncle Poseidon to gain possession of Attica he with his Trident and his horses she with her olive tree about how she had hoped the city of Athens defeat the Persians all this knowledge being common to all the citizens of Athens public art was not supposed to be novel in subject matter or a surprise but merely an affirmation of commonly held beliefs a subtle commentary upon these beliefs so in fact as the procession would have climbed they would have seen totally familiar images on the west pediment of the Parthenon the great battle between Athena and her uncle being represented a myth we were quite familiar with down below in the matter peas emblematic figures of centaurs and Lapiths another mythical subject of a wedding where beast men attacked the wedding party raped the women and so on the evil in us the wicked the animal in us in the noble tried together here interlinked adversaries the contest court in mid-battle in it we would be able of course to recognize recently Street this is not formally written for us we read it in our myths here are the Greeks and the Persians clearly the Persians are enemies the wild people the animals us the noble caught in mid-battle in the sembly form and then as we move a little closer perhaps for the first time a real surprised us on the temple the very procession that is going down below now shown on a frieze wrapping itself around the building there again the horsemen are Athens conquered never as the sources say there again those of us who do other tours in the procession the oil jar bearers are the leaders of the sacrificial animals that wonderful gesture are the heifer lifting its head as if in anticipation of what is to come to it and there are two in a space between the exterior row of columns and the rules of the temple where the frieze is the same columnar shapes reflected in the maidens who paired care carry the peplos the new garment that we are going to replace the old one on our goddess in her little temple showing her as the goddess of the hearth now well this I think stresses a few things that makes our first case important first that art in ancient Athens was a public matter it was a public necessity for the Greek of the Classical period and secondly that a strong identity a cohesive sense of community in Athens made it possible to use public art as a form of self-expression a medium that worked with the land the buildings and our memory to endow us with a recognition of ourselves and give us that comfort of fellows now the two things public art and a sense of community must work together must come together I think are necessary together for this kind of moving testimonial of a time and a place we have examples in history where tight communities like Athens did not feel this greek urgency for public expression through the visual arts the covenant to towns of colonial New England I think make the point it was in fact considered not a total proper to have a display of public art whatever art one had was in the privacy of one's own house and there are cases we have in fact are many examples many modern examples where there is a lot of public art all around but there being no tight-knit purposeful Association of people to make this public art edifying to make a clear-headed use of it it seems merely ornamental and not consequential I want to argue later on that this is the case with the modern city by and large places like New York and Los Angeles perhaps even much smaller cities than these there is so little common purpose so little sense that the people come with the place that it is hard to find themes of a binding self recognition like those that were orchestrated by the sculptor Phidias in his vast crew of artists and craftsmen for the limestone citadel of the great goddess whose name Athena bore proudly sorry Athens bore proudly this leads me to my second case study moving another all 13 14th centuries are what are 15 centuries for history this match between the public art for artistic reinforcement of a community's traditional values and future hopes and a society of a size and structure to make this public vision are possible we are still in Athens let's move on here and this a certain study my slide probably self through I'm sure it will be rescued in a minute deals with the city-states of Tuscany in the later Middle Ages in fact that period sale of itself as being a revival of the ancient classical notion of the police or city-state remember shalmar tells question to Dante would it not be worse for man on earth if he were not a citizen or fragile Donald are evaldo preety preaching in Santa Maria Novella in Florence the Lord city he said key widows sounds almost like love Caritas and through love our cities built since men delight in living together this notion then of the ancient city-state where the people are what make the city well the community is the city this is being returned to in the later Middle Ages in northern Italy and it is here that we find again lay writers using the word city as implying an attempt to reach a just human society and the role of the citizen as being that of one who shoulders public responsibilities to ensure self-government justice and Concord at the same time the city itself is considered a work of art the frame that houses not only good government but also beauty order in fact in the physical world is equivalent with good government with a good society with a just society so we see like Sidious in ancient Greece again individual masters at large guiding for the city government the city forum the public buildings and the art people like Arno for de cambio and righto at Florence which you see now on the screen and people like Lorenzo my Tania tour Viet Oh who has appointed we here in 1310 as the city's universalis coupled Maggie stare the universal headmaster or rather head craftsman of the city now this return to the concept of the city shaped to represent our own communal hopes and beliefs and of the art from the small-scale public art to the largest as being a reinforcement of the same beliefs we see I think most clearly in one of these cities in Tuscany namely Siena which is my second case I'm sure Siena is familiar to you the very form itself representative our long struggle for the city to reach its own independence there on one hilltop you see the prior Lord the Bishop of Siena with his Cathedral and Palace and there down below in the hillside in the hollow of the company space of our own firm the beacon of our own self-governance the tool tower of the City Hall pitting itself against the prior tradition of the feudal lordship of the bishop and everywhere there in the late Middle Ages when we have asserted our independence the notion of combining art architecture and urbanism to make this message patent can be read here for example in this wonderful harbouring hollow of that of the compo our own city hall proudly proclaiming our independence and find it a celebration our our own acts doings and beliefs this time a little more literally expressed than in Athens in Athens we would understand them through our myths here rather we see the paintings inside the City Hall as being a little more specific there are religious paintings which are not showing you this is taken for granted obviously but there are also celebrations of actual events a public record of the city's military victories it's great generals shown through the medium of great artists in the city for example here on the left is greed or eat the four Yano between two very specific places that we would recognize of Sienese territory Monty Massey and Sacha Forte which he had freed from siege and we learn in fact that the commune had paid the painter simona martini to undertake a journey to visit these fortresses so that he could paint them accurately then side by side with these very specific recent historical events allegories of government of good government and bad government its aims and means here we are see the great name of Ambrosia Lorenzetti are making enormous paintings for the four walls of the main room the main meeting hall in the city hall the picture you have on the right a little detail of an allegory of justice and the common good replete with subtitles so we'll get the message the rule of common good flanked by the cardinal virtues of fortitude and prudence on one side temperance and justice on the other and then reclining the side fortitude peace whom you see here between the roller and temperance is the Aristotelian virtue of magnanimity above the rulers the theological virtues of faith love and charity on the other worlds the good government fresco showing the city bustling the countryside peaceful and fruitful under the figure of security who holds a scroll and begins our saying the following inscription without fear let each man freely walk and walking let everyone our soul and soul are then a much damaged tyranny fresco showing the opposite of what happens when you don't have good government war treason fury discord and Ford all of them labeled for us are here a merchant robbed there an instant strangled to see why it is that we are in a good city with a good government now clearly you will recognize the differences with Athens we're at a slightly different point of my argument here here we have a very complicated program it isn't easily understood by everyone as the athenian program on the parthenon was somebody or some persons of higher education familiar with such arcane matters as to mystic Aristotelian ism and things of this kind are as modified by early 14th century Italian jurists was responsible for writing out this elaborate allegorical program maleic mornings of that educational level we haven't understood and appreciated the complexities of the artistic program but the common people were not left out and that is my point something out of the paintings too could be gotten by them even if they couldn't fathom the entire a range of complicated meat meanings that were embedded in the program first of all the common people were recognized that this was indeed their city in their program Larry Santa Ana where during her dress there is my house this is the third one on the left in other words the background the people are actually inhabiting the spaces of these allegories are again us are the people who are in the streets of siena whose houses in fact provide the detail for the painting itself and finally I think even if these were not enough to bind us to this program the recognition that it is our own artists who made this the pride in our own folk in our own sons this will in fact be the tradition that continues to this day in Siena where every Sienese a child will be very proud that its ancestry resides in fact in these frescoes in these paintings in 13th century our Siena many centuries before the present generations were born it is precisely this sense of continuity of our own talent invested in our own City that produces that bond that brings people from all corners to admire this very local event isn't it odd that with such a very specific program both in Athens and in Siena somehow instead of having provincial local and insignificant events they rise precisely because of their specificity into a realm of universal meaning so today we flock to these places to see them again now this point is important because we often think that propaganda art and certainly much of Siena's art was propaganda as was Athenian art is slanted and biased it is a one-sided glorification of the people who are involved at the time we say of allegorical art that it is not accessible to the public and hence it is in fact elitist we forget that if public art is good or convincing if it survives as a worthwhile masterpiece some strongly shaped vision it will long outlive the precise messages of its propaganda or its abstruse iconography if it is bad art or flaccid or inflationary it will remain bad flaccid or inflationary whether we understand the message clearly or not we therefore have to admit in the end I think that good just societies don't automatically produce good art whatever the earnestness of their patronage and conversely public art with perfectly objectionable messages assyrians destroying a city for example or perfectly objectionable rulers the public portrait head of Nero for example may be quite good art and therefore in a funny way timeless so this is ultimately what must be stressed the draw public art engenders the enduring affection it is capable of fostering the public pride that it might encapsulate the service it might perform as the repository of memories of past events or the setting of present ones this is what is important rather than any very specific historic and perhaps propagandistic message in its initial original form the talking statues of Rome for example are one such found element of Roman society and even the Victor Emmanuel monument for those of you who has seen it surely one of the most brutal ugly monuments in the history of art has a special bond to the people of Rome because are being embedded in their own history in their own memories because it being a pleasant thing to walk around in admire the stones touch them and so on Rome in fact I think to me is probably the quintessential city for a discussion of public art remember the Baroque period in Rome which is slowly my way of slipping into my third example remember challenge of the counter-reformation one of the biggest challenges against the established Catholic Church the challenge of Protestantism and the exuberant celebration of the church triumphant having put behind itself or so I thought this revolution the celebration of Roman supremacy the authority of the Vicar of Christ which is expressed in so much a baroque art the baroque mastery oversight and prior incident the sense of theater inside and outside buildings buildings buckling and curving well the arts being used in the inside materials manipulated to create sensations and experiences entire public spaces are collecting their garbage through the centuries little bits of buildings and moldings and this and that being given a new unity by one single gesture an obelisk in the middle a great fountain flowing and you how many of us really remember understand or care that each one of these seemingly improvised programs had what the Baroque period called a pancetta a very specific program of meaning that had to do with a specific reigning Pope who commissioned the work of art with his seals with Christian dogma perhaps with the universal imagery of the church we may not remember or know these things but then and now common people still could derive a lot of pleasure with this splash of water and marble with this manipulation and orchestration of public spaces with this combination of all the arts to create what the Germans called again some comes back a total work of art that embraces and harbors us for example my third case study is of course the drama of st. Peter's I don't think you have to be a Catholic it may even help if you're not to appreciate the tremendous orchestration of an entire segment of city organism architecture sculpture painting to get us through a sequence a culmination and a climax to see for example us in this piazza which started with something of a jumble as you can see here what Bernini had to work with and I think I have a pointer that I must use at least once was this sort of thing in the 1630s and 40s splendidly finished church which took a hundred years or so to do a prior to bringing an obelisk and putting it in the middle of this nowhere place the Vatican Palace not particularly tidy a series of cliff-like blocks a law a row of our office buildings for the Vatican offices and really that is it and one fountain that was here that was hoping to get another fountain on the other side and here is of course their ninis culmination of this program the combination of the church the path of which we come to it across the river the Vatican Palace and these buildings with this enormous Lea powerful gesture of what he called the arms of the church embracing catholics agnostics and heretics alike and he is imagining that there will be a third arm here which would briefly detain you before you came into the splendid space and the demolition of these buildings to create an axial spine in fact a program that was not accomplished until this century neither was the third arm accomplished but enough was there so that when you came as you were intended to do from the thickness of the core of the historic city to the one bridge that then led across to the Borgo the Vatican area the drama began already you are confronted by two Saints Peter and Paul the great twins of Christian Rome are Peter with his book Paul with his sword are greeting you as you enter you will see them again at the end of our sequence at the entrance to st. Peter's to remind you that the sequence is beginning to close then the bridges itself is not left untouched it is flanked by angels who carry the symbols of Christ's passion the nails the the instruments for the flogging the crown of thorns and so on greeting us in a processional war way across to the hulking mass of the coasts of Santangelo the great medieval castle formerly the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian that makes the crossing into the Vatican territory we there turn left and proceed now since bernini's great access was not done for a series of rather narrow streets coming either this way or that way - what presumably would have stopped us if the third arm were first built temporarily holding us there in anticipation constricting us and then releasing us into the splendid ample space seeming infinitely more ample because of our constriction as we came along where the floor begins to dip toward the center where the great axis will follow to slow down by the counter axis of the obelisk and that now the two matching fountains and where the meaning of this program is only complete when you see it of course filled with people the thousands and thousands who came to get the blessing will be at or be by the Pope either on regular Sunday services or in the great feast days of the year the entire rather overwhelming a complex then is meaningful only when the community when we are inside it when people are inside it and there this cross axis with a little temple France are stressing the middle of these arms the obelisk and the two fountains would slow us down enough so that we proceed now toward our goal a little piazza climbing uphill toward the facade of the building the whole embrace or by more than a hundred and fifty statues we really don't know quite who they are they're obviously Saints they're people who deserve to be up there the whole point is that it is a concentrated ribbon something that ties together these incredibly expensive architectural gestures and bringing us into this inner court which will be our crowding to get into st. Peter's and they're confronted by stairs that simply cascade down toward us there we are trying to get into the church and there they are are meeting us like ripples of real heart of marble water and we work against them we see again Peter and Paul greeting us now at the entrance of the facade again with a sword and the keys are to paradise and then we squeeze through of a gate or a series of them into a corridor the art never ceases on the left of which as we enter is the equestrian statue of Constantine the first Christian Emperor and on the right in the stair that leads in fact to the Vatican Palace are the statue equestrian statue of Charlemagne the first crowned emperor of the rest both of them extremely important for the power of the Bishop of Rome in history and then through the doors of the vestibule that we are in to the vastness of the Basilica where now our attention is pulled directly by light as well as by a fixture that that stresses the axis at the end of the Basilica this strange light-hearted Barbican which in fact is tall as tall as a four-story building as a Palazzo Farnese a and has foundations because it's very heavy to carry in fact it is made to seem by the miracles of art to be a little stand over the great altar of st. Peters under whom of course under which of course a st. Peter himself is buried we proceed to this area helped by the arts and there finally we are at the goal of our pilgrimage with a great Barbican of Bernini in the middle our eye is led upward by these twisting columns so that we can read the great inscription and the meaning of it all you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church Peter up above Peter below us and still the climax doesn't stop we have to look behind it where Peter's throne the throne of the bishops of Rome the cathedra Petri is lifted by four Saints - from the east - from the West telling you the universality of the church and of course in a resplendent a fact of light at the top in alabaster the holy spirit the Dove of the holy spirit now I submit that you really don't have to be Catholic or devoted follower of the Jesuitical arguments of the 16th and 17th century to enjoy this incredible demonstration of the union of the arts of urbanism and architecture and all the figural arts in a zestful orchestration of a total City now these trains of orchestrations of course you are aware are easy for autocracy paper warm well-run boss gives the order and has the money there sigh the Paris of the Baron Osmond and Napoleon the third in the nineteenth century or at least they're possible where there is a centralized vision where the commune believes in something and everybody can join in this belief even if the belief is something as universal and simple as the love of Christ or even if it is our the glorification of kinship or something in other words a confident national purpose a desire to create the semblance of unity a competitive grandeur in relation to all their brilliant cultures that you wish to emulate or equal or surpass now in America I think we have had one such extraordinary moment and this is the moment that we often call the American Renaissance which love lasted from roughly 1876 or so to World War one there was a unified vision it may be a little embarrassing today to talk about manifest destiny to talk about a unified country after the horrors of the Civil War but it is what held us together the national mood was one that rented unity in fact uniformity there was a kind of lofty idealism that began to show itself in our public buildings in an embrace Minh tabla cart that we had never shown before in the colonial period and the earlier decades of the 19th century there was an attempt to compete and surpass Europe in our monumentality and the marvel is that we created a movement that is legitimately cold I think the Renaissance where the arts flourished as perhaps never before stained glass in sculpture and painting we created all this by persuasion we are not a country of princes we don't have a pope or a Louis quatorze to tells us to tell us to will the creation of an entire city form and its art we are much like I think a asin's or Siena had been we have to persuade ourselves of a common purpose a common goal and it is precisely this marvel of the American Renaissance this sweeping revival of the Arts in this country which was accomplished by a rather elite core of new york-based artists architects and craftsmen some rich folk are they persuaded to become civic minded but also I think a general desire for the betterment of our environment with Civic Improvement society's Association City Art Commission's all working together regional museums expositions societies of artists such as the Society of American artists founded in 1877 or the Art Students League of New York II in 75 or the architectural League of New York in 1881 art magazines like American architect and building news the art review at separate all of these expressing this desire for us to put ourselves on the map of Western civilization with our art imagine this spectacle of Monument Avenue in Richmond Virginia which you see here this terrific orchestration again of urbanism of public art well coming from a desire for a unified vision and all created miraculously not through autocratic government but through the devices of democracy that linked us to Athens and the communes of late medieval Tuscany but the question for us remained a little bit ambiguous what should we represent in this new Civic urbanism what would the subjects be that would Express for us who we are the way those good government frescoes did first for Siena or the great program of Athena did for the Parthenon well it wasn't really very easy for us to come to those kinds of programs are the great precedent for this Renaissance is in fact Boston Public Library in my fourth example are in Boston in the 1880s which you tensional II began as a collaborative work of artists right from the entrance door the twin statues flanking the main door by béla Pratt showing science and art and then also the building statues and memorials of heroes and Patriots murals etc we brought in foreign people like to leadership on to do paintings we brought in our own best talents but when you look at the subjects when you read their titles they are subjects like pedido servants the muses of inspiration hailed the spirit the harbinger of light not a very easy subject to warm up to you know if you are using the library or Edwin Austin Abbey's the quest of the Holy Grail or John Singer Sargent's the history of religion well something has now changed a little bit in our modern period from Athens from Siena from Rome we have a vision we have the wheel we have galvanized the arts we have made patrons of robber barons we have trained artists in European academies to do it but we don't know really what to say income people seeing themes representing Homer or the history of painting or the evolution of civilization in the Boston library in the Library of Congress in Washington which you see now now here much of this is that great national obsession we had and still have to show that we belong in the roll call of high cultures that we are young but we're the air the millennial cultural bounty of the old world so ours was an edifying effort of the upper classes to make us Libre as a nation proud of our place in the scheme of things why are the citizens of a world state but perhaps in the process depriving us of that identity with public art that was there in baroque Rome in late medieval Siena empirically in Athens here is the muralist edwin blas field in 1913 the names of public buildings are the century marks of the ages wherever the footprints of the spirit of civilization have rested most firmly some milestone of human progress has risen to be called the Parthenon or not a dom or java style of the louvre and to teach from within and without by proportion and scale by picture and statue the history of the people who built it to celebrate patriotism inculcate morals and to stand as the visible concrete symbol of high endeavour all very true but a little puzzling for us the distancing of the people from the meanings and joys of the arts I think is a problem we had begun to encounter immediately on embracing high culture and high art that is the way they spoke in those days just as in this quote like graduation day addresses but the movement was long committed and serious the products extraordinarily fine and at least superbly competent if nothing else so why did they get to seem amusing in the end and even a little embarrassing today why is the world not rushing to see the frescoes of the Boston Public Library the way they rushed to Versailles and Assisi I think this is an enormous topic obviously is it because these our paintings and sculptures and urban programs of the American Renaissance to universal to be particular as opposed to Siena and Athens and Rome which were particularly nuf to give universal meaning is it because they're too pompous and righteous to be really fun the way Rome is without our understanding the abstruse iconography that the Pope's iconographer had had planned for us are they really too far removed from a common person's daily concerns one of the War World War one and the toppling of the old order does this have anything to do with the fact that these things now seem terribly distant not very engaging perhaps admirable but not really God love objects at any rate between the war and the rise of a new phase of public art in America that of the agencies are Franklin Delano Roosevelt the idealism of the American Renaissance was gone and with it that surprisingly harmonious vision shared by all branches of art was also gone by the time we reach my final case Rockefeller Center we have something that properly defines our dilemma we have now monuments of a corporate urbanism not a civic one of a private public realm were presented by banks and skyscrapers and so forth not by public libraries and city halls and county courthouses notable this new public art for its attempt to again to have a collaboration for the chance it provided to painters and sculptors to experiment with materials and new processes with aluminum and photo murals etc but the confusion about themes about the subject of our vision is almost entirely complete whom to invite what to tell them to represent what the purpose of it all was at least mr. Rockefeller was honest about it when an attempt was made to secure something from modern artists for the Rockefeller Center and Sullivan didn't respond I don't blame them imagine asking Picasso Matisse to illustrate a theme such as man's ultimate destiny depends on his acceptance of the lessons taught him close on 2,000 years ago can you imagine Picasso responding to this well anyway when they did not even have the courtesy to respond to mr. Rockefeller he wrote for advertising purposes I felt that Matisse and Picasso had the greatest drawing value and irrespective of my feeling about their work which wasn't much I felt it was highly important to secure them in other words the chief client has really no great conviction about the value of artistic independence or the integrity of artistic genius he has no great convinced conviction about the values he wants to celebrate in fact he hires a philosopher from the University of Southern California Hartley bill Alexander to work out a theme for this whole complex what should we represent he has no idea he wants to pay somebody to tell him and this man from the University of Southern California comes up with a subject although far bore man the Builder and then when Rockefeller isn't too keen on this frontiers of time how about that well JDR zone academics suggests things that he likes better these are things like the contemporary world or America in the pageant of civilization the final theme is finally settled to be new frontiers and the march of civilization so a private client in a corporate vision of America with a made-up subject that has to have a committee to be decided upon because it isn't obvious it isn't gripping it's not going to involve us all creates this lot of marvelous congregation of all the Arts in downtown Manhattan where now we really most of us have nothing to fall back on except the fun things there we don't respond to the quest for the fountain of eternal youth or intelligence awakening mankind but what we do understand is Lee Laurie's Atlas tall man ships what was called at the time tawdry prometheus in the lower plaza when we watch skaters way there was an attempt to make some significant art in Rockefeller Center to tell us perhaps what our time was really all about or perhaps an aspect of it to try to bond us with some social message Diego Rivera's great murals man at the crossroads of course mr. Rockefeller had destroyed it was much too specific much too realistic much too close perhaps to the truth Lenny stared you for God's sake from the walls of Rockefeller Center so this was not appropriate we took advantage of retreating behind intelligence awakening mankind and other such Universal but vapid themes with which no single community can be expected to link up so we enjoy Lee Laurie's Atlas we enjoy the tawdry Prometheus perhaps their because they are the most exposed perhaps in the best most public locations but I think more likely because the camp they're really bad enough to be good and because we really have a yearning to have public spaces people given some totems in human form totems that can do things we can't like lift a globe or fly anyway it's all really very unsatisfactory despite this concerted effort to produce a kazama-kun spark it fizzles it is not Siena it is not the Parthenon it is not simply ders it is not even at this stage in the thirties of this century even the Library of Congress or the Boston Public Library what happened why did we lose the urgency and flair for public art that's what I'm sure you would want to answer for yourself but in the short run several obvious reasons may be stated I think the first one we have to mention is that with the thirties and the defeat of the fascist and Nazi empires the public art that they saw powers for their propaganda the bloated rhetoric and bombastic heroism of these environments became emotionally intolerable after World War two after the horrors of that war it became clear that especially after forty five we would not allow ourselves to show recognizable human figures in the public sphere to do murals whose subjects one can read or perhaps Intuit 200 symbolic programs because they came to be associated with totalitarian regimes there is one aspect one reason of post-world War two divorce of recognizable public art figure art from the public realm the second reason I think we may cite is that of course modernism the modern style became triumphant after World War two whose aesthetic both hated literary programs of new rules and reliefs and made it physically impossible for them to exist because of these glass envelopes and the curtain wall at the same time the triumph of this general acceptance of the what is called the International style among the corporate clientele whose public relation needs were now served by being modernist this triumph obviously negated even the kind of lofty idealistic and incomprehensible public art of Rockefeller Center instead we chose now corporations especially to go for an abstract art instead of an art of content there was a reticence now to say anything explicit so a nice abstract bronze form or a tube or something that could be nothing was preferred now I want to quickly stress that I'm not suggesting for a minute that abstract art is meaningless and that public art has meaning only if you recognize the figures we have of course a great example in recent American history were a terrifically abstract and yet very meaningful public monument found its way in our most sacred stage of nationalism the mall in Washington DC what I am saying however is that much of the abstract art that began to be used in modernist and violence was a kind of how shall I say perhaps cop-out a kind of attempt not to say or offender to say anything that might offend anybody a kind of abstracted neutralized anemic public thing that of course got to be placed in equally abstracted neutralized spaces that not many people used I think additionally we have to stress that after World War Two the phenomenal spread of visual images of another kind eroded the need for committed public art I am of course speaking of television on the one hand which pictures our trials and triumphs in such abundant visual detail that it becomes difficult to build a case for celebrating them publicly with monumental art but also I'm stressing monumental public images like Johnnie Walker walking on top of a building on Times Square or the giant billboards on the roads trivializing the potency of truly public messages messages of community and/or vaneless and tradition and social continuity so that a giant revolving bucket of chicken replaces replaces the prometheus statue or Atlas rava carrying the globe on Rockefeller Center which may have been incomprehensible but at least it implied it was a little more serious than a thigh what all this really may be begging the question all this may be begging the question the these are enormously complex reasons why we have not been able to sustain in modern times the sharp cohesiveness of a classical Athens or Sienna under the line or the broad sweeping continuities of baroque Rome and these reasons go back at least as far as the Industrial Revolution if I had another hour which I know you don't want me to have I could are getting to this a little bit but to put it very bluntly modern life has slowly lost not in this country only but also broad the urgency for public art because I think it has lost the sense of public ritual during much of the 19th century and into the 20th century remember that the closest we come today to the Panathenaic procession is st. Patrick's Day parades the best we can do along the lines of the brilliant Flair of baroque Rome is international expositions with revolving restaurants we have lost the urgency of public art because we have ceased to be caring about the quality of public life long before the present we have made a clear separation in America between our residential fabric which is the suburbs and the central business district which is devoid of life after 5:00 p.m. public art went with a public sector the public sector deluded of people except those who work during the day and then go here at night there is no purpose for having these statues and paintings hanging around for whom for what what are they supposed to represent furthermore in America we had a further problem which is another law on topic and that is that with the invention of the skyscraper in the 80s of the past century almost a hundred years ago we created a privatized public realm as I suggested of banks and corporate buildings all of them to individual interests which began to overshadow the true public ground the 18th and early 19th century the churches the state houses and so on which was the largest buildings around and around which everything else had its own hierarchical scale if you look at Trinity Church as Henry James saw after a 20-year absence when he returned to New York in 1904 what had happened to his church in the context of New York you will recognize that the skyscraper city in fact confused altogether the sense of public realm when a department store is fully the equal in scale and ornament to our churches and government buildings something is lost in the expression of a public realm which was there in the city hall of Siena in the great limestone citadel of Athena in the Acropolis in Athens so that at the same time that the modern movement made it very hard for representative public art to merge with those glass walls and those abandoned piazzas so - we were busily for the urban renewal policies of the 50s and 60s destroying in fact much of the final fabric of the downtown and so this new privatize realm stood as it does in Houston as it does in some places in San Francisco in fact all our major downtown's stood now in a kind of desolate aloneness even when they're together not admitting much interaction between the pedestrian and the building's themselves and therefore the public ground being so destroyed really gutted from within public art clearly can't find much place and now at last it seems to me were fighting back we started about 10-15 years ago at Portland in San Francisco in various other cities the recent battles of preservation of contextualism have made us conscious once more that we must do something about the public realm ethnic groups and neighborhoods led the way if there is no common public vision for a major city a neighborhood may have a vision an ethnic group with its own roots may have a vision so the populist murals and arts and graffiti of the 60s and 70s led the way I think to a reappraise to look at we must have things to identify with we must merge these naked plazas in these tall skyscrapers with something that we can be bonded to respond to big guy look here I've already said what do you think it is something something to engage us and I think it is out of this out of the New Historicism that insists on Bill bringing again the orders and the cornices and those heavily laden value-laden past forms with them again an attempt not necessarily all admirable to create those tight early piazzas to people them with things as we see them here and Philip Johnson's PPG Plaza in Pittsburgh I don't particularly admire it but I admire the intention behind it or as received in the rather grotesque Portlandia figure that was hoisted atop Michael Graves is building in Portland Oregon and probably started us back again in the tradition which we had lost so long for at least a hundred years I would say in this country to recall the past in the design of our buildings which post modernism at its best and there isn't much of that brings about to recall at least the intention that the past being the design of our present buildings is to my mind to respect tradition and tradition to my mind is nothing less than the way in which society communicates with itself to recall our humanity in public art our public Joy's or our agony our dignity or mourning that is what is important and to do this is to pay homage to that precious sense of association of community which makes of every one of us a larger person than we are in our personal life and fills us with the pride of belonging thank you have had enough by all means tiptoe out not too loudly sir I won't get hurt but I'm happy to respond to anything that comes to your minds I know it's sweeping yes yes I should right I should have given a lot more attention to it but since I'm not doing a survey but case studies it fell through that is true of course the argument contra is that it was an artificial insemination of the Arts and that in fact it was a public works project in the best sense now out of it came a lot of terrible art and some very fine art but it was a kind of artificially engendered thing which you might I suppose say was true of the American Renaissance that was more elitist that went to the big time money people and said look you two can be like the Medici in Florence give a public library give a fresco and convince people to do that the FDR episode of course was more populist more an expression and I must say it is remarkable what it has done to our landscape the small scale I'm much more admire the little park benches the little corners in in the cities all of which have their stamp of FDR then the rather rather bloated maybe bigger schemes that we see today though those muscle-bound nudes and various things various people doing various things and so on but it is true that probably would be a chapter that has to be written you're right yes definitely I think it comes with this notion of the destruction of a public realm which I was describing we have in fact I think there's a broader issue there we have privatized the public realm ourselves not just the corporations the moment you moved to the suburbs as we did and I'm not condemning that it has happened history has no business condemning things just explaining them but the moment you moved to a suburb most families interiorized previously public activities the shopping was nearer to hand children were encouraged to get along with the family activities instead of being out in the streets and doing things or even our most important reformists like Olmstead in the Park System was not at all innocent of trying to make us not be ourselves Olmsted's clear stated purpose was that the parks would kill Little Italy and Chinatown all those public places where we expressed our individuality in the streets and will make us all or rather unified American citizenry all of us in the park would act similarly it was a great civilizing activity the American Renaissance movement was exactly the same it is embarrassing to read what they thought about quote-unquote slums you flushed them out with an avenue so a banya meant a Venetian side of it is in fact the destruction of small neighborhoods in the downtown that meant a continuation of people over 24 hours of the clock and therefore a public for which public art meant something all of these are two and now of course the fact that we are more comfortable in the house and in the car than in the Piazza downtown in fact for a long time Anglo Saxon Anglo American communities considered anyone sitting at a Piazza as being somebody who laters this is nothing that occurs to an Italian you spend an entire day in the Piazza that's what being the lies that's what being a citizen is you watch the show the city is the show but you know what happened to our great city beautiful piazzas they're now full of bombs and benches because it is embarrassing for us to linger and public places for a long time there was an illness associated with it we are purposeful people if you have a huge Piazza the best use you can make of it to cross diagonally and quickly go to your office and instead of moving around or sitting now that's coming back I don't know if you eat you've been recently to Portland but this wonderful little square they have what is it call the something Independence Square something everybody pays $25 to buy a brick to put on the floor of the Piazza with his name on it so you see a bunch of people going around all the time like zombies looking for their name it's terribly sweet you know that notion again that the city is us and we contribute in the downtown because it's for us it's our four-hole it's our it's our room our public room where we do public things and we're proud of it so yes the answer to your very short very proper questions my long-winded way is yes cars and air conditioning and sky walks people taking people away from the streets and up at that level all of these things kill public art definitely yes ma'am that reality has changed well that's the problem of course you hit it right on the head for example you may argue that in fact Times Square in New York is our equivalent to the great public arenas of the past that it is our compo of Siena our Acropolis because that is where our values are most constantly expressed whether we like some of us the the quality or the but perhaps Johnny Walker and all the tall buildings and the crowds down below is what we have to give the other side of it is that artists today I think again quite justifiably are not an artist but I see their point refused to become agents of the public vision I shared a day in Portland some years ago with the sculptor a cock Alice Aycock Alice's the first name isn't it a wonderful articulate artist I was the historian she the artist I made remarks similar to the ones I made this evening she in response said you know even if there were a public vision what it is to be American today I'm not sure I want to be the vehicle to express this public vision I want to do my art and she does you know these tremendous architectural pieces environmental pieces and let America be proud if they will of the fact that I have this gift to make these pieces and not say what is she trying to represent American civilization television age the nuclear war or whatever she has a point of course and I see that too in other words we are not in an age where artists are satisfied with B the gifted vehicles of a public vision do you follow my point they want to be recognized for what they are this is our obviously art for art's sake that started long time ago it is very hard now to say let's all have a public purpose as they seem to have done in the American Renaissance you're a sculptor make me a lead on horseback show me how you can make the best equestrian and take pride that this is part well we can't do this now I say I have my own agenda I'm sorry I make tall things and if they if they fit in applause are fine if they don't fit in a plaza too bad if you think they mean God fine if you don't too bad I call it abstraction number 12 you make you make what you can see