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I know you said that you wanted to talk about "modern architecture" as a whole and avoid quibbling over the details, but, it really depends on what you're talking about specifically. It varies from building to building. I think that some modern architecture is quite pleasant! Many people hate the "stroads" of America for example, but I find them to be comforting and nostalgic. Where other people see a dystopian late-capitalist hellscape, I see the familiar sights of the family road trips of my youth. YMMV.
Admittedly I'm a complete plebian and philistine when it comes to architecture. I've never made any attempt to study architecture qua architecture at all.
This goes back to at least Hegel (and by that I mean, he was certainly not the first human to ever find man-made beauty superior to natural beauty, but he did give it articulation as a self-conscious philosophical principle):
Focusing in on some specific examples:
I've always thought that House IV was quite lovely! Whether I'd actually want to live in it is a separate question; but I don't judge a painting or a film by how much I'd want to live in it, so it's not clear why that constraint should be applied to architecture.
I previously wrote some remarks defending Eisenman's philosophy of art if you're interested.
I grouped modern architecture together in part because no studies I know of are conducted with the objective of quantifying architects and laypersons' preference evaluations for specific architectural trends, in general they just present their preferences for broad categories such as "traditional architecture" and "modern architecture". I also think that it's perfectly acceptable to use these broad categories to simplify analysis - despite the different modern architectural trends possessing some differing philosophies they also share a lot and the variance in the end result isn't super significant for someone not well versed in the history of architectural trends.
Perhaps that is not obvious to a person who's read about architecture for three thousand hours and can see all the tiny differences, but two different pieces of modern architecture will both still be perceived as generally minimal and stolid, and there will generally be a high level of correlation between your average layman's evaluations of the two buildings. It's not that an individual layman will have the same opinions on all modern architecture, in fact I think most don't, but a person who dislikes one modern architectural trend will also probably dislike others (again, this is as a general tendency, not saying this always holds true on a person-to-person basis). You will probably find high correlations between what people think of Walter Gropius' Fagus Factory (early modernist) and Robert Venturi's Guild House/Gordon Wu Hall (postmodern). In any case, doing large-scale analyses of broad groupings based on proximity in concept-space is kind of necessary to some extent unless you only ever want discussion to remain on the level of the individual house.
Hegel and the modernists (as well as the architectural tradition they spawned) are exceptional in this regard though. People in general far prefer natural environments to man-made ones, studies on the topic have tended to show that people find landscapes that depart far from the rule of nature more uncomfortable than those that don't. They literally take more effort to process and increases the amount of oxygen used by the brain. That same source notes "We then analysed images of apartment buildings, and found that over the last 100 years, the design of buildings has been departing further and further from the rule of nature; more and more stripes appear decade by decade, making the buildings less and less comfortable to look at."
I would be fine with architects building these things if they were just making art for display in a dedicated space. When you walk into a gallery, you tacitly accept the fact that you are going to be seeing an individual artist's expression. The same is not true for public art, which has to be endured by people regardless of whether they want to see it - they have to work and play and travel in these spaces. I remember going into Union Station in Toronto and seeing a horrendous piece of art, Zones of Immersion, plastered all over the walls, it made me feel like I was boarding a train to Auschwitz. It sucked. It was terrible. It made me hate the artist for inflicting that travesty upon commuters that have to use the station day in, day out. In similar fashion every building an architect makes inherently has the ability to elevate or pollute the commons, and it makes me extremely annoyed when the government spends 250 million dollars worth of public money to erect monstrosities their citizens hate.
Personally, I like very weird, discordant music. I would not expect it to be played in a public square and especially not as a permanent fixture.
I'm glad you enjoy the look (given the studies linked in my post and in my comment to you here, I think that opinion might be a fringe one). But architecture is inherently part art, part design, and what makes it unique is that it doubles both as an aesthetic product and a tool which people want to use for its functionality as a living space. House VI indisputably fails at the latter, and in my opinion, the former as well.
I'm almost deliriously exhausted so I may be retarded right now, but the way the post is structured, it's a bit unclear where the defence of Eisenman starts; could you cite the sections which you consider as defending his philosophy?
Right, but there's a high correlation between the types of people who tend to prefer man-made beauty to natural beauty, and the types of people who tend to become artists. So their own aesthetic preferences get amplified and displayed to the public.
There have to be limits of some kind, of course. But within reason, I generally lean on the side of privileging the freedom of the (public) artist, regardless of the aesthetic preferences of the public who will be exposed to their work. If it's that important to you, then you should consider becoming an artist too. And if it's not sufficiently important to you, then you are at the mercy of the people to whom it was sufficiently important.
The most relevant section is everything between "McGowan and Engley" and "the Aristotelian idea of the virtuous mean".
To what extent is this itself a modern phenomenon? Plenty of historical artists were obsessed with natural, including human, forms (e.g. da Vinci, Michelangelo, Durer). I could believe that the obsession with man made beauty is a "preversion" of the modern artistic class, but I don't see a reason why it should be so, or even why the members of the academy should have been replaced by those who don't care about natural beauty in the first place.
It's a highly modern phenomenon, and it was driven by many things - the arrival of decent photography in part drove the visual arts into increasing abstraction, for example, since withdrawing from realism was a way to distinguish themselves and find something photography couldn't do. Of course, they didn't have to make the new style so ugly - Islamic art has long tackled non-representational visual style with incredible results which I think most of the public would enjoy, which leads me to my second point:
Artists previously conceptualised themselves as inevitably having to interact with the commercial world - many modern design schools were an attempt to distance themselves from this, to bring taste into the halls of academia, and this also meant they removed all sanity-checks on their vision of artistry. This is how you get things like Eisenman depriving his client of a master bedroom where the couple could sleep together, and depriving them of a staircase with a proper railing, and initially attempting to deprive them of bathrooms in-house. Mies van der Rohe made a building with only three positions for the blinds inside of them; allowing people to only open them fully, halfway, or have them completely closed, because the demands of life should not impose upon their artistic vision. In Tom Wolfe's book From Bauhaus to Our House, a sneering quote can be found from the director of the Museum of Modern Art "We are asked to take seriously the architectural taste of real-estate speculators, renting agents, and mortgage brokers!"
In many European art compounds it was not uncommon to announce something akin to "We have just removed the divinity of art and architecture from the hands of the official art establishment [the Academy, the National Institute, the Künstlergenossenschaft, whatever], and it now resides with us, inside our compound. We no longer depend on the patronage of the nobility, the merchant class, the state, or any other outside parties for our divine eminence. Henceforth, anyone who wishes to bathe in art’s divine glow must come here, inside our compound, and accept the forms we have created. No alterations, special orders, or loud talk from the client permitted. We know best. We have exclusive possession of the true vision of the future of architecture."
In contrast much art back then was "commercial" art understood to be made primarily for the benefit of wealthy patrons, and the first image that comes to mind whenever I think of a tremendous artist is Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, contorted in an uncomfortable position, paint dripping down onto his face, reading scripture intently so he could draw inspiration from the words of the Bible itself, and yet feeling so inadequate about his ability to rise to the task he literally believed it would destroy his reputation, as detailed in his poem about the painting of the chapel. He did not consider himself a painter and only acquiesced to the pope's pressure for him to take on the commission. But he singlehandedly made one of the most beloved pieces of Western art in existence.
Now consider this absolute hubris from Jan Tschichold's book The New Typography: "More than all previous art, the art of today demands creative will and strength. Its aim is utmost clarity and purity. ... Is it then surprising that its representations at first baffle the unsophisticated viewer, who is used to something completely different, or even actually repel him? Lazy and hostile people are still trying to make it appear contemptible in the eyes of others. and describe it as nonsense. These are the same people from whose physical attacks Manet's "Olympia" had to be protected by the police, a picture that is today one of the most precious treasures of the Louvre. Their prattling is too empty and unimportant to be taken seriously."
Yes, artists being indulgent has always existed, and there's some continuity between the attitudes of artists then and today, but in general the difference in humility is incredible. It's been a trend of modern artists and designers to view themselves as beholden to nothing, with the public being seen as an irrelevant triviality. And that would also be my response to @Primaprimaprima above - dictatorships of taste have never sat right with me, and the purpose of public art is for, well, the public. For artists not to consider the effects of their work on the intended stakeholders is basically a dereliction of their intended function, IMO. The complete separation of art from commerciality or the actual people it's being made for, where they will fail to consider the public's preferences and instead opt for narcissistic works of self-edification, is one of the very many defects of modern artistic thought.
Your first point is good and sounds reasonable.
Your second point is not clear to me. What is it that caused artists in the modern era to rebel against the tastes of their patrons? Why is it that these rebellious artists, rather than toiling in obscurity, actually became commercial successes with ample patronage?
It seems to me that the only explanation must be that they are not, in fact, rebelling against the tastes of their patrons, and it is actually the taste of the patrons that has changed. This is kind of kicking the can down the road, because we can ask why the taste of patrons changed in the first place - but I'm comfortable saying that peoples' tastes change over time for some exogenous reasons, and sometimes they change for the worse.
Two possibilities come to mind for a shift in power towards artists:
Artistic defectors have been shunned for hundreds of years. Off the top of my head, the Vienna Secession and the Exhibit of Rejects both consisted of artists with heterodox styles that couldn't find a place in the academy and had to strike out on their own.
Those are 1897 and 1863. Going purely by the links provided, the Vienna case is angry modernists splitting off from what they considered to be a defunct institution; the Paris case was similar and they got a special exhibit put on for them by the emperor.
Especially in Vienna, this doesn’t look like the academy shunning defectors so much as defectors coordinating to shun the traditional academy. Being less tolerant, they won and took over.
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