Imperial European ornateness vs. Block Symphony in American, Russian, and Scandinavian architecture (American ethnogenesis series)

In an earlier post on the rise of realism and naturalism in stage drama, the 3rd section was a brief aside on modern architecture. The same three regions pioneered these two unrelated trends, in order to distinguish their culture from that of the Western European empires who had dominated taste-making for centuries up to that point -- namely, the empires of America and Russia (including its incarnation as the Soviet Union), and the never-imperial region of Scandinavia.

We'll fill in some more details on the outline about architecture, in this and other upcoming posts. But basically, what we call "modern" architecture is really just American and Russian architecture of the 20th century, and the late 19th in America, where it originated in Chicago specifically. I'm focusing on the American strand of this convergent evolution, since we pioneered it. But for the curious, just look up Stalinist architecture or the Seven Sisters skyscrapers in Moscow, and notice how close they look to American Art Deco of the same period.

(Scandinavia played less of a role in the architecture field, but more of a role in the related fields of interior design, furniture, and other manufactured goods. Building lots of huge grandiose structures does require imperial-level wealth, something Scandinavia never had. But making tables, chairs, lamps, etc., is entirely do-able for non-imperial societies.)

I don't like the nondescript term "Modernism," although it at least says it's a conscious separation from many earlier eras -- which it obviously is. But that makes it sound like an internal development in those countries that spawned the earlier styles, like the Italian Renaissance, British Victorian Gothic, and so on.

But it was not -- it was born in America, which had no deep historical layers of styles of its own, owing to the colonial / settler nature of our founding. And it was born in Chicago and carried further over the Midwest out to the Pacific Coast, where there has been even less of a historical foundation to react against, unlike the relatively older (but still young) settlements along the East Coast.

So, the point of it being against or beyond or not like the Italian Renaissance, or Ancient Greeks, or Victorian Gothic, or the original French Gothic, etc., was not about a temporal succession or another phase in a fashion cycle.

Rather, it was the announcement that America is a whole new nation, society, culture, and empire -- and we're not in the Old World. Our new collective identity is being forged here in the New World, especially out on the Western frontier, where the meta-ethnic division has always been the starkest (that's where the battles against the Indians were fiercest and longest). Therefore, we cannot just blindly borrow from past cultures -- we're a whole new people, and we need something wholly new to distinguish ourselves culturally from our ancestors and distant cousins back in the Old World.

I'm going to simply call this "American" architecture, to make this ethnogenetic basis clearer. It's not one temporal era declaring itself separate from earlier eras in time -- but one region declaring itself separate from other regions in space (and time). Maybe you could modify it with "American Minimalism" or "American Block Symphony" or something, I don't know. Future historians will not nitpick and hair-split over decade-long micro-trends, in their view -- they're going to lump as much as possible, and it'll have a geographic term (American, obviously), and one or two words about its style per se.

This term encompasses everything from Louis Sullivan / Chicago School, Frank Lloyd Wright / Prairie School, Arts and Crafts, Art Deco (not Art Nouveau, which was European and highly ornamental, unlike American tastes and trends), Midcentury Modern, the so-called International Style (Second Chicago School, which went international as America replaced all Euro empires other than Russia after WWI and WWII, absorbing many outright into NATO), and so-called Postmodernism (really just a late / self-referential / weird stage of the entire unbroken evolution).

To the extent that its imperial reach spread outside the borders of the core nation, it assimilated local elements that were compatible with it -- and kept out those that were not. Where earlier European interest in Far East culture borrowed from the intricately ornamental side (Chinoiserie, Japonisme) in order to fit in with Rococo or Art Nouveau or other highly ornamental European styles, American interest in those same cultures eschewed that in favor of Zen Buddhism, bonsai trees, rock gardens, and other minimalist forms.

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What characteristics define the American Minimalist style? Well, it was a conscious separation from the styles of the existing / rival European empires, especially Britain and France, who seeded the culture of America and Canada (Spain in Latin America). Nothing that would look like a Gothic cathedral, Medieval castle / fortress, a rural chateau, Baroque, Neoclassical, Renaissance revival, or whatever else from the Old World.

Specifically, no simple curves or circular forms -- no domes, no columns (or turrets) with a circular cross-section, no cones for roofs (even of a little tower), no arches, etc. No tetrahedrons (pyramid-type shape) for tower roofs either -- maybe elsewhere, and in a larger scale, but atop a tower looks too much like an Old World castle or chateau. We don't like triangular forms atop a series of columns either, because it looks too much like an Ancient Greek pediment. As a design element for decoration, like zigzags or chevrons, triangles are fine, though -- just not as a main structural feature (unless functionally required for domestic buildings, like in a roof profile to send rain and snow down off of it).

Certainly one or two of these elements may appear, but too many of them together make it look like an Old World LARP, whether trying to ape a specific foreign style (like Ancient Greek) or being eclectic with Old World styles from all over time and space.

Unlike earlier structures built for defense, ours would have tons of windows, with a large cumulative surface area, right on the front of the building. We just about wiped out the Indians, and there has been no other empire to battle us on our home turf, so we don't need to be so defensive at home with our buildings. This reached an absurd logical conclusion in the "all-glass box" trend of the 2000s and after.

A huge tower, culminating in our unique contribution to architecture -- the skyscraper. Old World empires had buildings that were fairly level around the top, and the artists of the day complained about the Eiffel Tower dominating the Paris city-scape, with buildings that were not merely much lower in height, but fairly even in height around the rooftops. Even Medieval castles with a tower, or a bell tower next to a cathedral, do not jut as highly toward the sky as typical American towers do from their surroundings.

(Domestic buildings are exempt from the tower trend, since few homeowners have enough wealth to build it.)

Removing circular or curved forms, and most triangular forms (especially their combination, a cone -- perhaps the least American-looking architectural element), yields the defining block-iness of the American style. In lazier hands, it's just a boring simple box or a regular grid (like the Seagram Building). But in skilled hands, the boxes have a wide variety of scales, interwoven with each other, in different orientations, making a symphony of blocks (like Art Deco, the peak of American architecture). And there still may be a suggestion of a non-block shape, but it will be made up of clearly distinct blocks of various scales and orientations -- for instance, a V shape made up of rectangular columns of shrinking, then rising heights, next to each other.

Similar to the low-res / pixelated look of 8-bit video games -- or, for that matter, the most popular video game ever to this day, Minecraft, affectionately known as "block game". That was invented by a Swede. The earlier related Lego blocks were invented in nearby Denmark. So, Scandinavians can indeed participate in the American Minimalist evolution in architecture, if it's at the scale of children's playthings, which doesn't require imperial levels of wealth to build huge structures IRL.

Arrangements of blocks of varying scale may result in something from earlier eras and foreign places, like the ancient Middle Eastern ziggurat, or the Central American step pyramid. And since those are not too close to Ancient, Medieval, or Early Modern European styles, they're permitted as long as they don't try to merely copy the ziggurat or pyramid.

We do need to integrate earlier forms from the New World, to draw a historical link between us and earlier civilizations here, so we don't feel too new-born and rootless. And we have always been more obsessed with connecting ourselves to the ancient Near East, like Egypt or Mesopotamia, rather than Greece or Rome (too Euro). "We" -- I mean, the culture-makers of our unique American identity. We'll get to geographic differences in how American vs. Old World LARP-y the local architecture is, in posts to come this week.