AUTHENTIC ANONYMITY

Rowe makes the point that Mies was concerned with anonymity.  In Mies’ view, the idea was superordinant.  The fact and the form were secondary.  And this anonymity was deeply rooted in classicism. 

Beaux Arts architects were anonymous.  That is, with the adherence to the rules of the culture, the product was one of strict conformity, which then depersonalized the building from the creator.  If we lump all of the good Beaux Arts buildings together, and then ask ourselves, who did which one, the ideal state is that they are indistinguishable.  The minor differences are irrelevant.  The cultural standard, the ideal idea, was upheld.  

With the modernist / classicist ethos, the architect was able to operate neutrally, as an agent of the unconscious will, all the while refusing to accept the problem of form.  Form, and the resolution of form, became one of necessity, of evolution, of invention, of depersonalization.  Forms were resolved via inductive and empirical methods. 

Anonymity of form has great resonance for us.  Our generation of automatic form is authentic, exactly because it is anonymous.   Mies’ Crown Hall is an example of this anonymity.  

Can a form be both anonymous and authentic?  Or, for a form to be authentic, does it require iconographic status?  Is the best work of a civilization, then, anonymous?  

“What we have here is not so much a structure as an icon, an object of faith which is to act as a guarantee of authenticity, an outward sign of a new order, an assurance against lapse into private license, a discipline by means of which an invertebrate expressionism can be reduced to the appearance of reason.”  p107.  

Modernist solutions, in the purest sense, were to be inevitable, predestined, impersonal, beyond the subjective, purely objective.  This objectivity connotes limits.  The pure, the rational, admits the technique as being pure.  It is above emotion.  It addresses the needs of the spirit.  

 1. Rowe, Colin.  The mathematics of the ideal villa and other essays.  Birkhäuser Architecture, 1955