Architecture and the Ethics of Authenticity

Silos, mills, sheds, and refineries: Across most of Oklahoma’s gently rolling prairie countryside these artistically uninformed structures often provide the only vertical punctuation to a landscape otherwise made of mostly horizontal lines. One of the pleasures of teaching architecture here is to participate in the intellectual progress of students—many of whom hail from rural areas and have traveled little—as they eventually come to regard these structures with much the same admiration expressed for them some eighty years ago by Le Corbusier in his rallying polemic against the arbitrariness of nineteenth-century architecture: Vers Une Architecture.1 Like Le Corbusier, many of my students would have their work emulate these structures’ unselfconscious formal muscularity, frank materiality, and technological pragmatism—aesthetic qualities that emerge indirectly from having only usefulness in mind. Most students would gladly trade in whatever cultural elan they gain along the way in studio, during summer semesters in Europe, or in architectural history class for the ability to create work with such qualities, and I wouldn’t disagree with them. The yearnings of today’s students to capture the authority of unselfconscious design emerge from a different, and more radical, sense of the arbitrary than Le Corbusier confronted. In place of what in hindsight appears to be the relatively narrow problem of the arbitrariness of the prevailing style and the backwardness of taste, they experience aesthetic pursuit itself as arbitrary. When pushed to answer: “Why this form? Why this material?” Le Corbusier would have cited the pressing, inescapably rational logic of contemporary technology, industrial production, and the Zeitgeist coalescing to not merely permit, but to require, a modern approach to architecture.