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Le Corbusier.

Le Plan Voisin, 1925.


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On Architectureunder CapitalismFELICITY D. SCOTT

Rather than asking, What is the attitude of a work to the relationsof production of its time? I would like to ask, What is its positionin them?

Walter Benjamin

In May 1932, on the occasion of the Museum of Modern Arts (MoMA)International Style exhibition and symposium in New York, MeyerSchapiro published a short review in New Masses entitled The NewArchitecture. Written under the pseudonym John Kwait, Schapiros

article was the rst in a series of statements written during the 1930s(and collected in the dossier accompanying this text) that addressedthe antinomies inherent in the condition of modern architectureunder capitalism. Through a series of critical engagements withLewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, R. Buckminster Fuller, and theStructural Studies Associates (Fullers colleagues at the magazineShelter), Schapiro can be seen investigating the mutual imbricationof architecture, technology, politics, and capitalism in ways that arenot only of historiographic interest. During this period Schapiroattributed a social relevance to architecture that situated it at theforefront of advanced aesthetic practices while at the same time he

produced a biting and insightful critique of issues at stake in a pro-gressive architectural project. Even within what is undoubtedly thedifferent economic and historical conditions of today, aspects of thiscritique retain a cogency that warrants contemporary reevaluation.

Architecture or ShelterIn his rst review, The New Architecture, Schapiro situated theInternational Style exhibition as surely the most important inMoMAs short history. The social importance that as a Marxist arthistorian he recognized in the show was not of course a product ofthe social convictions of the organizers, Henry-Russell Hitchcock,

Philip Johnson, and Alfred Barr, nor that of the exhibited architects,even though he claimed that they anticipate the style of a SocialistRepublic. If the distinctly technical, classless, and unsentimentalaesthetic of the architecture on display could be seen to harbor implicitsocialist tendencies, any such vocation, as Schapiro pointed out, wascomplicated by the long-standing relationship between architectural


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modernism and capital. With architecture intimately tied both to com-mercialism and to the power relations of an industrial society, the dis-ciplines utopian or progressive potential could only, Schapiro

believed, be realized on the level of revolutionary praxis. As Schapironoted, of those involved in the MoMA show only Mumford, who orga-nized the section on housing, recognized the fundamental socio-

economic issues at stake, even announcing in the symposium ofFebruary 19 that architects must build as if for a Communist govern-ment.1 Although in this context Schapiro passed lightly over theimplications of the qualification as if, the implicit disavowal ofrevolutionary strategies that it entailed would, as we shall see, latercome to gure centrally in his critiques of Mumfords reformist politics.

The very same month that Schapiros review appeared in NewMasses, the magazine Sheltercarried a refutation entitled Transition,authored by Roger Sherman. Shelterwas the somewhat unlikely con-tinuation of the magazine T-Square, the Official organ of the T-Square Club of Philadelphia, a group presided over by the architect

George Howe. In its initial form, as edited by Maxwell E. Levinson,T-Square provided an open forum for contemporary architecturaldiscussion, typically containing articles by or on prominent mod-ern architects such as Rudolf Schindler, Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier,or Frank Lloyd Wright. The February 1932 issue had included thefirst installment of Fullers three-part exposition on UniversalArchitecture, the rst indication of the magazines future direction.In April 1932 its title changed from T-Square to Shelter, with thesubtitle Magazine of Modern Architecture. Continuing at this timeto promote modernist agendas, its editorial lineup was augmented

by associate editors George Howe, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Alfred

Barr, and Philip Johnson. Not surprisingly, given the addition of theInternational Style exhibitions organizers, Shelters rst issue includedthe proceedings of MoMAs International Stylesymposium along with contributions by Neutra andWright, as well as the second installation of FullersUniversal Architecture.

The May issue, put together by pro-tem editorFuller, was marked by another shift in editorialdirection. Not only were Hitchcock and Barr nolonger associate editors (Johnson would remain sofor one more issue), but the magazine had a new,

and symptomatic, subtitle: A Correlating Mediumfor the Forces of Architecture. Fullers UniversalArchitecture would replace the previous editorsagenda of promoting the International Style.Shermans rebuttal formed part of the front sectiongiven over to symposium articles delivered by

Left: Symposium: The Inter-

national Architectural Exhibition,

as published in Shelter, April 1932.

Opposite, left: Cover of T-Square,

February 1932.

Opposite, right: Cover of Shelter,April 1932.


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members of the Structural Study Associates (SSA). An introductorynote by Henry Churchill described the SSA as an informal associa-tion of those interested in shelter as an industrial, social and philo-sophic manifest and situated Fuller as its leader: The peripateticguide (peripatetic almost to the point of ubiquity!), as Churchill putit, is Buckminster Fuller; the Stoa is the Winthrop Hotel, N.Y.C.2

Fullers ubiquitous presence would be manifest not only in thegroups charter but in the rhetorical tropes and prose style adopted

by many of its members. The SSAs theoretical aspirations were char-acterized by a similar ubiquity. With regard to their integrated sys-tem of theoretical postulates and technical questions, we learn fromChurchill that The system is contained, complete; it was a tensileweb of postulates from a central concept of universality.3 In Fullerseditorial, Correlation, an analogous gure of totalizing control wasextended toward the readers; the writers viewpoints and objectives,he insisted, would only be revealed by complete consumption ofShelters pages, in the exact order of arrangement.4

It was in this context that Roger Sherman, SSA, also at that time aneditor of Architectural Forum, launched his refutation of Schapirosreview. It was not surprising that Sherman would be so motivated bythe claims of an unknown writer, Kwait, for The New Architectureended with a critical commentary on a housing symposium pub-lished in Architectural Forums March 1932 issue. Schapiro hadcited Housing the Other Half by the magazines primary editor,Kenneth Kingsley Stowell, in his charge that liberal architects . . .remain ultimately the highly paid employees of Realtors and buildersor are themselves small businessmen with a stake in the commonexploitation. Stowells calling for architects to embrace the problem

of mass housing as a potentially profitable new market for theirexpertise had, as Schapiro noted, adopted the statuesque lingo of


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philanthropic exploitation of the public good.5

Strictly following the tenets put forth by Fuller, Shermans responseagreed with some of Schapiros terms but sought to recast the idealrelations between modern architecture, social programs, and thenew society. Against the internationalism of Mr. Kwaits newstyle, Sherman argued that the embrace of industrialization was

distinctly American and offered the prospect of a naturalized modeof shelter emerging spontaneously from a unied and coherent cul-ture. It is not surprising that the roving tribes of Asia and thenomadic peoples of Arabia live in tents, wrote Sherman in supportof his claims, Mobility is a requisite for their survival . . . and theresultant shelter is a relatively perfect fulfillment of their needs.6

Likewise, the Western Acropolis and the Coliseum reected morestable and more powerfully organized societies. America, Shermanwent on to propose, revealing the nationalism underlying his con-ception, had until recently lacked a national idiom of design orshelter, and he attributed this situation to both the nations poly-

glot derivation and its contentment with borrowed philosophy,foreign art, [and] unnatural structure.7 Seemingly ignorant of thelong-standing embrace of industry and Americanist fantasies byEuropean modernists, Sherman claimed that it was only througha recent embrace of industrialization that America had finallyachieved a national characteristic. Sherman claimed, furthermore,that industry and not sociopolitical ideals was slowly shaping arational architectonic emergence. In contrast to Schapiros revolu-tionary program, this was to be an ecologic situation, a naturalemanation of technology disturbed only by the adverse effects of thebusiness-only-for-profit system. Pointedly attacking Schapiro,

Sherman argued that architectures adoption of adequate social pro-grams would arise not from the postulation of a creed or theory(such as the tags and slogans he attributed to Schapiro) but would,rather, spring from the purposeful, systematic correlation of forces.That [a social program] should be the static vehicle of an intellectualdogma is contrary to the dynamics of its own denition.8 Preempting

by forty years Colin Rowes remarksthat in the United States arevolution had already occurred in 1776, rendering radical socialreconstruction unnecessarySherman argued that the revolutionhas, in fact, arrived.9

Once again using the pseudonym John Kwait, Schapiro replied to

Sherman by sending a detailed response to Fuller for publication inShelters next issue. Entitled Architecture under Capitalism, it was,as he expected, rejected; but it appeared nonetheless in a perhapsslightly altered version in the December 1932 issue of New Masses.10

Schapiro felt the urgency to respond on account of the avowedlysocialistic claims made in Shelterby the SSA: aggressively con-


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cerned, as he described them, with architecture as a social instru-ment and with housing reform as a substitute for revolution.11

Although Sherman had conceded that Kwaits remarks on socialchange had been substantially correct, he had wryly suggested thathis reading required some amplification. This took the form ofShermans suggestion that technology be embraced as a force in

itself. That Schapiros Marxist social agenda could in any way beconfused or collapsed (even strategically) with what he referred to asthe SSAs uneven mixture of mystical and technical notions and theill-digested shreds of socialist doctrine was unthinkable to Schapiro(as it would be, albeit for entirely different reasons, to Fuller) andtherefore demanded a substantial disarticulation. Distinguishingtheir agendas, Schapiro argued that the humanitarian agenda of theSSA did not situate them as a radical, progressive group but ratheras a parasitic cheer-leader in the present campaign to boom the build-ing industry. Along these lines, he presented the key contributionof Fullers Dymaxion shelter as the savvy discovery of a previously

untapped industry available for intensive, large-scale exploitation.12Schapiro would critique the SSAs claims to an empirical embrace

of technology and scientific formulations not only for being con-flicted, but also for masking an underlying aestheticism. The SSA,he explained, remain bohemian and arty in their sentimental viewof technology and the social mission of architecture.13 To make hispoint, Schapiro would single out a project for a theater, or FestivalShelter, by an SSA member, Frederick Kiesler.14 Without naming thearchitect, Schapiro pointed to the contrast between the editorsclaims for the projects cleanliness and integrity and Kieslers own,more avant-garde aspirations, which Schapiro saw as marked by a

left-bank aestheticism manifest in the architects use of typography,pseudo-scientic formulas, and a manifesto-like prose style. Indirectlyacknowledging Kieslers relation to the historicalavant-garde, Schapiro likened the project to themathematical signs in cubist and abstract pictures;they beg us to credit the artist with a superior insight,somehow related to an esoteric, reputable physics.15

More signicantly, however, Schapiro pointed tothe pernicious effect that the scientism of the SSA hadin proposing an ineluctable progression of societydriven by the latent or inherent forces of technology.

Not only did this elide any prospect at all of class-based analysis, he explained, it also entailed a prob-lematic form of vitalism that substituted for realsocial changeone that insisted on the transforma-tion of the underlying structures and institutionsof capitalismthe assumption that a benevolent

Frederick Kiesler. A Festival

Shelter, as published in Shelter,May 1932.


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capitalism could be harnessed toward the amelioration of social cor-ruption and inequality. Sherman, he noted, trusts the Americanlypreferred evolution and would not fight forces, but use them.Thus, as Schapiro argued, the SSA pursued, under the banner of theLeft, reactionary tendencies that made them potential allies of total-itarian social orders.

As reported in Schapiros preface, Fuller seems to have respondedto the submission of Architecture under Capitalism disingenu-ously, citing a lack of available space within Shelterin which to pub-lish it. Yet when the next issue nally appeared (ve months late) inNovember, Fuller had taken the step of asserting that the Kwait arti-cle was so effectively answered as to silence Kwait.16 Despite sucha at and unsubstantiated rebuttal, Fuller felt it necessary to expandthe terms of Shelters response. In the section Bernays, Boogies,Bizness, and Bluff of the feature entitled Our Intimate Journal ofSummer Events, the sudden resignation of associate editor GeorgeHowe was attributed, rather indirectly, to the New Masses. This

somewhat paranoid account, the prose style of which strongly indi-cates Fullers authorship, blamed Howes resignation on a misun-derstanding in which the New Massess Marxist critique had beennot opposed to but conated with the program promoted by Shelter.It was reported that while Howe was in natural sympathy with thewhole SSA activity in early July, the misunderstanding of unnamed

businessmen with whom he was afliated had caused him to [turn]turtle completely on July 13 and resign his position.

Without directly asserting the connection, Fuller pointed to theinuence of an ordered series of meetings, lectures, and written pro-paganda by the New Masses group which insisted that Art have its

complete attention focused upon proletarian woes, and objectivelyseek a revolution through its emotional ministrations.17 Such activ-ities, Fuller believed, had led Howe to the erroneous attribution ofsuch a radical program to Shelter. The proof was supposedly to befound in a passage cited from Howes letter of resignation:

As I have explained to you, [wrote Howe] aesthetics and socialreform have in my mind nothing to do with each other. As adesigner it is a matter of indifference to me whether themechanical civilization be moral or immoral. If, on the otherhand, you ask me to join a movement of social reform, then Isay the mechanical civilization is spinach.

Howes rather strange letter invoking spinach indicates a desire todisengage architecture from ethicopolitical concerns, but it in noway implicates undue influence by New Masses. Nevertheless,according to Fuller, this unfortunate resignation (unfortunate sinceHowe had offered assistance in pursuing financial support for the


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magazine) had occurred because publicity-generals behind busi-ness organizations had prejudiced Howe against Shelter. This, heclaimed, was because those businessmen had only superficiallyunderstood the boldly evolutionary notions of the SSA and hadregarded Shelters critiques of business, land ownership, and pro-teering as akin to those of the Marxists revolutionary program.

Shelters attack upon Schapiro then continued by situating hisarticle The New Architecture as part of the New Massess illicitattempt to involve new-architecture, as an art into its propagandaactivity. Attempting to reverse Schapiros accusations of the SSAs

bohemian artiness, Fuller both recognized and misread the centralityof the role of aesthetics within Schapiros argument. For amidstSchapiros more overt discussions of social relevance, nancial spec-ulation, labor exploitation, and revolution was indeed a set of claimsfor the aesthetic dimension of architecture. In his articulation of themanner in which modern architecture anticipated the style of asocialist republic, Schapiro pointed to an indispensable technique

and aesthetic within the work and noted that artistic characters areappropriate to such ideals.18

Shelters rebuttal strategy, however, was precisely and strategicallyto collapse Schapiros interest in the aesthetics of an international,classless, and practical architecture with the overt aesthetic programof the International Style proselytized by MoMA. New Architecture,as a conscious professionalizable art, it was announced, is theambitious objective of the Johnson, Hitchcock, intrinsic-aestheticgroup, for the sake of their own personalaggrandizement as connoisseurs in theInternational Style.19 It was this aes-

theticization of the scientific develop-ment of architecture that, according toShelter, allowed for the New Massesspropagandistic assimilation of architec-ture, or what Fuller (presumably) char-acterized as a temporary onslaught-of-inclusion by the American revolutionarygroup, as an aesthetic, and thereforearbitrarily-compromisable activity.20

Thus, although Fuller rejected it, it wasin the aesthetic dimension that he, as

well as Schapiro, recognized the politi-cal prospects of architectural practice.Repudiating once again Schapiros cri-tique of Shelters aestheticism, Fullerargued that all aesthetic fringe has beencast aside from the evolutionary growth

R. Buckminster Fuller.

A Streamlined Dymaxion Shelter,

as published in Shelter,November 1932.


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of universal architecture, leaving nothing to be grabbed at by thesepropagandists. Universal architecture, he insisted, was not aes-theticizable but purely instrumental.

OrganicismAlthough Schapiro would not engage in any further polemical inter-

actions with Shelter, Fuller would only apparently have the last word,for Schapiro would continue his critique of the conditions of archi-tecture under capitalism through a new and more variegated oppo-nent, Lewis Mumford. Schapiros critique of Mumford would spanover four years, from 1934 to 1938, being most explicitly articulatedin reviews of Technics and Civilization and The Culture of Cities,bothentitled Looking Forward to Looking Backward. As with his cri-tique of Fuller and the SSA, Schapiro would be at pains to distancehis Marxist convictions from Mumfords position of liberal reform.

Most specically, he rejected Technics and Civilizations argumentfor the disconnection of capitalism from modern technics. In his

attempt to redeem technics from the evils of capitalism, Mumfordhad forcibly disarticulated the relationships between industry, themarket, and labor relations, thereby disabling the central tenets ofMarxist analysis. His narrative of the history of technology andhumanitys enslavement to and subsequent mastery of themachinea story, Schapiro noted, based less on historical fact thanon Mumfords social programsaw militarism rather than industri-alization per se as the central term in the rise of the machine andlooked forward to an organically informed biotechnics. Like Fuller,Mumford was seen as having substituted an idea of technology as anindependent, evolving force for a notion of class-based revolution.

As suggested by the title Schapiro chose for both of his reviews, suchan organicist position was understood as far from progressive.Technology, he argued, did not necessarily lead to either socialismor fascism; such a direction was determined by reigning power struc-tures. Mumfords apotheosis of the mechanical through biotechnicsthus entailed the potential of a reactionary step, possibly even

becoming part of a repressive, even fascist movement.21

In an unpublished five-page letter of August 15, 1934, Schapirowould clarify to Mumford that he had not intended to call Mumfordhimself a fascist (I consider you neither a proto-fascist, nor a near-fascist, nor a social-fascist, he explained), but rather to point out the

need to channel unstable potentialsfor instance those of technologyor progressive elements in capitalisminto a clear program and tosituate them in their historical and political context. [S]ome of thethings which you hail as prodromes of socialism might as well makefor fascism, he further explained, the love of sport, mechanicalforms in art, the perfection of machines, etc. were also elements of the


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program of the rst cultural fascists,the Futurists.22 Mumford, itseems, in earlier correspondence not yet found had attempted to turnthe tables on Schapiro, accusing him of a mechanistic model of his-tory and even pointing to the fascist elements in your communism.23

He evidently also put forward in his defense a list of elements thatwere proper to fascism but lacking in his own philosophy. In

response, Schapiro refuted Mumfords attribution of procapitalistand proproperty ideas to fascism, noting that as a popular movementin Italy and Germany fascism was anti-capitalist [and] against largeproperty.24 Schapiro noted, moreover, that fascism claimed totali-tarianism to be in the interest of a mythically homogenous public,an organicist model that he in turn attributed to Mumford by notingthat such unication was a ction that is continually supported byliberals such as yourself. Thus your criteria of fascism, he con-cluded, are reduced to one, patriotic nationalism, which may ormay not be a sign of fascism. You overlook, however, a fundamentalcharacter of fascism, the destruction of democratic liberties.25

This frank correspondence is interesting for the manner in whichSchapiro makes his critique of Mumfords reformist position explicit.With regard to Mumfords championing of cooperatives, garden cities,and the work of Le Corbusier, Schapiro noted that he did not denythat they were an advance. But, he claried, I attack the social phi-losophy which saysdo not revolt, do not change these intolerableconditions, but let us build garden cities, summer camps for needyartists, sports elds and schools, and eventually socialism will comeout of the state of mind generated by these things. The communist, heargued, does not reject reforms, but only reformism as a stumbling

block to class-consciousness and sound revolutionary tactics.26

It would be in his 1938 review of The Culture of Cities that Schapirowould set out his most substantial refutation of Mumfords organicism.Central to this was a critique of the category of the organic itself,which for Schapiro served merely to valorize the object it suppos-edly characterized. Pointing to Mumfords selection of examplessuch as Henry Hobson Richardsons Marshall Field Wholesale Storein Chicago and Heinrich Berlages Amsterdam Stock ExchangeSchapiro would explicate the manner in which Mumfords analysespersistently elided social and historical specicity and thus servedto mask apologetics for capitalism. Schapiro expanded his critiquefurther with reference to Mumfords practices of collapsing political

and pictorial forms through a form of pseudomorphism that hereferred to as crude analogical thinking.27 Announced on the coverof Partisan Reviewas Lewis Mumford and the Big City, Schapirosreview provides an important account of the contradictions inheringin Mumfords reading of relations between capitalism, urban andterritorial organizations, technology, and aesthetics, and it does so


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through a cogent critique of the impact of substituting for adequatehistorical analysis a mystical identication.28

Schapiro detected both a similarly crude analogical thinkingand an equally disturbing form of organicism in Frank Lloyd Wrightand Baker Brownells Architecture and Modern Life of 1937.29 In hisreview Architects Utopia, Schapiro would argue that although

Wright and Brownells book avowedly treated relations betweenArchitecture and Social Life (as indicated in the title of the firstchapter), that relation had been reduced to another form of pseudo-morphism: mirroring or reection. Similarly eliding historical andsocioeconomic analysis, Wrightthe specialist in new environ-mentsassumed that architecture had an independent role in shap-ing social life, and this assumption of autonomy had given rise to avisionary condence that enabled the architect to believe himselfable to correct society on the drawing board.30 Moreover, WrightsBroadacre Cityhis home for the urban refugeealong with hislater project of redemption by rural housing, provided Schapiro

with a platform to critique the architects model of deurbanizationas undemocratic. Schapiro noted that while this ideal was shared bysocialists and anarchists, in Wrights project it involved putting thosedispersed refugees to work within industrial profit ventures thatoverlooked the question of class and power. And, more disturbingly,Wrights antiurban sentiment was allied with an anticosmopolitanone. This does not gure centrally in Schapiros argument, but justas he noted that Sherman and Fuller had naturalized industrializa-tion, here the agrarian tradition in America was cast as an ideal statethrough the nationalistic rhetoric of the folk. This argument thuscontinued Schapiros earlier critique of the underlying agendas of

such nationalist sentiments in his Race, Nationality and Art, pub-lished in Art Frontin March of 1936, pointing to the way in whichsuch nationalist distinctions in art had been mobilized to claimracial superiority in the interest of oppression.31


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ArchitectureWhat emerges from Schapiros writings and their elicited responsesis an important articulation of the contours and fault lines of thedebates concerning aesthetics, technology, and politics within thearchitectural discourse of the 1930s. Relations between architectureand technology are not only considered in relation to capitalism, but

to the discourses of nationalism, regionalism, universalism, decen-tralization, and organicism in operation at the time. If the problem-atics raised in these texts are clearly historical, the map of thisintersection is, nevertheless, distinctly contemporary. This is not tosuggest that through them we nd critical models unproblematicallyapplicable to the present, but that those fault lines also inhere withinthe relations between advanced aesthetic practice, technology, andpolitics in late capitalism.

It is important to note, however, the manner in which the centralopposition of communism and capitalism that informed Schapiroscritical framework has lost aspects of its historical and critical speci-

city.32 Beyond the failure of communism to stand as a viable alter-native to capitalism, the geopolitical landscape has been radicallytransformed by the almost totalizing flows of information, com-modities, and people within the globalized contemporary condition.And the emergence of a new generation of technologies in turn can

be understood to entail a new complex of industrial and social relationsto those informing the polemics of the 1930s. Within this condition,insights developed in Mumfords attempts to theorize alternativeterritorial models to those of universalism or the nation-state (alongwith his work on militarism and the megamachine, which investi-gated systems of organization) have taken on a renewed relevance

within contemporary theory.33 Nevertheless, Schapiros insightfulanalyses of evolutionary practicesthose that assume the benev-olence of capitalism and technology and attempt to harness theirforcesretain a cogency that warrants reevaluation precisely withinthis new historical condition.34

Many of the questions raised by Schapiro continue to (or might inturn) haunt contemporary architectural practice. To the degree towhich such problematics persist, there remains the prospect of going

back through such critiques in order to push contemporary discoursefurther rather than passing them by in an elision of historical mem-ory. The model of embracing the forces of capitalism and of devel-

oping strategies of working within that seemingly inescapable milieuhas, of course, become a mainstay of certain postcritical trajecto-ries in architecture. The political implications of such positions have

been cast by its protagonists predominantly through a refusal of thecritical and theoretical discourses of the last few decades. Even whileacknowledging the totalizing condition of capitaland thus the fore-

Frank Lloyd Wright. Organic

Architecture, including Broadacre

City, as published inArchitectureand Modern Life, 1937.


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closure of spaces of critical distanceaesthetic practice can investi-gate other political spaces and other instabilities that remain to befurther articulated within this inescapable but complex milieu.

Schapiros embrace of the social importance of modern architectureduring the 1930s is also of contemporary historiographic interest.Although his writings on modern architecture have largely been

passed over in the literature on Schapiro to date,35 they bear directlyupon his noted reassessment, between 1936 and 1937, of the social

bases of modernist aesthetics. As traced in the following dossier,despite the manner in which architecture was captured within cer-tain problematics, Schapiro attributed to it a social relevance thatimplicitly situated the discipline at the forefront of advanced aes-thetic practice. In other words, even given its condition under cap-italism, modern architecture was seen to harbor radical potentialsthat were not initially attributed to modern art.

Schapiro ended his review of Wright and Brownells Architectureand Modern Life by reiterating a claim he made throughout the

1930s: Despite its imbrication within capitalism, modern architec-ture sustained a redemptive potential and thus had a vital bearingon socialism.36 In Architecture Under Capitalism Schapiro hadexplained that while technically efcient and accessible media suchas cinema and the printed book retained ideological problems, archi-tecture points to the greatest social possibilities, even if they werecurrently hampered by the exploitation of capitalist society.37 Inthe 1932 pamphlet Architects and the Crisis: An Open Letter to theArchitects, Draughtsmen and Technicians of America, Schapiro hadalso directly appealed to the profession to harness this potential,casting it as a solution to architects plight during the depression.

Positioning the profession as a favored group in American societyand as the intellectual and artistic sources of the human environ-ment, Schapiro went on to explain how the forces of capitalism hadcaused architects to become either lowly paid servants of businessor simply unemployed.38

In the April 1936 text Architecture and the Architect, Schapirowould expand upon his assessment of the devastating plight of thearchitect. Originally published in New Masses, the article traced thestructural causes of widespread unemployment and reduced payduring the depression. The new character of the professiononein which the model of an independent architect operating a small

ofce had given way to that of an anonymous worker alienated by thedivision of labor and operating beneath businessmenmeant thatthe work was increasingly commodied.39 According to Schapiro, itwas not large-scale work or modern techniques that had led to thispoverty of form. Rather, adverse socioeconomic factors were to blame,and it was precisely the aesthetic integrity of modern architecture


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that was thereby at stake. Pointing to the inexpensive feeble adjust-ments of minor surface details that injected an ersatz artistic com-ponent into large-scale housing projects, Schapiro explained suchpseudodifferentiation as being symptomatic of an inability to achievethe actualaesthetic qualities of modernisms use of mass production.Successful cities, Schapiro argued, indicating a way out of the cur-

rent predicament, were not the product of sheer repetition but hadto be the product of architects working collectively, with their imag-ination and intelligence unhampered, on issues of art as well astechnique.40 The work of the architect, allied as a producer to theworkers, was thus contingent upon the successful deployment of anaesthetic function.

If modern architecture had the potential to actively transformsocial conditions through engaging the means of production, it wouldonly do so, Schapiro argued, if its aesthetic dimension was activelyengaged in this process. While intimately tied to socioeconomic andtechnical conditions, the discipline must not just reect those con-

ditions. Immersed in the forces of production, architecture had theability to adopt an active and critical stance. It would be precisely atthis nexus of aesthetics and production that Schapiro would soonrecognize a similar critical and self-reflexive capacity inherent inabstract art. That he had not done so yet was evident two months

before the appearance of Architecture and the Architect whenSchapiro delivered The Social Bases of Art at the First AmericanArtists Congress against War and Fascism. Aligned with the politicsof the Popular Front, the three-day congress was held in February attwo New York venues, the Town Hall and the New School for SocialResearch.41 The opening address was delivered by Mumford, who

presented the need for artists to unite against the threat of war andfascism. Depression and repression, he argued, go hand in hand.42

Schapiro began his own remarks by clarifying that When I speak inthis paper of the social bases of art I do not mean to reduce art to eco-nomics or sociology or politics. Art has its own conditions that dis-tinguish it from other activities.43 Yet, as he went on to argue,although not fully determined by such factors, that which was spe-cific to art, including modern and abstract art, was largely a reflec-tion of the historical conditions under which it was produced.

Schapiro famously argued that the insistently personal character ofthe modern painters work and his preoccupation with formal prob-

lems alone were in fact symptomatic reections of the artists con-dition in modern times. The very content of that supposedly auton-omous art, which appears to be unconcerned with content, could

be traced to the commercial underpinning of modern life, to its cultureof consumption and visual spectacle.44 (In The New Architecture,we might note, he had claimed that the buildings were more than


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designs or spectacles.45) Central to this conception of modern art wasthe detachment of culture from practical and collective interests.This isolation of modern artists from practical activities, and theruthless and perverse character of their individualism, Schapiroexplained, arose with the rentier leisure class of modern capitalistsociety wherein the individual was simply a consumer, not a

producer.46In Architecture and the Architect, however, Schapiros argument

had been the converse. Assured both of architectures social functionand of its inevitable immersion within the conditions of production,he did not need to argue for connections between architecture andits social and historical context but rather for the value of its aes-thetic dimension. Here he argued that architectures radical poten-tial arose at the nexus of its social bases and its formal and material(i.e., aesthetic) inventiveness (achieved through actively engaging itsconditions of production).47 We might recall here Schapiros critique


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of Wright, whose model of reflecting society in architecture wasregarded as a fantasy of autonomy, an Architects Utopia forgedat the expense of actually engaging its social bases. In contrast,Schapiros utopian model of architectural practice involved a formaland critical experimentation with technologies of mass production.If architecture could realize the aesthetic potentials of modernism,

Schapiro implied, it would at the same time harness a critical self-consciousness that might resist assimilation to the forces of capitalism.

While The Social Bases of Art intimately tied modernist andavant-garde art to spectacle, The Nature of Abstract Art, publishedin the Marxist Quarterly the following year, would significantlyrecast the debate.48 As Thomas Crow points out, The basic argumentremains in place, but we find him using without irony terms likeimplicit criticism and freedom to describe modernist painting.Schapiro, Crow explains, now recognized some degree of active, resis-tant consciousness within the avant-garde.49 As Serge Guilbaut indi-cates, in arguing that abstract art was both socially conditioned and

at the same time able to express a critical social consciousness,Schapiro refuted both Barrs formalism and the criticism advancedfrom the communist perspective (that such abstraction had no relationto society): in Guilbauts terms, Schapiro outanked both camps.50

The Nature of Abstract Art concluded not with an analysis ofpainting or sculpture but by addressing artists who had tied theiruseless archaic activity to the most advanced and imposing forms ofmodern production.51 Schapiro recounted how In applying theirmethods of design to architecture, printing, the theater and theindustrial arts they remained abstract artists, understanding theirwork as the aesthetic counterpart of the abstract calculations of the

engineer and the scientist. His remarks suggest that he is thinking,initially, of European artists such as those associated with LEF, theNovembergruppe, De Stijl, and the magazine G. Advanced artists, heexplained, supported the Bolshevik revolution and collaborated withthe social-democratic and liberal architects of Germany andHolland. At this point in his text, such collaboration with architectsmeant that artists were engaged in practical and collective intereststhat addressed the stringent rationalization of industry withintheir aesthetic project. But he also pointed to the growing inuenceof a reformist illusion, as encapsulated in Le Corbusiers sloganArchitecture or Revolution!52 This was an illusion, as he had pre-

viously argued, that was shared by Mumford and Fuller, one whichassumed that technological advances would lead to a peaceful tran-sition to socialism.

In Schapiros narrative this reformist attitude, which had fore-closed radical potentials in architecture, here also marked a subse-quent breakdown in artists engagement with architecture and

Top: Le Corbusier. Villa Savoye,

Poissy, 192831.

Bottom: Hans Scharoun.

Bachelors Apartments, Breslau,1930.


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technology. Schapiro articulated how this collaboration had givenway to two distinct reactions that he cast as equally problematicdialectical poles. In the rst instance, under the impact of the depres-sion, both artists and architects had overidentied with the engineer,thus retaining a techno-optimism but denying the architect an aes-thetic function.53 Such extreme views, he explained, again recalling

his critique of Fuller, were common to reformists of technocratictendency. In Schapiros words, As production is curtailed and liv-ing standards reduced, art is renounced in the name of technicalprogress.54 The second instance was a neosurrealist rejection ofrationalism and mechanical abstract styles. This opposite pole hadlead both to what Barr termed biomorphic abstractioncharacter-ized by Schapiro as a violent or nervous calligraphy, or with amoeboidforms, a soft, low-grade matter pulsing in an empty spaceand toa new romanticism found in pessimistic imagery of empty spaces,

bones, grotesque beings, abandoned buildings and catastrophicearth formations.55

The question of technology stands at the center of Schapiros writ-ings throughout the 1930s, a period during which he is at his mostdialectical. This focus on technology allows, on the one hand, for asocial and material analysis of aesthetic production that overcomesdualities of form and content, as well as the psychologizing he attrib-utes to Mumford and Nikolaus Pevsner. Pevsners failure to ade-quately mediate between the formal and technical aspects of late-nineteenth-century architecture, Schapiro argued in his brief butinsightful review of Pioneers of the Modern Movement(published inthe Zeitchrift fr Sozialforschung), led him to the assumption thatthe work was the product of imagination or that it expressed moral

views.56 On the other hand, it was the embrace of new technology,epitomized for Schapiro in the potentials of modern architecture,that offered the prospect of a utopian and progressive vocation toaesthetic practice. Thus, if in The New Architecture technologywas invoked against the aestheticism of MoMAs presentation ofarchitecture, the aesthetic would subsequently emerge as an ade-quate dialectical counterpart, a counterpart developed in responseto the technological vitalism of Fuller and Mumford. Schapirosdebate with Fuller, in particular, revolved around the status of aes-thetics. As we have seen, his accusation that Shelterharbored an artyand sentimental view of technology had prompted Fuller to claim

that, unlike the avowedly technocratic program of the SSA, it was theaesthetic dimension in Schapiros project that had been (illicitly forFuller) harnessed for radical, political ends. For Schapiro this aes-thetic dimension was not, of course, akin to the aestheticism impliedin the codification of an international style. What he recognizedwithin architectural modernism was the prospect of a critical reexive

R. Buckminster Fuller. Dymaxion

House Model, with disassembledparts in shipping order, 1927.


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capacity, even a utopian dimension, in architects aesthetic mediationof the conditions of production, conditions within which the disci-pline always and already operated.

Schapiros writings are, of course, addressed to a distinctly differentgeneration of technologies to those informing aesthetic practice today.Yet if the rise of the postindustrial or information age elicits a distinct

set of historical questions, the intersection of aesthetics and politics,at which Schapiro situated his analysis, continues to raise pressingquestions regarding how architecture is positioned within this tech-nological milieu.


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Notes

1. Meyer Schapiro, The New Architecture, New Masses (May 1932): 23. Reprintedin the dossier of Schapiros writings accompanying this text. While Schapiro suggeststhat newspapers did not report this aspect of the symposium, the New York Timesdid in fact mention Mumfords remarks. See Calls the Drive Potential Slum, NewYork Times, 20 February 1932, 10, col. 2.

2. Henry Churchill, Structural Study Associates, Shelter2, no. 4 (May 1932): 3.

3. Churchill, Structural Study Associates, 3.4. Buckminster Fuller, Correlation, Shelter2, no. 4 (May 1932): 1. Emphasis in

original.5. Schapiro, The New Architecture, 23. Although Schapiro does not cite the exact

source, he is quoting from Kenneth Kingsley Stowell, Housing the Other Half, TheArchitectural Forum LVI, no. 3 (March 1932): 217220.

6. Roger Sherman, Transition, Shelter2, no. 4 (May 1932): 26.7. Sherman, Transition, 26. Schapiro will refute these claims as addressing

neither the peculiarities of the social-economic structure nor the historical facts.See Meyer Schapiro, Architecture under Capitalism, New Masses (December1932): 1013. Reprinted in this dossier.

8. Sherman, Transition, 27. Reversing Schapiros claims regarding the socialist

tendencies in architectural modernism, Sherman posited that the intentions ofarchitects were frankly, to make as good a living as their talents will enable them.If, he argued, the work of J.J.P. Oud, Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Mies Van der Rohehad initially been intuitively true, it had subsequently been adopted in the cause ofthe best-for-least shelter developed industrially in terms of mechanical adequacyfor human survival and development.

9. See Colin Rowe, Introduction, in Five Architects (New York: Wittenborn andCompany, 1972), 4.

10. Beyond adding preliminary remarks, it appears that some changes were madein Schapiros article for inclusion in the New Masses. For instance Schapiro refers toarticles by S.S.A.s which have a direct interest for the New Masses.

11. Schapiro, Architecture under Capitalism, 10.12. Schapiro, Architecture under Capitalism, 10.13. Schapiro, Architecture under Capitalism, 13.14. Kieslers project was for an experimental theater for the artists colony in

Woodstock, New York. See Frederick Kiesler, A Festival Shelter: The Space Theaterfor Woodstock, N.Y., Shelter2, no. 4 (May 1932): 4247.

15. Schapiro, Architecture under Capitalism, 11. Emphasis in original.16. Our Intimate Journal of Summer Events, Shelter2, no. 5 (November 1932): 16.

Fuller is actually arguing that Kwaits criticism had already been answered in theprevious issuei.e., the issue in which Shermans article appearedand that he isthus simply misguided in his critique.

17. Intimate Journal, 16. Also according to this column, the Art in Revolutionmovement had been incited at a meeting of Chicagos John Reed Club involving apresentation by Diego Rivera (in fact an acquaintance of Schapiro), and it entailed

a complete lack of empirical knowledge of the mechanics-of-evolution of the humanphenomenon in its essential economic trends in the North American continent, atrend that for Shelterwas inherently good and simply embittered by the temporaryparasitic prot-disease. Such an approach, it was claimed, had failed to see thesturdy tree that this odious orchid clings to. New Masses was the primary organ ofcultural reportage for the Communist Party. The John Reed Club (originating with the


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New York branch) was an association of artists and writers who were sympathetic tothe Communist Party.

18. Schapiro, The New Architecture, 23.19. Intimate Journal, 16.20. Intimate Journal, 16. Emphasis added.21. Meyer Schapiro, Looking Forward to Looking Backward: On Lewis

Mumford: Technics and Civilization, New Masses (July 1934): 3738. Reprinted inthis dossier.

22. Letter from Meyer Schapiro to Lewis Mumford, 15 August 1934, 2. LewisMumford Papers, Series I. Correspondence: Letters to Lewis Mumford. AnnenbergRare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania (hereinafter LewisMumford Papers).

23. Mumford, cited in Schapiro to Mumford, 3.24. While it is not clear what Schapiro is setting out to argue in this brief rebuttal,

his remark about fascism being against capitalism runs counter to the argumentmade by Walter Benjamin in the epilogue to the Work of Art essay of 1936. WhatBenjamin famously recognized is that, in allowing the masses a form of expressionseemingly against their subjection to existing property relations, fascism preservedthose very relations. That expression took the form of the aestheticization of poli-

tics, as prominently manifest in the futurists aestheticization of technologies of war.Communism responds, he concluded, by politicizing art. See Walter Benjamin,The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), trans. HarryZohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reections, ed. Hannah Arendt, 217251 (NewYork: Schocken Books, 1968). Schapiro will be clearly against the aestheticizationof politics, as evidenced in the second Mumford review.

25. Schapiro to Mumford, 23.26. Schapiro to Mumford, 5.27. Mumford had, for instance, pointed to afnities between regular frames that

ordered hitherto unrelated lines and solids in Renaissance painting and the polit-ical consolidation of territory into the coherent frame of the state.

28. Meyer Schapiro, Looking Forward to Looking Backward, Partisan Review5,no. 2 (July 1938): 1224. Reprinted in this dossier.

29. If not commented upon by Schapiro, there is also a marked continuity in theinterest with ows. The book opens with the suggestion that The Hudson river tun-nel is a glistening conduit through which a large amount of mankind is piped . . .Man is a uid in metropolitan regions. He ows through the rush hours, rolls alongthe bank-full streets. The tunnel is built for that fluidity. It is a homoduct . . . thatinterprets to some extent the social character of the times. Baker Brownell and FrankLloyd Wright, Architecture and Modern Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1937), 1.

30. Meyer Schapiro, Architects Utopia: Review of Architecture and Modern Life,Partisan Review4, no. 4 (March 1938): 46. Reprinted in this dossier.

31. Meyer Schapiro, Race, Nationality and Art, Art Front(2 March 1936):1012. Another version of this paper had appeared under the authorship of LyndWard, who acknowledged his indebtedness to Schapiro for part of the material

contained. See Lynd Ward, Race, Nationality and Art, in First American ArtistsCongress (New York: American Artists Congress, 1936), 3841. If Wright andBrownell seemed to share the Nazi enthusiasm about the folk, Schapiro went onto note that this in turn entailed further and dangerous implications: for the authors,a homogenous racial and national stock is preferable to a balance of stocks.

32. Faced with the widespread economic crisis of Western capitalism during the


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depression, in 1932 Communism, and in particular Soviet Russia, provided forMarxists such as Schapiro a model of an outside both to the capitalist structures ofexploitation and the devastating prospects of its impending collapse. This would,of course, change with the news of the Moscow Show Trials and the purges of Sovietintellectuals from 1936 to 1938. These events divided the left and led to a wide-spread disillusionment among intellectuals both with the Soviet Union and theAmerican Communist Party. This would be cemented with the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939. Schapiro himself ended up on the side of the Trotskyists,thus taking the opposite side to the New Massesby 1936. See Serge Guilbaut, NewYork, 19351941: The De-Marxization of the Intelligentsia, in How New York Stolethe Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1983), 1748.

33. For instance, Mumfords work has been a point of reference in the writings ofPaul Virilio on militarism and territory, as well as in that of Gilles Deleuze and FlixGuattari. See Paul Virilio, Linscurit du territoire, 2nd ed. (Paris: ditions Galile,1993 [1976]); Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism andSchizophrenia, trans. Helen R. Lane, Robert Hurley, and Mark Seem (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1983); and Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, AThousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minnea-

polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Within recent years this line of thinkinghas been developed in ever more sophisticated political and theoretical directionsthan that of Mumford, directions which would signicantly challenge even Schapirosmost dialectical criticisms. See, for instance, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

34. It should be pointed out, however, that Schapiros epistemological frameworkand methodologies would have rendered him unwilling to positively acknowledgethe very different conceptual apparatus informing Mumfords investigation. Mumfordswork was not, as Schapiro rightly recognized, premised on articulating historicaldialectics and formulating historical categories. Schapiro in fact recognized thealternative philosophical lineage to which Mumford was afliated, yet Mumfordsabstract and ahistorical notion of forces remained symptomatic of mystication. Forinstance, Schapiro attributed Mumfords interest in invisible forces to a Sad dilet-tante muddle of Whitehead, Bergson and ABCs of the cosmos! Schapiro, LookingForward, Partisan Review, 18.

35. A notable exception to this is Andrew Hemmingway, Meyer Schapiro andMarxism in the 1930s, Oxford Art Journal17, no. 1 (1994): 1329. Hemmingwaysaccount also provides relevant biographical information on Schapiro and his posi-tion with respect to the New York Intellectuals of this period.

36. Schapiro, Architects Utopia, 47.37. Schapiro, Architecture under Capitalism, 12.38. Meyer Schapiro, Architects and the Crisis: An Open Letter to the Architects,

Draughtsmen, and Technicians of America (1932), in Worldview in PaintingArtand Society(New York: Braziller, 1999), 168172. The anonymous pamphlet waspublished by the Architects Committee of the League of Professional Groups for

Foster and Ford. William Z. Foster and James W. Ford were Communist Party can-didates in the 1932 presidential elections.

39. Meyer Schapiro, Architecture and the Architect, New Masses (April 7 1936):3031. Reprinted in this dossier.

40. Schapiro, Architecture and the Architect, 31.41. On the politics of the Popular Front, which set out to forge alliances against


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fascism at the expense of the political differences of its various elements, see SergeGuilbaut, New York, 19351941. Guilbaut also notes that after the Hitler-Stalin pactand the collapse of the promise of Soviet Russia, Schapiro rejected the AmericanArtists Congress as Stalinist and fascist. In turn he organized the Federation ofModern Painters and Sculptors. It is interesting to note that, following the Russianattack on Finland, Schapiro called upon Mumford to form an alliance against theArtists Congresss decision to adopt the ofcial Communist Party line on this actof aggression. In a letter to Mumford dated April 12, 1940, Schapiro calls upon himto join dissident members in a meeting in which they would decide upon somecommon step, probably resignation (Lewis Mumford Papers).

42. Lewis Mumford, Opening Address, in First American Artists Congress(New York: American Artists Congress, 1936), 12.

43. Meyer Schapiro, The Social Bases of Art (1936), in Worldview in Painting,119.

44. As Schapiro explained, Although painters will say again and again that con-tent doesnt matter, they are curiously selective in their subjects. . . . First, there arenatural spectacles, landscapes, or city scenes, regarded from the viewpoint of arelaxed spectator, a vacationist, or sportsman, who values the landscape chiey asa source of agreeable sensations or mood; articial spectacles and entertainments

the theater, the circus, the horse race, the athletic field, the music hallor evenworks of painting, sculpture, architecture, and technology, experienced as specta-cles or objects of art. Schapiro, The Social Bases of Art, 122.

45. Emphasis added.46. Schapiro, The Social Bases of Art, 124.47. Schapiro also argued for the necessary formal and aesthetic dimension of

even the most abstract and technological architectural forms in The Arts underSocialism (1937), in Worldview in Painting, 129132.

48. Meyer Schapiro, The Nature of Abstract Art (1937), in Modern Art:Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1979), 189. Thiswas written in response to Alfred Barrs catalogue essay for his 1936 MoMA exhi-

bition, Cubism and Abstract Art, and advanced a critique of Barrs model of artistictransformations, his theory of [the] immanent exhaustion and reaction of styles.

49. Thomas Crow, Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts, in ModernArt in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 337.

50. Guilbaut, New York, 19351941, 25. See also Serge Guilbaut, The NewAdventures of the Avant-Garde in America, trans. Thomas Repensek, in Pollock andAfter: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina, 153166 (New York: Harper andRow, 1985).

51. Schapiro, The Nature of Abstract Art, 210.52. The work of Le Corbusier in fact poses important and difcult questions for

Schapiro. He returns to the work of Le Corbusier as an example of a politically con-servative but formally revolutionary architecture in 1957. See Meyer Schapiro, TheFuture Possibilities of the Arts (1957), in Worldview in Painting, 192199.

53. Schapiro, The Nature of Abstract Art, 211.

54. Schapiro, The Nature of Abstract Art, 211.55. Schapiro, The Nature of Abstract Art, 211.56. Meyer Schapiro, Review of Pioneers of the Modern Movement:From William

Morris to Walter Gropius, Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung 7, nos. 12 (1938):291293. Translated and included in this dossier.

on architecture under capitalism

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