The urban future that failed.(BOOKS)(FROM A CAUSE TO A STYLE: MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE'S ENCOUNTER WITH THE AMERICAN CITY)(Book review)

FROM A CAUSE TO A STYLE: MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE'S ENCOUNTER WITH THE AMERICAN CITY BY NATHAN GLAZER Princeton University Press, 292 pages, $24.95

NATHAN GLAZER'S NEW BOOK is a reminder of how distant even the recent past can seem. From a Cause to a Style collects 11 essays that were mostly written in the 1990s yet continue to reflect a disillusionment with modernist architecture rooted in the 1960s.

A sociologist long interested in urban planning, Glazer has two primary concerns: the twin failures of modernism as public architecture and as urbanism. Observers of the contemporary scene will encouragingly note that architecture has learned from modernism's mistakes and moved on. Given his commitment to the social agenda of architecture, Glazer might well be heartened by the goals of landscape urbanism and other new approaches to urban design. These essays are productively read as historical responses to a bygone era, not as fresh responses to recent trends. Nevertheless, the core worry of the book remains pertinent today: how to relate architecture and planning to the aims of social policy. And it is valuable to hear the voice of a public intellectual reinsert architecture and urban design into social criticism.

The argument in the first section of the book, "The Public Face of Architecture," hinges on a formalist critique of modernist architecture. Glazer believes that the stripped-down elements of the International Style and its offspring--the flat roof, undecorated cornice, unarticulated window and entrance--cannot fulfill the symbolic requirements of monuments and in particular of memorials. He approvingly quotes the critic and historian Lewis Mumford: "If it is a monument, it is not modern, and if it is modern, it cannot be a monument." This view was most relevant in the mid-20th century, and it is telling that Glazer's examples are situated on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a very particular context. Not only has the aesthetic power of modernist architecture been amply proven, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the defining memorial of our times, solved the problem formulated by Mumford.

Glazer's preoccupation with style seems misguided. As the evolution of the September 11 memorial at Ground Zero suggests, constituency concerns and budgetary pressures now shape monuments in more powerful ways than the designers do. But peeling away Glazer's antimodernist bias to get at the core values animating these spirited essays, you find an important humanist value: a belief in the rhetorical power and symbolic presence of buildings. A monument, he writes, is meant to celebrate, to recall, and to honor. Agreed, and to this list we might add a range of other emotional effects. Yet one suspects that in his criticism of modernist architecture, Glazer is mistakenly equating a set of physical forms that he calls the modernist style with a social dynamic, namely the disinvestment in and erosion of the public realm.