A New Way of Seeing?

So, I've been reading a book by Tom Wolfe called From Bauhaus to Our House. I became interested in the book after reading this month's issue of Dwell magazine, where the book was mentioned briefly. The magazine read-through inspired me to check out several books on Bahaus style, community building, and the significance of "place."

In the past several months, i've become increasingly fascinated with the role that the built environment plays in shaping human interactions, which has led me into a variety of learning endeavors. While i'm no architect, at least not presently, I find discussions on this subject very inspirational. Surprise, surprise when today I ran across an article entitled Learning from Venturi 'Maximum feasible dissent' on architecture by Christopher Caldwell. Wolfe's book is mentioned and quoted in the article. The article itself is a commentary on the pitfalls of the modernist architecture movement, where architects divorced their work from their clients and made it solely about "the art" instead of the person who was receiving it. Architects who don't consider the social implications of a certain style of building or certain building choices have, in my opinion, totally missed it.

Here's a noteworthy quote:

Modernist architecture does not give us new ways of seeing. It is an impoverishment, in fact. It ignores a varied cultural vocabulary accumulated over the centuries, because that vocabulary might endanger Modernism's political purpose. As a project, it resembles Kemal Atatürk's purging of the Turkish language to eliminate words with Persian, Arabic, or European roots.

"A way of seeing," mind you, is exactly what it's all about: making architecture that inspires people to imagine a better sense of place and community, thinking that the world that ought to be is possible. All of good art should do this, help us see. As architecture student Tyler Survant said in a recent article,

Representation goes beyond just conveying ideas to someone else. Representation helps you to understand the idea itself. It's about learning through making — about building a visual language that allows you to discover new concepts and new ways of seeing. (http://record.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/7203.html)

That quote from Survant says more than I can put into so few words...and it hints at this concept that has been scratching under my skin for months now, what Mako and his team at IAM call the "third language" of the arts:

Within a culture that is full of cynicism, apathy and anger, we must remind one another to remember. Our task as artists is to remind people that they are our neighbors. Our arts should lead others to recall who they are. And by doing so, we may remind them, and ourselves, who we are. Our responsibility is to re-humanize the divide, to speak a "third language" of generative creativity that defuses the cultural war language. (http://makotofujimura.blogspot.com/2008/03/empathic-creativity-generative.html)

It seems, then, that it isn't so much about a "new" way of seeing as it is about a "renewed" way of seeing, one that is informed by unspoken and unseen realities. Call it what you will, the concept of helping people see through art, architecture, music, etc. has me gripped. What does Tom Wolfe have to say on the subject and what does that have to do with me and you? Well, you'll have to keep reading to find out.