Imitation and the ‘Creative Genius’

Lucien Steil

London, Spitalfields area (photo by Lucien Steil)

Architects and builders were not more creative in the past than in modern times, nor

more intelligent, but they seem to have been smarter in some ways, and some time in

many ways .. . The main, very essential difference though is that they did not try, or

feel they had to be ‘creative geniuses’. They were not under pressure to be exciting and

innovative at every moment of their career. Today on the other hand everyone seems

obliged to be striking or ‘innovative’ and compulsively ‘unique’ and many like to be

considered as genial, inventive, special, with an unequaled and mesmerizing

personality, stunning charisma and creativity. The unprecedented claim for an infinite

realm of personal ego worth of ‘stardom’ and a limitless ambition of inventiveness,

creativity and subjective self-expression is not only tragic, frustrating, sad, but utterly

pathetic. It is a definite set-up for failure, anxiety and unhappiness and above all a

recipe for systematic cultural imposture. It favors a cultish ‘hubris’ of the super-creator

as much as it mistakes schools for incubators of competition, creativity and talent rather

than places of learning.. What is usually celebrated is arbitrary, transgressive, or

boringly minimalist and conceptual, and more often than not meaningless

architecturally, often nonsense. It seems almost we have all become part of a never-

ending ‘reality show’ distracting all of us from the ‘normality’ and ‘normative’, and

exacerbating the ‘iconoclastic’ and ‘iconic’. Professionals and students alike suffer

however from a contingency of imagination and a strangled use of visual memory.

They have to cope with the trauma of a bottomless, uninspired, undefined and open-

end creativity culture, and they cope poorly with it! The mind thus turns naturally to

hysteria and panic, depression and megalomania and often ends in the combined

interaction of all of these mental states resulting in one of the saddest and ugliest

culture of building ever experienced in mankind’s history! Strangely enough the full

steam on genius and high winds on unchained self- expression and ‘new subjectivity’

have killed off imagination and poetry, feeling and sensuality, as well as reason and

purpose, almost simultaneously alas, on the great battlefield of ‘modernity and

contemporaneity’.

At many schools of architecture students are coached, challenged, fired up, terrorized

and mystified, but not taught, and they are rushed into inventing and experimenting as

if they were all without exception extraordinary and exceptional geniuses with innate

divine capacities of vision, imagination and creation or as if just by random or arbitrary

‘bricolage’ the algorithm of ‘newness’, the gravity equation of ‘novelty’ and of so-called

‘originality’ were to be infallibly guaranteed. . This dysfunctional and naive pedagogy

obviously ignores the true ‘genius’ of many centuries of great craftsmanship,

architecture and urbanism: It is beyond doubt that good cities and good architecture

were mostly always produced with rigorous, rational and good education in

humanities and building trades, geometry, drawing, studies of precedent, classical

proportions and traditional building technologies and tectonics, apprenticeship and

training, etc. They were invented, developed and built by generations of wonderfully

anonymous craftsmen, ‘Baumeister’ , architects, ‘dilettantes’ and engineers. They relied

on copy, imitation and emulation based on the best and most excellent, time-tested and

successful precedents, models and types available in literature, building documents and

more often built in local or regional context.

Luxembourg City, Promenade de la Corniche (photo by Lucien Steil)

Now our modernist colleagues have no interest in ‘precedent’ and the study of

successful exemplars of architecture and urbanism in history and present, preferring the

gaze into the future hoping the unused potentials of massive contemporary genius will

prevail and improvisation will randomly lead to emulation and excellence, if not

eternal truth.. The clean slate, the “Tabula Rasa” and the obsessiveness of ‘novelty’ and

of ‘transgression’ remain the dominant imperatives of contemporary architectural

creation. For the modernist architects nothing is more valuable than their own personal

fixation on the drama of self-expression, the torments of ‘creativity’ and the tragic quest

for modernity. Dressed up in their black and austere outfits modernist architects and

artists have forgotten about the sweetness of the ‘Muses’ and have given up on the

‘Citta Felice’ as much as on harmonious, beautiful and comfortable architecture to

serve, elevate and delight human communities.

The whole world seems but a battlefield of competitive and often bitter creativity and

experimentation for the sake of experimentation, always seen from a narrow

perspective of a tyrannical and frivolous ‘Zeitgeist’, compulsive novelty, purposeless

innovation and individual genius ! Now how do the infinite legions of contemporary

geniuses account for an apparent lack of convincing evidence of success and popularity

in their design and rebuilding of the modern world? Where is the ‘piazza San Marco’ of

modernism, where is the St. Peter’s of ‘Deconstructivism’, and did Modernism ever

produce even a happy small town as the adorable little Pienza? How do modernist

activists then morally cope with their failure to build desirable, sustainable and

beautiful buildings and cities? How do they explain their indifference to beauty,

happiness and true citizenship? Do they care at all?

What others do, think and love is not important to the fervent missionaries and zealots

of architectural modernism. The task they consider most important is a mission of

radical and constant change, of transgression and of challenge enhancing and

encompassing the ruthless speed of change, sacrifices and transfiguration of

modernism. - They certainly cannot spend time wondering about nostalgia and of the

resilience of romantic images of the past, as do a majority of people forced to live in

their buildings and spaces! Thrown into the patterns of industrial modernism,

functional and social disruption, aesthetical anarchy and cultural deconstruction their

lives cannot but gravitate to hopes of redemption from modernism. Modernist

architects, planners and urbanists continue however to imagine, design and build sad

and depressing environments where nobody wants to live, and where nobody deserves

to live. Their combination of a ‘creative’ banality-mediocrity, of ugly ‘originality’, of

deconstruction, of minimalist misery, and of ‘parametricist’ non-sense have created

pathologies and architectural monsters difficult to explain or to understand. The overall

rejection of ‘imitative’ strategies based on time-tested precedents have made real

excellence and meaningful ‘wholeness’ impossible. How could any type of enduring,

sophisticated and civilized culture start from what seems an utterly absurd, fragmented

and unhappy legacy?

What's wrong with ‘modern’ architects?

They possess skills, intelligence, culture (probably as much as designers and builders

of the past), have idealism, sensitivity, dedication and can access huge databanks of

scientific, technical and artistic knowledge (more than any generation of artists in

history). Yet really what more can they achieve after almost 100 years of trials and

errors, and above all what else do they want to achieve? They often put all their efforts

to ruin the very art they claim to serve, ignoring the aspirations of people, and even

repressing their own feelings towards home, community and place. They often gave up

on many of their historic professional skills and seem to be torn apart by conflicting

ideologies* and aspirations.

They seem unwilling or incompetent to compose culturally, organically, ecologically,

architecturally, etc., with existing communities, landscapes, cities and buildings…Their

suffering is terrible but self-inflicted and unnecessary, -they keep trying, persisting

aloofly, and yet they continue to fail because they are no longer concerned with the

realm of architecture, nor interested to build durable, successful and popular places and

buildings.. They feel entitled to be the heralds of modernity and the heroes of a tortured

and tormented modern world, compelled to celebrate and brood upon unpopular

doctrines and experimentations of built forms and spaces. Rather than offering the

healing expertise and artistic emulation of the architect, they become a driving force of

the dissolution, deconstruction dissociation and fragmentation of our built and natural

environment. They have come to fight the very core values of architecture itself, the

substantial principles of ‘Firmitas, Commoditas, Venustas’ as outlined by Roman architect

Vitruvius and contributed ultimately not to a better architecture but to the ‘absence of

architecture’ in large parts of the contemporary world.

Modern architects are trapped in a ferocious dilemma: they act as “artistes maudits”,

unwilling to deal with conventions, public taste and common sense, which they regard

as petty bourgeois, kitsch or dishonest. On the other side, they claim social and

democratic principles to rationalize, standardize and/ or trivialize and fragment the

human environment with a widely unpopular aesthetic of industrialized and synthetic

products, unsustainable and unhealthy building materials and methods, and disruptive

incomprehensible scales, types and forms of construction . They refer to the artistic and

cultural freedom and autonomy of the modern architect, to the genius of the creator and

artist, but do not hesitate to confine the cultural diversity, ingenuity and freedom of

citizens in a despotic way! They blame traditional architecture to have served

authoritarian politics and repressive regimes in history but do not feel any scruples in

serving all contemporary dictatorships and undemocratic regimes throughout the

whole world with modernist icons designed by a handful of ‘star-architects’, and

participate uncritically to a vast production system of a most depressing, destructive

and unsustainable global suburbia. Their work often empowers corporations, big

institutions and obscure political regimes and disempowers local citizens, inhabitants,

neighbourhood associations, etc.

With no or little respect for historical conventions and cultural traditions, the modern

architect imposes a built environment claiming the legitimacy of a historical mission.

Rejecting the value of historical culture and precedent and criticizing classicists to ‘turn

back the wheel of history’ he has come to suggest to embodying the spirit of history

himself. Not having learnt from history he believes that history has to learn from him!

Endeavouring integration and harmony is considered to be a treason; the learning

from the existing communities, places and buildings as well as the analysis of principles

of historic cities and architecture are regarded as a matter of irrelevant amateurism!

Even if today’s modernist architects were as skilled, competent and able as architects

from the past centuries they seem to unfortunately insist to demonstrate the contrary.

They do refuse, often arrogantly, to engage with urban and architectural issues sensitive

to social and urban contexts, they refuse the time-tested traditions of urbanism and

contextual architecture and they often ignore even the best achievements of the ‘modern

tradition’ (and its social and cultural ideals) and contemporary precedents, a culture of

modernity to which they pretend to belong.

Luxembourg, Pole Nord Building: because the demolished historical building at this location was called

‘Pole Nord’ the architects thought that making their building look like a piece of ice was a stroke of

genius.(photo by Lucien Steil)

Looking at the designs of modernist colleagues, I don’t envy them for their fame and

commissions and often feel compassion when I see their grim faces and sad expressions.

I wonder whether they know the joys of ‘disegno’, or ‘inventio’ and the delight to

interact with empowered communities and happy citizens to share a vision, to craft

buildings and places where people can find meaning, identity and continuity, and

above all pride of place.! It always surprises me how distant the many joyless,

depressing plans and uninspiring visions and projects are from true human concerns,

desires and needs, and how artificially moralistic, puritan and abstract the

philosophical and theoretical views really are.. and how brutal above all when they get

built. - Why, should we continue to ask, why have they have forgotten or abandoned

the principles of ‘the good life’ and the virtues of citizenship?

It seems to me that architects from the past were happier and so were their patrons,

and all people pleased and inspired with their work. They regarded themselves as

modern, organically ‘contemporary’, without necessarily thinking of modernity as a

quality in itself. In fact, is modernity not simply the consciousness and positive

acknowledgment of a present historical situation and its specific sensitivity and

character? Is it not rather, the positive feeling, intuition and expression of a single and

unique present which every great culture experiences in its moments of intense cultural

and artistic creativity? We should hence avoid granting an absolute and universal value

to modernity: aesthetically, morally, stylistically, politically and culturally. Modernity is

not the sole privilege of the 20th century avant-garde or of any vanguard or cultural and

historical ‘rear-guard’. Every culture owns its modernity in moments where it is most in

unison with both its time and with the universe according to Hassan Fathy.

Luxembourg City, View towards the Faubourg du Grund (photo by Lucien Steil)

Why have the most beautiful cities in history been built, rebuilt, transformed and

enlarged in such a fine way over many centuries? Why has architecture been so

comfortable, pleasing and acclaimed? Why have architecture and city-building been so

much integral parts of a large popular culture while today they are being occulted as an

elitist and esoteric ‘cult’ and ignored or shoulder shrugged upon by the general

population? -There were certainly many reasons, but it seems to me that the happy,

harmonious and complex continuity and inventive development of cities and

architecture was made possible by:

- 1) The use of imitation as a creative method (Imitation of Nature)

- 2) The recognition of tradition as a living process that connects past, present and future.

- 3) The consciousness of humility of the individual in the cosmos and her/his acceptance of

limitations (recognition of the sacred and the profane).

Imitation encompasses following aspects:

- Respect of the built environment and un-built heritage: this is the ‘nature of

architecture’.

- The acknowledgement of the traditional city as an enrichment of nature and as

the natural habitat of mankind

- The translation of physical and moral characteristics of places and buildings and

the phenomena of tectonics in a conventional architectural invention.

- The articulation of the sensual, moral and abstract principles of nature , through

constructions and materials in an ecological, logical, consistent and significant

building that adapts harmoniously to a specific context.

Imitation is not codified as a building regulation but as a poetical and artistic sum of

principles. It has a lot of trust in the individual designer providing him with a wide

field for imagination, invention and experimentation within a system of natural laws.

Innovation is possible within imitation and occurs when necessary and useful. It proves

to be almost out of reach within both the rigid and authoritarian architectural, urban,

construction and technical codes, and the anarchic, arbitrary and iconoclastic design

wilderness of academy; innovation would then become a mere matter of stylistic

appearance and of symbolic gesticulation.

Originality

It does not ask for the absolute newness and contradiction, or a fanciful, weird and

strange, mostly superficial innovative form or content of a creation.

It is the sound creation from the essence of the original. Hence the issue is not the

sensational feeling of the unprecedented, but the quest for, - essential values and their

meaning, - unprejudiced creation that depends on an understanding of the original,

and ultimately the essence, the nature of a thing. According to Mircea Eliade, every

creation is a reproduction of the ‘original creation’. Martin Heidegger also perfectly

states that the nature of a thing can be found in its origin.

If only originality was understood this way, modern architecture would be much more

exciting and acceptable, for it would be part of a universal creation which is understood

and sensed as a harmonious unity of nature and culture, and of sacred and profane.

Pastiche/ copy/ imitation

Architecture that refers to traditions and that is committed to contextual issues and

integration is often regarded as pastiche. It is true that many an attempt to recreate an

architectural integration based on traditional precedents may become trivial and

superficial, and even ‘kitsch’, but this is equally true for the many ‘faux’ modernist

replicas and interpretations. The ‘culture of fake’ is a deeply rooted disease in our

modern building production and it is due obviously to the phenomena of mass

production and industrialized building materials and technologies. It is due in large

part to changing design paradigms in architecture from ‘The Imitation of Nature’ to

‘The Imitation of the Machine’

Definition of a copy

A copy is a consistent, complete and precise reproduction of something.

Definition of pastiche

It is a superficial and approximate interpretation of something; it is an impressionistic

reflection of a copy.

Definition of imitation

An invention of something new, based on the principles of ‘Imitation of Nature’, and of

selected precedents from a historical urban and architectural culture and its memory of

built and unbuilt legacy.

*On one hand an interest in ‘sustainable’ human cultures and ecological and environmental

concerns, urban cultures, political pluralism and tolerance, and refined living, but on the other

one no compassion for architectural and artistic pluralism, traditional art and architecture and

popular feelings. Modernists have no problem to openly admit that they prefer classical music

but consider classical architecture outdated, if not politically inacceptable. They like vernacular

architecture in exotic countries or as a style for their own country houses but reject local

vernacular architecture as a reference for contemporary creation and other people’s country

homes.