AVANT-GARDE

Taken literally, the avant-garde refers to the front part of a marching army, the scouts that
first head into unknown territory. As a metaphor, the word has been used from the 19th
century onward to refer to progressive political and artistic movements that considered
themselves to be ahead of their time. The avant-garde is struggling against the old,
heading toward the new. It is radical and controversial, fighting against consensus and
looking for disruption. The avant-garde radicalizes the basic principle of modernity: the
urge toward continual change and development. According to Matei Calinescu (1987), its
very radicality drives it to a conscious quest for crisis: Because the avantgarde attitude
implies the bluntest rejection of such traditional ideas as those of order, intelligibility, or
even success, its protagonists seek for an art that is to become an experience, deliberately
conducted, of failure and crisis. The most characteristic feature of the avant-garde,
therefore, might be the continuous cycling of short-lived movements that emerge and
whither away in rapid succession.
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As early as 1962, Renato Poggioli described the avant-garde as characterized by four
moments: activism, antagonism, nihilism, and agonism. The activist moment meant
adventure and dynamism, an urge to action that is not necessarily linked to any positive
goal. The antagonistic character of the avant-garde refers to its combativeness; the avantgarde
is always struggling against something—against tradition, against the public, or
against the establishment. Activism and antagonism are often pursued in such a way that
an avant-garde movement finally overtakes itself in a nihilistic quest, in an uninterrupted
search for purity, ending up by dissolving into nothing. The avant garde is indeed
inclined to sacrifice itself on the altar of progress—a characteristic that Poggioli labels
agonistic.
During the last decades, the term avant-garde has acquired a more precise theoretical
meaning because of the work of Peter Burger (1974). The avant-garde is clearly
distinguished from modernism in that it is confined to a more limited range of ideas and
movements. According to Burger, the avant-garde in the visual arts and literature was
concerned to abolish the autonomy of art as an institution. Its aim was to put an end to the
existence of art as something separate from everyday life—of art, that is, as an
autonomous domain that has no real impact on the social system. The avant-garde, says
Burger, aims for a new life praxis, a praxis that is based on art and that constitutes an
alternative for the existing order. This alternative would no longer organize social life on
the basis of economic rationality and bourgeois conventions. It would rather found itself
on aesthetic sensibilities and on the creative potentialities of each individual.
Avant-gardism has been most prominent in literature and the arts, whereas its use in
the context of architecture was less common. Nevertheless, there has been a tendency to
identify the Modern movement as the avant-garde in architecture. The theoretical finetuning
urged by Burger, however, necessitates a modification of this too-simple
identification. Bürger's work also brought about a growing consensus to distinguish
between the historical avant-garde, chronologically situated before World War II, and the
neo-avant-garde, which is a more recent phenomenon.
The issues and themes around which the Modern movement in architecture
crystallized were surely related to the avant-garde logic of destruction of the old and
construction of the new. The Modern movement was based on a rejection of the
bourgeois culture of philistinism that used pretentious ornament and kitsch and that took
the form of eclecticism (Gusevich, 1987). In its stead, the movement gave precedence to
purity and authenticity. In the 1920s, these themes acquired a distinct political dimension:
The new architecture became associated with the desire for a more socially balanced and
egalitarian form of society in which the ideals of equal rights and emancipation would be
realized. The architectural vanguard, nevertheless, did not become as uncompromising
and as radical as its counterpart in art and literature. Most architects, for example, never
renounced the principle of rationality, even if it stood for a bourgeois value.
Therefore, it might be more productive not to speak of the Modern movement as the
avant-garde but, rather, to distinguish certain avant-garde moments within its discourse,
for the movement was hardly a unified whole; rather, it consisted of widely differing
trends and tendencies. Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co cite tendencies such as De
Stijl in Holland, Productivism and Constructivism in Russia, and the late Expressionist
currents of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst and the Novembergruppe in Germany among the
architectural avant-garde. These movements, they argue, were inspired by an intensive
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exchange between visual arts and architecture and a new social reality that was based on
a new, artistic outlook on the world.
The early writings of Swiss historian and critic Sigfried Giedion testify to an
aspiration to abolish architecture as a typology or segregated discipline. In Bauen in Frankreich, Eis en, Eis enbeton (1928; Building in France, Build ing in
Iron, Building in Fer roconcrete), Giedion questions the very idea of an architecture with definitive boundaries, and
his implicit suggestion is that architecture no longer has anything to do with objects. If it
is to survive at all, it must become part of a broader domain in which spatial relations and
concerns are of central importance. Herewith, Giedion formulates as a goal for
architecture that it would break out of the limits imposed on it by tradition and by its
functioning as an institution.
Although Giedion did not develop these potentially subversive considerations in any
radical way in his consecutive work, they were not completely idiosyncratic, either. The
thought that architecture should no longer limit itself to the design of representative
buildings but rather should develop into a more comprehensive discipline that is focusing
on the whole of the environment and that merges with social reality and with life itself
was shared by many prominent modern architects from the 1920s. Avant-garde architects
such as Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ernst May believed that their mission had to
do with the design of all aspects of life, and they aimed at a reconceptualization of the
whole process of building, including construction techniques, housing typologies, and
urbanism. One of the most radical interpretations of such beliefs was to be found in the
work of Walter Benjamin.
Benjamin thought that the destructive gestures of the avantgarde, which aimed at
purification, were necessary to free the way for a revolutionary future. The transparency
and openness of the new architecture pointed for Benjamin to a revolutionary, classless
society based on emancipation and flexibility. He interpreted this architecture as part of
the avant-garde’s attack on bourgeois culture. The new architecture schooled inhabitants
and users to adapt to new social conditions that prefigured the future transparent society.
Benjamin saw architecture as a discipline that was capable of stimulating people to align
their attitudes with those required by the new society to come (Heynen, 1999).
The alignment between modern architecture and politically progressive tendencies was
thus clearly present in the 1920s and the early 1930s, in the self-reflection of its
representatives as well as in the discourse of major critics. This avant-garde position
claimed a new, more open and more socially relevant mission for architecture. It was
Utopian and critical, believing that the new future could be reached only by starting from
scratch. This position, however, did not dominate very long. When HenryRussell
Hitchcock and Philip Johnson introduced modern architecture to the United States, they
presented it as the latest and most topical style, leaving aside any social or political issues
(The Inte rnational Style, 1932). Giedion himself gravitated toward a similar position with his later Space, Time and A rchitecture (1941).
In presenting the space-time concept as a “secret synthesis” that was capable of building
a unity across very different disciplines, Giedion no longer referred to social experiments
or to the revolutionizing aims of the new architecture. Instead, he strove toward the
formulation of a common denominator that could unite rather diverse trends under the
banner of one “modern architecture,” thus formulating a certain orthodoxy that was at
odds with the continuous longing for change characteristic of the avant-garde.
This tendency toward consensus and orthodoxy in modern architecture was only
reinforced in the postwar years, when modern architecture was accepted by many
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administrations as the most appropriate answer to the building needs of the
Reconstruction era. Modern architecture thus became institutionalized as part of the
establishment, and consequently, it took its leave from the avant-garde aspirations of the
1920s. It was therefore no coincidence that after World War II a gap opened up between
modern architecture and the avant-garde in the arts. They soon drifted quite apart. The
most vehement criticism that was leveled against modern architecture in the early
postwar years came from movements such as Lettrism and International Situationism
rather than from right-wing conservatives. International Situationism was based on the
program for a “unitary urbanism,” which consisted of a vigorous critique of current
modernist urbanism. Unitary urbanism rejected the utilitarian logic of the consumer
society, aiming instead for the realization of a dynamic city, a city in which freedom and
play would have a central role. By operating collectively, the Situationists aimed to
achieve a creative interpretation of their everyday surroundings, and they created
situations that subverted the normal state of affairs. The Situationists belonged to the neoavant-
garde movements that formed an “avant-garde beyond modernism.” This neoavantgarde
considered itself to be ahead of the masses in its search for the future but took
its distance from the more conciliatory, consensus-oriented mainstream modernism
because it was much more radical and Utopian.
Within the field of architecture, there were also groups, such as Archizoom,
Archigram, and Superstudio that moved beyond modernist ideas and could be called neoavant-
garde. It is less clear, however, what the meanings of the terms “avant-garde” and
“neo-avant-garde” have become in the most recent decades. On the one hand, there is a
clear rejection of the avant-garde logic of destruction of the old and Utopian construction
of the new. It is stated that this logic is based on an ideology of progress, which has since
been proven to be false; that it gave rise to an elitist hermeticism that rendered its ideals
completely inaccessible to a general public; and that its supposedly radical innovations
and inventions nevertheless lend themselves all too well to appropriation by the culture
industry. This widely spread criticism would lead one to think that the avant-garde is
dead—a claim that has been made repeatedly. On the other hand, in the 1980s and the
’90s, the notion of a contemporary neo-avantgarde has resurged in the work of Peter
Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, and others. It seems clear, however, that this use of the term
neo-avant-garde is based on a perception of their position within a discursive field and that its
application has nothing to do with how they, contentwise, think about architecture. The
avant-garde and its significance for 20th-century architecture rests, then, with the
constant obliteration of boundaries between the arts and architecture, image and text, and
the meanings of old and new.