A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the 'Techno- Social' Moment

摘要

Leave it to nineteenth-century English poet, critic, and educator Matthew Arnold to cast the modern university's gambit in near-Mani-chean terms: "So the university of Ezra Cornell, a really noble monument to his munificence, yet seems to rest on a misconception of what culture truly is, and to be calculated to produce miners, or engineers, or architects, not sweetness and light." Appearing in the introduction to his redoubtable Culture and Anarchy (1868), Arnold's reference to the founding of Cornell University in 1865 was a reminder that Gladstonian educational reforms threatened to eclipse the "sweetness and light" of humanism in Victorian England. This Hellenic educational ideal was more platitude than coinage, and yet fear that Oxbridge could wither under the penumbrae of economic and social pressures was indeed real. Industrialization demanded a better-educated citizenry, not the public schooled "double-barreled Dilettantes" and "Midas-eared Mammonists" that became the target of Thomas Carlyle's opprobrium. Reactions throughout Europe were somewhat uniform. Wilhelm von Humboldt's "union of teaching and research" in Prussia, compulsory schooling mandated by the passage of the Elementary Education Act of 1870 in England, the creation of the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris in 1829: such responses equated good education with good citizenship while emphasizing a healthy coexistence between trade and liberal educations. Yet Arnold's use of a very specific American example to cast doubt on this accord still manages to pique-here was an implicit critique of the education system institutionalized by the Morrill Land Grand Acts of 1862. And though Cornell was established outside the ambit of the Morrill acts, its foundation still captured their spirit. So did the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1861. Both Cornell and MIT were land-grant institutions committed to balancing a technical-based education with a humanistic liberal arts curriculum. Whereas Cornell promoted the "liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life," MIT was established "for the purpose of instituting and maintaining a society of arts, a museum of arts, and a school of industrial science, and aiding generally, by suitable means, the advancement, development and practical application of science in connection with arts, agriculture, manufactures, and commerce."4 These were lofty ideals that took generations to come to fruition. Moreover, Arnold's characterization of American technical universities as places "calculated" to produce architects is a subtle yet powerful metaphor because it also foresees another dualism implicit in architectural education during the twentieth century: namely, should architectural schools produce architects or promote architectural thinking (or architectural decision making) as a discipline in its own right?