Burning an Idol of the Mid-Century Modern

While my deep and abiding ambivalence for Architecture may be a lifelong development, we can find certain moments that kindled the spark of contempt into a now smoldering animus; one such event happened 10 years ago last week when I and others helped the artist Chris Larson build and then burn down a full-scale model of a Marcel Breuer designed residential home in front of an audience of 40,000 people in downtown St. Paul. The New York Times wrote up this event and panned it, as if it were something cute and superlative that Midwest artists do—Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar burned down a gallery in Sweden in 2000 but who’s counting. If before this moment I took it for granted that the Architect was a kind of lord of society, dreaming up a rational heaven of steel, glass and light, erecting sublime structures that defy gravity and dominate the mind and the earth with their sheer size, weight and permanence, the fire that torched this idol of MCM burned off in me these ideal delusions. The architect is no lord, and, in my work experience, is often a tyrant (see Frank Lloyd Wright). And obviously the permanence of these structures is their greatest lie. If real-estate is the most secure form of wealth then the building represents the seeming permanence of capital itself; value in its most domineering and indestructible form. Our little act of fiery destruction was a hot repudiation of elite architecture and the whole sacred enterprise of private accumulation.