Opening

Under the umbrella title of “A Critical History,” part II of Kenneth Frampton's Modern Architecture (1980) comprises 27 chapters, each of which focuses on the work and contribution of a particular architect or architects and thinkers associated with a tendency or a movement. The present chapter neither presents a detailed discussion of each chapter of this section of Frampton's book nor examines the extent to which the two major architectural trajectories of modernism outlined in the introduction to the book inform Frampton's take in each chapter. What it does instead is to present a close reading of the ways that a few protagonists cast light on the proposed “Aalto contra Mies” paradox. Central to this inquiry is the ideology of architecture, especially in the politics of public space, the Arendtian “space of public appearance,” that Frampton has even pursued its dialectical relevance for the private nature of domestic space. Following this line of consideration, ample attention is given to Frampton's discussion of Giuseppe Terragni's Casa del Fascio (Figure 3.1), a project charged with civic and political connotations—and this concerning the concept of “monumentaliazation” introduced in connection with the late work of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, discussed in the next chapter. What is involved here is a constellation of themes, if you wish, that anticipate Jürgen Habermas's annunciation of “Modernity—an Incomplete Project.” To start with, the historicity of the annotated period is mapped at the expense of exceeding the scope of disciplinarity, keeping in mind that autonomy is a grey zone informed by history and the contingencies of the present time, the Benjaminian “now-time” (Jeztzeit).

At the outset, the importance of the epoch-making decade of the 1930s is highlighted. During this time, the revolutionary specter haunting Europe since the end of World War I culminated in crisis, aspects of which Walter Benjamin unpacks in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” first published in 1936. Conversely, this is also the moment when the architecture of Europe and America cultivated the formative ethos of modernism. In retrospect, the ideological apparatus of the contingencies of the project of modernism did foreground various stages of contemporary architecture.

Kenneth Frampton's historiographic taxonomy is essential for the project pursued in Modern Architecture: A Critical History, first published in 1980. The previous chapter demonstrated the extent to which a well-known passage from Walter Benjamin's “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” (1940) set the theoretical premises of Frampton's brief introductory remarks, notable aspects of which he elaborates on in the subsequent chapters of the book. It is to Frampton's credit that he writes the history of modern architecture while criticizing the Enlightenment idea of progress. His text also critiques the stakes involved in the avant-gardist failed attempt to catch up with the wind of progress (in artistic terms) that pushes Benjamin's angel of history forward. This “failure” speaks to the ideology of modernity, wherein “reality persisted independent of that sentimental and romantic ‘sphere of culture.’ “ Accordingly, it took almost half a century, Fredric Jameson contends, to face the vanishing stage of the suggested mode of separation, at least in the regions of the world that were the bedrock of early modernism. Call it the postmodern condition or the full-moon visibility of an ideology when alternative views are almost nullified, if not tossed to the dark orbit of history, at least for now.

At issue for a historian, among other things, was/is the possibility of maintaining a strategic distance from the Real without isolating historiography from the objective and subjective conditions of the everyday life that capitalism has successfully managed since the middle of the past century. Frampton maps the historicity of the formation of modern architecture in three chapters of the book's part I. He argues that what makes modernity distinct from the Classical are transformations implanted in the cultural, territorial and technical areas, which are discussed under the rubric of the “trilogy” below. These transformations run the historical gamut extending from 1750 to 1939. In addition to witnessing the emergence of architectonic expressions motivated by technical changes, the last years of the decade of the 1930s designate the end of modernity. This does not mean the literal end of modernity, a singular historical event that has attained global currency since the end of the Cold War (ca. 1990), but the loss of the theoretical currency of the modernity versus Classical paradigm.

Autograph books hit Lanham School when I was in 5th grade. All the girls had them. Mine was small enough to hold in one hand and had pastel-colored pages: green, yellow, blue and pink, if memory serves. Mostly the inscriptions were eminently forgettable and sappy. “Roses are red, violets are blue; no one loves you like I love you. Judy, your best friend forever.” Or else they were annoyingly uninspired and distinctly puerile, not funny except in the warped way of the young preteen mind. “Roses are red and violets are blue. You have a big head but I still like you. Ha ha ha,” the equivalent of today's LOL.

In a rash moment, I asked my mother to sign my book. (Just on the off chance that I might forget her??) Mother took the book, kept it overnight and then returned it to me with what seemed at the time an extremely odd poem. A real poem, not the “roses are red” variety I’d come to expect, and one I had never read before.

I didn't appreciate it, or even fully understand the poem at the time. But Mother's message stuck, as much a curse as a blessing.

I know now that passion is important in life. Loving someone or something more than reason dictates is a great gift. Just having that moment, in whatever form that fleeting instant takes, is transfigurative. It carries us out of ourselves and connects us with something akin to the divine.

TEACHING ETHICS THROUGH STORIES

We can define ethics— or moral philosophy; the two terms are often used interchangeably— as the moral principles that govern our behavior, the study or the branch of knowledge that asks how we ought to live. There are many ways to teach ethics. Instructors frequently lecture about the great works, describing the critical texts that address major themes in ethics, introducing the student to the canon: Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, social contract theorists, moral sense theorists, Utilitarians, virtue ethics and so on. Ethics is often also taught via religious instruction, in which students discuss the messages and values of various religions, from the Abrahamic Judaism, Christian and Islam to non-Western religions, such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism or the myriad other names given to faith by various groups over the centuries. Another approach emphasizes the Socratic dialogue; here students are posed hypothetical situations and asked to work their way through important moral issues. Is it always wrong to lie? Most of us would initially say yes. But what if the Nazis come and ask if Jews are hidden in your home? Would lying be the ethical thing to do then? Or, to consider another complex ethical situation, should society expend thousands of dollars to keep alive one premature baby or an elderly person, soon to die anyway, or instead spend the money on mosquito netting to keep alive hundreds of other small children? How do you decide this question if you are a Utilitarian? A Kantian? If it is your child? Your parent?

Each of these approaches carries value and worth. But this book takes another tack. It introduces the student to ethics through the use of stories. In particular, we ask how people use stories to weave thoughts about their lives into the moral choices they confront. Where do we get our moral values? Our ethical beliefs? How much of it comes from the stories we are read as children, the books we later read ourselves, the shows we watch on TV, or via novels, plays and short stories, such as those in Aesop's Fables? By the narratives created by adults to explain critical events in our lives, such as the death of a grandparent or a divorce?

Memo

To: Wretched, Slacker Disney Child

From: Stealth Bomber Mom

Re: Advice to parents

Date: Fall 2013

I first encountered the feeling of failure as a mother when my oldest son hit kindergarten. Alex was a bright and independent little boy. When we were living in faculty housing at Princeton, a 2-year-old Alex went to the communal Halloween party wearing the sweater Nani had knitted him out of Icelandic wool. In the midst of ghosts, goblins and pumpkins, Alex stood out. One mother asked with puzzlement about my son's costume.

“He's dressed as an Icelandic eccentric,” I replied, recognizing even then that this young man was going—always—to be his own person. The trait held and Alex remains bright, lovable and totally his own man, partly unmindful of the extent to which he deviates from norms and expectations, partly exalting in his difference, and enjoying the slight flaunting of authority. It is a trait he inherited from his maternal grandfather in spades, and one encouraged by both his doting parents. (On his college essay Alex took the opportunity to inform the admissions office at the University of Chicago that he found their questions “stupid and boring” and that he would write the question they should have asked and answer that one instead. Thank you very much!)

For the most part, I was quite comfortable with this behavior. I had a far different reaction one day when I picked up Alex from kindergarten, however, and realized all the children had drawn caterpillars and placed them around the room. Each caterpillar's face was extensively decorated and featured the child's name in big, bold, colorful letters. A segment was added to the child's caterpillar for every book the child read. The school was one for gifted children—though once it moved through its scruffy start-up stage it became more a school for children with financially-gifted parents—and many of the children were quite busily reading at home, usually under the supervision of adoring mothers. The links on some of the caterpillars were impressive. As was Alex's caterpillar. Impressive for its one teeny segment: one book and only one book.

Early (Theravada) Buddhism is philosophy of existence. Many practitioners are not ‘Buddhist’. They practise vipassana meditation as art of living, a way of knowing and realizing human potential. It is a way of thinking about freedom and death. These ideas are the focus of this book. They matter to how we live, day by day, as individuals. And they matter for global justice.

They matter for truth – about existence. The Buddha's view of morality is different from commonly assumed. He understood the moral order as the necessary fixed result of good or bad action. For instance, expression or even thought of anger is loss of beauty – for oneself. Every good or bad action affects us and remains with us. It means that morality is in the first instance existential.

The Buddha said, ‘All beings own their deeds, inherit their deeds, originate from their deeds; are tied to their deeds; their deeds are their refuge. As their deeds are base or noble, so will be their lives.’

An epidemic of loneliness rages and some blame social media. Others urge connection to nature, including wild animals. It is a popular theme. But connecting with nature is not a matter of will. It can't simply be chosen any more than one can choose to run a marathon. The mind needs training as the body needs training. Connection to nature is learned, and it has to do with thinking.

The way we think, being self-centred, opposes the essential truth of nature, which is constant change. The idea of an enduring, transparent self alienates us from nature, which is in flux, always ephemeral. It prevents us from understanding the sort of effort required to know nature as it is.

The universe contains mostly dark energy. Yet we think of ourselves as secure, enduring entities, enthralled by ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. The beauty of darkness, which after all explains health, is metaphorically challenging.

This book is neither a biographical investigation of Kenneth Frampton, a renowned historian, architect and architecture critic, nor a study of his oeuvre in its entirety, a huge task that would take into consideration many volumes, including the five editions of his Modern Architecture: A Critical History, in addition to the numerous published books, essays and forewords that he has written for scholarly books to date. Instead, it is a modest-yet-timely project: focusing on the first edition of A Critical History (as it will be referred to throughout this volume), published in 1980, it is a search for clues and positions that will provide the reader with a partial view of the significance of Frampton's historiography of modern architecture— “partial” because, in this volume, each chapter of the first edition of his book has not been examined. Although particular attention has been accorded to Frampton's work, the scope of this book is comprehensively narrow. Rather than reading the first edition of A Critical History through the lens of contemporary fashionable ideas and transient themes, the approach here is somewhat archeological: zooming into his book and simultaneously building out, an attempt has been made to historicize Frampton's positions, with a critical eye on the contemporary state of architectural praxis. The following reading of Frampton also offers a “prism” for comprehending architecture in global capitalism. Critically significant to this retrospective reading of Frampton's book is the fact that in the course of its subsequent editions, the first two parts of the first edition have remained almost unchanged, and also that its content comprises the core of the Modern Architecture movement, which still influences the course of future actions. For instance, among the many themes discussed in the second part of Frampton's book, his interpretation of events from 1930 to 1945—a watershed in the developmental process of modern movement architecture—is highlighted.

Like most offsprings of academics, my children have grown up frequenting scholarly conferences. A 3-month-old Alexander nursed in Rio de Janeiro and slept through a band playing the Brazilian national anthem at his first meeting of the International Political Science Association. As he neared his first birthday, Alex practiced walking up and down the steps of the Palmer House in Chicago during meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association; he attended later meetings while he was in high school, and was thrilled when two attractive, young, female graduate students from Oxford asked if he were writing his dissertation yet. .

Nik went on several job interviews with me. He freaked out an elderly faculty member who wasn't quite sure he was ready for a breast-feeding colleague, and was dragged to Lund, Sweden, as a teenager, not quite sure he still wanted to travel with his parents.

But it was Chloe who took in the most travel, happily logging the miles with her parents as she became an academic conference baby. In Chloe's case, the acronym was ISPP-baby, for the International Society of Political Psychology.

During this time, I should note, it was never clear who was really in charge. My academic conferences may have set the venue, but it was Chloe who defined the vacations. There was the ice cream and aquarium tour of Northern Europe. This was the year the ISPP met in Berlin, but we remember it as time structured around Chloe's love of sea urchins, dolphins, porpoises and whales. We saw every fish in every aquarium in Northern Europe, and Chloe suckered her parents into ice cream every chance she got. The ice-cream part of the tour climaxed in Norway when, after taking the night train from Oslo to Bergen, we were so exhausted we took turns sleeping and touring with Chloe during that first day. At dinner that night, as Chloe asked for ice cream for dessert, I said, “This will make twice today. You had ice cream this afternoon after the aquarium, remember?”

“Ice cream with Mom?” my husband demanded. “You had ice cream with me this morning!”

Chloe returns this weekend for college and Thursday is my last class with a wonderful group of students. I shall miss all of them. It's always sad to say goodbye to students, people who were strangers at the beginning of the term but who—in many cases—became friends as the quarter progresses. Saying goodbye to my daughter and to these students makes me think about what I am giving them as they go out into the world and whether I have done for them what I should to equip them against all the things that can—that will—befall them. Have I done my job, as a mother and as a teacher?

As I was pondering this question, I ran across a poem about teaching that I would like to share with you in this last lecture as we say goodbye. One of the reasons I like the poem is that it reminds me of the kind of books I poured over during my summers spent with my grandparents in Walnut. These were not great literature by any means, consisting mostly of stories and poetry out of date even then, school textbooks in many cases, filled with the kind of material my grandparents were required to memorize in school and, in this instance anyway, oozing all the sentimentality and Christian religion that dominated the American educational system at the turn of the nineteenth–twentieth centuries, when my grandparents were young. (In fact, the poem was published by Glennice L. Harmon in 1948.) Despite its slightly sappy overtones, I decided to share it with you, my students in what has been an exceptionally rewarding class for me, since I often find it easier to speak of deep feelings through someone else rather than expressing them directly. So here is the poem, with apologies for the syrupy sentimentality.

Brother, are you here?

I can't see you in the dark

and that Corporal of the Guard

is late

what time is it?

I’m cold.

I’m cold too

light a match

what time is it?

how are we going to believe in the world again?

what time is it?

The gate bolted

the road deserted

outposts in the dark

like discarded bones

and that Corporal of the Guard

my God!

he's late

why is the wind blowing?

What time is it in the dark?

What time is it in the rain?

What time is it tonight on all the earth?

What time is it?

*

We move on

our feet are lost in the mud

and can't be heard

one man thirsts

another has no cap

one man's breath stinks

another is covered in spots.

You want to think

but you sink

you want to say something

but your tongue is a slice of mud

your heart a slice of mud

may whoever survive attest to this

the world tonight was mud

give me your hand.

Machine guns under armpits

the soldiers’ raincoats

grate

and the rain starts

one man is cold

another carries a sack

one man remembers the sun

another has a wooden leg.

In the past they would walk

and their shoes grate

on the leaves

think about it

on the leaves.

Every so often we step aside

to let the trucks pass

the smell of bread

from a truck transporting army bread

one loaf next to the other

and therefore none cold

give me your hand.

If only

you could stop for a little

to take off your boots

and hurl them

to the heavens

in order to breathe upon

your numb soles

the night is a wall

a black wall

the mud a sure grave

give me your hand.

We move on

one man looks into the distance

another can't see anything

one man has a scar on his face

another halts

and isn't going anywhere

a soldier wanders off

and takes a piss.

If only you could stop

to remove your cap

and hide your face

and bend down to find

find what?

Every federal judge is the product of an earlier life in the law. On the bench you continue to learn from colleagues, litigants and many others, but your earlier experiences powerfully shape your view of judicial excellence and your own aspirations. No two judges followed the same path to the bench; no two judges have an identical jurisprudence. Yet there are commonalities. One of these is that we have great faith in the American legal system, imperfect as it is, and its ability to provide an impartial forum for the resolution of significant disputes and to thereby sustain our democracy. There is no other legal system in the world with the same authority, dedication to excellence, independence and honesty as our system of federal courts. For more than almost 60 years now, I have been a lawyer in practice and a federal judge, litigating and then adjudicating cases of some significance in the federal courts. This memoir describes the path that I followed to the bench from my earliest days, how I now pursue my craft, and my sense of privilege in having been able to serve this system from both sides of the bench.

There are relatively few memoirs or biographies of the legal careers of circuit judges during the period that I have been in active practice and on the bench—from the early 1960s to the present. The only non-Supreme Court comprehensive biographies of federal appellate judges in modern times that I am familiar with are those of Learned Hand, Henry Friendly, William Hastie, Jon Newman, Richard Posner and Damon Keith. With the exception of Newman’s, none of these is in the judge's own words, and the Hand, Friendly and Hastie biographies cover an earlier period. There is, therefore, a dearth of information about what it was like to be a lawyer and then a federal judge during my time in private practice and on the bench. I thought that it might be useful to record what I learned and what I experienced.

This memoir was not at the inception designed for the general public. Rather, it was originally designed for my children, my grandchildren and their descendants.

The history of the Cravath firm covers the period from the inception of the predecessor firms in the nineteenth century to the period after World War II. Most of the book is a boring listing of railroad reorganizations and other firm representations, but there are other parts that describe the way the practice used to be, and they are fascinating. That led me to attempt to describe the changes that occurred from the time that I started in practice to the time I went on the bench and to some extent thereafter.

Many of the changes in the legal profession in the past 50– 60 years are readily apparent and were summarized in Chapter . My goal here is to describe some aspects of those changes and other changes not so well known. The focus is on changes in what is fondly known as “Big Law” in Washington, the venue of my 35 years in private practice. The major changes can be easily summarized: Over the past 60 years, what used to be a profession has morphed into big business with all the attendant problems.

Size of the Legal Profession

There are now many, many more law schools and many, many more law school graduates than there were when I entered the profession. This has produced a great surplus of lawyers (though not a surplus of lawyers representing individuals, particularly the disadvantaged). Only a small percentage of recent graduates is hired by one of the leading firms. Many law school graduates do not end up practicing law at all. Interestingly, the same problem—a surplus of lawyers—has existed in vastly different contexts in nineteenth-century Europe and in China today. As a result of the lawyer surplus, there is a tremendous amount of anxiety at many US law schools about getting a job after graduation. That was not a problem when I was in law school. Even if you were toward the bottom of the class in a good law school, it was pretty much certain that you would have a job when you graduated, if you wanted one.

Composition of the Legal Profession

When I went to law school in 1958, there were very few women in the class. Harvard had only opened its law school to women in 1950.

On the eve of a class reunion, Judge Silberman, one of my classmates at Harvard Law School, had his clerks research the various Harvard classes and discovered that our class of 1961 had the largest number of federal appellate judges of any class that had graduated from the Harvard Law School. With Justice Kennedy's retirement from the Supreme Court in 2018, all five of my classmates who became appellate judges have taken senior status or have died (Williams in 2020). Almost all my classmates who joined private firms have also retired, though some have found meaningful work to do after retiring from their firms.

In all courts of appeals, at some point in the judge's tenure on the court there is a portrait painted of the judge which is presented to the court for hanging in one of its courtrooms. Unlike the D.C. Circuit, for example, in our court, the portrait presentation ceremony occurs before the judge leaves the court or takes senior status. In my case, that portrait presentation took place in October 2015 and resulted in a ceremony at which some of my former law clerks spoke. The transcript of the ceremony appears in 878 F.3d. The artist was British, named Brendan Kelly. He has painted portraits of members of the British government and has done the official portrait for Justice Breyer. His portrait of me appears on the cover of this book.

There was an amusing episode about my portrait. My wife and I went to London. Brendan had just finished the portrait. We went to his studio in London to look at it. Brendan had said that if there was something about the portrait that I wanted to have changed, he would address it. When we arrived, Brendan said that he wanted to give us the opportunity to look at the portrait in private, so he would walk around the block and come back. Before leaving, he unveiled the portrait. Both my wife and I were delighted with it—a uniform reaction by those who saw it later. As we talked about it, my wife noticed that one of my hands seemed to be lighter than the rest of the portrait. And so, when Brendan came back, she suggested that he could darken that part of the hand.

Chloe has a child's painting in her bedroom, hanging on the wall where Chloe can see it as she lies in bed and falls asleep at night. The painting is of a large red heart, with big turquoise letters saying: “I love my BFF.” It was painted by her best friend, Nicole and the letters BFF stand for Best Friends Forever. Nicole gave it to Chloe when the girls were quite young. I don't remember the precise date.

Chloe first met Nicole at the red park, so named because of the large red jungle gym in the play area. The girls were six, and life was simple and easy. Uncomplicated. Irvine is a pediocracy, organized around children, and life on the campus of the University of California at Irvine provided us with that mythic 1950s neighborhood, where youngsters could play unsupervised without fear of danger.

Over the years, Chloe and Nicole were in and out of each other's homes. They alternated dinners as they grew older, one Friday night with Nicole's family, one with ours. We had a series of “little girl Thanksgivings” with Nicole's family, one year at their home, one chez nous. (Nicole's mother made the best flourless chocolate cake ever.) The girls always were together in the mornings at Turtle Rock School, their closeness and rapport so strong even the teachers noted it. To this day, I am occasionally asked by one of Chloe's former teachers, when we happen to meet, how Chloe and her little friend Nicole are doing.

The girls took dancing lessons together at the local dance academy. Each spring, I had the pleasure of putting on their makeup for their recitals and practices, when beautiful little girls were transformed into miniature streetwalkers, with painted faces and rouged cheeks. Nicole has thick red lips and pale eyebrows with profuse platinum hair, to dye for, Chloe's father used to quip. Chloe is also blonde, but her hair is more honey blonde and not so thick. She has long, dark eye lashes that make me jealous.

They loved their dance classes—tap, modern, ballet; I think they must have taken everything except possibly hip-hop—and there was a period of several years when the girls would get together and draw up elaborate schedules for what they called their beanie baby dancing school.

The first part of what follows was published in 2014. It is an interview conducted by Virginia Hamilton, to whom this book is dedicated, director together with husband Bill of the Ontario Vipassana Centre, near Toronto, Canada. The first part took place in 2006, the second in 2007 and the last in 2021 after, once again, a diagnosis of terminal cancer.

There is a story about the Buddha: A young man comes crying because his father has died. He wants the Buddha to do something. ‘You’re so powerful. You can do something so that my father gets into the kingdom of heaven’, he insists. The man's mind was too unbalanced for intellectual instruction, so the Buddha sent him to the marketplace for two earthen pots. In one, pebbles were placed and in the other, butter. In India there is a tradition, after death, in which the skull is broken. The belief is that upon breaking the skull, the soul rises.

The earthen pots were put in a pond. The young man was told to break them. When the one with butter is broken open, the butter rises to the surface. When the other is broken, pebbles stay at the bottom. The Buddha instructed the man: ‘Now, call all your gods and goddesses and ask them to make the pebbles rise to the surface, and the butter to go down.’ The man laughed, ‘That won't work, sir. The pebbles are heavier than water. They will stay at the bottom. Butter is lighter. It can't go down.’

The Buddha said, ‘So it is with your father. If his deeds were of good will, nothing can pull him down. But if he acted from ill will, nothing could bring him up.’ He is referring to the laws of nature, applied to human beings, mind and body. It is the view held by José Martí, Karl Marx and many others.

But it is not the philosophy of existence lived today. We may not know it. We go along on hope, believing in unrealistic possibilities – pebbles coming up, butter going down.