The Great Debate of Architectural Schools: From Bauhaus to the Algorithm

On a night stage whose floor is a grid of drawings, a narrator gathers the schools of modern architecture around a long table set with a tubular steel chair, a white villa, a slender tower of bronze and glass, a twisting iron flower, a shining crown and a fractured mass of titanium, and gives each school a heart, a voice and a memory. The Bauhaus enters without a crown to seat painter and craftsman at the same table, Constructivism speaks through Vladimir Tatlin’s imagined tower, Le Corbusier presents Villa Savoye, Mies refuses to be reduced to glass and points to the Seagram Building, Art Nouveau asks whether anyone has seen a square tree as Hector Guimard and Antoni Gaudí take its side, William Van Alen defends the crown of the Chrysler Building, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown laugh at everyone’s seriousness. Deconstructivism breaks the table with Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, who returns with MAXXI in Rome to turn fracture into paths that cross like rivers, before Parametricism and then artificial intelligence, conjuring palaces, towers and a city under water in seconds, lay claim to the future. Then an ordinary person walks in carrying no model or screen and asks why nobody has asked him, and the narrator sets a mirror before every school so that each admits where its dream went wrong. In the final assembly Gropius sits beside Gaudí and Mies beside Zaha, the human being adds compassion to the list of what people need, and a city of the future full of people fills the stage, leaving the architect a small line within its long poem.