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Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, "Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago" (MIT Press, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm Matthew Wells, one of your hosts and today I'm delighted to be speaking with Joanna Moad Salisbury about her book Barbarian Architecture. Thorsten Beeblin's Chicago an important critic of modernity, Thorsten Liebling is best known for his concept of conspicuous consumption, the grandiose public display of goods in the service of social status and a term he coined in his classic book the Theory of the Leisure Class, an economic study of institutions. Scholars have employed Rublin in a sense support of a wide range of arguments about modern architecture, but never for has he attracted critical analysis from the viewpoint of Architectural History and in Barbarian Architecture. Joanna Merwit Salisbury corrects the submission by re examining Giblin's famous book as an original theory of modernity and situating it in a particular place and time, that is to say Chicago in the 1890s. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws on biography, intellectual history and architectural history, spatial histories, Barbarian Architecture explores Theban's position in relation to debates about social reform and design in Chicago at the turn of the 19th century. Joanna, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
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C
Thanks, Matthew. It's great to be here. I appreciate the invitation.
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E
Fantastic. Could you start off perhaps by telling us how you came to write this book?
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C
Sure. So I am an architectural historian, and I've spent a lot of my career researching and writing about what has been called the Chicago School of Architecture. My dissertation was a sort of analysis of the mythology of what the Chicago School of Architecture has come to mean in the historiography of American architecture. And I owe a great debt to Mark Wigley for this approach. When I took classes with him, he was very interested in dissecting architectural historiography, talking about how architectural histories are constructed, why they're constructed, by whom, and for what purpose. And so that kind of led me to start to interrogate this particularly important, important moment in American architectural history in particular, but also in the history of modern architecture internationally, which is what was happening in Chicago in the 1890s, particularly the rise of this brand new typology, the skyscraper. So my early research was looking at Chicago skyscraper in a way, trying to create a revisionist understanding of its place both in architectural history and also in social and political history. I lived in Chicago for a while and I did a sort of deep dive into what you might call discourse analysis of the skyscraper in that period, trying to understand how it was received by the people who were living in Chicago, not only how it was imagined by architects. And that was my kind of first step to start to place it in a kind of social context that I don't think really had been considered before. We had sort of a received narrative that the skyscraper was this kind of great symbol of technological and aesthetic innovation, that it represented kind of narrative of American modern Western progress. And just opening the archives was really interesting to me because it enabled me to start to understand how problematic the skyscraper was as a typology. It wasn't immediately received as something that was inherently progressive and exciting. There was a lot of kind of conversation about the urban problems that it would bring, a lot of nervousness about the kind of city, that the skyscraper city was the health and other impacts of that unprecedented building type. And in the process of sort of writing around that topic for a number of years, my first book, Chicago 1890, and then a bunch of other publications that came after that, the name of Veblen, Thorsten Veblen, kept cropping up and his name even crept into my writing, as you described in your introduction. He's best known for this concept of conspicuous consumption that he introduced through his book, the Theory of the Leisure Class, that was published in 1899. And that term has become kind of so pervasive throughout basically any kind of humanities discourse. You know, people use it in history, in sociology, even though it was actually an economic theory. When he wrote the book, he was himself an economist, or what we call now political economist. But the interesting thing for me was the way in which this theory that was written in a kind of totally disconnected from architecture situation, he wasn't really interested in architecture. He didn't really talk about it in any direct way. It became received in architectural history, I think, because it was a kind of American theory that supported a lot of other writing about modern architecture, particularly the ideas of people like Adolf Loos and Hermann Mutazius. And so it was often kind of quoted to support that European conversation about modern architecture, the need to kind of do away with the heavy weight of historicism and move forward into a society in which all kinds of cultural production were purely to do with. With industrial progress rather than sort of social signalling. And so his work was always kind of connected with them. But the more I started to think about it, the more interested I got, because his work was never really cited or placed. It was always. The idea of conspicuous consumption was thought to be so universally applicable that it could, you know, you could talk about skyscrapers in Dubai through the lens of conspicuous consumption or, you know, landscapes in Paris or anywhere. It didn't have a kind of historical grounding to it. And because I am historian of Chicago architecture, I started to dig a little bit to see, okay, in what ways was his work a product of the place in which he wrote the book, and in what ways did his theory influence the conversation about architecture in Chicago at the time? And I keep using the term Chicago because what's important about his theory is it was very explicitly an urban theory. Any kind of understanding of what conspicuous consumption is is grounded in the idea that it's a kind of social practice that emerged in modern cities before the sort of great influx of urbanization. People were living in communities where they knew each other, you know, much better and were more familiar with their neighbors. When suddenly people are moving to cities, they're living in places that they don't know their neighbors. There has to be a kind of more sort of transactional way of communicating with people, who you are, how much money you've got, what your position is in society. So the fact that this was an explicitly an urban theory made me think, okay, well, why don't we think about Veblen through the context of Chicago the way we think about Walter Benjamin through the lens of Paris and the arcades and loos through Vienna. Why isn't he situated? And that was the kind of basis for writing the book. Although at the beginning I didn't really know how I was going to do that. And the qualities that his most famous book, the Theory of the Leisure Class, has made it quite a difficult undertaking because it is very dense, it's very academic. And although he uses a lot of everyday examples, they're in a sort of non specific way. So it was sort of a challenge at the beginning to figure out, how am I going to actually do this?
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And, and how, and how, how do you, how did you do this? How, how did you structure the book? How did you, and, you know, also structure your research into combining these, these, this place and this individual?
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C
I started the project through looking at one particular architectural typology that he spent much more time on than any other, which was, you know, inherently fascinating to me because it is the modern American university. The book is called Barbarian Architecture because Veblen had a theory that contemporary Americans had kind of devolved into a barbarian state through the experience of the violent confrontation on the frontier through this kind of resource land grab that happened in the mid 19th century. And the sort of riches that were involved in the kind of huge competition for resources had created a sort of psychological regression to a barbarian state. And the kind of difficult thing for us today is to sort of understand the basis of that term in 19th century race science, which is where it all comes from, in which there's a kind of clear theory of social evolution, which ranks societies on a scale from primitive to civilized, with contemporary European and American society positioned as the most civilized and non Europeans and non whites positioned much in a much lower level of the scale. So this is a kind of conversation that is going on across multiple disciplines in Chicago, at the University of Chicago, where Veblen was a graduate student and then a professor. And it was a kind of accepted idea in academia. And what's sort of Fascinating to me about his work is the way he. The Theory of the Leisure Class presents a kind of reinterpretation of that theory in which he explicitly positions his own peers as a kind of retrograde barbarian type. And he talks about the kind of unconstrained growth of capitalism as a sort of equivalent to what had happened in the. In the medieval period where there was a kind of formulation of society that was divided between a labor class kind of serfs who just did all the work, and then a leisure class people who were warriors that went out and accumulated and bought the bought goods back to. Back to small hamlets. So in a way, he's kind of working with this theory, but also inverting it at the same time. And you, you know, the book, when it was published, was received in a sort of uncertain way because people weren't used to this accusation that Americans were perhaps not the pinnacle of progress. Maybe they were actually regressing to kind of social traits that were undesirable. But at the same time, you know, there's a sort of satirical intent that people understood, and they particularly understood it through the kind of conversation about reform that was going on in the States at the time. The idea that capitalism had become too. It had created too much inequity in society and that there was a kind of inevitable clash between workers and capital that was going to perhaps result in a terrible political confrontation which almost happened in the 1890s. So his work is sort of operating in two dimensions at once as a kind of straight faced academic treatise, but also as a kind of social critique at the same time.
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E
It's fascinating. And then how did you begin to spatialize this? I mean, for instance, in the first chapter, you move across Lake Michigan from the 1893 World, Columbia's expedition, to a Gothic revival house on Lakeshore Drive. Could you tell us a bit about how some of these spaces are connected and how you connected them to Eglin?
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C
Yeah. So the first chapter of the book is about the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, which is always fascinating to architectural historians because it so explicitly uses architecture to tell a story about progress and civilization, one in which the U.S. and not just the U.S. as a nation, but the Western U.S. the kind of states that were, you know, rapidly growing in the late 19th century, were the kind of advance guard of civilization. And that's, you know, everybody knows the story about the grand neoclassical exhibition halls that were meant to be the kind of ultimate realization of the US as this kind of revived, reinvigorated European nation that was the end point or the most recent place in which this kind of westward movement of civilization had arrived at. And at the same time, the World's Columbian Exposition had huge amount of displays of non us, non modern, non white architecture through the exhibition of a whole bunch of pavilions of different nations. But there was another side to the fear that is less talked about, which is an explicit exhibition of different kinds of American Native architecture. So the fair itself is an illustration through architecture of this kind of idea about progress. And Veblen, who was a young political economist, first of all a graduate student and then a member of the faculty, was a witness to this fair as it was being constructed right next to the University of Chicago. And so he could see all of these kind of narratives being played out through this grand architectural and urban agglomeration. And I should say that he doesn't actually talk about the World's Columbian Exposition at all. So I'm kind of using that very well known example as a way to kind of illustrate the fact that his book depends on this kind of inversion where he's claiming that what we see as progress is actually devolution. And so called primitive cultures may in fact be more progressive than we think because they have these kind of social structures based on communitarianism that we now or certainly social reformers in the 1890s were valuing as being, you know, a better way to organize society.
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And, and with. With that in mind again, here's the ways in which. And these different types of spaces are emerging. New typologies and new buildings are being constructed. At the time Liplin is, is in, is in Chicago. And you've mentioned the University of Chicago when he was a fellow, a grad student there in, in 1892. In the second chapter you draw a link between the, this con, this university, the way it's being constructed, but also with buildings outside the university, so the grain elevator and the futures market. How did Veblen and his work present this new image of Chicago's modernity? How do these ideas between these buildings and his political, economic ideas, how do these intersect?
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C
It is interesting that he very directly attacks this institution of which he is a member, the university. And the link that he makes, you know, it seems somewhat obvious, perhaps over obvious in a way, because he has this kind of theory of contemporary barbarianism. And he looks around and he sees all of this Gothic Revival architecture both in the university and in great institutional buildings and in, you know, the mansions of the very wealthy. And it's a sort of very easy link to draw between the idea of barbarian culture and a kind of explicit revival of medieval architecture by contemporary Americans. So that's one of the first things that I noticed about his work, is that architecture is serving a very clear purpose to him, which is to illustrate this idea of Bavarianism. And he uses the University of Chicago explicitly as his kind of ultimate example. I mean, this was a society building. It was built using funds raised by all of the merchants of Chicago who went to John D. Rockefeller, who was one of the wealthiest people in the nation, to ask for funds to help, you know, build a great university in the Midwest. And he gave millions of dollars towards the construction of the building. And this group hired the society architect, Henry Ives Cobb, who designed not just a single building, but an entire complex of buildings in the Gothic Revival style. Remarkably coherent in that each one is a kind of different expression of the Gothic Revival. And for Veblen, this is a kind of perfect illustration of the point that he's trying to make, which is that the university itself is what he calls a leisure class institution. It's built by and for the elite. It is intended to inculcate leisure class values in the students that go there. It is as sort of symbolic display of leisure class values. And. And that it encourages a kind of education that promotes that and passes it on to the next generation, which he was very bitterly angry about. He was friends with a lot of pure scientists, and he thought that the pure sciences were not being taught or supported appropriately and that too much money was being lavished on these buildings that were intended really just to advertise the institution rather than to effectively educate students. And so it's a perfect architectural symbol of his exact point. And that was what was so fascinating to me when I first started working on this project, that people had used his ideas and his theory of conspicuous consumption to talk about lots of different kinds of architecture, usually highly ornamented things, but they had never actually looked at the architecture that he himself used, which was this Gothic Revival style.
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E
And it somewhat perhaps might rhyme the development of the contemporary university campus, producing buildings that are maybe not ideally suited for anything other than the kind of valorization of the university itself. But I won't say any more about that. Yes, and the. Again, much like the University of Chicago, there's another chapter of the book that begins with the Marshall department store in Chicago and a typology of building that is very closely associated other particular objects on sale, elements of material, cultural elements of the building itself that reveal new insights into both leisure class culture, but also the architecture of modernity.
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Yes, I mean, I referred earlier to the parallels that are often drawn between Veblen and Loos. And one of the primary parallels is both of them used women's fashion as a kind of example of the kind of degeneration of society. The fact that, you know, in the 1890s, women's clothing was very, certainly high fashion clothing was very restrictive, highly ornamented, and intended to illustrate in a way, women's incapacity to actually function as full human beings. They couldn't work or labor because they were literally sort of trussed up in corsets with the giant hats and giant sleeves and things like that. And that the fact that Veblen and Loews both use women's fashion as a kind of example of retrograde design that is to be absolutely refuted has led his work to often be employed as a kind of critique of the kind of obvious architecture of mass consumption, things like the department store. So the department store is this architectural typology that emerged as actually in the UK before it started to appear in the States, that was dedicated to selling mass produced goods on a mass produced scale. And department store buildings were kind of obviously these buildings of high spectacle where goods were sort of tantalizingly piled up and shown through huge plate glass display windows to the sort of admiring public outside as the kind of epitome of culture, things that everybody should aspire to, own. And when we're talking about Chicago in particular, there's one building that is often used as a kind of illustration of the kind of pinnacle of this meeting of ornamented architecture and the society of mass cultural, and that is mass consumption. Excuse me. And that's Louis Sullivan's Schlesinger Meyer Building, later known as Carson Perry Scott. So there's sort of a perfect mapping in a lot of people's mind between Veblen, Sullivan and the department store. But in fact, Veblen never actually talks about the department store at all in the Theory of the Leisure Class. And he just refers to it very briefly in a subsequent book that he wrote called the Theory of Business Enterprise, published in 1904. And fascinatingly for me, in his discussion of the department store, he's not at all interested in its aesthetic or the way it displays goods particularly. He's interested in it as a sort of functional mechanism for promoting mass consumption. So he totally places it within that system that other people, like William Morris, et cetera, were all criticizing. But for him, the building itself was irrelevant. It was rather a sort of delivery system of mass produced goods. Sell as much stuff for as much profit as you can in one place. And he actually talks about, in that sense, he talks about the department store not in the same terms as other leisure class examples of architecture. He just talks about it either as a kind of mechanism for delivering customers to a point of sale, or he talks about it as a kind of advertising, no different to a large billboard. It's this kind of very simple kind of aesthetic that draws your attention and draws you in. So it's slightly false, I think, to apply Veblen's theory directly to the department store, because he never singled it out as a particularly evocative representation of his theory. Rather, for him, everything in what he called the pecuniary city or the city of capitalism is built in the service of capitalism. There is really no difference between the great mansion of the wealthy merchant or the University of Chicago or the department stores on State street in different ways that all kind of built mechanisms that service the leisure class.
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And with this pecuniary society's pecuniary city, in your final chapter, you kind of turn. You turn attention to a kind of the other side of the coin, or at least the kind of reform of industry and the reform of that society and ideas of an industrial democracy through Evelyn. What sorts of buildings were involved in that? How did Veblen's later work develop? And how can we see echoes of this or traces of this within. Within the built environment?
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C
That was another thing that I was anxious to dig into when I began the work, is to find out if Veblen had any direct knowledge or relationships with, or conversations with design reformers in Chicago in the time that he was living there. He only lived there for quite a short period. The aspect of design reform that we know from a kind of canonical history is the work that Frank Lloyd Wright was involved in when he was quite a young man in the 1890s, and his famous 1901 lecture, the Art and Craft with the Machine. In fact, Wright was a relatively junior member of quite a large design reform group that had different offshoots to it. And his essay, the Art and Craft of the Machine is in a lot of ways sort of just parroting what a bunch of other people said. But if there is one kind of built hub for all of that conversation, it's the Hull House settlement that Jane Addams founded on the west side of Chicago, which was a settlement built after the example of Toynbee hall in London. And she went there and she was very excited about it, and she wanted to bring that institution, the idea of that institution to Chicago, which she did very successfully. So Hull House began as a literal house, but it grew larger over many years to be a place for education of working class people, a place where they could learn not just strict academic knowledge, but how to live better in that sort of classic American progressive sense. They learned how to properly wash themselves, how to eat in a way that was healthy, and how to educate themselves by reading good books and things like that. So she was sort of this doyen of this incredible institution dedicated to social progress. And it was at Hull House that the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society was founded, that Wright was quite a member of as a young man. So I was very interested to find out if there were links between Biblin and that institution. And there was, but it was sort of very Tantalizing in that. I just found this one reference to a speech that he gave as part of Jane Addams effort to promote a particular part of Hull House called the Labour Museum, which was quite a small room, in fact, not a great building as the term museum seems to suggest. But it was her effort to illustrate to the working class residents of the local area the kind of history of labor so that they would be proud of the work that they were doing and then they would see what labor was contributing to society. Adams was interesting in that she was particularly interested in the labor of women. So the particular industrial field that she started out promoting was textile production. So she invited a whole bunch of local women to come in and demonstrate the sort of history of textile production right from a very early period into almost the industrialized way in which textiles are made in factories. And Veblen, in a fascinating historical event, gave a sort of lecture in aid of the Labour Museum, in which we presume, because I don't have the actual text of the lecture, that he bought his theory of the leisure and labor class to this institution and was very much in agreement with Adams that it was through women that a kind of way forward could be found. That women were, if properly educated, they were going to be the people that would lead the way towards this new progressive society. They would kind of give up the shackles of the corset and the big hat and everything like that and realize that they could be active contributors to creating a new culture. So in a historical sense, you could say the evidence is rather slim. He gave one lecture there, but there's so many interesting kind of parallels between what he wrote about women's role in society and what Jane Addams herself was trying to promote through the Hull House institution that I find that very, very suggestive. At the same time, Veblen was quite cynical about the activities of the progressive class. And he has quite a cutting section of his book where he talks about Progressives as being what we would call today virtue signaling, suggesting that through their worthy activities, they were really more interested in kind of elevating themselves above their social peers rather than deeply caring about the well being of the working class. So he was both drawn to Hull House, but also kind of suspicious of the motivations of some of the people who were involved in it.
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E
Yeah, I can imagine it seems a little bit cruel as a final question to ask someone who's recently finished a book. But I wonder, what are you working on at the moment? Could you give us a preview of the next project? Will Give us the direction of your future research.
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C
Yeah, no, no, I'm happy to do that. I have actually already published an article in the Journal of Design History which takes Veblen's theory and applies it to a Frank Lloyd Rice house, which was a fun project to do because the barbarian architecture was dealing with the whole city, which got very unwieldy at times. But this article, I could really focus down on this particular house and just talk about, in fact, Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic chair, dining chair, as perhaps not an illustration of this kind of future industrial design as Wright intended it, but exactly as Veblen would have seen it, as an attempt to create a kind of new taste for the leisure class that incorporated industrial methods of production, but in fact was intended to elevate the social status of the owner of the chair. And so the paper kind of builds out from the chair to the dining table to the dining room to the house. So that was fun to do a kind of scalar inversion of the book, looking at starting with a piece of furniture rather than a whole city. I haven't moved on beyond that in this direction. I've been doing some other stuff. I have a very exciting colleague called Jose Nunez Colado who has done a lot of work on race and speciality in the Dominican Republic, and I've been working with him on a bunch of papers looking at various aspects of that. The last paper, one that we published, was a kind of analysis of the architecture of American imperialism in the Dominican Republic. So it's the same kind of time period. In Veblen's terms, it's still this kind of pecuniary culture starting to become an empire. And we are seeing perhaps the 21st century version of that today and the impact that it has had historically, globally, in a way that I hope starts to kind of resonate with perhaps some contemporary issues.
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E
Absolutely. And I think a lot. I mean, both those papers and the book Barbarian Architecture definitely resonate with many contemporary issues. Thank you so much, Joanna. We'll wrap up.
- [40:14]
C
Thanks, Matthew. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you.
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F
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