Reading Response Week 12: This Will Kill That

I’ll admit that when we first touched on Victor Hugo’s “this will replace that” (the idea that the advent of the printing press lead to the end of architecture as humanity’s primary means of expression) in class last week, I wasn’t sure what to think of the idea.  But in reading excerpt from The Hunchback of Notre Dame in which Hugo puts forth his idea, I found myself being persuaded, and even moved, by Hugo’s prose.  He begins with the metaphor of stones as “letters”, and that the assembling of these stones led to construction of “words” and eventually the “books” of complete structures.  While print and books existed for a good chunk of the time he explores, it wasn’t until the printing press that print took on the durability and permanence of architecture.  As he says, “In order to destroy the written word, a torch and a Turk are sufficient. To demolish the constructed word, a social revolution, a terrestrial revolution are required.”  In reading this passage I couldn’t help but think of a moment in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.  During the final confrontation with the book’s villain inside a vast library, a fire is started and burns most of the collection.  As the book takes place before the printing press in the 1300s, we can’t help but feel saddened along with the protagonist as he watches so much literature and knowledge destroyed forever.
Hugo then goes on to discuss how the passion and meaning that once imbued architecture is now transferred to literature, with architecture taking on the lifeless, mechanical nature of a printing press.  “It drags along, a lamentable workshop mendicant, from copy to copy,” he says.  This is an idea that Mumford explores further “Architectural Forms” when points out that “the invention of printing gave to the process standardization the authority of the printed word and the mechanically copied drawing and plan.”
Hugo suggests that, while architecture will never contain the full meaning it did before the printing press, there is still the possibility of greatness in the field, going so far as to predict that “the great accident of an architect of genius may happen in the twentieth century.”  Whether this has actually happened is open to debate.  As Levine points out, Frank Lloyd Wright saw this as a prediction of the modern skyscraper and took at as an inspiration.  But one could also look at the functional glass and steel skyscraper as the culmination of the “lifeless” architecture Hugo discussed.  Perhaps this question is something we can touch on in class this week.