Winston Churchill originated the "iron curtain" phrase many years
before the wall was built. He used it in a speech in Missouri in
the early 1950s as part of the "cold war" campaign to promote
ideological warfare. Both phrases, I believe, were confected by
psyops personnel, accurately called public relations -- of which
Winston was an exemplar polyglot creator and consumer.
On the other side of the wall there were other terms used for
the barrier and for the mutually satisfying ideological games-
and words-playing.
"1984" was a tract in this tempest, as was Koestler's "Darkness
at Noon." Orwell and Koestler, ex-communists, were enlisted
and funded as reformed ideologues. Similar recantations were
sponsored in the Soviet orbit.
During the "cold war" there was a small industry of intellectuals,
artists, and yes, architects, engaged in political warfare on
behalf of their funders. Not that that was news, for similar
enterprises occur whereever and whenever there are rewards
and fame for sucking up to power. Rafael Vinoly only one who
has been recently named.
What is worth pursuing is who currently serves covertly in
ideological warefare -- no, not that of insipid aesthetes we see
overmuch in the journals and on Charlie Rose, but those who
work quietly in the giant design, engineering and construction
behemoths deliberately camouflaged by diverting PR polyglots.
A legacy of the cold war is that trenchant political criticism of
complicit professionals has been banned in great part by keeping
intellects and critics engaged in trivial pursuits. Witness the
WTC imbroglio wherein deep critique remains undone as
designers fall over themselves to maintain the claptrap careerism
fostered by MOMA and Philip Johnson and the gaggled of critics
sponsored by them under the banner of apolitical modernism.
The other legacy of the cold war is the profound belief in the value
of PR, indeed in its necessity as the ur art form for disseminating
ideology whether of the market, politics, art, personal success,
or religious faith. As a result, PR is the dominant ideology such
that no success is possible without adhering to that party line.
The current convention wisdom is that political action is suicide
for a designer, especially an architect. Far better is pretend
that epicene aethestics is superior, a program initiated at
the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies, funded by
Philip Johnson and fellow patrons, and which advanced the
careers of Eisenman, Koolhaas, Tschumi and a batch of
lesser knowns, most of whom excelled most at voluability,
and in Rem's case, PR. This was an ideology of iron curtainism
to insulate designers from the corrupting politics of the '60s.
Michael Sorkin, who came of age in the '60s, one of the
founders of "Radical Architectural Designers," is one of the few
critics who attempts to do incisive political criticism, and for that
effort he is excluded from the principal career development salons.
BTW, the NY Times last architecture critic which had political
courage, Ada Louise Huxtable, is now titled "architecture critic
of the Wall Street Journal," so that rag brags.
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