“Are You Illiterate About Modern Architecture?” by Peter Blake, was originally published in the September 1961 issue of Vogue.
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Just as Paris, during the first three decades of the century, was the centre of modern art, so this country is now the centre of modern architecture. All over the world, the names of great American architects—native as well as foreign-born—are known, and their work admired. Much early modern architecture in Europe and elsewhere received its impetus from the work of the great Chicago architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Louis Sullivan to Frank Lloyd Wright. Now architecture in Europe, Asia, and Africa is receiving its impetus from the work of living Americans. Impetus comes from Louis I. Kahn, perhaps the most creative U.S. architect since Wright. It comes as well from the work of Philip Johnson, Edward D. Stone, Paul Rudolph, Craig Ellwood, and Minoru Yamasaki—from the American buildings by such European-born American pioneers as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Richard Neutra, and Eero Saarinen.
Laymen, of course, recognize the names of the great pioneers—may recognize the names of Saarinen and Johnson and one or two of their contemporaries. But many would be hard put to identify the work of these men, or to separate it from that of lesser architects. The ferment itself is practically unknown. To some laymen, modern architecture looks much the same: glass-and-metal “graph paper” draped over rectangles of steel and concrete, with little variation in detail, little allowance for “beauty.” They are reconciled to this sameness because they have come to believe that modern architecture is cheap, and that sameness is the reason it is cheap.
The facts, however, are rather different. Although it is certainly cheaper to build a modern building today than it would be to build Chartres today, modern architecture is anything but cheap—nor does it all look the same. Indeed, it would be very difficult to find a contemporary art form in America, or anywhere else, in which there are so many vehemently opposed splinter groups at work. As a matter of fact, the great diversity in American architecture and the lack of consensus among its practitioners are among its diverting pleasures. While it is certainly true that glass-and-metal “graph paper” is one characteristic surface of modern buildings, glass and metal do not become architecture until employed by a glass-and-metal artist. The glass-and-metal Seagram Building in New York, designed primarily by Mies van der Rohe, is as different from the jerry-built glass-and-metal junk of much of Park Avenue as the poetry of T. S. Eliot is from this prose. (Furthermore, the Seagram may be one of the most expensive buildings, per square foot, put up by anyone since Angkor Wat.)
In short, it should be understood that (a) many modern buildings are not architecture; (b) modern architects may build with almost anything from prehistoric rock to irradiated plastics, and their forms and spaces may recall anything from the piazza at Vigevano to twenty-first-century science fiction; (c) modern architecture is not particularly cheap; and (d) modern architects do not think that ugliness is necessarily synonymous with goodness.
It is much harder to say what American architects do believe. One article of faith held by many of them is that the structural frame of a building is a kind of ethical basis for architecture. Because much of modern architecture began with structures rather than buildings—with bridges, dams, silos, railroad sheds, and airplane hangars, all shaped primarily by considerations of engineering—a good many architects now seem to have a fixation about “expressing structure.”
This fixation has, on occasion, produced some very odd results. On the one hand—quite validly—a young virtuoso like Victor Lundy, in Florida, may engage in fabulous acrobatics with laminated wood arches: or another man of outstanding talent, like Ulrich Franzen, in New York, may become just as fascinated by hinged arches of steel. But on the other hand, a number of Lundy’s and Franzen’s contemporaries have begun to decorate their buildings with symbols that are meant to “express structure”—but in truth have little, if anything, to do with the structure that actually holds up the roof. Philip Johnson’s new Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, a lovely piece of outdoor decoration, has a great portico of sculptured arches that look like formed concrete, but are actually a Texas variation of travertine, carefully fitted around thin steel pipe columns that are the true structural supports—but would look like toothpicks if left exposed to the eye.
Mies van der Rohe has been doing this kind of thing for some time. Although his tall glass towers are supported on fairly conventional steel columns and beams, encased in concrete to comply with the building codes, he has for years applied vertical steel rails to the exteriors of these towers to symbolize structure. Shaped like I-beams, these rails hold up nothing much except themselves, but look as if they had some connection with the actual structure.
This cult of “expressing structure” through applied pilasters and porticos is about to receive quite a workout at New York’s Lincoln Center. There, almost every building will be faced with arched porticos that do nothing but “decorate a plaza,” as the great German neo-classicist of the early nineteenth century, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, once put it. Philip Johnson had no qualms whatever about going back to Schinkel when he designed his Fort Worth museum; he takes an almost sadistic delight in parading his eclecticism before his more purist (and utterly infuriated) contemporaries.
Indeed, some of the early pioneers of the modern movement must be turning in their graves. The great Auguste Perret, who was Le Corbusier’s teacher some fifty years ago, used to say that “decoration always hides an error in construction.” And Perret’s contemporary, the Viennese Adolf Loos, once wrote an article which proved (at least to his satisfaction) that decoration was “a crime!” It has taken only fifty years to render Perret and Loos obsolete: by a quick twist of semantics, “decoration” has become “symbolism,” and what was once a “crime” has been legitimized.
On occasion, the cult of “expressing” or “symbolizing” structure may take on almost surrealist aspects: some contemporary architects have become so fascinated by the amazing thin-shell vaults, arches, and hyperbolic paraboloids, developed by such brilliant engineers as the Mexican Felix Candela, that they have gone in for what can best be described as “imaginary structures”—structures that look, superficially, like Candela’s graceful shells, but in reality violate every known principle of engineering and could not stand up, unassisted, long enough to last out the dedication ceremonies. These violent convolutions in concrete and metal actually need and have concealed “assistant structures” or “sub-structures” to keep them from toppling over in the spring breeze. Perhaps the high point of this structural craze was reached at the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958. There, almost every other pavilion was a startling display of structural gymnastics, each a little more hysterical than its neighbour. At last, Auguste Perret’s dictum had been totally paraphrased to read: “Construction always hides an error in construction!”
By now, most of our “structural exhibitionists” have calmed down: they have learned to let the engineers tell them the rules of the shell-game and use the new forms with increasing discretion. Such architects as I. M. Pei, Gordon Bunshaft, John Johansen, and Victor Christ-Janer have demonstrated not only that shells, domes, arches, and so forth are fine in their places—but that their places are not everywhere.
Quite a few modern architects, on the other hand, do not really believe that “expressing structure” is all-important. Because most of the cost of a building goes into services (like heating, air conditioning, and plumbing), these men have begun to “express services” rather than structural forms. The outstanding exponent of this approach is Louis Kahn, the remarkable, sixty-year-old Philadelphia architect whose new Richards Medical Research Building at the University of Pennsylvania is an astonishing complex of brick, concrete, and glass, dominated by a series of tall brick shafts that contain all the elaborate services required by research labs. These great shafts are as vigorous as the towers of San Gimigniano (which Kahn admires greatly), and while they contain the services which they are meant to symbolize, they also dramatize those services in a way that no cost-accountant could possibly justify.
The Blue Cross Building in Boston, by Paul Rudolph, the head of Yale’s School of Architecture, is another attempt to “express services”: the air-conditioning ducts of this building have been applied to the façade (rather than concealed within), and these ducts rise to the full height of the structure looking, for all the world, like small concrete columns. (So that we now have a further paraphrase of Perret’s dictum: “Construction sometimes conceals a maze of duct-work…”) Undoubtedly, there will be more buildings that “express services” rather than structure, for both Kahn and Rudolph influence their peers. Indeed, we may soon see buildings with mail chutes, telephone wires, pneumatic tubes, and soft drink dispensers all applied to, or expressed on the outside. Or we may not; for there are many who agree with Mies van der Rohe who said, recently, that “you can’t make architecture out of pipes.”
While no architect has ever been able to define beauty to anybody else’s complete satisfaction, some modernists have tried very hard indeed. Edward D. Stone, whose screens of concrete grill-work are famous from New Delhi to his native Fayetteville, Arkansas, speaks quite lyrically in his charming, southern voice when describing his own romantic pavilions. Minoru Yamasaki, the Detroit architect, who talks about harmony and serenity, manages to achieve them in his delicate temples of precast concrete. And there are other beauty-seekers of similar eloquence.
But there are some modernists who deride the beauty-seekers and say that their buildings are pretty rather than beautiful. One English critic, Dr. Reyner Banham, has called some of the beauty-seekers the “ballet school” of American architecture; and other critics are less polite, muttering darkly about “exterior decoration” and other offenses against purity. Louis Kahn (who is very polite) feels that it is more important for a building to have “character” than to have beauty—an argument brazenly stolen from the sisterhood of spinsters; Mies van der Rohe believes that if a building represents “truth” it will also be beautiful—his argument having been borrowed from the equally chaste beliefs of St. Augustine. Le Corbusier, since 1945, has been working exclusively in béton brut, and some of his many admirers have decided to call themselves the “New Brutalists,” producing buildings deliberately violent in form and deliberately crude in surface and detail. To the “New Brutalists,” as to Louis Kahn, beauty is to be found in the virile ruthlessness of their buildings—or, to coin a phrase, “beauty is ugliness.” This, one feels, is the Marlon Brando school of modern architecture. (The “New Brutalists” in Japan have spoiled everybody’s fun, because it is absolutely impossible for Japanese craftsmen to build imperfectly—hence, the “New Brutalist” architecture around Tokyo and Kyoto turns out to be rather pretty.)
The “New Brutalists” are, of course, a perfectly serious group: they bear some relation to the “Action Painters” of the New York School and to the “Angry Young Men” of the English stage. They believe that a building bearing the imperfect imprint of man’s hand—rather than the impersonal imprint of a rolling mill—can speak more forcefully than a too polished building. Unhappily, however, some men’s hands are clumsier than others. While a “Brutalist” building by Le Corbusier, Kahn, or the young Japanese genius, Kenzo Tange, may have the grandeur of an Easter Island head, a “Brutalist” building by a second-rater can look like the back of the A P.
But the central problem of American architecture is no longer the individual building, but the entire city and its environs. Recently, one American critic started to talk about “Chaoticism” as a movement in architecture in this country. “Chaoticism” is, of course, not a movement—it is a non-movement. It is the by-product of an apparent absence of civilization. Every new highway built across our land seems to be an invitation to string out more honky-tonk developments. Too often, new space opened in the cities seems to invite further vulgarity.
More and more architects of the younger generation in this country are trying to do something to halt this blight, to create a civilized, even beautiful American townscape. The first step, to them, is simply to create a sense of order, without which neither civilization nor beauty seems attainable. These younger men have approached the problem in two ways: some consider every new building on their draughting boards an element within an architectural “continuity,” and consider what each new building will do to existing structures and spaces nearby. Others have concentrated upon broader projects of city planning and urban renewal—projects that will take five or ten years to come to fruition.
A good example of “continuity” is Paul Rudolph’s new Arts Center for Wellesley, which duplicates the scale of older campus buildings nearby, uses some of the same materials, and contains a number of details that recall those of the neo-Gothic campus without copying them. Another example is Saarinen’s complex of dormitories at Yale, modern in fact but not in feeling, designed in a vaguely mediaeval pattern that recalls the ramparts of Harlech Castle—and some of the neo-Gothic romanticism of older buildings on the Yale campus. (The “ivy” on this Ivy League campus will be provided by the Sardinian-born sculptor, Tino Nivola, and it should be something to see.) Among such younger New Orleans architects as Nataniel Curtis and Arthur Davis, the buildings of the French Quarter and the Garden District have served as a powerful inspiration: colonnades, porticos, balconies, grilles of iron or tile reappear, admitting their debt to the past.
In short, wherever modern architects congregate, the talk is not about Perret, Loos, or the Bauhaus—but about Schinkel, San Gimigniano, mediaevalism, pilasters, St. Augustine, decoration, and similar heresies. Only the jerry-builders in cities and suburbs still talk about functionalism.
Unlike these jerry-builders, whose deplorable mark is on every U.S. street, the younger idealists in urban renewal and city planning do not yet have much to show for their efforts. It takes a long time to raze and rebuild a sizable portion of an old, dilapidated city—it takes a long time, that is, if you care about what you are doing. Among those who care is Edmund Bacon, the effective head of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, who was trained at the Cranbrook School in Michigan by Eero Saarinen’s great father, Eliel. Bacon and his chief architect, Willo von Moltke, together with their assistants, have begun to change the face of Philadelphia dramatically over the past ten years—and the change will become more dramatic in the next ten. Harry Weese, the Chicago architect, who was trained by Finland’s Alvar Aalto, is another dedicated renewer of cities (his plans include a part of Washington, D. C.) ; John Carl Warnecke, trained by Gropius at Harvard, is now busy trying to renew San Francisco and environs—the “environs,” in this case, encompass areas of Honolulu; and New York’s I. M. Pei works on urban renewal in almost every part of the country.
Unhappily, these excellent, idealistic architects and planners have made hardly a dent on the great face of the U.S. The reason is simple enough: so long as unbridled speculation in land is perfectly legitimate, most of our building will be shaped not by considerations of aesthetics or urban design, but by considerations of tax accountancy and rapid return on investment. The basic decision that must be made by Americans is whether they want their land to be used for the making of money or for the making of a civilization. Perhaps the two objectives can be attained jointly.
To many an investment builder, good architects are anathema—and for perfectly valid reasons: such architects think, and thinking takes time. Hacks are safe, fast, cheap, and untroubled by ideas. Meanwhile, exhibitions of outstanding, new American architecture are admired all over the world, and foreign magazines praise these new American architects in every issue. By comparison, the work of the hacks looks duller and sleazier every day. Unfortunately, it is also more numerous every day.
Still, the new American architects continue, with the zeal of missionaries. It has been said that it took this country close to two hundred years to create a workable political system, and that the next step is to create a civilization. These new architects have that sense of historic mission, and men with that sense are dangerous and hard to stop.