New World of Shells

Until recently, there seemed no end to the relentless parade of slick slabs marching in monotonous array down the Main Streets of U.S. cities. But now there is slow-gathering revolt against the tyranny of the grid with its curtain wall, which can make an office building look like a library, a courthouse like a morgue. Turning to engineering for a new excitement, architects are trying their hands at long-span, wafer-thin concrete shells. As more and more unfamiliar shells set their concrete sails to the wind, they may well provide 20th century architecture with the focal points that it has long needed to accent and offset the grid's severities.

Even shell purists do not claim that thin membranes of concrete soaring up into space are the answer to all ills; for short-span buildings, post-and-beam construction is as economical and easier to build. But for building meant to enclose large, pillar-free areas, shell construction is made to order.

Images in Concrete. It is being used to provide a large foyer for a store, to cover a New Canaan supermarket, to house a college library. Spain's famed Engineer Eduardo Torroja and Italy's Pier Luigi Nervi have proved that strictly utilitarian race-track stands, exhibition halls, ware houses and factories in shell concrete can become objects of surprising geometric beauty; Mexico's Felix Candela has shown that the hyperbolic paraboloid is versatile enough to use for churches, restaurants and bandstands. Already built, or on the way, are a host of equally new evocative shapes.

France's Le Corbusier used interlocking hyperbolic paraboloids to build the Philips Pavilion at last year's Brussels Fair, produced a building that looks like wildly flapping tents frozen in the wind, yet is basically nothing more than mathematical surfaces in concrete. U.S. Architect Hugh Stubbins tried a saddle-shaped shell delicately resting on two points for his Berlin Congress Hall (TIME, Sept. 30, 1957), achieved a building that seems to float yet looks (from certain angles) like a hooded owl. Designing an opera house to be built on the harbor front at Sydney, Australia (TIME, Feb. 25, 1957), Denmark's Joern Utzon developed a whole family of shells that poetically echo the sails of passing boats. Recognizing the new impulse, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week had on view a four-architect show of concrete structures. Outstanding was Eero Saarinen's design for the T.W.A. terminal, Idlewild, which masses huge vaults cantilevered out to suggest some great bird poised for flight.

Future Unlimited. Playing with a whole new world of conoids, cylinders and spheres, in single, double and compound curvatures, shellmen think the future is unlimited. The nearly completed French National Industrial and Technical Center, now abuilding on the outskirts of Paris, soars up 165 ft., spans 720 ft., covers 25 acres and will hold 60,000 visitors. Already research centers at M.I.T. and North Carolina State are exploring a whole range of fantastic new shapes; concrete shells have already been built with a thickness-to-span ratio ten times less than a chicken egg's.

Architects are delighted to be free of the restrictions of the international style, but are well aware that they are in danger of being carried away by the new tricks engineers have shown them. Explains M.I.T.'s Eduardo Catalano: "What we are trying to create is a grammar of enclosure in space, not designs that begin and end with one building." Architects Ladislav L. Rado and Antonin Raymond, who with Engineers Paul Weidlinger and Mario Salvadori have worked out details for a huge stadium that would rest on the earth like a bowl, unsupported at the edges, think another 20 years may have to pass before shells develop an esthetic of their own. Says Rado: "We are in a period like the Gothic when it first discovered its arch and the buttress. Now we have to find a way to do justice to both creative engineering and fine architecture."

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