The New Architecture

In no century did architects set out more consciously to create their own unique vision of a brave new world than in the 20th century. Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie houses were meant to open on a new democratic vista, where individualism and variety could prevail. In Germany, the Bauhaus scrapped pilaster, pediment and ornaments and created buildings with flat roofs and walls of glass. In France, Le Corbusier prophesied skyscraper cities where man's habitation would be "a machine to live in."

How well has this revolution succeeded? And where does it go from here? In an ambitious effort to answer these questions, the American Federation of Arts this week opens a major exhibit in Washington's Corcoran Gallery. Titled "Form Givers at Mid-Century," the show, sponsored and organized by TIME, will move on to Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum in June, then tour the nation. Gallerygoers at the Corcoran will see models and photographs of 66 pivotal buildings, set off by panel-sized color transparencies, which provide a sampling of the best in 20th century architecture.

The show selects five as master form givers--the late Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Alvar Aalto. Of the second generation, eight are singled out as leaders: Architects Marcel Breuer, Wallace K. Harrison, Philip C. Johnson, Richard J. Neutra, Eero Saarinen, Edward D. Stone, Engineer R. Buckminster Fuller, and the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Reviewing the past, assessing the present, and eying the future, the show leads to two major conclusions: 1) modern architecture has now clearly swept its early Beaux Arts enemies from the battlefield; 2) its architects, secure in their conquest, are moving on to new and more exciting adventures in structure.

Too Much Glass. As building after building in the exhibition shows, the major debt of the U.S.'s younger architects is owed to Chicago's German-born Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. His bronze-sheathed Seagram Building, shown glowing against Manhattan's skyline, is a masterful exposition of how the steel cage can, by the very economy of its means and richness of its texture, become a masterpiece. But in the most advanced projects, it is equally clear that few architects now consider themselves blind Mies followers.

The reaction is recent, caused in part by the miles of glass facades that have resulted from Mies's approach in the hands of less talented practitioners. Says Architect Philip Johnson, a onetime Mies collaborator: "Mies is such a genius. But I grow old and bored." Eero Saarinen quietly insists: "There does not have to be as much glass as Mies says." Says Edward D. Stone: "I am beginning to long for a feeling of permanence and monumentality." To all of this, Mies rumbles: "They say they are bored with my objectivity. Well, I am bored with their subjectivity."

Significantly, nearly every future project in the Form Givers exhibition is conceived in prestressed concrete. What attracts architects is the possibility of once again giving buildings a sculptured rather than a thinned-down look. As they move into a new world of tapered columns, arches and warped shells, engineers are once again welcomed back into drafting rooms, bringing with them new and daring structural solutions.

Ornament, once equated with tattooing, now reappears in building after building in the form of screens, grilles and even finials. In place of reflected skyline and cloud patterns bouncing back from vast glass slabs, architects are tucking glass back and out of sight, concentrating on giving back to architecture the play of light and shadow. Symbolism and historical evocation are suddenly staging their first comeback in over a quarter of a century.

Pace Setters. With the quickening in the architectural air even the oldtimers, once content merely to refashion their own styles, have turned innovators again. Le Corbusier's small French chapel at Ronchamp shows that the man who first put the box on stilts now leads in the move toward sculptural plasticity. Redoubtable Frank Lloyd Wright, who once made his houses hug the earth, built Manhattan's still unfinished Guggenheim Museum of reinforced concrete in the form of a giant snail shell resting on its smallest point. Even the austere Mies van der Rohe, in his proposal for the Bacardi office building in Santiago, Cuba, has designed a templelike reinforced-concrete building, with shadows playing around the frieze and fluted columns in the great classical tradition.

The models for future projects give a dramatic preview of the new architecture to come. Among the stylesetters:

P: Eero Saarinen's T.W.A. Terminal for Idlewild (TIME, March 9), a bold and sculpturesque winged form in concrete expressive of flight.

P: Banque Lambert, Brussels, a project designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's top designer, Gordon Bunshaft (whose Lever House was the ultimate in glass slabs), with Engineer Paul Weidlinger. Using precast, prestressed concrete with great discipline, Bunshaft has created a rhythmical fac,ade with all the richness of an Italian palazzo.

P: Philip Johnson's New Harmony Shrine, New Harmony, Ind., a bell-shaped structure with shingle roof that unabashedly owes its inspiration to Hindu temples, yet proved so complicated that an IBM machine took two weeks to calculate its compound curves.

P: Edward D. Stone's museum for A. & P. Heir Huntington Hartford Jr., a ten-story concrete structure that will sit on an island in Manhattan's Columbus Circle. Turning his back on the glass-brick walls he used for Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, Stone has designed a monumental fac,ade of white marble, enriched by porphyry and verd antique marble medallions over the columns of the arcade. Admits Stone: "The resemblance to Venice, the Ca' d'Oro and Doges Palace, is probably unmistakable."

P: R. Buckminster Fuller's latest world of geodesic domes, already tapped by architects for everything from Union Tank Car Co.'s roundhouse to theaters, factories and banks, and soon to be used for the U.S. Trade Fair in Moscow. Bucky's latest, a 407-ft.-diameter dome for the Oklahoma City Arena, has acquired five saddle-shaped canopies, will shelter 15,000 spectators. Fuller confidently predicts a day when aircraft companies will turn out dome shelters for whole cities.

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