Exuberant Architecture

One afternoon in 1890 the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan bustled into the office of his chief draftsman, Frank Lloyd Wright, and tossed onto the table his plans for a new building in St. Louis. "Look at it!" cried Sullivan triumphantly. "It's tall! Sullivan had good reason to boast: he had given form and logic to the skyscraper for the first time. A readable and richly illustrated new book called Architecture Today and Tomorrow (McGraw-Hill; $17.50) takes off from that boast to trace the rise of modern architecture--and the lively rebellion against it among the modernists themselves. A reader will have to look far to find in a single volume a better play-off between the older and younger generations.

The author of the book is Cranston Jones, a senior editor of TIME, who, in the five years he wrote for the ART section, made TIME the leading reporter on architecture outside the professional magazines. Though Jones's bibliography is impressive, his best material comes from conversations he had with the architects.

As a result, there is a rare freshness about the book, a personal as well as professional intimacy. In between the more technical passages, it is good to get a glimpse of Frank Lloyd Wright swatting flies and crying, "Mies," "Breuer" or "Gropius" at every swat, or to hear France's Auguste Ferret acidly say of his onetime associate Le Corbusier, "He is a clerk. He will pass," while Wright gleefully agreed.

Less Was More . . . The first part of the book deals with the old masters--Sullivan, Ferret, Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Finland's Alvar Aalto. Some readers may question Jones's conclusion that Wright and not Le Corbusier was the greatest architect of their generation, or that Wright's corkscrew Guggenheim Museum is his best work. (Perhaps because Le Corbusier is the most inaccessible of architects, Jones's chapter on him lacks the luster of the others.)

Yet Wright and Le Corbusier are not the pivotal figures of the book; instead, they are Mies van der Rohe and to a lesser degree Walter Gropius. Mies, declaring the doctrine of "less is more," gave modern architecture its greatest discipline and refinement--the spareness visible in glass and metal in any American city. And German-born Walter Gropius, with the artists, architects and craftsmen of his famed Bauhaus at Dessau in the '205, established the grammar of design suited to modern mass production. They made simplicity and austerity and a faithfulness to function the liberating marks of the International Style.

. . . And Became a Bore. Today, says Jones, "a new specter stalks architecture, the monotony of endless glass fac,ades." Among the old masters, Le Corbusier has turned from the '"pure prism" of his youth to an architecture that is pure sculpture. Other architects, each in his own way, are searching for riches the purists would have found intolerable. "Our architecture," said the late Eero Saarinen, "is too humble. It should be prouder, much richer and larger than we see it today."

Like Saarinen, Philip Johnson, whose loyal discipleship to Mies once earned him the nickname of Mies van der Johnson, turns to the great forms of the past for inspiration. "I grow old! And bored!" he once said. "My direction is clear: eclectic traditionalism. We cannot not know the past."

The past walks through Johnson's recent buildings with both grace and elegance; the column, the pergola, the once scorned arch are all there. Louis Kahn seeks to emulate the unified integrity of medieval Carcassonne. Other men seem to be reaching toward exciting new engineering solutions, using advanced techniques to create forms never seen before in the buildings of man. The best of architects have found at last that it is quite all right to break the rules. The ban on ornamentation is gone; so is the overemphasis on function, the cliche of the flat roof, the tyranny of the right angle and the inevitable faceless fac,ade. "One doubts," says Paul Rudolph, "that a poem ever got written to a flat-topped building silhouetted against the setting sun." Adds Victor Lundy: "I want my buildings to be exuberant."

The new generation, as Jones shows, has a poetic vision. Minoru Yamasaki's design for the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle dramatizes soaring vaulted archways. The Air Force Academy Chapel by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is made of aluminum-sheathed pipes, with a nave as high as Notre Dame. The shell-concrete constructions of Mexico's Felix Candela leap, float and swoop as if perpetually in flight. The glass box of the International Style has been opened at last, and the shapes and forms that are spilling out of it may well produce an architecture more splendid and more varied than man has ever known before.

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