The 40s: The Story of a Decade (94 page)

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So much has happened since 1931 that most people have probably forgotten the modifications that have been made in the original design, such as the elimination of the oval-shaped building, looking in the renderings exactly like a hatbox, which was originally intended as the central mass for Fifth Avenue. They may also have forgotten that nine years ago the architects were still pondering the idea of using brick and that there was still a chance some “interpretation” of Egypt or the Renaissance might be inflicted on the façades.

One can see that the choice of rough-faced limestone for the façades of the buildings was on the whole a happy one, for the stone has been steadily absorbing soot, so by now both the stone face and the metal plaques are about the same tone and color. Certainly the limestone, combined with the blue of the windowshades, was a safe choice. But now that there is a striking contrast in color between the new and the old façades, one can also see how the architects, by clinging to a single material and color, lost a jolly opportunity. Eventually all the buildings will have the same hue, whereas a positive contrast in color between the central mass and the supporting buildings would have made permanent what is only a temporary effect.

Because the architects went in for façades that were severe and uniform, they doubtless felt doubly bound to relieve this severity with ornament. It only remains to be said that never were so much money and pains spent with so little effect. The hanging gardens were, of course, hardly architectural devices. But even the ornamental sculpture that was used about the entrances is overpowered by the tremendous masses above them. Michelangelo could not have prevailed against this handicap. Furthermore, the most conspicuous murals, those of Sert and Ezra Winter, are aesthetically the worst flops.

The most blatant misuse of sculpture occurs in front of the Fifth Avenue entrance to the International Building. By itself, that entrance, with its absolutely severe rectangular columns framing rectangular glass openings, without a frill, without a fluting, is beyond doubt the finest single architectural element in the whole Center—traditional but fresh, superb in proportion and scale, complete. The beauty of that entrance was marred when the idiotic form of Atlas was placed in front of it.

The architects, too, made a serious muff of the one conspicuous piece of decoration that lay within their direct control: the vertical signs and
the marquees which identify the Center Theatre and the Music Hall. This is an art form in which architectural effort has been lacking, yet it is one of the most important features of any modern urban street composition, both by day and by night. The Rockefeller Center signs are, I regret to say, failures. They attempt monumentality and merely look elephantine; moreover, the lettering is clumsy and the use of script for “The” and “Theatre” is indefensible. Once the architect breaks away from the old-fashioned street layout, in which the buildings are consecutively numbered, it is important to have distinguishable signs to number and identify the buildings at a distance. It is only when one is close to these buildings—and not always then—that one is told, by lettering or decoration, where one is. This was a chance for organic ornament, so ably used on the office building at 417 Fifth Avenue, at Thirty-eighth. By going in for traditional embellishments, the architects of Rockefeller Center diverted themselves from their real task. (This same failure to identify irregularly placed buildings plagues one on university campuses and in modern housing projects, too, and it drives the casual visitor crazy.)

But the most serious aesthetic error in Rockefeller Center was the original mistake in scale. Except at a distance, one cannot see the top of the R.C.A. Building without tilting one’s chin at an uncomfortable angle. At a distance, it is no more impressive than twenty other buildings in the city; not nearly so good, in fact, as the Daily News Building or the Insurance Company of North America’s Building. What makes the Center architecturally the most exciting mass of buildings in the city is the nearby view of the play of mass against mass, of low structures against high ones, of the blank walls of the theatres against the vast, checkered slabs of glass in the new garage. All this is effective up to a height of thirty stories. Above that, the added stories only increase the burdens on the elevator system and inflate the egos of great executives.

Employing a unit like the sixteen-story office building that has been put up on Forty-eighth Street, a more compact and economic and efficient use might have been made of the whole site. Like the R.C.A. Building, this latest structure has a broad, low base of two or three stories for exhibition space and shops; and running through the middle of the block, insulated from the streets, set back from its neighbors across the way, is the main mass. This is definitely a new type of building, a substantial innovation and an excellent one. This unit is Rockefeller Center’s most conspicuous contribution to the city of the future, unlike
the wasteful towers and the dark, overgrown masses of earlier days. It corresponds in plan to the type arrived at in the new Memorial Hospital on East Sixty-eighth Street, and it is not merely a good unit but it makes possible, through the provision of a garage on the lower floors, adequate parking facilities. This structure has not got half the publicity the hanging gardens and the skating rink have received. But it is the real architectural justification of Rockefeller Center.

With a limit of thirty-two stories on the R.C.A. Building, and with units of eight and sixteen stories and theatres flanking this structure, the results would have been stunning, and what is more, every part of the project would have been easy to see. As it is, only from two points—from Forty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue, and from a third of the way east along the block on Fiftieth Street—can one see the Center at its best. Of course, many of the camera views of the buildings are striking, but then a camera doesn’t mind being tilted at a forty-five-degree angle for as much as five minutes, while the human neck does object. Good architecture is designed for the human beings who use or view the buildings, not for publicity men or photographers.

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Rockefeller Center is still to be seen as our descendants may see it in another generation. Once we lay out parks and ribbons of open space around such units—the Medical Center is another—they will form a new kind of urban organism. Don’t think that the future opening up of the city is just a pipe dream. The parking lots of today, like that on the site of the old Hippodrome, will be the gay playgrounds and squares of tomorrow. Rockefeller Center will look pretty old-fashioned by 1970, but then the Pyramids look old-fashioned now. Seen from quarter of a mile away, the Center group will knock one romantically cold. Even the R.C.A. Building.

JUNE 7, 1941

“A
new architecture, bold as the engineering from which it springs, is rising in the valley.… Look at it, and be proud that you are an American.” Those fine words by Stuart Chase stand at the entrance of the exhibition of TVA architecture at the Museum of Modern Art (it closes this Sunday), and they sum up admirably my feeling about the work that is on view. In these dams and power stations the largely unconscious precedents of our grain elevators and storage warehouses and coalbins reach the final mark of a conscious aesthetic expression. The photographs and models are excellent, but the actual buildings, as I saw them recently in their natural setting of hill and woodland and quarry and boat basin and river, are even more breathtaking than the photographs indicate. These structures are as close to perfection as our age has come.

There is something in the mere cant of a dam, when seen from below, that makes one think of the Pyramids of Egypt. Both pyramid and dam represent an architecture of power. But the difference is notable, too, and should make one prouder of being an American. The first grew out of slavery and celebrated death. Ours was produced by free labor to create energy and life for the people of the United States. Thanks to these dams, the colossal forces of the Tennessee River are held back or released almost as easily as one turns the water on and off at one’s private faucet, and instead of wasted water, there is an abundance of electricity. Aren’t we entitled to a little collective strutting and crowing? Though the whole staff of the TVA gets credit for the architectural success of these buildings, Mr. Roland Wank, the chief architect, deserves to be hauled out of his seat to take a bow. He would deserve it if only for the masterful way in which he has used concrete.

Engineers and architects have used concrete for a long time without thinking of anything better to do with it than to sheathe it in stone, as the Romans did, or else to rub away every last vestige of texture in the surface. Wank strove for a new effect; instead of obliterating the delicate pattern impressed in the concrete by the grain of the wood in the rectangular
forms into which the concrete was poured, he made the effect all the bolder by contrasting horizontal with vertical patterns. The result is handsome, comparable to what Eliel and Ero Saarinen achieved in the new Buffalo Music Hall by using a facing of stone, and, needless to say, it is the most economic treatment possible.

While the Hiwassee Dam is perhaps the most striking work of pure engineering that the TVA has done, the generator building at Guntersville, Alabama, looks extremely good. The interior is finished in tile, both walls and floor, and the outside of the main structure is done in brick, with a great rectangular panel of glass set off in a simple brick frame, above which the name “Guntersville” appears in bold letters. There is not a superfluous touch in this whole structure, and the architect’s high achievement with tile and brick shows that the success of the other buildings is no mere fluke of engineering and is not due only to a happy trick in employing certain materials.

The only criticism I have to make of this show is that it was too modestly conceived. Lack of space, if nothing else, confined it to the main structures in the Tennessee Valley and made it impossible sufficiently to indicate the architectonic treatment of the whole landscape. In modern architecture, not merely are the interior and the exterior equally important but the individual unit and the plan of the whole must be conceived as one. I can think of no better example of this partnership than the structures of the TVA. Here is modern architecture at its mightiest and its best. The Pharaohs did not do any better.

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The most important things that have happened in American architecture during the last month or so are three books. This is an event even rarer than the building of a skyscraper, for our architectural history and criticism have lagged a long way behind practice. Because of that, our practice has been more smug and provincial than it need have been.

Siegfried Giedion’s
Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition
has been put out in a most sumptuous format, and it is a very exciting piece of work. The book derives from the Norton lectures this Zurich critic and historian gave at Harvard in 1938 and 1939. Many of its illustrations and some exceedingly interesting data, however, came out of research in the history of American architecture which Giedion did after he came over here, and there is no one, no matter how well informed about the modern movement, who will not be stimulated and occasionally
made rather starry-eyed by the pictures of a developing world, creating new symbols for a new consciousness of nature and man, that Giedion presents.

The weakest part of Giedion’s book is his handling of modern city development, particularly his failure to understand the historic significance or the future importance of Ebenezer Howard’s conception of the garden city. In a book that stresses the social side of modern architecture, this is a serious blind spot. But apart from this, Giedion has done a good job. His emphasis on the social, the personal, and the human makes it as decisive a departure from the standpoint of Le Corbusier’s
Vers une Architecture
as that in turn was a departure from the commonplaces of the traditionalists. Giedion sees that our main problem is “to humanize—that is, to reabsorb emotionally—what has been created by the spirit. All talk about organizing and planning is vain when it is not possible to create again the whole man, unfractured in his methods of thinking and feeling.”