The Journals of Ayn Rand (26 page)

Investors sometimes ask an architect to select a site and tell them what to build on it.

Working practice of the author: after the site and the type of building is approved, he “settles all the fundamental problems of the new building himself,” then turns the problem over to his designers who compete for the actual design of the building. (!) (
Check up
on this! Is it the usual practice? Is the businessman really the boss who hogs the credit, while the creative designer is only a minor employee? Is it usual or is it just a typical instance of second-hand practice?
Good for John Eric Snyte
.)

Even the smallest firm building skyscrapers employs 20 to 25 draftsmen. A larger firm would have 60 on its permanent staff and double this number during a rush. The head architect travels a great deal on inspections. (Spends ten nights a month in a sleeping car.) A regular [payroll] of about $15,000 a week. Permanent overhead—$250,000 a year.

Preliminary drawings for a small (million-dollar) building take about two months. Every tiny detail is included. Separate sets made for the main sections of the job. In all, there are hundreds of them.

From the moment he starts on his drawings, the architect is in constant touch with structural engineers, contractors, manufacturers and suppliers of materials, and the heads of thirty-two trades that will work under him. Free exchange of opinions and information. Cooperative spirit. Open publicity about everything on job. Drawings and specifications posted in building, so that every worker can read them. Contractors bid for the job. The winner, in turn, opens the bidding for sub-contractors.

A “cost-plus” contract allows the contractor the cost of the building plus a fixed fee for himself (this is apart from the architect’s commission); anything the contractor saves is split between himself and the owner. This helps to save in buying materials, as the contractor is most experienced and acquainted with the market.

So speaks the mob. The results—the “Daily News Building” [designed by Hood] and [Bossom‘s] buildings—speak for themselves: they are the ugliest, flattest, most conventional, meaningless, unimaginative and uninspiring buildings in the book.

This type of architect works “by conference,” in which all parties concerned take part, discuss his drawings, make suggestions, etc. (A Hollywood story conference.) The result is a collective creation—“an average on an average.” (This method and these convictions, absolving the architect of all creative responsibility, are good for
Peter Keating
. Check up on just how much conferring and cooperation is done by an architect such as Frank Lloyd Wright.)

Good touch: workers who steal rides on trains and get tools out of a pawnshop in some town where the architect is working—in order to work again under him. [...]

The author talks a great deal about daring, courage and leaving the way free for new inventions. Yet—he is an eclectic artistically. His “newness” applies only to the technical, scientific side of new methods and materials, not to new esthetic ideas. No daring, courage or novelty in his architectural designs. No talk at all in the book of the artistic problem of skyscrapers. No esthetic convictions.

But a great deal of talk about cooperation. Let’s get together. The skyscraper cannot be the product of one man. It is all collective. A great many attacks on “separatism.” [He is] a second-rater and second-hander, following popular trends, praising engineering and Greek orders in skyscrapers with equal ease, naturally anxious for everyone to share ideas, in order to pick up what he can pick up. (Beware of those too eager for sharing—in wealth or in ideas; they’re the ones who know that they’ll get more than they’ll give in such a pool. Those with much to give do not talk of sharing—they do not need it.)

This
author
is just right for Peter Keating.

An important side-idea to bring out [regarding] the building of a skyscraper: If led by a strong personality, superior in knowledge and talent to the others, representing the complete authority and final judgment in all matters, with a pyramid of ranks under him, widening toward the bottom—the perfect organization with the proper spirit of cooperation and discipline results, and the created building is a magnificent monument. If cooperation means equality, with everyone’s voice as good as the next fellow’s and all the fingers in the pie—an eclectic mess results. (Check up on how, through what exact steps and means, these two methods work in practice.)

 

Matlock Price,
The ABC of Architecture
.

The best architectural training is to be had in the Architectural Department of one of the large Universities, or in a Technical School.

“In the University it is possible to begin architectural training in the first year and carry it on, with other and more general studies, through the four years of college.” After this, it is very desirable to take from two to four years post-graduate work, specializing entirely in architecture. (Check up on all this.)

The author also states that many architects consider a year or two of European travel as the best preparation. (Rubbish!)

University program:

First year: history of architecture, drawing, “thorough training in the Classic Orders,” simple problems of architectural design, freehand drawing, a general fine arts course.

Second year: making “measured drawings,” courses in perspective, shades and shadows, simple building construction, more advanced design problems.

The next two years—the same subjects carried still further in more advanced problems.

At the same time courses in higher mathematics.

Post-graduate work—design problems as advanced as the actual profession of architecture itself.

He may, at this stage, compete for a Traveling Scholarship which will pay his expenses for a year or two of special study in Europe, usually at the American Academy in Rome.

If the student intends to become the designer of important public buildings, he should spend a few years at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. (More rubbish!)

(Look into this. Sounds perfectly anti-Roark. Try to meet one of them. What prompts such a business?)

The step from draftsman to architect is seldom an easy one. In a small firm a draftsman may be taken into partnership, if his work is valuable; more likely if he can bring with him a “job”—“if through social connections he can develop a client.” With money, he can buy himself into a partnership.

In large offices, where it is more difficult, he may do work in his spare time, working at night or on holidays, if through some personal means he can get a building to design.

Sometimes, if two fellow draftsmen can get work of their own to do, they give up their jobs and set themselves up as architects. If they have no money they must be very economical. [They may set up] a small office, two drafting tables, bought second-hand, and do all their own work. While working on their first “job,” they must do all they can to find another to follow up with.

“
Sometimes one plucky fellow alone
makes the jump from draftsman to architect in just this way.”

About this particular book: a commonplace, plodding little author, well-meaning, but completely conventional. To wit: the advice about the Beaux Arts School. Equal notice for classical revivals and Frank Lloyd Wright. “Anything goes.” Scholarly and without convictions about it all. Naively funny descriptions of all the jumbled eclectic adaptions of architectural styles in America. Such sentences as “the best French chateau in America,” etc. After listing the English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Italian buildings in this country, he adds quite seriously: “The Floridians have been even more adventuresome in architecture, achieving surprisingly successful adaptations of North African architecture, in stucco houses that are extraordinarily suggestive, in their essentials, of the houses of Tunis or Algiers.” (!)

Note: The peculiar preoccupation of architects such as this author and the previous one with “proportions,” “moldings,” “scholarly faithfulness to Classic examples,” etc. Worrying about every little thing, except the main one—the composition and its meaning as a whole. Isn’t it like the people who worry greatly about fine points of “style” and grammar in literature, without caring what the writing is about? Again, the “how” against the “what.” (Yet, the “what” determines everything else, just as the end determines the means, not vice versa. I do not intend that the end should justify lousy means, either. The “how” should always be worthy of the “what,” but determined by it.)

 

Le Corbusier,
Towards a New Architecture
.

He claims that the most beautiful forms are the simplest geometrical forms, the easiest to see. (Danger of over-simplification of modem architecture here.) Thus he considers Classic, Egyptian, Roman and some Renaissance architecture good, but Gothic bad, or at least not pure architecture. (Lack of the true principle of Frank Lloyd Wright here.)

He claims that the terrible houses of today destroy the family, by being unlivable. Advises modem houses to save family life.

He claims that we must establish definite standards for architecture, in order to elaborate these into perfection. (Danger of a new standardization and new set of rules for all architects to follow—just as in the following of old styles.)