The Journals of Ayn Rand (30 page)

(Nice friends, ain’t they?)

(“I would also build anything, because I have nothing to say” can be his explanation as well.)

This Hood interests me. I may be wrong, but there’s something sinister about the man. He was broke and ready to give up architecture, when he won the Chicago
Tribune
competition by going in “partnership” on the design with a prominent architect who had been “invited” to participate in the contest. Hood did the design, and shared the glory with the other man, who got $40,000 out of the $50,000 award. The building was eclectic, Gothic, and none too good. This was after Sullivan, after Wright, when Mr. Hood could have discovered modernism if he had wished to listen, let alone “invent” it. But he goes Gothic “because embroidery was in vogue.”

He prospers on the reputation gained by this contest. He gets big buildings to do. Modem architecture is gaining. The shrewd gentleman realizes it—I imagine he was a very good businessman. He switches to modernism with a bang—the Daily News Building. He is successful and sensational. He likes it. It is now safe to be sensational. He speedily appropriates the language of the modernists—Le Corbusier, Sullivan and all. He is admired for it. He is “the foremost
modern
architect of America.” He is a prophet—neatly and nicely, with someone else’s prophecy and genius, and with someone else’s struggles and suffering having paved the way for his victory.

It is now embarrassing to know that the words are stolen. He would like to believe himself that he is what he has managed to make himself appear. So he hates the men he has robbed. He fights them.
He
keeps Wright from the Chicago Fair. He hates Wright for being actually what he, Hood, only appears to be. And—an interesting parallel: Wright refused to participate in the Fair, unless he could have complete say over it; Wright did it because he had an idea of what he wanted done with the Fair and he wished no interference with the idea; he had a truly beautiful and important thing to create. (“Terrible and megalomaniacal,” comments Kahn.) Hood, on the other hand, made no such demand; but, according to Kahn, Hood
was
the ruler of the exposition. And an ugly mess resulted; Mr. Hood compromised or was incapable of anything better; he had no idea and nothing to create; he merely wanted the honor of bossing other people and being the “ruler” in their eyes, even if he had nothing for which to rule. And, of course, he had to keep Wright out of it; Wright was the only danger to this kind of phony, second-hand supremacy and the one who could steal the thunder from and the spotlight off Mr. Hood. Isn’t that typical and significant? Isn’t that “second-handedness”? (I think I’ve analyzed it correctly. Check up.)

Kahn mentions that the plans for the Rockefeller Center were originally to be Gothic, because of Mr. Rockefeller’s love for the Gothic [style]. Plans had even been drawn in Gothic. But practical necessity, such as windows and lighting, led to the adoption of a modern design. When I asked him about this personally, Kahn hastily denied that Gothic plans had been drawn. (?)
Hood
was the guiding hand among the eight or ten architects of Rockefeller Center. (Any wonder he got in? Would Wright draw up Gothic plans and then “talk” Rockefeller out of it? Where is the great integrity and “modern” convictions of Mr. Hood? And Rockefeller Center is a mess, compared to what it could have been. As to its sculpture—I wonder if Hood had a hand in the giving out of
that
commission?)

As to the whole meeting: a lot of insufferable drivel. A bunch of wealthy idlers in evening clothes listening smugly to a re-hash of things they could read in any book in ten minutes. Two dotards pattering smugly about Classic and Gothic architecture. Kahn—the only one to say a little of something and to say it with conviction. The others—drooling about a “house in Pompeii,” which we are invited to inspect “from a magic carpet,” and about the long nave of a Gothic cathedral symbolizing “the long way of a sinner to redemption” (sic!). The well-fed morons listening contentedly, certain that they are acquiring “culture.” Tickets at $2.20 a head. And Wright could not raise the money to publish his magazine!

 

Samples of phony architectural language (from Kurt Jonas, in the
South African Architectural Record):

Here is a typical one of Toohey: muddle the issue, appear deep by being unclear, down with logic in the name of a “higher logic”; this is the spirit of Gertrude Stein and others, again denying superiority by denying reason—the sole danger to mediocrity. Remove reason—and what ground is there for greatness or smallness? Aren’t all equal when the scales have been destroyed?
[AR made use of the above “phony language”
—
see Gordon Prescott’s testimony at the Stoddard trial.
]

“Modernist” architects build their own homes in the most conventional, old-fashioned way. The exception—Frank Lloyd Wright.

A silly
New York Times
article (1931) gloats over this, emphasizing that even so-called “modernists” (such as Hood) do not live in “modernistic boxes,” that their homes are as old and eclectic as the homes of the conservative architects; [the article] stresses the fact that the [modernists‘] homes are ancient, reconditioned, part old barns, etc., and goes mushy over ancient cherry-trees, lawns, flowers and birdies and the like. One of the “modernists,” when asked about his home, got sheepish, then admitted that he didn’t build it for himself, but for a client: his wife, who “didn’t like modernism.” Could Wright have done this—wife or no wife? Could he stand living in a house he hated? Could any man with sincere and profound convictions about his art, the art that is his life, live in a house that denies all his ideals? Could I, for the sake of a husband or for Jesus Christ, read nothing but Kathleen Norris?
[Kathleen Norris, a novelist, wrote
Mother
(1911),
Saturday’s Child
(1914),
Sisters
(1919),
The Sea Gull
(1927), etc.]

 

Lewis Mumford: “A critic who deals with the whole field of American culture.” A swell description of Toohey.

The Beaux-Arts Ball (January 23, 1931 ) where famous architects wore costumes representing one of their buildings. “Human Skyline for Beaux-Arts Ball.”

(Note the little guy with the glasses peering through a hole in his headpiece—the Waldorf-Astoria.)

 

Note the difference of approach to their profession between all these successful New York architects and Frank Lloyd Wright. He wouldn’t go on a stag trip to the “Alma Mater” in Paris. He wouldn’t go to a ball dressed as his building. This is the difference between the “common touch” and the ideal, between art as a business and art as a religion. The difference in the men is also in their buildings. It is this feeling I want for Roark—the burning reverence as against the “meal-ticket” architecture.

Note also, for Toohey, the measly trick in the
Vanity Fair
article quoted previously, of not coming out with a direct statement of the writer’s own opinion, but hiding behind such phrases as: “There are many who believe” and “his friends claim.”

 

A. T. North, “The Passing Show,”
Current Architecture,
September, 1930.

This gentleman criticizes someone for saying that an architect must have convictions about his style—“as though the architect must have a style conviction just like one has a religious conviction.”
(Precisely!
That’s what he
must
have.)

What logic! Here’s mediocrity speaking.

Now what is beauty? Who is to decide? By what rules?

 

Pictures of the A.I.A. convention: terribly stodgy, pompous, either “Babbitt” or “Social Register” faces of prominent architects. What a figure Howard Roark will be among them!