1938: Architecture

1938: Architecture

American architecture was interesting in 1938 not so much for any high level of design as for the vigor evidenced by the encouragingly large number of modern buildings and their variety of conception and form. The spurious variety of our century of eclecticism is slowly being supplanted by the honestly differentiated forms of a truly modern architecture. The essential individuality of a building is based on thoughtful and sensitive consideration of function, regional requirements, materials, and construction, and can only be obscured by the application of borrowed styles, ancient or modern.

Stylistic borrowings are not always immediately recognizable as such. Symmetry is a classic ideal, justifiable today only if it be the logical solution to plan requirements. Massive monumentality is rarely warranted by contemporary materials and construction methods, and represents a way of thinking essentially foreign to a modern democracy. Windows cut through a facade like holes-in-the-wall are appropriate only to solid masonry construction. All these borrowed elements characterize the administration buildings which front Albert Kahn's otherwise beautifully straightforward factories. Other formulae are often borrowed without discrimination from Continental modernism: unsuitable use of corner windows, glass brick, 'lally' columns, flat roofs and white stucco.

American Houses.

The legitimate variety of expression possible in contemporary architecture is best illustrated by modern American houses. Interest in machine methods, prefabrication, standardization of building elements and procedure, and experiment with new building materials and techniques are for many architects closely allied with study of orientation, with increased use of natural materials, and with emphasis on intimate relationship between site and house, between nature and the work of man.

The recent work of Frank Lloyd Wright illustrates all these tendencies. Availing himself whenever possible of machine methods of production, Wright has yet gone further than any other architect in the humanization of architecture. His country house for E. J. Kaufmann on Bear Run, Pa., is certainly one of the most important buildings of our times. Great slabs of reinforced concrete are spectacularly cantilevered out over a ravine to make several terraces over and above the stream. Supporting the terraces, and contrasting with their airiness, is the heavy house-core, built up of native stone. Solid masonry for support, reinforced concrete for light horizontals — the materials are appropriately used. A lyric conception of architecture as related to its natural setting, the house is also a perfect example of form developed imaginatively and consequently from materials, construction, and purpose. Of a character more closely resembling his earlier work is the one-story house designed by Wright for Herbert Jacobs at Madison, Wis. To keep the cost within the $5,500 limit, the architect eliminated every unnecessary material in construction. Pitched roofs were considered expensive and unnecessary, and a sheltered carport took the place of a garage. The house is heated exclusively by its steam-warmed concrete floor-slab. Walls are formed of three thicknesses of boards screwed together with building paper between. These slab walls, the same inside as out, were assembled on the site, but would be well adapted to factory prefabrication.

Richard Neutra of Los Angeles represents a different tendency in architecture. Pioneer and preeminent experimentalist with modern synthetic building materials and rationalized building technique, he is an important figure in American architecture. To some critics, the ascetic purity of Neutra's precisely calculated houses more than compensates for their lack of warmth, of intuitive unity of design. Neutra is close to the strictest German 'functionalism' of the twenties, and his houses are more nearly 'machines for living in' than anything ever produced by LeCorbusier himself. One of Neutra's few buildings in the East is the Brown house, recently completed on Fisher's Island, N.Y. The distance between the widely spaced studs of the wood frame was used as a unit in the design of doors and windows. Elasticity of construction is evidenced by the manner in which the house stood up under the September hurricane. The house is surfaced with aluminum paint which, by reflecting the sun's rays, not only helps to insulate against their heat, but makes the house seem to disappear in the landscape.

The work of most American architects lies intermediate between that of the poet Wright and the technician Neutra. William Lescaze has designed an interesting house in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., for a client who wished a home that would also serve as an experimental laboratory for his hobby, air conditioning. The problem of insulation and control was solved by a one-story 'house-within a house,' an outer wall of steel frame and masonry separated by a two-foot corridor from an inner shell of wood. In spite of the novelty of its problem, this house is in many ways the best that Lescaze has produced in years.

On a small south-facing corner lot in Cambridge, Mass., Edward Stone and Carl Koch, Jr., have designed a house notable for its satisfactory combination of various materials as well as for its ingenious solution to a difficult site problem. The house faces the street, but is sheltered from it by a courtyard enclosed by a fieldstone wall. Reinforced concrete is used dramatically, but suitably, in Alexander Levy's cliff-top house for Richard Halliburton in California.

Wood as a Building Material.

Architects are particularly interested now in finding new uses for wood, the traditional American building material. The freshly conceived California houses of Harwell Hamilton Harris show a particularly imaginative and sensitive use of this material. Less personal in feeling are the two standard-frame wood houses recently designed by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in Massachusetts, one at Lincoln and one at Cohasset. The Cohasset house is ingeniously planned to combine clapboards and natural stone.

Clapboards have been unprecedentedly popular this year with architects who previously have preferred to use flat surfacing materials. Kenneth Kassler's use of narrow, untreated, natural cypress siding in the Starks House, Princeton, N.J., is particularly successful.

Much less sophisticated are the straightforward, region-conscious wood houses springing up all over the country. Usually conventionally framed, with simple low-pitched roofs, they boast modern open plans and modern fenestration. Traditional in spirit, though not in form, at their best they have the anonymous charm and livability of folk-architecture. Even the most conservative architects and builders are being forced by popular demand to consider such elementary principles of modern architecture as proper orientation and site-use, open planning, and large wall-openings. For reasons of economy rather than esthetics, less use is being made of applied ornament.

The new possibilities of plywood as a building material are being thoroughly explored. Development by the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis., of weatherproof resin-binding makes possible external as well as internal use of plywood. It is used in three main ways: (1) as panels applied inside and outside to conventional wood stud framing; (2) in large pre-fabricated slabs (two sheets of plywood separated by insulating material and lightly framed for stiffening) placed between widely spaced wood framing members, as in the Resettlement Administration's experimental house at Greenbelt, Md.; and (3) in large prefabricated units similar to those of (2) but designed for direct assembly without a supporting frame, as in the Forest Products Laboratory experimental houses, which use the prefabricated panels for floors and roofs as well as for walls.

Types of Houses.

Houses in various price ranges were designed for Life by eight prominent architects — four traditional, four modern. The lack of any one outstanding project may be partly accounted for by the short time allowed for their design. Of those Life readers who expressed their preference, 45 per cent voted for modern; and the Frank Lloyd Wright project, impractical though it was, led in popularity. Another project which has received wide publicity is Paul Nelson's model for a 'Suspended House,' an experiment in new use of space. Rooms of continuous metal sheeting, appropriately curved, are suspended at various levels from two elegant tubular metal arches, and hang freely within a tremendous air-conditioned glass shell. In form, the project is readily comparable with modern painting and sculpture.

Large-scale Housing Projects.

Economically and socially, though not at the present time architecturally, more important than the individual house is large-scale housing. In November the United States Housing Authority celebrated the first anniversary of its activity in providing low-rent housing for workers earning between $500 and $1,100. Almost all of the available $800,000,000 (Congress allowed the Authority an additional $300,000,000 this year) has been allocated to local housing authorities, and many projects have been completed. Under the present program, 150,000 homes will be built and an equal number of slum dwellings demolished. The fact that construction costs are proving to be lower than had been expected means that rents can be lower and more units built than was at first thought possible. An outstanding example of the economy which results from efficient planning and administration is Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn, which will cost 25 per cent less than the $16,000,000 allotted for construction.

Contributing to lower costs has been labor's agreement not to strike during the construction of a project against wage scales accepted at the beginning. There is some hope that a system of guaranteed annual wages can be set up in connection with large-scale building operations, although the difficulties encountered by such a plan are almost prohibitive.

Since maintenance costs account for a large proportion of the annual costs which must be met by rent, the Housing Authority is encouraging the construction of one-family houses with individual gardens.

Housing projects under the USHA are architecturally similar to those of its predecessor, the PWA. In the typical site plan, buildings of complicated shape form a series of small courts with dreary absence of any real clarity of form and complete disregard for orientation. With the not always justifiable excuse of economy, glass areas are limited, unfriendly materials used in unsuitable ways, and balconies made the exception rather than the rule. The atmosphere of gaiety which European architects have often achieved in similar low-cost housing is here sadly lacking. Exceptions to the general mediocrity are the excellent site-use and clear-cut forms of Westfield Acres, Camden, N.J.; Lakeview Terrace, Cleveland, O.; and the new projects in Puerto Rico and Hawaii.

The precedent set by these housing projects for future building, public and private, makes the question of architectural standards doubly important. (See also HOUSING: Government Projects.)

'Greenbelt' Extra-urban Projects.

Unlike the PWA and USHA projects, which try to solve the housing problem within the framework of existing cities, the 'Greenbelt' communities of the Resettlement Administration (now the Farm Security Administration) are entirely new and self-contained towns. Each is a satellite of a larger city, but protected from it by a permanent green belt of farmland. Each was designed as a unit, with its own schools, shops, and community center. Of the three recently completed communities, the best planned and handsomest is Greenbelt, Md. The 'Greenbelt' idea offers a new pattern for living which deserves serious consideration by the public.

Medium-rental Projects.

In all probability we will soon see a great amount of large-scale housing designed to rent at prices between those of government-subsidized projects and what has been regarded as minimum for private enterprise. First to see the possibilities for investment in this field was the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which has announced a $50,000,000 low-rent project for a 120-acre site in the Bronx, N.Y.

Another attempt to reach this neglected group of people is Gerard B. Lambert's housing plan. Tried out on a microcosmic scale in Princeton, N.J., it has received favorable publicity. According to the Architectural Forum (December, 1938), the plan calls for the establishment of 'investment housing corporations,' which 'would sell securities to the public, build housing projects with the proceeds, manage and maintain the projects until they have paid for themselves. At such a time, projects would be turned over to the municipality.' In return, the municipality would waive taxes on the projects. Interest on securities would be limited to 4 per cent.

Housing for Those on Relief.

Since people on relief are barred from government housing, the problem of housing them decently and economically is acute. To this end, Fort Wayne, Ind., has developed an ingenious scheme. Idle land, held privately on speculation, is rented by the city for one dollar a year (freedom from taxes naturally included). On this land are erected small semi-portable plywood houses modeled after the Purdue University experimental houses. Phenomenally low rents are being achieved under this plan.

Institutional and Industrial Buildings.

While college and preparatory school buildings remain Tudor or Georgian, public schools are taking the lead in more objective and appropriate design. The new high school at Ansonia, Conn., by William Lescaze and Vernon Sears is particularly good. Here the three main elements — classrooms, auditorium, and gymnasium — are clearly articulated and brought without the artifice of symmetry into a logical, rhythmic arrangement. The trend toward incorporation of adult recreation facilities with those for elementary education is well illustrated by Alfred Kastner's starkly simple new school for Jersey Homesteads, the Resettlement Administration community near Hightstown, N.J.

One of the most interesting buildings of the year is the home for crippled children on the beach at Lewes, Del. The architects, Victorine and Samuel Homsey, have avoided the clichés of modern architecture and produced an efficient solution which is also both gay and original.

Perhaps it is because the public has never thought of factories as 'Architecture' that such a high level of design prevails in this field. The client is rarely interested in monumentality, quaintness, or academic verisimilitude; he merely desires a building that will be efficient, flexible, economical, and perhaps handsome. As a result, our factories are directly and boldly conceived, with frank, often even imaginative use of modern materials. Many methods of construction first developed in factory design have later been taken over into general use. For example, factories pioneered with the use of an internal system of columns as support for floors and roof: all weight is thus removed from exterior walls, which can be entirely of glass.

While Albert Kahn, Inc., America's most prolific factory designer, turns out consistently interesting work, the most distinguished industrial building of the year is certainly the Administration Building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Johnson Wax Company at Racine, Wis. The building is supported by incredibly slender 'dendriform' columns of concrete reinforced with steel mesh. These columns taper down almost to a point at the base. Adapted from the 'mushroom' columns developed some years ago, they are as technically successful as they are architecturally gratifying.

Public Buildings.

Our public buildings present a very different picture. They slowly become more simple, but it is the superficial simplicity of rectangular moldings and squared columns rather than the basic simplicity which results from straightforward design. The stripped classicism of Paul Cret's Federal Reserve Board Building in Washington is far removed from any vigorous current in contemporary architecture. But the purest monuments to 'conspicuous waste' have come from the office of the late John Russell Pope: the new Mellon Gallery in Washington and the Jefferson Memorial, which, in spite of well-organized and articulate opposition, will be erected on the Washington Tidal Basin.

Prize-winning designs in the Government post-office competition were largely in the 'Government classic' style of the Federal Reserve Board Building. This competition was important for the precedent it may establish for the allotment of all Federal work on the democratic basis of open, anonymous competition.

Most interest, public as well as professional, was attracted by the competition, sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and the Architectural Forum, for an Art Center for Wheaton College, Norton, Mass. This was the first major competition in this country in which preference for modern design was expressed in the program.

Various Events of Interest to Architecture.

Public interest in housing was stimulated by the production of 'One Third of a Nation' by the Living Newspaper and the Federal Theaters of New York and Philadelphia. Based on the theme 'a man's got to have a place to live . . . ' the play offered a dramatic interpretation of the evils of land speculation and the resultant necessity for government assistance in providing housing for the lowest-third income group.

Major exhibitions of architecture organized this year by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and circulated by them all over the country featured Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann House, the architecture and furniture of the Finn, Alvar Aalto, and the early work of the Bauhaus, an internationally important post-war German school of art and architecture. The exhibition of 'Three Centuries of American Art' assembled by the Museum of Modern Art for the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris included a large section on American architecture, past and present. The present trend toward modern architecture was endorsed by the architectural magazine this year as never before. The December number of the Architectural Forum included Plus, a progressive and ultra-modern department of the magazine, separately edited and appearing every second month. Another event was the reappearance of Shelter as 'a correlating medium for housing progress.'

As the situation abroad becomes intolerable, many of Europe's most distinguished architects are coming to this country. With Mies van der Rohe and Hilbersheimer teaching at Armour Institute, Walter Gropius and Marcel Bretter at Harvard, American architectural education should benefit from foreign misfortune.

Great Britain.

England was slow to take up modern architecture, but now shows a vitality equal to that of any country on the Continent. Most consistently interesting work is that of Tecton, a group of young architects internationally famous for their imaginative zoo buildings.

There is no better illustration of the development within modern architecture during the past few years than Tecton's two apartment houses at Highgate, London. The first unit, completed in 1935, has a cubistic, impersonal boxiness, emphasized by a flat surface treatment and a non-committal coating of white stucco. The second building, just completed, contrasts with the first in its conscious richness of form and texture. Arranged like the first unit, it has a similar concrete skeleton with bearing walls at both ends, but here the end walls are faced with cream-colored glazed tiles, divided into panels. The concrete frame is exposed on the two long walls and filled in alternately with glass and white-pointed black brick.

In dynamic contrast to the static mass of the building, the entrance canopy forms a free curve. It is supported by concrete casts of the famous Erectheon cariatids — a precious detail of dubious validity. The flow of space between interior and exterior is emphasized by the extension of the garden into the entrance hall itself.

This second Highpoint illustrates important tendencies in contemporary architecture: structure of emphatic lightness and refinement, obliques and free curves used as contrast to more rigid outlines, and increased interest in texture and variety of materials. Pushed to the limit, the result is a kind of modern baroque, flexible and dynamic.

Since English school authorities like the directness and flexibility of modern planning, many commissions are going to the younger architects. They are designing pavilion-type schools, low and rambling, with each classroom intimately related to the outdoors. The exhibition of modern schools which was circulated about England by the Royal Institute of British Architects has done much to stimulate public interest in proper school design.

Of particular importance was the large exhibition of architecture and urbanism which the MARS group organized in London. Concise and dramatic, it was a masterpiece of modern exhibition technique.

The 1938 British Empire Exhibition at Glasgow was interesting chiefly for the consistency of design achieved by standardization of (1) materials and construction (steel or wood frame covered with asbestos-cement sheets), (2) sizes of parts, and (3) basic design of the smaller buildings. Such standardization makes for economy and speed of erection and provides a certain unity of appearance, but it must often be felt as restriction by the individual architect. Unity easily degenerates into monotony.

The gayest building of the Glasgow Exhibition was the 'tree-top' restaurant by Tait and Ross. Rather than cut down the many trees on the site, the architects simply raised the building on steel columns set among the trees and included the upper branches within the restaurant.

France.

France offers little this year to compare in architectural interest with the 1937 Paris Exposition. Still among the most active architects is the pioneer modernist, Auguste Perret. His new Museum of Public Works in Paris is typical of his personal idiom in concrete. In spite of its classic conception, the building achieves integrity and interest through the emphasis accorded its exposed frame of reinforced concrete, through the use of pre-cast concrete slabs to fill in the voids between the structural members, and through the sharply defined, simple profiles of the protruding door and window frames. The recently completed Louis Pasteur Hospital at Colmar, although ostensibly designed by W. Vetter with Perret only as consultant, also bears the unmistakable Perret stamp.

LeCorbusier, most distinguished French architect, seems to have been comparatively inactive this year; but his influence is obvious in the subtle façade treatment of the excellent Paris apartment house designed by Jean Ginsberg and François Heep.

Scandinavia.

Scandinavian architecture, though rarely inspired, continues to be straightforward, livable, and thoroughly modern. The freshest, best-considered work is being turned out by the Finn, Alvar Aalto, internationally recognized as one of the master-builders of our times. Few architects anywhere can equal his imaginative use of wood in bent-wood furniture and in the Finnish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition. This sensitivity to the qualities of materials is coupled with a refreshingly human approach to the problems of architecture. He now has two large projects under construction: a group of low-rent apartment houses at Munkkiniemi, and a self-contained industrial community at Sunila.

Switzerland.

As in Scandinavia, architecture in Switzerland is non-traditional as a matter of course. (The new Art Museum in Basle by Rudolf Christ and Paul Bonatz is notable as the single important exception.) Swiss solutions to the growing demand for urban outdoor swimming pools combined with restaurants and other facilities for recreation deserve serious study in this country. Architects are now busy with plans for the National Exhibition to be held at Zurich in the summer of 1939.

Palestine.

While modern architecture is an established fact in almost every country of Europe, nowhere has it found more enthusiastic general acceptance than in the rapidly developed Jewish communities of Palestine. Buildings of real architectural merit are, however, scarce. The prevalent use of reinforced concrete framework with brick fill is due to the high cost of Jewish labor and the resulting tendency toward mechanization and economy of material. Excessive land costs have already resulted in over-crowded housing and a scarcity of low-rent urban quarters. Huge housing projects are being planned for the cheap land surrounding the towns.

Italy.

Although Italian public buildings tend to retain the heavy symmetry, though not the elaborate detail, of the classic tradition, delicate, beautifully proportioned, thoroughly modern buildings are going up all over the country. Much use is made of concrete framework, and the more elaborate buildings are richly surfaced with thin slabs of travertine or marble. The elegant simplicity which can result is illustrated by the work of Giancarlo Palanti in Leghorn, although Luigi Moretti's fencing academy on the Forum Mussolini is the most distinguished example to date. Great glass areas are prevalent, but are protected from the hot Italian sun by projecting terraces or roof-slabs.

G. Mucchi's project for a fountain in Milan shows that the national genius for fountain design did not die with the Baroque period. Mucchi has combined sculpture, water, and curved, free-standing marble walls in a large and masterful composition.

Contemporary Italian achievements in city-planning include the cities on the former Pontine Marshes, the new mountain resorts in Aosta, and the interesting group of tall, widely spaced apartment houses now going up on the Genoa water-front.

Other Countries.

It is curious that the two other great totalitarian countries should have a conception of architecture so completely different from that of Italy. Both Germany and Russia hold that the primary function of architecture is to express the power of the state. For this purpose the most ponderous forms of classicism are aptly chosen. In spirit there is little difference between the Byzantine classicism of the 1938 All-Union Agricultural Exposition at Moscow and Albert Speer's buildings for the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. But there is strong evidence in both countries that architects are growing restless under these restrictions.

Both Austria and Czechoslovakia have long been accustomed to a vigorous, unselfconscious, untraditional architecture. Only partly completed is the great Austrian State Tobacco Factory at Linz by Peter Behrens and Alexander Popp. Faintly expressionistic in style, it is yet a distinguished treatment of utilitarian forms. Czechoslovakia's most notable recent buildings have been schools and sanatoria — in particular the beautifully simple Sanatorium Masaryk by Tibra and Kan. What result German domination will have on the architecture of these countries is a matter for conjecture.

International Pavilions at New York World's Fair.

The international pavilions at the New York World's Fair in 1930 will offer an opportunity for first-hand investigation of what is happening in architecture all over the world. The peculiar interest of exhibition buildings frequently lies in their use of advanced ideas which only later pass into the normal architectural vocabulary. The kind of showing we ourselves will make is not yet fully apparent — one can still hope that the majority of the buildings will be light, gay, open, and frankly temporary.