1940: Architecture

In any serious survey of architecture in 1940, the United States must assume a position of unprecedented importance. Not since the heyday of Chicago office-building construction in the '80s and the 'prairie houses' of Frank Lloyd Wright in the early years of the century has this country produced architecture of such quality and vitality.

Contributing to this renascence is the war which, negatively, has cut down construction abroad, and positively, has brought to this country many of Europe's most capable designers.

A New Independence.

What is more important, war psychology has stimulated an already existing tendency toward architectural independence — independence not only of the Beaux-Arts and of traditional European styles, but also of the international clichés of modern architecture. While the movement toward self-sufficient nationalism may be socially questionable and economically injurious, in architecture it encourages self-analysis and a new and healthy awareness of native problems and potentialities.

Architects are seeing with fresh and sympathetic eyes our unselfconscious vernacular buildings: the monumental stone and wood barns of Pennsylvania, the neat New England farmhouses, the ascetic buildings of the Shakers, the low, rambling Western ranch-houses, the old redwood-shingled houses of the San Francisco Bay region, even the dilapidated wooden buildings of Western mining-towns. They admire the economical, direct construction and the straightforward, often imaginative use of native materials, and find themselves incorporating some of this same fine regional flavor into their own work; no longer do they limit themselves to the characterless 'machine-smooth' materials and box-like forms which were so fashionable ten years ago.

New Attitude Toward Materials.

There is a new interest in natural materials such as stone, brick, and above all, wood. Sometimes these materials are used in the traditional way, if that is the way in which they still serve best; more often they are used in new ways, better suited to new production methods and living conditions. But inevitably, in the best work, each material is treated to emphasize those characteristics which differentiate it from all other materials, and the structure and form of the building is developed as directly as possible from the nature of the materials used. Important in this new phase of design is the segregation of building materials according to their best, most natural function; masonry, for instance, is best suited to unbroken wall-surfaces.

A spectacular example of segregation of materials is the famous house at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, which Frank Lloyd Wright designed in 1938 for E. J. Kaufmann. Here the core of the house is of local stone laid up in vertical masses broken only by the narrowest of window-slits. Projected out from this heavy core are great cantilevered terraces of reinforced concrete, partly enclosed by glass to form living space on various levels. The alert sensitivity to the nature of materials which finds expression in this audacious, yet thoroughly suitable use of stone and concrete has always been characteristic of Mr. Wright's work; like many of his principles, it is only now finding a sympathetic counterpart in the work of younger architects.

Whereas five or ten years ago unpainted wood was considered 'restless,' because its texture detracted from the desired effect of flat planes, now paint is avoided and materials are chosen with special regard for their surface interest. Natural materials such as cork, matting and bamboo are in great favor, and wood of all varieties and finishes: sometimes in its original state, complete with bark; sometimes in cross-section, especially for floor-blocks; sometimes as smoothly finished, neatly joined horizontal or vertical boarding; sometimes as great sheets of plywood, waxed or oiled to bring out the pattern of the veneer.

Even synthetic materials are influenced by the interest in surface texture; witness the sudden popularity of such products as ribbed glass, corrugated cement board, corrugated iron, and expanded metal mesh.

The new interest in materials was pushed into Wagnerian romanticism by the industrial designer, Russel Wright, in his exhibits at the summer show of Industrial Art at New York's Metropolitan Museum, and at the exhibition of interior design, 'America at Home,' at the New York World's Fair. His new hickory-splint furniture was shown in cave-like settings of giant boulders, mammoth stone fireplaces, fur rugs, animal heads, and jungle-like masses of greenery.

George Howe's exhibit at 'America at Home,' designed in collaboration with the sculptor, Wharton Esherick, used wood in various pseudo-primitive forms. The folk-art influence perceptible here appears again and again in contemporary interiors. Authentic primitive objects are frequently used; old Indian blankets, Moroccan and Indian rugs, African stools, etc. The suitability of primitive art to the modern interior was exploited years ago in Europe but is only now being discovered here in the United States.

New Forms.

Along with this new attitude toward materials is a new attitude toward form. The roof of a modern house is no longer inevitably flat. The hipped roof and even the long-despised shed (one-way pitch) and gable roofs are enthusiastically restored to favor. But whether the roof is flat or pitched, it is emphatically horizontal in effect, and is often continued out beyond the house walls as wide-spread sheltering eaves or trellises. Characteristic modern roof-lines are the sweeping hipped roofs of Harwell Hamilton Harris' Los Angeles houses, the decisive shed roofs of some of William Wilson Wurster's houses around San Francisco, the asymmetrical double-pitched roof as used by Rudolf Mock in Princeton, New Jersey, and the flat roof with projecting overhangs and trellises as John Funk has used it in houses in Modesto and Berkeley, California.

Just as the that plane of the roof tends to break up into angles, just as wall surfaces take on new interest through texture, so floor-plans become increasingly more fluid as the right angle often dissolves into diagonals and free curves. As rectangular planning breaks up, the character of the enclosed space becomes less decisive, and in a way more human. Something of the same effect is achieved by the sudden popularity of grillwork, which is a suggestion of space enclosure rather than an irrevocable definition.

Foreign Influences.

Various foreign influences, together with the new interest in the American scene and in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, have contributed to this new movement in architecture.

Eleven years ago Miës van der Rohe featured a screen-wall of onyx and a curving wall of macassar ebony in his Tugendhat house at Brno, Czechoslovakia. And LeCorbusier, the famous Swiss-French architect, pioneered in the use of diagonals, free curves and natural materials; the single, oddly-curved rubble wall of his Swiss Dormitory at the Cit‚ Universitaire in Paris (1932) contrasts brilliantly with the slick-surfaced regular forms of the rest of the building.

Of special pertinency has been the work of the Finnish architects, Alvar and Aino Aalto, first presented in this country by the Museum of Modern Art in 1938. Their Finnish Pavilion at the New York World's Fair was a fine three-dimensional example of their fluid planning and their extraordinarily imaginative, yet thoroughly craftsmanlike use of wood.

Frank Lloyd Wright.

The most important and influential figure in American architecture is still Frank Lloyd Wright. His great and basic innovations in plan and space-use were made years ago; the importance of his recent work lies rather in his masterful use of materials, new and old, in new types of construction and new and suitable forms. Each material challenges him to find for it a new and appropriate plastic expression.

Two of his projects which have attracted considerable attention from the press are the Community Church for Kansas City and the ambitious Crystal Heights project for Washington, D. C. Both are now ready for construction.

The horizontal masses of the Community Church are emphasized by cantilevered balconies and parking-terraces. Searchlights set in the copper roof play skywards to replace the conventional bell-tower. The building is supported by internal columns. Walls are merely a 2½' protective envelope of steel and 'gunnite': concrete sprayed from both sides onto a lattice of steel posts woven with bands of steel and paper.

Crystal Heights, designed for a large, sloping, wedge-shaped corner lot in the heart of Washington, will contain a hotel, apartments, movie-theater, shops and parking facilities. On the long sides of the wedge, facing Connecticut and Florida Avenues, are five floors of shops, reached by cantilevered open-air promenades. Behind the shops, within the angle which they form, is parking space on various levels.

On higher land at the wide end of the wedge, set among fine old trees, will be a group of 14 apartment-towers (one with 20 floors, the others with 12). Their design is based on Mr. Wright's 1929 St. Mark's Tower project; floors are cantilevered out from internal supporting piers of reinforced concrete, and the apartments are planned on a system of 60° and 30° angles.

Over the last three years Mr. Wright and his apprentice-draughtsmen have built for themselves an Arizona winter home and workshop, Taliesin West. Rocks found scattered about the desert site were piled up in rough forms and concrete poured over to make waist-high walls of varied side-slopes. On these walls rest great wooden roof trusses, pitched at an angle which recalls the outlines of the surrounding mountains. There is no glass: the roofs and the upper parts of the walls are composed of canvas-covered shutters, easily flapped open for view and ventilation. Closed, they admit pleasantly diffused light. Few buildings can equal this spectacular desert camp in intimate adjustment of construction and form to specific problems of site, climate, and labor conditions.

Along with the larger commissions, Mr. Wright is doing a host of small-to-medium houses all over the country. Many of the smaller houses are similar in construction to the well-known Jacobs house (1937) in Madison, Wisconsin. There is no basement; the one-story house stands on a thin concrete floor mat under which are copper heating coils embedded in broken stone. This ingenious method of heating is claimed to be very successful. On the floor mat are set prefabricated 2½' thick wall units built up of three layers of wood separated by insulating paper. The core is heavy plywood; inner and outer surfaces alike are of horizontal boards, unpainted. In plan these houses are often L-shaped, with the sleeping wing linked to a large projecting living room by compact service and dining space. A successful variation is the Bazett House, Hillsborough, California, where the board walls are disposed on a 'honeycomb plan' to effect an amazingly spacious interior.

More dramatic in appearance are the hillside houses which are launched into space by cantilevers; these are usually of stone or brick with wooden superstructure and airy terraces stiffened with steel for maximum projection. The living room of the Affleck House, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, is a partially enclosed balcony, projected out from a series of slim masonry piers. The newly finished Lloyd Lewis House in Libertyville, Illinois, is another magnificent example of this type of design. The Sturges House in Los Angeles rests on a single heavy core of masonry; it juts out so boldly that it seems to leave its hillside site untouched.

Houses.

It is always interesting to see what architects build for their own use. The house which Marcel Breuer has built for himself in Lincoln, Massachusetts, is thoroughly contemporary both in plan and in use of materials. The two long walls, one wood, one glass, of the living room taper together to butt against the convex stone wall which closes one end of the room. At the opposite end, the dining room and one of the balcony-bedrooms open to the living room to effect an agreeable extension of its apparent space.

Oscar Stonorov's house for himself near Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, also shows curves, diagonals, imaginative three-dimensional space-planning, and contrasting, textured materials. Particularly successful is the two-story living room with its oblique wood-faced balcony, its graceful cantilevered staircase, and its finely proportioned floor-to-ceiling glass wall.

A one-story house in Ojai, California, by Emrich Nicholson and Douglas Maler, has an arc-shaped bedroom block separated from the main living block by an open terrace. Some of the living room walls are freely curved, others diagonal.

Few architects are producing more ingratiating domestic work than Harwell Hamilton Harris. Strongly influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, Harris is yet an imaginative and powerful architect in his own right. In addition to new houses in Los Angeles, and a highly original Chinese restaurant, he has this year built a daringly cantilevered house on a Berkeley hillside.

Other California architects who are turning out excellent modern work are John Dinwiddie, John Funk, Gregory Ain, Hervey Parke Clark, Gardner Dailey, and William Wilson Wurster. Wurster's houses are unique in their unstyled functionalism, an approach which always gives a self-respecting, thoroughly livable building, and sometimes results in a forthright, effortless distinction.

In addition to his large practice in Los Angeles and, more recently, in San Francisco, Richard Neutra has completed this year a large house in Portland, Oregon.

At Belmont, Massachusetts, Carl Koch has built an interesting group of small houses, notable for imaginative, yet precise handling of stone and wood, and for decisive, freshly studied roof lines.

Edward D. Stone designed a model house for exhibition on one of the terraces of Rockefeller Center, New York. This amusing skyscraper excrescence, built of unpainted redwood with a shed roof, had a remarkably flexible and ingenious plan. The same architect built this year a very successful house in Old Westbury, Long Island. This house provides a fine, easy relationship between interior and exterior, and makes a splendid non-competitive background for the owner's collection of paintings and antique furniture.

In New York, Sanders, Breck and Smith-Miller have remodeled a brownstone-front into apartments and offices for their own use, and have produced one of the best-looking buildings in the city.

Little has come out of those flurries of interest in prefabrication which enlivened the '30s; the few types of prefabricated houses which are actually on the market are thoroughly undistinguished in design. Not yet on the market, but indicative of the multitude of structural and formal possibilities in this field, are William Callaway's experimental metal-framed octagonal house-units in Los Angeles and the John B. Pierce Foundation's Experimental House No. 2, built this year in Lebanon, New Jersey. This house is supported by widely spaced 4'x4' wooden posts; attached to the posts above and below bands of horizontally sliding windows are prefabricated plywood girders.

Private Apartments and Public Housing.

The United States has been slow to take advantage of new available techniques of apartment house design. The public low-cost housing projects, with their relatively low ground coverage and resulting amplitude of light, air and play-space, are far in advance of private enterprise. One of the two or three eastern apartment buildings with serious pretensions to rationalized, really contemporary planning was completed this year on Central Park South, New York, by Mayer & Whittlesey. Apartments are grouped in two separate towers, joined below by shops and gardens. This gives each apartment a maximum of view and cross-ventilation.

Two distinguished new low-rent projects built under the United States Housing Authority are Branch Village in Camden, New Jersey, and Mount Pleasant in New Britain, Connecticut. The Camden project, by Hettel, Radey & Stonorov, is built around a handsome community center. At the center of each alternate row of houses is a service unit containing heating equipment, laundry, and drying yard.

Ludorf, Bishop & Stonorov have completely eliminated noisy, dangerous through-streets in their design for Mount Pleasant; instead there are dead-end streets and pleasant foot-paths. Here the wood-framed sleeping floors of the row-houses project out over the brick walls beneath to provide shade for living room windows and sheltered outdoor sitting space as well as desirable extra bedroom space.

The housing which the Farm Security Administration is building for western agricultural workers is readily comparable in quality of design with the best low-cost housing of Europe and Scandinavia. Sometimes the houses of these cooperative farms are single-family, each surrounded by its own subsistence garden. The trim wooden houses at Mineral King Ranch, near Visalia, California, and the shed-roofed adobe houses of Casa Grande, Arizona, are of this first type.

More often the houses are joined in rows of eight. In the characteristic lay-out, the flat-roofed house-rows run east-west. Their long south sides are sheltered from too much direct sunlight by overhanging eaves and by the projection of the upper floor beyond the lower. The sleeping floor has no glass: instead there are two rows of shutters, the upper of Celloglas (wired cellophane), the lower of plywood, which admit plenty of light and which can be flapped open for efficient cross-ventilation. The rows of houses are grouped informally about a community social center and laundry; farm buildings are nearby.

Handsome communities of this type have been built at Eleven Mile Corner, Arizona, at Yuba City in northern California, and in other agricultural areas from Walla Walla to the Imperial Valley. While these cooperatives for permanent settlers usually adjoin FSA camps for migratory farm workers, the two must not be confused.

Shops and Factories.

By using a splayed glass front for a dress shop on narrow frontage in Berkeley, California, John Dinwiddie has not only enlarged its apparent width, but has made a thoroughly inviting entrance. A freely curving garden plot continues from the sidewalk into the shop itself, interrupted only by the plate glass front.

Another exceptionally attractive shop was designed for Altman & Kuhne on Fifth Avenue New York, by Gruenbaum & Krummeck. Here the regular pattern formed on ceiling and one side-wall by a network of bronze light-troughs is used as a foil for a curving staircase and a scalloped floor-pattern.

The new Sears Roebuck in Los Angeles, designed by Redden & Raben expressly for an automobilist-clientele, is a low-lying, windowless building of considerable originality.

The major share of new industrial work continues to go to Albert Kahn, Inc., of Detroit. Kahn-designed factories, typified by the new Toledo Scale Company in Ohio, are true industrial monuments, with virile power in their frank skeleton construction, their great sweeps of glass, their lean, clean lines. In comparison, the accompanying administration buildings, with their heavy, window-pierced, symmetrical facades, seem fussy and earth-bound.

Other Buildings.

The few good schools of 1940 include, in California, buildings by Franklin & Kump and the Oakdale Union School by Mayo & Johnson, and in Michigan, the brick gymnasium-auditorium designed by Lyndon & Smith for the Farmington High School.

The massive limestone and brick Fire Alarm Building in Houston, Texas, designed by MacKie & Kamrath, achieves a contemporary and legitimate kind of monumentality through concentration of glass areas and treatment of the limestone as great wall-planes unbroken by windows.

William Lescaze has designed a great balconied office-building which is now under construction in Washington, D. C.

The most handsome large building of the year is probably the Lake County Sanatorium at Waukegan, Illinois. Designed by William A. Ganster and the office of W. L. Pereira, it is the first hospital in this country which may be compared in quality and contemporaneity of design with the best work of the kind in Europe. The long, two-storied main building faces the south with an all-glass, balconied front; the bedrooms behind are flooded with sunlight and each bed can easily be pushed out onto an adjacent terrace. The nearby nurses' home was designed with the same care for orientation, plan workability, and plastic expression.

Exhibitions.

The summer exhibitions of 'America at Home' and 'Contemporary American Industrial Art' have already been mentioned. Most people agree that the most attractive interior in either show was the living room by Harwell Hamilton Harris, his first work in the East.

A major exhibition of 'Space for Living' was carefully prepared by Telesis (group of young West Coast designers) and presented with fine showmanship at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Using the San Francisco Bay Region as an example, the exhibition challenged the public to analyze its environment in the light of modern needs and possibilities.

The work of Frank Lloyd Wright, from the 1893 Winslow House through projects now on the drawing-boards, was illustrated in a large one-man show held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during the last two months of the year. Twenty-one impressive architectural models were on exhibition with plans, photographs, and beautiful original drawings.

Another important Museum activity was the publication of a Guide to Modern Architecture — Northeast States, which lists the addresses, architects, and construction dates of about 300 buildings, together with short critical notes and instructions for automobilists.

Architecture Abroad.

Scant information is available on European architecture of 1940, even on the relatively small amount of non-military building.

Finland has wisely allotted to Aalto the enormous problem of reconstruction and shelter provision for refugees from the Karelian Isthmus. Wishing to avoid the waste of temporary barracks, Aalto has developed a plan whereby soundly built permanent housing will be constructed in new, carefully planned communities. But at first the houses will be mere shells; modern conveniences will be added as time and money allow.

The death in 1940 of Robert Maillart ended the productive career of Switzerland's famous engineer, one of the greatest of our time. His slim, attenuated, concrete bridges, stripped of every surplus pound, have an audacious elegance which goes far beyond mere engineering. Less well-known than his bridges is his development of a concrete mushroom-slab construction in which the column tapers into the ceiling slab in one graceful, unbroken curve; the usual intermediate slab is avoided.

Among the most promising of the younger architects is Hans Fischli, whose wooden houses show an acute sensibility to materials and proportions which is too often lacking in the work of the older Swiss modernists.

The new Trade School at Berne, Switzerland, by Hans Brechbühler, is unthinkable without the precedent of LeCorbusier's Swiss Dormitory. The four-storied main block, its finely articulated concrete skeleton filled in with glass, is cantilevered out over round concrete columns which lift it clear of the ground.

Italy went ahead with its summer Triennale in Milan as planned. This exhibition of applied art was presented with the flawless technique which has made Italian exhibitions famous all over the world.

As part of the extensive Fascist program of child welfare, L. G. Daneri has designed the mountain vacation home 'R. Piaggio.' The long, arc-shaped shed-roofed building presents a glass front to sun and view. Two floors of dormitories are lifted from the ground on concrete columns; part of the space beneath is enclosed as common rooms.

One of the fine Gothic palaces on the Grand Canal in Venice, the Palazzo Foscari, has been made over into a modern academy. The architect, Carlo Scarpa, tackled the difficult problem with sensitive intelligence; instead of trying to work within the original style, he has successfully injected frankly modern elements in happy and sympathetic contrast to the ancient shell.

Modern architecture in England is fortunate in having the support, not only of the intelligentsia, but also of such enlightened public bodies as the London Passenger Transport Board, the Zoo, and various school boards.

Outstanding among recent English work is the girls' high school designed by Denis Clarke Hall for Richmond, Yorkshire. One-story classrooms are grouped in pairs as separate pavilions connected by glazed corridors. These pavilions all face southeast and are well separated from the 'noisy areas' — gymnasium, laboratories, etc. The rubble walls, uninterrupted by windows, and the concentrated, concrete-framed glass areas form a splendid example of segregation of materials.

In London, E. Maxwell Fry has built a Hostel for Girls, straightforward but pedestrian in design. Its exposed concrete frame is filled in with colored brick and tile, a type of surface much more sensible in that grimy city than the stucco finish so popular a few years ago.

The war, however, has brought with it so many restrictions on building materials and public works that non-military building has been drastically curtailed.

Sir John Burnet, Tait & Lorne, have designed standardized, prefabricated units for evacuation camps. The construction is carefully and economically worked out, but the result is a grim succession of dreary barracks.

The beginnings of an authentic regional variation are found in Palestine. On Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, Erich Mendelsohn has designed a Medical Center as the first part of a large new Hebrew University. The buildings are of reinforced concrete, surfaced with machine-cut stone slabs. Since extremes of temperature make extensive use of glass inadvisable, the glass is concentrated in areas easily accessible to patients in need of sunshine. The buildings are partially protected from bitter winds by their disposition about sheltered courts. A thoroughly native element is the use of shallow concrete domes which recall Arabian saucer-domes. The unforced, carefully studied, yet imaginative design marks a distinct advance in quality over Mendelsohn's earlier work in Germany.