1941: Architecture

The major part of the year's architectural production has in one way or another been related to national defense. And the real story has to do with the program of defense housing, a problem which decentralization and expansion of industry, together with extension of army camps and naval bases, have made much more acute now than in the last war.

Defense Housing.

What with administrative confusion, Congressional suspicion, and highly organized opposition from real-estate interests, all of which have impeded the defense housing program since its inception in October 1940, it is remarkable that the program has gotten under way as quickly as it has, and miraculous that it has already produced some projects which are not only economical and pleasant to live in, but even architecturally distinguished.

Congress has already appropriated about $300,000,000 for this purpose, and is now considering a bill authorizing another $300,000,000. This money is being spent through various agencies, each working in its own peculiar ways the PBA (Public Buildings Administration, specialise in post-office architecture, designs projects in Washington with its own staff of civil service architects), the USHA (United States Housing Authority, four years experience with low cost public housing, works through locally appointed housing authorities), and the Federal Works Agency's Division of Defense Housing (set up in April for direct construction through independent architects). A small amount of defense housing has also been done by the FSA (Farm Security Administration, famous for its beautiful rural housing projects, works through its regional offices) and the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority).

The Army has farmed out its housing problem to the PBA, but the Navy is doing its own construction.

According to the Architectural Forum, the 'average total cost of the first 100,000 defense houses, including land, utilities, streets, equipment and community facilities is about $3,900 for units which average slightly more than 2 bedrooms each.' In general, low cost was achieved without sacrifice of livability. Houses are tiny, but often conveniently arranged, attractively designed and, above all, grouped in pleasant and safe communities. Instead of the wasteful and dangerous old-fashioned gridiron plan, most designers have used a super-block layout to avoid unnecessary traffic streets, to retain the natural amenities of the site, and to provide safe and convenient recreation space.

Most of the work has been done by the PBA, including the largest single project of 3,000 units in San Diego, Calif. Most attractive of their published projects was built for families of enlisted men at Hickam Field, Hawaii. Here is a nice relationship between one and two story units, both with low, widespreading hipped roofs. Upper stories are faced with dark wood, lower stories are of masonry. Excellent ventilation is provided by a multitude of well-proportioned horizontal-flap windows, set in tiers and protected by deep eaves.

But most PBA housing is dull and unimaginative, set up without sufficient consideration for local living requirements, or for the findings of other Government agencies with longer experience in the field. The best work is being turned out by private architects working through either the USHA or the Division of Defense Housing of the FWA. The latter agency is particularly commendable for its choice of the country's most progressive and distinguished architects.

One of the largest projects is a group of 1,692 demountable houses for defense workers at Vallejo. Calif. William Wilson Wurster was the architect. Some of these houses are of plywood: most of them are of Homasote, a composition board. All are assembled from prefabricated panels. The one-story houses are ranged in parallel rows for uniform enjoyment of the most favorable orientation. To avoid expensive grading the houses are supported by concrete piers and are stepped up and down the rolling hills. The resulting pattern of flat roofs at various levels successfully removes all monotony from the parallel site plan. Wide roof-overhangs shield the large windows from too much direct sunlight.

Another handsome defense community designed to take full advantage of modern building methods is 300-unit Avion Village at Grand Prairie, Texas, designed by Roscoe P. DeWitt with David R. Williams and Richard J. Neutra as consultants. The buildings are crisp in outline, neat in detail; flat roofs are extended as deep sheltering eaves over concentrated groups of horizontally sliding windows. Projected from the two-story apartment blocks and adjacent to the individual living rooms are finely proportioned two-story open porches, a feature long recognized as advantageous by local builders, but all too often omitted by contemporary designers. New in American low cost housing is the one-story 3-bedroom houses sliding partitions between living room and adjoining bedroom can be pushed back whenever additional space or ventilation becomes desirable.

At New Kensington, Pa., is a well-designed project by the firm of Gropius and Breuer. All of the buildings are flat roofed double- or row-houses. Glass is concentrated on the sunny sides, but protected from the high summer sun by projecting sun shades constructed of open wooden louvres. An extraordinarily steep site prevented uniform orientation of all buildings for best exposure. As in Wurster's Vallejo project, grading was minimized by setting the houses on piers wherever necessary; but here the house-blocks run uniformly parallel to the contours of the slopes.

The defense housing project by George Howe and Louis I. Kahn at Middletown, Pa., shows an unfortunate mixture of flat roofs with gable roofs pitched in different directions. Confusion is the final result of this ingenious attempt at variety. But they have also designed an uncommonly attractive modern community center, to be built of wood and local stone.

The floor plan of the minimum-cost single-family house of one story and two bedrooms tends to become standardized. The typical unit is square, or nearly square, for economy of exterior wall area. Cooking and dining space are in an alcove off the living room. Bathroom and kitchen are set back to back to reduce plumbing costs. One side of the house is given over to two cross-ventilated bedrooms. The entrance door leads directly into the living room and corridor space, always wasteful, is reduced to a minimum. Given our present living requirements and building conditions as well as the need for stringent economy, any improvement of this basic scheme becomes difficult; but much variation is possible in construction, room proportions, fenestration and details.

The small but handsome defense community of Windsor Locks, Conn., by Hugh Stubbins, Jr., shows that a first-rate designer can develop this base-plan into something better than just economical shelter. In these houses the kitchen is open to the dining space yet screened from the living room proper. The windows of living room and main bedroom are grouped in a row under a protective trellis. The exterior, with low pitched gable roof over walls of vertical siding, is simple and well proportioned.

For Alexandria, Va., Kastner and Hibben have designed some defense housing of varied experimental construction. The most attractive of these have walls of either bituminous earth block or cement-stabilized earth tamped into movable forms (new version of an ancient structural method). With proper respect for the nature of these materials, the architects have built them up into piers and slablike walls unbroken by inset windows. Openings are concentrated in light wooden framework.

Prefabricated houses are widely used in the defense program. If they are easily demountable as well as prefabricated they are particularly well suited for erection in localities where extra housing will not be needed after the war. In a PBA experiment at Indian Head, Md., 650 units of identical plan and elevation were put up by 10 different prefabricators. To determine the most efficient of these structural systems, one of each type was demounted, transported over rough roads, and re-erected on new foundations. The TVA has evolved an interesting demountable house. Completely assembled in the factory, it is trucked to the site in separate three-ton slices.

Near Baltimore, 600 prefabricated houses for employees of the Glenn Martin factory have been built from plans developed by the Pierce Foundation. Single panels of special insulation-board replace all other wall materials. These panels are hung on the Foundation's patented horizontal wooden frame.

The FSA continued to turn out fine rural housing. The metal shelters of their camps for migratory workers are now laid out in a system of parallel rows, less formal than the old hexagonal layout. No longer a great gabled block, the typical community center has become long, low and well articulated, topped by intersecting shed roofs.

Private Houses.

Stimulated by prosperity and the popular desire for investments safe from possible inflation, private building flourished in the first half of 1941, undeterred by rising prices. But announcement of Government priorities on various essential building materials soon put a stop to all activity not directly helpful to national defense.

During the limited period of private construction, California retained its lead in quality of domestic architecture. Dailey, Funk, Wurster, Ain, Clark, Neutra, McCarthy, Harris and Corbett are only a few of the architects who have been designing houses which are straightforward, yet sensitively adjusted to site and climate; fresh and imaginative, yet unselfconscious; thoroughly modern, yet part of California's long native tradition of fine and simple building. These houses are often of unpainted wood with flat, shed, or low gable roofs. They are built close to the ground and their rambling plans embrace beautiful gardens. Rows of glass doors and windows under projecting roofs seem to unite indoors and outdoors.

Even the conservative East is beginning to discard its tightly symmetrical Neo-Georgian boxes for houses more directly conceived in terms of today's living requirements. Among the most capable of the younger architects is Carl Koch, known particularly for a group of five wooden houses which he built on a steep hillside in Belmont, Mass. Two new houses, one at East Sandwich, Mass., the other at Fitchburg, Mass., show many of the qualities which characterized the earlier group: economical but spacious and carefully detailed planning, quiet outlines, imaginative but respectful use of natural materials, and, above all, a romantic welcoming of nature into the very body of the house. The garden of the Fitchburg house penetrates right into the entrance hall, interrupted only by a wall of glass.

Edward D. Stone has recently finished a large house at East River, Conn. Low-sweeping hipped roofs and characteristic massing reveal the strong influence of Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie houses, but, unlike the originals, seem over-complicated. The floor plans, however, are open and flexible in Mr. Stone's best style. Particularly interesting is the staggered row of ground-floor guest rooms, each with its private garden.

Another very large modern house was completed in the first part of the year by Gropius and Breuer in Pittsburgh. Many parts of this house are fresh and crisp in design but they fail to add up to an integrated whole. Perhaps the architects' long concern with post-war Germany's need for 'minimum dwellings' has made it difficult for them to do their best work on the very different problem of the luxury house. The Pittsburgh mansion is filled with expensive and timely gadgets but in essence it is still a greatly magnified 'minimum dwelling.'

In 1941, modern architecture made its début in eastern speculative building. Small groups of houses went up in Washington, in the Bronx, in Falmouth, Mass., and in Madison, Wis., none of great architectural merit, but all unusually livable for this type of housing and all successful from the point of view of the speculator.

Educational Buildings.

Three outstanding school buildings were completed this year, buildings which should make education a pleasure to the fortunate children who will use them: Acalanes Union High School, Contra Costa County, Calif., by Franklin and Kump, designers of other revolutionary California schools; School for Crippled Children, Denver, Colo., by Burnham Hoyt, architect of Denver's famous Children's Hospital; and Crow Island School, Winnetka, Ill., by Eliel and Eero Saarinen in association with Perkins. Wheeler & Will. All three schools are designed to make the child feel at ease, not to overawe him with massive walls and colonnaded fronts. All are built close to the ground and planned for utmost enjoyment of sunshine and the outdoors.

Acalanes has three parallel rows of class rooms joined by open-sided corridors. Each row is really a single open loft, divided by movable partitions into classrooms of the desired size. Since class-rooms receive light from two sides, ceilings can be low. Heat-resisting glass is used on the south sides of the buildings to obviate the necessity for shades.

The Denver school is built on the pavilion system: pairs of class rooms alternate with open garden courts where classes can be held in pleasant weather. Each class-room presents an all-glass front to its adjacent court. The beams and the round columns of the reinforced concrete frame are exposed as integral ornament. The beautifully proportioned exterior is faced with precast concrete slabs.

The first step in planning the Crow Island school was to design the ideal classroom unit. Each has two adjacent sides of glass; each has its own connecting workroom and private garden. Then these units, together with the other necessary facilities, were assembled in a pinwheel-like scheme with three decisively articulated wings for pre-school, primary and intermediate activities. The exterior of this handsome building is partly massive brick, partly vertical boarding over wood-frame.

At Wheaton College, Norton, Mass., is a new Student-Alumnae Building designed by Caleb Hornbostel and Richard M. Bennet, winners of the Museum of Modern Art's 1938 competition for an art center to have been built at the same college. As the final result of so much good will it is disappointing to find a rather forbidding brick structure enlivened by incongruously playful details.

A new building by Frank Lloyd Wright is always a major architectural event. He has now completed a $50,000 chapel at Lakeland, Fla., first unit of his general plan for the development of Florida Southern College. The chapel is dominated by a 63-foot poured concrete tower embellished by free-swinging bells and by flower boxes incorporated in the structure at three different levels. The main building is composed of concrete blocks, many of which are perforated and inlaid with colored glass. As in his California houses of the early twenties, the joints between the blocks are reinforced with small steel rods. Light enters the auditorium through the pierced blocks, through a skylight, and through the rows of glass doors which lead from the interior gallery to exterior balconies. Less successful is the intricate pattern of the concrete block choirloft screen. Inside and out, vines and flowers climb over steel trellises and hang from the airy balconies of this extraordinary building.

The most widely publicized of the 1941 crop of buildings was the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. The architects were John Russell Pope, Eggers and Higgins. The tremendous Neo-classic building, more like an imperial tomb than an art gallery for living Americans, was roundly censured by the country's leading architectural critics, applauded by those people who are deeply impressed by endless marble corridors and towering Corinthian columns. Popularly known as 'the last of the Papal Bulls,' the building has an inhuman scale which dwarfs even the superb collection it was built to house. What such a museum could be if honestly and reasonably designed is clear to anyone who remembers the Saarinens' winning project in the 1939 competition for a new building for Washington's Smithsonian Gallery of Art.

Also in Washington, however, is a large and frankly modern new office building by William Lescaze. The two exposed walls are cantilevered out beyond the concrete columns and striped with horizontally continuous bands of glass. On the west side concrete balconies are cantilevered out to shelter the glass from the afternoon sun.

Citizens of Buffalo, N. Y., are justly proud of their new Kleinhans Music Hall, designed by F. J. and W. A. Kidd in association with Eliel Saarinca. Although the building must serve many people and must provide for a great variety of activities, the architects succeeded in producing a simple, clearly articulated plan: two horseshoe-shaped auditoriums joined at their open ends by a common lobby. The massive exterior is perhaps even over-simplified in its faithful expression of internal volumes.

A number of large municipal buildings have gone up recently in New York. The new Tombs Prison and the Criminal Courts Building, by Harvey W. Corbett and Charles B. Meyers, are free of academy detail but, like Rockefeller Center, retain a heay monumentality foreign to the best contemporary design. Better modern architecture is found in Hunter College, completed last year, and in some of the Department of Sanitation structures.

The center of hotel building continues to be Miami Beach, Fla., where 41 hotels (and 166 apartment buildings) were rushed to completion for the 1940-41 season. The hotels are of about twelve stories, spread at pleasantly wide intervals along the beach. The typical hotel is modern in design, boasting large windows, many balconies and, for some unknown reason, a conspicuous tower.

Utilitarian Structures.

Characteristic of many of the factories going up all over the country is the Government tank arsenal in Detroit, designed by Albert Kahn for the Chrysler Corporation. Walls are of continuous steel sash and the steel frame support a monitor roof. Like a fine piece of machinery, the building has an unselfconscious beauty derived from complete fitness for its purpose. But the advantage of the all-glass factory are being questioned by they who prefer windowless buildings for the regularity of their artificial light and the consequent freedom of interior planning, the ease with which they can be air-conditioned and, most important, their suitability for black-out.

An extraordinarily good-looking variation on the new factory type is the Johnson & Johnson Ligature Building. The architects were R. G. and W. M. Cory, designers of the famous Starrett-Lehigh Building in New York. The Ligature Building is far and away the best of the group of new Johnson & Johnson structures scattered over a large tract of pleasantly wooded ground on either side of U.S. No. 1 near New Brunswick, N. J. Designed to attract the favorable attention of passing motorists as well as to provide space for the packaging of surgical ligatures, the low building is set diagonally to the highway. Each of the two exposed walls is faced with flat slabs of dazzling white Vermont marble and is broken only by a continuous narrow strip of plate glass which lights the offices behind. The actual working area is almost entirely artificially lighted. At the intersection of the two glass ribbons and projected beyond the smooth walls is the great corner-window which marks the reception hall.

The TVA has now completed Hiwassee Dam on the Tennessee River. A massive storage dam, it is similar in function and design to the famous earlier structure at Norris. Details are possibly more refined at Hiwassee, but the power-house is less decisive in outline than at Norris, where the simple rectangular block makes a spectacular contrast with the fluid forms of the dam.

Exhibitions.

'The Architecture of the TVA' was the subject of a spring exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Other architecture exhibitions assembled and shown this year by that museum and later circulated about the country included 'The Work of Erich Mendelsohn' (the activity of a pioneer of modern architecture in Germany, England and Palestine), 'The Wooden House in America,' and 'Stockholm Builds' (photographs of modern Swedish architecture by G. E. Kidder Smith).

That group of young California architects and planners known as Telesis staged two vivid exhibitions this year, both of which received wide publicity. The first dealt with planning problems of the San Francisco Bay region: the second had to do with more general aspects of city-planning.

Bartlett Hayes, director of the Addison Gallery in Massachusetts, developed in interesting new technique for his traveling exhibition of 'What Is a Building?' The basic elements of structure and design are explained by 3-dimensional movable models mounted on easily-packed plywood panels. By manipulating the models the spectator gets first-hand experience with each problem and learns much more than he could from a mere array of photographs, plans and text.

Other Countries.

It is impossible to get information on the military building of Europe and non-military building seems almost non-existent. Many of Europe's leading architects and city-planners have sought refuge in this country, where they are teaching or engaged in private practice. Some private building does continue, however, in Switzerland, including a large modern church in Zürich and a large and handsome new class-building for the University of Basel.

Partly through the misfortunes of other countries, but mostly through our own vigorous expansion of independent creative effort, the United States has in the past few years assumed a dominant position in the field of building. Latin America, too, is extraordinarily active and has abandoned her preoccupation with Beaux-Arts precedent for more modern design. Much of the work still seems derivative and second-rate, but there are indications in many of these countries that the achievement of a more substantial, less provincial architecture, at once native and modern, may not be far distant. See also CIVIL ENGINEERING; HOUSING DEVELOPMENTS.