At Manhattantown, which we renamed Park West Village, we found ourselves committed to the existing architects and their basic building design. Pei, however, was able to greatly improve the site planning, and we wound up with a quite decent project. But the Bellevue site, which we renamed Kips Bay, was pure Webb & Knapp. Here we created something new in city housing—a sense of place and unity with buildings, gardens, and play areas—and have ever since been proud of what resulted. Kips Bay, being something new, had its flaws, but it was the prototype for any number of other developments.
The third project, Lincoln Towers, with its many buildings set out like cut-out sections of a giant beehive, was the largest project we ever built. Our financial backer in this venture was Lazard Freres, and this, from a New Yorker's point of view, had regrettable results. Lazard Freres, aware of our exceeding our original budget at Kips Bay, was determined to keep costs down and profits at a maximum for this next development. They resisted our use of Pei as architect. They fought with him over every major and minor design item and possible expense. Eventually they forced us to take him off the job and brought in an "expert" at putting up the pseudo-luxury, builders' housing that blankets so much of Manhattan and parts of Long Island. Lincoln Towers was a big job, where we handled the relocation of tenants with dispatch and fairness, but I'm not proud of the final product; I am ashamed of it. For a relatively very minor increase in costs, Lincoln Towers could have been one of the wonders of Manhattan, but this was not to be. When these towers are torn down, no one will mourn their passing, but the builder or politician who moves to tear down Kips Bay will have some angry citizens' groups on his hands. Kips Bay was no surrender, but a genuine advance in quality of city living, which is what Webb & Knapp's finest projects were really all about.
I was a guest at a Columbia University dinner honoring Le Corbusier. In due time Corbusier rose to make some remarks and at some stage paused and asked, "Is Bill Zeckendorf here tonight?"
I put up a hand, "I'm here, Corbu."
Stretching out a long arm to point a finger at me, Corbusier said, "There is the man who has done more than anybody else for architecture in America."
This was enormously flattering. Unfortunately, it was also true. In commercial architecture, Webb & Knapp was a lone and lonely pioneer for many years. In 1951, before we had yet launched our great building programs, The Atlantic Monthly printed a speech I had given at the Harvard School of Design. The speech was titled "Baked Buildings":
We may well be entering upon a golden era of construction, when the merger of the real-estate builder-economist and the artist and designer can be so skillfully integrated that we shall bring forth residential, industrial, and commercial architecture which will stand the two important tests of time: economic soundness, and beauty and functionalism. If we continue as we have been going, letting the devil take the hindmost—the builder builds for as little as he can and borrows as much as he can and runs, and the architect follows him —then the rebel who would design only things of great beauty can find no clients or only a few clients who are as crazy as he is because they do not understand. In that case, I say, we still have to wait for our golden era. But it is not necessary to wait. Not at all.
. . . There are many instances of buildings which combine beauty, functionalism, and economic soundness. But wherever you find them, the percentage in proportion to the total number of buildings erected is infinitesimal. Therefore, I do not address myself to the few but to the many.
. . . [Say] you go to a speculative builder—speculative builders build about ninety to ninety-five percent of all the things that are built in this country for rent—and you say, "Why do you dare to build that terrible-looking six-story apartment house that looks as though it came out of an oven, baked, according to a stenciled plan?"
He will say, "Well, maybe I like that, and maybe I don't. Maybe I would like to build something more beautiful, and maybe I wouldn't. But that's not my business. My business is to build within the framework, concept, and spirit of the FHA."
Well . . . that means designing as cheaply as possible, borrowing as much as possible, building as inexpensively as possible, and never mind the rest.
The builder says, "I'm not going to take a chance and build something more beautiful, something revolutionary. Maybe I do like a more modern design. But when I take that into a lending institution and they say to me, 'What is this . . . ? We've never seen that before. We'll discount it by twenty-five percent in the amount of a loan you've asked for'—well, that puts me out of business. I'm not that kind of a builder" And he speaks for ninety-five percent of the boys. "I have to borrow from the man who will lend me the maximum . . . and that man is the fellow who will lend me on what looks exactly like what every predecessor building of the same character looked like and was all the way back in time. Don't blame me. Blame the fellow I borrow from. Someday I'll build something more beautiful . . . But . . . I'm no contributor to the general welfare of the community. If I want to give charity, I'll find my own way to give it. But not in my business"
I am oversimplifying . . . but basically the philosophy of the speculative builder is exactly as I've said. So, you go to the man . . . who finances him, who limits his horizon, his vision, and his potential.
Who is he? He is the insurance companies, the big ones and the small ones; he is the savings banks; the building and loan companies —the impersonalized corporations that people visualize when they see a great tall building with a beacon on the top of it. But basically, those beacons are supported by a little group of self-perpetuating trustees, mainly of the same social strata, and you go talk to them. You say to a typical one, "What is the idea of financing these baked buildings that look like everything that was ever built before? What is the idea of perpetuating these monstrosities? You're the fellow who calls the tune, and the other fellow dances because it is your money that makes these buildings go. And if you say X song, they will dance X dance, over and over again, until they're dizzy. How come? Why have you made so little contribution to the furtherance of thinking in design and execution?"
Now, here is the answer you'll get from the typical trustee. He will say to you, "I am a manufacturer, I'm a chemist, I'm a banker, I'm a retired industrialist, I'm a professor, or I'm something—something completely unrelated to the subject specifically involved, the subject of lending money. I'm a trustee of this institution or that institution." He will say to you, "I'm interested in beauty. Come to my home and I'll show you beauty. But when it comes to lending, I want to bake them."
"Why do you want to bake them?"
"I want to bake them because I know that they've been baked for twenty-five years and they've never failed. The . . . [twenty-two story] fiat is a good thing. You know I don't work here. I come here without pay. I do not even get a director's fee for attending a meeting. I'm only here because I think it's my duty to run this institution."
Of course, he doesn't add that he enjoys being in association with a lot of other fellows like him who finally got up there, or that he is filling his father's seat, in the chair that his father and his father before him filled. But he says, "I'm here and I am going to make sure that this institution doesn't go broke. I know there's one thing certain" he says; "I never can be criticized for doing something new, something that was never done before—it might succeed; but the Lord won't spare me if it doesn't—and I am not going to take that chance"
That is the attitude of perhaps eighty to ninety percent of the trustees of the eleemosynary and mutual institutions that are financing the vast bulk of the construction in this country. Add to that the FHA and its own completely unimaginative and limited scope in thinking and design, which is understandable, because they are trying to protect themselves by the most minute specifications against the chicanery of the builder who is interested only in borrowing the most and building for the least. There you have the double hazard, these two, the builder and the banker, on their high stools. And right between them, our a
rchitecture and design fall flat.
There are exceptions. There are provocative thinkers among the boards of trustees, and every once in a while you will see a great new thing come out which finally brings us a notch forward and lifts us up, because the power of emulation is something that is always with us. But it comes from such a minute number of those who are in control of the purse strings, and is given to that very small percentage of those who would build and who are interested in doing something more progressive and more important, that progress is painfully slow. We are now building new slums, for old slums, anachronistic conditions following upon the horrors of years before, so that notwithstanding the billions of dollars that are at our disposal, we are still building approximately the same thing that we have had in the years gone by. . . .
What I said at Harvard holds true today. Things have gone up a notch or two. By entering many design contests, Webb & Knapp upgraded the quality of, and opened new doors to, architecture. In commercial office projects, such as Mile High Center, Place Ville-Marie, and L'Enfant Plaza, we are showing that power and beauty in architecture can pay. In our housing projects in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York, at Kips Bay and at our UN Towers development, we have shown that very remunerative housing need not be monstrous. Unfortunately, these great projects were not money-makers for Webb & Knapp; we were spread too thin in too many places to be able to hold these properties through an unexpectedly hard time, but the flaw was in me (I was trying to do too much too quickly) rather than in the projects.
Architects, as a group or guild, are at least as restrictive in their trade practices as doctors or plumbers, while as artists they are at least as jealous of each other as painters. Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, could not abide each other, but I was friends with both. Corbu I met during the UN development. Wright I met as a supposed antagonist on a TV discussion panel where I (the builder) was supposed to be his meat. All I knew about Wright was that I liked his work. When my aides compiled a dossier of his speeches and writings, I discovered the man made profound good sense. As a result, during the TV show we sang in duet and had a great time. After the program, in order to further admire each other and ourselves, we went out to my place in Greenwich for dinner plus a few drinks. The company was so excellent that we had a few more drinks, but in the course of maneuvering down into my wine cellar for a fresh bottle of brandy, Wright caught his heel on a step and fell, giving himself a nasty gash on the scalp. The next stop was the emergency ward of the hospital, where this fierce old man, refusing an anesthetic (he already had enough in him), sat on the operating table swinging his legs and singing bawdy songs as the intern stitched his scalp.
From then on we had an undying friendship, and I was very pleased, during the time of our Chicago redevelopment work, to save Wright's famous, 1909, prairie-style Robie House from destruction. The Chicago Theological Seminary, by dexterous compartmenting of its sense of values, was planning to raze the building in order to put up an apartment house for married students. We bought the building for $125,000 to use as a temporary headquarters. The eighty-seven-year-old Wright planned to take it over with his foundation, but he died. We then deeded the building to the University of Chicago, which eventually refurbished the landmark structure as its president's home.
I have worked or dealt in one way or another with a great many of the major architects of this era, but with the exception of Wallace Harrison, nothing very much ever came of these efforts. The fact is, I was so enamored of Pei, of how he thought and the kind of work he could do, that no other architects could really interest me. At first, because he was a newcomer and worked with a commercial builder, Pei encountered hostility in parts of the architectural fraternity and press, especially as regards Washington, D.C. But when everyone was able to see the kind of work he could do, and that we encouraged him to do, there was a complete reversal. The architectural fraternity became Webb & Knapp allies.
Webb & Knapp became a noted architectural research and training center. Pei and his associates, for instance, pioneered the techniques of poured-in-place, natural-finish structures to the point where they have become economically competitive with curtain-wall construction in many applications. As a result of my 1953 tour of Korea, made at the behest of President Eisenhower, I brought back many Korean architects for training at Webb & Knapp. We gave them quarters at the old Marguery Hotel, where they could cook up their own "kimchi" from time to time. In 1967, when I flew out to Korea to receive an honorary LL.D. from the University of Seoul, I found my trainees had become the leading architects in Korea.
Research is expensive, and the rewards, if they develop, tend to be far down the time line. Poured-in-place concrete, for example, is only now coming into architectural prominence, but I urged Pei to reach out for new things (he did not need much urging), and I encouraged him to spread his wings, take on outside projects, such as a design of part of the University of Taiwan or a housing project in Korea.
Pei is so gifted a man that even if he had not come to Webb & Knapp, he would eventually have attained or come very close to the eminence he now maintains, but we gave him and his partners the gift of time, with an accelerated boost up the ladder, plus some developer's insights on the use of land.
Once I asked Julian Bond of Bond Stores, "Do you give your architects much leeway in the design of stores?"
He snapped back, "Does your secretary dictate your letters?"
With Pei and Henry Cobb, we came to such a point that all I had to do, as in the case of Montreal, was lay down the basic guidelines of what I needed. The rest I could leave to them, because they had sat in on strategy and economic conferences and knew our needs. We had reached a point where we learned together and taught each other on every project we turned to.
There was too much going on at Webb & Knapp for the Pei group to handle everything. Thus, one great project that Pei had nothing to do with was a spanking new city Webb & Knapp ushered into being in California. This billion-dollar baby, Century City, born of Twentieth Century-Fox, through Spyros Skouras, had a full five years' gestation period and is now in healthy early life.
▪ 18 ▪Century City and Two Other Land Deals
SOMETIME IN LATE 1958, several years after our abortive attempt to purchase the Howard Hughes empire, I got a call from Spyros Skouras. He wanted a lunch. I knew what he had in mind. I accepted with an air of innocence, however, and was having a good time trading news and gossip until, about halfway through the meal, with studied casualness, Spyros said, "Have you heard about our Century City project?"
"Why, yes, I have. . . ."
About a year previously, Spyros had put Twentieth Century-Fox's Los Angeles studio properties on the market. He had realized that this 263-acre tract of land along Wilshire Boulevard would be worth more as real estate than as a movie lot. The architect, Welton Becket, had prepared a master plan indicating how high-rise offices, a hotel, shopping centers, and apartment buildings would fit on this acreage. Armed with this proposal, Spyros had gone looking for builder-developer-financiers to take over his plan and property. His asking price was one hundred million dollars, including oil rights.
The first I knew of the venture was a front-page story about it in The New York Times, but I decided not to make any bids. I knew Spyros would sooner or later come around to Webb & Knapp. He might shop that deal all over the country, but this was at least a half-billion-dollar conception, and I knew nobody else in America would tackle it; all we had to do was wait. Now, a year later, the old pirate was trying our door, which is why, when he asked if I had heard of his project, I said: "Why, yes, I have. It was in the papers. I'm surprised you haven't built it by now."
"Oh . . . but we are not builders. What we want is somebody like you. In fact, we want you more than anybody in the world."
"Come off it, don't kid with me, Spyros. You tried this thing' out with every builder in America and struck out. They wouldn't take it. Do you want to know why?"
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sp; "Why?"
"Your price is too high. Your terms are no good. The project is overly ambitious, and it is overplanned."
"Would you buy it?"
"I'll take a look at it."
A few days later I flew out to Los Angeles and drove out to the studios. I had never studied the site with an eye to real estate. Here were 263 acres of rolling prairie land, located just south of Beverly Hills, only fifteen minutes from the Santa Monica beaches and eight minutes from UCLA's campus. In the 1920's and 1930's, when not shooting films, people used to shoot partridge, wild fox, and coyote on the acreage, but now I was after a different kind of game. I walked through and around various old stage sets with street scenes from Chicago, the Wild West, London, and Hong Kong, visualizing what could happen to the area with the addition of roads and new high-rise buildings.
Nearby Beverly Hills has stringent restrictions on heights of buildings, but the Twentieth Century lots were in Los Angeles and free for the high-rise kind of building that was our specialty. The more I looked around, the more I liked the concept; its very size attracted me. Given space and strategic location in an urban area, you can create and extend your own environment. The economics of the proposal, however, bothered me. It is wonderful to have something big, but this was too big; it could not work. I went back to see Spyros and said, "What do you want for this thing without the oil rights?"
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