by Judy Jones
Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959)
By his own admission, Wright was the greatest architect of all time. More than any other modernist, he went through several distinct stylistic phases. The conventional view is that the initial, so called Prairie style was his best. A college dropout, he worked for a time in the office of the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan before setting up on his own in Oak Park, a town he proceeded to carpet with his work. This early output—mainly houses but including such gems as the Unity Temple (1906) and the Larkin Building (1904)—was, despite European as well as Japanese influences, at once very modern and very American, deriving its essence from Wright’s near-mystical sense of the plains. Unique in proportion, detail, and decoration, these projects also “articulated” space in a new way. Rather than thinking of architecture as segmented, Wright perceived it as continuous and flowing, not as so many rooms added together but as a sculptable whole. Wright’s later houses preserve this spatial sensibility but come in a welter of styles, ranging from zonked-out International to Mayan. The best-known house from Wright’s middle period is Fallingwater (1936), built over a waterfall in Pennsylvania and designed, according to legend, in less than an hour. Many people, confused by the disparity between the prairie houses and something like the Guggenheim Museum or the Marin County Civic Center, find late Wright perplexing. Although Wright was, like Le Corbusier, a power freak, his version of utopia—which he called Broad-acre City—was somewhat less threatening, resembling, as it does, the suburbs. Wright ran his office, which still exists, along feudal lines. His successor was married to Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana.
Alvar Aalto (1896-1976)
Aalto, the hardest drinker among the twentieth-century masters, came from Finland, where dipsomania is the national pastime, and which has, unaccountably, produced more modern architects per capita than any other country. After the customary neoclassicist dalliance, Aalto took up the International Style and produced a number of masterpieces in a personalized version of same. The most important of these are the legendary Viipuri Library and the Paimio Sanitorium, both dating from the late Twenties. The Viipuri Library, now in the Russian Federation and undergoing restoration, had an auditorium with a beautifully undulating (and acoustically sound) wooden ceiling—the first instance of an Aalto trademark. No discussion of Aalto can omit mention of the tremendous responsiveness of his buildings to their particular (generally cold) environments, especially the way they introduce and modulate natural light. Of the five immortals, Aalto is the most unabashedly sensuous and tactile, full of swell textures and gorgeous forms. Aalto’s best formal move was probably a fan shape, which allowed him to orient various rooms for best exposure to the sun over the course of the day; to illustrate this form in conversation, hold your hand parallel to the ground and stretch the fingers. As who wouldn’t be, coming from Finland, Aalto was big on the use of wood both in his buildings and in his famous bentwood furniture. Unfortunately, most of Aalto’s work—like the great Saynatsalo Town Hall (1952)—is located in places whose names are completely unpronounceable. This forces people to refer constantly to the several projects (e.g., the Imatra Church) that they can pronounce. FIVE MODERN BUILDINGS The Barcelona Pavilion
Built for an exposition in 1929, this is modern architecture’s holy of holies, a status further enhanced by the fact that the pavilion was torn down shortly after it was built; such are the rules of expositions. What this means is that everything everyone knows about it must be received from photographs, the preferred medium of architectural communication. The Barcelona Pavilion—did we mention that it’s by Mies?—is one of the most distinguished examples of a “free plan,” that is, a plan not primarily based on the symmetrical imperative but rather on a sensibility derived from Suprematism and de Stijl, yielding something rather like a collage. The result: spaces that flow and eddy, moving through large openings and expanses of glass into the out-of-doors and right on down the street. The Barcelona Pavilion is also remembered for its modern attitude toward materials. While retaining the International Style’s predilection for crisp lines and planes, Mies enriches their formal potential by the use of a variety of posh materials, including chrome, green glass, polished green marble and onyx, and travertine. Many conclusions to be drawn here. First, the building affirms the displacement of craft (the hand) by precision (the machine); instead of carving the stone, Mies polished it. Second, Mies treats the surfaces of planes not as deep and solid (like a Gothic church) or as smooth and white (as in so much International Style shtik) but as highly reflective, like glass; in the Barcelona Pavilion, everything either reflects or gets reflected, then gets reflected again in two shallow pools, one inside and one out. Finally, this was the occasion for the design of the famous Barcelona chair, the most definitively upscale piece of furniture ever.
Top to bottom: The Barcelona Pavilion (1929); L’Unité d’Habitation (1952); The Robie House (1909)
Top: Carson, Pirie, Scott (1904); bottom: the Chrysler Building (1930) L’Unité d’Habitation
Finished in 1952, this is the best of Corb and the worst of Corb, always referred to simply as “the Unité” despite the fact that there are actually three of them. (The original is at Marseilles, the other two at Nantes and Berlin.) So what is it? Well, you might say that it was an apartment house with social cachet, the result of an idea whose time had come. Also gone, some thirty years before. Back in the good old days of modernism, when architecture was seen as an instrument for progressive political transformation, architects talked about building “social condensers” and theorized vaguely about how people would learn to live in happy collective harmony if only they had the right kind of structures in which to do it. Corb, having glommed on to this idea, thought that if the whole countryside were dotted with “Unités” of his own design, everyone would get on fine. Fortunately, he was only able to build the three. By itself, the Marseilles Block (as some call it) is notable for a number of reasons, some social and others—the important ones—formal. The social program includes a shopping arcade on an upper floor, recreation and day care on the roof, and interior “streets” (big corridors, really) on every other floor: a variety of conveniences designed essentially to imprison. Formally, things are more positive and provide a golden opportunity for learning some key vocabulary words. Let’s start with pilotis, the big legs on which the entire building is raised. Corb thought that these would free the landscape from the building (the former is supposed to flow uninterrupted underneath), but they had the reverse effect. The Unité is constructed in béton brut (we’ve had this one already), and its heavily sculpted facades incorporate brisesoleils (sun screens) and are heavily polychromed in primary colors. The roof vents, chimneys, elevator housings, and such are done in free-form shapes; together they make for a lovely silhouette. The Robie House
The Robie House (1909) is the finest example of Wright’s Prairie-style work. Prairie style was both a style and—as with so much great art—an anxiety. At the turn of the century the prairies still abutted Chicago, and Wright had them on the brain: their endless flatness, their windsweptness, and, dare we say, their romance. As a result, the longness and lowness of Prairie buildings (Wright was not the only architect so moved) is fairly easy to understand. Other elements, including decorative treatments and Wright’s characteristic “flowing space,” bespeak such influences as an early dose of Japanese architecture and a stint in Louis Sullivan’s office. The Robie House itself is long, low, and brick. A tightly controlled but asymmetrical bi-level plan, a mature application of Wright’s geometrical decoration, vertical windows arrayed in strips, and a low-hipped roof each does its bit. Next time you stroll past the Guggenheim with a friend, mention the Robie House and how incredible you find it that one architect could have done both. Carson, Pirie, Scott
Designed by Louis Sullivan and built between 1899 and 1904, the Carson, Pirie, Scott department store (originally built as the Schlesinger and Meyer department store) is the hottest product of the Chicago School.
Why? For starters, it has great structural clarity, which is to say, it is easy to “read” the underlying steel structure in the lines of the facades, which look like an arrangement of posts and beams filled in with glass. The proportions of the structural bays (the distance between columns, framed by floors above and below) are on the long side, a proportion that is considered particularly “Chicago.” That old bugbear, the corner, is dealt with especially neatly by Sullivan, who, in effect, inscribes a cylinder there, accelerating the window proportions to help zing the viewer around the block. Less frequently noted is the incredible decoration that covers all surfaces (not counting the windows, dummy). Indeed, Sullivan was a great apostle of ornamentation, and the intricate system he finally arrived at was not so very different from Art Nouveau. The Chrysler Building
The good news is that it’s once again OK to like the Chrysler Building. For years seen as a detour on the way to boring modernism, we now acknowledge that the flowering of Art Deco (after the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris), which took place in the Twenties and Thirties, was one of the high points in modern design. In every sense, Deco’s highest point is the Chrysler Building, designed by William Van Alen and, briefly, the tallest building in the world. It is still the most beautiful, most “classic” skyscraper ever built. The convention in talking about skyscrapers is to analogize them to classical columns, with their three-part division of base, shaft, and capital, or, if you prefer, beginning, middle, and end. The Chrysler is great because it succeeds at all levels. The lower portion contains a handsomely decorated lobby and dramatic entries, well related to the scale of the street. The shaft makes use of an iconography based, appropriately enough, on automotive themes (flying tires, a frieze of Ply-mouths), and the crown is that wonderful stainless steel top, the skyscraper’s universal symbol. FIVE MODERN MAXIMS
After all, what’s a style without a slogan? Here are our favorites.
LESS IS MORE: Mies van der Rohe’s coinage. Postmodernist wags had so much fun turning this on its head—“More is more,” “Less is a bore,” etc.—that you’re advised to give it a rest for a decade or so.
ORNAMENT IS CRIME: Adolf Loos penned this goody (Anita wasn’t the only aphorist in the family), an obvious reaction to fin de siècle excess. Given the recent upsurge of interest in ornament, be sure to keep your delivery ironic.
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION: The functionalist credo, generally attributed to Mies, but actually used by several eminences, including Louis Sullivan. The earliest use appears to be by Horatio Greenough, a mid-nineteenth-century Yankee sculptor remembered for his statue of George Washington in a peekaboo toga.
THE PLAN IS THE GENERATOR: Corb’s version of the above. It means you should start (if you happen to be designing a building) from the floor plan, with all its implications of rational relationships, rather than impose some sort of “artistic” vision on a building a priori. Fortunately, Corb did not always practice what he preached.
ROAM HOME TO A DOME: From R. “Bucky” Buckminster Fuller, that is, the apostle of geodesic domes, Dymaxion houses, positive effectiveness, and other benign nonsense. And meant to be sung to the tune of “Home on the Range.” No doubt you’ll be keeping your delivery ironic.
Snap Judgments
An intelligent, and quite cheeky, view of photography, by contributor Owen Edwards.
No one really knows that much about photography, and no one is even particularly sure what he likes. The history of the medium is so short—Nicéphore Niépce made the first photograph, a grainy little garden scene, in 1827 (though if you point out that Thomas Wedgwood might have been first, in 1802, many will be impressed)—that its salient points can be picked up in an afternoon. And the exact nature of photography is so much in dispute that you can call it an art, a fraud, or a virus without much danger of being provably wrong. Indisputably, however, there are categories, giving such comfort as categories do, and here’s what you ought to know about each. LANDSCAPE
Not long ago, everything you needed to say about landscape photography was Ansel Adams. The straight, somewhat unimaginative wisdom holds that Adams is the greatest landscape photographer ever. The revisionist stance is that Adams is passé by about a century, and that after Timothy O’Sullivan photographed the West following the Civil War, landscape was played out as a theme anyway. Neorevisionism, however, says it’s OK to like Adams even if he is the Kate Smith of photography. Or you can end the discussion by saying that the only great landscape pictures nowadays are being made by NASA robots in the outer limits of the solar system.
A trendy group of landscapists now shows up at environmental disasters like Weegee homing in on a gangland hit in 1940s New York City. Poisoned horses and sheep, shot and skinned deer, and other gloomy slices of outdoor life are what the full moon rises on in the pictures of such as Richard Misrach and James Balog. It pays to know that nowadays, pretty pictures of awful scenery are a lot hipper than plain old pretty pictures. FASHION
Though it was discovered only recently that fashion photographers might be artists, no one has ever mistaken them for plain working stiffs. The first fashion photographer of note was Baron de Meyer. His title was suspect, but useful nevertheless; he created the archetype of the social photographer, the inside man who not only knew about haute couture, but knew the women who could afford it. Then Edward Steichen came along and did a better de Meyer. (Steichen always did everything better; when in doubt, say Steichen.) Then a Hungarian photo-journalist named Munkacsi appeared in the mid-Thirties and revolutionized fashion photography by making his models run along beaches and jump over puddles. Then Richard Avedon got out of the Coast Guard and did a better Munkacsi. And from then on, wannabes like Patrick Demarchelier, Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, and Steven Meisel have been raking in mind-boggling fees trying, unsuccessfully, to do a better Avedon. Only Avedon could really manage that trick, however, reinventing himself right up until his death in 2004. FINE ART
The answer to the tedious and irrepressible question “Is photography art?” is yes, but almost never when it thinks it is. Most of the avowed art photographers of the nineteenth century are considered quaint at best, grotesque at worst, while the pictures that have pried money out of the arts endowments look like what Fotomat used to promise not to charge you for. The great photographic art has been made by people doing something else: by Eugène Atget, trying to document Paris, or August Sander, trying to codify all the faces in prewar Germany, or Irving Penn (arguably America’s greatest artist/photographer since Steichen) dutifully helping fill the pages of Vogue. It’s perfectly safe, then, to dismiss any art photographer as hopelessly misguided. Except Man Ray, who was really a painter, and so can’t be blamed for his failures. And László Moholy-Nagy, who discovered that the more things you did wrong, the better the photograph looked.
The great muddler of art photographers is also the medium’s most revered saint, Alfred Stieglitz, who, early in this century, encouraged his fellow Photo Secessionists to blur, draw on, scratch, or otherwise manipulate their pictures to ensure that the hoi polloi would know they were artists. Stieglitz, by the way, was not Steichen, though even people with vast collections of lenses continue to think so. Steichen was a disciple of Stieglitz who fell out of favor when he began to make a bundle in advertising. (Stieglitz, being a saint, was not much fun.) In 1961, Stieglitz discovered Paul Strand’s unmanipulated masterpieces, decided that his followers were hopeless and misguided, and consigned them to oblivion. The resulting confusion has never quite cleared up.
Left: Edward Steichen, The Flatiron Building Below: Man Ray, Nusch Éluard
The photographers most likely to be granted acceptance by the haute scribblers of the art world are those who have been careful to stay clear of the low-rent precincts of the world of photography. David Hockney, whose cubist collages of Polaroids command rapt respect, is one of these drop-ins. And William Wegman, a painter who makes unspeakably kitschy dogs-as-people pictures, is another. As is Cindy Sherman, high priestess of high c
oncept who time-travels through female stereotypes with a few props—wigs, go-go boots, girdles—to create provocative reflections of the American psyche. My advice: When a photographer uses the word “artist,” reach for your gun. FINE ART, ABSTRACT DIVISION
Abstract photography is a disaster, invariably boring. Though photography is by nature an abstract of reality, it’s always of something, so attempts to make it of nothing seem silly. The viewer wants to know what he’s looking at, leans closer and closer, and ends up frustrated and peeved. The closest thing to true abstraction a photographer can manage is to take something and make it look like nothing. Most grants are awarded to photographers who are good at doing that. FINE ART, STILL-LIFE DIVISION
The most overrated still-life photograph in the universe is Edward Weston’s jumbo-sized pepper, made in the classic More-Than-Just-a-Vegetable style that has since accounted for more than half a century of abysmal amateur efforts. (Weston is probably the most overrated photographer, too, in large part due to the efforts of sons, lovers, and half the population of Carmel, California, to keep the legend alive.) The real contest for World’s Greatest Still-Life Photographer is between Irving Penn, who studied drawing and illustration with Alexei Brodovitch in Philadelphia, and Hiro, who worked as a photographer for Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar. (Remember Brodovitch—he was tough, selfish, often drunk, said, “If you look through the viewfinder and see something you’ve seen before, don’t click the shutter,” and was guru to two generations of great photographers.) Everybody knows about Penn; his prints are at least as good an investment as Microsoft stock. Few people know about Hiro except the knowing. PHOTOJOURNALISM