The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  Every time Wright read that Le Corbusier had finished a building, he told the Fellows: “Well, now that he’s finished one building, he’ll go write four books about it.” Le Corbusier made one visit to the United States—and developed a phobia toward America—and Wright developed a phobia toward Le Corbusier. He turned down his one chance to meet him. He didn’t want to have to shake his hand. As for Gropius, Wright always referred to him as “Herr Gropius.” He didn’t want to shake his hand, either. One day Wright made a surprise visit to a site in Racine, Wisconsin, where the first of his “Usonian” houses, medium-priced versions of his Prairie School manor houses, was going up. Wright’s red Lincoln Zephyr pulled up to the front. One of his apprentices, Edgar Tafel, was at the wheel, serving as chauffeur. Just then, a group of men emerged from the building. Among them was none other than Gropius himself, who had come to the University of Wisconsin to lecture and was anxious to see some of Wright’s work. Gropius came over and put his face at the window and said, “Mr. Wright, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I have always admired your work.” Wright did not so much as smile or raise his hand. He merely turned his head ever so slightly toward the face at the window and said out of the side of his mouth, “Herr Gropius, you’re a guest of the university here. I just want to tell you that they’re as snobbish here as they are at Harvard, only they don’t have a New England accent.” Whereupon he turned to Tafel and said, “Well, we have to get on, Edgar!” And he settled back, and the red Zephyr sped off, leaving Gropius and entourage teetering on the edge of the curb with sunbeams shining through their ears.w

  One up for Daddy Frank!—as the Fellows called Wright, when he was out of earshot. But it was oneupmanship of a hollow sort. Daddy Frank had just seen the face of the German who had replaced him as the Future of American Architecture.

  Tafel and the other Fellows were Wright’s only followers by now. Among the architecture students in the universities the International Style was all you heard about. Enthusiasm had been building up ever since the pilgrims had returned from Europe and the Museum of Modern Art began touting the compound architects. When the white gods suddenly arrived, enthusiasm became conversion, in the religious sense. There was a zeal about it that went quite beyond the ordinary passions of aesthetic taste. It was the esoteric, hierophantic fervor of the compound that seized them all. “Henceforth, the divinity of art and the authority of taste reside here with us …” The university architecture departments themselves became the American version of the compounds. Here was an approach to architecture that turned the American architect from a purveyor to bond salesman to an engineer of the soul. With the Depression on, the bond salesmen weren’t doing much for the architecture business anyway. New building had come to almost a dead halt. This made it even easier for the architectural community to take to the white gods’ theories of starting from zero.

  Studying architecture was no longer a matter of acquiring a set of technical skills and a knowledge of aesthetic alternatives. Before he knew it, the student found himself drawn into a movement and entrusted with a set of inviolable aesthetic and moral principles. The campus itself became the physical compound, as at the Bauhaus. When students talked about architecture, it was with a sense of mission. The American campus compounds differed one from the other—to an ever so slight degree, just as de Stijl differed from Bauhaus. Harvard was pure Bauhaus. At Yale they would experiment with variations. At one point the principle of “the integrally jointed wooden frame” seemed exhilaratingly rebellious—but it would have taken the superfine mind of Doctor Subtilis himself to have explained why. This, too, was after the manner of the European compounds.

  Faculty members resisted the compound passion at their peril. Students were becoming unruly. They were drawing up petitions—manifestos in embryo. No more laying down laborious washes in china ink in the old Beaux-Arts manner! No more tedious Renaissance renderings! After all, look at Mies’ drawings. He used no shading at all, just quick crisp straight lines, clean and to the point. And look at Corbu’s! His draftsmanship—a veritable scribble! A pellmell rush of ideas! His renderings were watercolors in mauve and brown tones, as fast and terribly beautiful as a storm! Genius!—you had to let it gush out! We declare: No more stone-grinding classical Renaissance details! —and the faculties caved in. By 1940, the sketchiness of Corbu’s quivering umber bird had become the modern standard for draftsmanship. With the somewhat grisly euphoria of Savonarola burning the wigs and fancy dresses of the Florentine fleshpots, deans of architecture went about instructing the janitors to throw out all plaster casts of classical details, pedagogical props that had been accumulated over a half century or more. I mean, my God, all those Esquiline vase-fountains and Temple of Vesta capitals … How very bourgeois.

  At Yale, in the annual design competition, a jury always picked out one student as, in effect, best in show. But now the students rebelled. And why? Because it was written, in the scriptures, by Gropius himself: “The fundamental pedagogical mistake of the academy arose from its preoccupation with the idea of individual genius.” Gropius’ and Mies’ byword was “team” effort. Gropius’ own firm in Cambridge was not called Gropius & Associates, Inc., or anything close to it. It was called “The Architects Collaborative.” At Yale the students insisted on a group project, a collaborative design, to replace the obscene scramble for individual glory.

  Now, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Buckminster Fuller came into his own. Fuller was an American designer with an endless stock of ingenious notions, one of which was his geodesic dome, a dome created of thousands of short, thin metal struts arranged in tetrahedra. Fuller’s dome fit in nicely with the modern principle of creating large structures with light surfaces out of machine-made materials and using tensions and stresses to do the work that massive supports had done for the old (bourgeois) order. But Gropius and the others never felt very comfortable with Fuller. It was hard to tell whether he was an architect, an engineer, a guru, or simply that species of nut known all around the world: the inventor. But to American university students he was a guru at the very least. He would give amazing twelve-hour lectures, great seamless geodesic domes of words that youths with supple spines and good kidneys found uplifting, even intoxicating. At Yale, after one of Fuller’s amazing performances, the architecture students were swept up into an ecstasy of rebellious and collaborative action. They constructed an enormous geodesic dome of cardboard struts and put it up on top of Yale’s stony gray Gothic Revival architecture school building, Weir Hall, and as much as dared the dean of architecture to try to do anything about it. He didn’t, and the dome slowly rotted in its eminence.

  In 1950, Yale got its own Bauhäusler when Josef Albers arrived from North Carolina to become the head of fine-arts instruction. Albers immediately instituted the fabled Bauhaus Vorkurs, except that now he wasn’t interested in depositing sheets of newspaper on the table. Now he deposited squares of Color-aid paper on the table and told the students to create works of art. As a painter, Albers himself had spent the preceding fourteen years seeking to solve the problem (if any) of superimposing squares of color, one upon the other. Now he had the Yale students doing it … and month after month went by. Yale, simply because it was Yale, attracted outstanding artists from high schools all over America. Some young lad who could take a piece of marble and carve you a pillow that looked so full of voluptuous downy billows you would have willingly tried to bury your head in it —this reincarnation of Bernini himself would sit there with Albers’ implacable Color-aid paper in his hands … starting from zero … and watch Albers point to some gristle-brained photographer’s little playpretty layers of colored squares and hear him say: “But this!—is form sculpted by light!” And the walls of the compound box closed in yet a few more inches.

  As for the compound taboos concerning what was bourgeois and nonbourgeois, these soon became the very central nervous system of architecture students in the universities, as if they had been encoded in their genes. There was a bizarre sto
ry in the press at the time about a drunk who had put a gun to the head of an upland Tennessee foot-washing Baptist and ordered him to utter a vile imprecation regarding Jesus Christ. The victim was in no mood to be a martyr; in fact, he desperately wished to save his own hide. But he was a true believer, and he could not make the words pass his lips, try as he might, and his brains were blown out. So it was with the new generation of architects by the late 1940s. There was no circumstance under which a client could have prevailed upon them to incorporate hipped roofs or Italianate cornices or broken pediments or fluted columns or eyebrow lintels or any of the rest of the bourgeois baggage into their designs. Try as they might, they could not make the drafting pencil describe such forms.

  O white gods.

  An intellectual weakness—and saving grace—of American students has always been that they are unable to sit still for ideology and its tight flemish-bonded logics and dialectics. They don’t want it and don’t get it. Any possible connection that worker housing or antibourgeois ideals might have had with a political program, in Germany, Holland, or anywhere else, eluded them. They picked up the sentimental side of it only. I can remember what brave plans young architects at Yale and Harvard had for the common man in the early 1950s. That was the term they used, the common man. They had a vague notion that the common man was a workingman, and not an advertising account executive, but beyond that it was all Trilby and Dickens. They were designing things for the common man down to truly minute details, such as lamp switches. The new liberated common man would live as the Cultivated Ascetic. He would be modeled on the B.A.-degree Greenwich Village bohemian of the late 1940s—dark wool Hudson Bay shirts, tweed jackets, flannel pants, briarwood pipes, sandals & simplicity—except that he would live in an enormous hive of glass and steel, i.e., an International Style housing project with elevators, instead of a fourth-floor walkup in a brownstone. So much for ideology. But the design side of the compounds they comprehended in all its reductionist, stereotaxic-needle-implant fineness. At Yale the students gradually began to notice that everything they designed, everything the faculty members designed, everything that the visiting critics (who gave critiques of student designs) designed … looked the same. Everyone designed the same … box … of glass and steel and concrete, with tiny beige bricks substituted occasionally. This became known as The Yale Box. Ironic drawings of The Yale Box began appearing on bulletin boards. “The Yale Box in the Mojave Desert”—and there would be a picture of The Yale Box out amid the sagebrush and the joshua trees northeast of Palmdale, California. “The Yale Box Visits Winnie the Pooh—and there would be a picture of the glass-and-steel cube up in a tree, the child’s treehouse of the future. “The Yale Box Searches for Captain Nemo”—and there would be a picture of The Yale Box twenty thousand leagues under the sea with a periscope on top and a propeller in back. There was something gloriously nutty about this business of The Yale Box!—but nothing changed. Even in serious moments, nobody could design anything but Yale Boxes. The truth was that by now architectural students all over America were inside that very box, the same box the compound architects had closed in upon themselves in Europe twenty years before.

  Every young architect’s apartment, and every architecture student’s room, was that box and that shrine. And in that shrine was always the same icon. I can still see it. The living room would be a mean little space on the backside of a walkup tenement. The couch would be a mattress on top of a flush door supported by bricks and covered with a piece of monk’s cloth. There would be more monk’s cloth used as curtains and on the floor would be a sisal rug that left corduroy ribs on the bottoms of your feet in the morning. The place would be lit by clamp-on heat lamps with half-globe aluminum reflectors and ordinary bulbs replacing the heat bulbs. At one end of the rug, there it would be … the Barcelona chair. Mies had designed it for his German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exposition of 1929. The Platonic ideal of chair it was, pure Worker Housing leather and stainless steel, the most perfect piece of furniture design in the twentieth century. The Barcelona chair commanded the staggering price of $550, however, and that was wholesale. When you saw that holy object on the sisal rug, you knew you were in a household where a fledgling architect and his young wife had sacrificed everything to bring the symbol of the godly mission into their home. Five hundred and fifty dollars! She had even given up the diaper service and was doing the diapers by hand. It got to the point where, if I saw a Barcelona chair, no matter where, I immediately—in the classic stimulus-response bond—smelled diapers gone high.

  But if they already had the chair, why was she still doing the diapers by hand? Because one chair was only halfway to Mecca. Mies always used them in pairs. The state of grace, the Radiant City, was two Barcelona chairs, one on either end of the sisal rug, before the flush-door couch, under the light of the heat-lamp reflectors.

  If a young man had suffered and sacrificed in this way and stripped the fat from his mental life and revealed the Mazda gleam at the apex of his soul—who, in the mundane world outside, could stop him now?

  It was about this time, the late 1940s and early 1950s, that The Client in America began to realize that something very strange had taken place among the architects. At Yale the first of the rude jolts—many more would follow—came in 1953 with an addition to the Yale Art Gallery. Barely ten years before, on the eve of the Second World War, Yale had completed a building program of vast proportions that had turned the campus into as close an approximation of Oxford and Cambridge as the mind of man could devise on short notice in southern Connecticut. Edward Harkness, a partner of John D. Rockefeller, and John Sterling, who had a railroad fortune, donated most of the money. Eighteen medieval fortresses rose up, tower upon tower, in High Collegiate Gothic, to house ten residential colleges (Yale Mid-Atlantic for dormitories), four graduate schools, a library, a power plant, whose buttressed smokestack reminded people of the Cathedral at Rheims, a ten-story gymnasium known as the Cathedral of Sweat, and the twenty-one-story Harkness Tower, which had a carillon on top. All these soaring structures had rusticated stone façades. Gothic Revivalism was carried to the point not only of putting leaded panes in the casement windows but also of having craftsmen blow, etch, and stain panes with medieval designs, many of them detailed representations of religious figures and mythical animals, and installing them at seemingly random intervals. The result was a campus almost as unified, architecturally, as Jefferson’s University of Virginia. For better or worse, Yale became the business baron’s vision of a luxurious collegium for the sons of the upper classes who would run the new American empire.

  The art-gallery addition, at York and Chapel Streets in New Haven, was Yale’s first major building project following the Second World War. A gray little man named Louis Kahn was appointed as architect. His main recommendation seemed to be that he was a friend of the chairman of the architecture department, George Howe. The existing gallery, built just twenty-five years earlier, was an Italian Romanesque palazzo designed by Egerton Swartwout, a Yale architect, and paid for by Harkness. It had massive cornices and a heavy pitched slate roof. On the Chapel Street side, it featured large windows framed in compound arches of stone.

  Kahn’s addition was … a box … of glass, steel, concrete, and tiny beige bricks. As his models and drawings made clear, on the Chapel Street side there would be no arches, no cornice, no rustication, no pitched roof—only a sheer blank wall of small glazed beige brick. The only details discernible on this slick and empty surface would be four narrow bands (string courses) of concrete at about ten-foot intervals. In the eyes of a man from Mars or your standard Yale man, the building could scarcely have been distinguished from a Woolco discount store in a shopping center. In the gallery’s main public space the ceiling was made of gray concrete tetrahedra, fully exposed. This gave the interior the look of an underground parking garage.

  Yale’s administrators were shocked. Kahn had been an architect for twenty years but had done little more than work as assistant arch
itect, under Howe, among others, on some housing projects. He was not much to look at, either. He was short. He had wispy reddish-white hair that stuck out this way and that. His face was badly scarred as the result of a childhood accident. He wore wrinkled shirts and black suits. The backs of his sleeves were shiny. He always had a little cigar of unfortunate hue in his mouth. His tie was always loose. He was nearsighted, and in the classrooms where he served as visiting critic, you would see Kahn holding some student’s yard-long blueprint three inches from his face and moving his head over it like a scanner.

  But that was merely the exterior. Somewhere deep within this shambles there seemed to be a molten core of confidence … and architectural destiny … Kahn would walk into a classroom, stare blearily at the students, open his mouth … and from the depths would come a remarkable voice:

  “Every building must have … its own soul.”

  One day he walked into a classroom and began a lecture with the words: “Light … is.” There followed a pause that seemed seven days long, just long enough to re-create the world.