by Ian Volner
Within the limited menu of Modernism then available in the United States, there were still a few selections on offer. Miesian Modernism Michael had already learned at the University of Cincinnati; thanks to Roush, he could also bring in a bit of Breuer to add a homey touch. At Harvard, on the other hand, all this was in poor taste. As his classmates told him, “You better do Corb.”40
Michael had seen enough of Le Corbusier’s work in college to know what that meant. Favoring white exteriors with occasional washes of color within and asymmetrical massing of pure geometries in artful juxtapositions, Le Corbusier’s was a looser, more self-consciously poetic approach than that of either the stringent Mies or the humbly antimonumental Breuer. Unafraid of a certain quantum of symbolic resonance, Corb’s definition of architecture as “the masterful, correct, and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light” wasn’t quite in tune with the more functionally inclined Gropius, either.41 Sert’s importation of the Corbusian strain signaled a changing of the guard at GSD.
Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein in Garches, France, 1927
Sert had been following in the master’s footsteps since the very beginning, having set up the Spanish chapter of the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM), the worldwide organization devoted to spreading Corb’s vision of Modernism and his radical proposals for reinventing the urban landscape. In his “Five Points of Architecture,” Le Corbusier called for rooftop terraces; Sert responded with a Barcelona apartment building that had just that.42 Le Corbusier called for a “Radiant City” of ultratall towers set in wide-open parkland; Sert would go on to create campus buildings for Boston University along roughly those lines.43 Le Corbusier saw Modernist architecture as engaged in millenarian combat for the soul of modern society, which the architect claimed was faced with a choice between “architecture or revolution”: either humankind would accept the serenity and simplicity of his own abstract, technological forms or civilization itself would perish.44 Sert saw himself as a foot soldier in this struggle.
This is not to diminish Sert’s skill as an architect. “One of the strongest proponents of the Mediterranean mentality,” as the eminent historian Sigfried Giedion called him, Sert was in many ways a superlative designer. His own country home on Long Island included an astonishingly beautiful lofted living room with a herringbone brick floor—“a town square in Catalonia,” as the artist Saul Steinberg once described it.45 He had been a champion of the Republican cause in his home country and a fearless opponent of fascism everywhere—despite the pro–Francisco Franco sympathies of his famous painter uncle Josep Maria Sert.46 But Sert could also be philosophically straightjacketed, and he could be a bully.
A mutual antagonism between him and the new midwestern transplant took hold early. In his first semester, as Michael recalled, students were tasked with designing a museum; for the interior sections, Michael drew wooden walls with a texture indistinguishable from maple, while in his bird’s-eye plan of the building’s front terrace he rendered a brick patio in such minute detail that every individual brick was outlined. He had done it, in truth, because he could—a bit of shameless, if harmless, showboating. If Sert liked bricks, Michael would give him bricks.
At the end-of-term charrette, when the students presented their work, Sert made his way around to Michael’s station. Before he launched into his critique, the dean leaned in to examine the drawings Michael had so carefully prepared, and without saying a word he started scratching them vigorously with his forefinger. “He was thinking it was some film I’d put down,” Michael remembered. Sert believed the detail was fake, a decal applied to the paper.47 Far from impressing him, Michael’s facility had merely aroused Sert’s suspicion, and suspicion swiftly escalated into hostility.
Sert’s more unfettered, free-form design thinking meant Michael’s GSD projects didn’t have to be quite so rigid and symmetrical as they had been at the University of Cincinnati or in Strauss’s office. But so far as Michael was concerned, the basic approach to architectural teaching was unchanged, a matter of looking to this or that Modernist pioneer and copying his work wholesale. Michael had begun to grow restless. His thesis on the trulli houses had marked a brief foray into the architecture of the past; with another year of schooling ahead of him at Harvard, he began to look back again.
He was in the wrong place to do it. Michael recalled how once, early in his first semester in Cambridge, he had been sitting with a book open to an image of the Palais Garnier, the Paris opera house completed in 1875 and known to the world by the name of its architect, Charles Garnier. The building, its extravagant front foyer graced by a richly ornamented, delicately contoured grand staircase, was a high point of Second Empire design, an impressive if slightly gaudy instance of the French Beaux Arts style. Sert walked into the room and approached him.
“What are you looking at?” he asked.
Michael showed him.
“You won’t need that here,” Sert said, and snapped the book closed.48 Art history belonged to the art historians; GSD students were to keep their heads down and deal with the real, the here and the now. Although architectural history had been reinserted into the curriculum following Gropius’s departure, the professor who taught the most celebrated course was Sigfried Giedion, a dyed-in-the-wool Modernist and former secretary general of CIAM. As in his influential book Space, Time, and Architecture (1941), Giedion’s lectures propagated an occasionally fanciful teleology that reduced much of human history into a centuries-long march toward the ultimate triumph of Le Corbusier, Gropius, and the Bauhaus. His mythmaking, and his reductivism, did not endear him to many students, who referred to his magnum opus as “Spare Time and Architecture.” Michael, given his advanced placement in the program, was exposed to but little of Giedion’s thinking, and appeared to have absorbed even less.49
In his second semester, Michael took a studio with the dean himself. At the time, Sert was becoming interested in new techniques in concrete construction; a decade later, he’d deploy an inventive semitubular system for the roof of his Fundació Joan Miró, the museum in Barcelona built and named in honor of the painter who had been Sert’s friend since the early 1930s. To acquaint his students with the process of mixing and molding in cement and aggregate, the dean sent Michael and a couple of other students down to the school workshop, charging them with making some concrete and pouring it into inverted forms like those Sert would later use for his museum.
“I thought, my god,” Michael said, “I’ve been on construction sites all my life, for six years. I don’t want to do this.”50 Finding that some of his colleagues felt the same, Michael proceeded to lead a small mutiny. The group demanded another, less menial assignment, and though their insubordination must have galled him, Sert finally conceded. They could design a house, he told them, provided that it too used inverted concrete shells. They accepted.
But Michael’s budding interest in the history of art wormed in, and once again he and Sert were at loggerheads. In conceiving his house, Michael did exactly as he knew Sert would want him to, devising an asymmetrical plan, as in a Le Corbusier house, and giving the exterior walls a slight sculptural wave in deference to Sert’s repeated exhortations to “animate the facade! Animate the facade!” But Michael added one tiny detail that spoiled the whole effect.
On a long wall in one of the perspective drawings of the house’s interior, he pasted a photo of a painting that he’d cut out of a magazine. (He might as easily have drawn a sketch of it, but he’d learned that that would avail him nothing with the dean.) The painting, Michael recalled, was the work of Nicolas Poussin, the early nineteenth-century French artist who had forged the bridge between the baroque and the classical in French art. The piece was one of his enchantingly enigmatic landscapes: tunic-bedecked shepherds and tall cypresses under a cobalt-blue sky. It was not, in other words, anything like the work of Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, or the other contemporary artists Sert favored.
Michael remembered watching Sert a
s he first espied the painting in the interior and then abruptly launched into a stream of richly accented invective. “I’ve spent my entire life getting rid of that shit,” Sert exclaimed, “and you bring this into my school willy-nilly!”
But the student pleaded his innocence. “I didn’t do it,” Michael told him. “The painting is in the collection of my client.”
As Michael related, the Fictional Client Defense only fanned the flames of Sert’s anger. He threatened to flunk Michael for the course and was dissuaded only when a sympathetic faculty member, the Polish-born architect Jerzy Soltan, persuaded him to fail the student for the project but pass him for the semester as a whole.
IT MIGHT BE SAID that the same mooncalf kid who had run up the Soldiers and Sailors Monument was still just playing hooky from dance class. Michael’s quarrel with the tempestuous Sert was largely a function of personality, not of principle; the accuracy and artistic flair that the student from Indianapolis could bring to the most difficult of sketching problems simply meant that he was often bored. He had no real allegiance to anything outside the Modernist current, only curiosity.
His Poussin moment notwithstanding, Michael was generally more inclined toward modern artists than Renaissance ones. In addition to Abstract Expressionism, he was increasingly exposed at GSD to those artists whose work was generally smiled upon by the CIAM axis: Miró, Picasso (who had created his famous Guernica for Sert’s Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Expo), and Le Corbusier himself, who for his entire career maintained an active sideline as a painter. More than anyone else—and more than Michael would sometimes, in later life, care to admit—Le Corbusier was exerting an outsize influence on him, as both an artist and an architect.
Le Corbusier’s artistic proclivities were on display both in his buildings’ colorful interiors and in his “free plans,” which were practically abstract paintings themselves, juxtaposing curved walls with straight. “The plan is the generator” was Corb’s oft-repeated phrase: the parti, the fundamental idea behind each project, always found its initial and most important expression in Corb’s floor layouts, and Michael learned to craft his designs in the same fashion.51 It was during these years that Michael began to affect a pair of round, black spectacles, identical to the ones that were a Le Corbusier trademark. And just as he was adopting the Swiss designer’s signature look, Michael took his signature, too, changing his autograph to more closely resemble Corb’s. If Michael was not quite a card-carrying Corbusian by the time he left Harvard, he was awfully close, whatever his misgivings about Modernist buildings and education in America.
“A house is a machine for living in,” another one of the Swiss genius’s most quoted lines, did not sit so easily with Michael.52 Enchanted though he was by the beauty of Le Corbusier’s machinelike forms, he was never partial to mechanical thinking. What he did not quite recognize, or was only beginning to, was that he was not the only one who harbored such reservations.
In September 1959, only months after Michael’s semester en enfer with Sert, Le Corbusier’s CIAM officially disbanded during the organization’s ninth congress in Otterlo, the Netherlands, the pressures that had pulled it apart representing the first stirrings of dissent within the Modernist ranks. An international group of loosely affiliated designers later known as Team X, who had first come together under the CIAM umbrella, had begun to openly criticize the conformism, bureaucratization, and cultural tone-deafness of mainstream Modernism. Charged with reviving Modernism’s three-decade-old bastion, its members deliberately dismembered it: at the final meeting, several held aloft a cemetery cross and wreath bearing the legend “C.I.A.M.”53
They were part of a going trend. In England the Independent Group—whose membership overlapped with Team X’s—had been advocating since as early as 1952 for a more dynamic, pop culture–infused attitude in art and design—less all-white-walls-and-pure-geometries and more color, light, and futuristic technology. Even in the United States, at least one figure at the fringe of the profession, Philadelphia-based Louis Kahn, had spent years quietly advancing an architecture more primal, more expressive, and more protean than anything in the pale and repetitious cities of glass and stucco from Le Corbusier’s prewar imaginings.
In point of fact, Corb had been changing too. His Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France, completed in 1955, showed that the old arch-Modernist would not be confined artistically within one of his own white boxes. The building’s boatlike form jutted dramatically out of a hill, and the nave twinkled and gleamed in the light of narrow, irregularly cut windows. It was not a break from Le Corbusier’s previous work, which had always had a music and a depth of its own. But it was an evolution.
These developments were beginning to penetrate even the cosseted precincts of Harvard Yard. Jerzy Soltan, whom Michael remembered as his second-semester savior (and who would advise him on his GSD thesis portfolio), had worked in Corb’s studio but was by that time a Team X fellow traveler.54 Magazines like Architectural Forum were filled with images of Modernism in transition. None of the emerging alternatives necessarily appealed to Michael any more than what had preceded them, and for the time being he remained, architecturally speaking, a man without a country. But change was afoot, and he was not alone.
WHEN THE WEATHER was fair, the GSD architecture crowd would go over to old Cardullo’s deli for sandwiches and bring them down to the banks of the Charles River. On one such sunny day in the spring of 1959, Michael was introduced to Peter Eisenman, a young designer of about his age working at Walter Gropius’s Cambridge-based firm, The Architects’ Collaborative (TAC).
They saw each other around the riverside once or twice thereafter. “Peter would always bring a construction problem because he couldn’t do working drawings,” recalled Michael.55 The latter was wrapping up his studies and working part-time in the office of a local architect, Carl Koch.56 “Sert’s office, TAC, Koch,” Eisenman remembered, “this sort of coterie of Harvard-based offices—we thought we were at the sort of high point of the world.” The clubbiness of it all began to grate, and Eisenman shortly thereafter decamped to New York to finish his master’s degree at Columbia, and then went to Cambridge, England, for his doctorate.57
The lunchtime companions hadn’t spoken much at all, and neither took much notice of the other. Nearly sixty years later, Eisenman didn’t even remember their first meeting until his memory was forcibly jogged—partly by concern that their mutual friend Richard Meier might claim that he had been the first to meet Michael.
“We didn’t become friends or anything,” Eisenman said. “But we knew who each other were.”58
ALTHOUGH IT WOULDN’T actually begin for years yet, that was the nearest thing to a lasting friendship that Michael formed at Cambridge. He remained closer to Roush than to any of his GSD classmates or teachers, not feeling much in common with any of them. And that feeling, at bottom, was the root cause of much of his durable contempt for Harvard.
“I was kind of the hayseed in the class,” as he put it.59
When he’d arrived, he was the only one of his contemporaries who knew, thanks to Roush, how to design a building in toto, and that gave him a leg up on the competition. But his practical aptitude only served to highlight his lack of cultural polish; almost all of his colleagues had traveled to Europe, and most had been educated at schools of grander and much older vintage than the University of Cincinnati.
They were Bud Graves’s dreaded Episcopalians—even the ones who weren’t. Few had any idea what a livestock agent was, or what it was like to miss the snap signal in front of a hundred jeering Hoosiers. Most of them, too, were more willing to conform to Sert’s architectural dictates, or at least more easily cowed by his imperiousness. (One student to whom Michael did form a brief attachment, Lo-Yi Chan, described an incident where a young student presented a project to the dean. When Sert objected to his design, the man fainted.)60 Few of his fellow graduates that year went on to start their own practices. Most of them, perhaps, simply didn’t
have that much to prove.
But Michael did. “I wasn’t in competition with my brother at that point,” he would say, “or with my parents, to get out of the nest. I was in competition with architecture.”61
He had begun to feel this way back at the University of Cincinnati, and the fear that he was out of his depth in Cambridge, surrounded by others so different from himself, added fuel to the fire. His overdrawn renderings, his historical allusions, even the refusal to mix cement: it wasn’t all schoolboy truancy. He felt he had to be better, do more.
Gail, meanwhile, did not weather so well the abrupt shift in social climate, at least in Michael’s view. As he recalled:
Early on, after the start of the first term, we were invited to a clambake on the beach. Marblehead, maybe. And she didn’t want to go. Only Harvard people were there, and they were too highfalutin for her. Lo-Yi Chan had us to dinner one night, and she said, “Now this isn’t so bad. Just regular folks.” But then she’d hear me say that the guy sitting next to me was the heir to the Welch’s Grape Juice fortune.… And to see him wearing white pants, blue blazer, loafers, no socks, shirt open to the waist—she couldn’t understand it. Her life being wrapped up in people like that? It really meant we didn’t see anybody in my class except the Chans.
What Michael perceived as his wife’s shyness may not have been quite the culture shock he supposed: Gail would prove, in time, that she could more than keep pace with the Ivy League set and come to embrace it. But next to Michael’s own burning drive to succeed, her more subdued response to their new surroundings might have appeared to him like retreat.
BY EARLY SUMMER—having barely avoided that failing grade from Sert—Michael had earned his master’s. Once again, he and Gail had to decide what to do next without a formal road map to show them the way.