two
in and out of fashion
Bryant Park, in midtown Manhattan, is the site of a bi-annual fashion show. Twice a year, in large white tents crammed with reporters, photographers, editors, and celebrity guests, models parade designers’ wares on the runway. Bryant Park is also a good place to observe an architectural fashion show. A row of Twenties beauties lines 40th Street, along the south side of the park. First is Ely Jacques Kahn’s French Renaissance office building, originally the headquarters of Scientific American. Its neighbor is the stately Classical Engineers Club. Then comes a flapper, Raymond Hood’s American Radiator Building, whose black brick and gold trim sets it apart from its neighbors. Charles Rich’s Bryant Park Studios, an elegant survivor of the late Gilded Age, is at the Sixth Avenue corner. The large north-facing windows and glazed penthouse are a reminder that this building was originally intended for artists.
Bryant Park Studios is built in an architectural style that was originally called Modern French but today is commonly referred to as Beaux-Arts, in recognition of the influential Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Starting with Richard Morris Hunt, during the second half of the nineteenth century many of the best American architects were graduates of the Ecole. H. H. Richardson and his protégé Charles Follen McKim were alumni, as well as McKim’s assistants, John M. Carrère and Thomas Hastings. Carrère and Hastings were the architects of the New York Public Library, whose stately presence commands the east side of Bryant Park. Narrow strips of windows indicate the book-stacks, above them nine thermal windows signal the vast reading room. In typical Beaux-Arts fashion, the façade manages to appear both grandly monumental and coolly rational, except for a curious row of little doorways high up the wall, which lack balconies or even railings and open into mid-air. The strange little sky-exits, which a friend who works at the library claims are for staff defenestration, provide a fanciful note to the great marble façade.*
A row of no-nonsense 1970s office blocks lines Sixth Avenue on the west side of the park. The largest is the New York Telephone Company Building, whose banal façade of gray-tinted glass and vertical strips of marble fills the block between 41st and 42nd Street. The north side of the park is dominated by the fifty-story W. R. Grace Building, designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1972. The swooping travertine façade appears to have been inspired by the buildings of Brasília. This bit of tropical flash is flanked by an undistinguished mirrored glass tower, and a generic brick-and-Colonial-trim box. Built 50 years apart, these commercial office blocks share a balefully functionalist approach to architecture. They are strictly off-the-rack buildings that only a developer could love.
Bryant Park also offers distant views of two of Manhattan’s most distinctive skyscrapers: the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. The Chrysler Building started life as a speculative office building. In 1927, the architect William Van Alen, influenced by the recent Parisian exhibition of the arts décoratifs, designed a skyscraper in a style that has come to be known as Art Deco. When the plans were finished, but before construction had begun, the design and the building site were bought by the automobile magnate Walter P. Chrysler. Chrysler wanted the building to serve as a billboard for his company. Van Alen obligingly grafted on eagle-head gargoyles (based on hood ornaments), winged radiator caps, a frieze of steel hubcaps, and black brick accents that suggest running boards. The tower’s most distinctive feature was its stainless-steel cap, which held the Cloud Club, a private dining room for Chrysler executives. Today, the flamboyant Chrysler Building is considered a brilliant emblem of the Jazz Age, but it was not an instant success. When it was built it was roundly criticized as frivolous and flashy. “A stunt design,” sniffed The New Yorker. The New York Times likewise derided the blatant commercialism of the architecture.
The Chrysler Building had the distinction of being the world’s tallest building—for a few months, until it was surpassed by the Empire State Building. Although designed at the same time as the Chrysler, the Empire State is quite different in appearance. Its exterior is the architectural equivalent of a gray flannel suit. There is no decoration. The plain limestone walls lack even traditional cornices; chrome-nickel steel mullions extend uninterrupted from the 6th to the 85th floor, accentuating the building’s height. “Ornament is crime” Adolf Loos had proclaimed years before, but the stripped-down appearance of the Empire State Building owed more to an accelerated building schedule—construction took less than eighteen months—than to architectural ideology. In fact, the architects of the skyscraper considered themselves traditionalists. Richmond H. Shreve worked for Carrère & Hastings on the New York Public Library, where he met William Lamb, a recent Ecole graduate. After Carrère’s unfortunate death in an auto accident and Hastings’ retirement, Shreve and Lamb took over the firm (for several years it was called Carrère & Hastings, Shreve & Lamb) and were eventually joined by Arthur Loomis Harmon, who had worked for McKim, Mead & White on the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Despite—or rather because of—their solid Classical roots, Shreve, Lamb and Harmon designed a beautifully proportioned building that became the most famous skyscraper in the world.
The Empire State Building has one whimsical touch. The final plans called for the skyscraper to end with a flat roof over the 85th floor—1,050 feet, precisely calculated to be two feet higher than the top of the Chrysler Building’s spire. Then, before construction began, the owners decided that two feet was not enough, and ordered the architects to add a 200-foot tower to the top of the building.* This was to be not merely a decorative spire but a functioning symbol of the modern age, a mooring tower for airships. Instead of dropping transatlantic travelers off at Lakehurst, N.J., the thousand-foot-long dirigibles would fly right into Manhattan and hook themselves up to the top of the Empire State Building. Passengers would disembark to an observation platform and descend by elevator to a lounge and customs area on the 86th floor. Most experts, including Hugo Eckener, commander of the Graf Zeppelin, doubted that it could be done. It was hard enough to dock the unwieldy leviathans at ground level, never mind 1,250 feet up in the air. The experts proved to be right, and no airship passengers ever landed atop the Empire State.1 Yet the rocket-shaped tower, with its cast aluminum buttresses and gleaming conical top, is the perfect fanciful crown for this rather solemn skyscraper.
Whimsy is absent from the tops of the 1970s office blocks around Bryant Park. They look as if the architects had lopped them off on a whim: “I can do 40 floors, or 42, or 45. Just tell me when to stop.” More recent skyscrapers around Bryant Park, no doubt emboldened by Philip Johnson’s Chippendale top on his AT&T Building, have more animated crowns. The hipped roof of a Fifth Avenue Postmodern high-rise adorned with circles and squares peeks out above the library. The top of the Bertelsmann Building is a slender spike. The new Condé Nast office tower has tilted forms resembling speaker cabinets on its roof. Pretty tame stuff compared to the more fanciful crowns of the 1920s buildings—neo-Gothic spires, Romanesque tile roofs, copper domes. The 58 floors of 500 Fifth Avenue (at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street), which was designed by Shreve & Lamb prior to the Empire State Building, step back dramatically as they reach the building’s apex. Spiky, wrought-iron finials enliven the chateau-like roof of the Scientific American Building. An animated silhouette of black brick with gilded and red highlights crowns the Radiator Building. According to Hood, the dramatic effect (floodlit at night) suggested a “pile of coal, glowing at the top.”
Raymond M. Hood was the outstanding commercial architect of the 1920s. He and John Mead Howells won a celebrated international architectural competition for the Chicago Tribune tower in Chicago with a handsome Gothic design based on the Butter Tower of Rouen Cathedral. The Chicago Tribune competition led to several New York commissions, including the Radiator Building, the Daily News Building, and the McGraw-Hill Building. With these designs, Hood developed the distinctly American approach to skyscrapers that would influence Van Alen and a generation of skyscraper designers: tall buildings conceived as Nietzschean symbols of corporate power or, to put it more mundanely, architecture as advertising. Hood once pointed out that since modern office buildings would be amortized in only 20 years, architects had an opportunity to experiment. The Daily News is a robust pinnacle, with alternating vertical strips of masonry and glass. His final skyscraper, the McGraw-Hill Building, is a witty blue-green take on the International Style, complete with the company’s name in huge “Broadway” style lettering on the top. Hood was also one of the key designers in the team of architects responsible for Rockefeller Center. His influence is felt in the centerpiece tower, the 70-story cliff-like RCA Building. This twentieth-century abstracted version of medieval verticality is one of New York’s most evocative skyscrapers, unsurpassed since it was completed in 1934.
Bryant Park chronicles a hundred years of changing architectural fashions. Buildings are sometimes referred to as timeless, as if this were the highest praise one could bestow. That is nonsense. The best buildings, like the Chrysler or the New York Public Library or the RCA, are precisely of their time. That is part of the pleasure of looking at buildings from the past. They reflect old values and bygone virtues and vices: the self-confidence of the library, the cheerful boosterism of Chrysler, the sobriety of RCA. Even the bland goofiness of the Grace Building recalls the naïve optimism of an earlier era. That is why old buildings are precious, that is why we fight to preserve them. It is not only because we think them beautiful, or significant. It is also because they remind us of who we once were. And of who we might be again, for old buildings also inspire. The ruins of ancient Rome inspired the Renaissance architects. The palazzos of Renaissance Italy inspired Charles McKim. And the memory of McKim’s Pennsylvania Station inspired David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to transform McKim’s old Post Office Building into a projected railroad terminal for the city.
Sometimes old buildings inspire us, sometimes the opposite is true. We look at an old building and ask ourselves, “What on earth were those people thinking of?” I cannot warm to heroic public buildings of the 1960s, for example. It is more than 35 years since Lincoln Center was built, enough time for the buildings to mellow, yet I can’t summon any sympathy for the colonnaded brutes. The idea of putting three theaters under one roof must have been compelling at one time, but when I visit the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., all I see are miles of red carpeting in those Brobdingnagian lobbies. Yet, who knows? Perhaps one day a future generation will see something in these buildings that eludes me.
The Kennedy Center was criticized from the start, but the dazzling décor of Radio City Music Hall, which opened in 1932—in the midst of the Depression—guaranteed its immediate success. Radio City became the most famous theater in the country, the Rockettes the most famous chorus line, “live from Radio City” the most famous dateline. In the late 1950s, when I visited New York City as a boy with my parents, Radio City was still one of the obligatory tourist sites. What I don’t remember is ever learning about Radio City as an architecture student. According to the reductive standards of my International Style teachers, its opulent materials, its glowing colors, and its very theatricality disqualified Radio City as architecture (never mind that it was a technologically sophisticated “machine for entertainment”). It was dismissed as kitsch. By 1978, Radio City had lost its glamour, and the owners of Rockefeller Center decided to demolish the aging hall. Thanks to preservationists’ efforts, the hall was saved from demolition and granted landmark status. Now, 20 years later, freshened by a masterful restoration, it is once again acclaimed as a masterpiece.
Radio City Music Hall is a reminder that it is not buildings that change, but architectural fashions. What seemed exciting in one decade, looks gaudy, if not downright embarrassing, in the next—or simply boring. When old buildings are torn down, the motive may be expediency or crass commercialism, but it may also be a desire for something new. This is as true of buildings as it is of women’s hats, pace Le Corbusier.
•••
Fashion has increasingly—and restrictively—become a term used in connection with women’s dress, as in “fashion designer” or “the fashion industry.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines fashion more broadly as “the mode of dress, etiquette, furniture, style of speech, etc., adopted in a society for the time being.” People have to cut their hair, eat, clothe themselves, decorate their homes—fashion affects how they do these things. According to the French historian Fernand Braudel, fashion affects everything. “It covers ideas as much as costume, the current phrase as much as the coquettish gesture, the manner of receiving at table, the care taken in sealing a letter.”2 There is no reason to think that architecture is immune.
If style is the language of architecture, fashion represents the wide—and swirling—cultural currents that shape and direct that language. Gothic architecture originated in France in the twelfth century, and remained in fashion in Europe for the next three hundred years. It was used in the great cathedrals, and in such secular masterpieces as the Doge’s Palace in Venice, and the Westminster Hall in London. One of the last great Italian Gothic buildings was Milan Cathedral, begun in 1385. It was so large that the domical vault and crossing were not built until 55 years later by the great architect Filippo Brunelleschi. By then the Renaissance was well under way, thanks to Brunelleschi’s Foundling Hospital in Florence, generally considered the first building designed in the revived Classical style. With the rediscovery of Greek and Roman Classicism, Gothic became distinctly unfashionable. The old monuments were preserved, but they were not admired. “A fantastical and licentious manner of building,” is how Christopher Wren characterized Gothic architecture. So general was the dissatisfaction, that Gothic came to stand for anything that was considered wild, barbarous, or crude.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the term Gothic reappeared, not in architecture but in literature. The Gothic romance, a type of novel, was usually set in the medieval past and involved the fantastic and the supernatural. Jane Austen’s heroine in Northanger Abbey is a devotee of such books and spends many hours in “the luxury of a raised, restless, and frightened imagination over the pages of Udolpho.” Austen is referring to Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, one of the most popular Gothic romances of the day, whose setting is a mysterious castle in the Apennines. Such surroundings—monasteries, dungeons, castles—figured prominently in Gothic tales ever since Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, which was published in 1764 and is generally considered the first Gothic romance.
In her novel Austen pokes fun at the genre. The abbey of the title is not a haunted ruin in Italy but a converted medieval building in Gloucestershire, complete with modern fireplaces, comfortable furniture, and other domestic conveniences. This is a reminder that by 1798, when Northanger Abbey was written, the Gothic fashion had embraced architecture. Horace Walpole was responsible for that fashion, too. In the 1750s, he had begun a project to enlarge Strawberry Hill, his Thames-side villa near London. While his contemporaries built stately houses in a delicate Classical style that was popularized by Robert and James Adam, the young Walpole, who had an independent frame of mind, looked elsewhere for inspiration. He had been an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge and admired its extraordinary Gothic chapel. The exterior of his house was battlemented like a medieval castle. The interior combined historicism with a playful eclecticism. Motifs copied from medieval altar screens ornamented the rooms—stained glass was used in windows and papier-mâché fan-vaults covered the ceiling. Walpole’s extensive collection of historical and modern books, paintings, and curiosities was also mixed in.
Walpole, the Fourth Earl of Orford, spent his entire life enlarging his house. He eventually added a cloister, a gallery, and a tower. As he was an author and a public figure who corresponded with a wide circle of literary and artistic friends throughout Europe, the Gothic design of Strawberry Hill became famous among connoisseurs. (It also became a tourist attraction, much to Walpole’s chagrin.) Architects and their clients now saw medieval buildings as sources of inspiration, just as they had once looked to ancient Greece and Rome. The Gothic style became an established alternative for building country houses, and pointed arches appeared in décor and furniture. Gothic was “in” again.
The revived interest in the Middle Ages was complicated, for fashion is rarely one-dimensional. Gothic meant different things to different people (sometimes different things to the same people). Spooky Gothic novels appealed to readers. Medieval buildings appealed to the current taste for the romantic and the picturesque. Goethe’s 1772 essay on Strassburg Cathedral pointed the way; he admitted to being “a sworn enemy of the tangled arbitrariness of Gothick ornament,” but found himself overcome by the grandeur and mystery of the building, which he described as “a most sublime, wide-arching Tree of God.” The French architectural theorist Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, on the other hand, was attracted by what he interpreted as the rationalism of Gothic construction. So was his English counterpart, George Gilbert Scott, who considered Gothic more “modern” than Classical architecture, hence a more appropriate model for architects. Augustus Welby Pugin, who worked on the British Houses of Parliament, saw a moral dimension to Gothic. He considered medieval architecture to be the ideal of Christian civilization, much as Greece and Rome had been admired as the cradle of classical—but pagan—civilization. John Ruskin, too, considered Gothic a moral force, but since he also loved Venice, polychrome Ruskinian Gothic has many Italian overtones. This incongruity is particularly striking since in England especially (but also in France and Germany), the Gothic style was considered a homegrown product—as opposed to Mediterranean Classicism. This was another cultural appeal of Gothic: at a time of growing nationalism in northern Europe, it conveniently provided a “national” style.
In North America, Gothic was, if anything, even more popular. Canadians chose a British architect and the Gothic style for their Houses of Parliament, which stand on a dramatic bluff overlooking the Ottawa River. Anglophile Americans built Collegiate Gothic campuses, Gothic parish churches, and a Gothic National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Ralph Adams Cram, who was devoted to High Gothic, built the nave and west front of New York City’s Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, the largest Gothic structure in the world. Cram’s partner Bertram Goodhue used a looser Gothic style in the military academy at West Point, as did Cass Gilbert in the Woolworth Building—the so-called Cathedral of Commerce. By then the cultural attributes of Gothic had worn thin. Hood’s Chicago Tribune Building, completed in 1924, was one of the last prominent buildings designed in the Gothic style.
Gothic has not—so far—come back into fashion. Early in his career, Paul Rudolph designed a building for Wellesley College that attempted to relate architecturally to the Collegiate Gothic surroundings. It was his first large commission, and it was not a success. “Wellesley shook me,” Rudolph later recalled, “and I returned to the International Style in my next building.”3 Eero Saarinen built a Gothicized dormitory at Vasser. Philip Johnson and John Burgee designed a Gothic-inspired skyscraper in Pittsburgh that was a giant abstracted glass version of the British Houses of Parliament. This was one of several stylistic forays that Johnson and Burgee made in the 1980s, including a Chippendale-top skyscraper in New York, a French Provincial high-rise in Dallas, and a neo-Burnhamesque tower in Chicago. None is particularly satisfactory, perhaps because they lack conviction. Moshe Safdie’s National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa is more successful. It mimics the Gothic chapter house-cum-library of the adjacent parliament buildings in a crystalline structure of steel and glass. This episode in Safdie’s oeuvre was unique, however, and Gothicized forms do not reappear in his later buildings.
The Classical style has proved more durable. This has something to do with its remarkable adaptability. Whether building an administrative center for the British Raj or designing a station for the Pennsylvania Railroad workable solutions can be devised in the Classical tradition. The cultural overtones of the Classical style are even richer than those of Gothic; they include not only the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, but also Renaissance Italian humanism, seventeenth-century Parisian splendor, Georgian London elegance, and English country-house comfort. During the immediate postwar period monumental Classical buildings also acquired authoritarian associations, since they had been fashionable in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union. If Gothic was considered a national style by some English architects in the 1800s, Classicism, rooted in the early days of the Republic, has a claim to being America’s national style. This is most evident in Washington, D.C. Except for brief flirtations with Victorian Gothic (the Smithsonian) and functionalist modernism (the Air and Space Museum), Classicism has remained in fashion for federal buildings ever since the construction of the Palladian White House. Washingtonian Classicism has taken many guises, ranging from the Jefferson Memorial (a small version of the Pantheon), to the severely abstract Federal Reserve Board Building. The Federal Triangle and the recent Ronald W. Reagan Building are modern interpretations of the Classical tradition.
While the architecture of federal Washington sometimes overwhelms foreign visitors, it is comfortably familiar to most Americans because of the popularity of a simplified version of Classicism—the so-called American Colonial style, which could more accurately be called American Georgian. In furnishings, décor, and above all in house design, this has been the dominant domestic fashion for the last hundred years. The origin of American Colonial can be dated with some accuracy. January 1874 was the inaugural issue of The New York Sketchbook of Architecture. It was edited by a youthful Charles McKim. The purpose of the publication, McKim wrote, was to document in sketches and photographs, “the beautiful, quaint, and picturesque features which belong to so many buildings, now almost disregarded, of our Colonial and Revolutionary Period.” McKim and his new partners, William Mead and Stanford White, made several sketching trips in New England. They were designers, not preservationists, and their interest was the inspiration found in old buildings. White clapboard walls, black shutters, and pedimented porches started to appear in McKim, Mead & White houses. The 1876 Centennial celebrations made the American public aware of its ancestral past. On a practical level, the understated, comfortable Colonial style was well-suited to prevailing domestic taste. It was also easily—and inexpensively—adapted to small houses. American Colonial remained the height of fashion until the 1940s. In a simplified form—the Cape Cod cottage—it reappeared in postwar Levittowns. It continues today, although the clapboard siding may be vinyl, the columns polystyrene, and the stamped metal shutters more likely symbolic than real.
“The Tribune and Radiator Buildings are both in the ‘vertical’ style or what is called ‘Gothic’ simply because I happened to make them so,” Raymond Hood once flippantly explained. “If at the time of designing them I had been under the spell of Italian campaniles or Chinese pagodas, I suppose the resulting compositions would have been ‘horizontal.’ ”4 Hood was no more comfortable discussing style than other architects. He left unexplained the question of what had put him “under the spell” of Gothic in the first place. It had happened early: Hood’s senior thesis at M.I.T.—he later also studied at the Ecole—had been a church in the Gothic style; his first employer was the Gothicist Ralph Adams Cram; and Hood assisted Bertram Goodhue on West Point. Later in life, Hood occasionally returned to the Gothic style, notably in the handsome Masonic Temple and Scottish Rite Cathedral in Scranton, Pennsylvania, but he never explained what broke the spell and led him to a more abstract style.
Like any successful architect, Hood had a strong sense of his changing time. It is easy to misunderstand the nature of that change. The abstraction that characterizes the Daily News Building and the RCA Building has little to do with new technology or changing functions. Those buildings are not any more “modern” than the Chicago Tribune tower, which had gargoyles and flying buttresses but was an advanced building in terms of planning and technology. Indeed, Hood’s Gothic design was more functionally advanced than Eliel Saarinen’s stylistically progressive second-place entry. It was not commodity and firmness that drove the changing aesthetic, but fashion. The public had a taste for simpler, forward-looking design, of which the International Style was but one expression. Art Deco, streamlined modern, and stripped Classicism were evidence of the same changing taste. Many industrial products of the 1930s displayed the same chic simplicity: Raymond Loewy’s curvilinear Coldspot refrigerator, Walter Dorwin Teague’s popular Kodak Brownie camera, Henry Dreyfuss’ Bell telephone, Loewy’s redesigned Coca-Cola bottle and the sleek Zippo cigarette lighter.
The medieval inventors of the Gothic style were likewise influenced by fashion. In the twelfth century, European cathedral builders abandoned the tried-and-true round arch in favor of the pointed arch. This change cannot be explained by functional or structural requirements, since the pointed arch provides only marginal structural advantages; and round-arch technology is perfectly capable of building tall naves, as Durham Cathedral and other magnificent Romanesque churches demonstrate. Cathedral builders obviously found something delightful in the pointed arch, which they used not only as a structural form, but in window tracery, in wood paneling, and even in choir-stall furniture and liturgical accessories. “[Gothic] was seized upon as essential not because it was materially essential, but because the pointed arch struck that note of fantasy which was what the mind of the age desired,” explains John Summerson. “It willfully destroyed the discipline of the round arch, which had become an incubus and a bore.”5 A note of fantasy? A bore? At this point, the eminent architectural historian sounds like a Harper’s Bazaar fashion critic.
Architectural reputations, as well as architecture, come under fashion’s sway. Hood, Ely Jacques Kahn, and Ralph Walker (the architect of the Irving Trust Building on Wall Street), all small men, were dubbed the “Three Little Napoleons of Architecture” by The New Yorker. Riding high in the 1920s, their careers were cut short by the Depression—Hood’s more so, since he died in 1934, only 53 years old. Rockefeller Center continued to be admired by the public, but because of his freewheeling approach to design, Hood was marginalized by modernist architectural historians. He was never forgiven for winning the Chicago Tribune competition and beating not only Saarinen, but such European avant-gardists as Adolf Loos, Bruno Taut, and even Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus and the guiding light of the International Style. Yet if I compare Hood’s RCA Building with Gropius’s Pan Am (today MetLife) Building, there is little doubt who was the more creative designer.
Looking at that monolith, bestriding Park Avenue without charm or grace, it is easy to forget that Gropius was once considered one of the great architects of the twentieth century. Architectural memory can be fickle. Thomas Ustick Walter is not a household name, but it should be—he was the architect of the U.S. Capitol dome, probably one of the most powerful symbols of American democracy. The Lincoln Memorial, designed by Henry Bacon, is another famous architectural icon. Bacon died in 1924, only two years after the memorial was dedicated, so he did not see the Classicism that he had learned at McKim’s knee slip out of fashion. At least Walter and Bacon were feted during their lifetimes. Edward Durrell Stone, an International Style wunderkind, developed an unfashionable interest in decoration at a time when architectural austerity was in vogue. And although he received large commissions (including the Kennedy Center for the Arts), he finished his career ignored if not actually ridiculed. In the mid-1960s, Paul Rudolph was probably the most promising young architect in the country. His robustly monumental Art and Architecture Building at Yale, where he was also chairman, reinvigorated postwar American architecture. A decade later, heroic monumentalism was out and Postmodernism was in. Although Rudolph continued to receive commissions in Asia, he was slighted in his own country. His contemporaries Gordon Bunshaft and Kevin Roche were awarded the Pritzker Prize, but Rudolph was passed over. By the time he died in 1997, he was virtually forgotten.
Yet Rudolph, a gifted designer, may be admitted to the architectural pantheon one day. Architectural reputations can rise and fall and rise again. The nineteenth-century Philadelphia architect Frank Furness designed Ruskinian Gothic buildings whose lively eclecticism anticipates James Stirling. Furness, an exceptional individual who won a Congressional Medal of Honor during the Civil War, dominated the Philadelphia architectural scene for 20 years. In 1891 he completed the University of Pennsylvania Library, a widely acclaimed brick and terracotta building with a dramatic four-story-high reading room. After the turn-of-the-century, with Classicism all the rage, Furness’ idiosyncratic brand of architecture became unfashionable. Although he lived until 1912, his practice languished. In time he was entirely forgotten, many of his buildings were demolished, others insensitively altered. As for the library, its tall reading room was crudely truncated by a suspended ceiling. In the 1950s, there was a revival of interest in Furness, which narrowly saved the library from demolition. Today, after a careful restoration, the library is unquestionably the best-loved building on the University of Pennsylvania campus—something about the spiky decoration and the willfully manipulated forms appeals to current sensibility. Furness has found an audience again.
The fate of Rudolph and Furness is a reminder that although architecture is susceptible to fashion, architects are not fashion designers. “I do not design a new architecture every Monday morning,” Mies van der Rohe is reputed to have said. This is often taken as a reflection of his serious commitment to his art. It was that, but it was something else, too. He might as well have said, “I cannot design a new architecture every Monday morning.” The Seagram Building is a masterpiece, not because Mies had a sudden inspiration, but because he had spent decades learning how to bring commodity, firmness, and delight into his particular version of balance; how to attach the travertine to the wall to create a particular effect; which metal fabricator could make a certain kind of handrail; and exactly how deep to make a window mullion to cast the right size of shadow. Buildings are extremely complicated artifacts, and the time necessary to cultivate and refine a particular manner of building cannot be underestimated. This is especially true when the manner of building is personal or unusual, as it was in the case of both Furness and Rudolph. They were not simply being stubborn or high-minded when they refused to adapt to changing fashions, they were being realistic.
Morris Lapidus is an architect who has lived long enough to see architectural fashions come full circle. In the 1950s, Lapidus designed many of the largest hotels in the Miami area: the Fontainebleau, the Americana, the Eden Roc. His flamboyant, eclectic designs were ridiculed by the architectural establishment, although they were popular with the public. Today, in a period of so-called entertainment architecture, when the world’s most celebrated architects design theme parks and casinos, Lapidus seems less like a maverick than a pioneer. “The father of us all,” Philip Johnson called him, with only slight exaggeration.
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Architecture changes at a bewildering pace. Consider only the last 50 years of museum design. The National Gallery of Art (1937-41) in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art (1937-39) in New York City are almost exact contemporaries. In the MoMA design, Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone ignored the Classical tradition represented by John Russell Pope’s masterpiece. MoMA’s entrance was not up a broad flight of exterior steps but through a revolving door. Goodwin and Stone replaced the monumental rotunda by a nondescript lobby, the lofty galleries by low-ceilinged loft spaces, and limestone and marble by stucco and plasterboard. MoMA was to be the last word in avant-garde International Style, but it was scarcely finished when it was challenged by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum (1943-58), which rejected the banality of the white box by squeezing the entire museum into a dramatic sculptural spiral. Nothing could be further from the International Style than the mollusk-like exterior (especially if it had been tinted rose-red, as Wright initially wanted). In the Yale Center for British Art (1969-77), Louis I. Kahn likewise incorporated central skylit spaces, but he disavowed Wright’s loud anti-urban exterior by hugging the sidewalk and clothing his building in drab stainless steel panels. Kahn preached taming technology by consigning it to so-called servant spaces; in the Centre Georges Pompidou (1971-77), Piano and Rogers stood Kahn’s dictum on its head and gave the servants the run of the house. In the Neue Staatsgalerie (1977-83), James Stirling cheekily lifted architectural elements from both the Pompidou and the Guggenheim and combined them with a variety of historical styles. I. M. Pei’s impeccably crafted East Building of the National Gallery of Art (1976-78) in Washington, D.C., had not one exposed bolt, not one allusion to the past. Pei rejected both Stirling’s eclecticism and Piano and Rogers’ technological posturing. Instead he relied on abstract geometry for architectural effect. Frank O. Gehry’s California Aerospace Museum (1982-84) in Los Angeles is no less abstract and geometrical, but his forms bump and grind into each other almost as if by accident. “I really enjoy the awkwardness with which [the forms] touch,” Gehry observed, “as it reminds me of the cities we live in and the kind of awkwardnesses of city buildings sitting next to each other.”6 The cost of the East Building was $94.4 million; the Aerospace Museum was built on a tight budget of only $3.4 million. Lacking money for refinement, Gehry turned awkwardness into a virtue, and in the process disowned Pei’s fastidious brand of modernism. He was carefree where Pei was careful, spontaneous where Pei was studied, brash where Pei was genteel. The Aerospace Museum was clearly not a cheaper version of the East Building, it was something different.
“Fashion is also a search for a new language to discredit the old,” writes Fernand Braudel, “a way in which each generation can repudiate its immediate predecessor and distinguish itself from it.”7 This puts fashion in the right light: it may be fleeting, but it is not frivolous. As Braudel suggests, changes in fashion imply not only the creation of something new, but the destruction of something old. That is why new fashions are inevitably upsetting. Whether one is wearing a lounge-suit instead of a frock coat, or turning a baseball cap backwards, someone else is bound to be insulted. No less so in architecture. Replacing an Ionic column with a steel I-beam, or exposing air-conditioning ducts, or using common materials in uncommon ways are calculated affronts to honored conventions. “We are not like our fathers,” the architects say, “we are different.”
