The Apostates
AS HE TOLD THE STORY, EDWARD DURELL STONE, ONE OF the earliest of the International Style architects in America, boarded an airplane from New York to Paris one night in 1953 and found himself sitting next to a woman named Maria Elena Torchio. Her father was an Italian architect; her mother was from Barcelona; and Maria, Stone liked to say, was “explosively Latin.” He fell in love with her over the Atlantic and proposed to her over the English Channel. She didn’t fall so fast. For a start, she thought his clothes looked like a college professor’s. She wasn’t wild about his buildings, either. Very careful buildings, they were, very restrained, a bit cold, a bit lifeless, if the truth were known … not very explosively Latin …
In 1954 Stone married Maria Elena Torchio and changed his style completely and created the luxurious and ornamental design of the American Embassy in New Delhi, with its terrazzo grilles of concrete and marble, its steel columns finished with gold leaf, its water garden traversed by curvilinear islands, isles, and islets. He thought of the embassy as his “Taj Maria.” What happened to Stone in the architectural world after the unveiling of the Taj—gold leaf?—gives us a picture of the other side of compound passion. It shows us the fate of the apostate.
Stone was the man who had designed the first International Style house built on the East Coast, the Mandel House in Mount Kisco, New York, in 1933. (An Austrian emigré, Richard Neutra, had built one in Los Angeles, the Lovell House, in 1928.) In 1934 Stone built his second International Style house in Mount Kisco, the Kowalski House, and the community rose up and changed the local building codes to put an end to the baffling infestation. So far, so good; a little flushing out of the philistines served one well in the compound. Stone’s credentials were s impeccable, in fact, that the Museum of Modern Art chose him as architect, along with Philip L. Goodwin, for its building on West Fifty-third Street, just off Fifth Avenue, on a site where the townhouses of both John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and John D. Himself had stood. Here would be the museum’s own exemplary building to show all New York the International Style. Stone had been chosen to devise the object lesson, the very flagship, of Utopia, Ltd.
The moment the New Delhi embassy was unveiled, Stone was dropped like an embezzler by le monde of fashionable architecture, which is to say, the university-based world of the European compounds. Gold here and luxurious there and marbled and curvilinear everywhere … How very bour—No, it was bourgeois ne plus ultra. There was no way that even Mies himself, master of the bronze wide-flange beam, could have argued his way out of a production like this one. What made it more galling was that Stone didn’t even try. He kissed off the International Style. To critics of his Kennedy Center in Washington, a vastly enlarged version of his Taj Maria, Stone retorted that it represented “twenty-five hundred years of Western culture rather than twenty-five years of modern architecture.” The man was not even a backslider. He was an apostate pure and simple. He had renounced the fundamental principles.
The fate of the apostate, classically, is that curse known as anathema. Within the world of architecture, among those in a position to build or dismantle reputations, every building Stone did thereafter was buried in anathematism. When the Museum of Modern Art decided to build an addition on West Fifty-third Street, there was not one chance in a thousand that Stone was going to be chosen to add to his own building. The job went to the most fashionable of all the American compound architects, Philip Johnson, now a graduate of the Harvard school of architecture, albeit still at the feet of the Silver Prince. In one of American art history’s nicer turns of plot, Stone was chosen instead by Huntington Hartford to design his Gallery of Modern Art nine blocks away at Columbus Circle. Hartford was a maverick on the art scene, a collector of the Pre-Raphaelites and Salvador Dalì, to mention but two of his unfashionable tastes. He was building his museum specifically to challenge Utopia, Ltd., and all its works. I can remember vividly the automatic sniggers, the rolling of the eyeballs, that mention of Stone’s building for Hartford set off at that time. The reviews of the architectural critics were bad enough. But not even such terms as “Kitsch for the rich” and “Marble Lollipops” convey the poisonous mental atmosphere in which Stone now found himself. He was reduced, at length, to saying things such as, “Every taxi driver in New York will tell you it’s his favorite building.” After so much! after a life-time!—to be hounded, finally, to the last populist refuge of a Mickey Spillane or a Jacqueline Susann … O Lord! Anathema!
The Two Stones. 1939: Edward Durell Stone, true believer, does the Museum of Modern Art’s building.
1964: Edward Durrell Stone, apostate, does Huntington Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art. “Marble Lollipops!” screamed the true believers.
One will note that Stone’s business did not collase following his apostasy, merely his prestige. The Taj Maria did wonders for his practice in a commercial sense. After all, the International Style was well hated even by those who commissioned it. There were still others ready to go to considerable lengths not to have to deal with it in the first place. They were happy enough to find an architect with modernist credentials, even if they had lapsed, who was willing to give them something else. But in terms of his reputation within the fraternity, Stone was poison. He was beyond serious consideration. He had removed himself from the court. He was out of the game.
Eero Saarinen’s experience was similar, although the hostility was not nearly so virulent. Saarinen was of noble modernist-architecture lineage. His father, Eliel, was a Finnish architect often compared to the Vienna Secessionists. Saarinen had been a conventional International Style architect until 1956, when he designed the Trans World Airlines terminal at Idlewild Airport (now Kennedy) in New York. The building was made of the conventional materials, glass, steel, and concrete, but it looked unmistakably like … an eagle. His Dulles Airport building in Washington was an even more flamboyant bird-in-flight sculpture with pagoda overtones … His Ingalls ice-hockey rink at Yale looked like a whale or a turtle. (Not the first animals that ice hockey might bring to mind, but so be it.) In Saarinen’s case, the curvilinear shapes were the least of it. The man had lapsed into some sort of Hindu zoömorphism. Saarinen had decided to go his own way, in a frank bid to become the unique genius of twentieth-century architecture. He said he would like “a place in architectural history.” He had picked the wrong era. There were geniuses in architecture, but they could not be unique. They had to be part of a compound, part of a “consensus,” to use one of Mies’ terms. The world of the compounds simply watched him disappear into the zoömorphic swamp mists. He was seldom attacked directly, the way Stone was. He was shut out from serious consideration, and that was that. I can remember writing a piece for the magazine Architecture Canada in which I mentioned Saarinen in terms that indicated the man was worthy of study. I ran into one of New York’s best-known architectural writers at a party, and he took me aside for some fatherly advice.
“I enjoyed your piece,” he said, “and I agreed with your point, in principle. But I have to tell you that you are only hurting your own cause if you use Saarinen as an example. People just won’t take you seriously. I mean, Saarinen …
The winged roof of Eero Saarinen’s Dulles International Airport (top) and the eagle shape of his TWA terminal infuriated modernists. Originality in design had become a cardinal sin.
I wish there were some way I could convey the look on his face. It was that cross between a sneer and a shrug that the French are so good at, the look that says the subject is so outré, so infra dig, so de la boue, one can’t even spend time analyzing it without having some of the rubbish rub off.
The principle illustrated by the Saarinen case was: no architect could achieve a major reputation outside the compounds, which were now centered in the universities. The architect who insisted on going his own way stood no chance of being hailed as a pioneer of some important new direction. At best, he could hope to be regarded as an eccentric, like Saarinen magazinelahoma architects Bruce Goff and Herbert Greene. (Oklahoma wasn’t too terrific a vantage point in the first place.) At worst he would be the apostate, covered in anathema, like Stone.”
STONE AND SAARINEN, LIKE FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND Goff and Greene, were too American, which meant both too parochial (not part of the International Style) and too bourgeois. Somehow they actually catered to the hog-stomping Baroque exuberance of American civilization. When Stone designed the Kennedy Center in Washington with a lobby six stories high and six hundred and thirty feet long—so big, as one journalist pointed out, that Mickey Mantle’s mightiest home run would have been just another long fly ball—it was regarded as an obscenity. Stone was actually playing up to American megalomania. He was encouraging the barbaric yawps. He was glorifying The Client’s own grandiose sentiments.
It was difficult to say all this in so many words, of course. Hence the shrugs and that look, which still flourishes today. How else to deal with the barbaric yawps of the major hotel architects, such as Morris Lapidus and John Portman? Probably no architects ever worked harder to capture the spirit of American wealth and glamour after the Second World War than these two men: Lapidus, with his Americana and Eden Roc hotels in Miami Beach; Portman, with his Hyatts all across the country. Their work was so striking and so large in scale it was impossible for their fellow architects to ignore it. So they gave it that look. Portman received the shrug and that look. Lapidus received that look and a snigger.
Lapidus had started off his career in the theater and had gone to Columbia to study architecture, with the idea of becoming a set designer. He wound up an architect. He had not been detained for even a moment by debates over honest materials and unconcealed structure. His vision remained theatrical from beginning to end. He had a Rimsky-Korsakov American approach that was as thorough, as monolithic, in its way as the Gropius approach in its way. When Lapidus did a resort hotel, he designed everything, down to the braid on the waiters’ jackets, even though the developers were seldom meticulous in carrying out such details. His lobby for the Americana Hotel in Miami Beach, with its tropical forest stuffed in a great glass cone, haunch-to-paunch with a Two Weeks in Florida version of the grand staircase at the Paris Opéra—well, here was the lush life, postwar America, in a single great and gaudy image.
In 1970 Lapidus’ work was selected as the subject of an Architectural League of New York show and panel discussion entitled “Morris Lapidus: Architecture of Joy.” Ordinarily this was an honor. In Lapidus’ case it was hard to say what it was. I was asked to be on the panel—probably, as I look back on it, with the hope that I might offer a “pop” perspective. (This word, “pop,” had already come to be one of the curses of my life.) The evening took on an uneasy, rather camp atmosphere—uneasy, because Lapidus himself had turned up in the audience. His work was being regarded not so much as architecture as a pop phenomenon, like Dick Tracy or the Busby Berkeley movies. I kept trying to put in my two cents’ worth about the general question of portraying American power, wealth, and exuberance in architectural form. I might as well have been talking about numerology in the Yucatán. The initial camp rush had passed, and the assembled architects began to give Lapidus’ work a predictable going-over. At the end, Lapidus himself stood up and said that the Soviets had once asked him to come to Russia and design some public housing and that they had been highly pleased with the results. Then he sat down. Nobody could quite figure it out, unless he was making a desperate claim of redeeming social significance … that might make him less radioactive in an architectural world given over to hotels, luxury highrises, schools, and corporate headquarters in the style of worker housing.
John Portman, meantime, has become the Lapidus of today. His enormous Babylonian ziggurat hotels, with their thirty-story atriums and hanging gardens and crystal elevators, have succeeded, more than any other sort of architecture, in establishing the look of Downtown, of Urban Glamour in the 1970s and 1980s. But within the university compounds—it is not so much that he is attacked … as that he does not exist. He is invisible. He takes on the uncertain contours of the folk architect. He becomes a highly commercial (and therefore unredeemable) version of Simon Rodia, who built the Watts Towers. What was a Hyatt Atrium Ziggurat, anyway, but a Watts Tower production with the assistance of mortgage brokers and automatic elevators?
Within the university compounds there was no way for an architect to gain prestige through an architecture that was wholly unique or specifically American in spirit. Not even Wright could do it—not even Wright, with the most prodigious outpouring of work in the history of American architecture. From 1928 to 1935, only two Wright buildings were constructed. But in 1935 he did Fallingwater, a home for Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr., father of one of his apprentices. This structure of concrete slabs, anchored in rock and cantilevered out over a waterfall in the Pennsylvania highlands, was the start of the final phase of Wright’s career. He was sixty-eight years old at the time. In the next twenty-three years, until his death at the age of ninety-one in 1959, he did more than half of his life’s work, more than 180 buildings, including the Johnson Wax headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, Herbert F. Johnson’s mansion, Wingspread, Taliesin West, the Florida Southern campus, the Usonian homes, the Price Company Tower, and the Guggenheim Museum. Within the university compounds this earned Wright a reputation like Andrew Wyeth’s in the world of painting: okay, for a back number.
The atrium lobby of John Portman’s Hyatt Regency O’Hare Hotel near O’Hare Airport, Chicago. Portman’s American exuberance was more than the sons of the Silver Prince could stomach.
In a way, the very productivity of a man like Wright, Portman, or Stone counted against him, given the new mental atmosphere in the universities. Oh, it was easy enough, one supposed, to go out into the marketplace and wheedle and vamp and dance for clients and get buildings to do. But the brave soul was he who remained within the compound, stayed within the university orbit, and risked the first ten or twenty years of his career in intellectual competition, doing the occasional small building, where a convenient opportunity presented itself, in the Corbu manner: a summer house for a friend, an addition to some faculty member’s house, and—if all else failed—that old standby, the retirement home for Mother, which she paid for. It was no longer enough to build extraordinary buildings to show the world. The world could wait. It was now necessary to win in the competition that took place solely within and between the world of academic architecture.
For that matter, in most of the higher arts in America prestige s now determined by European-style clerisies. By the mid-1960s, painting was a truly advanced case. The Abstract Expressionists had held on as the ruling compound for about ten years, but then new theories, new compounds, new codes began succeeding one another in a berserk rush. Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism, Hard Edge, Color Field, Earth Art, Conceptual Art—the natural bias of the compounds toward arcane and baffling went beyond all known limits. The spectacle was crazy, but young artists tended to believe—correctly—that it was impossible to achieve major status without joining in the game. In the field of serious music, the case was even more advanced; in fact, it was very nearly terminal. Within the university compounds, composers had become so ultra-Schoenbergian, so exquisitely abstract, that no one from the outside world any longer had the slightest interest in, much less comprehension of, what was going on. In the cities, not even that Gideon’s army known as “the concert-going public” could be drawn to an all-contemporary program. They took place only in university concert halls. Here on the campus the program begins with Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” followed by one of Stockhausen’s early compositions, “Punkte,” then Babbitt’s Ensembles for Synthesizer, a little Easley Blackwood and Jean Barraqué for a change of pace, then the committed plunge into a random-note or, as they say, “stochastic” piece for piano, brass, Moog synthesizer, and computer by Iannis Xenakis. The program winds up with James P. Johnson’s “You Gotta Be Modernistic.” Joplin and Johnson, of course, are as cozy and familiar as a lullaby, but they are essential to the program. The same thirty-five or forty souls, all of them faculty members and graduate students, make up the audience at every contemporary musical event. The unspeakable fear is that not even they will show up unless promised a piece of candy at the beginning and a piece of candy at the end. Joplin and Johnson numbers are okay because both men were black and were not appreciated as serious composers in their own day.
Choreographers had been slow in comprehending the idea of the compound, perhaps since dance had always seemed, by its very nature, representational. But by the 1960s they had made up for lost time. George Balanchine, the Russian choreographer who emigrated to the U.S. via Paris in 1934, was putting on abstract, neoclassical ballet at Lincoln Center by 1962. Choreographers such as Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer set about removing all traces of sexuality from dance, even in the simple sense of male and female roles, all traces of narrative, scenery, and costume, even all traces of music as a source of dance tempo. In fact, people in all the arts seemed obsessed with creating clerisies, with baffling the bourgeoisie, no matter how unlikely the prospects. For example, photography had always seemed to be a form of expression with an implacable obviousness to it. But photographers and their theorists, such as John Szarkowski, curator of photography at Utopia, Ltd., began to find a way around this impediment. Hadn’t Braque called for recognition of the fact that painting was nothing more than an arrangement of forms and colors on a flat surface? Which is to say, hadn’t he made a virtue out of what had always seemed a shortcoming? Of course, he had. So Szarkowski & Co. now made a virtue of what had always been regarded as photography’s flaws: blurring, grotesque foreshortenings, untrue colors, images chopped off by the edge of the film frame, and so on. They achieved their goal; they managed to make photography utterly baffling to those unwilling to come inside the compound and learn the theories and the codes.
Clerisy! The compound! The codes! The new arcana! The European fashion proved irresistible. Even among novelists. The strong suits of American fiction in the twentieth century had ben the realistic novel and the realistic short story. The American realistic novel of the 1930s had achieved considerable prestige in Europe, precisely because of its rude animal vigor. The American realists seemed as free and dionysian as the jazz musicians. But by the late 1960s the most talented young American writers in the universities—and few new writers came from anywhere else—now tended to look upon the realistic novel as a hopelessly primitive and out-of-date form. They set about expunging all realistic dialogue, local color, social issues, or other slices of real life from their work. They sought to write modern fables after the manner of the contemporary European masters, such as Kafka, Zamyatin, and the playwrights Pinter and Beckett.
The twentieth century, the American century, was now two-thirds over—and the colonial complex was stronger than ever. Young philosophers in the universities were completely bowled over by the French vogue for so-called analytical approaches to philosophy, such as Structuralism and Deconstructivism. The idea was that the old “idealistic” concerns of nineteenth-century philosophy—God, Freedom, Immortality, Man’s Fate—were hopelessly naïve and bourgeois. The proper concern of philosophy was the nature of meaning. Which is to say, the proper concern of philosophy was the arcana of the philosophical clerisy itself. In an era in which wars had become so all-encompassing they were known as world wars—in which people were now concentrated in metropolises of a scale and complexity never before envisioned by man—in which collisions of the races began to shake the stability of the globe—in which man had usurped the godly power to plunge the world into destruction—in such an era, what was the overriding concern of American philosophers? Why, it was the same as that of the French philosophers whom they idolized. By day, Structuralists constructed the structure of meaning and pondered the meaning of structure. By night, Deconstructivists pulled the cortical edifice down. And the next day the Structuralists started in again …
O faithful colonial yeomen!
It was not necessary for even the most highly educated person to be troubled for very long by contemporary philosophy, painting, or music. In the case of music, it was obvious that he need not be troubled at all. But the case of architecture was quite different. There was no way whatsoever to avoid the fashions of the architectural compounds, no matter how esoteric they might become. In architecture, intellectual fashion was displayed fifty to a hundred stories high in the cities and in endless de Chirico vistas in the shopping malls of the new American suburbs.
O worker housing.