Silver-White, Silver-Gray
IN 1973 THE VENTURI, OR POP, ARCHITECTS TOOK ON THE Whites in an attack that, in the planning stage, seemed like a great lark. This was a piece called “Five on Five,” published in Architectural Forum. The idea was that five architects from the Venturi wing—Moore, Stern, Jaquelin Robertson, Allan Greenberg, and Romaldo Giurgola—would review Five Architects. Stern led off with a piece entitled “Stompin’ at the Savoye.” Most of Stern’s teammates opened their rounds with a few bows and feints of professional courtesy, but Stern got into the spirit of the fight right off. He described Colin Rowe as the Five’s “intellectual guru,” a man stuck in “the hothouse aesthetics of the 1920s,” faithful to “the most questionable aspects of Le Corbusier’s philosophy”—and resentful of Vincent Scully’s accurate claim that Venturi existed on a plane with Le Corbusier as a “form-giver.” He said Hejduk was doing the only thing his designs were good for: “paper architecture.” As for Eisenman, his theorizing gave Stern “a headache,” and his houses were a “superfluity of walls, beams and columns” that added up not to “deep structure” but to claustrophobia. He called Graves and Meier “compulsively modern” and found Meier capable of doing “lumpish” work besides. Robertson tried to be generous and balanced in dealing with the work of Meier and Gwathmey, but when he got to Graves, he couldn’t hold back anymore. In Graves, he said, one came upon all that was “weak” and “wrong-headed” in Neo-Corbu. His houses were “crawling inside and out with a sort of nasty modern ivy in the way of railings, metal trellises, unexplained pipes, exposed beams, inexplicable and obtuse tubes—most to no apparent real or architectural purpose.”
The Whites screamed in protest. They screamed so bitterly that never again have American architects attacked one another head-on in print. They screamed, but in fact the Venturi Five had done them a great favor. They had made the Whites seem like one of two great armies battling on the plains of heaven for the soul of the modern movement. The very future of American architecture seemed to hang in the balance of the combat between the Whites and the Pop architects, or Venturians or Yale–Philadelphia Axis … or whatever they should be called. Somebody came up with “the Grays,” which was simpler. So it became the Whites versus the Grays. That was all you heard in the universities, the Whites vs. the Grays; the young architects began to choose up sides. The fact that both sides remained obedient to the tenets of modernism tended to be lost in the excitement.
The younger European architects couldn’t believe what was happening. Those eternal colonials, those most obedient natives, the Americans, had stolen the lead in, of all things, architectural theory. They were having a great time for themselves, even in the midst of the commercial slump in the profession. The same slump had hit European architecture. In some respects, it had been even worse. Private commissions scarcely existed any longer. Architects sat about nibbling at government feasibility studies, anything. Why not do what the Americans were doing? A theoretical architect could make a reputation without commissions. At the very least, he might obtain lectureships, and his drawings might be worth money.
For whatevereason, the Rationalists were born at this moment. The leading Rationalists were an Italian, Aldo Rossi, a Spaniard, Ricardo Bofill, and two brothers from Luxembourg, Leon and Robert Krier. The Rationalists were like the Whites in that they believed that the true and inevitable way of modernism was to go back to first principles. But they felt the Whites had not gone back far enough. The Rationalists liked to go back to the eighteenth century at least; and the early Renaissance was best of all. The Rationalists wanted to do pre-nineteenth-century buildings—stripped of all bourgeois ornament. The idea was that they were going back before the industrial revolution, back before capitalism; which is to say, back before capitalism could pollute architecture with its corruption.
The Marxist mist enveloping Rationalism was even denser, muggier, and more sentimental than the one that enveloped the Structuralists. The Rationalists had the romantic proletcult notion that the master craftsmen of the Renaissance built from out of the natural and inevitable impulses of the people, as if out of some sort of structuralism of the motor reflexes. The fact that these buildings were generally commissioned and paid for by kings, despots, dukes, pontiffs, and other autocrats didn’t matter. At least, they weren’t capitalists.
Soon the Rationalists were adding a certain primitive zest to architectural debate. At architectural conferences in the United States, they went about yelling “Immoral!” at everyone they disagreed with. They were embarrassing but fascinating. Venturi made them furious. “Immoral!” Venturi extolled the very gutter of capitalism in its modern phase, namely, the commercial strip. “Immoral! Corrupt! American!”
As for their own work, it looked … well, oddly Fascist. In both Italy and Germany, Fascist architecture had featured Classical designs with the applied ornament removed or conventionalized. When Rationalists like Leon Krier were reminded of this, they became unglued. Fascist or not, Aldo Rossi’s work was eerie. With the architraves, lintels, compound arches, and the like removed, his Renaissance windows ended up as rather lugubrious shaded voids. Soon the Rationalists were known as the Rats.
British architects tended to be skeptical of the theorizing, but they were intrigued all the same. A young American architect, Charles Jencks, something of a Venturi–Moore man in his own work, went to England and published a book called The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, which catalogued and analyzed all the new currents. Whatever his status as an architect, he immediately established himself as the wittiest and most knowledgeable architectural writer in the business. The term Post-Modernism caught on as the name for all developments since the general exhaustion of modernism itself. As Jencks himself remarked with some felicity, Post-Modernism was perhaps too comforting a term. It told you what you were leaving without committing you to any particular destination. He was right. The new term itself tended to create the impression that modernism was over because it had been superseded by something new. In fact, the Post-Modernists, whether Whites, Grays, or Rats, had never emerged from the spare little box fashioned in the 1920s by Gropius, Corbu, and the Dutchmen. For the most part, they were busy doing nothing more than working changes on the same tight little concepts, now sixty years old, for the benefit of one another.
Apartments in Milan, 1970, by the pride of the Rats, Aldo Rossi. Bourgeois-proofed architecture for the European school of holyrolling, foot-washing, primitive Marxis.
IN MAY OF 1980 ONE OF THE WHITES, MICHAEL GRAVES, professor of architecture at Princeton, was the lone architect amid thirty-seven artists, composers, and writers receiving awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters at their annual ceremonies at the Academy’s grand auditorium in New York. Graves stepped forward from his seat onstage and received the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize for Architecture. Seventeen awards later, Gordon Bunshaft, now seventy-one and an elder of the Institute, was called on to read the citations for five painters and hand out envelopes with checks inside. After disbursing the last of them, Bunshaft turned toward the audience and said:
“I suppose this is something you don’t see every day, an architect handing out money to artists.”
The audience laughed faintly, acknowledging that a pleasantry had been attempted but not quite getting it.
“But, then, a lot of things have changed,” said Bunshaft. “We used to give prizes to architects for doing buildings. Now we give prizes to architects for drawing pictures.”
Then he sat down. Not a peep out of the audience. Only a few souls—compound architects one and all—had the faintest notion of what he meant. Bunshaft had made no mention of Graves, who was seated behind him on the stage, nor did he look his way. But Graves was the only architect who had received an award, and furthermore it was true: he had won the award for drawings. Or, rather, for his drawings, for his theories, and for his status as Princeton’s resident White, or Neo-Purist. Not for buildings, in any event. You could count Graves’ built structures on one hand. “Structures”—an addition here, an alteration there, and a few small houses. They all looked like Gerrit Rietveld on a terrific bender, thanks to the inexplicable “modern ivy” of railings, tubes, and beams Robertson had complained about.
But so what! In the new mental atmosphere, in modern architecture’s Scholastic phase, Graves’ career shone with an unmistakable radiance. There was something sordid about doing a lot of building. Even among the Whites, the New York Five, Gwathmey and Meier were spoken of, sotto voce, as the light-weights, chiefly because they had going practices and actually made money from architecture. Meier ranked above Gwathmey because, in addition to building buildings, he taught at Harvard and enunciated suitably obscure theories. They were not so profoundly obscure as Graves’, however. When Graves talked about “the multiple readings inherent in a code of abstraction” and “a level of participation that involves the reciprocal act of ourselves with the figure of the building,” he almost achieved the Structuralist heights of Eisenman. (Almost, but not quite; Eisenman had managed to become perfectly obscure.) The Graves approach was known and talked about in the architecture department of every important university in the country. His watercolor renderings of his own unbuilt buildings were mauve, blue, swift, and terribly beautiful, like a storm. Corbu! One had only to say “Michael,” as his friends called him, and every aspiring architect on the circuit knew it was Michael Graves.
The sort of Corbusier-style drawing for which Graves is famous: a proposed Cultural Center Bridge across the Red River, between Fargo, North Dakota, and Moorhead, Minnesota.
You couldn’t say the same about Gordon Bunshaft—despite the scores of behemoth glass buildings he had designed or inspired. Within the university compounds you could say “Gordon” or even “Gordon Bunshaft,” and all you would get would be a look as heavily glazed as Lever House.
The hell with the behemoth buildings! Every heads-up architect knew you had to excel, first of all, in the intellectual competition of the compounds. The ideal career was the Corbu career. There had been an unmistakable purity about Corbu, in his career as in his designs. Corbu had triumphed through intellect and genius alone, through manifestos, treatises, speeches, debates, drawings, visionary plans, and the sheer moral force of his mission. He had become one of the greatest architects of the world, respected and admired by every avant-garde architect; had created that Radiant City which was himself, Corbu—without benefit of commissions, clients, budgets, buildings. All those things had come his way later. Eventually he would be handed commissions such as the Chandigarh complex in the Indian province of the Punjab. The clients, the governments, the builders, the peoples of the world, had come to him because he was the Radiant City, which had been a creation of his mind and his mind alone. They had fought, at last, to set foot inside his compound, which had been called, appropriately enough, “Purism.”
This same process was only beginning for Graves. Portland, Oregon, had just commissioned him to do its new Public Services Building. There was a furor in Portland over both the proposed design and the manner of Graves’ selection—much was made of the influence of Philip Johnson—but the fact remained that it was Graves’ intellectual victories within the university compounds that had led to this, his first large building, or at least the first one that was likely to be built. There were also incidental but lucrative dividends. Furniture manufacturers began to seek out the Post-Modernist stars to design showrooms. Graves was commissioned to do showrooms for the Sunar Company in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston. Venturi was commissioned to do a new showroom in New York for the best known of the firms specializing in modern furniture, Knoll International.
Michael Graves’ Benacerraf House addition. Underneath all the metal Gerrit Rietveld ivy are a breakfast room and playroom.
By the late 1970s, the more finely attuned young architects were devising a new approach to the business of architecture. They were creating firms that combined the two tracks of modern architectural competition—building buildings and theorizing about architecture—in a single entity. Which is to say, they turned their companies into compounds. They offered a particular approach to design, a set of forms, a philosophy—and a philosopher, a spokesman, who was scholarly, profound, even abstruse, should protocol require it. Arquitectonica, SITE, and Friday Architects were among the most prominent. Life in the company compound even had a touch of the communal existence of the Bauhaus or de Stijl. SITE’s James Wines became much in demand at architectural conferences in the United States and Europe. His Magritte-style storefronts for the Best discount-store chain were as much sculpture or “environmental art,” to use one of the new terms of the day, as architecture. In any case, SITE’s expenditure of so much talent and intellect on a chain of stores infuriated the Rats. They thought and thought and finally came up with a word or two for Wines and SITE: “Immoral! Corrupt! American!”
For the ambitious architect, having a theory became as vital and natural as having a telephone. Finally, the pressure even got to John Portman. He decided it was time he elaborated a philosophy. He wrote an essay for Architectural Record. Well, Portman may have changed the look of the American downtown, but in this league he was a novice. His message was entirely too clear and comprehensible. About as deep and dumfounding as a raindrop, it was. People like trees and water and human scale in public buildings, and they should have them … theories at the what-people-want level. Well, as one can imagine—how they sniggered at poor John Portman over that!
Nevertheless, it seemed vital, even to the commercial giants, to get in on the new game, at the very least. Last December, Gordon Bunshaft’s firm, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the commercial giants of the old Miesling glass-box vogue, took a rather desperate step. They invited the editors of the Harvard Architecture Review to put together a private panel of architects who would discuss new developments in Post-Modernism with them. The Review came up with Graves, Stern, Steven Peterson, and Jorge Silvetti. They sat at a U-shaped table at the Harvard Club in New York and confronted a team of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill architects—and lectured them as if they were architecture students receiving their first studio critiques. The Skidmore group showed slides of their new work, by way of proving that their work was by no means restricted to glass boxes of the Lever House tower sort. The fact was that they were also doing squat glass boxes with curved corners and the like. The Post-Mods, whether White or Gray, were having none of that. Stern said: “The kinds of buildings Skidmore builds are boring—tall or short, fat or thin, if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.” The Skidmores didn’t even bother to fight back.
O Destiny … At no time did it seem to strike anyone present as funny that here were the leading architects—commercially—in the field of large public building in America, and they were willingly—willingly?—they begged for it—sitting still for a dressing-down by four architects who, between them, could claim few buildings larger than a private house. Well, what was funny about that? Such was the hold of the compound mentality, of the new Scholasticism, on the architectural profession.
IN 1976 VINCENT SCULLY REFUSED AN AMERICAN INSTITUTE of Architects award for architectural history on the grounds that they had refused to induct Robert Venturi into their College of Fellows. It was no honor, said Scully, to receive an award from an organization that was so insensitive—since Venturi was “the most important architect of my generation.”
As to whether this assertion had any aesthetic merit—well, de gustibus non est disputandum. But in terms of Venturi’s influence on other architects, Scully once again had a point. Venturi’s wing, the Grays, was slowly winning the great battle on the plains of heaven. The Whites were beginning to abandon their Purist position—and their Structuralist jargon. (In the universities, Structuralism itself was being challenged by the new notion of Entropy, which held that there were no neat, logical deep structures after all; it was an uncertain, stochastic, Barnum & Bailey world. Graves began to work extremely subtle variations on the Venturi approach. He sought a higher synthesis of White and Gray, one worthy of Abelard or Duns Scotus. He was still using White “codes of abstraction”—but the codes referred to the familiar architectural environment of Venturi’s poor middle-middles. For example, in an addition to a house in Princeton he created a post-and-beam projection that looked like a David Smith sculpture as adapted by Rietveld—and painted it blue. This was supposed to resonate with the familiar middle-middle blue sky overhead as one walked under it. Whether anybody actually got that or not was not nearly so important as recognizing the sophistication of the approach. Later, Graves edged toward Moore’s position of playing Classical forms, notably columns, against modern façades so thin that, quite deliberately, they had the look of cardboard. The results resembled the backdrops in the typical resort community production of Aïda.
The continual playing with classical elements, by Moore, Graves, Venturi, and many others, tended to create the impression that some sort of revival of the classical tradition was taking place. Naturally, this was not so, for that would have been apostasy. The architects themselves always bridled at the suggestion. For example, Jorge Silvetti and his partner Rodolfo Machado said of their proposed Steps of Providence (for Providence, Rhode Island): “No one single classical element in a ‘pure’ state can be found. They are all transformations of classical motives, transformed to the point of being either aclassical or anticlassical.” Likewise, in 1978 Venturi announced his new definition of architecture as “shelter with decoration on it” and said that he knew this would be “shocking.” By now everyone could only yawn, because, of course, Venturi’s visual translation of his own definition would not be shocking. As an example he presented drawings for A Country House Based on Mount Vernon. “The detailing is simplified, flattened, and generalized,” he said. “Reproducing it [Washington’s Mount Vernon] as a house is somewhat like Jasper Johns making a painting out of the American flag.” So much for shelter with decoration on it. Bob Venturi was only camping it up a bit more, making more of his brilliant and amusing ironic references. At the heart of real architectural decoration, as the eclectic architects of the nineteenth century understood, was an impulse toward enrichment and embellishment, not flattening and generalization. By 1978 it had become apparent that not even with a gun at his temple could Venturi have produced an original and embellished piece of decoration. He simply could not make his hand move over a piece of paper in that manner. He could not manage such a motor response. He remained, after all this, the most loyal of subjects of the Silver Prince.
For any architect to have explored an avenue such as a new, straightforward (nonironic), exuberant (noncamp) system of decoration for American architecture in the late twentieth century would have been a revolutionary development. It would also have been heretical. No ambitious American architect, if he had his head on straight, was going to try it. And no architect who tried it was likely to have any significant effect on the course of American architecture. The entire structure of the compounds and the clerisy, with all their rewards, psychic and mundane, would have to be dismantled first.
By 1978, the evidence that Venturi was winning the battle of the compounds was decisive. Philip Johnson released renderings and models of his new corporate headquarters for AT&T, to be constructed on Madison Avenue in New York. It became the most famous unbuilt building of the 1970s. The most devoted Miesling of themll had designed a building with a top that seemed to have been lifted straight off a Chippendale highboy. Philip Johnson! Up off his knees at last! After forty years!
Johnson had learned one lesson well. He had finally realized that in an age of esoteric, intramural competition among artists, it was folly to try to counter a new style by meeting it head-on and calling it “ugly” or “ordinary.” (So did the bourgeois.) The trick was to leapfrog the new style and say: “Yes, but look! I have established a more avant-garde position … way out here.”
Venturi’s partisans were furious. They claimed that Johnson had stolen the idea of the highboy crown and its broken pediment straight from Venturi, from a piece he wrote in the March 1968 Architectural Forum. Venturi had mentioned a motel near Jefferson’s Monticello in Virginia. “The sign for the Motel Monticello, a silhouette of an enormous Chippendale highboy, is visible on the highway before the motel itself.” Well, swell, Bob. But Venturi had never dared go so far as to actually put such a thing on top of a building. It was as if Venturi had actually put his plaster madonna up on top of the Guild House and not merely talked about it and put up the Old Dotage Home TV Aerial instead. Johnson’s AT&T highboy verged perilously, perilously, perilously close to … sheer naked unmistakable apostasy!
And there are signs today that it is being interpreted as such. Inside the compound, one begins to hear Johnson talked of in the way Edward Durell Stone was talked of after the unveiling of the Taj Maria.
But Johnson remained as artful a tactician as Venturi. In speeches and interviews he managed to let the faithful know that in such areas as his attitude toward the client he remained the classic modernist. He told how his client, AT&T, had been “so perspicacious that they gave us a clue. They said, ‘Please don’t give us a flat top.’”
A model of the soon-to-be-built AT&T headquarters in New York. The design is Philip Johnson’s, but the victory is Robert Venturi’s.
It was very reassuring! One could see the scene: the CEO, the chairman of the board, and the whole selection committee, representing the biggest corporation in the history of man, approach the architect, making imaginary snowballs with their hands and saying, “Please, Mr. Johnson, we don’t mean to interfere in any way. All we ask is, please, sir, don’t give us a flat top.”
And what did the client think of what he got? Oh, that was a laugh and a half, said Johnson. “The chairman of the board said, ‘Now that’s a building!’ In other words, a building is a building; but a building isn’t a building if it’s a glass box. What’s in their minds as to what a building is, I’m not quite sure. It’s like saying, ‘That is a house!’ when you finally see a saltbox.”
Inside the compound, one could relax a bit. Johnson had committed apostasy, probably, but they still hadn’t gotten it. They only paid for it. The outside world remained as out of it as ever. The new masses still struggled in the middle-middle ooze. The bourgeoisie was still baffled. The light of the Silver Prince still shone here in the Radiant City. And the client still took itthey