chapter I
 
The Silver Prince
 
OUR STORY BEGINS IN GERMANY JUST AFTER THE FIRST World War. Young American architects, along with artists, writers, and odd-lot intellectuals, are roaming through Europe. This great boho adventure is called “the Lost Generation.” Meaning what? In The Liberation of American Literature, V. F. Calverton wrote that American artists and writers had suffered from a “colonial complex” throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and had timidly imitated European models—but that after World War I they had finally found the self-confidence and sense of identity to break free of the authority of Europe in the arts. In fact, he couldn’t have gotten it more hopelessly turned around.
The motto of the Lost Generation was, in Malcolm Cowley’s words, “They do things better in Europe.” What was in progress was a postwar discount tour in which practically any American—not just, as in the old days, a Henry James, a John Singer Sargent, or a Richard Morris Hunt—could go abroad and learn how to be a European artist. “The colonial complex” now took hold like a full nelson.
The European artist! What a dazzling figure! André Breton, Louis Aragon, Jean Cocteau, Tristan Tzara, Picasso, Matisse, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Valéry—such creatures stood out like Gustave Miklos figurines of bronze and gold against the smoking rubble of Europe after the Great War. The rubble, the ruins of European civilization, was an essential part of the picture. The charred bone heap in the background was precisely what made an avant-gardist such as Breton or Picasso stand out so brilliantly.
To the young American architects who made the pilgrimage, the most dazzling figure of all was Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School. Gropius opened the Bauhaus in Weimar, the German capital, in 1919. It was more than a school; it was a commune, a spiritual movement, a radical approach to art in all its forms, a philosophical center comparable to the Garden of Epicurus. Gropius, the Epicurus of the piece, was thirty-six years old, slender, simply but meticulously groomed, with his thick black hair combed straight back, irresistibly handsome to women, correct and urbane in a classic German manner, a lieutenant of cavalry during the war, decorated for valor, a figure of calm, certitude, and conviction at the center of the maelstrom.
Strictly speaking, he was not an aristocrat, since his father, while well-to-do, was not of the nobility, but people couldn’t help thinking of him as one. The painter Paul Klee, who taught at the Bauhaus, called Gropius “the Silver Prince.” Silver was perfect. Gold was too gaudy for so fine and precise a man. Gropius seemed to be an aristocrat who through a miracle of sensitivity had retained every virtue of the breed and cast off all the snobberies and dead weight of the past.
The young architects and artists who came to the Bauhaus to live and study and learn from the Silver Prince talked about “starting from zero.” One heard the phrase all the time: “starting from zero.” Gropius gave his backing to any experiment they cared to make, so long as it was in the name of a clean and pure future. Even new religions such as Mazdaznan. Even health-food regimens. During one stretch at Weimar the Bauhaus diet consisted entirely of a mush of fresh vegetables. It was so bland and fibrous they had to keep adding garlic in order to create any taste at all. Gropius’ wife at the time was Alma Mahler, formerly Mrs. Gustav Mahler, the first and foremost of that marvelous twentieth-century species, the Art Widow. The historians tell us, she remarked years later, that the hallmarks of the Bauhaus style were glass corners, flat roofs, honest materials, and expressed structure. But she, Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel—she had since added the poet Franz Werfel to the skein—could assure you that the most unforgettable characteristic of the Bauhaus style was “garlic on the breath.” Nevertheless!—how pure, how clean, how glorious it was to be … starting from zero!
Walter Gropius, the Silver Prince. White God No. 1. Young architects went to study at his feet. Some, like Philip Johnson, didn’t get up until decades later.
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Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Henry van de Velde—all were teachers at the Bauhaus at one time or another, along with painters like Klee and Josef Albers. Albers taught the famous Bauhaus Vorkurs, or introductory course. Albers would walk into the room and deposit a pile of newspapers on the table and tell the students he would return in one hour. They were to turn the pieces of newspaper into works of art in the interim. When he returned, he would find Gothic castles made of newspaper, yachts made of newspaper, airplanes, busts, birds, train terminals, amazing things. But there would always be some student, a photographer or a glassblower, who would simply have taken a piece of newspaper and folded it once and propped it up like a tent and let it go at that. Albers would pick up the cathedral and the airplane and say: “These were meant to be made of stone or metal—not newspaper.” Then he would pick up the photographer’s absentminded tent and say: “But this!—this makes use of the soul of paper. Paper can fold without breaking. Paper has tensile strength, and a vast area can be supported by these two fine edges. This!—is a work of art in paper.” And every cortex in the room would spin out. So simple! So beautiful … It was as if light had been let into one’s dim brain for the first time. My God!—starting from zero!
The Bauhaus. Gropius’ compound itself, built after the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925.
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And why not … The country of the young Bauhäusler, Germany, had been crushed in the war and humiliated at Versailles; the economy had collapsed in a delirium of inflation; the Kaiser had departed; the Social Democrats had taken power in the name of socialism; mobs of young men ricocheted through the cities drinking beer and awaiting a Sovietstyle revolution from the east, or some terrific brawls at the very least. Rubble, smoking ruins—starting from zero! If you were young, it was wonderful stuff. Starting from zero referred to nothing less than re-creating the world.
It is instructive—in view of the astonishing effect it was to have on life in the United States—to recall some of the exhortations of that curious moment in Middle Europe sixty years ago:
“Painters, Architects, Sculptors, you whom the bourgeoisie pays with high rewards for your work—out of vanity, snobbery, and boredom—Hear! To this money there clings the sweat and blood and nervous energy of thousands of poor hounded human beings—Hear! It is an unclean profit …we must be true socialists—we must kindle the highest socialist virtue: the brotherhood of man.”
So ran a manifesto of the Novembergruppe, which included Moholy-Nagy and other designers, who would later join Gropius at the Bauhaus. Gropius was chairman of the Novembergruppe’s Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Working Council for Art), which sought to bring all the arts together “under the wing of a great architecture,” which would be “the business of the entire people.” As everyone understood in 1919, the entire people was synonymous with the workers. “The intellectual bourgeois … has proved himself unfit to be the bearer of a German culture,” said Gropius. “New, intellectually undeveloped levels of our people are rising from the depths. They are our chief hope.”
Gropius’ interest in “the proletariat” or “socialism” turned out to be no more than aesthetic and fashionable, somewhat like the interest of President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic or Chairman Mao of the People’s Republic of China in republicanism. Nevertheless, as Dostoevsky said, ideas have consequences; the Bauhaus style proceeded from certain firm assumptions. First, the new architecture was being created for the workers. The holiest of all goals: perfect worker housing. Second, the new architecture was to reject all things bourgeois. Since just about everyone involved, the architects as well as the Social Democratic bureaucrats, was himself bourgeois in the literal, social sense of the word, “bourgeois” became an epithet that meant whatever you wanted it to mean. It referred to whatever you didn’t like in the lives of people above the level of hod carrier. The main thing was not to be caught designing something someone could point to and say of, with a devastating sneer: “How very bourgeois.”
Social Democrats in both Germany and Holland were underwriting worker housing projects and, for their own political reasons, commissioning younger, antibourgeois architects like Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Bruno Taut, and J. J. P. Oud, who at the age of twenty-eight had been made chief architect of the city of Rotterdam. Oud was a member of a Dutch group known as de Stijl (the Style). The Bauhaus and de Stijl, like the bourgeois-proofed Novembergruppe, were not academies or firms; in fact, they were not like any organizations in the history of architecture prior to 1897. In 1897, in Vienna, a group of artists and architects, including Otto Wagner faosef Olbrich, formed a group called the Vienna Secession and formally “seceded” from the officially recognized Austrian cultural organization, the Künstlerhaus. Not even the French Impressionists had attempted any such thing; their Salon des Refusés had been but a noisy cry to the National Institute: We want in! The Vienna Secession (and those in Munich and Berlin) originated an entirely novel form of association, the art compound.
In an art compound you announced, in one way or another, usually through a manifesto: “We have just removed the divinity of art and architecture from the hands of the official art establishment [the Academy, the National Institute, the Künstlergenossenschaft, whatever], and it now resides with us, inside our compound. We no longer depend on the patronage of the nobility, the merchant class, the state, or any other outside parties for our divine eminence. Henceforth, anyone who wishes to bathe in art’s divine glow must come here, inside our compound, and accept the forms we have created. No alterations, special orders, or loud talk from the client permitted. We know best. We have exclusive possession of the true vision of the future of architecture.” The members of a compound formed an artistic community, met regularly, agreed on certain aesthetic and moral principles, and broadcast them to the world. The Vienna Secession—like the Bauhaus twenty-five years later—built an actual, physical compound in the form of an exemplary building, the House of Secession, which they called “a temple of art.”
The creation of this new type of community proved absolutely exhilarating to artists and composers, as well as architects, throughout Europe in the early years of this century. We’re independent of the bourgeois society around us! (They became enamored of this term bourgeois.) And superior to it! It was the compounds that produced the sort of avant-gardism that makes up so much of the history of twentieth-century art. The compounds—whether the Cubists, Fauvists, Futurists, or Secessionists—had a natural tendency to be esoteric, to generate theories and forms that would baffle the bourgeoisie. The most perfect device, they soon discovered, was painting, composing, designing in code. The peculiar genius of the early Cubists, such as Braque and Picasso, was not in creating “new ways of seeing” but in creating visual codes for the esoteric theories of their compound. For example, the Cubist technique of painting a face in cartoon profile, with both eyes on the same side of the nose, illustrated two theories: (1) the theory of flatness, derived from Braque’s notion that a painting was nothing more than a certain arrangement of colors and forms on a flat surface; and (2) the theory of simultaneity, derived from discoveries in the new field of stereoptics indicating that a person sees an object from two angles simultaneously. In music, Arnold Schoenberg began experiments in mathematically coded music that proved baffling to most other composers, let alone the bourgeoisie—and were all the more irresistible for it, in the new age of art compound.
Composers, artists, or architects in a compound began to have the instincts of the medieval clergy, much of whose activity was devoted exclusively to separating itself from the mob. For mob, substitute bourgeoisie—and here you have the spirit of avant-gardism in the twentieth century. Once inside a compound, an artist became part of a clerisy, to use an old term for an intelligentsia with clerical presumptions.
But what was supposed to be the source of a compound’s authority? Why, the same as that of all new religious movements: direct access to the godhead, which in this case was Creativity. Hence, ural tendew form of document: the art manifesto. There were no manifestos in the world of art prior to the twentieth century and the development of the compounds. The Italian Futurists delivered the first manifesto in 1910. After that, there was no stopping the various movements and isms. They began delivering manifestos day and night. A manifesto was nothing less than a compound’s Ten Commandments: “We have been to the top of the mountain and have brought back the Word, and we now declare that—
Of course, it was one thing for artists—the Futurists, Vorticists, Orphists, Purists, Dadaists, Surrealists—to come down from the mountaintop with their commandments and declarations of independence and promethean aloofness to the bourgeoisie. It was quite another for architects, dependent, as they were, upon the favor of the usually conservative—and, if one need edit, bourgeois—elements who had the money needed to erect buildings. Amazingly enough, however, the strategy worked the very first time it was tried, by the Vienna Secession itself. Thanks to an accident of Austrian history, the government actually stepped in (inside the compound) and honored the Secession’s outrageous claims. There was a period of about five years when Otto Wagner and the others received important commissions.1 That was all it took. The notion of the uncompromisable architect became highly contagious. Before the First World War, the privately financed Deutsche Werkbund had set about designing the perfect forms of architecture and applied arts for all of Germany. (The client, naturally, was supposed to clamor to come inside and get some.) Gropius had been one of the Werkbund’s leading figures.
After the war, various compounds—Bauhaus, Wendingen, de Stijl, Constructivists, Neoplasticists, Elementarists, Futurists—began to compete with one another to establish who had the purest vision. And what determined purity? Why, the business of what was bourgeois (sordid) and what was non-bourgeois (pure).
The battle to be the least bourgeois of all became somewhat loony. For example, early in the game, in 1919, Gropius had been in favor of bringing simple craftsmen into the Bauhaus, yeomen, honest toilers, people with knit brows and broad fingernails who would make things by hand for architectural interiors, simple wooden furniture, simple pots and glassware, simple this and simple that. This seemed very working class, very non-bourgeois. He was also interested in the curvilinear designs of Expressionist architects such as Erich Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn’s dramatic curved shapes exploded all bourgeois conceptions of order, balance, symmetry, and rigid masonry construction. Yes—but a bit naïve of you all the same, Walter! In 1922 the First International Congress of Progressive Art was held in Düsseldorf. This was the first meeting of compound architects from all over Europe. Right away they got down on the mat over this business of nonbourgeois. Theo van Doesburg, the fiercest of the Dutch manifesto writers, took one look at Gropius’ Honest Toilers and Expressionist curves and sneered and said: How very bourgeois. Only the rich could afford handmade objects, as the experience of the Arts and Crafts movement in England had demonstrated. To be nonbourgeois, art must be machine-made. As for Expressionism, its curvilinear shapes defied the machine, not the bourgeoisie. They were not only expensive to fabricate, they were “voluptuous” and “luxurious.” Van Doesburg, with his monocle and his long nose and his amazing sneer, could make such qualities sound bourgeois to the point of queasiness. Gropius was a sincerely spiritual force, but he was also quick enough and competitive enough to see that van Doesburg was backing him into a dreadful corner.
Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower observatory, the ultimate example of Expressionist architecture.
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Overnight, Gropius dreamed up a new motto, a new heraldic device for the Bauhaus compound: “Art and Technology—a New Unity!” Complete with exclamation point! There; that ought to hold van Doesburg and the whole Dutch klatsch. Honest toilers, broad fingernails, and curves disappeared from the Bauhaus forever.
But that was only the start. The definitions and claims and accusations and counteraccusations and counterclaims and counterdefinitions of what was or was not bourgeois became so refined, so rarefied, so arcane, so dialectical, so scholastic … that finally building design itself was directed at only one thing: illustrating this month’s Theory of the Century concerning what was ultimately, infinitely, and absolutely non-bourgeois. The buildings became theories constructed in the form of concrete, steel, wood, glass, and stucco. (Honest materials, non-bourgeois, theory of.) Inside and out, they were white or beige with the occasional contrasting detail in black or gray. Bruno Taut, who was a member of Mies van der Rohe’s new group, the Ring, had designed his part of the Hufeisen worker housing project in Berlin with red façades. “Red front!” he would yell, just in case there was someone too dense to get the point. Bruno was a likable sort. And God knew he was profoundly non-bourgeois … on the emotional and intellectual levels … After all, he was a Marxist to the point of popped veins on the forehead. He was the kind of man they had naturally assigned to do a worker housing project called Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Onkel Toms Hütte) in Berlin. But a red façade? A color? Well, I mean, my God—how very bourgeois! Why didn’t he go all the way and put nasturtiums all over the front, the way Otto Wagner did with his Majolika House in Vienna in 1910! Oh, how they sniggered at poor Bruno over his beloved red front. Henceforth, white, beige, gray, and black became the patriotic colors, the geometric flag, of all the compound architects.
So goodbye, color. On spun that holy tornado, Theory, until buildings by compound artists were aimed at very little else. They became supremely, divinely nonfunctional, even though everything was done in the name of “functionalism,” functional being one of several euphemisms for non-bourgeois.
For example, there was the now inviolable theory of the flat roof and the sheer façade. It had been decided, in the battle of the theories, that pitched roofs and cornices represented the “crowns” of the old nobility, which the bourgeoisie spent most of its time imitating. Therefore, henceforth, there would be only flat roofs; flat roofs making clean right angles with the building façades. No cornices. No overhanging eaves. These young architects were working and building in cities like Berlin, Weimar, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, at about the Fifty-second Parallel, which also runs through Canada, the Aleutian Islands, Moscow, and Siberia. At this swath of the globe, with enough snow and rain to stop an army, as history had shown more than once, there was no such thing as a functional flat roof and a functional façade with no overhang.2 In fact, it was difficult to imagine where such a building might be considered functional, outside of the Painted Desert. Nevertheless, there was no turning bhe om the flat roof and the sheer façade. It had become the very symbol of nonbourgeois architecture. No eaves; so that very quickly one of the hallmarks of compound work, never referred to in the manifestos, became the permanently streaked and stained white or beige stucco exterior wall.
Then there was the principle of “expressed structure.” The bourgeoisie had always been great ones for false fronts (it hardly needed saying), thick walls of masonry and other grand materials, overlaid with every manner of quoin and groin and pediment and lintel and rock-faced arch, cozy anthropomorphic elements such as entablatures and capitals, pilasters and columns, plinths and rusticated bases, to create the impression of head, midsection, and foot; and every manner of grandiose and pointless gesture—spires, Spanish tile roofs, bays, corbels—to create a dishonest picture of what went on inside, architecturally and socially. All this had to go. All masonry, all that gross and “luxurious” granite, marble, limestone, and red brick was suspect, unless used in obviously non-load-bearing ways. Henceforth walls would be thin skins of glass or stucco. (Small glazed beige ceramic bricks were okay in a pinch.) Since walls were no longer used to support a building—steel and concrete or wooden skeletons now did that—it was dishonest to make walls look as chunky as a castle’s. The inner structure, the machine-made parts, the mechanical rectangles, the modern soul of the building must be expressed on the outside of the building, completely free of applied decoration. The ultimate expression of this principle was the de Stijl architect Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroeder House. Rietveld covered the exterior in projections whose only function was to indicate the grid, the diagram, the paradigm, the geometric progression on which the plans were based. Astonishing! What virtuosity! How very nonbourgeois.
Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. Flat roof. Sheer façade. White stucco. And “pilings” (pilotis). “Columns” was a bourgeois word.
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SO, IN THE WORLD OF THE ARCHITECTURAL COMPOUNDS, competition now took place on two levels. There was not merely the age-old competition to obtain commissions and get the chance to show the world what you could do by designing buildings and seeing them go up. There was also the sheerly intellectual competition of the theories. Since the divinity of art now resided inside the compounds and nowhere else, there was nothing to keep a man of inspiration and genius, a priest, a hierophant, a Duns Scotus, from making a name for himself without even leaving the priestly walls. Thus there came into being another unique phenomenon: the famous architect who did little or no building.
The first of these had been the Futurist Sant’Elia, with his visionary buildings for the Milan of the future, which he rendered in great detail in the years before the war. But Sant’Elia, who died in the war, was nothing compared to the Swiss-born star of the Paris art world, Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.
Le Corbusier’s instincts for the compound era were flawless. Early on, he seemed to mprehend what became an axiom of artistic competition in the twentieth century. Namely, that the ambitious young artist must join a “movement,” a “school,” an ism—which is to say, a compound. He is either willing to join a clerisy and subscribe to its codes and theories or he gives up all hope of prestige. One rummages in vain through the history of art and architecture since 1900 for the figure of great prestige who, in the Thoreau manner, marches to a different drummer, the solitary genius whose work can only be described as sui generis. (With the possible exception of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose fate we will observe in a moment.) No, the much-acclaimed solitary figure one finds instead is the artist or architect who, like Kasimir Malevich, is smart enough to cover himself in the trappings of a movement, an ism, and becomes a one-man compound. Or, if he can find a pal, a two-man compound. Whereupon he shouts: “I am a Suprematist! [or a Purist! or an Orphist!] Don’t think I’m out here by myself! The rest of my boys will be here any minute!” Le Corbusier hooked up with his pal Amédée Ozenfant—and became Purism.
Le Corbusier was a thin, sallow, nearsighted man who went about on a white bicycle, wearing a close-fitting black suit, a white shirt, a black tie, round black owl-eye glasses, and a black bowler hat. To startled onlookers, he said he dressed in this fashion so as to look as neat and precise and anonymous as possible, to be the perfect mass-producible wire figure for the Machine Age. He called the houses he designed “machines for living.” Le Corbusier traveled to Germany and Holland and was well known in all the compounds and at all the congresses, conferences, symposia, and panel discussions, wherever the insistent beat of the manifesto, the song of the compounds was heard: We declare—! We declare—! We declare—! We declare—! He was intense, he was riveting, he was brilliant, he was Aquinas, the Jesuits, Doctor Subtilis and the Scholastics, Marx, Hegel, Engels, and Prince Kropotkin all rolled into one. His Vers une architecture was a scripture. By 1924 he was one of the reigning geniuses of the new architecture. In his world he was … Corbu! the way Greta Garbo was Garbo! in hers; all on the strength of his manifesto, his zealotry, and a handful of little houses: for his brother, for Ozenfant, for kinfolk and bohofolk. Next came one for Mom and Dad. The retirement house for Mother, which she paid for and put up with, became the very insignia of the compound architect.
Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroeder House. The Dutch really knew how to bourgeois-proof a building.
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Le Corbusier. Mr. Purism. He showed everybody how to become a famous architect without building buildings. He built a Radiant City inside his skull.
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It was Le Corbusier’s particularly sad fate to live and work in France. Who in France was going to meet the terms of an architectural compound? Which were: “Henceforth, anyone who wishes to bathe in that divine glow must come here, inside the compound, and accept the forms we have created. No alterations or special orders and no loud talk from the client permitted.” Who, indeed! Practically no one, unless possessed with a Corbu mother’s love or fascinated with Le Moderne, such as the developer Frugés, who commissioned Le Corbusier to do some low-rent apartments in the Bordeaux town of Pessac in 1925.ost mortals who were in a position to commission buildings wanted the Beaux-Arts style, the latter-day synthesis of the Classical revivals that had begun in the Renaissance. The compounds had no public, no clientele, in the ordinary sense. The brutal fact of life was that it was difficult for compound architects to get work unless there was a government—usually socialist—that had decided, in effect: We need a new look around here, and you fellows have one. Here’s the budget; go to it; do what you will.
As it turned out, it was the German Social Democratic government in Stuttgart that gave Le Corbusier one of the first major commissions of his career. This was in 1927, and he had Mies van der Rohe to thank. The Stuttgart government put Mies in charge of a worker-housing exhibition, the Weissenhof Werkbund project. Despite an extremely tight budget, Mies managed to turn the project into a world’s fair of worker housing. He brought in Le Corbusier from France, Oud and Mart Stam from Holland, and Victor Bourgeois from Belgium to join him and eleven other Germans, including Gropius, Bruno Taut, Bruno’s brother Max, and Peter Behrens. Outsiders were amazed at the harmony or sameness (according to whether they liked the style or didn’t) of the work of these architects from four different countries. It was as if a new international style were in the wind. The truth was that the internal mechanism of the compound competition, the everlasting reductionism—nonbourgeois!—had forced them all within the same tiny cubicle, which kept shrinking, like the room in Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Short of giving up the divine game altogether, they couldn’t possibly have differed from one another in any way visible to another living soul on this earth save another compound architect outfitted, like a cryptographer, with Theory glasses.
And how did worker housing look? It looked nonbourgeois within an inch of its life: the flat roofs, with no cornices, sheer walls, with no window architraves or raised lintels, no capitals or pediments, no colors, just the compound shades, white, beige, gray, and black. The interiors had no crowns or coronets, either. They had pure white rooms, stripped, purged, liberated, freed of all casings, cornices, covings, crown moldings (to say the least), pilasters, and even the ogee edges on tabletops and the beading on drawers. They had open floor plans, ending the old individualistic, bourgeois obsession with privacy. There was no wallpaper, no “drapes,” no Wilton rugs with flowers on them, no lamps with fringed shades and bases that look like vases or Greek columns, no doilies, knickknacks, mantelpieces, headboards, or radiator covers. Radiator coils were left bare as honest, abstract, sculptural objects. And no upholstered furniture with “pretty” fabrics. Furniture was made of Honest Materials in natural tones: leather, tubular steel, bentwood, cane, canvas; the lighter—and harder— the better. And no more “luxurious” rugs and carpets. Gray or black linoleum was the ticket.
And how did the workers like worker housing? Oh, they complained, which was their nature at this stage of history. At Pessac the poor creatures were frantically turning Corbu’s cool cubes inside out trying to make them cozy and colorful. But it was understandable. As Corbu himself said, they had to be “reeducated” to comprehend the beauty of “the Radiant City” of the future. In matters of taste, the architects acted as the workers’ cultural benefactors. There was no use consulting them directly, since, as Gropius had pointed out, they were as yet “intellectually undeveloped.” In fact, here was the great appeal of socialism to architects in the 1920s. Socialism was the political answer, the great yea-lstereg, to the seemingly outrageous and impossible claims of the compound architect, who insisted that the client keep his mouth shut. Under socialism, the client was the worker. Alas, the poor devil was only just now rising up out of the ooze. In the meantime, the architect, the artist, and the intellectual would arrange his life for him. To use Stalin’s phrase, they would be the engineers of his soul. In his apartment blocks in Berlin for employees of the Siemens factory, the soul engineer Gropius decided that the workers should be spared high ceilings and wide hallways, too, along with all of the various outmoded objects and decorations. High ceilings and wide hallways and “spaciousness” in all forms were merely more bourgeois grandiosity, expressed in voids rather than solids. Seven-foot ceilings and thirty-six-inch-wide hallways were about right for … re-creating the world.
 
 
STARTING FROM ZERO! WELL, MY GOD! THE AMERICAN PILGRIMS, the young American architects who were making the discount tour of Europe—Louis Kahn, Edward Durell Stone, Louis Skidmore, and many others—had only to compare the position of these young men to their own. What was the best a young architect could hope for in America? If he were extremely fortunate, he might be commissioned to design a weekend home on the North Shore of Long Island for some Wall Street hardgrabber. Louis Kahn’s friend George Howe liked to say: “We used to give them Norman country manors with everything but the pile of manure in the yard.” Terrific. The height of excitement in American architectural circles was those brave new styles, North Shore Norman and Westchester Tudor, also known as Half-Timber Stockbroker. What a goal to aspire to … as compared to … re-creating the world!
Heretofore the American architect had been a man whose job was to lend coherence and detail to the gotrocks romantic fantasies of capitalists. But now, in Europe, you saw groups of architects working with the godly autonomy of the greatest artists.
No, the approach of the European compounds, of Gropius and the Bauhaus, of Mies, Corbu, and de Stijl, was utterly irresistible. There were several problems to be overcome, however. To begin with, the notion of starting from zero made no sense at all in the United States. The sad truth was that the United States had not been reduced to a smoking rubble by the First World War. She had emerged from the war on top of the world. She was the only one of the combatants who had not been demolished, decimated, exhausted, or catapulted into revolution. She was now one of the Great Powers, young, on the rise, bursting with vigor and rude animal health. Not only that, she had no monarchy or nobility to be toppled, discredited, blamed, vilified, or otherwise reacted against. She didn’t even have a bourgeoisie. In the absence of a nobility or any tradition of one, the European concept of the bourgeoisie didn’t apply. (American writers, dazzled by the European stance, imported it anyway, like a pair of Lobb shoes or a jar of Beluga caviar, and began talking about “the booboisie,” “Babbitt,” “boosterism,” and the rest of it.) There was very little interest in socialism. There was not even any interest in worker housing. Nobody even talked about it.
Nevertheless … it had to be! How could anyone turn back after having seen the Radiant City? The great new European architectural vision of Worker Housing would have to be brought to America by any means necessary, in any form necessary. Any form.
O young silver princes set against the rubble