Two Great Mavericks of American 20th Century Architecture : Louis I. Kahn and Frank Lloyd Wright

PART I - The Background

American architecture is fascinating as is the architecture of many other cultures including those belonging to “pre-history.” Designing and building dwellings or structures for worship, assembly, commerce and industry, reflects aspirations and limitations not only of contemporary materials but of the imagination as well. Except for native igloos, tepees and earthen houses often built into the mouths of caves, American architecture from its very beginnings to the last quarter of the 19th century was essentially an imitation or adaptation of European models. While there were interesting early Spanish influences in California and French influences in Louisiana, the “main stream” of American architecture, before and even considerably after the American Revolution, had British architecture as its model. There are not very many 17th century buildings left in North America. However, in Massachusetts, particularly along its coast, on Cape Cod and the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, there are several cottages and some more substantial buildings that have rustic or even medieval touches. The latter are also found in Virginia and the mid-Atlantic colonies. But around 1700, there is the beginning of the “Georgian” style which is the dominant and particularly attractive one in pre-revolutionary America.

The word “Georgian” itself is an approximation because the first George of quite a long line did not ascend the throne until 1714.

Hugh Morrison in his book Early American Architecture (Oxford University Press, 1952) says on page 271:

“No style changes overnight, and it would be false to suggest that Colonial was abruptly transformed into Georgian precisely in the year 1700.”

Georgian is a misnomer since it has no direct connection with the monarchy and is in fact the result of Italian Renaissance architecture making its way across the European continent from the 15th to the 18th century. The Georgian style is one of elegant simplicity which pleases us today as much as it did when it was first introduced and many examples of it in its original form may be found in all the former colonies together with an abundance of pseudo-Georgian buildings such as hotels, colleges and post offices.

Before the end of the 19th century, architects and contractors were no longer limited by brick construction. In order to carry their own weight, brick walls had to be wider at the bottom thus occupying the most valuable space and were simply not practical for structures of several storeys. Once steel reinforcements had been introduced to support the weight of a building, very great heights became possible. Also it soon became unnecessary to make the building look as if it were a brick building and so the American skyscraper was born. The Guaranty (Prudential) Building in Buffalo (1896) by Adler and Sullivan has been held up as an icon for the skyscraper although most of the early ones rose in Chicago. At the same time, as these frankly mechanical structures were sprouting everywhere, others which pretended to be something else were going up. Perhaps the best example is the Woolworth Building (1913) by Cass Gilbert which is in the late Gothic style. For many years it was the tallest office building in New York City and the world.

But Gothic was not the only “neo” style. There was also the neo-Romanesque. Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) built some still attractive university buildings, a library and Boston’s Trinity Church on Copley Plaza in this style. When it came to museums, libraries, large railroad stations and important government edifices, there was no need to get too original. While the technology to do other things existed, the Greek temple was good enough. I frequently wait for a bus across the street from a fairly large Montreal bank built before WW1, and I still can’t help wondering what the numerous massive Ionian columns had to do with banking.

The late 19th and the early 20th century in American architecture seems now to have been the captive of earlier styles with little connection to contemporary life. But revolutions were brewing and 20th century architecture was to become exciting, daring, mediocre and plodding, all in a potent brew. While new ways of looking at architecture were evident in Austria, it was the Bauhaus (1919-1932) in Weimar and later Dessau, Germany, which had a decisive influence in America for most of the rest of the century. The Bauhaus was a school of architecture and design featuring furniture, household objects and even fabrics. Its leader was the German, Walter Gropius, but it was an international group of teachers and students (EeroSaarinen, Man Ray, Marcel Breuer, Ulrich Franzen, Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei et cetera) of whom some, including Walter Gropius, came to the Harvard University School of Design after the Nazis closed down the Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus group was vigorously opposed to architecture which more or less concealed the purpose of a building. An office tower should not look like a Gothic cathedral even in part, or a railroad station like a Greek temple. Integrity in design would cause “form to follow function” and the honesty of a structure would make it attractive. The new doctrine was known as “modernism” and later as the “international style.” Critics of modernism, much later, forgot that the movement initially was truly liberating. When an architect received a commission for a museum, it was no longer necessary to imitate a Greek temple nor did an office tower have to resemble a Gothic, Romanesque or Art Nouveau model. The Bauhaus approach pretty well swept everything in its wake. As a result, after WWII and several decades thereafter, hundreds of sleek skyscrapers rose in all American cities until a reaction against this monotony and lack of “human dimension” set in. To be sure, modernist architects were capable of originality if the project called for it. Eero Saarinen, one of the leaders of the modernists designed splendid air terminals at both Kennedy and at Dulles International Airports. The latter terminal gives the public a sense of flight and has nothing mechanical or “cold “ about it. I.M. Pei built Place Ville Marie in Montreal, a cruciform office building to honour some of the early women pioneers from France who brought Christianity to the New World. But that was not all. The late William Zeckendorf and Pei erected the office tower by using “air rights.” To this day, there is busy railroad activity under the offices (properly noise shielded) and the owners of the building do not own the ground on which it stands.

By the 1980s,“post-modernism” was on its way. It was again de rigueur to be decorative and to design structures that had frankly attractive elements, even if these were not functional. Perhaps the most famous and most successful of these buildings came later (1997) when Frank Gehry built the second Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which has been described as looking like a Spanish galleon in full sail. In spite of this impression, I have been told that the structure works well and has attracted thousands of tourists to a city not normally on the tourist circuit. Recently I checked on the progress of a makeover started two years ago on the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto by Daniel Liebeskind. He is enlarging the Museum by combining it with a crystal like structure which projects at an oblique angle from the vertical existing building. Steel beams were still visible without the crystal. Have we now arrived at “function follows form”?

All this to set the stage for two great architectural mavericks who were part of no school or any movement: Louis Kahn and Frank Lloyd Wright.

June 2006