In Praise (And Castigation) of "The Folly of Modern Architecture"

UNDER THE RUG

Peter Blake is so eloquent in argument that, to revive a cliché, one scarcely has the heart to examine his logic. When higher education is cultivating the nontraditional student market, I can only applaud his plea for professional continuing education, and any longtime citywatcher is glad to find an architect observing his undertaking with detachment and criticism.

But as humble a seeker after new knowledge and as uncommon an architect as Mr. Blake clearly is, he fails to observe the first law of professionalism: respect for another professional’s territory. Tough, complicated, sticky problems such as America’s urban ones rarely yield to single-factor analysis or the dominance of a single profession. Yet in his excessive faith in the now familiar thesis that new forms of communication can replace old forms of transportation, and in his scorn for bankers and bureaucrats, Mr. Blake adopts both fallacies.

So one traces, step by step through the article’s nine propositions, how the analysis goes astray. Propositions 1, 2, and 3 are essentially architectural in substance, and the evidence is explicit, the critique crisp, and the conclusions persuasive. Number 4—tall towers in large urban parks—is a more complicated matter, and here Mr. Blake adopts the fallacy of the single example: dragging out poor, tired, Eisenhower-era Pruitt-Igoe as the case that proves children don’t like high rises. Rich or poor children? With parents from urban or rural backgrounds? Black, brown, or white?

By proposition number 5, Mr. Blake is outside his territorial limits. All the clichés about public housing come tumbling out in one long paragraph, the vintage one being, “The bureaucrats who build and administer projects are usually so incompetent that those projects cost twice or three times what they would cost if built by private enterprise.” The author is again back in the 1950s; for in the sixties, the preferred policies were Turnkey (private construction of public housing), and Section 23 (scattered-site public housing, privately provided and designed for mobility). As for Nixon’s “rent supplements,” they were first proposed by FDR and first enacted by LBJ. What’s missing now is money in the executive budget.

By proposition 6—the only good transportation is foot transportation—it’s pretty much downhill. Proposition 7, favoring renewal of old neighborhoods, is interesting. Number 8 is right in its skepticism of assembly-line housing, but it ignores the mobile-home industry.

Proposition 9—why travel, just communicate is an architect’s disastrous venture into economies, electrical engineering, and psychology. No hint of Raymond Vernon’s classic dissection of why home offices and confrontation trades congregate in New York; no acknowledgment of Wilbur Thompson’s thorough documentations of the economic ad vantages of large cities; indeed, no acknowledgment of the high rises actually under construction in downtown San Francisco, Miami, and Boston. Instead, here is the amateur’s excessive enthusiasm for the promise of TV, a promise that MIT examined eight years ago for business decision-making and found unfeasible.

The plain fact is that large compacted cities are here to stay and how we upgrade their inner composition and change their relations to the suburban ring are very live questions, deliberately pushed under the rug of national policy for the last six years. The critical decision, I think, will involve not so much architecture or housing, but land use, most particularly, land prices and the public’s capacity to recoup spec ulative profits made possible by public investment in roads, water and sewer lines, and community facilities.

But that’s an article in itself, and I hope Peter Blake will try it. For although he did venture too far outside his field of competence, his indignation is justified, his vision powerful. Now, if all our urban professionals can only think in his broad terms, but think together . . .

—ROBERT WOOD

President, University of Massachusetts

Secretary of Mousing and Urban Development, 1968-1969

WHAT PEOPLE WANT

Peter Blake’s article was more than a surprise. It is a sort of shock, whose effects will reverberate for a long time to come. All I can say is, “Bravo, Peter Blake.”

I have known Peter Blake for many years, but we have held widely divergent views about good architecture. His architectural gods were simply not mine. For a man of Peter Blake’s standing in our profession to admit publicly a discovery that his gods have feet of clay is a credit to his erudition and his honesty. Many architects will probably brush aside Blake’s me a culpa and brand him as an iconoclast seeking notoriety by turning his back on the towering masters of twentieth-century architecture.

Mies van der Rohe. Le Corbusier. Gropius, and Breuer were teachers who led us out of the quagmire of beaux arts eclecticism that was taking us nowhere. Moses led his people over the Red Sea for the Sea of Reeds) to a Promised Land. We architects, like the Chosen People, wandered for forty years never knowing where we were going; in fact, we thought that we really had arrived. Our “downtowns” have become our canyons flanked by towering glass cubes. The open spaces under, or adjacent to, our buildings are invitations to desolation and dreariness. Urban planning, housing, prefabrication are not what they should be. With this I have no disagreement. So far, so gtxd, Peter Blake, but where do we go from here?

The great form-givers who were Peter Blake’s idols seem to have lost sight of whom they were designing buildings for. We, the architects, must address ourselves to what people, the ultimate users of our architecture, really want, what will make their lives fuller, richer, more fulfilling, and happier. We must understand the likes and dislikes of people, their basic emotions, their life-styles. We must create structures and environments which satisfy not the architectural critics, the editors of architectural magazines (and Peter Blake is one of them), or our form-giving colleagues and peers.

PETER BLAKE’S LIST OF “FALSE” ASSUMPTIONS

1. “Structure is the ethic of architecture.”

2. “Glass skins draped over steel or concrete frames are the most rational, and most ephemeral, visions of the twentieth century.”

3. “The best way to bring life and happiness into a modern city is to construct it of tall towers, raised off the ground on columns for pilotis), so as to permit pedestrians to circulate freely at ground level, through wide-open spaces, parks, playgrounds, amt so on.”

4. “Towers in a park are the best solution for families living in urban areas, because open space will he available in the great parks created by building vertically rather than horizontally.”

5. “We need large housing developments in our cities, to solve our desperate housing shortages.”

6. “More sophisticated transportation systems will make our cities work.”

7. “Modern architecture will make people happier, healthier, sexier, more creative, and so on.”

8. “Prefabrication will solve most of today’s building problems.”

9. “Cities are essential if civilization is to survive.”

Years ago Peter Blake and I clashed during a Mike Wallace television interview, at a time when I was daring to depart from the Miesian cube to create an undulating plan for a hotel structure and clothe it with a rather free use of color on the exterior as well as the interior. I was designing to please people, not architects. People will continue to hunger for better housing, better schools, better places to work, to play, to find happiness. Now that Peter Blake has cleared away the “powder in the eye”—to Americanize a French saying-architects must find ways to achieve all of this through the use of new techniques, new economies, and a new vision of viable structures regardless of style or form.

Thank you. Peter Blake, for pushing aside the architectural idols of the early twentieth century and opening wide the doors through which we must find our way in our quest for an emotional architecture that will soothe our spirits in our troubled world.

—MORRIS LA PIOUS

Architect; credits include Americana Hotel, New York City; Fontainebleau Hotel. Miami Beach; housing, hospitals, shopping centers, office buildings

UP THE CITY

I sympathize with the problems faced by professional architects, problems of structure and design, and I feel strongly that public officials should know more about good architecture. But my seven years’ experience as mayor of Boston compels me to take exception to Peter Blake’s thesis that the city is passe, obsolete, and anachronistic. I cannot accept his postmortem of the metropolis—that it is a derelict and dying species, that the urban future can’t work, and that McLuhan’s vision of a “global-telecommunication-village" is the answer to the future distribution of our social resources human and cultural.

1 was disappointed to read that Mr. Blake had reversed his assessment of the city. His enlightened book The Master Builders, published in 1960, warns advocates of diffusion and sprawl not to assume “that people don’t like to live in cities; and. . .that businesses and industries can operate efficiently when cut up into smaller units.” And it reminds us that “many people like big cities. . . .”

We welcome sensitivity to a changing reality and recognize the need for new tools and ideas in his profession; but a blanket indictment of urban viability is a retreat from idealism, leading inexorably to the bankruptcy of national purpose, social integrity, and human respect.

Mr. Blake’s statement of fifteen years ago is substantiated by the American city today. Our thirty largest cities accounted for half the total growth of production in their metropolitan areas in the 1960s. They gained 1.5 million jobs an increase of 15 percent—their production of goods and services rose by more than one third and accounted for fully one third of the nation’s total economic output by the end of the decade.

My own city of Boston is more popular, more livable, more stimulating, and more viable in 1974 than it was in 1960. It gained 40.000 jobs between 1963 and 1972, and its mean household income, expressed in dollars of constant value, rose by one fourth from 1960 to 1970.

The cities have not withered, they have expanded in recent years—as centers of finance and insurance, as headquarters of government, communications and business, as the focus of recreation, tourism, and personal services. Furthermore, the demographic pattern of the 1970s shows that, far from alienating people, the city is attracting them. Boston, for instance, now enjoys an annual population growth rate of 2 percent. And the 20.000 people who have moved to Boston are not just the “verv poor" and the “very rich in pursuit of penthouse status.”Thev are people from all levels of society, eager to renew the search for community, to rebuild old neighborhoods for themselves and their families.

Blake’s thesis—that we can afford to retreat from contact with each other because of the panacea of technology represents a dangerous trend. It encourages the siege mentality of suburbia, leading us toward a nation that is growing separate and fragmented, and. as the Kenter Commission reported, increasingly unequal.

And as for those “technical dragons" which Blake claims terrorize the architect’s realm, his fears of the designer’s dilemma are unfounded. He has missed the forest for the “pilotis,” so to speak.

If, as he suggests, the form of urban life dictates the city’s functions, and not the other way around, it is then up to talented architects such as himself to change these forms and thus better serve the human needs of today’s besieged and beleaguered cities.

If indeed airy, windswept plazas are slowly strangling the metropolis with spacious but bleak expanses, city planners have an obligation to restore the streetside shops and restaurants that provided the safety-innumbers for pedestrians of the preplaza days.

If mass transportation treats only the symptoms of urban/suburban balance, we must face the distribution question head on. The answer is not to homogenize society into one great national suburb, where everyone would suffer equally from diffusion and high transportation costs, but rather to relocate human resources. Urban sprawl is dead. . .the assassinating bullet was energy-or the lack of it. Today, the ideal answer, the only answer, is the city.

Mr. Blake has lost his perspective and priorities. The human community is far more important than the stone and concrete patterns we choose for shelter. Without the need to relate to other men through the “interface” of the city, man individually and collectively will lose his ability to live with other men or to govern himself. Isolated from his society by the protective distances of rambling suburbia, he will become socially soft alienated from others by his vicarious experience of the world and forces around him. Not oidy soft, but vacuous. Not only alienated, but disenfranchised.

The city is viable, and Blake’s “technical dragons” are chimeras of stale imagination.

The answer to today’s problems is not the doomsday dismissal of urban America, but the return of human community a return that can only be realized through the renaissance of the dynamic and creative source of civilization the city.

—KEVIN WHITE

Mayor, Boston

FUTURISTIC NONSENSE

Someone had to say it, and I am glad it was Peter Blake. He says it so charmingly. What is more, I think he scores eight to one in his true-or-falsc architecture quiz.

True, the only thing worse than most of the new architecture that pollutes our surroundings is the “boulle chitte,” as Mr. Blake so delicately calls it, which architects keep dishing out to rationalize their work. Our architecture is indeed lost in utter abstraction. And the first step hack down to earth where the people are is to force architects to re-examine the assumptions on which they are building their dreams and our nightmares.

But Mr. Blake is false at any rate, I think he is terribly wrong with his answer to his last question: “Are cities essential?” He knows damned well they are. Peter Blake, for those who haven’t seen his magazines, Architectural Forum and Architecture Plus, has been defending the city for years in his own pieces and those he edited. So when he suddenly resorts to all that obsolete, futuristic nonsense about how the cities arc doomed, and how automobility and electronics make the suburbs inevitable, he is not true to himself, hither he suffered examination fatigue or he is just provoking us.

Perhaps, having answered his first eight questions so brilliantly, Mr. Blake simply got tired when it came to number 9, and let his architecture-school-conditioned reflexes take over. For half a century the modern masters have drilled it into their disciples that everyone will soon be scattered and telecommunicating alt over happy suburban tracts, Broadacres and Radiant Cities. To a large and perverted extent that has most unhappily happened. The prophecy was fulfilled with the generous help of federal mortgage insurance and highway trust funds. They let the city rot and gave us no choice. It’s part of the future that hasn’t worked and that Peter Blake says he wants no part of.

I am therefore inclined to think that Mr. Blake, that devilish advocate, repeated the old anti-city sermon only to arouse outraged responses like this one and accelerate the current trend back to the city.

—WOLF VON ECKARDT

Architecture critic, the Washington Post

STIFLING ARCHITECTS

I have seen Peter Blake’s article and it works as a piece of provocative journalism. I only hope that Atlantic readers are what I think they are: intelligent, perceptive, and fairminded enough to agree with the last paragraph of his piece, in which he says his questions are “unfair to architects” and that we have “less and less say in the shaping of the man-made environment.”

I have to say bluntly that the limitations imposed on architects by building codes, zoning regulations, safety codes, the demands of the disabled, and, finally, the objectives of the client, the community, and the banks and politicians are so great that the creative powers of the architect are almost wholly stifled. He has almost nothing to say in his architecture to deny the charges of the Peter Blakes of this world.

Not long ago Marcel Breuer designed a skyscraper to be built over Grand Central Station. To the sensitive layman and the architect as a citizen, it was an outrageous concept. Breuer was heavily criticized for accepting the commission. Undoubtedly he accepted on the grounds that if it was to be built, he had better design it, as someone else would surely do it but not as well. He also probably argued that it was not within the power or jurisdiction of the private architect to make judgments relating to zoning and land use. They were matters of law and public policy.

Peter Blake would undoubtedly have advised Breuer to turn down the commission with a fanfare of publicity, and it might have been good PR for the architect. It certainly would have made a good novel for Ayn Rand.

As it turned out, the project was never built, because the forces of public policy and opinion worked as they should. I think in the long run that the policy of “rendering unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” is wise in a country dedicated to government by law, not men. Blake does admit that our clout should be exerted as citizens, not architects.

Inflation and the interest rate may well solve the architect’s dilemma and Blake’s, too. We will soon have no work to do in our profession, so we will have lots of time to write and run for office. However, if the blame for all our ills today is successfully attached to us as architects, what credibility will we have to succeed in our new roles?

Come on, Peter! Let’s hear something constructive from your talented pen! Why don’t you write about some of the good things that are in prospect. Systems building, for instance, or community development corporations, or performance specifications, or National Land Use Planning.

Ben Franklin once said. If we don’t hang together we’ll hang separately. or words to that effect. That’s still good advice today. You have disparaged teamwork, but I think it is high time that the professionals in our society work together to restore our credibility as problem solvers, not problem-makers.

The architect philosophers of the beginning of this century may have been wrong, but they dared to look to the future with optimism and confidence. We desperately need that spirit today.

—NELSON W. ALDRICH

Architect; credits include consulting work for Dartmouth College and Phillips Exeter Academy; associate architect of Boston City Hall.

WHAT’S NEW?

Peter Blake makes a lively case for his admittedly naive group of youngsters; that is, 1920 to 1970 plus thirty years—a mere flick of God’s eyebrow in time. I would get a sneeze at least—1900 to 1970 pTus thirty—and can remember before Blake’s dogma fell through, or even arose.

For a long time, I have considered the product of that dogma and of this age mere compost in the cycle of time. Blake, as a rare and brilliant intellectual, stirs the surface of the problem into a mighty froth, but doesn’t get very far into the turbid waters of the deep, deep problems concerning, among others, the land ethic and habitat.

First, of course, there can be no dogma that is anything more than the reflection of one man’s ego; thus, Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Corbusier can be explained. And that is why when they fell, their dogma fell. Thank God that dogma did fall apart.

Now I would like to offer some thoughts. Let’s take Blake’s first premise. Number one, add “social” in front of “structure,” and you’ve got it. I quote: “[social] Structure is the ethic of architecture.” Now let me ask this, is architecture the mirror reflecting society? True or false? Get a better society, and they’ll give them, those people, a better archiI tecture. The other points Blake makes concern details of a bad dogma. One problem with architects that Blake only touched on is their generic illiteracy, their detachment from reality, their egomania. True or false?

Here is another true or false for anyone to look for if they’re seeking a clue to the future; Look back to Greek island villages; high Hopi villages on a mesa. Look to high-density. low-rise, stratified centers around a plaza with open spaces in between.

I also suggest reading Nietzsche’s Beyond Good or Evil—A Philosophy for the Future. There you can get perspective. He says that any truth more than twenty years old is getting ratty.

After all, the world’s second oldest profession isn’t as vigorous as the first at the moment, but don’t write us off, baby—the old person isn’t dead yet.

Man’s habitat may yet become our first concern, leading to a pro bono publico city-state. And then for a conclusion, here are some thoughts to remember:

When it’s popular, it’s obsolete.

If we are satisfied, we are wrong.

Look back, young man, there’s nothing new in the world.

Our heritage is probably better than our future.

And finally, all generalizations including this one are false.

—NATHANIEL ALEXANDER OWINGS

Architect, founding partner, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Private commissions include Lever House, New York City

IVORY TOWER DISDAIN

Peter Blake, whose career, it seems to me, has been marked by tons of rhetoric and minigrams of accomplishment, has simply switched old errors and old dogmas for new ones.

He is to be commended for his re-examination of the “fashionable” dogma and slogans which he and those colleagues he appropriately refers to as “radically chic” have imposed unflinchingly upon all of us for several decades. He deserves our sympathy for having endured his own self-criticism and introspection on IN to arrive at a new “fashionable dogma” as entirely removed from the real issues of urban design and of human and social organization as was the earlier credo.

The questions Mr. Blake asks almost speak for themselves. “Structure is the ethic of architecture.”True or false? “Glass skins draped over steel or concrete frames are the most rational, and most ephemeral, visions of the twentieth centurv.” True or false? Who, outside of an elitist coterie of academicians who never heard of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx. Staten Island, most of Manhattan surburbia, really cares?

Happily for Mr. Blake, he can dethrone Corbusier and elevate Jane Jacobs with the stroke of a pen. Unhappily for the city of New York, the former’s precepts became law in 1961 and we now are told we should have waited for Ms. Jacobs to become “chic.” Happily for Mr. Blake, he can ignore an inflationridden economy and a 0.5 percent vacancy rate in New York City housing and endorse the Nixon Administration’s irresponsible response to the most severe housing crisis we have faced. Finally, it is of great interest to learn that our cities will shortly be rendered obsolete through more imaginative use of television. Tell that to the poor and to the working-class millions who will never be permitted to own a home anywhere near the pastoral industrial parks which are attracting their jobs, fell that to those few of us who believe there really is an energy crisis. Why don’t you ask yourself some questions about these issues, Mr. Blake?

New York is not limited to the central business district, Greenwich Village, and the Upper Fast Side. While Peter Blake worries about whether “structure is the ethic of architecture,” thousands of New Yorkers pursue lives of desperation leading them to drug addiction, violence, and crime. The health care provided for the average New Yorker is substandard. Our mass transit system is a mass disaster. There is little housing for the middle-income family and almost no decent housing for the poor. Historically critical industries such as garment and printing continue to struggle in antiquated quarters. The theater district, once the show place and tourist attraction of New York, is now dominated by pimps, prostitutes, and perverts. The financial district has become a ghost town reminiscent of those little towns out west that closed their doors at the end of the Gold Rush.

And yet. New York has a strength that Peter Blake could never comprehend. What is that strength? It is that we are dealing with a still vital and competitive commodity . . . New York C ity itself, This city is built upon the most extensive and powerful social, economic, and physical infrastructure in the world. New York is the cultural, financial, and communications capital of the world running on “people power,” born of ethnic diversity, and nurtured by confrontation and challenge. New York is neighborhoods and people, not “glass skins” and “steel frames.”

Peter Blake sits in an ivory tower wrapped in gauzy, irrelevant generalities, issuing dictates and fiats. His attitude toward money is one of aristocratic disdain, and high rents for the working class are merely an inconvenient impediment to accomplishment of his questionable design ideals. He cannot relate to the New’ York masses, only to other savants and intellectuals. He suffers from the “garment-center syndrome,” being a slave to fashion where fashion-thinking changes every year.

Peter Blake has had the good sense to challenge the precepts lie grew up with and the lack of sensitivity to pose one question after another with no more than secondary significance to all of us who do not qualify as “radically chic.”

In conclusion, I would like to tell Mr. Blake that I like strawberries but when I go fishing I use worms.

—SAMUEL LEFRAK

Builder of Lefrak City, Forest Hills, New York; President, Lefrak Organization

ARCHITECTURE AS AN ORCHESTRA

I was born into the same past as Peter Blake, and it didn’t work either. I read the first half of his article in Barcelona, between rounds of walking in the pedestrian back streets of the Barrio Gothica and along the crowded, delightful Ramblas. One can’t breathe the air, of course, which supports Peter Blake’s theories of technological progress.

The second half I read in the fishing village of Cadaques, where all the houses are either the same as they have been for the last 300-odd years, always without the help of architects, or “recycled” by modern architects, on the insides only. The architects are protected from themselves by local laws, which do not permit styles other than that of the original town to appear publicly. All very supportive of Peter Blake’s general warnings and observations.

It’s too bad that architects are commonly so egocentric as to actually believe, despite the evidence to the contrary, that they arc best qualified to make architecture. The best of them have all died, the second-best prove limited points, the third-best do the obsolete and unnecessary superbly, the fourth drop out into academia and discuss the irresponsibility of those who stay in, and the balance just make a living or try to, wisely ignored, along with their more intelligent and talented colleagues, by 80 percent of those really responsible for building and developing.

Perhaps Peter Blake has hit on a solution. For example, first the client hires architect A to design a brewery; second, he fires architect A during basic construction; and third, he hires architect B to redesign the structure as a Rehabilitation Center for government bureaucrats. At the completion of the project, architect B is replaced by architect C, who “recycles" the building into apartments for the architects of the future, expensive, but guaranteed it) produce rational and interesting architecture eventually. Maybe.

Giancarlo de Carlo, the Italian architect, has pointed to another way which shows promise. He acts as an architectural conductor, allowing the inhabitants to help him, and vice versa, to orchestrate the places they as individuals will eventually live in.

—IVAN CHERMAYEFF

Architect, partner, Chermayeff & Geismar Associates, New York City; Cambridge (Mass.) Seven Associates

OVERBOARD

That as a vital cultural force the modern movement in architecture is dead, and that its belief in architecture’s ability to assure the good life for all is (alas!) absurdly naive, arc assumptions which I had thought had become part of the common wisdom by now. So my first reaction to Peter Blake’s “The Lolly of Modern Architecture” was one of surprise that an architect whom one would expect to be current would present as news what has been in the air for a long time. Architects would not be “totally lost,” as Mr. Blake says, if the modern movement’s dogma were suddenly to be proven fallacious; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill might flounder a bit, but the really creative minds in architecture have been operating beyond the physicaldeterminism rhetoric of Le Corbusier and Wright for years. There is Robert Venturi, for example, whose Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (which Mr, Blake, by the way, panned when it appeared in 1966) has surely been as important as Jane Jacobs in turning the tide against the orthodox modern movement’s schemes for a pristine, ordered architecture to cover the world. And there is Charles Moore, who has written extensively about the “vernacular” architecture of the everyday environment, and designed buildings clearly inspired by it. And how about all of the students in the mid-1960s who revolted against the formalist aesthetic and tried to shift the profession toward more social concerns?

Mr. Blake’s God’s Own Junkyard, a polemic against the disorder of the American environment which suggested more buildings by great architects as a cure, was published in 1964, three years after Jane Jacobs’ cries for urban diversity, which he cites as an important influence on his new thinking. So his changeover is obviously a very recent one, and like all converts, he seems to have gone somewhat overboard in his zeal. In God’s Own Junkyard he called for the elimination of honky-tonk areas, like New Orleans’ Canal Street, which he said “defile America,” and now he tells us that downtowns are obsolete altogether, and are destined to become “quaint historical sites.”

Both statements are simplistic and, if I may say so, silly. There is a great and continued move to the suburbs, as Mr. Blake says, and there is a serious need for architects to get out of their ivory towers and try to understand the choices many Americans have made with regard to their physical environment. But that does not make all cities ipso facto anachronistic, and it does not convince me that the Walt Disney people, who do brilliantly execute amusement parks, should therefore take over from Mayor Beame.

Mr. Blake’s comments on the city disturb me deeply, because they seem to reject the very responsibility to see reality and deal intelligently with it that he demands of all architects in his closing lines. Modern architecture has failed in its revolutionary social goals. It is absurd to plan cities totally, and not to allow for diversity and spontaneity. But that does not make all cities useless, and it does not make all new buildings inferior to old ones, as Mr. Blake also suggests. The end of the modern movement should teach us not that architecture is unable to be of much use to society, but rather that architecture and ideology do not mix well. There will always be much that the individual architect can do, and there will always be much that the individual building, new or otherwise, can mean for its occupants and for its surroundings. I fear that in his attempt to free himself, rather belatedly, of the modern movement’s ideological baggage, Mr. Blake has come close to thrusting architecture aside as well.

—PAUL GOLDBERGER

Architecture critic. New York Times

THE ICONS ARE FALLEN

Blake’s witty attack on this century’s architectural icons is long overdue. But why the depressing verdict? Why will the “future not work”? Our eyes are open. There is hope! For although the prestige of the “famous names” over the past fifty years did indeed tend to stifle debate of their basic premises, mans an architect has long since questioned them—and from there gone on to refute them in his work, if not by his words.

But I wish that Blake had probed further, asked deeper questions, for he writes well.

How much, for instance, in the final analysis, does the written word influence architecture as opposed to executed work? Surely the latter is more capable of winning followers than all the words ever written, yet why w’as the architectural world so long in thrall to a handful of architects, more given to the “word” than the “deed”—for their executed work was relatively slight? The answer could be that it was the character of the age in which they worked; an age of profound confusion, of transition, but above all, of vast uncertainty in matters architectural. It was out of such an era that Gropius and Corbusier emerged as the great polemicists, dogmatists, and propagandists. Supremely self-confident, they urged their beliefs from center stage with vigor, eloquence, and unremitting persistence. The “word” prevailed.

But they did, of course, have something of real value to say. something that greatly needed saying in the first decades of this century. The flaw in their philosophies, which became ever more apparent as the years passed, was their excessive emphasis on the rational, which left no place for the intuitive; for anything, in short, that spoke to that part of the psvche that apprehends beauty, mystery, surprise, delight.

What interests one looking back at these great figures is that toward the end of their careers, they themselves seemed to have sensed this want. How otherwise explain the famous Chapel at Ronchamp in France except that it dramaticall) marks Corbusier’s conversion to a totalK new approach to architecture, a conversion that sent shock waves throughout the architectural world.

Although one can point to no similar sea-change in Gropius’ case, I do know, from personal conversations with him, that his trip to Japan in 1962—his first, at the age of seventv-two had a profound efleet on his thinking, and that from then until his death he lost no opportunity to stress the vital importance of beauty in the total environment of man, in marked contrast to the teaching of his early and middle years.

We owe much to these men. They played great roles, but long after their mission was accomplished, their dogma lived on to obstruct rather than free the creative stream. One is grateful to Blake for his further freeing of the channels.

—JAMES LAWRENCE, JR.

Architect, partner, Lawrence, Shannon & Underwood, Boston, Mass.

A GULL

Mister Blake’s complaint, simple, classical, is that he and his friends “. . . received our dogma from Mies van der Rohe, from Le Corbusier, from Gropius, from Breuer, and some even from Frank Lloyd Wright [sic].”

Further, that: “. . . I (and others) have begun to discover that almost nothing that we were taught by our betters . . . has stood the test of time.” And, “Nothing—or almost nothing—turns out to have been entirely true. The premises on which we have almost literally built our world are crumbling . . .”

Finally, that: “It is quite a blow’.”

Sorry about that. But how anybody could expect to be vouchsafed a unified dogma from such a disparate group of oddballs, or why they should want one, is a puzzle. Mies van der Rohe, who suffered from acute artistic constipation (diagnosed as Mondrian’s Disease); Le Corbusier, poet and divine draftsman of one facet of the spirit (like William Blake); Gropius, lacking in creativity and therefore doomed to galloping teamworkeritis; Brcuer, just the opposite, creative all over the place; Wright, |uicy as an overripe plum, reveling in the most severe case of egomania in the annals of architecture, not to mention six others, were (or are, in Breuer’s case) the most absurd, fascinating, compelling, talented, wonderful architects of our time, each with his very own little old dogma. Supermen! If I had a buck for every hour I’ve spent thinking about their gross and lovable idiosyncrasies (supermen shouldn’t have them), I’d be a millionaire. They taught me never to trust a T square and triangle around a corner. Them dogmas hang too tough.

All of Mister Blake’s “. . . nine outrageous [sic] questions [sic] . . . that modern architects do not raise very frequently |sic|,” are, in fact, problems which have been discussed, written about, explored in practice and in research, agonized over, mocked, from the moment they burgeoned, as the result of ideas, or drawings, let alone as buildings. It takes no acuity, when faced with one of Wright’s or Le Corbusier’s badly distorted, crumbling structures, to moan, “Gee whiz! Whadya think’s wrong here, huh?”

Mister Blake’s avowal that “. . . like all of my dearest and closest friends . . . I want to remain radically chic . . .” reminds me of the dress designer who yearned to get into the cement overcoat business.

“. . . the architects of my generation . . . stopped asking questions the day we obtained our licenses . . .” Sudden withdrawal like that must have been something awful.

“I decided that it was time to reexamine things quite (sic] ruthlessly,” Mister Blake confides, Vogueishly. OK, but does he have to start with the question, “Was the earth really flat?”

All this is very soft stuff, cacad’colombe, rather than “boulle chitte,” so weak in its approach to mankind’s affairs that the entirely unintended effect is one of a gull. It’s sad, as is Meredith’s comment on the basic problem: “Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul, when hot for certainties in this our life!”

Now, let’s commence with the architecture!

—ROBERT WOODS KENNEDY

Architect, Cambridge, Mass.; author, The House and the Art of Its Design

PETER BLAKE RESPONDS

Some of the above comments seem to me so thoughtful that I would have to write a book to struggle with them-and that is one thing I am trying to do at the moment. Other comments seem so deliciously silly to me that I would prefer to let them stand. I am very pleased that my article stirred up so much controversy. Obviously my questions were at least timely. □