Image vs. Reality

...The future may well lie in the fusion of these approaches...

...The uncluttered laboratories have privacy, and yet, due to the way the glazed towers are grouped around the stair and elevator core, one is visually in contact with other men engaged in similar pursuits...

...Echoes of his work, particularly the Maison Jaoul (1955), appear on almost every page...

...the modern brotherhood of work...

...We can only expect shortly to see the publication of a contemporary Vitruvius Universalis, in which the Orders will have given way to the brise-soleil (already almost as much in evidence in Boston and Hamburg as in Rio and Accra), the nonstructural concrete vault, and the dramatized mechanical distribution tower...

...This is a book which is deeply bound up in the architectural malaise of our time...

...Nor are the illustrations any more consistent...

...Miss Veronesi happily approves and hastens to inform us that the plastic solutions to architectural problems (originally produced in response to rational programmatic demands, a point neglected in her essay) now crop up all over the world "without any national characteristics or differences in cultural tradition getting in the way and imposing stylistic frontiers on our attention-thus we are not bothered by any differences other than those inherent in the originality of the architect's achievements...

...Mies, whose architecture -emphasizing joints and connections-speaks more about the process by which men build buildings than any other, set out to create a system of simple principles which would make, as Einstein said of Le Corbusier's Modulor, "the bad difficult and the good easy...

...Only in Chicago, where Mies' towers dot the lakefront, do we begin to grasp his original meaning...

...it grows logically from this central concern...

...That is the direction pointed out to us by Louis Kahn's recent Richards Medical Tower and biology building at the University of Pennsylvania...

...Little attention is given to the rare, but overwhelmingly important, attempts to rationalize our still medieval building process: to approach the economies of our highly-developed consumer goods industries without losing (or while regaining) the art in building...

...15, Reviewed by Richard Hatch Chairman, Harlem Architects' Renewal Committee Giulia Veronesi and Bruno Alfieri selected the 38 works illustrated in this first Lotus Architectural Annual, Miss Veronesi tells us, so that the reader might make a critical evaluation of our present achievements in architecture "without having to make a world tour every year...

...Buildings have been selected for inclusion because of stylistic trends...

...The technical and social context in which architects work is ignored...

...Those that are presented were not prepared for this volume, are not to scale, and are generally too small to be of any use without one's jeweler's loup in place...

...And this art lies not in stylish outerwear or interior decoration, but in giving form to the way a man lives, works, moves or is moved through spaces, comes into contact with or is prevented from contacting other men...

...These are not problems of style...

...the Visual Arts Center is not so technically advanced as the Police Building...

...It is not surprising that this should seem to be true in the age of oversell, where image is generally regarded as more important than reality, whether the image is related to an architecture...

...an automobile, or a military posture...

...These apartment blocks, built for less than our white-brick luxury homing in New York, are all similar, yet far from dull...

...Gropius no longer speaks to our times," we are told, and Mies van der Rohe is only breathing life "into an esthetic that has had its day...

...If he is, say, Japanese or Spanish, English is used...

...Both Mies and Gropius are patient refiners of principle...

...The equipment and mechanical spaces are separated from the work spaces, vertically in well-defined towers, horizontally in the hollow construction of the floors...

...Only 55 years after the introduction of Frank Lloyd Wright's regional architecture (in Professor Kuno Franche's famous monograph, Berlin 1910), which astonished European architects then trying to discard the stultifying principles of the Beaux Arts, we find our architects and critics-Miss Veronesi is not alone-celebrating the fact that architecture is once again a correct combining of accepted elements...

...Ultimately, it is an uncritical catalog of styles from which the realities of the building process are banished...

...thus the present volume neglects them and their recent solutions...

...The Police Building is not as human as the Visual Arts Center...

...Their constantly changing relationships to one another as one moves down Lake Shore Drive are as impressive as their scale and elegance when they are close at hand...

...The entire form of the Harvard building arises from Le Corbusiers splendidly human demand that all men share in the creative process...

...Let me add that, to the non-scientist seeing it for the first time, it is more than just a strikingly handsome building, it is a clear expression of concern for the way men live...

...Both have directed themselves toward uniting the technical, scientific world with that of the artist...

...The editors' doubts about their audience are clearly seen in their peculiar language policy: The projects are described in the architect's own language if he is Italian, German, French, English or American...

...The two most significant buildings in the collection, Geddes Brecher Qualls Cunningham's Philadelphia Police Building and Le Corbusier's Carpenter Visual Arts Center at Harvard, show us what architecture can be and the principles from which it arises...

...But then the book was clearly not conceived for architects, architectural historians, or even serious buffs...

...The Police Building's constructive elements are made to do double and triple duty: The exterior walls-prefabricated concrete panels-are not only enclosure, but structure and mechanical distribution system...

...The photographs, often not credited, range from excellent (Dandelet's coverage of Frank Lloyd Wright's Marin County Center) to mediocre, and tend toward the picturesque, concentrating on dramatic building details, and all too often neglecting to show the buildings in context...

...Wright and Le Corbusier, too, wanted their ideas of human freedom, made flesh in their buildings, to become general solutions for the grave problems that beset us: adequate housing for all and the recreation of cities which encourage human contact...

...Captions are in English and one other (varying) language...

...Le Corbusier has suffered the same rough fate at the hands of his admirers, and being the more productive artist has had the greater debilitating effect on the current generation...

...Although Kahn's building was completed only last year, it has not been included, perhaps because the first sections are so familiar...

...Vincent Scully has called it "a classic town, the true polis of common action...

...If the examples chosen are the best recent work of their sort-and I am afraid that they are-then one is well advised to save the fare...

...There are no revelations here...

...Like so much that is Italian, it is a book of surface effects, showing us an architecture of surface effects...

...Here he has driven a pedestrian road straight through an agglomeration of glass-walled workshops so that students on their way to and from Harvard Square will be placed in contact not just with the products, but with the process of art...

...This Medical Tower derives its plan and section-its form-from Kahn's conception of how scientists work together and of how they relate to the equipment they use in their work...

...The earliest parts of the structure are only four years old, but already we have seen its forms, degraded into sculptural decoration, in the work of Rudolph, Johnson, Katselas and a host of others...

...Plans and sections, from which the trained eye might build up an image of the internal spaces and their relationships, are often omitted...

...Almost everything included has been better covered in the standard professional magazines...

...But such problems-not the creation of impressive single buildings for powerful clients-are the pressing issues...

...It is no little annoyance to see Mies' architecture-conceived to set off, through its very anonymity, our civic and cultural buildings-accepted for a time as the almost universal architecture of corporate power, and then east aside, "having had its day," without truly having had its day...

...The building is not "styled...

...Gropius stressed inter-professional collaboration aimed at the mass production of beautiful, rational building components in order that great architecture be available to all men...