{"id":699966,"date":"2025-11-16T16:37:45","date_gmt":"2025-11-16T13:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=699966"},"modified":"2025-11-16T16:37:45","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T13:37:45","slug":"from-the-archives-are-you-illiterate-about-modern-architecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=699966","title":{"rendered":"From the Archives: Are You Illiterate About Modern Architecture?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Magazine<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

From the Archives: Are You Illiterate About Modern Architecture?<\/h1>\n
By <\/span>Peter Blake<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

November 16, 2025<\/p>\n

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    Louis I. Kahn, \u201cPerhaps the most creative U. S. architect since Wright,\u201d photographed with a model of his Richards Medical Research building ni Philadelphia. Done for the University of Pennsylvania, the building is so superb and startling an application of intelligence to architecture that it was, this summer, the subiect of a one-man, one-building photographic exhibition ta New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art.<\/span>Photographed by Rawlings, Vogue<\/em>, September 1961<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n
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    \u201cAre You Illiterate About Modern Architecture?\u201d by Peter Blake, was originally published in the September 1961 issue of<\/em> Vogue.<\/p>\n

    For more of the best from<\/em> Vogue\u2019s archive, sign up for our Nostalgia newsletter here.<\/em><\/p>\n

    Just as Paris, during the first three decades of the century, was the centre of modern art, so this country is now the centre of modern architecture. All over the world, the names of great American architects\u2014native as well as foreign-born\u2014are known, and their work admired. Much early modern architecture in Europe and elsewhere received its impetus from the work of the great Chicago architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Louis Sullivan to Frank Lloyd Wright. Now architecture in Europe, Asia, and Africa is receiving its<\/em> impetus from the work of living Americans. Impetus comes from Louis I. Kahn, perhaps the most creative U.S. architect since Wright. It comes as well from the work of Philip Johnson, Edward D. Stone, Paul Rudolph, Craig Ellwood, and Minoru Yamasaki\u2014from the American buildings by such European-born American pioneers as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Richard Neutra, and Eero Saarinen.<\/p>\n

    Laymen, of course, recognize the names of the great pioneers\u2014may recognize the names of Saarinen and Johnson and one or two of their contemporaries. But many would be hard put to identify the work of these men, or to separate it from that of lesser architects. The ferment itself is practically unknown. To some laymen, modern architecture looks much the same: glass-and-metal \u201cgraph paper\u201d draped over rectangles of steel and concrete, with little variation in detail, little allowance for \u201cbeauty.\u201d They are reconciled to this sameness because they have come to believe that modern architecture is cheap, and that sameness is the reason it is<\/em> cheap.<\/p>\n

    The facts, however, are rather different. Although it is certainly cheaper to build a modern building today than it would be to build Chartres today, modern architecture is anything but cheap\u2014nor does it all look the same. Indeed, it would be very difficult to find a contemporary art form in America, or anywhere else, in which there are so many vehemently opposed splinter groups at work. As a matter of fact, the great diversity in American architecture and the lack of consensus among its practitioners are among its diverting pleasures. While it is certainly true that glass-and-metal \u201cgraph paper\u201d is one characteristic surface of modern buildings, glass and metal do not become architecture until employed by a glass-and-metal artist. The glass-and-metal Seagram Building in New York, designed primarily by Mies van der Rohe, is as different from the jerry-built glass-and-metal junk of much of Park Avenue as the poetry of T. S. Eliot is from this prose. (Furthermore, the Seagram may be one of the most expensive buildings, per square foot, put up by anyone since Angkor Wat.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    In short, it should be understood that (a) many modern buildings are not architecture; (b) modern architects may build with almost anything from prehistoric rock to irradiated plastics, and their forms and spaces may recall anything from the piazza at Vigevano to twenty-first-century science fiction; (c) modern architecture is not particularly cheap; and (d) modern architects do not think that ugliness is necessarily synonymous with goodness.<\/p>\n

    It is much harder to say what American architects do believe. One article of faith held by many of them is that the structural frame of a building is a kind of ethical basis for architecture. Because much of modern architecture began with structures<\/em> rather than buildings\u2014with bridges, dams, silos, railroad sheds, and airplane hangars, all shaped primarily by considerations of engineering\u2014a good many architects now seem to have a fixation about \u201cexpressing structure.\u201d<\/p>\n

    This fixation has, on occasion, produced some very odd results. On the one hand\u2014quite validly\u2014a young virtuoso like Victor Lundy, in Florida, may engage in fabulous acrobatics with laminated wood arches: or another man of outstanding talent, like Ulrich Franzen, in New York, may become just as fascinated by hinged arches of steel. But on the other hand, a number of Lundy\u2019s and Franzen\u2019s contemporaries have begun to decorate their buildings with symbols that are meant to \u201cexpress structure\u201d\u2014but in truth have little, if anything, to do with the structure that actually holds up the roof. Philip Johnson\u2019s new Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, a lovely piece of outdoor decoration, has a great portico of sculptured arches that look<\/em> like formed concrete, but are actually a Texas variation of travertine, carefully fitted around thin steel pipe columns that are the true structural supports\u2014but would look like toothpicks if left exposed to the eye.<\/p>\n

    Mies van der Rohe has been doing this kind of thing for some time. Although his tall glass towers are supported on fairly conventional steel columns and beams, encased in concrete to comply with the building codes, he has for years applied vertical steel rails to the exteriors of these towers to symbolize<\/em> structure. Shaped like I-beams, these rails hold up nothing much except themselves, but look as if they had some connection with the actual structure.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    This cult of \u201cexpressing structure\u201d through applied pilasters and porticos is about to receive quite a workout at New York\u2019s Lincoln Center. There, almost every building will be faced with arched porticos that do nothing but \u201cdecorate a plaza,\u201d as the great German neo-classicist of the early nineteenth century, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, once put it. Philip Johnson had no qualms whatever about going back to Schinkel when he designed his Fort Worth museum; he takes an almost sadistic delight in parading his eclecticism before his more purist (and utterly infuriated) contemporaries.<\/p>\n

    Indeed, some of the early pioneers of the modern movement must be turning in their graves. The great Auguste Perret, who was Le Corbusier\u2019s teacher some fifty years ago, used to say that \u201cdecoration always hides an error in construction.\u201d And Perret\u2019s contemporary, the Viennese Adolf Loos, once wrote an article which proved (at least to his satisfaction) that decoration was \u201ca crime!\u201d It has taken only fifty years to render Perret and Loos obsolete: by a quick twist of semantics, \u201cdecoration\u201d has become \u201csymbolism,\u201d and what was once a \u201ccrime\u201d has been legitimized.<\/p>\n

    On occasion, the cult of \u201cexpressing\u201d or \u201csymbolizing\u201d structure may take on almost surrealist aspects: some contemporary architects have become so fascinated by the amazing thin-shell vaults, arches, and hyperbolic paraboloids, developed by such brilliant engineers as the Mexican Felix Candela, that they have gone in for what can best be described as \u201cimaginary structures\u201d\u2014structures that look<\/em>, superficially, like Candela\u2019s graceful shells, but in reality violate every known principle of engineering and could not stand up, unassisted, long enough to last out the dedication ceremonies. These violent convolutions in concrete and metal actually need and have concealed \u201cassistant structures\u201d or \u201csub-structures\u201d to keep them from toppling over in the spring breeze. Perhaps the high point of this structural craze was reached at the Brussels World\u2019s Fair of 1958. There, almost every other pavilion was a startling display of structural gymnastics, each a little more hysterical than its neighbour. At last, Auguste Perret\u2019s dictum had been totally paraphrased to read: \u201cConstruction<\/em> always hides an error in construction!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    By now, most of our \u201cstructural exhibitionists\u201d have calmed down: they have learned to let the engineers tell them the rules of the shell-game and use the new forms with increasing discretion. Such architects as I. M. Pei, Gordon Bunshaft, John Johansen, and Victor Christ-Janer have demonstrated not only that shells, domes, arches, and so forth are fine in their places\u2014but that their places are not everywhere.<\/p>\n

    Quite a few modern architects, on the other hand, do not really believe that \u201cexpressing structure\u201d is all-important. Because most of the cost of a building goes into services (like heating, air conditioning, and plumbing), these men have begun to \u201cexpress services\u201d rather than structural forms. The outstanding exponent of this approach is Louis Kahn, the remarkable, sixty-year-old Philadelphia architect whose new Richards Medical Research Building at the University of Pennsylvania is an astonishing complex of brick, concrete, and glass, dominated by a series of tall brick shafts that contain all the elaborate services required by research labs. These great shafts are as vigorous as the towers of San Gimigniano (which Kahn admires greatly), and while they contain the services which they are meant to symbolize, they also dramatize those services in a way that no cost-accountant could possibly justify.<\/p>\n

    The Blue Cross Building in Boston, by Paul Rudolph, the head of Yale\u2019s School of Architecture, is another attempt to \u201cexpress services\u201d: the air-conditioning ducts of this building have been applied to the fa\u00e7ade (rather than concealed within), and these ducts rise to the full height of the structure looking, for all the world, like small concrete columns. (So that we now have a further paraphrase of Perret\u2019s dictum: \u201cConstruction sometimes conceals a maze of duct-work\u2026\u201d) Undoubtedly, there will be more buildings that \u201cexpress services\u201d rather than structure, for both Kahn and Rudolph influence their peers. Indeed, we may soon see buildings with mail chutes, telephone wires, pneumatic tubes, and soft drink dispensers all applied to, or expressed on the outside. Or we may not; for there are many who agree with Mies van der Rohe who said, recently, that \u201cyou can\u2019t make architecture out of pipes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    While no architect has ever been able to define beauty to anybody else\u2019s complete satisfaction, some modernists have tried very hard indeed. Edward D. Stone, whose screens of concrete grill-work are famous from New Delhi to his native Fayetteville, Arkansas, speaks quite lyrically in his charming, southern voice when describing his own romantic pavilions. Minoru Yamasaki, the Detroit architect, who talks about harmony and serenity, manages to achieve them in his delicate temples of precast concrete. And there are other beauty-seekers of similar eloquence.<\/p>\n

    But there are some modernists who deride the beauty-seekers and say that their buildings are pretty rather than beautiful. One English critic, Dr. Reyner Banham, has called some of the beauty-seekers the \u201cballet school\u201d of American architecture; and other critics are less polite, muttering darkly about \u201cexterior decoration\u201d and other offenses against purity. Louis Kahn (who is very<\/em> polite) feels that it is more important for a building to have \u201ccharacter\u201d than to have beauty\u2014an argument brazenly stolen from the sisterhood of spinsters; Mies van der Rohe believes that if a building represents \u201ctruth\u201d it will also be beautiful\u2014his<\/em> argument having been borrowed from the equally chaste beliefs of St. Augustine. Le Corbusier, since 1945, has been working exclusively in b\u00e9ton brut<\/em>, and some of his many admirers have decided to call themselves the \u201cNew Brutalists,\u201d producing buildings deliberately violent in form and deliberately crude in surface and detail. To the \u201cNew Brutalists,\u201d as to Louis Kahn, beauty is to be found in the virile ruthlessness of their buildings\u2014or, to coin a phrase, \u201cbeauty is ugliness.\u201d This, one feels, is the Marlon Brando school of modern architecture. (The \u201cNew Brutalists\u201d in Japan have spoiled everybody\u2019s fun, because it is absolutely impossible for Japanese craftsmen to build imperfectly\u2014hence, the \u201cNew Brutalist\u201d architecture around Tokyo and Kyoto turns out to be rather pretty.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    The \u201cNew Brutalists\u201d are, of course, a perfectly serious group: they bear some relation to the \u201cAction Painters\u201d of the New York School and to the \u201cAngry Young Men\u201d of the English stage. They believe that a building bearing the imperfect imprint of man\u2019s hand\u2014rather than the impersonal imprint of a rolling mill\u2014can speak more forcefully than a too polished building. Unhappily, however, some men\u2019s hands are clumsier than others. While a \u201cBrutalist\u201d building by Le Corbusier, Kahn, or the young Japanese genius, Kenzo Tange, may have the grandeur of an Easter Island head, a \u201cBrutalist\u201d building by a second-rater can look like the back of the A & P.<\/p>\n

    But the central problem of American architecture is no longer the individual building, but the entire city and its environs. Recently, one American critic started to talk about \u201cChaoticism\u201d as a movement in architecture in this country. \u201cChaoticism\u201d is, of course, not a movement\u2014it is a non-movement. It is the by-product of an apparent absence of civilization. Every new highway built across our land seems to be an invitation to string out more honky-tonk developments. Too often, new space opened in the cities seems to invite further vulgarity.<\/p>\n

    More and more architects of the younger generation in this country are trying to do something to halt this blight, to create a civilized, even beautiful American townscape. The first step, to them, is simply to create a sense of order, without which neither civilization nor beauty seems attainable. These younger men have approached the problem in two ways: some consider every new building on their draughting boards an element within an architectural \u201ccontinuity,\u201d and consider what each new building will do to existing structures and spaces nearby. Others have concentrated upon broader projects of city planning and urban renewal\u2014projects that will take five or ten years to come to fruition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    A good example of \u201ccontinuity\u201d is Paul Rudolph\u2019s new Arts Center for Wellesley, which duplicates the scale of older campus buildings nearby, uses some of the same materials, and contains a number of details that recall<\/em> those of the neo-Gothic campus without copying them. Another example is Saarinen\u2019s complex of dormitories at Yale, modern in fact but not in feeling, designed in a vaguely mediaeval pattern that recalls the ramparts of Harlech Castle\u2014and some of the neo-Gothic romanticism of older buildings on the Yale campus. (The \u201civy\u201d on this Ivy League campus will be provided by the Sardinian-born sculptor, Tino Nivola, and it should be something to see.) Among such younger New Orleans architects as Nataniel Curtis and Arthur Davis, the buildings of the French Quarter and the Garden District have served as a powerful inspiration: colonnades, porticos, balconies, grilles of iron or tile reappear, admitting their debt to the past.<\/p>\n

    In short, wherever modern architects congregate, the talk is not about Perret, Loos, or the Bauhaus\u2014but about Schinkel, San Gimigniano, mediaevalism, pilasters, St. Augustine, decoration, and similar heresies. Only the jerry-builders in cities and suburbs still talk about functionalism.<\/p>\n

    Unlike these jerry-builders, whose deplorable mark is on every U.S. street, the younger idealists in urban renewal and city planning do not yet have much to show for their efforts. It takes a long time to raze and rebuild a sizable portion of an old, dilapidated city\u2014it takes a long time, that is, if you care about what you are doing. Among those who care is Edmund Bacon, the effective head of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, who was trained at the Cranbrook School in Michigan by Eero Saarinen\u2019s great father, Eliel. Bacon and his chief architect, Willo von Moltke, together with their assistants, have begun to change the face of Philadelphia dramatically over the past ten years\u2014and the change will become more dramatic in the next ten. Harry Weese, the Chicago architect, who was trained by Finland\u2019s Alvar Aalto, is another dedicated renewer of cities (his plans include a part of Washington, D. C.) ; John Carl Warnecke, trained by Gropius at Harvard, is now busy trying to renew San Francisco and environs\u2014the \u201cenvirons,\u201d in this case, encompass areas of Honolulu; and New York\u2019s I. M. Pei works on urban renewal in almost every part of the country.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    Unhappily, these excellent, idealistic architects and planners have made hardly a dent on the great face of the U.S. The reason is simple enough: so long as unbridled speculation in land is perfectly legitimate, most of our building will be shaped not by considerations of aesthetics or urban design, but by considerations of tax accountancy and rapid return on investment. The basic decision that must be made by Americans is whether they want their land to be used for the making of money or for the making of a civilization. Perhaps the two objectives can be attained jointly.<\/p>\n

    To many an investment builder, good architects are anathema\u2014and for perfectly valid reasons: such architects think, and thinking takes time. Hacks are safe, fast, cheap, and untroubled by ideas. Meanwhile, exhibitions of outstanding, new American architecture are admired all over the world, and foreign magazines praise these new American architects in every issue. By comparison, the work of the hacks looks duller and sleazier every day. Unfortunately, it is also more numerous every day.<\/p>\n

    Still, the new American architects continue, with the zeal of missionaries. It has been said that it took this country close to two hundred years to create a workable political system, and that the next step is to create a civilization. These new architects have that sense of historic mission, and men with that sense are dangerous and hard to stop.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

    Source URL: http:\/\/vogue.com\/article\/from-the-archives-are-you-illiterate-about-modern-architecture<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Magazine From the Archives: Are You Illiterate About Modern Architecture? By Peter Blake November 16, 2025 Louis I. Kahn, \u201cPerhaps the most creative U. S. architect since Wright,\u201d photographed with a model of his Richards Medical Research building ni Philadelphia. Done for the University of Pennsylvania, the building is so superb and startling an application […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":699967,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[50],"class_list":["post-699966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-vogue-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=699966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/699967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=699966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=699966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=699966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}