I am privileged to serve on the National Advisory Council at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Cranbrook is truly a place like no other—a stimulating, open environment where art, architecture, and design are taught and explored without boundaries. There’s a rich dialogue and a consciousness about design that doesn’t exist elsewhere.

Reed Kroloff, the school’s director, does an incredible job of bringing us together to discuss issues and what they might mean to Cranbrook. This month, our interdisciplinary group looked at social media.

Through a series of extraordinary speakers—Randy Ortiz from Chrysler Corporation, Ben Watson of Herman Miller, Inc., and Nike’s Tesa Arragones—we learned big business is using social media in very sophisticated and effective ways. For these companies, social media is a means of letting the world communicate their messages. But rather than controlling the content, they let the culture adopt and extend their ideas. Potent stuff!

Gathering public input about architecture

We have been experimenting a bit in our own practice, using social media to harvest public values and perceptions. We did a project recently with the help of Alex Gilliam of Public Workshop where we publicized an event on Facebook and then re-capped and talked about it afterward—again all on Facebook. I was moved by both the breadth and depth of input we got, and it was a lot more fun than stuffy public input sessions in fluorescent-lit community centers with the same old city hall groupies.

I am all over Facebook. I use it as a forum for dialogue in my classes, and people are always sending me cool videos, interesting links, and articles I would never find on my own.

At Cranbrook, someone asked me why I have 1500 Facebook “friends.” Of course I don’t have intimate personal dialogue with all of these people, but I have had some significant contact with them, and I really like the ability to easily reconnect. I believe social media ties into the psychology of creativity; creative people often have more loose ties than strong ones. They need input and stimulation from a lot of different people. Social media is a way of keeping that stimulus going.

Finding new ways to engage

I am looking for more ways to use social media to generate a professional dialogue about architecture and as a tool for helping us engage a broad slice of the public more readily in what we do. If businesses like Chrysler, Nike and Herman Miller have found creative ways to use it, why shouldn’t we?

Reflecting on the past two winners of the AIA Twenty-five Year Award, I am moved to ask what this award says about our values as architects. This is supposed to be the quintessential award that says a building is cool and has stood the test of time as an embodiment of architectural excellence. The winner must demonstrate excellence “in function, in execution of original program, and in creativity of statement by today’s standards.”

Frank Gehry Residence

If we look at the Frank Gehry Residence, the 2012 award winner, I’d say what we really value as architects is novelty, weirdness, and idiosyncrasy. Gehry’s house is amazing when it comes to these values. But is this the core heart and soul of what we’re about? It is also a single-family home for the architect himself? Is this what is really valuable about architecture—our own self-indulgence? This is not a house that even 1 percent of the populace would relate to or understand.

John Hancock Tower

The John Hancock Tower, the 2011 winner, is a beautiful building. But this is also the building where all the glass fell out. Excavation problems undermined the foundation of neighboring Trinity Church, requiring a huge restoration. The John Hancock Building, in its totality, does not demonstrate excellence. It had some real problems! Furthermore, the resolution was sealed by the courts; as a profession we are left with major questions and bad memories.

I’m a real architecture junkie; I travel a lot to see buildings. I am constantly dismayed by disappointing failures of buildings that the media has hyped. It crushes me–hurts me to the core of my being–to find that what has been called great architecture has feet of clay.

Other buildings I visit and find amazing! They’re supporting a beautiful life, are beloved in their communities, and are making a palpable contribution to the world. I recently talked with a woman who had visited the Kimbell Art Museum with a fellow she had just begun to date. The experience of being at the Kimbell bumped their romance to another level. It illuminated a connection of their souls! This building got the Twenty-five Year Award, and it deserved it.

I believe submissions to this program need to articulate the contribution the building has made over 25 years. How has it enhanced the community, or become a beloved icon? How has it provoked a redevelopment in its neighborhood? How is it sustainable? We profess these as values and say that the 25-year Award must live up to “today’s standards.” Are these really standards we believe in?

There is a difference between a building that makes a huge contribution and one that’s interesting to the architectural subculture. We, as architects, need to talk about this.

One of the best parts of the trip to China was the opportunity to see these things with my son, Sloan and his girlfriend, Kate.  Sloan’s background in history and law and Kate’s background in anthropology complemented my own background in architecture.  They are really smart, perceptive people who could absorb the places we visited with great depth.  They are also full of positive energy and lots of fun.

We all love to photograph what we are seeing.

And we all love to try new food.

We are not afraid of a lot of hiking.

Here in the fourth largest city in the country, there seemed to be an inordinate emphasis on “small” projects.  Nine awards were given for new buildings recently completed.  Five of those were given to single family homes, two were for interiors and one was for a very clever carport and parking lot.  Only one award was given for a building of over 50,000 square feet.  Although there were dozens of substantial sized schools, office buildings, medical facilities, government and university buildings etc. submitted, only one was selected for an award.  Whereas one in six of the houses submitted might have won an award, more like one in sixty of the larger buildings won an award.  Having kept up with dozens of such awards programs over the years, it strikes me that the AIA Houston program is not so unusual.  Why are so few larger buildings chosen as models for the best of architectural design in programs like this?  (I should note that this is certainly not sour grapes on my part since the one large building selected, the General Services Administration Field Office, is the only one submitted in which I had any involvement.)

Maybe one could argue that the really good designers are mostly doing smaller houses and interiors and the designers working on larger buildings are just less skilled and therefore less appropriate to be recipients of awards.  That argument seems seriously flawed given the fact that some of the same designers who win awards for “boutique” projects have much less luck when they submit their larger projects.  It also seems very unlikely that all the best talent in the field has somehow gravitated to these little projects and eschewed participation in projects that might have a broader cultural role.  I think this very common pattern of awards recognition is symptomatic of an obsession with the small in our field that is very problematic.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love doing single family houses and other small projects, and have almost always had one going on at pretty much any point in my career.  They are far less complicated than larger buildings, and there is much more opportunity for control on the part of the architect.  Clients and users are less complex and hydra-headed.  Both fees and construction budgets are generally more flexible and much higher per square foot.  Their smaller size inherently makes it simpler to get your arms around the problem and understand every detail.  Frankly, they are just easier.  I think that is why so many projects in architecture schools are small.  They are manageable, and satisfying results can be achieved by a single student working alone for the limited time-frame of a semester.  Maybe we are trained in school to think this is the premier vehicle for good design–a project that can be boiled down to a simple concept, conceived in a napkin sketch or two, worked through in one head over a few months and presented in a handful of snappy drawings.

Unfortunately, the kinds of buildings our culture needs from us as architects are not that simple.  Children in our cities need schools that will stimulate them and facilitate their education, and these will not be tiny little schoolhouses anymore.  The workforce of our society needs office buildings, production facilities and other work places that will be nurturing, efficient and beautiful places to spend 8+ hours a day–often more hours than we spend in our homes.  Our cities need multi-family housing environments that create sustainable patterns of living while also making well-scaled, neighborly places for everyday life.  We need healthcare environments where both medical staff and patients feel supported and where design contributes to medical advances and individual patient healing.  All of these needs require large, complex buildings with a diverse range of users, complicated processes of design and construction and a wide array of architectural skills.

Shouldn’t we be recognizing, awarding and learning from the best of the kinds of buildings our society desperately needs us to design well?  Shouldn’t well designed large buildings–like schools, office buildings, laboratories, retail centers, airports, convention centers, university buildings, public buildings etc.–be purposefully represented in our awards programs?  In the 25+ design awards juries I have served on I have made it a point to be an advocate for the practice of architecture that serves large numbers of everyday people in their daily lives.  I am certainly proud to recognize the exquisite small project that is full of control and finesse.  But these projects should stand, in design awards programs, alongside a good complement of projects that make a substantial contribution to solving the larger architectural problems of our society.

“Why can’t you teach them to draw?”

“Every architecture student should be required to take at least four or five courses in the business school.”

“These kids need to be taught how to put a building together—not just to make pretty pictures.”

I have heard it all, and although I have great respect for these colleagues, I am genuinely dismayed at how little they seem to know about what really goes on in architecture schools today. Many of them seem stuck in the era of their own architectural education.

The 60-somethings think there isn’t enough emphasis on design and technical skills. There is too much “talkitecture,” they say—which is probably a valid criticism of the architectural education they received in the 1960s. The 50-somethings criticize an overemphasis on formalism in architecture schools where the well-rendered façade is the sine qua non. That probably reflects more their personal experience in the 1970s than it does design studios today. Forty-somethings question a concentration on abstract imagery, architectural language, and esoteric intellectualism. They think students should be grounded in making real buildings for real people to inhabit. Thirty-somethings are concerned about the worship of shape-making and novelty in architecture schools. They feel that students are too enamored of sexy computer models and have no idea how to really put a building together.

Although I believe that academia has a responsibility to be experimental and to constantly seek new territory, I am critical of the rapid “changing of the gods” that has occurred over the past decades in architectural education. Ours is a very broad field, in which it is easy to get sucked into one or a few aspects and lose sight of the big picture. Focusing students too tightly on a narrow set of issues, or indoctrinating them in a very specific architectural language, seems wrong-headed and irresponsible. It has certainly been a downfall of architectural education in the recent past.

It was heartbreaking in the early 1990s to see graduates of top architectural programs trotting around their portfolios with beautifully stippled Prismacolor drawings of façades filled with elaborate historicist allusions, then finding the work laughably out-of-date only a few years after school. It is similarly disillusioning to see the “globs and blobs” portfolios of a decade ago looking kind of sad and silly now.

I sincerely believe, however, that architectural education today is headed in a more durable direction—one more beneficial for students and more productive for our discipline as a whole. There seems to be a constantly increasing number of schools that view architecture as an inherently complex, multifaceted field, and believe architectural education should reflect just that. These schools are more pluralistic and less singular intellectually than their counterparts of the past few decades. There is more diversity of thought and less party line.

This conclusion comes in part from my long-standing experience as a faculty member at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, as a former dean who has participated in endless meetings of architectural educators and administrators, and as someone who frequently lectures and serves on juries in a wide variety of academic programs. But it also comes, in particular, from intensive visits that I have made as an advisor–evaluator for five architecture programs over the past two years. These were not the “check-the-box” inquisitions sponsored by NCARB for accreditation purposes, but were sincere efforts whereby each program independently solicited counsel from educators and professionals as to how they might improve themselves. The five institutions—the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Tulane University; the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV); Louisiana State University (LSU); and the University of Michigan—are very diverse in terms of financial capacity, ranking, and geography. They constitute a pretty good representation of architectural education in the United States, public and private.

Each two- or three-day visit involved presentations; informal discussions with students, faculty, and staff; and dialogue with provosts or presidents of the universities. I was impressed in every case by the frankness of the conversations and the genuine desire for improvement.

What I took away from these experiences was a reassurance that architectural education in this country is rich and thriving in a wide variety of contexts. It turns out that many students can do hand drawings and physical models (which I knew very well from my own institution), and they can also represent architectural environments in an amazing variety of other media that is more sophisticated and communicative than at any other time in the history of our discipline.

They may not be taking too many courses in the business school, but they may well be participating in the Urban Land Institute’s Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition, where they work on a team to solve a difficult urban problem in a way that makes economic sense and produces a healthy urban environment. Their school will very likely offer design/build opportunities where they can learn intimately “how to put a building together.” They might be involved in one of the 20 Solar Decathlon teams that will construct, stick by stick (or SIP panel by SIP panel), a 1,000-square-foot sustainable house that will be rigorously tested in front of thousands of spectators on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

Many programs have sophisticated community design centers like the one at LSU, where every undergraduate spends at least one semester working with clients in neighborhoods that desperately need architectural services but cannot afford professional help. Other programs, including studios at MIT, concentrate on plugging into similar authentic design situations abroad, in China, Turkey, and elsewhere. Students who participate gain personal exposure to the challenges of global architectural practice as well as to environmental problems beyond the ones we face in the United States.

Rich, mature architecture programs have a host of strengths. They offer excellent history and theory courses as well as a rigorous technical curriculum. Their faculties experiment with rapid prototyping as an alternative production means, but also construct retrofit projects with saws and measuring tapes in their own buildings. From breadth comes cross-fertilization: The education on offer is not a one-liner indoctrination, likely to become obsolete.

The human products of these comprehensive programs are extremely impressive. One graduate student at UNLV was heavily involved in research with a faculty member involving sophisticated modeling of energy performance in buildings; he also helped teach thermal fundamentals to beginning undergraduates. At the same time, he was producing design work that was beautiful, sophisticated, and immaculately detailed. Likewise, MIT undergraduates in a studio on multifamily housing were remarkably capable of synthesizing urban design concerns with a sensitivity to individual residents’ needs.

There are, of course, those who cling to the notion of a school of like minds preaching a clear, distilled doctrine to be absorbed unquestioningly by impressionable young students. They point, often, to the Bauhaus as the ideal example of the well-crafted curriculum taught brilliantly by a cohesive faculty. If they could just repeat that pattern, they feel they would reach the apex of architectural education.

As it turns out, the Bauhaus was anything but that kind of singular, cohesive environment. In its most fertile era, it offered diverse points of view on a wide range of architectural topics. While Johannes Itten and Wassily Kandinsky were helping students get in touch with a mystical, spiritualist side of design, Walter Gropius was helping them understand the power of mass production. While Theo van Doesburg was emphasizing the beauties of rationalist geometry, Ludwig Hilberseimer was encouraging an efficient, nonhierarchical social fabric for the city.

I would encourage professionals to become engaged in an architecture school and discover the changes that have occurred in the past decade. Sitting on a jury or two, or going to a reunion, probably won’t do the trick. It might require becoming a really active mentor to a student, learning as much from him or her as you teach. It might involve taking on interns and asking them about life outside the office. Or teaching a design studio as an adjunct faculty member.

Breadth is not an easy thing to see at a glance. More and more, though, it is the strength of American architectural education.

The book is written in the first person as a series of letters to friends and colleagues on various topics. They recount Box’s own trajectory through architecture, beginning with his introduction to building in Miss Klimer’s first-grade class and his own decision at age 15 to become an architect. He fondly recalls his days as a student at the University of Texas studying under Martin Kermacy and Hugo Leipziger-Pearce. He describes the work and ideas of his early heroes and mentors like David Williams, Sam Zisman, Charles Granger, O’Neil Ford, and Harwell Hamilton Harris. He gives a detailed chronology of his own early career as a practicing architect, including a charming account of taking and passing the registration exam and a description of the intense decade he spent establishing an influential young firm in Dallas with James Pratt.

Box also recounts his extraordinary academic career in architecture, including his role in founding the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington and his 16 years of deanship at the University of Texas at Austin. He savors his collegiality in the latter role with scholars and designers like Anthony Alofsin, Michael Benedikt, Kevin Alter, and Charles Moore, who have clearly influenced his thinking and perspectives.

But Box is clear about the dire need for more knowledge of architecture, particularly among “amateurs,” if that thrill is to be engaged and if the built environment in our own era is to be substantially improved. And that is the point of the book as well. This is an excellent primer, offering basic lessons about the field of architecture and a key to understanding its importance as well as its seductive allure.

Three of Box’s lessons are particularly poignant. Early in the book, in a chapter called “Dreaming and Seeing,” he suggests “ten ways to explore and understand a building.” For those with little experience in thinking about architecture, this is an essential first lesson. Step by step, the author walks the reader through a building, suggesting ways to really look at architectural forms and spaces. He asks the reader, as a student of architecture, to pay particular attention to construction methods, materials, history, and context-key issues that might not occur to the novice.

A second very cogent lesson comes in the middle of the book in a chapter titled “Making Architecture with an Architect.” In 10 short pages, Box delivers a strikingly comprehensive description of what is involved in being an enlightened architectural client. He covers mundane things like fees, contracts, procedural relationships between owner/architect/contractor, and what is involved in various phases of architectural services. But he also gives sound advice on slippery topics like how to select an architect and how to pace the design process in terms of critical decision making. Coming from the perspective of someone who has had a lot of experience being a client for significant projects as well as being an architect, Box offers a savvy, balanced point of view.

An impressive third lesson comes in the chapter “Making Connections,” at the end of the book. Here, complex issues of city planning and urban design are dealt with clearly and in plain language that will make good sense to almost any reader. Box asks the question, “Can a city, historically laid out to sell real estate as a laissez-faire enterprise, pull itself together into an urban form that facilitates wonderful places to live and work?” He sees this as the fundamental urban design challenge of our era and provides a compelling argument for a very different alternative to the pervasive American sprawl city.

In an often autobiographical style, Hal Box has done a “memory download” of all the collective wisdom he has gained about the field of architecture during a long, productive career. Written without jargon, but with evident enthusiasm and affection for the field, this book is engaging and easy to read. It is almost like sitting around a dinner table in Box’s current home, in San Miguel de Allende, and listening to the ruminations of an architect with extraordinary experience, charm, and passion.

The firm, based in Houston, eventually grew to an international practice with over 1000 employees under Caudill’s leadership. Its innovative design methodology, rooted in reliance on interdisciplinary teams of architects, engineers, environmental specialists and user groups, became a pattern for many large architectural practices in the 1970s. The firm also developed techniques for group dynamics management and post-occupancy evaluation which were broadly influential. ‘

WRITINGS

Space for Teaching (College Station, TIC, 1942)

Architecture by Team (New York, 1971)

She was, quite naturally, a music major both in undergraduate graduate school.  Slowly, through her collegiate years, her musical sensibilities changed. She became more discriminating about what she appreciated and what she sang. The Janis Joplin songs were, rightfully, the first thing to go because they abused her vocal chords. But, pretty soon the Beatles and Aretha Franklin were gone from her repertoire too, along with any sort of country music. When people asked her to sing, she responded mostly with folk songs and English madrigals that were accessible to lay ears but also “acceptable” in the musically “refined” crowd espoused.

By the time she finished graduate school, the repertoire had narrowed further. Even the madrigals had lost their interest for her. Only opera survived, and, even then, she disdained historical opera, favoring little-performed contemporary pieces instead. Needless to say, she got few requests from her “ordinary” friends to sing any more. The restaurants and clubs where she had performed earlier found their patrons were not interested in her narrowing musical tastes, so she no longer had that outlet for her talents.

Few contemporary operas are staged, and many of those are on college campuses with meager pay, so she had little professional opportunity there.  She became very frustrated with her music which she refused to “compromise.” She finally went back to school and became a computer analyst.  She sings very little these days. In my estimation, a gift—a great talent that gave joy and meaning—was lost in this process.  And though I find the music she eventually focused on quite wonderful, I am deeply saddened by the fact that this narrowing process, in the end, actually alienated her from the art she loved.

I am also disturbed by the tendency in many academic disciplines in this final decade toward narrowness and inacces­sibility. Just as my friend was marginalized in her musical development, so students of architecture, economics, film, literature, painting, philosophy and many other disciplines are often pressed to focus their education and their interests so restrictively as to preclude a broad understanding of their discipline and its potential contribution to society as a whole. I am troubled by what seems to me to be an effort to replace broad-minded education with indoctrination or training according to a narrow set of values or tastes—tastes which, too often, have a very short shelf life and are replaced by new, but no more valid tastes, with disturbing rapidity.

This is especially apparent to me in architecture, where, over the short twenty years of my own professional career, I have seen a very regular and distressing “changing of the gods.” A clear, but narrow, set of architectural issues or forms becomes “hot” in the architectural media and in leading schools of architec­ture. A small group of advocates/practitioners becomes iden­tified with these issues and is crowned “stars” for the moment. The new “stars” often feel compelled to “kill their fathers” so that an acceptance of a new direction generally requires rejec­tion of old ones. An illiberal and constrained view of architec­ture is sold almost fanatically for a few years with dogmatic intolerance for other perspectives. Then, the “gods” change and a new, but equally narrow movement prevails and the cycle continues.

A BROAD VIEW OF ARCHITECTURE’S CULTURAL ROLE
The result of this sequential and exclusive focusing has been, I think, a lack of real long-term progress in architecture and a loss of vision as to what we have to contribute to society. I sincerely believe that architecture has the power to be a central force for cultural progress. I accept Winston Churchill’s observation half a century ago that, “We shape our buildings, and, afterwards, our buildings shape us.” We have lost sight of the real potency of architecture as a fundamental factor in the everyday life of a society.

In this sense, I am not talking about architecture as media— drawings, models, photographs, magazines or books. I am talking about the real, direct experience of buildings and places— the inescapably literal nature of the discipline in its purest form. Real architecture occurs when there is interaction between physical form and the everyday tangible life of the society it is meant to serve.

This kind of architecture is the crucible in which most of the events of our lives occur. It is the cheery, messy classroom of our childhood where attitudes are shaped toward learning for a lifetime. It is the quiet shadowy front stoop where we feel the awkwardness of a first tender kiss. It is the antiseptic whiteness of a brightly lit delivery room where a child is born. And it is the lofty, noble galleries of a museum where we discover the meaning and emotion that can be captured on a canvas.

The places where we play out our lives have a direct and fundamental role in shaping who we are. If we, as a society, warehouse our lives in bland, lifeless environments, we reduce the richness and meaning of our existence. If, on the other hand, the physical environment we inhabit stimulates our senses, pro­vokes our curiosity and provides a broad range of real experi­ences, we are, as a culture, prepared for far greater challenges of creativity and self-actualization. If architecture is to fulfill its potential as a cultural force, it must play to its strength in real, visceral experience.

The perception of architecture in this very potent form must be understood to be implicit, subliminal or even subconscious in many instances. Attending a mass at St. Peter’s in Rome may be an extraordinarily powerful and moving religious experience. The processional, the liturgy, the ritual, the music are all absorb­ing and inspiring. You feel chills and lightheaded, and your emotions soar. The architecture of St. Peter’s is probably the most essential element in the chemistry of this phenomenal event. The building’s glorious majesty, its astounding scale, its rich excess and exuberance are all essential to the emotional potency of the mass. And yet, the event is not about architecture. It is about religion. The explicit, conscious experience is of the mass. The power of the architecture is implicit, subconscious, subliminal.

Architects and architectural critics are myopic, and we delude ourselves if we think that the experience of architecture is largely or even significantly one of people looking at buildings explicitly. The explicit gaze is, in fact, and always has been, a comparatively rare experience, largely confined to tourists, aficionados, critics and architects themselves. The far more prevalent and extraordinarily potent experience of architecture is implicit. It stimulates conversation in a friendly local bar. It tempts us to browse and window-shop on an urban sidewalk. It creates awe and respect in the lobby of a public building. It intensifies our communion with a painting on a gallery wall by its modulation of light, space and intimacy.

While architects may be tempted to envy music, film, theater, painting or literature for their ability to focus participants’ energies into an explicit experience, I think we devalue our discipline if we try to press it too fully into such a role. Architecture is often at its best when it is not fully controlled, linear and specific. It can be wonderfully malleable and is likely to be received in varied and unpredictable ways no mater how hard we try to make it otherwise. This is an extraordinary aspect of the discipline to me, and it is truly thrilling to see a building take a life of its own beyond the conception of its designer and fully engage with the lives and desires of the people inhabiting it.

Architecture is a completely quotidian enterprise. It is inescapable. It surrounds us. We play out virtually every event of our lives, from the christening of our child to a Sunday afternoon baseball game in a consequential architectural environment. The experience of architecture is constant in most of people’s lives regardless of interest or disinterest. It is critically important that we understand the broad, constant and non-selective character of the audience we reach.

From my point of view architecture is a cultural act, not a personal one. It grows out of the particulars of a situation – a range of needs and environmental conditions. At its best it makes magic of a set of societal parameters, and it has everything to do with the building’s purpose, its inhabitants, its landscape, its climate, its economic conditions and the technologies of its place and time.  The architect is certainly a key player in this cultural act, but so are, quite often, hundreds of other people, from engineers, consultants, project managers and clients to steel workers, stone masons, bricklayers, woodworkers and laborers. The architect is not, and never was, a romantic, lonely figure working in artistic isolation, but, rather, is an essential creative force in an enterprise far larger and more intricate then the work of one person could ever be.

NARROWNESS AND MIMICRY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURAL SCENE
We can, of course, struggle to extricate architecture from the broad cultural role I have just described. We can sever it from its life blood of real experience and define it very narrowly as a realm of drawings and models and ideas and discussion. We can distort its role in support of life, bring it to the forefront, and make a fetish of it—an end in itself rather than a means to broader cultural ends. We can paint the architect as a hero figure, a star, a lone combatant or a dilettante taste-maker rather than as a cultural advocate and master builder.

This, I think, is to a significant extent, what we have been doing over the last two decades and a direction we must confront in this final decade. For some reason, we seem to have lost confidence in the uniqueness and particularity of architecture itself as a discipline. Artificial and extrinsic agendas for producing form have overpowered intrinsic motivations. We have neglected those characteristics that set architecture apart, and have become enamored of and intimidated by related fields of philosophy, sculpture, painting, cinema, writing, linguistics and music.

Ironically, by trying to mimic the strengths of these other disciplines, I think we have only weakened our own capable enterprise. By defining architecture narrowly according to some projected coincidence with philosophy or linguistics, we certainly invent and redefine new boundaries for our field. But in charting these new boundaries we seem only to have narrowed our domain. We have isolated ourselves and marginalized our cultural role by eschewing the more catholic nature of the discipline traditionally. We have exchanged our role as “mother of the arts” for the far less central position of stepchild.

In the early 1970s, leading designers were running about looking for parallels between architecture and linguistics. They read Noam Chomsky and Umberto Eco and learned what a phoneme was and searched for comparisons between the structure of language and the structure of architectural form. They sought desperately to make architecture bear meaning in a linguistic manner—a task it is notably ill-suited to accomplish. Some fresh new forms emerged which rapidly became hallmarks of a new movement/style. But soon the futility of trying to make buildings behave like words and the frustration of trying to get people to pick up a building for a good read killed the effort. The few executed buildings were narrow polemics, not full, rich experiential architecture. They soon became more curiosities than meaningful environments. The new forms lost their appeal because they had little real merit beyond novelty. We tired of that shtick and moved on.

Several cycles later, a similar group of designers explored some equally forced parallels between architecture and litera­ture. They got very interested in allusion and reference. These interests became seminal forces in the creation of Post-modernism. Architects imagined that by alluding to certain historical forms they could conjure up all sorts of associations in the mind of the observer just as literary allusions conjure up associations in a reader. There was much talk of metaphor and poetic license. Buildings were imagined to tell elaborate tales, and intricate story lines were described in slide lectures that the era’s “stars” gave on their work. Again, a fresh new set of forms appeared and rapidly became the stylistic signature for the movement. They, too, were novel and provocative at the Lime. But when the resultant buildings just sat quietly on the streets of the city, without the aid of the architects’ storytelling, their meanings were not so clear or important. And, as with so many other novel formal systems, when the newness wore off, the stylistic signature of Post-modern­ism seemed hollow as well. And so we moved on.

In recent years, the rage has been for parallels between architecture and post-structuralist theories. Buildings are meant to become “narratives” or “texts” expressing deep meanings about angst or disintegration of our era. The new jargon refers to “forces,” “inscriptions,” “conflicts” and “traces.” The new stylistic forms physically attack one another causing damage by collision, interlodging, dents and scrapes.

Oddly enough, though the movement has claimed to be a rebellion against Post-modem style, it is, in many ways, only a minor shift. The projects are still about deeply imbedded verbal meanings that are incomprehensible in physical form alone and require extensive explanation—most effectively in slide lectures. The issues dealt with by the projects are very narrow, the key terms quite repetitive, and the formal language (right down to the details) is easily codified and imminently marketable. The forms themselves are often no less eclectic or historicist than in Post-modernism. They just draw from a different era.

The clearest lesson of Deconstructivist (Neo-Constructivist) style to me is that Modernism has, at long last, become acknowledged, not as a contemnporary expression, but as an historical style. After seventy years of being called “current” or “of our time,” it too is now being used in an historicist manner. While Post-modernism eschewed modern forms, Deconstructivism rebels in them. The eclectic hybridizations and recombinations of Constructivism, De Stijl, Expressionism, and Miesian Minimalism of the 1920s that are so prevalent today are, in many ways, just another version of mid-1980s Post-modernism. The clothes have changed, but, under the shiny new regalia, the ruling despot remains the same. Though the roots of Deconstructivism are claimed to be more philosophically au courant, the movement’s expression is as narrow and formalist as its predecessors, and it seems similarly doomed to an early death. Already the media savants are wondering, “What comes next?” (Architecture that usurps the visual qualities of film, video and computer imagery seems a good bet to me.)

I should make it clear that I believe there is a tenable coincidence and potentially meaningful interface between architecture and art, computing, economics, engineering, film, linguistics, literature, philosophy and physics. What troubles me is the myopic singularity of a focus on one of these to the exclusion of the others and of the broad cultural role architecture can play. Of the body architecture, any one of these might be a finger or, at most, a hand. To distort that relationship, and blow it out of proportion, is to create a freak. The new formal results that have developed from this process over the last two decades should not be mistaken for true architectural invention, originality or creativity, but should be seen merely as the freakish novelty that they are.

THE TASTE-MAKING SUBCULTURE
My colleague Michael Benedikt recently wrote, “style and stylistic evolution in art, cinema, publishing, music, architecture run on their own crazy energy and shallow logic, and no one involved need understand deeply or care what is going on for the enterprise to flourish.” Though Benedikt acknowledges that style “covers over” or “suppresses” much of the “serious business” that architecture might deal with, he seems tolerant and accepting of such “sport.” I am afraid I cannot be quite so sanguine in the matter. The enormous energy that architects pour into their fetish with style seems to me a significant and counterproductive force in diminishing their contribution to society and their uportance in contemporary culture.

While there is certainly nothing intrinsically wrong with explorations like Postmodernism or Deconstructivism, such arts can become negative when they draw attention away from architecture’s broader mission or when they crowd out a real and productive breadth of design alternatives. When architects give inordinate status to design which is perceived as being in the latest “style” or on the “cutting edge,” they distort appropriate evaluation of quality and cultural contribution. They marginalize their efforts by aiming them narrowly at a subculture which values stylistic conventions, but cares little about broader social and artistic goals.

Contemporary music, in the last decade, has overcome some of its earlier allegiance to style conventions and, in so doing, has increased its cultural power significantly. Recent music offers an extraordi­nary range of possibilities for its diverse audience of listeners. The old categories of country, heavy metal, jazz, pop, rhythm and blues, rock and soul are becoming increasingly meaningless. A country-western star can acknowledge a debt to Jimi Hendrix. A rock group can admit to being big jazz fans. “Guns & Roses” can make a hit out of an old Paul McCartney tune. And Paul McCartney can write music for a symphony. The result of this broad-minded diversity is music that is having an enormous impart on our culture. I envy that for architecture.

Unlike music, architecture plays an increasingly marginal role in contemporary culture. Whereas a broad cross-section of society is enriched and nurtured by the current musical scene, hardly anyone (outside of architects and a small group of aficionadas) knows or cares about the current architectural scene. By its clannish, esoteric directions, architecture has marginalized itself to the point that whatever new style happens to be the range, it really does not make any difference in terms of the larger society. For a discipline with such long-standing cultural power, this is indeed a pity.

Why are architects so “hung-up” on style consciousness? In particular, how can we justify such “sport” in a discipline where our products are so expensive and time consuming? Even if one could get excited by fashions in dress or graphic design (which are, by their nature, short-term media), architecture, except in the odd case of temporary exhibitions, seems intrinsically ill-suited to such ephemeral taste orientation.

Perhaps one explanation for our “hang-up” with style lies in the high esteem that has characteristically been granted the avante-garde in art and architectural criticism in the twentieth century. Despite recent challenges to the contrary, I believe that in the early century there was a potent, viable and admirable avante-garde movement that deserves sincere esteem. It rebelled against a solidly entrenched and repressive power structure and helped release a flood of responsive and creative solutions to real issues of a rapidly changing society. Our admiration for that movement should not, however, perpetuate a myth that this is the only viable means for progress for all places and all times.

In the final decades of the twentieth century, however, any pretensions toward a viable avante-garde have resulted instead in the creation of an effete and nostalgic taste-making culture which feeds on change for change’s sake. There is no longer, in fact, a monolithic power structure to rebel against. We are a diverse and relatively permissive society. Novelty and experimentation have become the rule rather than a powerful exception in art and architecture to the point that they have lost their ability to shock or move us. We have seen too many critics, artists and architects flying around the country demanding large lecture fees and first-class airfares, claiming to be rebellious members of a social avante-garde, while they live in conventionally stylish SoHo lofts and dine in all the right chic and expensive restaurants. The notion of a genuine avante-garde as a vital force for progress in our own time is corrupt and dying, if it is not dead already.

And yet, in a nostalgic, last-gasp gesture we frantically hold onto the notion that something new must be better—that even shallow and immature rebellion and change must be a path to progress. We desperately shift from fashion to fashion like an impatient and indecisive child avoiding the challenge of true vision that might lead toward real, culturally significant progress.

A second explanation for our “hang-up” with style may lie in the very real benefits that stylistic change accrues to its two most ardent perpetrators—the architectural media and architecture schools. Undeniably, these stylistic changes sell books and magazines. They produce a kind of controversy and excitement that draws attention and provokes discussion. As long as there is change, subscriptions must be maintained to all of the right journals to “keep up” with the “latest word.”

Promotion of a well-defined style with a clear label makes good media sense. Product identity is a key concept in any promotional campaign. Identification of designers with a readily recognizable “look” in their work is an essential ingredient in selling a style. They become an effective product to market.

Stability or diversity, on the other hand, are less likely to serve the media’s goals. Stability denies the immediacy, even urgency, that popular periodicals thrive on. Diversity precludes the kind of one-liner “punch” that is so marketable to readers with short attention spans. Though pluralistic and evolutionary progress may serve the society and the physical environment well, it does not sell books, newspapers and magazines. And, increasingly, the media of our profession is dominated by a concern for selling its wares.

Architecture schools, as well, often thrive on quick cycles of stylistic change. In recent years, new graduates of leading architecture schools have managed to stay in demand—often over more experienced (but less “current”) personnel. Design departments in style conscious firms have become ghettos popu­lated by a consistent group of twenty-eight-year-olds. A principal in one of the largest architectural firms in the Midwest once described to me how his firm liked to lure talented young graduates fresh out of school to do their design work. They found, he confessed, that after a few years, it was best to let these people move on and get a fresh crop of replacements. Under such a system, as long as a school stays “current,” its newest products remain in demand. But what about its older products— those who could contribute experience and maturity to design?

Students who graduated from Princeton in the mid-1980s would have been the cream-of-the-crop of their generation. Michael Graves was the reigning “star” architect and Princeton was his long-time home. The best and the brightest enrolled there, worked slavishly and received what would have been deemed the best possible education of the day. Upon graduation their lushly rendered portfolios were the “right stuff that would win them positions in leading firms (and teaching in other schools of architecture) across the country.

A mere five years later, the same portfolios had completely lost their currency and had even become the brunt of ridicule in many circles. The authors of the work were no less talented, no less hard-working, no less capable than they were a few years earlier. They were just out of style. By then, of course, their alma mater had moved on to other things and was producing a new generation of “hot” young talent. By staying current the school could ride the wave of style change. But it is not so easy for the graduates who actually believed in the narrow stylistic doctrine they were fed and found themselves lost and alienated by the new vogue.

Schools of architecture have become very adept at making such lightning-quick stylistic changes. I am amazed and appalled at the speed with which the work in the best architecture schools has totally transformed itself visually over the last five years. The schools have become extraordinarily adept at rapid change with the times. In this mode, faculty members who can change their skins with great regularity are of great value. Especially if a teacher does not build much (buildings tend to stick around and haunt their authors), such changes can be made in the midst of constantly rotating student bodies without seeming too hypo­critical. Many schools, on the other hand, have addressed the problem by virtually eliminating long-term faculty positions. Some of the leading schools in the country have acquired a revolving-door faculty that can be quickly and flexibly traded out from year to year maintaining complete currency.

I am greatly disturbed by the kind of planned obsolescence of designers and teachers that has proliferated rapidly in recent years. We need the best talents of the current generation to grow steadily for decades—not to languish or he used up in a few short years. Surely experience can be a great teacher and maturity can produce strong, vital results which freshness alone cannot. And surely the architectural press and architecture schools have more to contribute than merely being a taste-making subculture for the profession.

BEYOND STYLE
Some of the very best architects of the twentieth century have managed to free themselves from the hegemony of style and have produced rich, mature buildings that resist historians’ labels but lodge themselves firmly in our minds and hearts simply because they are extraordinary, vibrant physical environments. I am impressed by the breadth and variety, for example, of Frank Lloyd Wright’s mature work of the late 1930s. He is a designer working at his full creative potential and without the narrow constraints of a prevalent style of the day or even a fixed personal style of his own.

If we were not all so well versed in architectural history, I think it would be difficult to tell that such diverse works as Falling Water, Wingspread, Taliesin West, and the Johnson Wax Building were all done by the same designer at virtually the same point in time. Wright was free to react creatively to the Arizona desert, the woods of Western Pennsylvania or the rolling hills of the rural Midwest. His work is unfettered, responsive, appropriate and truly creative.

Le Corbusier reached the same kind of pinnacle in his mature career, creating such rich and diverse works as the Villa Sarabhai, the Villa Shodan, and the Heidi Weber Pavilion in a brief span of time. He was not limited by the sort of narrow palette of forms and materials that characterize so many stylish designers today. He created dark, low vernacular-inspired brick vaults in the deep wooded site of the Villa Sarabhai and then made a tall spindly concrete frame soar on the higher, more open site of the Villa Shodan nearby. The Heidi Weber Pavilion utilizes yet a third vocabulary of form and materials—a robust steel frame with glass and sheet-metal infill. Again, this is a designer with broad, diverse capabilities and a clear talent that transcends the narrow con­straints of style.

Louis Kahn demonstrated this kind of mastery as well in the late 1960s when he conceived concurrently two projects which I think are his best, but which are very different from each other—the Kimbell Museum and the Exeter Library. Low, flat, and tawny gray and tan in color, the Kimbell Museum hunkers into the north Texas prairie where it is located. Tall, proud and ruddy red, the Exeter Library is a quintessential New England building sitting like a jewel on the lawn of its Georgian campus. Their buildings are not about superficial aesthetic predilec­tions of their designer. They are rich, thorough cultural expressions inextricably tied to where they are and to the societal purposes they serve. They were not high profile trend setters of their day. They remain, even after twenty years, singular and inimitable.

In our own time, there are many architects who practice in this broadminded, astylar mode. They are generally not “media darlings.” Many, in fact, are not well known at all. But their work is sophisticated and mature, and it serves the society they build for, I would argue, far better than the work of the artsy style-conscious crowd who are so influential in publications and in architecture schools. I greatly admire the work of Sverre Fehn in Norway, Alvaro Siza in Portugal, Giancarlo de Carlo in Italy, Jorn Utzon in Denmark, Christian Gullichson in Finland, Fay Jones and Christopher Alexander here in the U.S., Richard Le Plastrier in Australia, Kazuo Shinohara in Japan—the list could go on and on. Many of these architects have long careers during which they have produced a very wide range of build­ings. If their works were compiled into a book, it often would not make a very coherent volume—nor should it. Their work is not meant to be experienced that way, but rather as real physical settings in diverse places and times.

ARCHITECTURE FOR A BROAD, DIVERSE WORLD
Surely a hallmark of the final decades of the twentieth century is the startling variety of cultures that exist on the face of the globe. This extraordinary political era has appropriately focused on the inde­pendence and identity of diverse ethnic and political groups and is working to find away for all of them to coexist in a finite world. Surely ours is an era when acceptance, broadmindedness, tolerance and mutual respect should be apart of any real intellectual enlightenment.

How liberating it would be to imagine an architectural era characterized by a broad diversity of design not easily codified into “camps” or styles. What a powerful advance it would be if leading architects were prepared to accept and even advocate a much broader range of design than they themselves might be prepared to execute. In the presence of such acceptance, our best design talents might be reoriented to meeting the authentic range of visual character appropriate to a diverse world.

If we are to regain the kind of real cultural power intrinsic to the medium of architecture, we cannot relegate our best minds and talents to marginal and esoteric pursuits of taste and style. We must liberate those minds from a repressive environment of style wars and set them loose to produce real, diverse, responsive environments for the cultures we are meant to serve.

As part of cultural renewal and growth, this process is natural and unavoidable – the intellectual landscape from architecture to zoology is littered with once-dominant ideas that fell to today’s or yesterday’s revisionists. And, as has been remarked before, there is a generational trough; we tend to regard as least valid ideas most closely associated with the views of the 20 to 30 years previous. But renewal on such terms has its costs, particularly in architecture. By blinkering our vision of recent decades we lose the experience of designers who have more in common with us, in terms of technology and social needs, than designers of any other era. By rejecting the recent past we neglect continuity in architectural development from which we could build maturity, stability, and confidence. The ideas behind architectural design from the 1950s fell into the trough in the mid-1970s. Some of those ideas are ripe for reassessment.

It is important, from the outset of such a reassessment, to be critical. If architecture is to evolve in a positive way, it must practice “survival of the fittest,” selecting for the strengths of the previous era and rejecting its weaknesses. We must not limit ourselves to a shallow copying of forms from the past, like kids rummaging through daddy’s old ties. We also need a comprehension of the generative forces behind the forms – daddy’s wisdom, as well as his old ties. Digging shows that the decade of the 1950s was an era of spirited creativity in architecture.

PERSPECTIVE
It takes some effort in 1985 to place oneself accurately in the context of the ’50s. There is a tendency to measure an era by yardsticks developed after the fact, and to recall aspects selectively. In the current ’50s nostalgia, for example, the decade is idealized as a frivolous and carefree backdrop to the traumas of the 1960s. Cruising to the drive in, cheerleader skirts, flat tops, and Joe Kool shades symbolize, in retrospect, a last innocent fling before the assassinations, protests, and national introspection of the next decade. But this is, of course, a thoroughly laundered view of the era. The 1950s not only preceded the 1960s, but inherited the aftershocks of the 1930s and 1940s. And it was a watershed decade, the time of beginning for the new society.

Returning veterans were picking up the pieces, generating the demographic bulge that would be called the baby boom. Whole industries were reconstituting themselves after almost 20 years spent either shut down or absorbed in the war effort. New technologies, often spun off from military research, were finding widespread civilian applications. After two decades of interruption, the economic, industrial, and political life of society – as well as the private lives of many citizens – were making a new start.

Perhaps for this reason, in the 1950s the good old days were rejected. Traditions-particularly European traditions-had been reduced to rubble by the Great Depression and the Second World War. Americans, with their native optimism, concluded that they could invent superior social and architectural modes of expression. Anything new and innovative seemed better than the familiar.

FULLER AND SAARINEN
In this context, an attitude developed in architecture in the 1950s that placed a premium on invention. With the rejection of tradition and an enthusiasm for newness came a new vision of the role of the architect – the architect as scientist, almost, assessing the new social situation, hypothesizing solutions, experimenting and testing, and finally, in success, inventing a new solution with a broad applicability. In this view, the architect was neither the sophisticated arbiter of taste, nor the erudite master of form, history, or style, but a tinkerer, a solver of problems.

No one embodied the new architect better than Buckminster Fuller, who came into his own in the 1950s. Half architect, half philosopher, he hardly built anything, but he redefined the role of the architect – well beyond the definition shaped by the early Modernists in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.

Buckminster Fuller represents an extreme case, but many of the leading lights of the architectural profession in the 1950s also directly partook of the role of inventor. Eero Saarinen, perhaps the most admired American architect of the decade, was widely admired for his inventiveness. Along with Charles Eames, Saarinen redefined that timeless instrument for sitting, the chair. Saarinen used the newly abundant technology of plastics and fiberglass to create fluid forms that conformed to the lines of the human body. He rejected the classic four-leg support in favor of a shapely pedestal. Saarinen’s chairs were astonishingly new in shape and material, even in “feel,” but they were also very practical, designed with great care to reflect their purpose as well as the technique of their manufacture.

The same attitude toward design informed many of Saarinen’s mature building projects. His idiosyncratic chapel and auditorium of 1955 for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology broke all the rules for both building types. The auditorium was placed under a bulbous three-sided thin-shell concrete dome. Its engineering was highly experimental, trying to achieve the maximum span with the minimum use of reinforced concrete. The materials were unconventional too. The roof was surfaced in a newly developed acrylic plastic that was supposed to give long-time pliability and accommodate movement within the structure over the seasons.

Saarinen’s MIT chapel was less inventive in technology than in light and form. Its magical interior character was created by the dynamic play of warped brick surfaces modeled by light coming, not from the side or top, but from below. Dappled sunlight dances on the interior walls, reflected up from a moat-like pool and through windows occupying the space between the exterior cylindrical skin and the (acoustically superior) irregular interior skin. The whole wall system is fresh and clever, the product of an inventive mind working at full tilt.

Saarinen’s Bell Laboratories facility in Holmdel, New Jersey, begun in 1957, is similarly full of fresh problem-solving devices. Mirrored glass was used here for one of the first times. Mirrored glass, later to become a stylistic symbol, made a lot of sense in its application at Bell Labs. It not only solved the problem of how to consistently sheath opaque and transparent portions of wall and reduce heat gain, but it gave visual security, a primary programmatic consideration. The building’s perimeter and corridor and cruciform atrium were also aimed at the requirements of a high-security research laboratory, where wall space for equipment was at a premium, but where visual relief and open sociability were desired.

In his short career Saarinen demonstrated an extraordinary flair for new conceptions. At the Yale Hockey Rink he experimented with a hanging structure for a long span, rejecting conventional from – below support. He virtually reinvented the airport terminal in his projects at Kennedy and Dulles airports, reconfiguring the modes of passenger transport along with the architectural expression of the type. He even developed a new technique for combining stone and concrete to make that most ancient of structural components – the masonry load-bearing wall – feasible for taller construction.

GOFF’S DOWN HOME INVENTIVENESS
Saarinen’s attitude reflected a national and even international interest in architectural invention in the 1950s. It was, however, in the rapidly developing southern and western parts of the U. S. that the penchant for inventiveness had its greatest impact. In the Texas region there was an impressive open-mindedness, a willingness to take chances on new approaches to architectural problems. H.C. Price of Oklahoma exemplifies the 1950s breed of client, taking the risks to build the visionary projects of their architects. Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1953 Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, embodied ideas Wright had nurtured, but been unable to build, for many years. The Price Tower broke new ground with its rich mix of uses, its tap-root structural system, its hexagonal geometrical base, and its highly textured cladding. It was a blockbuster invention.

When Price’s son tapped Bruce Goff to do a bachelor’s pad in Bartlesville in 1957, he got, on a smaller scale, the same sort of energetic free thinking. The Price house’s geometry was fresh and particularly suited to the panoramic views from the site. Its one-room plan fit the habits of its occupant like a leopard-skin glove. The large focal space, in which Goff replaced conventional furniture with a pillow-lined “conversation pit,” created a new twist on everyday life in the American home.

But it was in Goff’s use of materials that the architect’s open-minded approach truly shone. Like Saarinen, Goff searched for ways to apply commonly available – if unconventional – materials to building. On the exterior of the Price House he made rugged masonry walls from crystalline blobs that were rejects from an industrial process. On the house’s interior Goff ran carpet everywhere, using it as wallpaper as well as a floor covering. For the peak of the living-room ceiling Goff sought a material that would almost dematerialize the surface, making it more like a cloud than a roof. He ended up using goose feathers glued to the surface-an echo of Saarinen brought down home.

FORD’S DARING EMPIRICISM
O’Neil Ford, like Saarinen, Wright, and Goff, fervently pursued invention in the 1950s. The lift slabs – slab floors poured in place one on top of the other and lifted into position with specially designed jacks – he used at Trinity University show, as do few other techniques, the daring of empirical design. Using them, Ford took real chances with the goal of inventing a more economical and potentially revolutionary construction process. Ford was continually tinkering with structure in the 1950s. He admired the bicycle-wheel roof which Edward D. Stone had used in the U.S. Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, and he later used it himself in the La Villita Assembly Hall in San Antonio. He also watched with interest the work of Felix Candela and others in Mexico who were experimenting with thin-shell concrete and the use of advanced structural shapes, such as hyperbolic paraboloids. Ford used the Mexicans as consultants, making limited applications of their inventive work.

But Ford’s tour de force of 1950s inventiveness was the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Building in Dallas of 1956-1958, built in response to a truly new set of requirements presented by an emerging industry. Here Ford, working with Richard Colley, Sam Zisman, and Arch Swank, produced his single most original building. At virtually every point in the building, conventions were re-examined to create a pure response to the problem. Like the innovation-oriented engineers who were his clients, Ford took risks and broke new ground.

The Texas Instruments Semiconductor Building marked Ford’s most extensive use of hyperbolic-paraboloid roof shapes. With a minimum of structural depth, the long-span system provided 63-foot square bays, while at the same time giving a modular identity to individual places within the vast structure.

Even more inventive than the roof system was the spanning system for the interstitial floors – larger-than-normal service spaces between levels – used at TI. A nine-foot-high space frame, made of precast concrete tetrapods, separated the lower floor, with its offices and laboratories, from the soaring spaces on the upper floor, which housed manufacturing operations. The deep three-dimensional truss provided a floor between floors for the complicated servicing and mechanical equipment that TI required. Several years prior to Louis Kahn’s more celebrated application of the same interstitial-space notion at Salk Institute, Ford and his colleagues had invented a fresh prototype for organizing the intricate new demands of an unprecedented research and manufacturing facility.

The inventiveness in the Semiconductor Building did not stop with the organizational diagram, the structural system, or the mechanical servicing. In detail the building is inventive as well. Its marble cladding is attached by an elegant new x-shaped hanger at the corner of each slab instead of the more conventional concealed connectors. The lighting in the upper floor spaces was an early application of high-intensity mercury-vapor lamps; light from these was bounced off the interior’s warped paraboloid surfaces to provide an even high-footcandle light distribution – perfect for intricate high-tech manufacturing.

CAUDILL AND HARRIS
Ford was in good company in Texas as an inventive architect. William Caudill and his colleagues at Caudill Rowlett Scott, working in Bryan before their move to Houston, spent the early part of the 1950s reinventing the American schoolhouse. The impetus behind their innovations in school design was most often economic-educating all the little baby boomers threatened to swamp the state’s ill-equipped school districts. CRS’s flat, bare-bones, efficient schools met a need for low initial cost and economical operation that previous prototypes could not.

Other architects in Texas were rethinking building forms for a state in which suburbs were rapidly gobbling up a rural way of life. Harwell Hamilton Harris, building on the redefinition of the American house he had begun in California, developed a new prototype for the harsh West Texas climate in his 1958 Treanor House in Abilene – an  inward-focused plan centered on a “garden room” – an indoor air-conditioned court that was open and airy like an outdoor space. Shortly after the Treanor House was built, Harris applied the same principle, on a much larger scale, in the Trade Mart Court in Dallas, creating the first “atrium” space in a commercial building.

ASSESSMENT
We are still being served well by the inventiveness of architects in the 1950s. They left us a legacy of good creative ideas. But the urge for inventiveness in the era was not without its pitfalls. The flipside of successful experimentation is failure; the 1950s left us a substantial legacy of failure also, even in the work of some of the decade’s best architects, even though they researched and tested their ideas carefully. In Saarinen’s MIT auditorium the structure unexpectedly slumped and had to be shored up with supplemental steel at the perimeter. The plastic roof leaked from the very beginning and had to be replaced with a conventional lead one.

Besides dubious applications, the urge to invent resulted in an inefficient duplication of effort. Longstanding solutions to timeless needs were ignored in favor of a frenetic drive for originality. Many futile efforts to reinvent the wheel were made, often resulting in silly buildings: inventiveness turned into a manneristic stylistic infatuation with the new. Hyperbolic paraboloids became motel lobby pavilions, which hardly merited such long span capabilities. “Experimental” single-family houses were hung and cantilevered and distorted almost beyond habitability. Metal and plastic facades were hung on noble older buildings, to give them at least the appearance of being “with it.”

Many architects who admired and sought to emulate Saarinen, Wright, Ford, and Harris, failed to observe that these architects, at their best, exercised great restraint. They were conservative, even traditional in many ways. Saarinen’s chapel at MIT uses conventional motifs of moat, arches and spire. Wright’s Price Tower is made of copper aged to a rich patina. Ford’s Semiconductor Building is clad in marble – that most ancient of fine building materials. And Harris’s innovative houses reveled in the beauty of natural wood. These architects knew when and how to blend innovation with tradition.

Many architects of the era were also simply less capable of invention than were these leading lights. Some architects are strongest not at inventiveness but in sophistication and elaboration. In the 1950s, such skills counted for little. Architects like John Staub, a consummate refiner, felt an unfortunate pressure to break new ground. Some architects capable of mature traditional buildings failed to produce them because they were concentrating on largely unsuccessful attempts to be inventive. It was a cruel irony of the 1950s that originality was enforced so broadly as a conventional criterion of architectural worth.

Disappointing in retrospect as well is the lack of long-term or widespread applicability of so many of the promising inventions of the 1950s. Lift slabs, it turned out, were subjected to much more stress in positioning than they were in use-meaning that they made structurally inefficient floors. Thin shell concrete roofs, not to mention feathered ceilings, never really caught on. This illustrates that the inertia of the architectural discipline is probably appropriate. Real and substantial change comes in small steps, by evolution. Architecture does not need and cannot really absorb revolution.

AND NOW?
There are lessons to be learned from all this, and we would be well advised to take a hard look at the role of 1950s innovation in relation to design today. As has often been the case with architecture in the 20th century, we have overreacted to the missionary zeal for inventiveness from that decade by retrenching into an unfortunate conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s. We are now so infatuated with typology and precedent, prototype and illusion, that it seldom occurs to us that a really fresh approach might be appropriate. We have stifled the free thinkers among us and the free thinkers within us, to the point that fundamental innovation is now rare. New shapes, new allusions, new collages – our recent preoccupation – don’t qualify.

I would not advocate a return to the compulsive inventiveness of our predecessors, but I would suggest that we have a number of new environmental and architectural problems that are resting in limbo, unlikely to be resolved simply by a reworking of conventional devices.

Is there not, for example, some way, other than through the current developer-initiated process, to layout streets in newly developing areas that will produce more comprehensible, orderly communities, with fewer traffic bottlenecks and less confusion? Isn’t there something we can do about the ground-level treatment of rapidly sprouting loop-land commercial developments, like Houston’s Galleria area? Historical pedestrian-oriented models are clearly not analogous here, but must these areas be wastelands? And isn’t it time for a reinvestigation of residential prototypes? With the substantial demographic changes in recent years – a great increase in singles, single-parent families, and families with two working parents – are the same housing patterns still appropriate? The office environment also needs a fresh look. The impact of machines has substantially changed work routines and social relationships, as well as requirements for space, lighting, and servicing. Are the same old open-plan, nine-by-twelve cubicles still the answer? Is the central-core, uniform-lease-depth model still appropriate?

All of these are questions the architects of the 1950s would have thrived on. They would have challenged conventions, opened up issues, done research, and “engineered” some new solutions. Sometimes they would have fallen flat, but sometimes they would have made profound, long-lived contributions to the discipline. It is time to learn both from the successes and failures of the 1950s generation – to gather up the nerve and carefully and selectively readdress ourselves to appropriate invention as a means to architectural progress.