Glass boxes to ‘Chippendale’?

Press, 28 March 1979, Page 20

Glass boxes to ‘Chippendale’?

From llie “Economist,” London

Which way is American architecture developing? A long-awaited exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art this month, covering the last 20 years of contemporary architecture, has sparked off a controversial debate. Mrs Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic of the “New York Times,” has been led to extol the concept of the glass box, with its glass skin stretched over a steel frame, as “the best building of our time.” But the glass box does not work any more, according to Mr Philip Johnson, who at 72 is a leading apostle of American architecture. Mr Johnson has broken with the conventional modern style in favour of “post-modernism.” Mr Johnson’s latest effort, the design of' a new corporate headquarters for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company on Madison Avenue in Manhattan’s midtown, is a total renunciation of the “form follows function” credo of the Bauhaus school that he had long both preached and practised. A 37-storey pinkish granite structure, which will cost $llO million, it has a colonnaded base leading to a glassenclosed lobby and shopping arcade reminiscent of the Italian renaissance with a triangular pediment on top, w’hose peak is punctuated by a cutout centre designed to belch out steam from the building’s heating system.

Mr Johnson claims that it is in the tradition of historic

New York, but his critics, who have labelled it the “Chippendale” skyscraper, see in it a deliberate desire to create a vivid and puckish contrast to the flat roofs and unornamented detail of conventional modern architecture.

There is no doubt that glass-box architecture has been overdone, partly because it proved economical in the era of cheap heating, partly because it was so readily acceptable. During the great building boom of the past decade, New York’s renowned skyline thickened immeasurably. Instead of the thrusting spires and imposing ziggurats that characterised the earlier generation of buildings, the new towers were, as Mr Johnson puts it, “congeries of cigar boxes upended.” Yet . the architectural exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art reveals that the pristine design, which Mr Johnson has rejected, was never so übiquitous as he makes out. In fact, even at the height of the Bauhaus movement, architects were experimenting with texture, form and what has been termed the “vernacular” — the use of local materials and designs that maintained a sense of place and continuity. Even the glass box has been made to curve and vault and shimmer, with function giving way to style and feature. New ideas are clearly evident in Manhattan’s new building boom. Citicorp’s gleaming new skyscraper.

which cost $165 million, has a steeply slanted roof facing south that was originally conceived for solar heating. So far, it has had to use conventional fuel because solar heating technology has not developed big enough cells to work efficiently. But the building is a striking adornment to the midtown skyline and its immediate neighbourhood. Like other new structures, it has a two-storey public lobby containing shops and cafes, which was dictated by the city’s zoning requirements: in return for constructing a public arcade, it was allowed to add space to the building (Mr Johnson made use of the same opportunity for A.T. and T.). 1.8. M. is also constructing a 43-storey, five-sided, flattopped tower of its own alongside Mr Johnson’s new building. But its headquarters, like those of Citicorp, are in the modernist tradition, and therefore somewhat conventional compared with America’s “post-modernist” designs. The major shortcoming of the Citicorp building is in the design of an attached church, which lacks richness in detail and in ornament. In this respect, Mr Johnson’s plea that “we want churches once more to look like churches,” is apposite. Still, the true seeds of post-modernism may be found in modernism. There are few buildings as ethereal and as rich as the chapel at Ronchamps by Le Corbusier, although he and Walter

Gropius have become the chief subjects of post-

modernist scorn. Articulate and stylish. Mr Johnson himself has made some trenchant criticisms of the shortcomings of modern architecture, at least in its standardised, cliche forms. But if he is posing the right questions, his own solution hardly seems to exemplify the wave of the future. Although it may be rooted in history and symbolism, it appears to have more in common with Stalinist gingerbread than with the bold towers of historic New York. It is doubtful, for instance, whether Mr Johnson’s pediment roof can compare in majesty or delight with the pyramided pinnacle topped by a cupola of the New York Central building bisecting Park Avenue. Newly restored and floodlit, the roof is a glowing reminder of the beauty of pre-modernist eclectism, and far more inspiring than Mr Johnson’s creation promises to be. Controversy over architecture is legitimate and healthy. But post-modernism is unlikely to break as completely with the immediate past as Mr Johnson’s own design for A.T. and T. (which Mrs Huxtable dismisses as a “non-building” of “some passing shock value”). As design evolves, it is likely to draw as freely from Bauhaus as from older traditions, which as the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art has demonstrated, is what has been taking place. The pure forms of function are clearly losing out, but then they had always been more successful on the drawing board than in reality.