My Love Affair with Architecture

How did I get turned on to architecture? The more I think about it, the more ancient my passion for the subject becomes. I was born in 1927 in Battle Creek, Michigan, but when my father abandoned us in 1930 we moved to Detroit, where it would be easier for my mother as a single parent to find a job teaching, for which she trained at Central Michigan University (when it was then called Mount Pleasant Normal School.) She soon got a job teaching eighth grade at Dickinson Junior High in “nearby” Hamtramck (actually it’s a tiny urban island surrounded entirely by Detroit and full of both automobile factories and the Polish workers who manned many of them.)

It wasn’t too long before I was relishing my first masterpiece, the Fisher Building by one of my great heroes, Albert Kahn. (I was astonished to see only last week on German TV a documentary about Albert Speer’s design work at Peenemunde’s rocket factory featuring the unlikely document of Albert Kahn’s handbook on design for mass production!)

Fisher Body made chassis for many auto companies. My experience of Kahn was the gaily and grandly, nightly illuminated tower of the Fisher Building which my Uncle Dan Fitzpatrick referred to as the GillyHooBird’s Nest, his Hibernian confection to explain why each working day shortly after he arrived at our rented home on Mendota Avenue, he would “hear” a swoosh of wings and find that the GillyHooBird had just left another Mars bar or a Baby Ruth on the window sill next to our front door. Only many years later did I invent the critical term, Beaux Deco (it was a blend of Beaux Arts and Art Deco) to describe that skyscraper’s style. By then I was working my way through graduate school in Cleveland working at their Fisher Body factory where I had the undemanding job of squirting adhesive where the rubber mats on Chevrolet station wagons were about to be laid.

This is neither the time nor place to tell you all you should know about Kahn, but enough to know why he gave me my first passion about architecture. He was born in Germany, the first of a rabbi’s many children, and when they immigrated to America in 1880 they ended up in Detroit, which was about to take off as the automobile capital of the world. Kahn, like another neglected German immigrant architect, Timothy Pflueger, far across the country in San Francisco, didn’t even finish high school. He had to go to work to help feed and clothe his siblings of a very fruitful rabbi’s wife.

Luckily for the future of what the Germans came to call Fordismus, he hired out as a draftsman in the preeminent architectural firm of his adopted city. His genius with a pencil was quickly rewarded not only with rapid promotion but a fellowship in Europe to make up for his limited formal education. His greatest contribution to factory architecture was to study the mass production process and then build a structure to accommodate those patented needs. That’s what he did in Highland Park in 1914, complementing Henry Ford’s instinctive epiphany of paying his assembly workers the then magnanimous wage of five dollars a day (it outraged his competitors!) so his workers could become his consumers. By contrast the shoe last factory Walter Gropius “designed” for Fagus in 1910 was a fancy see-through glass case into which production facilities were stuffed, ex post facto.

Kahn’s factories were a pleasure to work in. I still remember with both visual and acoustic joy the bright-lightedness of the Fisher Body production line in Cleveland. Admittedly I was only twenty four at the time, but the summer before I got married (1950) I worked his Lincoln-Mercury plant in Detroit with similar pleasure. The summer of 1949 had been, by contrast, a noisy, dirty mess, working the midnight shift at a Chrysler stamping mill in Hamtramck.

So it was one of my first pleasures of becoming a Weimar immigrant (mainly to write a book about Walter Gropius’s social philosophy about fusing art and technology to bring good design to the masses) to see the first and still most important film about Albert Kahn, Dieter Marcello’s “Albert Kahn: Architekt der Moderne”. Dieter is a renaissance type who not only was interested in theater but also was an automobile worker and union steward in Stuttgart before he moved to Wayne University in Detroit to get an M.A. in sociology with a thesis on the auto industry.

One of the besetting evils of early Modernism (blame this mainly on Philip Johnson snooty hyper-estheticism) was its Platonic character. Mies van der Rohe, of course, is not only one of the most overrated “architects” of the new age but also its greatest sinner. Dr. Marie-Elisabeth Lueders, surely the most underrated feminist in modern EuroAmerican history—until the Bundestag finally got around to naming its new library on the Spree after her—writing in 1927 in the quarterly “Form”(the scholaly magazine of the Deutsches Werkbund, founded in 1907 to help Germany catch up with the UK's industrialization) subjected Mies’s apartments in the purportedly path-breaking architectural community, Weissenhof, to a devastating critique from the point of view of a housekeeper and a mother.

She pointed out the perils of exterior staircase so thoughtlessly designed that a small child could easily fall through its interstices, to the pneumonia generating floors full of frigid winds for babies crawling on them because of excess glass at both ends of the room, kitchen doors, which when opened let the winds blow out the gas flame, no place to take off wet clothes, and so on. Kahn, whom Mies and his mice mocked for the historicist villas he made for the new automotive gentry in Grosse Pointe, countered by calling the “innovators” the “glass house boys”. While Kahn was designing meticulously functioning factories, Mies and his star Weissenhof architects were making uninhabitable housing, unless you got off, uncritically, on living in a celebrity generated house.

The two apartments Mies tried manfully to get Corbusier to do at Weissenhof have recently been “elevated” to the ambivalent status of Visitor Centers. A suite of concrete chambers, it is disconcerting just to make a short “visit” through it. Ditto Mies’s Farnsworth House(1950) in Plano, IL. Imagine another Barcelona Pavilion (1929) outside Chciago. Too hot in the summer. Too cold in the winter. Dr. Farnsworth, who became his client after falling in love with the man (not the architect), eventually took him to court for excessive energy costs! It also was just demoted to a Visitor Center, to celebrate Mies’ “genius” as an architect.

Kahn was contemptuous of such design abuse. As I took a good look at Weissenhof in 2002 during a 75th anniversary symposium in nearby Stuttgart, I was astonished to see right across the street from Mies’ failed Starchitect publicized housing the Friedrich Ebert Houses(1927), named in honor of the first President of the Weimar Republic. I discovered that the Stuttgart SPD housing department wanted to collaborate with Mies. Mies would have nothing to do with such “socialist”collaboration. Mies was after fame, and infamous he would finally become! Conservative architects from the adjacent art school challenged him on not worrying about such simple things like waste water and utilities.

Don’t let me be misleading, among the over thirty architects amassed at Weissenhof, there were some enduring winners—Peter Behrens, J.J.P. Oud, Hans Sharoun. But mostly it is avant gardey blah. Contrariwise, the Ebert Houses have aged very gracefully, their rough field stone exteriors making a quiet transition from late Jugendstil to early modern. Snobbery aside (If one ever lived in a Mies apartment, repeated mindlessly among many Lakeshore Drive high risers in Chicago), any lover of architecture would chose an Ebert over a Mies.

The Ebert interiors pass on the wisdom developed in innumerable public housing projects in Vienna, Amsterdam, and Berlin before and after World War I. The tragedy of the Corbus-ification of American public housing is that it ignored the accrued wisdom of Social Democrat housing in Europe(not forgetting, for example, that the dwellers had to begin with a decent wage, not welfare handouts). Lord save us from arrogant architects who want to impose their obsessions on the dwellers. Less is moronic in this case.

In 1987, the centenary of Corbu’s birth, I made a pious odyssey of the Swiss architect’s masterpieces. In La Choux de Fonds, where he went to art school, I was astonished to discover that he never studied architecture. He studied watch making, in the Swatch capital of the world. His first international prize at Turin in 1902 was for a watch! Indeed his Jugendstil villas in that city remain for me, except for Ronchamps, his most pleasing achievements.

In Marseilles, at his iconic housing complex, a young woman carrying her baby onto the elevator where I had been chatting with the concierge about Corbu, invited me to visit her flat. She explained to me it was one of the “prolonge” apartments where the inhabitants had abandoned his mezzanine effects for more useable space. Her mother-in-law widow lived across the hall in a “pas prolonge” original design which she invited me to compare. Her father had been a colonial administrator in North Africa and his collection of indigenous art was so luminous that I am not sure I’d really gotten a good look at the mezzanine innovation, I spent so much time relishing the African art. But I do know that when I saw my first Corbu in America, the Carpenter Visual Center at Harvard, I was dumbstruck by the clerestory in their movie theatre. How outright tacky to insult the art you’ve been hired to celebrate: here’s gratuitous glare in your eye moviegoer. Modern architecture is full of such arrogance.

But Kahn was not the first inkling I had of great architecture in Detroit. North on Woodward Avenue is Cranbrook, that arts complex which George Booth, publisher of the Detroit News, created to “civilize” the same nouveaux riches auto millionaires Kahn was building villas for. After Kahn inveigled Saarinen to come to Ann Arbor, where Kahn had designed most of the first main structures for the University of Michigan, Eliel succumbed to Booth’s pitch that he head the new Cranbrook art school, bringing along another Scandinavian, the Swede Carl Milles, to teach sculpture, partly by adorning the campus with his own works.

For a generation it became what the Bauhaus aspired to be, a visionary center for social creativity in the twentieth century. And its graduates were not limited to furniture or housing designers. Edmund Bacon, later to be the planner of Philadelphia’s Center City renewal, not only got his chops in Bloomfield Hills, his first job was moving up to Flint where he pioneered social housing until the real estate lobby chased him out for being too “Red”.

Eliel’s son Eero teased me towards a civilized Modernism (neither Prefabby like Mies nor Goofy like Gehry) with his General Motors Tech Center in Warren,MI. And his Yale ice rink. And the St.Louis invitation to the West. And the TWA Terminal at JFK. As well as the Dulles airport. It was a great loss that he died at age 51.

Still in the Detroit of my youth there was also the indigenous Minoru Yamasaki, with a swatch of attractive buildings for Wayne University. Until they expanded it beyond prudence, his Lambert Airport in St. Louis with interiors by Harry Bertoia was one of my favorite airport layovers. But somehow Yamasaki overreached himself with the flaming gas top of the Detroit Gas Works. And there are those who argued long before 9/11 that he built the World Trade Center too flimsily.

Finally, I learned from the Austrian immigrant Victor Gruen. Though never a Shopper with a capital S, I learned from his Eastland and Northland and so on that shopping precincts could be civilized before Big Box architecture turned them into parodies of architecture. So my love began with Kahn and Saarinen. I like to say that I have a Finnish sensibility held in check by a German American’s common sense.

I love Marimekko, and had the good fortune to get to know its founder, Armi Ratia, before she died. And I regard Alvar Aalto as one of the great humanists of our time. On his centennial year, I spent some time in Finland honoring his past by visiting his monuments.

There have been others, on whose contact I will comment briefly, largely because they too are neglected. Timothy Pflueger, Emilio Ambasz, Douglas Cardinal, Santiago Calatrava, Richard Saul Wurman, Jean Renaud and Jose Caldas Zanine. That we know so little about these geniuses has forced me to think about the paradoxes of architectural reputation. And that we know so much about their overexposed contemporaries is the real problem. Hustle is no reliable guide to architectural genius. Careful, selfless work for the client is.

This passion for architecture was hyped by an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in which my five fields were two on American Lit (my teaching specialty), American art and architecture, American philosophy and its European antecedents, and American economic history. Such training led me to my only original idea in thirty years of teaching. I asked my Am Lit students to write a term paper on a Great American Building. Harvard started this interdisciplinary Ph.D in American Culture in 1936, to help celebrate its tercentenary. Am Lit in the 17th century was theology; in the eighteenth politics; and it wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that it achieved belles lettristic stature.

There was a masterpiece near our school, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Shalom synagogue. I used to take my students there so they could relish a great building in situ. Mostly they were radiant. But one middle aged student (she had raised her children before pursuing a degree) said it was a great building all right, except when your daughter was getting married in the rain. (The roof leaked!) For decades it seemed a leaky roof was a sine qua non of a Modernist icon. Philip Johnson designed the first Modernist house in Houston (1950) for the deMenil art collecting family. Its roof leaked for so long and so relentlessly that their children thought the ever-present roofers were the architects! (He also insisted not only that they use only Mies van der Rohe furniture, but they deploy it the was the Master would!) They told him to shove it, and never spoke to him again, come rain or come shine.

So I urged my students to learn how to talk back to architects who tend to show off rather than serve their clients. We will be plagued by Starchitects like Frank O. Gehry and Richard Meier (who impose their sellable shticks on a public with no sense of the importance of function in architecture) until the public demands their rights as clients and inhabitants. In a truly demotic architecture, an informed public calls the tune. People are just learning how to speak for themselves. Those term papers were their innoculations against arch-abuse!