Kicking the Can

Louis Kahn's Greenbelt Knoll

Following WR’s elegant traipse through the commodification of the Can in America-- SLATE (1/10/07), I have some commentary I want to eliminate. The late architectural journalist Peter Blake (1920-2006) makes a telling point in his memoir, “No Place Like Utopia”, that perhaps too easily influenced by Philip C.Johnson--who argued irrationally that only Art mattered in Architecture, his profession in America abandoned that postwar idealism best exemplified by Walter Gropius’s program for the Bauhaus (fusing art and technology to create decent housing and design for the working classes) for Mammon. Mies’ “Less is More” slithered down to “The Most is the Best”.

The evidence of this trahison des clercs surrounds us. Ever more elegant McCans in ever more extravagant McMansions. Not architecture. Mere building. The Obesity Epidemic extends its brown thumb to our manmade landscapes. WR finally concedes he wishes there were better places for reading in these McCans. Heh, consternation beats constipation, in the final anal – ysis. I long ago settled that problem by stacking periodicals, mainly weeklies, on the toilet’s flushing tank’s lid. Sybaritic is, of course, allowed in a free society. But to most adults it is quickly boring.

John Deering’s clever shaving setup in Viscaya reminded me of my visit to Corbusier’s first modernist house, a stripped down cement model for his parents in Vevey, Switzerland, overlooking Lac Le Man. In Tim Benton’s excellent new book, ”The Modernist Home” (2005),a spinoff of the V&A’s “Modernism” exhibition (now replaying in Frank O.Gehry’s MARTa in Herford, Germany), there is a photo of the monastically simple “guest room” (for when Corbu visits his parents?)in which a minilibrary allows a reader to gawk at the Lake! Not a loo, but a great view. I found his full dress Villa Savoie toilet too heavy breathing by comparison. Toodle loo!

I remain faithful to Bauhaus simplicity—it gives me more leisure to developed complicated ideas! Our first house (1954) was a National Homes three bedroom/ uni-can Cape Cod with grooved redwood siding, in a suburb of Lansing MI (read: an abandoned corn field.). Designed by Charles Goodman whom nobody knows but whom hundreds of thousands have enjoyed--$6000, $400 down, $40 a month mortgage! Gropius and the young Jewish genius Konrad Wachsmann (1901-1980) (Einstein got him a last minute visa out of Hitler’s Germany) founded the General Panel Corporation but didn’t ever figure out American financing and building codes.

And they wasted money by starting with a Park Avenue office. And guaranteed they’d never avoid bankruptcy by renting an abandoned aircraft factory in Los Angeles. (National Homes had the moxie to have its factory in Lafayette,IN—a central point for the major expense of distributing prefabs.) It was easier –but irrelevant--to pick an American sounding name!

When I started teaching at Penn’s then new Annenberg School of Communication (1959), we moved up to a Louie Kahn designed home in Greenbelt Knoll--$23,000 (one and a half baths!), an experiment in racially integrated housing in the Far Northeast of Philadelphia. It celebrates its 50th anniversary this June 10th. This cluster of nineteen modernist homes won an AIA award for Bishop/Montgomery for siting, using the hundred year old trees and unlevel land of a sliver of Pennypack Park to make a glorious sylvan retreat in a gritty city.

(Joyce Kilmer never wrote a corny poem, “I think that I shall never see/ a toilet prettier than a tree.” I still savour its simplicity when I’m not traveling or researching a book on the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Toilets to let? I couldn’t care less! Though I still have designs on that undeveloped toilet site in the basement. WR’s trip through McCanLand could motivate me to fulfill that long delayed dream. (I live in the basement. My non-traveling son Tim has taken over the upstairs.)