The Shape of Things

TV has to a great extent succumbed to the Hollywood delusion of elephantiasis: the larger the budget, the better the picture. Oliver Treyz, who made his own network (ABC-TV) a kind of informal pay-TV system for Warner Brothers, recently suggested that TV was fast approaching a "crisis in quality." By this he meant that the upwards of $100,000 for a half-hour of time and talent on network TV constitute an economic ceiling beyond which American advertisers won't rise to the challenge of sponsorship. His solution is to pick up excess circulation a la Hollywood (over 50% of film grosses are foreign in origin) in Asia, Europe, and Latin and Central America. ABC in fact has charged a new subsidiary with the responsibility of beginning a five-nation network this fall in Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.

Treyz and ABC board chairman, Leonard Goldenson, even have the chutzpah to contend that their search for non-American markets is an indispensable instrument of the Cold War. (I am still mulling the ideological implications of "77 Sunset Strip," "Maverick," and "The Untouchables"; in a war of ideas, ABC's kind of TV would seem to me to be a string of slick zeros.) It is significant that Treyz regards the inflationary bind of telefilm production as a "crisis in quality"; for in a culture that makes a fetish of bigness, questions of quantity begin to appear as qualitative ones. Two recent television shows about architecture impressed me with the paradoxical impoverishment of this esthetics of grossness.

In many ways, architecture is a good test for the vitality of what, for lack of a better category, we might call "cultural" television. For American architecture is surely at present one of our really creative forms. And it is preeminently a visual subject, almost quintessentially telegenic. Moreover, no other art form in America has a broader base of patronage (just the home building industry is a $20 billion a year business); nor does any other art have so wide and sustained an exposure to the general public. Here, in explaining the vitality of a technological art to a newly enfranchised cultural constituency, TV would seem to have a natural on its hands.

Yet TV has been notoriously blind and silent on the subject. True, NBC's "Wisdom" had a good conversation with Gropius a few years back, but it was talk not pictures. And Mike Wallace was interviewed several times by Frank Lloyd Wright. But on television, unfortunately, Wright was mostly a facade of his own devising-and though his wonderfully truculent face hugged the site of the 21" tube perfectly, the interviews never explicated the art of architecture to any appreciable extent.

Thus when NBC's "World Wide 60" announced an hour-long study of contempory architecture during prime evening Saturday time, I figured TV had finally recognized the extent of its failure in ignoring architecture. (It drew a 9.2 rating to Lawrence Welk's 16.2, "Have Gun's" 25.1). "The Shape of Things," it is depressing to report, was simply terrible. Why? For a number of reasons. For one thing, the format of using a cartoonist, Abner Dean, to soften the cultural blow on the sodden masses betrays a lack of confidence in the public that borders on contempt. For another, the men who threw this show together simply couldn't love architecture: it was too full of gimmicks (a Cook's tour of architecture via remotes of on-the-scene correspondents-Wells Hangen by a pyramid; Irving R. Levine on Rome's Via Veneto; Ed Newman at the Ritz "You can't enter the Ritz without falling under the spell of its dignified air of opulence"; and Joseph Harsch doing a Victorian expos6 of working class housing conditions from London).

The pyrotechnical camera work-fast cuts of dissimilar skyscraper grids, ad nauseam, if not ad infinitum-betrayed a sensibility intent on providing kicks for those Saturday clods, as well as a lack of reverence, or even affection, for the art of architecture. The good intentions were there-in the form of an epigram from Winston Churchill (We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us)-but rarely has an intrinsically exciting subject been so dully smothered.

In all fairness, it must be admitted that architects don't help the matter any by their complacent acquiescence in the fact that 85 % of American domestic architecture is designed by the Lawrence Welks of building, the nonarchitect jerrybuilders. Host Hugh Downs, once again, had the right words: "Architecture, once it gets out of the hands of the artist, becomes corrupt, misplaced, misinterpreted. It is no longer the unique solution to a specific problem that good architecture must be." But there was no picture of excellence for the mass audience to aspire to.

For, having chided Grauman's Chinese Theatre and the starstruck hinterlanders who take the guided bus tours in that architectural tossed salad called Hollywood, Downs turned to architect Philip Johnson for advice. Johnson advised Downs that architecture was not for the people. ". . . there simply aren't enough great architects to go around . . . to sit down and design a home for you and me." However, since people in Connecticut glass houses shouldn't throw stones when they're asked for bread, Johnson proposed a kind of Hamiltonian theory of architecture:

But there are ways in which architecture can be every single living person in this country. The obvious one is that the public buildings which everyone uses ... the office buildings, the post office, the church, should be-even if they're not at the present time in this country-great works of art by the greatest architects in the world. This is sort of catchy. If you go into a building and you feel better and you put on a necktie and a fat wallet, if you're going to "The Four Seasons" in the Seagrams Building because it seems a more formal and glorious place to be in and you will go home and you will want better architecture in the home. You'll want better architecture in your filling stations and in the ordinary run of life as well.

Nobody pointed out that there are distinguished architects who believe in the ordinary run of life enough to bypass the high spirits of Seagram's fees to build prefabricated houses of good taste for mass purchasing-such as Charles Goodman's first designs for National Homes and Carl Koch's continuing program for Techbuilt homes.

The moral issue raised is this: just how smug can an architectural profession be about the visual squalor of our landscape when they in effect turn it over to the Mickey Mice of domestic architecture. There was an all too brief sequence on George Nelson's experimental Airform house, a testimonial to the final victory of Buckminster Fuller, and the successful shopping plazas and even more audacious plans of Victor Gruen.

Actually Gruen, snuck in at the very end of the program, has more to say about humanizing a marketing society than a whole Seagrams Building full of cool, elitist classicizers. It is ironic that a marketing medium like TV missed the message of Gruen's marvelous indictments of Downtown, U.S.A. in suburban Detroit's Northland and Eastland. There, the consumer is treated like a human being, something that can't be said about "The Shape of Things," an expensive, pretentious, much too cute kiss of death for the most important social art.

A week later, "Camera Three," with about one-twentieth the money and infinitely more love for the art form, turned out one of its handsomest cameos in a long time. Rather than the weirdly unfocussed combination of Frank McGee (series host), Hugh Downs ("egghead" m.c.), and Abner Dean ("Give dem apes a few yocks, Abner!"), plus umpteen different subjects and objects (we've got mobile cameras and videotapes, so how can't we use them?), producer Jack McGiffert simply prepared the context for a conversation between Jim MacAndrew and an architect, Mr. Frederick Kiesler, who cares about a new idea he has. Mr. Kiesler, who according to Philip Johnson is the "greatest nonbuilding architect of our time," wants to liberate us all from the grid and box; the concrete shell has given him the technical freedom to create asymmetrically shaped structures. Even though his English was not the clearest, Kiesler was much more effective as an explainer than the schizophrenic combination of Hugh Down's dulcet tones and Abner Dean's coy pencil.

For example, Kiesler drew with a crayon over a translucent blackboard to trace the history of architectural styles in a fresh and most imaginative way: Kiesler showed how "the endless house" has a faint resemblance to the caves which provided man his first shelter; next he sketched an igloo ("the first case of prefabricated parts!"); then a pantheon arch of post and lintel; and, finally, his plastically controllable endless house. And, in contrast to the hysterical cutting in some of the NBC program, director John Desmond let his cameras catch and hold on the models of the endless house, respecting the curiosity of his viewers as they confronted a new and complex shape.

The 58-page hour-long NBC script is filled with the letter of architectural detail, but the spirit is almost wholly missing. On the other hand, almost seven of the eleven pages of the half-hour "Camera Three" script are completely devoid of detail, writer Clair Roskan's having had the respect and skill to "simply" provide a framework for Kiesler's articulateness.

One is torn between summarizing the remarkably rich dialogue between Kiesler and MacAndrew and trying to get producer McGiffert to rerun the program. Kiesler himself is about to receive the attention he has deserved ever since his prototype was exhibited in Vienna in 1924. The Ford Foundation has just given him a grant to design an ideal American theatre using the principles of "the endless house." And a private citizen is having a house built in Connecticut this summer.

But the question under consideration is the cost of good television. McGiffert, week in and week out, managed to achieve the intellectually satisfying, and often, as in this program of architecture, the truly brilliant-all from $3000 a week for basic staff salaries and camera rehearsals, plus some $600 special costs for the Kiesler program. NBC had a lot more money (roughly $50,000) but a lot less devotion. Until television policymakers learn that there are some things even money can't buy, there will be pretentious failures like "The Shape of Things" (and on the impoverished fringes of our expense account society gentle surprises like "Camera Three" and firm reminders of the price of excellence-which is love).

Source: The English Journal, Vol. 51, No. 9 (Dec., 1962), pp. 659-661
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English