All's Wells that Ends Wells

The way modern architectural reputations are formed confounds me!

Walter Gropius, Bauhaus founder, was so feeble an architect (he constantly complained to his mother that he couldn’t draw!) that he had a secret partner, Adolf Meyer, doing the heavy lifting! Mies van der Rohe made more than one Icon that was uninhabitable. More of Less! Philip C. Johnson was guilty of touting them endlessly in his quest to set architectural standards for MOMA (New York). He excitedly phoned Alfred Barr,Jr. from Dessau in 1926 to say he had just seen the greatest Modernist building, the new HQ for the Bauhaus.

No one is quite sure how much of it was “his”, backed up as he was by Meyer and Ernst Neufurt, the construction boss. Johnson should have asked the Bauhaus professors and students who found the excessive glass sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter. But it looked great in black and white publicity photos. Meanwhile really great architects like Peter Behrens, Albert Kahn, Max Berg, and Timothy Pflueger remain known only to a few specialists.

And take the instructive history of Cherry Hill visionary Malcolm Wells who just passed away at 83. He never took a degree, building a new architectural vision from engineering courses he took in the Marine Corps and later. Outraged that the RCA Pavilion he designed for the New York World’s Fair in 1964 was demolished two years after he built it, vowed never again to build above ground.

Joining the environment defenders movement triggered by Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (1962), Mac as he was called advocated a “gentle architecture” that left the land unpoisoned. When “Progressive Architecture” touted him in 1965, readers flooded the magazine with “crazy” putdowns.

To soften the impact of architecture on the land, he decided to embed his buildings in Nature. Bury the structure and give it a planted roof, to be cooled by Nature. As design critic Inga Saffron put it in her obit (Inquirer, December 8), “Rather than the designs being cavelike, strategic skylights made them light and airy,” (Read his own charming obit on his own website.) There he records his epiphany that buildings cause environmental damage. “I woke up one day to the fact that the earth’s surface was made for living plants, not industrial plants.”