"The Crystal Palace Syndrome": Modern Architecture's First Booboo

My German mother-in-law, Dr. Med Lisa Heinicke, just sent me a clipping from her professional monthly (Deutsches Arzeblatt, 29 Juli 2011, C 1391) touting the centennial of Walter Gropius’ first major building (along with his “silent” partner, Adolf Meyer), the Tagus-Werk, the 1911 shoe last factory in Alfeld am Leine in Niedersachsen. UNESCO has just declared it part of the World’s Cultural Heritage. Its “pioneering” glass façade curtain wall was described as “a Palace for the Worker”. As a Depression era Detroiter whose GI Bill had run out, I was happy to work three summer in car factories for financing my Ph.D. But, mind you, there were no Palaces.

Indeed, the leading designer of factories in the pioneer automotive phase, Albert Kahn, became my ideal architect from an early age (3!) because my Uncle Dan identified him as the designer of the Beau Deco Fisher Building in midtown Detroit, whose illuminated nighttime golden crown was slyly named the GillyHoo Bird’s Nest, to “explain” the mysterious appearance of candy bars on the front window sill when he returned from work as the supervisor of delivery trucks for the Crowley –Milner department store.

Later, in graduate school, I learned that Kahn, the first of six children of a Jewish rabbi, came at age 11 to Detroit in 1880. He never even finished high school, not to even think about architectural training. Indeed he was so gifted a designer that his bosses, who headed the City’s leading architecture firm sent him to Europe for a year in 1891, to polish his skills by studying the European architectural heritage.

Eventually, Henry Ford’s architect, and the leading factory designer of the twentieth century. Kahn mocked Gropius’s ambitions. He knew from experience that a good factory was not a Palace for the worker, but a structure specifically designed to facilitate the mass production of certain products. Each factory was designed from the ground floor up. The roof was then designed to control light in that process. Facile Facadism was thus an egregious architectural error. He called the Bauhaus in general the “Glass House boys.” Therein lies the first stumble of Modernism.

In 1851 Great Britain celebrated their domination of industrial production with the first World’s Fair in London. To attract attention, and simultaneously provide a convenient structure for huge crowds to ogle global achievements, it devised the Crystal Palace, utilizing the newly accessible materials of glass, iron (later steel), and cement. Our first generation of “modern” architects mistakenly adopted this triple ploy of materials in ways that defeated the purposes stated.

Take the Dessau Bauhaus designed by Gropius and Ernst Neufert which opened to much praise in 1926. American architect Philip C. Johnson Phoned the future director of the Museum of Modern Art/New York/1929 in Berlin (scouting new art for future exhibitions) that it was the greatest modern building he’s seen so far, as he cruised Europe looking for examples of which he would term “The International Style”. Sure, it made great images for the new Leica pro’s who were making a new modern art of photography. But ask the Professors and their students. Too much glass. Sweat in the summer and freeze in the winter! They hated the way it worked on them!

And take Mies van der Rohe, as an Aachen mason’s son always number two to Gropius’s upper class provenience, (his great uncle, Martin Gropius, was the last great pre-modern German architect.) As assistants to the really great Peter Behrens (whose luminous Berlin Turbine Hall (1910) had practically no glass!), Mies had to report to Gropius, and he hateed it! He believed if he made great art, he would gain the status he hungered for! (It only messed his work!)

For example, he organized the experimental Weissenhof community outside Stuttgart in 1927 by gathering 17 great or promising world architects. The proto-feminist Dr. Marie-Elizabeth Lüders criticized his apartments in the Deutsche Werkbund quarterly, “Form” for two much glass that endangering the health of crawling babies! Not to ignore the fact that the wind blew out the gas stove when you opened the kitchen door! Corbusier’s flats for the same experiment were abandoned to service as visitor center because the concrete was uncongenial for habitation. The Barcelona Pavilion (1928) used excess glass, but he was forgiven: It was a visual wonder that attracted visitors in that city’s World Exposition!

As late as 1950, Mies was making the same mistakes! The weekend residence he designed for his Chicago Doctor girlfriend had much too much glass. So much that she sued him in court for excess energy costs. (She lost the case. And Mies lost the girlfriend!) Years later, as several tenants declared it inhabitable, it was given the “ignominy” of reduction to a Visitor’s Center. Incidentally, Philip C. Johnson whose “Architecture is for Art” belief corrupted American commercial architectural for a century. The Museum of Modern Art’s latest architecture exposition concedes his mistake. Ironically, Johnson created his own Crystal Palace in Connecticut, Mies mocked it as looking like a hot dog place at night!

There were other bad habits at the beginning of Modernism: flat roofs (inspired by the traveling architects “marveled” at the flat roofs of Morocco. Their foolish abandonment of the gable (the greatest design breakthrough since our ancestors abandoned caves!) has made leaking roofs a plague of modernist architecture.

No genius completely avoids these Original Sins of Modernism. Corbusier’s first modern building was a home for his parents in Vevey, Switzerland, adjoining Lac LeMan. Unfamiliar with effects of temperature changes on concrete, their building was soon afflicted cracks in the concrete. Corbu made do with aluminum sheaths.

Heh, every new human adventures has its negative complications. It’s no solution to ignore them.

Incidentally, I was motivated to come and live in Weimar when I discovered in Graduate School that Gropius wanted to use art and technology to make good design accessible to the masses. Me too, as a former member of that exploited working class. But we no longer need Palaces! (Those “Crystal Palace” days are mostly over, except for Arabs and Africans and persecuted minorities.) We still do need strong unions, fairly shared incomes and social protections like health care for all.

A version of this article is published by Broad Street Review.