Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

By contrast the Seagram Building in New York does exactly that (Figure 18). It was designed by Mies van der Rohe, who had been the last director of the famous radical German design school the Bauhaus. During the 1930s, with the Nazis’ rise to power, many people left Germany and went to live in the USA. They had different reasons for doing so. Some knew that their lives were in danger. Mies tried to stay in Germany, but found it impossible to produce the architecture he was intent upon, because Hitler took an interest in design and decided to encourage a more traditional type of architecture, and modernist buildings were suppressed as unGerman. With some difficulty therefore, Mies uprooted himself in mid-career, and moved to the USA, settling in Chicago, where he became Professor of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, whose campus he designed. (Walter Gropius, the first director of the Bauhaus, had made a similar move, and became Professor of Architecture at Yale.) Mies had great personal authority and played on it to the full. His artistic aim was to iron out the role of personal idiosyncrasy and develop building types that expressed their steel-frame construction in a rational manner. The tall buildings in Chicago all had steel frames, but the earlier ones were decorated with historical ornament in order to give them a veneer of cultural respectability. The process is exactly parallel with the way that the Romans covered their daring new vaulted structures with traditional Greek architectural decoration. For example the Chicago Tribune Tower, which was designed by Raymond Hood as a conspicuously beautiful building, was covered in stone and had Gothic ornament, so it made a good architectural show and stood comparison with the monumental architecture of the past (Figure 20). Indeed its proprietor invited such comparison by embedding fragments of stone chipped off illustrious buildings around the world. It is to be hoped that they are not all authentic, and that the original monuments were not damaged in order to give up these souvenirs, which are labelled as coming from such places as the Pyramids at Giza, and the Taj Mahal. What these fragments of stone do is to remind us to look at the building in comparison with the great accomplishments of the past. In contrast with the Tribune Tower, Mies avoided any forms of historical ornament and tried to make his buildings look as if they were made of little more than the steel frame that did in fact support them. This is more complicated than it sounds, and Mies was famous for designing in an artful way that made the finished appearance look very simple. ‘Less is more’, he would say; and he inverted the traditional saying ‘the devil’s in the detail’, which means that grand ideas often don’t work out because some minor technicality gets in the way. Mies said: ‘God is in the details’, meaning that what makes a building special is that its minute parts have been well considered and perfectly resolved. Mies established the pattern for the modern tall building first of all in his Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings in Chicago, and then in the Seagram Building in New York, which was much imitated in the following years as a model of no-nonsense corporate glamour. That is why in retrospect it looks rather boring in photographs — because of the influence it had, it just looks like a normal office building. In fact it is a good deal more special than that, not only because it was the first in the line. There is bronzetinted glass in the windows, and the crisp dark mullions that run right up the building are also bronze, and the whole building looks rather dignified and inscrutable. It was a very expensive building, which has meant that its imitators have tended to produce noticeably inferior versions of the original, but the reason for its historical importance is not so much what it is in itself, but that it had a huge influence and spawned so many imitations. That it why it seems culturally important and why it is always mentioned in architectural histories. By contrast the Tribune Tower has probably been admired as much, but it has been imitated very much less, and so it cannot be said to have had so decisive an influence. It was an admirable building, but it did not change the way in which architects saw the office building; therefore it has less historical significance, even though it might (arguably) be a finer work of art. The buildings that we tend to call ‘great’ are those which change the course of events, so they mark out the next chapter in the story that is being told, and for that reason in retrospect they always look ‘ahead of their time’. This is not at all the same thing as supposing that buildings that try to look futuristic are historically important. It is impossible to tell in advance which way things are going to develop, so we cannot always predict which buildings are going to be the historically important ones. It is necessary for them to have some degree of accomplishment, but there are so many buildings around that it would be impossible to tell a story that included even all the reasonably good buildings.