howard roark

Ironically, it was in the speedy proliferation of the skyscraper form that its greatest potential for harm finally laid. Whether scaling the heights of elegance, as Seagram and the Equitable did, or trolling the aesthetic depths, as did so many lesser versions, they were ultimately perceived as repetitive, impersonal, and authoritarian. Not coincidentally, those very qualities attracted the attention of the country’s expanding corporate community, which saw in these large new forms an opportunity to affirm the power of financial success. In this, the commercial patrons of the 1950s differed not at all from the great Renaissance merchants of Florence and Rome, who had embraced the palazzo form for much the same reason, or indeed the Woolworths and the Singers.

And for all the insistence by the Modernists that they were originally inspired by social goals, the architecture to which they gave birth had less to do with the lessons of the machine in service to society than with an underlying urge for mechanistic order. There was little concern for context, and a clear aversion to the old architectural fabric. In a memorable scene from the film version of Ayn Rand’s 1943 paean to individualism, The Fountainhead, the architect Howard Roark, declares: “My ideas are mine! Those who accept them must do so on my terms!”

architecture, modernism

Architectural modernism in simplest terms is the banishment of ornament and the elimination of architectural history. Architecture based on historical precedent was pronounced as derivative, inauthentic, and, ultimately, dishonest, primarily because—in the view of the new orthodoxy—it failed to acknowledge advances in materials (primarily glass and steel) and construction technology. Henceforth, architecture was to embrace the social and structural realities of the twentieth century. In the eyes of the new generation, that meant buildings were to adhere to a “machine” aesthetic that expressed itself primarily in planar geometry, flat roofs, strip windows, and a total absence of decoration into the traditional sense.

Penn Station

New York's Pennsylvania Station, designed by Charles Follen McKim was a building dedicated to modern methods of transportation, and one that made full use of modern technology to serve it. The enormous train shed was a no-nonsense structure built with steel and glass, and the complex interpenetration of levels and access ramps acknowledged as no other building of its size had yet done the emerging role of the automobile. Yet few would have argued with McKim's decision to use Imperial Rome as the source for the building's public spaces.

The main waiting room measured 300 feet in length and was nearly 150 feet high, its vaulted and coffered ceiling springing from massive Corinthian columns to crate a space deliberately evocative of the Baths of Caracalla. Visitors arriving in New York through this grand structure could have no doubt that they were entering the epicenter of America's commercial energy; New Yorkers leaving from Penn Station might well feel that they were cultural emissaries bearing enlightenment to the provinces. The demolition of this building in 1963 sent such a shock through even the architectural uninitiated that New Yorkers swiftly passed the nation's first landmarks preservation law (reference: Mad Men Season 3 Episode 2).

Pennsylvania Station, 1910

The architects brought ancient models to bear on modern transportation

Reaction Against Romanticism

“The entire history of modern music may be said to be a history of the gradual pull-away from the German musical traditions of the past century”

- Aaron Copland

As the quotation from Aaron Copland implies, early-twentieth-century composers had to fight not only the Romantic past but the Romanticism in themselves. The new attitudes took hold just before the outbreak of the First World War. European arts sought to escape their overrefinement and tried to capture the spontaneity and the freedom from inhibition that was associated with primitive life. The fine arts discovered the abstraction of African sculptures, while Paul Gauguin and Henri Rousseau created exotic paintings of monumental simplicity.

In the years immediately preceding the First World War, the influential movement known as Dadaism was founded in Switzerland and spread after 1918 to other major art centers. The Dadaists, principally writers and artists who reacted to the horrors of the bloodbath that had engulfed Europe, rejected the concept of Art with a capital “A”—that is, something to be put on a pedestal and reverently admired. To make their point, they produced works of absolute absurdity. They also reacted against the excessive complexity of Western art by trying to recapture the simplicity of a child’s worldview.

Following their example, the French composer Erik Satie led the way toward a simpler, “everyday” music, linked below.

The Dada group subsequently merged into the school of Surrealism, exemplified by Salvador Dali and Joan Miro, who exploited the world of dreams.

Romanticism

“Music is the melody whose text is the world”

- Arthur Schopenhauer

The Romantic era, which grew out of the social and political upheavals that followed the French Revolution, came into full blossom in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

The romantic poets rebelled against the conventional concerns of their Classical predecessors; they were drawn to the fanciful, the picturesque, and the passionate. One of the prime traits of all Romantic artists was their emphasis on intensely emotional expression. Another was their uniqueness, their heightened awareness of themselves as individuals apart from others. “I am different from all the men I have seen,” proclaimed Jean Jacques Rousseau. “If I am not better, at least I am different.”

Romantic music was often linked with dreams and passions, to profound meditations on life and death, human destiny, God and nature, pride in one’s country, desire for freedom, and the political struggles of the age. These intellectual and emotional associations, nurtured by the Romantic movement, brought music into a commanding position as a moral force, a vision of human greatness, and a direct link between the artist’s inner life and the outside world.

pomo

modernism is rooted in minimal and true use of material as well as absence of ornament, while postmodernism is a rejection of strict rules set by the early modernists and seeks exuberance in the use of building techniques, angles, and stylistic references

Modernist Architecture

The appeal of Miesian anonymity had to do with the changing ways big business had been perceived since the 1930s and the ways in which it perceived the social and political climate. It was better to blend in and be conservative than to risk public scorn.

Corporate architecture was also reflecting changes with big business. Companies were diversifying and consolidating, becoming identified less with single products than with ranges of servicing, manufacturing, marketing, and investing divisions. Ownership had become anonymous, dissociated with individual names. Post-WWII corporate ownership appropriated what was understood to be the salient characteristics of 1930s modernism: cool competence, understatement, restraint, rationality, minimal disclosure, an internationally outlook, and most important, technocratic efficiency spurning historical association.

When applied to the skyscraper, the international style was made to be aloofly impersonal, almost blank, hardly revelatory, completely reversing pre-Depression New York Style, but elaborating Chicago School mannerisms.

New corporate façades bore no relation to structure or specific function: they simply covered everything over--they were neither symmetrical nor asymmetrical. They were not designed for human masses except, of course, for masses of clerical employees.

Compromising corporate identity may have been a small price to pay for recapturing public approval, but in the 1970s, it no longer sufficed. Possibly taking a cue from 1960s "lifestyle" politics, corporations began to realize how much they had denied themselves by clinging so long to conservative Miesian formulas.

Conspicuous early departures from the glass box and the featureless facade were eye-catchers like William Pereira & Associates' Transamerica Building (1972) in San Francisco, an elongated pyramid with twenty-story shoulder-like projections on two sides, rising straight from the sidewalk to a needle-like point some thousand feet up; Hugh Stubbins & Associates' 1977 Citicorp Center in New York, a 900-foot tower with the top 130 feet sliced off at a forty-five-degree angle; and Philip Johnson and John Burgee's 1978 AT&T Company Building in New York with a three-quarter round cutout at the apex of a faux gable looking like Chippendale breakfront.

Aside from these heavy-handed gimmicks, none of the three exteriors departed from the modernist canon. But they signaled that visual differentiation was again a corporate priority. So the Transamerica Building became the company logo and Citicorp Center a much-publicized New York icon, while the AT&T Building is sometimes said to have inaugurated in skyscraper design what quickly came to be called "postmodernism."