The conservative critic will regret that the "high" period of modern architecture is over and, recognizing similarities with 16th century Mannerism, deplore a priori what is now happening. The more liberal critic will respond to the excitement of perpetual novelty, recalling with nostalgia the stylistic battles of the 1920's and remembering the attitude of the founders of the International Style, in particular Gropius, who always insisted that even a truly contemporary "style" was a dangerous thing. This middle-of-the-road critic must rather withhold judgment, while retaining the conviction that on balance the massive preparation of SOM is a better omen for success with further experiments than the impetuousness of those who change their esthetic goals almost from building to building.
A test case is the chapel of the Air Force Academy, now approaching completion. When seen in January, 1961, in skeleton against the sky, its seventeen tetrahedrons of steel tubing seemed to be exactly, if surprisingly, the bold accent needed to crown and pull together the vast plant which rises so monumentally on its granite-clad mesa against the foothills of the Rockies. In almost everything else, except the small areas of bright-coloured mosaic on certain walls, the Air Force Academy not improperly expresses, in terms that closely approach the Miesian, the regimentation of military life. It impresses with a somewhat inhuman grandeur of scale and a rigid consistency of treatment that should be eased when the intended planting is completed and has reached its full growth. In contrast to its setting, however, the silhouette of the chapel appeals as frankly, if very differently, to the warmer emotions as Le Corbusier's churches at Ronchamp and Eveux.
At the Air Force Academy the weakest aspect is the deficiency of the planting. The fault is not SOM's but that of a penurious Congress, which was ready to spend many millions on a group of buildings that may well be unneeded within a decade, and yet refused the relatively small sums that would have made possible the filling of the courts with foliage, the completion of the water-garden approach to the dining hall in the central plaza with a quincunx of full-grown trees, and the general wedding of the tremendous man-made organism to its superb natural setting by the generous inclusion of a great deal of large-scale plant material.
This is all the sadder since SOM are, among current architects, not only unusually concerned themselves with the macrocosmic aspects of architecture – the settings of buildings as distinguished from buildings considered without context – but even more unusually successful in persuading their clients of responsibilities beyond the periphery of the structures they will occupy and use. Leaving aside the larger urbanistic entities – executed at Oak Ridge and Lake Meadows or lately projected for the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois – a majority of their most important buildings in cities, from Lever House to the just completed ones for the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York and for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company in Chicago, have risen from plazas carved out of the solid masses around them.
Back to Top