Where two of the greatest individual architects of the 20th century, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, have characteristically insisted on providing themselves both the landscape settings and the associated art works for their buildings, the SOM partners could hardly do the same, and this has on the whole worked to their advantage. Wright, perhaps because he had little independent interest in painting and sculpture unless it were Oriental, was not an unsuccessful collaborator as "painter" or "sculptor" with himself as architect when he designed the murals for the Midway Gardens in 1913, those remarkable large-scale examples of early abstract painting, or the carved geometrical relief over the fireplace at Hollyhock House in 1920. But most independent painters today, I suspect, would rather have their pictures hung in an SOM executive office than in Wright's Guggenheim Museum!
One may properly feel, not merely that Miró is a better painter than Le Corbusier, but that the Miró mural in the circular penthouse restaurant of the Terrace-Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, the first notable instance of SOM's use of commissioned works of art, is a happier instance of collaboration between architect and artist than Le Corbusier's own mural in the Swiss Hostel of 1930-32 in Paris or his painted windows and enamelled door in the Ronchamp church of 1950-55. For that matter, the incorporation of Miró's mural in Cincinnati was far more successfully handled than were his contributions to the Harvard Graduate Center in Cambridge by Gropius and TAC or to the Unesco Building in Paris by Breuer, Zehrfuss and Nervi. By commissioning such things as mobiles by Calder, screens by Bertoia and constructions by Lippold to provide focal interest in monumental interiors they have certainly shown in practice a more effective devotion to the ideal of making important use of collaborating painters and sculptors than many architects who have been more vocal on this subject.
But the major significance of SOM's architecture is, of course, to be measured, not by these admirably selected and placed works of art, however notable they have been, but by its relationship to the central building problem of our day. This is not the creation of individual structures of intense personal expression such as Le Corbusier's church or Wright's Guggenheim Museum, both conceived in isolation from an urban context and serving rather specialized cultural functions, but the rebuilding of our cities and, in the underdeveloped areas of the world, the creation of new ones.
Planners today first create voids in existing cities by clearing vast areas, then reorganize transportation systems, and finally propose the erection of fewer and larger structures than were there before or would have been provided in cities built de novo even a generation ago. Such filling up of the planners' voids as has already occurred, at its lowest point in the housing projects of New York but hardly more happily in Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle or Philadelphia's Penn Center – not to speak of several cities abroad where bombing rather than planning created the voids – has made plain the crying need that still exists for an architecture, such as the 1920's first set as a worthy goal and later decades have frequently realized with some distinction, that can be produced in large quantities without losing all visual interest.
Back to Top