The Journals of Ayn Rand Page 18

  This book is a good example of what happens to the ideas of geniuses when “adopted” by lesser [men], of how dead, devitalized, dull, common and flat a great idea can become in average, official, “communal” hands.

  Darcy Braddell, How to Look at Buildings.

  Somewhat similar psychological type to the preceding book, in the sense of a desperate struggling for the old along with reluctant concessions to the new. But a type of mentality and attitude that is less vicious and pompous than the preceding. A mild, esthetic mind trying, at least, to be fair. Not fighting vigorously against modernism and giving it its due, when unavoidable. The [concessions to modernism are] done with obvious reluctance and in terms of the old, applying old standards and appearing to justify it on the basis of the old, while actually trying to justify the old by the principles of the new. Frequent recurrence of such statements as: “Even the modernists can’t escape well-established fundamentals of architecture, which they have to share with the classics,” etc. No viewpoint at all. A thoroughly polite and Milquetoastish sitting on the fence. Plus a yes-man complex, prone to admire indiscriminately every established authority. (Such as the author’s silly admiration for [Christopher] Wren’s towers, and his weak excuses for their ugliness, his even going so far as to call them “original architecture.”)

  Not the type to violently oppose a new movement, but certainly not one to encourage or approve it, and certainly not until it is well established; then, perhaps, a little approval, grudgingly, without enthusiasm, in a dull, devitalized manner, strictly formalistic and superficial, not recognizing all the fundamental principles, but carping on details, just as one does about the old eclectic architecture, making a new sort of super-eclecticism, a mixture of eclecticism and modernity.

  This is not Toohey’s type, but a good source for Toohey, a good type for the minor, work-a-day “art critic,” a mass of which makes a good background for Toohey and leaves the field open to him.

  Typical quotation: One thing is quite certain, nobody is ever going to make a simpler (in the true meaning of the word) column cap and base than are already provided by the Classic Orders! Yet it is equally certain that their use is being discarded more and more every day because they are not modern. What, then, is going to take their place? The “flight from the orders” argues a flight from a culture we have all been brought up to revere. For the orders are not a worn-out decorative motif, but part of the language of architecture. They represent ordered expressions of thought.

  Also typical is his assertion that modern architecture is merely “dress-making,” only dressing a structural skeleton, but having nothing to do with real structure. This is how much he understands about modern architecture—which, above all, is structural, as compared to the “dress-making” of Renaissance and subsequent architecture. [...]

  Characteristic of this type is a total lack of basic principle or conviction. Vagueness. A great many contradictions. Details and petty measurements for criticism, instead of a complete, unified system of thought.

  March 2, 1937

  C. H. Whitaker, Rameses to Rockefeller.

  In reference to Louis Sullivan: when the Journal of the American Institute of Architects published Sullivan’s Autobiography of an Idea, many people demanded that the Board of Directors stop its publication. The members of the Board refused “even though some of them were a little fearful.” (This was in 1924.)

  About Sullivan:Your country has passed you by. That was what had happened, and I knew, as you read, what the passing by had meant and how you had been hurt. It was plain then that you had been crucified and lacerated, because you challenged the humbug of the art you loved. In every word that you read, I could feel the weight of the tragedy. But, like the voice of the captain rising above the wreckage, I could also feel the exaltation within you that no tragedy could crush. You had seen! You had beheld! You had known the rightness that has forever belonged to craftsmen. You had heard and accepted the everlasting challenge! Ah, that was a wonderful evening, Louis, and I never told you how I felt about it. I guessed that you guessed that I knew. You must have known.

  March 12, 1937

  Same book.

  Real pearls of wisdom for Toohey:

  It is so easy to give credit for the Parthenon to the men whose names have come down to us by the historical method—Pericles, Callicrates, Ictinus, and Phidias, whom Plato called “a wise stone-cutter”—and so easy to forget, by the same very defective historical method, the long procession of building craftsmen who, year by year, played with their changing ideas of form and proportion as succeeding variations passed the ultimate test by which like and dislike were determined.

  Had it not been for this great unsung host of stone-carvers and stone hewers, there could have been no Parthenon. It did not spring from any single mind. It was not born of any single concept. Rather was it the fruit of a slowly ripening experience over a century of trial and error. Year after year the builders studied the result of their labor, looked at it, lived with it, and noted what pleased them and what did not....

  Thus the historical method of giving credit for a building to some particular person seems ungenerous. No building ever had a single author. One cannot point to a single feature of building, anywhere, and say that it first appeared in this building, or that. The whole historical method, in so far as it applies to credit and authorship, rests only on the concept of society as a struggle for individual glory and reward. It completely denies ... the endless procession of workers and thinkers, each making his humble contribution.

  Could anything be sweeter and clearer?

  March 28, 1937

  Same book.

  As a slogan for Toohey’s idea of architecture:

  As a beginning—for the builders who shall at last set to work for a society that is resolved to build a civilization—what could be a better mark to aim at than for everyone a fine and spacious room, sun-lighted or sun-shaded, as one might choose!

  Fine degree of selective freedom!

  This is the best book for all the lying, evasions, and sophistries of Marxism as applied to architecture. Toohey’s exact psychology at work. Always the attempt to give credit to the masses. In Greek architecture—by pulling facts in by the ears, as in the quotation above [i.e., the March 12 entry]. In Gothic—great praise, because it is the anonymous architecture of collective workers. Blaming all the faults of the post-Renaissance architecture on the rise of the individual architect. Phony examples of exploitation as expressed in buildings, such as this explanation of the Parthenon columns: “[T]he temple was meant to advertise certain ideas that would inspire respect and make people pray and go to war without too much murmuring....”

  A dishonest, disgraceful, stinking book.

  Claude Bragdon, Architecture and Democracy.

  An idiotic, unimportant book. The only thing of interest is the author’s combination of communistic leanings and great talk about the “Long Denied” with a silly mysticism that denies reason completely and puts the “heart” above the “brain.” Typical process of subconscious adjustment to purpose.

  Use this. Show the process, particularly obvious in the Catholic Church and in Communism, through which all convictions, even on points [that appear to be] far from the main issue, are subconsciously, in individuals, and deliberately, in ideologies, constructed in such a way as to support the main issue somewhere, in its consequences or in its hidden roots. The “style” of ideologies.

  A good example of sheer drivel, of putting one’s point across where it does not belong, is Bragdon’s interpretation of Sullivan’s Prudential building:One feels that here democracy has at last found utterance in beauty; the American spirit speaks, the spirit of the Long Denied. This huge, rectangular bulk is uncompromisingly practical and utilitarian; these rows on rows of windows, regularly spaced and all of the same size, suggest the equality and monotony of obscure, laborious lives; the upspringing shafts of the vertical piers stand for their hopes and aspirations, and the unobtrusive delicate ornament which covers the whole with a garment of fresh beauty is like the very texture of their dreams.

  This is the way Toohey criticizes buildings.

  A sample of collectivist-mystic balderdash: “Now materialism is the very negation of democracy, which is a government by demos, the over-soul....”

  Glorification of the masses as against genius:But in every field of aesthetic endeavor appears here and there a man or a woman with unclouded vision, who is able to see in the flounderings of untrained amateurs the stirrings of demos from its age-long sleep. These, often forsaking paths more profitable, lend their skilled assistance, not seeking to impose the ancient outworn forms upon the Newness, but by a transfusion of consciousness permitting it to create forms of its own....

  His (the architect’s) problem, in other words, is not to interpret democracy in terms of existing idioms, be they classic or romantic, but to experience democracy in his heart and let it create and determine its new forms through him. It is not for him to impose, it is for him to be imposed upon.

  If he is at a loss to know where to go and what to do in order to be played upon by these great forces let him direct his attention to the army and the army camps. Here the spirit of democracy is already incarnate. (!!!)

  A great truth, not at all in the way the author intended!

  June 4, 1937

  Alfred C. Bossom, Building to the Skies.

  The author praises the pseudo-classic architects of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. He shows his eclecticism, praising the “modern” skyscraper, [while he is] devoid of true architectural convictions, of all inner fire or integrity—“anything goes with the fashion of the moment.” In the list of great American architects of the early skyscrapers—not a word about Sullivan. (Nor
about Frank Lloyd Wright.) Yet the author exhibits a plate of a junky building that got first prize in 1921. Typical instance of accommodating mediocrity.

  He praises women’s interest in the architecture of the home. (That’s the reason for the monstrosities we have!) Some architects will not work for a woman client, regardless of the fee. (Good for them!)

  Relatively simple regulations for American architects as compared to England. (Check on this.)

  According to the author, an American architect has to be a walking bureau of business information. He has to advise the client as to what type of building to erect on a certain site or even choose the site; what the prospects of the neighborhood are, how large a building it can sustain and make it pay, etc. (He has to consult the American Telephone Company that always knows all prospects.) Every skyscraper-building office has one or two employees, technical advisers on this point. Author refused to build a bigger building than the location warranted; he felt his reputation would be hurt if he were associated with a beautiful building which turned out to be a commercial failure. (??) (Check up on this by all means. Is this the general attitude ? Where does the creative instinct come in on this?)

  Investors sometimes ask an architect to select a site and tell them what to build on it.

  Working practice of the author: after the site and the type of building is approved, he “settles all the fundamental problems of the new building himself,” then turns the problem over to his designers who compete for the actual design of the building. (!) (Check up on this! Is it the usual practice? Is the businessman really the boss who hogs the credit, while the creative designer is only a minor employee? Is it usual or is it just a typical instance of second-hand practice? Good for John Eric Snyte.)

  Even the smallest firm building skyscrapers employs 20 to 25 draftsmen. A larger firm would have 60 on its permanent staff and double this number during a rush. The head architect travels a great deal on inspections. (Spends ten nights a month in a sleeping car.) A regular [payroll] of about $15,000 a week. Permanent overhead—$250,000 a year.

  Preliminary drawings for a small (million-dollar) building take about two months. Every tiny detail is included. Separate sets made for the main sections of the job. In all, there are hundreds of them.

  From the moment he starts on his drawings, the architect is in constant touch with structural engineers, contractors, manufacturers and suppliers of materials, and the heads of thirty-two trades that will work under him. Free exchange of opinions and information. Cooperative spirit. Open publicity about everything on job. Drawings and specifications posted in building, so that every worker can read them. Contractors bid for the job. The winner, in turn, opens the bidding for sub-contractors.

  A “cost-plus” contract allows the contractor the cost of the building plus a fixed fee for himself (this is apart from the architect’s commission); anything the contractor saves is split between himself and the owner. This helps to save in buying materials, as the contractor is most experienced and acquainted with the market.

  Typical and valuable instance of mob-spirit: [Raymond Hood is] an architect of the modem type who preaches and practices cooperation. He has no use for the architect who “shuts himself up in his office to make a design and then sends it out to a contractor to build or to an engineer to fit up with the plumbing, heating and steel as best he can.” Nor has he any use for the architect who “goes up to a Communion on Mount Sinai and hands the results to the owner, the engineers and the public.” In his view, as in my own, the best designs, at any rate for the building of skyscrapers, come from “a group of minds in which the architect is one link in the chain.”

  So speaks the mob. The results—the “Daily News Building” [designed by Hood] and [Bossom‘s] buildings—speak for themselves: they are the ugliest, flattest, most conventional, meaningless, unimaginative and uninspiring buildings in the book.

  This type of architect works “by conference,” in which all parties concerned take part, discuss his drawings, make suggestions, etc. (A Hollywood story conference.) The result is a collective creation—“an average on an average.” (This method and these convictions, absolving the architect of all creative responsibility, are good for Peter Keating. Check up on just how much conferring and cooperation is done by an architect such as Frank Lloyd Wright.)

  Good touch: workers who steal rides on trains and get tools out of a pawnshop in some town where the architect is working—in order to work again under him. [...]

  The author talks a great deal about daring, courage and leaving the way free for new inventions. Yet—he is an eclectic artistically. His “newness” applies only to the technical, scientific side of new methods and materials, not to new esthetic ideas. No daring, courage or novelty in his architectural designs. No talk at all in the book of the artistic problem of skyscrapers. No esthetic convictions.

  But a great deal of talk about cooperation. Let’s get together. The skyscraper cannot be the product of one man. It is all collective. A great many attacks on “separatism.” [He is] a second-rater and second-hander, following popular trends, praising engineering and Greek orders in skyscrapers with equal ease, naturally anxious for everyone to share ideas, in order to pick up what he can pick up. (Beware of those too eager for sharing—in wealth or in ideas; they’re the ones who know that they’ll get more than they’ll give in such a pool. Those with much to give do not talk of sharing—they do not need it.)

  This author is just right for Peter Keating.

  An important side-idea to bring out [regarding] the building of a skyscraper: If led by a strong personality, superior in knowledge and talent to the others, representing the complete authority and final judgment in all matters, with a pyramid of ranks under him, widening toward the bottom—the perfect organization with the proper spirit of cooperation and discipline results, and the created building is a magnificent monument. If cooperation means equality, with everyone’s voice as good as the next fellow’s and all the fingers in the pie—an eclectic mess results. (Check up on how, through what exact steps and means, these two methods work in practice.)

  June 10, 1937

  Matlock Price, The ABC of Architecture.

  The best architectural training is to be had in the Architectural Department of one of the large Universities, or in a Technical School.

  “In the University it is possible to begin architectural training in the first year and carry it on, with other and more general studies, through the four years of college.” After this, it is very desirable to take from two to four years post-graduate work, specializing entirely in architecture. (Check up on all this.)

  The author also states that many architects consider a year or two of European travel as the best preparation. (Rubbish!)

  University program:

  First year: history of architecture, drawing, “thorough training in the Classic Orders,” simple problems of architectural design, freehand drawing, a general fine arts course.

  Second year: making “measured drawings,” courses in perspective, shades and shadows, simple building construction, more advanced design problems.

  The next two years—the same subjects carried still further in more advanced problems.

  At the same time courses in higher mathematics.

  Post-graduate work—design problems as advanced as the actual profession of architecture itself.

  He may, at this stage, compete for a Traveling Scholarship which will pay his expenses for a year or two of special study in Europe, usually at the American Academy in Rome.