Importing the International Style: Architecture in the United States

IMPORTING THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE: ARCHITECTURE IN THE UNITED STATES

The Look

World War II indirectly brought modern architecture to the United States. Modern architecture emphasized function over form and simplicity over elaboration and embraced new materials and metals. The cool surfaces of glass and metal characteristic of what Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock called the International Style captured the modern fascination with technology and applied it to big and small structures alike. One center of modernist architecture was the Bauhaus in Germany, which gained notoriety in the 1930s through its principle designers Peter Bejrems, Walter Gropius, and Marcel Breuer. Their "monuments to modernism" owed nothing outwardly to traditional and local architectural vocabularies but instead emphasized the inseparability of structure (materials used and the foundations of the structure) and form (style).

New Arrivals

One important and immediate effect of the war on American architecture came in the years before the United States entered the conflict. Many European architects fled to the United States in the late 1930s to escape the political oppression of the Nazis and an increasingly less favorable economic environment. The transplanting of such talent to American cities, particularly Chicago, shifted the center of architecture from Europe to America and American design schools. Gropius was appointed chairman of the architecture department at Harvard University, where he hired longtime partner Breuer; Eero Saarinen taught at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; László Moholy-Nagy, a former colleague of Gropius, taught at the Institute of Design in Chicago; Alvar Aalto worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); and Eric Mendelson taught at the University of Southern California.

Adapting Modernism to America

These émigré architects helped to establish modernist architecture in the United States. In doing so, they introduced the International Style to their students while adapting its modernist vision to their new country. Gropius's first American works were detached houses done in collaboration with Breuer. The houses, such as Gropius's own house (1937) in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and the Robinson House (1947) in Williamstown, Massachusetts, combined classic New England vernacular architecture with modernist elements. The Lincoln House was constructed from a wood frame with vertical board siding along with glass block, low walls of irregular stones, and a prefabricated cast-iron spiral stair, giving the New England shingle house an entirely new and modern appearance. Similarly, Aalto's design for the Baker House dormitory (1948) at MIT altered the smooth, rectilinear slab of the International Style by erecting a six-story serpentine building, textured in red brick, that curved along the Charles River.

The Glass Wall

A typical feature of the International Style was the use of large glass panes for walls. The so-called glass curtain brought natural light deep into the building while functioning as a wall. Thus the glass wall or curtain perfectly captured the modernist joining of function and form by blurring the line between outside and inside, giving the appearance that the interior space reached continuously outward. Johnson's residence in New Canaan, Connecticut, the Glass House (1949), became the model for modern architecture's application in home design. The Glass House was just that: a small, geometric house, with walls almost entirely of glass, that blended into the landscape despite its use of modern materials.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe established the recognizable style of the 1940s by providing a working vernacular for modernist American design. His earlier work in Germany focused on transforming the skyscraper from a uniform stone block to a more fluid and technically advanced structure. He was one of the first architects to use the glass wall or curtain as a thin "skin" over the "skeleton" of the building's structure. His first executed buildings in the United States were in Chicago—the Promontory Apartments (1948-1949) and the pair of apartment towers for 860-880 Lake Shore Drive (1948-1951). Both relied heavily on steel grids framing long ribbons of glass.

New Applications for Modernism

Mies van der Rohe also designed the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT, 1939-1941), where he headed the architecture faculty from 1938 to 1958. The low buildings were predominantly rectilinear in shape and were made of simple materials, such as black-painted steel, buff-colored brick, and aluminum-framed windows. The IIT project, together with his glass-curtain walls, became a foundation for postwar architecture. IIT was also the first modern campus to be designed by one architect.

Miesian Architecture

His glass wall became the most visible sign of Miesian architecture and a popular expression of an increasingly technological culture. Pietro Bellushci's Equitable Savings and Loan (1948) in Portland, Oregon, used a polished sheet-aluminum skin to cover the building's reinforced concrete frame. Darker, cast-aluminum spandrels and tinted glass gave the effect of a single, smooth reflective plane more machinelike than any building by Mies van der Rohe. The firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill made Miesian architecture a symbol of financial muscle, as in the Lever House in New York (1952). Saarinen's early work also drew heavily on the IIT campus plan, most notably in Saarinen's General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan (1948-1965). Johnson also utilized Miesian designs, specifically in his Glass House. Its visible steel framing and open plan, separating rooms by limited partitions or the placement of furniture, emphasized Mies van der Rohe's concentration on structure as expressive form.

The War and the Profession

World War II affected American architecture on many fronts. While the economic depression of the 1930s had slowed construction and kept many architects underemployed, the war presented its own set of limits on the profession. Civilian housing construction was put on hold, as existing supplies were needed for the construction of military bases and temporary housing units. After the war, the need for new buildings burgeoned. The devastation of European cities created a pressing need for new buildings, city streets, factories, and housing. At home, the postwar economic boom generated an unprecedented market for new homes. Architects after the war had plenty of work to do; as a result, the ranks of the profession swelled.

THE "NEW LOOK" NOT FOR EVERYBODY

Not everyone was pleased by the so-called New Look sweeping the country in 1947. Influenced by Christian Dior's designs and emboldened by the lifting of government restrictions on cloth, American designers introduced what Life referred to as a new "covered-up bareness" and called it high fashion. Free of regulations, designers lengthened, flared, and dropped the hemlines of their skirts and added such luxuries as ruffles and bustles. But whatever devices the designers used to make the dress of 1947 look lush, Life complained that designers had become too enamored of clothes only a model could wear. The magazine explained that this crop of designer fashions had "made even less provision than usual for the country's millions of women with thick waists, stout arms, husky shoulders and short legs."

Source:

"Resort Fashions," Life, 22 (13 January 1947): 69-76.

Functionalism Goes to War

Once the United States had entered the war the government took control of all domestic construction. In April 1942 the War Production Board (WPB) issued Order L-41, prohibiting all but essential war construction. With resources for all construction requiring approval from the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board (SPAB), architects turned their attention to large, federally sponsored low-cost housing projects and military bases. With their modular framing, prefabrication, and simple, functional planning, both demonstrated the very qualities modern architecture espoused. Such housing projects designed by modernists included Channel Heights in San Pedro, California (1943), by Richard Neutra, and Aluminum City Terrace housing in New Kensingson, Pennsylvania (1941), by Gropius and Breuer. Stringent cost limits proved beneficial in these spartan, but distinguished, examples of modern wartime architecture.

Materials and Construction

Plastic became increasingly popular as a building material, as metals were commandeered for defense purposes. Plastics were used in light fixtures, furniture, floor coverings, paints, varnishes, and laminated boards. Low-cost housing for military troops abroad, housing of displaced Europeans, temporary housing for American workers, detention camps for interned Japanese Americans, and other projects stimulated innovative construction techniques. Prefabricated wooden houses were assembled from small units on-site or built in the shop and delivered to the site in sections. Structures were secured by screws, bolts, and glue.

New Ideas

The need for fast, inexpensive housing generated unique designs from American architects. One house designer based his ideas on the circular, galvanized, sheet-steel grain bin, which made single-room structures by stamping insulated steel panels into a dome shape. Popularly known as "igloos," these structures divided the interior space with curtains, were easily transported, and resisted earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, air raids, and insects. Many commentators believed that such houses would transform American cities.

Industrial Architecture

Architects also found work in heavy industry. As business geared up for war by converting to defense-related work, the need for new buildings increased. Albert Kahn's design for the Ford aircraft plant at Willow Run, Michigan, epitomized the wartime need for technical efficiency, quality control, and productivity in industrial buildings. Other noteworthy industrial designs were the North American Aviation plant at Grand Prairie, Texas, the Buick airplane engine plant near Chicago, the Hudson Motor naval gun plant at Detroit, and the Packard Motor Company's Rolls-Royce aircraft motor plant in Detroit.

Postwar Projections

With defense plants and the major part of war housing completed by 1945, architects and engineers began anticipating postwar construction needs. The National Housing Agency, established in 1942 to regulate domestic construction, expected that four hundred thousand houses at a cost of $5,000 each would be needed immediately after the war and predicted that the demand would rise to one million a year. The 1944 Servicemen's Readjustment Act, also known as the GI Bill of Rights, provided servicemen and servicewomen homes costing up to $10,000 without any form of down payment. By 1947 the GI Bill had underwritten mortgages for more than one million veterans. Home ownership rose from 43.6 percent in 1940 to 55 percent in 1950.

Prefabricated Houses

Several surveys predicted that the postwar house would have one story—including three bedrooms or a room convertible to a third bedroom, the equivalent of two bathrooms, a pitched rather than flat roof, no basement, and fewer but larger windows—and would be mass-produced but not standardized. In 1945 the architecture firm Kump, Wurster and Bernardi introduced a design for postwar housing based on advances in prefabrication during the war. Their design dictated that interior walls would bear no weight, thus allowing complete freedom in arranging rooms. Also in 1945 architect George Fred Keck introduced his Solar Home, in which solar orientation and panel heating were combined to ensure maximum heat efficiency. A gas furnace was used to heat the house through floor-laid clay tile ducts.

The Birth of Levittown and Suburbia

In 1948 Levitt and Sons, the country's largest house builders, transformed a fifteen-hundred-acre Long Island potato field into Levittown, the fastest-growing community in the nation—ten thousand homes by 1950. Their four-room houses—with panel heating, two-room fireplaces, electric kitchens, automatic laundries, and expansion attics—sold for $6,999 to $7,999. Veterans and an eager population waited to purchase a Levitt home. The firm cut its own lumber in its own forests, bought most of its other materials directly from the manufacturers, and hired non-union labor to keep costs low. The Levitts reversed typical assembly-line techniques to keep up with demand: the unit was stationary, and the laborers moved around it, performed their jobs, and then moved on to the next unit. With such techniques a Levitt house was finished every twenty-four minutes, complete with trees and shrubs. With Levittown, prefabrication and the postwar demand for affordable housing formed a comfortable relationship and helped the growth of suburbia.

PENT UP AT THE PENTAGON

In February 1943 Newsweek reported the opening of the largest office building in the world in Arlington, Virginia: the $70 million, five-sided, five-tiered Pentagon, which had no less than sixteen and a half miles of corridors. Housing thirty thousand War Department personnel, the Pentagon was the new nerve center of the nation's war and defense effort. However, the enormous size of the building posed its own set of problems, particularly navigation. Visitors and employees were frequently getting lost in its miles of hallways. One woman, late for an appointment, spent more than two hours searching for her destination. It took the War Department another hour to extricate her from the labyrinth. Newsweek reported that visitors were handed a guide card with colored squares denoting the floors and numerals and letters telling the floor, ring, corridor, and bay of the office sought. Guides were provided for the faint of heart. Some employees complained of feeling suffocated in offices that felt more like "a fortress without windows" than a place of employment. Others developed a fear of being in the Pentagon's large open spaces as they wandered through its endless lobbies and corridors. Still others complained that the soundproofing of the new building was so effective that they were unable to work without the din from the street. Relieved Navy Department employees, who were supposed to move into the Pentagon but did not, wrote a little jingle which Newsweek published: "Carry me back to the Pentagon Building—Five sides instead of the four that make a square; Carry me back to Old Virginny, 'Cause that's the only way you'll ever get me there!"

Source:

"Race between Claustrophobia and Agorophobia for Those Pent Up in Washington's Pentagon," Newsweek, 21(15 February 1943): 64-65.

Sources:

William Dudley Hunt, Jr., Encyclopedia of American Architecture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980);

John Jacobus, Twentieth Century Architecture: The Middle Years, 1940-1965 (New York: Praeger, 1966);

Marcus Whiffen and Frederick Koeper, American Architecture, 1607-1976 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).