“Are You Illiterate About Modern Architecture?” by Peter Blake, was originally published in the September 1961 issue of Vogue.
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Just as Paris, during the first three decades of the century, was the centre of modern art, so this country is now the centre of modern architecture. All over the world, the names of great American architects—native as well as foreign-born—are known, and their work admired. Much early modern architecture in Europe and elsewhere received its impetus from the work of the great Chicago architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Louis Sullivan to Frank Lloyd Wright. Now architecture in Europe, Asia, and Africa is receiving its impetus from the work of living Americans. Impetus comes from Louis I. Kahn, perhaps the most creative U.S. architect since Wright. It comes as well from the work of Philip Johnson, Edward D. Stone, Paul Rudolph, Craig Ellwood, and Minoru Yamasaki—from the American buildings by such European-born American pioneers as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Richard Neutra, and Eero Saarinen.
Laymen, of course, recognize the names of the great pioneers—may recognize the names of Saarinen and Johnson and one or two of their contemporaries. But many would be hard put to identify the work of these men, or to separate it from that of lesser architects. The ferment itself is practically unknown. To some laymen, modern architecture looks much the same: glass-and-metal “graph paper” draped over rectangles of steel and concrete, with little variation in detail, little allowance for “beauty.” They are reconciled to this sameness because they have come to believe that modern architecture is cheap, and that sameness is the reason it is cheap.
The facts, however, are rather different. Although it is certainly cheaper to build a modern building today than it would be to build Chartres today, modern architecture is anything but cheap—nor does it all look the same. Indeed, it would be very difficult to find a contemporary art form in America, or anywhere else, in which there are so many vehemently opposed splinter groups at work. As a matter of fact, the great diversity in American architecture and the lack of consensus among its practitioners are among its diverting pleasures. While it is certainly true that glass-and-metal “graph paper” is one characteristic surface of modern buildings, glass and metal do not become architecture until employed by a glass-and-metal artist. The glass-and-metal Seagram Building in New York, designed primarily by Mies van der Rohe, is as different from the jerry-built glass-and-metal junk of much of Park Avenue as the poetry of T. S. Eliot is from this prose. (Furthermore, the Seagram may be one of the most expensive buildings, per square foot, put up by anyone since Angkor Wat.)
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