Top to bottom: The Barcelona Pavilion (1929); L’Unité d’Habitation (1952); The Robie House (1909)
Top: Carson, Pirie, Scott (1904); bottom: the Chrysler Building (1930) L’Unité d’Habitation
Finished in 1952, this is the best of Corb and the worst of Corb, always referred to simply as “the Unité” despite the fact that there are actually three of them. (The original is at Marseilles, the other two at Nantes and Berlin.) So what is it? Well, you might say that it was an apartment house with social cachet, the result of an idea whose time had come. Also gone, some thirty years before. Back in the good old days of modernism, when architecture was seen as an instrument for progressive political transformation, architects talked about building “social condensers” and theorized vaguely about how people would learn to live in happy collective harmony if only they had the right kind of structures in which to do it. Corb, having glommed on to this idea, thought that if the whole countryside were dotted with “Unités” of his own design, everyone would get on fine. Fortunately, he was only able to build the three. By itself, the Marseilles Block (as some call it) is notable for a number of reasons, some social and others—the important ones—formal. The social program includes a shopping arcade on an upper floor, recreation and day care on the roof, and interior “streets” (big corridors, really) on every other floor: a variety of conveniences designed essentially to imprison. Formally, things are more positive and provide a golden opportunity for learning some key vocabulary words. Let’s start with pilotis, the big legs on which the entire building is raised. Corb thought that these would free the landscape from the building (the former is supposed to flow uninterrupted underneath), but they had the reverse effect. The Unité is constructed in béton brut (we’ve had this one already), and its heavily sculpted facades incorporate brisesoleils (sun screens) and are heavily polychromed in primary colors. The roof vents, chimneys, elevator housings, and such are done in free-form shapes; together they make for a lovely silhouette. The Robie House
The Robie House (1909) is the finest example of Wright’s Prairie-style work. Prairie style was both a style and—as with so much great art—an anxiety. At the turn of the century the prairies still abutted Chicago, and Wright had them on the brain: their endless flatness, their windsweptness, and, dare we say, their romance. As a result, the longness and lowness of Prairie buildings (Wright was not the only architect so moved) is fairly easy to understand. Other elements, including decorative treatments and Wright’s characteristic “flowing space,” bespeak such influences as an early dose of Japanese architecture and a stint in Louis Sullivan’s office. The Robie House itself is long, low, and brick. A tightly controlled but asymmetrical bi-level plan, a mature application of Wright’s geometrical decoration, vertical windows arrayed in strips, and a low-hipped roof each does its bit. Next time you stroll past the Guggenheim with a friend, mention the Robie House and how incredible you find it that one architect could have done both. Carson, Pirie, Scott
Designed by Louis Sullivan and built between 1899 and 1904, the Carson, Pirie, Scott department store (originally built as the Schlesinger and Meyer department store) is the hottest product of the Chicago School. Why? For starters, it has great structural clarity, which is to say, it is easy to “read” the underlying steel structure in the lines of the facades, which look like an arrangement of posts and beams filled in with glass. The proportions of the structural bays (the distance between columns, framed by floors above and below) are on the long side, a proportion that is considered particularly “Chicago.” That old bugbear, the corner, is dealt with especially neatly by Sullivan, who, in effect, inscribes a cylinder there, accelerating the window proportions to help zing the viewer around the block. Less frequently noted is the incredible decoration that covers all surfaces (not counting the windows, dummy). Indeed, Sullivan was a great apostle of ornamentation, and the intricate system he finally arrived at was not so very different from Art Nouveau. The Chrysler Building
The good news is that it’s once again OK to like the Chrysler Building. For years seen as a detour on the way to boring modernism, we now acknowledge that the flowering of Art Deco (after the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris), which took place in the Twenties and Thirties, was one of the high points in modern design. In every sense, Deco’s highest point is the Chrysler Building, designed by William Van Alen and, briefly, the tallest building in the world. It is still the most beautiful, most “classic” skyscraper ever built. The convention in talking about skyscrapers is to analogize them to classical columns, with their three-part division of base, shaft, and capital, or, if you prefer, beginning, middle, and end. The Chrysler is great because it succeeds at all levels. The lower portion contains a handsomely decorated lobby and dramatic entries, well related to the scale of the street. The shaft makes use of an iconography based, appropriately enough, on automotive themes (flying tires, a frieze of Ply-mouths), and the crown is that wonderful stainless steel top, the skyscraper’s universal symbol. FIVE MODERN MAXIMS
After all, what’s a style without a slogan? Here are our favorites.
LESS IS MORE: Mies van der Rohe’s coinage. Postmodernist wags had so much fun turning this on its head—“More is more,” “Less is a bore,” etc.—that you’re advised to give it a rest for a decade or so.
ORNAMENT IS CRIME: Adolf Loos penned this goody (Anita wasn’t the only aphorist in the family), an obvious reaction to fin de siècle excess. Given the recent upsurge of interest in ornament, be sure to keep your delivery ironic.
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION: The functionalist credo, generally attributed to Mies, but actually used by several eminences, including Louis Sullivan. The earliest use appears to be by Horatio Greenough, a mid-nineteenth-century Yankee sculptor remembered for his statue of George Washington in a peekaboo toga.
THE PLAN IS THE GENERATOR: Corb’s version of the above. It means you should start (if you happen to be designing a building) from the floor plan, with all its implications of rational relationships, rather than impose some sort of “artistic” vision on a building a priori. Fortunately, Corb did not always practice what he preached.