Richard Kostelanetz
Architecture
There was no room in such a tradition for diffuseness, there were no resources to spare for the ornate, and it was merely sound sense to design a thing as economically as one could. But in the United States these qualities seem to have become especially characteristic.
—John A. Kouwenhoevn, Made in America (1962).
Architecture is art and science and industry, simultaneously; so that an architect’s work forges an uneasy path between esthetic ideals and real materials, between spiritual and technical values as well as such hazards as building codes and unions—among, in short, the demands of commerce, construction, and criticism. A further anomaly is that buildings are often made beautiful for commercial reasons—so that units within them will sell or rent at higher rates, or the work as a whole will bestow free publicity upon the client’s brand-name (Seagram’s in New York, for instance). This beauty sometimes comes at the expense of structural quality and creaturely comfort. In a critical history of architecture, the major dividing issue pits beauty against use (since commerce, by definition, is beneath evaluative criticism). This distinction raises in turn two completely different sets of rationales—one typified in American thought by William James, the other by Thorstein Veblen. As Wayne Andrews draws this useful distinction, in his Architecture, Ambition and Americans (1955), the Jamesian believes that a beautiful building will enhance the lives of all who dwell within and around it, as elegant architecture does elegant people make; the Veblenian position argues that since a building’s usefulness as a human habitat is primary, technical efficiency and humane considerations create architectural quality and perhaps a certain kind of beauty.
From this distinction also follows two completely different kinds of criticism—the formalist and the functionalist, the former emphasizing esthetic qualities and perceptions, the latter social relevance and habitat experience. Pure formalism would acknowledge, for instance, that designs added to a structural frame to evoke an esthetic response, while the functionalist accepts only those shapes derived from internal structure. If the latter school of criticism analyzes buildings as primarily “machines built for living in,” in Le Corbusier’s classic phrase (though he was not himself a hard-line functionalist), the formalist critic is concerned with esthetic properties peculiar to buildings—not only the sculptural qualities evoked by three-dimensional volumes, but also the esthetic character of the entire space (the “artistic environment,” so to speak) surrounding a man inside the edifice. Needless to say, such judgments of architecture’s esthetic attributes, particularly its internal environmental qualities, require direct experience of the building itself; yet the outlines of an empathic description and thus experience can be gleaned from secondary sources alone. Until better means of three-dimensional reproduction are invented, the most convenient second-hand evidence of a work’s particular qualities will remain prose description accompanied by documentary illustration. (Most architectural photographs, however, are thus taken from straight ahead on a clear and sunny day, making the gleaming front, which represents the building at its prettiest, stand for the entire structure—a custom that inspired the historian James Marston Fitch to quip that, “The development of the photograph is the worst thing that ever happened to architecture,” as architecture can scarcely be comprehended from a single frontal view alone.)
The formalist position regards individual buildings as the end product of stylistic ideas, as distinct from, say, structural principles or environmental intentions; for another definition of “style” would be visual form that does not derive from structural necessity. Style and structure are not necessarily opposed in architecture, but many examples suggest the principle that the more formally inventive the architect is, the less attention will he likely to pay to the needs of human habitation. Intellectual history, nonetheless, regards individual buildings as expressing architectural ideas and most important recent architecture as reflecting current issues within the professional world.
The achievements of today’s architecture notwithstanding, one gets general impressions that many contemporary architects often characterize their work or aims with grandiose statements that have little general truth and/or relevance to their work. Many practitioners paying homage to Louis Sullivan’s adage of “form follows function” reveal in their buildings more concern with form than function, the functionalist rhetoric masking, so to speak, a design-mentality. Indeed, the functional achievements that architects and formalist critics admire in beautiful buildings often turn out, after closer examination of the work itself and/or the people customarily using it, to be largely fictitious. Finally, the dominant post-War stylistic persuasions were rather clearly established at the beginning of the period, so that not only did most new formalistic architecture reflect, albeit eclectically, identifiable sources, but even the most adventurous young innovators built within discernible traditions.
The major revolution in architecture between the World Wars, called “The International Style,” was spawned mostly in Germany, at the Bauhaus, an art school headed at different times by two masters of the mode, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The International Style, also known as “The Functionalist Style” or “The Machine Style,” stood for six general principles—the marriage of art and the latest technology; the geometric constructivist style whose “streamlining” symbolized the spirit of the machines more than intrinsic technological quality; the concept of the building as a volume, rather than a mass (and thus the penchant for glass walls that visually denied the building’s massive weight); a rejection of axial symmetry, as in classic cathedrals, in favor of non-centered, asymmetrical regularity, as epitomized by, say, walls composed of rows of glass; the practice of making opposite sides, if not all four sides, resemble each other so that, formally at least, the building has no obvious “front” or “back”; and finally a scrupulous absence of surface ornament. For these reasons, buildings cast in the International Style suggest no-nonsense efficiency and economy, if not a physical environment consonant with both modern technology an bureaucratic ideals, all tempered by geometric grandeur and numerous subtle visual effects produced, for instance, by colors in the glass, or intersecting lines and planes. Technological deference notwithstanding, the impact was finally more Jamesian than Veblenian.
Between the Wars, the International Style became the dominant minority viewpoint—much discussed, admired and publicized, even though the attractive ideas were rarely translated into buildings. With the post-WWII construction boom, however, its geometric severity came to signify modernism around the world, as disciples of the Bauhaus constructed a family of related buildings in all the European countries, as well as Latin America and Asia too. Particularly among U.S. corporations, forever in competition with each other, glassy geometric skyscrapers became the symbol (or advertisement) of futurism. Gropius and Mies had both immigrated to America in the late thirties, each quickly assuming the chief position in architectural schools at, respectively, Harvard and Chicago’s Armour Institute (later to become I.I.T.). The Bauhaus heritage received the best kind of publicity, ranging from newspaper articles to such highly influential texts as Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (1941). By the fifties, the International Style and its descendants became the dominant new architecture in America, less through the example of the masters, than the profligacy of the epigones. While Gropius remained more of an influence than a practitioner (even as a founding elder of the multi-member Architects’ Collaborative in Boston), Mies built at least two post-WWII masterpieces—Crown Hall (1956) on his own campus, and the Seagram Building (1958), which was in its time generally considered the most elegant of New York City’s new skyscrapers. Mies’s earliest American publicist, Philip Johnson, co-author of the first study of The International Style (1932), obtained his own architectural credentials after the War and swiftly made his mark with numerous very beauty-conscious but stylistically derivative private homes; in contrast, Eero Saarinen, the son of an accomplished modernist architect and a sometime student of Mies, extended the style to exhaustion, in such works as the General Motors Technical Center (1948-56) in Detroit, the post-Bauhaus principles of endlessly repeated glass-fronted grids. (Saarinen’s reputation was redeemed somewhat by several posthumously completed edifices, especially the TWA terminal at New York’s JFK [né Idlewild] Airport [1962], their sloping roofs echoing Matthew Nowicki’s truly innovative [and similarly posthumous] stock pavilion [1953] in Raleigh, N.C.) Johnson and the younger Saarinen were probably the two most influential individual architects during the fifties, when, however, this International style was most popularized, if not trivialized, by the American firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, whose numerous slick and sleek glass-and-metal boxes (usually more symmetrical than Mies’s masterpieces, as well as consuming more of their available land) functioned inadvertently to prompt by the late sixties a fairly general critical interest in purportedly “post-modern” alternatives.
The other primary American tradition grew from Frank Lloyd Wright, who created his first innovative buildings several years before Gropius and Mies even commenced their careers; and though Wright turned 70 in 1939, he lived to 1959, becoming more ambitious, if not visionary, with age. From the beginning, he regarded architecture less theoretically, or with less rationalistic theories, than the other modernists. Possessed of an expressive personality, he made buildings that invariably reflected his prejudices and identifiable personal values. His posthumously completed masterpiece, the windowless Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York City (1959), at once repudiated the International Style’s idea of urban architecture, served as an awkward showcase for most works of painting and sculpture, conquered ventilation problems that typically plagued other museums, constantly impressed its peculiarities upon everyone within it, and attained sculptural qualities by climaxing earlier Wrightian penchants for spirals and inverted ziggurats. Though the Guggenheim Museum scarcely represented an innovation in Wright’s thinking, based, at it is, upon sketches made many years before, it was nonetheless a masterful architectural work that had an immense impact, especially as a critical alternative to the International Style.
Actually, the keystone in Wright’s architectural philosophy was the epithet “organic,” or successfully relating a structure to both its intrinsic purposes and the surrounding environment; so that “inside” and “outside” blend into each other.
Thus environment and building are one [he wrote in A Testament (1959)]. Planting the grounds around the building on the site as well as adorning the building take on a new importance as they become features harmonious with the space-within-to-be-lived-in. Site, structure, furnishing—decoration too, planting as well—all these become as one in organic architecture.
Especially in his private homes, such as the legendary Falling Water (1936) in Pennsylvania, his works melted into their landscapes and looked as though they always belonged precisely where they were set. Officially, Wright had no disciples, as unlike Mies and Gropius he did not run a degree-granting school; however, several younger architects who passed through his tutelage extended his “organic” ideas. Bruce Goff, born in Alton, Kansas, in 1904, built numerous houses in the middle and far west that closely blend structure into environment. His masterpiece, the Baringer House (1950) in Norman, Oklahoma, has a continuous 96-foot wall that follows a spiral into the living space and ultimately around a pole from which the entire roof, interior stairway, and living areas are suspended, while plants inside the structure duplicate those outside; so that the environment literally flows into the home, or vice versa. Paolo Soleri, born (1919) and educated in Italy, but long resident in Arizona, has built several houses embedded in the desert (an advantage in heat protection), as well as designing, since 1948, a hypothetical but conceptually impressive “Mesa City” for two million people on fifty-five thousand acres, to be constructed in similar climate. The truth is that Wright himself and the neo-Wrightians function best not in cities but rural settings, and their stylistic ideas usually succeed best when the surrounding landscape has a particular character.
Most of the other American formalistic innovators did not suffer the Bauhaus, or post-Bauhaus training; or if, like Bertrand Goldberg, they did, it was decades before their innovative masterpieces arrived. Goldberg, for instance, left Harvard in the early thirties to study at the Dessau Bauhaus; but not until the late fifties, in his Marina City (1959) in Chicago, did his work achieve a breakthrough. The innovations here mix structural practicalities with an unusual design resembling a stacked pancake; so that the two similar skyscrapers fit into only three downtown acres. As the lower floors are devoted to stores and then parking lots connected by an endless ramp, the private apartments are set on the upper floors, enabling all of them to command a fairly clear view of the city. Developing another Wrightian idea, Goldberg’s apartments project and expand outwards from a narrow elevator and utility core in the form of undulating vertical rows that resemble corn on a cob; so that the major rooms all have outside exposure—a practical advantage indebted to the building’s unusual shape.
Louis Kahn descended from rather conventional American-Parisian “Beaux-Arts” sources. Not until he passed his fiftieth year, in the early fifties, did he get commissions encouraging him to do architecture that commanded the attention of his peers. His first major work, the Art Gallery at Yale University, displayed a taste for revealing the heavy structure of the building—the pillars as pillars, the materials as materials, as well as an emphasis on vertical lines that was then very unusual. This vertical dominance, which inevitably bestows classical allusions, was elaborated in the sprawling Unitarian Church (1962) in Rochester, New York, and the Richards Medical Research Center (1961) in Philadelphia. This last building, generally acknowledged as Kahn’s masterpiece (and perhaps the single most imitated work of the decade), has unadorned rectangular columns protruding from heavily windowed walls and towering above the roof of the building. Within the Richards Center, the walls remain unpainted, pipes and ducts are exposed overhead (creating in practice, however, a noise problem), and the windows lack curtains (bringing excessive heat and sunlight to the laboratories facing South). Technical deficiencies notwithstanding, Kahn’s imposing and un-pretty structures successfully established one alternative within and yet beyond the declining International style. It is indicative that Philip Johnson, something of an opportunist in his eclecticism, chose to emphasize unadorned towers in the Henry L. Moses Research Institute (1965) at New York’s Montefiore Hospital.
With the established styles so well defined, the time would seem ripe for the young and wayward; yet so entrenched were the older persuasions that stylistic leaps during the post-War decades were few and usually modest. Several stunning-looking private homes by John M. Johanson, for instance, display a penchant for unusual technical solutions and striking detail, generally informed by a strong Corbusian sculptural sense, all of which have yet to become a communicable style. Indicatively, when a touted young architect teaching at Yale, Robert Venturi, wrote a dense and allusive polemic on behalf of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), he meant nothing more radical than transcending Bauhaus simplicities and regularities, as well as perhaps more humbly acknowledging the surrounding styles.
R. Buckminster Fuller has been an entirely different kind of architect—a pure Veblenian so different from those already discussed that talk about his achievements requires a different critical language. Like other older architects—Wright, Mies and Gropius—Fuller belongs to pre-WWII cultural history as well as post-War. Unlike the others, however, Fuller had to pass his fiftieth birthday (1945) before his pet ideas, most of them formulated many years before, were realized. He passed sixty before his significance became widely recognized. (That he is one of the seminal minds of the era is an opinion no longer questioned, so it is hard to believe that not too long ago otherwise “intellectual” people were unfamiliar with his thought.) Fuller’s architectural proposals predate his social philosophy, but both incorporate three fundamental ideas first developed and expressed in the late twenties: 1.) The “dymaxion” principle, which maximizes dynamic performance, usually measured as terms of per pound of structure, whether in an automobile, an airplane, or a house—an idea related to industrial ephemeralization, which is the achieving of increasingly more results from increasingly less material. 2.) The practical advantages of mass-production, so that houses could be more economically assembled on a factory-line, like automobiles or airplanes, rather than, then as now, inefficiently produced on their final resting spot by scores of unrelated craftsmen. 3.) The universal applicability of all architectural solutions. Precisely because Fuller came to architecture from some education in engineering and experience in a construction materials business, his designs lack discernible stylistic antecedents professionally (and the realization of his projects necessitates an accredited architect-collaborator). Rather than consciously “reject one-of-a-kind” housing or even “The International Style” as “too visual,” as some critics have it, Fuller simply established his architectural position from an entirely other direction.
His first noted structural innovation was the Dymaxion House (1927) in which a circular multi-room area fifty feet in diameter is suspended by cable from a central unit, forty feet high, that can be set into the partitioned ground anywhere on earth. The living space is partitioned into several rooms while the volume between its floor and the ground can be curtained and filled to the owner’s taste, its most likely use being a parking space. Above the house is an open-air landing partially shaded from the sun by a suspended roof. Internal innovations include numerous labor-saving devices, several technologies to minimize the use of piped-in water (such as a recirculating shower), and (in certain versions) rotary generators for converting random wind energy into auxiliary power. A larger version of the same general structural scheme was a ten-deck building that, in spite of its weight of 45 tons, Fuller envisioned as deliverable by dirigible.
Architects have tended to see the problem of shelter as one, simply, of creating more elegant spatial experiences, whereas Fuller has seen it as one of creating more and better-serviced volumes of habitation [writes the British critic Reyner Banham]. That is why the Dymaxion House project of 1927...was a design that could have delivered what the other [architects] promised but could not produce, a radically new environment for domestic living.
Another early application of the dymaxion principle was a 1933 three-wheeled automobile that saved gasoline, better exploited the spatial area available to a private road vehicle by carrying as many as twelve passengers, turned on a near-radius, etc., until one of the three prototypes got into an unfortunate accident that destroyed its public future.
Though the Dymaxion House as such never progressed beyond its model form, Fuller extended its compositional principles to just parts of a house, producing in 1937 a model bathroom that, since it has fewer parts than the current version, could be put together in a single manufacturing process and then in 1940 an entire utility core that, if mass-produced, could then be moved into a pre-existing shelters. Both proposals offered industrial opportunities that were considered but, alas, not pursued. Fuller’s first real commercial opportunity came after WWII with the Wichita House—a circular aluminum shell-plus-utility-core built closer to the ground than its one-family predecessor. It was designed to be mass produced at six thousand five hundred dollars, if not less. Though many anticipated that the airplane industry, demobilizing from the war, would turn its technological capabilities to mass housing, this expectation proved unfounded and so many orders for Fuller’s innovation went unfilled. Indeed, though several companies have since been formed to mass-produce private dymaxion houses and utility cores, it still remains more of a proposal for universal housing than an achievement. (Some formalist critics blamed this commercial failure on the domes’ supposedly unsightly appearance; yet a more likely explanation is the threat they represented to the featherbedding practices of the housing industry.)
The commercial failure of the Wichita House drove Fuller into another contemplative period from which he emerged with a new proposal for spanning large spaces. Respecting his standing bias of doing more with less, Fuller suggested that distances commonly bridged by cables or girders should instead be spanned by a network of three-dimensional triangles (actually, tetrahedrons) often built up into larger tetrahedrons; for Fuller’s innovative truth, strangely not recognized by earlier builders, was that the tetrahedron better distributes weight and tension than the rectangular shapes traditionally favored in architecture. (Indeed, in his own lectures Fuller often demonstrated that tetrahedrons made of extremely flimsy framing materials, such as bamboo shoots, were capable of supporting surprisingly large amounts of weight.) As the best overall form for these tetrahedrons was the “geodesic” dome (stylistically connecting them to Fuller’s earlier work), he claimed that his “tensegrity” structural principles could span spaces of unlimited diameters with unprecedented light structures, exemplifying the earlier principle of high architectural performance per pound. (Prefabrication and modular construction also concerned the German-American engineer and sometime partner of Gropius—Konrad Wachsmann, whose results, especially his “General Panel System,” were useful, though less spectacular than Fuller’s.)
The first large-scale realization of Fuller’s geodesic innovation came in 1953, when the Ford Motor Company commissioned a 93-foot rotunda for its Detroit plant. The following year, the U.S. Marine Corps solicited Fuller’s advice on mobile shelters, subsequently adopting a sequence of domes, ranging in size from fifty-five feet in diameter to be delivered by helicopter to a 15-foot surrogate tent made of cardboard, all of which could be quickly assembled without expert labor. Nicknamed the “Kleenex House,” this last envelope for things and people weighed one-third as much as a tent, cost one-fifteenth as much, used less than ten dollars’ worth of materials, and packed into a small box, in short epitomizing the three Fullerian principles of dymaxion performance, mass-production, and universal applicability.
As the larger domes began to cover yet greater spaces, Fuller’s structures began to assume a peculiar kind of beauty—surely Veblenian at base and yet with Jamesian touches. The Climatron (1960) in St. Louis’s Botanical Gardens, a controlled environment housed beneath a Fuller hemisphere 175 feet in diameter, enclosed an elegant universe of lush nature cut off from a larger urban world; and the nearly complete sphere over 200 feet in diameter built for Expo ’67 in Montreal had an extraordinary grandeur that was surely Jamesian, particularly since the Lucite skin changed color in response to the outside climate and the multi-layered interior afforded views from various perspectives. Though Fuller’s domes functioned to preserve the classic distinction between inside and outside, the bigger the dome became, the less relevant to felt experience does the old wall become. The identical domes built for the Union Tank Car Company at both Baton Rouge, Louisiana (1958) and Wood River, Illinois (1959) span 384 feet, and covered 2 1/2 acres with a steel skin less than 1/8” thick—an efficiency rate that John McHale estimates as “roughly two ounces of structural weight per cubic foot enclosed.” By the early sixties Fuller proposed putting domes miles in diameter over whole cities or neighborhoods—the one proposed for midtown Manhattan would weight 80,000 tons and cost two-hundred million dollars. “It is believed,” writes McHale, “that the savings to the city in such items as air-conditioning (dome provides its own natural circulation), street-cleaning, snow removal, and lost man-hours from colds and other respiratory ailments would soon repay initial investment.”
It was Fuller’s singular achievement to extend brilliantly a peculiarly American tradition of magnificent architecture realized primarily through innovative engineering—a tradition dating back to Benjamin Franklin and including William LeBaron Jenney’s earliest skyscrapers and the great expansion bridges. To the cultural historian John A. Kouwenhoven, these figures established “the vernacular tradition in building,” which is characterized by “simplicity, lightness, flexibility, and wide availability.” Fuller wedded art and technology far more successfully than the Bauhaus, for his domes made grand art out of innovative technology. His works were eminently physical, and thus Veblenian, and yet also spiritual, so Jamesian; and for the future of building they offered not a particular style but a distinctly American example of architectural excellence.
Another scarcely noticed development in modern architecture has stemmed from paying especially close attention to managing the environment within the building—temperature, humidity, and ventilation, and perhaps because the severe extremes of most American climates demand optimal internal environmental control, Americans have also been the innovators at mediating between interior and exterior. According to the British architectural historian Reyner Banham, in his brilliant study of The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969), Benjamin Franklin invented the principle of heating a room with warm air and the private homes that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in Chicago early in this century—The Baker House (1908), the Gale House (1908), and The Robie House (1910) “with their easy mastery of environmental control”—made him “the first master of the well-tempered environment.” In Banham’s history, no American architect does as well again without mechanical air-conditioning—not even Wright—until Philip Johnson, in his own country home (1949), a Miesian glass-walled box shrewdly situated on a bluff in New Canaan, Connecticut. Another recent example in Banham’s citations is the inflatable portable theater designed by the architect Victor Lundy for the Atomic Energy Commission, which first used it in 1959—“unmistakably architecture [constructed] out of the exploitation of a new technology.” Here the elastic skin is blown up into two hemispherical spaces of different sizes, the smaller of which is cut away into an entrance with revolving doors—in sum running 230 feet long, about 100 feet wide and fifty high, and thanks to certain properties of inflated spaces and the construction’s internal design (“air balloons kept rigid by internal pressure”), only a small air-conditioner is needed to keep temperatures manageable. (Banham, perhaps the world’s most adventurous architectural critic, has also advocated impermanent or “clip-on” architecture—an idea that inexplicably had more visible influence in England than America, where the issue of possible impermanence goes generally unmentioned.)
To the rest of the world, American architecture at its best epitomized a contemporary spirit, yet within the profession were conservative forces constricting the drifts of change. On one hand, Paul Heyer, a British architect-critic traveling through America, could judge unequivocally that, “In the post-World War II years, leadership in the sphere of architecture is generally recognized as having centered in the United States.” Americans indeed produced the most intrinsically successful and influential developments out of the International Style. In part because of such technical achievements as new materials, the world’s cities were, in fact, slowly coming to resemble midtown Manhattan. Nonetheless, the International Style remained an importation to America, a grafting upon native soil and its own structural and environmental traditions; so that this new architecture around the world was curiously imitating the latest American imitations of Europe. Furthermore, in the success of American architecture came a general disinterest in alternatives more radical than, say, Louis Kahn. As James Marston Fitch noted in the new edition of American Building (1966):
In 1964, there were twenty-five firms each of which had over $60,000,000 worth of work on its boards. Ironically, this general prosperity has led to the impoverishment of intellectual speculation and artistic invention. The utopian element in architectural thinking has been largely submerged. Theory itself is in disrepute....the dominant attitude is one of complacent laissez-faire, the esthetic expression of which is a genial eclecticism.
The profession’s neglect of Fuller himself, his architectural values, and the pressing problems of mass-housing epitomized this moribund conservativism. Pious proclamations notwithstanding, the dominant attitude within the trade has scarcely progressed beyond the 1928 resolution of the American Institute of Architects “as inherently opposed to any [Fuller] peas-in-a-pod-like reproducible designs.” (In recent years Fuller has regularly been placing his bet on students, but at least within the licensed profession his faith has not yet been redeemed.) A book like John Jacobus’s Twentieth-Century Architecture: The Middle Years, 1940-1965 (1966) demonstrates that a respected academic historian can write an international history of “contemporary” architecture without even mentioning such non-stylists as Fuller and Wachsmann, or their European compatriots, Constantine Doxiades and Kaija and Heikki Siren, or such environmentalists as Goff and Soleri—as though these radical architectural alternatives simply did not exist. Indeed, compared to criticism of other arts, discourse about architecture is not especially good or scrupulous, which is to say that many statements simply do not apply accurately to the works described. One reason for this paucity is the frequent disparity, mentioned before, between the architect’s stated intention and the building’s actual effects; another is the limited number of architectural reviews (and reviewers) the absence of any American architectural periodical as radical as the British Archigram; a third is that fact that esthetic reputations are so frequently translated into publicity and monetary values; so that only the critic talking to nobody is allowed the genuine autonomy necessary for his cultural task. Moreover, given these problems intrinsic in architectural writing, one suspects that many speculative designs remain unknown or, if built, unrecognized. All these problems suggest that architecture needs its own New Criticism.
Within the process of professional training are yet other forces discouraging change. The aspiring American architect is subjected to several years of post-graduate education, then a period of internship with an established firm before he can take the examination for an official license—a hurdling process nearly as arduous as that required for medicine; and the American Institute of Architects’ policies reveal a reluctance to increase their membership. This explains not only why Fuller’s alternatives get blocked or deflected but also why it is rare for anyone under thirty-five to do his own building and impossible for anyone under thirty. Therefore, the personal or original impulses evident in the youth are likely to be suppressed or lost in the man. The fact that none of the great older masters underwent this sort of initiating ritual should discredit the system. Nor has U.S. architectural education yet produced someone widely acknowledged as great. Nonetheless, American architecture remains more practical than European; our cultural atmosphere is in general more congenial to individual initiative. In no other country is the tradition epitomized by Buckminster Fuller becoming so attractive; so that in spite of all the native conservatism, the best American architecture is genuinely a step ahead in the world scene.
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