Despite its vast productive capacity, the old western world in the mid twentieth century created rather fewer urban entities of distinction than did the nineteenth. Partly, this was because the building of cities necessarily remains a slower process than the building of individual structures, even in an age when there are many fiat towns and also much concerted rebuilding of older cities partially cleared by bombing in the Second World War. Even more, perhaps, it is because it takes far longer for the ‘planning’ ideals of architects in any period to achieve a degree of public acceptance sufficient to ensure over decades proper control of layout and construction—or reconstruction—of whole cities than to find clients, even governmental clients, for single buildings or for extensive, but piecemeal, social projects.

Perret’s Le Havre (Plate [140A]) has earlier been characterized as the realization—notable even if belated—of ideals that date back before the First World War. None of the post-war ‘New Towns’ of England were complete enough by the mid fifties to be apprehensible as urban entities; for the most part they were still only large-scale housing developments—suburbs in search of a city, so to say—realizing at a considerably lower economic level the ideals of the Garden Cities of fifty years before. Better than the English examples and indicative of the widespread acceptance of Garden-City ideals was Vållingby in Sweden.

More complete urban entities of the mid century could be seen in such heavily bombed and largely rebuilt cities as Coventry in England or Hanover in Germany; yet in neither case was the architectural achievement of the highest contemporary order. They should be compared for quality with Napoleon III’s Paris or Francis Joseph’s Vienna rather than with Alexander I’s Petersburg or Ludwig I’s Munich, and even that comparison is not always very favourable to them.

In the extensive and almost explosive expansion and reconstruction of various Latin American cities it was only in Caracas that the planner Maurice Rotival was able to keep a bit ahead of the builders. But even Caracas still had only samples of the characteristic new urbanism of the mid twentieth century: two or three isolated skyscrapers and a housing development, the Cerro Piloto, differing from those in other parts of the world chiefly by its very great extent and its superb mountain-backed site. The North American cities that were growing fastest, Houston or Los Angeles or Miami Beach or Toronto in Canada, were at least as chaotic as the Latin American ones, and neither the quantity nor the quality of the individual buildings was as high. Against the eruptive growth of a city like São Paulo in Brazil might be better balanced such a North American programme of large-scale rebuilding as that which had already cleared the Golden Triangle in Pittsburgh, replacing typical nineteenth-century urban congestion with an open park and spaced cruciform skyscrapers. The new capital of Brazil, Brasilia, was not planned by Lúcio Costa even on paper until 1957.

The mid twentieth century had no full-scale cities that properly exemplified the highest ideals of modern architects. It would be necessary to wait, with fingers crossed, even to see the results of such piecemeal projects of reconstruction as that proposed by Sir William Holford for the bombed district around St Paul’s Cathedral in London,[[539]] and still longer for such complete cities as Brasilia and Chandigarh where, however, the public buildings by Le Corbusier were in the mid fifties rapidly rising. But there were also in existence already certain special entities of almost urban scale planned since the Second World War that deserve attention. Notable are the ‘university cities’, complete educational plants located on new terrain, planned as a whole and designed as regards their individual buildings either by a single team of architects or by several teams whose work was closely co-ordinated from start to finish. The most remarkable of these is that of the University of Mexico, but even here the difference in quality between such highly original structures as the Olympic Stadium of Augusto Perez Palacios (b. 1909), Raúl Salinas Moro, and Jorge Bravo Jiménez of 1951-2, with its fine relief mosaic by Diego Rivera, or the Central Library of Juan O’Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra, and Juan Martinez de Velasco of 1951-3, with its stack tower entirely covered with mosaics designed by O’Gorman, and certain of the other equally large and prominent buildings is very notable (Plate [184]). The university city of Rio de Janeiro, for which Le Corbusier was originally called to Brazil to provide a plan in 1936, was by no means so far advanced; but the control of the design of all the principal buildings by one architect, Jorge Moreira (b. 1904), who is one of the three or four ablest in Brazil, seemed to promise a homogeneity of character and a distinction of finish unique in this field. Among several other Latin American examples begun and partly built by the mid fifties, that at Caracas by Carlos Raúl Villanueva (b. 1900) rivals in its principal building, the Aula Magna of 1952-3 with its extraordinary acoustic ceiling by the technician Robert Newman and the sculptor Sandy Calder, the achievement of the Mexicans.

Of a very different character indeed, and initiated much earlier, is the University of Aarhus[[540]] in Denmark for which Kay Fisker, C. F. Møller (b. 1898), and Povl Stegmann (1888-1944) won the competition in 1931. Some of its many buildings date from before the Second World War: professors’ houses of 1933, student residences of 1934, museum of natural history of 1937-8; while most of the classroom buildings were actually erected in the war years 1942-6. The work continues in the hands of Møller, and the layout of the beautiful sloping site was by C. Th. Sørenson (b. 1893). Built of buff brick with tile roofs of medium pitch, the general effect is much quieter than that of the Latin American university cities with their tall ferro-concrete buildings, crisply shaped and distinguished both by a bold use of colour and the conspicuous incorporation of work by distinguished painters and sculptors. At first sight—and to the prejudiced—the University of Aarhus may appear more conservative; but the range of the new architecture is recognized today as being wider than it was thirty years ago, and Møller’s aula in its very different way is quite as advanced as Villanueva’s; or even, for that matter, as the shell-domed auditorium of 1952-5 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., by Eero Saarinen (1910-61).

One of the earliest individual building types to find wholly untraditional expression was the large block of offices. The skyscraper reached maturity early in the hands of Sullivan in Chicago; the later vagaries of the form in New York did not recommend it to European emulation, although skyscraper projects by Mies, by Gropius, and by Le Corbusier were among the most notable early evidences of the birth—on paper—of a new architecture in the years 1919-22. Howe & Lescaze’s Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building of a decade later was the first large-scale example of the acceptance in America of the new architecture of Europe; but during the thirties skyscraper-building languished, and many critics thought that their day was already over. In many parts of the world that day had yet to dawn, and Europe still had very few notable examples to offer, but in the New World the fifties saw the start of a new wave of skyscraper building by no means confined to the United States. For the first time since the nineties a rather considerable number of really distinguished examples were being built in both North and South American cities. Wright’s Price Tower at Bartlesville, Okla., a relatively modest one, and Mies and Johnson’s Seagram Building in New York have both been mentioned already. Diagonally across Park Avenue in New York from the site of the Seagram tower stands the first epoch-making post-war skyscraper in New York, Lever House, designed by Gordon Bunshaft (b. 1909) of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill firm and built in 1950-2 (Plate [189]). The almost completely glazed curtain-walls of the east and west sides of the United Nations Secretariat in New York—built in 1947-50 by Wallace K. Harrison (b. 1895) and his partner Max Abramowitz (b. 1908) but incorporating ideas provided by an international panel of which Le Corbusier and Niemeyer were members—are carried round three sides of Bunshaft’s slab. More significant, however, is the fact that this slab, rising like the isolated United Nations building with no setbacks, covers only a portion of the available site. Thus it stands in its own envelope of space carved, as it were, out of the solid canyon of Park Avenue, just as Mies and Johnson would later set their building back 100 feet from the avenue and well in from both the side streets also. Their ‘plaza’ is unconfined; Bunshaft’s open space is defined by a mezzanine on pilotis carried round an unroofed court.

Reacting against the almost totally glazed curtain-wall of his U.N. Secretariat, a type of sheathing for large urban structures then spreading very rapidly to other countries, Harrison on the Alcoa Building of 1952 in Pittsburgh used storey-high panels of aluminium cut by relatively small windows. This alternative type of sheathing has been less exploited since, however, than the more completely glazed sort. There was a curious revival of Expressionist feeling in the complex angular design of the glazed lobby of the Alcoa Building that contrasted sharply with the paradigmatic expression of the ‘International Style’ seen in the Equitable Building in Portland, Ore., of 1948 by Pietro Belluschi (b. 1899), the earliest of the interesting post-war skyscrapers. A later Western skyscraper, the Mile-High Center in Denver, Col., completed by I. M. Pei (b. 1907) in 1955, followed almost more closely the formula of Mies’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago than he did himself in the design of the Seagram Building.

It is invidious to mention only these few North American examples, but production of similar skyscrapers was already so nation-wide in the United States and in Canada that one can still hardly hope to see the individual trees for the forest. There are good reasons why those selected for illustration or mention are likely to remain conspicuous and not become lost in the crowd. But skyscrapers are no longer a prerogative of North America; some of the finest were rising in Latin America, and these would before long be rivalled by European examples already projected or even under construction by 1955.

It is a mistake to assume that North Americans housed business only in skyscrapers. More and more large corporations were moving their headquarters to the open country. Quite as significant as Lever House in the production of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the mid fifties was the 700-foot-square but only four-storeyed office plant of the Connecticut General Insurance Company of 1955-7, set in a park of eighteenth-century size and amenity at Bloomfield, Conn., some ten miles outside Hartford, the insurance capital. Luxury of materials, white marble and granite as well as aluminium, makes up somewhat for the rigid asceticism of the standardized walls, while four interior court gardens by Noguchi and three pink granite figures by him on the slope beyond the ‘artificial water’ in which swans swim about below the all-glass cafeteria further balance the expression of crisp efficiency with something warmer and more humane.