In most Latin American cities all-glass walls are impractical because of the heat and the glare of the sun. As a result, architects have developed various versions of the sun-break system introduced twenty years ago on the first tall modern building to be erected in that part of the world, the Ministry of Education in Rio; glazed curtain-walls were by no means unknown, however. The egg-crate sun-breaks of the Edificio C.B.I. of 1948-51 in São Paulo by Lucjan Korngold (b. 1897) and the horizontally patterned grid of the Retiro Odontológico of 1953-4 in Havana by Antonio Quintana Simonetti and Manuel A. Rubio give these buildings a very different look from such examples of more North American character as the building in the Calle de Niza at the corner of the Calle de Londres in Mexico City of 1952-3 by Juan Sordo Madaleno (b. 1916), or that of the Suramericana de Seguros in the Avenida Jiménez de Quesada in Bogotá of 1954 by Cuéllar, Serrano, Gomez & Co.
The most ingenious and best designed Latin American skyscraper of the fifties, however, is the completely isolated Edificio Polar of 1953-4 at the Plaza Venezuela in Caracas. This was built by Martin Vegas Pacheco (b. 1926), a pupil of Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and his partner José Miguel Galia, a pupil of the one distinguished South American architect of the first modern generation, Julio Vilamajó, at the University of Montevideo. Here the structure was reduced to four ferro-concrete piers from which the curtain-walls were cantilevered out 11 feet on all four sides. The curtain-walls have a varied infilling, part solid sandwiches of plywood and aluminium sheeting, part louvres that transmit air but not light, and part glass. These are combined in different proportions on each side according to the orientation in order to control the glare and the heat of the sun while providing direct ventilation. Since this tower was isolated, it needed no envelope of space; in fact, however, the wider mezzanine extending under the base of the tower does provide this. The two open storeys, one at ground level and one above the mezzanine, give a lightness of effect and a frank view of the essential structure that is even more striking than at Lever House, where the relation of the towering slab to the mezzanine is less boldly handled.
European skyscrapers[[541]] as yet rarely rivalled North American ones in height, and few large urban office buildings reached even the median level of quality of those in Latin America. In rebuilding bombed cities, however, there were opportunities that could readily be exploited for carrying certain buildings very high over a portion only of their sites, as was first done in North America at Lever House, but using the ampler spaces provided by the replanning of the cities to extend lower blocks from the main slab. One of the best examples of this treatment is the Continental Rubber Building of 1952-3 in Hanover by Werner Dierschke and Ernst Zinsser, which replaces Behrens’s ponderous block of thirty years earlier that was destroyed in the war. The surfacing materials, mostly various stones, are serviceable and the general composition well studied, but the proportions lack the elegant lightness of the Edificio Polar. Yet the whole achieved a ‘reality’ of effect lacking in the C.B.I. in São Paulo, which looks, despite its great size, rather like a cardboard model; or Lever House, which too much resembles a slick cellophane-wrapped package. Some German commercial work at smaller scale was more refined, as, for example, the Haus der Glas-Industrie of 1951 at Düsseldorf by Bernhard Pfau and Pempelfort Haus there of 1954 by Hentrich & Petschnigg, or the Burda-Moden Building of the same date in Offenburg by Egon Eiermann. Hentrich & Petschnigg are also responsible for the striking BASF skyscraper at Ludwigshafen, the tallest built in the Old World up to the mid fifties.
Post-war Italian commercial work was more varied and imaginative than in other countries, but the tallest examples were not the best. Very often it was the fine marble or mosaic surfacing—echoed in the BASF—and the high quality of the craftsmanship that seemed to give them interest and an effect of luxury rarely yet found in other countries, rather than real distinction of design. Interestingly enough, since post-war Latin America has tended to follow Italian models, one of the best Italian buildings of this decade, the Olivetti offices in Milan of 1954-5 by G. A. Bernasconi, Annibale Fiocchi (b. 1915), and M. Nizzoli, has a very Latin American air because of its prominent sun-breaks. This was one of the few buildings premiated by the international jury at the São Paulo Biennal in 1957, and the only non-Brazilian one.
Industrial construction has not even yet been as fully accepted into the realm of architecture as has commercial building for the last hundred years. Ever since the factories of Behrens and the warehouses of Perret, however, industrial commissions have played an increasingly important part in modern architectural production. Probably the largest acreage of good factory-building just after the war, as earlier in the century, was in North America. With rising standards of amenity, moreover, and the substitution of road haulage for rail transportation, factories came out from behind the railway tracks and took their proper place visually as well as functionally, with well-maintained grounds as important features, in regional planning. It is hard to single out particular factories for mention, if only because their design, whether it is by engineers or by specialist architectural firms like Albert Kahn, Inc., had arrived at a largely anonymous standardization—the fate, incidentally, towards which some critics see all twentieth-century architecture as inevitably moving.
The General Motors Technical Institute at Warren, Mich., completed by Eero Saarinen in 1955 after a decade of planning and construction, is almost more comparable in scale and complexity to a university city than to a factory; yet this group of twenty-five buildings organized round a large rectangular artificial lake is also in its use and in its character a major example of American industrial building raised at the behest of a corporate client into the realm of distinguished architecture (Plate [168B]; Figure 55). Little or no link remained between this and even the latest buildings designed by Eliel Saarinen on which his son collaborated, although the former was involved in this commission down to his death in 1950. Instead, the influence of Mies was very strong, since in the younger Saarinen’s estimation the Miesian discipline was specially suitable for giving order to such a project, in terms both of over-all planning and of the characteristic structural vocabulary of curtain-walling. Yet the necessary variety of size and shape of the buildings, determined in part by the very different activities that they house, from power-houses and engine-test cells to the Styling Centre for new motor-car models, made impossible the imposition of so classic a pattern as Mies had aimed to produce at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Figure [52]). In conscious avoidance of the monotony of the motor-car factories around Detroit, which run on without modification for thousands of feet, and in pursuit of ideals which most modern planners have realized only on paper, Eero Saarinen accented his long lake-front with a water-tower all of stainless steel rising out of the water and provided a special domed unit at the south end to house the display of new models beside the one section of the complex to which the outside world has some access. Moreover, he varied the characteristic metal-and-glass vocabulary of the façades—the metal in general black oxidized aluminium, the glass greenish in tone to reduce glare in the interiors—with solid walls of glazed brick in various brilliant colours, almost rivalling the Mexicans in the intensity of the reds, blues, yellows, and greens that he chose. As with the later Connecticut General plant, sculpture of distinction, here by Antoine Pevsner, provides a note of humane interest amid all the expression of mechanistic efficiency.
In Europe the Olivetti Company were more consistent patrons of distinguished design in architecture than General Motors. The main plant at Ivrea, designed by Figini & Pollini, is small by American standards, and has been in existence for some time—since 1942. It is chiefly notable because it is the heart, as it is the raison d’être, of an architectural programme of almost urbanistic scope at Ivrea that is still in process of
Figure 55. Saarinen & Saarinen: Warren, Mich., General Motors Technical Institute, 1946-55, layout
realization by Figini & Pollini and by the resident architect Fiocchi, whose small foundry of 1954-5 is an exemplary industrial unit of almost Miesian elegance. Characteristic now of most Latin countries are the sun-breaks on the south-west side of the large Ivrea factory; while the north-east façade rises four storeys in sheer glass like a vast extension of Gropius’s studio block at the Bauhaus. Of the present period of the fifties, and better sited, more articulated, and more self-complete, is the later Olivetti factory at Pozzuoli near Naples by Luigi Cosenza. Structurally, however, the industrial work of the engineer Nervi is more original.