But the two aspects so far noted do not, in any case, even suggest the full complexity of the present situation. A third, not necessarily related to the other two yet also, possibly, subsuming both, is more evident to historians than it is to most architects. Admitting the danger of pressing analogies with the morphology of earlier periods—the Gothic, say, or the Renaissance—there is at least a presumption that what we have known as ‘modern architecture’ is (rather prematurely, it must seem) already in a ‘late’ phase. Recurrent in late phases there have usually been two distinguishable but often closely related aspects of academicism: a return towards principles that dominated the arts before the stylistic revolution with which the particular cycle began, on the one hand, and on the other the reduction to an easily applied system of formal elements of the painfully evolved features that were peculiar to the preceding ‘high’ phase.
But reaction, to give this aspect of the current architectural scene an unnecessarily denigratory name, is quite likely in particular instances to be more due to the special circumstances of the current building boom than to any hypothetical life-pattern of modern architecture. In the first half of the twentieth century economic influences were supposed, at least, to favour both technological advance in the building sciences and, concommitantly, ‘advanced’ design in the aesthetic sense. Not always, however, were the theoretical economies actually realized—or not, at any rate, before considerable time had passed—and ‘advanced’ design often proved in practice not only expensive but physically uncomfortable. Then other kinds of technological development, by setting up even more expensive new standards of amenity, notably in such things as vertical transport, glare-control, and air conditioning, were already cancelling out the economies that mechanized methods of large-scale production were eventually making real. At the same time the inherent practical difficulties of such things as all-glass walls and completely open plans were increasingly realized as they were ever more generally and uncritically exploited. By the 1960s some of the technical improvements in building advocated since the 1920s, notably in the field of partial prefabrication and prefabrication of larger and larger components—whole sides of houses and flats, for example—had become widely viable, not to speak of new materials and structural methods that made certain features relatively easy and inexpensive to provide. Yet total prefabrication of dwelling units was remoter from realization—except in mobile units such as caravans—than a quarter of a century earlier, in part because the public’s willingness to accept the results of partial mechanization of house-production seemed actually, in many countries, to have diminished.
The major building problems of the post-war world were not and still are not the production of individual monuments: opera houses, churches, stadia, and the like, on which professional as well as public attention has tended to focus and for which drastically new kinds of architectural expression can most readily be invented. What has been more significant are the large-scale reconstruction of bombed or blighted cities, the rehousing of very considerable segments of the population, and the provision of the manufacturing facilities, the offices, and the stores required by greater industrial, financial, and commercial activity. Inevitably, in a boom period, the very large volume of production over large sectors of the total range of building has led, in such work, to a sort of stasis in stylistic development. A vast amount of architectural energy everywhere must go into the mere carrying out of unprecedentedly extensive plans the major decisions for which were made as many as ten or fifteen years ago. An inertial lag is very evident wherever large urban areas, whether cleared twenty years ago by bombing or in the last few years by schemes of urban renewal, have been or are being rebuilt. Large parts of the world outside North America, moreover, are only now first learning how to build very tall structures and hardly yet ready to modify creatively what they have just learned to do at all.
The last decade, and particularly the last five years, have seen the production of a great part of the urban and suburban settings in which we will probably be living for the rest of this century, and doubtless well into the next. Somewhat as the post-Napoleonic period carried out at an ever lower level of quality the ambitions and aspirations of the revolutionary architects of the later eighteenth century, so in the post-war years—and particularly the last five—there has come about the realization of many urbanistic ideals that once seemed fantastic or Utopian when they were first proposed some forty years ago. Inevitably there has been a diminution of visual interest when certain modes of design, first adumbrated in a few unique individual structures or in relatively modest housing projects in the 1920s by architects of intense conviction and high inventive power, have been applied wholesale, almost as clichés, by countless other men, usually much less able and less dedicated, throughout the whole world. Moreover, serious errors in the original ideals, perhaps only recognizable as those ideals came to large-scale actuality, have been discovered and denounced. To some critics certain earlier urban conditions, against whose vices those ideals were first invoked as correctives, have come to seem, by nostalgia, preferable in various human ways to the ‘brave new world’ of the 1920s which has, to such a surprising extent, become the real world of the 1960s.
But the reaction against the International Style, thus to describe in over-simplified form what seems to be the consensus of many of the changes of attitude in the last years, is by no means as yet a counter-revolution. If the canons of the permissible and the desirable have been broadened by current theory and practice towards various aspects of what may still be called the traditional—including, as by now also traditional, much that was common to various pre- or extra-international Style aspects of earlier modern architecture—certain of the presuppositions of the most advanced architects of the 1920s still seem, though usually in revised form, quite as forward-looking as ever. For the rather limited aspects of function recognized by the Functionalists (if there ever were architects truly meriting that name), for example, far more sophisticated conceptions of function have come to be accepted by most architects whose fields of work are not industrial or commercial.
Yet some engineers—the Italian Nervi, whose practice has become international in scope, the late Spaniard Torroja, the Mexican Candela, the Danish Arup, and the American Fuller, to mention but a few of the best known—have today reputations throughout the architectural profession, and even with the public, which neither the Swiss Maillart nor the lately deceased Frenchman Freyssinet had in their heyday half a century ago. None the less architecture is not more largely in the hands of the engineers today than it was earlier despite many prognoses, both pessimistic and optimistic, that the engineers are, or should be, taking over. Moreover the architectural quality, as distinguished from the technical ingenuity, of the works of the great engineers is often as notable as is that of those buildings by certain architects in which engineering principles are dominant such as Eero Saarinen’s Chantilly airport (Plate [190B]).
These paragraphs have necessarily been of the most general nature and critical rather than historical. Properly they should be illustrated by a considerable body of carefully described photographs, plans, and sections such as fortunately can be found in several current books covering either the whole world, or single countries, individual architects, or particular types of building. Some of the most useful of those that had appeared by the summer of 1962 will be found among the additions to the Bibliography. The few plates that it has been possible to add in this new edition cannot hope to present a conspectus of the various aspects of the current situation that have been at least mentioned in this Epilogue. But the plates of the Seagram Building (Plate [192]) and the Guggenheim Museum (Plate [188A] and [B]) may serve as a reminder that some of the dichotomies of the third quarter of this century in architecture could, in the late 1950s, be almost as well illustrated in the work of long-recognized masters of architecture as in that of men a generation or more younger. The illustrations of the work of Aalto, work actually of an earlier date, show clearly whence one of the winds of influence has for some time been blowing; while the plate of Japanese buildings (Plate [187]) in contrast to the Thyssen Haus (Plate [191]), illustrate the international Corbusian and the international Miesian of these last years at levels that are notably high, both in the size and prominence of the structures and, what is more important, in intrinsic quality.
Throughout its length this book has been less concerned with urbanism, with the architectural macrocosm, than with individual buildings; nor, for that matter, can photographs give the feeling of the newly rebuilt central and peripheral areas of our cities even as well as for the nineteenth century. The character of the Ludwigstrasse (Plate [10B]) or the Place de l’Opéra (Plate [70C]) can be fairly well apprehended from photographs; Park Avenue above the Grand Central Station, as rebuilt beginning with Lever House (Plate [189]) in the last decade, or the cities, as distinguished from the individual public monuments, of Chandigarh and Brasilia—or even Cumbernauld in Scotland or Vållingby in Sweden—cannot.
Despite all the confusion of architectural doctrine in the early 1960s, despite the vast areas of undistinguished and even manifestly bad building, these last years have seen their share of new masterworks, or at least of structures which in our present myopic view have already been accepted as such. Yet, on the negative side, several of the older leaders have left us: Wright, Freyssinet, Torroja, Skidmore, Schwarz, and, alas, a few rather younger men as well: Yorke in England, for example, and in America Eero Saarinen.
Saarinen’s work, since the General Motors Technical Institute completed in 1955 and illustrated here (Figure [55]; [Plate 168B]) which was so very Miesian, came by the late 1950s to epitomize the variety, not to say the incoherence, of the ambitions of many architects throughout the world in those years. Happily, after a mature career which lasted only eleven years compared to his father Eliel’s fifty, his contribution to American, indeed to world, architecture, culminated in two works, his colleges at Yale (Plate [185B]) and his airport outside Washington (Plate [190B]) that in their differing, even apparently opposed, ways express many of the aspirations of our day at as high a level, perhaps, as earlier modern architecture ever reached except in the greatest works of Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies. But what make Eero Saarinen in retrospect the typical architect of the late fifties and early sixties are, on the one hand, his Miesian beginnings, in sharp reaction to his father’s half-traditional romanticism, and on the other the fact that his oeuvre included many works which in their wilfulness and even, one may say, their frivolity were well below the median standards of serious achievement in those years. Thus he stood, to an extent not always realized in his brief lifetime when the kaleidoscopic diversity of his buildings dazzled those it did not shock, at the centre of his age. His remarkably successful career, remarkable even in a period—so unlike several of the earlier decades of this century—when few architects of quality, even the most ascetic or most fanciful, were wholly without employment, made plain one of the central facts about these last few years: that the style or movement we call ‘modern architecture’ had in many, perhaps in most, countries achieved such total acceptance that clients were willing, almost too willing, to trust their architects in whatever novel direction they might wish to move, in terms of structure, of materials, and of either asceticism or decorative elaboration, not to speak of philosophical content.