Walter Netsch: What Architecture Is and Is Not

Address delivered at Grinnell College Convocation, October 17, 1959

by Walter A. Netsch, Jr., Partner, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

This symposium on modern architecture has to start out, I believe, with things that architecture is not. And, of course, in discussing architecture as a practicing architect, I have to be careful to talk about the elements of design for which all of us in a sense are responsible.

One of the things that I wish to stress most clearly is that the architect is responsible as a creator of space. He is responsible for providing an environment. The quality of this environment is a function of the ability of the architect to understand and perceive the quality of the problem. It is the responsibility of the client, therefore, to develop and explain, to look for the nuances of the problem. It is with the combination that we increase our visual environment. And one of the things that today seems most important to us in the profession is that our environment keep pace with the knowledge of science, the knowledge of our society that exists in the 20th century.

So for some things that architecture is not: first of all, it is not a social document alone. When modern architecture started, it started, of course, as a revolution. It was opposed to many things that happened in a preceding era. It was opposed to stylism. It was opposed to the problem of miniaturization of styles from Europe, where a tremendous Gothic cathedral got repeated on a 50x100 ft. lot-everything diminished, of course, except the people who participated in it. This is the kind of revolution that starts out overemphasizing the social aspects of its revolution. The Depression was the strongest simple individual force that existed for a period of a decade after, in terms of the professional in the arts. It’s true in art as well as in architecture. If you look at the artist of the same period, you’ll find social implication.

Today we look at art and at architecture and we recognize that there are new social implications which are influencing our way of life. These social implications deal primarily with the aspects of science and the problems of power politics with accompanying forces on this earth. It is interesting to note that Soviet architecture, in terms of connotation of modern architecture, it is using the very reactionary forms of social document to try to provide, once again, a mis-scaled and improperly scaled sense of order and an impoverished sense of beauty, so that they can try to convince a social organization that they have a kind of class distinction, which, of course, they would like to deny.

Architecture is not beauty alone, in terms of its knowledge and understanding as far as the profession is concerned. We have very many examples in the past where beauty has been the basic consideration—the most overpowering idea. In fact, it became such a concept of beauty, and it became so intellectualized, that tricks that were played often were not beautiful of themselves. Here, as in the social document, it was an overemphasis of one particular aspect of architecture.

Those of us who have studied architectural history are aware that the Renaissance absolutely vilified the Gothic period in architecture. Today, we would treat Chartres or Notre Dame or Amiens as wonderful examples of true architectural spirit—buildings which dominated their environment by expressing their environment, buildings which sought beauty inherently out of the social order of the time. But this was not recognized by many people of the Renaissance. By using only the criterion of beauty—and there were many beautiful Renaissance buildings created under this environment—we find that this, alone, can lead to a value judgment which is not perfect.

Architecture, especially today, is not archaeology. This is very difficult to explain. Many of you know of a special little problem that our office was involved in: Is an Air Force Academy chapel supposed to be Gothic, or is it supposed to be Georgian, or is it supposed to be contemporary? I think some of you have heard of that discussion. I think some of you have heard some of the things that the building was called. Well, it’ll be built, and as it’s built it will be an opportunity for all of us to see that we are trying to carry forth the idea that all of the aspects of architecture must be brought forward.

I’d like to recall, from a critic in a much earlier period, an archeological argument over something you could never imagine was arguable at all—the Washington Monument. In fact, it was because of argument that its design was actually changed…

I have been talking about what architecture is NOT. Now I’d like to try to state what I think architecture IS. I think architecture in all civilizations has been the environmental structure arising out of human need, and utilizing the materials and techniques of the particular era. Today, the multiplicity of human needs, materials, and techniques provides an infinite variety of spatial opportunities. The search for unity in this variety, the search for the nuances of need, and the search for visual order are the primary elements of today’s total modern architecture.

I would like, now, to try to analyze, in specific buildings, some of the aspects we have just talked about.

The Woolworth Building is an example of a skyscraper that touches on two aspects we have already mentioned. One, archaeology, and its misinterpretation in terms of a skyscraper which has no visual connotation that is at all related to the dress that has been surrounding it. And two, as a social document. This, to me, is a very strong example of a misguided interest in expressing a social order in a previous era’s dress. It has been proved time and again that the great buildings in any period that we like, admire, and keep, both as examples of great architecture and of great civilizations, have never been a part of or such a combination as we can see in the Woolworth Building. What is more important, when we look at this building in its setting, is what this does to a city. Look at the conglomerate relationships of forms and spaces. Look at the hierarchy of shapes: the old post office with its long, covered arcade for the post office trucks to come up, with an over-hanging roof that even conceals the stylistic forms of architecture from being appreciated on walking about the community. This is an aspect of architecture that is of great importance if our society is to express itself.

The old Reliance Building looks from the first floor as though it were the worst example of architecture that ever existed—at least that’s the opinion of the people, from what they have done to the bottom. Yet, this is one of the finest buildings that has been built in the Chicago school. We must remember that in modern architecture the United States has brought one building type to the architectural scene, and that is the office building. It started, incidentally, in Chicago, and it grew out of two products of our own environment. The fist was the development of the steel cage. The second was the invention of the elevator. Both of them permitted heights above six or seven stories, and with its original character was one of the finest and is still one of the finest buildings. It has a wonderful sense of form, and express what the building is. It is an office building before air-conditioning and before fluorescent lighting. It was essential to get as much light to the interior of the building as possible, so out of this technical need came a design, and out of this design came a special clarity which is totally unrelated to an archeological background.

The Guarantee Building in Buffalo, of Adler and Sullivan, is a wonderful example of the relationship between the past and the present. It shows the effect of previous architectural training and education and application to the tie in which it was built. The building is divided into three parts—it has a base, it has a middle section, and it has a top. This is a formal aspect of composition in architectural form, but it’s very interesting that Mr. Sullivan, in doing this placed these three parts logically into the building. The ground floor and the mezzanine are the stores and storages area. The large central portion is the offices. They represent the repetitive quality of each individual office space. The top floor represents the mechanical, where the elevators go up, and building storage and maintenance, crowned by a large, important cornice. One thing interesting about the building is that it is essentially two-dimensional in character. But this building has the strength of character of the creator and understanding of the past and present, and the strong use of masonry in terms of architectural character.

An office building built for today, the Seagram’s Building in New York by Mies van der Rohe, has very special characteristics that make it an important building in the development of the skyscraper. First of all, we can see the three parts once again. We can see the circulation entering at the bottom, we can see the main mass of office area, and we can see the ventilation and mechanical system forming the band at the top. But two things have happened. The proportion of that mechanical system has far exceeded that of the previous building, because fifty years have intervened from one building to the other; and with that have come a need and development in science for many more things, such as air-conditioning, fluorescent lighting, individual room conveyers, mail conveyors, all of this equipment that was not available to the earlier architects. And with these comes a new concept in form. We notice that this building does two things that were not done previously by either the Reliance Building or the Guarantee. This building gives something back to the city. We have a plaza in front. There is a concept of open space, and the form of the building is related in a 3x5 bay, a very classical proportion to this open space. So we have here a growth in architecture, all of it representing the development of science, all of it related to aesthetics, and all of it a social document of its time.

Let us talk now about three architects—in contemporary architecture—Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe. Obviously, it would be very irrational of me to stand here and talk about modern architecture without acknowledging the part that these three men played in the development of modern architecture, and how each of them has brought a separate item to the field of architecture.

First of all, in looking at the interior of the Administration Building of the Johnson Wax Company, by Mr. Wright, we notice an office building with an entirely different concept form that shown in the tall vertical office building of Seagram. Here we can see, because the forces of structure, the sense of weight, do not have to go forty-five stories in the air, that this is a low building, that the quality of the space and the character of the materials change. We have here the use of concrete on the low building, the development of individual structural form. Each of these represents a different connotation in the world of space—each of them valid in its own way, and each of them important and modern.

The second expression of Mr. Wright’s is the Robie House. It is a strong, important house, but unfortunately it spawned many examples in housing that Mr. Wright often declaimed and fought very hard against. But we can see that in lesser hands, this building would be difficult to duplicate if you didn’t search for principle and instead sought for form. Here we can see the quality of a building, the relationship of shadow and overhang, the strength of the brick structure. This kind of building was a shocker when it was built. It was strange and new and different. Today this building is accepted as beautiful. It is accepted as a prize example of the development of space in residential architecture. If you look at the plans, you can see one of the wonderful contributions that the house has made. In a sense, Wright, too, sought the enormous room. You can see that the stairway and the fireplace unit in the center of the building actually act as a form on which the space moves about. We can feel this strength, we can feel this flow of space. This is an important contribution. However, this contribution in space is available in all periods of architecture. The important thing is that only when we ceased looking simply at the social document and looked for the problems of human need were we able to redevelop the concepts of space.

Le Corbusier’s apartment house in Marseilles is a strange and wonderful experiment in our society. It happens to be, as far as I’m concerned, a building by a very brilliant architect that starts off with the wrong premise; but aside from that, it is interesting that anyone has attempted to establish the praise at all. The idea of this building, as you can see from the façade of the different uses that occur, by the different character in the building elevation, was that this was going to be more than an apartment house. It was going to be, in a sense, lifting a part of the city into the sky. It was going to have schools and shops, playgrounds, everything that you could possibly need for urban living in this one single building. The architect tried to express this, and this is a wonderful premise. My only disagreement with it is that there is a possibility that, in searching for this solution, the regimentation of the individual units became ever dominant. I think this scheme evolved from an idea that apartments could be built like little shoeboxes and slid into the frame of the building as you were building the building. But it’s concept of space and a concept of unity and variety that we can bring to urban living.

Le Corbusier’s famous chapel at Ronchamp has had a considerable amount of discussion in European and American professional circles. This is an important building because it searches for form and space without expressing structure. By its complete negation of the statement of structure it becomes a structural expression. This is a complete shift, like positive and negative, and this comes the success of the building. The spaces move and interpenetrate, and this can become an interesting and exciting form of space, but a special kind of space.

The third architect, Mies van der Rohe, has recognition that there is such a thing as structure, and recognition that there is such a thing as stability in architecture, in his apartment house, generally acclaimed now in America as one of the fine buildings in our modern period. It has a special character of recognizing quality of structure and the quality of buildings against the urban landscape. It has two buildings and fine juxtaposition in relation to the site and the lake entrance the quality of the building and the simplicity of the idea. We have an interesting connotation where we have urban architecture and many buildings. We have a need for simplicity, for unity and variety. Where we have a chapel or some building place in the country, totally unrelated to other structures, we have a different character.

This, then, has been a group analysis, you might say, of the buildings and the architects that have gone to make up some of the aspects of modern architecture, but these are not all the forces that exist. One of the problems is architecture today is that it is not discussed enough. This is a fact that we have long recognized in the profession. We discuss atom bombs, we discuss the problems of space flight, but we don’t often discuss our own visual environment. We should, because we participate in it, we and our children; and our children’s children will have to participate in it. We don’t all have to go to the moon, but we do have to live in our own environment, so this kind of participation is the responsibility, I think, of all of us. How to do it is, of course, another thing, and I will get into that in just a moment.

I’d like to quote, before getting into that, an explanation of the problem in a different aspect by Alfred North Whitehead, on “Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect”: “We look up and see a colored shape in front of us and we say, ‘There is a chair,’ but what we have seen is mere colored shape. Perhaps an artist might not have jumped to the notion of a chair. He might have stopped at the more contemplation of a beautiful color and a beautiful shape. But those of us who are not artists are very prone, especially if we are tired, to pass straight from the perception of the colored shape to the enjoyment of the chair, in same way of use, or of motion, or of thought. We can easily explain this passage by reference to a train of difficult, logical inference, whereby having regard to our previous experiences of various shapes, and various colors, we draw the probable conclusions that we are in the presence of a chair. I am very skeptical as to the high-grade character and mentality required to get from the colored shape a chair. One reason for this skepticism is that my friend the artist, who kept himself to the contemplation of color, shape, and position, was a very highly trained man, and had acquired this facility of ignoring the chair at the cost of great labor. We do not require elaborate training merely in order to refrain from embarking upon intricate trains of inference. Such absence is only too easy. Another reason for skepticism is that if we had been accompanied by a puppy dog, in addition to the artist, the dog would have acted immediately on the hypothesis of a chair, and would have jumped onto it by way of using it as such. Again, if the dog had refrained from such things, it would have been because it was a well-trained dog. Therefore, the transition from a colored shape to the notion of an object which can be used for all sorts of purposes which have nothing to do with color seems to be a very natural one, and we, man and puppy dog, require careful training if we are to refrain from acting upon it.”

This is Mr. Whitehead’s way of saying, perhaps, do we see a building when we see a building? Do we see the color? Do we see the form? Do we just see it as a building, like do we just see it as a chair? And this is part of the important problem of any society. We must recognize that our society is going to be as good as we demand of it; and as we can only demand better of it as we look more into it, we have to see the color and the shape, as well as the chair. Now this, as we said earlier, is difficult to do, and I’ll try to go through a system that might help.

Albert Bush-Brown and I have discussed this system for about a year now. I can tell you very frankly that he is in disagreement with much of it. Fortunately, because if there were only one system we’d be back in some kind of archaeological aspect of architecture that didn’t even need any architects—we could just devote it to the system. So, in presenting this, I am trying to suggest a way of looking at the building, at its color and its shape, rather than just looking at the building.

First of all there is a hierarchy in buildings. For example, the Grinnell Library is a central source of student intellectual activity. As an enormous room, with privacy for individuals within that enormous room, we are trying to convey the hierarchy of the totality of the space, and the rights of the individual to work within that space. But this kind of hierarchy goes beyond just a library or just a college individual building. There’s a hierarchy to college buildings themselves that should represent the greatest forward-looking intellectual and emotional group that should exist in any environment, the education of its society. And so the building tries to bring forward that quality as well as the individual quality of the library itself.

In developing and looking for this hierarchy we have to recognize its location. Once again, using the Grinnell Library directly: as you look at the library and as I look at the library, we see two different things. It is more than just a color or shape. We know that there are future buildings planned, and this is a building in transition. The landscaping will form one kind of transition. The additional buildings will form another. And then we have the complex of buildings as well as the individual buildings. But in all of this, in this search for the hierarchy, we are really looking for a significant idea, a concept, as talked about earlier, a theme.

And this particular case was a concept that was not ours alone. We must remember that the library was developed with many hands—not that someone other than the architect designed the building, but that the architect would not have been able to design the building without the help of other people: Mr. Curtis Bradford and the committee, in developing the program of need; Mr. Keyes Metcalf as the consultant, in bringing his broad area of experience in library planning, so that the nuances of need would be felt, as well as the immediate and technical problems of what is the right way and wrong way to place certain elements in the structure. So, aside from the concept, is the way in which the concept is arrived at. It does not come sort of full-blown, accidentally, out of context. It comes out of a background of knowledge that is contributed by many people.

We feel that a building should also have a positive relation to its environment. This is why we stressed earlier the problems of archaeology. It should be a positive relation to the world in which we live. It should be an exciting assist in day-to-day participation. We should want to feel and experience the spaces that are a part of our society. We want to recognize the quality of materials and techniques that go to make our society. I know that the students had an opportunity, when the building was going up, of seeing how the precast structure went into place, of seeing the beauty of the framework against the skyline, the quality that a building goes through that is being built. Now this brings another team into play. This brings the contractor, the craftsman, the worker, because the ideas have to go to fruition, and they can only be brought to fruition if built and built well. So this building has to be positive in relation to its environment.

Also we feel that it must be a clear expression of its function. This, I think, is a greatly misused word, and so I’d like to clarify how I mean “function.” It is the nuances as well as the basic elements of need. It is more than just a library that has books. It is a center for intellectual learning. This is what we are trying to portray, and this is the clear expression of its use. It’s really the recognition of use and spirit in occupancy.

Now, I think that in our times, more than in any others, we have a certain element, the clarity of structure. Our society, which has many technical advances, has an opportunity to develop, as we’ve seen again in the library, beautiful precast forms, and these precast forms are worthy of showing. They have clarity of structure, and the kind of structure that can be expressed. There are times, of course, in which it is not expressed at all, but this is a deliberate order, and a deliberate spatial environment that is being created. It is both in searching for clarity and in the recognition of both the materials and the methods, that special character is created.

A drawing or a speech can be forgotten. It doesn’t have to be inhabited. A building is inhabited. So all the ideas have to be put together well. And the selection and uses of materials are one of the important aspects of good architecture. It’s important that the materials be related one to another, that they have a relationship of need and use, so they are friendly together. It is better, perhaps, unless you wanted to develop a jarring note in space, to select materials that work together. So we’re talking about the correlation of quality and consistency and integrity in craftsmanship, and once again, this is the joint responsibility in our society between the people who make the drawings, who put the building on paper before it’s built, and the contractor who builds it, once again as an actuality. And this is entirely different, for example, from earlier times, when we dealt with just one material as stone, where we could build one on top of the other without drawings. Today, with the great complexities of services, lighting, air-conditioning, we must unite all these aspects, and uniting these aspects, we must build with a sensitive selection of materials.

With the problem of quality of space comes a concept of totality, the fact that we wish to relate total aspect of space. Now this doesn’t mean, for example, that a fine antique, or a sculpture of any period of art, could not be interrelated into a contemporary space; but at the same time, it means that what we put into the space is not an archaeological hunt for the number of items from the number of periods that we could possibly put into a given space, because it gives either an advantage to the individual piece nor to the quality of space itself. And it lacks the one concept you notice in Mr. Wright’s work, for example, the concept of totality. This is one of the basic criterions of good architecture.

And, of course, if we’re talking about architecture we have to be talking about today—the building of today. It really has to be an expression of its time. As an expression of its time it has to search for these nuances of need, searching for the techniques and materials that are available, and look forward to trying to present a new concept, to develop the quality of a space and enlarge our own visual environment.

I hope with these words that I have been able to try to explain both what modern architecture is to me and is not, and also, how we can all look at modern architecture, and all architecture, for that matter, so that all of us working together can demand a greater and finer sense of our own social environment.

Photographs courtesy Northwestern University Archives