The Ideal of Total Environmental Control: Knud Lonberg-Holm, Buckminster Fuller, and the Ssa 1138703354, 9781138703353

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Endorsement
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations used in the references
Introduction
Correlations
1 Knud Lönberg-Holm: A productivist architect in America
Functionalism in Denmark
KVE
The avant-garde in Germany
The Chicago Tribune competition
The modern functional building and the new objectivity
International constructivism
Amerika
The Mendelsohn controversy
Produktion-Reproduktion
The basic course at the University of Michigan
The theory of pure design
Private practice
Model before drawing
Reflections of a foreign correspondent
The G Group
ABC
Reflections in i10
Architecture in the industrial age
Architecture or organized space
Notes
2 Monuments and instruments: The SSA and the international style
The culture of industrial production at Architectural Record
Technical news and research
Affordable housing and prefabrication
From T-Square to Shelter: the critical issues
From Beaux Arts to functionalism
The international style
Universal architecture
Engineering consent for the cultural industry
Propaganda
Arts and industry
The Harvard modernists
Crystallizing public opinion
Shelter: a correlating medium for the forces of architecture
Correlation
The last issue
Teleology
Erewhon
Transmutation
Notes
3 Industrial emancipation and technocracy in the 1930s
Technocratic utopias
Bellamy and Steinmetz
Buckminster Fuller’s Soviet of Architects
Interstitial disturbances: clogging the system
“Industrially realizeable comprehensive, anticipatory, design science”
Technocracy Inc.
Automatism
Ergs for eggs
Charts of plenty
Urban obsolescence and mobility
Detroit: an industrial city in CIAM 4
The technician on the cultural front
Design for environmental control
Energy flows
The consumer as producer
Planning for productivity
Frederick Kiesler: a surrealist among the technocrats
The ideal of total environmental control
Notes
4 Sweet’s Catalog and repro-shelter
The modern quarry
The control revolution
Tooling up
An archeology of modernist knowledge
Architects’ data and the negotiation of standards
The Dodge corporate system
Designing information
Patterns for transmitting the flow of information
Technological translations and international exchange
The MRU
Prefabrication and the Soviet Union
Anonymous history
Notes
5 Information architecture
Worldwide reconstruction and postwar CIAM
Reformulation
Community standards
Inscriptional systems
Development Index
World projects
The epitome of navigation
Worldwide practice
Design automatism
From information to virtuality
Notes
The archetype of the invisible architects of the invisible architecture
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

i

The Ideal of Total Environmental Control

This book traces the ideal of total environmental control through the intellectual and geographic journey of Knud Lönberg-​Holm, a forgotten Danish architect who promoted a unique systemic, cybernetic, and ecological vision of architecture in the 1930s. A pioneering figure of the new objectivity and international constructivism in Germany in 1922 and a celebrated peer of radical figures in De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Russian constructivism, when he emigrated to Detroit in 1923 he introduced the vanguard theory of productivism through his photography, essays, designs, and pedagogy. By following Lönberg-​Holm’s ongoing matrix of relations until the postwar era with the European vanguards in CIAM and former members of the Structural Study Associates (SSA), especially Fuller, Frederick Kiesler, and C. Theodore Larson, this study shows how their definition of building as a form of environmental control anticipated the contemporary disciplines of industrial ecology, industrial metabolism, and energy accounting. Suzanne Strum is an architect and scholar whose research focuses on the interrelation of technology and design. She teaches in international programs in Barcelona and was previously Co-​ Director of the Metropolis Master in Architecture and Urban Culture at the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), as well as a lecturer at Elisava School of Design. She has a master’s degree from Columbia University and a doctorate in the Theory and History of Architecture from the UPC, and is a recipient of an SAH/Mellon Author Award in 2017.

ii

Routledge Research in Architecture The Routledge Research in Architecture series provides the reader with the latest scholarship in the field of architecture. The series publishes research from across the globe and covers areas as diverse as architectural history and theory, technology, digital architecture, structures, materials, details, design, monographs of architects, interior design and much more. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality architectural research. For a full list of titles, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeResearch-in-Architecture/book-series/RRARCH Shedding New Light on Art Museum Additions Front Stage and Back Stage Experiences Altaf Engineer and Kathryn H. Anthony The Break with the Past Avant-Garde Architecture in Germany, 1910–1925 Deborah Ascher Barnstone Architectural Colossi and the Human Body Buildings and Metaphors Charalampos Politakis From Doxiadis’ Theory to Pikionis’ Work Reflections of Antiquity in Modern Architecture Kostas Tsiambaos Thermal Comfort in Hot Dry Climates Traditional Dwellings in Iran Ahmadreza Foruzanmehr Architecture and the Body, Science and Culture Kim Sexton The Ideal of Total Environmental Control Knud Lönberg-Holm, Buckminster Fuller, and the SSA Suzanne Strum The Architecture of Medieval Churches Theology of Love in Practice John Lewis

iii

“From energetics and automatism to information and development, this trenchant and wide-ranging account of the Americanization of Soviet productivism via Knud Lönberg-Holm and his sphere of associates is a muchneeded synthesis of those figures who advocated for a more instrumental modern architecture. In correlating Lönberg-Holm’s intellectual trajectory with his collaborative work in the organization and integration of American architectural practice and industrial production, Suzanne Strum foregrounds a figure whose self-imposed invisibility allowed for a pivotal role in shaping American architecture.” – Glenn Forley, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons School of Design, New York, USA “By focusing on the personal and intellectual trajectory of Knud LönbergHolm, an intriguing, lesser-known Danish modern designer, Suzanne Strum unfolds a refreshing review of the architectural debate in the 1930s around Structural Study Associates (SSA) and Fuller – in addition to a renewed view on the transfer of architectural ideas between Europe and North America in the first half of the twentieth century.” – Xavier Costa, Professor of Architecture, Northeastern University, Boston, USA

iv

v

The Ideal of Total Environmental Control Knud Lönberg-Holm, Buckminster Fuller, and the SSA Suzanne Strum

vi

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Suzanne Strum The right of Suzanne Strum to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​70335-​3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​20317-​1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Out of House Publishing Illustrations in this book were funded in part or in whole by a grant from the SAH/Mellon Author Awards of the Society of Architectural Historians.

vi

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgments List of abbreviations used in the references Introduction 1 Knud Lönberg-​Holm: a productivist architect in America

ix xi xiii 1 12

Functionalism in Denmark  15 The avant-​garde in Germany  20 Amerika  29 The basic course at the University of Michigan  37 Reflections of a foreign correspondent  48 Architecture in the industrial age  55

2 Monuments and instruments: the SSA and the international style

64

The culture of industrial production at Architectural Record  67 From T-​Square to Shelter: the critical issues  77 Engineering consent for the cultural industry  84 Shelter: a correlating medium for the forces of architecture  92

3 Industrial emancipation and technocracy in the 1930s Technocratic utopias  113 Buckminster Fuller’s Soviet of Architects  116 Technocracy Inc.  121 Urban obsolescence and mobility  127 The technician on the cultural front  134 Frederick Kiesler: a surrealist among the technocrats  142

111

vi

viii Contents

4 Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter

155

The modern quarry  158 An archeology of modernist knowledge  166 Designing information  172 Technological translations and international exchange  178

5 Information architecture

191

Worldwide reconstruction and postwar CIAM  193 Development Index  201

The archetype of the invisible architects of the invisible architecture Bibliography Index

215 219 231

xi

Illustrations

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5

Knud Lönberg-​Holm in the United States 13 Roof structure of the Køge Værft 16 Facade of the main nave at Køge Værft 16 View of the Norde Værftsgård 18 Model of Jock Peters and Knud Lönberg-​Holm’s project Proportion, for the Königsberg Competition, 1922 23 1.6 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, Chicago Tribune Tower, 1922 24 1.7 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, New York, Times Square, 1923 31 1.8 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, Book Cadillac Hotel in Construction, Detroit, 1924 33 1.9 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, construction materials 34 1.10 and 1.11  Models from the basic course at the University of Michigan, 1924 40 1.12 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, small home steel lumber construction, 1925 43 1.13 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, radio broadcasting station, 1925 44 1.14 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, isometric drawings of the MacBride House, 1925 45 1.15 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, study for a gasoline station, 1925 46 2.1 Buckminster Fuller, Knud Lönberg-​Holm, and Starling Burgess 71 2.2 Knud and Ethel Lönberg-​Holm at the Bauhaus in 1931 72 2.3 J.J.P. Oud’s Hoek van Holland project in Knud Lönberg-​ Holm’s “Planning the Retail Store” 73 2.4 Model of the Dymaxion House in Knud Lönberg-​Holm’s “Trends in Lighting” 74 2.5 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, front and back cover 93 2.6 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “Monument” and “Instrument” 96 2.7 SSA, “Analysis Chart of Economy” 98 2.8 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “Teleology: Streamlined Up” 101 2.9 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “What Do You See? Teleological Demonstration” 103 3.1 Technocracy Inc., “Physical Production Chart” 124

x

x Illustrations 3.2 Harold Loeb, “Possible Production and Possible Consumption Measured in Terms of Accomplished Production 1929” 3.3 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodre Larson, Air lines and the radio net in “Building Production and Standards” 3.4 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, Circulation plan of Detroit for CIAM 4, 1933 3.5 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodore Larson, “Diagram of production phases” 3.6 Frederick Kiesler, zoo architecture in “Design-​Correlation: Animals & Architecture” 3.7 Frederick Kiesler, Standards: every need follows a characteristic pattern of development in “Design-​ Correlation: On Correalism and Biotechnique” 3.8 James Marston Fitch, “Modern building acts as a selective filter which takes the load of the natural environments off man’s body and thus frees his energies for social productivity” 4.1 Advertisement for Ladislav Sutnar’s new design of Sweet’s Catalog during World War II 4.2 “All this for a single custom built house,” in Lewis Mumford, “Mass-​Production and the Modern House: Part I” 4.3 H.H. Robertson Company advertising featuring Richard Neutra’s Beard House 4.4 Ladislav Sutnar, “Starts and Stops” 4.5 Ladislav Sutnar, “Coordination of Parts” 4.6 View of the installation at the l’Exposition des techniques américaines de l’habitation et de l’urbanisme, Paris, June 14–​21, 1946 4.7 Frederick Kiesler and Ethel Lönberg-​Holm, exhibition panel from the Architects Committee of the NCASF 5.1 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodore Larson, “Diagram of man, cosmos and culture” 5.2 Unistrut System at the University of Michigan 5.3 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodore Larson, “Fields of Activity” 5.4 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodore Larson, “Information Flow” 5.5 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodore Larson, “Development Cycle” 5.6 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “Development Process”

125 126 131 135 145 146 148 157 161 163 176 177 181 185 192 202 203 205 209 211

xi

Acknowledgments

Many people and institutions have contributed to this study. My sincerest thanks go to the family of Knud Lönberg-​Holm, to his son Karl, and to his grandson Fred Lonberg-​Holm, for their support and for sharing their personal insights about this enigmatic figure. A  fellow traveler, Adrian Täckman, shared a wealth of information on the Danish context. Mary McLeod deserves my deepest gratitude. This project began with the help of a Graham Foundation Individual Research Grant. In its second iteration, as a dissertation at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB), the work benefited greatly from the commentaries of Josep Maria Montaner, Juan Jose Lahuerta, Carlos Sambricio, Gonçalo M. Furtado C. Lopes, and Mary McLeod, and the support of Manuel Guàrdia. I was lucky to have the encouragement of the late scholar, Maurici Pla, my friend and advisor. Marc Dessauce’s compilation of the Lönberg-​Holm Archive has been a critical reference. Therese Dessauce and Adam Boxer of the Ubu Gallery gave me time to conduct research. My investigation took me to a number of institutions. I would like to express my gratitude for the assistance of: Daniel Weiss at the CIAM archive of the Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta), ETH, Zürich; Gerd Zillner at the Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation in Vienna; Janet Parks at Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, New York; and to the many librarians and staff who helped me at the United States Library of Congress, Washington, DC; the New York Public Library; the Smithsonian Institute, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum Library; the Canadian Centre of Architecture; and the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. This work evolved from public presentations at:  the ETSAB; the Dissertation Colloquium on American Architecture in 2007, at the Temple Hoyne Buell Center, Columbia University, with Joan Ockman and Reinhold Martin as conveners and Dietrich Neumann as respondent; the Nexus 2010 Conference on “Architecture, Systems Research and Computational Paradigms,” organized by Gonçalo M.  Furtado C.  Lopes and Kim Williams at the University of Porto; and the Design History Congress in Barcelona, 2011.

xi

xii Acknowledgments Ignasi de Solà-​Morales and Xavier Costa created a creative environment so central to my way of thinking at the Metropolis Master Program in Architecture and Urban Culture, a collaboration of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona. Shelley Roff’s insightful suggestions have been essential to a late stage of shaping the manuscript. I  am indebted to Bea Goller and Lea Annette Schramek for their time and contributions. I  appreciate the support of Francesca Ford and Grace Harrison; the assistance of Sade Lee and Aoife McGrath; and the commentary of my readers at Routledge. A very special word of thanks is reserved for Rodrigo Diaz and Alba Diaz Strum for their patience. The cover image is Knud Lönberg-​ Holm and C.  Theodore Larson, “Community Relationships.” Source: Development Index, 1953. Courtesy of the C. Theodore Larson Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan and the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive. Permission to quote from Buckminster Fuller’s unpublished “Memoranda to SSA,” in Chapter 2 is courtesy of the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller. Permission to publish Knud Lönberg-​Holm’s drawings and photographs, and to quote from his essays and correspondences was kindly given courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

xi

newgenprepdf

Abbreviations used in the references

CTL

C. Theodore Larson Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan ELB Edward L.  Bernays Papers. Manuscript Division. United States Library of Congress, Washington, DC ETH gta Archiv/​ETH Zurich (CIAM Archive) FK Kiesler Archive, Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna KLH Knud Lönberg-​Holm KLH-​A Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive LS Ladislav Sutnar papers 1927–​ 1976, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution (since 2014 called the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)

vxi

1

Introduction

In 1932, the young Danish émigré Knud Lönberg-​Holm (1895–​1972) found himself as Buckminster Fuller’s most formidable comrade in arms when he banded together with a small coalition of productivist architects, known as the Structural Study Associates (SSA) in New York. For a brief moment, the group took over the magazine Shelter, but their alliance proved to be just as fleeting as the avant-​garde coalitions that Lönberg-​Holm had been part of in Germany a decade earlier. A pioneering and doctrinaire figure of the Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) and international constructivism, his career is mostly forgotten despite his contribution to the formulation of the essential theoretical agendas of European functionalism at a key moment in 1922. In 1923, he arrived in New York, but his search for an American architecture in concert with his extreme materialist vision led him further west to Chicago and finally to Detroit. Once there, he introduced the vanguard theories of De Stijl, constructivism, and those of the Bauhaus to the United States through his photography, designs, and pedagogy. Yet even from abroad, he continued as a vital polemicist with his partisans in Europe, as a foreign member of the Russian group, ASNOVA (the Association of New Architects), and as the East Coast delegate to the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM) after 1929. By 1930, as one of the newly hired editors at Architectural Record, he led the way for American practitioners to adopt the architecture of the modern movement by presenting the designs of major protagonists, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as matter-​of-​fact technical solutions to new challenges. Many of his colleagues at the magazine joined him in the formation of the SSA, whose group agenda promoted a vision of building as a form of environmental control. This book traces the ideal of total environmental control by following Lönberg-​Holm’s geographic, intellectual, and professional itinerary and his ongoing affiliations with members of the European vanguards and the SSA until the immediate postwar period. By tracking the germination of the concept, from a constructivist concern with the transformation of matter, energy, and flow, to a technocratic vision of a new industrial order, this study seeks to contribute to our understanding of the paradigm as it evolved within the circle of architects allied to Fuller during the Depression. Lönberg-​Holm’s

2

2 Introduction career forms the structuring arc, but the traditional monographic tendency to make the protagonist the hero of the account is averted by allowing the rich history of ideas that is being explored to follow him. When Fuller (1895–​1983) and the SSA took over Shelter in May 1932, they reformulated it to serve as a tribune for their radical technocratic positions by presenting a unique systemic, proto-​cybernetic, and ecological view of architecture. Founded in 1930 as a journal for a Philadelphia Beaux Arts club, the publication, under the leadership of the architect George Howe, had already been converted into a pluralistic vehicle of debate among the American proponents of modern architecture who made up the East Coast avant-​garde. Fuller, Lönberg-​Holm, Frederick Kiesler, A. Lawrence Kocher, Albert Frey, Carl Theodore Larson, Douglas Haskell, Henry Wright, Simon Breines, and other SSA members launched an attack on the formalistic classifications of European modernism presented in the Modern Architecture: International Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the April 1932 issue, which was dedicated to coverage of the show. But when Fuller cashed out most of his remaining financial assets to assume control of Shelter, he found himself in the acrimonious company of Howe and the MoMA curators Henry-​ Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, who were monetary backers and associate editors. Following their resignations and with Fuller at the helm, the SSA managed to put out two last densely packed issues that constitute a group manifesto postulating a teleological view of technological innovation. Premised on the suppression of individual identities and supporting a common credo, the SSA sought to open up new aesthetic and ideological possibilities by defining architecture as a system of environmental control. This was deeply intertwined with their objective to set in motion a new industrial order by reformulating America’s building industry according to the tenets of advanced science. By contemplating the social and energetic configuration of fabrication, their engagement with the integrated processes of architectural production expanded beyond the factory mode and aesthetic concerns. Their ideas anticipated the contemporary disciplines of industrial ecology, industrial metabolism, and energy accounting. In treating their manifesto as a collective endeavor, this study tells the story of the SSA, and it brings to light the mission of Lönberg-​Holm. The SSA’s unequivocal understanding of technology as the integration of advanced science into industrial processes and of architecture as a technological system that shapes and is shaped by the environment, exemplifies a marginalized strain of American modernism, one that has only been attributed to Fuller. The unique environmental technologies embodied in the paradigmatic Dymaxion House were indicative of design principles premised on the production of dwelling as a totally amalgamated industrial and ecological assemblage. Notably, in the early 1930s, the SSA ushered into the architectural world a distinct glossary with a contemporary resonance. In defining and mobilizing concepts such as performance, emergence, emergency,

3

Introduction 3 flows, risk, biologic design, networks, environmental control, ecology, and information, the group promoted architecture as tools or instruments. They envisioned themselves as selfless service-​minded technicians mediating the benefits of technology for the community. In uncovering and tracing the work and associations of Lönberg-​Holm, this study suggests that by following the trajectory of lesser-​known figures and minor collectives we can greatly enrich and reshape our understanding of the period. Years before the European design migration of the mid-​ 1930s, the native and émigré architects who joined the SSA were seeking to reclaim the American sources of the modern movement as they searched for an appropriate architectural expression that could reflect the country’s advanced technological stature. While many of this coterie are well known in other contexts and historical narratives, their designation as a coherent, albeit ephemeral avant-​garde has eluded historiographical synthesis. The predominance of the international style as a lingering paradigm has hindered the formulation of distinct visions of the era, as has scholarship on Fuller, which tends to treat him as a lone thinker, set apart from his collaborators and divorced from any historical context. Despite several revivals and ever-​growing exposure of Fuller, his relationship with the SSA and a deeper examination of their connection to the conceptual lemma of technocratic movements during the 1930s remains an underexplored aspect of his career that this work seeks to redress. Lönberg-​Holm helped to formulate and then carried forward the SSA’s desire to intervene within the realm of building production. Their explicit reconceptualization of the relationship between the environment, technology, and the industrialization of architecture represents a cohesive manifesto, one that arose as a response to the major European movements that he had been part of a decade earlier, but which were just beginning to infiltrate the United States in the early 1930s. The majority of the architects who joined the SSA had already established direct contact with the European avant-​gardes in the 1920s. Many, like Lönberg-​ Holm, were contributors and editors at Architectural Record, and had extensive access to technical information and trends in the building and real estate sectors that exemplifies the close relationship between business, manufacturing, and the way that modern architecture evolved in the United States. With the Depression as a cogent backdrop, in Shelter Fuller repackaged the Dymaxion House as “universal architecture” in a clear case of quick-​witted one-​upmanship with Johnson and Hitchcock’s “international style.” At a time when he was searching out conventional sponsorship for his projects, the rhetorical technocratic discourse promoted by the SSA called for lifting the restrictions that landownership and real estate investment placed on the housing industry. They argued that “industrial emancipation,” a concept informed by technocratic theorists, would usher in an alternative to the market economy. In this new industrial order, the control of production processes and the national distribution of reproducible dwelling units would offer much-​needed activity for America’s

4

4 Introduction dormant factories and raise the standard of living, equitably for all. The SSA’s call for the total instrumentalization of architectural technique drew on a heritage of techno-​utopian writers dating back to the late nineteenth-​century novelist Edward Bellamy and the politicized left-​ wing engineer Charles Proteus Steinmetz. Their alliance as a “soviet of architects” was prefigured by the Norwegian-​American economist, Thorstein Veblen’s call for a revolt of technical experts in his book, The Engineers and the Price System (1919), but it was equally modeled on constructivist and De Stijl mantras that Lönberg-​ Holm carried with him and translated to American conditions. The SSA’s distinct ideology and network of affiliations goes beyond Fuller. In texts and projects, in Shelter and after, Lönberg-​Holm’s ongoing collaborations with some of the members were dedicated to theorizing and exploring the aesthetic possibilities opened up by a perpetual cycle of research, design, technological innovation, and obsolescence. The materialization of the concepts of mobility, reproducibility, and disposability, propelled the iconography of modern architecture out of its inherited rationalist framework. The promotion of an architecture predicated on technological performance and the latest achievements in dry assembly and tensile structures opened up a vision of modern architecture that, while recalling aspects of constructivism, was highly differentiated from their European counterparts. Before World War II, they promoted an unprecedented rhetoric as they outlined an early systems and cybernetic approach to the production of architecture. This worldview was grounded in the idea of energy as a unifying social project, a position that they held in common with technocratic movements in the Depression, but one that also finds parallels within the international constructivist circles that Lönberg-​Holm had joined in Europe. One of the most significant missions of this book is the vindication of the leadership role of this forgotten architect. As Fuller’s partisan, Lönberg-​Holm introduced the European ideology of productivism to the United States and succeeded in transforming this ideology into practice through his commitment to making the industrial production of architecture a reality. A political and artistic theory that emerged in constructivist circles around 1922, productivism asserted that the artist as a technician allied to labor processes and industrialization could reconfigure the meaning of production, worker, and product. Despite his ties to so many avant-​garde formations, Lönberg-​ Holm remains an anonymous figure, one who is mainly referred to in footnotes on the period. His multifaceted activities in Denmark, Germany, and the United States are examined in relation to his affiliations with the SSA. These include his beginnings in Denmark as an early proponent of functionalism; his role as the East Coast delegate of CIAM (1929–​1959); his position as an editor of Architectural Record’s technical news and research department (1929–​1932), and his job as director of design and research at Sweet’s Catalog (1932–​1960). After 1942, Lönberg-​Holm pioneered a particular version of the field of “information design” in collaboration with the Czech designer Ladislav Sutnar at Sweet’s Catalog and in a series of projects with C. Theodore Larson.

5

Introduction 5 Lönberg-​Holm is a missing link between the European avant-​gardes and the Americanization of modern architecture. By tracing his career it becomes apparent that there was far more transatlantic connection than has previously been acknowledged. Fuller credited him with anticipating his idea of “total environment” by inventing the provocative concept of “invisible architecture.” By following the logic of the evolving ephemeralization of construction materials and achievements in environmental control systems, Lönberg-​Holm prophesized that one day it would be possible to go anywhere, into any climatic condition unencumbered by building envelopes. Moreover, he understood architecture as a form of pure organization and as a dynamic and interactive agent in its environment. This study seeks to address how his productivist vision transformed over time through his engagement in avant-​garde circles; in his disappearance within the corporate world; and finally as part of the managerial and bureaucratic culture of postwar CIAM.

Correlations This book is structured as a relational matrix. Instead of placing the primary emphasis on biographical details and personal motivations, the focus of this study is upon the association of theoretical ideas, artifacts, and inscriptional methods as demonstrated in articles, photographs, projects, and graphics. These fields reveal correlations. A scientific term that refers to the mutual relation of two or more things as a causal, complementary, parallel, or reciprocal relationship, correlations are the statistical or qualitative correspondence between comparable entities that demonstrate how closely two or more random variables co-​vary. This concept is used operatively to guide the organization of diverse materials, designs, theories, and relationships. Correlation is the intriguing term that Buckminster Fuller used to describe the SSA as an “abstract association.” The SSA made it into a methodology for creating graphs and charts that delineated a web of correspondences between natural resources, industrial processes, and economics. Here, correlation serves as a methodology and as a form of historical explanation. This study traces the links of dependence, influences, and actions across time between Lönberg-​Holm in key episodes with some of the SSA, before and after the journal, by identifying the different correlations between people, concepts and artifacts that developed throughout his career and by focusing on his unusual collaborative field of activities. The heterogeneous and unorthodox production of the SSA demonstrates that the discipline of architecture is not consigned only to built works. Magazines, manifestos, exhibitions, research, congresses, manuals, standards, frameworks for practice, and ultimately policymaking methodologies are fields of activity that are equally essential in materializing and disseminating ideas that structure and modify practice. By drawing on the compelling but little-​known material in his archive, the book begins with the first critical historical reconstruction of Lönberg-​Holm’s

6

6 Introduction itinerary from Denmark to the United States in the early 1920s. Almost a decade before the principles of modern movement would be assimilated in Scandinavia, his only built works, in the port town of Køge, exhibit seminal characteristics of the new objectivity in embryonic form. During a year of residency in Germany in 1922, Lönberg-​Holm became part of the shifting and contingent coalitions of radical collectives who were prophesizing the merger of art, science, and technology. His Chicago Tribune Tower and other early designs were emblematic of the varied significations of functionalism at the time, and established his reputation as a pioneering figure among his peers in the International Faction of Constructivists, at the Bauhaus, in Russia, and within the coalitions generating the radical magazines G, ABC, De Stijl, and i10. A celebrated cohort of El Lissitzky, Adolf Behne, Werner Jakstien, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-​Nagy, Hannes Meyer, Werner Graeff, Cornelis van Eesteren, Theo van Doesburg, Erich Mendelsohn, Richard Neutra, Sigfried Giedion, and J.J.P. Oud, this constellation of affiliations, led him to assimilate productivism, and theories of organization and energetics, making him an ideal and obliged transatlantic mediator in CIAM. This first chapter examines how the ideologies that Lönberg-​ Holm brought with him from Europe transformed as he situated them over the decade into the American context as evident in his photographs, pedagogical programs, design work, and essays. After immigrating to the United States in 1923, he began a remarkable body of photographs that reveals an eye for urban flux. Anticipating the SSA’s emphasis on tension, his images of unclad high-​rise steel construction systems renewed the iconography of the modern movement away from monolithic grain elevators by celebrating metallic structures and building processes. Nineteen of these images appeared in Erich Mendelsohn’s seminal picture book, Amerika (1926), including two evocative nocturnal snapshots of buildings where matter and energy are transformed into light. Upon settling briefly in Detroit and Ann Arbor, his controversial studio at the University of Michigan in 1924 launched the didactic exercises of the Bauhaus Vorkurs (preliminary course) and the Russian VKhUTEMAS (Higher State Artistic and Technical Studios) by drawing on elementarist design principles that he was exploring in his own speculative projects. Lönberg-​ Holm acted as an international interlocutor by relaying his reflections back to his radical colleagues. Initially representative of the European fascination with American culture and technology, known as Amerikanismus, after 1927 he began to assert a new set of intentions that were governed by his direct engagement within the industrial processes he encountered in his adopted country. It is not by chance that he participated in the Machine-​Age Exposition, organized by the Little Review, where under the guise of productivist discourse Americans first became acquainted with the modern movement and Russian constructivism. Lönberg-​Holm’s polemical essay “Architecture or Organized Space” (1929) argued for a science of building as the systematization of organized experience where the

7

Introduction 7 emancipated factory would become the site of collective practice, an experimental laboratory and a research center. This agenda would align him with Buckminster Fuller and the future members of the SSA. Chapter  2, “Monuments and instruments,” demonstrates that the reception of the international style was not as streamlined as most historiographical accounts of Hitchcock and Johnson’s illustrious show might lead us to believe. At a dramatic moment when millions of Americans were homeless, Fuller sought legitimacy for the Dymaxion House by aligning himself with Kocher, Larson, Haskell, Frey, and Lönberg-​Holm. As newly employed editors at Architectural Record after 1928, these architects paved the way for the integration of scientific design principles and methodologies into everyday practice. They shared an enthusiasm for new synthetic materials, environmental control systems, and prefabricated dwellings. In response to the aesthetic premises of the international style agenda, the SSA joined Frank Lloyd Wright, Lewis Mumford, and other agitators to voice their dissent in the pages of Shelter. This chapter explores how the principles of rationalized mass production and standardization were applied not only to the culture of industrial production promoted by the SSA, but to engineering consent for the nascent cultural industry at MoMA. When George Howe and the museum curators enlisted the consultancy of Edward Bernays, the inventor of modern public relations in America, to persuade the public in favor of modern architecture, European ideologies were rendered as nothing more than style. Finally, an analysis of the SSA’s manifesto in the last two issues of Shelter demonstrates that as the group set out to lampoon the international style and to offer their counter-​vision, they addressed the emergency situation of the Depression by creating maps of the country as an abstract, national space netted together by networks of energy and natural resources and by communication and transportation infrastructures. The magazine’s unique graphic identity, one that mixed architectural projects with diagrams, news snippets, scientific information, technical reports, and economic data, was meant to reinforce an idiosyncratic glossary that espoused a teleological view of technology as an independent agent of progress. One of the central themes in this book is the ongoing redefinition of technology in the interwar period in the United States. In the 1930s the modern conception of technology was first being formulated within technocratic circles where it could be understood in multiple ways, as an artifact, an assemblage, a system, and as an abstract mode of inquiry. Chapter 3, “Industrial emancipation and technocracy in the 1930s,” offers an examination of technocratic thought extended to the political and cultural context of the era. It has long been acknowledged that Fuller was initially attracted to the political movement begun by Howard Scott’s Technocracy Inc., but this study departs from traditional scholarship on the subject by bringing to the forefront the revival of interest in the economist Thorstein Veblen by a wide range of technocratic thinkers including Mumford, Stuart Chase, Harold Loeb, and the SSA. Veblen created an epistemological theory of the relation of man to

8

8 Introduction machine technology, and Fuller’s comprehensive anticipatory design science owes much to his concept of the “instinct of workmanship” which described man’s proclivity to mold and transform the environment for the community as a natural impulse toward technological innovation. Following Veblen, technocratic theorists in the Depression believed that the automatism inherent in machine production would render capitalism obsolete. An examination of this legacy in urban projects of the 1930s reveals that with the dual crises of the Depression and mobilization for war, Veblen’s preoccupation with waste and obsolescence would ultimately be transferred to the American city by technocratic architects and planners during the New Deal to justify slum clearance as a modus operandi. As the East Coast delegate to CIAM, Lönberg-​Holm’s analysis of Detroit, an example of an industrial city for the famous CIAM 4, Functional City Congress (1933), went beyond technocratic views on urban blight by calling for the socialization of land, urban decentralization, and mobility. But more tellingly, many of the extra-​architectural techniques used by the SSA and their conceptual basis for rethinking the building industry drew on technocratic methodologies of energy analysis and chart making. Technocratic groups scrutinized the impact of industrial cycles on machines, labor, and natural resources by calculating the energy cost of production. This part explores the desire on the part of C. Theodore Larson and Lönberg-​Holm to construct an alternative system for the building industry by considering design as a perpetual cycle of innovation from research to obsolescence. In their examination of the modes of production, they made the surprising claim that the transformation of energy into flow patterns for productive use constitutes the true materials of design. Technocratic thinkers’ understanding of energy as a unified cultural project was informed by marginalized theories that equated energy flows with economic flows, that were put forth by a diverse range of scientists, including Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Ostwald, Patrick Geddes, and Frederick Soddy. Their agenda, to create integrated industrial cycles for the production of indispensable goods, prophesized a new role for the consumer as producer. Finally, this chapter opens up speculation on the potentials of the technological environment by examining the curious inclusion of the Viennese designer Frederick Kiesler among the technocratic architects of the SSA. His “Design-​Correlations” series published from 1937 to 1943 in Architectural Record drew on concepts developed by Larson, Lönberg-​Holm, and Fuller. Ultimately their shared concern with the ideal of total environmental control –​the impact of temperature, humidity, sound, and light on the physiological and psychological wellbeing of the dweller –​constitutes a unique mode of inquiry that transcends technocratic discourse. Lönberg-​Holm dedicated 28 years of his professional life to the rather prosaic and mundane reorganization of Sweet’s Catalog, a binder for industrially produced building components that the architect Richard Neutra praised as the modern quarry. Chapter  4 devotes special attention to the rapid growth and paramount influence on American practice

9

Introduction 9 of the corporate information interface between architects, builders, and manufacturers that dominated the field and that represents a unique alliance of building professionals, architects, and fabricators. It may seem questionable to attribute agency to such a system, but that is exactly what Fuller did when he argued that the integration of Sweet’s into everyday practice exerted a transformative role in the way buildings were designed and put together, that represented the culmination of automation in architectural production. By tracing the history of the catalog and by examining its significance, this chapter demonstrates how it captured the imagination of architects who reflexively exploited its intrinsic design potentials. Lönberg-​Holm’s tenure as the director of design and research at Sweet’s Catalog coincided with the accelerated invention of cutting-​edge materials, assembly techniques, and environmental control systems during the 1930s and World War II, as the prefabricated house became the predominant focus of the decade for architects and industry. Yet he recognized that his intention, to make it possible to create radical works of modern architecture with standardized elements, would ultimately delimit the role of the architect in the industrial arena. Fuller’s Dymaxion House and the design procedures and possibilities implied by Sweet’s Catalog suggested an architecture assembled out of prefabricated parts subject to continual innovation, obsolescence, and elimination, to be selected by consumer choice. This ready-​made kit-​of-​parts found its highest expression as an explicit design methodology in the postwar architecture of the California Case Study Houses program. But more than this, Sweet’s can be contrasted with a number of contemporaneous architectural manuals that delineated standardized procedures that codified modernist practice, such as Architectural Graphic Standards (1932) and Ernst Neufert’s Architects’ Data (1936). Such a comparison also calls into question their apparent objectivity. After 1941, at Sweet’s Lönberg-​Holm and Ladislav Sutnar theorized the integration of complex scientific and technical data into visual information by transforming the catalog and its product world into a totally integrated plastic and industrial oeuvre. Finally, as part of international diplomacy and technological transfer during and after World War II, SSA members offered their expertise in prefabricated systems to the French Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism, the National Council of American–Soviet Friendship Association, and CIAM, for defense housing and postwar reconstruction efforts. The prefabricated dwelling and the cause of standardization transformed from a utopian ideal into an emergency response to wartime devastation. Lönberg-​Holm learned much from working at Dodge Corporation on the  integrated information system that structured the national building industry, but he was evolving his own alternative scheme with Larson. Chapter  5 examines the merger of information about architecture with the design of information architecture as evident in their collaborative

01

10 Introduction project: Development index, a proposed pattern for organizing and facilitating the flow of information needed by man in furthering his own development, with particular reference to the development of buildings and communities and other forms of environmental control (1953). This proposal was the result of Lönberg-​Holm’s aim to create an independent organization for the collection and dissemination of constantly updated information on building systems and environmental controls. A project modeled on H.G. Wells’ proposal for a “World Brain” (1938), this work benefited from his involvement within the managerial culture of CIAM in the wake of World War II, where he not only developed the theme for the first postwar congress and a template for surveying community planning standards, he played a crucial role in redefining CIAM’s future mission in worldwide reconstruction and development. Development index was informed by Larson’s growing connection to systems experts whose ideas suggested an integrated approach to exploring man’s environment and community ideals. In exploring how their concerns enlarged from industrial production to information exchange, their positions suggest a new appreciation of the architect as a knowledge worker. In tracing how the ecological and environmentalist thinking of Lönberg-​ Holm and other SSA members arose not from conservationism, but from technocratic concerns with the flow and transformation of energy in industrial processes and with the imbrication of technological and natural systems, this study has been guided by a number of methodologies that emerged from social theories of technology and science, including Thomas Parke Hughes’ Networks of Power (1983), a seminal study of the development of electrical networks in Europe and the United States, that introduced systems theory to the history of technology. In his book, Hughes examined the design and operation of complex large-​scale technological systems by taking into account the philosophical, political and economic interests that shaped their conception, design and use. By demonstrating the complex alliances that bring technological systems into being through the coalition of entrepreneurs, politicians, scientists, and engineers, Hughes argued that technological artifacts do not exist in isolation and that system builders create the capital, institutional support, and market demand that enable and perpetuate such networks. His work offers a probing enquiry of the way that human relations to the natural world are embedded within technological artifacts and systems. The career of Lönberg-​ Holm invites us to look beyond conventional notions of design practice. As his productivist ideology shifted from the architecture industry to information architecture and from the factory to the bureau, he created unique methods of inscription to materialize new forms of knowledge. My examination of these instrumental architectures  –​flow charts, technical diagrams, organizational models and representational systems –​draws on the provocative methodology outlined by Bruno Latour, John Law and Michel Callon and known as actor network theory (ANT). A form of material semiotics concerned with relationality and its productivity, ANT

1

Introduction 11 arose out of empirical case studies of scientists in the laboratory. By focusing on technology in the making and by challenging great paradigm shifts and macro-​power structures, these theorists study the labs, institutions and agencies where technology comes in to being by following the actors and networks as they emerge, disappear and transform in different configurations. In this network of interconnection, the state or activity of one component influences the other. There are a multitude of associations within objects and modes of inscription are pivotal, because they impact the working methods that shape technology. The controversial aspect is that human and non-​human actors are considered equally and the scales between micro-​ actors and macro-​actors are leveled out in building power relations. Yet as a frame of reference, this tool has been useful for examining the SSA’s conception of building as a threshold of the ecological, the industrial and the technical and as a point of interaction between the human and the natural worlds. Lönberg-​Holm was a network builder who mobilized associations across networks of people, institution, and technologies. The industrial standardization of architecture and the ideal of total environmental control act as what ANT scholars would call the “black box.” ANT is an underlying inspiration that serves more explicitly as a tool for looking at his unconventional work after 1929, when he was mainly engaged in creating organizational methodologies and information systems for architects that had an impact on how everyday practice was carried out. In examining the SSA’s unique agenda as it was carried forward by Lönberg-​ Holm, this study seeks to follow specific moments of co-​development over time by tracing some of the American sources of ecological and sustainable architecture through a deep reading of concepts and terminology that emerged in technocratic circles of the 1930s, when environmentalism, rather than challenging large-​scale industrial development, as would be the case in the 1960s, was seeking to formulate a confluence of the natural and technological. The SSA’s formulation of the ideal of environmental control is especially illuminating in this regard and might lead us to reconsider the way the nature of technology was thought about at the time and how it contrasts with our contemporary understanding. The ideal of environmental control in the 1930s, as it emerged in the circle around Fuller, was initially a celebration of novel inventions such as air conditioning, lighting systems, and other benign appliances. The idea of building as a form of natural and social control would take on a very different meaning in the postwar period as a framework for worldwide development. Finally, this study underscores the mutual influence between Fuller and Lönberg-​Holm by addressing their reformulation of architecture as transformers of energy, transmitters of information, and as a technological ecosystem that mediates human and natural relations that shape the experiences that individuals and communities can have with their environment.

21

1  Knud Lönberg-​Holm A productivist architect in America

Our cities and buildings are organized space, space-​machines to facilitate the free function of human social needs: working, playing, mating, resting, thinking, and creating needs and human relations seen in the light of contemporary knowledge. These spatial structures must be flexible and always conform to the functions of life. They have no independent value in themselves. The plastic elements –​material, light and color –​should be organized in accordance with social, physical and psychological determinants. The utilitarian factory differs from the living quarters and the emotional stage setting only in the intended function. The creative process is the same.1

Although he was a crucial figure across a spectrum of avant-​garde circles in the 1920s in Europe and in the early 1930s in New York, Knud Lönberg-​ Holm’s notoriety eventually lapsed into almost complete obscurity within institutional and corporate spheres. Yet his essay “Architecture or Organized Space,” which both introduces and closes this chapter, offers a key as to how to reinsert him back into the history of modern architecture. In 1929, when he submitted the text to Architectural Record, the editors astutely recognized its radical proposition, only to reject it. To judge from the small excerpt above, the essay presents a synthesis of the polemical manifestos of the many factions of international constructivism that circulated throughout the decade. Despite its untimely publication in 1967, with the revamped title “Architecture in the Industrial Age” in Arts and Architecture, it nevertheless remains a forgotten document, fragmented from its original time and context, though one that is extremely relevant to this study, for it reveals his thinking in the year that he met Buckminster Fuller. Moreover, this thinking suggests how he planned to chart a course for functionalism in America. As part of the first wave of émigré architects to arrive in the United States in the early 1920s, he is the least known. His itinerary contrasts with that of his peers. The Viennese architect Richard Neutra landed in the same year, after apprenticeships with Karl Moser in Switzerland and Erich Mendelsohn in Berlin. Neutra embarked on professional practice in Los Angeles following a brief sojourn in the Chicago office of Holabird and Root and with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin. The Swiss architect William Lescaze arrived in 1920. In 1929, in his partnership with the Beaux Arts-​trained architect

31

Figure 1.1 Knud Lönberg-​Holm in the United States Source: image courtesy of the Ubu Gallery, New York. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

41

14  Knud Lönberg-Holm George Howe, he succeeded in realizing the first projects in the country to be designed in the international style. A similar route was followed by Albert Frey, who partnered with A. Lawrence Kocher in 1930, after having worked with Le Corbusier on the Villa Savoye. Lönberg-​Holm’s professional trajectory was neither as artistic, nor as chameleonic as the career of the Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, though they shared the same conceptual stimulation from the constructivists and the De Stijl group and were at times collaborators. After a promising start as a talented young photographer, designer and polemicist, Lönberg-​ Holm eventually moved away from practice in the 1930s, in order to concentrate on the reconfiguration of architectural practice through the design of professional standards and communication systems. This work, which is easier to recognize and appreciate today, was carried forward in the many facets of his career. Where do we situate him among the many movements whose stories have been told without him, despite his unique position as a link between Europe and America at a series of critical moments? A  detailed reconstruction of his little-​known early career provides a map of an intellectual journey more than just a geographical one. His voyage from Denmark to the United States by way of Germany traverses the paragon ideological agendas of the modern movement, on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1920s as a pioneering figure of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the Neue Bauen (the new building), the International Faction of Constructivists, the new photography, and the new vision, Lönberg-​Holm synthesized the science of organization, energetics, and productivism –​theories that emerged within constructivist circles. But he did not passively arrive with this complex worldview; rather he carried it forward through his direct engagement with American technological civilization. As a collaborator in Shelter in 1932, Lönberg-​Holm became Fuller’s comrade in arms, so to speak. His early journey reveals the unique affiliations that he brought to their brief collaboration and ongoing friendship. But while they both promoted the application of advanced technology to architecture, their paradigms regarding industrial production were fundamentally different. Fuller, following technocratic thinkers in the 1930s, believed in the utopian possibilities opened up by the automatism inherent in machine production. Lönberg-​Holm envisioned repositioning the artist, as an engineer directly within the realm of industry, as a facilitator of improved techniques and design. The artist as producer would dissolve his identity to become a selfless technician in the cultural field by offering expertise for the good of the collective. This would be realized by the promotion of an industrially reproducible dwelling whose design would undergo continual technological innovation. Among the radical positions that underscore the complex significations of functionalism that Lönberg-​Holm translated was the idea of energy as a unifying social and cultural program. An early systems approach that

51

Knud Lönberg-Holm 15 he absorbed from Soviet organization science, this agenda found its corollary among American technocratic groups that had an impact on Fuller’s thinking, as did his nascent environmentalism that alluded to the intrinsic biotechnical disposition of international constructivism, where architecture was contemplated as an active organism in dynamic relation with its milieu. This chapter traces his matrix of relations just prior to forming an alliance with Fuller, as a productivist architect who reconciled divergent currents in response to his confrontation with American culture, and it ends by returning to “Architecture as Organized Space,” a lost document that paves the way for his mission within a very different avant-​garde in the 1930s.

Functionalism in Denmark The Nordic architectural culture that constituted the basis of Lönberg-​ Holm’s heritage and training developed peripherally to the theoretical formulations being outlined within the vanguards in Germany, Holland, France, and Russia after World War I.  As a young and restless practitioner in Denmark, he began looking abroad with enthusiasm, to the radical movements in the rest of Europe.2 In the 1920s a conservative neoclassical style of architecture prevailed on the Danish scene, with the period being generally regarded as a transitional one. Yet his early work clearly indicates a conversion toward the modern movement. His projects for a shipyard and two ensembles of housing in the port town of Køge reveal a marked dichotomy between the exteriors and interiors that decidedly reflects an academic approach on the facades that camouflages functionalist impulses on the inside (Figures 1.2 and 1.3). Born in Copenhagen in 1895, Lönberg-​Holm was educated as an architect at the prestigious Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole (The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art) from 1912 to 1915, following his graduation from the University of Copenhagen. He came from a long line of artisanal manufacturers. His mother, Ulla Lønberg, was of Swedish lineage and the families of both parents were horseshoe fabricators. His father, Carl Johan Sophus Holm, directed their factory in Amager, an island to the south of Copenhagen, but the family lived north of the capital, in the well-​to-​do town of Hellerup, where he and his brother were encouraged to pursue careers that linked the technical and the artistic. After his studies, he served in the Danish Army Corp during World War I. From 1915 to 1917 he was assigned to work on an immense coastal fortification, the Tunestillingen, which was built to defend Danish neutrality in the conflict. From 1918 to 1920, in collaboration with the more experienced architect Kai Turin (1885–​1935), he realized his only built works, in a series of commissions secured by his younger brother Aage (1887–​1967), a civil engineer and ship designer employed in the nautical sector.3 As a first professional assignment, the Køge Værft, an impressive ship and engine compound in the town’s northern harbor, was an ambitious and

61

Figure 1.2 Roof structure of the Køge Værft Source: image courtesy of Adrian Täckman, architect MAA. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

Figure 1.3 Facade of the main nave at Køge Værft Source: image courtesy of Adrian Täckman, architect MAA. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

71

Knud Lönberg-Holm 17 large-​scale undertaking. To the east, two kilometers inland, the architects oversaw the design and construction of two distinct typologies of dwellings. The Norde Værftsgård (North Boatyard Housing) and the Søndre Værftsgård (South Boatyard Housing) provided apartments for the workers’ families. Although later in his career Lönberg-​Holm admitted that he was not very satisfied with these projects, they nevertheless demonstrate a high level of accomplishment in the handling of the long-​span structural systems in the industrial enclave and in the interpretation of workers’ housing, a typology where the transition to Nordic functionalism was being explored during the era.4 A port town, 50 kilometers south of Copenhagen, Køge grew as the demand for new vessels led to a wave of shipyard projects, following the sinking of many ships by German submarine and U-​boat warfare.5 Aage Lønberg-​Holm became the director of the Køge shipyard, and soon after in 1922 he married the owner’s daughter, Anna Lauritzen. The shipping magnate Ditlev Lauritzen, who was known as “the Consul,” founded a timber enterprise in the northern town of Esbjerg in 1884. With the acquisition of the steam ship the Uganda in 1888, he expanded his business horizons. By 1905, his company pioneered the development of refrigerated cargo ships, known as “the reefer trade,” that transported citrus fruits from Spain to England, and in 1914 the company and the family relocated to Copenhagen. The Consul partnered with two other businesses in Køge, the Progress and the Dannebrog, to acquire 100,000 square meters of reclaimed land in the new harbor basin that was linked by rail tracks.6 Their initial intention was to construct ferro-​cement ships. The steel shortage after the war led to experimentation with the constructive possibilities of what was then considered to be a new, inexpensive wonder material. The world’s largest ferro-​cement vessel of the time, the 60 m Triton, was built in 1918 in the town’s southern harbor at the Codan Shipyard. But ultimately the hulls of ferro-​cement ships could not withstand the vibrations of large diesel engines. Given this technical dilemma, by 1921 only two ships had been built at Codan when the yard was shuttered and the idea of using the material at Køge Værft was abandoned. Instead, five steel ships were fabricated, with the launching of the first vessel, the Nerma, taking place in 1921. The architects nevertheless found novel ways to put to use ferro-​cement in the stairs and landings of the housing and in the industrial naves. During its short-​lived peak, 400 workers and 40 staff members were employed at Køge Værft and dwellings had to be constructed for the new families who moved to the area. Turin brought with him expertise from earlier commissions for the Danish better building movement, a political initiative begun in 1915 that promoted state-​controlled domestic projects for the working class. In response to the national housing shortage after the war, experimentation with new construction materials became an increasingly relevant aspect of the program.7 The preference for a simplified neoclassical style in these promotions represented an official rejection of eclectic

81

18  Knud Lönberg-Holm historicism. Yet facades characterized by their clarity, rhythm, and harmony masked proletariat housing behind traditional typologies. The early 1920s was a period of intense experimentation in the design of socially responsible proletariat housing, as evident in Turin and Lönberg-​ Holm’s projects.8 For the South Boatyard Housing, they designed three buildings of multi-​family dwellings that reinterpreted traditional typologies. The simple three-​story volumes with pitched roofs recall rural buildings but actually masked 125 two-​or three-​bedroom apartments ranging from 48 to 77 square meters, that were consciously laid out to take advantage of solar orientations and cross breezes. As the earliest example of social housing in the area, the bright dwellings with large well-​proportioned rooms featured novel amenities, such as stove heating and kitchens. The architects handled the facades with a vernacularized classicism. The impressive three-​story palatial project, the North Boatyard Housing, cloaked modern apartments with a lingering classical vocabulary (Figure 1.4). In collaboration with the engineer C. Nyholm, Lönberg-​Holm designed two systems of long-​span reinforced concrete structures for the central nave and lateral wings of the shipyard with a clarity, economy, and skeletal construction that reveals an explicit sachlich position. The tapered beams of the main roof alternate with sleek monitor skylights to offer a space of striking modernity and elegance. The simple volumes, the unexpected expressiveness of the roof structure, and the severe muted classicism of the facade, exhibit

Figure 1.4 View of the Norde Værftsgård Source: image courtesy of Adrian Täckman, architect MAA. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

91

Knud Lönberg-Holm 19 a frank tectonic approach that approximates the Neue Bauen movement in Germany, with its central concern for the rationalization of construction. The project brings to mind the large manufacturing halls that illustrate Mies van der Rohe’s “Industrial Building,” (1924) in the avant-​garde magazine G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung (G: Materials for Elemental Form-​Creation). By 1923, Lönberg-​Holm was actively contributing to journals as an early proselytizer of functionalism, but design principles inspired by the Bauhaus and other avant-​garde sources did not truly take hold in the country until after 1930, when architects such as Kay Fisker and C.F. Møller combined modern formal canons with regionalist iterations that maintained aspects of traditional typologies, craftwork and materials. Among the few architects promoting a move beyond academicism in the 1920s, the efforts of the cultural agitator Poul Henningsen (1894–​1967), whose famous PH lamps are a milestone of Nordic design, are significant since Lönberg-​ Holm had something of a rivalry going with his group. Henningsen played an incisive role as a polemist in the radical left-​wing journal Kritisk Revy (Critical Review), whose inaugural issue in 1926 focused on workers’ housing. Although the editors were architects, their treatment of a broad range of themes, from philosophy to art, made Kritisk Revy a catalyst for societal radicalism. Henningsen’s essay “Tradition og Modernisme” of 1927 (“Tradition and Modernisme”) launched a critique of neoclassicism by attacking the climate of national conservatism.9 It was precisely the mimicry of bourgeois architecture in Social Democratic housing and civic buildings that he assailed, for cloaking proletariat apartments, public schools, and police departments behind palatial facades. Poul Henningsen and his cohorts, Thorkild Henningsen, Edvard Heiberg, and Ivar Bentsen, were instrumental in ushering in Nordic functionalism by promoting an independent workers’ culture with its own symbolism derived from the modern movement. During the early 1920s they were engaged in designing large-​scale demonstration housing settlements for Copenhagen’s municipal government.10 This took place after Lönberg-​Holm had already left, but he remained attentive to their endeavors.11 KVE In the shift toward a modern conception of design merged with industrial fabrication techniques, Denmark had its own early variant of functionalism that was pioneered by the architect Knud V. Engelhardt (1882–​1931), whose work for the public realm and for private industries influenced Lönberg-​Holm. KVE, as he is referred to in Denmark, is considered to be the country’s first modern industrial designer. In the urban sphere, he created Copenhagen’s tramcars in 1909 and he designed street signage for the municipality of Gentofte, with a modern interpretation of typefaces by the architects Thorvald Bindesbøll and Anton Rosen. His urban advertising pillars

02

20  Knud Lönberg-Holm and kilometer stone markers were set along major roadways throughout the country. An iconic gas stove ring of 1919 is just of one of the many objects he created specifically for mass production. Engelhardt was especially revered for his graphic design. Aage commissioned him to create the company logo for Køge Værft and Knud took a portfolio of his typographic work with him when he emigrated. The two architects maintained contact after KVE won a travel fellowship to collect well-​designed objects of daily use in China, Java, and Japan, from 1923 to 1925.12 KVE launched a functionalist aesthetic long before it would be recognized as such and they shared a concern for creating standards for industrial production.13 This pursuit was furthered in Lönberg-​Holm’s articles in Bygmesteren and Politiken, where he introduced the theories of modernism to Denmark by publishing Mies van der Rohe’s Berlin projects and his own work. As an exponent of new construction systems, he advocated for the use of concrete for housing almost a decade before the material would be widely implemented.14 His contribution, which reveals the beginnings of a severe and doctrinaire sensibility, would ultimately open up a direction beyond the academic tradition, yet it is difficult to situate him within the traditional historiography of functionalism in Scandinavia. In this regard, he was as much an outlier as his contemporary, the British-​born, Danish-​Norwegian engineer Ove Arup (1895–​1988), although there is no evidence that they knew each other. In 1921, after he left Køge, Lönberg-​Holm benefited from a grand tour to Germany, Italy and France. A rite of passage for a young architect, on this voyage his preferred mode of travel was walking. His photo diary, with its mixing of historic icons, such as the Doge’s Palace, with contemporary structures, indicates the works that caught his eye. In Germany he visited the Garden City of Hellerau outside of Dresden and photographed Heinrich Tessenow’s Theatre of Education Institution for Rhythmic Gymnastics (1913), a building that exhibits a severe classical facade, not unlike the one at Køge. Tessenow was a critical reference for Danish architects, given that he argued for industrialization and the standardization of housing, while his projects combined modern classicism with traditional handcraft. On his visit to Cologne, Lönberg-​Holm juxtaposed images of the Gothic cathedral with pictures of the metallic lattice of contemporary engineering works. In 1922, he settled in Germany for one year to be close to the sources that he had been looking toward from afar.

The avant-​garde in Germany Lönberg-​Holm’s radical theoretical and aesthetic identity belongs to the unique convergence and mutual imbrication between interdisciplinary avant-​ garde groups in Weimar-​era Germany in 1922. As he found his way into the spheres of the Bauhaus, De Stijl, and constructivism, this exhilarating year

12

Knud Lönberg-Holm 21 held great relevance for his metamorphosis as a designer and led him into enduring alliances with key figures of diverse coalitions. The formulation of the Neue Sachlichkeit and the launching of international constructivism proved to be milestones for the modern movement. In this pivotal moment, as the vibrant artistic and architectural collectives rallied together in a postwar spirit of internationalism, he participated in a change of direction away from the individualism and subjectivity attributed to expressionism toward a universalist and collectivist vision of art and architecture. Lönberg-​Holm set up a studio in Altona, a former fishing village on the Elbe River. Founded in 1535, the town had been a Danish duchy from 1640 to 1864, which was consolidated into Hamburg in 1937. The municipal architect Werner Jakstein (1876–​ 1961) and his half-​ Danish wife Thyra Dohrenburg, a translator of Scandinavian languages, had met in Copenhagen and were family friends. As a mentor, Jakstein paved the way for introductions and championed his early work. Born in the Prussian town of Potsdam and educated in Berlin, Jakstein settled in Altona in 1910. As a historian, he spent a great deal of time in Denmark researching the classical architect Christian Frederik Hansen (1756–​1845), who lived in Altona for 24 years as the master builder of Danish Holstein from 1784 to 1804.15 The author of several books on Hansen, he studied the private villas designed by the Dane along the town’s Palmaille Promenade in 1804. He lectured often in Denmark and was a frequent contributor to Scandinavian journals. Jakstein shared Lönberg-​Holm’s enthusiasm for the new direction that architecture was taking. A figure of diverse interests and an expert in brick construction, he produced city tableau, he held watercolor workshops, and he founded a workers welfare organization that offered concerts and tours. He was knowledgeable and conversant about contemporary architecture, but given his role as the city’s preservationist, Jakstein embraced the new sensibility intellectually, more than in practice. He admired J.J.P. Oud above all of his contemporaries, and he preferred Gropius’ work to that of Bruno Taut.16 During the 1920s he corresponded with Oud, van Eesteren, and Mies van der Rohe. His vibrant epistolary relationship with Lönberg-​Holm began when the Dane returned to Copenhagen and continued after he moved to America in 1923. Their letters touched on topics ranging from aesthetics, to family life, and plans for collaborative projects.17 Lönberg-​ Holm had the fortune to set up his studio in the U. Kunstgewerbeschule, Altona’s state school of applied arts. The director was the young architect Jakob Detlef (Jock) Peters (1889–​1934), who before being drafted into the German army in 1915 had worked for Peter Behrens for two years, following the path of the more acclaimed apprentices, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Gropius. Peters was gassed on the battlefield during World War I and lost a lung to tuberculosis in 1918. With the hope of restoring his health, he immigrated to California in 1923, to join his brother who was already entrenched in Los Angeles, and where he became connected with Neutra.18

2

22  Knud Lönberg-Holm The school was housed in a beautiful Romantic, neo-​ gothic estate designed by the architect Heinrich Strack in 1855 for the merchant banker Bernhard Donner. The town acquired the Donnerschloss after the death of his widow in 1912.19 From his studio, Lönberg-​Holm looked out to a lush park through tall windows with pointed arches. During his stay, he collaborated with Peters on a competition for the city of Königsberg and he worked independently on the Chicago Tribune Tower competition. Architects from a variety of geographic origins and stylistic orientations entered the Königsberg competition, an urban project with a hybrid program for an office building, post office, a bank, a hotel, and a retail store. The range of schemes indicates a move away from expressionism toward a more objective architecture. Among the submissions, an organicist approach is best exemplified by Hans Scharoun’s project, while a purely skin-​and-​ bones proposition can be found in the glass and concrete scheme by the young Dutch architect Mart Stam. Lönberg-​Holm and Peters’ entry, Proportion, demonstrates their desire to create a dynamic composition. The design features an asymmetrical arrangement of horizontal prismatic forms that create a pinwheel effect around a vertical core. The jury deliberation in Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst indicates that the judges did not find the solution to be fully resolved and it was not the winner. If executed, they predicted it would be costly to build. The clay model shows a rather inchoate project.20 The facade treatment, which bears Behren’s influence, was applied to a centrifugal composition where the slabs accentuate the corner entrance. Yet the project’s matter-​of-​ fact approach set it apart from the more expressionistic entries. It quickly became associated with the new objectivity (Figure 1.5). The Chicago Tribune competition It was Lönberg-​ Holm’s unsubmitted proposal for the Chicago Tribune competition that solidified his reputation as a daring and radical designer. The sudden European interest in the skyscraper was catalyzed by the Friedrichstrasse competition of 1921, which is mainly remembered for Mies van der Rohe’s glass tower, the most emblematic of the 145 submissions. Although Europeans critiqued the skyscraper as an isolated yet dominant element in the cityscape that symbolized the pretentions of the client, the Chicago contest proved to be the architectural event of the year, offering an opportunity to tackle the design of a tall building with the promise of a big cash award. Of the 260 entries, the first prize went to the neo-​gothic design by John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, with Eliel Saarinen taking second place. A gothic expressionist style dominated the 37 German entries, with the notable exception of the monumental industrial vocabulary featured in the tower by Gropius and Adolf Meyer. German architects distinguished between Kultur, a national ethos in which thought and production embodied a spiritual intent, and Zivilisation,

32

Knud Lönberg-Holm 23

Figure 1.5 Model of Jock Peters and Knud Lönberg-​Holm’s project Proportion, for the Königsberg Competition, 1922 Source: image courtesy of Adrian Täckman, architect MAA. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

a social organization in which human production was based on mere expediency. The predominant view was that America had civilization but not culture. As an outcome of Amerikanismus –​the phenomenon of European fascination with American technology and building processes  –​American solutions, with their sheer brute materiality, were considered to be lacking in culture. Yet Europeans looked to the symbolic potential inherent in the country’s utilitarian inventions, an ideal embodied by Lönberg-​Holm’s proposal.21 By returning to the origins of the skyscraper, his stark invocation of the Chicago School steel frame, laid bare and unveiled of ornamental accouterments, forged a path for what became known as rationalism in the Neue Sachlichkeit. The tripartite division of the polychromatic cladding distinguishes the programmatic elements. Lönberg-​Holm articulated the printing plant in the three floors at street level with black terracotta tiles. An elegant white skin and horizontal band windows mark out the administrative offices in the shaft and setbacks, contrasting them with the verticality of the central glazed elevator core. The architect underscored his fascination with the tensile possibilities of steel framing and the energy of commercial culture, by enlivening the building with a soft-​scape of small-​scale media and

42

24  Knud Lönberg-Holm electrical attachments, such as the floodlights that suggest the headlights of a Ford automobile or the metallic scaffolding and billboards that call out the company’s name. The stripped bare, skin-​and-​bones approach made this a paradigm-​shifting project that was widely regarded to be as groundbreaking as Mies’ skyscrapers (Figure 1.6). At the recommendation of J.J.P. Oud, his first opportunity to display the project was granted by Gropius, the director of the Bauhaus, who invited Lönberg-​Holm to participate in the International Architecture Exhibition in Weimar during the summer of 1923.22 A celebration of the school’s fourth anniversary, each of the student ateliers for textiles, graphics, furniture, and lighting had a dedicated display. The exhibit also offered a carefully calibrated clustering of 30 international figures of the emerging avant-​garde whose sensibilities coincided with Gropius’ vision of the unity of art and technology and the idea of the Bauhaus as a workshop of modernity. The installation paired the work of Taut with Mendelsohn and Mies’ Concrete

Figure 1.6 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, Chicago Tribune Tower, 1922 Source: Internationale Architektur, 1925. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​ Holm Archive.

52

Knud Lönberg-Holm 25 Office Building (1923) with Gropius and Meyer’s Tribune Tower. Lönberg-​ Holm’s projects appear in the accompanying monograph, Internationale Architektur (1925), which focused mainly on high-​rise buildings. As the inaugural issue of the Bauhausbücher series and the brainchild of László Moholy-​Nagy, it proved to be the first anthology of the modern movement that traced the vicissitudes since the war.23 The modern functional building and the new objectivity Much of Gropius’ content came recommended by the art critic Adolf Behne (1885–​1948), who considered the Danish architect’s work to be emblematic of the new theoretical direction, enunciated in his seminal survey, Der Moderne Zweckbau (The Modern Functional Building). Originally written in 1923, but not published until 1926, this study, which is considered to be an early critical historiography of the era, is essential for situating Lönberg-​Holm’s worldview.24 Behne, an insightful critic of contemporary culture, especially the new media of film and photography, drew on methodologies gained from the mentorship of the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–​1945). A concern with social phenomena reflects the imprint of another teacher, the German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–​1918). As an active participant in the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers Council for Art) and the Deutsche Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen), he was a key intellectual linchpin among avant-​garde groups.25 The Neue Sachlichkeit was coined by the art critic G.F. Hartlaub in 1924, to describe new directions in art as an outgrowth of expressionism, but it circulated in architectural thought in the late teens from the idea of functionalism and type that had been expounded by Hermann Muthesius at the Deutsche Werkbund from 1897 to 1903.26 As a former spokesman of expressionism, Behne’s assessment of postwar architecture underscored a shift from a crafts-​based ethos to a political embracement of machine age technology. Among the complex differentiated ideologies of functionalism, rationalism and the new objectivity that were operating in German theory at the time, he discerned a new outlook that rejected expressionism’s excesses for what he considered to be a more generic set of rational solutions reflecting an equilibrium between social concerns and aesthetics. For a committed socialist like Behne, the Neue Sachlichkeit was not a style, but an explicitly collectivist political agenda which was impelled further by a visit to Russia in 1923, where he championed the proletarian front of constructivism. One of El Lissitzky’s Cloud Irons, a horizontal antithesis to the skyscraper, graced the book’s cover.27 His writing is also infused with a suggestive organicism informed by the theories of the biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–​1944). Living organisms are understood to be built like a house and engaged in information processing, from the inside out, with their umwelt or surrounding world. For Behne, art and architecture constitute autonomous processes made

62

26  Knud Lönberg-Holm up of interlinked and coordinated functions that evolve together through feedback. In his book –​which begins by considering the home as a tool in its environment –​the positions unfold in three parts. The first chapter, “No Longer a Facade but a House,” argues that Hendrik Petrus Berlage, Otto Wagner, and Alfred Messel had pioneered the functionalist facade by moving away from nineteenth-​century ornamentation. But he elevates Frank Lloyd Wright as a pioneer of the new objectivity for his text, “The Architect and the Machine” and for his early house plans that are shaped by the life of the inhabitants. After examining Gropius’ ideas on vernacular American industrial architecture, Fordist assembly-​line production, and standardization, he critiques the reification of production in singular buildings such as Behrens’ AEG Turbine Factory (1909) and Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower (1921) as constituting a stylized functionalism. Instead, Behne argues for a socially responsible architecture capable of answering to societal needs, as represented in the unselfconscious functionality of American factories and in the repeatable forms and “shaped spaces” of Gropius’ Fagus Factory (1913), where the building is a response to the flow of life. A new synthesis is called for in the critical conclusion, “No Longer Shaped Space but Designed Reality.” In a critique of the individualized functionalism of Gropius and Scharoun, Behne endorses the rationalism of Le Corbusier and the Russian constructivists for their balance between social function and form. He praises a collective, sober, and almost mathematical approach to architectural technique as appropriate to the communal nature of society. But he also celebrates social condensers and paradigms of urban dynamism, from billboards to neon lights. In enunciating a new movement reflected in the work of Mies van der Rohe, van Doesburg and Oud which suggests a union of space and time, Behne claims that the guiding principles of “absolute objectivity,” the adaptation of architecture to technical and economic functions, would lead to the dissolution of the concept of form. Thus building would become a tool or instrument. This argumentation is reified in the postscript by Lönberg-​Holm’s competition designs and his photographs of John Wellborn Roots’ Monadnock Building, Albert Kahn’s factories, and nocturnal streetscapes. Even before the book came out, Lönberg-​ Holm’s projects circulated among the most radical architects of the new objectivity. In an issue of the Dutch magazine Wendingen that was dedicated to the skyscraper as a solution for the office and housing problem, the first pages celebrate the American high-​rise, but the main focus was a survey of European projects –​by Berlage, Stam, Mies, Gropius, Lönberg-​Holm and Saarinen –​before concluding with Le Corbusier’s Hypothetical City for Three Million Inhabitants.28 The dissemination of his projects as part of the skyscraper craze established his notoriety. Cornelis van Eesteren and Oud praised his approach to construction in Bouwkundig Weekblad. Le Corbusier juxtaposed his tower with projects by Mies and Auguste Perret in Almanach d’architecture modern,

72

Knud Lönberg-Holm 27 and The Dial’s German-​born critic Herman George Scheffauer also compared it.29 In Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (1929), Henry-​Russell Hitchcock declared that except for Lönberg-​Holm’s tower, no submission to the competition made significant formal advances over the proto-​modernism of “the New Tradition.”30 The lasting reverberations of his design are echoed in Raymond Hood’s McGraw Hill Building of 1930 and in Howe and Lescaze’s Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS), the first skyscraper to be built in the international style in 1932. An article in the Russian newspaper Ogonjok, in 1923, claimed that the architect was closely connected to the VKhUTEMAS: “A new collective style and the only possible one today.”31 El Lisstizky praised the approach to construction as a revealing form in his text “ ‘Americanism’ in European Architecture” (1925). Europe is adopting American principles, developing them in a new way. From this point of view it is interesting that of the huge number of entries submitted to the competition for a skyscraper design, organized by the Chicago Tribune, only a few European architects, for example, the Dane Lundberg-​Holm [sic], and the Germans Gropius, May, and Bruno Taut, attempted a form suited to American construction. America herself had covered her steel skeleton with endless meters of Gothic and rosette-​like ornaments.32 International constructivism Lönberg-​Holm’s commitment to the merger of art, science, and technology was fortified early in the year, when he participated in a foundational meeting at the Berlin studio of the painter Gert Caden, where he joined El Lissitzky, van Doesburg, Moholy-​Nagy, van Eesteren, Mies van der Rohe, Werner Graeff, and the filmmakers Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling, among others. A new transnational spirit following in the wake of World War I heralded a period of shifting alliances between artists and architects from extremely diverse backgrounds, with the aim of establishing a paradigm for a socially productive art and architecture. This gathering led to the consolidation of the International Faction of Constructivists at the Düsseldorf Congress of International Progressive Artists, an event organized by the Young Rhineland group on May 29, where the Italian futurist Enrico Prampolini consecrated the movement and passed the torch on to a brigade of kindred spirits from the De Stijl group of Holland; L’Effort Modern from Paris; the Hungarians of MA; the Sept Arts group from Brussels; and the international Dadaists.33 Constructivism was a synonym for communism and the Russian architect El Lissitzky was the most vital star in this asterism with its many constellations. He had galvanized this radical campaign with his arrival in Germany in 1921 as an official ambassador of Soviet culture. The aim of

82

28  Knud Lönberg-Holm his presence in the West was to foment an alliance for world revolution.34 His goal of establishing a constructive method for the organization of life was first elucidated in Veshch/​Gegenstand/​Objet, a magazine founded with the writer Ilya Ehrenburg in 1922. The formalization of the group –​which was orchestrated by van Doesburg and Richter as the proxy for groups from Romania, Switzerland, Scandinavia, and Germany  –​engendered an array of Western iterations of constructivism that reenergized De Stijl and the Bauhaus. The vehicles were fleeting magazines, group exhibitions, and congresses that espoused a vision of a collective and scientifically driven approach to architecture. In declaring art to be a method of organization for the whole of life and a tool of universal progress, the Western coalitions absorbed and carried forward the utopian agenda that originated with Vladimir Tatlin’s proposal for the Monument to the Third International (1919–​1920). The Manifesto of International Constructivism was issued in September at a meeting in Weimar, impelling the creation of a network of 27 ephemeral groups and their journals including De Stijl, G:  Material zur elementaren Gestaltung, ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen, MA, Manometre, Mavo, Merz, Stravba, Zenit, Blok, Broom, and Disk.35 Lönberg-​Holm’s ongoing engagement with members of these collectives continued after he moved to the United States and through his participation in CIAM. With the industrial proletariat as the point of departure, the core agenda –​ the idea of art as the organization of social experience and life –​was first articulated by the Russian theorist Aleksey Gan, when he proclaimed constructivism to be an art of scientific communism. In 1921, the Moscow Working Group of Constructivists –​formed by Gan, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Karl Ioganson, Konstantin Medunetsky, and the Sternberg brothers, Georgii and Vladimir –​created the pedagogical platform, VKhUTEMAS with the aim of transforming artists into technicians engaged in industrial work. Mass-​produced utilitarian objects fabricated from new industrial materials were proclaimed to address the pressing needs of the proletariat. Their “laboratory works” were exhibited to great acclaim in Moscow in 1921 and in October 1922 at Berlin’s Galerie van Diemen, an event that left its imprint on Lönberg-​Holm.36 The concept of organization, which figures prominently in Lönberg-​ Holm’s theoretical propositions of the time and that circulated among the vanguards, can be traced to the Russian proletkult philosopher and scientist Alexander Bogdanov (1873–​1928), an intellectual rival to Lenin, whose three-​volume study Tektology (1913–​1917) argued for a dynamic science of complex wholes by making reference to tekton, a Greek word signifying building or construction. His “general science of organization” was destined to clarify processes that regulate the organization of all systems of natural and social phenomena. Bogdanov is recognized as a progenitor of systems theory, whose meta-​science anticipated the ideas of the Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1930s that culminated in General Systems

92

Knud Lönberg-Holm 29 Theory (1968). Tektology was printed in Berlin at the time and the ideas permeated the work of international constructivist artists and designers.37 The migration of constructivism to the West may have altered some of the original premises but among architectural circles –​and evident in the work of Lönberg-​Holm –​the elision of this ideology with the new objectivity gave rise to a central concern with the industrialization of building processes. Through El Lissitzky, Lönberg-​Holm became a foreign member affiliated with ASNOVA.38 His deepening radicalization represents far more than just a series of serendipitous and fortuitous encounters with the avant-​garde. Parallels can be found in the trajectory of the 24-​year-​old Dutch architect van Eesteren, who won the Prix de Rome in 1921. They coincided in their alliance to constructivism. In the span of 12 months, both architects had forged ties with the most critical provocateurs of the day. In Berlin, van Eesteren connected with Mendelsohn, Behne, Richter, and Moholy-​Nagy. At the Bauhaus he met Gropius, El Lissitzky, and van Doesburg. In August, Jakstein and Lönberg-​ Holm guided him around Altona as part of his Scandinavian tour of brick construction.39 As they exchanged contacts, these encounters strengthened their ideological aspirations and made them agitators. Lönberg-​Holm’s year-​ long sojourn in Germany placed him within this once-​in-​a-​lifetime constellar alignment and made him a critical though distant light when he left for the United States.

Amerika Here, the architects are dead. The architects I encountered in New York were lacking. One cannot actually find any modern strivings in the architecture. No architecture at all, only classicism without spirit or taste. Young architects here are educated according to the principles of the Ecole de Beaux Arts and sent to Paris or Rome. The magazines are splendidly illustrated but they are written in a completely childish manner. Everything is so beautiful. There is peace. They celebrate the victory over the movement that Sullivan and Wright initiated with such great force. All problems are solved. All problems find their solutions in Vignola who has demonstrated his usefulness. Isn’t America the nation that sets the tone at the present moment? And why not then in architecture as well? Of course, New York is still extremely interesting for the feverish life of the masses in motion, an entirely new rhythm. Will America finally find its own form? In New York, I have not found the answer.40 After a series of disappointments procuring work, Lönberg-​Holm immigrated in July, 1923. This had not been his intention, when early in December 1922 he returned to Copenhagen where he planned to organize an exhibition of international constructivism. Jakstein had given him a drawing by

03

30  Knud Lönberg-Holm C.F. Hansen to sell, but as the months wore on he warned that it would be difficult to travel back to Germany. It was impossible to exchange foreign currencies due to the Weimar-era hyperinflation caused in part by the French occupation of the Ruhr Valley.41 With the devaluation of the Deutsch Mark, Jakstein experienced going from wealth to poverty in a single day.42 The possibility of another shipyard project never materialized. In fact, the Køge site was experiencing hard times and closed that year.43 Lönberg-​Holm received a similar response from Oud, who suggested that working for an institutional firm would not be a good fit for him, but told him that even the great Berlage had no work and had gone to India to lecture.44 Wielding a hand-​held 35 millimeter camera, Lönberg-​Holm captured his entry into New  York’s harbor. With a discerning eye, he documented the Brooklyn Bridge and other emblematic sites. A  prolific and highly reflexive photographer, his vision would soon depart from familiar imagery. His self-​conscious body of work manifests the formal qualities and distills the experimentation with technique that characterizes the interwar photography of Bauhaus and constructivist collectives. Lönberg-​Holm’s photographs demonstrate foundational aspects of the new photography and the new vision and should be considered to be a pioneering body of work that focuses upon building processes and urban dynamism, with affinities to Moholy-​Nagy’s contemporaneous Bauhaus experiments. His use of extreme viewpoints, worm’s eye views, and dematerializing effects ushered in a new approach to the medium that anticipates the practices of Rodchenko and El Lissitzky at the close of the decade, when following their experiments with photomontage in the early 1920s they sought to create novel techniques for a new mass society. Lönberg-​ Holm’s visual manifesto of urban America explores the sensorial defamiliarization and the dynamics of metropolitan experience  –​a preeminent topic of the era. With the constructivist proclamation “Painting is dead” in 1918, photography emerged as the most radical medium of visual expression in a technological culture. The mechanical aspects of the camera eye, with its unique method of prosthetic seeing, served as a means for capturing urban flux. Lönberg-​Holm’s images exploit the camera’s ability to unsettle traditional modes of representation that was celebrated by the avant-​garde as the embodiment of a range of concepts such as mechanization, industrial materials, reproduction, duplication, lab work, speed, automatism, and the study of light. This exacting visual construction constitutes a young architect’s travel diary, one that documents a search for modern architecture from New York to Chicago and finally to Detroit. The views of New York’s iconic skyscrapers –​the Singer, Woolworth, and the Equitable Trust Buildings –​accentuate the cavernous streets. Billboards, marquees, and other urban ephemera form a specific category of snapshots. Yet the most striking photographs experiment with light exposures to document the dematerialization of

13

Knud Lönberg-Holm 31

Figure 1.7 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, New York, Times Square, 1923 Source: image courtesy of the Ubu Gallery, New York. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

Ely Jacques  Kahn’s Thomas Cusack Co. Building in Madison Square and the luminous traces of traffic in Times Square. These nocturnal visions transcend mere representation. Urban architecture is made invisible by light, as if matter had been transformed into kinetic thermal energy (Figure 1.7).45

23

32  Knud Lönberg-Holm Upon realizing that he had no interest in New York, Lönberg-​Holm set his sights on Chicago, the wellspring of modern architecture and the home of Root, Louis Sullivan, and Wright. The collection of views taken there document skyscrapers under construction, revealing building procedures that would be echoed in a more prosaic way by Neutra in his construction logbook, Wie Baut Amerika? (1927; How America Builds). The two émigrés shared a fascination with the radical potentials of utilitarian steel framing. After moving up as a draftsman to a position in construction supervision at Holabird and Root, Neutra documented the functional complexity of the construction phases of the Palmer House Hotel, with a European readership in mind. In Amerika: Die Stilbildung des neuen Bauens in den Vereinigten Staaten (1930; America: The Development of Style in New Buildings in the United States), a photo by Lönberg-​Holm reveals the unclad skeleton of a skyscraper going up. After eschewing the path of other émigrés that led to the office of Frank Lloyd Wright, and initially turning down a faculty position at the University of Michigan, Lönberg-​Holm landed his first job at the electric company Detroit Edison. The structures just beyond their office windows captivated him and he later recalled: My first job in the US was as architectural designer for Detroit Edison. Designing at that time (24) meant unifying the envelope, and as a European I  was apparently assumed to be an expert on the pseudo Tudor style then in vogue. I had taken the job after turning down an offer from U of M because I naively thought that an organization like Detroit Edison was receptive to functional design… From the old office building we had a delightful view of downtown Detroit. Some of the photos later published in Mendelsohn’s book Amerika were inspired from this view. One showed the backside of the Statler Hotel. When I showed my colleagues in the office the photo their response was –​where did you find that extraordinary structure? I  pointed out of the window. They never learnt to use their eyes (to observe).46 Louis Kamper’s Book Cadillac Hotel on Washington Boulevard, that broke ground in 1923 and that became the tallest building in town, was on view (Figure 1.8). He followed the erection of the now-​demolished 16-​story Statler Hotel on Grand Circus Park that was built in a neo-​renaissance style and the expansion of the Hotel Tuller. But shunning the historicist front facades, instead he captured the erection of metallic structures in tension and celebrated the “unselfconscious beauty” of the functional back facades –​a sensibility already prefigured in his Chicago Tribune Tower. Contemporary industrial architecture fascinated Europeans. Lönberg-​ Holm captured Albert Kahn’s River Rouge Factory and the Flint Motor Company. Trams and car parks reflect an interest in mobility. Repetitive

3

Knud Lönberg-Holm 33

Figure 1.8  Knud Lönberg-​Holm, Book Cadillac Hotel in Construction, Detroit, 1924 Source: image courtesy of the Ubu Gallery, New York. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

stacked building elements reify the reproducibility of mass-​ produced construction materials and predate the better-​known images in Albert Renger-​Patzsch’s Die Welt ist schön (1928; The World is Beautiful). Lönberg-​Holm’s work accentuates spatial and temporal relations that are inaccessible to the unaided eye to offer a compelling vision of industrial culture (Figure 1.9). Although it was not his intention to make his name as a photographer, these images were appropriated by his colleagues, many of whom felt free to manipulate them as part of the collage sensibility of the era. The De Stijl group found them fascinating and at the Bauhaus, Paul Citroen inserted a skyscraper into his famous montage Metropolis (1923).47 The night photo of the Cusack Building became part of Moholy-​Nagy’s visual film script Dynamic of the Metropolis, appearing in the Hungarian constructivist journal MA in 1924 and in the appendix of Malerie, Photographie, Film (1925; Painting, Photography, Film). After years of collecting photographs

43

34  Knud Lönberg-Holm

Figure 1.9 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, construction materials Source: image courtesy of Adrian Täckman, architect MAA. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

that exemplified the new vision, he published 100 of these images in the Bauhaus book. As a compositional tactic, the cinematic storyboard features juxtaposition and disjunction. According to Moholy-​Nagy, “the visual relationships knit together into a vital association of events in space and time,” one that brings the viewer actively into the dynamic of the city.48 Such an explanation also describes the effect of Lönberg-​Holm’s photo work. The Mendelsohn controversy A similar cinematic organization characterizes Mendelsohn’s groundbreaking publication Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (1926; America: An Architect’s Photobook), which was composed out of many borrowed images: one by the filmmaker Fritz Lang and 19 by Lönberg-​Holm. In 1924, at the introduction of Oud, Mendelsohn and Lönberg-​Holm met at the University of Michigan, where the Danish architect was then teaching. In this commission for the Berliner Tageblatt, which proved to be the apogee of the genre of European architects’ travel journals of the United States, almost all of the images document urban skyscraper districts in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, and Pittsburg. Upon its publication in December 1925, the book had an enormous impact and went into five editions in the first two years. Yet, of the original 77 photographs, those that best illustrate the main objective  –​to capture the cacophony and dynamics of the

53

Knud Lönberg-Holm 35 American city  –​were by Lönberg-​Holm, though the innovative structure was Mendelsohn’s creation.49 Amerika is organized in six chapters:  (1)  Typically American; (2) Exaggerated Civilization; (3) Center of Money –​Center of the World; (4) The Gigantic; (5) The Grotesque; and (6) The New –​The Coming. The last half of the book explores the future potential of metropolitan experience. The scroll-​like unfolding of images demonstrates the influence of Richter and Eggeling’s Absolute Cinema, and it was precisely this filmic quality that fascinated El Lissitzky in his review, “The Architect’s Eye,” when it appeared in a Moscow journal: This “Architect’s Album” which has just come out in Berlin is of course immeasurably more interesting than those photographs and postcards by which we have known America up to now. A first leafing through its pages thrills us like a dramatic film. Before our eyes move pictures that are absolutely unique. In order to understand some of the photographs you must lift the book over your head and rotate it. The architect shows us America not from a distance but from within, as he leads us into the canyon of streets50 With its acute visual immediacy and montage-​like structure, the book anticipated the city symphony genre of films that culminated with Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). The viewer of the time was struck by the disruptive visual experience and by a sense of contrast, a sensation that El Lissitzky transcribed into words when he appropriated Lönberg-​ Holm’s photograph Broadway at Night, a double-​exposed image of illuminated advertising, and transformed it into Rekord and Runner in the City (1926).51 Next: Chicago, grain elevators. Special trains bring grain from the country’s heartland, steamers carry it across the Great Lakes, all this grain is poured into underground mills and, as flour fills up the battery of silos. The next contrast: A Gothic church founded by the first sea pirates, against a background of skyscraper Banks, the churches of the latest land pirates. And suddenly a street at night, the flash of headlights illuminated signs, unbroken rows of lit-​up windows. And on the next page, Fifth Avenue –​a conglomeration of all the styles borrowed from every historic square in Europe. The New-​the coming. The steel skeletons of unfinished skyscrapers, powerful in their simplicity and honesty, merely bare skeletons awaiting an equivalent formation of their flesh.52

63

36  Knud Lönberg-Holm Produktion-​Reproduktion In reality, two counter-​ visions of American architecture are juxtaposed within the dynamic organization, which might be better understood as a collaboration. Mendelsohn captured the monumental timelessness of grain silos and other American colossus that were already familiar to architects from Gropius’ Werkbund Yearbook (1913) and Le Corbusier’s Towards an Architecture (1921). The other type of image transcends literal representation to reveal lines of force, temporality, and urban energy transformed into light. In departing from accustomed views, these counterpoints held the greatest relevance; “counter examples” is how Mendelsohn described them when he wrote to ask permission to include them, soon after he returned to Germany.53 Moholy-​Nagy’s essay “Produktion-​Reproduktion” in De Stijl (July 1922) offers a distinction that is especially relevant here, between reproduction or the mere transmission of content through a medium and production, which refers to the creative use of that medium.54 The productive force of Lönberg-​Holm’s images show an intentionality that was recognized by El Lissitzky, who commented that: “The modern architect has armed himself with a more modern instrument –​a small camera. He merely has to take a good look, and be able to see –​from therein consists all of art. And then he must be in control of the camera, and not the camera of him: he finds the point of view and releases the shutter.”55 These images reveal essential concerns for time and space that are reflected in Lönberg-​ Holm’s essays of the era. Moreover, the contrast between the two types of images brings to mind the famous opposition made by Reyner Banham between Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and Fuller’s Dymaxion House, in the celebrated conclusion of Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960). Banham argued that Fuller had created an acknowledged response to the machine age rather than a mere representation of it. Lönberg-​Holm’s images reveal architecture as instruments rather than monuments. The question of authorship that unfolded early on was never fully resolved. Mendelsohn thanked Lönberg-​Holm for the stimulating trip. He asked him to guide a client on a tour of a power plant and to the Statler Hotel on an upcoming visit. Lönberg-​Holm gave him permission to publish his photographs as “counter examples.”56 But when the book came out, the editorial house neglected to credit him. Adding to the insult, the subtitle “77 photos by the author” had appeared. It was van Eesteren who informed him of the omission and who intervened on his behalf, by sending a stern letter demanding that Mendelsohn remedy the situation by informing the public in a timely fashion and by insisting that it was not an “international tradition to publish the works of a colleague under one’s own name.”57 The reproach insulted Mendelsohn, given the close friendship that he had established with Lönberg-​Holm.58

73

Knud Lönberg-Holm 37 Their ongoing correspondence indicate much bad feeling. Mendelsohn claimed that “During my stay in America in 1924 you were kind enough to give me photos we had talked about in Ann Arbor. We discussed that I didn’t have to make those images myself because you were taking them for me.” Mendelsohn argued that his ambition was not to be a famous photographer. “This book could have been created with only other people’s work. It is not important who the author is.” He insisted that it was not a case of intellectual robbery but a shared point of view. “I did not make the book for vanity or money but only to serve the idea that we are working on and van Eesteren knows that too.”59 Eventually 16 images were credited to Lönberg-​ Holm in the book’s sixth printing in 1928. But in 1931, after Werner Graeff included an image in Es kommt der neue Fotograf (1929; Here Comes the New Photographer), he discovered that the rights had been sold to a publisher, Dr. Franz Stoedtner.60 From the archival evidence it is clear that Lönberg-​Holm felt slighted all of his life, given the trailblazing nature of the images.61 Nevertheless, he continued to photograph. The new work after 1927 reveals a mature and secure eye with images that concentrate on reproducible building materials and extreme viewpoints of automobile plants and other industrial structures. Europeans received the book with fascination, but the American reaction was consternation. In “Traffic and Building Art,” Henry-​Russell Hitchcock commented that: “The stunning city pictures compiled by Erich Mendelsohn in the book America, depend almost entirely on the skill of the photographers whose views he used; for the buildings in themselves were usually exceptionally poor.”62 Much later in Architectural Forum, Douglas Haskell recalled: It was just 27 years ago when the complacent downtown architects of New  York City were shocked out of their seats by a German picture book. It showed only the backsides of the big city’s most honored buildings; it declared that the fire escapes, water towers, and blank walls facing the elevation had more architecture in them than the splendid Gothic or Renaissance facades out front.63

The basic course at the University of Michigan More than a decade before the Bauhaus exiles would implement the school’s pedagogy in the United States, Lönberg-​Holm conducted the first studio to introduce the methodologies of the Vorkurs and its sister academy the VKhUTEMAS at the University of Michigan in 1924. Up to this time there had been little penetration of plastic experiments coming from the European vanguards. This controversial and long-​forgotten studio demonstrates that although Lönberg-​ Holm celebrated American building techniques, metropolitan life, and mass culture, all of which were for him indicative of a highly developed sense of “time,” he believed that the country had no

83

38  Knud Lönberg-Holm understanding of architecture as form and “space.” By introducing radical spatial conceptions and abstract working methods from abroad he was seeking to train American architects to offer more than just expedient solutions at the end of the construction process when they camouflaged utilitarian structures in classical cladding. At the recommendation of the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, an initial offer to teach came in 1923 from Emil Lorch (1870–​1963), the director of the architecture program, but Lönberg-​Holm had already taken a position with Detroit Edison. After his design for three unrealized technical buildings with horizontal bands of glass gained him a reputation at the firm for having a “deranged brain,” he reconsidered. Lorch was inspired by the arts and crafts pedagogy of Northern Europe that he believed Lönberg-​Holm must have been part of in Atlona. He was impressed by his Chicago Tribune project, noting: “It was one of those marked by modernity in its conception which is a point of view in which this school is interested.”64 The university seemed like a perfect venue, given that William Le Baron Jenney, the inventor of the Chicago steel frame, had been the first professor in 1876 and Louis Sullivan was a frequent visitor. In 1924, the college of architecture, the country’s third largest, still formed part of the engineering school. Two hundred and thirty students were offered a selection of degree programs, with many young women choosing a path of studies in decorative design. The school was proud of its regional independence and the faculty came from a variety of orientations. There were French-​educated professors, but a Beaux Arts approach in no way dominated. Ernest Wilby, an associate of Albert Kahn, brought a strictly utilitarian approach to his teaching. This variety reveals Lorch’s openness. As the founding director of the architecture department in 1906, he initiated a pedagogical challenge to the academicism that prevailed in American training.65 He invited Mendelsohn to lecture and he hoped to make Berlage a visiting professor. Hiring Saarinen was Lorch’s great coup. After the Finn moved from Chicago in November 1923, he held the rank of professor for two years before departing to become director of the Cranbrook Academy. With a select group of advanced students, his studio was dedicated to designing civic centers, aviation fields, waterfronts, and an architecture school campus. His emphasis on designing in plan and model was a novelty that was meant to move the students away from time spent rendering in the Beaux Arts tradition. Yet Lönberg-​ Holm recognized that Saarinen’s influence was assimilated superficially as a fashion.66 The idea of designing through model-​making was furthered, more radically so, by Lönberg-​Holm when he became a lecturer in “Elements of Design,” an introductory prerequisite and the meeting ground for those in three different four-​year degree programs, and in the professional five-​year course of study. Students could choose between his “basic course” and a traditional atelier led by a University of Pennsylvania graduate, Frederick

93

Knud Lönberg-Holm 39 O’Dell. But Lönberg-​Holm subverted the course description. The catalog described it as: An introductory course to the field of artistic design, decorative and architectural. Principles of design and the possibilities of design of line, color and form. Architectural elements, their form and function; the influence of material. The pier, lintel, arch, openings; the plan and roof. Methods of indication, rendering, lettering. Drawing exercises, modeling and lectures.67 He stretched this to the limits. In his trailblazing studio, the students generated their projects exclusively with three-​dimensional studies premised on the materiality of space. The didactic approach was questioned since model-​ making was given primacy over drawing. Years later Lorch apologized about the conservative environment that led to his dismissal, after several conservative professors wrote letters of complaint that led to Lönberg-​Holm’s release at the end of his contractual period.68 He was extending the radical pedagogy of the vanguards to America. An academic achievement, the Vorkurs, was the defining feature of the Bauhaus. Color and materiality were the primary focus of the course in its first iteration under Johannes Itten. After completing a six-​month core, students then moved on to concentrations in a variety of master-​led workshops. Spatial dynamics, construction and technology took on greater relevance after 1923, when the new leader, Moholy-​Nagy, reconceived it as a laboratory for industry with the assistance of Josef Albers. The models constructed by Lönberg-​Holm’s students, with their elision of suprematist, constructivist, and neoplastic effects, demonstrate the notion of generating form as a process (Figures 1.10 and 1.11). The approach was aligned with the pedagogical ideals after 1922 when the influence of De Stijl and the VKhUTEMAS permeated the Bauhaus and following van Doesburg’s residence in Weimar. Although he never became an official teacher, the Dutch artist set up an off-​site atelier in 1921 that attracted several students, including Graeff. It was there that van Doesburg met van Eesteren and El Lissitzky, whose prouns–​an interchange between painting and architecture –​had a dramatic impact on the De Stijl artist. But in his almost concurrent program of study, Lönberg-​Holm’s far-​ reaching ambition was to merge the spatial imagination and complexity of European architecture with America’s efficient construction methods and emphasis on process. In his fascination for American time-​based innovations he came to the realization that the country had no appreciation of space. At his urging, the students explored materials such as plaster, clay, and glass and the compositional principles of volume and plane.69 One of the students, Thornton Abell, recalled that Lönberg-​Holm sought to convey the central tenets of functionalism, by taking his group to Detroit, where they were encouraged to document the functional rear facades of skyscrapers, just as he had done in his photographic work.

04

Figures 1.10 and 1.11 Models from the basic course at the University of Michigan, 1924 Source: image courtesy of Adrian Täckman, architect MAA. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

14

Knud Lönberg-Holm 41 The theory of pure design Lorch’s initial embrace of such a radical pedagogy reflects his unusual trajectory that began when, as a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1899, he found himself amid an upheaval to forge an explicitly national style, alongside Sullivan and Wright. In 1901, while studying toward his master’s degree at Harvard University, he encountered Denman Waldo Ross (1853–​ 1935), a professor of fine arts and one of the originators of the theory of pure design, a methodology of abstract composition that suggested a path toward his goal. As a way of bridging Beaux Arts principles and engineering, Lorch adjusted it to architecture. He became an energetic follower and promoter, first in a series of lectures at the Chicago Architecture Club in 1901 that was attended by Claude Bragdon and Wright and later through the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the Architecture League of America, two organizations that he had been instrumental in founding. The theory was formulated by Ross and Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–​ 1922), two artists who were inspired collectors of Asian art. Ross’ book, A Theory of Pure Design:  Harmony, Balance, Rhythm (1907), instructed artists on the perception of form by drawing on psychological and physiological studies and through exercises using point, line, shape, and color. In his classes at Columbia University and Pratt Institute and in the manual Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers (1899), Dow elaborated didactic exercises with the elements of line, mass, and color, that sought to stimulate creativity and an appreciation of historical styles.70 Although it predates the Vorkurs by more than 20  years, the emphasis on point, line, and plane brings to mind the compositional ideals practiced by Wassily Kandinsky in his painting workshop after 1922. The scholar Marie Frank suggests that this approach paved the way for an appreciation of abstract art and architecture before the influx of European modernism. Its scientific, objective, and intuitive conception attracted notable artists such as Georgia O’Keefe, a follower of Dow; moreover, several of the promoters of the international style were exposed to the principles, specifically the Harvard modernists, Henry-​Russell Hitchcock and A. Everett “Chick” Austin. When Lorch’s former student, Joseph Hudnut, become dean of Harvard’s architecture school in 1936, he invited Gropius and other Bauhaus exiles to teach there after 1939.71 The analogy, however, wears thin, for it was the generation of space through model-​making as a technique for exploring form and the expressive quality of surface and materials, or what the constructivists called faktura, that differentiated Lönberg-​Holm’s pedagogy from the painterly concerns of pure design. This was truly at odds with the traditional training at the school, where students learned to sketch by copying plaster casts and spent days rendering in watercolor. With photographic documentation of the models as an integral part of the process, the students’ constructions

24

42  Knud Lönberg-Holm demonstrate the deployment of floating planes, cantilevered floors and interlocking volumes. The neoplastic polychrome patterns they designed for interior elements were meant to achieve a synthesis between painting and architecture. Each exercise was designed to address a different problem and to generate an array of iterations, but all ascribe to the genesis of spatial concepts by cutting from a solid block or through the use of horizontal and vertical planes or prisms, that reflect the notion of tension in space. The dynamic constructions create a world of relations, wherein three-​dimensional space is articulated as the interrelation of planar surfaces, rather than as mass. Instead of constructing buildings whose stability moves toward static equilibrium, these exercises celebrate an equilibrium of tensions and centrifugal forces. Private practice Lönberg-​Holm’s exercises testify to his expansion of the training of the Vorkurs and the VKhUTEMAS. Yet his independent design work was also the fruit of intense exchanges with Oud and van Eesteren during his first years in America. In their letters, they lament the actual state of architectural design despite their admiration for the country’s construction industry professionalism. The conviction that building processes are pivotal undergirds these projects that sought to fuse spatial experimentation with rational erection techniques. A  concern with the possibilities of prefabricated systems is conspicuous in an advert that Lönberg-​Holm placed at the time, in De Stijl volumes 73 and 74, for an intended company, Oxilic Construction Co., though there is not much evidence that the enterprise went any further.72 This concern is also evident in projects for a model house built with “steel lumber” (1924–​1925); the Radio Broadcasting Station (1925), the MacBride Residence (1924–​1925); and a Gasoline Filling Station (1925). The two iterations of the Steel Lumber House –​a prototype for a freestanding home with an enclosed yard –​demonstrate his desire to adapt a neoplastic aggregation of forms to a steel stud structure akin to skyscraper construction, something that would be achieved by Neutra in the Lovell Health House in 1930. In the two variations of the dwelling, a central volume containing the main living area is juxtaposed to an elongated rectangular wing perpendicular to it that houses the bedrooms. The symmetry of the composition is broken by a car garage and by minor elements such as the chimney. The application of polychrome punctuates the volumes and constructive elements with primary colors, and the non-​colors –​black, white, and gray (Figure 1.12).73 The detail drawings indicate that Lönberg-​Holm intended to create a prefabricated structural system that could adapt to a variety of design configurations. The drawings of the Radio Broadcasting Station present the project as a site-​less, dynamic, asymmetrical composition with a modern program. A glass stair element acts as the hinge by interlocking the different volumes

34

Knud Lönberg-Holm 43

Figure 1.12 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, small home steel lumber construction, 1925 Source: image courtesy of the Ubu Gallery, New York. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

of the composition around a vertical core. The architect took care to specify a composite construction technique combining a metal framing system with prefabricated concrete wall panels. The axonometric worm’s eye view, exploits the rotational qualities of the drawing method and emphasizes the centrifugal pull of the floating planes (Figure 1.13). A new way of designing and representing architecture, axonometric drawings were embraced by the avant-​garde during the 1920s as the negation of perspective, which was considered to be an image of appearance that limits space. While such projections have a long history, they were primarily associated with the work of engineers, and it is perhaps for this very reason that they were adapted as an important visual tool more closely aligned to the ideologies of the new objectivity. The ability to undertake complex spatial analysis implicit in the drawing technique  –​the solid image of a projected object does not change even if the viewpoint shifts –​was exercised with the goal of creating universal projections of space. Bauhaus students preferred isometric views in contrast to the De Stijl designers who studied

4

44  Knud Lönberg-Holm

Figure 1.13 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, radio broadcasting station, 1925 Source: image courtesy of the Ubu Gallery, New York. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

their compositions from above. Lönberg-​Holm deployed the inherent capacity of the axonometric to give the impression that the graphic projections extend into infinite space. He capitalized on the technique as a vehicle for abstract universal exploration in his delineations of the MacBride House, a freestanding country residence for his landlady, which according to the historian Marc Dessauce exhibits a controlled reconciliation of the opposing influences of rationalism

54

Knud Lönberg-Holm 45

Figure 1.14 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, isometric drawings of the MacBride House, 1925 Source: image courtesy of the Ubu Gallery, New York. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

and neoplasticism (Figure 1.14).74 During his time in Ann Arbor, Lönberg-​ Holm was a lodger in the home of a Vassar graduate, whose daughter studied medicine at the university. But naming the project for her may have been a pretext for a speculative experiment that was in dialogue with the “counter-​constructions” that came out of the renowned collaboration between van Eesteren, Gerrit Rietveld, and van Doesburg in Paris. Their innovative residential designs for a collector’s house and a hypothetical artist’s dwelling were exhibited at Léonce Rosenberg’s L’Effort Moderne Gallery in October 1923.75 In his letters to Lönberg-​Holm, van Eesteren stressed the importance of such collective enterprises. Among the publications that he sent was a book by the French mathematician Henri Poincaré (1854–​1912), whose work on simultaneity inspired their exploration of four-​dimensional space, a theme of great importance to van Doesburg. During the time that they shared their ideas, the Dutch architect was fashioning himself as an urban designer in France. But upon his return to Holland, he was also seriously considering

64

46  Knud Lönberg-Holm immigrating and he asked his friend to help him secure an appointment at the University of Michigan.76 Their vibrant ongoing conversation drove the design of the MacBride House. The project breaks away from the traditional static axis of construction to transform the home into an object to be circled around, a system of floating planes and interpenetrating volumes, which appears with an X-​ ray transparency in the drawings. The house is shown as a series of planes rather than closed volumes that are hovering, dynamic, and detached from the ground. The traditional orientations between floor, ceiling and wall are overturned, yet paradoxically, at the same time the home has been masterly fitted to a site featuring a slope with a change in level, as depicted in the elevations and the model. The diaphanous relationship between the planes is highlighted in the black line axonometric drawing. The elevation demonstrates experimentation with polychrome surfaces in the use of gray for the walls and primary colors for the window frames. The flat cantilevered roof and the exaggerated horizontality in the more rationalist project for a Gasoline Filling Station demonstrates an interest in a typology linked to highway mobility that prefigures an article on the subject that Lönberg-​Holm wrote in 1930 for Architectural Record. The architect took great care to call out the specific materials.77 Lönberg-​ Holm’s design sensibility developed in concert with his Dutch colleagues, but with a vision adapted to American construction technologies and lifestyles (Figure 1.15).

Figure 1.15 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, study for a gasoline station, 1925 Source: image courtesy of the Ubu Gallery, New York. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

74

Knud Lönberg-Holm 47 Model before drawing The integration of his own experiments with the methodologies offered in his studio met with great criticism despite his students’ loyalty. The theme was revisited years later when Lorch recalled that he had defended the agenda:  “I actually suggested that you continue for at least another year because only by continued experiment would the validity of the model before drawing idea be established.” Lorch had taken photographs of the work to an ACSA meeting in New York, but he explained that: The small images were not as convincing as they were to me having seen the models develop along with the idea. Others here felt and it appeared that some of these students lost out in drawing. But that is a long story … One of our difficulties was that while progressive teaching was desired by me nearly all those who taught here or who could be secured were of conservative background.78 Lönberg-​Holm expressed an unfavorable view of the education system at the university to van Eesteren, although he did return there as a lecturer from 1948 to 1951: Architecture is taught as if it were painting. The students have 12 hours for the plans and two weeks to render. Saarinen only lets his students work in model and plan. The Americans cannot conceive of architecture as anything but show houses with nice colors. The basic design principles that I introduced were met with perplexity. Although the students have talent they have no independence due to the fact that education is mechanized like a trade school.79 With his contract rescinded, he returned to Detroit to work for Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls, a firm founded in 1855 that specialized in industrial structures and material testing in their engineering laboratory. Following World War I  and after Albert Kahn’s collaborator Wirt Rowland was hired in 1922, the staff grew to more than 270. The office practiced the kind of utilitarian design that he had sought at Detroit Edison but nonetheless he found the environment to be mechanistic, as indicated in another dispatch: Or this: Mechanical engineering office of well-​known Detroit architectural firm. 40 men bent over drawing boards. Boss in center. 10 o’clock. Boss looks at watch. Taps table with pencil. Draftsmen along windows stand up,  –​open windows  –​sit down again. 10–​15 Boss taps again. Draftsmen stand up. Close windows. Sit down again. No lost motion. The wooden soldiers of the Russian cabaret are the most popular entertainment when schoolchildren perform.80

84

48  Knud Lönberg-Holm In their formal sophistication, the projects designed while at the University of Michigan demonstrate the desire to merge neoplasticism and suprematist spatial explorations with a concern for American typologies, prototypes, and prefabrication. As a mentor, he exerted an indelible influence on a number of students. Abell went on to design House no. 7 of the California Case Study program by drawing on principles from the studio and elements chosen from Sweet’s Catalog. Maynard Lyndon (1913–​1998) benefited from a European itinerary with visits to the Rietveld House and introductions to Le Corbusier and van Eesteren.81 Lönberg-​Holm conveyed to them the lessons of the seminal works of modern architecture and an appreciation for the timelessness of space, which he hoped to merge with the national obsession with temporal processes.

Reflections of a foreign correspondent By drawing on his extensive network, Lönberg-​Holm played a key role as an agent of transatlantic exchange before the European design migration of the 1930s. These interchanges ranged from personal dispatches to contributing projects to avant-​garde journals. After 1930, when he became a staff member for Architectural Record, he disseminated the work of his colleagues by introducing their projects as innovative technical solutions. This matrix of connections made him a natural choice for Sigfried Giedion and Neutra, who offered him the role of East Coast delegate to CIAM in 1929 when they were trying to put together a working American chapter. It is a position that he held until the organization dissolved in 1959. He remained true to the founding principles of the La Sarraz Declaration that stressed the importance of the industrial standardization of building, and economic concerns. To the frustration of Giedion, the foundation of a consolidated American chapter in the Depression proved difficult since despite their interest, architects were remiss in paying the membership dues.82 Neutra sought a delegate with the aim of creating “not just a union but to establish a close unity with industry related to American conditions.” Lönberg-​Holm’s most notable contribution was the Detroit survey for the seminal CIAM 4, the Functional City Congress in 1933, which he achieved with the support of the SSA. He was later engaged in the American CIAM Chapter for Relief and Postwar Planning in 1944, and he elaborated the theme for CIAM 6, the first congress held after World War II in Bridgewater, England in 1947. He brought to the task his many affiliations with the European vanguards. The G Group Throughout the 1920s and later, Lönberg-​Holm connected with the artists and architects who rallied around the short-​lived magazine G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung (1923–​1926), whom he had met during the

94

Knud Lönberg-Holm 49 formation of international constructivism.83 With a Dadaist and constructivist spirit, Richter, El Lissitzky, Mies van der Rohe, Graeff, and Kiesler, among others, created the first German magazine to champion the relation of the arts, architecture, and film in a technological world. The enduring impact of the five issues that came out defied the journal’s ephemerality. Acting across a number of disciplinary fields, the group exploited the polemical and mutable connotations of the word Gestaltung, meaning form-​creation. Allied to this was their emulation of the constructive processes and technical solutions of nature, specifically plants –​a highly abstract organicist aspiration that arose out of Mies’ interest in the work of the Viennese botanist Raoul Heinrich Francé (1874–​1943), an inventor of bionics, which was referred to as biotechnik.84 The idea that there are no formal problems, only building problems –​a guiding principles of the Neue Bauen espoused by Mies in G–​proved to be a shared ambition. One of Lönberg-​Holm’s most prized possession was a copy of Mies’ “Aphorisms on Architecture and Form,” which appeared in the first issue in 1923. The text was accompanied by drawings of the Concrete Office Building that Mies sent with a small sketch.85 The first line, “We reject all aesthetic speculation, all doctrine, and all formalism,” would be used as an armament in Lönberg-​Holm’s critique of the international style in Shelter in 1932, where he adapted the same terse and minimalist language. When Mies began to concentrate on practice as the director of the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung (Weissenhof Estate) the two architects resumed contact. A prelude to the foundation of CIAM, this milestone for the modern movement was sponsored by the Deutsche Werkbund in 1927 and it involved the creation of 60 models of workers’ housing by Mies, Le Corbusier, Gropius, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Stam, Oud, and ten other architects. In 1926, Graeff, who was then the head of publicity for Die Wohnung (The Dwelling), invited Lönberg-​Holm to contribute to a collateral exposition when Mies made it clear that he wanted to include only pioneering figures.86 Graeff joked that they would have to show only engineering works when Lönberg-​ Holm had difficulty suggesting any significant modern American architecture. He shared his text from G3,“The New Engineer,” which proclaimed that “The new engineer does not modify, he creates afresh: that is to say he does not improve but provides an absolutely elemental fulfillment of every demand.”87 Lönberg-​ Holm recognized the Weissenhofsiedlung as a culminating moment for the Neue Sachlichkeit that established the international style as a discernable movement. He shared this sentiment in the Dutch journal i10: The Stuttgart exposition has evidently been a very important effort. Are the ideas of five years ago already conventionally agreed upon truths? The planideas [sic] seem rather conventional. They have been carried out with modern productionmethods [sic] –​and up-​to-​date constructions, but seem to indicate that the social structure has not been radically

05

50  Knud Lönberg-Holm changed. In other words:  pure form and industrial methods can very well be applied to the existing society.88 He noted that the exposition was a tremendously interesting experiment and “an established fact that cannot be overlooked … How do our American professional brothers react? They cannot take it.” His first contact with Kiesler –​who had joined the international constructivists and De Stijl, following the success of his stage set for Karel Capek’s play RUR at the theater in Kurfurstendamm in 1923 –​came when the Austrian architect was helping to organize the exhibit in Stuttgart. Their shared interest in van Doesburg’s “Manifesto of Tensionism” is on display in Kielser’s editorship of G3, where he published “City in Space,” and in the installation for the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925. When Jane Heap of the Little Review invited Kiesler to bring the work to her gallery in 1926, he and his wife Steffi settled in New York. The two architects reconnected in 1927. By 1930 they were meeting often in Greenwich Village, at times with Fuller. ABC Lönberg-​ Holm’s ideological outlook would prove to be closest to the extreme sachlich, anti-​aesthetic materialism of the Swiss constructivist ABC group with their commitment to production, leftist politics, and collective action. ABC:  Beiträge zum Bauen, a primer for construction rather than architecture, was founded by Stam and El Lissitzky in Zurich in 1923, with the contributing members Emil Roth, Hans Schmidt, Hannes Meyer, and Hans Wittwer. The core concerns elucidated in the nine issues published from 1924 to 1928 were the application of scientific principles to socially relevant building and the industrialization of building methods.89 A strictly architectural journal, ABC broke the mold of interdisciplinary magazines such as Veshch and G. The colophon stated the editors’ frank intentions: “to clarify the problem and process of design, the technical, economic and social aspect of design of cities, housing, and workplace,” by rejecting what they considered to be the primacy of form in movements such as De Stijl. The faction argued for a function-​oriented architecture modeled on Tatlin’s ideal constructivism. “Amerika,” Lönberg-​Holm’s rebuke of architecture in the United States, appeared in the opening segments of the inaugural issue, which showcased El Lissitzky’s “Element and Invention,” a seminal text that sought to systematize a means of expression for design. In this issue, Stam’s essay “Collective Design” urged the artist to master scientific facts, to be at the side of engineers, to understand materials, and “to comprehend the great organic interrelationship that redeems all things from the conditions of isolated objects and orders and subordinates them to that totality of laws which govern the universe.”90

15

Knud Lönberg-Holm 51 Prefabrication, standardization, and programmatic functions were Meyer’s central focus as editor of the second issue, where he argued that the implementation of new materials, technologies, and methods of construction should not be subordinated to aesthetics. The functional typography, matter-​ of-​fact illustrations, isometric drawings, and precise mathematical formulas for calculating the qualities of sunlight, acoustics, and heat gave this issue the appearance of a trade journal. Meyer’s idea of pure construction –​his formula “function × economy” and his call for an anti-​monumental and serially produced architecture made of lightweight materials –​bring to mind Fuller’s equation “dynamism plus efficiency” for the Dymaxion House. As an adherent to a strict and militant strain of functionalism, Meyer called for universal forms of organization and he believed that propaganda was a form of the times. Lönberg-​Holm shared the worldview elucidated in the polemical text “The New World,” which viewed building as a total organization of life processes. They both promoted the idea that the artist’s studio should become a scientific laboratory.91 For Lönberg-​Holm, like Meyer, building is thought of as a biological and technical process of interrelations and interactivity. In 1928, at van Eesteren’s urging, Meyer, who had recently replaced Gropius as the director of the Bauhaus, wrote to Lönberg-​Holm in Detroit to offer him the opportunity to lead the newly initiated area of construction as a Baumeister in the school’s first architecture department. In a departure from the pedagogical objectives of his predecessor, his aspiration was to educate the artist as a production engineer. After Gropius, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and Moholy-​Nagy left, Meyer’s controversial restructuring of the school aimed to establish a scientific orientation by introducing studies in building, engineering, photography, the science of work, psychology, and advertising. He sent a brochure that elaborated upon the heterogeneous approach.92 While stressing the “collectivist orientation in our common work,” he assured Lönberg-​Holm that “I am looking for a personality from architecture that has a strong spirited effect in all areas of cultural expression.” He was acquainted with his text in ABC, and their mutual friend Oud had shared his photographs. Although the yearly remuneration was a modest 8,000 Deutsche Mark with a five-​year contract, Meyer told him that “the position has freedom and the possibility of being active in building projects will be promoted.” Lönberg-​Holm declined the job due to institutional delays and in the end Meyer was forced out in 1930 and set-​up a foreign brigade in Russia. They remained in contact through their work in CIAM, but by the time Lönberg-​Holm visited the Soviet Union in 1937, Meyer had already moved to Mexico.93 Reflections in i10 Lönberg-​Holm’s closest personal ties were to van Eesteren and Oud, who gained his understanding of America from his friend. Although he was

25

52  Knud Lönberg-Holm commissioned to design a house for Philip Johnson’s mother and was canonized in the international style show, he never actually set foot in the country. On his way to the United States in 1923, Lönberg-​Holm visited him and, impressed by the Dutch contribution to modernism, he wrote back saying that he wished that he stayed in Holland. Although they had not known each other for very long, the Dutch architect considered him as part of his innermost circle of friends.94 They acknowledged that this was a vivid moment for architecture. Amsterdam baroque was coming to an end. The Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts in 1925 had proven to be an apotheosis. A new architecture was developing. “One shouldn’t want it too fast. It has to grow slowly. Money earned quickly is lost. There is a good base. A plant that grows too fast is not beautiful.” Oud recognized that the spirit of America is “open to everything organic” and that functionalism had emerged from the work of Sullivan and Wright.95 “America:  Reflections,” a text that Lönberg-​ Holm sent to his Dutch friends, drew a rebuttal from Henry-​Russell Hitchcock after it appeared in the short-​lived journal i10 in 1928, where Oud was the architecture editor. In a departure from journals of a single group such as ABC or G, the Dutch anarchist Arthur Lehning (1899–​2000) created a multilingual vehicle for diverse avant-​garde groups, left-​wing ideologues, and cultural writers such as Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin. Published from 1927 to 1929, i10 followed the fleeting hope of an organized constructivist international. Cultural renewal, transnational debate, and experimentation were the overriding objectives of the loose coalition of contributors from the Bauhaus, De Stijl, and constructivism. Moholy-​Nagy’s unique graphic design forged together the dynamic techniques representative of the varied affiliates.96 Their exchange anticipates the debate between the SSA and the curators of the international style exhibition in 1932 in Shelter. In Lönberg-​Holm’s essay, the emphasis on space and time reflects the incorporation of Einstein’s theory of relativity into artistic discourse of the era and especially the polemics of van Doesburg. But it also serves as a device to contrast American and European architecture and it brings to mind Lönberg-​Holm’s photographic celebration of temporal urban phenomena. The central question was: When would America develop its own modern architecture? America’s greatest achievement so far has been in the field of pure ‘time-​ problems.’ ‘Time is money.’ America has sufficient space. The result was a dominating appreciation of time. America has to ‘catchup’ with Europe. Has to do in one century what Europe did in ten. Europe –​on the other hand –​always faced the opposite problem: space. Time seemed eternal. The European architecture is a clear indication of this space-​feeling. The architectural understanding you can find in Europe –​the appreciation of form and space, is unknown in America. What appeals to the American in the European monuments is the history

35

Knud Lönberg-Holm 53 element-​time. Form means very little. What is going on in Europe at the present time –​what is behind the interest for America –​American production, American methods is –​I believe –​a new understanding of time as an essential element of life. Final aim: Time –​ Space. America has only developped [sic] the ‘time-​faculty.’ The finest intelligence has been working with time-​problems. Communications. Autos. Elevators. Railways. Moving-​ pictures. And first of all:  Production. Efficiency: time-​saving. Time-​ study is a profession. And a highly paid profession. What the Peters church was for the European Renaissance is Henry Ford’s assembly line for America of to-​day. The most perfect expression for a civilization whos [sic] God is efficiency. Detroit is the Mecca of this civilization. And the pilgers [sic] come from all over the world to meditate before this always moving line. American constructions –​inspiring for Europeans –​have got their form from the construction-​methods –​based on efficiency. The Europeans reenforced [sic] concrete constructions are solutions of space problems. The construction is in itself something new. The American frame-​construction is very old as structural idea, new are only the erection methods.97 The crux of his argument is that despite having the technological prowess, the latent potential, and pioneers such as Sullivan and Wright, the United States had not produced a truly authentic modern architecture. It underscores an emerging debate in the early 1930s, as American critics recognized that the sources of modern architecture had been appropriated from the United States. Cultural figures concerned with national identity urged the creation of a native style by repatriating the utilitarian vernacular sources of the modern movement.98 In his rebuttal, Hitchcock noted that Lönberg-​Holm’s photographs were more communicative than his essay. The images contrast the historicist front facades of buildings at the University of Michigan with the functional backs. He agreed that the country had failed to create its own modern architecture but he claimed that Henry Hobson Richardson had been the originator of the Neue Sachlichkeit, an idea that was clearly appropriated from Lewis Mumford. Lönberg-​Holm had taken the time-​space contrast too far, he argued. A space feeling could be found in the architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe and Richardson dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is rather surprising to find Hitchcock as a contributor to a left-​wing journal; after all, he would discount the link between architecture and radical politics in 1932. But with this early piece of criticism he was just becoming a cultural entrepreneur of modernism. From the outset his pictorial approach emphasized a split between structure and appearance in architecture that he claimed had begun in the Renaissance. In 1920, after originally intending to study architecture at Harvard, Hitchcock discovered that he

45

54  Knud Lönberg-Holm disliked the Beaux Arts system. He came under the influence of the medievalist Kingsley Porter and switched to art history. By 1926, he had read Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture and in the winter of 1927 and 1928 he had the opportunity to visit the Stuttgart enclave, which impressed him as “a living historical style.” A homage to his Harvard colleague Peter van der Meulen Smith appeared in i10 following the young architect’s death in Berlin in 1928.99 Hitchcock considered this talented designer, who worked in the Paris atelier of Andre Lurçat, to be the architect who could provide an American response to the international style. Hitchcock elaborated upon these viewpoints in his 1929 survey of architecture since 1750, Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration, where he reconciled different interpretations of modern architecture by placing Otto Wagner, Berlage, Behrens, and Frank Lloyd Wright under the banner of the “new traditionalist” as architects who modified historical styles to adapt to new technologies and modes of life. Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies, and Oud were, for him, the “new pioneers.” In his rebuke to Lönberg-​Holm he took offense at the idea that America did not have a sense of space, although he agreed that the time was near for the country to develop its own style. They just differed as to how that was to come about: The American is probably far more safely placed as regards the architecture of the future than the European on account of what Gertrude Stein calls his ‘disembodiment.’ When upon the flood of the raw material of architecture poured forth for economic reasons an aesthetic conscience comes in America to set form, that aesthetic conscience, more ‘disembodied,’ more ‘pure’ than that of Europe, is far less likely to forget architecture the art for architecture as a part of sociology.100 How could the international style be Americanized? In this deliberation, Hitchcock invoked Stein’s reflections on the “disembodied abstract quality” of the American character, which she considered to be evident in the vitality of space, the freedom of mobility, the serial production of automobiles, the notion of repetition, and the aridity and individualism of New Englanders such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and other transcendentalists. Germans had method, but not organization, she said. Instead of centuries of rooted land cultivation as in Europe, Americans possessed a propensity for aimless regional wandering.101 Lönberg-​Holm, if not Hitchcock, would soon find the response to this central question in Fuller’s Dymaxion dwelling, which was being articulated at that very moment. As an early enthusiast of this prototype, Lönberg-​Holm was intrigued by the deployment of advanced performative technologies and the aesthetic possibilities opened up by an endless cycle of permutation and elimination: a project disembodied like industrial machinery and based on relentless modification and technological expansion.

5

Knud Lönberg-Holm 55

Architecture in the industrial age Science has changed man’s relation to nature and to society. The individual and society alike are forced to find a new balance, a new synthesis. Relations to a visible world have become relations to invisible energy. We have discovered the close relations between phenomena apparently unrelated and gained a new understanding of the growth of civilization. Illusions have been destroyed. New needs exist, particularly the necessity for a reorganization of life and society to deal with the new reality. We enjoy form as a demonstration of function and have extended and deepened our conception of beauty. We are sensitive to new qualities.102 Productivism –​the Soviet notion of the artist as an inventor and organizer in the emancipated factory, directly engaged in the process of production –​ proved to be the ideology that most shaped Lönberg-​Holm’s identity and that motivated his interventionism into the industrialization of building once he was hired by Architectural Record in 1930. Moreover, productivism served as the conceptual rubric of the first international exhibition of modern architecture held in the country, an event that he participated in with his Radio Broadcasting Station. And it figures prominently in his text “Architecture or Organized Space” that demonstrates how his worldview evolved in the United States. Despite Johnson and Hitchcock’s claim that the international style exhibition of 1932 was the first of its kind, this was not the case. Five years earlier in 1927, Jane Heap of the Little Review had organized the Machine-​Age Exposition–​with the initial title International Exposition of New Systems of Architecture–​an eclectic mix of art, architecture, and machine-​fabricated objects that explicitly adhered to the productivist ideology that dominated the circles connected to Lönberg-​ Holm.103 Markedly different from the ideologically neutral MoMA show, Heap embraced speculative projects and entire movements that were edited out by their streamlined curatorial agenda. It was held a year after the cutting-​edge International Exhibition of Theatre of 1926, that featured Kiesler’s innovative time-​space installation and where the theater director Prampolini proclaimed a genealogy from futurism to constructivism in the catalog. As the sole editor of the important literary journal Little Review after the departure of the founder, Margaret Anderson, to live in Italy in 1924, Heap shifted the focus to the visual arts. By mobilizing a broad alliance across international art movements that included futurism, Dadaism, surrealism, and constructivism, she invigorated the journal by opening a gallery and coordinating the exhibition content with the print issues. After Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International appeared in the winter issue of 1922, she actively promoted a machine-​age agenda by proclaiming the engineer to

65

56  Knud Lönberg-Holm be America’s true artist and in the promotion of camaraderie among international practitioners.104 The productivist spirit was reified in the installation. Visitors to the empty industrial loft in the Scientific America Building entered a space that celebrated the exposed girders and unpainted plaster walls. From May 16 to 28, 440 works of architecture, painting, and machine components such as ventilators, valves, and gears, were lit by ordinary tin pails acting as reflectors. The daring approach became the model for MoMA’s 1934 Machine Art Exhibition; it catalyzed the invention of the industrial design profession and the streamlining craze in the 1930s; and it brought together projects that had been exhibited in Berlin in 1922. Most of the 60 designers, including Gropius, van Doesburg, and the Polish architect Szymon Syrkus, were constructivist colleagues of Lönberg-​Holm.105 The press and public were most captivated by the survey of Russian collectives. Although it is not known if Buckminster Fuller visited the exhibition, there are certainly striking affinities between the Dymaxion House and the cable structures and radio masts celebrated in the revolutionary work of the VKhUTEMAS, OSA, ASNOVA, the Vesnin Brothers, Moisei Ginzburg, Konstantin Melnikov, and El Lissitzky.106 It seems plausible to imagine that he became familiar with this work through Lönberg-​Holm, just as he learned of Le Corbusier’s five points from Paul Nelson. The selection of projects here was very similar to the First Exhibition of Modern Architecture held in Moscow in 1922, and in the catalog a productivist vision was elucidated in the essay “The Americanization of Art” by the Ukrainian-​American artist Louis Lozowick, who had spent time in Russia and in Berlin with the constructivists when they organized their show at the van Diemen Gallery.107 The origins of this productivist ideology, can be traced back to the constructivist response to Lenin’s New Economic Policy, when objects in the industrial arena became the central focus for the communist theorists Boris Arvatov, Osip Brik, and Boris Kushner. In their reaction to the shift from artisanal fabrication to the machine they declared the factory to be the new site of collective practice where art would be allied to labor. In such an experiential research laboratory, art would be situated within the realm of production. The constructivist artist as a technician would facilitate improved techniques and design. The goal was to reconfigure the meaning of artist-​ worker and product by transforming consciousness of production itself. Architecture or organized space This productivist outlook is on full display in “Architecture or Organized Space,” the essay that Lönberg-​Holm submitted to A. Lawrence Kocher, the managing editor at Architectural Record, when he was being considered for a post in 1929. A year earlier Kocher had pronounced a “Delphic utterance” claiming that the magazine would usher in a new era as it moved away from a Beaux Arts approach toward one offering a broad view of modern

75

Knud Lönberg-Holm 57 architecture. But Kocher rejected the text, claiming that it needed more clarification to make it comprehensible to the lay architect.108 The essay resonates among the many manifestos of international constructivism, but it also reflects Lönberg-​ Holm’s first-​ hand confrontation with American culture in its call for an architecture as cutting-​edge as the country’s technological inventiveness. In directing it to professionals, his aim was to map out a future path, and he did so by claiming that an architecture based on aesthetics no longer held any validity, given the transformation of society and human affinities to time-​space. The problems of building could not be resolved by the application of a superficial modern style. Instead, he urged city planning premised on the organic functions of a community that could lead to a change in the tools and methods of building. Lönberg-​Holm argued that: Arts and crafts has become science and industry … Matter as a solid has been destroyed. Instead of cities closed in by fortifications we have the metropolitan region existing as a sum of relations between individual units; instead of solid stone constructions, metal tubes and trusses; instead of pressure, tension; instead of steam, electricity. In expressing an antipathy to “mass gravity buildings as monuments and media of self-​expression,” he claimed that under these new conditions architects had clearly lost their leadership. At the end of the decade, the new direction that can be discerned in his outlook goes beyond mere commentary about American innovation to actually offer a proposition built on the idea of collaborative research. Lönberg-​Holm claimed that collective problems require collective thinking. He proposed a new economically independent research institute, an experimental laboratory for the analysis of constructive problems and information about building and the community. He promoted this idea throughout his career. But the manifesto also indicates a specific interest in the idea of harnessing invisible energy in architecture. Such an energetics viewpoint is explicit in this fragment: Matter, light and color we conceive as visible energy that can be measured and harnessed. Ornament and decoration have lost their value as symbols and have become atavistic exhibitions. We have discovered new relations between our physical surrounding and psychological reactions. Aesthetic has become psychology; time a new dimension. The idea of energy as a unifying social and cultural program is representative of a larger paradigm that permeated the thinking of international constructivists who assimilated the theories of the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–​1932), that made the laws of conservation and entropy the conceptual basis for all physical and social processes. At the Bauhaus in

85

58  Knud Lönberg-Holm 1927, the Nobel Prize-​winning scientist promoted his theories of social energetics, the organization of the sciences, internationalism and color, which became pervasive in the thinking of the artists and architects affiliated to Lönberg-​Holm. This energetics imperative was also invoked in Bogdanov’s Tektology, another important source for international constructivism.109 For Lönberg-​Holm, energy and luminosity are paradigms of flow and the highest manifestation of matter is light. The transformation of energy also implies invisible architecture, a concept prophesized by Lönberg-​Holm when he first met Buckminster Fuller in New York in 1929. Invisible architecture would arise from the evolution of ever more immaterial structural and environmental control systems, allowing man to go into any climactic condition or ambience unencumbered. Such a vision is prefigured in his night visions of urban flux, where buildings are dematerialized by light and kinetic energy as a universal force. Lönberg-​Holm promoted building as a total life-​organizing process with an energetics worldview that would be further elaborated upon in the 1930s. His work of the 1920s correlated the many divergent currents and confluences of the vanguards to American conditions. The synthesis of the paradigms of universality, collectivity, tensionism, standardization, organization, energetics, and productivism would lead him to plot a course for functionalism in America. It is this synthesis that sets the stage for his collaboration with Fuller and the SSA. Notes 1 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “Architecture in the Industrial Age,” Arts and Architecture (April 1967): 22. 2 Interview with Karl Lonberg-Holm, May 2011. 3 Hans Kai Turin-​Nielsen graduated from the Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole in 1907. From 1920 to 1924 he participated in the Studiebyen in Hellerup, a garden city project of working class housing in Copenhagen’s Gentofte municipality. 4 Interview with Karl Lonberg-​Holm, May 2011. I am grateful to Adrian Täckman for some of this information. 5 Lars Kjær, “Tråden  –​Værftseventyret,” last modified 2012, http://​koegearkiverne.dk. 6 J. Lauritzen, “The Heritage of J. Lauritzen,” www.j-​l.com/​timeline, last modified 2003. 7 “Værftsgårdens historie,” ‎ Historie, www.vaerftsgaarden.dk/​home/​historie. 8 Anton Rosen (1859–​1920), an important precursor, was a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy, who became the director in 1925. He experimented with regional iterations of jugenstil, arts and crafts, and vernacular nordic classicism. His designs for the Gerthasminde Garden City (1912–​1914) drew upon English precedents. 9 Seven issues were published from 1926 to 1928. “Tradition and Modernism” appeared in volume 3, October 1927. See:  Jan Dah, “Kritisk Revy Over Arbejdernes Boliger,” Arbejderhistorie, vol. 4 (2002): 18–​35. 10 They participated in the Studiebyen in Hellerup, alongside of Turin and Rosen. See: Kevin Mitchell, “Denmark” in Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Architecture (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 353–​355. 11 Jakstein to KLH, February 27, 1923, Box V, Folder 2, KLH-​A.

95

Knud Lönberg-Holm 59 12 They planned to meet in Detroit, but KVE returned to Denmark following a bout of mental instability and died in 1931. 13 For an account of KVE’s typography, see:  Mads Nygaard Folkmann, “Type Design: A Part of Danish Design Tradition,” Mind Design, vol. 4, no. 1 (December, 2007): www.dcdr.dk/​uk. 14 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “Den Moderne Bygningskunst og den Danske Akademiske Arkitekt,” Bygmesteren, vol. 14 (April 7, 1923); “Moderne Arbejds-​Metoder I Husbygningen,” Bygmesteren, vol. 15 (April 14, 1923): 85–​ 88; “Part II” Bygmesteren, vol. 16 (April 21, 1923): 91–​93; “Den Moderne Bygningskunst,” Bygemesteren, vol. 19 (May 12, 1923); and “Chicago Tribune Konkurrencen,” Bygmesteren, vol. 27 (July 7, 1923): 162. 15 Jakstein saved Hansen’s villas from demolition during the Nazi era. Among his publications on the architect are: “C.F. Hansens Rat-​und-​Arresthaus,” Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst, vol. 10 (1926): 222–​239; and Landbaumeister Christian Friedrich Hanst. (Neumunster in Holstein: Karl Wachholtz Verlag, 1937). 16 Jakstein to KLH, January 27, 1923 and February 27, 1923, Box V, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 17 They corresponded from January 3, 1923 until 1932. 18 Jakob Detlef Peters (1889–​1934) was born in Schleswig-​Holstein. Before collaborating with Behrens, he was a stonemason’s apprentice in Hamburg; he attended trade school in 1907 and worked as a draftsman in Dusseldorf from 1913 to 1914. In Los Angeles, he became the art director at the Famous Lasky Players (1924–​1927). He founded Peters by Jock, Brothers Modern American Design Office, whose most notable commission was the interior design of Bullock’s Wilshire Department Store. 19 The castle was destroyed by Allied air raids during World War II. See: “Ein Stück Altona:  Das Donner-​Schloss” Altona Info, last modified October 2011, www. altona.info/​2011/​10/​04/​ein-​stueck-​altona-​das-​donner-​schloss. 20 Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst (VII Heft 9/​10): 258 and 289–​291. 21 See:  Miles David Samson, “German–​ American Dialogues and the Modern Movement Before the Design Migration, 1910–​ 1933” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1988). 22 Gropius to KLH, June 4, 1923, Box V, Folder 1, KLH-​A. 23 Moholy-​Nagy to KLH, 15 October, 1923, Box V, Folder 1, KLH-​A. 24 See:  Rosemarie Bletter, ed. Adolf Behne:  The Modern Functional Building (Los Angeles, CA:  Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1996). 25 Behne also published KLH’s work in “Ein Wolkenkratzer-​Wettbewerb,” Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (January 1923): 63–​64. 26 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 130. 27 Bletter, Adolf Behne. 28 “Hooge Gebouwen in de Handelscentra van Europa en Amerika,” Wendingen, vol. 3 (1923): 9. 29 J.J.P. Oud, “Bijeen Deens Ontwerp voor de Chicago Tribune,” Bouwkundig Weekblad, vols. 44–​45 (November, 1923): 456–​458. Herman George Scheffauer, “Dynamic Architecture: New Forms of the Future,” The Dial, vol. 70 (March, 1921): 323–​328. 30 Henry-​Russell Hitchcock, Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (New York: Payson and Clarke, Ltd., 1929), 200. 31 Ogonjok, vol. 4 (Moscow 1923). 32 El Lissitzky, “Americanism in European Architecture,” in El Lissitzky:  Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky (London:  Thames & Hudson, November 1992). This was originally published in Krasnaya Niva, vol. 49 in 1925.

06

60  Knud Lönberg-Holm 33 Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy Nagy, 1917–​1946 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 59. 34 Sima Ingberman, ABC:  International Constructivist Architecture 1922–​1939 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 4. 35 The declaration was signed by the Belgian artist Karel Maes (1900–​1950) and the German artist Max Burchartz (1887–​1961). At the congress, the Hungarians, Moholy-​Nagy, Alfred Kemény, and Erno Kallai demanded a full communist agenda. See: Michael Jennings and Detlef Mertins, eds., G: An Avant-​Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–​1926 (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2010). 36 See: Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). 37 Bogdanov’s Universal Organizational Science (Tektology) was published in German and translated in 1921, 1926 and 1928 according to Charlotte Douglas. See: Peter Dudley, ed., Alexander Bogdanov, Tektology Book I (Hull: Centre for Systems 1996), xiv; and Charlotte Douglas, “Energetic Abstraction: Ostwald, Bogdanov, and Russian Post-​Revolutionary Art,” in From Energy to Information Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 76–​94. 38 Lodder, Russian Constructivism. 39 Sandra Guarda, Van Eesteren: Meeting the Avant-​Garde 1914–​1929 (Amsterdam: Thoth, 2013), 37. 40 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “Amerika,” ABC Beiträge zum Bauen, vol. 1 (1924): 1. Translation by the author. 41 Jakstein to KLH, February 7, 1923, Box V, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 42 Jakstein to KLH, April 7, 1923, Box V, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 43 In 1930, Junckers Lumber Company purchased the shipyard. The Norde Værftsgård was demolished in 1976. I am grateful to Adrian Täckman for this information. 44 Oud to KLH, February 1, 1923, Box V, Folder 3, KLH-​A. 45 The KLH-​A contains many unpublished photographs. 46 KLH to Larson, February 17, 1962, Box XII, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 47 Cornelis van Eesteren, “Amerikaansche Indrukken,” Bouwkundig Weekblad, vol. 12 (March 22, 1924): 121–​123. This essay is illustrated with three photographs: A Tram on Broadway, A Bus Terminal, and A New York Skyscraper. 48 László Moholy-​Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (London: Lund Humphries, 1939), 122. 49 For previous studies on this theme, see: Jean Louis Cohen, Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 85–​10; and the “Postface” by Cohen in Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika: livre d’image d’un architecte (Paris: Editions du Demi-​Cercle, D.L., 1992). El Lissizky, “The Architect’s Eye,” in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–​ 1940, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 1989), 221–​225. 50 Ibid. 51 See: Maria Gough, “Lissitzky on Broadway,” in Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–​1949, ed. Mitra Abbaspour, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg (2014). www.moma.org/​interactives/​objectphoto/​ assets/​essays. 52 El Lissizky,“The Architect’s Eye,” 221–​226. 53 Mendelsohn to KLH, January 1925, Box V, Folder 5, KLH-​A. 54 László Moholy-​Nagy, “Produktion-​Reproduktion” in Moholy-​Nagy, ed. Krisztina Passuth (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 289–​290. This was originally published in De Stijl, vol.7 (1922).

16

Knud Lönberg-Holm 61 5 El Lissitzky, “The Architect’s Eye,” 221–​226. 5 56 Mendelsohn to KLH, January 1923, Box V, Folder 5, KLH-​A. 57 Van Eesteren to Mendelsohn, August 12, 1926, Box V, Folder 5, KLH-​A. Van Eesteren, who claimed that ten of the images were by KHL, intervened because intellectual property was a sensitive issue for him. His collaboration with van Doesburg ended after he failed to credit the artist for his role in the design of two houses for Léonce Rosenberg. See: Guarda, Cornelis van Eesteren, 69, 73. 58 Mendelsohn to van Eesteren, August 17, 1926, Box V, Folder 5, KLH-​ A. Mendelsohn claimed that 13 of the images were by KLH. See: Kees Somer, The Functional City: The CIAM and Cornelis van Eesteren, 1928–​1960 (Amsterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007), 62. Somer suggests that Mendelsohn was never offered an important role in CIAM because of this controversy. 59 Mendelsohn to KLH, August 17, 1928, Box V, Folder 5, KLH-​A. 60 KLH to Mendelsohn, April 6, 1931, Box V, Folder 5, KLH-​A. 61 Mendelsohn to KLH, April 1931, Box V, Folder 5, KLH-​A. Mendelsohn denied that the rights had been sold. The controversy continued from 1925 until 1931. In 1964, Lönberg-​Holm commented to Haskell that it had never been fully resolved. See: KLH to Haskell, February 10, 1964, Box V, Folder 5, KLH-​A. 62 Henry-​Russell Hitchcock, Jr., “Traffic and Building Art: New York and Cleveland Contrasted,” Architectural Record (June 1930): 557. 63 KLH to Haskell, March 1, 1951, Box V, Folder 5, KLH-​A. Haskell’s article was published in February 1951 in Architectural Forum. Lönberg-​Holm wrote him that his photographs were “those most illustrative of the book’s main theme.” 64 Lorch to KLH, October 3, 1923, Box VI, Folder 1, KLH-​A. 65 Lorch attended the Detroit Museum of Art School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1890–​1892). He taught at the Detroit School of Art (1895–​ 1898). Following studies in Paris (1898–​1899) he became the director’s assistant at the Chicago Art Institute (1899–​1901) and secretary of the Chicago School of Architecture. After obtaining a master’s degree from Harvard in 1903, and until 1906 when he established the architecture department in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan, he taught at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia. In 1931 he became founding dean of the new college of architecture. 66 Nancy Ruth Bartlett, More Than a Handsome Box: Education in Architecture at the University of Michigan 1976–​1986 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1995), 57–​59. 67 “Colleges of Engineering and Architecture General Announcement, 1925–​1926,” University of Michigan University Bulletin, vol. 26, no. 45 (May 9, 1925): 175. 68 Lorch to KLH, January 25, 1948, Box VI, Folder 1, KLH-​A. 69 Thornton Abell (1906–​1984) attended the University of Michigan (1924–​1925); the University of California, Berkeley (1927–​1928); and graduated from the University of Southern California in 1931. He completed House no. 7 of the Case Study House program sponsored by Arts and Architecture in 1949. In a lecture on November 6, 1974 he discussed his relationship with KLH: “Thornton Abell,” in SCI-​Arc Media Archive, Southern California Institute of Architecture, http://​sma.sciarc.edu/​video/​thornton-​abell (May 18, 2015). Also see the interview of January 1, 1977: “Thornton Abell and Whitney Smith,” in SCI-​Arc Media Archive, Southern California Institute of Architecture, http://​sma.sciarc. edu/​video/​shelly-​kappe-​interviews-​thornton-​abell-​and-​whitney-​smith/​ (May 18, 2015). 70 Denman Waldo Ross, A Theory of Pure Design:  Harmony, Balance, Rhythm (London: Forgotten Books, 2003). Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1998).

26

62  Knud Lönberg-Holm 71 See: Marie Frank, Denman Ross and American Design Theory (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2011); and “Emil Lorch: Pure Design and American Architectural Education,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 57 (2004): 28–​40; and Jill E. Pearlman, Inventing American Modernism: Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007). 72 De Stijl 73–​74 were published in 1926. A  dry stamp for the company can be found in Box VI, University of Michigan Scrapbook, KLH-​A. 73 This project shares affinities with Oud’s Temporary Superintendent Office at the Oud-​Mathenesse Housing Project, Rotterdam, 1923. 74 See:  Mark Dessauce, “Knud Lonberg-​ Holm:  The Invisible Architect,” Press release of the Ubu Gallery, New  York, 2014. According to U.M.  information, Lönberg-​Holm lived at 1221 Willard Street, the home of Lavinia MacBride. 75 Van Eesteren to KLH, October 1923, Box V, Folder 3, KLH-​A. 76 This conversation appears in letters between van Eesteren and KLH from January 26, 1924 to April 30, 1925, Box V, Folder 4, KLH-​A. 77 The scheme brings to mind Oud’s Hoek van Holland Estate, Rotterdam. 78 Lorch to KLH, January 25 1948, Box VI, Folder 1, KLH-​A. 79 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “Reflections: America,” i10, vol. 15 (1928): 49–​55. 80 Ibid. 81 Born in Detroit in 1907, Lyndon graduated from the University of Michigan in 1928, and worked for Albert Kahn. In partnership with the engineer Eberle Smith (1935–​1942), he designed 30 schools and two public housing projects. He began his own firm in Los Angeles in 1942. His son, Donlyn, collaborated on Sea Ranch, the environmentally sensitive community in California that was planned by Lawrence Halprin. It is an important reference for Danish architects today. See: Donlyn Lyndon comments on May 28, 2014 02:05 pm, www.metropolismag.com/​First-​Look-​Knud-​Lönberg-​Holm-​Modernisms-​Long-​Lost-​Architect. 82 Among the architects being considered for the American chapter were: Rudolph Schindler, Lescaze, Kiesler, Hitchcock, Thompson & Churchill, Gregory Ain, Harwell Harris, and Gerhard Ziegler. This discussion appears in a series of letters on September 20, 1928; December 22, 1928; and June 18, 1929 in the CIAM Archive, Gta ETH, and a letter from Neutra to Giedion, November 22, 1929, Box X, Folder I, KLH-​A. 83 Werner Graeff, “Concerning the So-​Called G Group,” Art Journal, vol. 23, no. 4 (1964): 280–​282. 84 Jennings and Mertins, eds., G, 5, 80. Gestalung and the related verb gestalten can signify form, the process of formation, form-​creation, to shape, produce, construct, design and pattern, elemental design, vital creative forces, form-​ production and organization. Mertins also examines the influence of Francé. 85 Mies van der Rohe to KLH, 1923, Box V, Folder 6, KLH-​A. 86 Graeff to KLH, December 17, 1926, Box IX, Folder 1, KLH-​A. 87 Graeff to KLH, May 5, 1927, Box IX, Folder 1, KLH-​A. Kiesler to KLH, June 20, 1927, Box IX, Folder 1, KLH-​A. 88 Lönberg-​Holm, “America: Reflections,” 49–​55. 89 The ABC group included Hans Schmidt, Paul Artaria, Werner Moser, Max Ernst Haefeli, and Rudolf Steiger. See: Sima Ingberman, ABC: International Constructivist Architecture, 1922–​1939 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 90 Mart Stam’s “Collective Design” appeared in ABC, vol. 1 (1925). See: Mart Stam: A Documentation of His Work, 1920–​1965 (London: Royal Institute of British Architects, 1970). 91 Hannes Meyer, “The New World, 1926” and “Building, 1928,” in Hannes Meyer:  Buildings, projects, writings, ed. Claude Schnaidt (Switzerland:  Arthur Niggli, Ltd., 1965): 91–​94 and 95–​98.

36

Knud Lönberg-Holm 63 2 Meyer to KLH, April 1, 1929, Box IX, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 9 93 Meyer to KLH, November 27, 1931, Box IX, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 94 Oud to KLH, February 1, 1923, Box V, Folder 3, KLH-​A. 95 Oud to KHL, January 15, 1924, Box V, Folder 3, KLH-​A. 96 i10 was modeled on the revolutionary weekly, Die Aktion. It began with 100 subscribers and ended with 300. See:  Internationale Revue i 10 1927–​1929. Kraus Reprint (Nendeln 1979), www.dbnl.org/​tekst/​_​int001inte01_​01/​_​ int001inte01_​01_​0001.php. 97 Lönberg-​Holm, “America:  Reflections,” 49–​55. Part of this essay appears in Moholy-​Hagy’s Vision in Motion in 1947. 98 See: Mardges Bacon, “Architecture, Regionalism, and the Vernacular: Reconceptualizing Modernism in America,” in Repenser les limites: l’architecture à travers l’espace, le temps et les disciplines (Paris: INHA, 2005); and “Modernism and the Vernacular at the Museum of Modern Art, New York,” in Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 25–​52. 99 J.J.P. Oud, “In Memory of Peter van der Meulen Smith 1902–​1928,” i10, vol. 19 (1929). 100 Henry-​Russell Hitchcock, “America Europe,” i10, vols. 28–​29 (1929): 149. 101 These insights are found in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and The Making of Americans (1934). 102 Lönberg-​Holm, “Architecture in the Industrial Age,” 22. 103 Anderson founded the journal in 1914. Heap became an editor in 1916. Ezra Pound became a foreign correspondent in 1917. They gained notoriety for publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1920. 104 Man Ray, Ferdinand Leger, and Marcel Duchamp were consultants. Jane Heap, “The Machine-​ Age Exposition,” The Little Review, vol. 12, no. 1 (1927). See also: Anne Blood, “The Russian Section of the ‘Machine-​Age Exposition’ (1927),” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 154, no. 1315 (2012). 105 Hugh Ferris, Antonin Raymond, Saarinen, and Lescaze also represented the United States. Le Corbusier is mentioned in the catalog, but declined to participate, perhaps due to the cost of sending work. 106 Russian constructivism was first displayed in the United States in the traveling exhibit Modern Russian Artists (1920), organized by Duchamp and Katherine Dreier. 107 Most of the Russian work did not arrive in time to be included in the catalog. See: Blood, “The Russian section of the ‘Machine-​ Age Exposition’ (1927).” Louis Lozowick was a founder of the American Communist Party journal, New Masses, and a member of the John Reed Club. 108 Kocher to KLH, October 17, 1929, Box IX, Folder 4, KLH-​A. 109 Douglas,“Energetic Abstraction.”

46

2  Monuments and instruments The SSA and the international style

Architecture develops its characteristic cognition through the evolutionary resultant space-​time manifestation of the dominant forces successively at play in any time and place. American skyscraper design … emphasizes mass-​ weight-​ deadload-​ permanence-​immobility-​impressiveness-​monumentality as space manifestation of centralized mass production, decentralized control and accumulation of physical wealth with the anti-​social and anti-​industrial implications: big cities, congestion, inflated land values, buildings as media for speculative profits, exploitation, economic waste, human standardization, negation of individual freedom and responsibility. These are opposed to the criteria for centrifugal forces of progressive industrial communism: instrumentality, performance, mobility, flexibility, physical decentralization, diffusion of economic activity, elimination of waste in time labor, material.1

The statistics clearly demonstrate that 1932 was a very dire year, perhaps the worst of the Great Depression, with 12–​15 million Americans unemployed. By 1933 25 percent of the county’s labor force was out of work, more than 1,225,000 people were homeless, and around the country, housing production was down to one-​third of the level of the 1920s. Cities had converted into mere transit zones, with people passing through only in search of jobs. New York experienced an 18 percent decline in its population and 882,000 city dwellers’ homes were threatened by foreclosure. Thirty percent of the Lower East Side was unoccupied and slated for demolition. Most of the skyscrapers were vacant above the 12th floor. Eighty-​five percent of the city’s architects and two-​thirds of the construction workers were idle. Among the itinerant, there was a new government classification for unemployed white-​ collar workers, who were known as “transients.”2 They numbered 1–​2 million and Buckminster Fuller was among them, at least from Monday to Friday. In 1932, Fuller was 37 years old and without gainful employment. He found his way to New York in the fall of 1929 to promote the Dymaxion House, leaving his wife, Anne Hewlett, with their daughter, Allegra, close to her family in the eponymous Hewlett, Long Island, where he visited on weekends. During the week, he lived precariously by becoming a

56

Monuments and instruments 65 fixture at Romany Marie’s Greenwich Village tavern, where he carried out design work in exchange for meals. Among the people he met there was the young Japanese-​American artist Isamu Noguchi, the engineer Howard Scott of Technocracy Inc., Kiesler, and other future members of the SSA. Noguchi had recently returned from a sojourn as an assistant in the Parisian atelier of Constantin Brancusi around the time they were first introduced. The 25-​year-​old artist immortalized his newfound mentor by sculpting a portrait bust bathed in reflective chrome nickel steel, a material that Henry Ford had used to paint the radiators of Model A cars. In 1932, when Noguchi again returned after traveling abroad, he was evicted from his home and studio. He recalled that he and Fuller often slept the night on the couches of his friends. Fuller spent part of 1930, 1931, and 1932 dwelling in an elevator room of the unfinished Starrett-​Lehigh Warehouse on West 26th Street, but on the letterhead for the Structural Study Associates the address appears as the “Pent House.” He made a deal with the management of the Carlyle, a residential hotel on East 76th Street that was experiencing hard times and high vacancy rates. The two friends were allowed to work on drafting boards and sleep free of charge on air mattresses in unoccupied suites. A similar arrangement had also been forged with the Hotel Winthrop at East 47 Street and Lexington Avenue. For a time, this became the official headquarters of the SSA  –​a makeshift center of operations where Fuller first met with Starling Burgess to embark on their collaboration for the Dymaxion Car. In exchange for lodging, models of the Dymaxion House and a Soviet Shelter animated the lobby. In a creative padding of his CV, the hotel appears as the site of some of his “keynote addresses” and “major speaking engagements” for the year, although according to Noguchi he mainly hung out in the entry and explained his projects to passersby, who if not interested in the specifics of the “house of the future” could always peek at the figurine of a naked female lounging on the bed. The informal arrangements for lodgings saved them from having to find shelter at one of the temporary facilities that had popped up around the city to accommodate vagabonds and drifters, such as the shantytowns that appeared in Central Park and along the East River.3 Known as Hoovervilles, the denomination was an ironic commemoration to President Herbert Hoover, who had presided over the Wall Street crash. Fuller presented the Dymaxion dwelling –​the result of several iterations that evolved from Lightful Houses of 1927 and the more sophisticated 4D Houses –​at the Architectural League in 1929. The American Institute of Architects rejected the design on the premise of institutional opposition to mass manufactured housing. He hoped to build a prototype for the Chicago Century of Progress Fair in 1933, an effort that would ultimately prove unsuccessful. When he began promoting the project, the country was in the midst of an enormous building boom. In the Depression, his recasting of

6

66  Monuments and instruments the house as ephemeral, prefabricated, and technological had suddenly been latched onto by policymakers in the federal government, corporations, think tanks, laboratories, and research foundations, who deemed the manufactured dwelling to be the solution to America’s dormant assembly lines. With the skyscraper as a symbol of the failure of the capitalist system, prefabricated housing became the focus of the decade and Fuller found himself with competitors. It is against this backdrop that he cobbled together a diverse coalition of architects and called the movement an “abstract association.” Fuller, Kiesler, Lönberg-​Holm, and other SSA members met often to strategize at Monte’s, the Mosconi family’s trattoria on MacDougal Street.4 With Thorstein Veblen’s 1919 essay, “A Memorandum on a Practicable Soviet of Technicians,” as a guiding theoretical treatise, the coterie adapted technocratic critiques of capitalism that promoted the liberating potentials of industrial production. The SSA was modeled on the ephemeral avant-​garde collectives that Lönberg-​Holm had been a part of in Germany. They made Shelter their organ, as Fuller rallied them in a direct retort to the international style exposition at MoMA. As the most discernable meeting ground for the major proponents of modern architecture in the United States, George Howe and the young editor, Maxwell Levinson, had already remade the Beaux Arts portfolio into a tribune of American functionalism. On the eve of the New Deal, the inauguration of the MoMA show and the alliance of the SSA reflect the polarized positions toward the reception of the European modern movement by the East Coast avant-​garde. The historiographical legacy of the exhibit has long overshadowed the variety of viewpoints that were being debated at the time. An in-​depth examination of the SSA, a small contingency of architects and critics, some of whom were already connected to the vanguards since the 1920s, helps to illuminate their desire to forge an American response to “the style” by repatriating the technological vernacular that had been the source of the modern movement in the first place. The unique vocabulary that they introduced to architecture, as evident in the quote at the start of this chapter from Lönberg-​Holm’s essay, “Monuments and Instruments,” reflected a group initiative. By then, several key protagonists of the SSA had already established Architectural Record as a vehicle for the promotion of a culture of industrial production. The unique and differentiated manifesto that they expounded in Shelter was premised on the transformative role of technology and it provides a contrast to the biographies of masters at MoMA. As they shaped the circulation of modernism in the country, the SSA became experts in the accelerated production of new building technologies. With their reformulation of practice as utilitarian and productivist, they explored design processes opened up by following technological innovation as a central imperative. This aesthetic ideal set them apart from Johnson and Hitchcock’s art historical classifications; nevertheless their shared antagonism toward  the

76

Monuments and instruments 67 historicist and art deco skyscrapers that were emblematic of the 1920s demonstrates the elisions between the groups. After the crash, the structures that had so fascinated Lönberg-​Holm a decade earlier, as symbols of American engineering prowess, were now considered to be the voided tombstones of the failed economy. A year after its inauguration in 1931, the Empire State Building stood as an empty totem. By drawing on technocratic discourse, the SSA called for architecture as instruments of a new industrial order. Their cohesive agenda was correlated to contemporary advances in communication and transportation paradigms and to Einsteinium psychics. This chapter examines the SSA’s reformulation of Architectural Record and Shelter and grounds their manifesto in the tribulations of the Depression. Their concentration on the culture of industrial production proves to be a counterpoint to the production of the cultural industry, as exemplified by the contemporaneous creation of MoMA and the inauguration of the international style, with its consecration of a new set of monuments.

The culture of industrial production at Architectural Record The staff offices of Architectural Record became a crucible and an active nerve center for several newly hired writers who became the core members of the SSA in 1932. Following the appointment of A. Lawrence Kocher as associate editor in 1927, the work of C. Theodore Larson, Lönberg-​Holm, Albert Frey, and Douglas Haskell was instrumental in ushering in the reconfiguration of practice according to scientific and technological parameters by introducing American architects to a distinctly Neue Sachlichkeit approach to design. In Architectural Record, modern architecture was presented as the workaday, productivist integration of the architect into the realm of industrial fabrication, not as a set of formal attributes, which proved to be the framing device for MoMA’s canonical show. Yet this assimilation was tied to a corporate organization and to a technocratic perspective at a far remove from the political quotient that characterized the productivism of Jane Heap’s machine age show. The reformulation of architectural work was to follow the logic and natural evolution of machine age processes. F.W. Dodge Corporation, the magazine’s parent company, offered a unique confluence of technical and professional information from the fields that were transforming the profession. It was a highly conscious choice on the part of Fuller to associate himself with colleagues who, as early promoters of a uniquely technological vision of architecture, also had access to statistical data from the construction and real estate industries. A uniting force was their enthusiasm for prefabricated dwellings. Architectural Record, with its coordinated publications that included Sweet’s Catalog–​a continually updated information system featuring newly fabricated construction elements –​was founded in 1891 during the Progressive Era. Given the stewardship of Herbert Croly (1869–​1930), a

86

68  Monuments and instruments leader of the new liberalism movement, its readers were offered a more expansive cultural outlook than one might expect from a specialized publication. In anticipation of the rise of technocratic standpoints in the Depression, that would decisively influence the SSA, Croly’s political philosophy traced America’s transformation from an agrarian society to an industrial colossus. Until 1914, when he left to found the New Republic with the political commentator Walter Lippmann (1889–​1974), he served as the magazine’s director and as an editor from 1900 to 1906. He often contributed articles under the pen name of Arthur C. David. Croly commissioned “In the Cause of Architecture,” Frank Lloyd Wright’s groundbreaking essays that came out from 1908 to 1914. As harbingers of the impact of machine techne on architecture, Wright’s widely circulated series catalyzed the beginnings of modern architecture in Europe by arguing that the machine was a force capable of creating a democratic architecture. A renewed professional outlook that was very much in line with the tenets of the new objectivity came after 1928, when the urban economist Dr.  Michael A.  Mikkelsen became editor-​in-​chief. A  company insider and an expert in real estate with a doctorate in history and politics from Johns Hopkins University, he had been the director and vice president of F.W. Dodge since 1923. He reinstated Wright’s series with the prescient essay “Meaning in Materials,” which underscored the impact of machine production, standardization, and new materials for contemporary practitioners. Mikkelsen’s editorials announced significant revisions, such as his pronouncement in January 1929 that called for adjusting design to mass production, standardization, and modern technics as the emergent realities in industry and commerce. At this time, he launched the unprecedented technical news and research department, whose founding editor, Robert L. Davison, sought to make expertise in new building typologies and technologies part of everyday experience. This technical departure set it apart from the purely aesthetic concerns of more conservative magazines that reflected corporate interests, such as the Beaux Arts outlook of American Architect, which was linked to the business ventures of its owner, William Randolph Hearst. Architectural Record was affiliated to a broad array of industry publications –​Sweet’s Catalog, Real Estate Guide, and Dodge Construction Reports –​that formed part of the Dodge family, where the divulgation of modern projects was complemented by the promotion of sophisticated manufactured products, standardized details, and technical data. With 11,000 readers at the close of World War I, it was unrivaled as the premiere professional magazine of the era. Kocher became a contributing writer in 1927 while serving as director of the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Art and Architecture. By 1928 he became the first architect promoted to the post of managing editor. When Mikkelsen retired in 1936, he was made chief editor.5 Educated as a historian at Stanford University in 1909, before enrolling in architecture studies at MIT, Pennsylvania State University, and New York University, Kocher’s

96

Monuments and instruments 69 contradictory pursuits ranged from the study of vernacular buildings to a concern for new construction methods and affordable housing. Under his impetus, Architectural Record seized the lead in rendering modernism as a discourse about an industrialized and technologically advanced architecture that was also reflected in his professional endeavors. His first exposure to modern design came during a brief partnership with Gerhard Ziegler in 1929. But beginning in 1928, he also served on the Rockefeller family’s advisory committee for the restoration of colonial Williamsburg, just prior to forming a practice with Albert Frey (1903–​1998), who had worked for Le Corbusier, at the same time as Josep Lluis Sert and Charlotte Perriand.6 Kocher advocated for the use of color and new materials in architecture, and for applying principles of standardization. He recognized that the recent impulses from Europe that had originated with Sullivan and Wright would have repercussions for American practitioners. The addition to the editorial staff in 1928 of the 25-​year-​old, Harvard-​ educated art historian Henry-​Russell Hitchcock indicates that Kocher strove to expose Americans to theory from abroad. Hitchcock’s two-​part essay “Modern Architecture: The Traditionalists and the New Tradition,” and “The New Pioneers” became the template for his curatorial agenda.7 The young critic’s book reviews of Le Corbusier’s Towards an Architecture and of Neutra’s Wie Baut Amerika? familiarized practitioners with crucial theoretical formulations of the modern movement.8 While Kocher spent his days at the magazine, Frey kept their practice running. When he was made an associate editor in 1930 he brought with him the technological outlook of a Swiss polytechnic education. In their professional alliance from 1930 to 1935 –​which culminated in four innovative domestic projects –​Frey adjusted Corbusian idioms to American urban, social, and material conditions with a special concern for prototypical housing. In their joint articles in the magazine they examined windows, closets, and other building elements. Carl Theodore Larson (1903–​1988) was hired as an associate editor in 1929. A Kansan who earned an English degree and a master’s in architecture from Harvard, he had been a journalist for the Kansas City Star. That summer, after only a few months on the job, he learned that he was the recipient of a prestigious Harvard traveling fellowship. When he took the requisite trip to Rome to study ancient monuments and, at the behest of Kocher, attended CIAM 2, the Frankfurt Minimal Dwelling Congress, Haskell became his interim replacement. Douglas Putnam Haskell (1899–​1979) emerged as a cultural critic in the mold of Lewis Mumford, with whom he enjoyed a warm friendship. Born to American missionaries in Western Macedonia and educated at a German boarding school, where he became fluent in the language, Haskell studied political science at Oberlin College. During a visit to the Weimar Bauhaus in 1922, as the leader of a group of American students, he experienced an epiphany that sealed his commitment to architectural journalism when he

07

70  Monuments and instruments met Gropius, the school’s director. Before graduating, he entered into a close rapport with Frank Lloyd Wright and championed the cause of modern architecture as the co-​editor of the New Student from 1923 to 1925, a publication affiliated with the politically liberal collegiate organization the National Student Forum. “Shells,” an unsigned essay which appeared as a supplement in 1925, caught the eye of Croly. A critique of campus design and college education, the text made a case for the premises of functionalism and presented Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower and the Amsterdam School modernists. Haskell experienced a second revelation while attending a lecture by Fuller on the Dymaxion House. When Larson resumed his post, he left to work at The Nation and as a freelance journalist, but in 1932 he joined forces with the SSA in their promotion of the nomadic industrial dwelling.9 When Lönberg-​Holm was hired in February 1930, he was 35 years old and it marked a juncture in his career. In 1928, Wright’s disciple Barry Byrne recommended that Kocher publish the MacBride Residence. A  year later, Kocher interviewed the Dane in Detroit. He was taken on as a technical news and research editor, replacing Davison, who left to study affordable prefabricated housing at Columbia University.10 By this time his personal life had embarked in a new direction. He married Ethel Caroline Read (1908–​1996), a native of Detroit, in 1930. She was trained as an artist and occasionally collaborated with him on projects for CIAM. Later, and for 17 years, she worked an art director at J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency, a firm that was pioneering in advancing female copyrighters who oversaw product campaigns aimed at women consumers. The couple moved into a house in Bronxville and their son Karl was born in 1932.11 In the midst of the Depression, and with magazine readership down, Dodge’s statistics indicate that six out of seven architects were unemployed. The pressures of family life meant that he sought a secure position. He moved away from practice. With their mutual interest in prefabrication and environmental control systems, the future members of the SSA actively promoted the Dymaxion House. Larson commuted in from Yonkers when he joined Lönberg-​Holm in his department in mid-​1930 and they forged lifelong alliances with Fuller. According to Larson, “We hit it off very well together from the start. Bucky was of course a major factor in this amalgamizing of professional interests” (Figure 2.1).12 Technical news and research As technical news editors, they advocated for design methodologies based on research, scientific imperatives, and criteria of performance. They undertook the reorganization of information systems and new building standards that facilitated the restructuring of daily practice, as Beaux Arts compositional modes were supplanted by modernist diagrammatic techniques. With his recognition of the potential offered to practitioners by an ever-​expanding

17

Monuments and instruments 71

Figure 2.1 Buckminster Fuller, Knud Lönberg-​Holm, and Starling Burgess Source: image courtesy of the Ubu Gallery, New York. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

world of industrially produced building products advertised in Sweet’s Catalog, Lönberg-​Holm’s contributions drew on his affiliation with pioneers of the modern movement. He helped to reformat Architectural Record according to the tenets of the new typography. Moreover, his entries promulgated novel technological solutions by incorporating projects that he and Ethel visited during a tour to the Bauhaus during Mies van der Rohe’s directorship and to the Weissenhof enclave in 1931 (Figure 2.2). He transformed the magazine into a platform for CIAM. Taken as a whole, his articles –​a guileful subversion of normal magazine content –​exhibit a curatorial clarity that was not lost on Philip Johnson. These entries form a compilation of the purest exemplars of the Neue Sachlichkeit. With engineering discourse and graphics culled from scientific manuals, Lönberg-​Holm’s texts focus on performativity. “Glass” instructs about the chemical properties with a materialist vision as suggestive as Arthur Korn’s Glas im Bau und als Gebrauchsgegenstand (Glass in Modern Architecture) of 1929. The refractive index of glass and its thermal conductivity are examined by way of Mies’ Glass Skyscraper, Gropius’ Dessau Bauhaus, Albert Kahn’s River Rouge, and the Van Nelle Factory by Johannes Brinkman, Leendert van der Vlugt, and Mart Stam. “Planning the Retail Store” is illustrated by Oud’s Hoek van Holland project and Gropius’

27

72  Monuments and instruments

Figure 2.2 Knud and Ethel Lönberg-​Holm at the Bauhaus in 1931 Source: image courtesy of the Ubu Gallery, New York. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

Cooperative Store, in Dessau, Törten. “New Theatres in Europe” features Gropius’ most sachlich project, the Total Theatre, and Kiesler’s Space Theatre. Mies’ Concrete Office Building shows how to “reduce dead load, save time and increase control.” The Dymaxion House’s unique illumination

37

Monuments and instruments 73

Figure 2.3 J.J.P. Oud’s Hoek van Holland project in Knud Lönberg-​Holm’s “Planning the Retail Store” Source: Architectural Record, June, 1931.

is featured in “Trends in Lighting.”13 It is no wonder that so many loyal magazine readers complained (Figures 2.3 and 2.4). This emphasis on the culture of industrial building took into consideration the social and design implications of the expansion of production by focusing on recent innovations in environmental control systems, structures, and typologies. His articles on highway filling stations and the weekend home demonstrate a sensitivity to roadside mobility. With their matter-​of-​ fact observation, hypothesis, deduction, and verification, these works bear a striking affinity to the diagrammatic practice of the ABC architects Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer in their Petersschule competition entry for Basel of 1926, where mathematical proofs, metrics, and precise descriptions of materials dominate the drawings. Architecture is conceived of in objective terms: Building is the deliberate organization of the processes of life and the architect is a specialist in design as a social, technical, economic, and psychological organization. Larson, for his part, contributed studies on play areas,

47

74  Monuments and instruments

Figure 2.4 Model of the Dymaxion House in Knud Lönberg-​Holm’s “Trends in Lighting” Source: Architectural Record, October, 1931.

schools, publishing plants, affordable housing, and air conditioning –​an environmental system that was for the first time being applied to skyscrapers, such as Howe and Lescaze’s PSFS. At Record, the future members of the SSA, acclimatized American practitioners to the premises of the new objectivity not by focusing on aesthetic or ideological parameters, but by exploring the physiological impact of environmental controls on the wellbeing of the user, and by drawing on an underlying American concern for the complete conditioning of the interior, as exemplified by Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy. The molding of form in his buildings and in those of his California disciples, Rudolph Schindler and Neutra, was uniquely intertwined with the incorporation of complex regulating systems. Neutra’s Demonstration Health House for Dr. Lovell graced the cover of a steel manufacturer’s catalog in Sweet’s and was featured in the magazine in 1930 as the integration of innumerable products of American technology into a single frame of reference.14 The profound concern for the

57

Monuments and instruments 75 control of lighting, ventilation, plumbing, and temperature drew on vernacular traditions of designing from “the inside out,” to use Fuller’s jargon. This particular constructive heritage, with its responsiveness to and imbrication of environmental systems, was identified in the immediate postwar period by the historian James Marston Fitch in American Building:  The Environmental Forces that Shape It (1947) and later by Reyner Banham in Architecture of the Well-​tempered Environment (1969).15 Because of internal staff difficulties and dwindling revenues, arising from the Depression, in 1932 Lönberg-​Holm was transferred to Sweet’s Catalog, where he became the special assistant to Chauncey Williams, a divisional vice president for Dodge. Larson –​by then a close colleague of “K,” as he was known –​recalled that “I followed him into the same purgatory a year later … Too many complaints from AR readers about TN&R section featuring Bucky’s Dymaxion ‘nonsense.’ ”16 Lönberg-​Holm became the director of research and design for Sweet’s Catalog from 1932 to 1960, as the indispensability of designers in relaying complex product information became evident. By the 1930s, Dodge’s correlated system offered an array of services, such as drafting and photographic work on demand, and guides to zoning and construction laws. They advertised their integrated amalgam of publications and services as a complex, comprehensive communication system designed to expedite the exchange of project and product information between architects, engineers, contractors, owners, and manufacturers. It provided a complete view of national construction at any moment by reporting on trends in construction, news on individual buildings, and engineering projects from bid tendering through construction  –​information that Fuller would take into account in the promotion of the Dymaxion House. The evolution of the ready-​made kit-​of-​parts available in Sweet’s Catalog became increasingly more sophisticated throughout the 1930s, an era of great innovation in the creation of building components and synthetic materials despite the apparent stagnation of the Depression. But the ramifications for practice would not be fully appreciated until the postwar period, when Charles Eames explored off-​the-​rack elements as a conscious design methodology in his house, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM) created ready-​made curtain walls for corporate projects such as Lever House (1951). Lönberg-​Holm’s productivism in the interchange between fabricators and architects and his work in setting parameters for the communication of this complex array of material would ultimately lead him to explore “information design” in the 1940s through his collaborations with the Czech constructivist Ladislav Sutnar and with Larson. Affordable housing and prefabrication Architectural Record stood apart from other professional publications in another significant way. It was virtually the only architecture magazine

67

76  Monuments and instruments to treat the issue of affordable mass-​produced housing, an essential topic of the European modern movement, but one that was largely ignored by native practitioners. Lewis Mumford’s seminal essay “Mass-​ Production and the Modern House” in January 1930 was a response to the Dymaxion House, but with much less optimism about prefabrication; he lamented that “Building has shrunk, manufacture has expanded.”17 Larson’s study of low-​ cost minimal standards in his “How Small a House” was stimulated by his attendance at CIAM 2 in Frankfurt. In their practice, Kocher and Frey were exploring economical prefabricated dwellings. Their full-​scale mock-​up of the Aluminaire House drew 100,000 visitors when it was displayed for a week at New  York’s now-​demolished Grand Central Palace in 1931. The Cotton Zipper House of 1933 and Kocher’s Plywood Pavilion, which was exhibited at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, are representative of collaborative ventures during the 1930s that explored the design possibilities of a single material with the manufacturer’s sponsorship. As the prefabricated home became a paramount focus for designers and industry in the Depression, Fuller’s future takeover of Shelter was clearly a reaction to his rivals. There were several among the editors at Record. Around the same time, Kocher hired Fuller’s most formidable future competitor, Howard T. Fisher, a Harvard colleague of Larson’s and the founder of General Houses Inc., a company that experimented with a hybrid system that involved individual fabricators shipping components to regional warehouses for their subsequent on-​site assembly. Yet he succeeded in displaying two of his rather pedestrian designs at the fair in Chicago in 1933, while Fuller did not. Robert L. Davison left Architectural Record in 1930 to direct one of the decade’s foremost research projects on domestic space and prefabrication techniques under the auspices of the John B. Pierce Foundation, a philanthropic organization founded in 1924 with roots in the American Radiator Corporation. As part of their investigation into the effects of heating, ventilation, lighting, and sanitation on the human environment, Davison commissioned Fuller to design an integrated bathroom in 1931.18 They clashed and the collaboration lasted only three months, but Fuller revisited the project in 1936 for Phelps Dodge Corporation. Nevertheless, the shared concern for environmental controls had an impact on Fuller’s research. As a major vehicle for the promotion of modern architecture in America and a preliminary meeting ground for the SSA, Kocher and his crew at Architectural Record developed a cohesive ideology for design methodologies grounded in a productivist engagement with industrialization. Haskell, Larson, Lönberg-​Holm, and Frey contributed to the synthesis of architecture with the culture of industrial production where performance was given preference  –​a position dismissed by the explicit attack on functionalism orchestrated by the MoMA curators. Yet even Philip Johnson credited the impressive work, especially of Kocher and Lönberg-​ Holm, and George Howe’s partnership with Lescaze, for “having got the ball rolling” as a prelude to the international style.19

7

Monuments and instruments 77

From T-​Square to Shelter: the critical issues Architectural Record informed the instrumentation of practice, but Shelter was an open forum for debate. In 1932, when Fuller cashed out much of his life insurance to take it over, the conversion to radical content meant transforming an already existing magazine rather than launching a new one. Originally founded in December 1930 as the T-​Square Club Journal, this short-​lived publication played a pivotal role in shaping a national identity for modern architecture during the Depression. As the official organ of a Philadelphia Ecole de Beaux Arts coterie under the presidency of George Howe and the editorial direction of Maxwell Levinson, by the penultimate issue in May 1932 the magazine had transformed into the mouthpiece of the SSA with the title Shelter: A Correlating Medium for the Forces of Architecture. In the interim, the MoMA curators and director –​Johnson, Hitchcock, and Alfred Barr Jr.–​served as associate editors. From the outset, and since it was produced by architects for themselves, the journal departed from the limitations of commercial press. It is to Levinson and Howe’s credit that they truly envisioned it as a vehicle of lively debate. In its first incarnation from 1930 to 1932, in 17 issues that were intended to act, according to Howe, as the site of “polemics, rhetoric, recriminations and blows,” the title changed three times. The content reflects the critical moment when the dissemination of the European vanguards became a central concern for many of the contributors, who were wary of America’s reliance on imported models. At times, the content was overly wordy  –​emphatically so when Fuller took over –​but the pluralism made it strikingly different from conventional press. The unique format juxtaposed projects, correspondences, and rebuttals between disparaging factions within a single issue. Promotional endorsements reveal that architects very much appreciated this freedom when they noted that the magazine “stimulated formulation of architectural ideas, social and economic. Shelter fills a long felt need in the field of architectural publications as a journal of opinions.” Lönberg-​Holm stated: “There is today a great need for a magazine like yours –​commercial publications have become impotent from fear of offending advertisers or subscribers.”20 Mumford praised it for dealing with the climate of the Depression and the urban issues of housing and slum clearance. The magazine’s transformation is critical for understanding modernist polemics contextually within the era. As a platform where all of the East Coast’s progressive figures converged, it offers a crucial record of some of the major discourses on national identity, aesthetics, housing reform, and technology. Several formulations of modern architecture emerge. In this internationalist vehicle, Howe and the curators were joined by Frank Lloyd Wright, the technocratic SSA, and the housing reformers of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), Mumford and Henry Wright.21 Their mutual goal was to rethink the American origins of

87

78  Monuments and instruments European architectural theory and, to that end, Mumford and Hitchcock each traced a native genealogy for functionalism. Mumford tracked this through the  work of Henry Hobson Richardson, Root, and Sullivan and Wright. By focusing on the evolution of the single-​family dwelling, industrial processes, technological innovation, and environmental controls as a distinctly native heritage, the SSA sought to go beyond what they viewed as the simplistic iconography of American utilitarian structures that had so fascinated the Europeans. From Beaux Arts to functionalism In its first incarnation, T-​Square Club Journal was launched in 1930, to publish the projects of members of an evening atelier affiliated with the T-​Square Club, one of America’s oldest architectural organizations, founded in Philadelphia in 1883 by 13 Beaux Arts-​educated architects to engage in professional fellowship. The atelier was presided over by two French-​born, University of Pennsylvania professors, Jacques Gréber and Paul Cret, who was the honorary president. Under Howe’s leadership, Levinson, who had overseen the club’s news bulletin The Girandole when he studied with Cret, became the editor, with his brother Leon serving as managing editor. But by 1931, Howe was increasingly drawn to functionalism after starting an office with Lescaze, a former student of Karl Moser. A  clash between classicists and modernists began.22 Educated at Harvard and at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1912, Howe formed part of a second generation of Americans trained in Paris.23 His sudden rejection of academicism began in March with the publication of his project for PSFS. This change of heart was deepened when, in April, Levinson organized a symposium, “This Modern Architecture,” where Norman Rice, a local Beaux Arts-​trained architect and collaborator on PSFS, shared his own metamorphosis, which had been set in motion by his tenure as the first American to work with Le Corbusier in 1929.24 Howe was a deeply pensive and intellectual architect from New England Quaker stock, whose understanding of functionalism was more in accordance with aesthetic parameters than with ideologically driven European theories. In January 1932, after 12 issues, he became the sole financer of T-​Square as it outgrew its local readership to gain a substantive national following of 4,000 subscribers. Levinson steered the content to address the economic crisis, and Howe vowed to treat his adoption of functionalism in a socially engaged manner by arguing:  “Architecture no longer gilds only the tips of prosperity but touches the depths of our social and economic existence.”25 The main thrust of the contributors to this issue was to urge a break from the lingering Beaux Arts tradition that still predominated in the architecture world. Howe commented on the magazine’s newfound maturity after “a happy adolescence.” The new modern graphic design and format

97

Monuments and instruments 79 complemented his editorial departure.26 Architects whose work was being considered for the international style exhibition, such as Norman Bel Geddes and Neutra, were featured alongside Johnson’s promotion of Mies van der Rohe in an article on the Berlin Building Exposition of 1931. Rice’s essay, “I Believe,” shined a spotlight on his mentor and introduced Fuller’s Dymaxion House. A profile, “George Howe: An Architectural Biography,” underscored the architect’s realization that historicism could not truly address the communal problems of the era. The February issue marked yet another departure, with essays and projects  by Irving Bowman, R.M. Schindler, Ely Jacques Kahn, Le Corbusier, Henry S. Churchill, and Fuller. Anticipation of the upcoming Modern Architecture: International Style Exhibition–​which was held from February 10 to March 23 –​evoked commentary from both Wright and Fuller. A charged exchange between the elder statesman of American architecture and Howe ensued after Levinson approached Wright for an endorsement of PSFS. But Wright did not just decline. He submitted a scathing attack against the “internationalists” in “For all May Raise the Flowers Now, For All Have Got the Seed,” in which he criticized American practitioners of the “style,” as cultural weed salesmen who were selling a ready-​made imported product.27 He argued that the country had only produced an eclectic architecture because the culture had “prostituted” itself to the machine, and he lamented that the internationalist formula could be applied anywhere, regardless of its fitness to the climate or the environment. With a rebuttal, “Moses Turns Pharaoh,” Howe accused Wright of casting the first-​born male internationalists into the river and shaming them with the epitaph of “the New Eclectics.” He asked: “Why should he who has led us out of bondage turn and destroy his children?”28 In a clear case of gamesmanship, Fuller recast the Dymaxion House as universal architecture, to Hitchcock and Johnson’s international style. In presenting himself as a misunderstood prophet of reproducible housing, he contended that his shelter unit was the architectural analogue to Henry Ford’s automobile assembly, Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, the first international radio hook-​up of 1927, and the fourth dimension. Fuller critiqued the European modern movement on the premise of technological performance and by echoing Wright’s nationalist sentiments. The architecture of the foreign masters that was about to be shown at MoMA lacked the application of current knowledge in structural mechanics and chemistry. He considered the style to be: An aesthetic mode developed by European designers in appreciation of American Building through the advantage of a 4000 mile perspective. This “Quasi Functional Style” has been codified in European Schools, such as the Bauhaus and is re-​infiltrating itself into this country from which it sprung, as an aesthetic, static dogma of its original economic science.29

08

80  Monuments and instruments His main argumentation throughout Shelter was that the home-​building business was the only unorganized industrial field of the time, and he proposed a new industrial order premised on Fordism and the increasing mobility of modern life. Although it was originally intended to be a six-​part series, “Universal Architecture” was condensed into three articles that ran in February, April, and May. The first recounted the history of the Dymaxion dwelling and elaborated upon a scientific approach to design. As an outsider, Fuller was attempting to gain legitimacy within architectural circles. The magazine offered him a wider vehicle, as did the pretense of a group agenda. In anticipation of the rambling manifesto, Nine Chains to the Moon (1938), his essays, which were derived from more than 300 promotional talks, make up the bulk of his writing in the 1930s and contain echoes of 4D Timelock, the self-​produced mimeographed promotional pamphlet and corporate prospectus that he distributed in 1927. As he promoted his house, Fuller recognized that he was facing intense competition on various fronts. In 1932, the mass-​ produced dwelling emerged as a major theme, more than a decade after European architects had embraced the question, but the emphasis now was on the individual home. Mainstream publications offered a solution to the Depression with mottos like: “The industry that industry forgot” or “We can build our way out of it.” The house, as a successor to the automobile industry, was considered to be a site of investment, and a shift of direction for America’s idle factories and workforce. With little faith in the economic system, there was consensus that the government should be involved at least in the low-​income sector. But Fuller noted that American architects, who had never really dealt with mass housing, were now marginalized by the entry of the government and corporations into the field. Gatherings such as the Hoover administration’s 1931 Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership attracted 4,000 attendees but not many architects, although it marked the first federal incursion into the housing slump prior to the New Deal. The dissemination of the international style filled Fuller with a sense of urgency, offering him a target to stoke controversy for his own self-​ promotion. By emphasizing the lightness, reproducibly, mobility, and disposability of his individual shelter, with its metallic tensile structure, integrated environmental control technologies, and delimited life cycle, he sought to differentiate it from what he referred to as the “sardine box communism” of the European Marxist architects. He shared Wright’s aim to repatriate the utilitarian technological vernacular that had initially inspired the modern movement. Nevertheless, he selectively appropriated key concepts from the vanguards, such as Le Corbusier’s five points, to suggest his knowledge of contemporary architecture and as a rhetorical device. Yet the charts and equations that appear at the end of his essay bring to mind the decade-​old manifestos of Lönberg-​Holm and his colleagues and attest to their influence. Kenneth Frampton has mentioned the seemingly coincidental affinity between the SSA and the concerns of the Neue

18

Monuments and instruments 81 Sachklichkeit. “Fuller like the more extreme members of the Swiss ABC group, had no concern whatsoever for the idiosyncrasies of any given context and projected his house as though it were a prototype for serial production.”30 The fullest exposition of this correlation can be found in the text “Universal Architecture,” where Fuller presented the notion of designing centrifugal floating spaces cells  –​rather than monumental cubic forms  –​ with dynamic construction systems that celebrate forces, tension, and the magnitude of time. These principles bring to mind Lönberg-​Holm’s worldview and recall “Towards a Collective Construction,” van Doesburg and van Eesteren’s fifth De Stijl manifesto of 1924. The SSA’s collective building project, which was to be based upon collaborative research, standards, and technological innovation, shares affinities with the polemics of international constructivism, as does the vision of “Universal Architecture” as the union of “art, science and industry.” The international style In April, the magazine was dedicated almost exclusively to the MoMA show with Howe, Hitchcock and Johnson, and the museum director, Alfred Barr Jr., as associate editors. After PSFS was harshly critiqued by the Beaux Arts architect Albert Kelsey, Howe was soul searching, and he intended to separate himself from the magazine. In need of new funding, Levinson approached Fuller, but he also secured a monetary commitment from Johnson, who was eager to finance it as a promotional vehicle.31 When a copyright conflict arose due to the fact that a small house magazine published by Scribner’s and Sons carried the title T-​Square, Fuller suggested a new one: Shelter: Magazine of Modern Architecture.32 The articles in the magazine rivaled the exhibition catalog in depth. A synopsis of the symposium held on February 19 on the occasion of the inauguration included interventions by Mumford, Henry Wright, Raymond M.  Hood, Howe, Harvey W.  Corbett, and Neutra. In line with the magazine’s combative and conversational spirit, the curatorial agenda was overlapped in the same issue as a series of attacks –​a situation that was welcomed by Hitchcock in his editorial on the state of American architectural criticism. This issue reveals a multifaceted set of ideological intricacies toward the dissemination of modern architecture in the United States. Predicated on the promotion of European masters whom Hitchcock and Johnson had met during summer excursions in 1929 and 1930, the landmark exhibition had a lasting impact on American architecture. As is well known, the curators neutralized the political program of the Europeans by stressing the visual features of seminal works by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, and Oud. In the ten chapters of the accompanying book, The International Style:  Architecture since 1922, they outlined their idea of style and their understanding of functionalism  –​with a reproach to the asceticism of

28

82  Monuments and instruments Hannes Meyer –​and the forefathers, especially Frank Lloyd Wright, who was first to attack once again. Although Wright had secured a special place in the show, the curators infuriated him by relegating him to the position of a historical precursor. After he threatened to withdraw, Johnson appeased him with an offer to print an article in Shelter. But he had little desire to be included alongside the likes of Le Corbusier and Gropius and he objected to the inclusion of the émigrés Lescaze and Neutra in the American section. In his essay “Of Thee I Sing,” he launched out against the “self-​appointed committee on a style” and the Geist der Kleinlichkeit (the spirit of paltriness) of the European architecture. He defended nationalism, individualism, and urban decentralization –​positions that would surprisingly align him with Fuller.33 In their contributions, the housing reformers Mumford and Henry Wright examined the role that affordable dwellings could play in the Depression and they criticized the relative indifference of Americans to the theme. The exhibition was split into two distinct areas. The architecture section was complemented by a collateral housing display curated by Catherine Bauer, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, and Mumford, who recognized that such a division would have been incomprehensible to the Europeans. Mumford’s interest in recent German and Dutch housing experiments was galvanized by Bauer’s enthusiasm, and influenced by Ernst May and the critic Walter Curt Behrendt, the editor of Die Form in Berlin, both of whom he had met in a planning congress in 1925. That summer Mumford and Bauer planned to tour the projects. She had already visited the Weissenhof Estate and had participated in a workshop on social housing run by May in Frankfurt in 1930. As an organic regionalist, Mumford was hardly sympathetic to the internationalist credo and the housing projects on display mixed the garden city approach of architects of the RPAA –​Frederick Ackerman, Stein, and Wright –​with European Siedlungen. Two emblematic projects of the new objectivity –​Otto Haesler’s Rothenberg Complex (1929–​1930) in Kassel and Oud’s Kiefhoek project in Rotterdam (1928–​1930) –​were now embraced as prototypes for the urban renewal of degraded American cities.34 The only urban housing scheme to appear as part of the architecture section was Howe and Lescaze’s Chrystie-​Forsyth project, a large-​scale urban design in a downtown Manhattan slum district, composed of 24 apartment slabs raised on pilotis over seven city blocks that translated the CIAM neighborhood unit to American conditions. It was featured on the cover of Shelter, and it was the first work that visitors encountered in the entry hall. With its translation of a European multi-​dwelling typology to slum clearance conditions, it became the primary model for government-​sponsored housing under the New Deal.35 The curators had marginalized émigrés like Schindler and Lönberg-​ Holm, who did not match their vision. As a strict functionalist, Lönberg-​ Holm attacked the art historical classifications rather than the designers, who were his friends, in the essay “Two Shows: A Comment on the Aesthetic

38

Monuments and instruments 83 Racket.” When an invitation to contribute on the subject of his choice came from Levinson, he in a sense continued his debate with Hitchcock that had been initiated in i10 in 1928. Exhibiting a Duchampian wit, he derided the curators’ categories with an analogy between fashion jargon and a set of neoclassic bathroom fixtures cut from the pages of an American Standard Sanitary advertising from Sweet’s Catalog, and by citing Mies van der Rohe’s manifesto from G: “We reject all aesthetic speculation … all dogma … and all formalism.”36 Universal architecture The architecture student Simon Breines (1906–​2003) presented “Universal Architecture, Essay No.2” by defending Fuller’s jargon-​ridden writing style as “telegraph language.” The originally intended title was a mouthful: “The Relative Elimination of Feudal Land-​ Economics by the Unwittingly Established Universal Time-​ Energy-​ Economics.” In discussing obstacles to his vision of industrial housing, Fuller appropriated terminology from Technocracy Inc., a group of engineers and architects who engrossed the public at the onset of the Depression, with an approach indebted to the institutional economist Thorstein Veblen. This affinity will be further elaborated on in Chapter 3, but the pedestrian-​friendly city of the 1920s was now cast in a negative light, as the concentration of antiquated private enterprises known as “the profit system.” Fuller called for the liberation of shelter from the land. He conceived of the house as a service, like the telephone, with built-​in obsolescence and as part of a new economic system that awarded “time-​ energy credits” for the production of industrial dwellings. Fuller believed that the automatism inherent in machine age production could lead to “industrial communism,” which would allow for the production of basic goods for all mankind.37 In the housing arena, “industrial emancipation” –​ another technocratic premise  –​would progress with the elimination of restrictive antiquated institutional practices that caused a “time lag,” hindering the acceptance of the industrialization of the backward housing field. Reproducible shelter, rather than political agendas would lead to a new utopia. As an alternative to the market economy, this new order would be premised on the control of production processes and the distribution of housing by disinterested technicians to expand the standard of living for all. With the idea that technology delivers more performance with less weight and materials, the house, as an expendable product submitted to a perpetual cycle of technological innovation, obsolescence, and consumer election by advertising would lead to the total instrumentalism of architecture and open up new freedom within design processes. Such an ideology was at a far remove from the curators’ agenda and they complained to Levinson about the direction the magazine was taking. Fuller and Johnson had first met at the inauguration of the exhibition of

48

84  Monuments and instruments the Dymaxion House in 1929 at the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, an organization founded by the Harvard modernist, Lincoln Kirstein. Johnson had been struck by Fuller’s verbosity, his capacity for showmanship and self-​aggrandizement. Both men shared a Unitarian upbringing, but they were worlds apart. Johnson respected Fuller’s transcendentalist heritage and he recognized that he was something of a poet, but he found him to be a divisive figure and an interloper. His own participation in Shelter had been at the urging of Howe. During the time that they both funded the magazine, the two men never came face to face. Johnson recalled: Bucky Fuller was no architect and he kept pretending he was. He was annoying. We all hated him because he really thought the profession was unnecessary, and he was a … he knew everything, … and he didn’t see the need of any little artist wandering around on his tail because he was the great artist being the technical genius that he was. In his opinion.38 After this issue and despite still being listed on the masthead in May, Johnson withdrew financial backing and followed Hitchcock who had already resigned, citing his disdain for Fuller’s obscure and unintelligible writing. The SSA now commandeered full control of the magazine, steering it away from pluralism toward a single cohesive manifesto.

Engineering consent for the cultural industry The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.39 In the early 1930s, the convergence of the invention of the modern museum; the launching of the international style; the use of commercial venues to exhibit contemporary art; and the consolidation of public relations, or propaganda, as it was then benignly called, were all practices that can be explored through the foundation of MoMA and the work of George Howe. The professional expertise of Edward Bernays –​the inventor of modern public relations in America –​was enlisted on the part of the museum and the architect to mold public opinion in favor of modern architecture. Here we see in nascent form what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would later epitomize as “the culture industry.” Their critique

58

Monuments and instruments 85 of the commodification of the arts provides a useful lens for illuminating the way that the techniques of rational industrial production were transferred to entertainment and exhibition venues, as the principles of engineering and standardization were applied to the fabrication and promotion of culture. In the culture industry, manifestos operate as marketing and radical art becomes style.40 At the height of his transformation into a reluctant functionalist, Howe hired Bernays from 1930 to 1932 to promote PSFS and to create a climate supportive to his housing scheme for lower Manhattan. It was a tumultuous period in his professional timeline. His partnership was about to dissolve. Lescaze would later state that Howe had been only a front man and claim authorship of their collaborative work. Frey –​who moonlighted with Lescaze when he did not have enough work with Kocher –​asserted that the designs were his. The 32-​story PSFS, a building that looks remarkably like Lönberg-​Holm’s Chicago Tribune Tower, had broken ground in 1929 and was nearing completion. The team had come up with three preliminary schemes for the newly inaugurated MoMA in 1930, and they had designed Chrystie-​Forsyth Housing from 1931 to 1932. In April 1931, their work was displayed in the Rejected Architects Show, which was essentially a Salon des Refusés orchestrated by Johnson to protest the Architectural League’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition that included some American modernist works such as PSFS and Kocher and Frey’s Aluminaire House, but excluded younger practitioners who would later become associated with the international style. Howe’s resignation followed this publicity stunt.41 The firm’s work formed part of the canonical MoMA show. The inauguration of PSFS and the dissolution of his partnership followed his resignation from Shelter, which was now in the hands of the SSA. Propaganda Edward Bernays (1891–​1995) established a theoretical basis for modern public relations, a profession decried by Thorstein Veblen in the Gilded Age, as America moved toward becoming a society driven by consumption rather than production. Born in Vienna, as a nephew to both Sigmund Freud and to his wife, Bernays synthesized his uncle’s ideas regarding the illogical desires of the unconscious mind, the crowd psychology of Wilfred Trotter and Gustave Le Bon, and Walter Lippmann’s theories of mass public opinion. In recognition that Howe had been advised by his counsel to use the magazine as a promotional tribune, Fuller railed against Bernays as a “publicity psychology expert” and an “advertising doctor” in Shelter. Following Veblen, he regarded public relations scheming as a wasteful and superfluous part of business enterprise that was tied to the concept of “invidious distinction.” Fuller, who was no stranger to marketing himself, exploited Shelter as a vehicle of self-​endorsement, but in his condemnation of Bernays he claimed that salesmanship was a predatory activity endemic

68

86  Monuments and instruments to capitalistic inefficiency that sought to “manufacture” and “standardize” consumers. The SSA rejected the idea of architectural styling as advertising in and of itself. Propaganda, or the manipulation of the mass mind within democracy, was viewed in a positive light by government and corporations in the 1930s. The techniques that had been perfected during World War I  through the work of the Creel Commission, that sought to persuade public opinion in favor of the country’s entry into the conflict, were extended to consumer culture afterwards for the benefit of corporate elites. New forms of mass media were governed by the instrumental logic of monopoly capitalism, as advertising became more coercive and sophisticated. It is no coincidence that the staff of Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information included Lippmann and Bernays.42 Read today, Bernay’s exposes are at once chilling and completely familiar. Negative reaction to propaganda emerged in World War II, when Nazi Germany appropriated the tactics. Joseph Goebbels was apparently an avid reader. In Propaganda (1928), Bernays tried to eliminate any adverse response to the term by claiming that “In itself, the word ‘propaganda’ has certain technical meanings which, like most things in this world, are neither good nor bad but custom makes them so.”43 Commercial advertising at a mass scale began in the 1920s, but the promotion of goods was stimulated further during the Hoover era, when public relations couched consumption in terms of citizenship, thus camouflaging government underwriting of some aspects of consumer culture. Political metaphors established the legitimacy of public relations counsels as public servants. Bernays imagined himself to be a “technician” shaping “the mechanics of propaganda.” In a democracy, mass opinion could be maneuvered, thus accelerating the acceptance of a product or idea. It was the public’s choice, like voting. Corporate stewards were presented in civic leadership roles and public relations was enlisted to promote modern architecture as a cultural commodity. Arts and industry The MoMA directors and Howe were attracted to Bernays’ success in inventing the “Art in Industry Movement,” –​the highlighting of products in museums, exhibitions, and department stores. In the fashion field, he had orchestrated a campaign for Cheney silks, an old New England family mill with faltering sales in 1923. A typical scenario went like this: Capitalizing on the French origins of the family name and the history of silk production in France, Bernays created the “Cheney style service” issuing information on French fashions to newspapers, industry specialists and department store buyers. Amid massive media coverage, he arranged for Cheney to present a silk dress to the first lady of Warren G. Harding at the White House. He sent Cheney silk to the textile museum in Lyon France, the great nineteenth-​ century silk production center, and publicized the endorsement. The newly

78

Monuments and instruments 87 instituted Arts and Industry medal of the Architectural League, which he invented, was awarded to Henry Creange, an Alsatian industrial designer, whose work was in turn inspired by the ironwork of French artisan Edgar Brandt. Cheney’s silk was displayed in department stores draped over his work. Bernays bequeathed Cheney’s silk to the Louvre. Georgia O’Keefe was commissioned to use the company’s color palette, and to have her canvases act as product backdrops in store windows. When Hoover appointed Bernays as associate commissioner for American representation to the 1925 Paris International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, Cheney was invited to exhibit their silks, thus solidifying Franco-​American cultural and political relations. The products were then displayed at Macy’s, Lord and Taylor, and the Metropolitan Museum. But Bernays went even further. The silk manufacturer suggested to a large manufacturer that women’s shoes be clad with the textiles, to match their dresses. The fashion was systematically “propagandized” as a popular actress was persuaded to wear the ensemble. The shoe firm was ready with a supply to meet the created demand. The fashion press endorsed the products.44 Bernays created novel methodologies aimed at persuasion for the culture industry. In Propaganda he carefully considered the far-​reaching role that museums could aspire to in shaping the public’s taste. The museum can stand in its community for a definite esthetic standard which can, by the help of intelligent propaganda, permeate the daily lives of all its neighbors. Why should not a museum establish a museum council of art, to establish standards in home decoration, in architecture, and in commercial production? or a research board for applied arts? Why should not the museum, instead of merely preserving the art treasures which it possesses, quicken their meaning in terms which the general public understands?45 Since the Armory Show in 1913, when Gimbels first exhibited cubist painting, department stores became notable sites of cultural promotion, but thereafter in the 1920s and 1930s their expanded relation with world expositions and museums was mainly due to the efforts of Bernays. Department store mercantilism familiarized the public with modern art and helped to reconfigure venues for doing so. The notoriety of avant-​garde culture served to market its popular appeal. The period opened up novel, small-​scale collaborations across disciplines, involving the application of vanguard techniques to business and the commercialization of modernism as consumer commodities addressed to a mass audience. As part of this trend, Fuller’s 4D Lightful House was shown in Marshall Field’s store in 1929 when a resourceful copyrighter rechristened it as the Dymaxion House. Just as Europeans had assimilated grain elevators and Taylorism, American merchants propelled De Stijl, constructivism and surrealism directly into the marketplace.

8

88  Monuments and instruments Highly articulated selling techniques outlined in specialized trade journals on commercial display were scripted by Bernays, who was invoked by Frederick Kiesler in his much lauded book, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display (1929), which offered the “first modernist advanced theory of shop window and store design.” Display techniques and advertising had long been a concern of the Deutsche Werkbund, and more radically of the constructivist movement, but Kiesler recognized that the department store was the true introducer of modernism to the public by revealing contemporary art to commerce. Kiesler offered proposals for store designs premised on the principle of constant flux. From 1928 to 1930 as a window dresser for Saks Fifth Avenue, he transferred constructivist practices to display techniques, extending to the shop window his experience in stage sets and exhibition design that sought to dissolve the boundaries between the installation and the viewer. But most architects recognized the difference between true avant-​garde design and the “modernistic.” In an essay in i10 Lönberg-​Holm noted that:  “New  York Department stores have window-​ trimmings ‘à la Stuttgart’ –​an army of spinsters is lecturing on modernistic furniture (French Bordello Style).”46 The radical reconfiguration of cultural institutions and display venues created opportunities for the intersection of avant-​garde practices within commercial ambits.47 Kiesler urged designers to:  “Create Demand. You must stimulate desire. That is why show windows, institutional propaganda, and advertising were created and why their importance is continually increasing.”48 As he relocated constructivist design practices to the department store he theorized the concept of the technological environment by proposing the use of a recent invention such as the television, for broadcasting art in museums and shopping emporiums. He may have thought of himself as a radical advertising constructor, such as Hannes Meyer, but it was Bernays who was truly productivist in his engagement with mass media. What is today known as “synergy” in the business world, i.e., promoting a product across various media simultaneously, was pioneered by Bernays as “tie ins” and “tie ups.” Ephemeral events and fortuitous meetings were linked to mass media coverage. His client base from across a wide spectrum of society, from government leaders and intellectuals to starlets, served as endorsers. He popularized his uncle Sigmund’s theories in the same way. The publicity stunt was contrived to stoke controversy by, for instance, concocting a demonstration where cigarettes were declared “freedom torches,” an issue of young women’s right to smoke. This was not unlike the sandwich man who walked up and down the street at the Rejected Architects Show to advertise that “really modern architecture” could be seen there. But that sophomoric act seems to have been exclusively the work of the young propagandist Philip Johnson as a prelude to the international style show, although Bernays published a stern

98

Monuments and instruments 89 reproach to the League in the New York Times on behalf of his clients Howe, Lescaze, and the curators. The Harvard modernists The creation of MoMA, just as the economy nosedived, marked a departure from traditional art institutions and a counter to curatorial modes at the conservative Metropolitan Museum.49 Alfred Barr’s departmental structure was modeled on the Bauhaus to include painting, graphic design, architecture, crafts, typography, theater, cinema, photography, industrial design, and mass production, at a time when the art institution only legitimized painting and sculpture. The architecture department was launched in 1932, with Johnson, who was 26 years old, as its director. He was one of the Harvard modernists, a small coterie who took advantage of the lacuna of the old rich in the Depression by reconfiguring the country’s cultural and institutional landscape with elite cosmopolitan steerage and the transference of modernist ideals. The members conceptualized the museum, and were founders of the School of American Ballet, the Wadsworth Athenaeum, and the Julien Levy Gallery, the first showplace for surrealism.50 By differentiating themselves from the status quo of old masters at more traditional institutions, they introduced broadened cultural categories that embodied internationalism. In shaping museum professionalism, for the first time, intellectuals and curators took over, eclipsing the “little galleries” that had been founded and run by artists in the 1910s and 1920s.51 A tight-​knit network, they acted as museum directors, curators, dealers, and collectors. The Harvard Society of Contemporary Art, where Fuller’s Dymaxion House was exhibited in 1929, served as a testing ground. Bernays invented the concept of museum membership for MoMA and he provided counsel for the itinerant international style show. In an internal SSA memorandum, that appeared in a more polite version in Shelter, Fuller, who referred to them as the “intrinsic-​ aesthetic group,” summed up their use of public relations: New Architecture as a conscious professionizable art is the ambitious objective of the Johnson, Hitchcock, Modern Museum group, for the sake of their own personal aggrandizement as leading aesthetic “connoisseurs” in the “International Style” into which “high social status” they were royally ushered as the unwitting contact men for the European-​Aesthetic-​Modern-​Design-​Racket-​Association to cultivate the rich American sucker list. Claus of Claus and Daub was imported to U.S. by Johnson from Mies van der Rohe’s office to install a wholesale Mies room importation in Johnson’s NY apartment. When a man has put as much money into such an importation as this must have required he is liable to attempt self-​justification to the “exhibition” proportions – thus the travelling “International Show.”52

09

90  Monuments and instruments Crystallizing public opinion Howe’s engagement of Bernays reveals just how a public relations campaign was orchestrated. Beginning in 1931, after PSFS received negative scrutiny for its impact on the urban context from prominent Philadelphia architects including Paul Cret, Howe approached Bernays, who created a work strategy until the architect’s own apprehensions with using the same techniques “to sell soap flakes and ideas” would lead him to dismiss his consultant in 1932. In November, Bernays sent a year-​long program, where “each individual step was meant to be part of a greater cumulative effort” to project Howe and Lescaze “as architects who work to create in building the true and living expression of our times as exponents of the new spirit in architecture just as Proust is generally accepted as expressing the new spirit in literature.”53 Over his tenure, Bernays sent out blanket press releases describing PSFS as having the “homeliness of Abraham Lincoln” and orchestrating lectures to specialized collectives by Howe entitled: “Why I became a Functionalist.”54 The first attempt to gain validity for PSFS was to court the recognition of leaders in various fields of the arts “whose expression can in turn be interpreted to the laymen through the accepted media of propaganda.” Bernays endeavored to forge relations with spokesmen from federal, state and municipal governments, with an eye to future commissions. Given the conservative preferences of the public sector, a shift to a modern style would act as a new departure. Bernays sought affiliations with educational institutions and welfare groups. He urged his clients to strengthen their ties to international architecture groups, such as CIAM, but even Lönberg-​Holm as the East Coast delegate recognized that Lescaze’s interest in the organization was only for the sake of publicity. Professional conventions and clubs were approached as sources of prospective clients. Bernays worked across all forms of broadcast media from radio to movie tones. In recognition of the gendered nature of consumption, women’s groups were seen as essential, given their importance in setting aesthetic standards. Special events included dedication ceremonies, luncheons, and competitions. At the international style exhibition, Bernays set up a special showing of the Chrystie-​Forsyth project aimed at municipal, civic, and national leaders. Lescaze and Frey’s design drew on Le Corbusier’s redent typology. The project, which featured a steel structure, exposed concrete, and open elevated corridors, was formally the most interesting proposal of inner-​city housing in the era. It was a prelude to New Deal redevelopments that promoted slum clearance as the result of a call by the public administration that targeted the area against the Old Law Tenements. Bernays’ press package for PSFS highlighted the functional features such as a radio in every room, parking, and central air conditioning. He sought to extinguish criticism of the modern movement by press and radio endorsements. There is every indication that he would have succeeded, but Howe pulled back, just at the moment of breaking up his partnership. In a letter

19

Monuments and instruments 91 to Lescaze on February 5, 1932 that was forwarded to Bernays, Howe expressed his deep-​seated objections to the high-​powered salesmanship of things or ideas as destructive, and as offering only a momentary advantage over the competitors. I do not agree with Bernays when he says that things must happen in a democracy and might as well be brought about in his way much more quickly that they would come about by themselves … The Profession has remained outside of commercial maelstrom … No doubt many sound businesses make use of publicity. This fact however, I regard not as proof of the value of publicity but rather of the unfortunate necessity under which a conservative man labors of competing with the chewing gum, cigarette and lipstick kings of the world. It may be all very well for General Electric or American Telephone & Telegraph to compete with these giants, but you and I will consume our substance in vain. We are primarily artists and not businessmen and we must exist and progress by our personal efforts and not by methods thoroughly foreign to our trade.55 Bernays’ cordial response emphasized the validity of his profession as depicted in Crystallizing Public Opinion and Propaganda. We proceed on the assumption that the commodity we are selling is a valid one and socially acceptable and that therefore, in the final analysis we are only accelerating its acceptance by the public … There is nothing anti-​social or destructive in gaining acceptance with the social group for the type of architecture you stand for. Playing the game exists outside of the work. In a democracy, public acceptance can either be fortuitous or motivated. And that propaganda can take up the time slack and bring about public acceptance quicker. The ideas like the commodities are of the client projections. You are of course artists. But your acceptance in this work-​a-​day world depends upon knowledge of you by the individuals and groups who dominate the construction of building. This knowledge of you can be gained over a period of years, or this period of time may be condensed. Certainly methods of intelligent understanding in dealing with the public in a capitalistic world are foreign neither to the artist, author or musician.56 Lescaze wanted to break down political resistance to urban housing, but the Chrystie-​Forsyth project had been seriously admonished by Robert D.  Kohn, head of the AIA, and a member of Technocracy Inc. Although Bernays sought to take advantage of the controversy and believed that the public was just getting interested, Howe preferred retiring from architecture altogether rather than mixing with “politicians and second rate

29

92  Monuments and instruments businessmen.”57 For Howe, public relations was incompatible with architecture. Progressive groups would already become tired of a movement just as the public was getting interested.58 Not wishing to go into the business of quantity production but to experiment, he claimed that radical art and public relations in the big business sense are opposites. With the opening of PSFS and the exhibition at MoMA, Howe rescinded his professional agreement with Bernays. He canceled his speaking engagements, wishing that the architecture could speak for itself, and he departed from Shelter. By the end of the decade, as the public relations consul for New York’s World’s Fair, Bernays’ strategies diminished the role of national identity and innovations in technology –​two themes that had long been the pervasive framing devices of such international showcases –​by solidifying the power of corporate sponsorship and branding. As he did so, from the fair’s administrative offices on the upper floors of the Empire State Building which had until then been unoccupied, design consciously became a medium of persuasion and an extension of business identity, thus paving the way for corporate domination in the postwar era. Commenting on the culture industry much later, Adorno and Horkheimer acutely recognized that: Because the system obliges every product to use advertising, it has permeated the idiom –​the “style” –​of the culture industry. Its victory is so complete that it is no longer evident in the key positions: the huge buildings of the top men, floodlit stone advertisements, are free of advertising; at most they exhibit on the rooftops, in monumental brilliance and without any self-​glorification, the firm’s initials.59

Shelter: a correlating medium for the forces of architecture In May 1932 the SSA rechristened the magazine but they were only able to put out two issues. Without funding from Johnson and Howe, the Levinsons found themselves facing grave financial difficulties. To make matters worse, Fuller insisted on eliminating all advertising for what he described as maximum “dollarability.” Although many of the long, convoluted texts were authored by him anonymously, the new title announced a collaborative endeavor. The collection of striking images  –​many of them by Lönberg-​ Holm –​bind the publication together and act as a bold proclamation that announces a new paradigm for architecture conceived of as delicate instruments of transmission and as a system of environmental controls. The new graphic identity can best be described as meta-​textual. Essays are accompanied by newspaper clippings about contemporaneous scientific discoveries, the economic vicissitudes of the times and competitors in reproducible housing. The mixing of diagrams, statistics, and charts with letters, rebuttals, and fine-​printed anecdotes that Fuller entitled “esoteric addenda” created a scrapbook sensibility. The textual backdrop enhances the full-​ page plates with large photos that assume the role of visual manifestos with

39

Monuments and instruments 93 provocative titles and captions in sans serif lettering. The collective message constitutes a commanding counter-​project to the expired skyscraper age and to the reception of European modernism. In this incarnation of the magazine, the architectural manifesto is conceived of as a visual selling point for Dymaxion ideals. As they set out to dematerialize and uproot architecture, the SSA deployed a novel iconography that distinguished itself from the imagery of machine gears, high-​rise steel structures, and factories favored by the vanguards a decade earlier, and so well-​known to Lönberg-​Holm. The images construct a set of dialectical oppositions whereby the compressive weight of masonry buildings, especially skyscrapers, is contrasted with web-​like metallic structures of remarkable fineness that make minimal contact with the ground. With the motto: “To do the most with the least,” the SSA encouraged harnessing the “Forces Expressive of the Technical Age.” The cover diptych, by Lönberg-​ Holm, offers an aerial view of Manhattan juxtaposed with an image of airborne planes in the clouds that illustrates the conviction that the city was a concentration of corrupt real estate values and obsolete structures. This is contrasted to advances in transportation that stress mobility. The new programmatic agenda is enunciated on the back by a photomontage of a crowd superimposed by the bold words “Shelter Now” (Figure 2.5).

Figure 2.5 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, front and back cover Source: Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4. May, 1932. Image courtesy of the Maxwell Levinson fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/​Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

49

94  Monuments and instruments This visual counterpoint constitutes propaganda for a distinct constellation of principles:  tension, lightness, ephemerality, mobility, transmission, and environmental control. The SSA not only allude to, they also lampoon the concepts of the main architectural, economic, philosophical, and social currents of their time. They demonstrate a collective savage wit by parsing and reinventing the terminology of others. Through the use of word play, neologisms, and double entendre they create a series of send-​ups of the international style, the skyscraper age, the Hoover administration, John Dewey’s instrumentalism, Technocracy Inc., Stalin’s Soviet Palace competition, and the public relations and industrial design professions. Lönberg-​Holm’s affiliation with the Soviet vanguard magazine SA was surely among the sources for the group name. As an extracurricular endeavor outside of the constriction of their professional duties, the SSA were clearly enjoying themselves. In a career punctuated by largely under-​examined collaborations that are often diminished by the portrayal of Fuller in his own accounts and by his biographers as a lone genius, it is essential to address the nature of the teamwork found in Shelter and the historical context that contributed to his intellectual growth. Following such a line of thought, one might consider the role of Leland Atwood and Paul Nelson in tweaking the Dymaxion House in the late 1920s. In 1932, the SSA, but especially Lönberg-​Holm, offered formidable theoretical capabilities and his acumen for creating striking propagandistic graphics. Correlation “Shelter as an industrial, social and philosophic manifesto” was the binding agenda of the SSA, and in his editorial “Correlation” Fuller formally introduced the loosely knit coterie. In addition to the staff writers of Architectural Record, there were construction industry insiders such as Roger Sherman, an editor of Architectural Forum and Peter Stone of American Contractor.60 Haskell, who was then the Charter Secretary of the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen (AUDAC), an architectural critic at The Nation, and a contributor to the New Republic, had initially been invited to contribute by Johnson, but defected to the SSA. He was joined by Eugene Schoen who had founded the AUDAC in 1928 to promote modern American design. The practitioners, Simon Breines –​a 26-​year-​old Brooklyn-​born freelance draftsman and part-​time student at Pratt institute –​and Kiesler, contributed design proposals premised on the concepts of “Universal Architecture.” Research on industrial housing was the mutual concern that bound the unlikely members, Henry Wright and his collaborator Henry Churchill, to the SSA. As a founder of the RPAA with Mumford, Clarence Stein, and Benton MacKaye, Wright was recognized for designing the garden cities at Sunnyside, Queens (1924–​1929) and Radburn, New Jersey of 1928, two projects that experimented with decentralized terraced housing planned around collective green spaces. The two architects assumed significant

59

Monuments and instruments 95 governmental roles during the New Deal. As a member of the New York City Housing Corporation and the Buhl Foundation, Wright was attracted to the theme of mass-​produced housing, but as a regionalist, like Mumford he favored multi-​dwelling units rather than single-​family homes. He too would visit European Siedlungen that summer. Moreover, they were affiliated with technocratic movements that established New Deal planning principles. This link helps to explain the SSA membership of Dr. Alvin Johnson, a political economist, editor of the New Republic, and president of the New School of Social Research, which was founded by the historian Charles Beard, the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen.61 Relative to this study and despite the long roster, the core group of the SSA was Fuller, Breines, Larson, Kiesler, Kocher, Haskell, Frey, Stone, Sherman, Wright, Churchill, and Lönberg-​Holm, but nonetheless minor supporting contributions were made by several practitioners associated with the AIA, including Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cousin, most of whom were Beaux Arts-​ trained architects who were now sympathetic to the Shelter project.62 The Empire State Building, as a symbol of antiquated monumentalism, served as a foil for interventions by Haskell, Breines, and Lönberg-​Holm, and appears as a leitmotif throughout the last two issues. In the Depression, while most large projects came to a halt the art deco tower, designed by Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon, was an exception. John Jakob Raskob, the founder of General Motors, wanted to upstage the Chrysler Building and thanks to cheaper and readily available building materials, the anticipated construction budget was cut in half. The building was erected ahead of schedule, but even upon its inauguration it was considered to be an outmoded vestige of a corrupted era and a potent reminder of the failure of capitalism. Yet it is featured in Lönberg-​ Holm’s picture essay “Monuments and Instruments,” which was actually a sardonic critique of the Soviet Palace competition of June 1931(Figure  2.6). In this text he ponders why the Soviets in their eagerness to develop a new industrial order would base their architecture on the blunders of an older one, where the vertical towers of a bankrupt business era stand unoccupied (Figure 2.6). The SSA’s broad connections to their European counterparts has been overlooked. As a delegate to CIAM, Lönberg-​Holm actually spun his entries to address themes of relevance to fellow members, many of whom had entered the contest. CIAM was actively protesting the retrograde classicism of Stalin’s soviet realism, a style that characterized the three different prize-​winning projects in the first phase of the competition by Boris Iofan, Ivan Zholtovsky, and Hector Hamilton.63 Lönberg-​Holm had assured van Eesteren that the SSA would join the protests with a series of articles in Shelter and that copies would be sent to the New York Soviet Bureau. These events had a direct relation to the SSA. A purchase prize had been awarded to the Soviet Palace project by Simon Breines and the Dutch-​born architect Josef Van der Kar (1906–​ 2002) for a design featuring a pioneering cable catenary structure that drew on Dymaxion principles. For his attack, Lönberg-​Holm appropriated the

69

96  Monuments and instruments

  Figure 2.6 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “Monument” and “Instrument” Source: Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 May, 1932. Image courtesy of the Maxwell Levinson fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/​Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

title of Karel Teige’s anti-​formalist and productivist critique of 1929, of Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum project where the Czech architect had stated that “instead of monuments, architecture creates instruments.”64 The skyscrapers also inspired an emergency response to homelessness. In “The Emergencies,” Breines addressed the urgent situation facing New Yorkers by proposing that the city’s empty towers be transformed into provisional housing, or “Space Hotels.” Fuller believed that 90 percent of the population would soon be unable to buy food or pay taxes. With most of the city’s high-​rises vacant in the upper levels, the SSA suggested putting the 4,000 unemployed architects registered at the Architectural League to work by analyzing their possible reuse. There was a precedent for such a project. Since February 1931, the Architecture Research Group –​a collective of unemployed Philadelphia architects including Louis Kahn, who had been laid off from Cret’s office –​had been measuring and recording historic buildings for the AIA. The SSA claimed that residents of an entire city block could be housed in a single tower. For Breines the dense urban centers of immigration and production were now obsolete: The interest and the amortization of this dead weight of more or less idle capital, e.g. slums, super-​slums such as Park Avenue, skyscrapers

79

Monuments and instruments 97 and other obsolete excrescence of a faulty civilization throw an unbearable burden on industry in all its phases making it un-​economic, so that the situation is steadily becoming worse.65 His second essay, “Empire State Apartments: A Looking Backwards Test of the Emergency,” drew on Edward Bellamy’s techno-​utopian novel, Looking Backwards: 2000–​1887 (1888), and demonstrates the proximity of the SSA to technocratic movements in the Depression who were inspired by the novelist’s prophesy that in the future industrial production would be socialized and that due to advanced communication technologies, cities would become obsolete. Breines’ scenario imagined a former resident returning to New York at some time in the future in a diesel airliner to find that the Empire State, Chrysler, Lincoln, and Chanin Buildings had been transformed into Space Hotels and that 34th street had become an enormous plaza following the demolition of all low-​rise buildings up to 96th street. He claimed that almost 2,000 families could be accommodated within each of the Space Hotels. The narrative is representative of the anti-​urban sentiments that circulated among technocratic groups in the Depression. As one of the SSA projects to actually confront the immediate crisis, the outlandish proposal was picked up by the national press and started a short-​lived movement that was elaborated on in the last issue. The SSA believed that the evolution of technology, in and of itself, would transform social and cultural values. The redefinition of architecture through industrial technologies, new materials, and on-​site assembly was already a familiar theme to the European avant-​gardes of the 1920s, but here the SSA related them back to American vernacular traditions. Larson’s visual manifesto, “Chronic Disorders of Architecture,” equated traditional compressive building methods with the conditions of ring worm, piles, eczema, cancer, spinal meningitis, and infantile paralysis. Sherman, Stone, and Larson’s texts elaborated upon the themes of “industrial emergence” and “industrial emancipation,” two concepts that the SSA assimilated from the technological determinism of Veblen. But it is the imagery that accompanies Fuller’s essay “Universal Architecture No. 3” that decidedly marks a departure from the machine metaphors of the modern movement. The suspension bridges, high-​tension power lines, mastheads, and dams in the first plate reflect “Doing the most with the least.” The nomadic vessels, sea domes, and aircraft that illustrate “Mobile Shelters:  Designed for What They Will Do, Not for What They Look Like” enunciate the obsolescence of the dictum “form follows function,” by following the teleological advancement of technology, which the SSA believed would lead to an immaterial architecture of information. The SSA promoted design processes that celebrate centrifugal forces, instrumentality, performance, and architecture as a system of environmental controls. The group phenomena is explicitly announced in the “Analysis Chart of Economy (SSA)” (Figure 2.7). Although many of the members are

89

Figure 2.7 SSA, “Analysis Chart of Economy” Source: Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4, May, 1932. Image courtesy of the Maxwell Levinson fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/​Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.

9

Monuments and instruments 99 well-​known in other contexts and histories, the clustering of their projects in this issue reveals a collective vision. By concentrating upon lightweight metallic structures in tension, they exploit possibilities that were suggested, but not fully realized, by the European vanguards. There can be no doubt that Fuller gained much from the collaborative venture. The protagonists planned to design projects of an “instrumental nature” for a museum, a theater, a roadside refreshment, a supply shelter, an industrial center, a hotel, and a community garage. Kiesler contributed his Festival Shelter Space Theatre for Woodstock NY, an experimental scenic design with mutable time-​based effects. Kocher and Frey’s Aluminarie House and a Dymaxion Filling Station by Breines, which had been awarded a prize by the Architectural League, offer experimental and speculative projects that extend the fine-​spun vocabulary beyond Fuller. The last issue Although subscriptions had actually increased as corporate and government leaders took an interest in prefabricated dwellings, Levinson was unable to release an issue until November. By then he had spent the remaining subscription fees. With the realization that this might be the end, Fuller more than doubled the content. In this overly compact issue the organizational logic follows nine “Pass-​ages” that cluster texts and designs in relation to key concepts. The main connecting thread is the correlation of contemporary scientific discoveries to SSA projects, as exemplified by the cover which sports Noguchi’s sculpture Miss Expanding Universe. This beautiful flying figure, which was modeled on the dancer Ruth Page, highlights the astronomer Edwin Hubble’s discovery in 1929 that the universe goes beyond the Milky Way Galaxy, a revelation that captivated the public and that was collated with Fay Sturtevant Lincoln’s photographs of the multi-​ storied Dymaxion Dwelling on the back and inside covers. Here, the SSA demonstrate their assimilation of technocratic concerns with waste and obsolescence within industrial production. Prescient of what is today known as industrial ecology, by considering all the phases of production from design to obsolescence, Fuller conceived of the Dymaxion House as an integrated product with a delimited life cycle, like a car. Such an approach demonstrates an affinity to the social accounting of American industry that was carried out by the leftist economist Stuart Chase, a member of the RPAA and a friend of Fuller’s. Chase scrutinized the impact of manufacturing cycles on natural resources and, like Fuller, he sought a new environmental order that respected nature while allowing technological progress to move forward. The idea that human industry can be modeled on natural processes was postulated by Fuller in his definition of ecology in “Pass-​age 1” and in his essay on streamlining in “Pass-​age 5.” The term “ecology,” which Fuller defined as the economics of the household in “Putting the House in Order,” serves as

01

100  Monuments and instruments a metaphor and as a systems approach to fabrication, a form of industrial metabolism that contemplates the impact on the environment of the material and energy flows required to fabricate industrial shelter.66 Chase and other Depression-​era analysts placed the automobile industry under the microscope to dissect the entire manufacturing process in terms of the expenditure of natural resources; human and machine energy; and the treatment of industrial bi-​products and scrap. Fuller applied this thinking to housing. In his presentation of the Dymaxion Car, a collaborative venture with Starling Burgess that was illustrated by Noguchi’s striking models, Fuller was clearly reacting to the invention of the industrial design profession in the late 1920s. In the Depression, business leaders believed that the successful integration of engineering principles that had led to rationalization and uniformity in manufacturing processes might result in an over-​production of goods. Many industries, sought to incite workers to consume by introducing styling and planned obsolescence for products. Inspired by Jane Heap’s Machine-​Age Exposition, advertising and banking groups, who were heavily invested in the automobile industry, aimed to stimulate consumption with enticing aerodynamic designs that galvanized the streamlining craze. But streamlining, as defined by Fuller, represents purposeful design that follows natural principles according to the flow patterns of environmental forces. “Navy phraseology” and nautical metaphors dominate his texts. The Pass-​age entitled “Pan Continental Shelter Service” should be read as a provocative send-​up of the international style. A survey of ephemeral constructions from around the world include Noguchi and Neutra’s examination of the impermanence of Japanese paper pagodas; Fuller’s mobile Cooperative Soviet Farming Unit, designed to accommodate 20 workers for the length of Lenin’s Five-​Year Plan; and the ephemeral city being built to accommodate the Los Angeles Olympic Games.67 For the games and as part of their counter-​vision, the SSA endorsed Basic English, an international auxiliary language promoted by the British linguist C.K. Ogden (1889–​1957) after 1930. Ogden took a functionalist approach to language by reducing the 25,000 words found in any standard dictionary into basic concepts that could be achieved with only 850 words that functioned as “accelerators,” “lubricants,” “accessories,” or “gadgets,” and 16 verbs or “operators.” His inspiration came from Jerry Bentham (1748–​ 1832), the inventor of the terms internationalism, utilitarianism, minimize and maximize, and the author of the Theory of Fictions, a work issued by Ogden in 1932. Basic English made use of the “panoptic affect,” a concept borrowed from Bentham that meant that the meaning of the words could be understood in a glance. The language gained the attention of Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Chase. It served as the lingua franca in H.G. Well’s novel The Shape of Things to Come (1933). Lönberg-​ Holm wrote in Basic English, which, like Esperanto, formed part of international language reforms that sought to promote universal understanding and facilitate the sharing of scientific discoveries. Notably, Hannes Meyer

1 0

Monuments and instruments 101 had equated industrial standardization with Esperanto in his essay “The New World.”68 Teleology In his visual manifesto “Teleology,” Lönberg-​Holm postulates the idea of design as a dynamic process subject to continuous readjustment and one that was moving toward invisible flows of energy. The first plate, “Streamlining Up” is illustrated by Auguste Piccard’s high-​altitude balloon that was sent into the stratosphere in 1931 and 1932 to prove Einstein’s general theory of relativity by recording cosmic ray intensity.69 The SSA’s concern with teleology –​the idea of technology and science as goal-​driven –​clearly alludes to the notion of “ends in view” espoused by the pragmatist thinker John Dewey as part of his philosophy, instrumentalism (Figure 2.8).

Figure 2.8 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “Teleology: Streamlined Up” Source:  Shelter, vol. 2, no.  5, November, 1932. Image courtesy of the Maxwell Levinson fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/​Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

2 0 1

102  Monuments and instruments Dewey considered technology to be a form of inquiry and he explored the complex relation between human thought and action in molding the environment. For Dewey, theories were tools or instruments of inquiry with which to remodel nature. In Theory of Inquiry (1938), standards and ideals serve as instruments under continual review through experimentation. Ends and means inform and justify the invention and introduction of new tangible and intangible tools and artifacts.70 Yet here the SSA create their own understanding of this underlying conceptual premise which contributed to Fuller’s notion of “comprehensive design science,” but given the emphasis on a utopian vision of housing, their ideas should not be thought of as a mere iteration of pragmatism. With a great degree of humor and sophistication, Lönberg-​Holm deftly represents a series of Dymaxion principles in the second plate, “What Do You See? Teleological Demonstration,” with striking images of Olympic divers, sailboat racers, tulips, snowflakes, PH diffusing lights, and hexagonal cables clipped from a wire manufacturer’s pamphlet in Sweet’s Catalog, which represent the concepts of tension, gravity, streaming, continuity, and the correlation of Dymaxion principles to atomic structure (Figure 2.9). In the next plate, the Dymaxion House, as a complex environmental control system, is positioned within the context of innovations in New England vernacular structures built to “withstand forces” that include pig-​ feeding pens, central mast lighthouses, and the Old Octagonal residence of Wiscasset, Maine of 1855, an example of a housing craze begun by the phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler in his book A Home for All or A New Cheap, Convenient and Superior Mode of Building (1848).71 The SSA believed that ingrained institutional practices of professional and trade organizations –​ especially plumbers –​thwarted machine age discipline and new industrial approaches to housing. The images of high-​tension pylons in “Don’t Fight Forces Use Them: Habit Bound Inadequacy and Force Potential Balance,” bring to mind Meyer’s celebration of radio transmitters, electric lines, and telephone cables in “The New World.” The second plate –​“World Embracing Force Utilization” –​contrasts the devastating impact of hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and floods to the energetics imperative that postulates an architecture of the invisible electromagnetic realm against habit-​bound forces. Erewhon Technology could be a source of empowerment or a threat of enslavement, and such a teleological view was not shared by all. In July, Howe sent his resignation to Levinson for fear of being associated with a left-​wing movement, a concern that was triggered by a controversy between the SSA and the art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904–​1996), a politically engaged professor at Columbia University who was exploring Marxist theory as the basis for the analysis of artistic form. The dispute began when the American Communist Party’s New Masses ran “The New Architecture,” where Meyer, under the

3 0 1

Monuments and instruments 103

Figure 2.9 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “What Do You See? Teleological Demonstration” Source:  Shelter, vol. 2, no.  5, November, 1932. Image courtesy of the Maxwell Levinson fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/​Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. Permission courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

pen name John Kwait, praised the socialist program of the architects in the MoMA show. When Roger Sherman contested this view in “Transition” in the May issue of Shelter, Schapiro sent a rebuttal, but Fuller refused to print “Architecture under Capitalism,” so it appeared in New Masses in December 1932. Meyer’s concern for the relation of style to social and political conditions was the basis for his attack on the SSA’s technocratic viewpoints. (The only member who is salvaged is Lönberg-​Holm, given his critique of the Soviet Palace competition.) He accused them of failing to recognize the revolutionary implications of the architecture at MoMA and for creating just another aesthetic proposition with their naïve, home-​grown, apolitical philosophy, which he considered to be a mix of the mystical and the technical, with shreds of socialism thrown in.72 This debate underscores the sharp split between traditional Marxists and left-​wing technocrats in the Depression. Although these groups shared a

4 0 1

104  Monuments and instruments vision of the future where capitalism had ended, they envisioned arriving at these ends by different means. Instead of political agendas and revolution, the SSA believed that such a rupture would be brought about by the automatism inherent in machine age processes as part of the teleological evolution of technology. Yet they used a leftist vocabulary that called for the socialization of industrial production as an alternative to the market economy that resisted what they viewed as the limitations to individual freedom presented by communism and the material alienation of capitalism. The ever literary Howe now did his own send-​up by cleverly invoking Samuel Butler’s nineteenth-​century dystopian novel Erewhon (1872). A satire of Darwin’s theory of evolution applied to machine consciousness, the book is the first time that artificial intelligence is ever mentioned. In Erewhon or Nowhere, the citizens destroy all the machines for fear of their impending enslavement by them. In this case the reference is to an ironic chapter on the rights of vegetables: As I  have explained to you, aesthetics and social reform have in my mind nothing to do with each other. As a designer it is a matter of indifference to me whether the mechanical civilization be moral or immoral. If, on the other hand you ask me to join a movement of social reform, then I say the mechanical civilization is spinach.73 Nowhere is also a useful frame for examining the ongoing saga of the Space Hotels. By this issue the proposal for using empty skyscrapers as temporary housing had been picked up by the New  York Evening Post, The Nation, The New York Times, and The New Republic, who reported that “This may be a crazy idea, but it is not as crazy as the economic world in which it is projected.” Inspired by the Empire State Building’s dirigible mooring port, experimental radio and television broadcast stations, Fuller published a multi-​ media center that was to be linked to stations globally. The Conning Tower Concept proved to be an early precedent for the Geoscope of 1962, and it indicates the SSA’s concern with information and transmission.74 But in a concrete and activist confrontation with homelessness, the SSA had been enlisted to provide provisional dwellings on behalf of 247 veterans of the Bonus Expeditionary Force who were marooned in Hoovervilles. After a seven-​story tenement and former sweatshop on Ridge Street in the Lower East Side had been proffered and surveyed, they determined that the building could be made operational as a Space Hotel for only $5,000, and materials were procured from building wreckers. Ben Howe, a social worker, helped move the project through the maze of bureaucracy. But just as the men moved in, bank managers ordered the evacuation of the building claiming that it was a fire hazard.75 Yet the idea had spawned a short-​ lived movement that was recorded with press clippings. The Unemployed Citizens League of Norwalk, Connecticut demanded a condemned ocean

5 0 1

Monuments and instruments 105 liner for housing; the American Legion of Philadelphia sought city-​owned blocks with boarded-​up houses for impoverished veterans and their families; the Hotel Times Square offered 10 percent of their rooms to unemployed white-​collar men with a six-​month waiver on the rent; and the Emergency Committee of the Architectural League was seeking a building to house 2,500 homeless and destitute architects. Transmutation A final attempt to resuscitate the ailing journal came from Larson, who in a letter to Levinson, Fuller, and Lönberg-​Holm noted that “The publication is guilty of the same vice for which it spanks contemporary civilization: A spent purse and a mortgaged future.” With subscriber fees already gone, he urged that the “solution is not an ostrich like innocence.”76 But although he and Lönberg-​Holm proposed transforming the magazine into a system for disseminating information about all the phases of building, by this time Fuller had moved on to the Dymaxion Car and with the aid of Leland Attwood he was able to show it at the Chicago Century of Progress Fair in 1933. Levinson revived the magazine in its last incarnation from February 1938 to April 1939. The nine issues examined New Deal housing with collaborations from Kiesler, Breines, Churchill, and Neutra, under yet another title: Shelter: A Correlation Medium for Housing Progress. With its collaborative approach and technological viewpoints, the magazine stands out in its time. With Fuller as the dominant and peripatetic voice, one cannot discount the considerable perspicacious abilities of Lönberg-​ Holm as a polemicist. The notion of architecture as a tool or instrument had its origins in European functionalism, but in the American context the idea of an instrumental architecture was informed by the pragmatist philosophical tradition of Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey. For Fuller, manifestos constituted a form of advertising, but for the more ideologically committed Danish architect, manifestos were a form of thought. From his vision of American popular culture in the 1920s to his unremitting pursuit of a pragmatic and technological architecture, Lönberg-​Holm translated an uncompromising anti-​formalist, anti-​aesthetic and anti-​capitalist stance to American conditions and design discourse in the 1930s. In a sense, the SSA’s positions were extremely close to the functionalist ideal espoused by Adolf Behne, who considered the house to be an active force that is at work in its environment, and a tool to solve problems of cultural significance. Although they claimed that advancements in science and the invisible structure of things made the dictum “form follows function” obsolete, paradoxically they also returned it to its original transcendentalist roots, back to the meaning espoused by Horatio Greenough and Louis Sullivan, where function is understood as a social tool. The SSA did not conceive of building as completed artifacts with the fixity of monuments, but as perpetual works in progress –​not as real estate but as tools.

6 0 1

106  Monuments and instruments In the last issue, Fuller reviewed the “transmutation” of the journal, from T-​Square to Shelter, where the introduction of the international style to America was an event that fueled debate. Two appreciations emerge. For the curators, modern architecture was an art. For the SSA, shelter reflected the forces of nature where building is an active interface mediating between the human organism and dynamic processes of the environment. Under Fuller, Shelter was a collective endeavor with a singular vision that advanced an idiosyncratic lexicon whereby architecture would be transformed from monuments to instruments of environmental control. After their collaboration ended, members of the SSA went on to perform significant roles in research institutes, foundations, government agencies, and corporate settings. Notes 1 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “Monuments and Instruments,” Shelter, vol. 2, no.4 (May, 1932): 5. 2 Kim Hopper, Reckoning with Homelessness (New  York:  Cornell University Press, 2003), 42–​43. 3 See:  Shoji Sadao, Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi:  Best of Friends (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2011); and Isamu Noguchi, Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994). 4 According to Karl Lonberg-Holm, they continued the tradition into the 1950s. 5 Alfred Lawrence Kocher was born in San Jose, California in 1885. He left Architectural Record in 1938 to teach at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In 1940 he was appointed to the faculty of Black Mountain College in North Carolina. 6 Frey was born in Zurich and graduated from the Institute of Technology in Winterthur, in 1924. 7 Henry-​Russell Hitchcock, “Modern Architecture I: The Traditionalists and the New Tradition,” Architectural Record, vol. 63 (April 1928): 337–​349 and “The New Pioneers. Modern Architecture II,” Architectural Record, vol. 65 (May, 1928): 452–​460. 8 Henry-​Russell Hitchcock, “The Architect’s Library: Towards a New Architecture,’’ Architectural Record, vol. 63, no. 1 (1928): 90–​91; “How America Builds. Wie baut Amerika? By Richard J. Neutra,” Architectural Record, vol. 65 (June, 1928): 594–​595. 9 Haskell joined the staff of Creative Art (1927–​1929) and served as The Nation’s architectural critic (1930–​1942). He returned to Architectural Record as associate editor from 1943 to 1949. From 1949 to 1964 he was editor of Architectural Forum. See: Douglas Haskell, “Shells,” Untitled Supplement, The New Student, vol. 4 (April, 1925); and Robert Alan Benson,“Douglas Putnam Haskell (1899–​ 1979): The Early Critical Writings” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1987). 10 During the 1920s, the Harvard-​educated architect worked for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1930 he became acting secretary at Columbia University’s Institute of Economic Housing. For an account of his work at the magazine, see: Hyungmin Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 148–​161. 11 Conversation with Karl and Fred Lonberg-Holm, May 2011. 12 Larson to Levinson, 24 November 1977, Box XII, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 13 Lönberg-​Holm’s articles include: “New Theatres in Europe” (May, 1930): 490–​ 496; “The Gasoline Filling and Service Station” (June, 1930): 561–​584; “Heating,

7 0 1

Monuments and instruments 107 Cooling and Ventilating the Theatre” (July, 1930) 93–​94; “The Week-​end House” (August, 1930): 175–​192; “Glass” (October, 1930): 327–​358; “Recent Technical Developments:  Reducing Dead Load, Saving Time and Increasing Control” (December, 1930): 473–​482; “Planning the Retail Store” (June, 1931): 495, 514; “Trends in Lighting” (October, 1931):  279–​ 302; “Technical Developments” (January, 1932): 59–​72; “City Planning, Survey of Detroit, Michigan with Otto Sen and S. Washizuka” (March, 1933): 148–​149. 14 “The Demonstration Health-​House,” Architectural Record, vol. 67 (May, 1930): 433–​438. 15 See: James Marston Fitch, American Building: The Environmental Forces that Shape It (Boston, MA:  Houghton Mifflin Co., 1948)  and Reyner Banham, Architecture of the Well-​ tempered Environment (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1984). 16 Larson to Levinson, 24 November 1977, Box XII, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 17 Lewis Mumford, “Mass-​Production and the Modern House (Part I),” Architectural Record, vol. 67 (January, 1930): 13–​20 and “Mass-​Production and the Modern House (Part 2),” Architectural Record, vol. 68 (February, 1930): 110–​116. 18 Davison was made head of research at the John B. Pierce Foundation (1931–​ 1944). For an account of his later work at SOM, see: Hyun-​ Tae Jung, “Technologically Modern: The Prefabricated House and the Wartime Experience of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,” in Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities, eds. Vladimir Kuli, Timothy Parker, Monica Penick (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2014), 186–​218. 19 Philip Johnson, “Rejected Architects,” Creative Art, vol. 8 (June, 1931): 433–​435. 20 Endorsements can be found in promotional fliers in ELB and LS. 21 For different examinations of Shelter, see: Robert Stern, George Howe: Towards a Modern American Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975); Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein, Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 1999); Marc Dessauce, Machinations: essai sur Frederick Kiesler, l’histoire de l’architecture moderne aux Etats-​ Unis et Marcel Duchamp (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 1996) and “Contro lo Stile Internazionale: Shelter e la stampa architettonica americana,” Casabella, vol. 57 (September, 1993): 46–​53 and 70–​71; William Braham and Jonathan Hale, eds., Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory (London: Routledge, 2006); and William Braham, “The Heart of Whiteness: The Discussion of Color in American Architectural Journals Around 1930,” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, Department of Architecture, 1995). 22 Maxwell Levinson (1912–​) graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1932 and from NYU in 1936. He published the journal USA Tomorrow in 1953 and served as the assistant architect of Philadelphia, 1949–​1953. 23 In the late 1930s, Howe and Louis Kahn worked for the Philadelphia Housing Authority. Howe partnered with Oscar Stonorov in the 1940s. 24 Gaia Caramellino, “The ‘Shelter Project’ and the Multiple Itineraries of American Modernism,” paper presented at the International Congress:  Las revistas de arquitectura (1900–​1975) crónicas, manifiestos, propaganda, held in Pamplona, Spain at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Navarra, May 3 and 4, 2012, 137–​146. 25 George Howe, “T-​Square,” T-​Square, vol. 2, no. 1 (January, 1932). 26 Ibid. 27 Frank Lloyd Wright, “For All May Raise the Flowers Now, for All Have Got the Seed,” T-​Square, vol. 2, no. 2 (February, 1932): 6–​8. 28 George Howe, “Moses Turns Pharaoh,” T-​Square, vol. 2, no.  2 (February, 1932): 9–​10.

8 0 1

108  Monuments and instruments 29 Buckminster Fuller, “Universal Architecture,” T-​Square, vol. 2, no. 2 (February, 1932): 22. 30 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture, 239–​240. 31 An account of Fuller cashing out his insurance is found in:  Krausse and Lichtenstein, Your Private Sky, 29 and 152; and “Interview with Philip Johnson,” Buckminster Fuller: Thinking Out Loud, PBS. American Masters, www.thirteen. org/​bucky/​johnson.html. 32 Caramellino, “The Shelter Project.” 33 Frank Lloyd Wright, “Of Thee I Sing,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 3 (April, 1932): 10–​11. See: Harry Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673–​ 1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 301. 34 Henry Wright, “Slum Improvement,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 3 (April, 1932): 19. 35 For studies on Howe and Lescaze’s partnership, see:  Stern, George Howe and Richard Pommer, “The Architecture of Urban Housing during the Early 1930s,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 37, no.  4 (December, 1978): 235–​264. Lescaze’s New Deal projects are examined in: Gaia Caramellino, William Lescaze: un architetto europeo nel new deal (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2010). 36 Knud Lönberg-​ Holm, “Two Shows:  A  Comment on the Aesthetic Racket,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 3 (April, 1932): 16–​17. 37 Buckminster Fuller, “Universal Architecture, Essay no.2,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 3 (April, 1932): 34. 38 “Interview with Philip Johnson,” Buckminster Fuller. 39 Edward Bernays, “Organizing Chaos,” in Propaganda (Brooklyn, NY:  Ig. Publishing, 2004), 37. The book was originally published in 1928. 40 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94–​136. 41 The work of Oscar Stonorov, Elroy Webber, Clauss and Daub, and Hazen Size was exhibited in the show, organized by Raymond Hood and Harvey Wiley Corbett. 42 Lippmann expressed his skepticism toward the democratic system in Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925). 43 Bernays, Propoganda, 48–​49. 44 Cheney Silks, Book File:  1923–​ 1965. Container 457. Folder:  Biography of an Idea; Notes:  Cheney Brothers, Inc. ELB. See also:  http://​memory.loc.gov/​ ammem/​coolhtml/​coolhome.html. American Memory Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921–​1929. 45 Bernays, Propaganda, 147. 46 Lönberg-​Holm, “America: Reflections.” 47 Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display (New York: Bretano, 1929). 48 Ibid., 79. 49 MoMA was founded in 1929 by seven collectors, including Lillie P. Bliss, Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan, and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller. The first director, Alfred Barr Jr., visited the Bauhaus, VKhUTEMAS, and De Stijl. 50 The “little friends” were rooted in the fine arts department around the art historian Paul Sachs, a member of the banking family. The group included Barr; Lincoln Kirstein, who founded the American Ballet Theatre and Hound and Horn; Arthur Everett Austin, founder of the surrealist journal View; Kirk Askew; Hitchcock; John McAndrew; Edward Warburg; and Julien Levy. They dominated the commerce and historiography of modern art. 51 The Whitney Museum of American Art began as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s studio gallery. The art world was extremely small in the 1930s. Only three of the fifteen galleries in New York exhibited contemporary art.

9 0 1

Monuments and instruments 109 52 Buckminster Fuller, “Memoranda to SSA,” July 27, 1932, Box XII, Folder 1, KLH-​A. 53 Memorandum from Edward Bernays to Howe and Lescaze, November 16, 1931, Container I: 192, Folder October–​November, 1931, ELB. 54 Ibid. 55 Howe to Lescaze, February 5, 1932, Container I:193, Folder February, 1932, ELB. 56 Bernays to Howe, February 10, 1932, Container I:193, Folder February, 1932, ELB. 57 Bernays to Howe, April 19, 1932, Container I:193, Folder April, 1932, ELB. 58 Howe to Bernays, April 25, 1932, Container I:193, Folder April, 1932, ELB. 59 Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry” 94–​136. 60 Buckminster Fuller, “Correlation,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 1. 61 Alvin Saunders Johnson (1874–​1971) was an editor of the New Republic; co-​ editor with E.R.A. Seligman of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences; and head of the Economic Forum, an organization that applied technocratic formulas to problems of the Depression. 62 William Adams Delano (1874–​ 1960) was a Columbia University professor and the designer of public buildings in Washington, DC. Howard Morley Robertson (1888–​1963) was an American-​born British architect; a graduate of the Architectural Association; and the designer of the British pavilion for the International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts in Paris, 1925. Electus D. Litchfield (1872–​1952) planned Yorkship, a town built during World War I for the Emergency Fleet Corporation, New York Shipbuilding Company. 63 At this moment, he was preparing the plans of Detroit for CIAM 4, which was being organized in Moscow by Ernst May, Meyer, Stam, and Hans Schmidt, who had set up foreign brigades in the early 1930s. 64 Karel Teige, “Mundaneum,” in Opposition Reader, ed. Michael Hays (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 597. Teige, an affiliate of the ABC group, initially supported Le Corbusier’s League of Nations project of 1927, although he preferred Meyer and Wittwer’s design. But later he attacked Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum for Paul Otlet. 65 Simon Breines, “The Emergencies,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 18. 66 SSA, “Putting the House in Order,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 2–​8 and “Streamlining,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 71–​79. 67 SSA, “Pan Continental Shelter Service,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 79. Also see: Matthew Ehrlich, “Our Russian Correspondent,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 93. Ehrlich worked with Le Corbusier and was the SSA’s Russian representative. 68 C.K. Ogden, “Olympic Village,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 99 and “Basic English,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 97 69 “Teleology” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 105–​109. 70 See: Larry A. Hickman, John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press 1992). 71 Fowler (1809–​1887) popularized octagonal houses for their efficiency. 72 Roger Sherman, “Transition,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 26; Peter Stone, “Tooling Up,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 27–​30. Meyer Schapiro, “Looking Forward to Looking Backward: A Dossier of Writings on Architecture from the 1930s,” Grey Room, vol. 6 (winter, 2002): 66–​109; Felicity D. Scott, “On Architecture Under Capitalism,” Grey Room, vol. 6 (winter, 2002): 44–​65; and Architecture or Techno-​Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). For Schapiro’s political views, see: Andrew Hemingway, “Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994): 13–​29.

0 1

110  Monuments and instruments 73 SSA, “Bernays, Boogies, Bizness and Bluff,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 15–​16. 74 SSA, “Conning Tower,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 64–​65. 75 SSA, “Journal of the Space Hotel,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 55–​61. 76 Larson to Max and Leon Levinson, April 15, 1932, Box IX, Folder, KLH-​A.

1

3  Industrial emancipation and technocracy in the 1930s

The cultural front comprises all activities directed toward the expansion of social wealth. It is expressed in the continuous advancement of standards of productivity. The position of the technician (artist, architect, and engineer) on this front can be defined only through an analysis of economic and technical forces in production.1

Despite Fuller’s long-​running denial of any association to the technocracy craze of the 1930s, many of the SSA’s working methods can be traced back to the movement. In the Depression, when technocracy entered the popular imagination, it referred to a government or social system led by technicians and guided by the imperatives of technology, for the common good. But its modern provenance can be credited to the engineer William Henry Smyth, in the book Industrial Management (1919), where it signified the disruptive behavior of disenfranchised factory workers. By the 1930s and following the critiques of the laissez-​faire system in industrial society that were advanced by the institutional economist Thorstein Veblen (1857–​1929), in some sectors it was believed that industrial production could no longer be left up to the whims of absentee owners and should be taken over by centralized planning to reach optimization.2 This point of view constituted an evolution of scientific management and the Progressive Era. It culminated in the expansion of technocratic thought into diverse fields, whose persuasion can be traced to Veblen, one of the first critics of finance capitalism and investment banking manipulations, who was writing at the time of the creation of corporate mergers during America’s Gilded Age. In architecture, technocratic polemics are associated with two divergent groups: the SSA and Technocracy Inc., a band of engineers and architects led by Howard Scott (1890–​1970), who enjoyed great popular appeal after the Wall Street crash. Scott’s coalition took Veblen’s call for a revolt of technicians literally, by promoting autocratic rule in the belief that this would lead to nationalized industrial production. They collated charts that analyzed continental energy consumption and pointed toward an economy of abundance. The SSA called for lifting the “feudal restrictions” that landownership and real estate investment placed on the housing industry in order to

2 1

112  Industrial emancipation and technocracy promote “industrial emancipation.” By following the imperatives of technology in production processes, they sought to achieve a new industrial order for the obsolete building industry. Both groups introduced paradigms for macro-​scale infrastructures and complex systems techniques for energy and resource mapping that came out of a shared technological-​utopian lineage. Technocratic positions were also critical to Lewis Mumford (1895–​1990) in his formation as a historian of technology. As a direct disciple of Veblen, and despite his relationship with members of both the SSA and Technocracy Inc., he became the movement’s foremost critic by posing an essential question when he asked whether society should adapt to technological imperatives or if new machine processes could be assimilated to the traditional values of humanistic culture. The difficulty of reconciling democratic politics with the logic of machine processes was a common thread, yet a comparison between these groups reveals shades of gradations. Technocracy, as it emerged in the Depression, is a historically bound term, but the adherents spanned the ideological spectrum. Left-​ wing technocrats, including Stuart Chase, Harold Loeb, Mumford, and the SSA, rejected the rigid constraints implicit in expert control by questioning political instrumentality, at a difference not only to Scott, but also to the universalist approach grounded in Saint Simionism and Taylorism that characterized some of Le Corbusier’s polemics of the 1920s.3 As they took aim at the obsolete land zoning, real estate, and construction enterprises, as the last industries to be modernized according to the dictates of advanced technology and the inevitable mobility of modern life, the SSA developed an idiosyncratic glossary and distinct design practices that are now associated only with Fuller. Although “technocratic” is a common epithet applied to Fuller, he protested the label by perpetuating his family’s transcendentalist values and the planetary interconnection he came to comprehend as a seaman. In Shelter and in Nine Chains to the Moon (1938) he sought to distinguish himself from Scott.4 Yet a close reading of Shelter finds the SSA to be reliant upon Veblen’s theories, and Fuller even went so far as to outline the movement’s origins with Smyth.5 In their rhetorical positioning to Technocracy Inc., the SSA adapted their rival’s methodologies, which led to a unique systems approach to world problems that Fuller developed more fully as “design science.” Fuller’s promotion of the ideals of ecology and total environmental control were assimilated as part of ecological movements in the 1960s. They also informed his evolving formulation of the comprehensive anticipatory designer as an outsider, who could put to use the windfall of technocracy, its products and data for the common good. Yet it was during the economic crisis that the SSA’s techno-​utopian lineage served as a defining theoretical framework. In this context, the meaning of “ecology” was associated with the home and economics; “environment” with control and conditioning; and “flows” with the transformation of matter and energy. The SSA promoted the liberating potentials of technology as contingent, changing,

3 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 113 dynamic, and “evoluting.” Their idea of building as a form of environmental control, as a performative process, and as a material organization that regulates energy flows, was meant to open up new aesthetic possibilities. These unique ideological concerns ultimately transcend their technocratic origins.

Technocratic utopias The early sources may be charted through a number of politicized novelists, engineers, and economists. The possibility of optimized industrial output and a critique of corporate-​driven free-​market systems was explored by Edward Bellamy (1850–​1898) in his novel Looking Backward: From 2000–​1887 (1888); Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865–​1923) in America and the New Epoch (1916); and Veblen throughout his life’s work, specifically in The Business Enterprise (1904), The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914), and The Engineers and the Price System (1921). In Shelter, the SSA created scenarios indebted to them. Technology held a central relevance for intellectuals of the era that the historian Andrew Jamison has insightfully divided into four positions: technocratic, traditionalists, humanist, and pragmatist. By emphasizing the move from simple commodities to advanced technological research, Veblen placed the development of technology at the forefront of social and cultural transformation.6 In his studies of man’s institutions and tools, machine processes were elevated to be the very defining aspect of modernity. After the stock market crash, the works of Bellamy, Steinmetz, and Veblen experienced a newfound popularity given their sustained criticism of capitalism that had been developing since the advent of the twentieth century. Their analysis of institutional and corporate structures in relation to technical achievement clearly departed from traditional Marxist assessments. Within the American context, it should be stressed that scientific management was already fully ingrained even before the death of Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1919. Corporations became the focal point for varied assessments, following the collapse of industrial capitalism. As the first complex technological amalgamations came into being, the modern concept of technology was being constructed. According to the historian Leo Marx, the word “technology” only entered into widespread circulation after World War I, and not fully until the Depression, when its mutable meanings were not separable from corporatism.7 Large-​scale technological ventures, starting with the railroads, were indicative of hierarchical corporate entities. These centralized ensembles involved the bureaucratic coordination of inventors, capital investment, entrepreneurs, think tanks, managers, and engineers. From the 1870s to the 1920s, as large networks came to dominate the economy, huge systems replaced discrete artifacts and simple tools.8 By the 1930s the definition of technology coincided with increased corporate control of the economy. With the exception of military and state-​run utilities, corporate share and profitability made viable complex business assemblages, such as the

4 1

114  Industrial emancipation and technocracy telephone and electric industries. Central to the SSA’s position was Veblen’s critique of the “price” or “profit system,” a synonym for capitalism. In architecture, as in other fields, “the emergency,” as the economic crisis was called, brought on a radical rethinking of the basic organizational premises of economic, industrial, and political relations. Bellamy and Steinmetz The enormous popularity of Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–​1887 at the end of the nineteenth century spawned a network of national socialist clubs, and a genre of novels embracing optimum industrial production. Veblen and his wife read the book aloud. Mumford wrote about it in a survey of utopias in 1922.9 In this story, the insomniac Julian West falls asleep in 1887 in a domestic space that is essentially a regulated life support system. When he awakens in Boston in the year 2000, he finds that the country has been reorganized by industrial socialism  –​the merger of corporations into a single industrial organ performing at maximum production levels. Compulsory labor, a social duty, is to be fulfilled from the ages of 21 to 45 through citizen conscription in a national industrial army, with menial tasks left to the youngest recruits. Citizens exchange labor credits for vital products displayed in national shops. As a critique, the English arts and crafts designer William Morris (1834–​1896) appropriated this narrative to propose an agrarian artisan-​based counter-​vision of the future in News from Nowhere (1890). Bellamy initially envisioned a great city with monumental civic buildings and tree-​lined public spaces, but in the sequel, Equality (1897), he presaged the obsolescence of urban centers and their dismantling. In the year 2000, machinery would govern human ends with an engineering conception of efficiency. The production and distribution of essential goods would be carried out by ten allied industrial departments overseen by the president. Advances in communication technologies, such as round-​the-​clock radio and television broadcasting  –​inventions that Bellamy predicted  –​would make it inevitable to disperse the population into Arcadian communities, where citizens could dine communally. With cheap energy harnessed by electric power and with advancements in high-​speed transport, work could be decentralized. Products, to be paid for with a credit card, would be delivered to regional warehouses fitted out with pneumatic tubes. This perfected form of industrial organization was referred to in Shelter in the proposals for reusing empty skyscrapers, in Fuller’s Conning Tower broadcast station, and in the idea of the Dymaxion House as a labor-​saving device. The Space Hotels scenario envisioned fitting out the Empire State Building with a communal recreation floor where jobs across the nation could be broadcast in real-​time so that itinerant workers could travel by airplane to regional mobile fabrication units. The economy was to be based on a system of industrial credits once middlemen in sales and publicity were

5 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 115 eliminated. The SSA predicted that New  York would become a socialist municipality and a research center dedicated to advanced housing, with fabrication located out west and accessed by dirigibles parked inside St. John the Divine Church. The SSA took the idea of the liberating potential of technology from Steinmetz’s only incursion into political theory, America and the New Epoch (1916).10 Following the death of Taylor, he became the country’s foremost public engineer. As a committed socialist, he found no contradictions between his ideology and his work in R&D for General Electric during the years when the national electric grid was being laid out. The freedom that Steinmetz was given within that think tank led him to promote the corporation as the most promising arrangement for future public authority. After 1917, he supported the Russian Revolution by offering technical assistance to Lenin, which points to the convergence of American and Soviet advancements in electrification during the era. He promoted the idea of “industrial communism” as a natural evolution as mankind passed from an individualistic age to a collective one. The same engineering, managerial, and entrepreneurial prowess that had electrified the nation would lead to industrial and technological cooperation. GE was, for Steinmetz, a logical move toward socialism. Steinmetz argued that the productive capacity of modern industrial systems outstripped consumer demand. The welfare of society was the very purpose of “industrial communism,” a term adapted by the SSA. In this new society, the workday could be reduced to four hours. By eliminating the production of non-​essentials and ousting public relations intermediaries, a worker’s responsibilities could be reduced to 20 hours of work per week, and only 200 days of work per year. This would give everyone 4,675 hours of leisure, to pursue personal fulfillment and continuing education. The governing “Tribunicate” was to be modeled on corporate altruism. Economic efficiency would lead to greater industrial cooperation and the elimination of drudgery.11 In Shelter, the SSA relied on a utopian heritage that focused on technologically driven progress, which was believed to be a natural evolution of the country’s productive capacity.12 Henry George’s book, Progress and Poverty (1879), which examined the limitations of the earth’s resources, predated Bellamy’s utopia. George (1839–​1897), a Philadelphia-​born reformist, blamed land speculation for economic recessions and the existence of poverty within capitalistic society. He called for communal ownership of natural resources and coined the idea of Spaceship Earth, an idea that was later popularized by Fuller.13 Based on their suspicions of democracy and free-​market competition, Bellamy and Steinmetz sought to transform society by making large-​scale corporate models analogues for government. In Shelter, the SSA drew on Bellamy’s futurist scenarios by stressing the interrelation of cooperation, community, and technology. Looking Backwards dealt with the populace’s

6 1

116  Industrial emancipation and technocracy liberation from the domestic grind and the tension between centralization and decentralization, an anti-​urban theme that characterized the SSA’s thinking. But it was Veblen who recognized the paradox, that the potential for social wealth that had been generated by machine age forces under private monopolistic industries were thwarted by the pecuniary interests of the owners. The SSA translated this critique to the building and real estate sectors, as they sought to promote an economic and technically efficient dwelling as a “life support system,” and shelter as the service of ecology and economics combined.

Buckminster Fuller’s Soviet of Architects In the years immediately following the stock market crash, Veblen’s sardonic essays were widely held to have been prophetic of the collapse of capitalism. Although he died a month before Black Friday, his books were resuscitated, enjoying a second life. He can be considered as a linchpin connecting figures as diverse as Fuller, Mumford, and the members of Technocracy Inc. The Wall Street crash of 1929 came a year into the presidency of Herbert Hoover, an engineer and geologist with expertise in global mining operations who was known as the “Great Engineer” early in his career. He and his administration personified efficiency. His successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated the New Deal, a series of federally orchestrated programs aimed at relief, reform, and recovery, within his first 100 days in office in 1933. Veblen’s disciples served as directors and consultants for government agencies such as the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC), the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Home Owners’ Loan, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the Works Project Administration (WPA), and the Housing and Resettlement Administration.14 The slogan “the New Deal” was coined by Chase, a Veblen acolyte, a classmate of Walter Lippmann, and a colleague of Fuller. In the 1920s Veblen’s influence was already paramount for members of the RPAA, where Chase and some of the founders of the New School for Social Research were associates.15 In the 1930s Veblen’s ideas became more widespread, due in part to the biography written by the Columbia University economist Joseph Dorfman. Thorstein Veblen and His America (1934) captured the interest of rational reformers, many of whom became the administrators of the New Deal. Given the idiosyncrasy of Veblen’s work, and its current out-​datedness, it may seem difficult to fully comprehend his importance at the time, when his ideas served as an explanation for the economic collapse and pointed toward the potential of technological progress.16 Shelter reveals Fuller and the SSA to be under his influence. Veblen is most widely known for his analysis of emulative consumption patterns, sign systems, and class avidity in the Theory of the Leisure Class:  An Economic Study of Institutions (1899). He offered a native justification for a functionalist approach to architecture that Mumford

7 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 117 appreciated as he became acquainted with European theories and that made it obligatory reading for Alfred Barr’s disciples at MoMA. Veblen’s ethical and economic rejection of ornament and hand-​made goods as “honorific waste” espoused a position that was strikingly similar to Adolf Loos in “Ornament and Crime” (1908). He considered machine age production to be the product of a natural evolution and for the common good. Rather than foreseeing a workers revolution, he held a mistrust of mass society due to his belief in “emulation transfer,” the envy of the lower classes for the consumptive patterns of non-​essentials of the wealthy. In a comparative study of nations, he examined the assimilation of advanced technology into different societies.17 By combining philosophy, linguistics, institutional economics, anthropology, social criticism, and a theory of human drives derived from Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Veblen formulated an epistemological system involving man’s natural proclivities for productive work as a community endeavor. The epic scope of The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts examined the evolution of institutions, tools, and technology from man’s primitive stages to present-​day society. This theme was first articulated in Theory of Business Enterprise and furthered in The Engineers and the Price System. Veblen’s ideas offered an explanation of the society’s organizational collapse, despite its being an advanced technological milieu. The Engineers and the Price System began as a series of articles for The Dial in 1919. “A Memorandum on a Practicable Soviet of Technicians” constituted a portrait of corporate malfeasance and a critique of the robber barons of his day. Inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution, he offered the “captains of industry” a crepuscular specter of the conditions that would be needed for a revolt of the engineers to occur. Veblen argued that the owners of industry were “captains of vested interest,” who obstructed the productive capabilities of their businesses to maintain scarcity and profit. The staff engineers  –​whose profession valued disinterested efficiency, parsimony, and benign social service –​were his future revolutionaries. With their dominion over energy, prime materials, manpower, and production systems, their takeover would lead to a technocratic utopia, one capable of realizing the full productivity and abundance promised by the standardization implicit in machine processes. This critique of capitalism was not based upon the exploitation of workers. As Theodor Adorno noted, Veblen made a fetish of waste and inefficiency.18 The role of technological innovation in a modern industrial economy lags as society adapts to the imperatives of the machine. Unlike Marxists, who focused on the means of production, Veblen examined the legal structures and institutional relations of entrepreneurs and corporations. Such categories are found in Shelter in relation to landownership, credit, and housing. In an era of anagrams, the SSA was clearly Fuller’s Soviet of Architects. He claimed: “It is worthy of note that the SSA represents a group mechanically cohesive through a positive creative progressive

8 1

118  Industrial emancipation and technocracy urge … Self-​effacing and service minded, somewhat after the manner of the Ford planning department.”19 Interstitial disturbances: clogging the system The Engineers and the Price System begins by tracing the roots of sabotage, a term derived from the French word for wooden shoes, or clogs. In French, sabot signifies a dragging clumsy movement, but it was originally used to discuss disgruntled workers, throwing shoes into machinery to literally clog the system.20 Nonetheless, Veblen applied it to signify the conscious withdrawal of efficiency by absentee owners as emblematic of conflicts in production. Productivity was advanced by businessmen in collaboration with technical managers. Machine processes were seen as a discipline involving the balanced, well-​articulated and intricate coordination of systems of tools, machines, skills, and technique. The end result was to be the production and distribution of a community’s material livelihood. Business enterprise involved a set of pecuniary institutional controls, determined by the interests of private property, investment for profit, natural rights, and liberty. Although engineers had made abundance inevitable, businessmen were bent on slowing down production to maintain scarcity through the “price system” of credit and debt. By maneuvering to avoid overproduction, the rate of volume was adjusted to the market, resulting in shortage and unemployment. For Veblen, the inherent contradiction of capitalism was that efficiency and the possibility of super-​abundance was sabotaged by greed, with scarcity causing unemployment. Although 1929 had been a bumper production year, that is exactly what had occurred. Veblen’s rhetorical and bloodless revolution was inspired by renegade engineers  –​disciples of Taylor, such as Henry Gantt (1861–​ 1919) and Morris L.  Cooke (1872–​1960). The designer of the construction management chart that bears his name, Gantt advocated for the new productive order of the engineer in Efficiency and Democracy (1918) and Organizing for Work (1919). In 1916, at the convention of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), he founded the New Machine, a short-​lived collective of radicalized engineers who mapped out Lenin’s First Five-​Year Plan on the Gantt chart. Cooke sought to expand the influence of engineering professionals into political leadership. Real innovation, for Veblen, was created by “idle curiosity,” the human tendency to manipulate the world of evolving matter. This notion, as described in the Instinct of Workmanship, was inherited from his professor Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–​1914), one of the founders of pragmatism. “Idle curiosity” held much in common with John Dewey’s definition of “instrumental value.”21 An impulsive mental wanderlust, it was non-​teleological and free –​the human gift of play that led to scientific creativity and technological innovation. As a form of social aesthetics, it was based on standards of interdependence. “Workmanship” stemmed from man’s

9 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 119 inherent instinct to shape things and his environment. “Instrumentality,” a term that the SSA appropriated from Veblen and Dewey, concerned the technological imperative value of the future as embodied in the modern age by the engineer’s serviceability to society’s needs. Veblen defined the instinct of workmanship and idle curiosity, as the propensity of humans toward some kind of productive endeavor for the common good. As the province of the engineer, they are also suggestive of Fuller’s formulation of design science. “Industrially realizeable comprehensive, anticipatory, design science” Fuller claimed to have invented design science in 1927, by drawing upon his naval experiences, but the definition evolved. The early sources arose when Fuller appropriated Veblen’s terminology regarding natural proclivities, “teleological evoluting technology,” and the “time lag of habituation.” The comprehensive designer –​a synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist –​had supplanted the architect who had been the “comprehensive harvester of potentials” for 400 years, from feudal society to the present. The era of worldwide industrialization would arrive out of interdisciplinary collaboration, to raise the standards of living for all, through the enlightened management of cosmic energy and wealth.22 For Veblen, social beliefs and institutional structures restrained technological imperatives, leading to a “cultural lag” that pitted outmoded practices against the common welfare. Businessmen distorted the forces of industrialization and social evolution by causing “interstitial disturbances” in the realm where engineers labor toward ideal standards and interchangeability. Inefficiency was brought on by the manipulative promotion of superfluous commodities by advertising middlemen and systematic “dislocations.” Culture and institutions are habits that change more slowly than technological advancements. Such a “time lag” was understood by social reformers in the 1930s as a setback that triggered the crash. In Shelter, the SSA made the claim that it led to resistance to new housing alternatives. Veblen did not consider machine technology to be at odds with human development. It was part of the “instinct of workmanship,” a drive to purposeful work based on the matter-​of-​fact shaping of the environment by technological means. Society’s ceremonial structures represented past values as opposed to instrumental imperatives, and the control of future consequences that were linked to technological innovation. In his writing, one sees the replacement of traditional terms –​the useful arts, manufacturing, industry, invention, workmanship, techne, applied science, and contrivances –​with a newer machine age vocabulary. In the 1930s technology was understood in a multitude of ways. It could refer to assemblages, organizational and managerial methods, institutions and their practices, and means and ensembles of means. Or it could refer to a device, expertise, a process, an artifactual system, components, a specialized form of theoretical knowledge, a distinctive thought process, and a unique set of skills.23 With the

0 2 1

120  Industrial emancipation and technocracy interpenetration of practices of large, modern institutions, technology was endlessly reified as a synonym for advanced human domination over the environment and the material world. Fuller was drawn to Dewey’s instrumentalism, a philosophy that viewed technology not solely as material artifacts or a way of molding the environment, but also as conceptual tools and an abstract form of thought. Yet, in Shelter he drew upon Veblen’s pragmatist legacy that made instincts the prime movers leading to institutional change. For Veblen, man’s proclivities were for purposeful action, environmental adaptation, and technical progress. New technological insights would eventually entail a change in the pattern of life and habits, thus leading to institutional adjustments. These issues were echoed in Fuller’s concept of design science, even at the end of his life: The function of what I call design science is to solve problems by introducing into the environment new artefacts, the availability of which will induce their spontaneous employment by humans and thus coincidentally, cause humans to abandon their previous problem producing behaviors and devices.24 Essential here was the idea of industry defined as the production of materially serviceable objects including shelter and environmental controls for the wellbeing of all. Standards were socially definable ideals. In Shelter, Fuller wrote: Until it is understood (if not popularly, at least academically), that standards are abstract, progressive, enveloping-​ refining human notions representative of the continuity of subconscious empirical conclusions; and cannot be captured or dogmatically saticized [sic], will we be in no fit condition for a proletarian autocracy, i.e., socialism. Until this is understood discussions of “production” are unsane. Until such an understanding is work-​a-​day the faithful, anonymous, courageous, unself-​conscious leadership of the high-​speed industrial-​ democracy-​ emergence must remain in the hands of the currently aligned internal corporate administrations for the harmonic correlation of world-​wide elemental-​purveyance from source, through process, to consumer.25 As social advocates, the SSA believed that market forces could not be counted on to provide shelter. The material environment was the outcome of man’s shaping of technological imperatives. Aesthetics held no relation to style. They were functional and based on criteria of communal benefit. The role of the technician on the cultural front was to meet such “standards of serviceability” by molding the physical and social environment through cooperative action.

1 2

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 121

Technocracy Inc. Mumford and some members of Technocracy Inc. enjoyed direct contact with Veblen. In 1919, Mumford worked alongside him and Dewey as a contributor to The Dial, a journal founded by Fuller’s great aunt Margaret. Veblen, Dewey, and Charles Beard founded the New School for Social Research the same year. The economist Alvin Johnson, the school’s first president, became a member of the SSA.26 Mumford studied modern economic development with Veblen, although he launched a harsh critique of The Engineers and the Price System in “If Engineers were King” (1921) when he asked: “What does it matter if industrial society is efficient, if it is run in the same blind alley in which humanity finds itself today.”27 Veblen’s influence may have not been as decisive as the Scottish biologist and sociologist Patrick Geddes (1854–​1932), yet Mumford’s history of technology, Technics and Civilization (1934), was indebted to him in its ambition, though it posed a challenge. The sweeping narrative synthesized his mentor’s method  –​the teleological survey of technological and institutional change –​with Geddes’ ethos of organicism, biotechnique, and regional ecology. In the book’s 1,000-​year scope, the eotechnic era (1000–​ 1750) is characterized by water power and the use of wood. The paleotechnic phase (1750–​1830) relied on energy from coal and iron. The neotechnic era –​which began in 1830 and depended upon electricity and alloys –​was emblematic of increased industrial supervision by technicians. Mumford departed from Veblen in calling for the assimilation of the machine to the “vital standards of life.” Technology –​material artifacts and their social use –​was a complex assemblage of the machinic, the natural, cultural values, and institutional arrangements. For Mumford, machines are minor organisms, but society was not merely a passive receiver. As complex cultural and technological artifacts machines embody societal values and are shaped by human agency. His book argued for cultural regeneration, yet the last chapter, “Orientation,” echoes the generalized reception of Veblen’s ideas by calling for efficient production and the normalization of consumption through the elimination of non-​essentials. This “basic communism” would liberate Americans from material need by socializing the production and distribution of food, clothing, and shelter.28 Automatism Mumford and other technocrats in the 1930s believed that fundamental changes at the level of production were a precondition for a new society. Their vision of a post-​capitalist America was premised on the idea of automatism. The unlocking of the potentials of new modes of machine production would render capitalism obsolete and lead to a utopia of abundance –​an economy of use instead of an economy of profit  –​whereby those materials essential to basic human needs would be socialized. Fuller, too, believed

21

122  Industrial emancipation and technocracy that automatism had set in motion a rupture that would lead to “industrial communism,” an idea that Meyer Schapiro considered to be naïve and apolitical.29 In Shelter, Fuller claimed that:  “Industrial Communism bespeaks the eventual transfer of all physical function of prosaic necessity to the inanimate machine and the individual dictate of man’s time or life in relation to universal forces.”30 The forces of rationalized production that emerged under monopolistic ownership could trigger a switch whereby full automation would reduce labor, eliminate scarcity, and create leisure. The demise of capitalism would come about not by a revolt, but due to the end of labor as workers became machine overseers. Universal economic security would liberate Americans from want.31 Technocracy Inc. viewed Veblen’s call to revolt as a form of social engineering. The organization came out of a think tank, the Technical Alliance that was commissioned in 1918 to conduct a national energy survey by the International Workers of the World.32 Steinmetz and Veblen were part of the coterie that included the engineer Bassett Jones and members of the RPAA such as Chase, MacKaye, and the New  York architects, Frederick Lee Ackerman, Robert Kohn, and Charles H. Whitaker. They dissolved in 1921, without publishing any findings, yet the technocracy movement was spawned.33 But because the founding members –​Scott, Harold Loeb, and Walter Rautenstrauch, a Columbia professor of industrial engineering  –​ could not agree among themselves, they formed splinter groups: New York Technocracy, Inc., Committee on Technocracy, and Continental Committee on Technocracy, respectively.34 At the onset of the Depression the media showered them with attention until Scott’s credentials were called into question.35 In 1932, The New York Herald Tribune exposed Scott’s lack of engineering training by revealing that he was actually the part-​owner of a floor polishing company who had previously worked as the foreman of a cement-​pouring gang. By promoting conservation and abundance rather than the “price system” they called for a society to be steered by technicians who by tracking consumer needs could lead the country to full automation. An economy of energy credits, rather than money, would be implemented. There would be less work and more leisure. Their planning of “technates” –​decentralized, transnational, life pockets with industrial centers and housing interconnected by rail and air transport  –​bear a resemblance to proposals by the SSA. They claimed that American productive capacity was sufficient to provide for all but distribution needed to be properly deployed. Technocracy Inc.’s architects, Kohn, Ackerman, and Whitaker, had experience mobilizing resources during World War I.36 Kohn was head of housing production for the Emergency Fleet Corporation of the US Shipping Board. Ackerman was chief designer of planned communities for servicemen. Educated at Columbia University and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Kohn (1870–​1953) went on to hold significant institutional positions in planning as the president of the AIA from 1930 to 1932; as director of

3 2 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 123 the housing division of the WPA in 1933 in consultation with former SSA member Henry Wright; and as a vice-​president of the New  York World’s Fair in 1939. Frederick Lee Ackerman (1878–​1950), who was educated at Cornell and in Paris, worked with Wright during the war and participated with the New  York City Housing Authority in the 1930s. A  collaborator in Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn, New Jersey, Ackerman designed First Houses, the inaugural project of the WPA, which promoted the winnowing out of tenements in New York’s Lower East Side. In his view, and following Veblen, architecture was a social service. Ergs for eggs In Shelter, Fuller looked on as Scott commissioned two dozen unemployed architects of the Architects’ Emergency Relief Committee to conduct a national energy survey. The findings in Time Magazine offered a glimpse of how Fuller would undertake similar research. For their industrial survey of North America from 1830 to 1930, Scott planned to produce a chart to illustrate 3,000 commodities, including steel, cement, wheat, and cotton, with a graph indicating the amount of energy expended each year in the production, the number of men employed, the work hours, the volume, and the flow of goods. Scott revealed that the total capacity of US industrial equipment was one billion horsepower, which does the work of ten billion men, or five times the earth’s total population.37 The peak of national employment had been in 1918, but the year of peak production happened in 1929. He claimed that if America’s factories had maintained that rate, then more than half of the 12–​14 million idle citizens in the country would still have had employment. An individual worker needed to put in only 660 hours of labor a year to produce all essential commodities. He argued that: We are now in a dynamic system compared with the static system of history. The controls of the static age, namely the price system of production, are opposed to the controls which must govern the dynamic age of Technology.38 The Technocracy Study Course of 1934 offered an examination of energy: the laws of thermodynamics, the human engine, the flow of energy on earth, dynamic equilibrium among energy-​consuming devices, energy in human history, and early stages in the use of extraneous energy (Figure 3.1).39 They believed that society’s wealth could be calculated in British thermal units, kilograms, calories, joules, ergs, foot-​pounds, and horsepower. A man’s labor for eight hours was considered equal to 1,500,000 foot-​pounds. In a world managed by technocrats everyone would do an equal and rather small amount of work –​about 12.5 hours per week for 20 years. All citizens could enjoy an equal income in goods provided by the state in exchange for “erg” tokens.

4 2 1

124  Industrial emancipation and technocracy

Figure 3.1 Technocracy Inc., “Physical Production Chart” Source: Technocracy Study Course, 1934.

Fuller wondered just how they would “interpolate ergs for eggs.”40 After contacting them in 1930, he repudiated Scott’s “autocracy of engineers,” in Shelter and then again in Nine Chains to the Moon by claiming that their “reverse gear schemes” were similar to National Socialism. He repeated the disclaimer all of his life: Technocracy sought to convert the engineer to the role of politician. But the engineer proved no more effective than the most ignorant and slothful in the ballot box game, and much too forthright by training to be a good politically. Superficially saleable as an inviting scheme technocracy failed as an “out” for society, ordinarily because the engineer must vacate his creative and casual function for a negative and restraining function.41 Charts of plenty The energy appraisals, production charts, and forecasting so characteristic of technocratic stocktaking promised an economy of abundance that the SSA participated in. By showing what production numbers would be like if limited only to physical factors and expertise, rather than profits,

5 2 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 125

Figure 3.2 Harold Loeb, “Possible Production and Possible Consumption Measured in Terms of Accomplished Production 1929” Source: Report of the National Survey of Potential Productive Capacity, 1935.

Loeb’s Charts of Plenty (1935), a study funded by Roosevelt’s Civil Workers Administration in 1933, analyzed the country’s actual and potential economic output (Figure 3.2). An unlikely technocrat, Loeb founded the little magazine Broom (1921–​ 1924) with Matthew Josephson, the journalist who first coined the phrase “robber barons.” Like Lönberg-​ Holm, they had been affiliated with El Lissitzky and the Berlin constructivists in the early 1920s.42 Loeb’s Report of the National Survey of Potential Production Capacity (1935) and Production for Use (1936) called for the nationalized production and distribution of basic goods. His utopian novel, Life in a Technocracy:What It Might Be Like (1933) delved into the design of technates. Loeb, following Steinmetz, argued that optimized production would lead to a surplus of free time. The Veblen disciple who may have exerted the most influence on the SSA was Stuart Chase (1888–​1985). An economist, a public accountant, and an adherent to Fabian socialism with engineering training from MIT, he

6 2 1

126  Industrial emancipation and technocracy too strove to distance himself from the right-​wing technocrats. He updated Veblen’s ideas for a new generation, but his core commitments were to waste, the controlled use of resources and the environment. The Tragedy of Waste (1925), a pioneering study about industrial by-​products, examined the recycling of obsolete products by focusing on the scrap metal industry –​ a topic that Fuller touched on in Nine Chains to the Moon. Chase scrutinized waste in consumption, in human needs and idleness, in production techniques, and in advertising and distribution. Rich Land, Poor Land: A Study of Waste in the National Resources of America (1936) documented the squandering of regional hydraulic and geological systems soon after the National Board of Resources completed the first surveys of this type in 1934. Men and Machines (1929), a history of technology that predates Mumford’s, emphasized the contemporary impact of electrical energy and alloys.43 Chase criticized the co-​opting of natural resources by commercial interests and he paved the way for Fuller’s expansion of this thinking to a planetary scale. His examination of the 13 minerals needed to make a telephone call appear in Earth INC. (1973). Yet Fuller’s ideas remain compelling and timely today, while Chase’s work is period-​bound and dated. With their access to construction industry indicators, statistics, and production reports through Dodge Corporation, Larson and Lönberg-​ Holm created architectural iterations of technocratic accounting in “Building Production and Standards,” in The Real Estate Guide in 1935 and “Trends in Building” (1936) which illustrated the interconnected

Figure 3.3 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodre Larson, Air lines and the radio net in “Building Production and Standards” Source: The Real Estate Guide, 1935. Courtesy of the C. Theodore Larson Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan and the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

7 2 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 127 national network of pipelines, railways, airline flight paths and the radio net (Figure 3.3).44 By using survey techniques for the analysis of the economy, natural resources, and infrastructure, their unique methodology of territorial mapping was indebted to the technocrats; nevertheless, their network paradigms actually found their origins in the completion of the national electric grid.45 Fuller’s industrial correlation charts and his World Energy Map for Fortune (1940) drew on this methodology, which became more widespread after World War II, when systems theory and ecological concerns went mainstream. Yet their emerging environmentalism, which was suggested by the resource and productivity auditing of the 1930s, distinguished itself from conservationism by contemplating the confluence and interaction of industrial, technological, and ecological systems and their life cycles.

Urban obsolescence and mobility The political restrictive city boundaries –​the corporate city limits –​no longer correspond to the function entity. A  new urban entity conditioned by the mode of industrial production is evolving on a pattern determined by the worldwide network of straight line land transportation, communication and air routes, antagonistic to localized property interests, eliminating past differences of urban and rural development through more equitable distribution. The high velocity of technical advance implies a new time-​space use city planning and housing technique: design for fabrication-​use-​liquidation as the anti-​thesis to static design promoted by capitalist property accumulation. The two are incompatible.46 The antagonistic anti-​urban positions of the SSA are also symptomatic of technocratic theories. Indeed, their most dubious legacy can be examined in the coalescence of some of the members into leadership roles during the New Deal. As exponents of a centrally planned economy, decentralized urban initiatives, and mass-​produced housing, the architects of the SSA and Technocracy Inc. transferred Veblen’s tropes of waste and obsolescence to the American city. With the entwining of government and corporate interests, dilapidation and technological out-​datedness were justifications for urban “winnowing” as cities, especially the older ones in the industrialized north, entered into unprecedented situations of crisis. Technocratic polemics devalued the city by condemning the aging rail infrastructure and traffic congestion. Most traditional accounts of suburbanization take the postwar era as a critical turning point, yet this direction actually began in the early 1930s, a generally under-​examined yet pivotal period that marked a shift in the country’s development patterns, away from dense urban manufacturing centers to the dispersal of industries into agrarian areas. The national decentralization facilitated by automobile mobility

8 2 1

128  Industrial emancipation and technocracy was celebrated by the SSA. Their anti-​urban critiques and the impact of Henry Ford’s promotion of rural fabrication in village industries beginning in the 1920s is reflected in the quote from Lönberg-​Holm at the start of this chapter. Technocratic architects advocated for metropolitan patterns of development. The relocation of industrial jobs into regional areas was furthered by Roosevelt’s policies and subsequently helped to define strategies for the defense build-​up in World War II. The translation of Veblen’s ideas to the city made slum clearance a modus operandi. In 1932, when the federal government entered the scene, the unprecedented hollowing out of huge urban tracts was pioneered by Hoover’s emergency relief Reconstruction Finance Corporation, in a conversion from private to bureaucratic control. Of the more than 600 urban projects proposed, the only one that was actually carried out was Knickerbocker Village, and it set the precedent for urban razing.47 New Deal projects under the direction of Kohn and Henry Wright, took the same stance, which would ultimately result in the demolition of large urban tracts under the banner of obsolescence. Although the architects of the RPAA followed Mumford by advocating that mass-​produced housing be set within community initiatives, they nevertheless considered the tenement to be a left-​over remnant of nineteenth century industrialization, now eclipsed by the modern, technological, and cost-​efficient alternative of neighborhood units. As advocates of prefabricated housing, Wright and Kohn paved the way for inner-​city projects that were essentially massive urban clearance campaigns under different administrations throughout the 1930s.48 While their approach may recall Le Corbusier’s projects of the 1920s, where historic morphologies were replaced by tower and slab typologies, the justifications were different. Le Corbusier promoted urban cleansing for reasons of hygiene. In the Depression the key concepts were outmodedness and the critique of absentee ownership. Kohn set the pattern for government-​sponsored urban programs as a collusion of older traditions of American philanthropic housing, Beaux Arts urban design and new ideas from Europe. Following the elimination of slums, low-​density, cost-​efficient superblocks were to be set afloat in the city grid. Under the auspices of the New York Housing Administration and following the ideas of Veblen, Ackerman declared this to be part of the “replacement phase” of capitalist evolution. When former SSA members Henry Wright and Henry Churchill took charge of various WPA greenbelt towns under the New Deal, their work continued their earlier engagement in the City Housing Corporation. In Rehousing Urban America (1935), they advocated for garden city models as a middle ground to suburbia.49 The SSA’s analogy between the car industry and the technological revamping of the home was equally problematic. Fuller distinguished his project from CIAM’s study of minimal dwellings in urban ensembles by promoting an a-​geographical shelter divorced from traditional communities. By the

9 2 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 129 1930s the proposal was framed as a continuation of Bellamy’s dispersed techno-​utopia; as part of the technocratic view of cities as obtrusive capitalist land economics; and as an emergency response to the real transitory conditions set in motion by the Depression. The logic held much in common with Frank Lloyd Wright’s agenda in The Disappearing City (1932), where Broadacre City drew on a combination of sources, including Bellamy.50 With new forms of mobility and innovations in telecommunications, electrification, and environmental controls, the city could be anywhere. Fuller’s emphasis was on temporal dispersion. Wright’s justification was Jeffersonian and followed Henry George’s notion of collective land ownership. But they shared a transcendentalist’s heritage and the Dymaxion House was meant to mediate between the technological and the natural. As a descendant of a long line of Unitarians, Fuller was just discovering the work of his great aunt, Margaret Fuller (1810–​1850). She was a peer of Henry David Thoreau and the New  York Herald Tribune’s literary critic who founded the transcendentalist journal The Dial in 1849 with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Fuller recognized that their celebration of the liberating powers of technology demonstrated that the national railway and telegraph network had contributed to the creation of an intercommunicated techno-​pastoral ideal. This emphasis on mobility was underscored in Shelter and other vehicles of the 1930s, where the SSA promoted temporal dwellings and confrontational attitudes toward historic urban densities. In the essay “Emergence,” Larson examined the transnational transformations along the country’s motorways, and new programs for roadside refreshment stands, filling stations, and tourist camps. He argued that due to the migratory exigencies of the time, Highway 40 was now an unprecedented mutable linear city that was drawing increasing population. Without government, censorship, or crime  –​except for the occasional traffic tie-​up  –​this was but a crude precursor of an industrial urbanism in which the whole world would be a town plan. The depopulation of city centers was just a natural evolution. “Elastic transportation” and communication made mobile industrial fabrication units a possibility.51 In his essay in The Nation, “Say it with Streamlines,” Haskell declared that following the mass appeal of the car and advances in consumer products, America was now an experiment in transportation, but the next national adventure would be the grand theme of shelter. The 23,000,000 passenger vehicles already found on America’s roadways could spark the creation of different iterations of Broadacre City. In “Unchaining House from Land,” he contrasted the freedom offered by tepees, campers, diners, and other mobile shelters with the stark realities of urban blight. This fascination for ephemeral structures paradoxically laid the groundwork for the deployment of trailer camps and temporary settlements during the war effort.52 In Record and Guide, Lönberg-​Holm provocatively recommend parking the house for a limited time in “Time Zoning as a Preventative of Blighted

0 3 1

130  Industrial emancipation and technocracy Areas.”53 He argued that “the functions and growth of a city are conditioned by the nature of the control machinery with which private enterprise is limited and correlated.” Improvements in the design, and in the structural and mechanical equipment of home building, had led to the obsolescence of land-​based housing. He declared that increased mobility, decentralization and socio-​economic changes are not static. “Obsolescence and change are integral to an industrial production life span.” Shelters should be moved around. Fuller’s hyperbolic temperament expanded such thinking to an airborne planetary scale, with the belief that this would lead to an interlaced “world town” with centrifugal settlements covering all of the earth’s habitable surface in allotments of 54 acres per person. In a wink to Bellamy, daily needs would be contracted by television to global branches of the A&P Supermarket for air delivery. Instruments of communication were now “abstract transports.”54 In reality such negative attitudes and the policies that earmarked urban areas for slum clearance emerged from a collision of factors. When the New Deal began, municipal governments aggressively pursued federal relief funds with job creation rather than provisions for housing as their central goal. Old line civic establishments, preferring orderly growth, used governmental power to target rundown areas. Downtown slum conditions were viewed as incubators of urban problems instead of the result of ongoing deindustrialization, middle-​class relocation, and the mass migration of southern African-​ Americans to industrial jobs in the north. The demographic shift toward the suburbs by upwardly mobile whites prior to World War II anticipated the sprawling metropolitan areas that became the norm after the war. These views were insightfully recognized in Lönberg-​Holm’s urban research on the city of Detroit for CIAM 4 in 1933. Notably, his criteria of analysis is based purely on the emerging requisites of industrial production, exemplified in his claim that “The technological issue is mobility (change) vs. immobility (permanence) not decentralization vs. centralization.”55 Detroit: an industrial city in CIAM 4 In what would prove to be his most significant interwar contribution to CIAM, in 1932 Lönberg-​Holm returned to the city that had fascinated him in the 1920s when he was asked by Cornelis van Eesteren to prepare the plans of Detroit as a case study of an industrial city for the seminal Functional City Congress (Figure  3.4). Although there never was a fully formalized New York chapter of CIAM, until the design migration of the mid-​1930s this work was carried out with members of the SSA.56 The analysis of Detroit –​a city driven by the car –​was preceded in CIAM by the design of speculative projects segregating pedestrian and car circulation in the 1920s. Le Corbusier’s Voisin Plan, Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Vertical City, and Neutra’s Rush City Reformed were emblematic of CIAM’s

1 3

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 131

Figure 3.4 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, Circulation plan of Detroit for CIAM 4, 1933 Source: Courtesy of gta Archiv /​ETH Zurich (CIAM Archive).

desire to address the problematic relationship between city centers and the impending future of widespread car ownership. As chairman of CIAM since 1930, van Eesteren used his planning expertise to establish a framework for comparative urban analysis.57 The basis was to be the creation of three empirically based plans for 34 cities from 18 counties that were to study the four functions of dwelling, places of recreation, work, and circulation. During the cruise from Marseille to Athens (July 29 to August 14, 1933), he presented the plans of Detroit since Lönberg-​Holm was unable to attend.58 The Athens Charter, the culminating collective statement, which was published in Can Our Cities Survive? in 1942 under the supervision of Le Corbusier and Josep Lluis Sert, created a framework that played a significant role in the postwar reconstruction of European cities and in the creation of new urban initiatives in the Americas. As an indication of what must have been a European fascination for the city of Ford, the three plans of Detroit  –​the existing conditions, the

2 3 1

132  Industrial emancipation and technocracy metropolitan regional plan, and the circulation plan –​were published in the congress proceedings, receiving more coverage than any other city, including the American surveys of the multi-​functional urban areas of Los Angeles and Baltimore that were carried out by Neutra and William Muschenheim, respectively.59 Nevertheless Lönberg-​Holm recalled resistance to this kind of endeavor in the United States: “At the time of the Detroit survey, there was very little interest among architects in this kind of analytical work.”60 In “L’État Actuel de l’Architecture Contemporaine,” Giedion noted that despite the technological potential and although for a long time Americans had been building structures taller than the Eiffel Tower and had precursors such as Frank Lloyd Wright, they had failed to create a modern architecture. He claimed that they had not articulated the essential questions about middle-​and working-​class housing until the economic crisis.61 In a reference to the visits of Bauer, Mumford, and Henry Wright in 1932, he declared that only recently had architects and sociologist traveled to Europe to study the issue. Lönberg-​ Holm’s analysis is focused on the prerogatives of advanced industrial production toward dispersal, and he explained to van Eesteren that “Detroit more than any other city will reveal the influence of modern decentralized industry on a city structure.”62 Detroit was an excellent case study for such tendencies because in the late 1920s Ford launched the trend there. Founded by the French in 1701, Detroit was the country’s fourth largest city with a population of over 1.5 million when Lönberg-​Holm moved there in 1923. After Ford set-​up shop in 1903 and perfected the assembly line in 1913, the city experienced unprecedented growth as European immigrants and rural southern blacks arrived in different waves to seek work in the Big Three –​Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler –​who dominated the economy. Albert Kahn’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn was built for Ford from 1917 to 1928 and employed 100,000 workers at its peak. As the largest vertically integrated manufacturing plant in the world it inspired the European avant-​garde. But even as skyscrapers were being constructed downtown in the 1920s, Ford began relocating production facilities to small-​scale “village industries” in the countryside to foster a mixed economy of agriculture and light industry. As part of the generalized anti-​urban sentiments of the time, his dispersal of manufacturing catalyzed a trend in urban-​to-​rural resettlement patterns. Strict state annexation laws that limited city growth accentuated the centrifugal pull still further. At a far remove from the pedestrian city celebrated in Lönberg-​Holm’s photographs of the 1920s, Detroit experienced a profound decline in the Depression. He now condemned the impact of capitalist land speculation on urban blight, which was evident in an aerial photograph of the skyscraper district that revealed a new city pattern. Obsolete wooden shacks had been torn down to make way for more profitable surface parking lots, marooning office buildings, hotels, department stores, and theaters

31

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 133 within  the grid. The circulation plan demonstrated that by 1925 the city had expanded like a web into the region following the relocation of the descendants of the original white settlers to suburbs in the city’s third ring. Newly arrived European immigrants had concentrated in central locations, closer to the “colored population” who were confined to two dense downtown neighborhoods.63 Lönberg-​Holm notified van Eesteren that in contrast to European cities, race and ethnicity played a more important role in urban spatial separation than class distinctions.64 He noted the critical impact of capitalist speculation on land values, the fragmentation and land consumption caused by the predominance of single-​and two-​family homes and a downtown characterized by empty lots and derelict areas with great density only in the slums. The dispersal of factories made for long commuting distances and, despite having a metro, Detroit was completely dependent upon the automobile. His prescription for amelioration was the construction of temporary shelters according to his concept of time zoning.65 His research insightfully identified the intrinsic problems of industrial decentralization by foreseeing the gradual abandonment of Detroit by the automakers as their workers consumed the products of their own labors. Detroit experienced in a particularly accelerated way the de-​urbanization that occurred in other cities later. In the socialist journal Monthly Review in 1934, Lönberg-​Holm called for a centrally planned economy and the socialization of land and resources as a response to financial speculation inherent in “City Planning under Capitalism.” While Fuller eschewed direct political commitment, Lönberg-​ Holm presented a politicized viewpoint by stating that the accumulation of blighted areas was inherent to capitalism and that in the Depression the city as a capital investment had become a frozen asset. But his main concern was focused on production and distribution trends following Ford and the technocrats. With highway construction, truck transport, cheap electric energy, new telecommunication systems and mobility, the evacuation of cities was inevitable. As Ford had stated: The belief that an industrial country must concentrate its industry is in my opinion, unfounded. That is only an intermediate phase in the development. Industry will decentralize itself. If the city were to decline, no one would rebuild it according to its present plan. That alone disclosed our own judgment on our cities.66 Ford’s village industries set the stage for new patterns of mobility promoted by the SSA. After 1934 the Roosevelt administration’s decentralization policies furthered the precedent that by the end of the decade transformed into the national defense migration with the relocation of strategic industries to the American south and southwest. Yet in his essay “City Planning under Fascism,” already in 1934 Lönberg-​Holm presciently recognized that the Nazis had made industrial dispersal, road construction, and a

4 3 1

134  Industrial emancipation and technocracy return to the land a military air defense strategy in a distorted mirroring of Roosevelt’s New Deal.67 The call to urban razing and decentralization sheds light on attitudes toward cities and new urban patterns that appeared prior to the war. These positions emerged from technocratic positions on waste, obsolescence, and the call for mobility and industrial optimization. Job creation policies prioritized highway construction and the scattering of manufacturing. As roadway transportation became more critical than the train network, urban areas experienced a profound decline that had a lasting impact. The clash between centrifugal patterns of development and centralization is a problematic technocratic legacy that ultimately laid the groundwork for postwar suburbanization.

The technician on the cultural front Increasing productivity implies an increasing degree of interaction (motion and contact) between people, between things, between people and things. Such environmental forces can be analyzed relative to two classifications of motion (energy): 1. Human activities-​biologic and social forces. 2. Matter-​solids, liquids, gases and electromagnetic radiation. These varying and changeable forms of energy constitute the materials of design. Technically the problem is control of their motions and contacts to achieve their most effective transformation and arrangement into flow patterns for productive use.68 The most compelling architectural translation of the technocratic scientific mandate is evident in Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodore Larson’s collaborative efforts in the research department at Architectural Record and Sweet’s Catalog during the early 1930s. By employing tools of applied research to examine the material environment, they effectively sketched out what is today known as an industrial life cycle approach to the interaction of production processes with the biosphere. Moreover, their formulations contemplate the flow of energy in industrial production cycles by considering the architect as a technician within those processes, and by defining an activist role for the consumer as producer. The divisional vice president Chauncey Williams encouraged their findings, but Dodge leadership interpreted the doctrinaire stance presented in “Design for Environmental Control” and “The Technician on the Cultural Front,” both of 1936, as reflecting radical communist ideologies. This led to an internal investigation of the two architects and the eventual demise of their department.69 By following the notion of cycles of performance from research to obsolescence, they created a cybernetic conceptualization of industrial production for shelter  –​a science of systems of organization and their

5 3 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 135 controls  –​that anticipates and clearly had an impact on Fuller’s postwar pamphlet, “Designing a New Industry” (1946). But their ideas also bring to mind a number of contemporary disciplines concerned with sustainable manufacturing  –​industrial ecology, industrial metabolism, energy accounting, product life cycle analysis, and a cradle-​to-​cradle approach to design –​that were not fully institutionalized until the 1980s. These specializations grew out of the ecological activism of the 1960s that was impelled by Fuller’s promotion of “Spaceship Earth.” By focusing upon a complete vision of product design and industrial processes governed by environmentally informed positions, their systemic approach to design goes beyond scientific management. In this thinking, ecosystems serve as models for industrial production and its management. First, they proposed life cycles for any industrial product: All production –​products, enterprises, ideas –​can be analyzed relative to the phases of a characteristic cycle of performance: (1) research, (2) design, (3) fabrication, (4) distribution, (5) utilization, (6) liquidation. Each phase of this cycle is subject to planning control, for all are interrelated and interacting; a new design implies a liquidation of the old design.70 With a biological analogy, they envisioned industrial production systems as being capable of adjusting to feedback and forward-​looking technological change. Ephemeralization or dematerialization –​the ability to accomplish tasks with fewer resources –​represents a furtherance of principles of optimization. They considered the flow of materials and energy in industrial processes and the impact of human labor on the natural realm. This research culminated in Planning for Productivity (1940), a proposal for the transformation of the obsolete building industry that took into consideration the role that consumers could play in deciding what to produce (Figure  3.5).

Figure 3.5 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodore Larson, “Diagram of production phases” Source: Planning for Productivity, 1940. Courtesy of the C. Theodore Larson Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan and the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

6 3 1

136  Industrial emancipation and technocracy In this incarnation of the project they made an outline for the creation of an information feedback system for architects and other disciplines in the building field, as a way of organizing new and continually updated data on environmental controls. The architects approached design as the interrelation and transformation of invisible flows of energy. Design for environmental control In a minimalist and scientific way, “Design for Environmental Control” examines the impact on industrial production of the increased precision control arising from advanced technologies and the development of materials of increasing constancy, plasticity, strength, and lightness. The architects claimed: The advance of science and technology is reflected in the emphasis from standards of minimum subsistence to standards of maximum performance. The conception of shelter as a means of protection against nature or society thus changes to a conception of structural design as a means of controlling environmental forces to the advantage of the human organism. New and unthought-​of forms impossible with traditional means of production are thus implied.71 As a classification of motion or energy, human activities that include biologic and social forces and matter in the form of solids, liquids, gases, and electromagnetic radiation constitute the invisible forces that had transformed human shelter. They suggested that varying and changeable forms of energy constitute the very materials of design. Flow patterns are affected by varying conditions of density, pressure, velocity, and their interactions, which are subject to differing degrees of change, including friction, distortion, reflection, emission, dispersion, adhesion, absorption, and metamorphosis. In this socio-​metabolic reappraisal of architecture, the two architects argued that the purpose of environmental control was to increase life by eliminating waste in the metabolism. The human organism, as a specific but changing quantity of matter and radiation, functions itself as an environmental force. The balance between the human organism and its environment was changeable with instruments of control. The field of industrial activity was defined as the development of transitional production networks based on flexibility, mobility, rates of obsolescence, and including physical and social resources, power generation, transmission, communication, and transportation. The very criterion for structural design was the integration of motion and the control of productive flow patterns and their interactions. The advance of mechanical and social productivity was to be measured by an expanding range of human activity and the acceleration of events.

7 3 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 137 They extend design to the macroscopic scale of the biosphere and to the microscopic scale of the human metabolism by treating the transformative qualities of matter and energy as the foundation for performance-​based design parameters. By taking the chemical changes to the physical properties of materials and the ideal of total environmental control as the point of departure, they implicitly address architectures of the electromagnetic field. Instead of form, they promote a design paradigm premised on the immaterial and atmospheric conditions of ventilation, radiation, convection, and induction that suggests that design is part of an ongoing dynamic process, and building is a biological and technical organization. Energy flows How can we account for such an anomalous and fringe definition of design as “the effective transformation and arrangement of energy into flow patterns for productive use.” What did this mean in the mid-​1930s? This approximation forms part of a marginalized trend that began in the early twentieth century, when energy was thought to be the true measure of human progress and the first and second laws of thermodynamics were applied to societal systems. The seeds of this thinking arose from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ use of the terms “metabolism” and “material exchange” to discuss flows shaped by human interaction with the environment in industrial production.72 Technocrats embraced the idea of energy as a unifying social, economic, and political project with a special focus on exosomatic energy –​the use of energy in tools. In this flow-​based worldview, energy flows are likened to economic systems. A forerunner was Wilhelm Ostwald, the chemist who promoted an energy monism in close relation to the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–​ 1919) and who argued that cultural changes follow in the wake of new energy technologies. Among his many critics were the prominent scientists Ludwig Boltzmann, Max Planck, and the sociologist Max Weber; nevertheless, the Russian revolutionary scientist Bogdanov derived his own social energetics from Ostwald’s ideas that permeated the constructivist movements that Lönberg-​Holm had been a part of in the early 1920s. The SSA’s mantra, “Don’t fight forces, use them,” sounds remarkably like Ostwald’s energetics imperative: “Vergeude keine Energie, verwerte sie!”73 A social energetics departure is equally explicit in Mumford’s ecological positions that drew on Geddes’ belief that energy flows were not accounted for within classical economics. Geddes argued that energy and materials were transformed into products in four stages:  extraction, manufacture, transport, and exchange. Societies were energy systems composed of biological and social energy flows that constituted the very ecology of the community. In Cities in Evolution (1912) he considered the phases of human history by creating an input and output chart illustrating that the physical realities of economic processes form a “vital budget.” In Technics and Civilization,

8 3 1

138  Industrial emancipation and technocracy Mumford followed him by asking “What are, then, the essentials of the economic processes in relation to energy and to life? The essential processes are conversion, production, consumption and creation.”74 Fuller, following Einstein, enlarged the thermodynamic model to include radiant energy in the form of electromagnetic waves. His expansion of the idea of ecology came out of the literal interpretation of the word invented by Haeckel (1834–​ 1919) in 1866. Oekologie combined oikos, meaning dwelling or house and logos, which signifies science or study. Ecology was, then, the study of the household of nature, but could also be understood as nature’s economy that was based on the flow and transformation of energy and matter.75 Chase and the allied members of Technocracy Inc. found their source in the crank economics of the Nobel Prize-​winning English radio-​chemist Frederick Soddy (1877–​1956), who considered energy flows to be the primary concern of economics. Soddy’s collaboration with Ernest Rutherford on radioactivity made him famous. His book, The Interpretation of Radium (1901), inspired H.G. Wells to write the science fiction novel The World Set Free in 1914, with its narrative about atomic warfare. Soddy’s Matter and Energy (1912) linked the laws of thermodynamics to social mechanics.76 But around 1921 he turned his attention to the radical restructuring of global monetary relations and wrote four books on the subject. He argued that the real world economy was premised on exhaustible fossil fuels. Despite being considered something of a quack in his day, his intellectual heirs developed the field of ecological economics. The technocrats and the SSA absorbed Soddy’s bio-​economic theories and the critique of virtual wealth that is evident in his citation of the Victorian-​ era economics of John Ruskin (1834–​1900): “Capital which produces nothing but capital is only root producing root, bulb issuing bulb, never in tulip, seed issuing seed, never in bread.”77 Soddy considered true prosperity to be found in the matter and energy that was useful to mankind. Because solar power was essential to all life processes, he believed that plants were the first capitalists. Technological progress arose from the mastery of energy in nature to constitute “real wealth,” which Soddy distinguished from virtual financial wealth. Economic progress grew from the transition of solar energy to non-​renewable stores of fossil fuels. In Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt (1926), his analysis of the energetic cost of the production of every element in an automobile down to the tires anticipated the rise of technocratic energy auditing.78 Lönberg-​Holm and Larson’s fringe definition of design presents an early systems and cybernetics approach, equating technical artifacts, living organisms, and the invisible forces effecting dwelling that sought to open up new directions leading to unprecedented ways of form-​making. In this elision of environmentalism with the social relations of production, architecture is understood as an energetic organization that stabilizes and maintains material forces and a process involving construction materials and energetic

9 3 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 139 substances, where dwelling is viewed as a life support system. Form generation takes place within fields of interactive forces, agents, and conditions. The ideal of total environmental control in “The Technician on the Cultural Front” can best be understood in terms of rational reform movements of the era that applied scientific knowledge to production forces. But they conceded that technology could be emancipatory or it could be used as a tool of authoritarianism as exemplified by the design of instruments of military aggression, such as gas and bomb shelters in the war build-​up in Germany. The Dodge leadership was deeply disturbed by their challenge to the sanctity of private property and by their call for the socialization of resources, yet their mission was to suggest new design paradigms. The role of the technician was to advance wellbeing and greater social productivity. Human life could be improved by interrelated and interacting design phases. The integration of motion, and the control of time and matter, were the new criteria for design. The consumer as producer Another great source of controversy at F.W. Dodge was Larson and Lönberg-​ Holm’s advocacy of the producer cooperative movement which had been spearheaded by Chase. In the 1930s, as advertising became more aggressive, the role of the consumer was a focus of conjecture for technocrats. This grew out of an examination of the manpower wasted in the production of superfluous products. It underscored the implicit consumer-​oriented bias of Veblen’s critique of production. Among technocrats, it was believed that the buyer bore the brunt of wasteful industrial practices and false advertising. The idea of a planned economy was ultimately a way to safeguard consumer interests. The SSA sought a militant role for the consumer as producer. Technocrats formulated a unique role for consumers not only by calling for rationalized production, but by advocating “normalized consumption,” an ethical approach to the acquisition of products. In Technics and Civilization, Mumford argued that the aim of industrial efficiency should be the creation of a “vital standard” rather than increased consumption. Technocracy Inc. proposed stamping products with accounting labels that visualized the energy expenditure of fabrication. The SSA thought about the consumer’s role in selecting industrial housing. In “Notes on Consumer Cooperation,” Larson and Lönberg-​Holm sought to eliminate the opposition that was often made between producers and consumers by proposing the idea of the activist consumer that had been suggested by Chase. Chase called for social accountability by educating buyers and inciting them to demand superior products from manufacturers. Particularly noteworthy was his advocacy of the producer cooperative movement. A relief response to the Depression, self-​organized workers coalitions offered significant employment alternatives around the country. Consumer Cooperatives, a branch of the movement, was spearheaded by Chase and the mechanical engineer and physicist

0 4 1

140  Industrial emancipation and technocracy Frederick John Schlink, who worked with the National Bureau of Standards. Their muckraking book Your Money’s Worth (1927) scrutinized false advertising and the unreasonable pricing of goods. They founded Consumer Inc., a cooperative evaluation group that conducted laboratory testing and rated products. Their pamphlets lashed out against deceptive marketing and variations in the quality and cost of products. In 1933, Schlink collaborated with Arthur Kallet on One Hundred Million Guinea Pigs:  Danger in Everyday Foods, Drugs and Cosmetics, an influential publication that claimed that big corporations treated consumers like lab rodents. Fuller applied this thinking to housing and referred to himself as Guinea Pig B.79 As the consumer movement gained impetus, it became a peril to big business. A  pro-​ labor coalition made up of white-​ collar activists, they threatened business with boycotts and other forms of collective action by promoting a social conception of consumption and the labor that went into products. Inspired by this direction and at a loss for corporate financing, in Shelter Fuller suggested starting a producer cooperative for the Dymaxion House in Maine where the locals had long been engaged in shipbuilding. In his definition of the comprehensive designer, he stressed the designer’s “comprehensive function as consumer.”80 The SSA applied the idea of consumer cooperation to reproducible shelters as a “universal language of the everyday-​world-​wide-​consumer being consummated in the form of articulation.” By the 1950s, Fuller provocatively went further by postulating the idea of the critical and regenerative consumer. But while he was confident that in the marketplace consumers would automatically select technologically advanced new products, Larson and Lönberg-​Holm looked at the potential of consumers as producers by examining the cycles of performance for any industrial product as part of the findings from advocacy groups. The architects suggested that consumer cooperatives become producers themselves, by expanding their reach into research, design, and fabrication instead of being limited to acting only as watchdogs.81 Planning for productivity The correlated concerns of centralized planning for industrial production, cycles of performance for materials and buildings, and the consumer as producer were brought together in Planning for Productivity.82 Dodge Corporation rejected their re-​conception of the building industry. Larson recalled years later: It’s difficult today to believe these articles were then considered radical and subversive. In fact K and I were charged with being communists and there was even an in-​house investigation which fortunately showed that we were clean in that respect. Nevertheless, we were looked on as “bad boys” (like BF and those Shelter magazine jokers) which explains why we were both exiled to Sweets.83

1 4

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 141 The incident was one of the reasons that Larson was fired from the magazine in 1936, though he stayed on at Sweet’s for another two years.84 The research department had prospered with Chauncey Williams’ support, but several division heads were threatened by their findings. Larson noted that: The work that K. and I have done has pointed to the eventual predominance of industrial interests in the construction field, as opposed to the traditional craft interests:  we have argued that there is an increasing need for revamping the various Dodge properties along the lines indicated by increasing industrialization, incidentally bringing then all into a closer working relation. Company leaders turned away from industrialization in an effort to protect their own interests. According to Larson: “the Research department was liquidated.” Lönberg-​Holm was given the option of continuing as a consultant at Sweet’s, but Larson was ousted for his connection to the magazine division, and due to his sympathies for and membership in the labor union of the Book and Magazine Guild. With Larson unemployed in 1938, the two architects sought a platform for their work elsewhere. Planning for Productivity found support from the International Industrial Relations Institute (IRI), a two-​ woman transatlantic endeavor founded in the 1920s by Mary van Kleek and her Dutch partner Mary Fledderus, the personnel manager of the Leerdam Glassworks near Rotterdam. They formed part of a network of radical feminist rational reformers who were engaged in promoting international planning as the solution for putting resources in the service of all the world. A graduate of Smith College in 1906, van Kleeck was an advocate of Soviet socialism, who hoped to unite the liberating potentials of scientific management with social work through her affiliation with the Taylor Society for International Planning and the Russell Sage Foundation, a philanthropic institute dating back to 1907. Productivity, in her view, was a means to achieve welfare, and technology offered a potential source of abundance for worker-​technicians. In the 1930s the IRI financed a number of related initiatives, such as the Viennese economist Otto Neurath’s Isotype Foundation, which became a primary source for New Deal graphics.85 The study of the labor movement not only as producers but as consumers engaged in the promotion of housing and all its allied industries was their central concern. Larson and Lönberg-​Holm proposed a centralized research and information system to allow for advanced productivity within the building industry. Planning for Productivity presented cycles of performance for industrial housing, but it was also a skeletal outline of all topics related to environmental controls, specific flow patterns that conform to the changing needs of man, and a “production index” dedicated to continually updated information.

2 4 1

142  Industrial emancipation and technocracy It was presented during a congress in Washington in January 1939, to the White House, the National Defense Council, and other government agencies under the thematic “Design for Increasing Productivity” and “The Effects of Changing Technology on Labor and Management.” But the constrained minimalist language perplexed the experts despite its significance to the impending war.86 Lönberg-​Holm then presented it to CIAM, where it would serve as a foundation for postwar reconstruction. The unprecedented application of such a matrix of concerns to architecture and design in the 1930s created a unique set of paradigms. The consumer as producer and the idea of performance cycles for architecture, from conception and research to obsolescence, drew upon the technocratic reliance on scientific inquiry and research, yet their ideas anticipate the contemporary fields that study the material and energy flows within industrial systems from extraction to waste as the basis of sustainable design. Their preoccupation with the expenditure of energy and the labor needed to transform raw materials into finished products predates the fields of energy accounting and management. The idea of designing for environmental controls constitutes a vision that breaks free of European models, away from objects to what are often referred to today as environments and atmospheres. The idea of dwelling as a form of environmental control, rather than just simply a machine for living, presents a conception of material production involving matter, energy, entropy, conservation and information. Building is a performative process, a material organization that regulates energy flows and an energetic organization that requires energy. By considering the chemical, physical, and biological transformations of materials, the designer enters into the domain of invisible architecture.

Frederick Kiesler: a surrealist among the technocrats The technician can therefore be distinguished and analyzed in an operational sense as any one or all of the following: researcher, designer, fabricator, distributor, user and eliminator.87 A special mention should be made of the curious affiliation of Kiesler with the technocrats of the SSA. They were united by the concepts of time-​space, temporality, tensile structures, the incorporation of advanced technologies into architecture, and design principles that celebrate the sensorial realm. Their shared affinity was premised on exploring a marginalized area of architecture. Kiesler’s projects consider the body in space:  the fields of vision, the olfactory, the aural, the tactile and the gustorial. Many of them harness the latest environmental control systems and broadcast media with the aim of creating physical and psychological transformations in the inhabitant. The “Design-​ Correlation” series written for Architectural Record from 1937 to 1943 clearly points to his connections with Fuller, Larson, and Lönberg-​Holm.

3 4 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 143 An enigmatic sojourner among a myriad of groups, Kiesler called for the unity of art by blurring disciplinary boundaries in his own career. His camaraderie with Lönberg-​Holm came from their early allegiance to constructivism, but it also alludes to the range of ideas and techniques that came out of the different extremes of the movement. Kiesler’s early reputation was built on the blending of constructivist and De Stijl principles into stage craft; moreover, mutable time-​based effects truly informed all of his production, even domestic projects, where he integrated painting and sculpture but also created transformable attributes by incorporating audio and film projections and changeable lighting. While contending with the precariousness of life in the Depression, he engaged in an unorthodox, small-​scale artistic practice whose essence is exemplified by the design of window displays, installations, stage sets, and interiors. As something of a cipher, he assimilated the tendencies around him. Part of his appeal today is the difficulty in classifying his suggestive output that drew upon diverse sources that he somehow made his own. Around 1931 he toyed with producing a prefabricated dwelling, the Nucleus House for Sears Roebuck, which was catalyzed by the Dymaxion House. His Space House Display Showroom of 1934, his most ambitious installations of the era, explored “tensionism.” Throughout his life, he created many iterations of essentially one dwelling. The Endless House suggested a return to an organic cave or womb in contrast to Fuller’s nomadic hovering tensile tree structure that was premised on a return to an Arcadian ideal. As a member of the SSA, Kiesler’s contribution to Shelter was his Time-​Space Theatre for Woodstock, and his eulogy commemorating van Doesburg’s death. After the coalition disbanded, he and Lönberg-​ Holm met frequently. These dinners and gatherings brought together the émigré arts community, including members of CIAM. Despite their very different sensibilities, Lönberg-​ Holm, his wife Ethel, and Kiesler collaborated on an exhibition in the immediate postwar period for the National Council of American–​Soviet Friendship, and they shared a life-​long friendship. In the 1930s Kiesler was also a member of the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen (AUDAC), and the theater faculty at Julliard School of Music. One of his greatest professional coups was the exhibition of his Film Arts Guild Cinema as part of the American section of the international style show. His long-​term friendship with Marcel Duchamp allied him to the surrealists. After many unsuccessful attempts to start a research-​ driven pedagogical program, Kiesler, who had always been interested in interdisciplinary initiatives, finally succeeded in 1936 when he launched the Laboratory of Correalism at Columbia University, an atelier that generated the work that appeared in the essays for Architectural Record. The research agenda may have been informed by his affiliation from 1935 to 1937 with the Design Laboratory, a radical alternative school initially sponsored by the Federal Arts Project, an arm of the WPA that went through various incarnations.

41

144  Industrial emancipation and technocracy In the mid-​1930s the school was affiliated with the left-​wing Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians (FAECT). The pedagogy of this public relief project and alternative industrial design school was inspired by the Bauhaus –​several former students were faculty members –​and John Dewey’s experimental laboratory schools. Frank Lloyd Wright, Fuller, and Kiesler served on the advisory board. Meyer Schapiro and William Lescaze often lectured. The school’s directors, who were critical of the fad for streamlining, were affiliated to radical consumer advocacy groups. In the tradition of Veblen, the faculty developed a native justification for functionalism. The Columbia design lab drew on some of the same ideas, and was dedicated to the investigation of life processes with a scientific approach to design.88 Kiesler’s “Design-​ Correlation” series clearly extrapolates the graphics, sparse functionalist writing style, and the applied scientific research methodology of Lönberg-​Holm’s and Larson’s work in the technical news and research department at Architectural Record, but to surrealistic ends. “Correalism” leads back to Fuller’s concept of correlation in Shelter. “Biotechnique,” by Kiesler’s admission, was a variant of Geddes’ theory, yet it also had constructivist origins.89 But it must be admitted that he transformed such schemes into a personal line of inquiry, and Lönberg-​Holm appreciated his colleague as an unorthodox and original artist.90 In the first article of the series, “Towards Prefabrication of Folk-​Spectacles,” Kiesler explored the scientific development of sound reproduction and amplification in theater design. The article, which included graphic depictions of sound by using the latest technological developments, argued that “Our senses are neither built for transmission nor reception at long range.” Advances in the mechanization of sound systems would “liquidate the normal.”91 “Design-​Correlation:  From Brush-​Painted Glass Pictures of the Middle Ages to the 1920s” offers a “technical” interpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass as the first X-​ray painting of space by surveying industrial developments in plate glass, sheet glass, and even bulletproof glass. Kiesler claimed that “Duchamp’s painting’s outstanding (tectonic) achievement is in its new joint-​design.”92 He wished to bring “to the technicians of design-​ realization the teaching of its techniques.” The technical descriptions  –​of bulletproof glass fabricated by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. and industrial innovations that prevent the discoloring of plastic sheets –​mimic the scientific approach of Lönberg-​Holm and deploy product images from Sweet’s Catalog. A photograph of five men standing on a Herculite tempered plate glass sheet that was specially processed by heat and chilling demonstrates its resistance to an impact 7–​8 times greater than that found in ordinary plate glass. The essay “Certain Data Pertaining to the Genesis of Design by Light (Photo-​graphy)” features scientific terminology and includes a flow chart of the development of photo-​recording from visible and invisible realities to a reproduction device aimed at the public.93 In the most delirious of the essays, “Animals and Architecture,” Kiesler proposes applying functionalism to zoo areas for elephants and contests the adaptation of human housing patterns to animal shelter (Figure 3.6).

5 4 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 145

Figure 3.6 Frederick Kiesler, zoo architecture in “Design-​Correlation: Animals & Architecture” Source:  Architectural Record, April, 1937. © 2016 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.

With a checklist that includes the “liquidation of obsolete design parameters and superfluities,” he proposed the application of advanced environmental control systems for animal habitats. In his review of the first 100  years of zoo design, he compares the Tecton Group’s design for the

6 4 1

146  Industrial emancipation and technocracy

Figure 3.7  Frederick Kiesler, Standards: every need follows a characteristic pattern of development in “Design-​Correlation: On Correalism and Biotechnique” Source:  Architectural Record, September, 1939. © 2016 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.

Penguin Pools in London with Tatlin’s Tower and El Lisstzky’s work on Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Theatre. Penguins and children were still competitors in sub-​standard housing, he claimed (Figure 3.7). Kiesler advocated for applying the organizational premise of MoMA to zoos, so that species from

7 4 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 147 all climate zones could be housed under a single roof, since zoo exhibition practices were not compatible with modern principles of physical and mental hygiene.94 In his well-​known essay “On Correalism and Biotechnique,” man is considered as a nucleus of interactive forces: “Man = hereditary + environment.” Kiesler claimed that co-​reality or correalism constituted a new approach now that “form follows function” was an obsolete design formula: The term correalism consists of two categories of forces which inter-​ act constantly in visible and invisible configuration. This exchange of inter-​acting forces I call CO-​REALITY, and the science of its relationships, CORREALISM. The term “correalism” expresses the dynamics of continual interaction between man and his natural and technological environments.”95 A “Morphological Chart of Three Types of Technological Products,” –​the standard, the variation, and the simulated –​sets forth “new standards” in the creation of a technological environment (Figure 3.7). A metabolism chart is correlated to his design for a Mobile-​Home-​Library. With the Endless House, Kiesler formulated a unique spatial premise of continuous biomorphic forms, yet he shared with Fuller, Lönberg-​Holm, and Larson a set of outsider design parameters inspired by the technological environment  –​a third space set apart from the natural and the human environment –​and its transmutable effects where building is an interactive agent. The ideal of total environmental control In the immediate postwar period, when the preservationist James Marston Fitch set out to write American Building:  The Environmental Forces that Shape it (1947), he argued that his study was an antidote to traditional historiographies that traced the derivation of styles. One of the first histories to consider building from the point of view of environmental controls, his study sought to overcome a fundamental weakness of most discussions about aesthetics that fail to consider a full matrix of sensuous experiential reality beyond the passive visual field (Figure  3.8). Not surprisingly, the work of many former members of the SSA, figures prominently in the first and subsequent editions, where Fitch included a chart derived from Larson and Lönberg-​Holm’s cycles of design, Simon Breines’ Soviet Palace structure, and Fuller’s Dymaxion House. Kiesler’s shelf and tool analysis is described as being representative of “structures as force mediators.”96 Fitch, who became an associate editor at Architectural Record in 1936, recognized the decade of the 1930s as key in the development of a scientific approach to ambient systems. For the building designer, the period was indeed a stern if fruitful school. It opened with as many as ninety percent of all architects and engineers

8 4 1

148  Industrial emancipation and technocracy

Figure 3.8 James Marston Fitch, “Modern building acts as a selective filter which takes the load of the natural environments off man’s body and thus frees his energies for social productivity” Source: American Building, Vol. 1: The Historical Forces That Shaped It by James Marston Fitch Copyright © 1947, 1948, renewed 1966 by James Marston Fitch, Jr. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

unemployed. It closed with fully that percentage either in the armed services or exclusively employed in military construction. The years between had seen our society faced with problems of unprecedented scale and complexity –​problems which involved the architect in every level and sphere of his existence. It was in such an atmosphere that these new concepts of the function of building spread, deepened, intertwined to emerge finally as the recognizable body of theory and practice known today as modern architecture. If the period produced more ideas than buildings, both were pregnant with change; if the buildings of the thirties were statistically less important than those of the twenties, they were nonetheless far more significant. For the concept which they expressed was catalytic –​namely, that the function of the American building must be the maintenance of those optimal environmental conditions essential to health and happiness of the individual and to the peaceful and efficient development of American society.97 The SSA’s incipient enthusiasm for benign inventions such as air conditioning and synthetic materials led them into the generally neglected field of atmospheric architecture, where buildings mediate the body’s transactions with nature and the environment, or what Fitch called the microscopic, mesocosmic, and macrocosmic scales of the human habitat. Lönberg-​Holm and Kiesler’s worldview reflected the implicit yet veiled bioconstructivism of

9 4 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 149 the 1920s. The emulation of nature’s technological processes suggested by Raoul Francé’s biotechniques was widely absorbed, though not fully intonated by Mies van der Rohe, Moholy-​Nagy, and El Lissitzky, as was the bio-​cybernetics of Jakob von Uexküll and his notion of the umwelt.98 In the 1930s and in elision with Fuller, the more explicit technocratic concerns for the flow of energy and matter in production processes and the contemplation of man’s shaping of his environment through tools and other technological means would lead them to consider building as an interface of exchange between organic and inorganic relationships. This thinking contemplates unseen chemical changes and haptic forces. It strives toward dematerialization. This set of affinities was not lost on the MoMA architecture curator Arthur Drexler when he juxtaposed the unlikely pairing of Fuller’s Geodesic Dome House with Kiesler’s Endless House for the exhibition Two Houses: New Ways to Build, in 1952, to demonstrate that new conceptual and aesthetic results could arise from two different approaches: the scientific and the artistic.99 Notes 1 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodore Larson, “The Technician on the Cultural Front,” Architectural Record (December 1936): 472. 2 Born in Wisconsin to Norwegian parents, Tosten Bunde Veblen (1857–​1929) applied Darwin’s theory of evolution to the analysis of modern industrial systems. 3 Mary McLeod, “Architecture or Revolution: Taylorism, Technocracy and Social Change,” Art Journal vol. 43, no. 2 (1983): 132–​147. 4 Richard Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 94–​95. 5 Buckminster Fuller, “Dogs in the Manger,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 6. 6 Andrew Jamison, “American Anxieties: Technology and the Reshaping of Republican Values,” in The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity 1900–​1939, ed. Mikael Hard and Andrew Jamison (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 69–​100. This essay argues that technocratic thinkers such as Scott and Chase considered culture to be outmoded. Traditionalists, such as T.S. Eliot were disenchanted by the materialism of modern life. The regionalists, Mumford and Howard Odum, were humanists who sought an ecological and socio-​geographic response to technology. Pragmatists wished to reform social institutions to meet the challenges of modern technology. 7 Leo Marx, “The Idea of Technology and Postmodern Pessimism,” in Does Technology Drive History, ed. Merrit Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 237–​258. 8 See:  Thomas Parke Hughes, Networks of Power:  Electrification in Western Society, 1880–​1930 (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1983). 9 Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York: Viking Press, 1922). 10 Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865–​1923) played a fundamental role in the development of alternating current and hysteresis. He began working for GE in 1894 in Schenectady, New York. 11 See:  Charles Proteus Steinmetz, America and the New Epoch (New  York: Harper & Brothers, 1916).

0 5 1

150  Industrial emancipation and technocracy 12 See: Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2005). 13 Spaceship Earth was popularized by both the economist Kenneth E. Boulding and Buckminster Fuller. “It is a well provisioned ship this on which we sail through space” is found in: Henry George, Progress and Poverty (Elibron Classics Series, 2006), 185. 14 Veblen’s disciples included Benton MacKaye at the TVA; Frederick Ackerman, Clarence Stein, and Henry Wright at the WPA; and Rexford Guy Tugwell, director of the Green Belt Resettlement Projects. 15 The RPAA (1922–​1933) also included Alexander Bing, a real estate developer; the philanthropist Robert Bruère; the architects Frederick Lee Ackerman, Robert Kohn, and Charles H. Whitaker; and the housing reformers, Edith Elmer Wood and Catherine Bauer. 16 See:  John M.  Jordan, Machine-​Age Ideology:  Social Engineering & American Liberalism, 1911–​1939 (Chapel Hill, NC:  The University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 17 See: Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (Ontario: Kitchener Batoche Books, 2003). 18 Theodor Adorno, “Veblen’s Attack on Culture,” in Thorstein Veblen: Critical Assessments, ed. John Wood Cunnigham (London: Routledge, 1993). This essay, of 1941, is the first encounter with Veblen by members of the Frankfurt School in exile. Adorno questioned Veblen’s attitudes toward the consumption of non-​essential goods, while acknowledging his affinity to Loos’ conception of functionalism. In response to his view of technology as an independent agent of progress, Adorno argued: “It is more than doubtful whether one is entitled to attribute to mechanical technology in abstracto any ‘ends’ of its own without relating it to the concrete nature of the society within which it functions.” Yet it is significant that the originators of critical social theory were interested in his ideas, at all. They also studied Mumford’s writing on technology. 19 Buckminster Fuller, “Universal Architecture,” T-​Square, vol. 2, no. 2 (February, 1932): 37. 20 Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New  York:  Cosimo Classics, 2006). 21 Veblen studied with Peirce at Johns Hopkins University in 1881. For Veblen, Dewey, and William James, instrumentalism referred to the adaptation of organisms through active manipulation of their environment. 22 Buckminster Fuller, “The Comprehensive Designer,” in Your Private Sky: Discourses, ed. Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 1999), 243–​246. 23 Marx, “The Idea of Technology and Postmodern Pessimism,” 237–​258. 24 Buckminster Fuller and Kiyoshi Kuromiya, Cosmography, A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 8. 25 Buckminster Fuller, “Esoteric Addenda,” T-​Square, vol. 2, no. 3 (April, 1932): 35. 26 Johnson founded the New School’s “university in exile,” which offered refuge to members of the Frankfurt School. Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Max Wertheimer continued the interwar debates about mass culture there in the late 1930s. But they contested American instrumentality as “one dimensional thought,” to use Marcuse’s phrase. 27 Lewis Mumford, “If Engineers were Kings,” The Freeman, vol. 4 (November 23, 1921): 261–​262. 28 See:  Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New  York:  Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1934).

1 5

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 151 29 Schapiro criticized Technics and Civilization as “humanitarian technocracy” in a book review published in New Masses on July 3, 1934. See: Schapiro, “Looking Forward to Looking Backward,” 66–​109. 30 Buckminster Fuller, “Universal Architecture,” T-​Square, vol. 2, no. 2 (February, 1932): 34. 31 J. Jessie Ramirez, “Marcuse among the Technocrats: America, Automation, and Postcapitalist Utopias, 1900–​1941,” American Studies, vol. 57, no. 1 (2012): 31–​50. 32 The IWW or Wobblies, was a union founded in Chicago in 1905. 33 The other members of Technical Alliance were M.  King Hubbert, a geoscientist; the chemist Carl I. Alsberg; the physicians Allen Carpenter and John Carol Vaughn; the electrical engineer L.K. Comstock; the educator Alice Barrows Fernandez; the economist Leland Olds; Richard C.  Tolman, a physicist; and Sullivan W. Jones. 34 Jordan, Machine-​Age Ideology, 213. 35 Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture, 260. 36 In anticipation of the New Deal, these public housing projects for defense industry workers followed garden city models. Housing for 15,000 families and 14,000 single employees was built in just 14 months. 37 Staff writer, “Science Technocrat,” Time Magazine (December 26, 1932). 38 Ibid. 39 Technocracy Inc., Technocracy Study Course:  An Outline of Those Elements of Science and Technology Essential to Understanding Our Social Mechanism (New York: Technocracy Inc., 1934). 40 Fuller, “Dogs in the Manger,” 6. 41 Buckminster Fuller, “Earth Incorporated, 1947,” in Your Private Sky: Discourses, ed. Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 1999), 154. 42 Loeb was Peggy Guggenheim’s cousin. He formed part of the Parisian expatriate culture of the 1920s where he met Ernest Hemingway. See: Harold Loeb, Report of the National Survey of Potential Production Capacity (New York: New York City Housing Authority, 1935); The Chart of Plenty (New York: Viking Press, 1935); and Life in a Technocracy: What It Might Be Like (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996). 43 See: Stuart Chase, The Tragedy of Waste (New York: Macmillan Company, 1925); Men and Machines (New York: Macmillan, 1929); Rich Land, Poor Land: A Study of Waste in the National Resources of America (New York: McGraw Hill, 1936). 44 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodore Larson, “Trends in Building,” Real Estate Guide (April 18, 1936): 19–​ 24; “Building Production and Standards,” Real Estate Guide (February 16, 1935): 19–​23. 45 The cultural ramifications of electrification are examined in:  David Nye, Electrifying America:  Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–​ 1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 46 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “The Political Aspects of City Planning and Housing: City Planning under Capitalism,” The Monthly Review (September 1934): 10. 47 In 1933, the developer Frederick Fillmore French built Knickerbocker Village, the first low-​income housing project to receive federal funding in an attempt to revive the construction industry. 48 See:  Richard Pommer, “The Architecture of Urban Housing during the Early 1930s,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 37, no.  4 (December 1978): 235–​264; and Gregory Clancey, “Vast Clearings: Emergency, Technology, and American De-​ Urbanization, 1930–​ 1945,” Cultural Politics, vol. 2, no. 1 (March 2006): 49–​76. This study examines how the terms “blight”

2 5 1

152  Industrial emancipation and technocracy and “winnowing,” that referred to crop failure in the Dust Bowl were applied to the city. 49 See: Henry Wright, Rehousing Urban America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935). 50 See: Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (New York: W.F. Payson, 1932). 51 C. Theodore Larson, “Emergence,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May 1932): 9–​17. 52 Douglas Haskell, “Bringing Shelter Up to Date I,” The Nation, vol. 138, no. 3593 (May 16, 1934): 555–​556; and “Bringing Shelter Up to Date II,” The Nation, vol. 138, no. 3594 (May 23, 1934): 586–​588. 53 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “Time Zoning as a Preventative of Blighted Areas,” Record and Guide (June 24, 1933): 6. 54 Buckminster Fuller, “Universal Architecture, Essay no.2,” Shelter, vol.2, no. 3 (April 1932): 34. 55 Lönberg-​Holm, “The Political Aspects of City Planning and Housing Part I,” 10. 56 Breines, Larson, and Fuller contributed suggestions and funds to the treasury in Switzerland. They were connected to the CIRPAC since the early 1930s. SG-​ 13–​42, letter from KLH to Giedion, December 6, 1943, ETH. KLH suggested to Neutra that Alfred Kastner, Oscar Stonorov, and Norman Rice become members of the East Coast group. According to him: “Shelter is a new magazine which is leaving space to information on CIAM.” 42-​K-​1935, KLH to van Eesteren, April 25, 1932, ETH. 57 The symbol system was created by the Viennese sociologist Otto Neurath. 58 Somer, The Functional City, 164. 59 Oscar Stonorov and Alfred Kastner were unable to complete a fourth study on Philadelphia. 60 SG-​13-​42, letter from KLH to Giedion, December 6, 1943, ETH. KLH was assisted by Clifford Erikson, a Sweet’s employee, and the Swiss architect Otto Senn, who was born in Basel in 1902 and studied architecture under Karl Moser at the ETH from 1922 to 1927. In the early 1930s Senn worked with Frank Lloyd Wright, Neutra, Schindler, and Lescaze. The Japanese architect S. Waschinzukai and Ethel Lönberg-​Holm prepared the maps. Larson compiled the demographics and statistics. 61 Sigfried Giedion, “L’État Actuel de l’Architecture Contemporaine,” Technika chronika, Les Annales techniques, Technical Reports of the Congress, vol. 44–​46 (October–​November, 1933): 1137–​1140. 62 42-​ K-​ 1932, Lönberg-​ Holm CIAM USA. KLH to van Eesteren, January 26, 1932, ETH. 63 This refers to Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, the site of race riots in 1863, 1943, and 1967. 64 He noted that the Amsterdam distinction between working-​class and middle-​ class areas had no meaning for Detroit. 65 Cornelis van Eesteren, “Detroit,” Technika chronika, Les Annales techniques, Technical Reports of the Congress, vol. 44–​ 46 (October–​ November, 1933): 1170, 1164. 66 This quote appears in Richard Pommer, David Spaeth, and Kevin Harrington, “Cities and Defense, 1945 Ludwig Hilberseimer,” in In the Shadow of Mies: Ludwig Hilberseimer, Architect, Educator and Urban Planner (Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago, 1988): 89–​93. 67 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “The Political Aspects of City Planning and Housing. Part II,” The Monthly Review (November 1934): 19. 68 Knud Lönberg-​ Holm and C. Theodore Larson, “Design for Environmental Control,” Architectural Record (August 1936): 159. 69 Ibid., 154–​159. 70 Lönberg-​Holm and Larson, “The Technician on the Cultural Front,” 472.

3 5 1

Industrial emancipation and technocracy 153 1 Lönberg-​Holm and Larson, “Design for Environmental Control,” 158. 7 72 Nicholas Georgescu-​Roegen, Kozo Mayumi, and John M. Gowdy, Bioeconomics and Sustainability:  Essays in Honor of Nicholas Georgescu-​ Roegen (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar 1999), 28. 73 This can be translated as “Waste no energy.” 74 Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (London:  Williams & Norgate, 1915); “Civics: as Applied Sociology,” Sociological Papers, vol. 1 (1904): 103–​138; and Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 375. 75 SSA, “Putting the House in Order,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 2. 76 Frederick Soddy, Matter and Energy (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1912). 77 Frederick Soddy, Money Versus Man: A Statement of the World Problem from the Standpoint of the New Economics (E.P. Dutton, 1933), 5. 78 Frederick Soddy, Wealth, Virtual Wealth, and Debt (London:  George Allen & Unwin, 1926). 79 Stuart Chase and Frederick J.  Schlink, Your Money’s Worth:  A  Study in the Waste of the Consumer’s Dollar (New  York:  Macmillan, 1927); and Arthur Kallet and Frederick J. Schlink, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics (New  York:  The Vanguard Press, 1932). For an overview on consumer cooperatives, see: Stephen Broberk and Robert N. Mayer, Watchdogs and Whistleblowers:  A  Reference Guide to Consumer Activism (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2015): 141–​142; and Kathleen G. Donohue, Freedom from Want:  American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Baltimore, MA: John Hopkins University Press, 2005). 80 “Designer Cooperative,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November 1932): 23. 81 Knud Lönberg-​ Holm and C.  Theodore Larson, “Notes on Consumer Cooperation,” (1936). This text is found in the KLH-​A. 82 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodore Larson, Planning for Productivity (The Hague: International Industrial Relations Institute, 1940). 83 Larson to Levinson, November 24, 1977, Box Folder XII, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 84 Kocher, who was now managing editor, felt threatened by Larson and he entered into a dispute with several division heads. According to Larson, Williams annexed control of Sweet’s and Record. Kocher was forced out. See Larson to Stone, January 16, 1939, Box XIV, Folder I, KLH-​A. 85 For an account of van Kleeck’s activism, see:  Jordan, Machine-​Age Ideology, 193–​206. 86 IRI Conference Agenda, June 30, 1939, Box XIV, Folder I, KLH-​A. 87 Kiesler to KLH, November 27, 1948. See: Kiesler’s Definition of a Technician, January 28 1938, Box XI, Folder 5, KLH-​A. 88 Karen A.  Bearor, Irene Rice Pereira:  Her Paintings and Philosophy (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1993):  101–​106; and Shannan Clark, “When Modernism was Still Radical: The Design Laboratory and the Cultural Politics of Depression-​Era America,” American Studies, vol. 50, no.  3/​ 4 (fall/​ winter 2009): 35–​61. 89 See: Dessauce, Machinations. 90 KLH to Kiesler, January 14, 1964, FK. 91 Frederick J.  Kiesler, “Design-​ Correlation:  Towards Prefabrication of Folk-​ Spectacles –​Scientific Development of Sound Reproduction Proves an Important Influence on Architectural Design of Theaters,” Architectural Record, vol. 86 (June, 1937): 93–​96. 92 Frederick J. Kiesler, “Design-​Correlation: From Brush-​Painted Glass Pictures of the Middle Ages to the 1920s,” Architectural Record, vol. 61 (May, 1937): 56. 93 Frederick J. Kiesler, “Design-​Correlation: Certain Data Pertaining to the Genesis of Design by Light (Photography) I,” Architectural Record, vol. 82 (July, 1937): 89–​92 and “Part II,” vol. 83 (August, 1937): 79–​84.

4 5 1

154  Industrial emancipation and technocracy 94 Frederick J. Kiesler, “Design-​ Correlation: Animals and Architecture,” Architectural Record, vol. 81 (April, 1937): 87–​92. 95 Frederick J.  Kiesler, “Design-​Correlation:  On Correalism and Biotechnique,” Architectural Record, vol. 86 (September, 1939): 60–​75. 96 Marston Fitch, American Building. In the 1948 edition, Planning for Productivity is summarized on page  310. In a section on tensile structures, Paul Nelson’s Suspended House, the Dymaxion House, and Breines’ Soviet Palace appear on pages 188–​189. Kiesler’s work on tools and his bookshelf are found pages 275–​279. 97 Ibid., 146. 98 Detlef Mertins has explored bioconstructivism in the work of Mies van der Rohe. The art historian Oliver Botar has studied biofunctionalism in the work of Moholy-​Nagy and other international constructivists. See: Oliver Botar and Isabel Wünsche, editors, Biocentrism and Modernism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 99 MoMA Press preview www.moma.org/​momaorg/​shared/​pdfs/​docs/​press_​ archives/​1637/​releases/​MOMA_​1952_​0059_​54.pdf.

51

4  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter

Invisible architecture. This would be a way in which men could go anywhere about the Tropics, the Arctic, the sea bottoms, and the air and airless sky without getting too hot, too cold, too Nvet, too dry, or too un-​comfortably or too injuriously anything. Quite a trick but it’s in the works. It was suggested almost a half century ago by an as yet little-​known, but truly great new-​era architect, Knud Lönberg-​Holm, a Viking-​American who has spent his life searching, researching and teaching industrial research departments how to anticipatorily realize the integratable myriad of evoluting industrially producible building products which have been progressively tooled into production over the last one third of a century. Thereafter, these building products were commercially catalogued, also under his guidance of general architectural and engineering office catalogue files which have become generally available for the last three decades’ architects’ general design-​ use which made possible what has become visibly recognizable as modern architecture –​no one of those shiny, non-​rusting, neatly fitting and functioning parts were fashioned by craftsmen. Lönberg-​Holm is the twentieth-​century counterpart of the anonymous architects of the Gothic and Renaissance eras.1

The 28 years that Lönberg-​Holm spent as director of research and design at Sweet’s Catalog honed his expertise in industrial information. Sweet’s is an unusual marketing tool  –​a mediator between manufacturers, contractors, architects, engineers, and other construction industry professionals that is updated yearly following the launch of new innovations. This unique one-​stop product source is a filing compendium of standardized industrial building components. It formed part of a complex matrix of communication systems owned by F.W. Dodge Corporation that structured the American construction field since its founding in 1906. When the last print edition came out in 2012 there were more than 38 hefty volumes. Today, as an online digital interface, it integrates catalogs, CAD details, and building information modeling (BIM) to serve more than 200,000 professionals.2 Fuller considered Sweet’s to be an agent of change that led to the teleological promise of machine age automatism in architecture –​a ready-​made kit-​of-​parts that found its most emblematic embodiment in postwar design.

6 5 1

156  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter He credited Lönberg-​Holm with reconfiguring an outmoded system to offer it as a dynamic tool of practice in Ideas and Integrities (1963), which is quoted at the start of this chapter. In Newsweek’s “Global Report on the State of Architecture” in 1968 he claimed that Lönberg-​Holm was one of the truly great yet “unrecognized and unsung architects” of the “Nyska age” (his acronym for the New York skyscraper age) who made this prototyping revolution possible. “Lönberg-​Holm may be the one man most responsible for having given this industry the potential to be imminently convertible to complete and successful automation.”3 The thousands upon thousands of pages of companies and construction components advertised in Sweet’s provided the SSA with a sourcebook and a storehouse: an aggregated yet comprehensive snapshot of the construction industry from which to anticipate future designs, assemblages, equipment, and fixtures. From this industrial windfall –​a model of collation and raw accumulation  –​they sifted out and extracted images, technical specifications, details, and elements for the visual manifestos in Shelter and for the refinement of prefabricated housing with its promotional jargon. It served as a flow chart, a database, and a register of the unrelenting evolution, application, and assimilation of advanced research in its conversion into tangible building technologies as they entered into the marketplace, but also the dilemma of their obsolescence and renewal. It offered a case study of how an analogue and encyclopedic system of information classification, indexing, and retrieval can be processed and the enormity of the task of continually keeping it current (Figure 4.1). During his tenure from 1932 until his retirement in April 1960, Lönberg-​ Holm created a clear and integrated communication construct for the materials that were transforming practice. As a technological, commercial, and cultural artifact, Sweet’s helps to illuminate the close but somewhat ad hoc evolution of modern architecture with industry in America. Yet Lönberg-​ Holm’s extreme productivist view of serial building as part of an imminent, collective mass society was masked by a corporate endeavor. During World War II, alongside the Czech designer Ladislav Sutnar, they achieved a strikingly controlled visual environment that was in dialogue with the elements being sold and the architecture that could be assembled from them. Their collaboration manifests how radically trained constructivists, who considered standardization and propaganda to be productive practices, applied their skills to business. This work foreshadows what is today called “knowledge architecture.” This chapter draws together Sweet’s and other modernist manuals that emerged in the 1930s that might be thought of as immutable mobiles, as defined by the French sociologist Bruno Latour.4 An immutable mobile is a knowledge assemblage that organizes technical and scientific know-​how across space and that is made up of relevant procedures, such as maps, templates, charts, diagrams, and other two-​dimensional inscriptions that are unchangeable yet reproducible, combinable, and mobile. In Science in

7 5 1

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 157

Figure 4.1 Advertisement for Ladislav Sutnar’s new design of Sweet’s Catalog during World War II Source: Architectural Record, 1943.

Action (1986), a seminal examination of how scientists work in laboratories, Latour suggests that changes in writing and imaging procedures change discourse. The mundane inscriptions and procedures that develop out of day-​to-​day work lead to changes in thought and practice but because they are so modest, so pervasive and so close at hand, they escape attention. Such assemblages deflate the idea of great paradigm shifts in a discipline by concentrating on the simple modifications in the way in which groups of people converse with one another using paper, signs, and diagrams. Sweet’s forms part of an archeology of modernist knowledge that can be compared with Architectural Graphic Standards (1932) and Ernst Neufert’s Bauentwurfslehre (1936; Architects’ Data) to explore constructs and conventions that govern disciplinary know-​how in the process of industrialization. The disappearance of Lönberg-​Holm into bureaucracy, and his Dadaist renunciation of the traditional identity of the architect, was aimed at realizing the radical ambition of the comprehensive integration of architectural

8 5 1

158  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter production through standardization. In this endeavor, he attempted to reconcile the culture of the avant-​garde with American economies of production. Moreover, Sweet’s had an increasing impact on global technological transfers as American skill in prefabricated housing or what Fuller called “repro-​shelter” was offered to serve in international reconstruction initiatives in World War II and after through CIAM.

The modern quarry Sweet’s Catalog was already taking up an enormous amount of shelf space in the offices of 13,000 architects when Lönberg-​Holm started to rethink its organization. There was a direct correlation between its evolution and the accelerated proliferation of environmental control systems and prefabricated housing –​a trend galvanized by Fuller. Did the adaptation of Sweet’s as a design mode have a reciprocal relation that led to a new formulation of modern architecture, as Fuller suggests? Richard Neutra –​the first architect to consciously exploit its implicit possibilities –​believed so when he familiarized European practitioners with it in Wie Baut Amerika? This was, for him, the architectural equivalent of the vanguard techniques of collage and montage.5 Drawing inspiration from Adolf Loos’ praise of American standard bathroom fixtures, Neutra noted that for the architect, Sweet’s was a repository of raw materials, just as the forest is for a carpenter. But he also claimed that: “the ‘raw materials’ are no longer raw, but themselves end products of long drawn-​out and widely scattered manufacturing process.” His veneration led him to think of it in terms of a fitting metaphor: the modern quarry.6 Sweet’s Indexed Catalogue of Building Construction first became available as the building industry began to convert from small-​scale localized vocations to a national business network reinforced by advertising and the rise of consumer culture. By the mid-​nineteenth century, commercial trade catalogs constituted a common form of printed ephemera, but their lineage harks back a century earlier to craftsmen’s pattern books that were used by artisans of wood, plaster, and metal. In the early 1900s, so-​called “catalogers” bound together and sold goods from assorted enterprises. The original 706-​page tome showcased 478 manufacturers, principally of terracotta details, cast iron elements, and plumbing artifacts. Claude Bragdon and Louis Sullivan were early endorsers. The intertwined concern for modern systems of production, distribution, and information underlay the conceptualization when it was launched in 1906 by Architectural Record’s Irish-​born editor, Henry W. Desmond, and the clothing manufacturer Clinton W. Sweet (1842–​1917). It served professional and commercial interests affiliated with the company’s other business publications, such as Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, which was founded in 1869. From the start, the products advertised in the catalog were complemented by architecture projects featured in the magazine.

9 5 1

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 159 At the turn of the century, as the number of mass-​produced products expanded exponentially, so did the information about them.7 Sweet’s was invented to solve “the catalogue problem” after practitioners complained about accumulating vast amounts of loose trade literature in varied formats. They demanded a concise, serviceable method to solve their daily struggle with the retrieval of information by requesting that Sweet’s be reconceived of as a directory, a phonebook, or a reference manual with an “organic” organization.8 In 1912, Sweet’s was acquired by Frederick Warren Dodge (1864–​1915), a pioneer in building statistics and an expert in forecasting and consumer reports who founded the construction industry’s leading national subscription news service in 1896. His innovation was to keep pace with the rise of consumer movements and evolutions in marketing by applying the Dewey Decimal System to the catalog and to all the stages of construction records from bid tendering to erection. Specialized volumes aimed at architects, engineers, and builders reflected the emerging corporate chain of command among head architects, draftsmen, in-​house structural and electrical engineers, specification writers, office managers, accountants, bookkeepers, and clerical staff. The control revolution Trade catalogs open a window to obsolete products that no longer exist, to patterns of consumption, and to styles of promotion. They are artifacts of production and advertising history, but they are also by-​products of technologies of industrialization. Around 1900, the proliferation of tooled, mass-​ fabricated components coincided with the enlarged scope and complexity of new building programs. For the first time, grand structures were needed to house the burgeoning bureaucracies that coordinated production and services within the national market. During the Progressive Era and due to concerns with efficiency, a hierarchical stratification of labor emerged within the field. Architectural practice transformed from a craft to a business  –​ from a gentleman’s art to a managerial profession. Designers were reticent of merchandising and corporatism, but the skyscraper and other large-​scale ventures forced a push for greater coordination.9 Sweet’s can be thought of as part of what the sociologist James R. Beninger has called the “control revolution.”10 During the second industrial revolution from the 1880s to the 1930s, communications technologies that lagged behind material processing were set up to regulate the volume of production by sending out information and receiving consumer feedback. The emergence of channels of interchange marked the advent of advertising in its modern form around 1900. Specialized markets, magazine readership, in-​house design, technical research, and statistics related to specific industries had all evolved by 1910. The invention of market research and surveys followed in 1919 and 1920. The constituent evolution of reciprocal

0 6 1

160  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter flows between production, management, and consumers called for new communication-​ processing techniques, thus marking the transformation from an industrial to an informational society. Communication expanded in a white-​collar world of regulated and efficient interchange of which the computer might be seen as the latest installment. The “control crisis” marks the origin of what is today often called post-​industrial society. By the 1930s, the reciprocal relationship between Sweet’s and breakthroughs in prefabricated housing were noted by Lewis Mumford, who examined the shift from the building site to the factory in “Mass Production and the Modern House” (1934) in Architectural Record. During the last hundred and fifty years a great change has taken place in Architecture. This change has nothing to do with the questions of superficial esthetics that agitated the architectural world:  the quarrels between the classicists and the medievalists or between the traditionalist and the modernists are all meaningless in terms of it. I refer to the process whereby manufacture has step by step taken the place of the art of building, and all the minor processes of construction have shifted from the job itself to the factory. How far this process has gone everyone is aware who has watched the composition of a building, and who knows how suddenly the whole work would stop if the architect were forced to design or specify with any completeness the hundred different parts, materials, and fixtures he draws from Sweet’s Catalog. But what are the implications of this process? What results must it have on the status of the architect and the place of architecture in civilization? What further developments may we look forward to on the present paths: what alternatives suggest themselves?11 The surge in mass production coincided with the withdrawal of the architect from many types of building during the early industrial era (Figure 4.2). Mumford argued that engineers prevailed over the construction of factories, bridges, and railroads. Experts in mechanical and structural systems had taken over the housing field that was once monopolized by the speculative jerry builder. He heuristically questioned the replacement of artisan techniques by fabrication. Illustrating his essay were the Dymaxion House and Suspended Housing by the Brother’s Rasch that both featured mast structures. Bodo and Heinz Rasch compiled their own catalog of materials for industrial production in Wie bauen? (1927) that featured products from the Weissenhofsiedlung. Details of standard doors and windows are collated in their book Zu/offen (1930). The Marxist art historian Meyer Schapiro decried the fall of the profession in the Depression in “Architecture and the Architect” (1936) by claiming that offices had acquired a corporate character. With design widely regarded as a commodity, the stratification of practice shifted the architect away from art. In confronting the growing scale of production, practitioners were

1 6

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 161

Figure 4.2 “All this for a single custom built house,” in Lewis Mumford, “Mass-​ Production and the Modern House: Part I” Source: Architectural Record, January, 1930.

increasingly forced to rely on unornamented standardized components that depended little on accrued traditions of delineation.12 In 1932, when Lönberg-​Holm was transferred from Architectural Record to the smallest of six departments in its sister publication, he applauded the reformulation of practice implied by this process. It seemed to him that the architect, relinquished from the drudgery of piecework, would be empowered as a specialist in teamwork. Chauncey Williams offered him the directorship of the only department dedicated to the research on communication and industrial marketing in the industry. The challenge was to establish a guiding order for chaotic promotional pamphlets. Manufacturers paid by the page to list their wares, from complex assemblages to the smallest fittings and gadgets. Some of the advertising, which included technical attributes, dimensioning, packaging and images of workers installing the product, could run to many pages, eventually into the hundreds. In 1936 when the American Optical Company invented the Ophthalm-​o-​graph, a

2 6 1

162  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter device for educational reading assessments, Lönberg-​Holm seized upon it to analyze the “performance” of pamphlets by tracing the reader’s eye movements. From this examination of the mechanics of vision he proposed the dynamic concept of “visual flow.” Catalog Design Standards (1936) showed manufacturers how to create sections, visual units, indices, and covers, and to apply “diagraphs” and “pictographs” that set out standard layouts for photographs and graphics. In a sense, this wedded his constructivist design instincts to mundane in-​ house templates for efficient communication –​an outgrowth of the application of scientific management ideals to the modern bureau from 1880–​1920. In 1917, the stenographer William Henry Leffingwell conducted movement studies of clerical workers, but he also devised conventions for the design of business letters, order forms, complaints, memos, and card files.13 Over time, and fueled by the accelerated scientific innovation in novel materials during the era, Lönberg-​Holm suggested new products. Fuller noted this mediating role by claiming that as an influential advisor to corporations producing hardware for the “global building industry,” Lönberg-​ Holm was simultaneously evolving a cybernetic pre-​computerized index to free architects from the obligation to detail design. He showed manufacturers how to produce the kind of hardware the Bauhaus and their successors wanted by persuading firms to institute research departments to develop aluminum and other alloy materials, efficient lighting systems, exterior steel modules, and other modern design innovations. Fuller claimed that “Lönberg-​Holm ultimately became in fact the research design coordinator of the research departments of myriad mass production suppliers of building materials throughout America and the Western Hemisphere.”14 By seeking out companies in Sweet’s to create elements for his prefabricated housing prototypes, Neutra also engaged in a productivist interplay. In its conception as a factory-​ready assemblage, the One-​Plus-​Two Diatom House of 1926 experimented with a cable mast structure supporting prefab panels made from diatomaceous earth and shell aggregates. His lecture on the project at CIAM 3 in Brussels was complemented by a theoretical text, “High, Middle, and Low Building Construction under American Conditions.” Neutra anticipated the broad applications of plywood, a pilot composite material of the time, in his demountable demonstration house which was displayed at a construction materials expo at the Los Angeles Building Center in 1936. As a promotional stunt, the house was raffled off and it was eventually purchased by Lönberg-​Holm’s student Maynard Lyndon. The VDL Research House (1931) was fitted out with steel sash windows from Sweet’s and fashioned as an ongoing laboratory where new materials by the glass manufacturer Libbey-​Owens-​Ford and other companies were tested. Neutra also hacked standard products, such as H.H. Robertson’s hollow channel steel floor system that he used for the walls and roof of the Beard House in 1934, creating a single unit –​an air convection system for heating and cooling and a bearing wall capable of withstanding lateral forces (Figure 4.3).15

3 6 1

Figure 4.3 H.H. Robertson Company advertising featuring Richard Neutra’s Beard House Source: Sweet’s Catalog, 1936. Courtesy of Cordeck Building Solutions.

4 6 1

164  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter Tooling up The growth of Sweet’s Catalog was fed by the growing number of alliances between architects and manufacturers; the boon in newfangled building material; and the investment in repro-​shelter by the federal government, corporations, universities, laboratories and research foundations. Fuller had impelled the movement with his re-​conception of the house as an affordable and comprehensive “standard-​of-​living-​product.” This trend implied a range of responses to the SSA’s critique that the country lacked a modern housing industry “with testing, designing, sorting, assembly, distribution and advertising authority, having definite responsibility to the public by its declared ideal of service, guarantee, and resale value born of its necessary advertising.”16 The public was intrigued by the poet Archibald MacLeish’s five-​part series on the topic for Fortune Magazine in 1932, where he attacked the shameful inadequacy of low-​cost housing by portraying the American city as a collusion of corrupt forces and by questioning the responsibility of builders, bankers, municipal governments, and tax assessors. Fuller, seeking to bask in such media exposure, invited him to guest commandeer an issue of Shelter, but soon after the magazine folded. MacLeish argued that H.G. Wells’ prophetic imagination had failed to envision the modern house and so had architects involved in style wars since housing was an industrial problem, not an aesthetic one. The lightweight Dymaxion prototype was the exception. Charts correlating industrial progress and production with demand predicted that it would be deemed obsolete around 1949 due to changes in industrial techniques and lifestyles.17 In the end, it was the most forward-​looking of a litany of experiments in the decade that had a reciprocal relation to the expansion of Sweet’s by showcasing novelties in plastic, plywood, gypsum, asbestos, sheet steel, alloys, and lightweight aggregates. Among the companies hosting housing experiments that Fortune listed were Pullman Car & Manufacturing Corp., American Radiator and Standard Sanitary, Concrete Engineering Co., Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Thomas Edison, Inc., General Houses Inc., and A.O. Smith Corporation, the world’s largest manufacturer of auto frames who sponsored the Bowman brothers of Chicago to design a prototype with a central mast structure that rivaled Fuller’s. The aim of all was “the industrialization of the manufacture of shelter, perhaps the greatest single commercial opportunity of the age.” Nevertheless, Larson lamented the poor level of design of most of these initiatives in “Packaged Homes” in Survey Graphics in 1937.18 Overzealous manufacturers in search of market applications for masonite, brick, and lumber found a platform in the gimmicky demonstration houses at ephemeral events such as the House of Tomorrow expo at Chicago’s Century of Progress Fair in 1933, where the most notable experiments were by the local architects Howard T. Fisher and the brothers William and

5 6 1

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 165 George Keck. Fisher advertised his flat-​roofed modernistic prototype as “A house that’s twice as good at half the price.” When he left Architectural Record in 1931 he founded General Houses Inc. with major coordinated manufacturers who could furnish every component and appliance. The standardized assembly relied on supply chain management, but the product never sold enough to satisfy the investors, including General Electric and Pullman Car, who made the patented steel panel system that was used for the floors, walls, and roof.19 It was the profound concern for performance and for the impact on the dweller of invisible environmental forces that distinguished American domestic research in the 1930s. For instance, central air conditioning was applied to an individual home for the first time, as a happenstance remedy to the heat gain caused by the enormous glazed facade of Keck and Keck’s House of Tomorrow that was sponsored by Libbey-​Owens-​Ford. This project –​with its dodecagonal geometry and a design team that included Leland Atwood, Fuller’s collaborator in the late 1920s –​and the Crystal House of 1934 inadvertently paved the way for research into passive solar heating in the 1940s.20 Performativity and domestic wellbeing were the core concerns of Robert L. Davison’s studies at the John B. Pierce Foundation after he left Architectural Record and Columbia University. In 1931 he supervised the material testing of an experimental dwelling constructed on the roof of the Starett-​Lehigh Building, where Fuller had lived. In 1933 scientific management principles were applied to bathrooms and kitchens in his Laboratory of Hygiene. Studies that emerged from this initiative on the flow of domestic activities –​eating, sleeping, dressing, and washing –​led to the flexible spatial arrangements that characterized postwar housing. He carried this work further for wartime housing at SOM. By 1935, Architectural Forum listed 33 prefabrication systems:  sixteen of steel panels; five of steel loadbearing panels; eight of pre-​cast concrete; one of pre-​cast gypsum; and two wood framing systems and one of plywood. In 1938, the Modular Service Association and the American Standards Association set out a dimensional coordination system for repro-​housing. In 1934, when the Boston industrialist Albert Farwell Bemis began sponsoring studies on construction, new building materials and products, he developed his own cubical modular system that integrated structural components and equipment. The Bemis Foundation at MIT produced the decade’s most exhaustive treatment on prefabrication in a three-​volume set entitled The Evolving House. For all the “tooling up,” repro-​ shelter would ultimately prove to be untimely due to the entrenchment of economic interests and traditional building practices restricted by local building codes, trade unions, and the reluctance of mortgage lenders to finance the projects. Antiquated institutional values refrained from comparing the house to a car or an appliance. Furthermore, the initiatives did not benefit from the government subsidies that had aided the automobile and road building industries. During World

61

166  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter War II, expertise in new materials and prefabrication techniques took on an urgent significance and former SSA members offered their knowledge for war mobilization and reconstruction efforts. They also contributed to rethinking postwar American housing. Fuller’s collaboration with Herbert Matter, Charles Eames, and John Entenza on “What is a House,” the famous issue of Arts and Architecture of July 1944, helped to spell out the mission of the California Case Study Houses program to explore alternatives to traditional suburban housing by exploiting new materials and assembly techniques developed during the war.21 The design methodology offered by Sweet’s Catalog found its most sophisticated expression in this initiative. The architects took great care to cite the companies whose products were featured. Charles Eames’ personal innovation in House no.  8 was to choose products of industrial provenance that did not usually appear in domestic settings. House no.7 was designed by Lönberg-​Holm’s student Thornton Abell and attests to their ongoing dialogue. This project for customized domestic architecture fitted out with standard fixtures culminated in the conversion from artisan building to full-​on industrialization. Lönberg-​ Holm’s work on Sweet’s anticipates Reyner Banham’s essay “Design by Choice” (1961). The English critic argued that architecture, now subsumed as a category of industrial production, could no longer be considered as a universal analogy for all of the design fields. The rise of the industrial design profession marked the architect’s diminishing role in the total design of a work of architecture. Banham’s reflection upon the incompatible rates of obsolescence of different building components was an issue that the SSA had addressed in the early 1930s. Due to rapid advances in mechanical and electronic equipment and their short life span, the architect’s contribution would become ever more circumscribed. In the future, architects would not so much design as select. Lönberg-​Holm and Neutra had acknowledged this dialectic in 1938. In “Industrialization of Housing” in Technical America he admitted that “In this process the technician also tends to eliminate himself out of economic importance by narrowing his own range of performance.”22

An archeology of modernist knowledge Sweet’s can be thought of as an assemblage; a mode of practice and the result of practices, but the inherent modus operandi opened up by the recombinant assembly of standard products as a design procedure was an elemental language awaiting some rules of grammar and each designer’s conversational flair. Lönberg-​Holm’s ongoing reformulation underscores the intersection of mundane trade literature, incipient marketing, research and advertising within the field of architecture. His belief in serial production was consistent with his productivist outlook. It represents a convergence

7 6 1

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 167 with the early principles of CIAM with a muted ideological agenda. The aim, to make it possible to realize radical designs with standardized components, paradoxically participated in refining a methodology that would make the corporate postwar architecture of glass towers a viable possibility supporting late capitalism. Each of the manuals that came out in the early 1930s propagates a distinct notion of normative practice. A comparison between them is essential for understanding the codification of modernist methodologies. Lönberg-​ Holm’s project at Sweet’s was contemporaneous with the release of Architectural Graphic Standards (1932); American Architects’ Time Saver Standards (1936), and Architects’ Data (1936) by Ernst Neufert. Their implications reflect more than the impact of Taylorism on the regularization of design. As a class of documents, technical handbooks and trade manuals are close to everyday practice as primary resources. Despite their marginal status, they reveal the way that standardization was literally put into practice, and show how technocratic solutions replaced Beaux Arts fundaments. From the 1920s on, there exists a competition between norms that became invisible once assimilated into quotidian work. Why did so many conventions governing practice emerge in the 1930s? After the intense formal experimentation of the 1920s, the slowdown of the Depression allowed for integration with the construction industry. As indispensable instruments, these manuals are lingering systems that still define certain aspects of practice. Their underpinnings include the eclectic influences of technocratic frameworks, radical productivism, consumerism, and finally militarization. What are the implications of these inscriptional systems and the ideologies that lie behind their apparent objectivity?23 What is the profound effect of such technical literature on the constitution of building and the way works are executed? We might think of them as a compilation of portable knowledge, remote from the building site –​or immutable mobiles. They are, after all, inscriptional systems that outline relevant design procedures and it is precisely within the context of prosaic practice that regimes of knowledge emerge that allow work to be planned, designed, dispatched, and realized. These systems have been eclipsed by current advances in technology that have opened up the potentials of digital fabrication, robotics, and non-​standards that challenge design with a new set of paradigms. Now in its 11th edition, Architectural Graphic Standards was written in the office of the technocratic architect Frederick Ackerman, a proponent of standardized urban housing. The collaborative effort of an Irish draftsman, Charles George Ramsey, and the Ivy League-​trained architect Harold Reeve Sleeper, it is often referred to as the “draftsman’s bible.” The authors described it as a “graphic compilation of norms, an index of combined knowledge, a modern store and reference of factual knowledge somewhere

8 6 1

168  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter between a manual and a catalog.” The technocratic underpinnings of this endeavor, which stressed “serviceability,” are not incidental and many of the standardized construction details that it offered to practitioners were taken directly from products in Sweet’s. The historian George Barnett Johnston suggests that as the organization of offices shifted toward an industrial order, the vestiges of the delineator’s craft, with its reliance on pattern books, made way for the professionalized architect as pattern maker. The pervasive use of Architectural Graphic Standards brings to the forefront the question of the architect’s subjective agency in the face of a growing number of procedures that regulated practice.24 In carrying forward Gropius’ agenda at the Bauhaus, that made standardization and prefabrication a revolutionary rallying cry and a form of experimental practice, Lönberg-​Holm considered his job at Sweet’s to be lab work that could offer a response to mass technological society by facilitating channels between designers and industry. This involved tectonics, faktura and construction and suggested a radical vision of a new collective society brought about by mass production tied to the idea of serial building.25 The liberating potential of international standardization, proclaimed by Hannes Meyer in his manifesto “The New World,” made the case that mass production could fulfill essential needs for all. Standard building components constituted a visual Esperanto, “a supernatural language according to the law of least resistance, in standard shorthand, a script with no tradition.”26 Lönberg-​Holm called for a new mass aesthetic based on the systematic processing of building products. Standardization offered an index of a society’s communal productive system. Propaganda, a radical constructive form of the time, played a central role in the dissemination of collective construction and instrumental logics. In a mass technological society, building components formed part of a social program and process that was changeable, flexible, and adaptable, rather than universal and monumental. But due to the charged political context, by the mid-​1930s the codification of modernist practice in Germany was driven toward militaristic ends. Architects’ data and the negotiation of standards Now in its 40th edition and translated into 20 languages, with more than one million in sales, Neufert’s Architects’ Data is the best-​selling architecture book of all time. A comparison with Sweet’s is essential for distinguishing between American and European manuals and calls into question their apparent neutrality. These enduring systems have fundamentally different underlying conceptual and organizational frameworks. As an authorless system that represents the collective engagement with industry of networks of people and organizations, Sweet’s is market-​driven and technologically forward-​looking. Lönberg-​Holm confronted an information overload as he sought to mediate feedback between fabricators and architects in a flexible

9 6 1

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 169 loop that could evolve with scientific and industrial advancements. Neufert codified a set of universalist Bauhaus-​inspired design parameters based on minimal dimensions for spatial planning. The contrast here is between time and space –​product and system –​and this contrast is apparent in the two paradigms of prefabrication of the era: the Dymaxion House and Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann’s Packaged House. Born in 1900, Neufert worked as a bricklayer before signing up as one of the first students at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1919. In 1921 he became Gropius’ office manager. He began writing his book in 1926 by drawing on his teaching notes for his lectures at the Weimar Bauhochshule.27 Gropius and Hilberseimer endorsed his prescriptive set of minimal measurements corresponding to the dimensions of an idealized human body. The basic unit of his octametric system is 12.5 centimeters, the width of a brick. In this combinatory system of gridded space, every object and element can be standardized and combined.28 Both Neufert and Le Corbusier can be credited with establishing the golden section as a standard in modern architecture. Le Corbusier did so by using regulating lines. Neufert applied the nineteenth-​century proportional system and aesthetic theories of the physiologist Adolf Zeising (1810–​1876), who promoted the golden section as an anthropomorphic principle found in nature and in culture, dating back to antiquity.29 Neufert also formulated the template for the layout of architectural drawings that still prevails in Europe today by using the typefaces and paper formats from the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) –​a milestone of German design. His book even begins by suggesting that the DIN paper system is the measure of all things, and that the dimensions of the standard desk, the file cabinet, and the spatial module for the modern office building are an outgrowth of its measurements.30 The deep cultural and scientific ramifications of standardization in Germany is evident in the standardization of paper –​the result of endeavors to systematize intellectual work. With the aim of ensuring the country’s competitive edge in scholarship, the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald proposed a “world format” by setting out normative dimensions for specialized journals. After his assistant, the engineer Dr. Walter Porstmann, tweaked the dimensions in 1922, he created the DIN system, an elegant and interrelated proportional system that follows the mathematical ratio of 1 to the square root of 2 as the relationship between the width and the length of the paper.31 The remaining formats are obtained by halving. The system was adapted by the DIN in 1918 and it was disseminated by the International Federation of Standards (ISO), an organization founded in 1926 that had its origins in the electro-​technical fields and that marks the institutionalization of world standards in 1906.32 Standards are the result of negotiation and the Bauhaus was the site of contested conventions. In his lectures there in 1924 and 1925, Porstmann presented his paper system and a universal phonetic alphabet that influenced

0 7 1

170  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter the typographer Jan Tschichold and the artist Kurt Schwitters. In 1926, at the invitation of Gropius, Ostwald lectured on his color theories. An active member of the Deutsche Werkbund and an amateur painter, his contribution was the role assigned to gray as the key coordinate in color space.33 Piet Mondrian and the De Stijl group enthusiastically promoted his findings, but although many members of the faculty were profoundly interested in color, Paul Klee rejected the system. After pursuing an objective formulation of color, ultimately the artists of the Bauhaus turned away from the application of scientific and industrial parameters that suggested to them the standardization of perception itself. Yet such a debate illuminates the complex assimilation of standards. Neufert’s system highlights the tension between norm and form. His 2.50 meter module is still the basis for industrial buildings in Germany. The “Baumaß-​System” became DIN 4171 in 1942, when he worked as the director of building standardization under Hitler’s architect Albert Speer.34 But even before World War II, the extent to which militarism and utopianism made a common cause of standardization was recognized by Lönberg-​ Holm, who noted that, in Germany:  “Technical development becomes increasingly the design of instruments of military aggression. In housing, technical advances are expressed in the production of gas proof and bombproof shelters.”35 Neufert’s “design instructions,” as the title translates, are based on architectural knowledge. His work paradoxically demonstrates the triumph of standardization in rationalized militarization under fascism. Lönberg-​Holm was confronted with a consumerist world of continually updated fixtures, an incremental “living standard,” with obsolescence and teleological evolution as an underlying premise. Architecture is conceived of as a perpetually renewable process. The Dodge corporate system It is easy to understand why Dodge leaders were critical of the radical thinking that Lönberg-​Holm had put forward with Larson at Architectural Record. The company’s system of publications and services structured and dominated the national building field by integrating five components: (1) Dodge Reports; (2) the Home Owners’ Catalog; (3) Dodge Statistical Research Service; (4) Sweet’s Catalog Service; and (5) Architectural Record. During World War II their promotional literature emphasized the importance of information channels by adapting the terminology of military mobilization. By addressing different product markets for general building, mechanical engineering, and civil engineering, the system grew along with the complexity of building processes and teams of specialists. The majority of the staff were dedicated to information gathering. As an industry interface, Dodge Reports offered a comprehensive view of 91 percent of national construction at any moment, by reporting on trends and providing updates on all phases of construction of architecture and

1 7

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 171 engineering projects. Daily reports from 15 offices were sent to subscribers in 700 different lines of business.36 For the architect, the report –​which included public and privately financed projects, new and renovation work, and information about owners, engineers, and contractors –​was a time saver and a channel to product salesmen. A staff of 750 reporters harvested information from 138,000 news sources across different professional sectors. Dodge stressed the range of information gathering which, in 1940, included 1,845,000 personal interviews and 1,383,000 telephone calls. Management used Dodge Reports for sales control. Advertising highlighted products available through Sweet’s. Customers could request pre-​selected reports that pinpointed their needs by taking into account the type of project, its valuation, the status of planning and construction, buying and specifying factors, subcontract information, and bid taking. Dodge’s network of national plan room services gave potential contactors the possibility to review drawings and specifications. The Special Inquiry Service facilitated direct telephone inquiries to 28 offices for questions on current building issues. The Home Owners’ Catalog tapped into the residential market and offered information on equipment, furnishings, and services. Dodge Statistical Research Service provided general business, finance and government information, forecasting trends, and indicators on the volume and pricing for materials. It acted as a window to the state of the profession, including variations in the demand for architects’ services, which in 1939, for instance, showed that members of the profession designed only 36.5 percent of the total number of new buildings. Daily bulletins reported contracts in 37 states, with tri-​monthly forecasts. Dodge’s predominance over the construction industry was unchallenged. By 1940 Sweet’s supplied 14,500 offices of architects with product information. Architectural Record was conceived of as three magazines in one, presenting new products, new processes, and new plans. The materials and products in Sweet’s were critically evaluated in Record. The enormous project of each update began a year earlier, with 14 district managers and assistants arranging to receive new product developments from manufacturers. The preparatory work was carried out with a core of consulting architects and engineers. The company noted that 20 carloads of paper were printed and bound into 80,000 separate volumes weighing 400 tons for distribution in an endless cycle. Lönberg-​Holm oversaw a staff of 30 as head of the design department, which had a division dedicated to industry and another for building. By 1942, with Sutnar onboard in a small independent three-​person research department, in-​ house copywriters and designers were commissioned to create brochures. There was reciprocity between the assimilation of modernist projects in the magazine with the design and promotion of building components and advertising in Sweet’s. But although Lönberg-​Holm gained enormous professional knowledge about the building industry and its complex commercial information system at Dodge, he was never satisfied. In

2 7 1

172  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter collaboration with Larson he was working on an anticipatory project to offer to CIAM, whose underlying values considered building as a system of environmental controls.

Designing information Sutnar and his students’ exhibition for the Czech pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York was not fully installed when Hitler invaded his country. The Nazis demanded that he dismount it, but defiantly he completed it and refused to go back to Czechoslovakia to face prosecution. During his first difficult years in America, when his wife and sons were still unable to join him, Grover Whalen, president of the World’s Fair Corporation, got him work with the Coty Cosmetics Company and Norman Bel Geddes, the designer of the General Motors Pavilion.37 He met Lönberg-​Holm through the émigré community not long after, at the fair inauguration. Their collaboration began in 1942, and from the outset they defined their work as “information design.” Such a theoretical approach –​on how to convey complex themes that induce the viewer to think about substance over composition –​has a contemporary relevance that is suggestive of today’s digital infographics. This way of thinking was a response to new conditions in the war. Sutnar is primarily remembered as a graphic designer, but his scope was greater. He was a multifaceted creator of puppetry, theatrical sets, toys, glassware, textiles, furniture, flatware, porcelain, books, interiors, exhibitions, and advertising. Born in Pilsen and educated in 1919 at the Czech School of Applied Art, he went on to hold decisive leadership roles. In 1929 he became art director of Druzstevni práce (Cooperative Work), one of the country’s leading publishing houses, where he created their house brand as they expanded their design horizons into domestic furnishings. His collaboration with the vanguard photographer, Josef Sudek, began in 1928 and for ten years they created innovative promotional pamphlets for household products. He founded the Czech Arts and Crafts Association, modeling it on the Deutsche Werkbund. When they initiated the Baba Demonstration Housing Exposition, Sutnar worked on the graphics with the architect Pavel Janák, and he built his own house following a design by Oldrich Strarý. His installation in the Czech pavilion at Barcelona’s 1929 world exposition was awarded a gold medal. As the head of the state design school, a visit to the Bauhaus in 1933 inspired him to renew his curriculum to include photography, advertising, cinema, and modern techniques and technologies. The rigorous disposition that he brought to his work drew on his associations with inspired visionaries: Augustin Tschinkel, a painter and graphic artist; Karel Teige, a productivist polemicist; and Jan Tschichold (1902–​1974), the author of the manifesto The New Typography (1928), with whom he shared an interest in combining graphics and photography. Photography

3 7 1

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 173 Sees the Surface (1935), which was coauthored with the photographer Jaromir Funke, explored the potentials of magnified surface details in advertising and photomurals, such as those in the design of the Czech national pavilion in New York.38 Sutnar and Lönberg-​Holm shared a constructivist formation, but perhaps the most fascinating dimension of their affiliation is the high level of intellectual energy and rigor that they devoted to the rather mundane topic of catalog design for 20 years. As part of a diaspora of extraordinary designers who worked for American clients seeking new approaches to visual communication, Sutnar connected with the Bauhaus exiles  –​Moholy-​ Nagy, Gyorgy Kepes, Herbert Bayer, Joseph Albers, Marcel Breuer, and Alexander Schawinsky –​at Dr. Leslie’s Composing Room in New York, an early center of camaraderie.39 They were joined by other talented émigrés such as the Swiss designer Herbert Matter in 1936 and the German designer Will Burtin in 1938. During the war, Burtin lent his talent to the design of didactic gunnery manuals for the US Air Force. When he became art director of Fortune in 1945, he often commissioned Sutnar. He too defined his work as “information design” and the degree to which these designers sought to create striking didactic presentations of highly complex technical data underscores the differences with their European professional experiences. As the first generation educated in graphic design as a radical political activity, they had an arsenal of agitprop techniques with which to create pragmatic yet dynamic promotions to serve corporations. The indelible mark that they left on postwar design paved the way for a younger generation such as Eliot Noyes and the Eameses, who translated the total design ethos to film, and furniture for blue-​chip companies. Their collaboration laid the groundwork for the postwar streamlining of business information and contemporary web design.40 The Container Corporation of America (CCA) and Fortune magazine are two other prominent examples of enlightened corporate design patronage in the era. Walter Paepcke, the director of the CCA, was urged by his wife, an avid design enthusiast familiar with journals such as the Berlin monthly Gebrauchsgraphik, to enlist the advertising agency of Charles T. Coiner of N.W. Ayer & Son to fuse the company’s identity with cultural sponsorship. As the leader of the Chicago Association of Art and Industries, in a city that was a major center of manufacturing, merchandising, and distribution, by the mid-​1930s Paepcke convinced his colleagues to sponsor good design.41 At their invitation, in 1937 Moholy-​Nagy came from England to found the new Bauhaus –​the Institute of Design –​but the Hungarian struggled to adapt to the mercantile culture. The CCA commissioned Bayer, Matter, Kepes, and Moholy-​Nagy to create dazzling campaigns that unified their brand, which became identified with a range of cultural endeavors including the Aspen Institute as a more subtle way of protecting their house image.42

4 7 1

174  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter The arcane, concrete problems at Sweet’s had more in common with the high level of infographics at Fortune, which was founded by Henry Luce in 1930. With its visually dynamic emphasis on charts, glyphs, diagrams, maps, and photojournalism, the magazine set a new standard for complex visual information. It was an enormous success, despite the high $1 price tag in the midst of the Depression. The first art editor, Thomas M. Cleland, was followed by a succession of highly talented designers who commissioned daring graphics and photography. Margaret Bourke-White was photo editor. The complex technical tables and flow charts created by Sutnar and his colleagues constituted a compelling counterpoint to the literary style and a visual glorification of American industry. The urgency of the Depression and the war called for representations of social conditions and material resources that challenged designers to visualize increasingly complex phenomenon stimulated by advances in statistics and technology. Sutnar, Kiesler, and Bayer expanded the information sensibility into the space of exhibition design with a high level of graphic content. The ability to synthesize concrete communication problems marked a distinction from mere graphic design. Like Buckminster Fuller, with whom he collaborated on the book Transport – 1951–​2000 (1950), Sutnar envisioned complex information for Fortune by concentrating on what he called “integrated patterns for intelligent visualization.” Patterns for transmitting the flow of information For two decades, Sutnar and Lönberg-​Holm met every morning at the company headquarters at 119 West 40th Street. Sutnar ran his own practice in the afternoons. In the midst of World War II, in 1943 they convinced Williams to let them completely overhaul Sweet’s. Sutnar created a logo with the company initial in a bull’s-​eye and a tab system suggestive of the die cut tabs deployed by El Lissitzky to call out each of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s revolutionary poems in the extraordinary graphic collection of 1923, Dlia golosa (For the Voice).43 In fact their work reveals a reflexive circularity. In the early 1920s, El Lissitzky and other constructivists revitalized the genre of avant-​garde magazines, such as G and ABC, through the importation of forms and techniques belonging to utilitarian and commercial genres of printed matter and the language of advertising, by drawing on a panoply of typographic fodder from, inter alia, mundane trade brochures and address books.44 Here the objective was to sweep up the visual chaos by injecting avant-​garde diacritical marks –​ including the crucial device of the diagonal, from its futurist origins to constructivism –​to bring legibility to the pedestrian formatting of that original inspirational yet humdrum material. To do so, they expanded the ten principles offered by Tschichold’s manifesto that called for the use of standard paper, san serif fonts, asymmetrical compositions, and photography, but lacked a systematic approach to advertising and product information. Lönberg-​Holm’s

5 7 1

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 175 spare texts can be grasped in a glance, following C.K. Ogden’s Basic English, an auxiliary international language championed in Shelter. In this team, the architect contributes the structure, which sometimes has the sensibility of a cinematic storyboard. Lönberg-​Holm’s eye-​tracking analysis underlies the controlled perception of flow and continuity. With its visual sequencing it acts as an animated map that leads the reader’s eye across the page. Sutnar adds the more visceral, playful surface by treating image and copy as counterpoints. Their work brings into focus the elemental form creation and spatial temporal field that was so crucial to international constructivists, and it recalls Moholy-​Nagy’s film script, Dynamic of the Metropolis, with its rhythmic use of the double-​page spread, grids, arrows, dingbats, and its call: tempo tempo tempo. ISOTYPE, the International System of Typographic Education invented by Otto Neurath, a sociologist of the Vienna Circle and a CIAM member, was another transformed source. The icons, which were first introduced at the Museum of Economy in Vienna, were intended to constitute a utopianism of world communication and the democratization of social statistics for the masses. The simplified logos that relied on artists in collaboration with statisticians were disseminated as a New Deal standard by Neurath’s collaborator, Rudolf Modley, the founder of Pictorial Statistics in 1934. Sutnar was exposed to them in Prague by Tschinkel and Gerd Arntz, the Czech and German “transformers” who created the picture signs. Lönberg-​Holm knew them through CIAM and articles in Survey Graphics and Architectural Record.45 As a form of pictorial politics, these icons were meant to act as social transformers by revealing the material conditions of living standards at a glance.46 Sweet’s sponsored a series of pictorial essays to advise manufacturers on how to design the complex information accompanying their products to take into account the overwhelmed eye of the consumer. Traffic signs act as metaphors for traversing the din of information. The design historian Steven Heller has noted that:  “Sutnar developed an array of graphic navigational tools that allowed users to efficiently transverse seas of data.”47 The idea of design as “patterns for transmitting the flow of information” undergirds Sutnar’s didactic pamphlets “Controlled Visual Flow” and “Shape Line and Color” (Figures 4.4 and 4.5) and the collaborative endeavors Catalog Design: New Patterns in Product Information (1944), Designing Information (1947), Catalog Design:  New Field for Visual Communication (1948), and Catalog Design Progress (1950). These books were praised by Giedion and Moholy-​Nagy, who considered Lönberg-​Holm as his possible successor at the Chicago Bauhaus when he was stricken with leukemia.48 Catalog Design stressed the importance of function, format, and content.49 By following the logic of technological evolution, they argue that product information is lagging behind advances in visualization coming from art, film, psychology, and shortcut methods of visual education. The

6 7 1

176  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter

Figure 4.4 Ladislav Sutnar, “Starts and Stops” Source: “Controlled Visual Flow,” Design and Paper, no. 13, Marquadt & Company, 1943. Courtesy of the Ladislav Sutnar Family.

level of printed matter had to rise to compete with the new media of radio and television. Designing Information examines the role of the information designer in helping the average customer to wade through a deluge of data. They showed that the flow of information could be clearly transmitted through the creation of patterns arrived at by applying formal principles such as size, blank space, color, line, and shape.50 Catalog Design Progress, their most lyrical and beautifully printed project, claimed that the traditional street grid was now obsolete. With information forming an integral part of industrialization, “Designs for simplifying the flow of transportation become continuous with design for simplifying the flow of information.” The authors promoted the use of a clear statement of purpose, the definition of standards for performance, the interaction of content and form, and teamwork.51 Larson noted that “this book is truly a seminal publication on the visualization of information. A beautiful piece of work, it actually demonstrates what it preaches. It has had a profound influence in both advertising and industrial communication.”52

71

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 177

Figure 4.5 Ladislav Sutnar, “Coordination of Parts” Source: “Controlled Visual Flow,” Design and Paper, no. 13, Marquadt & Company, 1943. Courtesy of the Ladislav Sutnar Family.

They understood their work as trends in new information patterns, a concept that reflects the impact of computers and cybernetics during World War II. As archetypes of functional design, the dynamic spreads and punctuations force the user to go from one level of information to the next with abstract juxtapositions of scale and color.53 This collaboration demonstrates the expanding role of the information age designer and the challenge of forming interdisciplinary research collaboratives with manufacturers. The designs afford better ways to organize prosaic product descriptions at a juncture between information design and information architecture. Moreover, their approach to visual information follows the intrinsic systems thinking of repro-​shelter, with its logic of differentiation and integration. The components are hierarchically organized and each component is clearly articulated in its own right and as part of a comprehensive entity –​a whole made up of parts, whose relationships to each other and the whole are governed by defined laws of combination and a syntax of relationships.54

8 7 1

178  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter

Technological translations and international exchange Lönberg-​Holm and Sutnar’s graphic and spatial talents were put to productive use in initiatives that promoted Sweet’s and American experiences in prefabricated housing together as part of international diplomacy, cultural exchange, and technological transfer at the close of World War II. The country’s uninterrupted innovation in the development of new materials and research into repro-​shelter gained new relevance for defense and emergency housing in the context of the war. American expertise was sought after abroad for large-​scale planning and rebuilding efforts in the conflict’s aftermath. On the eve of reconstruction the value placed on American techniques in Europe attests to the degree to which mass production had been achieved by the country’s construction industry in the 1930s and in the rapid building of temporary housing during the war mobilization. But despite the shared enthusiasm for prefabricated housing, the translation of the American detached home to Europe would be filtered through the cultural, technological, and political codes of countries such as France and the Soviet Union. SSA members were able to offer their years of investigation to support the war effort and rebuilding initiatives. Fuller developed the DDU, the Dymaxion Deployment Unit, with the Butler Manufacturing Company after the United States entered the war following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. His Wichita House was fabricated by Beech Aircraft Company, but due to the rationing of metals these shelters were not widely produced. Lönberg-​Holm played a key role in the CIAM Chapter for Relief and Postwar Planning. Founded in 1944 as an interim organization, Neutra was president and Lönberg-​Holm, Josep Lluis Sert, and Paul Nelson served as vice presidents. As a prelude to the revitalization of CIAM from the United States, one of Lönberg-​Holm’s first tasks was the compilation of a detailed bibliography on American prefabricated housing experiments. A book was planned and a directory of companies was sent to European CIAM members. For this project, Larson offered up-​to-​date information from the military sector. Like many architects in the Depression, Larson worked on the war effort by holding a succession of positions in Washington, DC, as an architect and project planner at the US Housing Authority from 1939 to 1940; as an administrator at the National Housing Agency from 1942 to 1944; and as a technical consultant to the Senate Military Affairs Committee, Subcommittee on War Mobilization, better known as the Kilgore Committee from 1944 to 1945.55 His report contained 1,400 abstracts on new materials and prefabrication techniques that had been invented during the war. With Stamo Papadaki as the intermediary, 18 copies were sent to CIAM members, including Le Corbusier, Victor Bourgeois, and Pierre-Andre Emery in Algeria. Most of the projects and companies were published in Architectural Record and advertised in Sweet’s. The State Department had asked the US

9 7 1

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 179 CIAM chapter to select a prefabricated house to ship to Europe for an exhibition touring to France, Brussels, and Switzerland. They recommended Wachsmann and Gropius’ Packaged House. The zenith of prefabricated experiments, it was conceived of as a set of complex and flexible modular components rather than a finished product that reflected the theoretical ideas of Gropius dating back to the 1920s and the superb crafting and systems thinking of Wachsmann. The MRU Sweet’s design and research department participated in one of the first exhibition venues in Europe to promote national expertise in industrial construction. The Exposition of American Building Techniques, held at the Grand Palais from June 14 to July 21, 1946, was a co-​production of the French Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism (MRU), the US National Housing Agency, and the Office of War Information, where Larson was employed. The MRU was founded on April 21, 1945, to take over the task of reconstruction from the Vichy government. Their goals were to confront pressing social needs; to explore the conditions facing the nation’s builders; and to stimulate the public’s interest in new types of dwellings. To this end the organization was dedicated to creating didactic expositions on housing. In May 1945, they sent a delegation to the United States to study construction techniques. The American communist architect Paul Nelson (1885–​1979) was commissioned to design the exhibition as a prelude to a more ambitious show to be held in 1947. Nelson was a mediator between French and American culture. Born in Chicago, he moved to France in 1920 following a brief stint at Princeton University in 1914 and after serving in the US Air Force during World War I. In 1927 he became the first student at the Ecole de Beaux Arts to graduate from the atelier of Auguste Perret. During an extended stay in the United States, Nelson acquainted Fuller with the work of Le Corbusier and they began a lasting friendship. He offered his input into the design of the Dymaxion House, and became the product spokesperson abroad. Although he had a profound knowledge of concrete construction, their relationship led him to explore a lightweight metallic lattice structure. The extraordinary Suspended House (1936–​ 1938) experimented with prefabrication techniques that linked Nelson to the central concerns of the SSA. Nelson and Lönberg-​ Holm were collaborators. They served on the Building Industry Design Education Group, which included Larson and CIAM members Josep Lluis Sert and Ernest Weissmann. This committee was set-​up to examine the failure and closure of New  York University’s Beaux Arts-​oriented architecture program in 1940. Their findings, set out in The BI-​2 Report on Design Training for the Building Industry, stressed the role of the architect as a specialist and a team member in all facets of

0 8 1

180  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter building design, not as an independent artistic practitioner. With Planning for Productivity as a blueprint, they actively campaigned for the reform of professional education.56 Their vision furthered the same ideas that Lönberg-​Holm had been promoting since 1929 and coincided with Kocher and Howard Dearstyne’s prospectus for an architectural center at Black Mountain College in 1943, which also called for the creation of a national clearing house for building and construction research. In 1941, when Nelson was employed at the Federal Works Agency (FWA), Lönberg-​Holm collaborated with him in the elaboration of technical standards for the United States Housing Administration, as consultants in the Standards Study Group. Once he began teaching at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Marseille, Nelson’s students translated Planning for Productivity into French and tried to apply many of the same precepts.57 In 1944, the formation of the New York CIAM chapter reunited the architects. Nelson’s auspicious exhibition for the MRU was visited by 150,000 people before traveling to Brussels (Figure  4.6). The hallmark of the design was a lightweight metallic modular system for displaying photomurals by photographers of the Farm Security Administration, which complemented the exposition content and catalyzed the use of documentary images by the MRU. The French government faced an acute housing shortage and the MRU promoted the idea of domestic change as a way of reconstituting the fragmentation of postwar civic life. Yet it is hard to imagine the public’s response to the traditionally styled American prefabricated houses displayed on a metaphorical front lawn under the glass conservatory roof. A full-​scale mock-​up of a modern bathroom and a kitchen with integrated appliances offered the French a vision of suburban living as a prelude to the propagandistic promotion of American consumer lifestyle by the Marshall Plan after 1947.58 The MRU cast reconstruction as a national task and looked to American expertise in structural components, equipment, and methods of construction. The research department of Sweet’s, although not properly credited, contributed information on prefabrication, techniques, and a wide range of products. These elements were displayed in a three-​dimensional environment and within the exhibition catalog designed by Lönberg-​Holm and Sutnar, whose didactic graphic work contrasted with the flexible modular structure. The French public and construction industry professionals were so fascinated by Sweet’s Catalog that Nelson commented that many of the book bindings had been broken due to over-​handling. In a special companion issue of L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, dedicated to the exhibition, Nelson sought to soften any opposition to mass-​produced design practices by assuring French practitioners that such methodologies would not undermine their freedom and by emphasizing the extent to which Americans adapt to ever-​ changing conditions by constantly renewing their methods.59 The tangible outcome of this exchange culminated in the experiments with detached prefabricated dwellings that were carried out in Merlan in

1 8

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 181

Figure 4.6 View of the installation at the l’Exposition des techniques américaines de l’habitation et de l’urbanisme, Paris, June 14–​21, 1946 Source: courtesy of the Ministère du Logement et de l’Égalité des Territoires (MLET). © Andre-​Louis Guillaume Terra.

Noisy-​le-​Sec, when the town became a laboratory where 56 single-​family homes from seven countries were built from 1945 to 1951, including Nelson’s prototype for a concrete-​ panel house with interior decoration by Charlotte Perriand.60 The American prefabricated houses presented by different manufacturers were built of metal, lumber, or other lightweight materials. But the French attraction to the detached dwelling proved to be only an interlude to the planning of large-​scale housing complexes. The initiative points to the limits of such technological and cultural exchanges. French architects had been exploring prefabrication since the 1920s and had their own research. The architects who traveled the United States as part of the MRU delegation were most fascinated by the projects of the TVA. Postwar French builders preferred concrete and other heavy, low-​cost materials. Eventually the logic of prefabricated assembly was used to produce the grands ensembles rather than single-​family dwellings.

2 8 1

182  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter Prefabrication and the Soviet Union Architects of the Soviet Union urgently sought to learn lessons from the organization of the American construction industry, and experiments in prefabrication techniques as part of professional interchange that was orchestrated by the Architects Committee of the National Council of American–​Soviet Friendship (NCASF). Lönberg-​Holm and several former SSA members –​Breines, Kocher, Haskell, Kiesler, and Eugene Schoen –​were active in the organization, which was founded in 1944 as an outgrowth of radical left-​wing American–​Soviet friendship movements of the 1930s. The New York architect Harvey Wiley Corbett was chairman. The group planned to send an ambitious exhibition designed by Frederick Kiesler to Moscow as a follow-​up to the success of a small show, Rapid Construction in the USA, that had been put together by MoMA and the Office of War Information Department in March 1945. The exhibition introduced the Soviets to a range of prefabricated projects, including a home by Sears Roebuck, the Dymaxion House, and Gropius and Wachsmann’s General Panel System.61 The Soviet government and its building professionals faced a housing emergency and reconstruction at an unprecedented scale. The evacuation of industries to the east in 1941 had displaced 50,000 workers and their families. Furthermore, the country faced the rebuilding of 50 cities and 17 urban centers.62 For a brief moment before an ideological backlash against Western relations that marked the beginning of the Cold War, architects of the Soviet Union were looking to the United States for methods of rapid construction. The monumentalism of the Stalin era was redirected to explorations of American-​styled prefabricated single-​family housing, although many of the new dwellings were self-​built in agrarian communities. Among the powerful figures who promoted this interchange were Karo Alabian, the chairman of the Architectural Section of the All-​Union Organization for Cultural Relations Abroad (VOKS); Victor Vesnin, president of the All-​Union Academy of Architecture; and Igor Grabar, president of the All-​ Russian Academy of Arts. Given the emergency at hand, the influential architect Andrei Burov –​a former member of OSA and a graduate of VKhUTEMAS –​suggested that Amtorg, the Soviet purchasing company based in the United States, should buy American technologies and factories. A Soviet trade company founded in New York in 1924, Amtorg at times acted as a cultural attaché and in fact they had assembled the exposition of Soviet architecture that made such a great impact at Jane Heap’s Machine-​Age Exposition in 1927. Their real mission was commercial, and in the 1920s Amtorg was instrumental in importing American expertise from companies such as General Electric and for enlisting Albert Kahn to set-​up shop in the Soviet Union. During the First Five-​Year Plan and the Depression they negotiated contracts with more than 100 American companies, and in World War II they handled military

3 8 1

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 183 supplies under the lend-lease agreement. The NCASF added another dimension to this cultural and business alliance. In the words of Karo Alabian they sought “To establish closer mutual understanding of planning and building problems.” Harvey Wiley Corbett’s Architects Committee was set-​up to exchange information, and to familiarize the Soviets with American techniques and wartime technologies. The postwar context had changed the relations of former SSA members to their Soviet counterparts. In 1932, when the group joined CIAM to vehemently protest the outcome of the Soviet Palace competition, and the Stalinist rejection of the radical architecture of the 1920s, Shelter had published a range of correspondences with architects who went to the USSR to find work during the Depression. After the war they were now willing to work alongside architects of the regime as allies. The former SSA member best acquainted with and politically sympathetic to the Soviet Union was Simon Breines, who had well-​established contacts in Russia. He had won a prize in the Soviet Palace competition in 1932, and during 1933, accompanied by his future wife, he lived and studied in the USSR for five months. Breines and Lönberg-​Holm joined Frank Lloyd Wright on a trip to the First All-​Union Congress of Soviet Architects, held in Moscow in 1937. In 1939 he was the local architect in charge of the Soviet Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, which had been designed by Boris Iofan, the very architect whose prize-​winning Soviet Palace scheme the SSA and CIAM had deplored. Breines actively promoted cultural exchange by offering a seminar on Soviet art, architecture, and planning at Cornell University in the summer of 1944, and he helped to organize a small exhibition on the history of Soviet architecture and its contemporary situation. The show, which had been assembled by Lönberg-​Holm’s wife Ethel, traveled to the University of California and Pratt Institute.63 Breines’ interest in prefabricated housing is evident in the survey The Book of Houses (1946) and in his design of a dwelling that made use of airplane technology invented during the war for the Revere Copper and Brass Company.64 Former SSA members were instrumental in organizing the American Soviet Building Conference on May 5, 1945. Among the most successful events, when 200 American architects and 50 Soviets gathered to share expertise, was the prefabrication panel that included the participation of Josep Lluis Sert and Robert L. Davison.65 Douglas Haskell, who was then an associate editor at Architectural Record, was asked to write the script for the exhibition to be sent to Moscow. His sweeping propagandistic narrative covered the history of the nation’s building traditions from colonial times to the contemporary era, and traced the evolution of American mercantile cities and southern agriculture. The introductory section offered the Soviets a glimpse of the country’s human diversity by including native Indians and immigrants. The script, which brings to mind the later Cold War optimism of the Eameses’

4 8 1

184  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter Glimpses of the USA (1959), was divided into sections celebrating building and infrastructural typologies such as transportation, homes, industry, commerce, administration, and social purposes, with architectural works organized according to the topics of education, health, community centers, and recreation. Many of the contemporary projects had been shown in Elizabeth Mock’s exhibition, Built in USA:  1932–​1944, which was held at MoMA in 1944. The large-​scale infrastructural works of the New Deal included projects for the TVA and the FSA’s greenbelt regionalism. The panels on prefabricated housing highlighted the best designs by European architects, such as Neutra’s Channel Heights Housing of 1942. An important area of the exhibition was dedicated to information systems and manuals such as Architectural Graphic Standards, Time Saver Standards, and Sweet’s Catalog. Kiesler created the installation with Ethel Lönberg-​Holm. They designed 40 flat corrugated plywood panels of 4 × 6 feet with 350 photographs; budget limitations meant that Kielser was unable to realize a more ambitious design featuring a series of organic curving panels derived from his installation for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery of 1942. The layout of the panels drew complaints from committee members, who found the dynamic constructivist composition confusing and lacking in any chronological order. The panels made use of an underlying navigational pattern that moved the viewer’s eye across photographs of buildings in the foreground. They were shipped to Moscow after being presented in New York in December 1945, in an event that included representatives of both governments (Figure 4.7).66 In 1944 Alabian created the Commission for Scientific Technical Problems of Construction to address the challenge of adapting American prefabrication techniques to local conditions, building traditions, labor, and materials. This proved to be one of the concrete outcomes of this exchange, which led to a period of intense experimentation with assembly techniques. A particular criteria for the Soviets was to reduce the weight of the structures. The speed of construction and assembly was another major concern, and the Aviation Building Trust produced a three-​room bungalow that could be built in just 30 hours. Many of the houses explored rationalized construction methods for vernacularized wood constructions or hybrids that included masonry. The Soviets did not wish to rebuild their cities the way they had been, but to create new rational and harmonious designs. By the late 1940s the ideological backlash and anti-​Americanism known as Zhdanovism gave preference to large-​scale ensembles over single-​family housing.67 As a member of the Technical Information Committee, with Henry Churchill, Corbett, and George Nelson, Lönberg-​Holm’s role was dedicated to information exchange. He was charged with capturing the extreme situation in a series of weekly and biweekly news bulletins to keep the members up to date with the challenges of Soviet reconstruction. The most significant

5 8 1

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 185

Figure 4.7 Frederick Kiesler and Ethel Lönberg-​Holm, exhibition panel from the Architects Committee of the NCASF Source: © 2016 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.

outcome was that he created a methodology that included a questionnaire laying out the parameters of building and other problematics related to development. This survey technique was offered to professional organizations and government planners. It created a synthetic picture of the scale of the task of building by examining the institutional structure and interrelation of different professionals and their educational backgrounds.68 This methodology was adapted by the CIAM Chapter for Relief as the basis for assembling information for postwar reconstruction in Europe and for initiatives in the developing world. Several members of CIAM who were active in the NCASF, including Serge Chermayeff, who had been born in the Soviet Union, took note. During this time, Lönberg-​Holm began to envision a new role for CIAM as an international organization for information on all aspects of building and community development. Although he held on to the organization’s initial precepts regarding standardization, his survey questionnaires and field note idea served as a model for large-​scale reconstruction and development projects within CIAM.

6 8 1

186  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter Anonymous history Sweet’s Catalog is not mentioned in Mechanization Takes Command (1948), yet it forms part of what Giedion called “a contribution to anonymous history.” His declaration, “For the historian there are no banal things,” is very fitting here. Sweet’s offered American practitioners a flexible and heterogeneous aggregation of continually updated inventions that form part of the history of mechanization in architecture. In describing his historiography of the prosaic, Giedion stated: We shall deal here with humble things, things not usually granted earnest consideration, or at least not valued for their historical import. But no more in history than in painting is it the impressiveness of the subject that matters. The sun is mirrored even in the coffee spoon.69 This history sought to reconcile the deadly outcome of the rationalized processes of industrialization and standardization in the war when they “changed from a hope to a menace” and when the utopian ideal of repro-​ shelter transformed into an emergency response to war mobilization and destruction. The war was a decisive turning point. The architecture profession’s contributions to the intensification of mass production was integral to the advance of the absolute authority of modernism afterwards. This marked the beginnings of the international building industry. As Neutra realized, “the quarry was anything but local.” Just as cars were shipped from Detroit to all points of the compass, American fixtures had now filtered into many regions of the planet. Neutra believed that the national experience with distance and mobility had made it an ideal test site for the emerging global construction market.70 The exigencies of reconstruction made it strikingly evident that collective teamwork and industrial integration were crucial to confronting the vast challenges of rebuilding. Reconstruction depended less on the aesthetic abilities of architects than on their organizational acumen. To surmount the crisis, quality everyday buildings that had been lost needed to be replaced. The mundane would take primacy over monuments in this endeavor. The assembly of parts would be seen as a public service. Notes 1 Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (New York: Collier Books, 1971), 191. 2 McGraw-​Hill bought Dodge Corporation in 1961 and sold it to Symphony Technology Group in 2014. 3 Buckminster Fuller, “Architecture: The State of the Art Today,” Newsweek Global Report (May 27, 1989). 4 Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); and “Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” ed.

7 8 1

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 187 H. Kuklick, Knowledge and Society Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, vol. 6 (1986): 1–​40. 5 Cohen, Scenes of the World to Come, 85–​105; and Neutra, Wie Baut Amerika? 6 Richard Neutra, Survival Through Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 51. 7 Hammacher Schlemmer, the longest running American mail order business, started in 1881 out of a hardware store on the Bowery. By 1912 their catalog ran to 1,112 pages. 8 In the introduction to the first volume in 1906, the architect Thomas Nolan noted that the catalog was an indispensable filter to save the individual practitioner from having to deal with itinerant salesmen. 9 For another account of Sweet’s see: Andrew M. Shanken, “From the Gospel of Efficiency to Modernism: A History of Sweet’s Catalogue, 1906–​1947,” Design Issues, vol. 21, no. 2 (spring 2005): 28–​47. 10 See: James R. Beninger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1986). 11 Mumford, “Mass Production and the Modern House.” 12 Meyer Schapiro, “Architecture and the Architect.” A reprint of this article from April 1936 is found in: Scott, “Looking Forward to Looking Backward.” 13 William Henry Leffingwell, Making the Office Pay (Chicago, IL:  A.W. Shaw Company, 1918). 14 Fuller, “Architecture: The State of the Art Today.” 15 “  ‘One-​Plus-​Two’ Diatom House,” Architectural Record, vol. 76 (January 1934): 32–​33. For an account of the plywood house, see: Thomas S. Hines and Richard Joseph Neutra, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994): 128–​130. 16 Buckminster Fuller, “Universal Architecture,” T-Square, vol. 2, no. 2 (February, 1932): 25. 17 The Editors of Fortune, Housing America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932). 18 C.T. Larson, “Packaged Houses,” Survey Graphics, vol. 26 (July 1937): 377–​382. 19 The three prefabricated houses at the fair were:  Fisher’s House of Steel; Stran-​Steel House by O’Dell and Wirt C.  Rowland, and the Weibolt-​Roston Corporation House by Walter Schuler. The hybrid systems were the Armco Ferro Enamel Frameless Steel House by Robert Smith, Jr. and the Keck’s House of Tomorrow. Houses of a single material included:  Frazier and Raftery’s Masonite House; House for the Brick Manufacturers Association of America by Andrew N.  Rebori; the Florida Tropical House by Robert Law Weed; and American Forest Products & Lumber Industries House by Ernest A. Grunsfeld, Jr. 20 Daniel Barber, “Tomorrow’s House: Architecture and the Future of Energy in the 1940s,” Technology and Culture, vol. 55, no. 1 (February 2014): 1–​39. 21 Herbert Matter, Charles Eames and R. Buckminster Fuller, “Prefabricated Housing,” Arts and Architecture (July 1944); and “Announcement: The Case Study House Program,” Arts and Architecture (January 1945), 54–​55. Abell’s project appears as: “Case Study House Seven Thornton M. Abell, Architect” in July 1948. 22 Originally published in Industrial Design in 1965, this essay can be found in: Reyner Banham, Design By Choice, ed. Penny Sparke (London: Academy Editions, 1981). Neutra received a copy of the article: Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C.T. Larson “Industrialization of Housing,” Technical America (March 1938): 9. See: Neutra to KLH, August 3, 1938, Box XIV, Folder 3, KLH-​A. 23 In The Portfolio and the Diagram (2002), Hyungmin Pai examines modernist representational systems by framing his discussion with Michel Foucault’s definitions of discursive formations.

81

188  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 24 See: George Barnett Johnston, Drafting Culture: A Social History of Architectural Graphic Standards (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2008). Johnston frames his study with the notion of fields and habitus from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice. A field is an objective network of relations in the practice of a discipline. Habitus refers to the subjective element –​essentially what each architect brings to the field. 25 Paul Artaria, an ABC group member, celebrated the DIN paper system. Meyer claimed to use German and Soviet standard paper, typefaces, page divisions, notations, symbols, and color. He considered standardized drawings to be part of any architect’s equipment. 26 Meyer, “The New World.” 27 Neufert taught at Johannes Itten’s school in Berlin until it closed in 1936. He then traveled and visited Wright at Taliesin. During a stop in New  York he learned of the successful reception of his manual. 28 Jean Louis Cohen has shown that Neufert created standard dimensions for objects and minimal dimension for a range of activities. 29 For a discussion on this theme, see:  Marcus Frings, “The Golden Section in Architectural Theory,” Nexus Network Journal, vol. 4, no. 1 (February, 2002): 7–​32. 30 The idea that standards for office systems grew out of paper formats is also found in Le Corbusier’s L’Esprit Nouveau. 31 International Organization for Standardization, “Tracing the History of Paper Sizes,” www.iso.org/​iso/​history_​of_​paper_​size. 32 Most European countries assimilated the system in the 1930s. 33 Ostwald’s theories appear in his book, Color Primer (1917). 34 Neufert’s standard details for gas chambers and crematoriums have been used as evidence in Holocaust denial court cases. 35 Lönberg-​Holm and Larson, “The Technician on the Cultural Front,” 472. 36 This information is found in a promotional inset in Sweet’s Catalog (1941). 37 “Well-​Known Trade Mark Identifies Sweet’s Catalog Service,” Dodge Group News, vol. 4 (April 1958): 3. Box XIII, Folder 3, KLH-​A. 38 See: Helena Janáková, ed., Ladislav Sutnar: Prague, New York, Design in Action. (Prague: Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, 2003). 39 The Composing Room, which was founded by Sol Cantor and Dr.  Robert L. Leslie in their typesetting firm in 1927, became a hub for designers by sponsoring publications, exhibitions and events. See: Erin K. Malone, Dr. Leslie and the Composing Room, www.drleslie.com/​. 40 Paul Makovsky, “The Space of Information: Collaboration Between Theodore Larson, Knud Lönberg-​Holm and Ladislav Sunar at Sweet’s Catalog Service,” in Ladislav Sutnar: Praque, New York, Design in Action, ed. Helena Janáková (Prague: Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, 2003): 338–​348. 41 Twenty percent of all the nation’s advertising agencies were in Chicago, which was a printing and mail order center for Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. 42 See:  James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture:  Capitalism, Modernism and the Chicago-​ Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2002). 43 Steven Heller, “Ladislav Sutnar’s Monograph Manifesto,” in Ladislav Sutnar: Visual Design in Action, 1961, ed. Reto Caduff and Steven Heller (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers), 10–​11. 44 Maria Gough, “Contains Graphic Material: El Lissitzky and the Topography of G,” in G: An Avant-​Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design and Film, 1923–​ 1926, ed. Detlef Mertins and Michael W.  Jennings (Los Angeles, CA:  Getty Research Institute, 2010), 21–​52.

9 8 1

Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 189 45 Otto Neurath, “Visual Representation of Architectural Problems,” Architectural Record (July, 1937): 56–​61; “The Thrust of Invention: ISOTYPES,” Survey Graphics, vol. 22, no. 12 (December, 1937): 643–​ 647, 714, 715, 717, 718; and “Visual Education: A New Language,” Survey Graphics, vol. 26, no. 1 (January, 1937): 25. 46 At CIAM 4, Neurath stressed the need to include information about the living standards of different social groups on city plans, yet van Eesteren and Moholy-​ Nagy resisted making the ISOTYPE a standard. See:  Enrico Chapel, “Otto Neurath and the CIAM: The International Pictorial Language as a Notational System for Town Planning,” in Encyclopedia and Utopia: The Life and Work of Otto Neurath (1882–​1945), eds. Elizabeth Nemeth and Friedrich Stadler (Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol. 4; New York: Springer, 1996), 167–​182. 47 Steven Heller, “Ladislav Sutnar: Info Man,” in Ladislav Sutnar: Praque, New York, Design in Action, ed. Helena Janáková (Prague: Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, 2003), 14. 48 Giedion’s students were researching art and advertising. He proposed having the pair design an exhibition for CIAM that was to be organized by Bernard Rudofsky. 42-​ SG-​ 20-​ 76, ETH. Lönberg-​ Holm’s candidacy at the Chicago Bauhaus is addressed in: Makovsky, “The Space of Information,” 340. 49 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and Ladislav Sutar, “Catalog Design: New Field for Visual Communication,” Graphis, vol. 24 (1948): 342–​345. 50 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and Ladislav Sutar, Designing Information (New York: Whitney Publications, 1947). Originally intended as a visual essay for Sweet’s, this was published by Rudofsky in three monthly excerpts and as a 20-​page booklet. See: “Designing Information,” Interiors Magazine (February, 1947): 114–​125 and (April, 1947): 85–​98. 51 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and Ladislav Sutar, Catalog Design Progress (New York: Sweet’s Catalog Service, 1950). 52 Larson to Levinson, November 24, 1977, Box XII, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 53 Heller, “Ladislav Sutnar: Info Man,” 16. 54 This analogy is suggested in Joachim Krausse, “Unsichtbare Architektur,” Disko, 20 (June 2011). See also: Gilbert Herbert, The Dream of the Factory-​Made House: Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 8. 55 Papadaki to Neutra, March 13, 1946, 42-​ JLS-​ 23-​ 38, 39, ETH. Larson to Papadaki, May 20, 1945, 42-​JLS-​2-​112, ETH. 56 “NYU Failure, BI 2 Report,” June 17, 1941, Box XV, Folder 1, KLH-​A. 57 Nelson to KLH, Box XI, Folder 1, KLH-​A. 58 See:     www.territoires.gouv.fr/​1946-​exposition-​des-​techniques-​americaines-​de-​l-​ habitation-​et-​de-​l-​urbanisme. 59 Frederick Gutheim, Gygory Kepes, Louis Kahn, and Anatole Kopp assisted Nelson. See: Paul Nelson, “Précisions à propos de l’Exposition des techniques américaines de l’habitation et de l’urbanisme,” L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, vol. 12 (July 1947). He apologized for not crediting the efforts of Sweet’s design and research department. Nelson to KLH, September 1945, Box XI, Folder 1, KLH-​A. 60 For a study on the project, see: La Cité expérimentale de Merlan (Ville de Noisy-​ le-​Sec 2008) www.noisylesec.net/​kiosque/​_​48c0fae06c59b.pdf. 61 Minutes of Architects Committee Meeting March 2, 1944, Box XV, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 62 Box XV, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 63 Information about the seminar and exhibition appear in the Architects’ Committee New Bulletin, vol. 1, May 29, 1944 and News Bulletin, vol. 2 June 12, 1944. Box XV, Folder 2, KLH-​A.

0 9 1

190  Sweet’s Catalog and repro-​shelter 64 See: John P. Dean and Simon Breines, The Book of Houses (New York: Crown, 1946) and Simon Breines, The Airplane Helps Build This House (Revere’s Part in Better Living) (New York: Revere Copper and Brass Company, 1943). 65 “American-​Soviet Conference on Prefabrication,” Prefabricated Homes (1945): 19–​20. 66 Box -​REC PHO 652310–​652810 TXT 6664/​0-​6667/​0, FK. Kiesler created several versions of the installation. It is not clear as to whether it was exhibited in Moscow. See:  Jean Louis Cohen, “[American] Objects of [Soviet] Desire,” in Forty Ways to Think About Architecture: Architectural History and Theory Today, eds. Iain Borden, Murray Fraser, and Barbara Penner (Chicester:  John Wiley and Sons, 2014), 127–​133. 67 Richard Anderson, “USA/​USSR:  Architecture and War,” Grey Room, vol. 34 (2009): 80–​103. 68 “Outline for Information Requested,” Box XV, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 69 Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1948), 3. 70 Neutra, Survival Through Design, 51.

1 9

5  Information architecture

Unique among all forms of life, man has advanced in a relatively recent stage of history to a point where he seeks to change and adjust his environment to serve his own needs of growth and development. With man’s increasing knowledge of his environmental forces, physical and cultural, he becomes increasingly able to bring favorable relationships into existence and to eliminate those which he deems undesirable.1

Buckminster Fuller’s forays into information harvesting are well documented, but it was a shared concern. Development Index (1953), the first of several postwar collaborations between Lönberg-​Holm and Larson, is indicative of their increasing engagement in theorizing and designing shared information environments with the aim of offering architects access to continually updated data on advancements in the building industry. Their joint effort to create a knowledge framework, or what is known today as a database, about the natural and built environment, was presented to CIAM. Development Index promotes a paradigm that views man and the environment as responsive and regulating systems, as environmental control forces and as information (Figure 5.1). As productivist technicians in the bureau –​which Latour has suggested can be a site of experimental practice –​the significance of this endeavor lies less in conventional notions of architecture than in the conceptualization of organizational methodologies and policies. Acting as mediators in the processes of modernization in architecture and community design, their work brings into focus those who shape agendas for practice. This project sought to reformulate the role of the architect in the design of human domains. In Development Index, information about architecture merges with an architecture of information. Larson and Lönberg-​ Holm were drawn to media that thematized flow  –​energy, information, and consumption  –​to create a research methodology premised on free data. Their teleological view of technology led them to see the transformation from paper-​based information systems to the computer as a natural evolution. Their understanding of buildings as transformers and transmitters of intangible entities such as energy and information represents a shift from thinking about “flows” to

2 9 1

192  Information architecture

Figure 5.1 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodore Larson, “Diagram of man, cosmos and culture” Source:  Development Index, 1953. Courtesy of the C.  Theodore Larson Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan and the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

thinking about “patterns” and reflects the influence of theories of communication and cybernetics on architectural thought after the war. In the postwar era, the pair were increasingly focused on what is today known as information architecture: the design of systems for gathering, disseminating, and exchanging data. The term “information architect” was coined in the 1970s by the architect Richard Saul Wurman to address his own work, yet this definition is extremely fitting for examining the projects of Larson and Lönberg-​Holm. Wurman argued that an information architect is: a. the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear; b. a person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge; c.  the emerging 21st century professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding, and the science of the organization of information.2 In a further elaboration, he stated that he was not referring to a bricks-​and-​ mortar architect.

3 9 1

Information architecture 193 I mean architect as used in the words architect of foreign policy. I mean architect as in the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles to make something work –​the thoughtful making of either artifact, or idea, or policy that informs because it is clear. In Development Index, energy flows meet information flows. This project is indicative of a changed understanding of information and standards after the war. If in the 1930s Lönberg-​Holm’s work on the reorganization of Sweet’s offered an ever-​changing feedback loop between architects and fabricators, by the 1940s he and Sutnar understood information design to be something more complex than graphic design –​the creation of patterns for making complex technical and product data legible. Development Index was informed by Lönberg-​Holm and Larson’s engagement with the postwar revitalization of CIAM and its mission in worldwide reconstruction and development. Their new understanding of standardization and information was concerned with reformulating the structure of the building industry, but it was also aimed at the design of a relational matrix that set out parameters for buildings, communities, and other forms of environmental control. Policy is a key concept here. Development Index can be understood as an operational fulcrum, a theory of interaction, and a set of standardized institutional survey techniques for negotiating community design factors within different contextual contingencies. It would later serve as a template for global development missions sent out by the United Nations Commission. This work might lead us to consider the bureau as an exploratory laboratory in which many elements can be connected together because their scale and nature has been averaged out. As Bruno Latour has suggested, specifications, standards, maps, surveys, economics, politics, and sociology do not come into contact through the grandiose entrance of “interdisciplinarity,” but through the backdoor of the file. Of vital importance was his experience in the managerial culture of CIAM and the debates surrounding its survival.

Worldwide reconstruction and postwar CIAM Lönberg-​Holm assumed a vital role in the revival of CIAM from the United States just before the war ended, and it was within this context that his understanding of information and community deepened. His work was centered on three main issues –​relief efforts through offering information about prefabrication techniques; information in and of itself; and the creation of standards for community planning that could facilitate international reconstruction and development efforts. Crucial to understanding the reformulation of CIAM at this critical juncture, the rupture imposed by the conflict must be taken into account. Since the founding of CIAM as an avant-​garde association in 1928, the American delegates had carried out their duties at a distance from the parent

4 9 1

194  Information architecture organization, but they hadn’t taken part in policymaking. After all, there had never been a formal American chapter. Neutra conducted work out of his office in Los Angeles and Lönberg-​Holm was backed by the SSA. On the eve of Germany’s surrender and with the migration of many European members to the United States, the main concern of the leaders was not only how to reconnect, but the reformulation of CIAM. The question was: What role could they assume within an international network of organizations setting policies for relief efforts where they were seeking to gain a foothold? The aim of Sigfried Giedion and Josep Lluis Sert, who were both in the United States in 1939, was to portray CIAM as an elite coalition of international planning experts, despite the fact that the members did not actually hold significant positions.3 This reflected a professional crisis of confidence brought on by the mobilization of practitioners in the war effort. Presumably architects were responsible for coordinated evacuations and the planning and construction of industrial facilities, defense housing, and air raid shelters, but often this work was undertaken by large contracting firms. As collaborators in multidisciplinary teams dedicated to immense strategic planning and infrastructural projects, architects needed to assert their expertise beyond mere aesthetic considerations. CIAM’s founding principles had been built on a belief in the industrialization of architecture, mass production, prefabrication, and standardization. Lönberg-​Holm was still committed to these premises. The leadership of Giedion and Le Corbusier had been supported by van Eesteren and Sert, whose presence became more decisive in the United States. CIAM’s defining statement, the Functional City, had been assimilated in the ten-​year interim between the last congress before the war, which was held in Paris in 1937, and the reunion event planned for 1947. The participants had not had much contact during the years of conflict; they had aged and a younger and more geographically diverse generation was now keen to participate. The rejuvenation of the organization was vital. A key issue was the new role that CIAM could play in the reconstruction in Europe and in new planning initiatives in developing nations. The core values of Giedion and Sert had been shaken and in the wake of the fascism and destruction that their European colleagues had endured, they shifted. As they sought to address the failure of modern architecture to capture the imagination of the general public, the unity of the arts and spaces of collective life came to the forefront of their thinking. Giedion’s writings of the time exemplified a turn from materialism to spiritualism and an appeal to the common man. In Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition of 1941, which developed out of the Charles Norton Lectures at Harvard University, he promoted an enriched modernist idiom that could express the values of a shared civic sphere. In the seminal manifesto “Nine Points on Monumentality” (1943), co-​written with the artist Ferdinand Léger and Sert, the authors sought to amplify CIAM’s foundational precepts by promoting interdisciplinary collaborations between the

5 9 1

Information architecture 195 arts to create an enhanced vocabulary that could convey symbolic meaning. By 1948, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History offered a reflection on the implicit use of rational standardization in the killings of the war and sought to humanize the idea of mass production. In response to Lewis Mumford’s critique of his book, Can our Cities Survive? (1942), community became a pivotal prism for Sert and a core of collective life was added as a fifth function to complement the original four functions of work, habitation, leisure, and circulation. Giedion and Sert called for architectural works that could express regional inflections with a monumental character and emblems of collectivity. By 1952, Heart of the City proposed the revitalization of American cities with a civic space, offering a critique of the decentralization and slum clearance policies that had been promoted by the SSA in the 1930s. Yet these concerns do not reflect the preoccupation of American CIAM members of the time, who were for the most part developing prefabrication techniques for defense housing and reconstruction.4 In contrast to this search for a new monumentality and an enriched stylistic vocabulary, Lönberg-​Holm was still deeply engaged in working toward the integration of the building industry and in defining the architect as a specialist. During the war the construction industries of many countries had been taken over by the public administration and architects had to carve out a role within collaborative efforts. Furthermore, the challenges of reconstruction demonstrated the critical need to have in place a rapid and effective aggregated system for the design and construction of everyday buildings rather than exceptional structures. Never one to be concerned with expressive genius, Lönberg-​Holm argued for high standards of quality in confronting the emergency situation. In a sense, this point of view was already represented in the collaborative and anonymous legacy of the New Deal projects. Paradoxically such a position would align him with his old sparring partner Henry-​Russell Hitchcock, as reflected in the essay “The Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Genius” (1947).5 This text, while often cited as a blueprint for the emergence of corporate offices in the United States, was actually addressing the challenges of postwar rebuilding by considering architectural expertise as part of bureaucratic management and economies of production. By postulating a division between the architect as genius and the architect as a manager, Hitchcock insightfully articulated what had become a generalized postwar debate that was reflected in the discussions within CIAM at the time. In an attempt to reconcile the interwar avant-​garde culture of design with the enormous undertaking of rebuilding, Hitchcock argued that architects had to be capable of offering complete services in design and rapid execution with a high level of professional competence. Obsolete forms needed to be removed and new requirements had to be addressed. The building of housing, schools, neighborhood centers, hospitals, and other community facilities required quality production as

6 9 1

196  Information architecture exemplified by the competence of Albert Kahn in factory design, not monuments. The war made it clear that one way of building had triumphed, but the expansion of modernism called for an authorless collective acumen more than a singular expressive facility. Nevertheless, Lönberg-​Holm was not looking toward the institutional domain of the corporate office structure, but beyond it and, like Fuller, he was still running with technology. His focus on information architecture was emblematic of a general concern with the centralization and quantification of building information throughout and after the war. Reformulation The opposition between an architecture with a modernist idiom imbued with representational power and a preoccupation with well executed architecture carried out by teamwork and reliant on a correlated information network and evolutions in industry is reflected in the debates that ensued in CIAM and the attempts to found a formal American chapter after the organization’s partial transplanting to the United States when both Gropius and Mies immigrated in 1937. In 1939, two gatherings were convened with this objective and they both took advantage of the presence of several European delegates  –​Alvar Aalto, Sven Markelius, Victor Bourgeois, and Ernest Weissmann  –​for the inauguration of the Finnish, Swedish, Belgian, and Yugoslavian national pavilions at the New York World’s Fair. Significantly, many past members of the SSA, including Lönberg-​Holm, Albert Frey, and Simon Breines  –​who had co-​designed the Swedish pavilion and overseen the construction of the Soviet pavilion at the fair –​were in attendance at a symposium on contemporary architecture at New  York University on May 12, where Fuller presented the Dymaxion House to Oscar Stonorov, George Keck, Walter Sanders, Alfred Clauss, Giedion, Moholy-​Nagy, and his former rival at Shelter, George Howe. The minutes of the meeting held at the Architectural League the next day reveal the difficulties that the group encountered in negotiating an operable consensus; in the end no chapter was founded. Howe and Stonorov, who were now in partnership, were the main dissenters. Howe was uncomfortable with the idea of a group initiative and he stressed the relevance of the individual architect instead of a collective movement. Stonorov questioned whether the collective formation was merely a publicity stunt, instead of a platform for a common agenda. Following much deliberation, an interim chapter was set up on May 20, 1944, less than a month before D-​Day, at a meeting at the New School. As we have seen, Neutra assumed the role of president. Lönberg-​Holm, Sert, and Paul Nelson were made vice presidents with Harwell Hamilton Harris as chairman. In attendance were European exiles mixed with American colleagues, including Giedion, Mohly-​Nagy, Mies van der Rohe, Joseph Hudnut, Kocher, Pierre Chareau, Marcel Breuer, Chermayeff, Norman Rice, Oscar Nitzchke, Stonorov, Weissmann, and Gropius.6

7 9 1

Information architecture 197 This meeting opened up a debate over the future of CIAM when the agenda turned to the pressing issue of reconstruction. The mission of the New York CIAM Chapter for Relief and Postwar Planning was to serve as an information service for members in countries about to undergo rehabilitation. Giedion and Sert were acutely aware of the need to cultivate connections with institutional authorities who would command this effort. To this end, they sought to take advantage of the governmental affiliations of C. Theodore Larson in Washington, DC, Paul Nelson in France, and of Weissmann, a Croatian architect who was working for the United Nations. Yet it was precisely CIAM’s all-​embracing mission that was a point of contention. Giedion expressed the importance of CIAM as a nucleus of international exchange for research and information about temporary dwellings. He argued that other countries were looking to the United States for expertise and new industrial techniques and materials that had been created during the war. It was the architect Serge Chermayeff who articulated the critical question of the day, one that spurred great debate when he asked “What should CIAM do, and what could they, in fact do?” Weissmann then interjected: “Modern architecture was created because of the changes in production processes and only by organizing these could they achieve power.”7 He argued that the continuity of the organization should be left to the members in occupied Europe to decide upon. The scope of CIAM’s mission should be narrowed. The agenda should be redefined as a new platform that could offer services for relief. He noted that it was not only the Europeans who faced a housing shortage, but the Americans as well. The Europeans would not be able to use the materials developed in the United States unless they were paid for by American aid. He stressed the need to include a new generation of younger architects to revitalize the organization. The role of Ernest Weissmann (1903–​1985) in this debate is especially notable because many of the issues that he brought forward led to concrete outcomes in his work in global development in his long career at the United Nations. A proponent of the Neue Bauen in Yugoslavia and the leader of Zagreb group, the Yugoslavian chapter of CIAM, Weissmann had worked for Le Corbusier, alongside Sert, Frey, and Norman Rice, from 1929 to 1930. Following the inauguration of his World’s Fair pavilion, he immigrated to the United States. But more importantly, after collaborating with Sert on a housing project from 1939 to 1940, Weissmann aligned himself with former members of the SSA by working with Buckminster Fuller and the architect Walter Sanders on the design of the Dymaxion Deployment Unit (DDU), a low-​cost demountable housing prototype for military troops. In 1943 he got to know Larson in Washington, DC when he landed a position with the US Board of Economic Warfare, where he was put in charge of studies on emergency shelters, building industry reconstruction, and the shipment of supplies to devastated Europe. He joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA, 1944–​1947) and became the deputy director of the Industrial Rehabilitation Division, which was responsible

8 9 1

198  Information architecture for establishing international aid programs. Eventually Weissmann landed a job with the UN Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva (1948–​1950) and in their Department of Social Affairs in New York (1951–​1965). A left-​ wing ideologue with a scientific approach to architecture, his interest in new technologies and the industrialization of the building industry aligned him with Lönberg-​Holm. In fact, the two architects considered dropping out of CIAM altogether, since they thought the organization to be redundant in relation to the United Nations. Moreover, they had been marginalized by Sert and Giedion. At a meeting in February 1943, Weissmann questioned the idea of CIAM as an elite planning organization, by arguing that planning was needed to control man’s environment for the benefit of the people. He resented that Giedion had left his statements out of the official meeting minutes. Lönberg-​Holm felt slighted when Sert neglected to invite him to a number of informal gatherings to debate the continuity of CIAM that were instead attended by the Spanish architect’s partner, Paul Lester Weiner. Two days after the founding of the CIAM Chapter for Relief, Lönberg-​Holm wrote to Weissmann that he was thinking of resigning.8 The two architects shared an agenda. When they proposed that CIAM play a central role as an organization dedicated to information exchange for worldwide reconstruction and development, Weissmann advocated adopting the questionnaire that his Danish colleague had developed for Soviet reconstruction efforts with the NCASF, as an empirical survey technique for gathering information as a prelude to reconstruction efforts in different countries. Citing the failure of the foreign brigades in the Soviet Union before the war, because they had felt superior to their local colleagues, Weissmann argued that such a methodology could alleviate the tension between native professionals and foreign experts. Lönberg-​Holm declared that his template offered a universal application for this kind of work. The future objectives of CIAM postulated by the pair sought to advance planning standards for both emergency and reconstruction in Europe and to create parameters for new community planning in future international expeditions. At least at this juncture Sert and Giedion were both enthusiastic about CIAM as an international clearing house for the exchange of information for worldwide reconstruction and development. Community standards Lönberg-​Holm’s work on the postwar reunion congress led him to consider community, and this had a holistic impact on Development Index. In 1945, after the war ended, Neutra commissioned him to elaborate the theme for CIAM 6 to be held in Bridgewater, England in 1947 under the all-​embracing conceptual rubric of “Community Development with special reference to postwar reconstruction.” This event was to be hosted by the British CIAM members of the Mars group, and after ten years of separation it was hoped

91

Information architecture 199 that the goals of the organism would be reaffirmed, and contact among members reestablished. Stressing the need for a new analysis of all aspects of community planning, he sought feedback from members in Europe to build consensus for his first outline:  “Standards in Community Planning.”9 The archival correspondence demonstrates, once again, that internally there was a debate regarding the viability of CIAM as an institution staking a claim to create international planning standards, given the roles of already existing state, national, and professional organizations. After reading Lönberg-​ Holm’s proposal, Neutra, for one, thought that it would be interesting to compare existing standards in different countries as a preliminary analysis.10 A general outline and a questionnaire were sent to European members. The final version was the result of compromise, which incorporated several seemingly unrelated counter-​proposals. The feedback loops between the different national groups provide insight into the divisions among them. With the working title “Impact of Contemporary Conditions on Expression,” the Mars group believed that the central theme of the impending congress should treat aesthetic issues, and they sought to engage the man on the street. The Polish and Swedish groups concentrated on the more finite theme of the neighborhood unit. The Dutch, although empathetic to such topics, stressed the housing emergency in Europe. Giedion and the Swiss proposed the relation of architecture with the sister arts of painting and sculpture, a theme that was clearly drawn from the famous “The Need for a New Monumentality.” A questionnaire formulated by Giedion and J.M. Richards regarding architectural expression and the impact of the arts sharply contrasts to Lönberg-​Holm’s more rationalized focus on postwar emergency and industrial emergence.11 In the end Lönberg-​Holm’s agenda for the congress reaffirmed CIAM’s origins in minimum housing and planning, but it also reflected the experiences of the war by addressing the impact of social, economic and political factors on building and community design. The aim of CIAM was now to work for the creation of a physical environment that would satisfy man’s emotional and material needs and stimulate spiritual growth. Yet not surprisingly, he proposed the general framework of industrialization to unite all of the counter-​proposals by exploring its impact on:  “Planning (New Standards of Values in Community Development); Building Design (New Needs, Requiring New Means and New Forms; and Organization (Need for Integration of Specialists in Various Fields).” The definitive version was entitled “Community Development” and it was very much in line with positions that had originated among the SSA.12 It stated: Various developments in the world of today foreshadow the need for entirely new community patterns:  1.  The extension of mechanical  mobility from land to air; 2.  The perfection of new lightweight materials and equipment, admitting greater structural flexibility and community; 3. The revolutionary discovery of new sources of power;

02

200  Information architecture 4. The definition of new concepts, embracing new social objectives for the welfare of man. Not only are the new communities of the present inadequate, measured against new developments they were already obsolete.13 In his call for a redefinition and analysis of all aspects of community standards, he suggested techniques for facilitating the comparison of universal community patterns, and he created a questionnaire to serve as a template for the international exchange of information. Despite his continuous commitment to CIAM, Lönberg-​Holm was only able to attend one meeting, “The Core of the City” at CIAM 8 in Hoddesdon, England in 1951. Nevertheless, the same concerns would underscore his involvement until the organization ended, in his collaboration with the Committee on Information, the Technical Housing Committee, and the Commission for the Industrialization of Building.14 With his characteristically doctrinaire stance, the industrialization of building was put forward as an inescapable evolutionary and generative force that contrasted to Giedion, Le Corbusier and Sert’s preoccupation with expression. Inscriptional systems The creation of methodologies of inscription that made it possible to compare urban analysis between national groups was an essential aspect of CIAM’s institutional culture, yet, as the organization became increasingly managerial, the younger generation were critical of its culture of paper pushers. Maps and grids had been conceived of as universal exchangers that allowed work to be compared. Van Eesteren’s precise plan directives for CIAM 4, the Functional City, can be understood as part of this work-​a-​day inscriptional culture. In the postwar period it was the CIAM Grid designed by Le Corbusier and the Ascoral group that proved to be controversial among the young architects who formed Team X. Introduced at CIAM 7 in 1949, the grid, was a conceptual tool, a system for graphically organizing information about town planning with the goal of comparative urban analysis. In its initial incarnation it included the four functions and nine thematic classifications: environment land occupation, constructed volume, equipment, ethics and aesthetics, economic and social influences, legislation, finance, and stages of realization. At CIAM 9, in Aix en Provence in 1953, the younger generation rejected the rigidity of the grille and sought to replace the four functions with a new conceptual matrix –​vital human associations. They were joined by Lönberg-​ Holm’s Commission for the Industrialization of Building, which argued that Le Corbusier’s system lacked any understanding of the dynamic relations between design, technical innovation, and information. The emphasis on official and bureaucratic procedures for shaping information, such as the grid and the debates surrounding its validity, would eventually incite the younger generation to propose an alternative inscriptional system derived

1 0 2

Information architecture 201 from paradigms from the social sciences and Patrick Geddes’ famous Valley Section. Their Scale of Association diagram stressed the notion of habitat as the totality of a community’s character and environment.15 The debates in postwar CIAM were focused around different hierarchies and scales of spatial entities that could reflect and facilitate community. Another point of contention in the last years was the lack of consensus on a working definition for the Charter of Habitat, which had first been introduced by Le Corbusier in 1952 as a way of updating the Athens Charter. The younger generation’s interest in vernacular forms in developing cultures and the prisms of collectivity and community influenced Lönberg-​Holm, as did the biological metaphors and systems theory that characterized the thinking of Team 10. Their idea of habitat as an environment to accommodate the total and harmonious, spiritual, intellectual, and physical fulfillment of the inhabitants informed the more expansive outlook of Development Index, with its focus on the interdependence of the individual and the environment and its conceptual shift from energy to information.

Development Index Development Index: a proposed pattern for organizing and facilitating the flow of information needed by man in furthering his own development with particular reference to the development of buildings and communities and other forms of environmental controls (1953) is an exceptionally long title for an extremely short book. It is an unusual and forgotten document that Larson and Lönberg-​Holm believed was their most defining collaborative venture. A refinement of the CIAM template for “Community Standards” and a further elaboration of Planning for Productivity, this outline for a worldwide information system, or a database, specifically treats all criteria of environment controls and suggests a series of procedures for postwar reconstruction and future world development. During the war years, although they saw each other frequently, Larson and Lönberg-​Holm had little opportunity to collaborate. In 1946, after completing his stint in the Kilgore Commission, Larson went to work at the National Housing Agency alongside Howard T. Fisher; he then became the technical director of General Houses Inc. until the company folded in 1947. In 1948 Lönberg-​Holm recommended Larson, William Muschenheim, and Walter Sanders to the University of Michigan’s Architecture School when the dean, Wells Bennett, was seeking to revitalize the faculty. Larson had just been hired as an associate editor at Architectural Forum in New York, but he moved his wife and two sons to Ann Arbor. By this time Larson had become an influential advocate of performance and prefabrication in domestic architecture, an idea explored not only in the design of his own home in 1954, but also in the essay “Toward a Science of Housing.” Published in Scientific Monthly in 1947, Larson suggested using a single material such as metal or plastic to eliminate waste in the production

2 0

202  Information architecture process.16 Once established in Michigan, Larson followed the urgings of Senator Kilgore to transfer research from the military sector to academia by founding the Architectural Research Laboratory (ARL), one of the first fundable academic initiatives of this type. When Kiesler got wind of the news, he suggested that they should start a lab dedicated to research on the integration of the arts and architecture, but the ARL was already developing the Unistrut system, a school construction prototype sponsored by an alumni, Charles Atwood. The three-​dimensional space frame system brings to mind Konrad Wachsmann’s mobile aircraft hangers and Fuller’s domes (Figure 5.2). During this time, Lönberg-​Holm was a frequent lecturer at the school and they resumed their alliance. Development Index is structured in three parts. Part  1, “Man and Development,” explores the interrelation of man, cosmos, and culture with a special emphasis on the transformation of energy. Part 2, “Development Index,” offers 24 fields of human activity under the headings of intelligence, welfare, control, and production, and suggests classifications for buildings

Figure 5.2 Unistrut System at the University of Michigan Source: © John G. Zimmerman Archive.

3 0 2

Information architecture 203

Figure 5.3 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodore Larson, “Fields of Activity” Source:  Development Index, 1953. Courtesy of the C.  Theodore Larson Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan and the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

typologies (Figure 5.3). Part 3, “Development Use,” proposes a research survey questionnaire for places about to undergo reconstruction or new planning. The diagrams emulate the contemporaneous dynamic whole-​systems thinking of Fuller’s synergetics and his geodesic domes. Development Index was conceived of as a pattern for the organization of knowledge to be updated constantly in line with “new expansions in human knowledge.” The authors argued that: Implicit in the term “development” is a concept of man as an entity which strives endlessly to reach an undefined wholeness and completeness. Such emergence is expressed by an increasing variety of human needs. In satisfying these needs, man has available all the resources of his environment, including himself.

4 0 2

204  Information architecture Development thus becomes a problem of continually perceiving new needs and transforming the various environmental relationships into new forms or patterns of activity that will serve man to ever better advantage. By creating new forms to meet new needs man increases the wealth of resources at his command. In the process more needs are created which call for further development of the available means.17 The project offered an outline for a global specialized information system, an attempt to identify and organize into operational unity all the factors to consider in the development of forms and patterns that will further man’s growth. It was envisioned as a twofold screening system, where a central collection department would coordinate and disseminate information among decentralized units by making use of state-​of-​the-​art media such as microfilm, microprints, and electronics (Figure 5.4). The comprehensiveness of the outline and the compression of the texts drew on CIAM’s culture of questionnaires and checklists. A forgotten inscriptional system that might be compared with the maps of van Eesteren and the CIAM grille, its more humanistic emphasis was noted by Giedion, when he wrote to Lönberg-​Holm: I am so glad that the emphasis is now given to the flow of information on needs and that the poor man is placed not just between the circle of production but between cosmos and culture. Maybe we are coming much closer together by this kind of hierarchy of values.18 But the project also benefited from Larson’s connection to Kenneth E. Boulding, a professor in the department of economics at the University of Michigan from 1949 to 1967. A leading figure in evolutionary economics and general systems theory, he organized an interdisciplinary seminar, “The Integration of the Social Sciences,” attended by Larson, which included a session on the “Theory of Information and Communication.” Through this affiliation, Larson may have been introduced to Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general systems theory and to Claude Shannon’s communication theory.19 Lönberg-​Holm became aware of Norbert Weiner’s cybernetics through his friendship with the Danish physicist Piet Hein, but he realized that they had been promoting a similar approach since the mid-​1930s. Larson noted the aims of the project: K and I have always thought of it as something that would itself always be in process of dynamic change under the impact of ideas and suggestions contributed by others … to be tested out on the widest possible scale by organizations and individuals who are concerned with the worldwide development of the built environment as a means for continually improving the human condition as may be deemed generally desirable in a controllable further evolution of mankind.

5 0 2

Figure 5.4 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodore Larson, “Information Flow” Source:  Development Index, 1953. Courtesy of the C.  Theodore Larson Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan and the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

6 0 2

206  Information architecture This, I believe calls for the development of a global network of interactive centers of knowledge that can provide the integrated future oriented flows of specialized information needed by planners and designers of the built environment at every magnitude (local, regional, national, global) of community concern on this planet. In short the World Brain advocated by H.G. Wells and others.20 World projects In conceiving of Development Index as an assemblage capable of receiving, sorting, summarizing, and networking information, their proposal shares affinities with international bibliographic and encyclopedic movements pioneered by H.G. Wells, Wilhelm Ostwald, Paul Otlet, and Otto Neurath in the interwar period. Projects such as Otlet’s Mundaneum, designed by Le Corbusier in 1929, envisioned the dissemination of publicly available social data by international institutions, as information technologies were subject to the processes of scientific management in the 1930s. What might be called world projects  –​the world brain, the world encyclopedia, and the world city  –​sought to centralize all knowledge in a single location. Their vast scope was suggested by Nikola Tesla’s world system for wireless telegraphy in 1910 and other global communication networks. The first international organizations before the League of Nations were organized by engineers and dedicated to world technological interdependence. The concern for the unification of knowledge was theorized by proponents of these newly established world organizations.21 Their mission was to gather together all of the knowledge on the globe.22 The World Brain (1938) first appeared in Wells’ futuristic novel The Shape of Things to Come in 1933. He envisioned a central collection bureau in Barcelona, where all forms of knowledge could be snipped and edited into an information mechanism controlled by the experts of a totalitarian world state. C.K. Ogden’s Basic English was to be the lingua franca of the new ruling elites  –​an international council of scientists.23 On a more mundane level, and following the ambition of other world projects, Ostwald formulated a single currency or World Money, a World Auxiliary Language, and a World Format for standardized paper. But new technologies and information theory that grew out of World War II sent this arcane modernist archeology of paper-​based world projects into oblivion when data collection was radically transformed by new communication media such as memex, microfilm, and eventually the computer as described in Vannever Bush’s seminal expose of 1945, “As We May Think.” This represented a move from a modernist desire to centralize and monumentalize knowledge to a postwar conception of globalized information networks.

7 0 2

Information architecture 207 The epitome of navigation This concern with information broadcasting and processing brings to mind Fuller’s Conning Station in Shelter and it anticipates his Geoscope of 1962, a proposal for a virtual floating globe with real-​time data about the earth’s resources. Back in 1932 Fuller had suggested that Shelter become the standard reference for the building industry, just as American Practical Navigator was for the maritime trade.24 A manual for mariners, initially published in 1803 and continually updated ever since, the book was authored by Nathaniel Bowditch, a self-​taught mathematician, a student of celestial bodies, and a Unitarian seaman from Salem, Massachusetts. Bowditch or The Epitome of Navigation could be found on every US Navy vessel and became the Western hemisphere’s shipping industry standard for more than 150 years. The original text included tables for navigation and several novel solutions to the spherical triangle problem. After all, the world itself was for Fuller, and any sailor, a complex information system, and the comprehensive anticipatory designer was a nomadic roamer who could process information from industry and other technocratic sources while remaining an outsider. Such an elite figure would be “a harvester of potentials” peripheral to rationalized bureaucratic industrial systems, yet able to analyze and deploy the products of technocracy to serve the world’s needs. The Geoscope and the World Game of the 1960s were concerned with a whole-​systems analysis of the environment facilitated by the exchange of realms of data that promoted the redistribution of world resources. Paradoxically and on a more personal level, Fuller’s Chronofile is a chronologically organized archive of Guinea Pig B’s personal development correlated to major world events and to scientific and technological inventions. Started in 1915 and closed upon his death, the Chronofile and the Dymaxion Index were inspired by his naval experiences in World War I, when he had to compile secret records in chronological order. As a problem of information processing, Fuller, the emphatic proponent of lightness and ephemeralization, amassed a time capsule of private and world information that eventually weighed in at 45 tons or 90,000 pounds, a bundle of paper that was heavier than any of his house designs. These scraps and clippings had to be sorted, indexed, bound, and carted about throughout his nomadic entrepreneurial existence. Worldwide practice Weissmann was informed by Lönberg-​Holm and Larson’s work in his power of granting commissions as head of the United Nations Centre for Housing, Building and Planning from the early 1950s onwards, where he was instrumental in defining the architecture and planning introduced to developing countries that disseminated modernism as a technological

8 0 2

208  Information architecture and cultural mode of world urbanization. In 1949 he collaborated with Lönberg-​Holm’s Commission for the Industrialization of Building on an automated information system to be used for such missions, but eventually CIAM’s institutional rival, the International Union of Architects (IUA) assumed a mediating role in these endeavors. Weissmann was in charge of hundreds of world consultation missions that set out standards for community development. Development Index suggests methodologies for gathering and exchanging information. It is not by chance that Lönberg-​Holm and Larson became UN consultants in the early 1950s and that Larson adapted the methodology in his UN campaign to Bandung, Indonesia in 1957 by taking into account the climactic conditions of the region.25 In their anticipation of a worldwide dimension of practice, the authors of Development Index considered their system to be a dynamic conduit of exchange that laid out criteria for harnessing information about local differences. Arising out of the Soviet and American technology transfers during World War II and then refined within CIAM, this protocol took into account the structure of the local building industry, the system of architectural education, the professional organizations and other relevant institutional networks. Rather than imposing a static vision of modernism, it offers a perspective on the production of the built environment by revealing the relationship between architecture and policy. During the 1950s and 1960s, when global experts were sent out to oversee world projects in widely diverse cultural, climactic, and political milieu, the prisms of “development” and “environmental control” took on more problematic and complex significations within the context of third-​world development aid.26 Design automatism Development Index can also be understood as an input system that enters precise neutral requirements and predefined parameters into a relational matrix. In this extreme form of functionalism, design is reduced to a problem solving agenda by identifying prerequisites into eventual patterns that are to be used over and over again. In this regard, the design methodology and environmental design movements of the 1960s come to mind. The link here is Serge Chermayeff, who knew of this methodology from the NCASF and CIAM, and indeed the work of Larson and Lönberg-​Holm is cited in his collaboration with Christopher Alexander, Community and Privacy (1963), and again in Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964), the revision of Alexander’s dissertation at Harvard under the Russian architect’s mentorship. Community and Privacy implicitly suggested that the computer could not only aid the designer but also potentially replace him.27 Though Development Index was not automated and stopped short of creating a generative grammar, it offered a set of relationship variables and interrelated

9 0 2

Information architecture 209

Figure 5.5 Knud Lönberg-​Holm and C. Theodore Larson, “Development Cycle.” In the top image the text reads, clockwise from the top: “tool,” “research,” “programming,” “development,” “obsolescence,” “need.” In the lower image the text reads, clockwise from 1: “research,” “design,” “production,” “distribution,” “utilization,” “elimination” Source: Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, Community and Privacy, 1963. Courtesy of the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

subsets that suggest patterns (Figure 5.5). The techno-​scientific assessment of all the possible variants open to the architect and the automatism of the design process that it implies is contiguous with Lönberg-​Holm’s radical international constructivist legacy. From information to virtuality Environmental controls and information are brought together again in Larson and Lönberg-​Holm’s last two projects, “Educating Man for the 21st Century” and “Role of Mass Media of Information” (1972). Throughout the 1960s they collaborated with the anthropologist Edward T. Hall on the

0 1 2

210  Information architecture School Environmental Analysis (SER).28 An activity of the ARL, SER presaged long-​distance learning by examining the various relationships that link the environment with human behavior, particularly as it applies to educational settings for the design of a windowless classroom that examined the future of computer-​aided learning. This work investigated the interactions of the individual and the effects of space, the thermal environment, the luminous environment, the sonic environment, and the social environment. It proposed methods for processing information essential to environmental design. Larson claimed that: Mass media have already opened the door to mass education (i.e. selectively individually self-​learning) on a global scale and furthermore that the impending emergence of individually controlled computerized two way mass telecommunication systems which will enable participating learners should be seen and to talk back to aspiring Big Brothers is also a built-in guarantee of increasing democracy on a global scale. (Something our European friends find difficult to believe).” Inspired by Thorstein Veblen’s critique of American universities and John Dewey’s laboratory schools, since Shelter, Fuller and members of the SSA had been theorizing pedagogical reform and innovation. The final incarnation of their unusual joint effort in information processing was updated to include new advances in technologies in 1972, the year that Lönberg-​Holm died and just before Larson became a professor emeritus. “Role of Mass Media of Information and Communication” was published by Martinus Nijhoff in the European Cultural Foundation’s Plan Europe 2000, as one of 17 prospective studies under the title The Future is Tomorrow.29 Citing Claude Shannon’s information theory and Marshall McLuhan, the authors’ main argument was that globalized media could play a beneficial and transformative role. Computers and television offered the possibilities of mass education through learning at a distance. They promoted interdisciplinary projects and examined collaborations between artists and scientists, such as Robert Rauschenberg’s projects with MIT’s Experiments in Art and Technology. Finally they explored the potential of the computer, this time evoking Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere –​the notion of super intelligence arising from accelerated technological progress. The computer became a conceptual model before it was a real model. With their shared belief in the empowerment of information harvesting, Lönberg-​Holm, Larson, and Fuller developed theories of interconnectivity and interaction in response to geopolitical reshaping (Figure  5.6). Their work represents a cultural exchange with science and technology that concentrates on energy and information as a regenerative system. Following the first law of thermodynamics, energy in the universe cannot be lost. Energy is turned to the human advantage and wealth increases in

12

Figure 5.6 Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “Development Process” Source: correspondence with C. Theodore Larson, c.1968. Courtesy of the C. Theodore Larson Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan and the Knud Lönberg-​Holm Archive.

2 1

212  Information architecture geometric increments. It appears in atomic particles and molecular elements and in the form of radiation. Information is negentropic. In the form of technological know-​how and knowledge, information constantly increases and each technological innovation advances the wealth of the world community. Notes 1 Lönberg-​Holm, Knud and C. Theodore Larson, Development Index (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1953). 2 Richard Saul Wurman and Peter Bradford, eds., Information Architects (Zurich: Graphis Press, 1996). The quote is from the book jacket. 3 See: Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–​1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 4 Ibid., 131–​200. Eric Mumford points out that Sert addressed American urbanism rather than European reconstruction, but he did not include many New Deal projects or contributions by the US chapter members. Lewis Mumford, who had been asked to write the introduction, lamented Sert’s dismissal of the cultural, political, and civic role of cities. 5 Henry-​Russell Hitchcock, “The Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Genius,” Architectural Review (January 1947): 3–​6. 6 Meeting Minutes Post War Reorganization of CIAM, May 20, 1944, JLS 1-​16-​71, ETH. 7 Ibid. 8 Sert to Neutra, November 4, 1944, ETH. 9 Meeting Minutes, October 20, 1944 42-​JLS-​1-​126, ETH. For the sixth congress, Lönberg-​Holm suggested the themes:  the organization of education, construction, planning, and reconstruction. In a meeting on November 25, 1944 he was made the chairman of the Committee on Information. 42-​JLS-​1-​136, ETH. 10 Chapter for Relief and Post War Planning, Questionnaire, 42-​JLS-​2-​43, ETH. 11 Minutes of Meeting March 13, April 17 and May 1, 1947, New  York, 42-​ JLS-​158, ETH. In framing the congress in terms of emergency and emergence, Lönberg-​Holm proposed the rubric of industrialization to unite the themes: the impact of contemporary conditions upon architectural expression; the relation between architecture, painting and sculpture; the neighborhood unit; and community development. Among those present were Marcel Breuer, William Muschenheim, Papadaki, Walter Sanders, Sert, Wachsmann, Weissmann, Paul Lester Wiener, Giedion, Sven Markelius, Oscar Neimeyer, Marcelo Roberto, and Hazen Sise. 12 Muschenhiem, Chermayeff, and Papadaki served on the committee that decided on the final questionnaire. 13 A summary of CIAM 6 can be found in:  Sigfried Giedion, A Decade of Contemporary Architecture (New York: Witenborn, 1954), 20–​23. 14 The mission of the Committee on Information  –​whose members included Lönberg-​Holm, Chermayeff, Giedion, Papadaki, and Sert –​was to establish standards for information exchange. Weissmann’s aims were taken from Lönberg-​ Holm’s work with the NCSAF See:  CIAM JLS-​4-​68, ETH. They were:  (1)  To study the implications of applying industrial methods to the production of buildings, with particular reference to increasing specialization and integration in design. (2) To sponsor the formation of a research organization which will continuously set forth more desirable standards of performance for the design of

3 1 2

Information architecture 213 various building types. (3) To promote the development of a system of information services which will provide a continuous flow of information on new needs and new means involved in building design. (4) To promote the development of a system of educational services which will train designers capable of designing building in accordance with continually advancing standards. (5) To design new forms (e.g., room units, buildings, communities, regions) which will indicate the range of design potentialities offered by industrial methods of production. (6) To stimulate popular interest in the continuous development of more desirable buildings and related forms and in continuous elimination of obsolete forms. Larson served on the Committee for Shelter, Relief, Rehabilitation of Housing, Rural and Urban Development. Lönberg-​Holm became vice president of the Commission for the Industrialization of Building Technique, formed in Bergamo in July 1949 at CIAM 7 with Wells Coates as president. See: CIAM 7 Conference Documents, Bergamo July, 29, 1949, ETH. 15 CIAM 9, Aix en Provence, July19–​26, 1953, Rapport des Commission, 3, ETH. 16 C. Theodore Larson, “Toward a Science of Housing,” Scientific Monthly, vol. 65 (October 1947): 295–​305. For an account of the ARL, see: Avigail Sachs, “The Postwar Legacy of Architectural Research,” Architecture Publications and Other Works (2009). http://​trace.tennessee.edu/​utk_​architecpubs/​1. 17 Lönberg-​Holm and Larson, Development Index. 18 Giedion to Larson and KLH, March 18, 1953, 43-​K-​1953-​03-​18 (G), ETH. 19 “Prospectus,” March, 24, 1954, CTL. The first seminar offered a theory of competition and cooperation and brought together specialists in ecology, forestry, psychology, group dynamics, sociology, and economics. The second seminar focused on a theory of individual behavior. The third dealt with a general theory of growth and the fourth was on information and communication theory. 20 Larson to Levinson, November 24, 1977, Box XII, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 21 See: W. Boyd Rayward, European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) and Markus Krajewski, Restlosigkeit Weltprojekte um 1900 (World Projects around 1900) (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Tashenbuch Verlag, 2006). 22 Paul Otlet (1868–​1944), a Belgian lawyer and a pioneer in documentation science, proposed the first modern systematic organization of information –​a mechanical database that featured 12 million cross-​referenced 3" × 5" index cards with a universal decimal classification system. Otlet conceived of a number of world projects: the Palais Mondial and the Cité Mondiale or World City, which was to house all of the world’s international organizations. Otlet experimented with new media such as microfilm in coordination with the engineer Robert Goldschmidt. After World War II, his work faded into oblivion, only to be recently resurrected as a precursor to the World Wide Web. 23 Wells developed this further in The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia. See W.  Boyd Rayward, “H. G. Wells’ Idea of a World Brain:  A  Critical Re-​ assessment,” The American Society of Information Science, vol. 50 (May 15, 1999): 557–​579. 24 Buckminster Fuller, “To George Howe from B.F,” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November 1932): 128. 25 Carl Theodore Larson and Stephen Paraskevopoulos, The regional housing centre, Bandung, Indonesia; a summary evaluation report to the United Nations Technical Assistance Administration on the basis of field work performed during the period from July 1956 to June 1957. 26 Among the work of a new generation of scholars addressing the global transfer of modernism, see:  Lukasz Stanek, “Architects from Socialist Countries in

4 1 2

214  Information architecture Ghana (1957–​ 1967):  Modern Architecture and Mondialisation,” Society of Architectural Historians Journal, vol. 74 (2015): 416–​442. 27 Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, Community and Privacy (New York: Doubleday, 1963) and Christopher Alexander, Notes on a Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 28 Edward T. Hall wrote The Silent Language (1959) and The Hidden Dimension (1966). SER was a collaboration with the Ford Foundation Educational Facilities Lab, Inc. See: Memo of the Department of Architecture, March 1962 and “A Systems Approach to the Performance Concept in Building,” Larson to Hall, February 21, 1966, CTL. The outcomes can be found in: C. Theodore Larson, Ser 1,2,3 An Environmental Case Study (Architectural Research Laboratory, Dept. of Architecture, University of Michigan, 1965). 29 Carl Theodore Larson and Knud Lönberg-​Holm, “The Role of Mass Media of Information and Communication,” Future is Tormorrow (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 543–​585.

5 1 2

 The archetype of the invisible architects of the invisible architecture

Fuller and Lönberg-​Holm were life-​long friends who frequently shared their work. In September 1949, the Danish architect was awarded a “Dymaxion License” for attending a seminar held at the Dymaxion Institute, where he was a valued trustee. The subjects that he studied are listed as:  Fluid Geography, Energetic Geometry, Industrial Logistics, Trend Navigation, Geodesic Structuring, Autonomous Dwelling Facility, Design Equity, Comprehensive History of Man’s Evolutionary Extension of Faculty by Intellectual Realization in Physical Design, A  Priori Responsibility of Design, and Specialization in Complex of Specialization, Design Strategy and Initiative. The degree stated that: He voluntarily assumed responsibility in the realization of Dymaxion Philosophy of anticipatory mechanics and the obsolescence of ignorance, inadequacy and reformative preoccupation through creative application of principle in augmentation of physical advantage of the individual realizable only through the complex advantage of all.1 It was in 1958, in a speech addressing the members of the American Society for Metals (ASM) that Fuller first publicly paid homage to his colleague. Over the years there were several iterations of his eulogy, and in 1977 he even enlisted the help of Maxwell Levinson to research the Danish architect’s career with the intention of writing a book entitled Lönberg-​ Holm: Archetype of the Invisible Architects of the Invisible Architecture.2 As the complexity of Fuller’s discoveries and inventions grew into his own grandiose rhetoric, the idea of invisible architecture came to predominate his thoughts. His designation of invisibility in respect to Lönberg-​Holm might be understood in several ways. First, invisibility can be thought of as part of his theory of ephemeralization and tensegrity. Second, invisibility can be regarded as informational. Third, invisibility suggests the anonymous, uncredited, and seemingly authorless. Finally, invisibility may be understood more generally as the disappearance of the architect due to the culmination of automated processes and the new liberating potentialities of the computer.

6 1 2

216  The archetype of the invisible As the president of Synergetics Inc., Fuller told his audience at the ASM luncheon that “buildings are trending towards invisibility” and he noted that the Danish architect was the first to suggest this possibility. Fuller stated that in architecture this means that because stone had just so much compressive strength, a cathedral’s wall must display massive buttresses whose bulk and weight increase eightfold whenever the building dimensions are doubled. This was the “law of the cube,” he argued. But now, science has extracted many uniquely behaving chemical elements from the stones of yesterday’s buildings and recombined these elements into a multitude of new structural arrangements known as alloys, whose unique structural integrities are too small to be seen by man.3 By then, Fuller had discovered a directionally oriented system of forces that provided maximum strength with minimum structure. This vectorial structure, which he initially called “energetic-​synergetic geometry,” is found in the configuration of organic compounds and metals in the form of tetrahedron lattices. The Geodesic Dome, a web whereby the total strength increases in logarithmic ratio to its size, was the concrete architectural embodiment of this principle. The second understanding of invisibility has to do with information architecture. The design of structures for harvesting and sharing information became a central concern for former SSA members and suggests a shift from production to communication, where energy is converted into visual data. Yet Fuller also noted the “unsung” and uncredited work of the Danish architect, including his groundbreaking photographs that influenced his peers at the Bauhaus and other members of the European avant-​garde. To this we should add Lönberg-​Holm’s unprecedented pedagogical experiments at the University of Michigan that are long forgotten because they were more than a decade ahead of their time, or Lescaze and Howe’s pilfering of his Chicago Tribune design. And what of his unusual work with Larson, whereby the transformation of energy into productive flow patterns was shown to constitute the true material of design that could open up new and unthought-​of possibilities. Or their reformulation of industrial architectural production according to cycles from research to obsolescence. By following his career in unrecognized spheres of practice, hidden correlations between the European and American avant-​gardes  –​from the international constructivist to the technocratic SSA and CIAM –​come into focus. Invisible refers to Lönberg-​Holm’s disappearance from the radical avant-​ garde arena into institutional spheres and then finally into the coffers of bureaucracy, where he assumed a mediating position that led to mundane changes in everyday practice. Unsatisfied with his work at Sweet’s Catalog, he and Larson continued to develop their own scheme by treating architecture as a complex system of environmental control with its concomitant information network. The instrumental architectures of the SSA and Lönberg-​Holm took the form of inscriptional systems that sought to re-​ conceptualize building and its production.

7 1 2

The archetype of the invisible 217 Lönberg-​Holm’s career invites us to look at the role of micro-​actors and paper shuffling as the source of an essential power that escapes attention since its materiality is disregarded. It leads us to consider the notion of authorship in architecture in an unconventional manner because it may be dispersed across institutions in many fields of disciplinary inquiry that mediate and organize knowledge and technology in the making. We might consider the role of the productivist bureaucrat, which is not readily understood because we take for granted that there exist macro-​actors such as corporations, the state, productive forces, and culture. Naturally, these macro-​entities are used to explain the cognitive shifts of science, technology, and architecture that could not exist at all without the construction of long networks in which numerous records circulate. In 1968, in an article in the Saturday Review entitled “The Age of Astro-​ Architecture,” Fuller predicted the disappearance of the architect and his liberation from being a mere robot.4 Critical of the “world around sameness” of the “giant graveyard-​like clusters of fireproof monoliths” exemplified by glass towers around the globe, Fuller argued that this represented the combined legacy of the international style and the New York skyscraper age. He claimed that “The architecture of the Electromagnetic Air Age should be viewed from the Nysky-​belittling airliner’s night-​sky altitudes.” Fuller stated that architecture had been reduced to nothing more than a long technocratic network. “The architect is, finally just an esthetical, good taste purchasing agent and ways and means detailer who is practiced in finding and organizing the usable space amongst the columns, pipes and elevator stacks.” He noted that the design profession had been relegated to the end of a long lineup, following after the elevator shaft technicians, bank managers, and the engineers who calculate the air conditioning, the electric and hydraulic systems, and the steel skeleton. Now a mere automaton, the architect’s contribution had been reduced to choosing components from catalogs to satisfy the “Landlords Optimum Occupy and Earnings Analysis.” But this should not diminish the work of Lönberg-​Holm, since Fuller attributed part of this process to his career at Sweet’s. In fact here, Fuller predicted that the computer could free the architect and he recalled that when he first met Lönberg-​Holm, “he said that the greatest architect in history would be the one who finally developed the capability to give humanity completely effective environmental control without visible structure or machinery.” Fuller strived to become that person and he believed that only the air and naval transport sectors offered inspiring and relevant paradigms. By asking computers the right questions, he claimed that we could enter into the Age of Astro-​Architecture on our Spaceship Earth. The correlation of the SSA members over time had achieved a certain synergy. Fuller’s apolitical and ever optimistic celebration of technological advance as a means to restore nature contrasts to the work-​a-​day productivist interventionism of Lönberg-​Holm and his desire to organize industrial

8 1 2

218  The archetype of the invisible processes as a biotechnical system. Yet in their environmentalism, building is understood as a fully integrated eco-​technical process that mediates between the needs of the human organism and the fluctuating dynamics of the environment. Notes 1 Dymaxion License, September 29, 1949, Box XII, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 2 Fuller to KLH, September 23, 1963, Box XII, Folder 2, KLH-​ A. In 1977, Levinson requested that Larson send him information on KLH’s career. Larson to Levinson, November 24, 1977, Box XII, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 3 “Remarks by R. Buckminster Fuller, President Synergetics, Inc, at the March 6th Luncheon announcing the new ASM headquarters building,” March 6, 1958, Box XII, Folder 2, KLH-​A. 4 Buckminster Fuller, “The Age of Astro-​Architecture,” Saturday Review (July 13, 1968): 17–​19.

9 1 2

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. “Veblen’s Attack on Culture.” In Thorstein Veblen:Critical Assessments, ed. John Cunningham Wood. London: Routledge, 1993. Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, 94–​ 136. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Alexander, Christopher. Notes on a Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1964. Anderson, Richard. “USA/​USSR: Architecture and War.” Grey Room, vol. 34 (2009): 80–​103. Bacon, Mardges. “Architecture, Regionalism, and the Vernacular: Reconceptualizing Modernism in America.” In Repenser les limites: l’architecture à travers l’espace, le temps et les disciplines. Paris: INHA, 2005. —​—​“Modernism and the Vernacular at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.” In Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment, ed. Maiken Umbach and Bernd Hüppauf, 25–​52. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Banham, Reyner. Architecture of the Well-​ tempered Environment. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Bann, Stephen, ed. The Tradition of Constructivism. New York: The Viking Press, 1974. Barber, Daniel. “Tomorrow’s House: Architecture and the Future of Energy in the 1940s.” Technology and Culture, vol. 55, no. 1 (February, 2014): 1–​39. Bartlett, Nancy Ruth. More Than a Handsome Box: Education in Architecture at the University of Michigan 1976–​1986. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1995. Bearor, Karen A. Irene Rice Pereira:  Her Paintings and Philosophy. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1993. Bellamy, Edward. Equality. Project Gutenberg ebook. —​—​Looking Backwards, 2000 to 1887. Project Gutenberg ebook. Bemis, Albert Farwell. The Evolving House. Volume I:  A  History of the Home. Cambridge, MA: Technology Press, MIT, 1933. Beninger, James R. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Benson, Robert Alan, “Douglas Putnam Haskell (1899–​1979):  The Early Critical Writings.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1987. —​ —​“Douglas Haskell and the Modern Movement in American Architecture.” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 36, no. 4 (1983): 2–​9.

0 2

220 Bibliography Bernays, Edward L. Crystallizing Public Opinion. New York: Liveright, 1929. —​—​ Propaganda. New York: Ig Publishing, 2004. Bletter, Rosemarie, ed. Adolf Behne:  The Modern Functional Building. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1996. Blood, Anne. “The Russian Section of the ‘Machine-​Age Exposition’ (1927).” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 154, no. 1315 (October, 2012). Botar, Oliver and Isabel Wünsche, eds. Biocentrism and Modernism. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Braham, William. “The Heart of Whiteness: The Discussion of Color in American Architectural Journals Around 1930.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, Department of Architecture, 1995. Braham, William and Jonathan Hale, eds. Rethinking Technology:  A  Reader in Architectural Theory. London: Routledge, 2006. Breines, Simon. The Airplane Helps Build This House (Revere’s Part in Better Living) New York: Revere Copper and Brass Company, 1943. —​—​ “The Emergencies.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 19. —​—​ “Empire State Apartments.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 23–​25. —​—​ “SSA to USSR.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 84–​85. Broberk, Stephen and Robert N. Mayer. Watchdogs and Whistleblowers: A Reference Guide to Consumer Activism. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2015. Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” Atlantic Monthly (July, 1945): 101–​108. Carmellino, Gaia. “The “Shelter Project” and the Multiple Itineraries of American Modernism.” Paper presented at the International Congress: Las revistas de arquitectura (1900–​1975) crónicas, manifiestos, propaganda, held in Pamplona, Spain at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Navarra, May 3 and 4, 2012. —​—​ William Lescaze:  un architetto europeo nel new deal. Milan:  Franco Angeli, 2010. Chapel, Enrico. “Otto Neurath and the CIAM: The International Pictorial Language as a Notational System for Town Planning.” In Encyclopedia and Utopia: The Life and Work of Otto Neurath (1882–​ 1945), eds. Elizabeth Nemeth and Friedrich Stadler, 167–​182. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook vol. 4. New York: Springer, 1996. Chase, Stuart. Men and Machines. New York: Macmillan, 1929. —​—​ Rich Land, Poor Land: A Study of Waste in the National Resources of America. New York: McGraw Hill, 1936. —​—​ The Tragedy of Waste. New York: Macmillan, 1925. Chase, Stuart and Frederick J. Schlink. Your Money’s Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer’s Dollar. New York: Macmillan, 1927. Chermayeff, Serge and Christopher W. Alexander. Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism. New York: Doubleday, 1963. Churchill, Henry. “Structural Study Associates.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 3. Clancey, Gregory. “Vast Clearings:  Emergency, Technology, and American De-​ Urbanization, 1930–​1945.” Cultural Politics:  An International Journal, vol. 2, no. 1 (March, 2006): 49–​76. Clark, Shannon. “When Modernism was Still Radical: The Design Laboratory and the Cultural Politics of Depression-​ Era America.” American Studies, vol. 50, no. 3/​4 (fall/​winter, 2009): 35–​61.

1 2

Bibliography 221 Cohen, Jean Louis. “[American] Objects of [Soviet] Desire.” In Forty Ways to Think About Architecture:  Architectural History and Theory Today, eds. Iain Borden, Murray Fraser, and Barbara Penner, 127–​133. Chicester:  John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., 2014. —​—​ Postface to Amerika: livre d’image d’un architecte by Erich Mendelsohn. Paris: Editions du Demi-​Cercle, D.L., 1992. —​—​ Scenes of the World to Come:  European Architecture and the American Challenge. Paris: Flammarion, 1995. Dah, Jan. “Kritisk Revy Over Arbejdernes Boliger.” Arbejderhistorie, vol. 4 (2002): 18–​35. Dean, John P. and Simon Breines. The Book of Houses. New York: Crown, 1946. “The Demonstration Health-​House.” Architectural Record (May, 1930): 433–​438. Dessauce, Marc. “Aux États-​Unis et la Poursuite du Bonheur. In Les Années 30, ed. Jean Louis Cohen, 154–​161. Paris: Editions du Patrimoine, 1997. —​ —​“Contro lo Stile Internazionale:  Shelter e la stampa architettonica Americana.”Casabella, vol. 57 (September, 1993): 46–​53 and 70–​71. —​—​ Machinations: essai sur Frederick Kiesler, l’histoire de l’architecture moderne aux Etats-​Unis et Marcel Duchamp. Paris: Sens & Tonka, 1996. Donohue, Kathleen G. Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer. Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Douglas, Charlotte. “Energetic Abstraction: Ostwald, Bogdanov, and Russian Post-​ Revolutionary Art.” In From Energy to Information Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, eds. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, 76–​94. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Dow, Arthur Wesley. Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1998. Dudley, Peter, ed. Bogdanov’s Tektology Book I. Hull: University of Hull, 1996. Editors of Fortune. Housing America. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932. Ehrlich, Matthew. “Our Russian Correspondent.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 93. El Lissitzky. “Americanism in European Architecture.” In El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky. London: Thames & Hudson, 1992. —​—​ “The Architect’s Eye.” In Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–​1940, ed. Christopher Phillips, 221–​225. New York, Metropolitan Museum, 1989. Fitch, James Marston. American Building: The Environmental Forces that Shape It. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1948. Frampton, Kenneth. Modern Architecture:  A  Critical History. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1980. Frank, Marie. Denman Ross and American Design Theory. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2011. —​—​ “Emil Lorch: Pure Design and American Architectural Education.” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 57, no. 4 (May, 2004): 28–​40. Frings, Marcus. “The Golden Section in Architectural Theory.” Nexus Network Journal, vol. 4, no. 1 (February, 2002):7–​32. Fuller, Richard Buckminster. “The Age of Astro-​Architecture,” Saturday Review (July 13, 1968): 17–​19. —​—​“Architecture: The State of the Art Today,” Newsweek Global Report, May 27, 1989.

2

222 Bibliography —​—​“The Comprehensive Designer.” In Your Private Sky:  R.  Buckminster Fuller: Discourses, eds. Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein, 243. Zurich:  Lars Müller, 1999. —​—​ “Correlation.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 1. —​—​“Dogs in the Manger.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 6. —​—​ Earth Inc. New York: The Fuller Research Foundation, 1947. —​—​ Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure. New York: Collier Books, 1971. —​—​ Nine Chains to the Moon. Carbondale, IL:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1963. —​—​“To George Howe, from B.F.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 128. —​—​ “Universal Architecture.” T-​Square, vol. 2, no. 2 (February, 1932):  22–​ 25 and 34–​37. —​—​“Universal Architecture, Essay No. 2.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 3 (April, 1932): 30–​36. —​—​“Universal Architecture, Essay No. 3.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 31–​41. Fuller, Richard Buckminster and Kiyoshi Kuromiya. Cosmography, A  Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity. New York: Macmillan, 1992. Fulmer, O.K. “An Architect in Russia.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 86–​87. Geddes, Patrick. Cities in Evolution. London: Williams & Norgate, 1915. —​—​ “Civics: As Applied Sociology.” Sociological Papers, vol. 1 (1904): 103–​138. Giedion, Sigfried. A Decade of Contemporary Architecture. New York: Wittenborn, 1954. —​ —​“L’État Actuel de l’Architecture Contemporaine.” Technika chronika, Les Annales techniques, Technical Reports of the Congress (October–​November, 1933): 1137–​1140. —​—​ Mechanization Takes Command:  A  Contribution to Anonymous History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1948. Georgescu-​Roegen, Nicholas, Kozo Mayumi, and John M. Gowdy, Bioeconomics and Sustainability: Essays in Honor of Nicholas Georgescu-​Roegen. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1999. Gough, Maria. “Contains Graphic Material:  El Lissitzky and the Topography of G.” In G: An Avant-​Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design and Film, 1923–​ 1926, ed. Detlef Mertins and Michael W. Jennings, 21–​52. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2010. —​ —​“Lissitzky on Broadway.” In Object:  Photo. Modern Photographs:  The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–​1949. ed. Lee Ann Daffner and Maria Morris Hambourg. The Museum of Modern Art, 2014. www.moma.org/​interactives/​ objectphoto/​assets/​essays. Graeff, Werner. “Concerning the So-​Called G Group.” Art Journal, vol. 23, no. 4 (summer, 1964): 280–​282. Gropius, Walter, ed., Internationale Architektur. Munich: Albert Langen, 1925. Guarda, Sandra. Van Eesteren: Meeting the Avant-​Garde 1914–​1929. Amsterdam: Thoth, 2013. Haskell, Douglas. “The Architectural League and the Rejected Architects.” Parnassus, vol. 3, no. 5 (May, 1931): 12–​13. —​—​“Bringing Shelter Up to Date: I. Say it with Streamlines.” The Nation, vol. 138, no. 3593 (May 16, 1934): 555–​556. —​—​“Bringing Shelter Up to Date: II. Unchaining House from Land.” The Nation, vol. 138, no. 3594 (May 23, 1934): 586–​588.

3 2

Bibliography 223 —​—​ “Shells.” Untitled Supplement, The New Student, vol. 4 (April, 1925). Heap, Jane. “The International Theatre Exhibition.” The Little Review, vol. 2 (winter, 1926). —​—​ “The Machine Age Exposition.” The Little Review, spring supplement (1927). Heller, Steven. “Ladislav Sutnar: Info Man.” In Ladislav Sutnar: Praque, New York, Design in Action, ed. Helena Janáková, 14–​18. Prague:  Museum of Decorative Arts, 2003. —​—​“Ladislav Sutnar’s Monograph Manifesto.” In Ladislav Sutnar: Visual Design in Action, 1961, ed. Reto Caduff and Steven Heller. Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers. Hemingway, Andrew. “Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s.” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994): 13–​29. Herbert, Gilbert. The Dream of the Factory-​ Made House:  Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984. Hickman, Larry A. John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1992. Hines, Thomas S. and Richard Joseph Neutra. Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994. Hitchcock, Henry-​Russell. “America-​Europe” Internationale Revue i10, vol. 20 (1929). —​—​“The Architect’s Library: Towards a New Architecture.” Architectural Record, vol. 63, no. 1 (1928): 90–​91. —​ —​“The Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Genius.” The Architectural Review, vol. 601 (January, 1947): 3–​6 —​—​ “Editorial, Architectural Criticism.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 3 (April, 1932): 2. —​—​ “How America Builds. Wie baut Amerika? By Richard J. Neutra,” Architectural Record, vol. 65 (June, 1928): 594–​595. —​—​ Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration. New York: Payson and Clarke, Ltd., 1929. —​ —​“Modern Architecture I:  The Traditionalists and the New Tradition.” Architectural Record, vol. 63 (April, 1928): 337–​349. —​—​“The New Pioneers:  Modern Architecture II.” Architectural Record, vol. 65 (May, 1928): 452–​460. —​—​“Traffic and Building Art: New York and Cleveland Contrasted,” Architectural Record (June, 1930): 557. Hitchcock, Henry-​Russell and Philip Johnson. The International Style: Architecture Since 1922. New York: W.W. Norton, 1932. “Hooge Gebouwen in de Handelscentra van Europa en Amerika.” Wendigen, vol. 3 (1923): 9. Hopper, Kim. Reckoning with Homelessness. New  York:  Cornell University Press, 2003. Howe, George. “A Fair Future to the T-​Square Club Journal.” T-​Square Club Journal, vol. 1, no. 1 (December, 1930): 3. —​—​ “Moses Turns Pharaoh.” T-​Square, vol. 2, no. 2 (February, 1932): 9–​10. —​—​ “T-​Square.” The T-​Square, vol. 2, no. 1 (1932). Hughes, Thomas Parke. Networks of Power:  Electrification in Western Society, 1880–​1930. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1983. Ingberman, Sima. ABC:  International Constructivist Architecture, 1922–​ 1939. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. International Organization for Standardization. “Tracing the History of Paper Sizes.” www.iso.org/​iso/​history_​of_​paper_​sizes.

4 2

224 Bibliography Jamison, Andrew. “American Anxieties: Technology and the Reshaping of Republican Values.” In The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity 1900–​1939, eds. Mikael Hardt and Andrew Jamison, 69–​100. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Janáková, Helena, ed. Ladislav Sutnar:  Praque, New  York, Design in Action. Prague: Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, 2003. Jennings, Michael W. and Detlef Mertins, eds. G: An Avant-​Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–​1926. Los Angeles, CA:  Getty Research Institute, 2010. Johnson, Philip. “Rejected Architects.” Creative Art, vol. 8 (June, 1931): 433–​435. —​—​“Interview with Philip Johnson.” In Buckminster Fuller: Thinking Out Loud. PBS. American Masters. www.thirteen.org/​bucky/​johnson.html. Johnston, George Barnett. Drafting Culture:  A  Social History of Architectural Graphic Standards. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Jordan, John M. Machine-​Age Ideology: Social Engineering & American Liberalism, 1911–​1939. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Kallet, Arthur and Frederick J. Schlink. 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs:  Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics. New York: The Vanguard Press, 1932. Kelly, Burnham. The Prefabrication of Houses. Cambridge, MA and New  York: Technology Press MIT and John Wiley and Sons, 1951. Kiesler, Frederick J. “A Festival Shelter.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 42–​47. —​—​ Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display. New York: Bretano, 1929. —​—​ “Design-​Correlation: Animals and Architecture.” Architectural Record, vol. 81 (April, 1937): 87–​92. —​—​“Design-​Correlation: Certain Data Pertaining to the Genesis of Design by Light (Photography).” Architectural Record, vol. 82 (July, 1937):  89–​92 and (August, 1937): 79–​84. —​—​“Design-​Correlation: From Brush-​Painted Glass Pictures of the Middle Ages to the 1920s.” Architectural Record, vol. 81 (May, 1937): 56. —​—​ “Design-​Correlation: On Correalism and Biotechnique –​ A Definition and Test of a New Approach.” Architectural Record, vol. 86 (September, 1939): 60–​75. —​—​ “Design-​Correlation: Towards Prefabrication of Folk-​Spectacles.” Architectural Record, vol. 86 (June, 1937): 93–​96. —​—​“In Memoriam, Theo van Doesburg.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 3 (April, 1932): 29. Kjær, Lars. “Tråden –​Værftseventyret,” last modified 2012, http://​koegearkiverne.dk. Krajewski, Markus. Restlosigkeit Weltprojekte um 1900. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Tashenbuch Verlag, 2006. Krausse, Joachim. “Unsichtbare Architektur.” Disko, 20 (June, 2011). http://​a42.org/​ fileadmin/​_​img/​disko/​disko_​20.pdf. Krausse, Joachim and Claude Lichtenstein, eds. Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller. The Art of Design Science. Zurich: Lars Müller, 1999. Larson, C. Theodore. “Emergence.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 9–​17. —​—​ “Packaged Houses.” Survey Graphics (July, 1937). —​—​ Ser 1,2,3 An Environmental Case Study. Architectural Research Laboratory, Dept. of Architecture the University of Michigan, 1965. —​—​“Toward a Science of Housing.” Scientific Monthly, vol. 65 (October, 1947): 295–​305. —​—​ “Wreath to Wraith.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (November, 1932) 91–​93.

5 2

Bibliography 225 Latour, Bruno. “Drawing Things Together.” Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. M. Lynch and S. Woolgar, 19–​68 Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. —​—​ Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. —​—​ “Visualisation and Cognition:  Drawing Things Together.” Knowledge and Society Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, vol. 6 (1986): 1–​40. Leach, William R. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Vintage, 1994. Leff, Ralph. “When Winter Comes.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 61–​63. Leffingwell, William Henry. Making the Office Pay. Chicago, IL:  A.W. Shaw Company, 1918. Lodder, Christina. Russian Constructivism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983. Loeb, Harold. The Chart of Plenty. New York: The Viking Press. 1935. —​—​ Life in a Technocracy: What it Might Be Like. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996. —​—​ Report of the National Survey of Potential Production Capacity. New York: New York City Housing Authority, 1935. Lönberg-​Holm, Knud. “Amerika.” ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen, vol. 1 (1924): 1. —​—​“Architecture in the Industrial Age.” Arts and Architecture (April, 1967): 22. —​—​ “Chicago Tribune Konkurrencen.” Bygmesteren, vol. 27 (July 7, 1923). —​—​“City Planning, Survey of Detroit, Michigan with Otto Sen and S. Washizuka.” Architectural Record (March, 1933): 148–​149. —​ —​“Den Moderne Bygningskunst og den Danske Akademiske Arkitekt.” Bygmesteren, vol. 14 (April 7, 1923). —​—​ “Den Moderne Bygningskunst.” Bygmesteren, vol. 19 (May 12, 1923). —​ —​“The Gasoline Filling and Service Station.” Architectural Record (June, 1930): 561–​584. —​—​ “Glass.” Architectural Record (October, 1930): 327–​358. —​—​“Heating, Cooling and Ventilating the Theatre.” Architectural Record (July, 1930): 93–​94. —​—​ “Moderne Arbejds-​Metoder I Husbygningen.” Bygmestern, vol. 15 (April 14, 1923): 85–​88. Part II Bygmestern, vol. 16 (April 21, 1923): 91–​93. —​—​ “Monuments and Instruments.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 5–​7. —​—​ “New Theatres in Europe.” Architectural Record (May, 1930): 490–​496. —​—​“Planning the Retail Store.” Architectural Record (June, 1931): 495–​514. —​—​“The Political Aspects of City Planning and Housing: City Building under Capitalism.” The Monthly Review (September, 1943): 8–​11. —​—​“The Political Aspects of City Planning and Housing:  City Building under Fascism.” The Monthly Review (November, 1934): 17–​19. —​ —​“Recent Technical Developments:  Reducing Dead Load, Saving Time and Increasing Control.” Architectural Record (December, 1930): 473–​482. —​—​ “Reflections: America.” Internationale Revue i10, vol. 15 (1928): 49–​55. —​—​ “Technical Developments, 1931.” Architectural Record (January, 1932): 59–​72. —​—​“Time Zoning as a Preventative of Blighted Area.” Record and Guide (June 24, 1933): 6. —​—​ “Trends in Lighting.” Architectural Record (October, 1931): 279–​302. —​—​“Two Shows:  A  Comment on the Aesthetic Racket.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 3 (1932): 16–​17. —​—​ “The Week-​end House.” Architectural Record (August, 1930): 175–​192.

6 2

226 Bibliography Lönberg-​Holm, Knud and C. Theodore Larson. “Building Production and Standards.” Real Estate Guide (February 16, 1935): 19–​23. —​—​“Design for Environmental Control.” Architectural Record (August, 1936): 154–​159. —​—​ Development Index. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1953. —​—​ “Industrialization of Housing,” Technical America (March, 1938): 9. —​—​ Planning for Productivity. The Hague:  International Industrial Relations Institute, 1940. —​ —​“Role of Mass Media of Information and Communication.” In Future is Tomorrow, 543–​585.The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972. —​ —​“The Technician on the Cultural Front.” Architectural Record (December, 1936): 472–​473. —​—​“Trends in Building Production.” Real Estate Record (April 18, 1936): 19–​24. Lönberg-​Holm, Knud and Ladislav Sutar. Catalog Design:  New Field for Visual Communication, vol. 24. New York: Graphics, 1948. —​—​ Catalog Design: New Patterns in Product Information. New York: Sweet’s Catalog Service, 1944. —​—​ Catalog Design Progress. New York: Sweet’s Catalog Service, 1950. —​—​ Designing Information. New York: Whitney Publications, 1947. —​—​ “Designing Information.” Interiors Magazine (February, 1947): 114–​125 and (April, 1947): 85–​98. Lorance, Loretta. Becoming Bucky Fuller. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Makovsky, Paul. “The Space of Information: Collaboration Between Theodore Larson, Knud Lönberg-​Holm and Ladislav Sunar at Sweet’s Catalog Service.” In Ladislav Sutnar: Praque, New York, Design in Action, ed. Helena Janáková, 338–​ 348. Prague: Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, 2003. Mallgrave, Harry, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673–​1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Malone, Erin K. Dr. Leslie and the Composing Room. www.drleslie.com. Margolin, Victor. The Struggle for Utopia:  Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-​Nagy, 1917–​1946. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Marx, Leo. “The Idea of Technology and Postmodern Pessimism.” In Does Technology Drive History? ed. Merrit Roe Smith and Leo Marx, 237–​ 258. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Marx, Leo and Merrit Roe Smith, eds. Does Technology Drive History? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Matter, Herbert, Charles Eames, and Richard Buckminster Fuller. “Prefabricated Housing.” Arts and Architecture (July, 1944). McLeod, Mary. “Architecture or Revolution:  Taylorism, Technocracy and Social Change.” Art Journal vol. 43, no. 2 (1983): 132–​147. Meyer, Hannes. “Building, 1928.” In Hannes Meyer:  Buildings, Projects, Writings, ed. Claude Schnaidt, 95–​99. Switzerland: Arthur Niggli, Ltd., 1965. —​—​“The New World, 1926.” In Hannes Meyer: Buildings, Projects, Writings, ed. Claude Schnaidt, 91–​94. Switzerland: Arthur Niggli, Ltd., 1965. Mitchell, Kevin. “Denmark.” In Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Architecture, 353–​355. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004. MMR. “An International Ghost.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 88–​91. Moholy-​Nagy, László. Malerie, Photografie, Film. München: Albert Langen Verlag, 1927.

7 2

Bibliography 227 —​—​ “Produktion-​Reproduktion.” In Moholy-​Nagy, ed. Krisztina Passuth, 289–​290. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985. —​—​ Vision in Motion. Paul Theobald & Company, 1947. Mumford, Eric. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism 1928–​ 1960. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Mumford, Lewis. “If Engineers were Kings.” The Freeman, vol. 4 (November 23, 1921): 261–​262. —​ —​“Mass Production and the Modern House, Part I.” Architectural Record (January, 1930): 13–​20 and Part II (February, 1930): 110–​116. —​—​ The Story of Utopias. New York: Viking Press, 1922. —​—​ Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1934. Mumford, Lewis, Henry Wright, Raymond M. Hood, George Howe, and Harvey W. Corbett. “Symposium International Style, Exhibition of Modern Architecture, Museum of Modern Art.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 3 (April, 1932) 3–​9. Nelson, Paul, “Précisions à propos de l’Exposition des techniques américaines de l’habitation et de l’urbanisme.” L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, vol. 12 (July, 1947). Neurath, Otto. “The Thrust of Invention:  ISOTYPES.” Survey Graphics, vol. 22, no. 12 (December, 1937): 643–​647 and 714–​718. —​—​ “Visual Education: A New Language.” Survey Graphics, vol. 26, no. 1 (January, 1937): 25. —​—​“Visual Representation of Architectural Problems.” Architectural Record (July, 1937): 56–​60. Neutra, Richard. Amerika:  Die Stilbildung des neuen Bauens in den Vereinigten Staaten. Vienna: Anton & Schroll, 1930. —​—​ Survival Through Design. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. —​—​ Wie Baut Amerika? Gegenwärtige Bauarbeit Amerikanischer Kreis. Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1927. Noguchi, Isamu. Isamu Noguchi:  Essays and Conversations. New  York:  Harry N. Abrams, 1994. Nolan, Thomas. “Introduction.” In Sweet’s Indexed Catalogue. 1906. Nye, David E. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–​ 1940. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Nygaard Folkmann, Mads. “Type Design: A Part of Danish Design Tradition,” Mind Design, vol. 4, no. 1 (December, 2007). www.dcdr.dk/​uk. Ogden, C.K. “Basic English.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 99. Oud, J.J.P. “Bij Een Deensch Ontwerp voor de Chicago Tribune.” Bouwkundig Weekblad, vol. 44–​45 (November, 1923): 456–​458. Pai, Hyungmin. The Portfolio and the Diagram:  Architecture, Discourse and Modernity in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pearman, Jill E. Inventing American Modernism:  Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Phillips, Lisa. Frederick Kiesler. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989. Pommer, Richard. “The Architecture of Urban Housing During the Early 1930s.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 37, no. 4 (December, 1978): 235–​264. Pommer, Richard, David Spaeth, and Kevin Harrington. “Cities and Defense, 1945 Ludwig Hilbersheimer.” In In the Shadow of Mies: Ludwig Hilberseimer, Architect, Educator and Urban Planner. Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago, 1988.

8 2

228 Bibliography Ramirez, J. Jessie. “Marcuse Among the Technocrats: America, Automation, and Postcapitalist Utopias, 1900–​ 1941.” American Studies, vol. 57, no. 1 (2012): 31–​50. Rayward, W. Boyd, ed. European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. —​—​“H.G. Wells’ Idea of a World Brain: A Critical Re-​assessment.” The American Society of Information Science, vol. 50 (May 15, 1999): 557–​579. Ross, Denman Waldo. A Theory of Pure Design:  Harmony, Balance, Rhythm. London: Forgotten Books, 2003. Sachs, Avigail. “The Postwar Legacy of Architectural Research.” Architecture Publications and Other Works (2009). http://​trace.tennessee.edu/​utk_​architecpubs/​1. Sadao, Shoji. Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi: Best of Friends. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2011. Samson, Miles David, “German–​American Dialogues and the Modern Movement Before the Design Migration, 1910–​1933.” PhD diss., Harvard University,1988. Schapiro, Meyer. “Looking Forward to Looking Backward: A Dossier of Writings on Architecture from the 1930’s.” Grey Room vol. 6 (winter, 2002): 66–​109. Scheffauer, Herman George. “Dynamic Architecture: New Forms of the Future.” The Dial, vol. 70 (March, 1921): 323–​328. Schnaidt, Claude. Hannes Meyer: Buildings, Projects, Writings. Switzerland: Arthur Niggli, Ltd., 1965. “Science Technocrat.” Time Magazine, December 26, 1932. www.time.com/​time/​ magazine/​article/​0,9171,744852,00.html. Scott, Felicity D. Architecture or Techno-​ Utopia:  Politics after Modernism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. —​—​ “On Architecture Under Capitalism.” Grey Room, vol. 6 (winter, 2002): 44–​65. Segal, Howard P. Technological Utopianism in American Culture. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2005. Shanken, Andrew M. “From the Gospel of Efficiency to Modernism: A History of Sweet’s Catalogue, 1906–​1947.” Design Issues, vol. 21, no. 2 (spring, 2005): 28–​47. Sherman, Roger. “Transition.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 26. Sloan Allen, James. The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism and the Chicago-​Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform. Boulder, CO:  University Press of Colorado, 2002. Soddy, Frederick. Matter and Energy. New York: H. Holt and Company, 1912. —​—​ Money Versus Man: A Statement of the World Problem from the Standpoint of the New Economics. Boston, MA: E.P. Dutton, 1933. —​—​ Wealth, Virtual Wealth, and Debt. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1926. Somer, Kees. The Functional City:  The CIAM and Cornelis van Eesteren, 1928–​ 1960. Holland: NAI Publishers, 2007. Sparke, Penny, ed. Reyner Banham, Design By Choice. London: Academy Editions, 1981. SSA. “Behind the Scenes.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 9–​13. —​ —​“Bernays, Boogies, Bizness and Bluff.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 15–​16. —​—​ “Colloidals in Time.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 111. —​—​ “Concealed Plumbing.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 117–​135. —​—​ “Conning Tower.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 64–​65. —​—​ “Ecovolution.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 44–​51.

9 2

Bibliography 229 —​ —​“Foil, Epee, Broadsword and Sabre.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 114–​117. —​—​“Journal of the Space Hotel.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 55–​60. —​—​“Our Intimate Journal of Summer Events.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 14–​23. —​—​ “Perspectives.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 7. —​—​ “Potentials to Initiative.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 66–​70. —​—​“Putting the House in Order.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 2. —​—​“Scientific Shelter for U.S.S.R.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 94–​95. —​—​ “Streamlining.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 71–​78. —​—​ “Teleology.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 5 (November, 1932): 105. Steinmetz, Charles Proteus. America and the New Epoch. New  York:  Harper & Brothers, 1916. Stern, Robert A.M. George Howe:  Towards a Modern American Architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975. —​—​“The Relevance of the Decade.” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 24, no. 1 (March, 1965): 6–​10. Stone, Peter. “Tooling Up.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 27–​30. Strum, Suzanne. “Correlations: Instrumental Architectures of the SSA and Knud Lönberg-​ Holm, 1927–​ 1953.” PhD diss., Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2010. —​—​“The International Architectures of the SSA:  Informational Designer Knud Lönberg-​Holm.” Architecture, Systems Research and Computational Science. Nexus Network Journal, vol. 14, no. 1 (winter, 2012): 35–​53. Sutnar, Ladislav. “Controlled Visual Flow.” In Design and Paper Series, vol. 13. New York: Marquardt and Comp, 1943. —​—​“Shape, Line and Color.” In Design and Paper Series, vol. 19. New  York: Marquardt and Comp, 1945. —​—​ Visual Design in Action: Principles, Purposes. Michigan: Hastings House, 1961. Sutnar, Ladislav and Funke, Jaromir. Photography Sees the Surface. Michigan: Michigan Slavic Publications, 2004. Technocracy, Inc. Technocracy Study Course:  An Outline of Those Elements of Science and Technology Essential to Understanding Our Social Mechanism. New York: Technocracy Inc., 1934. Teige, Karel. “Mundaneum.” In Oppositions Reader, ed. Michael K. Hays, 597. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998. Tilman, Rick. The Intellectual Legacy of Thorstein Veblen. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. —​—​ Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, C. Wright Mills and the Generic Ends of Life. Baltimore, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004. Tschichold, Jan. The New Typography. Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1995. Værftsgårdens historie,” Historie, www.vaerftsgaarden.dk/​home/​historie. Van Eesteren, Cornelis. “Amerikaansche Indrukken.” Bouwkundig Weekblad, vol. 12 (March 22, 1924): 121–​123. —​—​ “Detroit.” Technika chronika, Les Annales techniques, vol. 44–​46 (October–​ November, 1933): 1170 and 1164. Veblen, Thorstein. Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009.

0 3 2

230 Bibliography —​—​ The Engineers and the Price System. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2006. —​—​ Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2003. —​—​ The Instinct of Worksmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2006. —​—​ Theory of the Business Enterprise. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1904. —​—​ Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Macmillan, 1899. Wells, H.G. The Shape of Things to Come. New York: Macmillan, 1933. —​—​ World Brain. London: Meuthuen & Co. Limited, 1938. Wigley, Mark. Bucky Inc. Zurich: Lars Muller, 2016. Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Disappearing City. New York, W.F. Payson, 1932. —​—​“For All May Raise the Flowers Now, For All Have Got the Seed.” T-​Square, vol. 2, no. 2 (February, 1932): 6–​8. —​—​ “Of Thee I Sing.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 3 (April, 1932):10–​11. Wright, Henry. “Imagination in Community Planning.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 3 (April, 1932):18–​21. —​—​ Rehousing Urban America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1935. —​—​ “Re-​Search vs Research.” Shelter, vol. 2, no. 4 (May, 1932): 50. Wurman, Richard Saul and Peter Bradford, eds. Information Architects. Zurich: Graphis Press, 1996.

1 3 2

Index

ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen 6, 28, 50–​52, 174 Abell, Thornton 39, 48, 166 Ackerman, Frederick 82, 122–​123, 128, 167–​168, 184 Actor Network Theory (ANT) 10–​11 Adorno, Theodor 84, 92, 117; see also culture industry Alabian, Karo 182–​184 Alexander, Christopher 208 Altona 21, 29 Aluminaire House 76, 85 American Practical Navigator 207 Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (America: An Architect’s Photobook) 6, 34–​35 Amerikanismus 6, 23 Architects’ Data 9, 157, 167–​168; see also Neufert, Ernst Architectural Graphic Standards 9, 157, 167 Architectural Record 1, 3–​4, 7–​8, 12, 46, 48, 55–​56; “Design Correlation” series 142–​147; promotion of modern architecture 66–​69, 71, 73–​77; relation to Sweet’s Catalog 158, 160–​161, 165, 170–​171 Architectural Research Laboratory (ARL) 202, 210 Athens Charter 131, 201 Atwood, Charles 202; see also Unistrut Atwood, Leland 94, 165 automatism 8, 14, 30, 83, 104, 121–​122, 155 Banham, Reyner 36, 75, 166 Barr Jr., Alfred 77, 81, 89, 117 Basic English 100, 175, 206 Bauhaus 1, 6, 19–​20, 24, 28–​30, 79, 144; energetics 57; exiles 173;

Hannes Meyer 51–​52; influence on MoMA 89; KLH’s visit 71–​72; photography 33–​34; standardization 168–​170; Vorkurs 37, 39, 43 Bayer, Herbert 51, 173–​174 Beard, Charles 95, 121 Behne, Adolf 6, 25–​26, 29, 105 Behrens, Peter 21, 26, 54 Bellamy, Edward 4, 97, 113–​115, 129–​130 Bemis, Albert Farwell 165 Beninger, James R. 159 Bentham, Jeremy 100 Berlage, Hendrik Petrus 26, 30, 38, 54 Bernays, Edward 7, 84–​92 Bogdanov, Alexander 28, 58, 137; see also Tektology Book Cadillac Hotel 32–​33 Boulding, Kenneth E. 204 Breines, Simon 2, 147, 182–​183, 196; in Shelter 83, 94–​97, 99, 105 Burgess, Starling 65, 71, 100; see also Dymaxion Car Burtin, Will 173 Bush, Vannevar 206 Case Study Houses 9, 166 Century of Progress Fair 65, 105, 164 Chase, Stuart 7, 99–​100, 112, 116, 122, 125–​126, 138–​139 Chermayeff, Serge 185, 196–​197, 208 Chicago School steel frame 23 Chicago Tribune Tower 6, 22, 24, 32, 85 Chrystie-​Forsyth project 82, 85, 90–​91 Churchill, Henry S. 79, 94–​95, 100, 105, 128, 184 Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership 80

2 3

232 Index Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM) 1, 4–​6, 8–​10, 28, 48–​49, 51; CIAM 2, Frankfurt 69, 76; CIAM 3, Brussels 162; CIAM 4, Marseille-​Athens 130–​131, 194, 200; New York Chapter for Relief and Postwar Planning 178–​180, 185, 197–​198; in the postwar era 191, 193–​201, 204, 208; and Shelter 71, 95 Conning Tower 104, 114, 207 consumer as producer 8, 134, 139–​140, 142 Container Corporation of America (CCA) 173 Corbett, Harvey Wiley 81, 182–​184 Cret, Paul 78, 90, 96 Croly, Herbert 67–​68, 70 culture industry 84–​85, 87, 92 cybernetics 138, 177, 192, 204 cycles of performance 134, 140–​141 Danish better building movement 17 Davison, Robert L. 68, 70, 76, 165, 183 De Stijl 14, 20, 27–​28, 33, 43, 39, 52, 170; fifth manifesto 81; and Frederick Kiesler 50, 143 De Stijl (journal) 6, 28, 36, 42 Depression 1, 3–​4, 7–​8, 48, 64–​65, 67–​68, 70, 75–​77; architecture profession 160; art institutions 89; construction 95; consumer movements 139; Detroit 132–​133; information design 174; prefabricated housing 80, 82; standards 167; technocracy 83, 97, 100, 103, 111–​113, 122, 128–​129 Der Moderne Zweckbau (The Modern Functional Building) 25; see also Behne, Adolf Design by Choice 166; see also Banham, Reyner design science 8, 102, 112, 119–​120 Deutsche Werkbund 25, 49, 88, 170, 172 Development Index 10, 191–​193, 198, 201–​203, 206, 208 Dewey, John 94–​95, 144, 159, 210; instrumentalism 101–​102, 105, 118–​121 Dial, The 27, 117, 121, 129 Doesburg, Theo van 6, 50, 52, 56, 81, 143; international constructivism 26–​29; collaboration with van Eesteren 39, 45

Dodge, Frederick Warren 159; see also Sweet’s Catalog Dow, Arthur Wesley 41 Dymaxion Car 65, 100, 105 Dymaxion House 2–​3, 7, 9, 36, 51, 54, 56, 64–​65, 114; in Architectural Record 70, 72, 74–​76; compared with Broadacre City 129; and consumers 140; prefabrication 160, 164, 169, 179, 182; in Shelter 79–​80, 84, 87, 89, 94, 99, 102 Dymaxion License 215 Eames, Charles 75, 166 ecology 2–​3, 99, 112, 116, 121, 135, 137–​138 Eesteren, Cornelis van 6, 21, 51, 81, 95; constructivism 26–​27, 29; and Erich Mendelsohn 36–​37; influence on KLH’s basic course 39, 42, 45, 47–​48; in CIAM 130–​133, 194, 200, 204 Eggeling, Viking 27, 35 Empire State Building 67, 92, 95, 97, 104, 114 energetics 6, 14, 57–​58, 102, 137 Engelhardt, Knud V. (KVE) 19–​20 Engels, Frederick 137 Engineers and the Price System, The 4, 113, 117–​118, 121 environmental control systems 5, 7, 9, 58, 70, 73, 142, 145, 158 Exposition of American Building Techniques 179 F.W. Dodge Corporation 67–​68, 75, 126, 139–​141, 155, 170–​171 Fisher, Howard T. 76, 164–​165, 201 Fitch, James Marston 75, 147–​148 Ford, Henry 53, 65, 79, 128–​133 Fortune 127, 164, 173–​174 Francé, Raoul Heinrich 49, 149 French Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism (MRU) 9, 179–​181 Freud, Sigmund 85 Frey, Albert 2, 7, 14, 67, 69, 76, 85, 90, 95, 196 Fuller, Margaret 121, 129; see also Dial, The Fuller, Richard Buckminster 1–​5, 7–​9, 11–​12, 14–​15, 56, 58; anti-​ urban positions 128–​130, 133; in Architectural Record 67, 70–​71, 75–​76; critique of advertising 85, 87, 89; design science 119–​125, 127; and energy 138; friendship with KLH

32

Index 233 215–​217; information 207, 210; prefabrication 155, 158, 162, 164–​166, 178; in New York 64–​66; in Shelter 77, 79–​84; SSA 92, 94–​7, 99–​100, 102–​106; technocracy 111–​112, 115–​117, 121–​125, 127 functionalism 1, 4, 6, 12, 14–​15, 39, 52, 58, 105, 208; ABC group 51; in America 66, 70, 76, 78, 81, 144; in Germany 25–​26; Nordic 17, 19, 20 G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung (G: Materials for Elemental Form-​ Creation) 19, 28, 48 Galerie van Diemen (van Diemen Gallery) 28, 56 Gan, Aleksey 28 Gantt, Henry 118 Geddes, Patrick 8, 121, 137, 201 George, Henry 115, 129 Geoscope 116, 207 German Institute for Standardization (DIN) 169–​170 Giedion, Sigfried 6, 48, 132, 175, 186; postwar CIAM 194–​200, 204 Graeff, Werner 6, 27, 37, 39, 49 Gropius, Walter 21–​22, 24–​27, 29, 36, 41, 49, 51, 54, 56, 70–​72, 81–​82; prefabrication 168–​170, 179, 182; postwar CIAM 196 Haeckel, Ernst 8, 137–​138; see also ecology Hall, Edward T. 209 Hansen, Frederik, Christian 21, 30 Harvard modernists 41, 89 Harvard Society for Contemporary Art 84, 89 Haskell, Douglas 2, 7, 37, 67, 129; and Architectural Record 69–​70, 76; in Shelter 94–​95; script for NCASF 182–​183 Heap, Jane 50, 55, 67, 100, 182; see also Machine-​Age Exposition Hein, Piet 204 Heller, Steven 175 Henningsen, Poul 19 Hitchcock, Henry-​Russell 2–​3, 7, 27, 37, 41; and Architectural Record 69; “Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Genius” 195; debate in i10 52–​54; international style 77–​79, 81, 83–​4 Holabird and Root 12, 32 Hoovervilles 65, 104

Horkheimer, Max 84, 92 Howe, George 2, 7, 14, 27, 66, 74, 76; and Edward Bernays 85–​86, 89–​91; in Shelter 77–​79, 81–​82, 84, 92, 102, 104 Hubble, Edwin 99 Hughes, Thomas Parke 10 i10 6, 49, 51–​52, 54, 83, 88 industrial communism 64, 83, 115, 122 industrial emancipation 3, 7, 83, 97, 111–​112 information design 4, 75, 172–​173, 176–​177, 193 instrumentalism 83, 94, 101, 120 international constructivism 1, 12, 15, 21, 49, 57–​58; formation of 27–​29 International Faction of Constructivists 6, 14 International Industrial Relations (IRI) 141 international style 3, 7, 14, 27, 41, 49, 52; Americanization of 52, 54–​55; culture industry 84–​85, 88–​90; and MoMA 66–​67, 76; in Shelter 79–​81, 94, 100, 106 Internationale Architektur 25 invisible architecture 5, 58, 142, 155, 215 Jakstein, Werner 21, 29–​30 Jamison, Andrew 113 Johnson, Alvin 95, 121 Johnson, Philip 2, 3, 7, 52, 55, 66, 71, 76; in Shelter 77, 79, 81–​85, 88–​89 Josephson, Matthew 125 Kahn, Albert 26, 32, 38, 47, 71, 132, 182, 196 Keck, William and George 165 Kiesler, Frederick 2, 8, 14, 49–​50, 55, 202; department stores 88; “Design-​ Correlation” 142–​149; exhibition design 174, 182, 184–​185; and SSA 65–​66, 94–​95, 99, 105 Kilgore Commission 178, 201 Kirstein, Lincoln 84 Kleek, Mary van 141; see also International Industrial Relations (IRI) Kocher, A. Lawrence 2, 7, 14, 56–​57, 85, 180, 196; Architectural Record 67–​70, 76; and SSA 95, 99 Køge Værft 15–​17, 20 Kohn, Robert D. 91, 122, 128

4 3 2

234 Index Königsberg competition 22–​23 Korn, Arthur 71 Kultur and Zivilisation 22 Kunst Akademiets Arkitekskole (The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art) 15 Larson, Carl Theodore 2, 4, 7–​10; and Architectural Record 67, 69–​70, 73, 75–​76; collaboration with KLH 134–​135, 138–​142, 144, 147, 170; Development Index, 191–​193, 201–​205, 207–​208, 172; SSA 95, 97, 105; “Mass Media of Information” 209–​210; “Packaged Homes” 164; technocracy 126, 129; work during WWII 178–​179, 197 Latour, Bruno 10, 156–​157, 191, 193 Lauritzen, Anna 17 Le Cobusier 14, 21, 26, 36, 48–​49, 54, 56, 69; Ascoral Grid 200; Charter of Habitat 20; international style 80–​2; Mundaneum 96, 206 Leffingwell, William Henry 162 Lehning, Arthur 52; see also i10 Lescaze, William 12, 144; partnership with George Howe 76, 78, 82, 85, 89–​91, 144, 216; Philadelphia Saving Fund Society Building (PSFS) 27, 74 Levinson, Maxwell 66, 77–​79, 81, 83, 92, 99, 102, 105, 215 Libbey-​Owens-​Ford 162, 165 Lippmann, Walter 68, 85, 86, 116 Lissitzky, El 6, 25, 39, 56, 125, 149, 174; ABC 50; G group 49; international constructivism 27, 29; and photography 30, 35–​36 Loeb, Harold 7, 112, 122, 125 Lønberg-​Holm, Aage 15–​16, 20 Lönberg-​Holm, Ethel (read: Ethel Caroline) 70–​72, 143, 183–​185 Lönberg-​Holm, Knud: “America: Reflections” 52–​53; ancestry and education 15; "Architecture or Organized Space" 6, 55; built work in Køge 15–​17, 20; “City Planning Under Capitalism” 133; “Design for Environmental Control” 134, 136; Gasoline Filling Station 42, 46; MacBride Residence 42–​46, 70; photography 26, 30–​37; Planning for Productivity 135, 140–​141, 180, 201; Radio Broadcasting Station 42, 44,

55; Steel Lumber House 42; technical news and research at Architectural Record 4, 70, 144; “The Technician on the Cultural Front” 134, 139; time zoning 129, 133 Loos, Adolf 117, 158 Lorch, Emil 38–​39, 40–​41, 47 Lovell Health House 42, 74 Lyndon, Maynard 48, 162 Machine-​Age Exposition 6, 55, 67, 100, 182 MacLeish, Archibald 164 Marx, Karl 137 McLuhan, Marshall 210 Mechanization Takes Command 186, 195 Mendelsohn, Erich 6, 12, 24, 26, 29, 32, 34–​38, 70 Meyer, Hannes 6, 50–​51, 73, 82, 88, 100, 102, 168 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 146 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 1, 6, 19, 20–​22, 24, 26–​27, 54; G group 49; Bauhaus 71; in Architectural Record 72; in Shelter 79, 81, 83, 89 Mikkelsen, Dr. Michael A. 68; mobility 4, 8, 32, 46, 54, 64, 73; and SSA 80, 93–​94, 112, 127, 129–​130, 133–​134; and industrial activity 136, 186, 199 Modern Architecture: International Exhibition 2 Moholy-​Nagy, Làszló 6, 25, 51–​52, 149, 173, 175, 196; international constructivism 27, 29; photography 30, 33–​34, 39; “Produktion-​Reproduktion” 36 Moscow Working Group of Constructivists 28 Moser, Karl 78, 12 Mumford, Lewis 7, 53, 69, 195; energetics 137–​139; prefabrication 160–​161; Shelter 76–​78, 81–​82, 94–​95; Technics and Civilization 121, 137, 139; technocracy 112, 114, 116, 121, 126, 128, 132 Muschenheim, William 132, 201 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 2, 7, 55–​56, 66–​67, 76–​77, 79; and Edward Bernays 84–​86, 92; Harvard modernists 89; international style 81, 103

5 3 2

Index 235 National Council of the American Soviet Friendship Association (NCASF) 182–​183, 185, 198 Nelson, Paul 56, 94, 178–​181, 196–​197 Neue Bauen 14, 19, 49 Neue Sachlichkeit 13–​14, 21, 25, 49, 53 Neufert, Ernst 9, 157, 167–​170 Neurath, Otto 141, 175, 206 Neutra, Richard 6, 8, 12, 21, 74, 79, 81–​82, 105; Lovell Health House 42; prefabrication 166 178, 184, 186; postwar CIAM 194, 196, 198–​199; Rush City Reformed 130; Sweet’s Catalog 158, 162–​163; Wie Baut Amerika? 31, 69 New Deal 8, 66, 80, 82, 90, 95, 105, 116; anti-​urban attitudes 127–​128, 130, 134; graphics 141, 175; infrastructural works 184, 195 New Masses 102, 103 new photography 14, 30 New School for Social Research 95, 116, 121, 196 new vision 14, 30, 34 New York World’s Fair 1939 76, 92, 123, 172–​173, 183, 196 Noguchi, Isamu 65, 99–​100 Norde Værftsgård (North Boatyard Housing) 17–​18 obsolescence 4, 8–​9, 114, 215–​216; building components 156, 166, 170; and housing 83, 97, 99–​100; production cycles 134, 136, 142; urban 127–​128, 130, 134 Ogden, C.K. 100, 175, 206; see also Basic English organization science 15 Ostwald, Wilhelm 8, 57, 137, 169, 170, 206 Otlet, Paul 206 Oud, J.J.P. 6, 21, 24, 26, 30, 34, 42, 49, 81; Hoek van Holland project 71, 73; and i10 51–​52, 54; international style 81–​82 Packaged House 169, 179 Paepke, Walter 173 Papadaki, Stamo 178 Peirce, Charles Sanders 118 Perriand, Charlotte 69, 181 Peters, Jakob (Jock) Detlef 21–​23

Philadelphia Saving Fund Society Building (PSFS) 27, 74, 78–​79, 81, 85, 90, 92 Piccard, Auguste 101 pragmatism 102, 118 Prampolini, Enrico 27, 55 prefabrication 48, 51, 70, 75–​76, 144; after WWII 182–​184, 193–​195; housing paradigms 168–​169; systems 165–​166 productivism 4, 6, 14, 55, 58, 67, 75, 167 propaganda 51, 84–​88, 90–​91, 94, 156, 168 Rasch, Bodo and Heinz 160 Rauschenberg, Robert 210 Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) 7, 82, 94, 99, 116, 122, 128 Rejected Architects Show 85, 88 repro-​shelter 155, 158, 164–​165, 177–​178; see also prefabrication Richardson, Henry Hobson 53, 78 Richter, Hans 27–​29, 35, 49 Rietveld, Gerrit 45 Rodchenko, Aleksandr 28, 30 Rosen, Anton 19 Ross, Denman Waldo 41; see also theory of pure design Russian constructivism 6, 25, 27–​28, 50, 55 Saarinen, Eliel 22, 26, 38, 47 Sanders, Walter 196–​197, 201 Schapiro, Meyer 102–​103, 122, 144, 160 Schindler, Rudolph 74, 79, 82 Schlink, Frederick John 140 Schoen, Eugene 94, 182 science of organization 14, 28 Scott, Howard 7, 65, 111–​112, 122–​124; see also Technocracy Inc. Sert, Josep Lluis 69, 131, 178–​179, 183, 194–​198, 200 Shannon, Claude 204, 210; Shelter: international style 7, 81–​84; leadership of George Howe 77–​79; take-​over by SSA 92–​96, 98–​106 Sherman, Roger 94–​95, 97, 103 slum clearance 8, 77, 82, 90, 128, 130, 195 Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls 47 Smyth, William Henry 111–​112

6 3 2

236 Index Soddy, Frederick 8, 138 Søndre Værftsgård (South Boatyard Housing) 17–​18 Soviet Palace competition 94–​95, 103, 183 Space Hotels 96–​97, 104, 114 Spaceship Earth 115, 135, 217 Stam, Mart 22, 26, 49–​50, 71 standardization 7, 9, 11, 20, 26, 48, 58, 85, 156, 158; after WWII 193–​195; assimilation of 167–​170, 185–​186; and Hannes Meyer 51, 101; promoted by Architectural Record 64, 68–​69; and Thorstein Veblen 117 Stein, Gertrude 54 Steinmetz, Charles Proteus 4, 113–​115, 122, 125 Stone, Pete 94–​95, 97 Structural Study Associates (SSA) 1–​11; and CIAM 8, 95, 130; and the Neue Sachlichkeit 80–​81 Sutnar, Ladislav 4, 9, 75, 193; at Sweet’s 156–​157, 171–​178, 180 Sweet, Clinton W. 158 Sweet’s Catalog 67–​68, 71, 74–​75, 83, 102; and Buckminster Fuller 155–​156, 162; and CIAM 178; compared with Architectural Graphic Standards 167–​168; compared to Architects’ Data 169–​170; and Dodge system 75, 170–​171; history of 158–​160; information design 172–​178; MRU 180; and new materials 164–​166; Soviet reconstruction 184 Tatlin, Vladimir 28, 50, 55, 146 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 113, 118 Technocracy Inc. 7, 65, 91, 94, 138–​139; and Buckminster Fuller 83, 124; and SSA 111–​112; and Thorstein Veblen 116, 121–​122, 127 technology: in Architectural Record 66, 74; histories of 121, 126; imperatives of 111–​112; modern definition 7, 113, 115; and SSA 2, 3, 14, 77, 83, 97, 104, 136, 139; social theories 10–​11; teleology 7, 101–​102; and vanguards 6, 23–​25, 27, 39; Veblen’s theories 117, 199–​120 Tecton Group 145 Teige, Karel 96, 172

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 210 Tektology 28–​29, 58 teleology 101 Tesla, Nikola 206 Tessenow, Henrich 20 theory of pure design 41 Thomas Cusack Co. Building 31 Tschichold, Jan 170, 172, 174 Tschinkel, Augustin 172, 175 T-​Square Club Journal 77–​78 Turin, Kai 15, 17–​18 Uexküll, Jakob von 25, 149 Unistrut 202 “Universal architecture” 3, 79–​81, 83, 94, 97 University of Michigan 6, 32, 34, 53, 201–​202, 204, 216; basic course 37, 40, 46, 48 Veblen, Thorstein 7–​8, 66, 83, 85, 95, 97; critique of education 210; functionalism 144; pragmatism 105; technocracy 111–​114, 116–​123; urban obsolescence 127–​128 Vesnin, Victor 182 VKhUTEMAS 6, 27–​8, 37, 39, 42; and Machine-​age Exposition 56 Vorkurs 6, 37, 39, 41–​42 Weissenhofsiedlung 49, 71, 82, 160 Weissmann, Ernest 179, 196–​198, 207–​208 Wells, H.G. 138, 164, 206; see also World Brain Williams, Chauncey 75, 134, 141, 161, 174 Wittwer, Hans 50, 73 World Brain 10, 206 world projects 206, 208 worldwide practice 207 Wright, Frank Lloyd 7, 12, 26, 29, 32, 41, 52–​54; Broadacre City 129; and conditioning 74; “In the Cause of Architecture” 68–​70; in Shelter 77–​80, 82; trip to USSR 183 Wright, Henry 2, 77, 81–​82, 94, 123; New Deal 128, 132 Wurman, Richard Saul 192 Zeising, Adolf 169 Zhdanovism 184