Machines to Live In

New York's Museum of Modern Art stepped a little beyond the business of showing pictures to people last week. It attacked a vital modern problem. Under the auspices of an imposing list of patrons, presented the largest and most complete showing of the works of modern architects working in what has come to be known as the International Style. Each of these men has made a contribution toward the serious housing problem of the U. S. A potent statement of the problem appeared in the February issue of FORTUNE.

Prime facts to jolt the complacency of citizens who still believe that the Great American Bathroom is a national institution:

According to best available computations, less than 50% of all U. S. homes measure up to the minimum standards of health and decency set by the National Housing Association. These standards include sunlight, proper ventilation, dry walls, garbage removal, adequate fire protection, a water closet, running water inside the house. A bathtub, central light, heat, and a telephone are not considered necessary.

Even Academicians who grow apoplectic over the "gaspipe & cement block" appearance of buildings in the International Style are grateful for the work its founders have done in low-rent housing.

Principles. If the average citizen does not understand the principles of the International Style in architecture the fault is not with its innovators. France's Le Corbusier, most vocal of the lot, has expressed it in a single sentence: "The modern house is a machine to live in."

Like all good architecture, the International Style demands that the new materials at the service of modern architects (reinforced concrete, plate glass, steel, etc.) shall be used honestly. Cement walls must look like cement walls and not be disguised as Gothic masonry.

The International Style thinks of building in terms of space enclosed as opposed to mass. Walls no longer support the house; they are curtains enclosing its skeleton.

The International Style as opposed to "modernist" architecture eschews all decoration and ornament. "Functionalism" (a word overworked ad nauseam) is its watchword. Such beauty as their buildings possess is dependent on fine proportion of individual units, clever use of color, and the technically perfect use of materials. (Cement is sometimes poured in glass-lined forms to give it a marble-like polish.) Light is its fetish. Houses look more and more like aquariums. The four apostles of the International Style are two Germans, a Dutchman and a French Swiss, as follows:

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret prefers to be known as Le Corbusier, the name of his maternal grandfather. Born near Geneva 44 years ago, the son of a Swiss watchmaker, he studied engraving, traveled in Italy, worked in Vienna. A performance of Puccini's La Boheme sent him to Paris to live. In intervals between struggling with advanced architecture he became a factory manager, publisher of L'Esprit Nouveau, and a painter. In 1923 he published his first book. Vers mi Architecture, which denned all his theories, has had an enormous influence on architects all over the world.

Though he lectured at Princeton in 1929, reporters could find no one in New York last week to translate J. J. P. Oud's initials. Born in Holland in 1890. he became a disciple, at a distance, of Wisconsin's Frank Lloyd Wright. His own style developed slowly. In 1928 he published a number of Cubist projects for workmen's houses which won him an appointment as City Architect of Rotterdam. He is responsible for Rotterdam's Spangen and Tuschendijken municipal housing development and numerous private houses. Critics find him the most refined and conscientious of the workers in the International Style.

Walter Gropius, 49, was born in Alsace but moved to Berlin before he was 20. He fought through the War. afterwards became director of the Grand Ducal Art School at Weimar that developed into the famed Bauhaus at Dessau. The severe Dessau Bauhaus with its horizontal ribbons of windows has been called the cradle of the International Style. In Dessau, too, he showed what he could do in the field of low cost municipal housing.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe worked in the same office with Walter Gropius as a young man. Two years ago he followed Gropius as director of the Bauhaus. Unlike copious Gropius, who has designed innumerable buildings, van der Rohe has actually built little--possibly because of his fondness for luxurious building materials : interior walls of onyx, silk curtains 75 feet long, etc. etc.

Models and plans of all four of the apostles were shown at the Modern Museum last week and with them the work of several of their U. S. disciples: Howe & Lescaze, Richard J. Neutra. Bowman Bros., and the recent convert Raymond Hood. Of particular interest were a Howe & Lescaze model of an ideal tenement, built on stilts to save the cost of cellar excavating; and Raymond Hood's elaborate model of a 21-story apartment tower for the country, designed to occupy the centre of a large co-operative garden.

An elaborately illustrated catalog of the exhibition, discussing the U. S. housing problem, the principles of the International Style, has been prepared by Lewis Mumford, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr.

Palace Builder

The Architectural League opened a one man show of the work of that gusty craftsman, Joseph Urban. It was more than a tribute. One dollar admission was charged for the benefit of the 1,700 unemployed draughtsmen.*

If not the best architect in New York, jovial Joseph Urban is certainly the most spectacular. A great vat-shaped Viennese, 60 years old, weighing 230 Ih. according to his secretary's latest estimate, his first triumphs were the Khedive's Palace in Cairo; the Alexander Bridge over the Neva in Leningrad; the castle of Prince Esterhazy de Galantha in Hungary. In 1912 he brought a corps of Austrian scene painters to the U. S. to design scenery for the Boston Opera House. Its failure threw him on the mercy of Florenz Ziegfeld. Since then he has done about one-third of the scenery for the Metropolitan Opera, all scenery for Ziegfeld. He gradually crept back into architecture. In recent years he has designed the Ziegfeld Theatre, Palm Beach palazzi for Edward Hyatt Hutton, Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Jr., a Gingerbread Castle for Wheatsworth Cracker Co. and the New York School for Social Research, his most successful building to date. Between times he keeps up with his stage work, designs furniture, lace curtains, trunks for Hartman, an automobile for the New Era Motors, and dress fabrics. A convivial soul,'he can work 16 hours a day and still find time for champagne suppers, Viennese songs, beautiful women. His wife is a New York Beegle. He keeps eight shepherd dogs in the country, and gives two Christmas parties a year complete with tinseled trees, lebkuchen and. champagne, one for his architects' office, one for his scenic studio. Soviet fathers have not forgotten his design for the Neva bridge, and Joseph Urban was one of the eight foreign architects invited to submit designs for the preat Palace of the Soviets in Moscow. The red plaster model of his project was the focal point of last week's exhibition. It embraced a huge segment-shaped auditorium to seat 25,000 people and allow whole regiments to march across its stage, offices, libraries, and a combined auditorium and theatre to serve the All Union Congress.

* Dedicating their cellars, their kidneys to the cause, 16 architects went to a cocktail party at Mr. Urban's studio. Each guest was expected to pay $2, and promise to give another cocktail party in his home or office and invite twelve paying guests. Each of the twelve must invite eight, each of the eight, four--by which time 7,921 people will have contributed $15,842 to benefit the 1,700 draughtsmen, drunk approximately 31,-684 cocktails to the benefit of 1,536 bootleggers, eaten approximately 180 Ibs. of caviar to the benefit of the Union of Socialist Soviet Repub-lics.

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