U. S. Monument

Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art decided last week that the biggest flood-control, navigation and power project of modern times was also art. To prove its point, the Museum put on a show of pictures and models of the vast reclamation project known as TVA.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, affecting an area as large as England, with an amount of architectural structure that would have made a Roman emperor gasp, is a whopper. Like many a gigantic monument of the past (Egypt's Pyramids, Rome's Forum, China's Great Wall), TVA is built for use as well as looks. Like them, it will go down as one of the most permanent achievements of its civilization, may even remain a landmark long after its usefulness is over.

Last week's exhibition attempted to show in a model nutshell that TVA's designers had coordinated its myriad parts into a unified symphony of structure. The severe functionalism of its big dams and powerhouses was echoed in the simple, modern design of its glass and tile lavatories, smooth-surfaced drinking fountains, control rooms, bridges, highways, dormitories, parks, recreation areas. The steely, mechanical beauty of smooth, insectile cranes, the generator rooms (see cut), expressed TVA's designers' aim: "to make TVA look as efficient as it is"

TVA's artistic success is due primarily to the solution of a problem that has been curling architects' hair since the machine age began: the problem of coordinating the art of architecture with the science of engineering. TVA has kept anonymous its thousands of artistic-minded engineers and efficient-minded designers. But the main responsibility for coordinating the true and the beautiful in TVA has been two men's: Chief Engineer Theodore Bissell Parker, Reserve Lieut. Colonel (Engineers), and Principal Architect Roland Anthony Wank.

Baldish, greying, affable and modest Colonel Parker bosses an army of more than 1,400 subordinate engineers, some 9,200 construction workers. When he is not working in his map-and-chart-laden office, he travels over his huge project in a TVA plane. Says he: "We are able to get specialists in our organization and keep them, because of the nature of the work. We exchange ideas. We not only design our projects but we have our own force to construct them, so that there is co ordination."

Architect Wank, Hungarian veteran of Austria's army in World War I, went to the U.S. in 1924 to escape the "dead hand of the past." Applying for his first U.S. citizenship papers the day he arrived, Wank soon made a name in U.S. architecture as a designer on two big jobs (both of which won gold medals from the American Institute of Architects): Manhattan's Grand Street Apartments and Cincinnati's Union Terminal. Since 1933, when he got the job with TVA, Architect Wank has been busy on everything from streamlined flagpoles to floating barges. Suave, energetic, he still talks with a slight Hungarian accent. In his own model TVA town of Norris, near the big Norris Dam, he works with fanatic fervor on what he thinks is the biggest and most path-breaking job in modern architecture. Says he: "Ever since one of our forbears leaned back against a tree trunk after a good dinosaur meal and contemplated the stars, men have fought, killed and suffered martyrdom for unified concepts to explain away their fear of the universe and to guide and justify their conduct. . . . Surrounded by cracks in our inherited framework, we are again at work to hammer out a new integration. To plan a housing develop ment, a roadside restaurant, a school or a powerhouse is not of itself very different nor more useful than to mend boots, run a lathe or total up accounts. But to share in a forward struggle when the fight is hot and passion runs high is one of the vital experiences that make life worth living. And that makes contemporary architecture fun."*

*Magazine of Art, January 1941.

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