To Cherish Rather than Destroy

Do you think about buildings? You live and work in them, but do you ever really think about them? New ones are piling up all around you. Did it ever occur to you that they might be killing the city by overcrowding? Do you try to judge buildings, wondering why some are good and others bad? Does one structure delight you and another depress you as just one more faceless fac,ade, adding up to more monotony, more soul-destroying boredom? Architecture has always been the mirror image of a civilization, expressing its needs, its priorities, its aspirations. How do you like what you're getting? Do you react? Do you care?

WHO poses these questions? Concerned architects, builders and planners do, and one of them presses the points with special urgency. He is Nathaniel Alexander Owings, a latter-day Jeremiah who is also a devout optimist, and who is the senior partner in America's most forceful and prestigious architectural firm. At 65, Owings is the remaining founder, the central O, in S.O.M.--Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

He oversees a nationwide enterprise with offices in Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., and Washington, D.C. In his long career he has presided over more than $3 billion worth of construction. It began with the beaver board exuberance of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. It led on to some of the largest and handsomest corporate structures anywhere, ranging from Manhattan's Lever House to San Francisco's Crown Zellerbach building. It raised Owings to national prominence as head of the presidential commission to replan the capital's Pennsylvania Avenue. Above all, Owings is engaged, along with many others, in a major effort to impose some direction, order and esthetic responsibility on the chaotic growth of building in America.

Convulsive Surge. The U.S. remains in the grip of the greatest construction boom in history, and the topping off is not in sight. Since World War II, building has become the nation's second largest industry (food production is first). It has accounted for about 10% of the gross national product, created new structures valued at $1 trillion--and that's a 13-figure number. In the past decade, Houston, for instance, has packed 17 major new structures into a 20-square-block area. Los Angeles has overcome its earthquake fears and built 107 high-rise office buildings. Denver has put up one new office building per year, while Manhattan boasts no fewer than 135 new office structures.

Statistics cannot express the convulsive reality. The American metropolis seems constantly to be tearing itself down and building itself up again. The din and confusion of building has become a built-in part of the city's confusion. Everywhere old towers crumble, excavations appear, followed by the quick climb of high steel skeletons. They rise straight from the busy city streets, the clusters of trucks, cement mixers and cranes hopelessly aggravating the snarl of traffic. Amid all this there arise new questions about the price of progress.

And what is--and isn't--progress? Every force, it seems, save pride, encourages shoddy, unimaginative construction. Zoning laws set minimum standards that speculative builders take as maximum. Antiquated codes bar technological breakthroughs. New York, for instance, only two months ago finally got around to revising its 30-year-old code. An office building can be written off for tax purposes in 45 years --so why build it to last any longer? Admits one construction-company official: "There's no such thing as a luxury rental building--only middle-income buildings at luxury prices." Most low-rent housing developments, says Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, rapidly turn into "vertical slums." As for planning, while many cities like Philadelphia and Boston have become showplaces, most of them cling to the old pattern of dull city blocks, where even the prestige corporate structures determinedly ignore their neighbors.

More Urgent than the Bomb. Complaints notwithstanding, high-density living is likely to be the style of the future. "All the major cities are as alive and as likely to keep growing as a tropical rain forest," declares Nat Owings. "There is no possibility of their dying. They are viable, they are vibrant and their growth is rank." By the year 2000, some 400 million Americans will be living in roughly the same areas as today. The question is: Can they do so and remain more or less human? "The answer," says Owings, "has to be yes, and the strategy of accomplishment must come in the next 15 years. The urgency is greater than that of developing the atomic bomb in the 1940s or reaching the moon in the 1970s."

In developing a "strategy of accomplishment," U.S. architects can draw on a whole arsenal of technology: precast concrete beams that span 100 ft.; cable-hung roofs that carry across distances of 420 ft.; mass-production assembling techniques; and a rapidly expanding range of building materials, from glare-reducing glass and spun plastic to rust-sealing steel. Concrete used as a finished material is already giving visual variety to the city. "It is the most important change in the art of building since World War II," says Architect Marcel Breuer. "You can sculpt concrete, you can mold it, chisel it, increase the vocabulary of architectural expression."

Nor does the U.S. lack for architects of ability, vision and daring. True, compared with many other professions, they form a thin line. There are only 29,000 registered architects in the U.S., compared with 315,000 lawyers, 315,000 doctors, 275,000 engineers, and they still have too little effect on U.S. building. But given the opportunity, the best U.S. architects often lead the world. Among the examples is the new World Trade Center, now going up in Manhattan: designed by Minoru Yamasaki of Birmingham, Mich., its 110-story aluminum-sheathed twin towers will top the Empire State Building, since 1932 the world's tallest. The steady, disciplined hand of German-born Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 82, soon will show in Washington's pristine, block-long central library. For Oakland, Calif., New Haven-based Kevin Roche has designed a three-tier museum, with the roof of each tier serving as a broad, verdant terrace. Philadelphia's innovative Louis Kahn, whom all architects watch with what amounts to fascination, has such projects under way as a factory for Olivetti and an art museum in Fort Worth. Across the U.S., there is a wide range of powerfully self-confident and optimistic buildings.

A building stands foursquare in the open to be judged. And for all the expertise bandied about, most architecture relies basically on a massive input of common sense. A good building, like a good suit, is made of fine materials well cut and well joined. The result must cost no more than the client agreed to pay. It must fit his requirements--and at its best, the requirements of the neighborhood, the city, the culture. The buildings on the accompanying color pages point up the qualities that good building must possess.

o HONESTY. Right away, it has to be admitted that architecture, like life, tolerates contradictory kinds of honesty. Today architects like to show how buildings stand by calling attention to the structural system. In San Francisco's Alcoa building, the beautifully proportioned glass box hangs within a strong steel cage of vertical and diagonal steel beams. It thus avoids that hallmark of cheap building, a forest of interior columns. In the Gulf Life tower in Jacksonville, the architects went a step further; they expressed engineering stress lines by thickening concrete beams where they meet columns, narrowing them where there is less need for brawn.

Another school of architects feels that a building ought to tell what is going on beneath its skin. The antic conglomeration of bumps, bulges and concavities of the Morris Mechanic Theater in Baltimore fairly shouts that the play's the thing--and also divulges stair towers and mechanical equipment spaces. With its fortress style, the Boston city hall states another simple truth: that city governments are under constant attack.

o ATTIRE. Expensive materials like marble, bronze, granite and stainless steel can lend an air of permanence and grandeur to otherwise undistinguished buildings. Look at the nearest cultural center. But they also demand less maintenance than cheaper materials--which is one reason why they show up so consistently in corporate headquarters, where vanity must be mitigated by accounting to make sense to stockholders. Glass has very different values. It looks pristine, pure, rational, and it reflects. The Lake Point apartment tower's curving glass facade marvelously catches, distorts, amplifies and refracts light and the reflections of an ever-changing skyscape. As for concrete, much in vogue these days, it is heavy, malleable, strong and cheap. In the hands of Paul Rudolph, its effect can also be sculptural.

o GRACE. A building, by its placement, can greatly detract from or enhance its surroundings. The 50-story General Motors building, by far the largest structure in its neighborhood, overwhelms everything in sight, including the small, lovely New York plaza it fronts. In New York's financial district, 140 Broadway, a restrained, withdrawn dark glass building, occupies only 40% of its site, giving away the rest as a plaza for the enjoyment of the public. Yet the problem of siting is never solved merely by creating plazas, which usually end up as unused sidewalks anyway. It takes deeper thought. Gulf Life, placed in a shoddy, chaotic part of Jacksonville, is a tonic for its area, acts as an organizing beacon. And the bold Alcoa building upgrades the bland apartment houses around it and thus makes a positive contribution to San Francisco. Both buildings thus achieve excellence.

o PROBITY. Poor workmanship in construction can ruin the effect of the best of designs. How different materials are joined, how columns meet floors, how corners are turned--these are things to notice. For in a good building, quality pervades to the smallest details, even in how a doorknob looks, how a door swings open. Which is why Mies van der Rohe, still the most important architect in the U.S., has always insisted that "God is in the details."

o PERSONALITY. If a man looks hard at a building, both inside and out, and tries to understand it, he will find that it has a personality and a gender. Chicago's Lake Point Tower is a sleekly dressed girl (but the circular bar on its roof is a silly hat). The John Hancock obelisk in Chicago is a new breed of circus giant, and New York University's apartment buildings are a trio of lean, tough city kids. Boston's city hall, with each facade different, is a politician with an intricate and elusive turn of mind, and the University of California at Irvine's library is a fussy fat lady. A building can have the effect of a slap in the face or a warm handshake, a serene smile or an aloof stare.

Now builders must face the problem that the day of the isolated masterwork is drawing to a close. Says the brilliant Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei: "If New York had 50 Seagram buildings, it would still be an ugly city. We just don't get great cities building by building." The need is for far vaster complexes, built to harmonize with the new megalopolitan city scale. In the search for someone to organize the chaos, critics look naturally to S.O.M., the General Motors of architecture, with a record of high performance in everything from its corporate Cadillacs to its economy Chevys.

Philip Johnson, a superb designer and rationalist, tried for a year to work out a slum-community project, then left it "out of sheer disappointment." He explains: "The politics of such projects is nearly impossible. Only Nat Owings would have the charm and patience to get things done." Adds Urbanologist Patrick Moynihan, who serves on Owings' presidential committee to redesign Pennsylvania Avenue: "He is ebullient, competent and devoted--and also a randy rogue, a bandit and a buccaneer. His great ability is to get other people to do good work."

Owings is neither designer nor town planner, but more than anything else an impresario; he frankly states that his role is to act as "the catalyst." And for this his training has eminently qualified him. One who had not been raised in architecture could not pull together the complex forces of clients, contractors, planning commissions and designers. And in bridging the gap between aesthete and politician or businessman, nothing comes in more handy than a touch of boisterous good humor and the forthright logic of the black-dirt belt of Indiana from which Nat Owings sprang. It is a breathtaking leap that the nation has been asked to make in the 20th century--from an era dominated by Main Street to a future seen in terms of megalopolis and megastructure. To a remarkable degree, Owings has grown up with the century.

Miracle in the Cathedrals. He was born in Indianapolis on Feb. 5, 1903, the son of a fine-wood importer. By then, Chicago's Louis Sullivan had refined the steel skyscraper, Frank Lloyd Wright was building his broad-winged prairie houses. For Owings, life was leisurely on a pleasant, tree-shaded side street. He was an Eagle Scout, and shortly after his 17th birthday he won a Rotary Club scholarship to attend the international Scout Jamboree in London, followed by a tour of the Continent. Out of this unlikely sequence of events came Owings' commitment to architecture.

"It wasn't the cities that impressed me," he recalls. "It was those extraordinary piles of stone and the richness, the light, the warmth they possessed--the cathedrals of Notre-Dame, Chartres, Reims, Mont-Saint-Michel." He knew then and there that he wanted to be an architect. "There is a miracle in discovering what you want to do and never questioning it again," he says. "It happens rarely."

Plans in Paddington Station. Owings attended the University of Illinois and Cornell, worked his way through by waiting on the athletes' training tables, earned degrees in both architecture and engineering. He leaped wholeheartedly into campus life, says, "I wasn't one of those drab, grey students. I was in debt to my tailor for four years." In retrospect, he realizes, "it was the end of an era. The Bauhaus had already started in Germany, and Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were already having an influence in Europe." For a young graduate, one of the most dynamic U.S. architects was Raymond Hood, then helping to design Rockefeller Center. Owings gravitated to Hood's office, still recalls the thrill of the 70-story RCA building: "You have this tall tree, this knife edge, presenting its narrow dimension to Fifth Avenue. It is breathtaking."

His own chance to discover where his abilities lay came when he was sent by Hood to Chicago to work on the 1933 World's Fair. With him went a brilliant young designer, Louis Skidmore. As the Depression deepened, the elaborate plans drawn up by the U.S.'s leading architects had to be discarded. "Skid and I took the fair over," says Owings, who does not suffer from modesty. "We had to devise solutions, do a bare minimum, use the simplest materials--we built the pavilions out of beaverboard." In the process Owings found that his strengths lay in making big plans and in rounding up and cajoling clients to effect them. "I'd go crazy doing the design details," he says. Adds a contemporary: "Skid and Owings worked like a bulldozer and finish grader. Skidmore was the grader."

After the fair was over, Owings and Skidmore took a trip abroad, then met by prearrangement in London's Paddington Station. There, perched on steamer trunks, they decided to become partners (Structural Engineer John O. Merrill, now retired, joined the firm in 1939). They also decided on the novel team concept that was to prove as important as any of S.O.M.'s buildings. As Owings explains it, "We decided that the young designer would be free to try anything. We would guide him, but we would not inhibit him." Backing up the designer would be a project manager to handle finances and a partner-in-charge to deal with the client. "It has worked," says Owings, "and it has worked fabulously."

High Quality. The first big break for the firm was the commission to build Oak Ridge, Tenn., the A-bomb town that was constructed in complete secrecy, eventually grew to a population of 75,000. In its wake came jobs to design a hotel, airbases in Morocco, and three towns in Okinawa. Having achieved a reputation for bigness, S.O.M. earned a name for high-quality design with Manhattan's Lever House. Lever has since been copied so often--and so badly--that it has lost much of its impact. But 16 years ago, it astonished and delighted the U.S. In its use of sheer glass curtain walls, its spacious plaza (75% of the site), and bold positioning of horizontal slab and vertical shaft, it was revolutionary. More than any other, it set the style of office buildings in the 1950s and '60s. Even today, despite rumors that the company will tear down and rebuild it, Lever Bros, insists it will keep the building, proudly uses its silhouette to identify its products.

When S.O.M. won out over nine other firms in its bid to design the $152.5 million Air Force Academy, it decided to use the same modular glass curtain walls. But not without a fight. When a high-ranking Air Force officer suggested that the architects might better use sandstone, Owings was ready with an answer. "General," he said, "would you build an airplane out of sandstone? Well, I don't think we will build the academy out of it either."

By the late 1950s, S.O.M. had established itself as the corporate architect.* As Owings recalls his first encounter with Henry Ford: "We were scared as hell. We didn't know what they wanted. So we just said, 'Look, we're going to live with you and love you and learn to know you.' " S.O.M. designers refer to the client-architect relationship as "a marriage," and as clients testify, there are few secrets from anyone by the end of the association. The product of this hard union is usually a beautiful building. S.O.M. has won more top design awards from the American Institute of Architects than any other architectural firm.

Invisible Partners. "I've produced the people who produce the buildings," says Owings with understandable pride. He is referring to his largely invisible partners, each busy in the five S.O.M. offices and each competing with the others. Among them are four designers who by general consensus rank at the very top of their profession.

Senior designer and the man responsible for eight of the firm's 13 top A.I.A. awards is Gordon Bunshaft, 59, whom Owings calls "the great classicist." Shock-haired and explosive, a bon vivant and art lover, "Bun" set the firm on the high road to quality with Lever House, most recently has turned out the Hirshhorn Gallery for Washington, and the L.B.J. library for Austin, Texas. Notably outspoken, he has been known to tell a client: "Take it all or nothing." In Chicago, Walter Netsch, 48, is dubbed "the professor" by Owings. Research-oriented, he appeals especially to institutions, designed the Air Force Academy. Counterbalancing him is Bruce Graham, 42, a towering, beardless Lincoln who firmly believes that "this is a technocratic age, and technocracy pulls us together." He designed the highly engineered John Hancock building in Chicago, likes to use computers to figure out the precise calculations, such as how much aluminum can be pared from window frames (the answer saved Shell $200,000 in Houston). The driving force in the San Francisco office is Charles Bassett, 46, a touseled six-footer who came to S.O.M. from the office of the late Eero Saarinen. He ranges widely in styles, designed the Alcoa building, the Mauna Kea Hotel in Hawaii, and the bare-boned Oakland-Alameda County stadium, which he boasts is a beauty "with no rouge on her cheeks."

S.O.M.'s impressive depth in talent has captured superb commissions. The firm now has $750 million worth of building under construction, including Dallas' Main Place office complex, the home office of the Georgia-Pacific Corp. in Portland, Ore., and the Art and Architecture building at the University of Illinois' Chicago Circle Campus--and there is another $1.2 billion of projects on the drafting boards. To each job S.O.M. will bring its proven methodology. Explains Owings: "You first ask if the building is needed or if it is possible to save the old one. Then you ask where it should be. How will it affect the environment of the surroundings? It should make a contribution to the community just as the community provides it with services." The last step in the process is design.

The Grand Axis. "My life is architecture," says Owings. For him it means operating with a telephone grafted to his ear and a suitcase ever handy for a dash from California's Big Sur. Often he is on the road for weeks on end, racks up 20,000 air miles a month. He drops in on each S.O.M. office, tramps through national parks as a special consultant to the Department of the Interior, returns to California to help plan a Victorian-style convention center for Monterey, meets actual and potential clients everywhere. Such total absorption led to divorce from his first wife, Emily, by whom he had four children. It also precipitated a drinking problem, which Owings conquered in 1964. He is now married to Margaret Wentworth, a skilled craftswoman (mosaics and stitchery).

A member of Lady Bird Johnson's committee to beautify the capital, and Interior Secretary Stewart Udall's man on the spot to improve the Mall, Owings also rides herd on the committee to redesign Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol -- Washington's "grand axis" in Pierre L'Enfant's original scheme. Appointed to the committee by John F. Kennedy in 1962, the architect has moved his bulldozer capabilities into high gear, taking every available scrap of power "on the theory that if I was not supposed to have it, someone would tell me." President Johnson helped by appointing eight Cabinet members to sit in on the committee. As a result, plans are coordinated at the top; funds, instead of being spent piecemeal, are pooled.

Shoe Under the Curtain. Owings --and the committee's -- goal is to turn Pennsylvania Avenue into Washington's ceremonial street -- a rival to Paris' Champs-Elysees. When completed, it will run straight and wide from a great reflecting pool at the foot of the Capitol to a National Square before the White House. Crucial to the plan is the 75-ft. setback along the avenue's north side, which is already being redeveloped by the Government and private entrepreneurs. To keep the setback, Owings has had to deploy his considerable powers of suasion. When he learned that the FBI intended to build a new headquarters right out to the old sidewalk line, he called on J. Edgar Hoover, urged him to redesign the projected structure. After listening to Owings' impassioned plea, Hoover nodded agreement.

When a second building threatened to break ranks, Owings took a different tack. Developer Jerry Wolman planned to jut a commercial building onto the generous sidewalk area. Owings explained that this would ruin the grand effect, like a shoe protruding from under a curtain. Wolman finally agreed to change the building. Owings flew to Boston with Wolman to arrange the new financing, then back to the capital to get the developer a zoning variance to add an extra floor. A lot of effort, but the grand design for the avenue was kept intact.

Into the Fifth Dimension. While supervising the Washington project, Owings has involved S.O.M.'s office there in a project that he describes as "the most important job S.O.M. has ever tackled." Surprisingly, it does not involve erecting a single building. The architects are studying ways of designing an 18-mile-long strip of Interstate 95 that will go through the heart of Baltimore. Secretary of Transportation Alan Boyd, whose department is financing the study with a special $4.8 million grant, says of Owings' effort: "The potential there is immense. Communities must decide for themselves what they want their cities to look like."

Why the excitement? Because of all the forces that affect cities, the interstate highway program, 90% financed by federal funds, has been the least controlled. And yet today, those wide concrete corridors play as vital a role in shaping cities as once was played by rivers. Undirected, highways smash and crash through whole neighborhoods, debouch a torrent of autos into already traffic-choked streets. Owings' team, which includes engineers, traffic and transit consultants as well as architects, intends to wield its power to direct Interstate 95's path through Baltimore as delicately as a surgeon's scalpel, avoiding historic areas, living organic communities and parks, while improving marginal areas. Only nine months along in a two-year study, the team has already recommended that the road bypass a stable Negro neighborhood, and is finding new possibilities for building schools over the highway.

The whole delicate operation has catapulted Owings' team into what he calls "the fifth dimension of planning--politics, the art of getting things done." The team works with local, state and federal governments, is bringing public officials together with homeowners, businessmen and minority groups. They form a giant new client. And they care what will happen to the highway as deeply as any client S.O.M. has ever served.

Lasting Investment. Politics represents a direction architects have traditionally been loath to take. But not for much longer. Says A.I.A. President George Kassabaum: "Architects cannot wait until the politician, the sociologist and the economist invite us into the picture. By then, too many of the important decisions have been made." Nat Owings heartily agrees. He knows from experience that once decisions have been built into concrete, they are there to stay. He also sees the architect as the only person trained to maintain the balance between those esthetic qualities that give grace to modern city living and the multiple commercial, cultural and humanitarian demands made on the organization of the city.

No visionary, but a practical organizer, Owings says: "The old cities can be reorganized more cheaply, more efficiently and more quickly than we can build new cities. We could double the population simply by better use of the existing area, and at the same time organize the chaos." As he observes, an aerial photograph of any major U.S. city makes it appear to be bombed out; vast areas are given over to empty plots and parking lots. These, plus railroad yards and even highways, would make ideal sites for future new towns within towns, of which projects such as San Francisco's Golden Gateway Center are only the earliest prototypes. Population will be dense, Owings admits, but city dwellers will get around more easily; traffic functions will be divided into layers, with pedestrians in the open air and rails and roads beneath them.

Owings places most of his faith in plain human reasonableness. The present supercompetition between building owners, with all their pride in towers, will eventually give way to the recognition of common concerns. And it is this comforting faith in reason that makes Owings predict: "We are going to reach the point where environment planning will be the supreme thing in this country. It will be the equivalent of the railroad and highway booms. Then perhaps we can change and begin to build as did the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, the Egyptians--begin to build a real environment that is a lasting investment rather than something to be destroyed."

* Among its clients: Heinz, Ford, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, Upjohn, Brunswick, Inland Steel, Union Carbide, PepsiCo, Emhart and Tenneco.

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