A newly emerging body of American architecture is resuscitating a style that died in the Depression of the 1930s, just when it seemed to be reaching a glorious peak of perfection.
The style was called Moderne. In the old days, it gave us wonders ranging from the skyscrapers of New York`s Rockefeller Center to such Chicago towers as the Board of Trade, the Palmolive Building and 333 N. Michigan Ave. Today, an updated version of Moderne is making itself felt in the design of tall buildings from coast to coast.
Moderne was a style marked by setbacks, lay-
ered wall planes and dramatic vertical rhythms. Its simplicity reflected the latest European thinking about stripping away superfluity. Its shapes also met such pragmatic concerns as zoning laws and the location of elevator banks.
A taste for Art Deco ornamentation ran concurrently with Moderne, and many buildings reflected a marriage of the two styles. Chicago examples include the La Salle Bank Building and the old Daily News Building at Madison and Canal Streets.
Credit for the resurrection of Moderne properly belongs to Georgia architect John Portman, who revived Rockefeller Center`s layered look 15 years ago at Peachtree Center in Atlanta and at Embarcadero Center in San Francisco. Still, those were isolated uses unconnected with the present rebirth.
Moderne`s widespread new life in the 1980s is a product of creative churnings that have given architecture a broad stylistic base in the last decade. That broadening has created bizarrely complicated design terminology, particularly among pedants. Yet the labeling of new highrises can usually be reduced to three categories:
— The bare-bones International Style, against which many architects have rebelled, but which is still employed on every continent.
— Postmodernism, created by the rebels in the 1970s and identifiable by its heavy-handed quotation of past styles and by in-jokes or metaphors understood only by other architects.
— New Mainstream architecture, an approach to design from which the excesses of Postmodernism have been drained and replaced by less arcane and often handsome historicist form-making.
Neo-Moderne architecture is an increasingly strong element of the New Mainstream movement that dominates commercial building. A clear-cut example of its popularity can be seen in plans for three recent Chicago-designed structures, two by Helmut Jahn and one by the firm of Loebl, Schlossman & Hackl.
Four years ago, the 1930 Chrysler Building in Manhattan inspired Jahn to design a similarly shaped and finial-topped skyscraper called Southwest Center, which was to have been built in Houston but has since been shelved. Jahn later used an almost identical scheme for Liberty Place, a twin-towered development in Philadelphia. Not long afterward, a similarly derivative structure was designed by Loebl, Schlossman & Hackl as a 64-story companion to Chicago`s Prudential Building.
Another Chicago architect who has advanced the Moderne revival in much purer form is Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Examples: Smith`s NBC Building, under construction just east of Tribune Tower, and his AT&T Corporate Center, to be built at Monroe and Franklin Streets.
With NBC, Smith not only follows the Moderne spirit, but sidesteps to make an obvious little bow to the Tribune`s pseudo flying buttresses (a nice gesture you will notice when NBC is completed). Even more interestingly, Smith`s plans for AT&T clearly acknowledge the look of the unbuilt tower designed by Eliel Saarinen as an entry in the 1922 Tribune Tower design competition.
Many other Moderne-informed skyscrapers are in place or coming off the drawing boards elsewhere in the nation. Philip Johnson`s Moderne-Deco Transco Tower in Houston, for example, became an instant classic when it was built a few years ago, and an equally Moderne highrise is planned for Los Angeles by Johnson and partner John Burgee. Cesar Pelli`s new Norwest Center in Minneapolis is a powerful recollection of 1930s facades, and so is a recently announced office slab at 1675 Broadway in Manhattan by Fox & Fowle. One could, of course, extend this list considerably.
One major difference between Moderne originals and their counterparts of today lies in the materials used to clad their exteriors. Limestone was almost unvaryingly used to finish tall buildings of the 1930s, but later fell out of favor when International Style practitioners switched to glass and aluminum. Today, limestone is making a comeback, although granite is a tough competitor because of its color variety and pollution resistance.
Some architects of the 1980s also use Moderne as only a conceptual departure point. By employing a variety of strongly articulated facade treatments and more complex combinations of geometry, they alter but enrich the original 1930s style.
It is risky to say where Moderne`s revival is carrying architecture, but surely it is strengthening and giving a greater sense of continuity to the New Mainstream movement, and for this we can be thankful.
Wishing for a truly uniform architectural style in America is a foolish intellectual compulsion, of course. We are nowhere near anything like that, and I can think of no reason why we should be.
Still, there is comfort in knowing that the New Mainstream architectural moderates are overriding radical Postmodernism and providing a strong antidote to its excesses. Not that the Postmodernists aren`t continuing to get major commissions, you understand.
In Cincinnati, for example, the new Riverbend Music Center designed by Michael Graves is one of the silliest pieces of Postmodern design posturing one can imagine. Graves first gave the big open-sided summer performance pavilion a totally graceless metal frame, then lined the leading edge of its roof with eight huge, ugly, two-dimensional fake statues supposedly inspired by 18th century grisaille paintings. The effect is unspeakably affected, a characteristic of all Postmodern extremism.
Everywhere in America, architects are aping the gestures of the Postmodern pacesetters and giving us Roman arches, Greek columns, Palladian windows, gables and barrel vaults–most delivered with all the subtlety of a lecher`s wink and many available by the running foot from prefab catalogs. Historicist appliques are being applied to everything from office towers to fast food outlets.
This is not to say that revival of even the inherently quieter 1930s Moderne cannot be denigrated by repetition and clumsiness. The languages of architecture are as easily bent out of shape as the languages of speaking and writing.
Yet one cannot help but hope that the power and beauty of Moderne–as it was expressed in Chicago by Holabird & Root, in New York by Raymond Hood, and so on–will be made to work again as more than a temporarily fashionable look. It took a long time for architects to rediscover its virtues. The best of it has never been surpassed for its dramatic elegance.
In any case, the New Mainstream moderates are still ahead in their competition with advocates of cartoon architecture. Let us pray that they remain so.
