The Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust Company building at 510 Fifth Avenue, New York. The lower levels are being renovated.

The ancient Egyptians were the ur-preservationists, but I have always thought that there was something perverse about their method of immortalizing dead kings. The first part of the process, carried out by skilled professionals, was to extract all the internal organs of the Pharoah’s body—all the parts that we call “vital” for good reason, that enabled the man to walk, talk, eat, and think. These the embalmers put away in sealed jars. They then went to great lengths to swathe the hollow shell of a body so we can go stare at it in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Much like the Egyptian mummifiers, the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) of New York gave the Manufaturer’s Hanover Trust Company building landmark status in 1997, but protected only its exterior. Read more…

Photo: Matthew Hinton/The Times-Picayune.

Not even a month after we wrote about the impending demolition of the Phyllis Wheatley Elementary School, the battle over one of New Orleans’s last standing mid-century modernist schools has come to an abrupt but decisive conclusion. On Friday, bulldozers began their work on the dilapidated structure, two months before anyone had any reason to expect them. Read more…

For five consecutive Sundays this summer, the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas will be showing a series of design-conscious feature films to revisit the vibrancy of 20^th Century Modern life. Suits & Sleuths: Midcentury Modernism in Film will include two dramas, a comedy, a suspense thriller, and soap opera that capture the attitudes, architecture, and design aesthetic of the 1950’s.

The series begins on July 10^th with a screening of Executive Suite, a dramatic film made in 1954 depicting the power struggles in corporate America. Directed by Robert Wise, Executive Suite was adapted from a novel with the same name written by Cameron Hawley, and nominated for four Academy Awards. The dramatic plot follows the challenge to find a new leader for a furniture company, the Tredway Corporation, after the sudden death of the company’s president causes conflicts between ambitious successors for power. The merits of quality manufacturing versus shoddy output help decide who will win the struggle.

Sloan Wilson’s popular 1955 novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, was adapted for screen a year later by Nunally Johnston in a poignant drama. The story revolves around the post-war life of an ex-soldier, Tom Rath (Greory Peck), who contemplates ethics and balance in his life at work, his loving wife, Betsy (Jennifer Jones), and their three children. The set design, both corporate and residential, is as uptight as the gray flannel suits and closely cropped haircuts of the time.

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Image courtesy World Monuments Fund.

The Phyllis Wheatley Elementary School in New Orleans looks like no other school anywhere else. Designed and built in 1955 by the architect Charles Colbert specifically for the historic African-American neighborhood of Tremé/Lafitte, the now-decrepit modernist glass box appears to float above the ground. Colbert managed to set back the columns needed to hold the building above flooding levels, creating dramatically cantilevered class rooms and an empty common area for the kids underneath. Huge windows let in plenty of sunlight, and kept the building surprisingly cool in hot and humid New Orleans. The building was celebrated for these features at the time, but fifty years of neglect and a hurricane have taken their toll. In July last year, the Recovery School District (RSD)—which works to rehabilitate underperforming schools in Louisiana—finally decided to tear the dysfunctional building down, and build a new school in its place by 2013. Read more…

Julius Shulman knew everybody. That’s how he worked. He moved through the city not merely photographing, but orchestrating and choreographing images that helped define what it meant to be modern and in Los Angeles through the buoyant optimism of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. He kept it up until his death in 2009.

In the new book Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis, authors Sam Lubell, West Coast editor for the Architect’s Newspaper, and Douglas Woods have assembled a collection of Shulman’s rarely seen works that document the burgeoning city as it became a metropolis. In fact, because of Shulman’s willingness to shoot anything and accept any photographic challenge, this collection constitutes a definitive sweep through the visual history of Los Angeles. Read more…

In a story in yesterday’s T The New York Times Style Magazine, Guy Trebay sits down with the 93-year-old furniture designer Irving Harper—and kindly gives credit to Metropolis for first uncovering Harper’s behind-the-scenes role in creating some of the most recognizable icons in midcentury furniture design. Click here to read the full text of Paul Makovsky’s original story on Harper, “Vintage Modern,” from the June 2001 issue.

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Recently brought to our attention: two short documentary films on a pair of intriguing midcentury architectural anomalies—an enormous Bucky Fuller dome in the woods of Louisiana (demolished in 2007; left) and a wildly ambitious art-school construction project in Cuba (abandoned in 1965 but now underway again after a four-decade hiatus.) Read on for more information, plus clips from the films. Read more…

Last week, General Motors’ design manager, Susan Skarsgard, spoke at the Museum of the City of New York on her book Where Today Meets Tomorrow, a monumental tome devoted to Eero Saarinen’s design of the GM Technical Center, in Warren, Michigan. Before her talk, Skarsgard was kind enough to give me a close-up tour of what is literally a one-of-a-kind book: Skarsgard personally put it together for the 50th anniversary of the Technical Center, in 2006, and there is only her one original copy. Which is a shame, because after spending an hour immersed in the scores of archival photos, plans, and other documents—not to mention pop-up models of interior spaces and a sumptuous fabric lining borrowed from the interior of a 1956 Cadillac—I almost felt like I had visited the iconic campus in person.  Read more…

Photo: John Ellis for Metropolis

The legendary architectural photographer Julius Shulman died last Wednesday, a few months shy of his 99th birthday. (Click here to view a slide show of his photos.) Here, three of Metropolis’s editors share their memories of the man and his work.

Martin C. Pedersen, executive editor:

The first time I met Julius Shulman was at a lunch in his honor at the Four Seasons. He sat at the end of a long table of admirers (a position he relished) and held court. Ninety-two or ninety-three years old at the time, he was at least four decades older than everyone there and yet, in spirit, he was easily the youngest. Without too much prompting (maybe a half glass of wine), he launched into a series of stories, recalling houses and architects and images with a vividness and color that made me suspect that he was filling in a lot of the blanks or (more likely) telling well-told tales. It didn’t matter. He took such clear pleasure in recounting the past and reliving it for us live that no one could remain un-charmed. I certainly couldn’t. And though he was one of the most important architecture photographers of the 20th century, he was also something else, a true oddity: the Un-Tortured Great Artist. Here, clearly, was a happy man. Julius was a walking billboard for a life well-lived. And for the rest of us “kids” at the table, an object lesson: Do what you love and the rest (with a little luck) will follow. Read more…

A recent sketch of the Glass House by the architect Mark McInturff

Attendees at last week’s Architects Retreat at the Glass House took advantage of breaks in the program to roam the grounds of Philip Johnson’s (now the National Trust’s) sprawling estate in New Canaan, Connecticut, sketching in their complementary Moleskine folios. They were involved in an act that, the Glass House hopes, will be repeated across the country wherever important Modernist buildings are located. This is sketching with a purpose: to raise public awareness of buildings and places, many endangered or in sad disrepair. The resulting sketches, with their potential to elicit emotional and action-inducing responses, will be collected in the Modern Sketchbook, to be published by the Glass House and Moleskine in 2010. Sales from the book will benefit the preservation of Modernist icons. Read more…