It wasn’t a masterwork, but it was the master’s work. Every day, hundreds of people walked by the gleaming space, but few may have realized its significance. A hidden gem in plain sight, the Hoffman Auto Showroom at 430 Park Avenue, opened in 1955. It was one of just three Frank Lloyd Wright projects in New York City. And now, it’s gone.

The sleek showroom captured by the astute eye of Ezra Stoller, 1955. Courtesy of Ezra Stoller © Esto / Yossi Milo Gallery

Wright’s bijou, as he described it,[i] was the architect’s first permanent work in the city, his first constructed automotive design, and one of his few interior-only projects. Realized during New York’s post-World War II commercial construction boom, it was the architect’s single gesture along the corporate corridor of International Style buildings designed by his rivals, the “glass box boys.”[ii] The showroom’s signature ramp was also one of Wright’s several design experiments with the spiral, culminating in the Guggenheim Museum.

The showroom was a bijou to me, too. It’s a character in my book, Frank Lloyd Wright in New York: The Plaza Years, 1954-1959. I spent considerable time studying, visiting, and writing about it. Imagine my shock on a warm day last month when I walked by showroom and witnessed it being gutted. A woman in construction gear, standing in front of the open doorway waved pedestrians past clouds of dust and dumpsters filled with the showroom’s remains en route to a nearby dump truck. Read more…

It’s no secret that the United States Postal Service is hitting hard times. Budget shortfalls have led to talk of ending Saturday mail deliveries, meanwhile delivery operations have already begun consolidating across much of the country. And while snail mail may be anachronistic in the era of electronic communications, the retrenchment puts at risk many of the storied structures that have housed the Postal Service for decades. In New York City, several historic structures face uncertain futures as they are considered for sale as part of this process.

At the south end of the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, the Bronx General Post office commands an entire block. Opened in 1936, the monumental structure is fronted on the outside with grand arched windows and a pair of sculpted figures. Inside, several New Deal-era murals by the prominent Lithuanian-American artist Ben Shahn cover the walls. These magnificent murals depict laborers milling textiles, farming, and engaged in other work. Shahn is well known for his left-leaning political artwork during the first half of the 20^th century, as well as for his involvement with the controversial Diego Rivera mural in Rockefeller Center. Read more…

Previously, we wrote about Oscar Niemeyer’s architectural legacy and the relatively non-Eurocentric direction of Latin American modernism. While Niemeyer’s undulating buildings present unique restoration challenges, the U.S. is also facing trials with its own, typically rectilinear modern buildings. Looming large are the weather extremes of climate change and the quest for energy efficiency, making it apparent that the worst aspects of our mid-century buildings are their envelopes.

Designers of concrete and masonry architecture in our temperate zones often disregarded energy consumption and thermal comfort in the last century. Their buildings are a virtual list of today’s “don’ts”…too much glass, single-pane glass with an R-value of one, concrete thermal bridges with a flywheel effect in the wrong direction, zero insulation, and poor air and vapor barriers.

Elson Arts Center, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA
Perfectly rectilinear yet large single-glazed openings allow significant heat loss and solar heat gain. The school replaced the windows with new “oversized” insulated glazing units with low-emissivity glass, nearly doubling the R-value of the walls.

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Phaidon Carrying Case

The largest book I own is the 20^th Century World Architecture: The Phaidon Atlas.  It’s 13.5 by 22 inches. Amazon indicates that its shipping weight is 18.2 pounds. The cardboard carrying case with handles helps. So yes, that’s a lot of architecture. “The most outstanding works of architecture built between 1900 ad 1999” means 757 buildings to the publisher, though some of your favorite buildings may be missing. But you get the distinct sense that if Phaidon had produced a more comprehensive volume the world may have run out of paper.  Those on offer are, of course, excellent.

Any comment about the selections is simply going to layer my cherry picking on top of that of the “expert industry panel with input from over 150 specialist advisors from every geographic region” that determined the book’s contents. So before getting to that part of the orchard, an overview. One interesting conceit is that all of the buildings in the book are still extant (find your Imperial Hotel in some other book) and even accompanied by coordinates of longitude and latitude, which might be practically useful if you happen to have a GPS and a native porter for carrying the book.

The buildings within are organized by regional groupings whose representation plays out around the way that these things normally do: about half of them are European, although more-frequently-unnoticed architectural continents aren’t quite glossed over. There are 72 pages on South America and 52 in Africa. The atlas doesn’t stop at that. Each subsection includes a breakdown of projects by local as opposed to foreign architects, which largely displays the ebbing of European global design hegemony. Additional early charts illustrate the movements of architects: There’s of course an influx to the US and the UK in the 1930s and 40s, but otherwise a riot of lines of intriguing origin and destination.

It’s difficult to detect a curatorial bias in terms of styles or years. Europe’s strongest decade was the 1930s. North America and Africa boast the largest relative number of buildings from the 1950s and 1960s.  Asia shows the greatest comparative strength in the 1980s. Aalto, Breuer, Le Corbusier, Mendelsohn, Van Der Rohe, and Wright lead the pack in individual selections represented; no surprise there.  Some entries stretch beyond the linear “building”. New Delhi and Brasilia are represented along with a few master plans that seem worthy of recognition even if their constituent structures had varied designers, such as Potsdamner Platz in Berlin or EUR in Rome.  It’s difficult to argue with these grand inclusions on any categorical ground.

Bank of Guatamela

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Paul Rudolph’s Claire T. Carney Library at UMass Dartmouth, Western facade during renovation

When I read Robert Campbell’s recent article in The Boston Globe on designLAB’s sensitive renovation of a significant Paul Rudolph building at UMass Dartmouth, I was intrigued to learn more. The word that got me going was “Brutalism”. For some time now we’ve been covering this experimental, some call it aggressive or even willful and arrogant, form making. Our story on the ongoing struggles to keep Bertrand Goldberg’s iconic Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Chicago dates to 2009, our more recent blog on the last minute reprieve of Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center brightened my day even as I mourned the loss other important works from that optimistic period in our culture’s history. And so we welcomed Brunner/Cott & Associates’ ongoing blog series on the trials and tribulations of saving and adapting Brutalist buildings.

Eastern facade during renovation

It’s no surprise, then, that the Boston architecture firm, designLAB Architects’ success at the library at UMass Dartmouth re-awakened my evergreen curiosity about Rudolph, Brutalism, preservation, adaptation, research, and progress. So I went to the source and asked designLAB’s Robert J. Miklos, FAIA, to talk frankly about these and other issues swirling around one of the most controversial movements in architecture history. Here is what he said:

Susan S. Szenasy: Now that your renovation work on Paul Rudolph’s Claire T. Carney Library at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth is nearing completion, it would be great to hear some of your reflections on the project. I believe that you and your firm, designLAB, consider Rudolph an architecture hero. That relationship can be intimidating to some architects. Did you struggle with Rudolph’s spirit? Or did his spirit seem to be at ease with your re-interpretation of his iconic building?

Robert J. Miklos: Truthfully, we don’t see him as a hero.  His work is heroic, perhaps, but I am a product of 1970’s GSD and was conditioned to reject the work of Rudolph.  At designLAB, our ‘courtship’ of the hero was a long process of research and analysis before we were able to find any true ‘affection’ for his work.

Rudolph with the library site model

It started with a talented young designer on the team who studied his early work at the University of Florida. There, Rudolph truly is a hero, if not a cult figure. I traveled to Florida to tour all his work in Sarasota—it was inspiring. His career is filled with contradictions: rationalism vs. expressionism, structural determinism vs. a personal obsession for hexagonal form. While we were continually trying to understand the original intentions and spirit of this project, we always recognized it as one of many experiments filled with successes and flaws. A radical approach to the interpretation and transformation was necessary, yet we believe our approach is rooted in the spirit of Rudolph.

It’s also important to note that at designLAB, we are invested in expanding the language of a specific context, whether natural or constructed. In this project, the existing building was that context, which we termed ‘Post-Utopian’. Our methodology is similar to what we have used in other contexts, determining when to push back, when to be deferential. Throughout our design process we immersed ourselves in Rudolph’s ideas and process developing a dialog between existing and new where the interventions might amplify the power of his original ideas and compositional themes. We also were not afraid to correct inconsistencies in his approach.

Library’s eastern facade during renovation

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Whether you call her Hurricane, Superstorm, or Frankenstorm, Sandy has brought devastation, destruction, and lasting change to our waters’ edge.

Across New York City and the tri-state region, neighborhoods glimpsed the climate change forecast—massive flooding, storm surges, and rising seas. With lives lost and billions in damages, it’s safe to say our communities will never be the same.

Red Hook flooded, photo courtesy The Brownstoner

Into this new reality comes a renewed vigor for finding new ways to cope. In New York City we’re hearing about many different solutions including storm barriers, oyster reefs, and waterfront parks—and as many political opinions. Some of these ideas treat water as something to keep at bay, working like the Dutch to build walls to protect us and keep the water out.

But storm barriers pose a lot of problems. They wreak havoc on the marine environment, are challenging to implement legally and politically, can cost billions, and are a binary system, meaning they work up until they fail, then it’s a disaster. A barrier does help with one thing—preserving what we have.

Brooklyn Bridge and harbor, New York City, New York. 1903

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Our preceding post, Concrete – The Offending Material, explored the expressive potential and construction-related problems common to the monolithic architectural concrete of mid-20th century. Here we focus on the typical fenestration of these concrete buildings and the issues inherent to their windows’ preservation and restoration.

Brutalist architecture exploited the visual potential of monolithic glazing in large openings as part of a materials dialog with concrete surface textures and mass.

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Paul Rudolph, completed 1966. Brutalist architecture used smooth, transparent, monolithic glazing in large openings to emphasize mass and textured concrete surfaces. [Photo: Bruner/Cott]

Frameless, non-operable butt-glazing developed along with concrete construction, introducing a new scale of transparency into large areas of massive structure. It allowed for extreme simplification—concrete building facades could be conceived as the architectural elaboration of a single material…plus glass.

Green Building, MIT, I. M. Pei, completed 1964. Frameless glazing minimized distraction from the sculptured contours of concrete building facades.  [Photo: Bruner/Cott]

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Our most recent post on Debating the Value of Mid-Century Modern discussed the architect as multi-party advocate and mediator. It was the last in a series that explored the interactions among the stakeholders of these buildings and how original design intent may hamper or encourage their rehabilitation and reuse. With this post, we begin a series that will focus on the technical aspects of modern materials and assemblies, including how construction methods of the period affect today’s decisions about the repair and improvement of mid-century building envelopes.

From the beginning, materials were significant to the design intent of modern architects and to the performance of their buildings. This trend first emerged in Europe before World War I, when design forcefully aligned itself with industrial production, challenging centuries of architectural values and design approaches. Visually, buildings no longer reflected history. Instead, they echoed the aesthetics of civil engineering and industrial structures. Traditional craftwork was replaced by factory-built components assembled on site with a minimum of expressive handwork, just as glass, steel, and concrete began to be viewed as expressive elements. This shift represented a deliberate affront to refined stone surfaces, the complexity of carved ornament, and the social hierarchies implicit in previous building facades and spaces.

The recessed windows, deep sills, and overhanging cornices of masonry buildings such as McKim, Mead & White’s 1872 Boston Public Library (left) shed wind-driven rain better than the sheer elevations of International Style buildings like Walter Gropius’s 1926 Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany (right).

Photo Credits: Boston Public Library Collection, no known restrictions; and Flickr user Franz Drewniak (drz image), respectively

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Our last post, “Stakeholder Equilibrium,” identified the historic preservation community as a critical voice in the debate about whether and how to reuse mid-twentieth century modern buildings. But today we face the challenge of a divided voice among preservationists: There are those who have a long-held reverence of original materials and those who recognize this way of thinking as unrealistic for many modern buildings.

The preservation ethic that has guided American and European architects regarding the repair, restoration, and adaptive reuse of historic buildings was originally derived from principles of fine arts conservators. William Morris, the English artist and textile designer, was an originator of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB). The society was formed in the Victorian period as a reaction to the demolition of Gothic church interiors to make way for the new. Morris his fellow Arts and Crafts advocates wanted to protect and conserve authentic, original, historic material with all of its inherent craftsmanship and association with lives past intact. Their fundamental credo was to “repair rather than replace.” The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties, established in the wake of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act, is a direct product of this Victorian preservation ethic, almost universally applied to craft-laden masonry and wooden structures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Single-glazed curtain wall, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall (John Andrews, completed 1969). Photo by Bruner/Cott.

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Modernist buildings have been under attack in the U.S. for years now. We’re reminded of this fact every day as our team at Bruner/Cott & Associates works to keep an entire period of architecture from being lost in Boston, our hometown.

Holyoke Center, Harvard University (Josep Lluis Sert, completed 1961)
Photo by Bruner/Cott

News of the recent thwarted attempt—for the moment, at least—to demolish Paul Rudolph’s Brutalist masterwork, the Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York, underscored for us the fact that important works of mid-twentieth century modern building design is, often, only one vote away from oblivion.

We consider ourselves pioneers in adaptive use and aficionados of modernism, so we understand the plusses and minuses of these buildings and how to turn them to current user advantage. Therefore, for us, this trend toward destruction is particularly painful to watch. For the past quarter of a century, we have worked to repair, enhance, and extend the use of this architecture, trying to, in our own way, stem the tide of threat. But the reasons for this tendency to destroy modernism are abundantly clear to us.

Peabody Terrace, Harvard University (Josep Lluis Sert, completed 1963),
view from campus, photo by Steve Rosenthal

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