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Revised October 24, 1985, for speech delivered at Museum of Science and Industry.

Original version published in Inland Architect,
January/February 1982.

Rich is Right

At the turn of the 18th century, the social changes were big statements such as "all men are created equal." During the 19th century both Europe and America began to change the definition of "equal." Biologists asked if all people were equal because all parts of all bodies were made from the same universal cell. Physicists asked if there was an equality in the physical world because gravity, electricity and light came from a universal force. Freud explained away the difference between individual psyches with a science of thinking and emotions which unified and standardized human behavior. In the 20th century after we decided that "equal" meant "the same," the individual disappeared - he became part of masses measured and counted. Governments and corporations lost their individuality as they were taken over by managers who replaced an elite group of aristocrats; these new forms of business and nations depended upon mass electorates, mass markets, and mass labor forces.

The 20th century artists - the architect - designed for the newly developed rich and shared their values. The abstraction of management systems in governments and business was matched by the "abstraction systems' in the arts and architecture. The building artisan was replaced by the factory. The artistic pictorial was replaced by the pattern. Light and shade were replaced by the plane and the line. At the beginning of the 20th century Taut, Loos, Oud, Gropius shared in the belief of Corbusier that "the right angle is the most perfect of all forms because with it we can measure all things." By the end of World War I the box was recognized as the perfect shape to package a right-angled society. The design of the perfect box kept pace with mechanization of all types of production with factory-made clothes, with steel rolling mills, with automobiles, radios and packaged food.

Were the 20th century architects making right angle designs? Were they suddenly thumbing noses at all the memories of building glory of past architectural history? Or were they part of the prior 100 year development in the revolution of democracy: the revolution which first made men equal and separate and then made them equal and identical. What started in the early 19th century as three startling promises for freedom of the individual: democracy in government, industrialization in our economy, structuralization of our aesthetics - by the first half of the 20th century had become a controlled managed, measured, and confused mass society packed in boxes.

The faceless architecture that sheltered this mass society was to be described and advertised to the world by two New York art critics: Hitchcock and Johnson with the backing of a then small museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, published in 1932 The International Style. Johnson was not yet an architect.

In 1932 Hitchcock and Johnson owed up as the new architectural tastemakers. They had found the architectural invention and ferment of the previous 100 years too much to handle. By counting backwards on their fingers they picked the date of 1922 and said a new architecture began in that year. They called it the "International Style." They said if cubism was good for painters it was good for architecture and from it they produced an honest-to-God formula for building design: volume, regularity and structural articulation.

Hitchcock and Johnson, backed by the power and approval of the New York Museum of Modern Art, glorified and promoted an abstracted dehumanized architecture, and provided a formula which permitted anyone with a pair of scissors to produce a building design. That buildings produced by these formulas would all resemble each other in plan, structure, and vocabulary whether housing, hospital, school or corporate headquarters, gave their theory its acceptability. The theory of the "International Style," very much in the style of its time, sought and promoted uniformity. It also buried the invention and social promise of the modern architects from the preceding century.

In 1784 Ledoux proposed a functional water inspector's house at the source of the River Loire. As can be seen, the river was allowed to run through the house which was vaulted across the flow of the water. This is not a design from the classical orders.

With the same spirit of invention and interest in a new biology Ledoux in 1800 showed his design for the theater at Besancon literally as reflected in the eye of the beholder.

In 1825 Jeremy Bentham designed a Panopticon Building. This structure with its eight pie-shape rooms built around a central control core was described as ideal for prisons, mental hospitals and poor houses where a centralized control was essential. Early Goldberg.

A further development of this form became the Copenhagen prison in 1850. The Crystal Palace by Joseph Paxton while best known for its use of steel and glass in 185 was actually selected for the London exhibition because of its promised speed of construction through the use of prefabricated connections of the steel structure. Early Wachsman.

St. Pancras Station in London, 1863, more than one hundred years ago has no date for us. It might well be built today.

In October 1888 in Paris the Eiffel Tower base had been completed and the tower structure began. Its completion was six months later. This obviously marked not only an achievement in structural engineering and the use of steel but of construction engineering as well. And in 1893, the Ferris wheel.

Hitchcock and Johnson were not alone in trying to stifle creative and technological architecture with a formula of style. Hitler was opposed to the revolutionary threat of a new society symbolized by an inventive architecture and Speer proposed a political architecture that we could recognize today as post modern.

Albert Speer- Hitler's state architect said: "We must learn to master technology and its potential by political means." In contrast, modern architects of the 19th century all saw architecture as a reform mechanism for politics: that is, for helping solve social problems rooted in urban life and community needs, and for devising improved ways for people to work and learn and grow together.

All of these open social issues, these unfulfilled promises, remain from the original battle of modern architecture in the 19th century.

Speer, Porsche and Hitler thought they were solving some of these problems by controlling technology with politics.

Charlie Chaplin thought we weren't. (Movie: Modern Times)

This is what God could do if he only had money.

For serious modern architects in search of a corporate "International Style," Mark II, there is always something to look back to.

This is designed by the co-author of the "International Style."

This is our Marina City project which broke ground for a new city within the city of Chicago in 1960- 25 years ago. It is contrasted with the form of the IBM box designed by Mies about 15 years later in 1975.

Marina City was not a deliberate protest against the Bauhaus Box. It was designed rather as a further industrialization of architecture. I found in Detroit rather than in the Bauhaus that our technology for the first time in history permits us to build whatever we think. The Marina City forms were more efficient than the box- spatially, functionally and economically. On 1960, Marina City cost $10/square foot to build.

More importantly, in the Marina City forms. I made it possible for people to participate in community formation. Both in the use of space and in the form of space I discovered that behavior can be influenced by the shape of space. The faceless anonymity of the corporate box which we had used for the buildings for our government, our health, our education, our business and our living, I discovered could be replaced more effectively by a new development of architectural structure and forms that supported its use by people. We could have both architecture and humanism just as we had begun to do 200 years before in the social revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.