You cannot not know history

By Temple Ligon

 

This Monday, May 4, at 4:00 p.m. in USC’s Cooper Library, a lecture on the architectural work of Lyles Bissett Carlisle and Wolff (LBC&W) will be given by Janie Campbell. The presentation will be followed by tours given by students in Lydia Brandt’s architecture seminar at the University of South Carolina.

When WWII ended, many economists were warning of the possibility of a recession, the fall-off in business trends due to the drop in demands for goods and services from what was a war economy. Around 1948 here in Columbia began LBC&W, an architecture and engineering firm kicking off the practice with the airport passenger terminal in San Juan, Puerto Rico. LBC&W thrived in the post-war era, becoming by 1970 a firm of 300 employees with three offices. The headquarters stayed in Columbia, and branch offices located in Raleigh and Washington. But the firm couldn’t get through the 1974-75 recession, the one caused by the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and its price hikes, even with an incredible track record of government work across the state.

According to Osceola, a Columbia-based alternative weekly dedicated to investigative journalism, LBC&W scored a super majority of state government architecture commissions for the decade 1960-1970, but then the firm shut down in the mid-1970s.

As good as LBC&W’s work had been for that whole decade, something was missing in that the buildings all pretty much looked alike, as they should coming out of the same office. LBC&W was something of a local reinterpretation of what architecture firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM) was doing in New York and Chicago: Homage to architect Mies van der Rohe, designer of the Seagram Building on New York’s Park Avenue and home of the Four Seasons Restaurant. SOM was so dedicated to following Mies the firm came to be known as “Three Blind Mies.”

Through the ‘60s most design firms in the country were still building their Brave New World, the certainty of the triumph of modernism and the avoidance of symbolism and decoration and any sense of history. Very few of the design architects knew or even cared to know a whole lot about architectural history.

Architect Philip Johnson, who went to architecture school at Harvard a little late, was already an established architectural historian and the director of the architecture and design department for the Museum of Modern Art when he enrolled in architecture school. Point being, he was probably the most history-conscious design student the faculty had seen in the 20C. Still, Johnson became famous in 1949 for his brutally modern glass house in New Canaan, Conn., his contribution to the Brave New World and his full-blown homage to Mies van der Rohe.

Having partnered with Mies van der Rohe on the Seagram Building, a modern monolith occupied in 1959, and having individually designed the interior of the building’s ground-floor tenant, the Four Seasons Restaurant, Johnson was in demand as a lecturer. He would come into the classroom or lecture hall and immediately put on the chalkboard, “You cannot not know history.”

The whole country began to shift more attention to architectural history by the mid-‘60s. The turning point, which was not necessarily recognized at the time as such, was a book by architect Robert Venturi, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” 1966.

Venturi was a hotshot architectural design graduate from Princeton, and he had his run of Rome while attending to studies at the American Academy. He met his wife architect Denise Scott Brown in 1960 and they married in 1967. As published intellectuals they attracted considerable attention and job offers to teach followed, which they accepted while they chased significant commissions. The big commissions were slow in coming, probably because the two were too thoughtful and too difficult to understand during boardroom presentations.

Venturi admitted he was not all that great of a writer, but he mostly wrote instead of designed because he had a hard time scoring design commissions.

As Venturi put it in 1973 while he tried to explain his lack of commissions, “The other reason is that our architecture is, evidently, hard to take, especially for many other architects. I don’t understand why, but we irritate architects very much… For instance, we like to look at the existing landscape and go on from there, looking at it nonjudgmentally at first. This horrifies architects very much, because they’ve been saying all along that everything is all wrong…But, of course, our buildings in another sense are extraordinary, extra-ordinary. Although they look ordinary, they are not ordinary at all, but are, we hope, very sophisticated architecture designed very carefully, from each square inch to the total proportions of the building. Literary critics have known about this all along, that is, about the use of… common, everyday language which makes the literature of Eliot and Joyce, for instance, extra-ordinary. This is a widely-used method in all art, and it is well-known, except, apparently, to architects.”

Try saying that to the school board, the church building committee or to a private real estate development project manager in 1973. Tough job. But it is interesting to see Venturi’s practice take off about the time LBC&W shut down, all in the mid-1970s.

In 1972, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown came out with another challenge for architects in their book, “Learning from Las Vegas.” Taking a design studio from Yale to Las Vegas, the professors wanted the kids to appreciate America and what America had and what America did better than anybody. “Main Street is almost all right,” they said.

According to “The Ohio Review”:

“Venturi has written a dangerous book… It inverts the ideas that many have based their professional lives upon. It threatens those things that we use to distinguish the difference between us, the cultured, and them, the vulgar. It is difficult to accept the idea of the citizens of our ‘know-nothing culture’ knowing more about the world they live in than the trained cultured architect and their insolence in preferring it.”

In the ‘80s Venturi had an agent in Columbia, you might say, in the USC campus architect, Princeton architecture graduate Dave Rinker. Venturi and Denise Scott Brown were invited by Rinker to come down to meet Rinker’s boss Jim Holderman, president of USC, and to survey the Vista for planning possibilities and to consider the design commission for the Koger Center.

This might be a case of starchitect lust, but Columbia could use an occasional world-class figurehead of an architect every now and then, something like what Darla Moore did with her architect on the new business school building. Columbia had its opportunity worked out by Venturi and Rinker as far as Rinker could take it, but Columbia went its own way. At the Columbia Museum of Art there was some starchitect interest, but Columbia stayed Columbia.

On Pendleton Street the National Advocacy Center designed by Yale dean Robert Stern worked out well as an example of how the guest designer and associated locals can get the job done, in this case Watson Tate Savory on Washington Street.

Venturi was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1991. The Pritzker family members in Chicago were probably best known as the owners of Hyatt Hotels. They owned a lot else. They put together the Pritzker Prize as something of an architecture equivalent of the Nobel. Beginning in 1979 and beginning with first winner Philip Johnson, the Pritzker is awarded to the best living architect in the world who has not already won.

Venturi came out in direct response to what Mies had been saying and designing since the ‘20s. Mies died in 1969, but his Seagram Building, fortunately, will be there on Park Avenue for a long time to come.

Venturi’s work, especially the house he did for his mother, 1961-64, is recognized as the force behind the beginning of the post-modern movement. Two years ago on a PBS series, “10 Buildings that Changed America,” Venturi’s mother’s house was among the 10. Venturi’s later work grew in scale and prominence. Take London’s National Gallery, for instance, a grand contextual work overlooking Trafalgar Square.

With one eye on what could have happened with Venturi’s Koger Center and another eye on what did happen with LBC&W’s Cornell Arms (1949), USC Coliseum (1969), and the State Capitol Complex (1970s), all with architectural indebtedness to Mies van der Rohe, attend the illustrated lecture by Janie Campbell on Monday, May 4, at 4:00 p.m. in USC’s Cooper Library.

 

 

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