Crystal Palace Syndrome: Modern architecture's first booboo

My adopted German homeland is currently celebrating the centennial of Walter Gropius's first major building, the Faguswerk, a 1911 shoe last factory in Alfeld am Leine. UNESCO has likewise declared this structure part of the World's Cultural Heritage. Its "pioneering" glass façade curtain wall was described as "a Palace for the Worker."

As a Depression-era native of Detroit whose postwar GI Bill had run out, I was happy to work three summers in auto factories to finance my Ph.D. But, mind you, there were no palaces.

Indeed, the leading designer of the first automobile factories, Albert Kahn, became my ideal architect from an early age (three!) because my Uncle Dan identified him as the designer of the Art Deco Fisher Building in midtown Detroit, with its illuminated nighttime golden crown.

He mocked Gropius

Later, in graduate school, I learned that Kahn, the first of six children of a Jewish rabbi, came to Detroit at age 11 in 1880. Kahn never even finished high school, not to even think about architecture school. Indeed, he was so gifted a designer that in 1891 his bosses at Detroit's leading architecture firm sent him to Europe for a year to polish his skills by studying Europe's architectural heritage.

Eventually, Kahn became Henry Ford's architect and the leading factory designer of the 20th Century. Kahn mocked Gropius's ambitions. He knew from experience that a good factory was no worker's palace but a structure specifically designed to facilitate the mass production of certain products.

Each factory was designed from the ground floor up. The roof was then designed to control light in that process. Facile facadism was thus an egregious architectural error. Kahn called the Bauhaus in general the "Glass House boys"— an astute perception of Modernism's first great stumble.

Great for ogling

That stumble began in 1851 when Great Britain celebrated its domination of industrial production with the first World's Fair in London. To attract attention and simultaneously provide a convenient structure for huge crowds to ogle global achievements, the fair's organizers devised the Crystal Palace, utilizing the newly accessible materials of glass, iron (later steel) and cement. Our first generation of "modern" architects mistakenly adopted this triple ploy of materials in ways that defeated the buildings' stated purposes.

Take the Dessau Bauhaus designed by Gropius and Ernst Neufert, which opened to much praise in 1926. The American architect Philip C. Johnson exclaimed in 1929 that it was the greatest modern building he'd seen so far, as he cruised Europe looking for examples of what he called "The International Style."

Sure, the Dessau Bauhaus provided great images for the new Leica pros who were then making a new modern art of photography. But ask the professors and their students. Too much glass! Sweat in the summer and freeze in the winter! They hated the way it worked on them.

Mies as social climber

Or take Mies van der Rohe, who as an Aachen mason's son always ranked Number Two to Gropius's upper class provenance. (Gropius's great uncle, Martin Gropius, was the last great pre-modern German architect.) As assistant to the really great Peter Behrens (whose luminous Berlin Turbine Hall of 1910 contained practically no glass), Mies had to report to Gropius, and he hated it!

Mies believed that if he created great art, he would achieve the status for which he so hungered. Bad idea: Reaching for the stars only messed up his work.

For example, in 1927 Mies organized the experimental Weissenhof community outside Stuttgart by gathering 17 great or promising world architects. The proto-feminist Dr. Marie-Elizabeth Lüders criticized his apartments for their excess of glass, which she said endangered the health of crawling babies. And did I mention that the wind blew out the gas stove when you opened the kitchen door? Corbusier's flats for the same experiment were abandoned to service as a visitor center— that is, a building where nobody lived— because the concrete was uncongenial for habitation.

Angry girlfriend

Mies's Barcelona Pavilion (1928) also used excess glass, but Mies was forgiven, because that visual wonder attracted visitors to that city's World Exposition.

As late as 1950, Mies repeated the same mistakes. The weekend residence he designed for his Chicago physician girlfriend contained much too much glass— so much that she sued him in court for excess energy costs. (She lost the case. And Mies lost the girlfriend.) Years later, as several tenants declared that home uninhabitable, it too was given the "ignominy" of reduction to a Visitor's Center.

Philip C. Johnson's "Architecture is for Art" mantra corrupted American commercial architectural for a century. Now the Museum of Modern Art's latest architecture exposition concedes his mistake. Ironically, Johnson created his own Crystal Palace in Connecticut, Mies mocked it as resembling a hot dog stand at night.

Plague of leaky roofs

Glass addiction wasn't Modernism's only bad habit. Those early traveling architects marveled at the flat roofs of Morocco and sought to emulate them. Their foolish abandonment of the gable— the greatest design breakthrough since our ancestors abandoned caves— has made leaking roofs a plague of modernist architecture.

No genius completely avoids these original sins of Modernism. Corbusier's first modern building was a home for his parents in Vevey, Switzerland, adjoining Lac Leman. Alas, Corbu was unfamiliar with the effects of temperature changes on concrete, and his folks' building was soon afflicted cracks. Corbu made do with aluminum sheaths.

Yes, yes— every new human adventure makes mistakes. But try living or working in them.

Incidentally, I was motivated to live in Weimar, Germany when I learned in graduate school that Gropius wanted to use art and technology to make good design accessible to the masses. As a former member of that exploited working class, I said: Count me in! But working stiffs no longer need palaces. Strong unions, decent pay and universal health care will suffice, thanks just the same.