burnham, sullivan, roark, and the myth of the heroic architect

The Art Institute of Chicago

Burnham, Sullivan, Roark, and the Myth of the Heroic ArchitectAuthor(s): Ross MillerSource: Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1988), pp. 86-95Published by: The Art Institute of ChicagoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4115893 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 01:26

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Art Institute of Chicago is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Instituteof Chicago Museum Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.182 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 01:26:29 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=artic

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4115893?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Bumrnham, Sullivan, Roark, and the Myth of the Heroic Architect R 0 S S M I L L E R, University of Connecticut

HOWARD ROARK, as played by Gary Cooper (see fig. 1) in the movie version of The Foun-

tainhead, epitomized the myth of the architectural hero.' Tall, handsome, and poetic, he more than person- ified Ayn Rand's protagonist; in affect and pose, Cooper-as-Roark embodied the way a profession wished to be known. Rand's novel provided an often less-than-glamorous business with a kitsch identity that architects had fantasized but were too pious or self-con- scious to assert so unapologetically. Since the time of Daniel Burnham (1846-1912), this popular identity had grown closer and closer to the "professional" persona that architects spoke of in the privacy of their clubs or offices. While visionaries like Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) and Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) were thought to be Rand's models for Roark, it was Daniel Burnham whose career and attitude toward the profession completed a

FIGURE 1. Gary Cooper as architect Howard Roark in the 1949 movie "The Fountainhead," from the book by Ayn Rand. The character of Roark epitomizes the "myth" of the heroic architect-the entrepreneurial visionary. (Photo: courtesy of the author)

century-long process of myth-making that put the architect at the center of critical and social attention. The uneasy mix of petulance and solid entrepreneurial savvy in Howard Roark's character was an acknowledgment of Burnham's role in creating an enduring professional identity. Burnham combined the brilliance of a visionary with a businessman's will to get things done; Burnham appropriated the visionary heroic mode-as first ex- pressed by Thomas Jefferson (and later by Sullivan)- and grafted it onto the dominant business ethic of the day. In doing so, he revised the stance of heroic architecture without abandoning its seductive power to persuade clients and provide a positive image.

Burnham ended a long-standing confusion over what architects should be that began a century earlier with Jefferson's and Benjamin Latrobe's debate over architecture's proper role.2 At that time, the question was asked: Were American architects artists, tradesmen, or businessmen? Anyone, it seemed, including builders, carpen- ters, and bricklayers, could claim the title "architect."

The architect continued to excite the interest of writ- ers and critics. To the Concord intellectuals, he repre- sented a particularly American breed of artist.3 Praised for his technical skills-primarily the ability to build- and motivated by an interest in beauty, the American

87



An architect needs clients, but he does not subordinate his work to their wishes. They need him, but they do not order a house just to give him a commission .... An architect requires a

great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his

design. What he does with them is his individual product and his individual

property. This is the only pattern for proper cooperation among men. The first right on earth is the right of the

ego.

Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand



architect seemed to be ideally suited to meet the material needs of a developing country. Lacking the frequent phi- listinism of those who actually settled the nation, yet also residing outside the airy precincts of the European court or the revolutionary bohemianism of the garret, the architect was the nation's "hands-on" artist, creating beautiful objects-like clipper ships and balloon-frame houses-out of necessity and not out of some high- blown theory. He was an artist in the rough, as in Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself."4 The American architect's modern phase began with this essentially romantic definition by outsiders of who and what he was.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "The American Scholar" provided the theoretical basis that allowed architects to be viewed as more than a servant class. Origi- nally delivered as an address to Harvard's Phi Beta Kap- pa Society in the summer of 1837, the essay suggests that the audience of "men thinking" should reject book learning and the pomposities of the lectern and pulpit. This process, said Emerson, begins by first turning away from received wisdom and foreign influences; the Amer- ican scholar must learn through experience to combine thought and action in the making of art.

Henry David Thoreau later argued in Walden for the authentic over the "stylish." "Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense, he slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin-the architecture of the grave. . . ."5 While Emer- son exhorted architects as "American scholars" to re- make the land, Thoreau savaged them by reminding them of their vapidity. Between the ideal and the repri- mand lay something important to an inchoate profession: architects in America were for the first time taken seriously.

The artist Horatio Greenough (1805-1852) adapted Emerson's ideas in the form of a sharp critique of current architectural practices and developed a useful doctrine of his own. To distinguish between an indigenous national architecture and one imported wholesale from Europe, he argued-in the same language Sullivan would use at the century's end-that in America form should follow function. He maintained that America's design, as with all great design, would follow inductively from actual conditions and not from yellowed manuals of style. The nineteenth-century art critic James Jackson Jarves was not so hopeful. He declared, "Strictly speaking we have

88

no architecture. . . . The one intense, barren fact which stares us fixedly in the face is, that, were we annihilated tomorrow, nothing could be learned of us, as a dis- tinctive race, from our architecture."'6 The engineer Calvert Vaux (1824-1895) put the criticism in the form of a question: "There are the buildings, but where is the architecture?"7 The answer would not come from critics viewing the situation from the outside but from architects attempting to answer the question for themselves. Their answers were wedded to the definition and organization of their profession. From the beginning, this professional development created a conflict between what architects were and how they ideally wished to be seen.

By mid-century, the economics of development had changed sufficiently for architects to begin to charge on a percentage-of-commission basis. They first began to play a prominent public role during the final stages of Boston's nineteenth-century rebuilding, in work on the Back Bay after 1857. A similar phenomenon occurred in New York during the same period and in Chicago after the Fire in 1871. On institutional and professional levels, changes were made to solidify architecture's newly dis- covered prominence. The American Institute of Archi- tects (AIA) was founded in 1857 on the East Coast. Able to boast only a single chapter for its entire first decade, it was still a success. It stood in marked contrast to earlier attempts to organize, such as Ithiel Town's Academy of Fine Arts in New York, which could barely sustain two meetings between 1836 and 1837.8

But it was more than the improved economic climate that made the country accept architects. Led by Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895), a new breed of practitioner emerged that was as concerned with image as it was with design. Hunt, who was AIA president at its inaugural meeting, was the first American to study successfully at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. From a wealthy fam- ily, he enjoyed sufficient distance from the gritty making of money in America to be at ease in the Parisian role of artist-professional. Money in the French atelier system was considered a natural result of the production of Neoclassical architecture and not an end in itself. Hunt could personally afford this high-minded view of art which separated him so completely from the clamoring mob of developers he had left behind in the United States. When he returned to New York, he imported this mock-aristocratic stance without any of the pecuniary disadvantages of such noblesse oblige. He quickly established a highly profitable atelier that combined rigorous architectural apprenticeship with professional education.



The Myth of the Heroic Architect

FIGURE 2. View of the intersection of State and Madison streets following the

devastating Chicago Fire of 1871. Archi- tects quickly found themselves in great demand in rebuilding the city. (Photo:

courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society)

Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886), the second prominent American architect to have studied in Paris, settled in Boston, where he also combined office and studio to stress the virtues of collaboration in modern practice.

These innovations proved immediately successful, and firms like that of William Ware (1832-1915) and Henry Van Brunt (1832-1903) were founded on similar principles. They prospered on the East Coast and were soon the established professional model for firms throughout the country. In the same period, the nation's first architectural schools were founded-at the Massachusetts In- stitute of Technology (1865), Cornell University (1871), and the University of Illinois (1873)-each based in the French system of architectural education. American students were thus drawn to Europe. While their experiences bore no relationship to the idea of indigenous architecture endorsed by Emerson and others (only Richardson of this first professional generation broke significantly with Beaux-Arts conventions to accomplish his own architectural style), the permanent professional reordering that accompanied the development of this Europeanized establishment was more significant than any ephemeral debate over style. This stage in the professional development of American architects culmi- nated with Charles E McKim's (1847-1909) organization of the American Academy in Rome in 1897.

American architects received immediate professional respect by choosing established European stylistic identities and tailoring them to their needs. But while they may have solved their identity crisis, there was still something absurd about it all. The next stages in the development of the profession reflected responses to a specific disaster and a growing sensitivity to the pecu- liarities of the American urban condition in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Both Burnham's and

Sullivan's distinct versions of the role-or myth-of the American architect grew out of their experiences in the aftermath of the Chicago Fire.

The Chicago Fire had a direct effect upon the way architects came to view themselves. Even though their

FIGURE 3. View of the northeast corner of LaSalle and Lake streets in 1872. Chi- cago's rapid post-Fire resurrection was aided by the influx from the East of architects who transformed disaster into opportunity. (Photo: courtesy of the Chi- cago Historical Society)

89



WM. W. BOYINGTON,

ARCHITECT AND

SUPERINT ENDENT,

Nos. 87 AND 89 WASHINGTON STREET,

Room 1., Second Flocr, over U. S. Espress Company.

CHICAGO. ILLINOIS.

ARCHITECT FOR

,;. r.':, :. .'.'.:.

(: . . - ? ...-" ?

. :..., r:.,; ., ,

rH IH H

~ans, leauAions, ani orhing gramings

professional identities were secure when the Fire occurred in early October 1871, it was the city's rebuilding that consolidated professional gains fought for over decades. Firms became larger and more specialized, and their power was solidified as a system of general con- tracts began to replace the policy of negotiating sepa- rately with individual trades. Outside capital and the accelerated demand for building instantly put the Chi- cago architect at the profession's vanguard.

There was no small irony in this. Heretofore, Amer- ica's important architects looked to Europe for inspira- tion, and all the rest looked east to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Chicago had a remarkable history of

development from its Fort Dearborn days through two major spurts of growth during the 1830s and 1850s. At the time of the Fire, Chicago was still profiting from its

displacement of St. Louis as a railroad hub during the Civil War. But nothing had yet prepared the city for the material and artistic opportunities delivered by the catas-

trophe of the Fire. There had been other fires that equaled Chicago's in

terms of devastation, but even the city's own experience

FIGURE 4. Advertisement by William W. Boyington, architect, announcing his achievements in 1872 in the rebuilding of Chicago after the Fire. (Photo: Rebuilt Chicago [Chicago, 1874])

with destructive fires-five major incidents in the pre- vious twenty years, including a relatively confined blaze the day before the Fire-offered inadequate preparation for the impact of the event (see fig. 2). Statistics alone

carry a good deal of drama. Industrial Chicago re-

ported, "There were 61,000 buildings in the old city at the time of the fire. Of that number, 20,000 were de-

stroyed."9 Architects soon found themselves at the center of attention: they were suddenly in the best position to repair the city's damage and plan the future. Chicago at the time offered a heightened sense of action; there, architects not only encountered a vast physical waste- land awaiting reconstruction, but also a city eager to transform their efforts into the stuff of popular legend. As far as architects were concerned, the timing of the Fire was perfect. The profession needed the publicity that contact with an already-mythic event could bring.

A transformation occurred in the month following the Fire. The tales of human suffering that filled letters, di- aries, and newspapers reporting the immediate disaster were replaced by descriptions of individual enterprise. Purposeful action was given the highest value. Brooding over the past was replaced by a celebration of the newest land deal or biggest building under construction. The

journalist E B. Wilkie reflected this change of emphasis in his report "Among the Ruins." He subordinated con- cern for individuals to the city's appetite to rebuild, fuel-

ing this optimism by focusing intently on the future, finding everywhere signs of recovery: "Brick walls have risen like an exhalation from among their disorder, and whence the smoke struggled up sullenly and where the moon flung a pitying veil, there now thronged the tem-

porary structures which are the overture to Chicago's architectural resurrection."10

Architects would later claim a large measure of credit for this remarkable "resurrection" from desolation (see fig. 3). They and their army of workers had finished the

job of insuring order by restoring the urban grid. In the words of Alfred L. Sewell, another eyewitness to the Fire, Chicago immediately following the conflagration "was a dreadful wilderness of wasted and crumbled mag- nificence." A month later, Sewell reported considerable progress. He was "astonished to witness the change that

90




had already been wrought. . . . This great city, so lately a mass of smoldering and ghastly ruins, is destined to be a great city still. It will be rebuilt, more solidly and firmly than at first. Purified and instructed, as well as afflicted and humbled, this wonderful metropolis of the West is apparently destined to outshine in the near future its glory of the near past.""

Provincial architects, sometimes no more than builders in Benjamin Latrobe's terms, were now given a prominence never before imagined. For at least the first year after the Fire, veteran designers like John Van Osdel (1811-1891), Otto Matz (1830-1919), and William

W. Boyington (1818-1898) carried on most of the rebuilding for which architects were required (see fig. 4). This in- cluded Potter Palmer's improved State Street and much of the relocated business district in the Loop. However, the reconstruction would not remain a predominantly local affair. The concentration of philanthropic and in- vestment capital from the East, especially the Boston banks that remained the city's prime financial support until late in the century, guaranteed that Chicago's rela- tive social insularity would not continue. The early influx of talented outsiders (such as Van Osdel), suddenly made what went on in Chicago of critical importance to the architectural profession at large. Burnham joined John Root (1850-1891) in Peter Wight's (1838-1925) firm; Sullivan found work in the office of William Le Baron Jenney (1832-1907). They were joined by hun- dreds of others who gave the atmosphere of frantic rebuilding a national flavor. Architects were visible in a dramatic national event, and they were the most prominent personalities in a rapid series of occurrences that had transformed disaster into immediate opportunity.

Work at this scale could not be met by individual prac- titioners. The Fire's aftermath supplied evidence that the practice of architecture must be highly organized. En- couraged to retain at least a veneer of the romanticism of the atelier, Chicago's architects still had to be businessmen, like the fabled Eastern firm of McKim, Mead, and White. That firm first formulated the tripartite plan of partnership: an outside man to meet with clients, a production supervisor to see that work was completed, and a principal designer in whom all of architecture's art

FIGURE 5. Daniel H. Burnham and John Wellborn Root, c. 1890, in their office in

the Rookery, 209 South LaSalle Street, Chicago. Burnham and Root were the architects of this well-known building.

and excess was tolerantly left to reside. Sometimes the tripartite division became two, as in the cases of Adler and Sullivan, Burnham and Root, and Holabird and Roche; but the principles of consolidation and spe- cialization were fixed, having been tested by years of concentrated rebuilding in Chicago.

More than any other architect who experienced and profited from the aftermath of the Chicago Fire, Daniel Burnham understood the full implications this disaster had for American architecture. The office of Burnham and Root came to epitomize modern architectural practice (see fig. 5; see also Hines, pp. 96-105). A contemporary observed, "Here for the first time we saw a large, thoroughly equipped office. It impressed like a large manufacturing plant."'2 This observation was made around the time the Rookery (1885-87), Monadnock (1890-91), and Reliance (1895) buildings were con- structed, and as Burnham began the preliminary plans for the World's Columbian Exposition. Burnham and Root, later D. H. Burnham and Company, did for the modern office building what the dominant East Coast firms did for public and domestic architecture. Burnham

91



managed a great firm and orchestrated his partner's considerable design skills to create a positive image for his

primary client: the American businessman. In turn, this close identification with business and businessmen

shaped the image of architects. Sullivan noted the fact in his polemical Autobiography of an Idea: "During this

period [late 1880s and 1890s] there was well underway the formation of mergers, combinations, and trusts in the industrial world. The only architect in Chicago to

recognize the significance of this movement was Daniel Burnham, for in its tendency towards bigness, organization, delegation, and intense commercialism, he sensed the reciprocal workings of his own mind."'3 With the success of his firm, Burnham had completed a process begun by Hunt upon his return from Paris.

With the commercial buildings of the Loop and the

proposed White City on the lake, Burnham had created a way to express the architect's will. He was able to combine the appealing single-mindedness of Sullivan with the mock-aristocratic stance of East Coast architects like Stanford White (1853-1906), who built stylish establishment architecture. White, in the words of a

contemporary, "was full of whims and flashes, and ex-

pected his client to accept them as a sign of genius."'14 Like White's, Burnham's version of the architectural hero existed outside a particular ideology and became

simply an effective way to present oneself professionally. But there was something empty in all this self-satisfac-

tion. Sullivan suggested that Burnham's posturing as

Chicago's high priest of business was as ludicrous as Hunt posing in front of an easel like Cimabue. Archi- tects desired to distinguish themselves completely from

FIGURE 6. Frank Lloyd Wright, June 8, 1957. (Photo: Carmie Thompson)

other successful bourgeois. This was accomplished through grafting the legends of the few legitimate heroes

produced by the profession onto the vocation's natural, sturdy conservatism. The myth of the architectural hero was a hybrid, developing as a counter-myth to the real-

ity of the profession's own subservience to the market-

place. It would have remained a private fantasy if not for the Chicago Fire, which conveniently provided the nar- rative required to sustain at least one generation's exalted

image of itself. The emotional entry of architects into Chicago after

the Fire was not lost on Sullivan. He remembered the

city's "intoxicating rawness" at a time when "many ashes remained," and felt "a sense of big things to be done."'5 Observing the rebuilding, he understood that he was

witnessing something extraordinary that was beyond the

experience of architects who were not there; it was as if he were at the Fall of Rome and then asked to play a role in its reconstruction.

Burnham's conception of the heroic architect was chal-

lenged by what Sullivan believed to be buried in the ruins of Chicago. Physical rebuilding could only restore a part of the community's health. Chicago had also to re- member the nameless masses that made history along with the celebrated families like the Kinzies, Fields, and Palmers. Sullivan's idea of a "democratic architecture" was an ambitious attempt to include the anonymous Chi-

cagoans along with the city's more famous citizens. This initiative linked his own fortunes to the fate of the city.

Sullivan attempted nothing less than to redefine the nature of the profession-first in a series of articles, some of which appeared in Inland Architect, and later in the Auditorium Building and Carson Pirie Scott & Company Store. For Sullivan, architecture was not concerned with acceptance by businessmen but with lead-

ership. While other American architects looked to the Renaissance for acceptable models, Sullivan looked no further than H. H. Richardson. He saw in Richardson's Marshall Field Warehouse a building type that was direct and pragmatic, an architectonic distillation of an historic

type. So, too, in the work of Jenney and Root, Sullivan found a contemporary model. The importance of this was not only architectural. Psychologically, it freed Sul- livan from the tyranny of the past. He could now con- vincingly argue that he was living among giants: the he-

92




roic generation was no longer in the past. Sullivan was free to be his own authority.

Sullivan's actual success in building democratic "ema- nations of a people" must be judged dispassionately outside his own rhetoric and intentions. Frank Lloyd Wright (fig. 6), first as Sullivan's apprentice and later as a self-appointed keeper of the myth, made it clear that his liebermeister's success or failure was not to be evaluated using accepted professional criteria. There is something perverse about this. Architectural language is necessarily precise, particularly in the working drawings needed to make a complex building. Habituated to precision, Wright here chose a vague way to to express what Sul- livan did. Wright saw his former employer trying a new professional identity that, to him, seemed infinitely more poetic and rich than the accustomed talk of his trade. The modern version of the architectural hero, associated at the time with Burnham, had him professional and responsible. This attitude was directly contradicted by the idea-held by Wright and, apparently, by Sul- livan-that architects could never be fully known and that their work would remain larger than life and re- moved. Wright argued that Sullivan's contribution was greatest because it was ineffable. In Genius and the Mobocracy, Wright concluded, "In the heart of him he [Sullivan] was of infinite value to the countrymen who wasted him not because they would: but because they could not know him."'16

Here was the paradox: the visionary hero, claiming to have the people in mind, possessed such an advanced talent that he could not be appreciated in his own time. The very disenfranchised individuals for whom Sullivan thought he built flocked instead to Burnham's Neo- classical White City to seek their architectural "emana- tion." Wright's Genius and the Mobocracy is both a eu- logy to Sullivan as conquered hero and a settling of blame, not only on the architectural establishment that Sullivan named in his Autobiography of an Idea, but on the people of Chicago. Wright's personal assessment of architectural professionalism was just as direct: "I am branded as an 'Artist' architect, and so under suspicion by my countrymen-and especially as I have been an 'insurgent' in private life as well as in my work; and my hair is not short nor my clothes so utterly conventional as to inspire confidence in the breast of the good Amer- ican Business Man that I am a good 'business proposi- tion.' "17

The people had made their choice and so had the profession. Any heroic myth was fine as long as it did not

interfere with business. In the winter of 1885, at the first meeting of the Illinois State Association of Architects (ISAA), Dankmar Adler (1844-1900) sounded more practical than his impetuous partner Sullivan. Adler agi- tated for state licensing and reform of the federal con- tract system for hiring architects. At this same inaugural session, Burnham urged code changes and alterations in the rules governing competitions. Both he and Adler had their eyes fixed on maintaining a proper commercial persona and nothing more dramatic than being taken seriously as businessmen. Adler proclaimed, "I believe in a business community like this, it is a body that appears to have money that is respected."18 There is no echo here of Sullivan's spiritual invocation of a people and a culture seeking architectural expression. Adler's concerns were more fundamental. He knew that architects would not share the fruits of American prosperity until they demonstrated an "ability to earn money."19 Once indepen- dent and radical, the ISAA joined the federated AIA in 1887, a year after Chicago's Haymarket riots. This turn toward conservatism, championed by Burnham and en-

thusiastically endorsed by Adler and the other delegates, defined architecture more accurately than any of Sullivan and Wright's more poetic discourses.

This struggle for professional identity would seem to have come to a natural conclusion at the end of the nineteenth century. Burnham's architectural organization of the World's Columbian Exposition insured that it was a grand cultural and commercial success (see Hines, pp. 96-105; fig. 10). For architects it was a playful time when they could show off their technical prowess free of any of the nastier constraints of architecture. The Fair was a grand stage set along the lake, like Burnham's ambitious Chicago Plan of 1909 (see p. 122, pl. 5). People would never live in either city. They were dreamscapes, like the theater, where visitors could associate architecture with release and momentary freedom.

This building activity had less happy memories to hold for architects who remembered an earlier time of frantic construction. Sullivan put it in a characteristically impassioned way: "We are at that dramatic moment in our national life wherein we tremble evenly between de- cay and evolution, and our architecture, with strange fidelity, reflects this equipoise."20 Architects might, for

purpose of social prestige and money, pass themselves off as simply another group of successful professionals, but it was hard to lose the sense, reinforced by vivid memories, that (not too long before) architecture was something much more.

93



FIGURE 7. The publication in 1910 of the Wasmuth Portfolio in Germany introduced European architects to the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright's influence is clearly visible in the work at near left by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Far left: Page 80 of the Wasmuth Portfolio (Berlin, 1910; reprint 1919) showing the Heath house in Buffalo, New York, by Wright. Near left: Mies van der Rohe. Leibknecht-Luxemburg Monument, 1926, Berlin. (Photo: Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe [Chicago, 1985], p.126)

In conclusion, it is useful to follow the myth to the present time. So complete was Burnham's corporate re- vision of the profession that Sullivan's and Wright's visionary language would have remained only a memory of a more dramatic time had it not been for the immigra- tion of European architects in the 1930s-most notably Walter Gropius (1883-1969) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969). Like the British pop groups during the 1960s returning black music to America in a sanitized form, Gropius and Mies delivered the American architect's own heroic pose home. They, like many European artists of their generation, were influenced by Amer- icans, especially by Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio of 1910 (see fig. 7).21 By the late 1930s, Harvard University and the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) boasted Euro- pean leadership. Bringing forms of modern romanticism cultivated in the Bauhaus, these Europeans were in a unique position to reintroduce American architects to the myth of the hero. Once again architectural heroism was associated with failure, but this time at the hands of the Nazis. The heroic stance, which had fueled the rebuilding of Chicago and now was employed in the search for a humanistic design in Germany, was emptied of substance. It became pure affect and, especially in the case of Mies, defied criticism. Where Burnham, Sul- livan, and the other American modernists were verbose, Mies was sullen and taciturn (see fig. 8). He can be remembered seated silently in Crown Hall at IIT, smok- ing a cigar, poised for an audience.

Architects continued to profess an interest in society and the larger role of their art, but the postwar building boom allowed them to build without constraint or commitment to such goals. There were notable exceptions to the dominant style. In Chicago, Harry Weese, Walter Netsch, and Bertrand Goldberg were the first architects to question a dominant Miesian ideology. Stanley Tiger- man (see p. 128, pl. 15), with an initially rag-tag opposi- tion in the 1970s, followed later and made similar points in their polemics and built work. Curiously, both pro- and anti-Miesians held on to the heroic myth, with only differences in style to distinguish them.

Regardless of ideology, architects after World War II took themselves seriously as thinkers. Gropius and Richard Neutra (1892-1970) wrote long, impenetrable volumes about the responsibility of architects, while the Mies clones, following the lead of the master, maintained cool silence or made an occasional cosmic comment. Louis Kahn's (1901-1974) architecture bore no re- semblance to Mies's, but his presentation of self was the same; he simply used a more romantic "less is more" credo on those rare occasions when he chose to speak publicly about his work (using interpreters like Vincent Scully to explain his ideas to an audience22).

At the present moment, talk about architecture bears little or no relationship to the state of the urban environ- ment. The myth of the architect as hero is there for anyone to claim, from student architects in editorials in

Perspecta, to an interior designer showing a loft renova-

94



tion in any of a dozen "shelter" magazines. But the most improbable, yet creative, transformation of the myth has been in Chicago, where huge corporate firms, beyond the imaginings of the Hunts and McKims, have meta- morphosed into a single identity. Skidmore Owings & Merrill-a clever transformation of the many into one, e pluribus unum-allows the firm to employ an heroic rhetoric to the press and the more reassuring drone of corporate language to its clients.

We are at a critical time when we have enough distance from the original heroic event of the Fire and its strange double in public policy generated by the building boom after World War II to evaluate the myth of heroic architect. Fundamentally rooted in history, the myth has been dug up, stripped of its commitment to a socially responsible architecture, and used to defend any excess or whim.

Like all myths, this one rests precariously between truth and imagination, an attempt to create through language what one is not reckless enough to do in fact. Studying the heroic myth in architecture reveals a permanent compulsion to reach beyond respectability and toward something more problematic and at least poten- tially ennobling. For it is in myth that the future is tested and the present transformed. Only when a myth is em- braced unconsciously or substituted belligerently for the truth does it become dangerous, as demonstrated by Howard Roark's statement at his trial (see p. 86 above) after purposefully destroying the collectivist Cortlandt Homes. In Ayn Rand's world, the architect-god re- shapes materials from their raw state into something ex- pressive of the self. Roark's speech works in The Foun- tainhead, but not in life. He is acquitted and at the novel's end is designing the world's tallest building. In such manic flights between professional obligation and visionary schemes does the heroic myth continue to be fueled.

Unable to pass the entrance exams for Harvard or Yale, Daniel Burnham came to Chicago without the establishment architectural education expected of his generation. Burnham's school was the city after the Fire, where he learned to combine the wildness inherent in his nature with a certain social wisdom. In Chicago, Burn- ham maintained an adventurous edge that proved essen- tial for the fast pace of rebuilding. His first biographer, Charles Moore, said of him, "He was never so much of a businessman that he was not also an artist. He felt as an artist, thought as an artist, and when he came up against

FIGURE 8. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, c. 1965. (Photo: courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society)

his limitations in knowledge or as a creator, he never failed to recognize those qualities in others."23 In the two decades between the Fire and the Fair, Burnham demonstrated the qualities that were thought to define the working artist. He reassured those with money interested in investing in Chicago that architects were not, by their nature, necessarily hostile to the successful businessman. Burnham himself combined the qualities of dull "good sense" for business-which got great architecture like the Rookery, Monadnock, Reliance, Mills, and Flatiron buildings built across the country-with an artist's intuition of what needs to be done and how.

Burnham's version of the architectural hero now finds itself in less academic favor than that of visionaries like Wright and Sullivan, who have been incorporated and confused with the same men they violently opposed in their own day. But there is something original in both kinds of American artists. Chicago immediately after the Fire supported and inspired both to practice side by side. Only later, in our century, has rhetoric so displaced the heroic action it pretends to describe, that any gesture beyond the predictable becomes a source of automatic revulsion or exaggerated praise. Howard Roark was Ayn Rand's creation, but in the actual careers of the major Chicago architects she could find real precedents. Daniel Burnham and the other architects who rebuilt Chicago made architecture visible to an entire society that was previously ignorant of what architects did. Burnham's

special contribution was to offer a safe model for the American architect who was interested in staying a step ahead of the new patron class of businessmen and entre- preneurs who saw their future fame and reputation sus- tained in the buildings they commissioned.

95



burnham, sullivan, roark, and the myth of the heroic architect

Documents