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5GORdOn bunshaft 4/59 west 57th stReet, new yORk (1971–1974) : Il GRattacIelO “a zaMpa d’elefante”nicholas adams

12—47aRte, RIceRca, tecnOlOGIa

13caRMe pInósescOla Massana, centRO d’aRte e dIseGnO, baRcellOna, spaGna

14nel centRO MutevOle della cIttàJuan José lahuerta

28knOche aRchItektenlabORatORI dell’IstItutO dI tecnOlOGIa aMbIentale, esslInGen, GeRManIa

29funzIOne e aMbIenteaugusta Man

38dIlleR scOfIdIO + RenfROROy and dIana vaGelOs educatIOn centeR, cOluMbIa unIveRsIty, new yORk, statI unItI

39un edIfIcIO dOve l’InsIeMe Muta la natuRa delle paRtI Massimil iano savorra

44l’effIcIenza della pROGettazIOne stRuttuRaleMatthew Melrose e anthony saby

48—83OutROs aRquItectOs nO pORtOa cura di el isa pegorin

50pORtO: uMa ManeIRa de seR pORtuGalelisa pegorin

54nunO MelO sOusa + huGO feRReIRaOh! pORtO apaRtMents,vIla nOva de GaIa, 2015 el isa pegorin

58baRbOsa & GuIMaRães aRquItectOsnuOvO edIfIcIO ÁGuas dO pORtO, pORtO, 2016 elisa pegorin

61JOãO paulO lOuReIRORecupeRO dI casa dRaGãO,pORtO, 2016 el isa pegorin

65nunO bRandãO cOstaRecupeRO e aMplIaMentO dI una casa nel MInhO, MelGaçO, 2016elisa pegorin

68luIsa penhaRecupeRO della ResIdenza Rua bela, pORtO, 2016 Marco Mulazzani

70luIsa penhaRecupeRO della ResIdenza duas pORtas, pORtO, 2017Marco Mulazzani

74seRÔdIO, fuRtadO & assOcIadOs aRquItectOsRIqualIfIcazIOne e aMplIaMentO dI una scuOla, pOnte de lIMa, 2017Marco Mulazzani

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9 West 57th Street, New York (1971–1974): il grattacielo “a zampa d’elefante”Nicholas Adams

Conosciuto anche come solow Building, l’edificio che sorge al 9 di West 57th street è uno dei più controversi tra quelli progettati da Gordon Bunshaft nella sua lunga carriera. I newyorkesi lo chiamano the ski-slope building (la pista da sci) o the building with the bell-bottom pants (l’edificio con i pantaloni a zampa d’elefante) e lo riconoscono dall’impo-nente numero 9 in acciaio rosso realizzato da Ivan Cherma-yeff, orientato a est verso Fifth Avenue. A volte viene asso-ciato con il suo fratello minore, il W.r. Grace Building (1114 di Avenue of the Americas) che sorge su 42nd street di fronte a Bryant Park (1971–74). Le due facciate ideate da Bunshaft nello stesso periodo sono le uniche davvero ri-curve di tutta la città. Benché unanimemente riconosciuto come il migliore dei due, il 9 di West 57th street è anche l’e-dificio che incrinò la buona reputazione di Bunshaft1.

Nell’estate del 1972 Gordon Bunshaft fu oggetto di un lusinghiero articolo pubblicato dal «New york times Maga-zine». Intitolato The Establishment’s architect-plus, era un brillante resoconto della vita e della carriera dell’architetto e del suo lungo rapporto professionale con soM. Malgrado i riferimenti allo spirito di squadra e i ripetuti elogi, da parte di Bunshaft, dei soci e dei collaboratori dello studio nel corso dell’intervista, il giornalista concludeva comunque af-fermando che la vera star dello studio era Bunshaft: in pra-tica soM era inimmaginabile senza di lui. L’articolo sottoli-neava inoltre come nei vent’anni precedenti lo studio avesse «realizzato a New york molti più edifici eccellenti di qualsiasi altro architetto o studio professionale» e come l’autore di quei progetti fosse Gordon Bunshaft. All’epoca della pubblicazione dell’articolo era stato da poco annun-ciato l’incarico che sembrava segnare l’apice di quella stra-ordinaria carriera: soM e Bunshaft avrebbero progettato l’imponente Convention Center a ovest della 11th Avenue a

Midtown. La struttura di quasi 162.000 metri quadrati avrebbe scavalcato la West side highway fino al fiume hudson. Bunshaft era comprensibilmente eccitato. era stanco di progettare torri di uffici: «In fondo sono solo spazi impersonali da affittare», osservò, dimenticando, a quanto pare, che parlava del suo stesso lavoro. «Mi piace l’architet-tura che può essere guardata senza piegarsi all’indietro». Pur non di meno, usò termini positivi per la nuova torre che stava progettando al 9 di West 57th street e per descrivere il suo cliente sheldon h. solow. «un uomo molto intelli-gente», disse, «difficile… ma ci tiene molto a realizzare un bell’edificio, uno di cui possa essere orgoglioso». Per quanto alla fine dell’articolo il giornalista preannunciasse l’arrivo di una nuova corrente guidata da robert Venturi che avrebbe presto detronizzato il modernismo di Bunshaft, dal punto di vista delle relazioni pubbliche l’intervista rappre-sentava un momento molto alto della fama di Bunshaft a New york2.

Meno di un anno dopo, Ada Louise huxtable, stimata critica d’architettura del «New york times», usò toni meno adulatori. Nella sua recensione del 9 di West 57th street –il «bell’edificio» di Bunshaft e solow– intitolata Anti-Street, Anti-People, rimproverò Bunshaft e tutto lo studio soM: «Ma allora cosa è andato storto? Perché qualcosa non ha funzionato con soM, anche se dire una cosa del genere è un po’ come attaccare il Papa. tuttavia, ciò che sostengono i professionisti in privato e ciò che si dovrebbe affermare in pubblico è che c’è stata un’evoluzione dei bisogni e della fi-losofia della progettazione che in qualche modo è stata ignorata da questo studio. Inoltre, gli edifici di soM, co-stantemente attenti alla qualità, sono sempre più all’origine di una persistente e monumentale forma di abuso ambien-tale che ingenera crescenti preoccupazioni critiche».

Gordon Bunshaft4 5

1 —9 West 57th street, dettaglio del fronte su 58th street con la trave al livello inferiore—9 West 57th Street, 58th Street side showing the lower level beam

2—9 West 57th street, il grattacielo nello skyline di Midtown Manhattan, sullo sfondo Central Park—9 West 57th Street, the skyscraper at in the Midtown Manhattan skyline, with Central Park in the background

3—lo skyline di Midtown Manhattan visto da nord con il grattacielo 9 West 57th street—the Midtown Manhattan skyline seen from the north, with the skyscraper at 9 West 57th Street

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simili), sia la pressione delle ambiziose nuove leve dello stu-dio SOM di Chicago (Bruce Graham e Walter Netsch), i gio-vani che aveva comandato a bacchetta quando facevano pratica con i progetti della Air Force Academy di Colorado Springs (Netsch, 1954–62) e dell’Inland Steel di Chicago (Graham e Netsch, 1955–58). Graham aveva realizzato l’Hancock Center di Chicago (1965–70), il suo grattacielo iconico, un obelisco tronco con le vetrate nere e la struttura a vista che aveva conquistato l’attenzione della critica e del pubblico. Anche la Sears Tower (1971–73) era in via di co-struzione. Per ottenere un risultato simile, Bunshaft aveva bisogno di un costruttore-imprenditore audace come Jerry Wolman, che aveva promosso il progetto dell’Hancock Center. Solow poteva essere l’uomo giusto, il tipo di cliente pragmatico ed esigente per il quale Bunshaft riusciva a dare il meglio di sé. A proposito del rapporto con Solow, l’architetto osservava: «Io contrattacco. Mi piace essere un bastardo».

Bunshaft propose quello che definì un grattacielo “a zampa d’elefante” –un particolare d’abbigliamento diven-tato di moda proprio in quegli anni– vale a dire un paralle-lepipedo ricurvo e svasato. L’edificio rispettava i complessi regolamenti newyorchesi sulla zonizzazione relativi alle quantità adeguate di aria e luce che dovevano arrivare in strada evitando sia l’antiquata soluzione “a torta nuziale” (una scelta mai presa in considerazione) sia la convenzio-nale torre modernista. Il progetto inoltre faceva il massimo uso degli spazi interni in un contesto in cui ogni metro qua-drato corrispondeva a dollari d’affitto: il 9 di West 57th Street disponeva di quasi 140.000 metri quadrati di spazio per uffici.

La costruzione dell’edificio attirò anche l’attenzione della stampa. In un articolo su «Fortune Magazine» il gior-

nalista Walter McQuade osservò che costretto nella «gab-bia delle norme di zonizzazione» Bunshaft stava cambiando il proprio «stile spigoloso per dare ai suoi edifici una forma più voluttuosa […] La sua attuale propensione è quella di curvare verso l’esterno la parte inferiore delle facciate sem-pre nel rispetto delle regole di arretramento». McQuade ci-tava poi la tipica osservazione tranchant di Bunshaft ri-guardo al problema: «Non sono neppure sicuro che gli edi-fici di uffici siano architettura. In realtà si tratta solo di cal-coli matematici, investimenti in tre dimensioni… Secondo me le leggi di zonizzazione di questa città hanno fatto più danni di qualsiasi dannato architetto»7. Come nel caso della Lever House (1952), la sua soluzione radicale per il 9 di West 57th Street infrangeva le convenzioni di New York.

La torre ricurva non vantava una lunga storia ma aveva già un significativo precedente recente8. A Chicago, l’edifi-cio di sessanta piani “a zampa di elefante” della First Natio-nal Bank (1964–69), firmato da C.F. Murphy con Perkins & Will, era diventato al suo completamento il più alto della città. Si trattava di una torre libera che occupava un solo isolato. Come spiegava l’architetto C. William Brubaker (1926–2002): «Volevamo progettare qualcosa che non fosse né una copia di un edificio di Mies né un’imitazione di ciò che andava per la maggiore in Europa o negli Stati Uniti». Il progetto di Brubaker rispondeva alla necessità della banca di poter disporre di un vastissimo piano libero destinato agli uffici per il trattamento degli assegni. «Ciò che abbiamo tentato di fare è stato analizzare un nuovo ge-nere di problema per trovare una nuova soluzione. Penso che ci siamo riusciti»9. La soluzione di Bunshaft prendeva in prestito il profilo del grattacielo di Chicago ma non aveva alcuna giustificazione funzionalista: il 9 di West 57th Street si limitava a massimizzare lo spazio da dare in locazione,

Qualcuno definiva SOM “arrogante”, proseguiva Huxta-ble. Per lei, tuttavia, si trattava «di un semplice caso di ar-teriosclerosi delle idee architettoniche». Malgrado ciò, le sue conclusioni erano spietate: «Oggi, il perfezionismo della serie “fagli mangiare travertino” di Gordon Bunshaft, il grande divo di SOM, rasenta spesso una sorta di agguer-rita antiumanità». Il 9 di West 57th Street e il suo gemello di 42nd Street sono «sberle in faccia alla città. Esprimono uno sdegnato rifiuto nei confronti della strada e sono tremen-damente impacciati nei rapporti con i loro vicini, distur-bando (nel caso del 9 di West 57th Street) in modo aggres-sivo lo skyline visto da Central Park South»3. Si trattava di commenti pungenti espressi da una critica che in passato aveva sostenuto Gordon Bunshaft e SOM. Cosa aveva pro-vocato l’inatteso rimprovero?

Sheldon H. Solow è una leggenda del settore immobi-liare di New York. Nato nel 1929, è figlio di Isaac, un mano-vale e poi costruttore di successo attivo a Brooklyn. Ridotti sul lastrico dalla Grande Depressione, padre e figlio entra-rono insieme in affari nel 1952 realizzando, con un prestito di 592.000 dollari, un complesso di appartamenti a Brook-lyn chiamato Sheldon Gardens.

Successivamente il giovane Solow costruì case, edifici di appartamenti e un centro commerciale a Long Island. Nel 1962 si trasferì a Manhattan dove costruì un edificio di ap-partamenti (al 501 di East 87th Street), il primo con i cami-netti dai tempi della guerra. L’impresa successiva fu il 9 di West 57th Street, dove la sfida era rappresentata dal Gene-ral Motors Building di cinquanta piani, progettato da Edward Durell Stone e completato nel 1968, sito all’angolo tra Fifth Avenue e 58th Street. La torre monumentale di Stone, con il suo quotidiano esercito di pendolari, aveva tra-sformato il margine sudorientale di Central Park, da tempo

una zona di hotel e appartamenti, gallerie d’arte e negozi di alta moda, nell’avamposto settentrionale del quartiere de-gli affari di Midtown. Solow fu tra i primi a riconoscere le potenzialità della nuova area4. Servendosi di società fittizie per non svelare i propri piani, il costruttore mise gradual-mente insieme i pezzi: quattordici lotti separati dovevano essere acquistati con quattordici trattative diverse, cor-rendo ogni volta il rischio che il suo obiettivo venisse sco-perto (Solow tentò persino di comprare un isolato con di-ciassette edifici lungo Fifth Avenue tra 57th Street e 58th Street occupato dal celebre negozio di abbigliamento Bergdorf Goodman, e quando non ci riuscì cercò di com-prare gli air rights). Dopo cinque anni e una spesa di 12 mi-lioni di dollari disponeva di un sito di quasi 6.000 metri qua-drati che si estendeva tra 57th Street e 58th Street a ovest di Fifth Avenue. A quel punto aveva bisogno di un edificio che potesse competere con quello di Stone per diventare la nuova ancora dello sviluppo di 57th Street, un’architettura in grado di distinguersi5. Scelse SOM e i soci dello studio die-dero l’incarico a Bunshaft, ma l’edificio che Solow voleva non doveva somigliare per nulla ai recenti grattacieli di Manhattan6.

Bunshaft accolse con piacere la sfida posta da Solow. Gli ultimi anni erano stati difficili per lui. Era stato obbligato a reinventarsi per l’ennesima volta. Il vetro e l’acciaio, la pelle e le ossa degli anni Cinquanta e dell’inizio degli anni Sessanta avevano caratterizzato il primo periodo di Bunshaft (dalla Lever House alla sede della Pepsi Cola); le scatole di calcestruzzo degli anni Sessanta realizzate in collaborazione con l’ingegnere Paul Weidlinger (dalla Bei-necke Library alla Banque Lambert) identificavano il se-condo periodo. Adesso Bunshaft avvertiva sia il fiato sul collo di una nuova generazione storicista (i Venturi e i loro

—9 West 57th Street, the northern facade of the skyscraper, with the Plaza Hotel in the foreground

9—Alan Dunn, Sì, una grandinata. Ha nuove idee, signor architetto?, «Architectural Record», 151, giugno 1972, p. 10—Alan Dunn, Yes, A Hailstorm. Got Any New Ideas, Mr. Architect?, «Architectural Record», 151, June 1972, p. 10

10—9 West 57th Street, l’angolo est della facciata su 58th Street—9 West 57th Street, the east corner of the facade on 58th Street

6—9 West 57th Street, la versione rifiutata con i supporti verticali che incontrano il terreno, le divisioni dei piani visibili in facciata e il fianco con elementi orizzontali sporgenti—9 West 57th Street, rejected elevation with vertical supports meeting the ground, sharp floor divisions and louvered flank

7—9 West 57th Street, modello—9 West 57th Street, model

8—9 West 57th Street, il fronte nord, in primo piano l’Hotel Plaza

4 5—C.F. Murphy con Perkins+Will, First National Bank, Chicago, 1964–69, modello e veduta aerea—C.F. Murphy with Perkins+Will, First National Bank, Chicago, 1964–69, model and aerial view

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PHOTO COURTESY OF PERkINS+WILL ESTO

PHOTO COURTESY SOM/ANTHONY CROSS

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creando un’immagine singolare, capace di attirare l’atten-zione10.

solow respinse il primo progetto di Bunshaft, in cui i pi-lastri, nascosti dietro la facciata, arrivavano al suolo come piedritti verticali e la superficie piegata appariva rigida. La sgraziata inclinazione iniziava a due terzi della facciata; i pannelli laterali della torre sembravano più che altro feritoie per la ventilazione e le divisioni fra i piani erano segnate da fasce. Questo primo progetto non aveva l’espressività strutturale della banca di Chicago e sembrava non risolvere il tema della facciata inclinata (uno schema molto simile a questo servì come base per il W.r. Grace Building di 42nd street)11. solow, a un certo punto, mostrò preoccupazione per la mancanza di uffici d’angolo, spazi che considerava fondamentali per le prospettive di locazione e, benché fosse disposto a cedere su questo punto, insistette sulla necessità di migliorare comunque il progetto12.

Il disegno che fu infine approvato presenta due fac-ciate ricurve equivalenti rivolte una a nord e l’altra a sud. Ve-trate grigie prive di evidenti divisioni orizzontali sono inse-rite in una cornice ricurva di travertino: la superficie liscia della facciata sembra precipitarsi in direzione della strada. Al confronto, la lobby di ingresso da 57th street non è parti-colarmente spettacolare e nel seminterrato era prevista un’area per attività commerciali che non fu mai realizzata (oggi quello spazio è occupato dal ristorante Brasserie 8½ progettato in modo un po’ incongruo da hugh hardy nel 2000). All’altezza del primo piano, sopra l’ingresso, la mas-siccia cornice di travertino sostiene l’estremità inferiore della vetrata e devia l’acqua piovana. Le traverse d’acciaio disposte in diagonale formano delle X sui fianchi dell’edifi-cio e servono a rafforzare la struttura. Dal lato di 57th street l’edificio è arretrato rispetto alla linea della strada e sorge

su uno spazio aperto con una pavimentazione di travertino che arriva fino al cordolo del marciapiede.

I pareri sull’edificio furono discordanti, ma a prevalere furono quelli negativi. Jaquelin t. robertson, stimato diret-tore dell’office of Midtown Planning, si rammaricò per il mancato rispetto della linea della strada con la conse-guente esposizione dei brutti muri laterali degli edifici adia-centi. In futuro, disse, avrebbe fatto quanto in suo potere per scoraggiare la costruzione di edifici con facciate incli-nate nei lotti centrali di un isolato. Questo aspetto fu sotto-lineato anche da altre critiche (espresse da Ada Louise huxtable e Paul Goldberger). Nel 1974, nel corso di una cena per la consegna di un premio, la Fifth Avenue Associa-tion fece qualcosa di insolito citando il 9 di West 57th street per la sua “maleducazione urbana”13. Arthur Drexler, cura-tore del dipartimento d’architettura del Museum of Modern Art, osservò invece che a dispetto di tante critiche erudite, l’edificio «fa quasi letteralmente fermare la gente per strada; l’immensa vetrata ricurva è uno spettacolo emozio-nante, non in quanto architettura ma come teatro urbano, affascinante come un’antica fontana»14. Ciò che Bunshaft era riuscito a fare nel reticolo urbano di New york era esat-tamente quello a cui mirava Mies van der rohe quando pro-gettò il seagram Building: realizzare un edificio che fosse, letteralmente, una sorpresa “barocca”, per riprendere l’a-nalogia usata da Phyllis Lambert che aveva seguito la co-struzione del grattacielo per conto del padre15. Il 9 di West 57th street rimane una sorpresa, un’anomalia in una città di angoli retti.

tra tante critiche mancava una giusta valutazione del lavoro di Bunshaft. L’edificio è audace, sembra quasi che l’architetto abbia usato due grandi segni della sua penna per creare la struttura (tenuta insieme dalle travi a X) e si sia

11—9 West 57th street, sezione trasversale—9 West 57th Street, cross section

12—9 West 57th street, pianta del piano terra—9 West 57th Street, ground floor plan

13—il John hancock Center di soM (Bruce Graham) nello skyline di Chicago, 1965–70 —the John Hancock Center by SOM (Bruce Graham) in the Chicago skyline, 1965–70

poi fermato. Il travertino e la superficie scura della facciata sottolineano la potenza della struttura così che l’edificio, per ricordare le parole di Louis sullivan a proposito del Marshall Field’s Warehouse di h.h. richardson (1885), si propone come «l’orazione di chi sa bene come scegliere le proprie parole, ha qualcosa da dire e lo dice; è l’esterna-zione di una mente ricca, diretta, grande e semplice». L’edi-ficio è anche emozionante, perché è una sorpresa nascosta e guardando la facciata dalla strada si avverte una sorta di euforia vertiginosa. Al confronto l’hancock Center di Bruce Graham sembra quasi grossolano: la struttura nasconde la vista ai residenti e per giunta arriva fino alla strada in modo non risolto.

Il tempo ha moderato i giudizi. La predilezione per il travertino, tanto deprecata da huxtable, oggi viene consi-derata un pezzo raro di grazia: un tappeto bianco steso da-vanti all’edificio. In realtà, il 9 di West 57th street risalta per chiarezza di linee nella diffusa banalità dell’architettura della strada. L’accusa di “maleducazione” degli anni set-tanta era un sintomo del conflitto nascente che opponeva un architetto potente e il suo ricco e ostinato cliente a un gruppo in ascesa che pensava che la città fosse al meglio quando somigliava a un patchwork di piccoli pezzi vivaci. Il 9 di West 57th street non era il primo colpevole né il peg-giore; da tempo la strada era un indicatore della voglia di cambiamento.

Già nel 1912 il «New york times» protestava contro gli edifici di una certa altezza che avevano cominciato a inva-dere la via un tempo residenziale ed elegante: una struttura di otto piani al 12 di east 57th street e una di nove al 10 e al 12 di West 57th street. Inoltre, stando a quanto riferiva il quotidiano, tra Fifth Avenue e sixth Avenue, «otto case sono già state consegnate al commercio» e altre erano in

procinto di subire la stessa sorte, come proclamato dai car-telli sulle facciate («si affitta per attività commerciale»). Considerati i facili collegamenti con il Queensboro Bridge (a est), «il suo sviluppo commerciale», osservava il giornali-sta, «è destinato a essere rapido»16. Aziende di abbiglia-mento, antiquari, gallerie d’arte (Pace, Valentine, André se-ligmann), e negozi di pianoforte (steinway, Chickering) ben presto si trasferirono in quella strada. Nuovi edifici residen-ziali di proprietà di cooperative (preferiti da artisti, scrittori e musicisti) furono realizzati più a ovest, vicino alla Carne-gie hall, e trasformarono l’area in una sorta di Greenwich Village dell’uptown (i rolling stones facevano le prove ne-gli studi di 57th street.) Malgrado ciò e a dispetto dei timori di chi vedeva l’invasione degli immobili di uffici come una minaccia e un pericolo, 57th street rimase, come scrisse la critica d’arte Grace Glueck nel 1983, «la strada più impor-tante della città per l’arte»17. ruolo questo che fu confer-mato quando soho diventò una trappola per turisti18. Per parte sua, il 9 di West 57th street non distrusse il carattere eterogeneo della strada. Da molti anni, infatti, la collezione d’arte di proprietà di solow (con opere di kline, Baltus e Ba-con, tra gli altri) è in mostra in una galleria al piano terra, an-che se non è aperta al pubblico19.

Il 9 di West 57th street appartiene a un’epoca in cui si progettava in modo raffinato e con risultati di alta quali- tà. si propone come una dichiarazione convincente sulla struttura e ha ambizioni estetiche tradizionali20. Più avanti nella stessa strada si erge l’edificio a triangoli denominato hearst tower, completato da Norman Foster nel 2006 (300 di West 57th street), ancora stranamente in conflitto con la base di sei piani progettata da Joseph urban (1926–28). Questa zona di Manhattan, adesso chiamata Midtown West, è di recente diventata il centro della nuova mania per

16—9 West 57th street, l’elemento vetrato riflettente tra il grattacielo 9 West 57th street e l’edificio adiacente su 58th street —9 West 57th Street, reflective margin between 9 West 57th Street and neighboring building to the east on 58th Street

14—9 West 57th street, profilo della trave al livello inferiore su 58th street. sullo sfondo il grattacielo della General Motors—9 West 57th Street, profile of lower level beam on 58th Street. In the background the General Motors Building

15—9 West 57th street, veduta verso est del portico su 58th street—9 West 57th Street, 58th Street underneath portico looking east

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i grattacieli residenziali altissimi simili ad aghi: edifici così sottili da non avere bisogno di setbacks e così alti da go-dere di panorami straordinari come il 9 W. 57th street. solo in 57th street ce ne sono quattro, alcuni completati, altri in via di costruzione: il 432 di Park Avenue su 57th street (ra-fael Viñoly); il 111 di West 57th street (shoP); il 157 di West 57th street (Christian de Portzamparc) e il 215 di West 57th street (Adrian smith). La loro presenza cambierà lo skyline di Central Park south più radicalmente di quanto non fece il solow Building negli anni settanta.

Nel 1952 Gordon Bunshaft e soM completarono la Le-ver house, il grattacielo che trasformò New york nel dopo-guerra. La torre fu accolta con grande entusiasmo. Come scrisse un corrispondente a Louis skidmore: «Adesso gli edifici circostanti appaiono così squallidi da farmi persino pensare che il tanto ammirato racquet Club stia meglio a Firenze o in un’altra città medievale»21. La Lever house di-ventò il simbolo dell’ottimismo del dopoguerra e fu de-scritta da Lewis Mumford come «un tacito emblema della speranza in un mondo pacifico»22. Venticinque anni dopo i valori erano cambiati. Le linee audaci del 9 di West 57th street rappresentavano l’apparente indifferenza del capi-tale nei confronti della gente comune e degli edifici adia-centi. A distanza di altri quarant’anni il suo decoro non è più oggetto di discussione, visto che la città tutt’intorno è cam-biata. I muri laterali non appaiono più tanto grezzi, la chia-rezza tagliente delle sue linee è gradita, gli effetti da capo-giro della sua altezza sono accettati e la relativa originalità della sua forma appare addirittura convenzionale rispetto a molti dei nuovi edifici. I loro architetti, anzi, possono ripen-sare con gratitudine a Gordon Bunshaft, perché la Lever house e il 9 di West 57th street aprirono «la gabbia delle norme di zonizzazione».

17—9 West 57th street, la scultura a forma di numero 9 di Ivan Chermayeff, sul lato sud del grattacielo—9 West 57th Street, Ivan Chermayeff’s Number 9 on the south side of the building

18—9 West 57th street, l’ingresso da 58th street nella forma originale, con le scale mobili che portano al livello inferiore; si può vedere 57th street attraverso la lobby

—9 West 57th Street, street entrance in original form with escalators leading to the lower level; 57th Street can be seen through the lobby

19—9 West 57th street, veduta da nord-est che mostra la facciata curva a nord —9 West 57th Street, view from the north east showing the sloping northern facade

Note ringraziamenti: sono grato a sheldon h. solow per le discussioni e a David Childs, Carter horsley, Alexander Luckmann, Matthew Postal e ryan Quinlan per i consigli.

1 sul 9 di West 57th street, vedi Carol herselle krinsky, Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Architectural history Foundation, New york 1988; robert A.M. stern, thomas Mellins, David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial, Monacelli Press, New york 1995; Carter B. horsley, 9 West 57th Street, in «the City review», sito web: http://www.thecityreview.com/.2 David Jacobs, The Establishment’s architect-plus, in «the New york times Magazine», 23 luglio 1972. 3 Ada Louise huxtable, Anti-Street, Anti-People, in «the New york times», 10 giugno 1973. 4 Lo squibb Building al 40 di West 57th (architetto Jack Brown), completato nel 1972, fu la prima torre di uffici della via. Già dalla seconda guerra mondiale i grattacieli residenziali hanno cominciato a spostarsi verso ovest rispetto all’east river. 5 I piani furono annunciati sul «New york times», 30 gennaio 1970, p. 77. Per un resoconto sull’aggregazione dei lotti si veda Franklin Whitehouse, A “Loner” Is Building on 57th Street, in «New york times», 29 marzo 1970. tra gli edifici demoliti c’era l’ufficio di Paul rudolph al 26 di West 58th street. Vedi timothy M. rohan, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, yale university Press, New haven 2014, p. 180. 6 secondo Bunshaft furono i suoi soci a sceglierlo per lavorare con solow. si veda Oral History of Gordon Bunshaft, intervista di Betty J. Blum, Art Institute, Chicago 1990, edizione riveduta, 2000, p. 257.7 Walter McQuade, A Daring New Generation of Skyscrapers: office buildings with vivid shapes are adding zest and grandeur to city skylines, in «Fortune», 87, febbraio 1973, pp. 78-82; 150-152 (vedi p. 81).8 A New york c’erano due precedenti: il 404 di tenth Avenue (in origine Midtown Mart), una strana struttura di loft di 15 piani e il National Maritime union Building in 17th street. Quest’ultimo, progettato da Joseph Ledner e completato nel 1966, era coperto di “oblò” e i lati ricurvi dovevano evocare una nave. Nessuno dei due può aver influito in modo rilevante sulle idee di Bunshaft. una proposta di henry Cobb and I.M. Pei per la New york stock exchange non fu realizzata. un’altra facciata ricurva scelta per ragioni funzionaliste è quella della sede della College Life Insurance a Indianapolis, nell’Indiana, progettata da roche-Dinkeloo and Associates nel 1970.

9 Brubaker citato in Oral History of C. William Brubaker, intervista di Betty J. Blum, Department of Architecture, the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago 2000, p. 76. Brubaker menziona come possibile fonte anche la facciata ricurva disegnata da I.M. Pei per la New york stock exchange e mai costruita. emery roth realizzò un ampliamento di quindici piani con la facciata ricurva per il 55 di Water street (1969-1972). «Architectural record» descrisse il nuovo edificio in termini assolutamente positivi, paragonandolo a «un’immensa vela a costoloni gonfiata dal vento di Chicago». Vedi The First National Bank of Chicago, in «Architectural record», 148, marzo 1970, pp. 137-140; citazione p. 139. 10 La descrizione di solow fatta da Bunshaft è indicativa: «era difficile perché era un finanziatore. Non stava costruendo un edificio per se stesso. Ma a differenza dei soliti finanziatori voleva un bell’edificio». Oral History of Gordon Bunshaft,, cit., p. 256. 11 si racconta che Bunshaft vendette il primo progetto a swig, Weiler, Arnow che lo usarono per il 1114 di Avenue of the Americas (su 42nd street), in origine noto come W.r. Grace Building: un affare in cui Bunshaft appariva un venditore spietato e solow come un raffinato esperto di architettura (il 9 di West 57th è l’edificio migliore). Per accertare che un simile scambio sia avvenuto realmente è ancora necessaria una conferma indipendente. 12 A quanto pare la pazienza di Bunshaft fu messa alla prova. riguardo al problema degli uffici d’angolo e a quella che considerava la lentezza di solow, Bunshaft esplose: «Non lo trattai con gentilezza, anzi fui molto sgarbato con lui». Oral History of Gordon Bunshaft, cit., p. 258. Vedi anche krinsky, Gordon Bunshaft, cit., p. 249. 13 Paul Goldberger, Award-Givers Honor a Few and Slap a Wrist, in «the New york times», 2 giugno 1974. robertson faceva parte della giuria. Per le opinioni di robertson, Wallace harrison e Minoru yamasaki, vedi Carter r. horsley, Sloping Office Buildings Make Provocative Midtown Debut, in «the New york times», 26 marzo 1972.14 Arthur Drexler, Introduction, in The Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1963–1973, Gerd hatje, stuttgart 1974, p. 22. 15 Phyllis Lambert, che lavorò come direttrice della progettazione per Joseph e. seagram, descrisse l’effetto che il seagram Building suscitava nel 1954: «Questa soluzione per l’edificio promette cose straordinarie: è così arretrato che quasi non lo si vede percorrendo la strada, ma quando si arriva lì che impressione, quasi barocco, non sai cosa ti aspetta e poi lo vedi […]». Phyllis Lambert, How a Building Gets Built, in «Vassar Alumnae Magazine», 44, 3, febbraio 1959, pp. 13-19. L’effetto in questione

svanì di lì a breve quando, non molto tempo prima che il seagram fosse completato, l’edificio residenziale a nord fu demolito. Al contrario del seagram, il 9 di West 57th street ha una facciata anteriore e una posteriore.16 Towering Lofts in Fifty-Seventh Street Indicate Rapidity of Business Invasion, in «the New york times», 25 agosto 1912. 17 Grace Glueck, Expressionism Meets Minimalism, in «the New york times», 18 febbraio 1983.18 robert Lipsyte, Why My Art Dealer Moved to 57th Street, in «the New york times», 21 aprile 1996. Alcune gallerie si trasferirono più a nord, vedi anche Amei Wallach, Overrun: SoHo’s Art World Shifts Ground, in «the New york times», 12 maggio 1996. 19 Le opere sono visibili dalle vetrate al piano terra. Di recente alcune sono state messe sul mercato. Per esempio, The Pointing Man di Giacometti è stata venduta all’asta nel 2015 per 140 milioni di dollari. Il comportamento talvolta eccentrico di solow è ben noto. Qualcuno lo ha descritto come «l’uomo più litigioso dell’industria immobiliare e forse di tutta l’America». Daniel Geiger, The Upheaval of Sheldon Solow, in «Commercial observer», 8 agosto 2012.20 Bunshaft andava particolarmente fiero della reazione di Jean Dubuffet: «Andava pazzo per il solow Building e gliene regalai un piccolo plastico». Vedi Oral History of Gordon Bunshaft, cit., p. 210.21 Lettera di r.C. Wilson a Louis skidmore, 7 aprile 1952. La lettera si trova tra i documenti di Louis skidmore Jr. conservati a houston, texas. 22 Lewis Mumford, House of Glass, in «the New yorker» 28, 9 agosto 1952, p. 54.

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page 59 West 57th Street, New York (1971–74):

The Bell-Bottom SkyscraperNicholas Adams

9 West 57th street, also known as the solow Building, is one of the most controversial buildings in the long career of Gordon Bun-shaft. New yorkers refer to it as «the ski-slope building», and «the building with the bell-bottom pants», or identify it by Ivan Chermayeff’s massive steel plate red num-ber 9 facing east towards Fifth Avenue. sometimes it is paired with its lesser frater-nal twin, the W.r. Grace Building (1114 Av-enue of the Americas) on 42nd street facing Bryant Park (1971–74): Bunshaft’s two contemporaneous sloping facades, the only true sloping facades in New york. 9 West 57th street, though universally agreed to be the better of the two, is also the build-ing that broke Bunshaft’s reputation1.

In the summer of 1972 Gordon Bun-shaft was the subject of a flattering story in The New York Times Magazine. entitled “the establishment’s architect-plus”, the article was a glowing account of the archi-tect’s life and work and of his long relation-ship with soM. Whatever the talk about col-lective spirit, and however many times Bunshaft gave credit to his fellow partners and collaborators in the interview, the au-thor still concluded that the real “star” of the firm was Bunshaft: soM was simply un-imaginable without him. In the previous twenty years in New york, the article point-ed out, the firm had «designed a greater number of the first-rate buildings than any other architect or firm», and the person re-sponsible for their design had been Gordon Bunshaft. Now, the apparent culmination of this extraordinary career had just been an-nounced: soM and Bunshaft would design New york’s massive Convention Center west of 11th Avenue in midtown. Forty acres in size, this structure would vault over the West side highway out into the hudson river. Bunshaft was understandably excit-ed. After so many office towers, he had tired of them: «they’re all sort of imperson-al, rentable spaces», he commented – seemingly oblivious to the fact that he was also speaking of his own work. «I like archi-tecture you don’t have to lie down on your back to see». even so, he had kind words to say about 9 West 57th street, a new west side tower that was on the boards and about its client, sheldon h. solow. «Very bright guy», Bunshaft reported, «very diffi-cult […]. But he really cares about making that a good building, and he gets a lot of pride out of it». though the conclusion of the article foresaw the arrival of a new movement led by robert Venturi that would soon dethrone Bunshaft ’s modernism, from the point of view of public relations, the article represents the high point for Bunshaft’s reputation in New york2.

Less than a year later Ada Louise huxtable, the highly respected architecture critic for The New York Times, was far less flattering. In her review of 9 West 57th street – Bunshaft and solow’s “good build-ing” – entitled “Anti-street, Anti-People”, she took Bunshaft and the whole of soM to task: «What, then, has gone awry? Because something has gone wrong at soM, and saying so is a little like attacking the Pope. But what professionals are saying in pri-vate, and what should be aired in public, is that there has been an evolution of design needs and philosophy that has somehow passed the firm right by. soM’s consistently quality-conscious buildings are also the in-

creasing source of a persistent, monumen-tal form of environmental abuse that is a growing cause of critical concern».

some called soM “arrogant,” she said. For her, however, it was merely «a simple case of hardening of the arteries of archi-tectural ideas». even so, her conclusion was merciless: «[t]he let-them-eat-traver-tine perfectionism of soM superstar Gor-don Bunshaft is seldom less than belliger-ently antihuman these days». 9 West 57th and its twin on 42nd street were «slaps in the city’s face. they are disdainfully anti-street, excruciatingly awkward in their con-nections to their neighbors and [in the case of 9 West 57th street] belligerently disrup-tive of the skyline seen from Central Park south»3. It was stinging criticism from a critic who had, in the past, been supportive of Gordon Bunshaft and soM. What pro-voked this unanticipated rebuke?

sheldon h. solow is a New york real es-tate legend. Born in 1929, his father, Isaac was a bricklayer and successful builder, operating in Brooklyn. Wiped out by the De-pression, father and son went into business together in 1952 completing an apartment complex, sheldon Gardens, in Brooklyn with a $592,000 mortgage loan. thereaf-ter, the younger solow developed houses, apartment buildings, and a shopping center on Long Island. In 1962 he moved to Man-hattan where he built a distinctive apart-ment building (501 east 87th street), the first built since the war with fireplaces. the next hurdle was 9 West 57th street where edward Durrell stone’s fifty-story General Motors Building, completed in 1968 at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 58th street pro-vided the challenge. Long a zone of hotels and apartments, of art galleries, and fash-ionable shops, stone’s GM Building with its monumental tower and daily army of com-muters turned the southern eastern edge of Central Park into the northern outpost of the midtown business district. solow was one of the first to recognize the possibilities of the new area4. using “dummy” corpora-tions to disguise his plans, he slowly as-sembled the pieces – fourteen separate parcels had to be purchased meaning four-teen separate negotiations each carrying the risk that his plan would be discovered. (he even tried to buy the seventeen-build-ing block along 5th Avenue between 57th and 58th street occupied by Bergdorf Goodman, the fashionable clothing store, and when that failed he tried to buy the air rights). After five years and $12 million he had assembled a 61,800 square foot site running between 57th and 58th street, just west of 5th Avenue. he needed a building to rival stone’s to become the new anchor for development along 57th street – so he needed distinctive architecture5. soM was his choice and the soM partners gave the commission to Bunshaft––but the building solow wanted could look nothing like Man-hattan’s recent skyscrapers6.

For Bunshaft, solow’s challenge was welcome. the early 1970s had been a diffi-cult period for him. once again he had been constrained to reinvent himself. Glass and steel, the skin and bones of the 1950s and early1960s had been the signature for the first Bunshaft period (from Lever house to Pepsi Cola); the concrete boxes of the 1960s done with the engineer Paul Wei-dlinger (from the Beinecke Library to Banque Lambert) identified the second Bunshaft period. Now, Bunshaft could feel the hot breath of a new historicist genera-tion (the Venturis and their like) and the pressure for status from the upstarts in soM’s Chicago office (Bruce Graham and

Walter Netsch), the young men whom he had bossed around when they were finding their feet at the Air Force Academy in Colo-rado springs (Netsch, 1954–62) and Inland steel, Chicago (Graham and Netsch, 1955–58). Graham had built hancock Center in Chicago (1965–70), his own iconic tower, a black-glassed truncated obelisk with its exposed structural frame that had captured critical and public attention. the sears tower (1971–73) was underway, too. For a comparable result, Bunshaft needed a bold entrepreneur-developer like Jerry Wolman who had initiated the hancock Center pro-ject. solow could be that man, the kind of tough-minded client that he thought brought out his best. on solow, Bunshaft noted: «I fight back. I like being a bastard».

Bunshaft proposed what he called a “bell-bottom” skyscraper––at a time when the fashion in clothes had just been intro-duced––a sloping, tapered block. It met the city’s complex zoning regulations for “sky exposure” that ensured the proper amounts of light and air reached the street, and it avoided the old-fashioned wedding cake solution (never a likely choice) as well as the conventional modernist shaft. It also maximized interior space in a situation where each square foot equaled rental dol-lars: 9 West 57th street had 1.5 million square feet of office space. the building was newsworthy, too. the journalist Walter McQuade in Fortune Magazine noted that within «the corset of zoning regulations» Bunshaft was changing his «angular style and giving his buildings more voluptuous shaping […]. his current penchant is for curving the lower facades of his buildings outward within the setback rules». he quot-ed Bunshaft’s characteristically brutal as-sessment of the problem: «I’m not sure of-fice buildings are even architecture. they’re really a mathematical calculation, just three-dimensional investments […]. I think the zoning laws in this city have done more damage than any goddamn architect»7. As at Lever house (1952), his radical solution for 9 West 57th street broke with New york City conventions.

the sloping tower had no long history but there was one significant recent mod-el8. In Chicago, the bell-bottomed 60-story First National Bank Building (1964–1969) by C.F. Murphy with Perkins & Will, when completed, was the tallest building in Chi-cago. It was a free-standing tower occupy-ing a single block. As its designer, C. Wil-liam Brubaker (1926–2002) reported: «What we wanted to do was to design a building that was not a copy of a Mies build-ing and not a copy of what was going on in europe or even around the rest of the unit-ed states». Brubaker’s design responded to the bank’s need for a super-wide open floor for check processing. «What we were trying to do was analyze a new kind of a problem and come up with a new kind of solution. I think we did do that»�. Bunshaft’s solution, while borrowing the profile, lacked Chicago’s functionalist justification: 9 West 57th street just maximized rental space and created a distinctive, attention-grabbing design10.

solow rejected Bunshaft’s first design. Bunshaft sunk the piers behind the façade and in the sloping façade is stiff, the piers meeting the ground as vertical trunks. the awkward slope begins two-thirds of the way up the façade; the lateral panels of the tower look like little more than ventilation louvers and spandrels mark the floor divi-sions. As a design this early project lacks the structural expressivity of the Chicago bank and seems ill-at-ease with the curving

façade. (A design very similar to this be-comes the basis for the W.r. Grace Build-ing on 42nd street)11. solow, at one point, was concerned that the design did not offer corner offices, something he thought es-sential for rental prospects and, while he conceded on that point, he was insistent that the design needed improvement12.

the design ultimately approved has two equivalent sloping façades facing north and south. Gray tinted glass without obvi-ous horizontal division is set into a curving travertine frame: the smooth surface of the façade rushes down towards the street. the entry lobby from 57th street is compar-atively undramatic – and a shopping zone (that never materialized) was planned for the basement. (today a restaurant called Brasserie 8 ½ incongruously designed by hugh hardy in 2000 occupies the space). At the second story, over the entrance, the massive travertine frame holds the lower edge and diverts rainwater. steel diagonal cross-beams form X’s on the flanks and serve to brace the structure. on 57th street the building is set back from the street line and rests on a travertine apron that runs to the curb.

opinions ranged widely on 9 West 57th – but the overwhelming opinion was nega-tive. the respected head of the city’s office of Midtown Planning, Jaquelin t. robertson regretted the failure to hold the street line and the subsequent exposure of the unat-tractive party walls of adjoining buildings. he would, he said, do everything in his pow-er to discourage further construction of sloping buildings on midblock plots. Criti-cism (from the critics Ada Louise huxtable and Paul Goldberger) underlined that as-sessment. At an awards dinner in 1974, the Fifth Avenue Association took the unusual step of citing 9 West 57th street for its «ur-ban bad manners»�. even so, Arthur Drex-ler, curator at the Architecture Department at the Museum of Modern Art, noted that for all the learned criticism, 9 West 57th street «quite literally stops people in the street; the immense curved glass wall is an exhilarating spectacle, not as architecture but as urban theater, as fascinating as a fountain»14. What Bunshaft managed in the gridscape of New york was just what Mies van der rohe intended when he first planned the seagram Building: to make a building that was, literally, a surprise, “ba-roque”, to use the analogy employed by Phyllis Lambert who oversaw the construc-tion of the tower for her father15. 9 West 57th remains a surprise, an anomaly in a city of right angles.

Lost in the criticism was a proper ap-preciation of Bunshaft’s achievement. It is bold. It seems almost as if Bunshaft had taken two great swipes of his pen to make the frame (held together by the scissors cross-beams) and stopped. the travertine and the darkened plane of the facade un-derline the power of its structure so that the building stands, to echo the words of the architect Louis sullivan about h.h. richardson’s Marshall Field Warehouse (1885), «as the oration of one who knows well how to choose his words, who has something to say and says it –and says it as the outpouring of a copious, direct, large and simple mind». It is also an exciting building – exciting because it is a hidden discovery, exciting too because looking up the façade from the street provokes a giddy elation. By contrast Bruce Graham’s han-cock Center looks fussy; the structure shields residents from the view; and meets the street in a confusion that has been re-peatedly renovated but barely improved.

the view of Central Park from 9 West 57th street is singular.

time has moderated judgments. What huxtable lamented in Bunshaft’s taste for travertine is, today, a rare piece of grace: a white carpet laid out before the building. Indeed, the clarity of the lines of 9 West 57th stand out against the common banali-ty of most architecture along 57th street. the “bad manners” attack of the 1970s was a sign of the developing conflict between a powerful architect and his wealthy and will-ful client, and a rising group who thought the city at its best when it resembled a quilt of small vibrant pieces. 9 West 57th street was hardly the first offender or the worst; the street had long been a bellwether for change.

In 1912, The New York Times com-plained that tall buildings had begun to in-filtrate the once-upper class residential street: an eight-story structure at 12 east 57th street and a nine-story structure at 10 and 12 West 57th street. Moreover, as the newspaper reported, between Fifth and sixth Avenues, «eight houses have already been given over to trade», and others were expected to follow as the signs on their fa-cades («to Let For Business») proclaimed. With its easy connections to the Queens-boro Bridge (to the east), «commercial growth», the newspaper noted, «is bound to be rapid»�. Dressmaking establishments, antique dealers, art galleries (Pace, Valen-tine, André seligmann), and piano show-rooms (steinway, Chickering) soon moved in. New cooperative apartment buildings (favored by artists, writers, and musicians) opened further west, near Carnegie hall and made the area an uptown Greenwich Village. (the rolling stones practiced in studios on 57th street). even so, despite the fears of those who saw the invasion of of-fice space as a threat and a danger, 57th street remained, as the art critic Grace Glueck wrote in 1983, «the city’s main drag for art»�. the status of 57th street was in-deed confirmed as soho became a tourist trap18. on its own, 9 West 57th street did not destroy the heterogeneous nature of the street. For many years, in fact, solow’s own art collection (with works by kline, Baltus, and Bacon among others) has been on view in a ground floor gallery – though it keeps no public hours19.

9 West 57th street belongs to an era of refined high design. It makes a convincing statement about structure and has tradi-tional aesthetic ambitions20. Just down the street is Norman Foster’s triangulated hearst tower (300 West 57th street) com-pleted in 2006 – still strangely at war with Joseph urban’s six story base (1926–28). Midtown West, as the area of Manhattan is now called, has recently become the focus of the new craze for supertall residential needle towers: buildings so thin that they require no setbacks; so tall that they gain extraordinary views like 9 W. 57th street. on 57th street alone there are four, either com-pleted or under construction: 432 Park Av-enue on 57th street (rafael Viñoly); 111 W 57th street (shoP); 157 West 57th street (Christian de Portzamparc); 215 West 57th street (Adrian smith). their scale will trans-form the skyline of Central Park south more radically than 9 West 57th did in the 1970s.

In 1952 Gordon Bunshaft and soM completed Lever house, the key postwar tower that transformed New york. It was received rapturously. As a correspondent wrote to Louis skidmore: «[I]t has made the surrounding buildings look so squalid that I now even think that the once admired rac-quet Club belongs in Florence or some

other medieval city»�. Lever house became the symbol for the age of post-war opti-mism described by Lewis Mumford as «an implicit symbol of hope for a peaceful world»22. A quarter of a century later, values had shifted. the audacious lines of 9 West 57th street were symbols for the seeming indifference of capital to the ordinary man on the street and to the adjacent buildings. Forty years on the decorum of 9 West 57th street is no longer a subject of discussion as the city has changed around it. the party walls are no longer so raw, the sharp edged clarity of its lines are welcome, the dizzying effects of its height accepted, and the com-parative originality of its shape almost con-ventional by comparison with many of the new buildings. their architects, indeed, may look back to Bunshaft, for Lever house and for 9 West 57th when Gordon Bunshaft cut through «the corset of zoning regula-tions».

NotesAcknowledgements: I am grateful for dis-cussions with sheldon o. solow and for counsel from David Childs, Carter horsley, Alexander Luckmann, Matthew Postal, and ryan Quinlan.1 on 9 West 57th street, see Carol herselle krinsky, Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Ow-ings & Merrill (New york: Architectural his-tory Foundation, 1988); robert A.M. stern, thomas Mellins, David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New york: Monacelli Press, 1995); Carter B. horsley, “9 West 57th street,” The City Review, web site: http://www.thecityre-view.com/.2 David Jacobs, “the establishment’s ar-chitect-plus,” The New York Times Maga-zine, 23 July 1972. 3 Ada Louise huxtable, “Anti-street, Anti-People,” The New York Times, 10 June 1973. 4 the squibb Building at 40 West 57th (ar-chitect: Jack Brown) completed in 1972 was the first office tower on the street. tall apartment buildings had been moving westwards from the east river since World War II. 5 the plans are announced in The New York Times, 30 January 1970, p. 77. For an ac-count of the assembly of the pieces, see Franklin Whitehouse, “A ‘Loner’ Is Building on 57th street,” New York Times, 29 March 1970. Among the buildings demolished was Paul rudolph’s office 26 West 58th street. see timothy M. rohan, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph (New haven, yale university Press, 2014), p. 180. 6 According to Bunshaft his partners se-lected him to work for solow. Oral History of Gordon Bunshaft, interviewed by Betty J. Blum (Chicago: Art Institute, 1990, revised edition, 2000), p. 257.7 Walter McQuade, “A Daring New Genera-tion of skyscrapers: office buildings with vivid shapes are adding zest and grandeur to city skylines,” Fortune 87 (February 1973), pp. 78-82; 150–152. (see p. 81)8 there were two precedents in New york: 404 tenth Avenue (originally Midtown Mart), an awkward 15-story loft structure and the National Maritime union Building at 17th street. the latter, designed by the ar-chitect Joseph Ledner and completed in 1966 is covered with “portholes” and the sloping sides are meant to evoke a ship. Neither could have factored significantly in Bunshaft’s thinking. A proposal for the New york stock exchange by henry Cobb and I.M. Pei was not built. Another sloping fa-çade also adopted for functionalist reasons is roche-Dinkeloo and Associates, College

Life Insurance, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1970. 9 Brubaker quoted in Oral History of C. Wil-liam Brubaker, interviewed by Betty J. Blum (Chicago: Department of Architecture, the Art Institute of Chicago, 2000), p. 76. Bru-baker also cites an unbuilt sloping façade design by I.M. Pei for the New york stock exchange as his possible source. emery roth built a sloping facade fifteen-story ad-dition to 55 Water street (1969–1972). Ar-chitectural Record was wholly positive in their description of the new building de-scribing it as «like a huge ribbed sail caught in the Chicago wind». see, “the First Na-tional Bank of Chicago,” Architectural Re-cord 148 (March 1970), pp. 137–40; quota-tion p. 139. 10 Bunshaft’s description of solow is re-vealing: «he was difficult because he was a promoter. he wasn’t building something for his own use. But he was unusual in these promoter types in that he wanted a fine building». Oral History of Gordon Bunshaft,, p. 256. 11 It is reported that Bunshaft sold that ini-tial design to swig, Weiler, Arnow who used it for the development of 1114 Avenue of the Americas (on 42nd street), originally known as the W.r. Grace Building: a deal in which Bunshaft came off as a ruthless salesman and solow as a refined judge of architec-ture. (9 West 57th is the better building).Whether such an exchange actually took place still requires independent confirma-tion. 12 Bunshaft’s patience seems to have been stretched. over the question of corner of-fices and what he perceived as solow’s slow pace Bunshaft exploded. «I didn’t treat him kindly. I was very rude to him». Oral History of Gordon Bunshaft, p. 258. see also krinsky, Gordon Bunshaft, p. 249. 13 Paul Goldberger, “Award-Givers honor a Few and slap a Wrist,” The New York Times, 2 June 1974. Mr. robertson was also on the jury. For the opinions of robertson, Wallace harrison, and Minoru yamasaki, see Carter r. horsley, “sloping office Buildings Make Provocative Midtown Debut,” The New York Times, 26 March 1972.14 Arthur Drexler, “Introduction,” The Archi-tecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1963–1973 (stuttgart: Gerd hatje, 1974), p. 22. 15 Phyllis Lambert, who served as director of planning for Joseph e. seagram, de-scribed the effect that the seagram Build-ing was intended to have in 1954. «this so-lution for the building has promise for terrific things –set back you hardly see it from the street coming up or down the Av-enue but now what an impression– when you arrive there –almost Baroque, you don’t know what is there then you come upon It». Lambert, “how a Building Gets Built,” Vas-sar Alumnae Magazine 44:3, February 1959, pp. 13-19). that effect was quickly lost when the apartment building to the north was demolished as seagram reached com-pletion. By contrast with seagram, 9 West 57th has a front and a back!16 “towering Lofts in Fifty-seventh street Indicate rapidity of Business Invasion,” The New York Times, 25 August 1912. 17 Grace Glueck, “expressionism Meets Minimalism,” The New York Times, 18 Feb-ruary 1983.18 robert Lipsyte, “Why My Art Dealer Moved to 57th street,” The New York Times, 21 April 1996. A number of galleries moved north, see also Amei Wallach, “overrun: soho’s Art World shifts Ground,” The New York Times, 12 May 1996. 19 the works are on view through the glass at street level. recently some have come on

the market. For example, Giacometti’s The Pointing Man sold at auction for $140 mil-lion in 2015. solow’s sometime eccentric behavior is well known. he has been de-scribed as «the real estate industry’s –and perhaps America’s– most litigious man». Daniel Geiger, “the upheaval of sheldon solow,” Commercial Observer, 8 August 2012.20 Bunshaft took special pride in the re-sponse of Jean Dubuffet.«he was just crazy about the solow Building, and I gave him a little model of it». see Oral History of Gor-don Bunshaft, p. 210.21 Letter from r.C. Wilson to Louis skid-more, 7 April 1952. Letter is in the files of Louis skidmore Jr., houston, texas. 22 Lewis Mumford, “house of Glass,” The New Yorker 28 (9 August 1952), p. 54.

page 14In the mutable core of the city

Juan José Lahuerta

The new Escola Massana is on Plaça de la Gardunya, right behind the Boqueria market (officially known as the market of Sant Josep), whose main entrance –as millions of tourists know– faces the Rambla, a few meters up from Pla de la Boqueria, which gives the site its unofficial name. Official and popular place names, squares and plazas, accesses that change their position... we are right at the center of Barcelona, in the beating heart of the city, the yolk of the egg or the inside of the bone (“Rovell de l’ou” and “Pla de l’òs” are two other names by which the place is known). But over the centuries the same space has also been a barrier, a diaphragm, a gate, an opening, an indefinite clearing, an intersection, a zone of temporary settlement, an unstable perimeter, a mere boundary...

With extreme pith: the Boqueria was one of the gates of the first medieval walled enclosure of Barcelona, which followed the line traced by the Rambla today; two streets and several waterways converged here, and every day a market was set up by farmers and shepherds, who since they did not enter the city did not have to pay taxes. In front of the gate stood (without fail) several of the city’s gallows. When the second walled enclosure was built, large monasteries faced the Boqueria: one was named for Sant Josep –hence the market’s official name– and right behind it, at the site of today’s Plaça de la Gardunya, stood the convent of Santa Maria de Jerusalem. Further on there was the imposing Goth-ic complex of the Hospital de la Santa Creu, which at the end of the 1400s gathered together all the hospitals of Barcelona. Moving forward a few centuries, in 1835 there was an uprising in Barcelona, and several churches and monasteries were destroyed by fire, including Sant Josep; year later, in 1868, in the midst of new revolutionary unrest, Santa Maria de Jerusalem was also torched. When the monasteries had been demolished and their vast lots had been freed up for use, the municipal administration decided to make a splendid plaza with porticos precisely in the “Rovell de l’ou” with regular facades and magnificent Ionic columns. This square was never completed, and only certain sections of the porticos were built: bordering the large space, only a few disconnected elements of vaguely

neoclassical inspiration remained. The same space continued to host the market, which had never strayed away from the area: the transitional arrange-ment became permanent thanks to a structure composed of cast iron pillars and metal roofs, replacing the tradition-al stalls with their impermanent awnings. At the start of the 1900s a gate was opened on the Rambla with modern glazing, but the space behind the market –facing Plaça de la Gardunya– continued to be neglected for a long time: it formed the courtyard of one of the city’s jails – “gardunya” is a name coined by crimi-nals – and temporary produce markets; later, it gradually became a parking area, a logistical space for loading and unloading of trucks, a noisy, chaotic space without precise boundaries, marked by constant movement, scat-tered, without facades... But what about the Escola Massana? The institute founded in 1929 “temporarily” – for almost 90 years! – occupied the spaces of the Hospital de la Santa Creu, which over the centuries had changed its uses. Renovations and additions were made, without any order or logic, giving rise to the legendary labyrinth that was undoubtedly a true attraction, but also one of the biggest problems of this marvelous school of arts and crafts.

In short: the MARROW –the core and the brain– of Barcelona has been a precarious place of passage for centu-ries, in a constant state of construction and destruction, liminal, intermediate, formless… the most crowded and hectic no man’s land one could imagine in the beating heart of a city.

This is the PLACE –and “non-place” at the same time– in which Carme Pinós has built the new Escola Massana. And not just the school: one of the four sides of Plaça de la Gardunya –the one facing the market (to the west)– is occupied by the magnificent medieval wall of the Hospital de la Santa Creu; on the other three sides there are three structures, designed by the same hand. In effect, thanks to successive commissions –it is important to note that this was not a single project– Carme Pinós has already designed the rear facade of the market (to the east), the Escola Massana (to the south), and several residential blocks that are about to be opened (to the north). An extraordinary opportunity and responsibility: we might say that Carme Pinós has been very lucky; but given the results, I would also like to emphasize the fact that Barcelona has also been very lucky.

Faced with a challenge of this scope, the temptation might arise to ORDER this paradoxically central and liminal urban nucleus once and for all, to try to make it definitively “central” through architectural measures of rigor, clarity and uniformity... as had been unsuc-cessfully attempted halfway through the 1800s by the designers of the large, regular plaza with its slim Ionic col-umns. In effect, if we examine the projects submitted for the various competitions held by the municipal administration, we can immediately see that this was precisely the main tempta-tion: to put an end to the “chaos” thanks to imposing buildings, an architecture with a vigorous physique and a severe visage (how can one otherwise embody the face of power?) that could bring discipline to the frenetic comings and

casabella 880enGlIsh teXts 9392

goings of a city that has always set up camp –literally– in this place as it pleased. The projects by Carme Pinós move in precisely the opposite direction. Starting with that of the rear “facade” of the market, which stands out –precisely the opposite of a facade– for its set of sloping roofs that avoid imposing the vast bulk of the iron structure and the view of its cross-section on the plaza, instead linking back to what has always defined this space: stands, awnings, stalls that shift forward or back, following the fluctuating and lively rhythm of the Boqueria. In a way, though on a different scale, the same solution has also been applied in the projects of the residential blocks and of the Escola Massana, which rely on the dynamism of alignments, the balance of horizontal and vertical parts, the sequence of terraces and infinite degrees of size.

Looking at the plan of Plaça de la Gardunya, we can immediately see what Carme Pinós has decided to make in this emblematic segment of the city: she has set out to mend, and I am not using that term as a hackneyed metaphor, but in a literal sense. According to the dictionary, to mend means to sew a tear in a fabric “connected the edges with orderly stitches and seams,” and in another sense “to skillfully connect one thing to another.” Observing the roofs of the market sloping down to reach minimum size near the plaza, and the residential buildings and Escola Massana as they settle comfortably into lots bristling with complications, irregular, crushed by the powerful void left by history, we can get a perfect sense of what is meant by “orderly stitches and seams,” gestures that in the end represent the guarantee of a successful “connection between one thing and another,” not imposed or forced by the architecture, but obtained “through skill.” When mending, it is essential that the effect remain concealed: the facades with which Carme Pinós has reshaped Plaça de la Gardunya do not hide, yet they skillfully “disguise” all the tears, representing –in short– a way of mend-ing that refrains from self-assertion, carried out in perfect freedom, as has always happened since the days when this site was just a clearing facing a gate in the walled enclosure, ready to welcome all the strata of the simultane-ously smooth and jagged history of Barcelona.

Finally, let’s examine the facility of the Escola Massana. The plan and volumes respond perfectly to these descriptions. In substance, there are three blocks of classrooms, arranged in rows connected by corridors, which have been “adapted” to the complex form of the lot, creating a place for themselves inside it: instead of being parallel, as would be dictated by the typological model they interpret, two of them open out like fans, while the third is perpen-dicular to the first two. The idea of mending/sewing is clearly suggested by the way the corridors are connected: by means of walkways –ramps and staircas-es– that span the void like “needlefuls” of thread extending from one to the other, and between the various levels, marking a direction that suggests a circular route (walkway/corridor, walkway/corridor...) through the various parts of the building –always in full

view, always easy to decipher– “skillful-ly” connected by our very footsteps. The same idea is even more visible and at the same time even more subtle, if that is possible, in the facade of the school on the plaza: two blocks with diverging orientation that pivot on an imaginary hinge, another reference to the past of the site, the historical “hinge” of the life of the city. The elevations are formed by bars arranged in horizontal and vertical fields, as if to form an immense jalousie. On one side, then, the facade is light-ened, taking on the image of a jalousie or, even more aptly, of a shutter – the aerial and mobile frame that has always been used, together with awnings, to protect the temporary stalls of the old market. On the other, the plane is converted into structure thanks to the arrangement of the fields of aligned parallel bars –first horizontal, then vertical– around large square openings. This is clearly an interpretation of a well-known Japanese pattern –in substance, the same one used by Gaudí in the design of the shutters of Casa Vicens– which like all the patterns of this type links back to the weave of fabrics or wicker.

In the design of Carme Pinós the conscious suggestion of the act of weaving, of mending tears through “orderly stitches and seams,” is there-fore not glimpsed only in the way the architecture adapts to a particularly complex urban fabric, or in the way the various blocks of the building are joined by walkways: the facade itself is trans-formed into a large piece of fabric that does not allude only to the awnings and shutters of the market –to what is mobile and temporary– but also becomes a metaphor of the entire project in the context of the city, of the HEART of the city. There is no distinc-tion between figure and background, form and structure in the striped surfaces, because the structure is form and figure. And, in this concrete case, also matter, given the fact that the ceramic elements of the bars determine the consistency and color of the entire facade. The bars are not exactly form, color or material, but structure –in the most radical sense of the term– struc-ture that incorporates everything. We have already mentioned the marvelous shutters created by Gaudí for Casa Vicens; we might also make reference to the “principle of cladding” formulated by Adolf Loos on the basis of the theories of Semper. The first architectur-al discovery of mankind was that of cladding; only later did man think about the walls that give form to spaces, “the covering is the earliest architectural feature,” Loos asserted. The covering and the curtain of which Semper spoke, or the shutter Carme Pinós proposes here. But amongst the tools the architect has used to make order –still temporari-ly– of the city that is impossible to put into order, we seem to also glimpse the comb, the rake, the plow. The result of the project is a structure/fabric that undoubtedly directs, arranges, but at the same time speaks without paradox –considering the fact that the bars symbolically suggest limits (window bars, barriers…)– of the space that contains movement, the to and fro, the life that disrupts boundaries –as has happened many times across the centuries, and will continue to happen–

in this solid and at the same time mutable core of the city of Barcelona.

page 86Frank Lloyd Wright, “Baroque”

Francesco Dal Co

After having set a milestone in the field of studies on the work and figure of Frank Lloyd Wright, with the publication of The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (see «Casabella» no. 661, November 1998), Neil Levine has devoted 20 more years to his encyclopedic approach to his chosen theme, namely the work of the great archi-tect born in 1867 in richland Center, Wis-consin, who died in Phoenix, Arizona in 1959. the results are seen in another book, whose 446 demand unusual commitment and patience on the part of readers, but al-so reward them for their efforts with a har-vest of information accompanied by fine il-lustrations. Given the disconcerting and engaging characteristics of Wright’s works, the experimental tension lurking in the main episodes of his very vast and variable out-put, flanked by many writings that cannot be reduced to a stringent or unified intel-lectual trajectory, the theme approached by Levine has been the background of many studies and research projects, but without ever coming to the surface except in limit-ed, sporadic cases. the American scholar should be given credit for having granted center stage to the ways in which Wright approached the contemporary city in its most general meanings, but also in its minute aspects often seen as being of little importance, aspects which make every work of architecture, to differing extents, also the product of the various ways the city influences its life.

Based on this historical approach, Lev-ine has retraced Wright’s career, laying the groundwork for an original interpretation of his work. the book takes its cue from the moment in which Wright had to come to terms with the sweeping changes in pro-gress in the American society, when he be-gan to work in Chicago at a very young age. In 1834 John Watkins, the first schoolmas-ter, had reached Chicago; in 1830 James thompson did the allotment of the land fac-ing Lake Michigan to be sold to finance the construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, contributing to make Chicago “the most right-angled city in the united states.” About 40 years later, in 1871, a fire swept away what remained of the city which the first mayor, William ogden, had guided through a phase of strong growth. this paved the way for the formation of a mod-ern metropolis, involving experimentation with a formidable set of innovations in the field of construction, in decades of extraor-dinary vivacity for architectural culture. Af-ter having reached Chicago in 1887 and having worked for Joseph L. silsbee and Adler & sullivan, Wright frequented circles in which one could sense or foresee, as the economist simon Patten wrote shortly thereafter in The New Basis of Civilization, that the “age of scarcity” was over. Picking up on this excessively optimistic diagnosis at the start of the 1900s, Benjamin Marsh, a student of Patten and himself a pioneer in the field of urban planning, using words with which Wright could have agreed, stat-ed: «the right of citizens to have leisure time, health, protection against illness, nor-mal employment, to live in conditions that do not threaten their wellbeing and effi-ciency, is about to be recognized as the equal of the right of the state to punish

wrongdoers and to protect property.»In this atmosphere, and in a city de-

signed with a grid of streets intersecting at right angles, Wright made his debut as an independent architect. For him, Levine writes, the grid was the «fundamental framework of the metropolitan condition.» this “foundation of democracy” was the premise from which to identify the alterna-tive both to the «Baroque system» which the construction of the Columbian exposi-tion of 1893, where Daniel Burnham was the director of works, had made popular, and to the new residential suburbs where curved streets transformed the subdivision of lots into a «pleasing and gracious whole,» in keeping with what was said about the settlement of riverside, de-signed by Frederick Law olmsted and Cal-vert Vaux in 1869. At riverside Wright built two villas, one of which was destined to re-main in the ranks of his masterpieces, the Coonley house (1909). But precisely the rigidly orthogonal layout of the Coonley house demonstrates that he was not inter-ested in the «artificial naturalism of river-side,» a factor Levine believes is «crucial to understand how Wright came to terms with the urban problem in this period.» the pag-es on these topics contain one of the book’s most interesting and demanding passages. Not by chance, in fact, what is introduced by the observations on river-side is the coherent development of the considerations set forth by Levine in his ex-amination of the houses built by Wright, in this case on the lots defined by a grid layout in another suburb of Chicago, oak Park – reached by the railway only in 1872, we should recall, confirming the speed of the transformation of the city in the second half of the 1800s. to grasp the potential of ur-ban development based on a uniform geo-metric layout of the lots, a constituent trait of the “American civilization,” working on building typologies to challenge the dis-tinctively repetitive character of this settle-ment model from within, we might say, be-came one of the goals of Wright’s efforts, as Levine demonstrates by calling our at-tention to the projects he prepared for a set of lots purchased (1895) by one of his loyal clients, Charles roberts, in the village of ridgeland, again at oak Park. the project prepared for roberts envisioned a solution Wright did not fail to develop during the course of his career. In it he developed a true typology that would be reworked in other situations, placing the constructions at the corners of each rectangular lot and making the central portion, Levine writes, «the point of communal tangency.» recog-nizing the seminal value of the first project for roberts, Levine has produced several pages that deserve closer attention, dem-onstrating that the «new idea of the sub-urb» that thus took form –unlike what is usually imagined– was not an alternative to the conception behind an equally outstand-ing project for the history of American ur-banism, namely the one developed from 1906 to 1909 under the guidance of Daniel Burnham and edward Bennett for the cent-er of Chicago, which was the manifesto, so to speak, of the City Beautiful movement. While the plan for Chicago presented in 1909, in the wake of what had been done for the Columbian exposition in 1893, des-tined to become a model applied in various American cities, substantially defined what would be the monumental core of the new metropolis, it was not in contradiction with what Wright was exploring and imagining for the purpose of granting suburban set-tlements the dignity of a true community, as

recalled by one of Wright’s most gifted col-laborators, Marion Mahony Griffin. this conception represents the framework in which Levine also examines the project for the famous house designed by Wright in 1900 for the Ladies’ Home Journal, pre-sented as part of a “prairie community.” this episode of Wright’s career is covered by an entire chapter of the book, describing all the projects commissioned to different architects and published in the magazine with the aim of offering readers models of affordable suburban homes. the chapter fails to fully satisfy, because the excessive detail of the description of the projects pre-sented in Ladies’ Home Journal winds up making it hard to grasp the originality of the one developed by Wright, which offers a tangible demonstration of the distance at the time between his ideas and current pro-fessional practice.

As they approach the fifth chapter of the book, readers are faced with a turning point. Levine no longer concentrates on projects for the suburbs, but on the city and its growth in the age of mechanization and the spread of the automobile. In 1924 Wright announced that he wanted to move to Chicago, to the heart of the city whose future would be decided by the rational ex-ploitation of the potential offered by the spread of the use of cars and by the appli-cation of an unprecedented tool of regula-tion of urban growth –zoning– adopted in New york in 1916 and shortly thereafter in the city facing Lake Michigan. Also in 1924 –and this is not a negligible coincidence– Wright began to work on one of the pro-jects that best illustrate how he imagined coming to terms with the urban implica-tions of tall buildings, avoiding slavish ad-aptation to the mechanical transcriptions of the dictates of zoning in the modes of their conception and configuration, as demon-strated by the magnificent skyscraper regulation Project that came two years later, whose importance is suitably empha-sized by Levine. the project from 1924 pre-pared in collaboration with richard Neutra and Werner Moser and extensively covered by the book is the one for the National Life Insurance Company, known to many thanks to a famous perspective published in 1928 by the Architectural Record. this was a building that exploited the overhang and set out to be “three times lighter and three times more luminous” than those being built at the time in the center of the city. though conceived for a client that wanted to make it «one of the attractions of the country,» as Levine explains, on this occa-sion Wright developed a strategy he would later apply constantly when approaching the problem of the skyscraper, both on a design plane and on a theoretical plane. though in radically different contexts, this strategy was not conceptually different from the one developed, as we have seen, to subvert the implications of the grid. As foreseen in the project for the National Life Insurance Company, the objective pursued by Wright was once again to “empty from the inside” the reasoning that already in the 1920s had induced many to consider “the skyscraper an intractable theme,” breaking up established construction practice on the one hand, while only apparently contradict-ing itself on the other, imagining the sky-scraper as a typology suitable to promote a general process of “democratic” decen-tralization, based on the spread of grid-based allotments.

At this point, the pages of the book be-gin to be filled by a cumbersome presence, that of Le Corbusier, and alter ego with

which Wright had to constantly come to terms, starting in particular with his plan to involve the swiss architect in the hillside home school of Allied Arts he built in 1902 at spring Green, later incorporated in the taliesin Fellowship, from the project for the st. Mark’s towers (1927–29) and the elo-quent review of the english edition in 1927 of Vers une architecture, published in 1928 in World Unity 2 and entitled Towards a New Architecture. the subtitle of the chap-ter in which Levine focuses on the develop-ment of the relationship between Wright and Le Corbusier after the second half of the 1920s reads as follows: Broadacre City’s Ruralist Alternative to Le Corbusier’s Urbanism. readers have to be discerning to grasp the meaning and above all the scope of the opposition –misleading, to some ex-tent– between the terms “ruralism” and “urbanism.” to explain this face-off, the book makes wide use of references to Wright’s writings from the second half of the 1920s, and above all to Modern Archi-tecture: Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930 from 1931, for which Levine acted as editor of a new edition in 2008. this opposition is based on the antithetical interpretations made by Le Corbusier and Wright regarding the possibility that existing cities could be reformed to meet the needs of the “ma-chine age civilization.” It came from the contrasting meanings and values the two architects assigned to the city: for Le Cor-busier the city is always the repository of its past, as expressed in the words he spoke and wrote to defend the «intangible values» of the Casbah of Algiers, for example; for Wright, on the other hand, also relying on what we can read in the Kahn Lectures, in particular where he discusses the «tyranny of the skyscraper,» and on what Levine has written, the city is a record. For Wright the sole alternative was to “take the city to the country,” to re-establish it starting with an infrastructural system capable of respond-ing to the need for individual freedom gen-erated by the “mechanization that has tak-en command,” to use a famous expression coined by one of his most assiduous coun-terparts in the discussion, Lewis Mumford. With the reorganization of the city based on new urban planning standards, building ty-pologies would also take on a different meaning as expressions of alternative life-styles to those aimed at mere fulfillment of utilitarian purposes and interests.

this vision nurtured for years took form after 1934 and assumed an architectural configuration when the large model of Broadacre City, the most tangible demon-stration of how Wright’s ideas quickly ma-tured, taking their distance from the pro-posals outlined by Le Corbusier since 1922, starting from the plan for a city of three million inhabitants, was presented to the public. Levine devotes several pages to the explanation of the meaning of Broada-cre City, before concluding by observing that the anti-urban conception that informs the whole project made it a sort of substan-tially sterile programmatic statement, per-haps due to an excess of polemical intent. the idea that Wright may have shared this view is suggested by Levine at the end of the sixth chapter, when he remarks that Wright «never gave much further intellec-tual or artistic thought to how Broadacre City could evolve,» then stating that this project, «in retrospect, seems more an anomaly than representative of Wright’s ar-chitecture as a whole.» the pages to follow confirm that Levine has been correct, as he reaches this rather original conclusion, in his definition of the Broadacre City project

as an exception in Wright’s career, though that should not imply that the premises for which the project represented one of the conclusions should be seen as “anomalies.”

In the sixth chapter the book delves into the project developed by Wright starting in 1938 for the civic center of Madison, for which the Monoma terrace Community and Convention Center built decades after the architect’s death provides but a faded im-age or inexact recollection. In this project Wright had to approach an urban planning problem that had remained open since the time when a valid architect, John Nolen, at the start of the 20th century, designed the plan of Madison, a city located a few miles from taliesin east, where Wright had built several houses. In this case as in others, Levine again seems too tenacious in his re-construction of the events prior to the as-signment of the commission to Wright to design the new civic center of the city, and he fails to address the perplexities raised by the proposal itself. While it is not admis-sible on a historical plane to compare this project for a «stage set for public gather-ings,» Levine writes, with a work that can be defined in the same manner like the Midway Gardens of 1914, for example, whose meaning also from the standpoint of urban planning implications cannot be over-looked, such a comparison is admissible only because it allows us to gauge the dis-tance that separates the works we have encountered thus far in the book from what Wright imagined and represented in an em-phatic, rhetorical way for Madison.

Levine tells a different and more en-gaging tale in the book’s eighth chapter. here he explains how «the largest architec-tural job ever given to a single man,» a pro-ject comparable to those prepared for rockefeller Center, as it was said at the time, was assigned to Wright in 1940 by a not fully reliable client. though involving more modest quantities, this project for Washington DC called for the use of an area of similar size to the one occupied by rock-efeller Center, with the construction of 24 buildings with 12 or 14 stories and a taller tower created to contain the world’s largest hotel, all standing on a podium formed by a shopping center, a theater and a vast park-ing area. Conceived as a “city within a city,” this project that took an unusual approach to a city jealous of its traditions and its im-age was never built. Levine precisely de-scribes the tribulations and discussions leading to the decision to abandon the pro-ject, «halfway between traditional center and suburb,» which identified a new per-spective for the growth of Washington. In this way, Levine clarifies the terms of an ex-emplary episode that helps us to under-stand how conflicts with urban and building regulations constantly marked Wright’s career, no less than his idiosyncratic stance on the clichés that nourished the dominant mentalities (again, from this viewpoint, the skyscraper regulation Project mentioned above is a symptomatic episode).

the ninth chapter is very extensive, fo-cusing on the work for a very particular ar-ea, the tip of the Golden triangle of Pitts-burgh, at the meeting point of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, location of the city’s financial and business district. Again in this case, while supplying as on other oc-casions such a surplus of information as to test the attention span of any reader, Levine has reconstructed the events involving various institutions and organizations through which an attempt was made to give a definitive order to this privileged portion of Pittsburgh. Among those involved in

these episodes there was also robert Mo-ses, the omnipotent Park Commissioner of New york, and the “cousin” of Wright. But it was thanks to one of his most loyal clients, edgar kaufmann, that Wright received the commission to design the Point Park Civic Center of Pittsburgh. therefore taking stock, as Levine punctually does, of the fact that this job was assigned to Wright during the course of a dinner held in May 1946 at Fallingwater, the famous residence he de-signed for kaufmann about ten years earli-er, should not be seen as emphasis on a simple, curious coincidence.

In a short time span, Wright developed two different projects for the Point Park Civic Center. the first called for the com-pletion of the Golden triangle with an im-posing construction with a circular base that would rise like the tower of Babel, while the second focused on a different hy-pothesis that also starting with the reserva-tions expressed regarding the previous version assigned a decisive role to the res-olution of infrastructural issues. In the sec-ond case, in fact, Wright imagined building a tower whose summit would reach a height of about 300 meters, also function-ing as a support pylon of the stays of the bridges, bringing out the «prominent role played by traffic considerations,» Levine writes, translated into the definition of an infrastructural note shaped as «a monu-mental overpass.» In spite of the mediation of kaufmann, the Pittsburgh project also remained on the drawing board, though it is still a demonstration of how Wright set out to interpret “the need for a new monumen-tality,” to take Levine’s suggestion to refer to the title of a well-known essay published by sigfried Giedion in 1944. But unlike what Giedion asserted by defining the new urban centers that cities would have to equip to reflect the aspirations of a society that now wanted to make use of «collective, emotional events» as “stages” of an original “civic monumentality,” Wright imagined the reordering of the apex of the Golden trian-gle of Pittsburgh not just as a place sym-bolic of the «city’s role in the life of the indi-vidual and the collectivity,» Levine writes, but also if not above all as a demonstration of the fact that architecture is the sole mak-er, in a pertinent, complete sense, of the spectacles cities are capable of offering.

the tenth chapter concludes the book, and it does so by facing the reader with a hypothesis of interpretation that is far from obvious or banal. the topic addressed by Levine on these pages is the “Plan for Greater Baghdad” developed by Wright to-wards the end of his life. the information supplied at the start of the chapter is very useful, and could become the basis for new research that without excessive opti-mism can be seen as having great promise on a historical level. halfway through the 1950s the Iraqi government decided to build a series of new complexes in Bagh-dad, to accelerate the process of moderni-zation of the capital, made plausible by the income from oil production and the pro-western political climate ushered in by the Baghdad Pact of 1955 ratified by king Faisal. In this context the Iraqi authorities turned to some of the most famous west-ern architects, also including Gropius-tAC, Le Corbusier, Dudok, Aalto and Ponti, for a series of emblematic projects, such as those of the courthouse, the stadium and the university. For the opera house as-signed to him, Wright prepared «one of the most elaborate, symbolically charged buildings» of his career, Levine observes. After having visited Baghdad in 1957, just

two years before his death, and after iden-tifying the area for the construction of the opera house on an island in the tigris, Wright was asked to prepare the plan for the entire monumental center of the Iraqi capital. to justify this ambition he present-ed himself to public opinion and the Bagh-dad authorities as the defender of the «characteristic beauties of the Middle east,» but also as a censor, Levine reminds us, of the «materialistic influences of the West» which «I hope,» Wright remarked in a conversation, «will never reach Iraq.» Apart from this nimble move, quite the op-posite with respect to those he made when addressing issues of existing features in his projects for Pittsburgh and Washington DC, for example, Wright made another that was even more significant. As we look back on it, we are inevitably reminded of the harsh positions he held against the archi-tects of “european origin who have immi-grated in the united states,” also defined by him as «left-wing modernists,» whom he listed among the most stubborn enemies of his project for the Guggenheim Museum in New york, which was under construction in 1957, the year of his trip to Baghdad. In fact, in a letter cited by Levine, with the usual accurate documentation, he takes stock of the number of architects involved by the Iraqi government in the projects for the capital, stating in the authoritative tone he knew how to use to effect that he had realized he had «arrived too late to save the country from the invasion of western pro-fessional architects.» on 9 April 1959 Wright died, and the Greater Baghdad pro-ject was left in the form of a series of draw-ings that reveal certain affinities with those made for Pittsburgh.

Levine concludes the pages on this last major project by supplying an intelligent re-sponse, though not unexpected at this point, to the question the last chapters of his book, in particular, tend to raise. After having examined the projects covered in the volume, he wonders if their background might be identified in the “Baroque plan” of Burnham and Bennett for Chicago, pre-sented in 1909, «with which Wright had grown up.» having absorbed Burnham’s urging to «make no little plans,» Wright made «big plans» that wound up represent-ing, according to Levine, the last episode of the City Beautiful movement, whose roots went back to the White City that had hosted the Columbian exposition in 1893 in Chi-cago, whose history was known to Wright in every aspect. But for his mentor Louis sul-livan the Columbian exposition did not mark the dawn of a new era. In The Autobi-ography of an Idea sullivan spoke in no un-certain terms about the assessment of what was represented by the White City. «thus Architecture died in the land of the free and the home of the brave, in a land de-claring its fervid democracy, its inventive-ness, its resourcefulness, its unique daring, enterprise and progress. […] the damage wrought by the World’s Fair will last for half a century from its date, if not longer,» he wrote, before concluding: «For architec-ture, be it known, is dead.» throughout his life Wright addressed sullivan as Lieber Meister; but, as this book demonstrates, the lesson he absorbed was not only the one supplied by the master he had chosen, but also that of Daniel Burnham, in turn the alter ego of sullivan, though during the course of his career Wright was able to fuse them together, accomplishing what only a cultivator of paradox, a man who has no pa-tience with the commonplace and no fear of contradictions, can do.

«Casabella» è disponibile anche in edizione giapponese, attraverso:Architects Studio Japan Inc.8-1 24F Kakuda-cho, Kita-ku, Osaka530-0017 Japantel +81.06.63635701www.asj-net.com

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numero 880/issue 880n. 12/2017 anno/year LXXXIdicembre/December 2017

Redazione / Editorial stafftel +39.02.75422179fax +39.02.75422706email casabella@mondadori.itemail segreteria.casabella@mondadori.it (produzione)

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