Having just written a post about tempera rendering in the
'50s and '60s, I thought I should note the other styles that were
alternatives to the dominance of tempera.
As I noted before, modern architecture emphasized the cold
orderliness of the machine, expressed in steel, glass and concrete. At the same
time, people became accustomed to full, vibrant colors in magazines, books and
advertisements, and this led to the dominance of tempera in architectural renderings.
Other forces were also pressing society toward uniformity, but there were
equally strong winds blowing toward diversity.
The most obvious “wind” was the expectation of a new
viewpoint in the fine arts. As noted in my post covering 1900 to 1940, there
was an ongoing dialogue between the modern and the traditional, as well as
between the realistic and the abstract. This conflict has continued throughout
my entire life. I started out naturally ignorant of it all, was enamored of it
in college and came to an accommodation with it in my middle age. It is now a phenomenon
to be mulled over while sipping sherry by the fire.
Anyway…
The interwar years were a scattered time in architecture and
architectural illustration. World War II forced a pause in the creative arts,
but after the war, art exploded, and the mix of styles became even wilder. Some of the architects and artists active
before the war came back (Wright as celebrity and Hugh Ferriss as apologist).
Some of the architects forced out of Europe by the Nazis landed in the United States and
created a “Europeanized” modern movement (Gropius at Harvard and Mies at
Chicago). Several movements that had been fermenting began to take center stage
(skyscraper style and expressionism). Everybody (who was anybody) was tied
together by electronic media, so that a new building in Chicago was soon
reproduced in Houston. There was plenty of creativity and talent, but it was a
wild whirlpool of confusion.
Some architects were seduced by the rational while pursuing
the beautiful.… For example…
Before the war Le Corbusier saw the human race as undifferentiated
objects to be fit into a massive box. His focus on science, analysis and the machine
as savior was mixed with a love of classical proportion. His Unite
d'Habitation was occasionally beautiful, but never humane. This sketch, on the
other hand, is thoroughly human and personal; indeed, it is almost primitive.
After the war his designs were more sculptural, human and
natural. Above is a sketch of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp (1951). In both
examples Corbu exhibited a disdain for photographic reality, opting for a
self-involved path of the genius artist, leading to celebrity. It was a very
shallow and very modern career move but a growing and lucrative trend.
Some architects of that time could draw…
Bruce Goff was a uniquely creative spirit based in
Oklahoma. He drew perspectives of most of his projects, even though his designs
were often non-rectilinear and organic in form. Above is an interior view of
his Crystal Chapel, an unrealized proposal for the University of Oklahoma.
Eero Saarinen leaves me cold, perhaps because I compare him with his dramatic father, Eliel. However, Eero could design in a uniquely modern
way; just look at his TWA terminal or his Dulles International terminal. He
never created full-scale renderings, like his father, but instead tended to draw
small sketches. This notepad-sized sketch of the David Ingalls Rink at Yale is
rightly called a classic.
Paul Rudolph, a consummate draftsman, studied under Walter
Gropius at Harvard (ironic because Gropius was famously uninterested in
drawing). He picked up the modern Bauhaus sense of design but developed an
almost Beaux-Arts sense of drawing. His hard-line ink renderings are elegant,
detailed and highly informative, an aspect that was rather unusual for the
time. His section perspective of the Art & Architecture Building at Yale is
a wonderful example of his seductive genius.
Some people have the talent, the drive and the
breaks that move them to draw: Louis Kahn is one of these. While still a child, Kahn helped earn money for his family by selling his drawings. His
architectural training, at the University of
Pennsylvania, was strictly Beaux-Arts, emphasizing drawing and watercolor rendering. Kahn studied under
and worked for Paul Cret, a Philadelphia architect and artist of some fame in
the '30s. The drawing above, of the Mikveh Israel Synagogue project in Philadelphia,
was done when he had achieved fame in his late-blooming career.
Other architects could design but couldn’t draw. Professional
renderers filled that void, producing seductive images.
Hugh Ferriss had been the toast of architectural illustration
in the '20s, and was still working in the '50s. Lever House (1952) by Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill offered an opportunity for Ferriss to reprise his iconic
black-and-white drama. Unfortunately, glass-and-steel towers were less amenable
to his rough charcoal approach than the masonry buildings of 1925 had been.
Watercolor rendering (or its cousin ink-wash rendering) was the
preferred technique at the Ecole des Beaux Arts through the 18th and
19th centuries. In addition, Cyril Farey was only one of many
professional watercolor illustrators active before and after WWII, but in spite
of that watercolor lost in popularity to tempera at this time. This student
painting of the United States Embassy in India is quite simplistic but
displays the charm of the technique.
This dusk rendering of St. Augustine’s Church in Union
City, New Jersey, by Alan Davoll suggests the subtlety and range that
watercolor could attain. Thirty years later watercolor would supplant tempera
as the most popular media.
In some circles the very idea of clearly reproducing reality
seemed to be optional. Instead personal expression and graphic impact were the
priorities.
At the “cutting edge” of design, perspective became less
realistic and more artsy. Paul Hogarth was a popular illustrator at this time
who specialized in drawing the built environment. His work is idiosyncratic and
charming, but only loosely realistic. Above is a 1967 drawing of an Art Nouveau Apartment House in Moscow.
You can obviously avoid photographic reality while using
hard-edged perspective. Such was the strategy of the neofuturistic architects
of the '60s (a style that I copied at one time in architecture school). A good
example is Bournemouth Gallery by Ron
Herron of Archigram, a British avant-garde design studio.
…and just as a contrast…
The reality to me growing up was that I didn’t see any of
this bubbling. There was a tension between the two approaches, with the common
man seeing only the practical realistic drawings/paintings while the
cognoscenti luxuriated in theoretical abstraction.
… I was too young in those years, and I was far from the
center of trendy culture. I did see magazines with commercial ads for houses,
however. Compared with the best illustrations of the time they seem simple and
naïve, but they were amazing to a ten-year-old.
Levittown house plan and rendering, 1958 (above), and a
house ad from 1960 (below).
By the end of high school I knew that I wanted to study
architecture. I’d taught myself perspective, and I had read several books on architectural
history, but my view of the profession was parochial. When I finally ran into
the most recent architectural drawings in Progressive
Architecture magazine, the wide range of drawing styles and attitudes was
both confusing and fascinating to me.
Final thoughts…
Now… look back over the drawings and paintings in this post.
Do you see any pattern?
The only thing I see is variety; a diversity of style, media
and effect. This is not bad; in fact, any vibrant cultural period will have a
lot of ideas gestating. But in a healthy
society this all leads eventually to a new consensus and a new synthesis. The
problem is… we seem to be stuck on a merry-go-round, reaching for the new ring
over and over and over again.
All the examples here are perspectives, but the fact is that
there were more isometrics, axonometrics and other orthographic drawings (such as
this final drawing, above, by M. Gierst, 1951). There
was less focus on being clear and more focus on being interesting, startling
and transgressive. All these graphic approaches should have led to a single dominant style and media, if historic patterns were followed, but they didn't. Why?
I think there are two reasons for this… first, technology
came to the rescue, allowing Gehry, Koolhaas and Hadid to solidify and construct
their dreams just as solidly as Pei, Pelli and Johnson realized their more rational ideas. Second, we continue to live in an age of celebrity and image,
which means that we (or the media elite) will forgive much silliness as long as it
is entertaining. "The engineers will keep it up; come on, let's party!"
Am I being pessimistic? Maybe. Would I like to return to the
realistic past of 100 years ago? No, but I think a reintroduction of thoughtfulness,
reality and craft wouldn’t hurt. In any
case, it has been a long, strange trip, and we don’t seem to have reached the
end.
Other posts on Perspective:
