The United States is not only a big country, it is a diverse one. Nowhere else can you find a greater array of people with different backgrounds living in the same place. It is also a country with many differences in climate and geography. What holds the nation together is a shared sense of who we are: an idea embodied by our diverse culture, including our architecture. When the building arts are able to draw on, express, and bring together what makes us both different and one nation, they at their best.
In my previous post, I discussed the attempts to create such diverse unity in Modernism, as showcased in two recent architecture books. They demonstrate how a group of houses and small buildings that appeared in cities such as Chicago and Houston in the 1950s and 1960s represented a new vernacular, one that broke from the tradition-bound elite and the English- and Spanish-influenced architecture that was the source of the most prevalent house styles until then. The architects did this by abstracting and simplifying forms and spaces, and by relying on mass production and a shared taste culture spread through mass media. The resulting Modernist homes and civic structures became icons of the better, more efficient, more open, and more exciting new society this country thought it was building after the Second World War.
Another selection of recent books spotlights other such attempts to create a unifying style by using local landscapes and materials. Of Barns and Palaces: John Yeon, Northwest Architect, by J.M. Cava and published by Oro Editions last year, features the work of Yeon, a self-trained, high-society architect in Portland, Ore. Triangle Modern Architecture, by Victoria Ballard Bell (published in September, also by Oro), spotlights the group of Modernist architects who worked in North Carolina (they were named after the Research Triangle in the Raleigh-Durham area, not after their peaked roofs or other dynamic diagonals). Both books describe architects who tried to bring together older and familiar styles and materials with modern spatial organization and building methods to create something that would be of the place.
Their influence was, in the end, limited. For starters, these architects worked for the commissioning elite, which meant for white males of the upper and upper-middle class, or for bureaucracies that represented that group. Second, the amount of work these designers produced was small compared to the volume of construction that rose up during the postwar boom years. This was not, as J.M. Cava claims in the Yeon book, a true vernacular, but a way for a new elite to represent themselves.
Yeon's Aubrey R. Watzek House
Yeon (who was also the subject of a recent volume by Marc Trieb, also published by Oro) was a singular character. According to Cava, he never advertised or attempted to build a large practice. Instead, he was content to design houses, either based on the “barn” model that Yeon said was inspired by rural structures in the Pacific Northwest, or also larger “palaces” for wealthier and more traditional clients.
Based on the array of plans and photographs Cava has collected—all black and white, and all historic, which gives the book a nostalgic tint—what Yeon did was to continue the Beaux Arts method of organization that he learned from his mentor Herman Brookman, only he used wood forms that slathered both the inside and outside of many of his buildings. For the “barn” houses, such as Swan (1950) or Prebble (1955) (both unbuilt), he looked not only to the farm, but also to Japan (though not to the local Japanese culture or communities) to inspire more fluid spaces. Yet he also delighted in the complex games of plan arrangement that included an occasional virtuoso use of central octagonal or hexagonal spaces. For larger commissions for more tradition-oriented clients, such as the Watzeks (1930) or the Cottrells (1950), Yeon tended to like rambles around courtyards, with corridors snaking around rooms that tended to be located in separate pavilions but remained part of the overall body of the houses.
Yeon’s work, if it resembles anyone else’s, was an American take on Edward Lutyens, whose houses distended and abstracted complex geometries and masses to adjust to the changing realities of modernity right before and after the First World War.
The work Bell has collected in Triangle Modern Architecture is altogether more eclectic and more varied in scale, program, and quality. The author’s premise is that the emergence of progressive architecture schools at both the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State, combined with an influx of money and commissions that followed the growth of those universities and other research facilities in the area, created a particular version of Modernism.
What distinguishes that architecture is, I am afraid, not very clear. Bell offers a two-page excursus on “Deep Roots,” which mentions everything from the indigenous people of the area, to the forests that supported the local timber industry, to tobacco barns (there’s no mention of slavery or even Black people), to the move towards brick in the middle of the 20th century. She spends more time on the curricula at the two universities, noting their Bauhaus roots and the connections to the short-lived Black Mountain College. But then she offers no argument about where we can find such a history in the buildings. Instead, she plunges into a catalog of the work.
She starts with Henry Kamphoefer, North Carolina State’s long-serving and influential dean, featuring one serviceable modern house he designed. More productive was G. Milton Small Jr., a prolific architect trained by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who created larger, commercial projects that showed off his ability to float restrained volumes, whether commercial or residential, in the softly sloping landscape. The tragic exemplar is that of Matthew Nowicki, a distinguished Modernist architect who managed to complete one remarkable building, the Dorton Arena at the State Fair Grounds—two interlocking saddle roofs swooping over the otherwise barren site—before dying early in a plane crash.
G. Milton Small Jr.'s Home Security Life Building (later the Durham Police Department)
Small's Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company Building
Certainly, Bell is right that, for a while, some amazing architects taught and worked in the Research Triangle. They included acclaimed designers such as Harwell Hamilton Harris, who moved there from California, as well as unsung masters such as George Matsumoto, whose restrained and elegant forms are a marvel to behold, and Eduardo Catalano, who enjoyed making his roofs twist, cantilever, and soar. You can imagine how this work could have scaled up and transformed the region.
I wish the volume had ended there. But Bell shows the work of the students and followers of this founding generation, a parade of rather mediocre structures that I found disappointing and even a bit depressing. I found not a single building of this group that rose beyond the modestly elegant. If this is Triangle Modernism today, it is of little interest.
Perhaps the message is that the work taught and produced during the postwar boom in North Carolina never really took root. It did not resonate enough with local traditions, the landscape, or any existing taste culture. It catered to imports instead of locals, creating for the former group a world that aspired to excellence in science, and, with Duke University’s purchasing power, the humanities. The Triangle region, in my opinion, never created architecture that matched those achievements.
I am afraid that this is the case in most of the United States. While you can still find architects such as Yeon across the country, quietly creating elegance for those who can afford it, most of what has become our vernacular consists of bastardized, cheapened, homogenous, and wasteful structures that could be anywhere. It is time to ask the question again: What would be a true American vernacular? It would be something true to its place and to its users, true to its materials and its forms, and true to the idea that we are, somehow and in mysterious but beautiful ways, one nation.
Aaron Betsky is a regularly featured columnist whose views and conclusions are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine nor of the American Institute of Architects.
