Cosmetic Architecture

For most of his sojourn upon earth, man built his houses, halls, castles and temples the way a child uses a set of building blocks--the walls support the roof. The age of the skyscraper demanded new methods and materials.

Chicago's 16-story Monadnock Building, built in 1891, required masonry 15 ft. thick at the base to support the crushing load. Such walls were made unnecessary by the so-called "curtain wall," hung from the building's frame. But since World War II, the architects' slang for a building's outer covering, "skin," has become especially appropriate; thin, lightweight metals and glass have turned more and more office buildings into glistening, icy slabs of graph-paper monotony. What Frank Lloyd Wright called "those flat-chested facades" has become a national vice.

Skinned & Reskinned. Most new buildings look as if they came off the same assembly line; architectural classics of a more individualistic age are being forced to conform. In San Francisco, the Home Mutual Savings Building, designed by Daniel Burnham and John W. Root in the tradition of the illustrious 19th century Chicago school of architecture, is now having its balanced grandeur shrouded by a curtain wall of glittery white porcelain enamel. "Worse than a desecration," growls Architect Nathaniel Owings of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "It's a stupid misunderstanding of what the future is."

And in Manhattan, the landmark that gave Times Square its name--the 59-year-old, 26 story Times Tower--has been sold to the Allied Chemical Corp., which will skin it of all its bony character and reskin it with a well-ribbed gridiron, making it look like a hundred other Manhattan towers.

Hiding the Nostrils. One of the most articulate enemies of this wallpaper architecture is the chairman of Yale Uni versity's Department of Architecture, Paul Rudolph, 44. "New York is full of cosmetic architecture," he says, "glass-sheathed, cellophane-like buildings which hide the actual structure and all the nostrils of the building--the ventilating systems. Packaging architecture in boxes is the main characteristic of most postwar building, and now there's a cry for honesty rather than cosmetics. I don't believe we can build large cities out of various-sized packages which are buildings. We need to sense and know what's holding up a building."

Except for Lever House and the Seagram Building, Rudolph thinks that all of lower Park Avenue "looks as though it's about to crumple and fall. Furthermore, Park Avenue is full of imitations of imitations, all of them reflecting each other, until it appears to be an enlarged barbershop with mirrors on all sides."

"It's not just a question of beauty," says Rudolph. "It's a matter of significant form. There is something in a human being which demands that we sense the support and the supported--even though it may be sheathed with other materials, and decorated. Look at the difference between these bland cosmetic boxes and a Gothic cathedral, where every last rib and column is structural."

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