Doing Their Own Thing

By ROBERT HUGHES

The 1970s were the decade in which Modernism died. Its Boot Hill turned out to be the U.S., in whose hospitable soil the dreams of the pioneers of modern art and architecture lie buried, toes to the rising sun. Once they hoped the world would be made whole by new paintings and new buildings. It was not, and there is no avant-garde any more; the very phrase has been scrapped, becoming one of the historical curiosities of criticism.

The belief that art could assist social change was a central idea of the Modernist enterprise. It pervaded the revolutionary idealism of the Russian constructivists, the Bauhaus designers, the Dadaists and Surrealists, even the Abstract Expressionists. It has now ended, and instead of the old faith in a heroic future, we have an institution: the Mausoleum of the Briefly New.

In architecture, the end of Modernism is particularly clear. For architecture is the social art: one looks at a painting or sculpture, but people live and work in buildings. It is the most expensive art of all and therefore the slowest to change; for once clients are used to a particular look, a standard method of construction and a conventional system of status-conferring clues, it is hard to wean any but the most adventurous away from them. Architecture is also the most visible of all arts. Buildings shape the environment; painting and sculpture only adorn it. All this has meant that though architecture changes more slowly than painting, its fluctuations mean more. When they occur, clearly something is up. What happened to architecture in the 1970s may turn out to be the largest revision of opinion about buildings--what they mean, what they do, how they should look--since the first third of our century, the "heroic years" of Modernist architecture, when its terms were shaped by such men as Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.

"After a run of a hundred years or so," wrote one of America's leading architecture critics, Peter Blake, in his belligerent text Form Follows Fiasco (1977), "Modern Dogma is worn out. We are now close to the end of one epoch, and well be fore the start of a new one. During this period of transition there will be no moratorium on building ... there will just be more and more architecture without architects." To travel in American cities is to know what he meant; the townscape of the '70s is perfused with cost-accountant buildings that bear no trace of human imagination: three-dimensional graphs of optimum efficiency, seemingly designed by computers for insects. In the whole pattern of American building, real architecture is a minority's activity.

But among the architects themselves there is an undeniable ferment, unlike anything in "classical" Modernist architecture. The receding tide of orthodoxy has left all manner of different organisms exposed on the reef. At one taxonomic extreme is California's Frank Gehry, 49. Gehry prefers materials--corrugated iron, chain-link fence, asbestos shingles, raw plywood--that allude to the commonplace substance of 1960s sculpture, and his formal interests frankly lie with what he calls "a fascination with incoherent and illogical systems, a questioning of orderliness and functionality." At the other extreme lie the clear, exquisitely modulated voids and surfaces of post-Corbusian designers like Richard Meier, 44, and Charles Gwathmey, 40. In between fall still more manners and interests: the glass caverns of Cesar Pelli, 42; the complicated linguistic play with Pop and history practiced by Robert Venturi, 53, and his firm in Philadelphia; the no less complex, but somewhat less ironic and more playful historicism of Charles Moore, 53, and Robert Stern, 39; the slangy, "high-tech" flexibility of Hugh Hardy, 46, and his firm, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer; the outright jokiness of Stanley Tigerman, 48.

Most of these architects are under 50, which is young in a profession whose only guarantee of big jobs is the slow growth of practical reputation. Apart from age, the main thing they have in common is a fascination with architecture as language. When tradition (including the Modernist tradition) appears in their work, it is quoted rather than adhered to. There is no common style. Above all, they have no uniting ideology, as the Bauhaus or, on a less exalted level, the corporate American architects of the '50s had. Yet they are regularly grouped under one umbrella phrase: Post-Modernism.

The very phrase recognizes the end of a tradition. Its main definer, if not exactly its inventor (it is one of those phrases that crept out of the woodwork in the art world in the middle '70s and attached itself to buildings), is the English architecture critic Charles Jencks. In his latest book, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), Jencks complains that "any building with funny kinks in it, or sensuous imagery" has come to be labeled Post-Modern, and suggests that the term should be restricted to hybrid, "impure" buildings that are designed around historical memory, local context, metaphor, spatial ambiguity and an intense concern with architectural linguistics. That, obviously, excludes the glass-cliff builders like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Minoru Yamasaki of the World Trade Center, or spokesmen of cultural grandeur like I.M. Pei. Indeed, given the architecture Americans have had for 40 years, such a description virtually deprives Post-Modernism of living father figures. There are, of course, dead grandfathers, from the Catalan master of Art Nouveau, Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926), to the English imperial architect Sir Edward Lutyens, whose richly coded and sometimes wildly illogical structures were left wherever the British army marched, from the Somme battlefields to New Delhi.

The nearest man Post-Modernism has to a senior partner is, in fact, the leading American architect of his generation: Philip Cortelyou Johnson. The firm of Johnson-Burgee has become to American architecture what McKim, Mead & White was 80 years before: the voice of authority, flavored with luxury. Johnson's critics see him as a brilliant opportunist capable of adapting to any regime of taste: in effect, the Anastas Mikoyan of architectural ideology. Certainly Johnson has, with dazzling skill, traversed the whole range of 20th century manners: from the idealistic severities of the International Style (whose name, as an architecture critic in tandem with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, he coined in 1932), through various essays in neo-historicism, to Post-Modernism.

He pointed to Post-Modernism 20 years ago, with his famous dictum "You cannot not know history"; and last June, when accepting the American Institute of Architects' gold medal, he gave a kind of official blessing to it: old Bernini patting heads in the studio. "We stand at an enormous watershed," he remarked. "We stand at a place where maybe we haven't stood for 50 years, and that is a shift in sensibility so revolutionary that it is hard to grasp because we are right in the middle of it. It is the watershed between what we have all been brought up with as the Modern, and something new, uncharted, uncertain and absolutely delightful." But to understand the newness of this terrain one must first grasp the culture out of which Johnson came: the attitudes of the International Style.

The essence of the International Style, or the Modern Movement (the two phrases are almost synonymous by now), was its dogmatism. The years 1900 to 1930 bristle with formulas and coercive epigrams: "Form follows function," "The house is a machine for living in," and so forth. Mies van der Rohe's "Less is more" was prefigured by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos' belief, published in Vienna in 1908, that ornament was crime: "We have outgrown ornament!" Loos exclaimed. "See, the time is nigh, freedom awaits us. Soon the streets of the City will glisten like white walls, like Zion, the holy city, the capital of heaven! Then fulfillment will come!"

The masters of the Modern Movement all tended to share this messianic tone. Architecture would produce the millennium: a perfect society, implicitly legislated by architects. In Le Corbusier's view, architecture would transcend even politics. "Architecture or revolution!" he wrote, at the turbulent beginning of the '20s. Consequently men like Mies, Gropius and Le Corbusier were prone to see themselves not only as prophets but as lawgivers, and their tracts were filled with a lofty utopianism. The dream was neatly parodied by John Betjeman:

I have a vision of the future, chum:

The workers flats infields of soya beans

Towering up like silver pencils, score on score,

While surging millions hear the challenge come

From microphones in communal canteens:

"No right! No wrong! All's perfect, ever more."

One might say that the essential subject matter of the International Style was the end of history. Its "functionalism," which correctly saw that mass production was destroying handcraft and, with it, ornament, was always colored by this millenarian fantasy. Johnson, whose relationship to Mies van der Rohe is complicated and Oedipal, argues that "Mies believed in the ultimate truth of architecture, especially of his architecture: that it was closer to the truth than anyone else's because it was simpler and could be learned. He felt it could be adapted on and on into the centuries, until architecture bloomed into the great science he thought it should be, and all our cities would look like a series of Mies buildings--a poor man's Chicago. He lost. But he didn't know he had."

Influenced (as it profoundly was) by the chaos of World War I and the Utopian dreams of postwar social reorganization, internationalism and communality, Modernist architecture was obsessed with the blank slate. Le Corbusier was thus able to dream up one of the most terrifying civic schemes in architecture, the 1925 Voisin Plan for Paris, which meant nothing less than the wholesale razing of the city and its replacement by a grid of giant tower blocks linked by freeways and parks: in the name of improvement, the French must submit even their memory to editing by the masterbuilder. Of course, it was never done; but the fact that so many of the classical projects of Modernism were not built gave their authors the sort of freedom the Bastille granted the Marquis de Sade's writing. The Utopian impulse did not have to break its teeth on the real world. Johnson remembers a conversation he had 40 years ago with the former Bauhaus architect Richard Neutra. " 'Oh!' Neutra exclaimed, 'If only I could work for Hitler!' And I said to him, but Mr. Neutra, you are Jewish! 'Yes,' he said, 'but he builds buildings.' " The peculiar frustrations of the time are condensed in that exchange.

The clarity and dedication of the founding fathers, their unquestionable sincerity, tended to paper over the faults in the buildings they did make. Several generations of architecture students have made the pilgrimage to Marseille to gaze on the mighty concrete stilts and nobly articulated flanks of Le Corbusier's mass-housing block, the Unite d'Habitation, without apparently noticing what a cramped, dingy, drafty building it is to live in, or how indifferent its design was to the habits and traditions of the Marseillais. The house-as-machine obsessions of the Modernists were hilariously skewered by Evelyn Waugh in 1928, in the person of Dr. Silenus (alias Walter Gropius), functionalist extraordinaire: "The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful, but I am doing my best. All ill comes from man. Please tell your readers that. Man is never beautiful; he is never happy except when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces." Indeed, Gropius' Siedlung (workers' housing development) (1928) in Dessau, one of the canonical Modernist designs, had ceilings 6 ft. 2 in. high--which, he thought, was he clearance an average German worker needed.

The International Style was an architecture of principles. No mass, but volume; instead of load-bearing brick or stone walls, sheets of glass were hung like curtains on a steel frame. The wall's transparency let the frame declare it carried all the load. Skin and bones were clearly differentiated. The preferred material for the opaque parts of the skin was stucco--white, taut, smooth and helplessly vulnerable to weather and staining. Mouldings, which gave depth and shadow to surfaces (and therefore bulk), were eliminated along with every other form of ornament. Candor was the goal, a search for reductive essences, a constant purging of superfluities. Thus architecture became, for its higher practitioners, a kind of secular religion. "We were in a great time of faith in the '20s," Johnson says. "I don't think there has been such a strong feeling of that sort since the High Renaissance; maybe the French Revolution had the same sense that classicism was revolutionary and pure."

The practical appeal of the Modernist idiom, however, was not its spiritual elevation but its low cost. "Every cheap architect could copy Mies," says Johnson. "He could go to the client and say, I can do a building cheaper than I did it for you last year, because now I have a religion. We have a flat roof and simple factory-made curtain walls. It was a justification for cheapness that took over our cityscapes, and that is what you see in New York today." The universal glass box, cut-rate Mies (for real Mies was real architecture, and too expensively finished for most developers to tolerate), would cover any function: airport, bank, office block, church, club. It tended to be what the Germans labeled Stempelarchitektur, rubber-stamp building. Thus a debased form of Modernist dogmatism, what Charles Jencks called "the rationalization of taste into cliches based on statistical averages of style and theme," turned out to be the official style of the '50s and '60s. When repeated ad nauseam by architects all over the U.S. during the building boom of the 1950s, to the point where the curtain-wall grid had become the "rational," cost-account face of capitalism itself, it was bound to provoke a reaction.

The first sign of it, not much better than the original malaise, was "historicism,"--the rich, beautiful prose of corporate style, achieved with acres of white marble that somehow always ended up looking like plastic laminate. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art by William Pereira is an early Western example of the genre; its equivalent on the East Coast was Lincoln Center in Manhattan, a large, poor parody of Michelangelo's Campidoglio in Rome, designed by Wallace Harrison, Max Abramovitz and by Philip Johnson, whose building was the New York State Theater. All the historical allusions in this corporate style (and there were plenty of them) were seriously trotted forth as an antidote to International Style purity. But they tended to escape the architects' control. Buildings mean things; sometimes they convey meaning in highly complicated ways, but they can also be very blunt, and unconsciously so. The silliness of many of the biggest recent official architectural projects in America flows from this. No doubt when Gordon Bunshaft and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the vast concrete drum of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington they had in mind the "ideal," unbuilt funerary monuments to heroes dreamed up by the French Revolutionary Architect Etienne-Louis Boullee. That does not stop the thing looking like a set for The Guns of Navarone, minus the guns: an unwitting parody of museum security.

At the end of a tradition, only irony can control quotation; and irony would become one of the main features of Post-Modernism. When Johnson decreed that "you cannot not know history," orthodox Miesians were scandalized. Johnson had allowed himself private ironies when building for himself; the gazebo on his lake in New Canaan, Conn., is scaled down to the proportions of the famous dwarves' quarters in the Gonzaga Palace in Mantua, a complete antifunctionalist joke. But for a long while Johnson was too embedded in the world of high taste and big money to permit himself large public ironies: that is one of the freedoms l'architecte du roi has to abjure.

Thus the work that did most to precipitate the Post-Modernist attitude in America was not by Johnson; nor was it a building. It was a book, published in 1966 by an obscure architect and theorist from Philadelphia named Robert Venturi. Its title was Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.

This text has the same importance for Post-Modernism as Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture, published in 1923, did for Modernism. It is, in other words, one of the hinges of recent architectural history. In tone, Venturi's manifesto was almost diffident: "Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox modern architecture. I like elements which are hybrid rather than 'pure,' compromising rather than 'clean,' distorted rather than 'straightforward,' ambiguous ... and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for messy vitality over obvious unity ... I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning."

Le Corbusier's book had put a generation on the spot. Progress or reaction? Architecture or revolution? Sheep or goats? Utopia or the dark backside of history? Which do you choose? Now Venturi was arguing for the Either, the Or and the Holy Both, and his text reads rather like the litany that Claes Oldenburg, the most powerful American artist of his generation, had written five years earlier: "I am for art that coils and grunts like a wrestler. I am for art that sheds hair. I am for art you can sit on. I am for art you can pick your nose with or stub your toes on."

In exalting the density and plurality of "everyday" architecture above the singleness of the Modernist ideal, Venturi's ideas joined up with the Pop movement, which by 1966 had already peaked in America. Venturi was roundly damned for this by Modernist critics, as Pop painting had been damned by formalist critics seeking to preserve the "purity" of canonical, Greenberg-style color abstraction. But young architects and architecture students thought otherwise; by the early 1970s Venturi, who had built very few buildings, had attracted a considerable following as a theorist and critic.

His most "shocking" venture was another book, Learning from Las Vegas (1972). That title said it all. After the high ambitions of Modernism, the glitzy show biz vernacular of Route 91.

"We believe," Venturi's group announced, "a careful documentation and analysis of the commercial strip is as important to architects and urbanists today as were the studies of medieval Europe and ancient Rome and Greece to earlier generations." Why? Because the strip was there; it was what the dominant American machine, the car, had actually done to cities. The architect's job was not to ignore the strip (it would not go away, whether Modernism liked it or not), but to learn to do the strip well. And this meant tolerating variety: of style, of lingo, of message. "For the artist, creating the new may mean choosing the old or the existing. Pop artists have relearned this. Our acknowledgment of existing, commercial architecture at the scale of the highways is within this tradition."

Venturi saw the everyday commercial vernacular--McDonald's, Ramada Inn, Burger King, Tastee-Freez, Fatburger. Kentucky Fried--as a source, just as the International Style had used the "styleless" metaphor of machinery, biplanes and ocean liners as its source. "We admit symbolism in architecture. As form, the strip is ugly and amorphous. As symbols, it works." In this way, Venturi gave architectural thinking the most angular shove it had received in half a century: away from beautiful, unitary, abstract form, toward linguistic variety and an ironic, mildly dandified awareness of history and how to quote it. The strip was the tool that opened a most curious can of worms.

Venturi's own buildings, designed in partnership with his wife Denise Scott Brown, John Rauch and Stephen Izenour, are more restrained in their use of Pop motifs than his polemics. As California's Charles Moore remarks, "Venturi has celebrated McDonald's Golden Arches, but I'd take bets he's never eaten a Big Mac." He has built no big commissions, so his intentions read best in his houses, most recently in a ski lodge at Aspen, Colo. It is a stew of historical references: "An Art Nouveau grandfather clock with arts-and-crafts overtones," says Venturi, and overlaid with suggestions of tree house, pagoda and the intimate precision of the Finnish master Alvar Aalto. Outside, it is an aggressive little building, with its oversize dormer windows, tight walls and thick compressive hat of a roof. Inside, the Mission style takes over, providing an enveloping timber womb in the form of a vaulted sitting room on the top floor--one of the most romantic and picturesque spaces, like an old Polish synagogue, that recent architecture has to offer. Nothing in this building could be called revivalist;, everything is quotation and proposition, exaggerated detail held in parentheses. Venturi seems to be expressing the same sort of relationship to the past that theorizing mannerist architects like Vasari, in the 16th century, had with Michelangelo's more heroic prototypes.

It is the sensibility of the architecture school, a trait also found in Robert Stern's work. Stern's remarkable house in Armonk, N.Y., is like an assembly of delicately related fragments. One seems to be looking at a stage set that represents a villa. Instead of coalescing in the strong cubical masses of Italian country architecture, the walls are like screens, separated, undulating, shearing away from one another; the effect resembles painting as much as it does building, in its dematerialization and purity of effect--down to the smallest detail of a skylight.

Charles Moore's work is more exuberant and whimsical than this. Academically, Moore is one of the most influential architects in America. He now teaches at U.C.L.A.'s school of architecture, and he ran Yale's from 1965 to 1975, giving the students a lively and eclectic program that was oriented more toward the Beaux-Arts inventiveness of the late Louis Kahn than toward the International Style. In his book Body, Memory and Architecture (1977), Moore also set forth his ambition for a more humanistic mode of building, the "dwelling" or "nest" as opposed to Corbusier's "machine."

Moore wants buildings to "freshen one's perception of the familiar," rather than turn Pop into a sequence of quotations `a la Venturi. He uses space with originality. It is not the "universal" grid-space, the abstract Raum-with-a-view of Bauhaus thought, but a choppily processional medium, full of ambiguities and kinks, stagy, and as apt to be inflected by supergraphics as by walls. Moore's latest project, with which he is "thrilled," is really a stage set. The Piazza d'ltalia fountain in New Orleans was commissioned as a celebratory space for the local Italian community. Moore dismissed all thought of "unitary" Tuscan directness and produced a razzmatazz design, a caprice resembling the gaudy, papier-mache fair sets of Sicilian festa decor: fragments of Roman and Renaissance buildings around an 80-ft.-long stone map of Italy, like the masterpiece of a megalomaniac pastry cook. A fountain spurts out of Moore's Sicily, and its water runs down in rivulets representing the Po, the Arno and the Tiber.

Carried further, mannerism turns into jokes. One exponent of the building as sight gag is Chicago Architect Stanley Tigerman. His best-known visual joke is the Daisy House in Porter Beach, Ind. The house is in the shape of a phallus; a flight of white concrete steps, cascading down to the lake shore, represents the semen. Tigerman can also be serious, as in his award-winning Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped at the University of Illinois' Chicago Circle campus. Since most blind people are at least partly sighted, and can register color, the library is candied with bright primary hues; and though its windows are the wrong height for people who walk erect, they are considerately built low for those in wheelchairs.

This revival of color--mainly mock-industrial color, the sharp hues used for coding function in factories--extends to other architects. The "high-tech" look that pervades Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer's projects is inherently slangy and decorative. If one buys a sculpture to perk up a building, it argues, one will probably get something made of brightly painted pipes, drums and I-beams. So why not forget sculpture and paint the ducts one has? "We've plunged headlong into the decorative arts," says the firm's head, Hugh Hardy. "Craftsmanship is busting out all over. It's clearly a reaction to the asceticism of the Modern movement."

"But that asceticism may also be quoted. The work of Richard Meier in particular, and to a lesser extent that of Charles Gwathmey and Michael Graves, is permeated by the Corbusian dream of the "white world," the building as a metaphor of clarity, order and singularity set against the enveloping otherness of nature. (If Mies and the grid-internationalists have ceased to be quotable, Le Corbusier has not; and the difference is due to the richness of Corbu's ideas, his use of volume and surface rather than abstract space.) Meier's architecture is highly abstract, but it is not inhospitable. A project like his Bronx Development Center in New York City, with its suavely detailed metal walls, certainly alludes to the Corbusian machine look; but it would not have been built by contractors in the '20s, and its rigorous attention to scale and finish amount to a degree of luxury that has almost vanished from public building since the 19th century.

Charles Gwathmey relates the purity of Meier's buildings, and his own, to direct expression rather than a longing for the abstract or Utopian form: "Our work has been called very abstract, but we wanted the exterior and interior of the building to be simultaneous. The form is derived from the inside to the outside. There are no external decorations or diversionary doodads. The fac,ade equals the living space. At night, with the lights on in the building, you can see the spatial organization--you're reading the building as a negative." Yet this constructivist approach can coexist with vestiges of a low-pitched Spanish mission roof, as in Gwathmey's recent Long Island house.

These inflections of form, historical allusion and context work well in small buildings; so far, their main testing ground has been houses for the rich. Can one see a similar shift in corporate buildings? Not yet. The "new" corporate look, however, is strongly mannered. It was developed by Johnson-Burgee in the IDS Center in Minneapolis (1972) and, more successfully, in their Pennzoil Place in Houston (1976). Johnson calls it "shaped modern"--the glass slab with shears and cuts. Sometimes it is combined with mirror glass. This fashion for veiling the mass in shine, or dissolving it in reflections, can be seen in the polished aluminum skin of Hugh Stubbins' Citicorp Building in Manhattan.

These structures retreating behind glitter are like elephants coyly dissembling themselves. The trouble with such high colloquial slickness is that since the walls do not even have the visible grid of columns, lintels and glass to lend them scale, they take on an even more remote and intimidating look than those done in the International Style. They are "abstract shimmering things," as one critic, Robert Jensen, wrote, "sealed from all memory."

The most confident example of the manner is by the Argentine-born architect Cesar Pelli, now dean of the college of art and architecture at Yale. His Pacific Design Center of 1976 has been assimilated into the local folklore of Los Angeles quicker than any building in recent memory, because it is so violently at odds with its flat suburban context. Known as the Blue Whale, it is an immense exhibition hall, the Crystal Palace of the West Coast, providing more than 750,000 sq. ft. of space. The surface is not mirror, but semitranslucent blue glass, which glitters and disappears and re-forms against the dusty blue sky. In form, it resembles an extruded architectural molding: one single block. Its scale is its success; a vast illusion built for the luxury interior-decoration industry, plunked firmly down in Dreamsville.

The only architect to apply the historicist metaphors of Post-Modernism to a large corporate structure, still unbuilt, is Philip Johnson. And only his age (72) and prestige have enabled him to get away with it. The building in question is the corporate headquarters of the world's largest business, A T & T, to be built in midtown Manhattan. Given its cost of $110 million and the prominence of its site, the building could scarcely fail to provoke argument. But in addition Johnson and Burgee designed it as a summing-up of Post-Modernist building. This prospect fills some architects with skepticism. Says Charles Moore, "Philip's a genius and a gadfly, a delightful tourist. But people's expectations that he would sum up all the currents in architecture today with the A T & T building are simply wishful thinking." Thus the design, long before excavations have started, is already controversial. At one end of the scale there is (as usual) Johnson's most fervent admirer among critics, Paul Goldberger of the New York Times, who called it "the most provocative and daring skyscraper proposed for New York since the Chrysler Building" and "the first major monument of Post-Modernism." Hogwash, retorted another critic, Michael Sorkin, in the Village Voice: A T & T will be "the architecture of applique ... the Seagram building with ears."

A T & T is certainly a shift from Modernism, but to where? Apparently, to "Manhattanism"--that fantasy-laden, Promethean language of shaped towers that produced the great monuments of the '20s and '30s: Rockefeller Center, Empire State, the Chrysler Building. As the architect Rem Koolhass has argued in his brilliantly suggestive book, Delirious New York (Oxford, 1978), these were the definitive fantasy-structures of American capital, the cathedrals of a "culture of congestion" that finds its apogee in the 1,244 blocks of Manhattan Island. No glass slab could hope to be as rich in imagery as the work of an architect like Raymond Hood (chief architect of Rockefeller Center, designer of the old McGraw-Hill Building and the Chicago Tribune Tower). This point was not lost on Johnson. Fantasy veiled as history: such is the message of A T & T. In the process, Hood is appropriated to the recipe.

A T & T is peculiar rather than radical. Its main element is a 660-ft. glass slab laced into a Beaux-Arts, Manhattanist corset of pinky-gray granite. This shaft sits on an entrance block that is an enormous pastiche of the courtyard front of Brunelleschi's 15th century Pazzi Chapel in Florence. One cannot guess from drawings or models how well this will work. To take a small, private Renaissance chapel and inflate it to nearly the size of the Baths of Caracalla is the kind of perversity Johnson enjoys but has never been allowed to do on such a scale before. It is architecture mimicking the strategies of Claes Oldenburg. What A T & T will eventually make of this high-camp, post-Pop irony performing as status monumentalism is anyone's guess, but that is what Johnson has produced, and the fact is emphasized by the top of the building--the now famous "grandfather clock" pediment with its round operculum, through which the heating system will issue clouds of steam on cold days. This is yet another historicist joke, alluding to one of Johnson's favorites from the past--Boullee, whose vast panoramas of pyramids, masonry globes and smoking crematoria are among the singular documents of the early Industrial Revolution. That a building should have a top was, of course, anathema to Johnson's mentor, Mies van der Rohe; the glass prism required a flat roof, finished in one clean cut. But since all the great pre-Modernist Manhattan buildings have tops--finials, breadbaskets, cornices, towers--the first big Post-Modernist one must have one too.

"To me," Johnson remarked in 1973, "the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food or sex, regardless of how we denigrate it. All cultures that can be called cultures have built monuments--that is, buildings of unusual size and expenditure of effort, that have aroused pride and enjoyment as well as utility."

In the end, the importance of A T & T may not be its status as a single act of building, but rather the permission it will grant other architects to build their own monuments of the hybrid. Johnson did not create the way of thinking that his building reflects. But he helped bring it about, and now he has given it a degree of public validity that cannot help affecting other corporate clients. Houses change the secret history of style, but monuments determine its public fate. Can one have a monument to doubt? Perhaps not. The idea would not have arisen 50 years ago. But what else, in a time of transition, questioning, and mannerism, can one expect?

--Robert Hughes

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