the private life of modern architecture-beatriz colomina

5/28/2018 The Private Life of Modern Architecture-Beatriz Colomina

1/10

ollaborationsThe Pr iva te L i f e o f M od e rn r ch i t ec tu re

A bou t a year ago, I gave a lecture in Mad rid, the citywhere I was born. T h e lecture was on the w ork ofCharles and Ray Eames and, to m y surprise, mostof the discussion at the dinner afterward centered aroundthe role of Ray, he r backgrou nd as a painter, her studies withHa ns Hofrnann, he r sense of color, and so on. I say to mysurprise because, first of all, there were not m any womenat tha t dinn er table-I was surro und ed by very well know nSpanish architects, all of them men-and also because I hadnot brought up the subject of Ray's c ontribution at all in mytalk. I would not have thought that there was an interest inand audience for this kind of topic in Spain, and besides,Ray's role was not the focus of my research. T h e conversa-tion drifted, as usually happens on these occasions, andbefore I knew it, we were talking about L illy Reich and whatan eno rmous role she must have played in the developmentof Mies van d er Rohe's architecture; how Mies might neverhave been Mies without her an d so on (Figure 1 . Again, itis important to insist that it was not I w ho was making thesepoints, but these m iddle-aged, extremely accomplished, andcultivated architects, whom one would be hard pressed tocharacterize as feminist. At a certain point, one of them,Juan Nava rro Baldeweg, said som ething that has stayed withme since. W e had been talking about the importanc e of suchprojects as the Silk and Velvet Cafi-a collaborative workof Reich and M ies's for the Exposition de la mode in Berlin(1927), where draperies in black, orange, an d red velvet andblack and lemo n yellow silk were hu ng from metal rods to

B E T R I Z C O L O M I NPrinceton University

form the space-and how there is no thi ng in Mies's work,prior to his collaboration with Reich, that would suggestsuch a radical approach t o defining space by suspended sen-suous surfaces, which would become his trademark, asexemplified in his Barcelona Pavilion of 1929. I was, ofcourse, astonished because, while I had long believed thiswas the case, I had no t yet dared to write about it-even ifmy studen ts had hea rd me say things like that for years. Andthe n Ju an said , It is like a dirty little secre t that we-allarchitects-keep. Som ethin g that we all know, that we allsee, but we do n't b ring ourselves to talk abo ut it.

T h e secrets of modern architecture are like those of afamily, where everybody knows abo ut things th at are neveracknow ledged. And it is perhaps because of the cu rrent fas-cination with the intim ate that the secrets of mod ern archi-tecture are now being unveiled, little by little. If one is tojudge by the publications of recent years, there appears tobe an increasing intere st in how th e practice of architectureworks. It is as if we had become more concerned with thehow than the what And the how is less about structure orbuilding techniques-the intere st of oth er generation s ofhistorians-and more about interpersonal relations. T h epreviously marginal details of how things actually happenin architectural practice are now coming in to focus.

Critics and historians are shifting their a ttention fromthe arch itect as a single figure, and th e building as an object,to architecture as collaboration. Attention is paid today toall professionals involved in the project: partners, enginee rs,


2/10

landscape architects, interior designers, employees,builders. With this shift, methodologies of research neces-sarily change. Pat Kirkham's book Charles and Ray Eames,Designers o the Twentieth Century (1995), for example, isextensively based on oral histories. In the course of herresearch, she interviewed n extraordinary number of asso-ciates, employees, and clients in n attempt to reevaluatethe nature of the collaborative work of the Eames officeand, in particular, the role played by Ray in what is proba-bly the most famous design partnership of the century.Likewise, Donald Albrecht incorporated extensive testi-monies from associates as videos in the international trav-eling exhibition The Work o Charles and Ray Eames,organized in 1997 by the Library of Congress in partnershipwith the Vitra Design Museum. Engineers write books thatare no longer textbooks about how to solve technical prob-lems but are instead intimate accounts of their practice.Peter Rice's An Engineer Imagines (1994) is half memoir, halfreflection on the many aspects of the collaboration of theengineer with contractors, architects, clients, even withphotographers and critics. Garden designers and landscapearchitects, for a long time largely ignored in histories ofmodern architecture, are now carefully studied in bookssuch as DorothCe Imbert, The Modernist Garden in France(1993), and Marc Treib and DorothCe Imbert, Garrett Ekbo:Modem Landscapesfor Living (1997). Builders, forever theugly ducklings of architectural history, and only of interestto sociologists, are now being acknowledged in academicconferences, books, and exhibitions, including the recenttraveling exhibition on Joseph Eichler (a developer of low-cost, mass-produced, postwar modernist houses in north-ern California), The Eichler Homes: Building the CaliforniaDream, organized by Paul Adamson and Kevin Alter andsponsored by the Center for the Study of American Archi-tecture at the University of Texas and the Graham Foun-dation of Chicago.

Even photographers, graphic designers, critics, cura-tors, and all of those who help to (re)produce the work inthe media are coming into focus. It is no longer possible toignore how much of modern architecture is produced bothin the media and as media, and how much of architecturalpractice today consists in the production of images. Bookslike Joseph Rosa's A ConstructedEm he Architectural Pho-tography ofJulius Shulman (1994), and Shulman's own mem-oirs, Architectzlre and its Photography (1998), bring into closerfocus the circumstances of the collaboration between Shul-man and Richard Neutra at a time when architects were notonly present during the photographic shoot, but alsoremoved the client's furniture, artworks, and draperies andbrought in their own props--directing, as it were, the mise-

Figure Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lil ly Reich on board anexcursion boat on the Wannsee. a lake near Berlin, 1933 Photographby Howard Dearstyne, one of their students, from Ludwig Glasser,

udwig Mies v n der Rohe New York, 1977

en-scsne. s Rosa points out, Neutra-as the only archi-tect included in Modern Architecture-International Exhibi-tion at the Museum of Modem rt in 1932 who was askedto have one of his buildings (the Love11 House) repho-tographed-was well aware of the importance of pho-tographs.' Most architects of the modem period had closeand longstanding relationships with their photographers.As Neutra said about Shulman: His work will survive me.Film [is] stronger and good glossy prints are easier [to] shipthan brute concrete, stainless steel, or even ideas. 2 By theend of the century, the graphic designer has assumed anequally important role. Bruce Mau, the designer ofS,M,L,XL, is credited equally as author with Rem Koolhaasand the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.).One day historical research will have to explore this kind ofpartnership.

Critics and institutions have similarly collaborated inthe production of modem architecture (Figure 2 . How toseparate Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner, Philip

C O L L B O R T I O N S 463


3/10

Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchock, the Museum ofModern Art Arts Architecture, and House Beautificl fromthe architects they helped to construct as figures? And yet,in comparison to the designers, their role has received lit-tle historical attention. I n recent years, coinciding with th ecentenary of Giedion's birth and the establishment of hisarchives at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule inZiirich, Giedion's work has been th e focus of a series of co n-ferences and publications, which incorp orate diverse mate-rial from Giedion's archive, including SigF-ied Giedion: AHistorical Project (1986), a special issue of t he Italia n maga-zine Rassegna edited by Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani;Doro the e Huber's edite d volum e Si@ed Giedion. Wege indie ~f fent lichk eit (1987); S okratis Georgiadis's Si@edGiedion, An Intel lectw l Biography (1989); and the exh ibitio ncatalogue Sig Fied Giedion, 1888-1986: der En murf einermodernen Tradition (1989). Mor e rec ently, Detlef M ertin scompleted in 1996 a dissertation on G iedion's conceptualframework. In Giedion's practice, there is no distinctionbetween the work of the architect and that of the historian;they are bo th engaged with equal status as collaborators inthe modern project. Similar conclusions could be drawnabout the role of John Entenza, who as editor of ArtsArchitecture headed th e Case Stud y Hou se Prog ram in LosAngeles at mid-century, and Esther McCoy, the leadingcritic of those years in the prom otion of modem architec-ture in south ern California. Both the magazine and the CaseStudy House Program were collaborative efforts involvingarchitects, writers, graphic designers, photogra phers, artists,and m anufacturers, and bo th have received critical atten-

Figure2 Ise Gropius, Sigfried Giedion.and Walter Gropius in the Gropiushouse in Lincoln, Massachusetts,around 1952, from Paul Hofer and UlrichStucky, Hommage a Giedion: ProfileSeiner Personlicheit Basel andStuttgart, 1971)

tion in the last decade. Arts Architecture: The Entenza ears(1990), an an thology of articles from the magazine ed ited byBarbara Goldstein, broug ht back the aesthetic, technical,and political debates. E lizabeth Smith's Blueprintsfor Mod-m Living (1989), accompanying a m ajor exhibition at th e

Museum of Contemporary rt in L os Angeles, provided acomprehensive analysis from different angles. Moreresearch is under way. With the newly established EstherMcC oy Archives in the Smithsonian Institution in Wash-ington, studies of her work will soon emerge--one hopes.Today, the role of critic as collaborator has been assumedby writers as varied as Jeffrey Kipnis, Kenneth Frampton,and Charles Jencks, all of whom maintain intimate work-ing relationships with the architects they support. Blobbuildings, critical regionalism, and postrnodernism are asmuch a product of the critics as the architects. It is impos-sible to say what came first, the architecture o r its promo-tion. Newspaper critics, like Ada Louise Huxtable andHe rbe rt Muscham p, also actively collaborate with archi-tects to transform the built environment. W ha t appears tobe criticism o r publicity is actually design.

Even the client is understood as a collaborator. If inter-est in the c lients of mo dem architecture has always existed,accounts of their role tended to be testimonial rather thananalytical-as when clients have spoken to reporters aboutthe experience of building or living in their houses. Oftenthe clients were more enlightened and insightful than thecritics or the editors of the day. Loren Pope, a client ofFrank Lloyd Wrigh t's, wrote a n unsolicited letter t o HouseBeautifil in 1947 enumerating the pleasures of living for six

464 J S A H 58:3 S E P T E M B E R 1999


4/10

years in on e of Wright's Usonian houses of 1939 . It too k ayear for the editors, who w ere afraid of angering their moretraditionally minded readers, to gathe r the courage to pu b-lish it.3 T h e Tugendhats, wh o comm issioned Mies van derRohe to design a house for them in Brno in 1928,responded to a negative review of the house by Justus Bierin Die Form of 193 1. To answer the question, Can O neLive in the Tu gen dha t Ho use? the title of Bier's article,one must consult the inhabitants, Grethe Tugendhat con-tended. She continued that H err Bier might feel that thehouse forced the inhabitants into a kind of living for showthat suppressed intimate living, but she, who lived in thehouse, felt the glass wall function s completely as a bou nd-ary and that, as a result, the space has a most uncom monrestfulness such as a closed room cannot possibly have. 4H er hu sband, Fritz Tugen dhat, also responded to Bier's cri-tique by stating that he preferred the distant horizon tothe restricting pressure of close walls when I am co ncen-~ a t i n g . ~h e glass wall and the horizon defined for theinhabitants of the Tugendhat House an enclosure, beforeany sophisticated architectu ral critic came to realize it.

Un til very recently such client accounts were consid-ered to be of marg inal, anecdo tal interest to m ost historians,who saw them as providing evidence about the personality,working m ethod, and m ind of the architect, or to illustratethe conditions with which he had to contend in realizinghis vision. T h e client was treated as a problem for thearchitect or as a witness to the effects of the architec-ture-rather than as an active intelligence and collaborarorwith the architect, as well as subject of the architectureitself. For a new generation of historians, clients havebecome an object of study in their own right. Sessions inconferences-including the last Annual M eetin g of theSociety of Architectural Historians in Houston-are nowdevoted to the client in the m odern era.

Serious research on architectural clients started abouttwenty years ago, when Rassegna for example, dedicated anissue (in 1980) edited by Pierre-Main Crosset to th e clientsof Le Corbusier. In addition to a number of articles bynoted historians-including amon g others Jacques Gubler,Jean-Louis C ohe n, Dani6le Pauly, Julius Posener, GiorgioCiucci, and T im Benton-the issue contained a catalogueraiso nni of the clients of Le Corbusier, categorized as indi-viduals, industrialists, and pub lic authorities. C lients hadattained the status previously granted only to works of art.As if anticipating or pro moting a different kind of research,the catalogue was compiled-using the resources madeavailable by the archives of the F ondatio n Le Corbu sier inParis-in the hopes that it would serve as a guide to futu rework. Wh ile m ost of the articles addressed the issue of the

client only obliquely, the direction of futur e research hadbeen established simply in the o rganization of such a specialissue.

T h e clients of Frank Lloyd Wrig ht have also been theobject of study. Leonard Eaton's book Two Chicago Archi-tects and Their Clients: Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard E nDoren Shaw (1969) gives a profile of the typical Wrightclient in the period up to 1910. In contrast to the upper-class North Shore establishment, which favored revivalistarchitects like Van D oren Shaw, the clients of Wrigh t, weare told , tended to be mobile, middle-class Republicanswho married suffragette wives, practiced liberal reli-gions and were passionately interested in music. Self-made men with considerable money to spend on a housebut few preconception s as to what it shou ld look like. 'j

If for Eat on, W right's clients' lack of preconceptionsallowed him to develop his architecture, for Mice Fried-man, in Women and the Making of the Modem House (1998),the client of modern architecture is understood to be anactive participant in the p roject of the modern house, a kindof collaborator of the architect. Consulting corresp onden ce,diaries, memoirs, and recorded interviews, Friedmandemonstrates the crucial role that women as clients playedin the making of mod ern architecture. Many of the housesof the Mo dern M ovement were commissioned by indepen-dent women w ho headed their own households. Unmarriedor w idows, many were also professionals and cultivated peo-ple who aspired along with th eir architects to arrive at a dif-ferent patt ern of dom esticity, and they were often in conflictwith the architects about exactly what th at pattern shouldbe. In t hat sense, these women were deeply involved in theprocess of design and collaborated in the mod ern project ofrethinking the ho use. Focusing on six of the m ost significanthouses of the twentieth century, Friedman gives a detailedaccount of the process of negotiation and decision makingin the program ming and design of the modern house.

Sylvia Lavin's recent research on Richard Neutra alsoexplores the intimate relationships between architect andclient by examin ing in detail a particular architect's philos-ophy and m ethod of engaging with the client. T h e contextis the American psychologizing of mod ernity in the post-war years. Ne utr a extensively interview ed the clien ts of hisprivate houses, providing elaborate questionnaires and ask-ing them to fill diaries with the intim ate details of their dailylife. H e considered this work part of a diagnostic proce-dure and compared the client's production of informationto lying on a couch, figuratively speaking, and talking witha psy~hoanalys t . ~eutra understood his residential archi-tecture as providing a kind of therapy for the clients:

The architect can't stay with [the client] for twentyC O L L A B O R A T I O N S 65


5/10

years . . . straighten ing out matrimonial friction and imbal-ance caused by environmental design. His job is simplybeyond words-a silent long range job. 8 Since psycho-analysis always involves the active participation of thepatient, the client is once again co llaborating with th e a rchi-tect in the project of the mo dern house. Neutra particularlyidentified with his women clients, describing his relation-ship with them as almost a love affair that end s up happilyin, by far, the m ost case^. ^

But it is not just women clients that are now beingstudied, nor even the private person, although these a re theones we tend to know better. Institutions, industrialists, andeven governments have been crucial patrons tha t are begin-ning to be studied in detail. T h e m ilitary as client, for exam-ple, com es into focus in Modernism at M id-Centu (1 994),a study of one of the most im portan t postwar projects, theUnited States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs(1954-1962), edited by Robert Bruegmann. HClkne Lip-stadt has explored the Eames office's involvement with thefederal government in he r essay in D onald A lbrecht's TheWork o Charles and Ray Eames. Eve Blau's The Architecture oRed Vienna 1919 1934 (1999) is an impo rtant c ontributionto the study of the involvemen t with mo dem architecture ofEurop ean social-democratic governments as clients of pub-lic housing during the interwar period. And MargaretCrawfo rd's Building the Workingman's Paradise: The DesignofAmerican Company Towns (1995) deals with th e com plexand som etimes contentious relationships between progres-sive architects and their industrialist clients for companytowns between 1910 and 1930. Industrial companies, fromOlivetti to IBM, offer com pelling new subjects of research.

Wo men and the m ilitary are interesting subjects of mod-ern architecture because they were clients who shared in th eproject. If women were actively involved in the redefinitionof dom esticity in th e first half of the tw entieth century, thelogic of the military domina ted the practice of mod ern arch i-tecture in the postwar years. From meth ods of mass produ c-tion developed during the war effort and applied as much inLevittown as in modern California houses, to the recyclingfor dom estic use of materials developed du ring the war effort,the military had a clear affinity with m odern architecture'smode of material production-but perhaps also with themechanisms of its practice. T h e choice of Skidmore, Owings

Merrill as the firm to realize the Air Force Academy was,in that sense, symptoma tic. s Sheri Olson has pointed out,the way S OM p racticed architecture was probably the great-est factor in the firm's selection for the Air Force Academ y.loT h e firm was immen se for its time, with mu ltiple offices indifferent parts of the country, and the decentralized charac-ter of the firm allowed each office to d raw on t he specialties,

facilities and personnel of other offices, while operatingautonomously. 11Projects were organized the same way inall the offices of SO M , with a clear chain of comm and in thedesign team for each project and a highly organized work sys-tem. Personnel were often switched from one office toanother. At the height of the Air Force Academy project,SOM employed 900 architects, engineers, designers, cityplanners, landscape specialists, and researchers and econo-mists.12 T h e m ilitary must have found th e logic of SOM'spractice a lot more familiar than tha t of a prima donnaarchitect.

Modernism a t Mid-Cenmry provides an im portant casestudy no t only of the m ilitary as client but of the broaderissue of architectural produc tion as collabo ration. SOM wasthe first design office of its kind to be recognized by theMuseum of Modern Art with a monographic exhibition in1950. For the first time, teamwork, instead of individualgenius, was acknowledged in architec ture. In its Bulletin,MoMA noted that SOM members work together animatedby two disciplines which they all share-the discipline ofmod ern architecture and th e discipline of American orga-nizational methods. . SOM bears its name almost as atradem ark. It is like a brand name. 13 But resistance also ranhigh bo th inside and o utside the firm. Som e designers feltthat teamwork prevented them from receiving credit forthe ir work-a problem a lso with many of the Eam es asso-ciates-and some critics found the anonymous quality ofthe work intolerable. 14 Frank Lloyd Wri gh t even testifiedbefore Congress in 1955 on the inadequacies of SOM'sdesign for the Air Force Academy, deriding it as a factoryfor birdmen, and raising questions about the qualificationsof SOM and its consultants (Pietro Belluschi, WeltonBecket, and E ero Saarinen).15Wrigh t had refused to com-pete with other architects for the job, declaring, in atelegram, Th e world knows what I can do in architecture.If officials of the air force have missed this, I can do n o m orethan feel sorry for what bo th have lost. 16

T he more one looks at collaboration the more it lookslike it might be a 1950s thing, a phenom enon of that pros-perous postwar decade when teamwork was canonized.MoMA exhibited SOM. Walter Gropius went into part-nership with seven architects from the youn ger ge neration,forming T h e Architects Collaborative (TAC). Some of thegreat masters of mo dern architecture associated withother architects to build in Manhattan. M ies van der Roheworked with Philip Johnson on the Seagram Building, a col-laborative project (with the crucial intervention of P hyllisLambert), from the mome nt of commission. Gropius cameon board with the team of Emery Roth to build the Panm Building. And Wallace Harrison stole from Le Co r-

66 J S A H / 58: S E P T E M B E R 1 9 9 9


6/10

igure3 Peter and Alison Srnithsonc. 1950 Photograph by Anne FischerAlison and Peter Srnithson The hiftdon 1982 , courtesy Peter Srnithson

rorn.on-

busier the forms for the new headquarters for the UnitedNations in New York. En-ablers is what Rem Koolhaascalls the local associated architects in these partnerships. Ina recent article on the subject in Bob Somol, ed., Autonomyand Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America (1997),Koolhaas suggests that such partners are always overlookedeven though they often contribute the more idiosyncraticfeatures of the buildings, the perversions of the master'susual style.17

The 1950s also saw the first acknowledged couplingsin architecture, by which I mean professional partnershipsthat are also intimate. Ray and Charles Eames provided amodel for following generations, to a certain extent for Ali-son and Peter Smithson, whose partnership provided amodel for that of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,and so on (Figure 3 . My own research on couplings hasfocused on this chain of identifications and the way it con-tinues into contemporary practice.

Perhaps it is the current interest in the 1950s amonghistorians and critics that has raised the issue of collabora-tion. Esther McCoy described the period as America's last'moral' era, a time when 'people stood together,' or shareda common belief in the correctness of their actions. '* Th epostwar period inaugurated a new kind of collaborativepractice that has become increasingly difficult to ignore orto subsume within a heroic conception of an individualfigure. In retrospect, we are also looking at the interwar

period for signs of a more complex story of the ModernMovement. Lilly Reich and Charlotte Perriand, the some-times associates of Mies and Le Corbusier (Figure 4), con-tinue to fascinate historians, and new studies of their workhave recently been published or are currently under way,including Sonja Gunther's Lilly Reich, 1885-1947: Innenar-chitektin, Designerin, zlsstellungsgestalterin (1988), MatildaMcQuaid and Magdalena Droste's catalogue of the exhibi-tion of Lilly Reich at MoMA (1996), and the Charlotte Per-riand exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris(1996), the Design Museum in London (1996-1997), andthe Architectural League in New York (1997-1998).recent conference organized by Mary McLeod at ColumbiaUniversity has launched a new wave of research. Other inti-mate partnerships still largely unstudied include MargaretMcDonald, partner and spouse of Charles Rennie Mackin-tosh; Pierre Jeanneret, partner and cousin of Le Corbusier(Figure 5); Jean Badovici, partner, client and lover of EileenGray; Marion Mahony, partner and wife of Walter BurleyGriffin, and so on. The 1950s also offered us other modelsof partnerships. Gwendolyn Wright has recently shownhow Catherine Bauer, a social historian, metamorphosedthe practice of the architect William Wurster, whom shemet and married in 1940, by politicizing him, infusing hisdomestic designs with her social and political ideas, just ashe helped her to become aware of the needs of middle-class American families, both in city apartments and subur-



7/10

Figure4 Charlotte Perriand wi th Le Corbusier in Perriand's Bar sousle toit at the Salon d'Automne, Paris, 1928, from Charlotte Perriand:Un Art de Vivre (exhibitio n catalog ue. Paris, 19851, Fonda tion LeCorbusier L1(2)9

ban homes. Bauer, Wright contends, had earlier radicallytransformed the work of Lewis Mumford, by spurring himto take on the grand themes of technology and commu-

nity, which will become the basis of his best-known books.Murnford,in turn encouraged Bauer, during the years of theirlove affair while he was married to someone else, to con-template aspects of design that could not be quantified, tobroaden and humanize her definition of housing reform. 19

Perhaps this fascination with collaboration is part of anew voyeurism. We don't care so much about the heroicfigure of the modern architect, about the falade, but aboutthe internal weakness. On the one hand, there is a concertedeffort to demystify architectural practice and debunk theheroes. On the other hand, the embarrassing details of pri-vate life are being incorporated into the heroic images, as ifin a kind of therapy. Architects themselves have started totell us private stories about their desperate attempts to getjobs, about their pathological experiences with clients,about falling in the street, and even about their masseuses.And we pay more attention than when they were trying todictate to us what their work meant. Television, also fromthe 1950s, has brought a new sense of limits. Talk showsbring increasing levels of privacy into the public eye. Canwe expect architecture to remain immune? And why wouldhistorians, detectives by nature, pretend to be disinterested?

Browsing through the exhibition of books at the SAHAnnual Meeting in Houston in April 1999, I came upon therecent book by Anne Tyng, Louis Kahn to Anne Tyng TheRome Letters 1953 1954 (1997), which I was immediatelyattracted to because of my interest in partnerships in archi-

tecture (Figure 6 .20Tyng, a young Harvard graduate work-ing in Kahn's office, became his lover while collaboratingclosely on key designs, so closely that Kahn would laterdescribe the relationship as another form of love. *' s thefull tragedy of the relationship and Kahn's ultimate selfish-ness unfolds, the letters between them are filled with thedetails of designs. Published design becomes inseparablefrom private soap opera.The question of collaboration is that of the secret life ofarchitects, the domestic life of architecture. Nowhere is thismore emblematic than in architects who live and worktogether. With couples who practice together, there is a com-plete identification between domestic life and the life of theoffice, between the private life and the private side of archi-tectural practice. Both have been kept secret for too long.

But who has been keeping the secret? Perhaps it is thehistorians and critics, who have felt more confident-reas-sured-responding to the idea of an individual author andto the formal qualities of the building as an art object thanto the messiness of architectural practice. Paradoxically,practicing architects have tended to be more sensitive tothe subject, perhaps because they know from their ownexperience what goes on and are endlessly curious aboutother architects' practices. Architects in partnerships, fromDenise Scott Brown to Rem Koolhaas, have publicly com-plained about the obsession of critics and the media withthe single figure, despite their offices' efforts to provideprecise credit. Women architects are opening up, althoughfeminist historians complain that for the most part womenavoid the subject of their everyday life in practice-thecomplications of designing in partnership and of jugglingthe office while rearing children-in favor of talking aboutdesign. Since Denise Scott Brown's talk to the Alliance ofWomen in Architecture, in New York in 1973, on sexismand the star systemin architecture, and the subsequent arti-cle Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System inArchitecture, which circulated privately for many yearsbefore it was finally published in P. Berkeley and MatildaMcQuaid's Architecture Placefor Womenin 1989, a num-ber of women architects have been raising issues of theirown. It is not by chance that women and gay scholars havebeen leading the way; the issue of collaboration is indebtedto feminist criticism, with its focus on the veiling of con-tributions, the domesticity of power, and so on. Morerecent scholarship on race, sexuality, cultural studies, andpostcolonial studies has also begun to act as a crucialresource. While rarely referring directly to this scholar-ship, architectural history is starting to absorb many of itslessons and to open research to new questions. Manysecrets are bound to come out.

468 J S A H 1 5 8 : 3 S E P T E M B E R 999


8/10

f -F7 - Figure 5 P~erre eanneret and LeCorbus~er, round 1926, from Michael

, Raeburn and V~ctor~a~lson, ds.,l .-

. ? Le Corbusier rchitect of the Century., exh~b~t~onatalogue, London, 1987)7 rp Photograph courtesy Fondat~on e*


9/10

otes1.Joseph Rosa, A Constructed View : Th e Architectu ral Photography of Juliu sShulman (New York, 1994), 47.2. Richard Neutra, letter, 29 January 1969, Shulman Archives, quoted inRosa, A Constructed View, 49.3. "We held it for m ore than a year before we decided to be brave enoughto publish it . We say 'brave' because it will make a lot of o ur readers veryangry." House Beauti&l, August 1948, reprinted in H . Allen Brooks, ed.,Wri ting s on Wr igh t, Selected Comm ent on Frank Lloyd W rig ht (Cambridge,Mass ., 1981), 51-57.4. "What the People W ho Lived in the Tugendhat House Had to Say AboutIt," English translation of the Tugendhats contribution to Die Form 11(193 1 ,in Wolf Tegethoff, Mies van der Robe: The V illas and Country Houses(New York, 1985), 97-98.5. Ibid., 98.6. Joseph Connors, The Robie House of Frank Lloyd Wr igh t (Chicago andLond on, 1984), 6-7. Leonard Eaton, Two Chicago Architec tsand The ir Clients:Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Van Doren Shaw (Cambridge, 1969).7. Richard Neut ra, "T he Architect Faces the Client and his Condition-ings-'The Layercake,"' typescript manuscript, 19 Ma rch 1957, Ne utraArchive. Quoted by Sylvia Lavin, "The Avant-Garde Is Not at Home:Richard Neutra and the American Psychologizing of Modernity," in R. E.Somo l, ed., Autono my and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Gar de in America(New York, 1997), 194. For detailed discussions of Neutra's relationships t ohis clients, see also Thomas S. Hines, Richard Ne utra and the Searchfor Mod-ern Architecture: A Biography and History (Berkeley, 1982).8. Richard Neutra , "Clien t Interrogation-An Art and A Science," A I AJournal uu ne 1958): 285-286. Quoted in S. Lavin, "The Avant-Garde IsNot at Home," 195.9. Richard Neu tra, "W omen Makes M an Clear," typescript manuscript, 13November 1953, Neutra Archive. Quoted by S. Lavin, "The Avant-GardeIs No t at Home," 195.10. Sheri Olson, "Skidmore, Owings Merr ill: Early History," in RobertBruegmann, ed., Modernism at Mid-Century (Chicago, 1994), 27.11.Sheri Olson, "Skidmore, Owings Merrill: T h e Project Team," Mod-ernism at Mid-Century, 35.2 Ibid.U."Skidmore, Owings Merrill," Museum ofModern Ar t Bulletin 18, no.l(19 50) : 5-7.14. Sheri Olson, "Skidmore, Owings Merril l: T h e Project Team," Mod-ernism at Mid-Century, 36.S Modernism at Mid-Century, 43-46,65 11.109.

16.Telegram from Frank Lloyd Wrigh t to Richard Hawley C um ng, 3 July1954, quoted in Modernism at Mid-Century, 43.17. "From the 1930s when he be gan 'working' w ith Lily [sic]Reich, on, Miesleft the theatrical to others-perversion by proxy. From her silk and velvetto Johnson's chain mail in the Fou r Seasons, what is the connecti on? W hotook advantage?" Rem Koolhaas, "En%bling Architecture," in Som ol, ed.,Autonomy, 298.18. Esther McCoy, quoted by Barbara Goldstein, "Introduction," ArtsArchitecture: The Entenza Ear s (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 8.19. Gwendolyn Wright, "A Partnership: Catherine Bauer and WilliamWurster," in Marc Treib, ed., An Everyday Modernimt: The Houses of WilliamWurster (Berkeley, 1995), 188.20. s I picked up the book, David M orto n, a senior editor at Rizzoli, told methe story of how he had given the book to the architect Richard Meier on aFriday and Meier had called him on Monday to say that he had spent theweekend reading the book, unable to put it down, and that i t had been themost depressing weekend of his life. No w I really wanted t o read the bo ok.47 J S A H / 5 8 : 3 S E P T E M B E R 1999

21. Letter of Lou Kahn t o Anne Tyng, 1954, quoted in Anne GriswoldTyng, ed., Louis Kbhn to Anne Tyng: The Rome Letters 19J3-1954 (NewYork, 1 997), 7.

Selected TextsAlbrecht, Donald, ed. The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legary of

Invention. Ne w York: Ha rry N . Abrams, 1997.Blau, Eve. The Architecture of Red Kenna 1919-1934. Cambridge, Mass.:M I T Press, 1999.Bosman, Jos, et al. Si$ried Giedion, 1888-1986: der Entwurfeiner modw-

nen Tradition.Zurich : Ammann Verlag, 1989.Brooks, H. Allen, ed. Wri ting s on W righ t: Selected Comm ent on Frank Lloyd

Wright. Cambridge, Mass.: MI T Press, 1981.Bmegman n, Robert, ed. Modernism at Mid-Century: The Architecture of the

United Stated A ir Force Academy. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1994.

Colom ina, Beatriz. "Couplings." Oase 5 1 (1999), special issue dedicated toAlison and Peter Smithson: 20-33.

Connors, Joseph. The Robie House of Frank Llqd Wright. Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1984.

Crawford, Margaret. Building the Working man's Paradise: Th e Design ofAmerican Company Towns. Lon don and N ew York: Verso, 1995.Crosset, Pierre-Alain, ed. "I Clienti di Le Corbusier." Rassegna 3 Uuly

1980).Eaton, Leonard. Two Chicago Architects and Their Clients: Frank Lloyd

Wri ght and Howard Van Doren Shaw. Cambridge, Mass.: MI T Press,1969.

Friedman, Alice T. Wome n and the Mak ing of the Mod em House: A Socialand Architectural History. New York: Harry N . Abrams, 1998.

Georgiadis, Sokratis. Si@ied Giedion, An Intellectual Biography. Translatedby Colin Hall. Edinburgh: Ed inburg h University Press, 1993.

Goldstein, Barbara, ed. Arts &Architecture: The Entenza Years.Cam-bridge, Mass.: M I T Press, 1990.

Giinther, Sonja. Lilly Reich, 188J-1947: Innenarchitektin, Designerin,Ausstellungsgestalterin.Stuttga rt: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1988.

Hines, Thom as S. Richard hTeutraand the Search for Mod em Architecture: ABiography and Histor y. Berkeley: University of C alifornia Press, 1982.

Huber, Dorothee, ed. Si$ried Giedion. Wege in die ~ffe ntlic hkei t. urich:Ammann Verlag, 1987.

Imbert , Doro thie. The Modernist Garden in France. Ne w H aven: YaleUniversity Press, 1993.

Kirkham, Pat. Charles and Ray Eames, Designers of the Twentieth Century.Cambridge, Mass.: M I T Press, 1995.

Koolhaas, Rem. "EnO/ablingArchitecture."In R obert E. Somol, ed.,Autonom y and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Ga rde in America. N e wYork: Monacelli Press, 1997.

Koolhaas, Rem , Bruce Mau, and the Office for Metrop olitan Architec-ture. S,M,L,XL. New York: Monacelli Press, 1995.

Lampugnani, Vittorio Magnago, ed. Si@ied Giedion:A Historica l Project,special issue of Rassegna 25 (1986).

Lavin, Sylvia. "The Avant-Garde Is No t at Home : Richard Neutra andthe American Psychologizing of Modernity." I n Robe rt E. Somol, ed.,Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Ava nt-Gard e in America, 180-197.Ne w York: T h e Monacelli Press, 1997.

Lockhead, Ian. "Beyond Architecture: Mario n Mahon y and Walter Bur-ley Griffin-America, Australia, India." JSAH 58 (June 1999):199-201.

McQuaid, Matilda, and Magdalena Droste, eds. Lilly Reich. New York:


10/10

HarryN Abrams and the Museum of Modern Art 1996.Mertins, Detlef. TransparenciesYet to Come: SigFried Giedion and the

Prehistory of Architectural Modernity. Ph.D. diss., Princeton Uni-versity, 1996.

Olson, Sheri. Various contributions in Bruegmann, ed., Modernimr atMid-Century.

Rice, Peter.An Engineerlmagines.London: Ellipsis, 1994.Rosa, Joseph. Constructed im The Architermral Photography ofj uli us

Shulman. New York: Rizzoli International, 1994.Scott Brown, Denise. Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in

Architecture. In P. Berkeley and Matilda McQuaid, eds.,Architemre:A Placefor Women 237-246. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institu-

tion Press, 1989.Shulman, Julius.Architemre and iu Photography. Cologne: Taschen, 1998.Smith, Elizabeth, ed. Blueprints for Modern Living: Histo? and Legacy of the

Case Study Houses. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.Treib, Marc, and Dorothie Imbert. Garre tt Ekbo: Modem Landscapesfor

Living. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.Tyng, Anne Griswold, ed. Louis Kahn to Anne Tyng: The Rome Letters

19F3-1914. New York: Rizzoli International, 1997.Wright, Gwendolyn. A Partnership: Catherine Bauer and William

Wurster. InMarc Treib, ed., An Everyday Modernism: The Houses ofWilliam Wurster 184-203. Berkeley: University of California Press,1995.


the private life of modern architecture-beatriz colomina

Documents

t h e lecture

i f e o f

i nprinceton universityform

t h e conversation

importanc e

metal rods tob e t r

t ec tu rea bou t

radical approach t o