Art: 70 Against the World

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Said the architects' most eloquent spokesman: "The world man has constructed is without sincerity, without scale, without cleanliness—narrow in space, without light and cowardly in color. . . ."

The men for whom M.I.T. Professor Gyorgy Kepes spoke were presumably men who could do something to change all these evils. They were 70 of the world's top architects, designers and engineers, gathered last week in Princeton, N. J. for one of the world forums in Princeton's bicentennial celebration.

Between meetings, such world-famed architects as Harvard's functionalist Walter Gropius, Finland's elfin Alvar Aalto, California's machine-minded Richard Neutra, and Brazil's hot-eyed Marcelo Roberto invaded the bar of the mock-colonial Princeton Inn to swap anecdotes about their worst frustrations and snapshots of their favorite jobs. Princeton itself came in for some sly digs. Philadelphia's George Howe, with an eye to the architecturally mixed but mainly neo-Gothic campus, observed that "collegiate Gothic and collegiate Georgian buildings are neither Gothic nor Georgian nor collegiate, but charnel houses of the mind, from which the corruption of death filters into the collective unconscious."

White-maned Frank Lloyd Wright, as usual, went further: he urged that all colleges should shut down for ten years (they were too departmentalized). Also, the U.S. Presidency and State Department should be abolished, and the capital moved closer to the heart of the country. Wright thought cities should be abandoned. "The city," Wright averred, "is a stimulus similar to alcohol, ending in similar degeneracy or impotence—for no city can maintain itself by way of its own birth rate, and a glance at history shows us that all civilizations have died of their cities."

Chicago Architect George Fred Keck, who thinks each generation should have a chance to decide whether it wants to live in caves or in skyscrapers, reached back 96 years for support from The House of the Seven Gables. "We shall live to see the day," wrote Hawthorne, "when no man shall build his house for posterity. Why should he? He might just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothes—leather, or guttapercha, or whatever else lasts longest—so that his great-grandchildren should have the benefit of them, and cut precisely the same figure in the world that he himself does. ... I doubt whether even our public edifices—our capitols, statehouses, courthouses, city-hall and churches—ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty years . . . as a hint to the people to ... reform the institutions which they symbolize."