(Hold on Etta’s lovely face a moment—)
It’s clear who is at the bottom of the pit, and it isn’t those frontier schoolteachers, whose work was honest.
Being interested in good movies doesn’t preclude enjoying many kinds of crummy movies, but maybe it does preclude acceptance of this enervated, sophisticated business venture—a movie made by those whose talents are a little high for mere commercial movies but who don’t break out of the mold. They’re trying for something more clever than is attempted in most commercial jobs, and it’s all so archly empty—Conrad Hall’s virtuoso cinematography providing constant in-and-out-of-focus distraction, Goldman’s decorative little conceits passing for dialogue. It’s all posh and josh, without any redeeming energy or crudeness. Much as I dislike the smugness of puritanism in the arts, after watching a put-on rape and Conrad Hall’s “Elvira Madigan” lyric interlude (and to our own Mozart—Burt Bacharach) I began to long for something simple and halfway felt. If you can’t manage genuine sophistication, you may be better off simple. And when you’re as talented as these fellows, perhaps it’s necessary to descend into yourself sometime and try to find out what you’re doing—maybe, even, to risk banality, which is less objectionable than this damned waggishness.
Butch Cassidy will probably be a hit; it has a great title, and it has star appeal for a wide audience. Redford, who is personable and can act, is overdue for stardom, though it will be rather a joke if he gets it out of this non-acting role. Newman throws the ball to him often—that’s really exactly what one feels he’s doing—and is content to be his infectiously good-humored (one assumes) self. He plays the public image of himself (as an aging good guy), just as Arlo Guthrie plays himself as a moonchild. Yet, hit or no, I think what this picture represents is finished. Butch and Sundance will probably be fine for a TV series, which is what I mean by finished.
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One can’t just take the new cult movies head on and relax, because they’re too confused. Intentions stick out, as in the thirties message movies, and you may be so aware of what’s wrong with the movies while you’re seeing them that you’re pulled in different directions, but if you reject them because of the confusions, you’re rejecting the most hopeful symptoms of change. Just when there are audiences who may be ready for something, the studios seem to be backing away, because they don’t understand what these audiences want. The audiences themselves don’t know, but they’re looking for something at the movies. This transition into the seventies is maybe the most interesting as well as the most confusing period in American movie history, yet there’s a real possibility that, because the tastes of the young audience are changing so fast, the already tottering studios will decide to minimize risks and gear production straight to the square audience and the networks. That square audience is far more alienated than the young one—so alienated that it isn’t looking for anything at the movies.
LEWIS MUMFORD
OCTOBER 20, 1962
THESE LAST FEW years, the United States government has been erecting new embassy buildings all over the world, on a scale that rivals the number of Air Force bases we constructed a little earlier. In some of these embassies the spirit of the airbases seems to have affected the program of our less warlike missions, and in the design of one of the most important of these structures we have gratuitously awakened no little local resentment. This embassy is in London, the last place one would think a misinterpretation of our purposes—indeed, a literal misconstruction—could have taken place. In certain cities the new embassies have added to the prestige of American architecture, for, by a happy reversal of the usual official procedures, the panel of architects who competed for the job included many of the best of our older exponents of modern architecture. There were no inhibiting provisions that these buildings should be Georgian, Early Republican, or plaster-cast Classic in outward form, so they stand on their own as exemplars of the contemporary American mode, touched with what our architects have recently learned from other lands.
In Edward Stone’s adaptation of the Indian screen wall for our embassy in New Delhi, he made a graceful bow to regional tradition. Its practical outcome, by all reports, has not, though, been on the level of its aesthetic success, for he unhappily forgot how difficult it is to translate ancient forms into modern materials. For Stone overlooked the fact, as did Le Corbusier and his associates at about the same time in designing the new Indian city of Chandigarh, that a concrete or stone grille, unlike its wooden counterpart, absorbs enough heat during the day to counteract even the cooling night air. Architects in America who have been copying Stone’s innovation even in places where our summers are almost as torrid as India’s may eventually regret their eagerness to take over this seemingly foolproof device for masking the familiar dullness of repetitive windows or for avoiding the imbecility of compensating for acres of exposed glass by using tightly drawn Venetian blinds. Employed judiciously, for a rational purpose, on a single wall, the grille may be a blessing, but, applied wholesale, it is both aesthetically depressing and functionally absurd.
The architect of the London embassy, the late Eero Saarinen, counts, like his father before him, as one of the most distinguished exponents of current American architecture. He was the one-man equivalent of the gigantic architectural corporation known as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and his buildings can be found on almost every great campus in the country—recreation halls, dormitories, auditoriums, hockey rinks, to say nothing of such a structure as the General Motors Research Laboratories near Detroit, which forms almost a super-campus of its own. Unlike the S. O. & M. brand, Mr. Saarinen’s trademark was a disinclination to repeat himself, yet it happens that in planning the London embassy he borrowed a façade he had already created for the American embassy in Oslo. If this design were a happy one, there would be nothing against such repetition, for a well-seasoned architect, dealing for the second time with a building of a particular sort, should not be afraid to refine and perfect an earlier form, as Frank Lloyd Wright, despite his boundless powers of invention, did with his basic “prairie house” to the end of his life. For in official buildings abroad expressive design is now a matter of great importance. Our embassies are no longer simply places of official residence with an attached office; they are, rather, a complex of governmental, economic, and cultural functions, with offices, an exhibition hall, a library, and an auditorium—places in which our government not merely does business with its own citizens but attempts to make a good impression upon the country in which, for all its extra-territoriality, it is domiciled. The problem in creating such a building is not unlike the problem an American lecturer faces in addressing a foreign audience: of retaining his individuality and his national idiom without making any blatant assertion of his Americanism—being, in fact, a better representative of our many-faceted national tradition by showing his ability to find common ground with his hosts. The ambassador who has not the tact to do this should be kept at home; the embassy that cannot create a likable concept of our country has not fulfilled a main purpose.
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The London embassy occupies the major share of one side of Grosvenor Square—a large eighteenth-century square with long evidence of American occupation, first by our earlier embassy, then by the postwar memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt that the grateful English erected there. The plot runs along the South Audley Street side of the square, from Upper Grosvenor Street north to Upper Brook Street, providing an all too imposing frontage on the square of some three hundred and fifty feet and a depth of some two hundred feet. Unlike the more formal squares of Bloomsbury and Belgravia, Grosvenor Square offers a considerable variety of form and color in its façades, though the buildings are mainly of the traditional, limited height. By the doubtful expedient of placing one floor half a story below the street level, and the tall ground floor half a story above that level, Saarinen respected this height limitation (the embassy shows only five stories aboveground), and when the trees are in leaf in the s
quare the foliage mercifully hides the embassy’s massive uniform façade from the spectator until it hits him full in the face. In any event, the square is so large that each side is a unit by itself, with little aesthetic relationship to the other sides, except at the corner meetings. Yet, as several British architectural critics have pointed out, the device of setting the embassy building back from the sidewalks, to get light for the below-street floor, created openings that disrupt the unity of the square far more than an additional story aboveground would. Not only that, but the building is further separated from the sidewalks by a formidable sloping stone-faced embankment, topped by a straw-colored metal fence. A retaining wall backs up the embankment, and between this wall and the building lies a deep if waterless moat—a drop capable of daunting any invader who dared to scale the outer barrier. From a military standpoint, the building is vulnerable only at the entrances, but for the purposes of friendly diplomacy this sidewalk barricade, which rises above the eye level, has the effect of a calculated insult—and has been so regarded by many not unduly sensitive Britons. Both the building and the barricade say, “Keep your distance! Do not enter!,” though this is the precise opposite of our program for introducing the British to our educational and cultural achievements while performing the other necessary offices of an embassy. To provide sufficient space for these cultural functions, the first two floors cover the entire plot, save for the setback; the four stories above form a rectangular U—with its base on Grosvenor Square—around a central light court. This upper mass juts out several feet to overhang the lower floors and is supported by a series of boldly expressed beams. Offices of both stenographers and officials, all with outside windows, are ranged along the sides of the U. There are three entrances to the building—the central embassy entrance on the square, with a double bank of elevators right at hand to give access to the whole building; a consular entrance on the south flank; a United States Information Service entrance on the north flank.
On the principle that the positive virtues of a building should be presented first, let me dwell on the interior public spaces, which give the ground floor a monumental scale that properly contrasts with that of the upper office floors and so provides the façade with what formal distinction it has. The tall, oblong windows on this level, which reach from floor to ceiling, have some justification for their existence, for though the exhibition hall, which is in the center of the building, is not served by them, they at least provide daylight for the library, which occupies one whole corner of the Information side of the building. This serene library, “all beautified with omissions,” as Henry James said of The Great Good Place, is just what a library should be—the readers’ tables close to the windows, and the stacks, holding some twenty-five thousand volumes of Americana, easily accessible. To give the authentic American touch, there is even an American Bible, but no King James Version! I cannot say as much in praise of the furniture. The clumsy, armless, almost immovable chairs were obviously chosen by someone with little experience in sitting or reading, much less in note-taking; they achieve a maximum of cushioned discomfort with a minimum of efficiency, and, compared with the not altogether adequate but still commodious oak armchairs of the reading rooms in the New York Public Library at Forty-second Street, they are singularly inept. There are today, incidentally, five badly designed “contemporary” chairs on the market for one that is even tolerably good, and the meekness with which the fashion-minded public accepts these incompetent pieces of furniture is second only to its eagerness to pay good money for the more infantile forms of modern painting. Here was a place for a dexterous innovation in modern library furniture, to match the high standard we have achieved in the conduct, if not always the design, of lending libraries. A room that vies in excellence with the library is the auditorium, for it is done with a quiet perfection that happily recalls Saarinen’s smaller theatre in the Kresge Auditorium at M.I.T. Whether such a single-purpose room, for intermittent use, is justified in the embassy is another question; the Beveridge Room in the University of London, so arranged that it can accommodate as little as twenty people at a seminar or two or three hundred at a concert or a lecture, seems to me a far more adroit solution.
The fact that the exhibition hall serves frequently as an art gallery—like the lesser space at the Information entrance—is an excellent feature of the plan, since until recently America’s contributions to painting and sculpture have been overlooked in other countries, a situation for which we have been partly to blame. Unfortunately, the hall is little more than a corridor, and space that might have been used to provide temporary alcoves, for a show of prints, perhaps, is sacrificed to a singularly irrelevant architectural device—a long, lengthwise trough of water, split by a wedge-shaped bank of stone that is punctuated by spouts, presumably to serve as a fountain. This trough cuts the gallery space in two without adding to its charm or usefulness. Possibly no one has yet backed into this watering trough, but it remains a clear and present danger, and, what is worse, it prevents one from going back and forth between pictures on opposite sides of the hall, as one often wishes to do when viewing a single artist’s work.
The upper-floor corridors and offices are a smooth miracle of cold anonymity, as violently antiseptic as an operating room in a hospital, and even on the hot day in summer when I inspected them the absence of color and contrast was far from ingratiating. One of Conan Doyle’s early villains tries to drive his girl victim insane by putting her in a white room with no hangings or decorations of any sort. This once seemed to me merely a quaint commentary on the Victorian conception of decoration, but after also looking at the endless array of white cubicles in the inner row of offices on the ground floor of the embassy I began to wonder whether there mightn’t be something in the notion, and I shuddered at the thought of coming into this building not out of the summer sun but out of the dark, dank fog of a London November or the cold rain that one may encounter at any London season. Under such conditions it would take more than central heating to make the embassy seem anything but bleak and forbidding. Only a distinguished architect could carry through his original errors with such consistency—and with so little misgiving about his basic premises.
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On the exterior, Saarinen attempted a more positive note in the four upper stories—in the bold fashion of Le Corbusier when he was modelling his Unity House in Marseille—by alternating oblong windows in broad, forward-thrusting stone frames and in narrow fluted frames that are not merely recessed into the walls but divided vertically by a bar. This pattern of alternation is carried through in the placing of the windows one above the other, so that a recessed window frame sits over a projecting window frame, and this scheme prevails through the entire façade. Such a strong modelling restores to us an almost forgotten part of the architectural curriculum—the traditional course on Lights and Shadows—and the contrasts hereby achieved will be strikingly accentuated, unless London’s smoke nuisance abates further, when the Portland stone Saarinen wisely employed weathers, in standard London fashion, into streaks and patches of charcoal and gray, set off against gleaming white. Then the alternation of the flat stone surfaces of the broader window frames with the fluted units that border the other windows may become far more effective than it is now. All in all, Saarinen used his best talents to give this façade the character of an old-fashioned masonry structure, and if one of the youngest leaders of the “Brutalist” school has complained that the embassy is too monumental, the fact is that at least its masculine strength compares most favorably with the slickly neuter glass walls that have dominated the buildings of the past decade. With the admirable structural consistency that was so marked in Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, Saarinen even carried the heavy beams of the lowest projecting floor out to the exterior, not alone to support the overhanging stories but to create a bold, serrated edge that sets off the recessed windows of the set-back ground floor as effectively as an old-fashioned cornice. Aesthetically, this is a far sounder feature o
f the façade than the overeffortful window frames, but the architect, alas, softened the effect by covering his beams with straw-colored anodized aluminum sheathing. The use of this feeble color throughout the building wherever a metallic covering is needed is an unfortunate lapse; it not merely looks fatally cheap, like imitation gold, but offers insufficient contrast with the diluted cream of the unweathered exterior stone.
What the architect sought here is obvious—he made a desperate attempt to conceal the incurable monotony of his façade by breaking away from the glib modern curtain wall, yet without going back to the simple repeating pattern of window and masonry wall that marked the buildings on the decently unobtrusive eighteenth-century London squares. In the older order of London, architects concentrated their efforts at individuality and distinction on the entrances of the houses, with their delicate fanlights and inviting classic porticoes; at most, they gave the special dignity of column and pediment to the building at the center of a row of houses, just because of its position. Saarinen sought to overcome the dull uniformity of a long, unbroken façade by making every other window stand out, but the power of his forms only increases the building’s obsessive, repetitive beat. In contriving this form of aesthetic escape, he chose a solution that was not quite so arbitrary as that in his elevation for the new girls’ dormitory at the University of Pennsylvania, in which, for no reason except superficial decoration, quite inadequate horizontal windows alternate with equally meaningless vertical ones. The truth of the matter is that if the functions within a building are themselves unduly repetitive, one cannot save the situation by overemphasizing that embarrassment.
In point of fact, Saarinen embraced the bureaucratic functions of the embassy too eagerly, and neglected to express the cultural functions that could have given life to this unnecessarily monotonous and sterile building. One would hardly guess from this façade that the embassy is not a mere office building. The library, the exhibition hall, the auditorium, the more public features of the building were all at the architect’s call, waiting for appropriate architectural expression—indeed, demanding it—to dramatize the building’s special ties to the great city and to those many Englishmen who are eager to come closer to our country’s culture. That culture, in all its brief historic exuberance, is in contrast to the conformities and standardizations of our more recent affluent, bellicose, and bureaucratized society, and this vitality and variety should not be hidden behind a uniform façade. On his own confession, Saarinen knew that the administrators of the Grosvenor estate planned to rebuild the other sides of the square to a height of nine stories, so, quite apart from the embassy’s privilege of extraterritoriality, there were no spatial limits to his handling of the varied functions of the embassy. By rejecting any formal expression of the cultural functions of his building, Saarinen repeated in his own fashion the mistakes of the United Nations headquarters in both New York and Paris—he gave precedence and eminence only to the bureaucratic function, thus bowing too complaisantly to the ruling force of our age and simply overlooking, or bluntly denying, our not inconsiderable cultural advantages.
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