ORAL HISTORY OF MYRON GOLDSMITH Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

Complied under the auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings Department of Architecture The Art Institute of Chicago Copyright © 1990 Revised Edition © 2001 The Art Institute of Chicago This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of this manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface iv

Outline of Topics vi

Oral History 1

Selected References 138

Curriculum Vitae 140

Index of Names and Buildings 142

iii PREFACE

Myron and I recorded his memoirs in his home in Wilmette, Illinois, on July 25, 26, September 7, and October 5, 1986. To describe his unique career, a colleague of Myron’s has coined the word “architechnologist,” while an architectural critic labeled him “Chicago’s new structural poet.” His training with world-class masters Mies van der Rohe and Pier Luigi Nervi, combined with Myron’s own poetic vision, have brought forth outstanding projects that embody pristine aesthetics and technology on the cutting edge. Now retired from Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Myron continues to transmit his special vision of architecture to colleagues and students through his teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology, guest lecturing, and writing.

Our interview sessions were recorded on eight 90-minute cassettes, which have been transcribed and reviewed by both Myron and me. Corrections have been made as necessary in order to clarify and amplify Myron’s thoughts and ideas. The transcript has been minimally edited to maintain the flow, spirit, and tone of Myron’s original comments. The transcription is available for scholarly research in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago.

During the time Myron and I met to record his oral history, he was under a deadline and deeply involved in finalizing his manuscript for a book about his work and ideas, which has since been published. In spite of this demanding prior commitment, Myron took great care to recount his experiences with his usual conscientious candor and attention to detail. For this I wish to thank him. His recollections are an important contribution to a more complete understanding of the events and personalities of his time, for which future scholars will thank him.

Myron’s career has been documented in Japanese, French, and English language architectural journals, in the Pigeon Library of Tape/Slide Talks on Architecture, and by Myron himself in his recently published book Myron Goldsmith: Projects and Concepts (Rizzoli, 1987). References that I found particularly helpful in preparing for this oral history are attached to this document.

iv Myron Goldsmith’s oral history was sponsored by the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago in cooperation with the Canadian Centre for Architecture. We wish to thank the Canadian Centre for Architecture for their support and encouragement in this endeavor. To our transcribers Kai Enenbach and Angela Licup, and editor Sarah Underhill go special thanks and appreciation.

Betty J. Blum August 1989

We are grateful to the Illinois Humanities Council for a grant awarded to the Department of Architecture in 2000 to scan, reformat, and make this entire text available on The Art Institute of Chicago's website. Annemarie van Roessel deserves our thanks for her masterful handling of this phase of the process.

Betty J. Blum September 2001

v OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Goldsmith as “Architechnologist,” Architect and Engineer Equally 1 Early Experiences that Led to a Career in Architecture 3 Study at Armour Institute of Technology in 1935 7 Mies van der Rohe Begins to Teach at Armour 10 Influence of the 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago 18 First Year of Graduate Study under Mies at IIT, 1939-40 20 Social and Political Implications of Mies’s Early Architecture in Germany 23 Return to IIT for Graduate Study 28 IIT in Chicago 29 Relationship with Mies 33 Employment in the Office of William Deknatel 37 Architectural Projects During World War II 37 United States Army Corps of Engineers 38 Return to Mies’s Office after 1946 41 Mies’s One-Man Show at The Art Institute of Chicago, 1938-39 45 Mies’s Approach to Seeking New Clients and Projects 46 Influence of Chicago School Buildings on Mies’s Architecture 49 Salary in Mies’s Office 51 Social Implications of Work Done in Mies’s Office after World War II 53 Thesis: “The Tall Buildings and the Effects of Scale” 56 Peace Bridge Project 61 Goldsmith as “Idea Man” 62 Edith Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois 64 50 x 50 House Project 73 Goldsmith’s Apartment at Commonwealth Plaza, Chicago 78 Reaction to The Unknown Mies and His Disciples of Modernism 80 Solar Telescope, Kitt Peak, Arizona 86 Study with Pier Luigi Nervi 87 The Merging of IIT with the Institute of Design 90 Employment at SOM in San Francisco, 1955-1958 92 Move to the Chicago Office of SOM, 1958 95

vi Mies’s Dismissal from the IIT Commission, 1958 99 Buildings on IIT Campus by SOM 100 Response to Criticism of Mies as Architect 103 Types of Projects and Work Environment at SOM 108 Fazlur Khan 116 More About SOM Buildings at IIT 117 Further Reaction to “The Unknown Mies…” at The Art Institute of Chicago 121 Preservation and the Architectural Community 123 The Architectural Establishment 129 Goldsmith as Educator 133 Reflections 134 Location of Goldsmith Records, Manuscripts, Photographs and Drawings 137

vii Myron Goldsmith

Blum: Today is July 25, 1986, and I’m with Myron Goldsmith in his home in Wilmette, Illinois. Myron, I’ve read that when you were introduced by the President of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1966 you were introduced as an architechnologist. The comment the president made was that you were the kind of professional that was very much in demand, but there were very few like you. How did you come to be what he called an architechnologist? If you will, try to go as far back as you can. Were you in any way influenced by your father’s profession or work?

Goldsmith: Do you mean to start from the beginning or try to explain what he meant by architechnologist, which I never understood?

Blum: Why don’t you first do that and then we’ll go back.

Goldsmith: You know I haven’t read that introduction for twenty years. I don’t know what in the world don’t he was saying. I don't know what an architechnologist is.

Blum: My impression from what he said was that he meant you were an architect as well as an engineer, in equal proportions.

Goldsmith: Is that what he meant by architechnologist?

Blum: I don’t know. That was what I thought it meant.

Goldsmith: If we take that idea of it I guess what I have really tried to do is to combine architecture, engineering, and aesthetics, all functioning

1 together. Certainly I’ve been interested in the aesthetics of engineering as well as the technical solutions. I’ve worked in engineering and know if you get into it you’re inundated by practical problems. Once the conceptual design is finished you’re inundated by problems of soil and the foundations and a thousand details that it be built right, analyzed correctly, and all those problems. I’ve not been interested in that although I’ve worked in it and tried and realized it was a mistake. I’ve been interested in engineering and aesthetics and tried to keep away from the details. I guess I don’t know if you can kind of keep away from the details. When I say details, I mean getting involved in the computation and so forth as far as engineering goes, although I was for a while chief engineer of SOM in San Francisco and responsible for all those things. I decided that my area of interest was more focused and narrower. Of course in architecture it’s a different question, you’re involved more in the details of everything. Still, working at SOM gave me a chance. Other people took care of business and the business organization, the great amount of details just of the business of architecture, getting a building done. I was lucky to cut out an area which interested me and that I think I was pretty good at. and to be able to work in my whole career. I don’t know if this responds to your question.

Blum: You have sort of added another dimension to what my simple understanding was of the word as he used it.

Goldsmith: I don’t know what he meant. I think it’s gobbledygook, myself.

Blum: I thought it was a combination of your two skills.

Goldsmith: Maybe. You know Nervi wrote a whole book called something like Technology and Aesthetics, and I’m now writing an essay for my book on trying to address this question, and it’s full meaning.

Blum: How did your interest in both fields begin?

2 Goldsmith: When it came time to choose a career, when I was in the final years of high school, I knew I was interested in building. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to become an engineer or an architect. It was quite far down the road when I was faced with making a decision. I tried to hedge the issue by deciding to become both. My degree was in architecture. Over the years I acquired enough, through education, through experience, enough background to become both, actually.

Blum You said a moment ago that you knew you were interested in architecture. Stepping back even a little further than the point where you selected a career, were you in any way influenced by any family members or friends, did you know an architect?

Goldsmith I’ll tell you I am not quite sure how I got on this track. I never knew an architect while I was growing up, I never knew an engineer. The nearest was a cousin who was working on chemical engineering at IIT, an older cousin by a couple of years. He eventually left for the University of Chicago. I was never interested in chemical engineering, I was interested in civil engineering. To my knowledge I never met an architect until I went to architectural school. It just was not in our circle of friends or anything like that.

Blum: Was your father was involved in any of that?

Goldsmith: If you want to do it a little chronologically, my parents both emigrated from Russia about 1910. They came in very modest circumstances. They met here and were married. My father was born in what was then Lithuania, but of course was part of Russia. My mother came from the Ukraine. They met here. Both had brothers and sisters here when they came to Chicago. I grew up in the Humboldt Park area. I went to Lafayette Grammar School and Crane Technical High School. My father delivered milk to stores and restaurants, worked for a dairy. That doesn’t explain the complexity of my background. I was first raised in the Humboldt Park area of Chicago. It was a very special area at that time. It

3 was a very densely Jewish area, a modest area with large pockets of Polish Roman Catholics. My father worked for a dairy and delivered wholesale milk at that time when I was growing up, with a wagon and two horses. Sometimes I helped him for fun.

Blum: Was there any building that was being built in your neighborhood when you were growing up that made an impression on you?

Goldsmith: I remember and I was very fascinated by the buildings that were going up. This was in the 1920s and buildings were going up, mostly apartment buildings, or apartments and stores. I was fascinated by the building process. I guess early on I got a kind of passion for things that were built and remembered watching everything with great interest.

Blum: When you were in grammar school did you enjoy drawing? Were you encouraged to draw?

Goldsmith: I don’t remember particularly finding it interesting. I remember drawing pictures of boats and the wagon and horses that my father had when I was quite young. I had at this time no formal training in drawing. When I saw what somebody who had training did there was a world of difference.

Blum: You went to Crane Technical High School. How did you come to go to a technical school? Was that your choice?

Goldsmith: Yes, that was my choice. By that time somehow I must have already started thinking of college. I couldn’t have thought of engineering but of college and maybe of some related field to engineering or architecture. Probably not architecture, but engineering, that probably was my first idea. I must have thought this was the proper preparation to get into college.

Blum: Was your family supportive of your of decision?

4 Goldsmith: Yes. It was understood. Later when I was to go into architecture my father was very mystified. He would say, “Why don’t you do something practical like be a lawyer, accountant, or a dentist?” They were the Jewish things that people in our circle went into. My mother was very supportive. There was never any real opposition. It was more a mystery to them.

Blum: Do you think that the basis of your father’s comment was that to become an architect was tending towards being an artist a little too much? Do you think he had a problem with the bohemian image that artists conjured up?

Goldsmith: I don’t think more of an artist, it was just sort of a mystifying profession.

Blum: When you were at Crane Technical High School did you have any courses that in any way prepared you for architecture or engineering?

Goldsmith: There was a course in mechanical drawing. The course was in mostly drawing machine parts or nuts and bolts and that sort of stuff to get mechanical drawing skills. I remember at one point the instructor—I think his name was Grasshoff—said to me, “Would you be interested in architectural drawing?” He broke me off from the rest of the class and we did something on architectural drawing. I can’t remember what. It wasn’t the sort of ambitious course in architectural drawing that you have now, but a sort of exploration. I remember I was interested first in the idea of being a class of one and second it quite coincided with my interest. I must have been already an upperclassman when this was done, an upperclassman in high school. I was beginning to think of careers. That, I think, had a big accidental influence.

Blum: Was the architectural drawing class at Crane based on copying or working out a problem?

Goldsmith: I have a feeling it was based on copying.

5 Blum: That would have been in 1932 or 1933 because you entered Armour in 1935.

Goldsmith: Then that’s correct.

Blum: The Beaux-Arts system would have been very strong at that time.

Goldsmith: Do you mean in Armour?

Blum: No, I mean just generally known to people who were instructors or interested in architecture.

Goldsmith: I don’t think the instructor was even that knowledgeable of architecture. He was thinking more of just drafting, not design. Design never came into the problems. I can’t even remember what we did.

Blum: Did you ever know why he selected you as a class of one for this kind of drawing?

Goldsmith: I really don’t know. I was pleased, I was flattered. I’m sure I didn’t show extraordinary talent. I was a very good student, probably in the upper ten percent of the class, ten students. I was a good student, and maybe wanted to experiment. I don’t know.

Blum: In 1935 you entered Armour. Why did you select Armour as your school?

Goldsmith: Two reasons. First, I could live at home and get there on the elevated very easily, and this idea to me, who I think had never been away overnight from home at that time. Going the next place was the University of Illinois at Champaign and that was like going to the end of the earth. IIT was comfortable. I also won a competitive freshman scholarship to IIT. It was pretty great.

Blum: Part of your fee was underwritten?

6 Goldsmith: It was a whole scholarship, so it was a very good and important thing to win. There were only a few of them. I remember when I had to say what field I was interested in I couldn’t decide whether civil engineering or architecture. At that time I had constructed the idea that I would take two degrees. It was quite possible at that time by just doing it correctly. I didn’t go too far in that idea in school because the courses began more and more to diverge. The architecture part of it required all my concentration in order to manage. I didn’t want to get too diluted. Very soon, maybe after the first year, I more and more put that idea in the back of my mind.

Blum: What was Armour like when you first entered? This was 1935 and they were oriented in the Beaux-Arts system.

Goldsmith: Architecture was all very new to me. The classes were held in the attic of the Art Institute. It seemed very exotic. First the whole ambiance of the Art Institute, in order to go to our classes we had to enter the front door of the Art Institute, go up that monumental staircase, go through galleries, and then climb a minor stair into the attic. Every day of your life you were passing all this art. Then there was a whole sort of bohemian tradition connected to architecture that had come out of the Beaux-Arts. The whole terminology, even the French word charrette, even the name—the Beaux-Arts system of education. There was a kind of bohemianism, let me say so-called bohemianism because it wasn’t too bohemian to be living in Humboldt Park, coming on the El. It seemed exotic, the life, drawing from the nude was a shocker. I was quite young, too. I must have been sixteen years old or so when I started, maybe seventeen. As I say, I had never been away from home overnight. There was something very interesting and enjoyable about it all. I think when Mies came and threw out all these traditions and all signs of bohemianism something nostalgic was lost. Where were we?

Blum: You’re jumping ahead to changes Mies made when he came in 1938. I’d like you to talk a little bit about what some of the texts were that were

7 recommended when you first began.

Goldsmith: I think there was no reading. I have to think back. I don’t remember any reference to reading outside of history of architecture. I think we had history of architecture and the old standby Banister Fletcher. There might have been some reading, but I can’t remember. The study of history of architecture at that time, the emphasis was on something to get acquainted with so you could use the style. Remember, we were in the midst of the Beaux-Arts system of design with all its ramifications and traditions. The drawings were made in a certain way. Everybody in the country who was studying architecture, after let’s see, the Beaux-Arts probably didn’t start before the second year. Before the second year the problems were locally given. After the second year they were given through the national Beaux-Arts. Everybody in the country was doing the same problem in the same way. They were first judged locally and then sent to New York to be judged against all the schools. At that time I realized that in the national competitions Armour was doing pretty poorly compared to other schools. For example, the University of Illinois at Champaign was usually doing very well.

Blum: Did you think of transferring just for the quality of education?

Goldsmith: If I did I wasn’t seriously thinking about it. I was having enough trouble keeping up in the architectural studies.

Blum: Who were some of your instructors that you recall?

Goldsmith: I recall that I only went to the Beaux-Arts for three years before Mies came. I think I had Professor McCaughey. I don’t know if he’d gone to the Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was a hard-drinking Irishman who made beautiful watercolors. I remember winning a prize of one of his watercolors. I don’t remember what happened to it. I don’t remember so much. There was Earl Reed, who was chairman, and probably taught. There was Krehbiel who taught also at the Art Institute, taught life

8 drawing and watercolor. I remember it was life drawing.

Blum: Did any of these instructors make any sort of meaningful impression on you, now that you look back?

Goldsmith: All this time I was just beginning to get some glimmer of understanding. I was trying to understand it. They were skillful. Krehbiel drew beautifully. I don’t remember what year I had McCaughey in—it might have been the third year. About this time some of us began to read about the work of Wright and Sullivan and even the book on more modern architecture, I hesitate to use that word, but the International School. Philip Johnson’s and Hitchcock’s book, The International Style, was out by then.

Blum: Was this the book for the exhibition at MoMA in 1932?

Goldsmith: I don’t know if Philip Johnson’s and Hitchcock’s was the catalog or another book, but we had the book In fact there were a couple of books. I don’t know in what year I was at school, maybe not the freshman year, but second or third year, that a few of us students began to read this stuff and to become very aware that out there was a whole other world in opposition. Of course, the great influence—and these books were attacks—the great influence was Corbusier’s book Towards a New Architecture. This was an attack on the Beaux-Arts and on traditional architecture. Those all made a tremendous influence on a certain group of young students. In fact by my later years, there was a revolt against the Beaux-Arts and complaints against this type of study by a certain number of students.

Blum: At Armour?

Goldsmith: At Armour and probably at many other schools. This was pretty stirring stuff. Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture was a big attack on Beaux-Arts.

9 Blum: Were you part of this uprising?

Goldsmith: It wasn’t an uprising. Don’t forget I had a scholarship, or a lot of aid. That scholarship was only the first year. I certainly wasn’t one of the leaders, but we certainly talked about all this stuff.

Blum: Who were some of the other students who were involved in this fascination with a newer architecture?

Goldsmith: The one I remember the most was a good friend of mine, Harvey Schaefer. We would talk about it a great deal. He was a good friend. I don’t know what happened to him.

Blum: Did he become an architect?

Goldsmith: I don’t know if we were even in the same year or he was ahead of me. I can’t remember him in Mies’s school. Maybe we did. He was a very articulate guy and he loved to talk.

Blum: How did all this unrest take shape in the context of the school? Was it just students getting together and talking after class or did it actually come into play in the classroom with the instructors?

Goldsmith: At a certain time, and I don’t know when, a committee was formed by the president of Armour to seek a new head of architecture. In fact I think at a certain time Reed was replaced and Louis Skidmore was head of the school. He was never around, I think he already was half in New York. I don’t know exactly what, maybe Loebl was involved as the acting head of the school. But, it was clear that some thorough changes were going to happen in the way it was taught. Student projects were done in a modern style, there was of course Greek Gothic, you name it, Byzantine, and modern. Maybe they wouldn’t decide which they were going to do until quite late in the process. The modern showed that. It was just whether you would do a modern facade, or, say, a Renaissance facade. We

10 students were informed enough to know the great superficiality of that. This might be when I was already in the third year that I began to get sophisticated. We knew that beautiful book by Philip Johnson where the work of Mies, Corbusier and others was shown. We realized that there was a whole different integrated architecture between the plan and the idea and what appeared on the elevation. In the Beaux-Arts all this was rather optional toward fairly far along in the project, when you could decide. We were fairly knowledgeable and I think most of the students were. They were looking for new things. Some of the instruction was awful. I remember there was a class in clay modeling. The design was for a newel post for an American Legion post. The project was to do that newel post, which is where a stair makes a turn. Everybody was doing stylized eagles. It was taught by an instructor who was a product designer at IIT. I was really rather ashamed of what I was doing. We were modeling it in clay. I remember while I was working alone in this modeling room, there was a special room, on my eagle which I hated, in walked a group through this room, it had two doors. A group of VIPs walked in one door, giving a quick look, and out the other. They were the head of the department and other people. I later learned one of these people was Mies van der Rohe inspecting the school. This was of course before he had accepted the directorship.

Blum: Do you think that look in that room convinced him he had to take the chairmanship of the school and revamp the curriculum?

Goldsmith: I don’t know. Just recently in this show at IIT called “Mies van der Rohe: Architect as Educator” there were a couple of projects from the old Beaux-Arts in there, one modern and moderne. That was the big, I think, influence, of the exposition of 1925 or so in Paris.

[Tape 1: Side 2]

Blum: Were any of the instructors at Armour renegades like the students you described?

11 Goldsmith: I don’t know. I didn’t have any close relationships with them. When Mies came some of the instructors continued on. Al Mell, I think, was an instructor under the old and under the new. About Charlie Dornbusch, I don’t remember offhand. A teacher of construction, I think. Krehbiel stayed on. I’ve never remembered having this kind of a discussion with any of my teachers under the Beaux-Arts.

Blum: It’s interesting you mention Charles Dornbusch. In 1933 he worked for General Homes, Howard Fisher. He designed very modern, not moderne but modern, International Style-looking houses. I wondered what his teaching was like at IIT prior to Mies.

Goldsmith: Did he come prior to Mies? I don’t remember.

Blum: Yes.

Goldsmith: I can’t remember that, he never was my instructor. I really don’t remember. I knew that I sensed, between Mies, Corbusier, Howard Fisher and even George Fred Keck, there is quite a gulf in what we mean by architecture. In one case you have a fairly local attempt at modern architecture and in the other case you have guys with worldwide reputations who are great geniuses. I think whatever it was, we even realized as students that gulf that Johnson exposed was something which was way outside of what you could get locally in understanding, in art. Of course we knew something about the painting movements too, that there was Picasso and so forth outside. Of course there were temporary exhibitions I guess. There was even the modern gallery. I don’t know when Katherine Kuh opened her gallery. Maybe it was even after the war or during the war, I don’t know. I’m not clear on dates.

Blum: Were you aware of the existence of the Bauhaus and Mies in that connection?

Goldsmith: We must have been. Gropius was given a part in Johnson’s book, as I

12 remember. We were certainly aware through the books of the projects and the ideas. As a matter of fact, I was very strongly impressed by Wright and Sullivan because they had written. Although I never worked on a project in the manner of Wright, I realized that this was something important from what I had read, from their own writings. We were reasonably knowledgeable. I don’t recall if these people were ever on the reading list, but we read them. There was a wonderful Art Institute book in the Burnham Library of Architecture, where all the books were on the open shelves, so to speak. You could just walk to them and we looked at things.

Blum: In terms of the formal classroom instruction, were any of the people like Wright, Sullivan, Burnham, or the Chicago School ever brought to your attention?

Goldsmith: I can’t remember. I’m sure it was mentioned but I don’t think they were considered very important by our instructors as a very important example. Things were still going on in Gothic and in all the styles. I remember the most successful things that were judged at the Beaux-Arts were in these styles. That’s my impression.

Blum: While the search was underway to find a new head by the committee at Armour, was there any connection between the students and the search committee, or people who had more to say about a selection than simply the classroom instructors? Was there any feedback or exchange?

Goldsmith: At least not on my level or not on anything that I knew. Whether any students were involved, this was before students were invited to sit on all committees, I was completely flabbergasted and pleasantly surprised, pleasantly is a poor word, absolutely dumbstruck when we heard that Mies had been selected. There was this big banquet to introduce him.

Blum: You say you were dumbstruck when Mies was selected. What were your expectations as the search was continuing?

13 Goldsmith: Skidmore was chairman for a while. If I had any expectations I thought it would go in that direction. It never occurred to me that some world- famous architect would come to IIT. It was a small school and I think a backwater school compared to these exotic eastern schools, maybe even to a certain extent the University of Illinois.

Blum: When Mies came, what happened as a result of his very different kind of curriculum that he proposed? What happened within the student body?

Goldsmith: I was a fourth-year student. I took one year of graduate work. It was very difficult for me, as well, and I’m sure for everybody else, to make the transition. He was organizing a curriculum with the incoming students where they go through this step-by-step process. For us upperclassmen, I think they were given, in the last year, the chance to finish up under the old Beaux-Arts system or to study with Mies. I think various students made different selections. I don’t know what percentage was. He said the problem given was to work on a house, a house for yourself, work on a model. Nothing else was given—what kind of a house or what it should look like. We tried to work in the manner of Mies. He would come and make some comments on it.

Blum: How did you know what the manner of Mies was?

Goldsmith: We knew it from the book. The manner of Mies, or whatever, I don’t know what everybody was working on. I think of a flat roof with freestanding walls. It was very difficult. There were no requirements. I think we were mostly working on a spatial problem. I must say I floundered around for a year.

Blum: Did he help you?

Goldsmith: Not much help, I thought. He said, “Keep trying,” which is what he would say to everybody, “Try something else.”

14 Blum: He was not pleased with it either?

Goldsmith: No. I think his attitude was that the trying was as important as the result, that what you found was good and what you found was as important as the final result. Finally there was a problem that we finished, toward the end of the year. It was for, I think, a country club. You did it mostly on your own, I think. I don’t remember what I did nor is anything left of it.

Blum: I understand he did not speak English very well when he first came in 1938.

Goldsmith: He didn’t speak it at all.

Blum: How did he communicate with students, even to say keep trying?

Goldsmith: I understood a little German from Yiddish. I knew enough Yiddish so I could understand him. I could understand the conversations the Germans had among themselves, only understand them. Rodgers was teaching with him. Rodgers would translate it. Mies would make a long statement and Rodgers would say, “Mies says do it again.” He was a very taciturn guy, Rodgers.

Blum: With your knowledge of German do you think he translated accurately?

Goldsmith: He gave a very, very short translation, the gist of the idea.

Blum: The way you describe the way Mies handled, say, your first project, that of designing a home for yourself, is rather interesting to me because I thought that Mies had a very well-disciplined and prescribed curriculum every year that the student studied. Contrary to the way Moholy taught people, or the philosophy of Moholy’s approach, and that was one of exploration. I think it’s fairly well known that Mies and Moholy differed philosophically as far as their approach to education goes. Personally I’ve heard there was also a personal dislike between them. Was there any

15 influence that Moholy had on IIT prior to Mies? He came a year before Mies came. Was there any effect that he had on the school?

Goldsmith: No. The new Bauhaus was on the South Side. There was no influence. I remember going down there at one time and even meeting with Moholy to see what his school was like. I don’t know what I had in mind. This first year with Mies was just—we were completely at sea. Mies had an organized curriculum which those starting in the freshman year followed, sort of step-by-step with this well known curriculum. We were students in the last year of a conventional Beaux-Arts curriculum. All he could do was give us one problem. Incidentally, that’s what people at his Bauhaus in Germany mostly worked on, were houses. I think they must have been very advanced students judging from the good work that came out of there, probably even graduate students of the Bauhaus, certainly they were very advanced students. I don’t think anybody did very much with Mies that first year.

Blum: You mean on the upper level?

Goldsmith: Yes. Certainly not me. I think almost any student would have difficulty going from the Beaux-Arts to Mies’s program. In the Beaux-Arts program, if you are to do a house, they gave you a house program that would have living, dining room of a certain size, even so many bedrooms, so many baths, the site given. I don’t know if they would give you a hint on what style it was to be in, say it was for a banker who liked colonial architecture. Whereas Mies said, “Work on a house for yourself.”

Blum: That’s pretty non-directive.

Goldsmith: Yes.

Blum: Did you have any occasion to know Moholy?

Goldsmith: I went down there once. We knew something was going on, I can’t

16 remember if I saw any exhibits of the work.

Blum: Was this prior to Mies’s coming?

Goldsmith: No, maybe it’s prior to Mies’s coming that I went down to see him thinking I might transfer to that school. I can’t remember if it was prior to Mies’s coming. I think whatever I was thinking about that, it was fairly interesting but mysterious stuff that they were teaching there. I didn’t think I would go there. I think that then Mies came, so that idea was pushed across.

Blum: As you came to know Mies over the years, and I think Moholy died in 1946, what did you know his relationship to be with Moholy?

Goldsmith: I had no contact with Moholy at all except we all got very friendly after the war and we all came back and I think the school moved down to the Near North Side, on Ontario and Dearborn or wherever it was. There were exhibitions and lectures. Bucky came and I used to attend those, it was very exciting. I was very interested in Fuller, very impressed with him. Bucky stayed there, perhaps a year, teaching in the school. I used to have a fairly good rapport with Bucky. I was very interested in what he was doing. I must say to their credit they then they got Konrad Wachsmann. When Wachsmann came, Wachsmann and Mies were very friendly. I only followed Wachsmann but at a couple of occasions. Wachsmann and his students would come up to Mies’s office or house and show their work, I don’t remember.

Blum: I think it was in later years.

Goldsmith: I was there and he would want my idea of an engineering problem.

Blum: What was Fuller like?

Goldsmith: A non-stop exotic talker. He was already doing these domes. They

17 seemed to have enormous potential. He made enormous claims for them but they did, as we see, have great potential for certain kinds of structures. Here was a guy with ideas, some of which were very interesting. I followed him that year. He gave public lectures. During his entire life we had a friendship. He was all over the world, but we remained in touch, let us say. I was very interested in Fuller.

Blum: Did his work seem possible to be realized to you?

Goldsmith: Yes. I don’t remember in what year his stuff began to be realized.

Blum: Speaking of Buckminster Fuller, I realize we missed talking about the 1933-34 Century of Progress in Chicago, about at the time that you were about ready to enter Armour. Buckminster Fuller had a rather revolutionary automobile at that fair. Did you remember that? Were you impressed with that at the time?

Goldsmith: In 1933 I think I was fifteen years old.

Blum: It was such a big event in Chicago.

Goldsmith: I went often to the fair. I think there was great publicity on Bucky’s three- wheeled car. There was much attention paid to the architecture, to the skyride. I must have seen buildings by Keck, the two buildings. I was impressed with them. I think I was less impressed with the typical architecture, it was a little funny I thought. This was modern architecture, which was vast areas, I think, of painted plywood, painted garish colors. The exhibits fascinated me. I think there were some shows along the lakefront. Was there a railroad show or was the railroad show after the fair? All that I went to, it was interesting.

Blum: Yes, there was a railroad fair but not until years later. Now that you look back at the 1933-34 fair, or even at the time if you had an opinion, did you think there was any significance to the fair in terms of architecture,

18 considering there were the Keck houses as well as the others?

Goldsmith: I don’t know how much of my opinions are of the time, or a little later when I began to have more understanding. My impression is that I thought the skyride was just uninteresting and ugly, which it was. I didn’t go on it ever. I don’t remember how much it cost, maybe that was something. In my opinion it seemed rather expensive for a fifteen-year- old kid. It was rather stupid to go up that high to ride what seemed like a few hundred feet and go back down. The whole thing was dumb. They must have had a lakefront show that was very moving. I don’t know, maybe later it became the railroad show. I think there were all these railroad exhibits. There were some very interesting things. I went often and was interested in but not particularly impressed by the architecture. I guess more by the exhibits. Don’t forget I was fifteen. I don’t know if that would have made me determined to be an architect, seeing all that stuff. I can’t remember that it had any influence.

Blum: It’s my impression that what you’re saying is that the technology was more impressive than aesthetics.

Goldsmith: I think so, or not so much the technology as the exhibits of railroad trains, I was always interested in that. My impression, I think, in one of the automotive exhibits, it was a little stupid too. In order to show an exhibit of technology, I think they had a huge machine stamping out ashtrays. It must have been to them some idea of mass production but to me, even as a fifteen-year-old, I was too sophisticated for that.

Blum: There are probably a lot of ashtrays around that are now priceless souvenirs.

Goldsmith: Ugly ashtrays.

Blum: We sort of deviated because you were talking about Buckminster Fuller and then you mentioned Konrad Wachsmann. What was he like?

19 Goldsmith: He was a very warm person. He was a friend of Mies’s. Mies and he had a genuine friendship. I think Mies had respect for him, maybe not so much as an architect, but he was trying for technical ideas and their expression, as was Fuller. I think Mies thought that Fuller’s dome had great limitations. But, at that time, he was proposing them for houses and everything. We knew that they would have great limitations for houses, which proved to be the case. They were awful as houses but as bigger structures certainly millions of these or thousands of these domes were built for various reasons because they were technically efficient. His ideas were provocative.

Blum: Were his ideas and his work known to you when you were a student prior to your graduation in 1939?

Goldsmith: I don’t think so. I think I first knew of him later on when he came and was at the Institute of Design.

Blum: According to the catalog that IIT published and the new information it brought out, your classes after Mies came were, I think there was one class with a man called Sterling Harper, one with Charles Dornbusch, and one with someone else, maybe John Barney Rodgers. The rest of your classes were with Mies or with Hilbs. You probably came to know Mies pretty well at that time. Was he an approachable kind of person?

Goldsmith: You see I stayed two years actually, one as an undergraduate, then as a graduate. As a graduate there were only a few students, and it was much closer. I finally got my degree in 1953 but this was 1940. Even then I was working on a thesis. I picked a farmhouse, which Mies wasn’t very much interested in. I was interested in the kind made out of wood and he wasn’t very interested in it. I didn’t get very far. I was at that time very interested in Le Corbusier, curiously enough, and some of the ideas for some of the houses. He had done a house with stone walls and wood. I was kind of thinking of that for my farmhouse. I never got very far with the idea.

20 Blum: Was this a point of controversy between you and Mies?

Goldsmith: No, when Mies wasn’t interested in something that you were doing he would more or less ignore you and spend the time with the students whose work he was interested in. We were friendly but I don’t remember getting very far on the thesis under Mies.

Blum: Did you come to know him personally?

Goldsmith: He would come to the class and talk to the students. We would all gather around as he went from student to student. I don’t think in that first year, in 1940 it must have been, that much happened with any student. They were doing their theses. Mies took the attitude that you got your thesis when you were ready, so a thesis could go on for a few years until the student was ready.

Blum: How did you decide to devote your time to a farmhouse as your thesis?

Goldsmith: I had been interested in the country, maybe readings from Wright and stuff. I was interested at that time in wood and stone or wood and masonry without having any very clear idea. Corbu had done a house, I don’t remember which one that was, with stone walls, maybe a couple of houses in stone and wood. It was pretty interesting. Of course I was all mixed up and having Mies, I should have worked on something that he was really interested in. It never occurred to me.

Blum: What do you think you could have chosen that would have pleased him?

Goldsmith: A house out of steel and glass, or a building out of steel and glass. I don’t remember what the other students were doing but he spent more time on some of the other students.

Blum: How many other students were there in that first year of your graduate school?

21 Goldsmith: Just a handful.

Blum: Who were they?

Goldsmith: I don’t know when Speyer finished his thesis. He was older than all of us and was very independent, maybe more mature in what he was doing. I don’t know whether he finished it the first year or worked on into the second year. He did this thesis comparing the space of Corbusier, Mies, and somebody else. I don’t know if Mies really paid much attention to that either. I can’t remember. Speyer also did a house. He was pretty much more advanced, I think, than some of us students, a little older.

Blum: But that was the same year.

Goldsmith: Yes. He started in 1938 with all of us. He was the sole graduate student. Did I say 1940? It might have been 1939. If Mies came in September 1938, the first year was finished in June 1939, and then graduate school must have been from September 1939 to June 1940 or something like that.

Blum: For you?

Goldsmith: Yes. There was another factor: the war was now going on. It was very disturbing. It was awful. It was very well known, German anti-Semitism. That was not a very good period to study architecture, with the world falling to pieces around you. Events in the world were terribly upsetting to, I think, everybody and also to me. The occupation of Czechoslovakia must have happened around this time, October 1939, the invasion of Poland, and what had happened before. Architecture seemed something that was not terribly relevant at this time with the world falling apart. When I finished my first year in the spring of 1939 I spent a few months or a month, I don’t know how long, at something called Highlander Folk School. Some friends had arranged it and it was in Mount Eagle, Tennessee. Mostly it was a school of union organization. This was all part of the turmoil of the war and so forth.

22 [Tape 2: Side 1]

Blum: What was the nature of the Highlander Folk School?

Goldsmith: I think it was named for a school that was really involved in unionizing the textile industry in the South. I enjoyed it. I made very good friends, and it seemed like something that was more important than architecture at the time. My family came down and convinced me to leave and go back for a year of graduate work rather than stay there organizing unions. It was a very curious thing. I think you should remember all this and what was going on in the world at that time. Mies started the school at the world’s worst time in the turmoil. The draft was soon on, the war was going to happen very soon.

Blum: Were you looking for something that had a stronger social connection?

Goldsmith: I think so. Just to say that architecture seemed suddenly quite irrelevant, if you could use that word, or unimportant in a time when the world was falling apart.

Blum: That’s very interesting because it was some of Mies’s early works in Germany that had a social context.

Goldsmith: I think Mies’s projects like the Liebknecht Monument—he explains, I think, as just another architectural problem. Let me not mistake this, to him it was a major effort to try to explain or symbolize this terrible event of these two murdered people. I think from what I read of their stories they were excellent socially conscious people but they were murdered. Mies was clearly not a communist. You probably know that story of a friend of his, I think his name was Fuchs, I don’t know if he was even a potential client, showing him the neoclassic design for this monument. He asked Mies what he thought of it and he said, “Well it looks more like a monument to a banker than to revolutionaries.” He said, “Well, what would you do?” and Mies did that. I think I’d take that story at face

23 value, that it was an architectural problem to do rather than being a convinced communist, which I think Mies was not.

Blum: What about the housing that he did?

Goldsmith: I don’t know the story of it. I had always assumed that he was able to get a commission, in a time when he was doing houses, for a much bigger building and certainly he eagerly took it. I think nobody ever considered it as one of his major accomplishments in the history of his work. What are you thinking?

Blum: I was thinking of the Weissenhofsiedlung. Did that have social implications?

Goldsmith: Certainly that they considered housing a major project for architecture. I’m sure that Mies as head of it had a lot to do with this, with the fact that this or that was chosen. I don’t remember whether the theme was fixed when Mies got the project. Don’t forget that it was mostly villas although I think there were two buildings, his own apartment building and probably one other, I don’t remember whose, they were group housing.

Blum: I thought this was supposed to have been workers’ housing, and it was to improve the conditions of workers?

Goldsmith: Of course, Oud did a group of houses. Whatever was the theory, I had always looked on it as a chance for a group of the best modern architects in Europe to do a house. I don’t know who sold it as workers’ housing. Certainly Oud’s building, which was a row house, could have been low- cost. Certainly the plan Mies did in his apartment building, the apartments for bachelors with this wonderful furniture, had nothing to do with workers. It was just the best, most elegant thing you could do. I don’t know where that title came from. In my impression it was just housing. It was a mixture but the real—call it agenda or hidden agenda—was to show the best that could be done by these modern

24 architects. If you were trying to do housing for workers, you would get a bunch of bureaucrats to do practical housing.

Blum: Were bureaucrats working in this new style?

Goldsmith: That was the real agenda, modern architecture, and not workers’ housing. I don’t know where workers’ housing came from. This is the first time I’ve heard of workers’ housing, I must tell you. I think it was to show modern housing at its best, within the parameters. I think partially he got who he considered to be the best architects and I think there were a few more conservative architects, like Bonatz, who were leading modern architects in Germany. They ought to be included, or it was expedient politically to include them. He had enough of the younger architects who he considered tops to do that. I think Mart Stam was not important. Corbu, Oud, himself, Hilberseimer—he certainly gave some to his colleagues and close friends. Was Gropius in that? I don’t remember.

Blum: Gropius did two houses.

Goldsmith: I think Mies based it on the ones whose work he knew. He based it on who he thought were important architects.

Blum: Do I understand correctly that you’re saying you think in his years in Germany there was no commission that would imply that Mies had taken any social or political stand with the work he did?

Goldsmith: No. That’s a mouthful, Betty. Any social or political stand?

Blum: In the two instances that you cite, the Liebnecht Monument and the Weissenhofsiedlung…

Goldsmith: I’ve already explained how I think of the monument, certainly I think he was very far from a communist. He was doing the best he knew how, taking it as an architectural problem and trying to express in strong terms

25 what it meant. He was not just trying to do an abstract thing. Probably a communist functionary did this neoclassical first example. I think it was, naturally, a very important monument.

Blum: Do you think he was apolitical about what it meant?

Goldsmith: How do you mean, apolitical? I’m not sparing with you, Betty.

Blum: I mean that he was not favoring communist philosophy by having taken that commission.

Goldsmith: I would say yes, and nothing else. I think he had many communist friends, all of Germany was politicized. Later, when he was head of the Bauhaus and these warring factions of the communists and the Nazis were upsetting the school, he closed it and threw all the leaders out and just let back in the people who were committed to architecture. I think he was a man who was committed to architecture and architectural ideas. This doesn’t mean that he couldn’t do a monument to communists who were murdered and do it in a really feeling way. Or that a painter like Picasso couldn’t be a communist without getting involved in this realism that was the official party idea of it. Do you find this unsatisfactory?

Blum: It’s your perception of it is what we’re looking for. One last question before we leave Mies in Germany because that really, I suppose, wasn’t your first-hand experience with him except through what he’s told you.

Goldsmith: Let me just go back a little bit. This strange going to Highlander Folk School and getting involved, I want to give you a little background. First of all, from the environment, the whole Jewish population, at least the working class, was oriented toward socialism. Maybe not the whole, but everybody I knew when I was growing up. The Workmans’ Circle was a socialist group and we would go to their camp, the whole family, in the summer. Around the bonfires we’d sing the International. One grew up in this environment. On the street corners of the neighborhood the socialists

26 and communists or the Trotskyites and the Stalinites would trade insults and long soapbox speeches. That’s the kind of environment you grew up in. The whole Jewish population was sort of split into warring factions.

Blum: Were the unions seen as a solution?

Goldsmith: Of course, but by whom? I think the socialists saw this evolution through unionization and so forth. The communists saw it—I can’t remember all the splits and the hairline splits. Others saw it as just a papering over of the contradictions of society by unionism which just delayed the day when communism would take over. Bitter arguments took place over this. Various factions hated each other more than they hated the capitalists.

Blum: What were your political leanings at the time?

Goldsmith: Not so strong. I think my family went so far as to go to this camp for a week, which was a pleasant vacation. That was our idea of a vacation. We would sing the International. I think the Workmans’ Circle was more unionization and more socialist than communist. Everybody voted for Eugene Debs for the socialist candidate for president. It was a rather benign effort for social change.

Blum: You must have felt compelled to do something in a social context.

Goldsmith: That was always present. I think the Highlander School was half exploring. I never did anything with it. There was a mixture of people there—some union people, some social workers, every branch of do- gooder. There were other people who were just socially conscious people, or trying to understand.

Blum: Did you benefit from that experience?

Goldsmith: Not directly. I wanted to be an architect and I never got very involved in

27 politics after that.

Blum: So you left the Highlander Folk School to go back to IIT for an additional year, your first year of graduate school?

Goldsmith: Yes. I might have even been kind of bribed by my family to get me out of that environment.

Blum: Hilbs was at the school. Was Peterhans?

Goldsmith: Yes.

Blum: How did Mies, Peterhans, and Hilbs work together, they all seem to be such different personalities?

Goldsmith: I think they were by this time friends and the nucleus of this intellectual group that was running the school and fighting for modern architectural ideas and, to Hilbs, modern planning ideas. Modern planning is a poor word, but certainly planning ideas. Don’t forget at that time, probably IIT or Armour was the only school, probably in the country, with a planning department. It probably still is. The rest of what is called planning is not physical planning. I don’t even know what you’d call what they’re doing. I think certainly the school was interested in architecture. Mies was interested mostly in his work in architecture. Through Hilbs he was interested in this architecture as cities and regions. Peterhans taught history and visual training. He also taught certain ideas. I remember he gave a special class on Kant and his aesthetic theories and ideas. I think they very much complemented each other and wove it into a kind of real idea of education.

Blum: Did Hilbs ever refer to or make any connection to Daniel Burnham and the fact that he had planned Chicago?

Goldsmith: I think Hilbs rather held the idea of the city as the City Beautiful idea, that

28 most of the planners at that time, like Harlan Bartholomew, I don’t know if you know him, he was doing all of the civic plans. What planning was, was a civic center of all the government buildings in a neoclassic example. I can’t remember exactly all the nuances of the Chicago plan that Hilbs thought of. I think he held this idea of planning from aesthetic ideas in a rather low opinion. After all, they worked with just the civic part of it, boulevards and leaving the rest of the city untouched. Hilbs was interested in starting with housing and that planning.

Blum: Do you think that IIT and the development of the ideas of these principles could have happened anywhere else? Where there was no influence from the city of Chicago, with its tradition of physical planning and great architects who had already worked here? Could IIT have been plunked down anywhere and developed the way it did?

Goldsmith: Had Mies been accepted at Harvard, for example, and the same group done at Harvard, I’m sure he would have given that school his coloration. You must remember that the job that Gropius had was, I think, quite limited. To my understanding of it, it was limited to his own teaching. The rest of the school might have gone in a diametrically opposite direction. I’m not entirely clear at that, but that’s my impression. Here Mies had the possibility of developing the whole school, the whole curriculum. The only thing that was done in the school was in accordance with their ideas. What Hilbs worked on was different. I think it was a very good combination. Mies was interested very strongly in architecture as art and Hilbs was interested in it really as a functioning entity. Of course he was also very aware of it as art, he’d been an art critic. He managed to not let that part of it get in the way of his planning. How do you say get in the way? Usurp his planning ideas—you could separate architecture as art from architecture as housing.

Blum: I suppose I’m wondering if, in fact, IIT took anything from Chicago. Do you think it did?

29 Goldsmith: Let me try to think. I’m taking a long time to think this over. To answer, because I forget, certainly all of us students were aware that giants had worked and lived in Chicago—Wright, Richardson, and Sullivan, and the buildings of the Chicago School were here. Especially Peterhans, my impression is that he spoke of some of the Chicago buildings with great appreciation. He must have spoken of Sullivan and so forth. I think what they liked probably was like on Carson’s—they liked the skeleton and the clear expression of the skeleton, where other people only saw in it the ornament as the important part of Sullivan. This was one example of Sullivan. There were other things where it was less clear.

Blum: Wasn’t the structural the basis for the Chicago School?

Goldsmith: The basis of the Chicago School? Oh, God, I think it was more complicated than that, to say this was the basis.

Blum: Of course, that as opposed to aesthetics primarily, such as the Beaux-Arts.

Goldsmith: They were trying to find, of course, the proper modern aesthetic. For example, Wright, whose work was very strong in Chicago, and Mies appreciated Wright as a great architect. I was very impressed with Wright. In fact, I went to work my job with Deknatel, a Wright student. I’m sure they thought in the school that Wright was just a very personal branch of what we were looking for. He was a great genius, it’s true, with beautiful buildings that were very impressive and very deeply felt. I’m sure there were great discussions. I remember some of them, about Wright. Johnson Wax was built during this period—it was a very impressive and beautiful building.

Blum: What about the early commercial style buildings in Chicago?

Goldsmith: I’m sure there was great admiration for some of them, many of them. There was great interest in architecture coming out of studying not the great monumental styles but more from buildings and examples that

30 were more out of a folk architecture. I’m looking for a word, vernacular. You know there was much in the Chicago buildings that were a vernacular architecture, that frame and so forth. Mies taught us great admiration for the artist-architects like Wright, Richardson, and Sullivan. His admiration was not just confined to the buildings that were exactly like his. I think he came away with very great respect for other things, not to copy them but as an example of great artist-architects. I think they were studied enough. We were taught to admire the engineering and the farmhouses of Europe, again the vernacular, as being a way to study and maybe even look for inspiration. There were exhibits of these farmhouses and stone buildings. I remember Mies admired the buildings of Pennsylvania, the Amish barns and so forth. They suddenly dug up a new speech for Mies, in the 1920s, where he speaks of these vernacular buildings, igloos and stuff. I think it’s in the catalog of Mies van der Rohe: Architect as Educator. In fact, Genther was doing a thesis, never finished, on the thing. He made an enormous collection of pictures of bridges, farmhouses, and all buildings that were thought of as worthy examples to study. They were mostly vernacular types rather than old buildings. I don’t know to what extent Wright was in there.

Blum: Would you say that’s the way Mies looked at the earlier commercial style in Chicago, in that vein?

Goldsmith: When you say, “that’s the way,” how do you mean it?

Blum: I thought I understood you to say that Mies had an appreciation for the vernacular. I was asking whether you thought if that appreciation could be extended to the buildings before 1900 in Chicago.

Goldsmith: Yes. I don’t remember specific examples and specific conversations. We all had a great appreciation for these early buildings—not everyone, some more than others. Not as examples to copy but principles of how it was done, historical principles by sometimes very great architects. They all spoke of it a little differently. Hilbs, for example I bet, didn’t like the

31 corner of Carson’s, you know the rounded corner. I’m sure Mies accepted the whole thing as that of a great artist-architect.

Blum: I’ve always wondered whether Mies could have been quite as successful and a school such as IIT succeeded so well in another place.

Goldsmith: Probably not. It was unheard of, I think, to give somebody free hand with a school. I don’t know anybody else in the history of education in the United States who could have come into a school and fired everybody he wanted to and be accountable to nobody else but themselves for that curriculum, except in Chicago, certainly not in Harvard. It just amuses me that you get a great man, and they needed letters of recommendation to go through the whole schtick to get a job. You would never have done it probably at any other school in the country—Black Mountain or something was not a real accredited school. Yes, I think it’s because of Chicago and its openness that he would have come with such fanfare. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t an opposition group to what was going on. Certainly a lot of conventional architects must have thought this was all nonsense. There were certainly attacks on Mies and this whole way of teaching at various times, which you must know about.

Blum: Myron, you said a little earlier that your thesis topic was a wood and stone farmhouse. That was what you worked on during the year 1939 and into 1940. What was happening between your two interests at this time, architecture and engineering? Had engineering sort of gone underground?

Goldsmith: I still had an interest but my great stress was to try the architecture part.

Blum: As you came to know Mies, during those years, were you one of the group of students that is sort of legendary now, that used to socialize with him in the evening and drink until very late hours?

Goldsmith: My socializing with him did not happen until after the war, when I came

32 back to his office.

[Tape 2: Side 2]

Goldsmith: When I came back, I think it was May 1946, I had really developed a lot. I had become registered as an architect and a structural engineer. I had had a chance to work on big construction, big engineering construction mostly. I worked for Deknatel. When I came to Mies’s office I think he was really interested in my engineering background. I had written to him saying I would like to come to his office. He had work on the campus during this period.

Blum: Was that the way a friendship developed?

Goldsmith: Yes. He had many other people who he’d see. I saw quite a bit of him during this time. I was working on the Farnsworth house. He liked to go there.

Blum: How do you remember him?

Goldsmith: How do you mean, what kind of person?

Blum: What kind of person was he? How would you describe him?

Goldsmith: Absolutely passionately devoted to architecture and architectural ideas and all the related things. I think everything else was secondary. He would work on a building as long as it took to make him feel satisfied. He would work on anything, choosing colors. I remember, this was not a project of mine, but when a model for 860 [Lake Shore Drive] was being built, Alex Corazzo, who was a painter, worked for weeks, if not months, on trying to explore colors. He was also a student of architecture. There were yellows and reds. Probably Mies had in mind black but wanted to explore. Peterhans used to come and discuss it. Finally he chose black. Other times he was interested in color. I remember once he said, “I’m

33 interested in natural colors, go and find the pigments.” The numbers and stuff that were found in nature. He never took it very far but I got a little portion on these natural colors. What was our focus?

Blum: You were speaking about Mies’s personality in a professional way.

Goldsmith: This passion for architecture, above all. I think really everything was secondary to that.

Blum: Did this passion manifest itself in his private life as well, with friends and others?

Goldsmith: I’m sure it permeated every aspect of his life, his private life. We’ve got to discuss how it did that. I think in general he tried to be a kindly man, so you can’t say that he would stab his brother in the back if it interfered with architecture. I don’t think he could have a relationship with anybody who hated his architecture, for example, which other people can, obviously.

Blum: He was also known on the other hand not to have been a very good family man.

Goldsmith: Yes. You can have all kinds of theories on that, whether they interfered with his architecture or just were secondary to his passion for architecture and all the kind of concerns about family life and three children. On the other hand, Waltraut, his younger daughter, lived with him for some time. I remember it seemed like quite a long time when she came to this country. I don’t know whether she was still living with him when she died or not.

Blum: Was she the daughter who worked at the Art Institute in the library?

Goldsmith: Yes. I think when she came here she might have lived with him for awhile.

34 Blum: I think Franz Schulze has a small segment on this in his book.

Goldsmith: I remember at a certain time after the war that Lilly Reich was trying to set herself up in business. They didn’t even have needles and thread. Mies had Bonnet, who was managing the office, and he spend a lot of time trying to get these things to her. They didn’t have the materials.

Blum: She was in Germany and he was sending it to her?

Goldsmith: Yes. I think she had a commission to do an apartment for some rich American, I don’t know who. He was trying to send things, they had nothing in Germany. I’m sure there was a limit to how far Mies would go in any relationship, if it began to impinge on architecture.

Blum: Was he a good friend to you?

Goldsmith: Until the end of his life we would see each other. He got a medal from the German government. I, among others, was usually involved. I’m sure Speyer and Danforth were also there. I always felt very grateful for his friendship, for our relationship, being able to talk architecture.

Blum: When you graduated in 1940 you were then finished with your undergraduate and had one year of graduate school. Aside from the fact that the war was closing in on the whole world at that moment, did you feel prepared to go out and practice your chosen profession?

Goldsmith: Do you mean open an office or go to work?

Blum: Either.

Goldsmith: I was not interested in opening an office, nor did I feel prepared to do that. I was assimilating not Mies’s ideas but trying to be a reasonable architect. I felt far from qualified even if I had licenses.

35 Blum: Did you think that having been caught in the switch between the Beaux- Arts system and Mies was an advantage?

Goldsmith: I think life would have been a little more simple if I had gone through the whole program and come out. Since that didn’t happen, I wouldn’t say in my whole career it was an advantage or disadvantage. One cannot say that your education is the only thing that happened to you. I had the advantage of working for seven years in Mies’s office. So, the deficiencies or the peculiarities of my schooling were sort of overcome in those seven years. I’ve always considered myself extremely lucky that here I was in a sort of third-rate school, Armour, and due to no efforts of my own, in walks Mies in 1938. I don’t know what would have happened if he had not walked in, whether I would ever want to go to Germany to study with him. I was very torn between Corbusier influences, Wright influences, and Mies for a long time. God knows how this would have all sorted out. Mies admired Corbusier, genuinely admired him very much. In fact, in the show “Mies van der Rohe: Architect as Educator,” there’s a beautiful project by Pius Pahl of a house in a meadow along a lake next to a hill connected by a bridge to the road. It’s a wonderful combination of a project by Mies’s student influenced by some things of Corbusier, too. It’s a very wonderful project to me, maybe one of the best in the whole show. Mies was very aware of Corbusier and I was very aware and influenced in my own work.

Blum: How is it that after you left IIT you went to work for William Deknatel, a man whose work is very much in the Wrightian mode?

Goldsmith: I think that was a mistake

Blum: How did that come about?

Goldsmith: I think I was looking for a modern architect to work for after I had finished school. I had gone to SOM. I don’t think Mies had an active office then although maybe unbeknownst to me he might have been working

36 on the campus. I didn’t have the courage to ask him, thinking if he needed me he would ask me. I had not been a ball of fire as a student. As I looked for modern architects, Deknatel seemed to need somebody. While I think it was the wrong place for me to go, it was on the whole a good experience. I worked on a couple of houses, supervised some construction, did some engineering, and did some detailing. It was not negative. I was very interested in Wright’s work still. I’d been to Taliesin visiting and was just stunned by it beauty and richness. Here was a great architect. I wanted to study with Wright, even then, or work with him or do something. I was not at that time even wholly in the Mies camp on graduating.

Blum: Why did you not go to Taliesin instead of staying at IIT?

Goldsmith: As a matter of fact, I was already finished at IIT. I had finished my year of graduate work, not getting the degree, and felt that I didn’t want to continue on at that time anymore. I then went to look around for work. It wasn’t until later I began to look around outside of architects’ offices. I tried to get in the office and didn’t succeed. I, finally in 1942, ended up near Washington working on war construction.

Blum: You were a civilian working for the navy? Is that when you were in Washington?

Goldsmith: Yes. I was working first not in Washington but outside. I was working officially for the navy.

Blum: What was your job?

Goldsmith: I actually was working in an office in the marine corps base on, I think, a hospital and some hangers. I later moved to Yorktown, Virginia, of all places. I lived in Williamsburg for a year, it was wonderful. I worked for the navy on their work in that area, that was a big naval area.

37 Blum: What did you do?

Goldsmith: I worked on buildings for a while at the Naval Mine Depot at Yorktown and then worked for buildings. They were doing a large supply base on the James River as an alternate to the one in Newport News in case it was bombed or something like that.

Blum: Did you work more as a design architect?

Goldsmith: I worked on that base as an engineer. For the Marine Corps I was working mostly as an architect and at Yorktown mostly as an engineer.

Blum: I think I lost you somewhere. I thought you worked for the navy as a civilian?

Goldsmith: The navy was the employer. The marines are a branch of the navy. I don’t know if they still are but then they were.

Blum: Were you sort of furthering your engineering interest or skill while you were a civilian working for the navy?

Goldsmith: Yes.

Blum: And then you joined the Army Corps of Engineers in 1943?

Goldsmith: 1944 to 1946. To say I joined isn’t quite right, I was drafted. I tried to join the navy and was turned down for some minor physical defect, but I seemed to be okay for the army. I tried to get in the officers corps of the navy but they turned me down. I was sent right back to where I was, to the corps of engineers, which was in that area outside of Washington.

Blum: Did you continue doing the same type of work?

Goldsmith: No. My career was very peculiar. I took basic training in the corps of

38 engineers. I went to a school for mapping. I then went into a construction group that was forming there. We went into training to be shipped out to the East but never was, and the thing was disbanded. I was then reassigned, actually working for the joint chiefs of staff and the Pentagon. The war may have already been over by this time. I was finally discharged in 1946, after the war.

Blum: While you were with the army, were you involved in any specific type of building?

Goldsmith: Mostly in training we built some bridges and did some exercises. I was with the headquarters so I think my job classification was what, draftsman, bridge designer, or something like that.

Blum: This was in the capacity of an engineer?

Goldsmith: Engineer. I already had an engineering license.

Blum: When did you get that?

Goldsmith: I got that before I joined the service. That would have been prior to 1944.

Blum: Did you have a license as an architect also?

Goldsmith: Yes.

Blum: So you had the credentials for both at that time?

Goldsmith: Yes.

Blum: The army and navy years sort of furthered your engineering skills?

Goldsmith: Yes. In fact, I’ll tell you. I loved construction. I was out where it was being done—this was a field office where it was designed and a few miles away

39 the stuff was being constructed. Some of it was very large, large construction. I loved that. Finally I really got into the, I would say, the groove where I belonged on large construction, and then it naturally led to SOM in later years.

Blum: If that fell in place for you at that time, did you then make any connections back to Mies and what you had learned in the few years you were with him?

Goldsmith: Maybe if I had any architectural decisions to make I probably would be influenced by what I had learned. I’ll just give you one project—that supply depot. It was being built on the James River a couple of miles from where we were designing the whole thing and they were building it. It was an enormous supply depot, big warehouses which I’d say was a couple of hundred feet wide and maybe one thousand feet long. There was a big group of oil storage tanks. I remember working on an emergency generating plant out of concrete. The warehouses had a wooden roof with block walls. There were all kinds of roads and docks. That gave me a love of construction and the construction process. Every minute that I was free on the weekend I would go there and watch it. For Deknatel I’d been working on houses. I decided that my interest was in larger buildings.

Blum: Did Mies and his type of architecture represent or mean that to you?

Goldsmith: No, because Mies had worked on everything from furniture to houses. I think this was my own interest, to work on bigger projects outside of houses. I think I was more interested on the big construction things rather than, say, doing an interior or working meticulously on a house and its cabinets and its furniture. I think that was my interest. Later I was to find my home at SOM where I could do that.

Blum: When the war was over you left the army. What brought you back to IIT?

40 Goldsmith: To Mies’s office?

Blum: To Mies’s office and to IIT to do your master’s degree.

Goldsmith: My master’s was done informally. I think I wanted to learn more about architecture, to learn what I could from Mies. I felt I hadn’t gotten it all, maybe with maturity and more understanding I was in a better position to try once again. The first two years of study with Mies had not been very successful.

Blum: How did you come to be hired or go to this office in 1946?

Goldsmith: I wrote to Mies and said I have now had this and this experience, I have an engineering license and architecture, and I would like to work with you. I had been out of contact with them during the war, pretty much.

Blum: And he just said, “Yes come out?”

Goldsmith: He wrote back, “Yes,” something like that.

Blum: Did you notice any changes in Mies?

Goldsmith: It was a very different relationship then than as a student. It was much more satisfactory, focused on real projects with real deadlines rather than the idea of just trying various things which if they’re good that’s fine and if they’re not then you’ve learned something from the lack of success. At least this is what it seemed to me, maybe I was a little too unfocused under Mies. That’s how I work. Some people who came there, they had a sort of deadline to learn what they could, get the masters degree and get out. I remember one poor fellow, I think his name was Morgan. He was older than the rest of us. He began to get impatient. Finally, in his desperation he said to Mies, “If I were working I could be making so much a month and here I am with no real progress, no idea of when I will finish.” I can’t remember exactly what Mies said, but it was not very

41 sympathetic. I think one other student—I don’t know if I heard him or Mies tells the story—got very impatient, and he said, “I’ve been here now six months and I wonder when I’m going to get my thesis.” Mies is reported to have said, or I heard, “Why that’s nothing to get a master’s degree, it takes a year to grow a potato.”

Blum: You say that you didn’t have that kind of time schedule in your head or an urgency to finish?

Goldsmith: No I didn’t. I wanted to learn from him and this was the reason for going back into his office. Besides, I thought it would be a good office to work in.

Blum: I understand the office in 1946 was rather small. Who was in his office then?

Goldsmith: I think when I came there it was Ed Duckett, Ed Olencki, Joe Fujikawa, probably that was all. I don’t know how long they had been there.

Blum: So you were a staff of, including Mies, five?

Goldsmith: I think so.

Blum: You mentioned Bonnet, did he come later?

Goldsmith: My impression is he came later. He did the typing, kept the books, generally managed things.

Blum: Was he a licensed architect?

Goldsmith: No. Bonnet’s background was he was a German Jew. His family had owned a big interior decorating firm, conventional interiors, in Germany before he was forced out. It was more than just interiors, the design was the smallest part of it. I think they also manufactured cabinetry and

42 rooms and all the moldings and stuff that went with interiors. He loved Mies and his work, although Mies sometimes drove him crazy. He was a man probably at this time in his mid-fifties. He, of course, had been a very wealthy, spoiled person in Germany. He was really kind of a jack-of- all-trades in this thing. To make matters worse, Mies’s office was a two- room office. Mies had one room, his office, and then there was a big room where everything else—Mr. Bonnet and we were. At a certain time Duckett set up a shop in there, which meant a circular saw. I think he scrounged the parts from petty cash, a saw blade here, a motor there, and assembled it. Incidentally, there was a mistake in our exhibition at IIT. They said the 50 x 50 house was a student project, it wasn’t at all. The published version with the four columns in the center was done in the office and I worked on it with Mies. There were other versions that were done in the school, which were done by Mies with his graduate students. There was a definite error in the exhibition on this point.

Blum: You were going to describe a typical day in his office. No day was typical?

Goldsmith: Actually the number of the people in the office varied. Sometimes more people were drawn in. We started talking about 1946 when I joined the office, I think it was May. I was there seven years.

Blum: Can you recall a typical day, say, in the early years?

Goldsmith: We would start at about nine o’clock, something like that. We would work on our thing, there was a small group of us. Olencki was in charge of the two buildings that were being built on the campus at that time. One was chemistry and one was what is now Perlstein. The name has been changed to Perlstein Hall.

Blum: What was the function of the building?

Goldsmith: It was a classroom and laboratory building.

43 [Tape 3: Side 1]

Goldsmith: Olencki probably was busy with the building of those two buildings. Each of us would be working on his thing. Mies would come in about noon, read his mail, talk to Bonnet, and then go out to lunch, usually with some of us or all of us. We would usually go over to the men’s grill at Carson’s. He would talk through lunch. It would be a time not so much for business, but for general ideas. That’s my recollection. That is, not so much to talk about the work. After lunch, he would look at the work. People might bring it into his room. He would call through the door, “Joe,” or “Goldy,” or something.

Blum: Is that what he called you, Goldy?

Goldsmith: Yes, at that time everybody called me Goldy. Later he called me Goldsmith, or maybe before. Or, he would call, “Duckett.” We would come. Mies had other duties, he might go to the school, he might stay most of the day. It depended on what was happening in the office, whether there was a lot of activity that he was interested in. Sometimes he would spend more time at the school when something that interested him was going on with the student work. Sometimes there was much more work in the office.

Blum: Did he ever bring some interesting ideas from the school or student work into the office, or into your luncheon discussions, just for explanation?

Goldsmith: These are events of forty years ago. I think everything under the sun was fair for discussion, whatever came up either in questions from people to get him talking on something or he brought it up. Certainly there was a connection between the school and the office. The fact that at the school they were working on versions of the 50 x 50 house. I remember going over and seeing them. For example, Duckett taught at the school and all of us were more or less nominal candidates for master’s degrees, which we were working on. At various times I got one, Joe Fujikawa got one,

44 Gene Summers got one, by doing a thesis which we usually worked on a long time. When we were busy, people from the school would come in the office to work, usually some students. They would come for a while. I remember Brenner was in for a while, Dunlap was there for a long time, Dorothy Turck was in for a while, Caldwell came one summer.

Blum: It sounds like a very stimulating kind of atmosphere. Did you find it so?

Goldsmith: Yes. Interesting people would come by. Philip Johnson would show up from time to time and other people. Sometimes we’d get to meet them sometimes not. It was a stimulating time.

Blum: Was there any effort among the staff or in the office to publish?

Goldsmith: No. When I say no, do you mean publish their own work?

Blum: Whether it was a project or a built project of the office’s work, or of their own work, just to draw some attention to the office so that clients would be more aware of the work.

Goldsmith: Mies’s work was published from time to time, but he wasn’t working under a bushel, so to speak. Let me explain just what I can remember offhand. Very soon after he came I believe there was a one-man show at the Art Institute on Mies, probably in 1938 or 1939. That’s pretty close after the war It was a beautiful show for which he did a lot of work. To this day it isn’t clear to me whether these were new projects or existing projects which he rebuilt, probably some of each. The models were certainly new. That was a wonderful show which was photographed. I used to have pictures of that show, maybe I still do, but I’m sure the Art Institute has them. I think he had a show at the Renaissance Society very early. In 1947 he had this big show at the Museum of Modern Art, and the book was by Philip Johnson. His buildings could generally get published in magazines. I remember 860 [Lake Shore Drive] being published. He sometimes got quite large issues.

45 Blum: In this case where he was exhibited so readily, did the magazines then simply publish his work with no effort on his part? I mean in between these exhibitions.

Goldsmith: I’m just guessing. I think these things happened on the initiative of others. Mies was not one to seek publicity, to approach anybody aggressively. I’m sure he turned down a lot of things that he did not consider worthy. There was not the kind of aggressive publicity-seeking that you have now of architects wheeling and dealing. The word marketing, which has become such a well-used word in the architectural profession didn’t apply then. I think Franz brings it out too, that Mies sat there until somebody approached him, usually.

Blum: Do you think that was also true in his approach to clients?

Goldsmith: I don’t think Mies ever approached somebody, “Could I do a building for you?”

Blum: Well not quite so boldly, but would he court someone thinking that he’s a potential client?

Goldsmith: I don’t think so. Knowing his character I think he would have considered it unworthy to do that, to have a relationship because he might do a building. In fact, I think Mies’s friends did not tend to be captains of industry or that kind of thing. I think it was just the opposite. Franz talks about it. I think I remember Joe talking about it in much later years after I had left the office. The office was bigger. I can’t remember the words. He said what a great difficulty he had in trying to get Mies to do anything about getting work other than waiting for it to come in, for somebody to approach him. Even sometimes when somebody showed an interest, Mies would take a long time to respond to inquiries. Maybe this thing got better and more organized after the office got people like Gene Summers, after I left. While I was there, and I should only speak about when I was there—the others can speak for themselves. To answer your question, he

46 certainly was not pushing and beating the drums for clients. I think he considered that improper. I think his general attitude was that if people wanted him to do something they would come to him. He was well enough known and what he would do was well enough known.

Blum: Did he ever consider that he might have had competitors for the same work among some of the other architectural firms, such as SOM?

Goldsmith: I can’t tell all the things that were going on in the recesses of his mind, right? He was a very intelligent man. I don’t know of any case where he was competing for a job, where somebody said, “I’m talking to you, Mies, and I’m talking to SOM.” Franz Schulze tells of his attitude when he learned at Harvard that they were also considering somebody else. He withdrew. I think he very well may have, during the years I know, withdrawn if they were considering anybody else. I can tell you a story, which illuminates or confuses the issue. He was asked by the city of Mannheim to enter a competition for the opera, a new opera house. It is a wonderful place in Mannheim. He knew that there were other people who had been invited. He considered it and decided to enter the competition. I was assigned to be his first assistant, other people worked on it. David Haid worked under me on that. We worked on it and did a wonderful scheme that has been published and is well known. Then they heard from Mannheim that they were going to have a second-stage competition. They were making slight changes to the program. I remember on the original program there were two theatres and two entrances, a very clear idea. They wanted still the two theatres, but one entrance, or one box office. I don’t know. I remember the year was probably 1952 or 1953. I had already been thinking of leaving the office and going to study with Nervi. Maybe I had been even accepted—this was after the competition was done. I remember discussing with him, or him wondering out loud, whether he should enter the second part of the competition. His thinking went something like this: I have made my design, they know what I can do, it was stupid of them to run another competition for minor changes. They knew what the architects would do.

47 He decided, even though he was on a very small list of people, maybe no more than two or three people, he decided not to do it. My impression of Mies was that he was a very proud man and he was very aware of his importance as an artist and architect. He knew that, this was not arrogance or false modesty. God knows all the things that were going through his mind, but I think the city of Mannheim was stupid. If they really wanted Mies if they were just setting it up as these things go to give it to a local architect and going through the motions, which they might have been doing. I don’t know if this went through Mies’s mind. In all his work Mies realized, I think, that he was doing something of great importance. He did everything as if the world depended on it. No shoddy work, no shoddy letters, no shoddy ideas, everything was as good as he could do it whether it was an exhibition, or the toilet of a house, or the materials of a house. That permeated the office, no shoddy drawings.

Blum: You’re making him sound like an extraordinary person, certainly an extraordinary architect.

Goldsmith: He was. He had this idea, and I think he instilled it in everything, that it was terribly important that everything that was being done was to be done in the best way, the most serious way and the most professional way. I think in all his public dealings, in a speech to, say, the faculty wives, he would spend weeks on it because he was making a statement. I think if he wrote a letter, other than a routine letter, it was very well thought out. You can see that to a man who thinks like that, that architecture is a kind of holy profession, that he’s the heir to the medieval builders where even a statue at the top of the cathedral they would finish as if it were on the ground. He often told that story. You would see that somebody like that would not do shoddy wheeling and dealing to get a job or seeking social contacts. I think Mies’s demeanor, the way he conducted himself, is just a wonderful example, if you consider architecture an important endeavor, or being an architect an important endeavor. That’s what he tried to instill in the students, in the faculty, and in the office.

48 Blum: The story has been told and I don’t know if it’s apocryphal, that he would go to work and go to IIT and almost never really look at the buildings, the environment of the city of Chicago. Would you comment on that?

Goldsmith: Oh, God. The environment between work and IIT is something that if you really looked at you would be depressed for the rest of the day. I’m giving you an extreme example of looking at it. I think it’s very wrong, the way it’s put. Certainly he had a very sensitive reaction to any surroundings and I’m sure he was aware in the early years how frighteningly depressing Chicago was, especially the area around IIT. It was one vast slum that was gradually cleaned out, people living in the utmost depravity. You asked the question before, to what extent he was aware of and influenced by the Chicago buildings? I was a little vague. I think that you would have to ask somebody like Danforth, who is more closely related to the school, how they taught the various things. I was an upperclassman and beyond that. That was given earlier. In the school were people like Caldwell, who is so much out of Wright and Sullivan and has given some of the most beautiful lectures on Sullivan and Wright. Everybody in the school, at some time, takes this lecture on the history of architecture from Caldwell. They study the Chicago School with John Vinci, who gives lectures on it. In the earlier years Peterhans would lecture on important buildings, like the Crystal Palace and so forth. I’m sure they would lecture on things like the Monadnock, the important buildings. To what extent Mies’s work was influenced by Chicago—certainly it has been argued where the IIT campus came from, that seemed such a break with his earlier work. Again, George Danforth was present at this early development. Some people say it’s out of German half-timber work and that’s the way it’s done. I think Philip Johnson has said that it’s really overworked and over-exaggerated, this exposed steel work. I know that when he did Promontory Apartments he certainly was aware of these exposed concrete skeletons that are so common on the back sides of tall buildings. In fact, I think the building next door has a respectable front but exposed concrete on the sides. He certainly was aware of that as a way of building. He certainly was aware

49 of the steel frame as a normative way of building and kept with it all his life, never seeking exotic structural solutions. He had a very good engineer in Frank Kornacker. Certainly he had a basic respect for good work, for good architecture, beyond that it was just in his style of doing things. Of course he had this without emulating these other styles or swiping something from a building and using it, which is so common, especially today. I think he was always trying to think of it as the principle of what was behind it. I remember, for example, having a drink with him in the old Auditorium Hotel bar. It was such a pleasant place. I don’t remember what year it was, it must have been before the war. I don’t know if the bar existed after the war, I don’t remember what year it was. It was a very pleasant surrounding. Mies liked very pleasant things, he often spoke of old buildings very respectfully. The thing everybody quotes is his quotation on the cathedrals, but he liked other classical and neoclassical buildings—we’re talking of real ones and not these poor imitations. He spoke of these and how he liked them. He said something like, “I like these things very much,” something like this, “and they’re very beautiful. I studied them first, this room was so big, this room that I liked was so big,” he’d say the dimension, height and width. “This corridor was so wide,” I’ll remember that all my life. He studied it but he said, “All my life I’ve struggled against the influence of the neoclassic.” He spoke of the great men that sometimes were architects of these things.

Blum: Did he ever speak of any specific building in Chicago that he either admired or did not admire?

Goldsmith: First, Mies never, that I can remember, personally attacked any architect or any building, even the worst. He may have lost his temper sometimes, I don’t know. He avoided that. He did not belittle things even though there was plenty of room for that.

Blum: Did he admire any that you can recall?

Goldsmith: Certainly he spoke of how beautiful Wright’s Taliesin was. I’m trying to

50 think, in the school people liked buildings like Monadnock and Reliance, these good old buildings were looked up to. I’m sure Carson’s. The work of engineering. It’s very curious that Mies said the best building in New York was the George Washington Bridge. Other than these generalities, he spoke of admiring Berlage’s building. I think if you are trying to make a case, Betty, that he only liked his own work, you’re wrong, if that’s your theory.

Blum: No, I really didn’t have a position. Perhaps we should move to another question that will require no speculation.

Goldsmith: I just am at a loss to think back to specific conversations. Mies liked good things, he enjoyed good architecture even if it was not in the way he would do it. He often spoke of how influenced he was by Behrens. In Chicago, certainly many of the Chicago School buildings were taught in the school and admired. I cannot think they would be if Mies despised them. I guess I’m not a good source of individual comment, but maybe they’ll come to me.

Blum: My question was, that I know you’ll have no doubt about, what did you get paid?

Goldsmith: At the very beginning everybody in the office, whether they came in the first day or had worked there five years, got the same amount of money.

Blum: What was that?

Goldsmith: A dollar an hour. Often in those days it was quite different than now, it was never very much. That probably went on until the early 1950s when they began to differentiate and the older people got more. There was probably a differentiation in a price. I think before I left, and I can’t remember how much, it was understood that people were getting different amounts and I can’t even remember how much.

51 Blum: Did you feel that you were well paid?

Goldsmith: I’ll tell you, what I think everybody felt is that we were privileged to be in this position to work on these projects with this man. I think people managed, many of the people had wives who all worked. Those who didn’t managed somehow. When I first started I was living with my family, as was Olencki. This was right after the war. I think not only did you feel privileged to work with the people who worked there but you felt that what you were learning, at least I did, was sort of money in the bank.

Blum: You were there to learn?

Goldsmith: For seven years. In part it was for learning. We felt it was by far the most important place where good architecture was done in the world.

Blum: That’s very interesting because quite a few other people have said that right after the war they felt the place to be was at SOM.

Goldsmith: SOM?

Blum: Yes, they felt that was the office to be with because they were doing exciting, important things.

Goldsmith: Yes, in a way. At a certain period Mies, I think probably right after Greenwald’s death, there was a very slow period, I think Joe and Bruno Conterato worked for a while at Skidmore. That was another good alternative, there were very good relations. I think Priestley was at Skidmore at that time, Bill Dunlap went to Skidmore from Mies’s office. Certainly Skidmore was a place where this sort of Miesian architecture was the thing that was driving the firm for many years, both in New York and Chicago. This was true. I think Dunlap left also in the big turndown of Mies’s office after Greenwald’s death. Joe and Bruno came back but Dunlap stayed on and went to San Francisco to work. At one time there

52 were at least three partners of SOM that came out of Mies’s office directly.

Blum: Franz makes a statement that covers the years when you were in the office. I’d like to read it to you to hear your comments.

Goldsmith: Okay.

Blum: He says, “In the early 1950s Mies became totally committed to the urban context. The city was the fact that required transformation by a superior order, not adjustment to the already prevailing caprice.” What was your perception of Mies’s vision for the city?

Goldsmith: I’m not quite sure what Franz means by that statement, what he means by order or not caprice. Read the statement again.

[Tape 3: Side 2]

Blum: The one sentence is, “The city was the fact that required transformation by a superior order, not adjustment to the already prevailing caprice.”

Goldsmith: As you know, planning was being taught in the school by Hilberseimer. His work certainly was an attempt to deal with the city and even the region in a rational, humane way. He was a very fine planner. I think Mies worked at a scale of where he had projects to do. For example, he did fairly large chunks, like Federal Center, like the projects in Toronto and Montreal, and in Detroit. Even at a smaller scale, some apartment projects like 860 to 910, although that was built over time. The first part was 860-880. I think these are among the best groups that were done in this whole period. Certainly if we take one that we all know, like Federal Center, it shows, I think, great respect for the surrounding fabric even though some people might think—I’m not even going to give them anything, I’m giving you a criticism—that there wasn’t enough. It does show very great respect for the fabric of masonry building that surrounds it. I was not in the office at the time but I know from those who were that

53 Mies worked very hard in the placement of the western building to protect the Monadnock, not to let it open on the plaza where somebody could want to develop that site. He had great respect for that building. Maybe that answers your early question of whether Mies was aware of anything or just drove to IIT in a cab with the shades down. Of course Lafayette Park, in a way, Hilberseimer was involved with that. I can’t any longer remember how much of it was built and not built. I think that was interrupted by Greenwald’s death. There was a very big park, with a school in the park, if I remember, all done according to Hilbs’s planning principles. If you see it now, it’s quite beautiful with the very lush landscaping. It’s too bad that pictures that are published are still the pictures right after construction. It gives you a picture, I think, of a very humane, aware person in his placing of buildings. I want to repeat that, of the great respect he showed in Federal Center for that surrounding fabric. And, of course, IIT, one of the big projects of planning that any modern architect has done. I think it’s a very important project even though I’m sure it would be nicer if it had a site like, say, Princeton instead of running through with all these streets and the elevated. I think it is an extremely pleasant environment. I don’t know if I’ve answered your question.

Blum: Myron, everything you have said about Mies has been said with a feeling of devotion and admiration. That is certainly apparent, in your words as well as your work. Could we step back for just a minute to when you returned to Mies’s office with the intention of learning more by working with him, and learning from him? You went on to get your master’s with him. Did you return to architecture with the idea that you were the part of the crusade to build a bright new world after World War II?

Goldsmith: Different people in the office may have had different ideas. My idea was, and I think it was probably close to Mies’s, too, that in a practical way you were, as an architect, given one building or a group of buildings to do. That was the problem, or it might be even a smaller problem, it might be an interior, or a lobby. It was up to you to do it in the best way that

54 you could. It didn’t solve the whole world, but it was maybe an example of what was good and hopefully beautiful and correct and moral. That’s what you could do. Maybe you could even set good examples by that. Of course at the same time, people like Hilbs had broader goals of whole cities, of making proposals for how cities and even regions should be done. We were aware of that, but my interest as an architect was in the individual building. I visited during my lifetime beautiful cities or beautiful parts of cities all over the world to study and enjoy them.

Blum: Did you have any expectations for your own work or for the work of American architecture as a whole after the war?

Goldsmith: Do you mean reforming society, that kind of thing?

Blum: Yes.

Goldsmith: If some architects believed that architecture would reform society, change society? I did not. I did not really have those aspirations. I had hoped to do something nice that would give pleasure and be a nice thing. I had a handle on or an education to teach students who would hopefully be good architects, would learn some respect for their surroundings.

Blum: Without cloaking it in a broader statement, it strikes me as perhaps you’re saying quite the same thing.

Goldsmith: As what? I’m not sure what you’re saying.

Blum: By being part of a movement that wanted to improve conditions.

Goldsmith: Yes, without believing that this or that building would change the world or change the people who lived in it too much. Architecture does have an influence. You give people pleasant surroundings and a good work environment where they spend eight hours a day their whole life. You think of that to try to make it as good as you can. I never had the idea, nor

55 did Mies, that this was the only kind of architecture in the world, that other people were not doing good and valid architecture. I don’t know if that last thing clarifies anything. I don’t have that idea today, that the way I do architecture is the only way that it can be done. Far from it. It’s just my way of doing what I can do and do it the best I can. I think I learned that little bit from Mies, too, that you work with what you have. I think that people spoke of it. I don’t know if Mies ever quoted to us this thing from Luther that, “If I knew the world was going to end tomorrow I would still plant my apple tree today.” I think in a way that was very Miesian. I think that’s what he would think. I don’t know if he said it.

Blum: When you returned to Mies’s office you went back and also completed your master’s thesis. Your thesis was “The Tall Building, Effects of Scale.”

Goldsmith: Right.

Blum: How did you go from that wood and stone farmhouse which you first attempted as the topic for your master’s thesis, to “The Tall Building and the Effects of Scale?”

Goldsmith: There was a war in between. I had worked for some years in the real world. Mies was in the office, we were beginning to do tall buildings. In fact, that was the major work in the office. 860-880, Promontory, and there were other buildings where Mies had a sort of minor part on the South Side, around Promontory. The Algonquin—I don’t even know how to describe it. I can’t remember what part Mies played, it wasn’t a full role. Maybe it was a certain amount of consultation to Pace on it, I think. What was my point?

Blum: You were describing how you developed the tall building as your thesis topic.

Goldsmith: Right. It was in the office and everybody was thinking about it, the skyscraper. It was a very challenging problem. I was especially interested

56 in it because it was an engineering problem. I don’t remember when, I was certainly wondering about even taller buildings and Mies suggested to me to read D’Arcy Thompson On Growth and Form. In that book the part of scale just made a huge impression and clarified my ideas. I think by probably in the late 1940s I was already thinking of very tall buildings and their structure. You would find distinct structures that would change what buildings look like. Thompson’s book clarified the problem of scale, that there was a whole theory about it, it clarified the ideas and put me in touch with somebody else who thought about the problem.

Blum: Did Mies encourage this, or suggest this?

Goldsmith: Yes. The project was quite independent. He encouraged it, he was interested in it. The designs and the ideas beyond that were pretty much my own, working it out. I showed it to him. A few weeks ago, a student of mine looked at my thesis in the library at IIT and said, “You’re mistaken that Mies was your advisor. It’s signed by Hilbs as your advisor.” It surprised me. I think the truth is that it was quite independent and I just showed it to them. It was a thing that percolated from 1946 to 1953, I probably didn’t start on it seriously until somewhat later. Five, six, or seven years, something like that.

Blum: I’ve read that at the time you were working on your thesis the tallest building in Chicago was slightly over thirty stories high. Your thesis I think proposed an eighty-some-odd story building.

Goldsmith: It was a little different. I had written somewhere, among the things that I worked on, was how the building, I think this was suggested in Thompson’s book, was how the building would be different by different materials, whether you did it in steel or concrete. To push the problem to what would require new solutions I changed the scale. The tallest concrete building in the world, at that time, had been thirty stories. There were higher buildings than that in Chicago in the 1940s. In the 1920s already I’m sure there were buildings over forty stories high in Chicago.

57 Already in New York the Empire State building had been built which is probably, in terms of real stories, maybe eighty or something like that.

Blum: With that as a given, that the tallest concrete building was a little over thirty stories, and you were proposing a concrete building that was over eighty stories, that even is more specific to what I was about to ask. Did you at that time have any realistic expectations that perhaps your eighty- story building would ever be realized?

Goldsmith: It didn’t even cross my mind I don’t think. That’s wrong. I didn’t do the scheme in order to realize a building. The idea in the school at that time was that research and ideas were what counted. Sometimes I have not even been too disappointed when something which I like very much, like the Ruck-a-Chucky Bridge, is there as a project and not built. When I say not too disappointed, I would like more than anything for that to get built. I think it, as a project, is something, too—two-thirds or three- quarters of the way there.

Blum: Given that statement, would you consider yourself informally somewhat of a visionary architect?

Goldsmith: I hate that term.

Blum: You may use any term you wish.

Goldsmith: I hate that term because there is a book on visionary architecture, or several, and it’s basically all full of foolish ideas.

Blum: That isn’t what I meant by using the word. Let me just explain for a minute.

Goldsmith: Have I tried to be in the avant-garde? Say what you mean.

Blum: Would you consider, say, the Ruck-a-Chucky Bridge project, or your

58 thesis project, somewhat akin to Mies’s glass skyscrapers of the early 1920s? They were never built.

Goldsmith: There probably is a certain correlation between those things. Actually, Mies’s skyscraper was a perfectly feasible thing to build. You would have had a little problem with the air conditioning, more than a little. It was feasible, I think, in a way, and I think Mies was doing something which was in the realm of possibility, he showed it as a possible idea. I think not probably expecting that somebody down the street was going to come in and ask Mies, “Will you build it for me?” I think that was the furthest thing from his mind. In the same way, I think in this thesis I also proposed some diagonally braced steel buildings. I was thinking that these were feasible ideas that I didn’t think that somebody was going to go out and build one like that, but that it was a good idea. Actually, at the time I considered the diagonally braced steel building more important. I was showing them how you would do it in steel, how the difference in material changed the expression. That’s what I wanted to say. I was thinking in fairly abstract terms, but working in feasible realizable concepts. I was very interested in that. I didn’t go, for example, from the eighty-story building to 180 stories. It was in the realm of possibilities and actually I think people have done eighty-story buildings in concrete already, or nearly that. Not like that.

Blum: Now with the benefit of hindsight, your idea about the diagonally braced building didn’t take shape until twenty years later with the Hancock.

Goldsmith: Yes. I want to say something else about the thesis. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say I think it’s one of the most important essays that has been written on this area of architecture, engineering, and aesthetics. First, bringing the ideas of scale and its influence on structure and architecture although Thompson had mentioned it in a few pages, he was talking about very primitive examples. I had brought it into modern engineering. Actually this thesis had a very important effect on our future explorations, especially the work in the school with Fazlur Khan and

59 myself. We were searching for things which we knew had to be there because of the change in the scale of things, even though we didn’t know what we were searching for, we knew that something lay out there. I think that’s the importance of these ideas.

Blum: Was that somewhat of your thinking that was in the diagonally brace dome, the very large dome, for a sports stadium that you designed long before there was any thought about building it?

Goldsmith: Yes. That was part of that same thing, to find a feasible form, if you had a need for a very big span structure. I think it was a proposed 800 feet in diameter. At that time nothing had been built more than, say, about 300 feet in a dome. Maybe not even that big. Here if you had to enclose a circular building, or a space of vast dimensions, this was certainly a feasible way to do it and a different way to do it.

Blum: What is your feeling now that that concept was eventually used and built in Oakland, the Oakland Coliseum?

Goldsmith: I worked on that project. That was my concept. I went out to Oakland, San Francisco, to do that.

Blum: How do you feel now that you actually see these ideas materialize?

Goldsmith: That I was right.

Blum: In 1980 you exhibited a drawing at the Chicago Architecture Club for a Peace Bridge. Is that an idea that you think can be built? Would you talk a little bit about what the Peace Bridge was, what the idea that influenced it was?

Goldsmith: I have been very interested in bridges. I am hoping some day that some of these will get built and also as a means of exploring engineering forms, expressive engineering forms. I was looking for a project for a student,

60 this was a student project. T.Y. Lin had, some years previously, made some designs for this Peace Bridge to connect Siberia and Alaska. He had been pushing it. He made these designs in the period when relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were much better, during the period of détente. It was before the energy crisis. When we decided to take it up again it was more as a design project to see what the possibilities were, much more than as a serious proposal to bring up again. As a matter of fact, to bring up the proposal again was not even the purpose, it was a design project that I wanted to work on. I had a student who was interested. That was as far as it went. I had no intention of seeing if it would fly as an idea. I realized that the time was wrong, I don’t know if there would ever be a time when it was right.

Blum: You mean politically it was wrong? That the political times were just not conducive?

Goldsmith: Yes. I think that was just at the limit of our ambitions, to see what could be done. Incidentally, he had asked me about it some years previously, he had published things on it. He had had a doctoral student work on it from an engineering point of view. He sent me the doctoral thesis, I think that’s what set me off to see what the form would be.

Blum: This was your design or it came out of IIT with some of your students?

Goldsmith: It was a student project. based on work that T.Y. Lin had previously done. We were mostly dealing with the architecture, with the possibility for making it beautiful.

Blum: I won’t use the word visionary to describe it, I wish there was another word.

Goldsmith: I have to tell you I had never thought this was a very practical idea, this bridge of Lin’s. That was not the idea. You can say either visionary or in the immediate future. As you know, when Lin got this presidential medal

61 of science, that’s not the exact title, some months ago, for his contributions to engineering, he presented President Reagan with a book on this bridge project of his as a proposal for peace between the two countries. Lin has apparently great hope, maybe not great hope, but still thinks that it’s a good idea. He’s a marvelous engineer and it was an absolutely feasible project, feasible from an engineering standpoint, not feasible politically or economically. That’s the extent of it. It was an interesting project to do with a student and with Lin.

Blum: Do you think that we may yet see it built in our lifetime?

Goldsmith: No. I don’t expect it to be. It didn’t have those ambitions, it was a project in the class with the eighty-story building, just a proposal.

Blum: It has been written that you, especially for SOM, were really an idea man, that concepts that you had worked on for years eventually somehow percolated through that organization and several of them were actually built. I’d like to read something to you and then I hope that we can move into some of the projects that you worked on in Mies’s office. The comment that I’d like to offer to you and hear your comments about was written by Sandra Honey in International Architect. She wrote an article on Mies’s office. She said that the years that you were in Mies’s office are now considered to be his most brilliant in America, in his American years. Your association with him she likens to that of Lilly Reich in his most brilliant European period. Would you comment?

Goldsmith: I think she’s going too far and I don’t think this is false modesty. It was a good period, there were other people in the office. After I left the office I think Mies did his two most brilliant projects.

Blum: Which ones?

Goldsmith: The Seagram building and the Convention Center. This was done after I left the office. I never had any doubt that when I left Mies would retire

62 because of his inspirations. I think Sandra Honey was exaggerating.

[Tape 4: Side 1]

Goldsmith: Were we not through with that idea?

Blum: You were saying you think she was exaggerating.

Goldsmith: Let me just add something. Let’s get back to the idea of an idea man. We explored ideas in the school and I have, after all, taught since 1962.. Very soon after I came to teach I enlisted Fazlur Khan, at that time a young engineer, but already it was clear that he was an extraordinary engineer. Events were to show that this was true. Together, with student theses, we explored ideas, engineering ideas, and their architectural consequences and expressions. Several projects that were theses were really very good ideas, both architecturally and structurally. For example, I can say that the diagonally braced buildings that have become standard for tall buildings probably came out of these theses. I’m speaking of the steel one that we did. Faz later wrote a great deal about this in the engineering and other journals. How to do a tall steel building efficiently and other theses by other people. Khan took this up. This is covered in One Hundred Years of Chicago Architecture very well. One of the writers is Peter Pran who was our student. He understood what was going on. Of course, the suspended roof thesis of Larry Kenny’s again became Baxter—that was a very good idea. The Hodgkison’s thesis for a diagonally braced building was later done in Onterie Center in Chicago and on a building in New York on Third Avenue. I’m sure it’s going to be done again. The first McCormick Place, by C.F. Murphy, the roof was very influenced by a thesis that we did, I’m quite sure, it’s quite clear, by Paul Zorr. The second McCormick Place that is being done now was influenced by a thesis of Tanaka’s that Fazlur and David Sharpe did. I had nothing to do with that thesis. There is no question that a lot of the theses that came out of IIT were influential. It’s not surprising Fazlur was the engineering advisor on it. He had explored that building and ascertained that it was a good idea. He tried

63 very much to build it, what he could. He actually was the engineer of the SOM project when they came through. It was all a very natural development.

Blum: A few moments ago you sort of begged the distinction that Sandra Honey gave you, and you did so by commenting on Mies’s most brilliant buildings done after you left. There were some brilliant buildings done while you were there. For instance, the Farnsworth house. It’s my understanding that Mies did a small model and a watercolor for that house. Then it sort of sat unattended for a while, apparently not ready to begin. When he was ready to begin he asked you to make the working drawings. Would you talk about that project?

Goldsmith: There isn’t any mystery I think in all this or any special significance. Let me put it differently, when I came into the office in 1946, that watercolor already existed. He had done it, not very long before. Over the years until we started again on it in the 1950s we saw much of Dr. Farnsworth. She would come into the office and there would be numerous picnics out to the site. Why Mies never started on it again I’m not quite sure, because the building that was finally started on was as close to the original concept as possible. I’m not quite sure why they never started, maybe nobody was in a hurry. Finally it was decided to go ahead with it. I was put in charge of it in the office. I did the structural engineering on it. Mies followed it very closely. Other people worked on the drawings.

Blum: Who else worked on the drawings with you?

Goldsmith: I remember I think Bill Dunlap developed the moveable windows on the end. There were quite a number of drawings—I can’t remember who else worked on the drawings, whether it was Y.C. Wong who worked on it. Finally we built, and Mies did something very unusual, we did all the drawings in the office, all the engineering. There was a consulting structural engineer, Bill Goodman, who did the heat and ventilating. We acted as the general contractor in the office.

64 Blum: You were clerk of the works?

Goldsmith: I think more than that. I think the clerk of the works was beneath what I was. I superintended the building on the site, checked the engineering drawings, actually got the bids, did everything for the contracts. I ordered stuff that had to be ordered for the house.

Blum: Is it fair to say that Mies designed the building and then it was up to you and others in the office, primarily you, to see to its execution?

Goldsmith: Oh no. There is no other building in the American work that Mies followed so closely. He examined every visible detail. He told us how he wanted the windows detailed. He personally went to the plywood warehouse to pick the panels for the primavera panels. When the travertine came he was on the site and looked at every piece. If they were different quality than what was first quality, what was second quality went into the corners and into unimportant places, and what was to be discarded. He absolutely enjoyed it, was fascinated by it, followed everything. When the steel was almost erected he came out and squinted along the beams. I think once he said, “Goldsmith, this corner is low, fix it.” I think it was the cantilever corner on the terrace.

Blum: So he was very much involved, beyond the design stage.

Goldsmith: Oh, yeah. When I got the prices together I gave them to Mies and we discussed them. I think he had great fun with this. I think Dr. Farnsworth said, “Mies, build it as if you were building your own house.” The understanding was that she would let him use it sometimes. I think that was the spirit of the whole thing.

Blum: Do you think he had such a personal interest in this because he was interested in the client in a personal way?

Goldsmith: It probably had something certainly to do with it, and that she had said

65 build it as if you were building it for yourself. I don’t know what was said and what was understood, certainly I had understood that he would be using it. It also was a thing in which he was interested because he had full control of it. It wasn’t like an apartment building where you don’t really have control of every detail. He had control of every detail here. It was understood that it would be built as beautifully as it could be done.

Blum: Someone has mentioned that the house was originally planned to be a little larger than it was actually built to be.

Goldsmith: Yes. Actually, there were at least two models built: an early model and then another rather large model was built for the Museum of Modern Art show in New York, the 1947 show. It was to exhibit. That had a certain size, I think about ten percent larger than the final one. When the prices came in on the original size it was more than she expected to spend. Mies suggested that we shrink the house in all its dimensions, not changing the proportion to make it less expensive. Farnsworth said, “Is this going to make the house less good?” Mies said, “No, I think it’s just as good.” So it was shrunk just to take some money out of it.

Blum: What was the limit she put on the house?

Goldsmith: This ended up in an unfortunate lawsuit. I think at the time that it was started we expected that it would cost about $65,000. Maybe some items were not included—like in the $65,000, the screen wire was bought for the porch but it did not include making them into screens, and maybe a cabinet in the house—that freestanding cabinet—might not have been included in the $65,000. That, as I recall, was the price.

Blum: That was her budget?

Goldsmith: Yes, the budget for it.

Blum: What did the house actually cost?

66 Goldsmith: I’m getting hazy, but I think the $65,000 turned to closer to $75,000 or $85,000. I think that cabinet was out of it and making up the screens was out of it.

Blum: He sued for nonpayment and she counter-sued. How did that all work?

Goldsmith: I think this was one of the most unfortunate things that could have happened. As the house was getting finished something went sour in the friendship of Mies and Farnsworth. It was not clear to me what. I remember there was the question of the furnishing. At one time, when things were going well and everybody was so enthusiastic about the house, Mies even spoke about maybe designing some furniture for it, furniture that wasn’t as elegant as the furniture that is now used, like Barcelona chairs. He said, “Maybe even using untanned leather, with the hair on it, and tanned skin.” I get the impression maybe more pillows on the floor, in a sort of informal way. I regret I never, in all the conversations, pushed him to go further or make a sketch. That I regret very much, or never even speak about what he had in mind other than that. It came time to order the drapes for the house, when the house was being finished. He wanted to use Shantung silk, he was very familiar with it. She balked at the color and she didn’t care for silk. She thought it wouldn’t stand up. Mies said, “In my experience we used silk drapes in my house and then after it was finished we made silk dresses for our kids,” or something like that, “and it lasted forever.” There was one other incident, I don’t know which came first. The house was finished during the Korean war. Several things became very scarce, like electrical equipment and copper. We could only get a contractor to do the electrical work on a cost plus, without any guaranteed limit. When the bills finally came in for the electrical work they were way over, like maybe even several thousand dollars over our budget that we had given. I went to Mies and said, “Mies this is what has happened, it’s terrible news. How shall we tell Dr. Farnsworth?” I don’t know why he said it but he said, “Goldie, you tell her.” I don’t know if already their relationship was in trouble. It must have been something like that, I think it was already in

67 trouble. I called her and told her. I remember she said, “Why didn’t Mies tell me?” I think that drove a nail further into the coffin of things. She thought that he had deceived her, that he had known that it would be higher. She suspected the worst. Really, he was innocent.. Maybe he was tired of her bitching about the curtains. I don’t remember events, maybe the curtains were an issue. She said something like, “I don’t like the Shantung natural silk color. I discussed it with Harry Weese and he thought it should be brown.” I don’t know whether I reported this to Mies or how he knew. He said, “If I would have known that she would be so difficult I would never have touched the house,” something like that. This was the background. At a certain time she sent a letter from her lawyer that the work was now finished and that she would finish it herself. I don’t know what elicited that letter. So much love and time from the office had gone into that house. One day, on one of the many drives to and from Chicago to the Farnsworth house, Edith Farnsworth was along—I think relations were still good. We talked a great deal. She was a great conversationalist and a brilliant woman. I think everybody admired her very much in the early days. The house was almost finished and she said, “Mies and I have never discussed a fee for this house.” Apparently she had trouble bringing it up and he never brought it up. She said, “I wonder if I should offer, he’s going to be able to use it, we will work out an arrangement when he can use it when I’m not using it. I also want to give him something, perhaps a painting.” I’m sure she had been thinking of a major painting. I did not mention this to Mies but I thought, my God, this thing has been going on for years and they have never discussed it. I did not bring it up. I was on a leave of absence from the office for a European trip. I took a long kind of indefinite leave of absence from the office.

Blum: In 1951?

Goldsmith: Yes. I was in Sweden ready to spend the winter, it was late in the year, maybe the late fall, when I received a telegram from Mies that there was a law suit over the Farnsworth house and to come back to testify.

68 Blum: Did Mies initiate the lawsuit?

Goldsmith: The way I understand it was something like this; by this time he and she were very, very angry and disappointed at each other, I’m sure. Mies had gotten this letter from her lawyer to not have anything more to do with it, that she would finish it. You can imagine all these hopes that went down the drain. I think he just never attempted to contact her. Mies, as I hear the story, was talking to Philip Johnson about how poorly the office was doing financially. Philip recommended his business manager, Phillip Wylie, maybe it’s a different Wylie. Wylie came in the office. Among the things, in going through the office to make it more efficient, more financially viable, he came across the Farnsworth thing where a certain amount, I think 2,000 hours of time was expended, not counting Mies’s time and nothing had been paid. He talked to Mies about it and he said, “I’ll collect it.” He was a hard-headed businessman. I think without knowing all what happened next, that he must have approached her in a heavy-handed way. The result was that Wylie suggested to Mies to sue her for a fee. Of course this was the world’s worst advice. He instituted a suit for a fee, I think it was $15,000, or was it? Let’s say almost $16,000. Whatever the fee was, fee as an architect, contractor. If it cost $75,000 a 10 percent fee would be $7,500, 20 percent could have been for contracting, $15,000.

Blum: The architects’ fee was then ten percent?

Goldsmith: I don’t know. I’m just taking rough numbers, they never discussed it. I remember Mies saying, “Well what I should have done was to get an amount for my design,” at this time trying to justify it, “and then she should pay all the expenses of the office.” Which is a good idea. She countered by another suit that said the house was unlivable and Mies was incompetent. She asked for, like, $25,000. The thing got very bitter. She also tried to take his license away from him among other things. I don’t know what the proceeding is. It ended up into a lawsuit out in Yorkville, near the site where the county seat is. It was very bitter on her part, very

69 vindictive. Disappointingly, Farnsworth lied about everything. She said he expected the house to cost, like, $20,000, which was her version. It later turned up in her own writing listing the cost of the individual parts adding up to $65,000. I think it fell out of a philosophical dictionary one day that Mies was looking through, which embarrassed her very much. She certainly did not act like a lady in all this. You may know that Elizabeth Gordon in House Beautiful took up the cause of the woman of the house wronged. This was the time maybe even of the McCarthy era where Mies was beginning to be thought of as un-American foisting this architecture. I can’t tell you, Frank Lloyd Wright got into the act on her side. It was all very upsetting.

Blum: What was the point of Wright’s involvement?

Goldsmith: I think Gordon solicited his comments on Mies’s architecture or what he thought of the house. He issued, I think, a very surprising statement since their relationship had been not warm or at least very civilized. I had a certain amount of sympathy, until all this happened, for Edith. She became a very embittered woman. Nobody who was in any way connected with Mies or the school could come close to the house during this whole period. It was allowed to run down. She finally sold it to Peter Palumbo. She died in Italy—she had moved to Italy with her sister.

Blum: Who were the people who lined up on Mies’s side to fight for him besides you, Al Shaw, who I understand was thrown out of court for contempt, and Paul Schweikher?

Goldsmith: You know, you know more about it than I do. The very interesting transcript of the trial is probably available somewhere in a stack three-feet high. I don’t know where they keep that stuff. I’m sure the lawyers have it. Most of it is minute and repetitious. I can’t remember, although I was not allowed in the courtroom when they were testifying, I don’t know why.

70 Blum: You mean when the others gave their testimony?

Goldsmith: When anybody else testified. I spent a couple of weeks sitting on the lawn at the courthouse waiting. I don’t know why I wasn’t allowed in.

Blum: Perhaps it would have influenced your testimony. What was your testimony about?

Goldsmith: It was a regular trial. At a certain time I was cross-examined by both lawyers. One of the testimonies I remember was as to my qualifications to do this house. One of the things he was trying to prove was that I was unqualified. It came out that I was both an architect and a structural engineer, that was a surprise, and I was registered. He tried another tack. He said, “During all this time you were making a dollar an hour. Could you live on that salary.” I could see me being set up that I was getting money under the table.

Blum: How did you save yourself?

Goldsmith: He said, “Isn’t that very little? How did you live, why did you live on this? Could you manage on this?” I said, “Yes, I could.” He said, “Why did you do it?” At that time I said, “Well, I considered working with Mies money in the bank.” I think he discontinued that line of questioning. The thing was vicious.

Blum: How did you feel up there on the stand?

Goldsmith: At that time I was very sad about and I still am to this day. Now that Peter Palumbo has it and all that, I think of what could have been if Mies had furnished it, if Mies had used it. We went out there in the heyday of wonderful picnics, the whole office. It was very agreeable. She was a terrifically agreeable and nice woman. One of the things that came out of at the trial was that Mies had foisted this unlivable house on an unsuspecting spinster that was full of flaws, a screwy house. This was

71 inferred. Actually, she had once, about the time the Museum of Modern Art show, written an article on Mies’s architecture that was brilliant. First of all, she was a brilliant writer, she had a wonderful command of the language. She knew exactly what she was getting and wanted what she was getting. Of course, Mies in his bitterness, said, “I’ve made her famous with the house and of course she’ll go down in history with the Farnsworth house.”

Blum: Do you think she had any part at all in helping him plan the house?

Goldsmith: I think that was his idea and she accepted it. They talked about it a great deal. Whether she said, “I would like a screened porch and a terrace to sit on,” or how it came about, that concept is his. In fact, I think the two bathrooms in the house are even his, one for her and one for guests. More elegant than for a guest to come in the bathroom and see her nightgown hanging. Actually, Mies, if you look at the plans of his German houses, they show a wonderful sense of how a wealthy family lives in a house translated into modern terms. Even though it was one room, he attempted to shelter her bed from her guest, give her her own private bathroom. I thought the core was getting too large but Mies thought this was necessary. Actually, she knew exactly what she was getting. People came from all over the world during the construction to see the house. I think, at the time, she liked it until things went sour. I had a lot of sympathy for her until she got vicious and began to lie at the trial. She became so vindictive.

[Tape 4: Side 2]

Goldsmith: She even attempted to have him considered incompetent to get at his license. The questioning by her lawyer was to try to prove that he was incompetent. Why did you use this expensive travertine, couldn’t you have used something less expensive, did you have any courses in heating and ventilating?

72 Blum: I think from what Paul Schweikher has said about his testimony, the point of the questioning directed towards him was to perhaps try and prove that Mies had not earned his fee because he didn’t design the bathroom fixtures but he placed them.

Goldsmith: I see. I think it went beyond that. She was by that time very vindictive and she was going to do her utmost to try to damage him and his reputation.

Blum: What a pity for such a beautiful, beautiful house. That was a house that indeed did make her famous, I suppose.

Goldsmith: I’m sure she couldn’t enjoy her fame.

Blum: I’m sure that’s true. You worked on another house or another project for houses while you were with Mies, the 50 x 50 house project. You said about the Farnsworth house that you thought it was entirely suitable for its purpose. Would you say that about the 50 x 50 houses as well?

Goldsmith: The 50 x 50 was an abstract. Mies and McCormick, for whom Mies built a house in Elmhurst, were talking about building quite a few houses—Mies wasn’t though, Mies would be the architect—maybe even for families and selling them. It was an idea Mies liked. He had the idea that it would be 50 x 50 feet and in it they would have different arrangements inside. There was no specific family in mind and the project never went beyond the model. I don’t know what happened to McCormick, why they didn’t go further. To Mies it was a challenge as an idea. At that time Mies was very interested in architecture just as background for people, to try to reduce the architecture as much as possible to nothing. I don’t know if he ever said, “It would be good if you had no architecture, if you could solve the problem of shelter.” I don’t know if he said that, he may have. I think, incidentally, that this would explain a lot of the difference between his American house and his European house. In his American house is the idea of reducing it to just background and that explains a lot of the

73 difference between work like the Barcelona Pavilion, which is in a way so active, such a big presence, and the Tugendhat House which has a big presence, compared to his much more subdued American work. We’ve often talked among ourselves, Mies people, about this difference. At this time, anyhow, Mies had different ideas for houses. He said he had visited the United States Plywood Company to pick some plywood for something and loved this big empty warehouse. What a wonderful house it would make, this space where you could just live. How all the problems are solved, one sees the glimmer of this in some of the lofts that are being done now, unified, very high spaces, solving the elements like sleeping and everything at an absolute minimum. Mies had the same idea. This was the idea of the 50 x 50-foot house, of how far you could go in one unified space and how you could live within it. It was all I worked on. He gave the problem to the students, some of them had girders above the house. This was very late, it must have been 1952 or 1953, right about then. It was one of the last things I worked on in the office.

Blum: This was actually done with an eye to building it with Robert McCormick?

Goldsmith: I think at that time it might have even fallen through and Mies did it as a project without any idea of how or if he would build it. We never saw McCormick in all this thing. I think it was more the same category as his five early projects, just exploring an idea.

Blum: So was there any thought to designing a house for the generic family of four, with two growing children?

Goldsmith: No.

Blum: But was it to be a family house?

Goldsmith: Even that wasn’t clear. A house, nothing specified in the plan. This house, and I can’t remember even the other plans that they tried in the school,

74 what variations, it was to be a beautiful space of the interaction of the walls and the core with the structure. The plan we showed, I think, with the house that I worked on, was quite abstract, I think more to show the possibilities than to show a plan for given people. It did have a core, like the Farnsworth, with, I think, two baths, a kitchen on the back of the core, and a heating room. It showed behind a low wall a double bed, presumably for a master bedroom. There was another wall that showed two beds. There was great speculation, at least on my part, how you could use that house. Was this a guest room for an occasional guest, or what? It was an architectural idea rather than for somebody. Just to give you another example, about this time Mies had a client, the Caines. He did that project, he did a house with a family in mind. Brenner worked on that with him.

Blum: Was it similar to the 50 x 50 house design?

Goldsmith: No. He was trying to open it up even more and it never was finished. The plans show some definite closures for the room. I don’t know if the master bedroom opened up into the main room. I can’t remember what happened, why nothing more happened, whether they ever solved the problems for the Caines.

Blum: Was that one built?

Goldsmith: No. It was not built, I don’t think it ever went very far, but it was an exploration of how you could live in these big spaces, what had to be closed, what could be opened.

Blum: Does that strike you as livable family space?

Goldsmith: There have been houses built on this idea for families, like Jacques Brownson’s house. He had the open parts and then he closed bedrooms. There are many, many explorations in student work at the Bauhaus in this show, “Mies van der Rohe: Architect as Educator,” where they were

75 exploring how far you could go. Most of them had eventually divided the houses into rooms you could close although the master bedroom might have opened into the main living room in some way. Certainly there have been houses built like that in real life. I brought up the question of the loft. I don’t know how they solve it but it’s not so unusual for a master bedroom to open up into a big living space spatially. I think it all depends on how much privacy one feels they need. I think you have to tread carefully when you begin to ask, is this a house for a family? He was exploring architectural ideas of how far he could go, of space, treading very gently and not ever making the statement that this is it, this is it for the typical American family. It’s kind of a hot potato you raised because the same kind of thing has been leveled against Mies with his apartment buildings. Are these proper buildings for raising families? I don’t know if he’s ever been attacked directly on it. Certainly people have said that’s not the kind of living for a family. I’ll go back to the 50 x 50 and the plan and speculate. Probably what those two beds indicated, on the opposite side from the double bed, could also be children. I think the big question is, could a family live in that house? I think it’s a question with the lack of privacy and the privacy of sound and so forth—after all, there is a family. I can’t remember all the discussions that took place on this. After all, they were fairly large distances apart in these places. One speculates, could it be done? After all, the Japanese house hasn’t got these hard and fast spaces that we have. Mies’s project for the three courthouses doesn’t even show bathrooms and kitchens. It’s sort of a suggestion for spaces, or his brick country house, a kind of suggestion for spaces. Those who are literally going along with the magnifying glass and saying, “What is this space? Where is that space? Where is the bathroom? Where is the powder room?” are missing the point that it’s an abstraction at this stage. It’s an idea for development.

Blum: I get confused about where an exploration for an imaginary occupant, or occupants, stops and where building for a real family living in Hinsdale, Illinois, begins. That line is not clear to me.

76 Goldsmith: Of course it becomes clearer if it were a house for a real family, right now it was just an abstraction. I think you’ve got to examine it project by project. For example, for some of his brick German houses there are several plans. I think there’s the plan that Mies tried to sell with it being very open and there is the plan that they finally built which is probably more typical German bourgeois that they could accept. That means a big hall, a living space, a men’s withdrawing room, and, I think, a woman’s withdrawing room. The elements of a conventional plan that he was able to sell the client, and not so much glass. I think you’ve got at least this. For me, I don’t know, never having discussed every one of these problems, but I think it’s clear when you see a house without any bathrooms in it. The public, even quite educated public, has such a hard time, even people as educated as you, deciding what was for real and what was an idea for exploration. The 50 x 50 house is one of these—not so abstract as the country house and not so finished as others. Mies understood very well. Mies looked at some of the plans, especially German ones, with his students. Even the brick country houses, the schemes that were not built, I think people today in America could live in those very well. They worked for days just figuring out how somebody, a maid, could elegantly get from the kitchen to answer the front door without going through the other spaces.

Blum: These would be the considerations if there was a real family in a real situation.

Goldsmith: You would have to consider it, except again I point to people living in lofts, even with children and quite open spaces. How you live in summer places—quite differently. It was sort of speculative of how far you could go in simplifying the unconventional living idea. Again those lofts, I think people have tried some without enclosing bathrooms. Some of the ideas don’t work, some may, some can only work with some unconventional families.

Blum: I realize you said that the 50 x 50 house was an exploration, but do you

77 think it could work for a family with children?

Goldsmith: I know it didn’t go that far. It was mostly of space, of seeing how far you could go. Of course there’d been the charge leveled at Mies by plenty of people that life is messy and life is this, gemutlicht, you need this, you need a pitched roof, you need a front door.

Blum: Why do you think Mies never lived in one of his buildings, such as 860?

Goldsmith: I think the explanation that Schulze gives that somebody said is so. So that he doesn’t get complaints. I think it was the same as, Why do I live in this old house instead of a Keck house? It’s a wonderful house, which most of Keck’s houses aren’t. It’s very comfortable for us, it goes nicely with the houses on the street.

Blum: This is not a house built by either Keck or Mies, but there was a time in your life when you lived in a Mies-designed building, the Commonwealth Plaza.

Goldsmith: This was when we were just married.

Blum: What was that experience like?

Goldsmith: It was a wonderful, exhilarating experience to live in that place. It was at Sheridan and Diversey. It was a beautiful plan, beautiful spaces, beautifully detailed for a rental apartment. We had a southern view over the park into the city on one of the high floors. We had lived also in another apartment on the corner. We enjoyed it thoroughly. I think the first one had one-bedroom and our second one had two. When we moved we had a year-old child. We moved because Robin was pregnant for a second time—maybe even the second child was born while we were in the process of moving. We didn’t want to go through the hassle of finding a school for them, Parker or something. We thought that was too precious. We thought that the city was grimy. I’d never lived in a house,

78 only in apartments; I was raised in an apartment. I thought it would be pretty good and by that time we could afford it. We thought at first of a bigger apartment in Chicago, maybe in an old building. We looked for some months. I was for moving into one of the near suburbs connected by good transportation. I’m very glad now. Next door to us was a family with three kids in a three-bedroom apartment. They sent their kids to private school. I think that was also possible. These buildings are full of all kinds of people. For us I thought it was a terrific chance to live in a wonderful building, it had a wonderful location. We liked it better than 860, which was so close there. It overlooked the park, we had beautiful spaces, it was just perfect for us. As you know, Mies’s building [860] is full of architects, most of whom, of course, don’t have children, if they’re single people or couples. They find it exhilarating I think. We did too. Getting back to the question, why did Mies not move into his own building—first of all the building he lived in for so many years was a wonderful apartment. It was very nice, as you could imagine Mies would do, very nice spaces, two apartments on a floor. I don’t remember how many floors, not more than about ten apartments in the whole building. There were very few people living in the building, probably no kids at all. It was well maintained. It was a wonderful 1920s building. He first of all he didn’t feel he had to make a statement, obviously, about living in his own building. There are plenty of architects that I know that don’t, who shall remain nameless, and, in fact who live in Mies’s building rather than their own. I think for privacy, very few people live there, and that it is basically a beautiful apartment. I think this thing that has troubled critics and writers, is to me, no problem. I know he stewed over it for probably over a year after he could have moved in, he was undecided. He finally didn’t move. He was comfortable there, he had lived there a dozen years.

Blum: Was the idea that Mies built it a big attraction for you?

Goldsmith: Not the only reason, if it had been an ugly building we wouldn’t. I still think it’s one of the best modern apartments you can get in the city. Probably tens of thousands have been built before and since. I liked the

79 idea that it was Mies’s building but besides that it was just a wonderful building. I think we liked the location for people just married without kids, but then after we had our first child it was less comfortable. The child wakes up and cries and in a small apartment, it’s not very comfortable. And yet, I was raised in a quite small apartment, there were three children in an old pre-war building then and we managed very well. I hadn’t lived in a house until I was forty or older.

Blum: Myron, while you were with Mies’s office there were other projects, some of which were mentioned earlier, such as the 50 x 50 house project. What was your involvement?

Goldsmith: There have been two recent exhibits in which the authorship of the 50 x50 house is wrong. The exhibits are the “Mies van der Rohe: Architect as Educator” exhibit at IIT and the “The Unknown Mies and His Disciples of Modernism” at the Art Institute. In both exhibits they have that as a student project by Phil Hart. As a matter of fact, in both exhibits they had pictures of two versions of the 50 x 50. One with the columns at the center of each facade, four columns, one in each center, and, another version with the same dimensions but the roof is supported by two girders on top of the roof. These projects, the 50 x 50 house with the columns in the center of each façade, were done in Mies’s office. I worked on it with Mies. He and I were the only people that worked on it in the office. The project had had some discussion with Robert McCormick about building a number of houses that could be sold to clients. Mies, in exploring the idea, we worked on this version. There was no particular client in mind. It was a generalized exploration of the project. I’m sure it was not even for McCormick as a client but just an abstract exploration. That was done in the office. I think about this time he also gave it to his graduate students as a project in the school. I think somewhat later, I think we were just about through with this project when he gave it to his graduate students. I believe it’s from the later project that the house version with the girders on top of the roof came out. Very definitely the one with the four columns in the center was done in the office and was not a school

80 project.

Blum: I think that’s really very helpful that you point out this misattribution. Do you think that Mies today, given the same opportunity to design a house with a project in mind and perhaps with a backer, do you think he would design the same type of house?

Goldsmith: This project was done in 1953, over thirty-three years ago. Mies was a youngish man then, and if he was still working, what he would do with it thirty-three years later. I suspect that he would change. As a matter of fact, if you look at his whole career he made at least a half a dozen very big switches in his work, from his neoclassical period at the beginning, to these avant-garde projects in the early 1920s, to these brick houses of the middle to later 1920s, to the extremely mature projects of Barcelona Pavilion and Tugendhat house, and then the enormous switch in the United States. I have pointed out five shifts and so I think you could expect that in thirty years Mies would have shifted a few more times. Not in violent shifts that the postmoderns are shifting from modernism to postmodernism to great eclecticism and neoclassic eclecticism, not in these violent shifts. His career represents a big shift. I think he would have shifted. Another question you asked, a little bit loaded, Betty, is was this proposal for a family house? The charge by many people, both people who somewhat admire him and his detractors, was that he was indifferent to planning, to practical planning. We have to distinguish what we are talking about. At one end Mies probably built about a couple dozen apartment buildings with very, very practical plans. I’ve lived in Mies’s 2801 Sheridan and it’s a beautiful apartment compared to what else is available. I would say if somebody wanted to live in a modern building Mies’s would probably be the best that somebody could live in. In fact 860, as you know, is all full of architects, interior designers, people who want a modern place. They love the glass and the quality of a modern building. It’s among the best you could do. That’s one end of the spectrum. It is also true that he did probably a dozen office buildings, all very successful like the apartment buildings, for developers who know

81 what is salable, rentable. Those are among the best there are, both in the quality of design and construction and in practicality. He’s done it for clients like IBM and the federal government who are not going to be pushed around, and for hard-boiled developers, so you see, these practical, well worked-out buildings. I could go on and on. We go now to Crown Hall where there is more experimenting, which is the building for the architectural department. I have worked in that building since about 1960 or 1961 when I started teaching. That would be more or less twenty years. I have found it a joy to work in, extremely practical in my view, or at least let us say it’s well known that it doesn’t have office space for the staff. At various times it lacked lecture space, now it’s got a very good lecture room.

[Tape 5: Side 1]

Blum: Myron, I didn’t intend to put you on the defensive to defend Mies’s projects.

Goldsmith: I think it’s important though and I’m not going to let you off the hook. First of all, a lot of people get it all wrong and you got it all wrong when you said the 50 x 50 house was designed for family living. People have attacked the Farnsworth house by saying, how can a family live in it, and it’s well known it was for a single woman. Those projects of the 50 x 50, and for that matter a lot of his other sketch houses, have no clear program. He was just exploring the possibilities of what you could do in that house. How far could you go with it? A favorite program for the house was a single person, an art collector or something like that. These open-plan houses were typically done for single persons, the Johnson’s and Mies’s, and for that I think they work quite well. Finally, Johnson built a whole series of houses on his estate for his complex program collecting his art and guest house and so forth. He started out with one house. In the same way in the 50 x 50 house there was no program. We did try to explore, how to make it more complex? Could you propose living in it for more than one person? We only showed a double bed in

82 one end of the house and in the other end we showed twin beds, never quite sure how far you could go. Were the twin beds for guests? Were the two people related or unrelated living in the house? He did a scheme with Brenner for a house, the Caine house, in which he explored dividing it up into more rooms. There are other examples, he did the Tugendhat house where one solution was closed bedrooms in one portion of the room and the public rooms were open.

Blum: Is that where perhaps the popular misconception came from? From the design with the one double bed and the two single beds in the other room? It’s always been my impression that it was designed for a family.

Goldsmith: We certainly speculated and wondered if one could do an open house with parents and children. I think whether they would have enough privacy separated by very large distances—certainly that was a speculation. Without ever coming to a conclusion, never really proposing it, although there might have been speculation on it. Don’t forget that under certain circumstances people live in unconventional ways, like in people sharing lofts or something like that, which are not readily divisible, people on vacation sharing it. There is a history of people, not American, of this period living under circumstances of much less privacy. You must understand it was a kind of a speculation on was it possible. Certainly we knew that it was not possible for the average family.

Blum: Do you think Mies or anyone whose thinking went into this was working with the architecture with a thought to changing housing patterns in a social sense?

Goldsmith: I think it was more architecture, more what the concept demanded and could it work. For example, Crown Hall, the concept, if you were going to work it out architecturally, really demanded an open space there, subdivided as it is with some lower walls. I mean bringing the architecture to its ultimate. Certainly Mies did other not dissimilar buildings like the Commons on IIT where they did divide up the space in

83 those stores and things like that. I think he was seeking a really great architectural artistic solution in Crown Hall and in this 50 x 50 house project. Once having set that up you have to accept the limitations or where this concept leads you. Then you decide, well, something like this will not work for a family. I think there are all kinds of mystifying things that Mies did that are mystifying to the public and also architects. For example, when he did that group of courthouses. George Danforth could probably speak to it better than I, because I’m quite sure he worked on those with him. If you look at the plans they’re very abstract, they’re more in my view a suggestion of how the space might work. There is no kitchen, there is no bathroom—this must absolutely floor some of the people who are looking at them who can only think in terms of family rooms, bathrooms, kitchens, bedrooms.

Blum: Ultimately it has to be brought to that level to be made suitable for its use.

Goldsmith: Sure there has to be a bathroom, but you can imagine one of those houses done for a single person or a couple. Sure you would have bathrooms. He was showing a concept, a rather abstract concept, of how something like that might work in the space. I think people have to understand that and go along with him. Just as I think, this is my own personal opinion, that brick country house is another abstract concept that upsets a lot of people. They wonder, where’s the living room, where’s the kitchen, where is the this or where is the that? I consider this an abstract concept of a kind of free flowing spatial house. To sum up, Mies very well understood practical planning and had done a lot of it. He also was a great one, you know from his body of work, of just exploring abstract ideas, spatial ideas, artistic ideas, just sort of indicating how things might be done. Knowing full well in the back of his mind, I’m sure, that some of our normal way we live would change due to widespread changes or social changes, that some of these ideas might be possible for even families. But, that it was not a practical possibility for a normal family. I’ve always felt very comfortable about that, just pushing it further. I don’t know where I saw the film where Mies spoke about the National Gallery [Berlin]. He

84 said, “I know when I did this of the great practical difficulties of mounting an exhibition in this space but it also has enormous possibilities and I would not give up these possibilities.” You know, the chance to present these possibilities, I think that is the way he thought.

Blum: Listening to you has been so interesting, it seems that you appreciate him on so many more levels than most people can.

Goldsmith: He was an enormously complex man, he was not just a single-level person. For example, when I was the office he was doing the boiler plant, the Farnsworth house, probably 860, furniture designs, all at one time, and the most nitty-gritty thing like the boiler plant where everything was determined by function to stuff of open-ended artistic possibilities.

Blum: Would you comment on what you think Mies’s influence has been?

Goldsmith: Mies influenced the whole architectural profession worldwide because he gave it a direction when it was floundering. He gave direction to firms as diverse as Skidmore, as I.M. Pei, to name the best, to a lot of people who had a more personal relation, who were his direct students. It was clear what he was doing and his ideas on skyscrapers were the dominant force all over the world. You must say, is Pei a disciple when all his partners except one were students of Gropius at Harvard? While they were students they were being influenced by Mies’s ideas. Influence was often very indirect. I think Mies’s ideas were in general clear to almost everybody except people who can’t look at it and say this is what it is. I will say that some people adhered quite closely to the Miesian forms, but others tried very hard to discover, to take the ideas and find new forms. Of course, if the postmoderns want to say that every building with a flat top is straight Mies no matter what else happened, there’s nothing to say. For example, leave me out of it for a moment. Take Gene Summers, who after he left Mies did McCormick Place, restored the Biltmore hotel in Los Angeles, and did a terrific job on it. He won a national honor award for it. You cannot say that he was a narrow-minded adherent of Mies. Certainly

85 nobody worked longer for Mies than Summers did. Or, take some other people, Dan Brenner, who was with Mies so many years, both in the school and in the office.

Blum: Or, Myron, take yourself as an example.

Goldsmith: You can’t say the Solar Telescope or the Ruck-a-Chucky Bridge came out of anything Mies did. Yet there was a certain way to approach architecture that it came out of.

Blum: What was there in the Solar Telescope that came from Mies and brought you to the solution that is not like Mies?

Goldsmith: It only came from the way of working on an idea, of trying to discover. Starting from a careful study of its requirements, which surprises everybody and yet that’s where Mies had a given program. He would study it very carefully and go to great lengths to satisfy. There would be careful study of that. Finally, when that was understood, you would try to see how far you could reasonably go to make a thing of architecture out of it, to study its form, to try alternate forms until you got one that not only worked well but was a satisfying piece of architecture, where you had made it into architecture. But, within the limitations, not trying to break out of those limitations. By pursuing a reasonable idea, not trying some fantastic idea such as the big high-tech people are trying, that’s where we break with them. That’s what was different in Mies and the fantastic things others are trying to do. The Ruck-a-Chucky Bridge, it’s all done within the geometry of highway geometry and then of principles of structure which are well known, very reasonable, very economical.

Blum: Going back to the telescope for just a moment, in some of the literature you have been called a “structural poet”. Given this very practical problem you achieved a sculptural and poetic solution. You’re saying, if I understand you correctly, that Mies gave you a way of approaching it. What was another component that led you to that solution?

86 Goldsmith: I sort of smiled when you said un-Miesian, that was a very telling remark. I think when people look at his work and find a great repetition toward his later years when he had developed prototypes, and after years of trying different things, because he tried different solutions for skyscrapers both in the office and in the school, to him this was the way to do it, his typical solution. I wanted to say that sometimes people base on this fact the idea that forms were fixed forever and ever. If you look at his whole work, it seems to me that he explored for a long time. I think the idea of exploring many solutions of a problem is Miesian. He would not hesitate to make a dozen models or a thousand sketches of something to explore it. That was very much him, to go through all the possible solutions and then pick one, not random solution, but from one to the other, and reasonable solutions not pie-in-the-sky solutions. On the telescope there were, I’d say, ten or fifteen models of different solutions made and some of them visually were nicer than others; nicer, were just superior to others. They led to others and finally there was one that was preferred. Happily it was, of all that we explored, the most reasonable in cost. It all came together. It was very Miesian, trying to make architecture out of the facts, the plan, the planning limitations, the limitations of normal structures, not fantastic structures. It was the architecture, trying to make architecture out of it, that he taught us. Not to stop at some lower point. Of course, we were helped by that fantastic site of the telescope, the huge scale of it and all that stuff.

Blum: Do you think that your experience in Europe with Nervi contributed to the fact that you achieve poetic solutions?

Goldsmith: Yes.

Blum: Let’s put this in chronological order. You left Mies’s office in?

Goldsmith: 1953.

Blum: You had traveled in Europe for nine months, in 1951 while you were still

87 in Mies’s office. And then in 1953 you went to Europe to study with Nervi on a Fulbright. Why did you leave Nervi?

Goldsmith: I was there for about nine months in 1951, but in 1953 I was there for two years.

Blum: Studying with Nervi?

Goldsmith: Studying with Nervi and that wasn’t the only thing I did. I entered competitions. I enjoyed living in Europe, particularly in Rome, it was all of that.

Blum: What did you learn from Nervi?

Goldsmith: First of all Nervi, whose work looks so different from Mies, was very close to Mies in his philosophy of architecture—that it came out of structure. The difference was he was working on different kinds of problems and working in concrete. Mies was working in steel for the most part. I was interested to learn about this kind of concrete construction, to see it. Just as Mies wrote beautiful things about structure and architecture, Nervi did, too. In fact I think what Nervi wrote in his book Technology and Aesthetics of Construction, it goes down as a landmark in this kind of structural architecture, in explaining the goals and the possibilities. I had just gone to study with somebody who I’d felt was very close in idea even though his forms were utterly different. Studying with him gave me courage that there were perhaps other forms, too, that were neither Mies’s or Nervi’s, which I kind of realized.

Blum: What was Nervi like as a person?

Goldsmith: First I have to tell you that I was never as close to Nervi as Mies. I was his student and I would occasionally go to see him in his office. There was a much more formal relationship than with Mies, and not as close. I spent a lot of time studying what he said, and seeing the buildings that he had

88 done. There are other engineers who were in the same direction. Morandi, for one, was an engineer who was interested in the aesthetics of engineering and how this related to architecture. You asked what Nervi was like. Obviously from what he has written, he was a man who had thought hard about the relation of aesthetics to his work. Not only aesthetics but he considered it a moral problem, too, to do things correctly, to build correctly. He was more isolated than Mies. Mies was more in the whole artistic movements worldwide. I visited in Nervi’s elegant apartment. If I remember correctly, his office and his apartment were in the same building alongside the Tiber in Rome, a beautiful apartment. He mostly had, as I remember, objects done with great taste and refinement but they were mostly traditional things. I think the paintings were traditional, maybe even might have been Renaissance paintings, the objects maybe traditional but probably not of the recent past but going back.

Blum: That’s an interesting contrast between his personal taste and what he was trying to do professionally.

Goldsmith: I was not surprised. I think his approach to engineering, although new forms because of the new materials and problems, was actually a very traditional approach. Just as I think in spite of Mies’s new forms, in many ways he looked on architecture the way any traditional architect looked on it. I never heard him say, what commodity, what are the three things? I think it’s out of Alberti, he had this view of architecture being a whole thing, not a single direction, not aesthetics or not construction, not planning, but the whole encompassing architect. I guess this has confused a lot of people who are now calling him a neoclassicist or something. I think it’s neither, they’re just some universal thing. If you believe in this whole thing that makes up architecture, and you put emphasis on the aesthetic part of it, then you will get to order. When you get to order, sometimes you’re going to get an axial order, sometimes it’s going to be an unsymmetrical order, but it will be order and I think this is a point of great confusion.

89 Blum: Can we go back to what was happening in Chicago at the time you were about to leave Mies’s office? IIT absorbed or merged with the Institute of Design at that time. Mies and Moholy were known to have differing views of the same concept. Do you know what was the basis of their dislike for each other?

Goldsmith: Let me say this. I didn’t start teaching in school until many years later, so I had no direct relationship to it. I understood that there was some tension between the two things. I understood that they [Institute of Design] taught a class called Shelter, which was really the making of little funny houses. I was going to say I thought it was odd because it was so different from everything they were doing. I never understood, I’m sorry. I never really understood it any further until I read about it in Franz Schulze’s book. I think he explained it. In other words, Mies did not talk. In other words, I can’t shed any light. If there was drama, and I understand there were periods of drama, I was unaware of it.

[Tape 5: Side 2]

Blum: When the Institute of Design merged with IIT, Chermayeff had been the head for about five years. In that relationship, too, between Mies and Chermayeff, it’s been said that it was a contentious one. Do you know the basis of that one?

Goldsmith: I can’t really help on that. I can say that my own relationships with some of the people I knew at the ID were very good. I used to go to their lectures when the schools were still separated. I was good friends with Bucky Fuller when he taught there and was very interested in what he was doing. I was good friends with Konrad Wachsmann when was teaching there, as was Mies with Wachsmann. In fact, there were sessions with Konrad’s students, Mies and me, even at Mies’s apartment, where we would discuss, I can’t remember if we were discussing their projects or discussing more abstract ideas. That relationship was very friendly.

90 Blum: How did Mies respond to the proposal that ID merge with IIT?

Goldsmith: I don’t know, except in hindsight I understand that in some of the research that Kevin Harrington has done that he has found letters where Mies was against it. But apparently they went ahead anyhow. I was in the office and that might have been a matter of great concern in the school.

Blum: I would think it was a concern of Mies’s that may in fact have spilled over wherever he was.

Goldsmith: We were not directly involved in it. I know there was an attempt—at least it may have been expressed, I may have just understood it—but an attempt to keep the work of the ID and the architectural department separate. I think if they weren’t there’d be great confusion of what the ideas of the school were, especially as I say they were doing this shelter design. These were very funny wooden houses.

Blum: I thought that was Konrad Wachsmann’s?

Goldsmith: No.

Blum: Was that Chermayeff’s?

Goldsmith: No. It was Dick Berringer who taught it, he’s now dead. Bob Tague might have taught it too. I think there was an attempt to keep them separate.

Blum: A deliberate attempt on Mies’s part so no one confused the two?

Goldsmith: I think so. I could understand that because it was very different than the stuff that was being done at IIT. Small houses were being done at IIT, small practical houses by Hilberseimer and his staff. These were kind of getting into architecture. They are so different, one is kind of very, well, you know Hilberseimer’s houses, and the other was, again, trellis as I remember, lots of columns. I really can’t cast much light on that. There

91 must have been very big drama but if I was aware of it I can’t really add anything other than what I’ve told you. Some of the discussions may have spilled over into the office, as you say. How could it not have? I can’t remember anything specific now.

Blum: When you came back to the United States after your study with Nervi you went to San Francisco to work for SOM. Why did you not go back to Mies’s office?

Goldsmith: Now that I was exposed to Mies and Nervi, and had some other ideas, I wanted to get the chance to do some independent work on my own. Working in Mies’s office there was no question that you were trying, at least the attitude I took, you were trying to help him realize his ideas, to work on his projects. There was no question that it was Mies’s office, the character changed much later when he began to retire and he made partners. When I was there it was very much Mies’s projects I worked on. I’d bring it to him, what do you think of it, Mies? If he didn’t like it he would say something. That’s all right. That is the way the office should be run. It’s unthinkable that I would bring something I had done to him to look at and then argue with him for my ideas. So, when you were in Mies’s office, at least at that time, you tried every step of the way to check with him and that’s the way he would come around and look at the things. Except, sometimes in the apartment buildings he did not, he followed less intimately the working of the plan that was done between, say, Joe and the developer. He would maybe check it, it would be shown to him at various times. On the projects I worked on, the Farnsworth, he was interested in everything that was done. When I felt ready to see what I would do, then I felt that it couldn’t be done within Mies’s office, it was subject to many other forces. This is not to say that Mies wasn’t still in a creative mood.

Blum: Did he invite you to come back knowing that you were returning to the States?

92 Goldsmith: I can’t remember how much we corresponded during that two years. At a certain time, it was quite interesting. I was at the end of my grant and I got a call from Bill Dunlap at SOM, San Francisco. He was a good friend and had worked in Mies’s office. He wanted to know if I was willing to come to San Francisco to design new hangars that they were going to do for United Airlines. I rushed at the idea. I don’t know how I told Mies about it. I don’t know whether he was expecting me to return. I might say parenthetically that Mies did some of his best work after I left. Mies went on with the interruptions of wars, holocausts, and people leaving. He just survived that.

Blum: You felt you just needed something broader for yourself at that point?

Goldsmith: I wanted to go out on my own, broader is not the right word. He was working in a certain way and I wanted to explore things, maybe other types of problems than were in the office. Also, I wanted to express structure maybe a little more explicitly, exposed diagonal skyscrapers, which I had proposed. I think while he encouraged me in my thesis, I don’t think it was his way to do architecture that way, who knows.

Blum: What was the office of SOM in San Francisco like in 1955 when you joined them?

Goldsmith: It had been established a few years earlier. I was working on the hangars. I was working actually as a structural engineer, in fact I had the job as chief structural engineer. I was in charge of the hangars, more or less both architecturally and structurally. In effect I had a fairly free hand. There were other buildings in the office. In fact, about that time Chuck Bassett entered the office. He might have even been there ahead of me, I don’t remember exactly. He took over design, maybe not entirely.

Blum: Was Bill Priestley there at the time?

Goldsmith: No. Bill Priestley was never in San Francisco, Jack Rodgers was there, I

93 think and Owings had a relationship with the office.

Blum: Was it a large office?

Goldsmith: I’d say not large in the terms that it is now, maybe it had fifty to seventy- five people. That’s just a complete guess. It wasn’t an extremely large office but they were doing Crown Zellerbach during the time I was there.

Blum: Some years later in an exhibition catalog of contemporary architects, the United Airlines hangars were called a modern masterpiece. This was your first attempt at doing something on your own and yet if I’m not mistaken it wasn’t executed quite as you wanted. What was the difference or what was the problem?

Goldsmith: There were two hangars and a flight kitchen, the flight kitchen I wasn’t very active on, but on the hangars I was. On the smaller hangar we pretty much got our way, it was called the wash hangar. We had proposed sheathing the larger hangar in a translucent glass for architectural reasons and also for the light quality. I think it would have worked because that part of San Francisco has a very benign climate, not a strong sun and an average temperature in the sixties. They eventually turned it down after we tried the glass. We sheathed it with siding and we put in some windows, which they insisted on. We just couldn’t control it. They then put some huge sign, United Airlines, on top of the hangar. I think pretty much everything disappeared, the interesting thing was the structure. Maybe added to it was my own lack of being able to solve the problem. Once going away from that, you can certainly solve a building. But it didn’t seem to come together.

Blum: What was their reason for turning down the glass?

Goldsmith: I think on cost, it was higher cost than the solid thing. Probably they thought it might be a maintenance problem in leakage of the skylights, although these seemed to be very good systems.

94 Blum: And yet it’s looked on as an architectural success.

Goldsmith: I think it’s the small hangar that got the attention. Before the big one was finished it got some attention, the steel was very beautiful. This was a period, at the beginning of when the aesthetics of steel construction had much attention paid to it. When you got something that looked good, where you had resolved the aesthetic and technical problems, it got a lot of attention. The atmosphere was right for it but it was just the beginning of that movement.

Blum: You stayed in San Francisco for three years, until 1958, then you transferred to the Chicago office. Why?

Goldsmith: Dunlap had moved to Chicago and Bruce was in Chicago.

Blum: Bruce Graham?

Goldsmith: Yes. My big support in San Francisco. The big support to get these things done had been Dunlap. I don’t think he was a partner yet, but an associate partner. I think he had helped get the ideas through. When he left I thought this structural architecture idea would not be easy in San Francisco. Their interests were a little bit different. If you look at Chuck Bassett’s work, he’s a terrifically competent architect, but it’s not the direction I wanted to go. Chicago was in the direction I wanted to go. I also wanted to leave structural engineering, being it wasn’t what I wanted to do, that is to be responsible for structures.

Blum: Are you talking about having the moral responsibility?

Goldsmith: Not only moral, but legal. Also, I decided that the thing I wanted to work with most was on the aesthetic problems of structure, engineering, architecture, and aesthetics. I didn’t want to get out in a narrow responsibility of the technical responsibility for something. When the chance came to go back to architecture, I took it.

95 Blum: You mentioned Bruce Graham—what was his attraction for you?

Goldsmith: He was already working in that direction. For a long time at the beginning of my career until I became a partner, I worked with Bruce. We had a very nice working relationship. I think Bruce was already a partner and he and Dunlap decided to invite me to transfer to Chicago. I did. I think United Airlines, the executive office building, was the first project I worked on. That was a wonderful opportunity. We had a wonderful working relation on that.

Blum: What did you sense as some of the big differences between the San Francisco and the Chicago office of SOM?

Goldsmith: I think in the Chicago office there was great commitment to this structural architecture, you could see it in Inland Steel, the structural idea. That thing was, I think, finished already in steel. When I came back I moved into Inland and I think Bruce was doing the Gunner’s Mate Service School at Great Lakes, these buildings. He was working in that direction too, in the structural architecture.

Blum: Was there a different atmosphere or personality between the two offices? Were they the same size?

Goldsmith: No, Chicago was much bigger. Chicago was the older office, San Francisco was only a few years old. I think the design in the San Francisco office very quickly took on the personality of Chuck Bassett, who as I say, was an extremely gifted designer but less structural than SOM in Chicago. I was to come back there to do the Oakland Coliseum. A few years later I came back for a summer to do a preliminary design for that project. I think I was working quite independently of Chuck on that project. I never know yet who engineered that thing that I came to San Francisco for. I should clarify it, although most of the actors are dead, Dunlap and Nat Owings.

96 Blum: Was this from an earlier design that you had worked on?

Goldsmith: Yes. I had worked as early as my Rome days on the idea of a big stadium. In fact, it had various sizes out of concrete with a hanging roof. That was an efficient structure. I had proposed it for the Portland Coliseum while I was in San Francisco and it was rejected there in favor of the scheme that they did. When it came up again I tried again and this time succeeded. I should say something very positive that happened in San Francisco, I made lifelong friends there, of course, with Chuck Bassett whose work and as a personality I like very much. I got a chance to know and work with some very important engineers, T.Y. Lin, I met Allan Temko there, another engineer, Boris Bressler, and the whole bunch from Berkeley, Popoff, who were really very important engineers and lifelong colleagues. I’m still working with T.Y. Lin from those days. T.Y. Lin was a consultant on United Airlines, this concrete structure.

Blum: When you came to the Chicago office were the three founders, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, were they still together in that office?

Goldsmith: I think Merrill was still here, he hadn’t retired yet. Nat Owings was in the West, he was already attached to the San Francisco office, although later he was to get involved in Washington on those projects. Only Merrill was there. I did not have much contact with him. I think he was involved with the Air Force Academy and so was totally absorbed in that. Walter Netsch was there, but I think the Air Force Academy group was a separate group at that time.

Blum: Was Walter Netsch part of that group?

Goldsmith: Yes, in fact he was the chief designer of that group. It was in Chicago but separate, they might have even been in a separate group within the office. I never was to work with Walter. You asked about the founders, John Merrill was the only one there and he was involved in the Air Force Academy.

97 Blum: How did such a large office with so many people work efficiently and satisfy everyone, or try to satisfy everyone?

Goldsmith: This would probably be repeating other stuff that you have, it was basically broken down. In fact the whole firm, I think, whoever set it up was a great genius. It was broken down as far as design and the handling of jobs, in small groups. They had the responsibility for the job, all aspects of it.

Blum: Is that what the partner-in-charge was?

Goldsmith: Yes. The partner-in-charge is usually an administrative partner, there is a design partner, various project managers, and technical people, and a senior designer, which I think was my title until I became a partner. For all the jobs I did until I became a partner, Bruce was the partner in charge of design.

Blum: So you worked with him?

Goldsmith: Yes. I worked a lot with Dunlap, for an administrative partner he was wonderful. He had, for example, a very large role in realizing the Solar Telescope. Not only as administrative, but in the process of design, and he was a very good friend.

Blum: In 1958, about the time you came back to Chicago, Mies was dismissed from the IIT campus commission. How did you feel being part of the firm that inherited the work and knowing that a man that you were close to and respected professionally and personally was not allowed to continue something he had designed?

Goldsmith: Of course all of us who had been close to Mies, and I wasn’t the only one, beside all the employees there were at that time three partners who had been close to Mies: Dunlap, John Weese, and myself. Other people like Bruce Graham were, if not close to Mies, at least acknowledged his

98 influence on their work. There was a big moral dilemma at SOM, and big soul-searching on what to do. Let me see if I can understand it, and big protests. That event is so painful I’m not quite sure exactly what happened. Two of the buildings that were done under that plan were things for which Mies had done important designs. I think Bunshaft is supposed to have called Mies and talked to him about it. First let me say that I think later the IIT administration explained it this way. Mies had been for some years in New York on the Seagram building and things had not gone well with his office here, he had essentially been out of contact. I think the student union [Hermann Union Hall] was the first building. For some years Mies had not done every building on the campus. For example, the Research Foundation work had been done by other architects than Mies. Mies did some of the buildings but some had been done by other architects. Now I’m getting vague on time. I think in some of the housing part other people had worked. SOM had done some housing there, and various fraternity houses and some dorms had been done by other people. I don’t know how to place this in time.

Blum: Even though the official statement said that he had devoted too much time to New York or whatever, what did you think the hidden agenda was?

Goldsmith: I thought that it about happened like that. That they were very stupid and didn’t know the whole implications of this. I took at face value what I had heard because it sounded like a typical bureaucratic error. This building came up, maybe Mies wasn’t around, and they thought like some of the other buildings they would go to somebody else. What I heard is they then offered Mies a library, and he would not take it. I tended to believe at face value what I heard. It did present a very big moral and ethical problem.

Blum: At SOM?

Goldsmith: At SOM, all over, especially with the protests.

99 Blum: SOM issued a statement they would continue to build the campus “in the spirit of Mies.” There was great outcry against such a thing when Mies was still available.

Goldsmith: I’m not trying to condone the firm, right? I was not at the partnership level at that time. I still believe I was getting the straight story. It’s a strange thing because I think the buildings that SOM did were very poor, even though they were in the spirit of Mies, very poor. The Research Foundation continued to build buildings by Schmidt, Garden and Erikson also, in the spirit of Mies, but they were also inferior buildings. This was a less critical part of the campus. I don’t know what one could have done. Caldwell, at that time, resigned from the school saying that he couldn’t morally continue. He came back many years later. He was a faculty member and I think he quit without a job.

Blum: Was he the only one who did that?

Goldsmith: Yes, as far as I know

Blum: Was there ever any mention of conflict of interest because Bill Hartmann was on the board of IIT and also a partner of SOM at the time?

Goldsmith: I don’t know if that was ever mentioned. Other firms are always doing work for things that they are on the board of directors on.

[Tape 6: Side 1]

Blum: One last question about that time in your life—how did you feel about it?

Goldsmith: Like everybody else it was a big moral dilemma. I don’t remember if I ever spoke to Mies about it. I think we did not lose our friendship with him, I did not personally. I don’t remember, there were long gaps when I did not see him. Walter was working on the campus buildings that were to be done. We, with a moral dilemma, at least I didn’t have to face this

100 problem every day. It wasn’t until several years later, and I don’t remember if Mies was alive or dead, what year was the first Mies building, do you know? I mean the first SOM building.

Blum: I presume it was right after Mies was dismissed, which was 1958. I don’t know the exact date of completion.

Goldsmith: He died in 1968, it was a period of ten years. Some years later I think there was a design for the fountain in front of Perlstein Hall that Ralph Youngren designed. It was a memorial fountain to his wife. It was a very insensitive design, it practically covered that whole grass strip with paving. It was a memorial to his wife but it was landscaping in front of there.

Blum: And done by Ralph Youngren?

Goldsmith: He did the design, I don’t know if Walter had anything to do with it. There was an outcry, and for good reason, on the campus. I was asked if I would do an alternative design. I said, “Yes, I would.” I came up with the design that was built. I thought it was not so bad and I thought that it even was a nice fountain. I had always felt it was a nice fountain. Later, after that, I don’t remember what year it was, I took over the balance of the buildings on the campus. We did some designs for parking lots and landscaping, which were never built. I built several classroom buildings to the north of 32nd Street, which was as far as Mies’s campus had been built. The gym was built later. I think by the time I had entered into it it was clear some years before that Mies wanted nothing further to do with the campus. It still always bothered me, as a moral question, to be working on it. I was very sorry. I attempted to do the best I could in the spirit of Mies. I may have bent over backwards in following that, I don’t know from this end whether I should have done it so close to what was there before or tried to change it. The reason I didn’t change it is there was no guarantee. SOM was never formally made the campus architect. They could have, on the very next building, just as easily gone to

101 somebody else, some other firm. One of the reasons I so closely followed it, I didn’t want to set a precedent for breaking with the campus thing. I felt if I kept it there’d be a precedent for the next firm not striking out and doing an all-brick building or some screwy building.

Blum: It looks, at least from the records I’ve read, that you worked on the campus buildings for a period of about ten years. From 1962 with the Engineering Building Number One, the Life Science building, the Keating Sports Center and the Stewart School of Management in 1972. You worked on a variety of buildings.

Goldsmith: I did the gym in what year?

Blum: I have 1967 in my notes.

Goldsmith: Yes, you’ve done your homework. In 1972 Mies was already dead four years. I tried to explain the dilemmas. I don’t know during this period how much I was seeing Mies.

Blum: Did he ever comment at all on any of the buildings?

Goldsmith: I may have brought it up, but I don’t remember his answer. He took it graciously. He never, that I can remember, he never attacked the firm.

Blum: Did it ever affect your relationship with him personally?

Goldsmith: I think not. In the last years I would see him from time to time at his house. I remember some occasions when I think he received an award, maybe even in house, I was there. Our relations continued all right.

Blum: Myron, I said to you a moment ago when we paused the tape that you are a marvelous spokesman for Mies, and you began to respond to that.

Goldsmith: I probably said before how lucky I was to become Mies’s student and

102 later work in his office because I do consider him the greatest architect of this period. I just considered myself enormously lucky to have had this association with him. With that, I may be very ready to defend him against what I consider mistaken or unfair attacks or criticism to set the record right, or just what I consider misinterpretations of him.

Blum: He is such a public figure, I’m sure he has been the subject of controversy.

Goldsmith: While I’ve been quick to defend Mies against criticisms, that is not to say that among ourselves and in my own mind I have not thought about the various criticisms and to the extent that they were true. For example, in the Museum of Modern Art show that just recently finished, Arthur Drexler in the captions of the photos is sometimes critical. He attempted to make comments. I think sometimes he was correct in his criticism. Sometimes I felt he was wrong. It was always a reasonable criticism, it wasn’t a stupid hostile criticism that we sometimes hear, he and all his ideas are just dismissed as nothing or worse than nothing. Arthur Drexler and his show had some criticisms that any reasonable person could agree with.

Blum: Do you remember any specifically?

Goldsmith: Yes, a few. For example, he said that the living space in the Farnsworth house was surprisingly narrow considering its ample dimensions. I have to agree with him. I have to reconstruct in my mind all the events that led to it and wonder. It does seem a little narrow considering the ample dimensions.

Blum: Was this particular issue ever a consideration as it was being designed and built?

Goldsmith: I can’t remember it coming up. The house was once larger than it finally ended up and it was decreased to make it less expensive. I think it was decreased in all its dimensions by ten percent. I don’t even remember the

103 dimensions, but if it were say twenty-five feet wide, ten percent is about two and one-half feet. It would have come off the living room area. I suddenly wonder about that. Other things happened. When it was shown in the 1947 show in a rather big model, in its original dimensions, and at that time the core was not fully worked out. The core might have gotten wider. When we put in that fireplace it might have gotten wider. I’m unclear on that. It would be worth looking back. I do feel it’s a little tight, although in the many times we were there it was never mentioned that it was wrong. I think it’s just surprisingly narrow. I do not remember Mies, on the many times we came there, thinking that it was too narrow. It was that kind of thoughtful criticism that Drexler gave. There were a few other things, I have to admit I didn’t read every word of the text in the exhibition. Thoughtful criticism like that could be given. One other thing that occurred to me in the Art Institute exhibition, the Mannheim theatre project is all glass. Again, as it is now it’s a conceptual idea, part conceptual and part real because it was working to a program. I don’t remember to what extent we ever resolved the acoustical problems, certainly there was not an acoustical study made of the thing. How you would darken it if you had a matinee program, I think we never got that far. These are my own thoughts on it.

Blum: Was this Mies’s entry in the first round, which he did not pursue?

Goldsmith: Yes, that’s right. The problems of the Berlin museum are well known. Some of the exhibitions I’ve seen there, I’ve only been there once, the photographs, they’re perfectly awful exhibitions that people have done there.

Blum: Is that the fault of the installation or is that the fault of the building?

Goldsmith: Partially both. The use of that gallery is for temporary exhibitions and naturally you’ve got to put in whatever the temporary exhibition is. You can’t refuse it because it doesn’t look well in the space, I think that’s taken for granted. A very good exhibitor will do it better than a poor one.

104 Certainly I’ve seen exhibitions in Crown Hall, in a similar space, and very beautiful ones, including the last one on “Mies van der Rohe: Architect as Educator,” done with Vinci. It is possible for a skilled person to do better. The place that was pointed out earlier has problems. The single glass, you can’t humidify that upper room. I had often thought it would be better if they could have used it like the big space in Pei’s National Gallery is used. It’s a very large space that has no other function but a reception space. It has a few specially commissioned pieces that go well with the space. You don’t have to contend with a changing exhibition. Maybe someday an addition will be built, I know there’s been a competition for an addition for the temporary stuff so that the big room can be used as a sort of entry area like the National Gallery. All this was done to say Mies’s people thought very hard about these buildings during and after Mies too. They were built, even to the criticism, of what would you do differently, or what didn’t work. Mies was certainly very severe on us if there’d be a goof-up on the construction of the building. Even minor details, like something not working out to brick bonding he would just go through the roof. The charge that we took everything with a religious kind of attitude is wrong.

Blum: But you certainly were devoted, along with some others.

Goldsmith: Yes, I think that’s right.

Blum: What word or designation would you have used that you felt would have been more appropriate than “disciples” in the title of the show “The Unknown Mies and His Disciples of Modernism”?

Goldsmith: Certainly many of us found different directions, maybe more or less different. I started to talk about it. Dan Brenner went into very special things, exhibits. I speak of him because he was a very talented person. He was a very early restorer of old houses and had this great feeling for it, like the beautiful job he did on the Madlener house. He went in his own way and even gave problems to the students of how to reuse some of the

105 old Chicago buildings, they made an apartment building out of Monadnock. They made apartments as a class problem in the Reliance building. I think it’s not a mistake that many of Mies’s people got into restoration, like Vinci. I don’t know how much he worked with Mies exactly. You did learn from Mies respect for good work, even if it was done by other people, respect for materials, anything good that existed, even materials and how you use them. You learned that. When Vinci, I think he certainly worked for a time with Brenner, went into it himself he carried over this respectful attitude for restoration. Certainly he is probably one of the best and does it in a scholarly intelligent way, but not pedantic.

Blum: Maybe there isn’t another term to identify as diverse a situation as you’re describing.

Goldsmith: There’s something more I want to add in between all this. I was saying how perceptive Drexler was in some of his comments on Mies’s work, and how I agreed with them. At the same time, I think, and this has been commented on by others, he rather downplayed all the late work. About fifteen or twenty apartment and office buildings were lumped together in identical-sized pictures, maybe to underscore the repetition of Mies’s work. That included some very big projects. I think he treated Federal Center a little differently, but then there was a similar project in Montreal. I think he was mistaken in his downplaying of it. I use that because I like Arthur very much and I think he’s an extremely bright guy, but I think he is mistaken, because to a museum man, having to show that in an exhibition, they’re repetitious. To an architect looking at them I see nothing wrong in putting a somewhat similar project in Montreal, New York, Chicago, various places in the office buildings and quite similar apartments that Mies did. 860-880 Lake Shore apartment building, to people looking at it superficially, is a repetition of the same theme built on Diversey and Sheridan [Commonwealth Plaza] in clear aluminum. I think that’s the brilliance of the solution that he did not feel compelled to find a different architecture each time because he had done it right. I

106 think this idea that you do a distinct building every time you do one is looking at architecture the way an artist looks at a painting. You are doing another distinct expression. I think it was absolutely brilliant of Mies to repeat these solutions, to not feel compelled to do a different idea. I think Arthur Drexler was saying that. I think if Arthur had wanted to show them distinctly, he could have done that because the site makes them all quite different. The thing that’s distinctive about Mies is that most of his buildings have very beautiful sites so that when you think of his Chicago apartment buildings, for example, or his office building it’s a very special one.

Blum: Do you think the public received a hidden message that all of the buildings, all of these late projects are monotonous and repetitious simply because of the way they were presented in the installation of that exhibition?

Goldsmith: I think the museum people think so. Of course at the Art Institute I think they ignored those buildings altogether actually. If you, and I’ve said this before, wanted to live in the best modern apartment building in Chicago you would probably go into one of Mies’s, because of the site, the beauty of the plan. To have such a commercial and artistic success in one thing, I think is extraordinary. There are a lot of extraordinary things in Mies’s career. He did the Federal Center buildings here which is a major project. Usually those projects in another city are given to the worst hacks, the worst political hacks. You look at it city by city, they’re terrible. It’s unusual that they were given to an architect of Mies’s quality and integrity in Chicago. I don’t know if Mayor Daley, who really did something for architecture in Chicago, had something to do with it.

Blum: Could we go back to SOM for a minute? SOM has the reputation for being an office that is fiercely competitive. How did you survive in that atmosphere?

Goldsmith: I think at least for most of the career I had colleagues who supported me

107 and ran interference for me, I was spared. For example, Dunlap was very supportive, he was a partner, Bruce Graham was very supportive, he was a partner. For a long part of my career I worked with them. I didn’t have big fights, fights or competition with other people. I wasn’t interested in being number one.

Blum: You went to this firm, as you said before, because you really wanted to try out new things. It’s curious to me that when I went to do research on you there were pages and pages of references to SOM buildings and projects. In almost no instance was the designer or the architect in charge mentioned in any individual way, often times not mentioned. It was simply identified as an SOM building.

Goldsmith: You mean in my projects?

Blum: In many of yours and other people’s projects. It seems that the publicity that SOM got treated individuals in a rather anonymous way. Was there leeway for individuality in such a large office?

Goldsmith: Let me see how to explain it. There never was a firm-wide policy on it. I must say that in my own career I always tried to take credit for my own work while at the same time seeing that other people who had an important part in it are mentioned. I think if you look at publications on my work it usually mentions all the other important people. I have kept that up to this day, my book’s going to mention all that. My Harvard exhibit mentioned all the people and what they did on the project. I have always felt that that was proper. It’s only been in relatively recent years that, even with other firms, people have emerged as individuals rather than firm names. I believe very much in that. Maybe that emerged with the development in time that people were more connected. I think the more recent projects, by recent I’m talking the last ten, fifteen, or twenty years, have emerged giving people identification. I know Bruce is identified, Adrian Smith is identified with his projects, Fazlur Khan was identified with projects. Sometimes in a big firm it’s terribly complicated

108 to know who had the idea. When Bruce and Faz worked on a project like on Sears, the engineering magazines had sometimes published it not even mentioning Bruce’s name. I know that caused great distress in the office. I think that’s been a development. In the earlier days, for example, I.M. Pei’s firm, it all went as I.M. Pei and Partners. It’s only recently that people like Jim Freed and Henry Cobb are emerging as they should. I think it’s the same at SOM, not entirely clearly. I noticed in the last book of SOM, which I had nothing to do with, it all gets terribly mysterious as to which office did something and who the individuals were.

Blum: It’s rather difficult to research in published sources to identify someone’s work in the early days.

Goldsmith: I noticed that recent SOM book is very difficult, maybe in all the SOM books. I think no stated policy but various people saying it should go under the firm, or it should go under individuals. The people thinking it should be firm-wide won out. I was not privy to the discussions. I notice in most of the magazine publications individuals are picked out. That is because on many, many things there’s no written policy.

Blum: If the firm only was given credit, using that as a gauge, was there any conflict for you between expressing your individuality and the anonymous quality of the literature?

Goldsmith: I think that I always tried very hard to get the stuff published and to get it as an SOM project with my role in it. I think if you looked at the stuff, to a certain extent, somewhere it’s been published. There are others that lump it just under the firm and I think it’s inevitable. Sometimes you send the stuff to a magazine and they publish it the way they want it, right? On a book like that you have more control, but a magazine does it the way they want to and you could have sent the whole list of everybody who worked on it and the editor took it in his head to just publish it under the work of the firm. Sometimes it gets really garbled. With the Ruck-a- Chucky Bridge, really the main person as far as credit goes was the

109 engineer, T.Y. Lin he took the responsibility for the bridge. We were consultants to him. I noticed something recently published by SOM where he wasn’t even mentioned. I think that you don’t have a czar in the firm in charge of publication. I think it’s a very soft thing. Even policies of the individual office, they could each have their own policies or no policy at all.

Blum: You mentioned a little earlier that you observed a change in the way the publications were presented. Nat Owings made a statement and I’d like you to comment on. He said, “SOM is supposed to be an anonymous group dedicated to producing a better society. Our success has dominated us. We’ve become order takers instead of creators.”

[Tape 6: Side 2]

Goldsmith: You have to decide or look at what time in his career Nat said something.

Blum: It was late.

Goldsmith: It is late. He was probably retired from the firm, very active in preservation, in trying to make this a better society. Before that he’d been very active in Pennsylvania Avenue, I think not on behalf of the firm but trying to do the best job he could. Nat has said lots of things, including sometimes very nice things about gigantic skyscrapers and very biting things about them, depending on when he wrote and what the occasion was. I think he has also said nice things about the tall buildings, maybe even in his biography that he wrote.

Blum: Do you if you agree with his observation?

Goldsmith: Read the quote again.

Blum: “SOM is supposed to be an anonymous group dedicated to producing a better society. Our success has dominated us. We have become order-

110 takers instead of creators.”

Goldsmith: At any time most of the buildings you do, by far the largest number, are done because somebody wants a building of such and such in a certain space. You, the architect, no matter who you are, have the role to do the best building, and hopefully if you’re lucky, a great work of art If you’re not, it will be a normal building. I think SOM has always done a very good job with a few exceptions. In my opinion they have done very nice buildings. There are some cases where you have a great deal of control over events. I’m sure it’s the vision that made Pennsylvania Avenue what it is today, probably Nat’s vision. Not his personally, because there were lots of people, but I think probably when it started it was the Johnson administration and there was great stress on making things nice, beautification, so that things were right for doing it. Nat had a lot to do with it, had a big vision for making this an important street, how far they succeed, some of the buildings along there are real dogs. In general I think it’s certainly superior to most, after all it’s partially commercial on one side and government-controlled on the other. They did some public spaces, some of which were a success and some of them were gross failures. Nat did not have control, or SOM, over this whole long period of development, other people took it over. What did he mean by order- takers instead of creators? I think when you get maybe a project like the Air Force Academy you have a great ability to set a direction in several ways. If you’re doing, say a skyscraper on a site, what you can do is quite limited. I think for a while Nat got anti-skyscraper too, which I must tell you I am not, providing that they follow some sensible city plan. Of course if everything’s overbuilt, then that’s another thing. Or if you’re knocking down great buildings for mediocre ones, I think that’s wrong. I think Nat was always one to speak his mind.

Blum: Somehow in this quote I thought he was expressing a disappointment at the quality of work that SOM was doing as opposed to what they did years ago. I wondered whether you also, having lived through those years, felt the same way.

111 Goldsmith: I can say this. When SOM started doing skyscrapers, both in New York and Chicago, there was no question that it did the best ones. SOM practically pioneered it, did all the important early ones like Chase Manhattan in New York, Inland was one of superb quality. I’m just trying to anticipate what to read into SOM’s mind, Nat’s mind, and in a little bit echo some articles that have been written by critics. Later this ability to do good skyscrapers became more diffused. More firms were doing good buildings, tall buildings. Everybody was getting at it. I think what he was trying to say, where in the early days every building that SOM did was important and made the media, now there are many less. You find other firms doing them. In fact in the publications there are other stars, like Helmut [Jahn], like Kohn Petersen and Fox. He may have been commenting on that.

Blum His statement dates from 1972.

Goldsmith: Probably it was the beginning of that. I still think SOM does very, very good buildings. Some of the monuments, the kind of architecture, that have become so popular, I look on it with a jaundiced eye. I don’t care for it. To wrap it up, at that period maybe in the 1960s if you wanted a good building you had practically nowhere else to go but to SOM. Now, you can go to a dozen firms, all good.

Blum: From 1958 on, until the time you retired, did you witness any change at all within the firm?

Goldsmith: Essentially after my big illness about eight or nine years ago, which would be 1977 or so, I became a consultant. That meant that I really wasn’t in charge of buildings in this long period until my retirement.

Blum: But you were actively working for twenty years?

Goldsmith: Yes. What was your question again?

112 Blum: What change or changes did you observe within the firm during that twenty- or thirty-year period?

Goldsmith: Only to this extent, that I think a change in taste developed in these later years. I think it’s a country or worldwide change in taste. Buildings became more complex, there was an attempt at greater richness, probably. I think the aesthetic changed and the firm was influenced by that. I think that’s okay because I think you are affected by the change in taste, even the taste in color changed. I think that was a change all the way from interiors to clothing, women’s clothing, packaging.

Blum: This change that you’re describing, did that begin with the leaders within the architectural profession or did that come from somewhere else and the people in the architecture profession simply responded to it?

Goldsmith: I think it was throughout the whole visual thing, all the way from graphics to architecture. I think maybe even some of the younger architects who were doing small projects had an influence on the bigger ones. I don’t say this in a cynical way, but their critical and media successes, their acceptance, must have had a big influence. I’m talking in a large way from hearsay and putting things together. I wasn’t really on the firing line so to speak. I think also the taste of clients changed and what they demanded. For example, I think in the early skyscrapers there was a great desire to standardize the size of the office, in fact that was absolutely rigorous that they were fifteen-by-fifteen offices, and that except for the highest echelons they were similarly furnished. Even that isn’t quite true, there were choices, individual choices. These choices began to get much larger, the idea of, you’re not a cog in a wheel but individualized, more shapes of offices. I think certainly that developed further and further until you had a lot of individualism and the individual image of the building. Right now I think you can’t repeat a building because the times are not right. They try to do one that has a distinct image. If it has a popular distinct image it helps in the rental. This is my perception for some of the things that were driving the change in

113 the taste. I think the clients read the magazines, the clients saw who was hot and what ideas were. I think a lot of bad things were done in the name of this. I think people were getting bored with the repetition. I think there was a change in taste. A good building was built and in a few years there was a cheap knock-off of it, or maybe less than a few years. Very few people could discriminate between a quality and poor building. You could have real bronze on Seagram and you could have colored aluminum on the next-door building, which to the uninitiated eye looked just like it. I want to say this opening up to other things does not bother me. I had never believed that everything should be a Miesian building. I think if you had too many of those together they present very great visual difficulties, I mean whole areas of new buildings.

Blum: Do you think Mies was one of the casualties of this changing climate, or his reputation, the popularly perceived Mies?

Goldsmith: No. I think we have to differentiate from who said what or the popular view. Certainly Mies died when things were beginning to change. He would never support a bad building by somebody else or his own.

Blum: You were talking about a change in taste, more elaborate, more decorated, more elaborate. Was his work, with all the knock-offs that were not the same quality, a casualty of this change in taste?

Goldsmith: In what way do you mean? A s re-perceptions of his work?

Blum: I mean, did people discard his work and reject him as a result of this change in taste?

Goldsmith: He died in 1968 and during his lifetime, the last years of his life, his office was extremely busy. He did the Federal Center, if I remember correctly, the IBM, the Illinois Center, he had done the big projects in Canada, in Montreal and Toronto. I think in the last years he left this world as a mighty success. I think the people were beginning to critically pick at

114 him, the critics were beginning to pick at his type of architecture. He was very popular still. That’s not the way I want to say it, popular—I think he had a lot of work. Some of it had started some years before. I think had he lived he would have had more trouble. What I think was a fundamental change in taste, he would have had trouble doing a black building in New York or Chicago. I see recently somebody has done a black building. These are very dangerous things to say what taste is, there are many tastes going on, including surprising successes. I don’t know if I’m doing very well on this part of it.

Blum: While you were at SOM you worked on many projects that took awards. Some were United Airlines from your early years, Kitt Peak work, Chestnut/DeWitt building, Brunswick, Inland Steel, Research Lab. In your opinion what was the most successful?

Goldsmith: Of all the buildings?

Blum: Of everything you worked on whether or not it took an award.

Goldsmith: I think it may be that my ideas of things will change over the years too, but right now I kind of like the Republic, the Solar Telescope, the Ruck-a- Chucky Bridge, even though it’s not been built, the St. Joseph Valley Bank, I guess Brunswick. Those would probably be my favorites, not necessarily in that order. I think you’ve got to give it to a series of things.

Blum: What is the quality or the experience in these five or six projects you’ve named that makes you say they were your most successful?

Goldsmith: The quality? I’m trying to think how to put that. I think each had different things that you could say I like it because of that. The Ruck-a-Chucky Bridge has one set of reasons that I like it, this sort of poetic bridge in the landscape; the Solar Telescope for it’s beautiful form in the landscape, and also for great originality of both of these projects. That’s something extraordinary. I know that the Solar Telescope had an enormous

115 influence on modern sculpture. In the Republic and the St. Joseph Valley Bank we can lump them for very, very nice small buildings and very reasonable, very pleasant buildings, on very pleasant sites in a small town. I think the Brunswick for its boldness and clarity, I think it’s a pretty good-looking building. All of them have a certain timeless quality, I think they’ll be good for a long time. All these projects won’t become dated, I think not.

Blum: One of your better-known colleagues with whom you worked was Fazlur Khan. I assume from what you said at his memorial service that you were a very dear friend of his.

Goldsmith: Yes.

Blum: Would you talk a little bit about him?

Goldsmith: Here’s a little bit of his background. He had joined SOM after he finished his Ph.D. in college. He left in the mid-1950s or so and left for several years to go back to Pakistan. He came back around 1960 or so. Whatever the year I first worked with him on United Airlines Executive Office Building—when the building was almost finished they decided to put an addition on it and he was the engineer of that addition. I met him and realized that he was an extraordinarily brilliant man, even though I didn’t know how brilliant. About 1961 or so I began to teach. I asked him if he would join me as the engineer in teaching because my work has a structural character and you can only work on it properly if you’re working hand in hand with an engineer. He agreed. I don’t think we worked on as many buildings in engineering in SOM as much as projects in the school, which later were prototypes for Hancock, Baxter, Onterie Center—these were done as student projects—and several others. What is less well known is that the prototype for the first McCormick Place and the addition were done in the school. The second one was done by Fazlur and Sharpe. It was a wonderful exciting period. We became very good friends. Toward the end of his life he became less active in the school. He

116 took on projects in Saudi Arabia and I saw much less of him. For almost twenty years I saw him.

Blum: What was he like as a person?

Goldsmith: First of all, he was a brilliant, competent guy who had in the course of working as an engineer, I’d say with Bruce and with me, developed a very keen aesthetic appreciation and sense. He also had a great sense for the aesthetics of engineering and its importance. He believed whole- heartedly, very strongly, in buildings coming out of the engineering aesthetic, the expression of structure, but the aesthetic expression of structure. It wasn’t just any exposure. He had boundless energy. I think he wrote over one hundred articles for technical journals during his lifetime. He lectured many times. He loved to do things. He was supposed to have been the head of the Chicago Architecture Club, I’m not quite sure why Stanley wanted that. When he died, I became it. I’m not sure why. I think it was something engineered by Stanley. Faz began to get interested in Islamic cultural and religious things when he became involved in projects in Saudi Arabia and served on more and more important committees, including a committee for the Aga Khan Award.

[Tape 7: Side 1]

Goldsmith: There’s something I want to add that we previously covered and this was the question of Skidmore replacing Mies on work for IIT campus, especially the student union building and later the library, for which Mies had done preliminary projects. There were several partners at SOM who had been Mies’s students. Their work was very heavily influenced by Mies’s work so it was for many people at SOM a dilemma. I know, and I previously referred to that, Bunshaft had called Mies. I think Hartmann had been in touch with the administration. What came back to us was that the school had decided that they would not work with Mies and if SOM decided not to do the student union, I guess that was the project which was at issue, then they would go to another firm. This then seemed

117 to end the discussion. I guess I was not a partner at the time. I got these discussions second-hand. People like Bill Dunlap, John Weese, Jim Hammond, had all been students with Mies and in the case of Dunlap and Weese, had worked in Mies’s office. For them, as well as for some of us who weren’t in the partnership, it was a very big problem for which there seemed nothing to be done about it. At least we felt that if SOM did it they would do it in a way that was respectful of Mies’s work. It is true that for years the future work on the IIT campus done by Skidmore or other people, Schmidt Garden worked on the Research Foundation, never deviated from what we can say are Mies’s ideas. In retrospect the library and the student union were not really good buildings and so you get into the problem of how respectful of Mies are you to do it. I still think not a very good building but it was better than somebody doing a totally foreign building in the middle of the campus that thumbed its nose at the other buildings.

Blum: Was that the idea behind the original discussion that came back to you, that someone totally alien to Mies’s ideas would then be given the commissions?

Goldsmith: That was rather left hanging. There was no speculation on who might be the other people. The campus administration could chose anybody, it would all be up for grabs.

Blum: It is curious, as you pointed out, that the library was done by somebody at Skidmore that was not necessarily of Mies’s persuasion.

Goldsmith: It’s very, very interesting—we have to go back to that. Walter was put in charge of these buildings, Walter Netsch. Why he and not Bruce, who was also a design partner, it’s not clear to me. Walter had done the Air Force Academy, which was, shall we say, very Miesian in its outlook. One could expect it to keep on that way. I think that was the idea. Walter is a very talented architect. That seemed to be a way out of the dilemma, maybe a cop-out. We weren’t directly involved in it, we could say we’re

118 not going to touch it. Later, of course, I did work on buildings on the campus, the gym and some classroom buildings, which I tried to do in Mies’s spirit. In the case of the classroom buildings, they were very, very close to the other buildings on the campus in appearance, which had been Mies’s intention, that there would be a single vocabulary with a few exceptions like Crown Hall.

Blum: If you did not know that Mies had wished for it to look like that, would you at that point have done something else?

Goldsmith: I debated with myself, I don’t know if I articulated it to Michael Pado who was working on the campus with me. He was out of Mies and he was with the school. Mike was and is a very good architect. We debated whether in the view that things were different, many years had elapsed, that the new buildings were now air-conditioned, which meant dropping ceilings instead of an eighteen-inch construction, as was on the early buildings, you had several feet to accommodate air conditioning. The question was whether to do it in the same constructive way but change it somewhat. You might use the black steel and the same brick, but you might find a different solution. I thought about it for a while and even probably made some sketches on what could be done. I decided to stay with the old appearance of things, the old system, for a couple of reasons: I seemed not to have been able to come up with anything better or as good; and the other thing was that we had no guarantee that after doing a building we would be invited back to do another, that they wouldn’t go to another architect. It was a building-by-building agreement, one at a time. I felt that once you broke down the discipline of the campus, the look of it, and opened it up to something different, then some future architect, not us, would feel absolutely free to do anything. It was clear there were simpler ways to do this building, this black steel which was the curtain-wall solution of the campus, was certainly a more expensive solution than the concrete buildings with brick infill that existed on the research part of the campus. That was one way that it might open up. Up until this time and throughout, everybody managed to hold the line, the

119 academic buildings were steel and the research buildings were concrete. They were slightly cheaper than the academic buildings. That was wonderful that we were able to hold that line. The steel buildings were finer, more architectural, and slightly even better quality. We were able to hold that. I thought if you open the whole thing up, God knows what would happen, certainly you would get some concrete buildings in the academic part.

Blum: So, in terms of your personal contribution to the IIT campus through SOM, you felt it was certainly in keeping with what Mies had originally designed and you felt no conflict in doing that?

Goldsmith: Years had passed, maybe it’s a cop-out but by the time I had started to work on the campus several years had passed with SOM having finished the library and the student union building. I’d say maybe four or more years. I don’t know if Mies was even still alive at that point. I think he had said and I had heard that later the administration came back and asked him to do the library after SOM did the student union and he refused to do it. I thought this was necessary to add.

Blum: How do you think the architectural community, in that they were incensed about the fact that Mies had been dismissed, how do you think they then felt about subsequent buildings that were built on the campus? Was there any conversation about it?

Goldsmith: Nothing ever came back to me. In a way I felt the dilemma of continuing that scheme exactly, even though in the gym we did something for which there wasn’t quite a Mies precedent although it was in his vocabulary. I felt that continuing this in the exact same way, perhaps it lacked a little life, a little variation that Mies might have given it if he had continued. It’s worth wondering what Mies would have done if he had continued, he might have changed it himself. I think there’s probably in the parts I did maybe there’s too much similarity between one building and another that could be changed. I’ve debated with myself over the years, was it correct.

120 I think in the case of Engineering Building Number One, this was a quite large building, and to keep the old scale of the campus a lot of stuff was put underground in the basement which maybe should not have been done. The debate can go on.

Blum: Do you think Mies and his teaching methods tended to create disciples?

Goldsmith: I’m one of those that resent the title of that Art Institute exhibition very much [The Unknown Mies and His Disciples of Modernism].

Blum: What do you resent about it?

Goldsmith: I think in my case with the exception of, say, the campus where I was finishing, where I felt I was working on the work with Mies, and one tries to carry out what you understand to have been his intention. I think a disciple has a meaning that everybody strove against in their work, that is to follow what was the Miesian line precisely. I think it’s very unfair, the title is loaded. When I think of people who were Mies’s students, like myself, whose work certainly strove in other directions. I never, in one of my works used a mullion on a highrise building, which is so characteristic of Mies. Let’s take other people, Jim Freed who is a partner of Pei’s in that firm, while the great influence on their work, their great direction, was obviously Miesian, they tried always to do very original things. Freed certainly carried it forward. His best known building is the white building at 88 Pine Street in New York City. It certainly is no Mies building. Now his mature work, the Javits Convention Center, in New York, is a wonderful original building. It certainly has to be considered as an original work, there is nothing like it in Mies’s work, although I think superficially somebody could say that it’s a Mies building because it’s dark, it’s orderly, it’s structure. Certainly I consider that a very original work. People who are lumped in the disciples category like Brenner, went into preservation and went into interiors, which he did in a very original way. I think to call him a disciple is just wrong. And Gene Summers who did McCormick Place, that’s certainly an original place. He remodeled the

121 Biltmore in Los Angeles, which was an old building, with great respect. I guess what’s Miesian about that is respect for good work, respect for somebody else’s work. That you might say is Miesian, otherwise there’s nothing in that to say that he was a disciple.

Blum: Throughout the history of architecture the younger generation seems to find it necessary to criticize the generation of architects that preceded them in order to establish their own credibility. Is that at work here?

Goldsmith: Yes. Of course, there are big changes that occurred. When I say big changes, changes in taste have occurred in all things, in architecture, in clothing, in colors. We’re going through this right now. Things that looked very good and convincing ten years ago, today people view them differently, things have evolved. I think it’s a taste difference rather than we are now much brighter than before. You have to be careful in your criticism. I think it has to be done with some intelligence. For example, it is true nobody would build buildings like Mies today. I think if he were alive he would be without work, just as Sullivan at a certain time went out of fashion and was completely without work. He was a very great architect. With the advent of neoclassicism and art deco, this exuberance of Sullivan must have looked hopelessly old-fashioned. I think that was probably what was happening. We have to be careful, or critics have to be intelligent, when looking at the work of the recent past, looking at wonderful buildings. There were good buildings done, and don’t forget that was the period of Saarinen, Aalto, Mies, and Corbusier. We don’t just dismiss very good buildings. For example, Crown Hall was a wonderful building, Seagram is a wonderful building, I think McCormick Place is a wonderful building, the first McCormick Place especially. I think you don’t remodel them now, I hope we have more sense than that, to bring it up to current taste.

Blum: Is what you’re talking about, an historical evaluation, that allow the good things, the really fine things, to stand out among all the rest that were done at that the same time? Is that a product of time? Is time a factor in

122 evaluating this?

Goldsmith: You mean that later they will be looked on for what they are?

Blum: Yes, and seen as outstanding for their time.

Goldsmith: I think you have to have a little historical perspective on things too. For example, wonderful Gothic cathedrals, chapels, churches, interiors, and altars were remodeled by the Baroque. Sometimes they were taken out and they still exist, sometimes they were smashed.

[Tape 7: Side 2]

Goldsmith: To us it’s incredible that this would happen, that Baroque architects would be so disrespectful of some other person’s work as to smash it. It was looked on as absolutely too grim, too out of style. I think there have been other periods when beautiful Georgian houses were remodeled by the Victorians. That’s not to dismiss the Victorians, because they did some wonderful things too. The idea in this period of preservation, or understanding that people could vandalize something very beautiful, like a Georgian house, in favor of later taste. But somebody who owned a Georgian house wanted a porch, so he felt it was all fair. There was more than that, people who actually remodeled. I think today, when there is such a big change in taste, you have to look at things in the past with the idea to know if they were they of good quality. Do we respect something that is old or has been done in a good way even if the taste of time which we look on as a little bit quaint, but that it was something of quality and worth preserving, even if it’s not up-to-the-minute? I find very few people who can think in this way who are talking about architecture, that there were things of high modernism, if that’s the buzz word, of the modernist movement that were wonderfully done. There is value in preserving. There are people that do it. For example, Mies’s Arts Club, they very carefully don’t change its colors. If something wears out they buy something exactly like it. I think people still enjoy that taste. If it’s not

123 up-to-the-minute taste, somebody else would remodel it. I’m not going to name names, some hot firm. I think this view of things, this respect, it’s part of the preservation movement. One would think it’s quite impossible to do that. I think there have been intemperate attacks on very good things. Just look at the way, going a little bit afield, that Corbusier has gone out of style. Almost anybody who is more than forty years old was either influenced by Mies or Corbusier through his school years and through his early work. Now, you never read anything about him except as an attack on Corbu.

Blum: Do you feel that his presence in the flow of twentieth-century architecture is firmly established even though people are not building or not designing in that vein any longer?

Goldsmith: I don’t know. I think from the point of view that when the dust settles he will be looked on as a great thinker, as a great artist, great architect, original artist, yes I do. Certainly one does not see his influence in the school, perhaps the sole hold-out is Richard Meier. I praise him for his integrity and having a set of ideas which he has not thrown over when the going gets a little rough. Luckily he has a lot of work, he has the Getty. He doesn’t have to fit in with the popular taste. I’m sure with his integrity, with his ideas, I’m sure he doesn’t get a lot of commissions that he might, considering his basic talent.

Blum: Does it worry you that comments of critics could taint or obliterate Mies from history?

Goldsmith: I think obliterated from history is going too far.

Blum: As you describe it with Corbu.

Goldsmith: Let me put it in another way, do I think that the condominium owners or the owners of 860-880 will decide that they want to remodel the lobby in a postmodern style. Do I think that is possible? I don’t know, at the

124 moment, no. I think these people who live there are very proud of it. They’ve just remodeled it and done a very faithful job, I think in better materials. I think they used stainless sometimes where it was painted. I think there is that part of it, the old buildings on Lake Shore Drive where it’s going east and west, have kept that up through all the changes of taste. I think they’re glorious. I think even if people are not doing things this way now, I think the probability is that they will preserve these things. Remember that the Sullivan building, the building near the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue [Gage building], the ground floor was remodeled in the cheapest, crummiest way and they broke up the Sullivan beautiful ornament, which you have fragments of in the Art Institute. What barbarism is that? It does happen. Many, many buildings, probably half the important Chicago School buildings have been torn down since World War II, the Chicago Stock Exchange, of which you got fragments. That is my view of it. How to finish it up? At least today there is a very strong preservationist movement of seeing in these old things richness and value. I hope it will continue.

Blum: May we return to what you’re saying just a minute ago? I wanted to mention in terms of your presence in the architectural community related to what you’ve said about the disciples or the Art Institute show, Carl Condit said, “Goldsmith is the leading exponent of the Miesian dictum, that whenever technology reaches real fulfillment, it transcends into architecture.”

Goldsmith: When did he say that?

Blum: In his book [Chicago, 1930-1970]. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?

Goldsmith: Let me say that I think the idea is more diffused, to say I’m the leading exponent, I’ll accept that I’m one of them. I hope I’m one of them. For example, I visited the Javits Convention Center last week in New York. I met Freed there. That is wonderful. I would be happy if I could do something that good. I think it is these ideas. I think Mies would have

125 been proud of him. I hate to tie him to Mies because Mies never did anything like that, never any space like that, never that structure. I think it’s an idea. Today maybe the ones who are the most noticed are the English high-tech people, like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. There are others. I think this has some differences from what we are doing, but they are trying to say something about technology too. We’re different from them and I think in some respects we disagree. Nevertheless, they are very active on big projects. Pei’s firm, he has been doing the Bank of China now, in Hong Kong, which I think is going to be an exciting structural expression. The movement, this idea is very much alive and I would hope that it’s not just concentrated in me. In fact, as you know, what I’m doing is mostly projects at the moment. It will take the active people to do it.

Blum: Myron, hasn’t that been somewhat the course of your career? Years ago you were doing projects that in fact didn’t get built at the time, but twenty years later someone at Skidmore, or elsewhere, realized those projects?

Goldsmith: Yes that’s true. My guess is that Skidmore still has a big movement in it in that way, the technological movement. Bruce has just finished the expansion of the Convention Center and certainly that’s in that direction. If I can tell, the Quaker Tower building seems to be a rectangular building. I can’t speak about Skidmore because I have not terribly much contact with the firm at the moment.

Blum: My comment was focused on you and how your work has reverberated in built architecture, either at the time or eventually.

Goldsmith: I’m sure it has an importance but I was just trying to question the leading exponent.

Blum: Do you agree with what Condit says, that Mies proposed technology that when developed to its fullest transcended into architecture?

126 Goldsmith: Oh, yes, I agree with that absolutely.

Blum: You talked a minute ago about preservation, I said I’d like to go back to that. You are a fellow of the AIA and have been a member for many years. What do you think the value of the AIA is in the architectural community?

Goldsmith: First, in general I support what the AIA is doing. I think it has a very valuable function. It has many, many facets, all the way from the nuts and bolts, like how to insure architects against being sued, to awards, to a magazine that shows important work, to everything. I think in that it has a very important function. As far as I can tell it’s doing a good job, it’s attracting a lot of devoted people to it.

Blum: The AIA, unlike what you’ve just said, does have its critics—architects who have dropped membership because they felt the AIA hasn’t been forthright in their stand on certain issues. For an issue such as preservation, which is a critical issue, historically important, has the AIA ever taken a stand on such an issue as preservation or standards, things of this sort?

Goldsmith: Certainly from the number of buildings we have lost, their efforts have not been enough. Certainly in the forefront of the preservation movement have been the architects, trying to preserve. I’m trying to think whether, for example, in the case of the Stock Exchange, the fight over that, or the Garrick Theatre, whether it was carried on by individual architects or the Chicago chapter of the AIA as a body got involved in it. I can’t remember. That was done largely by architects.

Blum: But individually

Goldsmith: I can’t remember whether the Chicago chapter got involved in it.

Blum: Assuming they did not, do you think it is reasonable for them to have a

127 policy about preservation issues?

Goldsmith: I would be amazed, and now I’m embarrassed. I can’t believe that they don’t have policies in favor of preservation.

Blum: They do have a preservation officer. With the AIA being such an all- encompassing important organization for architects, I’m raising the issue whether they do it, and if they do it do they do enough, in your opinion?

Goldsmith: Let me say that the preservation business has been a series of disasters ever since I can remember. Sure they should do more, they should do everything that they can. Again, I’m not expert on what they are doing or not doing. Maybe this is a fault, I consider it very important to do it and I may not have done everything I personally can do, which would be a criticism. I’ve been on the side of preservation ever since I can remember. Certainly whether I have done enough personally, probably not.

Blum: Preservation is only one of the issues, setting standards, supporting architects in difficult situations, taking a stand on controversial issues is, I suppose, a broader picture of what I’m asking. I wonder if you think the AIA serves that function well for architects?

Goldsmith: For example, they came to the defense of Holabird and Root on this issue of the [Chicago Public] Library against this confusion. I agree with their stand in defense of it. It was a very good report that I read by Hartray and then Harry Weese. They came out with this report in spite of several other AIA members who were personally involved in trying to put it in the park, like Booth. I think they acted very properly on that. I read the report, it was very thoughtful, very thorough. Hopefully it will do some good against all the confusion that’s been thrown up. I cannot speak of every issue, but certainly in that issue I think they were right. This doesn’t answer have they done enough, have they sometimes, because of political pressures, failed to take a stand. I am sure, but then individuals are free to act their conscience, to break with the AIA. Don’t forget the

128 AIA is the membership, if the members pressured it to take a stand on something I’m sure it would, at least the local chapter of the AIA. No. I don’t know whether I’ve clarified anything for you. You say people have apparently dropped out because of the wishy-washy stand of the AIA. I have never been in AIA politics and so I do not know if a strong stand to preserve a building was killed because the word got in that one of the prominent members who is building a building to replace it doesn’t want that in. I’m sure there are all kinds of pressures like that. Again, the members individually are free to disagree, come out in disagreement with the AIA policy if they are wrong.

Blum: Myron, does Chicago have an architectural establishment? Is there an establishment here?

Goldsmith: What do you mean by that?

Blum: I suppose on the most superficial level, is the “in” group, or people who influence the course of things and are powerful, does that exist in Chicago?

Goldsmith: Again my impression, you have to define what you mean by the establishment and the “in” group. Is there somebody or a group who, if they want to, can do anything within reason? I’d say I don’t think they’re that powerful. With the changes in administration, I think if you’re in with one you may be out with the next mayor. You just have to think of Harry Weese who has in general been a force for good. I think he was one of the spearheads who really had the ear of mayors and certainly had a lot to do with the saving of the Auditorium Theatre. He was the architect. I think his influence continues in Inland Architect, but my impression is that he certainly is not a powerful force at City Hall, having the ear of the mayor. I don’t know who is, I have the impression that nobody has it. There are people who are active in the Metropolitan Housing Council.

Blum: Have there been people in the past thirty years who have been considered

129 the “establishment”?

Goldsmith: I hate to use that word. Let me say that when Bill Hartmann was active I think he was a voice for good. I think he had a certain influence with Daley at a time, not to the point of getting big city jobs. For example, let me just say that during the Daley administration Murphy did some very good buildings. They did the O’Hare, and in my opinion did a very good job on it. To what extent it was the elder Murphy’s personal relation with the mayor, I don’t know. When Mies did the Federal Center it was amazing to me that an architect of Mies’s quality and uncompromising ideas should design this federal project. As is well known, most of the projects are given out to authentic hacks in another city, the worst level of architecture is done on these federal centers. All that in Chicago. Certainly Mies was not an architect of clout. The senators and Dirksen must have been made to realize that this was so. The city for many years, I think, was a patron of very good architecture. I don’t know what’s happening now, I’m sure much less so. I think at that time, from what I know, the mayor had a big push that you build things and you build them with excellence. He must have been getting advice from intelligent people. Even I ended up doing all these rapid transit stations for some reason.

Blum: How did that happen?

Goldsmith: I’m not even sure. They probably interviewed and considered different architects, I don’t remember, that was a long time ago.

Blum: Where you interviewed?

Goldsmith: I can’t remember if I was in the interviewing process or the interview firm. SOM was certainly one of the more prominent firms in Chicago, they got to do the Civic Center with Murphy. I think it was a glorious time in Chicago. Jacques Brownson was head of that big group of schools that had to be done, it was sort of amazing. I think it was a very good

130 period for Chicago.

Blum: Are you saying that you’re not sure there was an establishment, or is?

Goldsmith: I think you’ve got to come to grips with what you mean by that. Is there a group of architects who meet in a smoke-filled room and divide up the work between them? I don’t think it was from that point of view. I think it just happened that the biggest firms, the firms most competent to handle big projects, happened to have been good architectural firms and the largest firms in Chicago. If you want to say the establishments, that they got most of the work. I think they could not have gone in and said to the city, “Now you save the Stock Exchange, Mr. Mayor.” I think at that time Hartmann probably had a certain influence with the mayor on questions of civic architecture. But is it an establishment in that way? There are things they couldn’t do, they couldn’t get the world’s fair finally, even though they tried very hard for Chicago. They couldn’t save many buildings that would have been nice to save. God, we barely saved the Glessner house by the skin of our teeth. I don’t know whether Philip Johnson gave the money to save it. It is incredible. I think they only had to raise $60,000. I think SOM gave money for it, for that buying of it. Then there are honest differences. Harry Weese tried very hard for his own scheme for the world’s fair. He just went at it hammer and tong even though the difference between his scheme and SOM’s scheme looked very, very slight, at least to me. You do have disagreements among prominent architects, the big offices. I don’t know whether I’ve answered your question, Betty.

Blum: You’ve answered it as you perceive the establishment, which may be different from the way other people see the establishment.

Goldsmith: I’m sure if you’re a small architect, or a small-sized firm, and you think you would like to do the Civic Center and it goes to a consortium of SOM and Murphy, which is global, then you think they’re the establishment and you have every right to have gotten it because you’re a consortium

131 that you put together. I’m not saying it’s as silly as that, if that’s what they mean by the establishment, not getting their fair share. The last group of stations on the Dan Ryan was divided between four firms. We did one—I did one—Helmut did the one at the airport, there was one done by Perkins and Will, and Ralph Youngren did one. I don’t know if people who would like to have done that thought, there goes the establishment, how did Ralph Youngren manage to get one?

Blum: It’s certainly understandable, as you point out, that everyone would view the question from their own point of view, their own perspective. Myron, did the profession of architecture have an impact your family in any way?

Goldsmith: How do you mean?

Blum: The work of an architect demands certain things from you perhaps in ways that another profession wouldn’t. Did it inspire or influence your nuclear family or extended family?

Goldsmith: I’ve spent a lot of time on it, both teaching and in professional practice.

[Tape 8: Side 1]

Goldsmith: Robin and I have made many architectural trips. I guess for most years our vacations were spent going and looking at architecture in some way or another, whether it was in this country or in Europe. I was involved, preoccupied. As far as my children, none of them is interested to be an architect and Robin’s field is other than architecture, history, literature, religion although I have discussed most things on my mind with her. She has edited things I write. She is very involved and very knowledgeable.

Blum: You mentioned the fact that you taught. You did spend many years in teaching as well as in private practice. Which of those two parts of your career has been the most satisfying to you?

132 Goldsmith: I think undoubtedly the both together. I think certainly while I was with SOM the work there always took precedence. I tried to arrange my professional life so I never had to give up a class or meeting with my class. They were graduate students working on theses so life doesn’t come to an end if you miss a session with a student, you see him next time. I tried to take teaching seriously and keep conflicts away. From the standpoint of the development of my career, I’d say my professional work was more important than the teaching development of my career. I think the professional work was more important but I always considered the teaching as adding to it, enabling you to take a longer view of things, being able to look at something maybe a little more theoretically.

Blum: You taught graduate students and when you studied with Mies you were also a graduate student.

Goldsmith: I actually studied one year as an undergraduate, one year as a graduate student with him.

Blum: With that as sort of a parallel, how does your teaching differ from that of Mies? Let’s do it the other way around, are there things about the way Mies taught that you emulate?

Goldsmith: There’s no question that my teaching is within IIT and as such, there is a whole body of ideas which the school represents, the quality of work that’s expected. Even the way of working with models has come out of Mies’s way of teaching, where you work on a building with models as a primary way of working rather than sketching and drawing. That has come out of IIT. The idea of what is architecture, that architecture comes out of structure. The great importance of the visual part of architecture I think comes out of Mies, and that is very strong always in the school. The problems are different, there are differences and similarities. Mies would give the students projects that he was interested in to do as a thesis, they would discuss it. I’m sure if a student wanted to do a church or something Mies would probably say ok, there have been several churches

133 done. I have a student who wanted to do a church and she’s doing a Catholic church. I think probably where I am different from Mies, sometimes I let a student do something in a way that interests him and that I wouldn’t quite go about it that way. I do that because I’m interested to see what will happen out of that kind of complication. I think Mies would never allow something to come of the school that he didn’t agree with. By that I don’t mean that the quality of the work did not vary from student to student, it did, because in the end it is the student who has to do it. I think probably the difference is that if a student is very interested in something, knows what he or she is talking about, that I will probably go along with it much more than Mies might have done.

Blum: Are you learning from the projects, if a student initiates it?

Goldsmith: Yes. I think every teacher learns from what the students do. The theses vary, sometimes the students are much more—they go their own way. It is always something. You make suggestions that give your idea and the student comes up with ideas. Those projects are very often somehow more or less collaborations.

Blum: What do you hope most that you have communicated to your students?

Goldsmith: I hope they’ll go out and do good work. I hope they become good architects and not necessarily doing things that are in my image, but I hope not doing awful things, the things that I think are awful. I’m not speaking so much about the philosophical awful as just doing bad work. I hope we’ve given him some sense of doing things well and some sense of quality. I think that’s the most I can say about it.

Blum: In the course of your own career, what was your greatest opportunity?

Goldsmith: Greatest opportunity that I muffed? Let me just tell you that story. I think it will embarrass me all my days. I was working I forget on what, the Brunswick Building, I guess, and maybe Chestnut Dewitt, when Hancock

134 came up. Bruce had the Hancock. I’d been working with Bruce and he asked me did I have time to work on it. I think I said, “I’m very busy.”

Blum: But Myron, your ideas were incorporated into that building with or without you.

Goldsmith: Yes. It would have been different. Was it Hancock or Sears? Now I don’t remember. I’ve kicked myself for that ever since, I don’t know if it was Hancock or Sears. So that was my greatest opportunity—the one that got away.

Blum: What was your greatest opportunity that you took?

Goldsmith: I think when I was in Italy, nearing the end of my Fulbright, and Bill Dunlap called and said, “Would you like to come to San Francisco and work for SOM on these hangars.” I instantly said, “Yes.” I think this long association with SOM was probably by far the most important thing professionally.

Blum: In 1966 you said, “If I have a vision of architecture, it is that the majority of buildings should be a structural solution. The most modest solution for the problem, carefully executed and placed in its setting. If approached that way, civic order will be achieved.” Do you still feel the same way now, twenty years later?

Goldsmith: Did I really say that? Read it again.

Blum: This was published in the Royal Institute of British Architects Journal, 1966. “If I have a vision of architecture, it is that the majority of buildings should be a structural solution. The most modest solution for the problem, carefully executed and placed in its setting. If approached that way, civic order will be achieved.”

Goldsmith: Let’s discuss it up to the last phrase. I still agree this is the way to do

135 architecture. That rather big mouthful of “civic order will be achieved,” one can interpret that first part of it any way—carefully done, carefully placed in its setting. In a way, you can say that that should make things pretty good. I don’t think it’s the whole story for making cities. You may do your building right, according to all the rules, and it may still lead to an overcrowded city or other bad implications. I think people have struggled with it. I don’t know if you will achieve civic order just that simply. In my book you have all the right qualities. I’ve as much said if you do everything right the end result will be right. If you look at it that way, I suppose that’s correct. How to deal with our cities on a large scale is something that I think you cannot say in one simple sentence. I think probably I claimed too much for it.

Blum: Now that you’ve had the benefit of twenty years hindsight, you just wrote a book, the title of which is what?

Goldsmith: It’s called Goldsmith: Concepts and Buildings.

Blum: Did you touch on this idea in your book?

Goldsmith: There are a couple of parts, there are two essays in the book, which deal with architecture from a larger view and more on a theoretical aspect. I’m sorry to say that I really did not deal in it with the problem with the cities. I dealt more with what is architecture and explaining what I did. By that doesn’t mean that I am not interested, in fact I’m immensely interested in how the buildings worked out in their larger contexts. I was dealing at the level of the individual building, what I thought a good building was. I did not cast any information on that subject.

Blum: Myron, what would you like most to be remembered for?

Goldsmith: I hope for some of the projects I did that will give people pleasure and will be of some significance in this constant striving for good architecture. I hope some of these buildings and ideas will help. That’s it.

136 Blum: We’ve spoken in three separate sessions, is there anything that we touched on in any of our sessions that you’d like to expand on or something that we didn’t speak about that you’d like to address.

Goldsmith: Betty, nothing stands out. I may have left something out but I can’t think of anything.

Blum: If a researcher wanted to do more work on Goldsmith, where would someone find more information about you other than the standard published sources, this oral history, which will be in Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, and some of your drawings that we have at the Art Institute? Have you placed any of your papers or drawings on deposit anywhere else?

Goldsmith: I’m thinking what happened. I think things are in fairly good shape. For example, SOM has very good records of all the work in my whole career in the firm. In the Galvin Library at IIT are all the thesis projects that I worked on. There is this biography and bibliography, which you have a copy of, and every publication of every lecture, every jury I served on, every exhibition, every project, thanks to my secretary, Madge Spiegler. I think all the important things are in public places now. There are a few things that I have. I’ve tried very hard to publish everything. This book doesn’t have every building published, it has the ones which I consider worthwhile. I think there won’t be any secrets or any surprises with that. I’ve tried hard to be orderly without knowing what the end result was. I wanted to do this book because I think it gathers the important things in one place. I thought it was important to put these ideas down as clearly as I could. I think anybody that’s interested it’s going to all be very accessible.

Blum: Thank you.

Goldsmith: You’re welcome, Betty.

137 SELECTED REFERENCES

Adams, Robert K. “Reference Library.” Arts and Architecture 80 (May 1963):24-25. Cardon, Charlotte M. “The World’s Biggest Camera.” Architectural Forum 127 (October 1967):44-49. “Case History of an Industrial Complex.” Western Architect and Engineer 121 (February 1961):12-21. “Chicago’s New Rapid Transit Extensions.” Architectural Record 50 (November 1971):129- 132. Condit, Carl W. Chicago, 1930-1970. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Davis, Douglas. “Spans to Set Spirits Soaring.” Newsweek, 30 July 1979, pp. 80-83. “Five Projects: Myron Goldsmith and James D. Ferris in Conjunction with Collaborators.” Arts and Architecture 73 (November 1956):14-17. Goldsmith, Myron. Myron Goldsmith: Buildings and Concepts. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1987. _____. “RIBA Annual Discourse.” Royal Institute of British Architects Journal (June 1966):252-257. _____. “Structural Digest: Effects of Scale.” American Institute of Architects Journal 69 (October 1980):60-62. _____. “The Tall Building: the Effects of Scale.” Quarterly Column (Japan) 6 (April 1963):38-48. Miller, Nory. “A Critic’s View of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill: Staying on Top or Just Staying Alive?” Chicago, May 1982, pp. 156-157. “Myron Goldsmith Appointed Noyes Visiting Professor of Architecture.” Harvard Graduate School of Design News 17 (January-February 1983):1-3. “A New Multi-Use Gymnasium for I.I.T.” Architectural Record 146 (July 1969):111-113. Pigeon, Monica. “Myron Goldsmith: The Visual Solution.” Library of Tape/Slide Talks on Architecture (London) 1984. “The Republic: A Century-old Midwestern Newspaper Builds with Elegance and Civic Pride.” Architectural Record 151 (May 1972):114-117. Rottenberg, Dan. “SOM: The Big, The Bad and the Beautiful.” Chicago, May 1982, pp. 151-155, 196-202. “Seattle’s Sophisticated Tower.” Western Architect and Engineer 219 (May 1960):21-25.

138 Stephans, Suzanne. “SOM at Midlife.” Progressive Architecture 62 (May 1981):138-141. Temko, Allan. “A Dream of Splendor for Oakland.” San Francisco Chronicle, 30 April 1962, p. 15. _____. “Goldsmith: Chicago’s New Structural Poet.” Architectural Forum 118 (May 1962):134-139. _____. “Portland’s Great Hall of Glass.” Architectural Forum 114 (April 1961):108-111, 181. Weingarten, Paul. “Engineering Marvels Spanning the Ages.” Chicago Tribune, 1 December 1977, sec. 2, pp. 1, 4. Winter, John. “Myron Goldsmith.” Contemporary Architects. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980.

139 MYRON GOLDSMITH, F.A.I.A.

Born: 15 September 1918, Chicago, Illinois Died: 15 July 1996, Chicago, Illinois

Education: B.S. in Architecture, Armour Institute of Technology, 1939 M.S. in Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1953 University of Rome, 1953-1955

Military Service: United States Army, Corps of Engineers, 1944-1946

Work Experience: Several offices as structural designer, 1939-1944 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1946-1953 Independent work in Rome, 1953-1955 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, 1955-1983

Teaching Experience: Illinois Institute of Technology, 1961-1980 Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1982-1983 Huaehong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, The Peoples’ Republic of China, 1985

Honors and Awards: Fulbright Fellow, 1953 Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 1972

Selected Projects: United Air Lines Hangars and Flight Kitchen San Francisco, California, 1960 60” Solar Telescope, Kitt Peak, Arizona, 1962 Brunswick Office Building, Chicago, Illinois, 1965 Life Science Building, 1966; Keating Sports Center, Engineering Building No. 1, 1967; Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, Oakland, California, 1968 The Republic Newspaper Plant, Columbus, Indiana, 1971 Rapid Transit Stations, Chicago, Illinois, 1969 150’ Stellar Telescope, Kitt Peak, Arizona, 1972 Ruck-A-Chucky Bridge (project), Auburn, California, 1978 Ft. Dearborn Station Post Office, Chicago, Illinois, 1979

Selected Award Winning Projects: 1963, Chicago Chapter, American Institute of Architects, Honor Award, United Air Lines Executive Office Building, Elk Grove, Illinois 1963, American Institute of Steel Construction, Award of Excellence, 60” Solar Telescope, Kitt Peak, Arizona

140 1966, Chicago Chapter American Institute of Architects, Citation of Merit, Brunswick Building, Chicago, Illinois 1967, American Society of Civil Engineers, Award of Merit, Oakland Alameda County Coliseum, Oakland, California 1969, Chicago Chapter, American Institute of Architects, Distinguished Building Award, Arthur Keating Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois 1970, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Design Excellence Award, Dan Ryan Rapid Transit Stations 1975, American Institute of Architects, Honor Award for Achievement of Excellence in Design, The Republic Newspaper Plant, Columbus, Indiana 1978, Chicago Chapter, American Institute of Architects, Distinguished Building Award, St. Joseph Valley Bank, Elkhart, Indiana 1979, Progressive Architecture, First Award for Architectural Design, Ruck-a-Chucky Bridge, Auburn, California 1980, Metropolitan Chicago Masonry Council, Excellence in Masonry Gold Medal for Merit in Design, Ft. Dearborn Station Post Office, Chicago, Illinois

For more than twenty years Myron also served on committees in prestigious academic institutions and professional associations; served on architectural and engineering juries; exhibited his work in important museums in the United States and Europe; and presented lectures and published papers too numerous to list.

141 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

Aalto, Alvar 122 Chermayeff, Serge 90-91 Alberti, Leon Battista 89 Chestnut Dewitt Building, Chicago, Algonquin Apartments, Chicago, Illinois 135 Illinois 56 Chicago Architectural Club 117 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Chicago Civic Center (now Richard J. 127-29 Daley Center), Chicago, Illinois 130, Armour Institute of Technology 131 (remaned Illinois Institute of Convention Hall (project) 63 Technology), Chicago, Illinois 6-9, Chicago Public Library (now Chicago 20, 36 Cultural Center), Chicago, Illinois Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 128 Illinois 7, 9, 13, 34, 45, 80, 107, 121, Chicago Stock Exchange, Chicago, 125, 137 Illinois 125, 127, 131 Arts Club, Chicago, Illinois 124 Cobb, Henry 109 Auditorium Theatre, Chicago, Illinois Commonwealth Plaza, Chicago, Illinois 129 78-80. 81-82, 107 Condit, Carl 125, 126 Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 81 Conterato, Bruno 53 Bartholomew, Harlan 29 Corazzo, Alexander (Alex) 33 Bassett, Charles (Chuck) 94, 95, 97 Crown-Zellerbach Building San Bauhaus, Germany 12, 16, 26, 76 Francisco, California 94 Baxter-Travenol Laboratories, Deerfield, Crystal Palace, London, England 49 Illinois 63, 116 Behrens, Peter 51 Daley, Richard J. 107, 130 Berlage, Hendricus Petrus 51 Danforth, George 35, 49 Berringer, Richard (Dick) 91 Deknatel, William F. 30, 33, 36-37, 40 Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, California Dornbusch, Charles 12, 20 86, 122 Drexler, Arthur 103-4, 106, 107 Bonatz, Paul 25 Duckett, Edward 42-43, 45 Bonnet, Felix 35, 42-44 Dunlap, William (Bill) 45, 52-53, 65, 93, Booth, Laurence (Larry) 128 95-97, 98-99, 108, 118, 135 Brenner, Daniel (Dan) 45, 75, 83, 86, 105, 121 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Bressler, Boris 97 Illinois 33, 46, 53, 56, 79, 82, 85, 107, Brownson, Jacques C. 130 125 Brownson, Jacques C. (house), Geneva, 88 Pine Street, New York City, New Illinois 76 York 121 Brunswick Building, Chicago, Illinois 115-116, 135 Farnsworth, Edith 64-70, 72-73 Bunshaft, Gordon 99, 117 Farnsworth, Edith (house), Plano, Burnham, Daniel H. 13, 29 Illinois 33, 64-70, 72-73. 75, 85, 103- 104 Caine, Leon J. (house project) 75, 83 Federal Center, Chicago, Illinois 53-54, Caldwell, Alfred 45, 49, 100 106, 107, 115, 130 Carson Pirie Scott, Chicago, Illinois 30, 50 x 50 House (project) 43, 44, 73-78, 80, 32, 51 82-84 Chase Manhattan Bank, New York City, Fisher, Howard T. 12 New York 112 Fletcher, Banister 8

142 Foster, Norman 126 120, 137 Freed, James Ingo (Jim) 109, 121, 125 Illinois Institute of Technology, Fuchs, Edouard 23 Hermann Union Hall, Chicago, Fujikawa, Joseph (Joe) 42, 45, 46, 53, 92 Illinois 99, 117-118, 120 Fuller, R. Buckminster 17-18, 19, 20, 90- Illinois Institute of Technology, Keating 91 Sports Center, Chicago, Illinois 102 Illinois Institute of Technology, Life Garrick Theatre, Chicago, Illinois 127 Science Building, Chicago, Illinois Genther, Charles B. (Skip) 31 102 George Washington Bridge, New York Illinois Institute of Technology, City, New York 51 Research Foundation, Chicago, Glessner, John H. (house), Chicago, Illinois 99-100, 118 Illinois 131 Illinois Institute of Technology, Stewart Goldsmith, Robin (wife of Myron) 79, School of Management, Chicago, 132 Illinois 102 Goodman, William (Bill) 65 Inland Steel Building, Chicago, Illinois Gordon, Elizabeth 70 96, 112, 115 Graham, Bruce 95-96, 98, 99, 108-9, 117- Institute of Design (ID), Chicago, Illinois 118, 126, 135 20, 90 Greenwald, Herbert (Herb) 52-54 Gropius, Walter 13, 25, 29, 85 Jahn, Helmut 132 Gunner’s Mate Service School, Great Javits Convention Center, New York Lakes, Illinois 96 City, New York 121, 125 Johnson, Philip 9, 11-13, 45, 46, 49, 69, Haid, David 47 82-83, 131 Hammond, James Wright (Jim) 118 Johnson Wax Building, Racine, Hancock Building, Chicago, Illinois 59, Wisconsin 30 116, 135 Harper, Sterling 20 Keck, George Fred 12, 18, 78 Harrington, Kevin 91 Kenny, Lawrence (Larry) 63 Hart, Philip (Phil) 80 Khan, Fazlur (Faz) 60, 63-64, 109, 116- Hartmann, William ( Bill) 100, 118, 130, 117 131 Kornacker, Frank 50 Hartray, John (Jack) 128 Krehbiel, Albert 8-9 Highlander Folk School, Mount Eagle, Kuh, Katherine 12 Tennessee 23, 26-28 Hilberseimer, Ludwig 20, 25, 28-29, 32, Lafayette Park, Detroit, Michigan 54 53-54, 57, 92 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 9 Jeanneret 9, 11, 12, 20-21, 22, 25, 36, Hodgkison, Robin 63 122, 124 Honey, Sandra 62-64 Liebknecht-Luxenbourg Monument, Berlin, Germany 23 IBM Building, Chicago, Illinois 114 Lin, T.Y. 61-62, 97, 110 Illinois Center, Chicago, Illinois 114 Loebl, Jerrold 10 Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois 6, 14, 20, 28-29, 30, 54 McCaughey, William F. 8-9 Illinois Institute of Technology, Crown McCormick Place (first), Chicago, Hall, Chicago, Illinois 82, 84, 105, Illinois 63, 122 119 McCormick Place (second), Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, Galvin Illinois 64, 86, 122 Library, Chicago, Illinois 57, 118, McCormick, Robert 73-74, 80-81

143 McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, Kitt Peak, Arizona 86-87, 98, 115-116 Quaker Tower, Chicago, Illinois 126 Madlener, Albert F. (house), Chicago, Illinois 106 Reed, Earl 8, 10 Mannheim National Theatre (project), Reich, Lilly 35, 62 Mannheim, Germany 47, 104 Reliance Building, Chicago, Illinois 51, Meier, Richard 124 106 Mell, Alfred 12 Republic Newspaper Plant, Columbus, Merrill, John 97-98 Indiana 115-116 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 7-8, 11-17, Richardson, Henry Hobson 30, 31 20-26, 28-37, 40-57, 59, 62-93, 98-107, Rodgers, John Barney (Jack) 15, 20, 94 114, 117-122, 126, 130, 133-134 Rogers, Richard 126 Mies van der Rohe, Waltraut 34 Ruck-a-Chucky Bridge (project) 58-59, Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 15-16, 90 86, 110, 115-116 Monadnock Building, Chicago, Illinois 49, 51, 54, 106 Saarinen, Eliel 122 Morandi, Riccardo 89 St. Joseph Valley Bank, Elkhart, Indiana Morgan, D. 41 115-116 Murphy, C.F., Associates 63, 130, 131 Schaefer, Harvey 10 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New Schmidt, Garden & Erikson 100, 118 York City, New York 9, 46, 66, 72, Schulze, Franz 35, 46, 47, 78, 90 103 Schweikher, Robert Paul 70, 73 Seagram Building, New York City, New National Gallery (project), Berlin, York 63, 99, 114, 122 Germany 85, 104 Sears Tower, Chicago, Illinois 109 National Gallery of Art, Washington, Sharpe, David 64, 117 D.C. 105 Shaw, Alfred 70 Nervi, Pier Luigi 2, 47, 87-89, 92 Skidmore, Louis 10, 14 Netsch, Walter 97-98, 101, 118-119 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) 52, New Bauhaus (renamed Institute of 85, 99, 108-112, 117-18. 126, 131 Design), Chicago, Illinois 16 Smith, Adrian 108 Speyer, A. James 22, 35 Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, Spiegler, Madge 137 Oakland, California 60, 97 Stam, Mart 25 Olencki, Edward 42-44, 52 Sullivan, Louis 9, 13, 30-31, 49, 122, 125 Onterie Center, Chicago, Illinois 63 Summers, Gene 45, 47, 86, 122 Oud, Jacobus J.P. 25 Owings, Nathaniel (Nat) 97, 110-112 Tague, Robert Bruce (Bob) 91 Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin 37, 51 PACE Associates 56 Tanaka, Mineo 63 Pado, Michael 119 Temko, Allan 97 Pahl, Pius 36 Thompson, D’Arcy 57 Palumbo, Peter 70 Tigerman, Stanley 117 Pei, I. M. 85, 109, 126 Tugendhat, Fritz (house), Brno, Perkins & Will 132 Czechoslovakia 81, 83 Peterhans, Walter 28, 30, 49 Turck, Dorothy 45 Popoff, Igor 97 Pran, Peter 63 United Airlines Executive Office Priestley, William (Bill) 52, 94 Building, Elk Grove, Illinois 116 Promontory Apartments, Chicago, United Airlines Hangars, San Francisco Illinois 50, 56 International Airport, California 93-

144 95 United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado 97-98, 111, 118

Vinci, John 49, 105, 106

Wachsmann, Konrad 17, 20, 91 Weese, Harry 68, 128, 129, 131 Weese, John 98, 118 Weissenhofsiedling, Stuttgart, Germany 24 Wong, Y.C. 65 Wright, Frank Lloyd 9, 13, 21, 30, 31, 37, 49, 70 Wylie, Philip 69

Youngren, Ralph 101, 132

Zorr, Paul 63

145