ORAL HISTORY OF REGINALD MALCOLMSON

Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

Compiled under the auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project The Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings Department of Architecture The Art Institute of Chicago Copyright © 1990 Revised Edition © 2004 The Art Institute of Chicago This manuscript is hereby made available to the public 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

Postscript: Architect's Statement 139

Selected References 141

Curriculum Vitæ 142

Index of Names and Buildings 143

iii PREFACE

On August 28, 29, and 30, 1988, Reginald Malcolmson and I met in Chicago to record his memoirs. As far back as his memory can reach, Reginald has been a seeker of new solutions pressing the limits of knowledge of the day. He is inspired by a special vision that looks towards the future and attempts to satisfy the anticipated needs of tomorrow. Reginald is a visionary architect who is a proponent of the linear city.

Reginald's exceptional career began in Dublin, Ireland, in an established architectural practice, which he left in 1947 to come to Chicago to return to school to study with Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Mies's personality and methodology has inspired Reginald and informed his work ever since. His career has had a two-fold thrust: as an educator to inform students, and as an architect designing visionary projects that are embryos yet unborn.

Our interview sessions were tape-recorded on six 90-minute cassettes, which have been transcribed, edited, and reviewed by both Reginald and me for accuracy and clarity of intent. This transcript has been minimally edited to maintain the flow, spirit, and tone of Reginald's narrative. It was Reginald's desire to include his "manifesto" to set forth his own assessment of the ultimate significance of his career. The tape recordings and transcript are available for study in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Although Reginald has officially retired from his faculty position at the University of Michigan, he maintains a rigorous schedule of travel, lecturing, writing, exhibiting his work, and working on projects in his private practice. I am grateful to Reginald for his willingness and cooperation in recording his memoirs despite an uncertain health condition at the time. His scrupulous attention to detail has improved the final draft of this document. My thanks go also to Mrs. Malcolmson who gave this project her support.

Reginald's work and ideas have been documented by a representative selection of architectural drawings in the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago, at Avery Library at Columbia University, exhibition catalogues accompanying exhibitions of his work, and writings by Reginald and by others. References that I found particularly helpful in preparing this interview are attached.

iv Reginald Malcolmson's oral history is one of several 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 CCA for their support and encouragement in this endeavor. Special thanks go to Sarah Underhill for her editorial assistance, and to transcribers Kai Enenbach, Angela Licup and Wilma McGrew for their careful transcription of this document.

Betty J. Blum June 1990

The above preface remains unchanged since it was written fourteen years ago. However the intervening years have brought change. Reginald Malcolmson died in 1992, and electronic communication has vastly increased in importance as a method by which information is transmitted. We are grateful to the Paul and Robert Barker Foundation for support to scan, reformat, and make this entire text available on The Art Institute of Chicago’s website, www.artic.edu. We are pleased for this opportunity to make this document accessible for research worldwide. Thanks are due to several people in this effort: Stephanie Whitlock provided assistance in proof-reading and re-indexing this revised edition, and Annemarie van Roessel skillfully oversaw the entire conversion and republication process.

Betty J. Blum March 2004

v OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Influence of Family on Decision to Become an Architect 1 Early Education 8 Apprenticeship with John MacGeagh 14 City Planning Influences 23 Work with Phillip and Roger Bell 29 Decision to Study with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at IIT 32 Arrival and Early Experiences at IIT 38 Students and Faculty at the Institute of Design and IIT 47 Mies as Hero Figure 49 Graduate Thesis 51 Naum Gabo in Chicago 56 Impressions of Hilberseimer 60 Impressions of the Relationship Between Mies and Hilberseimer 61 More on Graduate Thesis 64 Relationship with Dan Brenner and Work on Jacques Brownson's Residence 69 Study with Alfred Caldwell 71 Position as Mies's Administrative Assistant 72 Impressions of Willem M. Dudok 73 Merging of the Institute of Design with IIT 77 Impressions of Konrad Wachsmann 78 Mies's Resignation from IIT 87 Appointment as Mies's Temporary Successor at IIT 92 Impressions of Changes Over Ten Years at IIT 95 Characterization of Ludwig Hilberseimer 100 Appointment as Dean at University of Michigan 103 Impact of Career on Family 106 Decision to Leave IIT in 1964 108 Impressions of the Architectural Establishment in Chicago 110 Thoughts on the American Institute of Architects 112 Visionary Architecture 115 Industrialized Houses 127 Contribution to Architecture 137

vi Reginald Malcolmson

Blum: Today is August 28, 1987, and I am with Reginald Malcolmson in Chicago to record his oral history. Reggie was born in Dublin in 1912, educated in Dublin, and was a successfully practicing architect in Belfast until 1947 when he came to Chicago to study with Mies van der Rohe at IIT. Throughout your career your work has been published, your writings have been published, you have lectured, your drawings have been exhibited, and you have taught. You are an internationally recognized visionary architect, along with being an educator for many years of your life. Reggie, how did it all start? Why is architecture your chosen profession? Can you begin as far back as you remember? Was your family influential in your decision?

Malcolmson: I would say yes and no. I was born in 1912, as you say. In fact, I was born in what you might call Joyce's Dublin. He'd left in 1905 but the aura of it was still around. In fact, the house that my family was living in when I was born was only something like half a mile from where Joyce had lived before he left for Paris. He was living in what was called a Martello tower. Martello towers were the invention of an Italian architect/engineer, some time, I think, in the eighteenth century. A number of them were built along the coastlines of England and Ireland in the time of Napoleon because there was a fear that Napoleon would launch an invasion. Nothing happened, of course, but these Martello towers actually had ancient cannons on the roof on a rotating trackage of some kind and they were supposed to be able to sink anything that came over the horizon. My memory of them is naturally somewhat fragmented. The extraordinary thing is I have a very good visual memory and I can remember back to a time probably before I could walk. I can remember being in a baby carriage and that must be something like about 1913. And then, of course, the traumatic event of World War I came in 1914. My mother's family are Bourkes. My wife often relates to me

1 that a friend of hers, a lady friend of hers in Ireland, when I told her that my father's family came from County Cavan which was in the middle north of Ireland and my mother's family came from County Mayo in the West, she roared with laughter because these are very rural areas. That's real rural Ireland and they are the centers of what is called Gaelic football and hurling. These are indigenous games that have been played for centuries in Ireland. My mother was actually born in the city of Dublin. She was born on the same street as Bernard Shaw was born on but some twenty years afterwards and in Synge Street. I was born, in fact, in a nursing home. It was an eighteenth-century house about fifty yards from what is called the Parnell Monument. That's the monument, incidentally, by a very famous American sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who was born in Dublin and emigrated to America, I would say, probably when he was about thirty or so. He was already a known sculptor before he left for the United States. There are a lot of pieces, I think, in the East, of Gaudens. There are some in Washington, monumental sculptures. What I am getting around to is that, as I told you, my mother's family were Bourkes and two of her brothers were childhood heroes of mine. They were soldiers of the First World War in an Irish regiment, and I can remember them as young men in military uniforms around 1915. One of them became an aviator, the other one became an engineer. The aviator didn't survive World War I. He was killed in a fiery crash in the end of the war—the last months of the war, in fact. He had become an instructor. He was a very proficient pilot so he was taken out of combat and made an instructor. Unfortunately some young man he was teaching made an error of judgment and they both crashed. My other uncle, my uncle Bob, lived to be eighty-eight years of age. He eventually emigrated to Canada. He was first of all a bridge engineer for the Canadian Pacific and then formed a partnership with another Irishman and built up a big contracting/engineering business in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They built a great number of defense projects in World War II—deep water harbors, air fields, air bases, with all the supplementary buildings, hangars, military quarters, a flying school, and so forth. In fact, when I had already made my decision to come to America, or was thinking of it, my uncle wrote to me and asked me if I would come and work with him because he had, he believed, secured a big campus to build somewhere in Newfoundland. I very nearly said, if not yes, let me take a look at it. But it turned out in the long

2 run that I didn't miss too much because it was a kind of ultra-conservative university board. It was a Catholic university in St. Johns, Newfoundland.

Blum: Reggie, did you have any early contact with your uncle, who in fact, was in some way related to architecture?

Malcolmson: Yes, yes, oh yes. I had a lot because that's where it started. You're getting me back to the point now where it really started. My uncle came back from World War I in 1918. He got an engineering degree in Trinity College, Dublin, and during the time he was a student he had set up, in his own room, a drawing table. He had all kinds of engineering drawings on the wall, drawing instruments all laid out beside the drafting board, and I was absolutely fascinated with all of this environment. I asked hundreds of questions about what all these roof trusses meant, what all these sections of buildings meant, and so forth. At that time he was doing some supervision on buildings that were under construction and he used to talk to me a lot about it. I didn't get to see these buildings. I knew the buildings, but I didn't get out, naturally, because some of them were quite dangerous. I mean, he was up on the dome of a parish church in the district my grandmother Bourke was living in. That would have been probably out-of-bounds to a five-or six-year-old. He really, without knowing it almost, transmitted to me something that made all this technical world seem very, very exciting and very interesting. I guess I got a little bit of that from the other one, Tom Bourke, who was the aviator. I mean, simply the idea of somebody being a flyer and seeing him dressed in an aviator's uniform, showing me photographs of the planes he flew and so forth. All those things seemed to me to be a world that was very exciting. My uncle in Canada, I think, was the primary spur towards this.

Blum: This was your Uncle Bob?

Malcolmson: Yes.

Blum: But he had an early influence on you as you describe visiting his room.

Malcolmson: Yes. This was around, I would say, 1918/1919.

Blum: You were quite young at the time?

3 Malcolmson: I was, in 1918, six.

Blum: Did he encourage you to draw?

Malcolmson: Oh, very much.

Blum: Did he explain things to you?

Malcolmson: My father had been in Africa for all of the war. I hadn't seen him since I was three, and when he came back I got a construction toy for Christmas one time, I think in 1920. It still exists as far as I know, Meccano. It's a steel construction. So my uncle Bob used to come and visit us on weekends and he would build fabulous bridges and all kinds of aerial tramways, where you have little cable cars going up cords to the ceiling and other ones coming down at the same time. We built towers and all kinds of fantastic things. So, you see, there he comes into the picture again.

Blum: With your set?

Malcolmson: Yes. Naturally, because sometimes I became a kind of spectator while my father and my uncle were doing all the building. But it was great fun. He never taught in his life but I could imagine he would have been a very good teacher.

Blum: But you had very positive encouragement within your family?

Malcolmson: Yes. They are still very real to me, you know. That is very real. Then the other thing, of course, that backed this all up was around four years of age I started to draw, quite consciously. I mean, it wasn't just a doodling thing any more. I became habituated to drawing and oddly enough my family encouraged me to do that.

Blum: Why do you say "oddly enough"?

Malcolmson: I say oddly enough because a number of people on both sides of my family have been either amateur musicians or music teachers, and I was faced with the possibility that I would learn music. I said no to them because I'd heard it was all this discipline of practice and so on. My father was a very disciplined person and I knew I was in for something if I let myself into that. So when I say I am

4 surprised that they encouraged the other, I think they saw that there was something going on there and they were farsighted enough to see that this is something he's got an affinity for. I had to say probably my mother encouraged me more than anybody else in the drawing, originally, because she showed more interest in it than any of the others did. Around the end of World War I there was an enormous political upheaval going on in Ireland at this time, incidentally. Maybe I should say something about that because I actually was faced with it point blank.

Blum: As a child?

Malcolmson: Yes. In 1916, Easter Monday 1916—it's a very crucial moment in the twentieth century in the history of Ireland, actually. On Easter Monday morning it was a beautiful day, blue sky, absolutely tranquil. The city was getting more or less empty, because Easter is celebrated more as a holiday in many European countries than it is in America and people will actually go away for a period from Good Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and they won't return until Tuesday. I found the same thing happens in South America. Anyway, at that time there was an uncle by marriage—he was married to one of the sisters of my Grandfather Bourke. He was staying with us in Dublin and he asked me would I like to go downtown with him to a park in the center, St. Stephen's Green, a very beautiful city park which was laid out some time in the early 1890s I think. It has artificial lakes, groves of trees, and landscaped lawns and it had then—and probably still has—a big variety of water birds, particularly ducks of all kinds imported from different places around the world. So he asked me would I like to go and feed them. We set off with a paper bag with a lot of food for the ducks and we got inside the green and we were feeding them. You know, I've never been able to eat a duck because of that friendship with these little birds since childhood. Anyway, then we turned to come out. It was coming near to twelve o'clock and my uncle said, "I think we have to go back home." So we started out. I could show you the gate that we set out to exit from "the Green." There was very high railing around this park. I would say it must have been about between ten and twelve feet high and at night, after dusk, it is generally locked up, just for protective reasons. But in the daytime these gates are on the north, south, east, and west sides—it's oriented, more or less, that way—are all open. So we set out

5 to go out through the north gate and when we got there, there was a soldier in uniform, but not in British uniform. He's in a dark, dark bluish-green uniform and he has a hat like an Australian soldier's hat—turned up at the side. He's got a bright green cockade in his hat and a badge on the hat that's got a red hand. It's an antique symbol in Ireland, this red hand. And my uncle and I walked up to the gate and this young man—he couldn't have been more than about twenty- three or twenty-four years of age, maybe younger—he advanced with a rifle and bayonet and stuck the bayonet in my uncle's topcoat on the button, and he said, "Halt!" My uncle, being a peace-loving Englishman who was never confronted with any dangers of this kind, nevertheless, had enough spunk to ask him, "Why are you halting me? What is going on?" The soldier said, "An Irish Republic has been proclaimed."

Blum: Has been proclaimed?

Malcolmson: It was noon. My uncle then said, "What is your authority for stopping me?" And this young man tapped the butt of his rifle and said, "That is my authority." He had, incidentally, not only this dark green uniform. I think it's actually a kind of dark blue uniform, because he belonged not to the main body, which was called Irish Volunteers, but he was a member of what was called the Irish Citizen Army. It was a trade union and socialist defense force, because there had been big strikes in Dublin around 1913, the longest labor strike in British history, in fact, and there had been a lot of violence, so this defense force had been formed then. We had to back away and there were some workmen in the Green and somehow with their help we got over those ten-foot railings. Nobody knows how we did it but we did. And then we got down into the street on the other side and as we ran across the street machine guns started blaring away. These were largely British machine guns that were on top of a big hotel, which overlooked "the Green." So I had the exciting, if you want to call it, experience of being under fire.

Blum: Were you frightened?

Malcolmson: Yes. At first I wasn't until I began to realize there was danger because I could see the way my uncle was behaving and the way everybody else was behaving that we were in a very, very dangerous situation. I can remember vividly the smell of

6 cordite, which is the explosive powder that was used in the bullets of those days. It's a pungent, acrid kind of smell and I could see this blue smoke blowing down the street. But what frightened me was that everybody was plastered against the doorways. They were in the doorways of these old eighteenth century houses and as soon as the machine gun would stop everybody was out in the street, running as far away as possible. And as soon as it started they were in the doorways again. Then I began to realize that we were in big peril. You could hear the bullets.

Blum: And this was what year?

Malcolmson: 1916.

Blum: 1916. So you were just four years old—quite young.

Malcolmson: My fourth year. I wasn't quite four.

Blum: When you entered, or as you proceeded with your early schooling did that make a difference?

Malcolmson: Not really, because I'll tell you what happened ultimately. Eventually we worked our way through all kinds of side streets back to my grandmother's house. I wasn't allowed out for a week after that because it had become a war situation. There was a gunboat in Dublin Bay shelling the city itself. And I looked out of my grandmother's house at night and you could see the city was on fire. All the leaders of this week, which is now very famous, were rightly or wrongly shot by a military tribunal without a real trial. It caused an enormous wave of sentiment all over the country.

Blum: For independence?

Malcolmson: Yes. They were completely outnumbered. Well, then it died down more or less you might say. And when the war ended it began all over again because the returning soldiers were swept into this movement and became drill sergeants. Now, did this affect me at all? My family were Protestants. There is a great difference between Protestants of the north of Ireland and the Protestants elsewhere in Ireland, but that's a long story. What I mean by that, is

7 Protestantism in Ireland really came in with the landlord system in the eighteenth century. That established us. Most of the landlords were Protestants. The big landlords. So, the reason why they are different—maybe I'm going too much into history for you now—the reason there is this difference is they were not so much settlers as hereditary owners of land. In the north they became farmers. It was colonized, so between Catholics and Protestants the friction grew up and when it became industrialized it even intensified.

Blum: And one that has not been resolved, even today.

Malcolmson: Not resolved yet. But anyway, it didn't affect me in any physical way. I can remember—and I should tell you some of these funny things because they give you more insight in the situation than anything else. I was in kindergarten class in the very elite Anglo-Irish school, Alexandra College, and we were asked in the class one day to draw flags and I grew the green, white, and orange flag, which was for the independence movement. There was a horror that went through the whole school. I believe the real reason I drew this thing was, first of all I had seen it, but also it was much simpler to draw than the Union Jack. It sent an earth tremor through the whole school because it was unthinkable to them that anybody would draw this rebellious emblem.

Blum: At that time were you drawing a lot in your school? Was it generally offered to everyone or was it just your special interest?

Malcolmson: No. Many of us did draw. It was quite a good school, you know, and it was, I would say, a kind of advanced school for its day.

Blum: We're talking about elementary education.

Malcolmson: Yes, I'm in kindergarten at this time, 1915 to 1919. So in 1915 I was three and 1919 I was seven. I quit in 1918. Three to six. There was a lot of drawing. The head of this school, Dr. Mullvany, actually had a doctoral degree in those days and that was really something for a woman to have a doctoral degree around the time of World War I—the principal of the school.

Blum: This was a woman?

8 Malcolmson: This was a girls school. It was an elite girls school.

Blum: Oh, I see.

Malcolmson: Ninette De Valois, the ballet dancer, was a graduate of this school. That's not her real name, that's an assumed name.

Blum: So this was in your elementary education. You were encouraged to draw as part of the curriculum.

Malcolmson: Well, yes, to the extent that a kindergarten school has a real curriculum. You know what I mean. There is a great element, or there was in those days, a great element of play in the kindergarten school. But certainly my recollection is that a lot of time was given to it.

Blum: Throughout your elementary education were there courses or were there programs that you feel today encouraged your interest in architecture and drawing and construction?

Malcolmson: Yes. In 1919 when my father came back from the war I went to a preparatory school, as we called it. That's a school that will take you from the age of about seven to twelve. It comes between kindergarten and secondary school. I went to St. Andrew's College preparatory school in a suburb of Dublin—then a suburb but now a part of the inner city, of course—and there were drawing courses, and I enjoyed them immensely. A very interesting thing that was also there, which sounds so old-fashioned now, but it had an indirect influence, is calligraphy. I became really, really skillful at this. It gave me in some way or other an extraordinary satisfaction to make this very precise writing.

Blum: Well you do that so beautifully. I mean your letters are pictures.

Malcolmson: That's where it comes from. When I was probably around nine or ten I could write like you see engraved writing on visiting cards. Then around 1923 my father had been in the legal branch of the Irish Land Commission. The Irish Land Commission was a government agency that had been set up when the British government decided to return land to the tenants. They literally bought out the landlords and returned the land to the tenant farmers. And he came to a

9 dilemma at the end of the war around 1923, when the new regime was being set up in Ireland—what was called then the Irish Free State—around 1922, whether he should stay or whether he should move. He could move to London or he could move to the north. He didn't like to move out of Ireland so he chose to move north. He went ahead of us and then we followed afterwards. And then came a very dramatic moment for me. He decided to build a house. He hired an architect, and every Saturday this architect would come to my father's house, or at least where we were living at that time. He would come with all these plans, colored and so forth, and they would all be laid out on the dining room table after dinner, and they would go over every single part of the plans, discussing everything. I listened to all of this and I became so intrigued with it I started to draw up plans of houses myself—at twelve. And I made a very interesting discovery. I told the students this many, many times. I don't think they got the point, but there is a point. I discovered how difficult it is to make a plan for a building like a house without ending up with one room in the middle that has no windows. It took me a long time to find out that there is a trick to it. That you can organize where you come in, where you take your coat off, and the space that you go from one room to another, and all the rooms that went from there.

Blum: Was that something that you became aware of as a child?

Malcolmson: I found it out for myself. I found the answer to it myself.

Blum: When you were doing those drawings, when you were twelve?

Malcolmson: Yes. Yes. They were not to scale, these drawings, they were just drawn in drawing books.

Blum: But you were beginning to tackle some of the problems.

Malcolmson: Oh yes. And to my delight I found out how to do this. It was a great discovery. Then I saw this house, which was quite a sizeable house, from the time it was just a field with nettles and weeds growing to the time when they dug for foundations, then they poured concrete, then they started to make brick walls, and they started to put window frames in and door frames, temporary ones, and then they built the lintels in and they put the upper floor in, they carried it on up

10 to the roof. I remember walking around the roof space when it was all without even any flooring. I can remember hopping around from joist to joist. And I saw it even to the time where—by then we were living in it, so it was being painted internally and then externally, and so on. Even to the point where the garden was landscaped. So I saw the whole thing from beginning to end. I think that was the summation of drawing in kindergarten school and seeing my Uncle Bob designing roof trusses and bridges, seeing his table all laid out with drawing instruments. Suddenly I came up against this fact that here is how houses are really made, and here's the architect that does it, this is what he does. He has to bring in contractors to do plumbing, do electrical work, and so on.

Blum: Did that firm up your desire to be an architect?

Malcolmson: Yes, it did. It did and then for a time, like happens to you when you are in a formative period, you got to kind of overlay it. What was happening was something like this. I began to become very, very conscious of drawing. Somebody gave me a book with John Flaxman's drawings. These were classical drawings. Flaxman was very, very famous in the eighteenth century. In fact, Goethe and his friend Winckelmann admired without reserve Flaxman's drawings. They are all linear drawings, very, very pure, and they are actually based, many of them, on classical vase paintings translated into magnificent line drawings. William Blake printed some of these, he made the plates for some of these drawings of Flaxman, and they are still very highly prized. So I started making copies of these drawings and they were a real discipline to draw. They required tremendous concentration, these very simplified linear forms. He drew illustrations for the Iliad and Odyssey. Those are his most famous. And I knew the Iliad because I had read it. I was somewhat precocious when I was very young because I grew up in a family that read a great deal. By the time I was twelve or fourteen I had read in abridged forms Cervantes' Don Quixote, Homer's Iliad, Homer's Odyssey, two or three Shakespeare plays, and I had read Wells's Outline of History, which was then just appearing on the horizon, 1919. So I knew exactly what Flaxman was drawing when I saw Hector, Achilles, Ajax the Great and Ajax the Lesser, and Menelaus, and Paris, and so on and so forth. These are very familiar people to me. And I had read Virgil, incidentally, also an abridgement. I was then in a transition stage in my life between what you might call old-

11 fashioned education and new education. I had nine years of Latin and four years of Greek. So by the time I was fifteen or sixteen I was very much immersed in classical literature. We translated, I think, certainly Caesar's Gallic Wars, Virgil, two or three books of Virgil, Cicero, and then in Greek, Herodotus, Xenophon, and Euripides, one or two plays, and I think one of Sophocles.

Blum: Are you suggesting that you were going to be a classicist?

Malcolmson: No, I wasn't going to be a classicist, actually, Betty. You know I found that out to my horror. I was really interested in the mythology. I was fascinated by the mythology. I still am. But I had no great gift for languages at all. I really hadn't. One of the astonishing things is I have a daughter who, if you put her in Czechoslovakia, in three weeks she could speak Czech. She has a natural gift for that. She can speak about seven languages.

Blum: At this time what was happening to your interest in architecture?

Malcolmson: What was happening was this. I transferred then to a secondary school in Belfast, and they had very good drawing teachers. They were not only teaching what we used to call object drawing, that is to say drawing from casts or drawing from still life, but they had geometric drawing. By the time I was about thirteen I had to lay out a Gothic arch, a Gothic vault, some of the Gothic windows, these geometrical windows. There was a great deal of interest for me in geometrical drawing. I became very, very excited about that.

Blum: What is geometrical drawing?

Malcolmson: It's the geometrical construction that is behind, let's say, laying out a Gothic rose window. There is a construction to that, you know. You've got all these radiating lines and they have to be in such and such angles to one another. There are so many divisions in the right angle and there is a circle in the center and there's another circle and so on and so on. And there are arches on the end. That has to be all laid out very, very exactly before you can draw in any of the stone work at all. It's the construction of them. So that excited me. Then my mother had a friend in Dublin—socially she knew a great number of people in Dublin, especially in the music world. But she knew a Professor Macalister who was a

12 very prominent archeologist of that time, both in the archeology of Ireland and the archeology of the ancient Near East. And there was a suggestion at one time that I should go with him to the Near East and make record drawings for him. At the same time, by the time I was about sixteen I had a very good art teacher then who was a painter. We got along very well, and he thought I should be an architect. He gave me a lot of books to read on architecture, on history of architecture especially. And I think it was about that time I began to get a kind of disillusionment with school altogether, at about sixteen. And I lost interest completely. I mean my father was absolutely horrified because I was on the point of becoming a dropout. So much so that at about, I would say, sixteen and a half I was sent to a boarding school in Derry, that's further north. I didn't like the boarding school very much because it was a monastic kind of life. It may amuse you to know that even as late as the late 1920s and early 1930s and probably even in parts of Ireland to this day, even England too, there were boys schools that were totally segregated, and girls schools too. And they hardly met all except on social occasions for dances or whatever. But that's it. So this monastic life was not for me. My father was determined I would go to a university and I didn't want to.

Blum: Why did you have this about-face after being so involved in the classics and serious learning?

Malcolmson: You know, I was aware when I was involved in the classics that I wasn't really interested in the classical language. I was interested in the atmosphere of the classics, the art of the classics. It was the art that really interested me, and the architecture. Long before I became an architect, or even went anywhere near architecture, I knew all about the orders of architecture. I knew a lot about Gothic architecture and so forth. So, around nineteen years of age I took the entrance exam to Trinity College in Dublin and I passed it, and my father enrolled me. I had a tutor and I took the freshman exam in advance and I failed it. So I said, "That's enough, I'm not going any further." So my father said, "How would you like to be an architect?" Well, of course, I had been thinking about that for a long time and I said yes, I would try it. So he knew an architect and he asked him what should my son do if he wants to be an architect. The architect said, "Many architects now go to schools of architecture, but there are still a lot of architects,

13 very good ones, that don't, so why don't you tell him to come and work for me on a trial basis." This was around 1932.

Blum: Who was the architect?

Malcolmson: A very good architect, actually, in a conventional sense, John MacGeagh.

[Tape 1: Side 2]

Blum: You were talking about John MacGeagh and your apprenticeship.

Malcolmson: To say a little bit about him, he was a very active man. He was what many people would call a workaholic. He had a very, very intense interest in his work. I'm told that he lived to be almost ninety years of age and worked almost to the end of his life. The big discovery I made in MacGeagh's office. First of all, I have to say he was a very ambitious man because he had not only built himself a practice where he built a lot of houses, he also built assembly halls, a movie theater, he entered a lot of competitions. In fact, one of the big moments when I first went there was when he entered a competition for a pavilion at a seaside resort in England, Bexhill-on-Sea, and who do you think won the competition?

Blum: I know who won the competition.

Malcolmson: Erich Mendelsohn.

Blum: With Chermayeff.

Malcolmson: With Chermayeff. And we were all fascinated with Mendelsohn's solution to it because really that was the best building Mendelsohn made outside of Germany. It still exists. And I think they are even planning to renovate it now. It's a landmark building. But that was the first time I heard Erich Mendelsohn's name. He had come to England—1933 was the year Hitler came, in January of 1933—and he had come in 1932, just in advance of that. So, that was one of the interesting things about MacGeagh's practice. He was very ambitious. He entered competitions and eventually he entered a competition for a very big sanatorium that was going to be built. It didn't get built because of the war but

14 he set up a joint office with another firm of architects. By this time I was well into an apprenticeship of four years. This was about 1934.

Blum: With him?

Malcolmson: With him. And we worked for, oh, weeks, months, on this competition. We had a very interesting fellow in that office at the time. He was from Liverpool University. He was the chief designer, in fact, chief assistant you might say. I learned a lot about Liverpool University through him. We won this competition so then we set up this huge office. When I say huge, the two offices continued to operate independently but the joint one probably hired about twenty people on all the preliminaries.

Blum: Reggie, you say you were into a four-year apprenticeship. As you worked in this office what did you do best? What did they want you to do?

Malcolmson: Well, let me explain, first of all, the mechanics of the apprenticeship. I contracted this by contract, this four-year apprenticeship. To qualify as an architect I had to take externally all the examinations set up by the Board of Education of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). That is a series of examinations. They are quite grueling actually. I did take part-time study in the College of Technology in Belfast in technical subjects—engineering subjects, construction, design. I didn't like it too much because it was very conservative.

Blum: You were attending the College of Technology at the same time you were an apprentice?

Malcolmson: Yes. Then I had to go through three stages of exams. A probationer's exam, then an intermediate exam; then later a final exam. And there was a lot of submission of drawings that had to be approved of before you could sit the exam, and so on. Design problems, construction problems, and so forth. The big discovery I made in that office was a young man who became a lifelong friend of mine, Granville Smyth. Granville Smyth was an apprentice one year older than I was. He had been there a year before me, that is. And he had an enormous talent for watercolor painting. He made beautiful rendered drawings in the classical style. He taught me how to make rendered drawings. I discovered then what I used to

15 hear many, many, many years later students telling me: sometimes the students learn more from the students than they do from the teachers. And I found it to be true then. He was simply a marvelous person, Granville Smyth. He was my best man when I was married and unfortunately he died about 1971 or 1972. He couldn't have been very old then. He was about, I would say, sixty-seven maybe. We had a lot of experiences together. He went to London and he worked for interesting architects. One of them was Louis de Soissons who was the architect at that time for Welwyn Garden City and he worked also for another architect, Hepworth, and there was an assistant of Hepworth's who worked with Granville at that time. He was considered something of an oddball. His name was Ralph Erskine. Ralph Erskine is now internationally known. He is an architect once more in England. He went to Sweden during the war because he was a pacifist. He was a mountain climber. That's how he originally went to Sweden. He went at his vacation time to Sweden and then when the war came he decided to stay in Sweden. He became a famous Swedish architect and then after the war he became a famous English architect. So anyway, I used to visit Granville a great deal in London. I got to see modern architecture then in a big way.

Blum: Modern architecture in London?

Malcolmson: In London. Because at that time, in the few years that were left before the war, 1936 to 1939, Gropius was there. Breuer, Mondrian the painter, Naum Gabo, Mendelsohn. And then Mendelsohn left, I think in about 1937 to go to Palestine, as it then was, and so for a very brief period before that London was, in a way, kind of a center of international architecture. I don't like that word too much, but you know what I mean.

Blum: What do you remember especially? What buildings do you remember especially being impressed by?

Malcolmson: I was very interested in buildings of the TECTON group, that is largely the work of Berthold Lubetkin, a Russian. He had been at one time a pupil of Tatlin—Gabo knew him fairly well. He is the author of the Penguin Pool in the London Zoo, which is very well known, and I went to see all the zoo buildings that he built, and he built a great number of them. I went to see apartment buildings, he built some, and there was an interesting group, Connell, Ward and Lucas. Connell

16 was the prime mover. He was from New Zealand. They were from all over, these people. Moholy was in London then and was to come to America with Gropius in 1937. So that's how I really got to see modern architecture. I had read a great deal about it before that. It's odd to think, you know, that in a provincial center like Belfast, this architect I was working with took Moderne Bauformen from Germany and here I saw the kind of housing that was being built in Berlin and Frankfurt. And I saw in one edition the work of Erich Mendelsohn in Germany. And in another what Walter Gropius was doing in Dessau and in Berlin, housing.

Blum: So the man you worked for, although he was traditional in his approach, he was interested in what was happening.

Malcolmson: Oh yes. Very much so. In fact, I don't want to make this sound like a piece of vanity, but I have to tell you it for the record. He told my father on one occasion, and my father was rather a little taken back by this because he didn't think that his son was that bright; I guess he thought he was bright but he didn't think he was that bright. But John MacGeagh told my father, he said, I have two young fellows in my office, your son and Granville Smyth. He said those are two really able boys. They have the capacity to go as far as their energy will take them in this profession.

Blum: What a nice compliment.

Malcolmson: I would say so. Yes. I was really quite stunned by that.

Blum: Now, you and Granville Smyth were both interested in modern architecture?

Malcolmson: Yes, oh yes. I was more than he was. Granville had a very, what you might call, catholic point of view. He had a very open mind and he had an extraordinary range of visual interests. At the same time he was a very practical person, much more maybe than I was. I should tell you, even when I was an apprentice I got to design houses. My boss had speculative builders who would come to him and say, "I would like you to make some plans of houses that I could build in such and such an area. I've bought a tract of land which I want to develop. Would you have some of your people draw up some plans for me?"

17 Blum: Considering your interest in modern architecture and this opportunity you had, as an apprentice, what did you design? In what style was the design?

Malcolmson: Oh, they were quite conventional, actually. When I say style I would say, you know, they were conventional types of houses. I think the only thing you could say that was modern about them was that almost all the houses I designed had white stucco on the outside. But most of them had pitched roofs. I was so interested in what I had seen in the publications that I made many, many designs for him of flat-roofed houses, but he always kind of steered away from them. He built some flat-roofed buildings. He built an assembly hall on the campus of Queen's University, which was quite a nice building actually. I mean it was a thoughtfully designed building, well proportioned, all in fairly conventional style, brick with white plaster walls on the inside, but that was a flat-roofed building in among a whole range of Gothic and pseudo-Gothic and Tudor buildings. Everybody was shocked by that.

Blum: So he was able to build…

Malcolmson: Oh yes. And he was partial to it. When we came to design the sanatorium, I will tell you that was as radical as anything in Germany or Europe at the time. And it was all to be purely functional buildings with flat roofs and terraces and balconies.

Blum: What was it about the modern buildings that captured your imagination?

Malcolmson: I've often asked myself that question. You know, I told you and you wrote that in the catalogue of the exhibition at the Art Institute, Mies van der Rohe and his Disciples of Modernism, Weissenhof made a tremendous impact on me. I was sixteen when I saw it in the glossy magazine, I think it was called The Sphere. I don't know whether it is defunct now, probably, but there used to be a number of very handsome glossy magazines published in London that were kind of photo-journals and they would show what's going on here, there and everywhere. Then they'd show, always they showed some architecture somewhere, America, what's going on in Central Europe or what's going on in Paris and so on. One day they published a big spread of about, I would say, three pages at least of photographs of the Weissenhof. There was something about

18 Weissenhof that I found very exciting. It is very hard to tell you. I think I had seen pictures before that of houses in concrete that were built for an exhibition either in London or Paris and they had roof gardens and sun-bathing terraces and so forth. When I saw this in a whole group of buildings that seemed to me like a new kind of civilization almost. I found out not very long ago no less than Aristide Maillol was fascinated to see the housing in Frankfurt. He was taken on a tour of the new houses of Ernst May in Frankfurt and he was absolutely fascinated by this kind of new way of living. Because that's what it seemed to be to people of that time. It seemed like a new way of living.

Blum: Had implications for better social…

Malcolmson: Physical culture, health, open-air life, relation to nature, to sunlight, spaciousness, untrammeled by any kind of history. You have to realize that after the First World War in spite of the fact that there was a new architecture growing, there was a tremendous reversion back to historical roots because of the trauma of the war. I think the First World War for Europeans and the West was far more grueling, because of the losses, than in the Second World War. All the losses of the second war were in the east but all the major losses in the first war were in the west. For people who lived in London, Paris, and Berlin this must have been a shocking experience.

Blum: Do you think there was any indigenous feeling for new architecture in England, or was it just with the migration of other Europeans?

Malcolmson: No. The odd thing was, in England there was a complete freezing out of modern architecture. Frozen out from the beginning. They wouldn't have anything to do with it. There was a kind of stony silence if it were mentioned, and it was only when the encroachment, the dictatorships in Europe, drove all the gifted people out of Germany and Central Europe—Gabo, Moholy, Gropius, Mondrian—it was only when they came in sufficient numbers, they had to be accepted because these were well-known, prestigious people and they had their own protectors in England, people that formed circles around them.

Blum: I thought it was mandatory for any architect from Europe that wanted to practice in England to have an English partner.

19 Malcolmson: Oh yes. Many of them had.

Blum: So Mendelsohn joined Chermayeff.

Malcolmson: Yes, that's true. Hilbs told me he visited Mendelsohn and Chermayeff when he got out of Germany. He went to London first. He was living in Mecklenburg Square and he visited both of them because he had known Mendelsohn very well in Germany. And he said, and this will be interesting for your records, "You should have heard what Chermayeff said about Mendelsohn. That was nothing to what Mendelsohn said about Chermayeff." But you know that's the way all these immigrants felt, that kind of envy of one another in a way. Don't you think?

Blum: I don't know. It seems like a very hospitable kind of thing for the English architects to have done and a very necessary thing.

Malcolmson: Oh yes. But towards one another the émigrés, I think, were jealous of one another.

Blum: Well, Chermayeff was a modernist in England in his own right. So it seems to me their philosophies would have been somewhat sympathetic.

Malcolmson: Oh yes. But their personalities didn't get along. But that's something else.

Blum: What was happening in Ireland?

Malcolmson: Nothing. Nothing really.

Blum: Was there any of this agitation for modern architecture that was happening in London?

Malcolmson: No that comes later, you know. I set myself a goal, I became so enthusiastic in the 1930s when I was working from the time I was an apprentice, I became so excited about architecture that I set myself a goal. I said I'm going to be in practice by thirty years of age. I'm going to be building for myself. I mean, I'm going to be "the architect." So I worked for architects. I worked for MacGeagh, naturally. I worked for him as an assistant after I was an apprentice. I went to work for the Department of Works and Public Buildings in the north of Ireland. I designed a

20 bridge with an engineer from the department. I never saw this bridge but people have told me that it is very nice. A concrete bridge. It's somewhere way out in the country. I never got to see it, but I remember designing it. I made the preliminary designs, although I got no credit for it, for an exhibition stand for the government of Northern Ireland in the Glasgow Exhibition of 1938. I never got to see it. I designed a few houses for MacGeagh when I was working for him, for clients of his. I even made preliminary designs for a house, I don't like to mention it now because it was in a kind of pseudo-Tudor style. That was MacGeagh's idea of it. It was a house for the then mayor of Belfast. I can also recall making, I don't think I made the original design for this but I had to make the working drawings, which meant actually that it had to be virtually redesigned to some extent, for what were called magnetic mine stations in the early days of the war. They were small towers. They were probably about fifty to sixty feet high. They had a glass- windowed observation room on the top and the supporting part, which was in concrete, the structure, was really just a staircase access inside this concrete box up to the main level where the observation room was that had telescopes and so forth. And I saw one of these by accident in the countryside. I was riding around with some friends and it was very nice.

Blum: Help me orient myself. We were talking about you working as an apprentice.

Malcolmson: Then as an assistant to MacGeagh.

Blum: This was all part of your official four-year apprenticeship.

Malcolmson: No, no I had finished it by that time. I stayed on with him. And then I worked, I think, for another architect for a short time. He was doing speculative houses again. And oddly enough, some of the houses he built were destroyed during the war by aerial bombardment. Then around 1937, at this time, oh, a very interesting thing I forgot to put on the tape for you. Granville… Somehow or other, there were people coming and going in this office because of the competition atmosphere. They were hiring people from outside who, some of them were very interesting guys because some of them were very able architects. I mentioned one from Liverpool. There was more than one from Liverpool. We had one at one time from the Architecture Association (AA) of London, from the school of the Architecture Association. And these guys infused a certain kind of

21 fresh air because they had been exposed to a lot of current modern architecture under the influence of Mendelsohn, Gropius, and so forth, in England. Because that's where it made the first big imprint, in the schools. And Granville Smythe encouraged me to go outside the limits of what the practice was and to design for myself, to make projects for modern houses.

Blum: Hoping to sell them?

Malcolmson: Hoping maybe my boss would even build some of them, or one of these speculative builders would come in and say, okay, I like that. Why don't you make some construction drawings for me and I'll build them.

Blum: But within the normal outlets of MacGeagh's practice, you really were not afforded an opportunity to experiment with new architecture.

Malcolmson: No, not really. I don't think that was his fault. I think he was very attentive to something I used to look on with a certain cynicism, if you like, and that he was very attentive to the fact that the client had to be satisfied. I used to think that was the bottom line, you know. But I am satisfied you have to go further than that. But, actually, it was this atmosphere of these fellows coming and going and showing me drawings of things that they had made in school and telling me about projects that they had made in school that gave me an enthusiasm for that. And that's how fifty years ago (1937) I made that airport drawing that was in Paris in your Chicago show.

Blum: What you are describing sounds like an time of great excitement, of experimentation, of agitation, but of great conservatism.

Malcolmson: Yes. Actually, this great conservatism helped in a way, because it was the opposition.

Blum: You know you said before that you thought there was not an indigenous group in England that really sort of opted for new architecture, and yet…

Malcolmson: Not until very late.

Blum: Well, in 1933 there was this MARS group.

22 Malcolmson: Well, it didn't really get going until about 1935 to 1939.

Blum: That was early.

Malcolmson: Yes, yes. They did two things that were interesting. They made a big general exhibition of architecture. Most of the examples came from either France or Germany. And they made a plan for London, a linear city, in fact.

Blum: Is that right?

Malcolmson: Yes. And there again, you see, they had to fall back on the European connection because one of the movers of that plan for London was Arthur Korn. Hilbs knew him in Berlin. He had come from Berlin. When Hilbs had gone to America, Korn went to England. Korn became a very much admired teacher in the AA and later in his life. People loved him because he was a teacher like Hilbs who had a lot to say. Young people were very enthusiastic about him.

Blum: You had training in city planning, or town planning.

Malcolmson: Yes.

Blum: Where and when?

Malcolmson: There again, that came about in a very, very strange way. I know for reasons of the catalogue this couldn't really be included, but in the first draft when you asked me to write something, I mentioned Le Corbusier's City of Tomorrow. I read that around 1934. One of these guys from Liverpool said to me, "Did you ever read any of Le Corbusier's books?" No, I said, I hardly even know who he is. Then he said, "Go read the City of Tomorrow." I read it. I couldn't stop reading it until I finished it. I think I read it maybe about two or three times and immediately I read it I thought to myself, making buildings doesn't make any sense if there isn't a new city. So that made me think about it, you know. But then I put it away like you do, you put them away in some filing cabinet in your head. So around 1942 my sister by that time was married and my brother-in-law was working in a government office and he got to know a prominent English town planner, a very prominent one. He was one of the founders of the Town Planning Institute.

23 Blum: Who was that?

Malcolmson: William R. Davidge. And Davidge was appointed actually as an overall planner to the government of Northern Ireland at that time and my brother-in-law introduced me to him. He invited me to come to his house one Saturday and here was Mr. Davidge, a very big cheese in planning in England then. And Davidge told me about what his job was, what he wanted to do, and he said, "You know, we have to introduce this planning. We have to educate people somehow or other." And I said, "I have a number of friends, and we have talked about what would happen after the war, and we thought we might get together, we'd make some projects and we'd make an exhibition of that." He said, "That's a nice idea." He said, "Are you really serious about that?" I said, "Yes, I am." I said, "I have to tell you, I know who you are and when my brother-in-law asked me to come see you I made up my mind I was going to tell you about it." So, before we had broken up he had already told me, he said, "If you get your group together I will see if we can't finance an exhibition for you." So, I got this group, there were ten of us, and we made a planning exhibition, town planning.

Blum: Where did you get the background to produce something that made sense in terms of town planning?

Malcolmson: Along with Davidge came a permanent appointee. Davidge, you might say, was a consultant. His role was as a prominent, highly experienced town planner, one of the founders of the Town Planning Institute in 1913. He was, as it were, to start everything. He was to lay out the framework of a planning organization. To direct us, they appointed a former lecturer from Liverpool University, Denis Winston. Winston was very enthusiastic because he understood immediately when he saw our drawings. He understood exactly what this was because he had taught it at Liverpool. Liverpool, for a very short time under Professor Reilly, was a very avant-garde school before World War II. They had Gropius many times as a lecturer there and they had Mendelsohn, Chermayeff, and Breuer. They had everybody you might think of. Gabo was there. And Winston saw at a flash that here were these young people who had all these ideas, so he literally gave us a crash course in planning. There and then. So from that we made a plan for the City of Belfast. And we made all the exhibition as a model.

24 Blum: Where was the exhibition held?

Malcolmson: It was in the Museum of Art in Belfast.

Blum: And what kind of effect did that have on the people who saw it?

Malcolmson: It had a very big impact. In fact, it did everything that Davidge hoped it would do and maybe more. It excited a great deal of interest. I made for that a model of that airport. I made some drawings of walk-up apartment buildings. Those drawings were lost afterwards. We made an overall plan for Queen's University. That didn't please my old boss, MacGeagh, too much because he by that time was the architect for Queen's University. But he was pleased to see people that he had trained. I'm trying to think, now, of the sections. There was one on transport and communications, one on houses and housing and whatnot, commerce and industry, one on parks and open spaces, one on civic buildings of the center. And it made a big impact. It made such an impact that we were encouraged to do a second one and, in fact, two friends of mine came from Dublin. Now you have to remember there were very funny conditions at this time that outsiders could not understand at all. Ireland was neutral but this section of Ireland was in the war because it was still related to the United Kingdom. But there was no conscription so it was a very funny kind of situation. But these two, Michael Costello and Noel Moffett. Now, Noel Moffett at the moment is somewhere in Washington State, I think, somewhere around Portland. He was a graduate of Liverpool. He was from County Cork. I worked with him during the war, subsequently, and these two came to see it and they were very enthusiastic. From it was founded a group that called itself the National Planning Conference of Ireland. And I was invited with my people to be part of them and in 1944 we made an exhibition for National Planning for Ireland. I have publications of this if you are interested to look at them sometime. I kept some, and some photographs.

Blum: Was town planning fairly new at that time?

Malcolmson: Not really.

Blum: The way you are describing it?

25 Malcolmson: Actually, the City of Dublin is one of the first cities in the English-speaking world to have had a long-term city plan. It was developed by no less than Sir Patrick Abercrombie, who was a pioneer in planning in England. He was the founder of the Town Planning Institute. He was hired around 1915 as consultant to Dublin Corporation and he made this very elaborate plan, I think, not too much of it was realized. But he made this very elaborate plan at that time. So it wouldn't be true to say that it was something that was imported. It had already been well established. We're talking about town planning being well established in Ireland from as long ago as World War I. In fact, Dublin, as a city, had a long tradition of this before. There were commissions in the eighteenth century that established, more or less, the framework of the whole city as a famous Georgian city.

Blum: Well, the reason I even asked that was because I was thinking about Daniel Burnham in Chicago and the 1909 Plan of Chicago and the subsequent city plans that he had established.

Malcolmson: Well, Abercrombie was not Burnham in the sense that we understand Burnham as a disciple of Haussmann. I think Abercrombie probably set the tone for a lot of English planning in the sense that he tried to avoid an overtly monumental city. At the same time, Abercrombie knew very well that the central areas of capital cities do need a special monumentalism or a special kind of urban expression that gives the central area a great architectural importance. He showed that in the plan he made. My reading of Le Corbusier in 1934 had touched it all off for me. And I looked at a lot of his work. As a matter of fact, when I read that book then I began to trace back and lay my hands on everything I could find out about Le Corbusier. Oddly enough, because I was trained as an architect in an environment that designed houses, which I still think is a very good beginning, the house is such a complicated and at the same time such an ingenious puzzle to put together that if you can design the house and make a good house, you can design almost anything. But I started to backtrack and find out everything he had done. I didn't like everything. As a matter of fact, the house that made the big impression on me in the 1930s was Mies's Tugendhat House. That was for me the ultimate. In fact, I liked it even better than the Barcelona Pavilion because the Barcelona Pavilion is very grand but it's something you can't live in. But when

26 translated into the Tugendhat House there it is, all very elegant, all very agreeable, all very compatible with living in.

Blum: Reggie, let me back up for one moment and ask you how you did your four-year apprenticeship. After that were you then entitled to get your license as an architect?

Malcolmson: I got as far as the intermediate exam, then I started on the final exam. Then the war began to trip me up on the final exam because, first of all, we were cut off from England to a large extent and secondly I got preoccupied with work I was doing at the time. Things like these magnetic mine stations and so on, practical things. And it was only little by little that I managed to retrieve the diploma work, which I finished during the war, and then I had a license. So the upshot of this is I didn't get to be an architect in my own right at thirty.

[Tape 2: Side 1]

Blum: You were talking about when you got your license. You said you didn't get it at thirty.

Malcolmson: No, I meant to say I had the license but I didn't get to be a practicing architect in my own right until I was thirty-three. That's what I'm trying to say.

Blum: You were talking about town planning and you are known as an advocate of the linear city. And that, of course, is planning. And by 1943 you were already promoting that concept. How did that evolve?

Malcolmson: No, in fact in 1943 I wasn't. I was accepting, more or less, I was feeling my way, you might say, in 1943. It's interesting that you should have mentioned 1943 because I made a drawing at that time which is unconsciously a little piece of the linear city. You see it in the drawing. It isn't until years later that I realized what it really was. It was a piece of it but I didn't understand it at the time. It was a center that had office buildings in the rear. They are not very big. They are about fourteen stories and they are like a double cross in plan. A long spine and two cross elements like this. And in front of them are low buildings that are about six stories. And in between them are parking areas and along them then is a corridor

27 which is a pedestrian corridor that connects all of them. It's a little fragment of the linear city. I didn't know that then because I didn't see it as a whole.

Blum: But the idea must have been somehow percolating…

Malcolmson: It was coming up, it was on its way.

Blum: Yes. When you became a practicing architect you mentioned before that…

Malcolmson: I have to precede that with a little piece I say now. I mentioned earlier this National Planning exhibition. That was really a big event. The Prime Minister of Ireland came to the opening of it, Mr. De Valera and this was almost a kind of official recognition of this effort. There were a number of very interesting young architects in this exhibition and there were even students that worked on this exhibition and later became very well known, very prominent architects in Ireland. Oddly enough, nearly all the prime movers of this exhibition left Ireland in subsequent years after the war. I suppose they were all restless and energetic people that couldn't be contained in such a little country.

Blum: In what year was this exhibition?

Malcolmson: 1944. During 1944 I worked with Noel Moffett. We were colleagues, so to speak. We shared a practice. In fact, that anticipates my later date saying 1933. Actually in 1944 I was in practice. We had a lot of clients and we had a lot of potential things but we got very little done as far as I can recall of the time. We did a renovation of a very elite restaurant in Dublin that made a big splash at the time.

Blum: Did you renovate it in a more contemporary…

Malcolmson: Oh, absolutely. In fact it was the subject of a lot of discussion at the time.

Blum: This was after the war?

Malcolmson: No, during the war in 1944. And we had a number of projects that didn't get off the ground. I am trying to think of other things. Of course, we were also one of the office groups that was working on the planning and design of the whole exhibition that year, which took a lot of our time and, in fact, I made some new projects for that exhibition, especially for the exhibition. Then a friend of mine,

28 who is a graduate of Liverpool who was practicing in the north of Ireland wrote to me and asked me if I would come into practice with him and his brother. So I went north again at the end of 1944 and from 1945 to 1947 I was practicing with him.

Blum: Who was he?

Malcolmson: Phillip and Roger Bell, brothers. They are both deceased now. Phillip Bell was older than I am. He was probably about four or five years older than me. He had been in practice before the war, mostly building houses. He built a yacht club somewhere during that time. He worked on that big sanatorium competition with us. In fact, he was in the office that was set up after the competition was won. He had been in the group that I organized that made the housing and town planning exhibition in 1943-44, the beginning of 1944. Then I went to work on the larger exhibition of 1944. Now through all of these things I met a great number of people. I think I knew almost every practicing architect in Ireland. The greatest influence that modern architecture had made in Ireland before the war was in two built projects. One was Dublin airport, which was designed by Desmond Fitzgerald. It still looks like a modern building. It was built around 1936 and the other one was a very large bus station built in central Dublin by Michael Scott whose firm is now the most important firm in Ireland and the most avant-garde one. In fact, Robin Walker, who was a graduate of Mies, became a partner of his and to wrap this up, then, I have to tell you Robin Walker was a student working for us on that big exhibition of 1944. But this has become an extraordinarily fertile firm and they have done some of the best work in the British Isles. They have an office, incidentally, in London as well as in Dublin. They built several university campuses and so on. So then we come to 1945. In the practice with the Bells I designed a factory building. It was more or less a straightforward thing. I designed a considerable amount of housing that was built, mostly row housing, duplex housing. But housing estates, I mean whole groups of houses, three or four hundred of them at a time.

Blum: Was the public more receptive to a new architecture at that time?

Malcolmson: Yes and no. Yes, I think generally, because of the need for new buildings. No, in the sense that they were always suspicious of any new ideas at all. There is a

29 saying in one of your volumes, I have the same edition as you have, of the Encyclopedia Britannica, that the King of England, while it could be said that he was not opposed to modern ideas, he resisted them at every possible turn. That is true of his people too. But we come to a critical year, 1946. In 1945 I had a setback. I designed some superlative housing for a borough council, a rural town, and they forced, they actually contracted to put pitched roofs on my houses where I had flat roofs. But I had flat roofs for a special reason. I mean it wasn't just for the sake of having flat roofs. My houses were on a hill and one house could see over the roof of the next one, and it had all been skillfully worked out in section to do this. They destroyed the whole thing. I was so mad I never went back to see those houses again.

Blum: They were built?

Malcolmson: Yes. And by that time there were young Americans working in our office. They were GIs that were going back to America.

Blum: In your office with the Bells?

Malcolmson: Yes. We were asked by the American Consulate's Office, would we accept GIs that the government would pay for. The object was that they would work for us and work with us as a way of reestablishing them in the profession when they went back home. So here it opened up a whole new world for me. I began to see Gropius at Harvard and I found Mies on the IIT campus and I saw this Museum of Modern Art publication Built in the USA and here was that Metals Research Building.

Blum: On the IIT campus?

Malcolmson: IIT campus. Yes, which you know all about. So, two things were happening at that time. I was very disturbed by that setback with the housing so I talked the Bells into embarking on a very ambitious competition to rebuild the Crystal Palace in London. And I made a set of drawings with them. I was the chief designer of the whole thing. I have these drawings at home, as a matter of fact. I have them in blueprint form. They are very big. They're seven feet long by about three feet wide. This was a project in which I had this idea to make a huge

30 exhibition hall with the floors moving inside. And it was very exciting to do. It's in my book now and I kept photographs of the models and so forth. I have retained practically every piece of paper that I ever made a drawing on. So, at this dramatic moment my mother said to me one day, "I'm going to leave you some money when I die but I have an idea that I would like to give you at least half of that money now to see what you will do. Why don't you think about what you will do and tell me about it and then we can decide how it's going to be arranged." So I began to think about it, very quickly. And I thought to myself, I've come to a point now where I've tried as hard as I can to find a way to build the type of buildings that I've seen published in books that I've seen in London, and among them are Gropius and Mendelsohn, and so on. I'm at the point now where I really need to work with somebody that has solved all these problems. At that time I was designing a youth center. I had made a design for the whole thing but I made the working drawings myself. Many times I made the working drawings because I wouldn't let anybody else do them. You know, the boss shouldn't be doing things like that, but I always did. But when I started to make the working drawings I made an extraordinary discovery, which was like the incident that happened when I was twelve with the house, I found that making the working drawings was designing the building. That constructing the building was designing the building. So I had to scrap all the so-called designs. I realized they were only pictures. But I made this extraordinary discovery. And within a month I saw the details of the corners of the Metals Research Building at IIT and I said, there's the man that has discovered it. So I had in my mind then, shall I go to Paris and work with Le Corbusier? Le Corbusier then had this huge building in Marseilles to build that was very much talked about. Models of it had been published but nothing had been started. And then I saw the book with Mies's work and that settled it. I said to my mother, "You know, if I went to Paris I'd have to brush up my French and so forth but these things that I see in Chicago, that's where I should be." She said, "Very well, do it." So that's how I came to America.

Blum: That was what brought you to make this huge change?

Malcolmson: That was the deciding moment. Yes. That was the deciding moment. Danforth still says to people, you know, in my presence, he says, "This extraordinary

31 fellow threw away a whole practice to come and work with Mies." But it wasn't too extraordinary to me, you know. Now that I told you the details... I was working my way towards this kind of big change. And it was a big change, believe me. Granville Smyth, I told you, was my best man. I was married in August and I was in Chicago by October.

Blum: Well, I'm sure from the outside it looks like a momentous decision and change but I can certainly see now that you've explained what was happening.

Malcolmson: There was a metamorphosis going on all the time, you know.

Blum: Reggie, just to review before we get into the crossing, your arrival in Chicago, and all those experiences, just review quickly as you see it what this metamorphosis was up until that moment when you made that decision.

Malcolmson: It was one of a number of turning points. If we look back on what's been said, it was a turning point, of the same magnitude as the building of a house when I was twelve years of age, my father building a house when I was twelve. It was of the same magnitude as when I started architecture just as experimentally it was something that I knew I couldn't stop. It took me only a week to ten days to find out that it was something I had to do. That was another such stage. I mentioned one that I think is very important, when I made working drawings of a youth center and discovered that I could discard the designs, so-called, because the construction of the building was the real thing. Or I should say it was the reality of the building—how it was put together. That was a discovery I didn't find from books, I didn't read it anywhere, I made it personally for myself. And actually, as you know, I've been a teacher for thirty-five years at IIT and then Michigan, I think I have to tell students those kind of things occasionally. Because not everything is taught in schools and the personal discoveries you make are probably the most alarming and significant discoveries that you are going to make in your career. So the moment I decided to go to Chicago was another one of the same kind. When I decided to go I wrote to Mies. In fact, I sent him a small portfolio that contained photographs of buildings that I was working on at the time, some of them under construction, some of them completed. Projects and the competition project I made for the Crystal Palace in London. And he sent me a telegram which said, "How soon can you come?" or something like that. So

32 then shortly after the telegram a series of forms came from IIT and I finished them. That was about April of 1947. The reason I didn't get to Chicago until October was, unfortunately, the consul died and somebody else had to take over all my papers and study them and process them. So there was a long delay because I had to have a visa at that time to come to the United States. It was just in the postwar period. And by the time all this paperwork was cleared up it was late September and I got a flight around the 20th of October, I think, and arrived in LaGuardia sometime about 3:00 in the morning around the 22nd, the 21st, or 22nd. My wife stayed a week in New York. Or no, she stayed, I think, a month in New York. I stayed a week. Hardly a week because we'd landed on a Tuesday and I had to be in school by the next Monday. So a couple of interesting things happened at that time. We stayed with a publishing editor in Westfield, New Jersey, whose wife had a sister who'd been a student with my wife in Ireland at Queens University. On the Saturday I had a marvelous experience because they decided to take me on a trip around Manhattan that would take in all the suspension bridges that connect Manhattan to across the East River and across the Hudson River. There is only one, naturally, on the Hudson River, the George Washington Bridge. We saved that one to the last because it was automatic, but it was an extraordinarily exciting experience. I'd never seen suspension bridges on such an enormous scale before. When I was a child I can remember seeing probably one of the first suspension bridges. It is in Wales, the Menar Straits suspension bridge (1819-24). It's a chain suspension bridge.

Blum: Was this your first trip to the United States?

Malcolmson: Oh yes.

Blum: What was your impression of New York?

Malcolmson: I preface my impression by telling you something about my preconception of it first. Oddly enough, in a little country like Ireland there is great interest in America because there is such an enormous population from Ireland in America. I think it's something like second only to the German population of the United States according to the census at the time—1980. Something like thirty-five million people claiming Irish descent. So there is a great deal of interest in the sense that many young generation people traditionally had gone to America and

33 still kept contact with the older generation. Naturally, one huge tide of immigration happened in 1847 when the famine came. Over a million immigrated to America then. And naturally through media like movies, and so forth, you had all kinds of preconceptions about America, that Chicago was full of gangsters, and that people played strange games like baseball. The movies seemed to create a kind of atmosphere that was a packaged form of America, that was, I found out, very far away from what America really was like.

Blum: Did the movies and the advance publicity of the United States give you any idea about its architecture?

Malcolmson: No, but I knew something about the architecture of America. In fact, Denis Winston, who gave us that crash course on planning was in America. He'd been in Chicago and he'd been primarily, I think, in Harvard. He was what was called a Commonwealth Scholar at one time in the 1930s and he told me a great deal about America and in fact he was one of the people who was a sponsor of mine. He wrote a nice letter of recommendation to IIT for me. He told me something that always stuck in my mind afterwards because I realized when I got there, lived there, that it was an irrefutable truth. He said, "Chicago is the spiritual capital of America." And I think that's absolutely true. I know it could be challenged but for me it's a self-evident truth.

Blum: Was that because of the architecture?

Malcolmson: I think yes, but I think it's for several reasons. Chicago is as much a melting pot as New York in a way. Not as obviously, probably, because many of the immigrations are firmly established in the nineteenth century, late nineteenth century, early twentieth. Also because traditionally Chicago has been really the industrial center of America. I mean, it's the city that we used to think everything gets done. People still tell me, you know, nothing gets done any more since Mayor Daley died but Chicago has always had that imprimatur of the place that things get done. Don't you agree?

Blum: Perhaps it was the fact that the city burned down in 1871 and…

Malcolmson: It rose from its own ashes.

34 Blum: In a very short while.

Malcolmson: And very dramatically, too, because it was an entirely new city.

Blum: And it did develop into the banking center and the railroad center.

Malcolmson: And it brought the great architects to Chicago, too. If you wanted to build buildings, Chicago was the place to build them on a big scale. Some of them from Boston, I think Richardson, yes, the Marshall Field warehouse and many others too.

Blum: This was also a place where experimentation took place.

Malcolmson: And experimentation, yes. So I find that the saying about Chicago to be, as I say, a self-evident truth.

Blum: What did you expect visually?

Malcolmson: Well, I knew from illustrations, from books on American architecture and so forth. I had even seen the new, in pictures, 333 North Michigan Avenue. I mean these things had all been very well documented and, naturally, there was Wright's connection with Chicago.

Blum: Did you know about Wright when you came?

Malcolmson: Oh, yes, yes. Wright was very well known in Europe. First of all, Wright was given the RIBA gold medal in 1940, which caused quite a splash because Wright had not been honored anywhere in America before that time. Wright gave a very special speech in London when he received this and he seemed to think that it was a confirmation of his genius that America hadn't yet come to terms with. He was right about that because, after all, he was a great American artist as well as a great American architect. I think sometimes, if we speak of the indigenous Americans, that is to say the people born in America, related by family to the American tradition, I would think that James Abbott McNeil Whistler and Frank Lloyd Wright are the two great artists of America. That's a debatable point, naturally, but I think not only because they were great artists but they had a

35 great international impact. Whistler spent a large part of his life in Europe, especially in England.

Blum: He is also considered an expatriate.

Malcolmson: Yes, yes. The point I am trying to make is he had a great European impact. For example, Manet was overwhelmed by Whistler's paintings because he thought that Turner and Whistler were the original Impressionists, and Wright, as you know, was recognized in Germany before World War I, in Holland and Germany. In fact, he made a great issue of that, that only in Europe he could get recognition.

Blum: So access to his work was easy for you being in Europe.

Malcolmson: Many of his books had come out just about World War II. Just before. I think there is one of Henry-Russell Hitchcock, In the Nature of Materials. That I read just before the war and his autobiography I read during the war.

Blum: Did New York live up to your expectations?

Malcolmson: Yes. I don't really know what my expectations were. I'll tell you a very interesting moment. We were arriving in LaGuardia at 3:00 a.m. We had to find a place to stay overnight. We didn't know where to stay so a taxi driver found us a place in Flushing. He drove us, I think, all around Manhattan. We had a very big bill for the taxi but he got us to Flushing. In the morning we took an elevated train to go downtown to Manhattan and it was a very clear sunny morning and I saw for the first time in my life the skyscrapers of Manhattan very far away in the distance. It was a very eerie sensation because this was a real sensation. This wasn't seeing anything in photographs or in movies or anything like that. You know, you had a very, very strange sensation, almost like a prehistoric man seeing a mammoth for the first time because it seemed so far away from any experience I had to see buildings that are so large and that are vertical buildings. You know, there are plenty of big buildings in Europe that are horizontal buildings but to see these gigantic vertical buildings was a very, very strange impression. Then we went downtown by an odd translation, we went from this seedy rooming house in Flushing to the Cornell Club to have lunch with Mr.

36 Beech, who we stayed with in the house in Westfield, New Jersey, and then we had this marvelous drive around the suspension bridges. We actually came to the Museum of Modern Art. It was a Saturday and it was closed and when I went to Chicago my wife wrote to me and she said, "Do you know what was going on inside the Museum of Modern Art the day we drove up and we were told it was closed? An exhibition of Mies van der Rohe had just opened."

Blum: Oh, what a pity.

Malcolmson: That was the Johnson exhibition of 1947. So I wrote back to her and I said, "Yes, it's too bad, but he's here."

Blum: That's what you came for. When you got to Chicago how did Chicago impress you? You had already been sensitized by New York's buildings.

Malcolmson: I had to go on an overnight train from somewhere in New Jersey. I think Harrisburg. Is that in New Jersey?

Blum: It sounds more like Pennsylvania to me but I don't know.

Malcolmson: I think we drove to Harrisburg and I got on the train there. I was astonished at the size of this train, this air-conditioned train. In those days the trains were very good and I had never seen a train of this scale. First of all, the length of this train alone was on a super scale. I got into this big air-conditioned coach and I sat down and in front of me was a young man who turned around and said hello to me and he asked me where I was going and I said I was going to Chicago. And I asked him where he was going and he was going to Denver. He said, "I live in Denver but I came to Chicago because I wanted to see a baseball game." And I thought to myself how can people go literally a few thousand miles just to see a baseball game.

Blum: But he was in New York.

Malcolmson: No, he was from Denver. I think he did come to see the World Series. But still it seemed to me an extraordinary thing to me to travel several thousand miles to see an athletic event. So, you know, the distances, after all I came from an island that was only 300 miles long by 180 miles wide. It's the same size as Indiana,

37 almost exactly the same size. And the idea of traveling a thousand miles or more seemed to me to be incomprehensible almost. The train got into Chicago about 9:00 in Union Station. I've said this before in the speech I gave in the Centennial about going through the basilica of the Union Station and going up the stairs and seeing Chicago. I got on a bus and there was a friendly bus driver. It was a period just after the war where people seemed to be exceptionally friendly with one another. This bus driver recognized by my accent that I came from Ireland because he'd been a soldier in World War I stationed in County Cork. He told me how much he enjoyed being in Ireland, got to know a great number of people and so forth, so I told him where I wanted to go. He said, "You just sit beside me here and I'll tell you where to get off and where to take the streetcar." So, eventually I took the streetcar to IIT. It was a rainy day. It was very, very cold and it was very, very wet. It was the 27th of October, 1947. It was a Monday morning. It was exactly four years to the day that my father died in Ireland. Sixty-six, it was relatively young. He had very bad malaria in Africa in the First World War. So I got to the IIT campus and here I saw the Navy Building and the Chemistry Building and the Metallurgy Building were under construction, but by no means complete. I think in the Chemistry Building they were still working on the roof. The thing that impressed me very much was that I had seen in London, as I told you in the earlier tape, the first buildings in my experience that could be called modern. But the Mies buildings, in spite of the very bad day and the rain, looked very good. I thought that was a very good test because I know very well that there is an art of photography that makes the buildings look even better than they are. And so I went in, I found where the Navy Building was, I went upstairs and I met Bill Dunlap and Dan Brenner. We sat and talked for a long time. By that time it must have been close to 11:00 so we talked on till noon and Dan said Mies is coming in this afternoon at 3:00. Why don't we go and have lunch and we can continue talking there. So we went over to the old Union Building that doesn't exist any more and we ate lunch and that took another hour and then we went back and Dan showed me around the building and we walked around the other two that were still being finished up. The Metallurgy Building, we used to call it then, that's the two-story, the Perlstein Building now, on State Street. It was almost finished. In fact in about a month it was finished. Then I met Abdel Kamel, from Egypt. He had come in while we were out at lunch and we

38 talked and there were one or two others there. Carter Manny was around then. I think I may have met him that day or certainly within three or four days after that. Within about two weeks I met Myron Goldsmith. He came out one evening because he heard there was something big going on at the graduate school and that was a big model we were working on then. You've seen it in the IIT exhibition.

Blum: All of these people that you are mentioning were there as students?

Malcolmson: Yes, they were all there at that time.

Blum: And were they enrolling as you were?

Malcolmson: Well, Carter had some special status which would be hard to begin to explain. He was working towards the licensing examination but he had some kind of special status as a graduate student at the time. He wasn't in our group. But that is not to say that there was anything exclusive about our group, as I call them.

Blum: Your group, meaning…

Malcolmson: Our group was Dan Brenner, Bill Dunlap, myself, and technically Abdel was in the same group. But Abdel was really a doctoral candidate. He was working towards a doctoral degree. Dan, Bill and I were the first-year graduates. We were the only three.

Blum: Was George Danforth there at the time?

Malcolmson: George was still in the Navy. He was on his way back. In fact Eddie Paul was then doing a lot of the administrative work in the office. He was doing the office work. You know who he is. He is the deceased husband of Frances Paul. You have seen her at some of these events. He was then in his last year as an undergraduate. Jacques Brownson was in his last year as an undergraduate. I met him very soon after I arrived. Bruno Conterato was in his last year as an undergraduate. And Jim Ferris. Mies arrived in the afternoon around 3:00 with Jim Speyer and Speyer introduced himself. As a matter of fact, Speyer had been there slightly before. I think Mies must have been in the office and then Speyer brought him down. But Speyer came in earlier, introduced himself, very affable. I

39 was very amused at Speyer because he was dressed in a style that was a little ahead of its time then. He wore tennis shoes and he wore a kind of tweed jacket and his hair was longer then than later and he had traveled a great deal. We talked at some length. He had been in the Sorbonne in Paris. He had been in Ireland. He had been on a cycling tour in Ireland and he told me about how much he enjoyed it, how much he enjoyed the countryside in the southwest. And then he disappeared and shortly afterwards came in with Mies. Mies was all smiles. Obviously I could see then he had that arthritic problem because he had a problem with his leg when he was walking and he asked me did I have a place to stay. I said no and he said to Speyer, "Why don't you see if you can do something for him."

Blum: He was speaking to you in English?

Malcolmson: Oh, yes. Yes. Very clearly, much more clearly than Hilbs. Hilbs always retained a very strong German accent. Very strong. Some people could hardly understand Hilbs, or claimed they couldn't. But I think that was just really provincialism because if you've traveled to any extent and been in other countries you begin to develop an ear that you can understand what people who don't speak very good English are really trying to say. Speyer then got me a room in International House on the University of Chicago campus. Then we sat down and we talked for a little while. I mentioned that in the Centennial lecture, about those skyscraper models being there and that I commented to Mies about it. It was so, I shouldn't say obvious, but to me it was a kind of revelation in a way that the room we were in was all in English bond brickwork, meticulously done and this was actually a detail of the skyscrapers that we were looking at that had brick panels and so forth. So I saw, you know, this link between the large and the small. There was a consistency there.

[Tape 2: Side 2]

Blum: You were talking about the link between the small and the large.

Malcolmson: I asked him, because I pointed this out to him, I said, "I've seen this here, this linkage," and I said something to the effect that I'm impressed that you make the English bond with such exactitude. Would you make the same if it was a

40 plastered wall? He said, "Let me tell you, if I had to build a wall I would make it an English bond even if it was plastered on all sides."

Blum: Did that surprise you?

Malcolmson: I said to myself, I know I'm in the right place now. This is what I'm looking for.

Blum: That first morning when you were greeted by these other students, met Mies, saw the buildings, some still under construction, did you think you had really done the right thing?

Malcolmson: Oh, I was very, very sure of it.

Blum: The IIT campus was in no way complete by that time. It was probably pretty bleak.

Malcolmson: There was almost nothing. On the site of Crown Hall was this enormous apartment house, known as the Mecca Building, which was a big slum building actually. Very dramatic. If you walked into the court inside it was like a setting from a Tennessee Williams play. There was this grandeur of this building. It was built in a style almost like Elmslie in that flat Roman brick that was used in Chicago in Sullivan's day so much, and by Sullivan himself. There were verandas on at least four or five levels around. You could see that this was at one time not only a luxury building but it was the first large apartment building west of the Alleghenies. It had been a great building at one time and it had simply gone into decay and decline.

Blum: But it was slated for demolition for the campus?

Malcolmson: Yes, it was. It had a kind of macabre grandeur and there were many other buildings around there. There was an old building Danforth remembers very well across State Street, the Grand. I'm afraid it was in such bad shape that it probably would have been enormously costly to restore but the Grand later was torn down. The Grand was a building that has a very big place in the history of Chicago. That's the building in which Louis Armstrong played for the first time. Everybody who came from New Orleans played in the Grand. Danforth could

41 list for you all the famous notabilities that played in it. And it was actually the port of entry of jazz into Chicago. So it seems sad that it disappeared.

Blum: The one building that impressed you before you came to IIT was the Metallurgy Building?

Malcolmson: Yes. It was very fresh.

Blum: How did that strike you? Did it live up to the photograph?

Malcolmson: Oh, yes. It was very fresh and in good shape, not as it is now. It's been very badly treated over the years. And it didn't have that extension that his office made later, with the blue glass. You could see that big wall that everybody used to call the Mondrian wall, you know the wall I'm talking about. In fact, Chermayeff referred to it as the Mondrian wall. Mies seemed to be a little irritated with the suggestion that it could be anybody but Mies. That was a splendid building at that time. It looked even better in actuality than it did in its pictures. The only things that were on the campus that were by Mies were the Metals Research Building on Federal Street, two long engineering buildings, one of which contained the library of the school at the time. They were made in concrete during the war, not very well executed, with wood window frames. They are still there. They are used largely as storage buildings now. They are only one story high. And then the little group up at the other end, Navy Building, Chemistry, and Metallurgy and, in fact, only one of those three completed. So, of classroom buildings there was only one, that's the Navy Building and it then looked very, very elegant. It was brand new. It had been built just the year before and it was really like a jewel. The school was on the upper floor, on the second floor, and we had a couple of rooms on the ground floor. The Navy had everything else.

Blum: What was the atmosphere among the students?

Malcolmson: It was also something that I wasn't prepared for. Practically all the student body had been GIs and they had a great sense of camaraderie. They helped one another on their work. They cooked in the classroom and ate in the classroom. They had portable electric stoves that they cooked on and they worked at night as well as in the daytime. Many of them were quite angry at the government

42 having used up so much of their lives in the war and they were determined to graduate as quickly as possible. So they just felt that the only way to graduate was to work your way towards it. Work around the clock. It created a very exciting kind of atmosphere because you felt the school was very much alive.

Blum: How did you find your own place in that situation?

Malcolmson: No problem at all. I was, in a sense I suppose, if I wanted to think about it now, I felt very much at home. As a matter of fact, there wasn't a moment from the first day I arrived that I felt a stranger to this environment at all. And, in fact, I was, if anything, a kind of novelty to many people. Somebody told me "Are you really an Irishman? Do you really come from Ireland? Because I know a great number of people who say they're Irish but they have never been in Ireland." So this created a certain amount of novelty so it wore off, naturally, after a while. But in the beginning a lot of people were very, very friendly to me. I found it a very, very friendly and exciting atmosphere. It was almost, you might say, the kind of atmosphere you'd hope a school would always be because there was a sense of purpose, urgency, excitement, everybody working around the clock, everybody thoroughly immersed in studying architecture. There was an institution that grew up at that time. It was a house on Prairie Avenue, 1700 South Prairie, and a group of students had that house—Jim Ferris, Paul Shaver, Arthur Takeuchi were there for a while, and three or four others whose names I can't recall at the moment. This house was a kind of off-campus dormitory that these boys had bought for themselves. They had redecorated it. It was a fine old house actually. It was about four, maybe five stories high. It was a big mansion inside and it was, I think, not far from where Moholy's original Chicago Bauhaus was. These students every so often would have an evening where they would ask the graduates and the faculty to come. They would cook a dinner for them and they would serve the dinner. They would act as waiters and serve the dinner. We had some fine banquets there, a typical evening, for example, was, I think it was almost the first evening Margaret and I went there. We were sitting in a downstairs room. Henry Wallace was then a candidate for president and there was always a fringe that was interested in Henry Wallace, I guess, simply because they were against the establishment, more than anything else. There was a guitar player who was an Institute of Design [ID] student. He was a guitar

43 player who had been a folk singer for the Wallace campaign, and he was brought in that evening to play for the guests. We were all sitting on couches and on the floor listening to this going on and I became conscious after a while that the audience wasn't as big as it had been when we started. There was more and more space in the room and I thought people were going home. There had been a lot of drinking. The big drink in those days used to be Jim Beam. I guess it was relatively inexpensive then and there had been very ample servings of Jim Beam before and after the dinner. Mies was not there. The faculty was not there on that night. There were only graduates and undergraduates and some Institute of Design people there. I think Chuck Wiley was there from the Institute of Design, who had worked with Skidmore later on. I got this uncomfortable feeling that people were going home. So I thought there is one way to find out. I went out to the hallway to look at the coat racks to see if there were coats missing. There weren't any, in fact there were some more coats and then I thought to myself, they are moving out somewhere. They are somewhere else in the house so I said to Margaret, go on, get up and we'll go upstairs. So we went upstairs with Bob Reeves who was a graduate student then, incidentally, with Hilbs. I forgot to mention there were more people with Hilbs, actually, in 1947 as graduates than with Mies. Hilbs had about six or seven I think. And we went up one flight and we didn't find anybody in any of the rooms. Then we went up another flight and then we began to hear some noise and when we went up the next flight the noise was getting louder. And then we got to the top of the house and there were only two rooms. We opened one and there was nobody there and then we opened the second one and a blast of sound came out of this room that would blow your head off. Ferris was officiating and they had African war drums playing at full blast. It could be heard blocks away. Abdel was seated on the throne that had been built for him at the far end of the room and he had a bed sheet on and a Jays potato chip can on top of his head and he had just been crowned King of Egypt. That's a sample of the joie de vivre that was among this crowd. They were full of invention and full of excitement. We had a very nice evening earlier than that at Speyer's house. Speyer had an apartment on Superior Street and it was right beside a laundry. I can remember that because there was this flashing sign that was right beside his window and it kept going on and off all the time we were sitting in this room. It had a bay window. Abdel was there, I was there, a friend

44 of mine, a student that I became very friendly with, Wilson Garces, he was from Ecuador, he was a planning student of Hilbs, he was there, and Dunlap. I think Dan was there. I'm not sure. Ferris was somewhere around. There must have been, I would say, fifteen or so, fifteen or eighteen of us there and then in came Mies with Speyer. Speyer had gone off to pick him up. We talked a lot and Abdel sat through all these sessions smiling like a sphinx and everybody knows how taciturn Mies was, or could be. After a while Mies couldn't stand it any more and he caught a hold of Abdel by the sleeve of his coat and he said, "Tell me, what are you thinking about?" And Abdel turned around and flashed a big smile at Mies and he said, "Nothing, Mies, nothing at all." Mies's jaw dropped. I can't remember the subjects we talked about that evening. Oh, we talked at one time about the attack that was made on Le Corbusier for saying a house is a machine for living in. And I said to Mies, and that's been confirmed many times since, you can read it in this interesting book called Elements of a Synthesis by Von Loos. It's about Le Corbusier. It's probably the best book on Le Corbusier that he didn't write himself, because he wrote very well. I said to Mies, "You know, this is a complete misunderstanding. If Le Corbusier thought that he was shocking the bourgeoisie in France by saying that, that's one thing. But the machine in the French language is not a derogatory term like it is in the English language. In the English language it has a mundane use and material connotation. In the French language, authors in the time of rationalism, the time of Descartes, used to talk about the mechanism of the universe as if it was some grand machine that was a machine to end all machines, that it worked with a perfection that only a machine could evoke. And he agreed with me. He said, "I think that was really what Le Corbusier wanted to convey. That if a house were to be designed the way a good machine was, it would become a superior object for use because it would have a certain precision which would have those exact qualities that a machine contains."

Blum: Was his use of the word also influenced by the industrialization that had taken place? Could it have been?

Malcolmson: I don't know. It was a phrase that people jumped on because they felt they could turn it against Le Corbusier. You know I referred to the attitude in England toward modern architecture. It was the same in France. The irony is, I think, that

45 when modern architecture became prominent, it was in Germany and Austria, the defeated countries. And in Russia, which had nothing to lose because they felt that the bottom had fallen out of everything, that the old order was completely discredited. But in England and France the fear of revolution coming out of the war, the fear of what had happened in Russia, was so intense they didn't want to hear about any new ideas. They knew themselves that they had just about won the war, and it had been very difficult.

Blum: So the utility of modern design, or the new architecture was really tinged with all of these political overtones.

Malcolmson: Oh, I think so. I think so, yes.

Blum: How can you apply that to what you found here in Chicago?

Malcolmson: In Chicago then there was a very deep interest to know about it. I was hardly in Chicago more than two weeks when this group in 1700, the same group, had an evening at which they invited Nellie van Doesburg. She had been in Chicago to present, in the Renaissance Society in the University of Chicago campus, an exhibition of [Theo] van Doesburg's paintings, drawings and some models, some of the architecture models that he made. I think Mies helped to set that up. I know the first exhibition Mies made in America, very few people seem to realize, was made in the Renaissance Society for the Mexican graphic artist Posada, the cartoon drawings of Jose Guadalupe Posada. But anyway, unfortunately I didn't get to see van Doesburg's exhibition but I met her and she was very interesting. And, in fact, she did the talking practically for the whole evening. She was, by that time, the only living representative of De Stijl. Mondrian had died in 1944 in New York. Van Doesburg, of course, had died a long time earlier in Davos in Switzerland in 1931.

Blum: Excuse me, but you touched on an idea just a moment ago that I'd like you to go back to. You were talking about the idea of the new architecture being related to a political climate.

46 Malcolmson: Yes, it's very difficult, of course, to make exact statements about this because it's tinged with sociological problems that are not fully resolved yet. It's very much a part of the social and political history of the cultural history at the time.

Blum: You went to IIT and from what I can gather there was a competition between IIT and Moholy's school, the Chicago Bauhaus, and that school, the Chicago Bauhaus, was founded on the idea that art and industry could work together.

Malcolmson: Yes. Let me tell you something about Nellie first. A question came up very early in that evening, that I think illustrated the climate of that time. It was a strange little incident that happened, but it was an exchange actually between her and one of the students. When we met her we were all introduced singly, especially the foreign students. She did like Victor Hugo, you know. There's a saying that when Victor Hugo met a group in Paris that were all from different countries, he would mention the name of some prominent person of that country. But then when a black man stepped up he was at a loss to know what to say, so he said "humanity." Well, when she came to shake hands with me she said, "Ah, James Joyce." So anyway, the interesting remark was made by Ferris. After she had explained the history of De Stijl, what van Doesburg's aims were, and how he envisioned architecture in relation to this aesthetic, she said, "Why don't you start to ask me questions now and then we can continue this as a kind of dialogue?" Ferris said to her, "When are we going to have an American architecture?" And she said, she smiled very sweetly at him, and she said, "I think you're already very American enough." And everybody applauded because that seemed the right answer to it. But there was this curiosity about these ideas coming from Europe and the feeling among Americans that they hadn't done enough and when were they going to be able to do something. It was in the air. Now, about Moholy's school. Moholy's school had, as you know, great financial problems at the beginning and those weren't resolved until after he got in contact with Walter Paepcke and that more or less put the school on an even keel. But Moholy did have people teaching architecture in his school. Crombie Taylor was one of them. He's now on the West Coast. I don't know whether you know him or not. I've known him many, many years. He was the assistant to Moholy. He was the administrative assistant to Moholy at the

47 Chicago Bauhaus from then on and in the very last days of the Institute of Design before it joined IIT he was the acting director.

Blum: I think what I was curious about was the attitude between the two schools from your point in view as an incoming graduate student.

Malcolmson: Among the students themselves, there were no hostilities or anything like that. I think anybody who has given accounts of that time that indicates there was any kind of tensions between them, I think those tensions probably existed more in the initiators. I think maybe there were some—this is speculation, you know, and I don't like to indulge in that, but I think there was some minor tensions between Moholy, Mies, Hilbs and so forth. Maybe. Maybe. But nobody felt, at least I don't think Mies and Hilbs felt that it was a threat or anything like that. The students, on the contrary, like students everywhere, mixed quite freely. We went to events in the old Historical Society building on Ontario Street many times. I can remember being at a lecture of Sigfried Giedion's which I was very disappointed in, and we had social evenings that ID people were in, as well as we were in, so that doesn't seem to me to have been anything in the way of real friction. I can remember there was a young man who came to work with us in Belfast in 1946 in the time when we were hiring, or I should say, accommodating returning GIs who were going to America. He had been a parachutist in the American army. He was one of three or four pupils that Mondrian had in America. Mondrian never cultivated large numbers of pupils. He didn't like to have big numbers. He would only take not more than one or two at a time. But this young man kept in touch with me and when I came to Chicago I looked him up and we had a big evening at his house somewhere around the University of Chicago campus. Wiley was there. I remember Wiley at that time tried to draw me into an argument about Mies's school. He was really proud of Moholy's school and he wanted to say that he thought there was an exaggerated form of hero worship at IIT. I said you may call it an exaggerated form of hero worship but I think that that's a symptom I find quite common among Americans. Many Americans look for heroes because they tend to be, in spite of themselves, a quite idealistic people. So then he started to talk about something else.

Blum: Did you think this feeling existed?

48 Malcolmson: Now, can you tell me what you think the feeling was?

Blum: About Mies?

Malcolmson: Oh, you mean about the hero worship?

Blum: Yes.

Malcolmson: Oh yes. I can recall being again in 1700 and Hilbs and Margaret and I were sitting on a couch and there was a group at the other end of the room that were all sitting around Mies and Hilbs said, "Look at them all sitting around there." He said, "You'd think that this was,"—what did he say—"You would think that this was some kind of a cult." He said, "Why isn't there some discussion going on?"

Blum: But in fact it did exist.

Malcolmson: Oh yes. It did exist because Mies was an interesting person. He had a very, very enigmatic personality. For me, he's the exemplification of a witticism of Oscar Wilde. "Simplicity is the last refuge of a complex mind." And he sure had a complex mind. He was very, very complex. In fact, I think that's where the fertility of his creative talent came from, this complexity. He had an almost overpowering sense of intuition. If you are sensitive to intuition you could feel it in his presence, that he had a very, very strong intuition about people and about what is going on.

Blum: Can you cite an example that would describe that?

Malcolmson: I'm trying to think of one. Well, in a moment probably it will come up. We'll just have to let it surface. I'll try and tell you some more things that I got impressions from him. The silence was very impressive. Dirk Lohan wanted to kind of rationalize that silence by saying that it was partly due to his sense of insecurity about his command of English. I don't think that's altogether it. It's a very good way of explaining it but I don't think it explained the whole thing because Mies had a habit of letting people talk their heads off. I don't know how he did it, you know, because you would hear sense and nonsense vying with one another over some considerable period of time and he had the ability to sit through that and it seemed to run off his back like water off a duck's back. He seemed to be

49 impervious to it. And then you had the feeling that when he started to talk he'd already gauged that people had about talked themselves out. So now he could make some kind of impact by saying things that would either sum up what had to be said about it or would inject into it something that nobody had mentioned before, nobody had thought of, you know. And he did that very many times so I am inclined to think that that was deliberate. I don't think this was at all due to diffidence about his command of English. It was a studied way with which he could make an impact on people by holding his fire until the right moment.

Blum: How did he handle himself as you studied with him?

Malcolmson: Very good, actually.

Blum: Did he do what you are describing?

Malcolmson: Yes and no. Because there were so few of us… You know, when I say so few of us it comes down to something like this. Dan had a part-time job. He was teaching with Speyer. He was helping Speyer with what was then the senior year. It was only a four-year program in those days. Dan had been there, I think, one semester before I came. He was helping Speyer with the fourth year. Dunlap was working for Speyer then. Speyer had a loft building where he had a studio and Dunlap worked there. So I was the only one that was absolutely full time. I had no other occupation except to work there. I worked from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., six days a week, because I was determined to catch up with all of the days and weeks that I had missed in the beginning of the term. Because there were only three of us Mies tended to linger on and sit there. He would come in around 3:00 but he wouldn't leave much before 5:00, and he would sketch a lot. At one time, you know, I thought to myself when I first saw him doing that, people used to present sketchbooks for Mies to sketch in and I thought to myself I should do that and keep those sketches. Then I decided against it and the reason I decided against it was I thought to myself, he shouldn't be making those sketches. I should. You know I shouldn't become an antiquarian, a collector of somebody's drawings. I should be making them myself. So I deliberately decided not to. But he sketched a lot as he talked. I mean some of them were very, very vague sketches. Speyer collected a great number of these. In fact, I want to tell you something that I hope it isn't a reflection on anybody at all, but there was one

50 sketch in that collection that was in the Art Institute which I made myself. It was of my theater. But Speyer used to walk around and pick up all the sketches at the end of the day if Mies left them on the tables, you know. And I think that's how he acquired a number of those because they were done on sketch pads or even on pieces of paper that were lying on tables.

Blum: Many of the sketches have been donated to the permanent collection at the Art Institute.

Malcolmson: I know that. But there's a little one in red crayon that I know I made myself and I probably made it in trying to explain something to Mies, so you know it had that context, which is quite all right with me. I mean I'm not going to claim it back again.

Blum: Was it attributed to you? Was it in the exhibition?

Malcolmson: No, it was attributed to Mies. But it was in his entourage, you know. So what. But I deliberately didn't encourage him to make sketches for me. But he obviously was somebody that I was attracted to because sketching was his way of explaining, and that was true for me, too.

Blum: Your thesis was a theater. How did you come to select that?

Malcolmson: Oh, I have to tell you that is very, very funny and very dramatic at the same time. Hilbs invented a very dramatic title: "The Theater—Historical Background and Present Possibilities." Hilbs—he was the advisor. If you did a graduate thesis in architecture Hilbs was your advisor. If you did a graduate thesis in planning, Mies was your advisor.

Blum: Why did they reverse roles?

Malcolmson: To take the advisor's role was to be independent of the course work. The role of advisor was to see that you were complying with all the conditions of the thesis. That you knew how to write a thesis, that you hadn't left anything out that was of any importance, that they were there to suggest areas of research if you were in trouble finding material, and so on. They were there simply to discuss the problem.

51 Blum: Well then what was Mies's role related to your thesis?

Malcolmson: Mies was my teacher. The advisor was only a resource person. Mies was my teacher. In the case where Hilbs was your teacher, as he was in the case of, oh let's say, who was in that colloquium?

Blum: There was Peter Beltemacchi.

Malcolmson: Beltemacchi, yes. But earlier than Beltemacchi I am thinking of this man from Germany—Gerd Albers. Hilbs was his teacher. Mies was his advisor. But the advisor's role was secondary. He was only there to insure you knew what you were doing and act as a resource person to fall back on. Primarily, of course, the topic material you talked over with your teacher. The advisor was only a kind of reference.

Blum: Again, how did you come to select that topic? Was it your idea?

Malcolmson: I didn't. We finished the first year in 1948. At the end of that year I had to start on the thesis, in fact, before the spring term of 1948 had finished I had to already have a thesis topic, because I wanted to work through the summer on the research. So I kept pestering Mies. What should I do for a thesis? He'd say, "Ja, we have to think about that." That was all I could get. So this went on for a couple of weeks and one day in the graduate room I said, "Mies, I'm still trying to find a subject to write on and to make a study of for the thesis." He said, "Why don't you design a theater?" Now there's the intuition. For me he couldn't have picked a more exciting subject. How did he figure out that I was the person who would want to do something like that? And immediately he said it, you know, I kind of felt a surge of excitement. So that was how it came about.

Blum: So it was his idea?

Malcolmson: Yes. Then he came around many, many weeks and months later when I was actually involved in doing it and he was looking over my shoulder. I stopped drawing and he said, "Ja, I'm glad you're doing it and not me." He realized it was a difficult one.

52 Blum: With your interest in flying, did it occur to you to want to do an airport? Or anything related to aviation?

Malcolmson: Could have been, yes. But you know, a little country like Ireland you would be surprised if you looked into it, has an enormous theatrical tradition of actors and dramatists. All the great ones at the end of the nineteenth century—Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw—were all dramatists and the Irish National Theater, which used to be known as the Abbey Theater, was a very big thing. It was second only to the Moscow Arts Theater at the beginning of the century. Yeats wrote for it. I saw Yeats when I was very young in the Abbey Theater. He used to sit up in the front row.

Blum: Do you think Mies took that into consideration when he suggested the theater as a topic for you?

Malcolmson: Oh, I'm sure. Because Europeans knew very well of the role of Irish drama since the eighteenth century, Sheridan, the author of The Rivals, Goldsmith, the author of She Stoops to Conquer and many, many more.

Blum: Had you ever discussed theater with Mies that would sort of give him an indication that you would be interested?

Malcolmson: No. That was just pure intuition.

Blum: And then how did you respond?

Malcolmson: Very, very actively. Very actively. As a matter of fact, I couldn't have thought of something for myself that I would have liked better to have done. Far more than airports or anything like that.

Blum: In working out the thesis, how did Mies critique your work? What was the method he used?

Malcolmson: He was very, very good. No, it was very good. We had been making these big long-span buildings. Bill Dunlap, Brenner, and I made that big 300 x 300 hall, photographs of it were in the IIT show. And in fact, Goldsmith came out to the campus to see that because he'd heard about it and he was very enthused about

53 it. Mies had us work for the open house on the interior, what to put inside it, so people were making balcony structures for an auditorium inside, acoustic shells for a band concert, you know, like the Grant Park acoustic shell, like the old one, and so on. We were making different interiors. He would talk to us about the possibilities of such, what he called a huge hall. There was a little formulation he used to refer back to again and again. He'd say, "Now, when you make this hall," he said, "that is a clear structure." He said, "That is very objective. It has nothing to do with what you and I like."

[Tape 3: Side 1]

Malcolmson: He used to say, "That's a huge hall which is a very objective building. It has nothing to do with personal preference. Its value depends on the consistency of its details and its proportions, but in every other sense it is objective. Then when we come to the interior that is where you can have all the fantasies you'd like, because this hall has created the freedom within which you can do as you please." So that was always reiterated in order to encourage us to make different things. I said on one of the tapes, I don't know whether I should bother to repeat it, that funny incident of Abdel sticking with this band shell for days and days and days. He put a shell, it was actually a section cut out of an automobile headlight to act as a band shell for a little auditorium that he was making in the interior for one of these halls. He kept it in the model for practically a whole week. Abdel was by training an engineer and he felt a little, in those days, a little insecure with decisions that had to be made on an aesthetic or intuitive basis. He would go around the classroom and ask different people almost as if he were making a survey, and it got to be something that we all joked about after a while, including Abdel who had a very, very acute sense of humor. He left it there and Mies kept coming in and looking, and after he went away he would say, "You see, Mies likes it." I said, "Does he really like it?" And he said, "Well, he didn't say so." I said, "Then we really don't know." So at the end of the week Mies was looking for a long time and puffing away on a cigar. He used to squint into the model into the inside, and he caught a hold of Abdel's coat and he said, "What is that?" And he said, "It's a band shell." He said, "Throw it out." Abdel said, "But Mies I thought you liked it." "Throw it out." So he did.

54 Blum: You couldn't really interpret his silence.

Malcolmson: Well, the fact actually was that Mies was always looking for experimentation and changes. He expected every time he came to see some development going on, some change. If people didn't make these changes, he assumed that they had fallen in love with the solution or they couldn't think of anything else, they'd come to a kind of sterile point where they'd run out of ideas of what to do.

Blum: Did Mies suggest directions for change?

Malcolmson: Oh yes. But he himself had a very interesting manner of terminating a problem. When I came we were working on that Albert Kahn factory collage. We were all given different things to do. Dan made one in natural materials. Dunlap made one in wood. Everything was to be in wood in different types of wood including the walls and so forth. And I was to make one in colors, just in abstract colors. I chose a color range that I liked very much that came from Juan Gris, from the Cubist paintings of modern days. These somber Indian reds, lemon yellow, blue, deep blue, black, and brown. And I worked so hard on this thing. I made many, many different phases of it. It took me a long time, in fact, to even get to the color range I wanted that I'd pushed pins into paper for so long that I had burst the skin on both of my thumbs and they were taped up so that I could keep on pushing pins. And one day when I made a presentation of it to Mies, he looked it for a very long time. I would say he had the ability to sit in front of something for about fifteen minutes and say nothing. So at the end of the fifteen minutes he looked at me and he said, "Ja. Now why don't we try something else." He knew the problem was over. That was his way of saying it. He didn't want to say it was good. He didn't want to say that he approved.

Blum: But did you understand?

Malcolmson: Oh, absolutely. I thought it was marvelous.

Blum: You understood that he approved of that?

Malcolmson: I thought it was marvelous that he had this stoic kind of way that without praising you he could tell you that you had succeeded. I thought that was very fine.

55 Blum: Were there four people that worked on the thesis for the theater?

Malcolmson: Oh, no, no. They all worked on the collage of the concert hall and the factory. Now that's the one John Zukowsky had the trouble with. The concert hall in the factory was a Mies collage originally. It was in that exhibition that was in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947. In fact, I'm not sure that either Danforth or Paul Campagna worked on that with Mies originally. But that was exhibited in 1947. Now when I came in 1947 it was still news, so Mies set it as an exercise for us with the same photograph. What would we do if we had the same photograph, and given the elements that were already defined, how would we express these elements in color, in natural colors, in synthetic colors, in metals, or whatever.

Blum: So this was a class exercise?

Malcolmson: A class exercise. Nothing more. But out of it came, we know, Dunlap's I think is lost, mine is now at home. It came back from the Bauhaus Archive as it went there with the other two drawings. Dan's is in your archives at the Art Institute and Abdel's is in the Mies Archive in New York. And Abdel did something very daring. He took out of the Mies collage Maillol's French peasant girl, a beautiful statue, and he put in an Egyptian scribe. Around that time Gabo was in Chicago. Gabo was really marvelous. He was very exciting. He was a great stimulus to everybody. He had an infectious enthusiasm about things.

Blum: Did he come to instruct a class?

Malcolmson: No, no. He came to make that exhibit at the Arts Club where he was exhibiting with Albers. In fact I didn't know Gabo was in Chicago. I knew very well who Gabo was because he'd been in England since I think about 1931 or 1932. He was one of that group we referred to earlier. And, in fact, he had a very successful career in England. He had good support. Herbert Read, the art critic, was a very strong supporter as well as a great personal friend of Gabo's. Of all the artists who came to England I can't think of anybody who had so much acceptance in the English art world and even in the public world. It so happened that I came in one morning and Hilbs was there and he said, "You should have been here yesterday." I said, "Why?" He said, "Do you know who was here?" And I said,

56 "How could I?" He said, "Gabo. He gave a lecture in the auditorium of the Metallurgy Building." And he said, "You know, when he started the lecture I was sitting in about the third or fourth row and he saw me and he stopped in the middle of the lecture and he said, 'There you are.' And he pointed at me and we both started to laugh. And he said 'I didn't know you were here. We have to talk about a lot of things.' And then he went on with the lecture." So then Hilbs told me the recorded lecture was in the Arts Club. Danforth suggested that he and I should go out there because there was going to be an opening and Gabo was going to give a lecture on his constructivist sculpture, and he did on that little stage that's in the salon part of the Arts Club. And very good it was. He made all kinds of sculptures in space with his hands and talked very volubly. Danforth and I were very enthused about him. So much so that when the lecture was over we went down to the coat room and we cornered Gabo and said how much we appreciated his talk and how exciting we thought it was and would he be available that evening to talk to us. Danforth was living on Elm Street then, and George suggested we all meet there, and Gabo said okay. So it ended up that Mies, Hilbs, Peterhans, Bluestein, Danforth, Dorothy Turck, Margaret, and I were all there. Danforth had hidden an old wire recorder under Mies's chair to make a tape of it because we all suspected that if Gabo knew it was there he would either object or he might make the talk much more formal. Well, we were there from about I would say 8:00 in the evening until 12:00 midnight and of the four hours I think Gabo was speaking for all but about fifteen minutes. It's a marvelous thing. I have written part of it in notation form. Danforth has the tape. It's a very, very poor tape because it was on the pioneer tapes, so to speak. Very scratchy. You wouldn't like it at all. And he had this friend of his who used to be in ID, I can't remember his name. He made copies. He made a copy for me. So I have that and I've played it a number of times. If you want to hear it some time you're welcome.

Blum: I think George may have given me a copy but the fidelity was so poor.

Malcolmson: Maybe he did. There's a big slice missing. There's a very big slice and because of my extraordinary memory I've been asked to write this out. Well I've written it out in note form. I have to transcribe it now into a longer form.

57 Blum: What did he talk about that was so remarkable?

Malcolmson: He talked about the Russian Revolution. He talked primarily about how the artists who had already existed—Malevich was exhibiting abstract art as early as 1913, maybe earlier, maybe 1912. I am talking about the really radical Malevich, the one that produced the Black Square. That was made about 1913. Before that he'd been making a kind of peasant art, which was semi-abstract. It had some kind of curious similarity to Léger, these rounded forms, the cylindrical forms. But Tatlin also had been making the abstract reliefs during the war. It wasn't the Russian Revolution that made modern art in Russia. It was the modern artists that tried to make an artistic revolution to coincide with the political and social revolution. And they were quite serious about it. They thought if there is going to be a new society, then everything has to start from scratch, and according to Gabo many people were quite convinced that this was a new epoch. He described how there was a huge studio in Moscow. It had been set up by an aristocrat for artists, some of them indigent artists, and it was in the style of a Russian isbah, a big peasant house. And it had cocks and hens running up and down the edges of the roof in wood in old Russian traditional style. Tatlin refused to live in it because of the cocks and hens. He didn't like that. Tatlin was for machine art. He couldn't stand anything of that kind so he refused to stay there. He took a studio of his own. But the others moved in and they kicked all the academicians out. That was their revolution. They put them out into the snow and they set themselves up in this barn-like building. And then he described how the water pipes all burst in the wintertime and there was ice on the floor so they had skating in the morning, and they were sleeping in sheepskins. He said the thing that was remarkable was the poverty in material and the excitement of ideas that was going on at the time. They were drawing on brown paper in some cases. And they were threatened with being put out of the building because Trotsky was moving into Moscow and the military needed some kind of headquarters building. But Gabo was related to Trotsky by marriage through his wife, so he wrote him a note. By this time the government had put guards on the building and Gabo asked one of the guards to take this note to Trotsky. The guard looked at the note and then he burnt it. And Gabo said he immediately felt very safe because he knew this was a test. He wasn't an intellectual revolutionary who might have made trouble for him. He couldn't

58 read. That's why he burnt it. But eventually he got information through to Trotsky. Trotsky then came and looked at the place and he said he even stayed for a while without disrupting their activities, and he asked Gabo, "What are you doing for heating because the building is so cold." Gabo told him, he said, "You know, we tore out all the handrails for the stairs and burnt them in the furnace and then we took out all the toilet seats and we burnt those too. We took all the shelving and burned that too. Then we found in an upstairs room rejected books from a publishing house and we burnt those too. And Trotsky said, "You mean you burnt some books in the furnaces?" And he said, "Marx is helping us." And he said Trotsky looked startled because this sounded like a heresy. It turned out that this was a publishing firm called Marx that published cowboy books about Cossacks, and they stuffed all of them into the furnaces.

Blum: Reggie, what impact did these stories, these meetings with exciting personalities have on you?

Malcolmson: Well, I asked Mies when Gabo came… Then he had a tour of the school, Mies took him down and showed him everything, introduced him to everybody, and so on. Gabo said, in my presence to Mies, he said, "Ha," when he saw the concert hall in the factory, "Ha," he said. "Maillol. When are you going to put Gabo in one of your building projects?" And Mies said, "Yah, later maybe." And then he told me afterwards, he said, "You heard what Gabo said." He said, "You know, I wouldn't put his sculpture in my architecture because I think Gabo should be an architect. This kind of construction, he's so ingenious and so skillful that he really has the talents of an architect and they are misapplied as a sculptor." He said, "The reason I put Maillol in is I have an architecture that is trying to make everything pretty thin and pretty light so I needed something very heavy to put in there." And he said, "After all I looked at so many pieces it was the only piece that was about the right size." He had a very funny way of telling you stories like this where it sounded all very reasonable and very practical when you know he must have spent a long time figuring out which was the best one. He said, "I would not put Gabo's sculpture in because it has the same qualities as my building." So there wouldn't be that contrast.

59 Blum: You were at IIT when Mies was there, Hilbs was there, Peterhans was there. You described some of the qualities that you sensed and that you experienced with Mies. What about Hilbs? You knew him quite well, too.

Malcolmson: Well, I met Hilbs on the Thursday of that week. I met Mies on the Monday and Mies was there again on Tuesday. It was a long time before I found out that every week for the graduates Mies used to come on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Hilbs on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. They had done that in Dessau and they had done that in Berlin so nothing changed. The only time, actually, Mies and Hilbs would get together in the week would be the Wednesday that they'd both be in school together. I met Hilbs on a Thursday, and we had a long talk for about an hour. I found him very challenging, argumentative, exciting to talk with, full of curiosity, full of questioning things and taking opposite points of view. Almost without any warning he'd take the opposite side. He knew that there was more than one side to almost every argument so if you tended to start asserting things about something he would very quickly pick up the opposite side and show you, how can you be so sure you are right about that? Do you really know what you're talking about. And I can remember at the end of that we started to talk. He asked me, "Why are you here? You know, you're coming for such a short time." I was planning to come only for one year. He said, "You're coming for such a short time. What do you hope to get out of it?" I said, "Well, I came to learn about steel architecture. I want to know how steel architecture can be made. How can you make an architecture in steel. What do you need to know to be able to make it. How do you construct it, and how do you put all the parts together, and how would you be able to resolve many of the practical problems of building in steel, like fireproofing and protecting the steel against erosion and so on and so forth. He said, "That's a very tall order. I think you'd better stay more than six months." Then we talked about the Eiffel Tower. I had seen it in 1938 in Paris and immediately he jumped on that and he said, "You know, interesting though it may be, Eiffel wasn't all that much right about it. He covered the lower part of the tower with a lot of ornament." Well, I said, you know, that was just a concession he had to make. He said, "Concession or no concession, he shouldn't have done it." So that was Hilbs's story. The character of Hilbs came across very spontaneously, you know, very immediately. You felt when you met Mies that it was going to take time if

60 you really understood him. Hilbs you understood right away. He was very talkative, combative, very witty, and extremely funny at times. I think he had that kind of urban wit that some big cities have. Berlin is supposed to have had that. Traditionally Berliners are supposed to be very witty people. He presented himself in a very unreserved way. When you got into contact with him and you started to talk there he was in the middle of the whole thing.

Blum: You're describing them as such different personalities, Mies and Hilbs. How did they interact and resolve any differences they may have had? Can you remember incidents?

Malcolmson: There were differences. In fact there was a difference going on when I came there that I didn't know of and didn't get to know of for some considerable time. Now I have to be careful about what I relate because I only have what Hilbs told me about this. When Mies took on the campus, the campus planning and the campus buildings, I think quite naturally Hilbs played some kind of a background role in this. But Mies wanted Hilbs to do the housing and in fact there are many drawings I think the Art Institute has some of them—for housing on the IIT campus. They are in Hilbs's book, the early book. They are in The New City I think, there are some. I know for a fact they are in The Nature of Cities, which he thought was not only a replacement for The New City but he thought it went much further and was much more complete. The New City had gone out of print around the time I arrived. I was very lucky to get a copy from Paul Theobald himself, almost the last copy he had but then it was out of print. Sometime around the early 1950s he wrote The Nature of Cities. That was simply to fill in all the things he'd been doing since then, which were very considerable because then he'd made plans for Chicago in great detail, and to recapitulate the best part of The New City and to intensify it, to enrich it, put more into it. So Hilbs's story is something like this. In the long run, the gist of the story is that he thought Nat Owings eased him out of the position of doing the campus housing.

Blum: Nat Owings eased Hilbs out?

Malcolmson: He was a trustee. He was a trustee at an early stage. He was a trustee of IIT. And SOM did Gunsaulus Hall on the IIT campus, which proved to be such a disaster that they hired Mies then to do Carmen Hall and the other ones. That's how Mies

61 came to do those. But long before that Mies had made a plan for dormitories and for faculty housing which would be somewhere between Michigan Avenue and the El, or between that other parallel avenue. I don't know what it is. I think it's Wabash. Yes. But those plans were quite detailed. Hilbs didn't put up much fight against this intrusion, as it were, if it was that, and Mies was very miffed about Hilbs not defending his project. Mies was miffed because Hilbs didn't put up a fight. That led to a kind of estrangement for quite a while.

Blum: It was my understanding that Mies was hired to do the campus plan. I thought that included whatever buildings were on the campus.

Malcolmson: It may have, and it may be that Mies talked to Hilbs and sort of subcontracted him to do the housing, and then Hilbs apparently didn't follow it through. Whether the incident with Owings was the prime cause or not I never found out, but I do know that Mies and Hilbs fell into a kind of disagreement about the fact that Hilbs hadn't carried it through. And that existed for a long time. You know, I was a very brash young man then and I said to both Hilbs and Mies, "How is it that in this school we have one of the world's greatest architects and a great city planner and we're not having anything done in the school that shows the relationship between architecture and city planning. Why don't they have some projects that show how that is, not to speak of some realizations of that in actuality." It was very bold of me to say this kind of thing.

Blum: And who responded to you?

Malcolmson: Both.

Blum: What did they each say?

Malcolmson: In the year when Jim Ferris, David Tamminga, Lo—that's the brother of Freddy Lo, his elder brother—Pepe Polar from Peru, and I think two others, Gene Summer and Y.C. Wong, made a graduate project for the University of Wisconsin, for the whole campus. That was Mies and Hilbs together. In fact, Ferris made the planning with Hilbs for the university campus and the others made the individual buildings.

Blum: So you are saying this was their response to your question?

62 Malcolmson: Yes.

Blum: By collaborating on a project for another campus?

Malcolmson: Yes. But that wasn't the end of it. Then they built Detroit together. In fact, when the Detroit project came up, you may or may not know this, there were other architects that thought they had this project all wrapped up, especially Oskar Stonorov. There was a group of architects around Walter Reuther, the union leader in Detroit. He had formed this group, Stonorov was one of them, and Minoru Yamasaki, and they made a project and then Herb Greenwald came along with the Mies and Hilbs one and they tried to put it out, but it proved that Greenwald's was the only accurate estimate. The others had all been souped up; so, much to their disgust, Greenwald managed to ease them out and Mies then, very explicitly, told Greenwald, because both of them told me this, "If I do the buildings, Hilbs will do the planning." That was a condition.

Blum: Maybe that wasn't what Mies did when he took on the campus and he just wanted to make sure that it worked that way in Detroit.

Malcolmson: It probably wasn't as explicit. But this time he made no bones about it, that if I'm going to be the architect Hilbs is going to be the planner.

Blum: Was there any tension in the school between them because of the situation initially?

Malcolmson: No, no. I don't know how to express this to you, there were levels of maturity that Hilbs and Mies operated on that were of such intensity that they would never let this come into the school. They simply wouldn't allow it.

Blum: Just two professionals.

Malcolmson: Yes. They could disagree about this themselves but that had nothing to do with the operation of the school. They were very strict about it, a kind of self- discipline imposed on themselves. They simply wouldn't allow any part of that into the curriculum.

63 Blum: I heard, and perhaps you were the person that told me, that Mies acquired one of your drawings. Is that so?

Malcolmson: No. I really think that he not only acquired a few sketches of the theater, but he may have had the original collage of the theater because in some dramatic way in 1948-1949 it was finished. It was exhibited in 1949. It was exhibited in the Navy building. There is even a photograph in your catalogue of Mies with a briefcase, and my collage is in the background. And on that morning he was waiting for some German architects to come in and he was so excited about this theater he could hardly wait for them. He kept asking people where are those visitors? Have they arrived yet? And then he started to explain in German my project to them. He was very enthusiastic, about that. In fact, I felt at the time very elated that he was so enthusiastic but I felt a little embarrassed because I knew that other people must have felt why are they picking on this guy coming from Ireland. Why is he making such a fuss about what he did. Some of them must have felt a little bit envious, if you want to say that, because it was so distinct. I can remember when we were in a party somewhere Mies saying to Margaret, "That is his theater and it is very good. Very good."

Blum: He was proud of it.

Malcolmson: Yes.

Blum: But did he have one of your drawings or some of your drawings?

Malcolmson: Well, that's all I can tell you. I think he may have got the original because it disappeared out of the department. I never saw it again. I made a number of them at the time. When the first one was made I was afraid the school would claim it, as they had every right to, you know, because work done in the pursuit of a degree, it's an old academic rule, work done in the pursuit of the degree belongs to the university.

Blum: I see.

Malcolmson: Oh, yes. And being aware of that I made a copy for myself, I made one for Speyer, which I don't know whether he kept or not. I made one for Goldsmith, I think it was lost, and I made another one for somebody.

64 Blum: So you made four?

Malcolmson: At least. Yes, I made four. Not more than four. Mine was destroyed by water damage. An old lady next door to me turned on the hose one Saturday afternoon and that was it, so I had to make another copy then for myself. So the one you have is that one. You know, we spent a long time to make that collage. Mies had made a collage of the theater. I think you know it. It was very ponderous. I'm on dangerous ground now, but even a man of Mies's exceptional abilities couldn't help sometimes but do things that I would be critical of. I don't like, for example, the 1910 Bismarck Monument project. It is terribly Teutonic and heavy-handed. There is a drawing called "Monument to the [Dead]." You see this interior. I think it was also very funereal, this interior. It's a tribute to Mies when I say that because, my God, if he was good 365 days a year he shouldn't be on this planet, he should be somewhere else. And in the same way, the theater collage he made I found terribly heavy-handed. Actually in my theater, that red structure, its origins come from the Crystal Palace competition of 1946. I had to make a big stadium and it was made something like that on legs. I was very excited about this stadium structure. It was in a model. It was made like a Japanese paper sculpture on heavy drawing paper. Very elegant for me. So it had a big part in that. Then I would have to say under the influence of Mies I became very interested in this idea of how you can reduce all the elements in a building down to the absolutely indispensable. So I worked very hard to do that. There were only the essential elements of the theater. The stage and the seating and everything else was subordinate to that. At one time I was invited to the University of Chicago by an interesting guy, Bunzell. He was the husband of Ruth Bunzell, who was a famous cultural anthropologist. She worked with American Indians. He was teaching a course in theater in University of Chicago. I think he was Viennese and he knew Hilbs. So he came out to IIT and he saw the drawings and model and asked me on the spur of the moment would I come and talk to his theater class. These were all people who were either interested in set designs, some of them were actors, amateurs, some of them were intending to be professional actors or actresses. A nice group. There were about twenty-five or thirty. I drew it all on the blackboard for him. He asked me to go back. You know I never went back? I should have. But anyway, he was critical of it. He said, "You know, you've ignored completely the idea there should be physical contact and

65 interaction between the audience and the actors." So now I've written a passage in my book about that because I wanted to explain exactly why. I thought about it for a long time. Why did I do that. I made a gulf between them. I use the word "gulf" deliberately. If you have to study the history of the theater you have to become aware of the fact that Richard Wagner had a very big influence on the design of the modern theater. He put the lights out. Before his time the lights were on for the whole performance because it was a social affair. People had to see one another and visit one another in the boxes and play backgammon when there was something on they didn't want to be bothered with. Wagner wanted to say that the theater will be the church of the future. So he put everybody in a position like you are in church where you are all facing one way and he put the lights out. He had Semper work with him on the design of the Bayreuth theater. But he made a very funny thing in the proscenium. It didn't work very well. He had what he called a "mysticher abgrunden," a mystical gulf that separated the orchestra from the stage and he had steam pipes and the steam came up in intermissions when sets were being changed. I think it caused a lot of coughing and sneezing in the first few rows because they never used it again. But I often thought about that mystical gulf and it seemed to me the real mystical gulf was not some kind of nineteenth-century steam apparatus but was an idea to make a distinction between the passive audience and the active actors. What I say is that the idea of intermingling actors and audiences, this was very common around 1949-50. It was a big thing in New York. In fact, somebody came to look at my theater from New York who was a friend of this theater producer in those days. Who was it? Somebody very prominent in American drama. Very well known. He had a Russian name. It was Lincoln Kirstein. Now a friend of theirs came and there was even a suggestion whether this shouldn't be built. I was all for it, I could tell you. To this day, aside from building a house for myself, the one building I want to make is the theater. I think I would change it maybe somewhat but it wouldn't change too much.

Blum: Would you change that mystical gulf?

Malcolmson: No.

Blum: You still believe in that concept?

66 Malcolmson: I do, and I'll tell you why. What I say in the text is this. I didn't say it in the thesis and that's where it should have been.

[Tape 4: Side 1]

Malcolmson: Lincoln Kirstein is the name of the person I'm trying to think of. Yes. Lincoln Kirstein. A friend of Lincoln Kirstein saw that model and the drawings and there was talk then about whether that could be built or not, somewhere in the area of New York. Naturally I was highly agitated about it. It was something I really wanted to do and it would have changed a lot of things, for me. So, one of the early things that I came to a decision on was that the seating should be elevated and the stage should be elevated. They should not be anywhere near ground level. They must be all supported in space. Now the gulf means something, because it's the visual contact and the oral contact between actors and audience that link them together because they're both elevated. And the other is because, as I say in this written text, you have to go up to the seating by staircases, which means that you're ascending to another plane which is a solemn ceremonial occasion, a symbolic act.

Blum: When you refer to the book you're writing…

Malcolmson: That's the projects.

Blum: This is what you are in the process of doing right now?

Malcolmson: It's 50 years of work called Projects for a New World.

Blum: When do you expect that to be available?

Malcolmson: Well, it's been turned down by six publishers.

Blum: Is it ready to go?

Malcolmson: No, because it's undergoing revision now, a necessary revision. Not that they wouldn't have published it. Three of these publishers said yes and three didn't say anything. They just returned it. But it's a good text. Now I have a first-class

67 structure of this text and everything fits into it perfectly, from little sketches to very elaborate models and drawings, and so on.

Blum: Reggie, you referred to the fact that you had come to IIT for a year or six months simply to learn steel architecture?

Malcolmson: Yes.

Blum: You did not go back?

Malcolmson: No.

Blum: What happened in the interim?

Malcolmson: Well. In six months I completed 1947-1948. That was an academic year. It was ended in May. Dan and Bill Dunlap and I had made the big structure for the open house. We'd made the collages for the concert hall. They were all exhibited then. Mies asked Dan and I to work in his office that summer. So we worked there. I worked on the Cantor Restaurant, the drive-in restaurant. I made miles of details for that but Mies didn't look at it for weeks and weeks and then eventually he did. I also made working drawings for the boiler plant, which I liked very much to do because that was getting close to understanding the steel construction. I was one of three people making the working drawings of that. In the meantime Mies had said, "Why don't you design a theater?" Now, how the hell could I go back when he said that, because that summer when I wasn't in his office I was in the Burnham Library reading everything I could lay my hands on the theater building. It was very, very hard because there were thousands of books on the drama for every one book on the building itself. And I had to write a thesis that began with the Greek theater, Roman theater, maybe even Renaissance theater, Restoration theater, Baroque theater, theater of the nineteenth century and then my theater.

Blum: This was for your thesis?

Malcolmson: For the master's degree. Some friends of my wife's in the University of Chicago when they saw it, said they should give you a doctoral degree, because I really

68 had to dig for this stuff. But I learned a lot from it. I mean I learned a lot from the researching of it.

Blum: So one of the reasons you did not return was because you were offered a job and you became more and more involved in what you were doing.

Malcolmson: Yes, I was drawn into it, you might say. Now I couldn't leave because I was getting more and more committed to it.

Blum: Reggie, you mentioned Dan Brenner before. Before we move on would you just say a few words about him?

Malcolmson: Yes. Dan was to me, for that short period when we were graduates together, the American equivalent of what Granville Smyth had been in Ireland. That's to say, a fellow student that you shared a lot with. At that time I got to know Dan very well. His father was an architect. Dan had worked with Keisler in New York making stage sets for the Metropolitan and he had a great interest in the theater. In fact, when I was making the theater Dan was making an art museum, and simultaneously Jacques Brownson was making the graduate studies for his house, but only in the form of a model then. The house hadn't come into being yet. Both Dan and I worked on the house. I mean as laborers we worked on the house. Dan worked on digging the foundations and up to the point where they put up the skeleton structure itself.

Blum: Wasn't that his master's thesis? The construction of that house?

Malcolmson: No. Dan's master's thesis was an art museum.

Blum: No, no. Jacques's?

Malcolmson: Jacques's thesis was his house, the model studies that he made with Mies in 1948- 1949, the construction of the house itself, and the record drawings that he made.

Blum: One of the things that I know was an integral part of the exploration of a design with Mies were models. Did you do a model of the theater?

Malcolmson: Oh yes. In fact, both Dan and I made models. Dan must have known more about that because working with somebody like Keisler theater sets have to be studied

69 as models very often. It's very difficult, I think, to rely simply on graphic and colored drawings in designing stage sets. You have to see the thing in three dimensions. Even if you are only trying to work out how the scene becomes the background for the positions the actors are in. You have little model figures of the actors themselves. So, to me that was a very interesting insight into Mies's methodology and, of course, it was a very, very direct and simple consequence of his own ideas of a structural architecture.

Blum: You're talking about the model?

Malcolmson: Yes. It's just impossible to think of a structural architecture which has to be three- dimensional without models, because model building and model study is the only way that you'll see the spatial enclosures that structures make. So, for me, that was not an entirely new experience but it was something that confirmed views that I was forming at the time but it brought it dramatically into focus, that the study of space is the study of architecture. So Dan and I worked alongside in the same room. Very often we were for hours and days together in the room without anybody else around and we had worked with Bill Dunlap on the big model structure the year before and I got to know Dan very well. And then he was taken on by Brownson for the first year of the construction of his house to do the foundations and help with the steel erection. Naturally, an erector came out with a crane to put the steel up but Jacques and Dan both had to work on it. Then I came the following summer and I worked on laying reinforcement and waterproofing for floor slabs and helping pour the floor slab. That was really hard work in 90 degree temperatures.

Blum: Was that the first time you were ever actually involved in construction?

Malcolmson: The first time. I'm a little bit ashamed to say that because I think that should have happened at about sixteen. But it was important for it to happen anywhere. Then I was put onto grinding steel. That was a tough job. I became very expert at it. Then I was put onto helping build the roof and painting. So I spent probably from the beginning of May to September.

Blum: Did that practical experience with materials influence you in any way in your design, your ideas about design?

70 Malcolmson: It influenced me in one way because one of the reasons I wanted to teach, even if only for a year or two, was I wanted to work with Caldwell on the steel construction. I told Mies I've got to understand this steel construction and I think the easiest way would be if I worked with Caldwell.

Blum: I thought Alfred Caldwell was the person who was in charge of teaching laying bricks.

Malcolmson: Well, Caldwell was actually in charge of teaching all the construction. Second and third year, sophomore and junior year, four semesters. But it so happened at that time, classes were abnormally large because there were still GIs around and we had sometimes sixty to seventy people in a class, so we had to double up teachers. That's how it came about that Dan was helping Speyer when I came there, because of the enormous load that there was on teachers. And then Caldwell accepted me as helper in taking the class. He asked would I like to divide the class and I thought, no, I won't do that. Dunlap did divide them, and I think it didn't work very well because they had some disagreements from time to time.

Blum: How did you wish to handle it?

Malcolmson: I wanted to see how he and I could work together. I wanted to learn something from Caldwell himself because I saw that he had developed a whole methodology of how to teach construction in great detail. He went, I think, beyond construction to almost produce what Mies was philosophizing about at a higher level of structural architecture.

Blum: So you wanted to do some team teaching with him.

Malcolmson: Yes. And it worked very well. We had, for somebody so temperamental as Alfred and somebody who can be very stubborn like myself we got along very, very well. I did get a lot out of it. That reinforced what I had done with Jacques because I'd worked on it and now I was teaching it and seeing how the details were made. Because Jacques made the details exactly as Mies was talking about them. So I got a good, thorough immersion in the whole thing. It was very valuable to me. So, for 1949 to about 1950 or into the beginning of 1951 I taught

71 with Alfred and with Bluestein. Bluestein was teaching the third-year housing then. Tom Burleigh was still there then from Boston. You will remember he was in the Centennial. But Burleigh left rather peremptorily to go to, I think, Iowa. He eventually ended up in Atlanta.

Blum: Tom Burleigh was a town planner, a city planner?

Malcolmson: Yes. He was from Boston. When Burleigh left Hilbs was left without anybody teaching the fourth year of city planning, so Bluestein had to move up into the fourth year. And then I got my opportunity to move into the third year and take the housing which was great. It was really good because this was something I knew very well. I'd built houses. I'd built housing and I knew how to teach it. That began some time in the very early 1950s. By 1953 Danforth was moving to Cleveland. He and Mies came into the big studio in the Navy Building one morning. I was the only person in the studio. I was drawing something and Mies came up and said, "Do you have a moment we could talk together?" I said, "Sure." And he said, "Danforth, as you probably know, is going to Cleveland." I said, "Yes, I had heard that." He said, "He's going to be the head of Case Western Reserve University and that leaves me without an administrative assistant." And he said, "George and I have talked about it and we thought to ask you would you like to do it." I paused for a moment and I said, "Mies, I hate bureaucrats and I hate bureaucracy but I will do it for you." And he smiled a big broad smile and he said, "That's fine." So then I started.

Blum: So George and Mies jointly thought that you would best fill George's place?

Malcolmson: Yes, apparently so.

Blum: What was involved in being Mies's administrative assistant?

Malcolmson: Well, it's hard to say. It would be easier to say what wasn't involved in being his assistant. I felt my job was really to keep all the trivia away from Mies and to have him sign things. To have him kept up to date about what's going on. And to tell him when I thought there was some kind of emergency coming up either with the faculty or there were some student problems in the school, or whatever. And I found Mies very easy to work with. Very easy. In fact, I can tell you, so

72 easy that I made two, what I consider real blunders, and I'm not hesitant about admitting them now. One was a quite natural blunder that one could make. When I worked in Ireland in the early 1930s there was a building built in Hilversum in Holland by a Dutch architect, Willem Dudok. He was a very much talked about architect in those days. Dudok's modernism had slight resemblances to Frank Lloyd Wright. It didn't go too far. They were flat-roofed buildings but sometime about 1934, I think, he made the town hall in Hilversum, Holland. I think it's still there. It had a clock tower like old-fashioned medieval town halls had and it had this massive building, which was not unlike in a very remote sense, but not as good as, Unity Temple. I think Wright had a very big impact in Holland. As a matter of fact, Dudok became a benchmark for English architecture because Dudok was about as far as English official architects were prepared to go. They wouldn't go any further than that. He still had decorative ornaments to some extent on his buildings and it was, you might say, a competent kind of public architecture. It was very much, in a way, but not as good as, the architecture of Eliel Saarinen. It tended in that direction but not nearly as good as Eliel Saarinen. Eliel Saarinen was very good. That's to say, Eliel Saarinen really came from the Scandinavian arts and crafts movement, but at a very high level. I think he's probably the greatest of the Scandinavian architects of this century. Anyway, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) was advertising a lecture tour that Dudok was giving and schools could elect to invite him. So I either suggested to Mies; I think I did, and I didn't get a positive yes or no, so I went ahead and I invited him and to my horror, what do you think happened? Dudok gave this lecture, and this lousy fellow started to attack structural architecture, right in Mies's own school. And at the end, Speyer was so indignant about this. I remember riding north in a cab with Speyer and Mies afterwards, Speyer was boiling and in his most sarcastic manner, he said, "Imagine the impertinence of Dudok showing us at the end a special house, as he called it, that he made for a philosopher and a Persian princess." And Mies said, "What a bourgeois." So I felt very bad after that.

Blum: Did you feel responsible for what he said?

Malcolmson: Oh, entirely. What made it worse was there was a public relations man on the IIT campus, Stewart Howe, who was partly responsible for bringing Jay Doblin in,

73 which caused a crisis, as you know. Well, Stewart Howe latched onto Dudok's remarks and wrote it up, which didn't make things any easier for anybody.

Blum: Was Mies truly offended?

Malcolmson: He was disgusted.

Blum: Was he?

Malcolmson: It was very hard to offend Mies. But you could irritate him. I mean, Mies was the kind of person who would not let himself get into a position where he'd be offended, but he could be disgusted. It blew over. It taught me a big lesson though. And the second one was… There used to be a joke going around that the AIA isn't interested in education until there's a slight recession when there isn't too much work in the offices and then suddenly the education committee of the AIA meets for the first time for maybe about six months. Well, whether that was true or not I don't know. At that time Professor MacEldowney was the head of Navy Pier U of I. He was very friendly to me. I didn't find any hostility or Machiavellianism, but a number of the faculty thought that MacEldowney was an enemy of IIT. I'm not sure. But anyway, the education committee apparently met one time and they appointed a member of the committee, who shall be nameless, he's not very well known in Chicago anyway, to come to IIT on a kind of investigative mission to see what's going on at IIT. I was not very happy about that because normally you would think the AIA committee would have written to IIT in advance. But this man showed up and I turned him over to a junior member of the faculty because I was going to a meeting. Now, in hindsight I could very easily have cancelled that meeting if I'd known what was going to happen. But it's one of those things that you don't know what's going to happen. You think you're doing the right thing. So I turned him over to this young man who'd been a student of ours a few years before, a student of Hilbs in planning and he showed him around. So this wretched man went back and he wrote in I think the Inland Architect that he had been at the IIT campus and he had been shown around by a young man who was an only recently appointed teacher, and that he was surprised to find that the reality of IIT was quite different from what we were told of the school of Mies. That, for instance, in Professor Daniel Brenner's class they were designing cow barns, and so on. Terrible. Dan was

74 furious about it. Poor Dan was caught in the middle because he was actually doing just that. He had said to a group in the fourth year to design farm buildings and this little malicious visitor wanted to present that in the worst possible light so he wanted to tell everybody that we were designing cow barns and so forth. And he said some prejudicial things about the faculty in general. There were too many foreigners on the faculty, in his opinion.

Blum: This man was there investigating for the AIA.

Malcolmson: Yes. On his presentation he came from the AIA Education Committee and he was their representative.

Blum: It doesn't seem very objective. It doesn't seem very fact-finding the way you are describing it.

Malcolmson: Oh, no. It wasn't fact-finding at all. But what it led to was an emergency faculty meeting. Speyer was furious at that time, especially at these remarks that had been made that were slanted at obviously Mies, Hilbs, and Peterhans, and he wanted to even think that they were prejudicial or racial remarks. So the outcome was that we drafted a letter, which Mies and Hilbs and Peterhans signed, addressed to Phil Will who was president of the Chicago Chapter of the AIA at that time. Mies had personally called, I believe, Al Shaw to remind him that an agreement had been made when Mies's appointment was originally ratified by Armour Institute that Mies would have a free hand and that this was considered as an intrusion on that agreement. I'm quite sure Shaw heard about that because Mies was on very good terms with Al Shaw. There was a mutual respect between them that was very strong. But then we heard no more about it. Those were my two major blunders and in retrospect they don't sound serious. I lost a lot of sleep over the first one. We thought of it as being more significant than it really was. When I first talked to you about making tapes, I can recall very vividly sitting in your office in the Art Institute and saying that we had a funny bias at the time where it was "we" and "them." We were a kind of group.

Blum: The IIT people were "we"? Everyone else was "them."

75 Malcolmson: All the outside world was "them." We felt, probably, very touchy about many things that were of no importance whatsoever, that the big outside world was indifferent to. It was a nice feeling sometimes, because we felt that we were kind of special.

Blum: Well Reggie, what is remarkable is that people today who attended IIT come together and they relive those moments and they have the camaraderie they obviously shared at one time.

Malcolmson: Oh yes, yes. There was something there. I mean that's the proof. There was something really there.

Blum: I had that feeling at the colloquium. Very strongly.

Malcolmson: Yes. I think that was really their success was due to the fact that everything came back to life again, even some of the animosities came back to life. You remember Tony Candido and Louis Rocah having it out with one another. That was something that could have happened twenty-five to thirty years ago, and it did. To speak a little more about working with Mies then, I found myself in a position where I had to represent Mies many times, you know, to go to functions that Mies didn't feel like going to. He was going through in the middle 1950s a very bad crisis with the arthritis and taking very strong dosages of cortisone. I can remember one time going to see him, and I went to shake hands with him and he said, “I'm sorry, I can't. My hand has turned black." And you could see it. It looked awful. And then I even found myself going to things like Collegiate Schools of Architecture meetings to represent the school generally. Mies was very pleased that I went to those things because I even spoke at the Collegiate Schools on what IIT stands for. There are some things I sent you there, the curriculum of ideas. That was done at that time. Mies was very, very happy about that and I can remember coming back from that. Jacques Brownson and I had gone, of all places we'd gone to Michigan to this. How odd the circumstances are. It was very successful. People were very nice to us. When we came back we came back to Jacques's house, and here was Mies visiting the house. We'd arranged that he would come up that afternoon and he did something he didn't often do. He welcomed me, shook my hand very vigorously

76 and he walked around the room with his arm over my shoulder and he said, "Do you have a drink? Why doesn't somebody get Malcolmson a drink?"

Blum: Well it sounds to me like he favored you as much as he could favor anyone with your work, with your drawing, with your thesis.

Malcolmson: Yes. He was very kind to me. I have to say, you know, that I'm not sure that Mies himself wasn't part of the magnet that held me there, because it was a very agreeable environment.

Blum: You participated a little bit in the hero worship.

Malcolmson: You know we were all working for peanuts but we didn't care about that. It seemed so worthwhile. I can remember sitting on a commencement platform and there was an engineer there that had worked with Wachsmann. He went to Michigan and then he came back to IIT. And he said to me, "You know if you want to be a teacher these days you have to take vows of poverty. That's the price of having all these freedoms."

Blum: Reggie, while you were Mies's administrative assistant—I think this happened during that time, or just a little bit before—ID merged with IIT. Was that during the time?

Malcolmson: Yes, just before. That was 1950, actually. Danforth was there then.

Blum: So much has been said about the merge and the feelings surrounding the merge.

Malcolmson: I hope you got something from George on tape on this because I think he was closer to it than anybody else other than Mies and Hilbs. I know more about its subsequent outcome than I do about the actual agreements that were made. Hilbs was very, I would say, angry about it because one of the things that they had agreed to with Chermayeff was that there would be no more architecture in the Institute of Design. But we found out it was continuing under the title "shelter design." Well, it came to a real crisis. Not on our part, but with the Dean.

Blum: Dean?

77 Malcolmson: Dean Owens, the dean of engineering, had asked me shortly after I took over, he said, "What do you think about shelter design?" I said, "Well, it's just architecture with another name." I said, "According to the agreement they are not supposed to be doing that." He said, "I know." I said, "You know, some day there will be trouble over the licensing because that's not an accredited school but ours is." And I said, "You really can only have one accredited program." So he said, "I don't know whether we'll have any trouble." So then about a year or two later he called me in urgently, and he said "I want you to read this." He handed me a letter that came from Brazil. It came from the girl with a German name that was hyphenated, Sophie Something-Something. She had a hyphenated German name. She had been the daughter of a German consul in some city in America, I can't remember where. In the East, maybe Philadelphia. She was a student in ID. I know that because I met Sophie when I worked with Wachsmann. I worked with Wachsmann 1953 to 1955. We'll talk about that in a moment. But I got to know Sophie then. She was very intelligent, well-educated, and she was doing the shelter course. She went to Brazil to get a license and the Brazilian authorities looked at the background and they refused her a license. She threatened IIT with a lawsuit. And Owens said to me, "What do you think of that?" I said, "Well, I don't like to say 'I told you so' but I suspected a day would come when somebody would challenge it." And I said, "As long as you have that course, shelter design, under whatever title you have it, the risk is there."

Blum: Well where was Sophie's diploma from?

Malcolmson: ID.

Blum: A degree in architecture from ID? It was my understanding that anyone who took ID courses and finished, completed, a course of study was given a diploma from IIT.

Malcolmson: Yes, that's true.

Blum: So it was not an ID diploma, because they weren't empowered to give that kind of diploma.

78 Malcolmson: No, no. That was where the trouble came about. Here was IIT issuing a diploma for shelter design, an unaccredited course, that was not worth the paper it was written on. It was like a bum check.

Blum: Was Chermayeff teaching that course for a while?

Malcolmson: Yes, he instituted it.

Blum: Was Wachsmann teaching that course?

Malcolmson: No. Crombie Taylor was teaching it. Wachsmann was brought in 1950, in fact that was the year I met him. To establish a course in research called "Advanced Building Research" Wachsmann had been brought to Armour Institute Research to give some lectures on what he did in prefabrication and he gave maybe about five lectures over ten days. Heald heard about them and Heald sent for Wachsmann. It gives you some measure of the kind of man Heald was. I have this from Wachsmann himself. Heald sent for Wachsmann and he said, "Mr. Wachsmann, I have heard very glowing accounts of your lectures in Armour Research," and he said, "that is something that is of great interest to this university." He said, "I would like to ask you, would you be prepared to accept a teaching appointment here as a professor in, say, the Institute of Design?" Wachsmann said to him, "Dr. Heald, I don't even have a high school diploma." And Heald said, "Mr. Wachsmann, I didn't ask you did you have a high school diploma. I asked you would you accept a teaching appointment at the Illinois Institute of Technology." So he said, naturally, that he had to say yes. So that's how he came. Wachsmann really had nothing to do with the shelter design at all. Wachsmann had this very precarious position in the Institute of Design where his appointment depended on his ability to bring in sponsored research, which is a very precarious position to find yourself in. In other words, he had to bring in, as long as they would retain him, research that had sponsors from the outside that would pay for the research.

Blum: You mean industrial interests?

79 Malcolmson: Yes. The first one he got was really, you might say, a blockbuster. He got the United States Air Force to sponsor that hangar. And that was, of course, immensely impressive to Heald.

Blum: Was that done for the Institute of Design?

Malcolmson: Yes.

Blum: Okay. I'm just a little confused whose staff he was on.

Malcolmson: That was after the merger, 1950. Konrad came in exactly at the moment the merger was made.

Blum: Came to ID or IIT?

Malcolmson: To ID and IIT because they had just joined.

Blum: It was my understanding that Chermayeff invited him.

Malcolmson: Yes, but I think there were others. Heald, naturally. Heald had heard of him, not from Chermayeff. Heald had heard of him from two people in Armour Research, Lewis and Prestini. You probably know who Prestini was. He crafted these beautiful wood bowls which are now rarities. Anyway, Heald had heard about that before probably even before Chermayeff had invited him because the Armour Research was an entirely independent institution on the IIT campus, and they did occasionally invite people in. Lewis and Prestini are the two that invited Dan and Speyer to make the chair that's in your catalogue, that plastic chair. They worked with Speyer on the fabrication of the chair, how it's done by this injection mold process. So Wachsmann was, fortunately for his own peace of mind, out of this contention altogether because he was dealing only with graduates. Shelter design was for undergraduates and it was probably, a bachelor of science degree because it was in an engineering unit. My degree, for example, and Dan's was bachelor of science in architecture. No, master of science in architecture, because it was an engineering dean. Now they are getting master of architecture degrees because they've got an architecture dean. So, that incident, of course, alarmed Owens to no end. And Owens was a very tough administrator. I think he must have had conflicts with Chermayeff.

80 [Tape 4: Side 2]

Blum: It was soon after the merge that Chermayeff left. From your close vantage point to Mies, was there resentment or conflict between Mies and Chermayeff?

Malcolmson: I don't think actually. Mies was a very difficult man to position into a confrontation. It was very difficult to put him into that kind of position. It was partly his really acute instinct that kept him out of trouble, and he had a horror of any kind of confrontational situations like that.

Blum: Chermayeff described the difference between the methodology at ID and that at IIT. He said students had learned Mies's form, but they had not learned how to learn. Do you agree with that?

Malcolmson: One could say that only if one had not fully understood what the school was about. I mean by that, that superficially you could say that's how it seemed to be but remember the curriculum was structured a certain way. I think the structure of the curriculum helps to avoid that in the sense that it begins with learning how to draw. Then it begins with learning how to see, visual training, and it begins with learning how to build, construction, and then it begins with learning how to plan, and then it puts it together. In other words, you don't teach design until they know all the fundamentals.

Blum: But they have a structured program of what to learn first, second, and third.

Malcolmson: Right.

Blum: And if I understand the other curriculum, they too had courses, not necessarily sequential but they were all offered.

Malcolmson: That's the trouble because the other, as you call it, is more typical of schools everywhere, that the courses are available, but there's no structure behind the course themselves. In other words, it's like trying to learn the French language by skipping the alphabet and not bothering too much about pronunciation now but translating sentences by simply memorizing what the words mean.

81 Blum: I understood that the strength of that, of the unstructured program, was that within each class there was great experimentation which allowed students to do what you said you did, you discovered by doing things yourself.

Malcolmson: Yes. Candidly, Betty, I don't believe that. I mean I don't believe it in a sense that it sounds plausible. That's the very reason I don't believe it. It sounds plausible but I think the unstructured, in a sense, tends to put things together in a higgledy-piggledy way. In other words, there is no rational progression from very elementary things to somewhat complex things, to more complex things, and so on. But in this free discussion or experimentation, whatever you want to call it, certainly very, very intelligent students will probably find their own feet, but there will be a great number of them won't find their feet at all.

Blum: But isn't that also true, or is that also true, in a structured program? Don't you lose some students that just either don't have it or can't follow through? And the ones who really have the talent and the stick-to-itiveness will, in fact, survive and do very well.

Malcolmson: Everybody knows, Betty, that there's a fall-out in every school. We used to say that if you survived the sophomore year then you're going to survive the course. But there has to come a time in every course when there will be dropouts. I mean it's natural. There are people who find that architecture isn't for them or find out that they thought they wanted to be architects but they really wanted to be psychologists, and so on. Schools have experimented with trying to correct that by making general studies as an introduction and then specializing in the second year or third year. I don't like that because I want to go into a school of architecture and day one I want to be doing architecture. I don't want to find out anything at all. There's no perfect system, I'm sure, but there are logical systems, and I prefer the logical system that gives you a sense that you're going from the elementary to the more advanced in progressive stages. I will tell you where I think the real friction came—between Rettaliata and Chermayeff. There were frictions there that were talked about a great deal. What the nature of those frictions were I don't know.

Blum: Was Rettaliata well liked within IIT?

82 Malcolmson: I think within the engineering community, probably, he had his advocates. Many people in the architecture school felt Rettaliata didn't understand or care. He didn't even, they thought, even want to understand.

Blum: Do you think it was administrative difficulties?

Malcolmson: Rettaliata was himself a controversial president because Rettaliata had the misfortune that has nothing, probably, to do with the fact that he was Rettaliata. But something more had to do with the fact that he was a successor to one of the greatest college presidents the Middle West had had for probably a couple of generations. The two biggies in the Middle West in those days were Henry Hutchinson, University of Chicago, and Henry Heald at Armour Institute. And they simply couldn't be replaced. And in fact, Rettaliata had very tough opposition from areas like Chemistry. Dr. Fitzpatrick said in a university assembly, publicly, "I didn't vote for you to be president of IIT. And I wouldn't if I had to do it again."

Blum: What was the effect of the merger? It took place, resentment or not.

Malcolmson: There were attempts to do things to make it acceptable, and they were rational attempts. IIT offered ID, in order to resolve the conflicts over the architecture programs, that people who were already in architecture in ID had a choice to transfer at about sophomore or junior level into the architecture program at IIT and they would get credit for anything they had taken up to that point. Only about three or four did.

Blum: What did the others do? Stay with ID?

Malcolmson: I assume they stayed. At the graduate level, when Wachsmann left in the uproar around 1955, Pao-Chi transferred. She was a student of Wachsmann. Pao-Chi Chang. She had been a student of Wachsmann. She worked at one time on the big aircraft hangar. But Wachsmann's role there was really quite independent and he had that tightrope act to perform of always being able to bring in sponsored research. When I came to work with him he had just been asked by Armco, in Cincinnati, to make a building panel. Armco wanted him to make a prefabricated panel system that could be used for almost any type of building. It

83 was a panel that had to meet certain criteria. It would be built in metals and it had to have a certain insulation value. It could only weigh a certain amount. It had to be possible to put this panel into a group of nine panels. If it was the middle one it had to be possible to take it out without moving any of the other panels, and so on. So Wachsmann asked me to be what he called an architectural consultant, and I signed up with him to do that. And for that my job was to set problems that would test his panel. For example, I made a little house twenty- four by twenty-four feet square, two stories high on four columns—no, it was about forty by forty feet square on four columns. The columns were about twenty-four feet apart. It was two stories high, an open lower story, a spandrel wall around the first level above ground and a roof, all made in the panels. Then I made an office building about thirty-five stories high. The object of this office building was to show how his panel could be used to make curtain walls. Then I made a factory building, a big horizontal building, and again the object was to show how the panel could be used. The last one we made was a system for school classrooms that could be built out of the panel. It was interesting. I got to know Wachsmann very well through this.

Blum: What was he like as a person?

Malcolmson: A very original type, Wachsmann. What I mean by that was he had a very curious background. He was born in Frankfurt am Oder, that is in what's now East Germany, the other Frankfurt, not the Frankfurt am Main. There are two Frankfurts. His father was a pharmacist and he used to tell me stories about his young days. He told me when he was going to Berlin his entire family came down to the railroad station, including his grandmother, and they were all in tears as if he was going off to America. He became a cabinetmaker. He was for a while a pupil of Poelzig, the expressionist architect. You know he cut his hair in the same manner as Poelzig. Poelzig had one of those artistic haircuts that were fashionable around the beginning of the century, where you brushed all your hair back and you cut it on a fringe in the back here. Well, Wachsmann had a hairdo like that at one time. It mellowed a little bit as he got older. Wachsmann's big moment, talking about big moments, was when he was sixteen he designed a house. Guess for who. Albert Einstein. A summer house in wood. He built it for him. The two were photographed standing in the doorway.

84 Blum: How would Albert Einstein have come to select him without a degree?

Malcolmson: That I don't know. You see, that's the kind of question you would ask but it never occurred to me. And Wachsmann not only became a friend of Einstein's but at the lowest point in Wachsmann's life, and he had some low points in his time. He worked many years in Italy for engineering firms and when Mussolini made this pact with Hitler overnight he was thrown out of Italy on racial grounds. He went to Paris. Le Corbusier hired him. He worked for a while with Le Corbusier and then when the war came he was drafted into the French army into an engineering unit. I think you know some of these things, but that was only the beginning of the end for him. He was stationed in Albi and he was absolutely fascinated with Albi, this fortified cathedral, the cathedral of Albi is a fortress. Albi was the center of a heresy in the early Middle Ages, pre-Reformation Protestants and the Pope actually preached a crusade against Albi, and prominent French knights took part in it. The Count of Toulouse refused and the Pope asked him why would he not do it. He said the people of Albi are the only people who have regularly paid their taxes. The Pope excommunicated the Count of Toulouse. So then France collapsed, in 1940, and here was Wachsmann in a prisoner-of-war camp. People were committing suicide, especially Jewish people. In the height of all this uncertainty and anxiety he was collecting pieces of paper and drawing the full-size details of the General Panel Corporation buildings that he built with Walter Gropius. Imagine the tenacity of being able to, in this horrendous atmosphere which had no future whatsoever, there was no apparent way out. At that moment he was designing something that he had no possibility as far as anyone could see of realizing. Albert Einstein wrote to the American ambassador in France to have the release of Konrad Wachsmann, and he brought him to America.

Blum: How do you remember him as a person?

Malcolmson: Fantastic, really. Unpredictable, very temperamental, full of beans, children loved him. When my children were small he knew all kinds of conjuring tricks, card tricks, and things like that. He could keep children entertained for hours on end. My uncle, this young man who was killed in the first war, the aviator, he was the same. He taught me card tricks. But Wachsmann was something else

85 again. You could hear him in the morning singing opera in the tub or in the shower, and he played the piano. If there was a piano in the house, the first thing he would do is sit down and start playing and he was a dynamo of energy. He could not sit still. Mies thought he was fantastic. When Mies and Wachsmann were together, as soon as Wachsmann would start to talk Mies would start to laugh. He'd laugh, and the tears were running down his face because Wachsmann was very funny, a very witty man. I remembered him telling me, he said, "You know, I turned on the television one evening and there was this miserable program where..." You remember this program where this man used to bring together people that hadn't seen one another for something like forty years?

Blum: "This Is Your Life"?

Malcolmson: I think so, yes. And he said, "One evening when I turned this on there was an elderly woman and then she was introduced to a very old man and they were both German and this old man suddenly exploded on the television and he said 'What's the matter with you crazy Americans? Why are you bringing me into this lousy program here. I haven't seen this wretched woman for forty years and now you dig her up again. Do you think the airplane was invented for bringing me to America just for this kind of thing.'" And Wachsmann said then, "He thinks the airplane was invented for dropping bombs." There's a very interesting difference between Mies and Wachsmann I noticed at that time when I was working with Konrad. Mies had a very deliberate approach to solving problems of details. It was very systematic and almost scientific. He would try to confine the problem areas, and he'd work around the areas that were unresolved, putting down, as we used to say, all the known facts and then beginning to make hypothetical attempts to solve problems that were unresolved until the whole detail was completely resolved to his satisfaction. Wachsmann was quite the opposite. Wachsmann gave you the idea that he was going to storm the problem and by sheer energy he would exhaust the problem itself. By continuously sketching and sketching and sketching he would get to the roots of what the joint condition or the detail had to be. But it was interesting to see because it was a much more emotional attack on the problems of a technical nature than Mies's was, or it appeared to be much more emotional because Wachsmann threw himself into

86 the problem. You felt that he was almost forcing the solution out of the problem, where Mies was very deliberately and calmly putting it all together without, it seemed, a great deal of stress or a great deal of commotion. It's a contrast that comes up in a lot of other things. Hilbs and Wachsmann were friendly to one another, and they were very compatible types because Hilbs was also a very witty conversationalist, and they enjoyed one another. The odd thing I found with all of these people is they never spoke German in my presence. One night when we talked with Egon Eiermann, Mies had to talk to Eiermann in German because Eiermann's English wasn't all that good, but every five minutes he was turning around and apologizing to me and then translating it, giving me a synopsis of what he had been saying. Hilbs and Wachsmann always talked in English within my hearing. Wachsmann admired greatly Hilbs's work, particularly some of his work that we didn't see in this Hundred-Plus Centennial that we've been talking about. And those are beautiful regional planning drawings made of the Willamette Valley in Oregon, made around, I would say, 1956 or 1957. Wachsmann was genuinely surprised that somebody so austere and disciplined as Hilbs should make such, as it were, almost abstract paintings out of these maps that were of natural resources, soils, arable land, geological formations, and so on and so forth. They were made into highly colored maps. The colors were very, very carefully selected and they became almost like paintings in themselves. It was a side of Hilbs that to anybody could have been a surprise, because you didn't expect him to have so much skill with color. On the other hand, Hilbs used to say to me, "You know Wachsmann is an extraordinarily ingenious man. But I think he's over-ingenious. Things don't have to be as complex as Konrad makes them. The joints in all these structures don't have to be so much a technical decoration."

Blum: There is something I'd like you to talk about because it happened while you were at IIT, you were close to the situation, and it seems that everyone knows about it, talks about it, and that is Mies's resignation. What was the political climate surrounding his resignation?

Malcolmson: You know in the short time that I knew Jim Hammond he raised a number of questions with me about Mies. They were very interesting, penetrating kind of questions, and I began to see that, in the role I was playing as Mies's assistant, I

87 had become very defensive of Mies and I wasn't prepared to listen to hardly any kind of criticism of him at all. Somehow or other Jim opened my eyes to the fact that there were blind spots in Mies's makeup. I knew very well they were there but I wouldn't tell myself about them.

Blum: Would you talk about them? Would you talk about those that you realized as a result of speaking with Jim?

Malcolmson: Yes. Jim brought up that very question of the allegations that Skidmore had moved into the campus and they had taken over Mies's work. He said then, and I think he was perfectly right, that Mies had made no attempt to resist that, and in fact, he had almost himself abandoned the campus. He was so engrossed with Seagram he was away for a lot of that time. He was so engrossed with Seagram that he seemed to leave open the question of how the campus was going to continue and that he, Jim Hammond, thought that the stories that Skidmore had stolen the campus, so to speak. It was a big cause célèbre at the time, people were threatening resignation and heaven knows what. The stories about it at the time were all groundless, in a way, that it was Mies's inability to make up his mind about what his future was in relation to the campus.

Blum: I was under the impression that it was the dream of his life to complete that campus.

Malcolmson: It was, but, you know, dreams of your life sometimes get overlaid with other dreams. I don't know, I can't actually tell you any details of it. There was a horrendous meeting, a dinner at which were Graham, Goldsmith, Dunlap, Dan Brenner, Danforth, Mies, Hilbs, and Caldwell. Hilbs and Caldwell arrived late. Caldwell and Hilbs had been drinking to some extent, and Hilbs turned on the whole group and told them that they had been letting Mies down. You know of this, you've heard about it indirectly.

Blum: I want to hear how you remember it.

Malcolmson: I remember it very well because Dan and George rushed into the school the next morning to find me and ask me what I thought about it.

Blum: Was that the evening Alfred Caldwell said he would resign?

88 Malcolmson: Yes.

Blum: And did so the following morning?

Malcolmson: Yes. You know what? I haven't mentioned it before but I have a guardian angel.

Blum: Who is that?

Malcolmson: It's been with me since 1912, and it works. It so happened that I wasn't at that dinner so I didn't know anything about it. So when they started to ask me to take sides I said tell me about it. So I said I can't take sides because I wasn't there, and it doesn't make any sense to me.

Blum: You mean that Alfred should resign?

Malcolmson: That the whole thing should have blown up the way it did. But anyway, how did this start?

Blum: I asked you about the political climate surrounding Mies's resignation.

Malcolmson: In which Mies resigned as director. So let me talk about Mies's resignation, as we used to call it. Even about Mies's resignation there were arguments. Did he really resign or did he retire?

Blum: What did he do?

Malcolmson: Well, this is what people asked. Has he retired? Did he resign? For what reason has he resigned? Was it to take care of his practice? If he's retired is he not going to practice any more? Hilbs didn't like to hear people saying Mies had resigned because it was all related to an earlier friction that had begun with the acquisition of the Seagram commission. When Mies got that commission, which you know came through Lambert, he set out for New York. As a matter of fact, in either the first or second trip I went with him to the train station. We had a drink while he was waiting for the train. He took the Twentieth Century. It was one of the last times the Twentieth Century ran, in fact, and they had the red carpet. The last time I remember seeing Mies was he turned around and waved to me as he was walking down the red carpet and then he was off. He told me in the station at the time, he said, "You know, I've been already in New York and I'm apprehensive

89 about going back now because I've been told I don't have a license to practice in New York." And he said, "For all I know, I might be arrested when I go back." I said, "I don't think that's at all possible." And he said, "Well anyway, they're all making some fuss about it and I don't know what the outcome is going to be." I said, "I wouldn't worry about it. If they really want you to design the Seagram Building they're going to make it possible." So that's the last we said about it.

Blum: That was the reason he affiliated with Philip Johnson.

Malcolmson: Yes. Now before he left he had talks with Owens, the dean, about what to do when he would be away. And in fact, another dilemma came about which I have some reservations about mentioning, but I'll try and tell you in an objective way. Mies thought at one time to ask Speyer would he act for him in his absence and he talked about it with Hilbs and Speyer. For whatever reason, Speyer began to make terms for Mies, and Mies and Hilbs got a little nettled by the demanding of terms, conditions under which he would do it. There was some genuine friction over that and it transpired that Speyer didn't do it at all.

Blum: In the school?

Malcolmson: Yes. And in addition, there was in the background another gnawing problem, and that is, who's going to succeed Mies. Even before Crown Hall was built in 1955 we had meetings to discuss who was going to be Mies's successor. We had at one time a list of thirty-two people and, of course, it got down very rapidly to a much smaller number, maybe about eight or ten. Then a dramatic thing happened. This one-time pupil of Gropius presented himself to Rettaliata. He was Gropius's graduate, presented himself to Rettaliata as a candidate for Mies's job. And he was supported by no less than Howard T. Fisher, a prominent Chicago architect who was at one time teaching at Northwestern and there was a new dean at IIT at the time, Dr. Boyce from the National Science Foundation. He didn't stay very long, about four or five years. I think he went back to the National Science Foundation. And Fisher's pressure on Rettaliata on the part of Leonard Currie, that was who Fisher's candidate was, was so intense that Dr. Boyce one day called Hilbs and me in. Mies had gone by this time, and he said, "I am open to recommendations for candidates for Mies's position as director from any quarter so long as the name isn't Howard T. Fisher." And Hilbs said, "Ja, I

90 know Mr. Fisher. He is a man that if you put him out through the front door he would come back through a crack in the ceiling." That was that. Caldwell and I had been sort of elevated into the position of being faculty representatives by Hilbs. We did most of the negotiation with Rettaliata and Boyce. We thought that there would be a coup of some kind, that somebody would be put in there. We were afraid something like the appointment of Doblin would take place, the dean would decide it.

Blum: Backed by the trustees?

Malcolmson: Possibly. So, I had to spend a long weekend with my wife addressing literally hundreds of envelopes to all the alumni that we could find. That was to say that we had been appointed as faculty representatives and that the majority of the faculty had chosen Danforth to be Mies's successor. And I mailed that late Sunday night. There were alumni meetings. Mies even attended one, I think. Caldwell attended one. I found out to my horror I was one of the candidates alumni had suggested at one time. I wouldn't have done it for many reasons, but the alumni meetings opened a can of worms because all kinds of impossible suggestions were being made. I said to Mies, "You know, when we first talked about this I said don't go too far into seeking alumni support. Alumni are a very volatile group and there may turn out to be a lot of politics." I said to Mies later, "You see what happened."

Blum: And what happened?

Malcolmson: Mies had resigned, or Mies had quit. I was at the dinner that Rettaliata and the trustees gave at the South Shore Country Club on the night Mies and Hilbs got their awards. Rettaliata was so mean he had to say... They gave each of them a check for something or other, he said to Mies publicly, "As if you needed it." How mean.

Blum: Reggie, you never really answered the question or even suggested an answer whether he resigned or whether he retired.

Malcolmson: We don't know. I don't think we know.

Blum: What do you personally believe?

91 Malcolmson: Well, Mies had announced a long time, in fact that was what started the search, and Speyer at one time was very strongly a candidate until that tiff blew up about who would act for Mies when he was in New York. Many of us wanted Mies to do something about it, but again, you know, that was a real difficulty with Mies. He didn't want them to worry about it.

Blum: What do you mean by "do something about it"?

Malcolmson: Appoint somebody, nominally even, that the administration could say this is the person we want to deal with.

Blum: You mean as his successor or in his stead.

Malcolmson: In his stead. Temporarily. So it fell out in a way that I was largely fulfilling that role for a while. Then when Mies actually did attend that banquet, that officially recognized that he was going out of the school. Then Hilbs told me, he said, "Why don't you go to Boyce and suggest that you will do this throughout the interim period." So I did, and Boyce was very happy because it got them out of a bind and because we had to wait a year for Danforth to free himself from his commitment to the Case Western Reserve. But Mies certainly didn't help that situation at all by indecision, by reluctance to make up his mind.

Blum: Do you think the same type of thing in Mies's personality was at work then as happened years earlier when he seemed to be offended when Harvard offered him a position. They asked him to submit some work and he said that if they don't know what my work is like then I suppose I don't belong there? I mean, he was offended.

Malcolmson: But that was very common in Mies's character.

Blum: Or do you think perhaps the same thing was at work at that time that you're describing?

Malcolmson: No, I'm not sure. To refer to the Harvard thing I can give you a parallel to it. When Crown Hall was presented to the trustees he was called in. He explained the model, he explained the drawings, and so forth, and then they asked him to leave the room and they would discuss it. And then they asked him to come back

92 again and do a little more explaining and he said to me, "As if there was something wrong with it."

Blum: The same kind of thing.

Malcolmson: You know, offended pride, in a way. I have to tell you something about that night he was at that dinner because my apartment was the closest point to the South Shore Country Club. I was at 75th and South Shore on the lake. So I asked the faculty to come. Everybody came but Peterhans. Peterhans was so upset by that dinner that he got up halfway through the dinner and walked out. I think maybe it was an emotional crisis for him to see them both going out because he had been with these two for so long. And the irony was, of course, that Hilbs stayed. He didn't go, although everybody thought that he was retiring by getting this presentation. So Mies, Hilbs, Caldwell, Dearstyne, Dan Brenner, Dorothy Turck, Brownson, somebody else, Robin Walker from Ireland who was teaching freshmen then. They were all there. We had a marvelous evening. I have to make a special mini-tape for you on that evening some time. Just to give you a rundown of topics, Mies became very voluble and very talkative and laughing and so forth. He felt very much at home. He started to talk about when he was a young man working in Behrens's office, what was going on, all the pranks they were playing and about what architecture was like in Berlin around 1910, 1912. And an argument broke out between Caldwell and Dearstyne over the merits of Gothic and Renaissance.

[Tape 5: Side 1]

Malcolmson: After a while Mies came down very heavily on Caldwell's side, or I should say, on the side of Gothic. Then he started to talk about the possibility of making big buildings that were suspended from cables and he said, "You know, I look at it this way. If I make a building of certain dimensions it is just beams and girders, and if it is bigger I have to make it out of plate girders and beams and girders, and if it is bigger again I have to make trusses, and then if it's very, very big I have to make a suspension system like a bridge." This led to Caldwell making that suspension model. He made it the next Monday morning. He came in and he was all in a state of excitement, he had sketches and calculations made on envelopes and he had people making preliminary model studies by the end of

93 the week. It was a very good evening. I should record it for you. I wanted to say a little about the influence of Mies and Hilbs on students, on the life of students. There is no question Mies and Hilbs, to some extent, were in their own persons exemplars. I said before and it's always worth repeating, that Mies had a great deal of what I call the old German virtues. He was always punctual. Hilbs, too, even more so. You never saw Hilbs or Mies sloppily dressed. Never. They were always on stage and very conscious of it. They were obviously two people of this kind that were very devoted to their own work. They set a kind of example to people of devotion to serious interests. They had a way of discussing things with young people that conveyed the seriousness of the discussion, very simply and very effectively. It was, I think for Americans, very refreshing, because Americans are used to, especially in present time I'm sorry to say, they are used to teachers that are trying to curry favor with them, that are trying to be one of the crowd. I mean we've even had teachers in Michigan that come in dirty shirts and unshaved, in the hope that if they smelled like some of the others do that maybe they'll strike up some common bond. Mies and Hilbs would have nothing whatsoever to do with such things. It wasn't just that it wasn't professional, it wasn't done. Period. And Mies had this interesting habit of when you would ask him something he would start to elaborate the question. There was a very interesting case of that with Caldwell. Caldwell wanted to make some kind of a panel system for making walls in the interior of buildings. He had some wood samples and he asked Mies if he'd like to sit down and talk with us about it. Mies took the wood samples and he was putting them edge to edge and forming Ts and Ls and you could see little by little he was trying to make the connections as simple as is possible to make them, beginning with almost no connection at all and reluctantly putting pieces in. He got so interested in this that he started to sketch on a big sheet of paper all the possible types of house in wood construction, elementary possibilities, some in brick construction, in section and in plan, and some in steel, and so forth. You know, he had this perspective on architecture that he wanted to look at it so detachedly that he wanted to look at it as if you could make classifications of the buildings almost like you do in natural history or something like that. He could identify the types. Caldwell was so excited about this thing that he had students make big drawings that showed all these different types. When Mies saw them he was very pleased, because here he

94 saw from these little doodles came these very exciting drawings that explained it all.

Blum: You were acting director of IIT from 1958 to 1959. In 1959 you gave a lecture at IIT and it was titled "The Philosophy of Architectural Education at IIT." And by that time you had been at IIT for over ten years. During those ten years you had gone from student, you'd worked in Mies's office…

Malcolmson: As a matter of fact… Sorry to interrupt. I have the amusing perspective of myself that I went from the very bottom to the top.

Blum: You did.

Malcolmson: I began as a graduate student. Then I became an instructor. Then an assistant professor, associate professor, then dean and professor, and then there was nowhere left to go.

Blum: And it was at that point that you delivered this lecture? What changes had you seen take place during those ten years?

Malcolmson: There were some big ones and then there were many minor ones. I think the big one, first of all, was the expansion of the curriculum from four to five years. It presented extraordinary problems that I think in this school have never been resolved to this day. The four-year was so dense and so full of meat and so accurately constructed. You know it was made almost like a structure itself, very, very exactly contrived. All the pieces fitted. When the accrediting board asked for the fifth year Mies and Hilbs quite frankly didn't know what to do and openly admitted to the faculty that this was something that was imposed on them. And they resolved it in a way that they were able to work with, but I don't think anybody has been able to work with since.

Blum: You mean Mies and Hilbs?

Malcolmson: Yes. And that was that the fifth year would be an introduction to graduate work. Now you have to know what graduate work is going to be to be able to make an introduction to it. In other words, you have to be teaching graduate work in order to structure the undergraduate year that's going to be its introduction. It so

95 happened that Speyer did that fifth year and did it very well and had been through that process himself and understood what it was about. And, in fact, Hilbs elected to do the fifth year himself as well as the graduate so he had it completely integrated. But when that becomes diverse, a number of people teaching graduates, as it turned out afterwards, and when you find then that the fifth year is as it has been over the past ten years or so, a number of different philosophies, because the teachers don't all agree and students are trying to figure out which is the best teacher to take, then you have a breakdown of the conception of how you transfer and use the fifth year as a foundation for a good graduate program. That was the big change that caused the most concern. There were many other changes. When I came there Forsberg was teaching life drawing. He was inherited from the Art Institute and he taught a style. Mies was, I think, troubled about it because it was not exactly what Mies wanted in life drawing. Mies thought of the life drawing as being a balance to the mechanical drawing. He thought if people were doing very disciplined drawing with instruments then they need the free drawing without any instruments at all. It's old fashioned but very sound, psychologically very, very sound. It's on very good rock foundations. You cannot deny the fact that if you make an intense discipline on one hand you must give it a very well balanced freedom on the other hand. And they're both dealing with visual things so you've got to remember that neither one holds primacy over the other. You could say the freehand is conceptual and the other is technical but those are only names. They are both parts of the same thing. So then he hired Paul Wieghardt, who was a pupil along with Klee in Dresden when they were young, and Nelli Bar who actually was a pupil of Aristide Maillol. And these were two marvelous teachers. They brought back to life this life drawing. In fact, they really put it on a basis where for many students it was an experience of having an art class, because they were marvelously good teachers. That was a very big change, a very positive and strong one. It did immense good for the school. A change that was not for the better was some time in the 1950s Peterhans developed this throat problem which eventually led to cancer. He died from it in 1960. He was only sixty years of age when he died. And Peterhans had been giving a course, History and Analysis of Art. When I was a graduate Mies told me to sit in on that. You don't have to take the whole course but sit in occasionally and find out

96 when there are special topics coming up. If you find them good go sit in to listen. They were really superb. He had, for example, on occasions a static analysis of the structure of the Gothic cathedral where it explained all the forces that are going through the vaults and flying buttresses and so forth, how they resolved and carried down to the foundations. He had a series that he gave on cast iron and steel architecture in the nineteenth century beginning with small bridges and pavilions; and then those big halls like Crystal Palace; the Palace of Industry in Paris at 1855; the Gallery of Machines of 1879 and the huge Palais des Machines of 1889, at the same time as the Eiffel Tower. He had also a series on showing painting, sculpture, and architecture in Byzantine, medieval, Renaissance and Baroque to show how the concepts of space changed in the different periods.

Blum: Were these classes that someone then was able to pick up and teach?

Malcolmson: They were primarily slide lectures. When Peterhans developed this tragic problem his doctor advised him not to lecture. Then Dearstyne came in. Now he was from the old Bauhaus. I mean not the very old, but he was from the Dessau Bauhaus. Dearstyne, interesting though his material was, was never of the same caliber as Peterhans. Couldn't be. So that was a real change and it was a loss that those lectures were never recorded, a real loss.

Blum: What happened after Mies left?

Malcolmson: Before we get to Mies leaving there are other little things to fill in, too. little by little Hilbs's planning ideas started to change. When I went there he had these exercises that he had students make but little by little, partly under suggestions Bluestein was making, he started to have people make drawings of things that had been discussed but never worked out. That's to say taking a small town somewhere in the Middle West and showing how through stage one, stage two, stage three you would come to a final plan, not simply jumping to the final plan like he tended to do in the early days when he first came. And that was a very big change for Hilbs himself because it began to open up a whole concept of more flexibility in his whole thinking about planning. By 1950 or so, because of the fifth year, in fact it was one of the positive things that came out of the fifth year, Hilbs decided to make the fifth year regional planning. Now up to that time Hilbs had talked a great deal about it. He had made some illustrations in books.

97 But he never really worked systematically on it. So now he started to study the region and his whole philosophy started to expand for the better. He was into a region now where he was physically planning and making diagrammatic and scale drawings of the implications of planning on the regional scale, which had only been discussed by geographers and by land economists and people like this in the 1930s and 1940s. Even the most advanced thinker, I would say, was Gutkind who came to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, from Germany, Erwin Gutkind. He had been in England, again with that group of émigrés that came out of Germany to England. He came to America sometime about 1950 or 1951 and he stayed in Pennsylvania until his death, I think about 1960. Gutkind had written big tomes on this and diagrammed them but he never worked it out in the way Hilbs did. Hilbs was breaking into a terra incognita. And that was a positive change. Now to come to Mies himself. Mies had done some interesting things with the graduate school. Mies saw, like Hilbs did, graduate studies as being a kind of research and he never hesitated to use the graduate facilities to study problems that he had in his own practice. It would be a stretch to the imagination to say so, but the step construction I had to make for my theater, of the seating, may have been related in some sense to the steps in the Farnsworth House, because the construction was the same. And the biggest of all his unbuilt projects came in 1953 to 1955, the convention hall which was very nearly realized. That was a very ambitious project. Many people worked on it. Over something like two years he had graduates working on it. It was very widely published at the time. I think by the time Mies came to leave he had perhaps, and this is only speculative, he had perhaps felt he had exhausted the possibilities at the school. That's just my guess.

Blum: Interesting speculation.

Malcolmson: I don't say that he'd exhausted the possibilities, but I think he felt that his energies now had to be directed more towards the practice that was getting very big. It was very big by that time.

Blum: You worked in his practice for how long? You began in 1948.

Malcolmson: We only worked a summer, Dan and I, from May to September. He wanted very badly for me to abandon the graduate degree and work with him. But I had

98 made up my mind I was going to do it. I had to do it. So when he left, I think it was under pressure in the office. He had moved to Ohio Street and he had then a very big staff, a lot of work, Canada and the East and so on.

Blum: When he left the school was there a big vacuum to fill? Or were the people around him trained so well that they simply carried on?

Malcolmson: Yes. I would say so. Actually, to outsiders, removing somebody of Mies's stature would seem like a kind of mini-disaster. It didn't prove to be at all, because the structural stability of the curriculum as it was, was so good that, I wouldn't say he wasn't missed. He certainly was, but at the same time I used to say somewhat heretically to Hilbs, it's still possible to have life without father.

Blum: You were at IIT until 1964. You taught for fifteen years before you…

Malcolmson: I taught first the housing and construction with Bluestein and Caldwell, then I taught the housing on my own for about three years. Then I taught the undergraduate city planning at the fourth year for about ten or eleven years. Then I taught a course that Hilbs asked me to teach, a history of cities and architecture of cities. That was a very nice one to do. Then when Mies went out, I took the graduates for the first year for six years, the first-year graduates. I think they were the most interesting ones because they were the ones that had to be sort of, some of them, re-educated. They had to be integrated into the ideas of the curriculum, and they came from all nationalities, almost everywhere. I calculated at one time that between Michigan and IIT I've had something like forty-five different nationalities of students that I've taught. I also had something like twelve to fifteen hundred students in my life.

Blum: What was the underlying message that you felt you had to give to those twelve hundred students?

Malcolmson: All right. First of all, I never thought to be a teacher in my life. Really. In fact, when I was a young man practicing in Ireland we used to joke among ourselves that teachers didn't know anything about architecture. I think I was right, then. But anyway, I found that I had some kind of natural talent for teaching. There are students from IIT of the Mies era who told me and have told people who

99 have relayed it back to me that they thought I was the best teacher after Mies and Hilbs.

Blum: What did they feel was your success?

Malcolmson: Well, I think first of all, what I tried to concentrate on was teaching people how to work, teaching them methods rather than teaching them styles, how to work, how to think about buildings, how to organize themselves to work, how to state the problem and how to find a way of analyzing problems.

Blum: Did you emulate Mies in his silence, forcing students to look for another solution?

Malcolmson: I'm going to say some wicked things now. For a while I drank martinis but I didn't like that too much so I gave it up. And for a while I smoked cigars, but if you mean seriously emulating him in the teaching method, never consciously at all. I learned more about teaching from Hilbs I think, than I learned from anybody else. I think Danforth would say the same. Hilbs was a teacher par excellence. I've seen a number of very good teachers in my lifetime but he was by far the best.

Blum: What was his secret?

Malcolmson: That is his secret.

Blum: Well, what was his methodology?

Malcolmson: His secret is his secret. He never revealed it to anybody.

Blum: What did he do that Mies didn't do?

Malcolmson: Hilbs had intense curiosity and he had great persistence. He never gave up. He was an entirely unsentimental type of person, or he appeared to be so. Actually if you got to know him very well there were elements of what you might call sentimentality in terms of his friendships, which were very strong. He was very loyal to people. So was Mies. That was a virtue in both of them. They both demanded loyalty from people. In fact loyalty was even better than efficiency. Mies used to tell me, he said, "That crazy old fellow Felix Bonnet that I have in

100 my office is not very efficient, but I keep him because he is absolutely loyal." But Hilbs's secret is something like this. Hilbs saw students who were failing or who were in difficulties as a challenge, and he wouldn't give up on them. He would go after them and he could actually get something out of people that had very nearly quit on themselves. He had this talent, which is a part of genius in a sense, that only exceptional teachers could build, and that was to bring people out, draw them out, by all and every method. By pounding on the table, by shouting at them, by making sarcastic remarks, by making witty remarks so everybody would laugh, and by asking the same question over and over again until he got an answer that he thought made some sense. He was the embodiment, in a way, of Socrates. I said that to him many times. "Oh," he said, "You are always exaggerating things." But he was the embodiment. He even looked like him at one time. In seminars he would ask a question and somebody would answer. Then he would say "What do you mean by that." So whoever it was would start and then the conversation would go on and on and on and then he'd say, "But five minutes ago you told me exactly the opposite. What do you really mean?" And so on. As soon as somebody would take a rigid position Hilbs would attack it from all angles, reducing it to rubble practically. And then he would say after that, "Now you understand that you think you know what you are talking about, but the question is do you really know?" He said, "You have to be skeptical and you have to keep asking questions, but you have to be skeptical about your skepticism." He was an avid reader when he was young of Nietzsche, who is full of this stuff. If you want to read it read The Gay Science. The "gay" doesn't mean what it means now. I think it is called La Gaya Scienza—it's in Italian actually, the title. But it's full of this contradictory stuff, of these paradoxes. He was a person who didn't believe in conventional religion at all. In fact he told me hundreds of times the two greatest crimes against humanity are politics and religion. He reminded me not only of Socrates, he's very much like some of these stoics you read about like Diogenes, you know people that bowed to nothing, they bowed to nobody. There wasn't anything he wouldn't question. And he was very much admired by students. I have a nice little photograph Danforth gave me recently and it's only, maybe you've seen this picture, within a couple of years of his death. And here is Hilbs, this frail little man, very much alive, in the middle of about six or seven big hulky guys that look as if they are members of a football

101 team. But they're all wrapped in silence because he's obviously expounding his ideas and everybody is listening very intensely.

Blum: You are describing him with admiration. What was it about the way he taught that you sought to emulate, or was there a way?

Malcolmson: No. There wasn't a way. I think what I saw in Hilbs's way of teaching was there were a number of very interesting things that he would do and suggest to us. There was a little group of us—Caldwell, myself, Brownson, Bluestein. Those are the people who worked with Hilbs at that time. Oddly enough they've all survived except Bluestein. He would say, when you came to grading work, I want to see what you think are the best and now let me see the worst. Then he said "Concentrate, first of all, on grading the ones that you think are the very best and the worst, and then the rest of them fall somewhere in between." He said, "You know this isn't an exact science but we have to be fair to people and the only way is to concentrate on the extremes first and then let everything fall into the middle."

Blum: Is that something that you proceeded to do when you taught?

Malcolmson: Yes. That's not the point I'm really trying to get at. He had a way of setting a problem for students and letting them work on it themselves. Then we would have an open critique, which was always great fun because they bring out these things and he would criticize them. He was a very good critic and the criticisms were always marvelous. What he wanted to do was to let them play with this problem and then, through his criticisms, he would show them they didn't understand the problem at all. He'd say, "Now we begin all over again. I'm going to tell you how I think it should be and then you work it all out." But he had this idea to let people sweat it out first to find out that there really was a problem and they were on their own and then they would be exposed to the criticism.

Blum: Sounds very similar to what Mies was doing in another way.

Malcolmson: Oh, yes, yes. But Hilbs had refined this very sharply, that it was a real method. It was a method that was highly visible. I'm trying to think now what I did with

102 students because it was interesting for me to go to Michigan. I'll say a few words about that now.

Blum: And you went there in 1964?

Malcolmson: 1964. I stayed on teaching until 1984.

Blum: And you went there as the dean?

Malcolmson: The dean. I did ten years as dean. I ran into a real political opposition. I brought Jacques Brownson with me. Jacques and the faculty didn't get along well at all. Because there was a lot of dead wood around. Some of it is still there. Jacques is a kind of hire-and-fire-them type, you know, and they didn't like that at all. It terrified them. There was a kind of buffalo stampede. But anyway he left then after a while to go to Denver and I stayed on. I finished the ten years that I had contracted to do and quit.

Blum: Did you bring any changes with you to Michigan from IIT?

Malcolmson: Some. Actually, it's a paradox to tell you I brought in more changes after I was dean than I brought in while I was dean, as a teacher I brought in more changes.

Blum: That is ironic.

Malcolmson: First of all, I found out that I was a far more effective teacher than any of the others. People were even struggling to get into my classes. There was a lot of maneuvering to get in. I taught an undergraduate design course for about six years after the deanship and I taught at least two to three years of first-year graduates, which I taught at IIT. I made some marvelous things with these people in the first year of graduate work. The last one I made the last year, I'm going to put it in my book, is a museum for prehistoric Indian architecture in the USA. We made some marvelous presentations for that. What I brought there was that I rejected, in class, any tendency for philosophizing. I told them universities may be and could be places to philosophize, but if you want to be a professional architect you have to know how buildings are made. You have to know how to put them together. I had people at graduate level drawing full-size details that had never seen a full-size detail in their lives before. Imagine. I made projects.

103 Throughout the six years I had this class I had two groups a year, which means I had something like—I had three groups in a year—I had the first part of the first term, the seven-week group. I had another seven-week group and then I had a thirteen-week group. That means I had three different groups in one year. That means over ten years this was thirty groups. I never repeated a problem. There was a new problem made every time. It became a challenge to invent new problems. I always exhibited the students' work. You know the teachers hid them many times probably because they were so bad. But I always insisted on showing them publicly in the corridors. The students were very enthused about that because they saw, you know, they could bring their parents in and show them what they were doing. Things like that I introduced into Michigan that didn't exist before. What I tried to do was give them the feeling it doesn't matter what kind of problem I had to solve, I've got a method. I know how to solve it, I know how to analyze it and I know how to put all the pieces back together again.

Blum: Is that what you brought with you from IIT?

Malcolmson: Yes. And it was accepted. They couldn't deny it because it was much stronger and, in fact, Michigan was very good to me in a way because I had a free hand as a design teacher. My own ideas began to develop in a freer way than they had been developing in Chicago. You see, what led the projects to come into being in Chicago was I was teaching under Mies and Hilbs, very middle-of-the-road theory and application as they understood it. It was well within their philosophy. I didn't dare go outside it too much. Within the projects, I did. They were my safety valve and actually they were the thing, I became convinced around 1950- 1951, I'm teaching so I have to make the projects.

Blum: Why did you wait until 1964 to get a license?

Malcolmson: That's a very awkward and worthwhile question. When I finished the graduate work in the early l950s my wife got a copy of the Illinois license and then without any problem I could have gotten an American license on a reciprocal basis because I had the British license. I waited and waited and did nothing and then, lo and behold, by about 1958 they changed the licensing laws. You had to take the examination. Walter Netsch met me the time I gave that presentation in Wisconsin of the curriculum. He was there and he said, "I don't think you should

104 have to take the examination. I'm the chairman of the Illinois Examining Board and I am suggesting we give you an oral examination." And they did. But Netsch wasn't there so the committee didn't know what to do and they were reluctant to give me the license. Netsch arranged a second meeting and he appeared and I presented myself a second time and then they agreed. It went downstate, and some old biddy down there, she's dead since, thank heavens, Vera Binks. She was a judge in Springfield. She said, "No foreign licenses." So now I had to start the examinations.

Blum: You had to take an oral and a practical?

Malcolmson: I hadn't taken a written examination in architecture for twenty-five years and I went in cold with nothing, no preparation. Well, I passed the design, which I expected to. I got 85 percent on mechanical equipment for buildings, which kind of astonished me because I didn't expect that. I think I passed the site planning, the history and something else. I didn't pass the whole thing, naturally. Dornbusch talked me into taking it cold. You remember Dornbusch—Charlie Dornbusch. He was related to the licensing examination for many years. So then I took it again and I passed it.

[Tape 5: Side 2]

Malcolmson: By this time I was on my way to Michigan. A very old friend of mine from Ireland came with me to Michigan. James Costello, was an engineer, an exceptionally good one. He was an electrical, structural, and mechanical engineer. Three degrees, in all, three. He coached me in the structural examination. It was a breeze. So then I opened an office there. I had a couple of clients, as a matter of fact.

Blum: In Michigan?

Malcolmson: In Michigan. One metallurgical engineer wanted me to design a house but it was in the Nixon era when the interest rates were going up. They were nothing like they were later but they got to about 11 percent and then he phased out.

Blum: You got an Illinois license as well?

105 Malcolmson: Yes. That's where I took the licensing, in Illinois and Michigan. And NCARB, that means National Council of Architectural Registration Boards. So I've taken more examinations in my lifetime than you could shake a stick at. My secretary, when I was dean, said, "Dean Malcolmson, why did you take so many examinations in your lifetime?" I said, "I suppose I had to." Anyway, I made a project for the new building for the architecture school, which was not accepted, naturally. That's in my book. It's very nice. You've seen it. It was in Inland Architect at one time. Bill Newman put it in. All in all, the teaching in Michigan was very good for me. I miss it now very much.

Blum: Reggie, you have been in architecture teaching, doing projects, exhibiting, lecturing for many years. Fifty years. How did your profession have an impact on your family?

Malcolmson: I think, first of all, it was a great surprise to my family that I turned out to be, as it were, a success. Success is a word I have some reservations about because there's connotations attached to the word success that are very ephemeral in the present day but nevertheless, my father especially was very surprised, pleasantly surprised, that I became addicted, as it were, to architecture. In fact, in a sense I was fulfilling a dream of my father's who had ambitions at one time to be a civil engineer.

Blum: What was your father's profession?

Malcolmson: He was a civil servant. The area he achieved the most distinction in was he was a great amateur athlete in the beginning of the century. Rugby football player, long distance swimmer, racing cyclist, handball champion, you name it.

Blum: My goodness.

Malcolmson: He was a collector of trophies. Among my contemporaries I think I made a lot of friends because a lot of people were interested in what I was interested in. I found I was able to interest people and make them, as it were, share my enthusiasm.

Blum: Your friends or your family?

106 Malcolmson: My friends. My friends almost exclusively became architects from there on, from 1933 onwards. Of course, when I came to Chicago it was a great surprise and no surprise. I had had a very strong addiction to making very exact drawings and I can't tell you what a delight it was to find myself in an environment where very exact drawings were highly valued, even demanded. It was an area in which projects were being made. Projects were a big thing, so I felt myself very much at home. I even felt in a very strange way that I was sharing the European exile of Mies and Hilbs, because they were, when it is looked at from a long view one has to realize Hilbs and Mies were the cream of the creative talent of the 1920s of this century in Europe. It was nothing short of scandal that people of such enormous creative abilities should have been driven out into exile. I always thought how generous America was to have taken over these people. There was an element of self interest, of course, but at the same time Mies mentioned many times to us that in Chicago you felt they gave you a chance. And I felt that too. Chicago is really now my spiritual home. I felt at home in Chicago from the moment I landed.

Blum: I know architects devote so many hours to their work, sometimes night-long charrettes, sometimes more than even one night. How did this affect your immediate family, your children, your wife?

Malcolmson: I was doing that from the l930s. I mean, that was a way of life for me. My wife knew very well that I was leading this way of life before we were married, on competitions, on architectural jobs that were behind schedule, and so forth. So that was nothing new to them.

Blum: What about your children?

Malcolmson: My daughter wasn't born until 1953. We were already, by that time, seven years married and she grew up in this environment. She knew Hilbs very well. They were on very good terms with one another when she was a child. He used to always buy her Christmas presents and she was a kind of adopted daughter of his. She knew Mies and she knew this whole circle, much more than my son does. So she grew up in that environment on South Shore Drive in Chicago. She quite naturally took to drawing very early. The same age as myself, four years of age.

107 Blum: What does your daughter do?

Malcolmson: She's a painter. She's a teacher and a painter. She lives in Mexico. She's been living and working in Mexico City and partly in Cuernevaca. She will go back now to teach in Xalapa, which is a kind of cultural center of the State of Vera Cruz. Vera Cruz is the richest city probably, outside Mexico City in Mexico because of the oil.

Blum: And your son?

Malcolmson: My son's the architect.

Blum: So your profession seems to have had a profound impact on your family.

Malcolmson: It did, you know. I always thought of myself as something of a bad example, but strangely enough I sort of bifurcated myself. You know, I was the dean of architecture and design and my daughter became the artist and my son became the architect, and it's very, very satisfying for me to know that. I keep telling this to my son, he was just graduated with an honors degree from IIT, he had Alfred Caldwell as a teacher, I persuaded him to take every possible course with Alfred and he and Alfred got along like a house on fire.

Blum: Why did you do that?

Malcolmson: Because I knew how much Alfred had to give and I knew that Alfred's drive and enthusiasm and fiery orations to students, were very inspiring to young people and motivated them. Niall caught fire very easily. Caldwell admired Niall no end. They got on very, very well and IIT has been very good to my whole family, in fact. I said that, I think, at a dinner we had after a drawing exhibition at IIT, all my family have been affected by Mies's school. Myself as a graduate, teacher, administrator. My wife did editing and typing doctoral theses not only for architects but for engineers and people from other departments of IIT.

Blum: After hearing you express this kind of loyalty to IIT, why did you leave in 1964?

Malcolmson: Well, just to complete. My daughter actually taught at IIT for a year. She went there as a student and because she had a good art background, she was hired to

108 teach the life drawing. Nelli Bar had retired by that time and there were two or three young people teaching and she was picked as one. She taught it for a year and she had great trouble to keep up with her architectural courses while the teaching assignments were going on, but she made that very special discovery that she was a born teacher and that started her on a teaching career. Of course, my son becomes the undergraduate product of IIT and I've told him we don't need great architects any more but we really need good architects and I hope he'll do it.

Blum: Why did you leave IIT in 1964?

Malcolmson: It was very hard to leave and I pondered over it many times. A number of us had said when Mies goes we all go and Mies went in 1958. After 1958 when Danforth came I was teaching the first-year graduates. Danforth was very kind to me. There were projects that I made then with students that affected the linear city and he helped finance that and the exhibit and I felt very comfortable there. At the same time I now had a new son. He was born in 1962 and the dedication to poverty was beginning to hurt now, so I began to think I've got to do something about this. Hilbs kept saying, "As soon as you go out of the school you people will be very much in demand." A number of schools asked me to come for interviews. I can remember Penn State in College Park, Pennsylvania, which eventually went to an associate of Neutra. I think I was in about the last two or three on their list. I wouldn't have taken it because I saw that Penn State was in trouble. They'd lost their accreditation and that didn't make them very attractive. Then came the University of Michigan. I had had a lot of contacts with them before. They had asked me to lecture there in 1958, 1957—the year I gave that talk in Wisconsin—or the year before it, in 1958. Then the dean of Michigan retired and Dean Bennett, who had been the previous dean and practically the cornerstone of the school as it was then, had seen me in Chicago and said to me that there was an opening coming up, would I be interested. He met me in Hyde Park in a hotel there and I said I'd like to look at it. So eventually it did come up and there were a number of candidates. I believe Walter Netsch was a candidate for it. Danforth was originally a candidate for it and he bowed out, naturally, because he had realized that his obligations to IIT were literally a calling. So he

109 suggested to me why don't you take it. And, in fact, he told them he would not take it but he'd like to suggest that I would.

Blum: But your underlying reason was to improve your financial situation?

Malcolmson: Yes. There's hardly any other reason except that curiously enough there was something in the background that I couldn't resolve. Some time in the middle 1950s, according to Hilbs, a school had asked if I could be a candidate for dean of their school and Mies said, "Oh no, we can't let him go. Forget about it." So I never knew what that school was. I never knew whether I really would have had a chance. So there was lurking, probably in my mind, the question, is this a resolution of that question, what's it like to be dean of a school. But it wasn't serious. The economic problem was a serious one.

Blum: You were in Chicago involved deeply at IIT but you were certainly aware of what was going on in the marketplace, so to speak, with firms, although you were not affiliated with one. Was there an architectural establishment in Chicago?

Malcolmson: It's hard to say. There were certainly a number of prominent figures in the architectural profession then, Perkins and Will, Al Shaw, of course, Jerry Loebl who had been very prominent and instrumental in bringing Mies to Armour Institute, and the people in Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. I knew many of the people at the level of Bruce Graham and Walter Netsch. Bill Dunlap became a partner. It's interesting that of the three graduates of Mies of 1947 Dunlap didn't finish. He went into Skidmore very early and he didn't finish the graduate work. Dan and I did. Dan became a very prominent practitioner, a very, very good and successful one and Dunlap became a partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and I became the dean of the College of Architecture and Design in Michigan, so it was a pretty good class.

Blum: You're responding to a question about the architectural establishment in a way that you're identifying prominent architects. Is that the underlying reason for perhaps being considered part of the establishment, to be part of a successful firm?

110 Malcolmson: Yes, partly. I would say George Fred and Bill Keck, although the Kecks were quite independent people, to my knowledge—one of them, at least, was never a member of the AIA.

Blum: Is that part of being part of the establishment?

Malcolmson: I think it is part of it. At least I think people then would have thought that's part of being part of the establishment.

Blum: And the movers and shakers, as you're describing them, were architects in prominent firms.

Malcolmson: Yes. Oh, they were prominent architects. They were owners of firms. Perkins and Will in those times were very, very prominent school architects. They built schools everywhere. In fact they were nationally, probably even internationally, known as school architects in the late l940s and 1950s. That was the foundation of their practice. Al Shaw had been a long-time practitioner in Chicago. He was the designer of the Chicago Civic Opera House in the days of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White.

Blum: Al Shaw?

Malcolmson: Yes, Al Shaw. Jerry Loebl, of course, Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett was a long established firm and Jerry, as I said before, had been a graduate of Armour and very, very much behind the scenes in Mies's appointment as director to the then Armour Institute. The graduates of IIT, it became apparent in the early l950s, were very much in demand in Chicago. Primarily I think because the word got around that these young people coming from IIT really can draw very, very well, very accurately, they know the construction, they know how to put a building together, and they seem to be very well equipped technically to work as architects.

Blum: Did you sense any elitism? Maybe coming from architectural firms towards selecting, say, someone trained at Yale as opposed to IIT?

Malcolmson: No, I wasn't aware that there was that kind of elitism. It's true a great number of people we're talking about were not from IIT. Walter Netsch was a graduate of

111 MIT and a number of other people at Skidmore were from eastern schools. I don't think that there was an elitism.

Blum: Perhaps that's a poor word.

Malcolmson: I think it is, if you don't mind my saying so. I would say almost the other way around. That IIT was well on the way to establishing a kind of elitism of its own. IIT was in that strange position which I've characterized to you before, a kind of "we and them" relationship to the outside world but that was in the first times, you know, just the postwar period. Once IIT really got going, you know, when I think about it, the moment I came was a very extraordinary time to come to Mies's school because it was hardly known as a Mies school before 1946-1947.

Blum: And he had been here for almost ten years.

Malcolmson: He had not built any building more than three stories high in Chicago. When I came the foundations were being laid for the Promontory Apartments on the south side of Hyde Park and he had built probably only about four or five buildings in America. From 1946, 1947 onwards his school was flourishing at an extraordinary rapid rate of growth nationally and internationally, of course. Mies was no mystery to Europeans. He was very, very well known in Europe and many times Americans have asked me how many people knew Mies in Europe. He was very, very well known. The Barcelona Pavilion had been a kind of bombshell. It had shaken people up to realize that an architecture which, in the hands of Le Corbusier and others, sometimes seemed bizarre and was made in engineering materials like reinforced concrete, that an architecture should be so elegant and made in such refined materials like onyx and bronze and glass. The whole European establishment was quite shaken by the fact that this architecture which they were supposed not to like, turned out to be something very splendid and very grandiose, not to speak of the furniture. Everybody knows that Behrens told Mies when he visited the Barcelona that these chairs were so elegant one hesitated to sit on them.

Blum: You mentioned the AIA in another context. Were you a member of the AIA?

112 Malcolmson: In the latter part before I left to go to Michigan, when I was struggling with the license situation, I became a member of the AIA, but not before that.

Blum: Why not?

Malcolmson: Well, I was always suspicious of organizations as being establishment and even the RIBA I suppose I felt it was respectable, naturally, in the English style, it was a respectable professional society but I always felt slightly suspicious of organizations.

Blum: Did you think there was any value to belonging to the AIA?

Malcolmson: Yes, I guess I did. I suppose there was, you know, such a professional society is a forum after all, it distributes and disseminates information, you get to meet people that have common values with you and you get to know the people that are visitors through such a professional society from other countries. I found at a very early age that architects are a very unique kind of people because no matter where you put them down, if there are other architects there—it doesn't matter whether they are Chinese, African, Indian, Mexican or European or American—they immediately found common ground and there is a kind of confraternity among architects. I think that's disappearing to some extent because I see now architects as being so much preoccupied with their personal egos that they can probably hardly stand one another's egos. And that's too bad. It's a sad state of affairs.

Blum: You know colleagues of yours have said that they thought, or this particular person, has said that there's really no reason for the AIA to exist because it doesn't promote standards and it doesn't engage in research and doesn't do things that actually benefit the profession. How do you feel about that?

Malcolmson: We've said this many times before. If you compare the AIA with the AMA, the American Medical Association, you could say it is by no means a trade union. It does nothing substantial for its members. It doesn't protect them in any way against legal processes. It doesn't protect them in any way as employees of architects, they're not protected in any way against discrimination in hiring. They are not protected in any way against wage levels or anything like that. There is

113 an element in architecture, professionally, of Mr. Pecksniff. If you don't know who Mr. Pecksniff is I recommend you read, as I read it around 1950 actually in Chicago of all places. It is a very amusing novel of Dickens called Martin Chuzzlewit and it's unlike most of the other somewhat gloomy social documentary novels. Martin Chuzzlewit is a young man who is hired by an architect called Mr. Pecksniff who turns out to be a scoundrel. He exploits poor Martin. Martin, incidentally, goes to America after and has many very amusing adventures in New York and Illinois, for which Dickens was chastised when he came to America by American writers. He made amends with them later. But there is a tendency in a the architectural profession to not act really as a profession that sets standards, that protects the qualities, that demands the qualities and sets the levels of performance, and so forth, which I think is too bad. As we know in the past back to the Middle Ages that such standards were in existence at one time and very rigidly adhered to.

Blum: Some time ago, earlier in the tape, you said that you in some ways felt that Mies favored your work—and you—on occasion.

Malcolmson: I have to qualify that. I would say Dan Brenner and I seemed to be his two favorite people, very much.

Blum: Do you feel that coming from another country benefited or did not benefit you?

Malcolmson: That's a loaded question. I'll answer it in a moment. I have to tell you something Hilbs said about the AIA, which, of course, is typical Hilbs. He said they are always talking about ethics and aesthetics, two things of which they have no understanding whatsoever. Now, was I getting favorable treatment because I came from another country?

Blum: Favorable or unfavorable.

Malcolmson: Certainly not unfavorable. Certainly not. I think, and this would be purely speculation on my part, that to do what I had done, which I mentioned earlier and Danforth's remarks about it, to "burn your boats" like Cortez, to abandon a lucrative practice to start a new life in America may have touched Hilbs and Mies because they had to do that for themselves. They were forced to do it.

114 Blum: But they were forced to do it and you were not.

Malcolmson: I did it voluntarily, very consciously. That might have been a factor. It's a very interesting question and it's one that I'm not really able to answer. All I can tell you is that I felt very much at home with both Hilbs and Mies, very much. They were intellectually very stimulating to me. Very much so. Hilbs especially. I miss Hilbs a great deal since his death because Hilbs was a type, and there are many people in that colloquium that could verify that for you, Hilbs was the type that, in an hour with Hilbs there was never a dull moment. His mind was so stimulating. He could find interest in almost anything. He looked at things in a quizzical and questioning way that was very, very exciting because we knew that he was always full of the unexpected.

Blum: Well he certainly came alive for those of us who were there who had never known him.

Malcolmson: Right. But Mies could do the same thing. Mies had a talent for saying something that you didn't expect him to say.

Blum: Let's now move into the idea of being a visionary architect. Someone said that there are two architectures, one of research and one of projects.

Malcolmson: There are, it appears, two architectures. One of research and the other professional, no he said, one of a visionary nature and the other practical. The practical seems to be in retrospect but a poor reflection of the first. A weak echo of the first.

Blum: And you have been called a professional visionary. How do you explain that?

Malcolmson: By Mr. Collins, exactly.

Blum: Let me just read a quote from the exhibition catalogue that George Collins wrote. "The highest aim of the visionary architect is to provide an imaginative and spiritual vision of the possibilities within the grasp of man that could elevate and ennoble his world. This is the utopian aspiration of the true visionary." Do you feel that applies to you?

115 Malcolmson: I try for it. I wanted to go back a little bit to try and tell you how I got to that lofty conception of things. I told you when I was an apprentice we started to make projects. In fact I made that now well-known airport fifty years ago. And I had been making many projects, as I told you, for speculative builders, small houses, summer houses, what we used to call weekend houses. In fact the oldest existing one I have that's identifiable as a project is a weekend house in concrete. Very small—twenty-four by thirty-six feet. That's my first really identifiable project as I see it now. Both Granville Smyth and I were occasionally making these projects, partly under the demand from speculative builders for plans. It's very funny builders used to think and still think only of plans. They never think of any other aspect of a building. But that's something else. Through the exhibitions that started in World War II, which I've talked about on the earlier tape, projects naturally became something that was in the public domain that was exhibited and seen, and I suppose the difficulties of World War II that put a complete damper on practice. First of all materials became short and then clients weren't available. That must have driven a number of people, it certainly drove me into thinking about projects. Many people were thinking especially about what will Europe be like after World War II. There was a big movement in England to replan London and, in fact, Sir Patrick Abercrombie, whom I referred to before, he became the center of the new London plan. It was the Abercrombie Plan for London and everywhere people were talking about what cities would be like when they were rebuilt after the war. Through the exhibitions and through this big competition for the Crystal Palace, which I spent three or four months actually on these drawings. It's very expensive to enter competitions you know.

Blum: Was there actually an intention then to rebuild the Crystal Palace?

Malcolmson: Oh yes. That was the purpose of the competition. There were about I think something like eighty to one hundred entries exhibited in London in 1946, and the one we sent in was twelfth. That's to say there was a first-prize winner, a second, a third, and there were four honorable mentions. That's up to number seven so we were hung as number twelve. So we must have been in contention at one time. At least somebody must have thought this was an interesting thing. I thought it was the most amazing discovery I'd ever made. The idea of building a big hall with floors moving inside of it.

116 Blum: But you did not enter that competition thinking it was only a project. It could have been built.

Malcolmson: I was determined it would be built. I had already thought who the engineers were going to be, and who was going to work with me on it. We had every intention to build it.

Blum: So that was not considered a project. I mean it was a project then that could be built.

Malcolmson: In my book I've had to try to define what are the sources of projects. They are unbuilt buildings, or projects, because they have never been realized in concrete form. Competition designs are projects because only one of a hundred will get built so all the others remain projects. Research projects will remain projects, and then there are visionary projects that are made for their own sake that have no basis in a commission or a competition or any impulse behind them that is of a practical nature that demands now this should be built.

Blum: When you design a project for any of those four categories do you do so with an eye to the practical side of constructing this building, the engineering, the mechanics of it?

Malcolmson: I have to go back to the definition of this. This is what makes my book important because I've analyzed what all these sources are. There's a fifth one incidentally I didn't mention, of diploma projects. There are two very famous ones in this century. Tony Garnier's Ville Industrielle for Lyons which influenced city planning all over the world. This was the first time anybody had made a detailed presentation of what an industrial city should be like. And the other is Leonidov's library that was made as a diploma project in 1927. Garnier's was made in 1907 to 1914. Those are both unbuilt but of major importance because of their influence. My theater is a diploma project and it's in the book for that reason.

Blum: But you were speaking a moment ago about the necessity of engaging in projects because nothing was being built or it wasn't likely that anything would be built.

117 Malcolmson: But I want to say also that in defining these categories I have made a very emphatic statement that all of these projects are buildable and all of them have been considered as technically capable of development into actual buildings because the unbuildable, in my view, is not architecture.

Blum: So it does have that possibility?

Malcolmson: They all have the possibility. And I wouldn't consider them if they didn't have the possibility of being built. You have to make a distinction between what I call visionary architecture and fantastic architecture.

Blum: And yours is?

Malcolmson: Is not fantastic.

Blum: It's visionary.

Malcolmson: It's visionary. Now I have to say I didn't work with the title "Visionary Architecture" in mind. I didn't know of the existence of this title until Arthur Drexler in 1960 mounted an exhibition in New York in which he put my linear city. In fact, I have two or three mini-distinctions. One is the first European graduate of Mies, the first European-born graduate of Mies in America, and I'm the first person who has exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art after Mies, of the IIT group. Mies was the only person at IIT that had exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art before me.

Blum: Your projects that would fall into the visionary category are of several forms.

Malcolmson: Yes.

Blum: One is buildings, another is a linear city—is that idea visionary?

Malcolmson: Yes.

Blum: Another is furniture.

Malcolmson: My friend Amancio Williams in Buenos Aires who will be in Chicago, if I can manage that, in November of this year, wrote a wonderfully poetic introduction

118 to my book, a foreword to the book, in which he says the original ideas for the linear city is a Spanish one. Soria y Mata in the l880s. But Soria's was somewhat primitive because it didn't take into account many factors that make a modern city such as heavy and light industry.

[Tape 6: Side 1]

Malcolmson: Then in the 1940s, during the German occupation of France, Le Corbusier began to study the linear city, a type that he had not achieved before except for one instance when he made a plan, a commissioned plan for Bata, the shoe manufacturer in Czechoslovakia, which was the original headquarters of Bata shoes for the city of Zlin. This is in his collected works. That was the one and only time he attempted a linear city. But during the war, with a group he was part of, ASCORAL, they made very intensive study of what he called the linear industrial city. Le Corbusier was addicted to the concentric city so he began to classify it. He made the concentric city a city of administration or commerce, and the industrial city a linear city so that the radial cities were at the intersections of triangles, so to speak, and then the cooperative farm centers within the spaces in between the triangles.

Blum: Was he your immediate inspiration?

Malcolmson: No. He was not. The immediate inspiration actually was Soria. Next to Soria and a very interesting man who was a forgotten celebrity of an earlier time in America, Edgar Chambless. Collins has written about him. Edgar Chambless proposed a city, which he called Roadtown, and that also had an influence on me.

Blum: When you read these things when you became aware of them, how did they have an impact on you?

Malcolmson: I saw them as being rational. I saw them as being perfectly common-sense solutions. I saw them as being something that belonged more to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than all the conceptions of the gridiron city or radial city which after all are really ancient. The gridiron city goes back to Babylonia

119 and even earlier to Sumeria, there are cities in the Euphrates, Tigris, that are gridiron cities. The concentric city is based on the medieval rings of fortifications one after another. Paris had nine rings of fortifications up to 1871, then they abandoned the fortifications because they realized you can't defend a city any more against gunfire. So what Williams is saying is that my linear city is the third he considers of the important statements of the linear city.

Blum: And how does your linear city express the linear city, the concept?

Malcolmson: Primarily the linear city for me came about in, you might say, one of those moments of discovery. Around 1954, there was a competition announced by Carson Pirie Scott for replanning the downtown area of Chicago. I wrote and got the conditions of the competition. I started in the spring of 1954 to make drawings of the downtown area to try and find solutions. And then my wife and I decided to go to Europe, primarily to visit my mother who was still alive, to let her see her new granddaughter who was then only one and a half, and we decided also to go to England and France. I incidentally got to see Le Corbusier's big apartment building in Marseilles that time and it was quite new and very, very fine. I was very, very impressed with it. I went to see a lot of English cathedrals then and Stonehenge and then I came back again. I was disillusioned with Ireland. It was very unreceptive to new ideas. Many people didn't even want to hear about America and I haven't been back since.

Blum: So you felt the linear city would not be appropriate.

Malcolmson: No, I had no idea about that. When I came back the competition was over and I looked at my studies and I realized they were all wrong. So then I decided now I'm going to find out what is the solution. I started working with drawings and models on the central area, the Loop area, and one day I set two models of office buildings. They were about thirty-five stories, apart from one another, and I put in the center a parking building that would serve these two buildings and then I put on top of it a department store. And I started to look at it and I realized this could go on. This center element here could expand indefinitely and then you simply repeat these office towers on each side. So I could hardly wait to draw this. I started then to draw all through what remained of the summer, and then came school. I worked at night on it. And then in the early summer of 1955 I

120 worked from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. every day of the week for about five weeks. At the end of five weeks I had a stack of drawings that was about, I would think, four or five inches high, and I had five presentation drawings. I brought them into the school and I showed them to Hilbs, and Hilbs asked me hundreds of questions about them. Olencki was there. He had been in Michigan not very long and he said to Olencki, "Your school publishes a student magazine don't they?" And Olencki said, "Yes, it's called Dimension." He said, "Why don't you go back to Michigan and tell them to publish his projects?"

Blum: This was Metro-linear?

Malcolmson: Yes.

Blum: Published in 1956.

Malcolmson: So that's where it was published for the first time. And then it was exhibited in Crown Hall, because on the day Crown Hall was dedicated Mies made a decision to ask the faculty to make an exhibition and everybody, of course, immediately said what are you going to show. He said, "The building is my exhibition." And I remember Speyer showed the Rose House that he did with Danforth. Peterhans showed some of his photographs. Brownson showed his house in photographs and drawings. Dan Brenner showed some of the things he was doing I think in Lincoln Park at the time. I showed Metro-linear.

Blum: Did Mies comment on Metro-linear?

Malcolmson: He started to one day. He said, "I have to talk to you about this but not now. We have to talk about it later."

Blum: Did that time ever come?

Malcolmson: It never came. He told me then because it drew a certain amount of interest, you know, it was published in Chicago, no the first stage was not published in Chicago, it was published in Michigan. It was published in France in Architecture d'Aujourd'hui. Andre Bloc came to Chicago not long after that and he saw it and he insisted on publishing it there. It was published in Buenos Aires by Williams, it was published in Tokyo, and in England in Architectural Design by Frampton.

121 So it got a lot of exposure. It was in 1960 in Arthur Drexler's show on visionary architecture. A huge model, the one you picked for the catalogue of the Art Institute. The model that was made for that exhibition is the linear metropolis.

Blum: I read somewhere where they said it was based on the supremacy of the automobile. Do you still think that is a viable solution?

Malcolmson: No it is not. In fact I'm working now for the Hilbs 100-Plus on one that will have no automobiles in it.

Blum: What will it have?

Malcolmson: Transportation.

Blum: Mass transportation?

Malcolmson: Of all kinds. It will have in the city center, escalators and moving sidewalks for pedestrians and elevators naturally. And it will be serviced by electrified train systems and high-speed train systems for long distances.

Blum: Do you ever expect that any of that idea will be realized?

Malcolmson: Yes. I'll tell you a very interesting little part of it has, not a little part, has been realized. This is a long shot. I made with and wrote in IIT around 1959, 1960, the year that the New York exhibition was on. In fact the boys worked on that one big model. I made with that class a project for Grand Rapids, Michigan, and we tore out the whole downtown area and put a big platform in its place with the downtown buildings on the platform. But this platform was capable of extension linearly. You know Skidmore has built a platform in Grand Rapids. It has a Calder sculpture on it and it has about three of the downtown buildings. Dunlap and others saw it at IIT and subsequently it got realized. And to my astonishment, one day in Michigan my assistant dean asked me to talk to the freshmen, so I showed some projects and I showed this one and a voice somewhere in the darkness said, "That's a copy of Grand Rapids, Michigan." I said, "Young man, be quiet. We'll talk about that later. Just listen to what I have to say." Then I told them about this. But that's where it came from. And in a way

122 I think this is a long shot. The Grand Rapids one is no guesswork. It is directly because I had very, very big contacts with Skidmore at that time.

Blum: Through Bill Dunlap?

Malcolmson: Oh, yes. And many students of mine were in Skidmore. Very many. Another that appeared almost at the same time was the Ville Marie, so called, in Montreal. There is an office building in that Ville Marie which is the mirror image of the office building we planned for Grand Rapids. It's a cruciform building with four wings and it's about the same height, about thirty-five or thirty-six stories high. So those I offer to you just as samples of things that came out of this and I'm quite sure more will come.

Blum: So fragments of the total idea have...

Malcolmson: Williams has had the same experience in Argentina. He made an immaculate project for a theater of light and sound with a kind of Saturn ring around it which was a lobby for exhibitions and so forth. That has been built in Buenos Aires, but not as a theater, as a planetarium, and very badly adapted too. You know, not as good as he would have done.

Blum: How does that make you feel to know that portions of your ideas, ideas and concepts are built, but you are not identified for it in any way?

Malcolmson: I'm not at all worried about it. I take the view, which may be a very long-range view, that do you think the inventor of the wheel is worried about all those automobiles that are running around?

Blum: One of the drawings that I remember very well was your expanding skyscraper, which, to me, in some way emulates the underlying idea of the city repeating itself and going on and on.

Malcolmson: That is the vertical city. It's a vertical linear city. You begin at the bottom of this drawing with light industry. In the middle of this drawing are commercial and community buildings and at the top everybody is living in apartment buildings.

123 Blum: I was making the connection between that idea of it going on and on serving different functions and being flexible in a way and your expandable skyscraper is...

Malcolmson: The other thing that I discovered that has great prominence in this book is, and it's a discovery that I would say is beyond Mies. Caldwell and I used to talk many times, you know, what comes after Mies, and we both agreed that what comes after Mies is not simply an extension of Mies only, but it is beyond Mies.

Blum: What is beyond Mies?

Malcolmson: Flexibility. Mies had flexibility as a concept in his buildings but most times didn't get to realize it very much. The one that Stanley Tigerman takes him to task for, in Stanley's unique way, is in the apartment buildings in Chicago where he could have, in Detroit or Chicago, I can't remember which, where he had made plans with Greenwald for open apartments and then eventually he made them all closed. He actually made open plans for the Weissenhof that were realized, and there are many, many of these later buildings. Crown Hall is the perfect example of the open plan that you can do as you please inside this big space. But my view is that there a demand in the twentieth century and there will be more in the twenty-first for an internal flexibility of buildings and even maybe an external flexibility, for the buildings themselves are expandable. Because we tend now to live in a society that, while it advocates freedom, has a certain complexity about, its actual functioning isn't as exactly defined as it would have been, let's say, in the eighteenth century. So our needs are much more flexible. We want to be able to change things, and why shouldn't technology meet this change.

Blum: Is that possible with a building that requires a certain foundation and…

Malcolmson: Oh, yes. Natural, in fact.

Blum: If you say build just to a certain height now because it satisfies the need of the moment, with the idea that perhaps you can go on, is that technologically possible?

Malcolmson: That's a very important question to ask. The building like this expanding skyscraper is in a sense a megastructure. In a sense that it is a large, very large,

124 framework into which things are fitted, added, extended and so on. But this megastructure expands, expands. It's a characteristic of megastructures and it's something Banham missed. He wrote a book on megastructures.

Blum: Who?

Malcolmson: Reyner Banham. In fact, Metro-linear is in that book. He missed a very important point. He brought in all kinds of exotic and interesting material to show megastructures proposed for all kinds of purposes. Megastructures by people like Hollein, who was a student of mine at one time at IIT, and Archigram, the Japanese metabolists, and so on, but he missed a primary point of major importance. A megastructure by its very nature has to be over-designed because you don't know what new loads are going to be imposed upon it. So, to answer your question, it will be in its very nature over-designed. It has to face the prospect that it will be built up to its limits. I mean it will be developed and enclosed up to its very limits so it has that unique distinction, if you can call it that, that instead of being structured only for its present needs it has to think of future needs.

Blum: So it's sort of built into the concept from the beginning.

Malcolmson: Yes.

Blum: Another building type that you have worked with a lot is the large hall.

Malcolmson: Yes. Again in this idea there is a high degree of freedom to do as you please in the interior. It opens up possibilities.

Blum: One of your drawings, was it the sports stadium or theater, where the seats move and I don't know if the stage moves at all, but the seats move according to the needs of the hall? Do I remember that correctly? Was that in the sports stadium, part of it closes down?

Malcolmson: I'm trying to think. I tell you the ones that, in fact, I have made. There are about four major ones. One is this one called the sport and cultural center. It's a cylindrical tower and then there's a big hall with a 1000-foot span with cabled structures holding the roof up. Is that the one you are thinking of?

125 Blum: I don't remember the outside. I just remember all these very exciting ideas on the inside.

Malcolmson: That one had a variety of possibilities suggested. You know, a racing track for bicycle races around the perimeter. Most of the space internally would be free. There would be demountable stages and demountable platforms for dance spectacles, for acrobatics, and so forth. There would be inflatable auditoriums that could be deflated and moved if you wanted to, to different positions. There was no mention there of moving the structure of seating at all. You may have in your mind, if you've been in touch with a very advanced project by a Czech, Svoboda.

Blum: No, it was yours and it was on exhibit at IIT and you explained it. I remember thinking how exciting it was.

Malcolmson: Ah. Then I'll tell you now the one you're talking about. That, in fact, was the convention hall. I think I tried to explain to you and Jim at the time that that convention hall set of drawings was made at the time Mies was working on the convention hall. Mies and Hilbs lent me the conditions. I had no possibility to enter the competition but I thought it would be an exciting thing for me to make one and see how the others fared, and so on. So I made this big vaulted structure which was in steel and glass and inside it is a big seating structure for 20,000. It has acoustic shells above that can be tilted to different angles and they are electronically controlled. There are heat sensors where the seating is so that we know where the people are and how many there are and then the computer will figure out to what angle should the reflectors be tilted in order to distribute sound. Then on the other end there are elevated platforms, actually elevated buildings on legs, which could conceivably move. Whether we would want to move them or not would depend really on how this building develops further. This building is very near to what I am working on right now, which is a big vaulted building as the center of the metropolis and in that case the buildings would move on trackage because this vaulted building might be anything up to two or three miles long. So I think that's the one you're referring to.

Blum: That probably is. I just remember thinking how exciting all those flexible features were and how unusual.

126 Malcolmson: You see there's an organic link in all these things because that exhibition hall I made for the competition in 1946 had moving floors and that's flexibility again. That's what touched off a spark in my mind when I made that, that if you make the interior so highly flexible, why can't buildings be flexible. Period. And, of course, the linear city is flexible in the sense it expands linearly.

Blum: In 1968 you did some industrialized houses.

Malcolmson: Yes. I got a research grant.

Blum: Were they patented? Did you patent that?

Malcolmson: I did. Those were made actually as part of a research grant I got from Michigan and I tried to see if they could be marketed. No. Most of the aluminum manufacturers are not interested in housing.

Blum: Why do you think prefabricated housing has not been popular in the United States? It was tried some time ago with Lustron.

Malcolmson: It's been tried. Wachsmann did it with Gropius in California but…

Blum: But why do you think it never really took hold when it seems like such a reasonable solution?

Malcolmson: Yes. Well, it's probably got many complicated answers, that question has. One is if transportation had lapsed into the hands of contractors and been built on an individual basis we would have now no automobile industry. We would have custom-made cars and no automobile industry. If transportation had been put in the hands of private contractors you would have to go and find a fabricator to build your car for you and it might take months to build. On the other hand, if housing had been put in the hands of somebody like Henry Ford this would be coming off the assembly line day by day.

Blum: Are you saying it's a fluke of history?

Malcolmson: No, it's not a fluke of history. It's a consequence of history. The obstacles to making the prefabricated house are the persistence of handicrafts in the housing industry. It's not mechanized and it's not industrialized.

127 Blum: How do you feel about that whole situation?

Malcolmson: I don't know. It's a situation that is so large that one can hardly have feelings about it. I have misgivings about it because I think the obvious advantages of industrializing buildings of this kind are, that if you produce enough of them the price should come down. The worldwide need for housing is so vast that we know there is a market there. The market in itself, of course, lacks capital. That is to say, how are these people going to pay for these houses? I don't think there's any such thing as low-income houses. Low income is generally identified with low cost. There is no such thing at the present moment as low-cost housing. The only way to bring about low-cost housing would be by industrialization and that would be the only way that you begin to fulfill the world's need for housing.

Blum: I think, Americans have been particularly unreceptive to prefabricated houses.

Malcolmson: Because of the built-in handicraft, the complicated labor situation of plumbers, all making specialized parts of the house and the houses not being built in the factory. In other words the subcontractors who make the parts have no way of collaborating in an overall scheme of things that brings these parts together in an industrial process; that they are all assembled and shipped out. All the arguments about uniformity and dullness and monotony forth are all trivia. We have a certain variety in the automobile. Nobody seems to notice the uniformity, and yet everybody is very happy with the automobile. They're in love with it. So if we could somehow turn on the television set in the evening and instead of seeing various forms of transportation, see various forms of houses coming out of the factories we would have made a big advance.

Blum: You've also designed furniture?

Malcolmson: Yes. In fact, I built a piece of furniture. When I was young I designed quite a few pieces of furniture, some built. Not for myself. Mostly for clients or other people. I wish I had done more, and I think students should do that. I think one of the good things that I managed to introduce in Michigan was that Olencki started a class, when I was dean, in furniture design. That was very much in demand, very much. And it was a good class for students because this is something that is

128 small enough that they can actually make it themselves. They can design it and build it.

Blum: Is it your idea that the furniture should be linked to the interior of a particular building? Or just furniture that can be placed anywhere?

Malcolmson: I don't know. I think that's a mistake to link the furniture to…

Blum: I was thinking more of interior design.

Malcolmson: No, I think the architects in this century have designed furniture, Mies, Breuer, Eames and others. Never with the intention that the furniture was intended for only one building. I think, the only case I can think of was the Barcelona chair, but, of course, it's become the executive chair for almost any important building anywhere in the world now. So the idea of the chair or the table being part of only one building I think has been successfully overcome. Your chairs here, Breuer, they are not designed for your house.

Blum: No, they've been designed all the way down to very inexpensive versions from very costly ones.

Malcolmson: How much does a Breuer chair of that kind cost nowadays?

Blum: Oh, I don't know. I'm sure, depending on the workmanship, it can range broadly. Reggie, if you had your wishes and could see any of your projects built, which one would it be?

Malcolmson: The theater. Now I wanted to say something at this moment about an aspect of the projects that you and John are very conscious of and I think an art museum actually is more prone to evaluate this kind of thing correctly. There are two things about the projects. The idea that's in the project, the concept, the invention that the project itself contains as an idea for a building and then there's the way in which it is presented, the skills and techniques and media, and so forth. Looking backwards, of course, the fact that I was drawing from the age of four helped to lay the foundation for this work. I said earlier in the tape the influence of Flaxman's classical drawings especially for the Iliad was a very big one. Botticelli's paintings—of all the painters of the Renaissance Botticelli was the

129 great graphic artist in the sense that he drew to perfection. He constructed his pictures beautifully. I can remember from at least before I was fourteen admiring Botticelli, more the pagan pictures, so-called, than the religious ones. Leonardo, very much, the drawings of all kinds, especially the inventions and even Leonardo's paintings which are really something exceptional. I've seen a lot of them. I discovered when I was very young archaic Greek sculpture. There was a strange man—he was an American my father knew—Edens Osborne. He's mentioned in Cecil Day Lewis's autobiography. He knew him. He was an entrepreneur but he was an eccentric. He had an old house in Belfast when we first moved there. It was a neo-Greek house from about 1810 or 1820 and he had classical sculptures on the staircases. They were made by a firm in London, Tiranti, that made models for drawing classes but a lot of them were classical. I can remember seeing the head of Ajax at the top of a staircase on a pillar and he used to put cigarettes in the mouths of these statues so that he could pick one out when he was going upstairs. He saw it in a useful way when he needed a cigarette going up or downstairs he simply took it from the statue. He had a figure replica from the temple of Aphaia at Aegina in Greece which is archaic and I saw something in that that I never saw in classical statuary. Very geometric, almost Egyptian. When I was young, I remember, when I was ten, King Tutankhamen's tomb was opened. That was a European sensation and I became fascinated by Egyptian art. Then I went to the British Museum and I saw Assyrian sculpture, these big wall reliefs from the palaces, which I found very dynamic and very vigorous, very masculine, if you will. I was a sports enthusiast when I was young. I think I inherited that from my father. I was a rugby football player for about fifteen years so I owe some of my longevity to all of that. What else. Yes, the aircraft of World War I was a big influence. Machinery of all kinds and then much later I became addicted to Malevich, Mondrian, Léger, very fascinated by Leger and Juan Gris. And, of course, in the techniques, there were Flaxman, Leonardo, Pisanello, and what I call the school of Paris. Around the period just before World War I Picasso made some beautiful pencil drawings. I was a great admirer of Ingrès and Picasso. Incidentally, I thought very highly of Ingrès and there was what I call a school of Paris. You see a style that is in Picasso's line drawings, it's in Cocteau's line drawings, it's in Alexander Calder's

130 line drawings and it's in Le Corbusier's and that influenced me a great deal, that linear style of drawing.

Blum: And also the early training you had in calligraphy?

Malcolmson: Yes. And Flaxman. So I interject that simply because that's an aspect of the projects. Mies introduced me to collage and I think collage is one of the great methods of presenting architecture. I've found it exciting because you feel you're really constructing the picture. You are putting it together.

Blum: Of the various techniques, drawing, collage, and models, which do you feel are most effective at helping the student or helping anyone understand the space?

Malcolmson: I think the models are the best in a teaching environment. Many of the experiences of space are, for them, virtually undrawable. Sad to relate, in recent times, I would say in the last fifteen or twenty years there is a terrible falling off in interest among students in drawing of itself.

Blum: Do they make models?

Malcolmson: They do. You know it is important to realize that students make what they are asked to make many times and where there's the demand on the part of the teachers for models, models will be made, but where there isn't they won't be. But in all cases, I think, models are probably the best way to make students aware of the cubic and three-dimensional character of architecture, the spatial character. I regret very much the lapse in drawing skills. I mean particularly even in sketching. They don't do that.

Blum: Has the computer helped?

Malcolmson: The computer is the enemy of this because the computer is really a business device. It is not a creative machine. No machine is creative. It's the enemy like television is the enemy of the imagination. The computer in a sense can become the enemy of skills because it substitutes a kind of ersatz method for a real skill that takes a long time to develop. I love to tell students it has taken me seventy years to be able to draw as I do, and believe it or not, it gets better all the time. All the time. In fact, every time I draw I have the attitude this is going to be

131 better than any of the others. It doesn't always come out so, but it's always in the background this feeling that it's going to be better.

Blum: Were models made routinely in your experience, say in Ireland?

Malcolmson: Oh we made many models. My partners actually had been running, before the war, a sideline as professional model builders. They were building models for other architects.

[Tape 6: Side 2]

Blum: Reggie, you have published off and on. Do you think the press has treated your work fairly?

Malcolmson: Yes, overall. I think it has. I have to tell you, American publishers take the attitude that they are doing you a favor by publishing your work. I was asked to write for a publication in Spain, Hogar y Arquitectura, a very, very good magazine. The then-editor, Carlos Flores, actually paid me $600 for writing this special article on Mies's work. Now that's a commission I've never had in my life before. I never got a cent from an American publisher for publishing any of my work.

Blum: Is that right?

Malcolmson: Yes. It doesn't bother me a great deal. My primary interest is to get it published and to get published right, you know, without any slips or errors. But it seemed to me curious that a country like Spain, which is not considered as a first world power, should be able to pay me for this and think it worthwhile to do so and American publishers have never even considered that. I think Mr. Newman did, in fact, for Inland Architect and, in fact, he was quite apologetic that he couldn't pay more, but I know very well that Inland Architect has limited distribution and in that time it was having financial problems. But his is the only magazine in America that has given me remuneration for publishing work.

Blum: What journals throughout the years have you found to be most satisfactory? What have your favorites been?

132 Malcolmson: Do you mean in general or in just in relation to my own work?

Blum: In relation to your work, in relation to keeping up with what was happening.

Malcolmson: I think, at the time when Andre Bloc was alive, Architecture d'Aujourd'hui was probably the premier architectural magazine in the world. Bloc had a universal view of architecture, and while naturally he was obligated to concentrate on what was happening in France and in Europe generally, he didn't hesitate to show architecture everywhere. In fact, he made some very spectacular special issues on, for example, Brazil, South America generally, North Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and several special publications on architecture in the United States. So for a long time—and I think Bloc's magazine began around 1930—it seemed to me to outclass almost all others.

Blum: Was there an American publication that you felt was...?

Malcolmson: And the quality of the photography in Architecture d'Aujourd'hui was superlative. Among American magazines I'm probably old enough to remember Pencil Points, Hugh Ferris's work was published to a great extent in that—marvelous drawings. Architectural Forum was for many years a first-class magazine. There were three special editions on Frank Lloyd Wright and so on. I would say, it was on about the same plane as Architecture d'Aujourd'hui. In the pre-Hitler period, there was the one I mentioned Moderne Bauformen by Julius Hoffman. One of Hilbs's books was published by this company—Groszstadt Architektur. I got a copy recently that was re-published again. Hoffman's is probably the one I knew most about coming out of Germany. There were many exhibition catalogues coming out of Germany. There were very, very fine ones in the Weimar period. The Bauhaus books, of course, which are now priceless documents. Architectural Review in England was very good before World War II when Pevsner was the editor. He elevated it to an international level, and it always contained good material. I think those are about the primary ones that I can think of.

Blum: What was your greatest opportunity in architecture?

Malcolmson: That's hard to say, Betty. To design the theater was a great opportunity. The other, I suppose, is when I undertook to make those exhibitions in Ireland, I had

133 no previous experience of making exhibitions, and it was a challenge to your powers of invention and organization, resourcefulness and so on that demanded a great deal of me and an exciting challenge. I don't know whether your question is directed to great moments or not.

Blum: My question is directed to what you perceive as leading to perhaps some discovery within yourself or some new direction. Something that changed something.

Malcolmson: Yes. Again I have to go back to that set of competition drawings made in 1946. I was staying in a boarding house at the time, and it wasn't a very comfortable building. It was very near to my office. That was the only reason I was living there. I even established in my bedroom a drawing table and I had read the conditions of this competition so many times that I could repeat them backwards almost. There was a line in the conditions that said it should be possible in a scientific and architectural manner to permit changes in the interior. So I kept asking myself what kind of changes could be feasible in a scientific and architectural manner. One night I went to bed and I couldn't sleep, so I got up at about 2:00 a.m. and I started to work on the drawing board and then I made a section that showed moving floors. Then I went back to bed and slept very peacefully because I knew I had made this big discovery, and I could hardly wait to draw out all these enormous drawings. We had to draw buildings that occupied an area of something like about twenty acres. That was a very big moment for me, a big time I should say, because it was a revelation. The moment I discovered that the Metro-linear was something more than just an accumulation of static buildings in the downtown area but was really a linear city which had a kind of dynamic quality to itself. That was another big moment for me.

Blum: What has been most satisfying for you as a trained architect, educator, lecturer, a designer of projects? What facet of that is most satisfying?

Malcolmson: That's a question that is very, very hard to plumb. What is most satisfying? I suppose actually the process is the most satisfying part for me. When I'm thinking, sketching, and then eventually drawing, I'm going through a process of experiment and discovery, and that process has a kind of obsessive role for me. I

134 mean it preoccupies me to the exclusion of almost all other interests. In fact, I developed in Chicago, when I made the linear city, a way of reinforcing this. When my daughter was about three, she helped me build a bed which is a hard wood bed. It was deliberately made that way so that I won't stay in bed too long. I had a small bedroom drawing area of my own and I kept continuously putting all the drawings I was making on the walls. The moment I would awaken in the morning, I would see them, and they would drive me out of bed back to working again as if a kind of challenge. They are looking at you from the wall in that kind of a stern and accusatory manner—why aren't you doing something about this, so I developed a kind of environment for myself that I still have, that forces me into this mold. I can remember Mies saying to Caldwell and me—and Caldwell had a very amusing attitude where he would act as a kind of straight man to Mies that he would ask him these leading questions to see what Mies was going to say. He asked him one day in Crown Hall when we first moved in, "How important do you think it is for students to have talent?" And Mies sat and thought for a while, he said, "I will tell you. I have seen many talented, gifted people in my lifetime, hundreds of them, maybe even a thousand, but talent is only cream in your coffee." He said, "So many people I've known that were very gifted, they were too lazy and they just didn't work it all out. There's no reason to rest on your talent. If you don't present it, then it gets nowhere." He even once said to me privately, "If you have a great idea you have to produce it. You must make it known. You must draw it out. If you don't do such things the only alternative for you is to be a Catholic or Protestant or a Jew." He meant to be just like everybody else. And he told me, "You have to make these projects. Who knows, someday you'll become famous for making these projects." But, he said, "It's something you can do, and you have to do it." And Hilbs said the same to me many, many times, he said, "Are you making any projects now?" I'd say, "I finished one about a month ago or so." And he said, "What are you doing now?" I said, "I'm not making any." "Any why not? Don't you have any new ideas about things? Why don't we talk about it?"

Blum: He encouraged that?

135 Malcolmson: Oh, yes, very much. Very much. Well that's what made the school, to me, an environment that was very, very stimulating because I saw that all the things that I had thought about were being valued and realized.

Blum: Reggie, you've been an educator for many years. What message would you like to give the next generation?

Malcolmson: Well, I have direct experience of that because I have to give messages from time to time to my son.

Blum: Sometimes it's different with your children.

Malcolmson: Yes, it may be, but I have learned that you can't make distinctions. What's good for my son is good for anybody who wants to be a good architect. There is no reason to change the prescription. A good architect is a good architect, no matter whose son he is.

Blum: And what is the message you have tried to give your son?

Malcolmson: First of all you have to work. You have to work hard. There isn't any other way. You have to make a resolve. I had to make resolves like this for myself. You have to make a resolve that you're going to make architecture worthwhile for yourself. Not just simply in a monetary sense, if you're thinking about monetary rewards you would be better to become a stockbroker or a psychiatrist, but you have to think about it as something that is its own reward. It's going to reward you and it will give you what you put into it. It won't give you any more, it won't give you any less. It's something that is so universal that wherever you travel you'll see it and it will always be a challenge to you. You'll never make the perfect building but you could come somewhat close to it if you tried very, very hard. You have to also realize that it's never going to dry up on you. It's an interest that is always renewing itself, and that there is no final solution to it. There is no perfect building that is going to come that will close down the whole future. If the perfect building came then it would raise the question what other perfect buildings are there that we should be thinking about? So those are, in general terms, what I would say. I think there are things one needs to do. You must learn to draw. You must learn to like drawing. You must learn to like sketching. You

136 must make it practically your daily bread. You must understand the history of any time is the history of what people were able to do with the resources, the needs and the skills and techniques of the time, which challenge us to say, are we able to do as well with the resources we have?

Blum: Reggie, if you were asked to evaluate, or even identify, your contribution to architecture, what would it be?

Malcolmson: The projects. The projects have been consciously with me since I would say the end of the l930s and much more intensified in the 1940s. Of course, when I came to the school of Mies and Hilbs that was a confirmation that all the things I had anticipated were in the right direction, they were true, they were good and they had a unique value. Both Mies and Hilbs, as you know, made projects. In fact Mies made his reputation on those five projects after World War I, the glass skyscrapers and so on. Hilbs made projects all his life.

Blum: Do you see these as being expressions of an idealism or a perfection that you were perhaps striving for?

Malcolmson: I have to make a distinction here, Betty, between what I call visionary and utopia. Utopia is, for many people, a very attractive concept, but if you read the utopias in my visionary architecture course I have them read quite a number of the utopias. Plato, Campanella, Bacon, to name only a few of them, and you find out that the utopians are actually talking about a perfect society. Now a perfect society is a static society. Nothing will change, so it's the end. Visionary architecture, as I see it, has no end. It has an open end because it's not static. It's always changing. For that reason it is quite distinct from utopian concepts. Does that answer the question?

Blum: It certainly does.

Malcolmson: All of these things are in my book. All I have to do now is get it published.

Blum: One last question. If a researcher wanted to do research on you, where would they find the materials outside of this oral history, which will be in Burnham and Ryerson Libraries, the drawings you've given to the Department of Architecture

137 at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the published material? Where else would they find material on Reginald Malcolmson?

Malcolmson: There are only a few—and not of the first rank—drawings in Avery Library at Columbia. Other than that they are all in my studio, and that's a matter of concern to me because I think these should be in some form of public trust where they can be preserved. There are many very valuable drawings I have that I'm concerned about their future care and there are literally hundreds of sketches. I have never even tried to assemble these. I should in the next year or two, but there are literally hundreds of these. The sketches I look on as primary. I keep every piece of paper that I draw on, because the sketches are first moments of what is a future project. Actually I keep all the drawing sheets that I draw the projects on because I can trace back, when I come to make the final drawings. I can trace back where changes took place, where a decision was made to go this way instead of going the other way, and so on. So those things are all, in this moment, in my possession. I have to find a hopefully unified source that I can have them preserved.

Blum: So at this moment if someone wanted more information, they would actually have to contact you?

Malcolmson: Yes.

Blum: Reggie, you talked off and on about a book. Are you using all this material in preparation for a book?

Malcolmson: Yes. This book is very comprehensive. It will have all the major parts of that fifty years of work in it, in illustration and in text.

Blum: I hope to see it in print soon. Thank you very much.

Malcolmson: The sooner the better. Thank you indeed.

138 POSTSCRIPT: Architect's Statement

Visionary architecture is my destiny. All else in my career pales and fades into the background by comparison. Its paramount importance, which exerted, as it were, a dominating influence on me, reduced all other activities to subordinate roles in promoting and making possible this work, which holds a never-ending and even obsessive fascination for me. The process by which I came to abandon professional practice, for the pursuit of creative ideas as exemplified in the projects, was a slow but inexorable one. Already, as a student at twenty-two years of age (1934), I was interested in the visionary sketches of Mendelsohn and Le Corbusier, and the heroic drawings of Sant'Elia for utopian cities. I began to make projects consciously around 1935-36; here was a territory I could freely expand in, the only limitations being those of my creative imagination. I had been attracted to architecture by the modern movement and felt repelled by the conventional and conservative set of received opinions my mentors represented. It must be remembered that, when I came to IIT in 1947, I was already a finished product—I had been in the profession over 14 years, as a student, assistant, and practitioner. I had produced two exhibitions on modern town-planning and housing, and had participated prominently in a national planning exhibition; I had designed and built housing, commercial and community buildings. I was considered in my native land as "a coming young architect." But the voyage to America was a turning point—ostensibly I had come to study the architecture of glass and steel from a master, but I was also turning away from the frustrations and limitations of the spirit imposed by practice. Although my education had begun with a strong emphasis on the practical, the narrow limitations of this direction soon began to dawn on me. By 1946, I had embarked on a formidable competition project for an Exhibition Center near London—that, too, was a turning point. I saw in this ambitious project, the intimate connection between architecture and planning—the extraordinary richness and variety of structures and forms possible in a large complex of buildings, using advanced constructional techniques. And finally, I felt the joyful discovery that a large exhibition hall could be made completely flexible by the use of moving floors in the interior. This experience was a little short of a revelation. From it, confirmation came of all my earlier essays in making projects. By now the die was cast—the following year I came to Chicago, where I saw in the school of Mies, a working process based on principles and ideas—the making of projects as an educational discipline in the pursuit of new knowledge.

139 Like Cortes, I burnt my boats. I abandoned my practice in Ireland, my family and my friends, in order to serve "the cause of Mies," which I did for 11 years. When change overtook IIT, with Mies's resignation as director, I moved on to Michigan, going from a highly disciplined environment to one (University of Michigan) that prided itself on the absence of discipline. When I began teaching in Chicago in 1949, I decided to devote myself to the projects to the exclusion of all else. I drew up resolutions for myself as a guide to action; my summer vacations became long working sessions, as did weekends in term-time. Over the years, I found that I was not only not a Miesian, but that the projects were taking on a life of their own—one that aimed to go "beyond Mies." By the mid-50s, my projects, especially the linear city, began to receive national and international attention. The high-point came in 1959-60 with an invitation from Arthur Drexler of the Museum of Modern Art in New York to present the project Metro-linear as part of the exhibition "Visionary Architecture." By now, my commitment was irrevocable, and the rest is history. Conventional wisdom, in my case, based on ignorance of the record, would seem to make it appear that the architectural projects were, so to speak, a by-product of my general role as an educator. I repudiate this view as being totally false, because the reverse is, in fact, true. How can the largely bourgeois role of an educator, with its emphasis on security and conformism, be compared in any way with the heroic role of the visionary architect? My architectural projects have been the real goal of my life; they were, in fact, my true credentials as a teacher, for they present to students a vision of the future. In the last analysis, the projects constitute an important statement: this is my idea of how we can "re-design the world."

Reginald Malcolmson Ann Arbor, Michigan July 1989

140 SELECTED REFERENCES

"A Campus Design Project Envisioning 'A New Architecture of Space.'" Inland Architect 16 (March-April 1972): 46-48. Collins, George R. "Linear Planning Throughout the World." Journal of The Society of Architectural Historians XVII, 3 (October 1959): 74-93. _____. Visionary Drawings of Architecture and Planning:20th Century Through the 1960s. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1979. (Exhibition catalog for exhibition circulated by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.) "A Cultural Center." Arts and Architecture 78 (August 1961): 20-21. "The Downtown Snarl: A Case for Sorting, Stacking, and Storing." Architectural Forum 119 (October 1953): 79-83. Malcolmson, Reginald F. "A Curriculum of Ideas." The Journal of Architectural Education XIV, 2 (Autumn 1959): 41-43. _____. "La Obra de Mies van der Rohe." Hogar y Arquitectura (Madrid) 108, 109 (September, December 1973). _____. "Metro-Linear." Dimension 2, 1 (Spring 1956): 17-25 (College of Architecture and Design, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). _____. "Metro-Linear, San Francisco." Arts and Architecture 79 (July 1962): 20-21. _____. "A Paradox of Humility and Superstar." Inland Architect (May 1977): 16-19. _____. "Visionary Architecture." Inland Architect (May 1980): 19-24. _____. Visionary Projects for Buildings and Cities. Washington, D.C.: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1974. (Exhibition catalogue.) "Metro-Linear: An Approach to the Modern City." Arts and Architecture 78 (May 1961): 10-13, 28. Placzek, Adolph K., ed. "Reginald Francis Malcolmson." Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects vol. 3. New York: The Free Press, 1982.

141 Reginald Francis Malcolmson

Born: 16 September 1912, Dublin, Ireland Died: 1 June 1992, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Education: Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, 1931 College of Technology, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1933-1937 Royal Institute of British Architects, London, England, 1937-1944 Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois, 1947-1949

Work Experience: Private Practice, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1945-1947 Office of Mies van der Rohe, Chicago, Illinois, 1948-1955 Private Practice, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1966-1980s

Teaching and Administrative Experience: Professor, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois, 1949-1964 Dean, College of Architecture and Design, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1964-1974 Fulbright Lecturer, various universities in South America, 1968-1969 Professor, College of Architecture and Design, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1974-1984

Honors: Fellow, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 1961

142 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

1700 South Prairie Avenue, Chicago, Candido, Anthony (Tony) 76 Illinois 43, 49 Cantor Drive-In Restaurant, Indianapolis, Indiana 68 Abercrombie, Patrick (Sir) 26, 116 Case Western Reserve University, Albers, Gerd 52 Cleveland, Ohio 72, 92 Albers, Josef 56 Chambless, Edgar 119 Chang, Pao-Chi 83 American Institute of Architects [AIA] 73- Chermayeff, Serge 14, 20, 24, 42, 77, 79, 80- 75, 111, 112-113, 114 82 Archigram 125 Collins, George 115, 119 Architecture Association [AA], London, Connell, Ward & Lucas 16-17 England 21, 23 Conterato, Bruno 39 Armour Institute (later renamed Illinois Costello, James 105 Institute of Technology), Chicago, Costello, Michael 25 Illinois 75, 79, 80, 83, 110, 111 Crystal Palace, London, England 30, 32, 65, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 97, 116 18, 51, 56, 61, 75, 96, 121, 138 Currie, Leonard (Len) 90 Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 56, 57 Danforth, George 31-32, 39, 41-42, 56, 57, ASCORAL (Association de Constructeurs 72, 77, 88, 91, 92, 100, 101, 109, 114, 121 pour un Renouvellement Architectural) Davidge, William R. 24-25 119 De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, England, United Kingdom 14 Banham, Reyner 125 Dearstyne, Howard 93, 97 Bar, Nelli (wife of Paul Wieghardt) 96, 109 Doblin, Jay 73-74, 91 Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 26, 112 Dornbusch, Charles 105 Bauhaus, Chicago, Illinois 43, 47, 48 Drexler, Arthur 118, 122 Bauhaus, Germany 97 Dudok, Willem Marinus 73-74 Behrens, Peter 93, 112 Dunlap, William (Bill) 38, 39, 45, 50, 53, 55, Bell, Phillip and Roger 29-30 56, 68, 70, 71, 88, 110, 122, 123 Beltemacchi, Peter 52 Bismarck Monument (project), Bingerbruck- Eames, Charles (husband of Ray) 129 Bingen, Germany 65 Eiermann, Egon 87 Bloc, Andre 121, 133 Eiffel Tower, Paris, France 60, 97 Bluestein, Earl 57, 72, 97, 99, 102 Einstein, Albert 84-85 Bonnet, Felix 100-101 Elmslie, George Grant 41 Boyce, Dr. 90-91, 92 Empire Exhibition, 1938, Glasgow, Brenner, Daniel (Dan) 38-39, 45, 50, 53, 55, Scotland 21 56, 68-72, 88, 93, 98-99, 110, 114, 121 Erskine, Ralph 16 Breuer, Marcel (Leujko) 16, 24, 129 Brownson, Jacques Calman 39, 69-70, 76, Farnsworth, Edith (house), Plano, Illinois 93, 102-103, 121 98 Burleigh, Thomas R. (Tom) 72 Ferris, James (Jim) 39, 43, 44, 47, 62 Burnham, Daniel Hudson 26 Fisher, Howard T. 90-91 Fitzgerald, Desmond 29 Caldwell, Alfred 71, 88-89, 91, 93-94, 99, Flaxman, John 11, 129, 130, 131 102, 108, 124, 135 Forsberg, Elmer 96 Campagna, Paul 56 Frampton, Kenneth 121

143 Johnson, Philip 37, 90 Gabo, Naum 16, 19, 24, 56-59 Garces, Wilson 45 Kahn, Albert 55 Garnier, Tony 117 Kamel, Abdel 38-39, 44-45, 54, 56 Giedion, Sigfried 48 Keck, George Fred (brother of William) Goldsmith, Myron 39, 53, 64, 88 111 Graham, Anderson, Probst & White 111 Kirstein, Lincoln 66-67 Graham, Bruce 88, 110 Greenwald, Herbert (Herb) 63, 124 Klee, Paul 96 Gris, Juan 55, 130 Korn, Arthur 23 Gropius, Walter 16-17, 19, 22, 24, 30, 31, 85, 90, 127 Lambert, Phyllis Bronfman 89 Gutkind, Erwin 98 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Jeanneret Hammond, James Wright (Jim) 87-88 23, 26, 31, 45, 85, 112, 119, 120, 130, 139 Haussmann, Baron Georges-Eugene 26 Léger, Fernand 58, 130 Heald, Henry 79-80, 83 Leonidov, Ivan Ilich 117 Hilberseimer, Ludwig (Hilbs) 20, 23, 40, Liverpool University, Liverpool, England 44, 45, 48, 49, 51-52, 56-57, 60-63, 65, 72, 15, 21, 24 74, 75, 77, 87, 88, 89, 90-91, 92, 93, 94, Lo, Freddy 62 95-98, 99-102, 104, 107, 109, 110, 114- Lo, W. 62 115, 120, 122, 126, 133, 135, 137 Loebl, Jerrold 110, 111 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 36 Lohan, Dirk 49 Hollein, Hans 125 Lubetkin, Berthold 16 Howe, Stewart 73-74 Hugo, Victor 47 MacEldowney, Professor 74 MacGeagh, John 14, 17, 20-22, 25 Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Maillol, Aristide 19, 56, 59, 96 Chicago, Illinois 30-31, 38, 41, 42, 47, Malevich, Kasimir 58, 130 61-62, 74, 83, 95, 99-100, 103, 104, 107, Manet, Edouard 36 111, 112 Manny, Carter Hugh 39 Illinois Institute of Technology, Alumni May, Ernst 19 Memorial Hall (formerly The Navy Mendelsohn, Erich 14, 16, 17, 20, 22, 24, 31, Building), Chicago, Illinois 38, 39, 42, 139 64, 72 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 1, 26, 29, 30, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chemistry 31, 32, 37, 38, 39-42, 44-45, 46, 48-56, 59- Building (now Wishnick Hall), 65, 68, 69-70, 71, 72-74, 75, 76-77, 81, 86- Chicago, Illinois 38 88, 89-102, 104, 107, 109, 110, 110, 112, Illinois Institute of Technology, Crown 114-115, 118, 121, 124, 126, 129, 131, 132, Hall, Chicago, Illinois 41, 90, 92, 121, 135, 137, 139, 140 124, 135 Moffett, Noel 25, 28 Illinois Institute of Technology, Materials Moholy-Nagy, László 17, 19, 43, 47-48 and Metals Research Building (Now Mondrian, Piet 16, 19, 42, 46, 48, 130 IITRI Materials Technology Building), Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New Chicago, Illinois 30-31, 42 York City, New York 30, 37, 56, 140 Illinois Institute of Technology, Metallurgy Building (now Perlstein Hall), Chicago, Netsch, Walter A. 104, 105, 109, 110, 111 Illinois 38, 42, 57 Neutra, Richard 109 Institute of Design (ID), Chicago, Illinois Nietzsche, Friedrich 101 44, 48, 57, 77-80, 83 Olencki, Edward 121, 128

144 Owens, Ralph 78, 80, 90 Owings, Nathaniel (Nat) 61, 62 Takeuchi, Arthur (Art) 43 Tamminga, David 62 Paepcke, Walter 47 Tatlin, Vladimir 16, 58 Paul, Edward (Eddie) 39 Taylor, Crombie 47-48, 79 Paul, Frances 39 TECTON 16 Perkins and Will 110, 111 Theobald, Paul 61 Peterhans, Walter 57, 60, 75, 93, 96-97, 121 Tigerman, Stanley 124 Pevsner, Nicholas (Sir) 133 Tugendhat, Fritz (House), Brno, Poelzig, Hans 84 Czechoslovakia 26-27 Polar, Pepe 62 Turck, Dorothy 57, 93 Posada, José Guadalupe 46 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 36 Prestini, James 80 Promontory Apartments, Chicago, Illinois University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 40, 112 46, 48, 65, 68, 83 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Read, Herbert 56 Michigan 32, 77, 94, 99, 102-106, 109, Reeves, Robert (Bob) 44 110, 113, 121, 122, 127, 128-129, 140 Rettaliata, John T. (Jack) 82-83, 90-91 University of Wisconsin, Madison, Richardson, Henry Hobson 35 Wisconsin 62 Rocah, Louis 76 Rose, Benjamin (house), Highland Park, van Doesburg, Nellie 46-47 Illinois 121 van Doesburg, Theo 46-47 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) 15, 35, 113 Wachsmann, Konrad 77-80, 83-87, 127 Wagner, Richard 66 Saarinen, Eliel (father of Eero) 73 Walker, Robin 29, 93 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus 2 Wallace, Henry 43 Scott, Michael 29 War Memorial (Monument to the Dead), Seagram Building, New York, New York 1930 (project), Berlin, Germany 65 88, 89, 90 Weissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart, Germany Semper, Gottfried 66 18-19, 124 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 36 Shaver, Paul 43 Wiegardt, Paul 96 Shaw, Alfred (Al) 75, 110, 111 Wiley, Charles (Chuck) 44, 48 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) 44, Will, Philip, Jr. (Phil) 75 61, 88, 110, 112, 122, 123 Williams, Amancio 118-119, 120, 121, 123 Smyth, Granville 15, 16, 17, 32, 69, 116 Winston, Denis 24, 34 Soria y Mata 119 Wong, Yau Chun (Y.C.) 62 Speyer, A. James (Jim) 39-40, 44, 45, 50-51, Wright, Frank Lloyd 35-36, 73 64, 71, 73, 75, 80, 90, 92, 95-96, 121 Stonorov, Oskar 63 Yamasaki, Minoru 63 Sullivan, Louis Henry 41

145