Collaborations: the Private Life of Modern Architecture Author(S): Beatriz Colomina Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol

Home , Richard Neutra

Collaborations: The Private Life of Modern Architecture Author(s): Beatriz Colomina Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 58, No. 3, Architectural History 1999/2000 (Sep., 1999), pp. 462-471 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/991540 Accessed: 25-09-2016 19:05 UTC

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The Private Life of Modern Architecture

BEATRIZ COLOMINA Princeton University

bout a year ago, I gave a lecture form in the Madrid, space-and how the there city is nothing in Mies's work, where I was born. The lecture was on the work of prior to his collaboration with Reich, that would suggest Charles and Ray Eames and, to my surprise, most such a radical approach to defining space by suspended sen- of the discussion at the dinner afterward centered around suous surfaces, which would become his trademark, as the role of Ray, her background as a painter, her studies with exemplified in his Barcelona Pavilion of 1929. I was, of Hans Hofmann, her sense of color, and so on. I say "to my course, astonished because, while I had long believed this surprise" because, first of all, there were not many women was the case, I had not yet dared to write about it-even if at that dinner table-I was surrounded by very well known my students had heard me say things like that for years. And Spanish architects, all of them men-and also because I had then Juan said, "It is like a dirty little secret that we-all not brought up the subject of Ray's contribution at all in my architects-keep. Something that we all know, that we all talk. I would not have thought that there was an interest in see, but we don't bring ourselves to talk about it." and audience for this kind of topic in Spain, and besides, The secrets of modern architecture are like those of a Ray's role was not the focus of my research. The conversa- family, where everybody knows about things that are never tion drifted, as usually happens on these occasions, and acknowledged. And it is perhaps because of the current fas- before I knew it, we were talking about Lilly Reich and what cination with the intimate that the secrets of modern archi- an enormous role she must have played in the development tecture are now being unveiled, little by little. If one is to of Mies van der Rohe's architecture; how Mies might never judge by the publications of recent years, there appears to have been Mies without her and so on (Figure 1). Again, it be an increasing interest in how the practice of architecture is important to insist that it was not I who was making these works. It is as if we had become more concerned with the points, but these middle-aged, extremely accomplished, and how than the what. And the how is less about structure or cultivated architects, whom one would be hard pressed to building techniques-the interest of other generations of characterize as feminist. At a certain point, one of them, historians-and more about interpersonal relations. The Juan Navarro Baldeweg, said something that has stayed with previously marginal details of how things actually happen me since. We had been talking about the importance of such in architectural practice are now coming into focus. projects as the Silk and Velvet Caf6-a collaborative work Critics and historians are shifting their attention from of Reich and Mies's for the Exposition de la mode in Berlin the architect as a single figure, and the building as an object, (1927), where draperies in black, orange, and red velvet and to architecture as collaboration. Attention is paid today to black and lemon yellow silk were hung from metal rods to all professionals involved in the project: partners, engineers,

This content downloaded from 204.168.144.216 on Sun, 25 Sep 2016 19:05:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms landscape architects, interior designers, employees, ~-_-__:-~--~-~:i,:::~i;l-l:--: -';ri'iii:-iiii;i-i-iiii'i-iii-:iiiii?i builders. With this shift, methodologies of research neces- sarily change. Pat Kirkham's book Charles and Ray Eames, Designers of the Twentieth Century (1995), for example, is extensively based on oral histories. In the course of her

~i:r~;i~ii~:iiiri.--i$~i;-ri:~~ ~i'~,,~~, ~iti-i~i-?iii~:~;~-_i:i-i-i~~iYriii~iiii research, she interviewed an extraordinary number of asso- s~iii~~i:ili;iii-/iijij~i__~ii-_iYj: ii:ii:~_P;-~iiiii:i6:i - ciates, employees, and clients in an attempt to reevaluate the nature of the collaborative work of the Eames office and, in particular, the role played by Ray in what is proba- r ~$8sg~$~B~'~si?.:.'~.: bly the most famous design partnership of the century. Likewise, Donald Albrecht incorporated extensive testi- monies from associates as videos in the international traveling exhibition The Work of Charles and Ray Eames, ?..?~I ~?. organized in 1997 by the Library of Congress in partnership with the Vitra Design Museum. Engineers write books that :???:_?ii.i.?~~?.,.lI?~I? are no longer textbooks about how to solve technical prob- lems but are instead intimate accounts of their practice. Peter Rice's An Engineer Imagines (1994) is half memoir, half reflection on the many aspects of the collaboration of the engineer with contractors, architects, clients, even with photographers and critics. Garden designers and landscape architects, for a long time largely ignored in histories of modern architecture, are now carefully studied in books such as Dorothde Imbert, The Modernist Garden in France (1993), and Marc Treib and Dorothde Imbert, Garrett Ekbo: Figure 1 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich on board an Modern Landscapes for Living (1997). Builders, forever the excursion boat on the Wannsee, a lake near Berlin, 1933. Photograph ugly ducklings of architectural history, and only of interest by Howard Dearstyne, one of their students, from Ludwig Glasser, to sociologists, are now being acknowledged in academic Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (New York, 1977) conferences, books, and exhibitions, including the recent traveling exhibition on Joseph Eichler (a developer of low- cost, mass-produced, postwar modernist houses in north- ern California), The Eichler Homes: Building the California en-scene. As Rosa points out, Neutra-as the only archi- Dream, organized by Paul Adamson and Kevin Alter and tect included in Modern Architecture-International Exhibi- sponsored by the Center for the Study of American Archi- tion at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932 who was asked tecture at the University of Texas and the Graham Foun- to have one of his buildings (the Lovell House) repho- dation of Chicago. tographed-was well aware of the importance of pho- Even photographers, graphic designers, critics, cura- tographs.' Most architects of the modern period had close tors, and all of those who help to (re)produce the work in and longstanding relationships with their photographers. the media are coming into focus. It is no longer possible to As Neutra said about Shulman: "His work will survive me. ignore how much of modern architecture is produced both Film [is] stronger and good glossy prints are easier [to] ship in the media and as media, and how much of architectural than brute concrete, stainless steel, or even ideas."2 By the practice today consists in the production of images. Books end of the century, the graphic designer has assumed an like Joseph Rosa's A Constructed View: The Architectural Pho- equally important role. Bruce Mau, the designer of tography ofJulius Shulman (1994), and Shulman's own mem- S,M,L,XL, is credited equally as author with Rem Koolhaas oirs, Architecture and its Photography (1998), bring into closer and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.). focus the circumstances of the collaboration between Shul- One day historical research will have to explore this kind of man and Richard Neutra at a time when architects were not partnership. only present during the photographic shoot, but also Critics and institutions have similarly collaborated in removed the client's furniture, artworks, and draperies and the production of modern architecture (Figure 2). How to brought in their own props-directing, as it were, the mise- separate Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner, Philip

COLLABORATIONS 463

This content downloaded from 204.168.144.216 on Sun, 25 Sep 2016 19:05:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 'IVA, Figure 2 Ise Gropius, Sigfried Giedion, and Walter Gropius in the Gropius It house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, ir 'aAMMM around 1952, from Paul Hofer and Ulrich ,;PK no... Stucky, Hommage 6 Giedion: Profile Seiner Personlicheit (Basel and

Stuttgart, 1971)

VII

41 AM- Pima oe

Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchock, the Museum of tion in the last decade. Arts &Architecture: The Entenza Years Modern Art, Arts & Architecture, and House Beautiful from (1990), an anthology of articles from the magazine edited by the architects they helped to construct as figures? And yet, Barbara Goldstein, brought back the aesthetic, technical, in comparison to the designers, their role has received lit- and political debates. Elizabeth Smith's Blueprints for Mod- tle historical attention. In recent years, coinciding with the ern Living (1989), accompanying a major exhibition at the centenary of Giedion's birth and the establishment of his Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, provided a archives at the Eidgen6ssische Technische Hochschule in comprehensive analysis from different angles. More Ziirich, Giedion's work has been the focus of a series of con- research is under way. With the newly established Esther ferences and publications, which incorporate diverse mate- McCoy Archives in the Smithsonian Institution in Wash- rial from Giedion's archive, including Sigfried Giedion: A ington, studies of her work will soon emerge-one hopes. Historical Project (1986), a special issue of the Italian maga- Today, the role of critic as collaborator has been assumed zine Rassegna edited by Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani; by writers as varied as Jeffrey Kipnis, Kenneth Frampton, Dorothee Huber's edited volume Sigfried Giedion. Wege in and Charles Jencks, all of whom maintain intimate work- die Offentlichkeit (1987); Sokratis Georgiadis's Sigfried ing relationships with the architects they support. Blob Giedion, An Intellectual Biography (1989); and the exhibition buildings, critical regionalism, and postmodernism are as catalogue Sigfried Giedion, 1888-1986: der Entwurf einer much a product of the critics as the architects. It is impos- modernen Tradition (1989). More recently, Detlef Mertins sible to say what came first, the architecture or its promo- completed in 1996 a dissertation on Giedion's conceptual tion. Newspaper critics, like Ada Louise Huxtable and framework. In Giedion's practice, there is no distinction Herbert Muschamp, also actively collaborate with archi- between the work of the architect and that of the historian; tects to transform the built environment. What appears to they are both engaged with equal status as collaborators in be criticism or publicity is actually design. the modern project. Similar conclusions could be drawn Even the client is understood as a collaborator. If inter- about the role of John Entenza, who as editor of Arts & est in the clients of modern architecture has always existed, Architecture headed the Case Study House Program in Los accounts of their role tended to be testimonial rather than Angeles at mid-century, and Esther McCoy, the leading analytical-as when clients have spoken to reporters about critic of those years in the promotion of modern architec- the experience of building or living in their houses. Often ture in southern California. Both the magazine and the Case the clients were more enlightened and insightful than the Study House Program were collaborative efforts involving critics or the editors of the day. Loren Pope, a client of architects, writers, graphic designers, photographers, artists, Frank Lloyd Wright's, wrote an unsolicited letter to House and manufacturers, and both have received critical atten- Beautiful in 1947 enumerating the pleasures of living for six

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This content downloaded from 204.168.144.216 on Sun, 25 Sep 2016 19:05:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms years in one of Wright's Usonian houses of 1939. It took a client only obliquely, the direction of future research had year for the editors, who were afraid of angering their more been established simply in the organization of such a special traditionally minded readers, to gather the courage to pub- issue. lish it.3 The Tugendhats, who commissioned Mies van der The clients of Frank Lloyd Wright have also been the Rohe to design a house for them in Brno in 1928, object of study. Leonard Eaton's book Two Chicago Archi- responded to a negative review of the house by Justus Bier tects and Their Clients: Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Van in Die Form of 1931. To answer the question, "Can One Doren Shaw (1969) gives a profile of the typical Wright Live in the Tugendhat House?" the title of Bier's article, client in the period up to 1910. In contrast to the upper- one must consult the inhabitants, Grethe Tugendhat con- class North Shore establishment, which favored revivalist tended. She continued that Herr Bier might feel that the architects like Van Doren Shaw, the clients of Wright, we house forced the inhabitants into "a kind of living for show" are told, tended to be "mobile, middle-class Republicans that suppressed "intimate living," but she, who lived in the who married suffragette wives, practiced liberal reli- house, felt the "glass wall functions completely as a bound- gions ... and were passionately interested in music. ... Self- ary" and that, as a result, the space has "a most uncommon made men with considerable money to spend on a house restfulness such as a closed room cannot possibly have."4 but few preconceptions as to what it should look like."6 Her husband, Fritz Tugendhat, also responded to Bier's cri- If for Eaton, Wright's clients' lack of preconceptions tique by stating that he preferred "the distant horizon to allowed him to develop his architecture, for Alice Fried- the restricting pressure of close walls when I am concen- man, in Women and the Making of the Modern House (1998), trating."5 The glass wall and the horizon defined for the the client of modern architecture is understood to be an inhabitants of the Tugendhat House an enclosure, before active participant in the project of the modern house, a kind any sophisticated architectural critic came to realize it. of collaborator of the architect. Consulting correspondence, Until very recently such client accounts were consid- diaries, memoirs, and recorded interviews, Friedman ered to be of marginal, anecdotal interest to most historians, demonstrates the crucial role that women as clients played who saw them as providing evidence about the personality, in the making of modern architecture. Many of the houses working method, and mind of the architect, or to illustrate of the Modern Movement were commissioned by indepen- the conditions with which he had to contend in realizing dent women who headed their own households. Unmarried his "vision." The client was treated as a "problem" for the or widows, many were also professionals and cultivated peo- architect or as a "witness" to the effects of the architec- ple who aspired along with their architects to arrive at a dif- ture-rather than as an active intelligence and collaborator ferent pattern of domesticity, and they were often in conflict with the architect, as well as subject of the architecture with the architects about exactly what that pattern should itself. For a new generation of historians, clients have be. In that sense, these women were deeply involved in the become an object of study in their own right. Sessions in process of design and collaborated in the modern project of conferences-including the last Annual Meeting of the rethinking the house. Focusing on six of the most significant Society of Architectural Historians in Houston-are now houses of the twentieth century, Friedman gives a detailed devoted to the client in the modern era. account of the process of negotiation and decision making Serious research on architectural clients started about in the programming and design of the modern house. twenty years ago, when Rassegna, for example, dedicated an Sylvia Lavin's recent research on Richard Neutra also issue (in 1980) edited by Pierre-Alain Crosset to the clients explores the intimate relationships between architect and of Le Corbusier. In addition to a number of articles by client by examining in detail a particular architect's philos- noted historians-including among others Jacques Gubler, ophy and method of engaging with the client. The context Jean-Louis Cohen, Danible Pauly, Julius Posener, Giorgio is the American "psychologizing" of modernity in the post- Ciucci, and Tim Benton-the issue contained a "catalogue war years. Neutra extensively interviewed the clients of his raisonn&" of the clients ofLe Corbusier, categorized as indi- private houses, providing elaborate questionnaires and ask- viduals, industrialists, and public authorities. Clients had ing them to fill diaries with the intimate details of their daily attained the status previously granted only to works of art. life. He considered this work part of a "diagnostic proce- As if anticipating or promoting a different kind of research, dure" and compared the client's production of information the catalogue was compiled-using the resources made to "lying on a couch, figuratively speaking, and talking with available by the archives of the Fondation Le Corbusier in a psychoanalyst."7 Neutra understood his residential archi- Paris-in the hopes that it would serve as a guide to future tecture as providing a kind of therapy for the clients: work. While most of the articles addressed the issue of the "The architect can't stay with [the client] for twenty

COLLABORATIONS 465

This content downloaded from 204.168.144.216 on Sun, 25 Sep 2016 19:05:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms years ... straightening out matrimonial friction and imbal- facilities and personnel of other offices, while operating ance caused by environmental design. His job is simply autonomously.""11 Projects were organized the same way in beyond words-a silent long range job."' Since psycho- all the offices of SOM, with a clear chain of command in the analysis always involves the active participation of the design team for each project and a highly organized work sys- patient, the client is once again collaborating with the archi- tem. Personnel were often switched from one office to tect in the project of the modern house. Neutra particularly another. At the height of the Air Force Academy project, identified with his women clients, describing his relation- SOM employed 900 architects, engineers, designers, city ship with them as "almost a love affair that ends up happily planners, landscape specialists, and researchers and econo- in, by far, the most cases."9 mists.12 The military must have found the logic of SOM's But it is not just women clients that are now being practice a lot more familiar than that of a "prima donna" studied, nor even the private person, although these are the architect. ones we tend to know better. Institutions, industrialists, and Modernism at Mid-Century provides an important case even governments have been crucial patrons that are begin- study not only of the military as client but of the broader ning to be studied in detail. The military as client, for exam- issue of architectural production as collaboration. SOM was ple, comes into focus in Modernism at Mid-Century (1994), the first design office of its kind to be recognized by the a study of one of the most important postwar projects, the Museum of Modern Art with a monographic exhibition in United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs 1950. For the first time, teamwork, instead of individual (1954-1962), edited by Robert Bruegmann. Hdlene Lip- genius, was acknowledged in architecture. In its Bulletin, stadt has explored the Eames office's involvement with the MoMA noted that SOM members "work together animated federal government in her essay in Donald Albrecht's The by two disciplines which they all share-the discipline of Work of Charles and Ray Eames. Eve Blau's The Architecture of modern architecture and the discipline of American orga- Red Vienna 1919-1934 (1999) is an important contribution nizational methods. . . . SOM bears its name almost as a to the study of the involvement with modern architecture of trademark. It is like a brand name.""13 But resistance also ran European social-democratic governments as clients of pub- high both inside and outside the firm. Some designers felt lic housing during the interwar period. And Margaret that teamwork prevented them from receiving credit for Crawford's Building the Workingman's Paradise: The Design their work-a problem also with many of the Eames asso- of American Company Towns (1995) deals with the complex ciates-and some critics found the anonymous quality of and sometimes contentious relationships between progres- the work "intolerable."'4 Frank Lloyd Wright even testified sive architects and their industrialist clients for company before Congress in 1955 on the inadequacies of SOM's towns between 1910 and 1930. Industrial companies, from design for the Air Force Academy, deriding it as "a factory Olivetti to IBM, offer compelling new subjects of research. for birdmen," and raising questions about the qualifications Women and the military are interesting subjects of mod- of SOM and its consultants (Pietro Belluschi, Welton em architecture because they were clients who shared in the Becket, and Eero Saarinen).'5 Wright had refused to com- project. If women were actively involved in the redefinition pete with other architects for the job, declaring, in a of domesticity in the first half of the twentieth century, the telegram, "The world knows what I can do in architecture. logic of the military dominated the practice of modem archi- If officials of the air force have missed this, I can do no more tecture in the postwar years. From methods of mass produc- than feel sorry for what both have lost."'6 tion developed during the war effort and applied as much in The more one looks at collaboration the more it looks Levittown as in modem California houses, to the recycling like it might be a 1950s thing, a phenomenon of that pros- for domestic use of materials developed during the war effort, perous postwar decade when teamwork was canonized. the military had a clear affinity with modern architecture's MoMA exhibited SOM. Walter Gropius went into part- mode of material production-but perhaps also with the nership with seven architects from the younger generation, mechanisms of its practice. The choice of Skidmore, Owings forming The Architects Collaborative (TAC). Some of the & Merrill as the firm to realize the Air Force Academy was, great "masters" of modern architecture associated with in that sense, symptomatic. As Sheri Olson has pointed out, other architects to build in Manhattan. Mies van der Rohe the way SOM practiced architecture was probably the great- worked with PhilipJohnson on the Seagram Building, a col- est factor in the firm's selection for the Air Force Academy.'o laborative project (with the crucial intervention of Phyllis The firm was immense for its time, with multiple offices in Lambert), from the moment of commission. Gropius "came different parts of the country, and "the decentralized charac- on board" with the team of Emery Roth to build the Pan ter of the firm allowed each office to draw on the specialties, Am Building. And Wallace Harrison "stole" from Le Cor-

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This content downloaded from 204.168.144.216 on Sun, 25 Sep 2016 19:05:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Figure 3 Peter and Alison Smithson c. 1950. Photograph by Anne Fischer, from Alison and Peter Smithson, The Shift (Lon- don, 1982), courtesy Peter Smithson

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busier the forms period for signs offor a more complex storythe of the Modern new headquarters for the United Nations in New York. "En-ablers" is what Rem Koolhaas Movement. Lilly Reich and Charlotte Perriand, the some- calls the local associated architects in these partnerships. times In associates of Mies and Le Corbusier (Figure 4), con- a recent article on the subject in Bob Somol, ed., Autonomy tinue to fascinate historians, and new studies of their work and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America (1997), have recently been published or are currently under way, Koolhaas suggests that such partners are always overlooked including Sonja Giinther's Lilly Reich, 1885-1947: Innenar- even though they often contribute the more idiosyncratic chitektin, Designerin, Ausstellungsgestalterin (1988), Matilda features of the buildings, the "perversions" of the master's McQuaid and Magdalena Droste's catalogue of the exhibi- usual style.'7 tion of Lilly Reich at MoMA (1996), and the Charlotte Per- The 1950s also saw the first acknowledged "couplings" riand exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in architecture, by which I mean professional partnerships (1996), the Design Museum in London (1996-1997), and that are also intimate. Ray and Charles Eames provided a the Architectural League in New York (1997-1998). A model for following generations, to a certain extent for Ali- recent conference organized by Mary McLeod at Columbia son and Peter Smithson, whose partnership provided a University has launched a new wave of research. Other inti- model for that of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, mate partnerships still largely unstudied include Margaret and so on (Figure 3). My own research on "couplings" has McDonald, partner and spouse of Charles Rennie Mackin- focused on this chain of identifications and the way it con- tosh; Pierre Jeanneret, partner and cousin of Le Corbusier tinues into contemporary practice. (Figure 5); Jean Badovici, partner, client and lover of Eileen Perhaps it is the current interest in the 1950s among Gray; Marion Mahony, partner and wife of Walter Burley historians and critics that has raised the issue of collabora- Griffin, and so on. The 1950s also offered us other models tion. Esther McCoy described the period as America's "last of partnerships. Gwendolyn Wright has recently shown 'moral' era, a time when 'people stood together,' or shared how Catherine Bauer, a social historian, "metamorphosed" a common belief in the correctness of their actions.""8 The the practice of the architect William Wurster, whom she postwar period inaugurated a new kind of collaborative met and married in 1940, by "politicizing" him, infusing his practice that has become increasingly difficult to ignore or domestic designs with her social and political ideas, just as to subsume within a "heroic" conception of an individual he helped her to "become aware of the needs of middle- figure. In retrospect, we are also looking at the interwar class American families, both in city apartments and subur-

COLLABORATIONS 467

This content downloaded from 204.168.144.216 on Sun, 25 Sep 2016 19:05:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms tecture (Figure 6).20 Tyng, a young Harvard graduate working in Kahn's office, became his lover while collaborating le. closely on key designs, so closely that Kahn would later describe the relationship as "another form of love.""21 As the full tragedy of the relationship and Kahn's ultimate selfish- ness unfolds, the letters between them are filled with the details of designs. Published design becomes inseparable from private soap opera.

41, The question of collaboration is that of the secret life of architects, the domestic life of architecture. Nowhere is this more emblematic than in architects who live and work

together. With couples who practice together, there is a com- plete identification between domestic life and the life of the office, between the private life and the private side of archi-

Figure 4 Charlotte Perriand with Le Corbusier tectural in Perriand's practice. Both "Bar have sous been kept secret for too long. le toit" at the Salon d'Automne, Paris, 1928, from ButCharlotte who has Perriand:been keeping the secret? Perhaps it is the Un Art de Vivre (exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1985), historians @ Fondation and critics, Le who have felt more confident-reas- Corbusier L1 (2)9 sured-responding to the idea of an individual author and to the formal qualities of the building as an art object than to the messiness of architectural practice. Paradoxically, ban homes." Bauer, Wright contends, practicinghad earlier architects radically have tended to be more sensitive to transformed the work of Lewis Mumford, the subject,by spurring perhaps because him they know from their own "to take on the grand themes of technology experience and what commu-goes on and are endlessly curious about nity, which will become the basis of his other best-known architects' practices. books." Architects in partnerships, from Mumford, in turn, encouraged Bauer, during Denise the Scott years Brown of to theirRem Koolhaas, have publicly com- love affair while he was married to someone plained about else, the obsessionto "con- of critics and the media with template aspects of design that could thenot single be quantified,figure, despite their to offices' efforts to provide broaden and humanize her definition of precise housing credit. reform."19 Women architects are opening up, although Perhaps this fascination with collaboration feminist historians is part complain of a that for the most part women new voyeurism. We don't care so much avoid about the subject the of heroic their everyday life in practice-the figure of the modern architect, about the complications faqade, of but designing about in partnership and of juggling the internal weakness. On the one hand, the there office iswhile a concertedrearing children-in favor of talking about effort to demystify architectural practice design. andSince debunkDenise Scott the Brown's talk to the Alliance of heroes. On the other hand, the embarrassing Women in details Architecture, of pri- in New York in 1973, on sexism vate life are being incorporated into the and heroic the star images,system in architecture,as if and the subsequent arti- in a kind of therapy. Architects themselves cle "Room have at the started Top? Sexism to and the Star System in tell us private stories about their desperate Architecture," attempts which tocirculated get privately for many years jobs, about their pathological experiences before it waswith finally clients, published in P. Berkeley and Matilda about falling in the street, and even about McQuaid's their Architecture: masseuses. A Place for Women in 1989, a num- And we pay more attention than when ber they of women were architects trying have to been raising issues of their dictate to us what their work meant. Television,own. It is not by also chance from that women and gay scholars have the 1950s, has brought a new sense of been limits. leading theTalk way; shows the issue of collaboration is indebted bring increasing levels of privacy into to thefeminist public criticism, eye. with Can its focus on the veiling of con- we expect architecture to remain immune? tributions, And the why domesticity would of power, and so on. More historians, detectives by nature, pretend recent to bescholarship disinterested? on race, sexuality, cultural studies, and Browsing through the exhibition of postcolonial books at studies the SAHhas also begun to act as a crucial Annual Meeting in Houston in April 1999, resource. I cameWhile rarely upon referring the directly to this scholar- recent book by Anne Tyng, Louis Kahn ship, to architectural Anne Tyng: history The is starting to absorb many of its Rome Letters 1953-1954 (1997), which lessons I was and immediately to open research to new questions. Many attracted to because of my interest in partnerships secrets are bound to in come archi- out.

468 JSAH / 58:3, SEPTEMBER, 1999

This content downloaded from 204.168.144.216 on Sun, 25 Sep 2016 19:05:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Figure 5 Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier, around 1926, from Michael Raeburn and Victoria Wilson, eds., Le Corbusier Architect of the Century (exhibition catalogue, London, 1987). Photograph courtesy Fondation Le Corbusier @ FLC L1 (2)9

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Figure 6 Louis Kahn, Anne Tyng, and Lenore Weiss during construction of the Weiss house. Photograph by Mor-

...... ton Weiss, from Anne Griswold Tyng, WIN M. ed., Louis Kahn to Anne Tyng: The Rome Letters 1953-1954 (New York, 1997), courtesy Rizzoli International

COLLABORATIONS 469

This content downloaded from 204.168.144.216 on Sun, 25 Sep 2016 19:05:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Notes 21. Letter of Lou Kahn to Anne Tyng, 1954, quoted in Anne Griswold 1.Joseph Rosa, A Constructed View: The Architectural Photography Tyng, of ed.,Julius Louis Kahn to Anne Tyng: The Rome Letters 1953-1954 (New Shulman (New York, 1994), 47. York, 1997), 7. 2. Richard Neutra, letter, 29 January 1969, Shulman Archives, quoted in Rosa, A Constructed View, 49. 3."We held it for more than a year before we decided to be brave Selected enough Texts to publish it. We say 'brave' because it will make a lot of our readers Albrecht, very Donald, ed. The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of angry." House Beautiful, August 1948, reprinted in H. Allen Brooks, Invention. ed., New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997. Writings on Wright, Selected Comment on Frank Lloyd Wright(Cambridge, Blau, Eve. The Architecture of Red Vienna 1919-1934. Cambridge, Mass.: Mass., 1981), 51-57. MIT Press, 1999. 4. "What the People Who Lived in the Tugendhat House Had to Bosman, Say About Jos, et al. Sigfried Giedion, 1888-1986: der Entwurf einer moder- It," English translation of the Tugendhats contribution to Die Formnen Tradition. 11 Zurich: Ammann Verlag, 1989. (193 1),in Wolf Tegethoff, Mies van der Robe: The Villas and Country Brooks, Houses H. Allen, ed. Writings on Wright: Selected Comment on Frank Lloyd (New York, 1985), 97-98. Wright. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981. 5. Ibid., 98. Bruegmann, Robert, ed. Modernism at Mid-Century: The Architecture of the 6. Joseph Connors, The Robie House of Frank Lloyd Wright (Chicago and United Stated Air Force Academy. Chicago: University of Chicago London, 1984), 6-7. Leonard Eaton, Two Chicago Architects and Their Clients: Press, 1994. Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Van Doren Shaw (Cambridge, 1969). Colomina, Beatriz. "Couplings." Oase 51 (1999), special issue dedicated to 7. Richard Neutra, "The Architect Faces the Client and his Condition- Alison and Peter Smithson: 20-3 3. ings-'The Layercake,"' typescript manuscript, 19 March 1957, Neutra Connors, Joseph. The Robie House of Frank Lloyd Wright. Chicago: Uni- Archive. Quoted by Sylvia Lavin, "The Avant-Garde Is Not at Home: versity of Chicago Press, 1984. Richard Neutra and the American Psychologizing of Modernity," in R. E. Crawford, Margaret. Building the Workingman's Paradise: The Design of Somol, ed., Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America American Company Towns. London and New York: Verso, 1995. (New York, 1997), 194. For detailed discussions of Neutra's relationships to Crosset, Pierre-Alain, ed. "I Clienti di Le Corbusier." Rassegna 3 (July his clients, see also Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Mod- 1980). ern Architecture: A Biography and History (Berkeley, 1982). Eaton, Leonard. Two Chicago Architects and Their Clients: Frank Lloyd 8. Richard Neutra, "Client Interrogation-An Art and A Science," AIA Wright and Howard Van Doren Shaw. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, Journal (June 1958): 285-286. Quoted in S. Lavin, "The Avant-Garde Is 1969. Not at Home," 195. Friedman, Alice T. Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social 9. Richard Neutra, "Women Makes Man Clear," typescript manuscript, 13 and Architectural History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. November 1953, Neutra Archive. Quoted by S. Lavin, "The Avant-Garde Georgiadis, Sokratis. Sigfried Giedion, An Intellectual Biography. Translated Is Not at Home," 195. by Colin Hall. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. 10. Sheri Olson, "Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: Early History," in Robert Goldstein, Barbara, ed. Arts & Architecture: The Entenza Years. Cam- Bruegmann, ed., Modernism at Mid-Century (Chicago, 1994), 27. bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. 11. Sheri Olson, "Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: The Project Team," Mod- Giinther, Sonja. Lilly Reich, 1885-1947: Innenarchitektin, Designerin, ernism at Mid-Century, 35. Ausstellungsgestalterin. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1988. 12. Ibid. Hines, Thomas S. Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture: A 13. "Skidmore, Owings & Merrill," Museum ofModern Art Bulletin 18, no. Biography and History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. 1 (1950): 5-7. Huber, Dorothee, ed. Sigfried Giedion. Wege in die Offentlichkeit. Zurich: 14. Sheri Olson, "Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: The Project Team," Mod- Ammann Verlag, 1987. ernism at Mid-Century, 36. Imbert, Dorothee. The Modernist Garden in France. New Haven: Yale 15. Modernism at Mid-Century, 43-46, 65 n.109. University Press, 1993. 16. Telegram from Frank Lloyd Wright to Richard Hawley Cutting, 3 July Kirkham, Pat. Charles and Ray Eames, Designers of the Twentieth Century. 1954, quoted in Modernism at Mid-Century, 43. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995. 17. "From the 1930s when he began 'working' with Lily [sic] Reich, on, Mies Koolhaas, Rem. "En%/ablingArchitecture." In Robert E. Somol, ed., left the theatrical to others-perversion by proxy. From her silk and velvet Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America. New to Johnson's chain mail in the Four Seasons, what is the connection? Who York: Monacelli Press, 1997. took advantage?" Rem Koolhaas, "En/abling Architecture," in Somol, ed., Koolhaas, Rem, Bruce Mau, and the Office for Metropolitan Architec- Autonomy, 298. ture. S,M,L,XL. New York: Monacelli Press, 1995. 18. Esther McCoy, quoted by Barbara Goldstein, "Introduction," Arts & Lampugnani, Vittorio Magnago, ed. Sigfried Giedion: A Historical Project, Architecture: The Entenza Years (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 8. special issue of Rassegna 25 (1986). 19. Gwendolyn Wright, "A Partnership: Catherine Bauer and William Lavin, Sylvia. "The Avant-Garde Is Not at Home: Richard Neutra and Wurster," in Marc Treib, ed., An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William the American Psychologizing of Modernity." In Robert E. Somol, ed., Wurster (Berkeley, 1995), 188. Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America, 180-197. 20. As I picked up the book, David Morton, a senior editor at Rizzoli, told me New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997. the story of how he had given the book to the architect Richard Meier on a Lockhead, Ian. "Beyond Architecture: Marion Mahony and Walter Bur- Friday and Meier had called him on Monday to say that he had spent the ley Griffin-America, Australia, India." JSAH 58 (June 1999): weekend reading the book, unable to put it down, and that it had been the 199-201. most depressing weekend of his life. Now I really wanted to read the book. McQuaid, Matilda, and Magdalena Droste, eds. Lilly Reich. New York:

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Mertins, Detlef. "Transparencies Yet to Come: Sigfried Giedion and the Shulman, Julius. Architecture and its Photography. Cologne: Taschen, 1998. Prehistory of Architectural Modernity." Ph.D. diss., Princeton Uni- Smith, Elizabeth, ed. Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the versity, 1996. Case Study Houses. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. Olson, Sheri. Various contributions in Bruegmann, ed., Modernism at Treib, Marc, and Dorothie Imbert. Garrett Ekbo: Modern Landscapes for Mid-Century. Living. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Rice, Peter. An Engineer Imagines. London: Ellipsis, 1994. Tyng, Anne Griswold, ed. Louis Kahn to Anne Tyng: The Rome Letters Rosa, Joseph. A Constructed View: The Architectural Photography ofJulius 1953-1954. New York: Rizzoli International, 1997. Shulman. New York: Rizzoli International, 1994. Wright, Gwendolyn. "A Partnership: Catherine Bauer and William Scott Brown, Denise. "Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Wurster." In Marc Treib, ed., An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of Architecture." In P. Berkeley and Matilda McQuaid, eds., Architecture: William Wurster, 184-203. Berkeley: University of California Press, A Place for Women, 237-246. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institu- 1995.

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